Republican Assault on Democracy and March Towards Fascism

[LFC]

Jeffrey Clark, the dirtbag Trump wanted to put in charge of the DOJ so he could attack fair state elections, just had his home raided by federal agents.

Federal agents searched the home of former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark on Wednesday, bringing the focus of federal law enforcement squarely onto a high-ranking official who tried to help former President Donald Trump stay in office after losing the 2020 election.

A spokesman for the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office told TPM that “there was law enforcement activity in the Lorton area yesterday. We have no comment regarding the nature of that activity.”

Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official who runs a foundation that employs Clark, tweeted that on Wednesday, more than a dozen “DOJ law enforcement officials” searched Clark’s home in a “pre dawn raid,” leaving the onetime pretender to the position of attorney general “in the streets in his pjs.”

The new era of criminalizing politics is worsening in the US. Yesterday more than a dozen DOJ law enforcement officials searched Jeff Clark’s house in a pre dawn raid, put him in the streets in his pjs, and took his electronic devices. 1/2
— Russ Vought (@russvought) June 23, 2022

ABC and the New York Times first reported the searches. It’s not clear what the focus of the searches was.

Clark was the only senior DOJ official in 2020 and early 2021 who was willing to do what former President Trump wanted: wield the department as a tool to interfere in the certification of the election results.

I love the whine about "criminalizing politics" because a well fleshed out and nearly executed coup attempt is nothing more than "politics."

[AnBr]

Jun 23, 2022 17:42:41 GMT LFC said:

Mo is more than a few bricks shy of a pallet.

For him I would say that more than a few fries short of a Happy Meal fits better.

[LFC]

Jun 24, 2022 1:07:33 GMT AnBr said:

Jun 23, 2022 17:42:41 GMT LFC said:

Mo is more than a few bricks shy of a pallet.

For him I would say that more than a few fries short of a Happy Meal fits better.

Yeah but I feel like I used that one too many times already.

[andydp]

Jun 23, 2022 19:34:31 GMT LFC said:

Jeffrey Clark, the dirtbag Trump wanted to put in charge of the DOJ so he could attack fair state elections, just had his home raided by federal agents.

I love the whine about "criminalizing politics" because a well fleshed out and nearly executed coup attempt is nothing more than "politics."

I thought it was "legitimate political discourse".

[LFC]

More fake electors are being investigated.

We’re learning more and more about the expanded scope of the Justice Department’s investigation into ex-President Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme, which was spearheaded, in part, by then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the legal team he led.

Allegheny County Republican Party chair Sam DeMarco, one of the sham electors in Pennsylvania, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Thursday that the FBI had visited his home earlier that morning to serve him a subpoena and interview him for about an hour.

DeMarco, who is also a member of the Allegheny County council and the county elections board, said that the FBI’s subpoena seeks all of his texts, emails and written communications with the Trump campaign, Trump’s legal team and the other 19 fake electors in Pennsylvania.

The deadline for those materials is July 8, DeMarco said, and he plans on cooperating.

“I’ll certainly comply with their request,” the county GOP chair told the Post-Gazette.

DeMarco claimed he only had direct contact with the fellow sham electors, not Trump’s campaign or legal team.

Reports of new FBI subpoenas to fake Trump electors have also emerged in Michigan, another swing state that Trump and his allies targeted in the elector scheme.

Michele Lundgren, one of the 16 bogus electors, told the Detroit Free Press and ClickOnDetroit on Thursday that federal agents interviewed her for two hours at her home that day. They also served her a subpoena directing her to go to D.C. for an interview on July 8, Lundgren said.

Like DeMarco, Lundgren said she plans to cooperate with the feds.

Bizarrely, Lundgren told ClickOnDetroit that when she signed the sham Electoral College certificate after the 2020 election, she “didn’t even know what an elector was, let alone a fake elector.”

Lundgren’s husband, Carl Lundgren, told MLive.com that a fake elector named Amy Facchinello got a federal subpoena as well, but she refused to talk to the agents.

