Daddy State Illustrated

First off, there's no greater example of an oxymoron than "conservative values".

Republicans waste an awful lot of time and effort trying to convince us that anyone not toeing the line on everything they put up as some kind of standard for behavior - there's another one: "Republican Standards" - anyway, if you don't follow along in perfect lockstep, then they're going to try to stick a label on you, and their go-to fave lately is any variation of pedophile - pedo-adjacent or enabler or groomer etc.

They spouted practically nothing but that usual shit at Ketanji Brown Jackson every time it was their turn to "question" her during the confirmation hearings.

And then - like right on cue - we get news (about a Republican, because of course it's a fucking Republican):

US Attorney's Office - Northern District of Florida:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, April 8, 2022

Former Florida Election Commission Attorney Sentenced to 72 Months in Federal Prison for Conspiracy and Distribution of Child Pornography

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA – Eric Matthew Lipman, 60, of Tallahassee, Florida, was sentenced to 72 months in federal prison for conspiring to distribute, receive, and possess material constituting child pornography, and distributing material constituting child pornography after pleading guilty on December 13, 2021. The sentence was announced by Jason R. Coody, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Florida.

“Those who seek to view and share child pornography facilitate the abuse of children by those who produce and profit from this illegal content,” stated U.S. Attorney Coody. “With the assistance of our law enforcement partners, we will ensure that those who engage in such heinous conduct will be held accountable for their actions.”

Between February 8, 2021, and February 11, 2021, Lipman, along with others, was a participant in Mega.NZ chat groups that distributed, received, possessed, and discussed child pornography images and videos. Mega.NZ was an Internet cloud storage and file hosting service based in New Zealand. Lipman conspired with the members of the chat groups to distribute, receive, and possess material constituting child pornography, and posted child pornography material within Mega.NZ chat groups for the benefit of other like-minded participants. The pornographic material that Lipman distributed, and that was found on Lipman’s electronic devices, involved prepubescent minors as well as minors under the age of 12.

Lipman’s prison sentence will be followed by 9 years of supervised release. He will also be required to register as a sex offender and will be subject to sex offender conditions.

“This child predator was part of a conspiracy to sexually exploit young children,” said HSI Tampa Special Agent in Charge John Condon. “Because of the investigative work of HSI and our law enforcement partners at the Leon County Sheriff’s Office, he will no longer be able to harm our most vulnerable.”

“LCSO applauds the work of investigators and the collaborative efforts by all entities involved in seeing justice carried out in this case,” said Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil. “We must continue to do our due diligence in protecting our most vulnerable and precious members of our community.”

This case was investigated by the Homeland Security Investigations and the Leon County Sheriff’s Office. Assistant United States Attorney Justin M. Keen prosecuted the case.

We've Got An Image To Protect

Madison Cawthorn (R-NC11) went too far when he spilled some (alleged) dirt on unnamed Republicans, and Kevin McCarthy just had to step in and have a word.

All in - Chris Hayes:

Laying It Bare

Chris Hayes, with a look at the blatant Lee Atwater-style racism built in to the GOP.

Republicans beat up on black nominees for being black (ie: not voicing a yessir boss desire to be white).

Then they try to sell it as being no different from Dems beating up on a religious zealot who says her faith and her deference towards her husband will color her decisions - or a boozing sexual predator who came to the nomination with questions about how his predecessor was ushered out, and some shady-as-fuck shenanigans involving his finances.

But hey - money talks and integrity walks

Overheard

Republicans who reverently quoted MLK yesterday will be right back to taking pictures with Confederate flags today.

Booed In Alabama

Mo Brooks gave a fiery speech on January 6, exhorting the crowd to kick ass and take names, because of course the election was stolen and they needed to storm the Capitol in order to "stop the steal".

Now, Mr Brooks is running for the seat of retiring Senator Richard Shelby, and he knows the bullshit they've been peddling is wearing thin and that it's possible he could be headed for prison about this time next year (I said possible - not likely), and he'd better start getting some things straightened around.

