#it is criminal that I must perpetually clean the house

[thebumblingbee]

Ahh yes. This will be the series of checklists that will help me complete household tasks on a regular schedule (I say as if I have not tried this and failed several times in the past)

[96thdayofrage]

This commentary is part of The Appeal’s collection of opinion and analysis.

Somewhere in America, right now, as you read this, a person—likely a young Black or brown man—is sitting in a jail cell, terrified he’s going to die because he can’t afford a few hundred dollars in bail. There have been tens of thousands of new COVID-19 cases reported each week in America’s jails, and those are just the reported cases—actual numbers may be much higher.

He may have asthma or high blood pressure, he may be diabetic or have a disability, and if he’s one of the millions of people who cycle through America’s jails over 10 million times annually, he is sitting in a world where he cannot get more than three feet away from another person. He may be sharing a bathroom with 40 other men. He may have no access to outside air, masks, running water, sanitizer and cleaning supplies, or even medical attention. He may not even be 18 years old. He is frightened for his life. He is frightened he will die in a cage over a few hundred dollars in bail.

Elsewhere in America, Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, is home. Accused of killing two men and wounding a third during protests against police violence, Kyle’s $2 million bond was paid by a group of supporters who raised the money online. Bail, you see, isn’t about what you did or whether you’re dangerous. Bail is about whether you can find the money to buy your freedom back from the state. 

As I write this, nearly 400,000 people cannot find that money. And for them and their children, partners, parents, colleagues and neighbors, the Rittenhouse case raises particularly pointed questions about what we are really talking about when we talk about bail. After all, in a world where an accused killer can pay his way out of jail but a father sits behind bars for picking up his kids during a family emergency, we’ve forfeited the right to argue that these releases are somehow about public safety or the severity of charges.  

In Missouri’s First Congressional District, which I am honored to represent starting in January, Black and brown people’s lives are at risk simply because they cannot buy back their freedom. In St. Louis City, Black people are held in pretrial detention three times as often as white people. We are living in poverty. Too often Black and brown people are detained indefinitely for minor offenses like traffic violations, trespassing, and drug possession—conduct that is much less frightening than the charges that stand against Kyle Rittenhouse. And statistically, we are far likelier to die if we catch the virus than he would be. 

The time has come to stop pretending that pretrial detention is about public safety. Even before the pandemic, a few days in jail would cost a person their entire life: lost jobs, disrupted education or mental health treatment, fractured families, and an increased risk of homelessness are just a few of the likely consequences of pretrial detention. When you factor in the significantly heightened risk of COVID-19 death to the list of consequences, it becomes clear: The safety of many more people is put at risk by detention than release.

The hard truth in making smart choices about public safety is that it’s an area where people are prone to mistake emotion for evidence. The evidence shows that releasing more people pretrial generally poses zero risk to public safety. The evidence shows that sending text messages is a proven and more cost-effective method than cash bail in getting people to come back to court. The evidence shows that the ease with which we toss people into prison destabilizes families and destroys the economic mobility of entire communities. When we let our government make policy choices based on fear instead of reason, we get remarkably cruel and horrific consequences. 

Willie Horton arguments fail when you realize that the number of people at risk of dying in a COVID-19-ravaged carceral facility is much higher than the number of people at risk of experiencing violent crime. The math is simple: Jails are now hotbeds of COVID transmission, and every day spent in jail is a risk to the health and life of everyone inside, including those who work there. When you fold how release benefits family unity, education, mental health, housing stability, and the economy of an impacted community, it becomes clear that the problem isn’t Kyle Rittenhouse’s fundraiser. The problem is that we don’t treat everyone like Kyle Rittenhouse. 

Kalief Browder spent three years in jail, most of them in solitary confinement, for allegedly stealing a backpack and because he couldn’t afford his freedom. At 16 years old, he was wrongfully incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. A system that locks innocent children and adults in cages is not just or smart—it’s cruel. When he was released, Kalief Browder tragically died by suicide. In stark comparison, Kyle Rittenhouse has been heralded a hero. 

This is why we continue to fight. When our freedom and justice are at stake, we cannot be silent. Elected leaders must have the courage to step past the fearmongering and create smarter, stronger, and more humane systems to spur change. The most important thing to keep our communities safe isn’t the local jail. It’s local jobs, housing, schools, and healthcare.  Guaranteeing these building blocks of stability does much more to keep our community safe than needless, perpetual detention. 

Although Congress does not have direct control over America’s thousands of jails, we do have control over funding that, if used to incentivize states and counties, could transform our criminal legal system. The first step is straightforward: We must invest in people and communities by funding affordable housing and child care, better schools, job opportunities, and healthcare. 

We must reward jurisdictions that end cash bail and be mindful that we should not trade one broken system for others such as risk assessment tools and electronic monitoring that are algorithmically biased, privatized, and equally cruel. By making these investments, we can exchange old cages for stronger communities. We can increase both freedom and prosperity for everyday people, instead of reserving these fundamental rights as privileges for the few. 

In Congress, I plan to sit on the House Judiciary Committee and craft policies in partnership with directly affected communities. This is the moment. This is our work to complete, our assignment unto liberation. This fight is in our hands. Standing together, it’s essential that we build a more just and equitable world that centers our voices and recognizes that freedom should never have a price. 

[chinatea]

Jikook Sexy Alien AU Part 1

Personas are a product of @satellite-jeon​ ‘s beautiful mind.

This is WIP and still pretty drafty, and I’ll be posting new parts to tumbler as I finish them. I’m planning 4-5 parts overall. 

For my best girl @kmheart​ <3333 Thank you for loving this mess. <333

Warnings: Coarse language.

Jungkook doesn’t know exactly when his life took a dive from awesome to downright shitty.

And even if he did, he wouldn’t be telling that story any time soon ‘cause no one gives a rat’s arse about good ol’ boy Jungkook who scrubs pools for a living. 

It didn’t start that way. In high school, he was a local superstar. The golden jock. The whole fucking trope, baby. With titties of all caliber following him everywhere. Boy did love him some pussy. Dicks, too. He loved everything to do with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

He believed himself invincible and it was only a matter of time before he mingled with the wrong crowd. Only back then, he thought of them as friends. His bros for life.

Well.

Now, he cleans pools - the only kind of gig he can scrounge up nowadays, what with a criminal record and whatnot - and trusts no bro. 

And when he’s not cleaning pools, he’s stuck at the garage being bossed around by a dirtbag who happens to be his uncle. His uncle, Sunmu, hates his guts - one of those stupid homophobic fucks who can’t mind their own fucking business. Needless to say, no love lost.

As much as Jungkook wants to punch his stupid teeth out - what’s left of them anyhow - he needs the money and it’s not like his uncle can do much more than run his smelly farthole of a mouth. Which he does. At lengths. The dude just never shuts up. Until one day, Jungkook made him shut up - even his golden-boy patience has its limits. And the dude blew up, called the police, the neighbors came a-running, the whole nine yards.

One hell of a shitshow, that night.

So now, Jungkook has taken to bringing guys to fuck in his garage instead. Totally intentional. He knows the geezer, like the sick fuck he is, had cameras installed all over for his own perverse pleasure. So Jungkook lets him enjoy it while he can.

‘Cause once the summer ends, Jungkook will burn down his fucking shack and hit the road, because he’s this close to being done with the shitfucks that are hell bent on ruining his life.

Another day. Another mindless grind.

Luckily for him, the client has vacated the house for the day, leaving their big pool in his capable hands. A much welcome break from those rich fucks being all smug and pissy and all up in his grill about every little nothing. 

Rich tits always think they know everything.

Not to mention their shitty kids running around, destroying his equipment and yapping his ear off. Or worse yet, their old haggy wives flashing their saggy tits at him - goodness gracious, does his face say he’s into wrinkled-ass pussy or something?

He thinks the fuck not.

Jungkook plops down on a deck chair and pops a can of coke open, taking a long chug. When he doesn’t have people looming over his ass, he prefers taking things slow. At his own pace. That’s what he’s all about. 

As much as he could wrap things up faster and call it a day, he’s not looking forward to trudging back to the garage. Sunmu the dipshit would be there, of course, nagging at him with this shit or that and he’d rather chill out here - the house is off-limits, locked tight, but the scenery is gorgeous. The house sits on a cliff, with the pool area overlooking the city below. 

It’s private and quiet and damn therapeutic. Like, he could just close his eyes and pretend it’s all his. That he’s not a broke-ass dude about to keel over any day now, but someone who is in control of his life. 

And he does just that. Closes his eyes and leans back, cradling the coke to his chest like one does a lover.

Mind blank of any thought.

The sky above crackles in warning, too close for comfort. And it wakes up goosebumps along his skin as he jostles awake from his little moment of inner peace. His hands flap around, knocking his coke over - it drips all over his tank top. 

Nice, Jungkook thinks. 

Of-fucking-course, it must rain today of all days. He scrambles up to his feet, ready to start hauling all the gear back into his truck when IT happens.

At first, he is not even sure what IT even is. One moment, he’s one grouchy mess, spewing dozens of profanities at no one in particular while tugging at his stained top in a retarded attempt to shake the mess off. And the next-

Something, fairly massive and spherical, materializes a few inches above the pool before plunging into water like a dead weight. Jungkook can only manage an undignified squawk before the impact wave sends him flying into the thorny shrubs framing the pool.

Mother-fucker.

When he drags his ass back from the shrubs, drenched from head to toe and covered in scratches, all he knows is that his stained shirt is the least of his problems now, because this…

What the fuck is this? he thinks, staring agog at the offender, hogging the pool now.

It looks like…something.

Maybe a futuristic car or a flying vessel of some sort. He has no clue, really. What it is or where it came from, but it’s here, right in his face, obstructing his work. Like a bastard.

He’ll have to call up a tow truck or something to pluck this sucker out, which will take forever and there go his plans for Friday night out.

Jungkook walks around the pool, inspecting the strange contraption from all sides. It’s slick and round and very, very chrome. Perhaps - a submarine. Some ultra-slick technology with masking abilities. Which apparently can fly, but not very well, otherwise, how the fuck it’d ended up stuck in his pool.

Those rich fucks and their stupid malfunctioning toys, eh. 

Jungkook sighs and kicks the empty coke can lying about. It flies off towards the pod, ricocheting right off its shiny cask with a sharp clank. And now he has even more trash to dredge up from the puddle bellow. What joy.

As he is about to roll over and wail in self-pity, the pod wakes up with a tremor, sending shallow ripples over the water. Jungkook freezes, frantically thinking over his choices - his gut reaction is to hightail the fuck out of here, because the thing is starting to show signs of life and it doesn’t sit well with Jungkook, not one bit.

He better scram and scram fast. Fuck the money and his uncle - especially his uncle - no one told him scrubbing pools involved close encounters of the third kind.

He makes to do just that but doesn’t make it too far as he bumps into someone, loosing his balance and sending them both to the ground. With a groan, he opens his eyes to stare at the unfortunate soul who had to bear the brunt of the fall on their- his. 

It’s definitely a he. A he so stunning Jungkook’s jaw goes slack and his brain radio-silent. Meanwhile, the he doesn’t waste any time making the most of their proximity as he slithers his hands around Jungkook’s neck and presses against him in a soft sweet kiss.

A supernova goes off at the back of his skull. 

It was awesome.

“Hello,” the other says, a quality to his voice that is out of this world. He must be out of this world, because how?

“I’m Jimin.”

“Hi,” Jungkook says.

A dumb grin takes over his face.

He’s tingly all over. He thinks he’s in love. 

“You’re gorgeous, Jimin-ah. Will you marry me?”

“Marry?” Jimin says tentatively as if testing the word on his tongue. His lips are pretty and full, forming a perpetual pout. It’s adorable. “I can’t marry. I need to mate.”

“Oh.” That throws Jungkook for a loop, as his heart swells with emotion. “Mate who?”

“You,” Jimin smiles. “Serendipity has chosen you as the most suitable candidate within this quadrant of our galaxy. We’re compatible.”

“Wow,” Jungkook whispers. He understands jack shit, but it does feel like serendipity, doesn't it. Just a moment ago, he was one miserable son of a bitch and now…he’s the luckiest son of a bitch in the whole fucking quadrant of their galaxy. 

“You do know I’m scrubbing pools for a living, right?”

He props himself up on his hands, hovering over the gorgeous Jimin and eyeing him like a candy on a stick. Jimin has pretty dainty hands. They are always in motion, feelings up Jungkook’s arm muscles, bulging all prettily just for him - this shameless little minx.

“I know everything about you,” Jimin says, his voice washing over Jungkook’s mind like a gentle summer tide.

Turns his brain all mush-mush. 

“Every second of your waking moment. Every dream, every thought you’ve had. Serendipity has shown me all of it.”

Whomever this Serendipity is, Jungkook hopes it didn’t show every single thought he had. After a certain age, they’d gotten rather repetitive and tended to fixate mostly on things below the belt - which is not the image of himself he wants to project into this world. 

“You’re thinking too much,” Jimin purrs, tapping his temple lightly.

His hands wind up in Jungkook’s hair, massaging the scalp and down his neck. His touches are flitting, almost shy and it kindles longing in Jungkook like never before. It tramples all of the questions budding in his head. Melting reason away. Before he knows they’re kissing again and it plays out like a dream. 

He’s doing something, but he’s not really in control. It feels good. Peaceful, he’s in a safe place. Jimin’s touches are weightless and tender as he maps out his body with the very tips of his fingers. 

Like he can reach everywhere - can touch anywhere.

The moment something prods his mind, gentle and soothing - akin to a light breeze caressing the leaves - Jungkook shivers. Falls under. A feeling like no other. Floating, like a little air bubble. 

It’s gone as sudden as it came and Jungkook finds himself yearning.

“We can’t do it here,” Jimin says as they both move upright in sync. He grabs Jungkook’s hand. “Let’s go. Serendipity will have to stay here for now.”

“Serendipity?” Jungkook asks, shaking off the drowsiness as his brain slowly kicks back into gear. “You mean that pod thing?”

“Don’t call her ‘a thing’,” Jimin chides. “She has feelings. Quite a temper, too.”

“Damn, a she-pod with feelings”.

They’re standing now with Jimin plastered against his chest and nuzzling his mighty pec. Not awkward at all. 

“She’s a ship. The most intelligent ship in the whole galaxy. Completely self-aware,” Jimin says, exploring the vastness of Jungkook’s chest with his curious palms now. Jungkook starts to notice a certain obsession here of a tactile nature, but can’t find it in himself to complain. “Be kind to her.”

“I am kind,” Jungkook says. “I’m like...wait, who are you?”

“I’m Jimin.”

“Okay,” Jungkook nods. “But what kind of Jimin are you? Where did you come from? You’re not with the Joneses here, are you?”

With the burden of rational thinking, Jungkook slumps into a realization that he has questions. And he must ask them. 

“No, I’m from space,” Jimin says like it’s not big deal. “We need to go,” he commands, taking charge and dragging Jungkook along.

“Space? Wow,” Jungkook says. “That’s, ah, nice, I guess. Never been myself, what with the radiation and minus fuck-ton degrees, you know. Transportation kinda sucks, too. I don’t know if you’re aware but we’re kinda still in the stone age or whatever, but, ehm...remember when I was lying on top of you, with our private parts perfectly aligned? That was nice too, wanna, ehm, do that again?”

“Here is not safe,” Jimin says and at least, it’s not a no. “Serendipity can hide herself well enough, but it’s a matter of time before he tracks me down. And if that happens, I don’t want him to track me down right next to her.”

“Who’s he?” 

“Just a man who never gives up what’s his.”

“You mean, like, ex-boyfriend?” Jungkook asks, swallowing down an annoying spike of jealousy. “Do you even have boyfriends in space?”

“I meant Serendipity, not me,” Jimin says. “And yes, we do have boyfriends up there in space. You don’t have to worry though, he’s been mated for the past five hundred years. He’s that boring.”

Jungkook lets out a low whistle.

“If his mate looks anything like you, that’s understandable.”

[relapseblog]

Dear Father: A Letter I will Never be Able to Send...

I’m unsure how to begin this. I don’t know what words to use. I don’t think there is an adequate or befitting way to compose a thesis or introduction. However, I do have a vague notion of the thoughts I’d like to convey.

I am hurt. I’ve existed in a state of superposition for as long as I can remember; simultaneously occupying space in two separate but parallel realities. One is authentic, one that is insincere. Within the authentic reality I suffer perpetual agony. Within the insincere reality I function through enactment of a false display so skilled that I at times even fool myself, forgetting that my authentic reality is one typified by anguish. To a slightly lesser degree, this remains true today.

Since before I was even born the story of how I would come to exist in such a state was beginning to transpire. You abused my mother ever since the two of you first became associated until the day she took us and escaped from you. You once threw her onto a bed where my baby big brother lied, proceeding to wrap your hands around her throat asphyxiating her, whilst at the same time suffocating infant Trey under her body weight being forcefully pressed against him. You could’ve killed not only my mother, but your infant son as well. This is just one of many incidents of this kind that I’ve been told of. I am certain for each story of your iniquity I’ve been told there exists another three.

