Politics-What's on your mind?

[Kätzchen]

I saw lots of video footage today showing what the t-p clan was doing in their tent while watching their followers at that rally, and it was so sickening to see the depravity among members of that clan, the lust for power, the warped thinking process articulated with dangerous smiling faces. It is scary, so frightening to see this type of demagoguery worship among not only themselves but those who listen to them and act on every thing they say.

I don't know if I can ever fully say that I think our society is suffering political polarization as much as this type of condition blankets or skirts the elemental processes by which it operates. Not sure I am succinctly describing all I have been thinking about but I do know that I am grateful that there are more of us whose moral compass is nothing like the hateful vitriol we've had to witness over the past several years, if not more.

I tend to think of the body of American society is riddled with a complicated type of 'cancer' by which is fueled by hatred for that which is not white.

I feel frustrated that it took this type of crisis for the proverbial spell to be broken, but it's only the beginning of lots of conscious, hard work and making the decision to commit to, as President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris use as a campaign slogan, Build Back Better.

My heart hurts for our country, and for those of us who have suffered tremendously over the past year, specifically.

So much loss. So much pain. Some critical lessons we need to nail down and actively work on, to become a better people.

[homoe]

I'd bet my bottom dollar old Mitch put a bug in Elaine's ear to resign, but not for the reason she's saying!

I think after what happened Tuesday, Mitch saw that maybe the trying to remove of Trump from office would put her right in the thick of things and best to get out before that happened!

[Cin]

Civil Society Groups Warn Against Anti-Protest Legislation Following Siege of US Capital
"We have to make sure this moment is not used to further anti-protest legislation."

Weaponizing the siege of the U.S. Capitol

When news broke of the white supremacists breaching the U.S. Capitol, multiple news outlets repeated statements labeling the mob as “anarchists,” echoing White House efforts to target “Antifa.”

This type of weaponization of the day’s events to justify efforts to clamp down on protests is raising concerns among civil society groups.

“We have to make sure this moment is not used to further anti-protest legislation,” says Justin Hansford, Founder and Director of Harvard University’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center.

The events on December 6 showcased preferential treatment by law enforcement for white supremacist groups. “The tanks, batons, and tear gas rounds aggressively used against BLM protesters this summer were conspicuously absent when these white supremacists stormed the capitol building,” says Hansford. “At the end of the day, for many people around the world, this incident punctuated not only the delusion of President Trump's supporters but more enduringly, the fundamentally racially tinged nature of police response to public assemblies."

This preferential treatment, also condemed by the National Lawyers Guild, is further proof that any new efforts to strengthen the power law enforcement to clamp down on dissent—such as through domestic terrorism legislation—is “without basis," says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

“This violent mob was allowed to storm the Capitol,” says Verheyden-Hilliard. “The differential treatment that they received, and as compared to the brutal attacks on actual First Amendment protected activity of the racial justice movement, is stunning. Capitol police have all the weapons, tactics and personnel at their disposal but they made an obvious decision not to deploy them. The last thing we need is to allow this right-wing attack on the Capitol to become a vehicle to give police more tools to clamp down on the progressive, peaceful social justice movement.” (The DC Police purchased over $130,000 worth of tear gas just before the November 2020 election and turned down offers from the Pentagon for backup.)

Chip Gibbons, Policy Director for Defending Rights and Dissent agrees. “While we condemn these crimes against democracy, such antics cannot be used to justify new repressive measures against actual protests, restrictions of the right of peaceful assembly, or curtailment of speech,” said Gibbons in a statement.

Groups including Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Center for Protest Law and Litigation, Defending Rights & Dissent and Justice for Muslims Collective are demanding probes into the federal and local police planning and response to Wednesday’s events.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2...owing-siege-us

[Orema]

In Capital, a G.O.P. Crisis. At the R.N.C. Meeting, a Trump Celebration.
Party members at a gathering of the Republican National Committee endorsed President Trump as the man to lead the party forward, ignoring the turmoil in Washington.

By Jonathan Martin
Jan. 8, 2021


Ronna McDaniel was re-elected as chair of the Republican National Committee despite the party’s loss of the presidency and the Senate. Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — In Washington, Republicans were dealing with a burgeoning crisis in their ranks, with high-profile resignations and bitter infighting over how to deal with an erratic and isolated president. But at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting on Friday, most party members were operating in a parallel universe.

