Racist America strikes again. Not that it ever stops. I'm not surprised that white boy vigilantism is considered to be okay but I am thoroughly disgusted.

They should (not done) be ashamed of the ruse Senator Kennedy R-LA pulls on the American people, I can see why he is being re-elected repeatedly He is Harvard and Oxford educated, but fools his constituency into thinking he's just a "good ol' boy."

McCarthy is an idiot. Shut up and sit down. Get out and vote when it is your turn folks we have to keep the Dems in office

I find it terribly worrisome and hugely concerning that women (and our allies) are not mobilizing to address harrowing concerns over the possibility that Roe vs Wade could be overturned by current judges occupying seats on the SCOTUS.


Also deeply concerning is people with conduct disorders, personality disorders and sexual misconduct disorders, who exist deep within the American fabric and hold positions of power.

Big red flags all over the political landscape.


Super scary stuff. (w)(w)(w)

Politics-whats on my mind?
 

I would like to shake all the Canadian fools that voted Trudeau in again as PM. Without a though for all of us he allowed Canadians abroad to come back and THEN put out a ban on arrivals from 3 other countries. The new virus is already here you bloody jerk.

That worries me as well, why aren't they mobilizing and speaking up?

I think as I see it, they are too busy arguing with each other over other stuff, they can't set aside time to coordinate to mobilize. However their male counterparts are no bettter, all they do is bicker.

I'm learning that the whole facet of the USA government doesn't truly care about us, in any form.

smh

Keeping fingers crossed....
 

~~
Democrat Stacey Abrams announces 2022 bid for Georgia governor.

Hopefully she'll get a fair shake this time around!

Turn the TV on MSNBC, you will see the throngs of people protesting the "right to life" movement and pro-women's reproductive rights.

It is sad for this very important and life-saving vote to occur after a horrible presidency and the fear it might return plunging us into Fascism again, a pandemic that has killed many Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, and untold numbers Caribbean Island residents and Cuban citizens, and untold numbers of catastrophic weather phenomenon causing much disaster.

It would not surprise me if very few protestors showed up at SCOTUS, but there are those hearty souls who show up at the SCOTUS and The Capitol to stand up for those of us unable to show-up in person.

Thank You to those well, able, with housing and food unlike many up in my neck of the woods. I am warm, feed, without any major worries. ;)

I was speaking on the women in the government mobilizing together! I rarely see them come together because they are too busy bickering and such on petty stuff, while the men do the crap deeds!

Why are US rightwingers so angry? Because they know social change is coming
 

Why are US rightwingers so angry? Because they know social change is coming
Rebecca Solnit

The American right might win the occasional battle – but they will never win the war against progress

https://i.postimg.cc/JzJ5TfJ6/4485.jpg
‘We are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation.’ Photograph: Steve Helber/AP

While their fear and dismay is often regarded as rooted in delusion, rightwingers are correct that the world is metamorphosing into something new and, to them, abhorrent. They’re likewise correct that what version of history we tell matters. The history we tell today lays the groundwork for the future we make. The outrage over the 1619 Project and the new laws trying to censor public school teachers from telling the full story of American history are a doomed attempt to hold back facts and perspectives that are already widespread.

In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current. Similar shifts are happening far beyond the United States, but it is this turbulent nation of so much creation and destruction I know best and will speak of here.

When a regime falls, the new one sweeps away its monuments and erects its own. This is happening as the taking down of Confederate, Columbus and other statues commemorating oppressors across the country, the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places, the appearance of myriad statues and murals of Harriet Tubman and other liberators, the opening of the Legacy Museum documenting slavery and mass incarceration and housing a lynching memorial.

There was no great moment of overthrow, but nevertheless we are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation, from the Olympic track medalists of 1968 making their Black power gesture at San Jose State University to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland. All those angry white men with the tiki torches chanting, in Charlottesville in 2017, “You will not replace us” as they sought to defend a statue of Gen Robert E Lee were wrong in their values and actions but perhaps not in their assessment.

White people are not being replaced, but in many ways a white supremacist history and society is. The statue of the general was removed earlier this year and will be melted down to be made into a new work of art under the direction of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. They call the project “swords into plowshares”, a phrase suggesting that this marks the end of a war – perhaps the civil war in which the north never fully claimed its victory, the south never accepted its defeat.

