#Mike DeWine

[dadsinsuits]

Mike DeWine

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 16, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 17, 2024

In the week since Trump’s disastrous debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, MAGA Republicans appear to be melting down. As Republicans commandeer the disaster news, the Democratic presidential nominee appears to be trying to stay out of their way. Harris sat for an interview with media host Stephanie Himonidis Sedano, known as “Chiquibaby,” of the Spanish-language U.S. audio Nueva Network, an interview that will air tomorrow on more than 100 radio stations.  

For the third day in a row, officials today had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, citing threats that have led to safety concerns. The city has also canceled “CultureFest,” its annual celebration of diversity, arts, and culture, and the local colleges are meeting virtually out of safety concerns. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles has had to close, as has the Ohio License Bureau.

Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said that there have been “at least 33” bomb threats against schools and public offices after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, spread the lie that Haitian immigrants to Springfield have been eating the pets of their white neighbors. DeWine reiterated that the immigrants in Springfield are there legally, and noted that he has authorized troopers from the Ohio State Highway Patrol to provide additional security at the district's 18 school buildings. 

On CNN yesterday morning, Vance admitted to Dana Bash that he had created the story of Haitian immigrants eating pets. He justified the lie that has shut down Springfield and endangered its residents by claiming such a lie was the only way to get the media to pay attention to what he considers the crisis of immigration. Once the pet-eating story was debunked, Vance said that Haitian immigrants are spreading HIV and tuberculosis in Ohio; in fact, new diagnoses of HIV dropped from 2018 to 2022, and the director of the Ohio Department of Health says there has been no change in TB rates.  

That a politician of any sort would lie to rally supporters against a marginalized population comes straight out of the authoritarian playbook, which seeks to build a community around the idea that the people in it are besieged by outsiders. But when that politician is running for vice president, with the potential to become the president if anything happens to his 78-year-old running mate, who is the oldest person ever to run for president, it raises a whole factory of red flags.  

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted the support of racist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg of the Nazi Party for the antisemitic text “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a text fabricated in the early twentieth century by officials in czarist Russia. Rosenberg stood by the “inner truth” of the text even though it was fake. Like Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote, “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.” While Democratic Ohio representative Casey Weinstein has called for Vance to resign, aside from DeWine, Republican lawmakers have not repudiated Vance’s lie. 

Astonishingly, Vance is trying to rise to power on lies about the people of his own state, the people he is supposed to represent. Not only have Democratic politicians demanded that he stop, but also amidst the chaos, the Republican mayor of Springfield and two Republican county commissioners would not commit to voting for Trump. The popular backlash against this lie has also been swift and strong. The Ohio-based Red, Wine, and Blue organization has organized the #OHNoYouDont campaign to reiterate on social media their stance against the division Vance and Trump are stoking. 

Trump seemed to try to regain control of the political narrative on Sunday by posting on social media, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” a comment that looked like an attempt to change the subject from the backlash to the pet-eating lie, the continuing disparagement of Trump’s debate performance, and increasing attention to Trump’s attachment to right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.     

In the days since Trump took Loomer to a commemoration of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—which she has suggested were an “inside job”—the media has paid more attention to the 31-year-old extremist who has been Trump’s close companion since Spring 2023. Loomer has cheered the drowning of 2,000 migrants and called for “2,000 more.” In June she said that Democrats should not just be prosecuted and jailed, but “they should get the death penalty. You know, we actually used to have the punishment for treason in this country.” 

When some commenters suggested her relationship with Trump was sexual, she countered with a truly vile statement about Vice President Kamala Harris. The increasing visibility of Loomer near Trump has made those Republicans trying to run a more traditional campaign beg him to cut her loose, but Trump seems reluctant to distance himself from her. Sam Stein of The Bulwark today wrote that those Republicans worried about Trump being surrounded by conspiracy theorists are a decade late. After listing Trump’s many years of conspiracy theories, Stein wrote, they’re not “worried that Loomer will turn Trump into a raving lunatic. They’re simply worried that Trump might lose.” 

