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anonymous

What We Know About The Boulder Grocery Shooting: 10 Murder Charges For Suspect : NPR - 0 views

  • Police in Boulder, Colo., have identified the suspect in Monday's shooting rampage at a grocery store as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 21. Ten people died in the shooting, including a Boulder police officer who had arrived to help those inside the store. The victims range in age from 20 to 65.Alissa has been charged with 10 counts of murder in the first degree, Boulder police said.
  • All of the victims have now been identified, and their families have been notified, Herold said at a news conference Tuesday morning.
  • The suspect is from Arvada, a small city between Denver and Boulder. He was wounded during the shooting and was expected to be released from the hospital and sent to the county jail sometime Tuesday, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said.
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  • Herold said the suspect's injury was a "through-and-through" wound to his leg.Ben Markus of Colorado Public Radio reported that Alissa has a police record, having been arrested on a misdemeanor assault charge in 2018. He pleaded guilty and paid a fine to resolve that case, according to court records.
  • An "extensive investigation" is now under way into Alissa's life, Dougherty said. He added that the suspect has "lived most of his life in the United States," but he did not elaborate on the suspect's history.The arrest warrant affidavit for Alissa says he purchased a gun less than a week before Monday's shooting, citing official databases that show the suspect bought a Ruger AR-556 on March 16.
  • The U.S. flag was lowered to half-staff atop the White House on Tuesday in honor of the victims. President Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden were "devastated" to learn of the shooting. Speaking from the White House, Biden also said it's time for Congress to tighten U.S. gun laws.
  • Biden acknowledged that the inquiry is still in its early phases, but he added, "I don't need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common-sense steps that will save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act." Lawmakers' priorities, Biden said, should be once again to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and close legal loopholes.
  • The arrest affidavit provides new details about what took place inside the store, drawing from 911 emergency calls and interviews with people who were present when mayhem erupted at the King Soopers grocery store on Table Mesa Drive.Store employees told Detective Joanna Compton that they saw the suspect shoot an older man in the parking lot.
  • The weapon used in the shooting is legally classified as a "pistol" in the U.S., but many people would likely consider it to be a rifle — and the affidavit repeatedly refers to it as one. The gun has the same lower receiver, the shell-like piece that houses the trigger, as AR-15 rifles that have been used in many other mass shootings in the United States.
  • Alissa surrendered to police after he was shot in the leg. An officer said the suspect took off most of his clothes and walked backward toward a SWAT team at the store."The suspect did not answer questions, though he asked to speak to his mother," the affidavit said.
  • As the scene was being cleared, authorities worked to account for people and locate victims. While most of the victims were inside the store, police found a dead person in the parking lot, next to a Mercedes sedan that Alissa had apparently driven to the grocery store.
  • Polis, who is from Boulder, noted that he has shopped at the same store where the violence erupted Monday. Herold later added that she lives about three blocks from the store.
  • Speaking about the slain officer, Herold said that just weeks ago, she had Talley and his family in her office so she could present an award. The commendation, she explained, was for one of his sons who had saved another boy's life by performing CPR.
  • The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal agencies are helping to investigate, mainly by processing evidence at the crime scene and conducting interviews with witnesses, said Michael H. Schneider, FBI special agent in charge. He added that the effort is ongoing to determine what could have motivated the attack.
  • As a teenager in Arvada, Alissa was on his high school's wrestling team. Tyson Crosby, the father of a boy who competed against Alissa, remembered him as being nice but also "a little frustrated with life."Despite Alissa having some "anger management issues," Crosby told Colorado Public Radio, "I would have never expected to hear what I heard [about the shooting], that came as a complete shock."
  • The first reports of shots fired at the King Soopers grocery store reached the Boulder Police Department around 2:30 p.m. local time Monday, Herold said that evening. She provided more details on Tuesday, saying that with a "barrage" of calls coming in, officers were dispatched around 2:40 p.m. and arrived within minutes.The officers "immediately entered the store and engaged the suspect," the police department said in a news release. "There was an exchange of gunfire during which the suspect was shot. No other officers were injured. The suspect was then taken into custody at 3:28 p.m." and taken to a hospital, the agency said.
  • In the wake of the shooting, other state and local agencies offered to handle service calls for the Boulder police, Herold said. But she added that while her department appreciated the gesture, it declined the offers.
  • When the chief was asked what she's telling her officers now, Herold said, "I tell them that I'm sorry, we're going to get through this. Don't lose your compassion, and we'll get through this. And we'll come out of it stronger."
Javier E

Trump Loyalists Want To Punish Liz Cheney. So? - POLITICO - 0 views

  • She offers a case study in a subject that interests both her father and Donald Trump: the psychological dimensions of leadership.
  • Dick Cheney’s leadership style was shaped by a stoical tradition in American culture, one celebrated in frontier mythology, in which words are used sparingly, actions alone convey strength, and personal flash and hunger for approval suggest weakness and sissification.
  • Donald Trump’s leadership style reflects more recent cultural trends, shaped by everything from Las Vegas to pro wrestling. Bombast and self-promotion aren’t simply means but ends as important, or more important, than any policy objective.
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  • But these two different styles have some unifying traits: Both believe in the optics of power, and that the projection of fearlessness creates its own reality.
  • Both Dick Cheney and Trump resisted public acknowledgements of uncertainty or even complexity in their thinking. Both were loath to admit error or issue apologies.
Javier E

