#bipartisan border deal

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 24, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 25, 2024

The dust is beginning to settle after last night’s New Hampshire primary. Former president Donald Trump won the Republican primary with 54.3% of the vote, netting him 12 delegates to the Republican National Convention. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley came in second with 43.3% of the vote, garnering her 9 delegates. Other candidates together took 2.3%, but none of them won any delegates.

There has been a lot of noise today about whether the New Hampshire results spell good news for Trump or bad news. While the result keeps him in the front spot for the Republican nomination, I fall into the category of observers who see bad news: more than 45% of Republican primary voters—those most fervent about the party—chose someone other than Trump. 

As David French pointed out in the New York Times today, Trump is running as a virtual incumbent, and any incumbent facing a challenger who can command 43% of the party faithful is in trouble. President Gerald Ford discovered this equation in 1976 when he faced Ronald Reagan’s insurgency; President George H. W. Bush discovered it in 1992 when he faced a similar challenge from right-wing commentator Patrick Buchanan. While both Ford and Bush went on to win the Republican nomination, they lost the general election. 

More important than opinions or history to indicate what the primary indicated, though, is Trump’s apparent anger about Haley’s showing. Politico’s Playbook noted that he “rage-posted” about Haley’s speech after her strong finish with posts that lasted far into the night. Ron Filipkowski noted that at 2:19 this morning he was still at it, posting: “NIKKI CAME IN LAST, NOT SECOND!”

In addition to attacking her from the podium, Trump appeared to threaten her when he warned her about “very dishonest people” she would have to fight. He said she was not going to win, “but if she did, she would “be under investigation…in fifteen minutes and I could tell you five reasons why already. Not big reasons, a little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, but she will be under investigation within minutes, and so would Ron have been, but he decided to get out.”

The tactics Trump might have been suggesting became clear this afternoon, when the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Jeff DeWit, resigned after a recording that appeared to show him trying to bribe Arizona Senate candidate and fervent Trump supporter Kari Lake to stay out of the Senate race was leaked to the press. The tape itself was clearly contrived to show Lake as if she were in a campaign ad, defending Trump and America, but it includes DeWit’s pleas for her to stand aside for two years, presumably while the Arizona party regroups with less extremist candidates, and his request that she name her price. 

This sordid story reflects a problem in the state Republican parties as MAGA supporters have tried to take over from the party establishment. In Arizona, challenging the 2020 presidential election—remember the “Cyber Ninjas” who audited the Maricopa County vote?—ran the finances of the Arizona party into the ground. Lake has continued to insist, without evidence, that the election was stolen, and she and other MAGA activists have called for purging the party of all but the Trump faithful. The recording positions Lake as a Trump loyalist fighting against party operatives.

In his resignation letter, DeWit claimed the recording had been “taken out of context” and said he had been “set up.” He noted that Lake has “a disturbing tendency to exploit private interactions for personal gain,” calling out “her habit of secretly recording personal and private conversations. This is obviously a concern given how much interaction she has with high profile people including President Trump,” he added. “I believe she orchestrated this entire situation to have control over the state party,” he wrote.

DeWit said he had “received an ultimatum from Lake’s team: resign today or face the release of a new, more damaging recording. I am truly unsure of its contents,” he wrote, “but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk. I am resigning as Lake requested.”

It seems clear the Trump team is eager to consolidate power behind him no matter what it takes, especially in the face of what appears to be his weakness. Rising authoritarians depend on the idea they are invincible, so being perceived as vulnerable—or as a loser—hits them much harder than it does a normal political candidate. 

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel—who was recorded on November 17, 2020, pressuring two Republican officials in Michigan not to certify Joe Biden’s electors in a county he won by 68% and promising the officials to “get you attorneys”—has urged Haley to drop out of the race. Traditionally, party chairs stay neutral in primary contests. Tonight, Trump posted a threat to donors: “Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country…. Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” 

For her part, Haley has vowed to stay in the contest. While observers point out that there is very little chance she could actually overtake Trump, it’s also true that either Trump’s obvious mental lapses or his legal troubles could knock him out of the race, in which case she would be the most viable candidate standing.

Curiously, what happened to Trump in New Hampshire was what, before the election, pundits suggested could and maybe should happen to President Joe Biden: a challenger would show that he was weak going into the 2024 election. 

Instead, despite dirty-trickster robocalls in a fake Biden voice telling Democratic voters not to show up vote for Biden, he appears to be on track to win 65% of the vote as a write-in candidate—he wasn’t on the ballot—while Representative Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson, who were on the ballot, together appear to have garnered just under 25%.. 

On Monday, Miranda Nazzaro of The Hill reported that the creator of ChatGPT banned a super PAC backing Phillips for misusing AI for political purposes. Billionaire Bill Ackman, who has been in the news lately for his fight against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, attacks on former Harvard president Claudine Gay, and threats to media outlets that pointed out plagiarism in his wife’s doctoral dissertation, donated $1 million to Phillips’s super PAC.  

There was other good news for the Biden camp today, too. Sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have surged by 80% under Biden, with a record 21 million people enrolling this year. Trump has promised to get rid of the program, saying that “Obamacare Sucks!!!” and that he will replace it with something better, but neither now nor in his four years in office did he produce a plan. 

