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Bernie Sanders on Biden and Gaza

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2024 //
3

Politico reported on Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ views about the Gaza War and the U.S. Presidential election:

It’s no secret that Sen. BERNIE SANDERS (I-Vt.) is not aligned with Biden on the Israel-Hamas war. “Privately, Sanders has felt less enthusiastic in recent days about making the political case on Biden’s behalf as the Gaza crisis worsened,”AP’s Seung Min Kim reports. But Sanders isn’t letting that get in the way of his support for the president: “I understand that a lot of people in this country are less than enthusiastic about Biden for a number of reasons and I get that. And I strongly disagree with him, especially on what’s going on in Gaza,” Sanders told the AP in an interview.

“But Sanders continued: ‘You have to have a certain maturity when you deal with politics and that is yes, you can disagree with somebody. That doesn’t mean you can vote for somebody else who could be the most dangerous person in American history, or not vote and allow that other guy to win.’

Categories Biden, Elections, Trump

Dana Milbank: Gaza Protestors Are Helping to Elect Trump, Who Won’t Tolerate Them

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2024 //
9

Dana Milbank wrote recently about the latest foibles of Trump: his endless verbal gaffes; his inability to stay awake at his trial in New York City; his endless lies about everything.

But the main point of his article is that the students protesting against Israel and calling Biden “Genocide Joe” are helping to elect Trump.

Trump will be far harsher towards student protestors than Biden and far closer to Netanyahu. Trump promises to use the National Guard to crack down on student protestors and to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.

He wrote that Trump:

….said he would change the law to reverse “a bias against White” people: “I think there is a definite anti-White feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed.” He walked away from his previous support for a Palestinian state, saying “I’m not sure a two-state solution anymore is going to work.” And he said he wouldn’t hesitate to use the National Guard against pro-Palestinian protesters while also leaving open the possibility of using the broader U.S. military against them.

Those last Trump positions — the restoration of white power, the rejection of a Palestinian homeland, the willingness to mobilize troops against peaceful demonstrators — show how deeply misguided those on the far left are as they protest Biden’s policies on Gaza. Their frustration with the president’s support for Israel is understandable. But in making Biden the enemy, including with chants of “Genocide Joe,” the plans to trash the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the proliferation of vows of the “uncommitted” never to vote for Biden, they are in effect working to elect Trump. This isn’t principled protest; it’s nihilism.

They are working to help return to office an authoritarian who just last week said the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville was “like a peanut compared to the riots and the anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our country.” In recent months, Trump said Israel should be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza and boasted about cutting off aid to Palestinians. And he has vowed, if elected, to reimpose his travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and “expand it even further.”

For those student protesters too young to remember, this is the guy who led the anti-Muslim “birther” campaign against President Barack Obama; who claimed thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks; who said “Islam hates us” and employed several anti-Muslim bigots in his administration; who wanted to have police surveillance of U.S. mosques; who called for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”; who retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda videos by a white supremacist; and who told figures such as Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

So it’s entirely consistent that, in Wisconsin on Wednesday, he said that he’s “restoring the travel ban, suspending refugee admissions and keeping terrorists the hell out of our country.” He went on: “We’ve seen what happened when Europe opened their doors to jihad. Look at Paris, Look at London. They’re no longer recognizable.”
Trump, on Hannity’s show this week, called the demonstrators at Columbia “paid agitators” and “brainwashed.” At his Wisconsin rally, he condemned the “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers at Columbia and other colleges.” He called for authorities to “vanquish the radicals,” many of whom “come from foreign countries.”

None of this should be surprising, either, for this is the same guy who called thousands of National Guard troops to Washington and federal police to Oregon to combat racial-justice demonstrators after the George Floyd killing; who held a Bible-wielding photo op in Lafayette Square after authorities cleared a peaceful demonstration with tear gas; who, according to his own former defense secretary, suggested to military leaders that they shoot demonstrators; who calls the free press the “enemy of the American people”; who defended the “very fine people” among the Nazis in Charlottesville and who called those convicted of attacking the Capitol “hostages.”

Yet the pro-Palestinian activists, through their actions, would return the author of this ugliness to the White House. They must have been doing for the last eight years what Trump has been doing in court the last three weeks: napping.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Higher Education, Trump

Michael Tomasky: Does Joe Biden Have “Absolute Immunity?” If He Does…

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
19

Michael Tomasky came up with an interesting thought. Writing in The New Republic, he speculated on what Joe Biden could accomplish if the Supreme Court rules that Presidents have absolute immunity for anything they do in their official capacity. Time for Dark Brandon!

