Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged bob

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
aidenborst

Biden seeks to chart a path out of the pandemic in prime-time address - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US Trump crisis Culture Policy Pandemic gop Immigration vaccine covid-19 pandemic-recovery Biden Biden-Administration

shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden can report in his first prime-time address Thursday that a vaccination drive now reaching 2 million people daily has brought America far closer to exiting the pandemic than when he took office 50 days ago.
  • He is also armed with a newly passed $1.9 trillion Covid-19 rescue package -- his first major legacy achievement -- which represents an ambitious attempt to rebuild the US economy to favor the less well off.
  • "This bill represents a historic, historic victory for the American people," Biden said Wednesday, touting his rescue plan that finally cleared Congress on Wednesday and pivoting to an address that he said would inform the country what "comes next" in the effort to prevail over the coronavirus.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • A clear majority of Americans -- 60% -- approves of the new President's handling of the pandemic in a new CNN poll.
  • The virus is far from purged. Covid-19 variants may trigger a new spring surge in infections before vaccination campaigns can tamp them down. Republican governors racing to open their states with cases still at a high plateau could also cause a new wave of unnecessary deaths.
  • A fast-building southern border crisis threatens to turn into the first big non-Covid-19-related emergency of this presidency, with Biden yet to get a handle on a surge of undocumented child migrants across the border.
  • Biden's success -- along with Democratic leaders -- in piloting a massive piece of legislation through Congress despite the tightest of majorities in the first weeks of his presidency is a historic achievement that ranks alongside the fastest of starts by modern presidents. The new law delivers on his promise to send $1,400 stimulus payments to millions of Americans.
  • Since taking office, Biden has led the nation in mourning for 525,000 lost citizens and has managed a steady rise in vaccinations, which now average 2 million a day.
  • The overhaul of the US counter-pandemic strategy after Trump's denial and mismanagement and Biden's success in passing the Covid-19 rescue plan leave an impression that the new President is effectively wielding the tools of his office, after a lifetime Washington apprenticeship.
  • Biden's impact is also being felt in the way he has restored traditional expectations of presidential behavior and has projected human decency from the White House -- for instance, when he visited an old friend, former GOP Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, after his recent cancer diagnosis.
  • No longer does the president of the United States spend his time attacking American democracy, waging personal feuds on Twitter or cratering painstakingly brokered political compromises in Congress.
  • Early victories do not guarantee successful or ultimately popular presidencies. The job is so vast, and the challenges -- from domestic security threats to a sudden foreign policy crisis -- can be grave and unexpected. The pandemic, which destroyed the economy Trump had hoped to ride to reelection, is proof of that.
  • If Biden fails to get the immigration crisis under control, the success of passing the rescue plan may be quickly forgotten.
  • One crucial issue overshadowed by the race to vaccinate Americans and put them back to work is the unresolved threat to American democracy. Republican state legislators across the nation are rushing to suppress the potential vote of the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election with new laws that often directly discriminate against minority and Democratic voters.
  • Given such tests, Biden's objectively strong start to his presidency is only revealing the height of the political mountain up ahead.
aleija

Opinion | My Ears Might Never Be Bored Again - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...music-streaming.html

Culture opinion technology

shared by aleija on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Something unexpected happened to me during lockdown: I gained deeper appreciation for my ears. I don’t mean aesthetically, (though I’ve got no problem in that department, believe me), but rather functionally.
  • he other day I realized that I’ve taken to popping my AirPods Pro in just after I wake up, sometimes at the same time I put in my contact lenses. From there my ears are usually occupado all day, often until I sleep, sometimes even during.
  • If you’re under 35 or so, my paean to the mind-altering magic of ubiquitous digital audio might sound more than a bit outdated; Farhad, do you also get goose bumps when considering the TV remote?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Streaming services are often said to have “saved” the music industry, which is no doubt true, notwithstanding persistent complaints from artists about the paltriness of their streaming paychecks. Revenue from the sale of recorded music in the United States declined for almost two decades before streaming services began turning the business around in 2016. In 2020, recorded music grew to $12.2 billion in sales, the vast majority from streaming (still well below the industry’s peak sales year, $14.6 billion in 1999).
  • For me, the clearest way that streaming has altered my relationship to music is in its steady blurring of the boundaries between genres. I
  • Streaming has turned me into a musical butterfly, flitting between moods and genres in whatever way my tastes happen to lean. Indeed, in the last half decade I have explored more kinds of music than in the decades before — and I keep finding more stuff I like, because thanks to endless choice, there’s never nothing to listen to.
  • The number of artists in the service’s most-played 10 percent of streams keeps growing — that is, there are many more artists at the top. “Gone are the days of Top 40, it’s now the Top 43,000,” Spotify crowed.
  • But you don’t need stats to show that music is increasingly breaking through staid genre boundaries — you can tell in the music itself.
  • What’s not going to change is the pre-eminent role audio now plays in our days. Once, I thought of my headphones as a conduit for music, and then they were for music and podcasts, but now they are something else entirely: They are the first gadget to deliver on the tech industry’s promise of “augmented reality” — the mashing up of the digital and analog worlds to create a novel, enhanced sensory experience.
  • Now that sound has been liberated from time, place and physical media — now that I can fly from the Nashville studio where Dylan recorded “Blonde on Blonde” to Taylor Swift’s Tiny Desk concert to the comforting, indistinct background murmur of a crowded coffee shop, all while on a walk in my suburban California neighborhood — my ears might never be bored again.
anonymous

States Fight Over How Our Data Is Tracked And Sold Online, As Congress Stalls : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...sold-online-as-congress-stalls

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Only two states, California and Virginia, have passed laws to give people more control over how technology companies mine personal details and online behavior, each bringing vastly different protections for users.
  • Last year, states introduced more than 20 data privacy measures, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, which has been tracking state bills.
  • A review by The Markup, a technology publication, found the vast majority of state proposals — 14 — were based on the Virginia framework that has been pushed by Big Tech.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The industry is hoping that by winning battles on the state level, it can set a friendly precedent for a federal privacy bill, which could override any state law.
  • Some members of Congress have said privacy legislation is a priority this year. But until Washington acts, a hodgepodge of proposals for regulating data tracking are emerging from state to state.
  • The fight over data privacy in Connecticut provides a window into how the debate is playing across the country. Connecticut Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, a Democrat, was frustrated that Congress was dragging its feet on the issue. Without any data protections, Duff said the country was in the grip of a "data privacy crisis."
  • He introduced a bill last year that would allow people in Connecticut to opt out of data collection and to sue tech companies if the tracking continued.
  • Duff recalls a packed hearing for the bill. But he did not see concerned citizens. Instead, he glimpsed seat after seat filled with lobbyists paid by Facebook, Google and other tech companies.
  • Now, Duff has re-introduced the bill — without the right to sue tech companies — with some similarities to Virginia's new law, but he said he plans to strengthen the provisions to favor consumers before its final passage.
  • Regulation on data privacy, and a host of other issues, has become something Silicon Valley now sees as inevitable, with companies like Facebook running advertisements saying the company actually welcomes new laws.
  • Soltani views this messaging effort with skepticism. "They're not doing it out the goodness of their heart," he said. "Kind of like a Taekwondo move, they want to capture that momentum and then direct it toward something that benefits them."
cartergramiak

