JD Vance says he must lie to get attention in the media but his evil hersay puts innocent people at risk of harm

Republicans DEMEANING behavior: Echo opinion letter published in the Kansas City Star newspaper:

HELLO? I love cats.

Most people I know love cats. Vice presidential Republican candidate J.D. Vance spreads false rumors about cats being eaten by Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and DonOLD Trump further promoted the idea in the presidential debate last week. This unfounded claim is based on wild internet hearsay and has been refuted by local police and other officials. 

The issue is not that one preposterous allegation has appeared online, but rather that it has been given extended life by a major (Republican❗) political party, including its members of Congress and candidates for president and vice president. 

Could this be part of their ongoing efforts to brand immigrants and people of color as those to be feared and hated? I guess they find their claims that immigrants are criminals, drug dealers, rapists and worse are not sufficient, so they resort to accusations of cat-eating.

Absurd. Can they possibly stoop any lower❓ 

From Sheryl Rose, St. Louis

Echo opinion: What makes vandals target the desecration of cemeteries?

There is a rising incidences of cemetery desecration and antisemitism in recent years, especially during the previous president's #TFG's one term and even today, as reported in a previous blog (link here).

So, I decided to learn more about why is it that certain people choose to vandalize headstones in cemeteries? Of course, Psychology Today published an interesting article written by Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D.

Expert echo essay by Dr. Garfinkel:

Cemeteries are attractive to juvenile vandals, as they are easy targets with minimal security. Adolescents—usually male, but also female—find the darkness and quiet comfortable locations for underage drinking and other illegal activities. The vandalism that follows is part of the antisocial package—with the added psychological edge of fear of death, defiance of death, "triumph" over death.

The vandals that fit this profile are opportunistic in their choice of location, the cemetery.

But the U.S. and Europe have recently seen a rise in another kind of cemetery attack. Not vandalism, but hate crimes. Not opportunistic, but selective. Not psychologically motivated, but politically meaningful.

Hundreds of gravestones in Jewish cemeteries around the country have been destroyed and overturned in an expression of anti-Semitism that has significant historical roots. 

Jews consider the land in which they bury their dead to be sacred ground, and cemetery destruction is a deeply felt defilement. It is heartbreaking for a family member to see a tombstone violated.

Donna Warwick’s great-grandparents’ graves were attacked in the St. Louis cemetery. Warwick posted an open letter to the cemetery attackers on Facebook, letting them know that their victims had been real people, with lives of dignity and struggle, who were proud of their children and grandchildren and believed in service to the community. She writes:

My great-grandparents gave to all kinds of charities and offered many people in St. Louis (Missouri) a chance for better lives. They may have even donated to a cause that helped someone in your family. You may never come to know it, but they could have donated to a hospital that offered your mother care or have given to a food pantry that fed your sister or to a scholarship fund that educated your brother.

With remarkable open-heartedness, Warwick honors her great grandparents’ memory by extending her hand to the “vandals.”

So, I want you to know something. Whenever you do find it in your heart to feel the regret, I will wholeheartedly forgive you. For I know that is what my grandmother would want me to do. So, please come forward and I will help you bury your hate and lead a life that would better honor your own parents, your own grandparents and your own great grandparents who may have struggled and worked hard to try to make a better life for you too.

Vandalizing a loved one’s grave injures the family, and far beyond. Attack on a cemetery is an attack on memory and community that resonates with humanity’s ugly history of ethnic and religious hatred.

Attacks against Jewish cemeteries carry the message “you don’t belong here,” and the threat “we are wiping out your memory, and therefore your existence.”

Cemetery attacks express contempt and symbolic uprooting of past—and therefore future—presence. The Jordanians understood this back in 1948, so when Jordan attacked and occupied parts of Jerusalem, it desecrated the 2,500-year-old Jewish graveyard on the Mt. of Olives. Tens of thousands of tombstones were broken into pieces to be used as building materials. Synagogues and other institutions were destroyed as well.

Cemetery desecration was part of the infamous Kristallnacht* in Germany, the initial step in the program of Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Although human beings continue to experience their darkest impulses, history need not repeat itself. These criminals can be caught, and the law enforced, when hatred is condemned at the highest levels. America cannot tolerate any hate crimes, including anti-Semitism.


Vice-President Pence sent that message by participating in the cleanup of the St. Louis Jewish cemetery. ("There is no place in America for hatred or acts of prejudice or violence or anti-Semitism," Pence said while visiting the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, Missouri.  Tragically, about 180 headstones were knocked off their bases at the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery.)

