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katherineharron

Matt Gaetz is denied a meeting with Donald Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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gaetz

shared by katherineharron on 12 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Rep. Matt Gaetz, who's facing a federal investigation into sex trafficking allegations, was recently denied a meeting with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate as the ex-President and his allies continue to distance themselves from the Florida congressman.
  • Gaetz tried to schedule a visit with Trump after it was first revealed that he was being investigated, but the request was rejected by aides close to the former President,
  • a spokesman for Gaetz, said the congressman did not request a meeting with Trump this week.
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  • Rep. Gaetz was welcomed to Trump Doral this week and has not sought to meet with President Trump himself,"
  • The interference by Trump's aides signals that Gaetz finds himself increasingly isolated as he weathers a potentially career-ending scandal just months after he offered to leave his plum job in Congress to join the 45th President's impeachment defense team.
  • Trump denied ever receiving a blanket pardon request from the 38-year-old congressman and noted Gaetz's denial of the allegations against him.
  • Trump spokesman Jason Miller wrote in a tweet on Sunday evening that Gaetz did not request a meeting "and therefore, it could never have been denied."Read More
  • Federal investigators are examining allegations that Gaetz had sex with an underage girl who was 17 at the time and with other women who were provided drugs and money in violation of sex trafficking and prostitution laws.
  • Gaetz has continued to deny all allegations against him and has not been charged with any crimes.
  • Trump omitted Gaetz as he name-checked many of his top Republican defenders -- from South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, according to two people familiar with his remarks.
  • Trump's failure to mention Gaetz was viewed as conspicuous to some in the crowd, given the congressman's outsized loyalty to the former President and the litany of other Republicans Trump called out during his speech.
  • Gaetz's appearance on Friday at a conference for pro-Trump women raised eyebrows inside the former President's orbit
  • Gaetz, who was announced as a "special guest" only days before the summit began, used his time on stage to denounce "wild conspiracy theories" about his personal life, and to reaffirm his plans to remain on Capitol Hill.
  • Gaetz has already faced calls from one Republican colleague, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, to resign his congressional seat and has received virtually no support from within Trump's orbit
ethanshilling

How Democrats Who Lost in Deep-Red Places Might Have Helped Biden - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-down-ballot.html

biden democrats politics

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.
  • State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.
  • The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates.
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  • The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, the study found.
  • The study showed a reverse coattails effect: It was lower-level candidates running in nearly hopeless situations — red districts that Democrats had traditionally considered no-win, low-to-no-investment territory — who helped the national or statewide figures atop the ballot, instead of down-ballot candidates benefiting from a popular national candidate of the same party.
  • In 2005, when Howard Dean became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he tried to institute a “50-state strategy” to build up party infrastructure and candidate recruitment at every level and in every state — even in solidly Republican districts.
  • For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races.
  • “Now that we’ve gotten through the 2020 election, we really need to make sure that this is what we’re focused on,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “We’ve elected Joe Biden, but Trump and Trumpism and the things he’s said and stood for are not gone, and we could lose everything again.”
  • Republicans have lapped Democrats in their legislative infrastructure for years, said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster. “Democrats are pretty open at a legislative level that they’re playing catch-up,” he said. “For whatever reason, Democrats have gotten more fired up about federal races.”
  • “It came as a shock to everybody that Republicans ran as strong in those districts as they did,” Mr. Hobart said. “But if you have candidates on the ballot for everything, it means you’re primed to take advantage of that infrastructure on a good year.”
  • In Georgia, Run for Something believes that Ms. Carter’s presence on the ballot significantly helped Mr. Biden’s performance in her area of the state. While the group said that district-level data alone could be misleading, and needed to be combined with other factors taken into account in its analysis, Mr. Biden averaged 47 percent of the vote in the three counties — Newton, Butts and Henry — in which Ms. Carter’s district, the 110th, sits.
  • Ms. Carter said she spent a lot of time during her campaign trying to educate people on the importance of voting, especially in local races that often have more bearing on day-to-day life, like school and police funding.
  • “I thought it was a lot of the work that people didn’t want to do or felt like it wasn’t going to benefit them,” she said. “We are not going to win every race, but we could win if we just did the legwork.”
kaylynfreeman

Targeting 'Critical Race Theory,' Republicans Rattle American Schools - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...critical-race-theory.html

politics US

shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In Loudoun County, Va., a group of parents led by a former Trump appointee are pushing to recall school board members after the school district called for mandatory teacher training in “systemic oppression and implicit bias.”
  • And across the country, Republican-led legislatures have passed bills recently to ban or limit schools from teaching that racism is infused in American institutions.
  • Republicans have focused their attacks on the influence of “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education. The concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.
hannahcarter11

Tulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice | TheHill - 0 views

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tulsa massacre injustice reparations centennial

