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BTW, what happened to East Palestine, OH? Look like politicians used it to posture and prance around and then everything went quiet. It was supposed to be the Chernobyl of our times. Was it?
Eric Holder says
BTW, what happened to East Palestine, OH? Look like politicians used it to posture and prance around and then everything went quiet. It was supposed to be the Chernobyl of our times. Was it?
Need to continuously monitor soil and groundwater within at least 500 miles of East Palestine, OH for at least the next 10 years.
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1684630438168387589
Sam Bankman Fried just walked, and he donated to BOTH republicans and democrats.
Patrick says
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1684630438168387589
Nothing will happen. This is just theater.
They always promise accountability and never deliver it.
Sam Bankman Fried just walked, and he donated to BOTH republicans and democrats.
That's not 100% accurate. They are limited in what they can do. Sure there is lots of theater, but they can't overstep their limits,
The guy was prancing around the site of that train wreck and taking selfies. Did he do anything meaningful to help the residents since then?
Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio is introducing legislation Thursday that would require immigrants with temporary visas to pay thousands of dollars before entering the U.S. – as part of the effort to crack down on visa overstays
The Timely Departure Act would require some foreign nationals seeking admission to the U.S. on a temporary visa to pay between $5,000 and $15,000 in a bond or cash payment. That money would then be returned to them when they leave the U.S. in accordance with the terms of the visa, or transfer to a green card.
If they overstayed, however, that money would be retained by the Department of Homeland Security, and it would be diverted into an account – the ‘Immigration Detention and Enforcement Account" – to fund the detention and removal of those in the country illegally.
The bill would also bar visa overstays from making a defensive asylum claim after their visas have expired.
Good Afternoon,
As you know, mask mandates are back: some universities and elementary schools have already reimposed mandates in response to the latest variant of COVID-19.
Democrats claim they oppose the reintroduction of mask mandates, and Senator Vance plans to hold them to their word.
Tomorrow, Senator Vance will force Senate floor consideration of his Freedom to Breathe Act, which would prevent the reimposition of federal mask mandates for domestic air travel, public transit systems, and primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. The legislation would also prohibit air carriers, transit authorities, and educational institutions from refusing service to individuals who choose not to wear a mask.
Senate Democrats will be forced to go on the record: do they support mask mandates or individual freedom? ...
We would appreciate anything you can do to bring attention to this important issue.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Luke Schroeder
Press Secretary
Senator JD Vance
Eric Holder says
The guy was prancing around the site of that train wreck and taking selfies. Did he do anything meaningful to help the residents since then?
I'm not sure what he is doing
You may know this, the movie Hillbilly Elegy was made on JD Vance's life. It is a high quality movie. Glenn Close and Amy Adams are excellent. I am told that he is a good guy.
Senator JD Vance is introducing legislation to prevent federal officials from enforcing masks mandates in schools and on airplanes. Please contact your Senator and let him or her know that you support Senator Vance’s “The Freedom to Breathe Act” to protect us from mask mandates. This is particularly important to contact both your democratic and republican senators - we need this bill to be passed, and in today’s Senate environment that will require bipartisan support.
EXCLUSIVE: Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance will introduce legislation Tuesday to crackdown on the ability by the federal government or commercial airlines to force Americans into wearing face masks amid a string of new coronavirus variants.
Titled the Freedom to Breathe Act, the legislation, if passed and signed into law, would prevent President Biden and federal agencies from implementing face mask requirements for public transit passengers or students in schools until Dec. 31, 2024.
Additionally, Vance's office said the measure would prevent federal spending from being used to propose face mask requirements or force Americans to wear face coverings.
Vance's office said the bill would:
Prohibit any federal official, including the President, from issuing an order requiring individuals to wear a mask or other face covering on any passenger flight in the U.S. national airspace system, on public transit, or in school (primary, secondary, and colleges);
Block Commercial Air Carriers, public transit authorities, and all educational institutions from refusing service to anyone who declines to wear a mask or other face covering;
Prevent the Secretary of Health and Human Services from requiring plane or train passengers and students to wear a mask or face covering in response to a public health emergency;
Restrict federal spending to propose, establish, implement, or enforce a mask requirement on airline and public transit passengers and students;
Require all agencies issue new and revised guidance within 90 days of enactment to implement the law and preempt all other laws or guidance contrary to the Act
On Tuesday, Senator J.D. Vance (R-Oh.) introduced a new bill to ban the federal government from nationally mandating face masks for airline passengers and students until December 31st, 2024.
It seems more likely that President Peters would confess he’s being paid by China and Ukraine than it would be for the democrat-controlled Senate to pass Vance’s anti-mask bill, but I suppose it’s some progress. Not so long ago, legislators wet their britches at the prospect of even questioning “the science” of masks, much less introducing bills to stop them, even if only for a year.
On Thursday, Senate Democrats shot down Ohio Republican J.D. Vance’s bill that would have banned the federal government from imposing any national mask mandates between now and the end of 2024. “What I would like is for the freedom of a school child to not be thrown out of class because he doesn’t wear a mask,” said Vance. “We cannot repeat the anxiety, the stress, and the nonstop panic of the last couple of years.” Countering that, Democrat Ed Markey of Massachusetts called the bill a “red herring” and said it would “be tying the hands of healthcare professionals.” A recent Frontiers in Public Health study found that “the efficacy of masking school children remains uncertain, and may even pose potential risks.”
Hillbilly Elegy is Vance's autobiographic book. Then a movie was created based on that.
Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union..." (video)
Vance: We Should Investigate ‘Collusion’ Between Press, Big Technology, National Security on Hunter Biden
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023/12/10/vance-we-should-investigate-collusion-between-press-big-technology-national-security-on-hunter-biden/
ABC Cuts Mic of Trump-Backing Senator Mid-Interview for Calling Out Unelected ‘Bureaucrats in Government’
Republican Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), known for his support of President Donald Trump, was cut off mid-interview by ABC News while trying to explain his calls for gutting the administrative state. ...
Vance argued that his concern was with the growth of an administrative state that had become unaccountable to the American public and elected officials.
However, Stephanopoulos twisted Vance’s argument into a fabricated summary, cut off his microphone, and ended the interview, thanking the senator for his time.
The abrupt ending to the interview left Vance visibly frustrated, and his protests could be heard despite ABC’s editing.
Senate Republicans are responding to growing concerns about Google’s leftist bias by calling for the Big Tech giant to be broken up.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) made an unprecedented call to break up Google’s monopoly.
Vance blasted Google as a “progressive technology company.”
The senator warns that the company has a “monopolistic control of information.”
He also quoted one of the Democrats’ favorite talking points by arguing that Google is a true “threat to democracy.”
In a post on X, Vance wrote:
“Long overdue, but it’s time to break Google up.
“This matters far more than any other election integrity issue.
“The monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”
Republican Senator J.D. Vance has fired back after it emerged that Tyson Foods is replacing American workers with illegal aliens.
Fox News anchor Jesse Watters reported that Tyson is shutting down its Iowa plant and killing 1,200 American jobs so it can shift operations to New York and hire illegal aliens instead.
Donald Trump Is an Opioid for the Masses...
J.D. Vance
Opioid of the Masses
To many, Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis, and the eventual comedown will be harsh.
A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I spent the morning volunteering at a community garden in our San Francisco neighborhood. After a few hours of casual labor, we and the other volunteers dispersed to our respective destinations: tasty brunches, day trips to wine country, art-gallery tours. It was a perfectly normal day, by San Francisco standards.
That very same Saturday, in the small Ohio town where I grew up, four people overdosed on heroin. A local police lieutenant coolly summarized the banality of it all: “It’s not all that unusual for a 24-hour period here.” He was right: in Middletown, Ohio, that too is a perfectly normal day.
Folks back home speak of heroin like an apocalyptic invader, something that assailed the town mysteriously and without warning. Yet the truth is that heroin crept slowly into Middletown’s families and communities—not by invasion but by invitation.
Very few Americans are strangers to addiction. Shortly before I graduated from law school, I learned that my own mother lay comatose in a hospital, the consequence of an apparent heroin overdose. Yet heroin was only her latest drug of choice. Prescription opioids—“hillbilly heroin” some call it, to highlight its special appeal among white working-class folks like us—had already landed Mom in the hospital and cost our family dearly in the decade before her first taste of actual heroin. And before her own father gave up the bottle in middle age, he was a notoriously violent drunk. In our community, there has long been a large appetite to dull the pain; heroin is just the newest vehicle.
Of course, the pain itself has increased in recent years, and it comes from many places. Some of it is economic, as the factories that provided many U.S. towns and cities material security have downsized or altogether ceased to exist. Some of it is aesthetic, as the storefronts that once made American towns beautiful and vibrant gave way to cash-for-gold stores and payday lenders. Some of it is domestic, as rising divorce rates reveal home lives as dependable as steel-mill jobs. Some of it is political, as Americans watch from afar while a government machine that rarely tries to speak to them, and acts in their interests even less, sputters along. And some of it is cultural, from the legitimate humiliation of losing wars fought by the nation’s children to the illegitimate sense that some fall behind only because others jump ahead.
During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.
Last Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, I met a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War at a local coffee shop. “I was lucky,” he told me. “At least I came home. A lot of my buddies didn’t. The thing is, the media still talks about us like we lost that war! I like to think my dead friends accomplished something.” Imagine, for that man, the vengeful joy of a Trump rally. That brief feeling of power, of defiance, of sending a message to the very political and media establishment that, for 45 years, has refused to listen. Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades.
In some ways, Trump’s large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities. Not all Trump voters spend their days searching for an analgesic.
Yet a common thread among Trump’s faithful, even among those whose individual circumstances remain unspoiled, is that they hail from broken communities. These are places where good jobs are impossible to come by. Where people have lost their faith and abandoned the churches of their parents and grandparents. Where the death rates of poor white people go up even as the death rates of all other groups go down. Where too many young people spend their days stoned instead of working and learning.
Many years ago, our neighbor (and my grandma’s old friend) in Middletown moved out and rented his house on a Section 8 voucher—a federal program that offers housing subsidies to low-income people. One of the first folks to move in called her landlord to report a leaky roof. By the time the landlord arrived, he discovered the woman naked on her couch. After calling him, she had started the water for a bath, gotten high, and passed out. Forget about the original leak, now much of the upstairs—including her and her children’s possessions—was completely destroyed. Not every Trump voter lives like this woman, but nearly every Trump voter knows someone who does.
Though the details differ, men and women like my neighbor represent, in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, dies with such frequency from heroin, and exposes its children to such significant domestic chaos. Not long ago, a teacher who works with at-risk youth in my hometown told me, “We’re expected to be shepherds to these children, but they’re all raised by wolves.” And those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes.
What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.
The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.
I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.
J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
RWSGFY says
J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
And it's a Netflix original TV adaption, too.
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