Anyway, another thing this change in direction is meant to accomplish is to get the rubes to stop reminding everybody of the failed coup attempt that he helped instigate.

(Notice how quiet Mike Lindell has been since that cluster fuck in South Dakota almost 2 weeks ago.)

Lie lie lie, then deny deny deny, then lie lie lie again.

• "What you heard is not what you heard."
• "What you saw is not what you saw."
• "Listen only to me because only I can steer you to the promised land."

Mo Brooks had a featured spot at Trump's rally in Alabama last night, and when he floated the proposition that the rubes need to unhitch themselves from the previous pack of lies in order to support him in the brand new set of lies that he'll be pimping in his run for the Senate, they booed him.

I guess Brooks and his fellow Daddy State travelers are finding out that the Ship Of 50 Million Fools is a lumbering hulk that doesn't exactly turn on a dime and hand you 9 cents change.

Republicans keep creating these monsters. And every time, they seem unable to understand that once the latest version of the monster is loose, it's even harder for them to control it.

Assume The Worst

David Pakman (from back in May)

For this discussion, "infrastructure" is the stuff that facilitates commerce - roads and bridges and other lines of communication - the stuff we use to move stuff around.

But also, it's the stuff that helps people find work, get to where the work is, and do the work. 

Things like childcare and elder care and broadband and renewable power and public transit and the variety of people development items (schools, VoTech training, grants and financing etc) - all of it helps people find a job, (or make their own job), go to the job, and do the job.

It's easy to think we have a Republican party that just can't extricate itself from a fantasy 1950s mindset, and refuses to stop lying to its voters about everything.

But I don't think that's it - not all of it anyway. It's not like the "party of business" suddenly doesn't know anything about economics - they do know - so what exactly is their game?

We don't do ourselves any favors by insisting they're all stupid. We're better off assuming they have a plan and that they're executing on it.

Overheard

Thanks to the extraordinary tech savvy and keen business acumen of the Republicans, Texans will never be short on electrical power except when the weather gets hot or cold.

Today's Attempt At Rehab

George wants us to believe he's fed up with the GOP. The GOP he helped build, BTW, by steadfastly maintaining his silent consent in the face of his beloved Mr Reagan's racist dog whistles, his union-busting, his embrace of the Daddy State Christianists, and his ugly refusal even to say the word "AIDS" for the first 3 or 4 years of his presidency, as the plague took hold and spread, beginning its monstrous campaign that went on to kill 700,000 Americans - 13,000 per year even now.

The list of shit George Will (et al, ad nauseam) have allowed the Republican Party to unleash on us is long, and will be remembered as one of the great evils of our history.

Now he wants to take a moment and tell us how he and a few of his brave stalwart compadres are trying to make it right by resurrecting a noble GOP that never fucking existed.

George Will, WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: The Reaganite optimist Paul Ryan on the future of the Republican Party

To those Republicans who think the first 18 Republican presidents were merely misbegotten preludes to the magnificent 19th, Paul Ryan is guilty of the eighth deadly sin, which they consider the worst of the lot: cheerfulness. They might not know that on Jan. 6, when a mob sacked the U.S. Capitol, Ryan wept.

This was two years after he ended his 10-term House tenure. Drafted by his colleagues to serve as House speaker, he was precluded from chairing the Ways and Means Committee, his highest ambition since he came to Congress with a vanishingly rare seriousness about policies for economic dynamism and a sustainable safety net of entitlements. The 2016 presidential election forced him into an excruciating collaboration. Had he sought reelection in 2018 from Wisconsin, he would have been volunteering for continuing complicity. So, he retired.

