This smarmy demagogue can pack a remarkable number of lies into a short racist screed:

"I'm still gonna call them an illegal alien" — JD Vance on Haitian migrants who are in Ohio legally pic.twitter.com/phe5yjiUyd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 18, 2024

“Illegal aliens” is a lie he openly admits is a lie. “20,000 Haitians” in Springfield is a lie. Calling legal immigrants who have settled in a community “migrants” is the Republican dog whistle lie du jour. And all of this in service of one big racist lie [gift link]:

The morning after the debate, parents in Springfield kept their children home en masse. Several schools, City Hall and the state motor vehicle offices in Springfield were forced to evacuate after receiving bomb threats. The city canceled its two-day CultureFest celebrating diversity, arts and culture “in light of recent threats and safety concerns.”

Blood Tribe took a victory lap for its presence in the town, boasting on Sept. 11, “We are on the ground in Springfield weekly—we even showed up to their City Council Meeting.” 

Vance, meanwhile, has continued to defend his claims.

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement. 

Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.

Vance has also added to his claims about Haitians, saying on social media that communicable diseases have been on the rise in Springfield because of the Haitian migration. 

Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015. The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015.

Heckuva job to every mainstream editor who promoted this asshole by claiming his book argued the opposite of what it did! Just great work all around.

The post JD Vance’s memo from Turner’s Diary appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

–Blll Buckley

The editor of the National Review made an appearance with racist ghoul Megyn Kelly to show us that Donald Trump becoming the unquestioned emperor of the Republican Party is a mystery that will never be explained, like the square root of 4:

The editor in chief of the National Review just said the N word in regards to Haitians and Megyn Kelly ignores it. pic.twitter.com/PK9trHPOUF

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) September 16, 2024

Note too that the context makes it worse. When Lowry dropped the n-word he was in the midst of doing the “libs say Vance was lying when he said Haitians were stealing and eating cats and dogs, but two people were accused of taking geese from ponds” shell game, which is intelligence-insulting bullshit in the service of defending JD Vance’s racist demoguagery and incitement. The slur fits in perfectly; it’s essentially redundant. It’s what the Republican Party, including its nominally “respectable” elements, is in 2024. And it’s certainly consistent with his magazine’s traditions.

The post JD Vance’s racist pogrom gives Rich Lowry starbursts appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Another woman killed by Trump and Alito’s new legal regime:

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Women dying from preventable medical conditions in a hospital full medical personnel who could have helped them and kept them alive but didn’t want to risk having their own lives ruined by state coercion — in other words, the legal regime favored by the Republican Party working exactly as intended. These people calling themselves “pro-life” is a dark joke on the universe.

The post Homicide: Life After Dobbs appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Let’s hear more from the Republican candidate for governor in a major battleground state:

In a newly unearthed video from 2022, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) scoffs at the idea that young women should have access to birth control and, repeatedly waving his hand near his groin, says they just need to “get this under control.”

During a January 2022 appearance at Hilltop Baptist Church in Thomasville, North Carolina, Robinson ― who is now the GOP nominee for governor ― also took aim at programs that provide sexual education and birth control to young women.

The North Carolina Republican has a long history of making sexist, homophobic and otherwise offensive remarks, in addition to peddling wild conspiracy theories. He has modeled himself after former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson in March.

“Particularly we love to tell our young women that. We want to empower you,” he said mockingly in his 2022 remarks. “We want to help you to build up your mind so you can be empowered.”

Robinson proposed what he called “a novel idea” to the audience.

“Why don’t you use some of that building up of your mind and building up of empowerment to move down here, to this region down here,” he said, moving his hand in circles around his stomach and crotch. “Get this under control.”

“See, because this region right here, that’s the only region on your body that can make life and take life,” he continued. “If there’s anything we need to be telling our young people, it’s they need to be responsible with their reproductive systems. That means you don’t lay down and act like you’re making a baby til you’re ready to have a baby.”

Robinson then dismissed the idea of educating young women about sex and birth control.

“All this giving out of birth control and advising people how,” he said. “Here’s how you don’t have a baby: You don’t have what you do to make a baby until you’re ready to have that baby.”

Yikes, what’s next, making JD Vance the vice presidential nominee?

One question that came up in our podcast earlier is whether Robinson is such a bad candidate that he materially helps Harris in North Carolina. Typically, this doesn’t happen, but in a close race in an era in which split tickets are becoming rarer than ever…it’s worth keeping an eye on.

The post But don’t worry, Griswold is totally safe! appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

In light of my post yesterday, this stood out (gift link):

During the administration’s first year, the briefer was presenting a classified personality profile of a female foreign leader Harris would be meeting. The briefer was a woman, but Harris thought some of the language she was using was gender-biased. Rather than just voicing her discomfort, Harris requested an intelligence community internal review.

The result, never previously reported, was an internal assessment by the intelligence community of whether analysts had routinely used gender-biased language in intelligence reports. The review examined several years of analytical reports, comparing how often certain words had been used about women and men. Harris was so concerned that she asked intelligence agencies to train their analysts to avoid any such bias in the future. She also requested more reporting from the intelligence community on gender issues and sexual violence around the world.

Gender issues make a difference in how intelligence is interpreted. Here’s an example.

Good for David Ignatius for reporting this without a sneer.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

The post Kamala Harris Gets It appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Listen, someone like Elon Musk openly wondering why Democrats aren’t getting assassinated while also holding massive multi-billion dollar government security contracts is the inevitable wage of neoliberalism. The government can work with private business, sure, but when you outsource huge parts of the government to private corporations so that government, like higher education can be “run like a business,” this is what will eventually happen. You empower the worst people in the world, i.e,, billionaires with our core national security interests, all while having no regulation, no control, no other option than to work with them.

This kind of thing is as much on the Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas of the world as any Republican. People wanted to deify our billionaires. Well, deify Elon Musk then as he calls for the assassination of Democratic leaders.

Alternatively, we could nationalize Musk’s holdings and run national security from the government, in conjunction with private business, but not handing them the keys.

The post The Inevitable Wage of Neoliberalism appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.