we remember the Holocaust…and our first female Secretary of State…Madeleine Albright…her funeral was today at the National Cathedral…one of Doris’ early apartments was across the street…on Wisconsin Avenue…the Cathedral is awe inspiring outside and more so inside…it was a beautiful service…Presidents Clinton and Obama with Hillary and Michelle…performers Herbie Hancock and Chris Botti…Hillary spoke of her last phone call with her – “She continued to issue blunt warnings about the dangers posed by authoritarianism and fascism with undeniable moral clarity,” Mrs. Clinton said. During the phone call, she said, Ms. Albright talked about the importance of rallying “the world against Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine and the urgent work of defending democracy at home and around the world.”…Biden recalled that he was aboard Air Force One heading to Europe to rally NATO allies to stand up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when he heard Ms. Albright had died. “It was not lost on me that Madeleine was a big part of the reason NATO was still strong and galvanized as it is today.”…from The New York Times by Peter Baker: “At Madeleine Albright’s Service, a Reminder of the Fight for Freedom: The former secretary of state, who died last month, was honored at Washington National Cathedral as America faces the kind of struggle between democracy and autocracy that she warned about.: WASHINGTON — She arrived on a ship called the SS America, an 11-year-old refugee fleeing tyranny for freedom. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, her adopted country bade farewell on Wednesday to Madeleine Korbel Albright, who in the course of a storybook life became a relentless evangelist for American ideals at home and abroad and an implacable foe of tyranny everywhere.
The little immigrant girl who survived Nazis and Communists before growing up to become the first female secretary of state was honored by presidents, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, diplomats, generals, foreign leaders and dissidents at one of those only-in-Washington memorial services that was about this moment in history as much as it was about the dearly departed.
In death as in life, Ms. Albright evoked the eternal struggle between democracy and autocracy that flared again in her final days in a land not far from her own native country. Taking a respite from the momentous confrontation with a revanchist Russia in Ukraine, President Biden and other leaders gathered at Washington National Cathedral to summon her courage and conviction to steel themselves and the next generation for the challenges of their own time.
“In the 20th and 21st century, freedom had no greater champion than Madeleine Korbel Albright,” Mr. Biden told a crowd of 1,400 in the majestic cathedral. Addressing Ms. Albright’s three daughters, the president added: “Your mom was a force, a force of nature. With her goodness and grace, her humanity and her intellect, she turned the tide of history.”
But the timing of Ms. Albright’s memorial in the midst of the most seismic clash between liberty and repression since the Cold War made the event feel all the more resonant. During her time as ambassador and secretary of state in the 1990s through her final years when she wrote books with titles like “Fascism,” Ms. Albright essentially spent her career warning of a moment just like this. Even more so, because it has come at a time when America’s own democracy feels at risk, a danger she confronted head-on as well.
“If Madeleine were here with us today, she would also remind us this must be a season of action, and yes, once again we must heed the wisdom of her life and the cause of her public service,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Stand up to dictators and demagogues from the battlefields of Ukraine to the halls of our own Capitol. Defend democracy at home just as vigorously as we do abroad.”…lastly her three daughters spoke…of the loving mother and teacher she was…”Katharine M. Albright said her mother lived justly, loved mercy and walked humbly with her God. “Dying,” she said, “was never on Mom’s schedule.” “…and on Remembrance Day, Madeleine born Marie Jana and her siblings were raised Roman Catholic…Josef and Anna, her parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1941, when Madeleine was 4. In 1997, Albright said her parents never told her or her two siblings about their Jewish ancestry and heritage.
then, all along trump’s compaign and administration, just when you thought it couldn’t get worst, it got worst… there was no bottom…and now when we are getting information and audios that make the hair on the back of your head stand up…plus more scandals of trump’s administration fleecing America…and yet, another Republican speaking up, speaking against the BIG LIE, in Michigan…Tony Daunt…and a Republican appointed judge warns us that the 2020 election was a dry run to be played again…a warning…from The Washington Post by Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger: “Talk of martial law, Insurrection Act draws notice of Jan. 6 committee: Trump White House discussions about using presidential emergency powers have become an important but little-known part of the panel’s inquiry:
Three days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. She told him that some Republican members of Congress believed the only path for President Donald Trump to change the outcome of the 2020 election and stay in power was for him to declare martial law.
