How Alarmed Should We Be?

Cause for hope?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump stepped up his election-year effort to dominate the Republican Party, holding a rally in Arizona on Saturday in which he castigated anyone who dares to question his lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, including the state’s GOP governor, Doug Ducey.

But 2,000 miles to the east in Washington, there are small signs that some Republicans are tiring of the charade. Mike Rounds, the generally unassuming senator from South Dakota, was perhaps the boldest in acknowledging the reality that the election was in fact fair. Instead of being shunned, he was supported by his GOP colleagues, including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Rounds later said the party needed to get “louder” in telling voters the truth about the 2020 campaign.

Meanwhile, top Republicans in Washington have engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to encourage Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, one of Trump’s most vocal antagonists in the party, to run for a Senate seat. And on Saturday, Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican since 2010 to be sworn in as Virginia’s governor after running a campaign that kept Trump at arm's length.
https://thehill.com/homenews/wire/589930-some-in-gop-begin-testing-partys-lockstep-loyalty-to-trump

 

How Alarmed Should We Be?

About elections? Not at all. Mass extinction events? A bunch.

 

From the earliest days of his presidency Donald Trump and his political team worked to re-engineer the infrastructure of the Republican Party, installing allies in top leadership posts in key states.

The effect has been dramatic — and continues to reverberate nearly six months after he left office.

joked about assassinating two Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump. Arizona’s state chair accused Republican Gov. Doug Ducey of nothing less than killing people by restricting the use of hydroxychloroquine, a Trump obsession, in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

There and elsewhere, state party chairs have been at the center of a raft of resolutions to censure or rebuke GOP lawmakers deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/13/trump-gop-enforcers-state-chairs-499456

 

If you have nothing to say about my post and just want a place to interject your partisan leanings, please spare me. Find another post.

 

If you want to start a thread about mass extinction events go elsewhere.

 

I have no interest in starting such a thread but thanks.

 

Trump’s Arizona project shows the dire threat to American democracy

Former president Donald Trump went there Saturday for a rally of the faithful, and what was most disturbing wasn’t even Trump’s own litany of lies and conspiracy theories. If you sat through Trump’s tired recitation of the old hits, you’d think he was slipping into irrelevance, a pathetic loser trying to convince a dwindling cadre of fans he was still relevant.

No, what mattered about the event was the parade of Arizona politicians who came to pay tribute to him, one more deranged than the next, each there because they hope they can ride Trump’s support to their own positions of power. And they just might.

Amid the expected GOP congressmen and right-wing media figures was Kari Lake, the former local news anchor whose campaign for Arizona governor is based on her embrace of Trump’s election lies. She has said the leading Democratic candidate, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, should be imprisoned for presiding over a fair election in 2020. Trump has endorsed Lake, and she leads in primary polls.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/17/trump-arizona-election-threat-democracy/

Lake is the dingbat who said if she had been governor she would not have certified Biden's election in AZ.

 

Trump blows a hole in 2024 presidential debates

Donald Trump thumbed his nose at traditional retail politics, preferring large rallies and appearances on conservative TV. In defeat, he refused to deliver the familiar concession speech and instead falsely claimed that his Republican or Democratic opponents stole elections.

Now it’s the presidential debates that are about to get a Trump makeover. They may never be the same again.

the Commission on Presidential Debates, the Republican National Committee began priming the electorate for a race in which the GOP nominee might not debate at all.

“It certainly gives the candidate more of an out if they’ve decided debating is to their disadvantage to be able to say, ‘The party rules prevent me from accepting’ the commission’s invitation,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/18/rnc-debate-trump-527247

 

Fifty-nine of former President Donald Trump's political allies signed onto a letter Wednesday demanding that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy remove Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the House GOP conference.

Cheney and Kinzinger are the only Republican members of the House's select committee on the January 6, which this week had the House of Representatives vote to hold Trump's former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in contempt.

As part of the proceedings Tuesday, Cheney ran the House floor debate for the committee, meaning she also provided rebuttals when her Republican peers argued against referring Meadows' case to the Department of Justice.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...emand-Cheney-Kinzinger-removed-House-GOP.html

 

The impact — DeSantis’ map would cut in half the number of African American districts from four on current proposed congressional maps to two, while boosting the number of seats Donald Trump would have won in 2020 to 18 from the 16 on the map being considered by the GOP-led Florida Senate. It would also wipe out the 5th Congressional District seat held by African American Rep. Al Lawson. His north Florida district includes the heavily Black Jacksonville urban core that was previously represented by African American Democrat Corrrine Brown since the early 1980s.
https://www.politico.com/newsletter...8/desantis-muscles-in-on-redistricting-495747

 

Democrats’ voting rights push in Congress is over. The fight for democracy isn’t.

If you listen to some leading liberal voices, the Senate defeat of the Freedom To Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts could sound the death knell of American democracy.

In a Wednesday speech held before the Senate votes, President Joe Biden warned of future stolen elections: “the prospect of [an election] being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.” Mother Jones’s Ari Berman, a leading journalist on the democracy beat, argued that the Senate is “killing the Democrats’ last, best chance to protect American democracy.”