[LFC]

DeSatanist was in on the coup a month before John Eastman started strong-arming the Georgia legislature.

Ex-Donald Trump attorney John Eastman’s comments to Georgia legislators in December 2020 that the Florida Legislature had been prepared to adopt its own slate of presidential electors came a month after Gov. Ron DeSantis was among the first Republicans to float the idea.

Two days after the Nov. 3 election, when votes were still being tallied in several states, DeSantis told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, “I would also tell (Republicans), especially if you’re in those states that have Republican legislatures like Pennsylvania and Michigan and all these places, call your state representatives and your state senators.

“Under Article 2 of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislators and the schemes they create and the framework,” DeSantis continued. “And if there’s departure from that, if they’re not following law, if they’re ignoring the law, then they can provide remedies as well.”

A spokesperson for DeSantis has not responded to a request for comment on whether something similar had been planned in Florida, and if DeSantis still backed doing so in other states.

[jackd]

That is what Florida was preparing to do in Bush v. Gore had the court not decided it.

[LFC]

It used to be that sexual crimes would get you pushed out of Congress. Matt Gaetz is still in. Steve King was pushed out of the House because his racism was overt. He'd do just fine today as multiple members who repost white nationalist posts show us. This fascist and off-duty police officer attacked pysically another candidate. They are withdrawing from the race but I predict they wouldn't need to in just a few years.

A Republican candidate for Rhode Island state Senate dropped out of the race on Saturday after a video that went viral allegedly showed him punching his Democratic challenger in the face during an abortion rights rally in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

In a video filmed Friday night, Rhode Island Democratic state Senate candidate Jennifer Rourke is seen at a rally outside the State House protesting the Supreme Court’s ruling ending the right to abortion. The video shows tensions escalating, with people throwing punches at each other. Rourke alleged that her GOP challenger, Jeann Lugo, punched her in the face. Lugo is a Providence police officer who was off duty at the time.

Every prediction about the right is coming true. Every ... single ... one.

[LFC]

This author calls it "folk libertarianism" but to me it's just a specific fascist technique. The author is certainly correct about it being incoherent, though.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is not a libertarian. Sure, he boasts of leading a “free state” and has drawn libertarian praise for some of his COVID-19 policies. But as an extensive new profile published in The New Yorker shows, he’s perfectly willing to wield and expand state power in decidedly unlibertarian ways.

DeSantis’ opposition to vaccine mandates, for example, included signing legislation “telling companies that they were not free to decide how to manage their employees,” hardly a free-market stance. He rails against “Soros-funded prosecutors,” which presumably means the reformist district attorneys whom libertarians tend to support. And he’s taken heat from actual libertarians for his eagerness to regulate tech companies, his use of tax policy as a culture-war weapon, and his recent push to sic Child Protective Services on parents who take their kids to drag shows.

The New Yorker’s location of DeSantis “at the libertarian edge of his party,” then, doesn’t make sense—unless we add an adjective: DeSantis is an exemplar of American folk libertarianism, an incoherent but important force in American politics today.

Folk libertarianism is not an ideological affair. Neither is it a policy agenda. It’s an anti-authority impulse that wants authority for itself, seeks personal license while denouncing libertinism, carries a ”thin blue line” flag while fighting the Capitol Police, and boasts of being a “live and let live” alternative to left-wing pieties while whipping up panic about how other people behave. The notion was popularized by The New York Times’ Ross Douthat in a 2020 column, but the term is at least four years older than that, and the phenomenon it describes is much older still. It’s an attitude or posture, a way of engaging in politics that is both profoundly American and, though there are some commonalities, substantively different from the philosophy from which it borrows half its name.

