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redavistinnell

America's iconic war machine - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-33766644

america war machine bbc news

shared by redavistinnell on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • America's iconic war machine By James Morgan
  • Her name is "Cajun Fear" - painted on her nose with a snarling alligator.
  • This bomber was built in 1960 - the year JFK won the US presidential election, Hitchcock's thriller Psycho was released in cinemas and the USSR successfully sent two dogs into space.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The pilots joke that if you flew upside down "chicken bones from Saigon would fall out."
  • "It is a symbol of American might," says Capt Erin McCabe. "Wherever we go in the world, people take notice."
  • In the era of drones, stealth aircraft, and cyberwarfare, a chunky old behemoth sketched out on a napkin three years after the end of World War Two still strikes fear into the enemy.
  • "Knocking down doors" in an aircraft this size - 159ft (48.5m) long, and with a wingspan of 185ft (56.4m) - is a team sport, performed by a crew of five.Sitting downstairs in the dark, with no windows, targeting and r
  • We hear a roar and look up. A dark bird is looming heavily over us, blocking out the sunlight.Plumes of smoke from eight engines fill the sky and eardrums vibrate to a distinctive sound. Not just a rumble but almost a scream from the turbofans. "The sound of freedom" as Schultz likes to say.
  • It can refuel in mid-air - giving it a potentially unlimited strike range. This created a "nuclear umbrella" for the United States during the Cold War, back in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction.
  • The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress
  • But internally, over the years it has been refitted with computers and GPS/INS (Inertial Navigation System).
  • The pointy tip of the spear
  • "You can't even stand upright, except on the ladder if you want to stretch your back. Though if you're creative you can sling up a hammock, he says.The ejection seats are "like sitting on a concrete sidewalk".
  • "Every B-52 I flew in smelled like stale sweat, piss and engine oil," he writes.
  • From this sleepy corner of Louisiana, Ward took part in one of the longest and most devastating bombing raids of the 20th Century.
  • He and 56 other crew entered seven bombers - his was the Grim Reaper, with a painting of Bugs Bunny carrying a sickle on its nose - and flew 14,000 miles to Baghdad to drop a wave of cruise missiles, which obliterated Saddam Hussein's air defences.
proudsa

How Badly Will US Exports of Crude Oil Hurt the Environment? | VICE | United States - 0 views

www.vice.com/...crude-oil-fuck-the-environment

shared by proudsa on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Over the holidays, when most Americans were busy buying stuff and trying to stay cool in the December heat, one of the most significant environmental policies of the last several decades was quietly enacted.
  • The reversal of the oil export ban, along with the expected first shipment of liquefied natural gas to a foreign country ever (expected later this month), is great news for oil and gas producers who've been hit hard by lower and lower prices for their goods in recent years.
  • "It's a huge deal," Jean Su, a lawyer with the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told VICE over the phone. "It's less than a week after the Paris agreement was signed and Obama said the US was committed, then we go and sign a thing that regresses on everything that happened in Paris. It's horrendous."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Oil prices dropped from over $100 a barrel in 2014 to just about $35 a barrel today. That's about the same amount it costs to produce a barrel, meaning right now oil producers are making nothing. Natural gas prices are down to their lowest levels in 16 years.
  • Thanks to new technologies, mostly fracking, which allows producers to extract gas and oil from rocks thousands of feet below the surface of the earth with a mix of high-pressured water and chemicals, production of oil skyrocketed from about 5,000 barrels a day in 2008 to 8,700 in 2014.
  • On New Year's Eve a Bahamian tanker called the "Theo T" cruised out of Corpus Christi, Texas with the first batch of crude oil to leave US shores in four decades, thanks to the budget bill that enabled it.
  • The short answer: politics. Without throwing a bone to oil-backed Congresspeople, the budget bill last month would have likely been blocked.
  • The other problem is leakage: Natural gas has been touted by Obama as a "bridge fuel" to get the world off of coal and other dirtier fuels. But it's only better than coal if the vast majority of it doesn't leak into the atmosphere before being burned.
  • negate any of its climate benefits,
  • But it's slightly more clear what oil exports will do: one analysis found exports will allow for 3.3 million more barrels a day of oil to be produced in the US between 2015 and 2035.
  • "We're already on the frontlines of oil and gas production," Raleigh Hoke, an activist with the Gulf Restoration Network, which works with communities affected by oil and gas in Louisiana, told VICE over the phone. "There are already 28 export facilities being constructed along the coast, so that means countless new pipelines through people's backyards, new trains carrying oil which are dangerous, and it hinders our efforts to restore our wetlands."
  • "Frankly we just have to wait until November," Athan Manuel, an organizer at the Sierra Club, told VICE. "And then hope we have an anti-fossil fuel Senate and an anti-fossil fuel President."
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...
  • 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?
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Without hope of victory, federal prosecutions for voting crimes fell by 90 percent after 1873.
  • 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.
Javier E

