Why the GOP May Lose Everything

All of these Republicans need to be forced into retirement.

I try to not get overly optimistic, but the 2020 elections have the possibility of  dealing the Republican Party and Donald Trump a horrific defeat and loss of control of both houses of Congress and the White House.  If it comes to pass, it will be most deserved and a repudiation of an agenda that has benefited the very wealthy and in the final analysis little or nothing to the vast majority of Americans. Indeed, the entire GOP game plan has been to use racism and religious extremism to dupe working class and middle class Americans to vote against their own best interests. The gambit worked in 2016, but signs indicate that 2020 may prove to be a different ball game, especially with the coronavirus pandemics underscoring the need for the very programs and policies the GOP wants to destroy. A column in the Washington Post looks at the rapidly changing outlook for the GOP come December.  If the economy continues to suffer and there is a second wave of the virus, things could get even worse for Republicans - and deservedly so.  Here are excerpts:

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) says that when he first announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, he “didn’t know what Montana and the country was going to look like in the short period thereafter.” With the covid-19 crisis, all his time has been taken up by being a governor, not a candidate. So far, that has only helped him in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines.

In Maine, House Speaker Sara Gideon, a Democrat seeking to end the long career of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, says the pandemic has “laid bare the inequities that already existed” and underscored the need for a “vision of what it means to work together and for each other instead of trying to sow divisiveness.” This brings home Gideon’s case against Collins’s willingness to ally with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two of the most divisive figures in American politics.

Colorado’s former governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a good chance of ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, expresses a sense of gravity about this campaign that he never felt in his races for mayor of Denver or governor.

And Democrat Cal Cunningham, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is facing incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), says that many North Carolinians today feel “an urgency that did not exist prior to March of this year” about “health coverage . . . about jobs, the economy.”

Issues that were once “percolating for many” are now “personal for everyone.”

If Bullock, Gideon, Hickenlooper and Cunningham all win, Democrats will likely take over the U.S. Senate and end McConnell’s days as majority leader.

And they are not the only challengers with a decent shot at Republican seats. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has been running ahead of Republican Sen. Martha McSally, and Republicans face vulnerabilities in Iowa, Georgia, possibly Kansas and perhaps even in South Carolina. McConnell, though favored, faces a spirited opponent in Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot. Only one Democratic incumbent, Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, is an underdog. Having disastrously bungled the pandemic, Trump is not only falling well behind former vice president Joe Biden in the polls; he could also be creating a tidal wave that would give Democrats unified control of the federal government’s elected branches.

Hickenlooper and Gideon are running in states Trump lost in 2016, and the president’s increasing vulnerability in Arizona and North Carolina could open the way for Kelly and Cunningham.

My conversations with four of the top Senate challengers suggested that the coronavirus crisis has reinforced core arguments that helped the Democrats win the House in 2018, particularly around access to health care, while also increasing the saliency of inequality — in both economic and health outcomes — as a mainstream concern.

At the same time, Trump’s brutal belligerence has turned Democratic candidates into missionaries of concord. This allows them to be implicitly critical of the president and reach out to his one-time supporters at the same time.

If the GOP does lose everything, it will be because the Trumpian circus-plus-horror-show is entirely off-key for an electorate that has so much to be serious about.

Trump Montana Rally: 76 Percent of Trump's Claims are False or Misleading

As a former Republican, I like to believe that there was once a time when the Republican Party mostly took truthful positions.  True, there could be honest debate on issues, but the vast majority of the Party platform or statements wasn't deliberately false.  As I have noted before, the GOP began turning its back on truthfulness and honesty concurrent with the rise of "Christian conservatives" - I call them Christofascists - within the GOP base.  Having followed self-labeled "Christian" family values groups for two decades, there are few groups/people in America who lie as consistently and/or viciously than these self-congratulatory "godly folk."   With the rise of Donald Trump, this type of lying and the dissemination of falsehoods has hit record highs.  With large majorities of Republicans supporting Trump, the endorsement of deliberate lying has gone party wide.  An article in the Washington Post looks at the level of lying that Trump engaged in during his recent "rally" in Montana.  What is frightening is that the Trump/GOP base eats it up and never question the truthfulness of their führer's statements and claims.  Here are article highlights:

We’re doing something new: analyzing every factual claim from President Trump’s campaign rally in Montana on Thursday.

