Politics-What's on your mind?

[homoe]

Paul Ryan slams Trump in speech about future of Republican Party.....


IF only "little Eddie Munster" of had a backbone when it really counted!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/paul-ryan...053116596.html

[homoe]

Texas Senator Ted Cruz is facing renewed criticism of his travel habits after spending the weekend in Israel touring damage from Hamas rocket strikes.

The firebrand Republican senator, who earlier this year was embroiled in controversy after it was reported that he traveled to Mexico for a family vacation amid a devastating winter storm that left millions in his state without power, now faces similar criticism after tweeting a video of himself inside an Israeli home damaged by rocket fire.

In the video, Mr Cruz discussed the death of an elderly woman’s caretaker in Ashkalon, Israel, resulting from a Hamas rocket strike that hit a residential home. Mr Cruz gives a brief tour of the damage in the home, and explains how the elderly resident was able to make it out of the home in time.

“I’m in Israel and I'm seeing the results of Hamas terrorism. A Hamas rocket destroyed this home and killed an elderly woman's caretaker,” reads the video’s caption.

Under the video, the senator was excoriated by angry Texas residents who demanded to know why he had not reacted similarly to the devastation wrought by the winter storms that largely shut down the state’s power grid in February.

“How much is this photo op costing us, Rafael? Did I miss the tour of frozen Texas homes?” wrote one commenter, who referred to the senator’s given name.

[homoe]

If there’s one thing that Donald Trump is good at is generating headlines, the latest news circulating has the former president telling those in his inner circle that he will be back in power by August, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. And of course, he has the support of his QAnon followers, who have been parroting the theory that the election was stolen from the 45th president, even though he lost the electoral and the popular vote in November 2020.

This all comes on the heels of Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who suggested that a Myanmar-like coup should happen here in the U.S. while at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Dallas. He swears he never made those comments, even though they were caught on video. He went on to set the record straight later saying, “I am no stranger to media manipulating my words, and therefore let me repeat my response to a question asked at the conference: There is no reason it (a coup) should happen here (in America),” he wrote on the messaging app, Telegram, per The New York Times.

[Orema]

If Larry Elder loses in California today, as suspected, then I think Trump may have found his next running mate.

I still think Nikki has a shot at running on Trump's 2024 ticket, but Trump can work with Larry a lot easier than he can Nikki.

[Orema]

Joe Manchin Should Stop Talking About ‘Entitlement’

By Jamelle Bouie
New York Times Opinion Columnist


Joe Manchin. Credit: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has been coy about what he wants from the Democratic reconciliation bill meant to pass as much of the president’s agenda into law as possible. Other than a number — he wants to shrink the Biden administration’s Build Back Better proposal from $3.5 trillion to $1.5 trillion — Manchin has not said much about which policies he would keep and which he would cut.

Manchin does, however, have one red line.

“I’m just not, so you know, I cannot accept our economy or basically our society moving toward an entitlement mentality,” Manchin said last week. “I’m more of a rewarding, because I can help those who are going to need help if those who can help themselves do so.”

He repeated the point on Wednesday, criticizing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who wants a larger bill. “I’ve been very clear when it comes to who we are as a society, who we are as a nation,” Manchin said. “I don’t believe that we should turn our society into an entitlement society. I think we should still be a compassionate, rewarding society.”

I find this incredibly useful not because it says anything about what Manchin wants but because it makes clear that this is a dispute over values as much as — or even more than — a dispute over policy.

In previous statements, Manchin used debt and inflation to justify his opposition to spending that went beyond his comfort level. “The nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges and will inevitably encounter additional crises in the future,” Manchin wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month. “Yet some in Congress have a strange belief there is an infinite supply of money to deal with any current or future crisis, and that spending trillions upon trillions will have no negative consequence for the future. I disagree.”

It should be said that Manchin’s case is not very persuasive. Interest rates are low and have been for the past decade. The Congressional Budget Office expects interest rates to stay low until at least the 2030s. For the government, then, borrowing is cheap, and there’s little risk that the additional debt will overheat the economy or crowd out private investment. We can, and should, spend much more than $3.5 trillion, especially since — when spread out over 10 years — that number would be 1.2 percent of our projected national income over the same period.

But the reality of America’s fiscal capacity isn’t the point. For as much as he talks about debt and spending, Manchin’s objection is more moral than it is practical. To say that you don’t want to foster an “entitlement” mentality among America’s able-bodied adults is to make a statement about the proper order of things, as you understand them.

Take tuition-free community college, one of the proposals tucked into President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Where Biden sees a pathway to opportunity for ordinary American families, Manchin seems to see another lane on the road to dependency, to a world where most adults do not have to work to receive benefits.

Indeed, even just using a word like “entitlement” speaks to a particular critique of the welfare state — in particular the view that a capitalist economy will not work without the threat of poverty and immiseration. If the market runs on the promise of reward and mobility, then to reward individuals without work is to undermine the very engine of the American economy.

As with so much of our national political discourse, this isn’t a new idea. In “Free Enterprise: An American History,” the historian Lawrence B. Glickman shows how proponents of “free enterprise” and laissez-faire capitalism used the language of entitlement and dependency to condemn the economic guarantees of the New Deal.