Biden also received the enthusiastic endorsement today of the United Auto Workers union, whose president, Shawn Fain, had made it clear that any president must earn that endorsement. Biden stood with the union in its negotiations last year with the big three automakers, not only behind the scenes but also in public when he became the first president to join a picket line. “[Trump] went to a nonunion plant, invited by the boss, and trashed our union,” Fain said, “And, here is what Joe Biden did during our stand up strike. He heard the call. And he stood up and he showed up.” “Donald Trump stands against everything we stand for as a society,” Fain told the crowd.

More news dropped today about the damage MAGA Republicans are doing to the United States. A report published today in JAMA Internal Medicine estimates that in the 14 states that outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, 64,565 women became pregnant after being raped, “but few (if any) obtained in-state abortions legally.”  

Finally, Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News confirmed this evening that although MAGA Republicans have insisted the border is such a crisis that no aid to Ukraine can pass until it is addressed, Trump is preventing congressional action on the border because he wants to run on the issue of immigration. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told a closed meeting of Senate Republicans that “the nominee” wants to run his campaign on immigration, adding, “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.” “We’re in a quandary,” McConnell said. 

Jennifer Bendery and Igor Bobic of HuffPost reported that Trump today reached out to Republican senators to kill the bipartisan border deal being finalized, “because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” one source said. “The rational Republicans want the deal because they want Ukraine and Israel and an actual border solution,” Bendery and Bobic quote the source as saying. “But the others are afraid of Trump, or they’re the chaos caucus who never wants to pass anything.”

“They’re having a little crisis in their conference right now,”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[kcinpa]

TL;DR Project 2025

Project 2025 has crossed my dash several times, so maybe tumblr is already informed about the hellish 900-page takeover plan if Trump wins office again. But even the articles covering Project 2025 can be a LOT of reading. So I'm trying to get it down to simple bulleted lists…

Navigator Research (a progressive polling outfit) found that 7 in 10 Americans are unfamiliar with Project 2025. But the more they learn about it, the more they don't like or want it. When asked about a series of policy plans taken directly from Project 2025, the bipartisan survey group responded most negatively to the following:

Allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime

Allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry

Removing health care protections for people with pre-existing conditions

Eliminating the National Weather Service, which is currently responsible for preparing for extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, and wildfires

Eliminating the Head Start program, ending preschool education for the children of low-income families

Putting a new tax on health insurance for millions of people who get insurance through their employer

Banning Medicare from negotiating for lower prescription drug costs and eliminating the $35 monthly cap on the price of insulin for seniors

Cutting Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age

Allowing employers to deny workers access to birth control

Laurie Garrett looked at the roughly 50 pages within Project 2025 that deal with Health and Human Services (HHS) and other health agencies, and summarized them on Twitter/X in a series of replies. I've shortened even more here:

HHS must "respect for the sacred rights of conscience" for Federal workers & healthcare providers and workers broadly who object to abortions, contraception, gender reassignment & other issues - ie. allow them to deny services based on religious beliefs

HHS should promote "stable and flourishing married families."

Require all welfare programs to "promote father involvement" – or terminate their funding for mothers and children.

Prioritize adoptions via faith-based organizations.

Redefine sex, eliminating all forms of gender "confusion" regarding identity and orientation.

Eliminate the Head Start program for children, entirely

Ban all funding of Planned Parenthood

Ban birth control services that are "egregious attacks on many Americans' religious & moral beliefs"

Deny pregnancy termination pills, "mail-order abortions."

Eliminate Office of Refugee Resettlement; move all refugee matters to the Department of Homeland Security

Healthcare should be "market-based"

Ban all mask and vaccine requirements.

Closely regulate the NIH w/citizen ethics panels, ensuring that no research involves fetal tissue, leads to development of new forms of Abortions or brings profits to the researchers.

Redirect the Office of Global Affairs to promoting "moral conscience" & full compliance w/the Mexico City policy

The CDC should have no role in medical policies.

"Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism," HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence & by what method.

I'm still looking for a good short summary of the environmental horrors that Project 2025 would bring if it comes to fruition…

[zvaigzdelasas]

President Biden fought on Friday to save a bipartisan immigration deal from collapse in Congress, vowing to shut down the border if the plan became law even as the Republican speaker pronounced it dead on arrival in the House.

In a written statement that came as Senate negotiators scrambled to finalize a deal that former President Donald J. Trump is pressuring Republicans to oppose, Mr. Biden used his most stringent language yet about the border, declaring it “broken” and in “crisis” and promising to halt migration immediately if Congress sends him the proposal.

“What’s been negotiated would — if passed into law — be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” he said. “It would give me, as president, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law."[...]

Under the emerging deal, the administration would be required to shut down the border to migrants attempting to enter without prior authorization if encounters rise above 5,000 on any given day[...]

As the immigration plan teeters on Capitol Hill, the fate of additional aid for Ukraine also hangs in the balance[...]

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, told fellow Republicans behind closed doors this week that Mr. Trump’s hostility to the plan and his growing dominance in the primary had put them “in a quandary.”

Mr. McConnell, a chief Republican proponent of sending more aid to Ukraine, has been a vocal supporter of the border deal that members of his party have insisted upon as the price of their backing for continued assistance for Kyiv.[...]