I don’t have detailed memories of the cruel torment you imposed on my mother. I have very few fractured memories of the vile things you said and did to her. what I do remember are the feelings of confusion, anger, helplessness, fear, and heartache. Feelings that I’ve carried with me my entire 25 years of life. Feelings so excruciating they placed me on a path of self-destruction where thrice I’ve attempted to kill myself, where I’ve wished for death innumerable times, where I’ve incalculably deliberated killing myself whilst writhing in tears and pain. Feelings that I wanted desperately to banish from my mind. At the tender age of 13 I became a heroin addict who would wish silently every time she stuck a needle in her veins that this would finally be the fatal shot she’d been waiting for. That this would finally be the shot that would end her lifelong torment she’d been subjected to.

It was also around this age I ceased believing in God. I did not believe that I would go to Heaven upon my death; I was not hoping to escape this world seeking refuge in a better place, I was hoping to be annihilated. To cease to exist. As though I’d never existed at all. I’d fantasize about my lifeless body going cold, then stiff, the bloating and changing colors, then beginning the process of decomposition until there would be no remaining trace of evidence that I was ever a living organism that existed on Earth. These thoughts strangely elicited a sense of comfort. But accompanying them were thoughts of how my mother and the rest of my family that loved me would feel. These thoughts were painful. Even more painful were the thoughts I’d have regarding you. I’d think to myself that if I were to die you would never even know, that if you did somehow find out you wouldn’t care because you don’t love me. The comforting images in my mind of my death did not stay comforting for very long before the accompanying thoughts made me feel worse than I previously had. Self-hatred ensued.

Before becoming a heroin addict often I’d dream of you at night. You’d come to where we lived in Iowa to visit me and Trey. Despite the fact she abhorred you and feared you my mother always graciously let you stay out your visit in our home so Trey and I could spend as much time with you as possible. You had missed us, you were happy to be with us, we were happy to be with you too. These dreams were extremely vivid. I would wake from my slumber, eagerly searching the house looking for you only to find that it was just a dream. This was very painful. I had variations of this dream at least twice weekly for four years. Eventually I stopped searching for you upon waking up, as I had accepted that it was merely a dream. Just as I had accepted that you didn’t give a fuck about me or Trey. I mean, you didn’t give a fuck about Aaron either; it was a bit narcissistic of me to believe that I was somehow any more important.

I’d always hated you for what you’d done to my mother; it’s unforgivable what you did to her, and she deserved none of the cruelty she suffered by your hands. For this, I have hated you all my life. I’ve also hated you because during my childhood in California and Illinois you never had a job, you never tried to help support our family, you were never a man. Rather you let my mother run the streets day and night committing illegal acts putting herself and our family in jeopardy because you were a lazy piece of shit. For these two things, I have always hated you. But it was during this time in my life, around age 13, that I started to hate you for what you did to me. Even thought I hated you for what you did to my mother and for what you did not do for our family I still loved and admired you. In my eyes you were strong, intelligent, wise. I loved you with the most unconditional love that anyone could ever have for another person. And you never came to see me. I just wanted to see you. To hug you. But you never came. I hate you so much for that. I loved you so much. No matter what you did wrong I always loved you. Despite my belief that you were evil I still loved you. But you didn’t love me. So, I buried it deep inside.

The first time I ever used heroin I felt brand new, reborn, like I had been recreated by this substance into someone I could never even have dreamed of being. I felt exalted. I felt warm. I felt happy. I felt safe. I felt loved. I felt serenity. Every ill thought and feeling instantly vanished. It felt as if I had been cleansed and anointed by the God I no longer believed in. There was no  more pain. I was unbound, infinite. As I continued to inject heroin into my veins day in and day out I found that I no longer had those painful dreams in which you loved me only to wake and be faced with the fact that you didn’t. For a while everything finally felt okay, better than okay. Exceedingly better than okay. Heroin comes to you as everything you could ever want to possess and own for yourself. But that’s the thing about heroin, you can’t own it, rather it owns you. I soon spiraled downward at an exponential rate and became slave to this cruel and beguiling master. i no longer had free will. My thoughts and actions were no longer mine. I now existed only to seek and use heroin. And I was still a child.

Injecting heroin every day, typically multiple times a day, continued until I was 19 years old. But I couldn’t live as a sober individual. I didn’t know how. Aside from the lifelong pain you inflicted upon me, now I had damaged my brain irreparably with heroin. Serotonin and dopamine were no longer being synthesized correctly in my brain, leaving me extremely depressed and angry all the time. I became violent like you. Moreover, the person I was at this point was someone I hated; someone I was ashamed of. I no longer recognized who I was. In my mind I was a filthy, immoral, lowlife scourge upon the Earth who had done nothing but degrade my own self and sadden, disappoint, and horrify my family to no end. I viewed myself as innately bad; I even went so far as to say to myself that I was evil. Because of the anger and rage I harbored I thought I was just like you. Which to me was the worst thing possible. I’d rather be like anyone, like anything, rather than be like you.

Even though I quit using heroin I continued to use methamphetamine and by the age of 23 I had relapsed on heroin too. Also at the age of 23 I got arrested for the first time. Then I was arrested again. And again. And again. The last time I was arrested I decided I needed to change. I was, and still currently am, in school studying criminal justice and psychology. Despite my deteriorated mental health, I always yearned to by successful. To graduate college, have a career, make my mother proud. I had spent half of my life putting her through a living Hell that I’ll never be able to comprehend. She has always felt that my addictions, my feelings of confusion, anger, helplessness, fear, and heartache, my wish for death, was all her fault. My wonderful mother whom I owe nothing less than everything believes that she has failed as a parent.I need to prove to her that she didn’t fail. If I succeed she will believe that she has succeeded. So, I quit using methamphetamine and I quit using heroin. My goal in life, my purpose for living, is to make her proud. To instate within her an overwhelming feeling of joy, success, and peace.

I have been clean and sober now for almost two year, though not without a couple of brief and minor lapses along the way, I am very proud of myself. I have not allowed these lapses to dishearten me or lead me to believe that the time I have managed to remain clean is null and void. I am affording myself grace. I am relearning how to live life. I have come to realize that I am not a bad, immoral, or evil person. I am simply a product of my upbringing which was less than favorable and of no fault of my own; though I also know that it is on me to become better, and that my past is not an excuse to continue to choose to be a bad person. I’ve come to realize that the circumstances of my birth and upbringing are not things that I can allow to define who I am and who I become. I’ve come to realize that my suffering is not in vain. I can help others who suffer as I have.

I am a heroin addict and a meth addict. This is something I must continue to manage and will continue to struggle with for the rest of my life. There is no cure for addiction. There is no cure for my bipolar disorder either. I am permanently afflicted, but I am not worthless, bad, immoral, or evil. I am a strong woman, but at the same time I am a very sad and broken little girl.

Last night (the other night at this point) I had that dream again for the first time in probably 12 years. I was little. Trey was little. Mother was gracious. You were with us. We were happy. I woke up wailing with tears streaming down my face as I placed my hands on top of my head and pulled my hair tight into my fists. All the painfully familiar confusion, anger, helplessness, fear, and heartache came flooding back. I wanted to run. I wanted to get high. I wanted to die. I wanted to disappear. I went to work that night at the emergency youth shelter here in Des Moines on overnight shift. All the boys on my unit were sound asleep throughout the entire night. I was alone in an eerily silent dimly lit room. I sat there a cried virtually all night because of you. Yet again, all the confusion, anger, helplessness, fear, and heartache resurfaced.

I don’t think these feelings, which are the product of being witness to the horrible things you did to my mother, will ever leave me. They are a permanent part of me. This is what you’ve given to me rather than love. Where your love was supposed to go, instead you have placed confusion, anger, helplessness, fear, and heartache. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with these things aside from using them to help others who feel similar things. But that still does not tell me what I am supposed to do with them when I dream of you, or when I am crying all alone for hours in pain because no matter how much I hate you I can’t unlove you. I wish I could. Living would be a lot easier if I could.

I used to view you as strong, intelligent, wise. I cannot say that this perspective has changed entirely. I will think that you are intelligent to a certain degree. My mother used to refer to you as a “smart dumb motherfucker.” To me this is an accurate statement. You’re intelligent, but mindless. I no longer view you as strong. You succumbed so easily to the vile and sordid influences of this world, being whisked away by them falsely thinking they somehow made you powerful. That they made people respect you. That they gave you control. Fact of the matter is that you were too weak to fight to retain your moral humanity, so you forfeited it. You had no power, respect, or control. You allowed the depravity of this world to control you thus becoming depraved yourself. Though I once thought you to be evil I never thought you to be ignorant to what a proper sense of morality was. I know you understand right from wrong, yet you could never summon the willpower to make the right decisions. Your trepidation of fear and lack of strength always prevailed.

In my eyes today you are a coward. You are a coward for your acts of violence and abuse toward my mother. You are a coward for being too ashamed to attempt to reconcile with the children you have forsaken. You are a coward for being too afraid to turn inward to fix whatever it is that’s inside of you that makes you so angry, calloused, and violent. To my dismay I am quite a bit like you. I’ve got your temper. I’ve got your rage. I had begun to become cold and calloused like you. I’ve got your propensity for violence. But the difference between me and you is this, I am no coward. I will admit that once I was afraid to turn inward and look at myself for who and what I was. I was afraid of what I would see. I was afraid of having to deal with the horrible things that I’ve done. I was afraid of having to relive moments from my past that I’d tried for so long to banish from my mind. Most of all, I was scared to think too critically about you. But none of this is true today. Unlike you, I am brave. Unlike you, I am strong enough to not allow this, at times, cruel world to corrupt me. Unlike you, I am not afraid of the pain associated with accountability and personal growth. I would much rather endure that pain than be forced to endure the pain of self-destruction. I would much rather endure that pain than become a monster who inflicts the pain I feel inside upon others.

I know that you were, and probably still are, in pain too. Hurt people hurt people. It isn’t an excuse for one’s shitty actions, it’s merely a fact. I no longer think that you are evil. At least not by some sort of malign nefarious nature. Any evil that exists within you is present not because you’re innately malevolent, rather it’s because you relinquished your control over the one and only thing you did have control over. Yourself. I can’t speculate much more than this about you. You’re a person shrouded in mystery and I think that I’ve finally accepted that I don’t have to fully comprehend the reasons for your actions and inactions.

I hate you. I love you. I hate myself for loving you, but I am learning to be gentle and kind with myself because regardless of anything you were my father. Regardless of how cruelly you treated my mother, regardless of your lack of ambition and failure to provide, and regardless of the fact that you abandoned me and Trey, for a short time when I was a small child you were an active and doting father to me. You made me feel like a beautiful and powerful princess in a world that does not readily subscribe beauty, power, nor prestige to black women and girls. You encouraged me in everything I did. You taught me many things that I carry with me to this day and will continue to carry with me for the rest of my life. This is the person I love unconditionally. The person that I’ve mourned the loss of for 16 long years who exists now only in my memory.

The person who victimized and tormented my mother for years without remorse as her two small children witness it crying a pleading that it stop, the person who failed to ever contribute to society and help provide for his children, the person who so easily cast his children aside, the person who seemed to delight in feeling evil. That person is not my father. That person is someone that I’ve had the grave misfortune of knowing. That person is someone that I’ve allowed to wreak havoc on my life for as long as I can remember. I don’t love that person. i abhor that person. That person is the exemplification of everything I never want to become. That person is who I fear every day that I will become because he is the reason for my anger, hostility, and predisposition for destruction and violence. That person is the cause of my greatest everlasting sorrow. That person is you.

For what you’ve done only God can forgive. If there is a God I pray that you find serenity and peace that you’ve never known on Earth. If God doesn’t exist and annihilation follows our death, then I hope that you somehow manage to make peace with yourself before death. I know pain, and it is not something anyone should have to carry with them to the grave. Not even you, Arcell.

[theysentushope-blog]

Turn (Poe Dameron x Reader) [Part Five/Five]

A/N: Alright, I lied. I managed to finish this today! I really enjoyed this series, and I hope that this is a satisfying conclusion.

Turn Series

It took an unnervingly short amount of time for Y/N to adjust back to life in the First Order. After she had been discharged from the medbay, she had been thoroughly debriefed, even coming face to face with General Hux himself. Shortly after, she had been cleared for duty, promoted to Major, and given command of a prison transport. Hux had called her a ‘model soldier’ and had proclaimed her a Hero of the First Order, having stayed true to their cause, even after being held captive for weeks by the Resistance.

Being back with the First Order was familiar, comfortable, and Y/N fell into her routine easily. When they received orders that they were getting a new group of prisoners, she signed off on the transfer without a second thought. A few hours later, she stood on the walkway above the ship hangar, watching as stormtroopers led the prisoners off of the shuttle and toward the processing area. They were Resistance, and Y/N fought down the surge of emotion she felt when she found a few faces that she recognized from the base. At the end, two troopers were struggling with a particularly troublesome prisoner, and Y/N couldn’t fight the gasp that escaped her as she saw Poe’s face. She had been sure that he had been killed in the attack, and if he hadn’t, a high-profile Resistance hero like him would have been kept on a higher-security transport. Whoever had caught him must not have recognized him for who he was.

“Let me see the prisoner manifest.” She ordered her lieutenant, who handed over the datapad a moment later. She scanned the list more thoroughly than she had the first time, but there was no Poe Dameron listed. She nodded toward Poe as she handed the pad back to the other woman. “That one. Put him in the interrogation room.”

“He has to go through processing first.” The lieutenant argued, and Y/N set her with a steely gaze.

“I said, put him in interrogation, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, Major Y/L/N.”

An hour later, Y/N dismissed the guards standing inside the room where Poe was waiting. They left with a nod, and Y/N locked the door behind her. It was only then that Poe looked up, and the happy glint in his eye belied his current situation.

“What are you doing here?”

“We received intel that you’d been promoted. Wasn’t sure it was true. Kind of ironic, them putting you in charge of a prison.”

“How did you get here? How do they not know who you are?”

“After the attack, I couldn’t find you. When the base got blown to smithereens, I was afraid…” Poe drifted off, his gaze unfocused for a moment. “Then, we heard word of a First Order soldier saved from the Resistance, and I knew that it was you. Took a lot of convincing to get the General to agree to come after you, and even more for Rose to get me an identity that was clean, but dirty enough to get me here.”

“You got arrested on purpose?”

“I came to find you, Y/N.”

“That was foolish.” Y/N snapped, pushing away the knot in her stomach she felt at the knowledge that Poe had tried to rescue her. “You’re a prisoner, now.”

“It was a risk I was willing to take.”

“I’m First Order, I’m back where I belong. I’m not Resistance scum like you.”

Poe seemed unfazed by her insult, as he only shrugged and smiled at her.

“God, I missed you.”

“You’re going to rot here, you know. You’re going to die in a First Order prison for this idea of a person you think I am.”

“I know who you are, Y/N. I know who you really are. That’s who I saved, and that’s who’s going to save me.”

Y/N banged on the door as she unlocked it, letting the two guards back in.

“Put him back with the others, he’s of no use to me.” Y/N ordered, turning away from Poe as she left the room.

Once she was back in the safety of her quarters, she collapsed on her bed,, her breath coming in quick gasps. Poe was alive, he was here, and suddenly all Y/N could think of was how differently they - Poe, Rey, Finn, even General Organa - had looked at her. Like she was a person, like she was real.

No, she was First Order. This was where she belonged, and Poe was her enemy. Whatever might have been had been destroyed along with the base. This was her destiny.

Days passed, and Y/N made a concerted effort to avoid the section of the ship housing the Resistance prisoners. It was easy enough, her day filled with the running of the transport. It was only at night, alone in her quarters, that she let herself think about Poe, about the Resistance. It was only when word came down that General Hux would be visiting the transport that Y/N felt fear flood her body. She knew that that it would only be a matter of time before Poe was discovered - he was the poster boy for the Resistance, after all. When Hux’s shuttle landed in the hangar, Y/N stood at the head of the honor guard that had been assembled for his arrival. He swept down the ramp in his black uniform, his perpetual sneer on his face as he walked up to her.

“Major Y/L/N.”

“General Hux, welcome to the Arcadia.”

“You seem to have failed to report a prisoner of some value.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, General. We have received no one of true importance in our prison transfers. Low-level Resistance fighters and common criminals.”

“You have Poe Dameron in your cells, Major.”

Y/N feigned surprise, her eyes going wide. “Sir, if we had received someone of such importance, I would have recognized his name in our manifests.”

“Not if he was brought here under an assumed name.”

“I will check the group of most recent Resistance arrivals myself. General, if Dameron is here, I will bring him to you at once.”

“Very good.” Hux snapped, and Y/N nodded to her lieutenant.

“Bring General Hux to the bridge. I will join you there shortly.” Her lieutenant nodded, and Hux dismissed Y/N with a wave of his hand as he followed the lieutenant to the bridge. Y/N let out a shaky breath once he was away, and forced herself to relax as she headed toward the prison cells. Her mind raced as she fought with her instincts. She knew that Hux would, at best, kill Poe quickly. At worst, he would make him suffer. She told herself that Poe was Resistance, that he deserved whatever was coming to him. In the same moment, she remembered the smile on his face as he watched her pilot the shuttle into the atmosphere above the base. She remembered how close he had been to her that night, how it felt to have his arms wrapped around her.

