#which are diet republicans

[ivymarquis]

How am I supposed to go out into the world and attempt to date, knowing that John Price is a figment of our imaginations and not real. What is even the point

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #19

May 17-24 2024

President Biden wiped out the student loan debt of 160,000 more Americans. This debt cancellation of 7.7 billion dollars brings the total student loan debt relieved by the Biden Administration to $167 billion. The Administration has canceled student loan debt for 4.75 million Americans so far. The 160,000 borrowers forgiven this week owned an average of $35,000 each and are now debt free. The Administration announced plans last month to bring debt forgiveness to 30 million Americans with student loans coming this fall.

The Department of Justice announced it is suing Ticketmaster for being a monopoly. DoJ is suing Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation for monopolistic practices. Ticketmaster controls 70% of the live show ticket market leading to skyrocketing prices, hidden fees and last minute cancellation. The Justice Department is seeking to break up Live Nation and help bring competition back into the market. This is one of a number of monopoly law suits brought by the Biden administration against Apple in March and Amazon in September 2023.

The EPA announced $225 million in new funding to improve drinking and wastewater for tribal communities. The money will go to tribes in the mainland US as well as Alaska Native Villages. It'll help with testing for forever chemicals, and replacing of lead pipes as well as sustainability projects.

The EPA announced $300 million in grants to clean up former industrial sites. Known as "Brownfield" sites these former industrial sites are to be cleaned and redeveloped into community assets. The money will fund 200 projects across 178 communities. One such project will transform a former oil station in Philadelphia’s Kingsessing neighborhood, currently polluted with lead and other toxins into a waterfront bike trail.

The Department of Agriculture announced a historic expansion of its program to feed low income kids over the summer holidays. Since the 1960s the SUN Meals have served in person meals at schools and community centers during the summer holidays to low income children. This Year the Biden administration is rolling out SUN Bucks, a $120 per child grocery benefit. This benefit has been rejected by many Republican governors but in the states that will take part 21 million kids will benefit. Last year the Biden administration introduced SUN Meals To-Go, offering pick-up and delivery options expanding SUN's reach into rural communities. These expansions are part of the Biden administration's plan to end hunger and reduce diet-related disease by 2030.

Vice-President Harris builds on her work in Africa to announce a plan to give 80% of Africa internet access by 2030, up from just 40% today. This push builds off efforts Harris has spearheaded since her trip to Africa in 2023, including $7 billion in climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation, and $1 billion to empower women. The public-private partnership between the African Development Bank Group and Mastercard plans to bring internet access to 3 million farmers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria, before expanding to Uganda, Ethiopia, and Ghana, and then the rest of the continent, bring internet to 100 million people and businesses over the next 10 years. This is together with the work of Partnership for Digital Access in Africa which is hoping to bring internet access to 80% of Africans by 2030, up from 40% now, and just 30% of women on the continent. The Vice-President also announced $1 billion for the Women in the Digital Economy Fund to assure women in Africa have meaningful access to the internet and its economic opportunities.

The Senate approved Seth Aframe to be a Judge on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, it also approved Krissa Lanham, and Angela Martinez to district Judgeships in Arizona, as well as Dena Coggins to a district court seat in California. Bring the total number of judges appointed by President Biden to 201. Biden's Judges have been historically diverse. 64% of them are women and 62% of them are people of color. President Biden has appointed more black women to federal judgeships, more Hispanic judges and more Asian American judges and more LGBT judges than any other President, including Obama's full 8 years in office. President Biden has also focused on backgrounds appointing a record breaking number of former public defenders to judgeships, as well as labor and civil rights lawyers.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Stephen Robinson at Public Notice:

A near-majority of American voters willingly reelected Donald Trump. This harsh reality is a collective moral failure, but it’s also not a choice made in sound mind. Consider that voters believed Trump’s first presidency was a roaring success and Joe Biden’s only term a Carter-level catastrophe. It’s an upside-down Bizarro World view that ultimately played a key role in dooming Kamala Harris.

Trump’s 2024 platform was rooted in an obvious lie — that the nation under Biden’s leadership is a flaming dumpster fire and everyone was much better off when Trump was president. Democrats challenged this false reality with facts, but they ultimately lost the messaging war. Their best efforts were no match for the most powerful weapons in Trump’s propaganda arsenal — a timid press and a right-coded social social media environment. Greg Sargent reports in the New Republic that the Harris campaign’s own internal polling revealed an alarming trend: “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency — even if they saw these things negatively — were his fault.” According to exit polls, Trump decisively won the questions “who do you trust more to handle the economy?” and “who do you trust most to handle a crisis?” Of course, in reality Trump utterly botched the 2020 pandemic response, which researchers concluded resulted in 40 percent more deaths than necessary. And yet swing voters are willing to risk it all again in hopes of cheaper eggs and cruelty against outgroups.

Disinformation on demand

Legacy media shoulders significant blame for their “sanewashing” of Trump’s incoherency and deteriorating mental state. Voters believed Trump could fix a steadily improving economy despite his promotion of inflationary tariffs. The media even presented Trump’s rants as cogent discussions of economic theory.

It’s worth noting, however, that an NBC poll from April revealed that voters who received news primarily from legacy media (newspapers, cable news, etc.) still overwhelmingly supported Biden. Trump owes his victory in great part to low-propensity voters of all races, including young men, and those voters don’t necessarily form their views based on mainstream media reporting. Rather, far too many are stuck in an online social media bubble where they are delivered a steady diet of rightwing propaganda. The median age of a Fox News viewer is 68, and liberals have joked about the network “brainwashing” their conservative parents. But rightwing social media content has effectively targeted and radicalized younger people, who — unlike the typical Hannity-obsessed grandpa — can vote for the next several decades. TikTok, which Trump joined in June, has 170 million users in the United States, and according a Pew Research survey, more than half of them said they regularly get their news from the platform. That’s up from just 22 percent in 2020. This is a serious concern because the far right uses TikTok to advance unfounded conspiracy theories and outright lies.

[...]

Lower income Americans, particularly young people, do spend more of their income on groceries, rent, and gas. That’s why Republicans were so laser focused on the price of eggs. Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of liberal content countering the negative vibes. Of course, explaining the post-pandemic economic recovery is complex and requires more than a punchy one-minute video can convey. Although people might idly scroll TikTok all day, consuming 60-second quick hit videos like potato chips, they will balk at reading an extensive, well-reported news article. That’s too filling a meal.