Opinion | The Excesses of Antiracist Education - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I want to start with what the new progressivism is interested in changing
  • One change involves increasingly familiar terms like “structural” and “systemic” racism, and the attempt to teach about race in a way that emphasizes not just explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how America’s racist past still influences inequalities today.
  • In theory, this shift is supposed to enable debates that avoid using “racist” as a personal accusation — since the point is that a culture can sustain persistent racial inequalities even if most white people aren’t bigoted or biased.
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  • Still, this kind of vision would, on its own, face inevitable conservative resistance on several grounds: that it overstates the challenges facing minorities in America today; that it seems to de-emphasize personal responsibility; that it implies policy responses (racial quotas, reparations) that are racially discriminatory, arguably unconstitutional and definitely threatening to the white middle class.
  • the basic claim that structural racism exists has strong evidence behind it, and the idea that schools should teach about it in some way is probably a winning argument for progressives.
  • What’s really inflaming today’s fights, though, is that the structural-racist diagnosis isn’t being offered on its own. Instead it’s yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problem it describes.
  • First, there is a novel theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to wrestle with their sins.
  • Second, there is a Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism — and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect “equity” may be a form of structural racism itself.
  • The first idea is associated with Robin DiAngelo, the second with Ibram X. Kendi
  • they usually circle around to similar goals. First, the attempt to use racial-education programs to construct a stronger sense of shared white identity, on the apparent theory that making Americans of European ancestry think of themselves as defined by a toxic “whiteness” will lead to its purgation
  • Second, the deconstruction of standards that manifest racial disparities, on the apparent theory that if we stop using gifted courses or standardized tests, the inequities they reveal will cease to matter.
  • The first idea arguably betrays the theory’s key insight, that you can have “racism without racists,” by deliberately trying to increase individual racial guilt
  • The second extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT.
  • figures like Kendi and DiAngelo, and the complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism, increasingly play a similar role to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side.
  • That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition
  • It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over Kendian or DiAngelan ideas as just a “moral panic” experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.
liamhudgings

To Predict the Role of Fake News in 2020, Look to Canada | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

  • How will online misinformation (“fake news”) affect America’s 2020 elections? It’s the kind of question that might send voters scurrying to the nearest stack of political science journals. But you’d be better off looking north—to Canada, and its impending federal elections, which will be held on October 21, 2019.
  • In part that’s because Canada has taken steps to address the potential for misinformation in this election cycle, developing what Politico recently characterized as “the most detailed plan anywhere in the Western world to combat foreign meddling in its upcoming election.” The government’s plan includes transparency guidelines for political advertising online, the establishment of a cybersecurity task force dedicated to monitoring for potential election threats, and the allocation of $7 million Canadian dollars to digital and civic literacy initiatives.
  • if all that fails, the country also has a non-partisan panel that’s empowered to alert the public in the event of significant foreign interference in the election.
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  • …data about disinformation campaigns are spotty at best. Many of these activities occur in secretive military contexts, or behind the proprietary walls of private actors. Thus, painting a complete picture of these activities online by government actors is extremely difficult, and there will be gaps in the data and cases collected.
  • Precisely because the internet re-invents itself so quickly, each election cycle takes place in what is effectively a brand-new online context.
  • That difficulty has led to some amusingly off-base predictions.
  • Today, that challenge takes the form of wrestling with online misinformation—a challenge I’ll resist characterizing as unprecedented, even though it really is tempting to argue that these factors take the political significance of the internet to a whole new level. The experience of repeatedly encountering brand-new territory has left me not just skeptical of the hyperbole, but also skeptical of political scientists’ ability to inform our efforts at grappling with each successive online challenge. Their work tends to be useful only in retrospect.
brookegoodman

An Ancient Greek Philosopher Was Exiled for Claiming the Moon Was a Rock, Not a God | S... - 0 views

  • Close to the north pole of the moon lies the crater Anaxagoras, named for a Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century B.C.
  • Anaxagoras, who died around the time Plato was born, had a knack for astronomy, an area of study that requires careful observational and calculation to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
  • Modern scholars have only “fragments” to describe the life of Anaxagoras—brief quotes from his teachings and short summaries of his ideas, cited within the works of scholars from later generations, such as Plato and Aristotle.
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  • Anaxagoras came to believe that the moon was a rock, not totally unlike the Earth, and he even described mountains on the lunar surface.
  • While Anaxagoras was not the first to realize that moonlight is reflected light from the sun, he was able to use this concept to correctly explain additional natural phenomena, such as eclipses and lunar phases.
  • Although many Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. believed in one or a few fundamental elements—such as water, air, fire and earth—Anaxagoras thought there must be an infinite number of elements.
  • He noted that when the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth than the sun, the full face is illuminated, “[producing] a model of the heavens that predicts not only phases of the moon, but how eclipses are possible.”
  • he philosopher also realized that the occasional darkening of the moon must result from the moon, sun and Earth lining up such that the moon passes into the Earth’s shadow—a lunar eclipse.
  • Anaxagoras also wrestled with the origins and formation of the moon, a mystery that still challenges scientists today.
  • Though his life was spared, the philosopher who questioned the divinity of the moon found himself in exile in Lampsacus at the edge of the Hellespont. But his ideas regarding eclipses and lunar phases would live on to this day, and for his recognition of the true nature of the moon, a lunar crater, visited by orbiting spacecraft some 2,400 years later, bears the name Anaxagoras.
Javier E