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • On the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre — in which a thriving Black neighborhood was burned to the ground and hundreds of residents were killed by an angry white mob — local and national leaders find themselves grappling with the lasting effects of racial injustice and violence.
  • The centennial comes just a week after the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, an event that sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter protests calling for an end to police brutality and systemic racism.
  • In 1921, Greenwood was a bastion of Black wealth at a time when Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan hamstrung and terrorized Black Americans in the South.
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  • Dubbed “Black Wall Street,” the northern section of Tulsa was home to dozens of Black-owned businesses, including hotels, restaurants, law firms and medical practices.
  • Despite its prominence, the massacre was little known, if at all, in most parts of the country, until the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was created in 1997
  • he seeds of violence were planted on the morning of May 31, when the Tulsa Tribune reported that 19-year-old Black shoeshine Dick Rowland had attempted to assault Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white elevator operator in the Drexel Building in the white part of town.
  • The Tribune’s overdramatized account of what happened — the story headline read “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” — sparked the forming of a lynch mob outside the Tulsa County Courthouse, where Rowland was in custody.
  • A group of roughly 25 Black men from Greenwood went to the courthouse armed to stop the mob from taking Rowland, only to be turned away by authorities.
  • Later, after the white mob continued to grow and a larger group from Greenwood returned, a scuffle broke out, followed by gunfire
  • Tulsa police appointed hundreds of white men and boys “special deputies,” even supplying some of them with guns.
  • It’s a “striking example of how our institutions, particularly policing but not only policing, have played a role over our history in enforcing systemic racism and brutality against Black Americans,” Rep. Steven HorsfordSteven Alexander HorsfordTulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice Gun violence: Save the thoughts and prayers, it's time for Senate action Democrats offer bill to encourage hiring of groups hard-hit by pandemic MORE (D-Nev.), second vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told The Hill.
  • The white mob had razed more than 1,200 houses across 35 city blocks, looting hundreds more. The prosperous business district of Greenwood was destroyed.
  • As many as 300 people died, historians say, though the exact number is unknown due to mass gravesites. The destruction displaced about 10,000 Greenwood residents.
  • In total, more than $1.8 million of Black property was destroyed, more than $27 million by today’s dollar.
  • The staggering economic loss was never recovered by Black Tulsans and is seen as a key factor in the stark racial wealth disparity in the city 100 years later.
  • Restorative justice, also known as reparative justice or reparations, was one of the recommendations of the Oklahoma commission’s 2001 report.
  • Steps toward justice, the commission said, could take the form of direct payments to the survivors and their descendants, a scholarship for descendants, economic development in Greenwood and a memorial for the massacre victims.
  • The 100-year anniversary includes events hosted by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which spearheaded the building of Greenwood Rising, a $30 million history museum and center that will fully open in July.
  • Many advocates have argued that the centennial commission hasn’t done enough to raise up the voices of the survivors and their descendants, but Horsford said he doesn’t want that to detract from the importance of the weekend.The focus should be on “what caused the massacre and those who contributed to it and the systemic reasons for it,” Horsford said.
aidenborst

US coronavirus: Americans are celebrating steps toward normalcy. But the real test of p... - 0 views

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US history politics crisis Culture policy Pandemic vaccine pandemic-recovery

shared by aidenborst on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • While Memorial Day was a milestone for a return to a sense of normalcy from the Covid-19 pandemic, it could take another two weeks to determine where the US really stands, an expert said.
  • "In some ways, this was the first big stress test," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "We have restrictions lifted en masse, people going about their normal lives. We know that in the past, after major holidays and an increase in travel, that we then had a substantial uptick in the rate of infections."
  • 12 states have reached President Joe Biden's goal of having 70% of Americans getting at least one dose by July 4.
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  • Overall, more than 136 million people -- about 41% of the US population -- are fully vaccinated, and about 51% have received at least one dose of vaccine, according to CDC data.
  • For the first time since March 2020, the US recorded a seven-day average of fewer than 20,000 new daily cases Tuesday. Less than 5% of the US population lives in a county considered to have high Covid-19 transmission, according to CDC data.
  • "You have parts of the country with very low vaccination rates," she said. "I really worry about the unvaccinated people in those areas spreading coronavirus to one another."
  • "Our study suggests that, for a population of 10.5 million, approximately 1.8 million infections and 8,000 deaths could be prevented during 11 months with more efficacious COVID-19 vaccines, higher vaccination coverage, and maintaining NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions), such as distancing and use of face masks," they wrote.
  • West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice on Tuesday announced a vaccination incentive lottery with prizes that include $1 million, two full four-year scholarships to eligible students and 25 weekend getaways.
  • In Kentucky, senior centers will be allowed to reopen at full capacity starting June 11, Gov. Andy Beshear said. "The reason that we can do that are vaccines. These things are miracles," he said in a statement.
  • Mehul Patel, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues used a mathematical model to simulate a coronavirus spread within the population of North Carolina.
  • They found that infections, hospitalizations and deaths would continue to rise if pandemic precautions such as quarantine, school closures, social distancing and mask-wearing were lifted while vaccines were being rolled out.
  • "On Father's Day, we are going to make one of you a millionaire," Justice said.
  • Fortunately, cases also do appear to be declining in children.
  • As of May 27, nearly 4 million children had tested positive since the pandemic's start.
Javier E

Opinion | 'The Point Was to Win,' Barack Obama Writes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...obama-biden-democrats.html

obama presidency interview racism politics crisis Culture history Democratic party strategy

