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Trump and MAGA Republicans: A Threat to National Security

The recent NATO meetings in Helsinki, Finland, and Vilnius, Lithuania, contrasted with a meeting in Helsinki five years ago and ongoing efforts by MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives to block further aid to Ukraine underscore the reality that the GOP under Trump and his acolytes is the party of Vladimir Putin and international despots and no friend of democracy either here in the USA or across the globe. Five years ago Trump did everything but give Putin public fellatio - causing many to still wonder what blackmail material Putin has on Trump - and put the word of a now international war criminal over the findings of America's intelligence community.  The late John McCain described Trump's self-prostitution to Putin as “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”  Trump and his MAGA minions should be anathema to anyone who cares about America's national security even as these individuals lie and describe themselves as "patriots" while spouting Putin's talking points. The reality is that these people are traitors in our midst and as the 2024 elections approach decent Americans need to understand that a vote for a MAGA Republican (I would argue for any Republican candidate) is ultimately a vote against democracy and a vote against America's national security.  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican looks at the contrast between five years ago and today under the Biden administration.  Here are highlights:

If you want to know the differences on national security between Democrats and MAGA Republicans, it all boils down to one word: Helsinki.

Five years ago, on July 16, 2018, President Donald Trump met in the capital of Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There he delivered what Sen. John McCain called “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Standing next to Putin at a news conference, Trump refused to condemn Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election or even to admit that it had occurred. This came a little more than a year after Trump had attended a NATO summit in Brussels at which he refused to affirm the alliance’s Article 5 collective security guarantee. (He later reluctantly endorsed Article 5 but continued to criticize the alliance relentlessly.)

On Thursday, President Biden visited Helsinki for a very different purpose. He came not to kowtow before Putin but to stand up to him — and not to undermine NATO but to strengthen it. This visit was meant to celebrate Finland’s recent accession to membership in the alliance, and it came shortly after Biden’s attendance at a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, where the alliance showed greater unity than at any time in recent history. Ukraine did not get a timeline for joining the alliance, but Sweden broke through the Turkish roadblock to its membership, and the allies signaled resolve in aiding Ukraine and bringing it closer to the alliance.

“I’ve been doing this a long time. I don’t think NATO’s ever been stronger,” Biden said during a meeting with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto. He’s right, and he deserves a world of credit for that achievement. Biden has shown more skill at marshaling an international coalition than any U.S. president since George H.W. Bush during the 1991 Gulf War.

Biden has often dragged his feet on aid to Ukraine for fearing of triggering World War III, but over and over again he has done the right thing in the end, supplying everything from Stinger and Javelin missiles to M777 howitzers to HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems to Patriot air defense batteries to Bradley fighting vehicles to cluster munitions.

It’s safe to say that none of that would have happened if Trump had still been in the White House. Just this week, Trump expressed opposition to Biden’s decision to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions — a type of munition that the Russians have used in abundance. Trump argues that Biden is “dragging us further toward World War III by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine” and boasts that he could end the war in a day. To which former vice president Mike Pence replied: “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”

[T]here is a large and growing faction in the GOP that is hostile to U.S. global leadership and to assistance for Ukraine. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed that 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the United States is sending too much assistance to Ukraine compared to only 14 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

The MAGA Republicans would rather wage culture wars at home than support Ukraine’s war of territorial defense against Russian aggression. Members of the House Freedom Caucus are offering amendments to the defense authorization bill making its way through Congress, demanding that the United States cut back or eliminate aid to Ukraine and even leave NATO. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps is now without a confirmed commandant for the first time in 164 years because Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has put a hold on hundreds of nominations for senior officers to protest a Pentagon policy enabling service members and their families to travel to states where abortion is legal to have the procedure performed.

The very real possibility that Trump could win back the presidency in 2024 fills U.S. allies with dread — and offers hope to U.S. enemies. John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser, has said Trump came close to pulling out of NATO in 2018 and would do so if elected to another term. It’s also a good bet that Trump would try to stop the flow of U.S. weapons to Ukraine. Indeed, the very prospect that Trump could return to office encourages Putin to prolong the conflict. . . . from the Kremlin’s perspective, “the main thing” is that Biden (“the guy with dementia”) not win reelection.

So, if you believe in making America, rather than Russia, “great again,” it’s imperative for Biden to win in 2024 and maintain the policies that have so greatly strengthened NATO and Ukraine. As long as the MAGA wing remains as strong as it is, Republicans cannot be trusted on national security policy.

