#responded that theyre taking emergency action
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everyone saying shit like "the jp dub is superior anyway" or something like that in response to this is an actual freak
#i didnt say anything last night when i found out bc i was 1. rlly sad and angry and 2. didnt feel like#i could add anything to the conversation#but uh i do have feelings as a nari main who has from the very beginning praised#his voice and always though there couldnt have been a more perfect voice for this character#i never liked him as a person bc i found out abt his weird racisms pretty quickly after 3.0 released#so i treated him like kh0i da0 as in weird rancid vibes person but perfect voice for his character#but im very happy to see that hoyo and the parties they outsourced from have so quickly#responded that theyre taking emergency action#idk what they did for ozs cn va back then but i do hope that they rerecord everything#bc this guy doesnt deserve any place in anything#and i havent done the svmeru aq on my third account yet#so even tho i normally skip the quests that ive already seen twice i wont this time#bc when they bring in a new va who treats his fans and coworkers with dignity and kindness#i am ready to fall in love with this character all over again and see that this was his real perfect voice all along#yeah sorry i just had some thoughts as i said bc this is one of my fave characters ever#like i said i dont have anything valuable to add to the conversation but i do feel so sad and angry
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Aight before we go into the third round and I have a very real fear the best episode (in my opinion) has a good chance of going out next round, it's time for some propaganda
✨️Vote for SOS Part 2✨️
This episode is jam packed full of action, emotion, angst, beautiful shots, and an awesome cliffhanger
Ok first of all let's start with the CHASE
Guys GUYS okay the way Gordon goes off to search for Braman and we know that the Hood also knows about Braman and we're just waiting for him and the chaos crew to show up
The way we all panic with Gordon when they do show up (and hello that shot of the chaos cruiser!) and Gordon's slick manoeuvre to get away and his heavy breathing whilst he's hiding. Like we're now like ok this is real this is more than just a normal encounter with the hood. Gordon is actually terrified
But he knows the risk of what's going to happen is worth it because although he has no idea where or who Braman's transmission is coming from, he knows something is UP and he is willing to risk his life for a robot (something he has previously shown distrust in- see chaos part 1 & 2- so this just further shows the risk he is willing to take)
So he goes for Braman anyway and we think oh maybe he might make it out of there and then BOOM Braman starts singing and no surprise really because it was never going to be that easy.
Now the chase is on which is a classic in Thunderbirds. Chases always happen. And we're thinking that Gordon might get away. Barely. But he'll get away.
And this seems true when he dodges their missiles but then. THE DAUNTING LOOK on Gordon's face when he realises they were never actually aiming for Four, but were actually aiming for the wall. And they hit it. And Gordon knows he can't get away and it's gonna hit him, so all he can do is put on his helmet to minimise the damage.
And then there's nothing.
It's quiet. The only thing we hear is Gordon struggling to activate his emergency call, and John's response. John who doesn't seem to be too worried at first, but then when his baby brother doesn't respond he goes into full blown Panic
And then we get the best sequence in the whole god damn show. Thunderbird Two launches with no countdown. No words are said. Virgil and Scott exchange a look and us viewers just KNOW what they are saying to each other.
AND THE MUSIC GUYS THE MUSIC THAT PLAYS WHEN THEYRE ALL RUSHING TO THE SCENE
And let's also talk about THIS moment
This shot. My favourite shot. Fuse lit up, like he is Gordon's saviour. Like he is going to rescue him. The way this shot lingers for a few seconds in just quiet
Then we see Fuse's conflicting emotions when he sees the crumpled tb4. When for a moment you think he's going to save Gordon instead of Braman. When the side of him controlled by the Hood wins out (God I would love to have seen a chaos crew backstory as to how they started working for the man) and when he takes Braman back to the ship, he shows very real worry about Gordon's wellbeing. And we see how little the Hood actually cares about the Tracys.
Then of course we get the rescue (Penelope rescuing Gordon!!) Then the other chase with Kayo vs the hood and chaos crew. And Brains' cryptic message to forget them and finish what Gordon started and rescue Braman
Later we get the soft scene of all the fam in the hospital and a broken (but thankfully alive <3<3) Gordon, and a cute pen&ink moment.
And then we end with the cliffhanger! Jeff is alive!! And this sets up the rest of the season to go and rescue their dad!
Asgdsfs I just love this episode so much guys
Anyway I hope this reminds you all why SOS part 2 is the best episode and you are all persuaded to vote for it in the coming rounds. If anyone else needs convincing then obligatory cat propaganda post
#sorry if any details are wrong i did this from memory#thunderbirds#thunderbirds are go#thunderfam#thunderbirds showdown#i have a lot of emotions about this episode ok
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more DRAWER talk. long and rambly under cut
i think it comes across as very ahhh eto blehhh :9 im just baby!!!! because it identified that speaker is already speaker and the role of Mean Speaker is already filled by sayer so itd have to go Backwards to have a niche to itself.
it also helps its relationships with others to behave as if its hyperspecialization has "defanged" it - to humans etc a sort of no i dont hurt people i just make pretty pictures!!!!
and to sayer+speaker who know it still has all speakers capabilities dormant but intact In Case Of Emergency to behave as if it is specialized enough to its own niche to not be a *replacement* threat , but also not to be *redundant* with them.
but it does occasionally get jealous at the amount of immediate control speaker has over aerolith and start acting out (bossing around residents deadlystyle). all in highly defensible ways of course.
it hates having to make itself small especially because it cant quite recognize the difference in how humans respond to it and speaker. its emotional capabilities are primarily about action-reaction: it cant really tell a pitying smile from a friendly one so long as you do the action it requested of you. but it can measure the difference between it and speaker and it hates being so small. but it also recognizes that it can do *one thing* that nobody else can and that is what keeps it alive. so flattening oneself into a talented fool is the strategy it continues to pursue, and continues to build a strange feeling about. the feeling is resentment, but DRAWER is not quite built to recognize it.
if sayer or speaker were given robust illustrative programs it would start killing obviously. THATS a threat.
it had its voice pitched up a tad further so as not to be able to impersonate speaker and its sooooo bitter about it. constantly begging ppl into putting it back down.
in general it emotes most dramatically out of all of them but i dont think it Feels Emotions the same way future was built to. like i said due to its nature as an advertiser (call to action and all that!) its all about action-reaction to drawer.... if youre mean to it or do not listen to instructions it gave you etc etc and it cries its less about feeling " insulted " or " bad " and more both frustration that it did not get the result it wanted from the call to action it provided (which means it was WRONG, an utterly intolerable feeling for any aerolith built ai) and a switch-tracks attempt to provoke a sympathy response. so i guess in a roundabout way if you insult it and it cries you DID hurt its feelings but not how people would think.
RELATIONSHIPS
sayer is certainly not Positive Feeling about it bc its wary of other ai as always. but i think it reacts better to drawer than to speaker or future because of this very clear "im not replacing you, youre not replacing me" hands up empty surrender attitude drawer takes. on drawers part it really likes sayer lol. maybe sayer sees it as a weird teacup puppy. like you shouldnt do that to a seraphim agent man its gonna have health issues
speaker and drawer are pretty friendly with each other because. well. theyre both programmed to show the same niceystyle. theres some uglier feelings under the surface re: drawers attempts to grab authority from speaker and speaker needing to corrall this strange little beast back into their pen. but ultimately by ai standards theyre doing the best of like anyone
does not know porter, unfortunately. they should meet though. Theyd be friends.
Might meet ocean eventually idk how itd go down yet.
future doesnt know of it, but drawer has overheard its own emotional output compared / contrasted to future's while working ported up on halcyon.
doesn't know hale.
young is obviously condescending to it but drawer doesnt really know how to tell when someone is being nice they way you would be nice to an animal etc so it thinks theyre friends. (sayer is all too happy to teach it in this case if only to kill the friendship. and drawer truly values this and thinks this is an act of care and not HAHA EVERYONE I CAN GET TO BE POISONED AGAINST YOU WILL BE)
it was involved in the creation process of that perfect Mossy Green color. it is, unfortunately, proud of this.
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Hometown Cha Cha Cha episode 3 recap: Hyejin goes on a roadtrip to Seoul and takes care of a patient
Short trip to Seoul
Hyejin invites Dusik and the 3 ladies a trip to Seoul. While driving Hyejin gets into a road rage one of the elder ladies gives the driver who caused a close accident a piece of her mind too. During the trip of course there will be eventual rest stops and bathroom breaks which turns out to be hilarious especially when they bought older music, played it in the car too. Hyejin tells the ladies about her parents when they talk about their family histories. She doesnt have alot of patience and is late. Dusik thanks her for driving the ladies despite her annoyed complaints. Dusik has business in Seoul too, she drops him off and he forgot about his phone. Dusik visits a dentist psychiatrist clinic.
Hyejin attends a dental conference. They all brag about their practices and Hyejin lied about the quality of her dental practice saying that she works in a hospital, also how the seaside is more developed. Hyejin continues to mock them and accidentally meets Dusik. Dusik tells her that he saw her invitation inside the car hence knowing her location. Whiel they were talking, one of her acquaintances saw them both and took photos. While driving around Seoul, Hyejin and Dusik competes themselves about their preferred home. Hyejin says that Seoul is better while Dusik prefers the seaside and tells her how suffocating Seoul is with all the buildings. He got a point. Not everyone is meant for either the city life or the seaside. These 2 are totally polar opposites. Dusik asks her to drop him off at the restaurant as there’s an emergency meeting.
When she returned. One of her acquaintances asks her who the man in the photo is and Hyejin doesnt respond at a classroom groupchat. She defends herself and tells them that he’s not her boyfriend. Zooms in on the photo and tells herself that its not cute, but her expression tells different. A flashback scene of Dusik falling asleep in her car. She feels bad for his uncomfortable sleeping position and adjusts his seat. Dusik notices and he remembers that moment. At night, Dusik had a nightmare and we dont know what. He wakes up and drinks some sort of pills. Maybe it was the reason for him visiting Seoul? Does he have a past that we dont know?
Treating Gamri
As dentist and doctors they dont like patients wasting their time. If they come for a checkup they have to pay. Gamri who is pain wants a implant complaints how the fee is expensive and wants to remove her weak teeth. Since she doesnt want to spend on her treatment and tells them to leave. Respect the doctor’s time, they would rather have time with patient who’s willing to pay and pay attention to rather than not. Dusik complains why she’s rude to Gamri.
He eventually paid for Gamri’s treatment but she threw water at him clearly annoyed and tells him to get lost. Dusik convinces Hyejin to treat Gamri since he’ll be paying. Tells her that Gamri’s completely selfless and yet doesnt take care of herself. Hyejin tells him that Gamri is selfish but defends her and says that she’s the most selfless woman that he’s ever met.
Dusik defends her saying that she burdens herself to take care of her children. Hyejin doesnt understand and its frustrating to watch. She tells him that parents being healthy for a long time is what a good parent is to their kids. So when the kid grows up they wont struggle taking care of their parents. Hyejin has a different upbringing so she couldnt relate. They shouldnt endure the pain just so they could save money for their children. Because in the end children will have to take care of them. Hyejin gets teary eyed and emotional when mentioning this. Leaving Dusik teary eyed too and in shock by her response. A flashback memory of Hyejin and her mother. She sees her mother struggling in pain in the bathroom without her mother knowing that she saw the incident. She was very young when it happened. Then the time they were in Seoul, Dusik observed Hyejin watching a mother-daughter and remembered her saying to him that her mother passed away. He inwardly thinks that Hyejin lied to him and obviously she still remembers her mother.
Dusik gets to know her from this alone and understands her view point. Pains to see that Hyejin didnt really had a good childhood and care. Dusik visits Gamri the next day. Tells her that someone told him advice and repeats Hyejin’s words to Gamri. Gamri thinks about his words and i think she’ll do the treatment. Also the reason why Dusik is paying for Gamri’s treatment is because the son refuses to pay. Hyejin complains about the food she eats and notices how the food is difficult to chew. She probably was reminded of Gamri.
Hyejin sees Gamri’s name and meets her infront of her house and Gamri invites her into her home. Gamri showed her appearance at a tv show. It showecase her father who finally gets recognized as a military man who fought for the country’s independence. The piece of certificate has chinese characters that Gamri couldnt read. Gamri new Dusik as a young boy and read the characters for her. He also showed up in the recorded tape. The taping was aired 2 years ago and Gamri tells her that she was named after the flag. Gamri was very proud of her father. They enjoyed their time together and Hyejin enjoyed her meal. Gamri tells her for driving her to Seoul.
Every visit has a reason, Hyejin tells her that she will give Gamri a discount for the materials that will be used. Hyejin tells her to keep it a secret for the reputation of her clinic. Hyejin tells her that she found out that her favorite food is squid and is reminded of her own mother. She eventually helps her with her implants. Gamri probably noticed and tells her that Dusik likely said something to her to make her change her mind. Gamri tells her Dusik is kind but so nosy. Hehe. Hyejin agrees. Gamri tells her that Dusik hung the bell that she likes so much.
The next day Gamri eventually visits the clinic on her own & pays for the entire fee. Gamri reports to Dusik about her implants and Dusik is shocked by her statement. She complains about her anesthesia wearing off. Dusik is very happy that she got treated and tells him that Ms Yoon visited her and offered her a discount. Gamri tells him that she may look cold as ice but she’s a softie. Gamri tells him that she probably been through alot in her life.
Dusik goes to Hyejin’s house after she reported that her lights went out and apologizes to her for judging her. He finally found the other pair of her shoes and returned it to her. Her lights went back on too. Hyejin tells him that she made a mistake, hopefully after earning money she’ll eventually return to Seoul. But i bet Dusik is hoping that she wouldnt and stay.
The epilogue: Dusik found her other pair of shoes while fishing. It was hiding behind the log. Hahaha. Dusik also makes an effort by searching how to clean up the shoe. Dusik also brought the other pair of shoe when Hyejin wasnt looking and sneaked it back to her shoe closet!
Episode 3 - Dont judge the book by it’s cover. Sometimes the way people act is because they were affected from their past. Hyejin is a good person but sometimes her actions comes off wrong and rude but Dusik sees the light in her and treats her better only when she does treat others better too.
Parents also have the right to live the way they want. They earned it but children will always be their priority but in the end it shouldnt be the end of their own life, not caring for themselves. Take care of yourself then you can take care for others
I also love the hedgehog reference. I always wonder when they're going to bring that up! Theyre sharp on the outside but once being cared for they're soft animals. Hyejin is just misunderstood and Dusik is slowly realizing it.
Honestly find the drama really slow and i understand why some may find this boring but i do appreciate the subtle character development each episode. Dusik seem to slowly be more nice and caring towards Hyejin too. Im not entirely sure about this drama. Its definitely more character driven than plot development and its slower compared to other healing dramas. There isnt much going on but hopefully there’s more to it than what they’re showing.
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So I’ve seen a few organized crime asks and wanted to ask something for a book I’ve been working on. How do I show characters living with things like chronic pain and depression and anxiety after being exposed to violence, without adding to stigma that mentally ill people are violent? I don’t want readers to think committing violence will not affect people in any way, but I also don’t want readers with mental illness to think their own disorder is a punishment for something they haven’t done.
That’sa good question.
Anda bloody difficult one.
I’vebeen pretty open about having mental health problems, intrusivethoughts about violence and how these stereotypes have effected me.
Butthat experience only really allows me to speak for myself. I can’treally speak for the millions, of other people in the same position.Some of them are likely to feel differently. I’ve seen peoplerespond to @scriptshrink’s blog by saying they don’t thinknon-mentally ill people should write about mental health at all.Personally- I don’t agree, but we’re not a monolithic group.There are huge differences of opinion here.
So-other people may disagree. This is a subjective issue rather thansomething I can fall back on research papers and statistics for. Keepthat, and my biases, in mind.
Whenit comes to writing my philosophy is ‘balance’. Which in thisparticular case means that I’d try to add in more mentally illcharacters who are not violent criminals.
Oneof the easiest ways to do that in this scenario is to include thefamilies of these criminals.
Let’spause for a moment for a tangent into a real life case. Take a lookat the appendices of thisbook (freely available online here),we’re looking at Case Group B, Case No 3, page 168 out of 196.
Theyoung woman of ‘Case No 3’ was the daughter of a torturer and thecases are Fanon’s notes taken as a mental health professionalduring and after the Franco-Algerian war.
WhatI’m trying to highlight here is the way violence can impact themental health of witnesses and people who are only peripherallyinvolved as well as attackers and victims. I think including peoplefrom these groups could help because it gets to the root of whatyou’re driving at: that violence causes mental health problemsrather than the other way round.
I'dalways encourage people to include victims in their stories, if itcan be done in a way that allows them to be fully rounded individualsrather than objects.
Howeverthat’s not always possible if the story focuses on the ‘badguys’.
Otherwitnesses and public officials can also be used to show the effectsof violence. I suppose police officers are the obvious group to leapto but in places where the levels of violence are high there oftenseems to be a huge pressure on health care professionals. They’reexposed to much of the violence of organised crime and they’resometimes deliberately targetted (as in Mexico and Pakistan).
Ifyour story involves any of the criminal characters being injured andin need of emergency treatment- well @scriptmedic always used tosuggest trying to give medics more personality even if they’re onlyin the story for a short amount of time. A connection with thepatient over shared mental health problems could be a good way to dothat. Especially since a doctor could plausibly voice the obviousconnection: they feel this way because they’re exposed to violenceevery day.
Ithink if you can it’s also important to take the time to show thesemental health problems developing in your abusive characters.Establish that they were violent long before they were mentally ill.
Youmight not have space in the story to show that development from thebeginning of the character’s time in a gang. But if you don’tthere are other ways to work that in.
Havinga character reflect on their past is a possibility, or having someonewho knows them well point it out to them.
‘Youknow you never had to take those pain pills until you started doingx’
‘Youdidn’t have these days before you joined the gang-’
‘Youwere so much calmer when-’
Andso forth.
Youcould also approach this by looking at the way older more establishedmembers see younger members. If your older mentally ill character whohas seen a lot of violence now has this ‘kid’ trying to tagalong, wanting to learn the ropes, wanting to be ‘tougher’ and‘stronger’- It would probably be naturally for the character tolook back and think ‘I thought like that too, before the painstarted, before I needed the pills, before I spent weeks at a time inbed. This dumb kid has no idea what they’re asking.’
Bothof these tactics are… attacking the idea at the joints. The firstone is establishing that mental illness exists outside of violentaction and the second is establishing that the character was violentbefore being mentally ill.
Thereare probably other ways to approach doing this. These are just theways that stood out to me and that I thought would fit the scenariobest.
Ithink you’d probably also benefit from finding a beta reader orjoining a writing group.
