All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[kidfresh512]

Man, I really the Dems to win Georgia, but I suspect they’ll lose and Mitchie Mitch and the other Republican senate ghouls will continue to be obstructionist cretinous monsters to President Biden like they were to Obama when he was in office.

I was just reading Britney Whaley's article Black Georgians Organize To Save Their Lives, Communities While Senate GOP Coddles 1 Percent in Essence Magazine. About the ground game basically and the final pitch for the Dems there and I desperately hope they can pull it off. But, I fully expect the GOP to take both despite everything they have done. Having it come down to Georgia was just desperation time.

This relief package is barely a band-aid over a gaping wound. More than 300,000 people have lost their lives to COVID-19. Millions have lost their jobs. More than half of the dead in my state of Georgia were Black, and a staggering 80% of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Georgia are Black folks. Black unemployment is double white unemployment. Hospitals have closed and our state’s healthcare system is at the breaking point.

Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his loyal foot soldiers—including Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue—have blocked the relief we need. But if Georgian voters throw out Loeffler and Perdue in January, we take back the Senate and put real relief and recovery for working families on the table. Most recently, even President Trump acknowledges families need more relief. But instead of protecting working families, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue made themselves rich.

They are not deserving of the public trust, and we will vote them out.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Chuck Winder, who in 2012, joined the ranks of Republicans who were talking about rape during a discussion about a mandatory ultrasound anti-abortion bill, when he intimated that a married woman could not be “truly raped”. When he was criticized for his comments, he defended them by saying that he just meant women should be “tested” to prove if they were actually raped or not. Winder has still has other issues with women, including supporting a bill so their employers could deny them contraceptive coverage on their insurance plans. Winder also has the staggering hypocrisy to demand federal marijuana laws should allow the states to override state law and continue to make the drug illegal, and then simultaneously push for legislation to nullify the Affordable Care Act on “states’ rights”, and supports the highly unconstitutional idea that states should be able to sue the federal government to annex federal lands. in 2016, he co-sponsored a bill to make the Bible as a reference tool in all public school courses. (Because when it's time to discuss evolution, you want to be able to cite a man being made of clay and a woman being made out of one of his ribs, for sciences' sake.)

Chuck Winder’s latest attacks on public education were in 2017 and were a move to pass legislation to remove the discussion of climate change from school classes, because heaven forbid the children learn that his party has been denying it’s happening and causing a global crisis for decades. (Spoiler Alert: He failed.)

Chuck Winder did receive a primary challenger in 2018, defeating him with 60% of the vote. And thus he remains a fixture in Idaho politics, not unlike an old leaky toilet that needs replacing. He accomplished virtually nothing while leading the Idaho State Senate in the past session in the state legislature, and his satisfaction with the status quo where everything is broken is why the GOP have yet again named him to lead them for the next two years. Because why do things like legislate to save lives from an approaching pandemic when you can ban transgender youths from participating in sports in public schools? He’s got priorities! (Terrible ones.) 

[Tami]

If you plan on going to D.C., you might want to avoid this hotel. Shame really.

For D.C. protests, Proud Boys settle in at city’s oldest hotel and its bar

Located just five blocks from the White House, the Hotel Harrington is the city’s oldest continuously operating hotel and has a long-standing reputation as one of the most affordable in the heart of the District. But over the past few months, the Harrington has been gaining a new reputation: Proud Boys hangout.

The militant right-wing organization that vigorously supports President Trump, which has clashed in violent street battles with members of antifascist groups and others who oppose Trump, has made the Harrington its unofficial headquarters when members come to the District. Several hundred Proud Boys recently stayed at the hotel while in town for the Dec. 12 protest of Joe Biden’s election as president.

The repeated and growing presence of Proud Boys at the bar and hotel has unnerved some guests and workers, many of whom are Black and Hispanic and were intimidated by their presence, according to two employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

In the past three months, Harry’s has been cited three times for violating social distancing and mask regulations. The violations occurred on weekends when large numbers of Proud Boys and other pro-Trump supporters, in town for demonstrations, were in the bar.

