January 6th seditious Donald Trump stopped following election rules. James David Vance is enabling Trump's immoral effort to overturn the 2020 election

"America is a constitutional republic with fair elections and robust liberal protections. This governmental system has worked fairly well. So I propose we keep it going," Jonathan Chait

Republican Ohio Senator J.D. Vance has been mocked as a "Bad Santa" and is compared to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Will "Hillbilly-Dance".....be the Trump VP candidate?

Echo essay published in The Intelligencer, in New York Magazine, by Jonathan Chait: 

James David Vance is the junior United States senator from Ohio. 

Vance carried off a cynical but highly successful mid-career switch from venture capitalist to professional pseudo-populist that requires catering to the beliefs of his constituency; he has fallen in with far-right authoritarian intellectuals who long for the destruction of the republic; and he is angling for a spot on Trump’s ticket.

Each of these individually provides Vance with more than enough reason to bless Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term. Collectively, they make the decision a no-brainer.

But Vance, surprisingly, still possesses a brain, or at least enough pretensions to wish to justify his stance to those who do. And so, in his interview with Ross Douthat, Vance could have simply justified Trump’s attack on democracy by pledging fealty to Trump. Instead, he constructed an elaborate rationale for a man he once described as “America’s Hitler” attempting his own Beer Hall Putsch.

Like many Republicans, Vance feels embarrassed by the claims made by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani that the election was rigged by Dominion Voting Systems and Hugo Chavez.

Instead, he argues that it was rigged by emergency pandemic measures to expand mail-in voting and media coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop:

The argument is basically that there were a host of institutional actors, technology companies, various forms of censorship, that mobilized in 2020, in a way that they hadn’t in 2016. There was tech censorship. People were primed to push back against any October surprises.

And look, October surprises are part of American democracy, and whether you think Hunter Biden is as major issue, or not, in the American democracy, you let the voters decide.

That was a way in which the basic democratic will of America was obstructed. I don’t see any reason to think that Dominion voting machines switched ballots, but there was a breakdown in democratic will.

Point No. 2 is that the rules of the game were changed in the middle. When does a ballot have to be mailed in Pennsylvania to count under the election rules? That was changed. That was changed for Covid reasons, in a way that partially is the fault of the Republican National Committee — we weren’t prepared for it, Democrats were, and they took advantage of it.

None of these complaints comes anywhere close to justifying Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. 

As a matter of fact, if voting procedures hadn’t been changed to accommodate a once-in-a-century pandemic, that would have distorted the result even more. And if biased media coverage makes elections illegitimate, then every Republican victory since the founding of Fox News deserves an asterisk.

Vance goes on to argue that Trump’s attempt to nullify the election result was fine because it followed constitutional ❓procedures:

He was using the constitutional procedures. Now, your argument is that he was using them ineffectively, or maybe even illegitimately, but he was trying to take a constitutional process to its natural conclusion.

Suppose it’s true that all this was constitutional. The Constitution, according to Vance, allows a candidate who has clearly and provably lost an election to overturn the result by getting his allies in Congress to accept a series of absurd claims, and then prevail on his own vice-president to join them.

If that is true, then the Constitution contains a wormhole that nullifies elections and functionally creates a dictatorship, as long as the president has reliable allies in Congress and the vice-presidency. If the Constitution actually did hand this gun to the president, and the only thing standing between the country and dictatorship was his willingness not to pick it up, then that would make it all the more important to denounce Trump’s efforts to fire it.

Instead, Vance just shrugs off Trump’s immoral effort to overturn the election because it followed the rules up until January 6th.

But this ridiculous argument is all academic anyway, because on January 6th, Trump stopped following the rules. 

Clarence Thomas plays the "race card" every time he is challenged about his ethics scandals

Echo report published in The Intelligencer by Jonathan Chait:"

A truly pathetic letter vouches for the disgraced Justice’s character.

Clarence Thomas Plays Race Card: 

"Clarence Thomas is a bitter angry man".

When the first revelations in the Clarence Thomas ethics scandal burst forth, conservative intellectuals rushed indignantly to his defense. Sure, they said, he has one very close personal friend (Harlan Crow) who just happens to be extremely rich, and was personally moved to cover educational expenses for his adopted son, his childhood home, and some personal hospitality. 

But there’s no big scandal in wanting to educate an underprivileged child or care for a poor widow.

As reporters have pried more and more details, none of which Thomas has voluntarily disclosed, the facts have gotten worse, and their previous defenses have grown inoperative. Thomas turns out to have not one but several close personal billionaire friends, and they turn out to subsidize some rather lavish tastes on the justice’s part.

After the most recent revelations, Thomas’s defenders have gone conspicuously silent. News organs like National Review and conservative legal apparatchik Ed Whelan, who loudly dismissed evidence of wrongdoing by Thomas, have had nothing to say about Thomas’s many billionaire patrons.

Now, finally, comes a defense (sort of): A total of 112 former Thomas law clerks have signed an open letter defending him against charges of impropriety. It is a revealing document.

By “defending,” I don’t mean detailing the charges against Thomas and explaining why they lack merit. Rather, their approach is simply to insist Thomas is a good person while pretending the exhaustive evidence of his unethical behavior does not exist at all.