When bias beats logic: why the US can't have a reasoned gun debate | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-gun-control-debate-bias

guns debate culture crisis politics nuance discourse polarization logic bias

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Jon Stokes, a writer and software developer, said he is frustrated after each mass shooting by “the sentiment among very smart people, who are used to detail and nuance and doing a lot of research, that this is cut and dried, this is black and white”.
  • Stokes has lived on both sides of America’s gun culture war, growing up in rural Louisiana, where he got his first gun at age nine, and later studying at Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he adopted some of a big-city resident’s skepticism about guns. He’s written articles about the gun geek culture behind the popularity of the AR-15, why he owns a military-style rifle, and why gun owners are so skeptical of tech-enhanced “smart guns”.
  • Even to suggest that the debate is more complicated – that learning something about guns, by taking a course on how to safely carry a concealed weapon, or learning how to fire a gun, might shift their perspective on whichever solution they have just heard about on TV – “just upsets them, and they basically say you’re trying to obscure the issue”.
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  • In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.
  • Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.
  • The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.
  • It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.
  • But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.
  • The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.
  • When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”
  • When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.
Javier E

James Comey: Take down the Confederate statues now - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html

statues confederacy white supremacy history culture racism

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • White people designed blackface to keep black people down, to intimidate, mock and stereotype. It began during the 19th century and wasn’t about white people honoring the talent of black people by dressing up to look like them. It was about mocking them and depicting them as lazy, stupid and less than fully human. It was a tool of oppression. As a college kid in Virginia during the 1980s, I knew that and so did my classmates. But a whole lot of white people seem to not know that history or understand why blackface is so offensive, whether it’s practiced by a college student or a new doctor
  • The turmoil in Virginia — where I have lived most of my adult life, including nine years in Richmond — may do some good if it reminds white people that a river of oppression runs through U.S. history, deep and wide, down to today.
  • There is no doubt that Virginia’s leaders need to be held accountable for their personal history, but every Virginia leader is responsible for the racist symbols that still loom over our lives.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The towering likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson weren’t put up to celebrate history or heritage; they were put up as a message: The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution aren’t going to help you black folks because the South has risen from that humiliation. Jim Crow — a name rooted in blackface mockery — is king.
  • No, the statues were put up by white people, beginning in the 1890s, to remind black people that, despite all that nonsense of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as the so-called Reconstruction, we are back, and you are back down.
  • The Confederate statues of Richmond’s Monument Avenue weren’t erected to honor the service of brave warriors. Those soldiers had been dead for decades before the statues went up
  • If you doubt that well-documented history — if you are tempted to buy the “heritage, not hate” rhetoric — ask yourself this question: “Where are the statues of James Longstreet?
  • Longstreet committed two unforgivable sins in the eyes of white supremacists: He criticized Lee’s war leadership, and he led an African American militia to put down an 1874 white rebellion in Louisiana. That’s why this central figure in Civil War history is not depicted among the other Confederate statues in Richmond.
  • The statues were about only a certain kind of heritage, just as blackface was about a certain kind of storytelling. It was about hate, not history or art.
  • If Virginia’s leaders want to atone for a troubling legacy, changing state law so Richmond’s statues no longer taunt the progress of our country would be a good place to start
malonema1

FEMA Will Aid Hurricane-Ravaged Churches - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...552941

US trump culture religion

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Tucked among the provisions in the budget bill passed by Congress on Friday are new rules about how FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, works with houses of worship. According to the new law, religious nonprofits can’t be excluded from disaster aid just because of their religious nature, which had been the agency’s policy in certain contexts prior to January.
  • Last summer, when Hurricane Harvey ripped across islands in the Caribbean, Louisiana, and Texas, it left roughly $125 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—second in cost only to Hurricane Katrina. Worse, it was followed almost immediately by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which further devastated Florida, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, and other areas.
  • While these new guidelines changed the situation for houses of worship, they were ultimately impermanent and vulnerable to revision under a new administration. That’s where Congress’s new budget bill comes in: It revised the text of the Stafford Act itself. Under the new law, which was signed by Trump on Friday, houses of worship can’t be excluded from aid provided to other nonprofits, including schools, hospitals, and elder-care facilities, just because they’re led by people “who share a religious faith or practice.” This includes money for the “repair, restoration, and replacement of damaged facilities.”
knudsenlu