The Republicans’ 2012 vice-presidential nominee was, however, chosen by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to deliver on May 27 the first in what will be a series of speeches by Republican leaders on their party’s future. Noting that there are statues of Reagan in London, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw and Gdansk in Poland, and many other places because the ideas Reagan championed are “universal” and “as hopeful and compelling as ever,” he cited Indiana’s freshman Rep. Victoria Spartz. She immigrated from Ukraine at age 22 in 2000, and “has seen socialism up close and knows exactly where it leads.” Born in the Soviet Union, “she arranged to take her oath of office standing by a portrait of Ronald Reagan.”

Ryan referred obliquely to Jan. 6 — “it was horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end” — and warned against basing conservatism on “the populist appeal of one personality, or of second-rate imitations. . . . Voters looking for Republican leaders want to see independence and mettle. They will not be impressed by the sight of yes men and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago.” This elicited a belch of stale invective (Ryan is “a curse to the Republican Party”) from the man who was the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose the White House and his party’s control of both houses of Congress in just four years.

Some conservatives took characteristically strident exception to these Ryan words: “Culture matters, absolutely, yes, but our party must be defined by more than a tussle over the latest grievance or perceived slight. We must not let them take priority over solutions — grounded in principle — to improve people’s lives.” Having three school-age children, Ryan is keenly aware that “as the left gets more ‘woke,’ the rest of America is getting weary.”

He is scathing about Democrats’ identity politics that “has gone from ideology to obsession.” Theirs is a “dreary view of America as a collection of groups in perpetual conflict with each other” — “constantly accusing, suspecting, claiming victimhood.” But he correctly says, “too many people on the right are enamored with identity politics,” defining the party “by resentments instead of by ideals,” abandoning individualism for “the selfishness and grievance-collecting of tribe against tribe.”

Ryan, who never met Reagan, was 18 when Reagan left the presidency. In the eyes — eyes squinting with suspicion when not protuberant with anger — of those currently setting the GOP’s tone, Ryan’s invocation of Reagan is distasteful. It is discordant with their aversion to fiscal discipline (especially when their party holds the presidency; their hero ran a $1 trillion deficit at full employment). And with their growing enthusiasm for protectionism and other forms of industrial policy. Ryan, however, suggests effective language for 2022:

“Joe Biden was put into the presidency by swing suburban voters — the kind who normally vote Republican, but in this case did so only for Congress and not for president. They expected a center-left unifier. The problem is, he has focused on unifying, not the nation, but the Democratic Party, surrendering to its progressive base. . . . In 2020, the country wanted a nice guy who would move to the center and depolarize our politics. Instead, we got a nice guy pursuing an agenda more leftist than any president in my lifetime.”

Not since Grover Cleveland, who lost as an incumbent in 1888 but won again in 1892, has a defeated president sought a second term. Many Republicans who disdain Ryan’s Reaganite optimism hope that if their hero cannot reprise 1892 in 2024, at least a second-rate imitator can succeed. In either case, they will learn what a real “curse to the Republican Party” looks like.

George is trying his best to convince us that the "good Republicans" are still there - just waiting to come back when the smoke clears and the dust settles and the bug-eyed-crazy is a little less virulent.

But Rob Portman, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker - these people, and so many others - they weren't engaged in some kinda "strategic withdrawal".

They aren't "living to fight another day".

What they did had nothing to do with "the better part of valor".

They quit. They saw the GOP for the shit pile it had become - the shit pile it still is - what they stood by and allowed it to morph into while they benefited from it - and they fuckin' quit on us.

And George Will can't save 'em.

Republicans Are Prone To Scandal

when you wish people would start talking

about your drinking problem again

Today's Quote

“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination."

- Lindsey Graham

“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination." pic.twitter.com/quD1K5j9pz

— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) September 19, 2020

RNC Wrapup

Eddie Colla - a montage

Today's Ad

act.tv - They All Knew

The Week

Here's another one we can file under: Holy fuck, I just realized the Republican party is chock full of Republicans! (hat tip = Driftglass)

Op/Ed piece from Damon Linker, at The Week:

In the raging debate among Trump-critical conservatives over whether the goal in November should be merely to defeat the president or to pursue the more radical strategy of burning the Republican Party to the ground, I'm firmly on the side of scorched earth.

