#and we might get a different democrat running besides biden | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

reasonsforhope · 4 months

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Btw, if anyone cares to know, my position on Biden and the 2024 election is this:

Starting September* 1, 2024, I will be doing whatever I can to make sure that Trump does not get a second term as president

Until that day, I'm going to be doing whatever I can to push for an end to the genocide in Gaza and an immediate ceasefire, and that includes criticizing, protesting, and lambasting Biden for funding and providing weapons for Israel's genocide

ETA: I will still be posting about significant good things the Biden administration has done, though, because some of it is a really big deal that people deserve to know about

ETA: But I will not be defending Biden from any criticism around Palestine/Israel/war crimes

*This originally said October 1st but someone pointed out to me that there are a few states where early voting starts in late September, including a couple swing states, so I changed it because that's a very good point

I don't plan to tell anyone not to vote for Biden in the meantime, myself, because shitty two party system and I'm really serious about Trump not getting reelected

But I'm also not going to do anything to discourage people who are seriously rallying against Biden, because he is, you know, literally bypassing Congress to make sure he can fund crimes against humanity

I never want to diminish that reality.

And more than that: If we want genocide to actually be a dealbreaker for politicians and presidents... then we need to start acting like it could be.

Details/related thoughts:

I will still be posting about good things Biden and his administration are doing, because they are the ones running the US government and Congress is super deadlocked, so a lot of the national-level good news in the US has been done by his administration, and I'm not going to stop posting about that good news

Shout-out to the anon who accused me of being a US government propagandist with a whole PR team bc I posted about Biden a few days in a row. I promise you I'm blogging from my bed in my pjs and do not have a PR team lol

Also, for people who don't think we should be spreading serious criticism about Biden, for fear of Trump winning in 2024: I hear you--that's an incredibly valid fear. I've struggled with that myself, in the process of coming to this(/these) decision(s). But consider this: it's better that we really pile on the criticism and pressure now, because a) people are dying, and b) Biden's chances will be much worse if Israel is still bombing/decimating Gaza on election day

Relatedly, for anyone who's tempted to think Trump would be better when it comes to the Gaza genocide, again, it's really understandable to want to put your hope in any viable alternative. However, I promise you that is not going to happen. Joe Biden at least conditionally gives a couple shits about human life. Trump doesn't. Remember Trump's Muslim ban? In all likelihood, Trump would just tell Israel to bomb Gaza harder and ban Palestinian refugees from entering the US

Last thing on Trump: maybe this is naive of me, but for a lot of reasons, I'm not actually particularly worried about Trump winning in 2024. If I was, I might have made some different calls here. I have a few asks about this in my inbox and will probably make a post at some point about the reasons why, but yeah, Democrats have mostly been wanting to run against Trump instead of DeSantis or Haley or whoever for some very real reasons

You're welcome to disagree with me/this post in any direction, btw

Seriously, I'm just a random person who doesn't speak for anyone besides myself and my own blog. I'm not saying these are categorically the right answers, or that any of this is what everyone should be doing. This is simply the system I have settled on (right now) for how I personally want to handle all of this

You're welcome to disagree with me but please don't send me any angry asks about any of it. Not that I in any way get a lot of those, thankfully! But yeah, this isn't something I'm interested in debating, this is mostly for notification/explanation purposes

#palestine #cw war #cw genocide #us politics #biden #not news #me #reminder that all my posts related to the war/genocide are tagged as “palestine” and “cw war”#and if you need to filter reminders about all of this then you should #esp coming from you know a good news blog #Far better to engage with all of this news/info deliberately when/where you're in a place to handle it #then to keep spiraling and spiraling because it keeps surprising you in the middle of your dash #that's what I do actually I have several related tags filtered on here #and then when I'm up for it I go read a bunch of news articles and look up protest listings #and you know actually go to protests or post about it on here etc. etc.

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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Out of curiosity, who do you think the Dems will put up for president in 2024?? I’m guessing the GOP will throw all their support behind Desantis but I’m genuinely unsure who the Dems will go for. (Biden’s doing a good job and all but I really would prefer someone under 70 this time around.)

Biden has said that he plans to run again, and if that's the case, I feel like all Democrats have a duty to support him. At that point, he will have been president for four years, he has the automatic right to be presumed the nominee, and even with the current Senate blockade/unfavorable legislative climate, he has a whole raft of accomplishments to show for it. If Democrats hold Congress and expand their majorities, we could also move into getting some extra-big things done (think a more comprehensive climate deal, the Voting Rights Act, Roe protection, etc etc). At that point, it would be foolish to switch to another nominee just because They Might Have Better Ideas. Biden will have the actual track record of accomplishments, and frankly, I consider his age and experience to be a good thing. We've all noticed the difference that it makes when it comes to getting things done, not just posting angrily on Twitter about them.

Besides, 2024 will absolutely not be the time for a fractious inter-party primary, or the Democrats trying to mount a palace coup and take down Biden (again, for absolutely no real reason other than some people on social media, who bitch all the time about not wanting to vote for Democrats, thinking that he's too old). I don't think they will, but the Republicans will already be fighting to nominate the most extreme and undemocratic candidate possible (DeSantis or one of the equally loathsome heirs to Trumpism) and the last thing the Democrats should do is play into the "Democrats In Disarray!/Both Sides Bad!!" narrative that the media loves to fan at the drop of a hat. They will need to stick together and ensure that they're pulling their weight in unison to defeat whatever horrible would-be fascist the Republicans will be trying to force on the country, and Biden has already proven that he can a) beat Trump and b) do the job. So yes, Biden should be the nominee. The end.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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math-is-magic · 4 years

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Nervous about the election? Throw in an hour or two to volunteer this week!

If anyone else is as anxious about the election this week as I am, may I assist you in doing something about it? At the very least, we’ll be able to say we did all we could, and at most, we might help flip some states and senate seats!

Vote Save America has a bunch of easy upcoming events to volunteer for in key states!

https://votesaveamerica.com/volunteer/

Just pick a state, and pick a way to help that fits your schedule!

Not sure where to start? Here are my recommendations:

Georgia

Georgia is slightly leaning towards Joe Biden, but more importantly, there are TWO Senate seats up for grabs this year that are currently toss ups between republicans and democrats (one even leans democratic!). Getting a few more democratic voters out could make a HUGE difference in the senate, by flipping those two unexpected seats. Besides, don’t you want to stick it to Brian Kemp for stealing Stacey Abrams’ governorship with his vote suppression last election? https://votesaveamerica.com/more-gotv/#take-action

The Georgia Democratic Party also put together a cheat sheet of ways you can help, organized by time commitment! Some take only 15 minutes!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ea_bMO2_Agenw9OD-D5rJy4b7b9KFkd-TQ4NW6xR6G8/edit

Florida

If Joe Biden wins Florida, there is almost no path to victory for Donald Trump. Plus, there are several ballot measures that will affect how future Florida elections are run, and who gets to vote in them! Turning out Democrats now will help those amendments go the right way, and keep the republicans from making it even harder to vote (and turnt he state blue) in the future!

https://votesaveamerica.com/fl-gotv/

Pennsylvania

According to Fivethirtyeight, Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping-point state (the state that will decide the election by getting the candidate to 270 electoral college votes). The GoP knows this, and have been running all sorts of stupid lawsuits to suppress votes and stop counts there. Kavanaugh’s recent stupid, election breaking opinion was about trying to stop the vote count here, and with ACB on the court now, they really could. Get people out to vote here, so it’s nowhere near close enough to go to the courts, and give the republicans a chance to steal it!

https://votesaveamerica.com/pa-gotv/

#2020 election #american politics #election #VOTE #voting #get out the vote #this probably will do nothing but maybe it will convince even one of my friends who will convince one person and that's worth it #but hopefully we'll do more #and crush this election #and get tons of senate seat #and reform the voting process #and make progressive legislation #fingers crossed

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confettipizza · 3 years

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Lunar Recap

How it started. How it’s going. How it ended for the last lunar cycle of 2020.

This lunar cycle began with the New Moon on Jan. 12, 2021 @ 11:01 PM CT (Jan. 13 @ 05:01 UTC). It was the 13th Moon of 2020 according to the lunar calendar. And it ended Feb. 11, 2021, just before the 1st Moon of 2021! Happy Lunar New Year 2021, Year of the Ox!

South Korean Court Orders Japan to Compensate Women Forced into Sex Slavery

Colorado AG Opens Grand Jury Probe of Police Killing of Elijah McClain

Guantánamo Bay Prison Starts 20th Year of Indefinite Detentions

Pfizer to Boost COVID-19 Vaccine Output as WHO Warns of Vaccination Inequality

Lawmakers Catch COVID-19 After Sheltering in Room Where GOP Reps Refused Masks

FBI Warns of “Armed Protests” in All 50 States and at Biden’s Inauguration

Tomorrow is Sun conjunct Pluto. Something that’s been lurking in the shadows bout to jump out. Might be pretty big, but there’s also the individual personal experience of this event and might feel more like an early Full Moon for you.

House to Impeach Trump as GOP Shows Signs of Backing Removal

Well this is dumb. Sun conjunct Pluto?

The $3,000-a-month toilet for the Ivanka Trump/Jared Kushner Secret Service detail

I also remembered/realized how much I really love Anna Sui designs since I was a kid which is pretty random to pop up on my radar, but this woman gets that all I want is sparkly heart shaped objects in lacquered black and flowy hippie dresses

Trump Tells Aides Not to Pay Giuliani’s Legal Fees as Bid to Overturn Election Fails

All I know is talking about dreams and discussing them with others makes you feel better. The tarot angle is there to shed some light on what the dream is actually telling you.

Joe Biden Unveils $1.9 Trillion Coronavirus and Economic Relief Package

ICE’s Acting Director Resigns After Two Weeks on Job

Found out today the woman at the car mechanic I've been faithfully taking my car to for the past two years can speak to the dead and had some messages for me from my dad who passed in October-

Intuitive guided tarot card pull.

Waxing crescent into Aries Monday, January 18, 2021 at 1:06 AM CT Today’s Astro x Tarot forecast valid for the next 24 hours: Feelings are flaring up for you to make a statement, a very zippy move or a quick decision about someone or something.

So long as you remain flexible and agile, whatever you choose to do with them will work to your advantage. If you decide not to impose hyper-agility into your decision making rn, then kudos to you! You’ve gained practice points in self-control experience.

More Than 760,000 Pounds of Hot Pockets Recalled

‘I Answered the Call of My President’: Rioters Say Trump Urged Them On

Raphael Warnock and the Legacy of Racial Tyranny

The Extraordinary Courage of Aleksei Navalny

Whoa, I was like a cycle early on celebrating the lunar new year! I’ve been a month into the future for a week now. My bad! I apologize for any confusion.

I was thinking that the soul's law of attraction is probably pretty unstoppable even concerning partners, so like, if someone didn't love you back then it's not some mistake or human misunderstanding that you or they need to fix.

To find one's soulmate looks something like 2 souls flying towards each other from opposite ends of the galaxy to join their physical selves together in a collision force so brutal you're stuck like that and if that's not what yours looks like then maybe that ain't your soulmate?

All the men going to jail for their poop smearing Capitol rioting have online dating profiles and that’s reason no. 2 I do not date online! Reason no. 1 is ain’t nobody cute on there.

The Witch’s Myth: The true story of the crane husband

Where are your witch stars, Circe and Hekate, located? Their location can explain your relationship to witchcraft. Circe is in my 1st house influencing my outer appearances and Hekate is conjunct Jupiter influencing my domestic style and home to be distinctively witchy.

Sun into Aquarius Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 2:33 PM CT Here is your Sun into Aquarius forecast effective for the next several weeks of Aquarius season.

Down to earth and grounded is our most qualified position to receive everything we need and use everything we receive. This is the reality of ourselves, the human condition.

We love reality based reality.

Get ready for reality-grounded White House press briefings

Why do people believe the lies they’re fed? Because those lies are designed to be more palatable than reality. Lies offer a quick easy patch, but what you’ve gotta ask yourself is are those lies actually designed to support the flow of all things into your life?

~* First Quarter Jan. 20 3:02 PM CT (21:02 UTC) *~

Biden and Harris Attend Memorial to Honor 400,000+ COVID-19 Victims in U.S. on Eve of Inauguration

Steve Bannon Among Final Trump Pardons and Commutations

Trump Admin Declares Multiculturalism Is “Not Who America Is” as WH Releases Racist, Revisionist Report

4,000+ Columbia Students Back Largest-Ever Tuition Strike

Today, whatever you’re doing or are wishing to become will be to the benefit of this unifying, love-aligned uprising.

Joe Biden Sworn In as 46th President of the United States, Ending Trump Era

Good inauguration Astro climate this morning feels like. #BidenHarrisInauguration

“What has shaken the U.S. population so badly, this assault on the Capitol yesterday, is really nothing by comparison to what U.S. operations have done in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, to other democratic movements and elected governments over the years.”

Progress towards wholeness can’t be made until we own up to the roles we’ve played in the past.

Read the full text of Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem ‘The Hill We Climb’

When did politics get so vibrant and fashionably uplifting? Please and thank you! #Inauguration2021

The two of wands says to review your options, do your research, crunch the numbers, imagine the outcomes, but there’s no need to force making a choice if you don’t have to. Buy yourself some time and let the plans for a resolution find you, not the other way around.

Donald Trump Leaves Office and Washington, D.C., Threatens “We Will Be Back”

Watchdogs Demand Transparency as Corporations Pour Millions into Biden-Harris Inauguration

Senate Dems File Ethics Complaint Against Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley over Jan. 6 Insurrection

Federal Forces Arrest Ex-Marine for Beating Officer with a Hockey Stick During Capitol Riots

It’s Friday and it just feels good to be alive, a socialist and calling Bernie Sanders cute on Inauguration Day week! What a difference a pandemic makes.

Instacart Lays Off 2,000 Workers, Including Group Who Started Company’s First Union

Mars square Jupiter January 23, 2021 @ 1:49 AM CT (7:49 GMT) Someone wants you to know that you are ready to conquer your perceived limits to arrive at expansion in your thoughts, feelings, emotions and understanding today.

Waxing gibbous into Cancer January 25, 2021 @ 12:51 PM CT (18:51 GMT) It’s a supportive Moon for dreaming for mental health and well being. Begin a dream journal or review your latest dreams, reflecting on them for a few minutes today.

You are opening yourself up to an emotional practice that includes care for yourself in ways no one else (besides you and your connection to the Moon) can provide.

