Both Sides: Why we don't fuck with the GOP

donwuan

The Legend
BGOL Investor
I love the idea that the country is morally and functionally falling apart, and that he believes that this approach is a proper solution to the situation and not demonstrative of the actual problem.

He should know there's limits on campaign contributions. You can't give anyone a million much less 10 billion legally.

 

carsun1000

Rising Star
BGOL Patreon Investor
Dinesh Dsouza was asking Elon Musk to bankroll Trump with 10 Billion and call it something else for tax purposes (a violation), now Mike Johnson is asking the Supreme Court to take a look at this case knowing fully well that the justices are MAGA friendly. I wouldn't hold my breath on the future of this country. The best thing you can do is continue to make your bread and put food on your families table. If those two actions are considered, the USA is for sale and not to the lower or middle class folks.

 

donwuan

The Legend
BGOL Investor


Becoming an adviser to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Musk has discussed advising Trump should he win the 2024 election, the Journal reported, citing unnamed sources. Musk called Trump directly via cellphone to explore a role that could potentially give Musk significant influence over US policies. It’s not clear based on the Journal’s reporting which party initiated conversations about the potential role.

The Trump campaign did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment; Musk also did not respond to the Wall Street Journal, but Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign spokesperson, told the outlet: “President Trump will be the only voice of what role an individual plays in his presidency.”

Musk pushed back on the Journal report in a post on X Thursday, saying: “There have not been any discussions of a role for me in a potential Trump Presidency.”

However, a potential role in a future Trump administration could expand upon the role that Musk played in the previous Trump administration, when he served on two business advisory councils before quitting them over Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
 

Dr. Truth

QUACK!
BGOL Investor
Dinesh Dsouza was asking Elon Musk to bankroll Trump with 10 Billion and call it something else for tax purposes (a violation), now Mike Johnson is asking the Supreme Court to take a look at this case knowing fully well that the justices are MAGA friendly. I wouldn't hold my breath on the future of this country. The best thing you can do is continue to make your bread and put food on your families table. If those two actions are considered, the USA is for sale and not to the lower or middle class folks.


So Trump and the Supreme Court should have ultimate authority now? This is a state case and he broke the fucking law!!! In that case throw out every case ever tried by SDNY then . Every one going back 200 years. Fuck them
 

blackpepper

Rising Star
BGOL Investor


Becoming an adviser to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Musk has discussed advising Trump should he win the 2024 election, the Journal reported, citing unnamed sources. Musk called Trump directly via cellphone to explore a role that could potentially give Musk significant influence over US policies. It’s not clear based on the Journal’s reporting which party initiated conversations about the potential role.

The Trump campaign did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment; Musk also did not respond to the Wall Street Journal, but Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign spokesperson, told the outlet: “President Trump will be the only voice of what role an individual plays in his presidency.”

Musk pushed back on the Journal report in a post on X Thursday, saying: “There have not been any discussions of a role for me in a potential Trump Presidency.”

However, a potential role in a future Trump administration could expand upon the role that Musk played in the previous Trump administration, when he served on two business advisory councils before quitting them over Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.

This is interesting. It could be a really wild turn of events. Not sure elon is capable of such a huge finesse though, mostly cause I don't think their egos will fit under the same umbrella in real time for more than a few nano-seconds.
 

DC_Dude

Rising Star
BGOL Investor



Today, President Biden put forward a clear, realistic and just plan to establish an immediate ceasefire and end the war in Gaza - a plan that ensures Israel’s security, returns hostages taken on October 7th to their families, increases aid into Gaza and relieves the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and engages Israelis, Palestinians, Arab countries and the broader international community in the process of rebuilding Gaza.

A ceasefire alone won’t ease the terrible pain of Israelis whose loved ones were butchered or abducted by Hamas, or the Palestinians whose families have been shattered by the subsequent war. It won’t resolve the longstanding conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, or answer contentious issues surrounding a two-state solution or continuing settler activity in the West Bank. But what it can do is put a stop to the ongoing bloodshed, help families reunite and allow a surge of humanitarian aid to help desperate, hungry people. It can save lives, here and now - and it can lay the foundation for what will be a long and difficult road to a future in which Israel is secure and at peace with its neighbors, and Palestinians finally have the security, freedom and self-determination that they have sought for so long.

