Donald Trump owns chaos he created and supported during his administration

Trump’s final year in office proves incompetence an echo opinion letter published in Florida's Orlando Sentinel: 

We don’t examine the effectiveness of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln by excluding the Civil War. We don’t look at George W. Bush’s effectiveness by excluding the financial market meltdown in 2008. Why do supporters of Donald Trump disregard his (chaotic!) fourth year in office?

Since George Washington’s time in office, we have judged a president’s effectiveness based on what shape they left the country in upon exiting the Oval office. Bottom line is, virtually no one was better off four years ago than they are today.

Whether you believe that Trump was a victim of circumstances or a poor administrator, he owns everything that occurred under his presidency. The tax cuts for the rich, the riots, the pandemic. He owns it all. That is what you sign up for when you choose to run for this country’s highest office.

In 1993 (after George H.W. Bush), 2009 (after George W. Bush), and in 2021 (after Trump) the elected presidents (Clinton, Obama and Biden) inherited a country in economic shambles and each of these Democratic presidents had to focus their first years of service restoring the economic wellbeing of this country.

Trump inherited a robust economy but couldn’t successfully drive the car for four short years.  #Vote Blue 2024  #VoteBidenHarris2024

Dan McGarvey in Orlando, Florida

Trump rallies are evidence of his bizarrre cult attraction fueled by delusional ideation

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley gets a broken ⏰clock award for this comment: Nikki Haley argues Donald Trump is always followed by ‘chaos’ before a large South Carolina crowd (AP report). Donald Trump Is His Own Chaos Whisperer

Chaos on steroids❗ Reported in The New York Times by Katherine Miller*- So, Trump opened his Allentown Pennsylvania rally by presenting a delusional fake news lead. He told theMAGA cult crowd that Israel was under attack, adding that “it would not have happened if we were in office — they know that, we know that, everyone knows that.” Onstage, at rallies over the last year, Trump has done these alt-universe loops in which if the election hadn’t been taken from him, nothing bad would have befallen the world — no embarrassing Afghanistan withdrawal, no Hamas attack on Israel, no Russian invasion of Ukraine, no inflation. Sometimes, with the way Trump talks, he can subtly lock more and more people into his inability to process his 2020, defeat. He does this by pairing his personal misfortune with that of the entire globe. (IOW Trump is detached from reality. Moreover, IMO, he should be receiving psychiatric medical care!)

But, in Allentown on Saturday night, these hypotheticals ended someplace else. When talking about the world being ablaze, Trump told the crowd about something Viktor Orban, the illiberal prime minister of Hungary, had said: “Bring Donald Trump back as president and it’ll all stop.” (👀Frank L. Baum wrote a classic story about delusional behavior like "Bring Trump Back😟😓".....like "follow the yellow brick road....OMG❗)  

As Trump put it, “He said something else, and I wouldn’t say it, I wouldn’t really like the word. ‘China was afraid of Donald Trump, Russia was afraid of Donald Trump, everybody was afraid of Donald Trump’ — I don’t want to say that. I want to say they respected me.”
Quantifying chaos is hard to do, but the last eight years have been some of the most chaotic in decades in American politics. And for the last year, Trump talked a lot about ending all this chaos simply through his resumption of the presidency — a kind of leviathan, superman thing. 

Delusional Trumpzi ideation! 

Before the rally, the Trump campaign played a movie-trailer-esque video that warned of nuclear annihilation. 

There is a theory advanced by some Republicans that Trump’s chaos and unpredictability deter others’ impulsive behavior — that other leaders could not quite read how the United States might respond, so the anxiety provoked by that uncertainty stalled out otherwise bigger and more drastic shifts in the world. After she left the administration, Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, framed her and Trump’s approaches to diplomats in the manner of a good-cop-bad-cop routine. “He would, like, ratchet up the rhetoric,” she said in 2018, “and then I would go back to the ambassadors and say, ‘You know, he is pretty upset. I can’t promise you what he is going to do. I’ll tell you, if we do these sanctions, it will keep him from going too far.’”

Trump himself will allude to his own chaos as preventive. Onstage, he sometimes claims he prevented Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine earlier on the strength of personal negotiation in which  Trump threatened a wild action. “‘Vladimir, don’t do it, don’t do it — if you do it, this is what’s going to happen.’ Someday I’ll tell you what I said,” Mr. Trump said at an Iowa rally on October 7. “He said, ‘No way you’ll do that.’ I said, ‘I will. I will; I’ll do it.’ And he didn’t believe me.” (This symptom is like the psychiatric patient who hears voices! There is medication available to treat these delusions.)

Then, in a possibly telling insight into how Trump views politics, he added: “But, he believed me 10 percent! That’s all you needed!” He said the same was true of Xi Jinping and Taiwan — Mr. Xi had believed him 10 percent and “that’s enough.” The idea of Trump injecting just enough creeping doubt or pain into the equation of how a person perceives what he’s saying explains a lot about American political chaos over the last eight years.

When you press on different parts of Trump’s reasoning, you find problems. For one thing, talking to Tucker Carlson last year, Mr. Orban framed his praise the opposite way from what Trump said in Pennsylvania: “The best foreign policy of the recent several decades belongs to him. He did not initiate any new war. He treated nicely the North Koreans and Russia, even the Chinese, you know. He did the policy that was the best one for the Middle East, the Abraham Accords.” And there are real crosscurrents even at Trump rallies: At the Pennsylvania event he opened by saying, “God bless Israel.” But at one point Trump supporters also chanted “Genocide Joe” — the chant about the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza and the thousands of Palestinians who’ve died — to which Trump said, “They’re not wrong.”