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • One passage, in particular, had stuck in my mind for weeks. Obama is reflecting on the Tea Party uprising, and the thrumming undercurrent of racism that powered it. He recalls the din of cable news chatter debating the Tea Party’s true nature, and the pressure that built for him to render his presidential verdict. He admits that his White House wanted nothing to do with this debate, in part because it had “reams of data telling us that white voters, including many who supported me, reacted poorly to lectures about race.”
  • I’m going to quote what Obama writes next at length:More practically, I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.
  • Over and over again, Obama tries to make clear that his assailants have a point, that his perspective is bounded by experience and self-interest.
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  • But what strikes me about that passage is that you can see Obama’s idealism and calculation shimmer into a single point. After suggesting that the motivations of his Tea Party critics were unknowable, he resolves the argument by saying the politics of it were thoroughly knowable. Whatever his own intuitions might tell him — whatever “truths the history books might suggest” — to cry racism, or even to coolly point it out, was to lose votes, and neither his version of hope nor of change would be helped along by defeat.
  • Obama is thoroughly a politician, and because he understood the depth of our divisions, he treated them gingerly, at times fearfully. In a particularly striking moment, Obama reveals that across the entirety of his presidency, his single largest drop in white support came when he criticized the white police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Black Harvard professor, on the porch of his own home. “It was support that I’d never completely get back,” Obama writes.
  • Much in our politics is not what it seems. Contrary to the aesthetics of our current political debate, there is a deep optimism in the confrontational politics of the modern left and a quiet pessimism in the caution with which Obama speaks.
  • Obama’s view of his own political situation echoes the current reality of the Democratic Party
  • When I brought up that passage about the Tea Party, Obama was frank in describing his calculations. “One of the ways I would measure it would be: Is it more important for me to tell a basic, historical truth, let’s say about racism in America right now? Or is it more important for me to get a bill passed that provides a lot of people with health care that didn’t have it before?”
  • To ask the question bluntly: Who truly believes America to be a racist country? The political voices who state that view clearly, because they think Americans can be challenged into change, or the ones who try to avoid even implying the thought, because they fear the power of the backlash?
  • Barack Hussein Obama, a Black man running for office during the era of the War on Terror, understood the deck was stacked against him. If he was going to win, he would need the support of people inclined to view him with suspicion. He would need to not just speak to their hopes, but to defuse their fears. To hear Obama tell it, those fears were not just that too much change would come too fast, but that those who fought that change, or just worried over it, would be judged or cast out.
  • “But I think maybe the reason I was successful campaigning in downstate Illinois, or Iowa, or places like that is they never felt as if I was condemning them for not having gotten to the politically correct answer quick enough, or that somehow they were morally suspect because they had grown up with and believed more traditional values.”
  • This is the fundamental asymmetry of American politics right now: To hold national power, Democrats need to win voters who are right of center; Republicans do not need to win voters who are left of center.
anonymous

A COVID-19 Vaccine Could Get West Virginians Cash, Guns Or Trips : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rizes-for-vaccinated-residents

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • West Virginia is giving its vaccine incentive program a boost to get more residents immunized from the coronavirus, Gov. Jim Justice announced on Tuesday.
  • All residents who get a COVID-19 vaccine will be enrolled in the chance to win a college scholarship, a tricked-out truck, or hunting rifles, in addition to a $1.588 million grand prize. The program, which will run from June 20 through Aug. 4, will be paid for through federal pandemic relief funds.
  • Justice announced in April that West Virginians ages 16 to 35 who got vaccinated could get a $100 savings bond. The immunization drive in the state has since drastically slowed after showing a strong early start.
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  • The state reports that 51.1% of West Virginia's population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Justice hopes the state's new offers of a $588,000 second prize, weekend vacations to state parks, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, and custom hunting shotguns will boost that number.
  • West Virginians who have been fully vaccinated will need to register to be entered to win the newly announced prizes at a later date.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported as of Tuesday night that 40.9% of the population has been fully vaccinated. President Biden is aiming for at least 70% of the U.S. adult population to have one vaccine shot and 160 million adults to be fully vaccinated by July 4..
rerobinson03

Opinion | Congress Needs to Defend Vote Counting, Not Just Vote Casting - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oting-law-rights-congress.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • It is a legislative assault motivated by the failure of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and justified by baseless allegations about the legitimacy of his defeat. Mr. Trump and his supporters pursued indiscriminate lawsuits to overturn the results and then, urged on by Mr. Trump, some of his supporters stormed the Capitol to halt the completion of the election process. Now they are seeking to rewrite the rules to make it easier for Republicans to win elections without winning the most votes.
  • The new restrictions have a disproportionate impact on Black and other minority voters. There is little comfort in the fact that these rules are much less restrictive than those in the olden days. The Jim Crow regime was constructed gradually.
  • At least 13 states have joined Georgia in passing new restrictions. Among them are a Montana law that ends the practice of allowing voters to register on Election Day and an Iowa law that requires the state’s polling places to close one hour earlier.
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  • Because there is little chance the bill will pass in its current form, Democrats face a clear choice. They can wage what might be a symbolic (and likely doomed) fight for all the changes they would like. Or they can confront the acute crisis at hand by crafting a more focused bill, perhaps more palatable for more senators, that aims squarely at ensuring that Americans can cast votes and that those votes are counted.
  • Some of the areas that are addressed by H.R. 1, including protections for voting and provisions to limit gerrymandering, are also urgent, because the threats to electoral democracy are interlocking. Restricting participation in elections, and playing with district boundaries, both conduce to the election of more extreme politicians, who in turn are more likely to regard elections as purely partisan competitions waged without regard to the public interest.
  • Senators with hesitations about H.R. 1 need to put forward their own ideas for protecting the rights of voters. The power of the states to administer elections is unquestioned, but it is not unlimited. In a representative democracy, the legitimate power of the representatives cannot extend to acts designed to undermine democracy.
hannahcarter11

Biden Responds to Sen. Tim Scott: 'I Don't Think The American People Are Racist' : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...the-american-people-are-racist

biden Black people America

shared by hannahcarter11 on 02 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden says America is not a racist country, but that Black Americans have been left behind and "we have to deal with it."
  • Scott, the Senate's only Black Republican, said that "America is not a racist country" and warned that "it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present."
  • "I don't think the American people are racist," he said, "but I think after 400 years, African Americans have been left in a position where they are so far behind the eight ball in terms of education and health, in terms of opportunity."
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  • "I don't think America is racist, but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow and before that, slavery, have had a cost and we have to deal with it."
  • Biden was also asked in the interview about the situation at the Southern border. He said that the number of children seeking to cross into the country "is way down now, we've now gotten control" and that there's "a significant change in the circumstance for children coming to and at the border."
  • According to Customs and Border Protection, nearly 19,000 children and teenagers arrived at the Southern border in March — the most ever in a single month.
  • Biden defended his administration's efforts to reunite children separated from their families by the Trump administration.
  • Biden also discussed the state of the pandemic. Asked whether all K-12 schools should be open this fall for in-person instruction five days a week, the president said, "Based on science and the CDC, they should probably all be open."
katherineharron