The text from Greene (R-Ga.), revealed this week, brought to the fore the chorus of Republicans who were publicly and privately advocating for Trump to try to use the military and defense apparatus of the U.S. government to strong-arm his way past an electoral defeat. Now, discussions involving the Trump White House about using emergency powers have become an important — but little-known — part of the House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation of the 2021 attack on the Capitol.: In subpoenas, document requests and court filings, the panel has demanded information about any Trump administration plans to use presidential emergency powers to invoke martial law or take other steps to overturn the 2020 election.
Interviews with committee members and a review of the panel’s information requests reveals a focus on emergency powers that were being considered by Trump and his allies in several categories: invoking the Insurrection Act, declaring martial law, using presidential powers to justify seizing assets of voting-machine companies, and using the military to require a rerun of the election.
There is no proof Trump ordered any U.S. official to invoke emergency powers, and many of Trump’s advisers and attorneys say privately they would have balked at such a request. An adviser to former vice president Mike Pence said he was never asked to invoke any emergency powers. But several advisers said that Trump was interested in seizing voting machines and that he did at times suggest that the election should be done over.
“Trump’s invocation of these emergency powers would have been unprecedented in all of American history,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge.”…
this judge, J. Michael Luttig in an opinion from CNN: “Opinion: The Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election: Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about.
Fewer still understand why former President Donald Trump and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the “stolen” election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen.
January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual voting fraud. It was always and only about an election that Trump lost fair and square, under legislatively promulgated election rules in a handful of swing states that he and other Republicans contend were unlawfully changed by state election officials and state courts to expand the right and opportunity to vote, largely in response to the Covid pandemic.
The Republicans’ mystifying claim to this day that Trump did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious objective.
That objective is not somehow to rescind the 2020 election, as they would have us believe. That’s constitutionally impossible. Trump’s and the Republicans’ far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if Trump or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest.
The last presidential election was a dry run for the next.
From long before Election Day 2020, Trump and Republicans planned to overturn the presidential election by exploiting the Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, the Electoral College, the Electoral Count Act of 1877, and the 12th Amendment, if Trump lost the popular and Electoral College vote.
The cornerstone of the plan was to have the Supreme Court embrace the little known “independent state legislature” doctrine, which, in turn, would pave the way for exploitation of the Electoral College process and the Electoral Count Act, and finally for Vice President Mike Pence to reject enough swing state electoral votes to overturn the election using Pence’s ceremonial power under the 12th Amendment and award the presidency to Donald Trump.
The independent state legislature doctrine says that, under the Elections and the Electors Clauses of the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary and exclusive power over the conduct of federal presidential elections and the selection of state presidential electors. Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under this theory.
The Supreme Court has never decided whether to embrace the independent state legislature doctrine. But then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in separate concurring opinions said they would embrace that doctrine in Bush v. Gore, 20 years earlier, and Republicans had every reason to believe there were at least five votes on the Supreme Court for the doctrine in November 2020, with Amy Coney Barrett having just been confirmed in the eleventh hour before the election.
Trump and the Republicans began executing this first stage of their plan months before November 3, by challenging as violative of the independent state legislature doctrine election rules relating to early- and late-voting, extensions of voting days and times, mail-in ballots, and other election law changes that Republicans contended had been unlawfully altered by state officials and state courts in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan.
These cases eventually wound their way to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2020, and by December, the Supreme Court had decided all of these cases, but only by orders, either disallowing federal court intervention to change an election rule that had been promulgated by a state legislature, allowing legislatively promulgated rules to be changed by state officials and state courts, or deadlocking 4-4, because Justice Barrett was not sworn in until after those cases were briefed and ready for decision by the Court. In none of these cases did the Supreme Court decide the all-important independent state legislature doctrine.
Thwarted by the Supreme Court’s indecision on that doctrine, Trump and the Republicans turned their efforts to the second stage of their plan, exploitation of the Electoral College and the Electoral Count Act.
The Electoral College is the process by which Americans choose their presidents, a process that can lead to the election as president of a candidate who does not receive a majority of votes cast by the American voters. Republicans have grown increasingly wary of the Electoral College with the new census and political demographics of the nation’s shifting population.
