Gratuitous Campaign Advice

Joey, Hey Joe:

Here are a couple of things about winning: 

In public, always lower your voice to more bass and raise the volume. That gives you more cred..........

Do NOT challenge him on facts or statements; instead, do the Reagan: 'There he goes again...'

In public, drop the 'contemplative' mindset. Show energy behind every remark.

Say to yourself all the time every day: "Yes I own this whole place. Don't even think about pissing me off". 

Let it show but do not say it out loud. Duh.......

Trot out your brain trust. We know you have good staff, show them to us.

We have your back.

GOP Project 2025 Takes Money from Hungary's Orban

July 4, 2024, Heather Cox Richardson

Monday, July 1, was a busy day. That morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that gives the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts. On the same day, Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon began a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Before he began serving his sentence, he swore he would “be more powerful in prison than I am now.”

 

“On July 2, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, went onto Bannon’s webcast War Room to hearten Bannon’s right-wing followers after Bannon’s incarceration. Former representative Dave Brat (R-VA) was sitting in for Bannon and conducted the interview. 

 

“[W]e are going to win,” Roberts told them. “We're in the process of taking this country back…. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.”

 

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the radical left…has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

 

Roberts took over the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in 2021, and he shifted it from a conservative think tank to an organization devoted to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Central to that project for Roberts has been working to bring the policies of Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, to the United States.

 

In 2023, Roberts brought the Heritage Foundation into a formal partnership with Hungary’s Danube Institute, a think tank overseen by a foundation that is directly funded by the Hungarian government; as journalist Casey Michel reported, it is, “for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.” The Danube Institute has given grants to far-right figures in the U.S., and, Michel noted in March, “we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation.” Roberts has called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

 

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.” He is moving Hungary away from the stabilizing international systems supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

 

No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his far-right political party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists, who attacked immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. While Hungary still holds elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for the people of Hungary to remove him from power.

 

Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.

 

The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure. In January 2024, Roberts told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times that Project 2025 was designed to jump-start a right-wing takeover of the government. “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Roberts said. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”

 

Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace: the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”

 

In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.

 

The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”

 

Dismantling the administrative state starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce—about 2 million people work for the U.S. government—and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.

 

The plan asserts “the existential need” for an authoritarian leader to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, the plan says the national government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.”

 

It attacks “America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture,” for their embrace of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and for their willingness to work with other countries. It calls for abandoning all of those partnerships and alliances.

 

Also on July 1, Orbán took over the rotating presidency of the European Union. He will be operating for six months in that position under a slogan taken from Trump and adapted to Europe: “Make Europe Great Again.” The day before taking that office, Orbán announced that his political party was forming a new alliance with far-right parties in Austria and the Czech Republic in order to launch a “new era of European politics.”

 

Tomorrow, Orbán will travel to Moscow to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin. On July 2, Orbán met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where he urged Zelensky to accept a “ceasefire.” In the U.S., Trump’s team has suggested that, if reelected, Trump will call for an immediate ceasefire and will negotiate with Putin over how much of Ukraine Putin can keep while also rejecting Ukraine for NATO membership and scaling back U.S. commitment to NATO.

 

“I would expect a very quick end to the conflict,” Kevin Roberts said. Putin says he supports Trump’s plan.

 

Roberts’s “second American revolution,” which would destroy American democracy in an echo of a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders, seems a lot less patriotic than the first American Revolution.

 

For my part, I will stand with the words written 248 years ago today, saying that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

 

—

 

Notes:

 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/01/politics/steve-bannon-report-to-prison/index.html

 

https://www.mediamatters.org/project-2025/heritage-foundation-president-celebrates-supreme-court-immunity-decision-we-are

 

https://newrepublic.com/article/179776/heritage-foundation-viktor-orban-trump

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html

 

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/

 

https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/30/make-europe-great-again-hungary-sets-scene-eu-presidency

 

https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-fidesz-form-new-far-right-alliance-austria-czech-republic/

 

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-orban-visit-kyiv-ukraine-peace-putin-zelenskiy/33022024.html

 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/02/europe/viktor-orban-visits-kyiv-intl/index.html

 

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/02/nato-second-trump-term-00164517

Don't Get Your Panties In A Bunch

Holy cow. 

Biden had a bad day. So what?

He's a genius; it helps that he agrees with me!

Look at all the things he has done and is doing on our behalf.

Sometimes we geezers need a break. Don't put us out there unless we are good. 

It ain't rocket science.............

SCOTUS Commits Treason Most Vile

The Supreme Court of the United States has stolen the rule of law from our country by giving the President immunity from criminal prosecution. We can no longer say that 'no man is above the law.'

Now we live in a tyranny. You should be afraid for your liberty, life and property. I am afraid.

Read Justice Soto Mayor's dissent to its grant of immunity to the Office of President: 

Her dissent, lightly edited by msmagazine.com 

   Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.

    Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President … The Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.

    The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power. … That is the backdrop against which this case comes to the Court.

    The Court now confronts a question it has never had to answer in the Nation’s history: Whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution. The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law. …

    Argument by argument, the majority invents immunity through brute force. Under scrutiny, its arguments crumble. … No matter how you look at it, the majority’s official-acts immunity is utterly indefensible.

    Historical evidence reinforces that, from the very beginning, the presumption in this Nation has always been that no man is free to flout the criminal law. The majority fails to recognize or grapple with the lack of historical evidence for its new immunity. With nothing on its side of the ledger, the most the majority can do is claim that the historical evidence is a wash.

    The majority today endorses an expansive vision of Presidential immunity that was never recognized by the Founders, any sitting President, the Executive Branch, or even President Trump’s lawyers, until now. Settled understandings of the Constitution are of little use to the majority in this case, and so it ignores them.

    Today’s Court … has replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts.

    The majority’s dividing line between “official” and “unofficial” conduct narrows the conduct considered “unofficial” almost to a nullity. … Under that rule, any use of official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt purpose indicated by objective evidence of the most corrupt motives and intent, remains official and immune. Under the majority’s test, if it can be called a test, the category of Presidential action that can be deemed “unofficial” is destined to be vanishingly small.

    I am deeply troubled by the idea, inherent in the majority’s opinion, that our Nation loses something valuable when the President is forced to operate within the confines of federal criminal law.

    The public interest in the federal criminal prosecution of a former President alleged to have used the powers of his office to commit crimes may be greater still. “[T]he President … represent[s] all the voters in the Nation,” and his powers are given by the people under our Constitution. …

    When Presidents use the powers of their office for personal gain or as part of a criminal scheme, every person in the country has an interest in that criminal prosecution. The majority overlooks that paramount interest entirely. … Yet the majority believes that a President’s anxiety over prosecution overrides the public’s interest in accountability and negates the interests of the other branches in carrying out their constitutionally assigned functions.

    If the former President cannot be held criminally liable for his official acts, those acts should still be admissible to prove knowledge or intent in criminal prosecutions of unofficial acts. … Imagine a President states in an official speech that he intends to stop a political rival from passing legislation that he opposes, no matter what it takes to do so (official act). He then hires a private hitman to murder that political rival (unofficial act). Under the majority’s rule, the murder indictment could include no allegation of the President’s public admission of premeditated intent to support the mens rea of murder. That is a strange result, to say the least.

    Today’s decision to grant former Presidents immunity for their official acts is

 deeply wrong. … In the hands of the majority, this new official-acts immunity operates as a one-way ratchet.

    The long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.

    The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.

    Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.

    Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.

    Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

    Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

    Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

    Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

https://msmagazine.com/2024/07/01/sonia-sotomayor-dissent-trump-immunity/