Get Ready Now: Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win.Trumpist county election officials are preparing to throw the process into chaos. The Bulwark A.B. Stoddard Aug 8 2024  The last two weeks—the unveiling of the Harris-Walz ticket, and Kamala Harris’s surge in the polls—feels like some surreal dream state. Everything has changed. Have you noticed Harris has pushed Donald Trump right out of the comfy lead he’s held for an entire year? He’s noticed. From FiveThirtyEight to RealClearPolitics—pick your polling average—they all now show Harris out in front after only two and a half weeks. Trump is no longer on track to win the election—which he has been for more than six straight months. Instead, the momentum, money, voter registration, volunteering, grassroots organizing, polling, and online engagement all favor the Democrats and it looks now like Trump could easily lose. But that won’t happen, because Trump doesn’t lose. He beat Joe Biden in 2020—remember? So if he’s not the rightful victor on November 5, an entire army of Republicans is ready to block certification of the election at the local level. No need to worry about mayhem on January 6, 2025 when Congress meets in joint session; the election deniers plan to stop a result right away if it looks like Harris is winning. Their goal: Refuse to certify anywhere—even a county that Trump won—and prevent certification in that state, which prevents certification of the presidential election. A Harris victory could become a nightmare.

Trump Is Promising To Fight For The Working Class ― While Telling CEOs The Opposite. It's not quite the populism his fans may have had in mind. Huffipost Jonathan Cohn Jul 19, 2024 Donald Trump and his allies spent a lot of time at the Republican National Convention this week proclaiming that they are on the side of everyday Americans in an ongoing, existential struggle against a wealthy, corporate elite. It’s the same basic pitch Trump has been making throughout this campaign, and since he first formally got into politics roughly a decade ago. And although it’s a sprawling appeal with a heavy dose of cultural affinity ― yes, that was pro wrestler Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt on stage Thursday night ― a key component of the Trump campaign is economic. JD V arons” and “America’s ruling class in Washington,” in defense of “the working man.” This is not the sort of rhetoric you would have heard at previous GOP conventions. And the change has certainly gotten the media’s attention, judging by all the discussion (including in my articles!) about how Trump has injected the Grand Old Party with some good, old-fashioned populism. It could help him win the election, too, if it resonates with voters who are frustrated with higher prices at the grocery store and gas station ― and who have a sense, going back decades, that neither political party has had their best interests at heart. One reason Trump can make this pitch so effectively is that he has broken with the GOP establishment on some substantive matters, most conspicuously trade and immigration. Republican leaders have traditionally tried to keep the flow of both as free as possible, putting them in lockstep with corporate groups and other wealthy interests who feel the same way. Trump is all about building walls that, he promises, will keep out both the foreign goods and the foreign people. And when he’s not invoking racist or nativist tropes as justification, he’s saying the barriers will protect American workers from unfair competition. But if Trump is the first Republican in recent history to embrace protectionism so completely, he’s hardly the first to say he’s fighting on behalf of non-wealthy Americans. Even Mitt Romney, the plutocrat’s plutocrat and now a senator from Utah, pledged fealty to the working class when he accepted the GOP presidential nomination back in 2012. And for all of the ways that Trump really is a different sort of Republican, there are a whole bunch of ways that he’s really not. In fact, if you look closely at the initiatives Trump is promising to roll out and consider the policies he’s pursued in the past, you might come to the conclusion that four more years of his presidency would be a bad deal for the very workers he claims to be defending ― with good reason.

A Closer Look At Trump’s Agenda......Trump wants to slap a 10% levy on all imported goods and a higher, 50% levy on goods from China. He says this will prevent foreign competitors from undercutting U.S. companies, so that the wares available in stores here are made “in America and only in America.” Tariffs can certainly deter foreign competitors, and nowadays plenty of mainstream economists agree that targeted tariffs make sense as a way to prop up particular sectors, like the auto industry, when it’s in the national interest. But the kind of sweeping, indiscriminate tariffs Trump is eyeing would almost certainly lead to less overall growth and higher prices for consumers. Lower- and middle-income Americans would bear the burden disproportionately, because they tend to spend more of their paychecks on goods rather than services. But the tariffs are just one part of Trump’s economic agenda. He also wants to cut taxes. He’s floated a few different ideas, including reducing the corporate tax rate to 15% ― a further cut from his 2017 tax law, which moved the top corporate rate from 35% to 21%. Because his campaign does not issue detailed briefings the way his predecessors have, it’s difficult to precisely predict the impact. But the benefits of the 2017 cuts were skewed towards the rich; analysts looking at his more recent rhetoric think his current promises would work out the same way. One particularly ominous idea is Trump’s suggestion that he could just junk the income tax altogether and rely on tariff revenue to replace it. It’s a fantastical promise that would work only if the federal government took a cleaver to spending or borrowed far more money than it already does.These possibilities explain why so many economists, representing so many different viewpoints, have trashed Trump’s plans. One analysis from the Peterson Institute of International Economics calculated that his agenda would work out to $1,700 in higher annual costs for the typical family, which is pretty much the opposite of what he’s promised people reeling from the price of food, gas or housing. Trump’s agenda, the report’s authors concluded, would “entail sharply regressive tax policy changes, shifting tax burdens away from the well-off and toward lower-income members of society while harming US workers and industries.”

