Middleboro Review 2: Jared Kushner emerges with some despicable remarks

Friday, March 22, 2024

Jared Kushner emerges with some despicable remarks

March 20, 2024

I'm not saying they don't exist. But I'd like to think that few people see financial opportunity in human suffering. One of those few seems to include Jared Kushner.

As I wrote, Kushner—ever the aspirational foreign policy expert with a penchant for a good conflict of interest—appears to see something desirable amid the catastrophic bombing and imminent famine that overwhelms Gaza. Here's what he told Harvard recently:

"Gaza's waterfront property. It could be very valuable to—if people would focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods. You think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions—if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done."

Despicable, no? Kushner's comments—which you can watch in full here—later included a recommendation to "bulldoze something in the Negev" to relocate Palestinians, are a blinking red warning of what we could expect if Jared's daddy-in-law returns to the White House.

As for the current White House, my colleague Noah Lanard spoke to a former Israeli peace negotiator about what the Biden administration could do if the president were truly committed to ending the devastation. It's a great read, one that offers real policy solutions. But this quote is staying with me today:

“We need to stick to our own values," Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Algeria and Syria who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said. "If our values say, ‘Starving children is way beyond the pale,’ then we need to react to that and take stern action, whether or not it changes Israeli policy."

—Inae Oh

Jared Kushner Sure Seems Excited About “Very Valuable” Beachfront Properties in Gaza

The former president's son-in-law also wants to move Palestinians into Egypt or southern Israel.

BY INAE OH

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Donald Trump—and Democrats—should be pleased with Ohio's Senate primary

BY ABBY VESOULIS

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During a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, over the weekend, Donald Trump spoke of a coming “bloodbath” for the auto industry and for the country should Republicans lose big in 2024 and not be able to impose their policy agenda.

But there was another bloodbath playing out in front of the embattled former president facing 88 criminal charges: a messy, jab-throwing, three-way Republican primary for the Ohio Senate seat Democrat Sherrod Brown has occupied since 2006.

Bernie Moreno, a Trump-endorsed former luxury car dealer, emerged victorious as the GOP nominee for Senate Tuesday night, pulling in upwards of 46 percent of the vote as of 9 pm ET. Moreno defeated Matt Dolan, a state senator and scion of the family that owns the Cleveland Guardians MLB team, and Frank LaRose, the Ohio secretary of state who last year futilely attempted to block reproductive health rights in two separate state ballot initiatives. Final polling ahead of Tuesday’s contest had shown Moreno with 38 percent of voters’ support, versus Dolan’s 29 percent and LaRose’s 12 percent.

Ohio’s race has been expensive monetarily, with $40 million in ad spending as of Monday—trailing only the presidential race and the California Senate primary in the 2024 cycle. (Both independently wealthy, Dolan and Moreno contributed more than $11 million and $5 million to their own campaigns, respectively.)

The competitive contest has also been costly to the GOP candidates’ political reputations. In assailing Dolan and Moreno to help their respective candidates in the short-term, various conservative groups have thrown around plenty of material for Democrats to capitalize on heading into November.

“Whoever survives that pretty bruised primary is going to come out of there a little damaged. No question about it. Especially because they had to spend an awful lot of money to get that victory,” says David Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Akron. “The other candidates have done a great job doing opposition research that the other party’s going to use come to the general election.”

Moreno won the primary despite a late-breaking Associated Press report alleging an email address linked to him had in 2008 created a profile seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” on a site called Adult Friend Finder. Republicans had been talking about the alleged account for weeks before the AP reported its existence. When the AP asked Moreno about the gossip, the candidate’s lawyer said a former intern of Moreno’s created the account as a prank and that Moreno “had nothing to do with” it. (The lawyer provided the AP with a statement from the former intern, taking responsibility for the account.)

A super PAC supporting Dolan, Buckeye Leadership Fund, quickly canvassed the state with ads referencing the AP story. “Breaking news: A new AP report suggests that Bernie Moreno, a married man, trawled the internet ‘seeking men for one-on-one sex,'” a narrator says. “Creepy, huh?”

Moreno also withstood attacks from the left and the right about lawsuits alleging he withheld wages from his car dealership employees. In 2022, Moreno was found liable by a GOP-appointed judge for withholding at least $53,500 in overtime wages from two employees between 2015 and 2018 and shredding company documents relevant to the lawsuit while the case was ongoing. He later settled at least a dozen more cases over wage theft. Facing Moreno in the November election bodes well for Brown, who often discusses the dignity of work and the dignity of workers, says David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati: “It sets up a really nice contrast for [Brown] to run against a car dealer with unfair employment practice decisions against him.”

Dolan’s Achilles heel was the accusation that he is not conservative enough. The state senator, endorsed by moderate Republicans like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and former Sen. Rob Portman, was lambasted by Trump on Saturday for the name-change of his family’s MLB team, from the Cleveland Indians to the Cleveland Guardians in 2021. “He’s easily pushed around by the woke left lunatics,” Trump said at the Ohio rally, where he touted Moreno as better on crime and the border.

Meanwhile, Moreno sought to closely align himself with Trump at the Saturday event outside Dayton, throwing a dig at Dolan, who has expressed more support for Trump’s policies than for Trump himself. “I am so sick and tired of Republicans that will say, ‘I support President Trump’s policies, but I don’t like the man.’ This is a good man. This is a great American,” Moreno said.

