Let Republicans Stew in Their Own Filth
Leaving the specifics about Trump out of Democratic campaign pitches is a good idea.
“Everybody knows” who will be vying for the top job in the 2024 presidential contest, short of a natural disaster or health related event.
On the Republican side, excitement — outside of the imagined conspiracies against Trump— will be limited to whatever spineless soul is willing to take the Vice Presidential slot. GOP electoral strategy will certainly consist of a torrent of half-lies and manufactured outrage; they have no program other than what the Dear Leader and his acolytes pull out of their hats.
On the Democratic side, there’s a concerted effort to sell the Biden administration’s efforts at boosting the economy. Inflation is down, wages are up, and Bidenomics means happy days are here again, unless one looks at the oligarchization of the United States. The economy is going to be an uphill climb—Republicans are still saying cities are burning due to Black Lives Matter—, made possible by starting with the pitch early and often.
Down ballot Democratic office seekers won’t have it so easy, especially with GOP Congresscritters claiming credit for the impact of legislation they voted against. The temptation will be to go after the stinky elephant in the room, namely Donald J Trump and his cascading legal troubles.
I think that one (or two, or three) more indictment(s) won’t change voting decisions. It’s safe to say that people have already made up their minds about the probable Republican candidate; either they hate him or they don’t. MAGAts have already committed to an alternative reality unassailable by logic or facts.
I also think Democrats hiding behind “MAGA is the enemy” are missing the boat. MAGA-this and MAGA-that is an unidentifiable opposition, akin to the mysterious “groomers” lurking in libraries in the imaginations of Mothers for Liberty and other grifters. Yes, everybody’s concerned about sexual exploitation of children, but when it comes to banning books in libraries the public’s reception is way less than enthusiastic.
For purposes of this essay, I’m saying leaving the specifics about Trump out of campaign pitches is a good idea.
There is a veritable smorgasbord of issues available for Democrats. Everywhere you look, Republicans are up to despicable things. Whether or not a GOP candidate in a Blue district is involved with these schemes is irrelevant; inquiring about those things is enough to remind voters about those bad things and interferes with the flow of the narrative that right wingers are pitching.
Let’s look at some of those issues and stances.
We already know from the midterm elections that abortion was a topic motivating voters. And Republicans, under pressure from the extremists in their party, are doubling down.
From Lyz at the Men Yell At Me Substack:
Last night, the Iowa legislature passed a law restricting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, well before most women discover they are pregnant. Other states have passed similar laws, so I am not speaking in hypotheticals when I say these laws are killing people. In her newsletter, “Abortion, Every Day” Jessica Valenti meticulously details the disastrous results anti-abortion laws are having on women. She writes, “Since Roe was overturned, horror story after horror story has come out of states with ‘exceptions’ to their bans. A woman in Texas going septic, a Missouri woman with a doomed and deadly pregnancy, a 10 year-old rape victim in Ohio.”
In states with abortion bans, women are nearly three times more likely to die in childbirth.
The pendulum could be swinging back on racism, thanks to a growing public consciousness about white nationalism, along with absurd attempts to “whiten” US history. The bad guys may win a few battles at school boards, but the war isn’t going well for them. The “we’re not racist” strains are wearing out their welcome.
Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville started out blocking all Senate approved military promotions until the Pentagon retracted its workplace policies for women undergoing healthcare related to reproductive health care. Now 250+ officers are waiting in line, and people are beginning to suspect there could be national security consequences.
Tuberville doubled down in the face of criticism, saying he was taking on a “woke” Pentagon. The example he gave was the military’s program of weeding out white nationalists, a claim he’s made before.
When asked if he believed white nationalists should be allowed in the U.S. military, Tuberville responded: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”
The Senator has tried to walk back his meandering trail of comments, but his intent was obvious even to other Republican Senators.
Jordan Zakarin at Think Progress is reporting on the GOP Governors who are using the end of the COVID emergency to boot hundreds of thousands of people off Medicare.
Regarding Arkansas (Complete with an example of inscrutable paperwork):
But the state’s mass-disenrollment has hardly been about ensuring that Arkansas’s most financially vulnerable are provided comprehensive care. Instead, nearly 75% of the state’s purged beneficiaries thus far have been stripped of their health insurance due to technical problems with their case files. Given the impenetrable legalese of the paperwork required for Medicaid renewal and the state’s half-hearted effort to get in touch with beneficiaries at risk of losing their insurance, the technical difficulties have often felt more like inevitabilities….
