#also the idea that a presidential campaign would wait until MOMENTS BEFORE election results to write a concession speech

[vanity-complex]

You know, I can excuse so many things in Red, White, and Royal Blue, but Uma Thurmans accent?

[losille2000]

Mister America, Prologue: Massachusetts

CHAPTER NUMBER: 1/? CHARACTERS: President!Chris Evans/OFC (see notes) GENRE: Romance/Drama FIC SUMMARY: After a massive social media write-in campaign organized by others, Chris finds himself thrust into a spotlight that he is unprepared to handle. His campaign managers suggest that a political marriage might help him weather the storm and help his image during the campaign... just so long as it isn’t the one woman Chris really wants. RATING: M  WARNINGS:  Nothing. AUTHORS NOTES: This story is AU in the fact that this is the 2020 presidential race, and Chris is a candidate. But everything in the past is still the same with him being an actor. Also, COVID-19 is not a part of this story. I needed to play in a land where COVID didn’t exist and “Captain America,” in his alter ego, punched out a Nazi in a metaphorical(?) way. For more on the story, go here.

This first part is prologue-y.

I have also curated a soundtrack for all 50 states, and then some. You can listen on Spotify right now, may eventually put it on Youtube. There will be 50 chapters (I’m hoping), but many of them will be shorter.

Also on AO3!

Boston, MA Evans for President Campaign Headquarters November 3rd, 2020 30 Minutes Before First Polls Close

Stage fright is no joke.

When it hits, it hits like a semi truck going seventy on an icy Massachusetts road. In the blink of an eye, you’re completely obliterated. Except this is on stage and you’re not dead, even though you wish you were. In fact, you’re very much alive. Alive enough to feel the force of the impact, followed by the squeezing in your chest and choking on your breathless words. Paralysis takes over. Cold clammy sweat slicks your palms and also trickles down your back to that one spot between your shoulder blades you can’t reach, but causes your costume to uncomfortably stick to your skin.

There’s no escape. You know what’s coming. You worry you’ll forget your lines, or trip on your cue, or make a complete and utter fool of yourself. You feel like an imposter, questioning why you’re here, in this role, when that dude, JD, from your acting class years ago was a million times more talented than you, and you’re the one that got that teen movie deal.  You’re the one who became one of America's most beloved superheroes for a decade.

You’re also the one who has a very real chance of winning the 2020 presidential election, despite no college education, limited understanding of what elected officials in DC actually do on a day to day basis, and the closest thing you have to experience as a “boss” or “commander in chief” of anything was a movie set or two where you were director and executive producer. 

Nope.

What I, Chris Evans, have is a dedicated online fan base who took the time to write my name into ballots when they discovered I had filed for ballot access in every state of the union. I didn’t do the filing on a whim; we sat around late one night talking about the interviews I had been conducting in DC for a website about party positions on important issues. My business partners and I came up with the idea that a long form documentary about campaigning would be interesting, and we determined the best way to understand the process was to become a “candidate” myself. Meaning, we only planned to use the credentials to be on the front line of the campaigning process. I was never going to create signs and make speeches or debate with others.

I never intended to run a legitimate campaign.

But, as I mentioned, something strange happened during the Democratic primaries. People started to vote for me, a trickle of rain in a hurricane.

I won a few primary delegates.

Without even trying.

Not enough to win the Democratic ticket, but enough to make pollsters sit up and take notice.

My loyal fans stepped in again, undaunted, and ignited a storm. They dubbed it “Operation America’s Ass” and created a grassroots campaign across the country with GoFundMe donations and a lot of pluck. I thought it was a joke. A part of me still does think it’s a joke. I mean, what other explanation is there for this mess? For the red, white and blue bunting hanging on the walls with the “Chris Evans for President” sign plastered underneath it? For the staffers who stop briefly to see if I need anything...‘Would you like a drink, sir?’... or, upon seeing how pale I look, give me a vote of confidence… ‘Are you ready for your acceptance speech?’ There’s absolutely no good explanation as to why there are twenty or thirty people buzzing around the hotel suite waiting for results. They’re so energized with hope for a better future.

Hope that I can be everything they ever wanted in a president.

An Independent president, free from party oversight.

A president with class.

A president for the people.

A president who can bring the United States back from the brink of destruction at the hands of previous leaders.

I wish I had their confidence.

When they asked me on career day in school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said artist. When I was older, in high school, I knew I was going to be an actor. Never president. The job never entered my mind as being a possibility, not even when I used to work for my uncle’s congressional campaigns. Or when I started filming those interviews.

Why does anyone think I, a straight white momma’s boy from Boston should be president in 2020? Just because I made a few popular Tweets about the current president’s lack of leadership?

It has to be a joke. A cosmic one. I’m a punchline. I am convinced they’ll jump out from behind a doorway and yell “You’ve been PUNK’D! We really got you this time, now here, Bernie, you’re the better candidate.”

And yet…

What if they see in me something I do not?

I place a lot of stock in being in the moment. I’ve also put a lot of work into accepting the twists and turns of life instead of allowing all the “what ifs” and “what should I dos” to eat away at me. I told everybody after I was done with Marvel and financially secure enough to only work on projects I really wanted to, I’d take life as it came at me.

Well, it came after me.

To be fair, I originally chose to get into politics, even in a tiny way, because I wanted to be informed about my choices. I created a website so others could learn, as well. As time went on, I became more involved on Capitol Hill. I even did some lobbying for a few causes dear to my heart. And, yes, I did file the ballot access paperwork.

Had I unintentionally set my path in this direction? Was it inevitable for me to become a contender for the presidency?

Fortunately, I learned early on in the process that a lot of being a presidential candidate is being a convincing showman. An actor. The world's a stage, after all, and I am but a player. You have to have some solid ideas and convictions to back up the image, but a lot of the governing comes from other members of the executive branch. Should I win, I’d only be signing off on everything.

Of course, that “everything” affects the lives of more than 300 million souls. I wouldn’t trust me with a kitchen knife, much less nuclear launch codes and people's livelihoods and education and health and…

My hands shake with nerves just thinking about it.

Let it be said, once I do make it out onto the stage--be it as an actor or presidential candidate--I rise to the challenge. The energy from the audience buoys me. Makes me feel alive. But I am not, by nature, someone who likes to sign away so much personal freedom in exchange for the weight of carrying an albatross around my neck. I thought signing for Captain America would be tough; the human toll of running for president even moreso.

Actually being President? I can’t even wrap my mind around that.

It would be easy to call it quits, even now when the votes are already cast. I could have done it a long time ago, when the reality of the situation hit me the first time. I didn’t. Something told me to hold back, play it out. I persevered. Why? Somewhere, along the line, I began to believe I could do this. I could make a positive difference in the lives of Americans.

I certainly want to do right by all my supporters--and my detractors. I want to be a leader for all Americans.

But can I, really, while knowing my incredible deficiencies?

Maybe I can’t, but I can be the team leader. A brand ambassador, if you will. A good leader delegates. And I intend, should I win, to surround myself with the best and brightest. I will accept no less. I will do ‘Whatever It Takes,’ as our slogan boasts. I am American, first and foremost, and I care deeply about this country.

A real Captain America, if you will. Maybe not as strong or powerful as others, but I sure as hell can give a great speech and will defend my country from bullies until my last breath, whether they be purple… or orange.

Except, I suppose if I’m elected, I won’t be Captain America anymore. They’ll call me Mr. President.

Or, horror of horrors, what if the new name my nearest and dearest coined makes it out into the public. They tease me with it just to see my visceral revulsion and get a laugh. But if I have learned anything about the internet--and pop culture--is that if something is catchy, it sticks around for a long time.

Maybe I ought to get used to the idea of being a punchline.

So, I suppose I have a question for you.

Won’t you consider a vote for Mr. America?

[disillusioned41]

Last week, House Democrats attempted to call President Donald Trump’s bluff and increase the COVID relief bill’s survival checks to $2,000. House Republicans blocked the initial maneuver, and may today prevent the legislation from passing. If it does pass, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could kill the bill.

The spectacle of Congress continuing to stall $2,000 survival checks during an economic emergency spotlights Donald Trump’s erratic behavior, Democrats’ persistent austerity ideology and the dysfunctionality of a government waiting until the last minute to hammer out 5,000-page emergency legislation in a matter of hours.