What’s happening goes far beyond public monuments. The statues mark the rejection of old versions of who we are and what we value, but those versions and values matter most as they play out in everyday private and public life. We are only a few decades removed from a civilization in which corporal punishment of children by parents and teachers was an unquestioned norm; in which domestic violence and marital rape were seen as a husband’s prerogative and a wife surrendered financial and other agency; in which many forms of inequality and exclusion had hardly even been questioned, let alone amended; in which few questioned the rightness of a small minority – for white Christian men have always been a minority in the United States – holding almost all the power, politically, socially, economically, culturally; in which segregation and exclusion were pervasive and legal; in which Native Americans had been largely written out of history; in which environmental regulation and protection and awareness barely existed.

You have to remember how different the past was to recognize how much has changed. Frameworks such as indigenous land acknowledgments that were unheard of and maybe almost inconceivable a few decades ago are routine at public events. Land acknowledgments are not land return, but they fortify the case for it.

The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; in 1965, with Griswold v Connecticut, the supreme court overruled state laws criminalizing birth control and laid the groundwork for Roe v Wade six years later; only in 2015, Obergefell v Hodges established marriage equality for same-sex couples (while equality of rights between different-sex couples had also gradually been established as marriage became a less authoritarian institution). The right is trying to push the water back behind the dam. With deregulation and social service and tax cuts, they have succeeded in reestablishing an economy of extreme inequality, but not a society fully committed to that inequality.

They have succeeded in passing laws at the state level against voting rights and reproductive rights, but they have not succeeded in pushing the majority’s imaginations back to 1960 or 1920 or whenever their version of when America was great stalled out. They can win the battles, but I do not believe they will, in the end, win the war.

While the right has become far more extreme and has its tens of millions of true believers, it is morphing into a minority sect. This has prompted their desperate scramble to overturn free and fair elections and other democratic processes. White Christians, who were 80% of the population in 1976, are now 44%. Mixed-race and non-white people are rapidly becoming the majority. On issues such as climate, people of color are far more progressive; if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling.

These are relatively concrete changes. Others are subtler and more recent, but no less important. Even in the last decade there has been an epochal shift in our expectations of how we should treat each other, and the casual cruelty and disdain targeting women, queer people, Bipoc, the disabled and those with divergent bodies that pervaded entertainment and daily life are now viewed as repugnant – and are met with consequences in some contexts.

A regular experience of this era (for those of us who were around for the last one) is to revisit a song, a film, a book and find that we have now become people who can see better the insults and exclusions that were so seamlessly woven into it. Some of the old art has not weathered well and will fall out of circulation, as some old culture always does; some will be interpreted in new ways; some neglected treasures will move from margin to center. We – a metamorphosing “we” – are sifting through an old and building a new canon.

Even more profound than this is a shift in worldview from the autonomous individual of hypercapitalism and social darwinism to a recognition of both the natural and social worlds as orchestras of interdependence, of survival as an essentially collaborative and cooperative business. Disciplines from neuropsychology to economics have shifted their sense of who we are, what works, and what matters. Climate change is first of all a crisis, but it’s also a reminder that the world is a collection of interlocking systems. The just-deceased bell hooks talked about a “love ethic” that included “a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet”.

Birth can be violent and dangerous, and sometimes one or the other of the two involved die. There is no guarantee about what is to come, and the shadow of climate chaos hangs over it all. We do not have time to build a better society before we address that crisis, but it is clear that the response to that crisis is building such a society. So much has already changed. The river Alexander described has swept away so much, has carried so many onward.

It has come far; it still has dams to overtop and so much farther to go.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-change-coming

Opinion: Biden is quietly erasing one of Trump’s cruelest legacies
 

Opinion: Biden is quietly erasing one of Trump’s cruelest legacies

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-ap...IMLY.jpg&w=916
President Biden on Dec. 22. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)

It has been overshadowed by months of Democratic infighting and the searing national debate over Jan. 6, but the Biden administration is quietly erasing one of the cruelest legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency. This is a genuine achievement, in both symbolic and practical terms.

On Thursday, the administration rejected Georgia’s proposal to impose work requirements and premiums on Medicaid recipients. This was effectively the last nail in the coffin of Trump’s zombie attempt to make Medicaid more cumbersome and bureaucratic, in hopes of knocking as many people off health coverage as possible.

When Biden took office, nearly 20 mostly Republican-controlled states were in the process of crafting work requirements for Medicaid, on which 76 million Americans rely.

