Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 29,015]

out in the open

fuck these fucks

 

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🤣

 

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Gun death rates in some U.S. states comparable to conflict zones, study finds

The Commonwealth Fund found that the rate of firearms deaths in Mississippi is nearly twice that of Haiti, an impoverished nation stricken by gang violence.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/31/us-gun-deaths-violence-global-comparison/

 

The rate of firearms deaths in several U.S. states is similar to their frequency in places around the world that are battling civil unrest or bloody gang wars, a new report shows.

The report, published Wednesday by the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research group, found that the overall rate of firearms deaths in Mississippi was nearly twice that of Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation where violent gangs control large swaths of the country and whose president was assassinated by gunmen in 2021.

Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama also had higher firearms death rates than Mexico, where rival drug cartels are engaged in bloody conflict. Montana’s death rate from guns was higher than in Colombia, where drug trafficking is rife.

Wyoming, Arizona and Oklahoma all ranked above Brazil. Suburban New Jersey had a higher gun death rate than Nicaragua, Mali and Djibouti.

In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis — putting it on a par with a 1960s warning on the lethal consequences of cigarette smoking.

The latest report illustrates “just how bad gun violence has gotten in the U.S. and how it’s something we should be talking about far more than we do,” said Evan Gumas, a research associate at the Commonwealth Fund and a co-author of the report.

“The fact that the U.S. ranks among countries that are involved in some form of conflict (whether that be civil war, general unrest, drug/arms trafficking etc.) is really startling, and even more so when we look at where U.S. states compare on the global scale,” he said in an email to The Washington Post. “I do think many Americans would be surprised by how similar our rates are to those in the world’s conflict zones.”

The report was based on data from the 2021 Global Burden of Disease study, which provides an in-depth look at mortality and disability across countries, and the latest 2022 mortality data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers defined firearm mortality in the study as an aggregate of physical violence by firearm, self-harm by firearm and unintentional firearm injuries.

So far this year, there have been 24 mass killings with guns in the United States, according to a tracker published by The Washington Post, which defines a “mass killing” as an event in which four or more people died, not including the perpetrators.

Globally, the United States ranks in the 93rd percentile for overall firearm mortality, the 92nd percentile for firearm mortality among children and teenagers, and the 96th percentile for firearm mortality among women, the report found.

U.S. states have a higher firearm mortality rate than most other countries in the world. Rates of self-harm are also much higher. Black, American Indian and Alaska Native people experience the highest rates of any racial or ethnic group.

Previous studies have compared firearm mortality in the United States with other high-income countries and showed consistently higher U.S. death rates.

The aim of the latest report, Gumas said, was to highlight how the United States compares to countries that aren’t in its usual wealthy cohort — such as Belize, which is plagued by bouts of civil unrest and has one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world.

“I think Americans recognize that we of course don’t compare to a lot of the high-income countries we typically compare ourselves to,” Gumas said. “But I don’t think they would expect us to compare to many of the countries that we do compare to like the Dominican Republic, Belize, or Haiti.”

[NikkiCFC 8,048]

2 hours ago, Vesper said:

out in the open

fuck these fucks

 

2:48 

 

[Fernando 6,484]

11 hours ago, KEVINAA said:

 

953 Billion Dollars has been wiped out from the US stock market today

The USA and world economy fully crashing just before Halloween night ends in USA eastern time.

I laugh when people talk about this, and you only focus on the daily movement. 

When you zoom out and look at yearly charts you see a whole different story. 

For the market to "truly" crash and "end of the world scenario" you will need to go to like 600 and below on the S& P 500 index. We are at 5705.44...

 

Edited November 1 by Fernando

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13 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

2:48 

 

 

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Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans vs. Harris’ Unity Agenda: The Stark Choices Facing America

As the US election nears, Trump promises sweeping deportations and attacks on opponents, while Harris advocates for democratic norms and a people-centred agenda.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/trumps-mass-deportation-plans-vs-harris-unity-agenda-the-stark-choices-facing-america

 

The best thing to be said of America’s 2024 presidential campaign season is it’s almost over. Donald Trump’s campaign has set a new record for vitriol, big lies and threats. No previous presidential candidate, dating back to the end of the 18th century, has ever vowed to “lock up” his political opponents or employed such Hitleresque characterisations of millions of immigrants as “vermin.” No previous presidential candidate I’m aware of has ever sought the office by vowing his presidency would be devoted to his own “retribution” against his own list of “the enemy within”, which begins with former Trump staffers who no longer support him and has told his supporters that “I’ll be your retribution,” too.

Trump could not have created the supposed enemies of his supporters all by himself, of course. It’s taken decades of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox “News,” talk-radio broadcasters in the mode of Rush Limbaugh, the conspiracy promoters on social media, and lately, Elon Musk’s remade Twitter ,now X, where far-right fabrications flourish, to convince those Americans who’ve become Trump’s base that feminists, various racial and religious minorities (who may bounce on and off Trump’s enemies list according to his whims), immigrants, liberals, elites (excluding the billionaires who are funding Trump’s campaign, of course), and just plain Democrats are all out to destroy America, following some obscure and alien ideology laid out by someone like Pol Pot.

Based on both media reports and the television ads I’ve seen while watching the current baseball World Series (L.A. Dodgers vs. N.Y. Yankees, a classic), Trump is closing by highlighting the threat that rampant transgenderism poses to the American way of life. His campaign has excavated an interview Kamala Harris gave in 2019 in which she said that convicts in California’s prisons have a right to switch genders, which presumably is proof positive that Harris poses a mortal peril to the roughly 98 per cent of Americans who aren’t transgender. If, somehow, she’s on transgenders’ “side,” Mr. and Mrs. America, she can’t possibly be on yours.

This closing blast was augmented last Sunday by Trump’s rally at New York’s legendary Madison Square Garden, where one comedian who preceded him to the stage referred to the American colony of Puerto Rico and its inhabitants as an “island of garbage.” Dehumanising though that was, the crowd of Trump-lovers “didn’t mind” it, said the Trump campaign’s press secretary, and Trump himself hasn’t repudiated it. As Puerto Ricans who live in the United States are American citizens who can vote in presidential elections, that may prove to boost the turnout of Harris voters among Puerto Ricans in such tightly contested swing states as Pennsylvania, where there are an estimated 500,000 Puerto Rican residents in a state of 13 million.

Harris voiced her own closing argument on Tuesday evening on the Ellipse – that part of the National Mall that abuts the White House, which was the site of Trump’s incendiary speech directing his followers, some of whom he knew were armed, to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. She chose the spot as the perfect setting for what she believes to be, and what actually is, the fundamental difference between her and Trump: that she adheres to democratic norms in which her opponents have every right to oppose her and her policies, and that Trump believes that anyone who challenges him and his policies is his enemy and thus an enemy of the state. She vowed to treat her opponents with respect, and has said she’ll even appoint a Republican, assuming one can be found, to a post in her Cabinet.

As I noted in a previous column, however, polling has shown that defending American democracy is not a notably persuasive argument among the relative handful of voters who are still undecided. For them, the most effective message is a progressive-populist one, a pledge to go after Wall Street and powerful corporate interests with higher taxes that would fund such Harris policies as universal childcare, and with regulations that would pare back corporations’ domination of markets and price-setting. In a number of swing states, Harris ads making that point still saturate the airwaves, and she made forceful arguments along those lines in her address on the Ellipse.

One closing argument that Harris supporters should be making to those left-wing voters who say they won’t vote for her because she hasn’t broken with the Biden Administration’s carte blanche of arms provisions to the Israeli government, however, has not been made. Most of those won’t-vote-for-her electors – the vast majority of them young – have doubtless been horrified by the wholesale slaughter of innocent lives in Gaza. The argument that Trump has clearly said he’s fine with whatever Bibi Netanyahu is doing, while Harris has said she’s not, hasn’t persuaded many within this subset to vote for her, despite the best efforts of such left leaders as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But to the degree that concern for innocent lives is key to these voters’ reluctance to support Harris, I think that their concern for innocent lives is precisely the way to convince those voters to cast a Harris ballot. The one campaign promise that Trump consistently makes in his otherwise stream-of-consciousness speeches – or, if you prefer, sewer of consciousness – is that he’ll deport record numbers of undocumented immigrants, whose number the government puts at roughly 11 million, but which Trump and JD Vance insist is really 20 million, or maybe 25 or 30 million, whatever. To that end, Trump vows to mobilise the National Guard, and if needs be, perhaps the army.

