Monday Reads: Republicans and the Great Undoing; a tale of personal greed and religious whackery

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

I’m always a bit ashamed to admit that I was once Republican, worked for Republican candidates and ran for a statewide office as a Republican.  The party left women like me decades ago and when I settled in Minneapolis I took my first step away by registering as an Independent Republican.  I’ve been nothing but a Democratic party voter since registering here in New Orleans over two decades ago. I’ve finished pretending that they’re anything but the party of personal greed and religious whackery.

The Republican Party was always a bit more about greed than your average political movement but it was not steered by billionaires whose personal wealth, fortune, and ideology was brought to bear on all levels of office. Well, maybe during the Gilded Age, but not as visibly so as today.  There was always some religiousity in the party since the very roots of abolition movements came from churches.  This has always been a somewhat pious nation even though it was very much birthed in religious tolerance. It is why it has historically been a place of refuge for the persecuted. The persecuted remember well and generally try to pass the favor on to others.  The new Republican Evangelicals seem to live their creeds absent of any knowledge of the Beatitudes or any other lessons attributed to the biblical Jesus.

Republicans used to be the party that gained the majority of educated voters. All of what we see today in them is the poison bought by the likes of the Kochs, the Mercers, and Grover Norquist.  It was also the Southern Strategy that brought in the Dixiecrats and the completely unJesus like movements of the evangelical right.  These coalitions were supposed to be nice silent partners who just won elections.  Now they are not so silent. They sit in Congress. They brought on the likes of Orange Satan and they’re destroying the very fabric of our nation.

I found some rather interesting reads that show how this unholy alliance of greed and religious whackery has so taken over the party that no Republican of the past would even recognize it today.   They would probably not want to claim it either.

The NYT’s has a long feature piece today in its politics section called “How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science”.  You need to break behind its wall or use up your freebies to read it. It’s the twisted tell of the Kochs and Norquist and a pretty good indication of why educated people keep abandoning Republican candidates.

I had just finished shaking my head over some right wing whackadoo that said since it was raining today it must be climate change.  Only the exceptionally ignorant these days confuse weather with climate. The weather channel is a most outspoken Cassandra on the dangers of climate change.  It’s difficult to turn it on without getting a a brief science lecture on the subject.

The NYT article details how the lies and misinformation of folks vested in fossil fuels and politics of drowning governments in bathtubs deliberately misinforms the public.  The article outlines the decades they’ve spent turning Republican officeholders and voters into backwater village idiots. Not all Republicans deny climate change as we’ve seen in the outpouring of business interests and politicians shocked at Kremlin Caligula’s lie-filled exit from the Paris accords.  Still, many elected officials are beholden to those that have consistently filled their coffers with donations and minds with lies.

Those divisions did not happen by themselves. Republican lawmakers were moved along by a campaign carefully crafted by fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries (which can process 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day) as well as a subsidiary that owns or operates 4,000 miles of pipelines that move crude oil.

Government rules intended to slow climate change are “making people’s lives worse rather than better,” Charles Koch explained in a rare interview last year with Fortune, arguing that despite the costs, these efforts would make “very little difference in the future on what the temperature or the weather will be.”

Republican leadership has also been dominated by lawmakers whose constituents were genuinely threatened by policies that would raise the cost of burning fossil fuels, especially coal. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, always sensitive to the coal fields in his state, rose through the ranks to become majority leader. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming also climbed into leadership, then the chairmanship of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, as a champion of his coal state.

Mr. Trump has staffed his White House and cabinet with officials who have denied, or at least questioned, the existence of global warming. And he has adopted the Koch language, almost to the word. On Thursday, as Mr. Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal, he at once claimed that the Paris accord would cost the nation millions of jobs and that it would do next to nothing for the climate.

Beyond the White House, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the House Science Committee, held a hearing this spring aimed at debunking climate science, calling the global scientific consensus “exaggerations, personal agendas and questionable predictions.”

Republicans of the past would certainly not believe it possible an entire Republican Presidential Campaign colluded with the Russians. They would be appalled at the treatment of NATO.  Many of today’s Republicans–including a few in the West Wing of Orange Satan’s White House–are still reeling from the idea of participating in outright Treason.  The Tweeting Terrorist spent the weekend upending world order as usual.

For a presidency that’s already in crisis — see his 36% job-approval rating per Gallup or this Thursday’s upcoming testimony by former FBI Director James Comey — the last 24 hours or so have been extraordinarily horrendous for President Trump.

For starters, there was his out-of-context shot at London’s mayor after the terrorist attack on the city Saturday night (before playing a round of golf). Then there were his tweets this morning that called his revised travel ban “watered down” and “politically correct,” potentially undermining his administration’s legal defense that the ban doesn’t discriminate against Muslims. And then there’s this stunning Politico article — that Trump deliberately failed to include language in his recent NATO speech reaffirming the alliance’s Article 5 provision.

