Black Violin - Lift Every Voice

George Takei's Great Tweet

I got an awesome postcard today!

It is red white & blue printed with the words We're all in this together, be a voter! on the out side and on the inside is a hand written note encouraging me to vote by mail and very specific info regarding my county. I was wondering who Tony the Democrat was and how I got so lucky to get a postcard from him, so I googled him and this is what I found...

https://newfacesofdemocracy.org/spotlight-tony-the-democrat/

U.K. Prime Minister Offers 3 Million Hong Kong Residents Path to British Citizenship

(Time Magazine) U.K Prime Minister Boris Johnson has offered three million Hong Kong residents the chance to live and work in the U.K., following China’s imposition of new security laws on the region.

Johnson told Parliament on July 1 that the enactment of the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” by Hong Kong authorities was a “clear and serious breach” of the 1985 Sino-British joint declaration. The legally binding international agreement outlined how certain freedoms would remain protected for 50 years after China gained sovereignty in 1997.

The law, which has been condemned by the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States as undermining freedoms that China promised Hong Kong, gives Beijing vast powers to crack down on various political crimes, including subversion, separatism and collusion with foreign elements, which could be punishable with life imprisonment.

In just the first day following the law’s enactment, Hong Kong police fired water cannon and tear gas at demonstrators, and made hundreds of arrests, as people took the streets to hold an annual march marking the anniversary of the territory’s 1997 handover from the U.K. to China.

“We made clear that if China continued down this path we would introduce a new route for those with British National Overseas status to enter the U.K., granting them limited leave to remain with the ability to live and work in the U.K. and thereafter to apply for citizenship,” Johnson said. “And that is precisely what we will do now.”
Read More: https://time.com/5862191/uk-citizenship-hong-kong-china-law/

Nearly 600,000 people have voted for candidates who support QAnon

(Washington Post) The overlap of Q supporters with Trump’s base of support is not a coincidence.

snip

Q, also called QAnon, is a sprawling and evolving conspiracy theory centered on the idea that President Trump’s secret mission in the White House is to combat a murky, nefarious web of sex predators woven throughout the political world and celebrity culture. It spirals out into various side theories, for example that John F. Kennedy Jr. wasn’t killed in a plane crash but instead is still living in the United States. Its sacred texts come in the form of anonymous posts from a figure who self-identifies as Q.

snip

Media Matters has documented 59 congressional and Senate candidates who have, at some point, demonstrated some support of the Q movement. Sixteen of the 59 did little more than drop a Q hashtag onto a social media post. Meaning that most, 46 of them, engaged with Q supporters to a greater degree, including promoting the movement or wearing Q-branded clothing. (The Trump campaign, recognizing the problem of being too closely associated with the movement, has in the past asked that attendees at its political rallies cover up pro-Q shirts, according to Q supporters I’ve spoken with.)

The thing that’s remarkable about these Q-adjacent candidates (nearly all of whom are Republican) is that many of them have gone on to win. A Post review of the outcomes of the races in which those 59 candidates have actually been on the ballot and received votes show that 11 of 28 candidates either won their primaries, advanced to a runoff or will be on the ballot in November.

In total, candidates who’ve shown support for QAnon have received more than 580,000 votes, as of this writing, including more than 425,000 votes that have gone to Republicans who were more actively engaged in the Q movement than simply using a Q hashtag on a tweet. This isn’t a sign that those voters were all demonstrating support for Q. It is a sign, though, that Q was not seen disqualifying for Republican primary voters.

(Read More)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/01/nearly-600000-people-have-voted-candidates-who-support-qanon/

A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap

(The Atlantic) What if a single, cheap, easy-to-administer, and race-neutral policy could help close the country’s chasmic racial wealth gap in less than a generation?

Reader, it exists. It is called a baby-bond program. For something like $80 billion a year—roughly 2 percent of the annual federal budget, less than a tenth of the annual cost of Social Security—the United States could not only end its most pernicious forms of poverty, reduce wealth inequality, improve social mobility, foster self-sufficiency among poor families, and increase family net worth en masse, but also put black and white families on more equal footing.

There is a strong moral case for doing that, and a strong economic case, too. The average white family is 10 times wealthier than the average black family. Black families with kids have a single penny in wealth for every dollar that white families with kids have. And white high-school dropouts have a higher net worth, on average, than black college graduates. Black individuals cannot close this gap on their own. Washington created the wealth gap. Washington needs to fix it.

snip

A little-known but elegant solution is waiting for implementation, a policy suggested by Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice and rewritten for the modern era by Darrick Hamilton, who leads the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, and Sandy Darity, the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Baby bonds are simple. The government would create investment accounts for infants, giving babies born to poor families large seed grants and babies born to rich families small ones. The money would grow, and kids would gain access to it when they reached adulthood, to use for school, a down payment, or a start-up. (Read More)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/close-racial-wealth-gap-baby-bonds/613525/