The Sewer That Is The GOP: With All The White Supremacists, Conspiracy Nutters, And Other Malicious Whacko Subgroups, How Does It Get Fixed?

[China]

Opinion - Why Trump Is Still Their Guy

 

His exile in Mar-a-Lago notwithstanding, Donald Trump’s authority over the Republican Party remains vast. You can see it in Republican reluctance to back a bipartisan inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in the widespread denunciation of party members who refused to overturn election results and who voted for Trump’s second impeachment, and in poll data showing continuing repudiation among loyal Republicans of the 2020 election results.

 

Trump’s centrality guarantees that large numbers of resentful, truth-denying, conspiracy-minded, anti-democratic, overwhelmingly white voters will continue to find aid and comfort in the Republican Party.

 

Ed Rogers, a top political aide in the Reagan White House who describes himself as “a committed Republican,” responded by email to my query about the degree of Trump’s command: “Trump is the most powerful person in the Republican Party — his endorsement can make the difference in a lot of primaries and sometimes in a general election.”

 

Trump, Rogers continued, “would win the Republican nomination for president if the race were today. He looks unstoppable in the G.O.P. I don’t know who could challenge him.” Anyone opposing Trump for the nomination “would be mocked, mimicked and generally harassed for months. Who needs that?”

 

Rogers captured his party’s current predicament: “For the G.O.P., Trump is like a fire, too close and you get burned, too far away and you are out in the cold.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Chris Christie is reportedly 'seriously considering' a 2024 presidential run

 

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) may be set to throw his hat in the 2024 ring — even if former President Donald Trump does, too.

 

Christie is "seriously considering" running for president in 2024, Axios reported on Wednesday, citing three people familiar with his thinking. The former New Jersey governor previously ran for president during the 2016 Republican primaries, but he ended his bid in February 2016 and backed Trump.

 

The former governor, according to the report, has been talking up his 2024 potential to friends, telling them he would be the only person in the Republican field with both executive experience and who has previously run for president — in what Axios describes as a "clear shot" at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who's also seen as a serious 2024 contender.

 

A source also told Axios that Christie "could run on a reputation for toughness that appeals to Trump's base minus the former president's recklessness."

 

Among the other Republicans who may enter the 2024 primaries include former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Of course, there's also the question of whether Trump himself will run again, a possibility the former president says he is "beyond considering."

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Captain Wiggles]

Run Chris Run!

 

[Ball Security]

22 minutes ago, China said:

Chris Christie is reportedly 'seriously considering' a 2024 presidential run

 

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) may be set to throw his hat in the 2024 ring — even if former President Donald Trump does, too.

 

Christie is "seriously considering" running for president in 2024, Axios reported on Wednesday, citing three people familiar with his thinking. The former New Jersey governor previously ran for president during the 2016 Republican primaries, but he ended his bid in February 2016 and backed Trump.

 

The former governor, according to the report, has been talking up his 2024 potential to friends, telling them he would be the only person in the Republican field with both executive experience and who has previously run for president — in what Axios describes as a "clear shot" at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who's also seen as a serious 2024 contender.

 

A source also told Axios that Christie "could run on a reputation for toughness that appeals to Trump's base minus the former president's recklessness."

 

Among the other Republicans who may enter the 2024 primaries include former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Of course, there's also the question of whether Trump himself will run again, a possibility the former president says he is "beyond considering."

 

Click on the link for the full article

Chris, you will be served the meatloaf.  And you will like it.

[TheDoyler23]

I will never laugh at the prospect of a Republican winning a nom or the presidency ever again.  No sir. 
 

I remember having a good old larf at Trump tearing down credible, ambitious prospectives in the 2015 debates and thinking, “this will never happen. He’s a clown. A completely broke, joke of a human. This will be a quick sideshow.” 
 

 

[Dan T.]

46 minutes ago, TheDoyler23 said:

I will never laugh at the prospect of a Republican winning a nom or the presidency ever again.  No sir. 
 

I remember having a good old larf at Trump tearing down credible, ambitious prospectives in the 2015 debates and thinking, “this will never happen. He’s a clown. A completely broke, joke of a human. This will be a quick sideshow.” 

Yep. And the circus sideshow turned into a 5 year slow-motion nightmare.

[Califan007 The Constipated]

In case it wasn't posted yet...

