Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged weight

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Stolen Elections, Voting Dogs And Other Fantastic Fables From The GOP Voter Fraud Mytho... - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-the-gop-voter-fraud-mythology

voting elections gop voter fraud history Politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Numerous studies have found that voter fraud is far from a major issue in the U.S., and in-person fraud of the sort Trump and Kobach like to talk about — things like non-citizens showing up to vote or people returning to vote multiple times under different names — is vanishingly rare. A 2007 study by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice memorably found that an individual American is more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud.
  • as of last summer, 68 percent of Republicans thought millions of illegal immigrants had voted in 2016, and almost three quarters said voter fraud happens “somewhat” or “very often.” The same survey found that nearly half of Republicans believed Trump had won the popular vote.
  • The idea that Nixon gracefully and expeditiously chose not to fight the outcome is a myth, the historian David Greenberg demonstrated back in 2000. Nixon did, however, eventually give in — but in the process, he turned the notion that the Democrats had stolen the election into an article of faith among Republicans, especially conservative ones.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.
  • the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.
  • Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution
  • Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.
  • One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”
  • Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.
  • The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.
  • As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.
  • At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote
  • Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.
  • “I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”
  • The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.
  • The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.
  • Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.
  • So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”
  • Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”
  • Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”
  • In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.
  • Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”
  • Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.
  • voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.
  • Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”
  • As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.
  • But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes
  • Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.
  • for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.
  • Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”
  • In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.
  • Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.
  • One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee
  • Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.
  • Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.
  • This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.
katherineharron

Georgia's new law suppressing the vote is a victory for Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

georgia

shared by katherineharron on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • The Georgia bill is only one example of GOP efforts in multiple states -- including many crucial electoral battlegrounds -- to hold back a diverse demographic tide in cities that favor Democrats, which critics see as an attempt to cement minority rule in the United States.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1245919-spin { from {
  • "This should be marked as Exhibit A in making the case that discriminatory voter suppression is alive and well, and makes clear why we need federal voting rights legislation to stop these laws in their tracks," Hewitt said. "We stand ready to take action and protect the fundamental right to vote through the courts."
  • as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber. But Biden declined to reveal his strategy for getting the voting rights bill into law.
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • In a statement to CNN, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who defied Trump's pleas in a telephone call to find votes to overturn Biden's victory, said he would still stand up for voter freedoms but did not criticize the law."In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy
  • The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden
  • Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchang
  • After leaving office, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures pass laws to ban mail-in voting and to prevent courts from weighing in on electoral disputes.
  • the former President has made the acceptance of his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates
  • Iowa has already passed a measure to limit absentee balloting and voting hours. Texas is taking steps to cut voting hours and absentee balloting in big Democratic cities like Houston. New voting laws are being pushed by Republicans in another swing state Trump lost, Arizona.
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • voter mistrust was largely fueled by Trump's blatantly false claims
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • The drama in the Georgia Legislature unfolded as Biden condemned restrictive state legislation as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber.
  • The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.
  • The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • The Georgia law was quickly signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who incurred the wrath of Trump last year for refusing to play along with his attempt to override Biden's victory by 12,000 votes in the state, which was confirmed by several audits.
  • "In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said.
  • Kemp is up for reelection in 2022 and could face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker and prominent voting rights advocate
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • the measure directly targeted voters of color who took part in record numbers in the 2020 election.
  • The For the People Act awaiting action in the Senate would create automatic voter registration nationwide and restore portions of the Voting Rights Act that were gutted by the Supreme Court. It would also strengthen mail-in voting and permit early voting across the country, while taking steps to cut wait times at the polls.
proudsa

Hillary Clinton Sets Up A Fight With Bernie Sanders Over Paid Leave - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...leave_568f2e27e4b0a2b6fb6f8d81

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday offered new details about her plan to make sure all workers can take time off, with pay, in order to care for a newborn or sick relative.
  • During that time, the worker would be eligible to receive replacement wages, up to two-thirds of his or her salary.
  • The proposal, if enacted, would patch a major gap in America’s safety net. Workers in every other developed country are entitled to paid leave, in some cases for more than a year.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Some companies provide paid leave anyway. In the last year, high-profile employers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs introduced or expanded paid leave for their employees.
  • But Clinton’s proposal differs from the bill in one crucial way. In order to finance the replacement wages that workers would get, the Gillibrand-DeLauro bill would impose a small payroll tax, of 0.4 percent, that employers and employees would split evenly.
  • Clinton has criticized that approach repeatedly because it would mean higher taxes on lower- and middle-income workers.
  • Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the only Republican presidential candidate to address the issue formally, has said he’d offer small tax breaks to companies that offer paid leave -- an approach unlikely to have much impact, except perhaps to help well-off workers.
  • “The benefit of being one of the last countries in the world to adopt paid maternity leave is that we have been able to learn from other countries' experiences and the results are clear,” Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist and former adviser to President Barack Obama, told the Huffington Post on Thursday.
  • To advocates like Heather Boushey, chief economist and executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, that’s a welcome sign that American politics is finally talking about the challenges of parents who also have jobs.
Javier E

Ozempic or Bust - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678211

obesity treatment culture history policy health

shared by Javier E on 09 May 24 - No Cached
  • June 2024 Issue
  • Explore
  • it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.
  • ...77 more annotations...
  • The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started
  • Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.
  • The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic.
  • Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”
  • Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.
  • In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight
  • The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight
  • For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.
  • The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify
  • if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”
  • How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk
  • The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years
  • the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out.
  • adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time?
  • “All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”
  • in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.
  • The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories.
  • But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991.
  • Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses.
  • Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent
  • National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.
  • Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm.
  • In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,”
  • In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million.
  • It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life.
  • the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”
  • News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque.
  • Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.
  • “I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”
  • She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”
  • For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.
  • In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.
  • In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.
  • he message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.
  • Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could.
  • Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country.
  • An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.
  • when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.
  • The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out.
  • although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.
  • sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,
  • that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.
  • Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.
  • From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.
  • obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”
  • she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions
  • Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years.
  • if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it
  • She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit.
  • Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.
  • “Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.
  • Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.
  • As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid
  • By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners
  • But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.
  • Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look
  • The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.
  • In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”
  • that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity.
  • That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism
  • But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”
  • Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events.
  • As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell.
  • Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed.
  • In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion
  • In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.
  • Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight.
  • If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat.
  • Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.
  • Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”
  • When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.
  • the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now
  • Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies.
  • “The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”
  • The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways
  • When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.”
  • why wasn’t there another kind of nagging voice that wouldn’t stop—a sense of worry over what the future holds? And if she wasn’t worried for herself, then what about for Meghann or for Tristan, who are barely in their 40s? Wouldn’t they be on these drugs for another 40 years, or even longer? But Barb said she wasn’t worried—not at all. “The technology is so much better now.” If any problems come up, the scientists will find solutions.
Javier E