In lieu of any engagement with the facts of Thomas’s misconduct, the letter is padded out with biographical detail, in the style of a book report written by a sixth grader. The authors explain that Thomas “descended from West African slaves, was “born to a young mother, not more than 20, in segregated Georgia.” We learn “His father left. And a fire took all he had and the shack where he lived,” and even receive details of major world events that took place during his life. (“Then came 1968. King was assassinated. Then Kennedy. It transformed him. He left behind hopes of the priesthood. He found Black Power. He wrote about revolution.”)There is just one small passage in the letter that even acknowledges the evidence of misconduct:

Lately, the stories have questioned his integrity and his ethics for the friends he keeps. They bury the lede. These friends are not parties before him as a Justice of the Court. And these stories are malicious, perpetuating the ugly assumption that the Justice cannot think for himself.

So the main defense is that Thomas is allowed to accept millions of dollars’ worth of gifts as long as his patrons are not personally involved in Supreme Court litigation? (As far as we know, anyway — since Thomas refuses to disclose his gifts, the public is only aware of what the media has been able to figure out in the face of his secrecy.)

Clarence Thomas is a useless Supreme Court Justice

The secondary defense is that there is an “ugly assumption that the Justice cannot think for himself” by reporting on his defiance of anti-corruption norms. Here, the Thomas defenders play the race card in a way that would make Ibram Kendi blush. They are insinuating somehow that Thomas is allowed to accept millions of dollars in undisclosed personal gifts, which no government officials would be permitted to receive, and that only racism can explain why the media would even report it.

In conjunction with the letter’s detailed recitation of the racism he experienced in his youth (I’ve only quoted a small portion of the letter, which is heavily padded), the argument seems to be that Thomas is exempt from ordinary ethical requirements on account of his race ❓, and that only racists would even want the public to know who’s underwriting his lifestyle.

The rest of the letter is given over to multiple assertions that his integrity is beyond reproach: “Justice Thomas is a man of greatest intellect, of greatest faith, and of greatest patriotism. We know because we lived it. He is a man of unwavering principle. He welcomes the lone dissent. He is also a man of great humor and warmth and generosity … His integrity (❓ ) is unimpeachable. 

Oh Please!

And his independence is unshakable … we unequivocally reject attacks on his integrity, his character, or his ethics.”

They reject any question about his ethics❗ And they somehow believe that their position as clerks, whose careers benefit from Thomas’s prestige and influence, somehow makes them more rather than less suited to make this judgment. Taken at their word, they believe a factual allegation of ethical misconduct can be adjudicated entirely on a combination of Thomas’s identity as a once-poor Black man and their say-so as judges of character.

This doesn’t tell us anything about Thomas’s compliance with ethics rules. It does, however, reveal a lot about conservative legal (bizarre and convoluted❓) reasoning.

Evil antisemitism has infected the Republican Party

The GOP’s Surrender to the cult Anti-semites

Echo essay published in the Intellingencer , in The New York Times Magazine. By Jonathan Chait

On September 3, Cynthia Hughes, founder of the Patriot Freedom project, regaled the crowd at Donald Trump’s “Save America” rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with the plight of her nephew, Tim Hale-Cusanelli. Poor Tim, who once served in the Navy, had been convicted for his role in the January 6th insurrection. The story of his “mistreatment” drew moans from the sympathetic audience.

Hughes did not mention that Navy investigators found 34 former colleagues who reported that Hale-Cusanelli had expressed “extremist or radical views pertaining to the Jewish people, minorities, and women.” One recollected Hale-Cusanelli’s practice of asking new colleagues if they were Jewish. Another remembered him saying Jews “are ruining everything and did not belong here,” and yet another recalled him saying, “Hitler should have finished the job.” Hale-Cusanelli has been photographed wearing a distinctive Hitlerian mustache. His passion for genocidal antisemitism developed into a passion for a right-wing putsch attempt, and now he has become essentially a martyr figure championed by the Republican Party’s leader.

Trump’s (radical!) rise has reshaped the GOP, driving out some of its constituent elements while bringing in previously excluded factions, the ranks of which include virulent anti-semites. The lessons of Hitler’s Germany have been badly overapplied, so it is important to contextualize these events carefully. 

Although the GOP may not be an anti-semitic party, the right wingers have coopted salient NAZI symbols. 

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican in Missouri, gives the Nazi salute to insurrection crowds on January 6th 

Indeed, at one time in the recent past,  the GOP tried to maintain a big tent that included both Jewish ultrahawks like Miriam Adelson and their most paranoid enemies. Nevertheless, now the GOP has become a party in which antisemitism has gained a foothold. No recent development in American life has done more to throw American Jews’ safety and civic equality into doubt.

In the early-20th century, contempt for Jewish immigrants was an important tributary in the stream of reactionary politics. Antisemitism reached a peak during the Great Depression, when right-wing populists like Charles Lindbergh depicted the Roosevelt administration as beholden to the Jews. The aviator’s “America First” movement characterized Jewish support for hawkish measures against Nazi Germany as evidence of disloyalty.

The war and the Holocaust discredited antisemitism, and it largely disappeared from mainstream circulation. When Pat Buchanan ran for president in 1992, and 1996, he revived both the slogan and many of the ideas of the “America First” movement and produced an enthusiastic reception. But his anti-semitic innuendo and creepy enthusiasm for the procedural rights of elderly former Nazi camp guards made him toxic to the party Establishment. (“I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to antisemitism,” concluded William F. Buckley.) 