Opinion | Let's Cut Our Ridiculous Defense Budget - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-defense-budget.html

politics Culture history biden

shared by cartergramiak on 07 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden loves spending money. Last month, he signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to stimulate the economy. Now he’s pushing the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He vows to follow that with the American Families Plan to improve health care, child care and education, which could cost billions or trillions more.
  • The more money Mr. Biden tries to spend, the more loudly critics ask where he’s getting it. He borrowed the funds for the stimulus. He wants corporations to pay for the infrastructure plan. With every legislative battle, finding the money grows harder. All of which raises a question: Will Mr. Biden try to cut defense?
  • It’s not as if there aren’t places to cut. In 2016, Bob Woodward and Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post disclosed that, according to an internal study, the Defense Department could save $125 billion over five years simply by trimming its distended bureaucracy. The department, the study found, employed close to 200,000 people in property management alone. After a summary of the report became public, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Whitlock noted, the Pentagon “imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings.” It remains the only federal agency that has never passed an audit.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • China, however, spends less than one-third as much on defense as the United States does and has fewer than one-tenth as many nuclear weapons. China’s military could indeed be a match for the United States in conflicts near China’s shores, but globally, China poses a far greater economic challenge. To meet it, the United States must invest enormously in education and emerging technologies — the very investments that military spending will sooner or later crowd out. The two superpowers also compete ideologically, and the United States gravely undermines the appeal of its democratic system when, amid a pandemic, the dictatorship in China proves better able to keep its citizens alive.
  • None of this means that Mr. Biden and his advisers aren’t doing what they believe is best for the country. But their beliefs about what’s best for the country have evolved in a Beltway ecosystem in which the military-industrial complex wields enormous power.
Javier E

The Better Letter: Randomness Rules - by Bob Seawright - The Better Letter - 0 views

betterletter.substack.com/...better-letter-randomness-rules

randomness probabilistic thinking success skill luck contingent history

shared by Javier E on 25 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • We readily – routinely – underestimate the power and impact of randomness in and on our lives
  • In his book, The Drunkard’s Walk, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow employs the idea of the “drunkard’s [random] walk” to compare “the paths molecules follow as they fly through space, incessantly bumping, and being bumped by, their sister molecules,” with “our lives, our paths from college to career, from single life to family life, from first hole of golf to eighteenth.” 
  • Although countless random interactions seem to cancel each another out within large data sets, sometimes, “when pure luck occasionally leads to a lopsided preponderance of hits from some particular direction...a noticeable jiggle occurs.” When that happens, we notice the unlikely directional jiggle and build a carefully concocted story around it while ignoring the many, many random, counteracting collisions.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • As Tversky and Kahneman have explained, “Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not ‘corrected’ as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.” 
  • Such contingency explains why sports provide the world’s best reality show. The better team does not win every game.
  • Its power, its meaning, and its joy are wrapped in its improbability. In retrospect, it seems destined. That the U.S. team was “born for this.” The truth is, despite the power and greatness of Brooks’ speech, it was anything but. 
  • As Stephen Jay Gould famously argued, were we able to recreate the experiment of life on Earth a million different times, nothing would ever be the same, because evolution relies upon randomness. Indeed, the essence of history is contingency.
  • Mauboussin describes the “paradox of skill” as follows: “As skill improves, performance becomes more consistent, and therefore luck becomes more important.” In investing, therefore (and for example), as the population of skilled investors has increased, the variation in skill has narrowed, making luck increasingly important to outcomes.
  • All-time great teams still lose about one out of every three games, all to inferior teams, demonstrating that winning baseball games involves a lot of luck.
  • Since mean reversion establishes that the expected value of the whole season is roughly 50:50 (or slightly above or below that level), a 60 percent winning percentage being really good means that there is a lot of randomness built into baseball outcomes.
  • Luck matters. A lot. Yet, we tend dramatically to underestimate the role of randomness in the world. 
  • The self-serving bias is our tendency to see the good stuff that happens as our doing (“we worked really hard and executed the game plan well”) while the bad stuff isn’t our fault (“It just wasn’t our night” or “we simply couldn’t catch a break” or “we would have won if the umpiring hadn’t been so awful”). Thus, desirable results are typically due to our skill and hard work — not luck — while lousy results are outside of our control and the offspring of being unlucky.
  • Michael Mauboussin’s The Success Equation seeks to untangle elements of luck and skill in sports, investing, and business
  • Randomness rules.
  • the ever-increasing aggregate skill (supplemented by massive computing power) of the investment world has come largely to cancel itself out.
  • Meanwhile, Smith argues that effort and repetition mean a great deal to athletic success, but that innate talent, which cannot be taught, means even more. Thus practice — even perfect practice — does not make perfect.
  •  randomness explains why the best team or player doesn’t always win, even though the best will tend to win more often. Being very good merely improves the odds of success. It doesn’t guarantee it. 
  • we should all recognize that the outcomes in many activities in life combine elements of both skill and luck. Like baseball, investing is one of these. Understanding the relative contributions of luck and skill can help us assess past results and, more importantly, anticipate future results, a point to which Mauboussin pays particular attention.
  • Lady Luck is crucial to investment outcomes. There is no getting around it. Managing one’s portfolio so as to benefit the most from good luck and (even more importantly) to get hurt the least by bad luck are the keys to investment management. Doing so well is a remarkable skill, but not the sort of skill that’s commonly assumed, even (especially!) by professionals.
  • In the markets, the average investor underperforms due to costs alone. Poker is similar on account of the house’s rake. Yet most investors — like most poker players and most people generally, due to optimism bias — think they are better (and often much better) than the norm
  • In a “quasi-experimental” study, researchers set out to examine these questions in poker. They got together a group of both expert and novice poker players to play fixed games, meaning that the players received hands that the researchers had set up – without the knowledge of the players – to test how things would go under various scenarios. The results revealed that while the cards dealt (luck) largely predicted the winner, skill was crucial to reducing losses when players were dealt a bad hand. That’s a true if unsurprising result as far as it goes. But the conclusion of the study (“that poker should be regarded as a game of chance”) is clearly overstated.
  • It’s surely true that over the short term, luck dominates skill in poker. However, over longer and longer periods of time – a much larger database of hands – a slight skill advantage will result in a positive win rate because no player will have better cards in the aggregate. In other words, given enough time, luck cancels itself out.
  • As Silver argues in The Signal and the Noise, especially when the skill differential is not great, the interesting question is how long it will take for skill to win out.
  • consistent with the study – the primary reason is that the expert player makes fewer mistakes. Science seeks the truth by uncovering and discarding what is false. What’s left is likely to be true.
  • As noted above, we all like to think that our successes are earned and that only our failures are due to luck – bad luck. But the old expression – it’s better to be lucky than good – is at least partly true. That said, it’s best to be lucky *and* good. As a consequence, in all probabilistic fields (which is nearly all of them), the best performers dwell on process and diversify their bets. You should do the same.
  • what we should already know – market success (however defined), especially over the relatively short run, is more a matter of luck than of skill.
  • nvestment performance data support this idea unequivocally. As Charley Ellis has shown, “research on the performance of institutional portfolios shows that after risk adjustment, 24% of funds fall significantly short of their chosen market benchmark and have negative alpha, 75% of funds roughly match the market and have zero alpha, and well under 1% achieve superior results after costs — a number not statistically significantly different from zero.” 
  • As Silver emphasizes in The Signal and the Noise, we readily overestimate the degree of predictability in complex systems [and t]he experts we see in the media are much too sure of themselves (I wrote about this problem in our industry from a slightly different angle…). Much of what we attribute to skill is actually luck.
  • Plan accordingly.
Javier E

