Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

Outgoing GOP Lawmaker Calls MAGA Base "Anti-American"

Virginia GOP congressman Denver Riggleman lost his seat in what was basically a rigged district "convention" after he committed the unpardonable sin - at least in GOP Christofascist circles - of officiating at a same sex wedding for two gay Republicans (yes, the two are an oxymoron).  In his place the GOP ran a far right loon with ties to Jerry Falwell Jr.'s Liberty University who won the heavily gerrymandered district. Riggleman is not going quietly and has unleashed on both Trump and the ever more toxic GOP base which he describes as "anti-American" as well as the spineless, complicit congressional Republicans.  Here are highlights from Newsweek:

Outgoing Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman of Virginia on Saturday unleashed a barrage of criticism against Donald Trump, his allies and "anti-American" supporters, as the president continues to cast doubt on his election loss.

Riggleman is among the few Republicans who have acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden's victory over Trump. Most media outlets called the election for the Democrat, who has secured 306 Electoral College votes, over two weeks ago, but Trump has refused to concede.

In an interview with Forbes, Riggleman condemned his fellow Republicans for remaining quiet amid Trump's attempts to cast doubt on the election process by claiming a "rigged" and "stolen" election. It's "completely unethical," he said, explaining that some of his colleagues believe that breaking with Trump would "cost them their careers."

“The career is more important than the facts, it's that simple," Riggleman added. "I'm so damn sick of it. I'm sick of it.”

Riggleman admitted that there were "true believers" of Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud, but he went on to suggest that they were not smart people. "[It] really speaks to where your intelligence level is... to believe in that type of operation," he said.

The lawmaker also criticized Trump for embracing "anti-Semitic" and "anti-American" supporters and added that it was "irresponsible" for the president to retweet QAnon conspiracies.

Riggleman's remarks came hours after he shot back at a tweet that accused him of being "responsible" for the "corrupt election" that led to Trump's loss. The tweet named Riggleman and a number of other Republicans who have acknowledged Biden's win or called for a peaceful transition of power to the incoming Biden administration.

"I'm proud to be on this list with my honorable colleagues—it's one of many circulating," he responded. "We have been tagged and called 'traitors' based on our use of data analytics, facts and common sense. Time for a GOP that represents the core of America, not the manic fringes."

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

Republicans Fight Democrats While Democrats Fight Each Other

To use the oft repeated term, Democrats are a big tent party with diverse factions that all too often seem to enjoy fighting each other more than defeating Republicans.  Meanwhile, despite the deceptively large number of votes Trump received, the Republican Party is a party with an ever shrinking tent with but three pillars: white supremacists, Christian extremists (and those duped by the GOP's anti-abortion and anti-gay planks into voting against their own interests) and those consumed by greed.  Thankfully, the Biden/Harris ticket pulled together enough of the Democrat factions to send Trump into forced retirement, but at the congressional level, there were far too many unforced errors, not the least of which is the - in my view - idiocy of using the world socialism by the far left when what they are advocating isn't true socialism in its purist and most negative form  Thus, I agree with Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) who said  “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” something lost on some from very liberal enclaves out of touch with larger political realities for those in smaller cities and more conservative states (yes, I am talking about AOC).  A lengthy column in the Washington Post that ought to be required reading for ALL Democrats (especially in the lead up to the Georgia Senate runoff elections) looks at Democrats' perennial problem.  Here are column highlights:

Joe Biden won the presidency by a decisive majority, ousting a dangerous incumbent loathed across his party. In the streets of Democratic cities, there was jubilation. Yet just two days after the election, House Democrats fell into angry recriminations. Moderates blamed lefties for ideas and slogans that Republicans deployed against them. “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) told her colleagues during an angry conference call. “We lost good members because of that.” Lefties, meanwhile, criticized moderates for running bad campaigns and failing to appreciate the energy the left generates.

Compare that with the Republican Party, which was almost entirely complicit with President Trump's insane and democracy-wrecking claim that he won the election.

