Author: clearandpresentdanger

. . . 87,000 IRS agents dressed in drag and high on rainbow fentanyl plan to replace our gas stoves with electric ranges smuggled into the country by Mexican cartels.

 

This post could get me thrown in jail.

And the fact that I’m even thinking that way is the entire point of Jim Jordan’s new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee which Jordan chairs.

He and his fellow fascist seditionists want Americans to be afraid of them, particularly Americans who may be in a position to identify their crimes and hold them to account.

Frankly, I’d be pretty low on their list. Just like the notorious Republican Senator Joe McCarthy back in the 1950s, Jordan and his buddies appear focused on using their power to intimidate those who have actual legal power. Like the FBI, IRS, regulators, and elected officials.

But it would be foolhardy to think they won’t go after members of the press. Or whatever they’re calling people like me these days: “fake news,” “lamestream media,” or the Lügenpresse in the original German.

The Committee will have the power to pry-bar their way into ongoing investigations, terrorizing agencies and government employees looking into Republican participation in the attempted coup of January 6th and the weeks around it.

They’ve even acquired, in yesterday’s vote, the power to access and use top-secret information normally reserved to the highly-vetted members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Sources and methods. How the FBI knows which seditionist Members of Congress were involved in giving tours or conspiring with Proud Boys. Secrets Putin or the Saudi’s would pay billions for, as they apparently already have with Jared Kushner and Donald Trump.

As congressman Ruben Gallego said yesterday, it’s “as if we gave the mafia the right to investigate the Southern District of New York attorney’s office.”

Congressman Adam Schiff calls it The Coverup Committee. He’s right, but it’s worse than just that.

They’ve proclaimed their desire to intimidate the FBI, the Capitol Police, America’s spy agencies, and any politician who might show the temerity to suggest traitors should be held accountable for their treason.

We’ve seen this movie before, complete with the bombast, threats, lies, and bullying. And it tells us a lot about what we can expect over the next two years.

On February 9, 1950, an obscure first-term Senator who’d lied about his military service to get elected, Joe McCarthy, gave the first speech of a 5-city tour before a Republican women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia. Apparently wanting to stir up some buzz, he pulled a random piece of paper from his pocket, waved it theatrically, and claimed it was a list of “205 known communists” who worked at the State Department.

Americans were worried about communists then, with some justification. The “communist miracle” was widely acknowledged under Stalin as just another form of brutal anti-democratic tyranny. Stalin had starved four million Ukrainians to death in what was known as the Holdomor, while he was imprisoning his own citizens in brutal gulags. The Soviet Union had exploded their first nuclear weapon just six months earlier, and that June North Korea, with help from the USSR, would invade South Korea.

By the end of McCarthy’s tour that month, reaching Salt Lake City, he’d reduced his claim to 57 communists in the State Department; in other cities he’d claimed the number was 81. It’s entirely possible he simply couldn’t keep track of his own lies.

In any case, no such list existed. Right up to the day he drank himself to death, May 9, 1957, McCarthy never was able to name a single communist in the State Department. But his demagogic claim got him on the front pages of newspapers across America.

McCarthy and his right-hand man Roy Cohn (later Donald Trump’s mentor) terrorized people working in the US government.

Being dragged before his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was a career-ender: over 2000 government employees lost their jobs because of his baseless accusations and innuendo.

In 1950, The Progressive magazine called McCarthy:

“[A]n ambitious faker living by his wits and guts, a ruthless egotist bent on personal power regardless of the consequence to his country, a shrewd and slippery operator with the gambler’s gift for knowing when and how to bluff.”

Even average Americans trembled before McCarthy, who was stepping into the anti-communist game late.

Three years earlier the “Hollywood Ten” (Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo)— none of them particularly rich or famous — had all been sent to prison for a year for refusing to acknowledge subpoenas and submit to public interrogation by McCarthy’s peers on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Their crime? Most were writers and one, Ring Lardner Jr., had written an op-ed very much like this one in which he noted:

“One of the first acts of the Republicans who took control of Congress in 1946 (for the first time in 20 years) was to convert a temporary committee [HUAC], which had been investigating fascist sympathizers during the war, into a permanent [committee] concentrating on the … left…”

Off he went to prison.