Gertrude Himmelfarb, the Historian of Moral Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Intellectuals played a different role then. They were more of a secular priesthood than today. The intellectual vocation, Irving Howe wrote, meant standing up for values that have no currency in commercial culture. It meant wrestling with the big questions, upholding the high ideals, and using the power of ideas to shape the mental life of the nation.
  • her passing marks the dusk of what was arguably the high-water mark of American intellectual life.
  • Himmelfarb was a great historian, and reported fairly on all sides, but it was always clear which side her heart was on. She grew up working-class and preferred the prosaic bourgeois values that fueled her family’s rise: work, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, cleanliness, moderation, respect for tradition.
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  • To understand a nation, you have to understand its literary and moral imagination—the way artists and writers reflect the times, the way the greatest minds of the day express their ideals and spread beliefs.
  • Britain in the 19th century, like America in the 20th century, was losing its religious faith and searching for a moral code to replace it.
  • Trilling believed that the manners, mores, and morals of a nation touch people everywhere, while politics touches people only in some places, and so morals are more important than day-to-day politics.
  • In its original definition, a neoconservative was a leftist who broke with the left when, in the 1960s, its leaders rejected bourgeois values for the counterculture. By this definition, she was a neoconservative.
  • Himmelfarb shared the Victorian awareness of sin. She detested the snobbery of cultural elites and narcissism in all its forms.
  • she came to admire the optimistic British Enlightenment, especially Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. We are endowed with a moral sense. We want not only to be loved, but to be lovely. We may have differences along race, class, and gender lines, but deep down we are much alike, longing to lead a life that transcends the individual sel
  • Himmelfarb didn’t fear immorality so much as demoralization, the sense that our age has lost a moral vocabulary and with it the ability to think subtly about moral matters. A great deal, she wrote, is lost when a society stops aiming for civic virtue and is content to aim merely for civility.
nrashkind

Kids' Climate Case 'Reluctantly' Dismissed By Appeals Court - 0 views

  • Back in 2016, as she campaigned for Hillary Clinton, Laura Hubka could feel her county converting.
  • "People were chasing me out the door, slamming the door in my face, calling Hillary names," Hubka recalled.
  • In 2012, Howard County voted for then-President Barack Obama by 21 percentage points. In 2016, it voted for candidate Donald Trump by 20 points.
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  • Howard County, with its 41-point shift, saw the biggest swing.
  • "Republicans stand behind their candidate," Hubka said. "Like, the Democrats have to fall in love. We have to be, like, 'Oh, Barack Obama.' You know, I don't feel like people are, like, 'Oh, Joe Biden,' you know — and that's a problem."
  • I met Ernst recently, along with some 20 other Democrats, at the local chamber of commerce, which also houses the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame. (Random fact: Tiny Howard County is home to multiple Olympic wrestlers.)
  • Ernst, like some other folks at the Democratic committee meeting, is looking for a moderate candidate. And he's worried about some ideas on the left of his party. The 66-year-old is skeptical of "Medicare for All."
  • "Amy Klobuchar is kind of right in the middle," Godwin said. "I like what she has to say."
  • "I will do my best to try to get this county back," said Hubka, the party chair. "I don't have high hopes. ... I don't know in November that it'll flip completely. I hope that I can get at least 10 of the points back or, you know, 15."
  • Democrats can turn to history for some hope. The last time the county went for a Republican prior to Trump was in 1984 for Ronald Reagan. Four years later, it turned blue again
  • A federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by nearly two dozen young people aimed at forcing the federal government to take bolder action on climate change, saying the courts were not the appropriate place to address the issue.
  • three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday the young plaintiffs had "made a compelling case that action is needed,
  • The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, was filed in 2015 on behalf of a group of children and teenagers who said the U.S. government continued to use and promote the use of fossil fuels, knowing that such consumption would destabilize the climate, putting future generations at risk.
  • it was unclear if the court could compel the federal government to phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess greenhouse gas emissions as the plaintiffs requested.
  • "Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power,"
  • The decision reversed an earlier ruling by a district court judge that would have allowed the case to move forward.
  • Both the Trump and Obama administrations opposed the lawsuit. All three of the judges involved in Friday's ruling were appointed under Obama.
  • In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response
  • yet presses ahead toward calamity," she wrote. "It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses."
  • Kids' Climate Case 'Reluctantly' Dismissed By Appeals Court
katherineharron