During last week’s oral arguments in United States v. Trump, it sure sounded like there might be five Supreme Court justices willing to conclude that a president should indeed have lifetime immunity from legal reprisal for official acts committed as president. This prospect is terrifying because it would hand a President Trump a nearly blank check to do anything he wants—to the Constitution, to his political opponents, to the executive branch—and there will be no way to stop him unless 67 votes emerge in the Senate to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors and remove him from office, which seems a near impossibility, given Republicans’ excessive fealty to and fear of the man and his movement.

But then it occurred to me over the weekend: Well, wait a second. Donald Trump isn’t president. Joe Biden is. And if presidential immunity for official acts were to apply to a future President Trump, would it not also apply to current President Biden?

Of course it would. And I hope that fact has them doing some thinking in the Biden White House. Democrats should drive the point home to Republicans and the nation that two can play this game.

What “official acts” might Biden undertake once Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and possibly John Roberts declare him to be above the law? Well, let’s have some fun here.

Let’s start with the Supreme Court itself. Biden could wake up one day and announce that the court should have 13 members, or 15, and he could set about appointing the new associate justices and doing his best to ram them through the Senate, offering Joe Manchin trillions in economic development for West Virginia to secure the retiring senator’s support, between now and Election Day.

Politically risky? Sure. But maybe not as politically risky as most pundits would assume—and not nearly as costly to the republic as the things Trump is contemplating doing. Remember, the Constitution calls for no set number of justices. Biden would be within even his pre-immunity rights to try to change it. Two polls came out last fall asking respondents whether they’d favor court expansion, and the affirmative view prevailed in both: It was 54-46 in one, and 44-35 (with 22 percent having no opinion) in the other. That looks like a winnable political fight to me.

Biden would need only to make two arguments. Number one, this court delegitimized itself when it took away a half-century-old right, the right to a safe and legal abortion, in the Dobbs ruling. Every one of the justices who voted to strip that right away from women vowed in his or her confirmation hearing about their deep respect for precedent. They all lied. Number two, this very court gave me the power to do this! I’m only doing what this very Supreme Court just ruled a president was within his rights to do.

Okay. We all know Biden is not going to do that. He’s too respectful of tradition, and Democrats are too fearful of the right-wing noise machine, which would kick into an unprecedented outrage gear if Biden actually tried to make use of the tools the Supreme Court just handed him.

But here’s my point. If this court were to give presidents a grant of immunity for official acts, Biden should most certainly use the occasion to play some hardball. Make some threats about what he might do with this power. Get the American public thinking about some things they just don’t think about enough, leading public opinion in the direction of reforming aspects of our democratic system that badly need reform.

Take the Electoral College. Democrats have won seven of the last eight presidential elections, in popular vote terms, but this archaic and reactionary system that was put into place to give presidential candidates from slaveholding states an advantage has helped elect two Republicans who lost the popular vote.

I don’t think Biden should just unilaterally end the Electoral College—although, if he had immunity for all official acts, he could certainly give it a whirl, let conservatives bring a civil lawsuit, and see what his new 13-member Supreme Court thinks of the idea.

Less audaciously, he could certainly find some legal way to put an end to all these MAGA-driven attempts to seat alternate electors in states whose outcomes they dispute, which they did in seven states in 2020 and by all accounts are preparing to do again this year. Yes, the GOP-led House would impeach him, but so what? There’d never be 67 votes in the Senate to convict. And as with court expansion, if it were clear that he had really won the disputed states, public opinion would be on Biden’s side, and he’d have pushed the Overton window dramatically in the direction of eventual abolition of the Electoral College.

Okay, this, too, is a little out there for Biden. More seriously, he could use an immunity grant to issue a series of rulings and orders that would be aimed toward two ends: one, shoring up some of his policy decisions against the inevitable Trump reversals should Trump be elected, and two, preemptively making it harder for Trump to do some of the things that the infamous Project 2025 pledges he will do.

On the former, for example, the Biden administration could undertake a number of administrative moves on the civil rights and labor fronts to make it harder for Trump to undo what Team Biden has done. And on the latter, Biden can find a way to make it basically impossible for Trump to implement his so-called Schedule F plans, under which Trump would give himself the authority to fire more federal workers and replace them with lackeys. And that’s just for starters. With immunity for official acts, Biden could preemptively defang a lot of what promises to be undemocratic and authoritarian about a Trump second term.

