Confirming My Bias

... but if my bias is the good kind of bias - eg: a preference for hard facts over conspiracy fantasies - then I should be looking for (and favoring) information that confirms it.

That doesn't mean I look at only the points of view that jive with my own. It just means I try to test the information for reasonableness and, if need be, adjust my world view accordingly.

Cynical manipulators (mostly Republicans these days) are convinced they can throw dust and glitter in the air, and while we're all busy fighting about whether it's red glitter or blue dust or some such bullshit, they have a free hand to go on picking our pockets.

But what if the rubes start to get hip to the tricks?

Are G.O.P. Voters Tiring of the War on ‘Wokeness’?

New polling shows national Republicans and Iowa Republican caucus-goers were more interested in “law and order” than battling “woke” schools, media and corporations.

When it comes to the Republican primaries, attacks on “wokeness” may be losing their punch.

For Republican candidates, no word has hijacked political discourse quite like “woke,” a term few can define but many have used to capture what they see as left-wing views on race, gender and sexuality that have strayed far beyond the norms of American society.

Gov. Ron DeSantis last year used the word five times in 19 seconds, substituting “woke” for Nazis as he cribbed from Winston Churchill’s famous vow to battle a threatened German invasion in 1940. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, speaks of a “woke self-loathing” that has swept the nation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina found himself backpedaling furiously after declaring that “‘woke supremacy’ is as bad as white supremacy.”

The term has become quick a way for candidates to flash their conservative credentials, but battling “woke” may have less political potency than they think. Though conservative voters might be irked at modern liberalism, successive New York Times/Siena College polls of Republican voters nationally and then in Iowa found that candidates were unlikely to win votes by narrowly focusing on rooting out left-wing ideology in schools, media, culture and business.

Instead, Republican voters are showing a “hand’s off” libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about “law and order” in the nation’s cities and at its borders.

The findings hint why Mr. DeSantis, who has made his battles with “woke” schools and corporations central to his campaign, is struggling and again show off Mr. Trump’s keen understanding of part of the Republican electorate. Campaigning in Iowa in June, Mr. Trump was blunt: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” he said, adding, “It’s just a term they use — half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”

It was clearly a jab at Mr. DeSantis, but the Times’s polls suggest Mr. Trump may be right. Social issues like gay rights and once-obscure jargon like “woke” may not be having the effect many Republicans had hoped

“Your idea of ‘wokeism’ might be different from mine,” explained Christopher Boyer, a 63-year-old Republican actor in Hagerstown, Md., who retired from a successful career in Hollywood where he said he saw his share of political correctness and liberal group think. Mr. Boyer said he didn’t like holding his tongue about his views on transgender athletes, but, he added, he does not want politicians to intervene. “I am a laissez-faire capitalist: Let the pocketbook decide,” he said.

When presented with the choice between two hypothetical Republican candidates, only 24 percent of national Republican voters opted for a “a candidate who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media and culture” over “a candidate who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.”

Around 65 percent said they would choose the law and order candidate.

Among those 65 and older, often the most likely age bracket to vote, only 17 percent signed on to the “anti-woke” crusade. Those numbers were nearly identical in Iowa, where the first ballots for the Republican nominee will be cast on Jan. 15.

Mr. DeSantis’s famous fight against the Walt Disney Company over what he saw as the corporation’s liberal agenda exemplified the kind of economic warfare that seems to fare only modestly better. About 38 percent of Republican voters said they would back a candidate who promised to fight corporations that promote “woke” left ideology, versus the 52 percent who preferred “a candidate who says that the government should stay out of deciding what corporations should support.”

Christy Boyd, 55, in Ligonier, Pa., made it clear she was no fan of the culture of tolerance that she said pervaded her region around Pittsburgh. As the perfect distillation of “woke” ideology, she mentioned “time blindness,” a phrase she views as simply an excuse for perpetual tardiness.

But such aggravations do not drive her political desires.

“If you don’t like what Bud Light did, don’t buy it,” she added, referring to the brand’s hiring of a transgender influencer, which contributed to a sharp drop in sales. “If you don’t like what Disney is doing, don’t go. That’s not the government’s responsibility.”

Indeed, some Republican voters seemed to feel pandered to by candidates like Mr. DeSantis and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, whose book “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” launched his political career.

Lynda Croft, 82, said she was watching a rise in murders in her hometown Winston-Salem, N.C., and that has her scared. Overly liberal policies in culture and schools will course-correct on their own, she said.

“If anyone actually believes in woke ideology, they are not in tune with the rest of society,” she said, “and parents will step in to deal with that.”

In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said the evolving views of the electorate were important, and he had adapted to them. “Woke” corporate governance and school systems are a symptom of what he calls “a deeper void” in a society that needs a religious and nationalist renewal. The stickers that read “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek” are gone from his campaign stops, he said, replaced by hats that read “Truth.”

“At the time I came to be focused on this issue, no one knew what the word was,” he said. “Now that they have caught up, the puck has moved. It’s in my rearview mirror as well.”

Law and order and border security have become stand-ins for “fortitude,” he said, and that is clearly what Republican voters are craving.

(The day after the interview, the Ramaswamy campaign blasted out a fund-raising appeal entitled “Wokeness killing the American Dream.”)

DeSantis campaign officials emphasized that the governor in recent days had laid out policies on border security, the military and the economy. Foreign policy is coming, they say. But they also pointed to an interview on Fox News in which Mr. DeSantis did not back away from his social-policy focus.

Along with several other Republican-led states, Florida passed a string of laws restricting what G.O.P. lawmakers considered evidence of “wokeness,” such as gender transition care for minors and diversity initiatives. Mr. DeSantis handily won re-election in November.

