Virginia Democratic Mailer Correctly Links Gillespie to White Nationalists

The campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is having conniption fits because a Virginia Democratic Party mailer correctly links Gillespie to white supremacists. Having viewed many of Gillespie's ads that have definite racist undercurrent to them, combined with his refusal to condemn Donald Trump's apparent embrace of white supremacists in Charlottesville back in August, 2017, and his effort to court Corey Stewart supporters who rallied to Stewart's openly racist and pro-Confederate campaign, I believe that the mailer is accurate.  No doubt some of my Republican "friends" who continue to stick their heads in the sand - or elsewhere where the sun doesn't shine, if you want my candid opinion - will whine and feign false outrage just like Gillespie, but the sad reality is that today's Republican Party IS a racist party and Gillespie - as are AG candidate John Adams and Lt. Governor candidate Jill Vogel - is pandering to white supremacists and religious extremist.  He has no chance of winning without their strong support.  Sometimes, the truth hurts and, if my Republican "friends" do not like being tied to white supremacists, they have two options on November 7th: stay home and do not vote, or vote for the Democratic ticket.  It's really very simple.  If you vote for candidates of a party with a racist, anti-minority agenda, then look in the mirror and face the reality that perhaps you are in fact a racist even if you are not donning KKK robes regularly. The Washington Post looks at the mailer and the GOP's feigned outrage.  Here are excerpts:

Virginia’s heated election cycle is becoming increasingly nasty, with the statewide Democratic ticket sending out a new mailer linking Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie and President Trump to the torch-bearing white nationalists who descended on Charlottesville over the summer.

In August, violent clashes between white supremacists in Charlottesville rallying to defend a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and counterprotestors left one woman dead and two state troopers died when their helicopter crashed.

The mailer features images of both Republican men above a photo of the white supremacists with the text, “On Tuesday November 7th, Virginia Gets To Stand Up...To Hate.”

The back of the literature features a prominent image of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam, along with Democratic lieutenant governor nominee Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring, with the message “This is our chance to stand up to Trump, Gillespie, and hate.” All three Democrats approved the ad, and the Democratic Party of Virginia paid for the mailer. Gillespie’s campaign condemned the mailer, which was first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Northam campaign spokesman David Turner countered that the mailer was fair because Gillespie did not explicitly condemn the president’s response to the Charlottesville unrest. Democrats pummeled Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, for not joining members of his own party, including Virginia U.S. Reps. Barbara Comstock and Scott W. Taylor, in directly criticizing Trump’s reaction. . . . Ed Gillespie should be willing to call out Donald Trump when he’s wrong and because he won’t, he gives voters a clear choice on Nov. 7.”
 [I]n September, Gillespie began airing ads that aimed to link MS-13 gang violence to Northam, while using images of Latinos in a way Latino groups call racist and inflammatory. And another ad suggests Northam wanted to restore gun rights to violent felons. Both parties are also trading barbs over mailers targeting against Latina candidates.

Oh, and lit's not forget that the entire GOP ticket supports voter ID laws and other GOP efforts to disenfranchise minority voters under the lie of preventing nonexistent voter fraud.   Gillespie, et all deserve the label given to the, plain and simple.

The GOP Is No Party for Honest, Honorable Men

A column in the New York Times hits a home run in my view when it comes to looking at the rank dishonesty and moral bankruptcy of today's Republican Party. There was a time when the Republican Party prided itself on honesty, education, respect for science and honorable behavior.  That was the Republican Party of my grandparents and parents and even my days as a GOP committee member.  Now, neither I nor my ancestors simply would recognize today's Republican Party compared to what it once was.   What happened? As I have noted many times before, the defining change in the GOP took place when the evangelical Christians - the Christofascists, if you will - hijacked the party base.  Numerous studies have found that the Christofascists lie with abandon and take the view that anything that furthers their theocratic agenda is justified, including lying constantly and deliberately.  