Of course, the Supreme Court might not even issue a ruling on immunity. It might just remand it back to the Washington, D.C., appeals court that ruled in February that Citizen Trump was not immune from prosecution—that is, the high court’s real intent may just have been to delay the prosecution of Trump on January 6 insurrection charges, not to shield him from prosecution.

But I hope we’ve all learned by now never to underestimate the cynical perfidy of this court majority. They may well limit presidential immunity, thinking they’re helping Trump remake the country in his fascist fashion. They’ll calculate that the old institutionalist Biden would never use his new powers in the closing months and weeks of his term. It would be delicious to see him prove them wrong.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: Biden Won the War on Crime!

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
15

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, a website for Never Trumper Republicans that has some of the best writing on the current state of politics. In this post, Last explains that Trump presided over a period of crime “American carnage,” Trump called it), but crime has dropped during Biden’s term in office.

Last writes:

Remember the bad old days when people lost their minds about the crime wave Joe Biden had unleashed on America with his woke whatever-whatever policies?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

There was so much of this. 

Well I’ve got some great news for you: Joe Biden has won the war on crime.

Here’s a headline from the WSJ that Heather Mac Donald might want to see: Homicides Are Plummeting in American Cities.

And this isn’t a one-time drop. It’s an acceleration of a trend that began in 2023.

How many stories have the Washington Examiner and the WSJ op-ed page written about these facts?

I’ll let you guess. But wait—there’s even more good news.

The “Biden crime wave” was always proffered in bad faith because the “crime wave” appeared in 2020, while Donald Trump was president: 2020 saw the largest rise in the murder rate in American history.

Now just because Biden inherited a problem doesn’t mean he gets a pass on its existence. When you’re president, you’re supposed to solve everyone’s problems, not just the ones that crop up during your administration.

And here’s the data: All crime is down under Biden, with one exception.

Violent crimes like murder and rape? Down. Property crimes like burglary and theft? Down. Crime in cities? Down. Crime in rural areas? Down.

The lone exception is that car theft in metropolitan areas has gone up. That’s it.

Like the man said: Take the W.

In Donald Trump’s final year in office the murder rate rose by 30 percent, which was the largest jump in U.S. history. Over Joe Biden’s last 16 months, we’ve had the biggest drop in the murder rate in U.S. history.

You are better off now than you were four years ago.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Data, Elections, Fraud, Hoax, Safety, Trump

Biden Sends $16 Billion to Texas for Clean Energy and Infrastructure: No Gratitude!

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
12

Texas is represented by some loathsome public officials (looking at you, Governor Abbott, Lt. Gov. Patrick, and Senator Ted Cruz). They have denounced President Biden in every imaginable way. Yet the Biden administration is sending $16 billion to Texas for clean energy and infrastructure. Texas Republicans voted against the legislation but they will gladly take the dollars and the new jobs. (All the red states are getting funds from Biden’s bills that they opposed, while taking credit for them.) And they will continue to insist that climate change is a hoax.

Chris Tomlinson writes in The Houston Chronicle:

Delivering reliable, affordable and sustainable electricity wouldn’t be difficult if officials in Austin and Washington worked together. The challenges are not technological or economic; they are about setting priorities.

Pablo Vegas, chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, promised a new approach to grid planning on Tuesday, promising to better track the growing demand for power from industry.

“We need to accelerate aspects of our planning processes and be able to look further into the future, anticipate what’s coming, because it still takes three to six years to build transmission,” Vegas said.

The Legislature ordered ERCOT to start considering long-term proposals to add load to the grid rather than relying only on finalized plans. The new approach makes demand forecasts look much, much larger but also less reliable because not all proposed projects come to fruition.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is offering Texans billions of dollars to fortify the electric grid, reduce electricity bills and cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the administration promised to upgrade 100,000 miles of transmission lines.

The Environmental Protection Agency also gave $249.7 million to the Texas Solar For All Coalition and  $156.1 million to the Clean Energy Fund of Texas this week to provide solar energy equipment to low-income communities.

The EPA has also granted $104 million in federal funds to 19 Texas school districts to purchase 288 electric school buses. The EPA grants are part of the $16 billion the federal government has committed to clean energy projects in Texas that have created 23,000 jobs.

