Proud of NYC for honoring the women who built this city. Shirley Chisom will receive a permanent monument in Prospect Park. As the first black woman to serve in Congress, she paved the way for the record number of trailblazing women elected to Congress in 2018.
lynseyaddario: At a cemetery in Georgia in 2016, Lucy McBath weeps over the grave of her son, Jordan Davis, who was killed by a white man at 17 years old at a gas station in Florida after being accused of playing loud music. After her son’s murder, Lucy became a gun control activist, and was just elected to Congress in Georgia. Her win, which unseats Republican Rep. Karen Handel, seems only more poignant the morning after 12 people were gunned down in California.
The census is basically the DNA for our democracy. It is the baseline for which so many things are done. The census determines how $675 billion is distributed to states and localities. The census determines how legislative districts are drawn. The census determines the composition of the Electoral College. So if this question about citizenship is added to the census, places like California and New York and Texas — which actually, funnily enough, is a red state — they could receive fewer members of Congress, they could have less influence in the Electoral College, they could have less money going to their states. And then places like Kansas, where there are fewer immigrants, where it’s a lot whiter and more Republican, they’re going to have more political power if this question about citizenship is added to the census like Kris Kobach wants.
Ari Berman on why the census matters (Kris Kobach, Kansas secretary of state, is an advocate for a question citizenship on the census)
Glenn Greenwald on Election of Bolsonaro: Democratic Values & Human Rights Are At Risk in Brazil
I think that the key thing to understand about Bolsonaro is that he really comes not from this modern ‘alt-right’ movement of the type of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen, but the Cold War far right that carried out enormous atrocities in the name of fighting domestic communism, which is what Bolsonaro believes his primary project to be. He recently vowed to cleanse the country of left-wing opposition, which he sees as a communist front. And so, the threat and the ideology is far more extreme than anything in the democratic world.
HBO guest host Brittany Packnett warned white Republican women that they will not be protected from male oppression just because of the color of their skin.
Packnett, an activist for Teach for America, made the remarks during HBO’s weekly Pod Save American program.
“Let’s talk about our sister Stormy Daniels because she absolutely does not deserve the way that this president has been talking about her,” Packnett said. “But here’s what, frankly, worries me. This ‘president’ – yeah, I used air quotes – he has been talking horribly about women since he was a candidate.”
“He admitted to being a sexual assaulter when he was a candidate and 53 percent of white women went ahead and elected him anyway,” she lamented. “So let me talk to my white sisters for a second. I just want to issue a warning and I hope you are listening closely.”
Packnett continued: “I want you tell your mamas and your aunties and your grandmothers – from me – to stop selling us out! Listen, I know it’s really hard but your whiteness will actually not save you from what patriarchy has for you.”
According to Packett, women should learn from the way Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was treated when she testified against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“Right?” Packett pointed out. “We all know what happened to her when she decided to stand up and be a patriot in this country and try to save the rest of us.”
Sinclair is the largest owner of television stations in the United States, with a 192 stations in 89 markets. It reaches 39% of American viewers. The company’s executive chairman, David D. Smith, is a conservative whose views combine a suspicion of government, an aversion to political correctness, and strong libertarian leanings. An ardent supporter of Donald Trump, he has not been shy about using his stations to advance his political ideology. Sinclair employees say that the company orders them to air biased political segments produced by the corporate news division, and that it feeds interviewers questions intended to favor Republicans.
“It’s hard to make time for history books when there is so much history crashing down on us every single day — and especially when that history is divisive, aggressive and seemingly never-ending,” says NPR’s Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow.
Case in point: This book review was due a week ago. Rather than finish this assignment, I spent the week in Senate hallways and hearing rooms, watching in real time as the most contentious Supreme Court confirmation in a generation turned into a national flashpoint on sexual assault and gender politics.
Luckily, he says, three of America’s most prominent and accessible historians are here to help us put everything in context – check out his full roundup here.
If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.
This is the election that counts. Start educating yourself now on who will be campaigning to be your congresspeople/governor/etc.
Register to vote NOW. Don’t wait. You can do it any time.
This is the fight we need to win. VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
Also…reminder to pay attention to all local elections and VOTE. These elected officials are the people most likely to directly impact your life in the short term.
This has to start now. Right now.
Get your birth certificates. There may be a fee or long wait times. Make sure you get a certified copy.
Make sure you have ID. Dig into your state’s laws and the whole Real ID thing, because (and sorry I can’t research this now, but pneumonia) I believe there are certain states whose driver’s licenses don’t qualify for Real ID.
Make sure you’re registered to vote. Google it. Follow the instructions for your state.
Know where your local polling place is or find out if you can vote by mail.
Vote in ALL your upcoming elections. Yes, that means the little ones for city council or dog catcher or whatever. Vote those racist, homophobic, bigots out at every level.
They’re like weeds. You can pull up every visible bit, but if you leave one tiny segment of root, they’ll just come back.