As Trump seems increasingly detached from reality, Vance has become the face of the Republican presidential campaign. He seems desperate to turn the media cycle from Trump and the extraordinary unpopularity of the plans outlined in Project 2025 and toward immigration. It’s a hard sell, since voters correctly note that it was Republicans, egged on by Trump, who killed the strong bipartisan border bill in the spring. On Thursday, September 12, Vance said on CNBC that if immigration were the path to prosperity, “America would be the most prosperous country in the world.” 

Outside of the hellscape in MAGA Republicans’ mind, it is. The Federal Reserve recently noted that as of the second quarter of 2024, U.S. household net worth is growing by a strong 7.1% a year. The stock market is also strong, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 228 points today to set an all-time high. 

On Sunday afternoon, shortly after Trump’s Taylor Swift post and another calling the “failing” New York Times a threat to democracy, as Trump was golfing at his club in West Palm Beach, Florida, Secret Service agents noticed and fired on a man holding a rifle with a scope. Today, Carol Leonnig, Josh Dawsey, and Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post reported that authorities have warned Trump of the risks of golfing at his own courses because of their proximity to public roads, but Trump insisted they were safe and kept using them.

The acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr., said today that Trump’s plan for golfing on Sunday was unscheduled, so the secret service used an emergency plan for protecting Trump. Rowe said the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, a convicted felon with a history of apparent mental illness, did not have a line of sight to the former president and did not shoot. He escaped and was later caught. Cell phone records suggest he was in the vicinity for 12 hours before being flushed out of the bushes. 

Democratic leaders again denounced violence and said it has no place in our country. Observers noted that it was Trump who signed a bill revoking gun-checks for people with mental illnesses put in place by President Barack Obama and that he promised the National Rifle Association (NRA) that he would roll back all the gun safety provisions President Joe Biden has put in place if he wins in 2024. But the Trump campaign called for donations on a website suggesting, as MAGA Republicans did after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, that Democrats were complicit in the threat to Trump. “There are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us,” Trump’s campaign said. 

Unfortunately, two attempts on a president’s life in such short order are not unprecedented. As Tom Nichols pointed out today in The Atlantic, Gerald Ford survived two attempts in 15 days in 1975. But, as Nichols also points out, Ford did not fundraise off the attempts or blame his opponents for them. 

Opponents are pointing out that it is Trump and the MAGA Republicans, not the Democrats, who are stoking violence. Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel noted that in July 2023 Trump posted an address for former president Barack Obama on his social media network, prompting a stalker, and that in four different jurisdictions, Trump’s lawyers have argued that the First Amendment protects Trump’s right to attack the judges, prosecutors, and witnesses in the cases against him, as well as their families. Other’s recalled MAGA’s “jokes” about the brutal attack on then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. 

Trump supporter Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform X, wrote, “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” a post he later called a “joke” after observers asked about the national security implications of a defense contractor who has $15 billion in federal contracts suggesting the assassination of the president and vice president. Musk’s post had more than 39 million impressions before he deleted it.

After his own incendiary post, Musk wrote: “The incitement to hatred and violence against President Trump by the media and leading Democrats needs to stop.” Conservative lawyer George Conway retorted: “What utter nonsense.”  

Indeed, the MAGA attempt to tie the shootings near Trump to the Democrats is pretty clearly an attempt to stop Democrats from talking about the issues of the campaign by claiming that any public discussion of Trump’s own unpopular policies and hateful words will gin up violence against him. 

One of the biggest issues MAGA Republicans would like to stop people from talking about is abortion. Reproductive healthcare journalist Kavitha Surana explained in ProPublica today that every state has a committee of experts that meet to examine women’s deaths during or within a year of pregnancy. Those committees operate with a two-year lag, meaning that we are now learning about women dying after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. 

Georgia’s state committee has recently concluded that at least two women have died in Georgia from preventable causes after hospitals in the state denied them timely reproductive healthcare.

Amber Nicole Thurman died just weeks after the Georgia abortion ban went into effect. She went into sepsis from unexpelled fetal tissue after an abortion she obtained legally in North Carolina. Georgia’s law made the routine dilation and curettage procedure, or D&C, a felony with vague exceptions that make doctors worry about prosecution if they perform it. Reports show that doctors repeatedly discussed a D&C for Thurman but put it off even as her organs began to fail. By the time they performed the procedure, it was too late. 