And too my Tarot Dream Readings are open if you would like guidance or support on a particular dream. See my pinned tweet for how it works.

When one’s soul is allowed to lead one’s life, working in the dark shadows, the invisible silence, the soul’s manifesting results are way more lasting and way more powerful than egocentric anything.

Good morning, self! A reminder my ego has never done a thing for me my soul can’t do better.

National Guard Deployment at U.S. Capitol Becomes COVID-19 Superspreader Event

Russia Violently Cracks Down on Protesters Calling for Release of Alexei Navalny

Trump Plotted to Oust Acting AG, Use DOJ to Force Georgia to Overturn Election Results

Hunts Point Market Workers in the Bronx Win Wage Increase After Week-Long Strike

This mourning brooch is a mindful way to mark the death of a loved one while paying tribute to the impact it has had on you. Bring back this Victorian trend!

Veteran Talk Show Host Larry King Dies After Hospitalization for COVID-19

Hank Aaron, Who Overcame Racist Barriers to Become Home Run Record-Holder, Dies at 86

We don’t give our bodies or our intuition enough attention and nourishment a lot of the time, so today’s the day we practice finding and sitting quietly with our inner voice.

~* Full Moon Jan. 28 1:17 PM CT (19:17 UTC) *~

House Delivers Article of Impeachment to Senate, Triggering Trump’s Second Trial

Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani for Lying About 2020 Election

President Biden Increases U.S. Vaccination Goal to 150 Million Shots in 100 Days

President Biden Reverses Trump’s Transgender Military Service Ban

Biden Restores Plan to Feature Abolitionist Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill

Value is further added the more you mint your words with a most whole and complete love. Love is the greatest asset we can let appreciate in our lifetimes.

This Full Moon tomorrow sends a flash point that reminds you to circulate this wealth because it’s the greatest emotional gift we can bestow upon our loved ones, family, friends, neighbors, elders, members of our community, etc.

Venus conjunct Pluto in Capricorn January 28, 2021 @ 10:18 AM CT (16:18 GMT) Going through your day today uncovers a forgotten desire or creative goal. You find yourself asking something like: Remember when I wanted to become a pastry chef?

Although you decided to pursue a different course, take a moment to focus on and honor this memory when it arrives and then release it. What did you become instead and why?

45 Senate Republicans Back Dismissal of Trump Impeachment Trial

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Supported Violence Against Pelosi and Others in 2018 Facebook Posts

Taking the time to recognize and honor your past desires gives the respect these memories deserve and it integrates them into the whole wider scene of the individual, both shadow and light on your path builds confidence in your steps, confidence in yourself.

You are who you are for a reason.

Had no idea how literal this grassroots King of Pentacles card was gonna materialize today, but here it is folks! When a subreddit takes down a hedge fund!

Leader of Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, Was a Government Informer

U.S. Freezes Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia, Reviews Deal with UAE Made Under Trump Admin

Poland Enacts Near-Total Ban on Abortions, Triggering More Protests

Honduras Locks In Total Ban on Abortions, Attacks Marriage Equality

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Confronts Parkland Survivor David Hogg in Newly Resurfaced Video

The stock market this morning: Sh*t! Normal working class people read the market and figured out the game! Time to change the rules again. Let’s write it in ancient Babylonian hieroglyphs this time. They’ll never figure that sh*t out.

A message crucial to promote the awareness of your personal role in the collective will become evident over the next three weeks. You will come to ask yourself, What am I doing with my life?

If you aren’t familiar or comfortable with seeking your inner journey, then the greatest clue I can offer you at the start is to become open to the invisible world within you. How you learn to relate to it is completely personal and uniquely your own

Speaking in more concrete terms the next few weeks may manifest a life event for you where you must apply both logic and feeling in order to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion concerning an interpersonal relationship or the question what am I doing with my life?

This Mercury retrograde should be a cinch, but during it don’t buy tech if you don’t have to. And remember to triple check communication before hitting send. If you arrive at conflict be quick to apologize and say no more until tomorrow

President Biden Expands Affordable Care Act Enrollment Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

House Speaker Blasts GOP for Assigning Racist Conspiracy Theorist to House Education Committee

Lawmakers Demand Probe into Trading App Robinhood After It Blocked Stock Sales That Hurt Hedge Funds

Pioneering African American Actor Cicely Tyson, Winner of Two Emmys, Dies at 96

Sun in Aquarius square Mars in Taurus February 1, 2021 @ 4:33 AM CT (10:33 GMT) The warrior’s edge has melted away and now you can take the scenic route through a field of wildflowers and mushrooms instead of blasting your way through a hillside of obstacles.

This energy catalyzes a scene that supports growth through varied experiences and it encourages everyone to seek their own way to resolutions, conclusions and understandings that are uniquely their own. Searching out your own way illuminates a strategic aspect of your purpose.

Happy Venus in Aquarius! The idea to refresh your wardrobe, hairstyle or redecorating by public opinion can be too hard to ignore under this influence. Your personal style will be influenced by the collective for the duration.

Burmese Military Stage Coup, Detain Aung San Suu Kyi

FBI Uncovers Evidence Jan. 6 Attack Was Premeditated as More Far-Right Rioters Face Charges

Trump Faces More Businesses-Related Woes as His Legal Team Departs a Week Before Impeachment Trial

It’s only the 21st day of the lunar cycle and already we’ve gone from the end of a rotten presidential era to the people’s revolution of the stock market, ok? And this moon ain’t even finished yet!

~* Last Quarter Feb. 4 11:38 AM CT (17:38 UTC) *~

U.S. Tops 26 Million COVID-19 Vaccine Shots, Surpassing Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

Moon Last Quarter in Scorpio February 4, 2021 @ 11:38 AM CT (17:38 UTC) A time for Descending, settling, closure, receiving compliments for doing a good job. Prime time for tying of loose ends and wrapping up unfinished business.

Democrats Say Trump “Singularly Responsible” for Jan. 6 Insurrection in Impeachment Brief

With consciousness humans are able to transcend the unconscious and reconfigure our relationship to it.

Though we can transcend the unconscious through viewing ourselves objectively, we are still apart of the the unconscious. Those rules still apply to us even as we contemplate their logic.

Jeff Bezos Steps Down as Amazon CEO After Amassing Huge Personal Fortune

Amazon to Pay Contract Drivers $61.7 Million After FTC Probe Finds It Stole Tips to Pay Wages

Republican Leader Won’t Punish Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene over Racist and Violent Rhetoric

Prosecutors Seek Rearrest of Kyle Rittenhouse, Wisconsin Teen Charged with Killing 2 Protesters

Sometimes the right thing to do is protect your one actual valuable thing not by defending it, but closing up all the channels the valuable thing is being attacked from the outside. Sometimes you just gotta block, delete or remove your account and move on with/to what's good.

What if we wake up one day and COVID has disappeared, like poof! It vanished into thin air? Maybe it’s the moon opposed to Uranus that’s got me wishing wild problem solvers would pop up overnight.

Poll Reveals 25% of U.S. Adults Plan to Gather at Super Bowl Watch Parties

VP Harris Casts Tie-Breaking Vote to Move Ahead with Democratic COVID Relief Bill

House Removes Marjorie Taylor Greene from Committees over Violent, Bigoted Rhetoric

Smartmatic Sues Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell for Election-Related Lies

I unfollowed some lawmakers this morning after feeling second hand anxiety over the handling of their interpersonal conflicts. Realized they were me on IG two years ago and I’ve moved on since. Can relate, but don’t wanna relive, thanks!

I just want to let y’all know that I’m coping w insufficient candle syndrome & will be studying the art & science of candle making to save myself potentially hundreds of thousands of $$ by making my own delicious smelling coconut wax babies in diy terra cotta flower pots.

Wyoming GOP Censures Rep. Liz Cheney for Backing Trump’s Impeachment

Mass Protests Continue in Burma Opposing Military Coup, Removal of Aung San Suu Kyi

You may tell others like it is today, but hopefully this inspires you to check in with yourself and be honest/come clean about something you've been overlooking.

Indian Farmworkers Blockade Roads as Mass Protests Show No Sign of Slowing Down

Black Sheriff’s Deputy in Louisiana Dies by Suicide After Condemning Police Violence and Racism

Amazon Workers in Alabama Begin Historic Vote on Unionization

Second Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump Opens in the Senate

Georgia’s Secretary of State to Probe Trump’s Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election

Mercury square Mars February 10, 2021 @ 6:14 AM CT (12:14 UTC) Still talking about talking, it’s also Dark Moon time to shape or let a habit form. This practice can come from breaking free of outdated relationships with yourself or with others in order to spur growth.

Dreamed Jungkook was correcting my pronunciation of Korean last night. I’m sorry! I’ll try harder to take this lesson seriously

Senate Votes to Proceed with Impeachment as Managers Present Harrowing Video of Jan. 6 Insurrection

Gov’t to Send Vaccines to Community Health Centers as U.S. Continues Ramping Up Vaccinations

WHO Team Confirms COVID-19 of Animal Origin; Ghana Shuts Parliament After Outbreak Infects Lawmakers

Journalists Decry Raid on Progressive Indian News Site NewsClick

U.S. to Pursue Extradition of Julian Assange as Press Freedom Groups Warn of Dangerous Precede

Fossil Fuel Pollution Causes One in Five Global Deaths

Four Louisiana Officers Arrested over Police Brutality Cases and Other Misconduct

Two NYT Journalists Exit Paper Following Revelations of Improper Conduct

Venus conjunct Jupiter February 11, 2021 @ 8:59 AM CT (14:59 UTC) Receive the overflow of creativity into your life. Welcome it even if you aren’t sure what to do with it. Write down project ideas if you don’t have the energy to start on them now. You can work on them later.

I'm cool with double masking, but a lot of folks still aren't even doing the one :|

“The Inciter-in-Chief”: Democrats Accuse Trump of Being “Singularly Responsible” for Insurrection

U.S. COVID Death Toll Tops 471,000; Half of All Deaths Occurred Since Nov. 1

Saudi Women’s Rights Activist Loujain al-Hathloul Released After 1,001 Days in Prison

Biden Administration to Continue Trump-Era Policy of Turning Away Asylum Seekers at Southern Border

Sen. Bernie Sanders Grills Neera Tanden, Biden’s Pick to Head OMB

Sen. Bernie Sanders: “According to The Washington Post, since 2014, the Center for American Progress has received roughly $5.5 million from Walmart, a company that pays its workers starvation wages; $900,000 from the Bank of America; $550,000 from JPMorgan Chase; $550,000 from Amazon; $200,000 from Wells Fargo; $800,000 from Facebook; and up to $1.4 million from Google. In other words, CAP has received money from some of the most powerful special interests in our country. How will your relationship with those very powerful special interests impact your decision-making if you are appointed to be the head of OMB?”

Neera Tanden: “Senator, I thank you for that question. It will have zero impact on my — on my decision-making.”

#lunar #news #headlines #tweets

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twiststreet · 4 years

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First time, long time. I remember a post you wrote back when Hill-dawg broke out the 'basket of deplorables', and how that gut reaction became more and more prophetic. Do you think something like '10-15% of you suck' could hit similar in public consciousness, or have we completely blown past the point where rhetoric even matters?

Oh man, I’d forgotten that one. That’s... incredibly fucking weird... to read. (Is that what I sound like? I AM SO SORRY!!!). Especially how it ends “But goddamn. What a fuck-up. Next time, maybe don’t anoint such a fuck-up.” HAHAHAHAHA WHOOPS!!!!

But yeah: I’m just some dumb guy. And right this second, jesus christ, I have no fucking Earthly idea what’s going on in this country or what happens in November... No idea. No clue. Anyone who has a guess in them just seems insane to me, just massive hubris...

On the one hand, you have more than 100,000 people dead, and while a lot of countries have handled this badly, it sure seems like there’s a lot of blame to be placed on Trump here. But the people who seem angriest about this whole situation are... fired-up right wingers who are angry they can’t get their haircuts at Red Lobster anymore. All the “Buy a shrimp, get a haircut” coupons they’ve been hoarding for years have been useless! Useless! Indiana Republicans all wanted a Caesar Cut and crippling diarrhea, and now they’re bereft and tragically clean-assed...

And then you have the country kind of plunging into chaos here. And I don’t really know how that plays because I’m (a) too aware that I’m a cynical moron, and (b) part of me doesn’t care (?) because the moral calculus here seems so pressing that going to the place of thinking about “how this plays” feels utterly soulless and psychotic. But just looking at how fired up people online are to shout “No, this is different from why I wanted to own an assault rifle and a bazooka to protect myself from the government... BECAUSE LOOTERS”... is troubling... I saw one guy just say “people on the coasts are going to be surprised when they find out how the rest of this country sees this shit differently than they do” ... he was a white supremacist but like... But again: see above re “don’t care.” It’s just not the moment where I want to care about that...

And I don’t know how much the Russia thing just turning into a fart has kind of robbed the “Trump will ruin everything, you guys” people of credibility. They yelled about their little Russia theories more than the actual and unholy horror show the last four years of this administration has inflicted us with, and I don’t know where that’s left anyone...

So I worry there’s going to be some enthusiastic Republicans out there, possibly. And I worry a lot that people who voted Gary Johnson come home to Trump this time around-- people get mad about third party voters, but Gary Johnson really saved Clinton from being truly embarrassed last time, electorally. Disgusted Republicans swung things blue somewhat in ‘18 but... I just have no idea what happens now! I don’t know where they’re at-- maybe they’re still in that mode! Possibly! But... Trump had an all-time high approval rating with Republicans at the beginning of the year. He’s at 86% now (higher approval with Republican women than Republican men!). He’s only at 40% with independents, though. And electing a Democratic Congress got... a House of Republicans run by Nancy Pelosi, ooooooh, so maybe those people are like “oh... right... the Democrats.” She clapped sarcastic one time and tore up a sheet of paper, but besides that, uhhhhhhhh... So I don’t know what happens there in November...

But I think it’s possible Biden can run an absolutely dogshit campaign and have a really good chance! I mean, all of that stuff could break his way. But... last I saw, Biden was doing worse with young people than Clinton was doing. I haven’t dug into those numbers, or anything, because I was busy reading 3-d porn visual novels, but ... young people were part of the Obama coalition. And if any young person told me like “Yeah, Biden baby” I’d just think they’re a fucking chump, a real loser, one of those incels I read about in the more judgmental 3-d porn visual novels. I don’t suspect that people like me who are like “good luck with Biden assholes -- fuck the world-- I’'m going to spend Election Day going to the most erotic places Steam can take me instead of voting for Joe fucking Biden” are a huge number, even if there are a lot of people peacocking like that on a twitter or a tumblr. But ... the ‘16 problem of the incompatabilities and fissures in the base of the Party seems even worse this year to me than before so...