Opinion | Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-change-costs.html

climate change economic costs risks assessment reader comments

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Red O. GreeneNew Mexico11h ago"Economists—the secular priests of the current age—have developed an elaborate theology in which perpetual growth is necessary, good, and inevitable, and those who acknowledge limits to growth are deemed pessimists who oppose human progress. They justify the rejection of limits by appeal to a view of human nature as greedy and insatiable, and to a definition of freedom that (unlike Kant’s) limits the use of reason to the instrumental pursuit of arbitrary ends, rather than seeing the recognition and pursuit of higher ends as key to real freedom. They have developed a metaphysics in which everything which is 'not us' has value exclusively as a resource for us." - Prof. Philip Cafaro, Colorado State University
  • BobTaos, NM9h agoThe Green New Deal proposed by Axlexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders has two things that recommend it -- 1) it is the first policy proposal or more accurately set of proposals that appreciates the URGENCY of the climate crisis, and 2) it recognizes the SCOPE of the climate crisis. We have to act NOW and we must review and revamp EVERYTHING -- energy generation and transmission, agriculture, industry, transportation, buildings and their power use. Switching to emission free energy sources and electrifying everything could halt the buildup of greeenhouse gased in the atmosphere. Reforming agriculture holds out the promise of sequestering CO2 in the soil and bringing atmospheric levels back toward 350. But, as AOC and Bernie say it must be done now and on a massive scale. To be fair, there are literally millions of people including most leading scientists, engineers and business people like Elon Musk, and nobodies like me who have been saying this for decades. Now for the first time it is politically feasible. This is truly the test for the generation of humans who are currently alive.
  • Comments
yehbru

Opinion: Trump is considering a move that would prolong Yemen's misery - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Trump Yemen Civil War Politics United Nations Funding Supplies Terrorism

shared by yehbru on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In one of its final foreign policy acts before leaving office, the Trump administration is considering designating Yemen's Houthi movement as a foreign terrorist organization.
  • The move is part of President Donald Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's campaign to impose more sanctions on Iran and its allies in the Middle East—and to create new hurdles that would make it difficult for the incoming Joe Biden administration to resume negotiations with Tehran.
  • this designation could prolong Yemen's brutal civil war and drive millions of Yemenis into starvation
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Yemen is already facing what UNICEF calls the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with around 80% of the population—more than 24 million people—needing food and other aid.
  • United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned that Yemen was "in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades." He added, "In the absence of immediate action, millions of lives may be lost."
  • If the Trump administration goes ahead with designating the Houthi rebels as terrorists, the UN and many international humanitarian groups likely would stop delivering aid to Houthi-held territory in Yemen for fear of running afoul of the United States
  • By March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two of Washington's closest allies in the Arab world, intervened in the war with massive air strikes and a blockade of Houthi-controlled areas.
  • Since taking office in 2017, Trump has repeatedly claimed that he wants to end US involvement in foreign wars, especially in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • Trump and his advisers blamed the war on Iran and its support for the Houthis, ignoring war crimes by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which could implicate US officials who continued to sell weapons to the two allies.
  • Despite international criticism and growing evidence of war crimes, Trump continued to support Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who is a major proponent of the Yemen war. In 2019, Trump used his veto power four times to prevent Congress from ending weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and its allies.
  • Designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization is likely to make the group more intransigent and to drive it closer to Iran.
  • Because of constraints imposed by the Houthis on humanitarian work, Washington has already cut nearly half of its assistance to Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen this year. In 2019, US aid amounted to more than $700 million.
  • The UN also decreased its food rations to millions of Yemenis because of reduced aid from the US and other donors. If the terrorism designation is finalized, Washington would immediately stop its remaining aid to Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen.
  • A terrorist designation would also have a ripple effect beyond hampering the work of UN and humanitarian groups: it would dissuade insurance, commercial shipping and trade firms from operating in Yemen because they would be afraid of violating US laws.
  • As a result, it would become far more difficult and expensive to ship crucial supplies into Yemen, which is almost entirely reliant on imported food. The threat of sanctions or US prosecution could also devastate shipments of medical aid and other supplies intended to shore up a healthcare system that has been devastated by years of war and, more recently, the coronavirus pandemic.
  • It's also unlikely to be a top priority of the new administration, which could be worried about being portrayed as "soft" on terrorism.
  • The full scope of suffering in Yemen has gone partly unnoticed because of an unreliable death toll.
mariedhorne