Since the pandemic began, in particular, it can feel as though we live in a more precarious, interlocking world, where one bad development can threaten even worse ones, like a wider regional conflict in the Middle East. Trump talks a lot about what wouldn’t have happened, but a lot may still happen next year, regardless of whether he or President Biden is elected. (Hey Trumpzi cult❓  Praise Isreal or call their actions Genocide❗ Chaos on steroids.)

Politics involves the art of perception, particularly during campaigns. And Trump (has a Fascist instinct). He knows how perception works — how to build up themes and crush opponents. Those skills have reshaped American politics. But not everything works like that.

One thing he barely talked about on Saturday night was abortion. “Sometimes with Great Events come difficulties,” he posted recently about how he helped end Roe v. Wade, just before announcing that he would leave the issue to the states, rather than pursuing a federal ban. But leaving abortion to the states also doesn’t resolve the issue — one state supreme court can essentially end in vitro fertilization programs, and another can ban abortion in the space of a month.

Indeed, Trump clearly wants this to go away, for people to not talk about it, for voters to just kind of land on a middle ground, quietly. But people have strong beliefs about what abortion law should look like, beliefs that exist outside of Trump, in part because — like war or the pandemic — abortion policy is not one of perception. Abortion is banned or permitted in real life. (Women risk death if they are unable to receive abortion care in emergent pregnancy situations.)

Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in The New York Times Opinion

Immigrants support the economy where aging population cannot fill jobs

Echo essay reported in The New York Times by Jeanna Smialek.

Maine has a lot of lobsters. It also has a lot of older people, ones who are less and less willing and able to catch, clean and sell the crustaceans that make up a $1 billion industry for the state. Companies are turning to foreign-born workers to bridge the divide. 

Chadai Gatembo, 18, who came to Maine two years ago from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Folks born in Maine are generally not looking for manufacturing work, especially in food manufacturing,” said Ben Conniff, a founder of Luke’s Lobster, explaining that the firm’s lobster processing plant has been staffed mostly by immigrants since it opened in 2013, and that foreign-born workers help keep “the natural resources economy going.”

Maine has the oldest population of any U.S. state, with a median age of 45.1. As America overall ages, the state offers a preview of what that could look like economically — and the critical role that immigrants are likely to play in filling the labor market holes that will be created as native-born workers retire.

Nationally, immigration is expected to become an increasingly critical source of new workers and economic vibrancy in the coming decades.

It’s a silver lining at a time when huge immigrant flows that started in 2022, are straining state and local resources across the country and drawing political backlash. While the influx may pose near-term challenges, it is also boosting the American economy’s potential. Employers today are managing to hire rapidly partly because of the incoming labor supply. The Congressional Budget Office has already revised up both its population and its economic growth projections for the next decade in light of the wave of newcomers.

In Maine, companies are already beginning to look to immigrants to fill labor force gaps on factory floors and in skilled trades alike as native-born employees either leave the work force or barrel toward retirement.

Governor Mills has requested for the state's legislators to work to create an Office of New Americans, an effort to attract and integrate immigrants into the work force, for instance. Private companies are also focused on the issue. The Luke’s Lobster founders started an initiative called Lift All Boats in 2022 to supplement and diversify the fast-aging lobster fishing industry. It aims to teach minorities and other industry outsiders how to lobster and how to work their way through the extensive and complex licensing process, and about half of the participants have been foreign-born.

They included Chadai Gatembo, 18, who came to Maine two years ago from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Gatembo trekked into the United States from Central America, spent two weeks in a Texas detention center and then followed others who were originally from Congo to Maine. He lived in a youth shelter for a time, but now resides with foster parents, has learned English, has been approved for work authorization and is about to graduate from high school.

Mr. Gatembo would like to go to college, but he also enjoyed learning to lobster last summer. He is planning to do it again this year, entertaining the possibility of one day becoming a full-fledged lobsterman.

“Every immigrant, people from different countries, moved here looking for opportunities,” Mr. Gatembo said. “I have a lot of interests — lobster is one of them.”

A smaller share of Maine’s population is foreign-born than in the country as a whole, but the state is seeing a jump in immigration as refugees and other new entrants pour in.

That echoes a trend playing out nationally. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the United States added 3.3 million immigrants last year and will add another 3.3 million in 2024, up sharply from the 900,000 that was typical in the years leading up to the pandemic.

One-third to half of last year’s wave of immigrants came in through legal channels, with work visas or green cards, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis. But a jump in unauthorized immigrants entering the country has also been behind the surge, the economists estimate.

Many recent immigrants have concentrated in certain cities, often to be near other immigrants or in some cases because they were bused there by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, after crossing the border. Miami, Denver, Chicago and New York have all been big recipients of newcomers.

In that sense, today’s immigration is not economically ideal. As they resettle in clusters, migrants are not necessarily ending up in the places that most need their labor. And the fact that many are not authorized to work can make it harder for them to fit seamlessly into the labor market.


Adriana Hernandez, 24, a mother of four from Caracas, Venezuela, is living with her family in a one-bedroom apartment in Aurora, Colorado. After journeying through the Darién Gap and crossing the border in December, Ms. Hernandez and her family turned themselves in to immigration authorities in Texas and then traveled by bus to Colorado.

They have no work authorization as they wait for a judge to rule on their case, so Ms. Hernandez’s husband has turned to day labor to keep them housed and fed.

“Economically, I’m doing really badly, because we haven’t had the chance to get a work permit,” Ms. Hernandez said in Spanish.

