#election night 2008

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday will honor Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose 1955 killing helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, and his mother with a national monument across two states.

Till, 14 and visiting from Chicago, was beaten, shot and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28, 1955, four days after a 21-year-old white woman accused him of whistling at her. His body was dumped in a river.

The violent killing put a spotlight on the U.S. civil rights cause after his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, held an open-casket funeral and a photo of her son's badly disfigured body appeared in Black media.

The national monument designation across 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares) and three sites marks a forceful new effort by the President to memorialize the country's bloody racial history even as Republicans in some states push limits on how that past is taught.

"America is changing, America is making progress," said the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., 84, a cousin of Till's who was with the boy on the night he was abducted at gunpoint from the relatives' house they were staying at in Mississippi.

"I've seen a lot of changes over the years and I try to tell young people that they happen, but they happen very slow," Parker said on Monday in a telephone interview as he traveled from Chicago to Washington to attend the signing ceremony at the White House as one of approximately 60 guests.

Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of Till's birth in 1941. One of the monument sites is the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till's funeral took place.

The other selected sites are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, close to where Till's body is believed to be have been recovered; and Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where two white men who later confessed to Till's killing were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Signs erected at Graball Landing since 2008 to commemorate Till's killing have been repeatedly defaced by gunfire.

Now that site and the others will be considered federal property, receiving about $180,000 a year in funding from the National Park Service. Any future vandalism would be investigated by federal law enforcement rather than local police, according to Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.

Other such monuments include the Grand Canyon, Statue of Liberty and the laboratory of inventor Thomas Edison.

Biden, an 80-year-old Democrat, will likely need strong support from Black voters to secure a second term in the 2024 presidential election.

He screened a film recounting the lynching, "Till," at the White House in February. Last March, he signed into law a bipartisan bill named for Till that for the first time made lynching a federal hate crime.

A Republican field led by former President Donald Trump has made conservative views on race and other contentious issues of history a part of their platform, including banning books and fighting efforts to teach school children accounts of the country's past that they regard as ideologically inflected or unpatriotic.

"This is an amazing, teachable moment to talk about the importance of this story as an American story that everybody can share in now, particularly at a time when people are trying to rewrite history," said Christopher Benson, president of the non-profit organization the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley Institute in Summit, Illinois.

“We have a memorial now that is not erasable. It can't be banned and it can't be censored, and we think that's a very important thing.”

#us politics #news #reuters #2023 #biden administration #president joe biden #Emmett Till #national monuments #Mississippi #Illinois #Mamie Till-Bradley #civil rights movement #Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. #Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ #Graball Landing #Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse #Patrick Weems #Emmett Till Interpretive Center #Christopher Benson #Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley Institute #racism #white supremacists #white supremacy #lynching

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think Barack Obama was a good president?

For the most part, yes. The fact that he got elected in the first place (and in a landslide) was nothing short of miraculous, but those of you on the younger side don't remember just how FUCKING FED UP the entire country was with Dubya and his bullshit. It didn't really matter if you were Democrat or Republican. Everyone hated him, especially when he went out in 2008 by causing a generational economy-crashing cataclysm. For him to go from a 91%+ approval rating just after 9/11, to the low 20s by the time he left office, shows just how sick and tired everyone was with him, and how we fondly (ha) imagined that he would be the worst American president in our lifetime. How very innocent we were.

The fact that Obama, a black guy with the middle name Hussein, who had not even a full term as a US senator as his only real meaningful political experience, could come in there and win is a feeling that honestly is nothing like anything anyone had experienced in politics before. I remember staying up with my family (I was studying abroad in the UK) over phone/Skype until the race was called for Obama around 3am, and one of my classmates ran outside the flat in delirium yelling "OBAMA WON!!!" The pictures of elderly African-Americans just crying their eyes out on that night, and the way they still look at Barack and Michelle now, is special. Yes, of course the reality didn't totally live up to the promise of that moment, but man, for a little while there, it really felt like we had changed the entire paradigms on which this stupid flawed country had been built from the beginning. I can't imagine we'll feel like that again for a long, long time.

Obama managing to save the economy (as noted before, it's a theme that Democratic presidents have to come in and clean up the ungodly mess left by Republicans) and pass the Affordable Care Act, even as watered-down as it was from what he wanted, were two very significant accomplishments. Where he fell short, however, was in his dealings with said Republicans, and obviously not all of this was his fault. Obama was intensely conscious of his position as a political newcomer AND that he was a black guy. The level of racism, vitriol, and sheer ugliness that he (and his family) faced from all quarters was (and is) yeah. We got the Tea Party, the "birthers," and the rest of the radical-right lunatics out in full force, and Obama was aware that he was going to get blamed for everything and then some. He also wanted to think that the Republicans would throw a hissy fit and then get over it and work with him. They didn't. Not for one single day. Not on anything. Just because he was a Democratic black guy. That was all it took, and they stuck to it even as Obama kept reaching for the football and thinking that THIS time, surely they would be reasonable. They weren't. On anything. Ever.

Likewise, the Democrats were caught unprepared by the special election for Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts senate seat, which they lost (taking them from a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority to 59, after which the Republicans accordingly filibustered everything and the Democrats didn't push hard enough to stop them/change the rules). They also seemed to just assume that hey, the country voted for Obama in 2008, they'd clearly do it again in 2010, and they didn't really hype up the ACA or campaign for it or anything like that. So they got shellacked to the tune of 60+ House seats lost in 2010, and then lost the Senate in 2014, allowing Mitch McConnell to flat-out blockade Merrick Garland's SCOTUS nomination (who Obama picked to fill Antonin Scalia's seat) and get away with it. Obama was also not nearly as assertive about nominating judges as Biden has been, though it's also the case that Trump hadn't yet packed the benches with an endless conveyor belt of unqualified uber-conservative hacks. Once again, I think this is a reflection of Obama's overall political inexperience and the fact that he felt he had to "play nice" or get pigeonholed as the "angry black guy," which he then did anyway. So it really was a catch-22.

Online Leftists always like to yelp about "Obama ordering a lot of drone strikes!!!", as if they a) know anything else about American foreign policy, b) are at all interested in criticizing Trump for using EVEN MORE (by like... a lot, and nearly starting WWIII when he killed the Iranian general with one), or c) ever consider the overall ungodly fucking mess that Obama was ALSO left with in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm not about to defend or agree with that either, but it's disingenuous (as per usual with them) to suggest that that was the only thing Obama did during his presidency and/or that he should be judged on that alone. They also like to pretend that he faced no racism at all, that he could have just "codified Roe vs. Wade and didn't!", that there were no double standards in how he was treated by the press, the political establishment, and the American people, and so on.