The bipartisan team of senators that has been working for months to strike a compromise to crack down on [...] migration and drug trafficking across the southern border with Mexico has come to an agreement in recent days on a set of policy changes. They include measures to make it more difficult to secure asylum, increase detention facilities, and force the administration to turn away migrants without visas if more than 5,000 people attempt to cross into the country unlawfully on any given day.

26 Jan 24

[reasonsforhope]

"In cities across the country, people of color, many of them low income, live in neighborhoods criss-crossed by major thoroughfares and highways.

The housing there is often cheaper — it’s not considered particularly desirable to wake up amid traffic fumes and fall asleep to the rumble of vehicles over asphalt.

But the price of living there is steep: Exhaust from all those cars and trucks leads to higher rates of childhood asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and pulmonary ailments. Many people die younger than they otherwise would have, and the medical costs and time lost to illness contributes to their poverty.

Imagine if none of those cars and trucks emitted any fumes at all, running instead on an electric charge. That would make a staggering difference in the trajectory, quality, and length of millions of lives, particularly those of young people growing up near freeways and other sources of air pollution, according to a study from the American Lung Association.

The study, released [February 28, 2024], found that a widespread transition to EVs could avoid nearly 3 million asthma attacks and hundreds of infant deaths, in addition to millions of lower and upper respiratory ailments...

Prior research by the American Lung Association found that 120 million people in the U.S. breathe unhealthy air daily, and 72 million live near a major trucking route — though, Barret added, there’s no safe threshold for air pollution. It affects everyone.

Bipartisan efforts to strengthen clean air standards have already made a difference across the country. In California, which, under the Clean Air Act, can set state rules stronger than national standards, 100 percent of new cars sold there must be zero emission by 2035.

[Note: The article doesn't explain this, but that is actually a much bigger deal than just California. Basically, due to historically extra terrible pollution, California is the only state that's allowed to allowed to set stronger emissions rules than the US government sets. However, one of the rules in the Clean Air Act is that any other state can choose to follow California's standards instead of the US government's. And California by itself is the world's fifth largest economy - ahead of all but four countries. California has a lot of buying power. So, between those two things, when California sets stricter standards for cars, the effects ripple outward massively, far beyond the state's borders.]

Truck manufacturers are, according to the state’s Air Resources Board, already exceeding anticipated zero-emissions truck sales, putting them two years ahead of schedule...

Other states have begun to take action, too, often reaching across partisan lines to do so. Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, and Rhode Island adopted zero-emissions standards as of the end of 2023.

The Biden administration is taking similar steps, though it has slowed its progress after automakers and United Auto Workers pressured the administration to relax some of its more stringent EV transition requirements.

While Barret finds efforts to support the electrification of passenger vehicles exciting, he said the greatest culprits are diesel trucks. “These are 5 to 10 percent of the vehicles on the road, but they’re generating the majority of smog-forming emissions of ozone and nitrogen,” Barret said...

Lately, there’s been significant progress on truck decarbonization. The Biden administration has made promises to ensure that 30 percent of all big rigs sold are electric by 2030...

Such measures, combined with an increase in public EV charging stations, vehicle tax credits, and other incentives, could change American highways, not to mention health, for good."

-via GoodGoodGood, February 28, 2024

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

I've seen the following headline discussed on several news sites:

And most of the discussion surrounded the issue of why are the terrorists shirtless (which takes the gold medal at the "turn a simple answer into a pointless debate" olympics. They're shirtless to make sure they're not carrying suicide vests, that they plan to detonate in the vicinity of the soldiers). What people should be noting about this, is that these armed terrorists were coming out of a hospital. It's another needed piece of evidence that Hamas has been using Gazan hospitals for their military operations. I am once again encouraging you to think about the UN, the Red Cross, the journalists reporting from Gaza, and every "respectable" human rights organization, like Doctors Without Borders, which operated in these places, and COVERED THIS UP for Hamas for the past 16 years.

Denmark's police announced that they have arrested 3 people (with one additional person arrested in The Netherlands) for planning to carry out a terrorist attack against Jews and Israelis.

Israel's top satire show continues to ridicule the inability of the world to have any moral clarity, of even the most basic kind, when it comes to antisemitism.

And that's how you could have done it, SNL.

In the same context, I watched the House debate on the bipartisan resolution calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign. Some of the arguments against the resolution were absolutely infuriating, either types of "whataboutism" ("But what about all the other things we should be doing to combat antisemitism?" Well, Karen, you can do those, too. There's absolutely no contradiction. At the same time, you say that you've dedicated many years to fighting antisemitism, and yet look at the state of your fight. Maybe holding people in position of educational power personally responsible, maybe making people see that there is a price to pay for taking Qatari money and allowing antisemitism to thrive, would make a difference, on top of those other measures that should be taken to fight Jew hatred) or just repeated, "But free speech!" (as if that line of defence wasn't obliterated during the hearing, when it was demonstrated that other marginalized groups' right to protection has been treated as superseding the right to free speech, on the same campuses where these presidents failed to define a call for the genocide of Jews as harassment, which means that not only did these universities fail to protect Jewish students from antisemitism, they engaged in discriminatory behavior towards Jews themselves).

