Open Thread February 4, 2023

 Posted by at 7:14 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Feb 042023
 

Yesterday, I managed to take some trash to the polycart before sunset. If I can break down enough boxes to recycle, and get them out in tume. then maybe next Wednesday I can get them to the curb, which would be nice.  If not, oh well.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

The Conversation – A Black history primer on African Americans’ fight for equality – 5 essential reads
Quote – 3. An image of a lynching found in a family photo album
Click through for more on this, and for the other four, all with links to more detail.

Mother Jones – Why Starbucks Is Inviting Social Workers Into Its Stores
Quote – On a chilly recent morning, customers inside a Starbucks in New York City’s midtown were doing what you’d expect: buying coffee, warming up, chatting. But one person was moving through the store with a different purpose: she first approached a woman standing near the door, and then another man seated with a cup of coffee, saying hello, asking how they were and offering them gloves, hats and handwarmers.
CLick through for story. Starbucks is not exactly the first corporation I would think of when it comes to empathy, or to positive innovation. But sometimes corporations, like people, will surprise me.

Food For Thought

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Video Thread 2/3/2023

 Posted by at 11:56 am  Open Thread, Politics
Feb 032023
 

Glenn Kirschner – Rep. Jim Jordan demands details of pending DOJ investigations. DOJ tells Jordan to ‘pound sand.’

The Lincoln Project – Last Week in the Republican Party – January 31, 2023

Ring of Fire – Ted Cruz Refuses To Apology For Spreading Pelosi Conspiracies

Really American – Chip Franklin RIPS Conservative talking heads over their CREEPY obsession with M&Ms sexuality.

This Cat’s Favorite Word Is Exactly What You’d Expect

Beau – Let’s talk about the Constitution and mixed messages….

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Open Thread February 3, 2023

 Posted by at 7:14 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Feb 032023
 

Yesterday, only a day or two after I pointed out that McCarthy had seated Ilhan Omar on the Foreign Affairs Committee, she was kicked off of it. The snake didn’t have the guts to do it himself. He took a vote of the full House. Grrrrr. Also, I want to highlight an article by Robert Reich on the debt ceilling – factual and easy to understand, like everything he writes.

Also, this video was in Wednesday’s video thread, and Lona recommended reporting it here because, essentially, it should be seen by everyone in the country.  She also recommended Freya including it in her action emails, which is up to Freya of course, but I’d concur.

PoliticsGirl – Why Less Tax is Actually More Tax

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

Letters from an American – February 1, 2023
Quote – On February 1, 1862, in the early days of the Civil War, the Atlantic Monthly published Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” summing up the cause of freedom for which the United States troops would soon be fighting…. [T]he hopes of that moment had crumbled within a decade. Almost a century later, on February 1, 1960, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil set out to bring them back to life when they sat down on stools at the F.W. Woolworth Company department store lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina…. Exactly 63 years later, on February 1, 2023, Tyre Nichols’s family said laid their 29-year-old son to rest in Memphis, Tennessee.
Click through for more detailed history. Mr. and Mrs. Nichols have accepted President Biden’s invitation to attend his State of the Union address. But – will we ever learn?

Washington Post (no paywall) – A Black professor defies DeSantis law restricting lessons on race
Quote – The painful chapter in Florida’s history known as the Newberry Six lynchings is one the university professor has taken pains to help document over decades of research. It’s also one that he fears will be removed from Florida history lessons under a new education law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as part of a broader push to root out ideas he deems “woke.”
Click through for story. In DeSantis’s Florida – Desantistan – it’ is not unthinkable that Professor Dun may need to be concerned that he may be lynched. That despite the fact that so many of us, even before 1861 and up to the present – have fought so hard to prevent that.

Food For Thought

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SOUND OFF! 2/2/23 – The Religious Reich

 Posted by at 5:25 pm  Politics
Feb 022023
 

The rise of the extreme right should have us all worried.

Am I being paranoid? Were those who warned about the rise of Hitler and the Nazis paranoid? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean nobody’s out to get you. Not every conspiracy theory is bugnuttery. All conspiracy theories begin with facts, but a few remain in the territory of truth.