A WSJ Cheat Sheet for Following House Races on a Long Election Night - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ong-election-night-11604320356

election voting

shared by mariedhorne on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Polls show Democrats are favored to expand their control of the House on Tuesday night. Nonpartisan analysts predict Democrats will win a net of somewhere between five and 20 seats and GOP strategists said keeping Democrats’ gains in the single digits would be a victory for them.
  • Both parties are closely watching the race to replace retiring GOP Rep. Susan Brooks in Indiana. Donald Trump won this district, located in the northern Indianapolis suburbs, by 12 points in 2016, and a Democratic victory there could signal that his weakness with suburban women is weighing down Republicans lower on the ballot.
  • Democrats took back many GOP-held suburban seats in the 2018 midterm election and are hoping to clean up the rest on Tuesday night.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Republican groups have invested millions in this cycle to win back seats they lost in 2018, forcing Democrats to spend significantly to defend these first-term lawmakers.
  • Polls show some races are tight in places that President Trump won in 2016. They include two open seats currently held by Republicans: Virginia’s Fifth District, where Democrat Cameron Webb is running against Republican Bob Good, in a mostly rural district currently held by Republican Rep.
  • In Arkansas, GOP Rep. French Hill is facing a tougher-than-expected race against state Sen. Joyce Elliott in a district that Mr. Trump won by 11 points in 2016.
  • There are 94 GOP women running in the general election, a record for the party, breaking its previous high mark of 53 GOP women who made it through the primary elections in 2018
  • Democrats have almost universally focused their messaging on health care and addressing the coronavirus pandemic, while Republicans have attacked Democrats for being socialists or espousing liberal ideas from the party’s far-left flank, such as defunding the police. The message that is most successful could help frame postelection priorities.
  • Democrats, meanwhile, have focused on Republicans’ efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, arguing they could jeopardize protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Democrats are running ads focusing on this popular part of the ACA in districts such as GOP Rep. Chip Roy’s Texas district, where he is being challenged by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis.
carolinehayter

Trump Lawsuits Target Votes In Largely Black Cities, Alarm Civil Rights Groups : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ties-alarms-civil-rights-group

trump politics us biden election voting gop Policy culture

shared by carolinehayter on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • When Joe Biden thanked Black voters in his first remarks as president-elect, he credited them with lifting his campaign from its lowest point during the Democratic primaries.
  • While Biden won Black voters overwhelmingly across the country, they were key to his victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia — places where President Trump and his allies have been targeting ballots in cities with large Black populations in an attempt to overturn the president's defeat and retain power.
  • The president's campaign has denied racial motivations in its lawsuits, saying that its recount strategy is not targeting Black voters.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But the persistence of the president and loyal Republicans has alarmed Black leaders, civil rights activists and historians who see an unprecedented attempt to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters, many of them Black.
  • To many civil rights advocates, this is another grim chapter in what they see as an expansive, decades-long effort by Republicans to gain more power by suppressing the votes of people of color.
  • A group of Michigan voters has also filed a lawsuit against Trump and his campaign, arguing that "defendants are openly seeking to disenfranchise Black voters,"
  • The plaintiffs, who are represented by lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, allege that the Trump campaign has attempted mass voter suppression by pressuring election officials into not certifying the election results in their state, and that Trump's apparent attempt to pressure Michigan election officials and state lawmakers was a violation of the provision against voter intimidation included in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
  • Trump and his allies have made similar efforts in Pennsylvania, with false claims about widespread voter fraud in Philadelphia.
  • But Bob Bauer, a senior legal adviser to the Biden campaign, said the Trump campaign's "targeting of the African American community is not subtle. It is extraordinary" and that "it's quite remarkable how brazen it is."
  • "It is difficult for me to think of another president in modern time who has literally driven a national scheme to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color en masse, in the way that we see with these post-election lawsuits," said Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. S
  • the Trump campaign was aided by supporters and allies across the country in his failed efforts to reverse Biden's victory.
  • "It's only because of the environment that was created by this president to defy the rule of law, to destroy customs and practices, and to really push people toward a sense of tribalism that's not in our economic interest, that's not in the interest of democracy, for his own selfish and self-reflecting outcome,"
  • The effort that Trump is undertaking, she said, is a new type of attempted voter suppression in which the president is attempting to invalidate ballots that have already been counted.
  • "I think he has targeted heavily African American cities because they happen to be heavily Democratic cities, and if he's going to invalidate enough votes to turn the election in his favor, this would actually be the best place to do it," Gillespie said.
  • voters of color, faced unprecedented obstacles to cast ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • With the election challenges serving as a sort of punctuation mark on all of that, Clarke said, "I think this will stand out in the history books as one of the darkest moments in our nation's history."
katherineharron

Q&A with Elizabeth Catte and Leah Hampton: Rural America and social inequity - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

unity

shared by katherineharron on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The January 6 invasion of the US Capitol laid bare many uncomfortable truths about American society.
  • Some of the danger comes directly out of Capitol attack coverage
  • it's critical not to let stereotypes about "hillbilly malignancy" or economic anxiety blind us to the role that "respectable people" — business owners, CEOs and real estate brokers; at least 19 state and local officials; and law enforcement and service members — played in the siege that left five dead and scores of police officers injured.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The danger we always have in this country is erasure.
  • Instead of that becoming the dominant conversation, the insurrection knocked the story of successful progressive organizing out of our political discussions, once again centering this toxic White supremacist identity and ideology.
  • Consider law enforcement's differential treatment of armed insurrectionists compared with demonstrators calling for racial equity and the end of police brutality. Take note of the race and class divisions at the heart of the rioters' discontent.
  • That kind of coverage means we have ended exactly where we started from, with this idea that this moment has been given to us by White, poor, rural people. Such stories erase complicity by upper-middle-class White people and reveal the tendency to turn up our noses at any nuanced portrayal of complicated issues of race, class and power that are actually at play here.
  • The reductive, monolithic hillbilly narrative sucks the life out of the work, the organizing spaces and even the imaginations of progressive people in Appalachia.
  • Another really big danger is when White people say, "This is not who we are." It is who we are.
  • When you talk about who profits, you also have to think about how this country glorifies work — particularly hard physical labor by White men
  • Some commentators have challenged the portrayal of rioters at the Capitol as "deplorables rising up from the muck of Rust Belt trailer parks" driven by economic anxiety.
  • All privileged people across the political spectrum profit from the economic anxiety myth, from energy CEOs — guys like Bob Murray — to the ecotourism industry and universities in the region by superficially distancing themselves from White supremacist ideology while also often preserving those same systems for their own benefit.
  • One of the dangers of these myths is that it allows the more genteel White toxicity to feel better about itself.
  • This masking is very dangerous and it worries me, because it erases the people who actually do most of the work in this country, while centering a very narrow, heteronormative view of masculinity.
  • The tendency to blame rural places comes because Appalachia isn't actually powerful. A state like West Virginia carries just five electoral college votes. The fact is that Appalachia and other rural places tell a story that is very pleasing to capitalism: That some people are willing to die for their work.
  • In this country, we seem to have a morbid need to find examples of people who happily sacrifice themselves for work
  • Practically speaking, we need to make sure the census is properly counted and make sure that rural progressive organizations are funded and have grant access.
  • The idea that we can flip a switch and be unified is absolutely ridiculous. That work is hard. We need a reorientation of perspective that helps us to see through the expeditious narratives that are so often sold to us.
Javier E

