Opinion

What does it say about a political party that defends a member as toxic and repulsive as Paul Gosar?

What does it say that 207 of the 210 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives — including the other three from Arizona, Andy Biggs, Debbie Lesko and David Schweikert — stood in defense of a man who last week tweeted an animated video that depicted his avatar violently slaying one of his political opponents and congressional colleagues?

More than 750,000 people have died from the coronavirus plague in the United States. Epidemiologists and other public health professionals predict that more than a million will die before the pandemic is finally vanquished. Millions more Americans will experience long-term and perhaps lifelong negative health impacts after surviving COVID-19.

By one serious estimate, the coronavirus pandemic cost the American people more than 7 million years of life in 2020 alone. More than 140,000 children have lost their primary caregivers to the coronavirus plague. These estimates do not include any guess as to how many millions of peoples' lifespans will be shortened because of the psychological, emotional and financial stress and other misery caused by the pandemic.

Some areas of the U.S. federal government are sacrosanct.

The CDC doesn't screw around with reporting COVID information, because millions of people, including scientists, make life or death decisions based on those data.

On January 2, Trump lawyer John Eastman called into Steve Bannon's War Room podcast to explain how to steal the election. Eastman told Bannon that Vice President Mike Pence could still overturn Biden's victory. The interview was part of an extremely public campaign by Trump and his closest allies to lobby Pence to steal the election during the certification ceremony.

One of Eastman's crackpot theories was that the vice president has the unilateral power to accept or reject electoral votes at his whim, or failing that, to somehow "send the election back" to Republican-controlled swing state legislatures that would disregard the will of their people and replace Biden's electors with Trump's.

Of the first 35 individuals sentenced in connection with the January 6 insurrection, no fewer than 21 have received probation and another nine have come away with slap-on-the-wrist jail sentences of 90 days or less.

A Raw Story analysis of sentencing information posted by the Department of Justice shows an astounding pattern of light punishment for the defendants, all of whom were allowed to plead guilty to offenses far less serious than the crimes for which they were charged. Here's a summary of what the insurrectionists were given:

Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar is a piece of work. A conservative Republican who first came to Congress in the 2010 Tea Party wave, he has obtained a national profile in the last few years by garnering the dubious distinction of being the most radical member of the House GOP caucus, and that's saying something. He's a full-fledged conspiracy theorist and white nationalist whose own family has publicly disowned him. But no one in the GOP leadership has felt it necessary to rein him in for any of this, not even after he posted a photoshopped anime video of himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, D-N.Y., and assaulting President Joe Biden.

Apparently, the GOP believes this dangerous extremist can literally do no wrong. Meanwhile, they are very busy plotting revenge on the Republicans who voted last week for the infrastructure bill, so it's understandable that they might not have time to discipline a congressman who publicly fantasizes about killing a Democratic member of Congress and attacking the president. They have priorities.

Mike Flynn and Josh Mandel do not stand at the center of the Republican Party. They do not stand at its margins either. Flynn is the former's president's former advisor. (He's a pardoned criminal, too.) Mandel is Ohio's leading Senate candidate. Both men have said in recent days they don't believe in the separation of church and state.

I'm paraphrasing. See for yourself what they said. However, their remarks should be familiar. They reflect the GOP's theocratic wing. For decades, it has opposed the incorporated interpretation of the First Amendment's establishment clause. They used to be way, way out there. But, even if I'm missing something, Flynn's and Mandel's remarks suggest the GOP's theocratic wing isn't as marginal as it once was.

Chris Christie is on what some are calling a rehabilitation tour. The combative Republican former governor of New Jersey is hawking his new book, "Republican Rescue" on all the major news networks, trying to position himself as an alternative to Donald Trump as he anoints himself the savior of the Republican Party.

Christie, who left office with a dismal 14 percent approval rating despite (or because of) having others in his way to distance himself from Bridgegate, somehow having escaped any legal ramifications over his management of Hurricane Sandy funds, and after trying to slough off Beachgate, for a short time tried to be less "Christie"-like. But that softer persona disappeared this week, especially late Tuesday afternoon when he stepped on the set of MSNBC's "Deadline: White House" and sat down with host Nicolle Wallace.

Mike Flynn and Josh Mandel do not stand at the center of the Republican Party. They do not stand at its margins either. Flynn is the former's president's former advisor. (He's a pardoned criminal, too.) Mandel is Ohio's leading Senate candidate. Both men have said in recent days they don't believe in the separation of church and state.

I'm paraphrasing. See for yourself what they said. However, their remarks should be familiar. They reflect the GOP's theocratic wing. For decades, it has opposed the incorporated interpretation of the First Amendment's establishment clause. They used to be way, way out there. But, even if I'm missing something, Flynn's and Mandel's remarks suggest the GOP's theocratic wing isn't as marginal as it once was.

A Virginia school board voted unanimously last week to ban all "sexually explicit" books from school libraries after a woman found the acclaimed novel about a gay relationship, "Call Me by Your Name" — which was made into an Oscar-winning film — as well as "33 Snowfish," about three homeless teenagers, in the district's online library catalogue.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report

We're demonizing the wrong people.

This is not a call to "understand" or "have compassion" for Trump voters. Instead, it's a call for a wholesale political and social indictment of Trump's Big Lie, along with every elected Republican politician or media member who knows Trump lost but keeps perpetuating that Lie.

Steve Bannon faces real trouble when he goes on trial for contempt of Congress. He has no legitimate defense — unless a judge sets aside decades of principles governing defenses in criminal cases.

If that happens, we are all in for a lot of trouble enforcing laws in America.

Despite weeks of worrying that Attorney General Merrick Garland didn't have the guts, the good news finally came down: Former Donald Trump advisor and current fascist propagandist Steve Bannon is under indictment for refusing to honor a subpoena to testify before Congress. Additionally, the announcement appears to have empowered the January 6 commission to enforce its other subpoenas. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., says Congress will "move quickly" to do the same to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who is similarly refusing to answer questions about his role in Trump's efforts to invalidate the 2020 election and the violent insurrection on the Capitol that ensued.

Both Bannon and Meadows are clearly at the center of what is very much looking like an insurrectionist conspiracy helmed by Trump. As journalist Lindsay Beyerstein explained on Twitter, January 6 appears to be "an inside game and an outside game," with the former focused on pressuring then-Vice President Mike "Pence steal the election procedurally" and the latter on using the violent mob "to terrorize potentially recalcitrant GOP reps into going along with the theft." New reporting shows the extent to which Meadows was orchestrating the pressure campaign against Pence. Bannon was also in the thick of it and is on tape telling his podcast listeners on Jan. 5 to "strap in" because "we're pulling the trigger on something" and "we're on the point of attack tomorrow."