Vann R. Newkirk II: How to Kill a Revolution - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...552518

revolution culture mlk

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.
  • After the Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, the revolution’s center of gravity shifted north, along with the stragglers of the Great Migration—toward de facto as opposed to de jure racism. Baldwin’s frequent premonitions of unrest in the streets began to come true. In his 1966 essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” he discussed the “powder keg” of poverty, joblessness, and discrimination in urban ghettos and warned that it “may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.” King, by then, had sensed the same trouble brewing in the slums as Baldwin had. In his 1966 campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, which moved his strategy of nonviolent protest from the South to the North, he tried to wield his activism machine against the social and economic troubles that Baldwin described. He was repaid with violent counterprotests.
  • King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights.
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  • As moderates abandoned him, King also faced a resurgence of the more virulent elements of white supremacy. The Klan firebombed the Forrest County, Mississippi, NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer to death in January 1966, and Klan night riders were suspected in the murder of the activist Clarence Triggs in Bogalusa, Louisiana, later that year.
  • The Kerner Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration to investigate the causes of the 1967 unrest, said plainly that racism was a major factor. Its 1968 report, authored by the commissioners, who were firmly rooted in mainstream racial politics, concluded, “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” But Gallup polls showed that a majority of Americans disbelieved that conclusion, and Johnson largely ignored the report in future policy making. The false tale of victory had sprung to life. White backlash and Johnson’s rift with civil-rights leaders who wanted to push further than he did slowed the White House’s efforts
  • y 1968, King had emerged from a series of trials with an understanding of the full breadth of white supremacy, and with no small despair at its depth. As he embarked on his Poor People’s Campaign, he braved dwindling funds, a loss of public support, and mounting desperation among the people on the margins of America. It became clear that King embodied the final seal of the eschaton—the urban apocalypse—that Baldwin had warned about.
  • In the immediate aftermath of King’s death, the intensity of the cataclysm became clear to all of black America. Three days after King’s murder, even as the fires across the country raged, Baldwin and King’s friend Nina Simone took to the stage at the Westbury Music Fair, on Long Island. The show had been scheduled long before, but now it had new meaning.
  • Even the ascendant Black Power movement, however, couldn’t withstand the might of the American status quo. In 1969, Chicago police and the FBI killed the Black Panther Party’s deputy chairman, Fred Hampton, dealing another blow to hopes for a visionary leader. The FBI’s continuing program of disruption, along with increasingly hostile public opinion among whites and the rise of “law and order” politics, had effectively destabilized the Black Power movement as a legitimate change-making force by 1970. Ever since, black activists have often been marginalized and widely discredited.
  • But Reagan did not mention the remarks he had made as the governor of California on the day of King’s funeral, when he had spoken of “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break”—in effect, blaming King’s own campaign of civil disobedience for his assassination. Nor did Reagan mention that a majority of whites had felt the same way and that many of them had hated King. No mention, either, of the last three years of King’s life, other than his death.
  • How much has changed in the 40 years since that retrospective? Have politicians improved? If King were alive today, would he bask in the glow of achievement, or would he gird himself again to march?I pondered those questions on that January morning in Washington. Just a few days later, the manicured National Mall would be trampled by onlookers who’d come to see American democracy’s quadrennial spectacle, this time for a man who’d been endorsed by the Klan. And I considered one last question: Is this what victory looks like?
ecfruchtman

Trump's vulgarity: Overt racism or a president who says what many think? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • President Trump had once again propelled himself to center stage — boxing out discussion of any number of world crises and, more immediately, freezing progress toward a bipartisan deal on immigration policy.
  • Trump’s slur Thursday against the “shithole countries” from which he would rather the United States take fewer immigrants sparked a louder-than-usual tempest Friday
  • President Trump referred to African nations and Haiti as "shithole" countries on Jan. 11
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “This is par for the course,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a supporter of the president who is writing a book about Trump’s America.
  • Gingrich said the normal concerns that presidents and other politicians have about their legacies and reputations don’t seem to apply to Trump
  • Former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana legislator David Duke said on Twitter that the president “restores a lot of love in us by saying blunt but truthful things that no other President in our lifetime would dare say!”
  • Last March, at a meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Trump asked his guests if they knew Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, the only African American in his Cabinet, NBC News reported Friday, citing sources who were in the room.
  • Steele called it “disappointing as hell” that Republicans in Congress have not had “a more forceful rhetorical response to the president
brookegoodman