According to a University of Oregon study, 40 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans surveyed said they’d become more conservative from their TikTok usage. Half of the Democrats surveyed said they’d grown more liberal, but a lot of far-left content on TikTok is downright alienating and can sound like MAGA’s idea of a strawman leftist. For instance, one user boasted that she “didn’t care” if liberal economic and social policies “hurt the economy,” thus conceding that those policies are in fact harmful to economic progress. TikTok’s artificial “vibecession” dominated the discourse, while abortion-related content was actively suppressed even while pregnant women were bleeding out in parking lots. Users of the platform resorted to disguising the word “abortion” as “aborshun” or “ab0rti0n” in order to reach an audience. TikTok has a longstanding policy against promoting abortion services, which it classifies as “unsuitable businesses, products or services.” However, TikTok, YouTube, and Meta have allowed users to spread and monetize anti-abortion misinformation. Studies have shown an interesting gender gap in where young people receive their news on social media: For most women, it’s TikTok, while most men learn about the world from YouTube, X, and Reddit, all of which have become havens of crude masculinity.

On YouTube, 56 percent of users are between the ages of 18 and 44. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that researches extremism, conducted a four-part research project this year that determined YouTube’s algorithm consistently steers users to rightwing and Christian content. The algorithm does this even with seemingly apolitical search terms, like “male lifestyle guru,” which YouTube reflexively associates with conservative ideology. Rightwing news content was also more frequently recommended, including anti-vaxxer videos. As far back as 2019, both YouTube and Facebook’s autofill search boxes would return content that promoted anti-vaccine misinformation.

[...]

Why rightwing content has the edge

When Kamala Harris appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, host Alexandra Cooper told her listeners, “I do not usually discuss politics or have politicians on the show because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place that everyone feels comfortable tuning in.” Left-leaning podcasters/social media content creators often avoid politics for fear of turning off their right-leaning fans. Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports don’t bother with such apologies when they have rightwing guests because it doesn’t compromise their brand. They are rightwing cultural influencers. Liberal podcaster Hasan Piker recently commented on the impact rightwing influencers have on young men of all races.

“There is a massive amount of rightwing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces. Everything is completely dominated by rightwing politics,” he said. “If you’re a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it’s playing video games, whether it’s working out, whether it’s listening to a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is completely dominated by center right to [the] Trumpian right. Everything they see is rightwing sentiment.”

Rogan and Portnoy might not present as overtly political as Walsh and Shapiro, but their edgy, hyper masculine personas are pure MAGA. Even billionaire CEO Elon Musk likes to present himself as a “disrupter,” an agent of change who boldly confronts the status quo. Anyone who’s seen the more popular indie films of the 1970s would realize how compelling this narrative is to young men. The subtle way that Rogan and Portnoy infuse politics into their personas presents a contrast with left-leaning social media content. The liberal TikToker or YouTuber who releases videos about home makeovers might endorse Democratic politicians during election season while wearing their “just voted” sticker, but rightwing influencers prime their audience on a daily basis. Young men marinate in a stew of rightwing sentiment and end up resenting the libs.

Stephen Robinson wrote in Public Notice a very valid case that a right-coded media environment gave Donald Trump the decisive boost to get elected, such as praising the disastrous Trump reign as a “success.”

Social media algorithms heavily favored right-coded and pro-Trump content, despite the never-ending whining about “censorship” from conservatives.

[sissa-arrows]

This tweet says it all… translation below.

(Repost because I wanted to make it into it’s own post instead of a reblog)

Banning the abaya is not a back-to-school "diversion". It is part of a plan.

Islamophobia is not an epiphenomenon. It is at the heart of a political project.

Racism is not an accident. It's a system.

There are absolutely no surprises in France.

The only "surprise" is that leftists and observers are still surprised by the repeated attacks against Black people, Arabs and Muslims in France.

No "red line has been crossed".

It's been going on like this for decades. It's just that depending on the mood or the privileges it touches, an opportunity arises where you "find out" what your fellow citizens are going through every day. It's there, too obvious for you to ignore, so you give it a tweet, an indignation, a passing concern. Then it goes back in the back of your mind filled with stuff that you don't live, while waiting for the next buzz that will occupy you.

The racist, sequenced, destructive and methodical harassment that targets Muslims in France varies only in its seasonality and its modalities of expression, but it is constant in its objectives as in its structures:

Muslim women are targeted in summer for the burkini, at the start of the school year for long dresses, on sports grounds because they want to play, all the rest of the year for their headscarves or their simple existence in public spaces. .

Muslim children are targeted at school for their beliefs, in the playground for their children's games (1), in the canteen for their "bismiLlah" and their diet.

Muslim men are targeted in their expression, treated as a security risk, criminalized in the public space.

Muslim associations and executives are targeted in their organizational methods, subject to political and ideological control by the prefectures.

And it just gets annoying to have to remind you of this with every controversy targeting Muslims, about twice a month.

The truth is simple:

France is filled by endemic Islamophobia. Racism is structural here. Antisemitism is structural here. Antiblack racism is structural here. The criminalization of migrants is structural here. Police violence is structural here.

And only racists deny racism.

Only those who don't experience it think it's a subject up to debate.

The "attacks on secularism" are as much shame on the French flag as the abusive reports that compose them, from the simple innocuous religious expression to the clothes police that are set up against young Muslim girls, as they are targeted with racial profiling to distinguish, by "use/purpose (2)" (the level of creative hypocrisy of racists) between the proselytizing use of a Zara dress (for Arabs and Blacks) and the admissible Republican use (for the others), while the handful of truly believable incidents are resolved with a simple warning and explanation.

The only attack on secularism is the establishment of a system of registration, denunciation and surveillance of Muslim students on a large scale. This is the count of students absent for Eid (3). It is the progressive decline of an educational institution which, since 2004, has gone from one moral panic to the next, with the same targets and the same results: the deterioration of teaching conditions and the systemic, slow and methodical stigmatization of some of the students. It is the silence that has become the choice of the majority of teachers and unions when their mission of inclusion and benevolent education of all children is ridiculed, that’s when they do not add their voice to the chorus of calls for the exclusion of students, calling for "clear rules" that invariably result in penalties and bans. It is the constant civilizing and post-colonial injunction to be free only according to modalities chosen by others than ourselves.

To people who still care about the fundamental freedoms of everyone (and in particular the young women targeted here for their clothing choices), I say: you are losing more than a battle, not to fight with all your might a fight which is already engaged, is tipping France into an authoritarian, racist and totally assumed oppressive posture.

To those Muslim men and women who minimize what is happening or blame young girls for their treatment, I say: you deserve what is happening to you. If you are humiliated in this way, it is because you allow it. To them their honor and to you your shame. They only wanted to study, without asking for the slightest preferential treatment or exceptional regime, while you found all the reasons in the world to defend their oppressors, out of unconsciousness if not out of cowardice. Those who already accepted the exclusion of young girls in 2004, those who looked elsewhere when imams were criminalized, those who believed in the promise of a state sanctioned Islam that would leave them safe if they remained docile to the exclusion of their brothers, those who allowed the associations which defended them to be dissolved and the mosques which welcomed them to be closed. If not out of modesty, at least for your own salvation, be silent and do not add your voice to those who make our children enemies of a republic which, rather than respecting them for what they do, chose to exclude them for who they are.

