County "Leaders" Failed the Test
There has been a kind of local systemic political failure this past month that I find myself thinking about a lot. It is such a microcosm of our county's politics.
In Montgomery County, Muslim groups egged on by rightwing Christians have protested twice recently because MCPS does not let them opt out of classroom readings of storybooks with gay and trans characters. Students can opt out of some sections of the sex ed curriculum, as required by state law, but you can't opt out of English class when there's a gay character in a story. Some parents at some schools had worked something out so their kids could leave the room while LGBT+ stories were read and discussed, but there was no formal process in place for that. In March the school district issued a clear statement that opting out was not a choice for those classes.
This was enough to stir up a protest on June 6, before a school board meeting. It was peaceful, not very big, and though the protest was promoted by, and attended by, the Christian nationalist group Moms for Liberty, participants were almost all Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodox. A number of the protesters spoke in the board's public comments session. It was fine, they said what they had to say. There were many misrepresentations but the board is not considering a new policy or anything, this was simply people complaining. There was a bigger demonstration later in the month -- I'm taking about the first one.
The last speaker in the board's public comments session was County Council member Kristin Mink. I am not really a very political person, and I didn't know who she was when she sat down. I didn't hear her name, and wouldn't have recognized it if I had. She was talking off the top of her head, with lots of "uhs" and "y'knows," backed up and started again a lot of times, but her comments were exactly perfect. It was a moment of heroism; she showed up on her own initiative, talked personally to the protesters to understand their point of view, and then sat at the board table with the video cameras rolling, to support our LGBT neighbors and tell the protesters that the school district was not going to change its policy, and why. A transcription of her statement can be viewed here: Kristin Mink comments 6-6-23
Mink was the only official from any level of government who showed up for the event. She said she has worked with the Muslim community on various community matters ("housing, and welcoming immigrants, and feeding our neighbors, and providing healthcare, and all of those sorts of things.") and knows a lot of them. And she said something true in the board meeting, which is the only thing anybody talks about. She said, "This issue unfortunately does put some, not all of course, some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots. However the folks who I talked to here today I would not put in the same category as those folks, although it's, again, complicated, because they're following the same side of this particular issue."
Break it down. Room is full of Muslims. They are there as Muslims because they do not want their children to learn about homosexuality, because of their religion. Are they on the same side as white supremacists and bigots? Well, yes, and in fact these Muslims are literally allying with Moms for Liberty, a white hate group; that group posted flyers and they attended the protest, and one of their leaders literally spoke at the protesters' press conference. Kristin said she would not put these people in the same category -- though it's complicated.
She got tons of backlash from the press and the Democratic establishment and ended up apologizing. CAIR and some of the Muslims, plus the whole world of rightwing media, accused her of being Islamophobic. Cowardly Council member Evan Glass found a reporter and said “I have spoken with Councilmember Mink about her comments and have expressed my profound disappointment.” Mink's comments were offhandedly referred to as Islamophobic and "a disaster." Because she said what needed to be said and she said it without being afraid to step over somebody's line in the sand.
I want to dwell on this for a minute.
A good friend will tell you when you've got a booger hanging out of your nose.
Okay, that is all.
Moms for Liberty set a trap here for liberals, who totally fell for it. M4L placed the cheese and set the trigger, but we're the ones who created an environment where you can't criticize a minority group. Kristin Mink spoke with sincerity and truth at the board meeting. She held the line on school district policy and proposed the only kind of solution that can work; the public school teaches facts and science, and religious values should be taught at home. She did not generalize about the nearly two billion people who participate in the Muslim faith worldwide. She talked about the group that protested, who were clearly self-identified Muslims advocating a rightwing position on sexual orientation. They are on the same side as our homegrown American bigots. It's complicated, if you grant that these were not actually horrid people like the Moms for Liberty that they associate with.
There was nothing that could be said about this situation that will not invite an attack. Of course they accused her of Islamophobia -- that's all they've got. They couldn't argue that her point was incorrect, or that her solution wouldn't work. But look, we have seen real Islamophobia. Years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan were nothing but American Islamophobia. Trump's Muslim travel ban was pure, unadulterated Islamophobia. After 9/11 Islamophobia was the default American attitude. People on the right have repeatedly implied that all Muslims are terrorists and if you say they are Islamophobic they shrug and go, so what? This group of people came to the school board to advocate a position that is normally advocated by white supremacist, rightwing bigots. But they don't seem like bigots themselves, if you know them. It's complicated.
You know what is worse than saying something that can be twisted into something it is not? I'll give you a minute. Okay, the answer is: saying nothing.
Yes it's a trap, it's a lion's den, and you have to be brave to walk right into it and speak your conscience in a way that is empathetic and also unswerving. You didn't see the County Executive, any of the other members of the County Council, any official of the Democratic Party, at the board meeting, and you did not see them back up their colleague when she came under attack. They should have queued up behind a microphone in Veterans Plaza or the Executive Building and taken turns saying: "We love our Muslim neighbors but some of them are on the same side as white supremacists and bigots on the issue of LGBT storybooks in school." They could have taken turns saying, "Kristin is kind of new at this game, God bless her, and she has not yet learned to talk out of both sides of her mouth. I remember when I first ran for office [goes into self-aggrandizing story of a not-really-embarrassing gaffe]." They could have said, "I know Kristin Mink and, whatever she is, she is not an Islamophobe." They could have said, "The MCPS policy is that you cannot opt-out of storybook readings, and I support that policy."
Nobody backed her up. All of our Democratic "leaders" hid, except for one. Kojo got Elrich and Jawando to talk superficially for a total of three or four minutes on WAMU, that's about it as far as I have seen. Oh when some Pride flags got burned later that week, every local politician in the county found a TV crew and expressed outrage in appropriately shocked tones of voice. But when our gay and trans neighbors actually came under direct attack, for real, in the school district where it counts, and when one of their colleagues stood up to directly address the situation, and there was some risk of being criticized for saying something, they hid. When we needed their leadership, they were not there.
posted by JimK at 3:27 PM
79 Comments:
Candidates for MCPS Board of Education are non-partisan.
So?
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — A firearms expert who testified at a Maryland murder trial shouldn’t have been allowed to offer an unqualified opinion that bullets recovered from a crime scene came from the suspect’s gun, the state’s highest court concluded in a ruling that will limit the use such testimony in the state’s courts.
The Supreme Court of Maryland ruled in a 4-3 decision this week in an appeal by Kobina Ebo Abruquah, who was convicted of murder in 2013 after the court allowed a firearms examiner to testify without qualification that bullets at a crime scene were fired from a gun that Abruquah had acknowledged was his.
Chief Judge Matthew Fader, who wrote the ruling, noted that the majority doesn’t question that firearms identification is generally reliable. He wrote that it can be helpful to a jury in identifying whether patterns and markings on “unknown” bullets or cartridges “are consistent or inconsistent with those on bullets or cartridges known to have been fired from a particular firearm.”
Fader also noted that it’s possible that experts who are asked the right questions or have the benefit of additional studies and data may be able to offer opinions “that drill down further on the level of consistency exhibited by samples or the likelihood that two bullets or cartridges fired from different firearms might exhibit such consistency.”
“However, based on the record here, and particularly the lack of evidence that study results are reflective of actual casework, firearms identification has not been shown to reach reliable results linking a particular unknown bullet to a particular known firearm,” Fader wrote.
Maneka Sinha, a law professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, said it was groundbreaking for a state’s highest court to take a critical look at the scientific foundations of such evidence and find that the type of testimony that courts have been relying on for years is unreliable.
Sinha was on a team of public defenders in the District of Columbia that litigated a trial-level case in which a judge restricted firearms testimony in a similar way.
“While challenges to this type of evidence have been made increasingly, very few high courts have taken up the issue,” Sinha said.
Sinha noted that the District of Columbia Court of Appeals has restricted how firearms examiners are allowed to present testimony.
The ruling remands Abruquah’s case back to Prince George’s County Circuit Court for a new trial.
In his appeal, Abruquah contended that the court abused its discretion in allowing the firearms examiner’s testimony. The state argued that the examiner’s opinion was properly admitted.
The ruling pointed out that firearms identification has existed as a field for more than a century, and for most of that time it has been accepted by law enforcement and courts without significant challenge. But recent reports have questioned the foundations underlying firearms identification, leading to greater skepticism...
Two civil rights organizations are launching a campaign to pressure state governments to disqualify former President Trump from appearing on ballots in 2024.
The groups say secretaries of state are empowered by the 14th Amendment to bar Trump from running for office because of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Starting Sunday, Mi Familia Vota and Free Speech for People will stage a week of rallies and banner drops outside the offices of the secretaries of state of California, Oregon, Colorado and Georgia.
The groups also penned a letter to Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar last month, calling on him to block Trump under what’s known as the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause.
“We’re really focusing on Nevada and California and [Oregon, Colorado and Georgia] to make sure that they are taking a stand by disqualifying Trump in those spaces, which is something that the secretary of state can do,” said Héctor Sánchez, executive director of Mi Familia Vota.
The groups are calling their campaign “Trump is Disqualified,” and are timing it to coincide with the 155th anniversary of the 14th Amendment.
Though Trump has been indicted twice and is under investigation in other cases, the groups say those are not disqualifying facts under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
However, the groups believe Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — for which he is also under investigation — does fit the constitutional clause’s definitions.
That clause bars from a series of public offices people who “having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
LET'S SEE JOHN ROBERTS' COURT DO ITS JOB AND ENFORCE THE CONSTITUTION
Even though TTF denounced a new movie concerning a real-life effort to stop child trafficking, the American public was very interested.
In news that is shocking Hollywood and the mainstream media elite world, Angel Studios’ movie “Sound of Freedom” beat out the latest long-promoted Indiana Jones sequel on July 4th, despite having a tiny fraction of the budget and media attention.
The Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel and Eduardo Verástegui, is based on a true story of a former special agent, Tim Ballard, and his mission to rescue hundreds of children from sex traffickers.
CPAC hosted a special screening for “Sound of Freedom” at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, a couple of weeks ago to bring awareness to the crisis and announce the unveiling of CPAC’s new Center for Combating Trafficking. The Center’s goal is to improve cross-collaboration between domestic and international entities dedicated to ending human trafficking, supporting victims in reintegrating into society.
"a kind of local systemic political failure this past month that I find myself thinking about a lot"
oh dear
I'll have to read this
In Montgomery County, Muslim groups...have protested twice recently because MCPS does not let them opt out of classroom readings of storybooks with gay and trans characters"
you mean books with gay and trans characters as protagonists, making homosexuality and transsexualism appear attractive?
"Students can opt out of some sections of the sex ed curriculum, as required by state law, but you can't opt out of English class when there's a gay character in a story"
you mean a book with with a gay character as a protagonist, making homosexuality appear attractive?
"In March the school district issued a clear statement that opting out was not a choice for those classes"
oops, I know TTFers couldn't care less but it looks like the school district violated the Constitution of the United States of America
the Supreme Court says reasonable accommodations
So MCPS will be able to get away with this policy until someone sues and takes up to the Amy, Samuel, Clarence, Brett, and Neil
after millions of dollars of taxpayer money is wasted
"The last speaker County Council member Kristin Mink"
isn't this supposed to be a place for the public to speak to the school board
they'd probably return Mink's calls
"I am not really a very political person,"
ooh yes, we can all see that
LOL!
"and I didn't know who she was when she sat down"
you went?
"Mink said something true in the board meeting, which is the only thing anybody talks about. She said, "This issue unfortunately does put some, not all of course, some Muslim families on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots"
So what?
In WWII, we were on the same side as Stalin.
And TTF is on the same side as the guy who shot a bunch of people in Philly last week, a the guys that exposed themselves to children at a gay pride parade in Seattle, the Unabomber, pornagraphers, child sex traffickers
people favor the same specific issue for different reasons all the time
this "hero" of TTF made an outrageous remark
hopefully she loses her next election over it
"Room is full of Muslims. They do not want their children to learn about homosexuality, because of their religion."
actualy, they don't want the schools teaching their kids a view of homosexuality that is biased against their religion
"Muslims are literally allying with Moms for Liberty, a white hate group"
Moms for Liberty is not a "white hate group"
MFL has no racist views
as far as "hate", this is another example of how the left distorts the English language to the detriment of society
following their reasoning, if you think that anything any person does, or wants to do is wrong, you hate them
the problem is, this dilutes the word of its power and, hence, makes true hate more widespread
"She got tons of backlash from the press and the Democratic establishment and ended up apologizing. CAIR and some of the Muslims, plus the whole world of rightwing media, accused her of being Islamophobic. Cowardly Council member Evan Glass found a reporter and said “I have spoken with Councilmember Mink about her comments and have expressed my profound disappointment.” Mink's comments were offhandedly referred to as Islamophobic and "a disaster." Because she said what needed to be said and she said it without being afraid to step over somebody's line in the sand"
and because she was wrong
"when our gay and trans neighbors actually came under direct attack, for real, in the school district where it counts, and when one of their colleagues stood up to directly address the situation, and there was some risk of being criticized for saying something, they hid. When we needed their leadership, they were not there"
and by "we", you mean the lunatic fringe
When spoiled toddlers lose a game, they often try to change the rules or otherwise throw a tantrum. That’s how former President Donald Trump handled losing the 2020 election. And it’s evidently how top progressive members of Congress — who endlessly criticize Trump — are handling a slew of recent defeats at the Supreme Court .
The conservative-majority Supreme Court recently ruled against racial discrimination in college admissions, against President Joe Biden’s attempt to twist the law to spend $430 billion on a student loan bailout against Congress’s wishes, and against LGBT activists in a free speech case.
Progressive Democrats are not taking these decisions well. Indeed, they’re responding by effectively calling to destroy the Supreme Court as we know it. "The Supreme Court is corrupt and continues to fail the people of this country," far-Left Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO) tweeted. "Expand the court."
"With this Court demonstrating time & again its contempt for the people, every option must be on the table … expand the Court … Our lives & our democracy depend on it," Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) added.
"People don’t have to live under constant fear of the Supreme Court," Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) concurred. "We can’t sit on our hands while these justices carry out the bidding of right-wing organizations. Expand the Court." Even activist groups like Planned Parenthood got in on the "expand the court" clamor.
What’s this all about?
"Expand the court" is a euphemism for packing the Supreme Court. Packing the courts is a tactic, most often employed by dictators in authoritarian regimes, where courts are rendered irrelevant because they are expanded and filled with cronies who are deferential to the government they’re supposed to be a check on.
The U.S. Supreme Court has had only 9 justices since 1869. However, the number of justices on the high court isn’t formally established by the Constitution. So, Congress could theoretically pass legislation adding more justices to the court and, assuming the president signed that legislation, give the president the opportunity to nominate more justices and skew the Supreme Court in their favor. In the short term, this might mean that more of the president’s agenda gets upheld, even if it’s not actually in line with the Constitution. But in the long term, it would mean the end of the Supreme Court as we know it.
Democrats "expanding" — aka packing — the Supreme Court would lead Republicans to expand it again to rebalance it once they took power. Then Democrats would do it again in response, and so on, leading to a vicious cycle where before you know it, the Supreme Court would have 500 members, none of whom would be viewed as legitimate. The court would become a complete joke.
It has no actual enforcement power, so once the Supreme Court lost its legitimacy, it’d only be a matter of time before government officials stopped complying with its rulings. And boom: We no longer have a third branch of government in any meaningful sense. We’d be reduced to simply hoping that presidents and Congress follow the Constitution, and be left without recourse when they don’t.
Make no mistake: that’s what Democrats are advocating for when they call to "expand" the Supreme Court. It’s an incredibly dangerous idea that would put us on the slipperiest of slopes.
Thankfully, so far, Biden is rejecting these calls coming from within his party. Americans of all political persuasions should hope he maintains this position. If the president caves to extremist Democrats and engages in court-packing, it won’t be long before our system of government becomes something unrecognizable.
Like a magician setting up a trick in one hand while distracting the audience with the other, the Biden White House and its allies are desperately trying to distract the attention of the American people from President Biden’s age, his obvious frailty and his increasing verbal and mental gaffes.
It has now gotten to the point where I have had a number of Democrats — including staunch supporters of the president — tell me it makes them “nervous,” “uncomfortable,” “sad” or gives them a feeling of “foreboding” anytime they watch President Biden speak in public, interact with guests or walk up or down the stairs to Air Force One.
Many I speak with honestly care about the president and want the best for Joe Biden, the human being. They all understand that every person on earth — rich or poor, famous or not — ages out. It is a reality and finality of life which unites us all.