“I totally reject, being in Iowa, New Hampshire, that people don’t think those are important,” he said of his social policy fights. “These families with children are thanking me for taking stands in Florida.”

For candidates trying to break Mr. Trump’s hold on a Republican electorate that sees the former president as the embodiment of strength, the problem may be broader than ditching the term “woke.”

As it turns out, social issues like gender, race and sexuality are politically complicated and may be less dominant than Mr. Trump’s rivals thought. The fact that Mr. Trump has been indicted three times and found legally liable for sexual abuse has not hurt him. Only 37 percent of Republican voters nationally described Mr. Trump as more moral than Mr. DeSantis (45 percent sided with Mr. DeSantis on the personality trait), yet in a head-to-head matchup between the two candidates, national Republican voters backed Mr. Trump by 31 percentage points, 62 percent to 31 percent.

The Times/Siena poll did find real reluctance among Republican voters to accept transgender people. Only 30 percent said society should accept transgender people as the gender they identify with, compared with 58 percent who said society should not accept such identities.

Insisting on a collective societal right to determine your identity - sexual or any other - is absolutely in conflict with conservatives' long-professed dedication to an individual's freedom to make their own decisions about such things.

Hypocrisy,

thy name is Republican

(not that it matters to them)

But half of Republican voters still support the right of gay and lesbian people to marry, against the 41 percent who oppose same-sex marriage. Fifty-one percent of Republican voters said they would choose a candidate promising to protect individual freedom over one guarding “traditional values.” The “traditional values” candidate would be the choice of 40 percent of Republicans.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, responded simply: “Americans want to return to a prosperous nation, and there’s only one person who can do that — President Trump.”

Mr. Boyer, who played Robert E. Lee in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” bristled at having to make a choice: “It’s hardly an either-or: Why wouldn’t I want someone to fight for law and order and against this corrupt infiltration in our school systems?” he asked.

But given a choice, he said, “the primary job of government is the protection of our country and there’s a tangible failure of that at our border.”

Maybe the rank-n-file GOP voters are beginning to see the culture war malarkey for what it is, but we need to remember that all that culture war malarkey grows directly out of the Law & Order malarkey they're trying to reassert. It's another kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, intended to disguise a predilection for Daddy State authoritarian rule.

One Plus One

I generally look for stories about two things that may seem disparate, but when taken together, could be interlocked, and cause something to happen that becomes obvious only in retrospect.

Or, in this case, two related things that seem to indicate the near-inevitability of an event, but could easily mean just the opposite - especially considering the upside-down-ed-ness of these Nazi MAGA Daddy State assholes.

(WaPo 1) Trump committee nearly broke and other key takeaways from campaign filings

Reports filed show that some of Trump’s fundraising committees are spending about as much as they are taking in amid legal expenses

- plus -

(WaPo 2) Opinion
Admit it, GOP. Trump’s legal woes make him an unviable candidate.

Normal people might think those two things have to mean Trump will keep sliding, and be out of the race pretty soon.

And we can hope for that to become more than a possibility. The Country Club Republicans can't be happy with the prospect of getting their asses kicked continually for the next several cycles as they refuse to stop playing their shitty little thread-the-needle game.

ie: "No, we love plutocracy - plutocracy is what we're all about. We simply haven't found the right Plutocrat-in-Chief yet. But don't let the rubes in on that, OK?"

The problem there is that the rubes hate the Country Clubbers so much, they've convinced themselves that Trump is actually on their side - like some weird fantasy version of the FDR-type traitor-to-his-class that they can call their own.

Knowing what we know about their tendency to embrace and internalize every shitty aspect anybody has ever ascribed to their character, we have to assume they'll do whatever it takes to be good little Cult45 devotees. 

Trump committee nearly broke and other key takeaways from campaign filings

Reports filed show that some of Trump’s fundraising committees are spending about as much as they are taking in amid legal expenses

Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee raised $53.9 million during the first half of this year for his presidential campaign — an enviable haul that speaks to the enthusiasm of his donors and dwarfs the sums raised by his GOP rivals.

But Trump’s political committees are burning through cash as he grapples with his mounting legal bills, according to campaign disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission Monday night. Here are a few takeaways from the new disclosures filed with the FEC:

Trump’s leadership PAC drains its cash

Trump remains in a commanding position, with a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday showing the former president leading the field with the backing of 54 percent of likely Republican voters. But reports filed on Monday show that some of his committees are spending about as much money as they are taking in. Though his joint fundraising committee raised $53.9 million over the first six months of the year, it spent more than $52 million over the same period, the reports show.

Trump’s Save America leadership PAC, which had more than $100 million at the beginning of last year, now has about $3.6 million in cash on hand after it became the vehicle used to pay millions of dollars in legal bills for the former president, his aides and his associates. As Trump fights federal and state investigations, his advisers have told The Washington Post that the PAC has been handling the legal bills for almost anyone drawn into the investigations if they ask Trump and his advisers for help.

Trump’s team is moving money to ease their financial strain

Trump’s legal entanglements are putting a considerable strain on his war chest, which has been bolstered by scores of small-dollar donors across the country — many of whom share his view that he is being unfairly persecuted by his political opponents. A portion of the money raised by the Trump campaign’s joint fundraising committee goes to the Save America leadership PAC. Earlier this year, Trump’s advisers upped the percentage of each contribution that is directed to the leadership PAC giving them more leverage to pay bills.

The reports filed on Monday night show Trump officials moving money among the different fundraising entities in his orbit to ease that financial strain. The Save America leadership PAC recently asked for a refund on a large contribution the group had previously made to another PAC supporting Trump. That development was first reported by the New York Times.

Monday night’s filings show that Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., reported that it had raised more than $13 million over the first six months of this year and had about $30 million in cash on hand at the end of the reporting period.