So: overall, yes, I think Obama had good intentions and tried to do the right thing. He failed at certain major parts of that, both because of the Republicans and because he didn't have the experience to challenge them or know how to work around them, and because he was in an utterly impossible position. The intense white backlash that gave rise to Trump showed that contrary to what anyone liked to think about Obama's election heralding a "post-racial" era, it was back and more ugly and public than it had been in a long time. It was also surprising that our first black president was a Democrat, and not a Republican shill like Tim Scott and/or Clarence Thomas, who has been allowed to rise in the party only because he faithfully repeats all the maxims of the (white) GOP ruling class. So the sheer strength of Obama Derangement Syndrome, which persists today, has to figure into any appraisals of either what he did or what he could have reasonably been expected to accomplish, and I don't think people get that.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

Stats from Movies 501-600

Top 10 Movies - Highest Number of Votes

Drag Me To Hell (2009) had the most votes with 1,156 votes. The Sudbury Devil (2023) had the least votes with 363 votes.

The 10 Most Watched Films by Percentage

Aliens (1989) was the most watched film with 59.5% of voters out of 785 saying they had seen it. Roadkill (2011) had the least "Yes" votes with 1.0% of voters out of 597.

The 10 Least Watched Films by Percentage

The Purge: Anarchy (2014) was the least watched film with 71.8% of voters out of 570 saying they hadn’t seen it. Awoken (2020) had the least "No" votes with13.4% of voters out of 677.

The 10 Most Known Films by Percentage

Aliens (1989) was the best known film, only 1.1% of voters out of 785 saying they’d never heard of it.

The 10 Least Known Films by Percentage

The Sudbury Devil (2023) was the least known film, 86,2% of voters out of 368 saying they’d never heard of it.

The movies part of the statistic count and their polls below the cut.

Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007) Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead (2009) Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011) Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines (2012) Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort (2014) Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) Ghostwatch (1992) Nekromantik (1988)

Hostel: Part II (2007) Hostel: Part III (2011) Antiviral (2012) Dead Ringers (1988) Drag Me to Hell (2009) Becky (2020) Stepfather 3 (1992) Roadkill (2011) Black Sheep (2006) Awoken (2019)

Exeter (2015) Excision (2012) Psycho Goreman (2020) V/H/S/94 (2021) The Lair of the White Worm (1988) Mad God (2021) Dash (2022) Don't Open Till Christmas (1984) C.H.U.D. (1984) Satan's Slave (1976)

Bad Taste (1987) The Deadly Spawn (1983) Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981) Laid to Rest (2009) Chromeskull: Laid to Rest 2 (2011) Rosemary's Baby (1968) The Midnight Meat Train (2008) Underworld (2003) The Last House on the Left (1972)

Little Shop of Horrors (1960) The Hills Have Eyes (1977) Aliens (1986) Wrong Turn (2021) A Haunting in Venice (2023) Old (2021) Cloverfield (2008) 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) Cloverfield Paradox (2018) The Invitation (2022)

Saw II (2005) Saw III (2006) Saw IV (2007) Saw V (2008) Saw VI (2009) The Curse of La Llorona (2019) Saltburn (2023) Saw 3D (2010) Jigsaw (2017) Spiral (2021)

Child's Play 2 (1990) Child's Play 3 (1991) Bride of Chucky (1998) Seed of Chucky (2004) Curse of Chucky (2013) Cult of Chucky (2017) Paranormal Activity 2 (2010) Paranormal Activity 3 (2011) Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021) The Purge: Anarchy (2014) The Purge: Election Year (2016) The First Purge (2018) The Forever Purge (2021) Don't Breathe (2016) Don't Breathe 2 (2021) American Psycho 2 (2002) Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Day of the Dead (1985) Night of the Living Dead (1990) Diary of the Dead (2007) Survival of the Dead (2009) Happy Birthday to Me (1981) Bloody New Year (1987) Saw X (2023) Pieces (1982) The Sudbury Devil (2023) Demon (2015)

Butterfly Kisses (2018) 12 Hour Shift (2020) Bloody Birthday (1981) Def by Temptation (1990) The Hunt (2020) Godzilla (1954) The Babysitter (2017) The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020) The Silenced (2015)

#recap

[mariacallous]

Though the Take Our Border Back convoy has largely been a mess so far as the small group makes its way toward the Texas-Mexico border, experts warn that it has acted as a lightning rod for militias, far-right extremists, and even long-dormant vigilante groups. It could reach a tipping point this weekend, as multiple rallies are planned against immigrants and the Biden administration along the border in Texas, as well as Arizona and California.

“Data we collected tells us emphatically that the standoff between Texas and the federal government has become a magnet for far-right vigilantism,” said Devin Burghart, the executive director at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, during a press briefing on Thursday organized by the immigration reform group America’s Voice. “From the convoy steering committee on down, the protest comprises many of the same dangerous elements as the January 6 insurrection: militia members, election deniers, QAnon conspiracists, Covid deniers, and other hardcore far-righters.”

Those groups include the Proud Boys, neo-Nazi militias, and other vigilante groups. Last week, the Republic of Texas Proud Boys shared a post in its Telegram channel calling immigrants “brown immigrant invaders,” and the South Texas Proud Boys told followers to “grab your guns.” Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi Aryan Network issued a rallying cry in support of the Texas ‘resistance,’ asking for white men to join. In another post, the group added, “to hell with the United States of America.”

“The convoy itself has really inspired some of these more fringe, really extreme sects of the far right to engage in operations down in border states,” said Freddy Cruz, the program manager for monitoring and training at Western States Center, during the briefing. “Discussions around the convoy and just the convoy itself really animate extreme anti-democracy groups to go down to the border.”

The convoy had an inauspicious start; just 19 vehicles set out from Virginia on Monday, and within minutes some were lost. There has been paranoia and infighting within the small group, and a convicted pedophile showed up. But on Thursday night, when the convoy organizers held a rally at the One Shot Distillery and Brewery, owned by former US Army colonel Phil Waldron, who was a key figure in proposing plans that ultimately led to the January 6 insurrection, a different picture emerged.

Hundreds of people gathered at the event, which featured far-right speakers that included Chrisitan nationalist pastors calling for “drawing a blood line around Texas, around America.” Convicted January 6 insurrectionists threatened another insurrection. There were Covid deniers, Pizzagate adherents, and sovereign citizens. Former conservative news presenter turned conspiracy booster Lara Logan was also onstage, talking in graphic detail about child trafficking and the dark web. Michael Yon, one of the convoy promoters, screamed and ranted at the audience about how Jewish people were funding an NGO that works along the Texas border. He also claimed that Hamas and Hezbollah are coming across the border: “Allahu akbar, when you hear that shit, you better get ready, your thumb better be hitting that safety.”

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the late senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign running mate, introduced musician Ted Nugent, who called President Biden a “piece of shit.”

Elected officials were also present: Republican Texas state representative Carrie Isaac repeated the conspiracy about “terrorists at the border.” She was introduced onstage by Chris Burr, a board member of the Texas GOP.