How a Liberal Lawyer in Georgia Took an Extreme Right Turn - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-Jr-georgia-capitol-riot.html

culture politics US trump history crisis individual corruption racism

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • last year, as the progressive movement in Georgia was on the cusp of historic electoral triumph, Mr. Calhoun, a small-town lawyer whose family had long roots in the state, suddenly abandoned the Democrats. And not only that, he pledged to kill them.
  • “I have tons of ammo,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter three months before storming the U.S. Capitol with a pro-Trump mob. “Gonna use it too — at the range and on racist democrat communists. So make my day.”
  • Some Black residents of Americus, Mr. Calhoun’s hometown, were not shocked that a person so worldly could end up doing something like this. “The Jekyll and Hyde effect,” said the Rev. Mathis Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Black residents in Sumter make up a reliable Democratic base, while whites are often divided, as one local put it, between liberal “come heres,” like Habitat employees, and conservative, locally raised, “been heres.”
  • Before it fell away, Mr. Calhoun’s white progressivism had a homegrown flavor, steeped in Georgia’s history, countercultural currents and higher education system. He preached criminal justice reform and broadcast his support for Hillary Clinton.
  • Then came his abrupt turn, and a headlong descent into some of the darkest places in Georgia history. He peppered his social media posts with racial slurs, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “fake negro.” He saluted the Confederacy, and he seemed to thirst for civil war.
  • He was not an unlettered man: In his years at school, Mr. Calhoun had written a master’s thesis on the historiography of Napoleon’s peninsular war and had attended a law seminar in Belgium. His profile — a well-educated, white-collar white man — matched that of some of the other Georgians who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6
  • The crowd that came from Georgia included a 53-year-old investment portfolio manager and a 65-year-old accountant. It included Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., 51, a successful business owner who graduated from an elite Atlanta prep school, who was arrested in Washington the day after the riot with guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a phone with his text messages about “putting a bullet” into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head.
  • he began a law career in Americus, an old Confederate cotton town and the seat of Sumter County, about 140 miles south of Atlanta. Sumter has for decades played an important role in liberal Georgia’s sense of possibility. A multiracial Christian commune, Koinonia Farm, was founded there in the 1940s. Jimmy Carter lives in the tiny town of Plains, and the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, founded by a Koinonia family, is headquartered in Americus
  • while Mr. Calhoun’s politics had changed drastically, Mr. Lankford said, his personality had not.“He’s the same old banty rooster, just on the other side of the fence,” Mr. Lankford said.
  • Rev. Wright suggested that the racism deep at the root of Georgia’s history was still very much alive, even if white people, including some of those who saw themselves as progressive, did not want to admit it. “What President Trump did was allow it to bud and to grow,” he said. “A lot of people who had been suppressing it no longer felt that they had to suppress it.”
  • “I was a Democrat for 30 years,” he wrote in a recent social media post. The new gun control proposals changed that, he said. “I was called a white supremacist and a racist for defending the 2A,” he continued, using a shorthand for the Second Amendment. Given all that he had done as a lawyer for “justice,” he said, “that hurt my feelings a little. That’s when I became a Trump supporter.”
  • His conversion was total. By the fall of 2020 he was posting about a looming “domestic communist problem” and the “rioting BLM-Antifa crime wave.” Of Joe Biden, he wrote: “Hang the bastard.”
  • Old friends were baffled, and some grew nervous. “I’ll be slinging enough hot lead to stack you commies up like cordwood,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter in October. Then, a few days later: “Standing by, and when Trump makes the call, millions of heavily armed, pissed off patriots are coming to Washington.”
  • After the election, Mr. Calhoun held a small gun rights rally in town, and the violent posts continued, with talk of civil war, mounting heads on pikes and showing the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar “what the bottom of the river looks like.” In December, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, found Mr. Calhoun buying a Confederate flag outside a Trump rally. “This is about independence and freedom,” Mr. Calhoun told the reporter, describing Trumpism and Southern secession as similarly justified fights against tyranny.
  • On Jan. 6, Mr. Calhoun’s posts showed he had made his way inside the U.S. Capitol with the mob. “The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door,” he wrote in one post. “Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen.”
  • A week later, federal agents arrested him at his sister’s house in Macon, Ga., where he had stockpiled two AR-15-style assault rifles, two shotguns, a handgun, brass knuckles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, according to the testimony of an F.B.I. agent.
  • After the 2016 election, an old friend, Bob Fortin, remembers Mr. Calhoun excoriating him for voting for Mr. Trump. “He cussed me out in his kitchen,” said Mr. Fortin, who said he later regretted his vote. “He made me feel like a complete ass.”
  • At Mr. Calhoun’s Jan. 21 court hearing in Macon, Charles H. Weigle, the federal magistrate judge, ruled that there was probable cause to believe that Mr. Calhoun had committed crimes when he stormed the Capitol.
  • A man who had committed such “extreme violence,” the judge said — who believed that it was his patriotic duty to take up arms and fight in a new civil war — constituted a danger to the community.The judge sent Mr. Calhoun back to jail.
Javier E

How America can shift to the right direction - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-856d-5054296735e5_story.html

American idea writer

shared by Javier E on 05 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • the writer and teacher Robert D. Richardson Jr., who died June 16 at 86. His signature biographies — of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James — together trace the implications of our founding ideals for the growth of a distinctly American philosophy.
  • Bob found the thread connecting these giants of America’s tumultuous, formative years “in their pluralism, in their liberation from Puritanism, in their respect for mind.”
  • They reconciled self with community and idealism with pragmatism, each arguing in a distinctive way that the path to a better society is through the free expression of our own best selves.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • They were “voices for democratic individualism,”
Javier E

Covid testing is about saving lives. Trump thinks it's just about numbers. - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9f5e-56d8239bf9ad_story.html