To my sisters, in skirts, dresses, jeans, sweatshirts or abayas, I want to (re)tell how proud we are of you. I don't know how to express the hope and sincere admiration I have for you when, in a toxic period like the one we are going through, I see the good you are doing, the projects you are planning, the enthusiasm and commitment that you display, in class, at home, on the soccer field or in associations, to respond to offenses with dignified words and smiles, to hold firm when we give up, to give us comfort in a world upside down, to pay the price for what is going wrong in our society and which should nevertheless concern us all. Rock in everything you do. Do not let yourself be locked into the image that some want to give of you, because you are not defined by any other voice than yours and by any other choice than yours. Please hold on tight. Be happy, make your plans and let others talk.

Maybe what angers them so much is to see you shine...

Notes:

1: Children love to see lay pretend and imitate adults. Some Muslim children (all below 10) pretended to pray at school. Some white kids eventually joined and instead of explaining to the kids to not play that way the teachers made a report. It ended on national news, they started acting as if it was super common and as if kids were forcing their non Muslim classmate to convert to Islam. It was a mess. To the point where the parents of the Muslim kids were so scared they pulled out their kids of all activities outside of schools… Some of the white parents actually had to get involved to ask people to calm the fuck down that it was just kids playing pretend. The end of the year school party was even canceled so no child would get attacked…

2: Teachers and schools were reporting and expelling Black and Arab girls for wearing long skirt or headbands. Those are obviously not religious clothes. People rightfully complained and said that it was racial profiling. Instead of telling schools and teachers to calm down the government changed the 2004 in 2022. Now clothes can become religious “par destination” so by purpose or use. Basically it means that depending on who (white or people of color) wears them clothes can become religious. If a white girl wears headbands very often that’s okay if a Black or North African girl does it then her headband is a symbolic hijab and she must remove it.

3: In the south west of France and in other regions the police asked schools to provide a list of all the children who did not come at school on Eid. For the record children are ALLOWED to miss school for religious holidays.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

de Adder

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 09, 2024

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. 

There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.” 

After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. 

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” 

In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”

Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”

Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’” 

In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region.

Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them. 

In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote.

In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law.

When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war. 

When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” 

By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to. 

Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region.

Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ross-hollander]

Conspiracy theories...

...either at rest or still in motion across the Inner Sphere and beyond:

The "Caravanserai Theory", founded during the 3060s by a handful of paranoid officers, which supposes that the so-called Homeworlds are, in fact, only a garrison en route from the Clans' true home turf. Generally discredited because not enough people believed the Clans would lie about it, although some hardcore faithful persisted, on the basis that the known Clans might not even know there were more of them out there.

The "Jingo Juice Theory", founded about a decade in the aftermath of the Andurien Crisis by a few researchers. They claimed that both sides of the war had experimented with Vita-Orange laced with combat stimulants and psychoactive elements that could clot seditious thought. (Not really a conspiracy theory as such; it actually did happen, with good documentation, although it never got too far. More hindrance than help.)

The "Voluntary Caucus of Free Individuals", typically shortened to the Caucus, an anti-government group in the Commonwealth who believe it is effectively a company town and all its laws don't apply to them if they use very specific terminology in court. They only do business in homemade gold coins, believing Lyran currency to be company scrip, and sign documents in thumbprint only.

The "Phantom Caste Records", originating specifically in Clan Jade Falcon, by researchers of Clan history who claim that a sixth official caste (not Bandit or Dark) was designed but never implemented. This is typically referred to as the 'Translator Caste', although nobody in the community can actually put a finger on when that name started getting used for it.

The "ilKhan't Theory", circulated by some ex-Republicans, regarding a suspicion that the so-called Alaric Ward is at least a dozen Alarics Ward in a sub-caste of cloned and honed perfected ruler figures. Believers attempt to dig up a lack of or contradictory evidence on Ward's background or catch pictures that show him looking too different from other photos.

The "Stone Age Button Theory", first found in the Confederation but spreading outwards, suggesting that 'mech failures are the doings of some shadowy cabal who have tech implanted in every 'mech in the galaxy that can- at their will -either hamper, cripple, or straight-up shut it down. Who exactly this is varies; in the Confederation, for instance, the answer is usually whoever tried to invade them last, but in the Combine it is always the Davion family.

The "Democracy Syndrome", created by a bright spark of especial nationalistic fervor in the Combine, who wrote a lengthy thesis explaining how refusal to submit to the divine majesty of the Dragon was, in fact, the mental impact of a poor diet on the part of their interstellar neighbors, and if everybody changed what they ate the Sphere would be unified in a decade or less.

The "Scorpion Sting Cabal", a deeply involved theory that tracks movement of specific power players just beneath the public surface, and claims that Operation SCORPION did succeed- putting Blakist deep-plants into command structures where they'd never be looked for, primed and ready to strike. Formulated purely to build up vitriol against certain politicians in the FWL; little to no hard evidence.

The "Dual-Pilot Thesis", a definite standout, by a lone author, PFC Ronnie Merritt of the AFFS Third Ceti Hussars. He spent sixteen years writing articles, blog posts and actual books detailing his grand theory: Pouncer OmniMechs have two pilots. Specifically the Pouncer, not even all OmniMechs. No explanation, nor detailed photos of several different Pouncer configurations, could dissuade him. Tragically, he perished in a bus crash at the age of 41, and fierce insistence could lacerate his heart no more.

[radlymona]

People are like “we need the liberal version of Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro” and it’s like but what do they have to offer? Podcasts about social inequality, racism and climate change? About the housing crisis?

People listening to these podcasts don’t want to coherent political and economic analysis they want content slop about how Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs, and showing women and gay people having meltdowns in debates and cancel culture and the Carnivore diet and isolation tanks and the vaccines will kill you and how Halle Bailey as Ariel is a sign that the woke mob will take your rights away and mass shooting victims are actually crisis actors.

There is no political coherence to this demographic, they’re just dumb. Even living paycheck to paycheck won’t make them realise the position they’ve subjugated themselves in. They’ll spend the rest of their lives blaming the invisible liberal elite while the Republicans they vote in grow richer and richer from the tax breaks they cut themselves all the while allowing landlords to up rent prices that eventually makes them go homeless. At which point they’ll STILL blame women and minorities because of DEI policies

[dirtyriver]

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

I don’t really do endorsements. I’m not shy about sharing my views, but I hate politics and don’t trust most politicians.