The case for maximalism is strong. The head of the party is a corrupt and malicious imbecile. Republicans in Congress are a mix of Trump enablers, obstructionist-demagogues out to maximize the wealth of their donors, know-nothing conspiracist loons, and a few reformers experimenting with the most politically palatable way to blend nationalism with socialism. All of them are primarily motivated by the drive toward self-promotion within the right-wing media complex. And when we move further down the Republican hierarchy to the state and local level, things only get worse.

- and -

There's just one difficulty with the plan: It does nothing to address the root of the problem, which no one — not the minimalist Trump haters, and not the fiercest maximalists out to pummel the party's establishment — has a clue how to solve.

That is, the problem of the Republican voter.

- and -

The voters who swooned for Sarah Palin in 2008; who seriously considered giving the nod to Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Ben Carson, and Rick Santorum in 2012; who four years later elevated a reality-show conman to the head of their party, cast ballots for him to win the presidency, and have rallied around him ever since — most of these voters remain undaunted in their conviction that politics is primarily about the venting of grievances and the trolling of opponents. The dumber and angrier and more shameless, the better.


I've made the point before:
Trump has not remade the GOP in his own image. He is the perfect reflection of what that party has become.

And Linker ends with:

So by all means, aim to burn down the GOP in 2020 if you can. But don't for a minute think it will solve the bigger problem that confronts us — the problem of the malignant Republican voter.

Today's Fuckin' Wack-Doodle

Kayla Epstein, WaPo:

Matt Bevin is no longer the governor of Kentucky, but his decisions continued to send shock waves through the state’s legal system this week after he issued pardons for hundreds of people, some of whom committed violent offenses.

Bevin issued 428 pardons since his defeat to Democrat Andy Beshear in a close election in November, the Louisville Courier Journal reported. His list includes a man convicted of reckless homicide, a convicted child rapist, a man who murdered his parents at age 16 and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash after giving birth in a flea market outhouse.

He also pardoned Dayton Jones, who was convicted in the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy at a party, Kentucky New Era reported.

It is not unusual for governors to issue pardons as they leave office, but Bevin’s actions boggled some of the state’s attorneys, who questioned his judgment.

“What this governor did is an absolute atrocity of justice,” said Commonwealth Attorney Jackie Steele, a prosecutor for Knox and Laurel counties. “He’s put victims, he’s put others in our community in danger.”

And the kicker:

“I’m a big believer in second chances,” Bevin said in a message left with The Washington Post on Thursday afternoon. “I think this is a nation that was founded on the concept of redemption and second chances and new pages in life.”

Can you say, "What a crock of shit that is"? I knew you could.

Outside of when they're taking about themselves and their god-knobber buddies, when was the last time you heard any Republican touting the value of giving anybody a second chance at anything - especially when the topic is crime and prison and shit?

There's something else at work here, and I'm gonna let the paranoia fly - I think it's a weird variation on Daddy State Awareness rule 3:

Every prediction of some dire consequence is a threat of the pain they intend to cause - or a signal that they’re already causing that pain - in an attempt to coerce us to do what they want.

First, I'll go ahead and say Bevins isn't actually mentally ill - no more than the usual pathologies that beset "conservatives" anyway.

So second, what Bevins is doing is planting time bombs that he figures will explode somewhere down the road "on the Democrats' watch". 

The main point is that he's sending a signal. ie: "You rejected me and now I will rain fire and fury down upon you. So don't do that again - we don't mind making it worse."

Alternate: Matt Bevins is guilty of some really bad shit and he's trying to soften things up a little so it doesn't land quite so heavily on his pointy little head when it comes out.

Trump-onomics

It ain't workin' for us.

via Seattle Times:

U.S. farm bankruptcies in September surged 24% to the highest since 2011 amid strains from President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and a year of wild weather.