But the group issued a $12.2 million refund to the Save America leadership PAC, which was reflected on the mid-year report.

DeSantis super PAC leads outside groups in cash on hand

The super PACs supporting the 2024 GOP presidential candidates were required to file their mid-year reports to the FEC by midnight on Monday — offering a more in-depth look at the top financial backers of the White House hopefuls and a few hints about which groups may be well funded enough to help their candidates go the distance in the battle for the nomination.

The super PAC supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Never Back Down, boasted nearly $97 million in cash on hand at the end of June to support its expansive field and advertising program as DeSantis tries to reboot his struggling campaign. The outside group has taken on many of the duties that would normally be shouldered by the campaign. Much of the $130 million that the group raised from the beginning of the year came from an $82.5 million transfer from the governor’s former Florida political operation that allowed it to build a team of more than 121 people and a contract workforce of about 240 canvassers who work out of 11 offices across the country.

A super PAC supporting Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina reported raising $19.3 million with about $15 million in cash on hand.

The sums raised by the super PACs supporting lower-polling candidates like former vice president Mike Pence and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie were far lower, reflecting the difficulty they may face in the months ahead. The group backing Pence, Committed to America PAC, raised about $2.7 million and has about $1.8 million in cash on hand. The Tell It Like it Is super PAC supporting Christie raised more than $5.8 million and had about $5.5 million in cash on hand at the end of the period.

‘Strategy consulting’ fees for Melania Trump’s former stylist

Though Trump’s growing legal jeopardy has contributed to a strain on cash for the Save America PAC that has been handling many of his legal bills, that committee still found the funds to pay Melania Trump’s former stylist. The committee reported payments of $108,000 to designer Herve Pierre Braillard for “strategy consulting” during the first six months of this year.

Opinion
Admit it, GOP. Trump’s legal woes make him an unviable candidate.

The revelation that Donald Trump’s political action committee spent more than $40 million on legal fees in the first half of 2023 does more than cast doubt on the former president’s ability to run a competitive primary campaign. It provides yet another reason why Republican voters should reject his candidacy if he does not drop out first.

Running for president requires more than charisma and a few rallies. It requires time and money — and lots of it. Candidates must constantly be on the road stumping for votes. They also need support from the modern apparatus that places digital and television ads and identifies persuadable voters that can cast ballots for them.

This is especially true when running against an incumbent who can count on a united party for support. President Biden, along with the national Democratic Party and its state counterparts, will raise billions of dollars to crush whoever rises as his opponent. In 2020, Biden’s campaign and affiliated outside groups spent $1.6 billion while the Democratic National Committee and state and local parties spent another $1 billion. A cash-strapped candidate would not stand a chance against this onslaught.

Then there’s the time factor. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that prosecutors are filing bogus charges to wound Trump politically. He might be able to beat all of those raps, either at trial or on appeal. But he would still have to manage his defense in at least two, and perhaps as many as four, major criminal cases. He has prodigious energy, especially for a 77-year-old man. But even he can’t be in five places at the same time.

Trump can theoretically solve his cash problem. He is reportedly considering a legal defense fund that would finance his team of lawyers. If he can raise money for that without cannibalizing his campaign fundraising, he might still be able to raise enough to be competitive. But that’s a big if.

Nothing can solve his time problem. He will have to attend a series of pretrial hearings over the next few months, and that’s the least of his concerns. A criminal defendant has to manage his defense team on a regular basis as it searches for evidence to win an acquittal. Consider Edward Gurney, the Florida senator who resigned in 1974 rather than run for reelection while simultaneously fighting a single criminal indictment. It’s unreasonable to think Trump will risk his own conviction to campaign.

This will strike many, if not most, Republicans as unfair. Whatever one thinks of Trump, it is clear he has suffered more harassment and vitriol from political opponents than just about any recent major figure. Democrats and their allies have been relentlessly hounding him since he became the GOP nominee in 2016. He certainly exacerbated his situation with his often over-the-top, pugnacious ripostes, but he has had a political bull’s eye on his back for years.

But fair doesn’t count in politics. Facts do, and it is a fact that Trump is already hamstrung by his legal charges, which are only going to get worse.

Trump insists he won’t drop out, but that doesn’t mean he’s locked in. As the financial and legal pressure ratchets upward, even a man of his colossal ego and willpower might eventually decide to save his own skin rather than press his luck.

If he doesn’t, Republican primary voters will have to decide whether they want to risk nominating a man who can’t campaign for himself. Trump acolytes might point to Biden’s campaign in 2020, much of which was conducted from his basement, as proof that someone can win without actively hustling for votes (although that would force them to acknowledge that Biden did in fact win). But that was during the pandemic, when all candidates — including Trump — were limited by covid-19 restrictions.

Biden might be old, but he’s certainly capable of making a few campaign appearances each week. Imagine what independent voters will think when they see that alongside coverage of Trump sitting in a courtroom for days at a time.

MAGA die-hards should be rooting for Trump to drop out sooner rather than later. If so, establishment-leaning Republicans such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin might reconsider their decisions not to enter the race. If they do join the field, they would splinter the establishment even further, giving Trump the chance to endorse a clear MAGA alternative. That person would likely vault to the front of the pack overnight and inherit Trump’s base.

Trump’s famous catchphrase on his show “The Apprentice” was “You’re fired.” In politics, though, the voters are the boss. If Trump won’t quit on his own, Republican voters should show him the door.

⬆︎

Manufactured Crises

Too Fuckin' Typical

Republicans have finally gotten it through their thick skulls that the "entitlements" are sacred to us old folks - we turn out and stomp the fuck outa candidates who threaten our Social Security and Medicare.

But they're still hellbent on fucking us out of it. So don't fall for any of the spin words they're always floating.