Thankfully, the resolution passed, 303 to 126.

Here's a reminder of what Jewish students have been dealing with:

On the last day of Hanukkah, I wanna share with you this story. You might have seen this picture before:

This is the Posner family's hanukkiah. In Dec 1931, a moment before the Nazis' rise to power, and when their imminent threat is already well felt by German Jews, Rachel Posner puts this hanukkiah at the window, knowing that the Nazis' headquarters in Kiel, the German city where her husband is the community's rabbi, is situated right across the street from their home. After lighting the candles, she's suddenly inspired to take a picture of the hanukkiah with the Nazi banner in the background. When she gets the picture printed, she writes on the back:

"Judea, drop dead!" says the banner. "Judea will live forever," answers the light.

"Judea, drop dead!" was a part of a common Nazi slogan back then. It went, "Germany, wake up! Judea, drop dead!"

The Posner family heeded the warning signs, and left Germany in 1933, one of the last moments when that was still possible for Jews. The family moved to Israel, and was saved. Once established, they decided to donate the hanukkiah to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance authority, to be displayed at our museum. The family only asked for one thing: to get to light the hanukkiah every Hanukkah. Now, museums are not supposed to say yes to this. If you donate something to a museum, that's it. The artifact belongs to the museum, you don't get to ask to use it, and in fact, for preservation purposes, it's not supposed to be used. But YV understood from the start that our museums is not going to be like other ones, and that when people donate artifcats to us, these are not just inanimate objects. These are the remainders of people who are lost, innocence that was robbed, a world that was destroyed. These are reminders of hope and life in the face of hatred and murder. And we can't take that away from people. That's why YV agrees to this type of request.

So, when I take people on a tour of our museum during Hanukkah, and go into our "German Jews room," and I show the corner where a large "window" bears an imprint of Rachel Posner's photo, I have to explain why the display next to the "window" is empty, other than a small note that reads, "temporarily removed." And why Hanukkah is the only time of the year when visitors can't see this hanukkiah.

This year was no exception. Hanukkah came, and we got the Posner family hanukkiah out of the glass display case... Except this year, after the Oct 7 massacre, things are different. The hanukkiah first traveled to Germany, where it was lit by the families of the hostages asking for their loved ones' return, and then it traveled back to Israel, and from there to Gaza, where it was lit by a great grandson of Rabbi Akiva and his wife Rachel Posner.

This is 41 years old Tal Haimi.

Tal was a third generation at kibbutz Nir Yitzhak. He's one of many Israelis, from which there was no sign of life since Oct 7, though there was an indication that they're held in Gaza (most commonly, their cell phone signal was picked up there). Yesterday, his family got confirmation that he was murdered during the Hamas massacre, and it was his body that was kidnapped to Gaza. His wife Ella is pregnant, and was documenting the course of the pregnancy for the past two months, hoping to share that with him, when he returns from captivity. May his memory be a blessing.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[mariacallous]

Former President Donald Trump participated in a town-hall-style event with undecided Latino voters on Wednesday night, facing a series of tough questions as Americans have begun casting early ballots across the nation.

Ramiro Gonzalez, a Florida Republican, gave Trump a chance to “win back” his vote after he said he was disturbed by the former president’s actions on and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I am a Republican,” Gonzalez, a construction worker, told Trump during the Univision event. “I want to give you the opportunity to try and win back my vote. Your action, and maybe inaction, during your presidency and the last few years sort of … was a little disturbing to me. What happened during Jan. 6 and the fact that you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol.”

He went on to voice concerns that some in Trump’s orbit, namely his former vice president, Mike Pence, no longer supported him.

Trump rejected that any notable portion of his supporters had broken with him and then launched into a series of falsehoods surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection while claiming there was “nothing done wrong at all” and “nobody was killed.”

“You had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me, they came because of the election,” Trump said, discounting his efforts to inflame his supporters after his loss to Joe Biden. “Some of those people went down to the Capitol — I said, ‘peacefully and patriotically.’ Nothing done wrong. At all. Nothing done wrong.”

The former president then criticized Democrats and said they “couldn’t get me,” as he’d done nothing wrong. Trump has, in fact, been indicted twice on felony charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

He said Wednesday night that he believed many people remained tremendously loyal to his presidential bid, including Latinos.

“Maybe we’ll get your vote,” he added to Gonzalez. “Sounds like maybe I won’t, but that’s OK, too.”

The encounter was just one of many tough questions from undecided voters, many of whom stood stone-faced as Trump relied on falsehoods and fear common at rallies he holds before much more vocal supporters. When one voter asked Trump why he ordered Republicans to tank a bipartisan border deal that would have helped shore up funding along the border with Mexico, he refused to answer and instead blamed Democrats for poor management of American cities.

Another person asked Trump if he truly believed the lies that were spread about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating neighbors’ pets.

“This was just reported. I was just saying what was reported,” Trump fired back. “And [they are] eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”

[kaapstadgirly]

US Senate unveils $118bn deal on border, aid for Israel and Ukraine

"The United States Senate has unveiled a $118bn bipartisan deal that would boost border security and provide wartime aid for Israel and Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden and Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate have been pushing to resupply Ukraine with wartime aid but have faced resistance from conservative Republicans who have insisted on measures to tackle illegal immigration at the border with Mexico.

