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Ongoing US GOP Debacle Thread: Seditious Republicans march toward authoritarianism

PhDeac said:
How so?
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Russian Orthodox churches are very different than an Evangelical church service - the prayers, the iconography, almost all elements done through song. Most evangelicals (many of whom don't even consider Catholics to be real Christians) would be waaay outside their comfort zone.

Coptic Orthodox services from the outside (and without the benefit of knowing Amharic) look more like Muslim prayer services than a Baptist church.
 
Garrett targeted in two ethics probes
Investigators are looking into misuse of staff time and alcohol use.
By JOHN BRESNAHAN 07/23/2018 07:22 PM EDT
Rep. Tom Garrett is the subject of two separate investigations by the House Ethics Committee and Office of Congressional Ethics, including questions over whether his drinking impacted the Virginia Republican’s ability to do his job, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Investigators are looking into allegations that Garrett and his wife improperly ordered congressional aides to conduct personal errands for them while on official time. These errands allegedly included picking up groceries, chauffeuring Garrett’s daughters to and from his Virginia district, fetching clothes that the congressman forgot at his Washington apartment, or even cleaning up after his dog. House ethics rules prohibit lawmakers from using staff for anything other than official congressional duties.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/23/garrett-ethics-virginia-republican-737100
 
Newenglanddeac said:
‘It looks kind of skeevy’: Illinois governor shamed by cash giveaway

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/23/illinois-governor-rauner-cash-giveaway-736244
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yeah, kind of

Gov. Bruce Rauner, who’s campaigning as an anti-corruption crusader, today found himself fending off attacks on his own ethics after attending an event where a political ally handed out $300,000 in cash.

The cash giveaway happened after the Republican governor spoke to a church on Chicago’s South Side on Sunday along with Willie Wilson, a onetime presidential candidate and 2019 challenger to Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Both Rauner and Wilson, political allies, addressed the congregation with the governor stating: “We’re honored to help you pay your property taxes. Happy to do it.” It was a reference, his campaign later explained, to Rauner’s work with Wilson’s private foundation.

Wilson then stood inside the church holding stacks of cash and handed out bills to passersby.

Wilson told POLITICO that the money was from his foundation — and that $100,000 of it came from Rauner himself.
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I guess I’ll put this here. Did we have a thread about Pubs/poor?

Anyhow, it’s an unfortunately fair bit of musing about what motivates “conservatives”.

And contains this nugget of truth:

...Many blue-collar whites still think that the poor are lazy and prefer to live off welfare. But as events in Maine show, such beliefs aren’t central to the war on the poor, which is mainly being driven by political elites.

And what motivates these elites is ideology. Their political identities, not to mention their careers, are wrapped up in the notion that more government is always bad. So they oppose programs that help the poor partly out of a general hostility toward “takers,” but also because they hate the idea of government helping anyone...
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I’ve claimed for a long time now that Pubs have proudly and stupidly embraced the lie that the “solution” to every problem is necessarily “less” government (regulation) and lower taxes. That’s it. No thinking required. No effort needed to understand anything. It’s just...like magic.

I’ll post the whole thing below as it’s behind a paywall.

The G.O.P.’s War on the Poor


Four years ago, on the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, House Republicans led by Paul Ryan issued a report declaring that war a failure. Poverty, they asserted, hadn’t fallen. Therefore, they concluded, we must slash spending on the poor.

Last week, Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers issued a new report on poverty, recognizing what most experts in the field have said: The standard poverty measure is badly flawed, and a better measure shows substantial progress. In fact, these advisers went so far as to assert that poverty is no longer a problem. (Do these people ever get out into the real world?)

Anyway, the war on poverty, said the report, “is largely over and a success.” And our response, says the Trump administration, should be to … slash spending on the poor.

O.K., the report doesn’t openly call for benefit cuts. Instead, it calls for the widespread imposition of work requirements for Medicaid, food stamps and other programs. But that would have the effect of sharply reducing those programs’ coverage.

