Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Well said. Republicans create problems that don't exist 5 Crises Republicans Made up to Distract You

"You fit in alright.... like a square peg in a round hole. It would mean something if the GOP could actually govern but, like you,
it's a non stop pity party making up problems that don't exist and cherry picking polls a year out from an election. "

All links

Here are five totally made-up “crises” Republicans have invented to distract from the real crises facing Americans today:
the growing concentration of wealth .. https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-irs-files-reveal-how-much-the-ultrawealthy-gained-by-shaping-trumps-big-beautiful-tax-cut ,
the worsening climate crisis .. https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/FossilFavors.pdf ,
and the undermining of our democracy .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/23/us-corporations-donate-midterm-campaigns-election-deniers .

Fake crisis #1: Anything they claim is “woke.”

[Insert: BE WOKE, all conservatives. Be aware of present dangers. Be aware of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library's position on Trump.
"BREAKING: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is hit with devastating news as the Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library refuse to invite him to speak at next week’s high-profile debate event, call Trump a “spoiled brat in a sandbox.”
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172980340
... and ...
Hey! Be awake!!. Be woke!!!.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171365775
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Lime Time, Just so we know you know how ignorant and insensitive your "... Go Woke. Go Broke." really is.
[...]If they don't like something liberals think, say, or do .. hey it's easy .. use the word. It's woke
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168711703]

Although Republicans struggle to define what “woke” even means, they’re constantly using it as a weapon to combat anything that seeks to foster tolerance and acceptance.

Pride flags? Woke!

Books about Rosa Parks? Woke!

Green M&M’s? The wokest!

Fortunately, most Americans .. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/08/gop-war-woke-most-americans-see-term-positive-ipsos-poll/11417394002/ .. think being informed and aware of social injustice…which is what being “woke” really means… is a good thing.

Fake crisis #2: The panic over trans people.

[conix, Hater. Judge strikes down Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172201222]

Trans people just want the right to exist safely as their true selves, like everyone else. And despite the lies spewed by some Republicans, there’s not a shred of evidence that they are a threat to anyone. But they’ve become easy scapegoats for the GOP, who vilify them and threaten to criminalize their very existence.

Fake crisis #3: Critical race theory

[How critical race theory became today’s defining culture-war issue
[...] While Fox News has been the primary purveyor of CRT hysteria on a national scale, a large network of conservative organizations has taken the fight to the state and local levels. These include the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council .. https://www.alec.org/article/reclaiming-education-and-the-american-dream-against-critical-theorys-onslaught/ .. and the Social Policy Network (SPN), which has affiliates in every state.
P - [You know ALEC the corporate funded bill-mill outfit. Say state legislatures - Republican - want a bill to target black voters, or clean air, or progressive education initiative as CRT or gender education stuff or, how could anyone forget abortion. It's tough to write a heavy bill, eh. Takes time, money and expertise. the later two sadly lacking in some red states. So ALEC writes the bill and sends it to any state legislature that wants it. There it is presented as a grass-roots effort ( fraudulently] and passed into law. See a couple from 2014
Republicans Launch Game-changing War on Black Voters in the South
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170889893]

In reality, critical race theory is mostly taught in universities — like quantum physics or philosophy. It’s really not taught in K-12, nor is it dangerous.

It’s merely a framework to understand .. https://www.naacpldf.org/critical-race-theory-faq/ .. the role that race and racism have played in shaping America’s laws and institutions. But Republicans have deliberately .. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory .. turned this obscure academic phrase into a weapon to silence any discussion of race they don’t like.

Unfortunately, this includes teaching many basic historical facts.

Fake crisis #4: “Couch potatoes.”

Republicans are whipping up anger over welfare recipients supposedly abusing the system.

The reality is most people who collect benefits already hold jobs and work exceedingly hard .. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/republicans-benefits-debt-ceiling-work-requirements/673888/ .

Like Ronald Reagan’s claim about so-called “welfare queens”, the “couch potato” myth is a cruel racial dog whistle. In fact, the vast majority of Americans who receive government benefits are white .. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/who-is-receiving-social-safety-net-benefits.html .

We should be asking why so many jobs pay such low wages that workers need government help .. https://www.epi.org/publication/a-majority-of-low-wage-workers-earn-so-little-they-must-rely-on-public-assistance-to-make-ends-meet/ .. to get by?

Fake crisis #5: “Out of control government spending.”

Another lie. Apart from mandatory spending like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, government spending has actually fallen more than 30% in the past 50 years as a percentage of our total economy.

[9.6% in 1973 vs. 6.6% in 2022, a decrease of 31.25%]

Yes, the national debt is a problem, but in recent years, among its biggest drivers have been the Bush and Trump tax cuts, which have added nearly $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment.

[05.16.23 --Extending Trump Tax Cuts Would Add $3.5 Trillion to the Deficit, According to CBO
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172526299]

All five of these so-called crises have been manufactured by the GOP. They’re entirely made up.

Why? To deflect attention from the near record share of the nation’s income and wealth now going to the richest Americans.

As the wealthy pour money into politics — largely into the GOP .. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vqY1UhQtFt4L0jGHPiq7O0hCJvze8JbDDY-k_bl5Kqs/edit?usp=sharing — they don’t want the rest of America to notice they’re rigging the economy for their own benefit, that their greed is worsening the climate crisis, and they’re undermining our democracy.

