Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

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The cartoon is incorrect in portraying a Democrat. There is no giant hole in its head, and it doesn't have its hand in some kids pants.

 

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It begins: Florida is losing convention bookings in what could be massive new economic blow

While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is desperately flailing around on the presidential campaign trail, let's not overlook his much more successful efforts to run Florida's economy straight into a ditch. ...

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Just when you thought Florida's educational system couldn't get any worse ...

Florida has banned a lot of books, movies, and ideas under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Here’s something it hasn’t banned: historically inaccurate, frankly racist videos from far-right advocacy group PragerU. This is explicitly right-wing content from an...

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During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:

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At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.


(full article online)

Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel

The fullest accounting yet shows how Thomas has secretly reaped the benefits from a network of wealthy and well-connected patrons that is far more extensive than previously understood.

www.propublica.org

 

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Exclusive: A veteran FBI agent told Congress that investigations into Giuliani and other Trump allies were suppressed

The FBI agent's bombshell allegations of political bias appeared in a leaked statement made to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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Donald Trump’s interview Wednesday night with Eric Bolling on Newsmaxcame with a surprise ending: a disclaimer.

The former president repeated his debunked claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
“I believe I won that election by many, many votes, many, many hundreds of thousands of votes,” he said. “That’s what I think.”



(full article online)

Newsmax Ends Trump Interview With Super Awkward Disclaimer

The network is currently facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit.

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Newsmax Ends Trump Interview With Super Awkward Disclaimer

The network is currently facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit.

news.yahoo.com

 

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[ Elections in every State are not agreeing with you Laura. The People are winning. ]

 

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“Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John Adams in 1776 as the colonies moved toward declaring independence and she looked ahead to the “new code of laws” that her husband and others would ultimately draft. More than 240 years later, a Utah Supreme Court judge hearing arguments on whether a state abortion ban should be allowed to go into effect highlighted how the ladies had not been remembered or included in the 1895 founding of her state.

As Republicans rushed to ban abortion starting in the summer of 2022, judges hit the brakes in some states, and those battles are still playing out. One such case was argued before the Utah Supreme Court this week: a trigger law banning abortion in the state, which was set to go into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, is currently on hold under a lower court’s order in Utah.

Taylor Meehan, a private attorney arguing on behalf of the state, worked hard to tie an abortion ban to the state constitution. “Any searching review of the Utah Constitution leads to this conclusion that abortion is one of those areas where the people left their elected officials free to exercise their judgment and servants of their constituents,” she said.

But Meehan’s argument did not actually hinge on the words of the Utah constitution. “There is an unbroken history and tradition … before 1973, of prohibiting abortion,” she said. “And that unbroken history has to be part of this Court's analysis, rather than present-day policy arguments about the benefits or the or lack thereof of abortion.”

I’m guessing there are other things that had unbroken traditions in Utah law between 1895 and the 1970s that are no longer in state law.

Utah Supreme Court Justice Paige Petersen—part of a court that is majority women for the first time, and entirely appointed by Republicans—had a question. At the 1895 convention that drafted the state constitution, “Women were in the audience, but they weren't any of the delegates,” she noted. That being the case, “How do we know … what they thought the meaning of their rights were?" Peterson asked. "It seems important in this context because women are the ones that experience pregnancy and experience childbirth.”

This is refreshing. Imagine if Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices would pause to think about the people who were not allowed to participate in drafting the U.S. Constitution, and what they might have wanted or thought.

Meehan’s argument that “abortion is one of those areas where the people left their elected officials free to exercise their judgment” and reliance on “unbroken history and tradition” are interesting finesses on the Utah constitution being silent on the specific issue of abortion.
But the Utah constitution does say some other things that could conceivably apply to the question of whether an abortion ban was acceptable.

“This enumeration of rights shall not be construed to impair or deny others retained by the people,” for instance. Or, “Frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is essential to the security of individual rights and the perpetuity of free government.” Or, “Both male and female citizens of this State shall enjoy equally all civil, political and religious rights and privileges”—like, say, making their own medical decisions? The state constitution, though, has little to say directly about women beyond that. It’s up to the Utah Supreme Court whether the security of individual rights extends to medical decisions about pregnancy in a time when women have somewhat more of a role in setting laws than they did in 1895.

Utah judge reminds anti-abortion lawyers of whose voices were missing in state constitution

“Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John Adams in 1776 as the colonies moved toward declaring independence and she looked ahead to the “new code of laws” that her ...

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Imagine being the lone evangelical preacher who saw Donald Trump for what he was: the complete betrayal of everything the church had taught. A moral reprobate who didn’t even pretend to go to church, misquoted scripture, slept with porn stars while his wife was at home with a baby, bragged about sexually assaulting women, never donated to charity but used charity funds to commission full-size paintings of himself, and never once apologized or showed remorse for any of this.