Coronavirus map of the US: latest cases state by state | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-latest-cases-state-by-state

us crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 continues to grow in the US. Mike Pence, the vice-president, is overseeing the US response to the coronavirus.
  • Confirmed cases 85,919 (Today: +2,083) Deaths 1,297 (Today: +88)
  • State/territory Confirmed cases Deaths New York 39,140 461 New Jersey 6,876 81 California 4,040 82 Washington 3,207 150 Michigan 2,844 61 Illinois 2,542 26 Florida 2,484 29 Massachusetts 2,417 25 Louisiana 2,304 83 Pennsylvania 1,813 18 Texas 1,658 24 Georgia 1,642 56 Colorado 1,430 19 Tennessee 1,097 3 Connecticut 1,012 21 Ohio 870 15 North Carolina 755 3 Wisconsin 728 10 Indiana 657 17 Maryland 583 4 Nevada 536 10 Alabama 531 1 Missouri 520 9 Arizona 508 8 Mississippi 485 6 Virginia 468 10 South Carolina 456 9 Utah 396 1 Arkansas 349 2 Minnesota 344 2 Oregon 317 11 District of Columbia 267 3 Oklahoma 248 7 Kentucky 247 5 Idaho 191 3 Iowa 179 1 Kansas 172 3 Rhode Island 165 0 Vermont 158 9 Maine 155 0 New Hampshire 154 1 Delaware 143 1 New Mexico 136 1 Hawaii 106 0 Montana 90 1 Nebraska 82 0 West Virginia 76 0 Puerto Rico 64 2 North Dakota 57 0 Alaska 56 1 Wyoming 56 0 South Dakota 46 1 Guam 45 1 Virgin Islands 17 0
brookegoodman

A state-by-state breakdown of US coronavirus cases - CNN - 0 views

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

crisis us

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN)The first US case of the coronavirus was reported January 21 -- a Washington state man who had recently returned from China. Now, the country has at least 82,250 cases across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
  • Alabama: 531 (including one death)Alaska: 69 (including one death)Arizona: 508 (including eight deaths) Arkansas: 349 (including three deaths)California: 3,006 (including 65 deaths)Colorado: 1,430 (including 24 deaths)Connecticut: 1,012 (including 21 deaths)Delaware: 143 (including one death)District of Columbia: 267 (including three deaths)Florida: 2,353 (including 28 deaths)Georgia: 1,643 (including 56 deaths)Guam: 45 (including one death)Hawaii: 106 Idaho: 189 (including three deaths)Illinois: 2,538 (including 26 deaths)Indiana: 645 (including 17 deaths)Iowa: 179 (including one death)Kansas: 168 (including three deaths)Kentucky: 248 (including five deaths)Louisiana: 2,305 (including 83 deaths)Maine: 155Maryland: 580 (including four deaths)Massachusetts: 2,417 (including 25 deaths)Michigan: 2,856 (including 60 deaths)Minnesota: 346 (including two deaths)Mississippi: 485 (including five deaths)Missouri: 502 (including eight deaths)Montana: 90Nebraska: 73Nevada: 535 (including 10 deaths)New Hampshire: 137 (including one death)New Jersey: 6,876 (including 81 deaths)New Mexico: 136 (including one death)New York: 37,258 (including 385 deaths)North Carolina: 636 (including two deaths)North Dakota: 52Ohio: 867 (including 15 deaths)Oklahoma: 248 (including seven deaths)Oregon: 316 (including 11 deaths)Pennsylvania: 1,687 (including 16 deaths)Puerto Rico: 64 (including two deaths)Rhode Island: 165South Carolina: 456 (including nine deaths)South Dakota: 46 (including one death)Tennessee: 957 (including three deaths)Texas: 1,424 (including 18 deaths)US Virgin Islands: 17Utah: 402 (including one death)Vermont: 158 (including nine deaths)Virginia: 460 (including 13 deaths)Washington: 3,207 (including 149 deaths)West Virginia: 76Wisconsin: 707 (including eight deaths)Wyoming: 55Repatriated cases: 70
  • CORRECTIONS: A previous version of this story included an incorrect number of cases for Florida. That number has been corrected. On March 14, CNN revised the US death count, taking it down by one after discovering a double count of one death. This article also has been updated with the correct number of deaths for Hawaii, and cases for Wisconsin, Alabama.
Javier E

