#jim demint

[dadsinsuits]

Jim DeMint

[saddayfordemocracy]

Uganda announces a ‘KILL ALL GAYS’ law !

Uganda has officially announced its plan for a bill that is said to impose the death penalty on all homosexuals in the African region.

"The Family" is behind Uganda’s anti-gay bill and has American ties with Rick Warren, Congress, and Fortune 500 CEOs.

The “Kill All Gays” bill is not a joke, the bill was proposed in Uganda earlier this month with the purpose of actually giving gay Ugandans the death penalty for being gay. Politicians in Uganda has publicly expressed that “the legislation would curb a rise in unnatural sex in the East African nation” and “Homosexuality is not natural to Ugandans, but there has been a massive recruitment by gay people in schools, and especially among the youth, where they are promoting the falsehood that people are born like that.”

The bill was supposed to be up and running five years ago but was cancelled. Government officials have officially announced that the bill will be up and running shortly. Grave acts according to Ugandan officials will now result in a full-on death penalty and the bill is supported by President Yoweri Museveni with final voting for the law happening by the end of the year.

Hundreds of LGBT+ people have been forced to flee the country as refugees and more will follow if this law stands trial. Three gay men and one transgender woman have been killed in homophobic attacks in Uganda so far this year – the most recent attack happened just last week when a gay man was bludgeoned to death.

Rick Warren, who has personally said gay marriage is “equivalent” to incest, pedophilia and polygamy and said that gay people are “evil” and have “Christ-o-phobia,” after significant pressure eventually severed ties with Ssempa and spoke out against Uganda’s anti-gay law.

In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama appeared in a forum hosted by Warren at Saddleback Church, in which Obama denounced marriage equality. Obama also said, “I love the ministries that are taking place here at Saddleback.” After his election, President Obama sparked outrage when he invited Rick Warren to deliver the convocation at his first inauguration. Last week, President Obama released a statement opposing the Uganda bill.

Dozens of members of Congress, several Fortune 500 CEOs, generals and at least one Supreme Court Justice are members of “The Family,” the right-wing evangelical mission supporting Bahati as well as Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) among others have lived in what’s known as “C Street,” The Family’s subsidized lodging in Washington, DC. 

Hillary Clinton has been active with Family prayer groups since she was First Lady. In her memoir, Living History, Clinton described The Family leader Doug Coe as “a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.”

When the anti-gay legislation was first introduced in Uganda, the New York Times wrote, “You can’t preach hate and not accept responsibility for the way that hate is manifested.” James Inhofe and Rick Warren not only preached anti-gay hatred with their own words but wrapped their political and institutional arms around David Bahati and Martin Ssempa and others who have taken hatred to its ugly, but foreseeable, conclusion in Uganda. Inhofe and Warren are responsible for the way that hate is manifested. Moreover, American political figures who have proudly associated with The Family and with Rick Warren are culpable as well. They cannot feign ignorance at the end of a journey that was ugly all along.

Uganda’s anti-gay law is not just an international disgrace. It is an American disgrace. And the American religious and political figures who played a role in spreading vicious homophobia in Uganda, whether actively or by turning a blind eye, should do more than just denounce the country’s law. They should denounce their own role in facilitating it.

The LGBT group SMUG (Sexual Minorities Uganda) works towards helping and saving gay identities in Uganda, visit their site and donate today, so they don’t have to fight this war alone.

Sally Kohn 

https://sexualminoritiesuganda.com/ 

[early-morning-rain]

[thecomedybureau]

Sen. Al Franken Discloses Which of His Fellow Senators Have a Sense of Humor and Which Do Not

The story that Senator Franken shares about his another former Senator not having a great sense of humor is almost too good to be true.

Watch it here.

[poorbasil]

Aesthetic: Sen. Jim DeMint

request me to make politican aesthetics 

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The MAGA Bootcamps Creating a Trump Army

SHERO is a reader-supported publication where all articles are free and available to the public. Please support independent journalism for e

Amee Vanderpool at SHERO:

Congressional disclosures by the US Senate and House — that detail the report of gifts received from outside organizations — show that the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) has sponsored elaborate trips held between February 2021 and April 2024. The CPI, which describes itself as the the place “Where Conservatives Go to Win,” advertises that they “train, equip, and unite Conservative leaders in Washington and across the country.” Essentially, the lobbying group is a conservative bankroll that seeks to cement a political bond between the mainstream Republican Party and far right election-denial extremists. Between February 2021 and April 2024, the CPI held 21 disclosed events for Conservative Members of Congress and US Senators, based on House Ethics Committee filings provided by Congressional staff. Thanks to the mandatory description required for each filing of the travel gift, its estimated value, the identity of the donor and the date received, we know that CPI held lavish training sessions for congressional staff at their lush Maryland ranch, as well as retreats at several luxurious Florida resorts.