What History Tells Us About the Accelerating AI Revolution - CIO Journal. - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...the-accelerating-ai-revolution

revolution ai tech post-industrial economy unemployment policy

shared by Javier E on 25 May 20 - No Cached
  • What History Tells Us About the Coming AI Revolution by Oxford professor Carl Benedikt Frey based on his 2019 book The Technology Trap.
  • a 2017 Pew Research survey found that three quarters of Americans expressed serious concerns about AI and automation, and just over a third believe that their children will be better off financially than they were.
  • “Many of the trends we see today, such as the disappearance of middle-income jobs, stagnant wages and growing inequality were also features of the Industrial Revolution,”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • “We are at the brink of a technological revolution that promises not just to fundamentally alter the structure of our economy, but also to reshape the social fabric more broadly. History tells us anxiety tends to accompany rapid technological change, especially when technology takes the form of capital which threatens people’s jobs.” 
  • Over the past two centuries we’ve learned that there’s a significant time lag, between the broad acceptance of major new transformative technologies and their long-term economic and productivity growth.
  • In their initial phase, transformative technologies require massive complementary investments, such as business process redesign, co-invention of new products and business models, and the re-skilling of the workforce.  The more transformative the technologies, the longer it takes them to reach the harvesting phase
  • The time lags between the investment and harvesting phases are typically quite long.
  • While James Watt’s steam engine ushered the Industrial Revolution in the 1780s, “British factories were for the most part powered by water up until the 1840.”
  • Similarly, productivity growth did not increase until 40 years after the introduction of electric power in the early 1880s.  
  • In their early stages, the extensive investments required to embrace a GPT like AI will generally reduce productivity growth.
  • “the short run consequences of rapid technological change can be devastating for working people, especially when technology takes the form of capital which substitutes for labor.
  • In the long run, the Industrial Revolution led to a rising standard of living, improved health, and many other benefits.  “Yet in the short run, the lives of working people got nastier, more brutish, and shorter. And what economists regard as ‘the short run’ was a lifetime, for some,”
  • A 2017 McKinsey study concluded that while a growing technology-based economy will create a significant number of new occupations, as has been the case in the past, “the transitions will be very challenging - matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.” 
  • The US and other industrial economies have seen a remarkable rise in the polarization of job opportunities and wage inequality by educational attainment, with the earnings of the most-educated increasing, and the earnings of the least-educated falling in real terms
  • Since the 1980s, the earnings of those with a four year college degree have risen by 40% to 60%, while the earnings of those with a high school education or less have fallen among men and barely changed among women.
  • When upskilling is lagging behind, entire social groups might end up being excluded from the growth engine.”
oliviaodon

We've Been Talking About World War III Since Before Pearl Harbor - History in the Headl... - 0 views

www.history.com/...-iii-since-before-pearl-harbor

war

shared by oliviaodon on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Ever since people began to speculate about “World War III,” its very name has implied its own inevitability. We talk about it not only as something that might happen, but something that will. And it’s been on our minds for a very long time.
  • The phrase seems to have emerged during the early 1940s, not long after people began to think of the “Great War” of 1914 as World War I—a precursor to World War II. Time magazine mused about a third war as early as November 1941, one month before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into WWII. More consequentially, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill started planning for a World War III while he was still fighting the second war. And he kept on worrying about it, too. “After he’s out office, during the summer of 1945 through 1946, he continually believes that the Soviet Union are going to start another war,” says Jonathan Walker, a military history writer and author of Operation Unthinkable: The Third World War.
  • The introduction of the atomic bomb in the 1940s and the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s gave the phrase “World War III” a new, specific meaning: nuclear annihilation. And as the U.S. and the Soviet union became locked in a Cold War, it seemed that nuclear war could break out at any moment. Writers had already been stoking people’s fears about nuclear energy long before the U.S. harnessed it into bombs, says Spencer R. Weart, a science historian and author of The Rise of Nuclear Fear. When scientists first discovered radioactivity and nuclear energy at the turn of the century, it evoked both awe and terror. One of them, Frederick Soddy, thought “it might even be possible to set off an explosion that would destroy the entire world,” Weart says.
Javier E

Today's Voter Suppression Tactics Have A 150 Year History - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...actics-have-a-150-year-history