As stated in this space in the past, I don’t believe Biden will be the Democratic nominee in 2024. Now, while the president, his White House and his allies may predictably denounce such speculation as ridiculous or wishful thinking, what if I and others turn out to be correct?
That possibility raises a critically important question: When would be the optimal time for President Biden to announce he’s dropping out of the race to give the Democratic Party the best chance to retain the White House?
A very strong case can be made for: immediately. If the Democratic National Committee is going to open up the primary to other candidates, the sooner the better.
Of course, a Democratic president dropping out of the race for reelection is not without precedent, or irony in this case.
On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson went on national television to make two shocking announcements. The first was that he was halting the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. The second was that he would not seek his party’s nomination for president.
The ironic part of those announcements made 55 years ago is that both may have been forced in part by the words and deeds of then–New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — the father of the man now challenging President Biden for the nomination.
By the time Johnson made those announcements, he was already viewed with deep suspicion by Republicans as the architect of “Big Government,” while many on the left, especially those in college, viewed him as a warmonger spot-welded to the military industrial complex.
Prior to his March 31 remarks, Johnson had shrugged off such criticism. None of that cut deeply.
But then the shadow of Robert F. Kennedy fell across his path. First, via his withering attacks against Johnson on Vietnam. One such rhetorical attack occurred on Feb. 8, when Kennedy declared: “Our enemy, savagely striking at will across all of South Vietnam, has finally shattered the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves, unable to defeat our enemy or break his will — at least without a huge, long and ever more costly effort.”
Kennedy, who truly despised Johnson for a number of reasons, called for the United States to enter into immediate negotiations with North Vietnam to end the war. Next, on March 16, Kennedy declared that he was running to challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president. That announcement came just four days after Johnson barely beat Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary.
Fifteen days after Kennedy declared for the presidency, Johnson withdrew. He had had enough.
Johnson was quickly aging out of the job. Between riots in American cities; the quagmire of the war in Vietnam; his failing poverty programs; his stumble in the New Hampshire primary; and his cloak of inevitability shredding, Johnson was a ball of conflicting insecurities. On top of all that, his public approval rating was hovering around 36 percent. Simply brutal.
Now, over a half a century later, we have President Biden with his very low approval rating being challenged by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
There is one striking difference between Johnson then and Biden now. When he decided in 1968 that he could not handle the stress of the rest of the election cycle — or the uncertainty of what was to come — the 6’4”, physically imposing Lyndon Johnson was only 59 years old; 21 years younger than our current president.
A question some Democrats had in 1968 was whether Johnson waited too long to drop out of the race. One reason for that question was a lack of confidence in then–Vice President Hubert Humphrey to retain the White House should he become the Democratic nominee. That concern was of course realized when Humphrey became the nominee and got crushed in the general election by Republican Richard Nixon.
Some now reasonably worry if history is repeating itself.
If Biden does drop out of the race, will he wait too long to do so? And, should that be the case, will Vice President Kamala Harris — whom few Democrats truly have confidence in — get crushed in the general election by the Republican nominee?
Timing is often as important as strategy. Johnson waited until the last day of March 1968 to drop out. If Biden dropped out now, he would give potential candidates like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg or even Michelle Obama an extra nine months to prepare for November 2024.
“It’s now or never” may prove to be a cliché that defines the upcoming election
Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.
Governments around the world seized unprecedented powers during the pandemic. The result was an unprecedented disaster, as recently demonstrated by two exhaustive analyses of the lockdowns’ impact in the United States and Europe. Both reports conclude that the lockdowns made little or no difference in the Covid death toll. But the lockdowns did lead to deaths from other causes during the pandemic, particularly among young and middle-aged people, and those fatalities will continue to mount in the future.
“Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times,” says Lars Jonung of Lund University in Sweden, a coauthor of one of the new reports. He and two fellow economists, Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University and Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, sifted through nearly 20,000 studies for their book, Did Lockdowns Work?, published in June by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in London. After combining results from the most rigorous studies analyzing fatality rates and the stringency of lockdowns in various states and nations, they estimate that the average lockdown in the United States and Europe during the spring of 2020 reduced Covid mortality by just 3.2 percent. That translates to some 4,000 avoided deaths in the United States—a negligible result compared with the toll from the ordinary flu, which annually kills nearly 40,000 Americans.
Even that small effect may be an overestimate, to judge from the other report, published in February by the Paragon Health Institute. The authors, all former economic advisers to the White House, are Joel Zinberg and Brian Blaise of the institute, Eric Sun of Stanford, and Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago. They analyzed the rates of Covid mortality and of overall excess mortality (the number of deaths above normal from all causes) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They adjusted for the relative vulnerability of each state’s population by factoring in the age distribution (older people were more vulnerable) and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (which increased the risk from Covid). Then they compared the mortality rates over the first two years of the pandemic with the stringency of each state’s policies (as measured on a widely used Oxford University index that tracked business and school closures, stay-at-home requirements, mandates for masks and vaccines, and other restrictions).
The researchers found no statistically significant effect from the restrictions. The mortality rates in states with stringent policies were not significantly different from those in less restrictive states. Two of the largest states, California and Florida, fared the same—their mortality rates both stood at the national average—despite California’s lengthy lockdowns and Florida’s early reopening. New York, with a mortality rate worse than average despite ranking first in the nation in the stringency of its policies, fared the same as the least restrictive state, South Dakota.
Meantime, the lockdowns did have other significant effects on health. Rates of smoking, drinking, and obesity increased. The number of excess deaths from non-Covid causes in the U.S. rose by nearly 100,000 annually due to extra deaths from stroke, heart attack, diabetes, obesity, drug overdoses, alcohol-induced causes, homicide, and traffic accidents. Many of these excess deaths, which occurred disproportionately among working-age adults, were presumably related to the lockdowns’ disruptions in people’s lives and in medical treatments. The delays in screening for heart disease and cancer will continue to have a deadly impact in the years ahead.
So will the economic and social consequences of the lockdowns, which showed up clearly in the Paragon Health Institute comparison of states’ performance. The researchers found that states with the more stringent pandemic restrictions had worse declines in economic output and higher rates of unemployment, and that children in those states lost more days of in-person schooling. These disruptions contributed to a substantial increase in domestic migration, the Paragon researchers found, as people escaped from the more restrictive states and moved to states with less stringent policies.
The lockdowns were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, implemented without evidence that they would work. (In fact, before Covid, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and other nations’ health agencies had specifically advised against lockdowns in their plans for dealing with a pandemic.) The experiment was promoted by computer modelers who projected that 2 million Americans would die by the end of the summer in 2020 unless governments mandated lockdowns, which they estimated would reduce mortality by 80 percent or more. Both estimates turned out to be absurdly wrong—and so was the modelers’ assumption that government mandates were the only way to change people’s behavior.
“Studies early in the pandemic assumed that without lockdowns everyone would be infected because people wouldn’t make any voluntary changes in their behavior,” says Herby, a coauthor of the IEA report. . “But in fact the voluntary social distancing and other changes in behavior had a huge impact, much larger than the lockdowns.” He points to Sweden, where elderly people drastically reduced their shopping and other activities outside the home without being ordered to do so. By avoiding lockdowns and school closures, Sweden fared as well or better than the rest of Europe in preventing Covid deaths while allowing younger people to go on with their lives. It also suffered less social and economic damage: while more people were dying from non-Covid causes in the U.S. and the rest of Europe, that rate of excess mortality declined in Sweden.
Swedes avoided lockdowns partly because of the wisdom of their public-health leaders, and partly because of a provision in the Swedish constitution guaranteeing freedom of movement to citizens. Constraining the power of government officials improved Sweden’s ability to cope with Covid. That lesson applies to other emergencies, too, according to Christian Bjørnskov, a Danish economist who has compared casualty rates in natural disasters around the world.
Bjørnskov and a German colleague, Stefan Voigt, have found that fewer people die from natural disasters in countries with laws that restrict the power of national leaders during an emergency. If leaders are unconstrained—if they can suspend people’s personal and economic liberties—then the disruptions hinder people’s voluntary efforts to deal with the disaster. After a hurricane, for instance, local officials and citizens will normally aid their stricken neighbors, but they’re less inclined to act if the national government takes charge by suspending property rights to commandeer boats, vehicles, and other local resources. “Civil society is more likely to help if the authorities are not allowed to run roughshod over private citizens,” Bjørnskov says. “It is also much more likely that the authorities will misuse their emergency powers for their own uses, diverting resources toward purposes that have nothing to do with the emergency. They increase spending and regulation, and it takes longer for the country to get back to normal.”
That was certainly the case during the pandemic, as politicians went on budget-busting binges that showered money on special interests and pet projects that had nothing to do with Covid. To reward teachers’ unions for their support, politicians kept schools closed long after it was obvious that they could be safely reopened. The inflationary effects of the spending have slowed the economic recovery from the pandemic, and the school closures have set children back so far that many will never catch up. One estimate suggests that the average American student will earn 6 percent less over the course of a lifetime because of learning loss during the pandemic.
Predictably, the officials responsible for the damage are ignoring these consequences and seeking even more power in the future. CDC officials are planning to be more aggressive in the next pandemic, and the World Health Organization wants countries to sign a new pandemic treaty giving the WHO the authority of international law to order lockdowns and other measures.
If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic and earlier disasters, we ought to be doing precisely the opposite by enacting new limits on government power during emergencies. Americans need what Swedes have enjoyed: legal protection against autocrats posing as saviors.
The military went woke, and now it’s facing a significant recruiting shortfall. Yes, those two things are connected.
Last year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent. This year, it’s on track for a similar performance. The Navy probably will miss its goal by more than 25 percent. The Air Force by 10 percent. The Marines are doing the best. The Corps met its recruiting goal last year and expects to do so again this year.
Numbers this bad would always present a problem. But the looming possibility of war with China in the South Pacific makes fixing this an urgent priority.
“Influencers are not telling them to go into the military,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Wall Street Journal. “Moms and dads, uncles, coaches and pastors don’t see it as a good choice.”
That’s a huge problem because nearly 4 in 5 Army recruits had a relative who served.
Something has changed.
The military embraced woke dogma. A quick definition. “Woke” began as a term of the left. It described people who had woken up to the supposed reality of systemic racism or sexism. For instance, critical race theory contends that group membership determines outcomes. Someone who believes or acts on that is woke.
For instance, the military has embraced transgender propaganda. You can pick your career field and your gender. The Department of Defense recently promoted an article about a military officer “living authentically” by deciding he was a woman. Transgender soldiers can be also receive exemptions from fitness standards. The military has embraced “diversity, equity and inclusion,” too. One Army general called diversity “a key American strategic asset.”
Leave aside your thoughts on the merits of these policies. But they and many like them reflect left-wing ideology. Military recruits are disproportionately from red states, such as Florida, South Carolina and Alabama. Veterans tend to be more Republican, too. Go figure they’re talking down military service.
These woke messages are counterproductive recruiting tools. For most 18-year-old guys, authentic living is rotting their brains on video games and pornography. One appeal of military service is the chance to be part of something greater than yourself by sacrificing your individual desires. Emphasizing this helps the Marines fare best in recruiting.
The diversity push is also nonsense. The military discriminates routinely. If you’re too overweight, old, dumb or disabled, you aren’t joining. That’s why 77 percent of young adults aren’t qualified for service.
Prizing diversity over competence is dangerous. When an enemy soldier is trying to kill you, racial diversity doesn’t make his bullets and bombs less deadly. Ironically, having objective standards in pursuit of a higher purpose is a great way to foster racial and cultural unity. When your life depends on your fellow soldiers, their skin color and background becomes trivial.
By going woke, the U.S. military is losing recruits and diminishing readiness.
“Influencers are not telling them to go into the military,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Wall Street Journal. “Moms and dads, uncles, coaches and pastors don’t see it as a good choice.”
That’s a huge problem because nearly 4 in 5 Army recruits had a relative who served.
Something has changed."
Indeed. Something has changed. But "wokeness" - whatever right-wingers are defining that now as, is not the problem. You don't have to make up excuses when 4 out of 5 recruits have a relative who served.
Those people have seen their relatives come back for 20 years from a "War on Terror," much of which was fought under false pretenses of the imminent threat of "Weapons of Mass Destruction," the only ones of which were found had been buried too long in the desert to be safe to fire.
Even after Osama was killed under Obama's watch - in neither Afghanistan or Iraq - the two countries we invaded - we still kept thousands of troops over in the sand killing people, making more enemies than friends. Unfortunately the victims were more likely to be innocent civilians rather than actual combatants, despite reassurances from our military that they were doing everything possible to minimize "collateral damage."
And what did many of our troops come home to? The lingering effects of traumatic brain damage, PTSD, and a VA system never financed and staffed well enough to properly take care of them all.
It's easy to recruit naïve young kids to war when they've never seen one and you can hide all the consequences wrapped in flags and patriotic rhetoric. But this generation of kids were born AFTER 9/11, so they didn't see the attacks. All they've seen is their relatives go off to war for years, and if they come back it's a hollow shell of their former selves, and many are struggling with suicides rate the military has never seen before.
And after 20 years of that, what do we really have to show for it? That after 9/11, we didn't have another similar attack on US soil? Did it really take that many soldiers and trillions of dollars and breaking these people to actually accomplish that?
If it did, what does a young person have to look forward to if they join the military now? Maybe they will get lucky and not be sent off into a generational war for dubious reasons?
These kids aren't stupid.
And in 2021, Biden created 6.7 million jobs - more than any president in history for a single year - while we were recovering from Trump's disastrous pandemic response.
As it is America's poor that often fill large portions of our military recruiting, as they desperately seek a way out of poverty, you can blame Joe Biden for creating so many jobs that they decided to stay home and work instead of a thankless and abusive stint in the military.
"this generation of kids were born AFTER 9/11, so they didn't see the attacks. All they've seen is their relatives go off to war for years, and if they come back it's a hollow shell of their former selves, and many are struggling with suicides rate the military has never seen before"
Might make sense except this is nothing new and the decline is more closely correlated to the DOD embrace of the gay agenda. Even Obama didn't have drag shows on bases.
This is a Biden thing.
btw, your view puts you in agreement with Trump on the issue of military intervention. Hate to tell you, but by TTF logic, you're a MAGA man.
The big four victims of the gay backlash so far are:
1. Bud Light
2. Target
3. U.S. military
4. Disney
Visitors to Disney theme parks this summer are encountering something they haven’t seen in a while: elbow room.
Travel analysts and advisers say traffic to Disney’s U.S. parks has slowed this summer. Data from a travel company that tracks line-waiting time at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., shows that the Independence Day weekend was one of the slowest in nearly a decade.
Disney executives have said they have expected weaker earnings from their U.S. parks this year. The Orlando-area resort is even offering hotel discounts around Christmas, typically a peak period.
"btw, your view puts you in agreement with Trump on the issue of military intervention. Hate to tell you, but by TTF logic, you're a MAGA man"
LOL!
If Muslims agree with white supremacists, according to TTF, they are as bad
So, if a TTFer, agrees with Trump, they are MAGA maggots
"closely correlated to the DOD embrace of the gay agenda"
Correlation is not causation.
"the decline is more closely correlated to the DOD embrace of the gay agenda. Even Obama didn't have drag shows on bases."
Folks born shortly after 9/11 weren't old enough to enlist during Obama's presidency - they didn't start reaching recruitment age until a few years ago.
"Disney executives have said they have expected weaker earnings from their U.S. parks this year. The Orlando-area resort is even offering hotel discounts around Christmas, typically a peak period."
Yeah, I posted about that a few days ago - folks and businesses are cancelling their trips to Florida because of DeSantis' jump to the fascist right. This isn't a surprise. Ron scaring out immigrant workers from the state probably isn't helping either.
A federal court in Texas imposed 90 consecutive life sentences to the man who killed 23 people and injured 23 others in a xenophobia-inspired mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.
Patrick Crusius pleaded guilty in February to 90 federal charges, including hate crimes, and was awaiting sentencing.
“The 90 consecutive life sentences announced today guarantee that Patrick Crusius will spend the rest of his life in prison for his deadly, racist rampage in El Paso. We are grateful to the victims and their family members who have spent the last three days bravely sharing the devastation and pain they endured because of Crusius’s horrendous crimes. The Justice Department’s commitment to combating hate crimes is unwavering,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
Among U.S. Hispanics and immigrants, the 2019 massacre has become a key symbol of the dangers of radicalized xenophobia.
Crusius explicitly laid out his intentions in a 2,300-word manifesto that intertwined racial, ethnic and political bigotry with broader economic and environmental concerns.
The manifesto directly targeted “Mexicans” and “Hispanics” and said his attack would remove the “incentives” for more migrants to come to the United States.