While the submitted record of disclosure forms for these events are online in separate House and Senate repositories, and available for download, there is no way to directly search through the forms by using a specific term or donor organization. I have compiled a list of all of the disclosed CPI trips for Members and staff of the US House for the Year 2024 here, so that you can easily view who was in attendance at these locations during the specified times. The CPI is currently led by former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who was recently indicted in Arizona for his alleged role in a fake electors scheme in 2020, and former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint. At their lavish events, the Conservative political powerhouse enlists approved organizations and far-right extremist organizations to help promote their agenda in a resort vacation setting.

[...] The main objective for CPI is to further develop MAGA partnerships and implement a stronger network that was not in place during the Trump administration. Meadows, was critical in implementing Trump’s agenda which included the "Schedule F" executive order. This ongoing plan was developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term, and launched 13 days before the 2020 election with the goal of radically reshaping the federal government and eradicating thousands of civil servants in order to fill career posts with Trump lackeys and his America First ideology. Ultimately, this elite group provides the resort clubhouse for a secret fraternity of Trump loyalists, who are currently developing the Human Resources department that will implement the MAGA infrastructure to incorporate the federal government.

The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) is creating an army of far-right MAGA loyalists to serve in government roles.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Inside the Trump Plan for 2025

A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White House.

Jonathan Blitzer at The New Yorker:

One evening in April of 2022, a hundred people milled around a patio at Mar-a-Lago, sipping champagne and waiting for Donald Trump to arrive. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, stood in front of an archway fringed with palm trees and warmed up the crowd with jokes about the deep state. The purpose of the gathering was to raise money for the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy shop whose most recent annual report emphasized a “commitment to end woke and weaponized government.” Its founder, Russell Vought, a former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, and a leading candidate to be the White House chief of staff in a second term, was in attendance, chatting amiably with the guests. He is trim and bald, with glasses and a professorial beard. His group is a kind of ivory tower for far-right Republicans, issuing white papers with titles such as “The Great Replacement in Theory and Practice.” In 2021, he wrote an op-ed for Newsweek that asked, “Is There Anything Actually Wrong with ‘Christian Nationalism’?”

The Center for Renewing America is one of roughly two dozen right-wing groups that have emerged in Washington since Trump left office. What unites them is a wealthy network based on Capitol Hill called the Conservative Partnership Institute, which many in Washington regard as the next Trump Administration in waiting. C.P.I.’s list of personnel and affiliates includes some of Trump’s most fervent backers: Meadows is a senior partner; Stephen Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration, runs an associated group called America First Legal, which styles itself as the A.C.L.U. of the maga movement; Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department lawyer facing disbarment for trying to overturn the 2020 election, is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America. All of them are expected to have high-ranking roles in the government if Trump is elected again. “C.P.I. has gathered the most talented people in the conservative movement by far,” someone close to the organization told me. “They have thought deeply about what’s needed to create the infrastructure and the resources for a more anti-establishment conservative movement.”

C.P.I. was founded in 2017 by Jim DeMint, a former adman from South Carolina who spent eight years in the Senate before resigning to lead the Heritage Foundation. During that time, he was one of Washington’s most notorious partisan combatants. As a senator, he attacked his Republican colleagues for being insufficiently conservative, tanking their bills and raising money to unseat them in primaries. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, called him “an innovator in Republican-on-Republican violence.” With C.P.I., DeMint wanted to create a base of operations for insurgents like himself. “If you’re not getting criticized in Washington,” he once said, “you’re probably part of the problem.”

Other conservative groups have defined Republican Presidencies: the Heritage Foundation staffed the Administration of Ronald Reagan, the American Enterprise Institute that of George W. Bush. But C.P.I. is categorically different from its peers. It’s not a think tank—it’s an incubator and an activist hub that funds other organizations, coördinates with conservative members of the House and Senate, and works as a counterweight to G.O.P. leadership. The effort to contest the 2020 election results and the protests of January 6, 2021, were both plotted at C.P.I.’s headquarters, at 300 Independence Avenue. “Until seven years ago, it didn’t exist, and no entity like it existed,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, told me. “It’s grown by leaps and bounds.”

