Will anyone know about it? Look at this: The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally at the southern border reached the lowest point of President Biden’s administration in September, three months into his crackdown on asylum claims, according to internal Department of Homeland Security statistics obtained by CBS News. In September, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded nearly 54,000 apprehensions of migrants who crossed into the country between legal entry points along the border with Mexico, the government figures show. It’s a smaller figure than the previous Biden-era low in July, when Border Patrol processed roughly 56,000 migrants who crossed the border without authorization. Border Patrol’s tally of migrant apprehensions in September is the lowest number recorded by the agency since August 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and the travel restrictions countries enacted in response to it led to a sharp decrease in migration to the U.S. southern border. It would be nice if there were screaming headlines about this but there are a lot of screaming headlines about everything right now.
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Then they came for the porn One of the most heavily contested voting demographics this cycle is the so-called “Bro” vote. Don Jr’s got Trump all over the Bro podcasts trying to grow the gender gap in his favor. But there’s a tensy problem, I’m afraid: Seventeen pornographic film actors on Monday announced that they had launched a $100,000 ad campaign on porn sites warning that Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a Republican administration that has been a centerpiece of some Democratic campaigns — wants to ban pornography and imprison people who produce it. The online ads will run in the states that will decide the presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. The architects of the “hands off my porn” campaign are nothing if not aware of the polling. Vice President Kamala Harris is losing to former President Donald J. Trump among men, but younger men might be winnable — and pornographic websites are among the most heavily trafficked on the internet.
Republicans are refusing to answer whether Trump won the 2020 election. Their dodging is transparent and anyone with half a brain would consider whether or not Trump might just be lying about this. If so, they simply cannot consider themselves decent Americans after everything he did and continues to do. Trump said last week that if they hadn’t stolen the election he wouldn’t be running again: “You know last time, last election, we did great in 2016 a lot of people don’t know we did much better in 2020. We won, we won, we did win. It was a rigged election, it was a rigged election. You have to tell Kamala Harris, that’s why I’m doing it again, if I thought I lost, I wouldn’t be doing this again. You know where I’d be right now, on the beaches of Monte Carlo maybe, or some place. Be having a nice life.” If only. He knows he lost. He’s said it numerous times in the last few weeks. “We lost by a whisker.” But his broken psyche just can’t handle that reality. So he’s putting the country through all this again to soothe himself.
How it ought to work Thousands of people, government agencies, military, and private volunteers, responded to Hurricane Helene’s devastation in western North Carolina. Don’t let the People of the Lie tell you otherwise. The official death count here is mounting. Our county sheriff reports over 70 so far. Search and rescue teams expect to find more victims among the tangles of branches and debris left behind by the flooding. Neighbors helping neighbors Not only is the military here, but an army of volunteers. Drew Reisinger, Buncombe County Register of Deeds, turned his office into a relief center for coordinating welfare checks on thousands of people unaccounted for (mostly because of lack of cell service, thankfully). Many of those processing incoming reports worked remotely. Everyone has heard that Asheville’s drinking water system will be down for weeks, so they’re sending in cases of bottled water. And cases. And cases. And cases. Thank you. What they’re missing is you can’t flush your toilet (or bathe) with bottled water.
I happened to spend some time with a highly intelligent 17 year old over the weekend who’s taking AP Government and is keenly interested in the election. She’s following all the polling and the punditry and knows the ins and out of the battleground map better than most adults I talk to. And she said something that struck me because I hadn’t really considered it before. We were talking about the VP debate and she found it odd that it was so civil. She kept waiting for something to happen. And I realized that there are millions of people for whom Trump’s brand of demagogic politics is normal. They are either young like this person and have literally grown up in this era of bad feelings or they are those for whom politics wasn’t of interest until Trump came along. That’s a lot of people who don’t know that it isn’t supposed to be this way. Granted we have had more spirited arguments in televised political debates than the one we witnessed last week between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But we never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016.
The West Virginia House has introduced a resolution that lays the foundation for the state to officially reject the national presidential election results in the case they suspect fraud in a Democratic victory. I don’t know if this means they will refuse to submit their electoral votes but if that’s what they’re saying they’ll only hurt Donald Trump who will certainly win them. So I guess they’re just preparing for secession then by saying they won’t “recognize” a Democratic president? What else could it be? The real point of this is ginning up their rubes to commit violence by pushing the idea that the Democrats are trying to kill Trump. If he loses, who knows what they’ll do?
Nobody’s ever seen anything like it… From Heather Cox Richardson: MAGA Republicans are now lying about the federal response to Hurricane Helene in much the same way they lied about Haitian migrants bringing chaos and disease to Springfield, Ohio. Both disinformation efforts are flat-out lies, and both are designed to demonize immigrants. Immigration was the issue Trump was so eager to run on that he demanded Republican lawmakers reject the strong border bill a bipartisan group of lawmakers had hammered out. The federal response to Hurricane Helene has drawn bipartisan praise, with Republican governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina thanking Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response. But on Sunday, September 29, two days after the hurricane hit, the right-wing organization started by anti-immigrant Trump loyalist Stephen Miller posted: “Billions for Ukraine. Billions for illegal aliens. And what for the Americans?
Marco Rubio used to be a normal politician. Yes, he was a conservative and he was full of shit in many different ways. But he was taken seriously on foreign policy as someone who understood the issues, even if people disagreed with him ideologically. He worked on immigration reform and had collegial relationships across the aisle. And at one time he was considered one of the prime GOP contenders for the presidency. Now he routinely panders to the dumbest MAGA conspiracy theorist, pushing whatever the cult demands. It’s unclear if he’s just become one of them, buying into every nonsensical bit of BS the fever swamp spits out or if he’s just cynically exploiting it for power. It actually doesn’t matter which because in the end it illustrates that the GOP is now fully merged with MAGA and whether Trump wins or not, there is no going back. They’ve trained tens of millions of their followers to think like this and they are now stuck in the same delusional rabbit hole and can’t get back out. Will it take generations to purge this from the body politic? Will it even be possible?
Probably not a good idea if you care about what’s happening in the Middle East. I appreciate him revealing his decision making process — “hit first and worry about the rest later.” What could go wrong? The Miller Center has an interesting overview of Trump’s foreign policy in the first term. It was all over the place. He is an isolationist who nonetheless built up the military and approved any number of military actions. He was heavily involved in Syria and his vaunted outreach to North Korea resulted in Kim Jong Un continuing his nuclear and ballistic missile program even as Trump boosted his prestige on the international stage. We all know what he did with Russia. His treatment of our allies was outrageous and completely gratuitous. In my opinion, he reversed as much of Obama’s policies as he could mainly because he didn’t know anything and that was an easy choice. (People around him were happy for him to do it because they genuinely disagreed with the policies like the Paris Accords and the Iran nuclear deal. If Obama had been against them, Trump would have been for them.) There was no coherence to his actions.
Don’t tolerate disinformation Got cases of bottled water here. Still without power and flushing/washing water (nine days so far); there’s power in three houses across the street. I’m fine here in the most accessible city in the region, just inconvenienced. Others are far worse off Many who have lost homes (here too) or jobs and businesses will need longer-term support. People need hazmat gear to do cleanup along the rivers. Rescuers are still getting to people still cut off in hundreds of isolated coves and by washed-out bridges. In some cases, it’s one home at a time. This woman lives in my county and works in the next county south. She addresses the uys for memalicious BS you’re seeing in social media. Screw those guys for me, please.