ImageAdriana Hernandez, a mother of four from Caracas, Venezuela, who lives with her family in Aurora, Colo., is awaiting a work authorization.Credit...Jimena Peck for The New York Times

It’s a common issue in the Denver area, where shelters were housing nearly 5,000 people at the peak early this year, said Jon Ewing, a spokesman with Denver Human Services. The city has helped about 1,600 people apply for work authorization, almost all successfully, as it tries to get immigrants on their feet so they do not overwhelm the local shelter options.

Most people who gain authorization are finding work fairly easily, Mr. Ewing said, with employers like carpenters and chefs eager for the influx of new workers.

Nationally, even with the barriers that prevent some immigrants from being hired, the huge recent inflow has been helping to bolster job growth and speed up the economy.

“I’m very confident that we would not have seen the employment gains we saw last year — and we certainly can’t sustain it — without immigration,” said Wendy Edelberg, the director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group at the Brookings Institution.

The new supply of immigrants has allowed employers to hire at a rapid pace without overheating the labor market. And with more people earning and spending money, the economy has been insulated against the slowdown and even recession that many economists once saw as all but inevitable as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022 and 2023.

Ernie Tedeschi, a research scholar at Yale Law School, estimates that the labor force would have decreased by about 1.2 million people without immigration from 2019 to the end of 2023 because of population aging, but that immigration has instead allowed it to grow by two million.

Economists think the immigration wave could also improve America’s labor force demographics in the longer run even as the native-born population ages, with a greater share of the population in retirement with each year.

The nation’s aging could eventually lead to labor shortages in some industries — like the ones that have already started to surface in some of Maine’s business sectors — and it will mean that a smaller base of workers is paying taxes to support federal programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Immigrants tend to be younger than the native-born population, and are more likely to work and have higher fertility. That means that they can help to bolster the working-age population. 

Previous waves of immigration have already helped to keep the United States’ median age lower and its population growing more quickly than it otherwise would.

“Even influxes that were difficult and overwhelming at first, there were advantages on the other side of that,” Mr. Tedeschi said.

In fact, immigration is poised to become increasingly critical to America’s demographics. By 2042, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, all American population growth will be due to immigration, as deaths cancel out births among native-born people. And largely because immigration has picked up so much, the C.B.O. thinks that the U.S. adult population will be 7.4 million people larger in 2033, than it had previously expected.

Immigration could help reduce the federal deficit by boosting growth and increasing the working-age tax base, Ms. Edelberg said, though the impact on state and local finances is more complicated as they provide services like public schooling.

But there are a lot of uncertainties. For one thing, nobody knows how long today’s big immigration flows will last. Many are spurred by geopolitical instability, including economic crisis and crime in Venezuela, violence in Congo, and humanitarian crises across other parts of Africa and the Middle East.

The C.B.O. itself has based its projections on guesses: It has immigration trailing off through 2026 because it anticipates a slow reversion to normal, not because it is actually clear when or how quickly immigration will taper.

National policies could also reshape how many people are able to come to — and stay in — the United States.

Chenda Chamreoun, who came to the United States from Cambodia in 2013, is a quality assurance supervisor at Luke’s Lobster’s processing plant in Saco, Maine.Credit...Greta Rybus for The New York Times

The influx of immigrants has caused problems in many places as the surge in population overwhelms local support systems and leads to competition for a limited supply of housing. As that happens, immigration has become an increasingly critical political issue, surging to the top of the list of the nation’s most important problems in Gallup polling.

Former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has warned of an immigrant-created crime wave. He has pledged to deport undocumented immigrants en masse if he wins the presidential election in November.

The Biden administration has used its executive authority to open a back door to allow thousands of migrants into the United States temporarily, while also taking steps to repair the legal refugee program. But as Democratic leaders have joined Republicans in criticizing President Biden over migration in recent months, he has embraced a more conservative tone, even pledging to “shut down” the border if Congress passed a bill empowering him to do so.

Politics are not the only wild card: The economy could also slow. If that happened, fewer immigrants might want to come to the United States, and those who did might struggle to find work.

Some economists fret that immigrants will compete against American workers for jobs, particularly those with lower skill levels, which could become a more pressing concern in a weaker employment market. But recent economic research has suggested that immigrants mostly compete with one another for work, since they tend to work in different roles from those of native-born Americans.

At the Luke’s Lobster processing plant in Saco, Maine, Mr. Conniff has often struggled to find enough help over the years, despite pay that starts at $16 per hour. But he has hired people like Chenda Chamreoun, 30, who came to the United States from Cambodia in 2013 and worked her way up from lobster cleaning to quality assurance supervisor as she learned English.

Now, she is in the process of starting her own catering business. Immigrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than the nation as a whole — another reason that they could make the American economy more innovative and productive as its population ages.

Ms. Chamreoun explained that the move to the United States was challenging, but that it had taught her how to realize goals. “You have more abilities than you think.”

J. Edward Moreno contributed reporting from New York, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.

New Hampshire Chris Sununu visibly lost his political way and needs a moral compass

ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted a skillful and revealing interview with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Over nine damning minutes, Sununu illustrated how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone.

The context for the interview is important. Former New Hampshire Governor Sununu is hardly a MAGA enthusiast. During the 2024, GOP primary, he supported Nikki Haley, and over the past several years, he’s been a harsh critic of Donald Trump. Sununu has referred to him as a “loser,” an “asshole,” and “not a real Republican.” He has said the nation needs to move past the “nonsense and drama” from the former president and that he expects “some kind of guiltyverdict” against Trump. “This is serious,” Sununu said last June. “If even half of this stuff is true, he’s in real trouble.”

