These are typical, sleazy, disingenuous attacks by Republicans and people on the right who know they can't survive politically without lying early and often! This isn't about democracy or the health of our country, this is only about the power they and their donors want and their attempts to destroy our democracy and undermine it with lies to get their way! They have no integrity and they aren't interested in being public servants. They are addicted to money and power and are psychologically and emotionally sick and deranged! Yet the people they manipulate are oblivious to the ring they have put in their noses!

Jim Jordan spearheads 'cynical' and 'wildly partisan' GOP effort to chill anti-disinformation research - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/jim-jordan-2661568445/

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPLies
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPTreason

"A combination of universities and think tanks have been sounding the alarm about disinformation, warning that outright lies could influence the outcome of elections in the United States. But some Republicans, according to the New York Times, are not happy about their work — including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (D-Ohio) and former Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller.

In an article published by the New York Times on June 19, journalists Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel report that Jordan and others GOP lawmakers are claiming that the anti-disinformation efforts are designed to suppress conservative speech online.

"The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public," Myers and Frenkel explain. "It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough…. Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online."

In Louisiana, Miller, who heads the MAGA group America First Legal, has filed a class-action lawsuit against anti-disinformation researchers — making, Myers and Frenkel report, similar claims to Jordan on the House Intelligence Committee. The Trump ally has described his lawsuit as "striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex," but Miller's critics believe he is the one trying to silence those he disagrees with.

Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, views the GOP attacks on anti-disinformation researchers as disingenuous and misleading.

Hanocck told The Times, "We see it in the media, in the congressional committees and in lawsuits, and it is the same core argument, with a false premise about the government giving some type of direction to the research we do…. We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research, but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to look at tweets we might think violate rules."

Jameel Jaffer, who serves was executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at New York City's Columbia University, is critical of the Republican lawmakers as well.

Jaffer told the Times, "I think it's quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research.""

The GOP leaders and elected representatives plot daily to undermine our democracy and turn the country into an authoritarian oligarchy/theocracy. They violate their oaths of office and are antisocial, greedy, power-hungry sociopaths! And, their supporters/base are all on board with this it seems. They are fine with voter suppression, insurrection, discrimination and violence against minorities, gaming the judiciary and installing a gun-worshipping theocracy as long as it maintains their privileges and prejudices. Sad and discouraging but at least they are a minority and we know what we are up against.

The GOP is an anti-America party - Republicans hate America and don’t care about national security -- Salon
https://read.letterhead.email/standing-room-only/letter/16388?

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesTheConstitution

"Republicans hate America and don’t care about national security

In the least surprising results ever, a new poll from CBS shows only 12% of Republican voters think it’s a crime now to steal nuclear secrets and put them in a ballroom for Russian and Chinese spies to thumb through. Trump was right that they’d forgive him if he committed murder. After all, he sent a mob to murder Mike Pence, and they don’t have a problem with that.

This news is still causing centrist pundits to reel, because they believed the lie that Republicans are a “national security” party. If they ever were — a big if! — that time has long passed. This isn’t just about loyalty to Trump. The GOP has become an anti-American party, so of course they don’t really care if foreign adversaries gain knowledge they could use to undermine or even destroy us.

Harsh, I know, but consider this: Trump attempted a coup to overthrow our democracy. His reward has been that he’s fast-tracked to the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. His fellow Republican politicians talk about him like he’s their god. This isn’t because they’re unaware that he’s a fascist. It’s because they agree with him and think he’s still got the best shot at accomplishing the goal of ending the American experiment.

That’s why Republicans don’t care if truly evil actors like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping get some kind of leverage against the U.S. Tearing the U.S. down and replacing it with a fascist government is also the goal of GOP primary voters. In that sense, foreign adversaries are their allies. For the fans of Tucker “I Heart Putin” Carlson, having some outside help as they rip this country apart is a good thing. So of course they shrug at Trump violating the Espionage Act. "

'Zero courage': Ex-GOP strategist torches members who stand by Trump
https://www.rawstory.com/zero-courage-ex-gop-strategist-torches-the-sergeant-schultz-brigade-of-republicans-defending-trump-2661189855/?