Subsequently, Buchanan was forced out of the party altogether. By the first decade of the 21st century, anti-semitic theories were more likely to be used against the Bush administration — whose more conspiratorial critics saw the hidden hand of international Jewry behind its bungled Iraq invasion — than on behalf of any Republican cause.

Trump resurrected Buchanan’s strain of populist nationalism. He’s always nurtured business relations and personal ties with Jewish people, but his revival of “America First” — both the slogan and the ideas surrounding it — inevitably excited antisemites. In 2016, he tweeted out an image using a Star of David to symbolize Hillary Clinton’s “corruption.” The Trump campaign tweeted an altered version after an outcry but then ran an ad in the campaign’s closing days decrying “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities” coupled with images of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein — all of whom are financial figures who happen to be Jewish.

Trump attacked his critics as a cabal of “globalists” and fixated on the secret powers exerted by Soros, who has displaced (or in some cases joined) the Rothschilds in the imagined role of secret Jewish financier orchestrating a series of catastrophes for profit. The explosion of militant paranoia that followed Trump’s rise — from the Oath Keepers to QAnon — has appeared both online and in the real world with occasionally deadly consequences in places like Charlottesville and Pittsburgh. Although much of this activity has taken place outside the party system, the energies on the right have crept into the Republican Party.

Two years before her 2020, election to Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video claiming “an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists, and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.” More famously, she wondered whether the Rothschilds had used space lasers to start a series of forest fires in California to clear public land for a rail network.

Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for Ron DeSantis, linked a decision by the nation of Georgia to join several European countries in implementing COVID passes to what she viewed as a suspiciously timed visit by a Rothschild: “Immediately after that the Rothschilds show up to discuss the attractive investment environment in Georgia (lol),” she noted.

In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor, paid the ultraright-wing social-media site Gab to promote his candidacy, which has articulated Christian-nationalist themes. Gab’s chief executive, Andrew Torba, is an explicit anti-semite who has promoted Mastriano as a fellow enemy of the Jews. 

“We don’t want people who are Jewish,” Torba explained. 😡

After reporters questioned their relationship, Mastriano released a statement that renounced antisemitism and said Torba does not speak on his behalf but failed to call him an anti-semite or to forgo his support. And while a handful of Pennsylvania Republicans have endorsed Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, the vast majority of the party apparatus has either supported Mastriano or stayed quiet. Conservative media has ignored the issue. Meanwhile, the Wyoming Republican Party recently encouraged people to follow it on Gab, calling it “an awesome platform.”

Before Trump came along, anti-semites had little investment in American politics. His rhetoric articulates themes they recognize as compatible with their own, and he has given them a reason to marshal their energies on behalf of one side in a two-party system from which they had been excluded.

There is a simple test to measure their influence. If anti-semites were too marginal to pose any danger, it would be easy enough for the party to cut them off. (If you want to know what it looks like when Republicans decide to really throw somebody out of their party, look at their treatment of Liz Cheney.) Instead, they vacillate. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to comment on Gosar’s attendance at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s conference. McCarthy has likewise promised to restore Greene’s committee privileges if Republicans regain the majority.

Prosecutors have found that Trump’s January 6 rally attracted a significant number of people who share Hitler quotes, hold membership in neo-Nazi organizations, have a fixation with “white genocide,” and the like, making the party leadership’s desire to sweep the whole thing under the rug all the more dangerous. Whatever misgivings the remaining old-line Republicans may have toward the militant cadres Trump inspired, Republicans fear their political and even terroristic power. They no longer imagine they have the gatekeeping force to exclude the anti-semites, less still to steer the party away from the kind of paranoid rhetoric that invites their participation.

The GOP’s overriding goal is to win, and it has decided this means accepting the support of anybody who will provide it. For three-quarters of a century, anti-semites were locked out of major American politics or at least had to keep their bigotry quiet. Now the door is open.

Russian leverage over Trump percolates like toxic swamp bubbles

Russia has kompromat on Trump. Full Stop!

An Ex-KGB Agent Says Trump Was a Russian Asset Since 1987. 

Does it Matter?

Kompromat!

Echo essay published in The Intelligencer New York Magazine, by Jonathan Chait.

In 2018, Jonathan Chait became either famous or notorious — depending on your point of view — for writing a story speculating that Russia had secret leverage over Trump (which turned out to be correct). The story’s most controversial suggestion was that it was plausible, though hardly certain, that Russia’s influence over Trump might even date back as far as 1987.

Here is what he wrote in that controversial section:

During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (Surprised? It never happened.)

Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. 

He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

Maybe, it was just a coincidence that Trump came back from his trip to Russia and started spouting themes that happened to dovetail closely with Russia’s geopolitical goal of splitting the United States from its allies. But there was a reasonable chance — loosely pegged it at 10 or 20 percent — that the Soviets had planted some of these thoughts, which he had never expressed before the trip, in his head.

Today, the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for  higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.

He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.

A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

That’s quite similar to what I suggested in my story:

Russian intelligence gains influence in foreign countries by operating subtly and patiently. It exerts different gradations of leverage over different kinds of people, and uses a basic tool kit of blackmail that involves the exploitation of greed, stupidity, ego, and sexual appetite. All of which are traits Trump has in abundance.

This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.

Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”

To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump. 

"Trump refused even to concede that the Vladimir Putin regime poisoned Alexei Navalny"

Nevertheless, his story is almost exactly the possibility sketched out by Chait's well developed assumptions.

Moreover, it fits the known facts about how Russian intelligence works and what Trump has done, pretty tightly.

