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Red State Policies Are Killing Their Citizens

One of the most baffling things if one looks beyond the Republican mantra of "god, guns and gays" and large doses of race baiting is the way working class whites continue to support Republican candidates despite the fact that the Republican economic agenda only serves to harm them by blocking health care and social program funding, attacking unions, and taxes cuts that in reality only serve to disproportionately  benefit the very wealthy.  Now, a new Washington Post study finds that these Republican policies are literally killing red states citizens by shortening their life spans compared to the life spans of similar citizens in blue states.   Talk about voting against one's own best interests. "Owning the lib" may thrill many of these red state Republican voter, but the Republican anti-social safety net agenda and efforts to gut safety regulations are killing these very same voters prematurely.  One of the case studies compares comparable communities in red Ohio, purple Pennsylvania and blue New York State and reveals that the Ohioans have significantly shorter life spans even when other things are equal.  The killing factor is the Republican policies that harm the working class that the GOP claims to represent.  Here in Virginia with the state elections just a month away, Republican candidates are peddling the same promises of tax cuts and lies about "wasteful Democrat spending" and seek to bring the same life shortening policies to Virginia  that are killing residents in red states like Ohio. Here are highlights on the Post findings:

ASHTABULA, Ohio — Mike Czup unspooled the hose to wash his hearse. It was time to pick up the body of yet another neighbor who had died in the prime of life.

Since he started working at 15 in the funeral business, Czup has seen plenty of tragedies. But the 52-year-old said he’s still coming to grips with a disturbing fact about the bodies he washes, embalms and entombs: About a quarter of the people he buries are younger than him, as residents in this once-thriving coal town are dying earlier and earlier.

Ashtabula’s problems are Ohio’s problems — and in large part, America’s problems. Americans are more likely to die before age 65 than residents of similar nations, despite living in a country that spends substantially more per person on health care than its peers.

Many of those early deaths can be traced to decisions made years ago by local and state lawmakers over whether to implement cigarette taxes, invest in public health or tighten seat-belt regulations, among other policies, an examination by The Washington Post found. States’ politics — and their resulting policies — are shaving years off American lives.

Ashtabula’s problems stand out compared with two nearby counties — Erie, Pa., and Chautauqua, N.Y. All three communities, which ring picturesque Lake Erie and are a short drive from each other, have struggled economically in recent decades as industrial jobs withered — conditions that contribute toward rising midlife mortality, research shows. None is a success story when it comes to health. But Ashtabula residents are much more likely to die young, especially from smoking, diabetes-related complications or motor vehicle accidents, than people living in its sister counties in Pennsylvania and New York, states that have adopted more stringent public health measures.

That pattern held true during the coronavirus pandemic, when Ashtabula residents died of covid at far higher rates than people in Chautauqua and Erie.

The differences around Lake Erie reflect a steady national shift in how public health decisions are being made and who’s making them.

State lawmakers gained autonomy over how to spend federal safety net dollars following Republican President Ronald Reagan’s push to empower the states in the 1980s. Those investments began to diverge sharply along red and blue lines, with conservative lawmakers often balking at public health initiatives they said cost too much or overstepped. Today, people in the South and Midwest, regions largely controlled by Republican state legislators, have increasingly higher chances of dying prematurely compared with those in the more Democratic Northeast and West, according to The Post’s analysis of death rates.

Ohio sticks out — for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found.

Public health officials say Ohio could save lives by adopting measures such as a higher tobacco tax or stricter seat-belt rules, initiatives supported by Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican generally friendly to their cause. . . . But those proposals have repeatedly stalled in a state legislature controlled by Republicans for 27 of the past 29 years and whose leaders show little inclination to move aggressively now.

Thirty years ago, Ohio’s health outcomes were on par with California’s, with nearly identical death rates for adults in the prime of life — ranking in the middle among the 50 states. But the two states’ outcomes have diverged, along with their political leanings, said Ellen Meara, a health economics and policy professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She has studied why death rates fell in California, home to some of the nation’s most progressive politics, while they scarcely budged in increasingly conservative Ohio. By 2017, California had the nation’s second-lowest mortality rates, falling behind only Minnesota; Ohio ranked 41st, according to The Post analysis.

