Final Monday Male Beauty

 

GA GOP Secretary of State Accuses Lindsey Graham and Republicans of Election Fraud Effort

Just when you think the recent election aftermath can't get any stranger - Der Trumpenfuhrer still refuses to concede - Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger has gone on the warpath and stated that numerous Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham, a/k/a Lady G and/or the Palmetto Queen, sought to pressure him (he has received death threats) to discard legal absentee ballots in order to hand Georgia's electoral votes to Trump.  Time and time again we hear Republican bloviating about election fraud, yet the worse perpetrators of would be election fraud are usually Republicans.  Some are now even calling for Lady G - who has shown yet again that there are no limits to his self-prostitution to Trump - to resign his U.S. Senate position.  The Washington Post reports on this shocking and no doubt illegal effort against Raffensperger and election integrity.  Here are highlights:

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who he said questioned the validity of legally cast absentee ballots, in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state.

Raffensperger expressed exasperation over a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes to be left out of the count.

osThe atmphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read: “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”

He said he reported the threats to state authorities.

The pressure on Raffensperger, who has bucked his party in defending the state’s voting process, comes as Georgia is in the midst of a laborious hand recount of about 5 million ballots. President-elect Joe Biden has a 14,000-vote lead in the initial count.

The normally mild-mannered Raffensperger saved his harshest language for Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), who is leading the president’s efforts in Georgia and whom Raffensperger called a “liar” and a “charlatan.”

Raffensperger has said that every accusation of fraud will be thoroughly investigated, but that there is currently no credible evidence that fraud occurred on a broad enough scale to affect the outcome of the election.

The recount, Raffensperger said in the interview Monday, will “affirm” the results of the initial count. He said the hand-counted audit that began last week will also prove the accuracy of the Dominion machines; some counties have already reported that their hand recounts exactly match the machine tallies previously reported.

“I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” Raffensperger said. “I can’t help it that a failed candidate like Collins is running around lying to everyone. He’s a liar.”

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

“It doesn’t matter what political party or which campaign does that,” Raffensperger said. “The secrecy of the vote is sacred.”

The secretary of state also warned that the Republican attacks on Dominion voting machines could create issues for the state’s Republican U.S. senators, Loeffler and David Perdue, who face runoffs on Jan. 5 that will be administered using the same Dominion machines.

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Christofascist Authoritarianism Is Here to Stay

Having been actively involved in politics - first as a Republican and now as a Democrat - I have long seen the Christofascists, those who advocate for white Christian nationalism, as a dangerous threat to American democracy. To these people, the end justifies the means and no lie is too big nor is any act of cruelty too severe (think Trump's family separation policy) and their focus is always on themselves  and their desire to inflict there beliefs on all of society.  When I saw their influence growing in the Republican Party and the GOP losing sight of the concept of separation of church and state, I left the .  Over the intervening two decades, the toxicity and threat of the Christofascist has only increased. Their support for Donald Trump came down to one thing: he promised to give them special rights and an ability to harm others.  This satisfied both the rank and file of evangelicals but also the scamvangelists who pose as the self-styled leaders of the moment as well as their wealthy donors.  A column in the New York Times looks at why Trump's defeat will not see these self-centered and cruel - evil, if you will - people disapper back into the political wilderness.  Here are excerpts:

Will President-elect Joe Biden’s victory force America’s Christian nationalists to rethink the unholy alliance that powered Donald Trump’s four-year tour as one of the nation’s most dangerous presidents? Don’t count on it.

The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness. With or without Mr. Trump, they will remain committed to the illiberal politics that [Trump] the president has so ably embodied.

As it did in 2016, the early analysis of the 2020 election results often circled around the racial, urban-rural, and income and education divides. But the religion divide tells an equally compelling story.  . . . . 28 percent of voters identified as either white evangelical or white born-again Christian, and of these, 76 percent voted for Mr. Trump.

The core of Mr. Trump’s voting bloc, to be clear, does not come from white evangelicals as such, but from an overlapping group of not necessarily evangelical, and not necessarily white, people who identify at least loosely with Christian nationalism: the idea that the United States is and ought to be a Christian nation governed under a reactionary understanding of Christian values.

In their responses to the election outcome, some prominent religious right leaders have enabled or remained true to the false Trumpian line of election fraud. . . . . “What we are witnessing only happens in communist or repressive regimes. We must not allow this fraud to happen in America.”