“General Hux.” Y/N greeted later, as she brought the Resistance prisoners to him. “These are the Resistance prisoners who came aboard some days ago.”

Y/N watched as Hux scanned the group, disgust clear on his face. When his eyes landed on Poe, his face turned truly evil, though Poe’s stayed impassive.

“Dameron.”

“Hey Huxy.” Poe replied, and Y/N fought the urge to roll her eyes. Only Poe Dameron could joke in the face of death.

“We’ll see if you’re so glib shortly.” Hux growled before grabbing Poe by the neck and forcing him down to his knees. He pulled a blaster from his side, pointing it at Poe’s head.

“You’ve been more trouble than you’re worth, Dameron. That will end today.”

“Sorry, but I think it’s actually your day that’s about to get a whole lot worse.”

Y/N pulled her blaster from its holster, pointing it directly at Hux.

“What do you think you’re doing, Major?”

“For once?” She replied, a small smile on her face as she glanced at Poe. “The right thing.”

In that moment, the other Resistance fighters pulled the weapons she had given them, pointing them at the troopers surrounding them. Hux stared at her in cold disbelief, his mouth open.

“You traitorous wretch.”

“It appears so.” Y/N replied, her aim still on Hux. “Now, you’re going to let us go - all of us. I would advise taking your blaster off of my friend’s head, unless you want to die too.”

“You’ll pay for this.” Hux sneered, but pulled away the blaster.

“Maybe, but not today.” Y/N pulled Poe toward her, one of the other Resistance fighters handing him his own blaster. “Clear the hangar.” She ordered her (now former, she assumed) lieutenant, who nodded jerkily and sent the orders through her commlink.

“Be seeing you around, General.” Poe quipped, joining Y/N in leading the Resistance troops down to the hangar. It was clear, but Y/N kept her eyes sharp as they boarded her personal shuttle. It was a tight fit, but one of the other Resistance pilots easily got the ship ready for liftoff.

“We better hurry, you know Hux will try to shoot us out of the…” Y/N was stopped mid-sentence as Poe’s lips met hers, his arm going tight around her waist as he pulled her to him. She melted into the kiss, pulling away only when she remembered the shuttle was packed full of people.

“I knew you had it in you.” Poe said, and Y/N smiled as she brought her lips to his once more in a quick kiss.

“Guess I’m Resistance now, huh? Just another traitor.”

“Yep, it’s the worst.” Poe replied, pulling away from her to help the other pilot get them away from the transport. “You’ll love it.”

Tag List: @imaginecrushes @yourwonderbelle

[minty-pepps]

some thoughts on comics

this has less to do with comics as they are in their current state in the industry and more about the artistry possible with the form, maybe even artistry in other mediums as well. this is something i’ve thought about a lot, and it’s rather long and a bit rambly, a bit elitist and maybe even pretentious, but i’d gladly appreciate it if you read it!

(this contains some spoilers regarding The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, the film and novel Drive, respectively by Nicolas Winding Refn and James Sallis, Devilman by Go Nagai and Persona by Ingmar Bergman.)

while discussing art with an art examiner, i came across a particular topic which has been bothering me for a while. i mentioned my interest in comics and their influence upon my work, and one way or the other, i can’t particularly remember how we got to the point before we moved on, she said “yes, but you need to use your influences in the high arts”.

a typically familiar distinction was made once again: comics are low-art, cheap and mass-produced, with little artistic viability; all visual arts besides it have the potential for high art. 

had i been the person i was a few years ago, i may have agreed. i may have also extended the idea of “high visual art” being only possible within the classical mediums of visual art: painting, drawing, sculpting. 

but as i’ve gotten a little older, a little more open-minded, and a little more willing to see things from others’ perspectives, i’ve realized just how much artistic expression is possible in other visual arts as well. photography, film, comics, collages, printing, 3D art, etching, animation. all of these visual mediums possess inherent strengths that can create extraordinary images, can communicate things otherwise impossible in other ways.

but, as i wrote in the title, this is about comics; or, maybe, more specifically, the concept of comics and their potential. 

so, to give a definition of comics, let me use scott mccloud’s definition: “comics are juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” 

this is ripped directly from mccloud’s book “understanding comics” (which is a great read and sort of inspired this write-up, i’d advise you to check it out) and while this may be the most accurate description of the form, it’s possible far more things may be done outside this definition, which could also fall under the idea of comics, but we will have to wait and see. 

it works well for now, however, and can possibly, with a backwards look at history, relabel some pieces of art as comics. an example of this, given in “understanding comics”, is the triptych, which typically is 3 paintings placed alongside each other to convey an overlying idea within the culmination of the works, with each work conveying their own specific idea. 

this gives one possible insight into the possibility of comics, and that is their ability to explore ideas in a “narrative” way via their images, whether it be actual narratives on display, or themes which link and provide context to each image. 

in other words, comics can explore singular ideas belonging to larger ideas, with each piece of art in the sequence informing the context and/or meaning behind the others, providing a framework for the entire comic from which meaning can be derived for each individual artwork.

 this ability of comics, for each piece in the whole’s meaning to be able to affect the overall whole meaning of the work, and vice-versa, falls under the idea of semiotics, and i believe it is this direct connection to semiotics which gives comics a large range of visual artistic expression beyond only narrative, beyond only language and beyond only imagery.

to give you an idea of why semiotics is such a powerful thing, let me illustrate for you; imagine a dog barking, wagging its tail, and running around in a field - see how it runs, jumps, and chases, in a friendly game, after a bird. now imagine a man, laughing, holding his belly, with a soft, loving smile on his face, a dog collar and leash in hand. finally, imagine a pickup truck parked in front of a house, its back canopy dirtied with mud and hair, with a man about to clean it up, a tired look on his face.

the logical association you could make here might be an obvious one: a man who loves his happy dog, after returning home from letting the dog run on a field, hates the process of cleaning his truck after bringing the dog back home in it. your mind has automatically made a logical framework to provide meaning to each idea shown.

but what if the man carried not a dog leash but now a shovel in the second idea? what if his face showed not happiness, but anger, hatred and disgust? the tired cleaning of the final idea can now carry a far darker association, yet it is entirely a created one within our minds. in fact, our entire perception of the relationship between the dog, the man, and the truck is created by ourselves. 

and it is with this perception of the whole, with our mind creating a logical connection between each individual element that comprises the whole, that gives comics its ability to convey artistic themes extraordinarily lucidly and at the same time also give the potential of intentional ambiguity and different interpretation (this intentional ambiguity i believe being the most important part of what people classify as “high art”). 

with this in mind, i believe comic artists have the ability to depict not only stories but thoughts and human ideas beyond the limitations of both narrative and visual arts in a vividly clear way which only our individual minds, informed as they are by our personal perceptions, can understand.

 but it does not happen, or if it does, it does not happen nearly enough. and this, i believe, is why comics are perceived as a “low art”, that comics are only a form that can only communicate simply and explicitly. 

so what are the limitations that, i feel, limit comic artists from being perceived as “high artists”, as artists with something serious to say in their respective form? 

i believe there are many reasons, reasons beyond the control of artists themselves which i can understand immensely (such as comics being a form of industry, which limits artistry a lot), but there are some beliefs and ideas which i believe are perpetuated within and around the form that limits comic artists from fully utilizing the medium in an artistic manner (this is also where i have to engage some elitist opinions of mine but nevertheless i believe they are necessary).

1) Comic art =/= Fine Art

(please note that this is dealing with artistic proficiency, not artistic intent or authenticity)

this is usually the first reason why comic artists are dismissed as “low art”. narrative propels comics, usually, and with the narrative behind comics providing the necessary framework for meaning to be connected between each frame in a comic, this usually has the unspoken implication that art in comics does not have to be technically proficient, or at least proficient to the standard of “amazing art” which most people expect from the visual arts.

i think, if you’re on tumblr, you can inherently understand why this is ignorant. if not, if you’ve ever given visual art a proper go, you can also understand why this is wrong. if an example must be provided, please look at this

this was made by Ashley Wood, an illustrator and comic artist, for his comic Automatic Kafka. i think this demonstrates how comic artists can display remarkable technical proficiency, and why i think the idea of comic artists not being able to be as technically proficient as a regular “fine artist” is a flawed belief.

However, even if a comic artist is technically proficient, what often drags them away from being considered a “serious” artist is

2) good art and good writing =/= good comic

(this is also handled in scott mccloud’s book, i highly recommend “understanding comics” once again”)

now i might sound elitist here, but listen, i think this is something that needs to be vitally understood by anyone who believes in comics as “high art”/a serious art form: any visual story when driven by plot, by actions, by thoughts, by things which can be tangibly translated into language and have a narrative formed from that, is inherently going to be inferior as an art when compared to literature; maybe not all forms of literature, since lots of “low art” fiction relies immensely on imagery to create scenes or events (which would be rendered a lot more elegantly and simply in a comic), but it’s simply due to the fact that words are far more useful for many abstract ideas which cannot be communicated simply by images alone. 

for example (and i’m going to use an example of a novel considered cheap, pulpy stuff to illustrate the problem here so that one gets the sense that it isn’t just “classic novels” that do narrative better than comics), if one takes a look at the film Drive by Nicolas Winding Refn, then compares it to the original novel by James Sallis (which, admittedly, the film adapted loosely), one will immediately notice the difference in tone between the two, but also what’s strikingly different is the way the Driver is characterised. 

In the film, the Driver is portrayed as a stoic, quiet and friendly guy, a sort of Man With No Name, with a dangerously efficient, criminally-inclined hidden life, whereas in the novel the Driver is shown to interally monologue a lot, and often in a cynical and acerbic way, while being a sort of anti-heroic moral judge, giving further insight into the character’s relation to the rest of the narrative, while still illustrating the abstracted Driver from the film. this could not be done as easily in the film, nor would it contribute to the film at all and quite frankly the novel’s Driver is a lot less of a character appropriate for the film in general but ignore this for now

this illustrates the problem of comics being believed (both by audiences and creators) to be only a narrative-driven or art-driven form. with this i must say there is nothing wrong with comics being narratively driven, it is just incredibly reductive to think of the possibilities comics may have if they’re only seen as narrative-driven and/or art-driven.

and, this is going to sound very elitist of me, a lot of the stories presented in comics are very schlocky, convoluted and contrived, and do not use the medium to its fullest extent to work on possible themes as best as they could. even highly acclaimed comics are praised primarily on their story lines and/or their art, perhaps some may throw in a nod to panelling, composition and so on, but there is rarely appreciation for how these comics use the form of comics, and often times, they don’t, really (i’ve had a couple of friends admit to skimming over the art in various acclaimed comics and manga they’ve read, such as Watchmen, The Sandman, Berserk and Goodnight Punpun, because “they’re secondary to the story”). 

to give an example of how i think comic form can be utilized to its fullest in narratives in a very good way for that “intentional ambiguity” i mentioned earlier, i’ll use the last page of The Killing Joke by Alan Moore

this is the culmination of the entire story, and it ends ambiguously for the reader (i suggest reading the comic for the full effect of this page, plus it’s a really good comic). 

is the joker being taken away by the police in the final panel? in the middle panel, is the joker being strangled, or is batman simply placing his hand on the joker’s shoulder? is batman laughing with or at the joker? is he being sympathetic, or is he trying to conceal his anger? does the laughter’s disappearance in the final 3 panels indicate resignation or death? 

we’ll never know, and thus we’re given this ambiguity which we can weigh against ourselves, reflect upon as human beings, and use as an insight into the overlying theme of the work. 

this may sound a little too serious for some, but I feel that dismisses the real issue here: it’s not about what approach an artist takes to approach their theme, nor what themes they have, it’s about how “seriously” they handle what they try to do - whether it illustrates the joy of familial love and care or the unseens horrors of war and their effect on everyday life, a certain level of gravitas should be employed by the artist to do so.

however, this comes to another point which i feel needs to be addressed, and it’s something i feel needs to be understood, as i feel it will help bridge the divide of comics and “high art”, or, more satisfactory, destroy the ridiculous barrier which prevents the form being appreciated or used for serious artistic expression, and that is

3) cliched and pulpy subject matter

(this is a bit of a rant and more rambling than my other thoughts, but i think this one is the main issue)

this ties in with a point i mentioned earlier, being that comics are seen as “narrative-driven” or “story-driven”. this often leads to extraordinarily convoluted plots having lots of “plot logic” and “lore” to justify many of the events that occur, as well as give a scenario for the emotional climaxes occur and for the themes to be explored. 

 now, let me say here, in addition to the earlier point about “serious handling of subject matter”, i personally, and i think some may agree with me, cannot stand having long and unnecessary trimmings surrounding a core theme, nor do i think justifications need to exist for anything and everything; if it works towards the emotion or ideas being explored, it works. 

for example, Devilman by Go Nagai is a pulpy action horror manga, that is its primary intent and the general expectation one gets going into it. i don’t really think i can get much exploration of any themes in the work beyond an “eh” touching on an anti-war theme in the second half with subsequent rereadings, but as a primarily action-focused manga with the intent being to entertain, Devilman is just perfect for that. there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s first and foremost a pulpy story, done interestingly and satisfyingly; anything further than that is entirely a reading of my own, since everything else within the work contributes to its main explicit intention of the work. 

it wants to create a fictional reality where the events in the story can occur, so it does that, and it does that knowing the story as its end to the means of the plot’s logic and events, nothing more (i think this is where most people get irritated by seeing others do in-depth analyses of anime, manga and general other “trashy” stuff like 80s horror B-Movies but I digress).

i’ve got a big space opera dealing with the horrors of war. i do not see why i would need to divorce war from its inherently political-social implications on earth. 

i’ve got a fantasy chosen one journey, with elves, orcs and warlocks, with a side-theme of racism. yes, this may add interest to the fictional world created, and that may be interesting to consider when applied to real life, but it is honestly too distant, too alienated from the context of real life to adequately consider in real life, and i feel that that cheapens the value of any possible interpretation or intended meaning.

(do note that i am not derriding people who wish to such with fiction, with comics, or with any form of art, but i feel this is simply the issue that causes such a divide between “high art” and “low art”.)

let me use an example of what i feel handles its artistic expression well, without the trappings of logic or subject matter (thus moving into that “intentional ambiguity” which i feels gives serious art its timeless quality), though it is a film: Persona by Ingmar Bergman (something which i’ve had a couple thoughts on, which i plan to write on).

this film, from what i understand, deals with the personas which make up one’s self, and how our personas, even if we try to distance them from ourselves, are ourselves. how it does this is not shown in a structured, logical or plot-driven way, even if there is a plot which gives context and drive to the events being able to explore it. it instead uses the elements of film to explore this in ways which only film could: acting, imagery, sound, continual movement of time. when the lead characters enter the beach house in the film, reality become less rigid in structure, as it seems to merge with dreams (hallucinations even), and things don’t generally seem to work within reality’s logic, but instead operate for the needs of the emotion, the themes, the ideas that wish to be conveyed.

and that’s how the film “works”; not because of the material around what the artist wants demanding things be this way,or that, but allowing what is wished to be expressed instead steering the artist and their internal artistic logic. it is this whole idea which is expressed by the entire work that should be given priority, not the clutter, i feel, and the minor ideas surrounding this whole idea should give both insight into the meaning of the whole idea, as well as its surrounding informing our perception of its own individual meaning.

and, as i’ve said before, this is semiotics, and comics have the most direct connection to it in all artforms outside maybe film, and as our entire human consciousness is formed from individual experiences and elements from which we derive meaning in both their entirety and in their individual context, this is why i think comics have such immense potential for artistic expression: they are the easiest way for us to express, as closely as possible, the human mind.

thank you for reading!

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-still-back-trump/

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

Want More Articles Like This Follow Think On Instagram To Get Updates On The Week’s Most Important Political Analysis

Importantly, Trump is increasingly fixating on the Republican-backed audits as he pushes the lie that he won the election. He needs to keep talking about this lie because he faces an existential political threat: His brand is based on winning, but he lost. Winners don’t lose, particularly winners who promise their fans that “we will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.”

Since When Do Republicans Care More About Criminals In Jail Than The Cops Who Put Them There Since Donald Trump

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell pauses during his testimony at the first hearing of the select committee investigating the deadly storming of the Capitol, in Washington on Tuesday, July 27, 2021. “The GOP overwhelmingly stuck with Trump, perpetuating his sick mythology about a day we all saw with our own eyes,” writes The New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd.

  | Aug. 3, 2021, 1:00 p.m.

Washington • It was, I must admit, a virtuoso performance by Sean Hannity.

Not since the sheriff in “Blazing Saddles” put a gun to his own head and took himself hostage has anyone executed such a nutty loop de loop.

Opening his show Tuesday night, Hannity gave a monologue defending the police . “Attacks on law enforcement are never and should never be acceptable ever, not at the Capitol and not anywhere,” he declaimed.

Yet Mr. Pro Police had nary a word for the four police officers who had appeared before Congress that morning to describe going to “hell and back,” as a Washington police officer, Michael Fanone, put it, as they relived the scarring, desperate hours of Jan. 6 when they were attacked by Trump’s mob .

