Donald Trump's actual "Help Wanted" posting. Not making this up.

JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism

Fascism and Christian Nationalism now define the GOP

Karyn Amira, College of Charleston

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and
vice presidential candidate JD Vance at a campaign rally in
Michigan on July 20, 2024. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Since Donald Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, it’s been widely noted that Vance once described Trump as “reprehensible” and “cultural heroin.” However, the day after Vance won his own Senate race in 2022, he reportedly made it known that he would support Trump for president in 2024.

Given this dramatic change, what does Vance’s selection mean for the Republican Party and conservatism, the political philosophy that the GOP once claimed to embrace?

I am a political scientist whose research and political analysis focuses on the relationship between Trump, the Republican Party and conservatism. Everyday citizens define conservatism in different ways, but at its root it is a philosophy that supports smaller and less-centralized government because consolidated power could be used to silence political competition and deny citizens their liberties.

Since 2015, Trump has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, moving it further away from its professed conservative ideology. The choice of Vance as Trump’s running mate – and the competition that preceded it – are the latest steps in this process.

Political columnist George Will describes how Trumpism has steered the Republican Party away from traditional conservative views.

Vance came from a small pool of contenders that included other noteworthy politicians who likewise once vehemently opposed Trump. By examining their trajectories, we can see how the Republican Party has abandoned conservative values to serve a single man.

Donald Trump ia a Profound Threat to Social Security, Medicare, and Seniors

How do we know? He's already told us—over and over and over again.

NANCY J. ALTMAN in Common Dreams

Donald Trump was the worst president for seniors in the history of the nation. That is not hyperbole. Alarmingly, if elected again, he will be even worse—and, worryingly, more effective.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he claimed he would be the one Republican not to cut our earned benefits but, when he actually became president, every single one of his budgets proposed deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare, as well as Medicaid.

When Trump couldn’t get the cuts enacted, he employed the old tactic of “starve the beast.” Figuring tax cuts are easier to enact than benefit cuts, he cut income taxes which help to fund Medicare and Medicaid, and sought to defund Social Security, which has its own dedicated revenue source.

To advance his goal of undermining Social Security, Donald Trump grabbed the questionable power to go after its dedicated revenue unilaterally—something without precedent. Because Trump was limited to executive action, he was able to only defer the revenue, but he made clear that he would not just defer the revenue, but eliminate it, if he were re-elected. Insufficient dedicated revenue leads to automatic cuts. Conveniently, automatic cuts means there is no one to clearly be held accountable.

Trump’s goals to undermine these programs, so vital to seniors, have not changed. Trump continues to claim he won’t cut benefits despite his record to the contrary, but tells the truth from time to time. Moreover, he is reportedly considering, once again, defunding Social Security, if he has the chance. Trump also plans to continue to give his billionaire friends massive tax giveaways.

Trump now says he’ll save Social Security from his OWN plans to gut it

Seniors will pay for his recklessness

By Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport Opinion Editor

It used to be said that cutting Social Security was politics’ third rail (i.e. you touch it, you die), a fatal taking of positions.

If that’s still true, you wouldn’t know it from the emerging attention Social Security cuts is getting.

Indeed, look at Trump’s handling of Social Security. 

You may find real flaws in the armor of a Best-of-All-Time economy cloak that Trump tries to wear.

Even as Trump rivals Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden mix it up over whether Biden did or did not say something supportive about a Republican plan in 2008 by then-Rep. Paul D. Ryan for spending reductions, here comes Donald Trump. He promises he is open to revamping entitlement programs toward December.

Just in case you didn’t have enough other reasons to want to reconsider your vote for November, this issue comes packed with dynamite.

End of the year? You mean just after the first week of November when we are all supposed to troop to the polls to re-elect Trump?

As usual, Trump just put the statement out there with no details, with no factual underpinning and with assertions  that tackling entitlement spending is “the easiest of all things.” For sure, we voters should be aware that Legislative Trump is definitely putting Medicare and Social Security cuts on the auction block.

House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills. Trump and Republicans are ignoring them.

Legislative paralysis gripped Capitol Hill well before impeachment started.