The money comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, which Texas Republicans vehemently opposed. The massive investment in energy and manufacturing is intended to grow the economy while fighting climate change.

Past investments led Waaree Energies to invest $1 billion in a solar panel manufacturing facility near Houston, creating 1,500 jobs. San Antonio has committed $30 million to build, with federal help, the largest municipal onsite solar project in Texas. Diligence Offshore Services announced in August it would invest $1.23 billion to open an offshore wind support and manufacturing facility off the coast of Port Arthur.

Climate change, though, is still missing from Vegas’ and ERCOT’s lexicon. He’s happy to talk about the growing electricity demand from artificial intelligence and fossil fuel facilities but never mentions the residential demand during climate change-driven extreme weather. That’s what causes record-setting peaks that can trigger outages.

Nationwide, weather caused 80% of the power outages since 2000, and the frequency of blackouts has doubled in the past decade, according to data collated by research nonprofit Climate Central. Texas experienced the most weather-related outages, and the pace is accelerating.

Improving the grid to meet growing industrial electricity demand is quite different from building a system that can withstand a changing climate. Adding more power generation and transmission lines is not enough when facing stronger hurricanes, larger wildfires, colder winter storms and hotter summers.

ERCOT’s planning will remain flawed until officials start preparing for more polar vortexes like 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, rain events like Hurricane Harvey and heat waves like last summer’s.

Transitioning to clean energy and building resilient generation plants and transmission lines offer huge economic opportunities. BlackRock, the world’s largest financial manager, says the world spent $1.8 trillion on the energy transition in 2023 but will need to spend $4 trillion annually by the mid-2030s.

Vegas never mentions climate change because the Republican elected officials who oversee him call it a hoax. Texas will never chart a strong economic course until we have a governor, lieutenant governor and speaker who recognize the greatest threat yet to human prosperity….

Categories Biden, Economy, Elections, Environment, Funding, Republicans, Texas

Joel: Why Does the Media Lie About the Economy?

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2024 //
27

Our reader is a retired union worker who follows economic and political news closely. He lives on long Island in New York. He wrote this comment in response to Jonathan V. Last’s article about the media’s insistence on saying that good economic news is “bad for Biden.” His response: “It’s about time!”

Joel wrote:

What we call MSM is owned by very wealthy people whose interests will not be hurt by a Trump re-election. Tax cuts for the wealthy don’t trickle down and never have, but they go into his and their pockets . But even a more benign explanation is that Trump is good for the business of the Washington Post , the New York Times , CNN… All with increased readership and thus advertising sales. Generated by the buffoon.

The jobs report was released on Friday the 5th showing a remarkable stretch of below 4% unemployment not seen since ” we partied like it was 1965″ . Showing millions of more Jobs created on top of all the Jobs recovered since the Covid recession. Jobs recovered in record time for any recovery. After a recession business close employees who were employed have moved on it took from 2010 till 2017 to just recover the Jobs lost in the great recession.

The US has a higher growth rate and lower inflation than almost the entire G20. We have been told by the MSM (not just Right Wing Media ) that the 10s and 10s of millions who either went to work or changed jobs during the recovery, don’t really care about easily getting a Job and changing Jobs for better paying Jobs. Don’t care that the real (inflation adjusted) median wage actually exceeded inflation by a few dollars a week. That most of those raises went to non-supervisory workers. In other words the working class. Not the upper middle class and the wealthy. What they care about we were told was inflation that subsided almost as quickly as it arose. Inflation that was due to supply shortages of Labor and Materials generated by Covid shut downs at home and overseas. By autocrats overseas manipulating oil prices to see an autocrat elected in America. Not due to the typical wage price spirals of the past. Inflation that saw corporations because of the hysteria generated in the media feel free to boost profits by raising prices far and beyond any increase in Labor or material costs.

Laughing in many Corporate Board Rooms that the people have been duped to expect inflation and we are going to give it to them as corporate profits rose to record levels not seen since WW2 and profits still are near record highs. I thought I could sleep after Biden was elected. Garland dispelled that hope quickly. So on Sunday the 7th two days after the employment report , I am up at 4AM. I tuned to CNN . They ran a story I thought was about the fantastic employment report that quickly turned to “but this may not be good for Biden”. And then for the next 8 minutes of perhaps a 10 minute segment diverted to the”oh but inflation”story.

I will say this again !!!! when Reagan declared morning in America inflation was 4.3% not 3.5% as now. Un-employment was still at 7.8% not 3.8% as now . Mortgage rates were at 13% not 7%. Biden compared to the Reagan administration should be declared the second coming by the media.