I also understand that people want to hear from me because I am not just a celebrity, I am a former Republican Governor.

My time as Governor taught me to love policy and ignore politics. I’m proud of the work I did to help clean up our air, create jobs, balance the budget, make the biggest infrastructure investment in state history, and take power from the politicians and give it back to the people when it comes to our redistricting process and our primaries in California.

That’s policy. It requires working with the other side, not insulting them to win your next election, and I know it isn’t sexy to most people, but I love it when I can help make people’s lives better with policies, like I still do through my institute at USC, where we fight for clean air and stripping the power from the politicians who rig the system against the people.

Let me be honest with you: I don’t like either party right now. My Republicans have forgotten the beauty of the free market, driven up deficits, and rejected election results. Democrats aren’t any better at dealing with deficits, and I worry about their local policies hurting our cities with increased crime.

It is probably not a surprise that I hate politics more than ever, which, if you are a normal person who isn’t addicted to this crap, you probably understand.

I want to tune out.

But I can’t. Because rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets. To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America is a trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.

And I will always be an American before I am a Republican.

That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

I’m sharing it with all of you because I think there are a lot of you who feel like I do. You don’t recognize our country. And you are right to be furious.

For decades, we’ve talked about the national debt. For decades, we’ve talked about comprehensive immigration reform that secures the border while fixing our broken immigration system. And Washington does nothing.

The problems just keep rolling, and we all keep getting angrier, because the only people that benefit from problems aren’t you, the people. The only people that benefit from this crap are the politicians who prefer having talking points to win elections to the public service that will make Americans’ lives better.

It is a just game to them. But it is life for my fellow Americans. We should be pissed!

But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it is for him, a candidate who will send his followers to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy besides a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me but helped no one else else, a candidate who thinks Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia, or North Korea - that won’t solve our problems.

It will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful.

We need to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know that former President Trump won’t do that. He will divide, he will insult, he will find new ways to be more un-American than he already has been, and we, the people, will get nothing but more anger.

That’s enough reason for me to share my vote with all of you. I want to move forward as a country, and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.

Vote this week. Turn the page and put this junk behind us.

And even if you disagree with me, vote, because that’s what we do as Americans. http://vote.org

[commiepinkofag]

Across the internet, communities of queer and trans youth have mobilized to oppose KOSA as the legislation became increasingly entangled in longstanding culture war debates over sex education and queer visibility in schools.

By Mike Ludwig , Truthout Published August 13, 2024

Despite many changes to the bill’s language since it was first introduced in 2022, KOSA continues to face stiff opposition from LGBTQ and digital rights groups. They take umbrage with the bill’s so-called “duty of care” provision for content recommendation, which makes internet companies responsible for designing their products to mitigate for broad threats to minors, such as “suicide,” “gambling” and “sexual exploitation.” Digital rights groups argue the provision would encourage tech companies to overcorrect and respond to threats from politicians by censoring reproductive and mental health resources, particularly for transgender youth and others who rely on the internet for support and information to navigate the marginalization of their identities. Across the internet, communities of queer and trans youth have mobilized to oppose KOSA as the legislation became increasingly entangled in longstanding culture war debates over sex education and queer visibility in schools. “The changes that I, LGBTQ+ advocates, parents, student activists, civil rights orgs, and others have fought for over the last two years have made it less likely that the bill can be used as a tool for MAGA extremists to wage war on legal and essential information to teens,” Wyden recently wrote on social media. “While constructive, these improvements remain insufficient.” Wyden and LGBTQ rights groups have reason to worry. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee who worked with Democrats on KOSA, said in 2023 that the bill could be used to censor content and shield young people from “indoctrination” and, as she put it, “the transgender.” After Democrats updated the bill earlier this year in an attempt to appease LGBTQ groups, Republicans, fed a diet of online misinformation about queer people, began to see KOSA as part of some liberal conspiracy to promote gender nonconformity, which does not exist.

[tomorrowusa]

Stuff like this is not exactly news, but it is finally making the news.

In a speech at the Turning Point Action convention in Detroit on Saturday night, former President Donald Trump once again questioned President Joe Biden's mental acuity, suggesting that Biden should take a cognitive test. However, in the next breath, Trump confused the name of the doctor who administered the test to him during his presidency. "He doesn't even know what the word 'inflation' means. I think he should take a cognitive test like I did," Trump said of Biden. Seconds later, he continued, "Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much indeed immediately."

The doctor Trump was referring to is actually named Ronny Jackson, not Ronny Johnson. Jackson, who served as the White House physician for part of Trump's presidency, is now a Republican congressman from Texas and one of Trump's most vocal defenders on Capitol Hill. Trump, who turned 78 on Friday, has made questioning whether the 81-year-old Biden is fit for a second term a centerpiece of his campaign. However, critics quickly seized on his Saturday night gaffe, with the Biden campaign posting a clip of the moment, minutes later.

Biden has had a lifelong stutter which he's mostly overcome. Trump's attacks on the disabled to draw attention from his own shortcomings are just part of his routine.

In fact, Trump is the candidate who repeatedly has shown increasing signs of psychological derangement.

In April, a leading psychologist said Trump's mental capabilities appear to be "faltering in a very dangerous way," while speaking on the David Packman Show. Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in psychology at Cornell University who has been critical of the former president's mental health said he believed Trump's "cognitive decline as being another layer of danger on top of an already erratic, mentally challenged person who shouldn't be anywhere near the White House."

As for Dr. Ronny Johnson Jackson, using him as a source is rather dubious.

First on CNN: Rep. Ronny Jackson made sexual comments, drank alcohol and took Ambien while working as White House physician, Pentagon watchdog finds

The Department of Defense inspector general has issued a scathing review of Rep. Ronny Jackson during his time serving as the top White House physician, concluding that he made “sexual and denigrating” comments about a female subordinate, violated the policy for drinking alcohol while on a presidential trip and took prescription-strength sleeping medication that prompted concerns from his colleagues about his ability to provide proper care.

Johnson Jackson got the nickname "Candyman" for freely handing out drugs at the White House.

Ex-White House doctor known as the ‘candyman’ dispensed pills without prescriptions

A former White House doctor was allegedly nicknamed the “candyman” for handing out pills to staff without prescriptions. [ ... ]

Former members of the White House medical unit claim that under Dr Jackson’s leadership, they had handed out stimulants and sedatives without prescriptions, and faked staff members’ identities to give them free healthcare. They claimed the practices had been shaped by Dr Jackson, now a Republican congressman, who was given the nicknames “Dr Feelgood” and “the Candyman”.

I'd love to see an analysis of Trump's blood. In addition to sky high levels of caffeine from his 12 Diet Cokes® per day, there are probably some interesting chemicals churning through his system.

