The only point they legitimately have to complain about are prices. Prices of groceries and gas are higher than they were. However, Inflation didn’t just hit America and wasn’t caused by Joe Biden. Most nations in the recovery from the COVID-19 recession faced high inflation, and in fact, the US has recovered from inflation faster than all of the G7.
We’d all like inflation to come down faster, but it's already dropping faster than almost every other country on Earth — how much faster could it realistically get than that?
There’s also the fact that Corporate Profits have been driving prices high far above labor and supply costs.
We are far ahead of the recovery, far ahead of over a dozen other nations at bringing down inflation and prices. Nobel-prize-winning economists indicate that Trump’s plan to cut regulations and taxes while implementing tarrifs are likely to release and Inflation bomb on the nation.
The economists say Trump's economic plans would reignite inflation, in part because of his pledge to impose stiffer tariffs on Chinese imports, which they say will hike prices on many goods bought by U.S. consumers.
"While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden's economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump," the economists state in their letter.
"We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.'s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.'s domestic economy."
But the GOP ignores these facts, they ignore that the economy is roaring, the GDP is soaring, unemployment has been at a 50-year low, the deficit has been reduced by a record amount, and inflation has come down by a record amount as well. This is the only valid complaint they have, but it wasn’t caused by Joe Biden it was an outgrowth of Covid — we have recovered from it faster than almost any other nation and further open corporate policies will only make it worse.
Trump’s tax policies blew a $8 Trillion Hole in the deficit and debt.
They ignore this, and they lie about everything else.
Republicans demand that Democrats “tone down the rhetoric” and claim that they’ve never done anything as horrible as the shooting against Trump this weekend. Yeah, right.
And, one of you tried to shoot TRUMP on the campaign trail. Not to mention one of you tried to kill Paul Pelosi in his own home. That was in 2022, that’s when.
Only one candidate in this election has inspired someone to send pipe bombs to his opponents and the media.
Also..
So far, she’s heard nothing from Trump. Nothing. He’s walking about the RNC floor — displaying his bandage — and he hasn’t called Corey Comperatore's widow yet? Three days later?
Chances are, he’s never gonna do it.
Meanwhile, on Fox, they continue to play the victim card for Trump and his criminal aids and supporters.
So, yeah, all the whining is still going on.
Meanwhile Steppin Fetchit 2.0 proclaims “America is not.a Racist Country”..
African Americans suffer disparate impacts with police, with the Justice system, with education — being disciplined more harshly for the same offense — with lending, with housing, with job oppurtunities and with a wage and wealth gap that is enormous.
The assumption of a perfectly competitive labor market is central to some of the most widely accepted theories in the field of labor economics. But the persistent threat of unemployment, in combination with prohibitive conditions imposed by employer practices, public policy, incomplete information about job opportunities, and geographic immobility, means that workers often cannot change jobs or employers easily and without cost.
This imbalance of power disproportionately disadvantages black workers: One of the most durable and defining features of the U.S. labor market is the 2-to-1 disparity in unemployment that exists between black and white workers. Attempts to explain the gap often cite observed average differences in human capital—particularly, education or skills—between black and white workers as a primary cause. But African Americans have made considerable gains in high school and college completion over the last four-and-a-half decades—both in absolute terms as well as relative to whites—and those gains have had virtually no effect on equalizing employment outcomes. Indeed, the significant racial disparities in unemployment that are observed at each level of education, across age cohorts, and among both men and women are the strongest evidence against the notion that education or skills differentials are responsible for the black-white unemployment gap.
Even if you control for the level of education, skills and experience — the wage gap persists. All that doesn’t magically happen without any racism at all. The fact is that the bias and the racism is baked into the system - it’s automatic. It happens on reflex. Anyone objectively observing America can clearly see that African Americans have the stakes pilled massively against them, and even when they manage to climb over and through those challenges, they’re still held back behind the 8-ball.