Now, that mentality permeates the Republican Party.  Donald Trump and Mike Pence personify this deliberate dishonesty. Sadly, many other Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have also embraced outright lying and dishonesty.  But the dishonesty is not limited to the Republican Party at the national level.  In the current Virginia election campaigns, all three of the Republican statewide candidates are lying  and know full well that they are lying.  Ed Gillespie whines about the cost of Confederate monument that will cut funds for public education, but totally ignores his proposed tax cuts that would leave Virginia with a 1.4 billion budget deficit which would be catastrophic to public education funding.  As long as the wealthy get a huge tax cut, trashing public education is perfectly fine with Gillespie.  GOP Attorney General candidate John Adams is no better than Gillespie.  It recent ads, Adams whines that Democrat Mark Herring is lying about him even though Herrings ads about Adams' shady clients is 100% accurate.  The same dishonesty plagues GOP Lt. Governor candidate Jill Vogel.  Like the leaders of Christofascist "family values" organizations, nowadays, if a Republican's lips are moving, the safest assumption is that they are lying.   Here are column highlights:

According to a new CBS News poll, almost 60 percent of the American public believes that the current Republican tax plan favors the wealthy. Some people see this number as a sign that the plan is in trouble; I see it as a sign that Republican lies are working far better than they deserve to.

For the plan does indeed favor the wealthy — overwhelmingly, undeniably. It’s shocking that as many as 40 percent of Americans don’t realize this.

It’s not difficult to see how the plan is tilted toward the very top. The main elements of the plan are a cut in top individual tax rates; a cut in corporate taxes; an end to the estate tax; and the creation of a big new loophole that will allow wealthy individuals to pretend that they are small businesses, and get a preferential tax rate. All of these overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, mainly the top 1 percent.

There are also some measures affecting middle-class families, but they’re relatively small change — and some of them would actually raise taxes. Over all, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that by 2027 almost 80 percent of the gains from the plan would go to the top 1 percent, just 12 percent of the gains to the middle 60 percent of Americans — and that more than a quarter of middle-class families would actually see their taxes go up.

The questions we should be asking instead are why Republicans are pushing this so hard, and how they can hope to get away with it.

Bear in mind that there is essentially no popular constituency demanding tax cuts for the rich. By a large margin, the general public wants to see taxes on corporations and the wealthy go up, not down; even Republicans are divided, with only a modest margin in favor of cuts.

Yet tax cuts for the rich are the overriding objective of the modern G.O.P. They were the principal motivation for the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, since that would also mean repealing the high-income taxes that pay for it; from Republicans’ point of view, depriving millions of health care was just a minor side benefit. And now tax cuts for the wealthy are pretty much the only thing left on the G.O.P.’s legislative agenda.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the hope for tax cuts is the main thing keeping congressional Republicans in line behind Donald Trump. They know he’s unfit for office, and many worry about his mental stability. But they’ll back him as long as they think he might get those tax cuts through.

So what’s behind this priority? Follow the money. Big donors are furious at missing out on the $700 billion in tax cuts that were supposed to come out of Obamacare repeal. If they don’t get big bucks out of tax “reform,” they might close their pocketbooks for the 2018 midterm elections.

[H]ow can an administration that pretends to be populist, to stand up for ordinary (white) working people, sell such elitist policies?

The answer is a strategy based entirely on lies. And I mean entirely: The Trump administration and its allies are lying about every aspect of their tax plan.

I’m not talking about dubious interpretations of evidence or misleading presentation of the facts — the kind of thing the Bush administration used to specialize in. I’m talking about flat-out, easily refuted lies, like the claim that America has the world’s highest taxes (among rich countries, we have close to the lowest), or the claim that estate taxes are a huge burden on small business (almost no small businesses pay any estate tax).

[C]an they really get away with this? A lot depends on how the news media handles it. If an administration spokesperson declares that up is down, will news reports simply say “so-and-so says up is down, but Democrats disagree,” or will they also report that up is not, in fact, down? I wish I were confident about the answer to that question.

One thing we know for sure, however, is that a great majority of Republican politicians know perfectly well that their party is lying about its tax plan — and every even halfway competent economist aligned with the party definitely understands what’s going on.

What this means is that everyone who goes along with this plan, or even remains silent in the face of the campaign of mass dissimulation, is complicit — is in effect an accomplice to the most dishonest political selling job in American history.

Do not fall for Republican lies at either the national level.  Instead, send a loud message to the GOP. Get out and vote a straigh Democrat ticket on November 7, 2017 - Ralph Northam for Governor, Mark Herring for Attorney General, and Justin Fairfax for Lt. Governor.  Then follow through and vote Democrat in the 2018 mid-term federal elections. 