The effects of such a programme, even if it deports just a small fraction of those immigrants, would be catastrophic to countless families and communities. During his first term, Trump sought to stop immigration by having border guards separate children, including toddlers and infants, from their parents when apprehended at the border. Seven years later, there are still more, perhaps many more, than a thousand families that have not been reunited. As his promised mass deportations constitute the one programme Trump will surely carry out, there will be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of US citizen children whose undocumented immigrant parents will be sent away, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of undocumented immigrants who were brought here by their parents when they were small children and have lived nearly the entirety of their lives in the US, who will be sent to countries that are altogether alien to them.

These are innocent lives that can be spared from tragedy if Harris is elected. To the extent that concern for innocent life underlies some voters’ reluctance to back Harris, this is, I think, an argument that could push her over the top in some of the swing states where polling now shows Trump and Harris effectively tied. Trump has stoked so much anxiety through his lies about allegedly dangerous immigrants, which has rendered many of the swing voters not concerned about Gaza wary of backing Harris, that this is clearly not an argument that she herself could advance in the campaign’s closing days. It would be well, however, if prominent progressives took it upon themselves to do just that.

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Nobel Prize in Economics: Do Democracy and Prosperity Really Go Hand in Hand?

Bo Rothstein 1st November 2024

This year’s Nobel laureates link democracy to economic success, but their theory ignores autocratic growth and rehashes old ideas.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/nobel-prize-in-economics-do-democracy-and-prosperity-really-go-hand-in-hand

 

This year’s Alfred Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson. Not only are these three highly successful, exceptionally productive, and highly acclaimed researchers, but it is also to their credit that they have published not only in academic journals but also in books that are accessible to the general public.

Nevertheless, some questions can be raised about this award. The justification for the prize is that they have shown that what they call “inclusive” political institutions and democracy give rise to economic prosperity. Let’s start with what counts as “inclusive”, as opposed to “extractive”, political institutions. One definition they present is that these are institutions that “allow and encourage the majority of people to participate in economic activities that make the best use of their talents and skills and that enable individuals to make the choices they desire.”

The first problem is that the nature of these institutions is extremely unclear and ill-defined. They do not provide a clear answer regarding the basic norm that characterises them, making it difficult to determine when an institution shifts from being inclusive to being extractive.

Secondly, it has been argued that, historically, inclusive and extractive institutions have not been opposite “modus operandi” for nations’ economies. Instead, they have presupposed each other. Slavery went hand in hand with the establishment of what they call inclusive institutions, such as property rights and legislative assemblies, which had a limited but gradually expanding franchise.

The third problem is that this is a bit like saying that the good society creates the good society. As the official motivation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science puts it: “good political institutions are a precondition for good economic institutions.” There is thus not much theoretical distance between what explains and what is to be explained. One could say that this way of reasoning is merely a repetition of data—much like stating that how voters vote is determined by which party they like best.

The fourth problem is that recognising the importance of institutions is not a new perspective. In 1992, the economic historian Douglass North was awarded this prize precisely for the insight that institutions are crucial to understanding economic development. While this may seem obvious now, at the time North received his award, social science research was largely divided into two camps. One camp emphasised the significance of basic social structures: Marxists focused on class structure, feminists highlighted the gendered power order, and proponents of modernisation theory pointed to culture as a fundamental structuring phenomenon. The other camp concentrated on individual behaviour, influenced by various psychological factors. North’s novel approach was to emphasise institutions, as they serve to connect individual behaviour with structural factors through (formal and informal) rule systems, such as laws and constitutions, as well as established social codes. Though this perspective was relatively new at the time, it has unfortunately become yesterday’s news today.

A key issue lies in the laureates’ assertion that democracy fosters economic prosperity. This perspective fails to account for the remarkable economic development of Communist-ruled China, which has lifted an unprecedented number of people out of extreme poverty in a remarkably short period. Nearly fifteen years ago, Amartya Sen, also a recipient of this prize, published a widely discussed article comparing Communist China to democratic India. Although Sen, being of Indian descent, was reluctant to draw such a conclusion, he ultimately found that China surpassed India in nearly every metric of human welfare at that time.

The current laureates’ inability to explain China’s economic success stems from their lack of understanding regarding the country’s unique state apparatus—an administration that manages to combine high levels of professionalism and meritocracy with strong political and ideological control. This organisational model, although relatively rare, is not exclusive to China; I have observed similar structures, as exceptions, in the post-war period in both Sweden and the USA. While this type of system can be highly effective, it is not particularly democratic.

That democracy in itself is not a main cause of economic prosperity can also be illustrated by comparing small countries. In the 1960s, the small island nations of Jamaica and Singapore were both impoverished. They had similar populations and were simultaneously liberating themselves from British colonial rule. At that time, an assessment of their development would likely have led most observers to predict a promising future for Jamaica. The country boasted extensive arable land, abundant natural resources, no ethnic conflicts, proximity to the world’s largest market (the United States), a budding democracy, and the potential for a thriving tourism industry, particularly as Cuba was stepping back from this sector.

In contrast, Singapore was at a significant disadvantage: it had very little arable land, no natural resources (including those for tourism), no democratic development, was far from major markets, and faced notable ethnic divisions within its population. Fast forward sixty years, and the contrast is striking. Singapore now enjoys a much higher GDP per capita than Sweden and performs exceptionally well on standard measures of human well-being. In comparison to Jamaica, Singapore’s GDP per capita is now twelve times greater.

The crux of the matter is that Jamaica has been a functioning democracy during this period, according to various measurements, while Singapore operates as an autocracy, albeit one that is not particularly brutal. The key difference lies not in the presence of democracy, but in the fact that authoritarian Singapore has largely succeeded in eradicating corruption and significantly enhancing the quality of its public administration and judicial system—achievements that democratic Jamaica has failed to attain. Unfortunately, democracy does not guarantee a remedy for corruption and ineffective public administration; in fact, the opposite can often be true, especially in newly democratised countries.

In summary, this year’s Economics Nobel Prize can be encapsulated by the phrase: What is true is not new, and what is new is not true.

 

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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/evangelical-antifeminism-conservative-christianity/

The Perfect, Smiling Wives of the Christian Right

When Ruth was 21, she put on a wedding dress; it was high time, her parents and everyone else around her had said, for her to be married.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Ruth (a pseudonym to protect a victim of abuse) had been told over and over what it meant to be a woman—and marriage was at the center of it all. In Sunday school and Bible study, she had been taught that a wife’s role is to be submissive and accept her husband’s headship. Women were not allowed to address the congregation at her church. The faith she had grown up in was a “dark and bloody” one, she told me; in her Sunday school lessons, she had been taught to expect an imminent apocalypse that would annihilate the faithless and wreak vengeance on God’s foes.

In her community, dating was forbidden before the age of 16; at that point, young congregants were permitted to engage in strictly marriage-minded “courtships.” At a Bible study for teens and young adults, she watched her female peers ask for prayers that they could be more submissive to their husbands. Her sex education, such as it was, consisted primarily of a video series called Sex, Lies &…the Truth, featuring Focus on the Family’s James Dobson. All sex outside of marriage was a sin, and the only alternative was total chastity. Even kissing was prohibited before the wedding night.

At 19, she met the man she would marry—the first one who had ever asked her on a date. Over the course of their courtship, the man, a fellow student at her Christian high school, became sexually abusive. He began by groping her; when she refused his advances, they only became more forceful. In Dobson’s teachings, men cannot control their lust, and the burden is on women to ensure that they do not fall into sexual sin. Even as the assaults escalated into rapes, Ruth felt—and was encouraged to feel by her future husband—that the “sexual sin” was hers, even as he had her pinned down. She had not screamed loud enough, she had not managed to overpower him, and so she was to blame.