In a chandelier-adorned ballroom at the seaside Ritz-Carlton here, there was no mention of President Trump’s disruption of the coronavirus relief package or his phone call to the Georgia secretary of state demanding that he help steal the election, both of which contributed to Republicans’ losing control of the Senate.

And while the R.N.C. chair, Ronna McDaniel, condemned the attack on the Capitol, neither she nor any other speaker so much as publicly hinted at Mr. Trump’s role in inciting a mob assault on America’s seat of government.

Even as the president faces a possible second impeachment proceeding, this collective exercise in gaze aversion was not the most striking part of the meeting. More revealing was the reason for the silence from the stage: Party members, one after another, said in interviews that the president did not bear any blame for the violence at the Capitol and indicated that they wanted him to continue to play a leading role in the party.

“I surely embrace President Trump,” said Michele Fiore, the committeewoman from Nevada, where Republicans have lost two Senate races and the governorship since 2016. Ms. Fiore, who was sporting a Trump-emblazoned vest, said the president was “absolutely” a positive force in the party.

The fealty to Mr. Trump was made plain on Friday when the state chairs and the committeemen and women who make up the R.N.C.’s governing board unanimously re-elected Ms. McDaniel, Mr. Trump’s handpicked chair. They also reappointed her co-chair, Tommy Hicks, who was first appointed to his post because of his friendship with the president’s eldest son.

Mr. Trump is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over the loss of the White House, the House and the Senate in a single term and will be the first since Andrew Johnson to boycott his successor’s inauguration. That hasn’t yet fazed the Republican rank and file.

“This room, they’re in denial, and that’s on the record,” Bill Palatucci, a committeeman from New Jersey, said during a break in the Friday session, acknowledging the “damage done to the country” and the Republican “brand” this week.

But Mr. Palatucci was a lonely voice of dissent, at least in public.

Privately, a group of Republican officials, mostly those from the pre-Trump establishment wing of the party, said that they were appalled by the president’s conduct and that Ms. McDaniel had been candid about the party’s difficulties behind closed doors.

These Republicans predicted with more hope than confidence that once Mr. Trump was out of office, the ardor for him in the conservative base would cool.

Yet for now, the flames still burn.

“I would love to see him go into states that have some House seats we can flip in ’22,” said Terry Lathan, the Alabama G.OP. chair, who said “absolutely not” when she was asked if Mr. Trump bore any blame for the attack on the Capitol.

When a committee member took an informal survey on whose closed-door speech on Thursday members had liked better, that of Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota or of Nikki R. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, the response was clear. The party officials preferred Ms. Noem’s, because she had not criticized Mr. Trump as Ms. Haley did in her remarks, a Republican familiar with the sampling said.

Earlier in the day on Thursday, when the president briefly called into a breakfast meeting, he was greeted by applause. And when the Missouri national committeeman, Gordon Kinne, said at the breakfast that he was a supporter of the president but had been upset by his comments about the violence at the Capitol, he was met with a generally frosty response, according to another committee member in the room.

The loyalty to Mr. Trump results in part from the turnover on the committee during his term. The president’s top political lieutenants intervened to install loyalists in state and local G.O.P. conventions ahead of 2020. The goal was to prevent any party rule changes that could have made it easier to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Trump, but the end result was to leave the committee heavy with Trump devotees.

The changes also accelerated a trend that pre-dated Mr. Trump’s rise: the evolution of the committee from a body filled with canny political professionals and power brokers in their states to one dominated by dogmatic partisans well-marinated in Fox News and Facebook memes.

Perhaps more significant, the president has fostered a new wave of activism on the right — and many longstanding G.O.P. leaders fear alienating these newcomers to party politics.

“We can’t exist without the people he brought to the party — he’s changed the direction of the party,” said Paul Reynolds, the Republican committeeman from Alabama. “We’re a different party because of the people that came with him, and they make us a better party.”

Reta Hamilton, a committeewoman from Arkansas, said Mr. Trump should play “a leading part” in the G.O.P. in the future for just that reason — “to bring his voters,” she said.

Ms. Hamilton and other R.N.C. members also sought to rationalize questions about the damage to the Capitol and the images of Trump banners and Confederate flags littering the building.

