That was an interesting read Soup. I'm always baffled by how completely insane the GOP became. I thought Obama in the Oval Office for 8 years sent them apoplectic. Because, you know, racism.

Didn't Griner have just a small amount of cannabis oil? Trump says she was "loaded up with drugs". Trump playing for the team once again. But then again, Griner is black.

The best description I've read is this: the Republican party has become the equivalent of a European psycho far-right party, except the context is not equivalent because most European democracies are multiparty systems in which the results of an election may propel political organizations to form coalitions and usually (at least so far, in the most "important" countries) stop the nuts, while in the United States, for all intents and purposes, there are two parties, and that is that with that.

Speaking of which...


Opinion | The GOP is Viktor Orban’s party now

By Max Boot
Columnist
August 7, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT



All you need to know about the state of the Republican Party today is what happened at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Thursday. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been destroying his country’s democracy, received a standing ovation less than two weeks after he gave a speech in Romania in which he endorsed the white supremacist “replacement theory” and denounced a “mixed-race world.”

One of Orban’s longtime advisers quit over what she described as a speech “worthy of Goebbels” before backtracking a bit. But Orban hasn’t recanted his repugnant views, and right-wingers in Dallas thrilled to his denunciations of immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights and “the Woke Globalist Goliath.” He even excoriated Jewish financier George Soros, a Hungarian native, as someone who “hated Christianity.” The racist and anti-Semitic signaling was not subtle.

You can trace the current iteration of the Republican Party to the 1990s Gingrich revolution, as my brilliant Post colleague Dana Milbank does in a new book. Or you can go further back to the Goldwater revolution in the 1960s, as I did in my own book. But we must also acknowledge that something profound has changed in recent years.

Ten years ago this month, Republicans nominated a national ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan, a centrist former governor and a budget policy wonk. Now we have the coup-coup caucus cheering Viktor Orban. This is the Trump effect: The former president has made the marginal into the mainstream of the Republican Party, and vice versa.

Some observers were deceived by the success in Georgia of Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in handily defeating Trumpist challengers in May despite certifying President Biden’s victory. That was an aberration. In other races across the country, Republicans are nominating far-right fanatics who claim that the 2020 presidential election — and any election that they lose, for that matter — was “rigged.” By refusing to accept electoral defeat, they embrace authoritarianism.

In four key swing states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — the GOP nominees to oversee state elections deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Two of those candidates, Arizona secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania governor nominee Doug Mastriano, were outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. If elected, they are no more likely to certify a Democratic victory in 2024 than they are to embrace critical race theory. Meanwhile, most House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection are being driven out of Congress. Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer was the latest to lose a primary last week to a proponent of the “big lie.”

Taking a cue from Trump, the winners of Republican primaries traffic in authoritarian imagery and rhetoric. Guns have become a de regueur accessory in GOP campaign commercials. Arizona U.S. Senate nominee Blake Masters wants to lock up Anthony S. Fauci for trying to slow the spread of covid-19. And Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake wants to lock up her opponent for certifying Biden’s election victory.

Masters and Ohio U.S. Senate nominee J.D. Vance are both bankrolled by tech tycoon Peter Thiel, who has concluded that freedom and democracy aren’t “compatible.” Thiel’s “house political philosopher” is far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who is also close to Masters and Vance. Yarvin has mused that we may need an “American Caesar” to take control of the federal government. Trump is auditioning for the role; his henchmen are plotting to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with ultra-MAGA loyalists in 2025.

The libertarian-leaning Republican Party I grew up with in the 1980s is long gone and not coming back. Republicans still use the language of “freedom,” but their idea of freedom is warped: They want Americans to be free to carry weapons of war or spread deadly diseases but not to terminate a pregnancy or discuss gender or sexuality in school.

Republicans, once suspicious of government power, are now eager to use it to impose their agenda. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, next to Trump as the most likely 2024 GOP nominee, is establishing his culture-war credentials by, most recently, suspending an elected prosecutor who vowed not to “criminalize personal medical decisions,” such as abortion or “gender-affirming healthcare.” DeSantis even threatened to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows.

These Republican extremists are often described as the “New Right,” but the term doesn’t fit. The New Right was the movement in the 1960s-1970s that produced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. You can argue that the New Right helped lead to the present imbroglio, but it’s hard to imagine Goldwater or Reagan flashing Viktor Orban a thumbs-up, as Trump did.