By Ella Nilsenella.nilsen@vox.com  

There’s a pervasive sense of legislative paralysis gripping Capitol Hill. And it’s been there long before the impeachment inquiry began.

For months, President Donald Trump has fired off tweet missives accusing House Democrats of “getting nothing done in Congress,” and being consumed with impeachment.

Trump may want to look to the Republican-controlled Senate instead. Democrats in the House have been passing bills at a rapid clip; as of November 15, the House has passed nearly 400 bills, not including resolutions. 

But the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee estimates 80 percent of those bill have hit a snag in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is prioritizing confirming judges over passing bills.

Congress has passed just 70 bills into law this year. Granted, it still has one more year in its term, but the number pales in comparison to recent past sessions of Congress, which typically see anywhere from 300-500 bills passed in two years (and that is even a diminished number from the 700-800 bills passed in the 1970s and 1980s).

Ten of those 70 bills this year have been renaming federal post offices or Veterans Affairs facilities, and many others are related to appropriations or extending programs like the National Flood Insurance or the 9/11 victim compensation fund.

Another week of crazy

The Koch Brothers’ New Look

Same shit, different look

By Leo Gerard

There’s a new Koch organization in town. Instead of trying to buy politicians to do the bidding of billionaires, as Charles and David Koch have historically done, their rebranded network now says they will support community groups trying to cure the miseries of eons – everything from poverty to addiction.

And they’ve got some street cred, having successfully worked with liberal commentator Van Jones to secure legislation to reduce mass incarceration. Billionaire Charles Koch says the mission is this: “We must stand together to help every person rise.”

That is some good stuff, right there. It’s what labor unions have always preached – workers must stand together to gain the collective power essential to pull every one of them up. It works, too. In the middle of the last century, collective bargaining created the great American middle class.

There’s an important difference, though, between the work of labor unions and billionaire-funded organizations. Labor unions are created and controlled by workers. Billionaire-funded organizations are beholden to billionaires.

Yeah, Trump screwed us on taxes

New study confirms ordinary Americans got fleeced by the Trump tax bill

By ALAN PYKE

Sorry, America’s middle class: President Donald Trump’s signature tax code overhaul has not generated any meaningful new economic growth that wasn’t already underway, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) has found.

The new numbers inject further complexity into a contentious and ongoing debate around the landmark tax legislation as to who actually benefited from its passage. 

But the study should also offer additional clarity: With hard numbers now available on the economy’s performance in the first full year of the legislation, it’s easier than ever to talk instead about who got what and how — and the answers, so far, aren’t pretty.

Large corporations with shiny accounting departments ended up being the largest beneficiaries of the tax bill’s largesse, with the rate of tax they actually pay dropping by half in 2018, according to the CRS analysis. 

But the vanishingly insignificant comparative break Trump’s law gave workaday people lays the game bare. This tax bill is already reshaping the real-world economy in ways that limit the prospects of ordinary people, potentially reinforcing the structural inequities that adversely impact democratic society.

Case for obstruction looks rock solid

Obstruction Of Justice, In Private and Plain Sight

By Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport New York Editor

Opening a broad review of how over two years, Trump has worked publicly and privately to thwart the widening investigations that threaten him, his family, his presidency and his businesses, The New York Times had a startling disclosure:

Trump asked his acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, to put a political ally—who had recused himself—in charge of the Michael Cohen investigation, apparently to halt it or put a friend in charge of it. 

Whitaker apparently said no, but the disclosure drew wide perceptions from both sides of the aisle as a blatant attempted obstruction of justice—and coincidentally put Whitaker in the position of coming very close to having lied to Congress about any presidential request to interfere in the investigations.

The Times said Trump called Whitaker about the case involving Trump payments to silence two women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign. 

Trump asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the former Rudy Giuliani partner named U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

“Whitaker, who had privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to ‘jump on a grenade’ for the president, knew he could not put Berman in charge because Berman had already recused himself from the investigation. 

The president soon soured on Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away.”

That incident and others described in dozens of interviews and documents were depicted as part of a pattern over two years that shows “the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement.”