But it gets worse. As I pointed out by November of 2021 and several times since on this Blog and elsewhere. The media was hyping inflation beyond any reality. The National price of Gas before Putin was $3.21 a gallon as people went back to living their lives after Vaccinations and Oil fields had not fully opened!!!!!. Yet the NY Times , CNN and PBS found people who used a 1000 gallons of milk or Gas a week to highlight the impacts of inflation . Worse the Picture in the NY Times on line was of a station that had to be in the Pacific off the Coast of California with gas at $5.99. As their own writer Niel Irwin pointed out the price of Gas was CHEAPER than it was for 4 whole years from 2011 till 2014 when the Euro crisis tanked oil prices. Pointed out that workers were working significantly fewer hours to fill that tank than in 2011-14 when the National Average never went below $3.60 and went as high as $3.90.

So imagine me waking up two Sundays ago to see the picture on that CNN segment with gas prices at $5.39 a gallon . The National Price was $3.50 . I had paid $303 a gallon in Trumplandia Long Island (Commack ) on the Friday before. I had paid $3.13 a gallon in Hicksville LI to fill my wife’s car the day before the Employment report . I rewound the TV and paused the TV to snap a picture of the $5.39 cent gas on my cell phone. The following Thursday I filled up in Elmont Long Island at an Exxon station cash or credit $3.15. Long Island is not Texas it has new Wind Mills going up , not oil wells and refineries. The inflation report that rattled Wall Street last week was a whopping 3.5% up 2/10ths from its recent lows in December of 2023 . Not exactly historically high and food inflation was 1.2% year over year .

But again the other day Niel Irwin now writing for Axios (?) came to the rescue with an interesting tidbit. This gets a little nerdy. As Krugman points out rents are responsible for 1/3 of the Consumer price index. The US Labor Department computes rents with a factor no or few other Foriegn Economies do “Owner Equivalent Rent”. Something that does not exist in the real world and no body ever actually pays. It is what you would have to pay to rent your own home. If you had to rent it. But I don’t rent my own house I own it (and the mortgage is free and clear ). Neil Irwin pointed out that back in January the BLS changed the way it computes this fictional cost. It added 5% more single family homes and thus 5% fewer less expensive multi family homes and condos to the mix. As detailed in an Email from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that soon got deleted.  Now this may be a perfectly legitimate statistical change from their view point . But it is like declaring Ketchup a vegetable . Forcing you to compare apples to oranges.

Rent increases across the Nation have moderated significantly . “BLS data on rents for new tenants out today(4/17) show they rose just 0.4% over the last four quarters, marking the slowest pace of advance since 2010. The largest and most important component of the consumer price index is likely soon to follow them lower.” Dean Baker WELL MORE BAD NEWS FOR BIDEN

Categories Biden, Economy, Elections, Fake News, Media

Jonathan V. Last: Why Is a Good Economy Bad for Biden? Media Muddle.

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2024 //
16

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, an excellent Never Trumper site. He noticed a curious phenomenon. Whenever there’s good economic news, the mainstream media worries that good economics news is bad news for Biden? What?

He writes:

We’ve reached the ne plus ultra of Here Is Some Good News and Also Why It’s Bad for Biden headline writing. I present to you an April 13 story in the Washington Post by Abha Bhattarai and Tyler Pager. (Don’t click the link yet.)

The piece is about the current economic indicators we’re seeing in the March reports: Job growth, wage growth, consumer spending—all headed in the right direction. The economy is, the piece declares, “booming.”

Now, are you ready for the two headlines the Post gave the piece?

Before I make your head explode, this is the part where I say that you should join Bulwark+ because we don’t do happy talk, but we also don’t pull the type of nonsense where we say “Puppies were spotted at the White House, here’s why that’s bad for Biden.” 

If we want a better media, we have to build it. That’s what we’re doing here and we’d love it if you joined us.

Okay, so back to the Post.

Here’s Headline #1:

And here’s Headline #2:

Here is a real sentence written by a real person at the Washington Post: “The economy’s unfettered strength is becoming more of a political liability for the White House.”

Are you forking kidding me?

We are deep into heads-I-win, tails-you-lose territory. Would it also be a political liability for the White House if, I dunno, we were experiencing deflation and the economy was shrinking? If unemployment was rising? If wage growth was stagnant?