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GreedKillsDemocracy

"An MSNBC panel on Sunday fiercely rebuked the defiantly nonchalant reactions by many Republicans to the historic federal felony charges filed against former President Donald Trump.

"I don't know. After reading those forty-nine pages, it was impossible for the special counsel to not indict Donald Trump," host Jonathan Capehart opined.

Capehart's guest, ex-Republican strategist Matthew Dowd, showed no mercy toward Trump's defenders.

"Well, you know, it, it's as if, if Mike Pence is saying, 'if Donald Trump breaks the law, nobody should ever hold him accountable.' That's actually what he's saying. And as I listen to Christina, who's absolutely right about this, about Mike Pence — but Mike Pence is just one of many — is that I'm reminded of what Maya Angelou said, which is courage is the most important of all the virtues because it's the only one that allows us to practice the other virtues consistently," Dowd said.

"There is a complete abject lack of courage of Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, every, uh McCarthy, Speaker McCarthy," Dowd continued. "All these others have zero cur courage, zero courage, and the other one — so you put that in one bucket — the other bucket that I think is most, is also upsetting is the sort of 'Sergeant Schultz Brigade' of the Republican Party, which is, I see nothing. I know nothing. I'll say nothing.

"And they just sit by apathetically understanding Donald Trump and the corruption that exists around Donald Trump and the danger of Donald Trump, but will absolutely act like their fingers are in their ears. They close their eyes and they want nothing to do with saying or doing anything about 'em. And I put Mitch McConnell in that bucket.""

He should have been expelled long ago, but he fit right in with the general corruption, dishonesty and lack of integrity that the rest of the GOP wears like a badge of honor. They lie to their constituents, they lie when they take their oath of office to defend the Constitution, and they and their votes are for sale to the highest bidder. He fits right in with the them! If he wasn't so flagrant and obvious, that it calls attention to their own sleaziness, they'd happily embrace him forever. Even then, most of the GOP voted not to refer him.

Video: 221-204: The House votes to send Democrats’ resolution to expel Rep. George Santos (R-NY) to the House Ethics Committee.

#GOPCorrupt
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPLongGrift

https://flip.it/rV9bW0

Lacking the mandate through our election process to achieve the policies that the GOP wants, they've decided, again, to hold our economy hostage using the debt ceiling, a dated relic that no longer serves any useful purpose. Again, they couldn't achieve these policies with the votes and power that our democracy accords political parties, so instead the GOP uses this relic to hold our economy hostage to the demands that their donors have placed upon them. This is not the way democracy works! This is yet another example of a party that doesn't care about democracy using any trick it can, to get its way, when democracy did not give it the mandate to do so legitimately.

GOP Hostage-Taking on Debt Ceiling Must Be Stopped to Avoid Economic Calamity https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/debt-ceiling-economic-calamity-gop

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#DebtLimit
#DebtLimitHostageTaking

"(If) nothing is done except the federal government fails to fulfill its spending obligations, economic calamity will ensue: People who depend on programs like Social Security and food stamps will suffer, and the spillover effects on the larger economy would certainly cause a recession—and a truly horrible one if the stalemate lasted for any significant amount of time.

The factor forcing this terrible outcome would not be any implacable economic reality, it would simply be Congressional Republicans weaponizing the absurd political institution that is a statutory debt limit that can only be adjusted through acts of Congress. With a responsible Congress, the debt limit would be a silly inconvenience to policymaking. But twice in the past 12 years, Republican-led efforts in Congress have brought the nation to a near-crisis—and the current near-crisis could still graduate into a real crisis in coming weeks.
...
In 2011 (the last instance of protracted debt limit brinkmanship), the GOP demands for large spending cuts did mammoth damage to the living standards of U.S. families by sabotaging the economic recovery from the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2008–09. This time around, the GOP demands are not just for recovery-damaging spending cuts, but also for a complete do-over on already passed legislation; Speaker McCarthy’s recently released list of demands includes rolling back student debt relief as well as the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) climate provisions and enhanced enforcement against the nation’s rich tax cheats.

