#like i get that it's more politically & economically advantageous to make it free for seniors as opposed to students

[murderballadeer]

not that they shouldn't have made the stm pass free for seniors but they keep increasing it for students and like i don't have any money either!! come on valérie plante i voted for you will you let me catch a break damn

[patriotsnet]

What Percentage Of Republicans Are On Welfare

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-percentage-of-republicans-are-on-welfare/

What Percentage Of Republicans Are On Welfare

Democrats Return The Favor: Republicans Uninformed Or Self

Republican States Are Mostly on Welfare

The 429 Democratic voters in our sample returned the favor and raised many of the same themes. Democrats inferred that Republicans must be VERY ill-informed, or that Fox news told me to vote for Republicans.;;Or that Republicans are uneducated and misguided people guided by what the media is feeding them.

Many also attributed votes to individual self-interest whereas GOP voters feel Democrats want free stuff, many Democrats believe Republicans think that I got mine and dont want the libs to take it away, or that some day I will be rich and then I can get the benefits that rich people get now.

Many used the question to express their anger and outrage at the other side.;;Rather than really try to take the position of their opponents, they said things like, I like a dictatorial system of Government, Im a racist, I hate non-whites.;

Average Spending Of Welfare Recipients

Compared to the average American household, welfare recipients spend far less money on all food consumption, including dining out, in a year. As families with welfare assistance spend half as much on average in one year than families without it do, there are some large differences in budgeting. Families receiving welfare assistance spent half the amount of families not receiving welfare assistance in 2018.

The Gop Push To Cut Unemployment Benefits Is The Welfare Argument All Over Again

The White House is on the defensive over accusations from Republicans that expanded federal unemployment benefits, which were extended through Sept. 6 as part of Bidens $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, are too generous. The GOP argument is that people receiving the $300 weekly benefit have little incentive to return to work. The criticism from Republicans has gotten louder in the wake of a disappointing jobs report.

Its an argument that echoes similar claims conservatives have been making about government assistance programs for decades that people are taking advantage of the system in ways that allow them to collect checks while sitting back and relaxing.

As Washington pays workers a bonus to stay unemployed, virtually everyone discussed very real concerns about their difficulties in finding workers, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday. Almost every employer I spoke with specifically mentioned the extra-generous jobless benefits as a key force holding back our recovery.

But Democrats counter that millions of Americans need that money to get by. More than 20 million jobs were lost in the early months of the pandemic; 10 million American workers are currently unemployed, the Labor Department says.

Democrats say the sudden demand for more workers from businesses is outpacing the number of workers that can get back into those jobs, especially since many schools arent fully open, and many workers cant afford child care.

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The Politics And Demographics Of Food Stamp Recipients

Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to have received food stamps at some point in their livesa participation gap that echoes the deep partisan divide in the U.S. House of Representatives, which on Thursday produced a farm bill that did not include funding for the food stamp program.

Overall, a Pew Research Center survey conducted late last year found that about one-in-five Americans has participated in the food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. About a quarter lives in a household with a current or former food stamp recipient.

Of these, about one-in-five of Democrats say they had received food stamps compared with 10% of Republicans. About 17% of political independents say they have received food stamps.

The share of food stamp beneficiaries swells even further when respondents are asked if someone else living in their household had ever received food stamps. According to the survey, about three in ten Democrats and about half as many Republicans say they or someone in their household has benefitted from the food stamp program.

But when the political lens shifts from partisanship to ideology, the participation gap vanishes. Self-described political conservatives were no more likely than liberals or moderates to have received food stamps , according to the survey.

Among whites, the gender-race gap is smaller. Still, white women are about twice as likely as white men to receive food stamp assistance .

How Democrats And Republicans Differ On Matters Of Wealth And Equality

A protester wears a T-shirt in support of Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is part of … a group of Democrats looking to beat Trump in 2020. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg

If youre a rich Democrat, you wake up each day with self-loathing, wondering how you can make the world more egalitarian. Please tax me more, you say to your elected officials. Until then, the next thing you do is call your financial advisor to inquire about tax shelters.

If youre a poor Republican, however, you have more in common with the Democratic Party than the traditional Wall Street, big business base of the Republican Party, according to a survey by the Voter Study Group, a two-year-old consortium made up of academics and think tank scholars from across the political spectrum. That means the mostly conservative American Enterprise Institute and Cato were also on board with professors from Stanford and Georgetown universities when conducting this study, released this month.

The fact that lower-income Republicans, largely known as the basket of deplorables, support more social spending and taxing the rich was a key takeaway from this years report, says Lee Drutman, senior fellow on the political reform program at New America, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Across party lines, only 37% of respondents said they supported government getting active in reducing differences in income, close to the 39% who opposed it outright. Some 24% had no opinion on the subject.

Also Check: Democrats News

Bases Of Republicans Antidemocratic Attitudes

shows how Republicans antidemocratic responses in the January 2020 survey were related to education, political interest, and locale. These relationships provide only modest support for the hypothesis that allegiance to democratic values is a product of political activity, involvement and articulateness, as McClosky had it . Although people with postgraduate education were clearly less likely than those with less education to endorse violations of democratic norms, the overall relationship between education and antidemocratic sentiments is rather weak. Similarly, people in big cities were only about 5% less likely than those in rural areas to endorse norm violations, while people who said they followed politics most of the time were about 7% more likely to do so than those who said they followed politics hardly at all. Given the distributions of these social characteristics in the Republican sample, the most typical antidemocrats were not men and women whose lives are circumscribed by apathy, ignorance, provincialism and social or physical distance from the centers of intellectual activity , but suburbanites with some college education and a healthy interest in politics.

Social bases of Republicans antidemocratic attitudes.

Key indicators of latent dimensions

Political bases of Republicans antidemocratic attitudes

Translation of ethnic antagonism into antidemocratic attitudes in Republican subgroups

Welfare Accounts For 10% Of The Federal Budget

Many Republicans claim that social services expenditures are crippling the federal budget, but these programs accounted for just 10% of federal spending in 2015.

Of the $3.7 trillion the U.S. government spent that year, the largest expenditures were Social Security , health care , and defense and security , according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities .

Several safety net programs are included in the 10% spent on social services:

Supplemental Security Income , which provides cash support to the elderly and disabled poor

Assistance with home energy bills

Programs that provide help to abused and neglected children

In addition, programs that primarily help the middle class, namely the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, are included in the 10%.

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At Least 60 Afghans And 13 Us Service Members Killed By Suicide Bombers And Gunmen Outside Kabul Airport: Us Officials

Two suicide bombers and gunmen attacked crowds of Afghans flocking to Kabul’s airport Thursday, transforming a scene of desperation into one of horror in the waning days of an airlift for those fleeing the Taliban takeover. At least 60 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops were killed, Afghan and U.S. officials said.

Welfare Spending By President And Congress From 1959 To 2014

Republicans’ Facts About Welfare Are “Not Factually True”

America faces many problems today. The current economic recovery has been the slowest since the Great Depression, the national debt has surpassed $18 trillion, and the federal government continues to spend more than it collects. While its not unusual, unethical, or unconstitutional for the federal government to operate with deficits at times, the question is why does Washington continue to overspend? Is there a legitimate reason or is it neo-politics? In this article, well take a look at spending on welfare programs during each presidents term from J.F.K. to Obama. Well also look at the party in control of Congress. Which one was the biggest spender as it pertains to welfare programs?

The Dark Side of Social Benefits

Politicians love to sing their own praises and for a very good reason. Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, made an astute political observation in the 1880s when he stated, A man who has a pension for his old age is much easier to deal with than a man without that prospect. Bismarck openly acknowledged that this was a state-socialist idea and went on to say, Whoever embraces this idea will come to power. Thus, the strategy of using legislation to gain votes was forever embedded in the political landscape.

Welfare Spending

Lets take a thorough look at federal welfare spending from 1959 through 2013. The following graph includes spending for two data points:

Democrats in control: 13.7%

Republicans in control: 3.5%

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What Is Governments Role In Caring For The Most Needy

Nearly six-in-ten Americans say government has a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Do these views vary depending on whether the respondent has personally benefited from a government entitlement program?

These data suggest the answer is a qualified yes. Overall, those who have received benefits from at least one of the six major programs are somewhat more likely than those who havent to say government is responsible for caring for those who cannot help themselves .

When the analysis focuses just on just the respondents who have received benefits from at least one of the four programs that target the needy, the gap between entitlement recipients and other adults increases to eight percentage points .

Some larger differences in attitudes toward governments role emerge when the results are broken down by specific program, though in every case majorities of both recipients and non-recipients affirmed that government has the obligation to help those most in need.

For example, nearly three-quarters of those who ever received welfare benefits say government has a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves. In contrast, less than six-in-ten of those who have never been on welfare agree.

Similar double-digit gaps surface between non-recipients and those who ever received food stamps and Medicaid .

How Come We Are Red And Blue Instead Of Purple

Republicans to live outside of urban areas, while Democrats tend to prefer living inside of urban areas.

Rural areas are almost exclusively Republican well strong urban areas are almost exclusively democratic.

Republicans also tend to stress traditional family values, which may be why only 1 out of 4 GLBTQI individuals identify with the GOP.

63% of people who earn more than $200k per year vote for Republicans, while 63% of people who earn less than $15k per year vote for Democrats.

64% of Americans believe that labor unions are necessary to protect working people, but only 43% of GOP identified votes view labor unions in a favorable way.

The economics of the United States seem to have greatly influenced how people identify themselves when it comes to their preferred political party. People who are concerned about their quality of life and have a fair amount of money tend to vote Republican. Those who have fallen on hard times or work in union related jobs tend to vote for Democrats. From 2003 to today, almost all of demographic gaps have been shifting so that Republicans and Democrats are supported equally. The only true difference is on the extremes of the income scale. The one unique fact about Democrats is that they are as bothered by their standard of living as Republicans tend to be.

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States Have Shifted To The Right

Democrats are floating a plan to tax stock buybacks.

Even excluding health insurance which some experts argue should not count people in this patch of Appalachia draw between a fifth and a third of their income from the public purse.

Perhaps the politics of welfare is changing up to a point. Democrats made big gains this year in elections for the House and several statehouses, running largely on the promise that they would protect the most recent addition to the safety net: the Affordable Care Act, including the expansion of Medicaid in many states. But championing the safety net does not necessarily resonate in the places that most need it.

Take Daniel Lewis, who crashed his car into a coal truck 15 years ago, breaking his neck and suffering a blood clot in his brain when he was only 21. He is grateful for the $1,600 a month his family gets from disability insurance; for his Medicaid benefits; for the food stamps he shares with his wife and two children.

Every need I have has been met, Mr. Lewis told me. He disagrees with the governors proposal to demand that Medicaid recipients get a job. And yet, in 2016, he voted for Mr. Trump. It was the lesser of two evils, he said.

About 13 percent of Harlans residents are receiving disability benefits. More than 10,000 get food stamps. But in 2015 almost two-thirds voted for Mr. Bevin. In 2016 almost 9 out of 10 chose Mr. Trump.

Program Goals And Demographics

Larger group differences emerge when the results are broken down by age and income levelsdifferences that are often directly related to the goals of specific benefits programs.

For example, adults 65 and older are nearly three times as likely to have received an entitlement benefit during their lives as those adults under the age of 30 . Thats not surprising, since nearly nine-in-ten older adults have received Social Security and78% have gotten Medicare benefits. Both programs were specifically created for seniors with age requirements that limit participation by younger adults.

Similarly, Americans with family incomes of less than $30,000 a year are significantly more likely as those with family incomes of $100,000 or more to have gotten entitlement help from the government . Again, this difference is not surprising, as assisting the poor is the primary objective of such financial means-tested programs as food stamps, welfare assistance and Medicaid.

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Which Party Are You

The average Republican is 50, while the average Democrat is 47.

55% of married women will vote Republican.

GOP candidates earn 59 percent of all Protestant votes, 67 percent of all white Protestant votes, 52 percent of the Catholic vote, making them a Christian majority party.

Only 1 out of 4 Jewish voters will support Republicans.

If you are white and have a college education, there is a 20% greater chance that you will be a Republican instead of a Democrat.

American Republicans have been found to be among the most generous people on earth, and not just financially. Republicans also provide more volunteer hours and donate blood more frequently.

Here is what we really come to when it comes to political party demographics. It doesnt matter if youre a Republican or a Democrat. What matters is that everyone is able to take advantage of the diversity that makes the United States so unique. Instead of trying to prove one way is the only correct path, both parties coming together to work together could create some amazing changes for the modern world. Until we learn to compromise, however, the demographic trends will continue to equalize and polarize until only gridlock remains. If that happens, then nothing will ever get done and each party will blame the other.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.;;

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

Recommended Reading: Did Trump Say Republicans Were Dumb

[cabiba]

The coronavirus pandemic is the perfect metaphor for the perils of hyper-connection. We no longer need the help of rats or fleas to spread disease — we can do it ourselves thanks to mass international travel and supply chains. And we are no longer self-sufficient when things go wrong. When a corona vaccine is eventually discovered, we will have to wait our turn in the queue as we no longer have a UK-based manufacturer. Talk of the need for de-globalisation seems suddenly to be everywhere.

The pandemic also illuminates a wider retreat from full-on free trade that has been gaining in support and legitimacy over recent years—everywhere, that is, apart from in the economics profession. Democratic politics and national social contracts are starting to assert themselves against the laws of comparative advantage — which in any case turn out not to be quite as benign as the economics professors claim. This was brought home to me a few days ago when I heard a very senior Tory say that he was, until recently, an orthodox free trader/free marketeer but now regarded himself as an economic nationalist.

He is not alone. World trade fell last year by 0.4%. There has been no multilateral trade agreement since 1993. Donald Trump wants to bring back some of the US supply chain from China. And this is not a Trumpian eccentricity, most of the US political class is behind him on this, acknowledging that allowing China entry to the global market economy in the belief that it would transform politically (and become less mercantilist economically) is a gamble that failed. There has been technological decoupling too, the world will not end up on single global platforms.

The ascent of climate change anxieties up domestic and international agendas is also making life uncomfortable for unfettered free trade, encouraging a bias towards localism, reduced travel and a degree of self-sufficiency. China’s air quality has improved dramatically in the past few weeks as a result of measures to contain the coronavirus. And more generically, Greta is asking whether you really need strawberries in March.

The truth is that the neat theories of free trade and comparative advantage have been oversold. Free trade, as Keynes pointed out, only works if the people displaced from good jobs by imports get equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. The election of Donald Trump is one kind of proof that this has not been happening.

Hold on, say the free traders, of course there will be downward pressure on wages and job losses in the short run but, in the long run, the additional purchasing power we acquire from cheaper imports means we can buy other goods and services that will create equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. Moreover, they say, when given the choice between protecting the Mid-West manufacturing plant and enjoying good quality, cheaper stuff in Walmart, people have voted with their wallets for the cheaper stuff.

But they have not been given a proper choice. Of course people would always prefer cheaper goods, but not at any price. If the choice was between slightly more expensive goods and services, and the preservation, or more gradual decline, of a certain agricultural or industrial way of life, they might well support such a deal. Indeed, they do so in the EU through the Common Agricultural Policy.

People are well aware that they are both producers and consumers. The end of production is not just consumption, as Adam Smith asserted, it is also about what sort of life you might have as a producer. This is one of those places where economics reveals its blindspot for culture and human beings in the round.

According to Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky, most trade doesn’t follow any discernible pattern of comparative advantage, and Cambridge economist Graham Gudgin has shown that, for countries in North America and Western Europe, joining free trade agreements has caused slower — not faster — growth in recent decades. Unlike comparative advantage in natural resources, which is better described as absolute advantage, comparative advantage in manufacturing systems is usually quite marginal.

Much of the comparative advantage of recent decades has been achieved by simply taking advantage of lower labour costs in poorer countries. Apple makes iPhones in China, which does benefit US consumers, and to some extent Chinese workers, but the main beneficiaries are probably Apple executives and shareholders. Bringing some of that production back to the US, even at the cost of slightly higher prices, would not, I suspect, be unpopular.

The theory that free trade engenders a permanent peace has long ago been exposed as an empty dream, which is why national security and the threat of war (and pandemics) continue to provide justification for some degree of national protection. In the 19th century, Britain did completely embrace free trade. It was enormously to our advantage to do so, as the workshop of the world, and we imported most of our food by the end of the 19th century. The result was that we nearly starved in two world wars. After the Second World War, we did not make the same mistake; even with the enormous change in tastes and increase in food imports in recent decades, we still produce more than half of what we eat.

