I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!
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If I can think of myself as loved, I can love and accept others. If I see myself as forgiven, I can be gracious toward others. If I see myself as powerful, I can do what I know is right. If I see myself as full, I can give myself freely to others. -Kathy Peel
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Blue vs. Green - Virginia Police Harass Army Lieutenant
[ "What are you?" says Gutierrez. "A specialist? A corporal?" naming two lower ranks.
"I'm a lieutenant," said Nazario. ]
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Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences PNAS 2019
Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.
Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men, and young men of color face exceptionally high risk of being killed by police.
Police in the United States kill far more people than do police in other advanced industrial democracies
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Republicans learned an extremely dangerous lesson from the 2020 election
President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence and Republican legislative leaders, listen to a briefing by Secretary of Defense James Mattis in the Laurel conference room at Camp David, Saturday, January 6, 2018, near Thurmont, Maryland. Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian Alex Henderson April 13, 2021When candidates lose a presidential election, their party typically performs an "autopsy" and tries to figure out exactly where they went wrong. President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, for example, was arguably the result of three "autopsies" — as Democrats had lost three presidential elections in a row during the 1980s. But Never Trump conservative Jonathan V. Last, in a column for The Bulwark published this week, argues that the Republican response to former President Donald Trump's loss to now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 election was to double down on Trumpism.
"In the days after Democrats unseated an incumbent president and won unified control of Congress," Last writes, "the victorious party went through a round of self-analysis and recriminations. The Republicans, who managed a trifecta of losing that hadn't been accomplished since Herbert Hoover, doubled down. Then they backed up their bets, split 4s, and doubled down again."
Last adds that with the GOP having doubled down on Trumpism following Trump's loss, one of the talking points of "Conservatism Inc." is "how beside-the-point 'democracy' is, anyhow." And Last points to a recent tweet in which conservative writer David Harsanyi wrote, "I'm not pro-democracy, I am pro-freedom. If democracy erodes freedom, (then) it's not something to celebrate."
The conservative Bulwark columnist argues that the GOP, with its post-election "autopsy," isn't trying to figure out how to appeal to a wider range of voters, but trying to discourage voting.
"When Republicans conducted their autopsy," Last writes, "they skipped 'How to Win: Option 1' and went straight to Options 2 and 3 — leapfrogging the question of how to get more votes and focusing on how to use institutional leverage to take power even while losing popular majorities. Option 2 — the path of least resistance — is for Republicans to change voting rules at the state level in the hopes that they can drive down the number of Democratic votes cast and win the Electoral College despite being a persistent minority. A lot has been written about these various initiatives, some of which are more grotesque than others."
With biting sarcasm, Last adds, "But the real cutting-edge work being done as a result of the GOP autopsy concerns Option 3: figuring out how a Republican can win the presidency even while losing the popular vote and the Electoral College."
After the 2020 presidential election, Last writes, some Republicans in the state governments in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia had enough integrity to resist Trump allies who wanted them to defy the Electoral College results. But with Option 3, according to Last, the GOP could try to purge state governments of Republicans who will accept Electoral College results even if they don't like an election's outcome.
"So, the key parts of the Republican autopsy have been: (1) building the political will to use raw power next time, and (2) removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply last time," Last explains. "That's why Republican state parties have censured nearly every Republican who did not participate in Trump's attempted coup."
Last continues, "That's why (Secretary of State) Brad Raffensperger is the target of a primary challenge in Georgia…. That's why Nevada Republicans are attacking Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, the only Republican to have won state-wide office in 2018. Even though she is a Republican, Cegavske refused to go along with the attempt to overturn Nevada's result."
As much sarcasm and scathing humor as Last uses in his column, the Never Trumper concludes it by making a disturbing point and stressing that many Republicans have become overtly "authoritarian" and are undermining checks and balances.
Last writes, "This is how authoritarianism starts. A society goes from the rule of law, to rule by law — where the minority gets just enough power to change the laws so that they can amass more power. And here is a serious question: If Republicans managed enough votes to sustain an objection to counting electoral votes, what would our recourse be? Crossing our fingers and hoping that the Supreme Court steps in?.... The time to fight against authoritarianism isn't December 2024. It's now."
