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Rick Plant:
Republicans now stand for nothing except trolling, vigilante violence and death



The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict sent a shudder through America as terrorists and vigilantes celebrated: One right-winger called for wholesale slaughter of Democrats, saying on Telegram, "The left won't stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood."

On Facebook, right-wing sites celebrating the verdict were the most popular nationwide by a factor of nine to one.

The parents of Anthony Huber, shot dead by Rittenhouse as Huber tried to disarm him, put out a public statement that said, in part:

Today's verdict means there is no accountability for the person who murdered our son. It sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.

A right-wing militia group in New York celebrated in the streets and then put a punctuation mark on their disdain for the law and simple rules of a civil society by entering the New York subway system through emergency exits, bypassing the turnstiles. "Rules don't apply to us!" they seemed to be shouting, along with, "You can't stop us!"

Trump wannabes in public office who are still trying to capture the white supremacist and white nationhood vote have doubled down on his strategy of fear, hate and vigilantism.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, recently signed legislation that gives legal protections to people who drive their cars into protesters in the street, and defines everybody in any protest as a criminal felon if anybody in that protest breaks a window or engages in other illegal activity.

With DeSantis and other Republican governors pre-exonerating people like the driver who viciously killed Heather Heyer, as well as vigilante protest shooters like Rittenhouse, many are worried that we're entering a new era where vigilante shooters and drivers-into-crowds will become normalized and accepted, just as Amy Vanderpool documents how normalized daily mass shootings have become in America.

Laws similar to Florida's have been passed or are pending in numerous Republican-controlled states, presumably in anticipation of citizen protests when those states use their newly passed laws to overturn the will of voters in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Object to your politicians handing an election they lost to themselves? You go straight from the streets to the jail, just like in tinhorn dictatorships.

There's always been a fringe movement of violent white supremacist vigilantes in America, particularly since the end of the Civil War, but they've never before been embraced by or succeeded in capturing a political party. Today, astonishingly, that's the case in our country.

So, what's motivating today's vigilantes and the police who often aid and support them, as in the Rittenhouse case?

Centuries ago, as white people fanned out across this continent to occupy land stolen from Native Americans, it usually took years or decades for stable government institutions to be created, including local police forces. Therefore, communities would organize their own forces, called "vigilance committees" whose job was to be "vigilant" to protect their own homes and communities.

That sort of "classic vigilantism" pretty much completely disappeared in the U.S. after the Civil War, however, when the Southern states' slave patrols were merged into those states' militias (what we call the National Guard) and professional police forces, state and local, took over.

Modern post-Civil War violent vigilantism, therefore, doesn't usually emerge because the government is failing to protect citizens and therefore communities field their own equivalent of police forces.

Instead, these days it's almost always a conservative response to cultural change that creates a vigilante backlash.

Virtually the dictionary definition of "conservative" is "opposed to rapid change in society." That's why, as America becomes more diverse and states like Texas have become less than 50% white, racist "conservative" factions that have had a home in the GOP since 1968 are turning to violence to try to maintain the absolute dominance of straight white men in American society.

When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, for example, those who were opposed to that change in our society, symbolized by the Roe v. Wade decision, organized vigilante groups that threatened women outside abortion clinics, followed and harassed women seeking health care and people who worked in the clinics, and murdered multiple doctors and bombed multiple clinics across the nation.

In the 1980s, conservative billionaires who supported Reagan helped impose neoliberal austerity on America, so for 40 years the country has been in steady decline as jobs went overseas, wages fell so badly the middle class sagged below 50% of Americans by 2015, and a general rage began to build across the country.

Much of that rage was channeled into "anti-government" movements that were encouraged by Reagan, who told us that government was the problem and not the solution. Neoliberal billionaires backed Republican politicians who kept their taxes low while openly and proudly obstructing any government efforts to help working class people.

The GOP also revived Nixon's "Southern strategy" in 1980, using open appeals to racism with Reagan warning about "strapping young bucks" and Black "welfare queens" taking white people's tax dollars. George H.W. Bush put it on steroids in 1988 with his "Willie Horton" television advertisements against Michael Dukakis, charging the Democrat wasn't doing enough to protect Massachusetts from violent Black criminals.