The sentencing hearing began Wednesday, with survivors and victims’ family and friends confronting Crusius and reading victim statements in court.
Crusius will now face trial in Texas courts, where prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.
“Violent language that encourages and cultivates the climate for violence cannot be ignored. When hateful rhetoric comes from political leaders, it is a danger to democracy and people’s lives,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a progressive immigration advocacy group.
“We’ve had to issue a disturbing volume of similar statements and reflections commemorating trial developments and anniversaries of horrific acts of white nationalist hate connected to the ‘invasion’ and ‘replacement’ rhetoric.”
Immigrant advocates have grown increasingly concerned about a rising tone on immigration and mainstreaming of the Great Replacement Theory, which states that foreign immigrants are purposely being brought into the country to replace white Americans.
Crucius directly appealed to the theory, taking inspiration from the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings, where a gunman killed 51 people and injured 40 others.
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Crucius wrote.
The term “invasion” became commonplace during the 2022 midterm elections, with GOP candidates from border and interior states alike used it as a centerpiece of their border security messaging.
It has also taken hold in the 2024 presidential race, as former President Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) compete to present the more hawkish vision on immigration.
The use of previously off-limits terminology — a staple of anti-woke politics — has advocates on edge.
“Despite the proven real world dangers, they’ve escalated their use of the ‘invasion’ and ‘replacement’ conspiracies in the last four years, seemingly not caring that this rhetoric comes with a body count,” said Mario Carrillo, campaigns manager for America’s Voice.
------------
Republicans can't wait to be first in line to ban books that mention gay people because it might "turn" some people gay.
But they have no problem with xenophobic rhetoric that might turn someone violent.
Why is that?
Trump said over the weekend that Joe Biden is the most corrupt president in history. Uh huh. Check out his latest grift with his good pals the Saudis:
"The LIV Golf League’s season-ending team championship will be played at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami for the second straight year.
LIV Golf League officials announced Monday that the $50 million team championship will be played Oct. 20-22 at Trump National Doral, which is owned by former U.S. President Donald Trump.
The three-day team championship was originally scheduled to be played Nov. 3-5 at Royal Greens Golf & Country Club in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. LIV Golf League officials have been working to move it back to Trump National Doral, where it was staged in the league’s inaugural season in 2022. The Jeddah event, now scheduled for Oct. 13-15, will be the final regular-season tournament."
The Republicans are relentlessly investigating Hunter Biden’s alleged influence peddling from years ago. This is not of interest to them. Hmmm.
And let's not forget:
Report: Jared Kushner’s $2 Billion Saudi Check Appears Even More Comically Corrupt Than Previously Thought
And:
Ivanka Trump won China trademarks days before her father's reversal on ZTE
A Florida Republican lobbyist’s attempt to sue the young woman at the center of the Rep. Matt Gaetz underage sex trafficking scandal has backfired in spectacular fashion, with the woman filing a response that repeatedly accuses the lobbyist of raping her.
In this hot weather us Little Mouses have been hiding out down in the wine cellar of this church, and I missed some news. We're back aboveground now, well except for Grandma Mouse, who says it's still too hot for her. She is behind the Cabernet, I think, with a comfy little bed of spider webs. It took her half a day but she was able to chew the cork out of a big jug, and she's good down there for a few more days, I think.
So this Republican Congressman raped an underage girl, took her across state lines, and he's still in Congress, making decisions that affect the rest of you humans? And you're all right with that?
This other Republican bozo tried to sue the girl who was raped Gaetz, claiming his career was destroyed by the bad press in the controversy that erupted, and kaboom, her lawyers file for dismissal with papers showing that this lobbyist also raped her when she was underage. Now he is, how do you say? -- screwed. Little Mouses call that Dum Bee, what do humans call it?
Many people in India now are foregoing in-person contact with a guru interpreting the Bhagavad Gita and turning to online chatbots, which imitate the voice of the Hindu god Krishna and give answers to probing questions about the meaning of life using plausible-sounding random words based on the religious scripture's teachings. It's new technology with the tendency to veer off script, condone violence, and say crazy stuff, according to experts, who warn that artificial intelligence chatbots playing god can be a dangerous mix.
At least five Gita chatbots appeared online in early 2023, powered by the GPT-3 language model. They're using a kind of unintelligent artificial intelligence, which simulates a conversation and creates answers based on statistical probability models. The sites say they have millions of users.
Us Little Mouses were just saying the other day, you know what, we miss George Carlin. Can you imagine what he'd do with something like this?
"Correlation is not causation"
of course not
but when it doesn't exist, there is clearly no causation
the idea that military recruitment has fallen during Biden's term because young adults have "seen their relatives go off to war for years, and if they come back it's a hollow shell of their former selves" is not accurate
the current military involvements have far lower US casualty rates than those of the past
also, being born after 9/11 doesn't make one nonchalant about an attack on US soil
the bizarre military embrace of transgenderism under Biden is more likely the culprit
"Yeah, I posted about that a few days ago - folks and businesses are cancelling their trips to Florida because of DeSantis' jump to the fascist right."
well, DeSantis took action against Disney
if you wanted to send him a message, it would be to flood Disney with business and boycott other Floridian businesses
Disney attendance is down because it embraced the gay agenda assault on Florida's young kids
"Republicans can't wait to be first in line to ban books that mention gay people because it might "turn" some people gay"
there are no Republicans advocating banning books
calling efforts to make sure young children have age appropriate reading material "banning books" reveals why gay agenda advocates should not be in decision-making roles in elementary education
they imply that if young kids aren't exposed to every book, that is "banning bboks"
you wouldn't have young kids reading Kama Sutra or Mein Kampf
under TTF mentality that would be "banning books"
twisting language is a major component of gay agenda propaganda effort
"Trump said over the weekend that Joe Biden is the most corrupt president in history. Uh huh. Check out his latest grift with his good pals the Saudis"
Trump is not President or any other type of government official
there is no influence to peddle
the Biden crime family is alleged to have taken bribes while Slidin' Joe was involved in a policy-making role with the government
Angel Studios’ recent film “Sound of Freedom,” which adapts the true story of a government agent-turned-vigilante who works within legal means to fight an international child sex trafficking ring, is receiving great commercial success and critical acclaim.
Briefly outperforming the latest pile of Disney slop, “Sound of Freedom” is a well-produced and well-acted film that effectively blends action and suspense while pushing one of the modern world’s most significant — yet under-discussed — issues to the forefront of public discourse. This issue, of course, being the multibillion-dollar, global human trafficking industry.
The point of the movie, as expressed by its star Jim Caviezel in a heartfelt mid-credits call to action, is to wake people up to the horrors of the all-too-real and overlooked exploitation of children in the contemporary sex trade.
This seems like a pretty harmless task, no? If anything, one would think that a widely popular cultural phenomenon attempting to encourage people to stand against the ongoing exploitation of children is a net positive.
However, perhaps unsurprisingly, left-wing media took the opportunity to lambaste “Sound of Freedom” as “a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms” and a “Trafficking Fantasy Fit for Qanon.”
Rolling Stone, placing a comically outsized focus on the “near-total absence of procedural logic” and the film’s embellishment of real-life events (it is a movie, after all), kvetched about Caviezel’s and Tim Ballard’s (the man whose story “Sound of Freedom” adapted) conservative affiliations, impassioned anti-human trafficking activism, and the possibility that they may believe in the “Qanon” conspiracy theory.
Rolling Stone, incredibly concerned about the film “enforcing stereotypes about trafficking,” downplayed the reality of the international human trafficking trade by suggesting “thousands of adults will absorb Sound of Freedom” as a “vigilante fever dream” and that “wanting to spread the word” about the reality of this international trade is “profoundly depressing.”
Other media cynically amplified skepticism about the film’s intentions by suggesting that Caviezel’s anti-human trafficking activism is being used to “peddle Qanon theories.”
And The Washington Post similarly cast aside the film’s message because of past statements made by Caviezel regarding “adrenochrome” and Ballard’s work insufficiently passing the leftist ideological smell test. Evidently, raising awareness about and working to stop child sex trafficking is irrelevant if you don’t properly adhere to the contemporary, politically correct orthodoxy.
In reality, human trafficking is a relevant issue; even the United Nations agrees. But left-wing media would rather drool over the specter of an irrelevant conspiracy theory than acknowledge that conservative Americans are working to effect positive change.
"calling efforts to make sure young children have age appropriate reading material "banning books" reveals why gay agenda advocates should not be in decision-making roles in elementary education"
Schools already choose age appropriate materials for children. The fact that some of them mention Johnny has two dads or that Billy likes to wear dresses is simply not the pornographic or dangerous materials that right-wing authoritarians project it to be.
Twisting language is a major component of the Christian Nationalist movement. That's who CRT, a legal theory taught to graduate law students, suddenly became part and parcel of elementary "woke indoctrination." The Christian Nationalists and Dominionists twisted any mention of race and historical events they didn't like into "CRT" and made it a boogie-man to incite parents into loud and aggressive behavior at school board meetings.
"you wouldn't have young kids reading Kama Sutra or Mein Kampf"
Of course not. But a kid's book about two male penguins hatching an egg simply doesn't fall into anything close to the Kama Sutra, and that's what they're banning. There's that twisting language thing you like to do so much again.
And middle and high-school kids should be taught about Mein Kampf - it will show them how similar the zenophobic and homophobic views of Tiny Mustache Guy eventually led to genocide and WWII. The parallels they can draw to the current right-wing militia movement, nationalism and Christian Dominionism here in the US should be eye-opening for them.
No wonder conservatives want to ban "Maus" (about the holocaust) from schools. They don't want the young kids catching on to what they're doing.
For conspiracy theorists, adrenochrome represents a mystical psychedelic favored by the global elites for drug-crazed satanic rites, derived from torturing children to harvest their oxidized hormonal fear—a kind of real-life staging of the Pixar movie Monsters, Inc. “QAnon also likes to say that Monsters, Inc. is Hollywood telling on itself,” says QAnon researcher Mike Rains, “because the plot of scaring kids to get energy is what they really do.”
The highest-profile adrenochrome incident took place in 2018, when Google CEO Sundar Pichai was questioned by the House Judiciary Committee about a conspiracy called “Frazzledrip.” (“Heard of Frazzledrip?” reads one comment on The Sisters of Mercy song.) The crackpot theory involved a mythical video, supposedly squirreled away on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, that if leaked, would show Hillary Clinton and her one-time aide Huma Abedin performing a satanic sacrifice in which they slurped a child’s blood while wearing masks carved from the skin of her face.
Code-named “Frazzledrip,” the video was supposed to depict an adrenochrome “harvest.” It never materialized. But the drug has since become a common reference in conspiracies of the far right. In the past year, the compound has been name-checked by German soul singer Xavier Naidoo, right-wing evangelical and failed congressional candidate Dave Daubenmire, and ex-tabloid writer-turned-QAnon conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin.
“There’s a lot of anons [QAnon adherents] that believe the white hats tainted the elite’s adrenochrome supply with the coronavirus, and that’s why so many members of the elite are getting the coronavirus,” Crokin said in a YouTube video from March, reported by Right Wing Watch. “Adrenochrome is a drug that the elites love. It comes from children. The drug is extracted from the pituitary gland of tortured children. It’s sold on the black market. It’s the drug of the elites. It is their favorite drug. It is beyond evil. It is demonic. It is so sick. So there is a theory that the white hats tainted the adrenochrome supply with the coronavirus.”
Social media is filled with adrenochrome theories. From January of 2018, adrenochrome truthers also gathered on the subreddit r/adrenochrome, until the website banned it two weeks ago. A Reddit spokesperson told The Daily Beast the page had been suspended after its moderator was banned for violating their content policies (they declined to specify which). “The community was then banned because it was unmoderated,” the spokesperson said.
Those in search of adrenochrome theories, however, can still find them on Facebook, YouTube, or Amazon, where several self-published titles on the subject appear in top search results. (After The Daily Beast contacted Amazon about several of these books, they disappeared from the website. Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) One Facebook group, called “Adrenochrome / Adrenaline (Epinephrine),” provides a 70-part introduction to the drug, with chapter titles along the lines of: The Epstein/JonBenét CONNECTION and The deep meaning behind Justin Bieber’s ‘Yummy.’ The group has 22,460 members.
“The use of Adrenochrome is Prevalent in our Society and it Time we had a Mass Awakening to these Fact's and Started become Educated in the Reasons,” the group’s description reads. “WHY , HOW , WHEN , WHO , WHERE and WHY we should be more ‘Open Eye'd’ to our Society from the TOP DOWN .........................” [sic].
Mike Lindell’s war against machines is costing him some of his own machines.
The MyPillow CEO is auctioning off company equipment after major retailers such as Walmart dropped his products due to his wild election conspiracy theories.
“It was a massive, massive cancellation,” Lindell told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “We lost $100 million from attacks by the box stores, the shopping networks, the shopping channels, all of them did cancel culture on us.”
As a result, bargain hunters in the Minneapolis area have a chance to bid on MyPillow equipment including trucks, forklifts, air compressors, sewing machines, computers and more.
Lindell told WCCO, the CBS station in Minneapolis, that he has a pile of unsold inventory and that he’s been shifting workers around to avoid layoffs.
“I do every customer like my only customer and every employee like my only employee,” he told the station.
Plunging sales aren’t his only financial problem.
Lindell was ordered to pay $5 million to a man who won a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest at his 2021 “cyber-symposium” where he challenged experts to examine his data, which he claimed proved Donald Trump really won the 2020 election.
It didn’t, and one expert who looked at the data demanded the prize.
Lindell refused to pay, so the case went to court, where he lost.
He’s also facing a $1.3 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems over his lies about the 2020 election, some of which center around voting machines made by the company.
He continues to stand by his debunked claims, insisting that machines were used to steal the election and filing an endless series of lawsuits, including one he claimed was “a class-action lawsuit against all machines.”
President Biden will never admit it, but he has Republican-led states to thank for the resilient U.S. economy and labor market. Witness how an earnings surge in right-leaning states is helping compensate for sluggish growth in progressive ones.
New state personal income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis highlights how aggregate worker and proprietor earnings in red states grew significantly more in the last year than in the blues. The disparity owes to GOP-led states adding more jobs, including in higher-paying industries like tech and finance, along with faster-growing wages.
Earnings nationwide rose 5.4% on average between the first quarters of 2022 and 2023, but much less in New York (2.6%), California (2.9%), Connecticut (3.4%), Rhode Island (3.6%), Maryland (4%), New Jersey (4.3%), Oregon (4.5%) and Illinois (4.6%). These states are run by Democrats—and most have been for years. They boast high taxes and a high cost of living, which along with Covid lockdowns spurred increased out-migration during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, earnings in the same period surged in North Dakota (9.7%), Nevada (9.1%), Florida (9.1%), Nebraska (8.6%), South Carolina (8%), Alaska (7.9%) and Texas (7.7%).
States with higher earnings growth tend to have lower tax rates as well as fast-growing populations. Consider neighboring Utah (7.2%) and Colorado (4.9%), which have similar economies but diverging political climates as Colorado becomes more like California. That is affecting its earnings growth.
Progressive states have sought to shower subsidies on favored industries such as green energy. Yet earnings in Texas and Florida grew faster across the board than in New York and California, including in information, manufacturing, construction, retail, finance, and professional, scientific and technical services.
Manufacturing earnings grew 11.1% in Texas and 8.7% in Florida, versus 5.5% in New York and 2.5% in California. While information earnings declined 1.5% in New York and 9% in California, they grew 6.7% in Florida and 9.9% in Texas. Construction earnings grew five times faster in Florida (10.1%) and Texas (11.7%) than in New York (1.7%) and California (1.8%).
Population growth in Sun Belt states such as Florida and Texas continues to fuel housing construction despite rising interest rates. Easier permitting makes it less expensive to build, resulting in more affordable housing.
Wages have also been growing faster in general in GOP-led states. Average private hourly earnings between March 2022 and March 2023 outpaced inflation in Texas (6%) and Florida (6.4%), but not in Illinois (1.4%), New York (2.7%) and California (3.2%). That means real wages in these blue states declined by 2% to 3%.
It’s no surprise that more Americans are moving to states where wages are growing faster and their earnings go further. Maybe one reason the U.S. economy continues to chug along is because the rising tide in states like Florida and Texas is lifting all boats.
"Schools already choose age appropriate materials for children"
yes, they do
and, in our democratic society, it's fair for parents to question if they've made the right choices
'
CRT, a legal theory taught to graduate law students, suddenly became part and parcel of elementary "woke indoctrination.""
it is all over public school curriculums
if not, why the liberal reaction to keeping it out of public schools?