The cuts to IRA climate provisions would be literally catastrophic—the act’s climate provisions are the only thing keeping the U.S. economy on a path of needed emissions reductions to contain the worst damages of climate change. Further, hundreds of billions of dollars of planned private investment have already begun based on the incentives provided in the IRA. Stripping these climate provisions away would snap the economy back to a path toward climate catastrophe and be a huge waste of society’s resources.

All of this clearly calls for abolishing the debt limit to keep irresponsible Congressional majorities from holding the nation’s economy hostage to its policy preferences in the future. But what makes today’s debt limit showdown so bad is how normalized it has become—often with the encouragement of too many in D.C. policymaking circles who should know better. Many institutions and people who had argued forcefully in the past that the debt limit should not be wielded to force policy concessions—from business lobbies to former Treasury Secretaries to bipartisan think tanks—have instead this time blessed the absurdly shallow “deal” put forward by Speaker McCarthy. If this drive to normalize debt limit brinkmanship does not spark an economic meltdown this time, we all know where it leads next time.

This makes it imperative that the Biden administration does whatever it takes to keep the debt limit from binding our nation’s continued prosperity (yes, the nod to Mario Draghi is intentional). Their negotiations with Speaker McCarthy cannot include spending cuts or special legislative processes that make it easier to enact cuts going forward (no supercommittees).
...
If the Speaker doesn’t agree to that deal, then the administration should use the range of accounting and legalworkarounds available to them to keep the debt limit from binding. These are all suboptimal relative to debt ceiling abolition in the short run, but in the long run they will end up implicitly codified (unless the Supreme Court wants to take responsibility for forcing an unnecessary economic crisis) and will take the prospect of a debt limit crisis off the table of future presidents and Congresses. This would be a huge gift to the future."

The GOP doesn't care about gay marriage or trans people, they care about riding their vilification into power so they can entrench themselves and their rich people-first policies. They are, the lowest of the low!

Republicans deny they want to erase trans people — Montana silencing Zooey Zephyr proves otherwise
https://www.salon.com/2023/04/28/montana-proves-wants-to-silence-trans-people/

#GOPLovesPower
#GOPFascism
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#NothingChristianAboutTheGOP

"...They do care very much about doing whatever they can to silence, erase, and yes, eradicate trans people. As Zephyr told NBC News, she is not being "hyperbolic" when she says Republicans are killing people with anti-trans bills. Studies show anywhere from 40-56% of trans and non-binary young people have attempted suicide, with higher rates in red states.
...
Republicans have been shown these statistics again and again, but they keep banning this life-saving care anyway. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Republicans would rather have young people be dead than trans. Sounds harsh, but this is the same party that's more avid about banning books than banning guns, as well. And the same party that is passing draconian abortion bans, even as the evidence piles up that it's maiming and will likely start killing women to do so. Republicans simply don't care who their policies kill, so long as they get to control who you are, how you use your body, and even what you're allowed to think about.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Republicans would rather have young people be dead than trans.

With Gianforte, the cruelty is incredibly personal. His own son, David Gianforte, identifies as non-binary and has publicly pleaded with his father to veto this anti-trans bill, writing that "these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights." Yet Gov. Gianforte has publicly demurred when asked if his own child's concerns bother him enough to reconsider signing a bill he has been eagerly supporting so far. I wouldn't hold your breath, however, waiting for Greg "Body Slam" Gianforte to start showing signs of humanity.

Meanwhile, outside of Montana, the genocidal impulse towards LGBTQ people continues to animate the Republican Party.

In Florida, Republicans dramatically expanded the "don't say gay" bill to high school students, in an overt effort to force teenagers back into the closet. They also passed provisions to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors, threatening parents and medical providers with prison if they want to save the lives of trans youth. To make the situation uglier, Florida Republicans have also passed a bill that would make it legal for the state to remove trans children from the homes of parents who support their gender identity.

The United Nations classifies the abduction of children to "re-educate" them as a "grave violation." ...Taking someone's child to brainwash them to hate themselves and/or their family is taken that seriously as a human rights violation, for good reason. Not that Republicans care how much psychological damage they would do to children by going this route. Causing pain to those who they see as "different" is the entire point.