So I mean... Right now, the volume on everything else besides the election is so loud after months of quarantine and now this last couple weeks of American life and this is so early in the cycle (Clinton’s thing was in September, after she’d disappeared during the campaign to be President for a month to go on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard), I don’t think the 10-15% thing will get any traction (and I haven’t seen much so far but I haven’t been looking-- there’s a bad history of saying shit like that, but like... it’s just not the news cycle where it’s going to stick). But the bigger problem that it points to sure aren’t going away anytime soon-- that Biden’s brain-dead, that he’s incapable at campaigning without either goofing constantly or yelling at people that he hates them and feels entitled to their vote (what is that??), that he needed a VP who people would feel shore up his biggest problem-- his melted brains, and instead he’s turned the VP position into some kind of “let’s hire a Girl! I saw Captain Marvel in the theaters!” feel good reward-for-being-a-girl merit badge thing, rather than just DOING it, selecting a girl and then being like “she was obviously the most qualified person!” (on some false and kind of offensive premise that women vote as some kind of monolith based just on ‘representation’ or some stupid Ghost of Comics Alliance shit like that, and without their own political thoughts, needs, sentiments), that he yells shit like “Charlamagne set me up!” when his melted brains make him say stupid shit, that he’s literally shitting himself on television, etc., etc., etc....

Or I’m thinking your “actually concise! how does being concise work???” point that we’re past the point of the things anyone saying mattering... just might be true... Which might be good. It’s weird to think about that bit.

I don’t know. There’s a lot going on, there’s a lot to worry about, and I’m just some dumb, middle-aged guy who doesn’t know anything both generally and especially at this moment... All I know for sure is there aren’t going to be making any good comedy movies anytime soon. Remember comedy movies? Man, I miss that shit.

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punkrockpolitix · 4 years

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Strap in for an Ugly Ride

by Mitch Maley — This week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden did the most Joe Biden thing left to do in announcing that centrist NeoLiberal Senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate. The establishment left swooned and suburban liberals rejoiced, while the lunatic right clutched their collective pearls at such a “radical” choice. Meanwhile, the rest of us yawned as the stage was set for an absurd, bizarro world, alternative-reality election that will take place in the midst of the most unstable American society in modern history.

The chaos created by the 45th President of the United States has a way of wearing the reasonable mind rather thin. After all, who aside from the angry mobs of nativists does not long for a return to the normalcy of the early aughts when all we had to worry about was forever wars in the Middle East, an infinitely-expanding wealth gap, 50 million Americans without healthcare, and trade policies that had hollowed out the middle class. Sure, the children of white collar elites would continue to thrive (so long as they could avoid pill mills and heroin needles). Meanwhile, the offspring of former factory workers who couldn't afford an increasingly cost-prohibitive college education would toil in Amazon warehouses with few benefits and no shot at the kind of modest defined-benefit pensions that had allowed their parents to enjoy some modicum of prosperity in their twilight years and increasingly gloomier chances of even enjoying the social security payments that have kept millions more from abject poverty once their working days were behind them, but that was certainly a little easier to swallow than 2020 has thus far been.

Sure, automation had already begun eating away at more jobs than even offshoring had, we'd done nothing to address the climate crisis beyond symbolic, feel-good policies that avoided pissing off the wrong special interests, and the only amber waves of economic growth in the past 30 years had been driven by engineered bubbles. So what? Wall Street was happy (the stock market tripled under Obama) even if the big party was being floated by artificially-cheap credit, and besides, we could all go to sleep each night relatively certain that we wouldn't face a zombie apocalypse type situation on any given morning which is more than you can say about our current situation.

But let's not forget where things had gotten by 2016 when populist spasms on both sides of the ideological spectrum saw our traditional two party-driven political process totally upended. Harnessing the power of the internet had been largely responsible for President Obama successfully splintering the Democratic establishment in 2008, but let's not over-romanticize the grass or the roots. Obama was the product of an inter-party schism that saw a large number of career Dems break from the Clinton dynasty and its requirement for complete fealty to the party's grudge-bearing first family.

Obama was not an anomaly. He was Wall Street approved, Bilderberg-blessed and mainstream media anointed because, regardless of what others projected upon him, he was a typical center-right Dem who wouldn't rock any of those boats. Yes, the right labeled him a dangerously-radical liberal, but those who paid attention in the 2008 primary will recall that the actual semi-progressive candidate, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, had to be actively cropped out of the debates in order for that narrative to take hold. After all, it wouldn't do to have Kucinich onstage talking about Medicare for All and explaining how to get out of Iraq tomorrow any more than it would do for Ron Paul to be onstage in Republican debates calling out the NeoCon likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Under Obama, the war machine kept rolling, taxes remained at historic lows, deportations skyrocketed and we expanded warrantless surveillance and other Big Brother police state tactics, including sending "surplus" tanks and other military armament to your local police forces. In other words, most of the things liberals hated most about the Bush era continued only they didn't hate them as much anymore. That said, institutional norms remained in place, our allies were quite happy and Americans, or at least those who weren't driven mad by the thought of someone with brown skin holding the highest public office, could hold their heads high knowing that they had an intelligent and articulate statesman at the helm who wouldn't embarrass them with Bush's tangled English or Clinton's infidelities. He was a family man who loved his wife and children and treated even his most vile-mouthed opponents with the courtesies of polite society. Yes, it's easy to grow nostalgic for such normalcy in the age of Trump.

However, years of bailing out Wall Street banksters who'd crashed the economy, allowing hedge fund managers to pay lower tax rates than teachers and failed companies to hand out huge bonuses often paid for by the taxpayers themselves took its toll. Millions of Americans who'd seen their homes foreclosed upon were scolded for buying into the worthless products being pushed by those same banksters—reverse mortgages, sub-prime interest-only loans, etc.—and lectured about "personal responsibility" and the "moral hazard" of bailing them out, even as those same fat cats who'd been rescued themselves swooped in to buy up all of those empty houses for cheaply-borrowed pennies on the dollars in order to make money hand over fist renting them back to the creditless schmoes who'd been kicked to the curb. It turns out a lot of people were fed up.

Enter Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump, two men, as different as can be, who nonetheless each managed to harness enough of the sometimes dangerous power of populist anger to finally upset the apple cart that had been two-party politics. While their platforms were radically different, the essential nature of their messaging was the same: you're getting screwed and have been for a long time. Their message was particularly well-received by working-class whites in formerly industrial states who'd been ignored by both parties for decades, beyond rhetoric from the right about it being the fault of illegal immigrants and rhetoric from the left about educational programs that would retrain the working class for the jobs of tomorrow. Regardless of whether they believed in or even understood the solutions either candidate was offering didn't matter so much as someone at last acknowledging that the reality they'd been experiencing actually existed.

The Clinton machine, with the DNC's foot on the scale and the MSM distorting perception, was able to (barely) keep Sanders at bay. Meanwhile, the GOP may have been able to do the same had it not been for the sheer giddiness of legacy media outlets like WAPO, the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN for what they saw as the death of the modern Republican party should it actually nominate a crass, foul-mouthed blowhard of a third-rate reality TV star (who'd until recently been a Democrat) for President. Make no mistake, Clinton's people desperately wanted to take on Trump, believing it amounted to not only an easy win, but a path toward retaking Congress, despite having been gerrymandered out of contention (for those of you who came to politics late, the GOP's electoral success in 2010, saw them take over a majority of state legislatures just ahead of the once-every-decade reapportionment that follows a census, allowing the party to gerrymander Congressional districts to such a degree that Democrats could not gain ground, despite regularly receiving millions more total Congressional votes than Republicans each cycle).

Everyone inside the beltway was caught sleeping in 2016. The Republican establishment never saw Trump coming and didn't know what to do with him when he arrived. Remember how sad Jeb Bush seemed in the debates? Remember how ineffective Marco Rubio was when he tried to sink to Trump's name calling? By the same token, the Democrats were so tone-deaf as to who Bernie was appealing to (far more aging New Dealers and working-class labor Democrats than the teen radicals they imagined) that they actually thought making trans-bathroom laws a wedge issue would drive turnout for their side. Imagine living in Michigan and working the counter at a Dollar General because the stamping factory you used to work at moved to Mexico, wondering whether your kid's rehab from Oxycodone would finally stick this time while being told that the real fight to be won was about where the gender fluid would take a leak.

That's not to say that trans rights aren't a worthy issue, so much as to point out how out of touch you would have had to have been to think it was a winning one in that moment of time. And if you think there was something more altruistic behind it, ask yourself how much energy has been expanded by the party on the same subject since. Like abortion-related ballot referendums used by Republicans to drive evangelicals to the polls, out-of-touch Beltway Dems thought that identity politics was the path to uniting the left-wing of their party and getting the Bernie crowd to turnout for Hillary, even after the DNC got caught smoothing her path to victory. After all, the donor class Dems never mind looking woke, especially if it prevents them from having to get behind things like a living minimum wage that might actually mean less coins falling into their coffers. And that my friends is what created the relatively small yet curious "I voted for Bernie in the primary and Trump in the general" demographic, not sexism, spite or misogyny.

Fast-forward to 2020 and Bernie is finally poised to emerge as the resistance candidate. Despite the MSM again selling alternative facts that kept explaining away his success, his path to the nomination looked inevitable until the Democratic establishment again intervened, this time with Obama in the role of Clintonesque king maker, convincing moderate establishment favorites Pete Buttiegeg and Amy Klobuchar to take one for the team ahead of Super Tuesday so that a path could be cleared for a sputtering Biden campaign to claim the nomination. For his part, Biden's 40-year record is as right of center as a Democrat can be without going full Joe Lieberman, so the remaining question was how not to repeat 2016 in alienating so much of the left-wing as to ensure Trump another four years.

Then, like a gift from the political gods, Trump began shooting himself in the foot so frequently in his responses to the pandemic and civil unrest that his approval rating—which has never even hit 50 percent even once during his presidency (not surprising considering he won the White House with a smaller share of the vote than either Romney or John Kerry managed in losing)—sunk to a pathetic 35 percent, convincing the NeoLiberal bosses that it was no longer necessary to kiss any rings on the far left. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and even Tulsi Gabbard and AOC had already bent a knee to Uncle Joe, imploring their supporters to vote blue no matter who, so why not instead go after the moderate Republicans and Bush-era Never Trumpers whose ideology make the Democratic donor class feel much more comfortable than the progressive left’s anyway?

Enter Kamala Harris, who, to the Democratic donor class at least, signals nothing less than a female Barack Obama. And they’re not exactly wrong in that she’s a highly-articulate, ideologically-flexible politician capable of putting a friendly, progressive veneer on the modern NeoLiberal platform. That’s probably why the left-leaning corporate media outlets tried so hard to give her a push in the primary, even though voters simply didn’t find her to be a compelling candidate. Despite a healthy fundraising machine and the focused attention of MSNBC and CNN, Harris didn’t even make it to Iowa, dropping out ahead of what surely would have been a bottom tier finish in her home state of California. In that sense, it’s hard to see what she brings to the ticket in terms of electoral success. Fortunately, she won’t have to deliver her home state, but while much has been made of the fact that she’s the first woman of color to be on a major party ticket, it’s worth noting that there’s little to suggest she’ll help turn out the African American vote as most polls had her fourth of fifth even among black voters, who preferred Biden, Warren and even Sanders over the Senator from California.

As long as we’re on the subject of Harris’s race, however, it’s worth noting that the we're-not-racist right immediately went down the rabbit hole with birther conspiracies disgustingly-similar to those used against Obama that, within moments of the announcement, were used to question her eligibility to ascend to the presidency and fear monger that it was all a plan to install Nancy Pelosi when an aging Biden stepped down soon after being elected. Harris was born in the United States and, furthermore, born to two U.S. citizens. Her eligibility shouldn’t be in question to anyone who’s taken a junior high civics class, yet from what we’ve seen already, I’m sure it won’t be long until someone asks to see her birth certificate.

That said, despite the RNC's painting Harris as the most radical choice possible, her politics are no more progressive than Biden's, as evidenced by the two articles in the Wall Street Journal about Wall Street “breathing a sigh of relief” at her selection. In fact, one of the audition rounds for the veepstakes included hosting a Biden fundraiser and insiders have suggested that it was deep-pocketed Obama donors and not Uncle Joe himself who put her over the top. In Harris, the NeoLiberal establishment has all but cordoned off the progressive wing of the party, perhaps for a decade to come. Like Obama, she allows them to market a progressive package to make affluent suburban liberals feel good without making Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, or the military industrial complex the least bit nervous. In fact, in a communication to investors, Goldman Sachs essentially said that even if it means the Trump tax cuts go away, the stability and predictability of a Biden administration would be at least as good for the 1 percent's bottom line.

To hear the Trump campaign tell it, however, Biden's selection of Harris is nothing less than a signal that, in his cognitive decline, Sleepy Joe has acquiesced to becoming nothing more than a puppet for far left radicals like Bernie, AOC and the rest of The Squad. In their narrative, if elected, he’d be doing the bidding of Antifa, while doing away with everything from God and religion to guns and even the suburbs, and the dangerously radical Harris is only further proof of that. In one of their weirdest turns yet, the Trump campaign is literally showing clips of what America has become under Trump himself and warning that this is what will happen if Biden is elected and only by reelecting the man that brought it to you in the first place and has failed to end it by uniting the country (or even trying) can you stop our present from becoming our future. When taken literally, it is a message that says the world I brought you is the world my opponent will bring you and the only way you can stop that from happening is by keeping the guy who brought it to you! If that doesn't make sense, congratulations, you're not an imbecile.

However, if you buy the narrative that the radical left has taken over the Democratic Party then I'm sorry to report that such may not be the case. Biden-Harris is literally the most Law & Order ticket I can imagine either party fielding. It’s the guy who brought us the Crime Bill, supported the private prison industrial complex and paved a smooth road for Clarence Thomas paired with the AG who wanted to jail young single mothers whose kids missed too much school, blocked access to DNA evidence of the wrongfully convicted, supported marijuana criminalization and pretty much accumulated the least progressive record any prosecutor could ever hope for.