Nobody sensible is arguing for self-sufficiency or anything like it, though it might be a good idea to retain at least some national capacity in certain strategic areas like steel or nuclear power plants or, indeed, vaccine manufacture. And, after all, isn’t the logic of comparative advantage to produce specialist monocultures in a world that values diversity in all things.

But there are some economists and political economists such as Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Barry Eichengreen and Robert Skidelsky who are arguing, persuasively, that we need more democratic caveats to free trade. Rodrik argues that where there is a national consensus about preserving some aspect of an economy or culture, for example French restrictions on Hollywood film imports, these should be allowed and not attract sanctions from international trade regulators.

A UK government that is serious about regional and industrial policy, and shifting more high value economic activity towards the North, is implicitly protectionist. It is not going to promote high-tech export industries in Hartlepool and then allow them to be wiped out by imports. It will protect with either subsidies or tariffs. It is true that free trade theory does allow some such protection under the title ‘infant industry protection’, which is far preferable to senile industry protection, but EU state aid policy is not friendly to either.

The unlikely bedfellows of populism, environmentalism and technology are all pointing in the same direction — the reshoring of some forms of production, a bit more self-sufficiency, more teleconferencing with people in other countries rather than immigration, all in all a retreat from the hyper-globalisation of recent decades.

Free traders will, not unreasonably, point to the costs. It could mean a bit less growth, though neither the populists nor the greens will necessarily object. Global supply chains are, indeed, a force for peace and breaking them up could bring back inflationary pressures. It could also mean that the dramatic fall in poverty in poorer countries will slow or stop. So why not try to mitigate the costs of free trade better? Subsidise the losers more intelligently? Or, the free trade sceptic might reply, why not prevent there being so many losers in the first place?

As Barry Eichengreen says, the problem with the global economy is not a lack of openness, but a sense that “the nation state has fundamentally lost control of its destiny, surrendering to anonymous global forces”. And as Hans Kundnani put it in last week’s Observer: “it is time the UK Government adjusted its rhetoric and stopped its paeans of praise to free trade”. Part of the point of Brexit is to put politics before economics, democratic legitimacy before economic growth.

Of course, we still want lots of trade and sustainable growth but at less cost to other things that people hold dear. A new rhetoric is needed that combines an appropriate level of openness with a sense of national control. An economic nationalism that most liberals can feel comfortable with.

[ourmrmel]

Mel Feller MPA, MHR, Recommends Starting Your Business in Texas.

Mel Feller MPA, MHR, Recommends Starting Your Business in Texas.

 Mel is the President/Founder of Mel Feller Seminars with Coaching for Success 360, Inc. and Mel Feller MPA, MHR, Coaching.  Mel Feller is a Texas – Utah Innovator and Business Leader.    Mel Feller currently maintains offices in Texas and in Utah. Currently an MBA Candidate.

  If you are looking for a great place to start your business, or you already live in Texas and wondering if the business climate therein would favor you, then I have good news for you; Texas is a great state to start and run a business.

  Why Start a Business Texas?

  Texas is sitting on a comfortable economy as it has a very stable telecommunication, technology, healthcare and medical research, banking and transportation sectors. The state is also a great place to do business as it offers reduced taxes, low cost housing and high quality education. In fact, Texas has one of the lowest tax burdens in the United States, ranking as a Top 10 Best State.

  Texas, also known as the Lone Star State has a natural geographic advantage over other states, with a first rate transportation network and an economy that is constantly developing. Cities such as Houston, Dallas and Austin remain choice destinations for entrepreneurs.

  The Lone Star State is home to over 50 Fortune 500 corporate headquarters including Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66 and AT&T. Texas is home to American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, two of the largest airlines in the world.

  In addition to all these, Texas is named the “Best State for Business” by CNBC and has been ranked the “Top State for Business” by CEO Magazine for the past six years, going to show that this state is viable for business and any entrepreneur that wants to move to Texas would be doing themselves a great favor.

  Texas does not only favor big conglomerates, as small businesses are also known to thrive there. So if are looking for a small-scale business to start up as an individual in order to take advantage of the bubbling economy of Texas, then here are 50 small businesses for you to consider.

  Coffee Shop: A lot of people love coffee, and would always stop over for freshly brewed coffee every occasionally. Setting up a coffee shop in a busy area will attract many customers during office break times and in the mornings. You can add donuts, pretzels or bagels as coffee accompaniment.

   Gift shop: granted, there are many gift shops already in Houston, but there is room for new players in the trade. Though the business might be somewhat seasonal, with profits spiking during the Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Valentine, and other festive periods, an encouraging volume of sales are made all year round.

   Hardware Store: setting up a hardware store in Texas is a good business idea because not only you do not need any skills to start the business, but also because the startup cost of the business is quite reasonable. You can setup your store in a commercial area and offer a wide variety of products at reasonable rates. To make it more appealing, you can set up an online storefront for people to choose items from and offer free delivery.

   Laundry service: everyone does laundry, and as such, a laundry service is a good business to start anywhere including Texas. This business, even as it is lucrative requires very little startup capital and expertise. All you need to do is find a good location and gather the required equipment. Spread word of your business all over your Houston neighborhood and you will surely get clients provided you offer quality services.

   Appliance repair Business: An appliance repair business repairs equipment and appliances that are used in the home and garden. The barrier to entry into this industry is very low and majorities of establishments in this industry are individuals who are running the business on their own. If you have the knowledge, you can start a business where you can repair appliances for people.

   Home health care: Home care providers majorly provide non-medical services such as personal care, homemaker and companion services in the homes of their clients. You can start this service on a small scale, but it would definitely expand due to factors such as the aging population and prevalence of chronic diseases such as cancer.

   Recycling Business: A recycling facility engages in the recycling of materials such as plastic, paper and glass from waste locations. Once these materials have been separated and sorted, operators go ahead to refine them into useable products and then sell them to wholesalers as well as manufacturers. You can run a small recycling plant in Texas where you can recycle either paper, plastic, metals or other types of materials.

      Math center: Many students have challenges learning mathematics, and would need a lot of aid. Setting up a mathematics center in Texas would surely fill such need, as parents would not hesitate to enroll their kids who have challenges with the subject.

   Library:  A library is an essential facility to have in any state. People go to libraries to read, make research and borrow books, periodicals and magazines. There can never be too many libraries, so one more in Texas would not hurt.

   Medical billing service: Medical billing is a payment practice within the United States health system. The process involves a healthcare provider submitting, and following up on claims with health insurance companies in order to receive payment for services rendered, such as treatments and investigations. You can start this business in Texas and make a profit; you only need to have good marketing and networking abilities to enable you get contracts.

   Retail travel agency: A travel agency is a private retailer or public service that provides travel and tourism related services to the public on behalf of suppliers such as airlines, car rentals, cruise lines, hotels, railways, travel insurance, and package tours. You can make money from starting this business in Texas to help people make travel plans.

   Senior care home: senior home care is a type of residential care that provides a round-the-clock nursing care for elderly people. Texas has a good population of seniors, so starting a business that aims to provide quality care for seniors would prove profitable. However, you need to ensure that you have the required personality to handle the elderly.

   Adult Daycare: An adult daycare center is typically a non-residential facility that supports the health, nutritional, social, and daily living needs of adults in a professionally staffed, group setting. Many people in Texas prefer to keep their aged parents and relatives at home instead of sending them to nursing homes, but they would need help to care for them when they need to go out for extended periods. With the right facilities and staff, you can easily carve a niche for yourself.

   Savings consultant service: A savings consultant helps clients accomplish financial objectives by assessing financial situations; developing and presenting financial strategies and plans; monitoring changes in financial status and life circumstances. Texas being an economically viable state, savings consultancy services are quite essential.

   Sanitation services: This business amongst other things provides odor control services to commercial, industrial, institutional and private markets. You can set up sanitation business to provide such services for businesses.

   Fitness club: People always like to keep healthy and fit, and they do so by eating right, getting enough sleep and going to fitness centers. So starting up a small fitness center would sure be a profitable business in Texas.

   Pilate’s center: Pilates is a physical fitness system that builds strength, flexibility and lean muscle tone with an emphasis on lengthening the body and aligning the spine, rather than on bulking and shortening the muscles. Some people, especially females prefer this fitness format because of its emphasis on toning the muscles instead of enlarging them. This business can be started small and enlarged gradually when you achieve good customer base.

   Healthy vending machine: These days, people are very careful about what they eat as they seek to minimize calorie-laden diets. Healthy vending machines mostly vend fruits, fresh juice etc as against candies and soda. This business would be quite profitable in Texas especially if located in areas where people take their health seriously.

   Locksmith: Locksmiths are people that fix broken locks, make keys, and install security systems like alarms. Security is a big part of every state, and since people would always want effective locks and security systems, then your services as a locksmith would be in high demand.

  Fundraising service: A fundraising service is a business that helps individuals and businesses to raise funds for their cause. A professional fundraiser works with charities, nonprofit organizations, schools, groups and political groups to help each organization raise the money it needs. Being that there are several such, businesses that need help raising funds in Texas, so a fundraising service would do well in the state. You will get your income from commissions from the funds you raise.

   Sales and sales management training: This is a sales management-training program that provides sales people and sales managers with proven skills, knowledge and tools they need to drive bottom line performance. Texas is a state that is high in productivity and as such sales is big business there. Setting up a center that trains people to be proficient in sales would be a moneymaker because you would always have individuals who want to acquire this skill, and organizations that are sending their people to become trained.

  Boutique: Part of the basic needs of man is clothing, and everyone has to be clothed no matter the season. You can choose to set up a boutique in the Lone Star State and make large profits. You can choose to go strictly high end in order to carve a niche for yourself because many people can afford such clothes owing to the economic viability of the state.

   Home inspection service: As a home inspection consultant, your job will be to identify construction and remodeling problems based on local zoning laws and building codes, and you will also be asked to recommend remodeling projects to help add value to a home. This is a small-scale business that one can start to take care of properties for people.

   Dry cleaning service: Texas is a productive state, and many of its citizens are likely to be too busy to take care of their laundry by themselves. A dry cleaning service is a small business that would prove profitable for you if you are able to market it properly.

   Window cleaning service: A window cleaning is a small-scale business that can only prove profitable in Texas if you have a right links. It is a fact that Texas has many offices with many of them being high-rise and all requiring professional cleaning. You can start this business if you have the right training.

   Ice cream parlor: Everybody love treats, and with Texas being a hot state because of its location close to the desert, their weather is usually suited for ice cream. Just ensure you can produce great tasting ice cream, and you would never lack customers.

   Interior painting company: It is a fact that people only paint their houses when they have disposable income. With Texas being an economically viable state, it would be easy for people to repaint their houses from time to time.

   Hood exhaust cleaning business: Hood exhaust cleaning (often referred to as kitchen exhaust cleaning) is the process of removing grease that has accumulated inside the ducts, hoods, fans and vents of exhaust systems of commercial kitchens. Texas has several commercial kitchens, and you are sure to make good profit when you start this business.

   Gardening service: Gardening is a fast-growing business idea that can save customers’ money and beautify the landscape while also helping the environment. With Texans being too busy to take care of their gardens, you can offer this service for a fee.

   Landscaping business: A landscaping business provides clients with lawn services to keep their yards groomed and can plant flowers, trees and shrubs. If you have some training in landscaping, you could provide this service too.

   Kitchen remodeling business: Kitchen remodeling is good business, as people frequently want to remodel their kitchens. This is also a good small business to start in Texas.

   Spa service: A spa is a business that provides a variety of services for improving health, beauty and relaxation through personal care treatments. Spas offer a variety of services such as manicures, pedicures, hair care, seaweed wraps, aromatherapy, facials, waxing, acupuncture, facial and full body massages. These services are almost essential because people need to relax and pamper themselves after working so hard during the week.

   Eyebrow threading business: Threading is a method of hair removal that uses strings in fast motions to remove single strands of unwanted hair in order to create a defined eyebrow shape. Many people want defined brows all days of the week, and you can make a good deal of profits if you start this business but you have to ensure that you are very professional about it. You can also make it a mobile business to gain more customers.

   Construction site cleanup: Texas is a state that is always improving on its structures because of its comfortable economic state, and wherever construction is going on, there is bound to be a mess. Construction site cleanup services perform a final cleaning and removal of left over construction materials from commercial and residential properties.

  If you can handle this level of cleaning, then you can start this business. Nevertheless, you should note that starting a cleanup business requires a variety of licenses and permits, as well as a budget for buying or leasing the equipment you will need.

   Recruitment service: Texas is an upwardly mobile town and as such, there would always be job opportunities to fill, you can as well decide set up a small business where you recruit staff for companies. You can also provide training for the new staff to increase your earnings.

  Document scanning service: Document scanning is all about transforming your paper piles into text- searchable digital images. Document scanning eliminates the need to store your paper documents in prime office space and allows you to focus on your core business. You can set up this service in a business area and offer your services to businesses.

   Pool cleaning service: People are always too busy or too lazy to clean their pools by themselves, so you can provide this service in a small scale and rake in profits especially during the summer.

   Mobile Salon: Nowadays instead of people travelling to salons to utilize their services, the services are travelling towards the people. Setup a vehicle with the required equipment, products and an assistant, and then you are good to go. Definitely, you will need some skills or you can always learn them. This is a onetime investment that will earn great profits.

   Travel Agent: Travel agents are people who plan trips for clients according to their budgets. You just need to have a good professional circle in the required field and set up your business online. Offer deals to the common holiday destinations and people will keep coming. You can also provide services to the corporate sector.

   Mobile food truck: A food truck is a large vehicle equipped to cook and sell food. Some, including ice cream trucks, sell frozen or prepackaged food; others have on-board kitchens and prepare food from scratch. The mobile food truck is quite profitable especially when set up near construction sites, or where blue collar workers abound in Texas. You can sell sandwiches, hamburgers, French fries, and other regional fast food fare.

   Social media consultant: A social media consultant is someone that handles social media publicity for a company. The social media consultant raises company brand awareness through social media. With there being a proliferation of companies in Texas, you can offer this service to companies who would not mind outsourcing it. This business can be started even from home and it requires only minimal startup capital.

   Chauffeur Agency: The Lone Star State hosts many conferences, symposiums and business meetings frequently. In this regard, many executives, CEOs, business officials and high profile people travel through the city and they need protocol as well. You can invest in some luxurious cars and appoint some people to be chauffeurs for those cars. You can even rent the cars and gradually buy them after saving the amount from business. The better your services, the greater clientele.

   Meat shop: Texas has many restaurants, diners and eatery businesses that need regular supply of the meat. Moreover, many people also like to cook for themselves. You can set up a meat shop of such kind and in a short time you will have regular customers. You need to have a sound knowledge of this business or you can always appoint one for the job.

   Car wash service: Car wash business is very lucrative for a state like Texas; it requires little investment, skills, and you are ready to start the business. Majority of people are lazy to clean their cars themselves, target them by providing the best services and making them your regular customers. You can add sidelines of tire changing, pressure check etc.

   Second-hand Goods Shop: Majority of people prefer to buy second-hand goods than investing heavily in new ones. The better the stuff you have on sale, the greater the customers entering your store. This business requires tact, and you can sell the goods at modest rates keeping a profit for yourself as well.

   Advertising agency: An advertising agency, often referred to as a creative agency, is a business dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising and sometimes other forms of promotion and marketing for businesses. Since Texas is not lacking in innovative organizations, you can approach them to handle their advertising and publicity. This business can be started on a small scale but it has the potential of growing big in future.

   Mortuary and cremation service: Death is a certainty of life, and with the growth of senior citizens in Texas, it only goes to say that a mortuary and cremation business is essential in the state. Have it in mind that you need to have the right attitude before you can succeed in this business.

   Sports Goods Supplier: Texas is home to major sports leagues and this is the reason for the heavy sports culture here. One of conventional ideas for business in Texas is opening a sports goods store. For this business to kick off on a sound footing, it needs some investment in good quality products. You can always work as an affiliate for some manufacturers in order to get the right products; all you need is to have the skill to sell them.

   Massage service: A massage therapist is someone who treats clients by using touch to manipulate the soft-tissue muscles of the body in order to relieve pain, rehabilitate injuries, and reduce stress, increase relaxation, and aid in the general wellness of people. Most people tend to overwork themselves especially in Texas where people tend to handle multiple jobs. You can set up this business to help them relieve their stress. You only need aggressive marketing to set the business on track.

   Pet sitting service: People with the increase in disposable income, many people in Texas can afford to have pets. You can decide to take care of pets for people when they have reasons to leave their homes for some length of time. You get to walk, feed and bath the pets. Taking care of pets is quite easy as pets generally do their thing most of the day. You can even decide to open a day care where people can bring their pets and collect them at the end of the day.