As the tragedy in Gaza has unfolded over the past eight months, we’ve witnessed an often fierce public debate here at home - and around the world - regarding how the United States should respond. But no matter where each of us stand in these broader debates, an enduring ceasefire is something we should all support - for the sake of Israelis, Palestinians and the world at large. I am deeply encouraged by the steady, tireless efforts of President Biden, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and our diplomatic team to bring this awful war to an end.
 

DC_Dude

Rising Star
BGOL Investor


POLITICS & POLICY

‘Project 2025’ and the Movement That Could Erode Black Equality​

Spearheaded by a right-wing think tank, the agenda would roll back policies that have aided Black economic and social gains.
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By Brandon TensleyApril 25, 2024
Hundreds of people gather for a rally to voice their concerns about immigration and border security in Quemado, Texas.
Project 2025, a transition plan spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, includes strategies to roll back civil rights polices should Donald Trump recapture the White House for the Republican Party. (Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

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You could say that President Donald Trump over the past year has been on a revenge tour. Just recall the militant language that he’s used to rile up his followers: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he declared at one gathering.
But only more recently have Americans gotten a concrete sense of what, precisely, that “retribution” might look like if Trump enters the White House in 2025.
Reporting from Axios this month revealed that one of the main goals of a second Trump administration would be to redirect the federal government’s focus to what the former president and his supplicants believe is the actual problem afflicting our country: “anti-white racism.” In particular, they would erode 1960s-era policies that have nourished economic opportunities for Black Americans, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that have flowered since the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
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Demonstrators protest the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action on Harvard University Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July 2023. (Ziyu Julian Zhu/Xinhua via Getty Images)
This assault on civil rights is one plank of Project 2025, a transition plan spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation — a right-wing think tank — for the next Republican president. Trump hasn’t officially co-signed, but many of his associates are authors.
The policy agenda is expansive, detailing how to use the federal apparatus to repeal gains made in a variety of arenas, from education and infrastructure to health care and LGBTQ issues.
These rollbacks would, to no one’s surprise, disproportionately harm Black Americans. This political vision only reaffirms how invested the conservative movement is in “normalizing white supremacy” and “standing close to people who espouse some of the worst rhetoric about Black people and race,” Marcia Chatelain, a professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told Capital B.
To understand more about what Project 2025 could mean for Black communities, read our breakdown.

What are the key elements of Project 2025?​

Education: Project 2025 advocates for rolling back the Biden administration’s more recent student debt relief efforts, which are rooted in the power that the Higher Education Act of 1965 grants to the U.S. Department of Education to “compromise, waive, or release loans.” The policy agenda claims that the administration is “acting outside of statutory authority.”
The administration has eliminated some $138 billion worth of student loan debt so far. This month, it announced new plans that would target the “disproportionate debt burden” faced by Black borrowers, who also would bear the brunt of any large-scale debt regulation reversal. To learn more about the impact of student loan debt on marginalized communities, check out a recent article from Capital B’s Aallyah Wright, Adam Mahoney, and Margo Snipe that illuminates how Black Americans are navigating an uncertain economy.
Health care: Project 2025 mentions that states should have the ability to impose work requirements on Medicaid, which helps to cover medical costs for low-income people. Several Republican-led states, including Idaho, Missouri, and South Dakota, are already making plans to restructure their Medicaid programs — just in case Trump wins in November.
Research shows that mandating work requirements only fuels racial inequality, given the discrimination against Black Americans that exists in the low-wage market. Compared with white Americans, Black Americans are about half as likely to be called back for an entry-level job, meaning that they’d be disproportionately burdened by work requirements. Plus, reforms to Medicaid and other social safety net programs have long been tied to stereotypes that portray Black Americans as lazy or scheming — recall the “welfare queen” trope of the 1970s.
Abortion: Project 2025 presses for decimating reproductive rights by excising the term “abortion” from all federal rules and regulations, denying federal funds to providers who offer reproductive care, and criminalizing the abortion pill through the Comstock Act — a 151-year-old law.
Black women are especially vulnerable in our hostile anti-abortion landscape. They receive about one-third of all abortions in the country, and are far more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related issues. Some Republican-led states also are targeting in vitro fertilization as part of their wider struggle to limit reproductive rights, tearing open a “Pandora’s Box for Black women,” who are plagued by infertility more than other groups, as one organizer previously told Capital B.
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Tamika Middleton, managing director of Women’s March, leads protesters during the “Bans Off Our Mifepristone” demonstration outside the U.S. Supreme Court in March. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Women’s March)
LGBTQ issues: Project 2025 seeks to ramp up the assault on LGBTQ rights and wipe out certain federal protections for queer Americans. This entails, as the policy agenda puts it, ending the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ “foray into woke transgender activism” by scrubbing the acknowledgment of gender and sexual identity from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,” criminalizing classroom instruction on LGBTQ experiences, and eroding vital medical coverage for transgender Americans.
These moves would only further imperil LGBTQ Americans. Last June, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for the group. This was in response to the avalanche of anti-LGBTQ legislation being introduced in Republican-led statehouses, and came after HRC’s announcement in 2022 that transgender Americans — specifically Black transgender women, who suffer the most from anti-LGBTQ opposition — are facing an “epidemic of violence.”
Civil rights: As mentioned above, Project 2025 calls for shifting the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice to quashing the supposed menace of “anti-white racism” by abolishing affirmative action policies. The policy agenda also calls for the next Republican administration to use the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to “prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” with affirmative action or DEI policies. And it demands that “voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction” be investigated by the DOJ’s Criminal Division instead of by its Civil Rights Division.
It’s hard to overstate just how damaging further chipping away at affirmative action would be. As Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, previously told Capital B, “it was probably the most effective social engineering experiment in dealing with the pernicious legacy of slavery.” Without it, Black Americans would lose a policy approach that has brought them into the middle class. And the emphasis on voter fraud, even though there’s no widespread evidence of it, amounts to voter intimidation that history tells us disproportionately disadvantages Black communities.
Climate: Project 2025 champions the gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s wide-ranging law that would generate some 10 million climate-friendly jobs over the next 10 years. The policy agenda also advises eviscerating greenhouse gas regulations and clean energy programs.
The impact of these moves wouldn’t be felt evenly. Specifically, as Capital B’s Adam Mahoney has explained before, “low-income Black people are exposed to the most pollution from power plants and have the highest risk of death from such pollution.” He added that “nearly 80% of Black Americans live near a coal-fired power plant, compared with 56% of white people.”