Even as prominent Republican figures like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney slowly tried to nudge Mr. Trump toward the exit, leaders of the religious right continued to man the barricades.

After processing their disappointment, Christian nationalists may come around to the reality of Joe Biden’s victory. There is no indication, however, that this will temper their apocalyptic vision, according to which one side of the American political divide represents unmitigated evil. During a Nov. 11 virtual prayer gathering organized by the Family Research Council, one of the key speakers cast the election as the consequence of “the whole godless ideology that’s wanted to swallow our homes, destroy our marriages, throw our children into rivers of confusion.”

The comments pouring in from these and other figures may be forgotten when Mr. Biden takes office. But they are worth paying attention to now for what they say about the character of the movement. While many outsiders continue to think of Christian nationalism as a social movement that arises from the ground up, it in fact a political movement that operates mostly from the top down. The rank-and-file of the movement is diverse and comes to its churches with an infinite variety of motivations and concerns, but the leaders are far more unified.

What holds them together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world. Partisan politics is the lifeblood of their movement.

The power of the leadership is the function of at least three underlying structural realities in America’s political and economic life, and those realities are not going to change anytime soon.

The first is the growing economic inequality that has produced spectacular fortunes for the few, while too many ordinary families struggle to get by. Leaders of the movement get much of the support for their well-funded operations from a cadre of super-wealthy individuals and extended families who are as committed to free-market fundamentalism as they are to reactionary religion. The donors in turn need the so-called values voters in order to lock down their economic agenda of low taxation for the wealthy and minimal regulation.

The second structural reality to consider is that Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.

The third critical factor is a political system that gives disproportionate power to an immensely organized, engaged and loyal minority. One of the most reliable strategies for producing that unshakable cohort has been to get them to agree that abortion is the easy answer to every difficult political policy question. Recently, religious right leaders have shifted their focus more to a specious understanding of what they call “religious freedom” or “religious liberty,” but the underlying strategy is the same: make individuals see their partisan vote as the primary way to protect their cultural and religious identity.

Republicans have long known that the judiciary is one of the most effective instruments of minority rule. Mr. Trump’s success in packing the federal judiciary — as of this writing, 220 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices — will be one of his most devastating legacies. The prospect of further entrenching minority rule in the coming years will keep the alliance between Republicans and the religious right alive.

The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler. The best guess is that religious authoritarianism of the next four years will look a lot like it did in the last four years. We ignore the political implications for our democracy at our peril.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 Pump is actually my favorite brand.

The Republican Party Has to Choose Between Two Paths Forward

As the date on which the Electoral College results confirming Joe Biden's election gets closer and closer, as a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican lays out, Republicans are approaching a point where they must decide between two paths going forward if they hope to avoid becoming a permanent minority party over the coming decade in all but the most rural backward states. One approach is more of the same with reliance on gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and the structural defect in the USA's constitutional system that gives even the smallest, thinly populated states two U.S. Senators.  This approach allows minority rule of the majority - or at least until the majority revolts and a systemic change is forced through.  The other is to modernize and seek to appeal to the rapidly changing majority of the county which is increasingly racially diverse, less religious, and better educated than today's GOP base.  A party with a long term plan and desire to thrive would choose the latter.  Sadly, given the deplorables (e.g., white supremacists, right wing Christian fanatics and ever greedy wealthy) who make up the current base of the GOP than approach may be off the table.  Here are column highlights:

Since the election, some of Trump’s supporters have begun to ponder pursuing a “Trumpism without Trump,” crafting a Trumpist ideology severed from Trump’s self-harming personality and grudges.

There are at least two big problems with this concept.

First, it’s not at all clear that such a thing as Trumpism exists, apart from Donald Trump’s own personality and grudges. Subtract Trump’s resentments and the myth of Trump the business genius and what’s left? Are immigration restriction, trade war with China, and blowing up NATO really such compelling concerns? Are those goals what energized 71 million Americans? Would they energize voters to support Tom Cotton, Dan Crenshaw, Josh Hawley, or Marco Rubio? That seems unlikely. And while there are potential contenders for the resentment vote—the cable host Tucker Carlson, Trump’s son Don Jr.—they cannot offer the myth of business success. Worse, they overdo the resentment. That’s fine for carving out a cable-TV or Facebook-based business. But if resentment didn't work politically for George Wallace in 1968, it’s not going to work for George Wallace knockoffs in 2024.