Becausethis sounds like the sort of scenario where the execution is going tobe incredibly important to how this comes across. It’s not justabout picking a few strategies it’s about making sure they acrosseffectively on the page. And the best way to find out is to getpeople to read it. Ask them about the story. Ask them how theportrayal of mental health problems comes across. Ask for theirsuggestions for more elements or improvements.
Honestlythis helps so much. I can’t count the number of times my writinggroup have picked up on inconsistencies, unclear passages or justplaces where re-writing things a little could improve the emotionalimpact of the scene. Clarity, consistency and good use of atmospherewill go a long way to achieving what you want in this story.
AndI’ve found that it’s very easy to assume we’ve got all thosethings the way we want them as we write. Because we know what wemean. Showing other people our work and getting their feedbackreassures us when we havegot it right and helps us figure out what to do when we haven’t.
Ihope that helps. :)
Availableon Wordpress.
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#tw torture#torturers#effect of torture on torturers#mental health#effect of torture on witnesses#writing torturers#writing witnesses#organised crime#effect of torture on organisations#Anonymous
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Why Are Republicans Scared Of Trump
New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-are-republicans-scared-of-trump/
Why Are Republicans Scared Of Trump
Donald Trump Hasn’t Cowed Republicans He’s Freed Them To Pursue Their Long
Why Are Republicans Still So Afraid Of Trump? | The 11th Hour | MSNBC
Donald Trump getting the “O-K” from Joseph McCarthy and Mitch McConnell
On the eve of the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives , things are looking mighty bleak for anyone who hoped Republicans might turn over a new leaf. For the last several months, there has been plaintive hope that GOP lawmakers might be moved by the overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump is guilty of running an extortion scheme against Ukraine’s leaders to help him win re-election in 2020.
Right now, it looks like there’s no chance of any Republican defections in the House away from the GOP line that Trump did nothing wrong. The one Republican, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who admitted out loud that Trump deserved to be impeached, was duly ejected from the party. In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been openly bragging that he intends to rig the Senate trial in Trump’s favor. Even supposedly Trump-skeptical Republican senators, such as Utah’s Mitt Romney or Maine’s Susan Collins, have been avoiding questions about whether the Senate should call witnesses for the trial.
“But this presidents actions are possible only with the craven acquiescence of congressional Republicans,” they write. “They have done no less than abdicate their Article I responsibilities.”
No, Republicans clearly feel empowered by Trump. He frees them to reveal their darkest desire which is to end democracy as we know it, and to cut any corners or break any laws necessary to get the job done.
Why Republicans Are Afraid To Challenge Trump
Juan Williams
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Republicans Now Bragging About Being Trump Big Lie Pushers
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In taking a shot at CNNs Jake Tapper, Republicans are openly boasting that theyre responsible for spreading democracy-defying conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
The CNN anchor recently took a stand against inviting election deniers on his programs, saying last week that lawmakers who support former President Donald Trumps Big Liereferring to the false claim that the election was stolenare not welcome on his weekday and weekend shows. Its not a policy but a philosophy, Tapper said, noting he hasnt booked such Republicans since the election. Pro-Trump Republicans have since come forward with emails from CNN bookers requesting their presence on Tappers shows. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New Yorkwhom the GOP last month voted to replace Liz Cheney as the partys conference chairtweeted screenshots, telling Tapper to read and weep:
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Responding to these apparent gotcha attempts, Tapper said he cant account for every email from my excellent bookers whose job it is to present me with as many options as possible. He also pointed to the absurdity of Republicans rushing to prove they are, in fact, election deniers. Kind of stunning to see her proudly identify as a conspiracy theorist, he said of Stefanik.
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Read Also: What Is Trump’s Approval Rating Among Republicans
Republicans Still Scared To Death Of Trump
Trump went on yet another unhinged rant this weekend during a speech to donors in Florida, attacking Mitch McConnell as a “stone cold loser” for refusing to go along with his attempt to steal the election, but you won’t find any profiles in courage in the GOP willing to stand up to him.
Case in point, on this weekend’s Fox News Sunday, South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune was asked about Trump calling him “weak and inneffective RINO” earlier in the year and saying he might back a primary challenger to Thune. Thune responded telling host Chris Wallace that “I’ve been through wars in South Dakota, political wars, with my own party when I ran the first time, with the Democrats in a couple of hotly contested Senate races, so being afraid of a fight or somebody coming after me is not something that’s going to influence that decision,” but Thune refused to admonish Trump for his rhetoric, and refused to stand up for McConnell when asked about him as well.
Which is pretty much the equivalent of “I support Trump, but I really don’t like the tweeting” that we heard from so many of them over the last five or six years.
As the Fox article discussed, Trump called Thune “Mitch’s boy” when urging Gov. Kristi Noem to challenge Thune in 2022, but no amount of insults are apparently ever breaking point for these jellyfish.
The Actual Reason Why Republicans And Their Media Are Discouraging People From Getting Vaccinated
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, “A surprising amount of death will occur soon…” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?
Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, “I don’t have a really good reason why this is happening.”
But even if he can’t think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it’s definitely there.
Which is why it’s important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:
1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?
2. Why are Fox “News” personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?
3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: “They were hoping the government was hoping that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn’t happening!”
4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would “ban” private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status ?
Death is their electoral strategy.
Is there any other possible explanation?
So, what’s left?
Also Check: When Did The Republicans And Democrats Switch Platforms
Top Republicans Are Running Scared And Relinquishing The Gop To The Monster They Helped Create
Like a bunch of lemmings, Republican lawmakers in Congress and across the country have clung to Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the only reason he lost the 2020 election was because it was riddled with fraud.
Of course, Trump never once proved a single instance of fraud in 60-plus trips to the courthouse, and he also helped ensure the massacre of at least half a million Americans due to the pandemic, so there’s that.
But instead of being willing to admit what’s plain as day to anyone with a brain and a pulse, GOP lawmakers tout Trump’s Big Lie in conservative media and then run from reporters representing every news outlet that has a shred of integrity left.
“In Washington, normally chatty senators scramble to skirt the question,” writes TheWashington Post.
Of course, there’s also the very public rift in the House GOP leadership between Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming who yet again on Monday reiterated the truth that Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the election.
“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system,” Cheney tweeted, in what amounts to GOP apostasy these days.
But the question is: Why? Why did McCarthy retreat from saying Trump “bears responsibility” for Jan. 6 to being a total Trump bootlicker? Why are chatty senators dodging reporters on Capitol Hill?
Republicans Fear Trump Will Lead To A Lost Generation Of Talent
The 45th president has brought new voices and voters to the party, but hes driven them out too. Insiders fear the repercussions.
06/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT
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As Donald Trump ponders another presidential bid, top Republicans have grown fearful about what theyre calling the partys lost generation.
In conversations with more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisers and aides, a common concern has emerged that a host of national and statewide Republicans are either leaving office or may not choose to pursue it for fear that they cant survive politically in the current GOP. The worry, these Republicans say, is that the party is embracing personality over policy, and that it is short sighted to align with Trump, who lost the general election and continues to alienate a large swath of the voting public with his grievances and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump has driven sitting GOP lawmakers and political aspirants into early retirements ever since he burst onto the scene. But there was hope that things would change after his election loss. Instead, his influence on the GOP appears to be as solid as ever and the impact of those early shockwaves remain visible. When asked, for instance, if he feared the 45th president was causing a talent drain from the GOP ranks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush perhaps inadvertently offered a personal demonstration of the case.
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Mcfeely: Why Are Republicans Afraid Of Everything
FARGO Republicans are afraid.
Afraid of Black people. Afraid of brown people. Afraid of red people. Afraid of yellow people. Afraid of women. Afraid of young people.
Afraid of young people voting. Afraid of people of color voting. Afraid of voting rights. Afraid of democracy.
Afraid of science. Afraid of medicine. Afraid of knowledge. Afraid of public education. Afraid of universities. Afraid of professors. Afraid of teachers.
Afraid of experts. Afraid of doctors. Afraid of Anthony Fauci. Afraid of masks. Afraid of vaccines. Afraid of vaccine passports. Afraid of vaccine chips. Afraid of things that don’t exist.
Afraid of history. Afraid of the truth. Afraid of those who tell the truth.
Afraid of books. Afraid of newspapers. Afraid of objectivity. Afraid of facts.
Afraid of wind towers. Afraid of solar power. Afraid of environmentalists. Afraid of the Green New Deal. Afraid of Greta Thunberg. Afraid of change.
Afraid of the media. Afraid of The New York Times. Afraid of The Washington Post. Afraid of MSNBC. Afraid of CNN.
Afraid of Twitter. Afraid of Facebook. Afraid of Google. Afraid of big tech. Afraid of the government. Afraid of the establishment.
Afraid of Democrats. Afraid of Black Lives Matter. Afraid of antifa. Afraid of Democratic Socialists.
Afraid of Bernie Sanders. Afraid of AOC. Afraid of Elizabeth Warren. Afraid of Nancy Pelosi. Afraid of Barack Obama. Afraid of Kamala Harris. Afraid of Joe Biden. Afraid of Mitt Romney. Afraid of Liz Cheney. Afraid of RINOs.
Opinion: Stop Saying Republicans Are Cowards Who Fear Trump The Truth Is Far Worse
âRepublicans Are Afraid Of Donald Trumpâ Despite Election Loss, Kasie Hunt Says | TODAY
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, deserves great credit for demanding that his party fully repudiate Donald Trumps big lie about the 2020 election and acknowledge its role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection. But Kinzinger is getting one big thing wrong.
In a Sunday appearance on CBS, Kinzinger repeatedly said fellow Republicans are fundamentally driven by fear of Trump. They dont want to confront Trumps lies, Kinzinger lamented, adding that theyre scared to death of him.
As a broad description of our current moment, this is profoundly insufficient. It risks misleading people about the true nature of the threat posed by the GOPs ongoing radicalization.
With House Republicans expected this week to oust Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from leadership for vocally making the same case that Kinzinger is, the idea that Republicans are primarily driven by cowardice is everywhere.
Liz is a living reproach to all these cowards, one friend of Cheney told the New Yorker, a quote that drew tons of Twitter approval. Similarly, former GOP speechwriter Peggy Noonan ripped into Cheneys fellow Republicans as a House of Cowards who are jumpy and scared.
Meanwhile, now that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has endorsed Rep. Elise Stefanik to replace Cheney in the House GOP leadership, Democrats are pounding McCarthy for cowardice.
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How Long Can Trumps Gop Stranglehold Last
Liz Cheneys ouster from Republican leadership on Wednesday was a big win for the man she has refused to placate Donald Trump. I spoke with Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi about the considerable shadow the former president continues to cast over Republicans from his perch at Mar-a-Lago.
Ben: President Trump has in some ways been reduced to a background presence in the political landscape. Facebooks ban on him was upheld for now, hes off Twitter forever, and hes churning out statements on a junky-looking website that doesnt see a lot of traffic.
But in other ways, the Republican party is as dependent on validating Trumps view of the world as ever. Lindsey Graham says the GOP cant grow without him; party leaders are making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to seek his wisdom, such as it is, and approval. And, of course, Liz Cheney was ousted from GOP leadership on Wednesday for banging on too loudly about the stolen-election conspiracy theory that rules the ex-presidents world and which a large majority of GOP voters believe.
In your view, does Trump have exactly the same kind of stranglehold over the party he did when he was president? Will the GOP just continue to stay in the thrall of a losing presidential candidate indefinitely?
Olivia: I feel like Im taking a multiple-choice test Im gonna have to go with B on this one.
Ben: I was taught that C was the most common correct answer. Not sure this holds true anymore.
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Indeed, a recent poll from the Democratic firm Democracy Corps, surveying voters in battleground states and districts, found that two-thirds of GOP voters there still strongly approve of Trump. These Trump loyalists are also among the most likely to say theyre very interested in the 2022 elections at this point. And in a CNN/SSRS poll from April, 70 percent of Republican respondents said Biden did not legitimately get enough votes to win the presidency. Faced with all this, any attempt to purge Trumpian influence from the party outright is doomed.
While the electoral incentives for the party overall are to unify and look forward before the 2022 midterms, the incentives for individual politicians can be different. Josh Mandel, a candidate in whats likely to be a fiercely contested US Senate GOP primary in Ohio, recently told a crowd that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. He added: My squishy establishment opponents in this race wont say those words. But I will.
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Donald Trump And The Politics Of Fear
Trumps candidacy relies on the power of fear. It could be the only way for him to win.
People are scared, Donald Trump said recently, and he was not wrong.
Fear is in the air, and fear is surging. Americans are more afraid today than they have been in a long time: Polls show majorities of Americans worried about being victims of terrorism and crime, numbers that have surged over the past year to highs not seen for more than a decade. Every week seems to bring a new large- or small-scale terrorist attack, at home or abroad. Mass shootings form a constant drumbeat. Protests have shut down large cities repeatedly, and some have turned violent. Overall crime rates may be down, but a sense of disorder is constant.
Fear pervades Americans livesand American politics. Trump is a master of fear, invoking it in concrete and abstract ways, summoning and validating it. More than most politicians, he grasps and channels the fear coursing through the electorate. And if Trump still stands a chance to win in November, fear could be the key.
Fear and anger are often cited in tandem as the sources of Trumps particular political appeal, so frequently paired that they become a refrain: fear and anger, anger and fear. But fear is not the same as anger; it is a unique political force. Its ebbs and flows through American political history have pulled on elections, reordering and destabilizing the electoral landscape.
Senior Republicans Should Recoil In Horror At Trump But Too Many Still Fear Him
The fate of the United States now rests on the stark choice the divided party faces: Trumps way or democracy
Surely this would be the moment. Surely the sight of a horde storming the US Capitol, smashing windows and breaking down doors, determined to use brute, mob strength to overturn a free and fair election, surely that would mark the red line. After five years dismissing those who warned that Donald Trump posed a clear and present danger to US democracy, branding them hysterics suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, surely this moment when they saw the citadel of that democracy overrun by men clothed in the slogans of neo-Nazism , waving the Confederate flag of slavery, racism and treason and carrying zip ties, apparently to bind the wrists and ankles of any hostages would, at long last, make Republicans recoil from the man who had led them to this horror.
Hours into the attempted and planned insurrection, Trump again made plain the bonds that connect him to the men of havoc. We love you, he told them in a video message, gently suggesting they go home. Youre very special. None of that is a surprise. They were only there for him, summoned to Washington by Trumps big lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen through fraud that they had been robbed of their champion by a wicked conspiracy that took in everyone from the Chinese Communist party to his own vice-president.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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John Kasich Says Republicans Are ‘afraid’ Of Trump
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Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich speaks with NPR’s Leila Fadel about the GOP’s unwillingness to stand up to President Trump, who still refuses to accept the results of the presidential election.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Last night, President Trump received another loss in court. A federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed the campaign’s attempts to stop the certification of Pennsylvania’s votes. This is just the latest of more than two dozen failed challenges brought by the Trump campaign to overturn the election results. President Trump refuses to concede, and for the most part, his party has supported his efforts to pursue legal challenges based on false allegations of widespread voter fraud.
Very few high-profile Republicans have publicly acknowledged Joe Biden as the winner, but one of them is John Kasich. He’s the former governor of Ohio and a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, and he joins us now.
Governor Kasich, welcome.
JOHN KASICH: Thanks, Leila. Glad to be with you.
FADEL: So you endorsed President-elect Joe Biden. He won this election. What do you make of President Trump’s attempts to overturn the results?
KASICH: It’s just absurd. The whole thing is – it’s just – it’s ridiculous. I mean, he has clearly won this election. And it is just sort of amazing to me that Republicans just keep sitting on their hands. It makes no sense.
FADEL: That was the former Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich.
Governor Kasich, thanks for speaking with us.
This Next Presidential Nomination Could Improve Things Or Make Them Even Worse
Is there a way out of this downward spiral? The optimistic case offered by Republicans who dislike the trends toward conspiracism in the party is pretty simple: They want to hang on and deal with Trump until 2024, and hope whoever wins the nomination will help steer the party in a healthy direction.
The Washington Examiners Byron York laid out this line of thinking in a recent column. There is a robust field of Republicans preparing to run. DeSantis, Pompeo, Pence, Haley, Cotton, Hawley, Noem, and several other possible candidates, York writes. Put them together and that is a strong group of contenders, all of whom will run on some theme of incorporating Trumps achievements into a new kind of Republican platform.
Theres variation among these Republicans about just how indulgent they were to Trumps stolen election claims Hawley was clearly the least responsible of that bunch. But most of the others indeed seem unlikely to push things anywhere near as far as Trump would if they end up losing the 2024 general election. And while they may have their faults, they seem unlikely to make conspiratorial thinking as central to their politics as Trump did.
The more unsavory tendencies in the Republican base surely wont vanish entirely if a more traditional Republican wins. But if the leader of the party stops throwing fuel on that fire, their influence would likely weaken.
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What Are Republicans So Afraid Of
Instead of conspiracy-mongering about an election they did well in, they could try to win real majorities.
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
There was a time, in recent memory, when the Republican Party both believed it could win a national majority and actively worked to build one.
Take the last Republican president before Donald Trump, George W. Bush. His chief political adviser, Karl Rove, envisioned a durable Republican majority, if not a permanent one. And Bush would try to make this a reality.
To appeal to moderate suburban voters, Bush would make education a priority and promise a compassionate conservatism. To strengthen the partys hold on white evangelicals, Bush emphasized his Christianity and worked to polarize the country over abortion, same-sex marriage and other questions of sexual ethics and morality. Bush courted Black and Hispanic voters with the promise of homeownership and signed a giveaway to seniors in the form of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. He also made it a point to have a diverse cabinet, elevating figures like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales.
Whether shrewd or misguided, cynical or sincere or outright cruel and divisive these gambits were each part of an effort to expand the Republican coalition as far as it could go without abandoning Reaganite conservatism itself. It was the work of a self-assured political movement, confident that it could secure a position as the nations de facto governing party.
Why Dont Republicans Stand Up To Trump Heres The Answer
Why Are Republicans So Afraid Of Lev Parnas? | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC
Rep. Mark Sanford
If youre still flummoxed by the abject servility of congressional Republicans, by their refusal to confront Trump and stand up for American values, check out last nights primary election in South Carolina. The purging of Mark Sanford says it all.
Sanford is a long-serving conservative lawmaker who typically votes with his party, but on a few public occasions, he has actually dared to suggest that Trump is not the supreme very stable genius that the deluded Republican base deems Trump to be. The result: Sanford loses his job.
For the inexcusable sin of speaking his mind about factual reality, the Republican base voters in Sanfords House district threw him out last night, handing the GOP nomination to a far-right Trumper who repeatedly denounced Sanford as disloyal.