…Arkansas didn’t want or need the grace period; a coalition of nonprofits in the state have been rallying and writing letters since January, but for many Republicans, seeing tens of thousands of poor people lose their government healthcare every month represents a dream come true.
It’s not just happening in Arkansas, either. In Florida, more than 300,000 residents lost coverage between April and May, with June numbers still to come. Nearly two-thirds of the purged residents — 197,367 to be precise — were taken off of Medicaid due to the proverbial procedural reasons.
“It feels like every month, I lose more and more kids from my client list because their Medicaid is not active,” says one mental health professional in Florida who works mostly with patients on Medicaid. “Now they're telling people who reapply that it can be up to six to eight weeks before things get moving. And so I just don't see kids during that time.”
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Joan McCarter at Daily Kos has a rundown on things the House GOP’s Freedom Caucus (and other Republicans) is willing to use for blackmail aimed at Democrats when it comes to the budget. And just to make sure their point is driven home, they’ve come up with a host of procedural gimmicks designed to force the country into another funding showdown.
Here are some of their targets:
Funding for fighting wildfires during the last couple of months of fire season is in jeopardy. As of Oct. 1, thousands of federal wildland firefighters are probably going to walk off the job unless pay hikes they received under the 2021 infrastructure law become permanent….
Law enforcement groups—state and local, as well as federal—are calling out efforts by House Republicans to defund the police. The Republicans are talking about a nearly 29% cut in discretionary spending that could end up cutting money to cops...
As we head into fall, we also head into flu and COVID season. The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act expires Oct. 1, and with it authorization to spend any money on prevention and preparation. The holdup here is a refusal by Republicans to work with Democrats to address the problem of widespread prescription drug shortages in the reauthorization bill…
All those projects Republicans have been touting back home (even though plenty of them voted against the projects in the first place) could be halted. That means drinking water and sewer system upgrades, bridge repairs, and rail repairs all potentially grinding to a halt…
They are trying to rescind billions from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, the most substantive legislation ever passed to address climate change. That includes stripping $11.1 billion from greenhouse gas reduction; $3.25 billion from a clean energy program; and $500 million from programs to help their rural constituents with a new energy program.
Kerry Eleveld, also at Daily Kos, is writing about the desperate steps Senate Republicans (of the moderate persuasion) are taking to keep candidates touting their support of the extremist measures from winning primaries.
The bottom line is that Sen Mitch McConnell knows the House GOP’s agenda will be poison come the general election. Democrats should keep this in mind in down ballot races in 2024.
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Wednesday News Mixtape
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Dude, Where’s My Recession? Via Paul Krugman at the New York Times.
…In any case, something really strange has happened. I can’t think of another example in which there was such a universal consensus that recession was imminent, yet the predicted recession failed to arrive.
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Paris to charge SUV drivers higher parking fees to tackle ‘auto-besity’ Via the Guardian. Tired of mechanical monsters taking up two parking spaces at the mall? Here’s an idea that could be translated into a “reform” for declining gas tax revenues, since free parking is a constitutional right in the US.
Electric vehicles and those with large families requiring a bigger car are expected to escape the increased fees that will come into effect on 1 January 2024.
Paris councillors approved the measure in an unanimous vote last month. Frédéric Badina-Serpette, a councillor from the EELV ecology party that proposed the increased charges, said: “We would like the city of Paris to change the pricing of paid parking to make it progressive according to the weight and size of vehicles.”
He said the aim was “to focus on an absurdity: auto-besity … the inexorable growth in the weight and size of vehicles circulating in our cities, and particularly in Paris”.
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The G.O.P. Backed Him on Hunter Biden Claims. Now He Has Been Indicted. Via the New York Times. He’s the ‘missing’ GOP witness - in hiding because he skipped bail.
In late 2016, Mr. Luft recruited and paid an unnamed former U.S. government official who was acting as an adviser for President-elect Donald J. Trump as part of a larger effort to “publicly support certain policies” favorable to China, prosecutors wrote in their filing.