C.P.I. and its constellation of groups, most of which are nonprofits, raised nearly two hundred million dollars in 2022. The organization has bought up some fifty million dollars’ worth of real estate in and around Washington, including multiple properties on the Hill. A mansion on twenty-two hundred acres in eastern Maryland hosts trainings for congressional staff and conservative activists. Four political-action committees have rented space in C.P.I.’s offices, and many more belonging to members of Congress pay to use C.P.I.’s facilities, such as studios for podcast recordings and TV hits. The House Freedom Caucus, a group of three dozen hard-line anti-institutionalist Republican lawmakers, and the Steering Committee, a similar group in the Senate, headed by Lee, hold weekly meetings at C.P.I.’s headquarters. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, called the organization a “gathering site” that offered “regular contact” with the power brokers of the conservative movement. He told me, “You walk into the building and you can talk to Mark Meadows or Jim DeMint if they’re there, or Russ Vought.”

[...] Still, one aspect of the speech caught the attention of C.P.I.’s executives. Ever since Trump was acquitted in his first impeachment trial, in 2020, he has threatened to purge the government of anyone he considered disloyal. His defenders are united in the belief that career bureaucrats foiled his first-term plans from inside the government. C.P.I., which has spent years placing conservative job seekers in congressional offices, is now vetting potential staffers for a second Trump term. One of its groups, the American Accountability Foundation, has been investigating the personal profiles and social-media posts of federal employees to determine who might lack fealty to Trump. “The key throughout the speech was that Trump complained about his personnel,” the attendee said. “He said he had these bad generals, bad Cabinet secretaries. That was a big signal to the people there.”

[...] As early as January, 2016, DeMint predicted that Trump would win the Republican nomination. It was an unpopular position among conservatives, many of whom felt more ideologically aligned with Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas. In a conference room at Jones Day, Trump gave a brief speech and opened the floor to questions. Leo asked him whom he’d nominate for federal judgeships. Antonin Scalia, the conservative stalwart on the Supreme Court, had died the previous month. Trump replied, “Why don’t I put out a list publicly of people who could be the sort of people I would put on the Supreme Court?” DeMint immediately volunteered Heritage for the job of drafting it. The Heritage Foundation was founded in the nineteen-seventies by Edwin Feulner, a Republican operative with a doctorate in political science. Under his direction, the think tank became the country’s leading bastion of conservative policy, with an annual budget exceeding eighty million dollars. When DeMint took over, in 2013, traditionalists on the organization’s board were concerned that his rebellious style would diminish the group’s reputation for serious research. He confirmed their suspicions by hiring several of his Senate aides. The former Heritage staffer said, “There were cultural differences between existing leadership and the DeMint team.”

But DeMint’s arrival reflected changes already under way at the organization. In 2010, as the Tea Party emerged as a force in conservative politics, the think tank launched an advocacy arm called Heritage Action, which issued scorecards evaluating legislators’ conservatism and deputized a network of local activists as “sentinels” to enforce a populist agenda. Vought, who’d previously worked as a staffer in House leadership, helped lead the operation. Under DeMint, the group became merciless in its attacks on rank-and-file Republican lawmakers. “Heritage Action was created to lobby the Hill, but they took it one step further,” James Wallner, a lecturer in political science at Clemson University, who worked with DeMint in the Senate and at Heritage, told me. “They had a grassroots army. They used tens of thousands of activists to target people.”

After the meeting with Trump, in 2016, some of DeMint’s staff objected to the task of drawing up a list of potential judges, arguing that Heritage was overcommitting itself. This was typically the domain of the Federalist Society, which was putting forth its own list of judicial nominees. But DeMint, sensing an opportunity to maximize his clout with Trump, dismissed the concerns. That August, after Trump became the Party’s nominee, Heritage was enlisted to participate in the Presidential transition in the event of a Trump victory. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey at the time, was overseeing the effort and put Feulner, who was then the chair of Heritage’s board of trustees, in charge of domestic policy. Feulner later told the Times that Heritage saw a greater opportunity to influence policy under Trump than it had under Reagan. “No. 1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes,” Feulner said of Trump. “No. 2, his views on so many things were not particularly well formed.” He added, “If he somehow pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference.”

