“What plainly irks the governor is how Trump and Vance keep calling the Haitians “illegal” migrants.
“To say that these people are illegal is just not right, you can’t make up stuff like that,” DeWine told me.
He repeatedly criticized President Biden’s handling of the border, but pointed out that’s a different matter than the Haitians who are in the country with Temporary Protected Status.
“Throughout my entire lifetime we’ve had programs similar to that that,” DeWine said, alluding to the Hungarians and Cubans who fled conflict for America. “We have said we’re going to let certain people in because of the great oppression that they are feeling, or the danger they are feeling. We ought to be a country that is capable of doing that.”
Of course, that would be to presuppose that such nuances matter to Trump and Vance, particularly when portraying migrants as threats is so politically rewarding in the heat of a campaign.”
“”Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris,” Donald Trump’s campaign avers in a statement issued on Monday. Like Trump’s assertion that “our crime rate is going up,” this claim is completely at odds with reality.
According to FBI data, the homicide rate jumped by more than 27 percent in 2020, when Trump was president; rose slightly in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration; and fell by 7 percent in 2022. Preliminary FBI numbers show bigger drops in 2023 (about 13 percent) and this year (26 percent for the first quarter). So far this year, according to data from 277 cities, homicides are down by about 17 percent.”
“A New York judge imposed a $364 million penalty Friday on Donald Trump, his companies and some executives, ruling that they engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated the former president’s wealth.”
…
“Engoron concluded that Trump and his co-defendants “failed to accept responsibility” for their actions and that expert witnesses who testified for the defense “simply denied reality.”
The judge called the civil fraud at the heart of the trial a “venial sin, not a mortal sin.”
“They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways,” wrote Engoron, a Democrat. He said their “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.”
“The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” the judge added.”
“Whatever you think of Donald Trump, we know what Carlson thinks, thanks to private communications that Dominion Voting Systems uncovered through discovery in its defamation lawsuit against Carlson’s former employer, which agreed to pay $788 million rather than defend its promotion of Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. “There isn’t really an upside to Trump,” Carlson said in a January 4, 2021, text message to his staff, describing “the last four years” as “a disaster.” Back then, Carlson was eager to be rid of Trump: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.” The day after the January 6, 2021, riot by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol, Carlson privately called him “a demonic force” and “a destroyer.”
But that was then. Carlson, like the GOP politicians whose phoniness he claims to despise, has adjusted to the reality that Trump remains stubbornly popular among Republicans. He is even willing to reinforce the election conspiracy theory that he publicly called unfounded and privately called a lie. Carlson’s current coziness with Trump was on vivid display Wednesday night, starting with the question of why the “far-and-away front-runner,” whose views are of such keen interest to voters, decided to skip the Republican debate in Milwaukee and any other similar forum in which he might have to defend those views or his record as president against competitors keen to make a dent in his commanding lead.
Trump’s answer was that felt no need to go through that ordeal, precisely because he is so far ahead. Why put up with “all these people screaming at me, shouting questions at me”—which Trump contradictorily claimed he “love[s] answering”—when he could sit down with an interviewer who is desperate to please him, especially in light of the criticism revealed in those embarrassing messages? Anyway, Trump said, he would probably get better ratings “using this crazy forum” than he would on Fox News, which televised the debate that he skipped. “I’m grateful that you did,” Carlson replied.”
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“Trump said Biden “is worse mentally than he is physically,” as evidenced by the fact that he “can’t put two sentences together.” Trump, by contrast, can put many, many sentences together, but they do not necessarily make sense, bear any logical relationship to each other, or stand up to critical scrutiny. Fortunately for Trump, Carlson was offering none of that.”
“Two-party political systems on their best days are pendulums—we vote for zig when the other side zags too far, often without getting too hung up on the details. This is indeed what brought us George Santos: Voters in the suburbs of New York City were fed up with crime, inflation, and education policy and sought to punish the locally dominant Democrats. That desire overwhelmed any motivation to learn about let alone act upon the preelection reporting from the local North Shore Leader newspaper that Santos was lying about his real estate holdings and much besides, to the point where the paper editorialized that “he’s most likely just a fabulist—a fake.”
