Source: The Lincoln Project
Monday, August 31, 2020
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Thursday, August 27, 2020
It's Up To America To Fix Its Number One Problem, Are We Up To the Task?
When America Goes To Hell Don't Blame Liberals, Progressives, Democrats, Immigrants, Our Adversaries, Muslims, or Any Outside Influences
Look Inwardly, At the Policies (and lack thereof) of the GOP and Its Driving Force, TRUMPISM
We Have the Right and RESPONSIBILITY To Vote, So America, It Is You and Only You That Controls Your Destiny
Vote November 3'rd 2020 To Rectify The Egregious Damage That Donald J. Trump and TRUMPISM, Along With GOP Sycophantic Support Has Thrust Upon America
Honor the Legacy Of Our Founding Founders
By Dumping the Turd DJT On November 3'rd
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
There Is Only One Logical Choice in 2020...
Every so often these days you come across a true principled conservative. Admittedly however this is almost as rare today as seeing a fish fly. With the advent of Trumpism, the personality cult of Donald J. Trump, conservatism has acquired an extremely negative and undesirable character. In other words principled conservatives are running as fast as they can from Trumpism and conservatism is general.
More and more we see long standing and respected republicans/conservatives such as the folks at The Lincoln Project signing on to support the democratic ticket during the 2020 election cycle. Principled conservatives like myself must, if they are honest, ask themselves one simple question. Does Trump represent the values and principles once advocated by principled conservatives in this democratic republic? To that question the answer is decidedly no.
Conservatives and republicans have been completely absent when it comes to balanced budgets and the national debt, even before Covid-19 hit our shores. Like his sycophants in government and the GOP DJT does not care about the national debt or budget deficits. A man with 6 bankruptcies to his list of failures is only concerned about gaming the system to achieve the greatest personal advantage and financial benefit.
Republicans at one time were concerned about protecting the environment and preserving the natural beauty of this marvelous land of ours. DJT has rolled back many of the regulations and protections that have ensured clean waters and good quality air. All in the name of the all might buck.
The party of Lincoln, the American president responsible for freeing African Americans from forced bondage now seems indifferent and sometimes almost hostile to the concerns of African Americans and other minorities. Sure they talk a good game but they have failed miserably to walk the walk. The evidence is readily available for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Donald J. Trump is, beyond a shadow of doubt, the worst human being to ever occupy the White House. Aside from being a "man" that never met a truth he liked when it reflects poorly on his narcissistic personality he is a rave danger to the very foundations of our democratic republic.
To be fair one thing DJT has done that reflects conservative values is that he has sprinkled conservative judicial appointments throughout the federal judiciary including tipping the SCOTUS to the right. Which of course potentially threatens women's reproductive rights.
Making the case for defeating Donald J. Trump much better than I is
Conservatives Have Only One Choice in 2020
After what we have seen during Trump’s first term, any true conservative should be appalled by the prospect of a second.
“You’re a traitor to the cause.”
In one form or another, that’s the charge most often made against so-called Never Trumpers, a group of which I consider myself an early and unofficial co-founder. The well-being of both the Republican Party and conservatism, according to this line of thinking, requires supporting Donald Trump. To be against him is to be an apostate.
Now it is certainly true that in the short run, and possibly in the long run, too, many of us no longer consider the Republican Party our political home. But for me, at least, a conservative approach to politics continues to lie at the core of my political being — and it is for that very reason that I believe even more strongly now, after what we have seen during Trump’s first term, that any true conservative should be appalled by the prospect of a second.
Put another way, to be anti-Trump is not to be anti-conservative; and to be pro-Trump is not to be pro-conservative.
That doesn’t mean that Mr. Trump doesn’t have any conservative policy successes he can claim. He does, though even here Mr. Trump’s record is not nearly as strong as his Republican defenders claim it is. From a conservative perspective, he’s gotten some things right and many things wrong.
The president is reshaping the judiciary in a conservative direction through his court appointments, but he has also given up on core conservative beliefs in limited government and responsible entitlement reform. He’s shredded federalism and embraced protectionism, both of which cut against conservative principles. It was also on Mr. Trump’s watch that, even before the pandemic hit, the United States set record annual deficits and exceeded $22 trillion in debt. (If Joe Biden becomes president, prepare for Republicans to rediscover a rhetorical commitment to fiscal discipline.)
The president’s conservative defenders point out that he has reduced unnecessary regulations on businesses, but they overlook the fact that he has proudly embraced crony capitalism and aggressively used the federal government to tilt the playing field and pick economic winners and losers.