 

*There's a one-word mild profanity in the tweet so hiding it, but abso-****ing-lutely worth the watch.

 

Spoiler

 

 

Edited April 22, 2021 by Califan007

[Llevron]

I like everything he said and the way he said it but ultimately it’s pointless. They are wayyy to far gone to hear anything he is saying. There are no words that will bring these people back. It will take decades, not minutes. 
 

We were born in the wrong timeline. 

[Long n Left]

18 minutes ago, Llevron said:

I like everything he said and the way he said it but ultimately it’s pointless. They are wayyy to far gone to hear anything he is saying. There are no words that will bring these people back. It will take decades, not minutes. 
 

We were born in the wrong timeline. 

Unfortunately, I agree with you. It’s why I’ve taught my daughters that hate and fear are not an ideological platform, but love, unity, and diversity are.

[LD0506]

32 minutes ago, Llevron said:

I like everything he said and the way he said it but ultimately it’s pointless. They are wayyy to far gone to hear anything he is saying. There are no words that will bring these people back. It will take decades, not minutes. 
 

We were born in the wrong timeline. 

 

And yet we persisted

 

The same way I have said there is no winning move/endgame option for them, there is no give up and walk away option for us. Sucks, doesn't it?

 

In spite of all the programming and delusion and fear and insecurity, they are here, they are part of the country, they are part of us. E pluribus unum, for better or worse.

 

IMO there is one central significant fact/attribute in play here. We, the all of we, the young and old and black and white and gay and immigrant and all the other threads that weave together to make the we ARE a we, a composite and consensus and cooperative enterprise that allows and enables us to accomplish..........anything. Anything we imagine or envision, but also anything we fear or loathe. We have to choose, we have to communicate and cooperate together, not in spite of those fears but because of them, because we know the only way to truly overcome them is together, to share them and be assuaged by the empathy and compassion of others. Together.

 

Our enemies are not other people, they are ignorance and greed and fear and the lonely isolation that lies at the heart of being a sentient being adrift in our own heads. Our enemies have infected those other people, turned them against themselves, their friends and families and neighbors, a contagion that tries to spread but serves no other imperative. There is a very real parallel between breaking transmission of COVID and breaking transmission of political insanity. It all begins with tending to your own hygiene, mental or physical.

 

Despair is the killer of heart, the killer of soul and ultimately the killer of the future. You only resist it together.

[China]

As economy spikes, Republicans are still waiting for the ‘Biden depression’ that Trump predicted

 

Throughout last year’s campaign, President Donald Trump issued a series of increasingly dark predictions about what would happen if Joe Biden were elected.

 

“If he gets in, you will have a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen. Your 401(k)s will go to hell and it’ll be a very, very sad day for this country,” Trump said in the Oct. 22 candidate debate.

 

Instead, the rebounding economy is headed for its best year since 1984, according to the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. economy likely expanded in the first quarter at an annual rate of 6 percent and should accelerate in the months ahead, economist Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics told clients this week. More than 1.3 million jobs have been added since the election.

 

By Trump’s preferred metric — the stock market — Biden is outperforming his predecessor at this stage of his presidency. Last summer, the Republican said stock values would “collapse” under Biden. But through Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average was up nearly 16 percent since Nov. 7, when the Democrat was declared the apparent election winner, compared with a 10.5 percent gain over a similar period following Trump’s election.

 

“There wasn’t much behind President Trump’s predictions other than aspirations that he’d be reelected,” said economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute.

 

Trump’s wild campaign claims of an imminent depression have complicated Republican efforts to develop an economic message that can dent Biden’s popular support. In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox on Monday, Trump repeated his familiar boast of having built “the strongest economy in the history of the world” before the pandemic, while leveling only scattered charges against Biden.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Califan007 The Constipated]

“There wasn’t much behind President Trump’s predictions other than aspirations that he’d be reelected.”

 

That's always been so blatantly obvious that I feel embarrassed for those who repeated his proclamations as fact. And there are a LOT of them on Twitter.

[China]

Trump's vendetta against U.S. intelligence agencies carried on by House Republicans

 

Donald Trump may be gone from Washington, but House Republicans — who hope to retake control of the lower chamber in next year's elections — continue to nurse his longstanding grievances against the American intelligence community.