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Élisabeth Lebas talking about Robespierre like he’s the Messiah or something compilation

[Edgar Degas] told me that, when he was a child, his mother one day took him to rue de Tournon to visit Madame Lebas, widow of the famous Convention deputy who, on 9 thermidor, killed himself with a pistol. When the visit was over, they withdrew with small steps, accompanied to the door by the old lady, when Madame Degas suddenly stopped, deeply overwhelmed. Letting go of her son's hand, she pointed at the portraits of Robespierre, of Couthon, of Saint-Just, that she had just noticed were hanging on the walls of the antechambre, and she couldn’t keep herself from crying out with horror: ”What! You still keep the faces of these monsters here!”  ”Be quiet, Célestine!” Madame Lebas cried out ardently, ”be quiet… They were saints!” Discours de l’Histoire prononcé à la distribution solennelle des prix du Lycée Jeanson-de-Sailly held by Paul Valéry on July 13 1932, cited in Robespierre ou les contradictions du jacobinisme (1978) by Albert Soboul.

I was able to converse, between 1838 and 1839, with a famous parrot who had been the friend of Robespierre. He belonged to Mme the widow Lebas, the wife of the famous Convention deputy who chose to die with Robespierre, and the mother of M. Lebas, Hellenist scholar, who died a few years ago. Mme widow Lebas, a very respectable woman, whom I had the honour of seeing often in her little house in Fontenay-aux-Roses, where she would make the sign of the cross when she pronounced the name Robespierre, adding these words: Saint Maximilien. As for her parrot, when one said "Robespierre", it replied Hats off! Hats off! It sang the Marseillaise with perfect diction and Ça ira like a Jacobin. It was — and perhaps, thanks to its diet of grain, still is — a sans-culotte parrot, the like of which can no longer be found. Mme Lebas recounted with great emotion how she had managed to save this precious psittacus  after Thermidor.  It had been seriously compromised.  After the arrest of Robespierre and Lebas, in the course of a long domiciliary inspection,  every time the name of Robespierre was pronouned the parrot would repeat its refrain, Hats off! Hats off! The government agents had grown impatient and were about to wring its neck, when Mme Lebas, as quick as lightning,  grabbed the bird, opened the window and set it free. The poor parrot flew from window to window, until it found a charitable person to open up for it; a few days later Madame Lebas was able to regain possession of this last friend left to her by Robespierre, the only one perhaps, besides his elderly mistress, who has remained faithful to his memory.  L’Union médicale: journal des intérêts scientifiques et pratiques, moraux et professionnels du corps médical (1861) volume 12, page 258-259.

Finally our providence, our good friend Robespierre, spoke to Saint-Just to engage him to let me depart with [him and Lebas], along with my sister-in-law Henriette. Élisabeth’s memoirs, cited in Le conventionnel Le Bas: d’après des documents inédits et les mémoires de sa veuve (1901), by Stéfane-Pol, page 131.

…If you had been informed of my residence, I would have been eager to tell you the truth. The good that you say of our martyrs is not too charged: they were the true friends of liberty; they lived only for the people, for their fatherland; but some monsters, in one day, destroyed everything; in one day they assassinated liberty. Yes, monsieur, a republican like you would have been happy to know those men, so virtuous on all accounts; they all died poor. Note written by Élisabeth a few years before her death regarding ”a work treating the revolution” (l’Histoire des Girondins?). Cited in Ibid, page 147.

[mariacallous]

The humble school meal is having a moment. With the nomination of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as Kamala Harris’s running mate, many voters and pundits are suddenly talking about school meals. And that’s good, because the stakes are high for the national school lunch and school breakfast programs since the campaigns and their parties have very different records and plans.

Since Walz became the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, an image of him has frequently circulated. In the photograph, he’s surrounded by smiling children hugging him after he signed a 2023 bill making school meals universally free for all Minnesota children. His was the fourth state to commit to feeding all children at school; now nine states have done so, and more are considering similar measures. No more forms to fill out to prove your income, which busy parents can forget or that get crumpled in a backpack. No more penalizing children when their parents fall behind on lunch accounts. Every kid gets fed, powering them up for their day’s work learning and growing.

By most measures, the Minnesota program has been successful and popular. Participation in the meals program soared, increasing 15% at lunch and 37% at breakfast compared with the previous year. Due to those increases, the economies of scale improved, and some districts have been able to invest more in scratch cooking with ingredients from local farmers. It turns out that relieving cafeteria staff of the duty to go after parents who fall behind on lunch payments leaves them more time to focus on food quality.

Minnesota’s registered voters are overwhelmingly happy with the program, too. A KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showed that 72% agreed with the legislation, including 90% of liberals and 57% of conservatives. Even 59% of Trump voters in 2020 agreed. In online forums, Minnesota commenters tend to be remarkably supportive of feeding all children, even if they don’t have any themselves or if they think the food could be better. Parents rave about the convenience and savings.

Minnesota’s success isn’t an outlier, but a consistent feature of free meals for all. A 2022 study of the national Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which provides universally free meals nationwide in districts that have a poverty rate of 25% or more, found that more kids eat when the meal is free. That’s true even among kids who were already eligible for free or reduced-price meals, suggesting that stigma is keeping many from accepting assistance. Even more helpful, families with children in schools that provide meals tend to spend less at the grocery store while still improving the quality of their diets. And, perhaps most important, research consistently shows that school meals improve students’ academic performance, behavior and health outcomes.

It’s not assured that a Harris-Walz administration would push such legislation nationally. Harris has mentioned school meal programs at least twice, once in a 2017 Facebook post deploring lunch shaming and recently on X, when she touted Walz’s school lunch program as a sign of support for the middle class. But if the Democratic ticket does put the issue on its platform or list of priorities, school meals would at least have a knowledgable champion in Walz. He has seen it work on the ground, and he knows the benefits that it brings to the vast majority of families with children in his state.

Meanwhile, Minnesota Republican lawmakers have criticized the free meals program. State representative Kristin Robbins’s complaint is typical: “All the low-income students who need – and we want to provide, make sure no one goes hungry – they were getting [meals] through the free and reduced lunch program. This [new legislation] gave free lunch to all the wealthy families … Is that really a priority?” Walz’s reply to this argument dripped with irony: “Isn’t that rich? Our Republican colleagues were concerned this would be a tax cut for the wealthiest.” The year before, the Minnesota GOP proposed a $3.5bn tax cut that largely would have benefited the wealthiest 20%. Feeding all the state’s schoolchildren, even after going over budget because it was so popular, costs only about one-seventh of that.