• "Revamping"
• "Revisiting"
• "Ensuring The Solvency"
• blah blah blah.

That's all just the basic Frank Luntz focus group bullshit buzzword factory hard at work.

Privatization is the goal - because it's always the goal. They'll tear down our institutions, point innocently at the wreckage, and then puff out their chests like they're going to ride in and save us all from our foolishness, when the foolishness we should be concerned about is our gullibility - our willingness to go on swallowing all the shit they float down to us.

But before we let ourselves think maybe they've changed, and that they intend to back off their fuckery, here they come again. Only this time, they're trying to bribe Seniors into a false sense of security, &/or by playing on the hard-heartedness they've been cultivating in people for decades (I've got mine - it's all good - everybody else should work for theirs or just fuck off and die).

At the same time, it would seem they're counting on the apathy of younger voters who don't see themselves very clearly in the future (so they don't think much about that at all), and who may well believe pretty strongly that nothing good's going to happen anyway, so why bother?

Republicans may be be laboring under a pretty gross misperception though. People who'll be eligible to vote in November 2024, have been going to school with - and making friends with, and getting close with - lots of the people currently being abused, and 'othered', and straight-up shat-upon and bullied by a GOP that can't bring itself to be anything but a collection of rubes, meatheads, and misanthropes.

First, maybe this is finally the election cycle that youngsters get the message, get up off their asses, and go vote.

Second, probably more than half of those new(ish) voters are women, and something like 65% of those are still hoppin' mad about losing on Roe v Wade, which feeds a further outrage at the prospect of being forced backwards into a culture that assumes them to be subjects instead of citizens. 

So anyway...

Trump’s GOP rivals open door to cutting Social Security for younger people

Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley propose curbing spending on the program without affecting seniors

Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans, as the party’s leaders grapple with the explosive politics of the retirement program.

In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Social Security will need to be revamped — but not for people who are near or in retirement.

Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare — a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party’s views — and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program.

“When people say that we’re gonna somehow cut seniors, that is totally not true,” DeSantis said on Fox News. “Talking about making changes for people in their thirties and their forties so the program’s viable — that’s a much different thing, and something I think there’s going to need to be discussion on.”

On Monday, Pence told Fox Business: “I’m glad to see another candidate in this primary has been willing to step up and talk about that.”

The positions the three Trump rivals are taking suggest that even the fiscally conservative candidates in the GOP presidential primary are reluctant to endorse cutting Social Security for seniors, highlighting just how much the party has shifted on the issue. Former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), the party’s 2012 vice-presidential candidate, had led the party in championing budget blueprints that would have entailed significant cuts to both Social Security and Medicare.

As the Republican Party becomes increasingly reliant on older voters for support and as Trump continues to exert heavy influence over the party’s beliefs, GOP policymakers have followed the former president’s lead in steering clear of proposals to cut the program, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ruling that out in debt ceiling negotiations earlier this year with the White House.

But concentrating potential cuts on the young, as the Trump challengers have proposed, has its downsides as well. The candidates’ posture risks alienating young voters that have already become increasingly alienated from the Republican Party. And cutting benefits for younger people leaves the bulk of the problem unresolved, experts say, given that the Social Security funding crisis is projected to arrive decades before millennials receive their first checks.

“It clearly would not address the shortfall, or the short- to medium-term problem we’re going to have in 10 years or less,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Economists of both parties agree that Social Security and Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly, face funding crises if Congress does not act to shore up their finances somehow, either by reducing benefits or raising taxes. If no reforms are enacted, Social Security benefits for an estimated 60 million people will be cut by 20 percent starting in 2033, according to according to the most recent report of the Boards of Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Medicare also faces an automatic benefit cuts as soon as 2031, the report says.

President Biden has proposed increasing taxes on the rich and businesses to prevent Medicare from running out of funds. But the latest White House budget does not propose a solution for extending Social Security. Numerous congressional Democrats have called for trillions in new taxes to avoid the Social Security shortfall, as well.

Policy experts have long said it will likely take a mixture of reduced spending and higher taxes to address the looming funding shortage facing Social Security and Medicare. Social Security’s old age and survivors insurance trust fund is expected to only be able to pay 77 percent of benefits in 2033, which would likely lead to automatic reductions in payments. People in their forties are still more than two decades away from receiving Social Security benefits.

The comments from DeSantis and Pence suggest that some Republicans have “not updated their talking points from the 1990s,” said Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. Thirty years ago, Riedl said, it would have been possible to argue for resolving the funding shortfall only by limiting benefits for future recipients. But given that the enormous baby boomer generation is now at retirement age, exempting them from cuts would still leave the program in crisis.

“I get the politics of not wanting to lead with, ‘We will cut seniors,’” Riedl said. “But it might be better to say nothing than to offer an unpopular approach that doesn’t even avoid a debt crisis because it would be implemented far too late.”

DeSantis’s message will likely soon be tested. Trump has released video messages tying DeSantis to House Republicans who wanted to cut Social Security and for pushing to raise the retirement age when the Florida governor served in Congress, although Trump has also expressed support in the past for raising the retirement age.

“Donald Trump ruled Social Security and other benefits out of bounds politically” for Republican politicians, said Bill Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. “But there are still Republicans, including some leading Republicans, who understand we wont make serious progress on our fiscal problems until everything’s on the table. They’re trying to open that discussion, without it immediately being shut down.”

These Fuckin' Guys

Republicans have alleged:

The FBI went after conservative parents at school board meetings.

(That’s entirely baseless)

FBI Director Chris Wray, a registered Republican, personally sicced the FBI on conservatives.

(Wray called this “insane”)

FBI has eagerly persecuted Trump.

(The FBI is rule-bound and cautious)

FBI plants incited the Jan6 attack.