 

At last week's House hearing on the top threats to national security, Republican after Republican grilled intelligence agency leaders not about Russia, China or North Korea — but about a series of niche issues with which only ardent consumers of right-wing news sources would be conversant. The lawmakers made it clear that they had little trust in America's security agencies.

 

"I'm telling you, if an FBI agent came up and asked to talk to me, there's no way in the world I would talk to them without a lawyer present. I don't care what they wanted to know," Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah told FBI Director Christopher Wray, a lifelong Republican appointed by Trump.

 

For most of the post-World War II era, Republicans embraced the national security state and particularly the FBI, a law enforcement agency whose members, by their own accounts, have tended to lean right in their politics.

 

The Trump presidency changed that. Under FBI investigation for much of his presidency, Trump referred to FBI agents as "scum" who "destroyed the lives of people" and branded as "rats" people who cooperated with law enforcement. His Republican allies followed his lead.

 

Now, even with Trump gone, his skepticism of intelligence agencies, including the FBI, which collects intelligence on domestic terrorism threats, appears to be holding on in Republican circles.

 

They express views widely held by the party's base. In a December Ipsos poll, 39 percent of respondents agreed that a "deep state" was working to undermine Trump. Majorities of both Republicans and Fox News viewers responding to the poll agreed with that assessment, as did nearly half of white men and rural residents, both strong GOP demographics.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Larry]

1 hour ago, China said:

"I'm telling you, if an FBI agent came up and asked to talk to me, there's no way in the world I would talk to them without a lawyer present. I don't care what they wanted to know," Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah told FBI Director Christopher Wray, a lifelong Republican appointed by Trump.

 

*nods* Probably a wise idea.  

 

[China]

Opinion - The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse

 

Those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.

 

It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.

 

What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swaths of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

 

The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

 

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

 

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

 

This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.

 

“The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”

 

With this view, the Jan. 6 insurrection was not a shocking descent into lawlessness but practice for the war ahead.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Jabbyrwock]

33 minutes ago, China said:

“The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”

 

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."-Nietzsche

[LD0506]

[Cooked Crack]

 

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[Captain Wiggles]

Traditional values from the former Speaker of the House who cheated on his wife and then married his mistress. 🤣

 

Traditional Americans = White straight Xtians in Newts mind. ****ing Fascists. 

[skinsmarydu]

On all that is holy...unless you're trampling my yard, I couldn't give a **** what you do. 

Be you.  I'll be me, which is probably supporting whatever it is you do. 

 

Just don't trample the yard.  It's in bad enough shape, and I gotta sell this place at some point.

 

 

Edited April 25, 2021 by skinsmarydu

[China]

 

Alaska Airlines bans Eagle River lawmaker for violating COVID-19 mask policy

 

Alaska Airlines said Saturday that it has banned state Sen. Lora Reinbold, R-Eagle River, from its flights for continuing to refuse to follow mask-wearing requirements for travelers.

 

No other airline has scheduled flights between Anchorage and Juneau, and Reinbold is now in Southcentral Alaska. A trip by sea and land could take several days: Juneau has no overland road access, and some kind of ferry trip would be required.

 

“We have notified Senator Lora Reinbold that she is not permitted to fly with us for her continued refusal to comply with employee instruction regarding the current mask policy,” spokesman Tim Thompson said by email.

 

“This suspension is effective immediately, pending further review. Federal law requires all guests to wear a mask over their nose and mouth at all times during travel, including throughout the flight, during boarding and deplaning, and while traveling through an airport,” he said.

 

He said the length of the ban will be determined by the review. Alaska Airlines has banned 506 people as of Friday.

 

Reinbold said Saturday afternoon that she had not been notified of a ban. Thompson said he will not be able to provide a copy of the notice, “but the notice was received.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

 

[Califan007 The Constipated]

8 minutes ago, China said:

 

Alaska Airlines bans Eagle River lawmaker for violating COVID-19 mask policy

 

Alaska Airlines said Saturday that it has banned state Sen. Lora Reinbold, R-Eagle River, from its flights for continuing to refuse to follow mask-wearing requirements for travelers.

 

No other airline has scheduled flights between Anchorage and Juneau, and Reinbold is now in Southcentral Alaska. A trip by sea and land could take several days: Juneau has no overland road access, and some kind of ferry trip would be required.

 

 

I'm now imagining Sen. Reinbold in a "Planes, Trains and Automobiles"-type of scenario lol...

[Cooked Crack]