What was Trump’s presidency like?​

The workings of time can make it easy to forget just how tumultuous the Trump years were, particularly for Black Americans. So, here’s a recap:
COVID-19: The Trump administration’s response to the pandemic had deadly consequences. It ignored the pandemic playbook that former President Barack Obama’s team left behind, misled the public about the severity of the disease, and eliminated roles that were designed to help the federal government confront the threat. The Trump administration’s inaction did nothing to address a pandemic that killed Black Americans at twice the rate of white Americans.
“Tough on crime”: Throughout his tenure, Trump embraced a “tough on crime” approach to leadership that mirrored the tack taken by former Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Their punitive political visions decimated Black communities and radically expanded the prison population in the 1970s and ’80s. Trump used the powers of the state to target and arrest Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020. One observer even characterized Trump’s potentially lethal show of force as “performative authoritarianism.”
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Protesters clash with police officers during a protest against police brutality near the Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, in December 2020. (John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Judges: Less eye-popping but most disturbing about Trump’s White House years was the historic number of judges the former president selected for the federal judiciary (and this is to say nothing of the three U.S. Supreme Court justices he nominated). This slate of conservative judges will shape our courts for years to come. In fact, we can already see their impact: It was a Trump-appointed judge who wrote the opinion in a recent case that denies individual citizens the ability to enforce their basic rights against discrimination under the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision will likely further widen the racial turnout gap that grew following the high court’s devastating 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.
Biden’s team has consistently denounced Project 2025, and reminded Black Americans of Trump’s abysmal track record when it comes to advancing racial equality.
“It’s not like Donald Trump has been hiding his racism,” Cedric Richmond, the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign co-chair, said in a statement. “[Trump] spent years discriminating against Black and Latino Americans as a landlord, he began his political career spreading the racist conspiracy that President Obama wasn’t born in this country, and he actively promoted white supremacy from the Oval Office.”
As the election continues to heat up, voters can expect Biden’s team to mention Project 2025 more and more on the campaign trail in order to paint a sobering picture of the uncertain future facing our multiracial democracy.
Or as Richmond, who represented Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional District from 2011 to 2021, put it in the statement: “Trump couldn’t care less about Black and brown communities — he never has. Now he’s making it clear that if he wins in November, he’ll turn his racist record into official government policy.”
 
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