Zephyr, for her part, remains defiant. During her speech before she was officially banned from the floor, she said she refuses "to be complicit in this legislature's eradication of our community."

Republicans simply don't care who their policies kill, so long as they get to control who you are, how you use your body, and even what you're allowed to think about.

Rex Huppke of USA Today argued there is "some good to be found in seeing what the smallness of Republicans in the Montana Legislature did to Zooey Zephyr. By trying to silence her, they made sure she was heard."...Just by being visible, Zephyr is doing the necessary, if basic, work of showing people that may not know much about trans people that she is not a scary figure at all. She's just a woman trying to do her job and live her life. She's not a threat to kids, but she is trying to protect them.

That visibility terrifies Republicans. It's why they threw a national tantrum over Budweiser sending some beers to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. They see Mulvaney, who has 1.8 million Instagram followers, as a threat simply because she's cute and charming. She reveals the truth they want so badly to hide, which is trans people are fine the way they are and should be allowed to be themselves. Not erased from existence, as Republicans clearly intend with their anti-trans legislation. "

All the GOP wants is power!! They really don't care at all about democracy! They lie, cheat and steal to have power and this woman has been behind this dogged determination to disenfranchise voters and entrench the GOP in power for decades. Why? Could be Christian nationalism, could be fear of liberalism and progress, could be racism, could be she hungers for power and the rewards the obscenely wealthy lavish on her to enact their agenda. She is a traitor to our democracy and she has lots of company there!

"EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Trump coup attorney Cleta Mitchell wants to "combat" voting on college campuses, citing North Carolina and Wisconsin, and says that when Republicans win the state Senate in Virginia, they can eliminate 45 days of early voting and same day voter registration."

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#ChristianNationalism
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

Here's a link to the audio:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1649075730687352833

Great video by Robert Reich detailing how the Republican party is now antithetical to democracy and all about fascism! Please give it a watch.

How Republicans Are Stepping Closer to Fascism - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp2D-PMW47c

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPFascism #GOPLovesPower

"Today's GOP is devoted to three ideas:

1) Power is only legitimate if Republicans wield it
2) Power must be acquired by any means necessary
3) The party is accountable to no one once it has it
Folks, the Republican Party is rapidly becoming the American fascist party."

The mainstreaming of the Republican effort to suppress the vote. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/republican-effort-to-suppress-the-vote.html

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPFascism
#GOPTreason

"It’s bad enough when a trio of voter suppression groups led by charlatans gets together at an annual secret conference that is sponsored, in part, by a group created by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to talk about all the ways they might make it harder for people to register or vote in future elections. But it is much worse when the participants in that secret conference also include secretaries of state and other top election officials from 13 Republican-led states, plus Don Palmer, a member of the United States Election Assistance Commission, plus counsels to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the House Administration Committee’s Republican staff, and a sitting Texas state senator. The entire conference—whose existence was revealed in a blockbuster report by the Guardian and Documented last week—shows that there is a thriving network of interlocking organizations working with elected and election officials to use unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to try to mess with fair elections for partisan advantage.
...
Dark money donors capture the courts and the levers of government to make actual vote tallies irrelevant to who holds power. This story didn’t start in Tennessee or the Amarillo district court. For nearly two decades, we have been chronicling the actions of members of the Fraudulent Fraud Squad who have been active in perpetuating claims of voter fraud to make it harder for people to vote.
...
former President Donald Trump’s aborted Voter Fraud Commission. Documents from that commission later revealed a purposeful effort to generate enough smoke around nonexistent election shenanigans to cajole Congress into allowing states to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. In other words, the commission was an elaborate search for a solution to a problem that never existed, but it made a play that has since been repeated elsewhere.
...
All of this voter suppression requires an infrastructure. To help support it, Heritage and PILF have teamed up with Leonard Leo’s Orwellian-named “Honest Elections Project” (HEP), headed by Jason Snead, to run a new conference for election officials and the representatives of Republican lawmakers. Leo, lest we forget, has been in charge of reshaping the federal courts, selecting Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, and figuring out how best to spend gobs of billionaire-donated money to reshape culture and democracy. The chillingly dishonest HEP not only supports these efforts to make voting harder but also the “independent state legislature theory,” ...
The election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.
...
this is no longer just a lobbying effort shored up with big, often untraceable money, coming from players outside the system. What’s no longer hidden is the involvement of lawmakers and their staffs, who say the quiet parts out loud. Their enthusiastic participation in these efforts shows that these groups are not offering false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud merely to raise funds or even to delegitimize Democratic electoral victories by convincing the Republican base that when Democrats win elections, it is inevitably by fraud. Instead, the conference is powerful evidence of coordination between the decades-old voter fraud–industrial complex and state and government officials who actually have the power to make rules over how elections are run. To put it in the simplest terms, the election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.
...
Finally, the very existence of this conference also highlights the coming together of the fringe elements of the Republican party with its allegedly saner mainstream."

