Tag Archives: rnc

Big Money Is Fleeing the Republican Party

by PhillipM93 Posted on October 14, 2016

Mother Jones

Donald Trump is right: American elites really do have it in for him. With 25 days to go until an epic bloodbath, rich Republican donors are demanding that the RNC disavow him:

To an elite group of Republican contributors who have donated millions of dollars to the party’s candidates and committees in recent years, the cascade of revelations related to Mr. Trump’s sexual conduct is grounds for the committee to cut ties with the party’s beleaguered standard-bearer, finally and fully.

“At some point, you have to look in the mirror and recognize that you cannot possibly justify support for Trump to your children — especially your daughters,” said David Humphreys, a Missouri business executive who contributed more than $2.5 million to Republicans from the 2012 campaign cycle through this spring and opposed Mr. Trump’s bid from the outset.

Bruce Kovner, a New York investor and philanthropist who with his wife has given $2.7 million to Republicans over the same period, was just as blunt. “He is a dangerous demagogue completely unsuited to the responsibilities of a United States president,” Mr. Kovner wrote in an email, referring to Mr. Trump.

Aside from outright repudiation, these guys are already getting most of what they want. The RNC isn’t providing any money to the Trump campaign, and from what I can tell it’s not providing much of anything else, either. When Election Day finally arrives, it’s likely that Hillary Clinton’s ground game will give her an extra point or two on top of an already lopsided victory.

And then it will be time for yet another Republican “autopsy” about what went wrong. The answer, of course, will be both familiar and obvious: as Sen. Lindsey Graham put it four years ago, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Donald Trump put Graham’s theory to a destruction test this year, and it turned out to be absolutely right. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it. How do you attract more non-white votes without actually embracing any of the usual policy positions that would attract them?

It’s a really hard question. In the meantime, there’s one thing that Republicans still agree on: they hate Hillary Clinton, and from Day 1 they will be united in an effort to oppose everything she does. There will be no Obamacare fixes, no infrastructure bank, no debt ceiling hikes, and no maternity leave plans. They might be having second thoughts about their angry-white-guy strategy, but they still haven’t figured out that pure obstruction isn’t much of a winner either. If they were smart, they’d do a bit of logrolling in the upcoming Congress and rack up a few actual accomplishments they could take home to their supporters. But even after this year’s dumpster fire of an election, I don’t think they’re quite there yet.

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Big Money Is Fleeing the Republican Party

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The Republicans Just Declared Mike Pence the Winner—Over an Hour Before the Debate

by ijgmyne6n Posted on October 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Well, this is funny. The Republican National Committee published a blog post Tuesday night declaring that their very own Gov. Mike Pence had won the vice presidential debate.

The only problem? The debate hadn’t started yet.

“The consensus was clear after the dust settled, Mike Pence was the clear winner of the debate,” the post read.

The post—obviously—was taken down pretty quickly, but not before being spotted, and mocked mercilessly, on Twitter:

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The Republicans Just Declared Mike Pence the Winner—Over an Hour Before the Debate

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Jon Stewart makes late-night TV great again

by SuzanneBl Posted on July 22, 2016

Your Moment of Zen

Jon Stewart makes late-night TV great again

By on Jul 22, 2016Share

He’s baaaack!

American hero Jon Stewart emerged from his bunker Thursday to join his old pal Stephen Colbert on The Late Show.

Looking fresh out of survivalist training, Stewart gave us much-missed commentary on this week’s Republican National Convention and Roger Ailes’ exit from Fox News.

He had one message for Donald Trump, and the machinery that nominated him: “I see your bullshit.”

Either Lumpy and friends are lying about being bothered by thin-skinned, authoritarian, less-than-Christian readers-of-prompter being president, or they don’t care, as long as it’s their thin-skinned prompter authoritarian tyrant narcissist. You just want that person to give you your country back, because you feel that you are this country’s rightful owner. The only problem with that: This country isn’t yours. You don’t own it.

There was plenty of BS like that in Trump’s address to the RNC.

CBS censors were less than pleased with Stewart, but the crowd loved it. Watch the segment above.

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Jon Stewart makes late-night TV great again

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The Republican Party makes its hatred of mass transit official

by Philip28X16 Posted on July 21, 2016

Get off the bus, gus

The Republican Party makes its hatred of mass transit official

By on Jul 21, 2016Share

The Republican Party has made its views on transportation clear: highways good, transit and bike shares bad — or at least not worth spending any federal money on.

This is the vision laid out in the recently released GOP platform. It’s intensely anti-urban, anti-transit, opposed to smart growth, and far outside the mainstream.

According to the GOP, the only legitimate federal transportation expense is building highways. The Republicans propose eliminating all federal spending on mass transit, which they call “an inherently local affair.” They would also end all federal funding for high-speed rail, ferries, “bike-share programs, sidewalks, recreational trails, landscaping, and historical renovations.” And forget about finding new revenue to pay for any of these programs: The platform reiterates the party’s longstanding opposition to raising the gas tax, which hasn’t gone up since 1993.