Republicans at the national level, too, disdain expanding access to free meals and improving nutrition standards. In March, the Republican Study Committee, a caucus to which roughly three-quarters of all Republican House members belong, released its 2025 budget proposal. It called for ending the CEP for high-poverty districts. Doing so would snatch school meals from millions of children currently receiving them, shifting that cost back to their families. It would also probably increase the bureaucracy for schools, though Republicans claim that this administrative system is rife with “fraud and abuse”. While there have been high-profile cases of fraud in the school meals programs (for instance, a Chicago area nutrition director was recently convicted of stealing $1.5m, largely in chicken wings), most identified “abuse” entails clerical errors like giving wrongly categorized meals (free or reduced-price) to kids very near the income cutoffs or ringing up a meal without one of the required components on the tray, like enough vegetables. I would also point out that, if all children got the meals free, there would be no “fraud” in giving a hungry child a school meal, and we could save the labor and cost of all that paperwork.

Reducing access to free school meals is also a priority of the now-infamous Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next administration. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but his ties to it are indisputable and a second Trump White House would probably be well populated with its adherents.

Regarding school meals, Project 2025 repeats the willful deception that the federal lunch and breakfast programs are “specifically for children in poverty”. In truth, from their beginnings, these programs were meant for all children. But they always made allowances for impoverished children’s access – not only poor children, but inclusive of poor children. The authors of Project 2025 argue that any expansion of free meals is against the “original intent” and creates “an entitlement for students from middle- and upper-income homes”. (I wonder what they think of all those wealthy children getting free textbooks?) Their stated policy goals are to “work with lawmakers to eliminate CEP” and to “reject efforts to create universal free school meals”.

While Trump himself may know little about school meals policy (I have never found an instance of him directly talking about it), his first administration set out immediately to relax nutrition standards set under President Obama. The very first policy announcement from Sonny Perdue, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, was that his department would seek to bring back higher-fat chocolate milk, reduce whole grain requirements and stop sodium reductions. And despite the US Department of Agriculture’s own research findings that Obama-era rules had made school meals significantly healthier and debunking claims that plate waste was increasing, one of the last acts of the Trump USDA was to propose a further weakening of nutrition standards to require fewer fruits and allow yet more usually high-salt items such as pizza and hash browns. But the clock ran out on that proposal, and the Biden-Harris administration then increased school meals’ nutrition standards.

Given the Republicans’ legislative goals and the direction of one of the GOP’s leading thinktanks, a second Trump administration would almost surely unravel access to school meals and gut hard-won, incremental gains that have made them healthier. All this despite nationwide polls that indicate a majority of US voters agree that all kids should get universally free school meals.

[misfitwashere]

November 8, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 9

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. 

There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.” 

After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. 

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” 

In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”

Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”

Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’” 

In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region.

Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them. 

In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote.

In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law.

When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war. 

When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” 

By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to. 

Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region.

Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights. 

—

Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on. These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.” But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win. Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often. If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

[...]

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter. And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him. But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible. [...]

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media. Likewise with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

[...]

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro. Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

[...] The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.

Michael Tomasky of TNR explains it perfectly: Donald Trump won due to the right-wing media apparatus feeding lies to the voters.

[ridenwithbiden]

TO PAY FOR TRUMPS TRILLIONS IN TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH.

"Oz will succeed Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the current administrator of CMS, to lead programs including Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people aged 65 or older, and disabled people, and Medicaid, the state-based health insurance program for lower-income people, which is jointly funded by states and the federal government. The two programs provide health insurance for more than 140 million Americans.

Also in the CMS fold are the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip) and the Health Insurance Marketplace, which was created by the Affordable Care Act under Barack Obama in 2010.

Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans are currently discussing possible cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other government welfare programs to cover the costs of extending the president-elect’s multi-trillion-dollar 2017 tax cut."

Dr Oz, best known for his daytime talkshow, leaned heavily into Trumpism during his failed 2022 run for US Senate. Donald Trump has chosen Mehmet Oz, best known for starring in his eponymous daytime talkshow for more than a decade and leaning heavily into Trumpism during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania Senate seat, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The cardiothoracic surgeon, who faced immense backlash from the medical and scientific communities for pushing misinformation at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, will oversee the agency that operates on a $2.6 trillion dollar annual budget and provides healthcare to more than 100 million people.

“I am honored to be nominated by [Donald Trump] to lead CMS,” Oz posted on X on Tuesday. “I look forward to serving my country to Make America Healthy Again under the leadership of HHS Secretary [Robert F Kennedy Jr].”

In the announcement of Oz’s selection, Trump said that Oz would “make America healthy again” and described him as “an eminent Physician, Heart Surgeon, Inventor, and World-Class Communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades”.

Oz has been on US television screens for nearly 20 years, first appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show in 2004. In that time, he has talked to his audience about losing weight with fad diets and what it takes to have healthy poops and, toward the end of his run, touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential remedy for Covid-19.

Here’s what to know about the New York University professor and surgeon turned television show host, and now Trump appointee.

Mehmet Oz, 64, is a Turkish American Ohio native best known for The Dr Oz Show, which ran from 2009 to 2022. His father was a surgeon in Turkey, and after Oz graduated high school in Delaware, he was admitted into Harvard. He also served in the Turkish military in order to maintain dual citizenship, the Associated Press reports.

Before entering US homes via daytime TV, he had more than 20 years of experience as a cardiothoracic surgeon at Presbyterian-Columbia medical center in New York. He was also a professor at Columbia University’s medical school.

His bona fides at the prestigious institutions earned him quick credibility with viewers, and his popularity garnered him nine Daytime Emmy awards for outstanding informative talkshow and host.

Though his show ended in 2022, Oz maintains a YouTube channel filled with old episodes of his shows where he interviews guests such as Penn Jillette about his weight loss and Robert F Kennedy Jr about his 2014 book about the presence of mercury in vaccines. He also has an Instagram account that boasts more than a million followers, where Oz shares photos of his family and sells products from iHerb, an online health and wellness brand for which he is global adviser.

Oz’s questionable medical advice and time in politics. Throughout his TV tenure, Oz dabbled in the hallmarks of weight loss culture like detoxes, cleanses and diets that promised rapid weight loss. He also faced a grilling by senators in 2014 over claims he made and alleged false advertising on supplements he promoted on his show. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Oz regurgitated misinformation that came from the fringes of the right and medical communities.

These comments continued when he threw his hat into the race to represent Pennsylvania in the US Senate in 2022 against John Fetterman. At the time, the Guardian wrote:

“Oz was dogged by questions about his actual connection to the state during the campaign. Oz lived in New Jersey for decades before he moved to Pennsylvania in October 2020, into a home owned by his wife’s family. He announced his bid to be the state’s US senator just months later.”

Following Fetterman’s stroke, during which he said he “​​almost died”, the Oz campaign launched unsavory attacks against him, with one Oz aide, Rachel Tripp, claiming Fetterman might not have had a stroke if he “had ever eaten a vegetable in his life”.