This decline in coverage wouldn’t be the result of large numbers of people earning their way out of poverty. Instead, many poor Americans would, for a variety of reasons — poor health, job instability for low-wage workers, daunting paperwork imposed on those least able to deal with it — find it impossible to meet the requirements, and be denied aid despite remaining poor.

So whatever the evidence, Republicans always reach the same policy conclusion. Was the war on poverty a failure? Let’s stop helping the poor. Was it a success? Let’s stop helping the poor.

And let’s be clear: We’re talking about the whole party, not just the Trump administration. In particular, Republican governors are fanatical about cutting benefits for their lower-income residents.

In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin tried to impose harsh work requirements on Medicaid. When a court ruled that his plan violated the law, he retaliated by abruptly cutting off vision and dental coverage for hundreds of thousands of people.

In Maine, voters overwhelmingly approved an initiative to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. But Gov. Paul LePage has refused to implement the expansion — a vast majority of which would be paid for with federal funds — despite a court order, and has declared that he’s willing to go to jail rather than see his constituents get health care.

So what’s behind the G.O.P.’s war on the poor?

It’s not about incentives. The persistent claim on the right that America is filled with “takers” living off social programs when they should be working may be what conservatives want to believe, but it just isn’t true. Most nondisabled adults receiving aid work; most of those who don’t have good reasons for not working, such as health issues or the need to serve as caretakers for family members. Slashing benefits would push some of these people into the work force out of sheer desperation, but not many, and at a huge cost to their well-being.

And claims that excessively generous social programs are the cause of falling labor force participation can be easily refuted by looking at the international evidence. Europe’s welfare states — or, as conservatives always say, its “failing” welfare states — provide much more generous aid to low-income families than we do, and as a result have much less poverty. Yet adults in their prime working years are more likely to be employed in leading European nations than in the United States.

It’s also not about the money. At the state level, many Republican governors are still refusing to expand Medicaid even though it would cost them little and would bring money into their states’ economies. At the federal level, it would take draconian benefit cuts, imposing immense suffering, to save as much money as the G.O.P. casually gave away in last year’s tax cut.

What about the traditional answer that it’s really about race? Social programs have often been seen as helping Those People, not white Americans. And that’s still surely part of what’s going on.

But it can’t be the whole story, since Republicans are fanatical about cutting off aid to the less fortunate even in places like Maine that are overwhelmingly populated by non-Hispanic whites.

So what is the war on the poor about? As I see it, you need to make a distinction between what motivates the G.O.P. base and what motivates conservative politicians.

Many blue-collar whites still think that the poor are lazy and prefer to live off welfare. But as events in Maine show, such beliefs aren’t central to the war on the poor, which is mainly being driven by political elites.

And what motivates these elites is ideology. Their political identities, not to mention their careers, are wrapped up in the notion that more government is always bad. So they oppose programs that help the poor partly out of a general hostility toward “takers,” but also because they hate the idea of government helping anyone.

And if they get their way, society will stop helping tens of millions of Americans who desperately need that help.
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Yeah, it's clearly what's driving the GOP's obsession with privatizing literally everything - public ed, the Veterans Administration, social services, etc. Apparently everything would be better if it were only run by private corporations. It's like the absurd Forbes article posted several days ago arguing that public libraries need to be turned over to for-profits like Amazon, because they would do so much better. That article got so much flak that Forbes apparently yanked it from their website. If you look at US History, it's amazing at how many companies were successful in part because of government assistance, not because government was in their way. We have had corporate welfare in this country, proudly sponsored by federal and state governments, since the nineteenth century; it seems only fair that the rest of us should get some government help too. But, not according to the GOP - that's "bad" welfare.
 
Election meddling bill would curb president's power, Paul warns

The bill, known as the DETER Act, is backed by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). The proposed law would bar foreign governments from buying ads to influence U.S. elections, and would also give the director of national intelligence the power to deploy “national security tools” like sanctions if the Kremlin interferes in another American election.

But speaking at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Paul cautioned that the legislation might hamstring the president's ability to protect elections.
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