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Illinois...agree The time to fight against authoritarianism isn't December 2024. It's now."
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“Last writes, "This is how authoritarianism starts. A society goes from the rule of law, to rule by law — where the minority gets just enough power to change the laws so that they can amass more power.”
I hope the U.S. voters see how the above could happen and vote accordingly to prevent it.
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Heather Cox Richardson’s Tuesday post is about the Biden/Harris focus on the caregiving economy:
“FDR tried to shore up the nuclear family, headed by a man—usually a White man—enabling him to support a wife and children. Truman nodded toward including men of color in that vision. But Biden and Harris are recentering American society on children and on their mothers, giving mothers the power to support their children regardless of their marital status. Theirs is a profound reworking of American society, much more in keeping with what has always been our reality despite our mythological focus on an independent man and his family.“
Full post:
April 13, 2021 (Tuesday)
Today, the administration issued a proclamation on Black Maternal Health Week. It noted that Black American mothers die from pregnancy-related complications at two to three times the rates of White, Hispanic, Asian American, and Pacific Islander women, no matter what their income or education levels. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris declared their commitment to "building a health care system that delivers equity and dignity to Black, Indigenous, and other women and girls of color."
There has been talk lately about President Biden assuming the mantle of Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who piloted the nation through the Great Depression and World War II. There is a lot to that. Biden is enthusiastically embracing the idea that the government has a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure. That ideology has been on the ropes since voters elected President Ronald Reagan, who argued that the government pioneered by Roosevelt smothered business growth and stifled individualism by levying taxes for programs that Washington bureaucrats thought would benefit the nation.
Since he took office, Biden has used the government to help ordinary Americans. He began by ramping up coronavirus vaccines at an astonishing rate, and then got through Congress the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, designed to rebuild the economy after the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. Now he is turning to the American Jobs Plan, another massive package designed to remake American infrastructure as it creates high-paying jobs, just as FDR's New Deal did.
Biden is clearly trying to undermine the Republican mantra that government is inefficient, and he is succeeding. His own chief of staff, Ron Klain, has made it a point to compare the two men.
But an article by Laura Barron-Lopez, Alex Thompson, and Theodoric Meyer in Politico begs to differ. Based on an interview with House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), the piece makes the argument that Biden is far more President Harry Truman than FDR. Unlike FDR, who constantly had to compromise with white southern Democrats to get his measures through Congress and thus had to back off on issues of racial justice, Truman worked to advance civil rights in the U.S. More like Truman than FDR, Biden has focused on addressing racial equity in his response to the various crises he has taken on in his first days in office.
To my mind, though, what jumps out about Biden and Harris is not their focus on either jobs or Black Americans, but rather their attention to the needs of children and mothers. Even before the pandemic, 21.4 million American women lived in poverty, as did nearly 11 million children, about 14.4% of kids under the age of 18.
The American Rescue Plan increased the Child Tax Credit from $2000 to $3600 for children under age 6 and $3000 for other children under age 18, offering monthly payments immediately, in advance of the 2022 tax filing season. The measure also provided $15 billion in expanded childcare assistance, and it increased food benefits (SNAP) by 15%.
Experts estimated that the American Rescue Plan could cut child poverty in the U.S. by more than half.
The administration's American Jobs Plan continues the focus on children and their mothers as it sets out to shore up the caregiving economy. The coronavirus pandemic hit women particularly hard as women, particularly women of color, left the workforce to care for children when childcare centers closed. Women have lost 5.4 million jobs, nearly a million more than men. The American Jobs Plan would invest $400 billion in the caregiving economy; $137 billion in schools, early learning centers, and community colleges; $111 billion in clean drinking water; and $621 billion in transportation.
FDR tried to shore up the nuclear family, headed by a man—usually a White man—enabling him to support a wife and children. Truman nodded toward including men of color in that vision. But Biden and Harris are recentering American society on children and on their mothers, giving mothers the power to support their children regardless of their marital status. Theirs is a profound reworking of American society, much more in keeping with what has always been our reality despite our mythological focus on an independent man and his family.
The crisis in Black maternal health is not new; a 2017 report from the LA Times revealed that maternal death rates more than doubled between 1987 and 2013, with Black women suffering in the highest percentages. But it is hard to imagine any previous president making it a priority. That Biden does suggests that his vision of rebuilding America is not that of FDR or Truman, but something entirely original.
