Tag Archives: politics

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Post-Election Political Fundraising is Scamming Donors

In politics, the grifting never stops.

Team Scalise (House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s fundraising committee) just sent me an e-mail citing the importance of Republican efforts to replace recently-resigned Rep. Matt Gaetz with another committed Republican:

                               *** SPECIAL ELECTION FOR MATT GAETZ’S SEAT *** 

It’s official – the special election in Florida’s First Congressional District was just declared and voting starts in January! Every House race is critical but with our Conservative House Majority hanging on by a THREAD, this might be the most important special election of the century. Our Pro-Trump Republican trifecta could be COMPLETELY DESTROYED if Democrats manage to win key races like this.

That’s why we are PLEADING for your help right now. Majority Leader Scalise set a goal of raising one million dollars to help fill Matt Gaetz’s seat with an America First Patriot, win every other special election, AND deliver President Trump’s agenda.

Of course, the message urges me to “DONATE NOW”. Most recipients of the message likely assume any donation they make will go to the campaign to elect a strong Republican to replace Gaetz. Not so.

Work your way through the entireTeam Scalise message and you discover that each individual contribution will be allocated to SCALISE FOR CONGRESS, which shall receive up to $3,300 per election (for a total of $6,600). 

Other politicians are in on the donations scam too.

President-elect Donald Trump has selected Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and Fox News contributor, to lead the Department of Defense. His nomination has generated considerable controversy because he has no managerial experience running a large institution like the Pentagon, has taken conservative positions on a number of hot issues and is enmeshed in an allegation of sexual assault. 

But Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) is still with him. Jackson just sent me an email:

The WOKE Democrats’ petition to IMPEACH Pete Hegseth has reached MILLIONS OF  SIGNATURES.

If we let Pete Hegseth FALL to the WOKE MOB – they’ll have everything they need to go after President Trump, and eventually YOU.

So, today we’re calling on 3,000,000 PATRIOTS to go on the record and say: 
I STAND WITH PETE HEGSETH.
I STAND WITH PETE HEGSETH

Of course, if you click on “I STAND WITH PETE HEGSETH” you get a plea for a contribution.

Bear with me now. 

The site explains: “Contributions go to Team Ronny (“JFC”), a joint fundraising committee composed of TEXANS FOR RONNY JACKSON (the “Campaign Committee”), TEXAS RED (the “LPAC”), RONNY JACKSON LEGAL EXPENSE TRUST (the “LDF”), and the National Republican Congressional Congressional Campaign Committee (the” NRCC” (each, a “Committee,” and, collectively, the “Committees”).”

But here’s the trick. The first $6,600 of any contributions will go to TEXANS FOR RONNY JACKSON (the “Campaign Committee”), PO Box 53058, Amarillo, TX 79159. 

In other words, Rep. Ronny Jackson has first dibs on any contributions made by people who want to “Stand with Pete Hegseth”. Way to go, Ronny. 

Then there’s this email urging me to rally behind Hegseth:

STAND WITH PETE HEGSETH!

The Radical Left’s petition to DESTROY Pete Hegseth has reached MILLIONS OF SIGNATURES. The Woke Mob will do whatever they can to REMOVE Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense from President Trump’s Cabinet. If Pete is gone we can say GOODBYE to America as we know it. An overwhelming and immediate response is needed right here, right now, or we’ll lose Pete Hegseth FOREVER.

Will you stand with Pete Hegseth?

Doing nothing is not an option.

PLEASE SIGN YOUR NAME NOW (and Donate to continue our MAGA Momentum)

The group behind the email urging me to rally behind Hegseth is the GOD, FAMILY, COUNTRY PAC. out of Arlington, Va.  No address. Just a PO box number.

According to Open Secrets, a research and government transparency group tracking money in politics, the PAC (political action committee) raised a total of $5,567 for 2024 campaigns. It spent $4,210. 

But almost all of that spending, $4,194, went toward fundraising costs: $203 to “fundraising fees” and $3,991 to “fundraising consulting.” The fees went to Better Mousetrap Digital, a major digital fundraising company for Republicans, and WinRed Technical Services, a “conduit” that centralizes donations to Republican-affiliated candidates and committees. The recipient of the “fundraising consulting” spending isn’t identified. The money likely went to the people who set up the PAC.

The only human being identified as associated with the PAC is Mr. Jason Young, listed as its Treasurer. But don’t try to reach him if you have any questions. He can’t be found.

Katie Elizabeth Britt, a Republican serving as the junior United States senator from Alabama, is in on the game, too.

As a Senate candidate, Britt publicly aligned herself with former President Donald Trump and gave credence to Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Trump officially endorsed her, calling her a “fearless America First warrior”. She won the general election in November 2022 and took office in 2023. 

Britt sent me a message urging me to fill out a “MAGA Priority Survey” and, of course, included a plea, “Will you rush support now to show your support to the growing MAGA movement as we head into a critical year ahead?”