When it came down to it, the question of whether Republican lawmakers in the House would side with Donald Trump or the police who risked their lives defending them, it wasn’t even a close call for the law-and-order party.

Since when do Republicans care more about criminals in jail than the cops who put them there? Since when do they coddle domestic terrorists?

We Looked At Which Gop Primary Voters Are Most Likely To Vote Based On Support For His False Election Claims

Many Republican senators, watching the harrowing footage of the Jan. 6Capitol insurrection played at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, were moved to tears, presumably remembering their own experiences that day. Yet it did not persuade many of them to vote to convict the former president on the charge of inciting the insurrection. Even though many prominent Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell , appeared to want a clean break with the president after the insurrection, those who turned on Trump have been rebuked by the party’s grass roots. And Trump has threatened to recruit and support primary challengers against Republicans who do not line up behind him.

So were the votes against conviction motivated by a desire to win primaries and, therefore, reelection? Our research shows that the situation is more complicated than that. The Republican rank and file is deeply divided over Trump and his false claims about a stolen 2020 election. This creates a minefield for Republican members of Congress.

Why Republicans haven’t abandoned Trumpism

Opiniona Republican Civil War Is Coming Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia Crusade Is Just The Beginning

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, moderate Republicans started to walk away from the party. Even some conservatives who stuck with Trump all through his presidency couldn’t stomach the insurrection. Currently, 53 percent of Republican voters believe Trump won the election. Similarly, in a national poll last month by Quinnipiac University, 66 percent of people who classified themselves as Republicans said they want Trump to run for president in 2024.

The fact that Trump still controls so many Republican voters explains the assertion by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the Republican Party can’t “move forward” without Trump. Speeding up the Republican Party’s hardening into a right-wing extremist party is Trump’s demand that anyone who doesn’t toe the line and repeat the lie be ousted and exiled.

Trump advisers and confidants have many reasons not to push back. For one, the former president often rebuffs advisers who tell him to drop the whole stolen election story. But those in Trump’s inner circle also need to keep voters riled up if Trump’s political future — and presumably theirs — is to continue. Dangling the possibility that Trump will be reinstated in August accomplishes this.

A Disturbing Number Of Republicans Still Believe All The Lies Donald Trump Tells Them

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One of the enduring legacies of Donald Trump’s runs for office and four years as president is the phenomenon in which a shameless politician can tell a brazen, easily fact-checkable lie and his or her supporters will buy it without question, even when evidence to the contrary is screaming in their faces. The earliest example of this was the claim Trump made when announcing his 2015 bid for office—that he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it, an absurd lie that he was still telling in the fall of 2020. And of course an equally audacious lie was the one he started spreading last November and hasn’t stopped spewing to date—that he won the presidential election and a second term was stolen from him.

Obviously, the most chilling repercussion of Trump’s supporters believing he, and not Joe Biden, won the election, was the January 6 attack on the Capitol, an insurrection that left five people dead and which Trump, in his final tweet before being kicked off the platform, described as “the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” And three months after the fact, a majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie.

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A Large Share Of Republicans Want Trump To Remain Head Of The Party Cnbc Survey Shows

A CNBC survey conducted in the days before former President Donald Trump‘s impeachment trial finds a large share of Republicans want him to remain head of their party, but a majority of Americans want him out of politics.

The CNBC All-America Economic Survey shows 54% of Americans want Trump “to remove himself from politics entirely.” That was the sentiment of 81% of Democrats and 47% of Independents, but only 26% of Republicans.

When it comes to Republicans, 74% want him to stay active in some way, including 48% who want him to remain head of the Republican Party, 11% who want him to start a third party, and 12% who say he should remain active in politics but not as head of any party.

“If we’re talking about Donald Trump’s future, at the moment, the survey shows he still has this strong core support within his own party who really want him to continue to be their leader,” said Jay Campbell, a partner with Hart Research and the Democratic pollster for the survey.

But Micah Roberts, the survey’s Republican pollster, and a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, emphasized the change from when Trump was president. Polls before the election regularly showed Trump with GOP approval ratings around 90%, meaning at least some Republicans have defected from Trump.

Squawk on the Street

Trump Mike Lindell And Why The August Election Conspiracy Should Worry Republicans

In late May, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” and said: “Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August.” He also said that eventually even liberals such as Rachel Maddow would admit that the election was stolen. Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election. Trump and others are watching the Republican-backed audit in Arizona because they believe in a “domino theory” — if Arizona ballots can be proven to be fraudulent, election results in other battleground states that President Joe Biden won can also be overturned.

There is, of course, no legal or factual basis backing up any of this.

Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election.

‘this Was A Scam’: In Recorded Call Trump Pushed Official To Overturn Georgia Vote

It’s worth noting that, even without Georgia, Trump won 13 states where slavery had once been legal and these states provided nearly 70% of his Electoral College votes.

The move to the right, and the focus on the South, have been the route to renewed success for Republicans again and again.

It was there Trump began his big rally strategy nearly six years ago. It was there he would emerge as the clear front-runner for the nomination in 2016 by winning South Carolina’s primary, dominating among the staunchest conservatives in that legendary bastion of Southern independence.

So it seemed more than appropriate that South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham would be the first Republican senator summoned to confer with Trump about the party’s plans after the impeachment trial ended. And appropriate that the meeting took place at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, where Trump has relocated his legal residence and political operation.

If Trump is to rise again, it will once again be as a born-again conservative and an adopted son of the South. And if the next Republican is not Trump, nearly all the top contenders to succeed him are from states with at least one college football team in the Southeastern Conference.

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Trump Blasts Mcconnell And His Leadership In Lengthy Response To Recent Criticism

Where will the party turn in its hour of crisis? If the past is any guide, it will turn in two directions: to the right, and to the South. These have been the wellsprings of strength and support that have brought the party back from the brink in recent decades.

That was the strategy that led to Richard Nixon’s elections as president in 1968 and 1972, and it was still working for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Solidifying the South and energizing conservatives were also crucial factors in the Republican tsunami of 1994, when the GOP surged to majorities in Congress and in statehouses. That hamstrung the remainder of Bill Clinton’s presidency and presaged the election of Republican George W. Bush in 2000.

It was a lesson not lost on Trump. While not even a Republican until late in life, he started his primary campaign billboarding the party’s most conservative positions on taxes, trade, immigration and abortion. And the first of his rallies to draw a crowd in the tens of thousands was in a football stadium in Mobile, Ala., two months after he declared his candidacy in the summer of 2015.

Whether the next standard-bearer for the GOP is Trump himself or someone else, there is little doubt the playbook will be the same.

Low points, then turnarounds

Perhaps the most discouraging of these for the GOP was Johnson’s tidal wave, which carried in the biggest majorities Democrats in Congress had enjoyed since the heyday of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump The Answer Is Simple: Attitude And Gratitude

Scott Jennings | Los Angeles Times

Why do Republicans stick with Donald Trump?

It’s a question I’m asked again and again by Democrats, “Never Trumpers”, and journalists. But the answer is simple.   Attitude and Gratitude.

For years, Republican voters wanted someone — anyone — to come along and do two things: Stick it to the Clintons and punch back against the media-Democratic Party alliance that fires on every Republican brave enough to stick a head out of the foxhole.

If you attended any GOP fundraiser or grassroots event between 2000 and 2016 — and I went to hundreds — you heard this sentiment over and over. And over. And over.

The secret sauce is Trump’s continued deliverance of an attitude for which Republicans thirsted for years.

For Republicans, it seemed like those awful Clintons got to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. And they always seemed so smug about it. Many had tried and failed to oppose them. The first Bush and Bob Dole, decent men and dedicated public servants, were steamrolled by the Clintons in ’90s.

Sure, we had George W. Bush after Clinton was termed out, and Obama managed to knock Hillary down a peg in 2008. But she still wound up Secretary of State while Bill traveled the world, racking up speaking fees and foundation tributes that would embarrass Croesus himself. Damn those Clintons.

The natural conclusion of this pent-up anger finally boiled over in 2016!

Have Expressed Reluctance Or Misgivings But Havent Openly Dropped Their Backing

Paul Ryan and John Boehner, the former speakers of the House: Both have expressed their dislike of the president, but have not said whom they will support in November.

John Kelly, a former chief of staff to the president: Mr. Kelly has not said whom he plans to vote for, but did say he wished “we had some additional choices.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: She has said that she’s grappling with whether to support Mr. Trump in November. She told reporters on Capitol Hill in June: “I am struggling with it. I have struggled with it for a long time.”

She said: “I think right now, as we are all struggling to find ways to express the words that need to be expressed appropriately, questions about who I’m going to vote for or not going to vote for, I think, are distracting at the moment. I know people might think that’s a dodge, but I think there are important conversations that we need to have as an American people among ourselves about where we are right now.”

Mark Sanford, a former congressman and governor of South Carolina: Mr. Sanford briefly challenged the president in this cycle’s Republican primary, and said last year that he would support Mr. Trump if the president won the nomination .

That has since changed.

“He’s treading on very thin ice,” Mr. Sanford said in June, worrying that the president is threatening the stability of the country.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Republicans Still Orbiting Trump Dark Star Fail To Derail Bidens First 100 Days

Trump continues to exert a massive gravitational pull on the party while the president forges ahead with ambitious agenda

Last modified on Tue 27 Apr 2021 07.01 BST

For Democrats it has been a hundred days of sweeping legislation, barrier-breaking appointments and daring to dream big. For Republicans, a hundred days in the political wilderness.

The party that just four years ago controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress now finds itself shut out of power and struggling to find its feet. As Joe Biden forges ahead with ambitions to shift the political paradigm, Republicans still have a Donald Trump problem.

The former US president remains the unofficial leader of the party and exerts a massive gravitational pull on its senators, representatives, governors and state parties. Obsessed with “culture wars” and voter fraud, the Trump distortion field has made it difficult for Republicans to move on.

“Trump is like a fire,” said Ed Rogers, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. “Too close and you get burned. Too far away, you’re out in the cold. So the party spends a lot of time talking about the fire, managing the fire, orbiting the fire. It takes a lot of energy out of the party.”

It’s a lot easier to grift on people’s fears of other people and prey on their concerns about culture wars that really don’t exist

Trump is still sucking all of the oxygen out of the room for Republicans

‘combative Tribal Angry’: Newt Gingrich Set The Stage For Trump Journalist Says

All these factors combined to produce a windfall for Republicans all over the country in the midterms of 1994, but it was a watershed election in the South. For more than a century after Reconstruction, Democrats had held a majority of the governorships and of the Senate and House seats in the South. Even as the region became accustomed to voting Republican for president, this pattern had held at the statewide and congressional levels.

But in November 1994, in a single day, the majority of Southern governorships, Senate seats and House seats shifted to the Republicans. That majority has held ever since, with more legislative seats and local offices shifting to the GOP as well. The South is now the home base of the Republican Party.

The 2020 aftermath

No wonder that in contesting the results in six swing states he lost, Trump seems to have worked hardest on Georgia. If he had won there, he still would have lost the Electoral College decisively. But as the third most populous Southern state, and the only Southern state to change its choice from 2016, it clearly held special significance.

Arizona Election Official Reacts To ‘check Your Six’ Threat From Republican

There was an exchange Thursday between Fox News’ John Roberts and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady that is remarkably telling about just how lost the Republican Party is at the moment.

Roberts: “President Donald Trump says the ‘Big Lie’ was the results of the 2020 election. Liz Cheney says, no, the ‘Big Lie’ was suggesting that the 2020 election was stolen. Between the two of them, who is right?”Brady: “I’ll leave that dispute to them.”alreadyhe is retiring

In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. Click to subscribe!

The Point: Political courage is in short supply among Republican elected officials these days. Very short supply.

Why Has No Trump Ally Faced Consequences For Trying To Overturn An Election

His solution is to insist that he won. To do this, he and his allies have devised an elaborate alternate reality in which he won the election but it was stolen from him through voter fraud.

Similarly, how does a would-be authoritarian retain power after having been ousted from office? Trump figured that one out, too: remain relevant by retaining control over the Republican Party. His election lies are a big part of this strategy, as well. It becomes self-fulfilling. The more people there are who believe the election was stolen, the more real it feels to Trump and the more he hammers the point home in speeches and blog posts.

List Of Republicans Who Opposed The Donald Trump 2020 Presidential Campaign

This article is part of a series about

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This is a list of Republicans and conservatives who opposed the re-election of incumbent Donald Trump, the 2020 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. Among them are former Republicans who left the party in 2016 or later due to their opposition to Trump, those who held office as a Republican, Republicans who endorsed a different candidate, and Republican presidential primary election candidates that announced opposition to Trump as the presumptive nominee. Over 70 former senior Republican national security officials and 61 additional senior officials have also signed onto a statement declaring, “We are profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”

A group of former senior U.S. government officials and conservatives—including from the Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump administrations have formed The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform to, “focus on a return to principles-based governing in the post-Trump era.”

A third group of Republicans, Republican Voters Against Trump was launched in May 2020 has collected over 500 testimonials opposing Donald Trump.

Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor

Such an embrace of insanity creates a cycle in which the Republican Party sheds itself of nonbelievers, finds ways to keep the true believers angry and engaged and unhinges itself even more thoroughly from reality and becomes, arguably, increasingly dangerous. The result is that conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell have somehow become influential, despite their very clear record of belligerent gibberish. And Trump, as he has been for five-plus years now, remains at the center of the Republican Party as it veers deeper into a made-up reality.

Related:

On Trump Approval Asking Why Reveals Differences By Education Within Gop

Many pollsters, including our team here at SurveyMonkey, track President Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen to an all-time low. We wanted to delve deeper—to ask respondents not just whether they approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, but why.

We did this in the simplest way possible: by immediately following our question on presidential approval with the open-ended question “Why?” This way, we can get explanations in respondents’ own words as to how they feel about our current Commander in Chief.

Republican Approvers: “Kept Promises” —  Republican Disapprovers: “Childish”

In SurveyMonkey’s most recent Trump approval update, 59% of people said they disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president.

What’s making these Republicans frustrated enough to split with their own party? To find out, we used structural topic modeling to explore how different groups of people explained their various reasons for approving or disapproving of President Trump. Structural topic modeling is a machine learning technique that discovers themes or “topics” within a large collection of responses, then predicts the prevalence of these topics according to certain respondent characteristics .

The graph below presents the differences in prevalence of various topics mentioned in response to our “Why?” follow-up, comparing responses among Republicans by whether they approve or disapprove of Trump’s performance as president .

Most Republicans Still Believe 2020 Election Was Stolen From Trump Poll

May opinion poll finds that 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the ‘true president’ compared with 3% of Democrats

Last modified on Fri 4 Jun 2021 19.39 BST

A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on baseless claims of illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.

About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from 13-17 November which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.

Biden, a Democrat, won by more than 7m votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.

US federal and state officials have said repeatedly they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered during the presidential election, rejecting the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters. Voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.

Reuters contributed to this report

Why Does Donald Trump Still Seem To Hold Sway Over The Republican Party

Why — after leading the Republican Party during a period when it lost its majority in the US House of Representatives and the Senate and its power in the White House — does former president Donald Trump still seem to hold the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Reagan in his thrall?

For US politics watchers, who on the weekend watched on as 43 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump of an act of reckless incitement played out in front of the cameras, that is the $64,000 question.

Or rather, it’s the 74,222,593-vote question.

That is the record number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump last November — more than has been cast for any previous president. Unfortunately for them, an even greater number — 81,281,502 — voted for his rival, now-President Joe Biden.

As much as anything else, those numbers sum up the quandary Republicans find themselves in.

They have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and only remain competitive because older white voters, who tend to be more likely to support conservative candidates, also tend to vote in greater numbers in a non-compulsory electoral system.

Those same voters are also the most likely to cast a ballot in next year’s house and senate primaries, and the next midterm elections in November 2022 — which will again determine who holds power in congress. They are the voters who initially flocked to Donald Trump.

The Night In 1968 When A Nation Watched An American Presidency Crumble

When this fistful of five states defected, it was a stunner. They had resisted Republicans even when the Democrats nominated Northern liberals like Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy , who was not only a New Englander but a Catholic.

Before that they had stuck with the Democrats even in the party’s worst drubbings of the century, although some had left the fold for third-party attractions such as segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who left the Democrats for a time to form the States Rights Party in 1948.

This shift in Southern sensibilities in the 1960s was linked to the national Democrats’ embrace of the civil rights movement, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and then to the creation of Medicare and other “Great Society” programs in 1965.

To be sure, there were other factors buoying what had been the “party of Lincoln” in Dixie, including the arrival of affluent Northern retirees and of industries lured by the lower cost of labor.

But the salient issue was race. As Republican strategist Kevin Phillips expressed it to New York Times reporter James Boyd in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

“The Southern Strategy”

Why Do Republicans Continue To Support Trump Despite Years Of Scandal

773.834.9123

It was late September last year when a whistleblower complaint revealed that President Trump had tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Within moments the scandal captured headlines. What followed was months of back and forth as Republicans supported the president while the Democrats used their political capital to get him impeached.