Coronavirus Slowdown in Seattle Suggests Restrictions Are Working - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...navirus-transmission-rate.html

restrictions washington pandemic

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Deaths are not rising as fast as they are in other states. Dramatic declines in street traffic show that people are staying home. Hospitals have so far not been overwhelmed.
  • While each infected person was spreading the virus to an average of 2.7 other people earlier in March, that number appears to have dropped, with one projection suggesting that it was now down to 1.4.
  • The researchers who are preparing the latest projections, led by the Institute for Disease Modeling, a private research group in Bellevue, Wash., have been watching a variety of data points since the onset of the outbreak. They include tens of thousands of coronavirus test results, deaths, and mobility information — including traffic patterns and the movements of anonymous Facebook users — to estimate the rate at which coronavirus patients are spreading the disease to others.
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  • “We made a huge impact — we slowed the transmission,” Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, said in an interview. She cautioned that any lifting of restrictions would bring a quick rise in new cases, and that she expected distancing requirements to continue in some form for months.
  • He said more restrictions may yet be needed, and that the state is not “within 1,000 miles of declaring victory.”
  • The demographics of those workplaces, with tens of thousands of tech workers who were able to telecommute, may have given the region an early edge in keeping people separated. Perhaps the city’s social norms helped, too, as local residents have long had a reputation for keeping to themselves or within circles of longtime friends — a phenomenon often explained to newcomers as the Seattle Freeze.
  • Ms. Durkan said the region also benefited from a robust network of researchers who were able to do early modeling to assess the reach of the virus in the community. Without that, she said, policymakers may not have taken the drastic steps to shut down the city as quickly as they did.
  • After scientists found evidence that the virus had been circulating weeks before some of the earliest cases were identified, researchers from local groups, led by the Institute for Disease Modeling, began looking at what it would take to slow the progress of the virus. On March 10, they developed projections showing that significant changes in human-to-human contact would be needed to avert hundreds more deaths by April 8.
  • Mr. Inslee warned at the time how drastically life needed to change, saying it was unacceptable for people to be crammed close together at bars and other settings; the restrictions, he said, were going to be “profoundly disturbing to a lot of the ways that we live our lives.”
  • Washington State’s coronavirus figures have continued to grow steadily, but not as fast as other states’. The death toll has been doubling about every eight days in Washington, compared with every two or three days in New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Louisiana.
  • Dr. Brueggemann projects that in the next two weeks his hospital may find itself without enough ventilators. But he said he was encouraged by what he has seen in Seattle.“A lot of us are crossing our fingers and hoping that maybe, maybe, maybe we’ve done some good here,” Dr. Brueggemann said. “We’re not ready to let our guard down.”
nrashkind

Rhode Island coronavirus: State is looking for New Yorkers to slow the spread of the virus - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Rhode Island's governor said Friday that law enforcement officers will stop cars and knock on doors in coastal communities to identify people who've been to New York state, joining other states in restricting the movements of out-of-state visitors to slow the spread of coronavirus.
  • Police began monitoring highways at noon Friday and may pull over individuals with New York state license plates to ask the same questions, particularly on the base of the Newport Bridge, Raimondo said.
  • "I feel bad that New York is getting such a bad rap sheet when it's really all over the place, you know, it shouldn't be that way, but unfortunately right now we have a lot of cases," Koppie told WPRI. She said she was planning to return home the same day.
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  • All individuals who have traveled to New York have already been ordered to self-quarantine for 14 days. These added measures will make sure law enforcement identifies individuals who should be following the self-quarantine order, said the governor, a Democrat.
  • New York is coronavirus epicenter in the US, with more than 52,300 cases and at least 728 deaths as of Saturday, according to CNN's state-by-state count.
  • Rhode Island has more than 239 cases with two deaths as of Saturday.
  • "I've got my hands full here with responding to this crisis and I'm not going to second guess or criticize what other governors are doing or not doing," Edwards said.
  • Earlier in the week, DeSantis said he would expand his executive order mandating a 14-day self-isolation period for travelers coming to Florida from airports in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
  • The governor said he would have to look at what it would take to shut the border.
  • In New Mexico, Gov. Lujan Grisham on Friday ordered that everyone traveling by air into New Mexico self-quarantine for 14 days immediately upon arrival. Under the state's emergency order, people will only be allowed to leave quarantine for medical care
  • In Kansas, the government said any travelers from Colorado and Louisiana must self-quarantine when they arrive in the state.
  • Kansas has already placed self-quarantine requirements on travelers from Florida, Washington, California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
blythewallick