And now, today, Jim Jordan and his colleagues have that same power of subpoena that was so bluntly wielded by McCarthy and his Republican collaborators when I was a kid.

We’ve been hearing about changes that the Republicans are making here and there in Congress since they’ve seized power, but now the full picture is coming into focus. I worried and warned about this two years ago in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

For example, back in April of 2009 the FBI/DHS issued a report titled: “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” It had been prepared during the presidency of George W. Bush, but Obama was now president when it was released and the reaction from the right was immediate.

John Boehner said the report was “offensive and unacceptable” and was particularly outraged that it used the word “terrorist” to, in Boehner’s words, “describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.”

That mild response caused Obama to essentially pull the report.

But imagine if such a report were issued today by the FBI. Jordan’s new committee could call before it — as McCarthy did in the 1950s — the actual government employees who’d done the research and written it.

Their careers would be destroyed, their homes and families under constant death threat, their lives turned upside down.

It would be a long time before any other federal employee would dare expose terrorism on the American right.

This is how fascists behave. It’s how they’ve behaved throughout history. It’s how they get what they want.

Unless you confront them with overwhelming resistance, you can’t negotiate with them; they keep taking more and more right up to the point of using violence.

I hope I’m wrong, but everything I’m seeing tells me this is exactly the direction Republicans in the House are moving.

We’ve entered the new McCarthy era, and Kevin is doing everything he can to empower Jordan as the new Joe.

Only this time the goal isn’t just feeding the ego of an alcoholic narcissist: it’s to end democracy in the United States.

What is Rush Limbaugh’s legacy?  Nothing.

• No one ever quotes him, discusses him, or mentions anything he did.
• His fortune didn’t go to any causes he professed to care about.
• He contributed absolutely nothing of value and was instead easily replaced with others who spewed the same hate and vitriol for their fellow man.

And what about the Rush Limbaugh copycats?  Whenever they die, they too will leave nothing and will be forgotten.

 

 

 

 

On Monday, Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) took to the floor to rail against “reckless spending” by Democrats — only to immediately be shot down by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA).

“1,740 new IRS agents in every state, for one purpose,” said Duncan, referring to funding to replace retiring IRS staffers and improve the agency’s manpower to fight wealthy tax evaders. “To go after small businesses, hardworking Americans, to raise money to pay for reckless spending, reckless spending that’s cost $31 trillion in debt in this nation. This is the right thing to do, I’ll tell you what: repurpose those agents to the Southern border. Or we could repurpose them and build the Keystone XL Pipeline … but then the government turns around and hires $87,000 IRS agents to go after your constituents and mine?”

McGovern had a few choice words in response.

“I would remind my friend that the first bill you’re doing is gonna add $114 billion to the deficit,” said McGovern. “Enough.”

McGovern is referring to a new Congressional Budget Office report finding that canceling the funding to restaff the IRS would save about $71 billion — but also reduce tax revenues by $186 billion due to reduced enforcement, for a deficit increase of $114 billion.

The IRS restaffing, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has directly pledged will not be used for audits on people making less than $400,000 a year, was passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act — the broad package of energy, climate, and health care reforms passed via reconciliation last year.

FACTS:

The IRS plans to hire about 87,00 people over the next 8-10 years to replace retiring employees.  While some of these will be auditors, the bulk of them are administrative support — IT specialists, secretaries, and the like.

The Keystone pipeline was completed six years ago and is transporting Canadian oil to refineries in the Midwest and Gulf Coast.  The Keystone XL pipeline has not been built.  It was intended to take Canadian oil directly to the US Gulf Coast where it would be exported, with the profits going to Canada.  Not a drop of XL oil would go to the US.

An editorial written by the New York Daily News editorial board on Monday delivered a scathing rebuke to former President Donald Trump over his recently released tax returns, which the editors argued should dispel any remaining notion that he is a business genius.

In fact, the editors argued that Trump’s taxes showed that he was “not so rich or so smart” and was really nothing more than a “bad businessman who racked up huge losses” even as he made repeated boasts about his purported great wealth.

In fact, note the Daily News editors, Trump’s stated finances were so dodgy that even his former accounting firm felt compelled to issue a statement after it dropped him as a client that his financial statements should not be relied upon.

