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When the next Congress convenes in January 2019, there won't be a single Republican member who voted against the Iraq war, thanks to Rep. John "Jimmy" Duncan (R-Tenn.) announcing that he will not seek re-election.

Duncan's retirement is sad news that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. The reliably conservative Duncan has quietly pushed back against a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus that has kept America mired in apparently unwinnable wars for nearly 17 years.

Duncan isn't alone as an antiwar Republican voice in Congress. After a short-lived "freedom fries" crusade, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) became a passionate opponent of the Iraq war and similar interventions. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), meanwhile, are prominent libertarians who are as skeptical of war as they are of welfare.

But Duncan was one of just seven Republicans in either house of Congress who voted against the original authorization of the use of military force in Iraq, at a time when half the Democrats in the Senate (including Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden) were voting for war.

Four of those Republicans Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, Rep. Connie Morella of Maryland, and Rep. Amo Houghton of New York were among the most liberal remaining GOP lawmakers at the time of the vote in 2002. That left Duncan among three conservative Republicans, alongside Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and Rep. John Hostettler of Indiana, to vote against the war at a time when many argued that support for President George W. Bush's foreign policy was the very definition of conservatism.

The elder Paul later drew attention to an alternate libertarian-conservative take on foreign policy through his two Republican presidential bids in 2008 and 2012, spawning a small army of admirers and imitators who believe in constitutionally limited government and don't consider the Pentagon an honorary member of the private sector. But Duncan has largely remained an unsung hero.

Duncan is no pacifist. He followed most Republicans in voting for our first war in Iraq, Operation Desert Storm. And like every other Republican, he voted to retaliate against those who aided and harbored the murderers who attacked America on 9/11, though he hasn't been on board with the bipartisan commitment to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely.

So why did he vote against the Iraq war in 2002?

"I supported the first Gulf War because I went to all those briefings and heard Colin Powell and all of them say that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the entire Middle East," he told The American Conservative in 2005. "I saw his troops surrendering to CNN camera crews and I became convinced that the threat had been greatly exaggerated."

As George W. Bush famously said: "Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me you can't get fooled again."

Duncan wasn't fooled again. The second time Saddam Hussein was presented as an international menace who could only be dealt with through immediate military action, this time without committing an act of aggression first and with regime change as the explicit goal, he voted no.

Since then, Duncan has also opposed President Obama's "kinetic military action" in Libya, which like the Iraq war toppled a dictator but led to chaos afterward and ended up leaving Islamic radicals who threaten America and its allies with more power, not less. He has voted to withdraw from Afghanistan.

"There's nothing fiscally conservative about this war, and I think conservatives should be the people most horrified by this war," he said at the time. "We turned the Department of Defense into the department of foreign aid."

Duncan's views recently seemed to be ascendant in the Republican Party. In last year's primaries, voters rejected hawkish candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham in favor of Donald Trump, a man who criticized the Iraq war in conservative, military-heavy South Carolina in terms that nearly got Ron Paul tossed off the debate stage less than a decade before.

Trump has reiterated some of those criticisms as president, saying that the United States would be better off if Bush and Obama had gone to the beach during the time period when they were engaged in nation-building in the Middle East.

Yet there is a yawning gap between Trump's rhetoric and the reality of his administration. For Republican hawks, his presidency seems to be a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition. We remain at war in Afghanistan. We are still intervening, without much fanfare, in Yemen. We have bombed Syria. We might shoot first and ask questions later in North Korea.

Trump's more hawkish advisers seem to have the upper hand inside the White House. And if Trump goes down, neoconservatives are well positioned to reclaim their lost influence, having warned the GOP against the president's flaws early and often via the "Never Trump" movement.

"I'm pro-military," Duncan once told The American Conservative, "but you can't give any department or agency in the federal government a blank check."

That seems like a good philosophy for our times. So why does Jimmy Duncan look like a member of a dying breed?

Read the original:
The last of the antiwar Republicans - The Week Magazine

The upper chamber of Congress, where acreage gets more representation than actual voters.

Republicans love wide open, empty spaces. From the Oval Office to many Twitter precincts, they like to brandish maps of the 2016-presidential-election results by congressional district, or even by county, implicitly suggesting the bloody-red hues signify political dominance:

This is extremely misleading because Americans are not distributed equally by geography, of course, and acreage does not receive representation in our electoral system, right? Wrong: Theres the United States Senate.

Those who look at all the close presidential elections since 2000 and the roughly equivalent levels of party self-identification and assume the two parties have an equal shot at political power may be missing a subtle shift with profound implications: There are now far more red than blue states, and they have equal representation in the Senate.

As David Wasserman explains at FiveThirtyEight:

In the last few decades, Democrats have expanded their advantages in California and New York states with huge urban centers that combined to give Clinton a 6 million vote edge, more than twice her national margin. But those two states elect only 4 percent of the Senate. Meanwhile, Republicans have made huge advances in small rural states think Arkansas, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia that wield disproportionate power in the upper chamber compared to their populations

Republicans dont even need to win any swing states to win a Senate majority: 52 seats are in states where the 2016 presidential margin was at least 5 percentage points more Republican than the national outcome. By contrast, there are just 28 seats in states where the margin was at least 5 points more Democratic, and only 20 seats in swing states.