By this time the GOP had totally embraced neoliberalism and stopped proposing any sort of policies that would lift up America. Instead, their efforts went to subsidizing billionaires with tax cuts and increasing profits for polluting industries via deregulation.

Working-class white people continued to fall behind, particularly in rural areas, as wealthy CEOs and trust-fund billionaires made out like bandits, pouring their surplus cash into the campaigns of politicians because five right-wingers on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United in 2010.

The Republican answer to the growing white angst in the country was to start a movement against affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s, calling it "reverse racism," reviving the old saw from the 1950s that "Black people want to take your job!"

Women, since the 1970s, have also been successfully competing for jobs formerly held by white men, building misogynist frustration and rage among lower-income and lower-education white men, and turning "incels" murderous.

Much of this white male rage was channeled in the 1990s into the fringe "white nationalist" movement, which got their martyrs with Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993, where heavily armed white supremacists shot it out with the feds and lost terribly.

That provoked Tim McVeigh to follow the "Turner Diaries" script for creating "a race-based civil war by provoking the government to seize guns so we can fight back," blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City on the anniversary of Waco in 1995, killing 168 and injuring 860.

He, however, was condemned by both political parties and ultimately put to death by a Republican president. The GOP had not yet fully turned toward embracing fascists, vigilantes and terrorists in the 1990s.

Modern race-based vigilantism with the support of the GOP took a big step forward after 9/11, when multiple Republican leaders used that crime as an excuse to vilify Muslims specifically and brown-skinned Arabs more generally. Most famously, Donald Trump perpetrated the lie that Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating in the streets the afternoon of 9/11.

George W. Bush took that anti-Muslim energy and amplified it as he pushed a revenge-based war against Afghanistan and Iraq, another Muslim country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Following Bush's presidency, a Black man whose middle name was Hussein became our president, creating a frenzy of bizarre conspiracy theories on the Fox Propaganda Channel and across right-wing internet and social media outlets.

Was Obama a "real" American? Was he really a secret Kenyan Muslim sleeper agent? Was he trying to flip America communist with his radical Obamacare program? Trump and Republicans asserted that those were all true claims.

With the hard right now empowered by these conspiracy theories on Fox and talk radio, in 2014 Cliven Bundy challenged the authority of the Obama administration to restrict him from grazing his cows on public federal land without paying a fee. Obama flinched and backed down, giving Bundy and armed, anti-government white men a huge national PR victory (as well as getting his cows back).

Two years later Cliven's son, Ammon Bundy, occupied another federal facility, this time the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon near the Idaho border. His armed vigilantes pointed their weapons at federal officers on live television, and again the Obama administration backed down.

Bundy's 2016 "victory" animated white supremacist vigilantes across the nation and made him enough of a media figure that he's now running in the Republican primary for governor of Idaho.

Things really stepped up throughout the Trump administration when the new president openly welcomed white nationhood militias and neo-Nazis into the GOP and praised them from the presidential pulpit, something no president had done since Woodrow Wilson hosted the debut of the Klan recruiting film "Birth of a Nation" at the White House in 1915.

Trump invited vigilantes to the southern border to "help" with the problem of brown-skinned refugees trying to enter the country, and sucked up to police, encouraging them to be even more brutal with (presumably minority) criminal suspects.

His presidency marked a turning point for American politics, with the GOP abandoning any pretense of caring about policy debates to full-on embrace of fear and hate of racial, religious and gender minorities as their core political position and strategy going forward.

As a result, NBC News chronicles, threats against federal officials reported to Capitol Police have about tripled since Trump's first year in office, reaching more than 9,000 incidents so far this year.

When we've seen these kinds of things happen in other countries, we've historically called them out as naked assaults on democracy; now Trump and his armed Republican faction have turned America's moral and political standing in the world on its head.