"Of course not. But a kid's book about two male penguins hatching an egg simply doesn't fall into anything close to the Kama Sutra, and that's what they're banning."
you miss the point
you use the term "ban books" to apply to activities that are commonplace
you aren't against what you are fallaciously calling book banning
you are all in favor of banning books
you just don't want those books to be part of the gay agenda
"And middle and high-school kids should be taught about Mein Kampf"
oh, I agree
just not to promote anti-semitism
similarly, books about homosexuality would be OK if the discussion could be free
but, part of the gay agenda is too silence any opinion that is not in line with the gay agenda
A youth minister at Celebration Church in Jacksonville Florida has been arrested and charged with six counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. The victim told police that he went to the minister's home several times for “bible study.” When he was approached by police, the youth minister spontaneously told the officer that he is “working with a ‘student’ through his church,” and that the student is “struggling with same-sex attraction.”
Us Little Mouses definitely don't go around in the name of the Lord doing anal Bible study with children.
CRT, a legal theory taught to graduate law students, suddenly became part and parcel of elementary "woke indoctrination.""
it is all over public school curriculums
if not, why the liberal reaction to keeping it out of public schools?"
Because you're not actually banning CRT from schools, you're pretty much just banning discussion of black history from schools if it doesn't align with your indoctrination. That's part of the Christian Nationalist agenda - to silence any opinion that doesn't align with the far-right Christian agenda.
Christians are insinuating themselves into the public schools because they can't indoctrinate enough children in churches anymore, and they don't want a multi-cultural, educated, egalitarian society where white Christianity isn't privileged above other races and religions like it has been since the country's founding.
And they're trying to fill up young people with as much right-wing propaganda while they're at it. That isn't education - it's indoctrination.
Cynthia Dunbar does not have a high regard for her local schools. She has called them unconstitutional, tyrannical and tools of perversion. The conservative Texas lawyer has even likened sending children to her state's schools to "throwing them in to the enemy's flames". Her hostility runs so deep that she educated her own offspring at home and at private Christian establishments.
Now Dunbar is on the brink of fulfilling a promise to change all that, or at least point Texas schools toward salvation. She is one of a clutch of Christian evangelists and social conservatives who have grasped control of the state's education board. This week they are expected to force through a new curriculum that is likely to shift what millions of American schoolchildren far beyond Texas learn about their history.
The board is to vote on a sweeping purge of alleged liberal bias in Texas school textbooks in favour of what Dunbar says really matters: a belief in America as a nation chosen by God as a beacon to the world, and free enterprise as the cornerstone of liberty and democracy.
"We are fighting for our children's education and our nation's future," Dunbar said. "In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections."
Those corrections have prompted a blizzard of accusations of rewriting history and indoctrinating children by promoting rightwing views on religion, economics and guns while diminishing the science of evolution, the civil rights movement and the horrors of slavery.
Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favoured separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the "significant contributions" of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.
The new curriculum asserts that "the right to keep and bear arms" is an important element of a democratic society. Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favour of examining scientific advances through military technology.
There is also a suggestion that the anti-communist witch-hunt by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s may have been justified.
The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous "Atlantic triangular trade", and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism.
"There is a battle for the soul of education," said Mavis Knight, a liberal member of the Texas education board. "They're trying to indoctrinate with American exceptionalism, the Christian founding of this country, the free enterprise system. There are strands where the free enterprise system fits appropriately but they have stretched the concept of the free enterprise system back to medieval times. The president of the Texas historical association could not find any documentation to support the stretching of the free enterprise system to ancient times but it made no difference."
The curriculum has alarmed liberals across the country in part because Texas buys millions of text books every year, giving it considerable sway over what publishers print. By some estimates, all but a handful of American states rely on text books written to meet the Texas curriculum. The California legislature is considering a bill that would bar them from being used in the state's schools.
In the past four years, Christian conservatives have won almost half the seats on the Texas education board and can rely on other Republicans for support on most issues. They previously tried to require science teachers to address the "strengths and weaknesses" in the theory of evolution – a move critics regard as a back door to teaching creationism – but failed. They have had more success in tackling history and social studies.
Dunbar backed amendments to the curriculum that portray the free enterprise system (there is no mention of capitalism, deemed to be a tainted word) as a cornerstone of liberty and argue that the government should have a minimal role in the economy.
One amendment requires that students be taught that economic prosperity requires "minimal government intrusion and taxation".
Underpinning the changes is a particular view of religion.
Dunbar was elected to the state education board on the back of a campaign in which she argued for the teaching of creationism – euphemistically known as intelligent design – in science classes.
Two years ago, she published a book, One Nation Under God, in which she argued that the United States was ultimately governed by the scriptures.
"The only accurate method of ascertaining the intent of the founding fathers at the time of our government's inception comes from a biblical worldview," she wrote. "We as a nation were intended by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world."
On the education board, Dunbar backed changes that include teaching the role the "Jewish Ten Commandments" played in "political and legal ideas", and the study of the influence of Moses on the US constitution. Dunbar says these are important steps to overturning what she believes is the myth of a separation between church and state in the US.
"There's been this amorphous changing of how we look at religion and how we define religion within American history. One concern I have is that the viewpoint of the founding fathers is very clear. They were not against the promotion of religion. I think it is important to present a historically accurate viewpoint to students," she said.
On the face of it some of the changes are innocuous but critics say that closer scrutiny reveals a not-so-hidden agenda. History students are now to be required to study documents, such as the Mayflower Compact, which instil the idea of America being founded as a Christian fundamentalist nation.
Knight and others do not question that religion was an important force in American history but they fear that it is being used as a Trojan horse by evangelists to insert religious indoctrination into the school curriculum. They point to the wording of amendments such as that requiring students to "describe how religion and virtue contributed to the growth of representative government in the American colonies".
Among the advisers the board brought in to help rewrite the curriculum is David Barton, the leader of WallBuilders which seeks to promote religion in history. Barton has campaigned against the separation of church and state. He argues that income tax should be abolished because it contradicts the bible. Among his recommendations was that pupils should be taught that the declaration of independence establishes that the creator is at the heart of law, government and individual rights.
Conservatives have been accused of an assault on the history of civil rights. One curriculum amendment describes the civil rights movement as creating "unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes" among minorities. Another seeks to place Martin Luther King and the violent Black Panther movement as opposite sides of the same coin.
"We had a big discussion around that," said Knight, a former teacher. "It was an attempt to taint the civil rights movement. They did the same by almost equating George Wallace [the segregationist governor of Alabama in the mid-1960s] with the civil rights movement and the things Martin Luther King Jr was trying to accomplish, as if Wallace was standing up for white civil rights. That's how slick they are.
"They're very smooth at excluding the contributions of minorities into the curriculum. It is as if they want to render minority groups totally invisible. I think it's racist. I really do."
The blizzard of amendments has produced the occasional farce. Some figures have been sidelined because they are deemed to be socialist or un-American. One of them is a children's author, Bill Martin, who wrote a popular tale, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Martin was purged from the curriculum when he was confused with an author with a similar name but a different book, Ethical Marxism.
"Because you're not actually banning CRT from schools, you're pretty much just banning discussion of black history from schools if it doesn't align with your indoctrination. That's part of the Christian Nationalist agenda - to silence any opinion that doesn't align with the far-right Christian agenda.
Christians are insinuating themselves into the public schools because they can't indoctrinate enough children in churches anymore, and they don't want a multi-cultural, educated, egalitarian society where white Christianity isn't privileged above other races and religions like it has been since the country's founding.
And they're trying to fill up young people with as much right-wing propaganda while they're at it. That isn't education - it's indoctrination."
this little bit of demagoguery seems to imply that opposition to CRT teaching in the schools is connected to Christianity
that has no basis
indeed, most members of minority groups are as likely to be Christian as whites
"insinuating" is an anti-euphemism for participation
despite your anti-religious bias, Christians have the same rights to a public education as anyone else
Dems famously lost a recent election in Virginia when the Dem candidate declared that parents have no right to influence curriculum
TTF candidates who reveal their true intentions don't get far
I don’t know if climate change models are right or wrong.
But the way the media now reports on weather - not broad climate issues, but day-to-day weather - has bugged me for a while, and last night it hit, literally, close to home.
Climate reporting in the elite media has become a series of endless, breathlessly reported firsts and 1-in-1,000 year events. The hottest June ever in Houston. The driest August in Tokyo. The wettest April in London. The biggest wildfire in Quebec.
Oddly, one regularly finds these factoids on ESPN too: Player X is the first rookie to average 15 points, 2.2 blocks, and 1.8 steals per game since 2014. The numbers are good, but rarely as special as the framing makes them seem. They come from producers running database dives. Slice the pie thinly enough, and a decent player looks great.
Where ESPN is hoping to impress its viewers, the extreme weather statistics have a different purpose: to frighten. They’re meant to make readers believe that a climate apocalypse is upon us and that only by giving up gas stoves - not private planes, never private planes, only gas stoves - can we survive.
Last night, a big thunderstorm hit New York’s Hudson Valley, where I live. (I wasn’t home.)
Yes, a thunderstorm in July in the Northeast.
Shocker, I know.
This one was particularly slow-moving, though, and it dumped a lot of rain. Or, as the Daily News reported, “Storm in New York’s Hudson Valley kills one, brings 9 inches of rain: ‘1,000 year event.’
1000-year-event?
Okay, the rain event hit not the United States, or even New York, or even southern New York, or even the Hudson Valley.
That rain dump covered, wait for it, a handful of towns. For some reason a storm cell got hung up just over the Hudson River - maybe there’s a good meteorological explanation for why, maybe not. It drenched the area to the west and slightly to the east of the river with two months of rain in a few hours.
Whole lotta rain, for sure. Our house is in that blotch somewhere. I felt bad not to be home, until I got the update from my older daughter this morning: it rained, we lost power, the generator came on, the power came back on. Two of the three kids slept through it all.
The end.
But that’s just one storm. We all know that climate change is bringing death and destruction worldwide. We all know its ravages increase every year.
Except they don’t.
In 2021, the World Meteorological Organization, which is part of the United Nations, released a 90-page “Atlas of Mortality And Economic Losses From Weather, Climate, and Water Extremes.”
Weather-related deaths rose slightly from the 1970s through the 1980s. They have plunged 75 percent since, even though the population has nearly doubled. Over the last decade, fewer than 50 people a day died from extreme weather - on a planet that now has 8,000,000,000 people.
The explanation for this apparent contradiction is simple. Hurricanes and drought-driven famines in very poor countries drive most weather-related deaths. Wealthy and even middle-income countries can easily mitigate the effects of short-term extreme weather. To take an obvious example, anyone with a car can easily escape a hurricane, provided even a few hours notice.
And the world, as whole, is far richer than it was in 1970. At that point, 60 percent of the world’s population - 2.2 billion of the 3.7 billion people alive at the time - lived in extreme poverty, less than $450 per year. By 2016, the number had fallen to 700 million out of 7.3 billion, fewer than 10 percent.
Of course, energy consumption both drives and rises with economic growth.
So the question is not if climate change is real. It is if climate change hysteria, driven largely by people so wealthy that they will continue to live exactly as they do now whatever happens to the global economy, threatens to undo the economic growth that has been the most important factor reducing deaths from extreme weather.
Or we could just keep looking for 1000-year-floods to scream over.
A humble lake in a Canadian suburb may soon become the symbolic starting point for a radical new chapter in Earth’s official history: the Anthropocene, or the age of humans.
The announcement marks a crucial step in a years-long effort to determine whether people have altered the planet enough to launch a new epoch in geologic time. Since 2009, an obscure scientific body called the Anthropocene Working Group has accumulated evidence that Earth’s chemistry and climate are fundamentally different from the conditions of the last several thousand years. The final requirement was to identify a “golden-spike” — a spot in the geologic record that perfectly preserved the dangerous transformation humans have wrought.
Crawford Lake shows that “all the different components of the Earth system and the way they interact with one another are fundamentally different than they used to be,” said Francine McCarthy, a professor of Earth sciences at Brock University in Ontario who led the working group’s research on the lake. “We felt it was the best place to illustrate this existential issue.”
A group of scientists said Tuesday the best evidence for humanity’s overwhelming impact on the planet could be found at Crawford Lake in Milton, Ontario. The lake’s finely layered sediments contain a thousand-year record of environmental history, culminating in an explosion of man-made disruption around the middle of the 20th century. That’s when scientists say human activities — from nuclear weapons tests and fossil fuel combustion to deforestation and global trade — began to leave an indelible imprint on Earth’s geologic record.
Speaking from the International Congress on Stratigraphy — a semiregular meeting of researchers who study the phases of Earth’s past — working group members recommended that the Anthropocene be established as a new epoch beginning in 1950, with Crawford Lake as its golden spike.
Before the Anthropocene can be added to Earth’s 4.6-billion-year official timeline, it must withstand the scrutiny of the wider geology community. In the coming months, the proposal will go before the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which is responsible for subdividing the history of the last 2.4 million years. Then the larger International Commission on Stratigraphy will vote. If it can clear those bureaucratic hurdles, the proposal will be ratified next year at the International Geological Congress in South Korea.
Crawford Lake was selected from among 12 golden spike candidates around the globe, including the ice of Antarctica, two remote coral reefs, a mountaintop peat bog and a polluted California bay. Each contained evidence for the same simultaneous surge in human pollution around 1950 — particularly a sudden spike in radioactive plutonium from nuclear weapons testing, which will serve as the primary marker of the Anthropocene....
After publicly boycotting Bud Light, musician Kid Rock has started to quietly sell the brand again at his Nashville bar, according to a new report by CNN. Rock, along with conservative politicians like Dan Crenshaw and Ted Cruz, became a local critic of Anheuser-Busch — Bud Light's parent company — after the brand partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on an isolated social media campaign in April. "F**k Bud Light, f**k Anheuser-Busch," Rock said in a viral video before shooting a semi-automatic weapon at cases of the beer.
However, at Kid Rock's Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock 'n' Roll Steakhouse, where "CNN This Morning's" Ryan Young recently visited, Bud Light was available for purchase. "It is not clear if the ban had been lifted or if there ever had been one to begin with," Young said.
This is another example of conservative politicians walking back on bombastic public boycotts, a memorable recent example being when former president Donald Trump called for a boycott against Coca-Cola — and was seen weeks later with a Diet Coke on his desk in the Oval Office. Kid Rock has not offered a statement on the CNN report; as of publication, a representative from his bar has not yet returned a request for comment from Salon Food.
"This is another example of conservative politicians walking back on bombastic public boycotts"
you go ahead and console yourself with that
but unlike the TTF boycott of Chik-Fil-A, the reaction to the Bud Light embrace of transgenderism was very effective and should ensure vastly less corporate support for the gay agenda
btw, the TTF boycott was effective: at boosting Chik-Fil-A sales
the cow in the Nats bullpen is very that everyone now east more Chikin
LOL!
the damage done to Bud Light, Target, and Disney is something every company will seek to avoid
Walt Disney World is billed as the "most magical place on Earth," but based on a growing amount of evidence, it seems like fewer people are spending this summer soaking up the fairy dust, likely due to its parent company's fight with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. It's pretty clear that the park's problems run deep.
Disney execs warned earlier in the year that they expected earnings at their US theme parks to be down this year, but according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the drop-off may be worse than feared. According to data from Touring Plans, a company that tracks major amusement parks, the average wait time for a ride in the flagship Magic Kingdom park on the July 4 holiday was 27 minutes, down 13% from 2022 (31 minutes) and 43% below pre-pandemic levels in 2019 (47 minutes). It was also the third-slowest day in the last year at Hollywood Studios, despite the park being home to the uber-popular Star Wars attractions. Disney-focused blogs have also been tracking the foot traffic decline for months, posting pictures of near-empty parks and nonexistent lines during major holiday weekends.
Disney's revenue from parks, experiences, and products was up 17% in the second quarter of this year, according to its most recent earnings report. However, that increase was credited to growth at Shanghai Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland Resort. In other words, countries where the population is not offended by Disney's embrace of the US gay agenda.
The other obvious issue is Disney's ongoing feud with DeSantis. The logic here is fairly clear: conservatives are less inclined to visit Disney World.
It's clear that a cut back on vacationing is not the issue. The number of travelers bouncing around the country over Fourth of July weekend eclipsed pre-pandemic levels — TSA screened a record number of passengers at airports on the Friday before the holiday. As Courtney Garcia, a senior wealth advisor at Payne Capital Management, put it on CNBC's "Fast Money," the data seems to point to a "more of a Disney problem than a travel problem."