Some other term is needed. “Christian nationalism” and “nationalist conservatism” have been bandied about, but the most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is the New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right. If the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbanized.

And speaking of that shitshow: CPAC Day 2 in 83 Seconds

The FBI are in Mara Fucking Lago!!! (And not for chicken wings!)

Beat me to the punch. I did include a link, though. :D

It's a witch hunt. It's the Dems. Blah blah fucking blah.

God....how is this motherfucker not in jail now? Even if you take Jan 6 out of the equation, how is he legally able to keep doing the Big Lie?

"They even broke into my safe!"

Asshole's never gonna go to jail, man. I'm glad the FBI went into Mar-a-Vago, but he and his minions will have to be repeatedly defeated at the ballot box in order to gradually, s l o w l y lose the degree of relevance they enjoy now.

OK, correction: the FBI executed a search warrant. Let's not fall for right-wing fuckos' tendentious vocabulary.

I keep thinking/hoping the that the GOP is slowly melting away from Trump. But look how they've rallied after this. Apparently this is all political. (Didn't Trump choose Wray?) And, you know, Barr never did anything for Trump. He was completely at arms length at all times.

ARE REPUKES REALLY THIS STUPID???

Anyway, someone in FBI/DOJ must comment soon, right?

Told ya.

Hillary Clinton promotes 'But Her Emails' merch after FBI search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago
:D

Was there a Biden Boom?

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Two weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter that I foolishly considered somewhat anodyne, not likely to get much reaction. It seemed probable that the initial estimate for G.D.P. growth in the second quarter would be negative and that many people would declare that this meant the United States was in a recession. So I spent some time pedantically explaining why we don’t actually use “two negative quarters” to define recessions and why, given other data, America probably wasn’t in one.

Silly me. I immediately received the biggest wave of hate mail I’ve gotten since the Iraq War, although it tapered off as many other economists and institutions declared that we weren’t in recession — not yet, anyway — and it pretty much vanished after Friday’s monster jobs report.

But absence of a recession aside, one question I get asked is what happened to the “Biden boom” I — and many other economists — predicted?

And the answer is, it happened! But Americans aren’t feeling it, and it’s worth asking why.

So, about that boom. Here’s a chart of jobs gained since Inauguration Day under Joe Biden and the Former Guy:



Yes, there was a Biden boom. FRED

Obviously there was a plunge in employment in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced the temporary shutdown of much of the economy. But one thing I haven’t seen widely noted is that job growth under Biden has been so fast that the economy added substantially more jobs in the past 18 months than were added in Trump’s first 37 months — that is, before the pandemic recession began.

I’m not saying that Biden deserves all the credit for this employment boom. When he took office, the U.S. economy was already in the process of recovering many of the jobs lost to the pandemic, although unemployment has fallen much faster than most forecasters were expecting in late 2020. But it’s kind of a moot point, anyway: Presidents often, dare I say usually, receive credit or blame for economic developments that have little to do with their policies.

So why doesn’t Biden get credit for the Biden boom, which is a real thing? Part of the answer is that people may not know about it. Some polling suggests that the public may not be aware that we’ve been creating jobs at all, let alone at a record pace. And we’re in a partisan environment where politicians — let’s not bothsides this, right-wing politicians — can make obviously false assertions and have their supporters believe them. The other day Trump told a crowd that gas in California costs $8.25 a gallon, and nobody laughed. (It was actually $5.43 at the time.)

Yet there has, of course, been a genuine dark side to the Biden boom: inflation. And people really dislike inflation. They would probably dislike it even if their incomes were keeping up. They definitely dislike it when prices are rising faster than wages, so the purchasing power of their income falls.

And inflation has, in fact, been outpacing wages since Biden took office; employment may be way up, but the real wages of those with jobs are down. We can argue about whether this episode is bad enough to justify the extreme negativity of public opinion about Biden and his economy, but it’s certainly a bad thing.

But what accounts for the inflation? That’s a huge subject, with scores if not hundreds of dueling studies, but there’s one fairly simple point that I think is clear: The inflation that people really hate, inflation that runs ahead of wage growth, is overwhelmingly a result of forces that were outside the control of the Biden administration, or any U.S. policymaker.

