Rethuglicans

With Roy Moore, Republicans Fully Embrace & Own The Ugliest Political Poster Boy, Ever

  “He totally denies it. He said it didn’t happen.” – Donald J. Trump Oh, okay, Don… By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (11/27/17) There is a very real chance that an accused multiple child sex offender is going to be elected to the United States Senate on a Republican ticket. A man, who, in his 30’s was banned from the local mall because of his reported predatory hitting on teenage sales girls. The behavior by the young assistant district attorney – who, obviously, should have known better – was so troubling it freaked out the community. With a…


Hey, Republicans, Your Silence Is Active Consent…

  While GOP Leaders May Want Roy Moore To Go Away, Rank-And-File Republicans Aren’t So Sure By Ariel Edwards-Levy The HuffPost (11/15/17) Republican supporters nationwide have yet to embrace calls by GOP leaders that party nominee Roy Moore end his Senate candidacy in Alabama, a HuffPost/YouGov pollshows, though support for him in the national survey is tepid, at best. By a 12-percentage-point margin, 39 percent to 27 percent, registered Republicans and independents who lean toward the party say Moore should not drop out of the race because of sexual assault and misconduct allegations against him. The rest of those polled said they were unsure…


The GOP Robbing Hoods Of The State Legislature Have Slammed The Doors Of Open Government Shut

Like a coven of blood sucking vampires, our state representatives are afraid of sunshine’s truth revealing power. What, a citizen might wonder, goes wrong when lobbyists and our representatives are hiding in the darkness away from the view of the electorate? By Dennis Brault The Commoner Call (10/23/17)   Wisconsin Open Meetings Law Wis. Stat. § 19.81 (2016) .  Declaration of policy(1) In recognition of the fact that a representative government of the American type is dependent upon an informed electorate, it is declared to be the policy of this state that the public is entitled to the fullest and…


Mother Jones Magazine Investigation: Rigged – How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin To Trump

And possibly handed him the whole election. By Ari Berman Mother Jones (November/December 2017) You can’t say Andrea Anthony didn’t try. A 37-year-old African American woman with an infectious smile, Anthony had voted in every major election since she was 18. On November 8, 2016, she went to the Clinton Rose Senior Center, her polling site on the predominantly black north side of Milwaukee, to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton. “Voting is important to me because I know I have a little, teeny, tiny voice, but that is a way for it to be heard,” she said. “Even though it’s…


Accomplices: Short HuffPo Video Nails Gun Massacre Enabling Senators On The Take With NRA Cash

  By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (10/12/17) The Huffingto Post put up a short, powerful video targeting four leading gun massacre enabling politicians who make repeated mass shooting possible.  In the 2016 election the campaigns of each pol directly profited from National Rifle Association (NRA) financial support either in ad contributions or direct cash contributions. Citing sources from The Trace, the politicians are: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) $3.2 million ad contribution. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) $6.3 million ad contribution. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) $3 million ad contribution. The big winner of NRA cash was Donald Trump, who raked…


Let’s Be Absolutely Clear What We Are Facing: Republican Heart Throb Ann Coulter Calls For Death Squads

  By Jared Holt Right Wing Watch (9/2/17) Right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter suggested last week that if President Donald Trump “continues down this path” of appearing to be open to immigration reform, one of the only solutions could be “death squads for the people who ruined America.” Last week, Coulter appeared on the “Todd Starnes Show” to discuss Trump’s apparent willingness to betray his campaign promise to oppose programs like DACA, which is designed to protect people who immigrated illegally to the United States as children. “We have made as clear as you can possibly make it, we want less immigration,” Coulter said. “Stop…


George Lakoff: Why Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech

  By George Lakoff GeorgeLakoff.com (9/8/17) Freedom in a free society is supposed to be for all. Therefore, freedom rules out imposing on the freedom of others. You are free to walk down the street, but not to keep others from doing so. The imposition on the freedom of others can come in overt, immediate physical form — thugs coming to attack with weapons. Violence may be a kind of expression, but it certainly is not “free speech.” Like violence, hate speech can also be a physical imposition on the freedom of others. That is because language has a psychological…