Now, Medicaid work requirements are all but dead in all those states.

That erases a legacy of the Trump administration, which had invited states to submit proposals to impose such requirements. Proposals were eventually approved for 12 states — all with Republican legislatures, governors or both — while a half-dozen others were pending when Trump left office.

In the most visible case, under Arkansas’s 2018 requirements, nearly 17,000 people lost health coverage. That wasn’t necessarily because they weren’t working. It was mainly because it was so difficult to satisfy all the reporting requirements.

Which is a feature, not a bug, of work requirements. By forcing recipients to prove they’re working and navigate a bureaucratic maze to stay in the program, the state gives itself an excuse to kick off those who make a paperwork mistake or miss a reporting deadline.

Biden’s reversal began just after he took office. In February, the administration informed states that it was preparing to withdraw approvals for work requirements granted under Trump.

One by one over the following months, those approvals were either rescinded by the administration, held up by court challenges, or delayed by state governments that expected the policy reversal (in Utah, officials suspended requirements due to the pandemic). Georgia was the last state where approval for this policy was still in force, though Republican states may still wage court battles.

Legacy of cruelty

Trump’s effort to impose Medicaid work requirements was part of a much larger campaign to undermine and roll back our country’s fitful advance toward universal health care. This constituted an even broader legacy of cruelty, and arguably outright betrayal.

That’s because Trump campaigned in 2016 as a corrective to Paul Ryan-style Republicans who had treated destroying the social safety net as a quasi-religious calling. Trump vowed that “everybody’s got to be covered,” and insisted no one would die on the street, uninsured.

But once in office, Trump embraced GOP anti-safety-net zealotry by going all in on the Republican effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act. Driven by hatred of Barack Obama, he endlessly raged that the ACA was a “disaster.”

That culminated in the 2017 repeal attempt, which fortunately failed. Stymied in that effort, which would have taken coverage away from millions on the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, Trump sought to weaken the safety net via other administrative means, such as these Medicaid work requirements.

And so, in erasing those requirements, Biden is also erasing a larger hangover of Trumpian cruelty.

The ACA is expanding

This legacy is being erased in another way. Under Biden, the same ACA that Trump tried to destroy is expanding and moving toward realizing its potential. A record number of more than 13 million people have signed up for 2022 coverage on the exchanges.

A key reason for this is that the covid-19 rescue plan that Biden signed in March expanded the number of people eligible for ACA subsidies and beefed up subsidies for those already eligible. As Margot Sanger-Katz details in the New York Times, this is a real achievement: It substantially reimagines and expands the ACA amid a pandemic, meaning the ACA is rising to an emergency occasion.

Still, this achievement is at risk. The ACA expansion in the rescue package expires at the end of next year, and while Democrats want to extend it in the Build Back Better bill, a certain West Virginia senator remains opposed. That would be a policy and political disaster for Democrats.

“If Democrats aren’t able to extend it, millions of people will get notice of huge premium increases right before the midterm election,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told us.

Making progress

In short, the pandemic has not dimmed the GOP desire to roll back that ACA expansion and undermine Medicaid, even as we face a new covid surge. But now, with the Georgia decision, work requirements are effectively dead — as long as a Democrat remains in the White House.

Biden has made serious mistakes with the pandemic, in particular the failure to secure enough covid tests when need has exploded. But he’s making progress in getting more Americans covered, replacing the Trumpian impulse to impose suffering for the sin of being poor with the principle that every American ought to have access to health care.

“Biden has quietly been moving us closer to universal coverage, picking up on a cause Democrats have been pursuing since the early 20th Century,” Jonathan Cohn, author of an excellent history of the ACA, told us. “A big part of that has been undoing the legacy of Trump.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...-trump-policy/

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene rants against ‘fake religion’ Kwanzaa as Black holiday begins.

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has denounced Kwanzaa as a “fake religion” just as millions of Black people start to celebrate the weeklong holiday.

The far-right Georgia lawmaker berated the national College Republicans for “pandering and BS” after the GOP group tweeted a seemingly innocuous happy holiday message. “Stop. It’s a fake religion created by a psychopath,” Greene said. “People are tired of pandering and BS.” She was apparently deriding Kwanzaa founder Prof. Maulana Karenga, who was convicted of felony assault in the 1960′s in what he says was a politically motivated prosecution spurred by his involvement in Black nationalist politics.

