Group items tagged

The sustained determination on the part of the conservative movement has paid off in an unprecedented realignment of power in state governments.Seven years ago, Democrats had a commanding lead in state legislatures, controlling both legislative chambers in 27 states, nearly double the 14 controlled by Republicans. They held 4082 state senate and house seats, compared to the Republicans’ 3223.Sweeping Republican victories at the state level in 2010 and 2014 transformed the political landscape

By 2015, there were Republican majorities in 70 percent — 68 of 98 — of the nation’s partisan state houses and senates, the highest number in the party’s history. (Nebraska isn’t counted in because it has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature.) Republicans controlled the legislature and governorship in 23 states, more than triple the seven under full Democratic control.

“How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States,” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol, in the Winter edition of the journal Democracy, documents the failure of the left to keep pace with the substantial investments by the right in building local organizations.

I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.

“In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”

This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.

the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

Lots of people should be charged if they contributed to the mayhem that led to these deaths. Only when criminals are held responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their hatred and the violence they incite will the peddlers of bigotry and barely disguised violence coursing through the country reconsider their assumed immunity from consequence.

In 2014, Conway was part of a group of Republicans that produced a poll for FWD.us, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration-advocacy nonprofit. It showed that immigration reform was a political necessity for the GOP—a finding at odds with the line Conway had been pushing since the 1990s.

Two months later, she produced a different poll, demonstrating that “enforcement of current law” and “encouraging illegal immigrants to return to their home countries” could be a winning message. She presented her findings to a group of Republican donors, who rebuffed her. But the poll found favor with opponents of immigration reform. The far-right website Breitbart .com (then headed by Bannon) hailed it as a “blockbuster.”

After she circulated her findings, Republicans began to embrace previously taboo positions. NumbersUSA’s executive director, Roy Beck, watched in amazement as one Republican presidential candidate after another—Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, even Jeb Bush—began parroting his group’s arguments. Trump was the most ardent convert.

A group of House and Senate Democrats on Thursday introduced legislation to expand the Supreme Court to 13 members from nine, working to build momentum for rebalancing the court after an aggressive Republican drive to move it to the right.

The bill, which would change the makeup of the court for the first time in 150 years, is unlikely to move forward even with Democrats in control of Congress — at least not before a new commission named last week by President Biden completes a study exploring the subject.

Democrats, who announced their plan on the steps of the Supreme Court, said the change was necessary to restore equilibrium on its bench after Senate Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee in 2016 and pushed through three of President Donald J. Trump’s conservative appointees, including one — Justice Amy Coney Barrett — just days before the election last year.

President-elect Joe Biden plans to sign roughly a dozen executive orders, including rejoining the Paris climate accord and ending the travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries, on his first day in office, according to a memo from incoming chief of staff Ron Klain.

He'll also sign orders halting evictions and student loan payments during the coronavirus pandemic and issuing a mask mandate on all federal property in an effort to either roll back moves made by the Trump administration or advance policy in a way that was impossible in the current administration.

Beyond executive actions in his first days in office, the memo outlines that Biden plans to send Congress a large-scale immigration plan within his first 100 days in office. The plan would offer a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrations currently in the United States.

Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer

Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities.

The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago.

Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), who has a cisgender daughter on a school golf team, is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow school competition only based on the sex listed on one’s birth certificate.

“What if one of the boys is not doing well, so he pretends to be transgender to win?” he asked. “I’m protecting a discriminated class: that’s girls and women in sports.”

But detractors say arguments about biological advantages among transgender athletes are based on limited research and put an outsize focus on a tiny fraction of young competitors. About 2 percent of high school students in the United States identify as transgender

There is a very well-funded, well-orchestrated climate change-denial movement, one funded by powerful people with very deep pockets. In a new and incredibly thorough study, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle took a deep dive into the financial structure of the climate deniers, to see who is holding the purse strings.

the 91 think tanks and advocacy organizations and trade associations that make up the American climate denial industry pull down just shy of a billion dollars each year, money used to lobby or sway public opinion on climate change and other issues.

“The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires,” says the Guardian, “often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change.”

It must be clear to almost everyone by now that the sudden and sharp economic downturn that began in late March is something more than a severe recession

“This situation is so dire that it deserves to be called a ‘depression’ — a pandemic depression,” write economists Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. “The memory of the Great Depression has prevented economists and others from using that word.”

People don’t want to be accused of alarmism and making a bad situation worse. But this reticence is self-defeating and ahistoric. It minimizes the gravity of the crisis and ignores comparisons with the 1930s and the 19th century. That matters. If the hordes of party-goers had understood the pandemic’s true dangers, perhaps they would have been more responsible in practicing social distancing.

Rulennis Muñoz remembers the phone ringing on Sept. 13. Her mother was calling from the car, frustrated. Rulennis could also hear her brother Ricardo shouting in the background. Her mom told her that Ricardo, who was 27, wouldn't take his medication. He had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia five years earlier.