Russ Feingold: Trump’s Disavowal Rings Hollow – How The Republican Party Quietly Does The Bidding Of White Supremacists

The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are. It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership.  By Russ Feingold The Guardian (8/19/17) It takes approximately 30 seconds to send a tweet. A half hour to draft and release a statement. And the shelf life of both is only marginally longer. We should not commend Republican party elected officials who claim outrage on social media at Trump’s remarks, often without daring to mention his name. The phony claimed outrage becomes dangerous if it convinces anyone that there is a distinction between Trump’s abhorrent comments and the Republican…


White Supremacism Is The Republican Brand

  By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (8/21/17) It has been encouraging to see a few prominent republicans condemn Donald Trump’s “Many sides. Many sides” defense of white supremacists and Nazis in the wake of the Charlottesville attacks. Utah republican Sen. Orrin Hatch spoke out forcefully about the Nazi torch lit display on a tweeted message: “Their tiki torches may be fueled by citronella but their ideas are fueled by hate, and have no place in civil society. We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged…


Mark Shields: When The Chickenhawks Flock They Are Clucking About Only Putting Your Kid At Risk

  “It is just a helluva a lot easier to talk tough when it isn’t your son, or your daughter who’s in harms way.”   By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (8/3/17) In doing some other research I stumbled across a few comments by PBS commentator Mark Shields during a conversation with David Brooks of the New York Times and moderator Jeff Greenfield during the midst of the 2016 campaign that are worth noting. Shields is one of the old lions of the media and his comments at the very tail end of the broadcast are well worth considering…


A Wisconsin Republican Looks Back With Regret At Voter ID & Redistricting Fights

  By Topher Sanders ProPublica (7/3/17) Dale Schultz, a Republican, served in the Wisconsin Legislature for more than 30 years, from 1983 to 2015. His Senate district is located in south Wisconsin, much of it rural farmland. Schultz was considered a moderate, and so much of what happened in state politics near the end of his tenure dismayed him: partisan fights over the rights of unions, a gubernatorial recall election, and claims of partisan Republican gerrymandering that will now be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there was the prolonged entanglement over voting rights in the state — who…


GOP Fascism Update: Portland Republicans Turn To Thugs

“The Nazis no longer felt any restraint; with their gangs, they regularly broke up the election meetings of other parties. They shot one or two political opponents every day. In a Berlin suburb they even burned down the house of a Social Democrat family. The new Prussian regional minister (a Nazi: a certain Captain Goring) promulgated an incredible decree It ordered the police to intervene in any brawl on the side of the Nazis, without investigating the rights and wrongs of the matter, furthermore to shoot at the other side without prior warning. A little later an “auxiliary police force”…


Nordic Odin Religion Hijacked & Perverted By Violent American White Supremacists

By Will Carless Reveal / Center for Investigative Reporting (6/1/17) In February 2016, 15 months before he was accused of stabbing three people on a train in Portland, Oregon, and killing two, Jeremy Christian pledged to kill whoever was elected president of the United States: “I Hereby Solemnly swear to Die trying to Kill Hillary (Herself a filthy Murderess) Clinton and Donald Trump should they be elected to the post of President in my faire country on (sic) Vinland,” Christian wrote in a Facebook post. Then he pledged his threat to an ancient Nordic god, as well as Hindu and Egyptian…


Spiritual Crisis: The Republican Party’s Empty Soul Sickness

  By Richard Eskow OurFuture.org (5/30/17) There’s a sickness on the land. You know the facts: millions of Americans lives in poverty. The number of Americans in the workforce remains low. Wages are stagnating and inequality is growing. “Deaths of despair” from alcoholism, opioid overdose, and suicide are on the rise. But it’s not just the inequality, or the poverty, or the despair, that wounds us. It’s the fact that so many Republican leaders and voters find ways to justify living with these injustices, and are now making them worse. There’s no polite way to say it: they suffer from a sickness of…



WTH? How Does Trump Get Away With It & Why Can’t His Followers See What’s Going On?