Greene suggested that the College Republicans should avoid political correctness if it wants to galvanize the conservative base of the GOP. “You aren’t bringing in new voters, you are turning them away,” she added.

The College Republicans did not respond to Greene’s criticism about the tweet, which itself misspelled the name of the holiday as “Kwanza.”

Kwanzaaa, which lasts for seven days, is a holiday festival, not a religion as Greene claims. It was created in 1966 as a way to allow Black people worldwide to celebrate their common African roots.

Former President Trump tweeted a similar “Happy Kwanzaa” message during his stint in the White House, but Greene did not criticize her political hero for the greeting it should be noted!

What a difference a year makes...

AND if you believe this, I've got a bridge to sell you...
 

Jacob Chansley, the convicted Jan. 6 rioter also known as the “QAnon Shaman,” now claims he was just trying to help during the insurrection.

“I actually tried to, on more than one occasion, calm the crowd,” he told “Inside Edition.” “But it just didn’t work.”

Chansley also said that he regrets not doing more to keep the peace as supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of the 2020 election results. However, multiple videos and images showed him howling and chanting his way through the Capitol and inside the Senate Chamber.

Prosecutors said he yelled, “Times up, motherfuckers,” and left a note on then-Vice President Mike Pence’s desk that said, “It’s only a matter of time. Justice is coming.”

Again what a difference a year makes! This loudmouth MotherF*^$er has turned into a sniffling little bitch!

Dick Cheney returned to the House and received a warm welcome . . . from Democrats. Including me. Who knew the day would come?

This has had me thinking of one of my favorite SNL openings ….



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF3dnVCTxBY

I didn’t anticipate the level of fury and aggression I would feel on Thursday's anniversary. I’m still spiraling through perseverating revenge fantasies.

Once I talked myself down off the ledge, however, I was able to enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_IxT2ei9gU

Twist of Fate Could End Democrats’ Control of the Senate...
 

The list of what threatens to end the Democrats’ control of the Senate is familiar: History says the White House’s party usually loses seats in midterms. The president’s low approval ratings in battleground states — even lower than his weak national ratings — portend trouble. Voters now say they prefer Republican control of Congress. And in several states, Republicans have made it harder to vote and are placing partisans in control of the vote-counting.

But there’s another possibility that should also have the Democrats reaching for the Maalox: A random act of fate could turn the Senate over to the Republicans not next January, but next summer, or next month, or next week. An illness or death could well trigger a political earthquake — by almost instantly switching control of the nation’s top legislative body.

States have a range of laws about replacing a departed senator, but the large majority — 37 — call on the governor to pick a successor. Of those, only seven require the governor to pick someone in the same party. So there are 30 states where the governor can pick whatever new senator he or she wants.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...manchin-526755

While that's true, an illness or death of a Republican Senator could give Democrats the advantage.

Several things have been on my mind:

A) Will Sen. Liz Cheney (R) become the front runner of the GOP bid for becoming the first woman president of the US (?);

B) Will the Jan. 6th commission draft laws and get these new guardrails into position so Cpt. Chaos and his followers cannot ruin our country ever again(?);

C) Will Sen. Manchin be held publicly accountable for his coal company profiting off legislative processes that enriches his pockets (?);

D) Will the GOP be held accountable for their gross efforts to undermine voting processes before it's too late? The 5-alarm fire on voting processes has been burning since before our late Senator John Lewis (D) passed, last year.

How NPR’s Steve Inskeep cracked the code for interviewing Trump
 

How NPR’s Steve Inskeep cracked the code for interviewing Trump

The veteran host used a ‘truth sandwich’ approach to counter the former president’s election lies

By Margaret Sullivan
Media columnist
January 14, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-ap...2EKE.jpg&w=916
Donald Trump speaks on the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. One year later, NPR’s Steve Inskeep deftly challenged the former president’s election lies in an interview Trump ended abruptly. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

How can journalists interview Donald Trump — or other politicians who consistently spread misinformation — without magnifying their lies? It’s been a challenge, and a problem, for years.

One answer arrived Wednesday when NPR aired its long-sought chat with the former president, conducted a day earlier by Steve Inskeep, a host of “Morning Edition.” The interview has drawn plenty of attention because Trump abruptly ended the call after nine minutes, cutting short what was planned as a 15-minute chat.

“So Steve, thank you very much,” Trump said, mid-conversation and without warning, after attempting to deflect or ignore some of Inskeep’s questions. “I appreciate it.” With that, he hung up.