CANADA The Conservative climate chasmChris Hatch | Opinion | April 8th 2024.....You’ll often hear that we’re over the hump on climate denial. Beyond the comment sections of the Internet, that’s broadly true for old-school, outright denial that climate change is happening at all. But a more insidious variant has taken root and it explains a good deal of the carbon ruckus in our politics — Conservative voters aren’t convinced humans are causing it. You’ll recall that surreal moment in 2021 when delegates rejected adding “climate change is real” to the Conservative Party of Canada’s policy book. You might chalk that up to the nature of party conventions — in any party, they attract a disproportionate number of, let’s just say, “enthusiasts.” But the political divide between Conservatives and other Canadians reaches far beyond the parties’ button-collecting bases. It’s not so much a divide as a chasm. Around 90 per cent of Canadians who say they intend to vote Liberal or NDP tell pollsters that "climate change is a fact and is mostly caused by human activities," according to a survey by the Angus Reid Institute conducted in March. By contrast, only one-third of federal Conservative voters accept this foundational climate fact. And you’ll note the generous space for wiggle room — respondents merely had to acknowledge that climate change is “mostly” caused by nebulous “human activities.” No pointing the finger at fossil fuels, no need to side with the world’s scientists that human causation is“unequivocal,”with effects that are “irreversible for centuries to millennia.” Conservative voters are a very long way from “unequivocal” — in the same survey, fully half said climate change is “mostly caused by natural changes and cycles.” If you’re managing to hold the position that climate change isn’t driving extreme events or that humans aren’t causing it anyway, it’s not surprising if you don’t support action against carbon pollution. And that’s exactly where most Conservative voters are at — barely one-third say that “climate change is a crisis and we need to act quickly.”The political chasm is even more striking when it comes to climate impacts. Re.Climate just published its annual review of public opinion,

Canadians who voted Conservative in the last federal election express very different beliefs about climate impacts than those who voted for other parties, such as whether wildfires are linked to climate change.” Only one-quarter of Conservative voters thought last summer’s forest fires were directly linked to climate change.....read on    https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/04/08/opinion/conservative-voters-humans-climate-change-poll              

UNITED STATES Majority in the US Say Project 2025 Is Exactly What Trump Represents. In a new survey, American voters expressed fear that Project 2025 is "an unprecedented, extreme Republican plan that will fundamentally alter the American government, making Trump even more dangerous in a second term." Common Dreams  JULIA CONLEY Jul 10, 2024 A new survey released Wednesday found that with days to go until former U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to be formally nominated as the GOP presidential candidate, a majority of Americans believe the far-right Project 2025 agenda represents what Trump stands for—and shows how a victory by the Republican would endanger people across the country. The progressive messaging firm Navigator Research conducted the survey of 1,000 registered voters from June 20-24, with the goal of learning how Democrats and rights advocates should frame Project 2025 ahead of the November election. The group found that opponents of the right-wing project, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, may have an uphill battle to ensure American voters are aware of the policy blueprint, which calls for a nationwide abortion ban, mass deportation of immigrants, the repeal of climate safety regulations, elimination of the Department of Educations and shrinking of other agencies, and consolidation of power within the presidency. The survey described Project 2025 as "a series of conservative policy proposals aimed at reshaping the executive branch of the federal government if a Republican is elected president in 2024," and found that 77% of respondents had heard "little" or "nothing" about the agenda. But after hearing two one-sentence descriptions of the plan—one in support and one opposing—the respondents opposed Project 2025 by an 18-point margin, with 49% in opposition. Sixty-three percent of Americans surveyed said the agenda represents Trump's policy priorities, even though the former president has taken pains to distance himself from Project 2025 in recent days, saying last week that he knows "nothing about" the plan and has "no idea who is behind it." Former top Trump administration officials, including Russ Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget, and White House personnel chief John McEntee, have helped write Project 2025. Nearly 90% of Democrats said they believe Project 2025 reflects the top priorities of Trump, who said late last year that he plans to be a dictator only on "Day One" of his second term, should he win the election. Sixty-two percent of independents and 42% of Republicans who do not identify with the MAGA movement led by the former president said Project 2025 represents Trump's agenda. The top concern expressed by respondents from across the political spectrum was that Project 2025 is "an unprecedented, extreme Republican plan that will fundamentally alter the American government, making Trump even more dangerous in a second term by granting him presidential powers like no president before him has ever had."....read on       https://www.commondreams.org/news/project-2025-trump?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=8a2149f608-Week+in+Review%3A+Sat.+7%2F13%2F24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-db383b6816-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D