The Times added: 

"The story of Mr. Trump’s attempts to defang the investigations has been voluminously covered in the news media, to such a degree that many Americans have lost track of how unusual his behavior is. But fusing the strands reveals an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession. Mr. Trump has done it with the same tactics he once used in his business empire: demanding fierce loyalty from employees, applying pressure tactics to keep people in line and protecting the brand—himself—at all costs.”

How to make $845 million, pay no taxes AND get a $22 million refund

Whatever You Paid to Watch Netflix Last Month Was More Than It Paid in Income Taxes 

By Jon Queally, staff writer for Common Dreams

Whether you paid $8.99 for basic, $12.99 for standard, or splurged for the $15.99 premium package so you would have the privilege of watching endless streaming shows and movies on Netflix last month, a new analysis shows you still paid much, much more than the company paid in federal and local income taxes for the entire year.

According to Matthew Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), "The popular video streaming service Netflix posted its largest-ever U.S. profit in 2018­­—$845 million—on which it didn't pay a dime in federal or state income taxes."

Not a dime. Not one penny.

"In fact," noted Gardner in a blog post on ITEP's website, "the company reported a $22 million federal income tax rebate." 

Our counterfeit Social Security crisis

Social Security is healthy and there are smart ways to make it even healthier

By Gerald Scorse, Progressive Charlestown guest columnist

The humorist Mark Twain once called reports of his death “an exaggeration.” The same goes for the endless fearmongering and scare stories about America’s most popular government program, Social Security.    

On the contrary, the nation’s safety net for seniors is in remarkably good shape. The trust fund holds government securities worth nearly $2.9 trillion, just under its all-time high. 

In 2092, at the end of the latest 75-year projection, the inflow from payroll taxes would still be covering roughly three-quarters of scheduled worker benefits—without increasing the tax rate or raising the retirement age or making any other change. 

That’s the truth and nothing but the truth, according to the 2018 annual report of the Social Security board of trustees.

Never let the facts get in the way of false alarms. As recently as mid-October, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed that cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were the only way to lower the federal deficit. He urged legislators to “address the real drivers of the debt” and “adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”

Honestly...

Off the rails

How Congress Stopped Working
by Derek Willis, ProPublica, and Paul Kane, The Washington Post

For more than 200 years, Congress operated largely as the country’s founders envisioned — forging compromises on the biggest issues of the day while asserting its authority to declare war, spend taxpayer money and keep the presidency in check.

Today, on the eve of a closely fought election that will determine who runs Capitol Hill, that model is effectively dead.

It has been replaced by a weakened legislative branch in which debate is strictly curtailed, party leaders dictate the agenda, most elected representatives rarely get a say and government shutdowns are a regular threat due to chronic failures to agree on budgets, according to a new analysis of congressional data and documents by The Washington Post and ProPublica.

The study found that the transformation has occurred relatively fast — sparked by the hyperpolarized climate that has enveloped politics since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama and the subsequent dawn of the tea party movement on the right.

Let’s see how Trump reacts to this!

Canada plans to go after Republicans in midterm elections

By Samuel Warde 

Canada launched a bold assault on swing states and Republican strongholds last week in the wake of Trump’s trade war and continued attack on the country’s political leadership.

Leading Canadian news magazine Macleans has been spearheading much of the country’s push-back against the Trump regime and led the charge with this bold new plan.

Macleans set their plan in motion last week with the publication of an article which “compiled a list of products” that Canadians can support “at the expense of their American counterparts.” 

In other words, Macleans is calling for a boycott of American products currently on Canada’s tariffs list.

But wait, it gets better. They are not calling for any old boycott. Nope, they are targeting key swing states and home states of leading Republicans such as Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis) and Mitch McConnell (Ken).

The aim of that plan was two-fold, as Macleans explained to fellow Canadians: “In some cases, you’ll be ramping up pressure in key U.S. political constituencies by foregoing products on Canada’s tariff list. 

In others, you’ll be boosting Canadian-based operations whose supply networks span the border, reminding Americans which country imports more of their goods and services than any other.”

Below are the products targeted in swing states:

‘Feckless Cowards’

GOP Strategist Switches Parties, Shames ‘Immoral’ Republicans In Epic Tweetstorm

By Conover Kennard

GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, a lifelong Republican voter, abandoned his “corrupt” party and vowed to vote for Democrats as he called for a blue wave in November.

