Will the NRA Meltdown Aid Democrats and Gun Control?

On Tuesday the Virginia General Assembly will open a special session to address the issue of enacting common sense gun control.  It is a near guarantee that most Republicans in both houses of the General Assembly will continue their slavish self-prostitution to the NRA and gun industry.  Thus, the question of the hour will be whether the NRA's current upheaval and financial meltdown might embolden a few Republicans to reach across the aisle to join Democrats in at last updating Virginia's abysmal gun laws. At the national level, a feeble NRA could harm the re-election efforts of Donald Trump and far right Republicans. For those who care about gun control and responsible government in general, the NRA's troubles are most welcome.  A piece in Politico looks at the ongoing turmoil and possible consequences.  Here are highlights: 

The National Rifle Association aired an avalanche of TV ads and pushed its 5 million-plus members to the polls for Donald Trump in 2016, propelling him in the Rust Belt states that delivered him the presidency.

Now, the gun rights group is in total meltdown — and senior Republicans and Trump 2020 officials are alarmed.

In recent weeks, the NRA has seen everything from a failed coup attempt to the departure of its longtime political architect to embarrassing tales of self-dealing by top leaders. The turmoil is fueling fears that the organization will be profoundly diminished heading into the election, leaving the Republican Party with a gaping hole in its political machinery.

With the Chamber of Commerce and Koch political network withdrawing from their once-dominant roles in electing conservatives, Republicans worry that three organizations that have long formed the core of their electoral infrastructure will be effectively on the sidelines.

The predicament has so troubled some Republicans that they are calling on the famously secretive NRA to address its 2020 plans. Within the past week, senators have privately expressed concerns about the group to National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Todd Young.

With the organization mired in palace intrigue and confronting a daily barrage of negative publicity, some NRA officials are skeptical a 2020 plan will emerge. Many Republicans are convinced the job of turning out Second Amendment supporters will fall to the cash-flush Republican National Committee, which is constructing a massive get-out-the-vote and data machine devoted to turning out conservatives. Jane Timken, chairwoman of the Ohio GOP, said her organization would work closely with the RNC to microtarget firearm owners. The national party, Timken noted, has compiled extensive voter data through sources ranging from gun licenses to gun magazine subscriptions.

Concerns over the NRA intensified last week after the resignation of Chris Cox, who had been the head of its lobbying arm since 2002. . . . . With Cox gone, it's an open question who will oversee the NRA’s 2020 strategy.  “Chris Cox is the guy everybody dealt with,” said Steven Law, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC closely aligned with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The organization's troubles are hard to overstate. The most serious threat is an investigation by New York state attorney general's office into its tax-exempt status. In April, NRA President Oliver North was ousted in an ugly public spectacle in which he declared the group was in a "clear crisis." News organizations have also reported that NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre used $275,000 of the group's money to buy luxury clothes at Zegna in Beverly Hills, Calif., and that the organization logged tens of thousands of dollars in other expenses that benefited its officials.

Trump weighed in on the NRA's problems Tuesday morning, tweeting that the group is a "victim" of "political harassment by New York State and Governor Cuomo."

Issues surrounding the Republican Party's outside infrastructure go beyond the NRA. The Chamber of Commerce, a key player in Republican politics over the past decade, spent just $10 million during the 2018 cycle, about a third of what it spent during the previous election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The scale back has led many to believe the organization, a staple of the business community, is preparing to play a diminished role in 2020.

Meanwhile, the Koch network is gradually shifting away from partisanship and toward policy issues like addressing poverty and drug addiction. The network, which like the Chamber has at times found itself at odds with the president, plans to sit out the 2020 presidential race and is recasting itself in a nonpartisan fashion.

The uncertainty surrounding all three groups is likely to increase pressure on America First Action, a super PAC devoted to backing Trump.

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. 

Did John McCain Kill Obamacare Repeal?

As noted yesterday, the latest GOP effort to kill Obamacare is perhaps the most heinous to date as noted in a post yesterday.   I still remain disgusted with what the GOP has become and just how vicious its agenda has become.  Thankfully, John McCain has shown that a few in the GOP have not utterly thrown away their integrity and morality.  With his announcement yesterday that he will not support the latest Trumpcare travesty, with luck the GOP repeal effort is dead.  A piece in the New York Times looks at McCain's announcement.  Here are excerpts:

Senator John McCain of Arizona announced on Friday that he would oppose the latest proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, leaving Republican leaders with little hope of succeeding in their last-ditch attempt to dismantle the health law and fulfill their longstanding promise to conservative voters.

