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US Politics: Catch the big crook under the “Big Cone”


Ser Scot A Ellison

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Abortion on the ballot in Wisconsen:

 

Abortion rights at stake in Wisconsin Supreme Court election (msn.com)

(Reuters) - Wisconsin voters on Tuesday will decide which state Supreme Court candidates will advance to an April election that carries profound consequences for abortion rights, control of the state government and the 2024 presidential election.

Four candidates – two liberals and two conservatives – are on the ballot, with the top two finishers moving on to a one-on-one matchup in April that will determine whether a right-wing or left-wing majority controls the state's seven-member high court.

 

The newly constituted court will likely decide whether to uphold the state's 1849 near-total abortion ban that took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision last June to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating a national right to abortion.

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On 2/16/2023 at 8:26 PM, Tywin et al. said:

You can't explain why the party of Jesus hates the teachings of Jesus. It just is what it is at this point for most of them. 

I think it's been quite a long time since the GOP was the party of Jesus; hell, the 2016 election demonstrates that the influence of the God Squad over the party was greatly exaggerated.

Back in the 80s and 90s, sure, Republicans wrapped themselves in faith, but these days they don't even pretend at piety. They admit they are a bunch of swaggering, immature, destructive, selfish assholes, and don't you wish you could get away with it like they do? 

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On 2/20/2023 at 8:17 PM, Week said:

New banger dropped.

Sounds like someone is obsessed with Putin's missile.   

It's a classic Trumpian stream-of-consciousness that reveals his obsession with money and willingness to stir the pot to get attention. 

So far, in the race for the R nomination you have own pro-Russia candidate (Trump), one coward (DeSantis), and one (doomed) candidate willing to call out Russian aggression (Haley).  

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I'm not the only one. Everyone knows what TG means by 'national divorce' is civil war.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greenes-national-divorce-was-the-civil-war.html

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.... Now, it’s easy to just dismiss these tweets and associated outbursts as the ravings of a marginal MAGA extremist who wouldn’t be in Congress without family money that enabled a carpetbagger move to a deep-red district that suddenly had an open House seat in 2020. But as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out, she isn’t so marginal in the skewed universe of the House Republican Conference these days. “Greene is in a very different position than she was when she made this claim in years past,” Bump writes. “Now, she’s part of the House majority and someone with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) ear. She is part of the Homeland Security Committee’s majority — as she advocates for the homeland splitting apart.”

She is being discussed by serious people as a potential 2024 running mate for her idol Donald Trump. So Greene is not just a provocateur whose function is to frighten liberals on Twitter. Indeed, it’s the combination of her wild ideology with growing respectability that makes her noteworthy, along with the alarm she has generated among fellow Republicans who clearly think she’s a signs of worse things to come (such as Utah governor Spencer Cox, who called her “national divorce” talk “destructive and wrong and — honestly — evil”).

The funniest thing about Green’s call for a red-state-blue-state divorce is that she lives in a state that voted Democratic in 2020 and is represented in the Senate by two Democrats. Is she willing to pull up stakes again and parachute into a more solidly Republican state to defend her allegedly threatened liberties or vindicate her hatred of LGBTQ folk and Ukrainians? Will she lead a red-state army into her old district on a 21st-century March to the Sea?

The only even vaguely plausible route to a peaceful dissolution of the union would be a constitutional convention that would require radically changing or even abolishing the Constitution with the assent of three-fourths of the states. The obvious path to a “national divorce” is precisely the one slaveholding states chose in 1861: a threat of rebellion forcing a choice of disunion or war. It did not work out well for the ideological forebears of today’s red-state conservative extremists and wouldn’t fare much better today. Unfortunately, the original secessionists began to believe their own delusions about a natural “right” to maintain a slave-based oligarchy; they also foolishly thought those in the residual Union cared so little about the subjugated people of the would-be Confederate States of America that they’d give up without a fight. Neo-secessionists could create the same toxic atmosphere, while further polarizing the country. ....

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

About frackin' time this is said in bold, up front, and publicly.