The Electoral Count Act empowers Congress to decide the presidency in a host of circumstances where Congress determines that state electoral votes were not “regularly given” by electors who were “lawfully certified,” terms that are undefined and ambiguous. In this second stage of the plan, the Republicans needed to generate state-certified alternative slates of electors from swing states where Biden won the popular vote who would cast their electoral votes for Trump instead. Congress would then count the votes of these alternative electoral slates on January 6, rather than the votes of the certified electoral slates for Biden, and Trump would be declared the reelected president.
The Republicans’ plan failed at this stage when they were unable to secure a single legitimate, alternative slate of electors from any state because the various state officials refused to officially certify these Trump-urged slates.
Thwarted by the Supreme Court in the first stage, foiled by their inability to come up with alternative state electoral slates in the second stage, and with time running out, Trump and the Republicans began executing the final option in their plan, which was to scare up illegitimate alternative electoral slates in various swing states to be transmitted to Congress. Whereupon, on January 6, Vice President Pence would count only the votes of the illegitimate electors from the swing states, and not the votes of the legitimate, certified electors that were cast for Biden, and declare Donald Trump’s reelection as President of the United States.
The entire house of cards collapsed at noon on January 6, when Pence refused to go along with the ill-conceived plan, correctly concluding that under the 12th Amendment he had no power to reject the votes that had been cast by the duly certified electors or to delay the count to give Republicans even more time to whip up alternative electoral slates.
Pence declared Joe Biden the 46th President of the United States at 3:40 a.m. on Thursday, January 7, roughly 14 hours after rioters stormed the US Capitol, disrupting the Joint Session and preventing Congress from counting the Electoral College votes for president until late that night and into the following day, after the statutorily designated day for counting those votes.
Trump and his allies and supporters in Congress and the states began readying their failed 2020 plan to overturn the 2024 presidential election later that very same day and they have been unabashedly readying that plan ever since, in plain view to the American public. Today, they are already a long way toward recapturing the White House in 2024, whether Trump or another Republican candidate wins the election or not.
Trump and Republicans are preparing to return to the Supreme Court, where this time they will likely win the independent state legislature doctrine, now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Court and ready to vote. Barrett has not addressed the issue, but this turns on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, and Barrett is firmly aligned on that method of constitutional interpretation with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, all three of whom have written that they believe the doctrine is correct.
Only last month, in a case from North Carolina the Court declined to hear, Moore v. Harper, four Justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) said that the independent state legislature question is of exceptional importance to our national elections, the issue will continue to recur and the Court should decide the issue sooner rather than later before the next presidential election. This case involved congressional redistricting, but the independent state legislature doctrine is as applicable to redistricting as it is to presidential elections.
The Republicans are also in the throes of electing Trump-endorsed candidates to state legislative offices in key swing states, installing into office their favored state election officials who deny that Biden won the 2020 election, such as secretaries of state, electing sympathetic state court judges onto the state benches and grooming their preferred potential electors for ultimate selection by the party, all so they will be positioned to generate and transmit alternative electoral slates to Congress, if need be.
Finally, they are furiously politicking to elect Trump supporters to the Senate and House, so they can overturn the election in Congress, as a last resort.
Forewarned is to be forearmed.
Trump and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine (thus allowing state court enforcement of state constitutional limitations on legislatively enacted election rules and elector appointments) and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.
Although the Vice President will be a Democrat in 2024, both parties also need to enact federal legislation that expressly limits the vice president’s power to be coextensive with the power accorded the vice president in the 12th Amendment and confirm that it is largely ceremonial, as Pence construed it to be on January 6.
Vice President Kamala Harris would preside over the Joint Session in 2024. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have any idea who will be presiding after that, however. Thus, both parties have the incentive to clarify the vice president’s ceremonial role now.
