Republicans finally revolt against Project 2025 but cannot excape the vile document's intentions

Project 2025:  "This 900-page proposal from the Heritage Foundation was published last year — with the input of many former Trump administration officials and those with close ties to the former president — to serve as a (dangerous) blueprint for a future administration."

Echo opinion by Governor Larry Hogan, a former Maryland governor, is the state’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, published in The Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness).

I am a firm believer in what might be called traditional American values: rule of law, separation of church and state, and respect for civil service professionals. 

Never before have I seen those core principles more under threat.On the left, the refusal by some to clearly stand up to radicals such as antisemitic and pro-Hamas protesters, advocates of defunding the police, and the open-borders movement has done substantial damage. However, on the right, there is no clearer example of the threat to American values than Project 2025.

This 900-page proposal from the Heritage Foundation was published last year — with the input of many former Trump administration officials and those with close ties to the former president — to serve as a blueprint for a future administration. To call many of these ideas “radical” is a disservice. In truth, Project 2025, takes many of the principles that have made this nation great and shreds them.

On the left, the refusal by some to clearly stand up to radicals such as antisemitic and pro-Hamas protesters, advocates of defunding the police, and the open-borders movement has done substantial damage. However, on the right, there is no clearer example of the threat to American values than Project 2025.

This 900-page proposal from the Heritage Foundation was published last year — with the input of many former Trump administration officials and those with close ties to the former president — to serve as a blueprint for a future administration. To call many of these ideas “radical” is a disservice. In truth, Project 2025, takes many of the principles that have made this nation great and shreds them.

Toxic politics on both sides of the aisle are undermining faith in our system of government. But Project 2025, sends this disturbing trend into overdrive, casting aside the checks on presidential power that have protected our democracy for more than 200 years.

One of Project 2025’s primary targets is federal workers, including about 150,000 Marylanders. Project 2025, proposes to eliminate civil service protections for most of these workers, instead creating more political appointees chosen by the president.

The goal is to remove nonpartisan civil servants, most of whom patriotically do their jobs without fanfare or political agendas, and replace them with loyalists to the president.

Republicans who believe this power grab will benefit them in the short term will ultimately regret empowering a Democratic president with this level of control.

Perhaps more troubling, Project 2025 would undermine the Justice Department by weakening its independence from the president, eliminating the norm that the White House does not intervene in federal investigations. My father was an FBI agent who believed deeply that this work should not be infected by politics. It was that approach that gave him credibility when he became the first Republican in Congress to come out in favor of the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon.

It’s true that the ideal of impartial justice that my father embodied has not always been realized. But that does not mean it should be abandoned by choice and design.

Project 2025, also proposes enacting absurd and dangerous policies that must be rejected, including mass deportations, disbanding the Education Department, potentially abolishing the Federal Reserve, and withdrawing the abortion medication mifepristone from the market.

This radical approach is out of touch with the American people. Most Americans — regardless of party affiliation — have more in common than many realize. They want common-sense solutions to address the cost of living, make our communities safer, and secure the border while fixing the broken immigration system. Instead of addressing these problems, Project 2025, opts for total war against the other side, making it impossible to find common ground.

I still believe that bipartisan progress is possible in Washington, but not if we keep going down this dangerous path and fail to defend what made this nation great. The extremes feed off each other, and the exhausted majority of Americans are left trapped between the crazy. 😲😳😵The way to start to fix the broken system in Washington is to elect leaders who will do things differently, stand up for American values and hold both parties accountable. That is the only real bulwark against extremism.

P.S. Although the Trumpzi extremists finally rebuked Proect 2025, the fact remains....they wrote it....and they cannot hide from the dangers it mapped out to destroy American democracy.

Democrats are over the top elated by candidate President Kamala Harris

Letters to the editor in the Columbus Dispatch: 

Kamala Harris should send Trump her birth certificate. Diversity is how life survives. Trump isn't normal (some would bump this description up to the concept of being "weird").👺💀👽

Echo opinion letter published in the Billings Gazette, a Montana newspaper:

So here is a letter I could never have imagined writing anytime these past six months or more. I am a baby boomer who, having loved my country my whole life, had finally thrown in the towel with the looming cloud of another Trump presidency on the horizon. I aged 100 years watching President Biden in what is now that infamous debate. I thought, oh my God, we are toast. Trump is going to win. But then ❗ came Sunday, with the seismic breaking news that President Biden was stepping aside and handing the baton to Vice President Harris. 😀😎

Vice-President Kamala Harris campaign to Vote Georgia Blue injects optimism with Democrats

ATLANTA, Georgia echo report by Greg Bluestein published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

When Vice President Kamala Harris makes her first visit to Atlanta since she became a presidential candidate, she’ll encounter a political landscape that’s been transformed by President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, just over a week ago.

Key Democrats are no longer despondent about their chances in November against former President Donald Trump. Republicans are promising renewed energy of their own.

And Harris’ visit signals Georgia will be even more hotly contested than expected.

Among those expected to welcome the vice president is Stacey Abrams, who was twice unable to channel enthusiasm and energy around her campaigns for governor into a winning coalition.

And Harris will get a glimpse of the party’s potential reach. Former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, one of the most prominent Republicans to endorse Harris, has become a de facto spokesman for disaffected conservatives. He’s scheduled to be on hand during the Harris event.

The visit comes at a pivotal moment in her nascent presidential bid. Social media is exploding with sunny pro-Harris memes, and her campaign coffers are bursting with fresh donations. Aides report thousands of volunteers staffed dozens of Georgia events for Harris this weekend.

But she is also facing escalating attacks from Trump and his allies, along with mounting pressure to pick a running mate before an August 7th deadline.