‘The Democratic Party in New York Is a Disaster’
After losing crucial seats in the congressional midterms, a bitter civil war over the moribund state organization has spilled into the open.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/magazine/new-york-democrats.html

Quote

....These disappointments have cast into sharp relief both the divisions within the party and the peculiar void of the state’s Democratic organization itself. Few New Yorkers cared, until late 2022, that the statewide Democratic apparatus operated, for the most part, as a hollowed-out appendage of the governor, a second campaign account that did little, if any, work in terms of messaging and turnout. New Hampshire, a state with roughly half the population of Queens, has a Democratic Party with 16 full-time paid staff members. New York’s has four, according to the state chairman, Jay Jacobs. One helps maintain social media accounts that update only sparingly. Most state committee members have no idea where the party keeps its headquarters, or if it even has one. (It does, at 50 Broadway in Manhattan.) ....


 

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4 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

I think it's been quite a long time since the GOP was the party of Jesus; hell, the 2016 election demonstrates that the influence of the God Squad over the party was greatly exaggerated.

Back in the 80s and 90s, sure, Republicans wrapped themselves in faith, but these days they don't even pretend at piety. They admit they are a bunch of swaggering, immature, destructive, selfish assholes, and don't you wish you could get away with it like they do? 

What makes you say that? The right is currently as aggressive as ever in trying to shove Christianity down the nation’s throat. It’s a bizarro version of it that preaches largely the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus, but it’s still their main cultural identification point.

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2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

What makes you say that? The right is currently as aggressive as ever in trying to shove Christianity down the nation’s throat. It’s a bizarro version of it that preaches largely the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus, but it’s still their main cultural identification point.

The election of Donald Trump, for one. This was a guy who was widely disliked by the God Squad...until he became the nominee. Then they all lined up to support him. Same in 2020, when Trump was running against a guy WAY more religious than The Donald ever claimed to be.

I certainly agree that these people strongly identify as Christians, but, when the rubber meets the road, they'll vote for even the most impious Republican one can imagine. 

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10 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

The election of Donald Trump, for one. This was a guy who was widely disliked by the God Squad...until he became the nominee. Then they all lined up to support him. Same in 2020, when Trump was running against a guy WAY more religious than The Donald ever claimed to be.

I certainly agree that these people strongly identify as Christians, but, when the rubber meets the road, they'll vote for even the most impious Republican one can imagine. 

They don't particularly care about the candidate's beliefs. They care about the candidate's actions. And Trump very early made sure that he would cater to the evangelical desires, specifically around anti-choice candidates for SCOTUS. About the only thing that he did that made them mad was reduce refugee help, but everything else he did was by far the strongest POTUS actions in US history for their political goals. 

So they might be voting for someone who isn't particularly pious in their personal life, but they voted for someone who pledged - and delivered - massive political wins for them. Their support is hardly surprising or special in that way. 

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15 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

The election of Donald Trump, for one. This was a guy who was widely disliked by the God Squad...until he became the nominee. Then they all lined up to support him. Same in 2020, when Trump was running against a guy WAY more religious than The Donald ever claimed to be.

No, that's not so. Trump claimed to be very religious, much more so than Biden. He was waving that family Bible around like nobody's business. It was a hollow pantomime of religious faith, to be sure. But he had to at least claim to be religious to win over the evangelicals. So does DeSantis. Claiming it is enough, nobody looks too closely, but speaking from a country where politicians very much avoid these types of demonstrations of faith, it's hard to make sense of the idea that the GOP are not the 'party of Jesus' when professions of loyalty to Jesus are de rigeur.

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5 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

So they might be voting for someone who isn't particularly pious in their personal life, but they voted for someone who pledged - and delivered - massive political wins for them. Their support is hardly surprising or special in that way. 

Many held their noses for the reasons you said, but a shocking amount of Trump supports believe he really is a man of great faith. Shit, some people called him a modern Jesus. The level of delusions in this group of people is truly staggering. 

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4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Many held their noses for the reasons you said, but a shocking amount of Trump supports believe he really is a man of great faith. Shit, some people called him a modern Jesus. The level of delusions in this group of people is truly staggering. 