The bill announced on Sunday would provide $60bn in aid to Ukraine, whose efforts to push back Russia’s invasion have been hampered by a halt in US shipments of ammunition and missiles.

The deal would also provide $14.1bn in military aid to Israel: $2.44bn to address security in the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Houthi rebels have launched dozens of attacks on commercial shipping, and $4.83bn to support partners in Asia where tensions have spiked between China and Taiwan."

[simply-ivanka]

President Joe Biden has blamed Donald Trump for sinking a bipartisan bill delivering billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine along with stricter immigration policies, after Republicans signalled their opposition to the deal under pressure from the former president. The legislation worth $118bn agreed on Sunday by Democratic and Republican negotiators in the Senate could be the last chance for the Biden administration to secure new military support for Ukraine in its defence against Russia’s invasion — alongside other national security goals including aid to Israel and Taiwan. It also marks a rare compromise on efforts to curb immigration through the border with Mexico, including restrictions on asylum, which has been a rallying cry for Republicans and a political liability for Democrats throughout Biden’s presidency.

Biden has authority to close the border and restrict border crossings without action by Congress.

He needs the bill for one reason and that is to funnel money to Ukraine!

Trump 2024

[izooks]

Trump is a loser on the Issues:

Abortion: keeps flip flopping

Border: Killed bipartisan border deal

Crime: He’s a convicted criminal

Defense: He was AWOL on January 6

Economy: Lost 2.7 millions jobs

Family Values: Hush money to porn star

Debt: Added $7-8 trillion in debt

[vbartilucci]

In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November.

So, to repeat that, the former president is telling Republicans not to fix the border issue...so he can complain, seven to nine months from now, that it's not fixed.

Republicans don't want to fix anything, they only want to complain that nothing's fixed.

Do they not realize that it's much better to list all the things you DID fix?

Not that they can., that is.

[tomorrowusa]

Bad news for Republicans: violent crime is down across most of the US.

Donald Trump and far right media want people to believe there is a massive crime wave sparked by hordes of bloodthirsty migrants charging in waves across the southern border. In fact, the spike in crime which began with Trump's botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

To hear the latest version of Donald Trump’s “American carnage” narrative of a country lost without him, you would think law-abiding citizens are cowering in their homes or stockpiling weapons to deal with a massive crime wave that’s due to illegal border crossings caused by various nations emptying their prisons and by leftist “Soros-funded” prosecutors gleefully opening our own penitentiaries. The idea of an ongoing crime wave is incorporated into all sorts of MAGA rhetoric, including claims that prosecutors pursuing cases against Trump in New York, Atlanta, Florida, and Washington, D.C., should instead be frantically trying and jailing predators who are cavorting on the streets. The alleged threat of murderous “animals” who entered the country illegally has been crystalized by Republican agitprop about the tragic death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was murdered while jogging, allegedly by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant. But graphic, horrifying anecdotal evidence does not an actual crime wave make. And the more we learn about what’s actually happening in our major cities, the clearer it is that the surge in violent crime that did occur during the COVID-19 pandemic continues to subside. The COVID crime surge largely ended in 2022. Then the incidence of murder and other violent crimes dropped significantly in 2023, according to preliminary federal data, as CNN recently reported:

Fact check: Trump falsely claims US crime stats are only going up. Most went down last year, including massive drop in murder

To the degree that migrants are involved in criminal activity can now be attributed to Trump's blockage of border security legislation in the House by his spineless minions on Capitol Hill.

Bipartisan border deal hits legislative wall as Republicans say they will block bill

Republicans are now officially the owners of border chaos – not the solution to it.

Back to the featured article...

[W]hen a long upward trend in crime during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s — a true crime wave — finally came to an end, then dramatically reversed. The current numbers are beginning to show that we’re more than likely in a long period of stable (and, by past standards, relatively low) crime rates that were briefly interrupted by the many dislocations the pandemic caused in American life (and police effectiveness). So the myth of a deadly threat to Americans stemming from liberal policies on the border and in the justice system is mostly just that. Perceptions of public safety, of course, aren’t always in line with objective reality, and violent crime is horrifying even if it’s not as prevalent as law-and-order demagogues suggest. An October 2023 Gallup survey that coincided with growing evidence of dropping crime rates showed 77 percent of Americans agreed there was “more crime” in the country than in the previous year.

Spectacular crime stories are always going to grab headlines. If it bleeds, it leads has been one of the mainstays of American journalism for centuries. You'll never see a headline in the NY Post like Murder Rate Plummets!.

One thing that is often overlooked is that the "long upward trend in crime during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s" mentioned in the article came to an end in the 1990s during the Clinton administration.

For ideological reasons, Democrats have been too restrained about publicizing their own law and order successes. As with the 1990s, another drop in crime is taking place under a Democratic administration – despite GOP attempts to exploit individual incidents of crime.

Donald Trump himself is a "one man crime wave".

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sahil Kapur at NBC News:

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has chosen Sen. JD Vance, an Ohio Republican, to be his vice presidential running mate, catapulting the first-term senator into the national spotlight.