For the hotel and the bar, there seems to be uncertainty about what steps they can or should take. Ann Terry, the general manager of the hotel, declined to comment. During a brief phone call, John Boyle, the owner of Harry’s, declined to comment other than to say that the bar closed early on Dec. 11 and 12 because of concerns over not being able to maintain coronavirus social distancing guidelines. The bar’s website announced it will be closed on Jan. 5 and 6.

[Gray Lensman]

So he claims that he "Line item vetoed" the heck out of it.

Something the Supreme Court shot down decades ago when Hillary's Husband tried it.

4 years in, Trump still has no idea what he is doing.

And Clinton at least had a law granting a line item veto (despite it later being declared unconstitutional). Trump doesn't even have that.

[Gray Lensman]

The Nashville Bomber, Anthony Quinn Warner:



I haven't watched all the news coverage, but I've heard and read there's been a reluctance to call this a case of domestic terrorism. Hmm! I wonder why?

Until we have some kind of manifesto or a political motivation he doesn't qualify as a terrorist yet. Although if he was a bit darker on the Family Guy OK/Not OK chart I'm sure right wing media would be calling him one anyways.

[DrNewGod]

I don't think we have an Oligarchy identical to Russia, but it's likely we have our own, unique U.S. version.
Without strict campaign finance reform and a very strong independent ethical enforcement agency, will likely never be free of interference from special interests and completely devoted to the people.

Russia is a straight up kleptocracy. An oligarchy usually has some consensus about rules among the oligarchs. Russia is a dictatorship of brute force.

[DrNewGod]

Until we have some kind of manifesto or a political motivation he doesn't qualify as a terrorist yet. Although if he was a bit darker on the Family Guy OK/Not OK chart I'm sure right wing media would be calling him one anyways.

I've rarely been so glad to be wrong. I really feared we were looking at Engagement 1 from an extremist militia group.

[Mister Mets]

Politico looks at Michael Tubbs, the 30-year old UBI loving mayor of Stockton, California, who has been the subject of much acclaim, including an HBO documentary.

Once in office, Tubbs kept the national media captivated by drawing a connection from his biography—and Stockton’s considerably grimmer story—to the progressive policies he championed. Leveraging connections from the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and throughout the Democratic Party, Tubbs raised or helped raise millions of dollars from private groups and government agencies for a local experiment in guaranteed basic income, as well as homelessness programs, mentoring of at-risk students and an intervention program to reduce gun violence. He spearheaded a college scholarship program for Stockton students that drew $20 million from Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, who had lived across the hall from Tubbs at Stanford. And he started a coalition of mayors supportive of guaranteed income. (Not all of these fans seem to care if he’s staying in office: Earlier this month, Tubbs announced that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who had already donated $3 million to the guaranteed income initiative across several cities, was giving an additional $15 million.)

Tubbs cut a uniquely high profile in what, in California politics, is typically a dead-end job—leader of a crime-ridden, once-bankrupt city of about 310,000 people in the flat agricultural expanses of the state’s Central Valley, far from the nation’s political and media centers. And on the surface, Tubbs seemed certain to keep it. In the March primary, from which the top two finishers advance regardless of party, Tubbs finished about 20 percentage points ahead of the rest of the field. And the makeup of the electorate appeared likely to favor him heavily in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Stockton by a more than 2-to-1 margin. And Tubbs’ challenger, a Republican pastor and businessman named Kevin Lincoln, had little experience other than a blowout loss to a Democrat in a state Assembly race in 2016.

The reason he's interesting now is that in a California city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1, he lost by eleven points to a Republican pastor.

The HBO special Carter mentioned was an 89-minute documentary, “Stockton on My Mind,” which followed his political rise and premiered over the summer, during his reelection campaign. It was the second documentary made about Tubbs before he was 30.