Though tensions surrounding immigration have been simmering for a while, the most recent crisis was sparked earlier this month when the US Supreme Court lifted an order by a lower court and sided with the Biden administration to rule that Border Patrol agents could remove razor wire installed by the Texas National Guard and state troopers. Rather than stand down, Texas governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, replied in a letter that Texas has the right to “defend and protect” itself against an “invasion” of migrants, adding that this “is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”

The vast majority of the GOP has backed Abbott, including more than two dozen Republican governors, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and former president Donald Trump, who called for National Guard troops from other states to be sent to Texas.

The rhetoric from the right has continued to ratchet up. “This is an invasion from third-world countries,”Texas’ lieutenant governor Dan Patrick told Fox News. “They're coming here with health issues, they're uneducated, unemployed, and all they do is commit crime on the streets.”

Since the standoff began, there has been “an online explosion of invasion and great replacement rhetoric, the idea that white people are somehow being displaced intentionally with immigrants,” said Heidi Beirich, cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “We've seen white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups all taking advantage of the standoff to push their propaganda and recruit new members.”

On Friday, the convoy will reportedly conclude in Quemado, Texas, and the Cornerstone Children’s Ranch, a humanitarian charity which provides food and support for low-income families in the US and across the border in Mexico. “The people that are coming here are doing a religious prayer for the border,” Lori Mercer, the director of the organization tells WIRED, adding: “We have to be peacemakers.”

The location was picked by Pete Chambers, one of the people organizing the convoy, who claims to be a former Green Beret. Last week, Chambers spoke with school-shooting conspiracist Alex Jones about how the convoy planned to travel to the border to hunt migrants in collaboration with sympathetic law enforcement. Other convoy organizers have said that the effort is “peaceful” and that they are not going to the border. But comments made by members of the group on livestreams, online videos, and in Telegram channels indicate that not everyone feels that way.

“We will engage decisively, and if it gets worse, in the infantry we call it ‘fix bayonets,’” Chambers told a pastor in one online video this week, adding: “That’s war, we don’t want to go there, but that’s where we’re at right now.”

On Saturday, the group will take part in a trio of rallies along the border: in San Ysidro, California; Yuma, Arizona; and Eagle Pass, Texas, the epicenter of the current standoff between Abbott and the Biden administration.

“They've discussed calling out militias or posses and needing to ‘show force,’” said Burghart. “One organizer, who is also a militia leader, even threatened, ‘We'll do whatever we got to do to put a stop to it.’ Leading border-conflict figures have also stated that their convoy is meant to pick up where January 6 left off. Moreover, they've amplified the specter of kicking off a second civil war.”

While it’s unclear what is going to happen over the weekend, there are already signs that the convoy and the standoff generally are activating long-dormant vigilante groups.

“Earlier this week, we did see vigilante group Women Fighting for America in Arizona livestreaming the group's expedition to try and track down a migrant camp in Arivaca, Arizona,” Cruz said. “Women Fighting for America have previously been on the border, but they took a two-year hiatus, and all of a sudden they're back on the border because the media is covering the convoy.”

In a video posted in the group’s Telegram channel, Christine Hutcherson, Women Fighting for America’s founder, is seen wearing night-vision goggles, talking about a camp run by a Catholic charity set in a remote part of the Arizona border region. “I’ve been here before a couple of years ago. They are housing migrants, illegals, mostly single adult males of fighting age. And we’re getting ready to go into this camp right now,” she alleged.

Experts are concerned about the impact of this kind of extremist rhetoric long term. “It’s important to keep an eye on how these types of efforts are successful in mainstreaming fringe far-right ideas and far-right groups into a much larger context,” said Burghart.

[tomorrowusa]

I frequently complain that people, especially on the liberal side, don't pay enough attention to state government. I hope that our readers in North Carolina take notice of this.

North Carolina Republicans have just nominated a candidate for governor who actually makes Trump seem slightly more moderate.

The Republican standard-bearer in the most competitive governor race of the 2024 election is now officially a man who has quoted Adolf Hitler, called LGBT people “filth,” and threatened to use an AR-15 on federal officials. North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson secured the Republican nomination in the state’s governor race Tuesday night. He was projected the winner of the primary by the Associated Press less than an hour after polls closed. Robinson defeated rivals Dale Folwell and Bill Graham, who were backed by figures in the GOP establishment uneasy with Robinson’s incendiary rhetoric and far-right views. Robinson’s primary win was expected. Now, he will face Attorney General Josh Stein (D) in a general election battle that is a top priority for both parties—and one that could have broader implications because of North Carolina’s status as a presidential battleground. [ ... ] A relative newcomer in politics, Robinson has quickly won many supporters and many detractors thanks to his eagerness to embrace controversy whenever possible. From making Islamophobic jokes to dismissing the Holocaust as “hogwash” in an old Facebook post, Robinson’s record offers seemingly endless opportunities for Democrats to craft attack ads. “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” Robinson said at a Baptist church in June 2023. “And yes, I called it filth. And if you don’t like it that I called it filth, come see me and I’ll explain it to you.”

The good news is that this is a winnable contest for Dems if moderate and liberal voters take it seriously.

While Democrats have not won a statewide federal race in North Carolina since 2008, their track record in statewide races for governor and attorney general has been strong. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is term-limited after winning election in 2016 and re-election in 2020. The state has only had a GOP governor for four out of the last 30 years.

Never assume that because candidates are perceived as being too extreme that they will automatically lose. Just think back to 2016.

If we want democracy to survive we need to drive a stake through the heart of electoral slackerism. There is no such thing as an unimportant election. When we vote, we win; just look at Minnesota.

#north carolina #mark robinson #republicans #maga #adolph hitler #donald trump #hate speech #the far right #homophobia #lgbtq+ #islamophobia #anti-semitism #holocaust denier #democracy vs. dictatorship #vote blue no matter who #election 2024

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Winkfield Twyman Jr.

Published: Dec 27, 2023

I have a tender spot in my heart for race pioneers. My spirits were lifted when L. Douglas Wilder was sworn in as the first Black American governor of a U.S. state—the state of Virginia, of which I am a native son. My mom was dying of cancer at the time, but she wanted me to witness Black History in the making. So on that cold January day in 1990, I left her bedside and bore witness to the coming of a better time in Virginia.

Similarly, on the night of November 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the first Black President of the United States of America, I joined family and friends to run into the darkness of the San Diego night, yelling and screaming, whooping and hollering. It was a sacred moment in our American history to be always cherished and never forgotten. That the American electorate would elect a Black person to the highest office in the land was something our grandparents and our grandparents' grandparents could only dream of.

I considered the project of race in America to be finished that November night in San Diego. The election of a Black U.S. president broke the psychological barrier in our minds. There is no higher office than President of the United States of America—in the entire world. For me, the questions of race were all answered. I was done with race.

But too many Americans can't seem to quit race. Fifteen years after President Barack Obama's triumph, some feel it noteworthy to remark that Claudine Gay is the first Black President of Harvard University. Worse, in the face of numerous mounting scandals, many are defending Gay by claiming that the attacks against her are racial in nature.

They are not. They are all well deserved.