This is why rank-and-file Republican lawmakers refuse to speak out. Theyre afraid of their own constituents. Its Trumps party now, and the constituents in red districts virtually worship the guy. Forget about putting country over party, because its actually worse than that. Sanfords colleagues wont put country over career. Theyll vow that what just happened to Sanford will not happen to them.
As conservative commentator Erick Erickson said today, Mark Sanford losing in South Carolina is pretty much proof positive that the GOP is not really a conservative party that cares about limited government. It is now fully a cult of personality.
I stand by every word.
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Why Are Republicans Scared Of Trump
Donald Trump Hasn’t Cowed Republicans He’s Freed Them To Pursue Their Long
Why Are Republicans Still So Afraid Of Trump? | The 11th Hour | MSNBC
Donald Trump getting the “O-K” from Joseph McCarthy and Mitch McConnell
On the eve of the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives , things are looking mighty bleak for anyone who hoped Republicans might turn over a new leaf. For the last several months, there has been plaintive hope that GOP lawmakers might be moved by the overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump is guilty of running an extortion scheme against Ukraine’s leaders to help him win re-election in 2020.
Right now, it looks like there’s no chance of any Republican defections in the House away from the GOP line that Trump did nothing wrong. The one Republican, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who admitted out loud that Trump deserved to be impeached, was duly ejected from the party. In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been openly bragging that he intends to rig the Senate trial in Trump’s favor. Even supposedly Trump-skeptical Republican senators, such as Utah’s Mitt Romney or Maine’s Susan Collins, have been avoiding questions about whether the Senate should call witnesses for the trial.
“But this presidents actions are possible only with the craven acquiescence of congressional Republicans,” they write. “They have done no less than abdicate their Article I responsibilities.”
No, Republicans clearly feel empowered by Trump. He frees them to reveal their darkest desire which is to end democracy as we know it, and to cut any corners or break any laws necessary to get the job done.
Why Republicans Are Afraid To Challenge Trump
Juan Williams
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Republicans Now Bragging About Being Trump Big Lie Pushers
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In taking a shot at CNNs Jake Tapper, Republicans are openly boasting that theyre responsible for spreading democracy-defying conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
The CNN anchor recently took a stand against inviting election deniers on his programs, saying last week that lawmakers who support former President Donald Trumps Big Liereferring to the false claim that the election was stolenare not welcome on his weekday and weekend shows. Its not a policy but a philosophy, Tapper said, noting he hasnt booked such Republicans since the election. Pro-Trump Republicans have since come forward with emails from CNN bookers requesting their presence on Tappers shows. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New Yorkwhom the GOP last month voted to replace Liz Cheney as the partys conference chairtweeted screenshots, telling Tapper to read and weep:
Twitter content
Responding to these apparent gotcha attempts, Tapper said he cant account for every email from my excellent bookers whose job it is to present me with as many options as possible. He also pointed to the absurdity of Republicans rushing to prove they are, in fact, election deniers. Kind of stunning to see her proudly identify as a conspiracy theorist, he said of Stefanik.
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Republicans Still Scared To Death Of Trump
Trump went on yet another unhinged rant this weekend during a speech to donors in Florida, attacking Mitch McConnell as a “stone cold loser” for refusing to go along with his attempt to steal the election, but you won’t find any profiles in courage in the GOP willing to stand up to him.
Case in point, on this weekend’s Fox News Sunday, South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune was asked about Trump calling him “weak and inneffective RINO” earlier in the year and saying he might back a primary challenger to Thune. Thune responded telling host Chris Wallace that “I’ve been through wars in South Dakota, political wars, with my own party when I ran the first time, with the Democrats in a couple of hotly contested Senate races, so being afraid of a fight or somebody coming after me is not something that’s going to influence that decision,” but Thune refused to admonish Trump for his rhetoric, and refused to stand up for McConnell when asked about him as well.
Which is pretty much the equivalent of “I support Trump, but I really don’t like the tweeting” that we heard from so many of them over the last five or six years.
As the Fox article discussed, Trump called Thune “Mitch’s boy” when urging Gov. Kristi Noem to challenge Thune in 2022, but no amount of insults are apparently ever breaking point for these jellyfish.
The Actual Reason Why Republicans And Their Media Are Discouraging People From Getting Vaccinated
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, “A surprising amount of death will occur soon…” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?
Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, “I don’t have a really good reason why this is happening.”
But even if he can’t think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it’s definitely there.
Which is why it’s important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:
1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?
2. Why are Fox “News” personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?
3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: “They were hoping the government was hoping that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn’t happening!”
4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would “ban” private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status ?
Death is their electoral strategy.
Is there any other possible explanation?
So, what’s left?
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Top Republicans Are Running Scared And Relinquishing The Gop To The Monster They Helped Create
Like a bunch of lemmings, Republican lawmakers in Congress and across the country have clung to Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the only reason he lost the 2020 election was because it was riddled with fraud.
Of course, Trump never once proved a single instance of fraud in 60-plus trips to the courthouse, and he also helped ensure the massacre of at least half a million Americans due to the pandemic, so there’s that.
But instead of being willing to admit what’s plain as day to anyone with a brain and a pulse, GOP lawmakers tout Trump’s Big Lie in conservative media and then run from reporters representing every news outlet that has a shred of integrity left.
“In Washington, normally chatty senators scramble to skirt the question,” writes TheWashington Post.
Of course, there’s also the very public rift in the House GOP leadership between Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming who yet again on Monday reiterated the truth that Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the election.
“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system,” Cheney tweeted, in what amounts to GOP apostasy these days.
But the question is: Why? Why did McCarthy retreat from saying Trump “bears responsibility” for Jan. 6 to being a total Trump bootlicker? Why are chatty senators dodging reporters on Capitol Hill?
Republicans Fear Trump Will Lead To A Lost Generation Of Talent
The 45th president has brought new voices and voters to the party, but hes driven them out too. Insiders fear the repercussions.
06/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT
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As Donald Trump ponders another presidential bid, top Republicans have grown fearful about what theyre calling the partys lost generation.
In conversations with more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisers and aides, a common concern has emerged that a host of national and statewide Republicans are either leaving office or may not choose to pursue it for fear that they cant survive politically in the current GOP. The worry, these Republicans say, is that the party is embracing personality over policy, and that it is short sighted to align with Trump, who lost the general election and continues to alienate a large swath of the voting public with his grievances and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Trump has driven sitting GOP lawmakers and political aspirants into early retirements ever since he burst onto the scene. But there was hope that things would change after his election loss. Instead, his influence on the GOP appears to be as solid as ever and the impact of those early shockwaves remain visible. When asked, for instance, if he feared the 45th president was causing a talent drain from the GOP ranks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush perhaps inadvertently offered a personal demonstration of the case.
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Mcfeely: Why Are Republicans Afraid Of Everything
FARGO Republicans are afraid.
Afraid of Black people. Afraid of brown people. Afraid of red people. Afraid of yellow people. Afraid of women. Afraid of young people.
Afraid of young people voting. Afraid of people of color voting. Afraid of voting rights. Afraid of democracy.
Afraid of science. Afraid of medicine. Afraid of knowledge. Afraid of public education. Afraid of universities. Afraid of professors. Afraid of teachers.
Afraid of experts. Afraid of doctors. Afraid of Anthony Fauci. Afraid of masks. Afraid of vaccines. Afraid of vaccine passports. Afraid of vaccine chips. Afraid of things that don’t exist.
Afraid of history. Afraid of the truth. Afraid of those who tell the truth.
Afraid of books. Afraid of newspapers. Afraid of objectivity. Afraid of facts.
Afraid of wind towers. Afraid of solar power. Afraid of environmentalists. Afraid of the Green New Deal. Afraid of Greta Thunberg. Afraid of change.
Afraid of the media. Afraid of The New York Times. Afraid of The Washington Post. Afraid of MSNBC. Afraid of CNN.
Afraid of Twitter. Afraid of Facebook. Afraid of Google. Afraid of big tech. Afraid of the government. Afraid of the establishment.
Afraid of Democrats. Afraid of Black Lives Matter. Afraid of antifa. Afraid of Democratic Socialists.
Afraid of Bernie Sanders. Afraid of AOC. Afraid of Elizabeth Warren. Afraid of Nancy Pelosi. Afraid of Barack Obama. Afraid of Kamala Harris. Afraid of Joe Biden. Afraid of Mitt Romney. Afraid of Liz Cheney. Afraid of RINOs.
Opinion: Stop Saying Republicans Are Cowards Who Fear Trump The Truth Is Far Worse
âRepublicans Are Afraid Of Donald Trumpâ Despite Election Loss, Kasie Hunt Says | TODAY
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, deserves great credit for demanding that his party fully repudiate Donald Trumps big lie about the 2020 election and acknowledge its role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection. But Kinzinger is getting one big thing wrong.
In a Sunday appearance on CBS, Kinzinger repeatedly said fellow Republicans are fundamentally driven by fear of Trump. They dont want to confront Trumps lies, Kinzinger lamented, adding that theyre scared to death of him.
As a broad description of our current moment, this is profoundly insufficient. It risks misleading people about the true nature of the threat posed by the GOPs ongoing radicalization.
With House Republicans expected this week to oust Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from leadership for vocally making the same case that Kinzinger is, the idea that Republicans are primarily driven by cowardice is everywhere.
Liz is a living reproach to all these cowards, one friend of Cheney told the New Yorker, a quote that drew tons of Twitter approval. Similarly, former GOP speechwriter Peggy Noonan ripped into Cheneys fellow Republicans as a House of Cowards who are jumpy and scared.
Meanwhile, now that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has endorsed Rep. Elise Stefanik to replace Cheney in the House GOP leadership, Democrats are pounding McCarthy for cowardice.
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How Long Can Trumps Gop Stranglehold Last
Liz Cheneys ouster from Republican leadership on Wednesday was a big win for the man she has refused to placate Donald Trump. I spoke with Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi about the considerable shadow the former president continues to cast over Republicans from his perch at Mar-a-Lago.
Ben: President Trump has in some ways been reduced to a background presence in the political landscape. Facebooks ban on him was upheld for now, hes off Twitter forever, and hes churning out statements on a junky-looking website that doesnt see a lot of traffic.
But in other ways, the Republican party is as dependent on validating Trumps view of the world as ever. Lindsey Graham says the GOP cant grow without him; party leaders are making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to seek his wisdom, such as it is, and approval. And, of course, Liz Cheney was ousted from GOP leadership on Wednesday for banging on too loudly about the stolen-election conspiracy theory that rules the ex-presidents world and which a large majority of GOP voters believe.
In your view, does Trump have exactly the same kind of stranglehold over the party he did when he was president? Will the GOP just continue to stay in the thrall of a losing presidential candidate indefinitely?
Olivia: I feel like Im taking a multiple-choice test Im gonna have to go with B on this one.
Ben: I was taught that C was the most common correct answer. Not sure this holds true anymore.
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Indeed, a recent poll from the Democratic firm Democracy Corps, surveying voters in battleground states and districts, found that two-thirds of GOP voters there still strongly approve of Trump. These Trump loyalists are also among the most likely to say theyre very interested in the 2022 elections at this point. And in a CNN/SSRS poll from April, 70 percent of Republican respondents said Biden did not legitimately get enough votes to win the presidency. Faced with all this, any attempt to purge Trumpian influence from the party outright is doomed.
While the electoral incentives for the party overall are to unify and look forward before the 2022 midterms, the incentives for individual politicians can be different. Josh Mandel, a candidate in whats likely to be a fiercely contested US Senate GOP primary in Ohio, recently told a crowd that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. He added: My squishy establishment opponents in this race wont say those words. But I will.
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Donald Trump And The Politics Of Fear
Trumps candidacy relies on the power of fear. It could be the only way for him to win.
People are scared, Donald Trump said recently, and he was not wrong.
Fear is in the air, and fear is surging. Americans are more afraid today than they have been in a long time: Polls show majorities of Americans worried about being victims of terrorism and crime, numbers that have surged over the past year to highs not seen for more than a decade. Every week seems to bring a new large- or small-scale terrorist attack, at home or abroad. Mass shootings form a constant drumbeat. Protests have shut down large cities repeatedly, and some have turned violent. Overall crime rates may be down, but a sense of disorder is constant.
Fear pervades Americans livesand American politics. Trump is a master of fear, invoking it in concrete and abstract ways, summoning and validating it. More than most politicians, he grasps and channels the fear coursing through the electorate. And if Trump still stands a chance to win in November, fear could be the key.
Fear and anger are often cited in tandem as the sources of Trumps particular political appeal, so frequently paired that they become a refrain: fear and anger, anger and fear. But fear is not the same as anger; it is a unique political force. Its ebbs and flows through American political history have pulled on elections, reordering and destabilizing the electoral landscape.
Senior Republicans Should Recoil In Horror At Trump But Too Many Still Fear Him
The fate of the United States now rests on the stark choice the divided party faces: Trumps way or democracy
Surely this would be the moment. Surely the sight of a horde storming the US Capitol, smashing windows and breaking down doors, determined to use brute, mob strength to overturn a free and fair election, surely that would mark the red line. After five years dismissing those who warned that Donald Trump posed a clear and present danger to US democracy, branding them hysterics suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, surely this moment when they saw the citadel of that democracy overrun by men clothed in the slogans of neo-Nazism , waving the Confederate flag of slavery, racism and treason and carrying zip ties, apparently to bind the wrists and ankles of any hostages would, at long last, make Republicans recoil from the man who had led them to this horror.
Hours into the attempted and planned insurrection, Trump again made plain the bonds that connect him to the men of havoc. We love you, he told them in a video message, gently suggesting they go home. Youre very special. None of that is a surprise. They were only there for him, summoned to Washington by Trumps big lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen through fraud that they had been robbed of their champion by a wicked conspiracy that took in everyone from the Chinese Communist party to his own vice-president.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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John Kasich Says Republicans Are ‘afraid’ Of Trump
EmbedEmbed
Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich speaks with NPR’s Leila Fadel about the GOP’s unwillingness to stand up to President Trump, who still refuses to accept the results of the presidential election.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Last night, President Trump received another loss in court. A federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed the campaign’s attempts to stop the certification of Pennsylvania’s votes. This is just the latest of more than two dozen failed challenges brought by the Trump campaign to overturn the election results. President Trump refuses to concede, and for the most part, his party has supported his efforts to pursue legal challenges based on false allegations of widespread voter fraud.
Very few high-profile Republicans have publicly acknowledged Joe Biden as the winner, but one of them is John Kasich. He’s the former governor of Ohio and a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, and he joins us now.
Governor Kasich, welcome.
JOHN KASICH: Thanks, Leila. Glad to be with you.
FADEL: So you endorsed President-elect Joe Biden. He won this election. What do you make of President Trump’s attempts to overturn the results?
KASICH: It’s just absurd. The whole thing is – it’s just – it’s ridiculous. I mean, he has clearly won this election. And it is just sort of amazing to me that Republicans just keep sitting on their hands. It makes no sense.
FADEL: That was the former Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich.
Governor Kasich, thanks for speaking with us.
This Next Presidential Nomination Could Improve Things Or Make Them Even Worse
Is there a way out of this downward spiral? The optimistic case offered by Republicans who dislike the trends toward conspiracism in the party is pretty simple: They want to hang on and deal with Trump until 2024, and hope whoever wins the nomination will help steer the party in a healthy direction.
The Washington Examiners Byron York laid out this line of thinking in a recent column. There is a robust field of Republicans preparing to run. DeSantis, Pompeo, Pence, Haley, Cotton, Hawley, Noem, and several other possible candidates, York writes. Put them together and that is a strong group of contenders, all of whom will run on some theme of incorporating Trumps achievements into a new kind of Republican platform.
Theres variation among these Republicans about just how indulgent they were to Trumps stolen election claims Hawley was clearly the least responsible of that bunch. But most of the others indeed seem unlikely to push things anywhere near as far as Trump would if they end up losing the 2024 general election. And while they may have their faults, they seem unlikely to make conspiratorial thinking as central to their politics as Trump did.
The more unsavory tendencies in the Republican base surely wont vanish entirely if a more traditional Republican wins. But if the leader of the party stops throwing fuel on that fire, their influence would likely weaken.
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What Are Republicans So Afraid Of
Instead of conspiracy-mongering about an election they did well in, they could try to win real majorities.
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
There was a time, in recent memory, when the Republican Party both believed it could win a national majority and actively worked to build one.
Take the last Republican president before Donald Trump, George W. Bush. His chief political adviser, Karl Rove, envisioned a durable Republican majority, if not a permanent one. And Bush would try to make this a reality.
To appeal to moderate suburban voters, Bush would make education a priority and promise a compassionate conservatism. To strengthen the partys hold on white evangelicals, Bush emphasized his Christianity and worked to polarize the country over abortion, same-sex marriage and other questions of sexual ethics and morality. Bush courted Black and Hispanic voters with the promise of homeownership and signed a giveaway to seniors in the form of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. He also made it a point to have a diverse cabinet, elevating figures like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales.
Whether shrewd or misguided, cynical or sincere or outright cruel and divisive these gambits were each part of an effort to expand the Republican coalition as far as it could go without abandoning Reaganite conservatism itself. It was the work of a self-assured political movement, confident that it could secure a position as the nations de facto governing party.
Why Dont Republicans Stand Up To Trump Heres The Answer
Why Are Republicans So Afraid Of Lev Parnas? | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC
Rep. Mark Sanford
If youre still flummoxed by the abject servility of congressional Republicans, by their refusal to confront Trump and stand up for American values, check out last nights primary election in South Carolina. The purging of Mark Sanford says it all.
Sanford is a long-serving conservative lawmaker who typically votes with his party, but on a few public occasions, he has actually dared to suggest that Trump is not the supreme very stable genius that the deluded Republican base deems Trump to be. The result: Sanford loses his job.
For the inexcusable sin of speaking his mind about factual reality, the Republican base voters in Sanfords House district threw him out last night, handing the GOP nomination to a far-right Trumper who repeatedly denounced Sanford as disloyal.
This is why rank-and-file Republican lawmakers refuse to speak out. Theyre afraid of their own constituents. Its Trumps party now, and the constituents in red districts virtually worship the guy. Forget about putting country over party, because its actually worse than that. Sanfords colleagues wont put country over career. Theyll vow that what just happened to Sanford will not happen to them.
As conservative commentator Erick Erickson said today, Mark Sanford losing in South Carolina is pretty much proof positive that the GOP is not really a conservative party that cares about limited government. It is now fully a cult of personality.
I stand by every word.
Read Also: Which 4 Republicans Voted Yes Today
source https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-are-republicans-scared-of-trump/
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People want data privacy but don’t always know what they’re getting
Differential privateness lets organizations acquire individuals's knowledge whereas defending their privateness, however it's not foolproof. imaginima/E+ through Getty Photos
The Trump administration’s transfer to ban the favored video app TikTok has stoked fears concerning the Chinese language authorities gathering private info of people that use the app. These fears underscore rising considerations Individuals have about digital privateness typically.