You can see this played out on the current and future Senate landscapes, where sometimes sharp partisan differences occur because only one third of the seats are up in any given cycle.

Democrats have a famously difficult landscape for 2018, defending 25 of 34 seats, with ten Democrats running in states carried by Donald Trump last year (only one GOP incumbent, Dean Heller of Nevada, is running in a state carried by Hillary Clinton).

It gets much better after 2018, right, but the red state/blue state factor limits Democratic opportunities for gains, even in theoretically favorable years.

In 2020, Republicans will be defending 22 Senate seats, with Democrats only defending 11 in 2020. But only two of those 2020 Republicans will be running in states carried by Clinton in 2016, and both of those were relatively close states (Colorado and Maine). In 2022, Republicans will again have to defend 22 seats. But not a single one is in a 2016 blue state.

Republicans having an advantage in the Senate carries no guarantees: At the moment, the Cook Political Report shows Democrats leading in all ten 2016 red states where they are defending Senate seats. If Democrats hold their own in the Senate next year, and particularly if they do well in the 2020 presidential contest, there is no reason they cannot gain control of the upper chamber in 2020 and hold it through 2022. But theyll be fighting a small-state bias built right into the system by the Constitution, which makes a mockery of the idea of equal representation.

As Tillerson meets with Duterte, the Pentagon mulls opening a new front in Americas war against the (so-called) Islamic State.

Hes just the latest in a growing trend of liberal-leaning politicians and political operatives taking up podcasting.

Nobody thought Judge Roy Moore had a chance to win a special Senate election in Alabama, until his main opponents began destroying each other.

The venture capitalist was an early passenger on the Trump Train, but it looks like hes steeling himself for a derailment.

McEnany once mocked Barack Obama for having a brother who lives in a hut in Kenya, and expressed support for the birther movement.

He announced a boost on high-end income-tax rates to fund public-transit fixes and reduced-fare MetroCards.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans can probably avoid a government shutdown or a debt default. But Trumps border wall could be a deal-breaker.

Trump wants to let coal companies pay well below market rate for the right to despoil public lands and damage the climate.

The GOPs advantage in dominating small states is giving it a permanent advantage in controlling the U.S. Senate, even in bad years for the party.

This is the third time in 100 years weve had this alignment of government, says Paul Ryan. So, how did the previous two go?

The government said it was a terrorist attack, but the men claimed they were defending democracy via a legitimate rebellion.

Diplomats complain that the former Exxon CEO is a surprisingly ineffectual manager but that may be what Trump wants.

Many have tried. All have failed.

A new Times report says that some Republicans, including Pence, are quietly betting against Trump being willing or able to run for president again.

No one was injured in the Saturday-morning blast, which may have been a domestic terrorist attack.

The U.S.-drafted resolution, which received unanimous support, is the first international measure taken against Pyongyang since Trump took office.

The DOJ inserting itself into this debate would represent a dramatic break with history and prior practices.

Conservative commentator Eric Bolling is the latest Fox News staffer to be accused of lewd behavior.

See original here:
Republicans Are Playing With a Stacked Deck in the Senate - New York Magazine

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Republicans 'move on' to tax reform, and yet it looks oddly familiar - Washington Post

Up until now, Russian and other foreign bots have been chummy with Trump and the GOP on social media, with "nearly half of the presidents followers appearing to be fake or spam accounts," according to Newsweek.

But over the last 48 hours, these bots have begun to change their tune. According to Newsweek:

Russian-linked bots and trolls have caused a surge in use of the hashtag #ResignPaulRyan on Twitter over the last 48 hours, just as the Republican speaker of the House was returning to his hometown of Wisconsin for a month-long respite from Washington, D.C.

A monitoring dashboard established by the Alliance [German Marshall Funds Alliance For Securing Democracy] noted the uptick Monday morning. It coincided with surges in the use of other hashtags by Russian bots, including #TrumpTV, #Magnitsky, #Fake and #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinion.

It hasnt been a common occurrence for the Alliances dashboard to pick up on Russian bot activity targeting members of the GOP since the site was first launched last week by former FBI special agent Clint Watts. But Ryan wasnt the only member of Trumps party to face countless bots demanding his removal. A campaign calling on the president to fire National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster received widespread support from bots and trolls over the last several days using the hashtag #FireMcMaster, eventually getting picked up by some right-wing fake news sites that seem to have the presidents full attention, including Breitbart.

Nice time to go on a 17-day vacation.

Image: DonkeyHotey

Twitters indecisive approach to dealing with trolls, harassment and general abusesuspected by the paranoid as a symptom its need for growth and reachconfounds users to this day. But the blind eye enables more interesting phenomena, too, such as bot armies pushing fringe stories into the trending tags list. Joseph Bernstein: MicroChip, who operates behind a []

Biomimicry continues to make amazing strides. Festo just released footage of their OctopusGripper being put through the paces.