The demand that Gay resign stems from the utter lack of moral competency she displayed in her testimony before Congress, in which she said that calling for the genocide of Jews is only against Harvard rules in certain contexts. She also failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities against Israel in real time on October 7, another reason she should resign. There is also now evidence of serial plagiarism. And did I mention Gay has published no books—an unprecedented feat for a Harvard President, unless one travels back in time to the year 1773?

And yet, many are coming to her defense. Having finally got their wish of a Black president of Harvard, Harvard seems unwilling to let her go. The racial wagons have circled around Gay, with President of the NAACP alleging that White Supremacy is afoot and Morehouse President David Thomas claiming in a Forbes interview that Gay is a scholar at the "top of her profession... as qualified as any President Harvard has ever had."

This is not only misguided, but deeply ironic. Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors?

As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College.

What was Professor Sullivan's offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein—an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system. Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty.

You may excuse this heartless termination as a one-off. You would be wrong. Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal.

Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer's research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay's crusade of discharge but Fryer's lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.

No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first Black president of Harvard. Even if you don't agree with me that our racial struggle is in our past, someone who has targeted Black male professors has waived any benefit of the "first Black" defense.

W. F. Twyman, Jr., Class of 1986 Harvard Law School, is a former law professor. He is also co-author of Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America published by Pitchstone Publishing.

==

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Claudine Gay is as corrupt as they come.

#Winkfield Twyman Jr. #Claudine Gay #Harvard University #Harvard #Claudine Gay is corrupt #Roland Fryer #academic corruption #diversity hire #diversity equity and inclusion #diversity #equity #inclusion #plagiarism #corruption #religion is a mental illness

[moonflower-rose]

Rosie my love, you know I’ll never get enough of my beloved In Dreams so anything you’d like to share with us about the process (maybe how you came up with the idea, or if you had a specific fic scene in mind etc?) would make my night!!! Tysm ily 💜 - Liv

Liv you sweet baby angel, I love how much you love that fic and one day I'll even complete the half-finished sequel for you that I started in fricken 2011.

God this was so long ago, things are a bit furry. What I do know for sure is that the opening scene where Harry is dreaming the DH epilogue had been in my head for more than a year before I signed up for H/D Holidays 2011 and decided to use it, but I didn't really have a clear idea of what I was going to write after that, lol. I had absolutely no plan, it all just sort of unrolled spontaneously.

I'd been in Kettering (which is where the main action for Chapter 1 occurs) for a wedding in 2008 and then I spent a few weeks sightseeing and visiting friends who were all over the place in London, so lots of the places we spent time ended up in the fic too (although I didn't spend a lot of words lingering on descriptions of places in the fic). Lots of the side characters were likewise named after people I'd been with on that trip. The name 'Champion de Crespigny' belonged to a student at the university I worked at, at that time, who's mother was so fricken obnoxious and would constantly hassle me about getting her daughter into the popular, quota restricted electives. I was also super obsessed with secret agent films (still am), in particular Salt and Casino Royale, and Alias. So all of that definitely had an influence.

The main thing I remember about writing this is that I was absolutely shitting myself about writing for Anna Fugazzi and I was likewise shitting myself because I'd written 37K and there was about 15K on the cutting room floor and I wasn't ready to stop or to give up on those scenes but I'd run completely out of time.

One of the things that tickled me the most to write was this line:

“Yours, then. Will you still be grumpy when we get there?” Malfoy turned away from Harry to face the fireplace. “That depends. Will you still be Dopey?” 

Ah, hilarity. I really do want to get back to the sequel for this.

#my asks #rosie answers #drarry #liv laugh love #in dreams

[beardedmrbean]

DETROIT − A Michigan city council banned LGBTQ Pride flags from being displayed on all city properties Tuesday night after months of debates. 

The Hamtramck City Council voted unanimously on the resolution, introduced by Mayor Pro Tem and Councilman Mohammed Hassan, which also prohibits the display and flying of flags with racist and political views, according to the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. 

Hassan and other members of the council said LGBTQ people and others are welcome in Hamtramck, but need to respect religious freedom. Proponents of the resolution said the Pride flag clashes with their faith, and argued American soldiers sacrificed for the U.S. flag, not the Pride flag.

Before the vote, Hassan blasted critics of the resolution for not respecting the views of Hamtramck residents.

"Please don't threaten us ... I'm the elected official ... I'm working for the people, what the majority of the people like," Hassan said. 

Hamtramck, whose population jumped 27% from 2010 to 2020, has the highest percentage of immigrants among cities in Michigan and is the only city in the U.S. with an all-Muslim city council and mayor. About half of the city is either of Yemeni or Bangladeshi descent. 

Tuesday’s vote was the latest in an ongoing debate stretching back 15 years over LGBTQ rights in Hamtramck. 

In 2008, conservative Christians launched an effort to defeat a ballot proposal in Hamtramck that would have protected gay rights by reaching out to the city's Muslim community to hold rallies and defeat the proposal backed by LGBTQ advocates. 

In 2021, then-Mayor Karen Majewski flew the Pride flag outside city hall, which drew criticism from challenger Amer Ghalib who defeated her. On Tuesday, Ghalib spoke out in favor of Hassan's resolution.

"We serve everybody equally with no discrimination, but without favoritism," Ghalib said.

Three city council seats are up for election this year in Hamtramck. 

Resolution ‘sends a clear message of discrimination,’ Hamtramck resident says

A majority of the public comments submitted by email and read by Hamtramck City Clerk Rana Faraj at the meeting opposed the resolution.

LGBTQ people and their supporters said the resolution would push them out of Hamtramck and reduce investment in the city. They called the resolution backwards and bigoted.

"The LGBTQ community is the life blood of our organization," executive director of Planet Ant Theatre in Hamtramck Darren Shelton said at the meeting. "I don't think sexuality is a political issue."

Hamtramck resident Hayley Cain said the resolution "sends a clear message of discrimination."

"The Pride flag represents making space for all humans on all the spectrums and this is where we're going as a human species," she said. "You can't stop that."

Some people said Muslim immigrants, who faced discrimination when they immigrated to Hamtramck, should be more sensitive about discriminating against other groups. 

#nunyas news #ok this is funny #and not all at the same time

[heckyeahponyscans]

In my search for info about the Oldsmobile ad campaign, I came across this blog post:

----

The story of “not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Or how some really bad advertising changed the culture forever!

October 14, 2008

Time for a story boys and girls. It’s a tale that requires we go back 20 years, before copywriters had Macs, before email, before I lost my hair. This story harkens back to a day when Oldsmobiles roamed the earth. And their commercials filled the airwaves. I should know; I made some of them. Including the campaign that served as Olds’ final and famous (infamous?) death gasp: “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile.”

 Dad’s was better.

The line has become a pop culture catch phrase, in the same ilk –albeit attached to worse advertising-as “Got Milk?”  Both slogans have been co-opted literally hundreds of times, far outlasting their original intent. Try reading your morning paper and not finding a variation on either line. For example, about a candidate: “This is not your father’s Democrat.”  About a technological innovation: “This is not your mother’s sewing machine.” And so on. Sadly enough, more Americans are familiar with the Olds’ slogan than of Shakespeare’s finest sonnets. Way more.