testing trump numbers

shared by Javier E on 17 May 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump paused to muse about the pros and cons of testing people for the coronavirus. “The media likes to point out” that the United States has the most covid-19 cases in the world, he observed. “But we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”
  • The United States does not do “the most testing,” at least not on a per capita basis — not by a long shot
  • And if the United States did “very little” testing, that would not change the number of people infected, although it would hamper efforts to reduce that figure and limit our understanding of where the virus is spreading.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Tests are perfect, in Trump’s mind, when they tell you what you want to hear — but not so great when they deliver bad news.
  • But if a test is going to produce an unwelcome result, why do it?
  • Numbers are crucial to the way Trump sees the world.
  • He cares passionately that people believe his claims that he has billions of dollars. He considered his (partly) abandoned nightly crisis briefings as TV shows whose success should be judged by the only metric for such events that matters to him: ratings. He began his presidency with an insanely obsessive row about how many people attended his inauguration. He understands the economy solely through the vicissitudes of the stock market
  • According to the book “Fear,” by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, Trump’s main concern in internal discussions about tax cuts was to have memorable figures: “I like those big round numbers. Ten percent, 20 percent, 25 percent.”
  • From the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Trump has been primarily concerned less with protecting lives and more with projecting positive statistics.
  • Today, Trump is caught in a contradiction he cannot resolve: He likes the number of tests performed to go higher and higher but refuses to acknowledge the implications of their results.
  • His fury arose from the basic premise of the question: What the reporter was implying was that there is supposed to be a relationship between testing on the one side and reality on the other
  • when Katie Miller, Vice President Pence’s press secretary, tested positive for the virus: Trump said the result illustrated why “the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.”
  • What Trump stopped short of saying is that a “good” test suddenly turns “bad” when it produces the “wrong” result
  • His ambivalence about testing — love the statistics, hate the results — leads him into wild inconsistency. Today he takes credit for the large numbers of tests done nationally (“nearly double the number of any country”), yet only a month ago he said flatly that governors were “responsible for testing”
  • those obstinate tests do have results, and they show a country with 5 percent of the global population having a third of the world’s known cases of covid-19
Javier E

How Trump Sealed the GOP's Suicide - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-trump-sealed-the-gops-suicide

gop suicide politics history culture trump crisis authoritarian personality cult

shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • How did the GOP find itself in this desperate, seamy dilemma? The short answer is four years of subservience to Trump
  • But it is nonetheless instructive to consider what the party had become before his advent—
  • By 2012, the GOP had come to rely on a partially overlapping base of evangelicals; whites without college degrees threatened by economic dislocation; and malcontents whose distrust of government partook of paranoia
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • These folks were not natural allies of the party of business or its wealthy donors. In exchange for pursuing the economic agenda of the wealthy, the GOP increasingly offered up a primal vision rooted in culture wars, contempt for government, and scapegoating blacks, immigrants, Muslims and other minorities.
  • The real causes of blue-collar woes were globalization, the Great Recession, the housing crisis, and an information society which marginalized the undereducated. About this, the GOP elite did nothing—not about student debt, stagnant wages, dwindling benefits, diminishing job security, retraining for the new economy, or the widespread unaffordability of quality medical care.
  • the new book Authoritarian Nightmare by Bob Altemeyer and John Dean presents “data from a previously unpublished nationwide survey showing a striking desire for strong authoritarian leadership among Republican voters.”
  • As president, Trump has pushed the boundaries of our constitutional democracy to achieve unprecedented executive power. Not only do his followers support this, but elected Republicans have done nothing to stop him.
  • In the Altemeyer-Dean survey, roughly half of Trump supporters agreed with this statement: “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.”
  • This squares with findings by Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels summarized by the Post: “Many Republican voters hold strong authoritarian and anti-democratic beliefs, with racism being a key driver of those attitudes.”
  • The GOP is no longer about ideas like limited government, or the higher ideals of inclusiveness and an American Dream open to all. Its toxic compound of raw anger and nativist passion is, at bottom, about subjugating the demographic “other.”
  • It is barely possible now to imagine the GOP had Trump been different. He came without ideology, propelled by a gift for embodying a potent but undefined populism
  • He might have become an agent of constructive reinvention, eschewing racism and xenophobia in favor of offering embattled middle-class and blue-collar workers genuine economic uplift. He could have reinstated fiscal responsibility by disdaining tax cuts for the wealthy. He might even have taken steps—if not to drain the swamp—at least to reform it.
  • But that would have required real talent, sustained attention, and a genuine interest in governance. Instead this irredeemably vicious, vacant, and narcissistic demagogue unleashed white identity politics and the endless overreach of Republican donors. This leads inexorably to the deadest of ends—a demographic death knell for his party and, for our democracy, the most grievous of wounds
anonymous

A Single Senator Dashes Hopes for Latino and Women's Museums - For Now - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nian-latino-women-museums.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • For more than two decades, Latinos and their allies in Congress have been fighting to approve the creation of a National Museum of the American Latino in Washington.
  • on Thursday night, as their congressional term dwindles to just days, Republican and Democratic senators gathered on the Senate floor in hopes of capturing overwhelming support to push both over the finish line.
  • In the end, the objections of a single senator out of 100, Mike Lee of Utah, were enough to stop both measures and ensure that for now, their proponents will keep waiting.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • when Senators John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, tried to advance the legislation setting up the Latino museum on the National Mall.
  • “My objection to the creation of a new Smithsonian museum or series of museums based on group identity — what Theodore Roosevelt called hyphenated Americanism — is not a matter of budgetary or legislative technicalities,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s a matter of national unity and cultural inclusion.”
  • “The so-called critical theory undergirding this movement does not celebrate diversity; it weaponizes diversity,” he said. “It sharpens all those hyphens into so many knives and daggers. It has turned our college campuses into grievance pageants and loose Orwellian mobs to cancel anyone daring to express an original thought.”
  • He argued that Latinos were just as entitled to their own cultural institution as African-Americans and Native Americans, to whom Smithsonian museums have been dedicated in recent years.
  • That concern, along with budgetary ones, has been one of the main points of opposition to a Latino museum in recent years amid extensive lobbying campaigns in its favor.
  • “Surely in a year where we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, this is the time, this is the moment to finally pass the legislation unanimously recommended by an independent commission to establish an American women’s history museum in our nation’s capital,”
  • Even if Congress approved the museums, it would likely take about another decade to open their doors.
Javier E

How Misinformation Threatened a Montana National Heritage Area - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rmation-national-heritage.html

