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jd vance
'One of the Most Pathetic Things I've Ever Seen': Watch Vance Refuse to Say Whether Trump Lost in 2020
A New York Times interview carried echoes of Vance's "damning non-answer" in the vice presidential debate.
Oct 11, 2024
Characterizing questions about whether Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lied about his 2020 election loss as an "obsession" of the media, vice presidential contender JD Vance on Friday refused five consecutive opportunities to acknowledge the election results.
In an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of The New York Times podcast "The Interview," Vance repeatedly attempted to suggest that questions about whether Trump refused to accept the results of a democratic election were unimportant, saying he was "focused on the future."
"Do you think he lost the 2020 election?" asked Garcia-Navarro, point-blank.
"I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election," Vance replied. "I think there's an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I'm much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable."
When Garcia-Navarro asked him the straightforward question a second and third time, he claimed tech companies' censorship of a New York Post story about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop "cost Donald Trump millions of votes," still refusing to answer whether President Joe Biden was, in fact, the election winner in November 2020.
"I've asked this question repeatedly, it is something that is very important for the American people to know," said Garcia-Navarro. "There is no proof, legal or otherwise, the Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election."
Vance later said he would not have certified the 2020 election if he had been in Congress at the time, citing his claim that "industrial scale censorship" cost Trump millions of votes.
"Vance definitively stated that he would have voided the votes of millions of Americans, and paved the way for installing Trump, after Trump lost the 2020 election," said lawyer and writer David Lurie.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar called Vance's refusal to answer the question "one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen."
The interview came days after Vance faced Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz in a debate. Vance responded to a direct question about whether Trump lost in 2020 with his favored refrain and more claims of censorship.
"Tim, I'm focused on the future," Vance said at the debate. "Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?"
Walz condemned Vance's "damning non-answer."
Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, responded to Friday's interview by calling Vance "the Project 2025 enabler of Trump's dreams."
"Donald Trump chose JD Vance to be his running mate for one reason and one reason only: He will do what Mike Pence wouldn't and put Donald Trump over our Constitution," said Chitika. "His refusal to acknowledge the simple fact that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is proof that if Trump wins, there will be no one left to check his worst instincts and stop him from gaining unprecedented, unchecked power to do whatever he wants and put our country at risk."
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Investing in Childcare Would 'Massively Increase' Parents' Earnings: Study
"This kind of payoff is almost unheard of in government labor-market policies."
Oct 07, 2024
While Republican proposals for solving the childcare crisis in the presidential campaign have ranged from recruiting "grandpa or grandma" as babysitters to slashing providers' certification requirements—with presidential candidate Donald Trump failing to give a coherent answer when asked about the issue last month—a new study delivers a simple message about how the benefits of public spending on childcare significantly outweigh the costs.
Researchers at Yale and Brown universities analyzed the universal pre-kindergarten program in New Haven, Connecticut, and found that "politicians could massively increase Americans' earnings" by expanding investments in such programs.
The New Haven program began as the result of a 1996 court ruling and is open to all families in the city regardless of income—but it uses a lottery system for enrollment due to limited funding and space.
The paper the researchers published with the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that parents whose children were selected in New Haven's lottery had 11 more hours of childcare than those who weren't able to benefit from the tuition-free universal pre-K program—enough to increase the parents' earnings by 21.7% even after their kids moved on to elementary school.
That increase makes childcare spending "one of the most effective, pro-work policies in the U.S.," said Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long.
The added earnings stemmed largely from the parents' ability to continue working without taking time off to fill in gaps left by a lack of childcare, particularly because New Haven's program includes extended hours, with children able to attend as early as 7:30 am and as late as 5:30 pm.
The paper emphasizes that families that didn't get a pre-K slot still utilized other childcare programs out of necessity—but they had to pay for them out of pocket and were able to send their children to the programs for fewer hours per week than those who won the lottery.
"A few more hours of care can have long-run returns for families that are quite a bit larger than the costs of provision," Seth D. Zimmerman, a research associate at Yale who co-authored the study, told the Post.
Combining the added earnings for parents and other economic benefits associated with early childhood education, the researchers found, every dollar spent on providing tuition-free full-time childcare yielded $6 in benefits.
"This kind of payoff is almost unheard of in government labor-market policies—much higher than for most other pro-work programs, such as the earned-income tax credit," wrote Post columnist Catherine Rampell in an analysis on Monday.
The study was published days after the White House released an issue brief titledChildcare Is Infrastructure, which the Biden administration said was made evident by its $24 billion investment in the industry through the American Rescue Plan.