  Mel Feller, MPA, MHR, is a well-known real estate, business consultant, personal development consultant and speaker, specializing in performance, productivity, and profits. Mel is the President/Founder of Mel Feller Seminars with Coaching For Success 360, Inc. and Mel Feller Coaching, a real estate and business specific coaching company. His three books for real estate professionals are systems on how to become an exceptional sales performer. His four books in Business and Government Grants are ways to leverage and increase your business Success in both time and money! His book on Personal Development “Lies that Will Sabotage Your Success”. Mel Feller is in Texas and In Utah.

[newstfionline]

Venezuelans become Latin America’s new underclass.

By Anthony Faiola, NY Times, July 27, 2018

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago--Free-spending Venezuelans once crammed store aisles in foreign countries famously uttering “dame dos”--”I’ll take two.” But the citizens of what was once South America’s richest nation per capita are now confronting a devastating reversal of fortune, emerging as the region’s new underclass.

As their oil-rich country buckles under the weight of a failed socialist experiment, an estimated 5,000 people a day are departing the country in Latin America’s largest migrant outflow in decades.

Venezuelan professionals are abandoning hospitals and universities to scrounge livings as street vendors in Peru and janitors in Ecuador. Here in Trinidad and Tobago--a petroleum-producing Caribbean nation off Venezuela’s northern coast--Venezuelan lawyers are working as day laborers and sex workers. A former well-to-do bureaucrat who once spent a summer eating traditional shark sandwiches and drinking whisky on Trinidad’s Maracas Bay is now working as a maid.

The U.N. refugee agency has called on nations to offer protection to the Venezuelans, as they did for millions of Syrians fleeing civil war. But in a part of world with massive gaps in protection for refugees, Venezuelans fleeing starvation at home are often trading one harrowing plight for another. Trinidad, for instance, has no asylum laws for refugees, leaving thousands of desperate Venezuelans here at risk of detention, deportation, police abuse and worse.

Sometimes much worse.

Luz, a 21-year-old Venezuelan single mother, came to Trinidad by boat with two friends in May, trusting a man with a soft Caribbean lilt who claimed to be from a Christian group offering aid and resettlement. Instead, she said, the three women were taken to a house and beaten before being abused by what appeared to be a pornography ring. Each woman, she said, was filmed while being raped by a series of men.

“We are helpless,” Luz said. “All because of the crisis.” She and the other two women escaped and are now in the care of a Catholic charity.

Carolina Jimenez, a senior official with Amnesty International, said, “Venezuela’s unprecedented situation has turned a domestic human rights crisis into a regional human rights crisis.”

“Countries in the region are not prepared to take in so many migrants and do not have the asylum systems needed to prevent job exploitation and human trafficking,” she said. “These people should be protected, but instead they are being taken advantage of.”

From the 1950s through the early 1980s, Venezuela was an economic dynamo--a nation with the world’s largest oil reserves and a beacon for immigrants from as far away as Italy and Spain. Then oil shocks and currency crises plunged the country into turmoil.

Hugo Chávez, who became president in 1999, adopted a form of socialism that resulted in many businesses collapsing or being nationalized. A purge of the state-run oil industry--a center of opposition to his rule--removed thousands of workers, who were often replaced by political supporters with little to no technical experience.

Venezuela’s slide turned into a free fall under President Nicolás Maduro--a former bus driver and union leader who inherited power after Chávez’s death in 2013. Critics say his government’s mismanagement and corruption and Maduro’s own ruthless bid to cement power--even as oil prices tumbled--have broken the nation.

Wealthy Venezuelans have been fleeing their homeland for years, landing in multimillion-dollar homes in Miami and Madrid. But as the economic crisis escalates, those leaving now are increasingly destitute, including members of a crippled middle class. The United Nations projects 2 million Venezuelans will exit their nation this year--on top of an exodus of 1.8 million over the past two years.

Those with means and visas are still venturing to the United States, where Venezuelans now make up the single largest pool of asylum seekers. Far more often, escaping Venezuelans are finding themselves in Latin American and Caribbean nations.

But in a region where many already live on the margins of society, governments are making it harder for Venezuelan refugees to stay.

Last year, Panama slapped new visa requirements on Venezuelans. This year, Colombia ended a program that allowed tens of thousands of Venezuelans to circulate in its border area. Chile welcomed tens of thousands of Venezuelans who showed up at its land border in 2017. But in April, it threw up new hurdles, requiring them to have a passport--something the vast majority do not possess--and to apply for asylum through Chilean consulates in Venezuela rather than at the border.

The regulations are “leaving Venezuelans with no choice but to work for pennies in the informal sector while being extremely vulnerable to exploitation and a high level of abuse,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank.

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing to the Caribbean--where many island nations lack asylum laws--face particular challenges. Mary Anne Goiri, spokeswoman for Venex, an aid group on the island of Curacao, said Venezuelan migrants there were being brutally exploited. In one case, she said, a restaurant owner had been holding the cash savings of one of his undocumented Venezuelan workers. When the employee asked for her money back, the owner beat her and called the police to have her detained, Goiri said.

Up to 45,000 Venezuelans, aid groups say, have crossed the narrow straits in recent years to Trinidad and Tobago, a country of 1.4 million. As many as 160 a week are still making the trip.

Irregular migration is criminalized here, and Venezuelans who arrive on smugglers’ boats face possible detention and fines. In April, Trinidad sparked international condemnation following the deportation of 82 Venezuelans.

“We cannot and will not allow U.N. spokespersons to convert us into a refugee camp,” Prime Minister Keith Rowley said after the incident.

In Trinidad, diplomats and international agencies say, there is also evidence of a worrying trend: Desperate Venezuelans, particularly women, have become commodities to be bought and sold.

In Trinidad, the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations body, has received 23 suspected cases of trafficked Venezuelans in the past three months--compared with no Venezuelan cases last year, according to Jewel Ali, the organization’s local director.

They include victims like Luz--who said she lost one of her three children in April after the hospital in her Venezuelan town ran out of medication to treat her daughter’s bacterial infection. When she was approached to come to Trinidad, the offer seemed too good to be true.

“But I told myself, I’m going anyway. I’m not going to lose the chance for my kids to be better off just because I had some doubts,” she said.

The ordeal--five weeks spent captive and repeatedly filmed being raped--had “damaged” her, she said. At one point, Luz said, she and a friend were tied up and raped side by side.

“We were looking at each other,” Luz said, tearing up. “We would cry. And I would tell her, ‘Sister, be strong, you have a daughter.’ I would just keep repeating that.”

The case has been documented by the U.N. refugee agency as a potential act of trafficking. Alana Wheeler, head of Trinidad’s counter-trafficking unit, said authorities were looking into Luz’s case and could not comment on an active investigation.

In a telephone interview from a detention center for migrants in the Trinidadian town of Arima, a 34-year-old single father said he came ashore in November after selling his possessions to pay for passage. He was arrested in June. Although he produced his asylum documents from the U.N. refugee agency--which give him a legal right to remain in the country--a policeman demanded $700, he said.

“I told him I didn’t have the money, so they took my belongings, what money I had and detained me,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Trinidadian authorities.

Dozens of Venezuelans are being held at the facility, he said. He said guards are serving food by throwing it to the floor and that he had witnessed several Venezuelan inmates being beaten. One migrant with advanced cancer, he said, is receiving no medical attention. No soap, shampoo or clean clothes are being provided, he said.

Guards, he said, routinely humiliate the Venezuelans. Trinidad’s Ministry of National Security did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“They tell us, ‘Go back to your country, or we’re going to make your life impossible,’” the Venezuelan said.

For many Venezuelans, life in Trinidad amounts to a jarring turnaround. Jhohanna Mota, a 42-year-old former secretary from coastal Venezuela, studied English in Trinidad in the 1990s. She spent Sundays at the beach and evenings at the discos. In 2016--with inflation soaring and food growing scarce in Venezuela--she opted to abandon her three-bedroom house to come back to Trinidad with her two sons.

But it has not gone as planned. She said she worked under the table in a bakery for a year, doing 8½-hour shifts for $20 a day. Then she got fired. “My boss didn’t want to employ an ‘illegal.’” She tried to legalize her stay but said she was duped into paying $800 for a visa that turned out to be fake.

She now faces a hearing and potential deportation proceedings. In the meantime, she is supporting her boys as a house cleaner--and is at risk of arrest for working without a job permit.

“Every time I walk out my door, I know I could end up in jail,” she said, weeping as her two boys sat in the hall of the building where they all now sleep in one rented room. “I think, ‘What will happen to my boys? Why am I doing this? How did we get here?’”

[patriotsnet]

When Have Republicans Controlled Both Houses Of Congress

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/when-have-republicans-controlled-both-houses-of-congress/

When Have Republicans Controlled Both Houses Of Congress

There Were 26 Additional Seats Up For Election But None Of These Seats Changed Parties Louisiana Could Still Switch But We Wont Know Until December And It Wont Make A Difference To Democrats

Republicans keep control of the House and Senate

The rest of the Senate races didnt switch parties this year. This includes 16 seats held by Republicans and nine held by Democrats. We still dont know the outcome of the Senate race in Louisiana as it has moved to a run-off that will be decided in December.

The open seat of Sen. David Vitter could now end up Democrat, but it still wont matter for Democrats when it comes to control of the Senate. The two candidates on the Louisiana ballot to fill Vitters open seat are Louisiana state Treasurer John Kennedy and Foster Campbell .

But this wasnt always the case: Up until a few weeks ago, Senate seats in Florida, Arizona, and Ohio were seen as pretty competitive races. The races only began to open up in recent days.

In Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio had a 3.7-point lead over challenger Patrick Murphy heading into Election Day. And in the other two states, incumbent Republicans John McCain and Rob Portman both enjoyed double-digit leads over their opponents, securing easy Republican victories.

Will you support Voxs explanatory journalism?

Millions turn to Vox to understand whats happening in the news. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today from as little as $3.

This Is The Future That Liberals Want

Say the Democrats win. Then what?

If Democrats manage to hold the House of Representatives and win back the Senate and the White House in November, the party will have full control of the federal government for the first time in 11 years. Police reform, climate change, and health care are all on their agenda. But before newly empowered Democrats get to any of that, they will very likely pass a relief package to address the coronavirus pandemic and the associated economic crisis. Then, they will aim to fundamentally change how voting and government work in the United States by expanding voting rights, reducing the influence of money in politics, strengthening ethics rules, and maybe even ending the Senate filibusterreforms they hope will make Americas democracy work better and the rest of their agenda easier to carry out.

If there is any political capital to be spent, the concerns over democracy reform take a front seat to everything in the agenda, a senior aide to a progressive senator told me . It would mean so much just in terms of building long-term power, a senior aide to a progressive House Democrat added.

What Is The Difference Between Republicans And Democrats

Republicans and Democrats are the two main and historically the largest political parties in the US and, after every election, hold the majority seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as the highest number of Governors. Though both the parties mean well for the US citizens, they have distinct differences that manifest in their comments, decisions, and history. These differences are mainly ideological, political, social, and economic paths to making the US successful and the world a better place for all. Differences between the two parties that are covered in this article rely on the majority position though individual politicians may have varied preferences.

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Biden Introduces Attorney General Nominee In Wake Of Capitol Riot

While introducing his nominee for attorney general, Merrick Garland, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said the nation needed to restore the independence and integrity of the Justice Department.

What we witnessed yesterday was not dissent, it was not disorder, it was not protest it was chaos. They werent protesters dont dare call them protesters they were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists. Its that basic, its that simple. I wish we could say we couldnt see it coming. But that isnt true. We could see it coming. The past four years, weve had a president who has made his contempt for our democracy, our Constitution, the rule of law clear in everything he has done. We need to restore the honor, the integrity, the independence of the Department of Justice in this nation thats been so badly damaged. And so many former leaders of that department in both parties have so testified and stated that. I want to be clear to those who lead this department, who you will serve. You wont work for me. You are not the president or the vice presidents lawyer. Your loyalty is not to me. It is to the law, the Constitution, the people of this nation, to guarantee justice. As everyone who watched yesterdays events in Washington now understands, if they did not understand before, the rule of law is not just some lawyers turn of phrase. It is the very foundation of our democracy.

Recommended Reading: I Bet My Numbers Would Be Terrific

Isan Control Of Congress

This table shows the number of Congresses in which a party controlled either the House, the Senate, or the presidency.

Party

^U.S. Senate: Party Divisions

^The Anti-Administration Party was not a formal political party but rather a faction opposed to the policies of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. The faction eventually coalesced into the Democratic-Republican Party.

^The Pro-Administration Party was not a formal political party but rather a faction supportive of the policies of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. The faction eventually coalesced into the Federalist Party.

^ abThough Washington never formally joined a party, he was broadly sympathetic to the coalition which later became the Federalist Party.

^Washington disapproved of formal political parties and refused to join either party, though he became a symbol of the Federalist Party.

^Adams won election as a Democratic-Republican, but he sought re-election as a National Republican.

^Whig President William Henry Harrison died April 4, 1841, one month into his term, and was succeeded by John Tyler, who served for the remainder of the term. Tyler had been elected as vice president on the Whig ticket, but he became an independent after the Whigs expelled him from the party on September 13, 1841.

^Whigs held their only trifecta from March 4, 1841 until later that year when the Whigs expelled Tyler from the party on September 13 and he became an Independent.

^

Don’t Miss: Republican Congress Leaders

Visual Guide: The Balance Of Power Between Congress And The Presidency

Which party controls Congress? Which, the White House? The answer reveals the balance of power in the two branches of government that have elected officials .

Americans seem to prefer that the checks-and-balances envisioned by the founders be facilitated by having different parties control Congress and the White House.

Contrary to popular belief, most of the time Congress and the President are at odds; that is, most of the time the same political party does not control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

Congress has usually been controlled by the same party; with the odd man out being,;literally, the President. Only 16 times since 1945 have both branches of Congress and the Presidency been controlled by the same party; the Democrats have held this advantage more often than Republicans . However, it has happened four times since 2003, making this seem more common that it has been, historically . Prior to WWII, having House, Senate and White House controlled by the same party was the norm.

Since 1945, the House and Senate have been controlled by different parties only six;times . The first three were under Reagan . The other three have been since the 2000 elections, which makes this seem more normal to us than it is, historically.;From 1901-1945, this happened only twice.

And there have been only two complete turn-overs of Congress since 1949: one in 1995 and the other in 2007.

How Is Senate Majority Chosen

The Senate Republican and Democratic floor leaders are elected by the members of their party in the Senate at the beginning of each Congress. Depending on which party is in power, one serves as majority leader and the other as minority leader. The leaders serve as spokespersons for their partys positions on issues.

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Iowa Montana And South Carolina

Though Iowa, Montana and South Carolina are all traditionally right-leaning, polls had shown tight Senate races in those states, and the Cook Political Report had rated each a tossup. But come Election Day, Republicans easily won each race.

In Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst, the Republican incumbent, dispatched Theresa Greenfield, her Democratic challenger, by 6.6 percentage points. In Montana, Senator Steve Daines, the Republican incumbent, won by more than 10 percentage points against Steve Bullock, Montanas two-term Democratic governor.

And in South Carolina, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, survived a challenge by Jaime Harrison, a former chairman of the states Democratic Party, winning by 10.3 percentage points.

Election Results : Veto

SE Cupp: Republicans have let Trump get away with too much

See also: State government trifectas

Two state legislatures saw changes in their veto-proof majority statusâtypically when one party controls either three-fifths or two-thirds of both chambersâas a result of the 2020 elections. Democrats gained veto-proof majorities in Delaware and New York, bringing the number of state legislatures with a veto-proof majority in both chambers to 24: 16 held by Republicans and eight held by Democrats.

Forty-four states held regularly-scheduled state legislative elections on November 3. Heading into the election, there were 22 state legislatures where one party had a veto-proof majority in both chambers; 16 held by Republicans and six held by Democrats. Twenty of those states held legislative elections in 2020.

The veto override power can play a role in conflicts between state legislatures and governors. Conflict can occur when legislatures vote to override gubernatorial vetoes or in court cases related to vetoes and the override power.

Although it has the potential to create conflict, the veto override power is rarely used. According to political scientists Peverill Squire and Gary Moncrief in 2010, only about five percent of vetoes are overridden.

Changes in state legislative veto-proof majorites State

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The laws largely focus on tightening voter ID requirements, purging voter rolls and restricting absentee and mail-in ballots.

Texas

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New Hampshire Hasnt Been Called Yet But That Wont Change The Balance Of Power In The Senate

New Hampshire, where Sen. Kelly Ayotte has a narrow margin over Gov. Maggie Hassan . Votes have only been counted from 94 percent of precincts, so there is a possibility that Hassan could still win, but with Ayotte wining 48.1 percent of the vote compared to Hassans 47.8 percent, it seems as if Ayotte will hold onto her seat.