Growers are also becoming increasingly dependent on trade aid and other federal programs for income, figures showed in a report by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest general farm organization.

The squeeze on farmers underscores the toll China’s retaliatory tariffs have taken on a critical Trump constituency as the president enters a re-election campaign and a fight to stave off impeachment. The figures also highlight the importance of a “phase one” deal the administration is currently negotiating with Beijing to increase agriculture imports in return for a pause in escalating U.S. levies.

Almost 40% of projected farm profit this year will come from trade aid, disaster assistance, federal subsidies and insurance payments, according to the report, based on Department of Agriculture forecasts. That’s $33 billion of a projected $88 billion in income.

The trade war and two straight years of adverse weather rattled farmers already facing commodity price slumps.

Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings in the 12 months ended September rose to 580 from a year earlier. That marked the highest since 676 cases in 2011 under the chapter of the bankruptcy code tailored for farms. The total “remains well below” historical highs in the 1980s, the federation said.

Recent bankruptcies were concentrated in the 13-state Midwestern region, a key battleground in the presidential election where grain, soybean, hog and dairy farms have been hit by trade disputes. More than 40%, or 255 filings, were in the region.

This story was originally published at bloomberg.com. Read it here.

And also too - Newsweek:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman took issue with President Donald Trump's repeated claims that the economy is doing better than ever under his administration.

The economic expert wrote on Twitter Wednesday that the president's promises regarding manufacturing jobs and GDP growth have failed to materialize.

"The meh GDP numbers won't help Trump next year. But what should really scare him is his utter failure to boost manufacturing in swing states," Krugman, who is a columnist for The New York Times and won the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, wrote on Twitter. He shared a graph of manufacturing job levels over time in Wisconsin to emphasize his point.

- snip -

Krugman also explained that Trump has fallen fall short of his promises regarding GDP growth. The economist tweeted an article by The Hill from last year, which highlighted how Trump was promising that GDP growth "could be in the fives," referring to 5 percent growth or higher.

Color Me Unsurprised

ABC News:

The lawyers who wrote a letter saying President Trump had no significant business ties to Russia work for a law firm that has extensive ties to Russia and received a “Russia Law Firm of the Year” award in 2016.

Sheri Dillon and William Nelson, tax partners at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, which has served as tax counsel to Trump and the Trump Organization since 2005, wrote a letter in March released by the White House on Friday stating that a review of the last 10 years of Trump’s tax returns “do not reflect” ties to Russia “with a few exceptions.”

In 2016, however, Chambers & Partners, a London-based legal research publication, named the firm “Russia Law Firm of the Year” at its annual awards dinner. The firm celebrated the “prestigious honor” in a press release on its website, noting that the award is “the latest honor for the high-profile work performed by the lawyers in Morgan Lewis’ Moscow office.”

According to the firm’s website, its Moscow office includes more than 40 lawyers and staff who are “well known in the Russian market, and have a deep familiarity with the local legislation, practices, and key players.” The firm boasts of being “particularly adept” at advising clients on “sanction matters."

Following the release of the letter, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) noted the firm’s connection to Russia, calling it “unreal."

The deafening silence coming from Republicans in Congress reinforces my conviction that it's not a matter of them not seeing the problem with this accelerating slide into the Daddy State, but that they're denying it because that's how they want it.

I could be indulging myself in Argument From Ignorance, but I'll need some pretty heavy convincing to get me off of this point. Every time we get another bit of confirmation about 45*'s corruption - followed closely by GOP denial &/or deflection &/or rationalization - it gets clearer: If Cult45 isn't really doing the shitty things they appear to be doing, then we should all apologize to OJ and help him find the real killer.

This is all kinds of fucked up.