The author's final paragraph is 100% correct and anyone who is a true patriotic American should vote against the party of Trump and Putin in 2024 (and 2023 here in Virginia).

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Holding Senate Republicans Accountable for SCOTUS's Reactionary Rulings

During its last two terms the the right wing extremist controlled U.S. Supreme Court has ignored precedent and overturned long standing rulings as the zealots on the Court strive to move the nation backwards in time to the 1950's or before. Among other things Roe v. Wade was overturned, affirmative action has been outlawed for college admissions - and soon likely for other issues - and Christofascists have been granted the right to ignore public accommodation laws and non-discrimination laws so long as they couch their bigotry in religious belief.   Some think racial discrimination could soon be similarly condoned by the religiously extreme majority and some talking heads on the far right are saying they want to see Griswold v. Connecticut while allowed contraception overturned. NONE of this would have occurred but for the machinations of Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans who contrary to tradition and many decades of precedent refused to confirm Merrick Garland to the Court and then rammed through Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before the 2020 presidential election. But for this unprecedented and outrageous behavior, the Court would now have only four far right zealots instead of six.  Of course, the always disingenuous and dishonest McConnell wants voters and Americans in general forget about these Senate Republican misdeeds and the consequences they have wrought as we head towards the 2024 elections where McConnell wants to win back a Republican majority so even more travesties can be unleashed on the majority of the citizenry.  This cannot be allowed to happen and voters must take out their displeasure on Republicans and make sure the Democrats hold control of the Senate (and hopefully regain control of the House of Representatives).  A piece in the Washington Post looks at McConnell's dissembling and lies as he tries to play voters for fools.  Here highlight:

Mitch McConnell wants you to know: The Court That McConnell Built — the Senate minority leader is, more than anyone else, responsible for its current configuration — is an unremarkable, by-the-books institution. In McConnell’s telling, the court is an “ideologically unpredictable body” that “produces diverse outcomes” . . .

You’ve heard about damned lies and statistics? The maxim applies to the Supreme Court, too. The Kentucky Republican is using numbers to try to sand the edges off a hard-right court, and the most intriguing thing about his argument, made in a recent Post op-ed, is that he felt compelled to make it at all.

Building a conservative-dominated federal judiciary has been McConnell’s passion project, but his greatest passion is achieving — or, in this circumstance, regaining — power. With control of the Senate up for grabs next year, McConnell must be worrying about whether the court’s actions, in particular its overruling of Roe v. Wade, are taking a toll on his chances of retaking the chamber and again becoming majority leader.

Because that is the best explanation for why McConnell is choosing to minimize the enormity of his accomplishment — his transformation of the Supreme Court from a wobbly center-right institution into a far more conservative, at times aggressively radical, body.

Under McConnell’s no-holds barred stewardship, Justice Antonin Scalia was replaced — not by President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, but by President Donald Trump’s, Neil M. Gorsuch. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy retired to make way for Brett M. Kavanaugh. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just before the 2020 election, and McConnell muscled through her replacement, Amy Coney Barrett.

The bottom line: one significant shift to the right (Kavanaugh) and one mammoth one (Barrett). Two seats that should have gone to Democratic presidents were instead handed to Trump. Thank you, Senator McConnell.

And the new justices delivered. Abortion rights, gone. Affirmative action, gone. Gun rights, dramatically expanded. The administrative state, deconstruction underway. Religious liberties, triumphant; separation of church and state, not so much. Does this sound “ideologically unpredictable” to you?

“What a difference five years makes,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed, dissenting from the six-justice conservative majority’s ruling in favor of a Christian website designer opposed to making websites celebrating the marriage of same-sex couples.

Sotomayor’s point is undeniable, yet McConnell prefers to blur it, and to obscure with statistics that assign equal weight to cases of dramatically varying importance. One Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, wiping out constitutional protection or abortion rights, or one Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, eliminating the use of racial preferences in college admissions, matters a whole lot more than a slew of more technical, less ideologically freighted decisions.

McConnell badly overstated his case. “Evidence from this past term indicates that the court’s defining characteristic isn’t polarization,” he wrote. “It is, instead, a politically unpredictable center.”