Oz ultimately lost to Fetterman, who garnered 51% of the vote compared with Oz’s 46%."

[darerendevil]

For archive purposes: March, 2013

If he has one driving goal in his film career, it's to participate in a project that leaves a lasting impression. "Ultimately what I'd like to do is leave behind a movie that's a piece of art," he says. "One movie out of however many I make that influences or has an impact or someone holds up in the future as a piece of art. That's the ultimate goal."

Chaos. Blackness. Then a pair of inconceivably blue eyes burst open, filling the screen. This is how most audiences were first introduced to Cillian Murphy three and a half years ago, when the Irish actor erupted onto the scene in the post-apocalyptic sleeper hit 28 Days Later. As Jim, a bike courier who awakens from a coma after London has been wiped out by a deadly infection, the largely unknown 24-year-old found himself as the lead in Danny Boyle's poetically terrifying film. As the audience surrogate, Murphy's face telegraphed all the confusion, innocence, and wonder we would expect of a hero-in-the-making who is realizing he might very well be the last man on earth.

After the success of 28 Days Later, a career in Hollywood films was inevitable. It's not just that Murphy looks as though his face were sculpted from marble, topped off by those aforementioned stunning eyes. As he showed in 28 Days Later and subsequent films such as Girl With a Pearl Earring and Intermission, he was a chameleonic performer, a character actor trapped in a leading man's bone structure. In 2005 he found himself starring in two blockbuster hits in which he played characters that couldn't be further from the well-intentioned Jim. As Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka Scarecrow, Murphy's silky smooth calmness was put to villainous use in Batman Begins. He followed that with a turn as Jackson Rippner, a mysterious stranger who traps hotel manager Lisa (Rachel McAdams) into an assassination plot in Wes Craven's Red Eye. While both films were unabashedly popcorn entertainment, each transcended its genre with stellar casting and sharp direction.

After these back-to-back successes, it seemed there was only one logical step for the newly minted star. So Murphy shaved his legs, plucked his eyebrows, and gamely jumped into the role of Patrick "Kitten" Braden, the transvestite orphan whose adventures with cabaret singing, prostitution, and the Irish Republican Army don't even begin to sum up the strange and delightful world of Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto (opening in limited release Nov. 18). Written by Jordan and Patrick McCabe, on whose 1998 novel the film is based, Pluto is a loopy journey featuring Murphy in a bravura performance as the needy heroine who spends her life looking since he first auditioned for it four years ago. Jordan couldn't get the film financed at the time, but he never forgot Murphy--largely because the actor wouldn't let him. "I did a test with Cillian and several young Irish actors to see: Was the role even playable?" says Jordan. "Cillian was not well-known at all but gave a blistering performance. Problem was, after that he would never let it go. Every time we met, he'd ask, 'When do we start shooting?'"

Murphy got his wish in 2004, when Jordan got the money and jumped right into a 10-week shoot. It was sudden, but Murphy took it in stride.

Early Stages

In person Murphy speaks softly, his voice heavy with his native accent--one that has rarely been captured on film, as he frequently adopts English or American accents for roles. He speaks in simple, sparse terms of how he came to acting.Born and raised in Cork, Ireland, Murphy grew up on a diet of American TV and was interested in movies and music. At age 20 he was playing in a band, and he saw a play at the Corcadorca Theatre Company in his hometown. "I went up and knocked on the door of the theatre and said, 'Listen, if you have any parts in any plays coming up, let me know,'" he recalls. "And the guy said, 'There's this play called Disco Pigs. Come in for an audition.' I went in and got the part, and that was it, really."He may make landing the job sound easy, but anyone who saw the 2001 film adaptation of Disco Pigs can attest it was more than luck that got Murphy cast. As the violent and unpredictable Pig, pathologically devoted to his lifelong friend Runt, Murphy is a force of nature we can't take our eyes off of. Still, he admits that at times he felt out of his league. "I was going to go back to playing in a band; I was just acting as a laugh," he says. "But it didn't transpire like that. I don't think I realized it was a career until recently. But I don't enjoy anything as much as I enjoy acting. I never got a kick out of anything as much as I get out of acting when it's going well. You build up a real hunger for it."

For the next three years he worked in theatre, learning on the job while performing in such classics as The Seagull and Much Ado About Nothing. "I think that's the best place to learn as actor," he observes. "I consider it my training ground. I was very lucky to work with a lot of great directors and great plays. I went from smaller parts onstage to bigger parts onstage, then smaller parts in movies to bigger parts in movies. It was a very organic way to do it."

He landed his first agent, Richard Cook at The Lisa Richards Agency, when Cook saw him onstage in Disco Pigs; he remains with the agent to this day. Murphy has a Los Angeles agent, Darren Statt at United Talent Agency, whom he says "saw an audition tape I did for a movie and took me on based on that--which is actually quite unusual." He also has a London representative, Lou Coulson with The Lou Coulson Agency. As Murphy began landing various film and television roles, he had to adjust to auditioning regularly. "It took me awhile to realize auditioning is a different skill than acting," he says. "They're entirely unrelated skills. Just because you're a good actor, it doesn't mean you'll be good in a room with a director. I had to learn to audition."

It was the film version of Disco Pigs that caught Boyle's eye when he was casting for 28 Days Later. Surprisingly, Murphy's newcomer status worked in his favor. "We thought that it was more appropriate for the film that it should not be a star vehicle," says Boyle. "Rather, it should be a community of people we cast as equals." Boyle also felt Murphy displayed an innocent quality that would endear Jim to the audience. "The feeling of a child who is forced to become a man and, by the end of the film, be almost primal, I thought Cillian had that," Boyle reasons. Murphy rewarded his director's trust with a searing performance, taking Jim from wide-eyed youth to fierce protector in the space of 108 minutes. "I've been lucky to have support from great people like Danny," Murphy raves. "He let me carry 28 Days Later. But, ultimately, if you don't produce in the work, you won't get hired. You're only as good as your last job."

Armed with this knowledge, Murphy was selective about his projects after the success of 28 Days Later. "I'm aware of the system and how certain doors open when a film does well," he says. "A lot more people started taking meetings with me. And people began to pronounce my name correctly, that's always been a good yardstick for me." Although most people probably know by now, the correct pronunciation is "kill-ee-un."

Being Bad

Murphy claims he would have been perfectly happy to continue doing theatre the rest of his life; indeed, when he speaks of performing onstage, it's with a low-key but palpable passion. But he is also practical. "If there's an opportunity to do a good film with a good director, you've got to take it," he muses. "You'd be foolish not to. And if a bit of momentum builds up, you have to stick with it."