Biden and Berman are right that American democracy is heading toward some sort of crisis, and there’s good reason to think these bills would have improved the long-term outlook. But the reality is that the bills Democrats sought to pass were hardly the “last, best chance” to act in democracy’s defense.

For all the good they would have done, the bills would only have had a limited effect on the biggest short-term threat to American democracy: election subversion, in which partisan political actors distort or outright disregard legitimate election results. The battle against these tactics was always going to take place in multiple arenas, most of which are outside of Washington.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22876361/freedom-to-vote-act-senate-filibuster-what-next

 

DOJ Task Force On Election Worker Threats Makes First Arrest

The Justice Department charged a man from Texas on Friday with threatening three government officials, the first criminal case brought forward by the department’s task force on combating violent threats against election workers.

According to the Justice Department’s announcement, 54-year-old Chad Christopher Stark of Leander, Texas was arrested by the FBI on Friday and charged with one count of making interstate threats. Prosecutors alleged in a 4-page indictment that Stark posted an ad on Craigslist on Jan. 5 last year offering $10,000 for the deaths of the three officials, who were not named in the indictment.
The title of the alleged ad declared that it was “time to kill” one of the officials.

“Georgia Patriots it’s time for us to take back our state from these Lawless treasonous traitors. It’s time to invoke our Second Amendment right it’s time to put a bullet in the treasonous Chinese [Official A]. Then we work our way down to [Official B] the local and federal corrupt judges,” Stark allegedly wrote.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/doj-task-force-on-election-worker-threats-makes-first-arrest

How would a guy in TX come up with batshyte crazy ideas about officials in GA?

Trump Tweets Conspiracy About Georgia Secretary of State’s ‘Brother’ Who ‘Works for China’
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump...state-brad-raffenspergers-nonexistent-brother

 

We’re already seeing what a mistake Virginia’s voters made

This week, we learned that Miyares has fired the University of Virginia’s counsel, Timothy Heaphy, supposedly because Heaphy does not share the new attorney general’s “philosophy and legal approach.” My strong suspicion is that Heaphy’s firing has more to do with the fact that he is presently on leave from his university position, serving as chief investigative counsel for the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/24/virginia-voters-mistake-youngkin-trump/

Firing a well respected attorney with support on both sides of the aisle as retribution for serving his country by participating in the 1/6 investigation, to appease Trumpists, cancels the hope Youngkin will govern as a moderate Repub.

 

Why should any nut case that is investigating the myth of 1/6 not be fired?

 

Texas school district reviewing over 400 books, pulls them from library shelves

LUBBOCK, Texas, Dec 8 (Reuters) - A San Antonio, Texas, school district has removed over 400 books from library shelves, works included on a list that a conservative state lawmaker has said may be inappropriate for children.

The North East Independent School District said in an emailed statement on Wednesday that it is reviewing 414 books and that most would likely be returned to library shelves soon, following a review for age appropriateness.

Reports of the review came as free speech advocates are raising concerns about an increase in calls to ban books.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/te...-books-pulls-them-library-shelves-2021-12-08/

https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/...nts-push-back-on-school-book-ban-131785797714

 

BTW, Never Trumpers and progressives (not Manchin or Cinema, for examples) are also authoritarian. In other words, the one thing Never Trumpers and progressives have in common is their upmost desire to control people and prevent liberties.

This is what aligns Never Trumpers and progressives against Trump:
(1) Trump's desire to be somewhat libertarian. Authoritarians like progressives and Never Trumpers have no desire to compromise...Just ask Manchin and Cinema.

 

Libertarians are in favor of stealing elections? Why must you make shyte up about those who point out Trump is a skidmark?

 

Libertarians are in favor of free and fair elections. If you're confused, why don't you read my signature?

 

So.......how is Trump one since he tried to steal the election?

 

IMO, my signature is self-explanatory. Why didn't you read it?

 

Putting aside your baseless conspiracy theory, Trump did in fact try to steal the election.

 

Talk about conspiracy theories.

 

We will stop right after progressives and Neocons.

 

Did he or did he not try to convince Pence to reject electoral votes from certain states, try to use the DoJ to have the electors from certain states changed, have 7 states send in a fake slate of EC votes, pressure state election officials to throw out their election results, summon a mob to DC to physically prevent Biden's certification?

 

Pennsylvania voting fight escalates as court strikes down mail ballot law

A Pennsylvania state court on Friday struck down the law allowing any voter to cast a ballot by mail, handing a victory to Republican lawmakers who sought to curtail the practice amid former President Donald Trump’s attacks on mail voting.

A panel of judges from Pennsylvania’s commonwealth court ruled that Act 77 — which passed out of the state legislature with bipartisan support and was signed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in 2019 — violated the state constitution. The state is expected to appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court, which turned back other challenges to the law in 2020 and has a generally liberal bent.

The practice once enjoyed broad bipartisan backing, but Republican support for the practice plummeted in 2020, as Trump attacked mail voting in the run-up to the election and then blamed it for his loss after, spreading conspiracy theories about widespread fraud within the practice.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/pennsylvania-court-strikes-mail-voting-law-00003179