Yet thing changed Chait's my mind on since his story ran. That is this: The effect any this would have on the American public, even if it were proven.

There is an allure to the mysterious that gives certain unknown facts outsize meaning. 

For example, uncovering the secret identity of “Deep Throat” was considered one of journalism’s greatest prizes, until Associate FBI Director Mark Felt admitted it was him, after which hardly anybody cared. If Jimmy Hoffa’s body had turned up shortly after his disappearance, its location would have been forgotten almost immediately, rather than becoming the subject of decades-long speculation and probing.

The nature and origins of Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia probably falls into this category. The full story will probably never be known, for certain. Robert Mueller was thought to be pursuing it, but steered clear of the counterintelligence investigation to focus more narrowly on criminal violations; the Senate Intelligence Committee produced tantalizing evidence of 2016 campaign collusion, but did not have access to Trump’s inner circle. In theory, the Trump lieutenants who clammed up, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, or their Russian contacts, like Manafort partner Konstantin Kilimnik, could eventually furnish some kind of deathbed confession, but even that would be rendered inconclusive by its source’s fundamental lack of credibility.

If something like the most sinister plausible story turned out to be true, how much would it matter? Probably not that much. Obviously, Russia having secret channels of leverage over an American president isn’t good. Even if we could confirm the worst, to the point that even Trump’s supporters could no longer deny it, it wouldn’t have changed very much. Trump wouldn’t have been forced to resign, and his Republican supporters would not have had to repudiate him. The controversy would have simply receded into the vast landscape of partisan talking points — one more thing liberals mock Trump over, and conservatives complain about the media for covering instead of Nancy Pelosi’s freezer or antifa or the latest campus outrage.

Unfortunately, a great deal of incriminating information was confirmed but very little, in fact, changed, as a result. In 2018, Buzzfeed reported, and the next year Robert Mueller confirmed, explosive details of a Russian kompromat operation. During the campaign, Russia had been dangling a Moscow building deal that stood to give hundreds of millions of dollars in profit to Trump, at no risk. Not only did he stand to gain this windfall, but he was lying in public at the time about his dealings with Russia, which gave Vladimir Putin additional leverage over him. (Russia could expose Trump’s lies at any time if he did something to displease Moscow.)

Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.

We don’t know what other sources of leverage Russia had, or how far back it went. Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. 

Even Trump's own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.

The truth was simultaneously bad and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.

P,S. - Maine Writer: Like being infected with toxic swamp bubbles, Trump is polluted by Russian influence. 

Trump is infected with Russian Swamp Toxins!

Republicans submitting to Donald Trump's serial lies

Where the rape allegedly happened: The Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City

What she said: In excerpts in her new book, Carroll claims that she encountered Trump at the department store where she says he attacked her in one of the dressing rooms after pressing her to try on lingerie and pulling her toward the dressing room. She alleged he "unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway -- or completely, I'm not certain -- inside me." She says she fought against Trump.

Reported in The Intelligencer by Jonathan Chait

Asked by reporters about E. Jean Carroll’s accusation that President Trump raped her, Senator Lindsey Graham replied, “He’s denied it. That’s all I needed to hear.”

(What ever happened to Lindsey Graham?)

This seems like an inappropriately high level of credibility to grant a man who has made over 10,000 documented false statements just since taking office. Even aside from the president’s general propensity to lie, though, there are a number of reasons to disbelieve his denial of this specific charge.

Trump began his denials by claiming he had “never met this person in my life.” This denial was pre-refuted by a photograph that The New Yorker ran with the story, showing the two of them together.

Donald Trump attending a party with E. Jean Carroll

He proceeded to insist “she’s not my type.” (Words to throw up on.)

Even aside from the insinuation that Trump does have a type of women he would rape, this denial echoed a line he has used before. After Jessica Leeds charged that Trump had groped her on an airplane — a story Leeds shared with four people at the time of the alleged incident — Trump public dismissed her with the same argument (“Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you”).

Trump also privately used the same argument to dismiss allegations that he slept with Stormy Daniels. Trump called her story a “hoax,” and as the Washington Post reported last year, “The president even has griped to several people that Daniels is not the type of woman he finds attractive.” Trump turned out to have signed checks compelling Daniels to keep quiet. Not even his most fervent defenders still deny she had relations with him. So it would seem a little strange for Trump to be now refuting a false allegation by using the same terms he previously employed to refute a true one.

For that matter, one might also consider the fact that 16 other women have made credible charges against Trump of sexual assault or other inappropriate touching. Trump was caught on a live mic bragging about his regular habit of committing sexual assault. He also boasted in a radio interview of barging in on beauty contestants in their dressing rooms to spy on them naked.

Some of Trump’s allies have questioned the motives of Carroll, who does have a new book that is bound to attract more attention in light of her accusation against the president. “I know that she’s selling a book,” says Senator James Lankford. 

However, Carroll shared this story at the time it happened with two journalists, predating both her book and Trump’s presidential campaign by two decades. If she was lying at the time, she had no obvious motive to do so. If all three of them are lying about Carroll having said this at the time, her two friends are taking a large professional risk — they’ve confirmed their accounts to New York and spoken to other media outlets, putting their professional credibility on the line — with no discernible upside for themselves.

Obviously, Carroll cannot prove her charge. But the standard of proof used in the court of public opinion is not the same as that used in a court of law, especially when the crime — a rape 23 years ago — is virtually impossible to prove, and cannot be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations.