Surana notes that Georgia governor Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” when the law went into effect, and that it would keep women “safe, healthy, and informed.” Attorneys for the state of Georgia accused abortion rights activists who said the law endangered women of “hyperbolic fear mongering” just two weeks before Thurman died. 

She left behind a 6-year-old son.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[politicaldilfs]

Ohio Governor DILFs

John Kasich, Ted Strickland, Mike DeWine, Jim Rhodes, Dick Celeste, John W. Bricker, John Gilligan, Michael DiSalle, Thomas J. Herbert, C. William O'Neill, Bob Taft, George Voinovich

[mysharona1987]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Liz Skalka at HuffPost:

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Joe and Cheryl Backus have plenty of concerns over the influx of immigrants to this central Ohio city. “They’re giving up on our homeless here,” Joe Backus, a retired 80-year-old, said from a loveseat in his living room, referring to the general strain population growth is having on certain sectors of the local government. “They’re ignoring them.” But the spotlight Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio’s own junior U.S. Sen. JD Vance, have put on Springfield and its estimated 60,000 residents hasn’t helped matters — whipping up tensions here to a potentially dangerous degree after the former president baselessly suggested to a live debate audience of 67 million people last week that foreigners here were eating cats and dogs. It’s quickly upended life, leading to bomb threats and general threats of violence that closed schools and government offices.

“I think here in this town, we’re going to have a — well, you wouldn’t call it a civil war — but an uprising,” said Joe Backus, a Democrat who’s in the minority of this red county that went twice for Trump. “Because I think people are going to get tired.” From a recliner across the room, Cheryl Backus, 67, recoiled at the idea of people associating Springfield with the consumption of pets. “Eating the cats and dogs? No, no, no, no, no. We don’t need — no.” The GOP ticket has made this blue-collar city a Midwestern front in the party’s immigration wars, stoking fears about a reign of terror that includes reckless driving and pet-snatching — all as Republicans continue to blame Democrats for a glut of asylum seekers and illegal crossings at the southern border in an election year when Republicans tanked their own border security bill to help Trump.

At the center of it all are people like Steven Pierre, a 32-year-old who emigrated to Springfield from Haiti at age 12. Now he’s a married father of four and works for Amazon. He has a dog, Baba. “It’s sad, because I gotta hear this, and my kids gotta ask questions about it,” said Pierre, who was building a chicken coop in the back of a pristine white home as Baba looked on. “And it’s like, what do I tell them?” “They’re not here to bother anybody,” Pierre said of the Haitians. “They’re here for a goal and to get on with their life. We’re just regular people. We want to be left alone.” Vance, who grew up an hour south of Springfield in a challenged town he popularized in his memoir, acknowledged last week there was no basis for the viral pet smears. But Vance still told his followers to keep sharing the cat memes these rumors helped spawn.

The vice presidential nominee took it a step further Sunday, suggesting he spread the hoax for the greater good of the country. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said on CNN. Trump also vowed to begin his planned mass deportation of immigrants in Springfield, where the Haitian population is mostly here legally, and claimed to know nothing about the bomb threats he helped stoke. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened,” Trump said Saturday. The rhetoric is beginning to grate on members of even their own party.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has a prickly relationship with Trump, went on TV this weekend to decry the drama surrounding Springfield as “unfortunate” and the pet rumors as “garbage.” He praised Springfield’s population of “hard-working” Haitians, who are able to work legally under a special immigration status afforded to immigrants from countries suffering from civil unrest or natural disasters. Springfield’s own GOP mayor, Rob Rue, said he was tired and angry, and wouldn’t reveal whether he’d vote for Trump in November. All the attention has turned Springfield into a tinderbox. Right-leaning content creators are prowling the streets, hunting down evidence of pet-eating for a $5,000 bounty. Elementary and middle schools were closed or evacuated for two consecutive days last week due to threats. City Hall also closed due to security concerns, as several city commissioners found themselves targeted with threats.