“For the first time in my lifetime, we have a president who is willing to mislead the people on fundamental questions of finance,” Robert Taft declared in a 1936 speech to the Women’s National Republican Club, “who is willing openly to attack the very basis of the system of American democracy, who is willing to let the people believe that their problems can be solved and their lives made easier by taking money away from other people or manipulating the currency, who is willing to encourage them to believe that the government owes them a living whether they work or not.”

Or, as Strom Thurmond put it in 1949, when he was the governor of South Carolina, “Nothing could be more un-American and more devastating to a strong and virile nation than to encourage its citizens to expect government to provide security from cradle to grave.”

This “hiving of the country into productive makers and unproductive takers,” Glickman notes, “formed the basis of the traditional American belief in ‘producerism,’ the idea that people who made and grew things deserved pride of place in the republic.” In the 19th century, this producerist ideology fueled labor and agrarian revolts against concentrated power in finance and industry. The great orator and three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan captured this in his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago:

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country, and my friends, it is simply a question that we shall decide upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight. Upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses? That is the question that the party must answer.

For conservative opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, however, the makers and takers were reversed. “Rather than an artisan, the maker was now described as a company,” writes Glickman. “The taker was no longer an unscrupulous employer or an enslaver who unfairly took the fruits of labor from the worker but the government, which now did the same through its system of confiscatory taxes and extravagant spending.”

It is this right-wing producerism that, I think, is the most relevant antecedent for Manchin’s fear of an “entitlement” society. Although, in fairness to him, there was a point — in the very recent past — when his views were the dominant ideological position within the Democratic Party, both a consequence of and a driving force in the neoliberal transformation of the United States.

Ronald Reagan was, of course, an important part of this development. He brought right-wing producerism into the mainstream, captivating the voting public with a simple story of undeserving takers and welfare cheats, social parasites who undermined the “hard-working people” who “put up with high taxes,” as he put it during his 1976 campaign for president.

Inextricably tied up in race hierarchy — to be white was to be a worthy taxpayer, and to be nonwhite, and specifically Black, was to be dependent — this producerism was the “common sense” behind the austerity and deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s, from Reagan’s tax cuts to Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform.” Americans would receive a “hand up” — a tax cut or a tax subsidy — and not a “handout” in the form of direct benefits.

These ideas don’t just fade away, and the extent to which they are recapitulated by the media, politics and, most important, the material conditions of our society, all but guarantees their continued potency, especially when the rising costs of housing, education and health care encourage zero-sum competition for every available advantage.

It is this potency that we see in the present debate, from Manchin’s resistance to an “entitlement” society to a public that appears not to want Congress to renew the child tax credit — a no-strings-attached benefit for almost every American family — in its current form.

We can also see it in Donald Trump’s appeal to broad swaths of the American electorate. Trump made his name as a builder in America’s largest city, then leveraged that celebrity in a popular television show that sold him as the nation’s greatest businessman. Years before he entered politics, Trump embodied the producerist ideal of a man who dominates but is never dominated.

At $3.5 trillion, Biden’s Build Back Better plan is more ambitious than anything offered during the Obama administration. If, to win the votes of Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrats have to scale their bill back to under $2 trillion, it will still be one of the largest spending bills to ever come out of Congress under a Democratic majority.

From that perspective, it might seem odd to speak of the influence of conservative producerist ideology on present-day American politics. And yet a major ideological obstacle to the social democracy progressives hope to build is this sorting of people into winners and losers, deserving and undeserving. “The myth of opportunity for energetic individuals,” Irving Howe once wrote, “has taken on a power independent of, even when in conflict with, the social actuality.” Manchin, in other words, is not the only American who fears an “entitlement” society.

In which case, the ideological challenge for progressives is to redefine what it means to be “entitled” — to return, in a sense, to that older meaning, in which it is the owners of capital who are the takers and the ordinary citizens of this country who are the makers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/o...hin-biden.html

[Orema]

Former Trump officials' new career ventures suggest very little changed after leaving White House

Their business practices didn't progress much past the questionable tactics that haunted the Trump Administration

By MEAGHAN ELLIS
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 17, 2021 4:30AM (EDT)


H.R. McMaster, Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner (Getty/Zach Gibson)

Now that former President Donald Trump's reign is over, the members of his administration have been forced to take their careers in different directions. So, where are the members of the Trump administration now? According to The Intelligencer, many are doing an array of different things; some of which are synonymous with the questionable activities that long-haunted the Trump Administration.

Here's where the top Trump White House officials are now:

1. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is still trying to distance himself from the kidnapping of Julian Assange. According to Pompeo, he had nothing to do with it.

Pompeo is adamantly denying any involvement in the plot to kidnap Assange. A report published by Yahoo! News back in September, suggested that Pompeo was livid when he learned Assange divulged U.S. national-security secrets. In fact, the report also claimed that he participated in discussions with members of the Trump administration on how to get retribution.