(The central evidence of this has collapsed)

Opinion

The MAGA persecution complex is eating itself to death

Stephen K. Bannon, a spiritual leader of the Trumpist right, infamously declared in 2018 that the secret to political warfare was “to flood the zone with s--t.” For many observers, this quote continues to capture the perils of our “post-truth” moment: Our democratic culture remains deeply vulnerable to being swamped by disinformation.

But with Donald Trump out of the presidency and his allies in Congress mired in infighting, we’re now seeing what happens when the zone gets so flooded with excrement that it threatens to drown the MAGA movement itself.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chaired a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week that purported to expose the FBI’s “weaponization” against conservatives. But GOP lawmakers floated so many allegations and conspiracy theories that the spectacle devolved into a haphazard, scattered mess with no storylines developed in meaningful depth.

After months of these hearings, it’s painfully clear they lack anything close to the focus of the congressional investigations into the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, during Barack Obama’s presidency. As a result, these proceedings are unlikely to produce the political benefits that the Benghazi hearings did.

Blame it on the “MAGA persecution complex” — the vast array of outlets in the right-wing media ecosystem that incentivizes GOP lawmakers to pander to conservative victimization and grievance. It’s feasting on so many claims of persecution that it’s essentially eating itself to death.

At last week’s hearing, Republicans alleged that the FBI investigated conservative parents at school board meetings. (That’s entirely baseless.) They insisted FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a registered Republican, personally sicced the FBI on conservatives. (Wray called this “insane.”) They claimed the FBI has eagerly persecuted Trump. (The FBI has actually been rule-bound and cautious.) They railed that FBI plants incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. (The central evidence of this has collapsed.)

Republicans even insisted the FBI is riddled with anti-Catholic bias based on a field-level memo about radical right-wing Catholics that is indeed problematic. But Wray admitted to a serious error, declaring it subject to internal review. Presenting one example of abuse at a huge agency as proof of another vast conspiracy is silly.

The barrage of these allegations and others — the FBI is covering up President Biden’s bribery, it’s investigating would-be GOP informants, it’s colluding with social media giants to censor conservatives — is dizzying. Storylines eclipse each other before any can gel into something coherent.

“Good oversight may start with a theory, but it gathers facts before reaching conclusions,” Brendan Buck, a former senior House GOP leadership aide, told me. “These committees are starting with conclusions and then trying — and mostly failing — to find facts to support them.”

Republicans are trying to tell one story about the persecution of conservatives that has fractured into a thousand subplots. By contrast, once the GOP-controlled House hit on Benghazi, the focus on that story was far tighter.

Kurt Bardella, a former House GOP communications adviser who has turned on the party, points out that at the time, lawmakers had fewer incentives to seek viral moments by hijacking specific narratives for themselves. Hearings could be more coordinated toward influencing mainstream news coverage.

“Nowadays, if you want to have a moment, you say something outlandish, put it up on social media,” Bardella told me. “All the right-wing platforms will amplify it for you.” That encourages freelance messaging and disunity, he noted.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton — the central character in the Benghazi hearings — was widely distrusted by reporters (to catastrophically unfair effect) at the outset. It’s hard to quantify the impact of those hearings, but a years-long drumbeat about vague corruption, amplified in mainstream coverage, probably took a toll.

Contrast that with today. Yes, the public is sour on the FBI. The agency did make serious mistakes during the Trump years. But voters are being asked to hate a villain that’s far more baroque and insidious than “mistakes were made.” The enemy is either absurdly nebulous (the “deep state”) or fantastical (thousands of federal officers conspiring against conservatives).

It also clashes with how the FBI has long been perceived in mainstream culture, noted Tim Weiner, author of a history of the agency. It’s a “very White, very male, very conservative law enforcement agency,” Weiner told me, and Republicans are trying to portray it as “antifa in a Brooks Brothers suit.”

That’s a tough sell. But as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein notes, this conspiratorial rhetoric has become party-wide dogma. Repeating it earns party approval, creating a self-reinforcing effect.

Also, mainstream media outlets appear inclined to cover Trump-aligned conspiracy-mongering with more skepticism than the Benghazi hearings. Matt Gertz has detailed for Media Matters that attacks on the FBI have taken on a Keystone Kops quality: New whistleblowers and revelations are forever promised to reporters and never materialize.

Finally, Jan. 6 sharply illustrated the true stakes of the situation: Many on the far right did commit serious crimes against the country. While Trump-loyal Republicans are handwaving it all away, law enforcement is meting out appropriate accountability. This probably inclines news organizations to cover right-wing attacks on law enforcement more harshly than Benghazi.

But no matter: The zone-flooding conspiratorial antics will keep on coming. The MAGA persecution complex requires no less.

Another One?

Rule 1: Every accusation is a confession

Hey - where ya keep all the voter fraud at?

4th resident of The Villages arrested for voter fraud

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Another resident of The Villages has been arrested for voter fraud by the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office.

Charles Franklin Barnes, was arrested on Jan. 4 for violating the law and attempting to cast multiple ballots in the 2020 election. He’s the fourth resident of the Florida community to see charges for voter fraud in the past month.

3 from The Villages charged with voter fraud, accused of casting more than 1 ballot in 2020 election

In December 2021, Jay Ketcik, Joan Halstead and John Rider were charged for casting more than one ballot, according to local authorities.

According to previous coverage by WFLA affiliate WESH, Ketcik voted by mail in Florida while also casting an absentee ballot in Michigan, while Halstead voted in person in Florida but cast an absentee ballot in New York.

Rider was charged with casting an absentee ballot in New York while also voting in Sumter County, according to reporting by Villages-News, a media company in The Villages.