In Georgia, Harris and her allies must fight to reassemble the fractious coalition of Black voters, independents, suburbanites and frustrated Republicans who propelled Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia in 2020.

And she must balance the tricky task of running for president on her shared record with Biden even while pushing to create her own policy platform that separates from the president’s agenda without conflicting with it.

Democrats are competing for Georgia with a vast campaign apparatus, boasting more than 170 staffers scattered throughout 24 offices. Harris spokesman Michael Tyler calls it the “largest in-state operation of any Democratic presidential campaign cycle ever.”

It’s fueled a guarded optimism that wasn’t there before. Gov. Roy Barnes, the last Democrat to hold Georgia’s highest office, acknowledged what few party leaders would say publicly a few weeks ago: The race in Georgia was tilting decisively toward Trump.

Former Democratic Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, who was doubtful about Democrats' chances of winning Georgia when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection, now says Vice President Kamala Harris has a "fighting chance" of winning the race for the White House. (Hyosub Shin/hshin@ajc.com)

“Initially, because of all the angst, if I were betting that I’d have to say that Trump was going to win,” he said Monday on “Politically Georgia.” Then came Biden’s withdrawal and Republican struggles to blunt what they call the “Harris honeymoon.”

Now, Barnes said he’s confident that Harris has more than a “fighting chance” to keep Georgia in the blue column.

His advice to her strategists: focus on younger Georgians, “quit worrying about angry old white men” and contrast her background as a prosecutor with Trump’s legal troubles.

“Because who’s on the other side? Someone convicted of 34 felonies and still has felony cases pending here in Georgia.”

A presidential ‘pathway’ - #VoteGeorgiaBlue

IMO, Project 2025 is a Republican guide to fascism

Senior Republicans also say Georgia is suddenly more competitive, but for different reasons.

Georgia GOP Chair Josh McKoon has crisscrossed the state for months warning conservatives not to get complacent, and he headlined a weekend event that drew more than 200 volunteers who trained to be poll watchers.

He said Harris’ ascension to the top of the ticket has “narrowed the electoral map considerably” by shifting the focus from the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to other battlegrounds.

Brad Hughes, from left, Jason Thompson and Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia Republican Party, pick up the state's delegate marker during the final day of 2024, Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Republicans came out of the convention feeling good about their chances of regaining the presidency, but McKoon has warned them not to get complacent. (Hyosub Shin / AJC)

More: “While President Biden had a plausible path to victory without Georgia, it seems virtually impossible for a Harris win without our state,” McKoon said. “So I would expect her to campaign in Georgia to try to establish a pathway.”

Polls throughout the past year have largely showed Trump with a lead over Biden, though the few that have been published since Harris became the presumptive nominee indicate the race has tightened.

Brian Robinson, a veteran GOP strategist who was one of then-Gov. Nathan Deal’s chief advisers, said Harris’ success might hinge on a factor that emerged in many of the polls: lagging Democratic support among Black men.

“I’m open-minded until I see data on that, but it’s my hunch this doesn’t move the needle with those voters,” he said. “I think it’s status quo.”

The 30-30 formula: At the center of Harris’ campaign argument in Georgia is support for expanded abortion rights, which she hopes will both galvanize party loyalists and middle-of-the-road voters two years after Trump’s appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court helped reverse Roe v. Wade.

Sonja Adcock, an Oconee County Democratic organizer, said she’s confident Harris will put forward a plan to reinstate abortion protections “so we don’t have to live in fear of basic human rights being taken away every transfer of power from one president to the next.”

She speaks of Harris as many stalwart supporters do — in lofty terms, as a ray of hope who can “turn the tide” against Trump. But veteran Democrats still warn the vice president faces an uphill battle.

Rick Dent was a top adviser to then-Gov. Zell Miller and other party officials, carving out a reputation as an unvarnished truth-teller. He said Democrats would be foolish to grow overconfident by metrics that indicate soaring Black turnout in Georgia.

“The math never changes. It’s the 30-30 rule — the only way a Democrat can win in the state of Georgia,” Dent said.

That rule posits that Democrats must win 30% of the white vote and Black voters must make up at least 30% of the overall turnout for the party to have a solid chance of prevailing.

“You have to energize the African American vote,” Dent said. “But if you don’t hit those thresholds of white voters, you’re not going to win Georgia.”

Harris’ campaign said it’s battling for voters on several fronts and has opened offices in often-overlooked parts of the state, including rural Jenkins and Washington counties.

Tyler, her spokesman, noted that her journey will mark 15 times that Harris has traveled to Georgia since becoming vice president. There will be more visits to come in the next few weeks, he added.

“We know the days ahead will be a marathon at a sprint’s pace,” he said.

Even the Wall Street Journal critizing former Marine Corporal JD Vance!

Echo opinion letter published in Midland Daily News, in Midland Michigan.

Former Marine Corporal J.D. Vance either received a poor legal education or he has adopted the Donald Trump attitude toward the constitution which is that of disdain.

I heard J.D. Vance say he would have done the opposite of Mike Pence on January 6, 2021. He would have sent everyone home with instructions to seat the alternate (fake) electors and then come back. If that is the kind of character he has, he should not hold any office and should not represent that he has a law degree.

From Mark Brissette, from Sanford, a village in Michigan

And wait....❗😉there's more from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ)...

Get a chuckle out of this Google Doodle on July 29, 2024. 😀😉

THE VANCE CATFIGHT — The WSJ editorial board is joining the pile-on over Sen. JD VANCE’s (R-Ohio) comments about “childless cat ladies.”- published in Politico's "Playbook", by Ryan Lizza, Eugene Daniels, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine.