And Trump has shown with both Project2025 and Agenda47 that he plans to keep all those barriers in place and make them worse by dismantling DEI, ripping apart Affirmative Action and even prosecuting District Attorneys who try to fairly balance the justice system so that it doesn’t treat African-Americans more harshly than they deserve.
This is on top of the GOP lie often repeatedly about “rising crime” because crime is down.
Misleading statements about crime and public safety are already proliferating in this election cycle. As November draws closer, misinformation is likely to intensify. That makes it even more important to take a close look at what the best and most recent crime data tells us. One major trend is becoming clear: violent crime dropped in 2021 and 2022 — and then declined again, significantly, in 2023. We’ll have to wait until the fall for final government data to confirm this trend. Until then, here’s what we know, how we know it, and what it means — drawing on both city data and the most recent information from the FBI.
City-level data shows declines in violent crime
City-level crime reports are the best places to look for up-to-the-minute crime data. Combining enough city-level crime data can, in turn, approximate national trends. Two research teams have used this approach to give a sense of crime in 2023. Both show sharp declines in violent crime.
- Drawing on data from 38 cities across the country, the Council on Criminal Justice reported that homicide declined by 10 percent in 2023. It also noted declines in assaults, gun assaults, burglary, and larceny, but a sharp spike in motor vehicle thefts.
- Similarly, Jeff Asher, a researcher and expert in data on crime and public safety, studied murder data from 175 cities and found a 7 percent decline in murders through December 7, 2023, compared to 2022. These cities are from across the country and include jurisdictions led by Republicans and Democrats alike.
A murder decline of this magnitude would be historic; the sharpest one-year drop on record occurred in 1996 when the number of murders nationwide fell by a little more than 9 percent compared to 1995.
The claim that crime is concentrated in “Democrat cities” (filled with Black people) is also false. There are higher crime rates in Red States and in rural counties than in Blue States and urban cities.
A recent U.S. Department of Justice study found that those quiet country roads don’t always mean lower crime. In fact, some rural areas have even higher crime rates than cities! While the types of crimes may differ—urban areas typically grapple with higher rates of violent offenses, whereas rural regions contend with property crimes—crime can happen anywhere. Think about it: fewer police officers stretched over miles of land and isolated homes can make easier targets for would-be criminals.
Moreover, the perception of rural areas as “safe havens” may inadvertently discourage residents from implementing adequate security measures, leaving them vulnerable. Here are just a few reasons why rural crime is often misjudged:
- Low population density: The population distribution in rural areas can spread law enforcement thin, leading to delayed response times or even undetected criminal activity. This makes official reporting inaccurate, and crimes seem less frequent than they are. Low populations also skew per capita crime rates easily.
- Social Dynamics: Some rural communities prioritize maintaining an image of safety while preferring to deal with issues amongst themselves. That sometimes leads residents to not report crimes to authorities, artificially obscuring crime rates.
- Types of Crime: Rural crimes are often property theft, not the violent assaults often associated with cities. News outlets don’t cover a stolen tractor the same way, painting a distorted image.
[...]
- Property Crime: Rural areas often surpass their urban counterparts when it comes to property crime, primarily burglary and theft. According to data from the FBI, the burglary rates in “extra-small cities” like El Dorado, KS (28.3 per 1,000 residents), Alexandria, LA (22.5), and Malvern, AR (17.5) are typically higher than large cities like Seattle, WA (12.6 per 1,000 residents), Oklahoma City, OK (9.5), and Memphis, TN (8.2).
- Violent Crime: Although violent crime tends to be lower in rural settings, some disturbing patterns stand out. Isolated residences, for example, might be easier targets for home invasions. Gun deaths by suicide rates for rural men and women are also higher than for urban men and women.
- Substance Abuse: The ongoing opioid epidemic highlights the fact that rural communities have often been hit harder than their urban counterparts. The scarcity of mental health resources, as well as economic hardship in some rural areas, contribute to high substance abuse rates and related crimes.
The image of the peaceful idyllic country-side is not all it’s cracked up to be. And, frankly, when it comes to murder rates — they are far higher in Red States.