Pray tell, describe the economic conditions which augur political benefits for the Joseph Robinette Biden?

My two complaints:

(1) The piece is wrong on the merits: We have seen a small—but measurable—increase in Biden’s poll numbers over the last month. He is not being harmed by the economy. Or at least, his political prospects are improving, so if the economy is causing him harm, that debit is being overbalanced by something else that’s working in his favor.

(2) The Post isn’t providing analysis, it’s manufacturing a rationalization. As I’ve written before, if you came down from Mars and looked at all of the economic data and had to guess who was winning the election right now, you’d think Biden was on track for a landslide. The fact that he isn’t indicates that something interesting is going on. Instead of investigating that interesting thing, the Post is trying to pretend that everything is normal. Which is what causes them to say, Uhhh, Biden’s not doing so hot. And the economy is great. So . . . here’s why having a great economy is bad for Biden!

1. Oh, who am I kidding: The videotape wouldn’t hurt Trump at all. Sigh.

Categories Biden, Economy, Elections, Media

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The Phony GOP Claim that Biden is Authoritarian

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2024 //
7

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University, who specializes in Italian history and the history of authoritarianism. She frequently appears on network television and writes a blog called Lucid. This article was written in 2021 but remains timely. Both Trump and the Republican Party project their intentions on the other side.

She wrote:

“Biden is an authoritarian,” warned Fox News on Sept. 11, responding to President Joe Biden’s announcement that vaccinations or weekly Covid-19 testing would be required for employees of large businesses.

No matter that Fox News has had a similar policy in place for months. Propaganda isn’t about logic, but about evoking emotions. And in 2021 America, the Republican charge that Democrats are out to take away our liberty is just too effective at triggering anger and fear.

That’s why Republicans and their allies are investing massive time and energy in circulating this political fiction. The alleged threat posed by “left-wing authoritarianism,” and by Biden as a dictator in the making, are now central talking points for the GOP and its media, religious, and political allies.

It may be tempting to dismiss such rhetoric. Biden is hardly a man of the left, and he has made the defense of democracy against autocracy a theme of his foreign policy speeches. Yet we need to take this phony argument seriously. It is designed to take polarization to the next level, by peddling the idea that Commies/Radical Lefties are out to destroy free will, spiritual life, and civilization as we know it. It is designed to depict Biden as an existential threat and foster survivalist thinking. And what do you do to survive? Anything necessary.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans have a formidable media machine that dispenses disinformation such as this to hundreds of millions every day. They know that propaganda works through repetition, but for maximum impact different sectors of society should deliver the same message, with small variations that cater to the tastes of their constituencies. That’s what’s happening right now with the “Biden as authoritarian” line.

Fox News hammers home the threat of socialism almost daily, providing a frame for its audience to interpret every Biden action. The president’s public welfare measures, like subsidies to mitigate the pandemic’s economic effects, become socialist handouts. And mask and vaccine mandates, which follow best public health practices, are evidence for millions that Biden is the Adolf Hitler of our times.

Fox also trots out survivors of state socialism in Eastern Europe, like Rebekah Koffler, to warn that political correctness, intolerance of religious feeling, and education in schools about “sex-related garbage” (presumably sexual diversity and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals) portend the development of socialism in America. 

Meanwhile, right-wing ideologues like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin provide intellectual cover with books like The Authoritarian Moment and American Marxism, the latter of which debuted at the No.1 slot for non-fiction hardcover on the New York Times bestseller list, selling 400,000 in its first week of release.

Faith leaders who support Donald Trump’s sham “stolen election” claims give their twist on the Biden-as-Duce talking point. Evangelical and nondenominational Christians preach the necessity of a spiritual crusade against a Marxist materialist who has seized power. And GOP politicians like Rep. Madison Cawthorn use a term associated with dictatorship to refer to individuals who were arrested for participating in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol: “political prisoners.”

The message that Biden is an authoritarian could lead to more armed actions à la Jan. 6. This is the solution alluded to in a May open letter by 124 retired military and national security officials. It urged Americans to act to “save the nation” from the danger represented by “a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyranny” –that being their characterization of Biden’s administration. Shutting down democracy to supposedly save democracy is in the best tradition of authoritarian takeovers and coups.

This talking point will escalate in 2021-2022. The more authoritarian the GOP becomes —criminalizing protest, suppressing voting, LBGTQ+ and reproductive rights, discarding the rule of law, and embracing violence— the more it will have to label Democrats as the freedom-wreckers.