Trump's push to overturn election result tears through GOP - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump is tearing the Republican Party apart on his way out the door, forcing Republicans to choose sides as they wrestle with the future of the party in the wake of Trump's overt attempts to subvert the results of the election.
  • The President's fixation with overturning the results of a fair and free election is the latest crusade throwing the GOP into a full-blown crisis mode as members attack one another's motives
  • There's no evidence of widespread election fraud
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  • But that hasn't stopped a dozen Republican senators -- including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri -- and more than 100 House Republicans from planning to join with Trump to reject the Electoral College votes in states that Biden won when Congress convenes a joint session on Wednesday.
  • The effort will only delay the inevitable, as the objections are sure to fail in both the House and the Senate,
  • For weeks, McConnell privately warned his party against making an unforced error by forcing votes on the Electoral College objections, fully aware that questioning the results of the election when Congress meets Wednesday would expose rifts in his ranks and force members up for reelection in 2022 into an unenviable political position.
  • "I'm concerned about the division in America, that's the biggest issue, but obviously this is not healthy for the Republican Party either," said Sasse
  • A group of nearly a dozen Republican senators announced Saturday that they would vote for Hawley's objection when it was brought forward, unless a commission was created to study voter fraud, something that is unlikely.
  • Trump's close ally, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, tweeted on Sunday that proposing an election commission was "not effectively fighting for President Trump" and added "It appears to be more of a political dodge than an effective remedy."
  • But the long-term effects could stretch for years -- and into the 2022 Senate races, with Trump and his allies threatening primary challenges to those Republicans who cross him and vote against the objections. Aides to GOP members still trying to decide what to do next describe an anxious time for the party as members grapple with what choice to make.
  • Throughout Trump's four years in office, Republicans have often expressed frustration or looked the other way at some of Trump's efforts and rhetoric, though they rarely crossed him. But in the past month, many Republicans voted to override Trump's veto of a popular defense policy bill, the first override of Trump's presidency, and McConnell blocked his attempts to give people $2,000 stimulus checks instead of the $600 in the spending and Covid-19 bill that Trump reluctantly signed.
  • "There is substantial reason for concern about the precedent Congressional objections will set here. By objecting to electoral slates, members are unavoidably asserting that Congress has the authority to overturn elections and overrule state and federal courts," Cheney wrote. "Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states' explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress. This is directly at odds with the Constitution's clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans," she added.
  • Former House Speaker Paul Ryan discouraged his former colleagues from objecting to the election results in a statement Sunday, saying it was "difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans."
  • "I think that if you have a plan, it should [be] a plan that has some chance of working. And neither of the two proposals that have been advanced will produce a result," said Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, who added: "I don't believe it has much long-term impact on our conference."
  • On Thursday morning, McConnell repeatedly called on Hawley to make his case to members on why he was objecting to the results from at least one state. Hawley wasn't on the call, however, and later responded by email to the conference on his rationale. Then over the weekend, multiple senators including Romney, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania skewered any questions that the election had been compromised.
  • Romney specifically said the effort to overturn the election was an "egregious ploy" that "may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic."
  • "I read Sen. Toomey's statement," Hawley said. "I recognize that our caucus will have varied opinions about this subject. That's not surprising. But I also believe we should avoid putting words into each other's mouths," Hawley wrote.
  • "The 2020 election is over. All challenges through recounts and appeals have been exhausted. At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans' confidence in the already determined election results," the senators said.
rerobinson03

Stanford Study Seeks to Quantify Infections Stemming From Trump Rallies - The New York ... - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON — A group of Stanford University economists who created a statistical model estimate that there have been at least 30,000 coronavirus infections and 700 deaths as a result of 18 campaign rallies President Trump held from June to September.
  • The numbers
  • are not based on individual cases traced directly to particular campaign events.
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  • They compared the 18 counties where Mr. Trump held rallies with as many as 200 counties with similar demographics and similar trajectories of confirmed Covid-19 cases before the rally date.
  • Based on their models, the researchers concluded that on average, the 18 events produced increases in confirmed cases of more than 250 per 100,000 residents.
  • Public health officials in states and counties where Mr. Trump has held rallies said in interviews this week that it was impossible to tie particular infections or outbreaks to the gatherings for several reasons: Caseloads are rising over all, rally attendees often travel from other locations, contact tracing is not always complete, and contact tracers do not always know where infected people have been.
  • A little more than two weeks after the event, Tulsa recorded 206 new confirmed coronavirus cases in a single day, a record high at the time
  • Around the country, state and local public health officials have also wrestled with the question of whether Mr. Trump’s rallies have become so-called superspreader events. With thousands of people gathered together in close quarters, many not wearing masks, the gatherings provide a fertile environment for the virus to spread.
  • In Minnesota, for example, state officials traced 16 coronavirus infections and two hospitalizations to a Trump rally on Sept. 18 in the city of Bemidji, in Beltrami County.
  • Assessing the risk of campaign rallies is “a noisy process,”
  • Professor Bernheim said, and focusing on a single event is misleading.
Javier E

Stanford Study Seeks to Quantify Infections Stemming From Trump Rallies - The New York ... - 0 views

  • the Stanford researchers, led by Professor B. Douglas Bernheim, the chairman of the university’s economics department, conducted a regression analysis. They compared the 18 counties where Mr. Trump held rallies with as many as 200 counties with similar demographics and similar trajectories of confirmed Covid-19 cases before the rally date.
  • The events took place from June 20 to Sept. 12; only the first two — in Tulsa, Okla., and Phoenix — were held indoors. The president has held about three dozen additional rallies since the study ended in September.
  • “The motivation for this paper,” he said, “is that there is a debate that is raging about the trade-off between the economic consequences of restrictions and the health consequences of transmission, and as an economist, I take that debate to be both important and appropriate.”
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  • Based on their models, the researchers concluded that on average, the 18 events produced increases in confirmed cases of more than 250 per 100,000 residents. Extrapolating that figure to the 18 rallies, they concluded that the gatherings ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and that the rallies had “likely led to more than 700 deaths,” though those deaths would not necessarily have occurred solely among attendees.
  • Around the country, state and local public health officials have also wrestled with the question of whether Mr. Trump’s rallies have become so-called superspreader events. With thousands of people gathered together in close quarters, many not wearing masks, the gatherings provide a fertile environment for the virus to spread.
  • In Minnesota, for example, state officials traced 16 coronavirus infections and two hospitalizations to a Trump rally on Sept. 18 in the city of Bemidji, in Beltrami County. Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who wears masks and encourages his supporters to do so, held his own campaign even that same day in Duluth; it resulted in one coronavirus infection, but no hospitalizations.
  • But Doug Schultz, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health, said that the full extent of the spread that had resulted from those cases was difficult to quantify, because many people who develop Covid-19 are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and do not seek treatment, and even those who test positive may not respond to contact tracing inquiries.
  • “What we are seeing in Beltrami County are indicators of transmission, and this is likely just the tip of the iceberg,”
yehbru