House Republicans held three field hearings on violent crime last year in New York City, Chicago, and Washington DC. These hearings should have been held in the murder-plagued states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. In 2023, Speaker Johnson’s hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana had a murder rate 8 times higher (41.1) than Minority Leader Jeffries’ hometown of Brooklyn, New York (5.0), 6 times higher than Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco, California (6.6), and more than 7 times higher than the national average (5.5). Our 2023 report in the Red State Murder Problem series found that murder rates were significantly higher in red states than blue states every year from 2000 to 2020. Over these 21 years, the red state murder rate was 23% higher than the blue state murder rate. Our analysis of the latest CDC data found that 2021 and 2022 were no exception.
[...]
We found that murder rates were down 5% nationwide in 2022, but a red state murder gap still persists. Murder rates in red states were 33% higher than in blue states in both 2021 and 2022. As in 2019 and 2020, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama hold the first, second, and third highest murder rates in the country, respectively. The rest of the 10 states with the highest murder rates include the usual suspects—South Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Georgia. States with the highest murder rates continue to be dominated by red states, not perennial blue states like New York and California. Even when we removed the county with the largest city in red states (and kept them in for blue states), murder rates in red states were still 20% higher in 2021 and 16% higher in 2022. This is not a blue cities in red states problem.
So this is a lie. This is whataboutism. Rather than addressing the problems in their own backyard — they point their fingers elsewhere. To New York, LA, Detroit and Chicago when the crime rate in all those cities are merely a fraction of the rates in their own home states.
MIke Johnson attacked Biden for “not being able to speak without a teleprompter” — which he clearly can — and when his own teleprompter failed at the RNC, he simply walked off stage.
And then you had MTG.
The right complains about the Left’s “ideology of transgenderism” but really what they're having an argument with — is science. The Mayo Clinic currently states the following about transgender reality.
Gender dysphoria is the feeling of discomfort or distress that might occur in people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth or sex-related physical characteristics.
Transgender and gender-diverse people might experience gender dysphoria at some point in their lives. However, some transgender and gender-diverse people feel at ease with their bodies, with or without medical intervention.
A diagnosis for gender dysphoria is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), a manual published by the American Psychiatric Association. The diagnosis was created to help people with gender dysphoria get access to necessary health care and effective treatment. The term focuses on discomfort as the problem, rather than identity.
Gender Dysphoria has been confirmed under the DSM-5, it is part of modern Psychiatric and Physical Medicine. It’s not just a "theory.” It’s not just an “Ideology” — it’s what science has shown us.
And most importantly, treatment has been developed for this condition mostly to prevent those afflicted from resorting to suicide.
Using data from the U.S. Transgender Population Health Survey (TransPop), researchers examined the prevalence of hazardous drinking, problematic drug use, serious psychological distress, suicidality, and non-suicidal self-injury between transgender and cisgender adults. Results from this study, which is the first national probability sample of transgender people in the U.S., support previously reported findings that showed significant disparities in health outcomes for transgender as compared with cisgender Americans.
While transgender and cisgender adults reported similar rates of hazardous drinking and problematic drug use, transgender people were significantly more likely to experience poor mental health during their lifetimes. Compared to cisgender adults, transgender adults were seven times more likely to contemplate suicide, four times more likely to attempt it, and eight times more likely to engage in non-suicidal self-injury.
Whether you “agree” or not — you should at least be willing to accept that professional psychiatrists and doctors are doing their best to apply treatments to prevent suicide and self-damage by these patients. Blocking and outlawing those treatments only leads in one direction — to their deaths.
At the RNC they are suddenly celebrating “Inclusion” — but do they mean it?
Yeah, right.
Similarly, Red States have increasing problems with pregnancy and childbirth exacerbated by the anti-abortion stance which is denying healthcare to pregnant women. This has led to an increase in infant mortality.
Ann Arbor, September 14, 2021 – Net of history, infant and postneonatal mortality rates are substantively higher under Republican-controlled state legislatures than under non-Republican–controlled ones, according to a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier.