However, Pompeo is still suggesting the reports are not true. "There's pieces of it that are true," Pompeo said during an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show. "We tried to protect American information from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, absolutely, yes … We're not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations. We never acted in a way that was inconsistent with that."

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

2. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been milking his access to the Secret Service.

Thanks to Trump's order extending the use of the Secret Service to members of his administration, Mnuchin has used the professional perk to his benefit. The publication reports that in his first six months out of office, Mnuchin has racked up the highest Secret Service tab. The Washington Post detailed how Mnuchin managed to rack up more than $150,000 in Secret Service expenses:

The receipts showed that agents spent $114,000 over the six months to rent rooms at a W Hotel in Los Angeles, where Mnuchin has a home. They also followed Mnuchin on three trips to the Middle East, where Mnuchin is reportedly seeking to raise money from sovereign wealth funds for a new venture called Liberty Strategic Capital…

Mnuchin's travels with the Secret Service weren't all business, however. Over the six months, the records show three separate trips to Cabo San Lucas — the Mexican resort, where Mnuchin had also vacationed during Trump's presidency.

To guard Mnuchin during those three trips, the records show, the Secret Service paid $56,000 for hotel rooms and $2,000 to rent golf carts.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Mnuchin is planning to use the $2.5 billion he has raised traveling so he can invest in technology and cybersecurity investments, along with "new forms of content." It remains unclear what Mnuchin specifically describes as "new forms of content" but "many big tech companies are pushing virtual- and augmented-reality hardware and content products and digital gaming."

3. Wilbur Ross is reportedly fantasizing about putting "Trump condos on the moon."

Back in February after the Trump administration transitioned out of the White House, Ross spoke with Bloomberg and shared his upcoming post-government plans; which involve "Trump condos on the moon."

On this particular afternoon, he's sitting in the living room of his 80-year-old home filled with Magrittes and Picassos, sipping a cappuccino, dressed in cashmere sweater, slacks and velvet slippers embroidered with octopuses.

Ironically, it's while ensconced in this paradise of earthly delights that Ross is gearing up to invest in space, among other possibilities. He sees opportunity in extraterrestrial tourism, manufacturing, research and habitation.

Habitation? When asked whether space would be a gold-plated real estate opportunity for Trump, Ross didn't disagree.

"Why not Trump condos on the moon?" he quipped back.

Ross' remarks came just months after the U.S. Commerce Department's inspector general released a scathing report about the former Trump official's behavior. According to The Washington Post, the IG's report "concluded that Ross had made many inaccurate statements to federal officials about his assets before taking office, though he did not willfully violate conflict-of-interest laws."

4. Ben Carson is launching a venture similar to Boy Scouts of America.

After departing Washington, D.C., Ben Carson —the former Housing and Urban Development Secretary— launched an organization called the American Cornerstone Institute. Carson's new think tank reportedly places an emphasis on discovering "commonsense solutions to some of our nation's biggest problems."



Carson has also created the Little Patriots program, which is described as a partisan organization for children. Speaking to The Washington Post, Carson explained the organization's initiative. "It will be something like the Boy Scouts," Carson told the publication. "But heavily exposed to the real history of America.

"You probably notice when ISIS goes into a place, they destroy the history, they destroy the monuments," Carson explained. "History is what gives you identity."

5. Elaine Chao contributed to calls for Kroger to be boycotted.

Chao —wife of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and former transportation secretary— worked for several of the country's top corporations prior to her role with the Trump administration. But Intelligencer reports that "she and other Trump Cabinet alums were having a hard time finding cushy landing spots after exiting the administration. 'The feedback was 'It's too soon,' said one of the headhunters involved in an unsuccessful effort to find companies willing to work with Chao."

Despite her struggles to re-enter the corporate world, Chao was appointed to Kroger's board of directors. But given her history of abusing her power and position with the government, social media users quickly expressed outrage and urged Kroger to drop the former Trump cabinet member from its board.

6. Alex Azar is reportedly conspiring against his former colleagues.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is at odds with many of his former colleagues. In fact, several of them including —former FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Robert Redfield, former Medicare chief Seema Verma, and former White House COVID coordinator Deborah Birx— have reportedly joined forces to prepare their statements regarding the Trump administration's handling of COVID-19.

According to Politico, they've done so out of caution and concern about Azar possibly using them as "scapegoats" to clear themselves.

"I know the way this goes — everyone has a different perspective," Hahn said in an interview. "I wanted to tell what it was that happened and why it happened and the perspective that we had."

In calls and text messages, members of the group have swapped notes, compared recollections, and sent updates on media requests and interview opportunities, four people with knowledge of the matter said …

And in a nod to their individual battles with Azar, some have jokingly referred to the group in private as "AAA," or Alex Azar Anonymous, according to a person in direct contact with multiple members.

From the looks of it, many Trump administration officials are still conducting shady business as they did while in office.

https://www.salon.com/2021/10/17/for...after-leaving/

[Kätzchen]

The political turbulence of corruption exhibited by long-standing members of executive branch officials and the peril our country is enduring. It is terribly worrisome and deeply concerning. It feels like our country is under attack from the inside and on every imaginable front.