Omar called Tubbs “the UBI mayor” and told him “your success is talked about quite a lot, not just in the corners where mayors exist, but … in the Beltway, where policy decisions are being made.”

There was one place, however, where his success was much less celebrated. As Tubbs spoke to the town hall about his ongoing commitment to “radical interventions” to address structural poverty, the votes were being counted back in his own, heavily Democratic city, and Tubbs was losing badly. By the following week, when Tubbs conceded to a little-known Republican challenger—ultimately beaten by nearly 13 percentage points, after holding out for an unlikely turnaround— interest in him outside Stockton had largely turned to probing his collapse.

For young Democrats, Tubbs had served as a model of how quickly an ambitious and charismatic candidate, even with little political experience, could gain power in a major American city, and use that seat to advance progressive causes across the country. His defeat served as a reminder of how fragile that route to progress can be.

[Mister Mets]

The New York Times reports on a college admissions story that reveals a lot about the attitude on the left.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/u...tion=US%20News

A high school freshman girl said something stupid. A student pissed off about it holds it onto it until a moment in which he can inflict maximum damage.

Jimmy Galligan was in history class last school year when his phone buzzed with a message. Once he clicked on it, he found a three-second video of a white classmate looking into the camera and uttering an anti-Black racial slur.

The slur, he said, was regularly hurled in classrooms and hallways throughout his years in the Loudoun County school district. He had brought the issue up to teachers and administrators but, much to his anger and frustration, his complaints had gone nowhere.

So he held on to the video, which was sent to him by a friend, and made a decision that would ricochet across Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.

Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir.

And now she's no longer going to college.

Mr. Galligan had not seen the video before receiving it last school year, when he and Ms. Groves were seniors. By then, she was a varsity cheer captain who dreamed of attending the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose cheer team was the reigning national champion. When she made the team in May, her parents celebrated with a cake and orange balloons, the university’s official color.

The next month, as protests were sweeping the nation after the police killing of George Floyd, Ms. Groves, in a public Instagram post, urged people to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word,” responded someone whom Ms. Groves said she did not know.

Her alarm at the stranger’s comment turned to panic as friends began calling, directing her to the source of a brewing social media furor. Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its admission offer.

By that June evening, about a week after Mr. Floyd’s killing, teenagers across the country had begun leveraging social media to call out their peers for racist behavior. Some students set up anonymous pages on Instagram devoted to holding classmates accountable, including in Loudoun County.

The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.

This seems excessive, and inconsistent with the idea that we should generous about the mistakes made by children.

Jill Filipovic thinks it reflects poorly on modern culture, punishing children for the mistakes of adults in the name of progress.

What most strikes me about this story, which is troubling in a great many different directions, is that we are saddling children with the consequences of decades of adult failures, and then calling sporadic excessive punishment "progress."

Adults fail to integrate the public schools. They fail to proportionately and fairly address racism when they see children engage in it. They fail to adequately educate their student body on American history. They fail to consistently protect kids of color from racism.

And then there is a carnival of public shaming for one girl who yes obviously should not have used a racial slur four years earlier when she was 15 but also grew up in an environment where that was quietly tolerated. Then online, folks attack the teenage boy who kept the video.

I've seen tweets calling the boy "psychopathic" and "evil." But he's also just a teenager, navigating a community that hasn't taken racism seriously nor given him any tools to address it in a productive way. Both of these kids are being so poorly served by all the grown-ups here.

The most frustrating part of these conversations is that there seems to be little interest in talking about proportionality. You're either "canceling" someone or you're "giving them a pass." Might be more productive to consider what fair, proportionate consequences would be.

Conservative writer Seth Mandel thinks the guy who waited to report the news is being blamed too much.

Reminder on that NYT story that while what that kid did to try to ruin the girl's life was obviously horrible, he was also young and teens don't make good decisions and this story is a good example of the need to help kids make better decisions.