For Mr. McCain, it was a slightly less dramatic reprise of his middle-of-the-night thumbs-down that killed the last repeal effort in July. This time, the senator, battling brain cancer and confronting his best friend in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, issued a statement saying that he could not “in good conscience” support the proposal by Senators Graham and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

“I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried,” Mr. McCain said. “Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will affect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it.”

With two other Republican senators likely to vote no, Mr. McCain’s opposition to the bill could be fatal. With Democrats united in opposition, Senate Republicans can afford to lose only two of their members.

A bill of this magnitude “requires a bipartisan approach,’’ Mr. McCain added.  Those concerns were compounded by the decision of Republican leaders to press forward with a vote next week before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could complete a full analysis of the Graham-Cassidy legislation. The budget office is expected to provide a preliminary fiscal assessment early in the week, but it indicated that it would not be able to complete an analysis of the bill’s effects on health insurance coverage or premiums by Sept. 30.

McCain has reminded us that sometimes one person can make a difference.  Each of us needs to remember this as we oppose the ugliness of what the GOP and Der Trumpenführer are seeking to do to America.  Another piece in the Times looks at why the GOP is so hell bent to harm millions:

As more than 40 subdued Republican senators lunched on Chick-fil-A at a closed-door session last week, Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado painted a dire picture for his colleagues. Campaign fund-raising was drying up, he said, because of widespread disappointment among donors over the inability of the Republican Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act or do much of anything else.

Mr. Gardner is in charge of his party’s midterm re-election push, and he warned that donors of all stripes were refusing to contribute another penny until the struggling majority produced some concrete results.

“Donors are furious,” one person knowledgeable about the private meeting quoted Mr. Gardner as saying. “We haven’t kept our promise.”

The backlash from big donors as well as the grass roots panicked Senate Republicans and was part of the motivation behind the sudden zeal to take one last crack at repealing the health care law before the end of the month.

This was not what Republicans had envisioned. Preparing for the 2018 midterm elections, they had thought they were in a strong position to maintain or expand their majority. Democrats must defend 25 seats — including 10 in states won last year by President Trump — while just eight Republican-held seats will be on the ballot. But their governing struggles — and attacks on congressional leaders by Mr. Trump — have soured their base, leaving the Senate majority feeling desperate.

Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, was even more blunt in a conversation with Vox. “If we do nothing, it has a tremendous impact on the 2018 elections, and whether or not Republicans still maintain control and we have the gavel,” he said.

Republicans say the fund-raising drop-off has been steep and across the board, from big donations to the small ones the party solicits online from the grass roots. They say the hostile views of both large and small donors are in unusual alignment and that the negative sentiment is crystallized in the fund-raising decline.

Republicans are also set to roll out their income tax overhaul plan next week in an effort to build support for it and find something the party can deliver to the president’s desk. They see the tax plan as their best opportunity to win back the allegiance of donors.

With health care repeal teetering yet again, the one thing they know for sure is that they need to show some accomplishments, and they need to do so fast.

What shocks me is that these Republicans seemingly fail to realize that perhaps some of the fund raising drop off is due to the ugliness of what the GOP is trying to pass. Not everyone is like the Koch brothers who happily want to restore the Gilded Age while the vast majority of Americans suffer.

The GOP's Dark Image of America

The Republican Party likes to talk about supposed American exceptionalism to the point where most thinking people want to vomit.  It's an image that is out of touch with reality and that conveniently ignores all of the ugliness in America's past and failed policies such as the Vietnam War disaster and the more recent debacle in Iraq.  Yet, despite this unreal vision of America, today's GOP has done a 180 degree turn and, if believed, would describe America as a dark and hopeless place.  Perhaps the vision is true for aging white supremacists who cannot tolerate the growing equality of other segments of society ranging from blacks, Hispanics, to LGBT citizens. The 1950's are gone forever, despite the fantasies of the far right.  A column in the New York Times looks at the out of touch view of America now peddled by the GOP and not just Donald Trump.  Here are excerpts:

I’m a baby boomer, which means that I’m old enough to remember conservatives yelling “America — love it or leave it!” at people on the left who criticized racism and inequality. But that was a long time ago. These days, disdain for America — the America that actually exists, not an imaginary “real America” in which minorities and women know their place — is concentrated on the right.

