Republicans Root for Ruin, Plunder the Public
Sean Hannity was pathetic. The east coast dock workers suspended their strike late Thursday after just three days, ending what many Republicans hoped was a no-win situation for President Biden and Democrats.
Earlier that day, Fox News kicked off broadcast discussions about the port strike threatening the livelihood of small businesses, consumers, and trucking companies. From day one, internet trolls worked to spread panic about nonexistent shortages of toilet paper at retailers.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called a press conference to announce he was mobilizing the National Guard and the Florida State Guard (DeSantis’ private army) to be “deployed to critical ports affected by the strike to maintain order and, where possible, resume operations.”
It is unacceptable for the Biden-Harris administration to allow supply chain interruptions to hurt people who are reeling from a category 4 hurricane.
Had the strike continued into a second week, actual shortages on consumer goods would have made mainstream media headlines crafted to make the administration look bad.
But it was all for naught.
Major business groups and some Republicans leaned heavily on the White House to intervene using the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which affords the president emergency powers to seek court injunctions to temporarily halt stoppages.
Biden repeatedly rejected the notion, banking his faith that the collective bargaining process would lead to a swift conclusion.
Taft-Hartley is near-universally reviled by labor unions, who see it as a weapon that deprives them of one of their biggest points of leverage in labor negotiations.
Invoking it would have essentially meant deflating unions’ enthusiasm for Harris in the hopes that doing so would have been less calamitous than a protracted strike — a trade-off that Biden’s bet sidestepped entirely.
Having lost that opportunity, thanks to the intervention of administration point man Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the MAGA propaganda machine shifted to alleging FEMA aid was not reaching disaster zones in the states.
This misinformation includes AI-generated photos.
The QAnon set has been busy claiming the Helene’s path was directed by the Biden administration. Here’s Miss Jewish Space Lasers…
After Trump’s initial lie about disaster relief in Georgia was refuted by the state’s governor, the narrative shifted to constant repetition saying FEMA’s funds were exhausted because they’d all been spent on immigrants. (Trump repeated the initial allegation throughout the day, despite its proven falsity)
This claim of exhausted funds is, of course, untrue on both counts. While FEMA will need additional funding, it continues working with state agencies in all the impacted areas. And the money for “illegals”(resettlement assistance for refugees) is not drawn from the same account as disaster relief.
President Biden has indicated that the Congress should return to Washington to authorize more FEMA funding, but as was true with bi-partisan immigration reform, GOP leadership says nope.
In a TV interview, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson didn’t seem too eager about bringing the House back for a special session to pass more FEMA funding to give to Hurricane Helene victims. He wanted to wait until their vacation was over, after the election, natch.
Speaking of disaster relief, Olivia Troye, a senior Homeland Security official in the Trump administration, revealed that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after wildfires in 2018 due to the state’s Democratic lean. He relented after being shown the impacted areas were heavily Republican.
Politico’s E&E News also revealed instances of politicization of disaster relief under Trump in Florida, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development Inspector General found that the White House delayed the release of $8.3 billion in HUD disaster aid for Puerto Rico that Congress approved in February 2018. HUD officials told the IG that the White House undertook a review process that it “had never before required.”
The money was allocated in January 2020.
The Trump administration also withheld for nearly two years a report that could have helped push Congress to improve HUD’s disaster-aid program, E&E News reported. The report, completed in April 2019, was released the day before Trump left office.
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No story involving MAGA and money would be complete without instances of grifting.
While the former president is claiming people can’t afford groceries, he’s also selling $100,000 watches. And who could forget the God Bless the USA Bibles at $59.95 each?
Obviously, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Schools Ryan Walter hasn’t forgotten. Having ordered bibles to be put in every classroom in the state, he’s now put forward a proposal to buy 55,000 ($6 million) of them. The specifications in the order match the content of…you guessed it…God Bless the USA Bibles.
They’ll all be bound in leather or leather-like material with an embossed American Flag on the front cover and include “copies of the United States Pledge of Allegiance, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Bill of Rights.”
Word and Way, a substack on issues of faith, says it’s not just any version of the Bible. Oklahomans will be taught from the New King James Version. Given that the Trump endorsed bible is the regular ol’ King James Version, it looks like they’ll be getting a custom printing job…at $145 each.
Choosing the NKJV adds to the constitutional problems of Walters’s budget — so perhaps that’s another reason not to include the Constitution in with the biblical texts. By saying the NKJV is the Bible, Walters would have the state of Oklahoma declare that Jews and Catholics hold an incorrect view of what comprises the Bible. But even among Protestants the NKJV is not always a preferred choice as its readership is generally more conservative and evangelical. For instance, while only 13% of pastors overall use the NKJV, it is used by 25% of Southern Baptist pastors (behind only the New International Version with 26%). Pentecostal pastors also use the NKJV (15%), putting it behind the KJV (45%) and the NIV (23%). But among mainline pastors, it’s not a top choice as they primarily use the New Revised Standard Version or the NIV.
