Lest You Thought That Dean Phillips Was A Legit Democratic Challenger To Biden…:
Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips received financial support in his run for Congress from Harlan Crow – the same controversial GOP megadonor who lavished Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with expensive gifts.
DailyMail.com can reveal that Crow gave the maximum $2,800 contribution to Phillips’ congressional campaign in 2019, according to Federal Election Commission records.
The Crow contribution will inevitably add to the fodder, with insiders already blasting Phillips’ decision to accept support from a Republican influencer known for mischievously donating to third party candidate Cornel West’s presidential campaign, giving Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni expensive gifts, and for collecting Nazi artifacts including a signed copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m still convinced, now more than ever, that Biden is more likely to lose to Trump or another R than pretty much anybody who would run instead. But Crow is a right-wing mischief-maker, and uses his massive fortune to take down democracy. Phillips is merely his agent.
Onward Christian Counseling Services. You’re humming that war-mongering tune, aren’t you? But it’s the mom-and-pop shop of, wait for it:
(Mike) Johnson and his wife, Kelly, have long intertwined their political and business lives: They became a known entity in the late 1990s when they went on national television as the face of Louisiana’s new marriage covenant law, which makes it harder to get a divorce. Today, they co-host a podcast, “Truth Be Told,” where they talk about political and social issues from a conservative Christian perspective. Their podcast is up to 69 episodes.
Kelly Johnson features the couple’s podcast on the website of her company, Onward Christian Counseling Services, which promotes Bible-based pastoral counseling. Her website also includes a link to its 2017 operating agreement, which lays out the corporate bylaws for the company ― and embraces a number of socially conservative beliefs about LGBTQ+ people and women’s reproductive rights.
The agreement states that Onward Christian Counseling Services is grounded in the belief that sex is offensive to God if it is not between a man and a woman married to each other. It puts being gay, bisexual or transgender in the same category as someone who has sex with animals or family members, calling all of these examples of “sexual immorality.”
“We believe and the Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God,” says the eight-page business document.
This agreement also refers to “pre-born babies” and says the company is committed to defending and protecting all human life, “from conception through natural death.”
Speaker Johnson’s signature is on the last page. He notarized the document on July 1, 2017. Notaries are not required to read the documents they notarize and are sometimes discouraged from doing so for privacy reasons.
The more you know, the weirder it gets.
Before then, he cut his teeth trying to erode the separation of church and state and abortion and LGBTQ rights as a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund – the Christian right legal powerhouse now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom.
The core of Johnson’s work in the years between his employment at ADF and his ascent to the Louisiana Legislature and then Congress, has been advocating against abortion, for expanded religious freedom for Christians, and against LGBTQ rights. In addition to working at ADF, he was counsel to Louisiana Right to Life, and he started his own legal firm, Freedom Guard, which claimed to “defend religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, marriage and the family.”
Johnson also became the founding dean of a law school established in 2010 at Louisiana College, a Southern Baptist school, which Johnson said would “acknowledge the Judeo-Christian foundation of the legal system.” Although organizers spent $5 million developing the law school, it was never accredited and never opened its doors; Johnson resigned after just two years as dean.
Something tells me these swing-district Rethugs are gonna wish they’d vetted this guy…
Dog Bites Man: Georgia Redistricting Maps Ruled Unconstitutional. Dog Bites Man, Part Deux: North Carolina Enacts Blatantly Gerrymandered Redistricting Maps.
The Supreme Court caused this by eviscerating the Voting Rights Act. The inevitable results are as they intended.
UAW About To Settle Strikes With Auto Companies? Looks like it. While they didn’t get everything they wanted, they got a lot.
- “The agreement grants 25% in base wage increases through April 2028, and will cumulatively raise the top wage by over 30% to more than $40 an hour, and raise the starting wage by 68%, to over $28 an hour,” it added.
- “The lowest-paid workers at Ford will see a raise of more than 150% over the life of the agreement, with some workers receiving an immediate 85% increase immediately upon ratification.”
- The agreement reinstates major benefits “lost during the Great Recession,” including cost-of-living allowances and a three-year wage progression, as well as killing wage tiers in the union. It improves retirement for current retirees, those workers with pensions, and those who have 401(k) plans.
- “It also includes a historic right to strike over plant closures, a first for the union,” the UAW notes.
What do you want to talk about?