disinformation partisan polarization Culture politics

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.
  • She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.
  • From the vantage point of informed democratic decision making, it’s a haunting tale about how a sustained political campaign can succeed despite — or perhaps as a result of — being divorced from reality.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • “Misinformation is the new playbook,” Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls, said. “You don’t like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality.”
  • “We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”
  • Steve Taylor, a former mayor of Neihart (pop. 43) whose family owns a car dealership in Great Falls, is a conservative who voted for Donald J. Trump twice, though he said he has regretted those votes since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Fellow Republicans, he said, have painted the heritage area as a liberal plot
  • “They make it a political thing because if you have a Democrat involved, then they are all against it,” he said. “It’s so hard to build something and so easy to tear it down. It’s maddening. It’s so easy to destroy something with untruths.”
  • And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.
  • Beginning in 2013, Ms. Weber teamed up with local preservationists, formed a nonprofit, enlisted local businesses and raised $50,000 for a required feasibility study. In 2014, the Great Falls City Commission included the heritage area as part of its official growth policy.
  • The proposal would take in four National Historic Landmarks: Lewis and Clark’s portage route around Great Falls; Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River that was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s; the First Peoples Buffalo Jump, a steep cliff over which Blackfoot hunters herded buffalo to their deaths; and the home and studio of C.M. Russell, the turn-of-the-century “cowboy artist” whose paintings of the American West shaped the popular image of frontier life.
  • The park service requires demonstrations of public support, which Ms. Weber and her allies solicited. For six years, the process went on largely undisturbed. Ms. Weber hosted dozens of public meetings and was a regular on local radio stations. Opponents made scarcely a peep.
  • The proposal for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area, encompassing most of two central Montana counties that are together roughly the size of Connecticut, was the brainchild of Jane Weber, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who spent a decade on the Cascade County Commission.
  • Ms. Grulkowski’s interest was piqued.At the time, she was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader.
  • Then the 2020 political season arrived.
  • By May, their campaign had reached the state capital, where Mr. Gianforte signed the bill barring any national heritage area in Montana after it passed on a near-party-line vote. A heritage area, the bill’s text asserted, would “interfere with state and private property rights.”
  • In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.”
  • Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski with the details.
  • But when pressed, Ms. Grulkowski, too, was unable to identify a single instance of a property owner’s being adversely affected by a heritage area. “It’s not that there are a lot of specific instances,” she said. “There’s a lot of very wide open things that could happen.”
  • That somewhat amorphous fear was more the point.
  • “We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”
  • One thing Ms. Grulkowski does not do — because she refuses to pay — is read The Great Falls Tribune, the local daily. It’s not what it once was, with just eight journalists, down from 45 in 2000, said Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the paper before the owner, Gannett, laid him off as opinion editor in 2016. He is vice chairman of the proposed heritage area’s board.
  • In the paper’s place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski. Last winter, a glossy magazine distributed to Montana farmers put the subject on its cover, headlined “Intrusive Raid on Private Property Rights.”
  • Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist.Buoyed by the trust her neighbors have placed in her, she has begun campaigning for Ms. Weber’s old seat on the county commission, in part to avenge the way she feels: mistreated by those in power.She doesn’t feel she’s been told the whole truth.
clairemann

How will the Women's March be remembered? - 0 views

slate.com/...rch-five-year-anniversary.html

politics us trump culture

shared by clairemann on 22 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • What started as a smattering of unconnected Facebook events that sprung up the day after Donald Trump’s election became the largest single-day political action in U.S. history — a convening of nearly half a million people, who organized themselves by state and city and bought plane tickets and chartered buses to D.C. to be together on Jan. 21, 2017, five years ago today.
  • If nothing else, the fact that we remember the Women’s March as a net-positive event rather than a Fyre Festival is a major win.But five years after the record-setting event, it’s a bit harder to identify its place in contemporary politics. The image of millions of Americans filling the streets to express dissatisfaction with the Trump agenda held immense promise for so many. Did it deliver?
  • What do we expect the purpose of public protest to be? Some critics deem a social movement a failure if it doesn’t yield immediate, tangible policy changes.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Grassroots movements don’t have a great track record, he wrote. “
  • Some marchers went into party politics: One participant from Maine—a woman who’d never done anything political but vote before attending the Women’s March—went home and became the chair of the Maine Democratic Party. Only a fraction of the marchers kept taking their cues from the Women’s March organization itself. And that makes sense: The Women’s March encompassed an almost unbelievably broad array of concerns.
  • Some did run for office, and some won. The march itself encompassed a diverse coalition of interest groups and the convention that followed, in October 2017, hosted workshops on the messier aspects of political organizing.
  • The members of that group threw themselves into the fight against partisan gerrymandering and worked to pass a state ballot initiative for an independent redistricting commission. Now, the Michigan maps have been redrawn. Though it’s impossible to measure how much the Women’s March contributed to that outcome, it unquestionably played a part.
  • Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics.”
  • They were everywhere: at fashion shows, cutting in front of rank-and-file participants at events, on magazine covers that they complained were not distributed widely enough. They accepted awards, posed for glamorous photo shoots, and fought a two-year battle to trademark the phrase “women’s march,” which they eventually dropped.
  • Organizers of marches are rarely given such disproportionate credit for their events’ success. Seasoned activists know that power of a grassroots movement lies not in its branding or executive leadership structure, but in the people who show up and sustain it. And yet, the Women’s March foursome quickly claimed to speak for something far more decentralized and organic than their own narrative would suggest.
  • But the organizers of Women’s March didn’t get that memo. The nonprofit that grew around it treated its four leaders — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Bob Bland, and Linda Sarsour — as celebrities, the visionary trailblazers at the head of a cohesive political movement.
  • But the Women’s March organization didn’t do much to refocus all that attention on the thousands of local organizers and millions of marchers who gave the march its meaning.
  • So when Mallory and Perez drew criticism for their support of noted sexist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, it was no big stretch for critics to use the leaders of the Women’s March to smear the entire movement.
  • The groundswell of women looking for community and purpose after Trump’s election needed some guidance—literally, marching orders. They did not need a clique of unelected spokespeople.
  • They had come to the Women’s March not as a unified people following a leader with a specific set of demands, but as individuals with a variety of related grievances, wanting to express a broad feeling of dismay at the direction the country was headed.
  • Many of them were inspired to undertake a deeper political education and find their place in other movements, including the fight to save the Affordable Care Act and the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020. In an alternate timeline, with no Women’s March to warm them up, would many of the white people at those Black Lives Matter marches have shown up at all?
  • The most memorable subsequent actions of the Women’s March—the groups that traveled to D.C. to beg their senators not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the marches in the streets to protest the end of Roe v. Wade in Texas—what did they accomplish?
  • Protests and marches reassure people that they’re neither alone in their anger or fear, nor crazy for being angry and fearful. They introduce demonstrators to new friends and networks of political activity. There’s nothing like the rush of standing in a chanting crowd, sweating or shivering with thousands of people who share one’s outrage, to revive flagging willpower.
  • I’m sure there are plenty of Women’s Marchers who heaved a sigh of relief and went “back to brunch” after Joe Biden took office, thinking the work was done. But I don’t think that’s the prevailing view among the people who first woke up to politics when Trump became president. They watched, as we all did, as right-wing rioters took the Capitol last Jan. 6. They’re witnessing the dissolution of a broad voting rights bill at the hands of two Democratic senators. They’re watching abortion rights disintegrate in Texas and across the South. And they’re living through the hottest years in recorded history, bracing for the next hurricane or forest fire, as the people with the power to save life on Earth as we know it look the other way.
  • In this moment, under those conditions, with five years of hindsight, the Women’s March looks nothing short of revolutionary.
criscimagnael

New Sanctions for Russian Gas Pipeline Fall Short in Senate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssia-gas-pipeline-ukraine.html