[...] After decades of economic decline from factory off-shoring, the legal influx of Haitian immigrants seeking blue-collar work at factories and warehouses in Springfield struck a raw nerve in a community with a significant number of boarded-up buildings and homes, and longtime residents struggling to make ends meet. An estimated 20,000 Haitians have flocked to Springfield since the pandemic, stressing the city’s housing infrastructure, schools and hospitals. “The people who have lived here pay taxes and support Springfield all their life. They cannot get help, because it’s all about [the Haitians],” said Carol Lawson, 65, who lives a block over from Pierre. Lawson, who said she does not work and collects disability, repeated an oft-cited complaint about the Haitians: That they drive nicer cars than everyone else and appear to be the beneficiaries of generous government support — even though Temporary Protected Status, while it affords a pathway to getting a Social Security card and eventual citizenship, does not automatically confer public benefits like food stamps.

Over the last week or so, the residents of Springfield, Ohio have been unwillingly thrusted into the spotlight thanks to JD Vance, Donald Trump, and the right-wing media’s amplification of the false and racist insinuation that Haitian migrants are eating pets.

Tensions have risen in the town as a result of the debunked and unsubstantiated rumor.

[thoughtportal]

Corruption Scandal in Ohio going on right now!

[an-onyx-void]

Ohio governor signs executive order banning gender surgeries for minors

[thingstrumperssay]

The governor of Ohio, Michael DeWine, (republican, of course) got a call from Biden saying that whatever he needs for Ohio he can get. He declined and instead ordered the cars carrying vinyl chloride to be burned.

Also he got donation money from the CEO of Nordfolk, the train company. I’m sure that’s totally unrelated though./s

UPDATE: Wow. So I read this, left to vote in the Wisconsin primary, and came back and suddenly DeWine decides that yeah, he needs help from FEMA. After two weeks.

FEMA was there on day one but they couldn’t do anything until DeWine declared the emergency in the Ohio state, a state of emergency. Which he waited two weeks to do.

[emperornorton47]

When Biden offered disaster relief, the stupid governor turned him down. Red states elect the least compassionate officials.

[gettothestabbing]

DeWine vetoed House Bill 68 on Friday, which would have prohibited doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors and banned boys from competing in girls’ sports, just hours before the deadline. A review of donations from 2018 to 2023 found that the governor received $40,300 from the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association (OCHA), Cincinnati Children’s, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and ProMedica Children’s Hospital, all of whom support transgender medical care. OCHA donated $10,000 to the Mike DeWine and Jon Husted Transition Fund on Dec. 28, 2018, and another $10,000 on Dec. 7, 2022, according to the report. A transition fund allows candidates to spend donations for “transition activities and inaugural celebrations,” according to Ohio’s campaign finance handbook. Cincinnati Children’s, an affiliate of OCHA, donated $300 on Dec. 15, 2022, to the fund and ProMedica, another affiliate of OCHA, also donated $10,000 in December 2018, according to the reports. Nationwide Children’s, a third affiliate with OCHA, donated $5,000 in December 2018 and another $5,000 in January 2023 to the transition fund. The governor’s office referred the Daily Caller News Foundation back to DeWine’s comments on the bill and his veto. DeWine said last week that he was visiting hospitals that provide transgender procedures to hear families out on both sides of the issue but did not elaborate on which hospitals he went to. Nick Lashutka, president of the OHCA, testified against House Bill 68, arguing that the bill “strips away” the rights of parents and their transgender children, according to The Guardian.

Cincinnati Children’s has a Transgender Health Center that works with patients from five to 24 years old, according to the hospital’s website. The center’s frequently asked questions section explains that patients can get puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones with family consent and does not list an age limit.

[ttpd-chair]

This is great news for trans kids in Ohio, but I think it’s important to know that the governor is considering actions related to gender-affirming care as shown in this quote from the article: “DeWine directed state agencies to begin the rule-making process to: restrict gender-affirming surgeries to adults only, to set up a system for tracking the gender-affirming treatments both minor and adult Ohioans are undergoing; and to prevent “pop-up clinics or fly-by-night operations” from deceptive practices surrounding gender-affirming care.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jack Ohman, Sacramento Bee

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The Trump/Vance myth making in Springfield, Ohio is an exhibition of exceptional moral depravity.