Democrats are already capitalizing on the Trump-Moreno kinship. Duty and Country PAC, a group affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, was on pace to spend more than $2.5 million to play an ad arguing that, “[i]n Washington, Moreno would do Donald Trump’s bidding.”

Formerly one of the most closely watched swing states in the country, Ohio went for Trump in 2016 and 2020 by about 8 points each year, with Trump-aligned Republican J.D. Vance winning Portman’s old Senate seat in 2022 by a 6-point margin. But in 2023, a ballot measure legalizing possession of marijuana in Ohio won while GOP attempts—advocated by LaRose—to block an initiative protecting reproductive rights were unsuccessful.

The abortion ballot measures hurt LaRose’s chance of winning the Senate seat, experts say. But those results also signaled that while Ohio voters may increasingly identify as Republicans, they don’t necessarily hold conservative values. “You ask [voters] about policies, and they prove themselves to be fairly moderate or even liberal on the issues. You put candidates in front of them and they prove themselves to be reliably Republican,” Niven says. “Sherrod Brown’s task here is to capture the people who already agree with him not to vote Republican.”

That’s an easier assignment when up against the more conservative candidate—whom both Trump, and Democrats, wanted to win the primary.

“There’s no question that Moreno is a juicier target for the Sherrod Brown campaign,” says Cohen. “He is the Trump candidate, he’s the MAGA candidate. And that is great for super conservative Trump-supporting Republicans. It’s not so great for the general election vote.”

Anti-abortion activists are peddling another lie about abortion pills—and we debunked it

BY JULIANNE MCSHANE

This tiny kitten is adorable, but "kitten season" is "terrifying"

BY SACHI MULKEY

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s almost that magical time of year that the Humane Society of America likens to a “natural disaster.” Kitten season.

“The level of emotions for months on end is so draining,” said Ann Dunn, director of Oakland Animal Services, a city-run shelter in the San Francisco Bay Area. “And every year we just know it’s going to get harder.”

Across the United States, summer is the height of “kitten season,” typically defined as the warm-weather months between spring and fall during which a cat becomes most fertile. For over a decade, animal shelters across the country have noted kitten season starting earlier and lasting longer. Some experts say the effects of climate change, such as milder winters and an earlier start to spring, may be to blame for the uptick in feline birth rates.

This past February, Dunn’s shelter held a clinic for spaying and neutering outdoor cats. Although kitten season in Northern California doesn’t typically kick off until May, organizers found that over half of the female cats were already pregnant. “It’s terrifying,” Dunn said. “It just keeps getting earlier and going later.”

Cats reproduce when females begin estrus, more commonly known as “going into heat,” during which hormones and behavior changes signal she’s ready to mate. Cats can go into heat several times a year, with each cycle lasting up to two weeks. But births typically go up between the months of April and October. While it’s well established that lengthening daylight triggers a cat’s estrus, the effect of rising temperatures on kitten season isn’t yet understood.

One theory is that milder winters may mean cats have the resources to begin mating sooner. “No animal is going to breed unless they can survive,” said Christopher Lepczyk, an ecologist at Auburn University and prominent researcher of free-ranging cats. Outdoor cats’ food supply may also be increasing, as some prey, such as small rodents, may have population booms in warmer weather themselves. Kittens may also be more likely to survive as winters become less harsh. “I would argue that temperature really matters,” he said.

Others, like Peter J. Wolf, a senior strategist at the Best Friends Animal Society, think the increase comes down to visibility rather than anything biological. As the weather warms, Wolf said people may be getting out more and noticing kittens earlier in the year than before. Then they bring them into shelters, resulting in rescue groups feeling like kitten season is starting earlier.

Regardless of the exact mechanism, having a large number of feral cats around means trouble for more than just animal shelters. Cats are apex predators that can wreak havoc on local biodiversity. Research shows that outdoor cats on islands have already caused or contributed to the extinction of an estimated 33 species. Wild cats pose an outsized threat to birds, which make up half their diet. On Hawaiʻi, known as a bird extinction capital of the world, cats are the most devastating predators of wildlife. “We know that cats are an invasive, environmental threat,” said Lepczyk, who has published papers proposing management policies for outdoor cats.

Scientists, conservationists, and cat advocates all agree unchecked outdoor cat populations are a problem, but they remain deeply divided on solutions. While some conservationists propose the targeted killing of cats, known as culling, cat populations have been observed to bounce back quickly, and a single female cat and her offspring can produce at least 100 descendants, if not thousands, in just seven years.

Although sterilization protocols such as “trap, neuter, and release” are favored by many cat rescue organizations, Lepczyk said it’s almost impossible to do it effectively, in part because of how freely the animals roam and how quickly they procreate. Without homes or sanctuaries after sterilization, returning cats outside means they may have a low quality of life, spread disease, and continue to harm wildlife. “No matter what technique you use, if you don’t stop the flow of new cats into the landscape, it’s not gonna matter,” said Lepczyk.

Rescue shelters, already under strain from resource and veterinary shortages, are scrambling to confront their new reality. While some release materials to help the community identify when outdoor kittens need intervention, others focus on recruiting for foster volunteer programs, which become essential caring for kittens who need around-the-clock-care.

“As the population continues to explode, how do we address all these little lives that need our help?” Dunn said. “We’re giving this everything we have.”

A close up of a kitten with black, brown and white colorings