US coronavirus: 100 million fully vaccinated people are helping the US reopen. But many... - 0 views

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covid

shared by katherineharron on 01 May 21 - No Cached
  • The United States has fully vaccinated more than 100 million people against Covid-19, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- a milestone that comes with optimism about the future.
  • "I think we can confidently say the worst is behind us,"
  • "We will not see the kinds of sufferings and death that we have seen over the holidays. I think we are in a much better shape heading forward."
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  • Although the vaccination milestone means that nearly 40% of adults have been inoculated, the US still has a ways to go to reach herd immunity -- which would be when 70-85% of the population is vaccinated, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci. And health officials say that the only way to keep bringing down the death rate is to increase vaccination efforts.
  • A lower death rate and higher vaccination rate would make it reasonable to target a full reopening by July 1, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Friday. Read More
  • Walensky said routine vaccinations among adolescents are down this year. The need for routine immunizations for children returning to school, the rollout of the annual flu vaccine and the expected availability of Covid-19 vaccines for children 12 and older may present a logistical challenge, she noted.
  • "We are focused on getting people vaccinated, decreasing the case rates,
  • "To achieve high vaccination coverage rates and reduce Covid-19 transmission, we need rapid and extensive vaccination of children under the age of 18," she said.
  • In West Virginia, the median age for new cases is currently 34 years old, Gov. Jim Justice announced. That is down 10 years from a few months ago.
  • Justice said the two biggest concerns with young people getting infected is transmitting the virus to others "even if you don't get sick" and the possibility of ending up with "significant side effects... [for] the rest of your life."
  • Rare reports of blood clots had sparked concern over the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine, but a new review of the safety data found that only 3% of reported reactions after receiving the vaccine are classified as serious.There have been a total of 17 incidents of severe blood clotting and low blood platelet levels among people who received the J&J vaccine, according to the CDC report published on Friday.
  • "A rare but serious adverse event occurring primarily in women, blood clots in large vessels accompanied by a low platelet count, was rapidly detected by the U.S. vaccine safety monitoring system," CDC researchers wrote in the report. "Monitoring for common and rare adverse events after receipt of all COVID-19 vaccines, including the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine, is continuing."
  • The data included 88 deaths reported after vaccination.
anonymous

US could be on the cusp of Covid-19 infection surge officials have been dreading, exper... - 0 views

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

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • he US may be on the cusp of another Covid-19 case surge, one expert says -- a surge that health officials have repeatedly warned about as state leaders eased restrictions and several lifted mask mandates.
  • "I think we are going to see a surge in the number of infections,"
  • "I think what helps this time though is that the most vulnerable -- particularly nursing home residents, people who are older -- are now vaccinated. And so we may prevent a spike in hospitalizations and deaths."
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  • The first warning sign came when case numbers, after weeks of steep declines, appeared to level off -- with the country still averaging tens of thousands of new cases daily.
  • But governors cited fewer Covid-19 cases and more vaccinations while lifting measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.
  • Chicago officials earlier this month raised indoor capacity for bars, restaurants and other businesses and Baltimore leaders announced Wednesday they were easing restrictions on places including religious facilities, retail stores and malls, fitness centers and food service establishments -- changes that will go into effect next week.
  • Delaware, Montana, Alabama and West Virginia have also seen big increases.
  • The B.1.1.7 variant, she said this week, is projected to become the dominant variant in the US by the end of this month or early April.Despite the warnings, spring break crowds are gathering -- with Florida officials reporting too many people and not enough masks -- and nationwide, air travel numbers are hitting pandemic-era records.
  • Now, as the country inches closer to 30 million reported infections, cases are rising by more than 10% in 14 states this week compared to last week,
  • We're in a race to get the population vaccinated. At the same time, we're fighting people's exhaustion with the restrictions that public health has put in place and we're fighting the move by so many governors to remove the restrictions that are keeping us all safe."
  • Michigan cases are increasing the fastest, with more than a 50% jump this week compared to last,
  • All that while cases of the worrying variants -- notably the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant -- climbed. The variants have the potential to wipe out all the progress the US made if Americans get lax with safety measures,
  • In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice said Wednesday that Covid-19 hospitalizations have "jumped up" slightly
  • Those include the rolling back of restrictions, a prison outbreak, Covid-19 fatigue, a failure to wear masks, and the B.1.1.7 variant fueling the surge, Morse told CNN. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer eased restrictions earlier this month, upping capacity limits at restaurants as well as in retail stores, gyms and other facilities.
  • There's a long list of factors contributing to the spike in cases in Michigan,
  • Justice had eased restrictions earlier this month, increasing capacity at bars, restaurants and other businesses to 100% and upping the social-gathering limit.
  • During Wednesday's news briefing, he added that the state has had "seven outbreaks in our church community" across five counties.
  • what could play a key role in helping control the pandemic will be more accessible, inexpensive coronavirus tests, top health officials
  • "I do believe that once we have teachers vaccinated that we can use testing in the schools -- serial testing, cadence testing -- to identify potential infections, asymptomatic infections, shut down clusters and keep our schools open."
  • Her remarks came the same day the CDC released updated guidance about testing, saying more and better testing should help catch asymptomatic cases and control the spread.
  • More than 73.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to CDC data. And more than 39.9 million people are fully vaccinated -- roughly 12% of the US population. But challenges -- including vaccine hesitancy, disinformation and inequities -- remain, and it's not entirely clear when the US will hit herd immunity -
  • On Wednesday, both Fauci and Walensky pushed back against questions about herd immunity, saying a lot depended on how quickly Americans take vaccines.
  • For now, the US still has a long way to go to overcome vaccine hesitancy,
  • Vaccination is the country's best hope to get beyond the pandemic, he said, "and yet there's all this overlay, and some of it is politics and some of it's social media conspiracy theories and some of it is just distrust of anything that the government had anything to do with."
  • Additionally, in the first two and half months of vaccine distribution, counties considered to have high social vulnerability had lower vaccine coverage than counties considered to have low social vulnerability,
  • The agency's social vulnerability index identifies communities that may need additional support during emergencies based on more than a dozen indicators across four categories: socioeconomic status, household composition, racial/ethnic minority status and housing type.
  • By March 1, vaccination coverage was about 2 percentage points higher in counties with low social vulnerability than in counties with high social vulnerability -- and the differences were largely driven by socioeconomic disparities, particularly differences in the share of the population with a high school diploma and per capita income.
  • Only five states -- Arizona, Montana, Alaska, Minnesota and West Virginia -- had higher coverage in counties with high social vulnerability.
  • Achieving vaccine equity, the CDC said, is an important goal requiring "preferential access and administration to those who have been most affected"
aniyahbarnett

