Elections; 2024
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
VIEWED: 206031
PAGE 8 of 514
The GOP's first bill exposes the lie of right-wing populism
After a bruising battle over the speakership, House Republicans kicked off their legislative agenda on Monday. It was a farce.
The GOP’s first policy bill would defund President Joe Biden’s efforts to help the Internal Revenue Service crack down on tax cheats. It’s a bill that’s predicated on disinformation, whose only real constituency is wealthy people who don’t want to pay their fair share. And it underscores how the Republican Party’s so-called populism isn’t about empowering the working class — it’s about exploiting them.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-gop-s-first-bill-exposes-t
he-lie-of-right-wing-populism/ar-AA16cZMK?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=48d3e3ed50b44769b544b98cc21b8c7a
Who knew, I did and have often said so.
T
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Want Moore? Be Careful What You Wish For
In fact, looking at the states where the greatest opportunity for increasing Democratic representation in the House of Representatives are, they reside in the highly populous states of California, New York, and Michigan, which together now have 29 Republican seats. Highly populated Republican states such as Texas and Florida have already been through major redistricting with major Republican advantages in how the districts were drawn. There simply is not much opportunity left there to create much more Republican partisan advantage.
https://www.newsweek.com/want-moore-careful-what-you-wish-opinion-1771
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Ok, the republicans are trying to use the Supreme Court to give states more power when it comes to how it handles elections and re-districting. Realize, the republican friendly states currently, and should they get what they want, offer very little opportunity for democratic growth.
However, three democratic states alone have 29 or so republican districts that the democrats can gerrymander out of existence if the republicans win. Districts in NY, California and Michigan. If the court gives the republicans what they want, it would be like the dog catching the car.
Too funny…
T
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Thank you, Ted, for illustrating how easy it is to manipulate idiots.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:Att: Evangelicals
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Thank you, Ted, for illustrating how easy it is to manipulate idiots.
Reminder: 81% of white evangelicals voted for a man who can’t name a single bible verse, cheats on all of his wives with porn stars, stole money intended for kids with cancer, and mocked the disabled.
How religion changed the presidency—and vice versa
Evangelical Christians are abandoning their core beliefs to follow a cult leader, says Reza Aslan.
Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the previous election. That’s a record. That’s more white evangelicals than voted for George W. Bush—and George W. Bush was a white evangelical.
This makes no sense to people, especially when you consider that Trump is not just the most irreligious president in modern history, that his entire worldview makes a mockery of core Christian values like humility and empathy and care for the poor; That this individual who couldn’t even name a single verse in the bible when asked to do so, and yet - and yet - received a record number of votes by white evangelicals.
Scholars of religion—normal, rational, people—have been trying to figure out why. Why? What happened?
And I think that there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
Number one, it’s white evangelicals. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, but 67 percent of evangelicals of color supported Hillary Clinton.
Now, these are people who believed the exact same thing, whose only real difference is that.. is the color of their skin.
So let’s not ignore the fact that there is a racial element to this support.
Jim Wallace, the head of the Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group, said it best when he said that these white evangelicals “acted more white than they did evangelical.” And I think he’s right.
The second reason I think has to do with the pernicious influence of something called the prosperity gospel, which has gripped the imaginations of white evangelicals.
This is that version of Christianity preached by charlatans like Joel Olstein and T.D. Jakes, the essential gist of which is that God wants you to drive a Bentley, that what Jesus really wants for you is material prosperity—and indeed that’s how you know God has blessed you, is by your material prosperity.
Many white evangelicals looked at Donald Trump, and what they saw was a wealthy man. And that wealth, as far as they were concerned, was just a sign of God’s blessings.
And so that freed Trump from having to do what every other candidate, certainly every other Republican candidate for president has had to do, and that is: actually prove his spiritual bonafides. Trump never had to do that. All he had to do was just keep talking about how rich he was. And for a large swathe of white evangelicals that was enough.
Thirdly, Donald Trump did something that no other president, not even any Republican president courting the evangelical vote ever did. He expressly promised secular power to these white evangelical groups.
In his speeches to them and in the conferences that he had, both private and public, he very clearly and very explicitly said that if they voted for him that he would give them “their power back,” even if he didn’t agree with their pet causes that he would just allow them to have those causes.
And you can see as president he’s talking now about removing, for instance, the Johnson Amendment, which is an amendment that prohibits preachers and churches from actually engaging directly in politics and preaching politics from the pulpit. It’s why they get to keep their tax break. No one has ever thought about removing this requirement until Donald Trump.
And now he is very seriously moving towards allowing churches to take part directly in political activism as churches.