In. light, subdued print below the plea her message says, “Your contribution will benefit Britt for Alabama Inc., Trump National Committee JFC, and 1 other.” Click through to the fine print and the first option for the donation is “Britt for Alabama Inc. AL-SEN”. 

I wonder how many more grifters are out there. And how many people have been and continue to be scammed by them.

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Trump’s Immigrant Solution: Manzanar Redux?

During World War II, President Roosevelt authorized the military to forcibly relocate people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast to inland camps. 

Manzanar War Relocation Center near Lone Pine, Calif.; it operated from March 1942 to Nov. 1945. Some 10,000 people were confined there during this time. Resistance to the incarceration at Manzanar soon led to a prison uprising that the Army put down by shooting 11 prisoners, killing two.

In April 1942, officials posted Civil Exclusion Orders No. 25 and No. 26 on telephone poles and store windows throughout Multnomah County. A few weeks later, Civilian Exclusion Order No. 49 was posted in Hood River. The orders gave Japanese-Americans only a few days to put their affairs in order before they had to report for evacuation.

On May 5, 1942, Japanese-Americans in Military Area No. 1 reported to the Portland  Assembly Center, leaving their pets, possessions, and lives behind. The center—built on the site of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition—was surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, and military guards armed with machine guns. The center had a peak population of 3,676.

Those living in Military Area No 2, including the Japanese Americans in Hood River, were sent by train to the Pinedale Assembly Center in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a temporary location until later transfer to permanent internment camps. 

Now President-elect Trump and his coterie of illegal immigration hardliners want to use the military again and put arrested immigrants in the country illegally in camps run by the Homeland Security Department. 

Will he follow through with his threats?  Count on it.

“Trump 1.0 was a test for the system, but it was also a trial for an inexperienced leader who had the inclination of a wrecking ball but often lacked the capacity or the cadres to follow through,” Susan B. Glasser wrote in the Nov. 21 New Yorker.  “Trump 2.0 is about an all-out attack on that system by a leader who fears neither Congress nor the courts nor the voters whom he will never have to face again.”

During the Republican primary campaign, The New York Times reported that  Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging )enters” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

 Earlier this month, Tom Fitton, who runs a conservative group, Judicial Watch, wrote that Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.”  Trump responded on his social media platform, Truth Social, reposting Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”

On Monday, Trump confirmed that he planned to declare a national emergency to carry out his promise to use the military in his mass deportations. 

Trump has also threatened to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – which allows presidents to deport citizens of an “enemy nation” without the typical proceedings – as part of his mass deportation plans. 

Thomas Homan, a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 25 and Trump’s proposed Border Czar, told Fox Business Network, “They’ll be used to do non-enforcement duties such as transportation, whether it’s on ground or air, infrastructure, building, intelligence.” Horman has also said transportation and supply assets from the Department of Defense, including military planes, could be used.  

Stephen Miller, Trump’s incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, has also floated the idea of “deputising” the National Guard  to carry out large-scale raids and detentions. The military could also be dispatched to the southern border with “an impedance and denial mission,” Miller has said. 

“You reassert the fundamental constitutional principle that you don’t have the right to enter into our sovereign territory, to even request an asylum claim,” Miller said  at the Conservative Political Action Conference  (CPAC) earlier this year. “The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border to say no one can cross here at all.”

No matter how Trump plans to use the military, the move is likely to bring an avalanche of legal challenges.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said on Monday that under US law, presidents may declare a national emergency and exert emergency powers only in specific situations. “And ‘use the military for deportations’ isn’t one of those specific things,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on social media.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, issued the following statement: on Nov. 18:

“We are crystal clear that the next Trump administration will do everything in its power to make mass deportation raids a reality. As we ready litigation and create firewalls for freedom across blue states, we must also sound the alarm that what’s on the horizon will change the very nature of American life for tens of millions of Americans.”

In 1983, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported that the internment program was a “grave injustice” driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered a formal apology to surviving victims.

It’s hard to believe all this current Trump-inspired turmoil is what the 76,744,608 people who voted for Trump this time around wanted.

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Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Invective Signals Trouble for Those With Temporary Protected Status

Photo: American Friends Service Committee

UPDATE 02/02/2025: The New York Times reported today that the Trump administration has ended Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., for more than 300,000 Venezuelans in the United States, leaving the population vulnerable to potential deportation in the coming months, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times. “The Trump administration’s attempt to undo the Biden administration’s T.P.S. extension is plainly illegal,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, who helps lead the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law. “The T.P.S. statute makes clear that terminations can only occur at the end of an extension; it does not permit do-overs.”

——————————————————-

President-elect Donald Trump has made it crystal clear. 

America’s “immigration crisis” is a “massive invasion” spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land” and the nation’s cities are being “flooded” by the “greatest invasion in history” of undesirables from “every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East,” Trump bellowed at the Republican National Convention in July 2024.