He has collaborated with some of the most prestigious directors working today, from Anthony Minghella in Cold Mountain to Ken Loach in the upcoming The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Yet he insists there's no deliberate strategy to his career. "I want to do different things and keep myself interested and keep improving," he remarks. "Wherever that takes me, I don't know. There's no plan--it's all out of your control anyway. The only thing I've ever insisted upon is diversity. Every role you take, you have to be afraid that you can't do it. Otherwise, there's no point in doing it." The primary factors that draw him to projects are the script and the director. "It's got to be a good script to start with," he says. "If it's a bad director, they can make the script mediocre pretty fast. But the combination of a good director and good script--that's the ultimate. And I can't believe how lucky I've been to have both."

When it came to auditioning for Batman Begins, Murphy didn't look at it as a blockbuster franchise that would raise his salary quote--he saw it as an opportunity to play a well-crafted character and work with director Christopher Nolan. "I would do any movie with Chris Nolan," he says. "It was a good script and a great part. I had so much fun." Nolan originally brought Murphy in to read for the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman. "I saw Cillian in 28 Days Later and was struck by the extraordinary intensity of his performance," says Nolan. "We tested him for Batman, and his presence just leapt off the screen. Everyone who saw it got very excited about the idea of casting him as Scarecrow. He has a fantastic ability to project interior passions with a power that can be by turns either chilling or seductive."

As Scarecrow, Murphy proved a hero is only as interesting as his nemesis, and his cool confidence was enthralling--just listen to the way he draws out "Batman" as two words in a cruel taunt.He brought that same dangerous appeal to Red Eye, a film in which his Rippner is more or less played as the romantic leading man--until he reveals he's a stone-cold killer. "I was very careful not to come at that character as the bad guy," he explains.

"He's been chosen for his job because he has access to this charisma and approachability. For him to be revealed too quickly would be pointless." Murphy also enjoyed being the heavy, a nice respite from saving the world in 28 Days Later. "It's fun to be the bad guy," he notes. "I thought it was a great role. Just because he turned out to be bad, it didn't represent any more or less fun than playing [Jim]. It's still a great range there to convey."Murphy also wants to make it clear that playing back-to-back villains was a fluke of distribution. "I did get very frustrated with the question, 'Why are you playing the bad guys this summer?'" he says. "I guess it's an easy in. I've made 10 feature films and played two bad guys. I think anyone who's seen the rest of my work will realize that's not what I specialize in at all."

Men Are From Pluto

If Murphy had any concerns about being pigeonholed, he certainly confounded expectations as Kitten in Breakfast on Pluto. "That role was a gift," he insists. "To work with Neil, who's a living legend--he's amazing." To prepare for the role, Murphy reread the book and talked extensively with McCabe, who was frequently on-set. "The book is a masterpiece but not always conducive to the screen, and the film has to be cinematic," Murphy notes. "I used a lot of the episodes in the book that aren't in the movie as my own research." Aware that the role was "completely transformative," he also spent a lot of time getting down Kitten's gestures and movements. "It's a long process," he says. "The physical side wasn't too hard; that's just grooming, really. The clothes and hair and eyebrows--anybody can do that. It was getting the voice and the walk and the physicality." Murphy went so far as to hit London nightclubs in drag. "It's important to do that. How much of it you use or not in the end is irrelevant," he says. "It's just important to have a reference point."

While the sight of Murphy in skirts and wigs is frequently funny, his sensitive and sweet portrayal elevates the film and engages the audience in Kitten's struggles. He is boosted by a top-notch supporting cast that includes Stephen Rea as a sad-eyed suitor, his Batman co-star Liam Neeson as a priest, and his 28 Days Later co-star Brendan Gleeson as a drunken theme-park character. It's a giddy, charming work Murphy aptly describes as "an unexpected fairy-tale disco fantasy."Murphy says he can talk about Pluto "until the cows come home," a bold statement considering that he confesses to an aversion to interviews. "I don't particularly like interviews or having my picture taken," he says, somewhat apologetically. "I don't mind it as a character, just not as myself. I don't like the perceived celebrity of it. I'm not about to become a personality or go on talk shows to entertain people as me, as Cillian." He points out he has never done a talk show in his life--mention Regis and Kelly and he pauses for a moment before replying, "I don't know who those people are."Of course, with his profile on the rise, Murphy admits he has given serious thought to how to maintain a healthy career without having his private life exposed to the world. He even discussed the topic with Batman co-star Christian Bale, whom he praises as "the best Batman" and a dedicated actor. "I actually asked his advice because you don't see him in the papers," says Murphy. "He pretty much told me, 'Don't behave like a celebrity, and you won't get treated like one.' I guess if you don't go out to a lot of parties and fall down, people don't take photographs of you."

Accent on Talent

Murphy recently wrapped Sunshine, a sci-fi adventure that reunites him with director Boyle in which he is once again saving the world-this time from a dying sun. Surprisingly--considering that Boyle gave the actor his biggest break--he still had to audition for the role. "I kind of wanted to," he says with a shrug. "That's what we do; we're actors. I don't understand this thing about actors who won't read for parts. I wanted to show him I could do it. I'm playing an American, and the movies hadn't come out yet where I'm American, so I think he wanted to see me do it." Murphy notes that early in his career he encountered resistance when auditioning for American roles. "They would hear me speak and say, 'Jesus, there's no way,'" he recalls. "But once you do it well, people accept it. And after a while it becomes second nature. That's why I think actors should never be limited by their background. This is what we do: We dress up and put on voices. So people should never be afraid to cast someone because of their accent."

Murphy isn't sure what he'll do next. He mentions taking a break, having worked steadily for the last few years. He'd also love to get back to theatre and tackle some of the great roles. Point out that a website erroneously reported that he has played Hamlet and he seems wistful. "No, I wish. I'd love to," he says. "I hope they said I did a good job." He also

acknowledges the differences between film and the stage. "Obviously, it's different vocally. If you're playing to an auditorium of 1,100 people, you've got to magnify the performance," he says. "For me, film acting is when you can see what the actor's thinking. Theatre acting, you've got to get up to the gods and let them know what's going on." Murphy doesn't mind returning to small theatres-he might even prefer it. "Disco Pigs was always in tiny little sweatboxes," he notes. "As the play got more popular and moved to bigger houses, I think it lost some of its allure. I remember doing Disco Pigs in its first incarnation and turning and getting sweat all over the front row. It was so visceral and dirty and sweaty. Then, when you start playing to bigger auditoriums, it's not as sexy."

If he has one driving goal in his film career, it's to participate in a project that leaves a lasting impression. "Ultimately what I'd like to do is leave behind a movie that's a piece of art," he says. "One movie out of however many I make that influences or has an impact or someone holds up in the future as a piece of art. That's the ultimate goal."