Health disparities also show up unevenly across Ohio. . . . Many of the state’s public health outcomes are a direct result of political decisions, Skinner and other experts say, pointing to differences in Medicaid and safety net funding, as well as tobacco taxes and highway safety laws between Ohio and its neighbors. They note that Republicans’ stranglehold on the legislature, after defying repeated court orders to redraw state voting maps, has protected those politicians from the consequences of their votes.

State data shows that seat-belt use has fallen in Ohio to its lowest level in 18 years — with fewer than 81 percent of residents regularly buckling up, compared with 92 percent of Americans as a whole — worrying officials who say the decline is preventable, inexplicable and contributes to greater risk. A Post analysis shows that Ashtabula residents are twice as likely to die of motor vehicle accidents as are people in Chautauqua.

Ohio’s GOP lawmakers have also rebuffed multiple efforts to boost cigarette taxes, a public health measure proven to decrease smoking rates — especially among new and young smokers.

There’s also a notable difference in health outcomes: Smoking-related deaths — including from lung cancer, heart disease and chronic lower-respiratory disease — have declined sharply across the country over the last two decades but increased in Ashtabula, where middle-aged adults are 55 percent more likely to die of those causes than the national average, The Post found. While the rates of smoking-related deaths in Erie and Chautauqua are grim, they are not nearly as bad as Ashtabula’s.

Ohio’s tobacco tax has been raised just once since 2005. Public health experts say the state’s relatively low tobacco tax is a key reason it had the fourth-highest adult smoking rate in the country — and ranked near the bottom of states for life expectancy as of 2019.

In contrast, Pennsylvania’s middle-of-the-pack smoking rate matched its life expectancy ranking, and New York — whose cigarette tax is now more than three times that of Ohio’s — had one of the lowest smoking rates and ranked third in life expectancy.

New York spent an average of $102 per person on public health annually in the years before the pandemic, more than double the $43 per person that Ohio spent, according to an AP-KFF Health News analysis.

Elizabeth Kidder, a Chautauqua native who serves as medical director of a safety net clinic, has seen how state policies can have a direct impact on county residents. The internal medicine specialist said her patients who move out of state often find they don’t have the same quality of Medicaid services

In Ohio, as in much of America, the fate of measures that can save lives boils down to a familiar tension: individualism vs. the public good.

Christine Hill, health commissioner for Ashtabula City, said some constituents have urged her to get government out of their health care.

To health advocates and the legislators, the fight over what’s known as preemption — state lawmakers passing legislation to stop local governments from implementing policies such as harsher cigarette taxes or stricter gun laws — is part of the existential battle over the direction of the state.

Republican lawmakers have increasingly deployed preemption laws to hamstring the ability of cities and counties to make health mandates that could save some residents, according to legal experts.

Read the entire piece. Republican voters are literally harming themselves and their loved ones but are too blinded by calls for "freedom", tax cuts, racism and prejudice towards others to take a look in the mirror and realize that they are their own worse enemies.  Virginia voters need to open their eyes and not let Republicans bring similar to Virginia and to the detriment of everyday Virginians.

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‘Trump’s Generals’ Need to Warn Voters

Recently, while having dinner with the husband and friends, one friend remarked that he had given up trying to understand why some mutual acquaintances continued to support Donald Trump despite the mountains of evidence why Trump is un fit for office and a menace to America and to democracy. Like myself, this friend felt that Trump's unfitness and threat ought to be painfully obvious to any decent, moral person - a definition that excludes evangelicals who wear false piety on their sleeves while being utterly immoral in their support of Trump.  One can only speculate that Trump's supporters are either lazy and uninformed (something hard to understand) or they are immoral and filled with hate and prejudice, something Trump fans and normalizes.  Indeed, if one looks at history some of Trump's parallels might well be the Roman emperors Nero and Caligula, both incredible narcissists and motivated by cruelty and no concern for the nation they led.  One has to wonder what it will take to wake up the majority of voters as to why Trump is unfit and to the fact that regardless of their misgivings about Joe Biden, Biden remains the only choice if his opponent is Trump.  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican argues that generals who held positions in the Trump regime have a duty to warn the public of Trumps unfitness for office.  Here are column highlights:

Three years ago, Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that President Donald Trump had referred to soldiers killed in battle as “suckers” and “losers.” Trump immediately called it a “fake story” and said it was a “disgrace” that the magazine was allowed to publish it. This week, John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, confirmed the accuracy of that article, as well as that of a book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser that quoted Trump complaining that being in the presence of military amputees “doesn’t look good for me.”