Evanston, Illinois, approves the country's first reparations program for Black resident... - 0 views

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US history

shared by aniyahbarnett on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • offering reparations to Black residents whose families have felt the effects of decades of discriminatory housing practices,
  • from a 3% tax on legalized cannabis into assistance for home loans.
  • We had to do something radically different to address the racial divide that we had in our city,
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  • the first major American bank to endorse HR 40, a piece of legislation sponsored by US Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee that creates a commission to develop reparation proposals for African Americans.
  • three decades ago.
  • "as real and right as the fight we had for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
  • more attentive ears with Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden in office.
  • "targeted resources into public schools and neighborhoods that have been generationally deprived of the similar types of investments that white neighborhoods have gotten,"
  • voted overwhelmingly in favor of appropriating funds for the benefit of Black residents
  • "remains unanimously supportive"
  • she called upon National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC) convener and Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) President Ron Daniels to help Evanston develop an action plan.
  • "the community process"
  • The first is the transfer of wealth to descendants of American slavery via individual cash payments,
  • I've never seen the issue of reparations being taken as seriously as it is now,"
  • , I think the process has been quite flawed when you look at it next to an HR 40
  • , there are some Black residents in Evanston who question if these policies go far enough,
  • "the strict enforcement of existing civil rights law."
  • They fear the limited funds will result in an application process that only high-credit Evanstonians would have access to.
  • "Modernity is our challenge, not social justice"
  • The City Council agrees with that
  • HR 40 was still very much in its infancy,
  • it was designed to establish a commission to examine enslavement and other derivative outcomes
  • It did, however, gain the endorsement of major civil rights organizations
  • Congress was not ready for the bill.
  • Black celebrities
  • In the over three decades since HR 40 reached the House floor, the case for reparations has only grown more organized and action-oriented. Today, the bill has more than 170 co-sponsors and a Senate companion resolution.
  • So it's really an attempt to address both the moral harm, and the crime that slavery and Jim Crow were, but also the wealth gap that was created by both of these institutions,"
  • In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement's resurgence last year,
  • Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery,
  • cultural experts and the executive branch of government that America has reneged on its promises to African Americans
  • "I think the reality is that we will as Black Americans never gain an entitlement that is commensurate with the suffering we endured.
  • "is that Black Americans will get about exactly as far as they take themselves,
  • However, Simmons sees the critique as an opportunity for more conversations on what reparations could look like for residents
  • Over a century of both legally enforced and de-facto housing discrimination and redlining, blockage from small business loans, and suppression of constitutionally protected civil rights until well into the 1960s
  • n 1920 to roughly 1.3% of US farmers in 2017.
  • history was not studied, it was not known.
cartergramiak

Jaime Harrison Said to Be Pick for Next D.N.C. Chair - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ime-harrison-dnc-chairman.html

Politics US trump history

shared by cartergramiak on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. plans to name Jaime Harrison as his pick to lead the Democratic National Committee, part of an effort to bolster the committee ahead of what are already expected to be challenging midterm elections for the party, according to two people with knowledge of the selection.
  • While Mr. Harrison lost in November, drawing 44 percent of the vote to Mr. Graham’s 55 percent, he developed a broad bench of support across the party.
  • ncoming presidents traditionally take control of the party committees, installing their own chair and staffers. Former President Barack Obama chose to try to establish his own political operation outside of the committee, a decision that many D.N.C. members say damaged state parties and led to years of dysfunction at the national level.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The focus on the national party committee comes as Democrats attempt to navigate a deeply uncertain political landscape.
  • He is also well-known to staff and members of the D.N.C., a result of his work heading the South Carolina state party and a failed bid to become chairman of the committee in 2017. (Tom Perez, the outgoing D.N.C. chair, won that race.) Mr. Harrison has been championed by Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, an influential Biden ally who helped the president-elect win the primary race in Mr. Clyburn’s home state. Mr. Perez opted against running for a second term.
Javier E