Most important, the antics of House Republicans and McConnell illustrate how — despite all of America’s paens to democracy — lawmakers ostensibly elected to represent us will routinely stomp on their own constituents.

Of course, constituents are barely part of the media narrative anymore. Indeed, if you read national news, you will almost never see a mention of whom exactly these Republicans are supposed to be representing.

For example, you will not see any mention of the fact that, according to research from AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer, the majority of lawmakers in the House Republican Conference come from districts in the bottom two income quintiles — meaning their constituents would particularly benefit from the $2,000 checks.

Similarly, you will see McConnell depicted only as an all-powerful Republican leader — an omniscient spectre haunting the halls of power, effectively disassociated from time, place and constituency. In this mythology, he is a phantom menace who controls everything but somehow represents nobody. You will not see much mention of the fact that McConnell actually does represent a real, live place — one that illustrates how this standoff is fundamentally a crisis of democratic accountability.

Kentucky’s Senator May Deny Emergency Aid To His Own Constituents

McConnell’s role in this debacle cannot be overstated: Had he already signed onto the plan to increase the direct payments in the COVID deal, it would probably be a done deal — but so far he has been reticent, as millions of Americans are struggling to survive.

Among those millions struggling to survive are hundreds of thousands of people in McConnell’s own state of Kentucky — which is one of the poorest in the country. As such, it would particularly benefit from the $2,000 survival checks.

As McConnell plays coy in Washington, his state is becoming a Dickensian nightmare. More than 700,000 Kentuckians live below the federal poverty line.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, things have become downright dystopian: Louisville’s ABC affiliate recently reported that “an estimated 42 percent of Kentucky children (live) in renter households (that) were behind on rent and/or did not get enough to eat, and 20 percent of adults with children in the household reported the children weren’t eating enough because they couldn’t afford enough food.”

According to census data, roughly 13 percent of adults in Kentucky are now suffering from food scarcity, meaning they either sometimes or often do not have enough food to eat. That number has increased nearly 40 percent since the start of the pandemic.

The median household income in Kentucky is about $52,000, and roughly two thirds of all Kentucky households make less than $75,000 a year. That means the current proposal to boost $600 checks to $2,000 for families making $75,000 or less would provide additional emergency aid to most people in the Republican Senate leader’s own state.

In light of these figures, you would think a lawmaker from a destitute state would be the single biggest champion of such an initiative.

Instead, McConnell may end up following House Republicans and use his power to block the checks. In that event, we would be watching Kentucky’s U.S. senator directly denying aid to most people in his own disproportionately poor state during an economic emergency and a deadly pandemic. This wouldn’t be a case of McConnell ignoring or punishing specific constituencies who didn’t vote for him — exit polls show he won reelection with a majority of voters making $50,000 or less.

And let’s remember: McConnell’s reluctance to quickly enact $2,000 survival checks is not the first time we’ve seen him pit himself against his own state during the pandemic — he has also led the fight to block direct aid to states, even though Kentucky faces one of the most acute budget and pension crises in the country.

A Feature, Not A Bug

Taken together, this entire situation confirms a trio of recent studies underscoring that we live in a bizarro version of democracy in which representatives are routinely using their public offices to ignore constituents’ wishes — and at times to directly harm the people who elect them.

This dynamic is a feature, not a bug. The founders created institutions like the Senate and lifetime Supreme Court appointments to try to insulate policymaking from the rabble, and to protect what Alexander Hamilton called the “permanent will” of the elite. They allowed for a lame-duck period in which a president gets to govern without any accountability at all. And such institutional limits on American democracy have been compounded by gerrymandered congressional districts and a campaign finance system that effectively insulates incumbents from any public accountability.

Those limits on democracy were supposed to encourage meritorious policy, but in this budget standoff, we see the opposite: Republicans have been able to behave so recklessly precisely because these limits on democracy mean they don’t have to care about their own constituents.

McConnell was just reelected to a Senate job where he won’t face voters for another six years, when the pain and suffering he inflicted will be a distant memory. House Republicans are safe in gerrymandered districts, many of which will likely remain that way because Democrats failed to win state legislatures ahead of redistricting. And Trump is a lame duck, who isn’t angling for reelection.  

In each situation, the power players involved know they are safely insulated from democratic accountability, allowing them to care only about a donor class that is far more interested in $200 billion worth of tax cuts for the wealthy than in $2,000 checks for starving people.

To know that a lack of democratic accountability is at the heart of this manufactured crisis, just compare Trump’s posture before the election.

Facing the potential wrath of voters back then, Trump was pushing a $1.8 trillion rescue package — not because he was a more moral person a few months ago, but because he was trying to win reelection and thus trying to depict himself as responsive to the public will. Once the election was over, he didn’t have to care anymore — he could use his lame duck moment to stage a childish conniption fit that did real damage to real human beings.

The same dynamic is also at play with McConnell. Arguably the only reason he even allowed a meager $900 billion stimulus bill with $600 survival checks to pass through the upper chamber was because he was worried about democratic consequences — more specifically, he was worried that blocking a bill would result in Georgians voting out their GOP senators, which would toss McConnell out of his job running the Senate.

He can now play games with the $2,000 check initiative knowing he won’t be voted out of a job by Kentuckians — but if he does capitulate, it will only be because he fears losing the two Georgia runoff elections.

In other words, it will only be because he fears some modicum of democratic accountability.

A Cautionary Tale About Democratic Accountability

Moving forward, there is a larger lesson here.

In elite circles, there is this idea that America’s problems are a product of politicians being too beholden to their constituents’ whims, which supposedly creates gridlock as elected officials aim to placate their parties’ voters. This mythology — which is a modern day version of the founders’ fear of too much democracy — has been weaponized to promote ideas like super committees, presidential commissions, fast track authorities and strict budget rules, all designed to insulate decisionmaking from public pressure.

The idea is that government officials will only be able to make tough, painful decisions necessary for meritorious policy if they are further protected from public accountability and consequences.

But this latest grotesquerie of House Republicans and McConnell threatening to deny $2,000 checks to their own constituents disproves the entire theory. It shows that a lack of democratic accountability is the problem.

[dispatchesfrom2020]

2020

What stories was I sleeping on?

So, what stories did I definitely miss before this project? Well, Atlantic Hurricanes and the Belarussian protests, for sure. Here are some of the other news I skipped out on during the year - or my recaps.

Ben Curtis/AP

1. Locusts Swarm 

An unusually wet 2019 led to swampy conditions across the Horn of Africa and western Asia - giving rise to a nearly biblical swarm of locusts. There are photographs where they literally seem to black-out the sun. The culprit? Climate change. The warming waters of the Indian ocean led to stormier weather - essentially more and bigger cyclones. It’s the worst outbreak of the crop-devouring pests in a quarter-century and it threatens food security across the region. The pandemic grinds international trade to a stop - obstructing many countries efforts to buy pesticides, equipment or bring in expert help to curb the infestation. Throughout the year, these swarms ballooned in size, stretching deep into Asia and across the Pacific ocean to Argentina and Brazil. An estimated 20 million people could face hunger and starvation and the UN’s World Food Program estimates that recovery could cost upwards of $9b USD in Africa alone.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

2. The Tigray War

For three decades the Tigray people held the balance of political and economic power in the country, tightly controlled through the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF), a Tigray nationalist party. In 2018 the Ethiopian election People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, led by Oromo Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, won control of the country’s government.

Animosities boiled over when the Tigray province persisted with the 2020 election, despite government orders to postpone voting until 2021 due to the coronavirus. Prime Minister Abiy cut off funding to Tigray, incising local leadership. In November 2020, youth militias affiliated with the TPLF killed six hundred villagers in the border town of Mai Kadra - and allegedly attacked Ethiopian military bases. 

The government responded by shelling the Tigray capital of Mekelle. Ethiopia’s armed forces quickly took control of the city and surrounding towns, with the militias retreating into the mountains where skirmishes have continued. 

With Tigrayan people facing violent retaliation - they have faced furloughs from jobs, had bank accounts suspended, faced arbitrary raids on their homes, and been refused permission to board airplanes or travel overseas. Many have faced direct violence, especially from non-Tigray militias.

The conflict has seen incursions from Eritrean forces. Abiy was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his work mending the relationship with Ethiopia’s former colony-turned-neighbour. They share a common enemy now - Tigray. Eritrean forces slaughtered church-goers at a religious festival in early December, killing children and elders indiscriminately. These shadow forces of Fano militias and Eritrean soldiers have committed war crimes - including extrajudicial killings and rape. They even looted the church that allegedly houses the Ark of the Covenant.