After a masterful presidential campaign that brought together every wing of Biden's party, our politics seemed to snap back instantly to old habits and an old rule: Republicans fight Democrats while Democrats battle each other. These contrasting behaviors reflect a simple fact: Democrats are a big-tent party, while Republicans are a closed circle. For more than a half-century, Republicans have purged dissenters and turned themselves into a rigid, radical, unified bloc — ideologically, racially, religiously. As the Republicans cast off free-thinkers, Democrats took them in.

This makes Democrats the larger party with better long-term prospects. But it also means that Biden's party is at risk of either pushing away the middle-of-the-road voters it needs to hold its majority or disillusioning the progressives who often power its apparatus, especially in urban centers. And Democrats must also struggle in a political system that — especially through the Senate and the electoral college — artificially tilts the playing field toward the GOP. . . . . History has made them what they are, and they have to learn to live with it if they want to win and govern.

The conundrum goes back to the 1960s, and not just the '60s of the counterculture, civil rights and antiwar protests. The movements for Black, women's and LGBTQ rights had a decisive impact on our country socially, and they continue to play an important role in the Democratic Party. But there was another 1960s, embodied in the rise of the conservative intellectual movement, Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, the backlash against civil rights and a New Right. The revolt on the right had a decisive impact on our party system.

The long-term effect of Goldwater's takeover of the GOP was a series of purges. They started with the liberals (senators such as Jacob Javits, Clifford Case and Tom Kuchel). The party then drove out moderates and eventually moved to cast away even genuine conservatives (Sen. Bob Bennett and then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor among them) whom activists charged with the unforgivable sin of squishiness. As Republicans became ideologically pure, they also became racially and religiously homogeneous.

This churn had overlapping effects. Many voters who would once have been moderate Republicans have been moving steadily Democratic since the 1990s — culminating, for example, in Biden's sweep of suburbs outside places like Philadelphia and Boston, which were once moderate Republican heartlands, and even in the more conservative-leaning suburbs around Atlanta and Phoenix.

Trump's success in winning over Whites without college degrees in 2016 sharpened the Democrats' internal debates over the relative priority of mobilizing base voters or persuading defectors. Biden did enough of both to win significant popular-vote and Electoral College majorities, but the margins in swing states were close, and Trump's 2020 mobilization of his own voters tipped more than a half-dozen House races in red territory his party's way.

Far from stopping the rightward radicalization of the GOP, what happened this year may only reinforce the trend. This means many debates that once took place between the parties — about, say, the appropriate size of the welfare state, the proper role of economic regulation or the right way to protect the environment — are being held almost entirely within the Democratic Party.

A government led by Democrats would amount to a coalition involving a left party, a broad center-left party with roots in a once-thriving labor movement, a socially liberal middle-class party, a Green party and perhaps a civil rights party. Coalitions of this sort are not unknown — progressive parties in Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal have governed successfully with such alliances — but holding all the pieces together requires the patience of Job and the canniness of Machiavelli.

Republicans are, basically, one big conservative party. Its constituencies give each other what they need. Economic conservatives live with appeals to religious conservatives, nationalists and even the fringe right in exchange for tax cuts and deregulation. All sides want conservative judges to foil possible future progressive advances. With the moderates in their ranks purged, they are united in fearing the liberal (or "socialist") enemy far more than they worry about each other.

The 2020 election perfectly captured the distinction between Democratic diversity and Republican homogeneity. Biden's coalition was a little bit of everybody — self-described liberals (they constituted 42 percent of his voters), moderates (48 percent) and conservatives (10 percent), according to the network exit poll conducted by Edison Research. In other words, contrary to Trump's claim that Biden is a tool for raging leftists, a majority of his electorate was non-liberal.

Racially, 53 percent of Biden's voters were White, but 82 percent of Trump's were; 21 percent of Biden's were Black, but only 3 percent of Trump's were. And for all the focus on Trump's gains among Latinos in South Florida and South Texas, the Hispanic vote is still crucial for Democrats: 16 percent of Biden's voters were Latino, compared with 9 percent of Trump's. The contrast is especially striking when race and religion are looked at in tandem: 67 percent of Trump's voters were White Christians; only 30 percent of Biden's were.