Ruth began to view herself as someone stained by the sin of enabling a man’s lust, someone impure and undeserving. When her future mother-in-law discovered condoms in her son’s room, she told Ruth’s parents that their daughter was sinning. In the ensuing months, her parents, future in-laws, and fiancé pushed her toward the sole solution they could see: ending the sin through the sacrament of marriage. So Ruth donned the dress and married the man who had raped her.

After all, she was an obedient Christian girl; she had internalized years of relentless teaching about sin, purity, and submission. Maybe the holy bond of husband and wife could erase all that had happened. “Marriage would help make it right,” she later told me.

Her future in-laws gave her a marriage manual offering a cure for women who suffered: prayer.

By the time of her wedding, Ruth had already begun to question the education she’d received about what it meant to be a woman. But it takes a long time to uproot a lifetime’s worth of indoctrination. So when the moment came, she walked down the aisle toward the man who had assaulted her, the man who, according to all she had been taught—through beatings and fire-and-brimstone sermons, through books and tapes and quiet Bible study sessions—ought to lead her through a life of wifely submission and child-rearing.

She had bought herself a dress tinted ivory rather than virginal white to show everyone that she had sinned, a quiet act of rebellion—one she performed while still unable to speak about what she’d endured. “I was trying so hard to assert myself,” she told me. Despite everything, she hoped that the sacrament of marriage would fix what was broken in him and in her. And so she said, “I do.”

What led Ruth to that moment—and what led her parents and church community to tell her to accept her abuse and repair it through submission? Was it an inevitable, fixed biblical truth—or a more recent invention?

The “good” wife: In recent decades, marriage manuals aimed at conservative Christian women emphasize a submissive vision of femininity.

From the very first debates about the story of Genesis, the role of women outlined in the Bible has been interpreted in many ways over the centuries. Some have focused on the heroism of Jael, impaling the skull of her foe in the Book of Judges; some on the sage judgments of Deborah; and others on the meekness prescribed by the Apostle Paul. But the contemporary, submission-oriented stringency toward women on the Christian right is relatively new, emerging as a response to the feminist movements of the 20th century. Even the term “complementarianism”—the notion that God created men and women to fulfill different roles—wasn’t coined until 1988. But through books, sermons, and DVDs, a new vision of femininity has taken hold across the conservative evangelical community. The rigidity of these gender norms cannot be exaggerated, nor can the Christian right’s fixation on the punitive enforcement of gender-appropriate behavior.

One of the most important books in the “Christian femininity” library, Let Me Be a Woman, by the wildly influential missionary Elisabeth Elliot, was published in 1976 explicitly as a rebuke to the women’s liberation movement. Part of a backlash against feminism, it helped formulate a new, unyielding view of what a woman should be that was the film negative of what women on the left were fighting for. In the preface, Elliot says as much: “This book was written at the height of the strong feminist movement that swept through our country in the seventies and eighties. Women were told that they ought to get out of the house and do something ‘fulfilling.’ They listened, and many discovered what men could easily have told them: that by no means is fulfillment necessarily to be found in any job…any more than in the kitchen. I knew that real satisfaction and joy come in response to acceptance of the will of God and nowhere else.”

In the book, Elliot scolds the feminist as being a monument to “immaturity.” The women’s movement is an evasion of responsibility, and a woman who asserts herself—who “defines her liberation as doing what she wants, or not doing what she doesn’t want”—is not only insulting God but is forfeiting her humanity. “By refusing to fulfill the whole vocation of womanhood,” Elliot writes, “she settles for a caricature, a pseudo-personhood.” To pursue your own will as a woman, in other words, renders you not God’s creature and even not fully human.

Elliot went on to be a mainstay in evangelical Christianity for decades, influencing the purity movement and other vital segments of right-wing Christian culture. But she was hardly the only Christian to respond with repulsion to the feminist movement. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, feminists built power and transformed popular sentiment. They secured women’s rights to obtain a no-fault divorce; to own their own credit cards; to access housing without sex-based discrimination; to obtain contraception, whether they were married or unmarried; to serve on juries. In 1970, marital rape was legal in all 50 states; by 1993, all states had withdrawn the “spousal exception” to rape laws. In 1973, Roe v. Wade secured the federal right to obtain an abortion.

Focus on the Family? James Dobson offers a prayer before a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Colorado in 2020.(David Zalubowski / AP)

But Elliot and her ilk objected to the whole movement—to every right obtained, to every piece of economic security won. Abortion would eventually become the focal point of the Christian response to feminism, but initially, the conservative Christian movement did not make abortion the primary target of its animus. Instead, its emphasis was on making clear that a woman whose goal was not submission within the confines of heterosexual marriage was an affront to God.

By the 1980s, the anti-feminist backlash within Christian movements had hardened into something permanent. And through the assiduous efforts of right-wing theologians, politicians, and scholars, it had begun to acquire the patina of ancient biblical truth.

In 1987, in Dallas, a group of influential evangelical theologians—two of whom were named Wayne, and all of whom have had long and influential careers on the Christian right—met to create a new organization, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. According to the council’s statement on its history, that meeting was inspired by “the spread of unbiblical teaching” during the burgeoning and expanding feminist movement.

Under the leadership of John Piper, a theologian and pastor and the founder of the Desiring God ministry, the group outlined, according to its website, “what would become the definitive theological articulation of ‘complementarianism,’ the biblically derived view that men and women are complementary, possessing equal dignity and worth as the image of God, and called to different roles that each glorify him.”

In December 1987, in Danvers, Massachusetts, the newly founded Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood formulated the Danvers Statement, a response not just to feminism in the culture at large but to the nascent Christian feminist movement, which had sought to reimagine gender roles within evangelical churches.

Expressing its concern with “the increasing promotion given to feminist egalitarianism with accompanying distortions or neglect of the glad harmony portrayed in Scripture between the loving, humble leadership of redeemed husbands and the intelligent, willing support of that leadership by redeemed wives,” the council laid out an image of Christian manhood and womanhood that would thoroughly repudiate any vision of a Christian feminist future. “Ambivalence regarding the values of motherhood [and] vocational homemaking” was excoriated, alongside the emergence of roles for women in church leadership that were “crippling to Biblically faithful witness.”

In response to those purported societal cataclysms, the group presented principles that it believed would lead Christians from a path of damnation back toward the loving arms of God: “In the family, husbands should forsake harsh or selfish leadership and grow in love and care for their wives; wives should forsake resistance to their husbands’ authority and grow in willing, joyful submission to their husbands’ leadership.”

Not content to simply issue such a proclamation, the ministers and theologians who created it set about ensuring that it was adopted by as many millions of Christians as possible. In 1989, the group published a full-page advertisement containing the entire Danvers Statement in Christianity Today, a flagship evangelical publication founded in 1956 by the legendary evangelist Billy Graham; in the 1980s, each issue of the magazine reached tens of thousands of Christians. A pressure campaign, including a 1991 anthology called Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, helped spread complementarian theology nationwide.

Eventually, the council would claim that its “gospel-driven gender roles” had been adopted by major Protestant denominations, including the Presbyterian Church in America and the Southern Baptist Convention, which together represent more than 10 million parishioners. The impact of the Danvers Statement on major Protestant denominations is impossible to overstate.

The notions of biblical manhood and womanhood, so recently invented, acquired a retroactive imprimatur of divinity, folded into sermons, marriage counseling for young couples, and education for future brides.

Christian conservatism benefits from the construction and adulation of an imagined, purer past—a time unsullied by the feminist movement. That is why these marriage manuals fixate on the Garden of Eden, old-school Hollywood fantasies, and 1950s home ec. Cherry-picked history coincides with cherry-picked Scripture; what is, in fact, a specific reaction to social change is recast as divine mandate—the inerrant word of God, the essential and unchanging nature of mankind since its creation.

Some stories do have a beginning; this one has a particularly famous opener. In Genesis 2—one of three versions of the creation story—God makes Eve because he decides it is not good for Adam to be alone. Some impromptu heavenly surgery occurs (complete with spiritual anesthesia!), and a rib is extracted from Adam, which God transforms into Eve, so that she may function as a “help meet” to Adam. “Help meet” is the King James Bible’s translation of the enigmatic Hebrew phrase ezer k’negdo, which means something like a “helper to suit him”—“meet” in the archaic sense of “fitting,” as in a being created to aid another. Eve’s condition as a help meet has formed the basis of countless guides to Christian marriage, ones that emphasize the submission of women to their husbands and advance the notion that a woman without a husband is both incomplete and untrue to her “created nature.”