The Tigrayan refugees have only one option: Sudan. One journalist writes: “Several [Tigrayan refugees] told me that they saw dozens of bodies along the route as they fled their shops, homes and farms and took to the long road to the border... in stifling heat.”

The New York Times series on Tigray was helpful in understanding more about the conflict and its historical and ethnic contexts. But I have to say - I feel unclear about what comes next. Will guerilla warfare between the Tigray militias and Eritrean-Ethiopian forces continue? Will the country face international consequences for their move towards genocide? I guess 2021 will decide.

A SolarWinds banner hangs outside the New York Stock Exchange on the company’s IPO day in 2018 - Brendan McDermid/Reuters

3. The SolarWinds hack

I chose to write about icebergs rather than this story for a reason. I wholly do NOT understand cyber security. Like, at all. My eyes glaze over when somebody tries to explain Wikileaks to me. I tried. I really did - I read like three articles trying to parse the details and make sense of anything and here’s what I got:

Hackers - almost certainly Russian - got into the US government secure networks. For a lot of departments. For months. It’s really, really bad. The government has a pretty blasé response to the disaster. Trump blames China. Agencies are turning directly to Microsoft for answers rather than their own cyber security people. It’s a blazing hot mess.

I’m going to continue to not understand this one, sorry.

Juan Carlos Ulate/Reuters

4. Civil Rights in 2020

The expansion of civil rights in Central/South America, with the legalization of abortion in Argentina in December and the introduction of gay marriage in Costa Rica in May, gave us something to celebrate in 2020. These new rights are the result of years - and decades - of organizing by activists in these two countries. 

Costa Rica is the sixth Latin-American country to legalize gay marriage. Argentina joins a short list of places in Latin America where abortion is fully legal - just Cuba, Guyana, Uruguay, and two Mexican states.

Some couples rushed to wed on the stroke of midnight - magistrates stayed up late into the night to marry couples. Marcos Castillo (L) and Rodrigo Campos (R) waited until the following morning - and celebrated with a masked kiss after their ceremony. 

Other notable moments in civil rights? New Zealand officially revoked their antiquated anti-abortion laws (which they’d been effectively ignoring for years anyway), Bhutan decriminalized homosexuality, Switzerland passed legislation that will allow people to change the gender on their government IDs, and Croatia struck down laws forbidding gay couples from fostering children. Albania banned gay conversion therapy - as did the Yukon, actually - and Barbados made discrimination on the basis of sexuality illegal.

Nicky Kuautonga/The Guardian

5. Oceania crushed the pandemic

Virtually all of the countries reported to be COVID-free during 2020 were Oceanic nations and island territories. Turkmenistan says they didn’t have any cases but they’re lyin’. -Tuvalu Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga, and Palau all ended the year with no cases, while Samoa and the Solomon Islands reported a few isolated cases in quarantine facilities as they re-opened the border to repatriate their citizens abroad. 

Some combination of strict travel restrictions, new hygiene rules, curfews, and early lockdowns kept most of these countries relatively untouched. While New Zealand and Australia experienced several flare-ups throughout the year, their targeted lockdowns helped eradicate community spread quickly each time, returning them to schools, workplaces and boozy brunches quickly.

Honourable mentions to Vietnam and Thailand - with 100 million and 70 million citizens apiece both have charted under 100 deaths to COVID - and Taiwan with only nine casualties.

Gulalay Amiri, a pomegranate farmer, surveys his slim haul. Fighting as worsened in many parts of Afghanistan after the United States announced they would withdraw from the country in 2021 - Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

6. War in Afghanistan

In March the United States signed a peace-deal with the Taliban, promising to withdraw troops by May of 2021. The War in Afghanistan has lasted 19 years - the longest war in American history and the majority of my lifetime.

I don’t know how to feel about it.

During peace talks the Taliban refused to commit to recognizing the country’s elected government, disavowing Al-Qaeda or protecting women’s rights. They support limited education for girls - only up to the sixth grade.

I listened to a few podcasts by the Daily on the ground in Afghanistan with the current government’s security forces. Many of the young soldiers they interviewed were so young they’d never lived in a country governed by the Taliban - and they fiercely oppose the idea. It also appears that the Afghan government were often excluded from peace talks, finding out details of the American meetings with the Taliban through international news reports and Taliban statements on social media. 

Since the Taliban’s deal with the United States, Taliban bombings and attacks have continued, targeting both security forces and civilians. The Afghan government has pointed the finger at the Taliban for mass shooting at a maternity ward in Kabul that killed 24 women and infants. “They came for the mothers”, said horrified eyewitnesses.

For almost two decades, the western world has supported the ‘new’ Afghanistan - but it feels very fragile. Will a withdrawal lead those people that assisted coalition forces vulnerable to retaliation? It feels likely. The fighting between the Taliban and the Afghan government has been fierce - and come with high civilian casualties. The year is punctuated, nearly monthly, with news of new attacks in Afghanistan.

It reminds me of the end of the Vietnam war. America withdrew and two years later the south was retaken by the North. In the final days of the Vietnam war the United States evacuated around 150,000 civilians who had worked with American on the ground. Nearly a million others left the country by boat, seeking asylum at refugee camps in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people who had collaborated with the US-backed South were sent to re-education camps where they were sometimes tortured or starved. Is this what Afghanistan will look like? 

There’s no 'good’ solution - and for now the future of the war in Afgahnistan feels very opaque. I think I under-reported stories in the region as a result - it feels too complex to boil down into daily recaps.

Bobi Wine, 38, was detained by police for allegedly breaking COVID-19 restrictions while campaigning in Uganda’s upcoming presidential election - Abubaker Lubowa/Reuters

8. Ugandan election protests

Western media doesn’t seem to place a lot of importance on reporting in Africa - but what little attention they had for the continent focused on the anti-SARS protests in Nigeria throughout the fall. The attention on police violence in America raised the profile of these demonstrations - and the brutality of the government’s response, shooting at dozens of peaceful marchers gathered at the Lekki toll bridge.

But they were far from the only protests in Africa.

As Uganda prepared for an election early in 2021, the government forcefully cracked down on youthful dissidents - like presidential hopefuls Bobi Wine and Patrick Amuriat who were detained by police during the final campaign pushes in November. 

Wine, a young musician, has been arrested numerous times since he announced his candidacy. One occasion police beat Wine so badly he temporarily lost his vision - they also killed his driver. They raided his offices, confiscating election materials, and arrested supporters. His bodyguard will later be killed after being struck by a military truck while helping an injured reporter escape tear-gas during December protests.

Police record 56 casualties as they violently put down the large-scale protests - though human rights group have suggested the real number could be dramatically higher. 

Ariana Quesada holds a photo of her father, Benito. He died after an outbreak at the Cargill meat-packing plant where he worked. She filed a complaint with the RCMP, asking them to investigate conditions at the plant - Justin Pennell/CBC

9. Meat packing plants become coronavirus hotspots

Meat processing plants become super-spreaders - these often rurally-located factories see massive outbreaks across the United States and Canada. Their floors are crowded with employees working elbow-to-elbow, forced to shout over the loud din of machinery. The refrigeration - necessary for keeping the meat unspoiled - may allow the virus to live longer in the air.

By September of 2020, nearly 500 meat-processing plants had reported at least one case of COVID in the United States. And 203 had died. 

At a Tyson Foods factory in Waterloo, Iowa, staff allege that management placed bets on how many workers would become sick - and die. Supervisors began avoiding the floor, relegating their responsibilities to untrained workers. 

The plant reluctantly closed - by the time they re-opened two weeks later over a third of their 2,800 workforce had tested positive. Five workers died - including Isidro Fernandez, whose family is leading a lawsuit against the company.

In Canada, Cargill faces a similar lawsuit after an enormous outbreak in their High River facility that resulted in three deaths - two employees and one staffer’s 71-year-old father. They were: Hiep Bui, Armando Sallegue, and Benito Quesada. The company offered a $500 “responsibility” bonus for workers who didn’t miss any shifts - and discouraged employees from reporting any flu-like symptoms. Many of the factory’s workers are temporary foreign workers or new Canadians. 

10. The Nazca Lines

I forgot about this and am shoehorning it in now, but Peruvian archaeologists discovered another ancient line drawing in the desert outside of Lima - this time in the shape of a kitty cat.