In a statement released to CNN, Kelly, a retired Marine general who lost his own son in combat in Afghanistan, not only wrote of Trump’s disdain for wounded and fallen veterans but also described Trump as “a person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. … A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”  Kelly concluded: “There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.”

With Trump leading the Republican primary field by a large margin, there is a lot more that needs to be said — and Kelly is one of the people who needs to say it. He needs to speak out in a much more public and sustained way about the unique threat Trump poses to American democracy, and he needs to be joined in doing so by two other retired generals who also served in the upper echelons of the Trump administration: former defense secretary Jim Mattis and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

All three men, who were often referred to as “Trump’s generals” or “the adults in the room,” have made clear that they hold Trump in well-justified disdain.

Mattis announced his resignation as defense secretary in 2018 by releasing a letter that noted Trump did not share his views about “treating allies with respect” and was not “clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors” — a reference, presumably, to Trump’s well-known affinity for dictators Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. . . .

In June 2020, at the height of the protests over the murder of George Floyd, Trump marched through Washington’s Lafayette Square, which had been cleared of peaceful protesters, for a bizarre photo op with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mattis subsequently issued a statement in which he wrote: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. … We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

McMaster has been a bit more circumspect, but he has condemned Trump for “aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to undermine U.S. democracy and for telling the Proud Boys militia to “stand back and stand by”

The danger Trump poses to our democracy might not matter to his cult followers — for many of them, it’s a selling point — but it’s a different matter when it comes to general-election voters who remain up for grabs. With Trump and President Biden essentially tied in head-to-head matchups, the Wall Street Journal’s polling shows that 26 percent of the electorate remains undecided between the two candidates, hard as that might be to believe.

Almost none of them, I’m sure, have heard of Kelly’s latest statement denouncing Trump.

Kelly, Mattis and McMaster — joined, ideally, by other disaffected Trump appointees, such as former national security adviser John Bolton, former defense secretary Mark T. Esper and former attorney general William P. Barr — need to mount an “Unfit to Serve” tour targeting early-primary states and general-election swing states. They need to spend every free minute over the next year alerting undecided voters to the danger of electing Trump again — before it’s too late.

Kelly, Mattis and McMaster, as generals who have devoted their lives to serving their country, have particular standing to make the case in a way that might make apathetic voters take notice. Simply issuing written statements is not enough: They need to go on TV and on the stump to get the message out.

“It’s pretty clear in the focus groups that when swing voters backslide toward Trump, it’s because they’re hazy on what they hate about him and are frustrated with the economy,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, told me. “A stark reminder from respected generals can remind swing voters why their hesitations about Biden pale in comparison to their fears of putting Trump back in the White House.”

[T]hey served Trump in political, not military, posts . . . . This would be one last duty they could perform for the country they love, to save us from a candidate whom Milley, in his retirement ceremony last month, rightly referred to as a “wannabe dictator.”

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GOP Fantasy Collides With Reality

As a piece in Politico lays out, the Republican Party is increasingly a failed party that has no real agenda other than providing performances to thrill elements of its hate-filled, knuckle dragging base.  Actually governing is beyond the party's ability, especially in the House of Representatives where gerrymandered districts have all but guaranteed that Republican candidates will win general elections regardless of their unfitness for office.  Throw in the fact that most of the party's effort is directed at appeasing and pandering to its cult leader, Donald Trump, a man truly living in a very disturbed fantasy world driven my his malignant narcissism.  When viewed in this light, the current debacle in the House of Representatives is of little surprise.  Ironically, some in the GOP are blaming Democrats for failing to save Kevin McCarthy from the fate he set for himself when he sold his soul and what little integrity he had left to secure the Speakership back in January.  The reality is that when you sell your soul and make a deal with the devil, it's only a matter of time before the true price comes due. Indeed, a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican makes the case that McCarthy - and by extension the GOP - got what he/it deserved.  What's most troubling is that the country and its citizens are being held captive by a failed party. Here are highlights from The Atlantic:

Last night was the night a lot of bills came due for Kevin McCarthy.  The bill came due for pandering to his party’s extremes, for desperate deals and broken promises. Most of all, the bill came due for the House Republicans’ failure in the elections of 2022.