In a tough piece posted last night, Paul Gigot and colleagues call the comment “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

They see the speed and breadth of the coverage of Vance’s remark as evidence “that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one.”

The WSJ editorial board are unimpressed with Vance’s efforts to clean things up on Megyn Kelly’s podcast yesterday (“he wasn’t at all apologetic”), and they come away with this surprising conclusion about the episode: “One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices.”

And then they move on to attack some of Vance’s other past (👽👺weird) ideas. His proposal that families without children should pay higher taxes is “bad policy” and “bad politics” and would amount to using the tax code “as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values.”

The editorial gives voice to what’s been a quiet murmur we’ve been hearing from some corners of the right all week: Does DONALD TRUMP regret picking Vance? (Ya'think❓😒😵😮)

The Trump campaign “can’t be happy about having to defend” Vance instead of attacking VP KAMALA HARRIS, the Journal writes. They end with a stinging conclusion about how Vance should start using his wife as a surrogate because USHA VANCE “might help persuade swing voters that Mr. Vance respects women more than his comments have made it seem.”

The piece is a notable escalation of the war within the GOP over the Vance pick. The (WSJ) Journal editorial board has sharply divergent views from Vance on foreign policy and trade and doesn’t have much use for his populist bashing of corporations. RUPERT MURDOCH reportedly lobbied Trump not to select Vance, and Vance allies see this piece as simply the continuation of that fight, with the Journal doing Murdoch’s bidding.

Just when the Republican rhetoric cannot get more weird- oh no! "Cat Lady?", is a false analogy by JD Vance

Echo opinion published in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd:

Former Marine Corporal JD Vance is Purr-fectly Dreadful😺😹🐱

Former Marine Corporal JD Vance makes Donald Trump look like he is now enlightened about women. Sure, he’s in a 1959, time warp, like some spray-tanned, comb-over swinger in a Vegas lounge, talking about skirts and broads.

Sure, he filled the Supreme Court with religious zealots ending women’s rights to reproductive health care and threatening to take away access to contraception.

Sure, he has been held liable for sexual abuse, accused of groping and caught talking about his right to grab women by their lady parts. He cheated on his first wife with the woman who became his second wife and then had flings when he was married to his third wife. He betrayed Melania with a porn star while she was home nursing their son and humiliated her again when the Stormy Daniels case went to trial. (See: Why Melania did not give a convention speech. IOW she went through the motions because she had a responsibility to do it. Her son Baron did not attend.)

Sure, his convention beatification was a dated homage to machismo, with Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt off and the U.F.C.’s Dana White introducing Trump as a fighter.

And yet, somehow, Trump managed to choose a vice-presidential pick whose views on women are even more draconian and meanspirited than his own.

JD Vance, he of many names, is off to a thudding start. He went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast Friday for cleanup on Aisle Feline. She sympathetically asked him about his 2021, rant to Tucker Carlson that top Democrats — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and A.O.C. — were “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance explained to Kelly: “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. He’s the Republican Party’s biggest wit since that laugh riot Sarah Palin.

He doubled down on the substance of his earlier argument, that only women who are in a traditional marriage, using their uteruses in a way JD Vance deems proper, can have “a direct stake” in America.

I grew up in a family brimming with military uniforms, police uniforms, altar boy outfits, Girl Scout uniforms, Catholic school uniforms and presidential medals for bravery. We were religious and patriotic and unbelievably proud to be Americans.

And now comes this ridiculous faux-billy, tailoring his beliefs to match his ambition, telling me I have no stake in America?

Unless women are fulfilling their duties as breeders and helpmates, they’re not fully Americans? It’s an un-American stance that’s beneath contempt.

Phony. Vance has a lovely wife, Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, a star of Yale Law School and a litigator at a top law firm. She clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court and Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Their marriage is clearly a modern one. He donned an Indian robe for one of their wedding ceremonies, which irked white supremacists supportive of Trump.

Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, said, “Do you really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

Vance replied Friday simply that he loves his wife. But on the campaign trail, he projects an archaic image nurtured by Heritage Foundation-Project 2025, fanatics and Vance’s fellow superconservative Catholics. 

You get the impression that they would love nothing more than to dispatch women back to the kitchen and bedroom, turning them into what Hilary Mantel called “breeding stock, collections of organs.”

Vance also said in a speech three years ago that parents should “absolutely” get a bigger say in how a democracy functions and more voting power; in different remarks, he said that childless Americans should pay higher taxes. 

Turns out, JD is as undemocratic as his running mate.

In 2022, Vance said he wanted abortion to be illegal nationally, though now he has amended his position to be more in line with Trump’s, giving states the power to decide. (Until they’re in the Oval Office, cave to the Christian right and get a national ban.)

Vance was so adamant on the issue when he was running for Senate that he said there should be a federal “response” to block women from traveling to other states to get abortions. He was worried that George Soros would send a jumbo jet to pick up “disproportionately Black women” and take them to California to “go have abortions.”

Vance wrote the foreword for the upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 wants to put on a full-court press to ban abortion and products like mifepristone and wants to restrict access to Plan B. This is the same wing of the party, cultural reactionaries, that targeted I.V.F. treatments.

And last month, Vance voted against a Democratic bill to protect I.V.F. (Invitrofertilization)

Trump chose Vance to stir up cultural resentment in rural areas and small towns against elites and cosmopolitan types. 

As a cat-loving, cosmopolitan type myself, I do not want Trump and Vance making intimate decisions for American women or judging us or disparaging us for our lives — all nine of them.🐈🐱😸😹😺😻😼😽😾

Marine Corporal JD Vance, "This is fine mess you've gotten GOP into"

Laurel and Hardy comedy line "Another fine mess..."