As it stands today, Trump, or his anointed successor, and the Republicans are poised, in their word, to “steal” from Democrats the presidential election in 2024 that they falsely claim the Democrats stole from them in 2020. But there is a difference between the falsely claimed “stolen” election of 2020 and what would be the stolen election of 2024. Unlike the Democrats’ theft claimed by Republicans, the Republicans’ theft would be in open defiance of the popular vote and thus the will of the American people: poetic, though tragic, irony for America’s democracy.”…as Robert Reich said “this is how fascism begins!”…
then there’s another two more fleecings by trump’s administration…from The New York Times by Alan Rappeport: “Trump Officials Awarded $700 Million Pandemic Loan Despite Objections: A congressional report raises new questions about a pandemic relief loan to a troubled trucking company with close ties to the Trump administration.: WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday released a report alleging that top Trump administration officials had awarded a $700 million pandemic relief loan to a struggling trucking company in 2020 over the objections of career officials at the Defense Department.
The report, released by the Democratic staff of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, describes the role of corporate lobbyists during the early months of the pandemic in helping to secure government funds as trillions of dollars of relief money were being pumped into the economy. It also suggests that senior officials such as Steven Mnuchin, the former Treasury secretary, and Mark T. Esper, the former defense secretary, intervened to ensure that the trucking company, Yellow Corporation, received special treatment despite concerns about its eligibility to receive relief funds.
“Today’s select subcommittee staff report reveals yet another example of the Trump administration disregarding their obligation to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic chairman of the subcommittee, said in a statement. “Political appointees risked hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds against the recommendations of career D.O.D. officials and in clear disregard of provisions of the CARES Act intended to protect national security and American taxpayers.”
The $2.2 trillion pandemic relief package that Congress passed in 2020 included a $17 billion pot of money set up by Congress and controlled by the Treasury Department to assist companies that were considered critical to national security. In July 2020, the Treasury Department announced it was giving a $700 million loan to the trucking company YRC Worldwide, which has since changed its name to Yellow.
Lobbyists for Yellow had been in close touch with White House officials throughout the loan process and had discussed how the company employs Teamsters as its drivers, according to the report.
Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, was a “key actor” coordinating with Yellow’s lobbyists, according to correspondences that the committee obtained. The report also noted that the White House’s political operation was “almost giddy” in its effort to assist with the application.
The loan raised immediate questions from watchdog groups because of the company’s close ties to the Trump administration and because it had faced years of financial and legal turmoil. The firm had lost more than $100 million in 2019 and was being sued by the Justice Department over claims that it had defrauded the federal government for a seven-year period. It recently agreed to pay $6.85 million to resolve allegations “that they knowingly presented false claims to the U.S. Department of Defense by systematically overcharging for freight carrier services and making false statements to hide their misconduct.”
To qualify for a national security loan, a company needed certification by the Defense Department.
According to the report, defense officials had recommended against certification because of the accusations that the company had overcharged the government. They also noted that the work that the company had been doing for the federal government — which included shipping meal kits, protective equipment and other supplies to military bases — could be replaced by other trucking firms.
But the day after a defense official notified a Treasury official that the company would not be certified, one of Mr. Mnuchin’s aides set up a telephone call between him and Mr. Esper.
The report indicated that Mr. Esper was not initially familiar with the status of Yellow’s certification. Before the call, aides prepared a summary of the analysis and recommendations of the department’s career officials that concluded that the certification should be rejected.
Before those reached Mr. Esper, Ellen M. Lord, the department’s under secretary for acquisition and sustainment who was appointed by Mr. Trump, intervened and requested a new set of talking points that argued that the company should receive the financial support “to both support force readiness and national economic security.” Ms. Lord could not immediately be reached for comment.
After the call with Mr. Mnuchin, Mr. Esper certified that the company was critical to national security, and a week later the approval of the loan was announced.
Mr. Mnuchin then sent an email to Mr. Meadows that included news reports praising the loan. He highlighted positive comments from James P. Hoffa, the longtime president of the Teamsters union, who according to documents in the report made a direct plea to President Donald J. Trump about the loan.
Mr. Esper and Mr. Mnuchin declined to comment.
A former Treasury official familiar with the process said the loan saved 25,000 union jobs during an economic crisis and prevented disruption to the national supply chain that the Defense Department, businesses and consumers had depended on. The former official said that because of the terms of the loan, taxpayers were profiting from the agreement.