But this was not the first time  – or the last time – the president was caught in the middle of a scandal. Since the impeachment trial that followed the Ukraine incident, episodes from The New York Times uncovering unsavory details from President Trump’s tax returns, to his questionable dismissal of multiple Inspectors General, to his refusal to clearly condemn white supremacists have all sparked widespread media attention and partisan fighting in 2020. 

Although with his polls dropping, some Republicans may finally be distancing themselves from the President, the question has been regularly asked the past four years: why do the Republicans continue to support the President despite these troubling charges being leveled at him? And, what is it that the Democrats stand to gain from repeated allegations?

 In addition to demonstrating how polarization accelerates scandals, the paper also found that: 

Republicans Fear That Trump Has Set The Party Back By A Generation

Republican leaders and operatives have been expressing concerns recently about the fact that Donald Trump has drive away plenty of talented lawmakers and would-be Republicans because of his behavior. They now fear that his antics have set the Party back a generation, and this has now become a “generation of lost talent” for Republicans. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains why they feel this way and why its a scary thought, even for those who despise the GOP.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Politico in recent weeks has spoken to more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisors, aids, and all sorts of other members of the Republican party, where they have all said the same thing. And that thing is that they’re terrified that Donald Trump has chased away what they call a generation of talent from the Republican Party. Here’s what they’re talking about. During the Trump years, we saw a record number of Republicans, including plenty of younger Republicans who could have had, you know, 10, 20, maybe even more years to keep running for office. Right. They were, they were in their prime. To be honest, Paul Ryan is one of those people, and I’m not saying we want any of those people in office, trust me. But these were people who had no reason to resign other than they understood the toxicity of Donald Trump, didn’t want any part of it. So there’s a lot of lost talent right there.

Republicans Fear Trump Will Lead To A Lost Generation Of Talent

The 45th president has brought new voices and voters to the party, but he’s driven them out too. Insiders fear the repercussions.

06/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT

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As Donald Trump ponders another presidential bid, top Republicans have grown fearful about what they’re calling the party’s “lost generation.”

In conversations with more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisers and aides, a common concern has emerged — that a host of national and statewide Republicans are either leaving office or may not choose to pursue it for fear that they can’t survive politically in the current GOP. The worry, these Republicans say, is that the party is embracing personality over policy, and that it is short sighted to align with Trump, who lost the general election and continues to alienate a large swath of the voting public with his grievances and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump has driven sitting GOP lawmakers and political aspirants into early retirements ever since he burst onto the scene. But there was hope that things would change after his election loss. Instead, his influence on the GOP appears to be as solid as ever and the impact of those early shockwaves remain visible. When asked, for instance, if he feared the 45th president was causing a talent drain from the GOP ranks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — perhaps inadvertently — offered a personal demonstration of the case.

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State of the Borough addresses social inequity recovery - Borough President Donovan Richards delivered his State of the Borough address on Wednesday detailing his plans for addressing social inequity while focusing on how to recover from the still...

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State of the Borough addresses social inequity recovery - Borough President Donovan Richards delivered his State of the Borough address on Wednesday detailing his plans for addressing social inequity while focusing on how to recover from the still...

Donovan Richards delivered his State of the Borough Address on Wednesday at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.

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Borough President Donovan Richards delivered his State of the Borough address on Wednesday, detailing his plans for addressing social inequity while focusing on how to recover from the still-lingering pandemic.

Speaking to an empty auditorium at the Museum of the Moving Image, Richards remarked that “these are not normal times” and went on to recap a tumultuous year for both Queens and the world.

“We were woefully underprepared,” Richards said. “That showed in the first days and weeks of the crises, as we all scrambled for gloves, masks, and face shields.”

He gave praise to the residents of Queens, first responders and healthcare workers who “as they always do, rise to the occasion.”

This was still a somber moment, as the borough president remembered the nearly 7,500 Queens residents who died from coronavirus, naming individual friends and family members.

“Those deaths were preventable,” he said. “Those deaths were systematic failures.”

He said that the pandemic revealed how “deep inequity runs right here in the greatest city in the world,” not just in healthcare, but within the penal system, the business sector, education, government and civic institutions.

“That is why for my first 100 days, I launched an aggressive and ambitious plan to address the racial and gender gap that we see and feel in our systems and institutions,” he said.

For healthcare, many immigrant communities in Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park were left with minimal COVID-19 testing centers, while racial disparities were revealed throughout the vaccine rollout.

Richards said that only 28 percent of the Black and Latinx community, which makes up more than 50 percent of the city’s population, has received their first dose of a vaccine.

“That should offend us,” Richards said. “It offends me. It should mobilize us to break down those barriers because lives hang in the balance.”

He called out the lack of hospital beds in the borough, saying that Queens has just 1.72 beds per 1,000 people with more hospitals closing, removing 840 beds and thousands of medical professionals.

“That cannot continue,” Richards said. “To accept this as a normal would be to accept that the 2.4 million lives here in Queens are not of equal value to those elsewhere.”

He added that creating community-based health centers, improving preventative medicine, fixing cluttered emergency rooms and building new hospitals are all essential in addressing these healthcare issues.

Meanwhile, the economic effects of the pandemic have left Queens with nine straight months of double-digit unemployment, with hundreds of small businesses closing.

“Countless families are lying awake at night, not knowing if they can afford to live in the community they love, in the borough they proudly call home,” Richards said. “And make no mistake, many of these families are families of color. They are immigrant families. They might even be yours.”

He highlighted different ways to secure funding for businesses, such as securing $17.5 million for the Queens Small Businesses Grant Program.

On the subject of evictions and rent relief, Richards noted that Queens must take measures to support both landlords and renters.

“If we do not take these measures, we will not only have tenants who are compromised, but owners of two and three-family homes who will lose their property,” Richards said.

He addressed the housing crisis, detailing new plans to create affordable housing for seniors as well as improving NYCHA developments.

“If we do not take the issue of housing seriously and start addressing it with our finances and policy, we will have an unprecedented amount of people in our borough who our housing insecure,” Richards said. “We cannot let this happen.”

He also spoke about adding more safety on the streets for cyclists, going electric with buses, expanding the Jamaica bus depot and other transportation projects.

With hate crimes on the rise in the city, Richards called on the NYPD to take the issue more seriously and get to the root of the problem, such as outreach to not only bring criminals to justice, but expanding education efforts to dispel myths that perpetuate these attacks.

“These forms of hate are rooted in ignorance, and we must stamp them out,” Richards said.

A new Immigrant Welcome Center at Borough Hall will serve as a one-stop shop for immigrant communities.

“All are welcome, and we will never ask about immigration status at my office,” Richards said.

Richards also spoke about climate change, calling it a “grave threat” to not only our borough and city, but the entire planet, detailing a plan to make Queens fully renewable by 2030.

“We want to plan for a healthy clean future for our children and grandchildren,” the borough president said. “We need to envision a future without fossil fuels and non-renewable energy assets.”

Richards spoke about how the community boards of Queens need to reflect the neighborhoods they serve, with his office spearheading new plans to be rolled out in the coming weeks to address these issues.

He digitized the application process this year, resulting in a 56.5 percent increase in applications from last year.

The overall message of his speech was to look further into these issues so that everyone can recover together.

“Queens will lead the way out of this pandemic,” Richards said. “We will create a more just society, a more just borough, and together we will improve the quality of life for all who call Queens home.”

[encephalonfatigue]

advent reflection #1: nowhere to lay his head

And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have dens, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58) 

The old Nativity tableau vivant of a Jewish peasant family shacked up next to a manger among assorted livestock is a familiar one this time of year. My neighbour has a beautiful inflatable nativity scene (complete with cute little sheep) that distends and glows every evening. Among the sparkling holiday lights though, I find that it’s sometimes easy to forget this Nativity scene is a scene of homelessness, and something as jarring as homelessness and destitution sits unsettlingly at the heart of Advent. Incarnation is the arrival of a Messiah to a people oppressed by an Empire, who arrives as a homeless person to join the unhoused in their homelessness. In so many ways homelessness is a type of dispossession. But this Messiah did not come so that the unhoused remain homeless, but rather that they find a home in the future radically egalitarian ‘kindom of God’. But as we live within this present reality of injustice, the manger outside the inn is where the Divine is made manifest in this narrative. This site of indignity and unjustifiable poverty is what demands our spiritual attention. 

There’s ‘no place’ in the inn for this young Jewish family, just like there’s ‘no place’ for those who cannot afford to pay their rent here in our cities today. Daily all across Canadian cities, faceless landlord corporations are deploying police officers to evict poor families who cannot afford to make rent, through no fault of their own, but because they are treated as the flotsam of a capitalist economy functioning as intended under a global pandemic. These evicted tenants are like the ‘illegitimate’ and ‘dishonourable’ holy family who one might imagine could not afford to shell out the expenses for a clean dry place to lay their head down for the night. 

Under the decree of a census, Mary and Joseph must travel where the imperial bureaucracy demands, but expenses are externalized onto poor working people. And such censuses were acts of imperial domination for extracting wealth from the colonized of Judea. We see the radical tax resistance led by Judas of Galilee in 6 CE at this time urging Jews not to participate in the imperial Roman census. The movement of Jesus would become associated with such a spirit of revolt by people like Gamaliel, who explicitly compares Paul and his rabble-rousing comrades with the likes of Judas of Galilee in Acts 5. 

Yet this old dynamic of the powerful extracting wealth from common people still persists with us today. In this time of Advent, courageous organizers like Sarah Jama and Desmond Cole are being arrested and fined for occupying space on public property, demanding a public meeting with the Herodian municipal powers over evictions and the housing crisis. I say Herodian, because an eviction can effectively be a death sentence for some, especially this winter, and that is why anti-eviction protestors say municipal leaders have blood on their hands, as do landlord corporations and REITs (real-estate investment trusts). Anti-war activists of old used to say nuclear weapons not only killed when they were detonated, but extinguished life by way of all the food they removed from the hands and mouths of poor children where enormous government resources were diverted into creating weapons of mass destruction rather than meeting the basic needs of its citizens. It is not unreasonable for young people today to ask similar questions about how collectively pooled money is being spent on the police compared to goals like guaranteeing housing for all. The number of officers municipalities send for each eviction have a daily wage that could pay someone’s rent for multiple months.

The anti-fascist theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in an Advent sermon he gave on December 2, 1928, said that: 

“The celebration of Advent is only possible to those who are troubled in soul... the curse of homelessness... hangs heavily over the world... we see in many lands people dying of cold in wintry conditions. The plight of such people disturbs us within and amidst our enjoyment; a thousand eyes look at us and the evil haunts us. Poverty and distress throughout the world worries us, but it cannot be brushed away...” 

Bonhoeffer goes on to emphasize how Matthew 25 is central to the way any Christian is to observe Advent: 

“…we face the shocking reality. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He asks for help in the form of a beggar, a down-and-out, a man in ragged clothes, someone who is sick, even a criminal in need of our love. He meets you in every person you encounter in need. So long as there are people around, Christ walks the earth as your neighbour, as the one through whom God calls to you, demands of you, makes claims upon you. That is the great seriousness of the Advent message and its great blessing. Christ stands at the door. He lives in the form of people around us. Will you therefore leave the door safely locked for your protection, or will you open the door for him? It may seem odd to us that we can see Jesus in so familiar a face. But that is what he said. Whoever refuses to take seriously this clear Advent message cannot talk of the coming of Christ into his heart. Whoever has not learned from the coming of Christ that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, has not understood the meaning of his coming.” 

Christians cannot forget that at the heart of their faith tradition is a homeless Messiah. If Christians are to take Matthew 25 seriously as central to observing Advent, and living out a life of faith daily, the mass evictions unfolding since August of this year should be of unwavering importance. While affordable housing has been a severe issue over the past many years around the GTA, it is especially salient under the cloud of COVID-19. There are thousands of online eviction hearings scheduled in the coming few months, pumping out rulings like a factory with a cold brutality that is chilling. Just last week alone 2000 eviction hearings were held.

Alykhan Pabani has pointed out that the large majority of rental units in cities like Toronto are not owned by so-called mom and pop landlords, but are owned by real-estate investment trusts (REITs), which are faceless corporations that hire management companies as a barrier between them and their tenants, to make the extraction of wealth as painless as possible for them. There is a reason they want to keep at such a remove from their tenants who are faced with high and steeply climbing rents, and perpetually degrading building conditions with more wildlife roaming about hallways and through building crevices than a Christmas nativity scene. Just speak with tenants anywhere in Parkdale, or read reviews or forums for rental units online. There’s a reason tenant protestors call their landlords ‘slumlords’. 

Alykhan Pabani and Aliza Kassam were interviewed on the Red Life Podcast, and it was an extremely informative glimpse into the housing crisis that began well before this ongoing global pandemic. They speak of how city workers and police are deployed to tear down the homes of encampment dwellers on public land and how management companies and landlords like MetCap are conducting mass evictions during this pandemic. Before COVID, some 135,000 people faced homelessness every year in Canada. Some 47% of Torontonians are renters, making a significant portion of the population vulnerable to evictions. Before the pandemic around 10,000 people on any given night in Toronto could be found sleeping rough, without a roof over their head. All these figures are only getting worse as the full gravity of this pandemic under capitalism is being felt. Tents, which are people’s homes, are being destroyed by the City, and despite officials claiming there are shelter spaces available to hold people overnight, there have been documented cases showing otherwise. One can see echoes of the alienating Roman imperial bureaucracy of Jesus’ time controlling where poor people’s bodies must be at any given time, and letting them deal with the consequences of being unhoused.

As long as basic clean sanitary housing remains a commodity, and is not ensured as a human right, this tragedy will persist. We have the resources in this country to provide housing for everyone. There are extremely wealthy families that live within our borders, but it is their interests that ultimately get the final say in government. People need jobs. Labour can be directed towards building and maintaining affordable homes for everyone, but instead labour in our economy is directed wherever wealthy people decide it should be directed, often towards that which is most profitable, which frequently happens to misalign with that which is most useful for meeting basic human needs that cannot be justifiably ignored. 

And so when the knocking on the door of Advent arrives, it is the knock of a homeless Christ figure at our doorstep. It is not a matter of performing individual acts of generosity though. Simply letting someone into one’s house is radically generous, but it is not changing the fundamental structure of property relations, and who controls what, and who has what type of access to what. Everyone needs housing – a safe place that they can call their own. The knock of Advent is the cry of the tenant with nothing but lint in her pockets, demanding they not be evicted from their home. It is the painful groans of the Holy Spirit praying for a day of justice to come (in Romans 8). Part of Advent is, as Bonhoeffer said, “taking seriously, not [only] our own sufferings, but those of God in the world.” And doing so requires a commitment to faith – faith that another world is possible. Or as Arundhati Roy says, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." 

In a sermon Bonhoeffer gave on December 17, 1933, he speaks of this revolutionary spirit that found its way into the Magnificat: 

“This song of Mary's is the oldest Advent hymn. It is the most passionate, most vehement, one might almost say, most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. It is not the gentle, sweet, dreamy Mary that we so often see portrayed in pictures, but the passionate, powerful, proud, enthusiastic Mary, who speaks here. None of the sweet, sugary, or childish tones that we find so often in our Christmas hymns, but a hard, strong, uncompromising song of bringing down rulers from their thrones and humbling the lords of this world…” 

And so more than petty housing reforms, and stop-gap government measures to quiet the rowdy demands of tenants and encampment dwellers trying to survive the brutal winter cold, what we need more than any of that is a total restructuring of the political order. What Alykhan Pabani and Aliza Kassam are doing with Encampment Support Network and various tenant organizing projects (People’s Defense Toronto, Malton People’s Movement) is not only meeting the immediate material needs of their neighbours (providing food, sleeping bags, tents, protection from evictions, affordable rents, etc.) they are also spreading good news that another world is possible. And that it should be made a reality. That this kindom of justice and dignity for all should be on earth as it is in heaven. That it shouldn’t be the job of volunteers to be doing all these things while so many are jobless and desperate for work. The state should be guaranteeing jobs to anyone who wants one and meeting the sea of needs that exist out there. We need a radically different economy. That is what Mary so rightfully recognized in her Advent hymn. She sang all those centuries ago: 

“He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:51-53)

If we are to fill the hungry with good things, and to adequately house everyone, we have no choice, but to send the rich away empty, and that is what is knocking on our door this Advent. Another world. “On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

[killmongerthiskoochie]

Sense8 Friend Group

hey, guys!  this request is really spur of the moment but i couldn’t resist because i love my little sensate babies so fucking much!!  they’re family regardless of having no blood ties to one another.  the show only has two seasons, therefor the sensates have only been friends for a short while, but this group will have known each other for at least 5 years to make their bond a little more realistic.

your characters don’t have be carbon copies of the sense8 crew, but they must be heavily influenced by them!  this means that their personalities should be as close to spot-on as possible but things like career, romantic relationships, and gender can be changed.  yes, gender swapping is allowed, BUT there must still be equal parts male and female.  and i’d prefer it if we still had two non-hetero characters and i’m hoping for at least two people of color.  i won’t be a pit bull about this because i don’t like to put a muzzle on people’s creativity, but i don’t want to perpetuate a disgusting trend.

below will be small blurbs to go along with each character, just in case some of you haven’t seen the show.  p.s. if you haven’t, you should totally check it out!! taken characters will be denoted by a full name and their character inspiration/face claim in parentheses beside it.  these guys should all be 30 + and they’ll all have been in miami for at least the last five years.