Echo report published in the Columbus Dispatch by Amelia Robinson.

Former Marine Corporal JD Vance thinks Jennifer Aniston's vote should count less. Actress Jennifer Aniston said, "I am a childless cat lady, but I respect Martha and George's decision to love dogs, birds and her biological children and grandchildren. They had a right to their choice."

https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2024/07/26/jd-vance-cat-lady-comments-jennifer-aniston-ivf/74543387007/

#PresidentGeorgeWashington did not have biological children but they were partners when raising Martha's children at Mount Vernon.

U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and his disdain for the childless — cat ladies in particular — has me thinking about the talented actress Jennifer Aniston and the two things America's first president George Washington and I have in common.

Vance's supporters say his words at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 202, were taken out of context, but they are not.

Here is what he said. “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power,” the Republican nominee for vice president (IOW a Presient in Waiting) said, reported in the Washington Post and a resurfaced in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter. 

“You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power,” the Republican nominee for vice president said according to the Washington Post and a resurfaced video posted on X, formerly Twitter. “You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

Like George Washington, I am childless. Like George Washington, I am invested in this nation's future.

I am not sure when George Washington accepted he'd never have children of his own, but the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon has records that indicate it was something that eventually happened.

I don't know exactly when I completely accepted the fact either.

The roller coaster that was my infertility hit its last hill eight years ago when an ultrasound revealed 70 fibroid tumors in my uterus. 

My kind and compassionate fertility doctor urged me to get a hysterectomy immediately, worrying that the sheer number may have indicated a rare cancer. It thankfully did not.

Vance called Harris childless cat lady.Where does he stand on family issues?

I speak so freely about infertility, a subject once never spoke about in polite society, for four simple reasons.

1. It was a medical issue.
2. There's nothing taboo about the female body.
3. Men like Vance have made it their business to control women's reproduction while criticizing women who can't or don't want to reproduce.
4. Silence is deadly.

I am a selfish, childless cat lady.🐱😸😻😲😳

JD Vance talking nonsense while drinking the Trump cult Kool Aid

Former Marine Corporal and now vice-president candidate J.D. Vance can’t go back in time — and neither can the rest of us- echo opinion published in the Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness), by Megan McArdie.

JD Vance drinking the MAGA Kool Aid

The days of America’s manufacturing boom are gone for good.

For one of the youngest vice-presidential candidates ever nominated, (former Marine Corporal) J.D. Vance sounds a little crotchety. 

His dull and retro-age convention speech last week pined for an America that the 39-year-old himself never knew — a land before drugs and deindustrialization ravaged the Rust Belt, when housing was cheap and families were intact, and proud American craftsmen made the world’s best products with their own hands.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong in wishing for things you don’t remember (or even have no experience with) — if they were really good, as many things were during the United States’ manufacturing boom: There were job opportunities, families formed easily and people felt support from society. I have sympathy for Vance’s desire to “put people to work making real products for American families.”

The problem is that Donald Trump cannot bring those days back. And I suspect Vance is too smart to truly believe the former president could.

It’s not just that economies have become too complicated to take apart and reassemble in some simpler, more desirable form. It’s also that American voters would never stand for it. To see what I mean, consider a talk that Vance gave last February in which he suggested that “economics is fake” — based on his experience owning a 40-year-old refrigerator.

“The refrigerator we had,” he told the audience, “you would put lettuce in the icebox and it would be good a month later. … You cannot at any price point buy a refrigerator today that can do that.”

During Vance’s more recent convention speech, the Lettuce Fountain of Youth surfaced on social media to much giggling — because it sums up both the hazy appeal and the implausibility of “Make America Great Again.” 

Yet, there is some truth in Vance’s remark, which is more than a lament for the country’s lost manufacturing might. It’s also a complaint about the way society has become monomaniacally focused on consumer prices, to the detriment of many other things that make our lives better.

This complaint comes not only from MAGA America but also from left-leaning thinkers such as Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. It resonates on both the right and left because the government and corporations do pay more attention to prices than to other things that are harder to measure, but no less important. People also care about quality, about having things that last. And they care about their identity as producers, as well as consumers.

Forcing manufacturing workers to compete with lower-wage counterparts elsewhere not only reduced their earning power, but also destabilized their communities, a process that began in the 1960s, and ’70s, but accelerated with the “China Shock” of the past 20 years. Many have had to choose between moving for work, sacrificing essential networks of friends and relatives, or staying put and contending with community decline. This has been a real loss.

What’s more, some of the goods they could buy — including, yes, home appliances — did get worse in significant ways. Dishwasher cycles have lengthened into eons, which helps them reduce noise and save water, but wastes our time. Refrigerators come with internet connections but break more frequently (it’s not your imagination). And when an appliance stops working, repairs are so expensive, people often just give up and buy a new one.

It’s not crazy to want to return to the old ways, or at least try to create options for people who want more expensive but more durable goods, made by Americans living in prosperous manufacturing towns. It’s just impossible. Not just practically, but also politically.

Voters might care about the quality of the goods they buy, but they still care a lot about prices, as our recent bout of inflation has demonstrated. Indeed, this is the reason that Vance looks might have an outside chance to become vice president in January.

And prices would have to rise a lot to bring back the fridge economy of yesteryear. The 10-percent, across-the-board tariffs Trump is proposing would be only a down payment.

In 1966, Sears sold customers a 21-cubic-foot capacity, self-defrosting, side-by-side refrigerator for as little as $545. Today, the store’s cheapest equivalent model is more than $1,000. The bigger difference is that, in 1966, the U.S. median family income was $7,500, while in 2022 it was $97,750. 