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told the New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.

It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences – without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.

Four and a half months into Trump’s presidency, it’s easy for political observers to become numb to every controversy and crisis coming from the White House. But this bears emphasizing: This is a president who, day after day, is destroying his credibility.

So, let’s look at some odd numbers.  Support for Donald Trump’s impeachment stands at  43%  according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll taken on  05/31/17.   Approval for Donald Trump stands at 36% (Gallup daily tracking poll; 06/04/17).   Think about this.  Support for Donald Trump’s impeachment is now higher than his approval rating.  (h/t to buddy Lamar and Uberfacts)

The press is still obsessing over Trump Voters.  I still can’t believe any one would vote for him but the sheer ignorance and anger I see spilling over the threads of friends I have that don’t wipe them from their Facebook friends list tells me they are mostly white, mostly angry, mostly male but a few white women are in there too, and really really really stupid. I have yet to see the noble working class everyyman just looking for a job.They are the voices and faces of the stereotypical ugly American. Most are screaming get a job and pay for it yourself so I can hardly think they’re actually some down on his luck auto worker.

A few weeks ago, the American National Election Study — the longest-running election survey in the United States — released its 2016 survey data. And it showed that in November 2016, the Trump coalition looked a lot like it did during the primaries.

Among people who said they voted for Trump in the general election, 35 percent had household incomes under $50,000 per year (the figure was also 35 percent among non-Hispanic whites), almost exactly the percentage in NBC’s March 2016 survey. Trump’s voters weren’t overwhelmingly poor. In the general election, like the primary, about two thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.

But, again, what about education? Many analysts have argued that the partisan divide between more and less educated people is bigger than ever. During the general election, 69 percent of Trump voters in the election study didn’t have college degrees. Isn’t that evidence that the working class made up most of Trump’s base?

The truth is more complicated: many of the voters without college educations who supported Trump were relatively affluent. The graph below breaks down white non-Hispanic voters by income and education. Among people making under the median household income of $50,000, there was a 15 to 20 percentage-point difference in Trump support between those with a college degree and those without. But the same gap was present — and actually larger — among Americans making more than $50,000 and $100,000 annually.

To look at it another way, among white people without college degrees who voted for Trump, nearly 60 percent were in the top half of the income distribution. In fact, one in five white Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

Observers have often used the education gap to conjure images of poor people flocking to Trump, but the truth is, many of the people without college degrees who voted for Trump were from middle- and high-income households. That’s the basic problem with using education to measure the working class.

My guess has always been that if you profile the typical white evangelical, you’ll find the typical Trump voter.  Believe me, they may think Trump knows them but it’s rather obvious he doesn’t know them, care about them, or care about their God since his object of worship is himself.  This was one of the funniest things I’ve read on line for a long time about him.  I guess I found it even funnier because I was raised Presbyterian.  Orange Satan had no idea that Presbyterians weren’t evangelical and were Christians.  This again speaks volumes about how so many of the Republicans are lined up to just use and abuse the religiously inclined.

As a swarm of reporters waited in the gilded lobby, the Rev. Patrick O’Connor, the senior pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Queens, and the Rev. Scott Black Johnston, the senior pastor of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, arrived to pray with the next president.

From behind his desk on the 26th floor, Trump faced the Celtic cross at the top of the steeple of Johnston’s church, located a block south on Fifth Avenue. When Johnston pointed it out to Trump, the President-elect responded by marveling at the thick glass on the windows of his office — bulletproof panels installed after the election.

It was clear that Trump was still preoccupied with his November victory, and pleased with his performance with one constituency in particular.

“I did very, very well with evangelicals in the polls,” Trump interjected in the middle of the conversation — previously unreported comments that were described to me by both pastors.

They gently reminded Trump that neither of them was an evangelical.

“Well, what are you then?” Trump asked.

They explained they were mainline Protestants, the same Christian tradition in which Trump, a self-described Presbyterian, was raised and claims membership. Like many mainline pastors, they told the President-elect, they lead diverse congregations.

Trump nodded along, then posed another question to the two men: “But you’re all Christians?”
“Yes, we’re all Christians.”

This is it for me today. We have a wonderful world. It’s just a damned shame we’re going to have to fight for it against a lot of bad actors. BTW, go see Wonder Woman. It was wonderful!  It’s wonderful news for women and girls fighting injustice everywhere.

Wonder Woman made a little over $100 million over the weekend which is reportedly with best domestic opening for a female director

Plus, Gal Gadot was five months pregnant when the movie was shot.  She was pregnant with her daughter Maya.

It’s a shot in the arm that we all need to move forward.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?