Within The Early Voting Boom, Youth Turnout Seems To Be Surging : NPR - 0 views

  • That year, young voters turned out in historic numbers and were part of the coalition that helped to elect a Democratic House of Representatives. And with days until Election Day, signs have emerged that young voters are poised for another cycle of record turnout, particularly as young people are more likely than their older counterparts to vote in person and later in the election season.
  • A poll released Monday by Harvard University's Institute of Politics surveyed 18- to 29-year-olds and found that 63% said they would "definitely" vote in the election, which is the highest proportion of respondents in the 20 years that the poll of young voters has been conducted
  • More than 6 million voters under 30 have already cast early ballots, according to the Democratic data firm TargetSmart, compared with roughly 2 million early votes at the same time in 2016.
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  • The figures are particularly dramatic in Texas, a state that has been known for low overall rates of voter participation, including among young voters
  • More than 800,000 voters under 30 have already voted in Texas, and 66% of them did not vote in 2016
  • In Florida, where both President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are expected to travel in the campaign's closing days, more than 514,000 young voters have cast their ballot already, hundreds of thousands more than had done so in a similar period ahead of the 2016 election.
  • This year in particular, organizers have wrestled with how to get younger Americans to the polls amid a pandemic that has upended life, particularly for college students
  • There are also significant legal hurdles that make it more difficult for young people, particularly young people of color, to vote in many states.
  • Some states have residency requirements or deadlines for voter registration that make it more difficult for people who are living away from home to participate. And in places that have strict identification laws, young would-be voters who do not have driver's licenses can run up against issues.
  • there is also a psychological component to all of this, experts say: When young people do not think their vote matters, they simply do not vote.
  • More than 66 million Americans have already cast ballots, a number that puts the country on track for historic levels of voter turnout, with many states already approaching their 2016 vote totals, even before factoring in Election Day turnout this year.
saberal

NBC's Savannah Guthrie Grills Trump Opposite ABC's Sober Biden Talk - The New York Times - 0 views

  • George Stephanopoulos of ABC had it easy, steering an old-school Washington veteran through policy plans against a patriotic backdrop, while Savannah Guthrie of NBC had to navigate the stormy waters of QAnon, white supremacy and whether the virus-stricken president had pneumonia. (Despite repeated inquiries, he would not say.)
  • Mr. Biden’s ABC town hall had all the fireworks of a vintage episode of “This Week With David Brinkley.” Mr. Trump’s NBC forum had all the subtlety of a professional wrestling match.
  • In an out-of-the-gate barrage, Ms. Guthrie pressed Mr. Trump repeatedly on his medical condition, if he had taken a coronavirus test before the first presidential debate, if he would denounce white supremacy and if he opposed QAnon — questions that Mr. Trump, who typically sits down with friendly interviewers, had avoided facing.
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  • On ABC, the mood was different. Mr. Biden and Mr. Stephanopoulos engaged in a sober policy conversation more suited to a Sunday morning public-affairs broadcast.
  • The tone tensed up when Mr. Biden declined, as he has several times, to fully explain his view on expanding the Supreme Court. “Don’t voters have a right to know where you stand?” Mr. Stephanopoulos asked.
kaylynfreeman

The Land That Failed to Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

  • China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.
  • in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new era of American hostility
  • The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.
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  • During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
  • China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.
  • China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.
  • The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.
  • American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.
  • Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.
  • Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.
  • The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise
  • At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy
  • mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.
  • In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.
  • party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant
  • The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.
  • These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”
  • They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.
  • It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.
  • the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”
  • even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.
  • China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.
  • The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs
  • Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.
  • The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.
  • Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.
  • Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain
  • Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.
  • In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.
  • The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.
  • The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.
  • The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.
  • “The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”
  • “The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”
  • China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.
  • Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.
  • both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.
  • Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.
  • there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.
  • Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.
  • Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries
  • Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.
  • n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must
  • Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning
  • There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.
  • But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.
  • In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.
  • Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?
  • The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.
  •  
    "In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture - and that to survive and surpass the United States it must. Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump's America is in retreat while China's moment is just beginning"
katherineharron

Donald Trump's impeachment trial set to rock Washington and echo through the ages - CNN... - 0 views