vote suppression history gop Politics democracy

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • The tools that broke American democracy were not just the Ku Klux Klan’s white sheets, vigilantes’ Red Shirts, and lynch mobs’ nooses; they were devices we still encounter when we vote today: the registration roll and the secret, official ballot.
  • Along with exclusions of felons and permanent resident aliens, these methods swept the entire United States in the late 19th century, reducing nationwide voter participation from about 80 percent to below 50 percent by the 1920s.
  • turnout in the United States has never recovered; by one 2018 survey, the country ranks 26th of 32 developed democracies in participation.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • Once the war came, hundreds of thousands of Irish and German immigrants enlisted in the U.S. Army. For a time this flood of foreign-born soldiers swept nativism away. In the years after the Civil War, 12 states explicitly enfranchised immigrant aliens who had declared their intention to become naturalized but had not yet been made citizens. Voting by non-citizens who planned to become naturalized was “widely practiced and not extraordinarily controversial” in this period, political scientist Ron Hayduk argues.
  • In the early 1800s, as organized political parties began to fight over issues like banking and infrastructure, that changed; turnout rose to 70 percent in local and state elections. Still, presidential polls remained dull and ill-attended. That changed in Jackson’s second run for the presidency in 1828. Heated debates and even-hotter tempers attracted men to the polls
  • Democracy for white men did not, however, spill over to democracy for everyone; in this same period several states rolled back laws that permitted free black men to vote.
  • For white men, the United States became a democracy by degrees, not by design, and it showed in the chaotic voting systems
  • While colonial Americans cast beans, peas, and corn into containers or called their vote aloud, in the 1800s most men either wrote the candidate’s name on a blank sheet of paper or turned in a ballot helpfully printed for them by the local political party or newspaper. Outside of Massachusetts, almost no one registered to vote
  • Today, the ubiquity of voter registration blinds us to its impact. It is a price we all pay for voting and so no longer think of as a price at all. But nineteenth-century Americans understood the costs. Registering in person months before the election minimized the chance of fraud but doubled the difficulty of voting and the possibility of interference
  • Alexander Keyssar’s excellent history of voting called the 1850s a period of “narrowing of voting rights and a mushrooming upper- and middle-class antagonism to universal suffrage.”
  • the flood of 200,000 black men into the U.S. Army and Navy inspired them — and others — to claim the vote as their due. “If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel armies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting against rebel citizens at the ballot-box?
  • Another way to bar African-American men was to expand the number of disfranchising crimes. Cuffie Washington, an African American man in Ocala, Florida, learned this when election officials turned him away in 1880 because he had been convicted of stealing three oranges. Other black men were barred for theft of a gold button, a hog, or six fish. “It was a pretty general thing to convict colored men in the precinct just before an election,” one of the alleged hog thieves said.
  • By the fall of 1867, more than 80 percent of eligible African-American men had registered. During the subsequent elections, at least 75 percent of black men turned out to vote in five Southern states. Democracy has a long history, but almost nothing to match this story.
  • Smalls and his compatriots tore down racial barriers; established public school systems, hospitals, orphanages, and asylums; revised tenancy laws; and tried (sometimes disastrously) to promote railroad construction to modernize the economy. Reconstruction governments also provided crucial votes to ratify the 14th Amendment, which is still the foundation of birthright citizenship, school desegregation, protection against state limits on speech or assembly, and the right to gay marriage.
  • , South Carolina, the counter-revolution was brewing in the upcountry by summer 1868. Ku Klux Klans and other vigilantes there assassinated Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a wartime chaplain, constitutional convention member, and newly elected state senator, as well as three other African-American Republican leaders. Nevertheless black South Carolinians turned out in force, carried the 1868 election, and helped elect Ulysses S. Grant president.
  • In his March 4, 1869 inaugural, Grant called on states to settle the question of suffrage in a new 15th Amendment. Anti-slavery icon Frederick Douglass said the amendment’s meaning was plain. “We are placed upon an equal footing with all other men.” But the 15th Amendment did not actually resolve the question of who could vote or establish any actual right to vote. It merely prohibited states from excluding voters based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its own language acknowledged that states could legitimately strip the vote away for other reasons
  • proposed prohibitions on literacy, education, property, or religious tests died at the hands of northeastern and western Republicans who feared expanding the power of Irish and Chinese immigrants.
  • Nor did the 15th Amendment protect voters against terrorism. As Smalls and other African-American Republicans gained seats in Congress, they and their white allies tried to defend black voting through a series of enforcement acts that permitted the federal government to regulate registration and punish local officials for discrimination. But the Supreme Court soon undercut those laws
  • Without hope of victory, federal prosecutions for voting crimes fell by 90 percent after 1873.
  • Keeping African-American people away on election day was difficult, and potentially bad publicity, so white Democrats over the 1870s and 1880s passed registration laws and poll taxes, and shifted precinct locations to prevent black people from coming to the polls at all. In 1882, the South Carolina legislature required all voters to register again, making the registrar, as one African-American political leader said, “the emperor of suffrage.
  • To disfranchise rural laborers, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and other Southern states doubled residency requirements.
  • Using data painstakingly compiled by Philip Lampi, historians have discovered that somewhere between half and three-quarters of adult white males were eligible to vote before the Revolution; by 1812, almost the entire adult white male population could cast a ballot.
  • By the 1880s, this so-called “kangaroo voting” seemed the solution to every political problem. Reformer Henry George and Knights of Labor leaders hoped the Australian ballot would free workingmen from intimidation, while reformers in Boston and New York hoped it might eliminate fraud and make it difficult for illiterate men to fill out ballots.
  • Massachusetts leapt first in 1889, and by the 1892 election a majority of states had passed the bill. In Massachusetts, turnout dropped from 54.57 to 40.69 percent; in Vermont from 69.11 to 53.02. One statistical survey estimated that voter turnout dropped by an average of 8.2 percent. The Australian ballot’s “tendency is to gradual disfranchisement,” the New York Sun complained.
  • by stripping political parties’ names from the ballot, the reform made it difficult for illiterate voters, still a sizable portion of the electorate in the late 19th century. But even more profoundly, the effort to eliminate “fraud” turned election day from a riotous festival to a snooze. Over time many people stayed home
  • In New York, voter participation fell from nearly 90 percent in the 1880s to 57 percent by 1920
  • The 1888 election was almost a very different turning point for voting rights. As Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and White House for the first time in a decade, they tried to bolster their party by establishing federal control of congressional elections so they could protect African-American voting rights in the south (and, Democrats charged, block immigrant voting in northern cities). The bill’s dual purposes were embodied in its manager, anti-immigrant, pro-black suffrage Massachusetts Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge. Although the bill passed the House, it died in a Senate filibuster. Democrats swept the House in the fall 1890 elections and soon repealed many of the remaining voting rights provisions.
  • African-American registration in Mississippi soon fell from 190,000 to 9,000; overall voter participation dropped from 70 percent in the 1870s to 50 percent in the 1880s to 15 percent by the early 1900
  • “We have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods,” Alabama’s convention chairman said in 1901, “but in the future we’ll disfranchise them by law.”
  • These laws and constitutional provisions devastated voting in the South. When Tennessee passed a secret ballot law in 1889, turnout fell immediately from 78 percent to 50 percent; Virginia’s overall turnout dropped by 50 percent. For African-American voters, of course, the impact was even more staggering. In Louisiana black registration fell from 130,000 to 1,342. By 1910 only four percent of black Georgia men were registered.
  • Poll taxes, intimidation, fraud, and grandfather clauses all played their part, but the enduring tools of registration and the Australian ballot worked their grim magic, too, and made voters disappear.
  • In the landmark case Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts turned the disfranchisement of the 1890s into a racial and regional exception, one that had since been overwhelmed by the national tide of democracy. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
  • This is part of what political scientist Alexander Keyssar critically called the “progressive presumption” that there is an “inexorable march toward universal suffrage” interrupted only by anomalous, even un-American, regional and racial detours.
  • But the tools that disfranchised Jackson Giles were not all Southern and not only directed at African-American men. When the United States conquered Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it imposed the Australian ballot there, too.
  • in 1903, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Massachusetts native, denied Giles’ appeal on the grounds that the court could not intervene in political questions. If citizens like Giles suffered a “great political wrong,” Holmes intoned, they could only look for help from the same political system that had just disfranchised them
  • The great writer Charles Chesnutt wrote that “In spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States are bound to respect.” It was a “second Dred Scott decision,” white and black activists lamented.
aidenborst