Ibram X. Kendi, Prophet of Anti-racism | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...x-kendi-prophet-of-anti-racism

anti-racism racism activism politics history Culture

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...51 more annotations...
  • The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement
  • His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with.
  • the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.
  • Kendi’s devout parents were drawn through their churches into political activism in the 1970s
  • Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.
  • Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi
  • “What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”
  • the autobiographical parts of this book show him to be tentative, even anguished, about identity
  • His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids.
  • The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . .
  • As a prose stylist, Kendi is clear, direct, and even witty.
  • we must understand what Kendi means by “racism” in the first place.
  • “Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”
  • it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.
  • As the Minnesota legal theorist Alan David Freeman noted in his landmark 1978 essay “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law,” the beneficiaries of a racist system (Freeman calls them “perpetrators”) are likely to view its dismantling as an ethical challenge. Getting over such a system means adopting an attitude of fairness and treating everyone the same.
  • The historic victims of that system, however, have a different perspective. They look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied
  • Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.
  • ideas about race and racism are central to Kendi’s system of thought, and you will understand why when you focus on its one truly original element: His “antiracism” is not a doctrine of nondiscrimination. In fact, it is not even anti-racist, as that term is commonly understood.
  • He does not even pay lip service to neutral treatment
  • If practical equality for blacks is the imperative, discriminating on their behalf is going to be necessary
  • He wants not pious talk but the actual policies that will redistribute the advantages, the stuff, that whites have undeservingly acquired. “What if instead of a feelings advocacy,” he asks at one point, “we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?”
  • The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. 
  • It is why this book really is as “bold” as reviewers say it is, and why the judges who in 2016 gave Kendi the National Book Award were right to say he “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.”
  • Kendi has decided that the two approaches to civil rights described by Freeman are not simply different perspectives on the same issue; they are mutually incompatible — one must destroy the other. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” he insists. The old view of the perpetrators — that everything will be well as long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect — is no longer just a different approach to the problem. It is illegitimate. It is a “racist” obstruction.
  • But also Oscar Lewis, once considered the hippest of radical anthropologists, for describing a “culture of poverty” in La Vida (1966) and other books.
  • To allude to color blindness or talk of a “post-racial society,” to back religious freedom or voter-ID laws . . . these are racist things, too. Even the overarching vision that rallied white liberals to civil rights — the belief that blacks could, and should, assimilate into American society — becomes morally suspect
  • Assimilation, Kendi announces at the start of his second chapter, expresses “the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior.” The idea is racist, Kendi reasons, because it is assumed the out-group would be improved by joining the in-group.
  • Also racist are those intellectuals and politicians whose explanations lessen in any way the weight of white racism among the causes of inequality:
  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, naturally, for their ideas on black family structure in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)
  • Ihad to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds,” Kendi writes. “I had to start researching and educating to change policy.” Something similar is inscribed on Karl Marx’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London. It is the credo of an activist, not a scholar
  • Kendi grants that blacks, too, can be racist, but we must understand the grudging sense in which he concedes this
  • He believes blacks can collaborate with the structures of white racism, as turncoats, agents, and enforcers
  • When Kendi opposes “racism,” he means only the treatment of blacks by European-descended peoples since the Age of Discovery, especially under the American system of slavery and Jim Crow.
  • But the racism itself is always white, no matter what the color of the person practicing it
  • He explicitly does not mean that he considers it wrong to discriminate by race in any abstract ethical sense.
  • On the contrary: He is carrying out the de-universalization of Western values that his mentor Asante urged.
  • To oppose reparations for slavery (or to have no opinion on the matter) is racist.
  • In African-American studies departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps and ideological unanimity.
  • their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing
  • It is from these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources departments have been staffed.
  • Those who are confident that Kendi’s argument is something they can take or leave probably do not understand what civil-rights law has become
  • The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will
  • it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.
  • All this requires is a few redefinitions, and here the law appears to be on Kendi’s side. With its Bostock decision this spring, the Supreme Court went into the business of policing transphobia,
  • In Kendi’s book — which, it bears repeating, has been for much of this summer the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States — the line between white supremacists and climate-change deniers, between white supremacists and opponents of Obamacare, is hard to draw or discern
  • It is difficult to imagine a reform more likely to drive American ethnic (and other) groups apart than the much-discussed project of defunding, or even abolishing, urban police forces
  • The same can be said for the wave of iconoclasm. Satisfying though it may be to throw ropes around a monument of Andrew or Stonewall Jackson and pull it down on one wild night, the effect is to add a grievance to American history, not remove one
  • In light of these unintended consequences, one assertion of Kendi, mentioned earlier, is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”
  • . For a couple of decades after the passage of civil-rights legislation, such black socioeconomic inequality as remained could be wished away by well-meaning people of all persuasions, whether quota Democrats or enterprise-zone Republicans
  • the persistence of this inequality through two whole generations puts those promises in a different light. The difference between “temporary” and “permanent” disadvantage looks like a rhetorical one. The dream, as Langston Hughes put it, has been deferred. A radical temptation arises.
  • Kendi, terrible simplificateur that he is, has picked up the gauntlet. As he sees it, there are only two explanations for this delay: Either you believe the problem is with blacks, unable to make it in a system that has been designed fairly for everyone, or you believe the problem is with whites, who have designed an unfair system that keeps blacks down.
katherineharron