Trump Called for Paid Family Leave. Here's Why Few Democrats Clapped. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...paid-leave-trump.html

politics US culture Policy

shared by blythewallick on 06 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump called for paid family leave in the State of the Union on Tuesday, the first Republican president to do so. But the bill he supported does not offer what has generally been considered paid family leave.
  • It is a bipartisan bill, introduced in December by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, and Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana. And it would enable new parents to collect a portion of their future child tax credits early and receive a smaller credit for the next 10 to 15 years.
  • “Not only is it a good solution, but it’s possible in the political world we live in today,” Senator Sinema said at an American Enterprise Institute and Brookings event in September.
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  • Paid leave, in general, is an easy sell with voters. Families need it — 72 percent of mothers and 93 percent of fathers with children at home are in the labor force — and a large majority of voters support it. But Americans, like their elected representatives, disagree on the details, particularly how to pay for it.
  • The child tax credit is worth up to $2,000 per child. If the Trump-backed bill passed, the average worker with a new child could receive $5,000, and then collect $500 less in child tax credits each year for 10 years. Workers earning less than $11,000 a year, who don’t qualify for the full child tax credit, could also get up to $5,000, and pay it back over 15 years.
  • Republicans have instead focused on ways to let people borrow from their future federal benefits. One idea, tapping Social Security early, has been unpopular, because it would mean receiving less money in retirement.
  • But opponents say that it would just delay parents’ financial stressors, because they would collect smaller tax credits for the first decade of their children’s lives, when they still had significant expenses like child care, clothes and food.
  • “Republicans have really painted themselves into a corner on taxes,” said Kathleen Romig, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning research group. “They know voters want it, constituents need it, but they don’t have anywhere to go for funding except for anything that already exists.”
Javier E

The Senate Impeachment Trial Reveals Priorities - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...605926

senate politics history trump impeachment

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • It is not necessary to romanticize the history of the Senate to acknowledge that something profound about it has changed. In the 1850s, it was the Senate that temporized America’s original sin of slavery in ways that all but guaranteed the Civil War. For the first half of the 20th century, the chamber was in the grip of southern racists who perpetuated vicious Jim Crow segregation.
  • But beginning with the civil-rights acts of the 1960s and continuing through Vietnam, Watergate, the CIA’s abuses of domestic and international intelligence, Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unsparing investigation of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program, the Senate—in moments of great national peril—has generally risen to the occasion in at least some halting, lurching, imperfect, but still bipartisan way.
  • Leahy is the last of the so-called Watergate babies elected to the Senate in 1974, and when I buttonholed him in the Capitol’s basement subway, he ticked through the long list of bipartisan leaders under whom he has served. “Bob Dole and George Mitchell, working so closely together, Democrat and Republican, the leaders working things out,” he said. “Like Trent Lott and Tom Daschle did, Mike Mansfield and Hugh Scott. I was there with all of them, and I’ve always felt the Senate should be the conscience of the nation. And we’re not sure [sic] the conscience.”
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  • One spring day in 1994, Dole, then the Senate’s Republican minority leader, passed a note to his longtime Democratic friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who as the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee had jurisdiction, asking, “Pat, Are we ready for the Moynihan-Dole Bill?” But the Clinton White House said no compromise, the Republican House leader Newt Gingrich said no dice, and Dole, who wanted nothing so much as to win the Republican nomination for president in 1996, realized he had to give up
  • Long-shot efforts at compromise by John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island and veteran of Guadalcanal who had been John F. Kennedy’s Navy secretary, and John Breaux, a laissez les bon temps rouler Democrat from Louisiana, also came to naught. Months later, the Democrats lost both houses of Congress and, arguably, nothing in Washington has ever been quite the same.
  • The House Intelligence Committee chair received an unsought assist from Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who said in an interview yesterday that the Senate would forever be known as a body that “shirks its responsibilities” if the trial concludes without calling witnesses.
Javier E

Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump Threatens to Cut Funding for World Health Organization - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...navirus-updates-news-live.html

inequality death pandemic racial income

shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are African-American, though only a third of the state’s population is black.
  • In the county around Milwaukee, where 27 percent of residents are black, nearly twice as many African-American residents tested positive for the virus as white people
  • in Chicago, where African-American residents make up a little less than a third of the population, more than half of those found to have the virus are black, and African-Americans make up 72 percent of those who have died of the virus.
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  • racial disparities in cases and outcomes, researchers said, reflect what happens when a viral pandemic is layered on top of entrenched inequalities.
  • The data, researchers said, is partly explained by factors that could make black Americans more vulnerable in any outbreak: They are less likely to be insured, more likely to already have health conditions and more likely to be denied testing and treatment.
  • There is also the highly infectious nature of the virus in a society where black Americans disproportionately hold jobs that do not allow them to stay at home
  • “If you walk outside and see who is actually still working,” said Elaine Nsoesie, of Boston University’s School of Public Health, “the data don’t seem surprising.”
andrespardo