The second problem is that Trump was felled by basic math. He polarized American society in a way that trapped him on the less numerous pole. The anti-Trump vote exceeded the pro-Trump vote by almost 3 million in 2016, by nearly 9 million in 2018, and by 5 million and counting in 2020.

Trump’s ego needs blinded him to that truth. He clutched a fantasy of his superb campaign and triumphant candidacy, and even now, he clings to the delusion that he did not really lose the 2020 election by a decisive margin. But Trumpism without Trump would face the challenge of reality. Trumpism minus Trump is Trumpism minus the excitement that mobilized Trump supporters, but still with many of the issues that repelled Trump opponents. Trumpism minus Trump has no idea how to shrink the gender gap among voters, no idea how to appeal to the college-educated, no message for the suburbs except more and noisier racism, nothing that can speak to the productive centers of the new American economy.

As for the idea of bypassing the college-educated, the suburbs, and the great majority of American women so that the party can reinvent itself as “a multiethnic, multiracial working class coalition,” in Rubio’s words—how can that fantasy come to life? The GOP has no coherent policy on health insurance or college-tuition costs. Trump appealed to less educated voters in part via his seething loathing of experts. But unlike his would-be successors, Trump meant it. He could feel smart only by dismissing everybody else as dumb, and the more expert those other people were, the more he needed to demean them. Some enjoyed that performance, more were appalled, but all could see it was real.

Trumpism is the political equivalent of losing money on every sale but hoping to make up the loss by volume. The harder you try, the worse you do.

All of which leaves Trump’s successors with only two practical strategies to follow. The first alternative is the one at the top of this piece: accept candidly that post-Trump Republicanism is likely to remain a minority party, and then maximize the powers of that minority.

As I write today, it looks like Republicans have actually strengthened their grip on the machinery of redistricting, enabling another decade of minority rule.

In cases from North Carolina and Wisconsin in 2018 and 2019, the Supreme Court greenlit partisan gerrymandering as long as those doing the gerrymandering take care to leave no evidence of racial animus on the record. Since the Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, enacting measures to suppress votes or to purge voters from the rolls has become easier, and if Republicans retain a majority in the Senate, they can ensure that no new Voting Rights Act supplements the old one.

Since the Senate map is becoming steadily less representative over time, this project of minority rule can be a robust basis of power for many years to come, even without the presidency. Better yet, as in the Obama years, if a Democratic president is nonwhite or female or highly educated or all three, cultural resentment of that president becomes a mighty weapon of partisan recruitment and media engagement.

The Republican future in this scenario replicates the southern-Democratic past. There is another way forward for the party, but it involves more change.  

This way begins with a basic fact: Over the course of the 2010s, the share of adult non-Hispanic whites with a college degree rose from 33 percent to 40 percent. That proportion will continue to rise in the 2020s.

It is education more than immigration that is making formerly red states purple, or even blue. In Texas, for example, the higher the proportion of college-educated adults in a county, the harder that county swung to the Democrats in the Trump era. One result, noted by The Texas Tribune, is that Dallas and Fort Worth are following Austin and Houston into the Democratic column—and in the six fastest-growing Texas suburban counties, Trump won by a cumulative total of a tenth of a percentage point, or 2,515 votes.

Similar stories can be told in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.

To compete, Republicans must adapt to the new American electorate: more secular, more diverse, more accepting of female leadership. And this is possible.

It may take time for Republicans to acknowledge to themselves the truth about the Trump years. But they can act on that truth even if they do not acknowledge it. They can begin by putting an end to Trump’s postelection tantrum and accepting without further weasel talk the reality of Joe Biden’s victory and his presidency. Then they can quit the gerrymandering business and recommit themselves to equal voting rights—competing to win over voters rather than disenfranchising them. Their goal should be creating a modern party of the center-right, redeemed from the squalor of the Trump era, unafraid of elections equally and fairly open to every adult citizen.

Otherwise, America is heading back to the politics of the Jim Crow era, with privileged minorities manipulating antidemocratic state rules to thwart democracy at the national level. This was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

Time for Donald Trump to Head Down Sunset Boulevard

October is mental health awareness month, but this month Americans are getting a heavy dose of watching mental illness on display with the White House being the set for a performance by Trump worthy of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.  The difference, of course, is that Swanson was acting while Trump is a real life Norma Desmond utterly out of touch with reality and seemingly ever more lost in delusions (the same applies to his lunatic supporters).  A snarky column in the New York Times lays out Trump's delusions and suggests he head down "Sunset Boulevard" and allow America to move on and, although not expressly stated, repair the damage wrought by his 4 years of misrule and self enrichment of himself and the many grifters he appointed to positions for which they were completely unqualified. Here are excerpts: 

Many see a wannabe despot barricaded in the bunker, stubby fingers clinging to the levers of power as words that mean nothing to him — democracy, electoral integrity, peaceful transition, constitutionality — swirl above.