This could scarcely be more misleading. Once upon a time, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I covered a center-right court that could be accurately described that way. Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter and Kennedy staked out that ground. The last two terms have witnessed the dismantling of their most important handiwork — preserving the right to abortion and upholding the use of race as a factor in college admissions.

Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett are not centrists, not even close. They are committed conservatives who happen to occupy the center of a court that has veered dramatically to the right. Liberal victories are few and far between, and they largely consist of being able to convince a few conservative justices to keep the status quo in place, not taking the law in any expansive new direction.

McConnell might not want you to understand that, but you should — and, McConnell notwithstanding, you should vote accordingly.

If you are unhappy with the Court's lurch to the extreme right, the proper response is to vote a straight Democrat ticket in every election.  McConnell and his extremists must be punished severely and must never have majority control again for at least a generation.

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Tuberville and the GOP Whitewashing of White Nationalsm

Truth be told, today's Republican Party has become the bastion of white nationalism and right wing "Christian" extremism (there is a huge overlap of the two groups).  After the 2016 election, many pundits and members of the media tried to explain the motivation of Trump voters as being fueled by financial and economic concerns yet later studies revealed when all the smoke screens were stripped away, the real motivation was racial resentment and grievance flowing from the political right's zero sum view of society and the world, namely that if blacks and other racial minorities (and gays) had improved their lot, then whites had lost something, especially their real and perceived privilege.  Ever since, the Republican Party - and Trump who never condemned the white nationalist invasion of Charlottesville in 2017 - has shameless pandered to white racists and white supremacist and sought to sooth their sensibilities by blocking the teaching of accurate history which they claim to be "divisive" and erasing uncomfortable truths about America's - in in Glenn Youngkin's case, Virginia's - true history.  Few have been in the forefront of this effort more than Ron DeSantis, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Alabama's latest self-inflicted embarrassment , and now Ryan Walters, the superintendent of public schools in Oklahoma. A column in the New York Times looks at this whitewashing of white nationalism and racism.  Here are excerpts:

In an interview in May, the senior Republican senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville — who is holding up hundreds of promotions for senior military officers because he disagrees with a Defense Department policy that facilitates abortion access for service members — was asked if he believes white nationalists should be allowed in the military.

His answer: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

It was an attempt to inject the idea of partisan subjectivity into the defining of the term, a tomato-tomahto innocuous differing of opinions, a cultural variation in how something is viewed and named. But the definition of white nationalism, a decades-old term, isn’t up for debate or a varied interpretation.

Tuberville doubled down on his definition on Monday night on CNN, saying: “My opinion, of a white nationalist — if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist — to me, is an American. It’s an American.

All the “ifs” and “opinions” here are intentional but unnecessary. Terms like “white nationalist” mean something: White nationalism is a form of white supremacy that advocates white dominance and white control. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can look it up. (On Tuesday, Tuberville admitted that white nationalists are racists.)

It’s not the first time that a prominent Republican has tried, particularly on the subject of race, to reduce fact to opinion — to convert the absolute into a matter of partisan interpretation. When they do, they’re engaged in a crusade of etymological alteration, of hijacking and bastardizing the meanings of words and phrases.

In 2018, Donald Trump proudly proclaimed: “You know, they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist. . . . Though not explicit, whiteness is coincidental to the nationalism in this construction, but nationalism is cast simply as profound patriotism.

[I]n this stew of adulterated meanings, “white nationalist” gets conflated with being a white patriot and allows any suggestion of racism to become an aspersion cast at white nationalists without cause. Racism, to this way of thinking, can only be unambiguous, naked hatred. And by playing these word games, they are prying apart their politically necessary disdain of open racists from a calm and considered tolerance of intolerance, a muted acquiescence to a racial hierarchy — a skewed view of the history of racial contributions to humanity and the vaunted legacy of the founders of this country.

But that distinction cannot be made here. It is tortured logic and it will lead to ridiculousness.

Last week, Ryan Walters, the superintendent of public schools in Oklahoma, was asked how teaching students about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre could be done without violating the state’s ban on teaching what it calls critical race theory. Walters responded:

“That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals. Oh, you can. Absolutely, historically, you should. ‘This was right. This was wrong. They did this for this reason.’ But to say it was inherent because of their skin is where I say that is critical race theory. You’re saying that race defines a person.”

Be clear: White racists attacked and destroyed the Black community in Tulsa called the Greenwood District, also known as Black Wall Street. And that community was attacked because it was Black.