A spokesman for Mr. Esper said that the company met the criteria to be eligible for the loan and emphasized that the report made clear that senior staff at the Defense Department recommended that he certify it. The Treasury Department made the final decision to issue the loan, the spokesman added.”
secondly, from Bloomberg by Matthew Boyle: “(Bloomberg) — The head of McKinsey & Co. acknowledged that it failed to see the opioid epidemic unfolding while simultaneously doing work for drug regulators and makers of products including OxyContin in his first appearance before lawmakers investigating the consulting firm’s actions.
Sternfels denied conflicts of interest in advising both the Food and Drug Administration and opioid makers including Purdue Pharma. He said an April 13 interim report by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform “took large speculative leaps” by focusing on the “time frame and not the nature of the work” McKinsey did for the FDA. The work focused on “administrative and operational topics” like business processes, but didn’t involve opioid-related matters or efforts to combat an epidemic that has killed thousands of Americans.
On Tuesday, an FDA official said it had stopped contracting with McKinsey while lawmakers continue their probe.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who’s been investigating McKinsey’s ties to Purdue for several years, fired back at Sternfels by saying the consulting firm “absolutely” undermined drug safety and worsened the epidemic. She said that in 2008, McKinsey “actively coached” Purdue to join with other drug makers to undermine an FDA proposal to impose stricter requirements on opioid sales, which was never implemented. She also discussed McKinsey’s previously disclosed work to “turbocharge” sales of the opioid OxyContin by “relentlessly targeting doctors” who wrote the most prescriptions.
“It’s infuriating,” Healey said. “They even went so far as to get in the car with Purdue reps to pitch OxyContin to doctors.”
McKinsey has agreed to pay $641 million to settle claims by U.S. states that the consulting firm helped fuel the country’s opioid epidemic by providing sales analysis and marketing advice to makers of the highly addictive painkillers, including Purdue and Johnson & Johnson.
In 2019 McKinsey said it would stop working with Purdue. “McKinsey’s conflicts and conduct are among the worst I have seen in my years in government,” Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York who chairs the oversight committee, said in an opening statement to the hearing.
Aggressive Strategy
“Cash prize,” “celebrity status” and “unrivaled recognition” were among the rewards dangled by McKinsey to Purdue’s salespeople if they followed the consulting firm’s aggressive strategy to boost prescriptions of the OxyContin, according to documents shared between the two companies that were released Wednesday as part of the congressional investigation into the firm’s role in advising the drug maker.
Sternfels said that he would “work fully with the committee to answer all questions,” but didn’t have responses to some of the lawmakers’ questions Wednesday, including what other opioid makers McKinsey worked for beyond Purdue and J&J. “We demand accountability and will not stop until we get it,” Maloney said.
Katie Porter, a Democrat from California, asked Sternfels why McKinsey didn’t let the FDA decide whether its concurrent work for the drug regulator and for Purdue, which often involved the same consultants, was a conflict of interest. “Who made you conflict of interest czar for the U.S. government?” she said.
Lawmakers also grilled Sternfels about a Sept. 2013 slide from a presentation entitled “OxyContin growth opportunities,” in which McKinsey outlined its so-called “Wildfire” sales strategy to increase the number of sales calls made to certain doctors to boost the amount of prescriptions written in markets like Wareham, Massachusetts.
The presentation included multiple images of Donald Trump’s television show “The Apprentice,” then a hit program, to illustrate how “top performers” on Purdue’s sales force could earn prestige across the company, along with “significant rewards” such as cash.
“I know you all wear suits and don’t consider yourselves drug traffickers,” Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan, said to Sternfels. “But you were doing the same freaking thing.” ©2022 Bloomberg L.P.”
and a voice in the wilderness – from Craig Mauger, The Detroit News: “Lansing, Tony Daunt, a longtime Michigan Republican insider, resigned Tuesday night from the GOP’s state committee, saying party leaders had made the coming election a test of “who is most cravenly loyal” to former President Donald Trump.
Daunt, who is one of two Republican members of the Board of State Canvassers, made the comment in an email addressed to Judy Rapanos, chairwoman of the 4th Congressional District Republican Committee. The message was obtained by The Detroit News.
