The November 2024 presidential election is the most important
election of our lives, simply due to the fact that if Trump wins, our democracy
will no longer exist, and will be replaced by a dictatorship.
There are two reasons for this:
2)
The second reason is Project 2025, a Heritage
Foundation project that spells out what they would like to achieve if Trump was
elected.
“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.
The paragraphs below explain the title of this article:
For about a about a year, there were three Joes at the Nissan
dealership where I worked.
The sales sale manager was a guy named Joe Canda, who I had
worked with when both of us sold life insurance for MetLife.
The assistant manager was a former Marine named Joe Kilian,
and I published one of his stories in 2009:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/05/another-cup-of-joe.html
He also was the inspiration for a story that I published in
April of 2009:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/04/schatzki-schlotzsky-they-all-sound-same.html
The reason that I brought up these guys is because ANOTHER guy
named Joe is very much in the news lately, and his name is Joe Biden.
On June 28, I published an article that explains why he should
remain the Democratic candidate.
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2024/06/galloping-right-along.html
Sadly, there is not universal agreement about whether Biden should run again. In other words, should we be committed to “another cup of Joe?”
Here are some facts to consider:
*********************************************
President Biden called into his
campaign’s all-staff meeting today and unequivocally declared that he was “in
this race to the end.” His press secretary also told reporters that Biden was
“absolutely not” considering withdrawal.
But Biden has privately confided to key allies that he knows he may not be able
to salvage his campaign if he cannot convince the public in the coming days
that he is up for the job after his disastrous debate performance. A new Times poll showed that the president’s support slipped in the
days after the debate.
Nationally, Donald Trump now leads
Biden 49 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, a three-point swing for
Trump from just a week ago. The poll also found that 74 percent of
voters now view Biden as too old for the presidency.
Tonight, Biden is scheduled to meet at
the White House with more than 20 Democratic governors in an effort to reassure
them that he can still win in November. In the coming days, the president is
looking to prove his acuity by sitting down for an interview on Friday with ABC
News and holding campaign events in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The president knows the appearances must go well. “He knows if he has two more events like that, we’re in a different place” by the end of the weekend, one of the allies said, referring to Biden’s showing in the debate. Democrats, meanwhile, are weighing the potential risks and rewards of a new candidate.
Biden told allies that he
was weighing his options
.Tonight, Biden is scheduled to meet at the White House with more than 20 Democratic governors in an effort to reassure them that he can still win in November. In the coming days, the president is looking to prove his acuity by sitting down for an interview on Friday with ABC News and holding campaign events in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The president knows the appearances
must go well. “He knows if he has two more events like that, we’re in a
different place” by the end of the weekend, one of the allies said, referring
to Biden’s showing in the debate. Democrats, meanwhile, are weighing the potential risks and rewards of a new candidate.
A former member of President Biden’s transition team who
helped craft the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, argued Wednesday that a replacement
Democratic presidential ticket must be
composed solely of politicians from swing states.
Ezekial Manuel l,
66, who served on Biden’s
COVID-19 task force before the president assumed office, explained on
X that “the ONLY justification” for replacing the 81-year-old incumbent would
be to put together a ticket that can “get to 270 electoral votes.”
The good doctor’s
suggestions for potential candidates to run in Biden’s stead were not named,
but their identities were obvious to seasoned politics watchers.
“As a scientist, I look at data. As an Emanuel, I know that
elections are about winning,” wrote Emanuel,
whose younger brother Rahm served as Obama’s White House chief of staff before
being elected twice as mayor of Chicago and then becoming Biden’s ambassador to
Japan.
“[T]he election comes down to six swing
states, of which four have blue governors that have proven they can win in a
purple electorate,” the doctor added. “One has a popular astronaut who is a
Senator.”
Emanuel’s criteria suggests that two of
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Wisconsin Gov.
Tony Evers, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) should
appear on the ballot should Biden drop out of the race or be otherwise denied
the Democratic nomination.
Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin are most often considered the states that hold the key to the 2024
election, and Georgia and Nevada have Republican governors (Brian Kemp and Joe
Lombardo, respectively).
Kelly, a former NASA space shuttle pilot, flew on four
missions during his career as an astronaut before entering politics.
Emanuel dismissed the idea of
including California
Gov. Gavin Newsom or New
Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on the ticket because their states do not appear
to be in danger of going for former President Donald Trump.
“We don’t need candidates from deep
blues [sic] states – like California or New Jersey,” he argued. “We need a
ticket that can win in swing states.”
“It’s the only choice.”
By Emanuel’s logic, Vice
President Kamala Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney and US
senator from California, should also be excluded as an option to replace
Biden.
Surveys by the New York Times and Wall
Street Journal released Wednesday found Biden trailing Trump by six points
among likely and registered voters, respectively.