Of all the archaeology finds this year - remains at Pompeii, a mammoth graveyard in Mexico, and a wealth of sarcophagi in Egypt - this is my favourite.

[msclaritea]

I still cannot believe how many young people listened to this woman, a multi-millionaire, who guided them into fighting against their own interest. What does the whole awakening we have gone through in race relations matter if in the end, we lose everything else, like a fair and balanced Supreme Court?

From the Guardian:

Protest all you like, Susan Sarandon. In effect you work for Trump

It’s time the Thelma and Louise star faced the fact that she’s a MAGA asset who works for the US president

Sensational news for people who thought Susan Sarandon couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood after her imbecilic suggestion during the 2016 US presidential election that there was no real difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

She’s been arrested! Not metaphorically, admittedly, and not in Hollywood – the Thelma and Louise star got picked up by police at a sit-in in Washington, protesting against Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy. It was, she later remarked, “worth it”.

Hang on, you may be thinking – I’m puzzled as to what Susan was doing there in the first place. Didn’t she, in effect, vote for Trump, with her showy endorsement of third party Green candidate Jill Stein? Yes. Yes she did. And if she disagrees with that paraphrasing, she’s welcome to come and have a sit-in at the Guardian’s offices about it.

For now, let’s remind ourselves of her rather grand public letter to the Stein campaign a couple of weeks before the election, in which she foregrounded policies such as Stein’s pledge to legalise marijuana: “I’m therefore very happy to endorse Jill Stein for the presidency because she does stand for everything I believe in. Now that Trump is self-destructing, I feel even those in swing states have the opportunity to vote their conscience.”

Mmm. Obviously, Susan is far from the only person to get that little bit of electoral prediction wrong. In fact, she doesn’t even make the cut of the top 100,000 people to be wrong about it, vast numbers of whom were journalists. She may, however, be one of the last remaining persons to still deny they got anything wrong AT ALL. Only a few months ago, Susan was explaining to this newspaper that had Hillary been elected: “We would still be fracking, we would be at war. It wouldn’t be much smoother. Look what happened under Obama that we didn’t notice.” As she concluded of Hillary: “I did think she was very, very dangerous.”

If your retort to that is “at least she’d have let us be in charge of our own fannies tho”, then hold tight. We’ll get to that. For now, you need to understand that Susan’s got a big old theory about how you jump-start history – one that is hugely similar to Steve Bannon’s, coincidentally. As she told an interviewer during the 2016 run-in: “Some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in. Then things will really explode.”

In some ways, it’s the only thing Susan’s been right about. And yet, it is faintly difficult to conclude that her brand of vaguely-gestured-towards creative destruction is the sort of thing you get to say when you can afford to hang around waiting for the revolution in between starring in Ryan Murphy shows.

If you’re being separated from your children right now, or losing your healthcare, or wondering about the imminent danger to your abortion rights, it may feel like Susan’s whole “let’s see where the cards fall” approach borders on the self-indulgent. And you know, it’s a highly porous border. It’s basically the Schengen Area of only-slightly-delineated types of twattery. Fellow residents include the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, who broke off from advocating vaginal steamers to judge the result of the election thusly: “It’s such an exciting time to be an American because we are at this amazing inflection point and everything is kind of up in the air.” Go on. “It’s such an amazing time for entrepreneurship. People are clearly tired of the status quo and […] it’s sort of like someone threw it all in the air and we’re going to see how it all lands.” Well done, Gwyneth! Can you send some $475 coffee-table books celebrating the world’s most important infinity pools to the Arizona detention courts? Because I heard they need them to snazz up the waiting cages. Maybe pop a few agate body brushes into the care package, too.

As indicated, Susan appears to have had zero moments of self-doubt since the election. She seems to yield to self-reflection about as much as Tony Blair, another individual unshakeably convinced of his own moral rectitude (see also Jeremy Corbyn), who will doubtless go to his grave thinking history will judge him right to have invaded Iraq with an aftercare plan slightly less comprehensive than that you’d get if you purchased a houseplant. “If you think it’s pragmatic to shore up the status quo right now,” Susan explained loftily before the 2016 election, “then you’re not in touch with the status quo.” Strong words – and yet, spoken not entirely like someone who’d been wandering the Appalachians in search of a clue for the past two years.

As far as perspectives go, hers appears not even to have been altered by the prospect of Donald Trump preparing to appoint his SECOND justice to the supreme court, in a decision likely to place various settled rights for immigrants and minorities, and Roe v Wade, right back on the table.

Donald Trump! Possibly a Russian asset, definitely a massive and monstrous arsehole, to say nothing of being the obvious purchaser of around 987 abortions down his years of what he described as “my personal Vietnam” – trying not to catch STDs as he screwed his way round Manhattan. He couldn’t make actual Vietnam, you’ll recall, owing to something called heel spurs. Incredible, really, that he’s yet to tweet about how fewer US servicemen would have died at Khe Sanh if he’d been there, and not detained by his urgent need to hump a model. As always, it is our place to simply thank him for his service.

As for Susan’s service, if only it weren’t so tireless. If only there had been some kind of learning curve for her, other than stuff like the fact she served as co-chair of the national steering committee for third party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000. Another tight election that worked out well, there. If only this doctoral student of absolutely everything was familiar with the famous observation Clement Attlee once made of Labour party chairman Harold Laski: “A period of silence on your part would be welcome.”

Still, if onlys aren’t going to butter many parsnips. Sometimes direct action is called for. So here goes. Susan! If you can’t face up to the fact you dropped a bollock, please don’t expect to be lionised for protesting things not-unrelated to decisions you still believe were unimpeachable. In fact, please expect to be used for it – by the enemy. Until you come to some sort of personal and public reckoning with the sillier shit you’ve said, in effect you work for HIM. You are a MAGA asset. Every piece of showbiz posturing offers his base another chance to internalize the idea of ludicrous liberal arrogance, embodied in someone who – for all her theoretical pretensions – is really operating at the same analytical level as “but her emails”.

Or, to put it more fawningly: we – as beautiful, strong, powerful, is-that-enough-trite-adjectives women – hereby endorse you to cough to the fact that the right to control who we buy our weed off is simply less important than the right to control our own bodies and keep hold of our own children. Thanks for your time!

AND she is still working to suppress the vote...

Susan Sarandon receives backlash after voicing support for Joe Biden detractor

[sinrau]

Do you remember “ Trump Derangement Syndrome?”It was a cute phrase that likely first appeared in 2015, deployed by prominent voices across the political spectrum to demean, mock, reject, dismiss and deflect the warnings that Donald Trump was a fascist, an authoritarian and a white supremacist, not to mention a vile and dangerous human being with apparent mental pathologies who posed a massive threat to American democracy.

Such truth-telling patriots were called “hysterical” and “alarmist,” or told they were “out of touch” and overly “bitter” about Hillary Clinton’s defeat thanks to the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College and Russian interference. Those who first raised the alarm about Trumpism as a new version of fascism were also assured that “the institutions were strong” and fascism could never take hold in America — and most certainly not in the form of a proudly ignorant wrestling-heel wannabe and reality-TV huckster.

When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were some on the left eager to dance on Hillary Clinton’s grave. A few even gave Trump the totally unearned benefit of the doubt: He claimed to oppose globalization, neoliberalism and “ endless war,” and to speak for the “white working class”.

Centrist Democrats and the so-called mainstream American news media also rejected the existential threat to democracy that Trump represented. They convinced themselves, over and over, that the supposed power and gravity of the office would normalize and mature him. He was a “businessman” and a “pragmatist” eager to make deals, not an ideologue — so why worry? Trump was “brash” and “unconventional,” but America’s political institutions were strong.

The stenographers of current events and the other hope-peddlers, with their horse-race journalism, false equivalence “both-sides-ism” and obsession with meaningless controversies would not let themselves see the truth of Trump’s danger or that of his neo-fascist movement. To admit the truth about Trump would mean that the old habits of writing and thinking about American politics are obsolete. Moreover, such an admission would demand speaking truth to power in a way that many members of the mainstream news media, specifically, are too afraid to, for both professional and personal reasons.