But when it comes to building highways, Republicans don’t want to let anything stand in the way. They want to “reform provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act which can delay and drive up costs for transportation projects.” Look out, sensitive wetlands, there’s a road to nowhere headed your way and — if Republicans get to rewrite NEPA — no stopping it.

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The Republican Party makes its hatred of mass transit official

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Never Trump Delegates Have One Last Chance to Stand Up to Trump

by AngelinaMcAlexan Posted on July 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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After their revolt was crushed at the Republican National Convention on Monday, Never Trump delegates are planning one final push to deny Donald Trump the nomination on Tuesday in Cleveland. There’s little likelihood of success—and the effort may be nothing more than symbolic—but it appears the movement will go down swinging.

On Tuesday evening, the convention will be gaveled into session for the roll call of the states, when the delegates’ votes will be counted in order to officially make Trump the nominee. According to Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate and a leader of the dump Trump effort, her movement will use this final procedural vote to stage their last stand.

During the roll call of the states, the head of each delegation will declare his or her states’ vote breakdown. But delegates who are bound under convention rules to vote for Trump—but who personally oppose him—plan to register their dissent at this time using a specific parliamentary procedure.

“There’s a process that you use,” Unruh explained. “You have to actually directly challenge at the microphone to the chairman and say a specific phrase or they are going to call it out of order.” She declined to state the phrase, citing strategic reasons.

Technically, delegates bound to Trump by their state party rules must vote for him. But Unruh contends that there is nothing a state can do, and little the national party or state parties can do, to sanction rank and file delegates if they want to challenge this rule individually and vote their conscience. They are unlikely to stop Trump from reaching the 1,237 votes necessary to officially become the nominee, but the televised show of dissent will be an embarrassment to the Trump campaign and tarnish the image of unity the Republican National Committee is struggling to project this week.

The lingering tensions within the GOP were on full display on Monday, when Unruh and her allies made their first attempt to derail Trump’s nomination, briefly sparking chaos on the convention floor. That revolt failed after Republican National Committee officials and Trump aides persuaded delegates to abandon the anti-Trump delegates’ plan—an effort that Unruh claimed RNC chairman Reince Priebus was personally involved in.

After Tuesday’s vote making Trump’s nomination official, the Never Trump effort will finally be out of procedural weapons to use against Trump. But Unruh says that won’t stop them from planning more symbolic shows of opposition to Trump in Cleveland. “We have to hold them accountable for how they’ve treated us,” she said of the Trump campaign and the RNC. “There’s still ways to show discontent, and that’s what we’re discussing.”

“We’re dealing with a narcissist,” she continued. “There’s one thing he’s really gonna hate and that is people trying to embarrass him and not pay attention to him.”

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Never Trump Delegates Have One Last Chance to Stand Up to Trump

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Cleveland Police Are Gearing up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention

by edwinputilin54 Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the Republican National Convention imminent, the Cleveland Police Department is finalizing its security plan for what is expected to be a volatile few days. The city announced last Friday that it was updating its plan following last week’s mass shooting of police officers in Dallas, and though it shared scant detail, the Cleveland PD is set to be outfitted with plenty of heavy gear.

The RNC is designated as a National Special Security Event by the US Department of Homeland Security, which entitled Cleveland to a $50 million federal grant toward its security plan. According to bids the city has posted to its website and reports from local news outlets, so far Cleveland has spent the money on:

2,000 sets of riot gear
2,000 steel batons
325 sets of tactical armor
300 patrol bicycles, with accompanying riot gear
25 rifle scopes
10,000 flexible handcuffs

Other supplies include bulletproof helmets, pepper spray, two-point slings (used to carry rifles) and inmate mattresses. The Cleveland PD also asked the Chicago Police Department to loan them three bearcats, and Taser International is loaning the department 300 body cameras that can be attached to riot suits. The city also put out a bid for tear gas, according to the Washington Post, and recently upped its protest insurance coverage from $9.5 million to $50 million.

This approach by the city isn’t unusual per se; Tampa bought similar kinds of equipment (though less of it) ahead of the RNC there in 2012. But Cleveland is the first city to host a political convention with its police department under a consent decree with the federal government. The Cleveland PD has been under the oversight of a federal monitoring team charged with enforcing the decree since October 2015, due to a history of excessive force and other abuses. Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department lawyer who supervised the agency’s Cleveland PD investigation, told the Marshall Project, “You would want a department to provide security that has systems that are in place where there is better accountability and better supervision.” In a report issued in June, the team monitoring the Cleveland PD under the decree characterzied the police department’s ability to investigate officer misconduct as “dire.” Cleveland’s consent decree calls for changes to the department’s use of force policy and internal review protocol, but those changes are still in progress.

