Kansas Crimson

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2024 11:43 am if someone has a differing opinion/perspective/angle/experience/way of looking at things. i don't automatically go to "mis/dis information."

Sparko wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2024 12:19 pm Is Randy implying that humanitarian support should be withheld from certain groups in disasters? That supercut was way cool without context. Misinformation would die otherwise.

The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is administered by the FEMA in partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). SSP provides financial support to non-federal entities to provide humanitarian services to noncitizen migrants following their release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is funded through U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and administered by FEMA, as directed by Congress in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023. SSP provides financial support to non-federal entities to provide sheltering and related activities to noncitizen migrants following their release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The intent is to support CBP in the safe, orderly and humane release of noncitizen migrants from short-term holding facilities. In Fiscal Year 2024, Congress appropriated CBP $650,000,000 for the SSP Program.

FROM SPRINGFIELD, OHIO TO THE FLOODED mountain towns of western North Carolina, Republicans are ending the 2024 campaign with a torrent of lies, misrepresentations, and falsehoods.

Donald Trump, as always, engages in demonstrably false lies he is easily caught in, but this time around he has a running mate who does so, too. A few of their fellow Republicans have called out Trump and JD Vance for some of their recent lies—about Haitians supposedly killing and eating pets in Ohio last month and about Democrats supposedly holding out on relief for Republicans in storm-ravaged areas. But many other Republicans are parroting the lies.

It didn’t have to be this way: Republicans hold an edge on the issues most important to voters, the economy and immigration, and could talk about what is real and offer solutions. Instead they are frightening voters with lies. In a particularly provocative smear, Trump’s son Eric even said Saturday at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, “They tried to kill him, and it’s because the Democratic party, they can’t do anything right.”

Last week Trump claimed that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp couldn’t reach President Joe Biden in the midst of the Hurricane Helene emergency. He claimed that “the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor” of North Carolina were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” He claimed that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are “universally being given POOR GRADES for the way that they are handling the Hurricane, especially in North Carolina.” He claimed that Harris and Biden “stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.” He claimed—while air traffic increased 300 percent with private and public rescue and relief flights over western North Carolina—that “Kamala wined and dined in San Francisco, and all of the people in North Carolina no helicopters, no rescue—it’s just—what’s happened there is very bad.”

None of this is true. Governors from all the states affected by Hurricane Helene have vouched for the response from the federal government.

Yet backing up Trump and Vance are GOP members of the House and Senate who are fueling distrust about the federal storm relief efforts—trying to convince voters the funds meant to help them are going instead to immigrants.

Sen. Ted Budd spread some of this B.S. Rep. Richard McCormick did, too. Sen. Tom Cotton said the suggestion FEMA was spending on immigrants instead of storm survivors was “not” misinformation and that the Biden administration now “can’t find” the funds to help storm victims in the South.

House Speaker Mike Johnson called the Helene response “a massive failure.” And while he acknowledged there are “different” accounts managing storm relief and managing the housing of immigrants, he suggested that the administration is “using any pool of funding from any account for resettling illegal aliens who have come across the border,” and said the American people are “disgusted.”

The lies were so egregious—and potentially so dangerous, if they mislead people desperate for help—that even some Republicans, like Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, felt forced to debunk the distortions, conspiracy theories, and “outrageous rumors” for the sake of their constituents’ safety.

Meanwhile it’s hard to see how preying on terrified and displaced people who have lost everything could be a path to victory in North Carolina, a purple state that gave Trump his smallest winning margin in 2020 of 74,500 votes and where the current GOP gubernatorial candidate, a porn addict who calls himself “a black Nazi,” is down by double digits to his Democratic opponent.

A very rare joint editorial by the state’s two largest newspapers, titled “Shame on Trump for worsening NC’s Helene tragedy with political lies,” was published last week by both the Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer.

But political lies are the campaign now. Republicans no longer use lies as a defensive tool to escape political jams. Spewing falsehoods is now an offensive tactic they all learned from Trump, what Steve Bannon calls “flood[ing] the zone with shit.”

Trump isn’t likely to stop, and neither is Vance.

After Vance copped to lying about the Haitian residents in Springfield—“If I have to create stories . . . then that’s what I’m going to do”—he kept spreading lies about them, including about their legal status. Even following all the harassment, intimidation, bomb threats, evacuations, and school cancellations that resulted from the first lies about pet-eating, Vance dug in more—calling the Haitians “illegal aliens” even though they are living and working in the United States legally on a temporary basis.

Vance chose to lie about policies he doesn’t like. He disagrees with the Biden administration’s decision to grant Temporary Protected Status to those refugees until February 2026, so he said, “that does not magically make them legal because Kamala Harris waved the amnesty wand. That makes her border policy a disgrace, and I’m still going to call people ‘illegal aliens.’”

Last week he smiled his way through laughable lies in the vice presidential debate—did anyone know that Trump saved Obamacare and transferred power “peacefully” after the 2020 election? Vance lied with ease but sneered at the moderator when he got caught: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he said to Margaret Brennan.

When asked directly by Tim Walz at the end of their debate whether Biden had won in 2020, Vance tried pivoting to the future while accusing Harris of censoring Americans “from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation.” It wasn’t a deft evasion, it was ludicrous. But that was the point. Flood the zone.

Within days of the debate, however, Vance wasn’t avoiding the question—like Cotton and Johnson tried to do, painfully. When asked by a political comedian whether Trump won in 2020, Vance said Trump won. It seems his “damning non-answer” wasn’t suitable for Trump, so Vance was forced to say what his boss wants, that he beat Joe Biden and won.

Gratuitous lies Republicans tell in 2024 are rooted in the Big Lie. Once you are party to a lie that consequential, smaller ones get easier to tell. The Big Lie has changed this country forever. It is why we had January 6th and why the lives of any Republicans who tell the truth are threatened and the lives of election workers are threatened and why we could have violence in the days and weeks following this election and why radicalized Republicans at the local level are planning to delay certification of the election and why Trump was able to be nominated again and be positioned to possibly win a second term and replace our democracy with an autocracy.

Prepare yourself for this ugly reality: Every Republican in elected office will be expected to go out and lie again if Trump loses on November 5. And they will do it, even if it causes violence. We know that because they are lying now about things that could endanger their fellow Americans who are grieving, desperate, and despairing. They looked the other way while Trump lied about COVID and untold thousands died as a result, and they went silent after just days of condemning a deadly insurrection. Honesty isn’t an option.

The Republicans’ new rule of politics is that they can’t be fact-checked. Let’s hope they can’t get elected.

Sparko wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2024 9:06 am Trump claiming the Medicare $35 insulin cap was his program is just the end in my opinion.
Desperate lies and damned lies are all he has left.

KUTradition wrote: ↑Thu Oct 10, 2024 7:43 am but i thought the dems controlled the weather?