In the short term, Democrats clearly have a coalition-management challenge: Big-tent politics requires a lot of work and leads to inevitable bickering. But over the long run, Republicans are confronting decline, not only because the Democrats' diversity better reflects the country, both now and in the future, but also because the GOP's coalition is aging. . . . . Biden captured voters under 30 by a better than 3-to-2 margin. In fact, the only thing that has saved Republicans in presidential elections over the past three decades is an electoral college that privileges White and conservative voters. The GOP has won the popular vote in only one of the past eight elections.

[E]ach camp within the [Democrat] party can acknowledge the truth of what their internal rivals say. The left is right that it provides a lot of energy, especially among young voters and in the urban areas that turned out big for Biden. But the moderates are right that, to win power, the party needs middle-of-the-road voters, particularly from swing districts. This may produce more cautious officeholders, but they are essential to building a congressional majority.

Progressives are right that the quest for racial justice should not be compromised — and is, in fact, an electoral asset. (After all, 85 percent of Biden voters told the exit pollsters that the criminal justice system treats Blacks unfairly.) But moderates are right that slogans like "Defund the police" can bring down moderate lawmakers

Here's a rule for the future: Any slogan that requires five minutes to explain what it really means is not a good slogan.

And while the word "socialist" appeals to younger progressives who associate it with the social and economic successes of Sweden, Norway or Denmark, it carries a lot of baggage for older voters . . .

The Democratic coalition can hang together only if its members accept this ground-level truth: that for all their quarrels, they want to move the country in the same direction (as I argued earlier this year in my book "Code Red"), and they want to defeat the radicalized GOP. Biden convinced both sides that they wanted the same thing by crafting a platform that appealed to moderates and the left alike

Georgia’s impending Senate runoffs will provide the ultimate test of strength between the mobilizing power of the Democrats’ big tent and the solidarity of the Republicans’ closed circle. The politics of diversity and a whole lot of voter registration helped Democrats convert Georgia from a Republican bastion into a battleground. So did Biden’s carefully calibrated appeal to all wings of the party’s coalition. Control of the Senate and Biden’s ability to enact his larger program depend on his party’s ability to hang together . . . .

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

The Real Reason Trump Won't Concede: Money

If nothing else, Donald Trump is consistent: it's always about him and it's always about money - money he's scammed from the gullible.  A case in point is his "Election Defense Fund" from which not a single penny of an typical donation goes to finance the campaign's ongoing litigation,  Rather, 60% of every dollar donated goes to Trump's new political action committee and 40% goes to the Republican National Committee, not that one would know this given his non-stop appeals to his sheep like supporters for money to supposedly finance the campaign's ongoing litigation. Like all things Trump, it's a big lie and one can readily see his PAC migrating to Trump's own pockets. Once a con artist, always a con artist.  It's amazing how easily Trump's supporters allow themselves to be fleeced.  A piece in Salon looks at Trump's latest self-enrichment and self-empowerment scheme.  Here are excerpts:

Joe Biden has decisively won the presidency. There is no way for Trump to overturn the results of the election, and his campaign's post-election lawsuits have gotten dismissed left and right. 

That hasn't stopped him from launching an "Official Election Defense Fund" and bombarding his supporters with fundraising appeals to supposedly finance the campaign's ongoing litigation.

60 percent of a donation to Trump's "Official Election Defense Fund" goes to Save America, Trump's new leadership Political Action Committee that he set up less than a week after the election. The other 40 percent goes to the Republican National Committee. 

So if someone donates $500, Trump's PAC gets $300, the RNC gets the other $200, and not a cent actually goes to the election defense fund.

Donations only start going to that fund once Trump's PAC reaches the legal contribution limit of $5,000 – and the RNC gets $3,000. 