  • The simple question posed by Donald Trump's second impeachment trial that begins Tuesday is whether a president who loses reelection can get away with a violent coup attempt in a desperate bid to stay in power.
  • The answer contained in the former commander-in-chief's likely acquittal for inciting a deadly mob assault on the Capitol will echo through generations and may influence the outcome of some unknowable future test of US democracy.
  • Events of the next week or so will inform the country's capacity to move on from a traumatic presidency that left it as divided as at any time since the Civil War.
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  • Even after his presidency ended, Washington is under siege from extremism, Trump's trashing of truth with false claims of election fraud and unhinged conspiracies that show the fight to save US democracy did not end on Inauguration Day.
  • A majority of Senate Republicans have indicated that they will not wrestle with Trump's behavior but will take refuge in a questionable argument that a President who was impeached while in office for seditious behavior cannot be tried after returning to private life.
  • That means there is a little chance of a two-thirds majority to convict Trump among 100 senators who will serve as jurors in the chamber that became a crime scene to which many of them were witnesses.
  • While the managers will likely fail to secure a prohibition on Trump serving in federal office in future, they hope to so damn him in public perception that a political comeback in 2024 will be impossible.
  • Video of Trump declaring to an angry crowd he had called to Washington on January 6 "if you don't fight like hell, we are not going to have a country anymore," followed by clips of rioters shouting "fight for Trump" as they smashed their way into the Capitol will have a powerful effect.
  • The price to be paid for deserting an ex-president who still dominates his party is being demonstrated by the backlash directed at 10 Republicans who voted to impeach in the House.
  • It's possible a handful of Senate Republicans will emulate Utah's Sen. Mitt Romney, the only member of his party to vote to convict Trump in his first trial. And Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who voted to impeach Trump, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post Monday encouraging Senate Republicans to vote to convict Trump, saying it "is necessary to save America from going further down a sad, dangerous road."
  • The claim that a former president cannot be tried after being impeached relies on a hyper-literal reading of the Constitution. Trump's supporters argue the trial is moot since impeachment is about removing a President from office and Trump has already left power.
  • The trial will consume hours a day over the next few weeks, but it will be only one half of a compelling political story that is unfolding in Washington.Biden, three weeks into his term, is intensifying his efforts to stand up his administration and to rescue the country with vaccines before new variants of Covid-19 trigger another deadly wave of infections.
  • The new commander-in-chief has steered clear of impeachment drama, leaving it to the new Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill to plow ahead.
  • Trump's hurriedly overhauled impeachment defense team on Monday laid out their strategy in pre-trial briefs.
  • "This was only ever a selfish attempt by Democratic leadership in the House to prey upon the feelings of horror and confusion that fell upon all Americans across the entire political spectrum upon seeing the destruction at the Capitol on January 6 by a few hundred people," the lawyers wrote.
  • The Trump defense will also revive one of the long-held tropes of the ex-President's apologists -- that his aggressive rhetoric should be taken figuratively not literally, with a claim that his call for the mob to "fight like hell" was metaphorical.
  • His team has also posited, despite multiple lawsuits and certifications of votes by states and Congress, that there is no evidence to disprove his false claims of voter fraud -- so prolonging the Big Lie that the election was stolen from the former President.
  • In a counter filling on the eve of the trial on Monday, Democratic House impeachment managers accused Trump's defense of indulging in "contortions" to support his discredited claims of a "rigged" and "stolen" election.
  • "President Trump violated his Oath of Office and betrayed the American people," the brief said. "His incitement of insurrection against the United States government -- which disrupted the peaceful transfer of power -- is the most grievous constitutional crime ever committed by a president."
  • The trial will begin just a month after a now infamous day, when Trump greeted a huge crowd in Washington already primed for revolt by his weeks of false claims of election fraud. The subsequent invasion of the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress to certify Biden's election victory led to five deaths and saw Trump fans parading unimpeded through the halls of the iconic building as lawmakers fled to safety.
  • "He wanted something to disrupt the electoral vote count that would mean he would no longer be President of the United States," Conway said."None of that is protected by the First Amendment. It's a flat out violation of his oath of office and it's impeachable and he should be punished by being barred from ever holding future federal office."
Javier E

The Summer Of Menace - The Weekly Dish - 0 views

  • When people look back on this surreal election year, I suspect they will see plague as the core actor. If you take a normal, functioning society and then force it to go underground for months, freezing it in place, forcing its members into long and unnatural mutual isolation, suspending the usual ways in which people make a living, ratcheting up financial insecurity … well, that’s a recipe for serious social upheaval.
  • it strikes me that this medical achievement doesn’t resolve the psychological trauma, the suspension of normality, the anxiety of an invisible enemy. It merely diverts it away from the illness itself toward broader social and political grievances. I don’t think you can fully explain the sudden increase in intensity of the social justice cult, for example, and its explosion in our streets and in our media in the last couple of months, without taking account of this. I don’t just mean the pent-up plague-driven frustration of young people, who, often forced to live at home with their parents, took the opportunity to finally get out, get together and do something, after the horrifying murder of George Floyd. I mean the more general frustration and despair of a generation with a gloomy and unknowable economic future—suddenly finding shape and voice in a simple, clarion call to reshape all of society. 
  • I wrote about the Flagellants in the essay—a new group of fanatical, radical penitents who challenged and mocked the church authorities during the Black Death, whipping themselves bloody in large crowds across Germany, calling everyone to account for their sins. It’s the same dynamic now: a movement to use a plague to cleanse ourselves of the past and indict the entire community for its iniquity
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  • Perhaps more analogous are the Lollards in England, who formed a deeply anti-clerical, Biblically-based, spiritually-focused movemen
  • They also share an economic and social context: a hefty section of the society is dislocated and anxious, work is unavailable, the future is highly uncertain, poverty is spreading, and criminality and violence in our cities are rising.
  • Revolts, if they seem to go too far, can summon up a classic 1968-style backlash. Victims of a new crime wave can argue back. The older generation may see the destruction of monuments and statues from the past a step too far. Visceral responses to scenes of violence and mayhem can rally the mainstream against change
  • Plagues, remember, are not unifying events; they often split the seams of societies, and the longer they go on, the deeper the divides and the greater the mayhem. In a society as deeply tribalized as ours, zeal cuts both ways, as we’re beginning to see in right-wing media.
  • In an environment where people are afraid and uncertain, authoritarianism has an edge. The more some cities descend into lawlessness and violence this summer, the edgier, and more popular, that performative authoritarianism could get.
  • the core reason for the deployment—ongoing vandalism and destruction of federal buildings like the Court House assaulted by protestors in Portland—is a defensible one.
  • It’s also true that in several major cities, violent crime has been surging both before and after the BLM protests, as the police have suffered a drop in morale and as retirements are way up.
  • In this context, “defunding the police” is not always good politics. And some white swing voters leaning toward Biden may become, if this continues or intensifies, less worried about Trump than this human toll.
  • so far, the BLM protestors have been able to shut down most of the worst violence and looting and murder, and have thereby kept the moral high ground. And Biden has also been shrewd in not taking any anti-police bait. But these situations are dynamic.
  • plagues are highly divisive and highly unpredictable. Trump, his back against the wall, may, in fact, be at his most reckless, gambling on escalating tribalism in a culture already unsettled by a tenacious virus. He will do everything to provoke an over-reaction, and escalate the conflict. The rest of us should do everything we can to calm it down.
  • Pepys. Here is my favorite quote of his
  • We should be most slow to believe that we most wish should be true.”
  •  
    "We should be most slow to believe that we most wish should be true."
Javier E