Genesis of gender: Drawing on Genesis 2, many marriage manuals assert that wives must be “help meets”—dutiful aids to their husbands.(Lucas Cranach the elder, Adam and Eve [1526])

In 2004, Debi Pearl, a nationally famous Christian figure and the wife of the right-wing pastor Michael Pearl, laid out her stark vision of this idea in her book Created to Be His Help Meet: Discover How God Can Make Your Marriage Glorious. It’s the companion to her husband’s book Created to Need a Help Meet: A Marriage Guide for Men, and it is a large-font, sweetly decorated instruction manual on how to build yourself a lifelong prison.

The book has sold some 500,000 copies in 12 languages, according to its 10th-anniversary edition; it was reissued in 2014 and 2019. One friend who grew up in an evangelical context disclosed that she had been given three copies of Pearl’s marriage manifesto upon becoming a bride. Another woman told me that her mother had given her the book as soon as she began to menstruate, to preview her future as a wife: “It was traumatizing.”

Drawing from Genesis, Pearl asserts that women who are not married to men—and, furthermore, women who are married to men but do not assume the submissive role of help meet—are forsaking the role for which God created them. Such a departure is aberrant, abhorrent to God. Women who work outside the home are also forsaking their role of help meet; female employment, Pearl writes, “leads to family ruin.” A woman may not lead her household either; she is instructed to accept her husband’s leadership, even if it is poor, as being superior to her assertion of self.

The perfect Christian woman Pearl envisions is always happy; her smile (much emphasis is placed on the necessity of a constant smile and a merry heart) is what draws her husband to her. “Being pitiful, hurt, discouraged, and even sickly is one side of a ‘bad marriage’ coin,” she writes. “Men, in general (your husband in particular), are repulsed by women who project this image…. He will react with anger.”

Women who are being abused must neither fight back (“with the voice of a shrew and the demeanor of a feminist”) nor “cower” and “brainlessly submit”—but rather display honor, reverence, and obedience to their husbands. In the spirit of Christ, they must “put on the whole armor of God” in order to “endure abusive words without feeling abused.” Women who complain about their abusers, who leave relationships, or who do not marry are addressed in a section titled “Disappointed Old Failures.”

Pearl’s writings are generally viewed as an extreme version of complementarianism. Nonetheless, Christian marriage guides with similar messages—even if delivered in softer tones, adorned with rose-blush pink covers and images of couples embracing—are legion; they fill bookshelves with their messages of the meek and quiet spirit, of the wife who never leads and only follows. Most of these books are neither particularly old—many of the “classics” currently in multiple reprints were released in the mid-2000s—nor obscure; though aimed at a Christian audience, they seek to appeal to any woman who wishes her life or relationship could be better and offer, as a solution, a theological straitjacket lined with the faux softness of gentle advice.

In Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, rereleased in 2021 in an expanded edition 16 years after its initial publication, the popular Colorado-based husband-and-wife ministers John and Stasi Eldredge couch a brutally confined view of sacred femininity in soft-edged prose and bland pop culture references. Since the expulsion from Eden, the Eldredges write, “Woman is cursed with loneliness (relational heartache), with the urge to control (especially her man), and with the dominance of men.”

Despite the book’s conversational tone—that of a gentle friend and confidant—the warning of the book is stark: When a woman is “grasping, reaching, controlling”—when she seeks to control and dominate her environment and those around her—she is “falling prey to the lies of our Enemy,” Satan. There is no way to run this gauntlet successfully except to surrender one’s control and self-protection, trust only in God and husband, and “return to our God with broken and desperate hearts.” All other paths lead to divorce and damnation—options presented as equally devastating.

The view of femininity advanced by this pink-hued surge of rigid rhetoric—not only in books, but in sermons, marriage seminars and workshops, and podcasts—is not necessarily confined to Christianity: The Eldredges hold up Renée Zellweger’s pathologically self-effacing character in Jerry Maguire as a model; Pearl cites a home economics textbook from 1950; and it is all bulwarked by carefully chosen verses, chains of domestic servitude disguised as the armor of God.

The Christian right’s expectations of women—submission and obedience, labor and servility—have no flexibility; any deviation is a fall from grace into mortal sin. But submission and obedience without question are easily abused. The pliant Christian wife suffers; when she is abused, she turns not to earthly authority but to God for her answers. Though some manuals offer caveats in cases of severe physical abuse, anything short of bruises is readily explained; in Pearl’s telling, a husband who feels insufficiently adored can become angry and violent, and the solution is not to escape or even fight back but to become a font of grace.

Abstinence only: In Sex, Lies &…the Truth (1993), Charmaine Yoest (misspelled in the video) says women “can’t afford to experiment” because they could end up infertile.

By the time Ruth was a teenager in 1990s Pennsylvania, the biblical womanhood prescribed by the Danvers Statement had been transformed from the adages of pastors into the timeless wisdom of God. She was taught that submission, obedience, and purity were the highest values a woman could hold. As she married the man who had raped her again and again, she had yet to fully reject the teachings so deeply and deliberately ingrained in her.

Remember that marriage manual her future in-laws gave her? During her engagement, Ruth received The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Omartian, a Christian manual first published in 1996 that teaches married women how to endure suffering. Omartian’s husband, Michael, a Christian musician with three Grammys to his name, writes a one-page foreword in which he relates a little joke he has become fond of telling over the decades: “It’s been twenty-five wonderful years for me and twenty-five miserable years for her.”

One chapter in, it becomes clear that this isn’t much of a joke—if it ever was. “I confess right now there was a time when I considered separation or divorce,” Stormie Omartian writes. “The last thing I want to do is grieve God. But I know what it’s like to feel the kind of despair that paralyzes good decision making…. I’ve felt pain so bad that the fear of dying from it propelled me to seek out the only immediately foreseeable means of survival: escape from the source of agony.”

Her husband, the flagship music producer for the organization Cru, formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ, had, she alleges in her book, wounded her repeatedly. “The only ones that were ever the object of his anger were me and the children. He used words like weapons that left me crippled or paralyzed,” she writes. “A husband can hurt your feelings, be inconsiderate, uncaring, abusive, irritating, or negligent. He can say or do things that pierce your heart like a sliver.”

Stormie Omartian found her solution in what she described as a kind of death. Clutching her Bible on her bed after once again considering separation, she decided instead to let her own will be extinguished: “As I sat there, God impressed upon my heart that if I would deliberately lay down my life before His throne, die to the desire to leave, and give my needs to Him, He would teach me to lay down my life in prayer for Michael.”

And she did so for that quarter-century—so wonderful for him, so miserable for her, and so full, so very full, of prayer. The ultimate prescription for women in this milieu is a kind of living martyrdom, a suicide of self that must be repeated every day. It is this view that dominates the lives of tens of millions of American women and fuels the kind of legislation that sees women not as conscious actors but as beings whose bodies and souls can and must be subject to absolute control.

As for Ruth? The seed of rebellion that had begun with buying her off-white dress continued to grow within her. Despite pressure from her husband, her church community, and her parents, she refused to bear children for her abuser. She had decided she would not inflict on her children what had been inflicted on her by her parents: threats and beatings, with implements and without, for reasons so small, she told me, that they would “break your heart.” Throughout nearly a decade of marriage, her husband berated her; he abused her sexually; he shamed her in the church community and among their families for her failings as a wife. She stayed with him like the good Christian woman she’d been raised to be, even as she worked to unravel the internal bonds that kept her tied to that image of suffering femininity. She endured it all—until she didn’t anymore.

Ruth left the faith she was raised in, and then any faith at all, and then the husband who had used God as a weapon against her. She refused to die to herself, to let her own will die. She left him without a prayer on her lips but with hope in her heart. She is in her 40s now, and as she spoke to me, her lively children interrupted her. She works to help other people who have left evangelicalism to root out the pain and shame instilled into them. It took her a long time, she told me, to figure out what a healthy relationship looks like. But she did. 