And Republicans seem happy to default to the standard Graham is using. They’re taking at face value the word of a man who has lied at unprecedented rates about everything, has already lied about this specific case, who has faced credible accusations of similar behavior by other women, and has indeed boasted about his own propensity to do it.

And this is not even to mention the general fact that Trump is extremely comfortable undertaking actions that most people would consider, well, bad.

This list of actions runs from small things like refusing to pay his contractors to asking a foreign dictator to steal his opponent’s emails. He is facing several current investigations at the state and federal levels for a number of alleged financial crimes. Before they completely abandoned all pretenses of the concept of morality for their posture of tribalistic relativism, conservatives used to be comfortable making judgments about the character of people who habitually lie and steal. Their decision to place their faith in Trump, against a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointing in the other direction, is a perfectly fitting emblem of their posture of submission to the Trump (failed!) presidency.

Making a health care deal with Democrats!

Republicans must face up to the only health-care options left standing.  

MaineWriter opinion- "Medicare for All" would work. All it takes is a vote by Congress to lift the age requirements to 50 years and older, rather than 65.

But, unfortunately, (cliche here...)
"...those who forget the past (aka Republicans) are likely doomed to repeat it."

Jonathan Chait is an American commentator and writer for New York magazine. 

"Donald Trump promised during the campaign that he would quickly and easily replace Obamacare with an alternative everybody would love. 'You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost,' he said. 'It’s going to be so easy'.”

Trumpcare Collapsed Because the Republican Party Cannot Govern- writes Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com

In 2009, David Frum, the former Bush administration speechwriter whose ideological apostasy was in its formative stages, met with conservative intellectuals to discuss the policy response to the great recession. 

Faced with evidence that only massive government action — a financial rescue coupled with fiscal stimulus — could have prevented a complete economic meltdown, one conservative made a startling confession: “Maybe it was a good thing we weren’t in power then — because our principles don’t allow us to respond to a crisis like this.”

The financial crisis is hardly the only issue for which conservative principles turn out to be incompatible with the practical demands of governance. (Climate change leaps to mind.) The collapse of the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare is an especially vivid demonstration of the broader problem. The cohesion Republicans possessed in opposition disintegrated once they had power, because their ideology left them unable to pass legislation that was not cruel, horrific, and repugnant to their own constituents.

Donald Trump promised during the campaign that he would quickly and easily replace Obamacare with an alternative everybody would love. “You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost,” he said. “It’s going to be so easy.”

One might dismiss this kind of rhetoric as a typical Trumpian boast. But the candidate was merely translating into the vernacular the somewhat more carefully hedged promises his party had made for years into terms in which they were meant to be understood. 

Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way” road map offered what it called “a step-by-step plan to give every American access to quality, affordable health care. … more choices and lower costs.” 

And why wouldn’t Republicans believe this? 

After all, Obamacare was, supposedly, a train wreck, a complete failure of design. It therefore followed that they could easily replace it without significant harm to anybody.

In truth, it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology. In a pure market system, access to medical care will be unaffordable for a huge share of the public. Giving them access to quality care means mobilizing government power to redistribute resources, either through direct tax and transfers or through regulations that raise costs for the healthy and lower them for the sick. Obamacare uses both methods, and both are utterly repugnant and unacceptable to movement conservatives. That commitment to abstract anti-government dogma, without any concern for the practical impact, is the quality that makes the Republican Party unlike right-of-center governing parties in any other democracy. In no other country would a conservative party develop a plan for health care that every major industry stakeholder calls completely unworkable.

Every attempt to resolve the contradiction between public demands and conservative ideology has led the party to finesse it instead. That is why Republicans spent years promising their own health-care plan would come out very soon. It is why their first and best option was repeal and delay.  But, Republicans knew their health care plan was garbage. Nevertheless, they tried to pass it, anyway.

But, that option has now failed.  "Repeal and reform is dead", wrote Jonathan Chait. Not it's time to negotiate with Democrats to improve Obamacare.

The Trump administration might lash out at Obamacare by continuing to sabotage its functioning markets. They will find, however, that sabotaging the insurance exchanges will create millions of victims right away, as opposed to the luxury of delaying the pain until after the elections. 

Indeed, the power to destroy remains within the Republican Party’s capacity. The power to translate its ideological principles into practical government is utterly beyond its reach.

Can we practice?  "Let's talk to Democrats?"  

Republicans have no alternative to Obamacare- keep calm and move on

"...It's impossible to design a health-care plan that is both consistent with conservative ideology and acceptable to the broader public....

Although Donald Trump claims he has a plan to recall and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) known as Obamacare, neither he or the GOP reveal their alternative plan. Rather than fill up media time talking about recalling Obamacare, the Republicans should tell Americans about their replacement plan.  

6 Years After Obamacare’s Passage, Haters Refuse to Accept Reality  By Jonathan ChaitFollow @jonathanchait

Obamaccare data supports the achievement of the program's goals but Republicans will not accept the obvious success.

The Week reports- Wondering about that Republican alternative to Obamacare? It will come along any day now, said Johanthan Chait.

During the Obama era, the keenest minds in the conservative movement have had to develop policy responses to the administration’s agenda. 

But those policies had to be crafted within bounds established by Republican politics — conservative ideas were useful only insofar as conservative politicians could plausibly advocate them. Republican politicians, in turn, had to operate within the bounds of what their voters considered acceptable. And Republican voters, as the 2016 election cycle has made abundantly clear to even those long committed to denying it, are bat-shit crazy.