One action Trump plans to take in response to the “invasion” is to cut back on the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. Set up in 1990, the program gave the federal government the ability to grant work permits and deferrals from deportation to nationals of any designated nation going through or recovering from natural or man-made disasters.

If you recall the uproar over unfounded claims that Haitians who live and work legally in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbor’s cats and dogs, those Haitians are TPS holders. In an interview with NewsNation, Trump said the influx of migrants in Springfield “just doesn’t work” and “you have to remove the people; we cannot destroy our country.”

To say the least, the fate of those in Oregon with TPS will be precarious, too, under the upcoming Trump administration.

I asked Oregon’s Office of Immigrant and Refugee Advancement how many people in Oregon are here under the Temporary Protected Status program, but they never responded. But I located a report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on the TPS topic. According to the CRS, as of March 31, 2024, there were an estimated 2,705 individuals with TPS in Oregon, fewer than the 9,500 in Washington, but more than the 510 in New Mexico. The current number in many states is likely higher now because the number of TPS individuals in the United States has increased by about 150,000 since March. 

TPS offers qualifying individuals already in the U.S. work authorization and a temporary legal status to remain in the country if their home country is determined unsafe. TPS offers up to 18 months of relief to qualifying individuals based on the status of that country. For example, the TPS program is scheduled to end in March 2025 for El Salvador and in April 2025 for Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela. 

TPS designations can be terminated prior to expiration with 60 days notice. TPS status can also be extended by the Department of Homeland Security. For example, on Oct. 17, 2024, the department extended through Aug. 3, 2025, the validity of certain Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) issued to Temporary Protected Status (TPS) beneficiaries under the designation of Haiti.

Since 1990, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have largely automatically renewed certain key TPS designations

The impact of Trump’s plans on current TPS holders could be calamitous. That’s partly because the number of people in the United States under TPS exploded under President Biden.

In 2020, TPS protected about 330,000 people from 10 countries who would otherwise be subjected to disease, violence, starvation, the aftermath of natural disasters, and other life-threatening conditions. The largest group of TPS recipients was from El Salvador (195,000 people) followed by Honduras (57,000 people) and Haiti (50,000 people).

Other countries with TPS holders included Nepal (8,950 people), Syria (7,000 people), Nicaragua (2,550 people), Yemen (1,250 people), Sudan (1,040 people), Somalia (500 people), South Sudan (84 people), Guinea (930 people), and Sierra Leone (1,180 people). 

With President Biden’s term winding down, there are now over 1 million immigrants in the United States under TPS status. Qualifying individuals include people from 16 countries, with Venezuelans, Haitians and Salvadoreans the largest groups of TPS beneficiaries.[1]

Under the Biden administration, new TPS designations have been issued for six countries (Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Myanmar [also known as Burma], Ukraine, and Venezuela), and extended for ten others (El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). The government has also granted or extended a similar protection, deferred enforced departure (DED), for people from Hong Kong and Liberia, with an estimated 3,900 and 2,800 covered respectively.

If a TPS designation ends, beneficiaries return to the immigration status that the person held prior to receiving TPS, unless that status has expired or the person has successfully acquired a new immigration status.

 If the Trump administration is aggressive in ending the TPS program, its beneficiaries in Oregon and elsewhere would return to being undocumented at the end of a TPS designation and become subject to removal. 

“It’s possible that some people in his administration will recognize that stripping employment authorization for more than a million people, many of whom have lived in this country for decades, is not good policy” and economically disastrous, Attorney Ahilan T. Arulanantham, a teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, recently told PBS News. “But nothing in Trump’s history suggests that they would care about such considerations.”

[1] Countries Currently Designated for TPS. Select the country link for additional specific country information.

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Portland City Council Voters: Do You Know What You Did?

All you Portland voters. Remember how you voted 58.1% to 41.9% on Measure 26-228 to switch to a ranked choice voting (RCV) system for the Portland City Council?

“In the end, we saw monumental wins that will change the landscape of our local democracy and advance opportunity for communities of color,” enthused the Coalition of Communities of Color after the vote.

“Portlanders made history by demanding a government that is effective, accountable and representative,” said Debra Porta, co-chair of the Charter Commission, which initially recommended voters consider the sweeping changes .

“The passage of Measure 26-228 is an historic step towards a democracy that truly gives all Portlanders a seat at the decision making table and a government that meets their basic needs,” said Sol Mora of the group Portland United for Change, which advocated for the measure. “This victory was powered by the people for the people.”

Well, supporters got what they wanted. But while Measure 26-228 required mote than 50% yes votes in Portland to pass, the 12 new city councilors elected under the the quirky new system didn’t need 50% to win in the 4 new districts.

This is how the RCV reform proposal described the system: 

 “If no candidate receives a majority of the vote in the initial round, subsequent rounds are counted in which (i) candidates retain the number of votes counted for them in the first and any subsequent rounds that already occurred; and (ii) the candidates having the fewest votes are successively eliminated in rounds and their votes are counted as votes for the candidates who are ranked next on the ballots that had been counted for the eliminated candidates. The process of eliminating candidates and transferring their votes to the next-ranked candidate on ballots repeats until a candidate has a majority of the vote.”