Christopher Thomas Sununu is an American politician and engineer who has served since 2017, as the 82nd governor of New Hampshire.

Most significant, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, five days after January 6, Sununu said, “It is clear that President Trump’s rhetoric and actions contributed to the insurrection at the United States Capitol Building.”

During the interview, Sununu didn’t distance himself from any of his previous comments; in fact, he doubled down on them. He reaffirmed that Trump “absolutely contributed” to the insurrection. “I hate the election denialism of 2020,” Sununu said. 

And he also admitted that he’d be very uncomfortable supporting Trump if he were convicted of a felony. But no matter, Sununu reiterated to Stephanopoulos that he’ll vote for Trump anyway.

“Look, nobody should be shocked that the Republican governor is supporting the Republican president,” Sununu said.

It’s worth examining the reasons Sununu cited to justify his supportfor Trump. The main one, according to the New Hampshire governor, is “how bad Biden has become as president.” 

Sununu cited two issues specifically: inflation, which is “crushing people,” and the chaos at the southern border.

Let’s take those issues in reverse order. Any fair-minded assessment would conclude that Joe Biden has been a failure (not!🚫😦) on border security—crossings at the southern border are higher than ever—and that the president is rightfully paying a political price for it. His record in this respect is worse than Trump’s.

But, Trump’s record is hardly impressive. In fact, Trump never got close to building the wall he promised, (Mexico never agreed to pay for it!) and fewer people who were illegally in America were deported during the Trump presidency than during the Obama presidency. Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were nearly 15 percent higher in Trump’s final year in office than in the last full year of Barack Obama’s term—when Trump called the border “broken.” Illegal immigration has bedeviled every modern American president.

More incriminating is that earlier this year, Republicans, at the urging of Trump, sabotaged what would arguably have been the strongest border-security bill ever, legislation supported by Biden. 

So why did Republicans, who have lacerated Biden for his lax enforcement policies, oppose a bill that included so much of what they demanded❓ Because they wanted chaos to continue at the southern border, in order to increase Trump’s chances of winning the election. That tells you what the Republican priority is.

As for inflation: During the Biden presidency, it soared to more than 9 percent—inflation was a global crisis, not specific to the United States—but has cooled to about 3.5 percent. (When Trump left office, inflation was less than 2 percent.) America’s inflation rate is now among the lowest in the world. More important, wages are rising faster than prices for ordinary workers, and low-wage workers have experienced dramatic real-wage growth over the past four years and for the first time in decades.

More broadly, the American economy is the best in the world❗❗ 😃The United States recovered from the coronavirus pandemic better than any other nation. Interest rates are the highest in decades, but America’s GDP significantly outpaced those of other developed countries in 2023. The economy grew by more than 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023, which is higher than the average for the five years preceding the pandemic. Monthly job growth under Biden, even if you exclude “catch up” growth figures in the aftermath of the pandemic, has been record-setting. Trump’s record, pre-pandemic, isn’t close.

In 2023, we saw the highest share of working-age Americans employed in more than two decades, while the Biden administration has overseen more than two years of unemployment below 4 percent, the longest such streak since the late 1960s. At the end of last year, retailers experienced a record-setting holiday season. The stock market recently posted an all-time high; so did domestic oil production. The number of Americans without health insurance has fallen to record lows under Biden. Trump claims that crime “is rampant and out of control like never, ever before.” In fact, violent crime—after surging in the last year of the Trump presidency (largely because of the pandemic)—is declining dramatically. 

As for abortions, during the Trump presidency, they increased by 8 percent after 30 years of near-constant decline.

Even if Republicans want to insist that Biden’s policies had nothing to do with any of this, even if these positive trends are happening in spite of Biden rather than because of him, America during the Biden presidency is hardly the hellscape that MAGA world says it is and at times seems to be rooting for it to be. 

On Biden’s watch, for whatever constellation of reasons, a good deal has gone right. And deep down, Trump supporters must know it, even as they wrestle with reality in order to deny it.

So the underlying premise that Sununu and MAGA world rely on to justify their support for Donald Trump—that if Biden wins, “our country is going to be destroyed,” as Trump said during a rally on Saturday—is false. Which raises the question: What is the reason Sununu has rallied to Trump?

It’s impossible to fully know the motivations of others, but it’s reasonable to assume that Sununu wants to maintain his political viability within the Republican Party. He’s undoubtedly aware that to break with Trump would derail his political ambitions. 

But for Sununu, like so many other Republicans, that partisan loyalty comes at the cost of his integrity.

Chris Sununu is not a true believer, like some in MAGA world. He’s not psychologically unwell, like others. He knows who Trump is, and what the right thing to do is—to declare, as Liz Cheney has done, that she will not vote for Donald Trump under any circumstances.

“I certainly have policy differences with the Biden administration,” she has said. “I know the nation can survive bad policy. 

We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.” Donald Trump has shown he’s willing to do that and more. Sununu is pledging fealty to a man who, among other things, attempted to overturn an election, summoned and assembled a violent mob and directed it to march on the Capitol, and encouraged the mob to hang his vice president. He sexually assaulted and defamed a woman, paid hush money to a porn star, and allegedly falsified records to cover up the affair. Trump controlled two entities that were found guilty of 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. He invited a hostile foreign power (Russia) to interfere in one American election and attempted to extort an allied nation (Ukraine) to interfere in another four years later. He has threatened prosecutors, judges, and the families of judges. 

And he has been indicted in four separate criminal cases, one of which finally began in Manhattan. 