Indeed, folk libertarianism is not the academic libertarianism of organizations like the Cato Institute or Reason (where, full disclosure, I publish with some regularity), nor is it the political vision of prominent libertarian figures like former Reps. Justin Amash and Ron Paul, or economist Friedrich Hayek. (Though if critics are correct, it might be the ethos of the new leadership of the Libertarian Party.) It’s not the libertarianism of the “libertarian moment,” that brief vogue for a movement which shows no sign of making a comeback as a cohesive power in national governance. And it’s not the milquetoast, white-collar libertarianism-lite—“socially liberal, economically conservative,” to use the familiar shorthand—that for decades we called “centrism” in the United States.

On the contrary, folk libertarianism is more at home in the new American center, a populist space which is the old one’s polar opposite: socially conservative (on some issues, anyway) and economically liberal, at least where one’s own Medicare check is concerned.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 27, 2022 16:49:44 GMT LFC said:

This author calls it "folk libertarianism" but to me it's just a specific fascist technique. The author is certainly correct about it being incoherent, though.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is not a libertarian. Sure, he boasts of leading a “free state” and has drawn libertarian praise for some of his COVID-19 policies. But as an extensive new profile published in The New Yorker shows, he’s perfectly willing to wield and expand state power in decidedly unlibertarian ways.

DeSantis’ opposition to vaccine mandates, for example, included signing legislation “telling companies that they were not free to decide how to manage their employees,” hardly a free-market stance. He rails against “Soros-funded prosecutors,” which presumably means the reformist district attorneys whom libertarians tend to support. And he’s taken heat from actual libertarians for his eagerness to regulate tech companies, his use of tax policy as a culture-war weapon, and his recent push to sic Child Protective Services on parents who take their kids to drag shows.

The New Yorker’s location of DeSantis “at the libertarian edge of his party,” then, doesn’t make sense—unless we add an adjective: DeSantis is an exemplar of American folk libertarianism, an incoherent but important force in American politics today.

Folk libertarianism is not an ideological affair. Neither is it a policy agenda. It’s an anti-authority impulse that wants authority for itself, seeks personal license while denouncing libertinism, carries a ”thin blue line” flag while fighting the Capitol Police, and boasts of being a “live and let live” alternative to left-wing pieties while whipping up panic about how other people behave. The notion was popularized by The New York Times’ Ross Douthat in a 2020 column, but the term is at least four years older than that, and the phenomenon it describes is much older still. It’s an attitude or posture, a way of engaging in politics that is both profoundly American and, though there are some commonalities, substantively different from the philosophy from which it borrows half its name.

Indeed, folk libertarianism is not the academic libertarianism of organizations like the Cato Institute or Reason (where, full disclosure, I publish with some regularity), nor is it the political vision of prominent libertarian figures like former Reps. Justin Amash and Ron Paul, or economist Friedrich Hayek. (Though if critics are correct, it might be the ethos of the new leadership of the Libertarian Party.) It’s not the libertarianism of the “libertarian moment,” that brief vogue for a movement which shows no sign of making a comeback as a cohesive power in national governance. And it’s not the milquetoast, white-collar libertarianism-lite—“socially liberal, economically conservative,” to use the familiar shorthand—that for decades we called “centrism” in the United States.

On the contrary, folk libertarianism is more at home in the new American center, a populist space which is the old one’s polar opposite: socially conservative (on some issues, anyway) and economically liberal, at least where one’s own Medicare check is concerned.

Adolescent Herrenvolk.  A master race, but one rooted in selfishness, insecurity, and lack of maturity, not in some sort of superior genetics (except the white part), intelligence, or morality.

[LFC]

Remember "political correctness?" "Wokeness?" "Cancel culture?" Welcome to the conservative version of it as practiced by Boise State University. The fascist movement in this country has been moving in this direction for a while, as evidenced by DeSatanist's targeting of Florida state schools. It's only going to get worse.

In August 2020, Boise State University chose a doctoral student in public policy, Melanie Fillmore, to deliver what is called a “land acknowledgment” speech at a convocation for incoming freshmen. Fillmore, who is part Indigenous, would recognize the tribes that lived in the Boise Valley before they were banished to reservations to make way for white settlers.