A soft-spoken creative director by the name of Joel Machak wrote that famous line. I actually came up with the campaign’s tag: “The New Generation of Olds.” Both pieces were intended as lyrics. That’s right, a jingle! As a matter of fact, I was brought in to help Joel come up with the refrain. The piece went together as follows (sing along):

       This is not your father’s Oldsmobile…This is the new generation of Olds.

Pretty spiffy, eh? The word “generation” was key. If you recall, each commercial featured a celebrity and one of his or her offspring. This is why the campaign is so damn silly. Outside of a morbid fascination with ogling Ringo Starr’s purple-haired daughter or Dave Brubeck’s motley looking brothers, placing the kin of “B” and “C” celebrities on camera was pure folly. Though I will concede we anticipated Reality TV by 10 years! If you do nothing else today, go to the above link. Trust me.

Where’s my Cutlass Supreme?

The very first spot was for the “totally redesigned Cutlass Supreme.” The protagonist for this commercial was none other than William Shatner, appearing as; you guessed it, Captain Kirk! Riding shotgun was his lovely college-aged daughter, Melanie Shatner. A middling actress, she was pretty darn cute. She also was well endowed. And this became problematic given her wardrobe and where we were shooting. It gets damn cold in the Palm Desert at night. The diaphanous gown provided Melanie was meant to be futuristic a la Star Trek, but it did nothing to warm her up. Subsequently, her nipples went completely rigid, sticking up like Spock’s ears.

beam me up, Scotty!

While this may sound lurid and comical now, at the time (3 AM) it was a “situation.” Imagine the middle-aged suit from GM, replete in a satin Oldsmobile Racing Team jacket, making his way over to the director. “Excuse me, but we can see her nipples!”  Given we’d already shot scenes of Melanie in the gown, a wardrobe change was not possible. The solution? Duct tape. And thus her cleavage had a silver lining.

The other moment I’ll never forget was a captured piece of dialogue (unscripted) between William and his daughter. Between takes, they were side by side in the white Cutlass. Unbeknown to either, the mic was still on. Listening to Captain Kirk school his daughter about the virtues of pep and sleeping pills as a key to nighttime shooting was priceless. What a Dad. What a cad. In a way, it preceded his Emmy-winning turn as Danny Crane by some 20 years.

I know this is trifling gossip, and long past its vintage. But like everyone else, I’m beaten down from our grim economy and an evermore-depressing election. Not to mention the woes of Chicago’s sports franchises… When I was new I used to love listening to the old-timers tell bawdy stories from their shoots. Now that I have a few under my belt, I figured we could all use a respite.

----

As a post-script: in 2021 the writer returned to his blog after fifteen years away. He explained that he had dropped out of the advertising biz and become a substance abuse counselor. He began work just as Covid broke out. Wow! I find that inspiring! He also has a Youtube channel devoted to his aquarium hobby, check it out here!

#Oldsmobile #advertising #William Shatner #I love little stories like this

[vomitdodger]

Great article from 2008 detailing how the Gulf of Tonkin attack on 4 Aug 1964 was used to justify our involvement in Vietnam. Note it’s from The Naval Institute which lends creedance to its accuracy and not some basement dweller blog. In other words, our own military admited this. More specifically the article details how the “attack” was immediately and long suspected to not have happened. Including eyes in the sky first hand knowledge/visualization. We of course know the result. Release of classified info some 20 years later prove without any doubt that the attack did not happen and was deliberately used as a ruse/known false flag to start the Vietnam conflict. Put that into perspective for everything that’s happening and happened over the last three years. And longer as it plays to current events. Stolen elections, Scamdemic, bio labs, big Pharm not releasing info for some 75 years, but especially Ukraine. All the above has been censored with hidden connections of repeated nefarious intent and those speaking out destroyed in every way possible. Ukraine alone:

US orchestrated coup in 2014

Known/ignored Nazi stronghold

Puppet actor as President

Unprecedented funneling of money and arms without accountability…while the US crumbles internally

Boots on the ground/nearby secretively placed

Unprecedented propaganda including video games as actual war footage

No or very limited true war footage in a modern day battlefield.

Constant lies in the main stream media and administration to support the cause including claims of Ukraine domination which in fact is the exact polar opposite as proven by a “leaker”

Errant missile into Poland blamed on Russia. Ultimately independent journalists force Ukraine to admit it’s theirs.

Perhaps the most damning: pipeline explosion blamed on Russia. Their own pipeline in fact. Ultimately proven to be done by the US and nothing happens. And this pipeline serves Germany our close ally which means they are most certainly in on it or we would literally screw our friends to start a war and move the agenda forward.

That’s the very very basics. We are at the precipice for what happens next in a corrupt and lawless international agenda. Vietnam, as tragic as it was, is small potatoes compared to all this.

[fabfemmeboy]

One of the things that strikes me, looking back, is both how long it took to get marriage equality and then how quickly it happened.

Like...we got married in 2008, as part of that pre-prop 8 cohort where it was legal in California for 3 months.  I still get instinctively angry thinking about election night 2008; everyone else was celebrating tolerance and diversity and I was refreshing state returns and watching my marriage be dissolved in the most liberal state in the country.  

(Turned out it didn’t actually dissolve my marriage because the writers of the legislation didn’t know what the hell they were doing, so it wasn’t retroactive.  But they tried, and there was a whole court case about whether we + 18,000 other couples were still married.)

So from 6/2008-1/2013, we were simultaneously legally married and not legally married.  If we had lived in California, we would have had state marriage rights but we lived in Maryland, which at the time didn’t recognize same-sex marriages.  We had to get really creative when my partner applied to school because he was under 27 and “not married” so he needed his parents’ information for FAFSA, but his parents had literally taken him to conversion camp on his birthday so we didn’t talk to them.  We did all our taxes with him as a random dependent member of my household.  And every time I filled out forms from HR, like insurance or whatever, my first question was “Where is this being adjudicated?”  Because in some states, I was allowed to list him as my partner.  In others I had to list him as a random beneficiary.  I remember I was all excited when it turned out that one of our policies was out of Iowa, which had just recognized marriage equality, so I got to list him as my legal spouse.  Oh, and the HR director was uber-religious and got mad at me every time I asked and just said “Write what’s true!”  Well, it’s true that I’m married and I have the certificate to prove it, but this is a law office and you’re HR so you know damn well it’s not that simple.

Then Maryland started recognizing out-of-state marriages if they were valid when performed.  So our taxes that year were weird.  We were single in the eyes of the Federal government, but married in the eyes of the state. So we (like countless other taxpayers) had to do two sets of tax returns: the federal ones we actually filed, and a “dummy federal” that showed what our numbers would have been if we’d been considered married, so we could use those numbers to put on our state returns.   By that point, lots of states (mostly California, New England, and Iowa) had people in the same situation.  And I still had to ask “what state is this form for?” for everything, but at least I was at a job where the HR person wasn’t so awful.

