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‘Quip’: Usha Vance Lies to Try to Clean Up Husband’s ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Attack

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Usha Vance, a Yale Law attorney and the spouse of U.S. Senator JD Vance, the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee, on Monday attempted to clean up her husband’s attack on Democrats who are not parents, whom he denounced by labeling “childless cat ladies” while suggesting they should not be allowed to run the county. He also separately said not having children makes people “sociopathic,” and suggested those without kids are among the “most deranged and most psychotic.”

JD Vance’s overriding claim was that people who do not have children have no “direct stake” in the country. Vance has not only not denied his remarks, but he has defended them, telling Megyn Kelly last month, “the simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way.”

A former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, and then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh (now the right-wing Supreme Court justice), Usha Vance on Monday (video below) falsely claimed that her husband was merely discussing how difficult it is to raise a child in America, and how some policies make it even harder.

And, taking a page out of his playbook, she falsely claimed that his comments were taken out of context, saying she wished people would take the time to look at his entire sentences and not just a few words from them – despite that videos of his comments are readily available on social media and have been viewed millions of times.

“We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2021, before he ran for his current U.S. Senate office.

READ MORE: Can Kamala Harris Win Florida? She’s Getting a Lot of Support – Even From Republicans

“And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact… Kamala Harris. Pete Buttigieg. AOC. The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said one year earlier. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.”

“You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable,” he continued. “And of course, you talk about going on Twitter — final point I’ll make is, you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home.”

READ MORE: A Reporter Read Donald Trump’s Words Back to Him. Now Hugh Hewitt is Furious.

In 2021, now running for the U.S. Senate, Vance defended his remarks, and others, in which he declared parents should have more voting power than adults without children.

Media Matters last month reported Vance “has for years deployed ‘cat ladies’ as a pejorative against his political foes and sneered at Harris and other political leaders without biological children when speaking to right-wing audiences.”

Usha Vance on Monday said, “I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often. And the reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive and it had actual meaning.”

“And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three word phrase or that three word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder. And we should be asking ourselves, Why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents? And that’s the conversation that I really think that we should have, and I understand why he was saying that.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Phony Baloney’: Shapiro Smacks Down Vance Over ‘Weird’ Obama ‘Insult’

 

 

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‘Cashing in’: Backlash as Trump Eyes Settling His $10B Lawsuit Against IRS

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President Donald Trump is now in “discussions” with his own government to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, a federal agency he exercises limited influence over, after a contractor released 15 years of his tax returns in 2019, which were published by The New York Times two months before the 2020 election.

“The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to ‘avoid protracted litigation,'” The New Republic reports.

“Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued, TNR notes. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”

TNR also repots that legal experts “have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.”

Critics allege a conflict of interest in the case.

READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats

“Right out in the open, Donald Trump is suing his own IRS to try to steal $10 BILLION taxpayer dollars,” charged U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who notes she has introduced legislation to prevent “this theft.”

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan described the situation as Trump “Negotiating with himself to loot the US Treasury.”

“Nothing beats reaching into the taxpayers’ pocket and helping oneself to $10 billion,” wrote Richard Field, the Director of the Institute for Financial Transparency.

“Trump is suing the federal government and cashing in. Who approves these settlements? HE DOES of course. There is no bottom to his shamelessness. Meanwhile American families suffer,” wrote U.S. Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL).

“Trump is just stealing $10 billion from taxpayers! That’s very MAGA,” charged Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump

 

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Trump’s MAGA Humiliation Playbook Is ‘Proof of Loyalty’: GOP Ex-Congressman

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MAGA has made a deal with Donald Trump, and the deal is that “the humiliation is the point,” argues Republican former U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger. In short, he says, “humiliating the MAGA faithful only binds them more tightly to Trump.”

Kinzinger, a never-Trump Republican who acknowledged last year that his politics are now probably closer to the Democrats, says that to “understand what Trump is doing, you have to stop thinking about each outrage as a separate event and start seeing them as a sequence.”

He walks through a timeline of humiliations.

Trump asked MAGA to believe the 2020 election was stolen, so they did, “including many who knew better.”

Trump asked MAGA to excuse the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a mere tourist visit, and they did.

“He asked them to accept that his 91 criminal indictments were a political witch hunt — and they did, turning his mugshot into a fundraising image,” he writes. “Each ask was larger than the last. Each capitulation required more of them — more willingness to contradict their own eyes, their own values, their own stated beliefs.”

READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats

Kinzinger reveals the psychology of what he believes is actually happening here.

“Every time MAGA accepts something they previously would have considered unacceptable, Trump’s hold on them gets stronger, not weaker. Because now they’ve paid a price. They’ve told their neighbors, their families, their coworkers, that they believe this. Walking it back would mean admitting they were wrong. And the movement doesn’t allow that.”

What does this mean for the future?

“Don’t expect a wholesale collapse in Trump’s support,” he predicts. “Some will leave, others have tied their conscience to his success. Those will double down, again and again.”

Kinzinger expects that MAGA is not breaking apart. “I don’t think there’s some dramatic rupture coming where the movement looks in the mirror and decides enough is enough. That’s not how this works,” he writes. Because Trump has trained his movement to accept humiliation as “proof of loyalty.”

“The more outrageous the thing he asks them to believe, the more committed they become,” he explains, “because disbelief now would mean admitting everything they’ve already accepted was wrong. It’s a trap that gets harder to escape the longer you’re in it.”

But, he says, “the humiliation ritual works until the day it doesn’t.”

“Until the day enough people decide that the price of belonging is higher than the price of leaving. We’re not there yet,” he explains. “But we’re closer than Trump wants you to think.”

READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump

 

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How Trump’s ‘Christian Fiefdoms’ Subvert Democracy and Crush Dissent: Columnist

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The Trump regime has an “erratic” and “theologically incomprehensible” preferred religion, a “bellicose, nationalist Christianity,” that is organized along various “fiefdoms,” argues Sarah Posner at Talking Points Memo. Those spheres of control and influence are “aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.”

Posner writes that the “goal of the Christian nationalist project is to subvert democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

She posits that during Trump’s second term, the White House and federal agencies “have been bludgeoning federal employees, the press, and the public with religious pronouncements of moral superiority to perceived enemies.”

On Easter Sunday, several administration agencies posted social media messages “heralding Christ’s resurrection,” the Associated Press reported.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth.”

READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats

“He is risen,” was the message from both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.

The Department of Justice went even further.

“Today, as millions of Christians gather in their churches across the nation to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, this Department —- is proud to protect and defend religious liberty,” the message read.

Posner argues how various administration officials use religion.

JD Vance “starts fights with the pope over his anti-war statements (even as Vance leaks to the press, with an eye to 2028, that he was against the war).”

Through his prayer meetings and press conferences, Secretary Hegseth “aims to compel Americans to embrace his Christian nationalist bloodlust and war crimes, and this week compared reporters to Pharisees for insufficiently cheerleading for the military.”

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer “has promoted her Catholicism in prayer meetings modeled on the ones Hegseth hosts at the Pentagon.”

“All these moves,” Posner writes, “are designed to crush dissent, marginalize other Christianities and religions, and empower government officials to violate the law. The fiefdoms, in different ways, prop up the would-be king’s corruption, and that of his allies.”

READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump

 

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