International observers have issued repeated alarms about the state of democracy in America since Trump's 2016 election. In 2017, the U.S. was downgraded by The Economist magazine's Intelligence Unit: instead of being a "full democracy," we are now a "flawed democracy." The international think tank IDEA just reported that we're now a "backsliding democracy."

Today, while the Democratic Party is working hard to secure benefits to all Americans, the Republicans have only two responses: Block legislation and support armed white nationhood vigilantes.

All the Republican Party has left, now that they've abandoned any pretense over the past 40 years of supporting working people or even rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, is hate, fear and death.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1933 inaugural address about an earlier generation of Republican obstructionists: "They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish."

And if we don't return to sanity, our democracy could perish as well.

https://www.rawstory.com/republicans-now-stand-for-nothing-except-trolling-vigilante-violence-and/

Rick Plant:
Trump supporters are now calling Crenshaw "Pirate Dan" or "One Eyed Dan" because of the eye patch he wears. Doesn't take long for MAGA to turn on their own.

GOP's Dan Crenshaw ignites furious uproar after warning of grifters and liars inside his own party



U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, is facing an uproar from some in his party after warning about "grifters" and liars among fellow conservatives, including in the House Freedom Caucus.

Crenshaw, one of the most visible members of the Texas congressional delegation, sought Thursday to clarify his comments, which came at a Houston-area GOP gathering over the weekend.

“When I said grifters and liars, I wasn’t talking about the Freedom Caucus," Crenshaw told the GOP podcast "Ruthless." "I was talking about a general group of people that exists on our side."The Freedom Caucus is a group of House conservatives who hold considerable sway within the GOP minority. It includes at least a few Republicans from Texas, like Rep. Louie Gohmert of Tyler, Ronny Jackson of Amarillo and Chip Roy of Austin.

Crenshaw made the original comments at an event Sunday in Cypress for the Texas Liberty Alliance PAC, and a clip of them went viral later after being tweeted by Ron Filipkowski, a Florida lawyer and former Republican. Crenshaw was introducing two congressional candidates he is supporting and sought to differentiate them from "performance artists" in Congress who he said say what conservative voters want to hear. He then sought to make the point by arguing that U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger — a prominent GOP critic of former President Donald Trump — actually voted more in line with Trump's agenda during his first two years in office than did "everybody in the Freedom Caucus — all of them."

"We have grifters in our midst," Crenshaw said in the clip. "I mean in the conservative movement. Lie after lie after lie. Because they know something psychologically about the conservative heart. We’re worried about what people are gonna do to us, what they’re gonna infringe upon us."

The comments drew denunciations from Freedom Caucus defenders and even from a key supporter of Crenshaw in his 2018 underdog run for Congress — Houston radio host Michael Berry.

"No, I do not support [Crenshaw]," Berry tweeted Tuesday. "I am embarrassed I helped him win."

Discussing the Freedom Caucus on the podcast Thursday, Crenshaw said there are "definitely some in there I don't like, obviously, but for the most part, no," he said he was not referring to the caucus with his weekend remarks. He offered praise for Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the current vice chair of the caucus, and went on to say he was mostly referring to people who "messaged knowingly falsely about" recent legislation to improve the sharing of data nationally about vaccinations.

In the full video of Crenshaw's remarks Sunday, he indeed went on to cite the immunization bill, which passed with the support of Crenshaw and 79 other House Republicans. Crenshaw said the proposal would decrease and "put guardrails on" funding for existing vaccine databases that do not track Americans individually. Some GOP opponents of the bill claimed it would create a new vaccine database.

"So you've got less money for it and more guardrails that requires you in the law to make the data anonymous," Crenshaw said. "So the real question is why did so many Republicans vote against that and then lie to you about it? Grifters."

One of the Freedom Caucus members from Texas, Roy, brushed off the uproar surrounding Crenshaw, saying the media "wants to focus on palace intrigue rather than the issues hammering everyday Americans."

"Dan is a good friend, and we can agree to disagree on some things," Roy said in a statement. "I am confident in standing behind my record and the record of the Freedom Caucus of successfully fighting for the people we represent — including this last week protecting against drafting our daughters, preventing our service members from dishonorable discharge, and fighting a dangerous [Department of Defense] office of extremism, among other things."