Annual Congressional Competitiveness Report 2020

Ballotpedias Annual Congressional Competitiveness report for 2020 includes information on the number of elections featuring candidates from both major parties, the number of open seats, and more.

HIGHLIGHTS

More U.S. House races were contested by members of both major parties than in any general election since at least 1920, with 95.4% of races featuring major party competition.

Of the U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators who were eligible to run for re-election in 2018, 55 of them did not appear on the general election ballot in 2020.

In the 53 open seats where an incumbent either did not seek re-election or was defeated in a primary, there were 13 races where the incumbents district overlapped at least one pivot county in 2008 and 2012, before switching to support President Donald Trump in 2016).

In 20 races, only one major party candidate appeared on the general election ballot, the lowest number compared to the preceding decade.

Read Also: Donald Trump Saying Republicans Are Dumb

Y Control In Congress And State Legislatures

In the politics of education course I teach this semester, I was looking for a nice overview of trends in party control for Congress and state legislatures. Just a simple chart showing trends in which party holds the majority in the House and Senate and whether similar trends occur in state legislatures. We often just focus on one or the other, but I want to see Congress and states on the same graph.

But I couldnt quite find what I was looking for. So in its absence , I compiled data from the Senate and House history pages along with the National Conference of State Legislatures partisan composition page.

A few notes about whats being measured here. For the states, NCSL tells us whether both chambers are controlled by a given party. If Democrats hold both chambers, then the state is coded as Democrat. States are coded as Split if Democrats carry one chamber and Republicans the other. Nebraska is omitted because it has a non-partisan unicameral legislature, but I put them in the Split plus NE category just so we have all 50 states. And all data are as of January of the given year, except 2016, which uses December to reflect the outcomes of the most recent election:

Shifting gears to Congress, the chart shows the percentage of members from each of the two parties:

But these three charts are hard to put the full picture together, so the following combines them into a single visualization that I think tells the story a little clearer:

Data:

What The Midterms Mean For President Obama And 2016

Only one in three voters in exit polls said the country was on the right track, and one in five said the government in Washington could never be trusted to do whats right. Two-thirds said the economic system is unfair.

The Republican swing fit a historical pattern: The last three two-term presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all served their last two years with the opposing party controlling both houses of Congress.

And the party controlling the White House has lost seats in the House in the midterm election every time but twice since World War II.

In the Senate, Democrat Mark Pryor of Arkansas was ousted by Rep. Tom Cotton, and Mark Udall of Colorado was bounced by Rep. Cory Gardner. Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan lost her seat to Thom Tillis.

Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire held off a furious challenge by ex-Sen. Scott Brown.

Republicans Joni Ernst in Iowa, Steve Daines in Montana, Mike Rounds in South Dakota and Shelley Moore Capito in West Virginia all captured seats held by retiring Democrats.

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Don’t Miss: Most Republican States 2018

What Happened The Last Time Republicans Had A Majority This Huge

They lost it.

Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of;Lincolnâs Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincolnâs Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnsonâs Great Society. Follow him .

Since last week, many Republicans have been feeling singularly nostalgic for November 1928, and with good reason. Itâs the last time that the party won such commanding majorities in the House of Representatives while also dominating the Senate. And, letâs face it, 1928 was a good time.

America was richâor so it seemed. Charles Lindbergh was on the cover of Time. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Jean Lussier went over Niagara Falls in a rubber ball . Mickey Mouse made his first appearance in a talkie . Irving Aaronson and His Commanders raised eyebrows with the popularâand, for its time, scandalousâsong, âLetâs Misbehave,â and presidential nominee Herbert Hoover gave his Democratic opponent, Al Smith, a shellacking worthy of the history books.

The key takeaway: Itâs been a really, really long time since Republicans have owned Capitol Hill as they do now.

But what if the Republicans of 1928 owed their demise to a more fundamental force? What if it was demography, not economics, that truly killed the elephant?

On a surface level, the Great Depression was to blame.

By Patricia Zengerle, Susan Cornwell

4 Min Read

A Quick Guide To The Eight Competitive Senate Races We Watched Most Closely

There were 34 Senate races this year, but only eight had a reasonable chance of a seat switching from one party to another. There were four races where Democrats led in the polls and four where Republicans were ahead. Most of them were very close, with the exception of the Illinois race between incumbent Sen. Mark Kirk and challenger Rep. Tammy Duckworth , where Duckworth handily beat Kirk.

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Control Of The Senate Could Be Decided By Georgia Races

;There are two races up in Georgia this election, a regular Senate race and special election. The rules in Georgia for both the regular Senate election and the Senate special election require a candidate to win a majority, and if none of the candidates clear the 50% threshold, the race goes to a runoff in January.;

Recent polling in the race between incumbent GOP Senator David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff has been tight, and the presence of a libertarian candidate on the ballot could prevent either Perdue or Ossoff from clearing the majority. In the special election, 21 candidates have qualified to be on the ballot, including Democrat Raphael Warnock, who has led in recent polls. GOP candidates Senator Kelly Loeffer, who was appointed to the seat last year, and Congressman Doug Collins are also on the ballot. If no candidate clears the majority, that race will also go to a runoff in January.

[khalilhumam]

The fraught politics facing Biden’s foreign policy

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/the-fraught-politics-facing-bidens-foreign-policy/

The fraught politics facing Biden’s foreign policy

By Thomas Wright For 18 months, Joe Biden was able to contrast his foreign policy with Donald Trump’s by painting in broad brushstrokes. He was in favor of alliances; Trump was opposed to them. He believed in American leadership in the world; Trump thought countries were taking advantage of the United States. Biden championed human rights; Trump sided with the autocrats. Now that he is president-elect, Biden will need to be more specific about his foreign-policy stance. In many ways, Biden is a known quantity. He has a track record dating back almost five decades. But he will begin his term in a very different world than when he was vice president or a senator. He will face new, substantive challenges, including COVID-19 and a more assertive China. To meet this particularly difficult moment, he will need to master the politics of foreign policy — among different factions within his team, with a potentially obstructionist Republican Senate, and with skeptical American allies. Biden cannot simply rely on competent technocratic management in foreign policy. His presidency may be the establishment’s last best chance to demonstrate that liberal internationalism is a superior strategy to populist nationalism. He must consider the strategic options generated by an ideologically diverse team, and he has to make big choices that are attuned to the politics of the moment, in the United States and around the world. Such a bold path is not one that a newly elected president with no foreign-policy experience could take. But he can. To understand how Biden might approach his foreign policy, I spoke with half a dozen Biden advisers and people who worked closely with him in the Obama administration, as well as current and former congressional staff, Trump administration officials, and allied diplomats. I agreed not to identify them by name, to ensure their candor. Within Biden’s team, an ongoing, but largely overlooked, debate has been brewing among Democratic centrists about the future of U.S. foreign policy. One group, which I call “restorationist,” favors a foreign policy broadly consistent with that of President Barack Obama. They believe in careful management of the post-Cold War order. They are cautious and incrementalist. They will stand up to China but will not want to define their strategy as a great power competition. They maintain high hopes for bilateral cooperation with Beijing on climate change, global public health, and other issues. They support Biden’s idea for a summit of democracies, aimed at repairing democracy and encouraging cooperation, but are wary of an ideological competition between democracy and authoritarianism. They favor a return to the Iran nuclear deal and intend to continue to play America’s traditional role in the Middle East. They generally support free-trade deals and embrace globalization. A second group, which I call “reformist,” challenges key orthodoxies from the Obama era. Philosophically, these advisers believe that U.S. foreign policy needs to fundamentally change if it is to deal with the underlying forces of Trumpism and nationalist populism. They are more willing than restorationists to take calculated risks and more comfortable tolerating friction with rivals and problematic allies. They see China as the administration’s defining challenge and favor a more competitive approach than Obama’s. They view cooperation with other free societies as a central component of U.S. foreign policy, even if those partnerships result in clashes with authoritarian allies that are not particularly vital. They want less Middle East involvement overall and are more willing to use leverage against Iran and Gulf Arab states in the hopes of securing an agreement to replace the Iran nuclear deal. They favor significant changes to foreign economic policy, focusing on international tax, cybersecurity and data sharing, industrial policy, and technology, rather than traditional free-trade agreements. Biden’s worldview is broad enough to be compatible with the restorationist and reformist schools of thought. He obviously trusts many of Obama’s senior officials and is proud of the administration’s record. At the same time, he chafed against Obama’s caution and incrementalism — for example, Biden wanted to send lethal assistance to Ukraine, when Obama did not. Biden has spoken more explicitly than Obama about competition with China and Russia, and he favors a foreign policy that works for the middle class. It is important to note that the legitimate and substantive disagreements between restorationists and reformists are between people who get along with each other. Restorationist sounds pejorative in the sense that the term looks backward, but it is not intended to be. Obama’s foreign policy was successful in many respects, and the case for restoring it is reasonable, as is the case for significant departures from it. Some officials are also restorationist on particular issues and reformist on others. The progressives who staked out new ground on foreign policy during the primary campaign will be a significant force inside the Democratic Party in a Biden administration. Progressives believe foreign policy should primarily serve domestic economic and political goals. They are skeptical of high defense spending and want to demilitarize U.S. foreign policy, but they are also alarmed by the rise of autocracy globally and want to push back against it. Several Biden advisers, in particular Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, made a special effort to engage progressives from the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders campaigns after the primary. Now that the election is over, progressives mainly focused on domestic politics are very much inside the tent shaping Biden’s economic agenda, but some foreign-policy progressives have adopted a more confrontational approach toward the Biden team, hoping to pressure it from the outside on China, Iran, and defense spending. Biden should see these contrasting perspectives as assets, and proactively create a team that reflects the broader foreign-policy debate and avoids groupthink. But he will need to actively manage the different views. He should start by learning lessons from Obama. In late 2012, Obama chose John Kerry to be his second secretary of state because he was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was an old political ally, and was widely perceived to be the most logical candidate. Obama’s signature foreign-policy accomplishment in his first term was the pivot to Asia away from the Middle East, but Kerry wanted to pivot back. Obama returned to a Middle East-centric State Department, seemingly without intending to do so. Blinken, then Kerry’s deputy, was left to manage America’s alliances in Asia—something that he did effectively and that might fall to him now. Similarly, Biden could unintentionally create a uniformly Obamian worldview in his national-security team, unless he purposefully decides to go another route. Biden’s governing goal should be a genuinely intellectually honest process in which fundamental assumptions and policies of restorationist, reformist, and progressive ideas are constantly stress-tested and assessed with an open mind. This process needs to be outcome-oriented and not devolve into the “more meetings” mindset that creates gridlock and trends toward the lowest common denominator. Biden needs a variety of strategic choices. As a seasoned foreign-policy leader, he is ideally positioned to adjudicate this debate and to choose among the options that it will present. Biden should certainly entrust senior positions to people who tend toward the Obamian worldview, but he should also find roles for people who might advocate for a new direction, including Pete Buttigieg, Senators Chris Coons and Chris Murphy, and former officials Jake Sullivan, Toria Nuland, Kurt Campbell, and others who have written or spoken in favor of major policy changes since 2016. Sullivan is likely to take a domestic-policy job, but given his role in developing reformist ideas over the past four years, it is important that he also remain an influential voice on national security, and he is well positioned to help connect the domestic to the foreign. Given the substantive nature of the debate thus far and that it has generally been amicable, an ideologically diverse Cabinet should bring out the best in all factions, sharpening thinking and policy options. Biden will need a variety of ideas because he faces significant political challenges at home. By any metric, Biden certainly has a mandate. He won 306 electoral votes and more popular votes than any president in history. However, the election was not the sweeping repudiation of Trump that Democrats craved. Trumpism has not gone away and instead appears to have transformed the Republican Party into a force for populist nationalism, including hostility toward international cooperation and skepticism about alliances. The Republicans are well positioned to retain control of the Senate following the two runoffs in Georgia in January. If Mitch McConnell reprises the obstructionist role he played in the Obama administration, he could kill Biden’s domestic agenda on arrival. Many Biden Democrats believe that a successful foreign policy requires rejuvenation at home, so McConnell’s tactics may be a big problem. Republicans will likely put Biden’s nominees through intensive hearings, and they may be willing to reject appointees, particularly at the subcabinet level. All Democrats and many Republicans agree on the need to repair and strengthen America’s alliances and partnerships, but this is more complicated than the campaign rhetoric made it appear. The year 2021 will not be like 2009, when Obama was widely greeted as a conquering hero, winning the Nobel Prize after less than a year in office, simply because of what his election signified. The world is a less cooperative and liberal place today. Just consider the rise of nationalist-populist governments in Brazil and India and the erosion of democracy in Turkey and Hungary. America’s closest allies will all work with Biden and welcome the end of Trump’s erraticism, but they have lingering doubts about where things are headed. The Australian and Japanese governments, for example, are quietly concerned about Biden’s approach to China and are watching his early appointments very closely. The French worry that Democrats will leave Europe high and dry as they try to withdraw from the Middle East and from the war on terrorism more broadly so that they can pivot to the China challenge. The British are wondering whether Biden will invest in their special relationship, given that he opposed Brexit. Several officials I spoke with from America’s allies in Europe and Asia have reservations about the planned summit of democracies that Biden made a centerpiece of his election. They worry that the meeting could become an end in itself and be too inwardly focused and beset by problems about which countries qualify as democracies. So how should Biden navigate this complicated landscape? Although he is absolutely right to claim a mandate and to convey optimism about the future, Biden must also be cognizant of the precariousness of his liberal-internationalist worldview. Liberalism is under siege at home and abroad. It will not automatically endure. In COVID-19, Biden will inherit the greatest international challenge facing the United States since the height of the Cold War. The pandemic is a moment of global reordering — not to deal only with the coronavirus but also the underlying issues it revealed, including an uncooperative China and the vulnerabilities of interdependence. Biden must be ambitious at home and abroad, because these realms are inextricably linked. The tricky part is that he must construct a bold policy within the political constraints of Washington, where Democrats may not carry the Senate. Biden should use competition with China as a bridge to Senate Republicans. Their instinct may be obstructionist, particularly because Trump is pressuring them not to recognize Biden’s win as legitimate, but many of them also know that the U.S. cannot afford four years of legislative gridlock if it is to compete with China. A number of Republican foreign-policy experts pointed out to me that some senators, including Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, may be out for scalps, but that others, including Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, and Dan Sullivan, are mainly interested in the substance of Biden’s foreign policy, especially toward China. Biden, then, can use competition with the country to gain support for other political measures. He can create goodwill with some of these Republicans by, in the first few weeks of his term, supporting pending legislation on investments in the semiconductor industry and 5G infrastructure, appointing assistant secretaries for Asia at the State Department and the Pentagon who can easily win bipartisan support, and showing that he is serious about using the Treasury and Commerce Departments to compete with China. These efforts would lay the groundwork for crucial elements of Biden’s Build Back Better domestic program: targeted infrastructure investments, including clean technology; an industrial policy to compete with China on 5G, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence; a limited and strategic decoupling from China in certain areas; and bolstering the resilience of the U.S. economy to external shocks, which would include making supply chains more secure. Although some in Biden Land support this bipartisan give-and-take, others, including many of the restorationists, are very skeptical of using competition with China as a framework for U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Some also have substantive reservations about any decoupling from China. They expect China to reach out for a reset early in 2021—probably regarding the pandemic and climate change—and would like to explore opportunities for cooperation. Foreign-policy progressives are also generally opposed to building Biden’s foreign policy around competition with China, believing that the strategy risks creating a Cold War. These restorationist and progressive fears are overblown. Almost all of these early measures are about enhancing domestic competitiveness, not engaging in an arms race or a clash of civilizations. Indeed, Elizabeth Warren advocated for domestic reforms to compete with China during her presidential campaign. Domestic progressives are much more inclined than their foreign-policy counterparts to support this conceptual framework if it unlocks the politics of an ambitious domestic agenda, which will include new jobs through investments in clean technology—a vital part of a climate policy. Getting serious about competing with China is also justified on the merits. Xi Jinping’s China has become more dictatorial and aggressive. Even the European Union, which is about as benign a geopolitical actor as China could hope for, has all but given up hope that engagement and cooperation will change China or fundamentally moderate its behavior, even on shared interests such as global public health. Cooperation with China on shared interests should occur, but we need to be realistic about the limits. To prevent competition with China from spiraling into outright confrontation, Biden should situate the strategy as part of a larger affirmative vision for strengthening the free world. This policy would include making free societies more resilient to external shocks such as pandemics and economic crises, fighting corruption and kleptocracy, standing up to autocratic countries that try to bully or coerce democracies, and combatting democratic backsliding. This approach would be more effective than organizing a global summit of democracies. The inescapable political reality in Washington is that competition with China is the only way to persuade a Trumpian Republican Party of the benefits of international cooperation—whether through alliances providing a counterweight to Chinese power, through vying with China for influence inside international institutions, or through relying on international law to prevent Chinese revisionism in the South China Sea. Without the China component, Biden has no hope of creating any kind of domestic consensus around internationalism. After addressing the China issue, Biden should shockproof U.S. foreign policy against the return of Trumpism in 2025. Republican senators may hope to harness populism for future elections, but they are, for now at least, committed to America’s alliances. Why not codify their support by introducing legislation that requires congressional approval if the United States is to leave NATO? Biden could proactively build redundancy into the alliance system by supporting EU security and defense cooperation, even if the action risks a duplication with NATO. Biden should also press Congress to enact new commonsense restraints on presidents—for instance on their ability to circumvent the confirmation and security-clearance procedures for appointees—to prevent a recurrence of Trump’s abuses of power. On climate change, he must prioritize carbon-emission cuts at the state and city levels, which are less likely to be stopped or reversed by Congress. In managing relationships with allies, Biden cannot rely only on shared problems to bring them closer. He must also engage these leaders on their terms, paying special interest to their political situation and priorities. It would be a disaster if France were to fall into the hands of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in 2022, so Biden should bolster President Emmanuel Macron, including by showing solidarity with France in the face of a domestic terrorism threat. He should make a genuine effort to help Britain succeed after leaving the EU, as long as it respects its obligations under the Good Friday Agreement. And finally, a bipartisan consensus on China will reassure Japan and Australia. Managing nondemocratic allies—including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Hungary, and the Philippines—is more difficult. They will try to put him in a vise by flirting with Russia and China. Biden won’t succeed by appealing to the better angels of their nature, and he cannot be tricked into thinking that America needs these regimes more than they need America. Biden must be feared by the so-called strongmen before he can be respected by them. He must show that he is willing to push back and that he can wield power and generate leverage more effectively than Obama. He must introduce red lines that cannot be crossed. Only then can transactional cooperation on matters of mutual interest really occur. Biden’s election is a reprieve from Trumpism. Whether that break is permanent or temporary depends very much on the choices that Biden makes. Biden must act with a degree of urgency and boldness to demonstrate that his brand of liberal internationalism effectively addresses the real concerns and anxieties Americans have about the world.