Fillmore considered it an honor. She was devoted to Boise State, where she had earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, taught undergraduate courses and served on job search committees. She also admired Marlene Tromp, a feminist literary scholar who came from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2019 to become Boise State’s first female president. Tromp had been hired with a mandate to promote diversity, and including an Indigenous speaker in the ceremony marking the start of students’ higher education would advance that agenda.

The convocation was to be virtual, because of the pandemic. Fillmore put on beaded Native American jewelry and recorded an eight-minute video on her phone. She began by naming the “rightful owners of this land,” the Boise Valley Indigenous tribes, and then described her own “complicated” background. Her father was Hunkpapa Lakota, her mother white. “I can trace eight generations of my Lakota ancestors being removed from the land of their lifeblood to the reservation, just as I can trace seven generations of Norwegian and English ancestors taking that land,” she said.

Fillmore urged viewers to “find a way to share your story here at Boise State” and to learn the history of Indigenous people. “When we acknowledge the Boise Valley ancestors and their land, we make room for that story of removal that was genocidal in purpose,” she said. “When we tell those stories honestly and fully, we heal, and our ancestors heal with us.”

She submitted her speech to the university, but the students never heard it. Boise State higher-ups thought that it was too long and too provocative to roll out in a politically precarious climate, one former official said. They consulted another administrator about whether to drop the speech. “I communicated that pulling it was a bad idea and incredibly wrong,” said this person, who has also left the university. “I don’t believe in de-platforming Indigenous voices.”

The advice was disregarded. Two days before the convocation, the vice president for student affairs told Fillmore that her appearance was canceled, explaining that her safety might be at risk or that she might be trolled or doxxed online.

You can't say anything that would butthurt a certain group of white people.

[LFC]

Another group of plaid shirts is forming to destroy free and fair elections.

A conservative attorney who brought John Eastman into Donald Trump's orbit is training an army of election deniers to aggressively monitor polling places.

Cleta Mitchell, a campaign finance lawyer who has worked closely with Ginni Thomas, is holding summits around the country as part of her Election Integrity Network, and recordings obtained by The Guardian show election deniers providing false and inflammatory instructions to guests interested in becoming poll watchers.

“I’m very familiar with the groups that are staging this," said Gary Sims, the elections director in North Carolina’s Wake County. "Some of these individuals I’ve been dealing with for over a decade now. It’s just that, honestly, after the events and post-events of 2020, these groups have a charged-up base. Before, they didn’t have an audience. Now they have an audience because of that. So they are capitalizing on that audience.”

“What they stated was, I want to say disinformation, not misinformation, because it was not true,” Sims added. “It’s actually intentionally trying to villainize us.”

[pnwguy]

Jun 30, 2022 14:42:46 GMT LFC said:

You can't say anything that would butthurt a certain group of white people.

"Blessed are the meek white people, for they will inherit the earth usable land"

[LFC]

The Trailer for the Jan. 6 Trump Documentary ‘Unprecedented’ Has Just Dropped

A trailer was released Tuesday for the three-part Discovery+ docuseries shot with Donald Trump and his family in the months before and after the 2020 insurrection. The teaser clip for Unprecedented, which was made by British documentarian Alex Holder, was included in the hours of footage Holder handed over to the Jan. 6 committee last month. The trailer, released by Politico, shows the moments around some of the Trump clan’s interviews, including a scene in which Ivanka frets about her appearance, and a truncated version of the former president’s excruciating futzing with a table and a glass of water. Don Jr. is also shown at a rally vowing to “make liberals cry again.” Text in the trailer reads: “Witness the 3-part documentary event… With exclusive access… To the most controversial family in the world… Gaining power is easy… Surrendering it is not.”

[LFC]

The Republican plaid shirts are threatening Rep. Adam Kinzinger and his family. Praise be to Jeebus.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of two Republicans who serve on the Jan. 6 Select Committee, posted audio on Tuesday exposing the violent threats his office has received in recent weeks and months — graphic and disturbing threats that have been fielded by interns serving in his D.C. office.