Then on 6/26/13, DOMA was struck down (and so was Prop 8, which I actually celebrated harder because it was Personal).  So for our 2014 taxes, we just did one set as we were federally married.  And originally people in states that didn’t recognize their marriage were supposed to still be unmarried for federal taxes, but the Obama administration said you could file as married anyway, so people had to still do dummy returns - only this time with federal-married and state-unmarried.

it took another 2 years before it was finally just legal.  Everywhere.  

In reality, it wasn’t all that long.  Universal marriage equality nationwide was ordered the day before our 7th anniversary.  But it felt like a lifetime.  And that’s nothing compared to the people who had a handful of domestic partnerships or civil unions beforehand because states kept changing their minds, or who got married in the 2004 window in California (which was much shorter than the 2008 window).  And the roughly 8 years since marriage equality was ordered nationwide feels like another lifetime - like we’ve had it forever, even though (for perspective) it had been in place for fewer than 5 years before the pandemic hit.  Time is so fucking weird.

#personal #rambling #marriage equality #i've been in a weird place lately in terms of thinking about where i've been #mostly because i did a whole thing for my chorus about when i was coming out as trans and such #and it's made me...not nostalgic - god no - but taking stock i guess

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Jack Smith, the U.S. special counsel named to investigate Republican former President Donald Trump, has a reputation for winning tough cases against war criminals, mobsters and crooked police officers.

Behind the scenes, however, Smith's former colleagues say he is just as tenacious in his pursuit to get criminal charges dropped for the innocent as he is to win convictions against the guilty.

When Smith isn't busy competing as a triathlete in Ironman races, they said, he is working as a dogged investigator who is open-minded and not afraid to pursue the truth.

"If the case is prosecutable, he will do it," said Mark Lesko, an attorney at Greenberg Traurig LLP who worked with Smith when both were prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York City's Brooklyn. "He is fearless."

Smith recently returned to the United States after working from The Hague in the Netherlands since November while recovering from knee surgery following a biking accident, a person familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Wednesday.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in November to take over two investigations involving Trump, who is running for President in 2024.

The first probe involves Trump's handling of highly sensitive classified documents he retained at his Florida resort after leaving the White House in January 2021.

The second investigation is looking at efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election's results, including a plot to submit phony slates of electors to block Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden's victory.

Grand juries in Washington have been hearing testimony in recent months for both investigations from many former top Trump administration officials.

SEARCH FOR INNOCENCE AND GUILT

Smith, a Harvard Law School grad who is not registered with any political party, started as a prosecutor in 1994 at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office under Robert Morgenthau, who was best known for prosecuting mob bosses.

Smith's friends credit Morgenthau with instilling in him the skills that made him the prosecutor he is today.

"There was just a real emphasis, from Morgenthau on down, on not just going after convictions," recalled Todd Harrison, an attorney at McDermott Will & Emery who worked with Smith in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and later in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.

"We were praised if we investigated something and demonstrated that the target of the investigation was innocent."

Once, he and Smith "spent the whole night making phone calls" after learning that a jailed suspect in one of their cases was innocent. The suspect was released the next day.

In 1999, Smith started working at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.

He won a conviction against New York City Police Officer Justin Volpe, a white policeman who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for assaulting Abner Louima, a jailed Black inmate, with a broomstick.

Smith also won a capital murder conviction against Ronell Wilson, a drug gang leader who murdered two undercover New York City police officers, though a federal appeals court vacated the death penalty verdict.

In 2008, Smith left to supervise war crime prosecutions at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He returned to the Justice Department in 2010 to head its Public Integrity Section until 2015.

Most recently, he worked as chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, and won a conviction last month against Salih Mustafa, a former Kosovo Liberation Army commander.

Moe Fodeman, an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati who worked as a prosecutor with Smith, said his former colleague is known for being methodical and thinking outside the box.

"He is famous for to-do lists," said Fodeman, adding that the lists would be filled "with ideas that, of course, you should do, but no one thinks of."

Smith is also known for being expeditious, and Fodeman predicted the special counsel's investigations involving Trump will probably move swiftly.

"He's not going to be dillydallying," Fodeman said. "He's going to get the job done."

#us politics #news #2023 #jack smith #special counsel #department of justice #ag merrick garland #biden administration #donald trump #trump administration #top secret documents #classified documents #2020 election #trump's big lie #Robert Morgenthau #Manhattan District Attorney's Office #International Criminal Court #the hague #war crimes #Salih Mustafa #Ronell Wilson #Justin Volpe

[qqueenofhades]

As an European I do love to shit on American politics of course, but at the same time, the moment you're a little bit aware of world politics as European you know to watch the USA.

Like. This is of utmost importance to us too. Look at the massive right in far right fascist ideas in Europe right now. I am willing to bet on Trump paving the way for these idiots. (In fact the night after Trump was elected, I dreamt he nuked the world outside of North America just because he felt like it).

In 2008, the crisis started in America and it spread from there. I remember watching with baited breath and it was rough. Tumblr's Americanocentrism is frustrating and unwarranted and must change, but American politics definitely DO affect the rest of the world in tangible ways. America is used as precedent. (I know you know this, mx. Queen, but idk about your followers which is why I'm saying this!)

These elections aren't just the most important to American citizens. They are extremely important to non-American too.

Ps I think it is bullshit you need to register to vote. I assume this is another Republican attempt to stop people from voting? Coming from a country where you're sent an invitation to vote when you're 18+ and they've voting offices at universities and train stations to increase the number of voters... Yikes. Fuck the Republicans and any politician abroad who supports them!

If, God forbid, American democracy was to end, the damage to both America itself, and the rest of the world, would be utterly incalculable. America is the oldest democratic republic and also the most powerful country in the world. We know the "freedom" thing is abused and misused, has been invoked to justify countless ill-omened imperial and foreign adventures, done plenty of very real harm to many places, and is built on a systemic and deliberate misreading of history. But if that's the case even in a flawed liberal democracy, how many orders of magnitude worse would it be in an unabashed theocratic fascist dictatorship? Can you even begin to imagine the damage that regime could and would do to EVERYONE?

America is a flawed, messy bitch of a country in so many ways, and it has never once actually lived up to its founding ideals. But at least it has been a democracy, and the influence it exerts on the rest of the world, for better or worse, is incalculable. It would be an absolute, unmitigated, unbearable, irreversible tragedy if fascism was allowed to have free rein here. If anyone is like "I hate America": I GET IT. I GET IT SO HARD. But if your response to that is "I don't care if it becomes openly fascist and won't act to stop that," that is a huge problem.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

[thedoubteriswise]

Eight TV Shows to Get To Know Me

Rules: list eight shows for your followers to get to know you.