"People are traveling," Garcia said. "They are just not going to Disney. Yes, it could be some of the political problems."
Does Disney have a DeSantis problem? Absolutely.
"But when our gay and trans neighbors actually came under direct attack, for real, in the school district where it counts, and when one of their colleagues stood up to directly address the situation, and there was some risk of being criticized for saying something, they hid. When we needed their leadership, they were not there."
well, stop wasting time with whining
start working on getting these bums thrown out next year!
In Team America, the 2004 puppet comedy from the creators of South Park, there’s a scene that satirizes the prevalence of gay-themed stage plays of that era (Angels in America, Rent, etc.) with the musical number “Everyone Has AIDS!”
I couldn’t help remembering that song when I saw this story yesterday: “Forty percent of Brown University students say they are LGBT.” This percentage has tripled since 2010.
“The Herald’s Spring 2023 poll found that 38% of students do not identify as straight — over five times the national rate. Since Fall 2010, Brown’s LGBTQ+ population has expanded considerably. The gay or lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by 232%. Students identifying as other sexual orientations within the LGBTQ+ community have increased by 793%,” the Brown Daily Herald reported.
A 793% increase? That’s not just a social contagion and Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. It also tells us that this is the fastest growing religious cult ever seen. The pressure to join, to belong, is so tremendous and the instant social benefits are so irresistible, so powerful, that many cannot resist.
And can you blame them? Becoming LGBTQ is like becoming ordained into the priestly class, you instantly ascend to the inner ring of the elite circles. Yes, you sacrifice marriage and a family and "normal life," but you are granted special favors and privileges that befit your rank above your hopelessly middle-class peasant roots. Imagine being white AND straight and "cis-gendered." That’s like being German AND a Nazi! It simply will not do.
The most elite of the priests, the Cardinals if you will, are the ones who submit to genital castration and body mutilation. “Top surgery” or “gender affirming healthcare” the university health center calls it in their glossy brochure, but we know what it really is: a hazing ritual you must endure to join the club.
Survive it and you are instantly elevated to a position of Moral Leader. You are conferred almost magical powers to control, judge, and arbitrate all other disputes. You bask in the forever glow of corporate sponsorships, TikTok likes, and dopamine overloads. You might even get to one day …. meet Joe Biden!
The University has become the seminary for this new caste of cult leader, where a BA is the sound you bleat as you are led to the slaughter with the rest of the rainbow sheep.
All the fairy tales were wrong. The witches that lure young children with promises of candy and treasure don’t live in thatched cottages in the woods, or on Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island. They live in New Haven and Cambridge and Palo Alto and Providence, Rhode Island, home of Brown University.
Brown University has always been the weird hippie freak of the Ivies.
It was never a real college. And here in 2023, it is offering a new sort of fantasy life to its undergraduate students, one where your freshman dorm room is the cocoon you and your old body will curl up in until you re-emerge around Spring Break in your new form, with your new body and your new identity.
Parents, if you like your child’s gender, you can’t keep your child’s gender if you send them to an elite university.
If you want the shortest route to social stardom, peer acceptance, and entrée into the shiny world of post-graduate networks and connections and social approbation, then bending over and submitting to the rainbow branding iron is the only way to go.
It’s like a miracle, really. In an instant, the hideous stain of middle class privilege is washed away. The stench of your unenlightened family or backwards hick suburban upbringing is expunged. You emerge like a butterfly and take your place at the right hand of the Regime enforcers.
The long, arduous journey your early American ancestors made—through the shtetls and peasant villages and ghettos of Europe, taking that long transatlantic voyage to our shores, that backbreaking scrabble up from industrial poverty or agricultural depression—ends with you, a sterilized, nonbinary princeling, a gender-neutral dauphin, a hormone-addled aristocrat with more privilege and social clout than a 17th century Royal courtesan.
You will never, ever reproduce, but that’s okay—the system is already busy minting thousands of your clones.
"A 793% increase? That’s not just a social contagion and Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. It also tells us that this is the fastest growing religious cult ever seen. The pressure to join, to belong, is so tremendous and the instant social benefits are so irresistible, so powerful, that many cannot resist."
No idiot. It just tells you that particular school has become known as very LGBT friendly, like for example, San Francisco. LGBT youth from small towns all around the country flock to San Francisco because it's well known for being LGBT friendly, something their repressive little red district back home isn't.
That doesn't mean all they youth are turning gay, or worse yet, "a sterilized, nonbinary princeling, a gender-neutral dauphin, a hormone-addled aristocrat with more privilege and social clout than a 17th century Royal courtesan."
Lay off the psychedelics for a while so you can get back in touch with earth.
Since the Great Depression, the economy has fared better under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents. This fact holds true regardless of the economic measure used: Economic growth, employment, job creation, income and productivity have all been stronger under Democratic presidents.
From 1933 to 2020, the economy grew at an average rate of 4.6% per year under Democratic presidents, or nearly double the 2.4% under Republican presidents. There were 14 different presidents over this time—seven Democrats and seven Republicans. Democratic presidents consistently ranked higher in economic growth and job creation:
Of the seven presidents with the highest annual economic growth rate, five are Democrats. Conversely, five of the seven presidents with the lowest economic growth rate are Republicans.
Of the seven presidents with the highest annual rate of job creation, six are Democrats. On the flip side, six of the seven presidents with the lowest job creation are Republicans.
Most recently, President Biden has overseen 5.7% real GDP growth, the highest annual economic growth rate since 1984, and the creation of 6.6 million jobs, the most in a single year in recorded history.
Democratic presidents often inherit weak economies and leave their successors with strong ones. In fact, 10 of the last 11 recessions began under Republican presidents. For example, after inheriting the Great Recession from President Bush, President Obama handed Trump the longest continuous run of job creation under a single president in modern U.S. history. President Trump became the first president to oversee net job losses during his single term in office, while the U.S. economy is experiencing record job growth since President Biden took office.
Under President Biden, the U.S. is experiencing a strong economic recovery
The U.S. is currently experiencing a strong economic recovery, with 5.7% real growth in 2021 and 6.6 million Americans returning to work under President Biden. Even with lingering pandemic challenges, economic growth in 2021 was the highest annual growth since 1984. The rate of annual growth surpassed both the Federal Reserve’s projection of 4.2% growth and the Congressional Budget Office’s projection of 4.6% growth before passage of the American Rescue Plan. The U.S. continues to lead among its peer countries in its pandemic recovery.
Under President Biden, 6.6 million jobs have been created—the most jobs created in a single year under any U.S. president in recorded history. About 87% of the jobs lost during the worst of the pandemic have been regained. The unemployment rate fell to 4.0% in January 2022—down from a pandemic high of 14.7% and 6.4% when President Biden entered office—exceeding experts’ expectations. Near the beginning of President Biden’s term, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the U.S. would not reach this level until 2026, while the Federal Reserve projected it would not reach this level until 2023. Policies like the American Rescue Plan helped lead to a much quicker recovery than after other recent recessions.
In addition to enacting policies that provide immediate relief to the millions affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden administration is pursuing investments in workers and families to build long-term economic resilience and advance stronger, stable and broadly shared growth.
Academic research finds that the U.S. economy performs better under Democratic presidencies
Academic studies confirm Democrats’ edge in economic performance. In a 2016 paper, economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson concluded that, “The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance.” Focusing on real GDP growth, they find that the performance gap between Democratic and Republican presidents is large and significant. Ultimately, Blinder and Watson conclude that the performance gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success.”
Economic journalism has also highlighted the stronger performance under Democratic presidents—and how this trend holds over time. A New York Times analysis found this pattern to be startlingly consistent, such that journalist David Leonhardt concluded that “Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe—like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation.” Democratic presidents have pursued evidence-based economic policies that benefit workers and families and support broad-based growth, while Republicans pursue policies that favor the wealthy and contribute to rising economic inequality.
Democratic administrations turn around weak economies left by their Republican predecessors
Historically, Democratic presidents have inherited weak economies from their Republican predecessors and have responded with policies that jumpstarted economic growth and improved economic well-being. George W. Bush administration policies directly contributed to the Great Recession, which reduced earnings for a generation of workers, led to years of widespread unemployment and caused an unprecedented decline in wealth. President Bush left office with just 1.4 million jobs added across his presidency and an unemployment rate of 7.8%—nearly double what it was when he entered office.
After inheriting a sputtering economy, President Obama spearheaded the longest expansion under a single president in U.S. history. During 76 consecutive months, 15 million jobs were created. The unemployment rate was cut from 10% near the height of the Great Recession in October 2009 to 4.7% in January 2017.
By contrast, President Trump inherited the longest economic expansion in U.S. history from President Obama and left office as the first president since World War II to oversee net job loss during his term. Even before the coronavirus, job growth under President Trump had slowed: just 183,000 new jobs on average were added during his first three years in office. He left office with 3 million fewer Americans employed than when he was sworn in. Despite inheriting an economy with a 4.7% unemployment rate, President Trump left office with an unemployment rate of 6.3%.
In just his first year, President Biden has overseen the fastest economic growth in 40 years, the most jobs added in a single year in recorded history and the largest calendar-year decline in the unemployment rate ever. Under President Biden, the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.0% in January 2022 from a pandemic high of 14.7% in April 2020 and 6.6 million jobs have been added.
How Our Efforts to Bring Competition To Television Unknowingly Helped Create the Fox Disinformation Machine
For what little it may, or may not, be worth at this point, Preston Padden, Ken Solomon and Bill Reyner wish to express their deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company and Fox Television that came to include Fox News Channel — the channel that prominently includes news that, in the words of Sidney Powell’s counsel, “no reasonable person would believe.”
How many people can recall, even fathom today, that we were brought up in an entertainment world that offered only three choice of video programming — programming that ABC, CBS and NBC chose and that you could only watch when the networks offered it?
In the 1990’s Bill was lead outside Counsel for NewsCorp/Fox/Rupert Murdoch (“Fox”) and Preston was their lead Washington Lobbyist. Ken was Executive VP of Network Distribution for Fox Broadcasting Company. There was no Fox News Channel on the horizon at the time, and none of us ever worked for that Channel.
With the help of others, Bill and Preston tenaciously defended Fox from attacks alleging Fox’s failure to comply with the foreign ownership restrictions of the Communications Act of 1934, and we obtained for Fox waivers of the FCC’s rules including the Financial Interest and Syndication Rule (“FISR”) and the Broadcast/Newspaper Cross-Ownership Rule. Eventually, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit confirmed the elimination of the FISR Rule. All of these waivers were critical in enabling Fox to become the long-sought fourth broadcast television network. Out of the ashes of antiquated rules, we were able to help Fox acquire more mass with the acquisition of essential large market VHF television stations and important rights to broadcast NFL games throughout the country.
Ken was instrumental in strengthening the lineup of local broadcast stations affiliated with the new Fox Network. He prepared powerful presentations that persuaded established affiliates of ABC, CBS and NBC to switch to Fox. His efforts were critical to enabling the viability of Fox.
At the time of our work in the 1990’s, we all greatly admired Rupert Murdoch and his vision and bold efforts. We genuinely believed that the creation of a fourth competitive force in broadcast television was in the public interest. Many others thought so also as our waiver requests and other actions on behalf of Fox garnered the support of Democrat and Republican FCC Commissioners and diverse political leaders such as New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Senator Ted Kennedy. Indeed, the development of Fox Broadcasting Company broke the hold that the Big 3 Networks had on US households and opened the gates to unlimited competition for many new sources of programming.
We never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become. In a 120 page Court Order, backed by extensive record evidence including voluminous emails from inside Fox, the Judge in the Dominion case found that Fox repeatedly presented false news. Fox did not appeal the decision but instead acknowledged it and paid nearly $800 million in damages to Dominion.
In our opinion, the Fox News Channel has had many negative impacts on our society. Arguably the worst has been Fox’s role in promoting Trump’s “Big Lie” about alleged widespread fraud in the 2020 election and, in our opinion, Fox’s role in contributing to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that undermined our democracy. In fact, the connection between Fox and the January 6 attack is so strong that multiple Jan 6 defendants have pleaded not guilty arguing they were suffering from “Foxitis” — a disease caused by watching false news on Fox!
Through months long email exchanges in 2020 and 2021, Preston gained first-hand knowledge of Rupert Murdoch’s thinking about former President Trump and alleged fraud in the 2020 election. Murdoch made it very clear to Preston that he understood that the 2020 election had not been stolen. Nonetheless, during the same time period, Fox continued to perpetuate the “Big Lie” and promote the Jan 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C.
Many other veterans of the historic effort in the 1990’s to break the strangle hold of the Big 3 Networks and to build a fourth competitive force in American television share our resentment that the reputation of the Fox brand we helped to build has been ruined by false news.
Whistleblowers allege President Joe Biden and his family have taken up to $30 million in illicit bribes and payments from foreign sources tied to China, Russia and Ukraine. Biden denies it. Do Americans believe him? No. By more than 2-to-1, they say they believe the whistleblowers, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
The online poll of 1,341 adults, taken July 5-7, asked respondents how likely is it that the claims are true? The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.
The results weren't close. Americans, by 56% to 27%, called Biden bribery charges "likely," rather than "unlikely." Further broken down, the "likely" responses included 34% who called it "very likely" compared to 21% who called it "somewhat likely." Among the "unlikely" responses, only 12% said it was "not at all likely," while 15% termed it "not very likely."
Among the remainder, 18% overall said they weren't sure.
What a difference a week makes!
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., was gloating Thursday about how his star witness against Hunter Biden, the president's son, would prove the doubters wrong. In May, Comer — whose main role in Congress is churning out falsified evidence for arcane right-wing conspiracy theories — had admitted that his supposed "whistleblower" had gone missing. Sure, it was generally understood that Comer's elaborate mythology about President Joe Biden running some secret international crime syndicate was pure make-believe. So the "missing" informant caused much cackling on the left. It was widely assumed that Comer hadn't even bothered to prop up a flesh-and-blood person to pretend to be the "whistleblower," but instead just made this character up whole cloth. Comer was triumphant, however, exalting that he had a real human being with a pulse to stand up as this alleged "whistleblower."
Talking to Newsmax, where Republicans go when even Fox News feels a lie is beneath their low standards, Comer crowed that "the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant" should "feel like fools right now," because "a credible witness that the FBI flew all the way to Brussels to interview" was a-coming.
On Monday, the truth came out. Cormer's supposed "informant," Gal Luft, is not preparing his dramatic exposé of the Bidens. No, he's actually on the run from the law, having been charged by the Department of Justice (DOJ) with illegal arms dealing and, oh yeah, being a Chinese spy.
Comer was right about one thing, though: Luft is, indeed, a biological human being who exists in the world. But so far, the folks at MSNBC don't feel chagrined. "Republicans have to make up their mind," anchor Willie Geist said Tuesday morning. "Is Joe Biden a doddering old man who can't find the door after a press conference, or is he the mastermind of an international criminal scheme?"
Of course, this egg on his face will not slow Comer down one tiny bit. As he understands all too well, what makes conspiracy theories such excellent propaganda for the right is that they are, by their very nature, impervious to debunking. Conspiracy theories are closed loop systems. When conflicting facts are presented, the conspiracist immediately declares not only are the facts fake, but the fakery is further "proof" of the conspiracy.
One could see this happening in real time the second the federal authorities announced the charges against Luft on Twitter. Underneath the tweet was a sea of MAGA diehards, easily identifiable by the $8-a-month blue checkmarks, declaring with confidence that Luft is an innocent man being framed by the deep state. Some augmented this with racist jokes, but mostly it was a knee-jerk assumption that this is a railroading job. Not one of these people could pick Luft out of a lineup or could say anything about his life prior to this moment. Yet the invention of a new conspiracy theory about Luft's arrest was not just automatic, it seemed as mindless as breathing.
It's not just randos on Twitter, either. Comer immediately folded the indictments up into the existing conspiracy theory, sneering on Fox News Monday night, "The timing is always coincidental, according to the Democrats and the Department of Justice." Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., was even less subtle with the nonsense.
It's critical to understand that it's highly unlikely that either Comer or Mace believes their own B.S. Indeed, Comer joked earlier this year to New York Times reporters about how he is just making it up as he goes along.
"You know, the customer's always right," Mr. Comer said wryly, of his approach to the people who elected him and now brandish conspiracy theories, vulgar photographs featuring the president and his son, Hunter, and other lies they expect him to act upon.