Not a defense obviously--waiting for the right moment to do maximum damage to her shows some chilling premeditation--just noting that ppl too young to have this much power over others have that power and it has implications far beyond school drama.

[worstblogever]

Until we have some kind of manifesto or a political motivation he doesn't qualify as a terrorist yet. Although if he was a bit darker on the Family Guy OK/Not OK chart I'm sure right wing media would be calling him one anyways.

The right accused a child who built a clock of being a bomb building terrorist because of his melanin content.

This old white guy loaded an RV up with explosives and detonated it, and it's somehow a question of what his intent was.

[PaulBullion]

The New York Times reports on a college admissions story that reveals a lot about the attitude on the left.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/u...§ion=US%20News

A high school freshman girl said something stupid. A student pissed off about it holds it onto it until a moment in which he can inflict maximum damage.



And now she's no longer going to college.



This seems excessive, and inconsistent with the idea that we should generous about the mistakes made by children.

Jill Filipovic thinks it reflects poorly on modern culture, punishing children for the mistakes of adults in the name of progress.



Conservative writer Seth Mandel thinks the guy who waited to report the news is being blamed too much.

So hate speech is "sOMetHINg sTuPId" to you.

Telling.

[Kirby101]

So the University of Tennessee is "the left". Hmmm?

[worstblogever]

Giving "teenagers who say something stupid (hate speech)" chances to succeed they don't deserve is how we got Stephen Miller.

So this episode of the New York Times' editorial page is brought to us by the letters "G, T, F, and O".

[Mister Mets]

Giving "teenagers who say something stupid (hate speech)" chances to succeed they don't deserve is how we got Stephen Miller.

So this episode of the New York Times' editorial page is brought to us by the letters "G, T, F, and O".

Why do you think she doesn't deserve this chance to succeed?

And what line should we draw? Should a kid who says something objectionable about religious believers be ineligible for college? How about socialist students who may upset important donors? Any male student who ever used a slur against women?

So the University of Tennessee is "the left". Hmmm?

The people making the phone calls to demand the university rescind admission would generally be to the left.

Right-wingers do sometimes do that, but it tends to be in bad faith. When that occurs, it should be opposed.

So hate speech is "sOMetHINg sTuPId" to you.

Telling.

The alternative to it being stupid is it being rational and intelligent.

As for whether it counts as hate speech is more complex. In the language, it's often just another way to say "person."

[Adam Allen]

The New York Times reports on a college admissions story that reveals a lot about the attitude on the left.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/u...§ion=US%20News

A high school freshman girl said something stupid. A student pissed off about it holds it onto it until a moment in which he can inflict maximum damage.



And now she's no longer going to college.



This seems excessive, and inconsistent with the idea that we should generous about the mistakes made by children.

Jill Filipovic thinks it reflects poorly on modern culture, punishing children for the mistakes of adults in the name of progress.



Conservative writer Seth Mandel thinks the guy who waited to report the news is being blamed too much.

The "now she's no longer going to college" thing is overselling it just a bit, Mets. You make it sound like she lost the opportunity to get a college education, when according to the article she's from an affluent gated community off a golf course, and apparently is already still taking online classes from a local community college ... in a year when classes were probably going to be online, anyway. In other words, her college track may have changed, but it is not as if she will not get a college education.

Beyond all that though, the bigger thing for me really is just the practical consideration of what exactly is it you imagine should be done to help this poor, innocent, defenseless girl?

She chose to use a racial slur, and people were offended by it. Are you suggesting the left should rise up in protests to insist that the school should be forced to readmit her, and she the cheer team should be forced to put her back on the team? When you read the article you posted, detailing all of the racial problems in the school system these kids came from, that's your takeaway? Why aren't we all up in arms over declaring how harmless her slur was?

FFS, this happened with her while there were protests and violent conflicts with police across the country over police brutality and racial injustice. So you think, maybe all the BLM protesters should instead have taken up her cause? Because that's the greater injustice?