  By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (5/15/17) As we have repeatedly seen over the past year and-a-half, facts and logic, history and common sense have no room in Trumpland America. Trump can spout the most obvious lies and repeat them over and over with boisterous self confidence as many numbly nod in agreement repeating his empty “Make America Great Again” mantra. Even when confronted by the facts or the past failure of his lies he doesn’t break pace. How, one asks, is this possible? There is a psychology lesson that can provide part of the answer to this…


Of All The Things About Enabling Trumpcare Republicans, Never, Ever Forget This…

“Lawmakers are exempt. Despite all of their rhetoric about the supposed failings of Obamacare, House Republicans inserted a provision on Tuesday that “exempts members of Congress and their staff from their latest healthcare plan,” Vox reported, meaning they will be able to opt out of the new amendment that charges more for people with pre-existing conditions.” – From “‘God Have Mercy on Your Souls’: GOP Passes Cruel, Destructive Trumpcare Bill”, Common Dreams (5/4/17)  


Trumpster Brown Shirts Stirring: “You’ve been warned”

By calebfox The Daily Kos (4/14/17) So late this afternoon the phone rang at my office — the Hamilton County Democratic Party in Cincinnati OH.   The caller asks for me by name.  I’m the Executive Director so usually its me answering the phone. He quickly rattles his name off and says he represents the Citizens for Trump Foundation.  He tells me “we have been monitoring your social media accounts and you have been posting many things critical of Donald Trump.”     I say yea.  Do you have any idea who you just called? What I took from that call yesterday is…


Gas Lighting America: How To Resist By Keeping Your Sanity In Trump’s Crazy Making America

“One of the most insidious things about gaslighting is the denial of reality. Being denied what you have seen. Being denied what you have experienced and know to be true. It can make you feel like you are crazy. But you are not crazy.”   By Ariel Leve The Guardian (3/16/17) Right now, many Americans listening to their president are experiencing what I experienced frequently a child. Nothing means anything, and reality is being canceled. There is confusion, there is chaos, everything is upside down and inside out. When facts and truth are being discredited, how is it possible to…


Here’s How Gas Lighting Works In Every Day America: Twisting The Meaning Of A Single Word

  By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (3/20/17) Every victim of a crazy, abusive relationship or childhood suffered at the hands of an abusive parent knows what it means to be the target of “gas lighting”, even if they have never heard the term. It is taken from “Gaslight”, a 1944 Oscar-winning mystery-thriller movie starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten about a woman whose husband slowly manipulates her into questioning her reality and making her believe she is going insane. Gaslighting is when someone in some position of relationship or power lies with a boldness then denies…


Finally, Some Justice! Texas Bill Would Fine Men $100 Each Time They Masturbate For “Act Against An Unborn Child”

By Isabelle Chapman CNN (3/13/17) A Texas lawmaker has proposed a bill that would fine a man $100 each time he masturbates. The bill also imposes a 24-hour waiting period if a guy wants a colonoscopy or a vasectomy, or if he’s in the market for some Viagra. Rep. Jessica Farrar, a Democrat, knows her bill isn’t going to get very far. But she proposed it last week to make a point and give male lawmakers a taste of their own medicine. Farrar has long been an advocate of women’s health in a state that has made it extremely difficult…


Oblivious: George Bush Paints The Veterans Whose Lives He Needlessly Shattered

  By Abbey Zimet Common Dreams (3/7/17) In what feels like a surreal stab at redemption, George Bush is back and being feted for his newest, guileless, bloodstained and evidently entirely unironic painting project: A book and exhibit of his Forrest-Gumpish portraits of 98 men and women blown apart, broken down, rendered limbless and otherwise shattered by his immoral, inept wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The newly released Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors  consists of 66 single images  and a group mural of physically and/or mentally wounded veterans from all the Armed Forces. Each…