The Federal Reserve, which usually runs U.S. macroeconomic policy — the White House sometimes matters, but most of the time it’s the Fed’s show — has long made use of the concept of “core” inflation: inflation excluding volatile components, typically food and energy. The idea is that core inflation gives a better picture than the overall number of whether the economy is running too hot. In the post-pandemic era, with wild swings in things like the price of used cars, there have been questions about whether traditional core inflation excludes enough stuff. But for today’s purposes, I’ll stick with the traditional definition.

The big critique of Bidenomics, which has a lot of justification, is that big spending last year produced too much of a Biden boom, which led to a rise in core inflation; now the Fed has no choice but to squeeze the economy with higher interest rates until underlying inflation comes down.

But this policy mistake, if that’s what it was, has little to do with the reasons Americans are unhappy despite the jobs boom.

Here’s a comparison of two definitions of real wages for nonsupervisory workers since Biden took office. (I look at this type of worker because it’s a better indicator than the overall average of what’s happening to the working class.)



What’s behind falling real wages? FRED

The lower line shows wages adjusted for overall consumer prices and tells us what we already know: Inflation has run faster than wage growth, so real wages are significantly down. The upper line, however, adjusts only for core prices, and it’s basically flat.

I’m sure this will be misinterpreted, no matter what I say, but I’m not saying that Americans should care only about core inflation: What matters for families is the cost of living, in all its components. What the chart does show, however, is that the component of inflation that upsets Americans most — inflation faster than wage growth — is overwhelmingly a result of forces, like the prices of globally traded commodities, that weren’t driven by U.S. economic policy.

In other words, the reasons people feel so bad about the U.S. economy have a lot to do with events outside U.S. control.

That won’t stop voters from punishing Democrats for inflation, although the odds are that over the next few months we’ll see a reversal of what happened over the past year and a half: Job growth will probably slow, but many prices will come down, especially gasoline, which dropped to an average of about $4 a gallon on Tuesday.

Anyway, the Biden boom was real. It just got overshadowed by inflation, much of which had nothing to do with U.S. policy.


Quick Hits

Not a recession, says the Dallas Fed.

Is the American job market too good?

Expected inflation is coming down.

Polarized economic sentiment.

Mar-a-Loco: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship DOJ. Its mission: to explore fucked up shit. To seek out new proof of egregious criminal corruption. To boldly go where no prosecutor has gone before!

Quiz: Who said "If you are innocent, why are you taking the Fifth?"

Hint: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022...the-fifth.html

It never ceases to amaze me how Trump's bots, both in the GOP and the public at large, see him as a good guy - a leader, honest and caring.

This baffles me more than General Relativity, or what happened "before" The Big Bang.

I'll never comprehend it.

Not only are Dems amazingly good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, they also really suck at selling themselves.

And where is the OUTRAGE at every stupid thing the GOP does?

Merrick Garland will have his revenge! (Fuck you, Mitch McConnell!)

This is fascinating. Trump has by 3pm tomorrow to say if he is ok with this!

https://thehill.com/regulation/court...ions-answered/

I worked in the Air Force for 40 years. If I ever took a classified doc home, no matter how innocuous the doc, and they found out, I would basically adopt the position. Because I would be finished. No ifs, ands or buts.

I guess things are different in Murica.

Jesus Christ Monkeyballs, the documents are about/related to NUCLEAR WEAPONS? Fuck me...

Oh no, it's "read the transcript" all over again:

https://thehill.com/homenews/3598033...pose-doj-move/

(Yes, I read the fucking transcript. It showed, very clearly, that you were a guilty motherfucker.)

Would Garland be doing this if the FBI found nothing significant? Fuck, I hope he is a Grandmaster, not a Novice.

When is Trump ever going to go down? Mueller fumbled at the 1 yard line. Two impeachments went nowhere. Teflon Don can't escape this one also, can he?

Update: Garland is no Novice!!

I swear to God, if Trump somehow escapes this one, I'm moving to Norway. I don't want to be anywhere near Murica.

Buy the tickets. He's not going to jail. :(

Yeah, even now some Repukes are rallying around Trump - the usual idiots like Greene and Boebert to the fore. But I wonder if most will.