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The Senate on Thursday rejected a bid to impose sanctions on a Russian natural-gas pipeline, as Democrats set themselves against a Republican-led measure endorsed by Ukrainian leaders but opposed by the Biden administration amid fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
  • The final tally of 55 to 44 fell short of the 60 votes needed for passage,
  • The bill prompted dueling lobbying campaigns on Capitol Hill, where top Ukrainian officials leaned on senators to back it and Biden administration officials sought to kill it.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Efforts to impose sanctions on the Nord Stream 2, an undersea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that would give Moscow enormous leverage over Europe, have long drawn bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have enthusiastically sought to bolster Ukraine against Russian aggression.
  • the timing of the vote — amid continuing diplomatic talks between Russia and the United States in the hopes of averting war — as well as the Biden administration’s vocal opposition ultimately helped fuel the measure’s defeat.
  • Six Democrats — some of them facing difficult re-elections in 2022 — defected from their party’s position and voted in favor of the measure,
  • The Biden administration and its allies in Congress argued the legislation, led by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, would do little to counter Russian influence because the pipeline’s construction is nearly completed.
  • Instead, they said, the sanctions would drive a wedge between the United States and Germany, which has championed the pipeline as vital to its industrial success, and give up a key point of leverage during diplomatic negotiations.
  • “If this bill passes, it won’t make the Nord Stream pipeline any less likely,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “It won’t stop Russia from invading Ukraine. In fact, it will do the exact opposite.
  • On a Christmas Eve video call with a bipartisan group of more than 20 lawmakers, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine cast Nord Stream 2 as an existential threat to his country, arguing that the pipeline posed as much risk to Ukraine as the Russian troops amassing on its border,
  • “I would suggest if Joe Biden were not president, if Donald Trump were sitting in the Oval Office today, every single Democrat in this chamber would vote for these sanctions.”
  • “The pipeline itself is the wedge,” Mr. McConnell said. “That’s the whole point. That’s been Putin’s goal: decoupling Ukraine from Europe and making Europe even more reliant on Russian gas.”
  • Republicans accused Democrats of allowing Russian aggression to go unchecked, painting their reluctance to impose sanctions as politically motivated.
  • An email sent on Monday to Senate offices by the lobbyist, which was forwarded to The New York Times, included a screenshot of Mr. Zelensky’s tweet, and added the message, “Ukraine Pres. Zelensky calls on all senators to vote in favor of Nord Stream 2 sanctions.”
  • The next day, the issue came up again as senators met with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in a closed-door meeting to discuss an upcoming delegation trip to Ukraine.
  • Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, unveiled on Wednesday a Democratic alternative to Mr. Cruz’s bill that would impose sanctions on top Russian government officials, including Mr. Putin, if Russia engages in or supports “a significant escalation in hostilities or hostile action in or against Ukraine.”
  • It likely did not help Mr. Cruz’s cause that many Democrats are furious with him for depriving President Biden of a slew of national security officials who are still awaiting Senate confirmation.
  • Last month, he agreed to stop blocking the confirmation of 32 of Mr. Biden’s State Department and Treasury Department nominees in exchange for Thursday’s vote.
  • Mr. Hochstein had also served on a supervisory board of Naftogaz until he resigned in late 2020, citing concerns about the Ukrainian government’s willingness to combat corruption.
Javier E

'Cynical, craven' Republicans out to bash Biden, not Putin, over gas prices | Joe Biden... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ns-joe-biden-russia-gas-prices

gas biden gopm opportunism

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The argument was amplified this week when gas prices hit at a record average of $4.17 per gallon and Biden announced a ban on US imports of Russian oil. He warned that while the move would hurt Vladimir Putin, “there will be a cost as well here in the United States”, and anticipated criticism by branding it “Putin’s price hike”.
  • the era when wars meant unity governments and a shared understanding that “politics stops at the water’s edge” is over. Republicans backed Biden’s ban on Russian oil imports but simultaneously went on an offensive that effectively absolved Putin of blame.
  • Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the House, told a press conference: “These aren’t Putin prices. They’re President Biden’s prices.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Factcheckers have pointed out that the main cause of increasing gas prices over the past year is disruptions to global supply and demand following the coronavirus pandemic. Only a 10th of the Keystone XL pipeline was complete when Biden cancelled it and it was not likely to become operational until 2023 at the earliest.
  • Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations, said: “‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Biden is going to own whatever the economy is come November. Republicans don’t have to do anything to make that happen. People feel it for themselves, they observe for themselves.
  • Bardella, a former senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “Republicans were so vocal about how the Biden administration needed to do sanctions on Russian oil and then they start attacking him. You can’t win because everything that they do is basically an illustration of how they operate in bad faith.”
  • He added that Republicans, in thrall to “big oil”, have spent the past two decades opposing the very measures that would have made America less dependent on foreign oil and fossil fuels in general. Green technology would have shielded the US from the effects of the Ukraine crisis on global markets.
  • “You don’t have to remind people too much of gas prices and overall inflation is a big macro political issue. Doing well as an incumbent is all about peace and prosperity, and prosperity is being eroded by inflation, with gas prices being a focal point.”
  • Democratic strategists are aware that the issue could weigh heavily on midterm voters. Bob Shrum acknowledged: “The facts don’t matter much here. If gas prices are really high, that becomes a problem for Democrats in the midterms because they’re in office. It’s just a natural tendency to blame someone under those circumstances.”
Javier E

DeSantis accused of 'catastrophic' climate approach after campaign launch | Ron DeSanti... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...santis-climate-crisis-campaign

climate approach campaign skeptic politics US gop

shared by Javier E on 28 May 23 - No Cached
  • “We need fossil fuels,” DeSantis said at an event in March. “You can’t just get rid of them unless you guys want to pay a lot more for energy.”However, the governor’s supporters argue that he has forged strong environmentalist credentials in Florida, signing bills to beef up the state’s resilience to sea level rise and pledging billions of dollars to restore the ailing Everglades, which has been besieged by agricultural development and, increasingly, climate change.
  • This record could have been the basis for a pragmatic alternative to Trump and help appeal to voters increasingly alarmed by rising temperatures, according to Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman who now advocates for a conservative response to the climate crisis.
  • Inglis said that while some senior Republicans fret they will lose out on a younger generation of climate-concerned voters, they still risk being beaten in primary races by candidates that back Trump’s ongoing embrace of climate denialism.“People like (House of Representatives speaker) Kevin McCarthy know that young conservatives want action on climate change and even if Trump wins he will be a lame duck by 2026 and the party could start moving on by then,” said Inglis.“The trouble is, the scientists say we don’t have the time to wait for that. That really is the problem.
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 80 of 83 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page