To be sure, progressives still see a lot wrong with the state of our society, and seek change. But they also celebrate the progress we have made, and for the most part the change they seek is incremental: It involves building on existing institutions, not burning everything down and starting over.

On the right, however, you increasingly find prominent figures describing our society as a nightmarish dystopia.

This is obviously true for Donald Trump, who views the world through blood-colored glasses. In his vision of America — clearly derived largely from white supremacist and neo-Nazi sources — crime is running wild, inner cities are war zones, and hordes of violent immigrants are pouring across our open border. In reality, murder is at a historic low, we’re seeing a major urban revival and net immigration from Mexico is negative.

[Y]ou find almost equally dark visions, just as much at odds with reality, among establishment Republicans, people like Paul Ryan, speaker of the House.

Mr. Ryan is, of course, a media darling. He doesn’t really command strong support from his own party’s base; his prominence comes, instead, from a press corps that decided years ago that he was the archetype of serious, honest conservatism, and clings to that story no matter how many times the obvious fraudulence and cruelty of his proposals are pointed out.

[C]onsider the portrait of America Mr. Ryan painted last week, in a speech to the College Republicans. For it was, in its own way, as out of touch with reality as the ranting of Donald Trump. . . . Mr. Ryan’s remarks were intended as a picture of what all such [progressive] policies do.

According to him, it’s very grim. There will, he said, be “a gloom and grayness to things,” ruled by a “cold and unfeeling bureaucracy.” We will become a place “where passion — the very stuff of life itself — is extinguished.” And this is the kind of America Mrs. Clinton “will stop at nothing to have.”

Gallup finds that 80 percent of Americans are satisfied with their standard of living, up from 73 percent in 2008, and that 55 percent consider themselves to be “thriving,” up from 49 percent in 2008. And there are good reasons for those good feelings: recovery from the financial crisis was slower than it should have been, but unemployment is low, incomes surged last year, and thanks to Obamacare more Americans have health insurance than ever before.

So Mr. Ryan’s vision of America looks nothing like reality. It is, however, completely familiar to anyone who read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” as a teenager.

So why does the modern right hate America? There’s not much overlap in substance between Mr. Trump’s fear-mongering and Mr. Ryan’s, but there’s a clear alignment of interests. The people Mr. Trump represents want to suppress and disenfranchise you-know-who; the big-money interests that support Ryan-style conservatism want to privatize and generally dismantle the social safety net, and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

The big question is whether trash-talking America can actually be a winning political strategy. We’ll soon find out.

The Koch Brothers' Top Operative Just Went to Work for Marco Rubio

While Marco Rubio continues to try to be all things to all the lunatic factions in the GOP base (some might say shamelessly prostitute himself to them), it increasingly appears that he is striving to sell his soul to the vulture capitalist faction of the Republican Party best represented by the Koch brothers - the very element in the GOP which has pushed failed GOP policies that have harmed the middle class.  As Mother Jones reports, Rubio just hired the top political operative of the Koch brothers.  As I have noted before, I don't like Rubio and view him as a lying empty suit.  Having just watched the Democrat town hall on CNN in South Carolina, I can't help but think that Hillary would eat Marcobit alive in a debate.  Here are highlights from Mother Jones:

Did Marco Rubio just pick up the biggest endorsement of all? Despite pledging nearly $900 million from their network of donors to fight the Democrats in the 2016 election, Charles and David Koch have been largely missing in action during the primary battle. But Politico is reporting today that their top political operative, Marc Short, is joining Rubio's campaign as a senior adviser.

It's not an actual endorsement by the Kochs, but nabbing Short is a big deal for Rubio. For the past few years, Short has served as the president of Freedom Partners, the nerve center of the Kochs' sprawling political operation. Freedom Partners has a lot of strengths, but the two biggest are arguably money and data. The group is organized as a membership-based organization, with Koch network donors kicking in a minimum of $100,000 per year—and many contributing much more than that. The group raised and spent at least $250 million during the 2012 election and almost $130 million in 2014. As the man at the forefront of the Kochs' vast political fundraising operation, Short may have the best Rolodex of donors in the world.