In Even good bots fight, a paper written by Oxford Internet Institute researchers and published in PLOS One, the authors survey the edits and reverts made by Wikipedias diverse community of bots, uncovering some curious corners where bots rate-limited by Wikipedias rules for bots slowly and remorseless follow one another around, reverting each []

Working remotely often means using a full-size laptop, or forcing a tablet to do things it was never intended to do. Depending on your job, each may be a reasonable, if somewhat compromising solution, or an impossibly frustrating one. Either way, youll be stuck with a tiny screen and a form factor that will destroy []

Web technology has matured considerably in the last decade, and developers are continually in demand. If youre looking to add some skills to your resume, or are just interested in exploring the possibilities of the web, check out this Interactive Web Developer Bootcamp.In this course, youll get a comprehensive overview of full-stack development using modern []

Even if you only use your PC for web browsing, media playback, or light document creation, default software can sometimes come up short. To give your Windows PC a bit of a boost, weve compiled a variety of helpful, paid apps that can enhance your user experience and make you more productive.In thePremium PC Power []

Follow this link:
Russian bots are turning against GOP, attacking Republicans - Boing Boing

Congressional Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Actso a former Trump volunteer wants to repeal his donations to the party.

Robert Heghmann is a former Trump campaign volunteer, and a sworn enemy of ObamaCare. In a lawsuit filed in Virginias Eastern District Court on Thursday, Heghmann says he and fellow Republicans had donated to the GOP with the understanding that the party would repeal the ACA once they took control of Congress.

But Republicans doomed repeal efforts last month left Heghmann feeling scammed. He accuses the party of running a racketeering and mail fraud scheme to rip off anti-ObamaCare donorsand he wants the GOP to return every donation it received since 2013.

Heghmann, 70, contributed well over $1,000 supporting Republican Party Events and Republican Candidates based upon the pledge... that if Republicans contributed money and votes to the Republican Party and Republicans successfully took control of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, Republicans in Congress would Repeal and Replace Obamacare, he claims in his lawsuit.

(Federal Election Committee filings only list $750 in donations under Heghmanns name. Heghmann could not be reached for comment.)

Senate Republicans attempts to repeal the ACA last month were met with national outrage. Protesters risked arrest to demonstrate outside congressional offices. Republicans huddled to draft a repeal bill in secret and moved to proceed on the mystery bill, before their efforts crashed and burned in a late-night vote. But the GOPs failure wasnt the result of a half-baked bill or intra-party dissent, Heghmanns suit argues: Republicans never actually planned to repeal the ACA.

As early as November, 2012, the leaders of the Republican Party knew that the Republican Party was not going to Repeal and Replace Obamacare, his suit reads. After the Re-election of President Obama in the November 2012 election, Speaker John Boehner admitted that Obamacare was not going to be repealed. Speaking to reporters he stated flatly, Obamacare is now the law of the land."

But Republicans kept fundraising on the promise of an ACA repeal. Since Boehners admission, the GOP and its branch in Virginia (Heghmanns home state) have collected over $735 Million by promising that the Republican Party would Repeal and Replace Obamacare, Heghmann writes in his suit. That promise was false and fraudulent.

The alleged fraud was baked into the GOPs now-debunked 2016 presidential election platform, which promised that a Republican president, on the first day in office, will use legitimate waiver authority under the law to halt its advance and then, with the unanimous support of Congressional Republicans, will sign its repeal." Heghmann correctly notes that this did not happen.

If Republicans do not repeal the ACA, Heghmann wants a court to force the party into returning all donations from 2013 until present.

The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Virginia did not return The Daily Beasts requests for comment.

Morton Blackwell, a member of the RNCs Virginia leadership team told the Virginian-Pilot that Heghmanns suit was frivolous but sign of conservative anger that the Republican-controlled Congress has not yet repealed and replaced Obamacare.

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Heghmann is far from the first Republican to attack his own party over its repeal failure. During Donald Trumps presidential campaign, Heghmann co-chaired Trumps operations in Carroll County, New Hampshire, a county that accidentally listed a journalist as a chair, forcing the journalist to contact the Trump campaign asking to be removed from its New Hampshire literature. (The journalists vacated seat was awarded to an 18-year-old.)

On the morning of the Senates most recent ACA repeal vote, Trump took to Twitter to cheer on what many viewed as an uphill effort for Senate Republicans.

Come on Republican Senators, you can do it on Healthcare. After seven years, this is your chance to shine! Don't let the American people down! Trump tweeted.

The following morning, when the sun rose on a thoroughly trounced GOP bill, Trump tweeted again to voice his disgust with 3 Republicans and 48 Democrats who let the American people down.

Heghmann claims that was the plan all along.

Continued here:
Republicans Sued for 'Racketeering' Over Trumpcare's Failure - Daily Beast