One presidential historian sees something different in Donald Trump’s swan song. Michael Beschloss has been tweeting pictures of Hollywood’s most famous divas, shut-ins and head cases.

Norma Desmond watching movies of herself, hour after hour, shrouded in her mansion on Sunset Boulevard as “the dream she had clung to so desperately enfolded her.”  . . . . [Trump] The president and his cronies are likely to do real damage and major grifting in the next two months. But in other ways, the picture of [Trump] the president as a pathetic, unraveling diva is apt.

Trump has said in interviews and at rallies that two of his favorite movies are the black-and-white classics about stars collapsing in on themselves, “Citizen Kane” and “Sunset Boulevard.”

In “Sunset Boulevard,” Max the butler and a camera crew conspire to make the demented silent film star believe she’s getting her close-up when she’s actually just being lured down the staircase to answer for her sins.

The Republicans enabling Trump’s delusion are like the camera crew, filming a scene with the disintegrating diva that is never going to be seen.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official told The Washington Post. “No one seriously thinks the results will change.”

Trump, who once wanted to be a Hollywood producer and considered attending U.S.C. film school, never made the pivot to being a politician. He got elected because he played a competent boss and wily megabillionaire on a reality TV show — pretty good acting now that we know he is neither — and he has stayed a performance artist and a ratings-obsessed showman.

As a growing number of Trump advisers and Republican Party leaders privately admitted the end was nigh — and as the Secret Service was rocked by coronavirus infections and quarantine orders from the president’s mask-defying, super-spreader campaign travel — White House officials propped up Donald’s grand illusions. This, even as his lawyers deserted him and judges ruled against him.

[Trump] The president, who has never shown much interest in governing, has finally dropped all pretense to focus on the core tenets of the Trump Doctrine: himself, cable news, Twitter, self-pity, and caterwauling about perceived slights.

“.@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed,” he tweeted. “Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”

The goose was at Fox’s neck. What an unnatural and delicious sight.

The network helped Trump become president and allowed him to maintain his viselike grip on his base. Fox was the oxygen inside his alternate-reality bubble.

But because Trump is 100 percent transactional, he couldn’t accept pure math, training his laser beam on Fox when it dared to veer ever so slightly from total fealty by correctly calling the race early in Arizona.

But the Golden Goose is also a Silly Goose. He should just recognize that Biden winning is actually the best outcome for him. He doesn’t have to do the job anymore and can simply get on with the branding and the whining and the pot-stirring — the parts that interest him.

Now Trump should move on and stick to what he knows best: promoting himself. Like Norma Desmond, he should give in to the fantasy of his life that he is so devoted to and leave the rest of us to live in the cold, cruel, unforgiving, inconvenient reality.

Mr. DeMille just called, Mr. President. He says he’s ready for your close-up. Keep your pancake makeup on and step on out of the house now. The cameras will be waiting.

Ouch!!

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

The Virginia Republican Party Is Irreparably Damaged

Sometimes I like to see what sane conservatives (to the extent they still exist) in Virginia are thinking.  It's not something one will find on Fox News or some of the other Kool-Aid drinking sites.    That's why from time to time I visit Bearing Drift which styles itself as "Virginia's conservative voice."   The site has two columns that do a post 2020 election autopsy.  One, argues that the Virginia GOP - and the national party as well - is too damaged to be repaired and argues that it is time for a multi-party system more on the European model.  Shots are taken at Democrat's as well, but in Virginia, only one of the two major parties has slipped into insanity mode.  The second column takes issue with the first and argues that in Virginia, only the GOP is irrevocably broken.  I'm inclined to agree with the second column and do not see the Virginia GOP resurrecting until it jettisons white supremacists and Christofascists who are become ever more toxic with voters in the so-called urban crescent which now dictates who wins statewide races.  Here are highlights from the first column:

The Virginia Republican Party is finished. We finished ourselves. Trumpublican darling State Senator Amanda Chase is the Medusa QAnon of the Commonwealth with her fraudulent fraud claims. Trump won’t admit defeat. Even strong characters like Nick Freitas won’t concede. Leon Benjamin won’t concede even after losing in a landslide.