Schmidt said the Republican Party has become “the party of Trump” and called the GOP “a danger to our democracy and values.”

Schmidt said the GOP is “indecent and immoral” and “filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders” then he pointed to the Trump administration’s “immoral” child separation policy in his tweetstorm.

He called out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan and he didn’t hold back.

Here’s Schmidt’s disaffiliation notice via Tweeter

Rep. Cicilline visits immigrant children prison

Cicilline describes life inside, and politics behind, tender age detention centers

By Bob Plain in Rhode Island’s Future

The facility Cicilline visited is a former Wal-Mart

“It’s horrific,” said Congressman David Cicilline. “It’s barbaric.”

The Rhode Island Democrat was describing what he saw after visiting immigration detention centers on the Texas/Mexico border this weekend where President Donald Trump’s family separation policy is playing out as a moral and political crisis before America’s and the world’s eyes.

“It is horrifying to see young children behind a chain link enclosure,” he said. 

“There’s no furniture. They are sitting on the floor, a few of them have mats, looking afraid, not sure of what is happening to them. It’s disgraceful. No child should be in that kind of facility ever and certainly children who are fleeing violence.”

Cicilline joined a congressional delegation that included senators Jeff Merkeley, Oregon, and Chris Van Hollen, Maryland, and representatives Peter Welch, Vermont, Mark Pocan, Wisconsin, Shelia Jackson-Lee, Texas, and Vincente Gonzalez, who represents the Texas district where the facilities are located.

“Every legislator in Washington should have seen those children and talked to those mothers,” Cicilline said, and I think they would understand what we are doing – what’s being done in our name – is un-American and needs to stop and doesn’t reflect the basic values of this country.”

The New York Times lists 51 of Trump’s ‘More Egregious’ Failures

“Donald Trump’s guide to presidential etiquette

By Samuel Warde 

Aptly titled “Donald Trump’s Guide to Presidential Etiquette, the Editorial Board explained that:

[Trump] is violating Americans’ expectations of how presidents should behave — even of how adults should behave, particularly when children are watching. 

Yes, Mr. Trump has now been compared to Joseph Stalin by one senior senator from his party, and, yes, he has been pre-emptively disinvited to the prospective funeral of another. But most Republican leaders, usually such vigilant guardians of Oval Office decorum, have remained strangely silent.

So, for the fourth time in a year, we’ve compiled a list of Mr. Trump’s more egregious transgressions. 

These items don’t represent disputes about policy, over which reasonable people may disagree. They simply serve to catalog what Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and all the other Trump-supporting Republicans in Congress and across America, through their silence, have now blessed as behavior befitting a president of the United States.

We find this guide a helpful way to avoid growing numb to what is so abnormal about this presidency, and to remind ourselves that a day may yet come when dignity and decency will matter again, even, perhaps, to Mr. McConnell and his fellow hypocrites

Liberals Unite took the time to count the list of “egregious transgressions,” coming up with a total of 51, but be sure to go to The New York Times article to read the full list.

The list itself is prefaced with the following words:

IF YOU ARE PRESIDENT, YOU MAY NOW:

Nothing is sacred with House Republicans

Paul Ryan fires chaplain for praying for fair taxes

By Jon Queally, staff writer for Common Dreams

Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is under fire after it was reported he forced out House Chaplain Patrick Conroy from his post, allegedly over a recent prayer that called for—get this—a fairer tax code.

According to The Hill, which first reported the story, Conroy makes it clear in his resignation announcement, which came last week but was not revealed until Thursday, that it was submitted at the behest of Ryan.

"As you have requested, I hereby offer my resignation as the 60th Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives," Conroy's letter to the Speaker reads. Conroy has been the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2011.

While an aide to Ryan told one reporter that Conroy was not asked to resign over any one specific prayer, Democratic lawmakers are demanding more answers. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: They’re not going to get any since House Republicans voted down a resolution to look further into the reasons for firing Father Conroy. – W. Collette

What is it?

Fox says it, Trump does it

For more cartoons from Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.