Findings suggest that effects may be greater for Black infants than for White infants.
[...]
The investigators examined how changes in the party composition of state legislatures, as well as in the upper and lower houses and governorships affected infant mortality rates, neonatal mortality rates and post-neonatal mortality rates from 1969 to 2014. They also analyzed annual state unemployment rates, average age of female individuals, birthrates and other sociodemographic data. They found that, net of history, infant mortality is consistently higher under Republican-controlled state legislatures than non-Republican–controlled ones. Going from a non-Republican–controlled state Congress to a Republican-controlled one is associated with a 4.2% increase in infant mortality and an 8.1% increase in postneonatal mortality.
Their findings show larger estimates for Black than for White infants, although the differences were not significant at conventional levels. Research has found that the introduction of Medicaid was associated with an 8% decline in non-White infant mortality between 1965 and 1980 (Goodman-Bacon, 2018). The annual increase in Black infant mortality under Republican legislatures found in this study is 5.9% — that is, equal to about 75% the magnitude of the 15-year benefit attributed to the introduction of Medicaid.
Studies have also shown that states with abortion restrictions have higher rates of Maternal Mortality.
The researchers found that states with the higher score of abortion policy composite index had a 7% increase in total maternal mortality compared with states with lower abortion policy composite index. Among individual abortion policies, states with a licensed physician requirement had a 51% higher total maternal mortality and a 35% higher maternal mortality (i.e. a death during pregnancy or within 42 days of being pregnant), and restrictions on state Medicaid funding for abortion was associated with a 29% higher total maternal mortality.
“It is critically important that state-level policies related to women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health care services, including abortion, are evidence-based and guided by the primary goal of improving women’s health and reducing maternal mortality,”said Dovile Vilda, research assistant professor at the Department of Social, Behavioral and Population Sciences and a lead author on the study. “Our study provides evidence that decreasing the number of abortion restrictions across the states may reduce incidence of death during pregnancy and postpartum among all women in the US.”
So Republican anti-abortion policies are leading to more infants dying, and more women dying. That’s a great record to be proud of. And of course, they want to abandon NATO and let Putin have his way with Ukraine who is a threat to all of Europe.
The Xenophobia of the GOP has been leading to an extreme anti-immigrant policy that is a massive danger to our economy.
While the rising number of immigrants in the US has sowed division among politicians across the country — and stoked angst among a swath of voters — there’s one place where almost everyone seems on the same, upbeat, page: Wall Street.
Last month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculated that immigration will generate a $7 trillion boost to gross domestic product over the next decade. The agency came to that conclusion after incorporating the recent surge in immigration.
The CBO release spurred a flurry of fresh number-crunching among investment bank economists, to account for the boost those new comers are giving to the labor force and consumer spending. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. revised up its near-term economic growth forecasts Sunday. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and BNP Paribas SA were among banks that acknowledged the economic impact from surging immigration in recent weeks.
“Immigration is not just a highly charged social and political issue, it is also a big macroeconomic one,” Janet Henry, global chief economist at HSBC Holdings Plc, wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. No advanced economy is benefiting from immigration quite like the US, and “the impact of migration has been an important part of the US growth story over the past two years.”
Besides the economic benefit, Trump has proposed to deport and detain 11 Million people from our nation, including those who were born here in violation of the 14th Amendment.
You can’t just throw people out without cause. You need evidence that they’ve committed a crime (and crime rates by migrants are incredibly low), or else you need to have an immigration hearing. Hearings take time. The average wait time for an Immigration Hearing as of 2023 is 762 days. That’s two years.
How much longer does that get when we throw another 11 Million people into the system? No matter how you slice it these people will need to be held somewhere, and Trump’s people have proposed Detention Camps.
Trump was asked whether he would build new detention camps as part of his campaign pledge to carry out the biggest deportation of migrants in the country illegally.
"I would not rule out anything," Trump said. "But there wouldn't be that much of a need for them" because, he said, the plan is to deport migrants in the U.S. illegally back to their home countries as quickly as possible.