I guess Walters’s argument, as flimsy as it is, hangs on the word “inherent.” And no, white people are not inherently terrorists or racists. No people are. But, there have been white people who were terrorists and racists and wreaked havoc and destruction in this country. Indeed, there was a period in our country, certainly up to the Jim Crow era, during which many white Americans were at least acculturated to, if not participants in, racial terrorism — can anyone deny that about a deadly mob descending on a thriving Black Tulsa neighborhood?

Racism was preached in church. Law enforcement was part of the racial terror. Elected officials championed resistance to racial equality. People sold and sent postcards of lynchings.

And white nationalism became central to white power and white politics. The rise and maintenance of segregation was rooted in a white nationalist impulse. The rising popularity of hate groups today is due in part to the mainstreaming of white nationalist ideas.

When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted that he had “repeatedly offered a platform to white nationalists” and “voiced fringe racial grievances in an apparent effort to give them greater cultural salience.”

These politicians are trying to use a distorted notion of patriotism and a distorted definition of nationalism to whitewash white nationalists and white nationalism.

That’s the reality. And I can’t change that to soothe anyone’s modern-day sensibilities anymore than I can change the color of the sky.

White supremacy, white nationalism and white terror were fundamental to the creation of America. Those facts don’t change because they make some uncomfortable or others angry. No one has the power to change a yesterday.

This current impulse to wish it away, to ban the books, to pressure the teachers, to alter the language, to muddy the waters, isn’t the answer. And it’s insulting.

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The GOP's Corruption of the Federal Judiciary

The rank corruption of some of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court - including three of whom lied under oath during the confirmation hearings - has been in the news of late, as the ethical rules applicable to other federal judges are utterly ignored.  However, the corruption of the federal judiciary by Donald Trump and Senate Republicans extends far beyond the Supreme Court.  From U.S. district courts to U.S. courts of appeal and, of course, the Supreme Court, Trump and his lapdogs in the U.S. Senate appointed ideologues and unqualified individuals to the federal bench for life time appointments where damage can be done for decades. The striking thing about the most unfit of Trump's appointees is that they appear to believe that the rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" applies only to themselves and those who hold similar extreme religious or political views. In their view, the rest of American society cannot be allowed to lead their lives based on their own beliefs and understandings of faith or even no faith.  Not surprisingly, a number of Trump's appointees were rated as "not qualified" by the American Bar Association and/or lacked the experience one would expect in a federal judge.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this rot within the federal judiciary and what can be done to lessen the damage going forward.  Here are excerpts:

The worst federal court decisions may not have come from the Supreme Court. If you are concerned about contempt for precedent, partisan hackery and judicial hubris, take a look at what district court judges have been doing.

There was U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s atrocious ruling in April reversing the Food and Drug Administration’s 2-decades-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. He obliterated any notion of standing, ignored the six-year statute of limitations for challenging FDA approvals, spewed a raft of right-wing disinformation and ignored decades of medical data. The Biden administration is appealing the ruling.

And let’s not forget the unsupportable ruling from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon of Florida putting her finger on the scale to try to block the Justice Department from reviewing secret documents hoarded by former president Donald Trump. Cannon never had jurisdiction to hear the case (her ruling was overturned on appeal), invented a new category of protection for a former president and utterly ignored national security interests.

But not to be outdone, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty in Louisiana, in a case involving government contacts with social media companies, “effectively issued a prior restraint on large swaths of speech, cutting short an essential dialogue between the government and social media companies about online speech and potentially lethal misinformation,” explained Leah Litman and Laurence H. Tribe in Just Security.

“Compounding that error,” Litman and Tribe wrote, “the district court crafted its injunction to apply to myriad high-ranking officials in the Biden administration, raising grave separation of powers concerns. And equally troubling is how the court’s order, which prevents the government from even speaking with tech companies about their content moderation policies, deals a huge blow to vital government efforts to harden U.S. democracy against threats of misinformation.” Tossing away standing, failing to find a smidgen of evidence of “coercion” and issuing a ludicrously overbroad injunction are not minor errors. They represent a leap into the legal abyss.

These three Trump-appointed judges betray their ideological fervor and lack of judicial restraint. Their radical rulings are indicative of the corruption of federal courts beyond the Supreme Court.