Truth❗ If the price of fridges had held constant as a percentage of family income, that new one would cost more than $7,000.

Now, one can argue that higher relative prices were a good trade-off for supporting a stable manufacturing sector that provided high-paying jobs to men with no education beyond high school. Those workers had the satisfaction of making tangible products and also the wherewithal to create stable families, buy homes and grab a piece of the American Dream. 

J.D. Vance thinks he is a smart guy, so maybe, I’m not sure, I could win that debate with him.

But I don’t think Vance is smart enough to win his argument with a voter who just walked into Sears and discovered that new appliances suddenly cost seven times what they used to. 

Maine Writer- IOW, consumers are much better off than what J.D. Vance wants voters to believe and, guess what else?  My lettuce stays fresh for over a week in my Lowe's refrigerator. And wait, there's more❗ My home fridge also makes ice cubes and gives me cold water to drink at the push of a button.  Cost? $1,000 and still working like new.  

Donald Trump's obsession with sharks in Nevada- "Supdity cubed!"

Letter to the editor: We all live with electric submarines, published in the Brunswick Beacon in Shallotte, NC:

Speaking in land-locked Nevada, Donald Trump asked, ‘Would you rather be electrocuted or eaten by a 🦈shark?’

Trump hates sharks. Porn star Stormy Daniels, whose sexcapades with Trump brought him 34 felony convictions, said Trump “made me watch an entire documentary about shark attacks. He is obsessed with sharks…He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks.’”

Trump unintentionally confirmed Stormy’s account: “I’m not a big fan of sharks. I have people calling me up, ‘Sir, we have a fund to save the shark.’ I say ‘no thank you.’”

Trump told Nevadans that environmentalists are forcing manufacturers to build electric boats. Trump hates them, too. “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight?”, Trump worries. “You’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there? What I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark!”

Horror novelist Stephen King compared it to “listening to your senile uncle at the dinner table after he has that third drink.”

Trump was once Commander-in-Chief of our military, including the Navy. If Trump’s dinghy hadn’t slipped its mooring, he’d remember that every WWII submarine ran on batteries.

If Trump’s reactor hadn’t melted down, he’d remember that nuclear subs make vast amounts of electricity to power themselves in emergencies.

If Trump’s periscope went all the way to the surface, he’d remember that, while he was president, the Navy awarded its largest shipbuilding contract ever, $22.2-billion for nine attack submarines, to the Electric Boat Company.

No Commander-in-Chief could forget that. Unless, like Trump, you’ve lost the thread so badly you’ve finally jumped the shark.

Michael P. Rush,  Leland, North Carolina

Elon Musk $45 million Trump donation reports were premature- denies the Wall Street Journal article

Retraction about the false report is expected.

Echo report published in Fortune Magazine by Eva Roytburg

Elon Musk denies reported $45 million a month pledge to Trump, says he doesn’t ‘subscribe to cult of personality.

Elon Musk is not spending $45 million a month to elect former President Donald Trump, though he has created a new super political action committee (PAC) to fund the Republican candidate, the billionaire told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson during an interview Monday evening.

During the interview, which was hosted on Musk’s platform, X, Peterson asked Musk if he had “shocked” himself by donating a substantial amount of money to Trump’s campaign. Musk – who has previously criticized Trump, calling him a “bull in a china shop” – paused to correct the “media.”

“What’s been reported in the media is simply not true,” Musk said. “I am not donating $45 million a month to Trump.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the claim, citing sources “familiar with the matter.” The outlet has not yet issued a retraction or follow-up article altering its reporting.

Musk did note that he created a super PAC, called the America PAC, to help support Trump. A super PAC is a group that can raise unlimited amounts of money for a campaign’s independent expenditures—such as for ads, or for day-to-day operations— but doesn’t donate directly to the campaign. 

They have become prominent among both Democrats and Republicans since a 2010 D.C. appeals court decision that authorized the existence of the super PACS. For a normal PAC, donors are limited to gifts of only $5,000 a year.

Several tech company leaders have donated to America PAC, including Ken Howery, an early executive at Paypal along with Musk, Antonio Gracias, a private-equity leader, Sequoia Capital’s Shuan Maguire, and the Winklevoss twins.

The super PAC is also led in part by Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of the software company Palantir and politically ambitious venture capitalist in Austin who is close to Musk, according to the New York Times.

The Austin-based America PAC “is not supposed to be a sort of hyperpartisan” organization, Musk said. He said that he isn’t part of MAGA—or Make America Great Again, Trump’s campaign slogan—but rather, his principles are aligned with “MAG”: Make America Greater.

“I don’t prescribe to [a] cult of personality,” Musk said. But, he added that Trump demonstrated “great courage” after being shot by an attempted assassin on July 13, and that strength helps intimidate America’s enemies.

Additionally, Musk spoke about the “core values” that make America great, which he thinks the Republican party embodies more so than the Democrats.

“One of those values being meritocracy, as much meritocracy as possible, so you get ahead as a function of your skill, and nothing else,” Musk said.

He also added that one of the principles the PAC aligned with was “freedom,” particularly freedom from “as much government intervention as possible.” The hand of government gets heavier every year, and if we don’t roll back some restrictions and regulations, eventually, “everything will be illegal,” Musk said.

When Peterson pressed Musk for why he was switching to Trump, after long voting Democratic, Musk said that Democrats had become the party of censorship.