Republicans have had a lot of bad elections since Donald Trump took over the party. They lost the popular vote for president in 2016, they lost the House in 2018, they lost the presidency in 2020, and they lost the Senate in 2021.

The 2022 election cycle was supposed to break the Trump curse. It was supposed to be the year of the red wave that would sweep away Joe Biden’s woke mob in Congress. Instead, Republicans posted net losses of one seat in the U.S. Senate, two governorships, and four state legislative chambers. Amid all of the defeats, there was one piece of good news: They reclaimed the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But that seeming victory proved deceptive. Democrats had lost the majority, but Republicans had not won a functioning majority of their own.

They tried to act otherwise. They tried to advance a big agenda, even tried to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. To propel that agenda required their tiny majority to march in unison, each member subordinating his or her own wishes to the collective will.

Predictably, that did not happen.  Which left Plan B: Accept reality; acknowledge that the GOP had not won a functioning majority; and reach across the aisle, make deals, and do your business that way.

That’s what McCarthy did in May with the debt-ceiling deal and tried to do again with the budget this past weekend. The first foray wounded him. The second finished him.

The rules of contemporary Republican politics make it hard to accept reality. Reality is just too awkward.

In reality, Trump has been a big vote loser for Republicans. He fluked into the presidency with a Dukakis-like share of the vote in 2016, then lost his party its majority in the House in 2018. Trump got decisively booted from the presidency in 2020; rampaged illegally on January 6, 2021; and then cost his party its Senate majority in the January 2021 runoff elections. His election-denier message damaged his party further in the elections of 2022. His demand for a Biden investigation and impeachment in 2023 is producing an embarrassing fiasco. But no Republican leader dares say these things out loud.

Most taboo of all is working with Democrats, on any terms other than total, one-sided domination: We win, you lose. So McCarthy just had to press ahead, acting as if he commanded a majority when he did not; insulting and demeaning the minority, even though he had to know that he might need their help at any minute.

That minute came. McCarthy sought Democratic votes to save him from his own refractory members, and in return he offered nothing. Not even politeness.

Where we are is a country with a solid anti-Trump majority confronting a pro-Trump minority that believes it has a right to rule without concession or compromise.

The only way to produce a stable majority in the House is for the next Republican leader to reach a working agreement with the Democrats to bypass the nihilists in the GOP caucus. But that agreement will have to be unspoken and even denied—because making agreements that show any respect for the other side will be seen by Republican partisans as betrayal. The price of GOP leadership is delivering delusions and fantasies: the delusion and fantasy that Trump won in 2020, the delusion and fantasy that the Republicans did not lose in 2022.

The next leader will have to manage another set of delusions and fantasies—those being trafficked via the Biden impeachment inquiry. The reality is: Republicans have made a lot of angry accusations, but they have scant evidence that the president is guilty of anything other than fathering a troubled son. The fantasy is: They’ll discover proof of a huge criminal scheme that implicates President Biden.

For seven years, Republicans have protected and enabled Trump, the most corrupt and lawless president in American history. They crave to believe that Biden is as bad or worse, and they won’t be denied that craving by pesky details such as its crazy untruth. The next ringmaster will have to deliver a more exciting act to the most frenzied fans in the circus seats.

For the rest of the country, all of this threatens more crisis, more drama, more misgovernment, until one of two things happens. Either Republicans will overcome their taboo against reality and find some way to strike deals with their opponents, or voters in November 2024 will replace this dysfunctional majority that lives by lies with a functional majority that can work with facts.

Let's hope and pray that the latter is what occurs.