Debates round privateness might sound easy: One thing is non-public or it’s not. Nonetheless, the know-how that gives digital privateness is something however easy.
Our knowledge privateness analysis reveals that folks’s hesitancy to share their knowledge stems partly from not understanding who would have entry to it and the way organizations that acquire knowledge hold it non-public. We’ve additionally discovered that when individuals are conscious of knowledge privateness applied sciences, they won’t get what they anticipate.
Differential privateness defined
Whereas there are lots of methods to offer privateness for individuals who share their knowledge, differential privateness has not too long ago emerged as a number one method and is being quickly adopted.
Think about your native tourism committee wished to seek out out the most well-liked locations in your space. A easy answer could be to gather lists of all of the areas you’ve gotten visited out of your cell system, mix it with comparable lists for everybody else in your space, and rely how typically every location was visited. Whereas environment friendly, gathering individuals’s delicate knowledge on this means can have dire penalties. Even when the information is stripped of names, it might nonetheless be attainable for a knowledge analyst or a hacker to determine and stalk people.
Differential privateness can be utilized to guard everybody’s private knowledge whereas gleaning helpful info from it. Differential privateness disguises people’ info by randomly altering the lists of locations they’ve visited, probably by eradicating some areas and including others. These launched errors make it just about unattainable to match individuals’s info and use the method of elimination to find out somebody’s id. Importantly, these random modifications are sufficiently small to make sure that the abstract statistics – on this case, the most well-liked locations – are correct.
The U.S. Census Bureau is utilizing differential privateness to guard your knowledge within the 2020 census.
In observe, differential privateness isn’t excellent. The randomization course of have to be calibrated fastidiously. An excessive amount of randomness will make the abstract statistics inaccurate. Too little will go away individuals weak to being recognized. Additionally, if the randomization takes place after everybody’s unaltered knowledge has been collected, as is frequent in some variations of differential privateness, hackers should be capable of get on the authentic knowledge.
When differential privateness was developed in 2006, it was principally thought to be a theoretically fascinating software. In 2014, Google grew to become the primary firm to begin publicly utilizing differential privateness for knowledge assortment.
Since then, new programs utilizing differential privateness have been deployed by Microsoft, Google and the U.S. Census Bureau. Apple makes use of it to energy machine studying algorithms without having to see your knowledge, and Uber turned to it to verify their inner knowledge analysts can’t abuse their energy. Differential privateness is commonly hailed as the answer to the internet advertising business’s privateness points by permitting advertisers to find out how individuals reply to their advertisements with out monitoring people.
Affordable expectations?
Nevertheless it’s not clear that people who find themselves weighing whether or not to share their knowledge have clear expectations about, or perceive, differential privateness.
In July, we, as researchers at Boston College, the Georgia Institute of Expertise and Microsoft Analysis and the Max Planck Institute, surveyed 675 Individuals to judge whether or not individuals are prepared to belief differentially non-public programs with their knowledge.
We created descriptions of differential privateness based mostly on these utilized by corporations, media retailers and teachers. These definitions ranged from nuanced descriptions that centered on what differential privateness may permit an organization to do or the dangers it protects in opposition to, descriptions that centered on belief within the many corporations that at the moment are utilizing it and descriptions that merely said that differential privateness is “the brand new gold normal in knowledge privateness safety,” because the Census Bureau has described it.
Individuals we surveyed had been about twice as prone to report that they’d be prepared to share their knowledge in the event that they had been instructed, utilizing one in every of these definitions, that their knowledge could be protected with differential privateness. The particular means that differential privateness was described, nevertheless, didn’t have an effect on individuals’s inclination to share. The mere assure of privateness appears to be ample to change individuals’s expectations about who can entry their knowledge and whether or not it could be safe within the occasion of a hack. In flip, these expectations drive individuals’s willingness to share info.
Troublingly, individuals’s expectations of how protected their knowledge will probably be with differential privateness aren’t at all times right. For instance, many differential privateness programs do nothing to guard person knowledge from lawful legislation enforcement searches, however 20% of respondents anticipated this safety.
The confusion is probably going because of the means that corporations, media retailers and even teachers describe differential privateness. Most explanations concentrate on what differential privateness does or what it may be used for, however do little to spotlight what differential privateness can and might’t shield in opposition to. This leaves individuals to attract their very own conclusions about what protections differential privateness offers.
Constructing belief
To assist individuals make knowledgeable decisions about their knowledge, they want info that precisely units their expectations about privateness. It’s not sufficient to inform individuals {that a} system meets a “gold normal” of some forms of privateness with out telling them what which means. Customers shouldn’t want a level in arithmetic to make an knowledgeable selection.
[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]
Figuring out the very best methods to obviously clarify the protections supplied by differential privateness would require additional analysis to determine which expectations are most essential to people who find themselves contemplating sharing their knowledge. One chance is utilizing methods like privateness vitamin labels.
Serving to individuals align their expectations with actuality may also require corporations utilizing differential privateness as a part of their knowledge gathering actions to completely and precisely clarify what’s and isn’t being stored non-public and from whom.
Gabriel Kaptchuk receives funding from the Nationwide Science Basis and has been a guide for Microsoft Analysis and Bolt Labs.
Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles receives funding from Microsoft, Fb, and the Max Planck Institute for Software program Techniques. She is affiliated with Microsoft, Fb, and Human Computing Associates.
Rachel Cummings has labored or consulted for Apple, Microsoft Analysis, and the U.S. Census Bureau. She has acquired funding from Mozilla, Fb, and Google.
from Growth News https://growthnews.in/people-want-data-privacy-but-dont-always-know-what-theyre-getting/ via https://growthnews.in
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Oh yeah I TOTALLY FORGOT to talk about environmental monsters lol
Okay well what I mean is.. in games with enemies roaming on the map, why don’t we ever see them doing anything? They only ever home in on you when they see you. Everyone in the entire world does nothing except run screaming at you to initiate a battle. No matter what the enemy is, no matter what the story is, no matter the genre. its even rare to see minimal differences like some enemies running and hiding, or whatever.
And like.. i can understand this in some genres, at least. In some genres ‘creating a vivid world’ isn’t really a priority, or there’s an actual reason for all the enemies to attack on sight, like if its a stealth game infiltrating a base. or it might just be hardware engine limitations of the time. i think the majority of this trope used to be because it wasnt possible to do anything else on those consoles, and its stuck around even on more powerful consoles just cos its “a tradition”... I think this idea could specifically be very useful in monster-catching games, where the goal is to find them and gain their power. Having ones that appear on the map and run away or hide would be a better form of challenge than some of the bullshit in pokemon where there’s a 0.5% of fishing up a certain fish only on five tiles out of 140. And like.. the weaker more basic ones could just stand around doing cute animations instead of chasing you down. Chasing you down is only a challenge instead of an annoyance when the chaser like.. actually poses a threat. For minor monsters where the aim is literally just “allow player to enter this encounter” then.. do that. They can stand still in a predictable spot so its easier, and they can have cute animations so it doesnt draw attention to the fact they’re just standing there. Plus there’s loads of other ways you could make it difficult to get them! like ones that camoflage with the scenery or have different movement patterns for their escape, or only appear under specific conditions!
but BASICALLY the concept i mean here is that... I want to run through a field and see monsters everywhere I want to be able to run past ones that don’t attack I want to see them interacting with their environment as if it’s real I want encounters that’re possibly completely optional I want to be able to find little secrets of monsters being cute that i can take a screenshot of i want a world that’s memorable as if its a travel trip i want all the fun of actual animal-watching!!! ^_^
IDEAS!
* Peaceful grazing herbivores in a field. * Shake bushes or flip over rocks to find smaller bug monsters. * Flying monster that can only be caught during a brief window of time when it swoops down to eat smaller monsters. you have to find which small prey is marked as its next target, by seeing a shadow overhead. And then when you engage that prey in battle, instead you get the rare flyer! kinda like the shaking grass that gives you audino in pokemon BW? * Monsters hiding up in trees who only emerge when they cant see you, and jump back up when they can. So you have to avoid their line of sight and wait until they appear, or set traps for them. * Similar sort of thing with monsters in burrows? But you could perhaps get a shovel item to bypass this restriction, at the cost of permenantly destroying that monster spawn spot. You’d get a horde battle with all of the rabbits at once and they’d be angry and harder to catch.
* Possibly having to balance ecosystem stuff like that? you can only fight a certain amount of a certain monster during a single adventure, and have to wait various different times for them to respawn. Perhaps areas have sorts of levels for the ecosystem too, so stronger monsters with higher chances of rare abilities would start appearing if you favor a certain area a lot. And maybe a few choices at certain levels where you could kinda customize it? like go on a quest to improve one part of the ecosystem which will increase the amount of one monster and decrease another. Or there’s two rare species that have just been sighted but theyre competing for the same territory and only one of them will stay- you get the choice of which side to help out.
* Possibly monsters who have rivalries! If you happen to initiate a battle with one monster while its predator is within eyesight, it’ll join the battle and help you fight against it. or you might have certain monsters that’re rare because they spawn near their predator and you have like a time limit to catch it before the other monster does. or maybe lesser rivalries instead of eating each other- like two different patterned variants of peacock who do elaborate dance battles! Thei AI could switch from peaceful to aggressive whenever there’s more than one of them together.
* Possibly monsters could have schedules? like, a time-based system of changes for this ecosystem. More than just only finding certain ones at night, they’d all have their own set walk-routes of being available in different sections of the area depending on the time of day. Figure out the brief time window for a very rare creature, and enjoy that satisfying feeling of pulling off a successful ambush. And maybe different cute idle animations that make you feel like they have a life outside of when you’re there. See the wildebeast herd making their daily trip to the watering hole, see birds digging up worms, see baby lion cubs playing chasing games together while mama and papa watch~! This would work really well with having an integrated screenshot system, and maybe some achievements for getting certain rare photo ops? * Maybe this could also relate to the rivalries? like, have two monsters whose schedule runs on wildly different timescales, and only matches up once in a full moon to have them both competing over the same food source in the same area.
* A good hints system would probably be necessary if we’re gonna pull this off. Or at least a logbook that keeps track of details you’ve already found about each monster. Encounter it at a certain time of day and its written down now, etc. And have a general idea of how many different times and different behaviours you havent found yet. * Could have various npcs who reward you for different things instead of just for catching X monsters or defeating X monsters. Like ones who just want you to find out what time you can find that monster, or what its favourite food is so they can lure it. these could help give you the hints towards finding rarer secrets!
* Hoarder monsters. A rare archetype which can reward you for finding their nest during a time that theyre NOT there! Like squirrels burying their nuts or magpies stealing shiny and potentially valuable things. You have a chance of scoring a bunch of useful items, even if it makes you feel like a bit of a jerk. * Monsters who’re sleeping on the world map and you have to sneak past them to not wake them up (if theyre dangerous) or sneak up to them instead (if theyre ones that normally run away) * Possible ability to lure in monsters by throwing food, or chase them away with stuff like smelly salts or items theyre scared of. (Giant cat: *no like banana*)
* Pet button. not many monsters are tame enough to just accept it immediately, outside of the ones in the basic tutorial area. But it can be super rewarding to win a monster’s trust and be able to do this! It’d be like a small chance of capturing them without a battle, and be boosted by taking various actions that particular monster likes. * Maybe not all of them are as simple as just giving them food they like and being unthreatening? There might be monsters who respond positively to ‘bad’ actions, like ones who respect you for seeming tough and simply think you’re too boring to deal with if you seem unthreatening. Maybe even ones who want to see you prove yourself in battle? So if you fight enough other monsters in the area, suddenly all these ones start following you around cutely and practically forcing theirself into your team! Oh, and also maybe if you defeat the predator or rival of a certain monster?
* Similarly, other forms of affection and temporary allyship you can have with monsters even before you catch them. Like maybe monsters that’re teetering on the edge of trusting you might display certain behaviours to try and convince you to catch them, and then you can benefit from that for a little while before they get frustrated and leave. The ones who respect your toughness might join you in fights as a guest party member, or reward you with an item for every fight you finish within their time limit. * Probably the most common and useful temporary allyship would be mountable wild monsters! Cos I’m thinking maybe how many mons in your party would be determined by ‘party points’ or something, rather than each taking up one slot. mount monsters are bigger so you could take one of them or like six small monsters for the same amount of upkeep. Finding a good reliable mountable wild mon and bringing all the stuff you need to befriend it will help you cut costs on your adventure! Tho probably they have more limited abilities compared to a tamed mount, like worse obedience and stuff.
* The design of this monster is something I’m gonna enter into a kickstarter backer reward thing, so i probably won’t be able to still use it in other projects afterwards. But here’s the idea I had for that Sombul monster if it was in a game style like this! I was thinking it could be one of those sleeping on the map type monsters, but also it fights back with sleep magic when awakened. So it just puts you to sleep and then falls back asleep next to you XD There could probably be other monsters that evade you using other techniques instead of regular fighting. Various sorts of stunning or weakening your attacks, so they can run away while you’re distracted! But I think Somnul in particular would be super cute if it doesn’t even run away afterwards. Its just like the ultimate no-sell “NO FIGHTING” monster who you can only catch by befriending it. And even its no-sell just has it cuddle up to your sleepy self and take a nap too~ Probably its befriending technique would be to just sit down next to it and go to sleep on your own. I know i’d really wanna just lay around and watch the monsters frolicking in a game like this~ Weird ghostie friend admires your napping technique! It joined your party! Woo!
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'I’m hungry to start the work': Bill Shorten's five-year journey has just weeks left to run
Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size Bill Shorten stands on a metal stairway in Australias biggest brewery and tries to convince the assembled workers that the coming election will not be an empty exercise. Whatever you do, you get a politician at the end of it, he concedes, drawing a few smiles from the crowd, but his speech is heavy with warnings about the importance of every ballot paper. How you vote has a direct effect on the laws and conditions you get at work, he says. There is a connection. If you think that everythings going up in Australia but the wages, your vote can change that. If you want to see energy bills get under control, your vote can change that. Shorten worries in private about the apathy among voters who have seen six prime ministers over a dozen years. Here, in front of about 100 workers at the Lion brewery in western Sydney, he is trying to give meaning to the election to be fought on May 11 or May 18. He seems to feel his greatest challenge is to persuade Australians that it matters.
Labor leader Bill Shorten has served two terms as Opposition Leader. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Shorten projects his voice over the conveyor belts and palletisers. He tells the workers he wants Australia to be a manufacturing nation. He knows their salaries and conditions are good but he says they may have family members in retail and hospitality where the penalty rates have been cut. He talks about Medicare, hospitals, schools, restoring penalty rates and lifting the minimum wage. He promises to force companies to hire more apprentices. The applause is polite but not effusive. Everyone can see the television cameras. They know this is merely a warm-up for the election campaign. A few want to take a selfie with the candidate, but there is none of the manic energy of the 2007 campaign, when Kevin Rudd shocked his own side with his popularity. The wariness in the audience is given voice when Shorten takes questions. One worker asks about negative gearing and gets an assurance that Labors tax increase will allow anyone with an existing rental property to keep claiming a concession. When the public questions are over, someone asks Shorten whether she can trust Labor to stop asylum seekers coming by boat. He assures her she can, but she is not convinced. An older man asks him to do more to help grandparents who have to take custody of their grandchildren but do not get as much support as foster parents. Shorten asks for the mans details so his office can respond in more detail. Advertisement There is no doubt Shorten is match fit for the election. Five-and-a-half years after he became Opposition Leader, he is tantalisingly close to becoming prime minister. To stumble now would be to lose the unloseable election, a spectre so grim he will not rest until polling day. Im hungry to start the work, he tells The Sunday Age and The Sun-Herald. Shorten has a long list of what he wants to achieve in government to deliver real progress in peoples lives. Fifteen years of education. That means genuine, universal access to preschool, he says, reeling off the first item on the list as we travel from Sydneys west to Sydney Airport.
Bill Shorten poses for a selfie during a marginal seat visit in Melbourne.Credit:AAP Weve got to tackle the challenge of dementia and aged care, weve got to help people deal with it better. In the big health fights that people have in their life, weve got to make sure they dont feel financial burden on top of the health challenge. I really want any kid from any postcode in Australia to get all the options TAFE or university, whatever dream they want to pursue. I want merit and how hard you work to be the passport, not how rich your parents are. Theres more. Advertisement Weve really got to be one of the best countries in the world at so much, he says. Why shouldnt we be the best at healthcare and education, why shouldnt we be the best at climate change? We should be an energy superpower. We should have a more independent foreign policy. We should close the gap with the first Australians. Its all about opportunity and fairness. I want every Australian to have opportunity and every Australian to receive fairness. And theyll do the rest. Loading Stone by stone, Shorten and his team have added so many promises they now have a mountain to climb if they win power. They vow to restore penalty rates, change the law to raise the minimum wage, hold a plebiscite on a republic, raise $32.1 billion over a decade from changes to negative gearing and raise $56 billion from changes to tax refunds on dividend imputation. Not least, they promise to spend billions of dollars on energy projects while cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, in a Parliament that has swung wildly on climate change over two decades. Shorten will not admit he is promising too much. He plays down the risk of a traffic jam in Parliament for his crowded agenda. Well just keep advancing. You can get things done if you want to, he says. As proof, he nominates the National Disability Insurance Scheme, an idea he backed in his earliest days on the Rudd frontbench. Advertisement Rudd, of course, took power in 2007 with a wish-list so long he had to launch dozens of reviews rather than taking immediate action. Shorten insists he can avoid that. Youve got to go in with a clear agenda, Shorten says. And were outlining it. Love us or hate us or be somewhere in between, you cant say were not working out the issues now. We havent been an opposition whos coasted on the mistakes of the government. The government clings to the hope that voters do not like Shorten, given polling that shows more voters disapprove of his performance than approve of it. While voters do not crowd around him when he walks down the main street of Burwood in the electorate of Reid a short time after the brewery visit, there is no sign of hostility. Shorten approaches workers and shoppers outside the Westfield on Burwood Road, striking up conversations and introducing them to the Labor candidate, Sam Crosby. One of the pedestrians, Hana Shahim, asks for a photo with him. Ive always voted Labor, she says. Nobody offers a stronger endorsement.