College Students, Told to Report Covid Parties, Ask: To Snitch or Not to Snitch? - The ... - 0 views

  • Some faculty members at schools have warned against asking students to police their peers. They have said doing so could disrupt student life when classmates are pitted against one other, particularly when the consequences for breaking the rules can be harsh.
  • In states with high virus counts, many administrators said they worried that college parties could accelerate an all-but-inevitable rise of clusters on their campuses. But in the New York metropolitan area, which has largely continued to stem its own outbreak, the concerns carry a different weight.
  • “The biggest concern is that you are going to have newly infected people leave these parties and disperse back into their communities,” said Dr. Stephen Thomas, an infectious disease specialist at SUNY Upstate Medical University. “It’s that they’re going to be sources for continuing to spread the virus and it’s going to reverse the work that has already been done.”
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  • But for others like Cambria Kelley, a first-year graduate student at New York University, the issue is more personal. Ms. Kelley, who is from California, said several members of her family contracted the illness over the last few months, including her grandmother who died in July.
  • “If it was bad enough, I wouldn’t hesitate to report them,” Ms. Kelley said. “I’m not going to be having my life put at risk because people decided to be selfish. These rules are for the good of everyone here.”
  • As a national conversation erupted on the role of police in cities following the killing of George Floyd, groups at schools including Vassar College, Stony Brook University and Columbia University called on their institutions to rethink their relationships with campus and local police.
  • Now they are wrestling with the prospect of relying on those departments to disperse and crack down on large gatherings.
  • As the first weeks back on campuses shift into the more regular pace of the fall, the question remains: Just how long will students, many of whom arrived in New York State to a mandatory two-week quarantine, continue to follow their schools’ physical-distancing guidelines?
  • Ms. Zhang, the first-year student at Cornell who posted videos of a party to Snapchat, said in a recent interview that she deeply regrets both the “lapse in judgment” she made by attending the gathering and her “insensitive comments” afterward.“Incoming freshmen come in with heavy expectations, we all want to find our people,” Ms. Zhang said. “I’m not proud of those posts, they show me at my worst.”
katherineharron

Opinion | Without the Right to Protest, America Is Doomed to Fail - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Protest is the foundational variable of the American experiment. Every pivot point in the history of our country is rooted in it.
  • Those unfamiliar with “no justice, no peace,” the oft-used mantra of the protest movement that arose in 2020, should first look to the lineage and legacy of nonviolent protest in the United States. Many forget that, in his later career, Dr. King wrestled deeply with the possibility of violence within emergent resistance movements.
  • Black and brown people have always protested for comprehensive systemic change and freedom for all Americans, even when they’ve been denied freedom themselves.
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  • The ideals of life and liberty that our nation holds dear — and the landmark moments in our history that have helped more fully to realize those ideals — were shaped and won by the protests and sacrifices of Black Americans.
  • Protests led by Black Americans, though often unrecognized, have been particularly crucial to every great political movement in this country.
  • Following years of largely peaceful protests, the next generation of Black freedom fighters adopted new approaches to highlighting the urgency of their cause. But by then, Dr. King’s stance on riots had evolved.
  • All such protests rely on a core assumption: that societies believe in — and universally agree to abide by — shared social contracts. Thus, “(if) the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots,” Dr. King ultimately concluded, “the hardened criminal would be the white man.” Dr. King recognized, in other words, that the real looters were the people devaluing Black bodies.
  • The primary purpose of protest is to ensure that all voices are heard.
  • On paper, this is America’s deepest commitment to its people.
clairemann

Supreme Court: Why Brett Kavanaugh could pick the next president if the election comes ... - 0 views