“What was your reaction to Black Lives Matter looting and robbing and killing people?” she shot back brazenly before walking away.

Steve Scheffler, a committeeman from Iowa, was equally quick to invoke last summer’s at times destructive protests over racial justice and the news media’s coverage of them.

“Why doesn’t the press condemn the violence that happened in Portland and Seattle?” said Mr. Scheffler. “It’s a double standard.”

Asked if he felt there was an equivalence between the left-wing protests of 2020 and the violent attempt to subvert the election this week, he said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s all bad.”

In her remarks to the committee, Ms. McDaniel, the niece of Senator Mitt Romney, thanked Mr. Trump for his faith in her and never directly acknowledged that Mr. Trump had been defeated, only referring to her frustration at “losing critical elections.”

As for the president’s own denial about his loss, she did not rebut the conspiracy theories he has pushed, and that the party’s base has echoed.

Addressing the Republican “grass roots,” she vowed to work with state legislatures to “make sure what we saw in this election never happens again.”

Ms. McDaniel went on to criticize the effort by House Democrats to withdraw gender-specific words like “wife” and “husband” from the rule book governing the chamber.

The standing ovation she received was a reminder that disdain for the left’s perceived excesses is the most animating, and unifying, force on the right. This brand of oppositional politics could help paper over Republicans’ challenges when they run as the out-of-power party next year.

Indeed, much of Ms. McDaniel’s speech was Republican red meat. There were warnings against socialism, attacks on the four liberal congresswomen known as “the squad” and boasting about the diverse class of lawmakers who helped the party gain House seats in November despite Mr. Trump’s broad unpopularity. “Candidates matter,” she said, alluding to new lawmakers.

David Bossie, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers and the Maryland committeeman, insisted that the party’s losses had been on the margins.

“You don’t have to throw out everybody when there’s nothing fundamentally wrong,” Mr. Bossie said.

A handful of committee members, however, believe more reflection is desperately needed, particularly after this week. “We’re whistling past the graveyard,” said Henry Barbour, the Mississippi committeeman, who called Mr. Trump’s conduct before the riot “totally unacceptable.”

Few of his counterparts, though, would criticize the president.

Asked if Mr. Trump was still the effective leader of the G.O.P., the Wyoming Republican chair, Frank Eathorne, said, “The way Wyoming sees it, yes.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/u...gtype=Homepage

[homoe]

~~
Voss, Chao, Mulvaney, the list goes on and on...

Really, now after 3 years and 50 weeks, you've finally saw what an idiot you've been ass kissing and brown nosing?! OR perhaps just now you're realizing soon you'll be out of a job and are trying to cover your ass!

[GeorgiaMa'am]

Originally Posted by homoe

~~
Voss, Chao, Mulvaney, the list goes on and on...

Really, now after 3 years and 50 weeks, you've finally saw what an idiot you've been ass kissing and brown nosing?! OR perhaps just now you're realizing soon you'll be out of a job and are trying to cover your ass!

Thank goodness some die-hard Republicans are starting to turn their backs on T***p and his legacy, for whatever reason. The RNC is delusional, claiming they want Trump to continue to lead the party, even after everything that culminated in this past week's sh*t storm. I welcome any of them who want to adopt a more centrist, if not Democratic, position. And if any of them truly see the light, well Hallelujah!

[homoe]

WASHINGTON — One of his most important early backers now says supporting him "was the worst mistake I ever made in my life" and a top donor called for him to be censured by the Senate. The largest newspapers in his home state called on him to resign. His publisher canceled its contract with him for an upcoming book. He's been pilloried by both Democrats and Republicans for leading the futile objection effort.

That's just some of the condemnation that's come Sen. Josh Hawley's way since the Missouri Republican became the first senator to announce he would object to the counting of Electoral College votes and then moved forward with his plan even after a pro-President Donald Trump mob had stormed the Capitol on Wednesday.

And a viral photo of Hawley entering the Capitol before the riot, showing the senator in a slim-fitting suit, hair perfectly coiffed and raising his fist toward the gathered crowd, has already become a lasting image of a day that won't soon be forgotten.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/sen-josh-...203731306.html

[Cin]

Originally Posted by Orema

In Capital, a G.O.P. Crisis. At the R.N.C. Meeting, a Trump Celebration.
Party members at a gathering of the Republican National Committee endorsed President Trump as the man to lead the party forward, ignoring the turmoil in Washington.

