Month: January 2018

Ex-GOP chair to Trump-supporting evangelicals: “Shut the hell up”

I have several bones to pick with Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee.  But now that he’s out of power, he seems to have some clarity about the Party of Trump that he helped create.

Evangelicals love a president who cheats on all of his wives, brags about assaulting women by grabbing their pussies, and pays hush money to a porn star to keep her from talking to the press about his sex affair with her. Tony Perkins of the right-wing Family Research Council, said Trump gets “a do-over” because evangelicals “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists.” But Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chair, has one thing to say to evangelicals about their unwavering support for the unfaithful Trump: “I have very simple admonition: just shut the hell up and don’t preach to me about anything ever again,” he said on MSNBC.

“After telling me who to love, what to believe, what to do and what not to do and now you sit back and the prostitutes don’t matter, the grabbing the you-know-what doesn’t matter, the outright behavior and lies don’t matter, just shut up!” Steele blasted.

“They have no voice of authority anymore for me,” Steele concluded.

Ernst defends Trump, audience guffaws

Joni Ernst embarrassing herself in Red Oak:

Republican senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley have been back home in Iowa to hold small town halls in rural areas, places they probably thought would be ‘safe spaces’ from angry voters. WRONG. The rural voters who turned out were not happy with Donald Trump and they unloaded on Ernst and Grassley. In one particularly embarrassing moment for Sen. Ernst in Red Oak, Iowa (population 5,476), she drew laughter and scorn after this exchange:

SEN. ERNST: “He is standing up for a lot of the countries, um… where we have seen…”

CONSTITUENT: “Name a few, could you name a few?”

SEN. ERNST: “Yeah, you bet. Norway…”

 

Trump: “…if we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.”

This reminder of who wants to shut down the federal government is brought to you by the President of the United States.  Trump was already threatening a government shutdown back in August.

Now, the obstructionist Democrats would like us not to do it, but believe me, if we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.

And if the government shuts down at midnight tonight, it will be because there aren’t enough Republican votes to prevent it.

Republicans defend Trump’s “shithole countries” comment

You know by now, because everyone in the world now knows, that the President of the United States called African countries and Haiti “shithole countries,” according to “several people briefed on the meeting.”  Trump later bragged about it to friends.

In the minds of Republican lawmakers, this is a problem.  Not the racist garbage the President said, but the fact the someone repeated it to the public.  Rand Paul is now telling us there can’t be an immigration compromise if people are running around calling the President a racist.

The premise that racist sentiments spoken by party leaders in private should not be repeated in public because allowing party leaders to be racist in private is important for legislative comity is word-for-word the argument used by decades of past southern Republicans. Presenting the two as equal sins—speaking racist things, and informing the public when racist things have been spoken—using the rhetoric of “both sides” behaving badly is the sort of moral grease fire Republican senators have long loved to simmer in.

And why would they turn on him now, after backing Trump for so long?  It’s not as if they didn’t know he’s a racist; white supremacy is his brand, and a core value of the Republican Party.

Congressional Democrats vote to give Trump unlimited spy powers

Thanks for nothing, Adam Schiff.

When Congress voted last week to renew the NSA’s controversial Section 702 powers, which gives the spy agency the power to conduct mass, secret, warrantless surveillance on Americans, they also voted down a bipartisan amendment that would have limited the president’s ability to abuse these powers, injecting the barest minimum of accountability and proportionality into a system that Republican and Democratic presidents alike have abused for decades.

The amendment was voted down because Democrats didn’t support it. The same Democrats who show up on the news every night, telling us that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian who can’t be trusted, just caved to the “intelligence community” and gave that dangerous authoritarian virtually unlimited powers to spy on every one of us.

When racism is accepted, this kind of thing happens (over and over)

When deportation is a death sentence

Sarah Still man of the New Yorker documents the deaths of people who were deported from the United States to their deaths.  Customs and Border Patrol agents have been emboldened by Trump’s overt racism, but many abuses took place quietly during the Obama administration.

Allegations abound of Customs and Border Protection officers dismissing asylum seekers more brazenly. According to a 2014 American Civil Liberties Union report based on conversations with nearly a hundred people who were removed without seeing an immigration judge, “Fifty-five percent said they were not asked about fear of persecution or torture,” while “forty percent who were asked and said they were afraid were ordered deported without seeing an asylum officer.” For years, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has documented Customs and Border Protection’s noncompliance with asylum-seeker protections, including, in more than fifty per cent of cases, officers at ports of entry neglecting “to read the required information.” More recently, after Trump’s election, civil-liberties groups began documenting an apparent increase in rejections in some places on the border. According to a recent lawsuit, C.B.P. officers have told prospective asylum seekers, “The United States is not giving asylum anymore,” and “Trump says we don’t have to let you in.”

 

Republicans totally focused on protecting Trump and stopping Russia investigation

We now have the transcripts of the closed-door Senate testimony of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, regarding the evidence of criminal activity by the Trump campaign with the Russians.  It is not pretty.  Senator Grassley should resign in disgrace for what happened in his Judiciary Committee.

Every question asked by Republicans in the meeting—every single question—focused on trying to find information they could use to demean and defame the witness. They wanted to paint Fusion GPS as a “Democratic operation.” They were determined to turn Christopher Steele’s visit to the FBI into a partisan act. They used every moment of their time to find something Fusion had done wrong, or that Steele had done wrong … some way that both the company and the information they had gathered could be dismissed. In a day-long interview that was supposed to further the investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, no Republican expressed the slightest interest in that topic.

Republicans protecting the crooks

At some time in the future, when a Republican tries to distance himself from the disgrace of Donald Trump, remember how it really was at the beginning of 2018.  At a time when new evidence is making an even stronger case that the President has obstructed justice,

In perhaps one of the most coordinated episodes of their entire tenure of single-party rule, House Republicans began a campaign to end their own Russia probe and oust Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Senate Republicans recommended the indictment of a key Trump-Russia whistleblower, the Justice Department decided to reinvestigate Hillary Clinton’s email use, and the FBI is taking aim at the Clinton Foundation—again.

I keep saying it because it needs saying:  the Republican Party is the Party of Trump.  Never let them live it down.