[...] A few weeks after Trump was acquitted, on a party-line vote in the Senate, a C.P.I. executive named Rachel Bovard addressed an audience at the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of conservative activists. They’d assembled for a board-of-governors luncheon at a Ritz-Carlton in California. “We work very closely . . . with the Office of Presidential Personnel at the White House,” Bovard said, in footage obtained by Documented, a Washington-based watchdog group. “Because we see what happens when we don’t vet these people. That’s how we got Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, O.K.? That’s how we got Marie Yovanovitch. All these people that led the impeachment against President Trump shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

By then, conservative activists, including Ginni Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, were assembling lists of “bad people” in the government for Trump to fire or demote. Government officials on the lists were often identified as either pro-Trump or anti-Trump. But behavior that counted as anti-Trump could be little more than an instance of someone obeying the law or observing ordinary bureaucratic procedure. In one memo, in which a Trump loyalist argued against appointing a former U.S. Attorney who was up for a job at the Treasury Department, a list of infractions included an unwillingness to criminally investigate multiple women who had accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, according to Axios. In October, 2020, Trump issued an executive order that was largely overlooked in the midst of the pandemic and that fall’s election. Known as Schedule F, it stripped career civil servants of their job protections, making it much easier for the President to replace them with handpicked appointees.

The following month, when Trump refused to accept his election loss, “there were people in the White House who operated under the assumption that they were not leaving,” a former aide said. One of them was John McEntee, a caustic thirty-year-old who’d once been Trump’s personal assistant and was now in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office. (In 2018, John Kelly, who was then Trump’s chief of staff, had fired McEntee for failing a security clearance owing to a gambling habit, but Trump rehired him two years later.) Young staffers were scared that McEntee might find out if they started interviewing for other positions. “There was fear of retribution if it got back to him,” the former aide said. Other White House officials, such as Meadows, were clear-eyed about the election results but vowed to fight them anyway. Meadows discreetly told a few staffers that, when Trump’s term was over, they should join him at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “C.P.I. was his ticket to be that pressure point on Capitol Hill,” one of the staffers told me. “He wanted to be the guy who held Congress to the maga agenda.”

[...] The structure of these groups could seem both byzantine and incestuous to an outsider, but the idea, Denton told me, was “to insure mission alignment.” Stephen Miller formed America First Legal, a public-interest law group that has primarily targeted “woke corporations,” school districts, and the Biden Administration. Vought started the Center for Renewing America, which generated policy proposals as though the Trump Administration had never ended. Corrigan and Denton were on the board of Vought’s group; Vought, Corrigan, and Denton sat on the board of Miller’s group. As more organizations joined the fold, their boards increasingly overlapped, and the roster of ideologues and Trump loyalists grew. Gene Hamilton and Matthew Whitaker, key figures from the Trump D.O.J., worked at America First Legal. Ken Cuccinelli, from the Department of Homeland Security; Mark Paoletta, from the Office of Management and Budget; and Kash Patel, from the Department of Defense, became fellows at Vought’s group. By the end of 2021, C.P.I. had helped form eight new groups, each with a different yet complementary mission. The American Accountability Foundation focussed on attacking Biden’s nominees. The State Freedom Caucus Network helped state legislators create their own versions of the House Freedom Caucus in order to challenge their local Republican establishments. The Election Integrity Network, run by Mitchell, trained volunteers to monitor polling places and investigate state and local election officials. American Moment concentrated on cultivating the next generation of conservative staffers in Washington.

C.P.I. connected the founders of these groups with its network of donors and, in some instances, helped support the organizations until they could raise money for themselves. As American Moment waited for the I.R.S. to formalize its nonprofit tax status, for example, C.P.I. served as a fiscal sponsor, allowing donors to earmark money for the new group by giving it to C.P.I. The organization also offered its partners access to an array of shared resources: discounted real estate, accounting services, legal representation. “This all had an in-kind value of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. C.P.I.’s accounting firm, called Compass Professional, was run by Corrigan’s brother; its law firm, Compass Legal, was headed by Scott Gast, a lawyer in the Trump White House. Aside from C.P.I., Compass Legal’s most lucrative client to date, according to F.E.C. filings, has been Trump himself, whose campaign and political-action committees have paid the firm four hundred thousand dollars in the past two years. Another major client was the National Rifle Association, which paid the firm more than three hundred thousand dollars in 2022. Compass Legal was established in March, 2021, two months after C.P.I.’s lead lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, was forced to resign from her job as a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner. Her participation in Trump’s phone call to the Georgia secretary of state had caused too much controversy. She blamed her departure on a “massive pressure campaign” orchestrated by “leftist groups.” In a subsequent C.P.I. annual report, the group said that a large part of its mission was helping conservatives “survive the Leftist purge and ‘cancel-proof’ conservative organizations.” This was not simply the rhetoric of conservative victimhood. Andrew Kloster, a former employee of Compass Legal who is now Representative Matt Gaetz’s general counsel, described one of C.P.I.’s goals as “de-risking public service on the right.” For anyone who might run afoul of mainstream opinion, C.P.I. had created an alternative, fully self-sufficient ecosystem. One part of it was material: recording studios, direct-mail services, accounting and legal resources, salaried jobs and fellowships. The other element was cultural. C.P.I. was demonstrating to Trump allies that, if they took bold and possibly illegal action in service of the cause, they wouldn’t face financial ruin or pariah status in Washington.