Republicans and other members of the Trump movement used “ Trump Derangement Syndrome ” to bully their critics into silence. The American right celebrated drinking “liberal tears” and loved the way Trump’s victory had made Democrats and so-called progressives go “crazy.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome is weaponized language in the same vein as the myth of the “liberal media.” Both lies put Democrats and the mainstream news media on the defense. While the American right and the Republican Party (and now Trump’s neo-fascist movement) drag the issue-space further and further to the right — and have done so for decades — the “liberal media” tries to find an imaginary balance by presenting right-wing extremism as somehow a “reasonable” alternative point of view.

Trump Derangement Syndrome was also a smokescreen for Donald Trump’s wild success in advancing the agenda of the plutocrats, gangster capitalists, Christian nationalists and “Dominionists” — as well as overt white supremacists — in destroying the very idea of government itself as well as American multiracial democracy.

Of course, it was not Donald Trump’s most vocal critics who were “deranged” but his followers, enablers and allies. As I explained in January 2017, shortly before his inauguration:

It is not those who oppose Trump who are deranged, but rather those voters who convinced themselves that a plutocrat authoritarian reality TV star con man and professional wrestler wannabe with no experience in government at any level was qualified to be president of the United States.

This is America’s great national derangement. Those who stand against and oppose Donald Trump are patriots who are trying to return the country to sanity.

Now, some three months away from another Election Day, Donald Trump has finally arrived at the moment which those of us who were slurred as “hysterical” and “alarmist” have warned about for more than five years.

Last Thursday, Trump issued this now-infamous tweet:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

That same afternoon, when questioned about Trump’s threats to interfere with the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.S. Senate: “In the end, the Department of Justice and others will make that legal determination.” This is not true. The Department of Justice and the president possess no legitimate authority to delay or cancel a federal election.

Later in the day, Trump continued to work from the authoritarian’s playbook, attempting to pivot away from his earlier statements. During a White House press event, Trump said:

Do I want to see a date change? No. But I don’t want to see a crooked election.

What will happen in November – it’s a mess. I want a result much more than you… I don’t want to be waiting around for weeks and months.

This is a familiar strategy in which the authoritarian challenges norms and boundaries by floating trial balloons and then pretends to change his mind as a way to make the heretofore-unthinkable into something acceptable.

Trump’s most recent threats are but another crescendo in he and his servants’ efforts to subvert and eventually overturn secular multiracial democracy and the rule of law in America.

Only weeks ago Trump began deploying his own personal secret police force, hoping to enforce his will by suppressing dissent and free speech in Democratic-led cities all over the United States. The events in Portland, Oregon, are but a prelude to Trump’s national terrordome.

Trump’s own personal secret police force along with his civilian “watchdogs,” may well be used to intimidate Democratic voters on Election Day and beyond. Trump has repeatedly asked hostile foreign countries to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf. He was impeached for doing just that with his attempt to blackmail the government of Ukraine to launch a phony investigation of Joe Biden.

Trump continues to threaten senior Democratic leaders, including Biden, Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others with treason charges, potential imprisonment and perhaps even execution. Former national security adviser John Bolton’s recent book includes details of Trump’s lurid fantasies about having journalists killed. According to Bolton, Trump supports imprisoning his “enemies” in concentration camps — something he is already doing with brown and Black migrants and refugees from Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the nonwhite world.

Donald Trump has repeated his threats, ever since the 2016 campaign, that he will not respect the will of the American people if he loses a presidential election.

In sum, Donald Trump is not pretending. None of this is a game. He is a neo-fascist. Such observations and warnings are not hysterical. They are plain observations based on a consensus of the available facts.

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained in a 2017 essay at The Washington Post:

The strongman knows that it starts with words. He uses them early on to test out his plans to expand and personalize executive power on political elites, the press and the public, watching their reactions as they arrange into the timeless categories of allies, enemies and those who help him by remaining silent. Some say the strongman is all bluster, but he takes words seriously, including the issue of which ones should be banned.

Now what to do?

In a perfect and just world, the hope peddlers, professional centrists, stenographers of current events and others who maintain the boundaries of approved public discourse in America would go to the public square, prostrate themselves before the world and then beg forgiveness for how they, for years and by various means, empowered Donald Trump.

That will not happen. Instead, such voices will proclaim that they were sounding the alarm about Donald Trump years ago and are the real vanguard defenders of American democracy. In reality, such voices were enablers, far behind the truth if not actively running away it. They are now trying to position themselves on the correct side of history because their shame and failure to protect America from Donald Trump and his neo-fascist movement are so great.

In the weeks remaining before Election Day — which will certainly not be “free and fair” and when Trump’s machinations will be at their most extreme — the mainstream news media and the American people must internalize the fact that the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution mean little for Trump and his regime.

Hopeful claims — or delusions — that the Constitution and state laws dictate the rules of Election Day must be viewed with extreme cynicism. Trump and his enforcers are not restrained by such arcane conventions.

If there is indeed an election on Nov. 3, Americans most vote against Trump in overwhelming numbers in order to force him to step down. Unless Donald Trump is convincingly vanquished at the polls, he will find some way to stay in office.

If Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr try to cancel the presidential election or interfere with it in any other way, Americans must take to the streets and engage in corporeal politics — including a national strike and other plans to disrupt day-to-day life and “business as usual” — on a scale so large that they make the George Floyd people’s uprising look like a PTA meeting.

Ultimately, those of us who warned the American people for years, sometimes on a daily basis, about this Mad King and would-be tyrant take no joy from saying, We told you so. There is no satisfaction in being correct about such a horrible thing.

On this point, Jared Yates Sexton, author of “American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People,” wrote last Thursday on Twitter:

Those of us warning that Trump is an authoritarian capable of destroying democracy haven’t been doing it for profit or attention or out of unwarranted alarmism. None of this is hard to predict. They don’t hide it at all. Stop expecting everything to be fine because “America.”

To watch American democracy fall so ill so fast, and now to be on the verge of collapse — when such a thing could have been so easily prevented — is a world historical tragedy.

Those of us who warned America that fascism was coming were called hysterical — but we were right about Trump all along #web #website #copied #toread #highlight #link #news #read #blog #wordpresspost #posts #breaking news# #Sinrau #Nothiah #Sinrau29 #read #wordpress

[megacircuit9universe]

Resurrection Stone

WED MAR 04 2020

But that plan only works if the other guy drops out and pledges his delegates to me… well before the convention.  If both of them… with only half the popular vote that Bernie has… are there contesting the nomination… neither of them has any rational argument for getting it.

Therefore, Bernie wins.

To avoid that, by coalescing around one centrist candidate… there is a timer already ticking.  Super Tuesday is already happening, it’s too late to hold Bernie back there!… how bout by the next Super Tuesday on March 10th?

Too soon to give up the dream and back a rival centrist?  

-SAT FEB 29

From my lips to God’s ears, apparently.  

The above quote is from my last entry, the night Biden won South Carolina by a huge margin... first state he’s ever won in his life, despite running in multiple Presidential primaries... and despite doing terrible in the first three states here in 2020.

My theory was, that even if the lesser centrists, like Buttigieg, and Klobuchar dropped out after Super Tuesday, Bloomberg would remain to split the centrist vote with Biden all the way to the convention.

Sanders was looking to win big just three days later... on Super Tuesday, possibly sweeping ten or more of the fourteen states.

Now... I’ve talked about quantum leaps before in politics... where something extremely unlikely to happen, nonetheless happens and changes everything overnight.  And we had one on Super Monday.

Biden did get a nice media bump on Super Sunday, after winning SC on Saturday, and then the seemingly impossible happened on Monday, where both Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out, and endorsed Biden.

Seemingly impossible, because it was just one day before the big game, and they both have such huge egos (as do all politicians).  But not only did they drop out and endorse Biden... so did Beto O’rourke!

I feel like such an idiot now for thinking about him as a great running mate for Bernie Sanders... I had no idea he was such a huge tool!  He dropped out of this primary forever ago now, and nobody was even thinking about him, but he still came out to endorse Biden on the same day as Pete and Klobi.

Then, on Tuesday itself, the unthinkable happened and Biden... kicked total ass and won ten of the fourteen states!  

Of the two big prize states, California and Texas, Biden won Texas... though it was a close call there.  Bernie did get a comfortable lead in California... but Biden cleaned his clock in other states he was supposed to win handily.

It can’t be overstated, what a blindsiding upset this was to everybody.  Even by the mainstream media, Joe Biden’s candidacy was thought to be dead.  He’d done terribly.  He was out of money.  And he’d never campaigned at all in any of these Super Tuesday states beforehand.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg, who had spent half a billion (with a, B) dollars on these fourteen Super Tuesday states... did miserably in all of them, winning nothing but American Samoa.