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Republican Dysfunction is Here to Stay

The only thing that defined Kevin McCarthy was his ambition to be Speaker of the House at any cost and to achieve that goal he empowered some of the most extreme and loathsome members of the Republican caucus.  Not surprisingly, these elements turned on McCarthy like a pack of rabid dogs and McCarthy now has the distinction of being the first Speaker  to be thrown out of the Speakership by his own party.  More frightening for the country is the reality that the House is controlled by a Republican Party that is unwilling and incapable of governing.  Rather than pass legislation that moves forward the interests and well being of the nation and its citizens, we have seen bill after bill introduced in a form of performance legislation that thrills extreme elements of the GOP/MAGA base and which have no chance of passage in the Senate much less broad public support.  Scoring points with the party base and issuing catchy one liners is the main obsession of the renegade elements of the House GOP.  Whoever ultimately replaces McCarthy likely has little chance of success and the nation will be forced to witness unending GOP incompetence and petulance while Democrats stand by as the only adults in the room.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the spectacle.  Here are highlights: 

“The Office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant,” the presiding officer, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), announced after the 216-210 vote to oust McCarthy.

From the front row of the gallery, I heard gasps from the floor. And then, from the Republican side of the chamber, a lone woman’s voice: “Now what?”

McCarthy, whose only evident ideology as speaker had been personal ambition, has secured his place in history: the only speaker in U.S. history to be voted out by his peers. His chaotic nine months in the job was the shortest tenure since that of Michael C. Kerr in 1876, as the Bulwark’s Tim Miller pointed out. But Kerr’s speakership ended because he died of tuberculosis. McCarthy, by contrast, was knifed by his fellow Republicans.

This is why Tuesday’s events are much larger than McCarthy, for they made it clear, if there had been any doubt, that the Republican Party has lost the ability to govern.

McCarthy’s term began in chaos, with his 15 rounds of balloting. It lurched from crisis to manufactured crisis, with a needless debt ceiling showdown, failed votes and pulled bills on the floor, recriminations and name-calling in Republican caucus meetings, the launch of impeachment proceedings on fabricated charges, and last week’s near-shutdown of the government. Now, it is ending in chaos, with Republicans openly savaging each other on the House floor and all legislative functions ceasing while the majority party tries to pick its next leader.

Under continuity of government procedures — designed for terrorist decapitation of the government rather than partisan zealots offing their own speaker — a predesignated speaker pro tempore took temporary control of the house. That man, revealed to be Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), did the only thing he could. “It would be prudent to first recess,” he told the body, so that leaderless lawmakers could “meet and discuss the path forward.” The House won’t return for an entire week.

It doesn’t really matter who Republicans choose to replace McCarthy, who announced late Tuesday that he won’t run again. Nobody will succeed in that role because the party itself is ungovernable.

McCarthy’s final day as speaker proceeded like the others before it — in a leadership vacuum.

McCarthy would need some Democratic votes to keep the speakership. But he offered Democrats nothing for those votes. This sealed McCarthy’s fate. Democrats unified against McCarthy at their own caucus meeting, after which the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), made it official by saying it was up to Republicans alone “to end the House Republican Civil War.”

On the House floor, the Republican combatants seemed ill-equipped to defuse the latest crisis they had created. Indicted Rep. George Santos (N.Y.) lifted up his sweater to reveal to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) his SpongeBob SquarePants tie. Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) played with her infant grandson.

“We need a speaker who will fight for something — anything — besides just staying or becoming speaker,” said Rep. Bob Good (Va.), one of the rebels.

Republicans laughed, booed and heckled Gaetz as he spoke. Rep. Mike Garcia (Calif.) called the rebels “Republicans running with scissors and supported by Democrats.”

Rep. Tom McClintock (Calif.), warning of a “paralyzed” House, said, “Democrats will revel in Republican dysfunction and the public will rightly be repulsed.” Foreseeing “grave danger” to the country, he prayed: “Dear God, grant us the wisdom to see it.”

Gaetz (only Good and Rep. Andy Biggs joined his side in the debate) parried his GOP colleagues with one-liners. When Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) improbably claimed that “this Republican majority has exceeded all expectations,” Gaetz quipped: “If this House of Representatives has exceeded all expectations, then we definitely need higher expectations.”

Gaetz, with his arched eyebrows and slicked back hair, looks the part of a cartoon villain. He’s more of a street thug than a legislator, and in his seven years in Congress, he has done nothing but tear things down.

But this street thug made quick work of McCarthy. As the clerk called the roll, the doomed speaker, sitting in the same seat he occupied during January’s 15 ballots, could be seen sitting silently, staring straight ahead.