*** please don’t use the original faces for your character’s face claim or keep their names!!!  you can message me here on tumblr or my discord is nikki007#3925. first come, first served.

joanna hirsch (riley blue / fc tbd):  joanna is the “mother” of the group.  she’s battled depression her whole life and has been an addict for probably the last 7 years of her life.  some years have been better than others but she always seems to fall off the wagon.  since childhood she’s believed she’s cursed and said curse (in her mind) is the reason everyone she seems to love is ripped away from her at the hands of the grim reaper himself (her mother, husband, and infant).  she can’t keep a job to save her life and she’s always in need of support from the friends.  no, she may not have many useful skills, but she’s empathetic to a fault and has been known to calm the more aggressive members in the group.

will:  will has lived most of his life trying to live up to the expectations of his police officer father.  he doesn’t necessarily want to be a cop like his dad but it’s kind of like a family tradition and he doesn’t want to be the one to break that cycle.  despite his disinterest in dawning a badge, he’s really good at his job.  he’s clean-cut, fair, gentle, kind, and sensitive to the plights of others.  will is super observant and he can always tell when something is up with each of the friends.  he’s smart and protective of everyone in the group - most of all joanna.

sun (originially a poc / e. asian):  sun is the daughter of a very wealthy business tycoon.  she’s smart, athletic, aloof, and hella responsible - especially when it comes to her bratty little brother.  she’s the type that would fall on a blade for the people she loves, so long as they don’t cross her.  it’s hard for her to forgive and forget, especially if you’re not in their circle of friends.  you definitely don’t want to be on her bad side. her father has always favored his prodigal brat of a son over his tough-as-nails, loyal daughter.  unlike the wolfgang (who she’s similar to and has a special quiet connection with), sun doesn’t have a problem asking for help when she needs it.  she’s comfortable in her skin and confident to a fault. she’s a kickboxing master.

lito (originially a poc / hispanic & homosexual):  lito does something in the entertainment industry.  he plays the macho-man part very well but he’s dramatic (is always crying about something) and terribly sensitive to how others perceive him.  next to capheus, lito is the biggest cinnamon roll in the group.  he can’t fight worth a damn but the wolfgang makes sure to fight any battles poor little lito can’t.  lying is something he’s learned to excel at and he’ll cover for any of his friends and be convincing about it.  originally, he’s closeted on the show but you can have him be open about his sexuality or not.

nomi (originially transgender & homosexual):  nomi is the group’s tech genius.  she was a problem child growing up and has had her hand in hacking since she was a teen.  she comes from a very conservative family that doesn’t agree with several aspects her lifestyle - especially her sexuality.  she’s self-absorbed and despite her problematic youth, she was raised in a middle to upper-middle class family.  she’s a very “screw the rules, i have money” type person.  she actually took the fall for a crime in her past because her folks are loaded and she knew she’d get off with a slap on the wrist (community service and probation).  she isn’t known for being the most reliable, but she’s working on it.

capheus (originially a poc / african):  capheus is the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet.  even when greeted with stony glares and silence, he’s still happy and greets people with a smile.  he works as a bus driver (or city worker?  garbage man, etc.) and puts in long hours to help his ailing mother who has a terminal illness.  positive, motivating, and empathetic - capheus will never turn a blind-eye to anyone in need.  but don’t mistake his kindness for weakness.  capheus has a voice and a very strong one at that.  he may believe in peace and community, but when there’s a wrong to be righted, he’ll do his part to fix it - even if it means getting physical.  it wouldn’t be unlikely for him to volunteer somewhere on top of working a regular job.

kala (originially a poc / s. asian):  kala is terribly confused.  she’s one of the smartest people in the group but she’s having difficulty figuring out her love life.  she doesn’t understand how she can love her husband, yet be so drawn to the wolfgang - sexually and emotionally.  she’s a competent scientist and despite her logic and good girl ways, she’s drawn to bad boys.  her husband is a good man and he treats her well, but that’s not enough for kala.  she’s probably the most pure and wholesome (besides capheus) of all the friends (lost her virginity to her husband people, i mean come on!).  she doesn’t believe in violence and is the most diplomatic in the group.  definitely an emotional cheater.

wolfgang:  wolfgang is the group’s resident bad boy.  he’s a criminal with little to no emotion (on the outside).  he was a loner growing up, raised in a house full of criminals.  the only ray of sunshine he had was his mother. wolfgang doesn’t have any immediate family (or if he does they’re all probably estranged) - the group is his family.  even when he needs it, he never asks any of the friends for help.  they have to practically force their way into his life half the time and wriggle information out of him.  he’s contemplative and brooding - definitely has daddy issues.  papa wolfgang was physically and emotionally abusive, which has made lil wolfgang super aggressive and violence prone in turn.  he viewed his family as monsters, so naturally wolfgang thinks he’s one too.  he’s attracted to the kala but knows she too good for him, so he’ll tease her about their sexual attraction but urges her to not leave her husband.

[jam-knife]

Get rid of your spite towards L for a moment, and consider yourself an average member of society (not a secluded genius who everyone thinks is dead). Now, answer me this; how would you commit the perfect murder? What would you do with the body, the weapon, how you would choose the time and place, how you would fool the police, etc. Walk us through every step of the way, if you would

“You mean, if I weren’t trying to play with L...”

He had thought around this idea a few times.

“Once I have my victim in sight, I investigate them. Their routines, workplace, home address, everything and anything that might be relevant. I wait for them to be alone at a time when nobody will look for them anytime soon -their house at night is a fine example. If necessary, I follow them there.”

Picking the lock or sneaking through a window was the easy part. What mattered was what you did once inside.

“I hide and pass unnoticed until my victim is completely relaxed and doesn’t suspect a thing. Then I use a blunt object to knock them out. I never use paralyzing drugs, since they are easily detected in a forensic investigation.”

Of course, a bruise in the head too, but anyone can hit another person in the head. Only a few have access to those drugs and know how to administrate them.

“I personally choose to find all the tools I need at the very crime scene, since carrying all that is needed with me can be deemed suspicious. Besides, an observant eye could draw deductions from an object that belonged to the killer.”

“After knocking the victim out, I proceed to lock the doors and windows, just in case, and I lay their body on a bed/table/etc. I can use rope, cables or even sheets to tie their wrists and ankles. Then comes the fun part. The first thing I must do is keep my victim from making any noise. Most criminals choose to tape their mouths or gag them, but I go a little further: I introduce a pair of scissors in their throat and cut the vocal chords, and I can use some thin tube, for example the outer part of a ballpen, to perform a tracheotomy and avoid them from chocking on their own blood. I can choose whether to do this while they’re awake or asleep, depending on the pain I’m willing to inflict.”

“After that, I’m pretty free to do whatever I want with them for as long a time as there is available. I can torture them if I want to. If what I’m looking for is a swift, quick death, though, breaking their neck right after knocking them out is the best choice.”

Then came the part of concealing the killer’s identity.

“Once I’m done killing my victim, I can modify the crime scene, to make it look as if someone else killed them, or even make it excessively theatrical, superstitious or nasty, so much so it will avert the media’s attention. I don’t like disposing of bodies, but that’s an option too, in which case I’d cut them in tiny pieces, put them in a bag and burn them, and then throw the bones into the bag again and sink it in the river.”

“After that, I must clean any object I could have left my DNA on. Of course I wore gloves, a mob-cap and an overall through the whole process, but I’m meticulous. These items can either be taken from the scene or purchase beforehand with cash in a store as far as possible from the scene. Once I’m done, I cut the clothing into small scraps, burn them, gather the ashes and dispose of them in several public trash bins scattered all around the nearest city. I can even take a bus or a train to make sure nobody can link one handful of ash to another one. If I can’t destroy the murder weapon, I clean it and leave it there.”

Then came the alibi.

“If I do all this successfully, there should be no reason why I’ll be interrogated. Still, as a safety measure, I can build an alibi. If all the previously mentioned can be done in a two-hour margin, I can buy two cinema tickets, take a change of clothes with me, change once inside, go kill my victim, make a stop at home, leave the clothes and take new ones, return, change into the original outfit again and wait for the movie to end. That way I won’t be spotted by surveillance cameras. I’d choose a seat at the back, so no one there turns around to look at me. Still the best alibi is that which includes a witness that can testify you were with them at the time of the death. I either fool someone into believing I was there when I wasn’t or I get them to lie for me. Both are easy.”

Of course, he didn’t need to say that, even if the alibi was the last resource that would be employed in practice, it was the first thing you needed to think of if you wanted to perpetuate a crime.

[ixvyupdates]

I’m a DACA Recipient and a First-Generation College Graduate and I’m Nervous About What’s Next

It’s a day I’ll never forget: September 5, 2017, the first day of my senior year at NYU. It was the day the Trump administration announced that they planned to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). What was supposed to be a joyous ride to the end of my undergraduate career was suddenly riddled with unnecessary stress and uncertainty about my future in this country.

Although the courts have reinstated DACA for now, the damage and anxiety the administration caused with its attempt to shut down the program cannot be undone. Furthermore, amidst the horrific immigration battleground at the border for the past few months lies the tenuous nature of DACA and how vulnerable its recipients are to the whims of the current administration.

This is my sixth year as a DACA grantee. My experiences with DACA have been fraught even before the current administration’s attempts to end the program.

DACA was created in June 2012 as an executive order from the Obama administration. DACA defers removal action, or deportation, for two years to undocumented immigrants who must meet a handful of strict requirements.

If approved, DACA recipients get a temporary employment authorization, as well as a social security number, and become eligible to obtain a driver’s license in their state. DACA does not provide a path to citizenship, nor is it a form of amnesty—it simply delays deportation for a two-year period. Additionally, despite the benefits, DACA does not provide a lawful status to its recipients, meaning they are still in a sense undocumented.

Proving I’m ‘Worthy’

A few days after I turned 15, my parents and I met with an immigration lawyer. To ensure that my case was as strong as possible, the lawyer told my parents and me that we had to find proof of identification, proof that I had come to the U.S. before my 16th birthday, proof of my (lack of) immigration status, proof of having continuously lived in the U.S. since June 15, 2007, and proof of my status as a student.

We went home and immediately began poring through every document that could prove I was “worthy” of receiving DACA status. The memories of looking for and making copies of countless documents for my application are vivid: Kindergarten report cards, my third-grade science fair certificate, a small piece of paper that marked my arrival to the United States in 2001, high school transcripts, my Salvadoran passport, and even a letter from my church stating we attended regularly. All were scanned, copied, and placed inside a large manila envelope to be sent along with my DACA application. Though this collection of documents would primarily be used to prove that I had been in the country since 2001, it also felt like a litmus test for good moral character.

Students and Teachers Sound the Alarm on the End of DACA

https://educationpost.org/students-and-teachers-sound-the-alarm-on-the-end-of-daca/embed/#?secret=NShOgRcOl6

As the years passed, I increasingly felt as though DACA served as a way to perpetuate the myth between the “good” immigrant and the “bad” immigrant, creating a hierarchy. The good immigrant (the DACA grantee) is an educated law-abiding citizen, who contributes to the nation’s economy, and is even willing to put their life on the line by serving in the armed forces. The bad immigrant, especially as depicted by this administration lately, is nothing but an uneducated criminal.

While this false dichotomy has become even more muddled during this administration, it is crucial to recognize that DACA plays a role in creating that divide through requirements that ignore the various contexts in which immigrant children and DACA grantees are treated by society. I believe it was pure luck that my parents were able to settle down in a neighborhood where I was able to find mentors in my teachers and feel valued as a student and a peer. Had they chosen differently, I may not be a DACA grantee or a first-generation college graduate.

DACA Opened Doors But Also Kept Some Shut

DACA allowed me to get a job at my hometown’s ice cream store to help support myself financially throughout high school and most of college. DACA allowed me to get my New York state driver’s license, making transportation easier for me. DACA opened up a host of opportunities that were previously unavailable to me. Yet other doors remained shut.

The first door-slam came when I had to fill out my FAFSA in order to receive financial aid. I was confused when I did not see any Pell Grants or state and federal aid on my student profile for my top two school choices. That’s when I learned DACA recipients do not qualify for federal aid or state aid in the state of New York. Though I was able to get a school scholarship, and my parents and I found other ways to pay for my education, the amount of money that I could’ve received from state and federal aid would’ve made a huge difference, as I am sure is the case for many DACA grantees across the nation.

Another source of anxiety around DACA has been the cost to apply and then renew every two years: $495—$85 for biometrics and $410 for work authorization document application/renewal. Regardless of how well you budget, the fees of applying for or renewing every two years can have a great effect on DACA grantees of low-income backgrounds or families that have more than one child who qualifies.

Getting together enough money to initially apply is difficult enough, and one bad financial year, or the need to pay for other costs such as tuition or housing, could cause unnecessary financial strain. The high costs became more problematic last fall when DACA grantees scrambled to pull together the funds to renew before the administration’s October 5 deadline. United We Dream even set up a DACA Renewal Fund in order to help grantees fund their urgent renewals.

I can’t pretend to speak for the hundreds of thousands of DACA grantees in the U.S. who are entering higher education and the workforce. However, the events these past few months have proved that it is vital that the country’s leaders provide a more stable future for all undocumented immigrants, so they can become fully engaged and active citizens in a country they yearn to be a part of. After all, I am only in the United States because of the American dream. This is my home. But for how long? Now that I have my bachelor’s degree, my professional career should be just beginning.

Earlier this month, I was able to renew my DACA for the third time, but the future still remains unclear beyond the next two years. Although I am nervous about what will happen next, especially in the wake of family separations at the border, I still remain hopeful that one day Congress will pass a clean DREAM Act.

Photo by @chefaniesteng, Twenty20-licensed.

I’m a DACA Recipient and a First-Generation College Graduate and I’m Nervous About What’s Next syndicated from https://sapsnkraguide.wordpress.com

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-still-back-trump/

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

Want More Articles Like This Follow Think On Instagram To Get Updates On The Week’s Most Important Political Analysis

Importantly, Trump is increasingly fixating on the Republican-backed audits as he pushes the lie that he won the election. He needs to keep talking about this lie because he faces an existential political threat: His brand is based on winning, but he lost. Winners don’t lose, particularly winners who promise their fans that “we will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.”

Since When Do Republicans Care More About Criminals In Jail Than The Cops Who Put Them There Since Donald Trump

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell pauses during his testimony at the first hearing of the select committee investigating the deadly storming of the Capitol, in Washington on Tuesday, July 27, 2021. “The GOP overwhelmingly stuck with Trump, perpetuating his sick mythology about a day we all saw with our own eyes,” writes The New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd.

  | Aug. 3, 2021, 1:00 p.m.

Washington • It was, I must admit, a virtuoso performance by Sean Hannity.

Not since the sheriff in “Blazing Saddles” put a gun to his own head and took himself hostage has anyone executed such a nutty loop de loop.

Opening his show Tuesday night, Hannity gave a monologue defending the police . “Attacks on law enforcement are never and should never be acceptable ever, not at the Capitol and not anywhere,” he declaimed.

Yet Mr. Pro Police had nary a word for the four police officers who had appeared before Congress that morning to describe going to “hell and back,” as a Washington police officer, Michael Fanone, put it, as they relived the scarring, desperate hours of Jan. 6 when they were attacked by Trump’s mob .

When it came down to it, the question of whether Republican lawmakers in the House would side with Donald Trump or the police who risked their lives defending them, it wasn’t even a close call for the law-and-order party.

Since when do Republicans care more about criminals in jail than the cops who put them there? Since when do they coddle domestic terrorists?

We Looked At Which Gop Primary Voters Are Most Likely To Vote Based On Support For His False Election Claims

Many Republican senators, watching the harrowing footage of the Jan. 6Capitol insurrection played at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, were moved to tears, presumably remembering their own experiences that day. Yet it did not persuade many of them to vote to convict the former president on the charge of inciting the insurrection. Even though many prominent Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell , appeared to want a clean break with the president after the insurrection, those who turned on Trump have been rebuked by the party’s grass roots. And Trump has threatened to recruit and support primary challengers against Republicans who do not line up behind him.

So were the votes against conviction motivated by a desire to win primaries and, therefore, reelection? Our research shows that the situation is more complicated than that. The Republican rank and file is deeply divided over Trump and his false claims about a stolen 2020 election. This creates a minefield for Republican members of Congress.

Why Republicans haven’t abandoned Trumpism

Opiniona Republican Civil War Is Coming Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia Crusade Is Just The Beginning

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, moderate Republicans started to walk away from the party. Even some conservatives who stuck with Trump all through his presidency couldn’t stomach the insurrection. Currently, 53 percent of Republican voters believe Trump won the election. Similarly, in a national poll last month by Quinnipiac University, 66 percent of people who classified themselves as Republicans said they want Trump to run for president in 2024.

The fact that Trump still controls so many Republican voters explains the assertion by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the Republican Party can’t “move forward” without Trump. Speeding up the Republican Party’s hardening into a right-wing extremist party is Trump’s demand that anyone who doesn’t toe the line and repeat the lie be ousted and exiled.