According to The Fact Checker’s database, [Trump] the president had made 3,251 false or misleading claims at the end of May, and his average daily rate was climbing. This side of Trump really comes alive during campaign rallies, so we wanted to do the math and find out whether the president speaks more fictions or facts in front of his crowds. We focused only on Trump’s statements of material fact at the Montana rally, avoiding trivialities and opinions. . . . According to our analysis, the truth took a beating in Montana. From a grand total of 98 factual statements we identified, 76 percent were false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.

Here’s a [partial] breakdown: [of the ] 45 false or mostly false statements, 25 misleading statements and four unsupported claims.

Trump’s rallies draw huge crowds — an estimated 6,500 people attended the Thursday rally — and they usually provide days of fodder for TV networks. Because three-quarters of the president’s claims in Montana were false, misleading or unsupported, there is a need to fact-check these events.

Here’s our [partial] analysis of all 98 claims:

False. The federal estate tax rarely falls on farms or small businesses, since only those leaving behind more than $5 million pay it. According to the Tax Policy Center, nearly 5,500 estates in 2017 — out of nearly 3 million — were subject to the tax. Of those, only 80 taxable estates would be farms and small businesses.

False. Democrats support measures to tighten border security, but they don’t support Trump’s plans for a border wall or other parts of his aggressive immigration agenda. There’s no evidence to show that immigration leads to higher crime. In fact, most studies have found that legal and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born.

False. Trump suggests the Justice Department went easy on Clinton while investigating her use of a private email server as secretary of state, but then-FBI Director James B. Comey gave detailed reasons for declining to bring charges and took the extraordinary step of rebuking Clinton in public shortly before the 2016 election. The Justice Department inspector general found “no evidence that the conclusions by department prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations” and said Comey acted inappropriately in calling her out before the election.

False. Germany in March approved an $11 billion pipeline, Nord Stream 2, to be built by Russian energy giant Gazprom. But the United States is not “paying for the whole thing,” not even by some logic that factors in U.S. spending on NATO. Germany is the second-highest contributor to NATO’s common programs. The United States pays 22 percent of these costs; Germany pays 15 percent.

False. Republicans often win the presidency. Trump’s suggestion that he lost the popular vote to Clinton because of voter fraud is not supported by any evidence.

False. MS-13 has a large presence in Long Island and other places, but it’s a serious exaggeration to say ICE has “liberated” towns from MS-13.

False. There’s no evidence that “thousands” of MS-13 members have been deported. Hundreds, yes. Thousands, no.

False. Trump has not secured funding for his promised border wall. The $1.6 billion he’s referring to comes with strings attached and cannot be used for the wall. It’s designated for a stretch of bollard-style fencing near San Diego.

False. Trump’s tax cut is nearly 0.9 percent of GDP, much smaller than Reagan’s tax cut in 1981, which was 2.89 percent of GDP. Trump’s tax cut is the eighth largest since 1918 — smaller than two tax cuts passed under Obama.

False. It’s not hard to find countries that the United States has a trade surplus with, including close allies such as Canada.

False. U.S. GDP growth is not the fastest among large nations, according to the World Bank.

False. Trump started commenting on NFL players kneeling in the fall of 2017. Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who first knelt during the anthem, began protesting in 2016. Ratings fell 9 percent in 2017 and 17 percent since 2016, according to Nielsen. But that roughly tracks with an overall decline in TV viewership and experts say that the protests were not the primary reason the ratings declined.

The lies go on and on and Trump's audience would rather embrace lies than face objective reality and the fact that their racism and bigotry are the real motivating factors for the support of Trump and the cesspool that is today's GOP.

Is a Progressive Blue Wave Beginning?

