Democratic Party detachment from reality and its internal weakness

An article in The Guardian that PD cited discusses the weakness of the Democratic Party. It is weak opposition to the Republican Party neo-fascist threat now gaining power over American government and society. The Guardian writes in a review of the book, This Will Not Pass, Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future:

This Will Not Pass is a blockbuster. Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns deliver 473 pages of essential reading. The two New York Times reporters depict an enraged Republican party, besotted by and beholden to Donald Trump. They portray a Democratic party led by Joe Biden as, in equal measure, inept and out of touch. 

On election day 2020, the country simply sought to restore a modicum of normalcy. Nothing else. Even as Biden racked up a 7m-vote plurality, Republicans gained 16 House seats. There was no mandate. Think checks, balances and plenty of fear.

Biden owes his job to suburban moms and dads, not the woke. As the liberal Brookings Institution put it in a post-election report, “Biden’s victory came from the suburbs”.

Said differently, the label of socialism, the reality of rising crime, a clamor for open borders and demands for defunding the police almost cost Democrats the presidency. As a senator, Biden knew culture mattered. Whether his party has internalized any lessons, though, is doubtful.

This Will Not Pass also amplifies the disdain senior Democrats hold for the “Squad”, those members of the Democratic left wing who cluster round Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Martin and Burns quote Steve Ricchetti, a Biden counselor: “The problem with the left … is that they don’t understand that they lost.”

Cedric Richmond, a senior Biden adviser and former dean of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), is less diplomatic. He describes the squad as “fucking idiots”. Richmond also takes exception to AOC pushing back at the vice-president, Kamala Harris, for telling undocumented migrants “do not come.”

This Will Not Pass also attempts to do justice to Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona senator and “former Green party activist who reinvented herself as Fortune 500-loving moderate”. In addition to helping block Biden’s domestic agenda, Sinema has a knack for performative behavior and close ties to Republicans.

Like Sarah Palin, she is fond of her own physique. The senator “boasted knowingly to colleagues and aides that her cleavage had an extraordinary persuasive effect on the uptight men of the GOP”.

It is not clear what can be done to fix the Dems. At this point, probably nothing. They cannot see the reality of the neo-fascist threat. They are distracted by internal bickering. How the 2022 and 2024 elections will play out ought to make reasonably clear whether the Dems will remain a significant source of opposition.

 

Some history on how the gun industry came to power

This 17 minute interview with historian Heather Cox Richardson describes some the history of the rise of the NRA to power. It still exerts enough power to block federal gun regulation legislation that a vast majority of Americans support. The Republican Party is firmly in the grip of the NRA in large part because gun demagogic propaganda has a firm grip on most of the GOP rank and file. Republican politicians still fear NRA opposition. They feel they need to tow the NRA line to stay in power, contrary public opinion be damned. 

In a comment on this, PD wrote:

The NRA doesn't have as much power as it did even 5 yrs ago, due to a bankruptcy and other troubles. But the their cause, and reputation on the Right remain intact because the socialization of 2 generations of Republicans into the GOP-style gun culture described by Richardson, has been so effective that, as one expert on gun violence says, "the machine can run on auto-pilot, with or without the NRA at this point." In essence, few GOP candidates want to defy the "base" on this issue anymore than on Trump, Roe, Climate Science and other issues that have now become emblematic of the Republican Identity.  

I am just as disgusted by the foolishness and detachment from reality in the Dem party as by the (to me) well-known depravity of Trump and his sycophantic GOP. The Dems present profiles in cowardice, and have not acted on the historical truth that they are under siege by a no-compromise party intent on winning by extra and/or anti-constitutional means if necessary, and imposing its ideology on the majority of Americans. .... Add the petty infighting between moderates and progressives (even worse than it seems from the headlines) and you get a weak and amorphous Dem party not only hated by all hard core Repubs, but increasingly by those who expected them to find common cause in the face of the GOP threat, and put aside differences for later on.

I'll keep warning about the Republican Party, the power of its propaganda and lies Leviathan as long as I can. The day may come fairly soon (~4-6 years ?) that people like me will be shut up by threats or force. Opposition will be deemed national security threats or whatever other excuse that Republican Party focus group data says would work best to crush opposition while still looking be democratic. That would start in earnest after Republican neo-fascism has come into full power. The process is likely to take shape after the 2022 elections.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for his comments and bringing this interview to my attention.