That frothing quality burst forth in its fullest form during the debate over health-care reform, in the summer of 2009. 

Angry Republicans flooded town hall meetings to denounce a law that they saw as redistributing resources from people like themselves to people who were not, identifying sources of grievance both real (cuts to Medicare) and imagined (death panels). The Republican Party’s stance on health-care reform took shape during those days of rage, and even six years after the law’s passage, its position on Obamacare has remained unaltered. The law is a failure and must be repealed, and no evidence can convince conservatives otherwise. A half-dozen years after its passage, none have dared revise that stance.

One of Obamacare’s goals, beyond expanding access to health insurance and paying for its budgetary costs, was to “bend the curve” of health-care inflation, which has historically grown faster than the cost of other things. The law implemented a wide array of reforms designed to bring more cost-consciousness into the system. Indeed, health-care inflation has not only slowed, it has dropped to the lowest level since the government began measuring it:

Some aspects of the lower health-care-inflation rate can be clearly tied to Obamacare reforms. For instance, the old Medicare system gave hospitals little incentive to keep their patients healthy once admitted. Just the opposite: A patient who acquired an illness in the hospital, or had to be readmitted, would receive more treatment, making more money for the hospital. Obamacare changed its reimbursements to penalize hospitals with high readmission rates. And sure enough, medical errors in hospitals are down, as are patient readmission rates:

Other reforms have worked through the medical economy in ways that are harder to measure as precisely. It’s impossible to know just what proportion of credit the law deserves for the lower inflation rate, some of which might have occurred anyway. (Or it might not — it can’t be proven.)

Among conservatives, though, it remains an unchallengeable certainty that Obamacare has failed. What about the historically low medical inflation? Ramesh Ponnuru, a leading conservative intellectual, expresses his certainty that the entire trend would have happened without any of the law’s cost reforms. (Hello? Does ice melt in the heat? How do we know?...OMG!)

According to Ponnuru, health-care inflation was already falling before Obamacare’s enactment:

The administration argues that the law has contributed to a slowdown in the growth of health spending. But that slowdown started in 2002. Obamacare can’t be the cause. The best that can be said about the law's effect on health spending is that its early years haven't interrupted that slowdown.

This data point is the state of the art in gainsaying Obamacare’s success. Here is what Ponnuru is referring to. During the middle of the last decade, health-care inflation had a mini-spike, which had already begun to recede by the time Obamacare was signed into law. But this doesn’t mean that health-care inflation was on an inexorably falling trajectory. It simply means that the unusually elevated levels of health-care inflation that took place during the Bush administration’s second term had given way to historically normal health-care inflation rates that were still unsustainably high. What has occurred since 2010 is not more of the same. It is a rate of health-care inflation far lower:

I followed the health-care debate extremely closely. In 2010, I was not aware of any influential analysts who predicted that health-care inflation was poised to drop to historically low rates on its own. Not only was that view unheard-of at the time, there was a deep skepticism that Obamacare could do much if anything to ameliorate it. Indeed, conservatives were unanimous in their belief that Obamacare would not only fail to bring down health-care inflation, it would cause health-care inflation to skyrocket. Ponnuru predicted that Obamacare would “exacerbate” health-care inflation:

The trouble is that the cost explosion is in the first place largely a function of the way the government has used its power as a provider and regulator of health insurance. The open-ended structure of Medicare and of the employer-based-insurance tax exclusion, together with the way Medicaid costs are shared by states and the federal government, have created huge incentives to spend more on health care, and therefore pushed costs upward. Obamacare would double down on an approach to limiting Medicare costs that has failed for decades, would massively expand Medicaid without reforming it, and would largely keep in place the tax exclusion while adding a new entitlement on top of it. It would exacerbate the causes of the cost problem while moving us further away from a real market in health insurance.

This was a testable hypothesis. If health-care costs rose at a higher rate than they had before 2010, conservative critics of the law would have reason to claim vindication. Indeed, they seized on every preliminary scrap of data that seemed to indicate higher health-care costs. National Review(where Ponnuru works as a senior editor) editorialized, beginning in 2010, that Obamacare was already causing health-care inflation to rise:

Health-insurance rates already are rising even more quickly than they had been in the past because of concern about the costs that will be imposed by Obamacare … These consequences were unintended, but they were not unpredictable: They were, in fact, predicted by a very large number of critics, not least those writing for National Review.

Conservatives have gone from absolute ideological certainty that health-care inflation would rise in the wake of Obamacare to absolute ideological certainty that the drop in health-care inflation has nothing at all to do with Obamacare. It’s obvious that no conceivable data can falsify conservative opposition to Obamacare. The premise that Obamacare has failed is a matter of doctrinal writ, as holy as the sanctity of the great Ronald Reagan. To abandon this position is to abandon conservatism itself. Conservatives can try to redirect their base’s rage toward the construction of an alternative plan to replace Obamacare, but they cannot concede that the law has actually succeeded in advancing its stated goals. Republicans hate Obamacare not for its concrete outcomes but for what it represents to them. If Trump’s campaign has demonstrated anything, it is the hopelessness of crafting technocratic justifications for the pulsating right-wing Id.

In other words, reports Chait, "the long promised Republican alternative to Obamacare will keep receding into the future".