  • Here’s how grim the future of voting rights looks for both large-D Democrats and small-d democrats: the pivotal vote on the Supreme Court — the justice who is likely to decide all closely divided voting rights disputes in the near future — is Brett Kavanaugh.
  • credibly accused of attempting to sexually assault Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school, denied the allegation then lashed out at Democrats who believed it disqualified him from serving on the nation’s highest court.
  • has staked out a position on voting rights that is less extreme than the views of many of his colleagues.
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  • he intends to banish to the sunken place longstanding doctrines protecting the right to vote. But Kavanaugh, at the very least, rejects some parts of the nihilistic approach shared by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.
  • her approach to constitutional questions resembles that of Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is himself frequently hostile to voting rights law, has written that he thinks his conservative colleagues are going too far i
  • was most visible in Andino v. Middleton, a recent decision that reinstated a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have another person sign their ballot as a witness.
  • he did not embrace the extreme position of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch,
  • Kavanaugh handed down another opinion suggesting that, while he is not as hostile to voting rights as his most conservative colleagues, he still wants to make radical changes that would profoundly impact American democracy.
  • appears to be torn between a belief that well-established rules governing election disputes should be abandoned, and a competing understanding that it is unfair to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules that were in place at the time when those voters cast their ballots.
  • Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), a case which — at least according to Kavanaugh — established that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”
  • “The Constitution ‘principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,’” Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, “it follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily ‘should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’
  • Let state legislatures decide how elections will be conducted in each state, for better or for worse. And don’t intervene even if those decisions are likely to disenfranchise voters.
  • that the Supreme Court should take unprecedented steps to overrule state judges and other state officials who try to make it easier to vote. But he also did not join a recent opinion by Alito that suggested that the Court may step in after the election to toss out ballots
  • Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch took the extraordinary position that voters who failed to anticipate that the Supreme Court would change the rules after their unwitnessed ballot was already cast should have their ballots tossed out.
  • Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case that determined that ballots that arrive after Election Day in Wisconsin shall not be counted, Kavanaugh pointed to a provision of the Constitution that provides that “the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’”
  • “in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”
  • the Supreme Court of the United States has the final word on questions of federal law, but state supreme courts have the final say on questions of their own state’s law.
  • It could mean that a state governor cannot veto a state election law (because the governor is not the “legislature”). Or that a state constitution may not empower an independent commission to draw un-gerrymandered legislative maps (because the commission is not the “legislature”).
  • Kavanaugh appears to be largely indifferent to voting rights, and is willing to give state legislatures a great deal of leeway to disenfranchise voters.
  • On Wednesday night, the Supreme Court handed down orders in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar and Moore v. Circosta, which concern whether late-arriving ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In both cases, state officials — but not the state legislature — decided that ballots that are mailed before Election Day and that arrive during a brief window after the election should be counted.
  • but they didn’t exactly tell the GOP “no,” either. The Court denied the GOP’s request to order, in advance of the election, that late-arriving ballots will not be counted. But an ominous opinion by Alito suggests that the Court might revisit this question after the election.
  • Alito wrote in a concurring opinion in Republican Party, which was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Nevertheless, he added that the case “remains before us” and could be decided “under a shortened schedule” after the election takes place.
  • Voters, in other words, might mail their ballots close to Election Day, believing that they can rely on state officials and lower courts that have said that these ballots will be counted, only to have the Supreme Court change the rules after the election is over — and order these ballots tossed out.
  • But Kavanaugh hasn’t yet shown the same willingness to disenfranchise people who followed the rules — or, at least, who followed the rules that were in place when those voters cast their ballots.
  • It may be a Biden blowout, or a fair-and-square Trump win. But if it’s close, and if Pennsylvania or North Carolina is pivotal, these are the competing considerations that Kavanaugh, likely the swing vote, will be wrestling with.
anonymous

Roberts, Kavanaugh appear skeptical of striking down Obamacare at Supreme Court: "Not o... - 0 views

  • The Supreme Court wrestled Tuesday
  • with the future of the 2010 landmark health care law championed by Democrats and attacked by Republicans
  • two justices on the conservative wing of the bench expressing skepticism toward arguments the Affordable Care Act should be struck down in its entirety.
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  • Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the three justices on the court appointed by President Trump, both signaled they disagree with arguments from Republican-led states that Obamacare should fall if its individual mandate is deemed unconstitutional.
  • It's hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire act to fall if the mandate were struck down when the same Congress that lowered the penalty to zero did not even try to repeal the rest of the act,
  • The chief justice added that he believes Congress wanted the Supreme Court to strike down the full law, "but that's not our job."
  • "Under the severability question, we ask ourselves whether Congress would want the rest of the law to survive if an unconstitutional provision were severed," Roberts said. "And here Congress left the rest of the law intact when it lowered the penalty to zero. That seems to be compelling evidence on the question
  • I tend to agree with you, this is a very straight forward case for severability under our precedents, meaning that we would excise the mandate and leave the rest of the act in place,"
  • it does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the act in place."
  • third attempt by Republicans for the Supreme Court to dismantle the 2010 health care law that has extended health insurance coverage to millions of Americans and provides protections to people with pre-existing conditions.
  • The states argue the rest of Obamacare should topple if the mandate is struck down, as it is "inextricably intertwined" with the remainder of the law and cannot be severed from it. 
  • Congress's change to the law "modified the terms of the choice presented by [the mandate] — by allowing individuals to freely decide whether to buy health insurance without facing any tax assessment if they do not."
  • "It would seem a big deal to say that if you can point to injury with respect to one provision and you can concoct some kind of inseverability argument, then it allows you to challenge anything else in the statute,
  • Isn't that something that the United States should be very worried about and isn't it something that really cuts against all of our doctrine?"
Javier E

Opinion | One Reason the Trump Fever Won't Break - The New York Times - 0 views

  • most observers and critics are paying too much attention to the wrong group of Christian nationalists. We mainly think of Christian nationalism as a theology or at least as a philosophy
  • In reality, the Christian nationalist movement that actually matters is rooted in emotion and ostensibly divine revelation, and it’s that emotional and spiritual movement that so stubbornly clings to Donald Trump.
  • Arguments about the proper role of virtue in the public square, for example, or arguments over the proper balance between order and liberty, are helpless in the face of prophecies, like the declarations from Christian “apostles” that Donald Trump is God’s appointed leader, destined to save the nation from destruction.
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  • Essays and books about philosophy and theology are important for determining the ultimate health of the church, but on the ground or in the pews? They’re much less important than emotion, prophecy and spiritualism.
  • Christians will claim that the Holy Spirit spoke to them directly. As one longtime friend told me, “David, I was with you on opposing Trump until the Holy Spirit told me that God had appointed him to lead.”
  • a key part of Trump’s appeal is the joy and fellowship that Trump supporters feel with each other. But there’s one last element that cements that bond with Trump: faith, including a burning sense of certainty that by supporting him, they are instruments of God’s divine plan.
  • It’s not a serious position to argue that this diverse, secularizing country will shed liberal democracy for Catholic or Protestant religious rule. But it’s exceedingly dangerous and destabilizing when millions of citizens believe that the fate of the church is bound up in the person they believe is the once and future president of the United States.
  • That’s why the Trump fever won’t break. That’s why even the most biblically based arguments against Trump fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to Trump is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself.
  • In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won’t be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the “prophecies” change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.
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