So no, Harris's pick wasn't to appease the progressive left. It was a middle finger to them, just like the initial convention lineup which didn't even feature AOC or Andrew Yang, the two stars of that set. Meanwhile, NeoCon warmonger John “life starts at the first heartbeat” Kasich is in primetime, along with Jeb Bush acolyte Anna Navarro. AOC finally got space for a 60-second pre-recorded (read vetted) afternoon spot, and the Yang Gang was able to kick and scream until their candidate was given a low-billing slot as well. In other words, if you don’t see that the progressive left is not only not running the show at the DNC but is all but powerless in the party’s politics, you’re simply not paying attention.

Why are NeoLiberals more interested in Bush-era Republicans than the media rock stars on the left who seemingly hold the future votes of the party in their hands? Simple, there's less of a difference in platforms, which means unlike working with the left, they don't really have to give anything up to court NeoCons. That’s because the age of Trump has seen those Republicans give up on social issues they never actually cared that much about from gay marriage to abortion in exchange for a seat at the table on the issues they do—things like energy policy, deregulation, aggressive foreign policy and, above all, jockeying their snoots into the trough of money that the winning team gets to eat from.

Excited because a Black Lives Matter protester is going to Congress? Slow down, Ace, as the hallowed halls are also about to get their first QAnon member. We've reached peak lunacy under Trump, this much is true, but the wheel has spun back to same old song and dance, remixed for 2020. The American empire is falling apart and one side is offering four more years of the lunatic king, while the other is betting that such a thought will scare voters enough to accept the same brand of politics that brought us that President in the first place. All that remains to be seen in whether Dems finally got the calculus correct. Are progressives so infuriated by life under Trump that they'll vote blue no matter who, or have they picked off enough white suburban Republican women for it not to even matter? We'll find out, though likely not until weeks after November 2, assuming we aren't fighting each other in the streets by then.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.

#biden2020 #kamala harris #bernie or bust #aoc #nevertrump

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evilelitest2 · 4 years

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Okay I'm going to be very careful with my words but I wanted to get a second opinion on this. We know besides the establishment being cowards and backing Biden he never would've gotten this far without older blacks. Do you think it was a bad call and against their best interests to vote for him despite his record showing he uh doesn't have the best track record on race? This is not me blaming anyone by the way.

Ok, this is complicated, an`d i’m seeing this talked about a lot, the African American vote. some caveats because this is a really complicated subject

1) The african American vote is not universal. Like the white vote, it is divided based on age, location (there is a big distincition in southern vs. northern vs. Western black voters), religion, income and class. There isn’t a universal way to understand the african American vote, so eveyrthing I am going to say are generalizations and anyone reading this should be careful to fall into generalizations. There are many african Americans who voted for Biden btw.

2) Voters make their choice for a variety of reasons, some of which I am not getting into, and it doesn’t always affect their ideology.

I also want to make clear that I am talking about black voters who ideologically might actually like sanders platform more than Bidens, there are also many african americans who just are conservative (like whtie conservatives).

Ok so something that people need to understand about the African American community, espicially in the south is this. Since the Republican party is so defined by white Nationalsim, blacks are among the worse hit by any republican administraiton, this has always been the case. like Trumps administration has hurt me personally in a few ways, but no where near as much as it is hurting racial minorities in the United States. So a lot of African Americans tend to focus on “harm reduction” when voting since they are the ones who get harmed.

tied to this is the place of hte Democratic Party in black culture, where it is one of the fundemental pillars. Espicially in the south, where the democratic party is sort of the one major national instiution actively trying to protect black Americans. Like try to imagine the sheer level of shit that the Black Community in Missisopi or Alabama has to endure, being trapped in some of the most conservative red states. So loyality to the democratic party is as fundemental in the black community as the Republicans party is to the eventalist community.

Its also important to understand that as a rule, african Americans are the best voters in the country. not just in the sense that they always go out to vote in every eleciton, its also that they tend to organize, voluenteer, give money, and raise awareness. This is partly due to the very well established community focus of black culture, but its also because they know full well what happens if a Republican wins. a good example of this was Doug Jones 2018 shocking victory in Alabama, which was only possible thanks to massive black voter turn out.

The only other voting community as good as the African American in terms of being voters are the Evengelical Christian community, who are like their evil fundementalist twin. But that is a story for another time.

But you know how despite Trump clearly being an atheist, the religious right supports him because he gives them what they want, and Mike pence serves as their surrogate. That is very similar to Biden with Obama as the surrogate, except that what the black community wants are objectively good things and not crypto fascism.

Because of how good the black community is about getting the vote (espicially older black women) the democratic party relies primarilty on black voters. And in the last 30 years, the black community has been extremely successful at steadily taking over the democratic party, and forcing it to address their issues. Which is why Joe Biden in 1980 is playing nice with segergationists and Joe Biden in the 2020 is running on a platform of racial justice. Because now the democratic party needs the african Americans to survive, they are moving steadily to the left on those issues. If the progressive movement wants to really be successful, we really should copy their example, because that the political leaders of community knows exactly what needs to be done to acheive tangible results. Ideally by turning many African Americans into progressives, but that would require the progressive movement to purge itself of its nastier elements (Chapo House)

See the progressive wing of the party has a long history of valuing rhetoric over the pratical, and this alienates them to a lot of black voters who are desperately afriad for themselves and their families.

and that is why they supported Joe Biden, because while many of them don’t actually like him and aren’t happy about his legacy on race, the fact is they know that he needed them to win. And thus as a reward for supporting him, he will give them what they want (again just like the evengelical community for trump but not evil).

specifically, they want the following

A) A democratic Supreme Court. The greatest blow to the Black community in the last 20 years (except Trumps election) was SCOTUS overturning the 1965 Voter’s Right act, which has been devestating to black voting power, espicially in in the south

B) A national law to push back against voter repression

C) Federal support for Black lives Matter

D) The Federal goverment to really crack down on the Alt Right and White Nationalism.

E) Pushing to end the wealth gap between the black and white community (which shrank dramatically under obama).

And most importantly, get trump and his white nationalist supporters out of office.

There are other policies obviously, but for many prominent african American leaders, Biden is a major way to acheive those ends and so they support him. And biden frankly is likely to deliver, between his 8 years working with Obama and his reliance on the black community in 2020, many African Americans feel like he is somebody who is going to listen to them and take them seriously.

So I don’t really feel comfortable saying that they are voting against their own best interest, instead they have a different set of “best interests” than what leftist usually consider. There is more at play than a strictly materalist understanding of politics.

#ask EvilElitest #joe biden #African American community

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years

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But the most important reason may be that the figure of Joseph Mifsud, so central to the prosecution of Papadopoulos and to the investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign, makes little sense in the stories laid out by Robert Mueller’s team or by the Democrats in Congress. Far from being a Russian cutout, as people like Congressman Adam Schiff and various U.S. news outlets have suggested, Mifsud seems to be a figure who was tied to high government officials in the west. So far, few of those associated with him have opened up public inquiries or otherwise retraced their steps, which you would expect if they felt they had been victims of Russian infiltration. The FBI spoke to Mifsud in early 2017 when he was in the United States and let him go, allegedly because Papadopoulos had misled them, but they don't seem to have gone hunting for him during the months that followed, even after the arrest and charging of Papadopoulos, nor do they seem to have alerted European allies. Mifsud continued to live and work in Europe as normal. Mifsud went into hiding shortly after the statement of offense against Papadopoulos was made public, in October 2017, but Italian media has since reported that Mifsud spent some of those months in a Rome apartment that was paid for by one of his erstwhile employers, Link Campus University, a small organization with ties to Italian intelligence. In short, with Mifsud, the rabbit holes are endless, and even the truth will be prove to be twisted.

To solve such mysteries, then, is why Barr and others are so interested in going to Rome and Australia. And, whether or not you trust Barr and team, there is reasonable cause for them to be taking their actions. If they’re expecting Papadopoulos’s narrative to bear fruit, however, they’re going to come up dry. I spent weeks trying to square Papadopoulos’s memories with various theories of the case, and I began to notice that those recollections kept changing or contradicting the available paper trail. Even the Trump campaign was on the receiving end of a number of false boasts from Papadopoulos, such as a claim of having met with the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom, when no such thing had happened. Most important, I realized that there was very little basis for a linchpin of countless narratives concerning Papadopoulos: namely, that Mifsud had mentioned Russian hacking. It’s a claim that nearly everyone, including the Mueller team, has embraced, but the only person making it is Papadopoulos himself. Why would he make such a claim? As the lawyer and blogger Hans Mahncke has laid out in more detail, it may well have been a panicked attempt to deflect trouble growing out of still more untrue claims. (Papadopoulos did not respond to a request for comment.)

Unfortunately for Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani seems to embrace Papadopoulos’s version of the story, in which Alexander Downer and Joseph Mifsud were co-conspirators. Last spring, mentioning the case of Papadopoulos, Giuliani told Fox News’s Bret Baier, “If that’s not a counterintelligence frame-up, I will eat my hat.” And if that’s how Giuliani feels, then it is likely that he has persuaded Trump to feel the same way. That’s why Giuliani has been globetrotting on Trump’s behalf and, it seems, bullying people and making a fool of himself. In short, he appears to be as obsessed with a wrongheaded theory of the case as any Russiagater on MSNBC.

At the same time, those who view investigations of the origin of Russiagate as nothing more than partisan attempts to discredit the work of honorable civil servants may want to brace themselves for unsavory findings. Even looking only narrowly at one element of Russiagate, the case of Papadopoulos, we can see questionable behavior by his prosecutors, notwithstanding his guilt. Here is one small but revealing example. In the summer of 2016, Papadopoulos wrote to Trump campaign official Sam Clovis about some “requests from the U.K., Greek, Italian, and even Russian government for closed door workshops/consultations” at a London venue. (In reality, no such requests had been made, but that’s beside the point here.) Clovis wrote back, “I have too much to do that requires me to be in the states” and encouraged Papadopoulos and another foreign policy advisor to “make the trips, if it is feasible.” The prosecution edited this exchange in order to make it look much more sinister. They described it as the culmination of “several weeks of further communications regarding a potential ‘off the record’ meeting with Russian officials” and quoted Clovis as saying that Papadopoulos should “make the trip[], if it is feasible.” In other words, the original suggests a series of London-based workshops that might include Russians, while the prosecution’s version suggests a concerted effort to link up with Russian officials and taking a trip to make it happen. I was able to see the difference only because I had the original emails. This sort of elision, which ran throughout the case against Papadopoulos, gave me an unfavorable impression of the Mueller team.

More broadly, we all have a stake in finding out whether U.S. authorities proceeded by the book when they began to investigate the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Trump advisor Carter Page that lasted for months and kept being renewed, yet we know it relied in part on the infamous “pee-tape” dossier that had been put together by someone who was paid by the Clinton campaign. That this dossier’s author, Christopher Steele was working with the wife of a Justice Department official connected to the investigation was, at the very least, a glaring conflict of interest. Returning to the case of Papadopoulos, a vague statement to Alexander Downer that, according to Downer, didn’t mention “dirt” or “email” but merely Papadopoulos’s belief that the Russians had “material that could be damaging” to Hillary Clinton hardly seems like an adequate justification for a major FBI investigation of a presidential campaign. As for the case of Ukraine, officials in that country were open in their opposition to Trump in 2016, and the Financial Times reported on a Ukrainian and MP and other “political actors in Kiev [who] say they will continue their efforts to prevent a candidate—who recently suggested Russia might keep Crimea, which it annexed two years ago—from reaching the summit of American political power.” It’s not as crazy as it looks that Trump, in light of Russiagate, wants to figure out what was going on back then.

Now, none of this is to give a pass to Donald Trump. He deserves to be investigated, and possibly impeached, for his behavior toward Ukraine over the past several months, and if you want to get a sense of how much power the president has to turn the screws on weaker parties, few recent stories have been better reported than a recent one from The Wall Street Journal showing how things looked from the Ukrainian side. Sending a henchman like Giuliani over to Kiev and dropping strong hints to Ukraine’s leaders of what you’re hoping to find is a recipe for lies and corruption.

But probing Trump’s misbehavior cannot be an underhanded instrument for shutting down investigations into what happened in 2016. Uncovering that part of the story may be unhelpful to the impeachment narrative in the coming months, but it is no less important than investigating this president. Trump represents the flouting of rules by one man, but the origins of Russiagate represent the potential flouting of rules by many people. If the FBI and the intelligence community can overstep their bounds in pursuit of a president many of us hate today, they can do so against a president we like tomorrow. So, no, Trump’s or Giuliani’s pet theories won’t bear fruit. No, there’s no DNC server in Ukraine, or whatever the hell Trump believes. No, Joe Biden didn’t try to fire a prosecutor for going after Biden’s son. No, George Papadopoulos isn’t the key to an international anti-Trump conspiracy. But the belief that Russiagate grew out of partisans overstepping their bounds—well, that’s still awaiting the jury. With or without Trump in office, we owe it to ourselves to figure out whether it’s true.

this is why it’s so tough to believe in either russiagate or the counternarrative that russiagate was a us intelligence honeypot intended to destroy trump. the people who are saying this shit are professional brown-nosers, bullshitters who get paid to slather on the praise until they manage to convince whoever’s in power to take on a business deal (and for that they get paid millions). the idea that these imbeciles could be co-conspirators on anything other than a dinner party is frankly absurd. the fact that the FBI will run roughshod over proper investigative procedure if it prejudges that someone is guilty is not in doubt because we see it happen to its much poorer victims all the time, so the notion that it might have done so here is not unfathomable.

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chubbycaucasianchristiancloseted · 2 years

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Obama is the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that's a storybook, man.

Obama is the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, I mean, that's a storybook, man. Did my post just get removed?

For the Democratic Party and media outlets that continuously play the victim card, they really don’t mind it when one of their own does it. Can you imagine if Trump said something like that? What would the moral outrage be? Now FB, Tumblr and Minds if you remove my post just remember it’s been “taken totally out of context my use of the world ‘clean”. I was referring to a phrase my mother used “clean as a whistle, sharp as a tack”. Come ON! WHAT A JOKE! The worst part about the whole statement was not even addressed! In 2007 Biden thought Obama was the first Main Stream African American? We ignore that?

This article goes on to quote a few more gems from Biden. If Trump or I said any of this we would be ridiculed as a raciest. Even Rev. Jesse Jackson gave Biden a pass. I wonder if people were aware of these comments when casting ballets in 2020? There are different standards in the court of popular opinion for conservatives than anyone else and it’s trickling over into the court of law.

There are only a dozen or so reasons Joey would say something like this and only a handful I would agree to discuss. One possible is Joe Biden is unknowingly raciest. He is not even aware that he treats or sees people inferior to him based of the color of their skin. The color of an individual’s skin is so important to liberal Larrys and Lindas and Joey tries to discuss it and play a part in it but trips and stumbles over his own biases.