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Divine, great summary. The CDC reports:
Racial and Ethnic Disparities Continue in Pregnancy-Related Deaths | CDC Online Newsroom | CDC
Pregnancy related mortality rates 2007-2016
- The PRMR for black women with at least a college degree was 5.2 times that of their white counterparts.
Additionally, Black women who graduated from college have a higher risk of preterm birth than white women who dropped out of high school.Through analyzing delivery data and creating models based on air pollution severity in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, investigators discovered air pollution is associated with spontaneous preterm birth. Data also show Black Americans experience consistently higher exposure to air pollutants, measured in fine particulate matter (PM)2.5.
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Just happened to run across this old post from FB... It's STILL funny! But not so funny for there are those who would still go along with anything he says!
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Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. -Melody Beattie
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I do think Biden has been a surprise to many. I read earlier that the Reps. are having such trouble trying to 'dirty up ' Biden because he doesn't spend much time on social media nor have too many 'appearances' as he is keeping his head down and getting soooo much work done. A huge amt. ( even a lot of Reps. ) are on board with most of what he is doing although he is being careful to address the portion of people who are not progressive. It is hard to tear up a person who is a kindly, but firm older person who has been in politics for a very long time. So, he was painted as sleepy Joe, but he hasn't done much sleeping. All the Reps seem able to do is paint him as being just what the other guy often was -- a shadow president with Harris and others behind all the things going on. He does not have the dementia I'm sure the other side all wishes for and I think ( hope ) it will remain elusive for anyone to paint him badly unless there are outright lies. The thing is -- it won't play in the end. He could end up being one of our best.
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Love the meme on Trump and the Titanic but beg to differ with what it implies. If I am not mistaken, the captain of the Titanic went down with the ship and I cannot for the life of me see Trump making that sacrifice. However, I do think one of the male passengers disguised himself as a woman to escape on one of the lifeboats (for women and children only). He was caught but I am unsure if he was thrown off the lifeboat. I can see Trump being one of the first to climb aboard a Titanic lifeboat and declaring he is entitled to this seat because he is soooooooooo important to the world, NOT! Plus he would expect the women and children to row the lifeboat because I am sure he would develop bone spurs on his hands to prevent him from being able to row. What a loser.
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Betrayal, all good points about theoretical situations if the former guy had been on the Titanic!
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Jen Psaki defended President Joe Biden's communication style after GOP Sen. John Cornyn tweeted excerpts from a Politico article (which I posted) about the president's limited social-media use, using the article to question Biden's leadership ability.
"I can confirm that the president of the United States does not spend his time tweeting conspiracy theories," Psaki told reporters during a news conference.
Coryn tweeted excerpts that called Biden's tweets "unimaginably conventional." He suggested that Biden's messaging strategy undermined his leadership, tweeting, "Invites the question: is he really in charge?"
Psaki pushed back on the assertion on Monday and said Biden "spends his time working on behalf of the American people."
***
You're right, Jackie, the Republicans are trying to dredge up some kind of something against Biden and keep drawing blanks.
And I think many if not all of us on this thread are happy with Biden being unimaginably conventional when it comes to social media. We had wretched puking overload from the former guy.
I got Hunter Biden's "Beautiful Things" from the library but it will have to wait a few days. I'm currently engrossed in reading "Between Two Kingdoms: A Life Interrupted", the best seller by Suleika Jaouad, a remarkable young woman diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, who began a blog during her lengthy, difficult cancer treatments, and afterwards, embarks on a100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital.
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Huffington Post:
Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto was thrown for a loop by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) on Wednesday.
It happened after the Wyoming lawmaker condemned former President Donald Trump's encouragement of the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill insurrection.
Cheney, who was one of 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump to be impeached for spurring on the riots, told Cavuto the former president's action "was the gravest violation of an oath of office by any president in American history."
She added: "We can't embrace insurrection. We can't minimize what happened on Jan. 6."
Despite those strong comments, Cavuto decided to ask Cheney if she planned to vote for Trump if he was the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
Her response was quick and to the point: "I would not."
Cavuto seemed a little flummoxed by her response and didn't know what else to say.