A Fox News version in Canada? Is it POSSIBLE?

 

Would Poilievre fund a Fox News Canada?

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/05/27/opinion/would-poilievre-fund-fox-news-canada

It’s not often coups get planned in broad daylight, much less with coverage by the media, but that seems to be what’s unfolding in Hungary right now. In a special meeting of the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, America’s aspiring autocrats are taking lessons from Europe’s most successful one: Viktor Orbán.

Hungary’s prime minister, who has spent his 12 years in power transforming the country from a functioning democracy to a de facto fascist state, laid out a 12-point blueprint for how other Christian conservatives can follow in his footsteps. Chief among those points was the role the media, and Orbán’s control over it, has played in his Fidesz party’s consolidation of power.

“Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left,” he told the CPAC audience. “The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

Orbán clearly practices what he preaches. In Hungary’s most recent election, state-controlled media outlets made it almost impossible for opposition candidates to have their message heard, much less supported. As the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said in a report, “The campaign itself was characterized by a pervasive overlap between the ruling coalition’s campaign messages and the government’s information campaigns, amplifying the advantage of the ruling coalition and blurring the line between state and party.”

As American scholar and former assistant secretary of state J. Brian Atwood wrote in a recent op-ed, Orbán’s populist message in the recent Hungarian election blamed immigrants, universities, Muslims and the LGBT community, along with “faceless bureaucrats in Brussels,” for the country’s problems. “Orbán’s drift over time toward corrupt autocratic power and xenophobic populism is a case study of how democracies can be perverted,” he wrote.

To other European nations, Hungary’s retreat from democracy is hard to watch. But for the Trumpist right, it’s a how-to guide for the 2024 election and beyond. Orbán told the Trumpist Republicans in attendance at CPAC that they should run shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight “24-7” in order to bend the broader narrative in their favour.

That’s a lesson Canadian conservatives who are watching at a distance could also take to heart. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Stephen Harper was tweeting his delight at Orbán’s 2018 election victory. “Congratulations to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Hungary's Fidesz for winning a decisive fourth term! The IDU [International Democratic Union, an international alliance of conservative parties] and I are looking forward to working with you.”

Canada isn’t in any danger of embracing Hungarian-style fascism, but Orbán’s manipulation of the media could easily serve as an inspiration for our conservatives — and specifically the one poised to become leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Already, we’ve seen Alberta Premier Jason Kenney use tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund a “War Room” in order to shift the narrative around Alberta’s oil and gas industry and get his own call-in radio show from one of the province’s biggest radio stations. Doug Ford’s government beat him to the punch here by creating Ontario News Now, a blatant attempt to do an end-run around actual journalists and their pesky questions. And, of course, the ultra-cozy relationship between his director of media relations, Ivana Yelich, and Postmedia columnist Brian Lilley speaks for itself.

But the big prize is at the federal level, and that’s where this campaign to sideline the media will almost certainly move next. In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, Conservative leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre hinted he had plans to rejig the Canadian media landscape. “(Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policies) make the entire media apparatus dependent on the goodwill of the state,” he said. “I haven’t made an announcement on exactly how I’m going to fix that problem yet, but … stay tuned.”

Defunding the CBC, as Poilievre has promised to do numerous times, might not be the hill he really wants to die on. But reviving Sun TV, the failed attempt from a decade ago to create a Canadian version of Fox News, could theoretically be on the table.

If Poilievre wanted to do that, ensuring the mandatory carriage status it was denied in 2013 by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) would go a long way towards meeting Orbán’s prescription. It would fill Canada’s airways with openly partisan — and unapologetically conservative — content and force millions of Canadians to pay for it. Poilievre has never said he would fund a right-wing media operation like this, but it’s not hard to see why he would try.

If it did ever happen, the Trudeau Liberals would have to be credited with an unintentional assist. By opening the door to government funding of media organizations and outlets, they have invited conservatives to test the limits of what does and doesn’t qualify as journalism. And while the first iteration of Sun TV was a clunky attempt at cloning Fox News, it’s hard to imagine the people behind it didn’t learn from their mistakes.