With off year elections, Virginia is always seen as a bell weather of the popularity of the party controlling the White House.  But special elections can also point to the popularity - or lack thereof - of the party in power in Washington, DC.  Here in Virginia, extraordinary efforts will be made to deliver a Democrat sweep of the statewide elections in November - plus gains in the General Assembly - to send a rebuke to Der Trumpenführer and the GOP controlled Congress.  However, as a piece in Salon reports, special elections in certain congressional districts could prove most embarrassing to Trump and the foul GOP congressional leadership.  Here are story highlights:

Multiple upcoming special elections for seats that are traditionally Republican may serve as a productive model on how the Democratic Party can start winning and building back its base.

On April 18, voters from Georgia’s 6th Congressional District will head out to the polls in order to fill the seat vacated by Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price. In the general election, Donald Trump carried the district over Hillary Clinton with a narrow margin, despite it being a longtime Republican chair. The current leading candidate is former Capitol Hill aide Jon Ossoff. At just 30 years old, the former investigative journalist managed to raise an unprecedented $8.3 million in only the first three months of the year — which is unheard of for a House candidate.

The majority of public and private polls have Ossoff leading the field by quite the margin, while holding percentages in the low to mid-40s according to Roll Call.

Video WATCH: Humorist P. J. O’Rourke on Donald Trump’s impending doom: “You could be really unpleasantly surprised” by how it happens.

NBC reports:

But while backing from party leaders like Nancy Pelosi has gotten him to the low 40s in most polls, Ossoff needs to shed his partisan edges to make Republicans and independents feel comfortable voting for him.

Under the unusual rules of election, all 18 candidates — 11 Republicans, five Democrats and two independents — will appear on the ballot. The top two vote-getters of any party will advance to a June runoff election, unless one candidate gets more than 50 percent, in which case they win outright.

Ossoff’s best chance at victory is to carry the day against a divided field this month, rather than face off against one GOP candidate and a united Republican Party in June. So he’s doing everything he can to climb above 50 percent.

Another special election Republicans are attempting to make sure they have under control will take place on April 11. Voters in Kansas’ 4th Congressional District will look to fill the seat of Mike Pompeo, who was chosen by President Trump to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The race has generally invoked little attention and will be between Republican State Treasurer Ron Estes, and Democrat James Thompson, a lawyer. Both local and national democrats have put little effort into race while the National Republican Congressional Committee launched an ad campaign in a district comfortably won by Trump during the general election. However, there is still some concern over GOP willingness to vote, as well as the overall quality of the Estes campaign, according to Roll Call.

In Montana, democrats were losing hope after the general election and generally concerned on how to bounce back. When Trump tapped Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke as secretary of the Interior Department, it was a small blessing in disguise. Legendary folk singer Rob Quist emerged as a democratic hopeful to win the vacant seat in a predominantly red state. His rallies are now regularly drawing hundreds, according to the Huffington Post, but Washington has paid little to no attention. The election will be held on May 25.

Pro-Trump Neo-Nazis Plan Armed March Against Jews

Absent Donald Trump's incitements to violence and empowering of alt-right and Neo-Nazi groups does anyone believe an armed march against Jews and those who support them would be in the planning stages for a confrontation before Der Fuhrer's inauguration next month?   Its as if every foul racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic group now feels free to crawl out from under the rocks and social slime they have hidden under for decades.  Just as frightening, silence of any form of condemnation of such behavior coming bot Herr Trump and "good Republicans" is deafening.  To my GOP "friends," if you do not support this type of viciousness and hatred as you claim, why are you silent?  Or am I correct in assuming that you actually support it even if you will not admit so in polite society?  A piece in LawNewz looks at troubling events being planned by Neo-Nazi groups and "news" outlets.  Here are highlights: 

The neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, is advertising an “armed protest” in the city of Whitefish, Montana “against Jews, Jewish businesses and everyone who supports either.”  The event is being organized by the site’s publisher Andrew Anglin as a result of ongoing controversy involving white nationalist Richard Spencer, and his mother who lives in Whitefish.

The announcement, which went up on Friday, says that the march will take place in the second week of January, “just before the inauguration” of President-elect Donald Trump. The post on the Daily Stormer instructs participants not to actually engage in violence, but does call for hundreds of people to walk the streets with guns, citing Montana’s “extremely liberal open carry laws.” People from outside the local community are being called on to join in the armed intimidation tactics, with the announcement saying that they are “busing in skinheads from the Bay Area” to increase their numbers. Anglin has also posted the names and addresses of various individuals, organizations, and businesses to target.