He also criticized a lawsuit that the Justice Department—under President Joe Biden’s administration— launched against his company SpaceX, last year, alleging that Musk discouraged refugees and asylum seekers from applying to work at the aerospace company. A court order later blocked the U.S. from pursuing the lawsuit.

Editor’s note: The headline of this article has been updated for clarity, to reflect Elon Musk never personally confirmed the reported donation.

Donald Trump creates hate filled campaign against immigrants based on fake information

Trump’s Cynical Attempt to Pit Recent Immigrants Against Black Americans- Echo opinion by Paul Krugman published in The New York Times.

Obviously, the big political news of the past couple of days has come from the Democratic side. But before last week’s Republican National Convention fades from view, let me focus instead on a development on the G.O.P. side that may, given everything else that has been happening, have flown under the radar: MAGA rhetoric on immigration, which was already ugly, has become even uglier.

Until now, most of the anti-immigration sloganeering coming from Donald Trump and his campaign has involved false claims that we’re experiencing a migrant crime wave.

Increasingly, however, Trump and his associates have started making the case that immigrants are stealing American jobs — specifically, the accusation that immigrants are inflicting terrible damage on the livelihoods of Black workers.

Of course, the idea that immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born Americans, including native-born Black Americans, isn’t new. It has, in particular, been an obsession for JD Vance, complete with misleading statistical analysis, so Trump’s choice of Vance as his running mate in itself signals a new focus on the supposed economic harm inflicted by immigrants.

So, too, did Trump’s acceptance Milwaukee speech, which contained a number of assertions about the economics of immigration, among them, the notion that of jobs created under President Biden, “107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens” — a weirdly specific number considering that it’s clearly false, because native-born employment has risen by millions of jobs since Biden took office.

What seems relatively new, however, is the attempt to pit immigrants against Black Americans. True, Trump prefigured this line of attack during his June debate with Biden, when he declared that immigrants are “taking Black jobs,” leading some to mockingly question which jobs, exactly, count as “Black.”

But the volume on this claim has been turned way up.

At the Republican convention, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, someone very likely to have a role in the next administration if Trump wins, spoke of “a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens stealing the jobs of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans.”

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published last week, Trump went even bigger, declaring that “The Black people are going to be decimated by the millions of people that are coming into the country.” He continued, “Their wages have gone way down. Their jobs are being taken by the migrants coming in illegally into the country.” He went on to say, “The Black population in this country is going to die because of what’s happened, what’s going to happen to their jobs — their jobs, their housing, everything.”

Trump’s diatribe forced Bloomberg to add this, parenthetically, as a fact check: “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of employment gains since 2018 have been for naturalized U.S. citizens and legal residents — not migrants.”

There was a time when a rant like this would have signaled that a politician lacked the emotional stability and intellectual capacity to hold the highest office in the land. Alas.

Also, it’s hard to overstate the cynicism here. Trump has a history of associating with white supremacists, not to mention his longstanding obsession with crime in urban, often predominantly Black precincts. Still, he clearly perceives an opportunity to peel away some Black voters by playing them off against immigrants.

But again, even if we ignore the cynicism, this new line of attack on immigration is just wrong on the facts.

If immigrants are taking away all the “Black jobs,” you can’t see it in the data, which shows Black unemployment at historic lows. If Black wages have, as Trump claims, gone way down, someone should tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says that median Black earnings, adjusted for inflation, are significantly higher than they were toward the end of Trump’s term. (You should ignore the spurious bump during the pandemic, which reflected composition effects rather than genuine wage gains.)

You might ask why, given we have indeed seen a surge in immigration, that we aren’t seeing signs of an adverse, let alone cataclysmic, impact on Black wages or employment. After all, many recent immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, lack college degrees and maybe even high school education. So aren’t they competing with native-born Americans who also lack college or high school degrees?

The answer, which we’ve known since the 1990s, is that immigrant workers bring a different set of skills to the table than native-born workers, even when those workers have similar levels of formal education. And yes, I mean skills: If you think of workers without a college degree as “unskilled,” try fixing your own plumbing or doing your own carpentry. It shouldn’t need to be said, but a lot of blue-collar work is highly skilled and highly specialized. As a result, immigrants tend to take a very different mix of jobs than native-born workers do — which means that there’s much less head-to-head competition between immigrant and native-born workers than you might think, or what Trump and Vance want you to think.

The bottom line is that the attempt to portray immigration as an apocalyptic threat to Black Americans is refuted by the facts. Will it nonetheless work politically? I have no idea.

Trump is an old man who cannot even give a teleprompter speech

Echo report published the Daily Beast by John Mulholland

Until the last part of the last day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the event could not have gone much better for Republicans. Then 🥱came Donald Trump’s boring speech.

Donald Trump’s Speech Wasn’t Just Bad and Mad. It Was Boring

“If Fidel Castro were alive today, he would have told Trump that it’s dragging on a bit long.” That was the view from a trenchantly anti-Biden, conservative publication, National Review.

After four days of an expertly choreographed and at times brilliant production—the presence of the Gold Star families on Wednesday was a devastating political hit on Biden—the wheels, as they do with Trump, came off.

He was the worst part of his own convention.

It wasn’t just the length of the speech. Yes, it was long (at a record-breaking 93 minutes), but it was also rambling, chaotic and, after some perfunctory remarks about uniting the nation, he went on to sow the usual seeds of division and grievance.

Worst of all, he committed the cardinal sin of being boring.

(Also, can we all now put aside the absolute nonsense that was peddled about a new, transformed Trump in the hours after Saturday's shooting? It always looked like disingenuous, political bullshit. Turns out it was 💩.)