(Yes, I'm an idiot who has not learned anything.)

Opinion | Liz Cheney’s demise was set in motion by her father

By Dana Milbank
Columnist | August 12, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

It has all the makings of a Greek tragedy.

The tragic hero, a statesman of great ability, is driven by hubris to abuse power. The forces he unleashes spread uncontrollably — and eventually destroy his own daughter. He comes to her aid, but it is too late.

Citizens, I give you the tragedy of Dick and Liz Cheney.

Closing the last hearing of the House Jan. 6 select committee, the younger Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, delivered a powerful indictment of Donald Trump’s abuse of his followers. “He is preying on their patriotism,” she said, turning “their love of country into a weapon.” A moment later, she added: “We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.”

She’s right. And Cheney deserves the lionization she is getting as she courageously fights the authoritarianism that has taken over the GOP. For this, she lost her party leadership position, and on Tuesday will likely lose her primary to a Trump acolyte.

There is a bitter irony in Cheney’s fall: She is being undone by the very politics her father championed. Weaponizing patriotism? Abandoning the truth? Vice President Dick Cheney was a pioneer.

In my new book, “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party,” I traced the actions of GOP leaders who essentially created the Trump era by removing the guardrails of our political system. Dick Cheney was one such leader.

Liz Cheney speaks rightly of the primacy of truth to a free people. But her father abandoned the truth in the most profound way, starting a war on the basis of lies. Liz Cheney denounces the evil of preying on patriotism. But her father was a key figure in a White House that politicized the 9/11 attacks and portrayed the administration’s opponents as traitors.

There was extraordinary national unity after the 2001 terrorist attacks. But George W. Bush’s strategists argued that Republicans should “go to the country” on the issue of terrorism and “focus on war” in the elections of 2002 and 2004, making the case that Democrats endangered Americans’ security. On the campaign trail, Dick Cheney warned that if people made “the wrong choice” and voted Democratic, “then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.” As Bush said Democrats were “not interested in the security of the American people,” Cheney claimed electing Republicans was “vital” for “defending our homeland.”

In that same year, Republicans close to the administration ran an infamous ad juxtaposing an image of Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), a triple amputee from his service in Vietnam, with images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Two years later, a group with ties to Bush did similarly to Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, with flimsy accusations that he lied about his Vietnam service and betrayed comrades.

Cheney was also the primary force for distorting intelligence about Iraq to make the case for war. He falsely claimed in 2001 that it was “pretty well confirmed” that the 9/11 mastermind met with Iraqi intelligence. He falsely called evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda “overwhelming” and said Hussein had “long-established ties with al-Qaeda.”He falsely called Iraq “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault … on 9/11.”

Cheney said in 2002 that he was “convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon”; U.S. intelligence said that was nearly a decade away. Eventually Cheney baldly — and falsely — said Iraq had “in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

In the scandal over the White House’s outing of a CIA operative after her husband questioned the administration’s nuclear claims, Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of perjury. Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan later complained that Libby “and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

Cheney claimed that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” in Iraq; intelligence had (accurately) warned that the situation could “rapidly deteriorate.” Later, Cheney wrongly claimed that Iraq had “turned a corner,” that the insurgency was “in the last throes.”

Those contagions — using disinformation and patriotism as political weapons — spread through the Republican Party and consumed it utterly with Trump’s triumph. Too late, Liz Cheney bravely stood against both, and is on the verge of political exile. Now, in the final act, Dick Cheney has returned, filming an ad for his daughter.

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” the elder Cheney said. “He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters.”

No, he wouldn’t. All our Greek tragedy needs now is the catharsis: a glimmer of self-awareness from Dick Cheney about his role in causing this.

salman rushdie was stabbed last night and is hospitalized right now

Decades avoiding that bullshit fatwa issued by Khomeini, and now the rest of his life is gonna be torture because of some motherfucker at a minor event in the U.S. Unbelievable. :mad::(

Is Class of Nuke'Em High a documentary yet?


Oh wait this is the political thread, not the movies thread.

James Carville. He tells it like it is:

“The problem the Republican Party has is, they got really stupid people that vote in their primaries. And … really stupid people demand to have really stupid leaders. That’s where the Republican Party is now,”

I must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Skuj again.