Democrats see impeachment proceedings taking longer than some initially expected - CNNP... - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 22 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • House Democrats are facing a time crunch to quickly wrap up their investigation into allegations President Donald Trump abused his office in pushing Ukraine to probe his political rivals, prompting growing expectations that votes on impeaching Trump could slip closer to the end of the year.
  • But that has proven to be more complicated than it initially seemed, according to multiple Democratic lawmakers and sources. The reason: Each witness has so far provided more leads for investigators to chase down, including new names to potentially interview or seek documents from. Plus, Democrats have had to reschedule several witnesses, including some this week in part because of memorial services for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, and others because they needed more time to retain lawyers.
  • "Every time we have a deposition, it leads us in a slightly different direction," Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, two of the three panels leading the investigation, said Monday. "We don't know how many additional pieces of testimony we may need. We just don't know."
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • "I think it's more like between Thanksgiving and Christmas" for the end of the investigation, said one Democratic member involved in the probe. "After that, it's a strategic decision about when to bring it to the floor."
  • "We are committed to moving as methodically but expeditiously as possible -- but we will interview witnesses, release transcripts and hold open hearings at time appropriate given the collection of facts," the source said.
  • There are still a number of more witnesses in a variety of agencies -- State, Pentagon, Energy, Office of Management and Budget and the White House national security council -- who have firsthand knowledge of Trump's handling of Ukraine, the work of his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and why congressionally approved military aid was held up for Ukraine.
  • Democrats still hope to talk to some big name witnesses, like Bolton, who privately raised concerns about Giuliani's efforts. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's statement Thursday — quickly retracted — that the White House held up aid pushing for Ukraine to investigate the 2016 Democratic National Committee server has added him as a potential target. And it's still uncertain if the committees will talk to the whistleblower whose complaint about Trump spawned the investigation.
  • At some point, the three House committees leading the probe plan to hold public hearings after all their witnesses have been behind closed doors. Plus, the committees say they will release transcripts of their depositions -- some of which have gone as long as 10 hours -- and that process can often take days, if not weeks, to complete.
  • "When you're shocked by the chief of staff basically saying that there was a quid pro quo, it's a little hard to make any predictions whatsoever about what the timing will be," Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "You know shocking things happen every single day. My belief is that the speaker of the House would like to get this wrapped up by the end of the year. I think that's probably possible."
Javier E

General discontent: how the president's military men turned on Trump | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...onald-trump-military-criticism

military trump

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • A torrent of raw military condemnation has been unleashed on Donald Trump, with some of the most respected figures among retired military leaders lining up to express their profound disapproval of their commander-in-chief.
  • McRaven accused Trump of spreading “frustration, humiliation, anger and fear” through the armed forces and of championing “despots and strongmen” while abandoning US allies.
  • That Trump should be coming under such sharp criticism from figures as revered as McRaven is all the more extraordinary given that Trump put those he called “my generals” at the center of his cabinet when he took office almost three years ago. He appointed Jim Mattis as defense secretary, Michael Flynn and HR McMaster as successive national security advisers, and John Kelly as homeland security secretary and then White House chief of staff.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The new sense of license to criticize Trump among military leaders originated with the president’s highly contentious decision last week to pull US troops from northern Syria. The sudden move has paved the way for a Turkish invasion that has put a prominent US ally in the fight against Isis, the Syrian Kurds, in mortal danger.
  • Adm James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of Nato, told MSNBC that it was a “geopolitical mistake of near epic proportion”. He said its long-term impact would be to cast doubt on the reliability of the US as an ally.
  • “It’s hard to imagine how one could, in a single stroke, re-enable Isis, elevate Iran, allow Vladimir Putin the puppet master to continue his upward trajectory and simultaneously put war criminal chemical-weapon user Bashar al-Assad in the driving seat in Syria.”
  • “Mr Trump seems to have single-handedly and unilaterally precipitated a national security crisis in the Middle East,” he said, adding that the president had put the armed forces in a “very tricky situation”.
  • the decision would destabilize the region and intensify the Syrian civil war.
blythewallick

New Energy Secretary Fits Trend: Cabinet Dominated by Lobbyists - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-cabinet-lobbyists.html

politics trump crisis culture policy US history

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Mr. Trump, who campaigned for president on the oft-repeated pledge to “drain the swamp,” initially favored charismatic former politicians with a flair for the dramatic, like Mr. Perry; or former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a former member of the Navy SEALs who arrived to work on horseback; his first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, a bellicose Oklahoma attorney general; or his first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, a former Marine Corps general whom Mr. Trump introduced as “Mad Dog.”
  • A ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations analysis this week found Mr. Trump brought in 281 former lobbyists since the start of the administration. His cabinet now includes a former coal lobbyist running the Environmental Protection Agency, a former oil and gas lobbyist in charge of the Department of Interior, a top lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon leading the Defense Department — and, if he is confirmed, an automobile lobbyist at the Energy Department.
  • That might seem like business as usual for Americans who accepted candidate Trump’s description of Washington as rife with influence peddlers and profiteers. But it might actually be worse than usual. Because of the extraordinarily high rate of turnover that is a hallmark of the Trump administration, the White House’s human resources professionals have had little time to come up with outside-the-Beltway replacements for the constant stream of openings, Mr. LaPira said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Elevating officials working as deputies or in the agency’s trenches is nothing new. But Mr. Trump’s penchant for simply promoting No. 2 officials to cabinet posts appears to be more a matter of expediency than a reward for hard work. Deputy secretaries have already been through grueling Senate confirmations, thus mostly eliminating the element of surprise in an administration not known for employing a stringent vetting process.
  • “The desirability of working for this president and working in these high profile jobs gets riskier and riskier over time, so I suspect the pool of applicants has also declined,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Elevating a No. 2, she added, is “the path of least resistance.”
  • Charles Untermeyer, who served as director of presidential personnel under the first President George Bush, said the average tenure of a presidential appointment was about two years, so the departure of Mr. Perry at this point in the administration is not unusual. And, he said, the promotion of seconds-in-command who have knowledge and experience is commendable.
Javier E