My Pick would be Josh Shaprio and Gretchen Whiten
Shapiro was reelected in 2020, defeating Republican nominee Heather Heidelbaugh with 50.9% of the vote. He received 3,461,472 votes, the most of any candidate in Pennsylvania history, and outran Joe Biden in the concurrent presidential election.
Other people feel that Kamala Harris should be the head of the
ticket:
https://nypost.com/2024/07/03/us-news/president-kamala-harris-is-future-of-the-democratic-party-white-house/?utm_medium=browser_notifications&utm_source=pushly&utm_content=Politics,News&utm_campaign=4993046
Evan among Democrats, there are some that feel that Biden should
bow out:
Tucson Democratic Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva called
Wednesday for President Joe Biden to leave the presidential race.
“If he’s the candidate, I’m going to support him, but I
think that this is an opportunity to look elsewhere,” Grijalva told the New York Times in an interview.
Referring to the president, he added: “What he needs to
do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat — and part of that
responsibility is to get out of this race.”
Grijalva became the second sitting Democrat in Congress
to make that call, following Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas who did so on Tuesday.
Biden “failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s
many lies” during last week’s debate, Doggett said.
With
President Biden under pressure to drop his bid for a second term, his party has
been thrust into uncharted territory, struggling with a long list of risks and
rewards as it faces the prospect of replacing Mr. Biden less than two months
before the party convention.
No
presumptive nominee has withdrawn this late in the process. But no party has
faced the challenge the Democrats face today: a nominee dogged by doubts about
his mental acuity; his ability to beat his rival, former President Donald J.
Trump; and his fitness to serve another four years as president.
All of
this has left Democrats struggling with critical questions: Is it easier to
defeat Mr. Trump with or without Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket? Is it
riskier to go with a new candidate or stick with a president who appears headed
for defeat?
On
Wednesday, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that Mr. Trump’s lead over
Mr. Biden among likely voters had grown to six percentage points after the
president’s halting debate performance last week.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/03/us/elections/biden-withdrawal-democrats.html
At this point, Biden still has the support of most of the
Democratic governors:
In the days since last week’s presidential debate,
President Biden’s team has said little that adequately explains why his
performance was historically bad, beyond that he had a cold. What we mostly
heard instead was the closing of ranks around a beleaguered and wounded
candidate.
It was just a “bad debate” they said, and we all have bad
days, right? The public will come around to recognizing that he’s still the
best candidate to defeat the would-be autocrat and convicted felon running
against him. If they don’t, it will be the
media’s fault.
And when those pleas for party-line loyalty weren’t
sufficient, they have argued process: Replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee
would be a risky and complicated process, they warn, one that might unleash
intraparty warfare that will only strengthen the dark forces of MAGA.
Maybe. But in the view of this board, and a
growing number of other editorial
pages and Democratic
officials, the greater risk lies in
allowing Biden to continue as the party’s standard-bearer. Serious questions
are now in play about his ability to complete the arduous work of being leader
of the free world. Can he negotiate with a hostile Republican Congress,
dangerous foreign powers, or even fractious rivals within his own Cabinet? The
nation’s confidence has been shaken.
And can he convince the American electorate of his fitness
to lead? If not, all other questions become moot. So consider the polls: The
president was trailing in most of them before that disastrous debate, and now
the chances that he can win over wavering independent voters, much less hold
onto loyal ones, are rapidly fading.
A CNN poll this week found that 3 out of 4 voters surveyed said another Democratic Party
candidate — apparently any other candidate — would do better than Biden. (To be
clear, polls show that many voters would like to see Trump replaced as well.) Similarly,
a new poll shows that Biden has fallen behind in the swing state of New
Hampshire, where he won by a comfortable 7 points in 2020 but is now struggling
to hold the support of even very liberal voters. Meanwhile, fresh reports
of his recent mental lapses arrive by the day.
The Editorial board of the Boston Globe feels that Biden
should step aside.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/07/03/opinion/why-biden-should-step-aside/
Replacing Biden with Harris may not be the solution because
polls show she would lost to Trump by 2 points.
https://elections2024.thehill.com/national/harris-trump-general/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/poll-debate-biden-trump.html
Alarmingly, when Biden met with the governors, he told them that
he needed more sleep, and to avoid scheduling events after 8 p.m. Although he is probably right, his opinion does not convey a message of strength.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/04/biden-independence-day-message-trump-values/
Even people that voted for Biden in 2020 are concerned.
These Voters Supported Biden in
2020. Now They Want a Plan B.
Dozens of
voters in four swing states expressed fear, frustration and anger. And they
want a new option — whatever (and whoever) that is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/us/elections/democratic-voter-biden-debate.html
Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos may help – and it
may not.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/business/media/biden-abc-interview-george-stephanopoulos.html
Regardless of who the nominee is, though, he/she will need our full support, because another Trump term would be a DISASTER.
It’s likely that Trump will officially become the Republican nominee in Milwaukee in July, but the judge’s opinion about the hush money case on September 18 may change things also.
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