AZProgressive
AZProgressive's JournalNew 'Don't Look Up' Images Show Meryl Streep as a Trump-Like President of the United States
A new batch of Don’t Look Up images give us a better look at Meryl Streep as the President of the United States and the star-studded cast of Netflix’s dark comedy about the end of the world. While Streep’s clearly Trump-inspired President was already introduced in the film’s first teaser, EW's new exclusive images also give the first look at Ron Perlman, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, revealing more details about their characters.
The new set of images shows Streep playing what seems to be a populist President, as she’s seen in public events waving and smiling and donning a hat with a slogan on it. A few photos also feature Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two low-level astronomers who find out a massive comet is coming towards Earth, which could mean the end of humanity as we know it. Although DiCaprio’s and Lawrence’s scientists try to warn the world about the cataclysm to come, they have to navigate the complex world of politics, where re-election is more important than the truth. Also, there will be no shortage of unbelievers that claim the scientific discovery is just a hoax.
Blanchett and Perry play cable news channel hosts in the new images, while Perlman is shown in full astronaut uniform. While the pictures also show many other cast members, their roles in the upcoming film are still unclear. The new images give a first look at Timothée Chalamet, Scott Mescudi (a.k.a. Kid Cudi), Ariana Grande, Rob Morgan, Himesh Patel, Tomer Sisley, and Melanie Lynskey. Jonah Hill, who was shown in the first teaser and plays the president's son, also comes back in a picture taken from a meeting on the White House.
Directed by Adam McKay from a screenplay he wrote based on a story by David Sirota, Don’t Look Up cast also includes Matthew Perry, Chris Evans, Mark Rylance, and Michael Chiklis. McKay produces Don’t Look Up, which was first planned as a climate change allegory but evolved to reflect the narrative disputes during the pandemic. According to McKay: “We can’t even talk to each other anymore. We can’t even agree. So it’s about climate change, but at its root it’s about what has the internet, what have cellphones, what has the modern world done to the way we communicate?”
https://collider.com/dont-look-up-images-leonardo-dicaprio-timothee-chalamet-meryl-streep/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
What the Critical Race Theory Panic Was Really About (and the Data to Prove It)
When, this past spring, a succession of stories about communities pushing back, angrily, against the supposed teaching of critical race theory in their school districts began to overtake my social media feeds, I had a hunch that it was a direct result of white fear. But a recent data analysis from NBC News confirms it.
Reporters found that the districts hosting some of the most combative debates over diversity and inclusion initiatives—including just teaching about racism—have seen a steady increase in students of color attending their schools. In Gwinnett County, Georgia, where parents have squared off over critical race theory, there has been a 52.4 percent increase in students of color since 1994. And in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the rights of transgender students and teaching racism have become ugly, loud battleground issues, there has been a 29.5 percent increase in that span of time.
If you’ve been following how whiteness has evolved since the 2016 election, this isn’t surprising. But it is nice to have the numbers to back it up. It reminded one of my colleagues of a similar, equally unsurprising yet very real finding following the Capitol riot. Political scientist Robert Pape, after going through polling and demographic data, discovered that most people who participated in the riots came to D.C. from places where residents were terrified of being replaced by people of color and immigrants. More specifically, as the New York Times put it, “counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists.”
“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Pape told the New York Times. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/09/critical-race-theory-nbc-news-school-districts-diversity-data.html
POLITICS Bernie Sanders Touts 'Progress' On Legalizing Marijuana And Ending The Drug War
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) says Congress is “making progress” toward ending the drug war and federally legalizing marijuana, and it helps that more states are enacting the reform in the meantime.
At a town hall event focused on Democrats’ large-scale budget plan last week, a voter said he was going to ask Sanders the same question he posed two years ago about when lawmakers are “going to end the racist, idiotic drug war.” The Senate Budget Committee chairman responded that he’s “happy to give you a better answer than I gave it two years ago in the sense that I think we’re making progress.”
“My own view is that the so-called war on drugs has been an abysmal failure. It has destroyed god knows how many lives, disproportionately African American and Latino,” Sanders, a longstanding champion of marijuana reform, said at the Iowa event. “What you are now seeing is a radical change of consciousness with regard to that war. You are seeing state after state after state legalizing marijuana.”
“I would legalize marijuana nationally. I am supportive of that,” he added. “But we are making some progress in state after state.”
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/bernie-sanders-touts-progress-on-legalizing-marijuana-and-ending-the-drug-war/
"Crushingly Cruel"
A shocking new speech has plunged Mormons into another furious battle over gay rights and the church’s future.