Montana Senator Steve Daines tweeted his opposition to the building anti-Semitic activity in his state.

The Anti-Defamation League said on Friday that they have “been in regular contact with the victim families, as well as relevant law enforcement authorities and other public officials,” including the U.S. Department of Justice.

I find this very frightening and can only imagine how much worse things may get after the inauguration of  Der Fuhrer on January 20, 2017.  

Can The Catholic Church Survive In America?

The caption to this post is a question asked by Andrew Sullivan who, unlike myself, has clung to the fantasy - at least in my view - that somehow the Roman Catholic Church will evolve on issues of sex and sexual orientation and slow or stop its death spiral in Europe and America.  Like many, Andrew has grasped at various statements of Pope Francis in an effort to convince himself that much needed change is coming.  However, despite some of the positive things Francis has said, the reality is that absolutely NOTHING has changed to date in terms of the Church's official dogma in terms of relegating women to second class status, the never ending obsession with controlling women's wombs and keeping gays as forever disordered. Personally, I see the Church as being incapable of changing unless there is a wholesale sacking of bishops and cardinals and even many reactionary priests.  Should Francis try to engage such an approach, I truly hope he has a food taster and some trusted body guards so that the Curia doesn't have him conveniently die.  What seems to have finally slapped Andrew up on the side of the head is the vicious actions being unleashed against an elderly gay couple in Montana.   Andrew reviews the ugliness of the Church's actions which are increasingly driving Catholics to simply walk away from the Church.  Here are highlights from Andrew's post which represents an epiphany for him:

I used to believe – and a part of me still does – that the question of homosexuality was not that big an issue for Catholicism. Gays are only a tiny minority of the population at large; the power and beauty of the church’s core understanding of heterosexuality sustains most people’s interest and commitment; and the central teachings of Jesus – of forgiveness of sins, redemption, charity, mercy – are so much more important than issues relating to human sexuality and romantic love.

When I was asked – with mind-numbing regularity – how I could remain happily gay and a Catholic, I answered honestly that, for those very reasons, I could live with institutional dissonance, as any thinking member of a hierarchical church has to, from time to time. But I think now that I misread a couple of things – and that the whole question may be a much bigger deal than I once believed and hoped. Here’s a story that underlines the problem:

A Catholic church in Montana has told two gay men that they can no longer receive communion simply because of their gay marriage and, in order to do so again, they must file for divorce. The two men, Paul Huff, 66, and Tom Wojtowick, 73, have been together for over 30 years and were married in Seattle in 2013.

The controversy has now led to the bishop intervening and holding a meeting with 300 parishioners to air views. The bishop claims there is polarization in the congregation over this and is now mulling the decision to bar the couple from the sacraments and from participation in their church – unless they get a civil divorce and sign a statement supporting civil marriage as exclusively heterosexual. Yes, the church is now in favor of divorce as a condition for being a Catholic! If that sounds perverse, you’re not wrong.

Here’s the problem: maintaining doctrinal orthodoxy requires penalizing two men, aged 66 and 73, who have been committed to each other for thirty years and are pillars of the local community.
If the church upholds this kind of decision, it is endorsing cruelty, discrimination and exclusion. Pope Francis’ view is that this is exactly the kind of thing that requires the church to exercise mercy not rigidity. But allowing a married gay couple to sing in the choir as an act of “mercy” would merely further expose the fragility of the church’s thirteenth century views of human sexuality. 

None of this is compatible with the core moral teachings of the church – about fairness, truth, compassion, forgiveness, mercy and inclusion. And this is clear to large numbers of Catholics – especially the younger generation who will rightly view this kind of decision as barbaric and inhuman. There is only so much inhumanity that a church can be seen to represent before its own members lose faith in it.

What was once a blemish can become a defining wound. It has split one small parish. It may slowly wreck the whole church.

As noted in posts in connection with The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, the Church suffers from an extreme neurosis when it comes to homosexuality.  Thankfully, more and more Americans are coming to recognize the sickness/mental illness that this neurosis constitutes.