Democrats must address this head-on, exposing the idea that Biden is an authoritarian as a phony talking point in their public declarations. Unified messaging on this point is key. Because the specter of an imminent left-wing takeover will be haunting American politics, threatening our democracy.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Republicans, Trump

What Did Trump and Biden Do on Easter Sunday?

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2024 //
21

Thanks to our friend Rick Charvet for sharing this very interesting clip from “Morning Joe,” in which Mika B. describes how Trump and Biden each spent Easter.

Trump apparently did not go to church and didn’t have much time for his family. Instead, he spent the day posting comments on his social media platform Truth Social. He posted 77 times. Seventy-seven times. He even posted notes from members of his cult likening him to Jesus.

In what ways is he like Jesus? Jesus was a teacher, a man beloved for his kindness, humility, compassion, and love for those in poverty, those in greatest need.

From Matthew:

Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

But when the young man heard this, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is very hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I’ll say it again—it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!

What did Biden do? He went to church with family.

Categories Biden, Billionaires, Education Reform, Religion, Trump

The Myth of an “Immigrant Crime Wave”

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2024 //
43

Republicans have followed their cult leader Trump in raising alarms about an “immigrant crime wave.” Which, of course, is Biden’s fault.

But as Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria explain at their blog “Popular Information,” these claims are not true. In fact, the crime rate is lower among undocumented immigrants than it is among American citizens.

They write:

Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states. 

In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts. 

The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year. 

Asher found that both murder and violent crime declined in 12 of 14 states. 

The only states that saw murders increase or stay flat, Rhode Island and Wyoming, had a very small number of total murders relative to other states — 28 and 14, respectively. This confirms previously available data from major cities in 2023 that showed sharp declines in murder and a smaller, but still significant, decline in violent crime. St. Louis and Baltimore saw their lowest murder rates in about a decade. Detroit was on pace for its lowest murder rate since 1966. 

Republicans and aligned media outlets claim that undocumented immigrants are driving the purported increase in crime. In a recent speech at the border, Former President Donald Trump falsely claimedthat the “United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Trump has made the issue a central focus of his campaign. 

Other politicians are following Trump’s lead. On a March 3rd appearance on Fox News, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that “[w]e face a growing migrant crime wave because Biden has released into America tens of thousands of illegal migrants who were criminals in their own country.” In Arizona, Kari Lake – a Trump ally who is currently running for Senate – claimed Biden was allowing “literal foreign armies” to cross the border. The House GOP also issued a press release this month with the headline: “Joe Biden’s Open Borders Have Unleashed A Catastrophic Crime Wave Across The Country.”

On Fox News, “migrant crime” has emerged as a coverage staple in less than two months. Host Jesse Watters told viewers in late February that “[t]here is a migrant crime spree killing Americans.” According to the Washington Post, “Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times” in the month of February.

Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona. 

Every act of violent crime is significant, and the modern media environment allows news of individual offenses — like the alleged murder of Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant — to travel widely. But Asher told Popular Information that “discussion of an increasing violent crime trend driven by migrants is lacking in any factual basis.” He noted that “violent crime rates in Texas border counties have remained relatively low and below both the rest of Texas and the US as a whole” over the last decade. That is not the kind of data one would expect to see “if a surge in violent crime was being driven by migrants.” Therefore, Asher said, “any hypothesized increases in crime committed by migrants is either too small to show up in reported crime data or the hypothesized increases are not occurring.”

Republicans, including the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), are also claiming that “noncitizen crime including, homicide, burglary, battery, and sexual offenses has risen 514.7% since Biden took office.” This is false. 

The data linked to by the NRCC tracks people who are arrested at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that have a prior criminal record in any country. It has nothing to do with new crimes that occurred in the United States. The most common prior convictions for people arrested at the border are illegal crossing and other immigration offenses. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an expert at the American Immigration Council, notes, the CBP arrested over 2 million people at the border in Fiscal Year 2023, which covers October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023. Of those arrestees, just 6,477 (0.3%) had a prior criminal conviction unrelated to their immigration status. 

Researchers who studied the issue have found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. From 2012 to 2022, undocumented immigrants were 14% less likely to be convicted of murder and 41% less likely to be convicted of any criminal offense. Similar research by Michael Light at the University of Wisconsin found lower rates of “homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations” among undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added.]

Categories Biden, Bigotry, Data, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Republicans, Trump
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