Opinion | At the NRA convention in Indianapolis, nonsense floated on guns - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/16/nra-convention-republicans-guns-democracy/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GunsBeforeReason

"The nonsense floated in Indianapolis — based on the idea that our national addiction to high-powered weaponry has nothing to do with America’s unique mass shooting problem — speaks to a deep ailment in our democracy. It has both partisan and (perverse) philosophical roots.

The GOP’s conversion to gun absolutism is the heart of the problem. But politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It often follows from cultural and moral innovations.

For roughly four decades, American conservatism has identified firearms as a marker of a manly rejection of urban cosmopolitanism and gun ownership as a right more important than any other. As DeSantis said in his video, the right to bear arms is “the foundation on which all our other rights rest” and essential to Americans’ “ability to rule themselves.”

“Why do Joe Biden and the liberals want our guns?” asked Gov. Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota, another speaker. “Because it will make it easier for them to violate all our other rights.”

It comes down to a variant of the old Maoist slogan: All liberty grows out of the barrel of a gun. When Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a White House rally before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, “Let’s have trial by combat,” he was speaking for a sentiment that runs deep in the gun rights movement.

A particularly dramatic example of how opposition to gun regulation is increasingly linked to efforts to undermine democracy itself: the Tennessee House Republicans’ recent vote to expel two duly elected legislators for protesting against the body’s inaction on guns after the Nashville school massacre.

It was no accident that the two since-reinstated representatives, Democrats Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, are not only both young and Black but also represent urban areas — Jones is from Nashville, Pearson from Memphis. Republican legislators, in Tennessee as elsewhere, regularly diminish the power of the big metro areas through gerrymandering and state overrides of local control.

Republican legislators may tout states’ rights, but with many cities in red states growing into significant islands of Democratic influence (and support for gun regulation), local control is not part of the GOP’s program.

Undercutting the ability of voters to cast ballots is another habit of those who privilege the Second Amendment over all the others. As Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan reported, Tennessee’s election laws allow gun permits as voter IDs but not college student identifications. There is no waiting time to buy a gun, but citizens have to register at least 30 days before an election. “It is absolutely easier to get a gun than to vote in Tennessee,” Democratic state Sen. Charlane Oliver told Gilsinan.

Our attitudes toward guns are often ascribed to our frontier past and a veneration of the Old West. But in truth, radical opposition to gun regulation is a relatively recent development, even in the NRA. Founded in 1871 by two Union Civil War veterans and a former New York Times reporter, the organization was initially devoted to improving urban marksmanship.

The group was long open to sensible rules around weapons, and the NRA helped Franklin D. Roosevelt draft the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act. It was not until 1977 that the NRA was engulfed by extreme ideologues. Our country, including the Supreme Court, thus embarked on a dangerous new path.

The good news in this story is that radical opposition to sensible gun laws is not embedded in the American character. It’s the product of an ideology that overtook a less dogmatic form of conservatism and seized control of a political party.

With Americans increasingly angry over the violence wrought by weapons of war in our schools, our banks, our shopping centers — pretty much everywhere we gather — the era of gun absolutism could finally be over, if the popular will on guns is allowed to prevail. But this depends on defending the democracy that so many, at the Indianapolis gathering and in Tennessee, deeply mistrust."