In a tweet, Kinzinger shared audio that he described as a “new low” in terms of the attacks he’s received over the last few years. Kinzinger has faced backlash since he became a vocal critic of former President Trump following the deadly Capitol insurrection last year.

The video — which Kinzinger noted was compiled by his new interns, who are in high school or college — contains audio of voicemails and phone calls with profanities and ominous language threatening the lawmaker and his family’s safety. Some of the callers are heard attacking Kinzinger for his defiance of Trump.

[pnwguy]

Jul 5, 2022 18:35:01 GMT LFC said:

The Republican plaid shirts are threatening Rep. Adam Kinzinger and his family. Praise be to Jeebus.

The Best People...

[LFC]

Texass's "Operation Lone Star" appears to be a classic fascist operation where silly little things like civil rights are ignored because they get in the way.

The Department of Justice is investigating alleged civil rights violations under Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar border initiative announced last year by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, according to state records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

The Legislature last year directed more than $3 billion to border measures over the next two years, a bulk of which has gone to Operation Lone Star. Under the initiative, which Abbott said he launched to combat human and drug smuggling, the state has deployed more than 10,000 National Guard members and Department of Public Safety troopers to the border with Mexico and built some fencing. Thousands of immigrant men seeking to enter the country have been arrested for trespassing onto private property, and some have been kept in jail for weeks without charges being filed.

Since the operation’s launch, a number of news organizations, including ProPublica and the Tribune, have outlined a series of problems with state leaders’ claims of success, the treatment of National Guard members and alleged civil rights violations.

An investigation by the Tribune, ProPublica and The Marshall Project found that in touting the operation’s accomplishments, state officials included arrests with no connection to the border and statewide drug seizures. The news organizations also revealed that trespassing cases represented the largest share of the operation’s arrests. DPS stopped counting some charges, including cockfighting, sexual assault and stalking, after the publications began asking questions about their connections to border security.

Another investigation by the Tribune and Army Times detailed troubles with the National Guard deployment, including reports of delayed payments to soldiers, a shortage of critical equipment and poor living conditions. Previous reporting by the Army Times also traced suicides by soldiers tied to the operation.

“If you are not already aware, the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ is investigating Operation Lone Star,” Kaylyn Betts, a DPS assistant general counsel, wrote in a May 23 email to a department official. She added that the agency should respond in a timely and complete manner.

In a letter sent Friday to the state’s attorney general, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice also cited a “formal investigation” of Operation Lone Star by the DOJ. The agency, which manages the state’s prison system, pointed to the investigation while fighting the release of public records sought by the news organizations.

In the letter, the department’s deputy general counsel wrote that the DOJ is investigating whether the state agency is subjecting people who are arrested as part of the border operation to “differential and unlawful conditions of confinement based on their perceived or actual race or national origin.”

[LFC]

History shows how anti-democracy political parties often tie themselves to violent militias, just as the GOP has done.

A detailed analysis from Just Security editor Rachel Kleinfeld walked through the ongoing problem that the Republican Party has with militia groups taking over their ranks.

Groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have become household names after the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. "The events on January 6 are not past. They are prelude," Kleinfeld wrote.

She cited people like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who was tasked with hand-delivering lists of fake electors to Vice President Mike Pence. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) pressured his state's House Speaker, Rusty Bowers, to call a new legislative session and decertify the 2020 election in the state. While there was violence seen before from GOP voters, it has become mainstream by party members.

"As a researcher on violence and democracy around the world, I have studied party-linked militia groups for years," explained Kleinfeld. "In countries like Iraq, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Colombia, politicians outsource violence to specialists in the trade, just as they hire consultants for robocalls and direct mail. In the past, googling these terms brought up countries just escaping from conflict or descending into it. Now, the United States, where militias have been embraced by GOP leaders at the national, state, and local level (as I discuss in detail below), appears among the early search results."