Edward Luce: It has been raining cats and dogs in America. The myth that immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio has triggered an outpouring of memes. An early example showed Donald Trump hugging a kitten and a goose. These were soon swamped by plays on the absurdity of the claims. The silver lining to this postmodern version of blood libel is that humour remains an effective tool. Beneath it, though, lies a momentous twist in American politics. Trump launched his 2016 campaign with an attack on illegal immigration. He has gradually expanded that to include legal migrants who come from the wrong culture. Refugees from Haiti, which Trump once called a “shithole”, are a soft target. Though most of the 20,000 or so Haitians in Springfield are in the US legally, they have arrived in short order.

It is easy to suppose that Trump will lose votes for indulging this pet-eating chimera. But his dark rhetoric masks a calculated bet. Trump’s first campaign was based on federal incompetence: the US, he said, should uphold the rule of law by policing its southern border. His revised case is that US lore must be defended from outsiders. American culture needs protecting from unwanted strangers, even if they are legal. This shift is exemplified by the political odyssey of JD Vance, Trump’s running mate. In his acceptance speech nine weeks ago, Vance said the true US nation could be found in the seven generations of family burials in Kentucky cemeteries. Their America was not so much an idea as a place for which his ancestors had fought and died. “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for a home,” Vance said.

The striking fact of Vance’s speech was not his awkwardly-phrased passage about the immigrant background of his wife, Usha Vance (born Chilukuri). Two of Trump’s wives, after all, have been immigrants. Nor was it his avoidance of American exceptionalism, which Trump has previously depicted as a lie. It was the degree to which Vance inverted what he said about his roots in his 2016 bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy. Then, Vance thought that the people with whom he was raised were culpable for their own plight of relying on handouts and food stamps.

“We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake” he wrote. “Thrift is inimical to our being.” Eight years later, he now claims that the same people are victims of outside forces, as opposed to what he once called their own “learned helplessness”. He has swapped a self-questioning brand of libertarianism for straight-up ethno-nationalism. Each is a coherent but opposite worldview. Vance’s switch is driven by the fact that Trump subscribes to the nativist one. There are plenty more votes in describing Americans as victims than as culprits. Vance’s road-to-Damascus personifies what has happened to the Republican Party in the last eight years.

But will it help them regain the White House? Trump and especially Vance have earned a lot of scorn in the last 10 days for spreading a tale that they know to be a lie. Vance has even defended the pet disinformation story as useful fiction because it reveals a deeper truth. Many of his Ohio constituents believe the story even if it is not technically accurate, he says. Trump once called this “truthful hyperbole”. If it sounds plausible you should go with it.

Democrats will find it hard to see past their outrage about the bomb threats that have closed schools in Springfield in the last week. Mike DeWine, Ohio’s governor, an old-style Republican, is even sending in the national guard to keep its schools open. That should not blind Democrats to the fact that Trump and Vance are following a calculated line. The more America thinks about immigration, which serves Trump, the less it focuses on abortion, which serves Kamala Harris. Those who say that Trump has gone too far are often the people who made that same claim in 2016. It is not a given.

Polls say that most Americans remain open to immigration. But they want the inflows to be controlled and legal. This is roughly midway between where voters see the Democrats and Republicans. The issue remains a weak point for Harris. In that regard, she did almost too well against Trump in their debate last week. Harris distracted him with such skill that he failed to debate her role as “border tsar” under Joe Biden. She will need to tackle that head on. Trump and Vance are playing roulette with real human beings. But elections are not morality contests. Their cynicism over the stolen pet myth may not be as self-harming as it looks.

[Financial Times]

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Marita Vlachou at HuffPost:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) on Wednesday dismissed false claims spread by former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield are stealing and eating people’s pets, citing local officials. In an interview on CBS’s “America Decides,” DeWine said the wild claims first surfaced online. “This is something that came up on the internet and the internet can be quite crazy sometimes,” DeWine said. The GOP governor added that city officials, including the blue collar city’s mayor, Rob Rue, have maintained there is no evidence to support the activity is taking place. “I think we go with what the mayor says. He knows his city,” DeWine said. While DeWine said Haitians in Springfield have filled job vacancies and “work very, very hard,” he also noted that the surge of migrants is putting a strain on the city’s resources. Still, he did not directly answer whether he worried the racist rhetoric used by Trump and Vance could endanger lives of members of that community.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) shoots down the right-wing conspiracist and racist nonsense about Haitian immigrants eating and stealing pets in Springfield.