The Councilors of each district were elected using a proportional method of RCV known as “single transferable vote” (STV). In this system, voters rank the candidates and if a candidate gets more votes than needed to be elected the extra, or surplus, votes get transferred to the voter’s next choices. The charter reform proposal was so convoluted it took almost 300 words to explain how it would work (See below for complete text).

Under this system, a candidate running for a seat in a multimember district could win a position on the Council with as little as 25% of the vote, or maybe even less.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Eleven of the twelve Councilors were elected with 25% of the vote in their district. One newly-elected Councilor, Jamie Dunphy in East Portland’s District 1, was even elected with just 22.8% of the vote.

District 1’s three final winners were Candace Avalos, Loretta Smith and Dunphy. In the 1st round, Avalos was the first choice of just 19.4% of the vote, Smith was the first choice of 13.1% and Dunphy was the first choice of 11.9%.

One consequence of all this is that the newly elected Councilors may be able to remain in office by consistently satisfying just that small segment of eligible voters and ignoring those who are disenchanted with their performance because it would require 75% of voters to vote against the entrenched councilor to remove him or her.

As Tim Nesbit, a former chief of staff to former Democratic Governor Ted Kulongoski and a critic of the ballot measure before its passage, wrote in the Portland Tribune, “This will be a ‘welcome to the Hotel California’ for candidates who seek office in the first council election to follow. It will be easy to check in to the council, but much harder to be forced to leave.”

Charter reform’s explanation of how “single transferable vote” (STV) would work: 

“Councilors of each district are elected using a proportional method of ranked choice voting known as single transferable vote. This method provides for the candidates to be elected on the basis of a threshold. The threshold is determined by the number of seats to be filled plus one, so that the threshold is the lowest number of votes a candidate must receive to win a seat such that no more candidates can win election than there are seats to be filled. In the initial round, the number of first rankings received by each candidate is the candidate’s vote count. Candidates whose vote counts are at least the threshold are declared elected. Votes that counted for elected candidates in excess of the threshold are called surplus. If fewer candidates are elected in the initial round than there are seats to be filled, the surplus percentage of all votes for the candidates who received a surplus are transferred to the next-highest ranked candidates in proportion to the total numbers of next-highest rankings they received on the ballots that counted for the elected candidate. If, after all surpluses have been counted in a round, no additional candidates have a vote count that is at least the threshold, the candidates with the lowest vote counts are successively eliminated in rounds and their votes are counted as votes for the candidates who are ranked next highest on the ballots that had been counted for the eliminated candidates, until another candidate has a vote count that is at least the threshold or until the number of candidates remaining equals the number of seats that have not yet been filled. The process of transferring surpluses of elected candidates and eliminating candidates continues until all positions are elected.”

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On the Cusp of Chaos: Trump’s Deportation Purge

“The American people have given Donald Trump ultimate power,” says Paul Glastris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, “They’re going to get the Trump agenda, good and hard.”

America’s “immigration crisis” is a “massive invasion” spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land” and the nation’s cities are being “flooded” by the “greatest invasion in history” of undesirables from “every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East,” Donald Trump bellowed at the Republican National Convention in July 2024. “They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. We have to stop the invasion into our country that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.”

Did you miss Trump describing migrants as “vermin” who would “poison the blood of the country”? How about when he said in 2023 that some South American countries were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” and “mental institutions” to send the patients to the United States as migrants.

You likely didn’t miss Trump’s solution? “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history” the Republican platform said in “one of a series of bold promises that we will swiftly implement” Trump promised.  Huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? Not in Trump country. Deport ’em all.

Easier said than done.

First, let’s talk about numbers.

In 2021, when Joe Biden took office, the figures thrown around for the number of undocumented/illegal/unauthorized/ (whatever word you choose) immigrants in the United States varied by a million or so. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) put the number at 11.2 million. The Center for Migration Studies said there were approximately 10.3 million.

Curiously, much of the media coverage of the immigration situation today continues to use the 11 million figure, despite the upsurge in border crossings. That may be a sign of lazy reporting, purposefully misleading numbers for ideological reasons, different collections methods or confusion over how to count migrants.

Trump’s numbers have been all over the map. In March 2024, he said 15 million migrants had crossed into the United States border over just the past two years. In August, he said 10 million had come across the border since Biden took office. In later election rallies, he cited a 20 million crossings figure during Biden’s tenure as president. .And in his one televised debate with Kamala Harris he claimed 21 million migrants were crossing the border every single month.