Bloomberg did so badly, that he dropped out today (Super Wednesday) and gave his endorsement to Biden.

Tom Steyer, another billionaire who’d been in the race also dropped out today, but... nobody was ever worried about him.

Elizabeth Warren, who did so badly that she came in third in her home state, after Biden and Sanders, has, for the moment, elected to stay in the race, despite having almost no delegates and having won nothing.

So, what happened here?

Well... word on the street is that Obama himself made a few phone calls in the hours after Joe’s big win in SC... to Pete and Klobi, and convinced them to drop out immediately, for JB’s sake... and then called Beto, just for good measure.

While the iron was still hot from Joe’s SC win, this very unexpected news kept it red hot long enough to turn out dazzled Biden fans in droves on election day.

And it seems to have flipped a lot of Bloomberg voters who were only backing him because they’d accepted that Biden... their true fave... had no chance.

Meanwhile Bernie voters... especially the young ones, had grown a bit complacent, thinking he had a lock on Super Tuesday, and weren’t paying enough attention over a Saturday and Sunday... because they’re young and have partying to do... and hangovers to nurse on Mondays... to realize there was any significant threat to their expectations.*

This all resulted in the political quantum leap we all witnessed, where Joe Biden essentially rose from the grave to steal front runner status from Bernie, in what is very suddenly, a two man race.

It’s important to note here that... this was not trickery.  This was not voter suppression or some kind of evil app designed to massage the numbers.  This was not foreign intervention.

This was... straight up political genius... most likely on the part of Obama... and totally by the rules.

He’s still the figurehead of the Democratic Party.  He’s allowed to make a few phone calls and use his influence to give his former VP the best shot possible.

And hey!   He was President for eight years, so...  shouldn’t we assume he knows more about this kind of shit than any of us do?  His Plan worked amazingly well, after all.

Can’t we just trust Obama to use this same kind of genius to guide Biden safely through a contest with Trump, and into the White House, ending our national nightmare?

Well?..

Obama may be a master of political calculation in many spheres... but his Achilles heel always was... and still is... his faith that Republicans can see reason, and will do the right thing.  

It’s one thing to resurrect Biden in a primary, when only Democrats are voting.

It’s a whole other thing to keep that reanimated zombie alive through a campaign against Trump, who will be ready with a shotgun, hatchet, club, and any other weapon of opportunity to send it back to Hell.

Trump got impeached and acquitted over his plans to destroy Biden by slinging mud about Burisma, but he won’t even need to bother gushing his hands into that goop when Biden is so clearly in the grips of early onset dementia.

Up until now, it’s been easy to brush that under the rug... with Biden being only one of ten or more candidates on a debate stage... his incoherent babble easily drowned out by the nine other assholes vying for the spotlight.

Yes, Trump is also in the early stages of dementia, but nowhere near as far down the road as Biden.

Also, as the incumbent, Trump’s brand of on and off dementia has been incorporated into his branding, and is accepted as normal... and very toxic to his opponents.

Trump will mop the fucking floor with Biden... the way only an extremely spiteful bastard could... to a cognitively disadvantaged, and thus helpless fellow senior.

We all know this is true about Joe Biden at age 77.

Some people do hit dementia in their seventies.  Not many.  Usually that’s a thing that develops in your 80s or even 90s, but for some, it does arrive early, and for Biden...it’s pretty advanced.  That’s down to random chance, but it’s still a fact.

People at his stage of dementia do not just bounce back to full brain function because they got the Democratic nomination for the Presidency...  that’s not how cognitive decline works.

This guy can barely string together a sentence.

And when that happens to your grampa, everybody in the family who loves him so much, will kind of be in denial about it, and rally around him, and give him love and hugs, and try to make him as happy as they can.

But... that’s a hell of a thing to trigger a national electorate to do!

Now, Grampa Joe is in a cage match with Bernie Sanders.

This will not be cute!

Of the three... Trump 73, Biden 77, and Sanders 78... in this extremely unfortunate battle to the death now, of very old grandfathers... Sanders is the oldest, but the only one who still has full command of his mental faculties.

Sanders is still sharp as a tack... metnally.  He did have a heart attack, but hey!  that’s child’s play compared to dementia, when you’re talking about a President in 2020.

Biden, if put on a debate stage with Sanders, will be exposed for his late stage dementia... to the awkward embarrassment of all.

But to try and keep Biden off a debate stage with Sanders, to avoid that, and allow him to coast completely on name recognition, and nostalgia for a pre-Trump era... will only result in putting off that awkward embarrassment until the fall, against Trump... at which point it will be ten thousand times worse.

Obama can smile as eight-bit sunglasses drop over his face, about the Super Tuesday maneuver he so cleverly engineered last minute from his living room, but it’s not a stunt that will work again in the general election against Trump.

For Sanders now... the only hope is that voters do shake off this daze and give him big wins next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that... solidifying his place as front runner well before the convention.

That’s possible... but at this point I’m not holding my breath about anything.

Still, for argument’s sake, let’s say that the cage match between Biden and Sanders not only gives Sanders the lead back... but also exposes Biden’s dementia to the point where he suspends his campaign.

That’s where Elizabeth Warren comes in.

My going theory is that she is still waiting for Biden to eventually drop out, after racking up a ton of delegates, but ultimately collapsing under the harsh spotlight.

She, then, would swoop in to get Biden’s endorsement, taking all his delegates, and challenge Bernie at the convention, perhaps forcing the super delegates to back her over him... because she’s a little more centrist.

If that happens... she will have won the nomination without having won a single state, and only a handful of delegates under her own steam.

And... Trump would still mop the floor with her because, “Pocahontas.”

She’s a deeply snakey, slimey politician who has proven herself to be so time and again... to the voters who matter in all the states she’s never been able to win even in primaries.

She will lose to Trump.

So... I don’t know where the fuck we go from here, but it’s looking more and more like Trump will get another... fifteen years, because if he wins in 2020, he’s president for life.

I will no longer be surprised if that happens, but... the only thing that can possibly stop it is if Bernie just kills it in every contest from next Tuesday until the Convention.

We’ll see.

I’m going to bed.

*Not to be a young voter apologist, because I’m not. I was  young too... partied a lot and had big hangovers.  I still voted in every election, primary or general, local, state, and federal, from the age of 18 to present (now 50).

It was infuriating in 2016, to see how badly millennials who were very vocal online about their informed political opinions, failed us at the polls.  It’s even more infuriating after three years of Trump, to see them, and now their GenZ counterparts, who are even more vocal online, and more informed... fail us once again at the polls... while in the same breath complaining about how the establishment has destroyed their future.

It’s all fun and games until you’re living under a dictatorship, kids, on a dying planet.

If you don’t get your asses out to vote in the 2020 primaries, you will spend a good sixty years in that hell, cursing yourself every single day that you didn’t vote in that one last little window where we still could, and you were dancing on Tik Tok instead.

[jasonhaw]

Same sex marriage* in Taiwan, explained

The past two years have been a glorious fight for equal marriage rights but it’s far from over.

The Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament, overwhelmingly voted (66-27) the “Enforcement Act of Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748,” an unassuming name for the unprecedented law in Asia legalizing same sex marriage. (See the infographic from Reuters below on the status of same sex marriage worldwide)

While the law is clear about the recognition of same sex marriages as marriages, not all civil rights are guaranteed for Taiwanese same sex married couples. I have been following this story very closely for the past two years, and this post summarizes what has happened over that period, why the law was crafted that way, and what it means moving forward.

What is Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748?

The Constitutional Court, the highest body in the Judicial Yuan, issued their ruling on May 24, 2017, effectively guaranteeing the possibility that same sex marriage will be legalized in Taiwan. The Constitutional Court gave the Legislative Yuan a two-year deadline to pass a law legalizing same sex marriage, otherwise same sex marriage will be legal by default through its decision regarding the Civil Code.

At the center of this Court Case is LGBT activist Chi Chia-Wei. Chi has been fighting for LGBT rights in Taiwan since 1986, so this court case decision was 31 years in the making. He had unsuccessfully tried to apply for a marriage license multiple times with his same sex partner, until his last attempt in 2013. During this attempt, he appealed for his case higher and higher in Taipei’s municipal bureaucracy, until in 2015 when the municipal government sought a constitutional clarification on the matter.