OR Joe Biden is sick and has been sick. This is my biggest argument; Joe Biden has never been the sharpest tool in the shed and in 2007 he started to slowly decline. His mental cognitive ability has been question to a lot of people for awhile. NOW it is thrust into the lime light. Thumbs up and finger points aren’t going to save Joey this time.

Direct Quotes:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Biden issued a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying: "I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone. That was not my intent and I expressed that to Sen. Obama."

"Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I've been around," Biden said on the call. "And he's fresh. He's new. He's smart. He's insightful. And I really regret that some have taken totally out of context my use of the world 'clean.'"

Biden said he was referring to a phrase used by his mother.

"My mother has an expression: clean as a whistle, sharp as a tack," Biden said.

Earlier in the day, Biden had officially filed the necessary paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to launch a presidential campaign. Biden ran for the White House in 1988, but pulled out of the race before the first votes were cast.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, who also ran for president in 1988, also said he did not think Biden was being racist. However, Jackson did say that he called Biden to talk to him about it.

"You cannot go into a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. Oh, I'm not joking."

"Better than everybody else. You don't know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state is the eighth largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a northeast liberal state," Biden said.

He repeated the comment during a visit to South Carolina in December 2006 at an event before the Columbia Rotary Club, according to a story published in The State newspaper. The State reported that Biden referred to Delaware as a "slave state that fought beside the North. That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way."

#USA #TheChubbyCaucasianChristianClosetedConservative #Biden #Obama #LetsGoBrandon

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare In 2008

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-republicans-voted-for-obamacare-in-2008/

How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare In 2008

List Of Candidates Who Ran In Us Congress Elections 2018

Senate Republicans fail to get necessary votes to repeal and replace Obamacare

The Republican Party held majorities in both chambers of the U.S. Congress entering the 2018 election. In the U.S. Senate, there were 23 Democratic seats, eight Republican seats, and two seats held by independents up for election in 2018. The Democratic Party needed to pick up two seats in the Senate in order to regain the majority they lost in 2014. All 435 seats in the U.S. House were up for election. In order to win the chamber, the Democratic Party needed to pick up 24 seats in 2018.

for the list of all candidates who ran in the 2018 U.S. Congress elections. For a listing of all candidates who ran in 2016, .

U.S. House

10Footnotes

How much are your senators and representatives worth?After heated budget debates, threats of government shutdowns and multiple votes to raise the debt ceiling, Congress has been dealing with fiscal issues on a regular basis. It is no wonder, then, that when the average citizen has the means to take a peak at each members ability to handle his or her personal finance, intrigue abounds.

The latest data calculated by OpenSecrets.org reports on disclosed information from 2012. The latest batch of numbers shows that the 113th Congress had a median net worth of $1,008,767. This is the first time in history that the majority of members are millionaires.

For information on which members saw the highest change during their tenure, please see Ballotpedias page on the Changes in Net Worth of U.S. Senators and Representatives .

Number Of Registered Voters By State 2021

Voter registration is the requirement that a person eligible to vote registers on an electoral roll before that person is entitled or permitted to vote. Voter registration may be automatic or may require each eligible person to submit an application. Registration varies between jurisdictions.

Almost 92 million eligible Americans did not vote in the 2016 presidential election. Voter registration and participation are crucial for the nations democracy to function properly and for the US government to provide fair representation.

Low voter registration numbers and low voter turnout can be the result of several factors. To increase voter registration and participation, barriers to registering to vote, and barriers to voting must be eliminated, such as additional restrictions on identification forms and reforms to ensure all eligible ballots will be securely counted. Additionally, those alienated from the democratic process or discouraged from voting must feel that their voice is heard by their leaders and encouraged to participate in elections.

Some pro-voter policies that have shown to increase voter registration and participation are:

Automatic voter registration.

Mcconnell Reacts To ‘skinny Bill’s’ Failure

We told our constituents we would vote that way and when the moment came, the moment came, most of us did,” he said.

“This is clearly a disappointment,” McConnell added. “It’s time to move on.”

The return of McCain to Washington after a brain cancer diagnosis added drama to the already tense proceedings. It was his vote the 50th that allowed Republicans begin debating the measure.

McCain gave a heartfelt speech upon his return to the Senate on Tuesday, decrying the rise of partisanship. And it was McCain who put an end to the partisan repeal effort.

McCain spoke to Trump last night on the phone and the president urged him to vote to for the skinny repeal bill assuring him it wouldnt end up passing into law, according to one source with direct knowledge of the call.

Vice President Mike Pence, who arrived in the chamber in a bid to rescue the bill and in preparation to cast the deciding vote, stood alongside McCain’s desk and then joined the senator in the cloakroom. By the time they re-emerged, separately, the vote had begun.

McCain went back to his desk and sat after casting his “no” vote. He eventually made his way to the Democrats’ side of the chamber and was greeted with hugs and cheers.

“I believe each of us stood up for the reasons that we felt were right”

Several Republicans said they did not know where McCain would fall, and there were audible gasps in the chamber when he turned down his thumb to indicate his decision.

Read Also: When Did Republicans And Democrats Switch Platforms

About The House Of Representatives

The United States is also divided into 435 congressional districts with a population of about 750,000 each. Each district elects a representative to the House of Representatives for a two-year term.

As in the Senate, the day-to-day activities of the House are controlled by the majority party. Here is a count of representatives by party:

What Is Your Analysis Of This Vote

What trends do you see in this vote?

Members of Congress side together for many reasons beside being in the same political party, especially so for less prominent legislation or legislation specific to a certain region. What might have determined how the roll call came out in this case? Does it look like Members of Congress voted based on party, geography, or some other reason?

How did your senators vote?

There are two votes here that should be more important to you than all the others. These are the votes cast by your senators, which are meant to represent you and your community. Do you agree with how your senators voted? Why do you think they voted the way they did?

If you dont already know who your Members of Congress are you can find them by entering your address here.

How much of the United States population is represented by the yeas?

GovTrack displays the percentage of the United States population represented by the yeas on some Senate votes just under the vote totals. We do this to highlight how the people of the United States are represented in the Senate. Since each state has two senators, but state populations vary significantly, the individuals living in each state have different Senate representation. For example, Californias population of near 40 million is given the same number of senators as Wyomings population of about 600,000.

Do the senators who voted yea represent a majority of the people of the United States? Does it matter?

Also Check: Republican Tie Color

List Of Current Members Of The Us Congress

Features of Congress Lifetime voting recordsNet worth of United States Senators and RepresentativesStaff salaries of United States Senators and RepresentativesNational Journal vote ratings

The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the United States of Americas federal government. It consists of two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives, with members chosen through direct election.

Congress has 535 voting members. The Senate has 100 voting officials, and the House has 435 voting officials, along with five delegates and one resident commissioner.

to find your representatives with Ballotpedias Who represents me? tool.

Also Check: Republican Wear Red Or Blue

Majority Of The Public Prefer Building On The Aca Or Keeping The Law As Is

Building on the ACA has been a focal point for;Joe;Bidens presidential bid, as he;has proposed creating;a government-run public option;health care plan;that will compete with private insurers and be available for all Americans.;The;December;KFF Health Tracking Poll;finds nearly;half of adults want the;incoming presidential administration and Congress to build on what the ACA does . A smaller share;wants;to keep the law as it is and about three in ten want to either scale back what the law does or repeal it entirely . Partisans differ on these approaches, with three in four Democrats wanting the incoming administration and Congress to build on what the law does and six in ten Republicans wanting the law to be scaled back or repealed entirely .;;

Figure 5: Most Want To Build On The ACA Or Keep It As Is, Though Partisans Differ

Endnotes

This estimate is a household measure of all groups and does not classify pre-existing conditions by whether they are or not a deniable condition.

Also Check: Did Trump Say Republicans Are Stupid

Most Say It Is Important That Pre

If the Supreme Court overturns the ACA, a host of provisions could be eliminated, including the laws protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions. These provisions prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage based on a persons medical history and prohibit insurance companies from charging those with pre-existing conditions more for coverage . The KFF Health Tracking Poll found that a majority of the public says it is very important for many of the ACA provisions to be kept in place, including the guaranteed issue provision and community rating . While partisans divide over the importance of keeping many provisions of the ACA in place, majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independence say it is very important to continue each of these protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Figure 3: Most Say It Is Important That ACA Provisions Remain In Place

Efforts To Invalidate Premium Subsidies

How the Obamacare repeal failed, in two minutes

In King v. Burwell , plaintiffs argued that premium subsidies could not legally be distributed in states that didnt establish their own health insurance exchanges. The Supreme Court ruled in the governments favor in 2015, upholding the legality of premium subsidies in every state.

Its notable, however, that Indiana, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia all joined amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell. Those states all of which use the federally run exchange supported the idea that premium subsidies should not be available in states that use the federally run exchange.

If the challengers had won, the individual mandate penalty would no longer have applied to most exchange enrollees in states that use the federally facilitated exchange, as coverage would not be considered affordable without the premium subsidies . And the employer mandate penalty would also not have applied, since its triggered when employees receive subsidies in the exchange.

But there are 1.09 million people in those seven states who were receiving premium subsidies as of 2019. Not only would their subsidies no longer have been available had the King v. Burwell plaintiffs prevailed, but without premium subsidies, the individual market would likely have collapsed altogether in states that didnt run their own exchanges. That concern did not, however, stop those states from siding with the plaintiffs.

Recommended Reading: Who Ran Against Trump For Republican

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didnt Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Donât Miss: Who Is Behind Republicans For The Rule Of Law

Cori Bush Becomes Missouris First Black Congresswoman Cbs News Projects

Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat and activist, has become Missouris first Black congresswoman, according to CBS News projections. With 88% of votes reported, Bush is leading Republican Anthony Rogers 78.9% to 19% to represent the states first congressional district, which includes St. Louis and Ferguson.

Bush, 44, claimed victory on Tuesday, promising to bring change to the district. As the first Black woman and also the first nurse and single mother to have the honor to represent Missouri in the United States Congress, let me say this: To the Black women, the Black girls, the nurses, the essential workers, the single mothers, this is our moment, she told supporters in St. Louis.

Also Check: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are In The House

Were Also On Social Media

GovTrack.us is an independent website tracking the status of legislation in the United States Congress and helping you participate in government. Now were on Instagram too!

Follow on Instagram for new 60-second summary videos of legislation in Congress.

Follow on Twitter for posts about legislative activity and other information were tracking, and some commentary.

And please consider supporting our work by becoming a monthly backer on Patreon or leaving a tip.

Trump And Congressional Republicans Have Spent Years Working To Undermine The Aca

Health insurance & health reform authority

The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have long said that the ACA is collapsing under its own weight. But the individual insurance markets in most states had begun to stabilize by 2017, and began to show profits by 2018.

After steep rate increases in 2017 and 2018 , rate increases for 2019 averaged less than 3 percent nationwide, and average rates for 2020 were essentially unchanged from 2019. And while there were numerous insurer exits from the exchanges at the end of 2016 and at the end of 2017, that was not the case at the end of 2018; there was an overall trend towards insurers joining the exchanges for 2019, and that happened in many states for 2020 as well.

While the individual market might have stabilized to some degree, Republican talking points about the problems in the individual market are not entirely without merit. The markets are note out of the woods insurers still have some concerns about the ACA-compliant market, and premiums can be entirely unaffordable for people who dont receive premium subsidies.

Once the premium increases of 2017 and 2018 gave way to much smaller increases and even decreases in 2019 and 2020, it was no surprise that the Trump administration took;, attributing the lower rates and smaller rate increases to their own administrative prowess. But the recent premium stabilizations have come about despite the GOPs efforts to drag down the ACA.

Also Check: Who Is Right Republicans Or Democrats

Record High Percentage Of Voters Registered In California

Voter interest continues to grow in California as officials announced Thursday over 83% of the electorate has registered to vote, the highest entering a general election since 1952.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. Voter interest continues to grow in California as officials announced Thursday over 83% of the electorate has registered to vote, the highest entering a general election since 1952.

Following a Super Tuesday in which a record 9.6 million Californians voted, Secretary of State Alex Padilla says the registration spike has continued even with the extended coronavirus shutdown.;;

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, California is on track to reach another registration milestone, Padilla said in a statement. California will reach 21 million registered voters before the November General Election-extending our current state record for voter registration.;

After lawmakers bumped the primary up from June to March to encourage participation, California counted a record number of votes and notched its second highest turnout for a primary. Padilla and other officials said the move was a clear success as it forced presidential candidates to campaign in the nations largest state.

In the first registration report since the primary, Padilla says 2.8 million more people have signed up to vote compared to a similar point in the 2016 election cycle. A total of 20.9 million of the states 25 million eligible are slated to participate Nov. 3.

Additional Reads

How Did Obamacare Pass In Congress

The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, could pass into law because the Democratic Party briefly held the White House, a majority in the House of Representatives and a supermajority in the Senate in 2010.

Origins of Obamacare Officially known as the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare was President Barack Obama’s overhaul of the health insurance system. The concept of affordable care goes back to the 1980s, when conservative economists and senators championed a healthcare reform on the basis of individual responsibility.

In 1993, president Bill Clinton proposed a healthcare reform bill, and in 2006 the state of Massachusetts enacted a state-level insurance expansion bill. By 2008, most Democrats backed the Massachusetts model as the basis of state reform, and the topic was one of the most important during the 2008 Democratic primaries. During the general elections, Obama committed to fixing healthcare during his presidency.

Passing Obamacare Into Law The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act needed to pass through both chambers of Congress to become a law. The seeds for this passing were sown during the 2008 elections. That evening, the Democratic party came away with a 257 to 199 seat advantage in the House, and Obama was elected president.

Also Check: Number Of Senate Republicans

Requirements For Insurance Companies

Prohibit bans on pre-existing health conditions in children, lifetime and annual limits on expenses, and limits coverage exclusions of pre-existing health conditions in adults.

Requires family policies to include coverage of children up to age 26.

Allows states to form compacts in order to allow the interstate sale of insurance.

Requires direct access to obstetrical and gynecological care, which might include abortion.

Creates health insurance exchanges or marketplaces that will be state-based and state-administered, but states can opt out of this if certain conditions are met; insurance can be sold within the exchange only if government-approved. If a state fails to set up its own exchange, residents of the state can purchase insurance on a federally-administered exchange. Insurance can be sold outside of the exchange, but only policies purchased on the exchange will be eligible for a premium tax credit.