That's the reason it's so easy for not just Comer, but the entire GOP base, to reflexively roll up these charges into the ever-expanding conspiracy theory. Most of them don't believe any of this crap, not in the traditional sense of the word "believe." In my recent investigation into social media conspiracy communities, one family member of a conspiracist explained how the ostensible "belief" is always just a rationalization built around the actual belief, one which is often too shameful to be spoken out loud. As he pointed out at Medium, conspiracy theorists often contradict themselves in frankly comical ways:
At the University of Kent in 2012, social psych researcher, and core member of my crew, Karen Douglas found that "the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered." The more they "believed that Osama bin Laden was already dead when US special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive."
Throughout and since 2020, conspiracy theorists have said that Covid is at the same time a nonexistent hoax, a bug no more dangerous than the flu, and a deadly Chinese bioweapon. It didn't matter to them that these things can't be true at the same time.
For Comer and other MAGA Republicans, the actual belief is straightforward: They wish to destroy the legitimately elected president and replace him with Donald Trump, a wannabe fascist who attempted a coup. Just saying this plainly, however, is socially and politically difficult. It's an admission to having a fascist ideology, as well as a willingness to break the law and back a criminal as president in order to get their way.
The conspiracy theory about the "Biden crime family" is not a sincere belief, but a political weapon: A noisy distraction from their own fascism and criminality that allows Republicans to pursue their unspeakable agenda while pretending to have righteous motivations. To serve that purpose, the conspiracy theory does not need to be plausible or believable. It doesn't have to make sense. In fact, it's often more useful if it doesn't make sense. When a conspiracy theory is confusing, most people — whether they support the theory or not — can't be bothered to actually try to make sense of it.
With the Hunter Biden conspiracies, the most obvious aspect is that it's impossible for anyone, even those who made it up, to follow what exactly is being alleged here. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo recently gave it the old college try, explaining both one of the conspiracy theories and why it's not true.
According to a purported IRS whistleblower, U.S. Attorney David Weiss had been turned down when he requested special counsel status....
The claims centered on Weiss, who was now put forward as a sort of muzzled, reluctant whistleblower. Weiss, remember, was appointed by President Trump and left in place by the Biden Justice Department to avoid any appearance of an attempt to interfere with the Hunter Biden investigation. But now Weiss has stated unambiguously that none of these claims are true. He never requested to become special counsel (which is itself kind of an absurd suggestion) and he was never blocked from bringing any charges or investigating aspects of the Hunter Biden case.
If you're going cross-eyed trying to keep up, you're not alone. And that's the point. Not of Marshall's debunking, which is about as straightforward as you're going to get when it comes to this ever-more-deranged GOP conspiracy theory, but in even trying to figure out what the hell Republicans are talking about in the first place. This is all by design. If a conspiracy theory is easy to follow, it's also easy to see its flaws. But if it's so complicated that even efforts at straightforward debunking are bewildering, so it's hard to argue against it. The complexity guards against people being able to point out the contradictions or implausibilities, allowing the devotees of the conspiracy theory to keep at it, without fear of being called out.
Keeping it impenetrable, convoluted and weird is especiallly important in light of the purpose all these lies serve, which is to protect Donald Trump. The vast majority of Trump's crimes are simple enough to explain on their own terms: Stealing classified documents. Tax fraud. Sexual assault. Attempting to steal an election. But the sheer number of Trump crimes is mind-boggling. What the average Trump voter needs in order to justify themselves is a claim that "both sides" are corrupt. With so much Trump criminality to distract from, the lies about the Bidens need to be overwhelming.
Not that it's a hard task to keep making crap up. After all, nothing Republicans say about Biden needs to make sense. It just needs to be noisy.
For Republicans who are worried the Trump party is turning into a rump party, the Arizona GOP serves as a cautionary warning: Things can always get worse.
In case you missed it, political writer Jon Gabriel sounded the alarm in a recent AZCcentral political column.
“The Arizona GOP had less than $50,000 in cash reserves as of March 31. That’s not much money to fund crucial expenses such as rent, payroll, and campaign operations. Four years earlier, it had close to $770,000,” Gabriel wrote.
“The cobwebs in the bank vault aren’t as important as all the money wasted. The party blew $300,000 on ‘legal consulting,’ much of which focused on overturning Trump’s 2020 defeat. All they have to show for it are a Democratic governor and U.S. Senate delegation,” Gabriel continued.
The obvious conclusion is that election denial hurts the deniers. This is true for multiple reasons. First, obsessively worrying about having a future election stolen from you can divert energy away from voter-contact programs that might actually prevent, you know, losing elections in the first place.
Second, in the aftermath of a loss, pretending you won guarantees zero lessons are learned, even as it continues eating up money (in, say, legal fees) and diverts attention from future elections.
Third, donors don’t want to give money to a crazy party. As Gabriel writes, “If they [Republican party bosses] waste their money on Cyber Ninjas and futile lawsuits, they can’t be shocked when donations dry up.”
This is a national problem for Republicans, but Arizona has had it twice as bad. First, when Trump claimed he won the state in 2020, and next, when Trump’s disciple Kari Lake followed his same script in 2022.
But as Arizona demonstrates, election denial isn’t the only thing to fear from a MAGAfied GOP.
From 1995 until 2019, Arizona boasted not one, but two Republican senators. What is more, from 1991 until 2023, Republicans held the governorship for all but six years. And before 2020, the last time a Democrat won the state’s presidential election was 1996.
Interestingly, the shift toward electing Democrats has little to do with the notion that the state has somehow turned blue. It has much more to do with candidate quality and incompetent management by the state’s Republican Party.
Aside from wasting money on two Big Lies, the Arizona GOP spent more than $530,000 on “vanity projects” like a 2022 victory party and bus tour. When you consider the close down-ballot races (most famously, Arizona’s Republican attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh lost by just 280 votes out of 2.5 million cast), this expense becomes even harder to justify.
And the conspiracies and incompetence are only part of the story.
In the Grand Canyon State, independent registrations just surpassed Republicans and Democrats. At least some of this is due to Republicans and Democrats abandoning their parties. According to Chuck Warren, a Republican strategist who has worked on voter registration in Arizona, “There are 48,893 people who have switched their registration from Republican to independent since 2018.”
Because they do not believe politics is a game of addition, the MAGA forces don’t seem to mind the shrinkage. At one speech in 2022, Lake literally told John McCain supporters to “get the hell out.” That didn’t work out so well for her—or Republicans.
Of course, the fundamental problem is that the inmates have been running the asylum—and inmates don’t tend to be very good at that.
Consider, for example, Kelli Ward. After running back-to-back failed primary campaigns against John McCain and Martha McSally in 2016 and 2018, Ward—the firebrand/crackpot election denier who was accused of having “aided a coup attempt” by the Jan. 6 Committee—was (for reasons that defy logic) elected to serve as chair of the Arizona GOP for two cycles.
(Note: In January, Ward was replaced by former state treasurer Jeff DeWit. While DeWit was a prominent Trump supporter, he also appears to be a functioning adult who understands how to run an organization.)
How on Earth did Ward ever get to be in charge of a battleground state’s Republican Party, in the first place?
The first part of the answer is that the base of the Republican party has been radicalized. But the second part of the story is that Republican elites and elected officials were unwilling or unable to do what it takes to save their state’s Grand Old Party.
This is where leadership comes in. “John McCain spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting conservative allies elected to party positions,” Warren says. But that all ended with McCain’s death in 2018. Things have been going downhill ever since.
In 2022, then-Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s endorsed gubernatorial primary candidate, Karrin Taylor Robson, lost her primary to Lake (Note: As I worried at the time, Ducey’s endorsement turned out to be too little and too late).
Despite Lake’s subsequent loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs, there is no reason to believe that Arizona Republicans—or any other Republicans, for that matter—are tired of losing, yet.
As John McCain used to always say, “It’s always darkest... before it turns pitch black.”
It’s the logo that Costco shoppers dread: when the “Death Star” appears next to their favorite item, indicating that the discount retail giant won’t restock once current inventory has sold out. Just this year, the Death Star has appeared on Filthy brand blue cheese olives, Kinder’s organic toasted onion dip mix, and Jonny Pops chocolate dipped strawberry pops.
Now the Death Star has been spotted adorning the price signs for Bud Light, which was the most popular beer in America back in the olden days of […checks notes…] a couple months ago.
If you think that’s a bad sign for Bud Light sales, you’re wrong. It’s much, much worse.
I first became aware of Bud Light’s Alderaan-like fate on Wednesday evening, when a friend tweeted that “they’re not even selling Bud Light at my local Costco anymore. Don’t know when it stopped but I’ve noticed it’s not in stock anymore.” Kira was reporting from southern California, which, as I noted on Instapundit earlier today, “isn’t exactly overrun with conservatives.”
Sure enough, sharp Costco buyers have been sharing photos on social media of the Death Star menacing Bud Light signs across the nation.
The troubled beer brand has quickly gone from “we can’t give this stuff away” to “a discount retail giant won’t even give it shelf space.”
That’s all the stuff you might already know. Now let’s get to the part where things go from very bad to much, much worse.
According to Investopedia, Costco has 111 million members who pay between $60 and $120 a year for the privilege of shopping their discount items. The average US member, believe it or not, is “a 39-year-old college-educated Asian-American woman who earns more than $125,000 per year.”
These are not the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons the press would have you believe are the only ones put off by Bug Light’s newly woke marketing and outrageous sense of superiority over their own customers.
What Costco’s Death Star tells me is that the unofficial Bud Light boycott extends far beyond those who are deeply steeped in politics. If the broad middle of America isn’t buying the stuff anymore, at least not in numbers sufficient to maintain Costco’s sharp eye for market trends and good deals, then parent company AB-InBev has dug itself a deeper hole than most of us imagined.
I’d also add that once a brand has lost shelf space, it’s very difficult to win back. Going even further, customers can’t buy what isn’t made available. Costco buyers who never even heard of Bud Light’s marketing fail with He Who Shall Not Be Named will stop buying Bud Light, too, just because it isn’t there — but some other discount light beer is.
If there is such a thing as a death spiral for a brand, we might be witnessing it.
Costco might decide to discontinue items due to poor consumer sales, or because they can no longer get a volume purchase discount big enough to suit their value-minded customers, or maybe because they just can’t get enough anymore to fill the shelves.
A fourth possibility just occurred to me: Maybe Costco HQ just doesn’t want to deal with the headache of a brand that’s turned toxic.
Democrats need to start thinking about who they are going to nominate for President once Slidin' Joe Biden's impeachment trial begins. Personally, I hope it's Kamala - or, better yet, HILLARY!
LOL!
People overwhelmingly believe it likely that President Joe Biden took up to $30 million in bribes in scams connected to first son Hunter Biden, and now even Democrats are starting to believe it's true.
In the latest test of voter faith in the president’s denials, 56% said that he probably took bribes from sources tied to China, Russia, and Ukraine. Some 27% said they think that it is unlikely. That’s more than a two-to-one gap in the latest I&I/TIPP online survey.
The survey is bad for the White House because it shows voters don’t believe the president. The numbers: Democrats (39% likely vs. 42% unlikely), Republicans (80% likely vs. 9% unlikely), and independents (56% vs. 22%).
The Democrat numbers should be very concerning, the analysis said.
“When the 2.7-point margin of error is taken into account, even Democrats were split nearly equally on the question of whether Biden took a bribe. The president is in trouble even within his own party,” it said.
It added that just 2 of 36 demographic groups polled showed an edge in support for Biden, liberals and Democrats.
The trust issue and questions of bribery are the latest hurdles Biden is facing in his reelection campaign.
CNN has apologized to transgender Dylan Mulvaney after twice referring to Mulvaney by his birth gender pronoun in an on-air segment discussing the right-wing backlash to Mulvaney's Bud Light partnership.
On Tuesday, CNN National Correspondent Ryan Young said he incorrectly referred to the 26-year-old using the pronouns “he/him” – a horrible heresy under transgender ideology that neither he nor anchor Kate Bolduan corrected at the time.
The two journalists were discussing the boycott of Bud Light after the beer brand entered into a sponsorship deal with Mulvaney back in April.
Right-wing figures such as Kid Rock sparked a transphobic backlash and vowed to stop drinking the beer because of its collaboration with the transgender.
The beer brand then faced further backlash from liberals and Mulvaney’s fans who condemned it for not supporting Mulvaney enough.
LOL!
In a “CNN News Central” segment, Ms Bolduan pointed out that, amid the controversy, sales of America’s best-selling beer plunged a dramatic 28 percent in the last month alone.
Mr Young then joined to reveal a number of interviews he had done on the topic – stopping people in bars in Nashville and Chicago and asking them their opinions on th matter.
One man in the show said that he supported the boycott: “It’s quite simple: people just don’t want it shoved down their throat.”
A woman adopted a similar tone, saying: “No Bud Light, because it’s like, I have grandchildren. We don’t need to put that in the young kids’ heads.”
Mr Young said he also heard from one bar which planned to stop serving Bud Light “because they don’t like the way Dylan Mulvaney was treated after this whole controversy started”.
At this point, Mr Young then went on to explain who the transgender influencer is – but referred to Mulvaney as "he/him" in the process.
“He, of course, is the transgender person they were going to sponsor and go along with, with Bud Light,” he said.
“But they didn’t like how Bud Light didn’t stand by him after all this.”
Following the segment, CNN faced a backlash of its own, with social media users slamming the network for "misgendering" the social media star.
LOL!
“What horrible coverage and the pundit couldn’t even correct the misgendering of Dylan. This makes me sad,” one person tweeted.
On Wednesday, anchor Ms Bolduan addressed the "mistake" live on air and issued an apology of penance to the influencer on behalf of the network.
“Yesterday in a segment about transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who was featured in Bud Light’s recent campaign, she was mistakenly referred to by the wrong pronouns,” she told viewers.
“CNN aims to honor individuals ways of identifying themselves and we apologize for that error.”
Mulvaney does not appear to have commented on the matter.
However, earlier this month, Mulvaney did speak out to slam Bud Light for failing to support him amid the transphobic backlash of the last three months.
“For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse, in my opinion, than not hiring a trans person at all,” she said in a TikTok video.
Mulvaney later revealed he has left the US for Peru because she no longer “feels safe” in the current situation.
The conversations keep happening – quiet whispers on the sidelines of events, texts, emails, furtive phone calls – as top Democrats and donors reach out to those seen as possible replacement presidential candidates.
Get ready, they urge, in conversations that aides to several of the people involved have described to CNN: Despite what he has said, despite the campaign that has been announced, President Joe Biden won’t actually be running for reelection.
They feel like time is already running out and that the lack of the more robust campaign activity they want to see is a sign that his heart isn’t really in it.
It’s a persistent sense that the inner circle of advisers to the president and several of the very few aides who have been hired for his reelection campaign dismiss as absurd. Of course, he is running, they say. Of course, they’re taking preparations very seriously. And, with the always present Biden chip on their shoulder, of course they’re being written off again by the purported wise elders of the party and pundits who still refuse to take him seriously.
“They are so underestimated, and they keep getting it right,” said Jim Messina, former president Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign manager, who has been one of the people privately advising Biden’s team to ramp up gradually.
Anxiety, complaints and apocalyptic thinking that have often defined Democrats in the Biden years are about to get their latest Rorschach test, with the disclosure of fundraising for the first few months of his campaign – which must be filed by Saturday.
Concern over how it will be measured against the $86 million Barack Obama raised in the first few months after announcing his own reelection campaign in 2011, along with the slow pace of building out a campaign structure, is already feeding the latest round of frustration and worry described to CNN by almost two dozen current Biden aides, top Democratic operatives and donors, and alumni of other recent campaigns.
Some things are already clear: multiple big donors aren’t locking in. Grassroots emails are sometimes bringing in just a few thousand dollars.
In a race that many expect will likely come down to a few hundred thousand votes in a few states, the doubters argue that every day without a packed schedule on the stump will prove to voters that Biden’s age is as big a worry as they believe it is. Or that the president and people around him aren’t taking the threat of losing to Donald Trump or another Republican seriously enough, and they’re setting up for Election Night next year to be 2016 déjà vu.
“If Trump wins next November and everyone says, ‘How did that happen,’ one of the questions will be: what was the Biden campaign doing in the summer of 2023?” said a person who worked in a senior role on Biden’s 2020 campaign.
“I’m not sure which is harder: Getting people to focus on the campaign, or getting people excited about it,” a longtime Democratic fundraiser said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid alienating a sensitive White House.
Though people around Biden still believe that Trump’s continued lead in the GOP primary polls sets up a stark contrast that will be helpful for the president, they are privately much more concerned with the possibility of losing to the former president than they tend to let on. His campaign planning is kept very closely held – and still almost entirely run out of the West Wing, so much so that the president himself has asked to meet personally with finalists for senior roles, all of which is slowing nearly every decision. Biden advisers have told allies they are following a tight, purposeful strategy which takes into account the vulnerabilities they recognize their candidate has, the strengths of his record they think they can tap into, and the particularities of America heading into 2024.