"Violent groups that get involved in politics in other countries follow a common path that I detailed in my last book," explained Kleinfeld. "At first, politicians recruit experts in violence and intimidation to use those tools as a campaign tactic. Later, those violent leaders run for office or take political roles directly, cutting out the political middleman."

She used 11 of India’s current national legislators facing 10-year-old murder charges as an example. There are also 30 who have attempted murder charges.

The question becomes why Republicans would so openly welcome violent militia members and criminals into the party.

"Because violence and intimidation are already bolstering their power. Intimidation is being successfully used to silence opposition. Representative Gonzalez was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. After threats to his wife and young children, he decided not to run for reelection," Kleinfeld continued.

While normal Americans think they can avoid the attacks, violence is increasing in the United States. Protest rallies are becoming more dangerous and it's now legal in Oklahoma to ram one's car into protesters. It's also legal for someone to "stand their ground" and use a gun to protect themselves and their property. Thanks to the Supreme Court ruling last week, protecting one's self also now includes outside of their home. That sets up more possible political violence similar to what happened in Charlottesville during the "Unite the Right" rally, but add guns to the equation. As Black Lives Matter began protesting the murder of George Floyd, at least 139 drivers drove their cars into protest crowds. Four have been killed with at least 100 injured.

A report last week from the Capitol Police revealed threats against members of Congress have increased by ten times with 12 times the activity against them by white supremacists.

Assassinations might be down, but violence has dramatically increased since Trump came onto the scene of politics.

I can't get to the Boston Globe piece but 139 cars driving into protestors? That's an epidemic of violence.

[LFC]

Wikipedia has a list of domestic terrorism incidents where people drove vehicles into George Floyd protests from May 27 to Sep 27, 2020. Several of them were law enforcement. There's over 100 incidents though not all are considered terrorist attacks.

[LFC]

They just can't help but brag about their fascism.

To film oneself committing a crime might seem a guileless act of self-incrimination, however, it is becoming increasingly popular. Take the Jan. 6 insurrection as a case in point.

With 874 people arrested on charges from disorderly conduct to seditious conspiracy, many were apprehended because of video or photos shared online. This is considered performance crime: the performance of criminal activity in which filming and sharing it with an audience is intrinsic to the crime itself.

[goldenvalley]

Jul 7, 2022 21:00:58 GMT LFC said:

They just can't help but brag about their fascism.

To film oneself committing a crime might seem a guileless act of self-incrimination, however, it is becoming increasingly popular. Take the Jan. 6 insurrection as a case in point.

With 874 people arrested on charges from disorderly conduct to seditious conspiracy, many were apprehended because of video or photos shared online. This is considered performance crime: the performance of criminal activity in which filming and sharing it with an audience is intrinsic to the crime itself.

Strangely the fact that they tape it and set it out for the world to see makes them believe they didn't commit any crime.  I think they take the "it's the cover up, not the crime" concept too literally.

[LFC]

Poor, Mittens. He is still stuck in the land of wishful thinking, unable to grasp how the near totality of his party and its bug-eyed, frothing base is functioning. He still thinks this is about actual problems, not Faux News / right-wing noise machine generated lies and insanity. He needs to watch some tapes of CPAC before writing this kind of drivel.

Sen. Mitt Romney’s Fourth of July essay at The Atlantic was mostly unremarkable and frequently correct. Ours is a country in thrall to wishful thinking, the Utah Republican said, to believing “what we hope to be the case” rather than what is actually the case, and thereby refusing to address real and growing problems.

But one portion, in which Romney prescribed a remedy for “our national malady of denial, deceit, and distrust” was strikingly, tellingly wrong.