In fact, law enforcement needs to follow.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D., is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator.

* On the night of November 9, 1938, violent anti-Jewish demonstrations broke out across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Nazi officials depicted the riots as justified reactions to the assassination of German foreign official Ernst vom Rath, who had been shot two days earlier by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year old Polish Jew distraught over the deportation of his family from Germany.

Over the next 48 hours, violent mobs, spurred by antisemitic exhortations from Nazi officials, destroyed hundreds of synagogues, burning or desecrating Jewish religious artifacts along the way. Acting on orders from Gestapo headquarters, police officers and firefighters did nothing to prevent the destruction.

Abraham Lincoln time traveler- Message to Donald Trump

Their view: What would Lincoln think of Donald Trump?- 

Opinion in the Wilkes Barre, PA Times Leader news.

Sidney Blumenthal commentary:

Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum Address was delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838, titled "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions". 

Donald Trump has a sketchy relationship with Abraham Lincoln. “Great president,” Trump said. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right?” Trump also conjectured that “had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” though Jackson had died many years before.

But what would the 16th president have thought of the 45th? 

Beyond pure speculation, we can find clues in Lincoln’s first formal speech, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” in which he criticized attacks on the free press and warned against a future demagogue who would threaten the fragile American experiment.

On Jan. 27, 1838, mounting the podium before the Springfield Lyceum for Young Men in Illinois, the 29-year-old Lincoln, a member of the Illinois Legislature, described the “mob-ocratic spirit.”

Lincoln began by decrying a spate of recent crimes that reduced the rule of law to “the caprice of a mob,” including the lynching of a black prisoner in St. Louis. “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation.” He also condemned the “bands of hundreds and thousands” who “throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors” — which everyone in the audience would have recognized as a reference to the Lovejoy case.

On Nov. 6, 1837, in Alton, Ill., Elijah P. Lovejoy, an antislavery editor, was murdered by a group of men who stormed his warehouse to destroy his printing press. 

Lovejoy had been driven out of St. Louis for publishing antislavery articles. Moving his base of operations across the Mississippi River, he soon joined in calling for the formation of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society. Lovejoy’s assassination made him the first martyr of the abolitionist movement. His killers were acquitted in a trial that reached its verdict eight days before Lincoln delivered his speech.

The overwhelming view in Illinois was that Lovejoy deserved his fate. Promoting antislavery opinion was deeply unpopular. In Washington, lawmakers upheld a gag rule that barred the presentation of antislavery petitions to Congress. Former President John Quincy Adams, now serving in the House of Representatives, stubbornly led the resistance. But Northern legislature after legislature passed resolutions in solidarity with Southern states to affirm the gag rule. On March 3, 1837, Lincoln and only one other member of the Illinois House signed a dissenting statement declaring “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.”

Lovejoy, according to Lincoln, did not bring about his own death. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he was wholly innocent, the victim of “the vicious.” Those who “shoot editors” were not simply breaking the law, but also assailing the basic right of free speech — the very foundation of American government. The attack on Lovejoy, whether one agreed with his opinions or not, was an attempt “to subvert our national freedom.”

Then Lincoln pointed to an even greater menace than rampaging mobs, “a probable case, highly dangerous.” He warned against the emergence of a man driven to power by a fierce desire for “celebrity and fame” who “thirsts and burns for distinction.” 

This demagogue “scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious,” and believing that “nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”

There is a contemporary figure who resembles that fame-hungry demagogue, one who tears down institutions and incites the mob-ocratic spirit, subverting the right to free expression and, with it, our national freedom. These Lincolnian terms describe our reality-TV-star-turned-president, who called the “FAKE NEWS media” the “enemy of the American people,” and tweeted an altered video that showed him body-slamming a man with the CNN logo in place of his head.

But Trump would no more understand Lincoln’s forewarning than he will accept responsibility for his incitement. 

Trump’s sense of history is as limited as his self-control.

If we can deduce how Lincoln would perceive Trump, we can also surmise how he would advise Americans to handle him. This is what he said about the possible rise of an American demagogue: “And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”

Sidney Blumenthal is the author of “Wrestling With His Angel, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume II, 1849-1856.” “A Self-Made Man, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume I, 1809-1849,” describes Lincoln’s Lyceum Address. 

Blumenthal wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.

MaineWriter- Abraham Lincoln's 1838 was prophetic, as though he time traveled to the 21st century.