The GOP's new family values takes 'creepy' to a whole new level

— Is Trump Helping Putin Defeat Ukraine? ‘Lil Marco Rubio announced yesterday that the Trump administration is on the verge of simply handing Ukraine over to Russia, if Putin won’t go along with the so-called peace deal Trump has offered. Zelenskyy has agreed to it, even though the price is huge (no NATO, Russia keeps the land they have, no security guarantees from the US at all, possible mineral/oil deals), but Putin clearly doesn’t intend to stop until he’s subjugated the entire nation, setting up his next drive into Poland and the Baltic states. To make things even worse, Zelenskyy has been virtually begging the US to sell him Patriot anti-air missiles, as they’re about the only system available in the world that can stop Russian hypersonic glide missiles.

Phillips Obrien has a great summary of the situation over at his Substack newsletter.

Zelenskyy came over here with at least $30 billion out of the $50 billion European countries have given him as grants and loans for that bizarre Oval Office meeting, but Trump and Vance, beside behaving like schoolyard bullies, are simply refusing to sell him the systems. Even though that will be a $30 billion stimulus to the US economy, would help out GOP-donor defense companies, and would help defend a democratic ally who was promised security by the US in the Budapest Memorandum back in 1994 in exchange for giving up their nukes. It appears that Trump is totally, nakedly, openly dancing to Putin’s tune here.

Will Europe be able to fill in the gap left by Trump’s abandonment of our ally? And if Putin pushes harder or even tries to take part of Poland or Estonia, will Trump sabotage the Article 5 guarantee of NATO on Putin’s behalf? It’s looking like all of these are viable scenarios, and don’t bode well for world peace or the future of democracy in Europe or America. Trump is either the most stupid president we’ve ever had or he is, in fact, the oft-predicted Manchurian Candidate, eager to destroy America and hand our people and resources over to the world’s dictators.

— Our government used to keep track of lies and disinformation coming from Russia. Marco Rubio just shut that agency down. Most Russian and Chinese propaganda designed to get Americans hating each other or destroy our country from within first appears on rightwing websites and social media sites. They’ve been so successful at it that when YouGov polled Americans they found that roughly a third of us believe at least ten outright lies Russia has promoted via our media including things like “Ukraine President Zelensky's approval rating is down to 4%” and “Ukraine sold Hamas weapons that were donated to Ukraine by the United States.”

Our federal government set up an agency within the State Department, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (CFIMIH), which has been regularly documenting these thousands of daily efforts to damage America, but Trump and his buddies are outraged that the CFIMIH keeps pointing out lies, deepfakes, and outright propaganda appearing on rightwing media, websites, and Xitter. So, ‘Lil Marco deleted the agency this week. As The New York Times reported yesterday:

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his aides shut down a State Department office on Wednesday that tracks and counters global disinformation from foreign actors, including the governments of China, Russia and Iran, U.S. officials said. …
“The office had been tracking disinformation campaigns by rival powers of the United States, as well as terrorist groups, and publishing reports on them. Some Republican lawmakers in recent years have accused federal employees and nongovernment experts working on tracking disinformation of trying to stifle the views of right-wing political groups around the world and trying to coordinate with social media companies to do so. Russian disinformation often circulates in far-right online channels.”

So, here we are. Both the GOP, the rightwing media ecosystem, and the Trump administration are all just fine with Russian efforts to influence our elections, foment hatred, and cause the collapse of America’s soft power around the world. Apparently, they all hate democracy as much as Putin does, and are committed to ending the rule of law — and any semblance of honest dialogue and debate — in our nation. In any other time and circumstance, the news media would be calling this out for what it is: treason.

— Can Trump really fire Fed chair Jerome Powell as he claimed yesterday? In fact, the law and Supreme Court precedent say he can’t but his lawyers are hard at work trying to overturn that. Back in 1935, President Roosevelt tried to fire the head of the FTC, but was blocked when the Supreme Court, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor, said he lacked the power to do it. That precedent applies to the Fed, as well as other agencies like the Labor Department, where Trump just illegally fired a few Democrats from the NLRB. The case was accepted this week by SCOTUS and, if they rule to overturn their own precedent (as both Thomas and Gorsuch have already publicly called for) Jerome Powell’s job could vanish the next day.