Jim Webb: The Iran crisis isn?t a failure of the executive branch alone - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9313-6cba89b1b9fb_story.html

national security rationality failure executive foreign policy establishment partisan

shared by Javier E on 10 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • How did it become acceptable to assassinate one of the top military officers of a country with whom we are not formally at war during a public visit to a third country that had no opposition to his presence?
  • what precedent has this assassination established on the acceptable conduct of nation-states toward military leaders of countries with which we might have strong disagreement short of actual war — or for their future actions toward our own people?
  • In 2007, the Senate passed a non-binding resolution calling on the George W. Bush administration to categorize Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as an international terrorist organization. I opposed this proposal based on the irrefutable fact that the organization was an inseparable arm of the Iranian government.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • It is legally and logically impossible to define one part of a national government as an international terrorist organization without applying the term to that entire government.
  • The Revolutionary Guards are a part of the Iranian government. If they are attacking us, they are not a terrorist organization. They’re an attacking army.
  • last April the State Department unilaterally designated the Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist entity.
  • the designation was by many accounts made despite the opposition of the CIA and the Defense Department.
  • No thinking American would support Soleimani’s conduct. But it is also indisputable that his activities were carried out as part of his military duties. His harm to American military units was through his role as an enabler and adviser to third-country forces. This, frankly, is a reality of war.
  • I fought as a Marine in Vietnam. We had similar problems throughout the Vietnam War because of Vietnam’s propinquity to China, which along with the Soviet Union provided continuous support to the North Vietnamese, including most of the weapons used against us on the battlefield
  • China was then a rogue state with nuclear weapons. Its leaders continually spouted anti-U.S. rhetoric. Yet we did not assassinate its military leaders for rendering tactical advice or logistical assistance. We fought the war that was in front of us, and we created the conditions in which we engaged China aggressively through diplomatic, economic and other means.
  • the United States desperately needs common-sense leadership in its foreign policy. This is not a failure of the executive branch alone; it is the result of a breakdown in our entire foreign policy establishment, from the executive branch to the legislative branch and even to many of our once-revered think tanks.
blairca

MLK Day: Americans marking Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and birthday as fears of deep... - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...-racial-divisions-roil-america

mlk americans inequality US race relations

shared by blairca on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • But at the same time, he's struggling to come to grips with the deep racial divisions roiling the nation
  • As the nation marks the holiday honoring King, the mood surrounding it is overshadowed by deteriorating race relations in an election season that has seen one candidate of color after another quit the 2020 presidential race.
  • People have the right to be — and should be — concerned about the state of race relations and the way people of color, in particular, are being treated
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • You can't understand a minority if you've never been in a minority situation. Even though you can advocate for us all day, you could never understand the issues we go through on a daily basis."
  • people are showing their hatred openly, but it doesn't mean it wasn't there," Savitt said. "There is a coming realization in our country. We have to come to a reckoning about our past and the truth about our history from slavery to the lynching era to Jim Crow. Only with real honesty about our situation can we come to some reconciliation and move on to fulfill King's hope and dream of a real, peaceful multicultural democracy."
  • In 2018, there were more than 7,000 single-bias incidents reported by law enforcement, according to FBI hate crime statistics. More than 53% of the offenders were white, while 24% were black. Nearly 60% of the incidents involved race, ethnicity and ancestry.
  • "With Trump, he has pushed the American nationalist identity that I think tamps down the kind of conflicts we would have,"
saberal

Punchbowl Arrives From Reporters Who Left Politico's Playbook - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ook-capitol-hill-politics.html

US history

shared by saberal on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The big debates over political journalism in the Trump years were about morality: What began with arguments over whether the media should call something a “lie” or “racist” has now become: How do you cover a Republican Party that votes to overturn an election?
  • But an ambitious political news start-up hoping to tell the central story of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s years is, a bit like Mr. Biden himself, less concerned with those big questions
  • But nobody thinks politics is much fun anymore, and the notion of covering politics as an amoral sport has become repellent to Americans. The big legacy news operations — The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, in particular — became players in Trump’s reality program and were judged as much for their symbolic choices in tweets and headlines as for their reporting. But Politico and Axios, started by two other Politico co-founders in 2016, never quite became symbolic figures in Mr. Trump’s character universe, and generally steered away from trying to insert themselves into the self-referential theater.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The departure of three of its best-known journalists is part of another trend in American journalism: As in other industries, much of the power is shifting toward “talent,” and off-the-shelf publishing and subscription technology are making it easier for stars to quit and start something new.
  • “They’ll be an instant must-read,” said Jim VandeHei, who took a similar path when he left Politico to start Axios
  • And then there’s the question of how to cover the Republican Party, many of whose top figures have indicated they will vote to reject the results of the presidential election. Is this a political party responding to its constituents, and should be covered as such? Or should reporters spend most of their time treating the House minority as a toxic anti-democratic sect?
  • “I don’t think it’s incumbent on me to say, you know, to necessarily brand a person a liar, say that they’re disloyal to the country or anything like that,” Mr. Bresnahan said. “But what is important for what we do is to say, Why is this person is doing that?”
  • During the Trump era, Capitol Hill has often been treated by news organizations as an afterthought,
  • Punchbowl appears likely to stay small for now, though the centrality of Capitol Hill to Mr. Biden’s early agenda will give it an outsize importance in 2021. They’ve raised only $1 million, a fraction of the start-up costs of Axios or Politico. But
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