And they believe that moving too much into campaign mode too early wouldn’t just burn through millions of dollars, but risk politicizing the president as he tries to position himself as a commonsense guy standing up for the middle ground against extremist Republicans. It would also complicate Biden and his Cabinet fanning out across the country to talk about infrastructure and “Bidenomics” – an attempt to proactively tackle the complaints about the economy which remain a top political concern internally – which is, for now, being done as government events, at taxpayer expense.
David Axelrod, one of the chief strategists for Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns and now a CNN senior political commentator, said building up fundraising is critical, especially as insurance against a potential economic downturn or other crisis which could entice voters to look to whoever wins the Republican nomination as a fresh alternative.
“Trump is fully known, but you still want to dictate the terms of the debate, and you want to be able to do that next spring – and you want to have the resources to do that,” Axelrod told CNN.
Biden’s campaign insisted that it was off to a “strong start.”
“Democrats are unified around his historically successful agenda,” said campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz, who cited the early endorsements the campaign has received to build off Democrats’ performance in last year’s midterms. “Put that against the MAGA Republicans seeking the presidency, all fighting each other to the extremes on an agenda that has been soundly rejected by voters time and time again. The contrast speaks for itself.”
Biden has famously blown through every political timeline he has set for himself over the past eight years, but for an incumbent putting together what he and supporters feel is a campaign that is existential for the country, many leading Democrats feel time is running shorter than ever.
The headquarters in Wilmington discussed to be open by mid-July still isn’t. No staff is currently on the ground in competitive states, and names of potential hires have only started to be collected for review by the president and top advisers. The dozen people who are working for Biden-Harris 2024 full-time are mostly camped out at desks in the Democratic National Committee near Capitol Hill in Washington, with some griping about the delays in hiring staff and others still grumbling about how long it took to get on the payroll themselves. There is still no campaign finance director.
The president’s stumbles in public and meandering comments at fundraisers, meanwhile, continue to make supporters wince, like when he said, “I’m not big on abortion, but guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right” at a late June fundraiser in the D.C. suburbs or got caught up multiple times within one paragraph of the “Bidenomics” kick-off speech a day later.
Much of the Democratic anxiety is fed by comparisons to the pace of the Obama reelection campaign for the 2012 cycle: by this point 12 years ago, that Democratic president seeking a second term was months into building out an operation based in Chicago, with key staff making major strategic decisions and its revolutionary data operation starting to take shape. There were offices in swing states already building up local connections. They had a slogan.
That campaign is far from an exact analog: Republican nominee Mitt Romney was largely unknown nationally, while Trump is more defined in voters’ minds than possibly anyone in the history of American politics. And unlike when the Obama team spent years siphoning off staff and money from the Democratic National Committee to back his own Obama for America group, now Jen O’Malley Dillon, who helped lead those efforts in 2012, is a deputy White House chief of staff who has been the point person for directing the DNC to do most of the groundwork for the Biden campaign.
Among what Messina has urged the Biden team to learn from is holding off on hiring on-the-ground staff or packing a headquarters too early. His moves in 2011 eventually led to a hiring freeze in 2012, he said, and wasn’t, in retrospect, helpful to winning.
“We spent a lot of money in field in the off year, and there’s an argument that that wasn’t money well spent,” Messina said. “There are different ways to stoke the fire, and policy is one of them.”
For a president whose approval ratings remain in the low 40s and has tended to suffer from low voter enthusiasm, the challenge may prove different, and multiple experienced Democratic campaign operatives argue that should encourage Biden to start doing more of that engagement work immediately.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said that as he has talked with the president’s political advisers about making his state a prime battleground for 2024, he believes the organizing that the state Democratic party is handling there puts the presidential campaign “right on target.”
“When you’re a year and three months away from the election, it’s important that the president and supporters talk about the successes that this administration has experienced,” Cooper said, ticking through the events he has joined with Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Cabinet secretaries touting job growth, new bridges and reproductive health care access on their many recent official visits to the state.
“There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes organizing and strategizing with the campaign, and I think when it’s time to flip the switch to do that, we will be ready to go, and the Biden campaign will be ready to go.”
Michigan Democratic Party chair Lavora Barnes said that in her swing state, they are also continuing to build out their year-round organizing efforts in a coordinated way, but in a way that the president’s campaign isn’t footing the bill. And while multiple veteran Democratic operatives stressed to CNN that their worries about the campaign are underscored by the selection of Julie Chávez Rodriguez as manager despite her lack of experience running major races, Barnes said her own conversations have left her confident.
“We will grow and ramp up alongside the Biden campaign, probably in late fall or early next year,” Barnes said.
As even some of the people voicing them acknowledge, many of the complaints about Biden are the same that they have been at nearly every point over the last four years: He is slow to make big decisions, his impenetrable inner circle is only slightly less old and White than Biden is himself and keeps as tight a grip on power as on information. Excitement for the president himself has never been high, and efforts to change that have never amounted to much.
“They rightfully would say, ‘Everybody said we didn’t know what we were doing in 2019 and into 2020, and he’s the guy they play Hail to the Chief for when he walks into the room, so we obviously know something, and we know what we’re doing,’” said Axelrod, who acknowledged that he has been one of those critics, but is impressed with how much Biden has accomplished as president.
Some frustrated next generation Democratic operatives compare Biden to a house guest who’s overstayed his welcome whom they still have all agreed to back at this moment. More committed progressives say they are ready to fall in line too because of the threat they believe Trump and other Republicans pose – “it’s basically a popular front to stop what Biden calls the attacks on freedom,” said Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America and board chair of the Bernie Sanders-aligned Our Revolution.
But the threat of Trump’s return is precisely what keeps the worries about Biden coming back.
“It’s a crapshoot, this election,” said one senior Democrat, “and when it’s a crapshoot, you have to do everything possible. It cannot be done when the guy’s 80 years old and has his day job. People say you can have a Rose Garden strategy, but usually it’s because it’s a strategy, not because you don’t have a choice.”
A half-dozen senior Democratic advisers, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to give a frank assessment of the Biden reelection effort, said they were concerned about the slow pace of the campaign. While all peppered their comments with respect and admiration for Biden’s achievements, they said they fear the campaign is not fully embracing the advantage he has as the Republicans fight out their own primary.
“The most important power of incumbency is taking time to plan and build your campaign while your challenger is busy with a primary,” a Democratic campaign veteran said. “They are late in doing everything, and everyone knows it.”
Still, another Biden 2020 campaign alumnus pushed back on concerns over the president’s stamina, pointing to a cross-country fundraising blitz he did in the final days of the quarter and noting his travel schedule this year is on par with that of Obama’s – who was 30 years younger when running for reelection – in 2011.
Animosity toward Trump papered over many similar holes for Biden in 2020.
“What motivates people is less the love of their party, but hatred of the other candidate,” said Lis Smith, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked on the Obama-Biden reelection campaign in 2012. “A lot of enthusiasm will come for voting against Republicans.”
Meanwhile, Trump is still holding a massive lead in every Republican primary poll, giving hope to Biden pessimists.
“You can raise more now, but President Biden is raising less,” a veteran Democratic fundraiser on the West Coast said. “The money will clearly be there in the end – certainly if Trump is the nominee – but it’s not there yet.”
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Shaker Heights Trump-supporting attorney accused of illegally voting in the last two general elections should be acquitted, in part, because he cast ballots in two states by accident, his attorney argued to a judge.
Have you noticed this thing that Republicans do? They accuse other people of doing stuff that they themselves are doing. How many drag-queen "groomers" have they turned up? Compared to Republican politicians and Christian ministers. How many cases of election fraud have been committed by someone who was not a Republican? Any? How can they live with themselves?
Anti-transgender sentiment is suspected to have played a role in the separate deaths of two people, an Oregon man and an Indiana woman, over the past two weeks.
The first incident played out at an apartment complex in Richmond, Indiana, on the afternoon of June 30. Police say that Tommy Wayne Earl, 67, told them he looked out the window of his fourth-floor apartment and spotted Michelle Dionne Peacock, a neighbor he disliked, sitting at a gazebo with another person.
Earl told investigators he’d “had enough” and went out to confront Peacock with a straight razor, allegedly slicing her throat in such a way that she bled out before she could be moved from the scene, according to a detective’s sworn affidavit.
In talks with investigators, Earl referred to the victim as “a male acting like a woman,” the affidavit said.
But Peacock was a 59-year-old cisgender woman.
According to the detective’s sworn statement, Earl was unrepentant and stated multiple times that he would attack the neighbor again if he could. Bystanders had attempted to subdue him at the scene, and responding officers used a stun gun on Earl after he allegedly threatened to kill them too.
Just two days later, in Portland, Oregon, Colin Michael Smith was stabbed to death after a man allegedly came up to his group of friends at a bar and began spewing homophobic slurs.
An LGBTQ+ news blog, Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents, was the first to notice similarities in the two incidents.
Rahnique U. Jackson, 24, is accused of killing Smith after the 32-year-old defended a transgender friend in the group, according to Smith’s sister.
“It was a hate crime,” Danielle Smith told KOIN 6 News, a CBS affiliate. “She was trans, he [Jackson] ... didn’t like it, and Colin — defending his friend — was in the way. And that’s what happened. It’s just tragic.”
An LGBTQ+ news blog, Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents, was the first to notice similarities in the two incidents.
Rahnique U. Jackson, 24, is accused of killing Smith after the 32-year-old defended a transgender friend in the group, according to Smith’s sister.
“It was a hate crime,” Danielle Smith told KOIN 6 News, a CBS affiliate. “She was trans, he [Jackson] ... didn’t like it, and Colin — defending his friend — was in the way. And that’s what happened. It’s just tragic.”
Earl has been charged with first-degree murder and resisting law enforcement; Jackson was booked on second-degree murder.
Polls repeatedly show that voters don’t want a rematch of President Biden versus former President Donald Trump in 2024.
Republicans are going through a formal primary process to determine their nominee. GOP voters support Mr. Trump’s nomination in early polling by more than 20 percentage points.
Democratic voters are not getting the same choice. Establishment Democrats have chosen to coronate Mr. Biden as their nominee — eliminating debates and an open primary process even with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson challenging Mr. Biden’s candidacy.
Now, the Democratic establishment is freaking out over what could be a third-party run.
No Labels, a centrist group of Democrats and Republicans, is organizing to get on the ballot in 2024 if it’s left to a Biden-Trump race. They’re courting Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who is scheduled to headline a July 17 town hall for the group in New Hampshire.
Mr. Manchin told CNN last week he hasn’t ruled out anything, including a third-party run. No Labels says it’s spending $70 million to launch an independent unity ticket.
“The prospect that No Labels will nominate a candidate at their April convention and gain ballot access across the country is causing an increasing amount of alarm in the Democratic Party,” Axios reported on July 14. The news outlet quotes Democratic operatives worried that a third-party run would throw the general election to Mr. Trump, noting that Senate Democratic chiefs will be briefed on the third-party threat on July 27.
No Labels insists there’s a path forward for a third-party candidate, citing a recently conducted poll where an independent candidate, on the ballot with Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, starts the race with 21% support. The group insists it would be able to increase that base into a winning margin and not be a spoiler.
No Labels says its polling shows the public is open to a third-party candidate. According to an NBC News poll last month, 44% of registered voters say they are willing to consider supporting a third-party or independent presidential candidate if Messrs. Biden and Trump are the two major-party nominees in 2024.
No Labels is already on the ballot in five states, and hopes to get on all 50.
Hey did anybody notice how hot the world is now? Records shattered everywhere. You know what, if mouses were running things this wouldn't have happened. Humans are destroying the whole world for everybody, including cheerful cute little mouses who live in the walls of old churches. A little request from the Little Mouses to the humans: would you please quit it? You needed to act fifty years ago, at least you can do something now. Please, think of the mouses.
"would you please quit it? You needed to act fifty years ago, at least you can do something now"
oh, there are many things that can be done but lunatic fringe gay activists oppose them
the expansion of nuclear energy would help reduce carbon emissions
so would conversion to more natural gas and fracking'
massive forestation suck up carbon
but a few inconvenient truths remain
1. the US has done more to reduce carbon than any other country
we aren't the problem
you need to show the courage of your convictions and travel to China to protest
2. despite the rise in the temperature in the last century, climate-related deaths have plunged, and life expectancy has explode upward
what point is point is there is canceling the industrial revolution that has helped so many
3. if the alarmists are right, it's too late - what good would penance do?
4. June was pretty cool around here, July is supposed to be hot
Biden's prospects looked pretty bad before
and now polls show most Americans think he took bribes, surrendered Afghan's women to the Taliban, caused a spike in inflation that cost the average worker thousands of dollars annually even if inflation grinds to a halt now, hosted transgender freaks on the White House lawn and put the gay pride flag higher than ol' glory a few days before 4th of July..
so who else is available to beat Trump?
Gavin Newsome
Kamala Harris
the Bern
Hillary
Pete Buttagieg
Michelle Obama
Elizabeth Warren
Adam Schiff
RFK Jr
Anthony Weiner
Stormy Daniels
Al Franken
Monica Lewinsky
Fredo Cuomo
Jesse Jackson
Anthony Fauci
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!
no matter who it is, sounds like Republicans will be doing a lot of celebrating over the next year and a half!
To appease teacher unions, Slidin' Biden and company sold out America's kids.
Despite billions of federal dollars spent to help make up for pandemic-related learning loss, progress in reading and math stalled over the past school year for elementary and middle school students, according to a new national study released Tuesday.
The hope was that, by now, students would be learning at an accelerated clip, but that did not happen over the past academic year, according to NWEA, a research organization that analyzed the results of its widely used student assessment tests taken this spring by about 3.5 million public school students in third through eighth grade.
In fact, students in most grades showed slower than average growth in math and reading, when compared with students before the pandemic. That means learning gaps created during the pandemic are not closing — if anything, the gaps may be widening.
“We are actually seeing evidence of backsliding,” said Karyn Lewis, a lead researcher on the study.
On average, students need the equivalent of an additional 4.5 months of instruction in math, and an extra four months in reading to catch up to the typical pre-pandemic student. That’s on top of regular classroom time. Older students, who generally learn at a slower rate and face more challenging material, are the furthest behind.
National exams last year showed that students in most states and across almost all demographic groups had experienced troubling setbacks, especially in math, because of the pandemic, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a gold-standard federal exam. And last month, national math and reading test results for 13-year-olds hit the lowest level in decades.
Students who do not catch up may be less likely to go to college and, research has shown, could earn $70,000 less over their lifetimes
Sabrina Ionescu just set the all-time record for NBA or WNBA with a score of 37 PTS in the FINAL ROUND of the #Starry3PT Contest to be crowned the NEW 3-PT CHAMPION �� |
The 25-year-old point guard landed all but two of 27 possible shots for a total score of 37 out of 40—outscoring Curry’s single-round NBA record of 31 points, and Allie Quigley’s WNBA record last year of 30 points. On Twitter, Quigley exclaimed, “UNBELIEVABLE!!! This record won’t ever be broken.”
Players in the contest compete to make the most three-point shots within 70 seconds from five different positions around the three-point line.
Ionescu’s score is the latest in a career marked with records—one that is a far cry from her earlier years, when her school didn’t have enough players to field a girls’ basketball team. “My middle school said I should be playing with dolls. Seriously, word-for-word,” Ionescu told the Washington Post in 2019. “So I went out and recruited a bunch of girls to sign up for the team, and then I would just play. It’s funny now. I wish I could go back and just tell those people they had made a mistake.”
The link above is to the video of her stunning performance.
Yes, she's better than the men of the NBA!
SALT LAKE CITY – Finally, the clock hit Dame Time for Damian Lillard on Saturday in the Starry 3-Point Contest.
In his third career appearance in the event, Lillard bested 2020 3-point Contest winner Buddy Hield and third-year guard Tyrese Haliburton in the final round of the competition, and it was his accuracy on the “Starry” shots in the end that made all the difference.
Lillard knocked down two shots from “Starry” range, and those buckets counted for three points apiece in the final round as he edged out Hield 26-25. Lillard’s last attempt from the corner with a two-point money ball gave him the victory.
Haliburton looked like the early favorite, though.
Haliburton blew out the field initially, tying a 3-point contest record in the first round with 31 points, as he hit four of five shots in an all-money-ball final rack to close out the round. Wearing his college jersey from nearby Weber State, Lillard finished the first round in second place with 26 points followed by Hield, who scored 23 points to start the competition.