This means a supporter would have to donate over $8,000 before any money goes to the fund they think they're supporting.

Apparently enriching himself on the taxpayer dime for the past four years wasn't enough for Trump. Now he's lining his pockets by attacking our elections and undermining our democracy — and swindling his supporters every step of the way.

Is this just a final grift before Trump leaves office? Or is there more at stake?

Trump certainly wants to keep the money flowing, and a leadership PAC is an easy way to do it. Trump's PAC can be used to fund a lavish post-presidency lifestyle, as leadership PACs can use donors' funds for personal expenses, like personal travel and events at Trump properties, while campaign committees cannot.

But there's more at stake than just Trump's personal greed. Creating a PAC solidifies Trump's grip on the GOP, as he can distribute the funds to GOP candidates . . . . In the grand scheme of things, Trump's PAC also fuels the GOP's cynical strategy to maintain power. The GOP has a permanent stake in stoking a cold civil war. 

A deeply divided nation serves the party's biggest patrons, giving them unfettered access to the economy's gains while the bottom 90% of Americans fight each other for crumbs. That division will persist even with Trump out of the White House, thanks to his bonkers claim of a stolen election, and a base more riled up from racist appeals than ever.

We may have defeated Trump, but we haven't defeated Trumpism.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

George Washington Warned Us About Individuals Like Trump

Donald Trump is the embodiment of what the Founding Fathers feared: a populist demagogue who might win the nation's highest office and place self-interest and divisiveness ahead of the common good and the unity of the nation. The supposed safeguard against such an event was the Electoral College in which electors could refuse to certify the election of such an unworthy and dangerous individual to the office of president. This safeguard utterly failed in 2016 and the last four years have been a nightmare where deliberate attempts to divide the nation have been non-stop and morality has been thrown out the window not only by Trump but also far too many Republicans, especially at the congressional level.  In his farewell address as he left the presidency, George Washington warned the nation against such individuals and spoke of the need to maintain national unity:  

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. 

I doubt much of Trump's base has ever read Washington's farewell address and, of the few who have, they certainly have ignored Washington's warning.  Washington also warned against political parties and individuals who would subvert the best interests of the nation to power of the party or an individual as noted in a column in the Washington Post.  The contrasts between Washington and Trump could not be more stark:

Two-hundred twenty-four years ago, the first president retired with a passionate warning against political parties becoming “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”

Now, as a defeated president mobilizes his party in an open (if bumbling) attempt to overturn a free and fair election, and as Republican congressional leaders shamefully legitimize his behavior, George Washington’s Farewell Address takes on renewed importance.

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge … is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington warned. And, “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

President Trump, who has no purpose other than his own elevation, will never pen such a speech. But in the weeks that have passed since the election, he has already given us his farewell address of sorts. Here it is, assembled entirely from his own words and tweets:

This election was a fraud. A total fraud. It was a fraudulent election. This was a massive fraud. This fraud has taken place. You have a fraudulent system. Fraudulent voting and fraudulent votes. There’s tremendous fraud here. There’s fraud all over the place. Massive fraud has been found.

We’re like a Third World country. We will find tens of thousands of fraudulent and illegal votes. You’re gonna find fraud of hundreds of thousands of votes per state. They used covid in order to defraud the people of this country

RIGGED ELECTION! This Election was RIGGED. This, it was a rigged election. Very sad to say it, this election was rigged. This was a 100% RIGGED ELECTION They know it was a rigged election. At the highest level it was a rigged election. This election was a rigged election.

This was an election that we won easily. We won it by a lot. I won Pennsylvania by a lot. In Georgia, I won by a lot. I won that by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way Trump didn’t win Pennsylvania because the energy industry was all for him. No, we won by a lot. We were robbed.

Fake ballots. Fake votes. Fake recounts. Fake results. Fake pollsters. Fake polls. FAKE NEWS.

I concede NOTHING! It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede because we know there was massive fraud. Should President Trump concede to Biden? Poll Results: No: 190,593 (98.9%). This election has to be turned around. They have to turn over the results.