Mr. Trump has promoted the conservative anti-abortion cause; he has also epically mismanaged a pandemic that has claimed more than 175,000 American lives. Before Mr. Trump, the Republican Party spoke out against so-called identity politics, yet today it embraces the worst form of white identity politics. The Republican Party once claimed to be home to constitutional conservatives, yet Mr. Trump has acted in ways that makes a mockery of our constitutional system of government, most recently through his use of executive orders to bypass Congress. (This is the kind of thing for which Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz and citizen Donald Trump excoriated President Barack Obama.)
Mr. Trump has increased spending on national defense, which has pleased conservatives, but he has also done more than any president in history to undermine NATO and the Atlantic alliance generally, which should not. The president has imposed tough sanctions on Iran even while engaging in bromances with Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Vladimir Putin of Russia and bonding with the authoritarian leaders Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. He betrayed the Kurds and eroded our relationships with South Korea, Mexico, Canada, Germany and many other traditional American allies. He has also praised China’s forced internment of a million or more Uighurs as “exactly the right thing to do,” according to his former national security adviser, John Bolton.
Under Mr. Trump, then, the Republican Party is only incidentally conservative. At its core it is now ethnonationalist and populist, meaning that in its anti-establishment fervor it incites rather than refines public passions; it is increasingly antagonistic toward free markets, inward-looking and reactionary, hostile to diversity, pessimistic rather than optimistic, encased in cultural grievances, more interested in looking backward than forward.
But that is hardly where the erosion of conservatism ends.
The Republican Party once portrayed itself as the party of “family values,” insisting that character counts, especially in our political leaders, and most especially in our president. That was certainly the case during the Bill Clinton presidency. But today it has jettisoned all that, defending a rogue who paid hush money to a porn star while cheating on his third wife. Social conservatives once (rightly) warned against cultural decay, the coarsening of society, vulgarity and indecency. Yet Republicans now stand four-square behind a man who is uncaring and indecent.
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.
“Donald Trump is engaged in a disinformation campaign against his own country, which we’ve never seen before in an American president,” Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is writing a book about political attacks on truth, told me.
One conservative writer recently suggested to me that the Republican Party under Mr. Trump has become a dissident, anti-institutional party. There’s nothing that it really wants to conserve; the American right, under Mr. Trump, wants to burn things down. “It hates almost everything about contemporary America,” he said, adding that Trump supporters see the United States “as corrupt, degraded, and overtaken by forces they basically consider foreign in one way or another.”
Any attempt to rescue conservatism from the ashes, then, has to begin with the defeat of Donald Trump in November. If he wins a second term, whatever latent conservatism remains in the Republican Party will be extinguished. The redefinition of the Republican Party into the Trumpian Party will be complete and very difficult to undo. Conservatism as a political philosophy, as a political sensibility, will be homeless.
That would obviously be bad for those of us who are conservative; it would also be bad for the country. Conservatism at its best — conservatism properly understood — appreciates the complexity of human society, the role of civic institutions in the formation of human character, and the dangers of popular passions, mob mentalities and conspiratorial thinking. It places greater weight on human experience and practical wisdom than on the attachment to abstract theory and ideological purity that Ronald Reagan warned against in 1977.
More BELOW the FOLD.
The choice is ours to make. Think long and hard before casting your vote for Trump. The health and Well Being of our democratic republic is what is at stake. For the sake of the American democratic experiment please place your sights higher than the DOW and the dollar. Principles do matter. At one time conservatives had principles and placed value on truth, integrity, and decency. Lets return to those values and vote Joseph Biden on November 3, 20200. Your kids and grand kids futures depend on it.
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
A Mentally Compromised President...
Something that should concern EVERY American of voting age. Donald J. Trump is both mentally and emotionally impaired as well a great danger to the integrity and stability of our democratic republic.
Newsweek - A psychiatry professor claimed President Donald Trump is so mentally impaired that he cannot think in abstract terms and can only view things in a one-dimensional way.
Several experts in the areas of psychology and psychiatry have voiced concerns about Trump's mental well-being. While some argue that it is important to do so given the global importance of the U.S. presidency and the power wielded by the office, critics say you cannot make a proper assessment or diagnosis without a face-to-face session.
"Trump has no policy on any issue because his mental impairment means he cannot think strategically or in abstract terms," tweeted John M. Talmadge, MD, a physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center.
"He cannot weigh options, assess risk, or foresee consequences. Concepts like fairness, justice, honor, and integrity quite literally do not register. You can see this in every interview or press encounter. He never states an abstract thought or idea.