"Introduction of universal pre-K across various states led to increased pre-K enrollment and higher employment rates among mothers with young children in those areas on average," said the White House. "Consistent with an increase in overall economic activity, places that introduced universal pre-k also had larger increases in new business applications and the number of establishments than places that did not."
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has expressed support for expanding childcare programs and lowering costs for families, including by restoring the expanded child tax credit and providing an extra tax break for families with newborns.
The new study suggests that in the presidential campaign, "childcare should be front and center," wrote Rampell. "If you want to help workers, help them care for their kids."
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It Shouldn't Even Be Close: Harris Must Ditch Genocide and Embrace Working-Class Politics
Winning should be a breeze for Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the other Democratic candidates. What's going on?
Oct 05, 2024
With little more than four weeks to go before the November elections, polls show the Trump/Harris race as “too close to call.” Winning should be a breeze for Harris and the other Democratic candidates. The GOP’s Congressional votes and policies are bad for women, children, and workers. The GOP doesn’t recognize and act against climate violence, it protects the corporate-favorable tax code, it is soft on corporate crooks, it scuttles regulatory protections for the peoples’ health, safety, and economic wellbeing and mocks the dire necessity of preparedness for future pandemics. (The military Empire with its violent war crimes and runaway budget-busting drain on our domestic necessities is supported by both Parties and not in electoral contention.)
Why so close, then? Because for years, the Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP. It has hired corporate-conflicted political consulting firms that control campaign messages, strategies and has excluded access by citizen groups to candidates, generally preferring corporatism over democracy, regardless of its rhetoric.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country—the red states—and surrender them to the Republicans. The mountain states and North and South Dakota used to have Democrats representing them in the Senate. Failing to compete in these low population states concedes about ten Senate seats at the outset.
Most telling in these last remaining days is the refusal for Kamala Harris and most Congressional candidates to have front and center proven and proper vote-getting agendas reflecting the New Deal.
It also doesn’t advance any path to electoral victory to abandon half the country—the red states—and surrender them to the Republicans.
To begin with I’m referring to raising the GOP frozen federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour from its present $7.25. Democrats need more than a throwaway line on wages. They need to pour some of the billions of dollars raised into media and groundgame campaigns around the slogan “go vote for a raise, you’ve long earned and been denied by the Republicans.” That, authentically conveyed by thousands of Democratic candidates will get the attention of 25 million underpaid and struggling workers, who make our real economy run daily. Why aren’t the Dems ringing that bell?
Another winner for 65 million elderly voters is to pledge with full throttle to increase Social Security benefits frozen for half a century and to raise the Social Security tax on the wealthy to pay for it. Astonishingly, Kamala Harris and her handlers are not championing the “Social Security 2100 Act” which had 200 sponsors in the Congress, led by Congressman John Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal. The throwaway line is that they “will protect social security” as it deficiently exists. Talk is not enough. The Democrats need to organize and communicate to drive this message.
Third, they should be championing government-paid child care, maternal and family sick leave and the child tax credit—all opposed by the Wall Street GOP. Paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy—this issue is an 85 percent poll winner. Instead, Harris and the Dems mumble with some general rhetoric that nobody really believes. Western countries have long had such social safety net protections for families and children.
The Democratic Party has abandoned the blue collar, New Deal roots of the Roosevelt era and ferociously dialed for the same commercial dollars as does the GOP.
Get-out-the-vote efforts are still inadequate. The Party has trouble listening to Rev. William Barber who argues that just a ten to fifteen percent increase in low-wage voter turnout from 2020 would win the November elections. Instead of scapegoating the Green Party and spending money to block Third Party ballot access, the Democrats should try harder to tap into the 80 to 90 million non-voters who stay home, many of whom don’t see anything benefiting them coming from bloviating, hypocritical politicians.
If readers want more ideas for ways to get more votes, such as midnight shift campaigning, and cracking down on corporate crooks, they can obtain my usable new book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” and go to winningamerica.net.
Are you wondering why Tim Walz didn’t do better against J.D. Vance in the VP debate? Vance managed to normalize criminal felon Trump with his serial lies and law violations, corruption, abuse of women, awful presidential record (recall his lethal mocking of the early Covid-19 pandemic), because Walz was muzzled by the Harris campaign operatives. He was told what not to speak about and to hew to the narrow Party line. That kind of advice may sink the genocidal Democratic Party with its insular cowardliness in November.
Will these observations get the attention of the tiny number of ruling Democratic Party operatives who make most of the major decisions for their rank and file? Probably not. But similar advice from loyal party columnists like Dana Milbank, Michelle Goldberg, Eugene Robinson, Charles Blow, E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, among others, may breach the upper deck’s aloofness.
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