The Religious Right has been planning for decades to take over this country and pervert it into a theocracy. They are suppressing voters, dumbing down our education system, bleeding social programs white in order to feed the insatiable maw of Defense. They are increasingly injecting religion – specifically, evangelical Christianity – into government. While women struggle for better wages and reproductive rights, while POCs fight for economic and voting rights, while LGBTQ people battle for civil and human rights, the Religious Right seeks to squelch these movements, spreading vicious lies that anybody who is not a straight, white, Christian man or a submissive white woman is a tool of the Devil who seeks to upend this country and ram socialism (which they ignorantly equate with Communism) down everybody’s throat. Meanwhile, they seek to ram their twisted, narrow morality down everybody’s throat. Qui parle.

One look at Florida and you can see where the rest of this country could be headed. Governor DeSantis has not only banned books but also yanked Black studies from school curricula. Librarians are under threat for refusal to pull banned books from the shelves. How else will DeSantis attempt to squelch education and knowledge in his state? Welcome to Florida, please set your watch back 70 years.

I recently discovered a shocking article about a community of home-schoolers who are endeavoring to turn their kids into “wonderful little Nazis.”  I yi yi yi yi! They call Robert E. Lee a “grand role model for young, white men” and Martin Luther King Jr. “the antithesis of our civilization and our people.” That is how hideously twisted their minds are. People who harbor such attitudes would gleefully carry out another Kristallnacht and pass Nuremberg-style laws. Their victims will be numerous, and could easily include people just like you. Yep, you.

Fortunately, there is good news. Progressives and Leftists are rising up and fighting back. When news of overturning Roe v Wade was leaked, the number of women registering to vote spiked. The more liberal states are passing laws to counter the RR’s evil machinations. In the 2022 midterms, the “Red Wave” that right-wingers hoped and prayed for turned out to be a red ripple. Republicans gained only a slim margin in the House, and Democrats hung on to the Senate. Rafael Warnock held off Herschel Walker to keep Georgia’s Senate representation blue.

Even while we hope and work for the best, we need to prepare for the worst. Never, never, NEVER think a horror like Nazi Germany couldn’t happen here. We must accept that even our votes and efforts may not be enough to prevent the extreme right wack jobs from taking over. Ergo, we need to plan what to do Just In Case. Where will we go? Whom can we trust? How can we resist? (Ever notice that, in dystopian movies and novels, there is little if any mention of a domestic resistance movement? Did they forget the Maquis?) And if we have to flee, where will we go?

Let us counter the Religious Reich as much as we can, in every way we can.

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Video Thread 2/2/2023

 Posted by at 11:57 am  Open Thread, Politics
Feb 022023
 

Glenn Kirschner – NY DA Alvin Bragg opens a grand jury probe & AGAIN begins investigating the crimes of Donald Trump (I would remind y’all that the investigation being discussed involves a case which was dead under the NY statute of limitations, involves a crime regarding which NY has just opened a sort of amnesty window under which it may now be considered.)

The Lincoln Project – RNC Chaos

Thom Hartmann – Will Right Wing Sheriffs Perp Walk America Right Into Fascism? (Colorado has a cople of those Sheriffs too.)

Mrs. Betty Bowers – The Secret To Reading an Inconvenient Bible

Couple Saves ‘Gargoyle’ Dog After 8 Years On The Streets

Beau – Let’s talk about what escalation is….

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Open Thread February 2, 2023

 Posted by at 6:51 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Feb 022023
 

Yesterday, the weather site I use was predicting highs in the 40’s and 50’s for the next ten days, and no snow. That will certainly make life more comfortable for me. While I am of course concerned about the snowpack, snow here does not translate into snow in the snowpack. Menot getting any doesn’t mean the snowpack is a lost cause (of course it also doesn’t mean it isn’t.)  Denver (measured at DIA) did get the heaviest snowfall this year (so far) than they have seen in over ten years.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

The Good in Us by Mary L. Trump – A Failing of Basic Humanity
Quote – The great Sherrilyn Ifill [responded] “I suggest that what Friedersdorf sees as failure, is instead his own inability to recognize the power and resilience of white supremacy, and its hold on the institution of American law enforcement. Those of us in this work have long explained the systematic and cultural hard-wiring of racism in policing, while so many leaders in the white community have insisted that it is only “bad apples.” We explained that so deeply-imbedded is the culture of white supremacy in policing that even Black police officers can participate in brutality against Black victims, because they too are responding to the messages of white supremacy in their profession that promotes and rewards officers who know whose lives matter and whose don’t.”
Click through for full opinion. It’s long – but Mary gets it (as does Sherilynn – IIRC a niece of the late Gwen.)