Sure! But that's the minority. Most of the evangelicals who support him heavily are much happier to do so transactionally. The ones who bring up things like that are trying to justify their own emotional reaction to Trump; it has no rational connection to anything. It's hypocritical, but as always liberals get way too involved in thinking that being a hypocrite is the worst possible thing that people could be.

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1 minute ago, mormont said:

No, that's not so. Trump claimed to be very religious, much more so than Biden. He was waving that family Bible around like nobody's business. It was a hollow pantomime of religious faith, to be sure. But he had to at least claim to be religious to win over the evangelicals. So does DeSantis. Claiming it is enough, nobody looks too closely, but speaking from a country where politicians very much avoid these types of demonstrations of faith, it's hard to make sense of the idea that the GOP are not the 'party of Jesus' when professions of loyalty to Jesus are de rigeur.

If a claim is patently ridiculous, I don't consider it a very good claim. (I seem to recall Trump couldn't even specify what part of the Bible he liked best; "All of it" was his response. Good grief.) And although I have no doubt that conservative Christians (CCs) are sincere in their faith, I don't think I am going too far out on a limb to suggest that their support for a sleaze-talking divorcee ("Grab 'em by the pussy") with more mistresses than socks demonstrates that a candidate's adherence to Christianity isn't all that important to them. 

Admittedly, CCs were voting for the guy they believed (correctly) would nominate judges who would strike down Roe, but the same could be said of secular pro-lifers. This, in my view, strongly suggests that CCs valued specific positions on certain issues over any religiosity. 

Yes, I know one can argue that CCs really believed Trump's nonsense despite the fact that it was patently nonsense, but I don't find that argument persuasive. I think it's more likely they just didn't (and still don't) care all that much about which candidate is in church on Sunday, as long as that candidate is in office when it's time to pack the Supreme Court.

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TN - the disagreement here is on what the 'party of Jesus' actually means, I think. The way you're using that phrase is not how I would understand it or have heard it used. It's always indicated to me a performative version of Christianity, where ambitious Republicans pretend to be devout and devout Christians pretend to believe them, for the purposes of maintaining a political alliance.

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Just now, mormont said:

TN - the disagreement here is on what the 'party of Jesus' actually means, I think. The way you're using that phrase is not how I would understand it or have heard it used. It's always indicated to me a performative version of Christianity, where ambitious Republicans pretend to be devout and devout Christians pretend to believe them, for the purposes of maintaining a political alliance.

I agree that the arrangement involves a good deal of pretending, yes. I guess my view is...well, here's an example.

Let's say President Tracker says, "I believe that every American should have a Netflix account." However, when pressed, I won't help Americans pay the monthly fees, nor will I pressure Netflix into lowering those fees, and I won't even ensure every American even has Internet access. Given this, it would be reasonable for an observer to conclude that, however much I might talk about universal Netflix, I don't really mean it. Morever, it would also be reasonable for that observer to conclude that those voters who say their support for me is based on my Netflix policy are not being honest, no matter what they say.

Maybe this is all just a matter of who is pretending what, I don't know. However, I judge people not by their words but by their actions. Conservative Christians will cheerfully and full-throatedly support all manner of rogues and rascals, and thus I judge their religious beliefs not all that important to them, at least not when it comes to voting.

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2 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Sure! But that's the minority. Most of the evangelicals who support him heavily are much happier to do so transactionally. The ones who bring up things like that are trying to justify their own emotional reaction to Trump; it has no rational connection to anything. It's hypocritical, but as always liberals get way too involved in thinking that being a hypocrite is the worst possible thing that people could be.

That's certainly how it started, but over time I think for many it has morphed into true belief. Piggy backing off of Mormont, it was at one point a pretend game, however now Trump has become conservative evangelicals' real daddy. 

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18 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

That's certainly how it started, but over time I think for many it has morphed into true belief. Piggy backing off of Mormont, it was at one point a pretend game, however now Trump has become conservative evangelicals' real daddy. 

Let's say we view the relationship between Trump and evangelicals in purely transactional terms. 