The decision of the Constitutional Court was that the current Civil Code is in violation of the Constitution, specifically the following articles:

Article 22: “All other freedoms and rights of the people that are not detrimental to social order or public welfare shall be guaranteed under the Constitution.” – one of the rights guaranteed under this article is the right to marry

Article 7: “All citizens of the Republic of China, irrespective of sex, religion, race, class, or party affiliation, shall be equal before the law.” – this guarantees that sexual orientation should not be a basis for refusal of the right to marry

Therefore, same sex marriage is guaranteed under the Constitution, but the current Civil Code definition that marriage should only exist between a man and a woman violates the Constitution. Therefore, some policy change must be enacted to correct for this error.

Some might argue that the Court is overstepping its role by interfering in the legislative functions of the Legislative Yuan. But there have been precedents of judicial lawmaking in the past.

The political climate was also favorable for legalization, as one of current President Tsai Ing-Wen’s campaign promises during the 2016 Presidential campaign was to legalize same sex marriage.

On May 17th, 2019 in #Taiwan, #LoveWon. We took a big step towards true equality, and made Taiwan a better country. 🏳️‍🌈

— 蔡英文 Tsai Ing-wen (@iingwen)

May 17, 2019

The past two years have been critical moments for both supporters and opponents of same sex marriage, the most important being the 2018 referendum on same sex marriage. This is why a law was only passed by the Legislative Yuan at the last minute, one week before the scheduled deadline of May 24, 2019.

Why was there a referendum, and what was it exactly about?

President Tsai’s party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), could easily have passed a same sex marriage law right after the Court decision. After all, they hold a significant majority in the Legislative Yuan, thereby not needing the support of the main opposition, the Kuomintang Party (KMT), known to be more conservative.

However, President Tsai and the DPP’s approval ratings have dropped significantly since she started taking office. This is largely due to the stagnating economy, which heavily relies on the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The PRC does not like having the DPP in power as the DPP is historically known for their assertion of Taiwanese independence and have openly refused the 1992 Consensus. The 1992 Consensus is a political declaration by PRC and Taiwan (or officially, the Republic of China) that states that both PRC and ROC agree there is only one China, which is both mainland China and Taiwan, but disagree as to what that exactly means in terms of sovereignty.

Therefore, the DPP was slowly waning in its active support for one of their more controversial party platforms. Instead, the DPP seems to wait the clock out until same sex marriage becomes legal by default. But this also gave time for opponents of same sex marriage to campaign against it as much as they legally can.

The key way that they were able to undermine the Court decision was through a referendum. On December 2017, key amendments to the Referendum Act were enacted, which lowered thresholds to put a motion up for referendum, as well as the proportion of votes required for a referendum to pass. The amendments were largely seen to make the electoral process more democratic, and as a result, ten referendum questions were included in the November 2018 local elections (Referendum 12), three of which were related to same sex marriage. The questions were as follows:

“Do you agree that marriage defined in the Civil Code should be restricted to the union between one man and one woman?” (Proposition 10) – When passed, this increases the pressure on the Legislative Yuan to pass a separate law, rather than make amendments to the Civil Code or waiting out the two-year Court-imposed deadline;

“Do you agree to the protection of same-sex marital rights with marriage as defined in the Civil Code?” (Proposition 14) – Similar to Proposition 10, this further clarifies that when rejected, amendments to the Civil Code become more unlikely; and

“Do you agree that the Ministry of Education should not implement the Enforcement Rules of the Gender Equality Education Act in elementary and middle schools?” (Proposition 11) – When passed, this decreases the likelihood that LGBT-related education will be taught as part of the Taiwanese basic education curriculum.

While referendums are non-binding, a resounding majority vote is a strong indication of public opinion and can threaten the ruling party’s political standing in the next election if it refuses to respect the results. All three motions won in favor of same sex marriage opposition groups, 2-to-1. In an added blow to the DPP, they lost most of their local races, leading to President Tsai’s stepping down as party chair and jeopardizing her and her party’s political future in the 2020 elections.

After the referendum, the challenge then was to create a law that both complied with the Court decision AND respected the referendum results. This meant that while same sex marriage will still probably be legalized, some concessions need to be made to make that happen.

What ended up being the law?

For the first few months of 2019, three legislative proposals were put forward by opposing groups:

The opposition-backed bill, “The Enforcement Act of Referendum 12” was the most watered-down version. Same sex couples were referred to as “same sex familial relationships,” which makes the legal language terribly confusing as it can be interpreted as typical, non-sexual same sex family relationships like mother and daughter. The minimum age requirement for marriage was also raised to 20 as compared to the Civil Code minimum age of 18.

A bill drafted by a more conservative DPP member, “The Enforcement Act of Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748 and Referendum 12,” kept the minimum age requirement of 20 but calls same sex marriage as a civil union and called same sex couples as domestic partners. However, it had a highly controversial provision where a relative up to the third degree of consanguinity can file for an annulment even without the same sex couple’s consent. The rationale behind this was that sham marriages were going to be common among same sex couples to gain the benefits of civil union, and this rationale definitely does not make any sense. Furthermore, it protects the religious and cultural freedoms of those who may be opposed to the idea of same sex marriage.

Finally, there was the government-crafted bill, “The Enforcement Act of Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748” which was the most progressive among the three. Same sex marriages will be called marriages, and same sex couples will be called spouses. It also affords the most civil rights and lowers the minimum age threshold to 18, similar to the Civil Code.

The first two bills were not even put to a vote anymore as the third one won by an overwhelming majority. However, the two most controversial provisions that passed are as follows:

With regards to adoption, only the biological children of one spouse can be adopted by the other. Same sex couples cannot adopt other children.

With regards to marriages with a foreigner, the marriage will not be recognized if the foreigner is a citizen of a country where same sex marriage is not yet legal. This means that a Taiwanese and an American couple can get married, while a Taiwanese and a Filipino cannot.

With regards to the second controversial position, this is in accordance with a Taiwanese law (An Act Governing the Choice of Law in Civil Matters Involving Foreign Elements) that states that the marriage of a couple of different nationalities must follow the rules of both spouses’ countries. Advocates were hoping that an exemption would be granted under a same sex marriage legalization law but said amendment was overwhelmingly rejected.

So what does this mean?

Same sex marriage is legal, but the fight for equal rights is far from over. Advocates accepted the government-backed bill as the lowest possible compromise and promise to fight for the remaining rights down the line. Opposition groups are also ramping up efforts to undermine the law’s credibility and rally public support in their favor.

The key lesson here is this: change takes time, and when it comes, it may not be perfect. But that’s okay – we have tomorrow to fight and make it perfect.

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: ‘This Is Very Good.’ How Trump Beat the Mueller Investigation

President Donald Trump had finished a round of Sunday golf and repaired to his private quarters at his Palm Beach, Fla., club when the news arrived. After 22 months, the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were in.

Moments before, around 3 p.m. on March 24, Trump’s White House lawyer Emmet Flood received a call from Attorney General William Barr’s chief of staff, Brian Rabbitt. The Department of Justice official said that after more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants and a similar number of witness interviews, Mueller had not established that the Trump campaign or its associates conspired with Russia during the 2016 election. In addition, Mueller declined to draw a conclusion about whether Trump had obstructed justice in the aftermath. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein immediately cleared the President.

Aides were elated. “This is very good,” Trump said, according to an official present. Back at the White House, staff crowded into press secretary Sarah Sanders’ office to toast the result with a bottle of sparkling wine. Within hours, Trump’s 2020 campaign was making money off the news, texting supporters that Democrats had “raised millions off a lie.” Greeting reporters on a Florida tarmac, Trump claimed “complete and total exoneration.”

It was one of the biggest victories of the Trump presidency. No collusion, no obstruction–just as Trump had vowed. A special-counsel investigation of this ilk might have proven fatal to Trump’s predecessors, yet the President survived it, stiff-arming Mueller’s demands for an in-person interview and attacking the legitimacy of the special counsel to stir up his supporters. By the time Trump sat down for a chicken piccata lunch with GOP Senators on March 26, he was also savoring the victory. Trump was “exuberant,” recalled Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana. “It’s apparent that it’s a big weight lifted.”