The second area where Freedom Partners has excelled is data—one of Short's specialties. Freedom Partners is an investor in i360 LLC, a sophisticated databank of voter information that has been augmented with personal information gathered by campaigns and commercial groups.

Short is a longtime political operative who got his start working for Colonel Oliver North's failed congressional campaign in 1994. He went on to a series of high-level staff jobs working for GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including serving as chief of staff for the House's Republican Conference. As the head of Freedom Partners since 2013, he surely has a good grasp on the money and the data. It remains to be seen whether Short's move to the Rubio campaign is a sign that the Kochs and their donors are lining up behind the Florida senator. But nonetheless this is very good news for Rubio.

Rubio Grilled By College Republican On Climate And Energy Policy

Like most of the GOP presidential contender field, Marco Rubio has shown no reluctance to embrace ignorance, prostitute himself to Christofascists, and reverse prior sane positions in order to win the votes of the ugliest elements of the GOP base.  The problem is that younger Republicans - like more and more Americans - are rejecting the governmental policies of advocated by the Koch brothers that allow the pillaging of the earth and treatment of workers as disposable garbage.   And they also are less slavish in the devotion to far right religious dogma.  Marco Rubio got a taste of this at an Iowa town hall last week.  Think Progress has these details:

When Dan Herrera asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) about the environment at a town hall meeting in Iowa last week, it almost seemed like a set-up. 

After all, environmental groups have been known to plant their advocates among the crowds of Republican candidates’ events across the country, attempting to pressure them on issues like clean air and climate change. And Herrera’s question was framed the way any good environmentalist would ask it — first, an appeal to Rubio’s Catholic faith, and then, a direct question about specific policy.

“Pope Francis in the past couple days said a lot about the environment,” the 20-year-old Herrera said, smiling into the brightly lit stage where Rubio stood. “What environmental policies, if any, will you implement if you’re president?”

As it turned out, Herrera was not a member of 350.org or NextGen Climate Action, but a member of the Augustana College Republicans. Located at Augustana College just across the Missisippi River, the group was is dedicated “to promoting the ideals and candidates of their party.”
The Republican party — at least in Washington, D.C. — has been roundly accused of being anti-environment.

But among young Republicans like Herrera, the climate tide seems to be changing.

“Look, we all live here,” Herrera told ThinkProgress after the town hall.  . . . I think that in the current pathway we’re at, that’s not going to be a possibility.”

Young Republicans like Herrera are far more likely to support government action on climate and the environment than their older counterparts. 

Before the first Republican debate, the groups Young Conservatives for Energy Reform and the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum gathered to promote their version of conservative environmentalism — “ending government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, boosting energy efficiency, advancing renewable sources like wind and solar power and moving away from the idea that ‘drill baby, drill’ is a solution.”

Herrera’s views largely aligned with that version. “Why are we still subsidizing oil? That shouldn’t be subsidized anymore. We should be supporting air and ethanol and solar,” he said. 

“The amount of permanent jobs we can come up with in the clean energy industry is phenomenal,” he continued. “When I go to a wind farm, I see actual people working on [turbines] and talk to the designers — I see actual jobs out there. And I think that’s where the Republican solution comes in. It is very possible to stimulate the economy while continuing to produce jobs.”

Herrera criticized Rubio for not publicly accepting the science of climate change, which states that the phenomenon is caused by carbon emissions and will be catastrophic if those emissions are not reduced. Rubio has recently said he doesn’t think climate change is a problem.

Herrera thinks that presidential candidates will continue to face those kinds of questions from GOP Iowans.

“[Iowans] are so very intimately tied with the land, they’re recognizing that the climate is changing and that as a human race … we’ve been awful stewards of the land,” he said. “That should have changed years ago, but it didn’t. And we can’t change the past, so we need to act right now.”

