Spain, like many other nations globally, needs workers, and it will be able to choose migrants who have skills needed in the country, AP says.
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“America never would have gotten into this mess if it weren’t for me and my friends,” says former Republican National Committee spokesman, campaign aide and opposition researcher Tim Miller in the introduction to his book "Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell."
"'Why We Did It' is a book about the people who submitted to every whim of a comically unfit and detestable man who crapped all over them and took over the party they had given their life to,” says Miller. "It’s about the army of consultants, politicians, and media figures who stood back and stood by as everything they ever fought for was degraded and devalued. The people who privately admitted they recognized all the risks but still climbed aboard for a ride on the SS Trump Hellship that they knew would assuredly sink.”
Miller is a millennial who started working in GOP politics when he was 16. His publisher, HarperCollins, describes his writing style as “darkly satirical."
Miller has left the GOP and now is a political analyst for MSNBC and a writer at The Bulwark (founded in 2018 by Bill Kristol and others to focus on political analysis and reporting "without partisan loyalties or tribal prejudices,” according to its website).
Miller’s book is a mea culpa and a dispatch from the inside. “As a gay man who contorted himself into defending homophobes and a Trump abhorrer who didn’t hesitate when asked to spin for a Trump lover, I am more than capable of inhabiting the mind of the enabler,” he says.
Themes of the book:
“How many of the players in the upper echelons of American political life treated their duties as a big game, where they awarded themselves the status of public service while minimizing the responsibilities of that service in favor of performance and skulduggery.”
“How the Republican ruling class dismissed the plight of those we were manipulating, growing increasingly comfortable using tactics that inflamed them, turning them against their fellow man. How often we advanced arguments that none of us believed. How we made people feel aggrieved about issues we had no intent or ability to solve.
"How we spurred racial resentments and bigotry among voters while prickling at anyone who might accuse us of racism. And how these tactics became not just unchecked but supercharged by a right-wing media ecosystem that we were in bed with and that had its own nefarious incentives, sucking in clicks and views through rage hustling without any intention of delivering something that might bring value to ordinary people’s lives."
Miller’s categories of the men and women who “succumbed to the MAGA wiles”:
Messiahs — "High-level staff who took it upon themselves to protect the country from disaster,” such as National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis
Junior Messiahs — Lower-level staff who “told themselves they were patriots, sacrificing on behalf of the American people, who deserved dedicated public servants like them”
Demonizers — "For some this was a dogmatic response to any signs of Democratic hostility to people of faith or the free market (or both, for those with the in-home Milton Friedman shrine). For others, it was cultural, a rejection of the liberal pieties that ground their gears, a discomfort with how fast the script around gender and race was changing. For still others it seemed more personal, emanating from a bitterness over the snooty know-it-allism of the liberals in their life.”
LOL Nothing Matters Republicans — “a comforting ethos if you are professionally obligated to defend the indefensible day in and day out.”
Tribalist Trolls — “Whatever is good for their side is good. And whatever is bad for the other side is good.”
Strivers — The old-fashioned blind ambition
Little Mixes — Craving the proximity to power, the ability to tell your friends back home that you were “in the room where it happened.”
Peter Principle Disprovers — “The Peter principle is the business management concept that people in a hierarchy rise to their maximum level of incompetence. … These hacks and maroons would have been nowhere near the Oval Office in any other administration.”
Nerd Revengers — "Sociable wannabes who aspired to sit at the cool kids’ table in high school but were too awkward or unlikable to get the invite."
The Inert Team Players — “… who lacked the imagination to conjure what else they could do with their lives. Company men and women [who] couldn’t fathom another option besides taking the next step up the political ladder."
The Compartmentalizers — “The inerts’ more anxiety ridden peers. … They would tuck bad Trump thoughts in a box in the corner of their brain somewhere and go on with their duties, clocking in and clocking out as required.”
Cartel Cashers — “The most common and obvious motivator for this or any ethically dubious endeavor: money."
Finally, the quote at the beginning of the book:
“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has seen himself free — for higher dreams, for higher privileges.” — James Baldwin, “Faulkner and Desegregation”
Here is the video of Miller’s talk about the book on June 30 at Washington’s Politics and Prose bookstore.
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That’s the bottom line of the cover story of The Atlantic magazine’s January/February 2022 special issue, which is focused on “American democracy in crisis.”
Online, the article, by Pulitizer Prize-winning reporter Barton Gellman, is titled "Trump's next coup has already begun."
In nearly 14,000 words, the article examines the current GOP trends. Here are the main points:
— Ballots cast by American voters may not decide the presidency in 2024. People already are working on that. And "who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today,” Gellman says.
— "For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft,” Gellman says.
"Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election.
"They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.”
— "By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response,” Gellman says.
"Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. … His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.”
— A main concern of Trump supporters is the “Great Replacement” — that Africans Americans or Hispanics eventually will "have more rights than whites,” as one poll put it.
— Since Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans in at least 16 states have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature, Gellman says. Under the banner of election integrity, even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote.
— Trump’s legal team — of top-tier lawyers this time around, according to Gellman — is fine-tuning a constitutional argument to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court.
It "exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an 'independent state legislature' doctrine, which contends that statehouses have ‘plenary,' or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead," Gellman says.
— President Biden’s response to the threat to democracy so far comes down to “enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws, vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans stand athwart their own electoral schemes,” Gelllman says.
(And Gellman says in an NPR interview about his article: "grassroots organizers who are in support of democratic institutions could be doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.
"And news media, frankly, could be putting a lot more attention on this. … they are not [doing the] sort of sustained war-footing news coverage that says democracy is under threat.
"You're accustomed, as a mainstream journalist, to not taking sides in a political dispute and not being for or against any political party," Gellman says. "But what we're for as journalists is truth. And what we're for as journalists is democracy. We are unambiguously in favor of our democratic system and of allowing the people to choose their own leaders.
"And the conundrum is that right now we have a political party that is bowing to authoritarian forces, that is systematically lying about the political process, about the election process itself. And so we're not —I'm not trying to advance the interests of the Democratic Party in my reporting.
"But we have only one party right now that is small-D democratic. We have only one party that is prepared to lose a legitimate election and another one that's prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy. And so I am calling out the mainstream of the Republican Party for its lies and for its election subversion in a way that tonally is different from what I could have imagined writing 10 or 20 years ago.")
— "The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.”
— Gellman concludes his article: "Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.”
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Congress oversees current laws and makes new ones. If you don't like the way things are or the way things are headed, write to your two senators and your representative (they pay attention to the mail — no joke — they want to be re-elected, after all). To find out who they are and to track legislation of interest to you, click on GovTrack.us.
After bills passed by Congress are signed by the president and become law, the executive branch writes regulations to implement them. The public is given time to comment before the regulations are finalized. For an easy way to track regulations and comment on them, click on regulations.gov.
But do you get discouraged, thinking there's no way to compete with big-money lobbyists? Here's what former Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., says: "Money is important, but votes will beat money any day."