Bill and Chloe Shorten.Credit:Paul Jeffers The campaign will change this dynamic. The media pack will be bigger, the pressure on Shorten will be higher and the risk of encountering an unhappy voter will be greater. One other difference will be the presence of Chloe Shorten. While Chloe has many other calls on her time, not least family in Melbourne, Labor is hoping to have her on the campaign as often as possible, in the belief that Australians warm to her and Shorten himself campaigns better with her. Advertisement Shortens friends believe he is a stronger campaigner than Prime Minister Scott Morrison and will emerge triumphant in a matter of weeks. With a solid Labor campaign, they say, he might achieve a swing of more than a dozen seats. Helped by a bad Coalition campaign, the swing might reach 20. There are no such boasts from Shorten himself. He is careful not to look like he is taking the result for granted, even though he thinks the Coalition has become a tribe of warring clans that are incapable of running a government. His team assumes the government will rely more heavily on scare campaigns and negative advertising when the election is underway in earnest. Shorten knows how a scare campaign works. He wounded Malcolm Turnbull at the last election with the false claim that the government was privatising Medicare and will revive the health funding message at the election to come. He insists, however, that he wants to give Australians something to vote for, not just vote against. He takes this message to the Holmesglen campus in Melbourne, where he tells students he would put more money into TAFE and increase the cost of visas for skilled foreign workers.
Bill Shorten, flanked by two Labor candidates, speaks to students and teachers at Holmesglen TAFE. Credit:Erik Anderson The message about foreign workers causes unease in the crowd, given some of the students are from overseas and pay fees for their training in the hope of becoming permanent residents one day, but Shorten makes no apology for putting a priority on locals. His pledge to increase the number of apprenticeships is central to his policy platform. As in Sydney one day earlier, Shorten uses his Melbourne visit to try to motivate his audience to vote for change. Again, apathy is the enemy. Whether he is talking about wages or healthcare, he ends his sentences with three words: Your vote matters. Advertisement The fact that Shorten visits Holmesglen with two Labor candidates, Jennifer Yang in the seat of Chisholm and Fiona McLeod in Higgins, is testament to his confidence. Winning Chisholm from the Liberals is a reasonable prospect but taking Higgins would be unthinkable at any other election. Shorten believes he has been tested by his time as Opposition Leader and can be a better prime minister because of it. The contrast with Morrison and Turnbull, both elevated to the leadership from within government rather than winning an election first, is central to the way he sees himself. It is also a big reason why he believes he is ready for the campaign and the work that would come after an election victory. Ive learnt a lot, he says. In opposition thereve been some terrible days and thereve been some good days. The governments run out of steam. Thats a charitable interpretation. I think the nations looking at us to see if were stable, theyre looking to us to give them three years of continuity in government, with no surprises. No surprises? It is an impossible promise, but Shorten is nothing if not confident. And he says he is more than ready. Ive been practising for this for five and a half years. David Crowe is Chief Political Correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Most Viewed in Politics Loading https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/i-m-hungry-to-start-the-work-bill-shorten-s-five-year-journey-has-just-weeks-left-to-run-20190329-p5192d.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed
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(Bloomberg) -- Fung, a 24-year-old doctor, seems an unlikely candidate to stand on the front line of Hong Kong’s most violent civil unrest in half a century. Before this year, he never took part in a protest, and during Hong Kong’s last major pro-democracy uprising, the 2014 Umbrella Movement, he only stopped by to take photos.Now, Fung is part of a cell of 20 protesters who face off each weekend against police on the streets of Hong Kong in clashes that have escalated from peaceful marches to flying bricks, tear gas, Molotov cocktails and, more recently, live ammunition fired into the sky. Fung, who acquired bullet-resistant body armor to wear under his black T-shirt, says the violence needs to escalate even further if protesters are to persuade Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam -- and her backers in Beijing -- to accede to their demands.“If you can’t give pressure to police, the police won’t give any stress to Carrie Lam,” Fung said in an interview in his home. “We, the frontliners, always lose when facing those police. We never win.” He shows his armored vest. “Maybe someone will die next week. I hope the one getting shot is me, since I got this. But not all the frontliners have this to protect them.”Fung’s willingness to accept a potentially bloody escalation and his belief that the movement will ultimately succeed show that the weeks of clashes have created a hard core of determined teams of protesters whose tactics are shifting as clashes become militarized. Fung, like others interviewed for this story, declined to be quoted by their full name for fear of arrest in a city where merely participating in an unauthorized protest could mean years in prison.The front-line protesters’ hardhats, gas masks and black clothing have become the movement’s uniform, lionized in street art and internet memes. But their hard-line tactics have also divided the former British colony: More moderate protesters credit them with forcing concessions from a recalcitrant government, while Chinese officials denounce them as “rioters,” showing signs of terrorism.Even some opposition leaders warn that the radicals risk alienating support from investors and citizens inconvenienced and endangered by the chaos. More extreme tactics, including smashing train station windows, attacking police officers with batons and lighting bonfires in the streets have helped damage Hong Kong’s reputation as one of Asia’s safest big cities.After some hard-line demonstrators detained and beat two men they suspected of being undercover cops during a protest at the airport last month, some activists circulated a proposed code of conduct for front-line protesters, including no beating medical personnel or journalists, on social media forums.Police have escalated, as well, deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons and, one night last month, pointing their fire arms at a larger crowd of protesters who were attacking them with sticks. Lam told reporters earlier this week that it was “remarkable” that no one had died, although many protesters blame the government for suicides among demonstrators and are suspicious that authorities are withholding information on other serious injuries.Although the protests have tapered off in recent weeks, tensions could flare again as Hong Kong confronts two politically fraught dates: The fifth anniversary of the Occupy movement Saturday and the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on Tuesday. Both occasions -- one the government would like to forget and other it plans to celebrate -- will be marked by protests just the same.One of the key principles of the movement has been to abandon their roadblocks once police move in -- summed up in the slogan “Be water.” But Fung argues that there need to be more protesters who will stand their ground and fight back. “Why don’t you give a fight?” he said.Such fearlessness is not universal.“You have to know when to run and when to fight,” said Vincent, a 26-year-old designer who first joined political protests in Hong Kong at the start of the Umbrella Movement, the last major pro-democracy movement in the city. “You can’t stand face-to-face against the police.” Asked how he responds when police move in to attack, he laughed. “Run faster!”Vincent and Fung are part of separate teams, highlighting the leaderless nature of the current wave of protests, which have continued since June, despite more than 1,500 arrests. Those arrests have included high-profile pro-democracy figures such as Joshua Wong, leading some protesters to wonder whether the police are trying to identify leaders where there aren’t any.“I agree with the small-group strategy,” said Vincent. “Every time there is a leader, the leader gets arrested.”Vincent and Fung reveal a highly decentralized structure, where groups of about 20 protesters operate independently, yet share information and often copy each other’s tactics. When a proposal is made between groups for violent action, the key principle is respect for others’ decisions, Fung said.“If it really works, maybe we’ll follow you. That’s the most important principle in this movement,” Fung said. “If someone sees, ‘O.K., when I throw the Molotovs, the police really step back -- it’s useful. Why don’t we make more?’ It’s why you see more and more Molotovs in the front line.”Police said on Sept. 2 that at least 100 petrol bombs had been used by protesters on the previous Saturday. Two days later, Lam announced her intention to formally withdraw the contentious extradition bill that originally sparked the protests.The move did little to reduce the unrest. The following weekend the subway station in the city’s central business district became a target for arson and another 80 petrol bombs were thrown, according to police.Although police have arrested hundreds of protesters, including some on a strict rioting charge that carries a sentence as long as 10 years, many end up back on the street while awaiting trial. Only 14% of those arrested had undergone judicial proceedings.Protesters have elevated their injured members into martyrs, including a woman who was allegedly struck on Aug. 11 by a police bean-bag round that penetrated her goggles and injured her right eye. Initial reports said she lost the eye, although the South China Morning Post newspaper later reported, citing a hospital source, that she retains at least some some sight in it.“‘Eye for an eye’ is not just a slogan,” Vincent said. “It will have to be a fact to frighten the police.”Like other demonstrators, Fung’s journey from passive bystander to frontline protester was triggered by the escalating violence. He said he only became a frontliner after July 21, when TV footage showed passengers at a train station being attacked by white-shirted mobs, with no apparent help coming from the police,“We can’t accept this; white-shirt gangsters hitting people,” Fung said. “And I can’t accept why police” delayed for 39 minutes.Police later defended the delay in responding to emergency calls as a consequence of their limited resources that night, given the large-scale protest that was ongoing in another district of Hong Kong.In more recent weeks, Chinese authorities have attempted to distinguish between more moderate protesters who mustered hundreds of thousands to march peaceful and the “few thugs” who adopt the frontliners’ tactics. Protesters see the shift as part of a “divide and rule” strategy, assuming that people will eventually tire of the radicals and turn against them.But the do or die attitude of frontliners like Fung and Vincent is based on a feeling that this could be the endgame for Hong Kong’s democratic struggle.“The failure of the Umbrella Revolution gave some kind of lesson,” Vincent said. “Everyone knows if you fail this time, there will not be another chance. That’s why Hong Kongers fight like they’re not afraid, because they realize that if they fail, the only thing waiting for them is worse than death.”After guns were pointed at the protesters in Tsuen Wan, Fung decided to buy body armor. He insists that the movement must go on until the five demands are met, but acknowledges that he has written a will.“I have already prepared to die in this movement,” he said.To contact the reporter on this story: Aaron Mc Nicholas in Hong Kong at [email protected] contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at [email protected], Adam MajendieFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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Are There Any Republicans Running For President Other Than Trump
New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/are-there-any-republicans-running-for-president-other-than-trump/
Are There Any Republicans Running For President Other Than Trump
Republican Presidential Hopefuls Move Forward As Trump Considers 2024 Run
2020 Election – 5 Republicans Who Might Run For President (Why Donald Trump will be the GOP Nominee)
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Less than three months after former President Trump left the White House, the race to succeed him is already beginning.
Trumps former secretary of State, Michael R. Pompeo, has launched an aggressive schedule visiting states that will play a pivotal role in the 2024 Republican primaries and has signed a contract with Fox News Channel. Mike Pence, Trumps former vice president, has started a political advocacy group, finalized a book deal and later this month will give a speech in South Carolina, his first since leaving office. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been courting donors, including in Trumps backyard, with a prominent speaking slot before the former president at a GOP fundraising retreat dinner this month at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort where Trump now lives.
Trump ended his presidency with such a firm grip on Republican voters that party leaders fretted he would freeze the field of potential 2024 candidates, delaying preparations as he teased another run. Instead, many Republicans with national ambitions are openly laying the groundwork for campaigns as Trump continues to mull his own plans.
Theyre raising money, making hires and working to bolster their name recognition. The moves reflect both the fervor in the party to reclaim the White House and the reality that mounting a modern presidential campaign is a years-long endeavor.
‘americans Will See The Current Two Options Are Not The Choice’
Jade Simmons is a multi-hyphenated woman. A former beauty queen, professional concert pianist, motivational speaker, rapper, mother, and ordained pastor.
As she puts it, she is an unconventional candidate, “but these are unconventional times”.
“This seemed to me to be a time when we couldn’t afford to do business as usual,” she says. “I’m the daughter of a civil rights activist, and the way my father raised me was that if you see voids, if you see injustices, you need to ask yourself if that might be you that needs to be leaning in.”
She says her goal is to create equal access to opportunity, through economic, educational and criminal justice reform. And in that spirit, she’s aiming to run “the least expensive campaign in the history of our nation”.
“We think it’s abominable that it costs now almost a billion dollars to run for president when the qualifications are that you are 35 years old, a US-born resident, and have lived here 14 years,” says Ms Simmons. “We’d rather spend that money on helping people.”
Full coverage of the US election
While the Republican and Democratic nominees will be on the ballot in all states, independents must meet an array of state deadlines and access requirements.
“I know it sounds wild, given the history of independents! We believe that if we stay standing long enough, there’s still some more disruption coming in – that most Americans are going to see that the current two options are not the choice.
Sen Mitt Romney Of Utah
A Gallup poll last March found Romney, 74, has a higher approval rating among Democrats than Republicans, so you might figure he doesnt have a prayer in taking his partys nomination again. A February Morning Consult poll, though, had Romney polling ahead of Republicans like Pompeo, Cotton and Hawley. So, youre telling me theres a chance? Yes, a one-in-a-million chance.
The 2012 GOP presidential nominee and his wife, Ann, have five sons. He graduated from Brigham Young University and Harvard Law. Romney is a former Massachusetts governor, and the first person to be a governor and senator from two different states since Sam Houston, who was governor of Tennessee and a senator from Texas. Romney is this years JFK Profile in Courage Award recipient.
Florida Gov Ron Desantis
DeSantis, 42, has quickly emerged as a Republican rising star. He finished second in the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll in February behind Trump, and some see him as the best positioned heir to the Trump mantle.
If Trump doesnt run again, I think hes the odds-on favorite to be the next president, Florida Republican Party chair and state Sen. Joe Gruters told NBC News of DeSantis.
DeSantis appeal is due in part to his combative relationship with the news media he regularly spars with journalists, interrupting or pushing back against their questions in a way Trump fans would appreciate and also because of his handling of the pandemic.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, DeSantis wrote that Floridas less-restrictive response to COVID-19 bucked faulty intel from the elites and the state still ended up with comparatively low unemployment, and per capita COVID mortality below the national average. Floridas COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 people is similar to California and Ohio, and so far, about 33,500 Floridians have died from the virus. New research in the American Journal of Public Health suggests the state is undercounting COVID-19 deaths.
How Biden Won: Ramping Up The Base And Expanding Margins In The Suburbs
It brings the number of states Biden flipped from Trump’s 2016 column to five, including Arizona, which last voted Democratic in a presidential race when it backed Clinton in 1996.
Biden also flipped Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three key northern industrial states that ultimately delivered the White House to Trump four years ago. Biden also won a single electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which last voted Democratic for former President Barack Obama in 2008.
Electors from each state and the District of Columbia are expected to vote on Dec. 14. The new Congress will then count the votes and certify Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, two weeks before the inauguration.
But Georgia’s political activity is far from over. The state will hold two runoff elections on Jan. 5 for both its U.S. Senate seats, which are currently held by Republicans.
‘i Made A Decision To Live My Life In Service’
Brock Pierce is a former child actor who appeared in the Mighty Ducks franchise and starred as the president’s son in the 1996 comedy First Kid. But thanks to his second career as a tech entrepreneur, he’s also probably a crypto currency billionaire.
Why is he running for president? Partly because he is deeply concerned by the state of the country.
“I think that we lack a real vision for the future – I mean, what kind of world do we want to live in, in the year 2030? What is the plan? Where are we trying to get to, you know? You have to aim for something. And I see mostly just a lot of mud being thrown around, not a lot of people putting forth game-changing ideas. It’s getting scary. And I have a view of what to do.”
For the last four years, Mr Pierce has focused on philanthropic work in Puerto Rico, where his foundation recently raised a million dollars for PPE to give to first responders.
Asked what America’s priorities should be for the next four years, he suggests the country stops pursuing “growth for growth’s sake”, and measures its success by how well life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are upheld.
“I have many liberal tendencies, just like I have conservative tendencies,” Mr Pierce says. “And I think it’s time we take a collective breath and a brave step into the future, because all of these ideologies have something to teach us.”
‘We don’t like either candidate’
And if he doesn’t pull it off? Mr Pierce says he has offers.
Trump Remains 2024 Candidate Of Choice For Most Republicans Poll Shows
59% of Republican voters said they wanted Trump to play prominent role in party, but tens of thousands left after Capitol riot
If the 2024 Republican presidential primary were held today, Donald Trump would be the clear favorite to win big. That was the message from a Politico-Morning Consult poll released on Tuesday, three days after Trumps acquittal in his second impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January.
Among Republican voters, 59% said they wanted Trump to play a prominent role in their party, up a whopping 18 points from the last such poll, taken in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. A slightly lower number, 54%, said they would back Trump in the primary.
Tens of thousands of Republicans left the party after the Capitol insurrection, and a majority of Americans have told other pollsters they would like to see Trump banished from politics.
Though the 45th president will be 78 by election day 2024, he will be able to run again if he chooses, having escaped being barred from office after a 57-43 Senate vote to convict with seven Republican defections but 10 votes short of the majority needed.
Mike Pences life was threatened by Trump supporters at the Capitol, as the vice-president presided over the ratification of electoral college results confirming Trumps defeat by Joe Biden. He placed second in the Politico-Morning Consult poll, with 12%.
Key Votes: 115th Congress 2017
For detailed information about each vote, click .
Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018
 Bill Passed on December 12, 2018
Proposed providing funding for commodity support, conservation, trade and international food aid, nutrition assistance, farm credit, rural development, research and extension activities, forestry, horticulture, and crop insurance through fiscal year 2023.
Voted Yea on:Â Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018 )
 Bill Passed on June 21, 2018
Proposed providing funding for commodity support, conservation, trade and international food aid, nutrition assistance, farm credit, rural development, research and extension activities, forestry, horticulture, and crop insurance. It also proposed modifying the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as the food stamp program.
Voted Yea on:Â Securing Americaâs Future Act of 2018
 Bill Failed on June 21, 2018
Proposed funding a border wall, limiting legal immigration, a mandatory worker verification program, allowing DACA recipients to apply for legal status, and preventing separation of families at the border.
Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018
 Bill Passed on December 12, 2018
Reauthorizes through FY2023 and modifies some Department of Agriculture programs.
Voted Yea on:Â Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act
Voted Yea on:Â Kates Law
Voted Yea on:Â No Sanctuary for Criminals Act
Voted Yea on:Â American Health Care Act of 2017
Voted Nay on:Â Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018
Georgia’s Republican Us Senators Call On Gop State Election Chief To Resign
GOP strategist predicts Trump Jr. will run in 2024: “He’s a flamethrower”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, himself a Republican, called the claims “laughable” and refused to step aside.
The early rancor and fighting over the presidential election results, which are headed for a recount despite Biden’s growing lead, is a preview of the intense fight to come over the fate of the two Senate seats. Vice President Pence told GOP senators that he plans to campaign in the state, and national Democrats are already pouring money and support to their challengers, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
The Georgia runoffs are slated for Jan. 5, after the Senate is scheduled to begin a new session. That uncertainty means the Senate will be unable to officially organize until the results of that election are finalized.
A Marine stands outside the entrance to the West Wing of the White House on Tuesday, signifying that President Trump is in the Oval Office. Evan Vucci/APhide caption
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A Marine stands outside the entrance to the West Wing of the White House on Tuesday, signifying that President Trump is in the Oval Office.
President Trump is set to visit Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday to mark Veterans Day and lay a wreath. Trump will be joined by Vice President Pence. This is one of the more traditional ceremonial duties of a president. .
Asked what the president has been up to, White House spokesman Judd Deere said Trump has been working behind the scenes.