What we need, he asserted, is a good president, someone more energetic, perhaps, than President Joe Biden—but certainly not former President Donald Trump. “I hope for a president who can rise above the din to unite us behind the truth,” Romney wrote. Yet he also offered, as a stopgap, the prospect of ordinary Americans rising “above ourselves—above our grievances and resentments.” Eventually our presidential savior will fix us, but “[w]hile we wait,” kind and responsible behavior from normal people will have to suffice.

Romney is far from the first to express this hope, nor will he be the last. Waiting for just the right president to come along and solve everything is a popular American hobby. Biden himself promised to be that president in 2020, telling supporters in Georgia shortly before the election that though “divisions,” “anger and suspicion are growing, and our wounds are getting deeper,” he’d work to “restore our soul and save our country.”

Well, maybe he tried. And maybe Romney actually believes what he wrote, as implausible as it is coming from a senator and erstwhile presidential nominee who knows full well our government’s capacities and, more important, its limitations. But the rest of us should be under no such delusion.

It’s true, another four years of Trump would exacerbate our confusion and distrust. But it’s absurd, even naïve, to imagine that if we can just get a better president everything will be fine. That’s not how presidents work. It’s not how people and polities work. It may be “what we hope to be the case,” but it isn’t the reality at hand.

The reality is the presidency is at once too powerful and too impotent to fulfill these hopes. The power of the office is a detriment because it makes the role too valuable a prize. Partisan animosities scale up with executive authority, and that all but guarantees we’ll elect “a divider, not a uniter,” to tweak another former president’s phrase. But even if we did elect some anodyne candidate, someone so mild Biden looks spicy by comparison—well, what could that president do? There are ever fewer things beyond the reach of executive power, but the human heart is among them. No president can make us turn away from denial, deceit, and distrust.

It doesn't help that when Romney ran for president he proved himself to be a serial liar, right to the point of denying he said things that were actually on video. That makes him a pretty awful messenger about "our national malady of denial, deceit, and distrust." He helped build it.

[goldenvalley]

Jul 11, 2022 15:48:44 GMT LFC said:

It doesn't help that when Romney ran for president he proved himself to be a serial liar, right to the point of denying he said things that were actually on video. That makes him a pretty awful messenger about "our national malady of denial, deceit, and distrust." He helped build it.

Mitt spoke his truth back in the presidential race.  In his view most people are takers and he only cares about the makers. He may think he's a fine upstanding moral man but his morality is expressed by his business practices and his statement about the takers.

[LFC]

In what can be a shock to no one CPAC is hosting Viktor Orbán as a speaker in August. Read Orbán's comments made to CPAC in May about the media. Rod Dreher is touching himself over the very thought.

GOP’s Lovefest With Viktor Orbán Takes Another Step

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is slated to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas in early August, fully closing the gap between U.S. conservatives and the leader of a backsliding democracy.

• CPAC already hosted Orbán as a star speaker at its special session in Hungary in May. In his speech, the far-right leader urged Republicans to go for a media takeover because “the madness of the progressive left can only be demonstrated if the media is there to help us do it.”

[LFC]

Mark Meadows should rot out the rest of his days in prison.

In a statement issued early Tuesday morning, Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen accused the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows of turning over information on his advocacy group and his fellow founders to former Attorney General Bill Barr and questioned the reasons why.

According to Galen, "It’s hard to describe the feeling of knowing the most powerful people in the country are preparing to attack you for your political views. Knowing the tremendous power of the White House and the Department of Justice would give any American pause."

Linking to a document where Meadows served up a helping of information to Barr mentioning Galen, Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens and others, Galen added, "On Wednesday, November 11, 2020, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed Attorney General of the United States, Bill Barr, a document titled 'Lincoln Project Harassment,' writing, “This is all the Lincoln project info.” (When, where, how, and by whom this information was compiled, we don’t yet know.)"

He continued, "“We’re trying to discover if Barr responded or acted against us. We will soon begin the process of determining if Trump’s DOJ followed up Mark Meadows’ prompts. Meadows’ missive was the second time in just over six months that either Donald Trump himself or his highest advisors had called us out by name."