Rulennis knew that her brother was in crisis and that he needed psychiatric care. But she also knew from experience that there were few emergency resources available for Ricardo unless a judge deemed him a threat to himself or others.

Ricardo was becoming aggressive; he had punched the inside of the car. Back on their block, he was still yelling and upset, and couldn't be calmed. Deborah called 911 to get help for Ricardo. She didn't know that her sister was trying the non-emergency line.

when the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, it found a public-health system in disrepair. That system, with its overstretched staff, meager budgets, crumbling buildings, and archaic equipment, could barely cope with sickness as usual, let alone with a new, fast-spreading virus.

By one telling, public health was a victim of its own success, its value shrouded by the complacency of good health

By a different account, the competing field of medicine actively suppressed public health, which threatened the financial model of treating illness in (insured) individuals

Though libertarianism as a political philosophy will continue, there is no longer anything resembling a coherent libertarian movement in American politics. That’s because the movement still bearing its name is no longer recognizably libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor can it still claim to be a political movement, which implies an association organized around not just a consistent set of ideas but a distinct political identity

For over a decade now, since Trump has dominated the national stage, longstanding disagreements have boiled over into a complete schism. There are those who have effectively become adjuncts of MAGA, and some who have gone firmly in the opposite direction, while others took a stance more akin to anti-anti-Trump voices who neither endorse nor firmly oppose the former president but train their ire toward those opposing Trump.

requires tracing internal libertarian disputes that began long before the rise of Trump. In some ways, they are a microcosm of similar developments in the American intellectual landscape writ large

Social movement scholars have known for decades that most people, even if they agree with an idea, don’t take action to support it. For most people upset by a policy decision or a disturbing news event, the default is not to protest in the streets, but rather to watch others as they do. Getting to the point where someone acts as part of a group is a milestone in itself.

Decades of research show that people will be more willing to engage in activism that is easy, and less costly – emotionally, physically, or financially. For example, more than a million people used social media to “check in” at the Standing Rock Reservation, center of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Far fewer people – just a few thousand – have traveled to the North Dakota camps to brave the arriving winter weather and risk arrest.

Once people are primed to act, it’s important not to discourage them from taking that step, however small. Preliminary findings from my team’s current research suggest that people just beginning to explore activism can be disheartened by bring criticized for doing something wrong.

It is clear by now that Russia’s government has dug in against outside intervention in Syria, its longtime partner and last firm foothold in the Middle East. Less well known is the position taken by the Russian Orthodox Church, which fears that Christian minorities, many of them Orthodox, will be swept away by a wave of Islamic fundamentalism unleashed by the Arab Spring.

This argument for supporting sitting leaders has reached a peak around Syria, whose minority population of Christians, about 10 percent, has been reluctant to join the Sunni Muslim opposition against Mr. Assad, fearing persecution at those same hands if he were to fall. If the church’s advocacy cannot be said to guide Russia’s policy, it is one of the factors that make compromise with the West so elusive, especially at a time of domestic political uncertainty for the Kremlin.

The issue of “Christianophobia” shot to the top of the church’s agenda a year ago, with a statement warning that “they are killing our brothers and sisters, driving them from their homes, separating them from their near and dear, stripping them of the right to confess their religious beliefs

immigrants played a role in more than three out of four patents at the nation’s top research universities.

nearly all the patents were in science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM fields that are a crucial driver of job growth.

“No one is asking what is in their best interest, the American worker,” said Eric Ruark, director of research for the Federal for American Immigration Reform, an advocacy group that is pushing for reduced immigration. “It’s what is best for the employers. What is best for the foreign workers. It’s not as if the foreign workers aren’t skilled. What’s being ignored is we already have a domestic work force that has the same skills.”

As they moved through the isolated villages in this region in 1943, systematically killing men in a reprisal for an attack on a small outpost, German soldiers dragged Giannis Syngelakis’s father from his home here and shot him in the head. Within two days, more than 400 men were dead and the women left behind struggled with the monstrous task of burying so many corpses.

Mr. Syngelakis, who was 7 then, still wants payback. And in pursuing a demand for reparations from Germany, he reflects a growing movement here, fueled not just by historical grievances but also by deep resentment among his countrymen over Germany’s current power to dictate budget austerity to the fiscally crippled Greek government.

Estimates of how much money is at stake vary wildly. The government report does not cite a total. The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt.

the regulations could radically reshape how Internet content is delivered to consumers. For example, if a gaming company cannot afford the fast track to players, customers could lose interest and its product could fail.

The rules are also likely to eventually raise prices as the likes of Disney and Netflix pass on to customers whatever they pay for the speedier lanes,

“Americans were promised, and deserve, an Internet that is free of toll roads, fast lanes and censorship — corporate or governmental.”