Edited November 1 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,015]

Russia is making swift advances in Ukraine

Over the past month, Russia has made its largest territorial gains in Ukraine since the summer of 2022. This progress in the eastern Donbas region will help the Russian Army secure its flanks before launching an assault on the city of Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub for Ukraine, analysts say.

Half of Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine so far this year were made in the past three months. Russia’s rapid advance is a striking change from the situation last year, when the front lines remained mostly static. But that stalemate laid the groundwork for Russia’s current progress, gradually weakening Kyiv’s forces.

 

Russia’s Swift March Forward in Ukraine’s East

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/russia-gains-ukraine-maps.html

For much of the past year, Russian troops launched bloody assaults on Ukrainian positions that often yielded only limited gains. But the relentless attacks are now starting to pay off: In October, Russia made its largest territorial gains since the summer of 2022, as Ukrainian lines buckled under sustained pressure.

Over the past month, Russian forces have seized more than 160 square miles of land in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, the main theater of the war today. That has allowed them to take control of strategic towns that anchored Ukrainian defenses in the area, beginning with Vuhledar in early October. This past week, battle has raged in Selydove, which now appears lost.

Ultimately, experts say, these gains, among the swiftest of the war, will help the Russian army secure its flanks before launching an assault on the city of Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in the Donbas.

Russia’s rapid advance is a striking change from the situation last year, when the front lines remained mostly static, with both sides launching ambitious offensives that largely failed.

But the stalemate that defined 2023 laid the groundwork for Russia’s recent progress. However marginal the gains, Russia’s attacks gradually weakened the Ukrainian army to the point where its troops are so stretched that they can no longer hold some of their positions, Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts say.

Half of Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine so far this year were made in the past three months alone, according to Pasi Paroinen, a military expert with the Finland-based Black Bird Group. “The situation in southeastern Donbas rapidly deteriorates,” he said.

Source: The Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project Note: As of Oct. 29 By The New York Times

Mr. Paroinen likened the relentless assaults Ukrainian forces must try to fend off to “a constant game of whack-a-mole, with new crisis points emerging faster than they can be dealt with.” That allows Russia to quickly advance whenever it finds a weak spot.

Vincent Tourret, an analyst at the French Foundation for Strategic Research, pointed to other factors that have helped Russia’s advance, including its increased use of powerful guided bombs, which can destroy fortified enemy positions, and a lack of Ukrainian fortifications in the area where the fighting is now taking place.

“Ukraine’s defenses are more and more battered, the terrain is more and more favorable for Russian offensives and, on top of that, the Russians have a better impact” with the guided bombs, Mr. Tourret said. “The three factors combine to explain the increase in Russian gains.”

Ukrainian forces have also suffered from serious personnel shortages that have them largely outmanned on the battlefield. To address the problem, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told Parliament on Tuesday that an additional 160,000 people would be drafted, with the goal of raising the manning of units to 85 percent.

In the past few months or so, Russian forces broke through Ukrainian strongholds that had sustained prolonged fighting, such as Chasiv Yar. Russian troops had long been thwarted by a canal dividing the town from its outskirts, which served as a natural barrier for the Ukrainians. But recently, according to Britain’s defense ministry, it is “highly likely” that Russia “crossed the canal and “approached the town’s boundaries.”

In other places, the Russian army has used a tactic of threatening encirclement to force Ukrainian forces to withdraw, such as in Selydove. Serhii Kuzan, the chairman of Ukraine’s Security and Cooperation Center, a nongovernmental research group, said Selydove protected Pokrovsk’s southern flank and that its capture would help Russia position artillery and secure supply routes there.

The semi-circles formed around towns by Russia’s encirclement tactics have given the frontline in the Donbas a jagged appearance.

The Donbas, which comprises Ukraine’s two easternmost regions, Luhansk and Donetsk, has long been a prime objective for Russia.

Russia’s recent rapid advance points to another Ukrainian weakness, military experts say: a lack of fortifications.

After seizing the fortress town of Vuhledar earlier this month, Russian forces encountered largely open terrain with sparse Ukrainian defensive lines and few urban areas where Ukrainian troops could entrench to form stiff resistance. In just the past week, Russia advanced roughly six miles north of Vuhledar — an unusually swift pace compared with previous gains.

“The Russians are now well past the old frontline and its extensive minefields, which halted the previous offensives against Vuhledar back in 2023,” Mr. Paroinen said.

To make matters worse, Ukraine has weakened its positions in the Donbas by redeploying seasoned units from there to Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces launched a surprise cross-border offensive this summer.

The troops have often been replaced by less experienced units that are struggling to fend off Russian assaults. Mr. Tourret noted that many units now manning the frontline in the Donbas are from Ukraine’s Territorial Defense — a force largely made up of civilians who volunteered to fight the Russian invaders in 2022, but lack the training and equipment of regular army units.

Mr. Paroinen said Russia’s recent rapid advance supports “the overall picture that we have of Ukrainian forces: Reserves are low, too many quality units are stuck in Kursk and Russia has enough force left to exploit any weaknesses in Ukrainian lines.”

Edited November 1 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,015]

Fact Checker

 

The Harris and Trump final arguments. True or false?

Here’s a guide to key claims being made by Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump in the campaign’s waning days.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/01/harris-trump-final-arguments-true-or-false/

The presidential election race ends Tuesday, which means it’s time for a roundup of key claims made by Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump in speeches in the past week intended to deliver their final arguments. Neck and neck in the polls, both pitch the election as a stark choice with consequences that will last generations.

In rally speeches that can last 60 minutes or more, Trump repeats many of his favored debunked claims. Using dark and vulgar rhetoric, he stirs fears over immigration, the state of the economy and what he calls the “enemy from within” — Democrats, among others. Trump’s speeches often feature outlandish promises — that he will pay down the national debt and that he will cut energy prices in half in one year. He also makes claims that are speculative, such as that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine or that Hamas never would have attacked Israel if he had been reelected president in 2020.

Harris’s speeches, before crowds as big or larger than Trump’s, are shorter, with a heavy emphasis on three key themes — her conviction that Trump is dangerous and unfit for office, her belief that nationwide abortion rights must be restored and her pitch for an “opportunity society.” Rather than make grandiose promises, she highlights ideas, such as building 3 million new houses or allowing Medicare to pay for home care. She casts Trump as a danger but also belittles him, saying that “for the life of him, he cannot finish a thought. And he has called it the ‘weave.’ But I think we here would call it nonsense.” Her speeches have a sprinkling of false or misleading claims compared to Trump’s avalanche, detailed below.

Donald Trump

“What they’ve done to our country is unbelievable, allowing more than 21 million people into our country.”

“Kamala has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo. A lot of people are coming from the Congo prisons.”Follow

Trump’s signature issue is immigration. He often claims that more than 20 million people have entered the country under President Joe Biden, about four times higher than the real number. Even so, 5 million migrants is a large figure. But after Biden in June imposed new restrictions on asylum claims, undocumented immigration has plummeted. In September, Border Patrol agents recorded about 56,000 apprehensions of migrants who crossed into the country between legal entry points along the border with Mexico. That was the lowest monthly figure since September 2020, during the pandemic and when Trump was president.

Immigration experts know of no effort by other countries to empty their prisons and mental institutions, a claim Trump appears to have invented. Officials from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the neighboring Republic of Congo have denied to CNN that there is any effort to send prisoners to the United States.

“And if you look at the arrow on the bottom, you’ll see that was the day I left office. That was the lowest illegal immigration that we’ve ever had in recorded history, the recorded history of our country.”

As part of a contrast with Harris, Trump displays his “favorite chart” — an image that he was pointing at when a would-be assassin shot at him in July. But the chart is misleading.

The arrow he references is not pointing at the end of his term but at the sharp decline in migration at the start of the pandemic, when much of the world shut down. When Trump left office, border apprehensions were near the highest point of his term — an upward trend that continued under Biden.

“More than 13,000 illegal immigrants convicted of murder have been caught at the border and then released into the United States.”