'Of course it could happen again': experts say little has changed since Deepwater Horizon | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rs-later-could-it-happen-again

enviro climate change global warming

shared by andrespardo on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • A massive deepwater oil spill is nearly as likely today as it was in 2010, experts warn, 10 years after the disastrous explosion of BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused an environmental catastrophe.
  • Trump administration’s decision to loosen Obama-era safety rules. Those standards had grown from an independent commission’s damning findings of corporate and regulatory failures leading up to the spill.
  • “Of course it could happen again, and I think one of the things of most concern is that our ability to control a spill is pretty much the same as it was 10 years prior,” Beinecke said.
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  • Outside of safety concerns, the scientific community is also increasingly encouraging world leaders to consider that any new oil development is unwise, as emissions from fossil fuels exacerbate global heating, threatening human civilization.
  • Trump has pushed an agenda of “energy dominance”, which critics say encourages industry to take risks. A constant ally of fossil fuels, Trum
  • “BSEE is transitioning from an era of isolation to cooperation, from creating hardships to creating partnerships,” the bureau director, Scott Angelle, said at an industry symposium in August 2017.
  • “The next major oil spill, when it happens, will catch us off guard … like every previous one has, unless we decide that this time it’s going to be different,” Amos said.
  • “Offshore drilling is going after bigger and bigger wells that have more and more oil,” said Bob Deans, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council who co-wrote a book on the BP disaster. “These are being drilled in deep water and they’re being drilled in high pressure wells that are harder to control. And they’re being drilled in more complex geology.”
  • Deans called the current regulatory approach “an honor system” that “smacks of exactly the kind of self-enforcement that the independent commission found to be a fatal flaw” in the BP blowout.
  • “Many steps have been taken by both government and industry since the accident 10 years ago … I felt comfortable – not that the risk was reduced to negligible – but that we were in better shape now than we were,” Boesch said. “I’ve frankly been made more concerned about how the safety issues are being treated under the Trump administration.”
  • Wesley Williams, a petroleum engineering professor at Louisiana State University, who was awarded a nearly $5m research grant from a fund BP was forced to pay into, said the “real motivator” for industry was “the image issue that happened and the financial cost of what happened to BP”.
  • “BSEE is committed to its mission to promote safety, protect the environment and conserve offshore resources through vigorous regulatory oversight and enforcement,” said Day, adding: “Safety is a top priority for the Trump administration’s oversight of OCS [outer continental shelf] operations, and BSEE has significantly increased safety performance in comparison to the Obama administration through increased inspections and more effective use of data.”
  • Those companies work with large networks of contractors, and smaller independent operators are active in the Gulf of Mexico too. Williams said they did not always have the resources for extensive safety training.
andrespardo

Flooding will affect double the number of people worldwide by 2030 | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-number-people-worldwide-2030

crisis global

shared by andrespardo on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The World Resources Institute, a global research group, found that 147 million people will be hit by floods from rivers and coasts annually by the end of the decade, compared with 72 million people just 10 years ago.
  • When WRI first developed its flood modeling tool in 2014, the predictions felt “like a fantasy”, said Charlie Iceland, director of water initiatives at WRI.
  • Floods are getting worse because of the climate crisis, decisions to populate high-risk areas and land sinkage from the overuse of groundwater.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The effects will be less dire but still increasingly serious in the US, where the risk is highest for coastal flooding. The US ranks third among countries with the most to lose from urban coastal flooding in the next 10 years, after China and Indonesia.
  • $38bn in 2050, with half the country’s exposed population in just three states – Louisiana, Massachusetts and Florida.
  • What are now once in a lifetime floods could become daily occurrences for most of the US coastline, according to a separate study.
  • River floods will get worse in the US, but those damages will stay about the same, as large investments will be made in flood protection.
Javier E