One number often used to track migrants is “encounters” with migrants, including people who tried to cross into the US illegally and people who tried to enter legally but were deemed inadmissible.  According to the Border Patrol, since Biden became president in January 2021, there have been more than 10 million encounters, about 8 million of those at the southwest land border with Mexico, up from 2.4 million encounters during the Trump administration. The number is not, however, a reliable count of people who stay in the US. Some are sent back and some are counted multiple times from multiple attempts to cross the border. The encounters number also, obviously, do not count those who manage to slip across the border and escape undetected.

Compounding the numbers problem, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump wants to “revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants, including tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed in after the Russian invasion.”

Whatever the accurate number, it’s one hell of a lot of people, about equal to the entire population of Georgia.

How exactly does Trump plan to deport them all?

Is he going to demand that the military, the FBI, the Border Patrol, local police, the whole shebang of law enforcement, round them up and put them in detention centers?

On Nov. 18, The New York Times reported Trump had confirmed that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The Times said Trump used his social media platform, Truth Social, to respond to a post made earlier in November by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, and who wrote that Mr. Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.” At around 4 a.m. on the 18th, Mr. Trump reposted Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”

Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, told the Times earlier in 2024 said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries. The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, Miller said.

Is he going to commandeer railroad lines, planes and riverboats to ferry them to the Mexican border?

How’s Trump going to pay for this massive deportation program? The American Immigration Council, an admittedly pro- immigrant group, says the cost of deporting 13 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally could cost $968 billion over a little more than a decade.

Then there are the courts. Do Trump’ and his henchmen expect the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant advocacy groups to forego court battles if Trump again tests the bounds of his legal authority. The ACLU’s website already promises, “Starting on day one, we’re ready to fight for our civil liberties and civil rights in the courts, in Congress, and in our communities. We did it during his first term – filing 434 legal actions against Trump while he was in office – and we’ll do it again.”

Of course, no matter what Trump wants to do, not all countries will be willing to accept the return of their citizens. Trump faced that problem in his first term.

In a 2016 speech in Phoenix, Trump said, “There are at least 23 countries that refuse to take their people back after they’ve been ordered to leave the United States, including large numbers of violent criminals. They won’t take them back. So we say, ‘Okay, we’ll keep them.’ “Not going to happen with me, not going to happen with me.”

Not so fast, Mr. Trump. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) defines any country that fails to cooperate with the U.S. immigration removal process as “recalcitrant”. According to ICE, “Uncooperative countries significantly exacerbate the challenges presented to ICE by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001). In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that: With narrow exceptions, noncitizens with final orders of removal — including noncitizens determined to pose threats to the community or considered flight risks — may not be detained by ICE beyond a presumptively reasonable period of six months if there is no “significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future”.

The Trump administration may also encounter enforcement resistance from so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions across the country, which include: Alameda, Berkeley, Fremont, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco (county and city), San Mateo County, Santa Ana, Santa Clara County, and Watsonville in California; Boulder and Denver in Colorado; King County, Seattle, and Walla Walla County in Washington; Portland in Oregon; and even Washington, D.C. The Los Angeles City Council has already voted to prohibit city resources from being used for federal immigration enforcement.

“Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken,” Trump said at the Republican Convention. “By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.” But not all employers will likely be cooperative in immigrant sweeps. The Pew Research Center estimated that unauthorized immigrants represented about 4.8% of the U.S. workforce in 2022.  About two-thirds of U.S. crop-farm workers are foreign-born, for example, and 42% aren’t legally authorized to work in the country,  About two-thirds of U.S. crop-farm workers are foreign-born, and 42% aren’t legally authorized to work in the country, according to a Labor Department report.

“Implementing Trump’s (deportation) plan would be a logistical nightmare and social tragedy, with consequences reverberating beyond the deportees and into the lives of over 20 million people living in mixed-status households, including 5.5 million U.S.-born children suddenly missing one or both parents,” the Center asserts.

Then, no matter how individuals voted, there’s the question of how Americans across the board are going to respond to Trump’s draconian deportation program once it hits their neighborhood. I expect there will be a backlash. I couldn’t put it better than Yascha Benjamin Mounk, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. In a post-election podcast conversation with American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Mounk said:

“When you have very lax policies and high levels of illegal immigration, people say, “clamp down, we want to close the border,” and the moment you start doing the things you actually need to do to clamp down, they start to say, “well, hang on a second, I didn’t want this kid to die. I didn’t want those kids to be separated from their parents. I didn’t want this particular member of the community, who’s been here for 25 years and who seems like a very good and reasonable person, to suddenly be taken and sent back to where they came from.” And so I think even on that issue, which was a winning issue of Trump’s and which he clearly has a popular mandate…he may quite quickly lose public support, nevertheless.”

Well put.

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Bynum vs. Chavez-DeRemer/ Tis a Quandary

Chavez-DeRemer vs. Bynum

Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Democratic challenger Janelle Bynum are at each other’s throats in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District race

At recent debates on KOIN TV in Portland and KTVZ in Bend, each candidate asserted that their opponent couldn’t be trusted. Bynum worked hard to tie Chavez-DeRemer to  Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and the conservative Republicans in the House. Chavez-DeRemer, in turn, attacked Bynum for supporting Measure 110, the drug decriminalization measure later amended by House Bill 4002 in the face of public backlash against the measure. 