It’s just a matter of time until Gaetz — and the many others like him — render McCarthy’s successor a failure, too. This is all they know how to do.

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Why MAGA Wants to Betray Ukraine

The nation dodged - at least for now - a government shutdown triggered by House Republican extremists (a reprise of the circus may take place in mid-November). One of the significant items missing from the continuing resolution that funded the federal government was additional aid to Ukraine which reflects the reality that a significant faction within today's Republican Party is not only anti-democracy here at home in America but also pro-Putin and seeking to aid Russia, America's enemy, in its war to subjugate Ukraine and expand Putin's Russian empire. A column in the New York Times looks at the funding bill and blows apart the GOP pretense that cutting aid to Ukraine is due to the GOP extremists' desire to rein in spending as a means to fund needed programs at home.  In truth, in relative terms aid to Ukraine is a tiny piece of overall federal spending and pales in comparison to the red ink caused by the Trump/GOP 2017 tax cuts for the super wealthy.  Here are column excerpts: 

[T]he federal government wasn’t shut down over the weekend, although we may have to go through this whole drama again in six weeks. Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, ended up doing the obvious: bringing a funding bill to the floor that could pass only with Democratic votes, because the hard-liners in his own party wouldn’t agree to anything feasible. And the bill didn’t include any of the spending cuts Republicans have been demanding, except for one big, bad thing: a cutoff of aid to Ukraine.

Democrats appear to have agreed to this bill because they expect to get a separate vote on Ukraine aid; President Biden has indicated that he believes he has a deal with McCarthy to that effect. I hope they’re right.

But why did things turn out this way? . . . Nothing short of a coup can satisfy this inchoate rage. But McCarthy evidently thought he could reduce the backlash against his deal with Democrats by betraying, or at least pretending to betray, Ukraine. That’s clearly something MAGA wants. But why?

Whatever anti-Ukraine voices like Elon Musk may pretend, it’s not about the money. Right-wing hard-liners, both in Congress and outside, claim to be upset about the amount we’re spending supporting Ukraine. But if they really cared about the financial burden of aid, they’d make the minimal effort required to get the numbers right. No, aid to Ukraine isn’t undermining the future of Social Security or making it impossible to secure our border or consuming 40 percent of America’s G.D.P.

How much are we actually spending supporting Ukraine? In the 18 months after the Russian invasion, U.S. aid totaled $77 billion. That may sound like a lot. It is a lot compared with the tiny sums we usually allocate to foreign aid. But total federal outlays are currently running at more than $6 trillion a year, or more than $9 trillion every 18 months, so Ukraine aid accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending . . . . The military portion of that spending is equal to less than 5 percent of America’s defense budget.

Incidentally, the United States is by no means bearing the burden of aiding Ukraine alone. In the past, Donald Trump and others have complained that European nations aren’t spending enough on their own defense. But when it comes to Ukraine, European countries and institutions collectively have made substantially larger aid commitments than we have.

Given how small a budget item that aid is, claims that aid to Ukraine somehow makes it impossible to do other necessary things, such as securing the border, are nonsense.

And the benefits of aiding a beleaguered democracy are huge. Remember, before the war, Russia was widely viewed as a major military power, which a majority of Americans saw as a critical threat (and whose nonwoke military some Republicans exalted). That power has now been humbled.

Ukraine’s unexpectedly successful resistance to Russian aggression has also put other autocratic regimes that might have been tempted to engage in wars of conquest on notice that democracies aren’t that easy to overrun. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Russia’s failures in Ukraine have surely reduced the chances that China will invade Taiwan.

Finally, what even Republicans used to call the free world has clearly been strengthened. NATO has risen to the occasion, confounding the cynics, and is adding members. Western weapons have proved their effectiveness.

Those are big payoffs for outlays that are a small fraction of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and let’s not forget that Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying. Why, then, do MAGA politicians want to cut Ukraine off?

The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.

So pay no attention to all those complaints about how much we’re spending in Ukraine. . . . the people claiming to be worried about the cost don’t really care about the money. What they are, basically, is enemies of democracy, both abroad and at home.