Crenshaw made the original comments while seated alongside Wesley Hunt and Morgan Luttrell, two Houston-area congressional candidates and fellow veterans that Crenshaw is backing. Hunt is running for Texas' new 38th District, where he has been the frontrunner, while Luttrell is vying in a crowded primary to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands.

Luttrell's race is particularly relevant to the Freedom Caucus controversy. One of his competitors is Christian Collins, who has committed to joining the caucus and has already received over a quarter-million dollars in support from a caucus-aligned super PAC.

https://www.rawstory.com/gop-s-dan-crenshaw-ignites-furious-uproar-after-warning-of-grifters-and-liars-inside-his-party/

Rick Plant:
Analysis: Texas’ electric grid is half-ready for another winter freeze

You never hear politicians promise that hurricanes and tornadoes won’t hurt you, that you won’t get wet (or flooded) when it rains, that protracted heat waves won’t endanger anyone or that urban fires are no threat during droughts.

That would be nuts.

But after the storm that left Texans across the state freezing in the dark last February, the state’s leaders are promising now that the winter just ahead of us won’t cause any electric blackouts.

The odds are probably in their favor. Freezes like the one this year are rare, and freezes that cover the entire state are rarer still.

But making a promise that nobody is going to have a power failure is a big bet, and an unnecessary one. It would probably be enough to say, for political purposes, that they’ve taken steps to protect the state’s electric grid if the weather repeats itself.

While Texas Democrats aren’t openly hoping for a freeze or a power failure, that sort of disaster would be helpful to their political chances in a year when circumstances favor the Republicans. Democrats still want to turn Texas blue — their 2020 election slogan — but turning Texans blue to get there could be a smidge too literal for the liberals.

The guarantee that the lights will stay on started with Gov. Greg Abbott, and has now filtered down to the regulators he installed after the last freeze.

“I can guarantee the lights will stay on,” Abbott told Austin’s Fox 7 News last month. He said he was confident because of the laws put in place in response to the February freeze. This week, Peter Lake, the chair of the state’s Public Utility Commission, echoed his patron.

“The ERCOT grid is stronger and more reliable than ever,” said Lake, who was appointed to the PUC — the state’s electric utilities regulator — in April. “We are going into the winter knowing that the lights will stay on.”

One difference between now and this time last year is that state regulators and the main players in the electric grid — the companies that generate, transmit and distribute electricity and the companies that supply electric plants with fuel — know just how wrong things can go.

So do the state’s politicians, who set up the current regulatory framework and whose standing with voters could hinge on whether the state’s homes are lighted and heated when it gets cold outside.

New laws and rules require electric generators to prepare their facilities for the cold, taking a precaution that was recommended but not heeded after winter blackouts in 2011.

The natural gas companies that provide most of the fuel for those plants during winter months aren’t yet being held to the same standard. The Texas Railroad Commission regulates them, and state lawmakers didn’t require winterization of those suppliers. They and the electric generators are powerful and influential, but the electrics suffered most of the blame for the blackouts, and the Texas Legislature was more lenient with the gas suppliers. They have another year before they have to worry about winterization requirements, and then only after a new committee makes recommendations.

That’s on the other side of the coming winter. Natural gas lobbyists say the best protection against winter weather is keeping their electricity on. That’s half of what is supposed to be a kind of virtuous cycle, where electric companies heat the gas providers who supply the electric companies. Last February, it was often a vicious cycle: Gas companies that weren’t identified as essential customers lost power, froze up and stopped sending the needed fuel to the electric companies.

Texas blacked out. Nearly everyone was miserable, and hundreds of Texans died.

The long-range weather forecasts this year are better than they were 12 months ago. Meteorologists — who, unlike politicians, don’t make promises about what’s going to happen two or three months from now — say a storm like the last one is less likely this winter.