Why Pope Francis Terrifies the Right and GOP

No one has done more to inject religion into politics than the Republican Party and its masters among the Christofascists and the nations plutocrats such as the Koch brothers.  The former have done so in an effort to force their increasingly foul religious beliefs on all Americans - and to crush out anything that threatens the fairy tale world they live in - while the latter have do so out of cynicism and a desire to feed their greed and push a vulture like version of capitalism.  While Francis drinks from the dame Kool-Aid when it comes to obsession with all things sexual, on most other fronts he remains in touch with objective reality and part of that reality is that the far right's efforts to build a new Gilded Age and to rape the Earth of its resources run directly afoul of the Gospel message.  Stated another way, Francis sees the so-called "prosperity gospel" so loved by the professional Christian crowd (with themselves a prime beneficiaries) as a lie and blasphemous.   His pounding of the idols of the far right terrifies them because (i) the fear others will see that their economic policy emperor has no clothes, and, worse yet, (ii) that they are utterly wrong.  A piece in Salon looks at this phenomenon.  Here are excerpts: 

Republican legislators who attended Pope Francis’ address to Congress were apparently relieved that he didn’t threaten them with fire and brimstone, and that he said that human activity is causing “environmental deterioration,” rather than using the dreaded words “climate change” or “global warming.” What remains clear, however, is that they won’t listen to anyone about this subject – not the overwhelming majority of scientists, not economists, not public policy analysts, and not the world’s most famous religious leader.

All of this raises an interesting question: Why exactly are the Republicans so determined to ignore reality? Why won’t they listen to anyone? The answer is actually simple: The reality of climate change demonstrates that progressives are right and they are wrong. Not just wrong about the effect of human activity on the environment, but wrong about their basic approach to the problems of the modern world.

Republican ideology is based on the idea of freedom for capitalists (another concern voiced by Pope Francis). For progressives, freedom involves the ability of ordinary people to express themselves, to choose their own level of religious observance and, increasingly, to receive the education and healthcare that they need to function in modern society. For conservatives, it means the ability of property owners and large corporations to use their economic power any way they wish, to determine exactly how they will treat their employees and what they will say to the consumers who depend on the products they produce.

Americans have rejected this approach for over 100 years, perhaps since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. . . . . we have insisted that the impact of these enterprises on the environment needs to be regulated as well, and that they cannot be permitted to pour poison into our waters and fumes into our air at will.

Recognizing the reality of climate change will necessarily lead to further forms of regulation. That reality emphasizes what physical and social scientists have come to recognize in recent years: that the most recent geological era (usually called the holocene) has ended, and that we are now in an entirely new situation, often described as the anthropocene – the era of human domination.

All this means that conservatives are simply wrong. We’ve gone past the point where the large enterprises that determine the health of the economy, our working people, our environment, and now our planet, can be left to do what they wish.

People don’t like to admit that they are wrong, however. Children stamp their feet or burst into tears. Adults concoct bizarre conspiracy theories (tens of thousands of scientists, from all over the world, have joined together to perpetrate a hoax), engage in outright denials in the face of overwhelming evidence (Marsha Blackburn says that someone – she won’t say who — told her that the Earth is getting cooler) and insult anyone who tells them something they don’t want to hear (even if that person is the leader of a religion they’ve been touting as the truth for decades). But the conservatives are wrong — wrong about climate change and wrong about their entire approach to governing our nation. It’s time for everyone else to stop listening to them.

It is far past the time that conservatives cease being afforded credibility.  Sadly, lazy  journalists cling to their "fair and balanced" fantasy which allows them from having to do the work to challenge bullshit statements and lies from both Republicans and foul Christofascists such as Tony Perkins. Pope Francis may be wrong on matters of sexuality and the control of women's bodies - why is it the celibate men with no sexual or head of family experience claim to be the authorities? -  he is right on the basic falsehood the conservative agenda in America. 

New National Poll: Donald Trump Surges, Jeb Bush 3rd

The Republican Party continues to see the consequences of making itself the party of angry aging whites longing for the past and lost white privilege, outright racists, and far right Christian extremists as a new national poll shows the always bombastic Donald Trump surging and assumed GOP establishment candidate Jeb "Jebbie" Bush slipping down to third place.   As Trump surges, the ugly truths about the GOP continue to be highlighted and more and more Americans are waking up to the selfishness, greed, and extremism of the GOP base.  A piece in Politico looks at the most recent poll findings.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump leads the GOP presidential field by a significant margin, according to a new Quinnipiac University national poll released Thursday.