[...] Vought and Clark, meanwhile, have been advancing a formal rationale to break the long-standing expectation that the D.O.J. should operate independently of the President. The norm has been in place since Watergate, but they have argued that Trump could run the department like any other executive agency. Clark published his case on the Center for Renewing America’s Web site under the title “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent.” In early 2021, while Trump was fighting the results of the election, he wanted to make Clark the Attorney General, but the entire senior leadership of the department threatened to resign en masse. Now, if Clark gets a top job at the D.O.J., he is expected to use the position to try to remake the department as an instrument of the White House.

Stephen Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to the Times. The President would have to deputize federal troops to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military. Many of the other agenda items related to immigration that were delayed, blocked, or never fully realized during the chaos of the first term would be reinstated to more extreme effect in a second: an expanded ban on refugees from Muslim-majority countries, a revocation of visas for students engaged in certain forms of campus protests, an end to birthright citizenship. “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error,” Miller told the Times last November. “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”

The overarching scheme for the second Trump term, called Project 2025, follows an established Washington tradition. It is being organized by the Heritage Foundation and has taken the form of a nine-hundred-page policy tract. But the scale of this undertaking, which is costing more than twenty million dollars, is bigger than anything Heritage has previously attempted. The organization has hired the technology company Oracle to build a secure database to house the personnel files of some twenty thousand potential Administration staffers. Kevin Roberts, the current president of Heritage, has also enlisted the participation of more than a hundred conservative groups, as well as top figures from C.P.I.: Vought, Corrigan, Miller, and Saurabh Sharma, the president of American Moment. “These were the key nodes,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Roberts was paying Center for Renewing America, American Moment, and America First Legal to do parts of the project.” (Heritage did not respond to requests for comment.)

The fact that Heritage was helping to staff a full-fledged maga operation, the person went on, was a reflection of C.P.I.’s mounting influence. Two years ago, Roberts addressed the National Conservatism Conference, an annual gathering of far-right activists, which was hosted by an organization that is now associated with C.P.I. “I come not to invite national conservatives to join our movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours,” he said. Last year, Corrigan, who is on the steering committee of Project 2025, was invited to speak at Heritage’s fiftieth-anniversary conference. “The leadership at Heritage has brought back the C.P.I. folks even though they got pushed out six years before,” the person close to C.P.I. told me. “Kevin is being realistic. He needs to make peace with these guys.”

My source, who has been involved in Project 2025, outlined a few immediate actions that Trump would take if he won. Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., would be fired “right away,” he told me. Even though Trump nominated Wray to the position, the far right has blamed Wray for the agency’s role in arresting people involved in the insurrection. (As Vought told me, “Look at the F.B.I., look at the deep state. We have political prisoners in this country, regardless of what you think about January 6th.”) The other hope in getting rid of Wray is that, without him, the Administration could use the agency to target its political opponents.

The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before, during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?”

[...] The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the most radical aspects of Project 2025. There are no benefits—only political liabilities—to endorsing so many specifics. Trump’s supporters already know what he stands for, in a general sense. And there is the more delicate matter of the former President’s ego. “He wouldn’t want to be seen as taking guidance from any other human being,” the former senior White House official told me. “He doesn’t like to be seen as someone who doesn’t know everything already.” On July 5th, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He said that he wished them luck.

The New Yorker has a report on how a network of far-right activists from the likes of Conservative Partnership Institute are helping plan Donald Trump’s potential 2nd term.

Read the full story at The New Yorker.

[early-morning-rain]