There will be no Ezra Levant in the next version, as just one example. The production values will be better, if only because they probably couldn’t be any worse. And conservative pundits and politicians have years of gaslighting practice on issues like free speech and diversity of opinion that they could easily bring to bear on the government regulators at the CRTC.

So brace yourself, Canada. We’re not at risk of backsliding away from democracy the way Hungary has and America’s Republicans clearly want to, but Harper and the IDU are almost certainly still working with Orbán in one way or another.

If they get their way, our media ecosystem may soon get even more conservative than it already is.

The Republican Strategy to make climate change worse

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs. -- The one and only mention of climate change in Rick Scott’s 11-point Republican Party plan to destroy America

 

Yes, there really is a GOP strategy to make sure climate change is not interfered with. This is serious and real, not a joke. The Republican Party goal is staunch, all-out support for continuing to pollute as usual. That Tragedy of the Commons strategy will continue to provide profits to polluters, campaign contributions for Republicans and more environmental damage and misery for the rest of us. The New York Times writes:

How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action

Legislators and their allies are running an aggressive campaign that uses public money and the law to pressure businesses they say are pushing “woke” causes.

In West Virginia, the state treasurer has pulled money from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, because the Wall Street firm has flagged climate change as an economic risk.

In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels. Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.

And officials in Utah and Idaho have assailed a major ratings agency for considering environmental risks and other factors, in addition to the balance sheet, when assessing states’ creditworthiness.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.

“We’re an energy state, and energy accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue for us,” said Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer. “All of our jobs come from coal and gas. I mean, this is who we are. This is part of our way of life here in the state. And they’re telling us that these industries are bad.”

“We have an existential threat here,” Mr. Moore said. “We have to fight back.”

In doing so, Mr. Moore and others have pushed climate change from the scientific realm into the political battles already raging over topics like voting rights, abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In recent months, conservatives have moved beyond tough words and used legislative and financial leverage to pressure the private sector to drop climate action and any other causes they label as “woke.”

“There is a coordinated effort to chill corporate engagement on these issues,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares, chief executive of the Leadership Now Project, a nonprofit organization that wants corporations to address threats to democracy. “And it is an effective campaign. Companies are starting to go into hiding.”

Once again, the GOP’s abject moral rot with its anti-democratic neo-fascism is on display in broad daylight for woke minds to see. Unwoke minds are not going to see it. To those closed minds, climate change is a Chinese hoax, Democratic Party socialist ploy, Democratic pedophilia, liberal atheism or whatever other slanders the Republican propagandists’ focus group data says will be most effective for trapping minds in the GOP’s various mental sewers.

“AMERICANS DESERVE TO KNOW WHAT WE WILL DO WHEN GIVEN THE CHANCE TO GOVERN.” — Rick Scott’s 11-point plan to screw us once the GOP gets back in power, which is going to be pretty soon; what they are going to do is defend and expand pollution and their campaign contributions

Rick Scott’s lies and slanders at the start of  

his evil neo-fascist plan

Bad COVID news

The Washington Post writes:

Vaccines may not prevent many symptoms of long covid, study suggests 

A large U.S. study looking at whether vaccination protects against long covid showed the shots have only a slight protective effect: Being vaccinated appeared to reduce the risk of lung and blood clot disorders, but did little to protect against most other symptoms.

The new paper, published Wednesday in Nature Medicine, is part of a series of studies by the Department of Veterans Affairs on the impact of the coronavirus, and was based on 33,940 people who experienced breakthrough infections after vaccination.

The data confirms the large body of research that shows vaccination greatly reduces the risk of death or serious illness. But there was more ambiguity regarding long covid.  

Six months after their initial diagnosis of covid, people in the study who were vaccinated had only a slightly reduced risk of getting long covid — 15 percent overall. The greatest benefit appeared to be in reducing blood clotting and lung complications. But there was no difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated when it came to longer-term risks of neurological issues, gastrointestinal symptoms, kidney failure and other conditions.  

At the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s Post-Acute COVID Syndrome Clinic, Christina Martin, an advance practice nurse, said that since November, her staff has noticed a “worrying trend” of vaccinated people having breakthrough infections and developing long covid.

When the clinic was founded a year ago, she said, they anticipated seeing fewer new patients by this time as more people became vaccinated. Unfortunately, they’ve seen the opposite, with patient numbers going up.