The poll also indicates that Ohio Gov. John Kasich could ride a post-announcement bump onto the stage for next week’s debate in Cleveland, despite fears that Trump’s wall-to-wall media coverage had overshadowed his late entry into the race.

Fully 20 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they would vote for Trump if the primary were held today — the largest share any single candidate has received in Quinnipiac’s seven surveys over the past two years. That puts the brash real-estate magnate ahead of the two other candidates who earn double-digit support: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at 13 percent and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 10 percent.

It’s a four-way tie for fourth place — with pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio all at 6 percent. Kasich, at 5 percent, is tied for eighth place with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

That’s enough to vault Kasich into the top 10 in POLITICO’s analysis of the most recent live-caller polling of the GOP primary — and potentially onto the dais at the Fox News debate on Aug. 6. Kasich replaces former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who earned just 2 percent of the vote in the Quinnipiac poll and slipped to 11th in the POLITICO average.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie stays at ninth in the average thanks to his 3 percent haul in Thursday’s Quinnipiac poll. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who earned 2 percent in the Quinnipiac poll, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, at 1 percent, are tied for 12th place in the POLITICO average — a full percentage point behind Kasich for the 10th-place spot.

Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former New York Gov. George Pataki also earned just 1 percent of the vote — and are all well behind in the average.

Trump’s strength in the poll comes primarily from male voters: He earns 24 percent of the vote among men. But he also leads among female voters, with 15 percent of the vote to Bush’s 12 percent and Walker’s 9 percent.

[F]or Trump, a 59 percent majority of voters views him unfavorably, with 27 percent who have a favorable opinion. But his image ratings have actually improved over the past two months: In Quinnipiac’s late May poll — taken before he announced his candidacy — just 20 percent viewed him favorably, and 69 percent viewed him unfavorably.

In short, the spectacle continues.  Meanwhile, the Koch brothers seek to derail Trump in favor of one of their puppets.

Scott Walker Annouces Candidacy with Appeals to Greed, Racism, Homophobia and Xenophobia

Driving home tonight I listened to portions of Scott Walker's candidacy announcement speech on Satellite radio and when not yelling at the the radio, I found myself wanting to vomit.  Particularly over the mindless cheering of an audience - which was, thankfully small - who seemed to embody the ignorance and bigotry that are now synonymous with being a Republican.  Walker's speech was big on the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda, embroiling U.S. ground troops in wars across the globe, slashing taxes for the wealthy who he code named "job creators," slashing the social safety net, and throwing American families to the whims of employers and health care insurance companies for health care coverage.  As a piece in Policususa.com noted,  you could almost see the Koch Brothers' lips moving as Walker spoke.  Here are some article highlights:

Scott Walker announced his campaign for president by repeating almost word for word the top priorities of the Koch brothers.

Scott Walker immediately listed why he thinks he should be president. He discussed his efforts to suppress the vote (voter ID laws), more guns (Castle doctrine), less medical care for women (defunding Planned Parenthood), and lower wages (union busting). Walker gave the usual empty Republican gibberish about giving power back to states. 

Gov. Walker’s whole speech was based on selling himself as someone who can win in blue states because he has managed to survive in Wisconsin. Walker announced his plan to gut federal funding for education, Medicaid and job retraining by disguising this as sending money back to the states. What Walker was referring to was block grants that would lead to fewer people getting services. 

Walker attacked poor people and talked about the “dignity of work.” Walker disguised it as helping people move from government dependence to independence. He touted his drug testing of welfare recipients. He claimed that he was making it easy to get a job, but what he has actually done in Wisconsin is throw hundreds of thousands of people off of healthcare while harming senior citizens by cutting Wisconsin’s SeniorCare program.

Scott Walker promised to take away 18 million Americans access to healthcare by repealing Obamacare. Just like every other Republican candidate, Walker called for the repeal of regulations, which he called “the Obama regulations.”

Gov. Walker’s speech was a direct point by point delivery of the Koch agenda. Walker said that job creators need a tax cut so that they can be more competitive in the world and create more jobs.

Scott Walker claimed to be a new leader, but his plan for the future is straight out of centuries past.