Barnes was released on a $2,000 bond, according to the Sumter County sheriff. According to Florida vote records, Barnes was not affiliated with a political party.

The Alarm Keeps Clanging Away

A Sinister New Page in the Republican Playbook

On Tuesday, I wrote about the Republican effort to limit the reach and scope of initiatives and referendums as another instance of the party’s war on majority rule. One thing I wanted to include, but couldn’t quite integrate into the structure of the column, was a point about the recent use of legislative expulsion to punish Democratic lawmakers who dissent from or challenge Republican majorities.

We saw this in Tennessee, obviously, where Republicans expelled two Democratic members — Representatives Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin J. Pearson of Memphis — for loudly supporting a youth protest for gun control from the statehouse floor using a bullhorn.

We saw another example this week, in Montana, after State Representative Zooey Zephyr, a transgender woman, spoke out against a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors. Calling her comments (“If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”) “disrespectful and “inappropriate,” Montana Republicans have barred Zephyr from attending — or speaking during — the House session for the rest of the legislative term, which ends next week.

In Nebraska, a Democratic lawmaker is being investigated by an ethics panel for a conflict of interest regarding her filibuster of another bill to ban gender-affirming health care for minors. The conflict? She has a transgender child.

And if we look back to last year, we’ll recall that House Republicans censured former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their roles in investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

What to make of this?

Expelling or censuring members isn’t necessarily an attack on majority rule or popular government, and yet it feels more sinister, in a way, than an impenetrable partisan gerrymander or even a strict voter ID law. I think that’s because these moves against dissenting members constitute an attack on representation itself.

No one forced Tennessee Republicans to expel Representatives Jones and Pearson. They could have ignored them. But they were so incensed by the show of opposition that they deprived about 130,000 people of their representation in the legislature. Silencing and effectively banning Representative Zephyr means that about 10,000 people in Montana’s 100th District don’t have a voice in the legislature.

The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities.

The Constitution guarantees to each state a “republican form of government.” I’ve written before about how this “republican form” is mostly undefined; neither the framers nor the courts have really said what it means for a state to have one. But I think we can at least say that when legislatures are stripping communities of representation over dissent and disagreement, it doesn’t exist.

What I Wrote

My Tuesday column was, as I mentioned, on the Republican attack on referendums and initiatives, and how the party has committed itself to circumventing the will of the majority wherever it thinks it’s necessary.

There’s still room for innovation, however, and in the past year Republicans have opened new fronts in the war for minority rule. One element in these campaigns, an aggressive battle to limit the reach of the referendum process, stands out in particular. Wherever possible, Republicans hope to raise the threshold for winning a ballot initiative from a majority to a supermajority or — where such a threshold already exists — add other hurdles to passage.

My Friday column was on the drama on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where its chairman, Dick Durbin, asked Chief Justice John Roberts to testify at a hearing on Supreme Court ethics. I wrote that the response from Roberts demonstrates something crucial about the relationship between the court and the American political order.

“Separation of powers,” in Roberts’s view, means the court is outside the system of checks and balances that governs the other branches of government. “Judicial independence,” likewise, means neither he nor any other member of the court has any obligation to speak to Congress about their behavior. The court checks, according to Roberts, but cannot be checked.

And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1995 political comedy “Canadian Bacon.”

Today's Face Palm

When you try to run your office in the US House of Representatives by having your staffers "inform" you by way of the comment section at some horseshit "conservative" website.

We Deserve Better

First, Paul Gosar does the Daddy State thing perfectly, accusing Mark Milley of conspring to overthrow the government.

Then we get to the part where I'm reminded that, it used to be, conservatives were known for being frugal. We wanted to make sure we were spending the money on the right things and for the right reasons.

And now? Cheap - just flat-ass fuckin' cheap shit, penny-wise-and-pound-foolish fuckery.

And stupid.

But not stupid. Not really. Because, as we hear from Maxwell Frost (at about 3:20), we're spending way more on contractors than we are on the people who're actually on the line, ready to do the fighting and the bleeding and the dying - so the plan to privatize everything is well under way, and still being executed right under our fucking noses.

BTW, I think Max Frost would be a great name for a private detective in a Mickey Spillane novel.

This Is The GOP

It's old and crusty, and it's started to sound very stale, but:

ladies and gentlemen, this is the GOP -

the party of law-n-order

Ex-Florida lawmaker behind the 'Don't Say Gay' law pleads guilty to COVID relief fraud

Former Florida lawmaker Joseph Harding has pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges related to COVID-19 relief funds. The 35-year-old is scheduled for sentencing in July.

A former Florida lawmaker who sponsored a bill dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" law by critics has pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining COVID-19 relief funds.

Joseph Harding entered a guilty plea on Tuesday in federal court in the Northern District of Florida to one count of wire fraud, one count of money laundering and one count of making false statements, according to court records.

Harding faces up to 35 years in prison, including a maximum of 20 years on the wire fraud charge. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 25 at the federal courthouse in Gainesville.

The former Republican lawmaker shot to notoriety last year as one of the sponsors of a controversial Florida law that outlawed the discussion of sexuality and gender in public school classrooms from kindergarten through grade 3.

The legislation became a blueprint for similar laws in more than a dozen other conservative states.

"This bill is about protecting our kids, empowering parents and ensuring they have the information they need to do their God-given job of raising their child," Harding said when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law last March.

Critics from Democrats to LGBTQ groups took to calling it the "Don't Say Gay" law and condemned Republicans for chilling speech in schools.

In December, a federal grand jury returned an indictment against Harding, 35, who was accused of lying on his applications to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, which gave out loans to businesses impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. He resigned from Florida's House of Representatives one day later.

Harding fraudulently obtained more than $150,000 from the Small Business Administration, portions of which he transferred to a bank and used to make a credit card payment, prosecutors said.