Texas legislators did put some new safeguards in place this year, mostly aimed at the electric companies. Before Abbott and the regulators were promising a warm and well-lighted winter, lawmakers gave gas providers more time, gambling that Texas wouldn’t get another storm like the last one — at least, not right away.

https://www.rawstory.com/analysis-texas-electric-grid-is-half-ready-for-another-winter-freeze/

Rick Plant:
Without hesitation, President Biden signed a federal emergency declaration for Kentucky. This is a state that didn't vote for President Biden, but since he is a President for ALL Americans he signed it without any problem. That's what a President is supposed to do. Under the hateful and partisan regime of Criminal Donald, he refused to sign emergency declarations for blue states because  verything was about him and he made everything political in times of tragedy. Glad those days are gone.

Biden signs federal emergency declaration for Kentucky in wake of deadly tornado outbreak
https://www.wlky.com/article/biden-kentucky-emergency-declaration-deadly-tornado/38492420

Rick Plant:
Hypocrite Rand Paul was begging President Biden for federal dollars after tragedy struck Kentucky. Rand Paul is a guy who voted against a bill for 9/11 first responders who needed help after they developed diseases when they were at ground zero. Paul cited the debt and said we couldn't afford to pay our heroes who nearly gave their own lives on 9/11. Paul voted for the debt because nearly 8 trillion dollars went into the pockets of corporations and billionaires in Criminal  Donalds tax cut giveaway. Rand Paul and the rest of these right wingers rail against federal assistance from the government. They call that "socialism" and call Democrats "socialists" for offering for those in need. Well, here's hypocrite Rand Paul with his hands out begging for the "socialism" that he rails against. Republicans are socialists as well as long as the money benefits them politically. Right wingers are total hypocrites and believe in Republican socialism.

Rand Paul begs Biden for federal aid to Kentucky tornado victims -- after a career of voting 'no' when others needed the same



Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky dashed off a letter to President Joe Biden today pleading for expeditious federal relief aid to victims of a deadly 200-mile tornado that struck his state Friday.

That was of course the right to do. But Paul is a strange one to have done it.

Throughout his two terms in the U.S. Senate, Paul has prided himself as a Tea Party fiscal conservative willing to say no to the most milquetoast causes if federal spending is involved. Opposing federal disaster relief is one of his pastimes.

In 2017, Paul was one of just 17 senators to oppose an emergency $15.3 billion federal relief bill for victims of Hurricane Harvey. It had wreaked havoc similar to Friday’s tornado, but not in Kentucky.

In 2013, Paul was one of 31 Republican senators who voted against a $50.5 billion relief aid package for Hurricane Sandy -- “after previously disaster aid for their home states,” as reported by ThinkProgress.org.

In 2011, Paul’s first year in the Senate, he was among 38 Republicans voting against a major FEMA funding package despite the fact -- not lost upon publicintegrity.org -- that his own state of Kentucky had been the nation’s largest recipient of FEMA funding ($293 million), mostly because of a 2009 ice storm.

A decade later, Paul wrote to Biden like the two were old liberal spendthrift friends.

“Last night and early this morning devastating storms swept across multiple states, including Kentucky. A single tornado from that system may have been on the ground for over 200 miles, and a large swath of the Commonwealth has been severely hit.

“As the sun comes up this morning we will begin to understand the true scope of the devastation, but we already know of loss of life and severe property damage.

“The governor of the Commonwealth has requested federal assistance this morning, and certainly further requests will be coming as the situation is assessed. I fully support those requests and ask that you move expeditiously to approve the appropriate resources for our state.”

Paul’s stinginess with federal aid to people outside of Kentucky has hardly been limited to aid responding to physical disasters.

In the very first coronavirus Senate aid package -- a mere $8 billion passed on March 5, 2020 -- Paul stood out as the lone Senator to vote no.

His complaint: Congress never cuts other spending as the direct offset he insists upon having for federal aid not earmarked for Kentucky:

“This isn't the first time we've had emergency money,” Paul complained after the first COVID-19 spending passed. “This is probably the tenth time we've done emergency money in the past two or three years. So everything is an emergency."

https://www.rawstory.com/rand-paul-2655999297/
       

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