Stocks week ahead: Saying goodbye to a wild 2020 - CNN - 0 views

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

Politics US history crisis economics stocks stock-market rebuild

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Dow and the S&P 500 ended the year at record highs and the Nasdaq Composite logged its best performance since 2009 with a whopping 43.6% jump. Overall, the indexes registered gains for the second year in a row.
  • Nobody could have predicted the market mayhem of 2020. Stocks hit record highs at the start of the year, before worries about the coronavirus pandemic — first abroad and then closer to home — pushed US markets into a spiral in February and March. The Dow routinely set new records for worst one-day point drops in history, and the New York Stocks Exchange had to suspend trading in the S&P 500 multiple times as the selloff triggered circuit breakers.
  • But in the months that followed, the market recovered — and faster than many had expected.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Some of the year's biggest winners are investors who closed their eyes and muffled their ears during the pandemic selloff and held onto their stocks. By the end of the year, their portfolio balances were looking pretty good
  • "This year was a year with a lot of reminders for investors: number one, don't overreact," Leo Grohowski, chief investment officer at BNY Wealth Management, told CNN Business.close dialogBefore Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets Open
  • The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street will likely be a topic that follows us into the New Year.
  • The US economy is operating at 82% of where it was in early March, according to the Back-to-Normal Index from Moody's Analytics and CNN Business.
Javier E

The rise of irreligion is the GOP's real demographic crisis - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...e-gops-real-demographic-crisis

crisis politics religion christianity GOP demographics

shared by Javier E on 21 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • While the process of secularization has been slower-moving in the U.S. compared to Europe, it is now proceeding rapidly. A 2014 study by Pew Research found that 23 percent of Americans say they’re “unaffiliated” with any religious tradition, up from 20 percent just three years earlier. The Public Religion Research Institute confirmed the statistic as well with a 2014 poll based on 50,000 interviews indicating that 23 percent of respondents were unaffiliated.
  • Between 2007 and 2012, the number of people claiming “nothing in particular” increased by 2.3 percent, those saying they were agnostics increased by 1.2 percent and those claiming to be atheists increased by 0.8 percent. No actual religious group has experienced anywhere near such growth during this time period.
  • Looked at over the longer term, the trend is even more discernible. In 1972, just 5.1 percent of Americans said they had no religious affiliation, according to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey. In 2014, that number was 20.7 percent, an increase of more than 400 percent.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • To put that growth in perspective, consider that Hispanics were 4.5 percent of the U.S. population in 1970 (according to the Census Bureau) and 16.9 percent by 2012 (according to GSS). Despite receiving almost no attention whatsoever, people with no religion are both more numerous and increasing their numbers at a faster pace than people of Hispanic descent
  • While some of those who are unaffiliated do profess a belief in God, a huge majority of those with no religion appear utterly uninterested in joining up with any particular faith tradition. A full 88 percent told Pew they were “not interested.” That is likely because Americans of no faith have strong, negative viewpoints about religious organizations, overwhelmingly characterizing them as “too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics.” Nearly half of these individuals describe themselves as neither spiritual nor religious.
  • The implications of Americans’ exodus from cultural Christianity are significant for the political right because the religiously unaffiliated appear to have a real preference for Democrats. In fact, a person’s religious perspective is generally the most accurate predictor aside from party identification of how he or she will vote.
  • In the 1990 ARIS study, 42 percent of respondents who claimed no religion said they were “independents,” 27 percent said they were Democrats, and 21 percent said they were Republicans. According to the 2008 poll (the most recent), 42 percent of people with no religious affiliation said they were “independents,” 34 percent said they were Democrats, and just 13 percent said they were Republicans.
  • The likely reason why Republicans have declined in popularity among the non-religious is GOP’s long habit of identifying itself as a Christian party.
  • According to a 2014 poll commissioned by the American Bible Society, just 35 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 believe the Bible “contains everything a person needs to know how to live a meaningful life.” The millennial generation is also much more skeptical about the role of the Bible within society. Just 30 percent of that age group surveyed said they thought the Bible had “too little influence” on Americans. By contrast, 26 percent said the Bible had “too much influence” on society.
  • That so many non-Christians would choose not to vote for Republicans and conservatives really should come as no surprise considering the fact that many Christian conservatives—even at the very highest echelons of power and influence—seem to be utterly unaware that their repeated use of Christian symbolism and their insistence on promoting religious liberty only for Christians can be perceived as offensive or non-inclusive to people who do not share their beliefs.
  • As bad as things are now for Republicans with regard to secular voters, however, they seem to be worsening. A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that the Democratic share of the None vote has increased significantly since 2000 when it stood at 61 percent. In 2004 it rose to 67 percent. In 2008, an incredible 75 percent of the religiously unaffiliated voted for Barack Obama. In 2012, not quite as many, 70 percent, did so again. As it stands, people with no faith tradition have shifted a full nine points toward Democrats.
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

Barack Obama calls for stricter gun laws following Colorado shooting to prevent more 'r... - 0 views

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

obama

shared by katherineharron on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday called for stricter gun laws following the mass shooting in Colorado, bemoaning what he called a national tolerance for "these kinds of random, senseless acts."
  • they "are also feeling a deep, familiar outrage" for these types of tragedies.
  • "It is long past time for those with the power to fight this epidemic of gun violence to do so. It will take time to root out the disaffection, racism and misogyny that fuels so many of these senseless acts of violence," Obama said. "But we can make it harder for those with hate in their hearts to buy weapons of war."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The statement by the former president came shortly before President Joe Biden publicly commented on the shooting
  • The attack, which came days after another shooting rampage in Georgia that left eight dead, has renewed calls from lawmakers for federal gun control reform. close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-row bx-row-image bx-row-image-d
  • During his time in the White House, Obama urged Congress to take up gun control legislation following several mass shootings around the country, though no significant congressional action was ever taken.
  • Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday called the shooting "absolutely tragic," but ignored a question about the future of gun control during a swearing-in ceremony for William Burns as CIA director.
  • Earlier this month, the House passed H.R. 8 that would expand background checks on all commercial gun sales and H.R. 1146 to try and close what's known as the "Charleston Loophole," which allows some firearms to be transferred by licensed gun dealers before the required background checks are completed.
katherineharron

Russia-Ukraine: US considering sending warships to Black Sea amid tensions - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

russia

shared by katherineharron on 12 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The United States is considering sending warships into the Black Sea in the next few weeks in a show of support for Ukraine amid Russia's increased military presence on Ukraine's eastern border
  • The US Navy routinely operates in the Black Sea, but a deployment of warships now would send a specific message to Moscow
  • The US is required to give 14 days notice of its intention to enter the Black Sea under a 1936 treaty giving Turkey control of the straits to enter the sea.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • On Wednesday, two US B-1 bombers conducted missions over the Aegean Sea.Read More
  • Although the US does not see the amassing of Russian forces as posturing for an offensive action, the official told CNN that "if something changes we will be ready to respond."
  • On Thursday White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Russia's actions are "deeply concerning."close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchange.com/assets/uploads/clients/340/creatives/ac22162ccde0493f3e08745fedbf
  • The Biden administration and the international community have expressed concerns about mounting tensions between Ukraine and Russia
  • "The United States is increasingly concerned by recently escalating Russian aggressions in eastern Ukraine, including Russia's movements on Ukraine's border. Russia now has more troops on the border of Ukraine than any time since 2014. Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed this week alone. These are all deeply concerning signs," Psaki said.
  • "We are concerned by recent escalating Russian aggressions in eastern Ukraine, including the credible reports that have been emanating about Russian troop movements on Ukraine's borders and occupied Crimea," State Department spokesperson Ned Price said this week.
  • Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said this week that it was important "for all sides to comply with the Minsk Agreement" and "for the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of Ukraine to be respected by Russia."
carolinehayter