In his bio on the Florida House Republicans website, Harding is described as a "serial entrepreneur" who started several businesses related to "boarding and training horses, real estate development, home construction, and landscaping."

He was first elected to public office when he won the state House seat in November 2020.

Either It Is Or It Isn't

Plain old everyday common sense tells us two contradicting notions can't be true at the same time ... but hey - Quantum Politics, anyone?

Mike Lindell says he had to borrow $10 million last year to keep MyPillow afloat — and is running out of cash, too

• MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell told Insider he had to borrow $10 million in 2022 to keep MyPillow afloat.
• Lindell said he'd also sold a building for $2 million and borrowed a further $2 million for himself.
• Lindell says he's burning through $1 million dollars every month on causes related to voter fraud.

MyPillow CEO Says Company Is Going Broke Defending Election Fraud Claims

MyPillow Founder and CEO Mike Lindell claims the company has had to borrow almost $10 million to keep the lights on. The MyPillow guy has been embroiled in a series of lawsuits brought by voting machine manufacturers who allege Lindell defamed them by spreading conspiracies regarding their role in the 2020 election.

“The machine companies continue to sue us for billions of dollars, and we had to borrow almost $10 million at MyPillow,” Lindell told far-right radio host and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on Wednesday.

- and -

Mike Lindell Backtracks on Claims MyPillow Is Going Broke

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell says his company is in great shape, just hours after telling Steve Bannon it was going broke due to political pressure.

“I invented MyPillow2.0 and it is doing great!” Lindell told The Daily Beast on Wednesday night.

Despite trying to claim that his business was the victim of a political vendetta earlier on Wednesday, Lindell was quickly peddling a different story.

“Over 1/2 the loans are already paid back! MyPillow2.0 is manufactured 100% by MyPillow in Minnesota! You must have seen the ads in all TV stations across the country,” he said, referencing his collaboration with QAnon podcasts and web shows that are selling MyPillow products in a significant profit-sharing deal.

Lindell has been entangled in a number of lawsuits brought about by voting machine manufacturers after he spread unfounded conspiracy theories based on the “stolen” 2020 election. Lindell is a diehard Trump supporter.

The full scope of financial crisis is unclear, however, in January, he told WCCO that MyPillow had lost $100 million in retailers and that “we are not up 30-40%—we are down. We are down. I had to borrow money.”

Lindell told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on Wednesday: “The machine companies continue to sue us for billions of dollars, and we had to borrow almost $10 million at MyPillow.”

Lindell declined to say whether MyPillow is currently losing money, instead telling The Daily Beast that “MyPillow had to spend millions on lawsuits and the last 2 years lost 30 box stores and shopping channels.

- more -

Feckless Little Men

Opinion

Ex-intelligence officials challenge the Hunter Biden witch hunt

Right-wing House Republicans have left little doubt that they want to spend the bulk of their time and energy investigating phony conspiracies and made-up scandals. Their main obsession appears to be Hunter Biden, whose very name has become a buzzword in right-wing media. The contents of one of his laptops, revealed in 2020, have inspired a fantastical conspiracy theory that has been comprehensively debunked by, among others, Asha Rangappa, a senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and former FBI agent.

She persuasively applies a “a basic three-part formula” employed by psychologists who study conspiracy theories “for disentangling truth from fiction, one that activates the rational, analytical side, rather than the lizard, fight-or-flight side, of the brain.” Her takeaway: The conspiracy theorists have reached the “temper tantrum” stage of the Hunter Biden “scandal.”

Obviously, there is no legitimate basis for congressional “oversight” of the matter. And that brings us to the current faceoff between the Republican chairmen of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, on one side, and 50 or so former intelligence officials, on the other.

In October 2020, these officials crafted a statement that appeared in Politico alleging that appearance of the laptop and emails purporting to relate to Hunter Biden’s time on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

As my Post colleague Glenn Kessler has explained, the statement’s claims — in contrast to news reports and Democrats’ description of the claims — were explicitly limited. “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the statement cautioned.

Nevertheless, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) sent letters to the signatories, demanding all documents relating to the statement and directing the former officials to appear for transcribed interviews. If they don’t comply, they have been warned, subpoenas will be forthcoming.

Perhaps Republicans imagine the former intelligence officials were put up to signing the statement pointing the finger at Russia as part of a Democratic plot to mislead voters. (Talk about projection!) Whatever the reason for this GOP fishing expedition, it would be a dangerous threat to the First Amendment if Congress could haul in for questioning any private citizen (as the former officials were at the time) to explain an op-ed or open letter.

And, ironically, it would be an illegitimate and inappropriate use of congressional power — a weaponization of government — if every president’s family members and their associates and defenders could be summoned to testify about a made-up controversy.

Several of the signatories are represented by Mark Zaid, who provided me with a copy of a letter challenging the fishing expedition. In a response to the chairmen, Zaid notes that the power of Congress to exercise oversight is not “unbounded.” Citing the 2020 Trump v. Mazars Supreme Court case, Zaid explains that Congress needs a legitimate legislative purpose to demand compliance with a subpoena. And here, “no conceivable legislative purpose” exists, he says, only a “purely political, partisan exercise” that wastes taxpayer money.

Indeed, it is hard to divine any legislative purpose for a Republican-led, contorted investigation of the president’s son. But I cannot say the maneuver surprises me. House Republicans have continually boasted about their plans to investigate President Biden and his family, meddle in ongoing prosecutions and run interference for former president Donald Trump. Now, their admission is being turned against them.