How do you square that away with your religious beliefs? Russell Moore, a top official at the Southern Baptist Convention, couldn’t abide. His church’s embrace of Trump, white nationalism, and a sexual abuse coverup led to fierce words, and he was subsequently drummed out of his leadership post at the SBC. Now he has nothing but harsh words for his former colleagues from his perch as editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine. Among the harshest? The realization that his own congregants now consider Jesus too liberal.

Moore was the subject of NPR’s “Main Character of the Day” podcast, and there are some truly salient points.

It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — "turn the other cheek" — [and] to have someone come up after to say, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?" And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, "I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ," the response would not be, "I apologize." The response would be, "Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak." And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.

We liberals have long argued that Jesus was liberal. It’s amazing that upon coming to that same realization, these conservative congregants don’t rethink their hateful ideology to better align with the teachings of their god. Instead, they declare the teachings of Jesus as “liberal talking points,” call him “weak,” and then cast him aside as anachronistic.

Of course, there’s always a Southern preacher willing to take these souls and give them a hateful, vengeful, conservative version of Jesus, one that skips over the Sermon on the Mount.

That’s why Moore has clearly surrendered trying to win back the soul of his old denomination. They’re gone. He talks about working “small and local,” which as a liberal atheist I’d translate to “join the local Episcopalians or Unitarians.” Not every church is hateful and bigoted.

This was also interesting:

I think that the roots of the political problem really come down to disconnection, loneliness, sense of alienation. Even in churches that are still healthy and functioning, regular churchgoing is not what it was a generation ago, in which the entire structure of the week was defined by the community.

This issue is so much bigger than church attendance. Social media, suburbia and its fences, cars, television, gentrification, mass mobility and migration, and almost every other technological and sociological advancement of the last 100 years have served to disconnect people from their communities. COVID didn’t help. For some people, that is a godsend (no pun intended). I was happy to ditch attendance at Catholic mass for the internet, and I found (and founded) a community there. But I’ve learned that introverts like me are the exception, not the rule.

My son and I, both deep introverts, thrived during the pandemic. It almost broke my incredibly social daughter. Connection is important to most, and it’s true that church was historically connective tissue for communities, but it’s been a long time since that was the case.

COVID certainly did a number on a great many churches. Once people got used to “attending” service via Zoom, why bother showing up in person? Yet it was that person-to-person connection that brought real value to those gatherings.

But that person-to-person connection has also been utterly mangled by our polarized political environment, and that’s where Moore focuses a great deal of his attention. He argues that "almost every part of American life is tribalized and factionalized," and that includes the church. And while there is an audience for a church that worships Trump as a false idol, it also cuts out a percentage of the congregation who see through the charade. Even in deeply red rural communities, 10%-20% of residents are Democrats. Not a lot of businesses can survive the loss of up to a fifth of their customers, and churches are no different.

According to the Annual Church Profile, the Southern Baptist congregation is down significantly since its heyday in 2006, from 16.3 million to 13.2 million, a drop of around 25%. Factor in the overall population growth, and the decline is even more stark. Half a million of that loss was in 2022, and 1.5 million since 2018. Moore argues that political polarization is part of that story. Another part is the loss of young evangelicals on issues like LGBTQ+ and climate change issues.

But in the end, it all comes down to that one congregant who thought the Sermon on the Mount was “liberal talking points.” There’s a church that would work to educate that radicalized individual and bring him back to Jesus’ actual teachings in the Bible. And there’s a church that has thrown out its entire moral high ground to embrace Trump’s gospel of selfishness and bigotry.

The Southern Baptist Convention, unfortunately, chose the latter. And if they hadn’t, well, someone else would have done so anyway.

Jesus is too liberal

Imagine being the lone evangelical preacher who saw Donald Trump for what he was: the complete betrayal of everything the church had taught. A moral reprobate who didn’t even pretend to go to ...

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The nation's premier forced birther group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, identified a lot of scapegoats earlier this week after Ohio voters decisively rejected a ballot measure 57%-43%, which was intended to block abortion protections from being added to the state's constitution in November.

"Tragically, some sat on the sideline while outsider liberal groups poured millions into Ohio," the group moaned in a statement issued minutes after the failure of Issue 1. "The silence of the establishment and business community in Ohio left a vacuum too large to overcome."

Issue 1 would have raised the threshold for amending the state's constitution from a bare majority of voters to 60%. State Republican lawmakers sought to sneak it through in what they believed would be a sleepy August special election. Unfortunately for Republicans, they missed the memo that a group of high-turnout erstwhile GOP loyalists—suburban moms—are actually deeply committed to keeping abortion legal while many are also fleeing the Republican Party.