@phileasfoggstiddies tagged me. thanks Gabe! I'm also not sure I have eight whole shows but we'll see

1. The West Wing - my parents loved this show when I was a kid, and my mom decided I was old enough to understand it when I was about 14. we binge watched it on Netflix's mail-in DVD service, which was the only service they had at the time. this happened to coincide with the 2008 election. you can imagine what it did to my adolescent brain.

2. M*A*S*H - reruns were on all the time in the background when I was a kid, but I also used the aforementioned Netflix mail service to watch it in order as a teenager. again, if you've seen it you have some idea of what this did to me

3. The Untamed/CQL - my dearest friend and comrade. my beautiful perfect insane epic fantasy slash political thriller slash romance slash zombie flick. I think I would have perished in the ravaging plague without you and the massive supply of incredible fanfiction you generate.

4. Supernatural - it sucks. I love it. I end up watching it every fall. It's always as bad as I remember. I bonded with one of my best friends watching it. it's the star trek of our generation, and that would be a compliment if I was saying it about any other show. unfortunately I'm saying it about this show.

5. Good Eats - a cooking show? from a person who always bitches about cooking? yes, because every cooking show should explain specifically why you are doing things and how the things you are doing work. why is this not a baseline requirement for cooking shows. I used to watch it every night when I was a kid. at least 40% of whatever culinary ability I possess is down to Good Eats

6. Good Omens - I don't have anything to say, other than this show was designed in a lab to fuck me up.

7. Interview With The Vampire - this was also designed in a lab to fuck me up but in a WILDLY different way. can you believe this show exists? I can't really believe it exists

8. Sherlock - I know it's the done thing to complain about Sherlock. I know we like to pretend it's a bad show. Here's the thing though: I'm not going to do that now or ever because it legitimately slaps like hell and changed my life. it's a work of art and would be a work of art even if it hadn't inspired an absolutely unparalleled online experience and introduced me to several wonderful friends, including one of my very favorite people whose couch I am on right at this moment. Hustle loyalty respect✌️😎

Anyone feel free to do this if you like. I suppose I will specifically make @featuresofinterest, @manhasetardis, @6000yrs, and @finaldiorama responsible for this water bottle if they choose to be :)

[mariacallous]

(JTA) — Dianne Feinstein, the long-serving Jewish senator from California who rose to national prominence when she appeared before cameras with her hands stained with the blood of a murdered colleague, has died.

Feinstein, who had recently faced criticism for remaining in the Senate despite clearly failing health, was 90 years old. She died Thursday night, major news organizations are reporting.

Feinstein had served in the Senate for more than three decades as its longest-serving woman.

Feinstein became a national figure in 1978 when she was the president of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and found the body of fellow supervisor Harvey Milk. 

Milk, who was Jewish, was the first openly gay elected official in the city’s history and was assassinated by a former colleague, Dan White. White also killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

Feinstein announced the murders while her hands were still stained with Milk’s blood. She soon stepped in to replace Moscone, serving two terms as mayor.

“I remember it, actually, as if it was yesterday,” she recalled in 2008. “And it was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life. It was a devastating moment. For San Francisco, it was a day of infamy.”

Feinstein’s father was a Jewish physician and her mother was a model who was born to an ethnically Jewish family but raised in the Russian Orthodox church. Feinstein was born on June 22, 1933, in San Francisco, attended a Roman Catholic school and said, when she was running for governor in 1990, that her parents left it up to her to decide which faith suited her. 

When she was 20, she picked Judaism, she said, “because I liked its simplicity and directness.” She was twice widowed and once divorced; all three of her husbands were Jewish.

The trauma of the double murder propelled her to become an outspoken advocate for gun control, a cause she took with her into the Senate, when she won a special election in 1992 to replace Sen. Pete Wilson, a Republican who had defeated Feinstein in the 1990 election for governor. 

That election cycle became known as the Year of the Woman. Feinstein and three other newly elected women senators tripled the number of women in the Senate from two to six. One was Barbara Boxer, who, like Feinstein, was a Jewish Democrat from California. 

Record numbers of women ran for office, spurred in part by the humiliating treatment Anita Hill got in the Senate the year previous when she testified about the sexual harassment she allegedly endured while employed with Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee. 

Hill’s treatment helped galvanize Feinstein’s decision to run for the Senate. During the 2018 hearings for another Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual wrongdoing, Brett Kavanaugh, Feinstein recalled coming across a crowd of people watching the Thomas hearings at a TV in an airport in 1991, a year before her election. 

Not a lot had changed, she lamented. “How women are treated in the United States, with this kind of concern, is really wanting a lot of reform,” she said during the Kavanaugh hearings.

With Boxer and Feinstein, California had a two-Jewish women representation in the body until 2017, and the effects of the Year of the Women were long lasting. 

“I would be proud to carry on just a portion of their legacy,” Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has signaled his intention to run for Feinstein’s seat, said in February when Feinstein announced she would not run for another term, regarding Feinstein and Boxer. Referring to a traditional Jewish imperative to repair the world, he added, “I would love to bring that passion for tikkun olam with me to the U.S. Senate.”

Laws long on the liberal wish list were suddenly ripe for passage, among them an assault weapons ban that Feinstein took the lead in passing in 1994. It lapsed after 10 years, and Feinstein since 2004 persistently, and unsuccessfully, sought to reinstate the ban.

Also in 1994, Feinstein joined then-Sen. Joe Biden in passing the Violence Against Women Act. When it lapsed in 2019, Feinstein led the charge to reauthorize it, but faced conservative resistance because the reauthorization bill added protections for LGBTQ partners and sought to close the  “boyfriend loophole,” extending restrictions on gun ownership to people who had abused partners to whom they were not married.

It took until 2022 for Feinstein to overcome resistance and reauthorize the Act. It was a compromise: The LGBTQ protections remained in, but the boyfriend loophole was out; Feinstein was unable to overcome gun lobby resistance.

“This is a major advancement for protecting women from domestic violence and sexual assault – a tragedy faced by one in three women in this country,” Feinstein said then in a statement. President Biden, its original author, signed the reauthorization into law.

Feinstein stood apart from her liberal cohort in some respects. Her best known split with liberals was her championing the death penalty until 2018, when she said during her campaign for reelection that its unfair application had finally changed her mind.  

Her enthusiasm for law and order was triggered when a far left group, the New World Liberation Front, detonated a bomb planted in a flower box outside her home in 1976, when she was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, part of a terrorist campaign targeting city leaders.

As outraged as she was at the easy access to guns that brought about the murder of Milk and Moscone, she was also furious that White got away with a manslaughter conviction by claiming he had been depressed. The tactic became known as the “Twinkie defense,” as a defense psychiatrist testified that junk food had contributed to White’s depression.

“Yes, I support the death penalty,” she said in 1990 when she was running for California governor, earning boos at a Democratic convention. “It is an issue that cannot be fudged or hedged.” She won the primary but lost to Wilson. 