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Unholy Alliance: Evangelicals and Donald Trump

For decades now I have thought few groups more hypocrisy-filled, dishonest and often outright cruel than so-called "conservative Christians," including far right Catholics who cherry pick Old Testament verses to condemn and harm others others while utterly ignoring New Testament dictates of love of neighbor and caring for the poor and less fortunate.   In addition, this group has long sought to inflict its toxic beliefs and prejudices on all of society.  Thus, in many ways it is no surprise that this group is enthralled with Donald Trump who promised (and continues to promise) them political power and who enjoys cruelty to others as much as they do even as they posture with false religiosity.   Trump truly embodies the seven deadly sins yet this groups sees him as god's anointed one and is deaf to logic and reason - evangelicals are among the least educated demographic - when it comes to exposing Trump's moral lacking and never ending un-Christ like behavior.  Instead its all about emotion and Trump legitimizing hatred and prejudice.  A column in the New York Times looks at the threat these people pose to the nation.  Here are highlights:

The more I consider the challenge posed by Christian nationalism, the more I think most observers and critics are paying too much attention to the wrong group of Christian nationalists. We mainly think of Christian nationalism as a theology or at least as a philosophy. In reality, the Christian nationalist movement that actually matters is rooted in emotion and ostensibly divine revelation, and it’s that emotional and spiritual movement that so stubbornly clings to Donald Trump.

Three related stories illustrate the challenge.

First, Katherine Stewart wrote a disturbing report for The New Republic about the latest iteration of the ReAwaken America Tour, a radical right-wing road show sponsored by Charisma News, a Pentecostal Christian publication. The tour has attracted national attention, including in The Times, and features a collection of the far right’s most notorious conspiracy theorists and Christian populists. The rhetoric at these events, which often attract crowds of thousands, is unhinged.

Then there’s Thursday’s report in The Times describing how an anti-Trump conservative group with close ties to the Club for Growth is finding that virtually nothing is shaking Trump voters’ confidence in Trump.

And finally, we cannot forget the astounding finding of a HarrisX poll for The Deseret News, showing that more Republicans see Donald Trump as a “person of faith” than see openly religious figures like Mitt Romney, Tim Scott and Mike Pence, Trump’s own (very evangelical) vice president, that way. It’s an utterly inexplicable result, until you understand the nature of the connection between so many Christian voters and Donald Trump.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, there was a tremendous surge of interest in Christian nationalism. Christian displays were common in the crowd at the Capitol. Rioters and protesters carried Christian flags, Christian banners and Bibles. They prayed openly, and a Dispatch reporter in the crowd told me that in the late afternoon Christian worship music was blaring from loudspeakers. I started to hear questions I’d never heard before: What is Christian nationalism and how is it different from patriotism?

I’ve long thought that the best single answer to that question comes from a church history professor at Baylor named Thomas Kidd. In the days before Jan. 6, when apocalyptic Christian rhetoric about the 2020 election was building to a fever pitch, Kidd distinguished between intellectual or theological Christian nationalism and emotional Christian nationalism.

The intellectual definition is contentious. There are differences, for example, among Catholic integralism, which specifically seeks to “integrate” Catholic religious authority with the state . . . . and Pentecostalism’s Seven Mountain Mandate, which seeks to place every key political and cultural institution in the United States under Christian control.

But walk into Christian MAGA America and mention any one of those terms, and you’re likely to be greeted with a blank look. “Actual Christian nationalism,” Kidd argues, “is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” 

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the “rage and joy” of MAGA America. Outsiders see the rage and hatred directed at them and miss that a key part of Trump’s appeal is the joy and fellowship that Trump supporters feel with each other. But there’s one last element that cements that bond with Trump: faith, including a burning sense of certainty that by supporting him, they are instruments of God’s divine plan.

For this reason, I’ve started answering questions about Christian nationalism by saying it’s not serious, but it’s very dangerous. It’s not a serious position to argue that this diverse, secularizing country will shed liberal democracy for Catholic or Protestant religious rule. But it’s exceedingly dangerous and destabilizing when millions of citizens believe that the fate of the church is bound up in the person they believe is the once and future president of the United States.

That’s why the Trump fever won’t break. That’s why even the most biblically based arguments against Trump fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to Trump is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself. In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won’t be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the “prophecies” change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.

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