Vance was an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 presidential campaign, the same year Vance was promoting his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” He has since transformed into one of Trump’s staunchest MAGA allies over 18 months in the Senate, after winning a 2022 race for an open seat in red-trending Ohio. As a senator, Vance is known for his "America First" skepticism of U.S. involvement in global affairs like the war in Ukraine and his opposition to bipartisan deals on government funding. He has also helped lead a rail safety bill across party lines in the wake of last year's deadly train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. And Vance has echoed Trump's attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, which the ex-president has put front and center in his campaign as he continues to promote false claims that it was stolen from him. Unlike some other vice presidential prospects, Vance was not in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, and didn’t vote on certifying President Joe Biden’s victory. In a February 2024 interview on ABC News, Vance endorsed the claim that the 2020 election was problematic and said Congress should have considered competing slates of electors. [...]

An opponent of Ukraine aid and abortion rights

Vance has carved out a niche as a vocal opponent of aid to Ukraine, arguing that the U.S. should encourage a deal in which Ukraine cedes land to Russia in order to end the war. He has dismissed concerns that Vladimir Putin would continue his territorial march through Europe if he takes Ukraine. And while he has continued to express support for Israel, he has broadly stood against interventionist U.S. foreign policies.

“There’s still this fundamental inability to deal with the limits of American power in the 21st century,” Vance told NBC News in April, after the Senate passed $95 billion in Ukraine aid, adding that his colleagues — who have “have presided over the declining relative strength of this country” — should instead work to rebuild it. During his year-and-a-half in the Democratic-controlled Senate, Vance has led the introduction of 57 bills or resolutions, none of which have become law, according to the legislative tracking website Congress.gov. He has co-sponsored many more, just two of which have made it to President Joe Biden's desk. They would have undone Biden's consumer and environmental regulations. Biden vetoed both. Vance has co-sponsored symbolic resolutions that have been adopted by the chamber, including a resolution to celebrate the U.S. flag and the Pledge of Allegiance, and another resolution to honor the life of former first lady Rosalynn Carter. Vance has been a reliable vote with the right flank of the party against most of Biden’s legislative priorities, judicial nominees and bipartisan government funding deals that have been championed by Republican leaders in both chambers.

Like most Republicans, Vance has consistently voted against Democratic-led legislation to codify abortion rights, restore the protections of Roe v. Wade, establish federal rights to access contraception and create protections for in vitro fertilization. Vance opposed and campaigned against last year’s ballot initiative in Ohio to protect abortion access, calling the measure’s passage “a gut punch.” He has rejected calls for tougher gun laws and clashed with Democrats over the politically thorny issue. And he voted to sink a bipartisan border security deal this year that Trump and many conservatives said didn't go far enough. [...] On the one-year anniversary of the Capitol attack, Vance — a Yale Law School graduate — falsely claimed that “dozens” of people “who haven’t even been charged with a crime yet” were being held in “D.C. prisons” pre-trial when, in fact, every person who was held in pretrial custody had been charged and had been ordered held by a judge. Vance linked to a fundraiser for Jan. 6 defendants including Jack Wade Whitton, who subsequently confessed to his crime and was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison.

Trump VP pick J.D. Vance has crafted a far-right image during his time in the Senate, such as opposition to Ukraine Aid funding, support abortion bans, opposition to IVF and contraception protections, election denialist claims about the 2020 election being “stolen”, and opposition to bipartisan government funding bills.

[reasonsforhope]

"In cities across the country, people of color, many of them low income, live in neighborhoods criss-crossed by major thoroughfares and highways.

The housing there is often cheaper — it’s not considered particularly desirable to wake up amid traffic fumes and fall asleep to the rumble of vehicles over asphalt.

But the price of living there is steep: Exhaust from all those cars and trucks leads to higher rates of childhood asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and pulmonary ailments. Many people die younger than they otherwise would have, and the medical costs and time lost to illness contributes to their poverty.

Imagine if none of those cars and trucks emitted any fumes at all, running instead on an electric charge. That would make a staggering difference in the trajectory, quality, and length of millions of lives, particularly those of young people growing up near freeways and other sources of air pollution, according to a study from the American Lung Association.

The study, released [February 28, 2024], found that a widespread transition to EVs could avoid nearly 3 million asthma attacks and hundreds of infant deaths, in addition to millions of lower and upper respiratory ailments...

Prior research by the American Lung Association found that 120 million people in the U.S. breathe unhealthy air daily, and 72 million live near a major trucking route — though, Barret added, there’s no safe threshold for air pollution. It affects everyone.

Bipartisan efforts to strengthen clean air standards have already made a difference across the country. In California, which, under the Clean Air Act, can set state rules stronger than national standards, 100 percent of new cars sold there must be zero emission by 2035.

[Note: The article doesn't explain this, but that is actually a much bigger deal than just California. Basically, due to historically extra terrible pollution, California is the only state that's allowed to allowed to set stronger emissions rules than the US government sets. However, one of the rules in the Clean Air Act is that any other state can choose to follow California's standards instead of the US government's. And California by itself is the world's fifth largest economy - ahead of all but four countries. So, between those two things, when California sets stricter standards for cars, they effects ripple outward massively, far beyond the state's borders.]

Truck manufacturers are, according to the state’s Air Resources Board, already exceeding anticipated zero-emissions truck sales, putting them two years ahead of schedule...