This is an outrageously false claim. Trump is twisting a recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement report on the number of noncitizens with criminal convictions on ICE’s docket of those not detained. But the data, which included 13,000 people convicted of homicide, shows only that they are not detained by ICE; they are more likely in state or federal prison serving their time. Moreover, the data goes back four decades, including during Trump’s term, even though he suggests this happened under Biden. In reality, the number of convicted criminals on the non-detained docket is not much bigger than it was under Trump, indicating they have been on it for a long time.

“325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves or slaves. They came through the open border, and they’re gone. Their parents will most likely never see them again. Almost any of them.”

This is false. There is little evidence this many children are sex slaves or dead — or that this would be the result of Biden-Harris policies.

Trump is using a number that refers to unaccompanied children who crossed the border and were placed with a sponsor, including during the last two years of his administration. A Homeland Security Inspector General report from August, which tracked data from October 2018 to September 2023, said 320,000 children were never given a date to appear in immigration court or missed an appearance, providing “no assurance” that the children were not vulnerable to trafficking. About one-quarter of the cases took place under Trump. The report recommended creating an automated system, rather than a manual one, which Homeland Security said it would implement.

“Remember, they stole the election from an American president. They stole it. I could say … I don’t even want to call it, they just stole the election.”

This is one of Trump’s signature lies. Every claim he made about election fraud in key states was debunked and rejected by the courts.

“They called me a threat to democracy, right? She’s a threat to democracy because she shouldn’t even be the candidate. They should have picked a candidate fairly, not just given her because they want to be politically correct.”

Trump tries to flip the narrative of the Harris campaign — that he’s a threat to democracy — by claiming that she was selected as the Democratic nominee in a nefarious manner. Biden’s decision to leave the race came late in the election cycle, but he was not yet officially the Democratic nominee, and Harris was his running mate. Parties are free to choose their nominee by any method they wish.

Trump, it should be noted, refused to participate in any Republican debates during the primaries, which made it difficult for his would-be rivals to challenge him.

“It’s called weaponization. … I call it the Department of Injustice. Ours is the Department of Injustice, but we’re doing well. We won the big case in Florida. You saw that? That was the big one.”

Trump refers to “weaponization,” code for Biden’s supposedly using the resources of the U.S. government to target his political opponent. There is no evidence that Biden directed the Justice Department or local prosecutors to pursue prosecutions of Trump.

As for the case in Florida, Trump is referring to a ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — whom Trump nominated to the court — that the prosecutor in the case was improperly appointed. In dismissing the case, Cannon did not rule on the merits, and Jack Smith, the special counsel, has appealed on the grounds that her legal reasoning was at odds with past decisions on the issue.

“With your vote in this election, I will end inflation.”

“You wouldn’t have had any inflation. You know, we had the best economy, but we had no inflation.”

Inflation spiked to 9 percent in June 2022, the highest level in 40 years, and this has been a burden for Harris. But inflation for the 12 months ending in September was 2.1 percent — meaning it’s nearly been beaten. Before the pandemic, the monthly inflation rate ranged from 1.5 percent to 2.9 percent during Trump’s presidency. So Trump is making an empty promise.

As for the claim that there never would have been inflation if Trump had won a second term, that’s false. Higher prices for goods and services would have happened no matter who was elected president in 2020. Inflation initially spiked because of pandemic-related shocks — increased consumer demand as the pandemic eased and an inability to meet this demand because of supply chain problems, as companies reduced production when consumers hunkered down during the pandemic. Indeed, inflation rose around the world — with many peer countries doing worse than the United States — because of pandemic-related shocks that rippled across the globe.

“The word tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. More beautiful than love. More beautiful than respect. … It’s going to make our country rich, and our politicians were too stupid for so many years, or something else was going on.”

Trump’s signature economic proposal is a pledge to impose steep tariffs — 10 percent to 20 percent on every U.S. trading partner, 60 percent levies on goods from China, and rates as high as 100, 200 or even 1,000 percent in other circumstances. But economists agree that tariffs — essentially a tax on domestic consumption — are paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, which in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers who may use imported materials in their products. As a matter of demand-and-supply elasticities, overseas producers will pay part of the tax if there are fewer goods sold to the United States. Domestic producers in effect get a subsidy because they can raise their prices to the level imposed on importers.

Many experts say that Trump’s tariff plan, if enacted, could send inflation higher again and roil securities markets.

“She cost the typical American family over $30,000 over the last three years.”

“Kamala wants to raise the typical family taxes by nearly $3,000 a year.”

Trump loves to cite these two statistics, though they are both bogus.

The $30,000 comes from the Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee, which posts an “inflation tracker” that claims average household costs in the United States have risen more than $30,000 since January 2021. This estimate relies on state-level personal consumption expenditures. Economists say there are issues with such expenditures, as they includes items — stuff the government buys for people, such as health care, as well as spending by nonprofit organizations serving households — that would exaggerate the impact. But the biggest problem is that Trump is ignoring income gains that have accompanied the rise in prices, putting the finances of many Americans in the net positive territory.

The $3,000 in higher taxes is even less tethered to reality. Trump is citing a Tax Foundation report on what would happen if his 2017 tax cut was allowed to expire as scheduled in 2027. But that’s not Harris’s policy. She would keep in place the tax cut for people making less than $400,000 a year — and has proposed additional tax cuts for the lower and middle class. The Penn Wharton budget model found that Harris’s plans would raise after-tax income for all Americans except the top 5 percent of taxpayers.

“To his and her egregious hurricane response, the worst response in North Carolina and other states since Katrina, but I think it was even worse than Katrina. They haven’t even responded in North Carolina — they haven’t even responded. There’s nobody, they don’t see any FEMA. You know why? They spent their money on bringing in illegal migrants. So they didn’t have money for Georgia and North Carolina and Alabama and Tennessee, and Florida and South Carolina.”

This has been repeatedly debunked, but Trump keeps saying it anyway. Before the hurricanes hit, Congress provided nearly $20 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster fund. No money was diverted from the fund to aid undocumented immigrants — though that was something Trump did. The administration’s response to the hurricane relief has won praise from local officials, including Republican governors.

“She wants to ban fracking. And as California attorney general, she redefined child sex trafficking, assault with a deadly weapon and rape of an unconscious person as a totally nonviolent crime. She pledged to confiscate your guns. Is there anybody in the room that would like to give up their gun to Kamala?”

As part of a general indictment of Harris, Trump mixes old positions and fake ones. Harris in 2019 supported a ban on fracking, but she says she changed her mind. As vice president, she cast the tiebreaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a bill that included many green-energy incentives but also increased leases for fracking. She’s a gun owner and has supported an assault-weapons ban, but she does not want to confiscate guns.

The redefinition claim is totally false. At issue is Proposition 57, a 2016 California referendum promoted by then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D) that allowed people convicted of nonviolent felonies to be considered for early release. Brown argued it would save the state millions of dollars of incarceration costs and encourage rehabilitation. Harris, then the state attorney general, did not take a position on the referendum — which had the support of leading newspapers and was approved by 64 percent of voters — but in her role as attorney general she approved a brief summary description of the initiative on the ballot, which included no new definition of nonviolent offenses.

Kamala Harris

“On Day 1, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list full of priorities of what I will get done for the American people.”

This line is the core of Harris’s final case, and in her speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday she said unequivocally that Trump “has an enemies list of people he intends to prosecute.”

“Enemies list” is more of a rhetorical device than an actual fact. Cliff Sims, an aide in Trump’s White House, described in his memoir “Team of Vipers” how he watched Trump scrawl an unofficial enemies list of disloyal aides that he kept in his coat pocket. In this campaign, Trump has never said he has a literal enemies list — he has spoken broadly about the “enemy from within” — but he has suggested prosecuting foes he has identified by name.

According to a count by NPR, since 2022 Trump has issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents. For instance, in September, Trump said Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted.” He also said that he would appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”; that former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) was guilty of treason and should be brought before a military tribunal; that New York Attorney General Letitia James and Judge Arthur Engoron (who presided over a civil fraud case brought against Trump by James) “should be arrested and punished accordingly”; and that Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in his administration, should face execution.

“I will give a middle-class tax cut to 100 million Americans, including $6,000 during the first year of a child’s life.”

Children don’t pay taxes, but Harris is counting them as part of part of this figure.