Walker promised to fight and win for Americans, but by Americans he clearly meant the wealthy billionaires.

The name Scott Walker will be on the ballot, but it is the Koch brothers agenda that he is running on.

Should Walker win the presidency, in short order we will find ourselves living in a reprise of the 1890's Gilded Age with all of its worse attributes.  And with all his talk of families with a "mother and father." LGBT Americans with half a mind should understand that we are on the hit list right behind unions and minorities.  When Walker is compare to Trump, at least trump is honest about his greed and his bigotry.

What I find so ironic - or should I say hypocritical - about the GOP candidates id that they all claim to revere "Christian values," what they are in fact peddling is the antithesis of the true Gospel message.  It is all about hate, division, lots of greed, and and utter disdain for the welfare of one's neighbors and fellow man.  Needless to say, the "godly folk" - for whom I have nothing but contempt - will eat it up. 

The Vatican Issues a Warning on Climate Change

While I hold the Vatican in less than high esteem, in one of his "Dr. Jekyll" phases Pope Francis has issued an encyclical on climate change that has immediately garnered attacks from Rick Santorum and Jebbie Bush, both of whom like to wear their Catholicism on their sleeves, especially for campaign purposes, and reactions from the GOP that make the party faithful seem either severely constipated and/or in need of extra strength Midol.  As much as the Koch brothers and their allies in the carbon fuels industry spin out misinformation - a polite term for lies - most Americans do seem to be catching that the climate is indeed changing.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Poper Francis' encyclical and things that can be done to begin to make a difference in mankind's contribution to climate change.  Here are highlights:

The document is eloquent and intelligent, especially in its handling of science. “Most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity,” it says. “Concentrated in the atmosphere, these gases do not allow the warmth of the sun’s rays reflected by the earth to be dispersed in space.” That is as lucid a two-sentence description of the mechanism of global warming as I have read.

The encyclical is gloomy. But in fact, remarkable changes are taking place that could put the planet on a much more sustainable path. You get a sense of them if you read another important report that was issued this week, to much less fanfare than the pope’s missive — the International Energy Agency’s special report on energy and climate change.

The report points out that last year the global economy grew at 3 percent but that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions stayed flat, the first time this has happened in 40 years. Renewables accounted for nearly half of all new power generation last year, and the energy intensity of the global economy dropped by twice as much as it has on average annually over the past decade. With concerted action, we could actually push global emissions downward in the next few years.

The cost of solar cells has plummeted, leading to their widespread use. Cars, buildings and machines are becoming much more energy efficient. And over the horizon, one can see progress in batteries, nuclear power and biofuels, which could collectively produce a new energy ecosystem.

We need a revolution in public policy as well. Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, points out that most of the improvements that have been made in technology and efficiency would not have happened without rules and laws. And a series of smart policies — which are not very costly or disruptive — could dramatically accelerate the shift to a cleaner economy. First, stop doing harm. 

Even Bjorn Lomborg, a skeptic about many efforts to tackle global warming, argues for a reduction in the massive, market-distorting subsidies for fossil fuels. The IEA estimates that last year these subsidies globally amounted to $510 billion, about four times those provided to renewable energy.

[S]olar power could become far more widespread if governments were not as beholden to utility companies and their phalanx of lobbyists. “There are lots of nonmarket barriers to renewables, placed at the behest of the established players,” he said. 

Natural gas is better than coal, but its production, transport and use release significant amounts of methane, which has much worse effects on the climate than carbon dioxide. The good news is that serious studies have found that these emissions could be reduced relatively cheaply with new regulations. 

The smartest new policy would be the simplest, . . . a carbon tax — effectively putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions to encourage companies to adopt cleaner technologies. This seems impossible to imagine — yet this month, several major oil companies in Europe [BG Group, BP, Eni , Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil and France's Total] came out in favor of a price on carbon, whether through a tax or an emissions trading system like those used in California and Europe.

Technology and policy innovations are happening, just not on the scale that they need to be. That’s why the pope’s warnings are so useful and important . . . .