By Jonathan Martin
Jan. 8, 2021


Ronna McDaniel was re-elected as chair of the Republican National Committee despite the party’s loss of the presidency and the Senate. Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — In Washington, Republicans were dealing with a burgeoning crisis in their ranks, with high-profile resignations and bitter infighting over how to deal with an erratic and isolated president. But at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting on Friday, most party members were operating in a parallel universe.

In a chandelier-adorned ballroom at the seaside Ritz-Carlton here, there was no mention of President Trump’s disruption of the coronavirus relief package or his phone call to the Georgia secretary of state demanding that he help steal the election, both of which contributed to Republicans’ losing control of the Senate.

And while the R.N.C. chair, Ronna McDaniel, condemned the attack on the Capitol, neither she nor any other speaker so much as publicly hinted at Mr. Trump’s role in inciting a mob assault on America’s seat of government.

Even as the president faces a possible second impeachment proceeding, this collective exercise in gaze aversion was not the most striking part of the meeting. More revealing was the reason for the silence from the stage: Party members, one after another, said in interviews that the president did not bear any blame for the violence at the Capitol and indicated that they wanted him to continue to play a leading role in the party.

“I surely embrace President Trump,” said Michele Fiore, the committeewoman from Nevada, where Republicans have lost two Senate races and the governorship since 2016. Ms. Fiore, who was sporting a Trump-emblazoned vest, said the president was “absolutely” a positive force in the party.

The fealty to Mr. Trump was made plain on Friday when the state chairs and the committeemen and women who make up the R.N.C.’s governing board unanimously re-elected Ms. McDaniel, Mr. Trump’s handpicked chair. They also reappointed her co-chair, Tommy Hicks, who was first appointed to his post because of his friendship with the president’s eldest son.

Mr. Trump is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over the loss of the White House, the House and the Senate in a single term and will be the first since Andrew Johnson to boycott his successor’s inauguration. That hasn’t yet fazed the Republican rank and file.

“This room, they’re in denial, and that’s on the record,” Bill Palatucci, a committeeman from New Jersey, said during a break in the Friday session, acknowledging the “damage done to the country” and the Republican “brand” this week.

But Mr. Palatucci was a lonely voice of dissent, at least in public.

Privately, a group of Republican officials, mostly those from the pre-Trump establishment wing of the party, said that they were appalled by the president’s conduct and that Ms. McDaniel had been candid about the party’s difficulties behind closed doors.

These Republicans predicted with more hope than confidence that once Mr. Trump was out of office, the ardor for him in the conservative base would cool.

Yet for now, the flames still burn.

“I would love to see him go into states that have some House seats we can flip in ’22,” said Terry Lathan, the Alabama G.OP. chair, who said “absolutely not” when she was asked if Mr. Trump bore any blame for the attack on the Capitol.

When a committee member took an informal survey on whose closed-door speech on Thursday members had liked better, that of Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota or of Nikki R. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, the response was clear. The party officials preferred Ms. Noem’s, because she had not criticized Mr. Trump as Ms. Haley did in her remarks, a Republican familiar with the sampling said.

Earlier in the day on Thursday, when the president briefly called into a breakfast meeting, he was greeted by applause. And when the Missouri national committeeman, Gordon Kinne, said at the breakfast that he was a supporter of the president but had been upset by his comments about the violence at the Capitol, he was met with a generally frosty response, according to another committee member in the room.

The loyalty to Mr. Trump results in part from the turnover on the committee during his term. The president’s top political lieutenants intervened to install loyalists in state and local G.O.P. conventions ahead of 2020. The goal was to prevent any party rule changes that could have made it easier to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Trump, but the end result was to leave the committee heavy with Trump devotees.

The changes also accelerated a trend that pre-dated Mr. Trump’s rise: the evolution of the committee from a body filled with canny political professionals and power brokers in their states to one dominated by dogmatic partisans well-marinated in Fox News and Facebook memes.

Perhaps more significant, the president has fostered a new wave of activism on the right — and many longstanding G.O.P. leaders fear alienating these newcomers to party politics.

“We can’t exist without the people he brought to the party — he’s changed the direction of the party,” said Paul Reynolds, the Republican committeeman from Alabama. “We’re a different party because of the people that came with him, and they make us a better party.”