Jill Vogel Embraces Lies and the Trump Agenda in the LT. Governor Race

Jill Vogel with E.W. Jackson at a ultra-far right "Christian" gathering

It seems that almost all Republicans lie nowadays and GOP candidate Jill Vogel may be one of the more devious liars in the Republican field as she runs against Democrat Justin Fairfax for Lt. Governor.  Although some of her campaign ads strive to show her as a moderate, she is no moderate. One can only hope that voters are not fooled by her deliberately disingenuous campaign.  Vogel indeed stands for all of the worst of the Trump and GOP reverse Robin Hood agenda.  Nor is she any friend of the LGBT community even though she has pretended otherwise at a few LGBT pride events where she distributed rainbow stickers at LGBT.  Her true view of the LGBT community is not much different that the hysterically anti-gay E. W. Jackson who ran for Lt. Governor four years ago (Jackson has endorsed her and lauds her in a video on his Facebook page).  If elected, Vogel will be all in on the Trump/Pence war against the LGBT community and likewise all on board with the effort to disenfranchise those who do not vote Republican.  Vogel is a liar, although a very, very smooth one - something that makes her very dangerous.  And yes, she is in bed with the Koch brothers and Karl Rove.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Vogel's wolf in sheep's clothing campaign of deceit.  Here are excerpts:

Jill Vogel was just getting her legal career off the ground — still a “baby lawyer,” as a friend tells it — when she went to work for the Republican National Committee.

Before long, she was chief counsel. Then a top lawyer for President George W. Bush’s Energy Department. From there, she built one of the nation’s most prominent GOP elections law firms and won a seat in the state Senate.

Now Vogel, 47, is running for lieutenant governor of Virginia — in the drain-the-swamp style of President Trump.

“We are going to take back Virginia the way this president is going to take back this country!” Vogel declared at an August rally in tiny Marion, in southwest Virginia.

If it takes a certain chutzpah for a longtime GOP insider to adopt the president’s anti-establishment mantra, Vogel has it.  . . . Vogel is all in.

Hers could be a risky strategy in the only Southern state that Trump lost, a place where the president is deeply unpopular. Her Democratic rival, former federal prosecutor Justin Fairfax, played up her ties to Trump as a negative during their debate last week. Democrats speak less admiringly of her balancing act, which in the course of the campaign has included distributing rainbow stickers at LGBT pride events while also teaming up with E.W. Jackson, a lawyer, Christian minister and critic of gay rights who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 2013. Vogel gained notoriety — and the ire of abortion rights activists — in 2012 for a bill that, as originally proposed, would have required most women seeking abortions to first undergo a vaginal ultrasound and be offered a view of the fetus.

“She is intentionally different things to different people,” said Anna Scholl, executive director of Progress Virginia. “When she is with moderate swing voters, she is trying to sell herself as a mom who’s just working hard for families. But you get her into a room with the base and she’s right there with E.W. Jackson. . . . I think it’s a little bit of, don’t look at the woman behind the curtain.”

Specializing in elections and campaign finance law, [Vogel's law firm] it represents some of the nation’s largest super PACs and their related “social welfare” nonprofit organizations, which are allowed to shield their donors. Among them are Americans for Prosperity, part of the “dark money” political network established by the billionaire Koch brothers, and American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by Gillespie and GOP strategist Karl Rove. 

Vogel narrowly won the nomination for lieutenant governor after a mudslinging battle with Sen. Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania). During the primary, Reeves turned up digital records linking Vogel to a pseudonymous email that falsely accused him of having an extramarital affair. Vogel denied any involvement and suggested her family’s electronics had been hacked.  

Her campaign website boasts that she has introduced “more pro-gun bills than any other state senator.” .. . . There was no wavering after the Las Vegas mass shooting, even after the National Rifle Association on Thursday unexpectedly supported a review of regulations on “bump stocks,” devices that allow a semiautomatic rifle to mimic the rapid discharge of an automatic weapon. 

“She comes across as very moderate, very nice — a soccer mom,” Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington) said. “Because of that persona, voters are really tricked because they can’t imagine she’s as strident as she is.” 

[A]head of her primary, Vogel raised all-caps alarms with a mailing about the Obama administration’s order to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice: “DO YOU WANT BARACK OBAMA TO SET TRANSGENDER BATHROOM POLICIES AT YOUR CHILDREN’S SCHOOL?”

Like most of the Virginia Republican Party, Vogel wants to take Virginia backward in time and to put "those people" back in their place.  Vote for Justin Fairfax on November 7, 2017.