Pentagon watchdog finds National Guard's use of helicopters to fly over DC protestors "... - 0 views

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

politics trump us

shared by carolinehayter on 28 May 21 - No Cached
  • The Pentagon's watchdog found that the DC National Guard's use of low-flying helicopters in response to protests in DC on June 1, 2020, over the death of George Floyd was "reasonable," but the mission was mired in confusion.
  • The report from the Department of Defense's Inspector General, released Thursday, concluded the deployment of helicopters was justifiable based on the needs of the emergency, as well as the direction from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper to "flood the zone" and "use everything available" to protect "federal property and symbols."
  • A lack of clear guidance on the helicopters' mission compounded the confusion, because Ryan "did not provide clear and consistent direction and mission guidance" and "did not provide his clear and consistent commander's intent to include key tasks and parameters for the operation."Enter your email to sign up for CNN's "What Matters" Newsletter. "close dialog"Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters Newsletter<di
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "No specific training, policies, or procedures were in place for using helicopters to support requests for assistance from civilian authorities in civil disturbances," the report's authors wrote. "Prior to the night of June 1st, 2020, the DC [National Guard] did not have a prepared plan to maintain command and control of aviation assets used to support civil disturbances."Read More
  • Well after the curfew, protesters were still out on the streets, and video captured by CNN showed a military helicopter hovering over a group of them, kicking up strong wind and debris with its downwash. The tactic is a show of force and commonly used by the military in overseas combat zones to drive away targets from a specific area.
  • The Defense Department Inspector General largely agreed with an earlier report from an Army investigation that found the use of helicopters was not against federal laws or policies, though there was a "lack of understanding" about their mission.But the new report contradicted the Army investigation's finding that MEDEVAC helicopters were used against regulations and that the helicopters were used without approval from the chain of command.
katherineharron

The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump's presidency - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 -- when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.
  • Trump got even worse after November 3. Since then, he has spent the final months of what has been a wildly dishonest presidency on a relentless and dangerous lying spree about the election he lost.
  • The most telling lie: It didn't rain on his inaugurationclose dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-group bx-group-default bx-group-1245864-3DW
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • It rained during Trump's inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished talking and went inside, at which point "it poured."
  • The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.
  • The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control
  • This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one -- the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was "totally under control"; the lie that the virus was "disappearing" -- suggested to Americans that they didn't have to change much about their usual behavior.
  • more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.
  • The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate
  • Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm
  • Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.
  • The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts
  • When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts' National Jamboree was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them," I didn't expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.
  • A senior Scouts source -- a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC -- confirmed to me that no call ever happened.
  • The ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda
  • The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion
  • It was a problem for the country that the President was not only a conspiracy theorist himself but immersed in conspiracy culture, regularly stumbling upon ludicrous claims and then sharing them as fact.
  • So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China -- though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.
  • The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before
  • according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude -- even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.
  • The most traditional big lie: Trump didn't know about the payment to Stormy Daniels
  • he also lied when he needed to. When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen got the money for the payment, it was both audacious -- Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen -- and kind of conventional: the President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.
  • The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation
  • ere's what he told NBC's Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: "You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it." Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy.
  • The most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditions
  • When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions -- though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them,
  • Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them
  • The lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice
  • Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn't good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018.
  • That's not the story he did tell -- whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama's legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over -- more than 160 times before I lost count -- that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.
  • The Crazy Uncle lie award: Windmill noise causes cancer
  • At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.
  • his 2019 declaration that "they say" the noise from windmills "causes cancer."
  • The most hucksterish lie: That plan was coming in two weeks
  • Trump's big health care plan was eternally coming in "two weeks."
  • My personal favorite lie: Trump was once named Michigan's Man of the Year
  • Trump has never lived in Michigan. Why would he have been named Michigan's Man of the Year years before his presidency?He wouldn't have been. He wasn't.
  • The most depressing lie: Trump won the election
  • Trump's long White House campaign against verifiable reality has culminated with his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost.
Javier E

The Right's Continuing Glorification of Violence - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/uing-glorification-of-violence

violence glorification right alt-right

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Less than a week before the 2016 election, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic published a chilling prediction. The Trump campaign, they wrote “has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate.” If their analysis of the process of violent radicalization was correct, they said, “the result will be blood.”&nbsp;
  • in March, Christian Vanderbrouk wrote an extraordinary piece about a darker but related strain of rhetoric on the right. It is time, he wrote then, for conservatives to stop trafficking in violent fantasies about racial civil wars that pit red and blue states against one another.&nbsp;
  • “Schlichter’s books and The Turner Diaries share the same paranoia that progressive governments, aided by white collaborators, are empowering blacks to enable them to rape white women and ultimately exterminate the white race.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The racialized themes of Schlichter’s books are not subtle. Nor are the refrains of “replacement,” or “invasion,” — themes that have become popular – and deadly – on the fringes of the white nationalist movement.
  • at the core of Schlichter’s books is the catharsis of violence, and the racial elements are often explicit.
  • Schlichter is not alone in his fascination with the pornification of political violence. Vanderbrouk also highlighted the Federalist’s Jesse Kelly, who warned that Trump supporters face genocide or ruin.&nbsp; In his essay. “America Is Over, But I Won’t See It Go Without An Epic Fight,” Kelly asks readers to “imagine themselves as native Lakota tribesmen who must choose between life on a reservation—‘in the liberal utopian nightmare of 57 genders and government control over everything’—or glorious, doomed resistance: as the Lakota who fights back and holds his enemy’s scalp in his hands.”
  • Vanderbrouk’s piece was published in March, Hugh Hewitt doubled down on his defense of Schlichter. The Federalist continues to be sunk in terminal whataboutism. Trump continues to ratchet up his rhetoric, even in the face of national tragedy. Tucker Carlson denies that there is a problem of white supremacy at all.&nbsp; And there has been blood
Javier E