"We're not leaving them in the country," Trump said. "We're bringing them out."
This will be a total clusterfuck. Our total prison population — which is already greater than any other country on earth — is 2.5 million. Placing 11 Million people in camps for years is completely bonkers. The human rights violations would be astronomical.
We can see that they take this seriously, as Don Jr is confronted on Trump’s separation policy.
This will be their reaction as they implement the Detention Camps. They’ll just complain about “MSDNC” and the “Lamestream Media” while millions are abused.
And on top of all this is Trump’s threats against his opposition. His threat to use Military Tribunals against the members of the January 6 Committee.
Former President Donald Trump amplified posts on social media calling for a televised military tribunal for former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney and the jailing of top elected officials, including President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“ELIZABETH LYNNE CHENEY IS GUILTY OF TREASON,” one post created by another user that Trump amplified on his social media website Truth Social on Sunday reads. “RETRUTH IF YOU WANT TELEVISED MILITARY TRIBUNALS.”
Cheney responded on X, “Donald - This is the type of thing that demonstrates yet again that you are not a stable adult—and are not fit for office.”
A separate post Trump amplified on Truth Social Sunday includes photos of 15 former and current elected officials and says, “THEY SHOULD BE GOING TO JAIL ON MONDAY NOT STEVE BANNON!”
In addition to Biden and Harris, the post includes photos of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President Mike Pence and members of the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
As much as he whines that he’s being targeted with prosecution for political purposes — he would do the exact same thing to his political opponents.
And if there are protests and public complaints to all of this — Trump will unleash the armed military to deal with it with deadly force.
According to Donald Trump’s posts on Truth Social, Trump’s plan for a second term includes increased militarization of federal law enforcement to arrest people experiencing homelessness, “wag[e] war” on drug dealers, crack down on border crossings and ramp up the use of the death penalty. Many of these plans would represent an unprecedented expansion of presidential power and could lead to a slippery slope of weaponizing the federal government against civilians and infringing their civil liberties. Congress should take action to counteract them.
According to a CREW analysis of over 13,000 of Trump’s Truth Social posts from January 1, 2023 to April 1, 2024, Trump has vowed at least 19 times to weaponize law enforcement against civilians. This includes deploying state and local police, multiple branches of the military and federal law enforcement agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, FBI and Homeland Security agencies against people crossing the southern border, homeless people and protestors. Trump has a niche audience on Truth Social so the full extent of these plans—and the violence they promise—have flown under the radar.
These tactics are not unfamiliar, but the posts suggest a ratcheting up of an anti-democratic trend in the event of Trump again becoming president. During his one term as president, Trump ramped up militarization of the border by sending more than 5,000 National Guard troops. President Trump and his allies have talked about how they would “immediately deploy a ‘surge’ of federal troops” to the border in a second Trump term, sending “anywhere between 100,000 to 300,000,” a source close to Trump told Rolling Stone. In comparison, President Bush sent 6,000 troops to the border and Obama sent just 1,200. In 2020 Trump deployed the National Guard against citizens in Washington, D.C. protesting the murder of George Floyd, and sent officers from Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to police protests in Portland, Oregon. This was the first time a U.S. President used federal troops against civilians since 1992, when George H. W. Bush sent active-duty troops to Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King riots. While the militarization of law enforcement during Trump’s term was already met with alarm, Trump’s Truth Social posts promise even more militarization of government and police power in a potential second term.
The GOP being back in power with Trump at the head would be a disaster. It would destroy the deficit, it would set inflation on a supercharger, it would destroy the economy, it would be a disaster for women and also infants, it would be devastating for migrants, anti-Semitism, anti-Asian, anti-Islamic, anti-Feminism, anti-LGBTQ and Racism would be rampant and accelerated. Thousands, possibly Millions, would suffer Human Rights violations and be brutalized and murdered by Militarized Police and Active Duty Troops turned against the people and their rights of Free Speech and Expression.
We would become a Fascist Police State.
It can’t be allowed to happen.
And also, this…