Opinion

U.S. Rep. David Schweikert might end up being a case study in how escalating extreme rhetoric to avoid the wrath of former President Donald Trump and his voters turns from an advantage to a liability because of redistricting.

Schweikert won his seat in Congress in the GOP wave year of 2010, knocking off incumbent Democrat Harry Mitchell, who had improbably represented the reliably Republican district for two terms.

It's always a fool's game trying to keep up with the latest right-wing outrage. Theirs is a profit-making enterprise — and the customer base is in a buying mood. In the last month or so, we've seen an unusually high volume of vomitous rhetorical spew coming from both elected Republican politicians and conservative media figures. I guess it's their way of celebrating the holidays.

First, we had Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar distributing a noxious anime video depicting the killing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and attacking President Joe Biden. The Republican leadership shrugged their shoulders and it was left to the Democrats to take action, which they did by stripping Gosar of his committee assignments and censuring him.

It was a 21st-century version of a Jim Crow-era lynching. Ahmaud Arbery was stalked, hunted down and executed in the street by three white men on Feb. 23, 2020. The men claimed they suspected Arbery of being a thief or burglar, but he had committed no crime and was unarmed. He was a Black man who went running in the predominantly white residential neighborhood of Brunswick, Georgia.

The three white men who chased Arbery through the streets of Brunswick were Travis McMichael — who shot and killed Arbery — his father, Greg McMichael, and their neighbor, William "Roddie" Bryan. They attempted to claim self-defense, saying they were carrying out a citizen's arrest of a criminal suspect. The McMichaels chased Arbery in a pickup truck. They cornered him. Travis McMichael would then shoot Ahmaud Arbery three times.

It’s impossible not to make all the connections regarding the terrible school shooting at Oxford High School in Oakland County, Michigan, in which four students were shot and killed by 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley and several others were injured.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo conceded in March, 2021 that he could not, ethically, cover the sexual harassment allegations against his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The family ties were simply too strong for him to do so independently.

But afterwards, Chris provided behind-the-scenes counsel to his brother and his brother’s team. By August, 2021, when Andrew resigned in the wake of the scandal, there were calls for Chris to step down from his job as well because the New York attorney general’s initial report revealed that he had helped draft a statement for his brother in February. As the adage has it, no one can serve two masters. The CNN anchor who should have been serving the public was secretly putting family loyalty first by helping his brother navigate a political and public relations disaster.

Joe Biden frequently says that he wants to emulate Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president most revered among American liberals (along with John F. Kennedy and, latterly, Barack Obama). In one way he no doubt laments, Biden has indeed emulated FDR — by seeing a pair of "centrists" from his own party (in this case, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) undermine his agenda. Roosevelt faced some of his fiercest opposition from conservative Democrats, including his own vice president, John Nance Garner, whose nickname really was "Cactus Jack."

This article first appeared in Salon.

In October, chief executives from four of the world's most powerful Big Oil companies testified before Congress about climate change — a scene that was eerily reminiscent of something that happened in the spring of 1994. Then, seven industry giants appeared before the House of Representatives — but from Big Tobacco, not Big Oil. As the business titans withered under persistent questioning from Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, Americans collectively witnessed the story as to how tobacco companies knowingly hooked their customers on an addictive and deadly product. To cap things off, many of those who appeared lied under oath about their actions, making it possible for prosecutors to later charge them with perjury. (This is no doubt why the energy industry figures prepared very carefully prior to the 2021 hearing.)

This article first appeared in Salon.

The entire edifice of Donald Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election — that it was stolen from him through illegal votes cast by Democrats — now seems to rest on the unprepossessing business-suit-clad shoulders of one man: Jeffrey Clark, a former official in the Trump Department of Justice. He has informed the HouseSelect Committee on the Jan. 6 uprising that he is willing to be interviewed by investigators and if called upon, to testify with one condition. He intends to invoke his right against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

This article first appeared in Salon.

If it seems like it was just yesterday that U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled the President of the United States and in fact every Democrat in the country “communists,” it was, which is why it might seem strangely hypocritical that the Republican from Georgia minutes ago was labeling herself the “most attacked” freshman member of Congress in all of U.S. history.

“Joe Biden is a communist,” Greene declared strongly Thursday evening. “And that’s who the Democrats are – they’re communists.”

If Roe goes down, there will be more at stake than access to abortion. In the absence of federal protections, state governments would be free to regulate trans rights, “sodomy” and even condoms. “Once you pull on the loose thread of Roe,” Editorial Board contributor Anthony Michael Kreis said on Thursday, “the rest of the stitches holding the right to privacy and sexual liberty together are easier to unravel.”

The threat to individual rights doesn’t end there. All civil liberties are in danger. Roe’s death would signal a high court prepared to restore the power of states to discriminate against their residents, wrote historian Heather Cox Richardson. “Make no mistake,” she said this week, “it is not just reproductive rights that are under siege. If the Supreme Court returns power to the states to legislate as they wish, any right currently protected by the federal government is at risk.”

Some analyses of Trumpism and Republican populism have claimed to detect a strain of anti-corporate sentiment. It is true that today’s right-wingers are willing to criticize big tech companies for supposedly treating them unfairly, but most of the time the GOP continues to serve the interests of big business.

That was clear during an important hearing just held by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law. Subcommittee chair David Cicilline (D-R.I.), vice-chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), other Democratic members and the witnesses all raised serious questions about the current regulatory system, focusing on issues such as disclosure and social equity.

Most days, it’s hard to fully comprehend our current dystopian nightmare.

We now accept that 777,000 Americans are dead in the COVID pandemic and the death toll continues to climb day after day, even when we’ve had life-saving vaccines widely available for eight months.

Michael Flynn is always in the news for the worst reasons.

Today, it’s because of the former Trump advisor’s feud with Lin Wood and the leaking of text messages and audio recording during which he calls QAnon “total nonsense” as well as a CIA psy-op. Last time, he was calling for a single religion in the United States. Time before that, QAnon members accused him of being a Satanist for a sermon at a church drawing from a former New Age apocalyptic leader.