"Instead he falls back on simple adjectives: disgraceful, horrible, low-intelligence, perfect, innocent, nasty, stupid, fake, etc. He's driven by negative emotion, often paranoid and often insulting, vulgar, vitriolic."
UT Southwestern said Talmadge was speaking in a personal capacity.
Talmadge wrote that Trump expresses positivity in a "shallow tone" using "childish adjectives" and is non-specific when discussing plans or projects.
"The meaning of this is clear. Trump does not have a vision or a plan, because he can think only in concrete, elementary, childlike, one dimensional terms. He does not process an abstract idea like American forces stabilizing a multilateral conflict with geopolitical implications," Talmadge wrote.
"This Trumpian brain failure is hard for normal people to understand because for normal people, abstract thought is natural, baked in, largely unnoticed. Normal people see the consequences, assess risk, make rational decisions most of the time.
"What is true today is that Trump is not normal, Trump is mentally impaired, Trump cannot think normally, and Trump is dangerous. When he is removed from office he literally will not understand what happened. He will have to make up a story, tell lies, and rant about Hillary's DNC server."
More BELOW the FOLD
The Trump Crime Syndicate...
Found at Progressive Eruptions today. A big thank you shout out for finding and posting this revealing data on the criminality of the Donald J. Trump administration. Or should I be calling it the greatest crime syndicate in American presidential history?
TRUMP AND THE TRUMPUBLICANS WANT YOUR VOTE FOR 4 MORE YEARS OF THIS:
The Trump Administration Crime Syndicate:
After 8 years in office, President Obama, 0 indictments.
After 4 years in office, Trump (so far) has 215 indictments!
FOUR MORE YEARS OF CRIMINALITY?
VOTE NO!
VOTE BIDEN-HARRIS 2020
Monday, August 24, 2020
More Prominent Conservative Republicans Supporting Biden...
(CNN) - Former chairman of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele is joining the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans working to prevent President Donald Trump's re-election.
"Today is the day where things should matter and you need to take stock of what matters to you -- and the kind of leader you want to lead in these moments. And for me, it ain't him," Steele, a political analyst for MSNBC said making the announcement to host Nicole Wallace on Monday afternoon.
Steele was the first African American to be elected to statewide office in Maryland, serving as lieutenant governor from 2003 to 2007. He was also the first African American to serve as chairman of the RNC.
"I get my role as a former national chairman. I get it, but I'm an American. I get my role as a former party leader. I'm still an American," Steele told Wallace, adding, "And these things matter to me more than aligning myself with a party that has clearly decided it would rather be sycophantic than principled."
More BELOW the FOLD
EXCLUSIVE - More than two-dozen former Republican members of Congress threw their support behind a “Republicans for Biden” effort being launched Monday by the Democratic presidential nominee's campaign to engage potential GOP supporters this November.
The announcement comes on the first day of the Republican National Convention, as delegates prepare to formally re-nominate President Trump on Monday.
In their respective convention agendas, each party has sought to showcase converted supporters. Joe Biden's list of Republican supporters, shared first with Fox News, includes a number of well-known Trump critics, most notably former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona.
Last fall, he penned an op-ed urging lawmakers to abandon the president and save their "souls," as he backed impeachment. He's since said he won't vote for Trump, but had held off on a formal Biden endorsement until now.
Some others on the list had already backed the former vice president, including former Republican Sens. Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire (who is now an independent) and John Warner of Virginia. They're joined by a number of former Republican House members:
Former Reps. Steve Bartlett of Texas, Bill Clinger of Pennsylvania, Tom Coleman of Missouri, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Charles Djou of Hawaii, Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, Jim Kolbe of Arizona, Steve Kuykendall of California, Ray LaHood of Illinois (who served as Transportation secretary in the Obama administration), Jim Leach of Iowa, Connie Morella of Maryland, Mike Parker of Mississippi, Jack Quinn of New York, Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island, Chris Shays of Connecticut, Peter Smith of Vermont, Alan Steelman of Texas, Bill Whitehurst of Virginia, Dick Zimmer of New Jersey, and Jim Walsh of New York.
A Biden campaign official told Fox News the endorsements are a “strong rebuke” of Trump and his administration.
“These former members of Congress cited Trump’s corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course as a reason why they support Biden,” the Biden campaign official told Fox News.
“These former Members of Congress are supporting Joe Biden because they know what’s at stake in this election and that Trump’s failures as President have superseded partisanship,” the official continued.
Meanwhile, the official told Fox News that Flake, who repeatedly clashed with the president during his time in the Senate and even floated challenging him, is expected to make remarks Monday afternoon on why he is supporting Biden.