So the game of the Republican Party and their major donors is to deflect attention — to use fake crises to disguise what’s really going on.

Don’t let them get away with it.

https://robertreich.org/post/723951124534755328

And they ignore the biggest problem, made absolutely clear at least 11 years ago.

Opinion - Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
April 27, 2012 at 11:46 a.m. EDT

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are "78 to 81" Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it's not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West's comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.

It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/liberals-and-conservatives-dont-just-vote-differently-they-think-differently/2012/04/12/gIQAzb1kDT_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_7 ; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

"Both sides do it" or "There is plenty of blame to go around" are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California's Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

[The Deep Roots of Republican Dysfunction
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173063997
... and ...
11 y-old - Why Is the GOP Suddenly Turning Against College?
[...]This created a civil war within the Republican Party. Moderates such as Bob Dole supported a series of tax increases that partially reversed President Reagan's huge 1981 tax cut. But the 1980s also saw the emergence of Newt Gingrich as the leader of the conservative opposition, and anger at President Bush's 1990 tax increase gave the conservatives control of the party. The 1994 elections marked the victory not only of Republicans over Democrats, but also of anti-tax Republicans over balanced-budget Republicans, and the anti-tax orthodoxy has only gotten stronger since then.
[...]Paul Krugman .. http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/romney-in-ohio-want-college-cant-afford-it-too-bad/ .. argues that Republicans prefer tax cuts to education for political reasons: Their goal to preserve upper-class prosperity comes at the expense of heightened middle-class insecurity.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172258806]

From the day he entered Congress in 1979, Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority. It took him 16 years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders; provoking them into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote against Democratic initiatives; exploiting scandals to create even more public disgust with politicians; and then recruiting GOP candidates around the country to run against Washington, Democrats and Congress, Gingrich accomplished his goal.

Ironically, after becoming speaker, Gingrich wanted to enhance Congress’s reputation and was content to compromise with President Bill Clinton when it served his interests. But the forces Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base — most recently represented by tea party activists — and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress. (Some of his progeny, elected in the early 1990s, moved to the Senate and polarized its culture in the same way.)

Norquist, meanwhile, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and rolled out his Taxpayer Protection Pledge the following year. The pledge, which binds its signers to never support a tax increase .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-grover-norquists-anti-tax-pledge-works--even-among-voters-who-support-taxes/2012/04/17/gIQAo6IDOT_blog.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_19 .. (that includes closing tax loopholes), had been signed as of last year by 238 of the 242 House Republicans and 41 of the 47 GOP senators, according to ATR. The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible. For Republicans concerned about a primary challenge from the right, the failure to sign such pledges is simply too risky.

[Oh look! Your favorite side fixed it for you. Keep voting MAGA!!!!
A GOP Government Funding Plan From Hell & It's Roots (my words)
[...]
'...a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government...
P - Grover Norquist...in 2010...said...the solution to societal ills is tax cuts...“Government should enforce [the] rule of law...enforce contracts,...protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately....and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP....The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172158780]

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America's first credit downgrade .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/sandp-considering-first-downgrade-of-us-credit-rating/2011/08/05/gIQAqKeIxI_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_23 .

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/campaigns?itid=lk_inline_manual_24 .. and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party's most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations.

The results can border on the absurd: In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others had turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP backing for any bill that came within a mile of Obama's reform initiative. As one co-sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), told The Washington Post's Ezra Klein .. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/alexander_draft.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_28 : "I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn't have voted for it."

And seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded and thus denying the president a seeming victory.

This attitude filters down far deeper than the party leadership. Rank-and-file GOP voters endorse the strategy that the party’s elites have adopted, eschewing compromise to solve problems and insisting on principle, even if it leads to gridlock. Democratic voters, by contrast, along with self-identified independents, are more likely to favor deal-making over deadlock.

Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking.

The GOP's evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska called his party "irresponsible .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/afternoon-fix-hagel-disgusted-by-republicans/2011/09/01/gIQAdiA3uJ_blog.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_37 .. " in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. "I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow," he said. "I've never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics."

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe .. http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult .. last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. "The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe," he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

Shortly before Rep. West went off the rails with his accusations of communism in the Democratic Party, political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization .. http://voteview.com/political_polarization.asp , mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.

If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change. In the short run, without a massive (and unlikely) across-the-board rejection of the GOP at the polls, that will not happen. If anything, Washington’s ideological divide will probably grow after the 2012 elections.

In the House, some of the remaining centrist and conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats have been targeted for extinction by redistricting, while even ardent tea party Republicans, such as freshman Rep. Alan Nunnelee (Miss.), have faced primary challenges from the right for being too accommodationist. And Mitt Romney's rhetoric and positions offer no indication that he would govern differently if his party captures the White House and both chambers of Congress.

We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.

Look ahead to the likely consequences of voters’ choices in the November elections. How would the candidates govern? What could they accomplish? What differences can people expect from a unified Republican or Democratic government, or one divided between the parties?

In the end, while the press can make certain political choices understandable, it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better.

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Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from their book "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism," which will be available Tuesday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html