You can see why they would come home to Trump after he became the nominee in 2016, as Hillary would not deliver any of the things they wanted on judges/abortions/faith rights etc.  You can see why they supported him in 2020 because "but Gorsuch".  The fact that they didn't coalesce around a single candidate in opposition to Trump in 2016 is telling, but political christianity as it exists in the US has very little in common with the Sermon on the Mount. 

We shouldn't ignore that in a very real sense, Trump is America's first post-Christian president, i.e., the first president who did not subscribe (at least publicly) to the major tenets of the Christian faith such "love thy neighbor".  

But for 2024, there's no open SC seat, and more significantly, Trump believes (probably correctly), that a national abortion ban is a political loser.  Pence is for a national abortion ban.  Ron DeSantis will probably be support a 15 week national ban as well (federalism principles being conveniently forgotten for both).  So we will be able to test the proposition that evangelicals are more personally loyal to Trump than their principles let alone christian values. 

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18 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

That's certainly how it started, but over time I think for many it has morphed into true belief. Piggy backing off of Mormont, it was at one point a pretend game, however now Trump has become conservative evangelicals' real daddy. 

To be clear I'm not saying that these started out as false beliefs. I'm saying that it's belief borne in how they personally feel about the person. If they like him - or love him - that much, the only thing that they can have in their world that gets that kind of feeling is a religious figure. 

I'd also caution about lumping all evangelicals in that bucket. It's certainly the case that some feel that way, but most probably do not. It still remains that Trump is by a large margin the best POTUS that evangelicals have ever had so they will have very high loyalty regardless of their viewpoint on how holy Trump actually is.

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They are vigorously planning, strategizing and implementing removing all discourse from public life -- not only from education, but the military and every institution -- that applies to anyone not white, cis and male, even men who are white, cis and male who do parenting with their infants and little children -- except, presumably, arming the toddler with an AK-47 and teaching HIM to shoot his sisters and classmates.

Charles Blow has provided a rundown of what They have attempted and succeeded at, and where, so far.

America, Right-Wing Censors and the ‘Battle for the Next Century’

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/opinion/america-right-wing-censors.html

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... “They started with C.R.T. They moved to ‘Don’t Say Gay.’ Now they’re moving to all of Black studies. It’s not going to be long before they include all ethnic studies. We’ve already seen they’re attacking diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education. And the real thing, Charles, is going to be when they come for diversity, equity and inclusion in corporations.”

This is the New Right’s strategic plan: a relentless push to re-establish and strengthen the straight, cis, patriarchal, white supremacist power structure. And, Crenshaw said, “this thing will not be satisfied by one victory. This is just one skirmish, in a wider, broader battle to make racism unspeakable and basically to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”

In fact, every perceived win will only embolden the extremists. The objective is to win the war against progress and to freeze America in a yesteryear image of itself. This is a swing-for-the-fences play. They are seeking to widen the conservative aperture in their quest to suppress and reverse, to promote a universal vision on oppression, to apply uniform pressure.

As Crenshaw put it, “I believe that this is the battle for the next century.”

 

 

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4 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Let's say we view the relationship between Trump and evangelicals in purely transactional terms. 

You can see why they would come home to Trump after he became the nominee in 2016, as Hillary would not deliver any of the things they wanted on judges/abortions/faith rights etc.  You can see why they supported him in 2020 because "but Gorsuch".  The fact that they didn't coalesce around a single candidate in opposition to Trump in 2016 is telling, but political christianity as it exists in the US has very little in common with the Sermon on the Mount. 

We shouldn't ignore that in a very real sense, Trump is America's first post-Christian president, i.e., the first president who did not subscribe (at least publicly) to the major tenets of the Christian faith such "love thy neighbor".  

But for 2024, there's no open SC seat, and more significantly, Trump believes (probably correctly), that a national abortion ban is a political loser.  Pence is for a national abortion ban.  Ron DeSantis will probably be support a 15 week national ban as well (federalism principles being conveniently forgotten for both).  So we will be able to test the proposition that evangelicals are more personally loyal to Trump than their principles let alone christian values. 

This ignores Trump was strong with the Christian evangelicals from early in the primary. They didn't coalesce around him after he won the primary, they helped drive him to be the nominee. 

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