That pendulum-swing inattention becomes actively corrupted every time an election is cast as a potentially apocalyptic showdown against forces that threaten to bring down the entire country. Who’s got time for political niceties (like not making crazy things up) when the very future of the republic is at stake? That logic helped bring us one of the wildest liars in U.S. political history, Donald Trump. And it also brought us his serially fabulist successor, Joe Biden.”
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“Whataboutism does have the honest-to-goodness virtue of pointing out hypocritical imbalances of treatment, especially by allegedly neutral institutions, of political actors based on their partisan or ideological status rather than on the behavior being critiqued. But for people locked into a must-win electoral mindset, it defaults to pure deflection. How can you criticize our guy when you didn’t criticize their guy? How can you bust Biden’s chops on repeatedly saying untrue things without immediately producing a scorecard showing that his predecessor was worse?
At the risk of overstating the obvious, this is not a recipe for reducing the amount of venal and possibly even criminal dishonesty among elected officials. Whataboutism could be used in a partisan way for good—like, “Hey, that bad behavior on the other side; is anyone on our side doing something similar? If so, we should knock it off.” But there’s no reason to expect politicians to take that path until the rest of us show them the door.”
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“But we also need to solve the problems of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which means not excusing or minimizing their lies just because the other guy is worse, and maintaining the citizen self-respect not to succumb to political trench warfare. Not only do your political hatreds pay for an entire unproductive economic sector, they also enable awful people to get away with their past malfeasance in the improbable name of saving America. Want politicians to stop lying to you? Stop letting them.”
“The village of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, is still dealing with the fallout of the infamous Foxconn deal the state struck in 2017. Former Governor Scott Walker promised the Taiwan-based tech giant $3 billion in state subsidies in exchange for a state-of-the-art factory to be built in Mount Pleasant, and said that the deal would generate 13,000 high-paying jobs.
Four years later, the factory was nowhere near completion, and the company had created merely 1,400 jobs. The state rescinded most of the subsidies, but the Mount Pleasant Village Board, the local governing body, had already authorized bulldozing dozens of homes, including via eminent domain, designating more than four square miles “blighted” to make the land even easier to seize from private owners. It also took on hundreds of millions in debt, leading to the town’s credit rating being downgraded.”
“As the Capitol riot unfolded on January 6, Fox News hosts knew exactly how bad things were.
“The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Laura Ingraham texted to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “Please, get him on TV — [the riot is] destroying everything you accomplished,” Brian Kilmeade wrote to Meadows. “Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?” wrote Sean Hannity in yet another Meadows text.
The texts, revealed during a Monday hearing of the House January 6 Commission, were at odds with the hosts’ on-air comments on the night of the attack. Ingraham suggested that “antifa supporters” may have been responsible for the violence. Kilmeade took a similar line: “I do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation.” Hannity, for his part, asserted that “the majority of them were peaceful.”
This is tangible proof that some of Fox’s marquee personalities knowingly lied to their audience about January. The lying began basically immediately, in the direct aftermath of a national tragedy.
This isn’t the only issue on which Fox’s dishonesty has been exposed. On one of the fundamental policy topics of the day, the pandemic, the right’s most influential news network is saying one thing to its audience and doing another in private.
Fox News’s programming on vaccines and vaccine mandates has been relentlessly hostile. Yet more than 90 percent of Fox News employees are fully vaccinated, and the company has a vaccine mandate that’s actually stricter than the one President Joe Biden has proposed for large corporations. Hosts tend not to mention this on air and, on the rare occasions that they do, they mislead their audience about it.
They are lying to their audience, and anyone paying close attention can see it.
These incidents speak to a deep pattern in modern conservatism, a parasitic relationship in which a super-wealthy elite preys on the fears of the conservative base for profit.”