[patriotsnet]

How Can Republicans Win The House

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-can-republicans-win-the-house/

How Can Republicans Win The House

House Republicans’ 2022 Strategy To Beat Democrats: Target Socialist Agenda And Job Killing Policies

How Republicans can win back the White House

House Republicans have laid out their path to winning back the chamber they came close to flipping in 2020. They plan to rely on a similar playbook: slamming the Democrats as socialists who will implement “job killing policies,” while at the same time downplaying any divisions within the GOP.

Since President Biden has taken office, the National Republican Congressional Committee has honed in on the impacts of closing the Keystone XL pipeline and delays in reopening schools.

“It’s going to come down to two different agendas: one is about freedom one is about having the right to self-determine your economic freedom, your individual liberties. The other one is about big government,” National Republican Congressional Committee chair Tom Emmer said in a call with reporters on Wednesday.;

“Every voter is going to have a clear understanding of the Democrats’ socialist agenda and the damaging impact it’s going to have on their daily lives.”

The party is;targeting 47 Democrats and needs a net gain of five seats to flip the chamber. The committee has split its targets into three categories: battleground districts where Mr. Biden lost or won by less than 5%; districts where House Democrats trailed his margins or where they won by less than 10%; and districts in states expected to add or lose congressional districts.

“Liz Cheney not losing her position really showed, ‘Okay we’re going to move on,'” she said.

Reality Check : The Democrats Legislative Fix Will Never Happenand Doesnt Even Touch The Real Threats

Its understandable why Democrats have ascribed a life-or-death quality to S. 1, the For the People bill that would impose a wide range of requirements on state voting procedures. The dozensor hundredsof provisions enacted by Republican state legislatures and governors represent a determination to ensure that the GOP thumb will be on the scale at every step of the voting process. The proposed law would roll that back on a national level by imposing a raft of requirements on statesno excuse absentee voting, more days and hours to votebut would also include public financing of campaigns, independent redistricting commissions and compulsory release of presidential candidates’ tax returns.

There are all sorts of Constitutional questions posed by these ideas. But theres a more fundamental issue here: The Constitutional clause on which the Democrats are relyingArticle I, Section 4, Clause 1gives Congress significant power over Congressional elections, but none over elections for state offices or the choosing of Presidential electors.

Opinion: The House Looks Like A Gop Lock In 2022 But The Senate Will Be Much Harder

Redistricting will take place in almost every congressional district in the next 18 months. The party of first-term presidents usually loses seats in midterms following their inauguration President Barack Obamas Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010 and President Donald Trumps Republicans lost 40 in 2018 but the redistricting process throws a wrench into the gears of prediction models.

President George W. Bush saw his party add nine seats in the House in 2002. Many think this was a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America nearly 14 months earlier, but the GOP, through Republican-led state legislatures, controlled most of the redistricting in the two years before the vote, and thus gerrymandering provided a political benefit. Republicans will also have a firm grip on redistricting ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The Brennan Center has found that the GOP will enjoy complete control of drawing new boundaries for 181 congressional districts, compared with a maximum of 74 for Democrats, though the final numbers could fluctuate once the pandemic-delayed census is completed. Gerrymandering for political advantage has its critics, but both parties engage in it whenever they get the opportunity. In 2022, Republicans just have much better prospects. Democrats will draw districts in Illinois and Massachusetts to protect Democrats, while in Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Ohio and Texas, the GOP will bring the redistricting hammer down on Democrats.

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Voting With The Party

This section was last updated in 2014.

The following data comes from OpenCongress, a website that tracks how often members of Congress vote with the majority of their party caucus.

The average Republican voted with the party approximately 93.6 percent of the time.

The average Republican voted with the party approximately 94.3 percent of the time.

The top Republican voted with the party approximately 98.2 percent of the time.

The bottom Republican voted with the party approximately 75.1 percent of the time.

Reality Check : Biden Cant Be Fdr

Theres no question that Biden is swinging for the fences. Beyond the emerging bipartisan infrastructure bill, he has proposed a far-reaching series of programs that would collectively move the United States several steps closer to the kind of social democracy prevalent in most industrialized nations: free community college, big support for childcare and homebound seniors, a sharp increase in Medicaid, more people eligible for Medicare, a reinvigorated labor movement. It is why 100 days into the administration, NPR was asking a commonly heard question: Can Biden Join FDR and LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?

But the FDR and LBJ examples show conclusively why visions of a transformational Biden agenda are so hard to turn into reality. In 1933, FDR had won a huge popular and electoral landslide, after which he had a three-to-one Democratic majority in the House and a 59-vote majority in the Senate. Similarly, LBJ in 1964 had won a massive popular and electoral vote landslide, along with a Senate with 69 Democrats and a House with 295. Last November, on the other hand, only 42,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from winning re-election. Democrats losses in the House whittled their margin down to mid-single digits. The Senate is 50-50.

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The 2024 Presidential Election Will Be Close Even If Trump Is The Gop Nominee

One very important thing we should have all taken away from both the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests is that the two major parties are in virtual equipose . The ideological sorting-out of the two parties since the 1960s has in turn led to extreme partisan polarization, a decline in ticket-splitting and and in number of genuine swing voters. Among other things, this has led to an atmosphere where Republicans have paid little or no price for the extremism theyve disproportionately exhibited, or for the bad conduct of their leaders, most notably the 45th president.

Indeed, the polarized climate encourages outlandish and immoral base mobilization efforts of the sort Trump deployed so regularly. Some Republicans partisans shook their heads sadly and voted the straight GOP ticket anyway, And to the extent there were swing voters they tended strongly to believe that both parties were equally guilty of excessive partisanship, and/or that all politicians are worthless scum, so why not vote for the worthless scum under whom the economy hummed?

The bottom line is that anyone who assumes Republicans are in irreversible decline in presidential elections really hasnt been paying attention.

Can Republicans Win The House

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee came out with a memo yesterday asserting that the House was not likely to land in Republican hands, but Nate Silver thinks its more likely than Democrats may want to admit:

The DNCC memo, of course,; is meant to serve a purpose other than providing an accurate forecast of November theyre trying to make sure that the base doesnt become so demoralized that they stay home and make a bad election even worse.

Im still not certain that Republicans can take back the House, but its certainly possible for the reasons Silver points out.

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How Republicans Can Win In 2022

STUART WESBURY | Special to LNP | LancasterOnline

For Republicans, the only goal must be to win back the U.S. House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

That should be easy. In November, even though Donald Trump was not reelected president, the down-ballot races boded well for the GOPs future. But we Republicans are not acting like we want to win anything. So where do we go from here?

Of late, Republicans have separated themselves into several distinct groups, each with a different attitude and view.

For one group, retribution is the goal. These enthusiastic Trump supporters, distressed by the seven Republican U.S. senators who found Trump guilty in his second impeachment trial, are in a very unhappy mood. While the Republican Committee of Lancaster County did not pass a vote to censure Sen. Pat Toomey, other local committees did. The Pennsylvania Republican Party rebuked, rather than censured, Toomey.

The other senators who voted with Toomey to convict Trump were subjected to a variety of admonishments, as was, most notably, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. It began to look like an inquisition.

This is very serious. A very large group of Republican voters, numbering in the millions throughout the United States, are similarly angry. They continue to challenge the validity of President Joe Bidens election, wrongly insisting victory was stolen from Trump in November.

In other words, the fight goes on and many solid Republicans are on the proverbial chopping block.

Republicans Will Likely Take Control Of The Senate By 2024

How the GOP can win the house in 2022

The usual midterm House losses by the White House party dont always extend to the Senate because only a third of that chamber is up for election every two years and the landscape sometimes strongly favors the presidential party . But there a still generally an out-party wave that can matter, which is why Republicans may have a better than average chance of winning in at least some of the many battleground states that will hold Senate elections next year . If they win four of the six youll probably be looking at a Republican Senate.

But its the 2024 Senate landscape that looks really promising for the GOP. Democrats will be defending 23 seats and Republicans just 10. Three Democratic seats, and all the Republican seats, are in states Trump carried twice. Four other Democratic seats are in states Trump won once. It should be a banner year for Senate Republicans.

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Reality Check #: The Electoral College And The Senate Are Profoundly Undemocraticand Were Stuck With Them

Because the Constitution set up a state-by-state system for picking presidents, the massive Democratic majorities we now see in California and New York often mislead us about the partys national electoral prospects. In 2016, Hillary Clintons 3-million-vote plurality came entirely from California. In 2020, Bidens 7-million-vote edge came entirely from California and New York. These are largely what election experts call wasted votesDemocratic votes that dont, ultimately, help the Democrat to win. That imbalance explains why Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within a handful of votes in three states from doing the same last November, despite his decisive popular-vote losses.

The response from aggrieved Democrats? Abolish the Electoral College! In practice, theyd need to get two-thirds of the House and Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures, to ditch the process that gives Republicans their only plausible chance these days to win the White House. Shortly after the 2016 election, Gallup found that Republican support for abolishing the electoral college had dropped to 19 percent. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state scheme to effectively abolish the Electoral College without changing the Constitution, hasnt seen support from a single red or purple state.

Why Republicans Are Likely To Win The 2022 Mid

The public opinion in the United States may indeed be generally opposed to the Republican Party coming to power in the 2022 mid-term election, yet we should not close our eyes to the fact that the GOP is still well-positioned to take back the House and change the balance of power in its favor.

Taking a glance at what happened during recent months, it seems highly probable that the Republican party may have little to no chance to win the 2022 mid-term election. The first and the most noticeable incident that helps this idea prevail is that it was a Republican president who instead of leading the country towards peace in a time of crisis back in January, actually added fuel to the huge fire of division and riot in the U.S. and encouraged his extremist supporters to attack the Capitol Building, creating a national embarrassment that can hardly be erased from peoples memory.

To compound the puzzle, while no one can deny the destructive role the former president Donald Trump had in plotting for and leading the , in the battle of Trump against the truth, the members of the Republican party chose to opt for supporting the former at the cost of sacrificing the latter; It was on this Wednesday that Republican leaders in Congress expressed their opposition to a proposed bipartisan commission designed and created for investigating the Capitol riot that was carried out by Trumps supporters.

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The Plausible Solution: Just Win More

Whether the public sees Democratic demands for these structural changes as overdue or overreaching, the key point is that they are currently exercises in futility. The only plausible road to winning their major policy goals is to win by winning. This means politics, not re-engineering. They need to find ways to take down their opponents, and then be smarter about using that power while they have it.

They certainly have issues to campaign on. In the few weeks, we have learned that some of Americas wealthiest people have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all. Even as the Wall Street Journal editorial writers were responding to a Code Red emergency , the jaw-dropping nature of the reportfollowed by a New York Times piece about the impotence of the IRS to deal with the tax evasions of private equity royaltyconfirmed the folk wisdom of countless bars, diners, and union halls: the wealthy get away with murder.

Of course this is a whole lot easier said than done. A political climate where inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues has the potential to override good economic news. And 2020 already showed what can happen when a relative handful of voices calling for defunding the police can drown out the broader usage of economic fairness.

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For The People Act Matters

Gerrymandering, under state laws, can be done by the party in power. That means the GOP has a significant advantage as they control the legislature in most states. In some states, redistricting is done by an independent commission, but that’s a rarity. According to Ballotpedia, the GOP has a trifecta in 23 states, compared to the 15 by Democrats.

In a bid to break their dominance over redistricting, the Democrats have introduced HR 1 or the For The People Act. Amongst other things, the bill bans partisan gerrymandering and state-level voting restrictions, which would make it harder for the GOP to limit voting rights. So naturally, the party filibustered the bill in the Senate. TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier told Mother Jones, “Absent the passage of HR1, the GOP is poised to gerrymander their way to a House majority.”;

If HR 1 is passed, it would abolish partisan gerrymandering by state governments in favor of independent commissions. It also invalidates existing maps that have the intent or effect of unduly favoring or disfavoring one political party over another. This is an issue that has to be fixed in Congress because as the Supreme Court ruled in 2019, federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering. There is however some hope for Democrats. A stripped-down version of HR1 has been proposed by Sen Joe Manchin. It does get rid of some of the more controversial measures but keeps in the ban on partisan gerrymandering.;

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Republicans Can Win The Next Elections Through Gerrymandering Alone

Even if voting patterns remain the same, Republicans could still win more seats in Congress through redistricting

In Washington, the real insiders know that the true outrages are whats perfectly legal and that its simply a gaffe when someone accidentally blurts out something honest.

And so it barely made a ripple last week when a Texas congressman said aloud whats supposed to be kept to a backroom whisper: Republicans intend to retake the US House of Representatives in 2022 through gerrymandering.

We have redistricting coming up and the Republicans control most of that process in most of the states around the country, Representative Ronny Jackson told a conference of religious conservatives. That alone should get us the majority back.

Hes right. Republicans wont have to win more votes next year to claim the US House.

In fact, everyone could vote the exact same way for Congress next year as they did in 2020 when Democratic candidates nationwide won more than 4.7m votes than Republicans and narrowly held the chamber but under the new maps that will be in place, the Republican party would take control.

If Republicans aggressively maximize every advantage and crash through any of the usual guardrails and they have given every indication that they will theres little Democrats can do. And after a 2019 US supreme court decision declared partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable political issue, the federal courts will be powerless as well.

How The Republicans Can Win The White House In 2016

The Republican Party finds itself in an odd place heading into the 2016 presidential election. Theyve made tremendous gains at the state level under President Obama, hold a near-unbreakable majority in the House, and now control the Senate as well.

But theyve come up short by a significant margin in the last two presidential elections, where turnout is higher and the electorate is more diverse, and have plenty going against them in the next one.

Presidential elections are unpredictable and it often appears that one party can’t lose until it does. Democrats bounced back from three demoralizing blowout losses to win in 1992 against an incumbent, President George H.W. Bush, who seemed unbeatable earlier in his presidency. Republicans could do the same in 2016.

So what does the GOP have to do to finally crack the White House? These are some broad theories on how they win:

Cut Into the Democratic Base

The guiding principle behind a number of Republican candidates is that the party can only win when it reverses its losing margins with Democratic-leaning groups. That means winning converts among the most important planks of President Obamas winning coalition young voters, minorities, and single women.

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[deniscollins]

Paid Time Off, Free Fries: How Corporate America Is Getting Out the Vote

If you owned a business, would you offer employees up to 3 hours of paid time to vote: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Bank of America is offering employees up to three hours of paid time to vote this year. The spirits company Diageo North America has declared a no-meeting day on Nov. 3. Best Buy is closing stores until noon that day, and PayPal is offering a half day, paid, to workers who volunteer at polling places.

Less than two weeks before the general election, corporate America is having a civic awakening, with thousands of companies encouraging voter participation by offering their workers paid time off, voter-education tools and interactive sessions on how elections work. Some are even providing marketing and free legal advice to local election boards or nonprofit get-out-the-vote groups.

“Companies can’t do everything, but we can function in civil society in a way that really helps to encourage and enable civic participation,” said Franz Paasche, head of corporate affairs at PayPal, where the efforts have varied from paid time off to hosting a speaker series on elections.

Two years ago, when executives from PayPal, Patagonia and Levi Strauss founded Time to Vote, a nonpartisan project that asks companies to encourage workers to participate in elections, there were around 400 members. In recent weeks, membership has shot up to more than 1,700. A similar initiative, called A Day for Democracy, has attracted more than 350 companies since it began with seven Boston-area companies in July. ElectionDay.org, sponsored by the nonprofit organization Vote.org, has gathered pledges from more than 800 companies promising employees paid time to vote.

Most companies are quick to say that their goal isn’t to wade into politics or get any particular candidate into office. Rather, many executives say that they were galvanized by recent upheavals that have put issues of race and gender discrimination, economic inequality, climate change and other topics at center stage for employees and customers, and voting is a way to take a stand.

“The Black Lives Matter and the civil unrest has been a call to arms for C.E.O.s in terms of informing corporate behaviors and civic actions,” said Peter Palandjian, a private-equity executive in Boston who started A Day for Democracy with commitments from the Red Sox and Bank of America. “And I think that’s what’s very different this year.”

Earlier this week, Goldman Sachs announced that it would give workers up to half a day off to vote, paid, for the first time. Other companies that have offered paid time to vote in the past, including Citi and Gap Inc., have announced that they’re providing additional paid hours if needed as well as voter-education resources this year.

The extra hours are likely to be necessary given that a record turnout is expected this year, which could mean long lines and additional safety procedures in light of the pandemic. In anticipation, Diageo North America, which owns brands like Guinness and Smirnoff, is changing course and allowing employees to take whatever time they need to vote without a written request. Previously, employees were given up to two hours of paid time off to vote, which they had to request in advance. The company also plans to set up a team for workers to call if they run into any trouble casting their ballots, said Laura Watt, its executive vice president of human resources.

Some companies are hoping to encourage voter turnout in general. Shake Shack is giving away free french fries to customers who vote early. Tory Burch, the clothing label, designed a T-shirt that reads “VOTE,” the proceeds from which go to a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote project called I Am a Voter. Coca-Cola dispatched a team of marketers to create public-service announcements on the importance of early, in-person voting that ran on radio, television and at bus shelters around its home state of Georgia; broadcast spots featured the voices of Ed Bastian, chief executive of Delta, the Atlanta Hawks forward Cam Reddish and other local celebrities.

Corley Kenna, who runs communications at Patagonia and co-founded Time to Vote, took advantage of additional benefits her employer is providing this year to work at election sites in Atlanta, her hometown, with two colleagues. Between morning and afternoon shifts at the State Farm Arena and the Southwest Arts Center this month, she caught up on work.

“I think it is on all of us — the private sector, nonprofit, academia — to help provide safe and secure elections,” said Ms. Kenna, a Democrat and environmental advocate who was a senior adviser in the State Department under President Obama.

Old Navy, the biggest brand owned by Gap, said it would pay employees to be poll workers, on top of what they get paid by county election commissions. The retailer said it hoped its policy would fuel voter turnout among its young store staff, more than 60 percent of whom are between the ages of 18 and 29. Levi’s extended its paid time off for voting to poll worker training this year and has been featuring environmental and racial justice activists on its Instagram account to talk about voting.

The push by retailers and restaurant chains is significant because it can be especially difficult for hourly workers to find time to vote. After health care, retail is the second-biggest private sector employer in the United States.

In addition to making sure that their efforts are not being seen as partisan externally, companies have been careful about how they communicate internally. Diageo North America has been holding weekly events in the run-up to the election with the African heritage group and women’s network, for example, discussing the issues at stake for their communities, but in a “neutral way,” Ms. Watt said. “We’ve been very clear about not being partisan or not having a particular view leaning one way or another,” she said.

At PayPal, dozens of employees have participated in PayPal Votes, a multipronged internal effort that directs people to polling sites and other voter information and sponsors an election newsletter and guest speakers. A Sept. 10 interview with Alex Padilla, the California secretary of state, on voting procedures drew 600 participants.

Still, not every company is being so proactive. Workers at Amazon, who have been pushing unsuccessfully for a paid day off to vote, are threatening to shut down warehouses temporarily on Oct. 31 if the e-commerce giant doesn’t meet their demands. And on Thursday, Vote.org, a digital platform that helps people register to vote online and provides information about polling sites, called on more than two dozen companies that have not yet committed to giving workers time off to do so. It cited Pew Research Center statistics from 2014 showing that in the past, 35 percent of registered voters didn’t vote because of work or school conflicts.

Tory Burch, which employs nearly 3,000 people in the United States, was one of the few companies offering employees paid time off to vote in 2016, when its founder wrote an op-ed encouraging other company bosses to do the same. At the time, fellow chief executives, some from Fortune 500 companies, told Ms. Burch that they couldn’t follow suit because doing so would be regarded as a partisan act, intended to favor Democratic candidates.

The feedback was “eye opening,” Ms. Burch recalled, given that “encouraging Americans to use their vote is patriotic and not a Democratic initiative.” This year, she is closing all stores and offices on Nov. 3 and encouraging her staff to volunteer as poll workers, believing that the employee good will it generates far outweighs the lost revenue.

In a note to employees Thursday morning reminding them of their options to take paid time off to vote, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, talked about the importance of a smooth political process.

“The peaceful and stable transition of power — whether it is to the second administration of a president or a new one — is a hallmark of America’s 244-year history as an independent nation,” Mr. Dimon wrote, adding that while he acknowledges the “tremendous passion and strong opinions” that have played into the current race, respecting the democratic process “is paramount.”

[wellesleyunderground]

W in Art: Hoi-Fei Mok ‘10 (@alifeofgreen)

Cover Image by Lydia Yamaguchi

Hoi-Fei Mok is our fearless leader here at WU but they are also an artist, activist and environmental scientist. Based in the Bay Area, Fei recently completed a fellowship with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of the cohort addressing the question “What does EQUITY look like?” We recently sat down to talk about the arts, sciences, and the YBCA fellowship experience. 

What is your “origin story”? How did you fall in love with the arts? (and sciences?)

I’ve been a creative person since I was young - drawing, painting, playing the violin. I never expected to take it far because I was always told it wouldn’t make a good career. At Wellesley, I became super focused on my schoolwork and pretty much stopped anything creative except orchestra. Even then, it felt like doing things out of habit rather than for the joy of it. After graduating, I really wanted to go back to art. I picked up the guitar and bought some paints, but wasn’t confident in how to jump back in. A writer friend of mine told me to just do it, sketch something out even if it doesn’t look good, and made me set a goal to have two pieces ready in time for his book reading in a few month’s time. That really helped me get back into the groove of things. Slowly I got away from the thinking that art had to look portfolio ready or that my music had to be perfect, and I started doing it for my own self-care and joy. Eventually as I got more radical and involved in activism, my art also became a medium to talk about social justice and I joined community art projects.

My route to science came about through my environmentalism. I majored in biochemistry thinking I was going to go to veterinary school (to save the animals!), but I realized in hindsight (the summer before senior year, hah) that this came about from my interest in conservation and the environment. I ended up doing some ecological research after graduation and ended up getting my PhD in environmental science, focusing on wastewater reuse for agricultural irrigation. And now I work in climate change policy. Looking back, science set a good foundation for understanding the environment and climate change, but I wouldn’t say I fell in love with science so much as realized that I was good with data. I am hugely passionate about addressing climate change and while it is very useful to have a science background, climate change is not just a technical problem, it requires a strong social, political, and economic understanding as well. So I’m still in the process of learning all of that.

How has your background in science influenced your art, and vice versa?

I haven’t gotten as much crossover as I would like (or generally enough time/capacity for doing art)! There have been a few climate related pieces that I’ve done, like this recent street art installation about bee colony collapse and the seed connection in my art fellowship project below. I love the pieces that incorporate climate data directly, like Jill Pelto’s paintings, Natalie Miebach’s musical sculptures, or this string quartet of rising temperatures, and all of the light installations by Luzinterruptus are brilliant for bringing in so many environmental themes, upcycling, and public education. I’m really interested in exploring installations more, so as soon as I get the right opportunity, that’ll be the next thing I’m working on.

What is the story of this fellowship? (selection/application)

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is a unique art institution in San Francisco. They work from the premise that art and culture drive social change, so many of their projects have a social justice bent. Their Fellows program came out of their annual YBCA 100 Summit in 2015. During this summit, people crowdsourced hundreds of different questions that drive and inspire community transformation. These questions were distilled down to three themes: 1) can we design freedom?, 2) what does equity look like?, and 3) why citizenship? Then three cohorts of 30 people - artists, activists, policymakers, writers, educators, and more - were selected by essay to “engage in a yearlong process of inquiry, dialogue, and project generation”. I applied for the equity cohort and (much to my surprise) was accepted.

Can you give us a brief overview of the final project that you ultimately presented?

We had a couple of group collaborations. Our cohort came up with an equity statement which came out of this beautiful collective exercise of brainstorming what equity looks like to each of us. Malcolm Gin analyzed the most frequent words and Martin K. White pulled them together into a free flowing poem. It may not make a ton of sense to the layperson reading it, but the collective process that created the piece represents to me one of the truest forms of equity and inclusion, and reminds me that the process is as important as the outcome itself.

We also wrote up a framework for creating equitable community art projects, which was shared on WU a few months ago. We created the guide for those looking to do community art projects to help them design equitable and inclusive projects that don’t take advantage of the communities they’re working in or help to gentrify the neighborhood. As artists are often the first wave of gentrifiers in a neighborhood, we felt very strongly that we needed to help other artists understand how they can work with the community and raise up local voices, rather than come in to take up more space.

In addition to these group projects, we each had individual projects we were working on. My project partner, Shalini Agrawal, and I were inspired by the People’s Kitchen Collective as well as an existing collaboration YBCA had with the local elementary school, Bessie Carmichael. Our final project, Food Equity and Cultural Memory: A Public Feast, was done in collaboration with rising first graders from Bessie Carmichael and artist E. Oscar Maynard. During the past school year, the students collected oral and cultural histories of family recipes that resulted in the recipe cards by Oscar. Using the recipes as a point of inspiration, we designed a public meal for attendees of YBCA Public Square. In feeding the public, this project highlights the issue of food access and insecurity in the neighborhood as well as the available cultural resources and memory in the form of recipes passed down from generations. By providing seeds to the feast participants, we reconnected the ideas of growing and cooking one’s own food to resilience, the earth, and self-sustainability. The students were centered as featured artists and like the seeds, they are the rising stewards of resilience for the community.

The projects were all presented at an one day public square exhibition at the YBCA. My first time presenting work at a high profile art museum, so pretty cool!

The theme of this year’s fellowship was addressing equity. How did you approach this theme? (on your own and collaboratively?)

The topic of equity is really wide. We could start by talking about what it DOESN’T look like (racism, poverty, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamphobia, misogyny etc) and that in itself is already a complex topic because of all the intersections. But finding examples of what equity DOES look like is much harder, especially in thinking about how to bring it to fruition. We spent several sessions workshopping some ideas on this and I don’t think we came close to even scratching the surface on the question.

One of the interesting points we brought up was whether equity is some horizon that we never actually reach because true equity is impossible and we spend our entire lives working towards it and maybe that’s the point that we’re struggling in process all the time. Darkness, pain, and trouble was one of the recurring themes in our discussion and needing to move through it to self heal and realize the love.

We spoke a lot about the public square and the intention behind it. Many of us thought that an one-day event wouldn’t be enough to really achieve everything we wanted (change the way community arts is done, catalyze some of the momentum from the post-election political revitalization), but we recognized it as the beginning rather than the end-all. That being said though, we wanted it to be as equitable and inclusive as possible, which included making it accessible to people who wouldn’t normally feel invited/comfortable to art museums. One of the things we fought for and won was provision of a higher number of complimentary tickets and promotion of YBCA’s pay-what-you-can membership offering. My project partner and I intentionally set our project outside so that we could reach people who weren’t otherwise going to go inside the museum. One of my highlights was in fact talking with an Iranian elder who wandered over from the Yerba Buena Gardens and sharing some fava bean salad with him, which made him remember Tehran.  

What was your creative process for this project? How long did it take and how much of the work was done either solely/with the project team vs input from others (not actually working on the project) along the way?

The fellowship was structured initially for monthly meetings over the course of a year. YBCA organized guest lecturers to showcase different examples of what equity could look like and facilitated some discussion during the meetings. But we didn’t get many opportunities in the beginning to talk with each other about what we thought equity looked like. A few of us started organizing outside meetings a few months in to get to know each other and attend community events to get ideas. But before that could take off, the aftermath of the national elections hit and we were all in a stupor over the holidays. And then finally, six months after we started, after we had a second round of cis white dudes presenting to us (a cohort on equity of all things), we put our foot down and decided to self organize.

It was really, really hard trying to restart in the middle of the year. Not only were we trying to get to know each other, we were also trying to schedule outside meetings for 30 people, hold each other accountable, figure out what exactly we were doing as a group and as individuals, figuring out project finances, and talk about this giant topic of equity. Needless to say, it was really exhausting and frustrating, particularly when the brunt of the labor of organizing/attending the extra meetings and herding all of us cats was done by the women/genderqueer folx in the group. And then after we had group meetings, we had project meetings with our project partners. Unfortunately, talking about logistics and organizing took up about 80% of our time and energy, with so little leftover to actually dive into the content.

But when we did get to connect, it was beautiful and illuminating. We had grand ideas for what the public square should be like and we knew we didn’t want it to look like a disjointed science fair with projects all over the place. We came up with the equity statement to help tie everything together and several of our projects were created with similar themes (games/play, benches as a metaphor for equity, etc). For my own project, I had approached my project partner Shalini with an idea early on in December and we kept up conversations about it, but didn’t get around to settling on a solid project until April. Meeting and working with Shalini was definitely one of the highlights of my fellowship experience. Shalini is the director of the California College of the Art’s Center for Art and Public Life and is super experienced guiding projects through, so it was really awesome to learn from her, especially the brainstorming process, which I always struggle with. It was also my first time doing production for an event like the public square, as much of my previous art is visual, so the process was quite different from what I was used to. And despite the high level of stress/frustration, it was also a good learning experience.   

Looking back, is there anything that you wish you had/the team had done differently?

Some reflections from our fellowship are written up here by Katherin Canton and Trisha Barua here but “moving at the speed of trust” sums it up pretty well. Because we didn’t get the time in the beginning to build relationships with each other and talk with each other, it was so much harder when we had to self organize because we couldn’t fall back on our relationships to hold each other accountable (and show up to meetings or even fill out the doodle poll to have said meeting). One of my biggest takeaways was that in any project, you have to get a solid working relationship before you can move forward.

Now that the fellowship is over, I feel like we’ve gotten to a space with each other where we’re much more comfortable supporting each other’s projects and making time to meet. We’re organizing monthly potlucks to maintain connections and maybe find projects to continue collaborating with each other. It’s a super rad group of people so I’m hopeful we find other places to work with each other.  

Just for fun…

What are your favorite comfort foods+drinks?

Milk tea, Hong Kong style pineapple buns, and egg tarts.

What do you do for self-care?

My art is my self care and my activism. I think art is a way to connect to people and change culture. When I have enough time and space, I’ll do art that talks about stories from the queer and trans Asian Pacific Islander community or the prison industrial complex. But other times, I’ll paint rabbits going on journeys because the world needs more light and joy too.

That and I read a lot. And do triathlons.

[politicoscope]

Sanders’ Remarkable Transformation to Possibly Face Off With Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.politicoscope.com/sanders-remarkable-transformation-to-possibly-face-off-with-trump/

Sanders’ Remarkable Transformation to Possibly Face Off With Trump

By the fall of 2018, when Democrats were promoting a slate of centrist candidates to topple Republicans in Congress, Bernie Sanders was seeing a very different picture. The Vermont senator and avowed democratic socialist was convinced his most fervent supporters were as energized as ever, ready to rally around the political insurgency flag he planted in 2016. He could keep stoking the deep frustration and mistrust of the political system and attract backers who had felt too disillusioned to bother voting in the past — much like President Donald Trump had on the right.

Sanders, 78, the oldest candidate in the race, also saw his unwavering commitment to universal health care, combating climate change, canceling student debt, and tuition-free college continuing to excite young people, including Latinos who came to call him “Tio” (uncle) Bernie.

Bernie Sanders sure he’d have the money

And, most importantly, he was sure he’d have the money, enough consistent financial backing built on mostly small donations made online from around the country, to finish what he started in 2016, rising from an unknown nationally to a credible challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

This time, Sanders’ movement has a political machine to propel it.

“Last time, we really did not know how this would go with our fundraising model,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ senior adviser. “It ended up being $240 million, but we had no way of knowing that in the spring of 2015, so we were very slow to staff-up in early states. This time, we did things very differently. We knew we were a front-runner.”

Bernie Sanders Election Campaign

Bernie Sanders political transformation

Now everyone else knows it, too. Sanders’ lopsided win Saturday in Nevada caps his remarkable transformation from political insurgent to possibly even a favorite to face off with Trump in November. Both have campaigns built on mobilizing die-hard loyalists but also disaffected voters — even though their politics are polar opposite.

“The Trump Democrats are people that got abandoned by the Democrat Party and Bernie was straightforward about that,” said Jim Hightower, a populist former Texas agriculture commissioner who endorsed Sanders in 2016 and remains loyal to him.

Bernie Sanders’ impressive campaign bank account

Bernie Sanders’ impressive campaign bank account has helped keep many others loyal to him as well. He raised nearly $96 million by the end of last year, raked in an additional $25 million in January and has vowed to raise and spend $1 billion to defeat Trump in November. His donors are like a faucet that he can turn on as needed because they contribute in small amounts, with little concern of exceeding federal limits.

That stream of cash has also meant Sanders could build a more professional operation, with longer-range planning and better organizational structure.

His last campaign didn’t even have a human resources department, something that allowed multiple accusations of sexual harassment among staff to fester and forced Sanders to apologize before launching his 2020 bid. This time, Sanders has emphasized hiring more women and minorities to top positions, including Faiz Shakir, a Pakistani-American, who is the first Muslim to manage a major presidential campaign.

It’s a money advantage that few of his competitors can match.

Bernie Sanders worked to better frame issue

Beyond money and organization, Sanders has also worked to better frame issues. After he struggled in 2016 with foreign policy, Sanders spent the years between presidential runs giving speeches about America’s place in the world and became an especially vocal critic of U.S. efforts to help Saudi Arabia fight a war against insurgents backed by Iran in Yemen.

Bernie Sanders worked for change within the structure of the national Democratic Party

He also worked for change within the structure of the national Democratic Party, muscling through rules changes that helped his campaign this time. “Superdelegates,” mainly elected officials and party leaders, helped Clinton secure the party’s nomination four year ago. Sanders supporters helped force a change to limit their influence during the national convention coming up this summer in Milwaukee.

Bernie Sanders campaign drove changes

And his campaign drove changes in the way that Iowa reported its caucus results by reporting voters’ first preference in addition to how many delegates a campaign won. That’s allowed Sanders to crow about edging Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in the popular vote, even though the pair essentially tied in the number of delegates awarded.

“One way to put it is the 2016 campaign was compost that the 2020 campaign has grown out of,” said Norman Solomon, co-founder of the activist group RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. “A lot of campaigns go boom and then go bust after they are over. Bernie is still booming.”

It didn’t always seem that way. Sanders joined the 2020 race with polling that was largely stable but not overly impressive, showing him among the leaders with former Vice President Joe Biden, but potentially with less room for growth than newcomers like Buttigieg.

To improve his standing, Sanders began hiring staff in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada far faster than in 2016 when “he wasn’t well-known and it took a while for people to catch on,” said Jane Sanders, the senator’s wife and close adviser.

“They didn’t know him throughout all of the country and that hurt,” she said. “They do now.”

Bernie Sanders focused on attracting Iowans

Rather than introducing himself to voters, Sanders focused on attracting Iowans who traditionally didn’t vote, hiring students who lobbied their classmates. He ultimately won nine of the 13 precincts with more than 20% registered voters under 23.

Bernie Sanders activated volunteers nationwide

Sanders also activated volunteers nationwide who supported him in 2016 and began pouring into Iowa as the election neared. By just before caucus night, his campaign said about 1,700 out-of-state volunteers had arrived.

“I think a lot of people wanted change in the Obama years and we didn’t see enough,” said Boyd Walker, a 51-year-old real estate investor who drove from his home in Virginia to volunteer in Iowa for Sanders in the weeks before the caucus. “Now we’re really ready for change.”

The campaign also concentrated on 87 satellite caucuses, sites which Sanders supporters had lobbied for and which were designed to make voting more accessible for people unable to attend traditional caucuses – which, in some cases, were college students and minority voters.

The campaign said it built similarly strong racially diverse support in heavily Hispanic Nevada, where Sanders advertised in Spanish-language media and organized more than 30 events in Spanish, including a town hall led by one of his top supporters, New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

“Super Tuesday”

It is attempting to do the same in California and Texas the largest states voting on March 2’s “Super Tuesday” and home to an estimated 13.5 million eligible Hispanic voters. During a Saturday night rally in San Antonio, organizers led the more than 1,500 people in the crowd — some of whom didn’t speak even basic Spanish — in cries of “Arriba Tio Bernie!”

Wooing minorities, especially African American Democrats throughout the South, was something Sanders was largely unable to do against Clinton in 2016. But his top advisers now say Nevada was a preview of their candidate’s improved appeal with people of color that can help carry him through not only this year’s primary but the general election against Trump.

Bernie Sanders’ core message remains an economic one

Sanders’ core message, though, remains an economic one. He’s promising to reduce income inequality, appealing to Americans Sanders sees as most hurt by the current system, working-class people and those under 25 — even though they tend to vote in lower numbers.

“They are the hardest constituency to get out to vote,” Shakir said. “They’ve got other things on their mind.”

The results so far have been mixed. Sanders vowed to spark unprecedented Iowa caucus turnout and failed. Eight days later he won a New Hampshire primary that featured a record of nearly 300,000 Democratic ballots cast — but that total was inflated by the state’s voting-age population that’s increasingly rapidly.

Early in the campaign it seemed that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was ascendant, and Sanders adjusted. He replaced his state director in New Hampshire and in South Carolina, home to the South’s first primary.

Bernie Sanders’ Health Problem

And then there was Sanders’ heart attack Oct. 1.

“With that, I think he’s also reassessed the campaign. Similar to when you’re looking at your life and looking at a campaign, you’re trying to see what’s working, what’s not,” said Shannon Jackson, Sanders’ New Hampshire state director. “It was a great point for us to pivot and really focus on various parts of the campaign that can really hopefully lead us to victory.”

Indeed, Sanders was largely able to rebound not by overhauling his campaign, but by simply staying the same. Sanders’ top policy advisers say he focuses on making big ideas relatable to people who have felt left out of the political process.

One area the campaign had hoped to stress more this time compared to his 2016 run was Sanders’ personal side. In his announcement speech last March in Brooklyn, the senator spoke about growing up in “a three-and-a-half room rent-controlled apartment” nearby. In San Antonio on Saturday night, Sanders told a crowd about 150 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border that he understood the immigrant experience, speaking at length about his father arriving penniless in the U.S. from Poland.

Bernie Sanders undeniable connection with his voters

While Sanders has made an undeniable connection with his voters, he hasn’t done it by revealing much about himself, something he acknowledged in an interview that aired on “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

“I’m a kind of — private person in a sense,” he said. “And … you know, I’m not particularly anxious to tell the world about everything personal in my life.”

The higher he rises, though, the harder that may become.

Bernie Sanders and his wife during an Election Campaign

ap

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

In this week’s politics chat, we discuss what major legislation, if any, Republicans in Washington can pass. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): We’re going to play a game today!

This was supposed to be the week when President Trump really started selling the American public on tax reform. Instead, he started Tuesday with a series of tweets attacking Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican senator who would be key in passing … tax reform. And then Sen. Jeff Flake announced his retirement, freeing him from the need to please Trump or the Republican base.

So, this got me thinking: Will Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress accomplish any of their major legislative goals before the 2018 midterms? Which are most likely? (“Major” is obviously subjective.)

To answer that, I’m giving everyone $100. You can bet however much of it you want on Trump signing major legislation on …

Taxes.

Health care.

Infrastructure.

A Dreamers deal.

The Wall.

Abortion.

Something else. (Campaign finance? Voter ID? Who knows?)

So if you think the GOP is 100 percent likely to pass tax reform and has no chance of passing anything else, you would put all $100 on taxes. You must bet all your money.

Everyone got it?

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Yo, Micah … can I borrow $100?

micah: No.

Everyone good on the rules? Also, shout out to @coreyhogan for this idea. (He suggested we should have done this with our last chat.)

harry: I’m into it.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Yes.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Yeah.

micah:

First up: TAXES!

Place your bets!

perry: $40.

clare.malone: $50

harry: Well. I’ll say $44.50.

micah: $74

BAM!

clare.malone: wowww

Spicy bet.

harry: WOW.

perry: So, Micah, is that because you think taxes has a great chance or everything else has almost no chance?

harry: Micah is coming in hot and strong.

clare.malone: Bad sign for THE WALL.

micah: Here’s my reasoning: They’re working on it now, which by itself is a huuuuuuge advantage given the timeline (before the midterms). I don’t necessarily think taxes are guaranteed to pass — or even more likely than not — but the odds seem much better than all this other stuff.

perry: That seems right to me.

clare.malone: Yeah, I agree with the reasoning, though not the amount bet.

I’m a cautious lady.

micah: Although, the Trump-Corker stuff this week seemed about taxes, right?

perry: Not really. Corker called him crazy again. (Paraphrasing, slightly.)

micah: Oh, that happened first?

There was this, though:

Bob Corker, who helped President O give us the bad Iran Deal & couldn't get elected dog catcher in Tennessee, is now fighting Tax Cuts….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2017

perry: Corker was on morning shows:

WATCH: "Left to his own devices, do you think the president is a threat to national security?" @savannahguthrie asks @SenBobCorker http://pic.twitter.com/GxFFZvUTeU

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) October 24, 2017

So Corker made his comments and Trump was responding

micah: Ahhh, OK…

clare.malone: This is like middle school: We need the timeline of who insulted whom before first period

micah: haha.

clare.malone: It’s depressing.

harry: I think the bigger story here — besides Micah’s crazy bet — is that we all put down a ton of money.

Let me explain why I think tax reform has a good shot of passing. It comes down to four key variables:

Congressional Republicans want it to pass.

The public isn’t that interested in taxes, so you could pass something that might be unpopular.

Donors want it.

It hasn’t failed yet like health care.

perry: I agree with this. Micah’s high number is right.

micah: I don’t think tax reform is likely!!!! I just think it’s far likelier than this other stuff!

perry: Right.

I see a couple of other things having a chance. But tax reform may be close to 50-50, and some of this other stuff is 0-100.

clare.malone: Wait, I forgot I have to spend all my money by the end of this game.

micah: Yes.

clare.malone: Many of these things won’t get done.

harry: You gotta spend all that green.

micah: You can change your bet, Clare.

clare.malone: So, yeah, I think Micah’s convinced me!

micah: I’m winning!

clare.malone: I want to cautiously bump up to $65.

harry: That’s a lot of dough.

perry: I’m sticking with $40. Harry, you can change too.

micah: Harry can’t change his.

I MAKE THE RULES AROUND HERE!!!

perry: I see.

harry: I don’t want to change.

micah: OK, anyone have any other thoughts on tax reform’s chances? Or what kind of bill would have the best chance?

perry: A deficit-increasing bill that doesn’t pay for itself.

micah: Go on …

perry: To get it passed, the GOP needs a bill that is a tax cut, without any real tax increases. Anything that raises anyone’s taxes is a political problem, except for raising taxes on the wealthy, which Republicans don’t want to do. So a bill that cuts taxes and does nothing else — thus increasing the deficit — likely has the best chance of passing.

clare.malone: So, one of the ways they’re considering doing that are these caps on 401(k) contributions, which Trump has now come out against.

Which is an interesting mini-battle.

perry: Trump seemed to have the politics right on that question. It was a really dumb idea.

clare.malone: It’s like Trump, champion of middle class, vs. big bad Wall Street Republicans.

micah: So you think they end up with a bill that’s just a giant tax cut (rather than reform) and that increases the debt/deficit? And that actually may be the best move politically?

perry: Yes. No one really cares about the deficit.

clare.malone: Except Corker, right? Purportedly.

perry: Corker is the only senator who is voting solely on the deficit, as far as I can tell.

harry: The polling mostly agrees on that: People don’t want the deficit to be raised, but they place a low priority on it.

micah: Next!

HEALTH CARE!

Place your bets!

perry: $0

clare.malone: I place $6 of bitcoin.

harry: $1.50.

micah: I’ll go with $1.

Wait, would something like Alexander-Murray (the bipartisan bill to stabilize Obamacare markets and offer states more flexibility) qualify as major legislation?

perry: Yes.

harry: Oh, wow. I was thinking it wouldn’t.

perry: So assuming it would, go ahead. I was including that in my $0.

micah: Yeah, let’s count Alexander-Murray-level legislation.

clare.malone: Where does that stand?

micah: ☠️ ?

perry: The fact that you can’t figure that out is why I’m at $0. I have no idea. Trump took six different positions on the plan in a week.

clare.malone: Per Politico: “McConnell said on Sunday during an interview with CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ that he would bring the bill to the floor only if Trump would sign it.”

harry: I don’t think it has a good shot of passing, but I might raise my bet to $2.50. Maybe Trump will change his mind and support Alexander-Murray if it looks like it could be a win for him?

clare.malone: You know he would!

micah: Agreed.

perry: So $0 on Obamacare repeal because Republicans can’t get the votes from the Senate moderates. And $0 on Alexander-Murray because that would require the House to pass a bill propping up Obamacare, which I don’t think will ever happen.

micah: Hmmm … that’s hard to argue with.

harry: I have learned that a low probability isn’t the same thing as zero probability.

micah: Very true.

Also, what about the idea that Trump’s meddling with Obamacare will cause price increases and chaos and that therefore political pressure will build for Congress to do something?

harry: Right.

micah: Anyone buying that?

harry: Well, as Perry said: What are the chances that a bill akin to Alexander-Murray could pass the House? We’re talking about the Senate mostly here.

perry: Political pressure from liberals, moderates, governors and the media could build because of the ACA price increases. But those are all people Trump doesn’t care about. When will Sean Hannity demand an Obamacare fix?

micah: OK…

INFRASTRUCTURE!!!

perry: $0

clare.malone: I’m going to put $10 on this.

harry: Uh, $5.

micah: $20!

perry: Micah, that’s insane. The House Freedom Caucus will leave Congress en masse before they allow an infrastructure bill to pass!

Explain yourself.

micah: OK, so I put a big bet on taxes, right? But let’s say that fails. What happens?

Answer: Trump and Republicans get really, really freaking desperate. They need a win. Badly.

And if taxes fail, I think we’re in “Trump/moderate Republicans would make a deal with Democrats” territory. Trump would most likely be furious with Senate Majority Mitch McConnell. Even the Freedom Caucus would be so desperate for a win before the 2018 midterms that they might sign on to infrastructure.

clare.malone: If we’re reasoning that taxes are the thing that’s been most discussed, next most discussed (excepting health care) is infrastructure, and it’s very on-brand for Trump. I’m not sure how congressional Republicans besides Freedom Caucus members feel, but I have a sense that there’s some kind of bipartisan effort to actually be made here.

perry: Interesting.

clare.malone: If ever the Republican Party might be inclined to do a big jobs creation program, it would be in this moment.

perry: I would have agreed with Clare in February. But Trump has not taken the economic populist message of the campaign and acted on it, except in bashing trade deals.

micah: Case in point: Congress just passed a law this week repealing a rule that would have let people form class-action lawsuits against banks and credit card companies. The Trump administration sided with Wall Street.

Although, Republicans could probably rig an infrastructure package to benefit rich people and corporations! j/k. Sorta.

harry: I feel like y’all are creating a universe that doesn’t exist.

micah: I am, but that’s sorta the point. I’m imagining a universe where nothing on taxes gets done.

Think about what the narrative would be like in that world. It would go something like “MORE THAN 1 YEAR IN, TRUMP AND REPUBLICANS HAVE ACCOMPLISHED NOTHING.”

Also, Harry, how freaking popular is infrastructure spending?

perry: Raising taxes on the rich is popular too, but Republican don’t want to do that. Medicaid is really popular, and Republicans tried to cut that. (I’m not Harry, but I know these things!)

The Hill agenda seems, at times, to be: 1. Find out what is popular; 2. Do opposite.

harry: Well here’s one poll on it: “Do you support or oppose increasing federal spending for roads, bridges, mass transit and other infrastructure?” Quinnipiac finds 86 percent support. (Of course, how to actually get money for that spending is another question.)

micah: IDK, I bet the Obama-Trump voters would love infrastructure spending.

perry: I agree.

micah: And in desperate times, maybe Trump reverts to what he sorta knows: building stuff.

clare.malone: Almost like it’s a perfect prelude to midterms!

micah: Right.

If the midterms are approaching and Republicans in Congress haven’t passed anything, I think Trump starts distancing himself from them. Infrastructure would be a good way to do that.

harry: How much money have I spent so far is my question…

I gotta start spending dough.

micah: I have only $5 left.

clare.malone: You can always spend the bitcoin, Harry.

I’ve got $19.

micah: OK…

DREAMERS!

(Basically, some legislative deal that would allow people who qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to stay in the U.S. legally.)

perry: $35.

clare.malone: A bill to fix the program … hm. $10.

harry: This has got a real shot. $30.50.

clare.malone: These all seem proportional to what we’ve spent.

micah: wow

$3.

clare.malone: hah

Do tell.

There’s a decent amount of political will to fix this.

micah: Well…

clare.malone: You think it loses steam because it’s off-brand for the party base?

micah: Basically, yes. (Also, I simply ran out of money.)

I think it would take a sustained, strategically smart push from Trump to get the GOP to go against one of its defining features — anti-immigration sentiment — and … I have a hard time seeing that happening.

perry: Lots of Republicans, even conservatives, have written Dreamer-style bills. So I think there’s a way to cut a deal here that adds some border enforcement to placate conservatives. It’s off-brand, but I think the people-brought-here-as-kids issue makes this different.

But Micah’s argument is strong.

micah: Hmmm… yours is too.

Maybe I spent too much on taxes?

But you all think the Freedom Caucus/Senate hardliners would go along with a Dreamer fix?

perry: It has to be in a bill with border stuff. You can see where my bets are heading.

clare.malone: Yes.

perry: Maybe just because this kind of compromise seems so obvious to me, I’m overstating its odds of happening.

micah: You think Democrats would go along with pretty stringent border control stuff to get a fix?

clare.malone: Yes. Ultimately.

micah: I think they should! I’m not sure they will, though.

clare.malone: Hah, well yes … but saving Dreamers is a huge priority, I’d say.

perry: Right. I think we see this as a tactical choice that is logical. They might not. As Harry and Clare have written: Democrats have moved left on immigration.

clare.malone: Verrrrrry left:

harry: The Dreamer bills are very popular, including among some Republicans.

clare.malone: It’s actually quite a philosophical predicament for Democrats, though.

micah: Spell that out a little more please?

clare.malone: Dreamers, The Wall — both are gut issues for the Democratic base. If they accede on a wall, it does give Trump a moral victory of sorts, but they’re saving these hundreds of thousands of people from deportation in the process. Do they just tell their voters, “Hey, The Wall matters, but actually not that much”? Or will they see it as dangerous to give Trump one of his biggest campaign promises?

I guess I’m making it sound very much like an optics thing.

perry: That is how to describe the tactical question too.

clare.malone: You can see which way I’m tilting…

I think it’s still OK for them politically to do a Dreamers deal.

micah: That brings us nicely to …

THE WALL.

Place your bets!

perry: $25

harry: Wow.

micah: WOW!

clare.malone: I have only $9 left.

micah: I have $2.

harry: IDK how much I have. LOL. Let’s go with $7.50.

micah: I’m going with $0.50.

Five dimes.

clare.malone: I’m going with $6, per my explanation above with the Dreamers.

perry: Do I think it will be a wall as described in the campaign? I do not. But I think something that Trump can call a wall, moderate Republicans and some Democrats can call enhanced fencing, etc.

micah: WAIT A SECOND!!! Perry, that’s cheating. A symbolic wall shouldn’t count.

perry: You think so?

harry: It’s not cheating. It’s interpretation.

perry: I didn’t mean to cheat.

harry: Micah’s just upset that he’s a crummy manager of money.

clare.malone: I don’t think Perry is cheating, and I think that sounds about right.

micah: You’re not allowed to gang up against me.

clare.malone: The proletariat have to unite somehow.

perry: Let’s say $25 for something everyone can call a wall then.

I’m fine with that.

micah: Deal.

perry: I’m pretty bullish on the wall.

micah: So it seems like all three of you think something close to “The Wall” will come out of the Dreamer deal?

perry: Yes, I think a Dreamer deal with some kind of wall and heavy border security component is almost as likely as taxes

As Clare said, the wall has become a symbol. And no one can be seen as losing. Which makes this complicated.

clare.malone: Isn’t politics grand!?

micah: I guess I’m just betting on the fundamentals here, sorta: Democrats have moved waaaaaay left on immigration; Republicans have moved waaaaaay right.

So, it’ll be hard for them to come together.

perry: Right. Micah’s case is not wrong.

harry: Remember, the wall is very unpopular overall. So Democrats may be unlikely to compromise on it.

micah: OK, last one before the grab bag …

ABORTION.

clare.malone: $3. Because that is what I have left.

micah: $0.50.

perry: $0. Assuming you mean the 20-week ban, that seems to be going nowhere. I’m sure some kind of Planned Parenthood something could pass. But I’m out of money anyway.

micah: The 20-week bill is a no-go in the Senate, right?

perry: Right.

It would need 60 votes. So it would need Democrats. So it isn’t going anywhere.

harry: Right. So $0.

It could get a majority. But they need more than that.

I have no idea how much money I have.

micah: Harry, this is basic math and you work for a data-obsessed news organization.

clare.malone: C’mon, Enten.

micah: Last one!

OTHER.

(Some issue comes out of nowhere, and Congress passes substantive legislation on it.)

Place your bets!

perry: Other things could happen, I just don’t have any single thing I see as very likely. Like, I don’t think anything big will happen on Iran. Or North Korea. So $0.

clare.malone: NO MONEY.

Nothing else will happen.

Ever.

micah: $1.

Clare, you could borrow money from Harry.

clare.malone: Unless … sanctions or something?

perry: Iran sanctions could happen.

micah: Yeah, how likely is something like sanctions? Or something even more out of left field?

harry: $10.

Something crazy might happen.

micah: What about something out of the Kris Kobach voter “fraud” commission?

perry: I see that as a $0. I assume Democrats in the Senate would kill it.

micah: Yeah.

perry: Another Supreme Court nominee is the obvious wild card.

clare.malone: Impeachment. (I’m trolling.)

perry: lol

clare.malone: But impeachment.

micah: OK, so in sum, I had:

Taxes — $74

Infrastructure — $20

Dreamers — $3

Health Care — $1

The Wall — $0.50

Abortion — $0.50

Other — $1

perry:

Taxes — $40

Dreamers — $35

The Wall — $25

Health care — $0

Infrastructure — $0

Abortion — $0

Other — $0

clare.malone:

Taxes — $65

Infrastructure — $10

Dreamers —$10

Healthcare — $6

The Wall—$6

Abortion—$3

Other — $0

harry:

Taxes — $44.50

Dreamers — $30.50

Other — $10

The Wall — $7.50

Infrastructure — $5

Health care — $2.50

Abortion — $0

micah: This made for some interesting disagreements! We all think taxes are most likely, but Clare and I are much higher on infrastructure than Harry and Perry, who are instead much higher on a Dreamer fix.

Readers, send us how you would spread out the $100 to @538politics.

Thanks, all!

[upshotre]

CAN president, Adeboye, others ask Buhari to scrap Ruga

The President, Christian Association of Nigeria, Dr Supo Ayokunle, as well as top members of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria and  other Christian bodies, including the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, on Saturday asked President Muhammadu Buhari to “completely scrap” the suspended Rural Grazing Area scheme, popularly known as Ruga. This was disclosed at the Church leaders stakeholders’ summit, themed, ‘RUGA: The church’s response in the 21st century,’ which held at the ShepherdHill Baptist Church, in Lagos on Saturday. Other church leaders present at the summit included the President of the Christian Council of Nigeria, Most Rev Benebo Fubara-Manuel; President of the Organisation of African Instituted Churches, Dr Napo Emuchey; Vice-President of CAN, Rev Caleb Ahima, and the acting General Secretary, CAN, Mr Joseph Daramola. However, the President, Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, Rev Felix Omobude; the Presiding Bishop, Living Faith Church Worldwide, Dr David Oyedepo; and the President, Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria, Archbishop Augustine Akubeze, were billed to attend the summit, according to the programme of the event, but they were absent. But the spokesperson for CAN, Pastor Bayo Oladeji, said all the blocs of the Christian body were represented at the meeting. Reacting to observations that Omobude was not in attendance, Oladeji said the cleric was out of the country. He added, “Though he could not make it to the meeting because he is out of the country, he sent a representative. All the blocs making up CAN were fully represented at the meeting and they all endorsed the decisions and resolutions.” Speaking at the summit, which centred on insecurity in the country, the CAN president said the association’s involvement in the debate was needed as CAN, which is the umbrella body for all Christians in the country, could not fold its arms when the church was “hurting very badly at the hands of Fulani herdsmen.” A one-minute silence was observed at the event in honour of Rev Fr David Tank, who was ambushed and brutally killed by bandits at Kufai Amadu in Takum Local Government Area of Taraba State on August 29. The slain cleric, who was set ablaze in his vehicle, was said to be on his way to Takum for a peace meeting with his fellow clergymen on how to resolve the lingering Tiv/Jukun crisis. Many Nigerians have been killed as a result of clashes between farmers and Fulani herdsmen in the past months and years. In its report for 2018, Human Rights Watch, an international non-governmental organisation, said communal conflict between nomadic herdsmen and farmers in the Middle Belt intensified in 2018 and that at least 1,600 persons were killed while about 300,000 persons were displaced. The Federal Government, in finding a solution to the clashes, designed the Ruga scheme to settle the Fulani and their cattle on acquired land across states of the federation. The scheme however attracted severe criticism, forcing the Federal Government to “suspend” the scheme on July 3, 2019, even though some states in the North, like Zamfara and Kano, decided to continue with its implementation. Presidential aide on New Media, Bashir Ahmad, had tweeted, “The Federal Government after consultations with stakeholders has suspended the RUGA Settlement Project, for now, Kebbi State Governor disclosed that after a meeting with Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo.” But speaking at the stakeholders’ summit on Saturday, Ayokunle while commending the President for suspending the Ruga scheme, said, “We believe Ruga was just an unnecessary impediment in the wheel of the nation’s progress. We urge President Muhammadu Buhari that he must summon courage to go further by scrapping it completely.” CAN asks Buhari to scrap Ruga, ban Miyetti Allah In his earlier special address on the theme, Ayokunle said the association took painstaking approach to set up a committee to dig deep into the issue of Ruga before coming up with recommendations. He added, “Anything that smacks of mutual suspicion should be avoided in the interest of national unity. The Federal Government should immediately disarm and prosecute the Fulani herdsmen terrorists that have been recorded as one of the deadliest terrorists groups in the world. “The group of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association which openly supported the activities of the murderous Fulani herdsmen be identified and banned immediately. “President Buhari should suspend his membership and patronage of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association until he leaves office to reduce tension.” Ayokunle, who also spoke with journalists shortly after the meeting, stated that insecurity in the country had become an embarrassment. He said, “Enough is enough about insecurity in the country. It is totally embarrassing and people are having sleepless nights over it. There is no free movement anymore. Even military officers can no longer travel without heavy military escort; it is as bad as that. It is happening on a daily basis, it is no longer propaganda, neither is it political opposition talks. “Our relatives are constantly being kidnapped and we are being compelled to look for money to pay ransoms. There are no other persons we can call upon than the government because that is why they are there. They should be able to mop up the guns which these criminals are using to threaten others and also arrest them.” Ayokunle said it was clear that there were facts about Ruga which the government had not cleared or refuted. For instance, he pointed out, “Large expanse of land will be delineated and taken from indigenous people in all the 774 local government areas for use by Fulani herdsmen. The Federal Government will deep its hand into the commonwealth of the nation to develop this programme for the interest of just one out of the 250 ethnic nationalities in Nigeria contrary to the provisions of the constitution. “As perceived, these settlements will over time metamorphose into politico-religious entities within host communities, thereby reconfiguring the political, religious and cultural status of the environment. This is capable of becoming a landmine for future crisis that will be to the advantage of the settlers. The situations in Plateau and Southern Kaduna are very instructive. “The Ruga programme is a contradiction to the modern-day livestock production system that centres on ranching and feedlots.” The CAN president also said investigations had shown that there was no nexus between Ruga and the National Livestock Transformation Programme that was being pursued by the Federal Government. “What we see is a surreptitious insertion and speedy implementation of selfishly concocted programme into a robust and holistically articulated national livestock transformation programme approved by the National Economic Council,” he added. Ayokunle said CAN would present its recommendations and advice to the Federal Government for consideration. He added, “We are going to send our position to the Federal Government in black and white because we know that we are part and parcel of this nation and it is our own duty also to help government as the few of them in government cannot know everything. So, they should be prepared to listen. “We have consulted experts, so government should be very brave in listening and meditating over recommendations coming from us because we are closer to the market people more than them and we are the ones that their policies have direct impact on. So, when they (government) think they are helping us and we are feeling pains through this help, anyone in government should be wise enough to think twice before continuing with such a policy. “We are convinced that Nigeria can operate a rancour-free agro-allied business where all stakeholders can contribute to the transformation of agriculture for the needed food sustenance of the nation and job creation, rather than the present situation where agriculture has become an avenue for cheap death for Nigerian citizens.” Adeboye speaks on Ruga Meanwhile, Adeboye, who urged the stakeholders to listen with anointed ears to his rather proverbial address at the event. He said he would relay an encounter he had with a close, mathematician friend of his, whom he said advised Christians to reduce or stop the consumption of beef. He said, “Please, do not quote me, quote my friend. Listen with anointed ears. I have a friend who is a mathematician and he is very funny. My mathematician friend told me a story that a cattlerearer kills your brother and your brother’s blood spilled on the grass and the cow eats from the grass, directly or indirectly, you are also participating in the killing of that your brother. “Someone cannot be killing your brother and you are eating his cow meat. My friend said if you begin to allow them to rear cow at your backyard, very soon, they will send you out of your house. My friend also said that even the scientists have said that red meat is not good for our health and we are buying cow meat, why can’t we eat fish which has been confirmed to be the best for us. My friend said if we stop eating cow meat for a while, the man who sells it will come and renegotiate the terms.” When contacted on the call for the scrapping of Ruga by CAN and other church leaders, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr Garba Shehu, re-directed one of our correspondents to the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed. “We now have a Minister of Information. Please, can you speak to him?” he said. Meanwhile, efforts to get the response of the minister were not successful as he did not answer his calls neither did he reply the text message sent to his phone as of press time. Meanwhile, a top source at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has told one of our correspondents in Abuja on Friday that the Ruga settlement initiative was now being managed by the presidency and is no longer under the full control of the ministry. FG budgets N12bn for controversial scheme – Report In another development, SUNDAY PUNCH investigations revealed that the Federal Government planned to spend N12.11bn for the establishment of eight Ruga settlements in each of the eleven frontline states in the federation, including Adamawa, Benue, Kebbi, Kaduna, Katsina, Nasarawa, Niger, Taraba, Plateau, Sokoto and Zamfara. A document by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, ‘Intervention for resolving farmers-herders clashes in Nigeria through establishment of Ruga model settlement, which was sighted by one of our correspondents, indicated that the Federal Executive Council had approved the funds in the 2018 before Ruga scheme suffered setback. However, a source at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development told one of our correspondents that the proposed budget of N12.117bn had been released to enable the Federal Government to end the clashes swiftly through the implementation of the project. The immediate past Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters (Senate) to the President, Senator Ita Enang, had disclosed that N2.258bn was provided for the implementation of the Ruga programme in the 2019 budget. Meanwhile, before the 2019 budget for the scheme was unveiled, the source in the ministry alleged that the Ministry of Interior, under the former minister, Lt. Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazau (retd), had proposed that operatives of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps would provide security in each of the 88 Ruga settlements. The source said, “The former minister proposed a sum of N1bn to provide security at the Ruga settlements. The money was released to the ministry before the controversies around the project started.”

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