For five years, Daunt has been one of about 100 members of the Republican Party’s state committee, a panel that helps guide the party’s decisions. But that ended Tuesday with his immediate resignation, three days after a contentious GOP convention in Grand Rapids.
Instead of focusing on Democrats’ “myriad failures,” Daunt wrote that “feckless, cowardly party ‘leaders’ have made the election here in Michigan a test of who is the most cravenly loyal to Donald Trump and re-litigating the results of the 2020 cycle.”
Daunt described Trump as a “deranged narcissist.”
The former president has maintained unproven claims that fraud cost him Michigan’s 2020 election, assertions that have divided the state’s Republicans. Trump lost the 2020 race to Democrat Joe Biden by 154,000 votes or 3 percentage points.
“Incredibly, rather than distancing themselves from this undisciplined loser, far too many Republican ‘leaders’ have decided that encouraging his delusional lies — and, even worse — cynically appeasing him despite knowing they are lies, is the easiest path to ensuring their continued hold on power, general election consequences be damned,” Daunt wrote in his email.
“Rather than assembling the courage to do the right thing, at the right time, and guide the activist base towards the truth, they’ve repeatedly backed down and dissembled, hoping that just one more act of cowardice will be what does the trick.”
Daunt’s resignation was another sign of growing divisions within the Michigan Republican Party ahead of the 2022 election, in which the state will elect a governor and fill every seat in the state Legislature.
Daunt previously served as executive director of the Michigan Freedom Fund, the director of constituent relations for former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and logistics director for the Michigan Republican Party.
His letter came three days after the Michigan Republican Party endorsement convention, where delegates selected Kristina Karamo and Matt DePerno, two Trump-backed candidates, to run for secretary of state and attorney general.
Karamo and DePerno rose to prominence questioning the 2020 election and have focused their campaigns on issues related to it.
Meshawn Maddock, the party’s co-chairwoman, had endorsed Karamo and DePerno.”
Tony Daunt’s Letter:
Dear Judy
Please accept this email as the formal resignation, effective immediately, of my position as amember of the Michigan Republican Party State Committee from the Fourth Congressional District.You are one of the most wonderful, principled, and hard-working individuals I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, and it has been an honor to have your support. The Fourth District isblessed to have such an honest and dedicated individual as their chairwoman, and I lookforward to continuing our friendship for years to come.
Unfortunately, the priorities and “leadership” of the Republican Party, particularly here in Michigan, are no longer recognizable as those of a serious institution. Thanks to the disastrous policies and poisonous cultural warfare being pushed by the equally unserious Democrats from Joe Biden to Gretchen Whitmer on down
Republicans should be poised for tremendous gains across the country. But not here in Michigan. Not now.
Instead of focusing on highlighting the Democrats myriad failures from the Afghanistan debacle,to COVID authoritarianism (which didn’t even succeed at their supposed goal of stopping the virus), to crippling inflation, to the still cratered and crumbling DAMN roads – feckless, cowardly party “leaders” have made the election here in Michigan a test of who is themost cravenly loyal to Donald Trump and relitigating the results of the 2020 cycle. A cycle that saw Republicans PICK UP seats in the US House and win countless close elections across the country, and that would have ended with Republicans maintaining their narrow majority in the US Senate… if not for the disgraceful, petulant, and dangerous actions of a deranged narcissist. Incredibly, rather than distancing themselves from this undisciplined loser, far too many Republican “leaders” have decided that encouraging his delusional lies – and, even worse – cynically appeasing him despite knowing they are lies, is the easiest path to ensuring theircontinued hold on power, general election consequences be damned. Rather than assemblingthe courage to do the right thing, at the right time, and guide the activist base towards the truth, they’ve repeatedly backed down and dissembled, hoping that just one more act ofcowardice will be what does the trick. Apparently more than just the radical Left needs to getback to basics on world history and the tragic consequences of appeasement.
Whether it’s misguided true belief, cynical cowardice, or just plain old grift and avarice, it’s alosing strategy and I cannot serve on the governing board of a party that’s too stupid to see that.
All my best to you and the many other Republicans who are doing their best to do the right thing despite a “leadership” class that refuses to help you.
Tony Daunt
all this on days of Remembrance – the Holocaust…
Art Salazar 