But none of this, none of this explains the most important phenomenon about white evangelicals in America, and that is this: In the span of a single election cycle, white evangelicals have gone from being the gro
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Donald Trump ordered to pay Hillary Clinton $172,000
Several months ago Donald Trump lost his bizarre lawsuit against an array of his worst imagined enemies. On Thursday his enemies had their say:
A Florida-based federal judge has ordered nearly $1 million in sanctions against Donald Trump and his attorney Alina Habba, calling the former president a “mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.”...In the new order, Hillary Clinton got the biggest award of fees for a single defendant: almost $172,000.
Losing the lawsuit is bad enough. Getting fined a million bucks is bad enough. But having a huge chunk of the fine go directly to Hillary Clinton? Priceless.
POSTSCRIPT: Today Trump dropped his lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Coincidence? I doubt it.
https://jabberwocking.com/donald-trump-ordered-to-pay-hillary-clinton-
172000/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump ordered to pay Hillary Clinton $172,000
I hope he delivers it to her house in a fleet of trucks as rolls of pennies.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Donald Trump Rules the GOP For a Simple Reason
The GOP must finally come to grips with the fact that, yes, Donald Trump has taken over and transformed the Republican Party, and it is his policies that dominate what the voters in the party want.
And that makes sense, as it was Donald Trump who won over what I would call Reagan Democrats and millions of others who felt the America of the last twenty years had left them behind.
Many in the GOP want to try and go back in time, try to bring back somehow the boring pro-business, social security slashing, low-taxes, interventionist version of the GOP – make it look like a populist message – but the simple fact is Republican voters want the populism Donald Trump is selling them.
There are no two ways about it.
In effect, Donald Trump is not only the face of today’s GOP – Donald Trump is the GOP for the simple fact that the GOP still refuses to digest his message and learn the lessons of 2016.
As one top Donald Trump 2016 staffer told me just recently: “Do you want to know why Donald Trump – despite all of his mistakes and classless comments and drama – still dominates the GOP? The answer is easy to see: no one in the GOP has fully taken his vision of the party – based on populism and made it their own. Until there is a clear alternative to Trump, Trump rules. Sure, some in the party take a policy position here and there that mirrors Trump. But has anyone really gone full populist like Trump? I would argue no.”
How The GOP Can Move On: Populism Is the Answer
How would one take over the GOP from Trump and beat Trump in 2024? So what would that look like?
Well, you would need a Republican that would 100% embrace:
-non-interventionist foreign policy ideas and would be willing to call out allies in, say, Europe who won’t pay for their own defenses while we arm Ukraine to the teeth
-making China the top national security threat and spending the money and shifting the resources away from other parts of the world to make that happen
-embracing reciprocal trade deals and not blanket free trade
-refusing to cut Medicare and Medicaid
-making illegal immigration a top priority and working to ensure migrant flows are slashed. And yes, that means tariffs if trade partners cheat on deals
-battling the fentanyl crisis that is ruining America
-working to ensure America’s cities are not giant homeless encampments and open drug-use areas
-being pro-law enforcement and making no compromises on that
-being willing to wage a war on wokeness ideology
-and, finally, embracing a tough, no-nonsense, no-BS attitude when it comes to messaging to GOP voters. They clearly don’t want Mr. nice guy or gal. They want someone they feel is bold and to stand up for them.
These are the reasons that Donald Trump is the Republican Party today and why I think he would be very hard to beat in 2024. The only way I see someone coming along and doing that is they have to embrace the vision of the GOP Trump offers GOP voters. Until that happens, Donald Trump is the king of the GOP. Like it or not.
I know what you are going to say: What about that Florida governor everyone is nuts over?
While some argue Ron DeSantis is the person to take Trumpism over from Trump, we still don’t know enough of his preferred policy ideas to get a sense of what he offers the GOP as the man in the Oval Office. He could very well make the populist base happy, but I would argue the jury is still out on that. But I think we are going to find out.
More at https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/01/donald-trump-rules-the-gop-for-a-s
imple-reason/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The GOP must finally come to grips with the fact that, yes, Donald Trump has taken over and transformed the Republican Party, and it is his policies that dominate what the voters in the party want.
Yup. That's what I told you from the start.
DeSantis is young. He can wait his turn.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Trump's 'comeback attempt' mired in campaign event 'duds,' failed lawsuits and legal woes: analyst
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-comeback-attempt-mired
-in-campaign-event-duds-failed-lawsuits-and-legal-woes-analyst/ar-AA16APeP?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=021aa53623a544a6a0e2b10f51ca5967
Trumps done.
T
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