Prohibits health plans from discriminating against providers, but plans are not required to contract with any provider.

Requires health plans to develop politically correct language services, community outreach and cultural competency trainings.

Requires “silver” insurance plans sold on the exchange to implement a premium tax credit program for individuals making less than $45,960 . The insurance company receives the credit from the federal government and is responsible for billing the difference to each insured person.

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theliberaltony · 3 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Last Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol was attacked by a mob of President Trump’s supporters, many of whom had very explicit and not so explicit ties to right-wing extremism in the U.S. There are reports now, too, that there could be subsequent attacks in state capitals this weekend. President Trump’s time in office has undoubtedly had a mainstreaming effect on right-wing extremism, too, with as many as 20 percent of Americans saying they supported the rioters. But as we also know, much of this predates Trump, too. Right-wing extremism has a long, sordid history in the U.S.

The big question I want to ask all of you today is twofold: First, how did we get here, and second, where do we go from here?

Let’s start by unpacking how right-wing extremism has changed in the Trump presidency. How has it?

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): Well, the first and most obvious thing is that Trump has spoken directly to right-wing extremists. That is to say, using their language, condoning previous armed protests at government buildings and explicitly calling on them to support and protect him. And that, probably unsurprisingly, has emboldened right-wing extremists and made their extremism seem — well, less extreme.

That goes for a wide array of extremists in the U.S., too. I’m thinking, of course, about Trump’s comment after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” But Trump has also encouraged white Christian nationalists, anti-government extremists and other groups and individuals that I certainly never thought I’d hear a president expressing sympathy or support for.

jennifer.chudy (Jennifer Chudy, political science professor at Wellesley College): Absolutely, Amelia. And while the actual extremists may represent a small group of the public, the share of Republicans who support their behavior, whether explicitly or implicitly, is not as small. This is, in part, due to mainstream political institutions — like the Republican Party, with Trump at its helm — helping make their mission and behavior seem legitimate.

maggie.koerth (Maggie Koerth, senior science writer): I’ve been talking to experts about this all week, and I think it’s really interesting how even the academics who study this stuff are kind of arguing over the role class plays in it. People like Christian Davenport at the University of Michigan have argued that we should understand that all of this is happening in the context of decades of growing income inequality and political stagnation. In other words, he contends that there are legitimate reasons to be angry at and mistrust the government. But it also seems like this crowd was not even close to being uniformly working class and probably contained people from a range of different backgrounds. And that’s why I liked one of the points Joseph Uscinski at the University of Miami made: We might be seeing a coalescing of two groups: the people who have been actually hurt by that inequality and are angry about it AND the people who are doing pretty well but who feel like somebody might come and take that away. And, of course, both those positions can dovetail very easily into racial animus and white supremacy.

ameliatd: That’s interesting, Maggie. As you alluded to, though, it’s important to be clear that economic anxiety — which was used in the aftermath of Trump’s election to explain why so many Americans voted for a candidate who framed much of his candidacy around animus toward nonwhite people — doesn’t mean that racism or white supremacy isn’t a driving force here, too.

Part of what’s so complex about the mob that attacked the Capitol is that it was a bunch of different people, with somewhat disparate ideologies and goals, united under the “stop the steal” mantra. But underlying a lot of that, even people’s anger over economic inequality or mistrust in institutions, is the fundamental idea that white status and power are being threatened.

jennifer.chudy: There is also just a lot of evidence in political science that racial attitudes are associated with emotions like anger. Two great books, one by Antoine Banks of the University of Maryland and the other by Davin Phoenix of the University of California, Irvine, consider this point in depth. Insofar as right-wing extremists express anger at the system (in contrast to fear or disgust), their anger appears more likely to be motivated by racial grievances than by economic ones.

Additionally, the Republican Party’s base has, for years now, become more racially homogeneous, in part because of the party providing a welcome home to white grievances. But some have argued that this has also been exacerbated by the Democratic Party speaking more explicitly about racial inequality in the U.S., something that wasn’t the case in the 1990s. Regardless, a more racially homogeneous base can make a party’s members more receptive to this type of extremist behavior.

We also can’t underestimate the role that COVID-19 plays here. As Maggie and Amelia suggested in their article from this summer on militias and the coronavirus, many folks are at home and glued to their computers in ways that facilitate this type of organizing. They can burrow themselves into online communities of like-minded folks which may intensify their attitudes and lead to extreme behavior.

Kaleigh: (Kaleigh Rogers, tech and politics reporter): Polling has shown that ideas that previously had been considered extreme, like using violence if your party loses an election, or supporting authoritarian ideas, have definitely become more mainstream.

This is partly due to Trump’s own rhetoric, but also due to the effects of online communities where far-right extremists and white nationalists mingle with more moderate Trump supporters, effectively radicalizing some of them over time.

What’s interesting to me about all of these different factions, though, is there is actually a lot of division among these groups: Many members of the Proud Boys aren’t fans of the QAnon conspiracy, for instance. And a lot of white nationalists don’t like Trump, but they still end up uniting against a perceived common enemy. That’s why you saw people in the mob at the Capitol waving MAGA flags alongside people with clear Nazi symbolism. They are not all white nationalists, but they’re willing to march beside them because they think they’re on the same side.

But in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, those divisions are becoming more stark in these online communities. I’m seeing a lot of infighting over whether planned marches are a good idea, whether they are “false flag” events or traps or whether they should be armed. There just seems to be this heightened anxiety as they draw closer to an inevitable line that they can’t come back from: Biden’s inauguration.

sarahf: That’s a super important point, Kaleigh, on how different extremist groups have rallied behind this. But given how much Trump has directly spoken to right-wing extremists, as Amelia mentioned up top, can we drill in on the violence, as well? It’s not just that different factions have united or that these views have mainstreamed under Trump, but also that there’s been an actual uptick in violence, too, right?

ameliatd: One thing Maggie and I heard from experts on the modern militia movement is that these groups’ activity levels depend on the political context. The uptick in violence under Trump is real, but it’s not something that’s only happened under Trump. There was a surge in militia activity early in Obama’s presidency, too, for example.

maggie.koerth: Very much so, Amelia. The reality is that the right-wing extremism we’re seeing now is a symptom of long-running trends in American society, including white resentment and racial animus. And on top of that, you have these trends interacting with partisan polarization, which means the political left and right (which used to have fairly similar levels of white racial resentment) began to diverge on measures of racial resentment in the late 1980s and now differ greatly.

Kaleigh: Exactly, Maggie. That’s also why the FBI and other experts are particularly concerned about planned militia marches ahead of the inauguration. These groups tend to be much more organized and deliberate in their actions than the mob we saw last week. And because of that, they’re even more dangerous.

ameliatd: Right, so this violence isn’t new. But I do think it’s fair to say that Trump has raised the stakes so dramatically for right-wing extremists that we’d see a throng of them storming the Capitol. A lot of them see him as their guy in the White House!

So when he says, look, this election is being stolen from me, and you’ve got to do something about it, they listen.

jennifer.chudy: That’s true, Amelia, but work in political science shows just how much of this change was afoot prior to Trump’s election. Some tie it to Hillary Clinton talking too much about race during the 2016 election — they argue that this drove away some white voters who had previously voted Democratic (and could do so in 2008 and ‘12 because Obama, despite being Black, did not mention race much during his candidacy). But Clare Malone’s article for FiveThirtyEight on how Republicans have spent decades prioritizing white people’s interests does a great job of tracing these roots even further back.

maggie.koerth: Yeah, I’m really leery of the tendency I’ve seen in the media to act like this is something that started with Trump, or even that started post-Obama. Most of the experts I’ve spoken with have framed this more like … Trump’s escalation of these dangerous trends is a symptom of the trends. We’re talking about a lot of indicators that have been going in this direction since at least the 1980s.

jennifer.chudy: True, Maggie, from the beginning of the Republic, I might argue! But one reason the tie to Trump and Obama is so interesting is that Trump’s baseless claims around Obama’s birth certificate correspond with his debut on the national political stage. So even as there is a long thread of white supremacy throughout American history that has facilitated Trump’s ascension, there may also be a more proximate connection to recent elections, too.

ameliatd: Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke University, has done some really compelling research on white identity politics — specifically how the country’s diversification has created a kind of “white awareness” among white Americans who are essentially afraid of losing their cultural status and power.

This is a complicated force — she’s clear that it’s not exactly the same thing as racial prejudice — but the result is that many white people have a sense that the hierarchy in which they’ve been privileged is being upset, and they want things to return to the old status quo, which of course was racist. And the Republican Party has been tapping into that sense of fear for a while. Trump’s departure was that he started doing it much more explicitly than previous Republican politicians had mostly done.

So yes, Maggie, you’re absolutely right that it’s not like Trump came on the scene and suddenly right-wing extremism or white supremacist violence became a part of our mjui78 political landscape. Or partisan hatred, for that matter! FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman has written about the effect of political polarization and how it’s created intense loathing of the other party, and he’s clear that it’s been a long time coming. It didn’t just emerge out of nowhere in 2016, as you can see in the chart below.

On the other hand, though, it’s hard to imagine the events of last week without four years of Trump fanning the flames.

maggie.koerth: Right, Amelia. Trump is a symptom AND he’s making it worse. At the same time.

Kaleigh: What you said, Amelia, also speaks to just how many Trump supporters don’t consider themselves racist and find it insulting to be called so. A lot of Trump supporters think Democrats are obsessed with race and identity politics, and think racism isn’t as systemic of a problem as it is. There are also, of course, nonwhite Trump supporters, which complicates the image that only white working-class Americans feel threatened by efforts to create racial equality.

ameliatd: That’s right, Kaleigh. We haven’t talked about the protests against police brutality and misconduct this summer, but I think that’s a big factor here as well — politicians like Biden saying that we have to deal with systemic racism is itself threatening to a lot of people.

sarahf: It does seem as if we’re in this gray zone, where so much of this predates Trump, and yet Trump has activated underlying sentiments that were perhaps dormant for at least a little while. Any child of the 1990s remembers, for instance, the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh, who held a number of extreme, anti-government views, or the deadly standoff between federal law enforcement officials and right-wing fundamentalists at Ruby Ridge.

And as Jennifer pointed out with Malone’s piece, the thread runs even further back. It’s almost as if it’s always been part of the U.S. but maybe not as omnipresent. That’s also possibly naive, but I’m curious to hear where you all think we go from here — in how does President Biden start to move the U.S. forward?

maggie.koerth: Honestly, that’s the scary part for me, Sarah. Because I don’t really think he can. Everything we know about how you change deeply held beliefs that have to do with identity suggests that the appeals of outsiders doesn’t work.

jennifer.chudy: Yes — one would think that a common formidable challenge, like COVID-19, would help unite different political factions. But if you look at the last few months, that’s not what we see.

maggie.koerth: Even Republican elites who they push back on this stuff get branded as apostates.

ameliatd: And there’s evidence that when Republican elites are perceived as apostates, they may also become targets for violence.

Kaleigh: But we also know that deplatforming agitators helps reduce the spread of their ideas and how much people are exposed to/talk about them. Losing the presidency is kind of the ultimate deplatforming, no?

jennifer.chudy: Is it deplatforming, though? Or is it just moving the platform to a different setting? I don’t know the ins and outs of the technology, but it seems like the message has become dispersed but maybe not extinguished.

sarahf: That’s a good point, Jennifer, and something I think Kaleigh hits on in her article — that is, this question of … was it too little, too late?

maggie.koerth: I think it has been a deplatforming, Jennifer. If for no other reason than it’s removed Trump’s ability to viscerally respond to millions of people immediately. And you see some really big differences between the things he said on Twitter about these extremists last week and the statements he’s made this week, which have had to go through other people.

It’s not so much taken away from his ability to speak, but it does seem to have affected his ability to speak without somebody thinking about the consequences first.

ameliatd: There is an argument that Trump’s presidency and the violence he’s spurred is making the underlying problems impossible to ignore. I’m not sure whether that makes it easier for Biden to deal with them, but it does make it harder for him to just say, ‘Okay, let’s move past this.’

Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland who’s written extensively about partisan discord and political violence, told me in a recent interview that while someone like Biden shouldn’t be afraid to push back against Trump or his followers because it will lead to more violence (an argument against impeachment that’s circulated in the past week), she does think pushing back against Trump and his followers probably will result in more violence.

So that leaves us, and Biden, in a pretty scary place.

Republicans are in a bind, too. Electorally, many of them depend on a system where certain voters — white voters, rural voters, etc. — do have more power. So yeah, Sarah, that doesn’t make me especially optimistic about a big Republican elite turnaround on Trumpism, separate from the question of whether that would actually diffuse some of these tensions.

sarahf: One silver lining in all this is we don’t yet know the full extent to which Trump and Trumpism has taken a hit. That is, plenty of Republicans still support him, but his approval rating has taken a pretty big hit, the biggest since his first few months in office in 2017 — that’s atypical for a president on his way out the door. More Republicans also support impeachment of Trump this time around.

There is a radicalized element here in American politics — and as you’ve all said — it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but I do wonder if we still don’t fully understand where this goes next.

Kaleigh: What gives me some peace in this time is looking back at history. America has dealt with far-right extremists before. It has dealt with violent insurrectionists before. We have continued, however slowly, to make progress. Sometimes the only way out is through.

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multipleservicelisting · 3 years

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Sen. Tom Cotton: Xavier Becerra nomination – here’s why Senate should reject culture warrior for HHS post

Joe Biden campaigned on pledges to unite the country and defeat the pandemic; he continues to stress these twin priorities. But his nominee to be secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, is a partisan culture warrior who undermines both pledges.

The Senate ought to reject Becerra’s nomination.

First off, Becerra isn’t qualified for the job. Facing a once-in-a-century pandemic, one might think that Biden would nominate, say, a doctor or a seasoned health-care executive to oversee the federal response and vaccine distribution. Donald Trump’s two HHS Secretaries fit that description.

SEN. MARCO RUBIO: JOE BIDEN IS PRESIDENT, NOW WHAT

But Becerra is a lawyer and career politician. He served 12 terms in the House of Representatives before becoming California’s attorney general in 2017. He has no experience in public health, large-scale logistics or other challenges of the pandemic.

What Becerra lacks in public-health experience, however, he makes up for in enthusiasm for his party’s most radical views.

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For instance, Becerra has bragged that he “absolutely” supports “Medicare-for-all,” Bernie Sanders’ $34 trillion proposal to eliminate private health-insurance coverage and replace it with government-run plans. This idea is so toxic that it sank several Democratic presidential campaigns.