Obviously, Republicans must accept the inevitble while they "keep calm and carry on," regardless of their inability to redesign a viable, quality based alternative plan.

Unpopular Senator Ted Cruz has four reasons to be unqualified

...."stupid"...."evil"...."crazy"....and "evasive"...in a report by Jonathann Chait.

Ted Cruz experienced candidate fatague when he rambled about "rubbers' as proof that Repubicans don't prevent access to "birth control". Certainly, it was a bad campaign moment, to say the least. In fact, Cruz advocates for "rubbers for all". 

Senator Ted Cruz is likely the reason why Tumpenstine (Mel Brooks says "steen") is leading in the popularity Republcian presidential polls. 

Although  Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican of Texas, is ambitious, he's also unpopular.  People don't like him. Therefore, when Republican voters look for an alternative to "Donald Trump-the-Chump", they see Senator Ted "Cruz.to loose".  Oooooops! Therefore, they clearly prefer "Trumpenstine" to "Cruz to loose".

New York News reports how Senator Cruz is unpopular.

You’d Think Being Crazy and Unpopular Would at Least Free Ted Cruz to Speak Honestly, But No  By Jonathan Chait

“Historically the media's had two caricatures for Republicans — that we are either stupid or evil,” Senator Ted Cruz told John Harwood in a fascinating interview. “They've to some extent invented a third caricature for me, which is crazy.” 

Cruz’s interview seemed dedicated to the proposition that attempting to shove him in just one of the categories of stupid, evil, or crazy is a false choice. You can be all of those things! There’s also a fourth category: evasive. Cruz displays this quality in droves.

Cruz’s dishonesty comes through especially clearly in three portions of the interview. One comes when Harwood brings up reports of his snobbery as a young Ivy League student (a quality that is damaging in the realm of electoral politics, and especially in the modern, populist Republican Party). 

Here’s the exchange:

Harwood: I read an anecdote that said you asked a friend at Harvard Law School her IQ, and then when she didn't know her IQ, asked her SAT score. What was that about?

Cruz: That was a silly story that appeared in a magazine. I have no recollection of ever having had any such conversation. So, I can't respond.

Harwood: And the idea that you wouldn't study with anybody who didn't go to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton?

Cruz: Now that's just a complete lie. It's actually the same magazine, which was one of the more noxious hatchet jobs.

(Oh paaaleeeze Senator Cruz, you can do better than go into denial. You could've said something intelligent like "I studied with smart people and they also studied with me..." or used more enlighted words than saying "noxius hatchet job" - what does that mean?)

There are a couple of dimensions to this dispute. One is that the original report about Cruz refusing to study with anybody who didn’t attend Harvard, Yale, or Princeton was incorrectly phrased. Cruz expressed reluctance to study with any non-graduate of any school whose selectivity fell below his (hilariously self-serving) cutoff line, but ultimately submitted.

Now, that anecdote, along with the story about him asking about a fellow student’s IQ, pits his word against theirs. Cruz denies the reports, and there’s no proof. But his attempt to discredit the reports is clearly wrong. Cruz claims “the same magazine” reported both stories. That’s false. The report about Cruz’s study group came from Jason Zengerle in GQ and was confirmed by Josh Marshall. The IQ story was reported by Matt Viser of the Boston Globe. The possibility that all of these sources are lying seems remote, and Cruz’s factually incorrect attempt to discredit them as all coming from the same source does not inspire confidence.

Harwood also asks Cruz about the monetary and fiscal response to the financial crisis:

Harwood: When historians write 30 years from now, when your kids are grown, your political career might be over by then, when they write that government in the form of George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, and Barack Obama saved the U.S. and the world from depression, you say what?

​​Cruz: ​I don't think anyone's gonna write that. And— and in fact, if we don't stop the path we're on—

​​Harwood: They're saying it right now. (Hello???? Senator Cruz is stupidly naive to say "I don't think anyone's gonna write that...")

​​Cruz: Well, yes. But— but— but they're the same liberal academics whose Keynesian answer to everything is, "More and more spending— " and, you know, what was really funny, you watch, for example, the stimulus, you know. $900 billion in spending.

So you have Cruz rapidly retreat from his claim that historians will never vindicate the response to the crisis to him conceding that this is already happening. (“Well, yes.”) But then Cruz insists it’s nothing but “liberal academics” who believe “more spending” is the “answer to everything.”

Actually, there is an extremely broad consensus among economists that fiscal and monetary stimulus is the answer, not to everything, but to the specific conditions of the crisis. Economists overwhelmingly believe fiscal stimulus increased economic growth:

Cruz may think economists are just “liberal academics,” but plenty of conservative academic economists share this theory, too (that fiscal stimulus increased economic growth). 

Nor is the consensus limited to academic economists — if anything, the private macroeconomic forecasting field accepts this theory with even more unanimity.

Finally, and most fascinating, is Harwood’s attempts to draw out Cruz’s beliefs about the proper size of the welfare state. The conservative movement has dogmatically and often hysterically opposed every expansion of social benefits in American history, from Social Security through Obamacare. And yet, once in place, those programs have proven too popular for Republicans to uproot.

Harwood asked Cruz about Medicare Part D, an expansion of the welfare state bitterly opposed by conservatives and which subsequently became the primary evidence for their case that George W. Bush abandoned conservative principles:

Harwood: Was [President George W. Bush] right to expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs?