Other states have begun to take action, too, often reaching across partisan lines to do so. Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, and Rhode Island adopted zero-emissions standards as of the end of 2023.

The Biden administration is taking similar steps, though it has slowed its progress after automakers and United Auto Workers pressured the administration to relax some of its more stringent EV transition requirements.

While Barret finds efforts to support the electrification of passenger vehicles exciting, he said the greatest culprits are diesel trucks. “These are 5 to 10 percent of the vehicles on the road, but they’re generating the majority of smog-forming emissions of ozone and nitrogen,” Barret said...

Lately, there’s been significant progress on truck decarbonization. The Biden administration has made promises to ensure that 30 percent of all big rigs sold are electric by 2030...

Such measures, combined with an increase in public EV charging stations, vehicle tax credits, and other incentives, could change American highways, not to mention health, for good."

-via GoodGoodGood, February 28, 2024

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

[stephen-barry]

Vice Pres. Harris said that former Pres. Trump "killed" a bipartisan border bill that would have added hundreds of border patrol, ICE agents and asylum officers and funded construction of a new border wall, among other measures.

This is true.

Hours after the draft legislation was unveiled, Trump urged his party to oppose the bill, even as many Republicans have spent years lobbying for some of the security measures included in the deal.

Learn more:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fact-checking-kamala-harris-donald-trumps-1st-presidential/story?id=113567997

[mariacallous]

If anyone believes that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is “just bluster,” they are deluding themselves. Trump usually says exactly what he wants to achieve and then fights with hammer and tongs to make it happen. Nowhere has this been truer than with immigration.

From the day that he started his political journey in June 2015, going after immigrants—“rapists” who are “bringing crime,” as he stressed on the infamous escalator in Trump Tower—has been his signature theme. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump continued to emphasize this issue. In February, he went so far as to pressure House Republicans into killing a bipartisan border deal that would have given the GOP almost everything that the party has been asking for, just so that he could have an issue to run on.

During his campaign against outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump dramatically escalated his rhetoric. He promised militarized roundups of migrant workers and a massive deportation program. All of these policy promises were sold through dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at both documented and undocumented immigrants, most famously with unfounded stories of Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.

Immigration continued to poll extremely well for Republicans through Election Day. Exit polls have suggested that the problem was on the mind of voters when they cast their ballot. Voters blamed Biden for having eased Trump-era restrictions in 2021, resulting in a substantial influx of people across the border.

Two of the earliest appointments in Trump’s new administration confirm how integral the issue will remain. Former speechwriter and advisor Stephen Miller, one of the architects of Trump’s first-term immigration program—including the travel ban on people coming from certain Muslim-majority countries—will serve as his deputy chief of staff. The “border czar” will be Tom Homan, the former acting leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Over the next four years, we should expect the anti-immigration rhetoric and policies to ratchet up dramatically. Fighting immigration is not only an issue that Trump has come to care deeply about, but it also serves a hugely important political purpose, as the singular theme unifying his coalition and placing Democrats on the defense.

For former President Ronald Reagan, anti-communism served a similar purpose.

When Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980, he brought to Washington a vast and somewhat unwieldy conservative coalition that had taken form during the 1970s.

The coalition was not easy to hold together. Many of the factions within the movement did not have much in common and were frequently at odds. There were evangelical Christians, fiscal conservatives, neoconservative Democrats, Wall Street and Big Business deregulators, and traditional hawkish Republicans.

Always the savvy politician, Reagan understood that he alone was not enough to keep his supporters on the same page. So, besides charisma, the president deployed thematic rhetoric to unite them all.

One major rallying point was lower taxation. Reagan argued that income taxes embodied the intrusive nature of the federal government and undercut the ability of the national economy to grow. In 1981, Reagan pushed through Congress a massive supply-side tax cut that benefited corporations and wealthier Americans.

More important than taxation, though, was anti-communism. Reagan had spent much of his time as a conservative railing against the threat that the Soviet Union posed to the stability of democracy and a nuclear-free world. Reagan had risen to national prominence in the 1970s by railing against then-Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (both fellow Republicans) as well as Carter (a Democrat) for practicing the policy of “detente”—the easing of relations—as all three administrations negotiated arms agreements with the communists and accepted steep cuts in defense spending (even though Carter actually increased defense spending in the final year of his presidency).

Washington’s political establishment, Reagan argued, had failed to stand up to the “evil” threat that the United States faced and was allowing tyranny to prevail.

“America’s defense strength is at its lowest ebb in a generation,” Reagan warned in his speech accepting the presidential nomination at the 1980 Republican National Convention, “while the Soviet Union is vastly outspending us in both strategic and conventional arms.”

Anti-communism was an issue that every faction of his coalition could support. After all, during the Cold War, fighting communists had become as American as apple pie. Although evangelical Christians fighting abortion had little in common with corporate executives seeking rollbacks of workplace regulations, reinvigorating the war against communism was an objective that everyone could get behind. Anti-communism also provided Reagan with an emotional and moral rallying cry that that the president could use to scare and inspire voters all with a single sentence.