Trump populated the judiciary with underqualified ideologues, 10 of whom were rated unqualified by the American Bar Association. (In addition, they were overwhelmingly White and male; not a single African American judge was nominated to a circuit court.) Not all of the 54 circuit court judges and 174 district court judges he appointed are ideological kooks or partisan hacks, but the frequency with which outlandish rulings now pop up in high-profile cases suggests how extensive the damage to the credibility of the federal judiciary as a whole may be.

What can be done? First, the number of lower court judges should be expanded to reduce workload and court congestion, to improve diversity, and to dilute the impact of unqualified and intemperate judges. The number of lower court seats has not been expanded since 1990, when there were about 80 million fewer Americans.

Second, Democrats should end the use of “blue slips,” which allow senators to block consideration of a district court nominee in their states; Senate Republicans have abused the tradition to stop dozens of Biden’s reasonable nominees. Consultation with the Senate is one thing, but allowing the opposing party to veto judicial appointments is daft.

Most important, Democrats cannot let a single nominee from a GOP president go through without a detailed investigation of his or her rulings and philosophy, evidence of significant judicial experience and a minimum-qualified ABA rating. “It’s only for a district court” is a shoddy excuse for rubber-stamping a nominee unwilling or unable to abide by his or her oath and administer justice fairly. When nominees refuse to explain their views adequately or lack sufficient experience to allow a proper assessment of their legal principles and fidelity to precedent, they should be rejected.

Beyond the quality of judges, the controversy over nationwide injunctions issued by MAGA-friendly judges looms. There are times when an aggrieved party alleging harm from a regulation or statute needs injunctive relief. However, the practice of shopping for favored judges in far-flung one-judge divisions should end.

Congress has the power to set jurisdictional rules. Requiring all such cases be brought to district court in D.C. would at least ensure the case would be assigned to one from a diverse set of judges experienced with federal regulations and constitutional questions. Alternatively, Congress could require three-judge panels hear cases seeking injunctive relief against the federal government.

The country faces a crisis in credibility not only in the Supreme Court but throughout the federal judiciary. Democrats need to step up to expand and raise the caliber of lower court judges, end GOP vetoes on nominees and address the issue of nationwide injunctions. If not, the rule of law and democracy’s survival will remain at risk.

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Don't Believe the Right's Maligning of America

If one listens to Fox News, a.k.a Faux News, and the majority of Republican officer holders and candidates, you would think America has turned into an utter hell hole and prospects for the future are bleak.  Sadly, much of the mainstream media prefers to focus on all things negative and/or to stir controversy by parroting Republican misinformation and endlessly stirring the political pot. Truth be told, America does face challenges, but the true picture is shockingly different than what the political right would have one believe.  The right's real problem is that despite gerrymandering and the rural state bias in the Electoral College, the right and its base are losing power and the ability to inflict their dogma on the majority despite the U.S. Supreme Court's recent rulings and state level Republican legislative efforts that seek to push the nation backwards in time on matters of race, LGBT rights and the freedom to vote. Yes, wealth disparities and GOP policies that have harmed the middle class are real problems, but as a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican lays out,  America is not the wasteland the GOP and its propaganda outlets would have you believe despite the GOP's continued reverse Robin Hood agenda.  Here are article highlights: 

As Americans celebrated the Fourth of July by watching baseball, fireworks, and Joey Chestnut hammering home his 16th win in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, poor Uncle Sam labored through the mid-summer celebration beleaguered and under siege from all sides. News items over the course of the holiday weekend reported that Americans were feeling more skeptical of their country’s future and less patriotic. Seventy-four percent believe America is headed in the wrong direction, and a great majority dread the presidential rematch America seems doomed to face.

The usual suspects, who once regularly delivered garrulous Eric Stratton–style defenses of all things American, are now scattered to the winds by the tumult of Trumpism. Neither the Capitol riot nor a barrage of indictments has stopped these hucksters from slavishly siding with Donald Trump in his attacks against the same American institutions that conservatives once defended against enemies real or imagined . . .

The opposing counsel’s bench will likewise be unhelpful, because it is packed with a motley crew of progressive politicians, left-wing think tankers, and journalists who are far more comfortable prosecuting claims against American greed, U.S. imperialism, and ruling-class dominance than mounting muscular defenses of America.

Rallying around the flag still comes off as a bit gauche at Berkeley barbecues and East Hampton clambakes. So Uncle Sam lumbers on through another sweltering July, poked and prodded by political hacks of all stripes.