According to data from the Treasury Department, about 57 million adults would benefit from Harris’s proposed expansion of the childcare tax credit, to the sum of $2,000 to $6,000 per child; an additional 14 million low-income adults would benefit from her proposals to permanently expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That’s about 70 million taxpayers there. The Treasury data indicates that about 62 million children would benefit, with many lifted out of poverty. So in all, about 130 million Americans would benefit. Harris appears to have averaged 70 million and 130 million to come up with a snappy-sounding 100 million.

“He will impose what I call a Trump sales tax, because he has an intention of putting an at least 20 percent tax on everyday necessities, which economists have estimated would cost the average person more than $4,000 more a year.”

Harris calls Trump’s tariff plan a “sales tax,” and that is roughly accurate, as noted above. Her estimate of $4,000 comes from a left-leaning group supportive of Democrats, but other estimates are in the same range. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center this week released a report that Trump’s worldwide tariff and the China tariffs would increase household taxes by an average of nearly $3,000. A separate Trump proposal — a 200 percent tariff on auto imports from Mexico — would raise household taxes by an average of an additional $600, the group said.

“Donald Trump intends to end the Affordable Care Act — with no plan to replace it. Oh, y’all watched the debate. He has, quote, ‘concepts of a plan.’”

“If Donald Trump finally gets his way and repeals the Affordable Care Act, which would throw millions of Americans off their health insurance. And take us back to when insurance companies have the power to deny people with preexisting conditions.”

In the debate between Harris and Trump, he did say he had “concepts of a plan” for the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Trump has offered no details, but Harris is on solid ground here.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), has suggested going back to letting insurance companies offer different plans and pricing based on whether patients have preexisting conditions or might need more medical care because of their age, health status, gender and other factors.

That would be the opposite approach of the ACA, which spreads the insurance risk so that younger, healthier people help subsidize older, sicker people. Before the ACA, states found that high-risk pools did not work well, and insurance was unaffordable for many people with chronic health conditions.

“He would ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control and put IVF treatments at risk and force states to monitor women’s pregnancies. Just Google ‘Project 2025’ and read the plans for yourself.”

Harris is making some assumptions here but also engaging in exaggeration and falsehood. Trump has claimed that he would not sign a federal law that would ban abortion nationwide and that he would leave the matter up to the states. But conservative allies are pressing to restrict abortion by using an 1873 law, the Comstock Act, which limits interstate mailing of “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” That could be used to restrict mail-order abortion pills — or even materials used to produce abortions.

This year, Trump briefly embraced the idea of restricting contraceptives but then later on social media said he “has never and will never” advocate for restricting birth control and other contraceptives.

As for IVF, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in that state are “unborn children,” prompting a backlash. Trump has proposed requiring the government or private insurance companies to cover all costs associated with in vitro fertilization treatments but has offered few details.

Finally, Project 2025 — not an official campaign document but a Heritage Foundation report — does not call for monitoring pregnancies. Instead it calls for better statistical tracking of abortions across the country, as not every state (California, for instance) submits abortion data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Trump has called for the ‘termination,’ I quote, of the Constitution of the United States of America.”

This is open to interpretation. Trump posted this on social media in 2022 regarding his lie that the 2020 election had been stolen: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he wrote. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

“Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him, people he calls ‘the enemy from within.’”

Trump certainly suggested this. In an interview this month on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Trump said: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics.” Then he added, “It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

end

 

 

I (Vesper) want to clarify one thing. Republicans HAVE introduced legislation to track/collect data on pregnancies.

https://www.murray.senate.gov/senate-democratic-women-respond-to-new-senate-republican-legislation-to-collect-data-on-pregnant-women-through-new-government-website-push-anti-abortion-propaganda/

 

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), a senior member and former Chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), and Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Tina Smith (D-MN), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), and Laphonza Butler (D-CA) issued the following statement in response to new legislation introduced by Senate Republicans that would create a new government-run website to collect data on pregnant women and direct them to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers and other “resources” to pressure women into carrying pregnancies to term, no matter their circumstances.

The legislation would require the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish a new government-run website, pregnancy.gov, that pregnant women in America would be encouraged to visit and answer a series of questions to generate a list of pregnancy-related “resources” within their zip code. The legislation specifies that such  “resources” would include information about the “risks” of abortion, “information on child development from moment of conception,” scam abortion pill “reversal” services, and other misinformation peddled by anti-abortion crisis-pregnancy centers—and would explicitly exclude any “entity, including its affiliates, subsidiaries, successors, and clinics, that performs, induces, refers for, or counsels in favor of abortions.” The website would also encourage users to provide their contact information, “which the Secretary may use to conduct outreach via phone or email to follow up with users”—meaning that pregnant women would be encouraged to provide data to a potential Trump administration and potentially allow a government bureaucrat to follow up with them about the status of their pregnancy. The legislation would also take steps to enshrine fetal personhood, by requiring child support payments to start at pregnancy. The full text of the proposed legislation is HERE.

“Americans don’t want the government to track, intimidate, and coerce pregnant women into carrying their pregnancies to term no matter their circumstances. Yet, Senate Republicans want to mandate the creation of an online federal database where women will be encouraged to register their pregnancies with the government in order to push them toward anti-abortion propaganda and dangerous crisis pregnancy centers—this tells us exactly how Republicans will weaponize the whole of government to restrict a woman’s freedom to choose and force them to stay pregnant no matter what,” said Senators Murray, Stabenow, Klobuchar, Cantwell, Baldwin, Hirono, Duckworth, Warren, Cortez Masto, Smith, Rosen, and Butler.

“Republican politicians refuse to accept that Americans just don’t want the government to be making deeply personal family planning decisions—and this legislation is going nowhere while Democrats have the majority in the Senate. Americans must be clear-eyed about the fact that if Donald Trump and Republicans take control, legislation like this is just one stop on the road to a nationwide abortion ban,” the senators continued.

“Democrats are fighting to make sure that every woman has the right to make her own decisions about her pregnancy and her future, without interference from politicians—and we’re fighting to restore Roe v. Wade at the first opportunity we get.”

Senate Democrats made clear at the outset of this Congress that they are continuing to fight to protect every American’s reproductive rights and will be a firewall against Republicans’ continued attacks on women’s rights. Senate Democrats have introduced more than a dozen pieces of legislation to protect reproductive rights from further attacks, protect providers, and help ensure women get the care they need; importantly, Senate Democrats are fighting to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would restore the right to abortion nationwide. Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, Senate Democrats sought unanimous consent on the Senate floor to pass four common-sense bills to protect women’s fundamental freedoms—Senate Republicans blocked every single bill. Led by Murray, Senate Democrats also hosted a “State of Abortion Rights” briefing earlier this year to highlight the chaos and cruelty of the abortion bans that have been enacted in Republican-led states since Roe was overturned, and the need to pass legislation to restore the right to abortion nationwide.  

###

[cosmicway 1,333]

Strangely enough the party of civil rights in the USA used to be the republicans.
They did have some crazies in their ranks like Barry but the dems also had some similar.
In world war I democrat Woodrow Wilson was the president. He proposed a kind of Marshal plan for Europe that would have changed things and prevent the second world war that the Anglo-French rejected. But back at home he was a dyed in the wool racist.
Things changed with JFK and the democrats became the party of civlil rights. The much jeered LBJ was also a champion of civil rights.
Now the dems have placed themselves inside a vicious circle however.
By championing LBGTQism and free abortions they have made many enemies, more enemies than they cared to have.
So it's one of the reasons we have Trumpism now.
One would n't expect Trump to do much better than Barry Goldwater back in 1964.
Initially we thought of him as some new peculiarity, like Pepe Grillo or the monster raving loony party.
But he 's going to be the next president.

Edited November 1 by cosmicway

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

3 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Strangely enough the party of civil rights in the USA used to be the republicans.
They did have some crazies in their ranks like Barry but the dems also had some similar.
In world war I democrat Woodrow Wilson was the president. He proposed a kind of Marshal plan for Europe that would have changed things and prevent the second world war that the Anglo-French rejected. But back at home he was a dyed in the wool racist.
Things changed with JFK and the democrats became the party of civlil rights. The much jeered LBJ was also a champion of civil rights.
Now the dems have placed themselves inside a vicious circle however.
By championing LBGTQism and free abortions they have made many enemies, more enemies than they cared to have.
So it's one of the reasons we have Trumpism now.
One would n't expect Trump to do much better than Barry Goldwater back in 1964.
Initially we thought of him as some new peculiarity, like Pepe Grillo or the monster raving loony party.
But he 's going to be the next president.

