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Post by jdredd on Jun 13, 2020 9:33:17 GMT -5
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Post by jdredd on Aug 25, 2020 1:59:56 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/opinion/trump-conservatives-republicans.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage"The “party of ideas” is a phrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to describe the Republican Party in the early 1980s; today, large segments of the party are anti-intellectual, anti-science and dismissive of medical experts, to the point that it has turned wearing masks during a pandemic that’s spread by respiratory droplets into a “culture war” issue. The party of law and order aggressively defends a president who is lawless. A party that for many years positioned itself as the defender of objective truth, a bulwark against subjectivism and ethical relativism, has as its leader a serially dishonest man who is engaged in a daily assault on reality. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump praised the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who spread the false narrative that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — and just last week the president praised QAnon, which Kevin Roose of The Times describes as “a sprawling set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.” The lunacy and paranoia that was once on the fringe is now becoming more and more mainstream, which is hardly what one would expect to see in a serious, thoughtful conservative movement."
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Post by jdredd on Sept 2, 2020 17:19:33 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/us/politics/Joni-ernst-Covid-deaths.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage"As Iowa sees a sharp spike in coronavirus cases, Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican in a tight race for re-election, echoed a debunked conspiracy theory that Covid-19 deaths were being greatly inflated and suggested that health care providers had a financial motive to falsify cases. Ms. Ernst said she was “so skeptical” of the government’s national statistics about virus fatalities during a visit on Monday to Waterloo, a city in northeast Iowa. “They’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly Covid-19,” Ms. Ernst said. “I’m just really curious. It would be interesting to know that.” Ms. Ernst’s comments seemed to repeat a false claim spread by President Trump on Twitter over the weekend, which the company removed for violating its rules against sharing disinformation because it is linked to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory." Wow, the Republicans have really gone off the deep end, yet they will probably keep the Senate and WH. A reckoning will come, just not in 2020 I guess.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 25, 2020 20:23:11 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/opinion/amy-coney-barrett-scotus.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage "Republican lawmakers recognize that the party’s policy positions, what few it has left, anyway, tend to lack broad appeal. Unwilling or unable to win the battle of ideas in areas such as health care and immigration, they are content to outsource the work — and risk — to the judicial branch. As the Republican commentator Amanda Carpenter observed on “The Bulwark Podcast” this week, over the past decade, Republicans gave up on consensus building and doing “the hard work of passing laws,” and instead are aiming to “have the courts solve our problems.” Even with total control of the government, Republicans failed to repeal and replace Obamacare, which they had been promising for years. Instead, they have kicked it to the courts to dismantle. Republicans understand that ideas matter. They also know that having apparently run out of appealing ones, they must find other ways to exert power. For them, these court fights are increasingly a matter of political life and death." Of course they can still run around yelling "The Socialist are coming, the Socialists are coming!"
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Post by jdredd on Oct 19, 2020 16:05:01 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/us/politics/qanon-trump-republicans.html"Across the country, Republicans like Ms. Putnam — longstanding party members who could hardly be described as fringe radicals — are embracing QAnon. The followers of this online phenomenon believe that the Democratic establishment and much of the Republican elite are deeply corrupt, and that Mr. Trump was delivered to save America from both. Urged on by the president, whose espousal of conspiracy theories has only intensified in the waning weeks of his campaign, QAnon adherents are pushing such ideas into the conservative mainstream alongside more traditional issues like low taxes and limited government." "His most ardent supporters, especially QAnon believers, have amplified and further exaggerated his imagined powers. An entire cottage industry of online memes is devoted to photoshopping the president into famous great-man images, like the iconic painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware. It can now be found online with a grinning Mr. Trump pasted over the face of America’s first president. At other times, Mr. Trump is treated as something close to divine. After the president’s coronavirus diagnosis, a prominent QAnon promoter, Brenden Dilley, told listeners of his radio show that Mr. Trump was blessed with “god-tier genetics.” That same reverence was on display at Q Con Live!, a QAnon convention held in late August in Jacksonville, Fla. Much of the program was given over to extolling the accomplishments of Mr. Trump. The words “glory” and “glorious” came up often." God, this is such a hopeful sign Republicans will marginalize their own pathetic party.
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Post by jdredd on Oct 24, 2020 22:28:53 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/opinion/sunday/trump-republican-party.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage"Of all the things President Trump has destroyed, the Republican Party is among the most dismaying. “Destroyed” is perhaps too simplistic, though. It would be more precise to say that Mr. Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals. Tomato, tomahto. However you characterize it, the Republican Party’s dissolution under Mr. Trump is bad for American democracy. A healthy political system needs robust, competing parties to give citizens a choice of ideological, governing and policy visions. More specifically, center-right parties have long been crucial to the health of modern liberal democracies, according to the Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt’s study of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe. Among other benefits, a strong center right can co-opt more palatable aspects of the far right, isolating and draining energy from the more radical elements that threaten to destabilize the system." Yes, one party states suck. What I would like to see is a Democratic Party and an even more democratic party.
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Post by jdredd on Nov 11, 2020 1:02:59 GMT -5
The Republicans are once again disgracing themselves by backing Trump's ludicrous claims of voter fraud.
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Post by jdredd on Nov 21, 2020 1:32:11 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/immigrants-vote-election-politics.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage“The joke,” the political strategist David Shor said in a recent interview, “is that the G.O.P. is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of.” As someone who has spent years reporting in immigrant neighborhoods, I share Mr. Shor’s concerns. The Republican Party’s message of hard work, capitalism and freedom makes sense to large portions of the immigrant population — in fact, it’s why many of them, including my uncle and many of his fellow kitchen workers, chose to plant roots in the country." I guess that's a joke. Perhaps the "multiracial working-class coalition" isn't all it was cracked up to be, if it embraces nationalism and injustice.