Have a great life General Flynn! Rudy, you were the greatest mayor. Thanksgiving is a special day for turkeys. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the president of the United States. I concede NOTHING!!!!!

Sadly, Trump is a cancer whose damage to the nation will not be quickly erased.  

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Blame Game Erupts Over GOP’s Decline in Youth Vote

Even if one puts aside the toxicity of Donald Trump, the Republican Party has little to offer younger voters who are much more racial diverse that the far right elderly and who are concerned about issues that the GOP continues to pretend are not problems: climate change, racial inequality, homophobia, religious based intolerance and bigotry and, of course wealthy inequality which the GOP has only made worse. Thus, it is little surprise that the 2020 election showed the GOP and Trump losing ground with younger voters, including in key swing states that Trump lost. Within the GOP the blame game is raging even as no one within the party wants to look at the ultimate source of the decline in younger voters opting to support the GOP: younger voters simply don't want what the GOP is peddling.  A piece in Politico looks at the finger pointing game which will do nothing to fix the true underlying problem.  Here are article highlights:

Nobody involved in Donald Trump’s reelection thought the president would win the youth vote in 2020. But they didn’t think it would be this bad.  Now the finger pointing has begun.

In nearly every Midwestern battleground state that mattered to Trump’s reelection, the president performed worse among young voters than in 2016, according to a POLITICO review of state exit polls. Trump ceded ground in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two states he lost. He also regressed in Arizona, another critical state that slipped away.

In Pennsylvania, President-elect Joe Biden won young voters by a 20-point margin, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 9-point advantage in 2016. In Wisconsin, Biden won the state’s youngest voters by a 16-point margin, a dramatic rise from Clinton’s razor-thin edge in 2016 — and a significant swing in a state Trump only lost by 20,000 votes. Michigan saw a four-point shift from 2016 to 2020.

To Trump’s critics, Biden gained ground with young voters because of who his opponent was: a divisive politician with a culture wars playbook that failed to energize audiences outside of his base. But among the president’s campaign aides and allies, the consensus is far less clear. Interviews with more than a dozen people involved in Trump’s 2020 operation revealed rifts, acrimony and a system in which no one would take the blame but everyone had a scapegoat — from the president himself, to the campaign to outside groups like Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative campus organizing group.

The fallout has left the GOP with a dearth of insight into what went wrong with millennial and Gen Z voters — particularly in a cycle where Trump saw gains with other demographics — and no clear strategy to prevent another surge of youth support for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections. And the Republican Party is desperately in need of a strategy to reverse the trend, having struggled for decades to connect with younger voters.

“The Republican party has no future if it doesn’t improve its performance among younger voters,” said Michael Steel, a GOP strategist and former top aide to House Speaker John Boehner.

“I’m not a fan of top-down autopsy processes,” Steel added, “but I do hope the end of the Trump presidency is a natural inflection point and a time to reboot to some extent.”

Some Republican operatives involved in the 2020 cycle said the way young voters, who skew heavily Democratic, currently perceive the GOP will automatically improve once Trump is no longer in office.

They said the president’s inflammatory approach to issues like race relations, which became a major cultural flashpoint this summer, likely cost the party the support of young conservatives who may have been on the fence about supporting Trump and are less ideologically rigid than their older counterparts on such topics.

[T]wo Trump campaign aides who have worked closely with Kirk said the campaign had its own youth outreach efforts that went beyond voters who are still in college. These aides described Turning Point’s messaging as too sycophantic to bring in young voters who might align more closely with conservatism but remain apprehensive about Trump himself.

In the end, Trump saw a decline in his youth support from four years ago in Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and several other states. Only Georgia and Michigan saw a slight increase in Trump voters under the age of 29 — from 33 percent in 2016 to 39 percent this cycle in Georgia, and 34 percent to 35 percent in Michigan, according to exit poll data. But the gains were not enough to put either state in the president’s column.