Liberals once gained favor among their base by attacking the Pentagon’s top brass, but now it is Republican members of Congress who longingly swoon over Russia’s manly military while trashing U.S. generals and our men and women in uniform. Those GOP attacks come despite the fact that America’s military is more powerful today relative to the rest of the world than at any time since the Second World War.

Unlike in years past, American allies no longer grouse about the U.S. “leading from behind” or burrowing itself into a self-defeating “America First” hole. Instead, the U.S. is first among equals in a dynamic and expanding NATO alliance that just added a new member with more than 800 miles of Russian border, and that has provided a devastating response to Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Looking east, the United States has finally begun its pivot to Asia, strengthening military cooperation with Japan, the Philippines, Guam, South Korea, and Australia. The current disruption in U.S.-Sino relations may have less to do with spy balloons and diplomatic missteps than with Xi Jinping’s rational fear of being hemmed in by an increasingly muscular U.S. military presence surrounding the South China Sea.

The most significant U.S. geopolitical failure of late was the country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, a move promised by the past three presidents and supported by 70 percent of Americans before the evacuation. Even after the chaos unfolded in Kabul, most Americans told pollsters they supported Biden’s decision to get U.S. troops out after 20 years. Be assured that nobody in Moscow or Beijing is still looking at the Afghanistan withdrawal in light of recent events and parroting Republican’s un-American talking point that our armed forces are “woke” and “weak.”

While we’re on the topic of the right’s meltdown over all things woke, the Republican Party’s hypocritical attacks against American colleges and universities display the same anti-institutional impulses.

Once again, the ideological tables have been turned. In the past, it was leftist radicals who rioted on college campuses and laid siege to university presidents’ offices. Now Trump-supporting rightists bravely pull themselves off their fainting couches to declare war against the same elite institutions from which they proudly graduated not so long ago.

Every year, American colleges and universities dominate rankings of the best schools in the world. Maybe that’s why some of the most powerful political and business leaders across the globe keep sending their children to American colleges. They do so for the same reason many Republican politicians with Ivy League degrees worked hard to get admitted into Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania years ago: because nobody in the world does higher education better than the United States of America.

All of this anti-American drivel coming from Trumpists can be tedious. But stay with me, because there’s much more to be said in America’s defense.

Childhood poverty has dropped to the lowest level on record; teenage pregnancy has done the same; the U.S. dollar has experienced generational highs over the past year; unemployment recently hit a 54-year low; the number of job openings this past year also hit record highs.

Overall, the U.S. economy continues to surge forward despite economists’ dire predictions. America’s GDP grew to $25 trillion last year; Texas has a bigger economy than Russia, and although California is routinely rebuked by right-wing critics, it has the fourth-strongest economy in the world—stronger than Britain’s, France’s, Canada’s, or India’s. The United States and its European allies collectively run an economic machine that doubles China’s stagnating output. Despite record debt levels, a stubborn case of inflation, and other structural challenges, American capitalism continues to drive and dominate the world economy.

All of this is not to say that the United States is free of challenges. Like any great power, we have our fair share of political and moral failings.

Our Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveholder, the government has yet to address what it owes to Native Americans, and the right of women to control their own bodies has been shattered by Supreme Court rulings and radical state legislation.

But it was American democracy that provided a swift political rebuke to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and led to right-wing defeats in red states such as Kansas, Kentucky, and Wisconsin. The political backlash to Roe’s demise has been so dramatic that even Ann Coulter and The Wall Street Journal editorial page now take exception to the GOP’s extreme abortion stance.

[Y]es, it’s true that a fulsome defense of Uncle Sam often requires dialectical thinking. But remember this: Even with all of its failings, America has fed and freed more human beings than any other country in history. And despite the blather that cable-news hosts spit at you daily, your country is doing pretty damn well.

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DeSantis' Bizarre Anti-Gay Ad

As Ron DeSantis gets more desperate to gain traction against Donald Trump, one increasingly has to wonder who is advising his campaign.  Last week team DeSantis ran an anti-gay ad seemingly targeting Donald Trump as too friendly to LGBT citizens that was so bizarre that it was slammed even among right wing talking heads and then taken down.  The ad had one positive impact in my view: gay Republicans - something to me akin to a Jewish Nazi in 1930's Germany - finally have awaked to the reality that DeSantis is their mortal enemy as noted in a piece at LGBT Nation: 

Gay Republicans are abandoning Florida Gov. and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R) in droves after his rapid response team shared a bizarre video bragging about his reign of terror against the LGBTQ+ community.

