The seeds of fascism, like the climate emergency, were apparent decades ago. The leading scholars of fascism told us that unless American society halted its slide to ever greater levels of social inequality and returned democratic power to a betrayed populace, fascism would metastasize and consume the state. The ruling class, blinded by greed, a lust for power and willful ignorance, was as deaf to these warnings as they were to those of climate scientists.

could the GOP go the way of the Whig?

why didn't the last political party breakup lead to a three-party system? is there an inherent reason?

“The point I want to make again and again and again is that, relative to the last time CBO was projecting stable debt/GDP, spending is down, not up,” Kogan said in a tweet Friday night. “It’s lower revenue that’s 100% responsible for the change in debt projections. If you take away nothing else, leave with this point.”

Billionaire Charles Koch, who will turn 88 on November 1, is funneling his wealth into two secretive organizations that can continue his right-wing political advocacy for years. Koch structured more than $5 billion in donations to exploit a loophole to allow him to avoid paying capital gains or gift taxes. It's not surprising that Koch is familiar with the loophole — he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying to create it.

The report also noted that Biden had asked Congress in his fiscal 2022 budget request to cancel any “unobligated” funding, meaning money that hadn’t yet been contracted, for border barriers. “Cancellation of this funding can only be accomplished through a duly enacted law,” GAO said, adding that Biden can’t legally withhold the funding based only on his request.

“Nearly three years into a new administration, any further delay would pretty clearly be intentional disregard for following the appropriations statute as Congress drafted and the president signed,” Murphy said.

What’s the penalty if Biden violated the impoundment law? Murphy explained that GAO can sue to force compliance. “But the biggest consequence is political. Clearly and deliberately flaunting the will of Congress is generally not looked upon highly by Congress,” he said.

GAO said the Trump administration violated the act in withholding security assistance to Ukraine in 2019, a decision Democrats used in Trump’s first impeachment case.

As for Biden’s action on border wall spending, he said he still doesn’t think a wall is effective. Asked whether he thought a border wall “works,” Biden responded: “No.”

It was equally shocking to learn several days after Trump’s private conflab with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. that he had “shared secrets about Israel” with the two Russian officials.
Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

25% want to annex Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley in the West Bank even without US support
25% want it only with US backing
30% oppose it
The Trump plan also envisages negotiations leading to a Palestinian state under near-complete Israeli security control, creating what Palestinians leaders say would be an unviable country
Israeli cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi said on Army Radio on Wednesday that settlers need not worry “because there will never be” a Palestinian state. Israeli-Palestinian talks collapsed in 2014, part of a now-moribund peace process that began in the 1990s.
This week, Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz ordered the military to begin preparing for the consequences of annexation, which could stoke Palestinian unrest.

28% support the two-state solution
53% support a return to an armed intifada, 47% support waging peaceful resistance, and 26% support a one-state solution
52% believe that armed action is the best way to end occupation

“I’ll answer one question on the border wall: The border wall – the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money. They didn’t, they wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that,” Biden told reporters in the Oval Office.

Asked whether he believes the border wall works, Biden answered, “No.”

According to Björn Höcke, the AfD’s parliamentary group leader in Thuringia, “This EU must die so that the real Europe can live.” And a strong AfD will almost certainly risk moving the Parliament’s right-wing faction even further to the fringes, and disrupt politics in Brussels.

Instead of starting with a problem that both Democratic and Republican voters can agree exists and then incorporating his own conservative stance, he has immediately launched himself to the far-right. He has attacked education as being “too woke” and argued that teachers are indoctrinating children. But the idea that teachers are largely partisan actors is only shared by a tiny segment of Republican voters.

According to a recent Pew Research study, 44 percent of Republicans (and 42 percent of Democrats) believe that teachers’ influence in the classroom is just about right. Only 16 percent of Republicans think teachers’ influence in the classroom is oversized.

Trump Administration United States Department of Justice official wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “white supremacy and far-right extremism are among the greatest domestic-security threats facing the United States. Regrettably, over the past 25 years, law enforcement, at both the Federal and State levels, has been slow to respond. … Killings committed by individuals and groups associated with far-right extremist groups have risen significantly.”

Seventy-one percent of the 387 “extremist related fatalities in the United States” from 2008 to 2017 were committed by members of far-right and white-supremacist groups, according the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Islamic extremists were responsible for 26 percent.