In fact, voters in suburban GOP strongholds joined forces with those in progressive areas such as Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, and Cleveland to thwart the measure,according to The Columbus Dispatch. "For example, nearly 58% of voters in suburban Delaware County north of Columbus rejected Issue 1 despite the county's long history of supporting Republicans," noted the Dispatch.

Additionally, formerly Democratic blue-collar regions turned Trumpy–for example, Mahoning County, which also rejected the measure. This led to its lopsided demise in a solidly red state Donald Trump won by 8 points.

As Daily Kos Elections' Stephen Wolf noted, Biden won just seven of Ohio's 88 counties in 2020, while the "no on Issue 1" campaign carried 22 counties in total and bested Biden in every county across the state.

That's an impressive coalition of voters wise to the Republicans' fascist scheme, even though many of them won't vote Democratic next year and may even vote against enshrining abortion rights in the Buckeye constitution later this year.

What is clear, however, is Ohioans are paying attention, the electorate is shifting, and fractures are deepening among the decades-old GOP coalition of business-minded and socially conservative voters.

The Susan B. Anthony statement made those fault lines immediately apparent. Though the group scapegoated "liberal dark money" for defeating their wildly unpopular measure, it also lamented the absence of its allies.

"So long as the Republicans and their supporters take the ostrich strategy and bury their heads in the sand, they will lose again and again,” concluded the group's post-loss statement.

The line smacked of two fallacies at once: The assumption that if forced birthers simply talked about abortion more, they could win the public over to their side, and the idea that forced birthers' political bedfellows could be prodded into to altering their "ostrich strategy."

Both propositions are fundamentally flawed, but the latter foretells the fracturing of the Republican coalition. In truth, Christian zealots and the business community are on an irrevocable path to growing further part in what was once a union of convenience. In the past, the two factions' policy aspirations appealed to a like-minded set of voters that represented a fairly sizable and cohesive slice of the electorate.

But right-wing efforts to demonize LGBTQ+ individuals while stripping both them and pregnant Americans of bodily autonomy is broadly alienating Corporate America and educated voters alike. The Susan B. Anthony group's interests and its committed voters no longer benignly overlap with those of the business sector, which is exactly why the extremist laws enacted by Florida Republicans are starting to cost the state millions in business revenues. It's likely just the tip of the iceberg for the Sunshine State.

It’s also why the Ohio Business Roundtable, Ohio Manufacturers Association, and Ohio Council of Retail Merchants—three of Ohio’s “Big 6″ business groups—declined to take sides on Issue 1.

A key proponent of the ballot measure, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, admitted on national television this week that Republicans and forced birthers have lost the business community on the issue.

“The coalition on the right, when it holds together, we can get things done,” LaRose told MSNBC's Chuck Todd Thursday. “It can be social, cultural conservatives and business conservatives, and I consider myself both of those. But when the business community started to think this was about abortion, they walked off the battlefield."

LaRose, who recently announced a Senate bid, can thank himself for that revelation after he confessed in June Issue 1 was "100%" about keeping the abortion rights amendment from succeeding in November.

This week's results don't exactly bode well for his candidacy, but they will likely prove even more ominous for the fortunes of the Republican Party moving forward.

Republican coalition shrinks as suburbs, businesses flee

The nation's premier forced birther group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, identified a lot of scapegoats earlier this week after Ohio voters decisively rejected a ballot measure 57%-43%, which was intended to block abortion protections from being...

www.dailykos.com

 

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"Why hasn’t DOJ appointed a special counsel for the Hunter Biden investigation?" GOPers questioned in February​

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Friday that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, has been named as the special counsel in the Justice Department's investigation into Hunter Biden, the Associated Press reports. The move follows the collapse of Biden's plea deal as prosecutors are now saying that the case will likely head to trial, according to a Friday court filing.

Despite advocating for the appointment of a special counsel in the investigation and acknowledging Weiss' request to ascend to the role earlier this year, House Republicans are now turning their backs on the federal prosecutor. A spokesperson for House Judiciary Committee Chairman, Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News Friday that not only do they not believe Weiss is the right person to handle the job, they don't "believe he can be trusted."

In a lengthy statement, House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., dismissed Garland's appointment of Weiss as "part of the Justice Department's efforts to attempt a Biden family coverup in light of the House Oversight Committee's mounting evidence of President Joe Biden's role in his family's schemes selling 'the brand' for millions of dollars to foreign nationals." He went on to accuse the Justice Department of misconduct in the investigation into Biden by refusing to pursue certain evidence, "tipping off" Biden's lawyers and attempting to strike the "sweetheart" plea deal. "The Biden Justice Department is trying to stonewall congressional oversight as we have presented evidence to the American people about the Biden family's corruption," he added before vowing to continue his probe into the Biden family.

GOP cries "cover-up" as Garland appoints Hunter Biden special counsel

"Why hasn’t DOJ appointed a special counsel for the Hunter Biden investigation?" GOPers questioned in February.

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