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Post by jdredd on Nov 26, 2020 13:26:10 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepagen a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood. What is going on? Many people point to the internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge. This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny. “We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”Over the past decades the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas. While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives. People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war. In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them. People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century. For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want. Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source. What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree. Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation. I almost never post a whole article, but David is so right on with this one I had to..
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Post by jdredd on Jan 14, 2021 13:48:28 GMT -5
www.newsmax.com/politics/peter-navarro-impeachment-big-tech-parler/2021/01/14/id/1005621/"White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, while insisting Thursday President Donald Trump was "legally elected" in November, said the Democratic Party "did violence" to the country by attacking the president and impeaching him in a "travesty" during the last remaining days he has in office. "I will say to these people on Capitol Hill, knock it off," Navarro told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo. "Stop this. Let the man leave peacefully with his dignity. He was the greatest jobs president, the greatest trade negotiator we have ever had in this country's history. This is just wrong what they're doing." Navarro also insisted "if the election was held today" Trump would win again, and "that's what the Democrats fear." "I have never been more pissed off in my life at this place, and I think 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump feel exactly the same way," said Navarro." Here's another guy I will be glad to see crawl back under his (San Diego) rock.
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Post by jdredd on Feb 7, 2021 21:17:53 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/us/politics/liz-cheney-trump.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage"WASHINGTON — Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming waded deeper into Republicans’ identity crisis on Sunday, warning her party on the eve of a Senate impeachment trial not to “look past” former President Donald J. Trump’s role in stoking a violent attack on the Capitol and a culture of conspiracy roosting among their ranks. In her first television interview since fending off an attempt by Mr. Trump’s allies to oust her from House leadership over her vote to impeach him, Ms. Cheney said Republican voters had been “lied to” by a president eager to steal an election with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. She cautioned that the party risked being locked out of power if it did not show a majority of Americans that it could be trusted to lead truthfully. “The notion that the election had been stolen or that the election was rigged was a lie, and people need to understand that,” Ms. Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We need to make sure that we as Republicans are the party of truth, and that we are being honest about what really did happen in 2020 so we actually have a chance to win in 2022 and win the White House back in 2024.” Republicans? The Party of truth? Makes me laugh. But I'm still betting on them making a good showing in 2022. They will be fired up. I wonder what the odds of me still being here are.
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Post by jdredd on Feb 19, 2021 0:59:11 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/republican-party-voters.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage"The Democrats have become the party of the educated metropolitan class. There will always be a lot of Americans who do not share the interests or values of that class and they tend to vote Republican. The party is politically viable, but it is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Under Trump it became an apocalyptic personality cult. But you should know, as I’m sure you do, that there are many Republicans who want to change their party and make it a vehicle for conservative ideas. These people are energized as never before and feel their whole lives have been preparation for the coming moral, intellectual and political struggle. This is a struggle to create a Republican Party that is democratic and not authoritarian, patriotic and not nationalistic, conservative and not reactionary, benevolent and not belligerent, intellectually self-confident and not apocalyptic and dishonest." Once again a columnist stealing my ideas (yeah, right).
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Post by jdredd on Mar 29, 2021 11:13:09 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/us/politics/transgender-girls-sports.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage"South Dakota is just one of a growing number of states where Republicans are diving into a culture war clash that seems to have come out of nowhere. It has been brought about by a coordinated and poll-tested campaign by social conservative organizations like the American Principles Project and Concerned Women for America. The groups are determined to move forward with what may be one of their last footholds in the fight against expanding L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Three other states have passed bills this month that resemble South Dakota’s. In Mississippi and Arkansas, they are set to become law this summer. And similar bills have been introduced by Republicans in two dozen other states, including North Carolina, where an unpopular “bathroom bill” enacted in 2016 prompted costly boycotts and led conservatives nationwide to pull back on efforts to restrict rights for transgender people." Sad that this party has nothing better to do than stick it to transgender kids. But it rallies the dupes.
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Post by jdredd on Apr 24, 2021 12:23:17 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/us/politics/texas-republicans-voting.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage"Twenty-four-hour voting was one of a host of options Harris County introduced to help residents cast ballots, along with drive-through voting and proactively mailing out ballot applications. The new alternatives, tailored to a diverse work force struggling amid a pandemic in Texas’ largest county, helped increase turnout by nearly 10 percent compared with 2016; nearly 70 percent of registered voters cast ballots, and a task force found that there was no evidence of any fraud. Yet Republicans are pushing measures through the State Legislature that would take aim at the very process that produced such a large turnout. Two omnibus bills, including one that the House is likely to take up in the coming week, are seeking to roll back virtually every expansion the county put in place for 2020." When your flawed policies aren't enough to get a majority of voters to vote for your party, you do the next best thing: Try to limit the number of voters.
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Post by jdredd on May 26, 2021 1:36:34 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/opinion/republicans-donald-trump-loyalty.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage"Political scientists have long noted that our two major political parties are very different in their underlying structures. The Democrats are a coalition of interest groups — labor unions, environmentalists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and more. The Republican Party is the vehicle of a cohesive, monolithic movement. This is often described as an ideological movement, although given the twists and turns of recent years — the sudden embrace of protectionism, the attacks on “woke” corporations — the ideology of movement conservatism seems less obvious than its will to power."
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