Tuesday, May 17, 2022

For the Record: Grindelwald on "Mainstream Democrats"



I didn't spend much time on the East Side during my ten years in Buffalo, to my shame, if you like, and certainly to my loss, as is proven by the one occasion I remember—a visit to a jazz club somewhere near Jefferson Avenue to hear a couple of sets by the McCoy Tyner Quartet, which was transcendentally good, maybe 1978. 

I won't say I was like Bill O'Reilly being astonished to learn that they had cloth napkins in Sylvia's in Harlem, because I wasn't, but I wish I would have thought about going there more often.

Justifying political violence, alongside anti-democratic manipulation and political bribery

The Court’s decision in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a boon to wealthy candidates. It strikes down an anti-bribery law that limited the amount of money candidates could raise after an election in order to repay loans they made to their own campaign.

Federal law permits candidates to loan money to their campaigns. In 2001, however, Congress prohibited campaigns from repaying more than $250,000 of these loans using funds raised after the election. They can repay as much as they want from campaign donations received before the election (although a federal regulation required them to do so “within 20 days of the election”).

The idea is that, if already-elected officials can solicit donations to repay what is effectively their own personal debt, lobbyists and others seeking to influence lawmakers can put money directly into the elected official’s pocket — and campaign donations that personally enrich a lawmaker are particularly likely to lead to corrupt bargains. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) manufactured a case to try to overturn that $250,000 limit, and now, the Court has sided with him.

—is a thing Republicans openly advocate. That guy Hodgkinson may have identified as a Democrat, but the thing he did wasn't inspired by anything he heard on Democracy Now! or the Daily Show. But he could have gotten it from Republicans over a pretty mainstream range, as in these threats from 2019:

Last month, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke proposed a modest solution to the relentless tide of mass shootings: a mandatory buyback program for every AR-15 in the country. The View co-host Meghan McCain responded with a dire warning. “The AR-15 is by far the most popular gun in America, by far,” she told her fellow panelists. “I was just in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, if you’re talking about taking people’s guns from them, there’s going to be a lot of violence.”

Tucker Carlson echoed McCain’s blood-soaked sentiment on his Tuesday night broadcast. “So, this is—what you are calling for is civil war,” he said. “What you are calling for is an incitement to violence. It’s something I wouldn’t want to live here when that happened, would you? I’m serious.”

As Glenn knows full well.



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