The episode displayed her political chops: She used footage of the boos in political ads in the general election for governor, reinforcing her image as a moderate and helping to propel her to the Senate in 1992. She managed to preserve the seat in 1994, her first full term election, a year that was otherwise disastrous for Democrats.

In 2004, she feuded with Kamala Harris, then the San Francisco District Attorney and now the vice president, when she learned at the funeral of a slain police officer that Harris opposed the death penalty for his killer. Feinstein said then she would not have endorsed Harris for the district attorney job had she known of her opposition to the death penalty. (The feud didn’t last; Feinstein and Boxer endorsed Harris in her 2016 Senate run to replace Boxer, key nods that helped propel Harris to victory.)

Feinstein was for years a centrist on Israel, allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, although she was a sharp critic of the country’s treatment of non-Orthodox Jews. In 1986, as mayor, she expanded commercial ties with San Francisco’s sister city, Haifa. It was  her revulsion with deadly weapons that nudged her toward questioning Israel: She was appalled at Israel’s use of cluster bombs in its 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“What gives rise, in part, to my bill are recent developments in Lebanon over alleged use of cluster bombs by Israel,” she said in 2007, introducing legislation to restrict the sale of the weapons. 

Remarkably, Feinstein chose to promote her proposed cluster bomb ban that year at the Arab American Institute, an organization frequently at odds with the mainstream pro-Israel community. “We will get this job done,” she said at the time to applause.

Within a few years she was departing from pro-Israel orthodoxy in other areas: She opposed proposed Iran sanctions in 2014 because she feared the underlying legislation would draw the United States into a war on Israel’s behalf.

“Let me acknowledge Israel’s real, well-founded concerns that a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten its very existence,” she said then on the Senate floor. “While I recognize and share Israel’s concern, we cannot let Israel determine when and where the U.S. goes to war.”

More recently, she championed renewed aid to the Palestinians, slashed to almost nothing by Trump and Republicans in Congress hostile to a Palestinian leadership they depict as bloodthirsty.

“Denying funding for clean water, health care and schools in the West Bank and Gaza won’t make us safer,” she said in 2019. “Instead it only emboldens extremist groups like Hamas and pushes peace further out of reach.”

Feinstein, who was the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2009 to 2017, also differed from her colleagues — particularly Ron Wyden, the Jewish Democrat from Oregon — in defending the intelligence community even after a welter of leaks toward the end of the 2000s revealed its abuses. 

She defended the intelligence agencies’ collection of American citizens’ metadata, the wealth of information that can track where a person is with whom they communicate and for how long, among other details. “It’s called protecting America,” Feinstein said in 2013, claiming the practice was routine.

As her party moved left, however, so did she; In 2014, as committee chairwoman, Feinstein declassified a report on the CIA’s use of torture after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, over the objections of President Barack Obama. In 2017, she said her decision in 2002 to be one of just five Senate Democrats to authorize the Iraq War would haunt her, in part because she bought into the false claims the intelligence community was peddling.

“It is the decision I regret most and I have to live with it,” she told author Gail Sheehy.

One factor nudging her to the left was the election in 2016 of Donald Trump as president. Her deep experience in matters of intelligence helped spur her outrage with the new president as she uncovered evidence ahead of the election that Russia was interfering.

“Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,” she and Adam Schiff, a House California Jewish Democrat who is now running to replace her in the Senate, said in a headline-making statement just weeks before election day.

“At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election,” the statement said. “We can see no other rationale for the behavior of the Russians.”

Republican obfuscation about Russia’s interference helped push her over the edge, a close friend, Orville Schell, told Sheehy in 2017. “Trump injects an entirely new level of outrage,” he said. “Dianne is like the canary in the mine shaft. The last bastion of bridge building in the Senate may be giving up.”

On one issue LGBTQ rights, Feinstein always tracked to the left of her party; in the 1990s she was one of just 14 Democrats to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. She became a leader of a years-long effort to repeal the Act, which was successful in 2022.

In 2020, as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Feinstein drew outrage from fellow Democrats for her friendly questioning of Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court nominee Republicans rushed through to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal Jewish icon who had died just before an election that returned Democrats to the Senate majority. It didn’t help that she hugged the committee chairman, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, after the hearing.

That along with signs that Feinstein’s mental acuity was diminishing led her to step down as the top Democrat on the key committee. Reporting described her as engaged during meetings and telephone calls, and then, hours and even minutes later, not remembering the exchanges. In early 2023, she announced that she would not run again for election in 2024.

Feinstein is survived by her daughter, Katherine Anne Feinstein, a former judge, and a granddaughter.

[jidongliu]

"We would prefer Biden to win the election," a senior Chinese intelligence officer told me

Last night, I attended an internal seminar on "US Strategy towards China and US Elections". This is the first seminar I attended after the Chinese Spring Festival holiday, and the seminar was conducted online.

For Chinese intelligence officials and political analysts, the most noteworthy international event in 2024 is the US election, and the election results directly affect the direction of China's foreign policy in the next five years. My department has rarely established a US election research group, recruiting experienced political analysts from around the world. In my impression, the last time a research group was established was in the 2008 US election, as the world was facing a severe global financial crisis at that time.

The seminar predicted the future direction of the US election. Interestingly, a senior intelligence analyst told me that they would prefer Biden to win the election because the liberal foreign policy represented by Biden is more favorable to China. I basically agree with his view, and the following are my reasons:

1.Biden's diplomatic decisions are more predictable and rational.

As an "old-fashioned" and "traditional" American politician, Biden's strategy follows the conventions of the traditional American political ecosystem: in line with the interests of "parties", following "party" decisions, "negotiating" and advancing his policies in a rhythmic manner. A very obvious example is the domestic of the Biden administration (3A, American Rescue Plan, American Jobs Plan, American Family Plan) , which is basically a variant of Roosevelt's 3R policy (Relief, Recovery, Reform). In terms of diplomatic principles, Biden fully inherited the diplomatic strategies of a series of Democratic presidents such as Obama. The core composition of his diplomatic team is "elitism" and "specialization".

2.Trump's diplomatic decisions are more emotional and unpredictable.

Trump is a political figure with a strong personal color and anti political tradition, and his most prominent feature in diplomatic decision-making is unpredictable.

We believe that personalized presidents like Trump are difficult to change the tone of US policy, and there cannot be a fundamental shift in US diplomatic logic. The underlying logic here lies in the intricate constraints and balances of American political power. Therefore, for the United States, the structural view that "China is the enemy" cannot be changed no matter who is elected.

Therefore, under the premise that China has no illusions about the long-term relationship between China and the United States, an unpredictable president will definitely bring greater harm to the relationship than a predictable president. In the specific social atmosphere of the United States, Trump will exacerbate "division" (cognitive, social), "internal contradictions", "partisan internal friction (strong retaliation of personal character)", and increase "uncertainty of foreign policy" (NATO). Trump may not be able to change the long-term logic of US foreign policy, but he has enough ability and energy to disrupt Sino US relations, Furthermore, it will drag the relationship between China and the United States into an irreversible situation.

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