It isn’t clear where this is going from here. Zaid says his clients have voluntarily agreed to produce documents. One signatory, Marc Polymeropoulos, who helped organize the former intelligence officials’ statement, has agreed to sit for an interview. However, should the committees issue formal subpoenas to others or demand the former officials reveal classified information about their past service (which is the basis for their opinions set out in the statement), the issue likely would head to the courts in the first substantial legal challenge to the House GOP’s conspiracy-driven inquests.

The last thing these right-wing congressmen likely would want is a court ruling that their three-ring circus lacks any legitimate legislative purpose and, therefore, cannot compel testimony or document production. A legal defeat for MAGA-inspired investigations (which to date have spectacularly flopped) would be the perfect denouement to Republicans’ inept efforts to harness congressional power for political gain.

If their power to hold hearings is neutered, the absence of a substantive House GOP mission would be laid bare. Republicans would be left to make wild accusations — such as bank failures are due to “wokeness” — advance a hugely unpopular agenda (restricting abortion, raising prescription drug prices) and reveal their disarray, as they have with the debt ceiling.

In standing up to congressmen bent on bullying and intimidating witnesses to score political points, the former intelligence officials will have performed a public service: revealing the feckless little men behind the curtain.

Today's Brian

GOP primaries are gonna be lit. (Blue Gal)

What They're Doing

Citing their disdain for The National Debt - a disdain that surfaces only when a Democrat is in the White House - Republicans moved yesterday to rescind the increased funding for the IRS that was part of Biden's Omnibus.

First - this is called "defunding the police".

Second - it's estimated that the move will add $114B to The National Debt.

As stoopid as they seem, they are not stoopid. Every time out, they reinforce my paranoia. Everything they do that seems weird and nonsensical contributes to the dismantling of our institutions.

Bad For Us

Why House Republicans Keep Eating Their Own

A party that refuses to share power turns its rage inward.

The House Republican majority is currently paralyzed by an internecine power struggle that, like some ninth-century Byzantine religious schism, is simultaneously all-consuming to the participants and utterly inscrutable to outsiders.

Reporters attempting to discern the conflict have taken to describing the competing factions as “conservatives” (the far-right members opposed to Kevin McCarthy’s bid for Speaker of the House) and “moderates” (the much larger faction of Republicans loyal to him). But these labels do very little to clarify the strange mania devouring the House Republican caucus. If you define conservative in traditional terms — meaning loyal to the conservative movement of Goldwater and Reagan and opposed, in principle, to any new taxation or social-welfare benefits — the entire Republican caucus is composed of conservatives. McCarthy’s loyalists aren’t moderates and don’t describe themselves as such.

Indeed, the division has barely any real ideological content at all. What Republicans are fighting over is whether to accept the limits of sharing power.

One of the key differences between the two major parties is that Democrats accept the reality that their agenda is not going to move forward when the opposing party occupies the White House. Democratic partisans might grow angry at their leaders for failing to stop it, but members of Congress generally understand that there are limits to the power of the opposition, and even the most unrealistic Democratic rank-and-file voters don’t expect their leaders to actively advance liberal policy in the face of a Republican president. Progressive Democrats wanted to defend Obamacare from Donald Trump’s repeal attempt. They weren’t demanding that Nancy Pelosi somehow force Trump to enact Medicare for All.

Republican voters, by contrast, expect and demand that the conservative agenda be advanced even — perhaps especially — under Democratic presidents. The Republican caucus is routinely gripped by frenzied efforts to compel Democratic presidents to roll back the welfare state. Newt Gingrich shut down the government to pressure Bill Clinton to sign a capital-gains tax cut and reductions to Medicaid and Medicare. Republicans used both shutdowns and the debt ceiling to try to blackmail Barack Obama into repealing his signature health-care plan.

This is why Democrats tend to splinter when they hold power but unify in opposition while the reverse holds true for Republicans. Democratic demands expand when the party holds full control of government and contract in opposition. Republican aspirations paradoxically become more grandiose during Democratic presidencies, which draw Republican minds deeper into the fever swamps of hysteria, making them more insistent on demands for maximal confrontation. These demands are inevitably impossible, causing Republicans to turn, again and again, against their own leaders.

By way of illustration, take this op-ed by Representative Bob Good, one of the anti-McCarthy rebels. “We must elect a speaker who will utilize the power of the purse as leverage to restore fiscal sanity and defund the government tyranny we campaign against,” he writes. “For the good of the Republican conference, for the good of Congress and for the good of the country, let’s hope Republican leaders will listen to the will of their constituents and vote for transformational change on Jan. 3.”

Good believes that the Biden administration is imposing “government tyranny” and that the House will somehow bring it to an end through a funding agreement with the Biden administration. He believes the House should be a venue for “transformational change.” Many political activists and candidates have called for transformational change, but only on the right wing is it considered normal to expect this to happen while the other party controls the presidency.

Or consider this statement by Citizens for Renewing America executive director Wade Miller and reported in the conservative Daily Caller:

Kevin McCarthy is the essence of the uniparty swamp, where two parties pretend to oppose each other, offer show votes to demonstrate theoretical differences of opinion, but then always work together to advance and fund the woke and weaponized government leviathan that is leading the way in destroying our communities through the direct funding of incremental cultural Marxism.

The putative complaint against McCarthy’s leadership is that he advanced “incremental cultural Marxism” through government funding. Of course, no such thing exists, which means McCarthy has no way to redress the complaint. The far right is angry about the Biden administration’s continued existence and wishes to blame the leadership for this fact.

Because this anger has no productive channel, it returns again and again in the form of internal recriminations. The House caucus during Democratic presidencies for the last quarter-century has been an endless procession of coup attempts. Gingrich was deposed for failing in his holy mission of forcing Clinton to slash government. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were driven into retirement. The House Republican caucus will be a cauldron of rage, because the party, at its core, does not believe it should be forced to share power.