To quote Mira Grant, rise up while you can. Because the Republicans are way the hell worse than zombies.
What’s next? A simple majority of House
members signed on to a discharge petition to force a floor vote on the
CRA before August recess begins on July 30. We currently have 177 out of 218
needed supporters. At the same time, the court case against the FCC’s
2017 action will be ramping up towards the end of the summer.
If all forty-nine Democrats and independents in the Senate vote against Kavanaugh as a bloc, he could still be confirmed. But even if it’s a hopeless gesture, it is vitally important that Democrats, their supporters, and anybody else who harbors a sense of fairness and history register a strong protest in the coming weeks and months.
Of course Kavanaugh is going to overrule Roe v. Wade. They’ve got four votes already who are willing to uphold a Texas law that was just a sham law intended to shut down abortion clinics. Kavanaugh is going to be the fifth. He has criticized Roe v. Wade. He said that it was a freewheeling decision. He wrote an opinion just last year that took a very aggressive posture, said that the Trump administration could literally imprison women to delay their ability to have an abortion… There’s two Republican senators—Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski—who claim to be pro-choice. And at the very least, they want to have deniability if they vote for Kavanaugh. But there’s no deniability here. This guy is the fifth vote to overrule Roe v. Wade, period.
Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress on Trump’s nomination of right-wing Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Yesterday we spent the show looking at Kavanaugh’s record—watch or read the coverage here. (via democracynow)
As the political season heats up,
Trump is ramping up his lies through his three amplifiers: Fox News, rallies,
and Twitter.
According to The Fact
Checker’s database, the average daily rate of Trump’s false or misleading claims is climbing.
The problem isn’t just the number
or flagrancy of the lies – for example, that Putin and the Russians didn’t intervene
in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, or that the Mueller investigation is
part of a Democratic plot to remove him.
And it’s not just that the lies
are about big, important public issues – for example, that immigrants commit
more crimes than native-born Americans, or trade wars are harmless.
The biggest problem is the lies aren’t subject to the filters traditionally applied to presidential
statements – a skeptical press, experts who debunk falsehoods, and respected
politicians who publicly disagree.
The word “media” comes from the
term “intermediate” – that is, to come between someone who makes the news and
the public who receives it.
But Trump doesn’t hold press
conferences. He doesn’t meet in public with anyone who disagrees with him. He denigrates the mainstream press. And he shuns experts.
Instead, his lies go out to tens
of millions of Americans every day unmediated.
TV and radio networks simply rebroadcast his rallies, or portions of them.
At his most recent rally in Great
Falls, Montana, Trump made 98 factual statements.
According to the Washington Post’s fact checkers, 76 percent of them were
false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.
For example, Trump claimed
that “winning the Electoral College is very tough for a
Republican, much tougher than the so-called ‘popular vote,’ where people vote
four times, you know.”
Meanwhile, over 50 million
Americans receive his daily tweets, which are also brimming with lies.
Recently, for example, Trump tweeted that Democrats were responsible for his administration’s policy
of separating migrant families at the border (they weren’t), and that “crime in
Germany is way up” because of migration (in fact, it’s down).
Around 6 million Americans
watch Fox News each day and relate what they see and hear to their friends and
relations.
Fox News is no longer
intermediating between the public and Trump. Fox News is Trump. Trump takes many of his lies from Fox News, and Fox News amplifies Trump’s lies.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity is one of
Trump’s de facto top advisers. Trump has
just appointed Bill Shine, the former number two at Fox News, as his deputy
chief of staff for communications.
No democracy can function under
a continuous bombardment of unmediated lies.
So what are we to do, other than
vote November 6 to constrain Trump?
First, boycott Fox News’s major
sponsors, listed here. Vote with your wallet and starve the
beast. Get others to join you.
Second, attend Trump’s rallies,
as distasteful as this may be. You’re entitled to attend. He is, after all, the
president of the entire country.
Organize and mobilize large
groups to attend with you. Once there, let your views about his lies be heard
and seen by the press. You can find out when and where his rallies will occur here.
Third, sign up for his tweets, and
respond to his lies with the simple: “b.s.” You can sign up here.
Fourth, write to Twitter and tell its executives to stop enabling Trump’s lies. Its contact information is here.
In addition, as the Times’ Farhad Manjoo suggested recently, Twitter’s employees should be encouraged to
make a ruckus – as did Amazon workers who pushed the firm to stop selling
facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies, and Google employees
who pressured Google not to renew a Pentagon contract for artificial
intelligence.
Twitter defines its mission as
providing a “healthy public conversation.” Let them know that demagoguery isn’t
healthy.
Your vote on November 6 is the key,
of course.
But as the political season heats
up, Trump’s lies are heating up, too. And they will sway unwary voters.
So you need to be active now, before
Election Day – on behalf of the truth.