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Today, examine your beliefs, your actions, your wants,
to determine whether they still represent your highest purpose.
Choose your Habits, Choose your Life.
Your Habits Are Your Life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie0 -
Divine and Ruth in a nutshell. The Reps. just don't know where to go with themselves. They haven't so far come very close to a hit on Pres. Biden or the Democrats much as they have been trying. They'd get farther likely if they would just accept a bit more of the inevitable since it seems to be the more they try to 'dredge' the deeper in sh** they get. They have forgotten if its not actually broke ( thinking Biden as president so far ) maybe it is not fixable. Their goals are too extreme for what the majority of voters wanted when they went to the poles and too many are still cheering for what they wanted back on 11/6/20. So it feels to me like they are still not able to see the forest for anything else. Maybe that is good for us -- I won't be fighting it for now.
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Sad but very true !!
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Just why this one needs to be sent to Kentucky and kept there and out of government from now on. Just maddening that he and so many of the other Reps. have been the abiding factor so MANY times in whomever is President not being able to accomplish the things they were elected for. Not saying of course, that any pres. from either side should be able to get everything they ran on -- but who wants more killing, and lower wages, and people starving, and poor people w/o any kind of Ins. Most of the Democrats I know sure don't.
One giant hypocritical a**hole.
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I was tempted to put a copy of this on Facebook but I think I could have already been x-ed ( un-friended ) by a number of people who likely never realized what I really thought because while it was always important to me as a democrat -- only after Trump did I think it was close to a duty to make sure that many reminders of his lack of intelligence, disdain for government and total in-aptitude for the position he had, show up.
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I think the term they're looking for is "colluded with Russia" to influence the outcome of an American election. I wonder if that could be prosecuted under RICO statutes? Longer prison sentences that way.
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I came across a documentary on Netflix called 'Crip Camp' that I am going to highly recommend. The movie starts out in 1971 at Camp Jened in New York. Jened was camp for disabled teenagers; its goal was to give the kids the fun 'normal' teenage experience of going to summer camp. One of the kids, a 16 year old boy with Spinal Bifida, brought along his home-movie camera. (This former camper, Jim LeBrecht, is the co-director of 'Crip Camp'.....the Obamas are the Executive Producers) The movie starts out with his black and white camp footage, combined with interviews made by an independent film group who came to camp inviting campers to speak their minds. From Camp Jened, the documentary follows some of the kids into their adult lives, where several alumni became nationally visible disabilities activists. It shows how their struggles helped lead to The Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in 1990. The film also follows the personal lives of several campers from their teenage years through today. It is a wonderful documentary and maybe even more so for me because in the mid-1970s I was a counselor at a similar camp. The kids at the 6 week Therapy Camp were a little younger (7-15 years old), but we also had a week-long Adult Camp. Before the supports from the ADA were in place, many of these people, despite being of normal intelligence, were forced to live in Nursing Homes due to their physical limitations. This was the only week of the year where they were treated like normal human beings (there was one man & lady who could only correspond or talk on the phone all year long except for that week. Once the law was passed, they were able to marry and live together as a couple....which I mention because they do discuss sexuality in the movie.) The camp I worked for is still going strong and its mission is the same as Camp Jened, "to provide a summer camp experience where children and adults can learn, grow, and build friendships while fostering independence in a supportive and accepting environment".
Check it out. It is wonderful!
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Ruth, I saw the documentary Crip Camp and also highly recommend it! I LOVED it. It's been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Crip Camp in this case is short for Cripple Camp, a nickname the disabled kids gave it themselves. The black and white footage from the 1970s is absolutely fascinating to watch, and the continuing story of how some of the kids from that camp went on to work for years to pass legislation for the rights of the disabled is incredible.
I was so impressed with Crip Camp, I got the autobiography written by Judith Heumann, the attractive, wonderfully outspoken young teenager in a wheelchair at Crip Camp who was truly instrumental in bringing to fruition the American Disabilities Act we know of today. I recommend the book, too! (Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disabilities Rights Activist). Judith Heumann's story is so inspirational it begs to be made into a Hollywood movie so people can truly grasp the enormity of the ongoing struggles and roadblocks disabled people went through to achieve equal rights.
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