Cruz: ​You know— that was a policy fight I was not engaged in at the time. I had other issues on— on my plate. I'll tell you what wasn't right. When George W. Bush entered office, the national debt was $5 trillion. When he left, it was $10 trillion. That wasn't right.

And, now, Obama has taken that and— and made it much worse. He's taken it from $10 trillion to over $18 trillion. But I respect George W. Bush a great deal. I spent a number of years of my life working for him. I think he is an honorable man. I think he did what he believed was right. But I think domestically, his administration spent far too much money.

Harwood: But specifically on Medicare, was that a mistake? 'Cause that was not financed. That added to the—

Cruz: As I said—

​​Harwood: ​—deficit.

​​Cruz: —I was not engaged in that particular detail—

​​Harwood: ​Sure. No. But—

Cruz: ​—of that legislation.

Harwood: —your judgment of it looking back?

Cruz: My judgment of it as part of the broader element that the deficit— or the debt, rather, went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. And— and listen, the simple reality, having— having spent a year and a half on the Bush campaign, all right, George W. Bush did not campaign as a small government conservative. ​In— in that sense, he was quite candid about it. He campaigned under the banner of compassionate conservatism. And it was also a different time, you know. When— when he came into office, they were predicting surpluses for years to come. And, so, you know, there was an interesting dynamic on the Bush campaign where periodically, the senior leadership would ask the more junior folks, "Can you come up with specific— programs for us to cut?"

And a number of us would suggest different programs. And inevitably, when they'd get suggested, the response would be, "Well— well, gosh, if we cut this program, this constituency is gonna be unhappy." And I— I remember kind of laughing and thinking, well, you know what? Whenever you're cutting something, the person getting the money is always going to be unhappy.

Harwood kepg asking Cruz if it was a good idea to create a Medicare prescription drug benefit, and Cruz kepg refusing to answer. First Cruz insists “that was a policy fight I was not engaged in at the time,” which, of course, isn't a reason to avoid having an opinion on it and which doesn't stop him from opining on other issues. Then, he changed the subject to the deficit in general. Harwood asked again about Medicare Part D, and Cruz again replied that he was “not engaged” on the issue. 

Then Harwood asked, again, and Cruz replied, “My judgment of it as part of the broader element that the deficit— or the debt, rather, went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion,” which is not a sentence and lacks any coherent meaning. And then, incredibly, Cruz proceeded to boast about how he, as a member of the Bush campaign, proposes all sorts of tough spending cuts, only to be vetoed by moderates — directly after refusing to say what he thought of the biggest domestic spending increase Bush enacted.

Harwood immediately proceeded to ask Cruz about the original Medicare program, which conservatives such as Ronald Reagan denounced as a socialist monstrosity.

Harwood: Now, a third Texas president, L.B.J., created Medicare in the mid-'60s. Your hero, Ronald Reagan, campaigned vigorously against that, saying it would lead to socialized medicine, it would end liberty in the United States. Who was right, L.B.J. or Reagan?

​​Cruz: ​You know, at the end of the day— it's not worth tilting at windmills. And we are at a different point in time than we were in the 1960s. Today, Medicare is a fundamental bulwark of our society.  And there is an entire generation of s—

Harwood: ​So, the philosophical objection just goes out the window?

Cruz: ​At the— I'm— I'm a big believer at focusing on battles that matter and that are winnable. And there is a broad, universal consensus that Medicare is a fundamental bulwark of our society that's fundamentally different. Look, it's one thing to have asked 50 years ago should we have created it. It's another thing when you have a generation of seniors who paid into it 30, 40, 50 years who have been made promises. We need to honor those promises—

Harwood: Fair enough. But—

​​Cruz: ​—and— and— and—

​​Harwood: ​—do you think at the time Reagan as right?

​​Cruz: You know, I don't know. I wasn't alive then. What I do know is that today, we have got to preserve and reform Medicare. But, Cruz dodged the question again; this time he retreated to a defense that he “wasn’t alive,” a fact that hasn't prevented him from expressing strong opinions on other historical controversies. (I would really like to see Cruz use the fact that he wasn’t contemporaneously alive to avoid taking a stand on the 1938 Munich Agreement - ie, the settlement permitting Nazi Germany's annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia.) Obviously, there’s a reason why Cruz avoided stating his opinion on this question; he refused to even endorse the opinions of the sainted conservative President Ronald Reagan.  As Cruz warned about Obamacare, President Obama’s “strategy is to get as many Americans as possible hooked on the subsidies, addicted to the sugar. If we get to Jan. 1, this thing is here forever.” That is, once people see how the program works, they will like it and punish any politician who threatens to disrupt their benefits. Just as Cruz today refuses to own up to the contemporaneous conservative position on Medicare and Medicare Part D, future Ted Cruzes will one day dodge and weave about their intent to destroy Obamacare.

Clearly, Cruz isn't qualified to be president. As a presidential candidate who can't answer questions and, also, an unpopular person, he isn't likely to upstage Donald Trump in his quest to be the 2016 Republican Presidential nominee.

Obviously, the Republican party has a leadership crises and it may be so severere as to destroy our nation's two party political system.

Well, "what goes around comes around".  "you reap what you sow".  "watch who your friends are", "birds of a feather flock together"....all of our mother's proverbs are appropriate. The GOP is now, officially, a do nothing extremist party and their political leaers are totally unqualified to be leaders of the free world.

Hillary Clinton is highly qualified and must be elected to become America's first woman president of the United States.