Good people have been corrupted by a Trump Strain epidemic, pandemic. What are rational people to do? The rotting corpse of the TEA Party needs to be covered in lye. No perfume. No eulogy. No vaseline.

Honestly – we’re not the only ones that ought to admit defeat. Left-of-center moderates should flee to the Democratic Party if they haven’t already. Moderates should form a Virginia Independent Party and draft someone like Denver Riggleman or Bill Bolling.

Progressive Democrats should accept that the Democratic Party will never accept them, embrace the Movement for a People’s Party and rescue Bernie’s dream from the corporate clutches of Kamala Harris.

Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden represent Virginia Democrats as well as John McCain and Donald Trump represent Virginia Republicans. The time for a duopoly is finished. The time to move forward is now. Let’s embrace the chaos and reject the corruption that surrounds us. Republicans need a cleanse to clear the Trumpism from its bloodstream and digestive system.

But that won’t happen.

It’s time for the hangers-on to stop hanging on. Let’s all do something else now. Trump broke the GOP easily because the GOP was already hollowed out by corporate corruption. Joe Biden would have lost if Bernie Sanders and AOC hadn’t rescued his lethargic campaign.

While Abigail Spanberger bites her thumb at the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, it’s the Progressives who are speaking the people’s language, not Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

Remember policy? There was a time when policy was more important than politics and when character was more important than popularity. The Republican Party will never escape the shadow grip of Donald Trump. Sometimes when you sell out you sell out forever.

The Republican and Democratic Parties aren’t unified despite their being ubiquitous. Let’s blow them up and join the rest of the First World Republics and Democracies with a multi-party system of our own.

I agree that sometimes when you sell out, the decision can be irreversible, especially when character and basic morality no longer matter.  Trump merely embodies the moral bankruptcy of the GOP which crept in when Christofascists were voted into the party committees.   The second column better describes where the Virginia GOP is today.  Here are excerpts:

Chris Saxman and Steven Brodie Tucker have each delivered withering critiques of the Republican Party of Virginia – and rightly so. Somehow, however, their zeal to look past the Virginia GOP combined with old tribal antipathy toward its rival to create a bizarrely shared viewpoint that the entire two-party system is somehow in trouble.

Both men rely largely on anecdotes (Saxman explicitly so) for their assertions about the Democrats’ travails. The data tell a different story.

Biden won more than 54 percent of the vote last week. Not only was that the largest share of the vote for a presidential candidate in Virginia since 1988, but it was also the best performance for a Democratic nominee in Virginia since FDR. Yet somehow, Tucker’s response to the party having it’s best presidential result since World War II was …”Let’s blow them up.”

The Congressional results were far more troubling for the Democrats nationally, but Virginia was another story. All three House seats taken from the GOP in 2018 were held. In fact, Congresswomen Luria, Spanberger, and Wexler won higher shares of the vote in 2020 than in 2018. This is hardly the sign of a party in trouble.

Tucker and Saxman are straight shooters. Their blistering diagnoses of the Republicans make that clear. However, their long histories in that party have shaded their views on the Democrats. As Saxman himself notes (albeit regarding the media): “It’s one thing to show bias, we all have some.” They may also have another motive – building a third-party movement. Tucker is explicit on this: “Moderates should form a Virginia Independent Party….”

… but then he nearly causes a miscarriage by recommending the V.I.P. “… draft someone like Denver Riggleman or Bill Bolling.”

Tucker would have us believe a movement led by an outgoing Congressman “who was on President Donald Trump’s re-election team in Virginia” (CBS19) and an ex-LG who openly supported Trump can appeal to the 54 percent of Virginians who supported Biden. I’m … not seeing it.

[T]he Democratic Party now has all three statewide offices, both U.S. Senators, a Congressional majority, and legislative majorities, all while delivering electoral votes for a victorious Democratic president. Nearly everyone acknowledges the Democrats are the favorites in Virginia’s 2021 races. Of course, favorites can lose, but it’s more difficult to see that if the opposition divides between pro-Trump Republicans and pro-Trump “Independents.”

For now, the simple fact remains that the Democratic Party of Virginia is stronger than it has been in decades. What ails the Virginia Republicans is limited solely to the Virginia Republicans.

Having driven away moderates and people actually tethered to reality, it is hard to see how the Virginia GOP can be restored to sanity.