Joycelyn Rosnick, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild’s Cleveland office, told Mother Jones the group has concerns about the equipment and tactics that the Cleveland PD plans to deploy. The police department’s purchase of 10,000 flexible handcuffs, she said, indicates “they are preparing for mass arrests.” She also cautions about potential escalation: Earlier this year, a coalition of international civil liberties groups released a report on the health impacts of crowd-control weapons commonly used by law enforcement. The report focused on how projectile weapons such as rubber bullets or bean bags can cause severe injuries, including ruptured organs and even death. The report also found that chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray can cause permanent disabilities such as blindness and respiratory problems.

Rosnick also notes that wearing riot gear is a display of force that could chill people’s First Amendment right to protest. (Cleveland officials have said that officers will only wear riot gear if it becomes necessary.) And she wonders whether the Cleveland PD has sufficient training or will show adequate restraint. “The police department that was found to use excessive force a couple months ago,” she said, “is still the department we have today.”

Jane Castor, who was chief of the Tampa Police Department when that city hosted the RNC in 2012, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the Tampa PD’s approach to security—which included officers working in standard uniforms, passing out food and water to protesters, and arresting people only as a last resort—resulted in just two convention-related arrests and zero lawsuits from protesters after the convention. Cleveland is expected to see many more protesters than Tampa did, however.

Militarization of police departments has returned to the spotlight since the country erupted with protests last week following two high-profile fatal shootings by cops. Baton Rouge police officers used tear gas, pepper spray, and a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) to disperse protesters during demonstrations over the police shooting death of Alton Sterling. And officers in St. Paul, MN, used smoke bombs to disperse a crowd that had blocked a highway.

Watchdogs are working to prepare protesters for what may come. Matthew Barge, the attorney appointed to lead the federal oversight effort, told the Marshall Project that the public could report instances of police abuse at the RNC on the monitoring team’s website. “We are not going to be bashful about reviewing what happens at the RNC,” he said.

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Cleveland Police Are Gearing up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention

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Republican platform declares coal is clean

by EstelaWJWvzqh Posted on July 12, 2016

HEADDESK

Republican platform declares coal is clean

By on Jul 11, 2016Share

The Republican platform committee met in Cleveland the week before the Republican National Convention to hammer out the party’s policies in a Trump era. Not to be outdone by Democrats, who approved the party’s strongest platform language yet on climate change this weekend, Republicans have gone as far as possible in the other direction — by endorsing coal as clean.

After a unanimous vote on Monday, the RNC’s draft platform officially declares coal “an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.”

David Barton, a delegate from Texas, proposed the single-word edit to the RNC’s already-glowing list of adjectives on coal in its platform draft. “I would insert the adjective ‘clean’ along with coal, particularly because the technology we have now,” was Barton’s reasoning. (You can watch a clip of the vote on C-SPAN).

For years the coal industry — and at one point, even President Obama — promoted the idea of “clean coal,” that expensive and imperfect carbon-capture-and-storage technology could someday make coal less terrible. But there’s no way it is clean.

The RNC language just happens to reflect the same talking points favored by the lobby group, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), which on its website calls coal “an affordable, abundant and increasingly clean domestic energy resource that is vital to providing reliable low-cost electricity.”

The RNC copied most of that language correctly, give or take a few words.

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Republican platform declares coal is clean

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Here’s Why the RNC’s Anti-Hillary Clinton Campaign Involves an Orange Squirrel Suit

by CelesteXHU Posted on June 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, the Republican National Committee unveiled its latest tactic to tear down Hillary Clinton’s would-be presidential campaign: an intern in a giant orange squirrel suit. The concept behind the attack requires some mental gymnastics to grasp. See, Republicans find it crazy that Democrats have latched onto Clinton as their 2016 standard bearer, so the squirrel’s tagline is “Another Clinton in the White House is Nuts.” When the squirrel wandered around outside a Clinton event in DC last Friday, its message wasn’t readily apparent; most Hillary devotees offered it high-fives before they noticed that the furry mascot was a GOP project.

So why a squirrel? Consider it a money-saving move on the GOP’s part. This isn’t the first time the party has used this particular squirrel suit. Back in 2008, the GOP introduced it as part of a campaign against ACORN, the voter registration group that would eventually close after a conservative backlash. The squirrel traveled the country that fall protesting ACORN. The RNC even gave the squirrel its own WordPress blog. “We are a group of concerned squirrels traveling around the country in an effort to highlight Barack Obama’s relationship with ACORN,” the About page said.

The squirrel visiting Times Square in his ACORN incarnation AcornsDontFallFarFromTheTree.wordpress.com/

He became friends with fitness guru Richard Simmons:

Richard Simmons goes nuts for the RNC AcornsDontFallFarFromTheTree.wordpress.com/

The ACORN squirrel speaks:

Ultimately, the squirrel failed at its mission: Obama won the 2008 election despite the ACORN controversy. Since then, the suit has lingered unused at RNC offices. Why revive it this year? Kristen Kukowski, press secretary at the RNC, told Mother Jones over e-mail, “What can I say? We believe in recycling.”

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Here’s Why the RNC’s Anti-Hillary Clinton Campaign Involves an Orange Squirrel Suit

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