Trump has championed crazed and racist conspiracy theories, dined with avowed anti-Semites, and mocked war heroes, people with handicaps, and the dead. He has swooned over the most brutal dictators in the world, sided with Russian intelligence over American intelligence, abused his pardon power, and said we should terminate the Constitution. He obsessively told his staff to use the FBI and the IRS to go after his critics.

Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton look like Boy Scouts.

It’s not all that uncommon for politicians to put party above country, to bend and to break when pressure is applied. 

Courage is a rare virtue, and tribal loyalties can be extremely powerful. But this is not any other time, and Trump is not any other politician. Rather (and obviously), Trump is a man of kaleidoscopic corruption. There is virtually nothing he won’t do in order to gain and maintain power. And he telegraphs his intentions at all hours of the day and night.

Given all Trump has done, and given all we know, the claim that Joe Biden—whatever his failures, whatever his limitations, whatever his age—poses a greater threat to the republic than Donald Trump is delusional.

In his new book Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf reminds us of something that Steve Bannon 😠😧, who served as a close adviser to Trump and is one of the most influential figures in the MAGA movement, once said: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Chris Sununu has now enlisted in that war. What is so discouraging, and so sickening, is how many others in his party have done so as well. They are Trump’s willing accomplices. 

MAGA maniacs like Steve Bannon are the evil equivilent of the release of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz

Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.

Trumpziism intends to create a dictatortorhip fascist illegal government

Echo Florida Today opinion.

Trump's unmitigated gall calling President Biden "Criminal Joe," while he (Trump himself ❗)  is facing a myriad of criminal charges himeslf, is insane😲😧.

Charges of unethical and unlawful business practices against Trump pale in comparison to his seditious rantings of Jan. 6 and attempts to coerce Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 additional votes to falsify an election win. Trump's Machiavellian behavior has bamboozled millions of gullible Americans into believing implausible assertions, replete with categorical lies.

Trump's idolatry of Putin and Xi Jinping is irrefutable proof of his belief in dictatorial rule, erroneously correlating fear with respect. Trump, as with these dictators, is ruthless, affirming retribution against those who failed to reinforce lies of a stolen election. 

Trump has stated as president he would free those defendants arrested for their rebellious incursion of our Capitol building, giving credence to his autocratic intentions, appealing to domestic terrorists.

Trump's monocratic (IOW personal rule of an individual) approach to governing, playing on people's ignorance and prejudice, has been (unbelievably❗❓😟  successful. His supporters ignore, even admire, his criminal offenses, which are frighteningly dangerous. 

Trump's hubris (exaggerated pride) in defiance of the law, despite inordinate evidence, is nonpareil, constantly deriding lawyers, judges, and those who dare to testify against him.

Gregory W. Hewitt, from Melbourne in Florida

Arizona 1864 archiac anti-abortion law was created during the Civil War before statehood

Echo essay published in the New York Magazine Intelligencer, by Sarah Jones: Not long after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an 1864, ban on abortion could be enforced by the state, Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake released a curious statement.  (Ms. ambiguous diva!), Lake opposed the ruling, she said, and if elected would vote for a spectrum of pro-family policies. 

1864 Arizona law outlawed abortion from the moment of conception, with an exception to save the woman's life. It made abortion a felony punishable by two to five years in prison for anyone who performed an abortion or helped a person obtain one. Arizona became a state on February 14, 1912.

Arizona's Supreme Court made Lake's candidacy difficult when it ruled that the 1864, ban on abortion could be enforced, further igniting an already smoldering political issue.

Not long after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an 1864, ban on abortion could be enforced by the state, Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake released a curious statement. She opposed the ruling, she said, and if elected would vote for a spectrum of pro-family policies. Baby bonuses are on her list. So is paid family leave and an extension of the Child Tax Credit, in addition to “investing in childcare,” whatever that means to Lake. “What we need to do is really start supporting women and giving them true choices,” she previously said in March, adding that Republicans “talk about being pro-family, and it’s about time we put the money where our mouth is.” It’s clear enough that she would like to be seen as a moderate in contrast with her current, conspiracy-addled image.

Kari Lake

Nevertheless, much like Donald Trump’s (I was for it before I was against it❓) abortion statement , Lake’s declaration is notable for what it leaves out. She would prefer we all forget that she once supported that 1864, archiac law, which could punish providers with prison time, if enforced. Nor does she explain exactly what shape her pro-family policies would take.

Lake performs a familiar dance. Anti-abortion conservatives railed against Roe v. Wade, but the ruling did them a favor, too. As long as it held, they could use it to rally the base. Now that it’s gone, candidates like Lake have no choice but to confront the deep unpopularity of their position among the broader public. 

Lake, like Trump, hopes to mollify voters by saying that abortion should be left up to the states. However, she can’t dodge abortion extremism. Republicans who say that states should decide abortion law bind themselves to whatever happens in those states. Moreover, Lake can’t paint over her prior positions with a pro-family veneer and hope that voters have short memories. The truth is too obvious to disguise.

The end of Roe forced abortion opponents into uncomfortable territory. For some, the only sensible recourse has been to promote policies that would, in their view, encourage family formation. (Republicans who claim to be pro-life are on the record for voting against family friendly social policies, like family leave.)

In 2023, the New York Times profiled several such thinkers, who have arrived at no consensus on how precisely to help families now that abortion is inaccessible in much of the country. “A full-spectrum family policy has to be about encouraging and supporting people in getting married and starting families,” said Oren Cass of the American Compass think tank. “It has to be pro-life, but also supportive of those families as they are trying to raise kids in an economic environment where that has become a lot harder to do.” Some conservatives have proposed sending families monthly cash for each child, though the Times said they debate the role work requirements might play, and their policies are generally not as expansive as those proposed in the Build Back Better bill.