None Of Them Can Win But They Could Play Spoiler
Remember when half of American white males over the age of 40 declared themselves for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016? There were so many candidates that they couldn’t fit them all on two packed debate stages. One guy stayed in after receiving a grand total of 12 votes in the Iowa caucuses; in New Hampshire, Jim Gilmore’s showing improved to , an unprecedented 1,000 percent increase. Reader: He didn’t withdraw for another six days.
Since Donald Trump is our incumbent president, and will thus almost surely be the GOP nominee in 2020, we should be spared a repeat, and really ought to be able to give our undivided attention to the approximately 437 mostly Social Security-eligible senators, governors, congressmen, mayors, and billionaire activists looking to run on the Democratic ticket in 2020. Unfortunately, Trump will almost certainly be challenged, either in the ostensibly meaningless Republican primaries or by one or more independent right-of-center candidates.
Stephen Bannon thinks 2020 will be a proper three-way race. #NeverTrumpers are already ferreting around for someone to challenge the president for the GOP nomination. “I just finished reading a book about the French resistance. It reminds me of that. People are meeting over their garages their ateliers trying to figure out who’s going to do it,” one of them toldNew York recently.
Here are five people who might just fit the bill.
1. John Kasich
Chance of running: 80 percent
2. Jeff Flake
Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger: National Gop Figures Didn’t Understand Our Laws
But Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said on Wednesday that the system is working exactly the way it is intended.
“The irony of saying ‘fraudulent votes have been found’ â he has gained in the finding of these votes,” he said.
Raffensperger has said he’s been pressured by top Republicans to find ways of disqualifying ballots that hurt the Trump campaign.
“They say that as pressure builds, it reveals your character, it doesn’t change your character. Some people aren’t behaving too well with seeing where the results are,” Raffensperger told NPR’s Ari Shapiro on Tuesday.
“At the end of the day, I want voters to understand that when they cast their ballot in Georgia, it will be accurately counted. You may not like the results and I get that. I understand how contentious it is. But you can then respect the results.”
Poll workers check voters’ identifications on Election Day at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wis. The Trump campaign has announced it is filing for a recount in two Wisconsin counties.hide caption
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Poll workers check voters’ identifications on Election Day at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wis. The Trump campaign has announced it is filing for a recount in two Wisconsin counties.
President Trump’s campaign announced Wednesday morning it is filing a petition to formally ask election authorities to conduct a recount in two Wisconsin counties. President-elect Joe Biden won the state by a little more than 20,000 votes.
If Trump Runs In 2024 Could Any Republican Beat Him
As we await the final results to come in from the decisive states, let us assume for a moment that this election ends in the way that now appears most likely. That is, Joe Biden wins, and a large number of conservatives are convinced that the only reason President Trump lost is that Democrats stole the election.
Given these circumstances, if Trump decided that he wanted to run for president again four years from now, is there a Republican politician in the country who would be able to stop him?
For sure, professional Republicans would want to move on from Trump. And many of the Republican voters who merely tolerated him because he was better than the Democratic alternative may be eager for other options. But those are the same groups of people that tried unsuccessfully to kill his candidacy in 2016.
Trump may decide that he doesn’t want to run again. Or his health may decline as he enters his late 70s. But let’s just assume he decides to run and that he’s in roughly the same mental and physical condition that he is now. How can any Republican hope to compete with him?
In defeat, Trump would be in a position unlike that of other one-term presidents. Typically, one-term presidents are written off as losers, and their parties run away from them. Think of Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, or George H.W. Bush. After 1980, nobody ran for office claiming, “I’m a Jimmy Carter Democrat.” Bush I was never a coveted speaker in conservative circles after his loss.
The This Sounds Crazy But Hear Me Out Wild Card
Mike Lindell
Donald Trump wasnt the first celebrity businessman without any experience in elective office who got traction in a Republican presidential primary. In 2012, it was former Godfathers Pizza CEO Herman Cain. In 1996 and 2000, it was magazine publisher Steve Forbes. Back in 1940, utility executive Wendell Willkie snagged the GOP nomination.
Today, who is the most famous, politically active Republican businessman? MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. That may sound crazy, but no crazier than what we experienced in 2016.
Lindell is a leader of the bitter-enders trying to overturn the democratic results of the presidential election. He claims to have spent $1 million on legal work and Stop the Steal rallies to support Trumps delusional cause. On December 19, he tweeted out a call for Trump to impose martial law in these 7 states and get the machines/ballots! though he soon deleted the post.
He became a conservative darling in part because he heavily marketed his pillows on Fox News; in the second quarter of 2020, MyPillow was Fox Newss top advertiser, spending more than double the amount of the second-place company. But now he accuses Fox News, and its early call that Biden won Arizona, of conspiring to defeat Trump
What to watch for in 2021:While Lindell has been thinking about a Minnesota gubernatorial bid, he has managed to visit neighboring Iowa several times in 2020. Lets see which state he campaigns in more in 2021.
Filed Under:
What Is A Voter
The , which took effect January 1, 2011, created voter-nominated offices. The Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act does not apply to candidates running for U.S. President, county central committees, or local offices.
Most of the offices that were previously known as partisan are now known as voter-nominated offices. Voter-nominated offices are state constitutional offices, state legislative offices, and U.S. congressional offices. The only partisan offices now are the offices of U.S. President and county central committee.
Former Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo
If the 2024 election turns into a foreign policy debate, the 57-year-old Pompeo is in a strong position with his background as former secretary of state and CIA director.
During Pompeos recent speech at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa, he gave a preview of some of the lines that might end up in his presidential stump speech. He said hes spent more time with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un than any other American, including basketball star Dennis Rodman, and talked about the threat he sees from China. His mention of the U.S. moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem during his tenure was met with applause.
Before serving in Trumps Cabinet, Pompeo blasted then-candidate Trump as an authoritarian. Pompeo made the remarks the day of the Kansas caucus in 2016, quoting Trump saying that if he told a soldier to commit a war crime, they would go and do it. Pompeo said the U.S. had spent 7½ years with an authoritarian president who ignored the Constitution, referencing former President Barack Obama, and we dont need four more years of that.
Pompeo served three full terms representing Kansas in the U.S. House before joining the Trump administration. He and his wife, Susan, have one child. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and Harvard Law and served in the U.S. Army.
Academics Journalists Authors Commentators
Reuel Marc Gerecht, writer
Michael Gerson, columnist and speechwriter for George W. Bush
Peter Mansoor, military historian
Meghan McCain, commentator, daughter of Senator John McCain
Charles Murray, political scientist and commentator
Ana Navarro, strategist and commentator
Tom Nichols, national security affairs scholar
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; founder of Andreessen Horowitz
Mike Fernandez, founder of MBF Healthcare Partners
James Murren, Chairman and CEO of MGM Resorts International
William Oberndorf, Chairman of Oberndorf Enterprises
Whos Running For President In 2020
Republican Lawmakers Are Terrified Of Trump Running For President Again
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge President Trump in the 2020 race.
The field of Democratic presidential candidates was historically large, but all others have dropped out. Mr. Trump had also picked up a few Republican challengers, but they have also ended their campaigns.
Running
Has run for president twice before.
Is known for his down-to-earth personality and his ability to connect with working-class voters.
His eight years as Barack Obamas vice president are a major selling point for many Democrats.
Signature issues: Restoring Americas standing on the global stage; adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act; strengthening economic protections for low-income workers in industries like manufacturing and fast food.
Main legislative accomplishment as president: a sweeping tax cut that chiefly benefited corporations and wealthy investors.
Has focused on undoing the policies of the Obama administration, including on health care, environmental regulation and immigration.
Was impeached by the House of Representatives for seeking to pressure Ukraine to smear his political rivals, but was acquitted by the Senate.
Signature issues: Restricting immigration and building a wall at the Mexican border; renegotiating or canceling international deals on trade, arms control and climate change; withdrawing American troops from overseas.
Ended her campaign in March 2020 and said she would back Mr. Biden.
Views About The Publics Influence On Government
Overall, most adults see voting as an avenue to influence the government: 61% say that voting gives people like me some say about how government runs things.
However, on a more general measure of political efficacy, the public is more divided: 52% say ordinary citizens can do a lot to influence government if they make an effort, while 47% say theres not much ordinary citizens can do to influence the government in Washington.
On both measures, younger and less-educated adults are more skeptical about the impact of participation.
The view that voting gives people some say increases with age; while just 53% of adults under 30 say this, that compares with nearly three-quarters of those 65 and older . This age gap is seen in both parties.
Similarly, those under 50 are less likely than their elders to say ordinary citizens can influence government if they make an effort .
Education is also associated with a sense of political efficacy: 77% of postgraduates say voting gives people some say, compared with two-thirds of those with a bachelors degree and 57% of those with less education.
Political engagement is highly correlated with attitudes about voting. Highly engaged adults are considerably more likely to see the value of participation and the potential of ordinary citizens to influence governmental policy.
Sen Tom Cotton Of Arkansas
Cotton, 43, has been preparing for a potential presidential run since before the 2020 election even happened, visiting the first-in-the-nation primary state New Hampshire last year to campaign for local Republicans. I expect Ill be back to New Hampshire again in the future, he told Insider last October. The betting site PredictIt currently ranks Cotton alongside Pompeo, Rubio and Hawley.
Cotton represented Arkansas in the U.S. House for two terms before becoming a senator in 2015. His first brush with national prominence came in 2006 when he was serving in Iraq as an Army lieutenant. Cotton sent a letter to the editor at The New York Times criticizing their story about the U.S. terrorist finance tracking program. Cotton called for the paper to be prosecuted for revealing the program, and though his letter wasnt published in the Times, it was picked up by the conservative blog Power Line, which Cotton copied on his petition to the Times.
Another Cotton opinion piece did later make it into the Times. His controversial 2020 op-ed, headlined Send In the Troops about using the military and an overwhelming show of force against protesters and rioters following the death of George Floyd, led to the resignation of Times editorial page editor James Bennet. Cotton referenced the op-ed in January after the attack on the Capitol, and said in a statement that those involved should face the full extent of federal law.
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Are There Any Republicans Running For President Other Than Trump
Republican Presidential Hopefuls Move Forward As Trump Considers 2024 Run
2020 Election – 5 Republicans Who Might Run For President (Why Donald Trump will be the GOP Nominee)
Print
Less than three months after former President Trump left the White House, the race to succeed him is already beginning.
Trumps former secretary of State, Michael R. Pompeo, has launched an aggressive schedule visiting states that will play a pivotal role in the 2024 Republican primaries and has signed a contract with Fox News Channel. Mike Pence, Trumps former vice president, has started a political advocacy group, finalized a book deal and later this month will give a speech in South Carolina, his first since leaving office. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been courting donors, including in Trumps backyard, with a prominent speaking slot before the former president at a GOP fundraising retreat dinner this month at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort where Trump now lives.
Trump ended his presidency with such a firm grip on Republican voters that party leaders fretted he would freeze the field of potential 2024 candidates, delaying preparations as he teased another run. Instead, many Republicans with national ambitions are openly laying the groundwork for campaigns as Trump continues to mull his own plans.
Theyre raising money, making hires and working to bolster their name recognition. The moves reflect both the fervor in the party to reclaim the White House and the reality that mounting a modern presidential campaign is a years-long endeavor.
‘americans Will See The Current Two Options Are Not The Choice’
Jade Simmons is a multi-hyphenated woman. A former beauty queen, professional concert pianist, motivational speaker, rapper, mother, and ordained pastor.
As she puts it, she is an unconventional candidate, “but these are unconventional times”.
“This seemed to me to be a time when we couldn’t afford to do business as usual,” she says. “I’m the daughter of a civil rights activist, and the way my father raised me was that if you see voids, if you see injustices, you need to ask yourself if that might be you that needs to be leaning in.”
She says her goal is to create equal access to opportunity, through economic, educational and criminal justice reform. And in that spirit, she’s aiming to run “the least expensive campaign in the history of our nation”.
“We think it’s abominable that it costs now almost a billion dollars to run for president when the qualifications are that you are 35 years old, a US-born resident, and have lived here 14 years,” says Ms Simmons. “We’d rather spend that money on helping people.”
Full coverage of the US election
While the Republican and Democratic nominees will be on the ballot in all states, independents must meet an array of state deadlines and access requirements.
“I know it sounds wild, given the history of independents! We believe that if we stay standing long enough, there’s still some more disruption coming in – that most Americans are going to see that the current two options are not the choice.
Sen Mitt Romney Of Utah
A Gallup poll last March found Romney, 74, has a higher approval rating among Democrats than Republicans, so you might figure he doesnt have a prayer in taking his partys nomination again. A February Morning Consult poll, though, had Romney polling ahead of Republicans like Pompeo, Cotton and Hawley. So, youre telling me theres a chance? Yes, a one-in-a-million chance.
The 2012 GOP presidential nominee and his wife, Ann, have five sons. He graduated from Brigham Young University and Harvard Law. Romney is a former Massachusetts governor, and the first person to be a governor and senator from two different states since Sam Houston, who was governor of Tennessee and a senator from Texas. Romney is this years JFK Profile in Courage Award recipient.
Florida Gov Ron Desantis
DeSantis, 42, has quickly emerged as a Republican rising star. He finished second in the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll in February behind Trump, and some see him as the best positioned heir to the Trump mantle.
If Trump doesnt run again, I think hes the odds-on favorite to be the next president, Florida Republican Party chair and state Sen. Joe Gruters told NBC News of DeSantis.
DeSantis appeal is due in part to his combative relationship with the news media he regularly spars with journalists, interrupting or pushing back against their questions in a way Trump fans would appreciate and also because of his handling of the pandemic.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, DeSantis wrote that Floridas less-restrictive response to COVID-19 bucked faulty intel from the elites and the state still ended up with comparatively low unemployment, and per capita COVID mortality below the national average. Floridas COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 people is similar to California and Ohio, and so far, about 33,500 Floridians have died from the virus. New research in the American Journal of Public Health suggests the state is undercounting COVID-19 deaths.
How Biden Won: Ramping Up The Base And Expanding Margins In The Suburbs
It brings the number of states Biden flipped from Trump’s 2016 column to five, including Arizona, which last voted Democratic in a presidential race when it backed Clinton in 1996.
Biden also flipped Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three key northern industrial states that ultimately delivered the White House to Trump four years ago. Biden also won a single electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which last voted Democratic for former President Barack Obama in 2008.
Electors from each state and the District of Columbia are expected to vote on Dec. 14. The new Congress will then count the votes and certify Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, two weeks before the inauguration.
But Georgia’s political activity is far from over. The state will hold two runoff elections on Jan. 5 for both its U.S. Senate seats, which are currently held by Republicans.
‘i Made A Decision To Live My Life In Service’
Brock Pierce is a former child actor who appeared in the Mighty Ducks franchise and starred as the president’s son in the 1996 comedy First Kid. But thanks to his second career as a tech entrepreneur, he’s also probably a crypto currency billionaire.
Why is he running for president? Partly because he is deeply concerned by the state of the country.
“I think that we lack a real vision for the future – I mean, what kind of world do we want to live in, in the year 2030? What is the plan? Where are we trying to get to, you know? You have to aim for something. And I see mostly just a lot of mud being thrown around, not a lot of people putting forth game-changing ideas. It’s getting scary. And I have a view of what to do.”
For the last four years, Mr Pierce has focused on philanthropic work in Puerto Rico, where his foundation recently raised a million dollars for PPE to give to first responders.
Asked what America’s priorities should be for the next four years, he suggests the country stops pursuing “growth for growth’s sake”, and measures its success by how well life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are upheld.
“I have many liberal tendencies, just like I have conservative tendencies,” Mr Pierce says. “And I think it’s time we take a collective breath and a brave step into the future, because all of these ideologies have something to teach us.”
‘We don’t like either candidate’
And if he doesn’t pull it off? Mr Pierce says he has offers.
Trump Remains 2024 Candidate Of Choice For Most Republicans Poll Shows
59% of Republican voters said they wanted Trump to play prominent role in party, but tens of thousands left after Capitol riot
If the 2024 Republican presidential primary were held today, Donald Trump would be the clear favorite to win big. That was the message from a Politico-Morning Consult poll released on Tuesday, three days after Trumps acquittal in his second impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January.
Among Republican voters, 59% said they wanted Trump to play a prominent role in their party, up a whopping 18 points from the last such poll, taken in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. A slightly lower number, 54%, said they would back Trump in the primary.
Tens of thousands of Republicans left the party after the Capitol insurrection, and a majority of Americans have told other pollsters they would like to see Trump banished from politics.
Though the 45th president will be 78 by election day 2024, he will be able to run again if he chooses, having escaped being barred from office after a 57-43 Senate vote to convict with seven Republican defections but 10 votes short of the majority needed.
Mike Pences life was threatened by Trump supporters at the Capitol, as the vice-president presided over the ratification of electoral college results confirming Trumps defeat by Joe Biden. He placed second in the Politico-Morning Consult poll, with 12%.
Key Votes: 115th Congress 2017
For detailed information about each vote, click .
Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018
 Bill Passed on December 12, 2018
Proposed providing funding for commodity support, conservation, trade and international food aid, nutrition assistance, farm credit, rural development, research and extension activities, forestry, horticulture, and crop insurance through fiscal year 2023.
Voted Yea on:Â Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018 )
 Bill Passed on June 21, 2018
Proposed providing funding for commodity support, conservation, trade and international food aid, nutrition assistance, farm credit, rural development, research and extension activities, forestry, horticulture, and crop insurance. It also proposed modifying the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as the food stamp program.
Voted Yea on:Â Securing Americaâs Future Act of 2018
 Bill Failed on June 21, 2018
Proposed funding a border wall, limiting legal immigration, a mandatory worker verification program, allowing DACA recipients to apply for legal status, and preventing separation of families at the border.
Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018
 Bill Passed on December 12, 2018
Reauthorizes through FY2023 and modifies some Department of Agriculture programs.
Voted Yea on:Â Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act
Voted Yea on:Â Kates Law
Voted Yea on:Â No Sanctuary for Criminals Act
Voted Yea on:Â American Health Care Act of 2017
Voted Nay on:Â Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018
Georgia’s Republican Us Senators Call On Gop State Election Chief To Resign
GOP strategist predicts Trump Jr. will run in 2024: “He’s a flamethrower”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, himself a Republican, called the claims “laughable” and refused to step aside.
The early rancor and fighting over the presidential election results, which are headed for a recount despite Biden’s growing lead, is a preview of the intense fight to come over the fate of the two Senate seats. Vice President Pence told GOP senators that he plans to campaign in the state, and national Democrats are already pouring money and support to their challengers, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
The Georgia runoffs are slated for Jan. 5, after the Senate is scheduled to begin a new session. That uncertainty means the Senate will be unable to officially organize until the results of that election are finalized.