“We now feel that long covid is here to stay. … This will have profound implications on our health-care system and resources,” Martin said.

This is not good. It seemed reasonable to think that vaccinated and boosted people would have reduced chances of getting all kinds of long covid disease. Apparently, that is not the case if this data holds up. Given how large the database is, 33,940 patients, this finding is probably reliable.

It's beginning to look like covid is just never going to go away. The human species just cannot get its act together to fight this. Self-serving crackpots and liars like Faux News and Republican Party elites feed the endless torrent of disinformation, confusion and stupidity, which helps stymie efforts to deal with this. That is not going to change. Dark free speech is legal. It is necessary to keep radical right neo-fascists in power and wealth. Covid has and still is costing trillions, but we just cannot do squat about it on a global scale. 

Maybe it's time to accept this new risk as another bad new normal for a long time to come. Maybe forever.

US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wins GOP primary in Georgia

A defiant U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene easily defeated five fellow Republicans on Tuesday in a primary race that showed her conservative Georgia constituents standing steadfastly beside her after a turbulent freshman term.

Greene showed no signs of mellowing in her victory speech late Tuesday. She called, as she has in the past, for the impeachment of President Joe Biden and dismissed his election as the product of “fraudulent electoral votes.” She likened pandemic mask and vaccine mandates to “medical tyranny,” and bemoaned “the cruel and illegal treatment of many nonviolent Jan. 6 protesters.”

Greene called Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell one of Congress’ “failed leaders” and said to loud applause that she’s part of a “majority who even now wants to see Hillary Clinton in jail.”

“Sending me back to Washington will send a message to the bloodsucking establishment: It is we who will set the policy agenda for the next decade and not them,” Greene said. She added: “We’re going to start speaking the truth more forcefully and more loudly than ever before.”

Greene, 47, will be back on the ballot in November facing Democrat Marcus Flowers in northwest Georgia’s 14th District, a seat drawn to give Republicans a huge advantage. Flowers, an Army veteran who raised $8.1 million, easily beat two other candidates in the Democratic primary.

Greene became a celebrity of the Republican Party's far-right fringe with her election two years ago as she embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and engaged in conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.

Greene spoke at an event organized by a white nationalist where the crowd chanted “Putin!” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and launched other partisan attacks that critics said promoted racism and violence.

Greene remained on the primary ballot Tuesday in Georgia's 14th Congressional District after a failed effort to disqualify her by opposing voters. They argued Greene engaged in insurrection by encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that disrupted Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Georgia's secretary of state and an administrative law judge dismissed the claims.

Still, fellow Republicans refused to give Greene a free ride to reelection. Though her first term won loyal followers, it left others in the GOP embarrassed.

Leading the slate of Republicans running to oust Greene in the primary was Jennifer Strahan, founder of a suburban Atlanta health care advisory firm who pitched herself to voters as a “no-nonsense conservative.”

“This is not the time for unserious politicians who just want to hear themselves talk,” Strahan said in one campaign ad, without mentioning Greene by name. In another she stated bluntly: “Our current U.S. representative isn’t doing her job.”

Greene was stripped of her committee assignments last year by House Democrats who accused her of spreading violent and hateful conspiracies. In recent months, Greene got banned from Twitter for spreading coronavirus misinformation.

Green has been largely unrepentant. In a campaign ad posted recently to her Facebook page, she calls Biden and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “communist Democrats” who “hate America, hate God and hate our way of life.”

Greene proved popular enough that she raised more than $9 million for her reelection bid, placing her among the year’s top fundraisers in Congress, according to the Federal Election Commission. Greene spent more than $6.6 million before the primary.

Strahan's $391,000 in fundraising trailed far behind Greene but dwarfed that of other Republican contenders — retired physician Charles Lutin, engineer James Haygood, Marine Corps veteran Seth Synstelien and logistics executive Eric Cunningham.

Spanning a stretch of northwest Georgia from metro Atlanta to the state line at Chattanooga, Tennessee, Greene's district was drawn to favor Republicans even after state lawmakers slightly shifted its boundaries during redistricting last year.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/us-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-wins-gop-primary-in-georgia/ar-AAXGiqa?ocid=mailsignout&li=AAggNb9