Modest help for families is better than no help at all, but there are few reasons to think that such conservatives are the vanguard of a friendlier movement. “The end of Roe will require a new type of politics,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote in an editorial for the Times. 

But, Brown and his allies haven’t come up with anything new. Beneath all the hype, the conservative pro-family vision is still a violent one. It demands forced pregnancy and birth from women. Abortion opponents all deny women the basic freedom to make a family when or if they choose, or to control what form their family takes. Moreover, even with medical exceptions in place, bans make it difficult — often impossible — for women to seek the care they need, which can put their reproductive plans in serious jeopardy. Abortion restrictions aren’t pro-woman, and that means they aren’t pro-family, either.

Consider the specific case of Ascension, a large chain of Catholic hospitals. “Historically, the Catholic hospitals have had a better reputation, mostly because of their mission,” Jean Ross, a co-president of National Nurses United, told Religion News Service this week. But the union found that Ascension has closed “labor and delivery departments at a higher rate than the national average from 2012 to 2021,” and “to date has shuttered more than 26% of its units that existed in 2012.” Most of the closures occurred in low-income areas and in Black and Latino communities, RNS added. The probable reason? Profitability, though Ascension officials dispute this. The church teaches a consistent ethic of life, but pregnant women are learning that pro-family can mean nothing in practice.

Lake, of course, is no thinker, or true believer in anything except herself, with the exception of Trump. She is a reactive creature, and she belongs entirely to the fringe, whatever she says now. 

In fact, during Lake's failed campaign for Arizona governor, she thanked an evil Nazi 卐 sympathizer for his support and appeared with figures linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, CNN reported at the time. What does it mean for the pro-family cause if someone like this considers herself to be an adherent- (when what she has said in the past is different than what she says today.....)? Under scrutiny, pro-family conservatives are extremists, too. They can be trusted with nothing. There’s only hot air and more danger for women.

Voters must participate in the democratic process- Vote for Biden to protect democracy

Opinion letter published in the Houston Chronicle*: Voters will do well to remember that, in America, we live in a country where our form of government is a democracy. 

The electorate selects the representatives that perform the government functions. It is the electorate's right to periodically confirm or change those representatives. Interestingly, the electorate also has the right to change the form of government through the voting process.

I cannot believe that more than 20% of voters would knowingly vote to end our democracy and establish an authoritarian (IOW Trumpziism) system. 

Also, I know that voting is not always a binary choice. There is the third option of not voting. That third choice cannot be an option for anyone who wants to maintain our democracy. The only way to ensure the preservation of our democracy is to drown with our votes that 20% of the electorate who might support authoritarianism.

It is not an overstatement to say that our country faces an existential choice in the coming election. It is time for voters to get over petty grievances. The future of our system of government is at stake, as are the freedoms derived from such a government. We ignore that at our own peril.

Vote like your vote depends on it. It does.

If we vote to change our form of government, for example by voting in a "dictator ❗for a day," it is highly unlikely that our democratic form of government could ever be reinstated. The voting process to enable a change back to democracy would no longer exist. 

Vote Blue 2024 #VoteDemocrat

*From Bill Crawford, in Surfside Texas

Antisemitism language includes Anti-Zionism

 An echo opinion published in the Chicago Tribune by Kenneth Seeskin.

Demonstrations protesting Israel’s role in the war in Gaza claim that Zionism is racist, colonialist, even genocidal. The response among many Jews has been to accuse the demonstrators of thinly veiled antisemitism. Lawsuits charging universities with antisemitism are pending and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened numerous investigations.

Are antisemitism and antizionism the same or different?

In 2010, the U.S. State Department proposed the following as a working definition of antisemitism: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The State Department tried to clarify its position by providing numerous examples of the kinds of actions that would count as antisemitic. Unfortunately, their examples raise more questions than they answer. Chief among them: what is the relation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism? Or more precisely: what exactly is Zionism and how is it related to Judaism?

Is Zionism (A) commitment to a Jewish homeland, (B) some level of support for current Israeli policies such as the Israel-Hamas War, or (C) active involvement or total support for the war? I will take them up in turn.

The State Department tried to clarify its position by providing numerous examples of the kinds of actions that would count as antisemitic. 

Unfortunately, their examples raise more questions than they answer. Chief among them: what is the relation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism? Or more precisely: what exactly is Zionism and how is it related to Judaism?

Beginning in the 19th century, the need for a Jewish homeland became a hotly debated topic among world Jewry. 

Thinkers on the political left argued that in an enlightened age, Jews would be accepted as full citizens in the countries where they lived, making a homeland unnecessary. By contrast, many Orthodox thinkers opposed the idea that a homeland for Jews could be created by secular means and put their trust in divine intervention instead.

It is also worth noting that unlike Christianity, Judaism is defined by birth rather than belief. A Jew is someone born to a Jewish parent (traditionally a Jewish mother) or someone who wishes to join the Jewish people by converting.

For example, if one were to list the various nationalities in the world, there would be Greeks, French, Koreans, English, Brazilians, Chinese, Italians — and Jews. If, on the other hand, if one were to list the great world religions of the world, there would be Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — and Judaism. Jews are listed twice, which means they are both a nationality and a religious community.

Although one of the examples of antisemitism listed by the State Department is “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist,” there were and still are Jews who reject the idea of a homeland. A prominent Hasidic rabbi once claimed that the Holocaust was divine punishment for the sin of Zionism. ❓ (Makes no sense❗) ✡️

Pundits on both side of the conflict say that it is unrealistic to think that after centuries of hatred and violence, Jews and Palestinians can live side by side and retain their respective identities. Perhaps so, but what does such alleged “realism” offer us other than endless brutality?

If it is realistic to continue fighting without ever stopping to ask what a more humane alternative would be like, then I say that being realistic amounts to moral bankruptcy.

To be sure, these people are a minority. According to a 2020, survey undertaken by the Pew Research Center, 8 out of 10 American Jews thought that Israel was either essential or important to their identity. Most synagogues include a prayer for the State of Israel as part of their worship service.

But the tide may be turning among younger Jews. A Pew Research Study in 2022, showed that 41% of Jews aged 18 to 29 had a favorable opinion of Israel while 69% over 65 did. As the war in Gaza drags on, that gap has surely increased.

Regarding (B), many Jews oppose the occupation and the war in Gaza but still feel a tie to Israel. Huge crowds of Israelis have demonstrated against the Netanyahu government prior to October 7. According to the 2020, study, only 1 in 3 American Jews thought Israel was sincere in its pursuit of peace.

That brings us to (C), whose adherents support Netanyahu’s goal of “total victory” regardless of the consequences. Although I don’t have exact figures, I suspect that in America, they too are a minority.

In sum, the relation between Judaism and Zionism is complicated depending on what era one is talking about and how one understands key terms. Criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic. But one thing the State Department got right is that there is no basis for holding the Jewish people as a whole responsible for the actions of Israel.

The problem is that those who demonstrate against Israel rarely take the time to study history or consider definitional questions. Not surprisingly many contain slogans calling for a worldwide intifada, or complete elimination of the State of Israel, where half the world’s Jews now live.

Should the world tolerate a Jewish state? At present it tolerates more than 15 states which are officially Christian and 23 which are officially Muslim. As for me, I support a cease-fire in Gaza, humanitarian aid, release of the Israeli hostages and the creation of a Palestinian state to exist alongside a Jewish one; in short, a two-state solution.

For most Jews, the debate over Zionism ended after World War II. The idea that Jews would be accepted as full citizens in an enlightened age seemed to go up the smokestack at Auschwitz. 

Main entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. This photograph was taken some time after the liberation of the camp in January 1945.

While reliance on divine intervention might be a comforting trope in the prayer book, it did not answer the question of what to do with the thousands of Jews left homeless by Nazi devastation or who were expelled from Islamic lands.

Kenneth Seeskin is professor emeritus of philosophy and the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Professor of Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University.

Immigrat workers - legal and otherwise- protect Americans against recession

 How immigrant workers in US have helped boost job growth and stave off a recession. By Paul Wiseman, Gisela Salomon in Washington DC and Christopher Rugaber in Miami. Echo report published in WABI5 newsletter website, in Bangor, Maine. 

Every day we are bombarded with stories of immigration

Immigration is one of the most contentious topics of debate in Maine. Controversy aside, immigration is also America's oldest tradition, and along with religious tolerance, what our nation was built upon.

Reported in AP and published in WABI5, Bangor ME- Millions of jobs that new immigrants have been filling in the United States appear to solve a riddle that has confounded economists for at least a year: How has the U.S. economy managed to prosper, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates — normally a recipe for a recession.

MIAMI, Fl (AP) — Having fled economic and political chaos in Venezuela, Luisana Silva now loads carpets for a South Carolina rug company. She earns enough to pay rent, buy groceries, gas up her car — and send money home to her parents.

Reaching the United States was a harrowing ordeal. Silva, 25, her husband and their then-7-year-old daughter braved the treacherous jungles of Panama's Darien Gap, traveled the length of Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande and then turned themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol in Brownsville, Texas. Seeking asylum, they received a work permit last year and found jobs in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

“My plan is to help my family that much need the money and to grow economically here,” Silva said.

Her story amounts to far more than one family’s arduous quest for a better life. The millions of jobs that Silva and other new immigrant arrivals have been filling in the United States appear to solve a riddle that has confounded economists for at least a year: How has the economy managed to prosper, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates to fight inflation — normally a recipe for a recession?

Increasingly, the answer appears to be immigrants — whether living in the United States legally or not. The influx of foreign-born adults vastly raised the supply of available workers after a U.S. labor shortage had left many companies unable to fill jobs.

More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has helped drive economic growth and create still-more job openings. The availability of immigrant workers eased the pressure on companies to sharply raise wages and to then pass on their higher labor costs to their customers via higher prices that feed inflation. Though U.S. inflation remains elevated, it has plummeted from its levels of two years ago.

“There’s been something of a mystery — how are we continuing to get such extraordinary strong job growth with inflation still continuing to come down?’’ said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department. “The immigration numbers being higher than what we had thought — that really does pretty much solve that puzzle.’’

While helping fuel economic growth, immigrants also lie at the heart of an incendiary election-year debate over the control of the nation's Southern border. In his bid to return to the White House, Donald Trump has attacked migrants in often-degrading terms, characterizing them as dangerous criminals who are "poisoning the blood" of America and frequently invoking falsehoods about migration. Trump has vowed to finish building a border wall and to launch the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history." Whether he or President Joe Biden wins the election could determine whether the influx of immigrants, and their key role in propelling the economy, will endure.

The boom in immigration caught almost everyone by surprise. In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that net immigration — arrivals minus departures — would equal about 1 million in 2023. The actual number, the CBO said in a January update, was more than triple that estimate: 3.3 million.