Republicans Are Now Looking on the Bright Side of Climate Change - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-bright-side-of-climate-change

gop climate change crisis denial

shared by Javier E on 09 May 19 - No Cached
  • Gone are the carefree days of the early oughts, when GOP lawmakers were all-in on the idea that global warming was a nefarious hoax perpetrated by the communists and globalists of the environmentalist lobby. As the evidence has continued to pile up over the years to indicate that warming is not only coming, but is in fact already upon us, Republicans have been forced through a series of gradual rhetorical shifts:
  • first, a grudging acceptance that warming was occurring paired with continued questions about whether or not human behavior could be responsible; next, a faux-fairminded commitment to pay attention to “both sides of the science” of the climate debate; and finally, the laughs-first, serious-talk-never approach we see (with occasional exceptions) today.
  • last September, when reports surfaced that the latest forecasts from the Trump administration’s own climate scientists suggested that the planet would warm a catastrophic seven degrees Fahrenreit by the year 2100
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Pompeo’s remarks were actually just the latest, loudest expression of the Trump climate doctrine: Yeah, the Earth is warming, but it’s too late to stop it, so we might as well quit bitching about it. Every melting glacier has a silver lining.
  • Pompeo uncorked a wild new talking point: Sure, climate change might have its downsides, but if we play our cards right, this thing can be great for trade!
  • But the administration had deployed this report not to underscore a call for environmental reforms, but to argue that a specific environmental regulation—fuel efficiency standards for new cars—be discontinued.
  • Republican voters have begun to wake up to the notion that huge corporations don’t always have the country’s best interests at heart, and that free markets aren’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of national economic policy that many previously insisted they were
  • Conservatives have soured on Facebook and Starbucks; less so on ExxonMobil. Funny how that works.
johnsonel7

India and Pakistan Are Edging Closer to War in 2020 - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...akistan-edging-closer-war-2020

india pakistan politics

shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Turmoil is never far away in South Asia, between disputed borders, acute resource shortages, and threats ranging from extremist violence to earthquakes. But in 2019, two crises stood out: an intensifying war in Afghanistan and deep tensions between India and Pakistan. And as serious as both were in 2019, expect them to get even worse in the coming year.
  • Afghanistan has already seen several grim milestones in the last 12 months that attested to the ferocity of the Taliban insurgency. Casualty figures for Afghan security forces and civilians set new records. It was also the deadliest year for U.S. forces since 2014.
  • Meanwhile, 2019 was a dangerously tense year for India and Pakistan—two rivals that are both neighbors and nuclear states. In February, a young Kashmiri man in the town of Pulwama staged a suicide bombing that killed more than three dozen Indian security forces—the deadliest such attack in Kashmir in three decades.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Bilateral relations remained fraught over the last few months of the year. Islamabad issued constant broadsides against New Delhi for its continued security lockdown in Kashmir. By year’s end, an internet blackout was still in effect. Then, in December, India’s parliament passed a controversial new citizenship law that affords fast-track paths to Indian citizenship for religious minorities—but not Muslims—fleeing persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
  • This means Afghanistan is unlikely to have a new government in place for at least another few months, and even longer if the final results are different from the initial ones and require a second vote. Due to winter weather in Afghanistan, a runoff likely wouldn’t occur until the spring. Without a new government in place, it beggars belief that Afghanistan could launch a process to establish an intra-Afghan dialogue, much less negotiate an end to the war.
  • The two nuclear-armed nations will enter 2020 just one big trigger event away from war. The trigger could be another mass-casualty attack on Indian security forces in Kashmir traced back to a Pakistan-based group, or—acting on the threats issued repeatedly by New Delhi in 2019—an Indian preemptive operation to seize territory in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.&nbsp;
blythewallick

6 Takeaways From the January 2020 Democratic Debate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democratic-debate-live.html