And despite DeSantis’s years-long crusade against LGBTQ+ people, this video, for whatever reason, seems to be the last straw for gay conservatives who had formerly viewed the Florida governor as a palatable alternative to Trump.

“Not only did DeSantis show that he is as anti-LGBTQ+ as the mainstream media has alleged, he made a mockery of any GOP candidate that shows an interest in LGBTQ+ rights, setting the whole party back decades,” wrote Yvonne Dean-Bailey, former Republican state legislator in New Hampshire, in an op-ed for the Daily Beast. 

Why these gay Republicans are shocked is baffling since the planks of the last GOP national platform contained stridently anti-LGBT provisions.  A piece in Politico looks further into the truly bizarre nature of the ad and its strange themes that have prompted negative reactions save perhaps among the most hysterically gay elements of the hideous elements of the MAGA base.   Here are article highlights:  

 Over Fourth of July weekend, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign drew fire from across the political spectrum after it shared a bizarre, 1-minute-and-13-second video hyping the Florida governor’s hardline opposition to LGBTQ rights. The video, which was created by an anonymous account and shared on Twitter by the DeSantis campaign’s “rapid response” team, has been skewered by critics on both the left and the right for its homophobia and transphobia. But commentators also fixated on another element: It’s just plain weird, a video that is largely unintelligible to someone who hasn’t spent too many hours on the darker corners of the internet.

The clip, which was tweeted by DeSantis’ team with the message “To wrap up ‘Pride Month,’” opens by attacking former President Donald Trump for his past support of LGBTQ people, setting pictures of Trump shaking hands with Caitlyn Jenner and holding a pride flag against upbeat techno music. But 23 seconds in, the video takes a turn. The upbeat techno music is replaced by an ominous base tone. Clips of DeSantis fade in and out, intercut with a series of seemingly random images: DeSantis with red lightning bolts emerging from his eye sockets; a black-and-white photo of a chiseled bodybuilder; pictures of Hollywood anti-heroes.

To the average voter, this rapid-fire mishmash of images might seem like a political fever dream. But the video fits squarely within an emergent strain of an online conservative subset that focuses on LGBTQ issues and masculinity. This discourse, which emerged from an obscure corner of the internet sometimes called the “manosphere,” relies on a heavily self-referential set of memes to convey its message, a message that is almost always drenched in irony . . . Yet beneath the irony lies a coherent — if deeply intolerant — argument: The embrace of LGBTQ people is part of a broader plot in society to destroy traditional masculinity.

For the most part, this irony-laden variety of homophobia remains a relatively fringe position on the online right. But its prominence in DeSantis’ latest campaign video suggests that it could be seeping into the conservative mainstream, and that might pay dividends among a group of Republican voters. . . . “They are trying to demonstrate that DeSantis doesn’t just talk the talk, but he walks the walk — that Trump is all full of lip service, but that DeSantis is the one who makes good on quasi-Trumpian promises.”

“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last weekend when asked about DeSantis’ video — apparently referring to several shots of slick-looking male bodybuilders flexing their bulging muscles. But in certain corners of the online right where the popularity of bodybuilding is on the rise, it’s not strange at all. For one possible explanation of this trend, look no further than Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed documentary The End of Men, which advanced the argument that the destruction of men’s bodies through poor nutrition and poor exercise habits is part of a broader globalist plot to take over the world.

As many commentators online have pointed out, there a poignant irony to the fact that a video targeting LGBTQ people included an image of Achilles, given that many scholars have interpreted Achilles’ friendship with Patroclus as a type of homosexual relationship. But the valorization of Achilles fits neatly within a broader far-right obsession with ancient Rome and Greece, which some conservatives hold up as the cradle of “Western civilization.” Ever heard of “Bronze Age Mindset”? We bet the creators of this video have.