A Marine stands outside the entrance to the West Wing of the White House on Tuesday, signifying that President Trump is in the Oval Office. Evan Vucci/APhide caption
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A Marine stands outside the entrance to the West Wing of the White House on Tuesday, signifying that President Trump is in the Oval Office.
President Trump is set to visit Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday to mark Veterans Day and lay a wreath. Trump will be joined by Vice President Pence. This is one of the more traditional ceremonial duties of a president. .
Asked what the president has been up to, White House spokesman Judd Deere said Trump has been working behind the scenes.
None Of Them Can Win But They Could Play Spoiler
Remember when half of American white males over the age of 40 declared themselves for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016? There were so many candidates that they couldn’t fit them all on two packed debate stages. One guy stayed in after receiving a grand total of 12 votes in the Iowa caucuses; in New Hampshire, Jim Gilmore’s showing improved to , an unprecedented 1,000 percent increase. Reader: He didn’t withdraw for another six days.
Since Donald Trump is our incumbent president, and will thus almost surely be the GOP nominee in 2020, we should be spared a repeat, and really ought to be able to give our undivided attention to the approximately 437 mostly Social Security-eligible senators, governors, congressmen, mayors, and billionaire activists looking to run on the Democratic ticket in 2020. Unfortunately, Trump will almost certainly be challenged, either in the ostensibly meaningless Republican primaries or by one or more independent right-of-center candidates.
Stephen Bannon thinks 2020 will be a proper three-way race. #NeverTrumpers are already ferreting around for someone to challenge the president for the GOP nomination. “I just finished reading a book about the French resistance. It reminds me of that. People are meeting over their garages their ateliers trying to figure out who’s going to do it,” one of them toldNew York recently.
Here are five people who might just fit the bill.
1. John Kasich
Chance of running: 80 percent
2. Jeff Flake
Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger: National Gop Figures Didn’t Understand Our Laws
But Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said on Wednesday that the system is working exactly the way it is intended.
“The irony of saying ‘fraudulent votes have been found’ â he has gained in the finding of these votes,” he said.
Raffensperger has said he’s been pressured by top Republicans to find ways of disqualifying ballots that hurt the Trump campaign.
“They say that as pressure builds, it reveals your character, it doesn’t change your character. Some people aren’t behaving too well with seeing where the results are,” Raffensperger told NPR’s Ari Shapiro on Tuesday.
“At the end of the day, I want voters to understand that when they cast their ballot in Georgia, it will be accurately counted. You may not like the results and I get that. I understand how contentious it is. But you can then respect the results.”
Poll workers check voters’ identifications on Election Day at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wis. The Trump campaign has announced it is filing for a recount in two Wisconsin counties.hide caption
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Poll workers check voters’ identifications on Election Day at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wis. The Trump campaign has announced it is filing for a recount in two Wisconsin counties.
President Trump’s campaign announced Wednesday morning it is filing a petition to formally ask election authorities to conduct a recount in two Wisconsin counties. President-elect Joe Biden won the state by a little more than 20,000 votes.
If Trump Runs In 2024 Could Any Republican Beat Him
As we await the final results to come in from the decisive states, let us assume for a moment that this election ends in the way that now appears most likely. That is, Joe Biden wins, and a large number of conservatives are convinced that the only reason President Trump lost is that Democrats stole the election.
Given these circumstances, if Trump decided that he wanted to run for president again four years from now, is there a Republican politician in the country who would be able to stop him?
For sure, professional Republicans would want to move on from Trump. And many of the Republican voters who merely tolerated him because he was better than the Democratic alternative may be eager for other options. But those are the same groups of people that tried unsuccessfully to kill his candidacy in 2016.
Trump may decide that he doesn’t want to run again. Or his health may decline as he enters his late 70s. But let’s just assume he decides to run and that he’s in roughly the same mental and physical condition that he is now. How can any Republican hope to compete with him?
In defeat, Trump would be in a position unlike that of other one-term presidents. Typically, one-term presidents are written off as losers, and their parties run away from them. Think of Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, or George H.W. Bush. After 1980, nobody ran for office claiming, “I’m a Jimmy Carter Democrat.” Bush I was never a coveted speaker in conservative circles after his loss.
The This Sounds Crazy But Hear Me Out Wild Card
Mike Lindell
Donald Trump wasnt the first celebrity businessman without any experience in elective office who got traction in a Republican presidential primary. In 2012, it was former Godfathers Pizza CEO Herman Cain. In 1996 and 2000, it was magazine publisher Steve Forbes. Back in 1940, utility executive Wendell Willkie snagged the GOP nomination.
Today, who is the most famous, politically active Republican businessman? MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. That may sound crazy, but no crazier than what we experienced in 2016.
Lindell is a leader of the bitter-enders trying to overturn the democratic results of the presidential election. He claims to have spent $1 million on legal work and Stop the Steal rallies to support Trumps delusional cause. On December 19, he tweeted out a call for Trump to impose martial law in these 7 states and get the machines/ballots! though he soon deleted the post.
He became a conservative darling in part because he heavily marketed his pillows on Fox News; in the second quarter of 2020, MyPillow was Fox Newss top advertiser, spending more than double the amount of the second-place company. But now he accuses Fox News, and its early call that Biden won Arizona, of conspiring to defeat Trump
What to watch for in 2021:While Lindell has been thinking about a Minnesota gubernatorial bid, he has managed to visit neighboring Iowa several times in 2020. Lets see which state he campaigns in more in 2021.
Filed Under:
What Is A Voter
The , which took effect January 1, 2011, created voter-nominated offices. The Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act does not apply to candidates running for U.S. President, county central committees, or local offices.
Most of the offices that were previously known as partisan are now known as voter-nominated offices. Voter-nominated offices are state constitutional offices, state legislative offices, and U.S. congressional offices. The only partisan offices now are the offices of U.S. President and county central committee.
Former Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo
If the 2024 election turns into a foreign policy debate, the 57-year-old Pompeo is in a strong position with his background as former secretary of state and CIA director.
During Pompeos recent speech at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa, he gave a preview of some of the lines that might end up in his presidential stump speech. He said hes spent more time with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un than any other American, including basketball star Dennis Rodman, and talked about the threat he sees from China. His mention of the U.S. moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem during his tenure was met with applause.
Before serving in Trumps Cabinet, Pompeo blasted then-candidate Trump as an authoritarian. Pompeo made the remarks the day of the Kansas caucus in 2016, quoting Trump saying that if he told a soldier to commit a war crime, they would go and do it. Pompeo said the U.S. had spent 7½ years with an authoritarian president who ignored the Constitution, referencing former President Barack Obama, and we dont need four more years of that.
Pompeo served three full terms representing Kansas in the U.S. House before joining the Trump administration. He and his wife, Susan, have one child. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and Harvard Law and served in the U.S. Army.
Academics Journalists Authors Commentators
Reuel Marc Gerecht, writer
Michael Gerson, columnist and speechwriter for George W. Bush
Peter Mansoor, military historian
Meghan McCain, commentator, daughter of Senator John McCain
Charles Murray, political scientist and commentator
Ana Navarro, strategist and commentator
Tom Nichols, national security affairs scholar
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; founder of Andreessen Horowitz
Mike Fernandez, founder of MBF Healthcare Partners
James Murren, Chairman and CEO of MGM Resorts International
William Oberndorf, Chairman of Oberndorf Enterprises
Whos Running For President In 2020
Republican Lawmakers Are Terrified Of Trump Running For President Again
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge President Trump in the 2020 race.
The field of Democratic presidential candidates was historically large, but all others have dropped out. Mr. Trump had also picked up a few Republican challengers, but they have also ended their campaigns.
Running
Has run for president twice before.
Is known for his down-to-earth personality and his ability to connect with working-class voters.
His eight years as Barack Obamas vice president are a major selling point for many Democrats.
Signature issues: Restoring Americas standing on the global stage; adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act; strengthening economic protections for low-income workers in industries like manufacturing and fast food.
Main legislative accomplishment as president: a sweeping tax cut that chiefly benefited corporations and wealthy investors.
Has focused on undoing the policies of the Obama administration, including on health care, environmental regulation and immigration.
Was impeached by the House of Representatives for seeking to pressure Ukraine to smear his political rivals, but was acquitted by the Senate.
Signature issues: Restricting immigration and building a wall at the Mexican border; renegotiating or canceling international deals on trade, arms control and climate change; withdrawing American troops from overseas.
Ended her campaign in March 2020 and said she would back Mr. Biden.
Views About The Publics Influence On Government
Overall, most adults see voting as an avenue to influence the government: 61% say that voting gives people like me some say about how government runs things.
However, on a more general measure of political efficacy, the public is more divided: 52% say ordinary citizens can do a lot to influence government if they make an effort, while 47% say theres not much ordinary citizens can do to influence the government in Washington.
On both measures, younger and less-educated adults are more skeptical about the impact of participation.
The view that voting gives people some say increases with age; while just 53% of adults under 30 say this, that compares with nearly three-quarters of those 65 and older . This age gap is seen in both parties.
Similarly, those under 50 are less likely than their elders to say ordinary citizens can influence government if they make an effort .
Education is also associated with a sense of political efficacy: 77% of postgraduates say voting gives people some say, compared with two-thirds of those with a bachelors degree and 57% of those with less education.
Political engagement is highly correlated with attitudes about voting. Highly engaged adults are considerably more likely to see the value of participation and the potential of ordinary citizens to influence governmental policy.
Sen Tom Cotton Of Arkansas
Cotton, 43, has been preparing for a potential presidential run since before the 2020 election even happened, visiting the first-in-the-nation primary state New Hampshire last year to campaign for local Republicans. I expect Ill be back to New Hampshire again in the future, he told Insider last October. The betting site PredictIt currently ranks Cotton alongside Pompeo, Rubio and Hawley.
Cotton represented Arkansas in the U.S. House for two terms before becoming a senator in 2015. His first brush with national prominence came in 2006 when he was serving in Iraq as an Army lieutenant. Cotton sent a letter to the editor at The New York Times criticizing their story about the U.S. terrorist finance tracking program. Cotton called for the paper to be prosecuted for revealing the program, and though his letter wasnt published in the Times, it was picked up by the conservative blog Power Line, which Cotton copied on his petition to the Times.
Another Cotton opinion piece did later make it into the Times. His controversial 2020 op-ed, headlined Send In the Troops about using the military and an overwhelming show of force against protesters and rioters following the death of George Floyd, led to the resignation of Times editorial page editor James Bennet. Cotton referenced the op-ed in January after the attack on the Capitol, and said in a statement that those involved should face the full extent of federal law.
source https://www.patriotsnet.com/are-there-any-republicans-running-for-president-other-than-trump/
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Your Syllabus to SXSW EDU 2019 (and Where to Find Us!)
Between the barbeque and baristas, the dive bars and dueling pianos, thousands of educators, along with entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and policymakers across the education industry, will descend on Austin, Texas, during the first week of March for SXSW EDU.
Now in its ninth year, the show has become a staple for convening a potpourri of ideas that span broad swaths of the education community, from instructional practices and school models, to social inequities and far-out visions of the future that seem more like a dream than reality.
This year saw more than 1,500 session proposals from 42 countries, including 49 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. From those, event organizers and the public decided on the roughly 400 sessions that made the agenda. Here’s a look at the most popular topics in the proposals.
There are plenty of hands-on sessions with practical tips to apply in the classroom. For the techy wonks, there are discussions on blockchain and interoperability. And in keeping with the city’s “weird” pride, this year’s schedule features delightfully creative sessions involving hip hop and puppets, tattoos and zoos.
We’ll be there, too! In addition to finding us scribbling notes from the seats and hallways, you’ll also find us on stage. Below’s a cheatsheet to where we’ll be, and the other sessions on the agenda that caught our eye.
EdSurge Sessions
In between hearty servings of Tex-Mex and meat, won’t you have time to stop by and meet? Here are the times when you can find EdSurge on stage.
Monday, March 4, 5 p.m. Where School Safety, Security, & Surveillance Meet Happy hour will have to wait, as we kick our sessions off with a sobering and important conversation that warrants your attention. From facial-recognition cameras to web and social media filtering software, surveillance technologies are finding their foothold in schools across America. Ostensibly these tools are for the greater good—keeping kids safe.
But how much surveillance is acceptable, and what are the implications for students’ privacy rights? EdSurge’s managing editor, Tony Wan, will pose these questions to Bill Fitzgerald (New Knowledge), Doug Levin (EdTech Strategies), Courtney Goodsell (Impero Software) and Stephanie Cerda (administrator at Austin Independent School District).
Tuesday, March 5, 11 a.m. SXSW EDU Launch Competition Judge Tony will try his best Judy Judy impersonation, as he joins Bridge Burns (University Innovation Alliance), Vince Chan (Creta Ventures) and Jonathan Rochelle (Google) to dispense advice and feedback for eight companies pitching their wares. Companies include an AI robot, student incubator and a startup called Pie for Providers. Join us for a slice of the action!
Tuesday, March 5, 4 p.m. Who Does Online Education Really Serve? Online education was supposed to provide access to quality education for those who can’t attend or afford traditional college. But it’s become increasingly unclear if online learning is living up to its promise for students, as concerns persist over quality, inequitable disparities in digital-learning participants and outcomes.
This session, moderated by EdSurge’s senior editor Jeff Young, will take the form of a series of lightning talks by Jill Buban (Unizen), Martin Kurzweil (Ithaka S+R) and Robert Ubell (New York University), followed by a panel discussion with the speakers.
Thursday, March 7, 2 p.m. Translating Research Into Practice When it comes to the constantly-evolving science of how we learn, what’s fact—or fiction? And how can educators and learners apply what research says into everyday practice? EdSurge CEO Betsy Corcoran will explore these questions and search for actionable tips with three executives from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative—K. Brooke Stafford-Brizard, Bror Saxberg and Priscilla Chan herself.
Monday, March 4
12:00 p.m. Developing Engaged Global Citizens of the Future: Swarthmore College President Valerie Smith explores how educators can equip students with the skills needed to support inclusive, diverse communities and prepare them to be proactive participants in the democracy and fight for a just future.
1:00 p.m. Arrested Development: Children, Trauma and School: The session may bring back memories of the TV comedy series, but the talk from former high-school principal Liz Dozier is serious matter. The CEO of nonprofit Chicago Beyond will explore “unconventional ways” in which her group has helped children overcome trauma and build the networks and supports they need.
3:30 p.m. Media Lit: A Make-or-Break Competency for Teachers: As students engage more and more with media, how are they to make sense of what’s reliable—or not? And how are educators supposed to prepare to teach media literacy lessons? Hear from speakers representing KQED, PBS, the National Association for Media Literacy Education and the Relay Graduate School of Education.
4:00 p.m. A Hidden Dimension: Equitable Science Classrooms: Perhaps you’ve heard of the Next Generation Science Standards. But what does it take to make access to quality science education truly accessible for every student? This workshops offers educators a glimpse into how science class can be redesigned to be more inclusive and accessible for all cultures.
Tuesday, March 5
11:00 a.m. Beyond the Hype: Adopting Predictive Analytics: Data analytics can only be as useful as how well they’re implemented. College officials from four large public universities share their trials and tribulations with using these tools, and offer a glimpse of how predictive analytics can be used properly to boost learning outcomes for low-income students.
12:30 p.m. Ban the SAT: College Admissions Redesigned: Standardized test score can be predictive of a lot of things—including inequitable admissions practices. Hear what led Hampshire College to ban standardized test results as an admissions requirement, and what the school has learned since.
2:00 p.m. Learning Science Truths All Educators Should Know: Left brain, right brain, learning styles and preferences. With the emergence of findings from neuroscience, psychology and other learning sciences, how can educators sort through what’s real or not? Researchers from three universities and Sesame Workshop offer a primer on what teachers should know.
5:00 p.m. Who Is Your SEL Program Not Serving? It’s not hard to get behind and support social-emotional learning. But what does it take to turn SEL from a feel-good idea into something that works in the classroom for all students?
5:30 p.m. From Courtroom to Classroom: An Inmate’s Tale: If prison is supposed to prepare inmates for society, then the current system is in dire need of improvement. A former inmate-turned-lawyer offers a glimpse of the education system behind bars, and how it falls far short of preparing learners to readjust and succeed outside.
Wednesday, March 6
11:00 a.m. Students’ Safety or Privacy? Why Not Both? Are safety and privacy zero-sum rights, and must one be sacrificed for the sake of the other? Speakers from the U.S. Department of Education, privacy advocacy groups and a school district explore how to find the right balance between the two ideals.
12:30 p.m. The Future of the K-12 Education Industry: From BigChalk to Pearson, then to Renaissance and now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jack Lynch has steered education companies through plenty of change in the digital era. Here’s his forecast for how the K-12 industry will continue to evolve and shape teaching and learning.
1:00 p.m. U Good? Empower Students to Manage Chronic Stress: For children, school can be stressful—for many reasons that originate beyond the classroom. Speakers from the American Public Health Association explore how educators and school communities can provide the support and strategies to help students cope with violence, food insecurity and other difficult situations.
3:30 p.m. Transforming Refugee Education Through EdTech: Disasters manmade and natural have displaced families, leading to growing population of refugees. This session explores how technology has been leveraged to support refugee learners and provide them with some opportunity to continue their education.
4:00 p.m. Improving Equity Through Unbiased Data: Data is not objective; in fact, the way it is collected, organized and analyzed reinforces bias and inequities. This session will explore how to be mindful when leaning on data to make inferences and decisions about students’ educational journeys.
5:00 p.m. Race, Social Media and the Role of Schools: Educational activism is on the rise and more visible than ever before. In the wake of transformational movements that connect students and teachers across social media, how should schools respond? This session explore how educators can support student activists and transform social justice struggles into teachable moments.
Thursday, March 7
11:00 a.m. Progress and Challenges for AI in Education: Artificial intelligence has moved beyond a pitch deck buzzword, and into reality as it shapes how adaptive learning and assessment tools operate. At this session, a pair of AI experts join an edtech investor and head of the superintendents association to explore what’s currently possible—and what’s not.
12:30 p.m. Is Your Marketing Plan Sinking Your K–12 Startup? Unfortunately, the best edtech products don’t speak for themselves, and are no guarantee of a successful business. Karen Vaites, who’s led marketing efforts for four different edtech organizations, offers the ins and outs, dos and don’ts when it comes to creating a marketing plan.
Your Syllabus to SXSW EDU 2019 (and Where to Find Us!) published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness
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What you are going to learn:
Why Habits are so Powerful and Potentially Dangerous
The Three Elements of a Habit
How a Better Understanding of Habits can Help Us Replace Bad Habits with Good Ones
A Simple Approach to Overcoming our Natural Resistance to Change
Why We Often Blame our Lack of Willpower when it is usually our Lack of Commitment that is to Blame
People often say that change is difficult, and they are correct. Change is difficult, but we are all capable of change. Our lives are continually changing, learning to drive, marriage, having children, new job responsibilities, and new technological tools. Initiation is the most challenging phase of any change because when we are learning to perform new tasks, it is mentally exhausting. Learning to perform a new activity requires our cerebral cortex (“Conscious Brain”) to do the heavy lifting.