No question, Bynum is a flaming liberal. In September, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries showed up in Portland to bolster her campaign. Par for the course, he accused Chavez-DeRemer of being aligned with extreme MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump., who Democrats portray as an imminent threat to democracy.

In contrast, Chavez-DeRemer works hard to portray herself as a moderate. She was ranked the 29th most bipartisan House member, and the most bipartisan Oregon member of the House, in an analysis released in May 2024 by the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. But she has endorsed Trump’s return to the White House, has praised the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and has voted for a number of bills critics claim support the MAGA agenda.

The high-profile race is being run in a swing district created when the Legislature changed the district’s boundaries in 2021so it included a presumably more Democratic Bend. The race is now one of just a few that could decide who controls the U.S. House of Representatives.

So what to do if you are in the middle?

If Trump wins the White House, a vote for Chavez-DeRemer increases the likelihood that the House will stay in Republican hands. The Democrats now have a majority in the Senate but current thinking is that the Republicans have a high probability of retaking control with a net gain of two seats or by winning the presidential election along with a net gain of one seat. 

A particularly endangered Democrat is Senator Jon Tester of Montana, who trails his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, a wealthy Republican businessman. Polls suggest he’s toast because of the changing demographics of the state.  Republicans are also expected to flip West Virginia — where Joe Manchin is retiring- in the face of competition from Republican Governor Jim Justice . 

Of course, Democrats are still hopeful they can hold onto critical Senate seats in states like Ohio and Arizona and there are signs of weakness in Republican  Senator Ted Cruz’ s  race against Democratic challenger Colin Allred.

But if Trump wins, and the Republicans can hold on to the House and retake the Senate, that clean sweep would give Trump and his MAGA allies an opportunity to govern with impunity. If that’s not what you want, your best choice might be to vote for Bynum , even if you lean conservative, to increase the likelihood the Democrats will at least control the House and be in a position to block the more unpalatable elements of Trump’s MAGA agenda.

Tricky, isn’t it?

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Portland’s Next Mayor? Who Cares?

Portland’s Next Mayor?

In all the turmoil and media attention focused on Portland’s new ranked choice voting election in November, much of the focus has been on the contest for mayor.[1]

Why?

The next mayor is going to be a eunuch. No, I don’t mean a castrated man. I mean the word metaphorically, in the sense an ineffectual or powerless person.

It’s the new 12-person City Council that will have the power to enact laws. The new mayor won’t even sit on the City Council or vote on council items (except to break a tie).  The mayor, and the new city administrator, who will be appointed by the mayor with council approval, will be in charge of carrying out City Council actions and crafting the city budget.

The mayor will also be tasked with appointing a city administrator, city attorney, and police chief, but that will also be only with the City Council’s approval. And to top it all off, the mayor won’t have veto power over council decisions. 

The mayor will serve more as a $175,463-a-year figurehead than a legislator, Tate White, a member of the city’s government transition team, told OPB earlier this year. “They’re going to be partnering with other jurisdictions, they’ll be standing at press conferences, they’re going to be the people meeting with representatives from sister cities when they come and visit, it will be far more ceremonial,” she said.

But don’t count on the new 12-person City Council, with three representatives per four new geographical districts and only one staff person for each City Council member, to be all that cooperative, efficient or effective. It might be more functional than New York City’s 51-member City Council, but likely not much. After all, a City Council member can be elected with as little as 25% + 1 votes, so their constituencies will be pretty damn small.[2] One consequence could be a Councilor able to remain in office by consistently satisfying just that smaller segment of eligible voters.

Jeff Jacoby, an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe, calls the ranked choice voting process “democracy on the Rube Goldberg model”, where  ideas that supposedly simplify people’s lives wreak havoc instead.

[1] Mayoral candidates include three current members of Portland City Council: Rene Gonzalez, Mingus Mapps and Carmen Rubio. Others running are: Saadiq Ali, early childhood educator Shei’Meka As-Salaam, inventor James Atkinson IV, REAP youth advocate Durrell Kinsey Bey, financial advisor Nancy Congdon, Yao Jun He, advocate for the unhoused and community activist Michael O’Callaghan, artist and performer Liv Osthus, city hall veteran and green energy advocate Marshall Runkel, owner and president of TITAN Freight Systems Keith Wilson and maintenance supervisor Dustin Witherspoon. 