But to me, the interview was less notable for its sudden ending than for what it accomplished. Although noncombative in tone, it still managed to give listeners an accurate picture of the subject matter: Trump’s insistence on promoting an evidence-free and thoroughly debunked argument that the 2020 election was rigged and that he should have been granted a second term as the rightful winner.

Inskeep and NPR demonstrated that they were fully aware of how damaging such fabrications can be — and that they are unwilling to hand a big megaphone to that “big lie.”

Throughout the interview, Trump kept coming with his misleading rhetoric, offering one fleetingly plausible-sounding but utterly false idea after another about a supposedly fraud-ridden election.

But Inskeep kept coming, too, pushing back at each of these statements. “Your own lawyers had no evidence of fraud,” the host corrected Trump at one point. “They said in court they had no evidence of fraud, and the judges ruled against you every time on the merits.”

It was a great example of what I’ve been advocating for years: the “truth sandwich” approach to covering false claims, not a new problem but certainly a pervasive one in the Trump era. The idea is to avoid magnifying lies; and the technique is to surround false statements with established truths before and after, thus blunting the effect of what can amount to propaganda.

It helped, immensely, that NPR’s interview was taped. It meant that Inskeep was able to lead into his piece with almost five minutes of reporting, including archived interviews with election officials and others. So, when listeners heard Trump, they could keep in mind what they had heard just minutes before. After the conversation with Trump came yet another voice — that of Mara Liasson, an NPR national political correspondent, who talked with Inskeep for a minute or so to provide valuable perspective and another helping of truth.

“A master class in contextualization,” Richard Tofel, longtime president of ProPublica, called the interview. And, he added, a reminder of “why Trump and fellow Big Liars should be interviewed on tape rather than live.”

Inskeep said Thursday that a taped interview was always the plan and that Trump and his handlers had no objection when they agreed to the interview, NPR’s first with Trump since he became a presidential candidate in 2015. Inskeep has been requesting one regularly since then.

The host was not only well-prepared to counter, in real time, what Trump probably would say during the interview. He was also well aware of the possible pitfalls. “The whole genre of newsmaker-interviews is broken,” Inskeep told me.

Too many interviews make the newsmaker “the narrator of the story,” he explained — and particularly in these political times, “sometimes they are unreliable narrators.”

Presenting these conversations as raw Q&A’s means that the public is deprived of the necessary context. Deprived, too often, of truth. “You need extra voices, extra facts, extra context,” Inskeep said.

As the first snippets of the recorded interview were played for listeners just after 5 a.m. Wednesday, some essential context came in the form of an introductory dialogue between Inskeep and co-host Rachel Martin. At one point, Inskeep bluntly characterized his conversation with Trump with this straightforward observation: “He repeated his lies a lot.”

Crucially, NPR had chosen not to rush the long-awaited interview onto the airwaves, giving Inskeep and his team time to produce the segment smartly, with all the necessary background. “There’s almost no story that isn’t improved by holding it for a day,” Inskeep said. That isn’t always possible of course — sometimes the news won’t wait. But in this case, the extra time paid off.

Some observers challenged the entire premise of the interview: Why give Trump more attention, given the misinformation he spreads so relentlessly?
Even if Trump weren’t eyeing another run for president, the answer would be simple: The massive campaign to deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election is a crisis for our nation and undeniably newsworthy.

Trump is at the center of it all, given his dominance in American politics and his grip on the Republican Party. In thrall to him, Republican politicians and operatives are day after day finding ways to make it more difficult for Americans to vote and easier for partisans to overturn valid voting results. Democracy itself is on the line.

The role of mainstream journalists is significant, and, overall, their record has been far less than stellar. Too many, whether in a one-on-one interview or at larger sessions with a number of reporters, have failed to push back in a way that matters. Trump is such a facile talker — one who specializes in dazzling displays of distraction, ad hominem attacks and repetition — that challenging him effectively in real time can be almost impossible.

Those journalistic failures have not served the public.

As George Lakoff, a linguist and a proponent of the “truth sandwich,” told me in 2018: “Trump needs the media and the media help him by repeating what he says.”

With all-important midterm elections this year, and the 2024 presidential campaign ready to erupt soon after, journalists need to finally figure out how to cover Trump and his acolytes effectively.

They could do a lot worse than to follow NPR’s example.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media...ump-interview/