Which, of course, could provoke a massive international crisis of confidence in the US financial system, further crashing markets, the dollar, and perhaps even beginning the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If that happens, hang onto everything you have as all bets are off; it’ll be the beginning of a major impoverishment of the United States at all levels and in dozens of different ways.

— Idaho Republicans gave families $50M for private schools — and scrapped $30M used for public education..say what?!? One eternal truth about the GOP going all the way back to the late 19th century (with the exception of the Teddy Roosevelt presidency) is that they hate public education. David Koch ran for VP in 1980 on a platform calling for not just the end of the Department of Education but also shutting down all the public schools in America and ending compulsory schooling altogether; his ideas have now become doctrine for the Trump administration.

So it should surprise nobody that the Republican-controlled Idaho legislature just coughed up $50 million to give $5000 a year to families wealthy enough to already be sending their kids to private schools (which invariably cost more than $5K) while partially paying for it by cutting $30 million out of public schools. The subsidies will be enough for 6,000 upper middle class and wealthy families to benefit, but means cutting support to 24,000 public school students.

As we learned from our experience with the GI Bill after WWII, the most productive investment a nation can make is in educating its young people; for every $1 we spent sending young returning soldiers to college, America got back $7 in lifetime tax revenue over and above what we would have gotten had they not had that college education. The numbers for primary school are even starker. But don’t try telling that to the GOP: There are campaign contributions to be collected from the for-profit private school industry!

— JD Vance says if Brits can’t use the N-word and slurs against gays in public venues, they can’t cut a trade deal with America. Seriously. The United Kingdom has the same sorts of hate speech laws that are extant in most of the rest of Europe and the developed world, and that’s really pissing off the straight white male supremacists who run the Trump administration. Echoing classic arguments made by the Klan over the years, Vance is referring to straight white European Christian men as the carriers of “western civilization” and, if they’re not allowed to publicly intimidate, harass, and hate on non-white, non-Christian, queer people and women he wants to withhold favorable trade terms.

As he recently said in a speech in Germany, “The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” From the 19th century KKK to today’s GOP, hate is a core “fundamental value.” Disgusting.

— Did your miscarriage tissue have a dignified funeral at a state approved facility? If not, get ready for jail if Republicans have their way. Remember last month when a young Georgia woman was arrested for disposing of a miscarriage in the trash behind her apartment? She was let out of jail and charges were dropped after a few days of outrage in the media, but this scenario may soon become far more common in Red state America. One in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage, and often they’re so early they just resemble a very hard menstrual period.

Nonetheless, Republican legislators in Nebraska are the first in the nation to demand that women give the tissue expelled in those miscarriages a $9,000 funeral, complete with coffins and burials; if they flush or otherwise dispose of the tissue they risk prison. Democratic State Senator Megan Hunt asked the bill’s sponsor “how much blood has to be on the pad?” before the law would kick in, but never got an answer; apparently the answer is, “Any amount.” If this passes and is implemented in Nebraska, expect it to come to a Red state near you next. The GOP’s war on women rolls along…

— Crazy Alert! The GOP has adopted new family values: you can now DM offering to inseminate women you don’t know! Has Elon sent you a DM on Xitter offering to inseminate you? If so, as Wonkette notes, you’d apparently be one of many. In what must qualify as one of the creepiest articles ever published by The Wall Street Journal, they chronicled his obsession with producing as many offspring as possible to, apparently, improve the gene pool of humanity. As the Journal’s piece notes about Musk’s interactions with social influencer Tiffany Fong:

“Musk’s interactions ramped up as Fong posted more political content in support of Trump, and Musk followed her last summer.
“That sort of attention from Musk on X, where he has 219 million followers, sent droves of followers to Fong, which was a financial boon. More engagement meant more earnings for her as part of a revenue-sharing program for creators on X.
“During the height of her interactions with the billionaire owner, Fong earned $21,000 on the platform in a two-week period in November, according to a screenshot she posted.
“That was about when Musk sent her a direct message asking if she was interested in having his child, according to people familiar with the matter. The two had never met in person.

This takes adjectives like “bizarre” and “creepy” to a whole new level…

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