[2] Charter reform’s explanation of how “single transferable vote” (STV) will work: 

“Councilors of each district are elected using a proportional method of ranked choice voting known as single transferable vote. This method provides for the candidates to be elected on the basis of a threshold. The threshold is determined by the number of seats to be filled plus one, so that the threshold is the lowest number of votes a candidate must receive to win a seat such that no more candidates can win election than there are seats to be filled. In the initial round, the number of first rankings received by each candidate is the candidate’s vote count. Candidates whose vote counts are at least the threshold are declared elected. Votes that counted for elected candidates in excess of the threshold are called surplus. If fewer candidates are elected in the initial round than there are seats to be filled, the surplus percentage of all votes for the candidates who received a surplus are transferred to the next-highest ranked candidates in proportion to the total numbers of next-highest rankings they received on the ballots that counted for the elected candidate. If, after all surpluses have been counted in a round, no additional candidates have a vote count that is at least the threshold, the candidates with the lowest vote counts are successively eliminated in rounds and their votes are counted as votes for the candidates who are ranked next highest on the ballots that had been counted for the eliminated candidates, until another candidate has a vote count that is at least the threshold or until the number of candidates remaining equals the number of seats that have not yet been filled. The process of transferring surpluses of elected candidates and eliminating candidates continues until all positions are elected.”

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Don’t Let Janelle Bynum Recast Herself as a Law-and-Order Candidate

Democrat Janelle Bynum, who is running against Rep. Lori Chavez-Deremer (R-OR) in the 5th Congressional District, knows the tide has turned so she’s trying to reposition herself as a law-and-order conservative. Don’t let her do it.

In a previous post, I wrote of how Bynum has the gall to say in her latest TV ad , “In Salem, I brought Republicans and Democrats together to re-criminalize fentanyl and other hard drugs. In Congress I’ll work with local law enforcement to get the officers and resources Oregon needs.”

She neglects to mention she supported decriminalization in Measure 110 before she opposed it. 

Specifically, she supported Measure 110, the 2020 ballot measure that decriminalized drugs.

That’s not all.

She says in her ad, “I won’t rest until our communities are safe”.  She undermined that pledge in 2017 when she voted to reduce voter-approved sentencings for ID Theft and Property Crimes in (HB 3078).  On the same day, she allowed car thieves to have short sentences and supported reduced sentencing for drug possession, cutting off court-ordered drug treatment for 2,500 addicts a year (HB 2355). 

As a Feb. 2024 report by the Oregon Criminal Justice System said, HB 3078 was enacted, primarily to reduce the number of persons incarcerated in Oregon’s prison system due to property offenses and identity theft. 

Section 5 of the bill changed sentences for Identity Theft and Theft in the First Degree for sentences imposed on or after January 1, 2018. These offenses were essentially removed from the sentencing structure created through the adoption of Measure 57 by Oregon voters in 2008 (creating statutory minimum sentences for certain property crimes). 

It worked.” “…prison usage remains at a lower trajectory than before, thanks in part to HB 3078,” the report said. 

 The Oregonian reported in 2018 the Dept. of Corrections was patting itself on the back for having 2500 less people in the system because of HB 3078. But some critics contended that meant cutting 2500 people a year on average from state sponsored treatment, and that spurred more homelessness and crime. 

Moreover, when crimes went from a felony to a misdemeanor and then in Measure 110 to a class E violation, all those with addictions were no longer precluded from gun ownership.

 On June 29, 2017, Steve Doell with Crime Victims United wrote in a guest column in The Oregonian that the bill “exemplifies the willingness of the legislature to sacrifice safety for savings.” 

In 2019, Bynum further muddied the waters when she voted to pass SB 1008, overturning much of voter-approved Measure 11, that required minimum-mandatory sentences for certain violent crimes and mandated that cases involving juveniles 15 years and older, accused of specific violent crimes, were to be to be handled in public in adult court. SB 1008 allowed a judge to see them in juvenile court in a non-public setting.

“Enough extremism” says one of Bynum’s ads. She should have thought that before she jumped on the social justice bandwagon.

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Donald Trump. Meet Lonesome Rhodes.

Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd”

The blistering movie A Face in the Crowd deliciously exposes how Americans are seduced by people who swindle us. “This parable about a small-town con man who attains the power to sway the nation to his whims is America: our fanaticism, whimsy, and desire for elusive authenticity at the expense of our souls,” April Wolfe wrote in a spot-on review of the 1957 movie.

Andy Griffith, in his first film role, long before he played Andy Taylor, the low-key widowed sheriff of Mayberry, plays a charismatic hayseed who rises to popularity in a television show and, with an exaggerated sense of his new persuasive power, goes berserk. 

Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, investigative reporters for The New York Times, recently wrote a lengthy, perceptive and revealing inside story of how the producers of “The Apprentice” crafted a TV version of Donald Trump — measured, thoughtful and endlessly wealthy — that ultimately fueled his path to the White House.

The story meticulously exposed how the producers of The Apprentice turned Trump from a slightly garish, smug New York real estate schmuck with a history of business failures who worked out of a musty, messy office into business royalty, an astute, self-made billionaire.

“The facts never really mattered,” the New York Times story noted. “Drama mattered. Comedy mattered. Entertainment value mattered. Mr. (Mark) Burnett (the show’s executive producer) liked to call it “dramality.” And Mr. Trump was dramatic, occasionally funny, and always entertaining.”