I'm O.K. - You're Pure Evil - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...im-ok-youre-pure-evil.html

demonization politics culture trump partisan polarization

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Over the past decade in particular, the internet and social media have changed the game. They speed people to like-minded warriors and give them the impression of broader company or sturdier validation than really exist.
  • What people find on the web “creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once unthinkable,” Simas told Remnick. Obama, in his own comments to Remnick, picked up that thread, saying, “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”
  • “The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate,” Obama added. Suspicion blossoms into certainty. Pique flowers into fury.
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  • As Michael Gerson noted in The Washington Post after the shooting, today’s partisans “have made anger into an industry — using it to run up the number of listeners, viewers and hits.” Mocking and savaging political opponents have been “not only normalized but monetized,” Gerson added, and he stated the obvious, which needed stating nonetheless: “If words can inspire, then they can also incite or debase.”
  • Our language is growing coarser. Our images, too. And even if they’re only rarely a conduit to violence, they’re always a path away from high-minded engagement.
  • Madonna fantasizes about blowing up the White House. Kathy Griffin displays a likeness of Trump’s severed head. Stephen Colbert uses a crude term to describe Trump as Putin’s sexual boy toy. Maher suggests that Trump and his daughter Ivanka have engaged in incest. I don’t question the earnestness of these entertainers’ objections to Trump, which are wholly warranted. I ask whether they’re converting even one person with a contrary point of view.
  • We’re surrendering restraint and a musty but worthy thing called tact, in ways guaranteed to widen the divisions between us. The Fusion website published a story noting that one of the cops who heroically took on Hodgkinson and possibly saved Scalise’s life was a gay black woman and that Scalise, in his political career, has indulged white supremacists and fought against L.G.B.T. rights. That was worth telling.
  • But the headline began by branding him a “bigoted homophobe,” and the story described this situation as an “especially delicious irony.” “Delicious”? When the congressman is lying in a hospital bed in critical condition?
  • For more and more Americans, the other side isn’t merely misguided in the extreme. It’s evil in the absolute, and virtue is measured by the starkness with which that evil is labeled and reviled. There are emotional satisfactions to this. There is also a terrible price.
ethanshilling

More than 40 states say they will meet or beat Biden's May 1 deadline for vaccine eligibility for all adults. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-vaccine-eligibility.html

US biden pandemic vaccine

shared by ethanshilling on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The push to get Americans vaccinated has picked up momentum in recent days.
  • “Everybody in the state vaccinated, that ought to be our goal,” said Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, one of five states where everyone 16 and older is already eligible.
  • On Tuesday, Texas, Indiana and Georgia announced universal eligibility dates for late March. On Wednesday, Louisiana and Idaho each moved up the date in their states that eligibility would be expanded to those 16 and older.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In Arizona, everyone 16 and older became eligible this week at state-run sites. In Tennessee, universal eligibility was set for April 5. In New Jersey, officials said they expected to meet Mr. Biden’s May 1 goal.
  • As of Tuesday, all people 50 and over can receive the vaccine in New York, in addition to teachers, some essential workers and people with some medical conditions that make them more susceptible to serious illness from the virus.
  • But a number of essential workers identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Protection as being part of Phase 1c, the third round of priority groups, are not eligible to get vaccinated in the state unless they meet age requirements.
  • The pandemic, however, continues with about 55,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths identified each day. Though the number of new deaths continues to fall, reports of new cases have leveled off in recent weeks as more cases of worrisome variants are detected.
  • With new cases plateauing, “I don’t think you can declare ‘victory’ and say you’ve turned the corner,” said Dr. Fauci, who is the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a pandemic adviser to Mr. Biden.
  • Many officials hope expanding eligibility and increasing the pace of inoculation could bring those outbreaks under control.
clairemann

Opinion | Why Your Ballots Are Boring - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...errymandering-republicans.html

history US policy Politics culture gop

shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Gerrymandering is the age-old practice of trying to fix the boundaries of electoral districts to make sure your side gets as much advantage as possible.
  • The bill now headed toward Senator McConnell’s dustheap would require states to establish independent redistricting commissions when they prepare new maps for their legislatures and congressional districts based on the 2020 census.
  • Check out its website for an index that will tell you, for instance, that in the fast-growing state of Texas, only 9 percent of the 2018 state legislative races featured a real contest. A large chunk didn’t have even a second contender.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • There are a few saintly lawmakers dedicated to reform, but plenty just concentrate on making the system work for them.
  • In one, your party has at least a 40 to 50 percent chance of winning six. In the other, it has no hope whatsoever of taking four; a 65 percent chance of getting two; and a 97.7 percent chance of winning the one in which you happen to be running.
  • Right now in Louisiana, voters are picking a successor to Cedric Richmond, who gave up his House seat for a job as a White House adviser. The district, which resembles a very long and thin dragon balancing a ball on its nose, seems drawn to squish in as many Democrats — particularly Black Democrats — as humanly possible.
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