Trump advisers and confidants have many reasons not to push back. For one, the former president often rebuffs advisers who tell him to drop the whole stolen election story. But those in Trump’s inner circle also need to keep voters riled up if Trump’s political future — and presumably theirs — is to continue. Dangling the possibility that Trump will be reinstated in August accomplishes this.

A Disturbing Number Of Republicans Still Believe All The Lies Donald Trump Tells Them

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One of the enduring legacies of Donald Trump’s runs for office and four years as president is the phenomenon in which a shameless politician can tell a brazen, easily fact-checkable lie and his or her supporters will buy it without question, even when evidence to the contrary is screaming in their faces. The earliest example of this was the claim Trump made when announcing his 2015 bid for office—that he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it, an absurd lie that he was still telling in the fall of 2020. And of course an equally audacious lie was the one he started spreading last November and hasn’t stopped spewing to date—that he won the presidential election and a second term was stolen from him.

Obviously, the most chilling repercussion of Trump’s supporters believing he, and not Joe Biden, won the election, was the January 6 attack on the Capitol, an insurrection that left five people dead and which Trump, in his final tweet before being kicked off the platform, described as “the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” And three months after the fact, a majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie.

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A Large Share Of Republicans Want Trump To Remain Head Of The Party Cnbc Survey Shows

A CNBC survey conducted in the days before former President Donald Trump‘s impeachment trial finds a large share of Republicans want him to remain head of their party, but a majority of Americans want him out of politics.

The CNBC All-America Economic Survey shows 54% of Americans want Trump “to remove himself from politics entirely.” That was the sentiment of 81% of Democrats and 47% of Independents, but only 26% of Republicans.

When it comes to Republicans, 74% want him to stay active in some way, including 48% who want him to remain head of the Republican Party, 11% who want him to start a third party, and 12% who say he should remain active in politics but not as head of any party.

“If we’re talking about Donald Trump’s future, at the moment, the survey shows he still has this strong core support within his own party who really want him to continue to be their leader,” said Jay Campbell, a partner with Hart Research and the Democratic pollster for the survey.

But Micah Roberts, the survey’s Republican pollster, and a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, emphasized the change from when Trump was president. Polls before the election regularly showed Trump with GOP approval ratings around 90%, meaning at least some Republicans have defected from Trump.

Squawk on the Street

Trump Mike Lindell And Why The August Election Conspiracy Should Worry Republicans

In late May, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” and said: “Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August.” He also said that eventually even liberals such as Rachel Maddow would admit that the election was stolen. Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election. Trump and others are watching the Republican-backed audit in Arizona because they believe in a “domino theory” — if Arizona ballots can be proven to be fraudulent, election results in other battleground states that President Joe Biden won can also be overturned.

There is, of course, no legal or factual basis backing up any of this.

Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election.

‘this Was A Scam’: In Recorded Call Trump Pushed Official To Overturn Georgia Vote

It’s worth noting that, even without Georgia, Trump won 13 states where slavery had once been legal and these states provided nearly 70% of his Electoral College votes.

The move to the right, and the focus on the South, have been the route to renewed success for Republicans again and again.

It was there Trump began his big rally strategy nearly six years ago. It was there he would emerge as the clear front-runner for the nomination in 2016 by winning South Carolina’s primary, dominating among the staunchest conservatives in that legendary bastion of Southern independence.

So it seemed more than appropriate that South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham would be the first Republican senator summoned to confer with Trump about the party’s plans after the impeachment trial ended. And appropriate that the meeting took place at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, where Trump has relocated his legal residence and political operation.

If Trump is to rise again, it will once again be as a born-again conservative and an adopted son of the South. And if the next Republican is not Trump, nearly all the top contenders to succeed him are from states with at least one college football team in the Southeastern Conference.

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Trump Blasts Mcconnell And His Leadership In Lengthy Response To Recent Criticism

Where will the party turn in its hour of crisis? If the past is any guide, it will turn in two directions: to the right, and to the South. These have been the wellsprings of strength and support that have brought the party back from the brink in recent decades.

That was the strategy that led to Richard Nixon’s elections as president in 1968 and 1972, and it was still working for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Solidifying the South and energizing conservatives were also crucial factors in the Republican tsunami of 1994, when the GOP surged to majorities in Congress and in statehouses. That hamstrung the remainder of Bill Clinton’s presidency and presaged the election of Republican George W. Bush in 2000.

It was a lesson not lost on Trump. While not even a Republican until late in life, he started his primary campaign billboarding the party’s most conservative positions on taxes, trade, immigration and abortion. And the first of his rallies to draw a crowd in the tens of thousands was in a football stadium in Mobile, Ala., two months after he declared his candidacy in the summer of 2015.

Whether the next standard-bearer for the GOP is Trump himself or someone else, there is little doubt the playbook will be the same.

Low points, then turnarounds

Perhaps the most discouraging of these for the GOP was Johnson’s tidal wave, which carried in the biggest majorities Democrats in Congress had enjoyed since the heyday of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump The Answer Is Simple: Attitude And Gratitude

Scott Jennings | Los Angeles Times

Why do Republicans stick with Donald Trump?

It’s a question I’m asked again and again by Democrats, “Never Trumpers”, and journalists. But the answer is simple.   Attitude and Gratitude.

For years, Republican voters wanted someone — anyone — to come along and do two things: Stick it to the Clintons and punch back against the media-Democratic Party alliance that fires on every Republican brave enough to stick a head out of the foxhole.

If you attended any GOP fundraiser or grassroots event between 2000 and 2016 — and I went to hundreds — you heard this sentiment over and over. And over. And over.

The secret sauce is Trump’s continued deliverance of an attitude for which Republicans thirsted for years.

For Republicans, it seemed like those awful Clintons got to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. And they always seemed so smug about it. Many had tried and failed to oppose them. The first Bush and Bob Dole, decent men and dedicated public servants, were steamrolled by the Clintons in ’90s.

Sure, we had George W. Bush after Clinton was termed out, and Obama managed to knock Hillary down a peg in 2008. But she still wound up Secretary of State while Bill traveled the world, racking up speaking fees and foundation tributes that would embarrass Croesus himself. Damn those Clintons.

The natural conclusion of this pent-up anger finally boiled over in 2016!

Have Expressed Reluctance Or Misgivings But Havent Openly Dropped Their Backing

Paul Ryan and John Boehner, the former speakers of the House: Both have expressed their dislike of the president, but have not said whom they will support in November.

John Kelly, a former chief of staff to the president: Mr. Kelly has not said whom he plans to vote for, but did say he wished “we had some additional choices.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: She has said that she’s grappling with whether to support Mr. Trump in November. She told reporters on Capitol Hill in June: “I am struggling with it. I have struggled with it for a long time.”

She said: “I think right now, as we are all struggling to find ways to express the words that need to be expressed appropriately, questions about who I’m going to vote for or not going to vote for, I think, are distracting at the moment. I know people might think that’s a dodge, but I think there are important conversations that we need to have as an American people among ourselves about where we are right now.”

Mark Sanford, a former congressman and governor of South Carolina: Mr. Sanford briefly challenged the president in this cycle’s Republican primary, and said last year that he would support Mr. Trump if the president won the nomination .

That has since changed.

“He’s treading on very thin ice,” Mr. Sanford said in June, worrying that the president is threatening the stability of the country.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Republicans Still Orbiting Trump Dark Star Fail To Derail Bidens First 100 Days

Trump continues to exert a massive gravitational pull on the party while the president forges ahead with ambitious agenda

Last modified on Tue 27 Apr 2021 07.01 BST

For Democrats it has been a hundred days of sweeping legislation, barrier-breaking appointments and daring to dream big. For Republicans, a hundred days in the political wilderness.

The party that just four years ago controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress now finds itself shut out of power and struggling to find its feet. As Joe Biden forges ahead with ambitions to shift the political paradigm, Republicans still have a Donald Trump problem.

The former US president remains the unofficial leader of the party and exerts a massive gravitational pull on its senators, representatives, governors and state parties. Obsessed with “culture wars” and voter fraud, the Trump distortion field has made it difficult for Republicans to move on.

“Trump is like a fire,” said Ed Rogers, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. “Too close and you get burned. Too far away, you’re out in the cold. So the party spends a lot of time talking about the fire, managing the fire, orbiting the fire. It takes a lot of energy out of the party.”

It’s a lot easier to grift on people’s fears of other people and prey on their concerns about culture wars that really don’t exist

Trump is still sucking all of the oxygen out of the room for Republicans

‘combative Tribal Angry’: Newt Gingrich Set The Stage For Trump Journalist Says

All these factors combined to produce a windfall for Republicans all over the country in the midterms of 1994, but it was a watershed election in the South. For more than a century after Reconstruction, Democrats had held a majority of the governorships and of the Senate and House seats in the South. Even as the region became accustomed to voting Republican for president, this pattern had held at the statewide and congressional levels.

But in November 1994, in a single day, the majority of Southern governorships, Senate seats and House seats shifted to the Republicans. That majority has held ever since, with more legislative seats and local offices shifting to the GOP as well. The South is now the home base of the Republican Party.

The 2020 aftermath

No wonder that in contesting the results in six swing states he lost, Trump seems to have worked hardest on Georgia. If he had won there, he still would have lost the Electoral College decisively. But as the third most populous Southern state, and the only Southern state to change its choice from 2016, it clearly held special significance.

Arizona Election Official Reacts To ‘check Your Six’ Threat From Republican

There was an exchange Thursday between Fox News’ John Roberts and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady that is remarkably telling about just how lost the Republican Party is at the moment.

Roberts: “President Donald Trump says the ‘Big Lie’ was the results of the 2020 election. Liz Cheney says, no, the ‘Big Lie’ was suggesting that the 2020 election was stolen. Between the two of them, who is right?”Brady: “I’ll leave that dispute to them.”alreadyhe is retiring

In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. Click to subscribe!

The Point: Political courage is in short supply among Republican elected officials these days. Very short supply.

Why Has No Trump Ally Faced Consequences For Trying To Overturn An Election

His solution is to insist that he won. To do this, he and his allies have devised an elaborate alternate reality in which he won the election but it was stolen from him through voter fraud.

Similarly, how does a would-be authoritarian retain power after having been ousted from office? Trump figured that one out, too: remain relevant by retaining control over the Republican Party. His election lies are a big part of this strategy, as well. It becomes self-fulfilling. The more people there are who believe the election was stolen, the more real it feels to Trump and the more he hammers the point home in speeches and blog posts.

List Of Republicans Who Opposed The Donald Trump 2020 Presidential Campaign

This article is part of a series about

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This is a list of Republicans and conservatives who opposed the re-election of incumbent Donald Trump, the 2020 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. Among them are former Republicans who left the party in 2016 or later due to their opposition to Trump, those who held office as a Republican, Republicans who endorsed a different candidate, and Republican presidential primary election candidates that announced opposition to Trump as the presumptive nominee. Over 70 former senior Republican national security officials and 61 additional senior officials have also signed onto a statement declaring, “We are profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”

A group of former senior U.S. government officials and conservatives—including from the Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump administrations have formed The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform to, “focus on a return to principles-based governing in the post-Trump era.”

A third group of Republicans, Republican Voters Against Trump was launched in May 2020 has collected over 500 testimonials opposing Donald Trump.

Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor

Such an embrace of insanity creates a cycle in which the Republican Party sheds itself of nonbelievers, finds ways to keep the true believers angry and engaged and unhinges itself even more thoroughly from reality and becomes, arguably, increasingly dangerous. The result is that conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell have somehow become influential, despite their very clear record of belligerent gibberish. And Trump, as he has been for five-plus years now, remains at the center of the Republican Party as it veers deeper into a made-up reality.

Related:

On Trump Approval Asking Why Reveals Differences By Education Within Gop

Many pollsters, including our team here at SurveyMonkey, track President Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen to an all-time low. We wanted to delve deeper—to ask respondents not just whether they approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, but why.

We did this in the simplest way possible: by immediately following our question on presidential approval with the open-ended question “Why?” This way, we can get explanations in respondents’ own words as to how they feel about our current Commander in Chief.

Republican Approvers: “Kept Promises” —  Republican Disapprovers: “Childish”

In SurveyMonkey’s most recent Trump approval update, 59% of people said they disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president.

What’s making these Republicans frustrated enough to split with their own party? To find out, we used structural topic modeling to explore how different groups of people explained their various reasons for approving or disapproving of President Trump. Structural topic modeling is a machine learning technique that discovers themes or “topics” within a large collection of responses, then predicts the prevalence of these topics according to certain respondent characteristics .

The graph below presents the differences in prevalence of various topics mentioned in response to our “Why?” follow-up, comparing responses among Republicans by whether they approve or disapprove of Trump’s performance as president .

Most Republicans Still Believe 2020 Election Was Stolen From Trump Poll

May opinion poll finds that 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the ‘true president’ compared with 3% of Democrats

Last modified on Fri 4 Jun 2021 19.39 BST

A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on baseless claims of illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.

About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from 13-17 November which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.

Biden, a Democrat, won by more than 7m votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.

US federal and state officials have said repeatedly they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered during the presidential election, rejecting the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters. Voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.

Reuters contributed to this report

Why Does Donald Trump Still Seem To Hold Sway Over The Republican Party

Why — after leading the Republican Party during a period when it lost its majority in the US House of Representatives and the Senate and its power in the White House — does former president Donald Trump still seem to hold the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Reagan in his thrall?

For US politics watchers, who on the weekend watched on as 43 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump of an act of reckless incitement played out in front of the cameras, that is the $64,000 question.

Or rather, it’s the 74,222,593-vote question.

That is the record number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump last November — more than has been cast for any previous president. Unfortunately for them, an even greater number — 81,281,502 — voted for his rival, now-President Joe Biden.

As much as anything else, those numbers sum up the quandary Republicans find themselves in.

They have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and only remain competitive because older white voters, who tend to be more likely to support conservative candidates, also tend to vote in greater numbers in a non-compulsory electoral system.

Those same voters are also the most likely to cast a ballot in next year’s house and senate primaries, and the next midterm elections in November 2022 — which will again determine who holds power in congress. They are the voters who initially flocked to Donald Trump.

The Night In 1968 When A Nation Watched An American Presidency Crumble

When this fistful of five states defected, it was a stunner. They had resisted Republicans even when the Democrats nominated Northern liberals like Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy , who was not only a New Englander but a Catholic.

Before that they had stuck with the Democrats even in the party’s worst drubbings of the century, although some had left the fold for third-party attractions such as segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who left the Democrats for a time to form the States Rights Party in 1948.

This shift in Southern sensibilities in the 1960s was linked to the national Democrats’ embrace of the civil rights movement, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and then to the creation of Medicare and other “Great Society” programs in 1965.

To be sure, there were other factors buoying what had been the “party of Lincoln” in Dixie, including the arrival of affluent Northern retirees and of industries lured by the lower cost of labor.

But the salient issue was race. As Republican strategist Kevin Phillips expressed it to New York Times reporter James Boyd in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

“The Southern Strategy”

Why Do Republicans Continue To Support Trump Despite Years Of Scandal

773.834.9123

It was late September last year when a whistleblower complaint revealed that President Trump had tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Within moments the scandal captured headlines. What followed was months of back and forth as Republicans supported the president while the Democrats used their political capital to get him impeached.

But this was not the first time  – or the last time – the president was caught in the middle of a scandal. Since the impeachment trial that followed the Ukraine incident, episodes from The New York Times uncovering unsavory details from President Trump’s tax returns, to his questionable dismissal of multiple Inspectors General, to his refusal to clearly condemn white supremacists have all sparked widespread media attention and partisan fighting in 2020. 

Although with his polls dropping, some Republicans may finally be distancing themselves from the President, the question has been regularly asked the past four years: why do the Republicans continue to support the President despite these troubling charges being leveled at him? And, what is it that the Democrats stand to gain from repeated allegations?

 In addition to demonstrating how polarization accelerates scandals, the paper also found that: 

Republicans Fear That Trump Has Set The Party Back By A Generation

Republican leaders and operatives have been expressing concerns recently about the fact that Donald Trump has drive away plenty of talented lawmakers and would-be Republicans because of his behavior. They now fear that his antics have set the Party back a generation, and this has now become a “generation of lost talent” for Republicans. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains why they feel this way and why its a scary thought, even for those who despise the GOP.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Politico in recent weeks has spoken to more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisors, aids, and all sorts of other members of the Republican party, where they have all said the same thing. And that thing is that they’re terrified that Donald Trump has chased away what they call a generation of talent from the Republican Party. Here’s what they’re talking about. During the Trump years, we saw a record number of Republicans, including plenty of younger Republicans who could have had, you know, 10, 20, maybe even more years to keep running for office. Right. They were, they were in their prime. To be honest, Paul Ryan is one of those people, and I’m not saying we want any of those people in office, trust me. But these were people who had no reason to resign other than they understood the toxicity of Donald Trump, didn’t want any part of it. So there’s a lot of lost talent right there.