“Imagine if people had been going ‘don’t fight hate with hate’ back when Hitler was around.”
Fam…let me tell you bout Poland.
Let me tell you about how the entire rest of Europe sat ack and watched the invasion of Poland because they thought it would be “improper” to send military aid. How they were unwilling to enforce the treaties that Germany was breaking, because that would make them “just as bad.” They sat back and wrote strongly worded letters while fascists grew in power because they didn’t want to dirty their hands. They thought reasonable discussion and politics would be enough to stop a fascist dictator from rising to power.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t enough.
like yes, people literally did try that argument then too.
Everywhere there’s fascists there are fascist apologists hiding under the guise of pacifism, ready to enable their shit and demonize resistance.
My friends, this is a dark hour. Intolerance, cruelty, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and environmental destruction have been let loose across the land.
Trump controls the Republican Party, the Republican Party controls the House and Senate, and the Senate and Trump will soon control the Supreme Court.
Republicans also control both chambers in 32 states (33 if you count Nebraska) and 33 governorships. And in many of these states they are entrenching their power by gerrymandering and arranging to suppress votes.
Yet only 27 percent of Americans are Republican, and the vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump. The GOP itself is now little more than Trump, Fox News, a handful of billionaire funders, and evangelicals who oppose a woman’s right to choose, gay marriage, and the Constitution’s separation of church and state.
So what are we – the majority – to do?
First and most importantly, do not give up. That’s what they want us to do. Then they’d have no opposition at all.
Second, in the short term, if you are represented by a Republican senator, do whatever you can to get him or her to reject Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, or, at the least, postpone consideration until after the midterm elections. Urge others to join with you. Senate switchboard: 202-224-3121
Fourth, don’t succumb to divisive incrimination over “who lost” the 2016 election (Hillary loyalists, Bernie supporters, Jill Stein voters, etc.). This will get us nowhere. We must be united.
Fifth, vote this November 6 for people who will stand up to the Trump Republican outrage. Mobilize and organize others to do so. Contact friends and relations in “red” states, and urge them to do the same.
Sixth, help lay the groundwork for the 2020 presidential election, so that even if Trump survives Mueller and impeachment he will not be reelected.
Finally, know that this fight will be long and hard. It will require our patience, our courage, and our resolve. The stakes could not be higher.
Working off of the labor of others, only there because of being born into capital and pre-existing familial or business relations? Yep
And people still try to defend this shit with ‘Well they MUST work REALLY HARD to earn THAT kind of money!!!’
I assure you they don’t. I assure you the people earning the least money are working the most. I don’t see CEO’s doing 60 hour weeks just to keep food on the table. They don’t do that, because they don’t have to, because they get paid so much they aren’t desperate enough to have to.
If you follow me, reblog this. It is an important piece of data. I would love to see one for the annual tax expenditure of minimum wage versus CEO’s as a proportion of their annual income.
This is the aggregation of labor. This is what it looks like. It has happened before. It will likely happen again unless it is changed.
Ronan Farrow just won the Pulitzer Prize for stories he wrote for The New Yorker, but before uncovering sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein for the magazine, he worked at the State Department as a special adviser in the Obama administration.
In War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, Farrow writes about his time at the State Department and what he sees as a dangerous whittling away of the agency’s influence through mass firings and efforts to cut its budget.
The idea that Texas will be eternally red I think is a false one. But when it will turn is hard to say. Once it does turn, though, if you take the largest red state and add it to the blue column, the politics of America totally transform.
House Speaker Paul Ryan’s announcement Wednesday that he would not seek re-election adds a big name to what was already shaping up to be a near-record year of seat turnovers in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In a recent podcast interview with David Axelrod, former NBA star Charles Barkley talks about how NBA legend Bill Russell persuaded Barkley to stop publicly complaining about how much income tax he paid (transcription by Steven Greenhouse).
Bill Russell called me one time… He says, “Charles Barkley.” I said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Russell.”
“You grew up in Alabama. Right?” I said, “Yes, sir.”
He says, “Did you go to public school?” I said, “Yes, sir.”
He says, “Did the cops ever come to your neighborhood?” I said, “Yes sir.”
He said, “Any of the houses ever on fire and the firemen come?” I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “I don’t want to see your black ass on TV complaining about your taxes anymore.” I says, “What do you mean?”
He says, “So now that you got money you don’t want to help other people out, but when you were poor, other people took care of you.” And I says, “You know what, Mr. Russell, you will never hear me complain about my taxes again.”
And it was a very interesting lesson for me, because I do think rich people should pay more taxes. I’m blessed to be one of them, and we should pay more in taxes. I learned my lesson. I never complain about taxes.
I think Bill Russell needs to make a few phone calls to Congress…
The largest block of voters in America isn’t Democrats or
Republicans. It’s the people who don’t vote. Our latest video with voting
rights expert Heather McGhee looks at what we could achieve if everyone voted.
House of Brat 