In fact, the editors conclude, the biggest reason that Trump tried to keep his tax returns hidden so long is that they exposed his image as a fraud.

“He’s not such a rich man,” they write. “His adjusted gross income was negative, mostly from a Net Operating Loss carryover of $105,157,825. He had to pay the IRS $707,123. No wonder the fraud didn’t want Americans to see.”

While the clown show has been highly entertaining to anyone not named Kevin McCarthy, in all the ways that truly matter, it’s been irrelevant.

As Heather “Digby” Parton noted Friday at Salon, the members of the insurrectionist caucus “already run everything.” That was true long before Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida decided to head up the “Humiliate Kevin” fund-raising scheme. It was true last year, when McCarthy cozied up to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, cementing the QAnon-loving congresswoman as one of the most powerful people on Capitol Hill. It was true when McCarthy tried to get Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on the January 6 committee because he thought Jordan possessed the necessary lying skills to cover for Trump’s guilt. It was true even on January 6, 2021, when McCarthy joined 146 other House Republicans to vote to de-certify the 2020 election, even after Donald Trump sent a murderous mob to the Capitol. The media covered the Speaker fight as one between McCarthy and “election deniers,” but in truth, McCarthy should be considered an election denier himself.

In a very real sense, the silly drama over the Speaker election has distracted from a larger, more disturbing truth: House Republicans are going to spend the next two years using taxpayer money to wage war on not just democracy, but truth itself. The antics of various House committees, as they work hand-in-glove with Fox News to create and disseminate right wing conspiracy theories, will make an epsiode of Infowars seem downright sober-minded.

As Crooked editor Brian Beutler noted in his latest “Big Tent” newsletter, the insurrectionist caucus differs from the radical right wingers of GOP caucuses past, whose goals were to “gut Medicare, defund the Affordable Care Act, etc.” Instead, these new Republican radicals “want to steal elections. They want to sabotage criminal investigations that implicate themselves, Donald Trump, and January 6 defendants, current and future.” Having realized that they’ll likely never get their desired ends through democratic means, they’ve determined democracy itself must go. And make no mistake: McCarthy and other GOP leaders are only too happy to go along with the program. ….

Another summons has been issued to Donald Trump in a case related to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The former president was served notice Monday of a civil lawsuit filed by the longtime girlfriend of the late Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick alleging conspiracy, wrongful death and other complaints against Trump and two rioters involved in the attack, reported CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane.

“The horrific events of January 6 2021, including Officer Sicknick’s tragic, wrongful death, were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ unlawful actions,” the suit alleges.

The lawsuit brought by Sandra Garza was filed in District of Columbia federal court the day before the insurrection’s second anniversary and demands millions of dollars n damages.

When will Republican voters figure out how badly they’re getting screwed by Republican politicians?

— Desperate workers struggle with soaring rents (courtesy of Republican-donor hedge funds);
— lack of healthcare (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand Medicaid for under-$15,000/year workers) is literally killing Americans;
— wages have flatlined since Reagan declared war on workers in 1981 while the merely rich have become the morbidly rich;
— Americans pay 10 times as much as Canadians for some drugs because Republicans block any effort to bring competition to that marketplace;
— at the same time Trump and his GOP buddies in the House and Senate borrowed $1.7 trillion to fund a tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies, student debt passed the $1.7 trillion mark…

Yet somehow the “conservative” base voters never seem to figure it out. Why?

Most Republican voters don’t think much about it, but there are two very distinct layers to the GOP. It’s like a pyramid with a capstone at the very top.

The vast base of the pyramid are the white voters who Richard Nixon invited into the party after the Democrats embraced racial equality in 1964/1965 with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

They mostly live in all-white neighborhoods, attend all-white churches, and send their kids to all-white schools. While most aren’t the Confederate-flag-toting “out and open” racists like the folks who showed up at the Capitol on January 6th, they’re nonetheless “uncomfortable” with nonwhite people. It’s their “culture,” they’ll tell you.

At the tippy-top of the pyramid, it’s capstone, are the handful of white billionaires who answered Lewis Powell’s 1971 call to get active and seize control of America’s political institutions.

They’ve funded think tanks in every state and at the federal level, sponsor anti-labor economics and political science professors in our colleges and universities, lever judges into positions all the way up to the Supreme Court, and pour a seemingly unending river of cash into Republican candidates for office.

These elite of the GOP live insular lives in their mansions with servants’ quarters and private security, travel on private jets, and vacation on private islands or their own personal super-yachts. They don’t really care that much about race because it’s not an issue in their daily lives: the people who enter the circle around them and their families are tightly regulated.

These conservative elite often own or are descended from the owners of America’s largest and most profitable businesses. Their issues, therefore, are their own income taxes and the regulation of their companies’ behavior.

They understand that Voltaire was dead serious when he said, “The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.”

To keep their taxes low they fund movements to privatize public schools, gut “entitlements,” and oppose any sort of “welfare” aid to working class or poor people. To keep their businesses “free of government interference” they pay off politicians and hire judges to destroy unions, kneecap regulations, and spiff “conservative” media celebrities who lionized them as “job creators” and “geniuses.”

You’d think the white base of the GOP would have figured out by now that the Republican elite are more interested in keeping their wages down than having them as neighbors, but the “Makers” of the party have executed a brilliant strategy to keep their own taxes low and profits high while suppressing the “Takers’” wages and benefits among the party’s base.

Truth be told, many in the GOP base were beginning to figure this out by the end of the disastrous presidency of trust-fund-baby George W. Bush.

He’d begun the privatization of Medicare with his Medicare Advantage scam in 2003; lied us into two unnecessary and illegal wars; borrowed around $4 trillion to fund a massive tax cut for his donors, family, and friends; and to top it all off was only in the White House because his brother was governor of Florida and threw 80,000 Black voters off the rolls just months before the 2000 election…and still needed his father’s friends on the Supreme Court to get him into office.

Bush Junior was also the least racist of the Republican presidents since Nixon, and put two Black people at the top of the State Department: many in the white GOP base never forgave him for Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice.

All in all, most Americans — including a substantial margin of Republican voters — were done and over with Bush and the metaphorical horse he rode in on (as much as he wanted to emulate Reagan, Bush is afraid of horses which is why his Texas election-prop “ranch” was an old pig farm).

Combine that dynamic with Barack Obama being one of the most gifted political orators of the 21st century and in 2008 a Black man became President of the United States for the first time in history.

Obama’s ascension to the highest office in the land was a gift to the morbidly rich funders of the GOP: a “Black liberal from Chicago” being president broke the brains of the most reliable part of the GOP base.

The billionaires leaped to the opportunity. Resurrecting a meme from the tobacco industry’s “smoker’s rights” scam of the 1990s, they rolled out the 2009 version of the Tea Party, complete with millions of dollars to pay for buses, staged events, and well-funded PR operations to get it all into the media every day.

While the foreground was “taxed enough already” and “death panels,” the background was “Black man in the White House wants to give your tax dollars to his Black friends.” It was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” all over again, only in a far more sophisticated form.

There’s a lot of truth to the internet meme: “Republicans have gotten over Trump’s sexual assaults, affairs, idolatry, greed, profanity and vulgarity…but they’ve never gotten over Obama being Black.”

By the end of Obama’s presidency, though, the Tea Party had become a caricature of itself: old white boomers with silly “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” signs wrote their own jokes.

So, with fellow billionaire (at least he said he was) Trump in the White House, the capstone funders of the GOP changed their brand positioning.

They plastered the word “freedom” all over everything, including the caucus they bought and paid for in Congress. They helped launch hundreds of Spanish-language radio stations to spread the gospel of “free markets” and “you, too, can have white privilege” to America’s fastest growing demographic group. Their media operations made billions and aligned themselves with Russia, Hungary, and other straight-white-male-power authoritarian states.

They even continue to financially support politicians who tried to overthrow the government of the United States.

Which brings us back to the question:

“When will Republican voters wake up to their own oppression at the hands of the GOP’s billionaire funders?”

My bet is that as long as Democrats continue to welcome racial and gender minorities into their party, Republican voters will stay with their nearly-all-white politicians. Particularly people like Steve “David Duke without the baggage” Scalise and Marjorie “Jewish space lasers” Greene.