More BELOW the FOLD
Putting country ahead of party these republicans recognize the extreme destructive danger Donald J. Trump is to our now fragile democratic republic. The deserve out respect and gratitude for standing against DJT and FOR our democratic republic.
Trump’s Postal Service Chair Has A Demonstrated History Of Active Voter Suppression As Republican Party Operative...l
President Donald Trump’s selection for a key Postal Service position, Robert M. Duncan, once had a very different job: steering the Republican Party while it undertook some of its most brazen voter suppression schemes.
Duncan is now the chair of the Postal Service board of governors, but he previously served as general counsel and then chair of the Republican National Committee from 2002 to 2009, a time when the committee and its state counterparts oversaw an unprecedented escalation of voter disenfranchisement efforts in swing states.
From 2004 to 2006, when Duncan was the committee’s general counsel, party officials challenged the eligibility of at least 77,000 voters, a 2007 report by the nonpartisan group Project Vote found.
As it happens, one of the party’s favored tactics relied on the U.S. mail. In 2004, Republicans in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania sent thousands of nonforwardable letters and postcards to select voters — particularly minority voters — and used the mail returned as undeliverable to come up with voter registration challenge lists.
Duncan’s history is the latest alarm bell for those fearful that Trump is attempting to undermine the U.S. Postal Service in order to win reelection.
Given Trump's incessant, yet totally unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud with mail in ballots, America should anticipate he will be working hard (through backdoor channels) to suppress the vote in 2020. Especially the vote of minorities who are very likely to vote democratic. Trump knows that with a record number of voters casting ballots he cannot win reelection. It is in Trumps' own personal interest that he does everything in his power to suppress the vote.
If the vote unseats Trump prepare for him to pull out all stops contesting the results. An action that will likely end up in the Supreme Court of America. Trump will not accept a defeat and his claim will be VOTER FRAUD. He has been telegraphing this for weeks. Count on kit happening when he loses.
Continue reading BELOW the FOLD.
Sunday, August 23, 2020
Saturday, August 22, 2020
The Lincoln Project, A Town Hall...
A must watch. If you need any more reasons to NOT vote for Trump and his divisive and destructive Trumpism tune in to The Lincoln Project Town Hall.
Friday, August 21, 2020
Trump Attacks An American Company...
“This week we’ve seen a parade of well-respected Republicans, including former Ohio Governor John Kasich, voice their support for Joe Biden,” said Tim Miller, political director of Republican Voters Against Trump. “Meanwhile, the President’s attacking an American company that provides well-paying jobs. Operation Grant couldn’t be more needed.”
Reed Galen, a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, put the attack in perspective, “Ohioans are already dealing with the rising unemployment caused by Trump’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The last thing they need is to suffer the economic aftershocks of a presidential temper tantrum.”
The Lincoln Project plans to spend $425,000 airing “Goodyear” today through next week.
As the general election approaches, Americans everywhere will now have to ask themselves what happens if the president’s ire falls on their city, state, or employer next.
The Future - Emerging From the Darkness of Trumpism...
A breath of fresh air coming to America November 3, 2020. The future without Trumpism holds unbounding promise and hope for America. Working together We The People, united in common purpose will Build America Back Better Thsan Ever!
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Explaining the Failure to Control the Spread...
Nearly every country has struggled to contain the coronavirus and made mistakes along the way.
China committed the first major failure, silencing doctors who tried to raise alarms about the virus and allowing it to escape from Wuhan. Much of Europe went next, failing to avoid enormous outbreaks. Today, many countries — Japan, Canada, France, Australia and more — are coping with new increases in cases after reopening parts of society.
Yet even with all of these problems, one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months: the United States.
SKIP
When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman.
As in several of those other countries, the toll of the virus in the United States has fallen disproportionately on poorer people and groups that have long suffered discrimination. Black and Latino residents of the United States have contracted the virus at roughly three times as high of a rate as white residents.
How did this happen? The New York Times set out to reconstruct the unique failure of the United States, through numerous interviews with scientists and public health experts around the world. The reporting points to two central themes.
First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic. It is a large country at the nexus of the global economy, with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes — including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy — than in most other rich countries.
“As an American, I think there is a lot of good to be said about our libertarian tradition,” Dr. Jared Baeten, an epidemiologist and vice dean at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said. “But this is the consequence — we don’t succeed as well as a collective.”
For a lot more be sure to click HERE.
Yet even with all of these problems, one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, susta
Yet even with all of these problems, one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)