Reta Hamilton, a committeewoman from Arkansas, said Mr. Trump should play “a leading part” in the G.O.P. in the future for just that reason — “to bring his voters,” she said.

Ms. Hamilton and other R.N.C. members also sought to rationalize questions about the damage to the Capitol and the images of Trump banners and Confederate flags littering the building.

“What was your reaction to Black Lives Matter looting and robbing and killing people?” she shot back brazenly before walking away.

Steve Scheffler, a committeeman from Iowa, was equally quick to invoke last summer’s at times destructive protests over racial justice and the news media’s coverage of them.

“Why doesn’t the press condemn the violence that happened in Portland and Seattle?” said Mr. Scheffler. “It’s a double standard.”

Asked if he felt there was an equivalence between the left-wing protests of 2020 and the violent attempt to subvert the election this week, he said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s all bad.”

In her remarks to the committee, Ms. McDaniel, the niece of Senator Mitt Romney, thanked Mr. Trump for his faith in her and never directly acknowledged that Mr. Trump had been defeated, only referring to her frustration at “losing critical elections.”

As for the president’s own denial about his loss, she did not rebut the conspiracy theories he has pushed, and that the party’s base has echoed.

Addressing the Republican “grass roots,” she vowed to work with state legislatures to “make sure what we saw in this election never happens again.”

Ms. McDaniel went on to criticize the effort by House Democrats to withdraw gender-specific words like “wife” and “husband” from the rule book governing the chamber.

The standing ovation she received was a reminder that disdain for the left’s perceived excesses is the most animating, and unifying, force on the right. This brand of oppositional politics could help paper over Republicans’ challenges when they run as the out-of-power party next year.

Indeed, much of Ms. McDaniel’s speech was Republican red meat. There were warnings against socialism, attacks on the four liberal congresswomen known as “the squad” and boasting about the diverse class of lawmakers who helped the party gain House seats in November despite Mr. Trump’s broad unpopularity. “Candidates matter,” she said, alluding to new lawmakers.

David Bossie, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers and the Maryland committeeman, insisted that the party’s losses had been on the margins.

“You don’t have to throw out everybody when there’s nothing fundamentally wrong,” Mr. Bossie said.

A handful of committee members, however, believe more reflection is desperately needed, particularly after this week. “We’re whistling past the graveyard,” said Henry Barbour, the Mississippi committeeman, who called Mr. Trump’s conduct before the riot “totally unacceptable.”

Few of his counterparts, though, would criticize the president.

Asked if Mr. Trump was still the effective leader of the G.O.P., the Wyoming Republican chair, Frank Eathorne, said, “The way Wyoming sees it, yes.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/u...gtype=Homepage

This is quite disturbing. Although I don't know why I'm surprised. This is the Republican Party. This is who they are.

Apparently they are not at all concerned that Trump will be impeached.

All the clutching of pearls by members of the GOP, it's all for show. I guess there will be no price to pay for all the elected officials of the Republican party who participated in this attack on the Capitol or publically supported the riot.

This is all too disheartening. People don't change their minds. People believe what they believe at their core. We all think the other would change their minds if they just understood the truth. The line between fact and fiction has been so blurred that truth is considered a matter of opinion.

[Orema]

Originally Posted by Cin

This is quite disturbing. Although I don't know why I'm surprised. This is the Republican Party. This is who they are.

Apparently they are not at all concerned that Trump will be impeached.

All the clutching of pearls by members of the GOP, it's all for show. I guess there will be no price to pay for all the elected officials of the Republican party who participated in this attack on the Capitol or publically supported the riot.

This is all too disheartening. People don't change their minds. People believe what they believe at their core. We all think the other would change their minds if they just understood the truth. The line between fact and fiction has been so blurred that truth is considered a matter of opinion.

Exactly............

[Cin]

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill
That was then and this is now.
Now they change lies for truth and truth for lies and they don't hurry off, they stand there smug and content with what they have accomplished. No need to fear the truth today. One can wiggle out of any inconvenient truth.

Apparently the formula for turning lies into truth is to simply share the lie with like minded folk and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Before this over it will be Antifa who stormed the Capitol to make these poor, good hearted, special, god fearing patriots look bad.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2...l-rumor-sprea/