When Walters says the government should spend $6 million to buy copies of the NKJV, he proves he wants the government to pick winners and losers when it comes to religion. He’s saying his faith should win and be adopted and promoted by the state. After all, his father regularly uses the NKJV in sermons at a Church of Christ congregation.
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The family that grifts together…makes money, I think…
CNN revealed on Thursday that it had refused to sign off on a Non-Disclosure agreement accompanied by a demand for $250,000 for an interview with former first lady Melania Trump about her now-released book.
The book’s publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, now says the quarter million fee was included in error. It’s worth noting that:
Records show Melania Trump was also paid $250,000 for a Log Cabin Republican event in December 2022, one of three payments for $250,000 or more that she received for speaking that month, just after the former president announced he was running for reelection, according to Donald Trump’s prior year financial disclosure form.
So maybe that’s her going rate.
Via CNN:
“It’s totally unprecedented. No former first lady has ever done that,” said Kate Anderson Brower, author of “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.”
Anita McBride, director of The Legacies of America’s First Ladies Initiative at American University and a former special assistant in the George W. Bush White House, said that while first ladies have received handsome fees for writing books, such a payment for a news interview is unusual.
“It is a consistent practice with Mrs. Trump to make the choices that work for her and to be unburdened by any past practice by anyone else. She is her own enterprise when it comes to everything in her life,” McBride said. “That’s the premise of her book. I’ve made my choices and not constricted by anyone else before her.”
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RFK, Jr is probably more of an albatross than an asset for the Trump campaign these days, but the old saw about birds of a feather does hold true. At the same time Kennedy announced his support for the former president’s campaign, his law firm executed a “flat fee” contract, receiving $100,000.
Maybe that’s his going rate…
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Friday Finds in the News World
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The details of Trump's crimes lay bare the corruption of the Roberts Court by Hunter Lazzaro at The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places.
John Roberts and his compatriots owe the nation a better explanation than the comically half-assed insistences that democracy itself is secondary to whatever powers a would-be strongman instead imagines himself to "officially" have. Their actions in these cases have been corrupt because they cannot stand on their own logic; there is no way to retain a Constitutional legal system if the executive branch—or the judicial branch—gets to brush off whichever laws they like with a bit of hand-waving insistence that no, those parts only apply when we want them to.
Trump's allies have already announced a plan to "denaturalize" American citizens—to strip their citizenship—based on criteria of their own choosing. Will that, too, pass Roberts Court muster? Is birthright citizenship now to be erased, now that an ascendent fascist ideology deems immigrants and their descendants to be illegitimate residents of the country?
Jack Smith's filing shows the Roberts Court to be not just ideologically captured, but corrupt. There is no way to look at Trump's acts and plausibly declare them to be either Presidential or legal. The court's sweaty attempts to pretend otherwise show them to be as indifferent to democracy as Trump himself is—and shows off how utterly dishonest the court has become in its efforts to amass ever-increasing power for the nation's fascist fringe by stripping those powers from everyone and everything else.
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Mass Deportation - Devastating Costs to America, Its Budget and Economy a report by The American Immigration Council
Beyond the direct financial cost of mass deportation, we also estimated the impact on the U.S. economy. Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, we found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2 to 6.8 percent. It would also result in significant reduction in tax revenues for the U.S. government. In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare.
Mass deportations would cause significant labor shocks across multiple key industries, with especially acute impacts on construction, agriculture, and the hospitality sector. We estimate that nearly 14 percent of people employed in the construction industry are undocumented. Removing that labor would disrupt all forms of construction across the nation, from homes to businesses to basic infrastructure. As industries suffer, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs.
These numbers do not even come close to capturing the human cost of mass deportation. About 5.1 million U.S. citizen children live with an undocumented family member. Separating family members would lead to tremendous emotional stress and could also cause economic hardship for many of these mixed-status families who might lose their breadwinners, jeopardizing their economic and social well-being.
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Anti-Haitian Rhetoric From Trump, Vance Is Impacting Young Haitians by Caroline Val at Teen Vogue
Dr. Nicolas tells Teen Vogue that, if she had to guess, she’s probably gotten more than 20 phone calls from parents and young students in the weeks since the presidential debate, all in Miami-Dade County alone. “I'm talking about first-graders whose friends want to know if they eat cats at home,” she elaborates. “How do you work with parents to better equip their kids to respond to their friends in school asking them such a question? It's been really difficult for young people."
Dr. Nicolas explains further, "Because the whole point of this is it’s supposed to keep you where you are, you're not able to move forward. You're not able to progress and grow and develop, because you're stuck trying to respond to stupid questions.”
In Florida, the state with the largest Haitian population in the US, immigrants from the Caribbean island have lived alongside immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela for generations. Some young Haitians in the state say the inflammatory discourse isn’t surprising. Hannah Celian, a 20-year-old Haitian American based in Orlando and a recent University of Miami alum recalls, “My initial thoughts weren’t of surprise or shock because Trump always spews heinous lies and accusations, but it just made me feel exhausted.”
Coming MONDAY, October 7