I dont see how he wins tbh.

 

I think Kamala wins comfortably in a few days. I could be wrong, and I was wrong before like in 2016, but I just dont see it for Trump this week.

[Fulham Broadway 16,918]

Republicans preparing to reject US election result if Trump loses, warn strategists

Polling experts point to ‘fake polls’ exaggerating his support, with baseless lawsuits alleging fraud already filed

Republicans are already laying the ground for rejecting the result of next week’s US presidential election in the event Donald Trump loses, with early lawsuits baselessly alleging fraud and polls from right-leaning groups that analysts say may be exaggerating his popularity and could be used by Trump to claim only cheating prevented him from returning to the White House.

The warnings – from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans – come as Americans prepare to vote on Tuesday in the most consequential presidential contest in generations. Most polls show Trump running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee, with the two candidates seemingly evenly matched in seven key swing states.

But suspicions have been voiced over a spate of recent polls, mostly commissioned in battleground states from groups with Republican links, that mainly show Trump leading. The projection of surging Trump support as election day nears has drawn confident predictions from him and his supporters. “We’re leading big in the polls, all of the polls,” Trump told a rally in New Mexico on Thursday. “I can’t believe it’s a close race,” he told a separate rally in North Carolina, a swing state where polls show he and Harris are in a virtual dead heat.

An internal memo sent to Trump by his chief pollster is confirming that story to him, with Tony Fabrizio declaring the ex-president’s “position nationally and in every single battleground state is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was four years ago”.

Pro-Trump influencers, too, have strengthened the impression of inevitable victory with social media posts citing anonymous White House officials predicting Harris’s defeat. “Biden is telling advisers the election is ‘dead and buried’ and called Harris an innate sucker,” the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted this week.

GOP-aligned polling groups have released 37 polls in the final stretch of the campaign, according to a study by the New York Times, during a period when longstanding pollsters have been curtailing their voter surveys. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to the findings of long-established non-partisan pollsters, which have shown a more mixed picture – often with Harris leading, albeit within error margins.

 

 Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 30 October.

One poll puts her ahead of Trump by one point in the state, but another behind him by three points. 

In one illustration, a poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group – an organisation founded by a former Republican consultant – gave Trump a three-point lead over Harris in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll two days later in the same state put the vice-president ahead by a single point.

The polling expert Nate Silver – who has said his “gut” favours a Trump win, while simultaneously arguing that people should not trust their gut – cast doubt on the ex-president’s apparent surge in an interview with CNBC. “Anyone who is confident about this election is someone whose opinion you should discount,” he said.

“There’s been certainly some momentum towards Trump in the last couple of weeks. [But] these small changes are swamped by the uncertainty. Any indicator you want to point to, I could point to counter-examples.”

Democrats and some polling experts believe the conservative-commissioned polls are aiming to create a false narrative of unstoppable momentum for Trump – which could then be used to challenge the result if Harris wins.

“Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to get the answer right,” Joshua Dyck, of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, told the New York Times.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democrat strategist and blogger, said it followed a trend set in the 2022 congressional elections, when a succession of surveys favourable to Republicans created an expectation of a pro-GOP “red wave” that never materialised on polling day.

“These polls were usually two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were being done and they ended up having the effect of pushing the polling averages to the right,” he told MeidasTouch News.

“We cannot be bamboozled by this again. It is vital to Donald Trump’s effort if he tries to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that somehow he was winning the election.

“The reason we have to call this out is that Donald Trump needs to go into election day with some set of data showing him winning, so if he loses, he can say we cheated.”

Trump, who falsely claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, is also paving the way for repeating the accusation via legal means..

 

Bucks County, in Pennsylvania, was ordered to extend early voting by a day after voters waiting to submit mail-in ballots were turned away. Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

 

He told a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats were “cheating” in the state, and on Wednesday his campaign took legal action against election officials in Bucks County, where voters waiting to submit early mail-in ballots were turned away because the deadline had expired. A judge later ordered the county to extend early voting by one day. There is no evidence of widespread cheating in elections in Pennsylvania or any other state, and mail-in ballots are in high demand in part because Trump himself has encouraged early voting.

Suing to allege – without evidence – that there has been voting fraud is part of a well-worn pattern of Trump disputing election results that do not go his way. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits disputing the results, all of which were forcefully thrown out in court.

Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about Trump’s actions. Michael Steele, a former Republican national committee chair and Trump critic, told the New Republic that the GOP-commissioned polls were gamed to favour Trump.

“You find different ways to weight the participants, and that changes the results you’re going to get,” he said. “They’re gamed on the back end so Maga can make the claim that the election was stolen.”

Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate, and a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the same outlet: “Their gameplan is to make it impossible for states to certify. And these fake polls are a great tool in that, because that’s how you lead people to think the race was stolen.”

Trump-leaning surveys have influenced the polling averages published by sites such as Real Clear Politics, which has incorporated the results into its projected electoral map on election night, forecasting a win for the former president.

Elon Musk, Trump’s wealthiest backer and surrogate, posted the map to his 202 million followers on his own X platform, proclaiming: “The trend will continue.”

Trump and Musk have also promoted online betting platforms, which have bolstered the impression of a surge for the Republican candidate stemming from hefty bets on him winning.

A small number of high-value wagers from four accounts linked to a French national appeared to be responsible for $28m gambled on a Trump victory on the Polymarket platform, the New York Times reported.

Trump referenced the Polymarket activity in a recent speech. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means we’re doing pretty well,” he said.

[Vesper 29,015]

6 hours ago, cosmicway said:

By championing LBGTQism and free abortions

free abortions?

The decision on what we do, as women, with our reproductive choices is OURS, fucking men do NOT control us.

it is OUR bodies, not yours

championing LGBTQism?

it is championing basic human rights

and it is OUR lives, we are free to love whomever we do, we do not give a fuck what you think in terms of your hate-filled desire for control over OUR lives

you are an open homophobic bigot and an open misogynist

you fundamental authoritarian religious types do NOT get to shove your fucked up religious-based hate down our throats

you lot always scream about 'freedom', when you are the most anti-freedom people in the advanced world

your idea of 'freedom' is 100 per cent control over any and all who disagree with you

you do NOT get to declare we are undeserving of the freedom to live our lives as we chose and as we are biologically fashioned

you can take your religous-based bigotry, misogyny and hate and shove it up your collective arses

 

By the way, the majority of Americans agree with ME, not you and your fucking christofash, woman-hating, non cis-het hating ilk over there.

 

your days of running the road, stepping on our necks, are OVER, be it your hatred for women, and/or queer folk, and/or people of colour, etc etc

those days of darkness are not coming back to stay

we have FAR more allies in the advanced world that you and your fellow travellers/traffickers-in-hate do

we are NEVER going back to the days of hate and suppression of our basic human rights

you lot will lose at the end of the day

your superstructures of brutal bigotry and suppression was always destined for the ash heap of history, no matter how long it has taken, no matter how long it takes moving forward

 

The arc of the moral universe will bend toward justice, dignity, and freedom if we pull it there, and pull it there we shall.

[Vesper 29,015]

https://www.drudgereport.com/

 

[Vesper 29,015]

Seething Trump rips out mic and threatens to 'knock people out' as restless crowd chants

Donald Trump was plagued with technical issues during his Milwaukee rally and shouted "I'm blowing out my arm with this stupid mic.'

https://www.the-express.com/news/politics/153411/trump-meltdown-mic-chanting-rally

Donald Trump had a meltdown at his Milwaukee rally and threatened to "knock people out" over microphone issues.

The former president, who was heckled during his Michigan rally and made vile comments about shooting Liz Cheney, then started mimicking oral sex on the mic stand while plagued with audio problems for the second time in one day.

During his earlier Michigan rally, raging Trump called for the contractor to be fired without pay as parts of his audience couldn't hear him speak.