Bidenomics is gaining no voter traction. To understand why, step back from all the technical economic indicators and look at economic life for key voters — the majority is falling farther and farther behind, faster and faster than ever.
On June 28, President Biden stood in front of Bidenomics banners to tout his achievements for the U.S. middle class. And, as he has done with any glimmer of good economic data, he followed that up on July 7 with what was effectively a self fist bump, touting new jobs numbers.
Still, two out of three voters disapprove of his economic performance, and no wonder — roughly two-thirds of American households are living paycheck to paycheck and/or skipping purchases they can no longer afford.
Is employment as good as the president claims? Yes, if you ask the Federal Reserve. No, if you look at the majority of Gen Xers who are still underemployed or can’t find jobs that make ends meet. More than one-third of Americans are out of the workforce, with this problem particularly acute for women in general and minority women in particular. Will Black voters turn out for Biden or stay home as they did in 2016, when Hillary Clinton told them the economy was in a good place, but Black Americans didn’t find themselves anywhere close to it?
“Robust” employment looks even worse when one looks at wages — the reason most people work. As of Wednesday, it cost $121 to buy what once cost $100 at the end of 2019. Looking at inflation-adjusted wages — not the nominal data the president prefers — the bottom 50 percent of American households would need to earn $5,000 more just to buy the same things it could the year before the pandemic.
Most Americans also don’t feel the “progress” against inflation on which rests Bidenomics’ putative appeal. According to the Fed’s most recent study of economic well-being, the percentage of Americans saying that they were doing worse than the year before rose to the highest level since the Fed’s survey began in 2014.
Electronic Health Records were a game-changer — but a new proposal could be deadly
The US-UK alliance is rebuilding: How Biden’s visit laid a new foundation
And no wonder. American wealth inequality is at one of its highest levels since the Fed began calculating it in 1989. Income inequality has improved a bit in recent years due to nominal increases in labor income, but overall income disparities remain pronounced. The top one percent takes home $2 million in average post-tax income versus the bottom 50 percent’s average of $39,274. Even before inflation really took off, a survey in January 2022 found that Americans thought they needed $128,000 in income to feel financially secure.
Biden is trying to persuade voters that happy times are here again. This was a hard campaign promise even from an orator as awesome as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Failing a sudden macroeconomic miracle, the only way Joe Biden can persuade Americans that he’s on their economic side is to understand the side they’re actually on and then target a critical source of persistent economic inequality by holding the Federal Reserve accountable for its manifest, manifold mistakes.
Following the May 25, 2020, killing of George Floyd and amid the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, controversy erupted over the teaching of critical race theory in the nation’s K-12 schools. The mainstream media adopted a contradictory approach. Journalists reported that American schools generally did not teach critical race theory; at the same time, the prestige press contended that opponents of CRT’s presence in the curriculum obstructed students’ encounter with the harsh realities of race in America. The journalists’ conflicting denial of its presence and endorsement of its radical ideas reflect CRT’s extensive influence. A perverse mixture of doctrines deriving from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, CRT undergirds much of the hard-left agenda that has burrowed deep into America, not least the mainstream media.
Consider two 2021 articles that appeared less than two weeks apart.
On July 1 of that year, NBC News journalist Phil McCausland reported that according to a survey, “Teachers nationwide said K-12 schools are not requiring or pushing them to teach critical race theory, and most said they were opposed to adding the academic approach to their course instruction.”
McCausland lacked curiosity. He did not ask whether the ideas teachers were presenting could reasonably be understood as reflecting CRT’s central tenets. And he did not consider whether parents’ concerns about critical race theory stemmed from the shift to online instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With children learning onscreen at home, parents could look over their kids’ shoulders and see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears as teachers explained that America was systemically racist, that white people were of necessity oppressors and African Americans were of necessity oppressed, and that group identities and group rights superseded personal achievement and individual rights. Instead, NBC News implied that parents objected to CRT to suppress the cruel facts about race in America.
Several days earlier, Washington Post reporters Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey published a 3,000-word article tracing much of the furor over critical race theory – “a decades-old academic framework that most people had never heard of” – to the belligerent activism of Christopher Rufo, “a young conservative from Seattle.” The reporters sought to refute Rufo’s claim that critical race theory “has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people” by suggesting that Rufo used “questionable evidence” to gin up CRT as “the latest cultural wedge issue.”
Although posing as objective observers, Meckler’s and Dawsey’s biases distorted their analysis of the CRT controversy. “At its core, it pits progressives who believe White people should be pushed to confront systemic racism and White privilege in America against conservatives who see these initiatives as painting all White people as racist,” they wrote. “Progressives see racial disparities in education, policing and economics as a result of racism. Conservatives say analyzing these issues through a racial lens is, in and of itself, racist.” These apparently straightforward sentences are riddled with distortions.
First, the journalists assume the truth of “systemic racism.” Second, they imply falsely that the portrayal of all whites as racists springs from conservatives’ imagination about systemic racism although it is intrinsic to the doctrine. Third, they soften the systemic racism thesis, whose proponents generally hold not only that all disparities in education, policing, and economics arise from racism but also that to even question that claim is itself proof of racism. Finally, the journalists mischaracterize the conservative critique: Conservatives are not opposed to examining racism as a factor in explaining racial disparities; they object to treating racism as the sole explanation. Instead of reporting the news about critical race theory, journalists Meckler and Dawsey tailored a narrative to fend off criticism of it.
Rufo responded swiftly and sharply, first on social media and then in The New York Post. He claimed that his criticism forced the Washington Post to acknowledge errors in its timeline of events, highlighted the journalists’ use of hair-splitting distinctions, and compelled the newspaper to engage in a substantial online rewrite of the story, retracting or adding six paragraphs. In Rufo’s judgment, “The episode also shed light on the bizarre determination of the prestige press to play down just how radical and fundamentally un-American CRT is.”
Rufo’s spirited new book vindicates – not without a dose of polemical overstatement – his contention that CRT is rooted in the repudiation of basic principles of American constitutional government, starting with individual freedom, equality under law, and toleration of dissent. In “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything,” the Manhattan Institute senior fellow and trustee of Florida’s New College investigates the genesis of the extreme views about reason, race, and justice that are routinely preached these days not only in K-12 schools and universities but also in government bureaucracies, corporate human resource departments, and leading newsrooms and opinion pages.
It is misleading for Rufo to characterize this ideology as “the new nihilism,” since CRT does not hold that nothing is true and that everything is permitted. To the contrary – as Rufo himself argues, both through exploration of leading personalities and examination of central arguments – the ideology that inspires the leading edge of the American left aims at a revolutionary remaking of the nation’s political ideas and institutions to achieve liberation from all forms of domination. This incoherent, anti-democratic, and illiberal political program is more accurately called postmodern progressivism. It combines a Marxian belief that the world’s oppressed are morally superior to, and must overthrow, their oppressors with the Nietzschean conviction that a higher morality entitles the oppressed – or the intellectuals agitating on their behalf – to fabricate narratives to advance their purposes. That’s not nihilism, but it is inimical to individual rights, limited government, and reasoned discourse among free and equal citizens.
Rufo identifies four “prophets” of American’s cultural revolution. The German émigré professor Herbert Marcuse specialized in the original critical theory, which revised Marxism in light of the proletariat’s failure to revolt against capitalism. In “Repressive Tolerance,” a short polemic originally published in 1965, Marcuse set the stage for today’s woke censorship, maintaining that true tolerance, which aims at the construction of an authentically liberating political order, mandates the suppression of conservative voices and ideas because they rationalize a despotic status quo. Drawing on Marxism and feminism, Marcuse’s graduate student, Angela Davis, acquired international fame for championing armed revolt against what she insisted was a pervasively racist America that could only understand the language of brute force.
In 1970, with the English language translation of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire provided America’s schools of education with the intellectual framework for “critical pedagogy,” which holds that education’s overriding goal is to raise students’ consciousness and prepare them to overcome the evils of capitalism by instituting a genuinely just social and economic order.
Finally, at Harvard Law School – where, in 1971, he became the school’s first tenured African American professor – Derrick Bell introduced a generation of students to the notion that legal reasoning itself was inherently racist and must be replaced with stories that conveyed the relentlessly horrifying experience of being black in America.
Critical race theory blends these components of 19th-century German philosophy, 1960s revolutionary activism, radical education theory, and the subordination of empirical data, historical inquiry, and reasoned analysis to stories and “lived experience.” The CRT project receives polite expression in the seemingly anodyne triumvirate of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which presupposes that alongside race, discrimination based on sex and gender runs rampant in America.
The basic elements of CRT increasingly define the new progressive orthodoxy. Education is not about acquiring knowledge, or about studying great books, major ideas, and seminal events, or about learning to think for oneself. Rather, schools and colleges must focus on liberating students from oppression by conscripting them to transform culture, society, and politics.
Systemic racism – slavery was only its most visible manifestation – is the fundamental form of oppression in America. Mere racism refers to discriminatory law or bigotry; it can be dealt with through reform. But systemic racism involves white people’s comprehensive oppression – built into society’s fundamental beliefs, practices, and institutions – of black people (and, to a lesser extent, other people of color) and requires new principles and institutions.
All white people are guilty of implicit racial bias and perpetuate systemic racism, which is particularly embedded in the pursuit of impartial judgment, the quest for excellence, the rule of law, capitalism, and the traditional family. Not only schools but also businesses and government bureaucracy must compel white people to accept guilt, acknowledge complicity in the toxic racism that permeates America, and accept responsibility for radically reorganizing society to compensate African Americans for the continuing harms inflicted by systemic racism.
Not the least evidence of critical race theory’s far-reaching impact – and its threat to the rights shared equally by all – is the mainstream media’s determination to conceal CRT’s influence even while espousing its doctrines.
Rhonda Santis’ presidential campaign has fired roughly a dozen staffers and more are expected in the coming weeks as she shakes up her fascist political operations after less than two months on the campaign trail.
The littlest Little Mouses do not like her a bit. They think she's scary, kind of like Cruella Deville but ... do you know how many Little Mouses it takes to make a fur coat? Lot, lot mouses.
"Rhonda Santis’ presidential campaign has fired roughly a dozen staffers and more are expected in the coming weeks as she shakes up"
interesting that the pro-LBGTQ set thinks it's insulting to change someone's preferred gender identity
what a bunch of hypocrites!
"fascist political operations"
Fascist..another word diluted of its true meaning by pro-gay lunacy propaganda
what a bunch of hypocrites!
"The littlest Little Mouses do not like her a bit. They think she's scary, kind of like Cruella Deville but ... do you know how many Little Mouses it takes to make a fur coat? Lot, lot mouses."
No one's going to trun your creepy kids into coats
once they're caught, they'll be fed to the boa constrictors at the zoo
Wait a minute, are you saying Rhonda Santis has preferred pronouns? And how would you know that -- do you know her personally? Have you ever seen what's inside her panties, or do you take her word for it? You humans are mighty corn-fusin', as Grandpa Mouse would say. (He can't say it right now. It sounds like he and Grandma Mouse are in the next wall, working on another generation.)
"the expansion of nuclear energy would help reduce carbon emissions"
Then you must be happy about Biden's IRA funding:
Along with the tax credits above, the IRA allocated $150 million to the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Nuclear Energy “to carry out activities for infrastructure and general plant projects.” The IRA also allocated money through 2026 to support the development of a domestic HALEU fuel supply. Most advanced nuclear reactor designs require HALEU, a uranium fuel that is more power dense than the fuel used in the current reactor fleet. Currently, the domestic HALEU supply is constrained and much of the current HALEU supply is sourced from Russia. The IRA addresses this issue by allocating $700 million dollars in funding to DOE to develop a domestic HALEU supply chain.
The majority of funding, $500 million, will be allocated to environmental impact reduction work and public relations initiatives, and to support collaboration between the National Laboratories and the private sector. Another $100 million will be allocated to research, development, and safety initiatives. Finally, an additional $100 million will directly support HALEU availability for civilian domestic research, development, demonstration, and commercial use. The advanced reactor community has advocated for this kind of support for years, but this is the first big appropriation to support the domestic HALEU supply.
"so would conversion to more natural gas and fracking'"
Only at the margins, where it could replace some coal. Natural gas still puts out CO2 when its burned, and US oil companies are still letting tons of methane leak away every day.
"1. the US has done more to reduce carbon than any other country"
No it hasn't. China has. They've built and installed more solar panels and wind turbines any anyone else on the planet.
China gets nearly 3x more power from solar than the US does, and almost 2.5x the wind power. As some point, you're going to have to come up with talking points that aren't a decade old.
"we aren't the problem"
Actually you are. And the climate change deniers like you are holding the rest of humanity back with your lies, bogus arguments, and ridiculous conspiracy theories. Folks will suffer because oil company propagandists have filled the information space with BS, and conservatives were stupid enough to buy it hook, line, and sinker.
"you need to show the courage of your convictions and travel to China to protest"
I hear they're outlawing transgender health care in Russia. Sounds like your kinda place; need help with the ticket?
"2. despite the rise in the temperature in the last century, climate-related deaths have plunged, and life expectancy has explode upward"
Yes. That's because in the last century, physicians and scientists have invented things like vaccines to get rid of smallpox, polio, and tuberculosis. And invented ways to make nitrogen fertilizer from air. They also invented air conditioners and ice-makers.
"what point is point is there is canceling the industrial revolution that has helped so many"
No one is talking about "canceling the industrial revolution" except right-wing alarmists desperate to keep their oil stocks up - they use it to mischaracterize any arguments they don't like.
"3. if the alarmists are right, it's too late - what good would penance do?"
We're on a exponential curve - starting late is still better than not starting at all.
"4. June was pretty cool around here, July is supposed to be hot"
Large parts of the country are sweltering under the heat, and parts in the NE are seeing record floods. Every reasonable day is a blessing.
The Georgia State Election Board is asking a judge to order a conservative voting organization to produce information to help investigate its claims of ballot trafficking in the state.
The Texas-based True the Vote group filed complaints with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in November 2021, including one saying it had received "a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta" during the 2020 general election and in a runoff election in January 2021.
True the Vote’s assertions were relied upon heavily for the film "2000 Mules," a widely debunked film by conservative pundit and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. The film featured surveillance video from drop boxes in Atlanta’s suburbs showing people depositing multiple ballots. A State Election Board investigation found that those people were submitting ballots for themselves and family members who lived with them, which is allowed under Georgia law.
In the court filing Tuesday, the state attorney general’s office asked a Fulton County Superior Court judge to order True the Vote to comply with its subpoena.
"After multiple good faith efforts by the State Election Board and its counsel to obtain the requested information and documents, True the Vote continues to indifferently vacillate between statements of assured compliance and blanket refusals," leaving the election board with no choice but to turn to the courts.
True the Vote’s complaint said its investigators "spoke with several individuals regarding personal knowledge, methods, and organizations involved in ballot trafficking in Georgia." One of those people, referred to in the complaint only as John Doe, "admitted to personally participating and provided specific information about the ballot trafficking process." Doe is alleged to have outlined a "network of non-governmental organizations" that paid people to collect and deliver absentee ballots.
The group said it was able to confirm patterns of activity to support the allegations using surveillance video and geospatial mobile device information. In a September 2021 letter, Vic Reynolds, who was director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation at the time, said the evidence produced did not amount to proof of ballot harvesting.
After receiving the group’s complaints two months later, Raffensperger’s office opened an investigation. Investigators in April 2022 issued subpoenas to True the Vote for relevant documents and information, including the identity and contact information for people who True the Vote said provided details about the alleged ballot trafficking.
A lawyer for True the Vote in May 2023 wrote a letter to a state attorney saying that a complete response to the subpoenas would require the organization to identify people to whom it had promised confidentiality and that it could not do that. The lawyer wrote that True the Vote was withdrawing its complaints.
State Election Board Chair William Duffey responded in a letter two weeks later, saying that the board’s investigation into True the Vote’s "serious allegations" was ongoing. Therefore, he wrote, he would not allow the complaints to be withdrawn and asked the state attorney general’s office to seek enforcement of the subpoenas.
One man falsely accused in the film of committing ballot fraud has filed a still-pending federal lawsuit against True the Vote, D’Souza and others. Surveillance video in the film shows Mark Andrews, his face blurred, depositing five ballots in a drop box in downtown Lawrenceville, a suburb northeast of Atlanta, ahead of the 2020 election. A voiceover by conservative pundit and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza says: "What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes."
A state investigation found that Andrews was dropping off ballots for himself, his wife, and his three adult children.
Post a Comment
<< Home