Tipping

The Beat with Ari Melber:

Business Insider:

• MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell said a "source close to Deutsche Bank" told him that President Donald Trump's loans were underwritten by "Russian billionaires close to Vladimir Putin."
• "If true, that would explain every kind word Donald Trump has ever said about Russia and Vladimir Putin," O'Donnell said.
• There has yet to be any other reporting to substantiate this claim.
• Earlier on Tuesday, Deutsche Bank confirmed that it held tax records to do with Trump, but no details have yet been made public.
• Trump's ties to Deutsche Bank have long been the subject of rumor and speculation, and O'Donnell has a long record of controversial statements.

MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell added to the swirl of rumor that surrounds President Donald Trump's relationship with Deutsche Bank, suggesting that his loans with the lender were underwritten by Russian billionaires.

O'Donnell, appearing on the network Tuesday night with host Rachel Maddow, said that a source "close to Deutsche Bank says that the co-signers of Donald Trump's Deutsche Bank loans are Russian billionaires close to Vladimir Putin."

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, WaPo ran this today:

President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

And to be clear, the Press Poodles are pimping the narrative that this whole thing coalesces around the premise that it's all Trump's doing - that Trump is the driver and the sole owner of the responsibility.

Not even POTUS  - the most powerful guy on the whole fucking planet - can pull this off all by himself.

To reiterate - 45* has NOT remade the GOP in his image. He's the near-perfect reflection of what that party has been morphing into for at least 2 generations.

He's not working alone. He's surrounded and propped up by a full compliment of enablers from Washington to Moscow to Wall Street.

And most of those Daddy State pimps are wearing Republican badges. It has to be obvious at this point that the GOP has become a criminal enterprise.

They must not be let off the hook this time.

Today's Today

It's like a bad movie franchise - we can hope anyway.

What Does It Take?

"Fact: Donald Trump is a feckless racist catastrophe who would gladly light the world on fire just to see his name printed in the last newspaper ever published."

William Rivers Pitt at truthout:

You have to wonder what Jeff Flake and Bob Corker are thinking today. I'm sure neither were expecting their Sunday to be this quiet. These two stalwart bedrock pillar Senate Republicans dropped a couple of building-sized bricks on the White House last week, and all that came of the resulting DONK was yet another hashtagged rhetorical victory lap by Donald Trump.

According to normal political gravity, this was the sun rising in the West. Flake and Corker took Reagan's 11th Commandment -- "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican" – and fed it to the bears. Two major figures within the GOP brutally attacked a sitting Republican president on national television, using phrases like "debasing the nation" and "flagrant disregard for truth or decency," and in any other time in US history, it would have been a nine-days wonder.

It should be noted that Flake and Corker’s words assailing Trump do not bump them to the head of the line for beatification. Their profile in courage is shorter than the flyers you find on your windshield. Flake happily voted several times to strip millions of Americans of their health insurance not long ago, and Corker just voted to blow up a major consumer protection regulation. Both have voted with Trump 90 percent of the time.

The smiling hyena will still eat your children.

Still Not Back Yet

But I had to put up this passing thought:

Lil Donny Trump gets lotsa left-handed love from the Repub gurus - at least he does from the consultants who show up on certain TV shows to give us the appearance of "balance" (which is really just the standard Both-Sides-Baloney), even tho' most of these people sound like they're auditioning for a slot on somebody's campaign staff rather than offering anything of substance for us to contemplate.

Anyway, the theme seems to be that whatever passes for GOP leadership these days is not thrilled to hear Trump say the ass-wipe things he's been saying about Mexico or Latinos or Immigration in general, but that hey, he brings up some things that the Republican Base wants us to talk about blah blah blah.

No, guys. Not really.  Cuz here's what that sounds like to normal people: "Last Sunday at dinner after church, little Billy said 'Fuck you, Grandma', and you know - bless his heart - at least he had the courage to say what was on his mind..."

Not every thought is worthy of expression - especially all the weird shit that comes straight outa your id.  Learn something; grow the fuck up; you're not 9 years old, and you're not the only one in the fucking room - at the very least try to pretend you have enough higher brain function to be allowed out in public.