DeSantis is dangerous and needs to be sent into the political wilderness.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

New Survey: Majority Oppose SCOTUS Anti-Gay Ruling

In striking down Roe v. Wade the extreme right wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court inflicted their religious view and those of the Christofascists in the Republican Party on all Americans.  The ruling has proved immensely unpopular with the vast majority of Americans and made abortion an issue that will continue to plague Republican candidates here in Virginia and nationally.  Now, in its ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis - a case that increasingly appears to have been based on fabricated facts (lies in common parlance) - that same extremist majority has granted bigots using the smoke screen of religious belief a license to discriminate against LGBT individuals and by extension blacks, non-Christians, interracial couples and others and gutted state public accommodation laws. In so ruling, the Court once again underscored that the Court's majority is out of step with the attitudes of a sizable majority of Americans and further caused many to question the Court's very legitimacy.  Indeed, rather than being based on the law and constitution, the Court's action was based on the views of bitter religious extremists like Samuel Alito and the wants of evangelicals, a shrinking demographic in America, and demonstrated that religious belief continues to be a force for evil, hatred and bigotry.  A piece in USA Today looks at the findings of a new Data for Progress (one of the more accurate polling concerns) survey which shockingly found that 40% of Republicans also say that businesses should be able to refuse services for interracial marriages and interfaith marriages suggesting that gays are just the first of the Christofascists' targets.  Here are article excerpts:

Days after the Supreme Court's ruling that businesses can deny same-sex wedding services if it clashes with their religious views, new data says most American voters disagree with that position.

Last week, the nation's high court sided with a Colorado business owner who argued a state non-discrimination law could not compel her to make same-sex websites.

The survey, conducted by Data for Progress, found 65% of voters believe businesses should not be allowed to turn away customers who are of a particular sexual orientation because of the business owner's personal beliefs.

The findings come as LGBTQ rights are increasingly under attack in state Legislatures and other courts.

Despite the onslaught of moves to curtail the rights of LGBTQ people, the Data for Progress survey found voters "consistently land on the side of nondiscrimination, rejecting the idea that business owners should be able to refuse services to a member of a protected class based on personal beliefs," said Rob Todaro, the group's communications director.

Across the U.S., LGBTQ people make up only 7.2% of adults in the U.S. Yet their rights have increasingly come under attack in state legislatures.

Many anti-LGBTQ bills introduced and passed in state houses in recent years were pushed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group [actually, ADF is a certified hate group]. In the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, the CEO and president of the ADF argued before the high court on behalf of the web designer.

Other recent data also has shown that the majority of Americans support policies protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.

Most American adults – including two-thirds of those identifying as Catholics or Christians – disagree with religious-based denial of medical care, employment or other services to LGBTQ individuals, according to a September 2022 survey conducted by the University of Chicago in partnership with the Williams Institute, a think tank dedicated to gender identity and sexual orientation research at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law.

The Human Rights Campaign in 2016 began quantifying support for LGBTQ rights among everyday Americans by identifying voters who said they support pro-LGBTQ rights political candidates and vote against anti-LGBTQ candidates.

This group of voters, dubbed "equality voters," accounted for 29% of the electorate in 2018, according to Human Rights Campaign data. In comparison, white Evangelicals made up 26% of voters.

As noted, LGBT citizens are not the only ones bigots within the Republican Party base want to discriminate against.  Here are some other findings of the new survey that show that today's GOP is not only anti-democracy but also the party of open bigotry.  Here is more on the survey findings:  

This case is particularly perplexing as it was entirely hypothetical — the plaintiff had never designed a website for a wedding up until the point of filing the lawsuit against the state of Colorado, and no gay couple had requested one or been turned away. It was all made up for the sake of challenging Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act.

New Data for Progress polling finds that 65 percent of voters say businesses should not be allowed to turn away customers who are of a particular race, religion, disability, or sexual orientation because of the business owner's personal beliefs. This includes a majority of voters across age, race/ethnicity, and gender, and a plurality of Republicans (48 percent).

64 percent of voters say the right of individuals to be served by businesses, regardless of their race, religion, disability, or sexual orientation, is more important than the right of business owners to refuse service based on their conscience or religious beliefs (30 percent). 

When asked about various hypothetical scenarios, more than 3 in 5 voters disagree that a business owner should be able to refuse services for interfaith marriages (63 percent), interracial marriages (67 percent), or a baby shower for an unwed mother (68 percent). The belief that business owners should be able to refuse services in these scenarios is driven by Republican voters, with more than 1 in 3 agreeing in each case. 

While the precedent set by this decision is alarmingly gray, the harms of discrimination are abundantly clear. And most voters do not believe one’s beliefs are justifiable means for discrimination against a member of a protected class.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty