#miami herald

[mysharona1987]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jim Morin, Miami Herald

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 17, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 18, 2024

Yesterday, Trump gave his first press conference since the election. It was exactly what Trump’s public performances always are: attention-grabbing threats alongside lies and very little apparent understanding of actual issues. His mix of outrageous and threatening is central to his politics, though: it keeps him central to the media, even though, as Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo on December 13, he often claims a right to do something he knows very little about and has no power to accomplish. The uncertainty he creates is key to his power, Marshall notes. It keeps everyone off balance and focused on him in anticipation of trouble to come.

At the same time, it seems increasingly clear that the wealthy leaders who backed Trump’s reelection are not terribly concerned about his threats: they seem to see him as a figurehead rather than a policy leader. They are counting on him to deliver more tax cuts and deregulation but apparently are dismissing his campaign vows to raise tariffs and deport immigrants as mere rhetoric.

As the promised tax cuts are already under discussion, interested parties are turning to deregulation. Susanne Rust and Ian James of the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that on December 5, more than a hundred industrial trade groups signed a 21-page letter to Trump complaining that “regulations are strangling our economy.” They urged him to gut Biden-era regulations and instead to “partner” with manufacturers to create “workable regulations that achieve important policy goals without imposing overly burdensome and impractical requirements on our sector.”

They single out reductions in air quality, water quality, chemical, vehicle, and power plant environmental regulations as important for their industries. They also call for ending the “regulatory overreach” of the Biden administration on labor rules, saying those rules “threaten the employer-employee relationship and harm manufacturers’ global competitiveness.” They want an end to “right-to-repair” laws, a loosening of the rules for how and when companies need to report cyber incidents, and the replacement of mandated consumer product safety rules with “voluntary standards.”

They also call for cuts to the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts and for looser corporate finance regulations. On December 12, Gina Heeb reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s advisors are exploring ways “to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington,” including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

As Catherine Rampell explained in the Washington Post today, Congress created the FDIC in 1933 to protect bank deposits so that a bank’s customers can trust that mismanaged banks won’t lose their money. The FDIC also oversees those banks so that they are less likely to get into trouble in the first place. Congress created the system after people rushing to get their money out before a collapse actually created the very collapse that they feared, with one bank failure creating another in a domino effect that dug the economy even further into the crisis it was in after the Great Crash.

But the insurance money for those banks comes from fees assessed on the banks themselves, so abolishing the FDIC would save the banks money.

When he learned that Trump’s advisors are eyeing cuts to the FDIC, Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse commented: “When I lecture about New Deal banking reforms, I note that some of the key measures—like Glass Steagall—were repealed by the right with disastrous results like the 2008 financial meltdown, but ha ha, no one will ever be stupid enough to kill FDIC and bring back the old bank runs.”

Ben Guggenheim of Politico was the first to report that twenty-nine Republican members of Congress are also quick off the blocks in getting into the act of promoting private industry, calling for the incoming president to end the program of the Internal Revenue Service that lets people file their taxes directly without using a private tax preparer. Other developed countries use a similar public system, but in the U.S., private tax preparers staunchly opposed the public system. When more than 140,000 people used the IRS pilot program this year, they saved an estimated $6.5 million. Republicans called for its end, warning it is “a threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach.”

But for all their faith that Trump will deregulate the economy, economic leaders seem to think his other promises were just rhetoric.

Brian Schwartz of the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that business executives have been lobbying Trump to change his declared plans on tariffs. The president-elect has vowed to place tariffs of 25% on products from Canada and Mexico, and of an additional 10% on products from China. He claims to believe that other countries will pay these tariffs, but in fact U.S. consumers will pay them. That, plus the fact that other countries will almost certainly respond with their own tariffs against U.S. products, makes economists warn that Trump’s plans will hurt the economy with both inflation and trade wars.

Schwartz reported that some companies and some Republicans are hoping that Trump’s tariff threats are simply a bargaining tactic.

Trump supporters say something similar about his vow to deport 11 to 20 million undocumented immigrants, hoping he won’t actually go after long-term, hardworking undocumented people. On December 10, Jack Dolan reported in the Los Angeles Times that the resort town of Mammoth Lakes, California, depends on migrant labor, and on December 15, Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff of the New York Times reported the story of an undocumented worker brought to the U.S. as an infant, who is now trying to figure out his future after his beloved father-in-law voted for Trump. Two days ago, CNN reported on Trump-supporting dairy farmers in South Dakota who depend on undocumented workers, insisting that Trump will not round up undocumented immigrants, no matter what he says.

One person who is not discounting Trump’s threats is Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell will give up his leadership position in January and has told his colleagues he feels “liberated.”

McConnell appears to be taking a stand against Trump’s expected appointee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy speaks often against vaccines, and after the New York Times reported that the lawyer working with Kennedy to vet potential HHS staff petitioned federal regulators to take the polio vaccine off the market, McConnell—a polio survivor—warned: “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed—they’re dangerous. Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

McConnell has also been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s isolationism. He is a champion of sending military support to Ukraine and, after he steps down from the leadership, will chair the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, the subcommittee that controls military spending. “America’s national security interests face the gravest array of threats since the Second World War,” McConnell says. “At this critical moment, a new Senate Republican majority has a responsibility to secure the future of U.S. leadership and primacy.”

McConnell will also chair the Rules Committee, which gives him a chance to stop MAGA senators from trying to abandon the power of the Senate and permit Trump to get his way. McConnell has said that “[d]efending the Senate as an institution and protecting the right to political speech in our elections remain among my longest-standing priorities.”

That last sentence identifies the current struggle in the Republican Party. McConnell is showing his willingness to prevent Trump and MAGA Republicans from bulldozing their way through the Senate in order to undermine the departments of Justice, Defense, and Health and Human Services, among others. But when he talks about “protecting the right to political speech in our elections,” he is talking about protecting the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that permits corporations and wealthy individuals to flood our elections, and thus our political system, with money.

It is those corporations and wealthy individuals who are now lining up for tax cuts and deregulation, but who don’t want the tariffs or mass deportations or isolationism Trump’s “America First” MAGA base wants.

Trump and his team have been talking about their election win as a “mandate” and a “landslide,” but it was actually a razor thin victory with more voters choosing someone other than Trump than voting for him. He will need the support of establishment Republicans in the Senate to put his MAGA policies in place.

At yesterday's press conference, he appeared to be nodding to McConnell when he promised: “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. That’s not going to happen.” McConnell’s fierce use of power in the past suggests that the Senate’s giving up its constitutional power to bend to Trump’s will isn’t likely to happen, either.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[contemplatingoutlander]

Florida reviewers of AP African American Studies sought ‘opposing viewpoints’ of slavery

This excellent article from the Miami Herald, looks at some of the previously unreported objections Florida had to the AP African American Studies course.

“It’s not really about the course right? It’s kind of about putting down Black struggles for equality and freedom that have been going on for centuries at this point in time and making them into something that they are not through this kind of distorted rightist lens."

--Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor, Brown University

When Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, state officials said they objected to the study of several concepts — like reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory.” But the state did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state’s attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African Americans throughout history, according to a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state comments. For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced. The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.” In another lesson about the beginnings of slavery, the course delved into how tens of thousands of enslaved Africans had been “removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe” and how those “plantations became a model for slave-based economy in the Americans.” In response, the state raised concerns that the unit “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and that it “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.” “There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Pattillo is one of several scholars the Herald/Times interviewed during its review of the state’s comments about the AP African American Studies curriculum. “It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come. There is no other side to that in African American studies. If there’s another side, it may be in some other field. I don’t know what field that is because I would argue there is no other side to that in higher education,” Pattillo said. Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor at Brown University, said the evaluators’ comments on the units about slavery were a “complete distortion” and “whitewashing” of what happened historically. “It’s really trying to go back to an earlier historical moment, where slavery was mainly depicted by white historians through a white perspective. So to say that the enslaved and the sister African nations and kingdoms and white colonizers and enslavers were the same really misrecognizes the fundamentals of the situation,” Weheliye said. [emphasis added]

The entire article is well worth reading, and I encourage people to do so.

[weaponizedhorse]

‘Large’ creature — with 20 arms — found lurking in Antarctic sea. It’s a new species

Scientists aboard a research vessel near Antarctica pulled their nets out of the chilly ocean water. Among their catch, they found a 20-armed creature with a distinctive body shape. It’s a new species.

Researchers trawled the Southern Ocean on several research expeditions between 2008 and 2017, according to a study published July 14 in the journal Invertebrate Systematics. They were searching for a group of “cryptic” sea animals known as Promachocrinus, or Antarctic feather stars.

Antarctic feather stars are “large” animals that can live anywhere from about 65 feet to about 6,500 feet underwater and have an “otherworldly appearance” when swimming, researchers said. Although both are invertebrate ocean animals, feather stars are distinct from more well-known sea stars

During their surveys, researchers collected eight feather stars with a distinctive body shape and discovered a new species: Promachocrinus fragarius, or the Antarctic strawberry feather star.

The Antarctic strawberry feather star has 20 arms branching off its central “strawberry-like” body, the study said. It can range in color from “purplish” to “dark reddish.” Researchers did not provide measurements of the animal’s overall size.

Photos show the new species has two types ofappendages. Its lower, shorter arms appear almost striped and bumpy, while its upper, longer arms appear almost feathered and soft

A close-up photo shows the Antarctic strawberry feather star’s lower body. It has a roughly triangular shape, wider at the top and tapering toward a rounded bottom tip. The texture appears bumpy with circle-like indents likely left from broken-off arms.

Researchers named the new species after the Latin word for “strawberry” because of the “resemblance of the (body) shape… to a strawberry.”

[galerymod]

NFL star in handcuffs:

It remains to be seen what the consequences of the incident will be for the players involved.

Shortly before the start of the NFL season, superstar Tyreek Hill was temporarily taken into custody as part of a traffic stop. As a result, the pass receiver and his team were asked to take a critical stance towards the player. The police justify their actions.

The police had previously released video footage from bodycams documenting the stop. The published video footage shows Hill sitting in a black sports car. A police officer approaches his vehicle and Hill hands the officer something through the lowered window. The window is then rolled up again.

The police officer then asks him to lower the window again, but Hill does not do so. Another police officer then forcefully opened the driver's door, whereupon Hill was pulled out of the vehicle and pinned to the ground. An officer pressed his knee into Hill's back, whereupon he was handcuffed.

‘I still don't know what happened,’ Hill said after the NFL opener against the Jacksonville Jaguars (20-17) and criticised: ’What if I wasn't Tyreek Hill? God knows what those officials would have done.’

The Dolphins wrote in their statement that this was ‘a reminder’ that ‘not every situation like this ends peacefully, and we are grateful that it did in this one.’

There are ‘some officers who confuse their responsibility and dedication with misguided power’, it continued: ‘We commend the MDPD (Miami Dade Police Department, ed.) for taking the proper and necessary action and releasing this footage so quickly, but also urge them to take equally swift and decisive action against the officers who behaved so abhorrently.’

Hill uncooperative according to police

No, Power abuse in its purist form.

It's interesting how many cops turned up on the tray for a normal traffic stop!

Any non-POC citizen would have had no problem getting into his car and the traffic stop would not have happened, this is structural racism!

The black man with the big fat car fits the image of police officers abusing their power.

Throw them out, they have no place in the police force, at most as security guards in a shopping centre car park.

mod

Of course, first investigate properly and then throw them out, that's just our opinion, then jobs will open up for more capable people with a greater sense of responsibility and the appropriate de-escalation skills.

Cops on Steroids?

Is that the problem? It's interesting when a professional athlete looks like an untrained citizen against a normal patrolman, isn't it?

I can only puke for the steroid pumped up cops with their bullshit core spirit.

Do a test on steroids with one of them - I bet you'll be surprised.

[tkachuktkaching]

[subsidystadium]

The Miami Heat continue to screw over Miami-Dade County by refusing to follow through on their promised waterfront park

In 1996, the Miami Heat were losing the PR battle for a new basketball arena. The Miami Heat were trying to justify to the public why the team should be given a new sports arena on the public’s dime. As a former Heat political consultant wrote in 2004, as the referendum date got closer, the “arena project appeared to be doomed”. So how did they turn it around and win the vote? They did everything…

[derekhernandezfuentes]

I had the GREATEST Time in High School, College and University as a Teenager during Our United States Republican Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Tenure during Bush-Cheney Eras! 🍟💵❤️🇺🇸☀️🌈🥞🍊🍋🍑🍉🍌 “Mangoes…” says George W Bush! I miss the Scents of Peaches and Mangos in my Family Home! Since Obama Era, I can’t find Peach Scents in Home Depot anymore… We must Bring Back Peach Scents for Happy, Family Memories! Cut Taxes so we All have many more Festivities and Fiestas! 🍣🍱🍰🍿🍪🍫 US Gay Men and Our Fellow Lesbians benefited SOOO MUCH from the Republican Tax Cuts from President George W Bush and Governor Jeb Bush that Our Celebrations and Gay Parades were filled with LIGHT — but now Lady Gaga’s, Lady Antebellum’s, and Rihanna’s Dark Gloomy Gravity Music have brought down Movies with Netflix’s Black and Bloody Red Logo and more terror. CUT THE TAXES!

[albertcapraro]

March 16, 1975 - Miami Herald Page 4-BW For big moments, you might want to waft around in, say, this cotton voile, quite bare when you slide off the jacket.  Casual but elegant, by Albert Capraro for Jerry Guttenberg and exclusively ours.  Fifth Avenue Shop.

[minnesotafollower]

Reactions to Marco Rubio’s Nomination for U.S. Secretary of State 

On November 13, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced his nomination of Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American U.S. Senator from Florida, as U.S. Secretary of State. Trump stated, “It is my Great Honor to announce that Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, is hereby nominated to be The United States Secretary of State. Marco is a Highly Respected Leader, and a very powerful Voice for Freedom. He will…

[rayhaber]

Spirit Airlines Uçağına Kurşun Saldırısı: Haiti'deki Güvenlik Endişeleri Artıyor

Spirit Airlines Uçağına Kurşun Saldırısı Miami Herald’ın aktardığına göre, 951 sefer sayılı Spirit Airlines uçağı, Dominic Cumhuriyeti’ndeki Santiago Havalimanı’na güvenli bir şekilde iniş yaptı. Bu olay, uçuş sırasında yaşanan bir kurşun saldırısı sonucunda gerçekleşti. Spirit Airlines sözcüsü, Santiago Havalimanı’na iniş yapan uçağın ilk incelemelerinin ardından kurşunlardan kaynaklanan hafif…

[photo-roulette-wheel]

The news last week

[netalkolemedia]

Les autorités haïtiennes s'opposent à une visite en Haïti du président colombien

Le président de la République de Colombie, Gustavo Petro, ne pourra pas visiter Haïti ce week-end en raison du refus des autorités haïtiennes qui lui ont expliquées que le moment est inopportun en raison de la précarité de la situation sécuritaire dans le pays. Le chef d’État colombien voulait profiter de sa présence en République dominicaine à l’occasion de l’investiture du président dominicain…

[tachyonblu]

GameDiviner feared there would be violence against GamerGate at SPJ Airplay in Miami… then bomb threats got called in. He shares his thoughts on this, as well as the Gamers Are Dead articles, what he perceives as bias from Ren LaForme and laziness from the Miami Herald.

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

LEGGY LOVELIES FROM THE THURSTON MOORE FAMILY TREE.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on Eleanor Nann Moore (left), mother of musician and SONIC YOUTH co-founder Thurston Moore, poses with her twin sister Louise at their home in Coral Gables, Florida, in an undated photograph, possibly c. late 1940s. Courtesy of Thurston Moore.

Source: https://amp.miamiherald.com/entertainment/article287358050.html.

[samiamisblog]

Miamiiiii