But if confirmed, Becerra would oversee Medicare, Medicaid and other health-care programs, which he could use to get the camel’s nose of socialized medicine under the tent of America’s health-care system. A government takeover of our health-care system rightly terrifies many Americans, and this position alone is disqualifying for an HHS nominee.

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Becerra also belongs to the open-borders wing of his party. He has proposed to decriminalize illegal immigration, which could allow illegal aliens to receive government benefits such as Medicaid. Further, HHS has sensitive immigration responsibilities that a radical like Becerra would likely politicize.

But Becerra is most extreme when it comes to abortion. In Congress, he earned perfect scores from Planned Parenthood and NARAL by voting, for example, against the 2003 bill that banned partial-birth abortions. Becerra also cosponsored bills that would have mandated HHS to conduct research using human embryonic stem cells and forced religious employers like Hobby Lobby to cover contraception, such as the morning-after pill, that violates their sincere religious convictions.

Besides his extreme views, though, perhaps most alarming is how Becerra has wielded his power as attorney general to harass his political opponents with a flood of lawsuits and prosecutions.

Becerra has targeted social conservatives, religious groups and others who deny the Democratic Party’s dogmas about life, marriage and the family. That’s why he has enforced California’s unconstitutional lockdowns against houses of worship while Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed attended dinner parties at the French Laundry.

America deserves a professional at HHS – not a partisan culture warrior.

Consider two of Becerra’s rogue abuses of the law and his office.

Becerra prosecuted pro-life activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, who released undercover footage of Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sale of the body parts of aborted babies.

These activists employed tactics little different than those used by animal-rights activists concerned about factory farming, but they exposed the wrong kind of business. Becerra charged the activists with 15 felonies, mostly for recording conversations in violation of California’s two-party consent law. The Los Angeles Times editorial board – not exactly ardent pro-lifers – commented that “it’s disturbingly aggressive for Becerra to apply this criminal statute to people who were trying to influence a contested issue of public policy.”

Another example is the Supreme Court case bearing his name, NIFLA v. Becerra.

Becerra defended California’s Reproductive FACT Act, a law targeting pro-life pregnancy crisis centers. The FACT Act compelled licensed pro-life clinics to distribute notices to their patients advertising the state’s free and low-cost abortion programs. The act also required unlicensed pregnancy centers – which frequently provide ultrasounds, pregnancy tests and counseling to women in need – to “conspicuously” post “in no less than 48-point type” that they are “not licensed as a medical facility by the State of California.”

The law notoriously did not impose the same demands on other clinics, such as those that provide free birth control.

The Supreme Court ruled against Becerra, explaining that the act compelled pro-life clinics to promote the very service they exist to oppose, a gross violation of the First Amendment. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his concurring opinion, “this law is a paradigmatic example of the serious threat presented when government seeks to impose its own message in the place of individual speech, thought, and expression.”

That line serves as a succinct indictment of Becerra’s abusive tenure as attorney general.

HHS has the largest budget in the federal government – even bigger than the Pentagon’s – and one of the most powerful bureaucracies. Given how Becerra conducted himself as a state attorney general, who can doubt that he would use HHS’s vast resources and powers to keep waging his culture war?

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As we fight to defeat the coronavirus, America deserves a professional at HHS – not a partisan culture warrior. Becerra’s zeal for lockdowns, radical politics and abuse of power won’t distribute a single vaccine or improve health care for a single citizen. But he will threaten on-the-job health insurance and persecute disfavored political opponents.

Any senator who supports his nomination will bear responsibility for his all-too-predictable radical actions in office.

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jamr0ck83 · 3 years

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What, Exactly, Have You Done to Help Build a Less Racist America?

So, here it is, the end of November. I think we can all agree that 2020 was not the year we wanted (although I might argue that it’s not all of us who didn’t deserve it). Yes, this year has been an absolute mess. But also, it’s not some grand accident that just happened to befall us. Everything that has transpired this year has been in the making for years, decades, centuries even.

We are getting rocked by Covid-19 because our healthcare system is so inadequate and predicated upon profit that it’s not at all set up to deal with this situation. Also, one of the things that’s always been held as a virtue in America is its citizens’ sense of individualism. Everyone is responsible for their own destiny and has the right to make any and every decision for themselves. That’s what we’ve told ourselves makes us a great nation. The problem with that is, in this pandemic scenario, many people then don’t feel obligated to withstand any kind of personal inconvenience to help keep others alive, even if those others are their own family members. We want what we want when we want it, and we won’t take “no” for answer. Unfortunately for us, pandemics aren’t really concerned with making sure Americans don’t have to play by the same rules the rest of the people on this planet do, and when viruses come to kill you, they will kill you if you don’t respond appropriately, and there’s no chapter in The Power of Positive Thinking that effectively helps you wish death away.

It’s an election year, which should’ve been a surprise to no one, especially not to those of us who have been counting down to this year since the 2016 Presidential Election. And let’s be real; this was an awful election year. Due to the realities (as opposed to promise) of living in a democratic republic, we really only have two viable political parties, and real talk, neither of them are meeting the needs of the people, and that’s definitely not new. The Democratic Party offered way too many candidates, especially when they had absolutely no intention of letting anyone but Biden secure the nomination. And it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that they did this. The Democrats have BEEN riding the wave of appealing to the idealistic and progressive portions of the population for votes and then once those votes are received, their focus is keeping their own jobs. And not even keeping their jobs for the sake of leading the nation and providing the people with what they need; they just want to keep their jobs. And Trump has spent a lifetime of telling half-truths and outright lies, so there was no scenario where he was going to abandon that to become a “respectable politician” this go-round. So, his entire campaign was propaganda nonsense, and because all of our mainstream news outlets are so concerned with ratings, they played and replayed and replayed every ridiculous thing he said, which was helpful to no one. Point being, the way our media corporations are cogs in the wheel of unfettered capitalism, that’s not new at all, either.

And then the #BlackLivesMatter Movement became a thing more than black people were talking about. And to be clear, the movement itself isn’t new and black people being murdered by police with astronomical frequency isn’t new, but apparently things don’t matter until white people care about them, so this became a huge “aha” moment for many of them. But again, all of this? Not new.

My point is that all of these things have been building for some time, and it’s unfortunate that they all decided to implode in the same year, but the implosions were inevitable. But when it comes to #BlackLivesMatter, it seemed like we had reached a crucial moment back in the spring. People saw that video of George Floyd and then heard about Ahmaud Arbury and Breonna Taylor, and there seemed to be an urgent desire to get some societal changes made which would include tackling racism. And a lot of people vowed that this time would be different. White allies were going to rise up in droves and be the ones to see to it that this world, in which their privilege serves to oppress others, was going to change. They said, “we’re going to have to be the ones to end racism, and we will.” And as I recall, black folks were optimistic but skeptical, and there was a sense that many allies were basing their allegiance in their need to make themselves feel better instead of a need to see the humanity of all respected. And to be fair, many of us black folks tried to warn them not to do this. “It’s not about your feelings,” we said. “Basing it on that alone isn’t sustainable,” we said. But allies assured us they were in it for the long haul this time and would prove it with their actions. And I, for one, was willing to see how that went. So, I offered resources where they were needed and provided perspective on some of the issues and then trusted that white people were doing the work. And this was a mistake. And I don’t think the failure of most white allies to actually do the work is the mark of people being malicious; I just think they got bored and were ready to move on. And I think they also saw that this wasn’t going to be as easy as getting everyone to “find common ground”. And as the work began to require them to do more than post a black square and say “black lives matter” out loud, that became too inconvenient and too uncomfortable.

So now, it’s November. And white allies, many of you were beside yourselves with shock to see Trump get so many votes, and it was nearly like 2016 all over again. But what exactly did you perceive had changed since May that would mean less voters would align themselves with the white supremacy antics of the Republican Party? How did you expect those votes to go from Republican to Democrat when you knew just from talking to your family that they had no intention of voting for Democrats? What exactly did you think had been accomplished in the struggle to fight racism? And what were the specific things you did in order to help make this happen? Here; I will list a few examples of action steps, and you can see which of them you did.

Have you read any books by black authors regarding the history of racism in this country and the ways in which we’ve fought against it in the past?

Have you read anything by black authors regarding the contemporary issues facing Black America like higher unemployment and prison rates and the wealth gap to learn more about the systemic reasons why these problems persist?

Have you watched any documentaries about Black History and/or contemporary black issues like Eyes on the Prize, I Am Not Your Negro, and Central Park 5 by Ken Burns?

Have you arrived at the conclusion that the version of American History you were taught is fraught with grandiose lies promoting white supremacy and basically ignores any black people of prominence who weren’t Dr. King or Rosa Parks?

Have you wondered why it’s those two people that have been chosen as our black heroes by mainstream white culture?

Have you realized that even the version of Dr. King and Rosa Parks that you were taught that painted them as passive and nonthreatening is wholly inaccurate?

Have you checked out any black entertainment that you might have never thought to notice before like:

TV shows such as Living Single (which was ripped off and reworked into the mega hit we know as Friends) and A Different World (which tackled many issues of its day including AIDS, bigotry, and date rape AND had such an impact on the black community that, during its original run, enrollment in HBCUs increased drastically)?

Famous playwrights like Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson?

Famous authors like Colson Whitehead and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie?

Famous poets like Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni or even someone more up-and-coming and contemporary like Kai Davis?

Famous artists like Jacob Lawrence and Kehinde Wiley?

Famous musicians like John Coltrane, Earth Wind & Fire, A Tribe Called Quest, and Talib Kweli?

Famous films like Malcolm X, The Hate U Give, and BlacKkKlansman (none of which rely on the overly-played and inaccurate trope of the white savior who ends up diffusing hostile racial conflicts by merely learning to care)?

Have you had any meaningful conversation with friends and family in which you explained the basis and need for the BLM movement and why it’s not a political stance to say that black people should not have to still be fighting to be acknowledged and respected in 2020 AND have you done that without validating any of their bigotry and misconceptions with phrases like “Yes, I agree that both sides are the problem” or “Yes, it’s valid to feel that being pro-western culture does not necessarily mean being pro-white”?

Have you looked inward and really thought about the biases you harbor within yourself, where they came from, and what you can do to re-conceptualize these ideas?

Have you checked on your black friends in these past several months?

Have you realized that you don’t really have any black friends or that you don’t have any black neighbors or that there are no black kids that go to your kids’ schools and see how problematic ALL of those things are?

Have you been aware of all the terrible things that have happened since the death of George Floyd that have traumatized the black community such as the death of Quawan Charles and the fact that the grand jury convened in Kentucky was not even given the option to issue murder indictments against the police officers who shot and killed Breonna Taylor?

Have you been following any contemporary black activists like Shaun King, Tamika Mallory, Gary Chambers, and Stacey Abrams who have been doing the legwork of enfranchising black voters, leading protests, and using their voices to lead and denounce systemic racism?

Have you been willing to determine whether white fragility is something you might unknowingly harbor and resolve to change that?

Have you grown concerned that support for BLM has dwindled significantly between the end of May and now, and have you decided to do something about that?

Have you realized that, if you were shocked by how many people STILL voted for Trump in this election, that probably means you’re not as in tune with the prevalence of white supremacy in modern America as you thought you were?

Have you re-examined your base level of respect for the Republican Party after witnessing them spend the last couple of months trying to steal this election and how that was in direct response to the belief that they couldn’t allow too many black votes to be counted because they’d likely be against them, which is not at all the way of a democracy?

Have you maintained the same anger and determination to “be the change” that you felt when you watched that video of George Floyd having the life choked out of him?

Have you finally come to the conclusion that grounding your fire to combat racism in your feelings CANNOT be the way to move forward, because the second you feel better, your desire for change will wane, even if nothing has really improved?

How many of these things can you honestly say you’ve done? And I don’t ask that as some sort of indictment on your character or to shame you. I ask because I am being honest and realistic when I tell you that any plan you might have that does not include the majority if not all of these things is not a plan that will work. There are established methods for being effective allies; nobody is asking you to figure that out on your own. People have been working to secure the rights of the oppressed for centuries, and it’s pretty certain that you’re NOT going to invent some new way that gets the job done AND allows you the comfort you are used to. This can’t be like Covid-19 when many Americans assumed the rules of science don’t apply to them because they didn’t want them to. And you don’t get to sit on this until you feel like playing a more active role is convenient, because people are dying while you make your plans for the holidays. And maybe that’s a low blow, but I don’t know else to put it. Black people are not a cause you can keep putting on the back burner because you’re not ready to deal with it. And obviously no one has the power or ability to make you engage in ways in which you are not comfortable, but if that’s the case, then you need to own that. And stop acting like racism is some rare occurrence in America that is largely on the run. IT IS NOT. So, stop telling black people that lie, because none of us believe it, and it’s insulting to constantly be told that, anyway. You don’t have to be an ally, but you don’t get to opt out of being one and still claim to be a defender of all humanity. Either you are someone who believes something is wrong and you want to work to change it, or you are someone who doesn’t care. There is no middle ground, there are no further considerations to be made. It’s not hard to decide which of these people you are. So, which one are you and what are you going to do about it?

Above image from WAM Theatre

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dailynewswebsite · 3 years

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US election 2020: Why Trump gained support among minorities

Latinos overtook the black neighborhood to change into the most important minority voting bloc this election

Regardless of his election defeat, President Donald Trump can boast a hit that has intrigued pollsters – he was extra common with ethnic minority voters than in 2016.

Some may discover this stunning provided that his political critics so typically accused him of racism and Islamophobia. Mr Trump denies being a racist and has accused Democrats of taking African People voters with no consideration.

The Republican president gained a 6% vote share amongst black males, and a 5% improve amongst Hispanic girls.

It means some voters modified their minds and determined to forged their vote his manner, after both not voting or voting for one more candidate in 2016.

But it surely tells us one thing about Mr Trump’s distinctive enchantment.

Brief presentational gray line

“I used to be positively extra liberal rising up – my grandmother was massive within the civil rights motion right here in Texas throughout the 60s, and I grew up with that ideology.”

Mateo Mokarzel, 40, is a graduate pupil from Houston, Texas and is of blended heritage, Mexican and Lebanese. He did not vote in 2016, and he is not loyal to both main social gathering – however this time round he determined to forged his vote for the Republicans.

“The primary time Trump ran I actually wasn’t satisfied. I simply thought, this is this movie star talk-show host man that wishes to run for president, I did not take him critically – so I used to be not a Trump supporter the primary time he ran. To be trustworthy, I assumed he was a ringer for Hillary, so I simply wasn’t ,” he tells BBC Information.