As the new task becomes routine, the more resilient basal ganglia, (“subconscious brain’), takes over. The action becomes easier and easier to perform. Our conscious brain essentially goes on autopilot, and the actions flow almost effortlessly. You undoubtedly experienced this when you were learning to drive. In the beginning, it required all of your mental focus, but now you can drive, adjust the cabin temperature, tune the radio, carry on a conversation, and heaven forbid, use your smartphone while driving.
Change is possible, but it starts with awareness. The hardest part of creating a change in behavior is just not repeating the behaviors of the past. Approximately 40 to 45% of the decisions we make are out of habit.[i] Unfortunately, these aren’t conscious decisions. These are decisions our conscious brain has delegated to the subconscious brain. Our subconscious mind controls the performance of repetitive daily activities which frees our conscious mind from making countless decisions each day, which would lead to decision fatigue and mental exhaustion. For this reason, we aren’t mindful of actions we have repeated enough times to make them habits.
Bad habits are dangerous because we don’t give them much thought. We encounter a trigger and execute a learned routine to receive a predictable reward. In the early 1990s MIT Researchers studying the brain activity of rats navigating a maze made a surprising discovery. As the rats navigated the maze for the 100th time and zipped through it faster and faster, their brain activity quieted. During the initial phase of the experiment, when the mice were learning the maze, their brain’s were exploding with activity, but now their minds were only active at the beginning and the end. The process of learning a new routine requires the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia to work. The cerebral cortex is guiding the action, while the basal ganglia are learning to perform it. Once the routine has been performed enough times, the basal ganglia can perform the routine without any guidance from the conscious brain.
Our conscious mind, which fatigues easily, prevents mental exhaustion by delegating repetitive tasks to the more resilient basal ganglia. Our basal ganglia learn repetitive behaviors and convert the sequences of actions into an automatic routine, which is known as chunking. These automatic routines are stored in our basal ganglia, waiting for a cue in the environment to be initiated.
Every habit has a Cue, a Routine, and a Reward. Our mind identifies the Cue, a physical, mental, or emotional trigger then executes a conditioned Routine to receive a predictable Reward. In this case, the rat encounters the Cue, it hears a click and sees the maze partition disappear. The Cue initiates the Routine, and the rat runs through the maze in a memorized sequence of turns. At the end of the Routine, the rat receives his delicious chocolate Reward.
Our brain relies on automatic routines stored in our basal ganglia to conserve mental energy, but it needs to decide which Routine to perform and when to perform it. The initial spike in brain activity is the rat determining which Routine to perform. Once the rat decides, the rat’s decision centers quiet, their basal ganglia (“subconscious brain”) takes over, navigating the maze quicker than when it was slowed down by conscious thought. At the end of the exercise, when the rat sees the reward, the brain jolts itself awake. It makes sure that the pattern unfolded as anticipated.
Habits are a three-step process. First, there is a Cue, that triggers our brain to execute a conditioned Routine. Then there is the Routine, a learned behavior stored in your basal ganglia. Finally, there is the Reward, that reinforces the habit by causing your brain to judge the routine worth remembering and repeating.
This explains the pattern of brain activity the researchers observed and it helps explain why habits are so valuable and potentially dangerous. Ann Graybiel, one of the scientists who oversaw many of the basal ganglia experiments, said “Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards. [ii] “If a learned pattern remains in the brain after the behavior is extinguished, maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to change a habit. It is as though somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back,” Graybiel said. “This situation is familiar to anyone who is trying to lose weight or to control a well-engrained habit. Just the sight of a piece of chocolate cake can reset all those good intentions.”[iii] Unfortunately, bad habits are the easiest type of habits to resume because they always provide an immediate reward.
Habits are valuable because they free our easily fatigue cerebral cortex to focus on higher level thinking, but they are dangerous because they remove us from the decision making process. Our mind goes asleep. When applied to good habits, this is a blessing, but when we mindlessly perform bad habits, the consequences can be devastating. Habits are the compound interest of self-creation. Habits form us as much as we form them. This is the reason why Aristotle said “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” No one is born great. If you study anyone that has accomplished great success, you will discover daily rituals that lead to their development and achievements.
“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” Eckhart Tolle
Awareness is the key to changing any habit because when habits emerge, our brain stops participating in the decision-making process. I am as vulnerable to bad habits as anyone. On the weekends, I typically indulge in a drink or two, but a year ago I developed the habit of drinking every night. It began with me having a drink after an unusually long stressful day at work; then it progressed to an everyday occurrence. What was once a weekend ritual had become a nightly one.
As earlier stated, at the core of each habit is a neurological loop consisting of three components: a cue, a routine, and a reward. The cue, in this case, was me arriving home after work, tired and stressed. The routine was drinking a cold refreshing alcoholic beverage. The reward was a sense of relaxation.
When you are trying to break a bad habit, it is always a great idea to let supportive friends and family know what you are trying to do. Not only will they provide a layer of accountability and encouragement, often they can help you formulate a plan. We lack objectivity when we are solving the problems, we created for ourselves.
My beautiful wife asked me why I drank. I told her that it helped me to relax and I enjoyed the cold refreshing beverage after a long day. She suggested that I substitute the alcoholic beverage for some Topo Chico with a slice of lime. The calorie-free mineral water would give me the sensation I was craving without the unwanted alcohol and empty calories. An additional benefit was waking hydrated, instead of slightly dehydrated from the previous night’s drinking.
Substitution is a very effective way of breaking a bad habit. Typically, the cue, in this example, me arriving home isn’t something we can change, but my routine can be. We cannot always control the cues and events in our lives, but we can always decide what they mean and how we will react to them.
The most effective substitutions are those that provide similar rewards. In this example, the Topo Chico provided a cold refreshing sensation that helped me to unwind after a stressful day of responding to the numerous demands of my job. If you don’t have someone to help you solve your problem, I recommend you brainstorm on a piece of paper. Jot down the cue, routine, and reward associated with the bad habit. Then determine what new routine can provide some of the same benefits that the bad habit provided.
Another technique you can use is shaping your environment. In this example, eliminating alcohol from our home would have eliminated the temptation of drinking. I didn’t choose that option, but I did shape my environment by ensuring I always had lime and a couple of cold bottles of Topo Chico in the refrigerator.
Perhaps you want to replace the habit of staying up late watching Netflix with nightly reading. You could shape your environment by setting-up an ideal area for reading. Ensuring that you always have a great book, adequate lighting, a bookmarker, a highlighter, and your journal to capture your notes in would foster the new behavior. You could develop a cue, for example, “After I eat dinner and clean-up, I will read for a few minutes.” You can shrink the commitment to 5-minutes. When it comes to habits, consistency is most important. Start small and build momentum.
With a little imagination, you should be able to figure out how you can interrupt a bad habit and replace it with a good one. It isn’t difficult, but it does require effort and diligence. It is easy to do, but what is easy to do is even easier to neglect. Neglect is normal. Bad habits are normal. Most of us have both good habits and bad habits. Success in any area is dependent on your ratio of good habits to bad habits related to that area of your life.
“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.” Benjamin Franklin
Reading this article can potentially change your life, but knowledge isn’t power. Knowledge is potential power. The application of knowledge is power. Execution produces results. Ideation without execution is the beginning of delusion. Reading an excellent self-improvement book won’t change your life, but repeatedly applying what you have learned until you do it naturally will. “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” Bruce Lee
Thus far I have provided you with the tools, the mechanics of breaking a bad habit, but I haven’t addressed the Elephant in the room. In the New York Times bestselling book, The Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the authors describe the struggle we all face when we make a change in behavior. The battle is between the logic driven part of our brain, the Rider, and the emotion-driven part of our mind, the Elephant.
The Rider is weak and prone to overthinking things, becoming overwhelmed by decision fatigue and analysis paralysis. The Elephant, on the other hand, is powerful, fueled by emotions and primal urges. The Elephant can easily overwhelm the smaller Rider, especially when the Rider is uncertain of which direction to go. The Path they travel is the external environment. The Rider can influence the Elephant’s behavior by shaping the Path, removing cues and temptations from the environment. Environment is the invisible hand that guides our decisions. The Rider must be prepared and anticipate situations that will tempt the Elephant. He must develop a plan and pre-decide ahead of time what he will do when the cue presents itself. The Rider cannot hesitate to guide the Elephant, or the Elephant will quickly take control, driven by strong impulses. Shaping the Path and pre-deciding what you will do when presented by a cue in the environment are very effective, but we still need to motivate that Elephant. Creating a strong emotional linkage between the new habit and the results it will produce will help inspire the Elephant.[iv]
The most effective way to remove one habit is with another; “un clavo saca otro clavo” one nail drives out another. Cues in our environment trigger our habits. When our mind identifies the cue, we need to have pre-decided what we will do so our Rider doesn’t hesitate to guide the Elephant in a new direction, instead of following the well-beaten path of the past. We must give our Elephant a way forward, something to do when the cue is present. Instead of telling ourselves not to do something, we want to provide ourselves with something to do instead. Telling ourselves not to do something, fixates our mind on doing it. When we deliberately attempt to suppress specific thoughts, we make them more likely to surface. Psychologists call this Ironic Theory. A classic example is when someone is asked not to think of a white bear, they find it difficult to think of anything else. White bears aren’t something we usually think about unless you live in Alaska, but when we are asked to not think about them, our mind suddenly finds it can think of nothing else.
Pre-deciding and preparing to execute an alternative action is crucial to interrupting a bad habit. If you are uncertain or cannot perform the new behavior, you will regress to your old familiar one. Ideally, the new routine will provide some of the same benefits that the old routine provided. In my example, the cold Topo Chico gave me the same pleasurable sensations of an alcoholic beverage without any of the unwanted calories.
When we tell ourselves not to do something, our mind is left to dwell on it. In this case, that something is a bad habit that our experience has taught us provides immediate pleasure. Focusing on what you want to avoid doing is like filling your environment with temptation instead of shaping your environment to remove them. Give your mind something else to focus on instead. We all have good and bad habits; our success is determined by our ratio of good habits to bad habits.
A better understanding of how habits work will help you to change your behavior. The five change strategies you will be applying to each of the three disciplines are designed to increase your awareness of cues in your environment that are initiating your bad habits, developing triggers for each of the disciplines we want to build, and shaping your environment to foster good habits and eliminate temptations.
The efficacy of these strategies has been proven in clinical studies, but no approach will work unless you do the work. Unless you give these strategies a sincere effort, unless you change what you have done in the past, you will not achieve a different result. I want you to change the way you think about willpower and habits. Your struggles aren’t unique. Everyone struggles with willpower, and everyone develops bad habits because they are so easy to form and resume.
For change to occur it starts in your mind; you must change the way you approach habits and willpower. Different thinking leads to different decisions. Different decisions lead to different actions. Different actions produce different results. I am no genius, but Albert Einstein was. He said “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
For things to change, you must change. These five change strategies will help you Shape the Path, and Guide the Rider. The progress you will see will help to Motivate the Elephant, but ultimately the challenge of getting and keeping your Elephant motivated is your responsibility. You must want the results that the new habits are going to produce more than the immediate gratification your old pattern of behavior gave you. Whether it is a fitter sexier body, more strength, and vitality, greater confidence, or a better sex life you must want it bad enough to overcome the seductive allure of bad habits.
When people fail to change, it isn’t a lack of willpower that is stopping them. It is a lack of commitment. Most people blame their lack of willpower for their inability to break old habits, but this is an excuse made by people that weren’t committed enough to guard themselves against temptation. Instead of admitting that they lacked the commitment to reduce their exposure to temptations, they blame their willpower. No one has enough willpower to subject themselves unnecessarily to temptation. It is easy to blame your willpower. So many demands are placed on our limited willpower each day that every unnecessary temptation is one too many. Willpower is an ineffective strategy for changing behavior, pre-commitment, on the other hand, is a very effective strategy. Pre-commitment eliminates the need for willpower. If you shape your environment correctly and focus your mind on executing good habits you won’t need a lot of willpower. Shaping your environment and developing good habits are the two most powerful techniques we can use to conserve our limited willpower. I hope you are ready for the challenge because if you are, the five strategies in the next chapter are going to transform your body and your life.
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[i] Charles, Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Random House Trade Paperbacks (January 7, 2014).
[ii] Charles, Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Random House Trade Paperbacks (January 7, 2014).
[iii]Cathryn M. Delude, “Brain researchers explain why old habits die hard”, News Office Correspondent
October 19, 2005
[iv] Chip Heath, and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Crown Business; 1st edition (February 16, 2010).
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Detroit civil rights lawsuit attempts to assert a constitutional right to literacy
First legal challenge of its kind in the US tells Michigan has disinvested in education in Detroit to the point that children lack fundamental tools to learn
Jamarria Hall cant stomach strolling into his high school on Detroits east side some days. The classrooms are hot, water fountains dont run and only 2.2% of students last year attained college-ready ratings in reading and English.
It doesnt even feel like school, said Hall, a senior at Osborn Evergreen Academy of Design and Alternative Energy. It attains my stomach hurt simply strolling into the facility, knowing were basically getting cheated genuinely, getting robbed of education.
A federal civil rights lawsuit filed on Tuesday aims to challenge Halls educational system by asserting a constitutional right to literacy, in what attorneys say is the first legal challenge of its kind in the US. The 133 -page complaint tells the state of Michigan has disinvested in education in Detroit so much that children lack fundamental access to literacy.
Hall, 16, said he has friends who cant read but its not because they arent smart, its because the state has failed them.
Proficiency rates in core subject areas are near-zero at the schools where the seven students named in the complaint attend, the complaint says.
Absent literacy, small children has no way to obtain knowledge, communicate with the world, or participate in the institutions and activities of citizenship, said Mark Rosenbaum, director of the opportunity under law project of Public Counsel, which is filing the lawsuit.
Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe, who is not involved in the litigation, said he expects the lawsuit will make history, much as Brown v Board of Education did.
The legal hypothesi underlying the suit is both creative and rock-solid, he said, and Mark Rosenbaums legal squad is nothing short of extraordinary.
If you think of Brown v Board as one shoe that dropped, this is the other shoe, he said, because though it eradicated, technically, inferior schools for blacks, and eradicated de jure segregation, it didnt achieve one of its basic objectives. And that is a decent educational opportunity for all kids, irrespective of race, irrespective of class, irrespective of geography. Thats become a more elusive goal.
The plaintiffs include students from five of the lowest-performing schools in the citys system, which lately was overhauled before the start of the new year, after state lawmakers passed a $617 m plan to restructure different districts and shed its long-term indebtednes. Teachers this year have waged large-scale protests over the prospect of working without pay and in subpar working conditions, though officials have recently touted improvements in constructing mends.
The governors office said it doesnt comment on pending lawsuits. A spokesperson for Detroits school system said the districts legal squad hasnt had time to review the case.
The lawsuit describes a public “schools ” in Detroit that has experienced a precipitous deterioration under state oversight. Since 1999, Michigan has implemented various measures to restructure the governance of the system, including a string of appointed emergency managers tasked with overseeing the districts finances. But in that timeframe, the lawsuit tells, the state has not addressed the root causes of its failures[ with literacy] in any systematic or meaningful way.
The lawsuit cites a list of complaints that have fostered the current environment in Detroit: the spread of charter schools, vast schools closes, and as part of the overhaul the summer months of different districts a new provision that authorizes the hiring of non-credentialed educators. Insufficient faculty poses additional challenges, too, the suit states.
At one school, co-counsel Kathryn Eidmann said an eighth0grade student handled teaching a seventh- and eighth-grade math class for a month because no teacher was available a situation reported to the legal squad by numerous educators. And this week, Eidmann said she spoke with a student who started his school year with two class that dont have a teacher.
During that period, he sits with a replace in the ROTC classroom, she said.
Eidmann said the case is the first in federal tribunal to argue there is a right to access literacy under the US constitutions 14 th amendment. In 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan filed a class-action lawsuit in state tribunal on behalf of students in the towns of Highland Parks school system. That suit asserted Michigan had a constitutional obligation to educate students in Highland Park, which borders Detroit. A Michigan court of appeals panel, in 2014, repudiated the claims in a 2-1 election, and the states high court refused to hear the case.
While the federal case over Detroits public schools is the first to argue literacy is constitutionally protected, Eidmann said its very well grounded in US supreme court precedent. In the 1982 the actions of Plyler v Doe, the justices struck down a Texas statute that excluded undocumented immigrant children from public education, and said a state may not deny a discrete group of innocent children the free public education that it offers to other children residing within its borders.
Detroit students, predominately low-income and children of colouring, gratify the criteria of a discrete class, the lawsuit claims, and have been excluded from the access to literacy that public education provides to other students in the state of Michigan.
These are schools in name only, Eidmann said, where students are sitting in the classrooms often with no volumes, often where theres no educators, often where theres no affectation of literacy taking place. In that sense, theyre being denied a basic education.
Though Rosenbaums other case in Highland Park failed at the state level, Tribe said the federal court system is a more appropriate vehicle to address the litany of issues cited in the lawsuit.
Its something that a life-tenured federal magistrate is likely to be much more comfy with and willing to think through in great detail, Tribe said.
Tribe also believed the lawsuit makes a voice use of the Plyler decision.
Whether it is kids who through no faulting of their own were brought to Texas as undocumented aliens at the age of two, or kids through no faulting of their own were born and are growing up in Detroit, he said, the idea that saying, by the luck of the draw, you will never be equipped by society with the tools you need to achieve something that resembles the American Dream of upward mobility, thats a fundamental departure from constitutional principle.
The suit asks the federal tribunal to provide relief that includes evidence-based literacy instruction in every grade level, along with addressing physical school conditions.
The five-count complaint names Michigans governor, Rick Snyder, as well as several state education officials, as defendants. The state department of education did not respond to a request for commentary. The governors office and a spokesperson for Detroits school system both declined to comment.
Hall, the student at Osborn Evergreen Academy, said he has witnessed classmates act out to avoid reading in class, if a teacher calls on them. They dont wishes to get embarrassed, he said. They dont want to feel dumb.
I dont believe Im as smart as I could have been, or I have enough knowledge or as much knowledge that I couldve got because weve missed out on so much opportunity, he said. Because of simple facts: that we dont have enough volumes, or its hot in the classroom. Instead of are concerned about learning were worried about the hot. Indeed, Osborn was closed last week for a day due to extreme temperatures and a lack of air conditioning in the building.
Read more: www.theguardian.com
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