Mueller’s verdict was not nearly as definitive as the President and his allies would claim. He did not clear Trump of obstruction, according to a summary of the report Barr sent to Congress. Mueller laid out evidence on both sides, noted the “difficult issues” involved and declined to render a judgment, instead leaving the decision to DOJ brass. As Barr wrote, “The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.'” (Indeed, that fact irked Trump when he first heard it, according to a White House official.)

Mueller found that Russia had mounted an unprecedented campaign to influence the 2016 election, spreading disinformation on social media, hacking Democratic computers and engineering the release of damaging emails in an effort to sow discord and help Trump win. The special counsel indicted 34 people and won seven convictions or guilty pleas, including from Trump’s former campaign chairman, his deputy campaign manager, his White House National Security Adviser and his longtime personal lawyer. By any historical measure, the Trump presidency remains extraordinarily scandal-scarred.

Which is why the most important result of the Mueller report may be to politically inoculate Trump against the many probes still looming. America has now seen Trump weather a massive investigation led by a widely respected prosecutor. Somehow, Trump turned what might have been a catastrophe to any other President–a sweeping inquiry into potential collusion with a foreign power to undermine U.S. democracy–into a rebuttal against whatever comes next. “The politics of what’s happened over the last few days just places the President in a much better political position than he probably could have imagined,” says Russell Riley, professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia.

Cliff Owen—APAfter a 22-month probe, Mueller did not find that any Trump campaign officials or associates coordinated with Russia

Mueller’s findings matter in no small part because of what his investigation came to represent. For Democrats and many disenchanted Republicans, the special counsel evolved into a symbol of the rule of law itself. His investigation dominated social media and cable news, and his likeness spawned a cottage industry, with Trump’s opponents snapping up prayer candles, action figures and mugs emblazoned with the words it’s MUELLER TIME.

The former FBI director’s reputation was one reason congressional Democrats were willing to pin so much on the outcome of his investigation. When asked about the Russia investigation, Democrats typically said they would reserve judgment until Mueller completed his work. Now that he has, it’s harder for Democrats to quibble with the conclusions. “You can’t on the one hand defer to Mueller,” says Stanley Brand, former counsel for the House of Representatives under Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill, “and say, Now that we have it, we want to replow that ground.”

Some of the Democrats calling for Trump’s impeachment have long been wary of staking too much on Mueller’s findings. Tom Steyer, the liberal California billionaire who has committed nearly $100 million toward a pro-impeachment campaign, says he never thought the report would actually move the needle. Waiting for the report, Steyer told TIME in February, would be “a very ill-considered and mistaken idea.”

While Democrats were building up the import of the Russia investigation, Trump, after months of cooperation, decided to aggressively criticize Mueller last year. Those rants showed Trump following his instinct to lash out when he feels under attack. “I’m not going to begrudge Donald Trump for defending himself against a witch hunt and a hoax that was proven to be so,” says White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley. “He’s a counterpuncher.”

Once he started, Trump hammered at the investigation’s legitimacy incessantly. (In total, he’s tweeted 181 times that the probe was a “witch hunt.”) Many of the President’s detractors snorted at the broadsides, dismissing them as the ravings of a cornered man. But there was power in the mayhem. The President’s campaign to discredit the decorated former Marine and lifelong Republican as a rogue prosecutor seems to have had a real effect. Over time, Trump was able to convince supporters that a meticulous inquiry was politically motivated, and the public’s views became more and more entrenched along party lines.

Trump’s criticism will continue to pay off as the 2020 election nears, predicts former White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah. “On a wide range of issues–whether it’s the economy, whether it’s national security–you’re going to have critics fairly or unfairly criticizing the President,” Shah says. “And he’s going to be able to say on the biggest, most prominent issue, they were dead wrong, I was dead right, you should believe me. And I think that’s going to sell.”

The fog of the Mueller report transcended pure partisanship. By the end, many Americans had no idea what to make of the sprawling investigation. Some grew convinced that no matter what Mueller found, the outcome wouldn’t matter. In the days before Barr released his summary of Mueller’s conclusions, TIME was given access to a series of focus-group sessions, convened in Des Moines, Iowa, by the Democratic polling firm GBAO on behalf of a group called Protect the Investigation. The researchers sought to study “soft partisans,” people who scored relatively low on an assessment of party loyalty. One panel was made up of college-educated Republicans, one of college-educated independents and one of Democrats without college degrees.

The similarities were striking. The groups shared a sense that the investigation was merited, the matters were serious, and it was important that justice be done. They were troubled by the idea that politicians and the privileged might get away with things regular people wouldn’t. And yet many of the allegations against Trump didn’t strike the participants as a big deal. The prevailing view was that there was a lot of funny business going on around Trump–but that the President had likely found a way to keep his hands clean. “I do think he probably did some stuff, but I’m pretty sure he did a good job insulating himself,” a 35-year-old Republican man said.

Strikingly, none of the focus-group participants expected the Mueller report to be a game changer. “There may be a lot of pistols, but there probably isn’t going to be a smoking gun,” a 69-year-old man in the independents’ group said. Few said the report was likely to alter their opinion of the President.

Which appears to be the case for many Americans: In a national Fox News poll conducted the week before the report’s release, 70% said there was no chance or only a small chance the report would change their views. A poll by Morning Consult and Politico conducted in the two days following the release of Barr’s summary found the President’s support was essentially unchanged from a week earlier.

Hours after Barr revealed Mueller’s findings, Trump and his top aides watched television news coverage in his office on Air Force One. Soon they began to stew. “The mood fluctuated from happiness to righteous anger,” recalls Gidley. “There was a lot of relief, but there were definitely a lot of questions.”

White House officials are hungry to press ahead. They want to use the momentum to push Trump’s policy agenda forward, with legislative initiatives on health care, trade and infrastructure, according to two West Wing aides. Trump’s liaisons to Capitol Hill say they hope to work with House Democrats on key committees willing to work with them, especially on legislation to repair the country’s aging network of highways and bridges.

Yet the White House knows there’s little chance of major bipartisan legislation getting through. “There were Democrats who wanted to work with us and Democrats who didn’t,” says a top White House official, “and I don’t think that’s really changed.”

How lasting Trump’s victory proves will depend on a host of factors, including how much of Mueller’s actual report sees the light of day. Trump campaign officials believe the end of the investigation creates an opening with independent voters. Yet so far Trump has focused more on exacting vengeance against Democrats and the media than on any attempt at reconciliation.

As his attention shifts to the 2020 election, aides say Trump plans to campaign on his Administration’s achievements, from low unemployment rates to prison-reform legislation to confirming conservative judges and gains against the Islamic State. “We will be running on that,” says Tim Murtaugh, communications director for Trump’s re-election campaign. On the other hand, he adds, “I think a little righteous indignation is warranted.”

Mueller’s conclusions have tamped down talk of impeachment among Democratic leaders, who were already wary of publicly embracing the idea. But House Democrats have no plans to let up on their probes of the President, his Administration, his family members or their business dealings with foreign powers. They are already pushing Barr for the release of the full Mueller report and its underlying documents, as well as to continue investigating other Trump controversies.

At the same time, Democrats have been careful to balance their investigative efforts with a renewed emphasis on legislative priorities. For them, the silver lining in the Mueller outcome may be that they can now zero in on issues like lowering health care costs. Within a day of Barr releasing his summary of the Mueller report, the Trump Administration handed Democrats an apparent political gift, telling the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans that it supports the complete invalidation of the Affordable Care Act. Focusing on kitchen-table issues like health care helped Democrats win the House in 2018, and it is the strategy presidential hopefuls plan to use in 2020. “This campaign can’t be about [Trump],” said South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, in an MSNBC interview. “I think part of how we lost our way in 2016 was it was much too much about him, and it left a lot of people back home saying, ‘O.K., but nobody is talking about me.'”

The outcome of Robert Mueller’s investigation was as disappointing for Democrats as it was buoying for Republicans. But in the end, it may have been a boon for U.S. democracy. For nearly two years, the fate of the Trump presidency has been bound up in a rare and opaque legal limbo. Mueller may have punted the question of whether Trump had obstructed justice to the President’s handpicked Attorney General. But in the process, he returned the power to render a verdict on the Trump presidency to American voters. The final report will come at the ballot box, on Nov. 3, 2020.

With reporting by Alana Abramson, Molly Ball and Tessa Berenson/Washington and Charlotte Alter/New York

This appears in the April 08, 2019 issue of TIME. via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste