Vance – Page 2 – Lone Candle

Devastating flooding in North Carolina.

Posted on September 30, 2024 by ajk1311@gmail.com

Devastating flooding in North Carolina.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZc2oX0YPj4

J.D. Vance Says It Does Not Matter Whether ‘Rumors’ of Pet-Eating Migrants Are True

Posted on September 20, 2024September 20, 2024 by ajk1311@gmail.com

“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”

Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””

…

“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.

Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”

Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.

You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”

https://reason.com/2024/09/15/j-d-vance-says-it-does-not-matter-whether-rumors-of-pet-eating-migrants-are-true/

J.D. Vance’s Revisionist History

Posted on September 19, 2024September 19, 2024 by ajk1311@gmail.com

“”Six years after then-President Donald Trump signed the first tariffs and began a costly U.S.-China trade war, it’s become clear that these tariffs are an abject policy and economic failure,” wrote Jay Derr of the Reason Foundation (the organization that publishes this website) earlier this year. “These tariffs have negatively impacted trade between the U.S. and China, leading importers to shift toward Mexico’s west coast instead of shipping directly to the United States. As a result, trade between Mexico and China has grown by 60% in one year.”
They also, on net, failed to protect American jobs: The U.S.-China Business Council found in 2021, that some 245,000 American jobs were lost as a result of the tariffs. And despite the Trump team’s hopes, U.S. Steel may in fact get sold to Japan’s Nippon Steel Corporation after all (though pulling the deal off is proving complicated).

“The entire purpose of a tariff is to shift consumer behavior away from politically disfavored goods—such as imports from China—toward domestic-made items that would otherwise lose out in a free market of price competition,” wrote Reason’s Eric Boehm last month. If reimposed and broadened, “Trump’s proposed 10 percent tariff would be equivalent to a $300 billion tax increase,” reports Boehm. “Assuming other countries would also raise trade barriers in retaliation, the final toll would be more than 825,000 jobs lost, according to Tax Foundation Senior Economist Erica York.” For the typical American household, Trump’s round two would impose costs of an additional $1,500 annually.”

…

“If we get more tariffs, it’s American consumers who will have to bear the consequences—after suffering through several years of high inflation that have already taken a big chunk out of their budgets.”

https://reason.com/2024/08/26/j-d-vances-revisionist-history/

Where J.D. Vance’s weirdest idea actually came from

Posted on September 14, 2024 by ajk1311@gmail.com

“The “extra votes for parents” proposal came in a 2021 speech sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization that encourages college students to engage with right-wing ideas. About halfway through the speech, Vance says that he wants to “take aim at the left, specifically the childless left.”
He knows these comments will be controversial: He says “I’m going to get in trouble for this,” and then asks the hosts if he’s being recorded. But he continues on by listing off leading Democratic politicians who didn’t have children at the time — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and then asks, “Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children?”

Of course, this is misleading: Harris is a stepmother and Buttigieg has become a father since Vance’s remarks. But the specific examples are less important than Vance’s general point, which is a moral one.

In his view, being a parent is the primary source of happiness and meaning in a person’s life, and people who don’t have kids can’t be trusted to make decisions in the interest of society writ large. Societies are good, per Vance, when they have babies; if they don’t have enough, they rot.

So what to do about it? Vance suggests borrowing ideas from Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister who has made increasing Hungary’s birthrate a centerpiece of his policy agenda. But Vance also worries that a Hungarian model might not be possible because families suffer from a “structural democratic disadvantage”: children can’t vote. Hence, he concludes, we should let parents cast votes on their behalf.

“Let’s give votes to all the children in this country and let’s give control over votes to the parents in this country,” he says.

It’s an old idea called “Demeny voting,” named after 20th-century Hungarian demographer Paul Demeny (a vocal champion of the idea). Typically, the argument for Demeny voting is rooted in fairness. Children are people who, like anyone else, deserve political representation. Since they lack the maturity to make informed choices about their interests, parents should vote on their behalf — much in the same way they make decisions about children’s medical care or education. To get a sense of how this argument works, I’d recommend a recent paper by two law professors at Harvard and Northwestern making the case at length.

But for Vance, the policy isn’t just about ensuring fairness for families: it’s about punishing childless adults. Vance sees Demeny voting as a tool for creating two-tiered citizenship, one where parents have more and better political representation than other adults.

“When you go to the polls in this country, you should have more power — more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids,” he says. “If you don’t have much of an investment in the future of this country, then maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

This is not the language of a liberal looking to expand the sphere of people whose interests are represented in the system to children. Vance’s defense of Demeny voting reveals a belief that people who aren’t like him, who don’t share his values about childrearing, are social unequals: non-participants in the political project of ensuring America survives across generations, and hence deserved targets of political discrimination.

In short, Vance wants to turn the law into a vehicle for legislating hard-right morality.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/363473/jd-vance-weird-voting-parents-demeny-postliberalism

Trump, Vance, and The Republican Anti-Worker Playbook | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

Posted on September 5, 2024September 5, 2024 by ajk1311@gmail.com

Republicans like Vance and Trump use populist and pro-worker rhetoric, but their policy is pro-business and helps the wealthy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJgWsj7Qhw

J.D. Vance has made it impossible for Trump to run away from Project 2025

Posted on September 2, 2024September 2, 2024 by ajk1311@gmail.com

“Former President Donald Trump has lately been trying to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming it was cooked up by the “severe right” and that he doesn’t know anything about it.
But it turns out the severe right is coming from inside the house.

Kevin Roberts, the self-proclaimed “head” of Project 2025, has a book coming out in September — and the book’s foreword is written by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who lavishly praises its ideas.

“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes, according to the book’s Amazon page. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

What ideas? Like Vance, Roberts is obsessed with the idea that the left controls major American institutions — he lists Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education and even the Boy Scouts of America. The book argues that “conservatives need to burn down” these institutions if “we’re to preserve the American way of life.” (Vox has requested a copy of the book, but has not yet received one at the time of this writing.)

Obviously, this poses a problem for Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the virally unpopular Project 2025 and its lengthy agenda for what he should do if he wins, which includes proposals to restrict abortion access and centralize executive power in the presidency.

And it’s one more indication that Trump’s pick of Vance might be politically problematic for him. Vance has a fascination with provocative and extreme far-right thinkers, and a history of praising their ideas. He is not a running mate tailored to win over swing voters who are concerned Trump might be too extreme — quite the opposite.

The book was written and announced before Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate. But there’s some indication that people involved had some late second thoughts about it. It was originally announced as “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” with a cover image showing a match over the word “Washington.”

More recently, though, the subtitle has been changed to “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match has vanished from the cover.”

…

“Project 2025 contains a multitude of proposals in its 922-page plan, not all of which J.D. Vance necessarily supports.

But he’s on record backing ideas similar to those put forth in two of Project 2025’s most controversial issue areas.

The first is abortion. Project 2025 lays out a sweeping agenda by which the next president could use federal power to prevent abortions, including using an old law called the Comstock Act to prosecute people who mail abortion pills, and working to prevent women from abortion-banning states from traveling out of state to get abortions.

Vance is on record supporting these ideas. Last year, he signed a letter demanding that the Justice Department prosecute physicians and pharmacists “who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws.” In 2022, he said he was “sympathetic” to the idea that the federal government should stop efforts to help women traveling out of their states to get abortions. That year, he also said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”

At other points, Vance has struck a different tone. ““We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans,” he said last December. And this month he said he supported a Supreme Court decision that allowed the abortion bill mifepristone to remain available. Here, Vance is trying to align with Trump, who — fearing political blowback — argues he merely wants abortion to be a state issue, despite his long alliance with the religious right. But Vance’s record implies his true agenda might be otherwise.

The second controversial area where Vance is sympatico with Project 2025 is centralizing presidential power over the executive branch. The project lays out various proposals to rein in what conservatives view as an out-of-control “deep state” bureaucracy — mainly, by firing far more career civil servants and installing far more political appointees throughout the government.

Vance, as I wrote last week, has backed a maximalist version of this agenda. In 2021, Vance said that in Trump’s second term, Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” The courts would try to stop this, Vance continued, and Trump should then “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

So it’s no big surprise that Vance would write the foreword for a book by Project 2025’s architect. They fundamentally agree on how they see the world, and in much of what they want out of politics: a battle against the left for control of institutions, and expanded government power to stop abortions.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/362917/jd-vance-project-2025-book-kevin-roberts-trump