Yawn! The Trump rapture fest in Milwaukee pointed out a tale of two speeches—the opening, scripted remarks, and then frequent forays where he veered wildly from the teleprompter into a stream of consciousness.

One’s heart went out to the teleprompter. On center stage, it had prepared all week for its big moment in the spotlight—and then was casually cast aside, ignored and eclipsed by the wayward ego that is Donald Trump.

Maybe expectations were set too high. Trump was touted all week as the headline act that would close the event on a high. He was paraded like a heavyweight boxer about to enter the ring. The knockout would come Thursday.

Only it didn’t. Trump ended up getting in his own way.

The ground had been prepared by his team: Expect New Trump. A changed man. A call to unity. On Monday, the man himself told The Washington Examiner that instead of a planned “humdinger” of a speech, he would rewrite his convention remarks to focus on unity and togetherness.

“He understands there’s a moment,” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, told an audience in Milwaukee this week, “If there’s one person I know who’s capable of meeting the moment… it’s him.”

Only it wasn’t.

Donald Trump daunting hate filled speeches avoid discussion about policy issues- Social Security Medicare Project 2025

Donald Trump's hate and rhetoric filled "lie your way into an eletion again" campaign. Whatever happened to policy discussions? Echo opinion by Michael Gold and Simon J. Levien, published in The New York Times with editorial commentary inserted by Maine Writer....

Trumpzi Owellian anachronism:  “It was a bright hot day in July, and the Pennsylvania clocks were striking thirteen.” 

Trumpzism convention speech was "...merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another". (George Owell)

At the first campaign rapture rally since he survived an assassination attempt last week in Pennsylvania, former guy Donald J. Trump on Saturday July 20,  launched a litany of attacks that suggested his call for national unity in the wake of the shooting had faded entirely into the background.

Over the course of an almost two-hour speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan., Trump insulted President Biden’s intelligence repeatedly, calling him “stupid” more than once. 

He said Vice President Kamala Harris was “crazy” and gleefully jeered the Democratic Party’s infighting over Mr. Biden’s political future.

Even as Trump made numerous false claims accusing his political opponents of widespread election fraud, he presented the continuing push by some Democrats to replace President Biden on their ticket as an anti-democratic effort.

By contrast, Trump — who falsely insisted he won the 2020, election and whose effort to overturn it spurred a violent attack on the Capitol that threatened the peaceful transfer of power — presented himself as an almost martyr trying to protect the United States from its downfall.

“They keep saying, ‘He’s a threat to democracy,’” Trump told the crowd of thousands inside the Van Andel Arena. “I’m saying, ‘What the hell did I do with democracy’? Last week, I took a bullet for democracy.”

The line — one of the few additions to a speech that culled from Trump’s standard rally repertoire — came as Trump was trying to rebut Democrats’ claims that he was an extremist and distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a potential second term that would overhaul the federal government.

The Biden campaign repeatedly tried to tie Trump to the Project 2025, effort, which involved Trump allies and former advisers.

But Trump on Saturday criticized the project as the work of the “radical right,” even as he acknowledged that he knew some of those involved. (Oh paleeeze❗😳😔 Donald Trump lies about everything❗) “They’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said of Project 2025 — which he kept calling “Project 25,” even as he has previously referred to it by its full name. (There he goes again😕)

Saturday’s speech was the latest signal that the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump had done little to change his political message. Though his closing convention speech on Thursday opened with a somber call for unity, he reverted quickly to standard rally repertoire, including an aside comparing himself to the gangster Al Capone and a discursive tangent regarding sharks and electric boats.

Saturday’s Trumpzi speech was the latest signal that the assassination attempt on Trump had done little to change his political message.

Though his closing convention speech on Thursday opened with a somber call for unity, he reverted quickly to standard rally repertoire, including an aside comparing himself to the gangster Al Capone and a discursive tangent regarding sharks 🦈and electric boats.

Trump did discuss the assassination attempt, in which his ear was struck by a bullet at a rally last week in Butler, Pa., even though he said on Thursday that after his convention speech he would not describe it in detail again.

Sporting a light brown bandage on his ear, smaller than the large white gauze he had been wearing, Trump once again cited divine intervention, telling the crowd, “I shouldn’t be here.” He offered praise for Corey Comperatore, a volunteer firefighter and rally attendee who was killed in the gunfire, and thanked officials in Butler for their efforts.

But where Trump was somber and visibly affected in front of the Republican delegates and national network cameras, a moment of seeming vulnerability, on Saturday he at times struck a somewhat lighter tone discussing the shooting.

At one point, referring to a screen showing a chart on immigration that he was pointing to when the shooting began, Trump joked that “I owe immigration” my life and that the “sign was very good — I think I’m going to sleep with it tonight.”

Before Trump spoke, his newly chosen running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, took the stage and marveled at the former president’s resilience.

“I find it hard to believe that a week ago an assassin tried to take Donald Trump’s life, and now we have a hell of a crowd to welcome him back on the campaign trail,” Mr. Vance said, in his first joint rally with Mr. Trump since he joined the Republican ticket.

Though the security procedures at the rally were largely unchanged from past Trump rallies, the venue was held indoors after the Trump campaign had largely held events outdoors. There was a heavier police presence than typical inside and outside the building.

Sean Solano, a 22-year-old missionary to Nicaragua, said he had taken one extra precaution in light of the shooting.

(This is just radical opportunism. A self described missionary man had no effect or impact on the July 13, Pennsylvania Trump Rapture Fest tragedy. The shooting was the result of a 20 year old white male who had access to an AR 15 rifle, full stop.🛑 Praying over a building is engaging in sheer delusional fantasy.)