Thousands of employers desperately needed the new arrivals. The economy — and consumer spending — had roared back from the pandemic recession. Companies were struggling to hire enough workers to keep up with customer orders.

The problem was compounded by demographic changes: The number of native-born Americans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — was dropping because so many of them had aged out of that category and were nearing or entering retirement. This group's numbers have shrunk by 770,000 since February 2020, just before COVID-19 slammed the economy.

Filling the gap has been a wave of immigrants. Over the past four years, the number of prime-age workers who either have a job or are looking for one has surged by 2.8 million. And nearly all those new labor force entrants — 2.7 million, or 96% of them — were born outside the United States. Immigrants last year accounted for a record 18.6% of the labor force, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of government data.

“If you want to boost the economy," he said, “it definitely needs to have more immigrants coming out to this country.”

Or consider the workforce of the Flood Brothers farm in Maine’s “dairy capital’’ of Clinton. Foreign-born workers make up fully half the farm's staff of nearly 50, feeding the cows, tending crops and helping collect the milk — 18,000 gallons each day.

“We cannot do it without them," said Jenni Tilton-Flood, a partner in the operation.

For every unemployed person in Maine, after all, there are two job openings, on average.And employers welcomed the help.

Consider Jan Gautam, CEO of the lodging company Interessant Hotels & Resort Management in Orlando, Florida, who said he can’t find American-born workers to take jobs cleaning rooms and doing laundry in his 44 hotels. Of Interessant’s 3,500 workers, he said, 85% are immigrants.

“Without employees, you are broken," said Gautam, himself an immigrant from India who started working in restaurants as a dishwasher and now owns his own company.

“We would not have an economy, in Maine or in the U.S. if we did not have highly skilled labor that comes from outside of this country,” Tilton-Flood said in a phone interview with The Associated Press from her farm.

“Without immigrants — both new asylum-seekers as well as our long-term immigrant contributors — we would not be able to do the work that we do," she said. "Every single thing that affects the American economy is driven by and will only be saved by accepting immigrant labor.”

A study by Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson, economists at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, has concluded that over the past two years, new immigrants raised the economy’s supply of workers and allowed the United States to generate jobs without overheating and accelerating inflation.

In the past, economists typically estimated that America's employers could add no more than 60,000 to 100,000 jobs a month without overheating the economy and igniting inflation. But when Edelberg and Watson included the immigration surge in their calculations, they found that monthly job growth could be roughly twice as high this year — 160,000 to 200,000 — without exerting upward pressure on inflation.

"There are significantly more people working in the country," Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last week in a speech at Stanford University. Largely because of the immigrant influx, Powell said, "it's a bigger economy but not a tighter one. Really an unexpected and an unusual thing.''

Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden's immigration policy over the surge in migrants at the Southern border. Only about 27% of the 3.3 million foreigners who entered the United States last year did so through as “lawful permanent residents’’ or on temporary visas, according to Edelberg and Watson's analysis. The rest — 2.4 million — either came illegally, overstayed their visas, are awaiting immigration court proceedings or are on a parole program that lets them stay temporarily and sometimes work in the country.

“So there you have it,’’ Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director who is president of the conservative American Action Forum, wrote in February. “The way to solve an inflation crisis is to endure an immigration crisis."

Many economists suggest that immigrants benefit the U.S. economy in several ways. (1) They take generally undesirable, low-paying but essential jobs that most U.S.-born Americans won’t, like caring for children, the sick and the elderly. (2) And they can boost the country’s innovation and productivity because they are more likely to start their own businesses and obtain patents.

Ernie Tedeschi, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University's Psaros Center and a former Biden economic adviser, calculates that the burst of immigration has accounted for about a fifth of the economy's growth over the past four years.

Critics counter that a surge in immigration can force down pay, particularly for low-income workers, a category that often includes immigrants who have lived in the United States longer. Last month, in the most recent economic report of the president, Biden's advisers acknowledged that "immigration may place downward pressure on the wages of some low-paid workers" but added that most studies show that the impact on the wages of the U.S.-born is "small."

Even Edelberg notes that an unexpected wave of immigrants, like the recent one, can overwhelm state and local governments and saddle them with burdensome costs. A more orderly immigration system, she said, would help.

The recent surge “is a somewhat disruptive way of increasing immigration in the United States,” Edelberg said. “I don’t think anybody would have sat down and said: ‘Let’s create optimal immigration policy,' and this is what they would come up with."

Holtz-Eakin argued that an immigration cutoff of the kind Trump has vowed to impose, if elected, would result in “much, much slower labor force growth and a return to the sharp tradeoff’’ between containing inflation and maintaining economic growth that the United States has so far managed to avoid.

For now, millions of job vacancies are being filled by immigrants like Mariel Marrero. A political opponent of Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro, Marrero, 32, fled her homeland in 2016 after receiving death threats. She lived in Panama and El Salvador before crossing the U.S. border and applying for asylum.

Her case pending, she received authorization to work in the United States last July. Marrero, who used to work in the archives of the Venezuelan Congress in Caracas, found work selling telephones and then as a sales clerk at a convenience store owned by Venezuelan immigrants.

At first, she lived for free at the house of an uncle. But now she earns enough to pay rent on a two-bedroom house she shares with three other Venezuelans in Doral, Florida, a Miami suburb with a large Venezuelan community. After rent, food, electricity and gasoline, she has enough left over to send $200 a month to her family in Venezuela.

“One hundred percent — this country gives you opportunities,’’ she said.

Marrero has her own American dream: “I imagine having my own company, my house, helping my family in a more comfortable way.”