Koch brothers and Republican Party Go to War With Each Other

Illustration: Tom Cocotos for Yahoo News

Perhaps the so-called Republican Party establishment is belatedly realize that the Koch brothers are power mad and greed driven megalomaniacs.   Add the GOP's foolish previous pacts with the Koch brothers and its creation of the Frankenstein monster known as the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the party and the establishment has done much to destroy the GOP as a sane and respectable political party.  Time and time again the GOP establishment has looked at short term expediency with no though about the adverse impacts down the road.  Now, it is uncertain how these twin monsters can be defeated.  Yahoo News looks at the war with the Koch brothers.  Here are highlights:

The Republican National Committee’s data arm last year called it a “historic” occasion when it struck a deal to share voter information with the Koch brothers’ rapidly expanding political empire. 

It was an uneasy détente between the party committee, which views itself as the rightful standard-bearer for the GOP, and the behemoth funded by Charles and David Koch, which is free of the campaign finance restrictions that bind the RNC and plans to spend almost $900 million in the 2016 election cycle to elect a Republican to the White House. 

Party leaders, including the current chief digital officer for the RNC, hailed the deal as an important step forward in the GOP’s attempt to modernize itself. 

But after the fall midterm elections, the deal was allowed to expire without being renewed. Since then, relations between the two sides have soured, turning into what one Republican operative described as “all-out war.” 

The RNC is now openly arguing, however, that the Kochs’ political operation is trying to control the Republican Party’s master voter file, and to gain influence over — some even say control of — the GOP.

“I think it’s very dangerous and wrong to allow a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone to have control over who gets access to the data when, why and how,” said Katie Walsh, the RNC’s chief of staff. 

The fight between the RNC’s chairman and the political operatives affiliated with Charles and David Koch over who controls the rich treasury of data on likely Republican voters has raised fundamental questions about what role the party’s central committee — even under the best management — can hope to play in the age of super-PACs. And it raises an even more fundamental question of how you define a political party. 

Priebus believes the RNC is the proper custodian of the Republican Party’s master file on the nation’s electorate, which is used as a starting point for campaigns, who then use that information to build lists — called voter universes — of the people in a state or district that they want to target for both turnout and persuasion. Volunteers and donors are also targeted for recruitment using such lists. 

The core issue, from Priebus’ point of view, is one of loyalty and allegiance. The RNC is a permanent entity, committed to the Republican Party without question. The Koch network is too independent from the party to be trusted with possession of the GOP’s most valuable core assets. If the Kochs — whose political history is steeped more in libertarianism than it is in any loyalty to the Republican Party — decided next week to use their database to benefit only their massive multinational corporation, they could do so. 

The RNC, Walsh said, “has one job: to elect Republicans.” 

Some in the Republican Party agree with Priebus’ point of view, believing the issue of allegiance to be fundamental. Others in the GOP, even some in highly consequential positions, think Priebus and the RNC are crying wolf.

And the problem for the RNC is that while it has political data going back roughly two decades, you need more than just data in order to be the data hub for a political party. And that is where the RNC has fallen short.

In 2013 the RNC promised to build a next-level system called Beacon. But so far Beacon is being used by only a small handful of state parties, Walsh said. About 40 state parties are still using the RNC dashboard that Beacon was built to replace, GOP Data Center, which was designed a few years ago by a company called FLS Connect. The most common complaint from those who do not like Data Center is that it is not easy for the average volunteer or field staffer to use. 

The RNC has signed data-sharing agreements with most of the 2016 candidates or likely candidates. And the RNC — as it did in 2014 — is trying to discourage campaigns and state parties from signing up with i360, according to numerous conversations with people who have knowledge of such conversations. This was a tactic that irritated many people in 2014. But Walsh, the new chief of staff, appears to be setting a different tone that admits past shortcomings and focuses on the philosophical argument that the GOP’s data should be housed at a party committee, not at a private business empire.

The RNC is now confronting the Kochs more openly than before, by having Walsh speak on the record for this article and by making other key players available for interviews. Their decision to take their dispute with i360 public shows the level of alarm inside the RNC at the growing clout of the Koch political empire. They have concluded that the Koch political machine wants to replace them and to essentially become a shadow party.  

The GOP establishment just doesn't grasp the fact that when you make a deal with the Devil, the Devil is going to want a very high price in return.  Shortsightedness and cynical beliefs that the monster can be controlled have proven wrong over and over again.