politics US gop

shared by blythewallick on 16 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • There was little incentive to go on the attack.
  • It’s a reflection of the muddled state of the race. The candidates have all made a calculation that being the aggressor in any interpersonal conflict would only lead to increasing their unfavorable ratings — or falling down Iowa caucusgoers’ second-choice lists, a critical element because supporters of candidates who don’t receive 15 percent support will be free to back someone else.
  • The Sanders-Warren clash fell flat — until after the debate.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Ms. Warren did highlight her status as the top-polling female contender at several points in the debate, ending her closing statement with a reference to the possibility of electing the first woman president.
  • Warren makes her electability pitch.
  • One of Ms. Warren’s biggest political obstacles is the perception among some voters that she would face daunting challenges in a general election — both thanks to her boldly progressive outlook, and to societal sexism that many Democrats believe damaged Mrs. Clinton in 2016. @charset "UTF-8"; /*********************** B A S E S T Y L E S ************************/ /************************************* T Y P E : C L A S S M I X I N S **************************************/ /* Headline */ /* Leadin */ /* Byline */ /* Dateline */ /* Alert */ /* Subhed */ /* Body */ /* Caption */ /* Leadin */ /* Credit */ /* Label */ /********** S I Z E S ***********/ /******************** T Y P O G R A P H Y *********************/ .g-headline, .interactive-heading, .g-subhed { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; } .g-alert, .g-alert.g-body, .g-alert_link, .g-byline, .g-caption, .g-caption_bold, .g-caption_heading, .g-chart, .g-credit, .g-credit_bullet, .g-dateline, .g-label, .g-label_white, .g-leadin, #interactive-leadin, .g-refer, .g-refer.g-body, .g-table-text { font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; } .g-body, .g-body_bullet, .g-body_link { font-family: "nyt-imperial", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; } /* Light text */ .g-asset-leadin.g-caption_heading, .g-chart, .g-headline, .interactive-heading, .g-label, .g-label_white, .g-leadin, #interactive-leadin, .g-refer, .g-refer.g-body, .g-table-text { font-weight: 300; } /* Normal text */ /* Medium text */ .g-alert, .g-alert.g-body, .g-alert_link, .g-body, .g-body_bullet, .g-body_link, .g-caption, .g-credit, .g-dateline, .g-refer, .g-refer.g-body, .g-refer_link, .g-subhed { font-weight: 500; } /* Bold text */ .g-byline, .g-caption_bold, .g-caption_heading, .g-chart-header, .g-credit_bullet, .g-subhed, .g-table-heading { font-weight: 700; } strong { font-weight: 700; } /* Type Mixins *************************/ /* MODULE : GUIDE */ /**********************/ .g-electionguide-list-circle p, .g-electionguide-list-circle div, .g-electionguide-list-circle li { position: relative; padding-left: 1.75em; } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide-list-circle p, .g-electionguide-list-circle div, .g-electionguide-list-circle li { padding-left: 0; } } .g-electionguide-list-circle p:before, .g-electionguide-list-circle div:before, .g-electionguide-list-circle li:before { position: absolute; content: "•"; top: 2px; left: 1em; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide-list-circle p:before, .g-electionguide-list-circle div:before, .g-electionguide-list-circle li:before { top: 3px; left: -1em; } } .g-electionguide { background-color: #F4F5F2; text-align: left; margin-top: 30px; margin-bottom: 30px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide { max-width: 690px; margin: 40px auto; border-radius: 10px; } } .g-electionguide-container { margin: 0 15px 0px 15px; height: 100%; padding: 20px 0 60px 0; } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide-container { padding: 40px 0 60px 0; } } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide-logo { padding-left: 25px; } } .g-electionguide-date { font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; color: #666666; max-width: 600px; margin: 0px auto 25px; } #g-electionguide-headline { font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 26px; margin-top: 10px; font-weight: 600; max-width: 600px; margin: 10px auto 6px; line-height: 32px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { #g-electionguide-headline { font-size: 35px; line-height: 40px; margin: 20px auto 6px; } } /* LINKS */ #g-electionguide-id a { text-decoration: none; } .g-electionguide a { color: #326891; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 2px solid #CCD9E3; } .g-electionguide a:visited { color: #333; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 2px solid #ddd; } .g-electionguide a:hover { border-bottom: none; } /* LIST */ .g-electionguide-list-header { font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; font-size: 17px; line-height: 24px; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 5px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide-list-header { font-size: 19px; line-height: 26px; margin-bottom: 10px; } } .g-electionguide-item-list { margin-top: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: 24px; font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 500; } #g-electionguide-item-list li { margin-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 15px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { #g-electionguide-item-list li { font-size: 19px; line-height: 26px; } } #g-electionguide-item-list li:before { color: #C4C4C4; margin-left: -15px; margin-right: 10px; color: #ccc; top: 0; font-size: 15px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { #g-electionguide-item-list li:before { left: 1em; } } ul.g-electionguide-list { max-width: 600px; margin: auto; } /* TABLE */ .g-electionguide-line { border: 0.5px solid #dcddda; width: 100%; max-width: 600px; margin: auto; } .g-electionguide-table { margin-top: 10px; } .g-electionguide-table-header { font-size: 14px; font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 800; padding: 15px 0; } .g-electionguide-table-row { font-size: 14px; font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 40px; } .g-electionguide-table tr { border-bottom: 1px solid #dcddda; } /* viewport example .g-element { max-width: 100%; @include viewport('small') { // 600px max-width: 90%; } @include viewport('medium') { // 740px max-width: 80%; } @include viewport('large') { // 1024px max-width: 70%; } } */ .g-electionguide-photogrid-item { display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; -ms-flex-align: start; align-items: flex-start; -ms-flex-wrap: wrap; flex-wrap: wrap; height: 100%; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; } .g-electionguide-photogrid-link { display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; -ms-flex-pack: center; justify-content: center; width: 49%; margin: 0px 0px 30px 2px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide-photogrid-link { width: 20%; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; -ms-flex-direction: column; flex-direction: column; margin: 10px 10px; } } .g-electionguide-photogrid-link a, h2 { text-decoration: none; color: #333333; font-family: nyt-cheltenham, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px; /* or 118% */ display: inline-block; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; } @media (min-width: 600px) { .g-electionguide-photogrid-link a, h2 { font-size: 17px; } } .g-electionguide-photogrid-name { -ms-flex-wrap: wrap; flex-wrap: wrap; margin-left: 8px; max-width: 50px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide-photogrid-name { -ms-flex-wrap: nowrap; flex-wrap: nowrap; margin-top: 8px; margin-left: 0px; max-width: 140px; } } .g-electionguide-photogrid-img { background-color: #1980c3; border-radius: 50%; width: 60px; } @media (min-width: 370px) { .g-electionguide-photogrid-img { width: 70px; } @media (min-width: 740px) { .g-electionguide-photogrid-img { width: 90px; } } #photogrid-id { text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 0px solid; } #photogrid-id:hover img { background-color: rgba(25, 128, 195, 0.7); } /*# sourceMappingURL=style.css.map */ @charset "UTF-8"; /*********************** B A S E S T Y L E S ************************/ /************************************* T Y P E : C L A S S M I X I N S **************************************/ /* Headline */ /* Leadin */ /* Byline */ /* Dateline */ /* Alert */ /* Subhed */ /* Body */ /* Caption */ /* Leadin */ /* Credit */ /* Label */ /********** S I Z E S ***********/ /******************** T Y P O G R A P H Y *********************/ .g-headline, .interactive-heading, .g-subhed { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; } .g-alert, .g-alert.g-body, .g-alert_link, .g-byline, .g-caption, .g-caption_bold, .g-caption_heading, .g-chart, .g-credit, .g-credit_bullet, .g-dateline, .g-label, .g-label_white, .g-leadin, #interactive-leadin, .g-refer, .g-r
  • And she invoked her 2012 victory over then-Senator Scott P. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, as she declared herself “the only person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent Republican anytime in the past 30 years.”
  • Klobuchar throws punches.
  • Yet while she described herself as a winner tethered to the Midwest, somebody whose friends and neighbors hail from flyover country, she didn’t come out of Tuesday’s debate with any significant headlines of her own.
  • The only vetting of Buttigieg came from the moderator Abby Phillip on race.
  • Mr. Buttigieg deftly dodged by suggesting that the black voters who “know me best” — in his native South Bend — chose him twice to lead the city. And he cited recent endorsements from Representative Anthony Brown of Maryland and Mayor Quentin Hart of Waterloo, Iowa, who this week became the two most prominent African-American elected officials to back him.
  • Biden avoids attacks.
  • Mr. Biden, who flew under the radar particularly at the last debate, often stayed in his comfort zones — discussing foreign policy and health care — and he was not the center of the kind of memorable exchanges that had dealt his campaign blows earlier in the race.
katherineharron