Republicans Fear Trump Will Lead To A Lost Generation Of Talent

The 45th president has brought new voices and voters to the party, but he’s driven them out too. Insiders fear the repercussions.

06/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT

Link Copied

As Donald Trump ponders another presidential bid, top Republicans have grown fearful about what they’re calling the party’s “lost generation.”

In conversations with more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisers and aides, a common concern has emerged — that a host of national and statewide Republicans are either leaving office or may not choose to pursue it for fear that they can’t survive politically in the current GOP. The worry, these Republicans say, is that the party is embracing personality over policy, and that it is short sighted to align with Trump, who lost the general election and continues to alienate a large swath of the voting public with his grievances and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump has driven sitting GOP lawmakers and political aspirants into early retirements ever since he burst onto the scene. But there was hope that things would change after his election loss. Instead, his influence on the GOP appears to be as solid as ever and the impact of those early shockwaves remain visible. When asked, for instance, if he feared the 45th president was causing a talent drain from the GOP ranks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — perhaps inadvertently — offered a personal demonstration of the case.

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[elizabethcariasa]

Latest tax scam twist: crooks deposit fraudulent refunds into real taxpayers' bank accounts

Your tax refund showed up in your bank account! Party time, right?

Wrong. It's possible that the money isn't really connected to your filing. It could be part of a new tax scam that's appeared this filing season.

And crooks are using even more chicanery to get the money that's in your account, from posing (once again) as Internal Revenue Service agents to pretending to be debt collectors (you knew this would eventually happen).

But before this latest effort to steal your tax refund got to this point, it started with stealing your tax identity.

Here's the tax tale in four acts steps.

Step 1: Tax preparers targeted Earlier in February, the IRS alerted tax preparers of a new scam that begins with cybercriminals stealing data from practitioners' computers and filing fraudulent tax returns.

Generally, criminals use alternative ways to get the fraudulent refunds delivered to themselves rather than the real taxpayers.

However, in this latest scam variation, some of the criminals have the money sent to the real bank accounts using the info stolen from the tax preparers' data bases.

I know. Criminally speaking, it sounds counterproductive. And in the past when this happened, it was a screw-up by the crooks.

But in the years that they've been refining their tax identity theft techniques, thieves have learned that it's more difficult for the IRS to identify and halt fraudulent tax returns when the filings use real taxpayer data, such as income, dependents, credits and deductions.

And following through on that approach, instead of sending the refund to an unrelated account or address that could prompt the IRS to take a closer look, they let the money go to the real bank destination.

Step 2: Crooks reclaiming refunds That's where the next twist of the tax scam, the impersonation portion, comes into play.

So far, the IRS has learned of two ways the crooks go about recovering the fake refunds they generated and sent to real taxpayers.

In some cases, criminals pose as debt collection agency officials who are acting on behalf of the IRS. Again, not to gloat, but we knew this was going to happen.

In that guise, they contact taxpayers to say a refund was deposited in error. The criminal caller then instructs the taxpayer to forward the money to the fake collection agency.

In another version, the taxpayer who received the erroneous refund gets an automated call with a recorded voice identifies him/herself as an IRS agent. As in the previous iteration of this pervasive (and costly) tax call scheme, the fake IRS agent threatens the taxpayer with criminal fraud charges, an arrest warrant and/or a blacklisting of the person's Social Security number. The recorded voice gives the taxpayer a case number and a telephone number to call to return the refund.

Step 3: Cleaning up after the erroneous refund scam If a tax refund amount shows up in your bank account and you haven't yet filed your tax return, don't panic.

Yes, it looks like your tax identity has been stolen. So immediately contact the IRS about the steps you need to take to get your taxpaying life back on track.

First, contact the IRS Identity Protection Specialized Unit (IPSU) toll-free at (800) 908-4490. You'll also need to fill out the IRS Identity Theft Affidavit, Form 14039.

You also need to talk with your financial institution. Since crooks have you account number, you probably should close those accounts or take other protective steps recommended by your bank.

And you'll definitely want to talk to your tax preparer since that might be the place from where the crooks got your data.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also has an ID theft recovery plan to help you dig out of this mess.

The first step is to place a free, 90-day fraud alert on your accounts by contacting one of the three credit bureaus. That company must tell the other two.

The fraud alert will make it harder for someone to open new accounts in your name. As for your existing accounts, you also need to request a credit report to see what other possible fraudulent activity might have taken place there.

Step 4: Returning the wrong refund Now about that fake tax refund money that you received. You use the same steps to take care of a fraudulent tax refund as you do with a real one that's wrong, which just happens to be today's Daily Tax Tip.

If the erroneous refund showed up as a direct deposit, you should:

Contact the Automated Clearing House (ACH) department of the bank/financial institution where the direct deposit was received and have them return the refund to the IRS.

Call the IRS toll-free at (800) 829-1040 (individual) or (800) 829-4933 (business) to explain why the direct deposit is being returned.

If the erroneous refund was a paper check and you haven't cashed it:

Write "Void" in the endorsement section on the back of the check.

Submit the check immediately to the appropriate IRS location based on the city (possibly abbreviated) on the bottom text line in front of the words TAX REFUND on your refund check. They are:

ANDOVER – Internal Revenue Service, 310 Lowell Street, Andover, MA 01810

ATLANTA – Internal Revenue Service, 4800 Buford Highway, Chamblee, GA 30341

AUSTIN – Internal Revenue Service, 3651 South Interregional Highway 35, Austin, TX 78741

BRKHAVN (Brookhaven) – Internal Revenue Service, 5000 Corporate Ct., Holtsville, NY 11742

CNCNATI (Cincinnati) – Internal Revenue Service, 201 West Rivercenter Blvd., Covington, KY 41011

FRESNO – Internal Revenue Service, 5045 East Butler Avenue, Fresno, CA 93727

KANS CY (Kansas City) – Internal Revenue Service, 333 W. Pershing Road, Kansas City, MO 64108-4302

MEMPHIS – Internal Revenue Service, 5333 Getwell Road, Memphis, TN 38118

OGDEN – Internal Revenue Service, 1973 Rulon White Blvd., Ogden, UT 84201

PHILA (Philadelphia) – Internal Revenue Service, 2970 Market St., Philadelphia, PA 19104

When you mail the erroneous refund back to Uncle Sam, don't staple, bend or paper clip it to anything. That includes not attaching it to the note you should include that tells the IRS "Return of erroneous refund check because …" and give a brief explanation of why you're giving back the tax cash check.

If the erroneous refund was a paper check and you have cashed it, then:

Submit a personal check, money order, etc., immediately to the appropriate IRS location listed above.

If you no longer have access to a copy of the check, call the IRS toll-free at (800) 829-1040 (individual) or 800-829-4933 (business) and explain to the IRS assistor that you need information to repay a cashed refund check.

On the check/money order write "Payment of Erroneous Refund," the tax period for which the refund was issued and your taxpayer identification number (Social Security number, employer identification number or individual taxpayer identification number).

Include a brief explanation of the reason for returning the refund.

Note that if you have to repay an erroneous refund that you cashed and/or spent, you may owe the IRS interest on the money.

That's another reason not to dally if you get a wrong refund, either due to a tax scam perpetuated in your name, or just because of a mistake.

You also might find these items of interest:

Tax-related ID theft tops FTC's annual consumer complaint list

Protecting your financial & tax data from Equifax (and all) hackers

5 ways to protect your identity (and money!) during National Tax Security Awareness Week (and year-round!)

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Latest tax scam twist: crooks deposit fraudulent refunds into real taxpayers' bank accounts

Your tax refund showed up in your bank account! Party time, right?

Wrong. It's possible that the money isn't really connected to your filing. It could be part of a new tax scam that's appeared this filing season.

And crooks are using even more chicanery to get the money that's in your account, from posing (once again) as Internal Revenue Service agents to pretending to be debt collectors (you knew this would eventually happen).

But before this latest effort to steal your tax refund got to this point, it started with stealing your tax identity.

Here's the tax tale in four acts steps.

Step 1: Tax preparers targeted Earlier in February, the IRS alerted tax preparers of a new scam that begins with cybercriminals stealing data from practitioners' computers and filing fraudulent tax returns.

Generally, criminals use alternative ways to get the fraudulent refunds delivered to themselves rather than the real taxpayers.

However, in this latest scam variation, some of the criminals have the money sent to the real bank accounts using the info stolen from the tax preparers' data bases.

I know. Criminally speaking, it sounds counterproductive. And in the past when this happened, it was a screw-up by the crooks.

But in the years that they've been refining their tax identity theft techniques, thieves have learned that it's more difficult for the IRS to identify and halt fraudulent tax returns when the filings use real taxpayer data, such as income, dependents, credits and deductions.

And following through on that approach, instead of sending the refund to an unrelated account or address that could prompt the IRS to take a closer look, they let the money go to the real bank destination.

Step 2: Crooks reclaiming refunds That's where the next twist of the tax scam, the impersonation portion, comes into play.

So far, the IRS has learned of two ways the crooks go about recovering the fake refunds they generated and sent to real taxpayers.

In some cases, criminals pose as debt collection agency officials who are acting on behalf of the IRS. Again, not to gloat, but we knew this was going to happen.

In that guise, they contact taxpayers to say a refund was deposited in error. The criminal caller then instructs the taxpayer to forward the money to the fake collection agency.

In another version, the taxpayer who received the erroneous refund gets an automated call with a recorded voice identifies him/herself as an IRS agent. As in the previous iteration of this pervasive (and costly) tax call scheme, the fake IRS agent threatens the taxpayer with criminal fraud charges, an arrest warrant and/or a blacklisting of the person's Social Security number. The recorded voice gives the taxpayer a case number and a telephone number to call to return the refund.

Step 3: Cleaning up after the erroneous refund scam If a tax refund amount shows up in your bank account and you haven't yet filed your tax return, don't panic.

Yes, it looks like your tax identity has been stolen. So immediately contact the IRS about the steps you need to take to get your taxpaying life back on track.

First, contact the IRS Identity Protection Specialized Unit (IPSU) toll-free at (800) 908-4490. You'll also need to fill out the IRS Identity Theft Affidavit, Form 14039.

You also need to talk with your financial institution. Since crooks have you account number, you probably should close those accounts or take other protective steps recommended by your bank.

And you'll definitely want to talk to your tax preparer since that might be the place from where the crooks got your data.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also has an ID theft recovery plan to help you dig out of this mess.

The first step is to place a free, 90-day fraud alert on your accounts by contacting one of the three credit bureaus. That company must tell the other two.

The fraud alert will make it harder for someone to open new accounts in your name. As for your existing accounts, you also need to request a credit report to see what other possible fraudulent activity might have taken place there.

Step 4: Returning the wrong refund Now about that fake tax refund money that you received. You use the same steps to take care of a fraudulent tax refund as you do with a real one that's wrong, which just happens to be today's Daily Tax Tip.

If the erroneous refund showed up as a direct deposit, you should:

Contact the Automated Clearing House (ACH) department of the bank/financial institution where the direct deposit was received and have them return the refund to the IRS.

Call the IRS toll-free at (800) 829-1040 (individual) or (800) 829-4933 (business) to explain why the direct deposit is being returned.

If the erroneous refund was a paper check and you haven't cashed it:

Write "Void" in the endorsement section on the back of the check.

Submit the check immediately to the appropriate IRS location based on the city (possibly abbreviated) on the bottom text line in front of the words TAX REFUND on your refund check. They are:

ANDOVER – Internal Revenue Service, 310 Lowell Street, Andover, MA 01810

ATLANTA – Internal Revenue Service, 4800 Buford Highway, Chamblee, GA 30341

AUSTIN – Internal Revenue Service, 3651 South Interregional Highway 35, Austin, TX 78741

BRKHAVN (Brookhaven) – Internal Revenue Service, 5000 Corporate Ct., Holtsville, NY 11742

CNCNATI (Cincinnati) – Internal Revenue Service, 201 West Rivercenter Blvd., Covington, KY 41011

FRESNO – Internal Revenue Service, 5045 East Butler Avenue, Fresno, CA 93727

KANS CY (Kansas City) – Internal Revenue Service, 333 W. Pershing Road, Kansas City, MO 64108-4302

MEMPHIS – Internal Revenue Service, 5333 Getwell Road, Memphis, TN 38118

OGDEN – Internal Revenue Service, 1973 Rulon White Blvd., Ogden, UT 84201

PHILA (Philadelphia) – Internal Revenue Service, 2970 Market St., Philadelphia, PA 19104

When you mail the erroneous refund back to Uncle Sam, don't staple, bend or paper clip it to anything. That includes not attaching it to the note you should include that tells the IRS "Return of erroneous refund check because …" and give a brief explanation of why you're giving back the tax cash check.

If the erroneous refund was a paper check and you have cashed it, then:

Submit a personal check, money order, etc., immediately to the appropriate IRS location listed above.

If you no longer have access to a copy of the check, call the IRS toll-free at (800) 829-1040 (individual) or 800-829-4933 (business) and explain to the IRS assistor that you need information to repay a cashed refund check.

On the check/money order write "Payment of Erroneous Refund," the tax period for which the refund was issued and your taxpayer identification number (Social Security number, employer identification number or individual taxpayer identification number).

Include a brief explanation of the reason for returning the refund.

Note that if you have to repay an erroneous refund that you cashed and/or spent, you may owe the IRS interest on the money.

That's another reason not to dally if you get a wrong refund, either due to a tax scam perpetuated in your name, or just because of a mistake.

You also might find these items of interest:

Tax-related ID theft tops FTC's annual consumer complaint list

Protecting your financial & tax data from Equifax (and all) hackers

5 ways to protect your identity (and money!) during National Tax Security Awareness Week (and year-round!)

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from Tax News By Christopher http://www.dontmesswithtaxes.com/2018/02/tax-scam-twist-crooks-deposit-fraudulent-refunds-into-real-taxpayers-bank-accounts.html

[twsor1]

To Live Forever

As advances in medical research progress the probability of extending human life spans is becoming more and more likely.  There is even talk of immortality for human beings.  The science is fascinating and multi-faceted involving such things as genetic manipulation, technological integration, and lifestyle modification.  As more people live to older ages I have naturally started pondering the consequences of longer human life and I have found myself wondering if I would want to live much longer than my parents or grandparents.  There are practical considerations of  course, like how you will manage your financial needs.  But, for me, the more interesting aspect to a potentially longer life involves the psychological impact of cultural evolution.

As with many people my age I experienced a childhood that was quite different than those of children today.  We were free to run, barefoot and unsupervised, from one friend’s house to the next.  Our parents didn’t worry about us being abducted and our dogs ran freely around the neighborhood playing alongside.  We were taught that, in the presence of adults, children were to be seen and not heard.  If we were to say anything at all it was pretty much limited to ‘Excuse me’, ‘Please’, ’Yes, ma’am/sir’, ’No, ma’am/sir’, and ’Thank you’.  Spankings were the standard punishment when we misbehaved.  And, when my father drove the family to dinner on Saturday night, he brought along a cocktail for the ride.

That childhood experience was, for me, idyllic.

Dare I say though that today most of those things would be frowned upon and some are even criminal.  Just this morning there was a post on our neighborhood website about an elderly man, walking with a cane, who was caught by a security camera allowing his dog to poop in a neighbor‘s yard without being cleaned up (there is an ordinance here that says you must pick up after your dog).  This criminal behavior was met with a call to identify the perpetrator so that he could be dealt with accordingly.  Never mind that he was elderly, crippled, and grew up in a time when dogs did not even need to be leashed much less cleaned up after.  His actions were deemed unacceptable with no empathy for his personal circumstances.  If he is identified, and confronted, I suppose he will feel bewildered and angry and I can only imagine what sort of indignities he’ll endure if he lives another hundred years.  Social norms change with each passing generation, usually for the better, but changing with them is certainly difficult.

As we live longer lives there are bound to be changes in the way we live them.  For example, the decline in birth rates might be attributable to expectations of a longer life.  Perhaps our natural instinct to perpetuate the human species is being suppressed.  Taken to the extreme of eternal life I am left to wonder if we, as a species, would have any desire to procreate at all.  As examples… Increasingly, pregnancy is considered a disease and abortion a cure.  Respect for life is waning as we begin to embrace euthanasia as an acceptable end to life.  And, more recently, if you consider the trends to develop sex robots,you must wonder if we aren’t evolving away from sexual reproduction.  Indeed, it may go beyond even that.  Perhaps they are the next step in our evolution as we are now seeing rights being granted to robots.

It also stands to reason that longer lives could cause a certain level of apathy in a society.  After all, the certainty of death has motivated humans forever and formed the bedrock of religious beliefs.  People have been motivated to adhere to a high moral standard in hopes of achieving a better existence when they die.  With a diminishing prospect of death it is only natural for there to be a decline in moral standards.  There can be no doubt that removing the certainty of death from one’s outlook will have massive impacts on human nature.

The conundrum of immortality is made even more complicated by the concept of time.  Even when we live forever time will still be part of the framework.  By its very nature it takes a toll.  I am reminded of the poem by Delmore Schwartz (and Khan Noonien Singh :) ) Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day which famously stated that ’time is the fire in which we burn’.   Perhaps aging is a blessing bestowed on us by God and that living forever may be possible but, in the end, intolerable.