Along with verbal abuse locally over Detroit radio station WJR (760-AM), U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib now must endure her own national media stalker in the halls of Congress.
She is Hillary Vaughn of Fox Business Network who likes to chase Tlaib to ask questions that would seem to be none of her Fox Business Network’s business.
“Do you condemn chants of ‘Death to America?’” Vaughn asked last week, a rhetorical “gotcha” question designed to inflame.
“I don’t talk to Fox News,” Tlaib said. “Using racist tropes about my community is what Fox News is about and I don’t talk to Fox News.”
Tlaib is the only Palestinian-American in Congress. Her district (the Michigan 12th) covers part of Detroit’s west side and some of its western and northern suburbs. It includes many Muslims and people of Arabic descent.
In Dearborn recently, a few hecklers chanted “Death to America,” briefly interrupting a speaker at a rally. Vaughn seemed to demand an apology and a condemnation.
“Why are you afraid to talk to Fox News?” Vaughn said as Tlaib waited for an elevator. “Is chanting ‘Death to America’ racist?”
“Talk about you guys’ racist tropes,” Tlaib said. “You guys know exactly what you do. You guys are Islamaphobic.”
On October 7, Hamas in Gaza launched an attack into Israel that killed 1,200 people. Since then, Palestinians say Israel’s response against Hamas has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, not all of them Hamas combatants.
In her October stalking of Tlaib, Vaughn said Hamas burned children alive and raped women in the streets and chopped off the heads of babies and demanded Tlaib respond. Then she conflated the terrorists with the entire Palestinian population, another right-wing, talking-point trick.
“Congresswoman, why do you have the Palestinian flag outside your office if you do not condone what Hamas terrorists have done to Israel?” Vaughn said. “Do Israeli lives not matter to you?”
Closer to home, Tlaib frequently receives rude treatment on WJR radio, particularly from nationally syndicated screecher Mark Levin, who shouts and growls for three hours most weeknights. He has called Tlaib a “pig,” among other things, and frequently refers to Dearborn as “Dearborn-istan.”
In addition, local WJR morning host Tom Jordan has said that Tlaib “probably” supports multiple terror groups in the Middle East. “She is a staunch opponent of Israel,” Jordan said in October, adding ominously: “She should be gone.”
Will the Crumbley cases prove historically significant?
History books of future centuries may view the sentencing of the Crumbley parents last week in Oakland County as a pivotal turning point for common-sense gun safety law enforcement in the gun-crazy United States.
Their son, Ethan, pleaded guilty to murdering four fellow students and wounding seven other people at Oxford High School in November of 2021. He’s serving life in prison. His parents — James and Jennifer Crumbley — were convicted at trial of involuntary manslaughter.
Each will serve 10 to 15 years in prison because they failed to deal with their son’s homicidal warnings while allowing him access to a family gun they bought for what they thought would be good, family fun, something they could share.
It is the first time parents of a mass murderer in a school massacre have shared the legal blame. And it raises further questions like:
Does the gun store get any guilt for profiting from mass slaughter? What about the makers of hand-held murder machines that — when used as designed — kill innocent humans? The Crumbley precedent might give momentum to the gun-safety movement.
This, of course, assumes the Crumbley convictions withstand appeal, however high that rises. No doubt, the American gun industry would challenge such a precedent before the U.S. Supreme Court, a zoo of kangaroos packed by former President Donald Trump.
This clique of religious fundamentalists — who voted “pro-life” in repealing the Constitutional right to abortion — might find “originalist” and “textualist” excuses to protect the greedy gun groomers and continue the carnage, as if this was what the Founding Fathers intended.
Michigan set template for abortion votes this November
Speaking of the abortion issue: Few people ever accuse former President Donald Trump of speaking too much truth. But he did so in 2016 when he first ran for the White House by vowing to abolish a woman’s right to choose abortion. His promise kept might bite him in the rear end.
When his right-wing appointees on the Supreme Court obeyed Trump in 2022, they took away a Constitutional right of nearly 50 years and delegated the volatile issue to each of the 50 states, thereby sparking bitter battles in courts, in legislatures, and in public debate.
The Court’s historic mistake has had a cascading effect in cases regarding in vitro fertilization, severe abortion limits, and even contraceptives sent through the mail. The issue may significantly boomerang against Trump and his red-hatted MAGAts.
In that Trump overplayed his hand on this issue, he spent last week double-talking with a forked tongue from both sides of his mouth. He tried to reassure his “evangelical” supporters that he is no baby-killer, at least not after 15 weeks or so of a fetus in the womb.
On the other hand, liberals and progressives find it hard to believe Trump’s vow not to sign a federal abortion ban if a Republican Congress were to send such a bill to his desk should he win a second term.
He might not have to worry about it if abortion brings more liberals and progressives to the polls this fall, the way it did two years ago in Michigan. This state set the template in 2022 when it immediately put on its ballot a state Constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights.
The amendment received 59% support and those liberal voters helped re-elect progressive Democrats like Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. The blue team also took both houses of the state legislature.
With similar Constitutional amendments on the ballot in swing states like Florida and Arizona, even Sun Belt conservatives might be appalled by strict limits against abortion in these states and discretely fill in the blank for the pro-choice side.
With any luck, some might further take it out by voting against the large, loud, orange-faced, yellow-haired demagogue whose “right to life” promise became a double-edged sword, the appropriate metaphor when trying to cut a baby in half.
COVID and measles? Science as a matter of “choice”
With a perceptive essay in a recent issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reflected on the fourth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic and how different people responded in conflicting ways to medical advice about stopping the spread of the fatal virus.
“People who wore masks and people who did not weren’t simply members of different clans,” Gopnik wrote. “The ones with masks were making a gesture toward social solidarity and signaling a reluctance to infect their neighbors; the ones without were affirming selfishness as a principle of conduct.”
That thought struck a chord again last week when an unvaccinated 4-year-old contracted the first known measles case in Detroit this year and the fifth in the state of Michigan.
Although measles is not a masking issue, it is a vaccination issue. The illness — once thought defeated — is reviving in part due to propaganda during the COVID-19 pandemic which cast doubt on almost all medical advice, including vaccinations. This spurred a backlash against science that lingers.
Last week, the Free Press reported: “In Michigan, immunization rates (for measles) have fallen to 66% among Michigan toddlers — the lowest point in more than a decade for recommended childhood immunization,” according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
This year’s cases are Michigan’s first since 2019, before the pandemic. Governed as we are in the Great Lakes State by mostly rational elected officials, we at least try to heed the medical science. Not so in places like Florida, a land of faith healing.
During a February measles outbreak at a South Florida school, the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, sent a memo to parents granting them permission to send unvaccinated children to school. His department, he said, “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions.”
He is an appointee of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who turned vaccine and mask mandates during COVID into a divisive political issue. Ladapo’s predecessor — former Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees — responded that measles “is not a parental rights issue.”
In agreement with him was Rebekah Jones, a scientist removed from the Florida health department in 2020 in a dispute over COVID statistics.
“I think this is the predictable outcome of turning fringe, anti-vaccine rhetoric into a defining trait of the Florida government,” she said. Should Florida’s quackery go contagious over state borders, we’ll have to build a wall.