BY HALEY SWENSON
On Aug. 23, Jeffrey R. Holland, Brigham Young University’s former president and a senior apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, gave an inflammatory speech to BYU faculty and staff. In it, he urged faculty to take up metaphorical muskets to defend the faith. He called on them to be both builders of knowledge and defenders of the institution—the church—that determines whether the university exists and the faculty get funding to do their jobs, a fact he reminded them of multiple times in the speech. His words were unmistakably a call to arms: Holland used the word “fire” 10 times, “musket” eight times, and made multiple references to “friendly fire,” “wounds,” and “scarring.” In particular, he called for “more musket fire” from BYU’s faculty to defend Mormonism’s official position on the inferiority and social dangers of same-sex relationships and marriages.
Though the speech was directed at the faculty of BYU, it has shocked Mormons and ex-Mormons far beyond the university in its aggressive tone toward the LGBT community. Just two years ago, the church received much public praise for rescinding a 2015 policy, controversial among Mormons at the time, that declared the minor children of gay people could not be baptized into or join the church as members—at least not until they were 18 years old, and only then if they would denounce their parents’ marriage and condemn their sexuality. Given how contentious the question of gay rights has been among Mormons since the church threw its whole weight behind California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 in 2008, the post-2019 period has been one of welcome relative quiet from the church. That is, until Monday.
I’ve spent my whole life dodging Mormon “bullets” aimed toward non-traditional families. I have Mormon pioneer blood in every one of my eight great grandparents’ lines on my family tree. I grew up in a mostly inactive but still technically Mormon family (my parents and I had all been blessed and baptized into the Mormon church as kids, but we attended services only sporadically). Now, after 15 years living out of state, I’ve recently given Utah another chance. I came back in 2020, with my wife in tow, and we’ve settled here with the intention of someday having our own kids. I took the relatively positive, pro-LGBT developments of the past few years as encouraging signs we were making the right decision. In the 18 months since we moved here from Washington, D.C., Holland’s speech was the first time I truly worried that my future kids might attend public school with peers who would be taught about the evils of being gay, week in and week out at church. Just like I did.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/09/mormon-lds-church-gay-rights-controversy-byu-speech.html
Biden urges Congress to pass his infrastructure proposals
Majority of US Voters Favor $3.5 Trillion Build Back Better Bill: Poll
Underscoring what critics call the out-of-touch nature of Republican and right-wing Democrats' opposition to the Build Back Better bill supported by the Biden administration and progressive U.S. lawmakers, new polling published Wednesday confirmed that a majority of likely American voters favor the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.
The Invest in America and Data for Progress survey (pdf) of 1,201 likely U.S. voters, conducted from August 27 to August 30, found that 61% of all respondents supported the $3.5 trillion spending proposal. Among Democratic voters, support for the measure soared to 83%, while 58% of Indpendent and third-party voters, and 40% of Republicans, backed the bill.
Some of the bill's individual provisions saw even higher support among survey respondents, including long-term care (80%), power grid modernization (74%), and updating K-12 schools (71%). Even the bill's more controversial components enjoyed majority support, including a pathway to citizenship for migrants (61%) and free community college (59%).
(Snip)
While Republicans and right-wing Democrats including Sens. Joe Manchin (W-Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) have balked at the bill's $3.5 trillion price tag, the survey found that a majority of all queried voters do not want to cut provisions from the proposed budget. For example, 75% want long-term care to remain in the package, while 69% and 64% respectively say that power grid modernization and updating K-12 schools should not be removed.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/09/01/majority-us-voters-favor-35-trillion-build-back-better-bill-poll?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1630541576
Ilhan Omar holds an in-person town hall (The Hill)
Top Human Rights Tweets Of The Week
https://twitter.com/KenRoth/status/1430821107288977411https://twitter.com/msaez_torres/status/1429443450454294532
https://twitter.com/pagossman/status/1429914595272036361
https://twitter.com/KenRoth/status/1430197423188676608
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/29/top-human-rights-tweets-week#
Sanders, Tlaib hold presser on climate justice FULL (The Hill)
58 Years After Historic Rally, Thousands March on Washington for Voting Rights, DC Statehood
A summer marked by rallies, motorcades, and pressure campaigns targeting lawmakers standing in the way of voting rights legislation culminated on Saturday in the 2021 March on Washington, where thousands demanded that Congress pass far-reaching measures to protect and expand the right to vote.Demonstrators traveled from across the country to mark the 58th anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
As groups including the Poor People's Campaign, Stand Up America, and Public Citizen have for months, thousands of protesters called on Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and to eliminate the legislative filibuster to do so if necessary.
(Snip)
The For the People Act would grant statehood to Washington, D.C.; ban partisan gerrymandering; implement automatic voter registration for federal elections, and take other major steps to expand voting rights.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/08/28/58-years-after-historic-rally-thousands-march-washington-voting-rights-dc-statehood?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1630180673
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