However Mateo says his upbringing in Texas colored his view of each political events.

“It is laborious for individuals who aren’t from right here in Texas, folks overlook that Texas was once a blue state,” he says. “The blue right here wasn’t just like the ideological progressives that we consider now, they have been extra the old fashioned ‘southern Democrats’ – very racist, very illiberal. So, it was a completely completely different social gathering, and I had experiences rising up on each side [of my heritage] of loads of racism.”

Story continues

Mateo has disregarded accusations of racism levelled towards the president. As an alternative, he says he was attracted by Mr Trump’s isolationist international coverage and financial insurance policies.

“He actually delivered on his anti-globalisation coverage,” he says. “Neo-liberal growth has actually harm each Mexico and the US, and when you’ve got household that dwell there, and you may see the way it’s harm folks dwelling, their jobs, their wages, it actually has elevated the narco-war, and this is likely one of the issues Trump got here in saying – ‘hey, we’ll tear aside these commerce offers’ – after which he really did it. That was for me the primary signal that he really meant among the issues he was saying.”

Mateo’s spouse Lily, a instructor, first-generation Mexican-American and likewise a Trump supporter, provides that she voted for him for financial causes – “our salaries have elevated since Trump grew to become president” – and since she likes his “real self”, regardless of her colleagues and her union supporting Mr Biden.

“The best way I have been seeing him attacked, the lies,” she says. “I by no means used to vote, as a result of I by no means felt my vote counted… And I really feel like, since Trump has been in workplace our lives have improved.”

Elizabeth, 27, additionally modified her thoughts in regards to the president over the course of his 4 years in workplace. She’s a Mexican-American voter from Laredo, one among Texas’s majority-Latino border cities wherein Mr Trump over-performed with voters this yr. She did not vote in 2016, and initially wasn’t satisfied by Mr Trump.

However when it got here to casting her vote, she felt the Republican social gathering greatest mirrored her socially conservative, Catholic beliefs – notably on abortion. President Trump lately nominated anti-abortion decide Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Courtroom, and mentioned it was “definitely potential” they may revisit Roe v Wade, the legislation that legalised abortion nationwide in 1973.

“My household have been all Democrats, it was an enormous line of Democrats in my household – however this time I did see a distinction,” Elizabeth says. “A whole lot of presidents make guarantees however they by no means maintain them, together with [former President Barack] Obama. With Trump, when he got here into workplace he got here in promising, and at first I used to be like, ‘oh yeah extra empty guarantees’ – however then I began seeing the outcomes… I do love that he is pro-life and pro-God, and for me that is crucial.”

In 2020 Latinos overtook the black neighborhood to change into the most important minority voting bloc within the nation – and are due to this fact a politically highly effective group. However it’s also various, made up of individuals from very completely different political and cultural backgrounds.

Even on points comparable to immigration, on which President Trump has been notoriously hardline, the Latino neighborhood is much less monolithic than some assume. A 2017 Gallup ballot, for instance, discovered that 67% of Hispanic folks mentioned they anxious a terrific deal or honest quantity about unlawful immigration – larger than the proportion of non-Hispanic white folks (59%) who answered the identical manner.

When the primary outcomes have been known as on election night time, there was shock when it was introduced that Miami-Dade had misplaced a piece of the Democratic assist it had in 2016. Democratic analysts puzzled whether or not the social gathering had completed sufficient to enchantment to Cuban-People, who make up a big proportion of that county’s voters.

The Trump marketing campaign’s portray of Mr Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris as socialists would have additionally been profitable amongst Cuban-People and Venezuelan-People.

Writing in Vogue, Paola Ramos – herself Cuban-American – says: “I come from a household of Cuban exiles and grew up round dinner tables that mentioned the crumbling of Fidel Castro’s regime – amongst household dialogue that plotted the awaited return to an island that was overtaken by communism within the early ’60s. Like many younger Cuban People in Florida, we knew the that means of Castro, socialismo, and comunismo earlier than we even realized methods to add or subtract.”

Graphic

The group that noticed the most important improve in assist for Mr Trump in comparison with 2016, nevertheless, was black males.

The black neighborhood has lengthy been seen as essentially the most solidly blue voting bloc, constantly lending its assist to the Democrats in massive numbers every election. This yr was no completely different – actually, in keeping with exit polls, white voters have been the one group wherein a majority voted for Mr Trump.

For that reason Sam Fulwood III, who performed the Black Swing Voter Venture this yr, tells BBC Information that the rise in assist for Trump amongst black voters should not be overstated:

“I feel it is extra hyped than actuality,” mentioned Mr Fulwood, who has been extremely vital of Mr Trump. “No different demographic in US society voted for Joe Biden in larger numbers than black males, besides black girls.”

However though black voters are likely to overwhelmingly vote Democrat, they don’t seem to be a monolith. In keeping with a Pew Analysis Middle examine from January 2020, 1 / 4 of black Democrats determine as conservative, and 43% as reasonable.

A 2018 Harvard-Harris ballot additionally discovered that black People are extra in favour of decreasing authorized immigration than every other demographic – 85% mentioned they needed immigration to be lowered from its present stage, and 54% selected the strictest choices out there – permitting fewer than 250,000 immigrants into the nation per yr, and even saying they might need to enable no immigrants in any respect. In an article within the LA Occasions that very same yr, former diplomat Dave Seminara suggests it’s because younger black males within the US “typically compete with current immigrants for low-skilled jobs”.

Teams comparable to Blexit centered on growing black assist for Trump

Of their e book Steadfast Democrats, printed in February this yr, Ismail White and Chryl Laird recommended the rationale black voters have so constantly voted Democrat up to now was not due to a unified ideology, however due to “social stress from different black voters”. Organisations comparable to Blexit, headed up by right-wing character Candace Owens, gained growing prominence too. And this yr, a number of black celebrities appeared to voice their assist for Mr Trump, together with rappers Curtis Jackson (aka “50 Cent”) and Ice Dice – though 50 Cent later rowed again his endorsement, and Ice Dice, who had backed Mr Trump’s Platinum Plan, distanced himself from the president’s precise marketing campaign.

Black Leisure Tv (BET) founder Robert Johnson additionally voiced many black voters’ frustrations with the Democratic social gathering, when he advised US broadcaster CNBC: “I feel black People are getting just a little bit uninterested in delivering big votes for the Democrats, and seeing minimal return when it comes to financial wealth and shutting the wealth hole, job creation and job alternatives… Joe Biden was not an inspiring candidate for a lot of black People.”

Mr Fulwood tells BBC Information that though most black voters he spoke to for the Black Swing Voters Venture overwhelmingly believed President Trump was “racist” and “incompetent”, in addition they admired how he “reveals power and defies the institution”.

“As a result of People are fiercely unbiased, they like robust management, and Trump initiatives the picture of being a powerful chief,” he says.

The president appears to defy authority, he provides. “I feel that resonates with a large number of, notably younger, African-People, who already really feel that the institution is weighted towards them. So his rhetoric faucets into their antipathy… They do not like him, they do not like his insurance policies, however they like the concept that he sticks it to the institution.”

Stephanie Muravchik, creator of Trump’s Democrats, additionally suggests President Trump’s enchantment to some voters was all the way down to his picture as a “boss politician” – an previous fashion of native politician whom she says could be personally aware of their city’s residents.

“It is a tradition the place males are completely required to defend themselves towards any form of insult,” she tells BBC Information. “Trump actually intuitively understands that tradition and adopts it as his personal. He says issues like, ‘by no means present worry, it is all about power’ – when he bought Covid after which recovered, he whipped off his masks. That will appear absurd and infantile to some, but it surely reads otherwise in these communities.”

The Covid-19 stimulus cheque despatched to US residents, with a letter personally signed by President Trump, was an instance of so-called “boss politics” in motion.

President Trump signed the letters that have been despatched out with folks’s stimulus cheques in April

“Trump actually needed to signal the cheques,” she provides. “As mine was robotically deposited, I bought a letter from the US authorities signed by Trump, saying ‘Howdy Stephanie, I’ve given you this cash, I am looking for you. Sincerely, Trump’. It was actually absurd, but it surely was sensible, as a result of it was invoking that mannequin of politician as protector.”

However even with all of this in thoughts, are the racism accusations off-putting for minority voters?

For Mateo, these claims have solely strengthened his resolve to assist Mr Trump – and to push again towards what he calls “media bias”.

“He has a powerful nationalist stance, they usually attempt to painting that as racist,” Mateo says. “Defending your borders and build up your financial system is one thing most People need… I do not see how that is racist or some form of canine whistle.”

You may additionally be inquisitive about:

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/us-election-2020-why-trump-gained-support-among-minorities/ via https://growthnews.in

#Growth News

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baoanhwin · 4 years

Text

My tip for the US election 2024: Pete Buttigieg at 50/1

It’s never too early to look forward

2020 is all over bar the shouting, though there’ll be plenty of that yet. The next two and a half months may not be pretty but their essential course is set: Joe Biden will become president of the United States on 20 January next year. He may not quite be assured of victory in any of the outstanding states but he’s favourite – very strong favourite in some – to take Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania. That final state would be enough to see him over the line by itself, as would any two of the other three. That seems all but certain.

So let’s look forward to 2024.

Even by usual standards, 2024 looks a difficult election to predict four years out. The new president’s in-tray is formidably challenging: Covid is not only unresolved but the US is setting new daily records for cases, and numbers are accelerating. The US government’s finances were in a shocking state even before Covid and are far worse now. The country is deeply divided on values and healing it against those two interrelated policy challenges will be exceptionally hard. And his Democrat political allies only control one House of Congress. Internationally, both Russia and China are aggressively seeking to expand their influence and physically asserting themselves.

Joe Biden may stand again but if he does, not only will he be doing so against the backdrop of all of the above (plus whatever other black swans Events might throw his way), but his advancing age. As has been frequently noted through this election, Biden will be the oldest ever US president on his first day in office. An alternative international comparison might be that across the G7 countries since 1945, there have only been two octogenarian leaders: Konrad Adenauer and Winston Churchill. Biden will join them by mid-term and pass Churchill into second shortly after. If he does stand again, and win, he would be 86 by the end of his second term.

All of which is presumably why Ladbrokes make him 4/1 to retain office at the next election. It’s a long time since any one-term US president declined to seek re-election – you have to go back into the 19th century (the precise instance is definitional) – but it has to be a realistic possibility. Alternatively, Kamela Harris may have already become the 47th president (assuming Trump serves out his current term). That she is the same 4/1 price speaks volumes.

However, if Biden does stand down, I’m not convinced that Harris is that strong a favourite for the nomination. When she ran for this year’s nomination, she performed so badly she didn’t even make it to Iowa. No doubt the Vice Presidency will give her the gravitas of office and she performed adequately in the debate against Mike Pence, but a 20% chance that she is either already president and wins re-election, or Biden declines to run, Harris wins the nomination, and then the general election? That’s too high to my thinking.

Top of the other side of the ballot is none other than Donald Trump himself, at 10/1. I’m unconvinced by that either. He has a difficulty with potential court cases (and the president can only grant pardons for federal offences – or potential offenses – not state-level ones), but even if he can see those off, he has several practical problems with a second run. He might be able to retain his position as the voice of the populist right, holding rallies, frequent TV appearances (indeed, Trump TV?) and so on but even if he can, he’d be term-limited to four years and would be taking office at 78. He certainly wouldn’t get the free run he had this time.

Two other members of the Trump family appear in the top ten odds: Ivanka (25/1), and Donald Jr (33/1). These are the wrong way round. Ivanka was pushed by Trump early on in his presidency and was clearly way out of her depth. Junior, by contrast, has the shameless truth-free brand-building narrative-spinning off almost as well as his father. He is the member of the Trump dynasty to back for next time (in a betting sense).

But of course there are other Republicans. Donald Trump may have brought the Party within his personal orbit for practical purposes when he was president but it’s a different matter dominating it after a loss. Mike Pence and Nikki Haley are both 12/1, with the latter being the better bet if the Republicans are in a more conventional frame of mind while still attempting to appeal to the Trump base.

Thereafter, the list of odds begins to throw in all sorts of oddball options: Dwayne Johnson at 25/1? No thankyou (you’re welcome). Michelle Obama at 33/1? No. Kanye West or Meghan Markle at 50/1? Don’t. Be. Silly. Hillary Clinton at 100/1? Some will take it but then again, some never learn.

But out among the has-beens, won’t-bes and celebs, there are some genuine possibilities (as there should be: several presidents would have been very much outsiders four years before they took office). And the one that stands out to me is Pete Buttigieg.

By rights, Buttigieg was playing well above his league this year. Mayors from a mid-sized towns do not run for the presidency – or, if they have the temerity to do so, fail quickly; he didn’t, finishing strong seconds in both Iowa and New Hampshire and leading the delegate count after those two states. By contrast, three governors, three senators (including Kamala Harris) and a host of other candidates didn’t even make the starting line. Despite his thin CV, he showed he could mix it with the big boys and girls.

And since dropping out, his media appearances, particularly on potentially hostile networks like Fox, have been assured and effective. He clearly has the ability to take on higher office. The key question here is whether he’ll be offered a place in Biden’s administration (not least because if he is eyeing a 2024 bid, he has no other obvious launchpad being without office now)? Obviously, we can’t know that at the moment but it must be a reasonable chance.

Some will raise the question of his sexuality. Is America ready for a gay president? In many cases, no. But evangelical votes break very heavily for the Republicans anyway and while Iowa and New Hampshire were primaries or caucuses, Buttigieg proved his sexuality wasn’t a bar to success. Besides, with Trump reported to have won more than a quarter of the LGBT vote this time, the Democrats have ground to make up there themselves.

Clearly, we’re piling a lot of ‘ifs’ upon each other here but then odds of 50/1 allow us to do that and potentially still receive value. Yes, his route to the White House in 2024 has many obstacles in the way, some of which he’d be relying on others to move for him, but on the other hand, he has a crucial proven track record in the early states and is a highly capable media performer (as well as a good track record in his political career more generally). He should not be ranked alongside the likes of Kanye or Meghan – and while they’re woefully under-priced, the man who might be Secretary Pete is not.

David Herdson

from politicalbetting.com https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/11/07/my-tip-for-the-us-election-2024-pete-buttigieg-at-50-1/ https://dangky.ric.win/

#nhacai #one88 #danhbaidoithuong #ricwin #choibaidoithuong #gamedanhbaidoithuong #choigamedoit

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