Daily Beast – Racist RSVP Cannot Ruin 9-Year-Old’s Birthday
Quote – Dr. Ijeoma Nnodim Opara[, MD, FAAP, FAIM] sent [her daughter] to school with party invitations [for the girl’s 9th birthday] in bright yellow-and-white envelopes for her close friends. But the daughter still had one of the invitations when she returned home. Her explanation pained Opara as both a Black mother and a physician researcher who studies systemic racism in health care. “She said this person will not be able to come because their grandfather does not like Black people,” Opara told The Daily Beast….
[B]efore Opara spoke, her daughter responded exactly how the mother would have hoped. “She said ‘I know it’s racist, and I told [the classmate] so,’” Opara recalled.
Click through for bittersweet story. So many responded wanting to send her a card that D. Opara is opening a PO Box just for tehm. But it should not have been necessary.

Food For Thought

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Video Thread 2/1/2023

 Posted by at 11:58 am  Open Thread, Politics
Feb 012023
 

Glenn Kirschner – Donald Trump goes out for ice cream while the folks he told to attack the US Capitol go to prison

PoliticsGirl – Why Less Tax is Actually More Tax

Farron Balanced – Kevin McCarthy Goes Absolutely Nuts When Reporter Asks About George Santos

Robert Reich – The One Thing That Would Make Elections Better For Everyone

This Cat’s Obsessed With One Movie

Beau – Let’s talk about Biden’s impeachment and the GOP Senate….

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Open Thread February 1, 2023

 Posted by at 6:48 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Feb 012023
 

Yesterday, I received a breaking news alert from Axios – ” George Santos tells colleagues he’s stepping down from House committees.” That will be nice if it happens. But he’s such a liar, how can one tell? I also spent way too much time untangling – but that, alas, is what it takes, and it has to be done if I’m going to use the yarn. Today is the first day of Black History Month (except in FLorida.) I”ll be doing what I can – which means not every short take is going to be current.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

Mother Jones – How a Sunken Slave Ship Set Off “a Search for Ourselves”
Quote – [M]aritime archaeology has tended to focus its masked eye on the wrecks of rich and famous ships rather than those that traded in flesh and blood. Redressing that archaeological, academic and sociocultural imbalance was the driving force behind the Slave Wrecks Project, a partnership established in 2008 between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and other institutions and organizations in Africa and the US. “People talk about the slave trade; they talk about the millions of people who were transported, but it’s hard to really imagine that, so we wanted to reduce it to human scale by really focusing on a single ship, on the people on the ship, and the story around the ship,” says [Lonnie] Bunch [NMAAHC Director]. “Yes, we tell you about the thousands of ships that brought the enslaved, but we also say: ‘Here’s a way to humanize it.’”
Click through for story. Not everyone wants to know about their ancestral history, and that is true of people from all backgrounds (and compinations of backgrounds. But those who do want to know should have equal access to that information. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has done wonderful work in that field, but anyone who has watched his show knows that the history of slavery in the U.S. presents a huge stumbling block, much as fires destroying records do, with the revealing difference that this suppression was deliberate. Anything which can help cut through that curtain is welcome.

Daily Beast – Florida Explains Why It Blocked Black History Class—and It’s a Doozy
Quote – The Florida Department of Education says it banned AP African American History because it teaches students about activism, intersectionality and encourages “ending the war on Black trans, queer, gender non-conforming, and intersex people,” according to a document the department sent to The Daily Beast…. DeSantis’ administration further made their anti-LGBTQ stance known in their explanation for prohibiting the class, simply listing “Black Queer Studies” as a violation of state law. The document further admonishes the teaching of intersectionality, claiming it is “foundational to” Critical Race Theory, without explaining how.
Click through for details. I’m not sure “doozy” is the right word – “doozies” are supposed to be positive (it’s derived from “Duesenberg.”) This is so negative, and so far right – I’d call it a “Q-zy,” as in QAnon.

Food For Thought

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