One of the most successful ads from Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign against Democrat Walter Mondale—which ended in the last major election landslide (Reagan won with 525 Electoral College votes and 58.8 percent of the popular vote)—was called “Bear.” Viewers watched as a big bear slowly walked around the woods. The narrator intoned: “There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear?”

Simultaneously, anti-communism put Democrats on the defense. Whereas Democrats could fight supply-side economics as a boon to the rich, they were leery about appearing weak on defense, a charge for which they had suffered since the presidential election of 1972, when Sen. George McGovern suffered a devastating defeat to Nixon after a campaign in which his national security credentials were questioned.

On Capitol Hill in the first half of the 1980s, Democrats struggled as Reagan and his Republican minions—such as Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich—railed against their opponents for ignoring the dangers that the Soviets were creating in Central America and Africa. On the floor of the House, Republicans questioned whether Democrats even cared about the nation’s security and insinuated that they were more loyal to the socialist allies of the Soviets than they were to the United States. Democrats fractured over controversial measures to provide military and economic assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras in their effort to bring down the Sandinista government.

Frustrated with the shellacking that Democrats suffered in 1984, more elected Democrats formed centrist organizations such as the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democratic Policy Commission—including figures such as Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and Biden, then a senator representing Delaware—that endorsed investments in new weapons systems such as the stealth bomber and avoided talk of a nuclear freeze.

The council, according to the political scientist Dan Wirls in his book Buildup: The Politics of Defense in the Reagan Era, focused on criticizing planning and rationale rather than spending more on defense. And in its 71-page founding document, released in 1986, the commission proclaimed: “Democrats harbor no illusions about the Soviet Union. Theirs is a totalitarian society that remains an empire in the classical sense.” They sought, according to New York Times journalist E.J. Dionne Jr., “to create a new image of the party …  that includes strikingly tough criticism of the Soviet Union.” There were a greater number of Democrats such as Colorado Sen. Gary Hart publicly acknowledging that the party had spent too much time saying what kind of force they were against rather than “when and where do we use military force.”

By the end of Reagan’s first term—with its military buildup, the cutoff of negotiations with the Soviets, and a series of dangerous incidents involving the superpowers in 1983, such as when the Soviets shot down at South Korean airplane and killed all 269 people on board, including a conservative U.S. congressman—many Americans feared the real possibility of nuclear Armageddon.

He was not just bluster, Americans learned. A 1983 ABC movie called The Day After depicted the brutal effects of a fictional nuclear attack on a small town in Kansas and traumatized the nation.

The film, Reagan admitted in his diary, was “very effective and left me greatly depressed.”

Trump has and will continue to turn to immigration for similar political effect. In 2024, the issue helps to hold serve as the glue for his disparate coalition of evangelical Christians, climate change denialists, business and financial interests, podcast bros, and working-class rural Americans.

He has also placed Democrats on the electoral ropes. Almost nobody in the opposition today seems to be talking about a path to citizenship anymore. Even Harris spent much of her campaign hammering away at the fact that Trump helped to kill the stringent border control bill.

Much of the election postmortem has focused on ways in which Democrats ignored the severity of the problem.

“Many Democrats have been in denial about immigration,” observed David Leonhardt of the New York Times.

Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric is dangerous in different ways than Reagan’s anti-communist message was. By the 1980s—when the kind of intense McCarthyism of the 1950s, which had destroyed the lives of many alleged to be communists, was not as prevalent of a force—the greatest danger was the risk of triggering a war. Trump’s rhetoric, which is stripped of any of the optimism that Reagan always made central, targets specific people who live and work within many U.S. communities.

The only slim hope for those who don’t agree with Trump’s immigration agenda is to remember how Reagan’s presidency ended. When a new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, emerged within the Soviet Union in 1985, the fever finally broke. Gorbachev had good personal rapport with Reagan and sought to spend political capital to improve relations with the United States, Reagan and Gorbachev participated in several major summits, the third of which culminated with one of the most famed anti-communists signing the historic Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, dismantling a class of nuclear weapons and strengthening verification processes.

If there was a voice within the Democratic Party who could recreate this role within the partisan fault lines of Capitol Hill, then maybe that person could create the opportunity for some kind of breakthrough on an immigration deal. The possibility of the Reagan-Gorbachev exchange was just as fanciful in his first term.

The ideal scenario today would be some kind of deal that brought back some sort of limited path to citizenship as well, with Trump playing the role that the red-baiting Nixon played by opening relations with China. One recent model could be the criminal justice reform legislation that members of both parties joined forces to pass in 2018.

But at this point, the odds remain slim. The intensity of Republican partisanship within the White House would make it difficult—some think impossible—for the president to ever see a Democratic leader in this light. As Max Boot noted in his recent biography of the president-elect, Trump lacks the pragmatic streak that was an essential part of Reagan’s character.

As a result, the odds are not good for a breakthrough being around the corner but, rather, for the new administration to escalate the threatening rhetoric and move to implement policies that deport, restrict, and intimidate immigrant communities. Given that Trump won with anti-immigration front and center, even as he increased his strength in Latino communities, the president will conclude that this path is a winning one, politically.

By 1984, millions of Americans were terrified about what Reagan’s policies were doing to the safety of the world. In a few years, many immigrants might be feeling the same way about their communities, as will the native populations of those who still believe that immigration has been a vital element of what makes America great.