“On Wednesday, I prayed over the building,” Mr. Solano, of Cutlerville, Mich., said about the rally’s venue. 

Echoing several other rally attendees who spoke of Mr. Trump’s survival in religious terms, Mr. Solano added that he thought God had given the former president a chance and that now Mr. Trump would “fight with fury like never before.”

Trump’s dark message about the pernicious threat to the country posed by undocumented immigrants, Democrats and foreign adversaries, a signature theme from previous rallies, was largely intact. He broadly characterized those crossing the border as “prisoners and people from mental institutions,” whom he again likened to the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter. And he promised once more the largest deportation operation in U.S. history if elected.

Trump also joyously mocked Democrats as they contended with the viability of Mr. Biden’s place as the party’s presidential nominee. Trump called his rivals “the enemies of democracy” because Democrats who called for President Biden’s replacement would have to answer to the millions of primary votes the president secured over other candidates.

“They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we. That’s a problem,” Trump said in a tone that suggested he thought anything but.

Building on months of attacking Democrats as a threat to democracy, usually based on his false insistence that Mr. Biden has directed all four criminal cases against him, he argued once more that it was his political opponents who were anti-democratic.

“This guy goes, and he gets the votes, and now we’ll take it away,” Trump scoffed. “That’s democracy.”

Still, Trump showed little sympathy for Mr. Biden. After mostly, though not entirely, avoiding direct personal attacks against the president in his convention speech, Trump repeatedly called him unintelligent, saying that he had a low I.Q. compared with other world leaders and that he was incompetent. (Remember how Trump is reported to have paid for a surrogate to take his college entrance exams?)

He widened his focus to include Ms. Vice-President Harris, insulting her laugh and calling her “nuts.” He similarly called Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, “crazy,” and then mocked her over her having privately told Mr. Biden that he might not win in November, which he characterized as a sudden display of disloyalty.

“Crazy Nancy,” Trump said. “Did you see Nancy Pelosi is selling out Biden now? Did you see she turned on him like a dog?”

Republicans, he pointed out, were unified largely behind him. As evidence, Trump ceded the stage to a display of party unity: Sandy Pensler, a Republican running in Michigan’s Senate primary, took the stage to end his bid and endorse his Trump-endorsed rival, Representative Mike Rogers.

“Unifying the party,” Trump said as he took back the microphone, “it’s beautiful to watch.”

Michigan is seen as a critical battleground state for both Trump and Mr. Biden in November. It is one of several that Trump won in 2016, only to lose to Mr. Biden four years later.

The decision to hold Trump’s first joint rally with Mr. Vance in the state offered another signal of its electoral importance. Mr. Trump, when he announced Mr. Vance’s selection, singled out his ability to win over workers in the state, and Mr. Vance several times in his convention speech mentioned working-class people in Michigan as crucial to the nation.

J.D. Vance, on the other hand, gave a well-received 13-minute speech — a small fraction of Trump’s lengthy remarks — more than an hour beforeTrump took the stage. He returned later to introduce the former president to raucous applause, and the two embraced in front of the crowd.

“I chose him because he’s for the worker,”  Trump said after Vance left the stage. “He’s for the people that work so hard and perhaps weren’t treated like they should have been.” (Whaaadaya mean Trumpzi? Like hiring people and then not paying them, like you do❓)

God did not save Donald Trump's life and God did not take away the life of an innocent rally victim

As a woman of Roman Catholic faith, I am compleley confident saying that God was not in attendance at the outdoor rally in Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump was injured on July 13, 2024, while an innocent bystander was murdered.  

Scripture 1 Thessalonians 5:22: "reject every kind of evil"

God was definitely not present at the Pennsylvania rally.  

However, what was evident to many alert rally attendees was their warning about a suspicious person who was reported to police. It turned out the suspicious person was a 20 year old man with a gun who shot at Trump, killed an innocent bystander, badly injured two other people while traumatizing the entire audience, somehow escaped the police and, yes,  stunned the Secret Service personnel (who obviously seemed to act like deer caught in the headlights before they took decisive action to protect the shooter's victim). 

Nevertheless, Republicans who spoke at the Republican Trump Rapture Convention in Milwaukee, seem to have developed some kind of mystical understanding about what God wanted to have happen during the shooter's evil intentions, when he aimed his A15 style rifle at his target. Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Tim Scott spoke like they had first hand knowledge about what God intended to happen at the Pennsylvania rally. Well, just so they both know.....with 100 percent certainty, I know God was not there and had zero to do with the horrible shooting. God is not the motivator of evil. Sadly, the innocent man who was murdered while attending the event with Donald Trump was the victim who experienced the evil intention of the shooter- a young man who had a gun. 

Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:  

Dear Editor: Thanks to the Globe for the fascinating article by Emma Platoff and Jim Puzzanghera about the religious zeal and insane rapture atmosphere (ie, my editorial comment), at the Republican Convention (“For the faithful, it’s greatest story ever,” Page A1, July 17). 

Aenators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tim Scott (R-Florida) in speeches ascribe Donald Trump’s escape from death by an AR-15-style rifle to the deity, who supposedly intervened to save Trump’s life.

Do Cruz and Scott and their audience believe that the Almighty also intervened to bring about the death of the rallygoer on the stage near Trump, who died protecting his family from the kind of weapon the Democratic Party wants outlawed for civilian use?

Have the Trump faithful noticed that the suspected shooter had not reached the age of 21? Should we be blaming God for circumstances of our own making? 

From Megan Brook in Cambridge, Massachusetts

P.S.  God did not save Donald Trump. An evil intentioned shooter with a gun was at the Pennsylvania rally and God was notwhere to be found.