Ranking the Top 5 Democrats in the 2020 race - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • @charset "UTF-8";.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .m-footer__bottom__text a[data-analytics=footer_adchoices]:after{content:"";display:block;margin:0;padding:0}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket a{font-size:1rem}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .buckets{list-style:none;margin:0;padding:2rem 0 1.5rem;font-family:CNN Condensed,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;-webkit-font-feature-settings:"kern";font-feature-settings:"kern";text-rendering:optimizeLegibility}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .buckets{padding:0}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .buckets:after{clear:both;content:"";display:table}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket{float:left}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket a{color:#404040;display:block;font-weight:500;letter-spacing:.9px;line-height:2.1;position:relative;text-align:center;text-decoration:none;text-transform:uppercase}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket a{line-height:50px;padding:0 .5rem;font-size:14px;letter-spacing:1px}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket a:after{background:#3061f3;bottom:.25rem;content:"";height:.25rem;left:0;margin:0 auto;position:absolute;right:0;-webkit-transition:width .2s ease-in-out;-o-transition:width .2s ease-in-out;transition:width .2s ease-in-out;width:0}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket a:after{bottom:.75rem}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket a:hover:after{width:25%}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket a:hover:after{width:calc(100% - 1rem)}}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .bucket+.bucket a{margin-left:1rem}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .logo{background:0;height:auto;position:static;width:auto;z-index:auto}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .logo:after{clear:both;content:"";display:table}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .logo:after{content:none}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .logo-links{-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;height:50px;width:172px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .logo-links__cnn{background-color:#c00;background-image:url(//www.i.cdn.cnn.com/.a/2.183.1/assets/logo_cnn.svg);float:left;height:50px;width:50px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .logo-links__politics{background-image:url(//www.i.cdn.cnn.com/.a/2.183.1/assets/logo_politics.svg);background-position:0;background-repeat:no-repeat;float:left;height:50px;margin-left:.4rem;width:115px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social a{font-size:inherit;color:inherit}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .gigya-sharebar-element+.gigya-sharebar-element{margin:0 0 0 8px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .m-share__rail .gigya-sharebar-element+.gigya-sharebar-element{margin:0 0 8px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social{color:#404040;list-style:none;margin:0 auto;padding:2rem 0;position:relative;width:80px}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social{padding:0}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social:before{background-color:#d9d9d9;content:"";display:block;height:1px;left:0;margin:0 auto;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;width:88px}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social:before{content:none}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social:after{clear:both;content:"";display:table}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link{float:left;font-size:20px;text-align:center;-webkit-transition:color .1s ease-in-out;-o-transition:color .1s ease-in-out;transition:color .1s ease-in-out;width:20px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link:hover{color:#3061f3}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link{height:50px}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link+.social__link{margin-left:10px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link a{line-height:20px}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link a{line-height:50px}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link--facebook a:before{content:"";font-family:cnn-icons}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link--twitter a:before{content:"";font-family:cnn-icons}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .social__link--instagram a:before{content:"";font-family:cnn-icons}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.pg.pg .skinny .nav .buckets{position:static}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-header{height:auto}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.nav-open .nav .menu-collapse{background:0}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.nav-open .nav .buckets{-webkit-transform:none;-ms-transform:none;transform:none}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav .drawer>.buckets{width:auto}@media (min-width:1024px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics #header-wrap #sticky-ad-wrap,.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics #header-wrap.ad-active{background:#fefefe}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics #header-wrap .ad.ad--epic{background:#fefefe}@media (min-width:800px) and (max-width:899px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.nav-open{height:100%;overflow:hidden;overflow-scrolling:none;position:fixed}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav{-webkit-box-sizing:border-box;box-sizing:border-box;position:relative;height:auto}@media (min-width:800px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav{background:0}}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav{background:#fefefe;border-bottom:1px solid #e6e6e6;height:98px;padding:24px 10px 24px 0;-webkit-transition:all .2s ease-in-out;-o-transition:all .2s ease-in-out;transition:all .2s ease-in-out}}@media (min-width:1120px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav{padding:24px 0}}@media (min-width:800px){html:not(.iemobile):not(.ios):not(.android) .pg-vertical--politics .skinny .nav{height:auto}}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.pg.pg .skinny .nav{height:51px;padding:0 10px 0 0}}@media (min-width:1120px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.pg.pg .skinny .nav{padding:0}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav__container{background:#f2f2f2;border-bottom:1px solid #e6e6e6;height:50px;z-index:28}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav__container{background:#fefefe;border-bottom:0;float:left}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-search--mobile{position:absolute;right:50px;top:0}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-search--mobile{display:none}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-search--desktop{display:none;float:right;outline:none}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-search--desktop{display:block}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-search__icon{display:block;height:50px;overflow:hidden;text-align:center;width:50px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-search__icon:before{-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;box-sizing:content-box;color:#404040;font-size:22px;line-height:50px;padding:2px 0 0;-webkit-transform:scaleX(-1);-ms-transform:scaleX(-1);transform:scaleX(-1);content:"";font-family:cnn-icons}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-search__icon:before:hover{color:#3061f3}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav-search--mobile .nav-search__icon{width:25px}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .menu-collapse{height:50px;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;width:50px}@media (min-width:800px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .menu-collapse{display:block}}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .menu-collapse{display:none}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .menu-collapse .hamburger,.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .menu-collapse .hamburger:after,.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .menu-collapse .hamburger:before{background-color:#404040}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.nav-open .menu-collapse .hamburger{background-color:rgba(0,0,0,0)}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .drawer{overflow:auto;position:relative}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .drawer{overflow:auto}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.nav-open .drawer{height:100vh;height:calc(100vh - 50px)}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.nav-open .drawer{height:auto}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .drawer__container{background:#f2f2f2;border-bottom:1px solid #e6e6e6;position:absolute;-webkit-transform:translate3d(0,-100%,0);transform:translate3d(0,-100%,0);-webkit-transition:all .2s ease-in-out;-o-transition:all .2s ease-in-out;transition:all .2s ease-in-out;width:100%}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .drawer__container{background-color:#fefefe;border:0;position:static;-webkit-transform:none;-ms-transform:none;transform:none;-webkit-transition:none;-o-transition:none;transition:none;width:auto}}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.nav-open .drawer__container{-webkit-transform:translateZ(0);transform:translateZ(0)}.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics.nav-open.breaking-news--showing .drawer__container{padding-bottom:100px}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .nav .buckets{float:left;margin:0 0 0 2.75rem}}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.pg-vertical--politics .skinny .nav .buckets .bucket>a{line-height:50px}}@media (min-width:900px){.pg-vertical.p
  • 3 (tie). Elizabeth Warren: We're moving the senior senator up on our list for two reasons. First, although Warren is arguably in a worse position than Buttigieg in Iowa and New Hampshire, she is in a better position than he is nationally.
  • 5. Amy Klobuchar: The Minnesota senator wanted (needed?) a star turn at the debate earlier this week in Iowa to close the gap between herself and the four top candidates in Iowa.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • But the level of not-knowing-what-the-hell-is-going-to-happen is much higher in this race than any we've seen in modern memory. Just four in 10 Iowa Democrats said they were locked in on their candidate choice in a CNN/Des Moines Register poll earlier this month. That's significantly lower than the 59% who said they had made up their minds about a candidate at the same time in 2016.
  • 3 (tie). Pete Buttigieg: Buttigieg is, weirdly, the most divisive candidate in the field. Just take his debate performance on Tuesday night as an example. Chris wrote that he came across as well-versed on the issues, authoritative and possessing the necessary gravitas to serve as commander-in-chief.
  • . Bernie Sanders: We've both written about how it's not far-fetched at all that the junior senator from Vermont could win the nomination.
  • 1. Joe Biden: The former vice president has the easiest path to the nomination. If Biden wins in Iowa, he is the heavy favorite to be the nominee.
1 - 20 of 362 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page