So when he came down the escalator in June 2015, staging the announcement of his candidacy for president, he was a new man, remade by reality television.

Since producing The Apprentice, Burnett has made other successful shows, including “Shark Tank” and “The Voice”, but as Patrick Radden Keefe  wrote in The New Yorker in 2018, “…his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Katherine Walker, a producer on the first five seasons of “The Apprentice,” told Keefe. “But Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”

The New York Times story agreed. 

But Burnett and his associates kept their opinion of Trump to themselves, giving him free reign to elevate his prominence based on lies.

Commenters on the Times story savaged Burnett and his associates for foisting Trump on the American public. 

“Mark Burnett created this mess the country is in,” one commenter posted in the paper’s online comments section. “The dumbing-down of America is from all reality TV and especially this egocentric reality “star” turned president. It’s all a complete disgrace that has ruined the fabric of our country.”

“You couldn’t print what I think of these garbage people,” another commented. ”Between Burnett’s greed… and all these enablers, they tipped over the first Domino to end what is left of our Democracy.” 

“He was always a 2-bit husband, father and criminal,” wrote another. “Then, the megalomaniac and pathological narcissist gets a gig on probably one of the most scripted and controlled shows ever produced and becomes a 2-bit actor. Ratings and fakery will take you a long way in TV.” 

“He’s a phony who starred in a show that presented him as a wildly successful businessman while his real business “empire” was failing with numerous bankruptcies despite his $400 million inheritance,” said another. “His political success is also a product of the same fake narrative coupled with a vast army of low information voters who enjoy his racist tinged insult comic act.”

But Burnett and his cronies weren’t the only ones willing to hide the reality of Trump from the public.  Hangers-on who rode Trump’s coattails to the White House and then stayed on in Trump’s administration were guilty, too.

They were perfectly willing to advance an empty vessel of a man created by television, just like the admirers of Chance, a simple gardener whose TV-informed utterances are mistaken for profundity in Peter Sellers’ 1979 movie, Being There.

The essential difference between Chance and Trump is in their relative naïveté.. Chance is a picture of childlike innocence thrown out among vultures. Trump is no innocent. Nor are the hangers-on who have attached themselves to his star like remora, fishes noted for attaching themselves to sharks for food and locomotion.

The remora men (they are mostly men) who have attached themselves to Trump, likely knowing full well of his destructive narcissism, includes key campaign advisors Roger Stone, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Brad Parscale, and Hope Hicks, his Chiefs of Staff, Reince Priebus, John Kelly and Mark Meadows, as well as cabinet members including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.

Then, of course, there were the Republican members of Congress who derided Trump and his incendiary rhetoric in private and gave him rapturous praise in public. I recall reading a story about how, after Trump left a private meeting with key members of Congress when he was president, they could be heard laughing at him.

They have all been in a position to tell the truth to the American people, to the mob Trump has spawned, but they have chosen not to. They are as guilty as Burnett, more-so because they had an obligation to the country.

They all have displayed the same self-serving weakness as the men and women who were well aware of President Biden’s declining mental and physical state, kept it from the public and still backed him in his ego-driven selfish run for another term. “Taken together, this is all a troubling portrait — of unelected staffers trying to shield the public from Biden’s declining mental health so they can preserve their access to power and ability to make policy,” Philip Klein wrote in the National Review.  

We deserve better. 

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Talk About a Flip-Flop: Janelle Bynum and Measure 110

Janelle Bynum, meet John Kerry.

Back in 2004, Sen.  John Kerry was the subject of a lot of ribbing when he said, in response to a question about his vote against an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” The George W. Bush campaign seized on the comment, using the footage in television ads to illustrate its charge that Kerry flip-flopped on issues, particularly the war in Iraq

Democrat Janelle Bynum, who is running against Rep. Lori Chavez-Deremer (R-OR) in the 5th Congressional District, has a lot in common with Kerry.

Sounding like a law-and order Republican, Bynum has the gall to say in her latest TV ad , “In Salem, I brought Republicans and Democrats together to re-criminalize fentanyl and other hard drugs. In Congress I’ll work with local law enforcement to get the officers and resources Oregon needs.”

She neglects to mention she voted for decriminalization before she voted against it.

Specifically, she supported Measure 110, the 2020 ballot measure that decriminalized drugs.

“It tells us a couple of things. No. 1, Oregonians are compassionate people,” Bynum said in response to a question about Measure 110 in a November 2023 interview. “Number two, it also tells the legislature that the people were hungry for a certain approach. And it’s not the legislature’s job to question the people; it’s the legislature’s job to implement the will of the people.”

On April 1, in response to a public outcry, Governor Tina Kotek signed HB 4002, recriminalizing hard drugs and rolling back some parts of measure 110. It was all so predictable.

Take responsibility, Janelle. You were one of the people who made that necessary.