July 3, 2020

Black Violin - Lift Every Voice

July 2, 2020

George Takei's Great Tweet

George Takei
@GeorgeTakei

Dear Donald,

There are now 11 million Asian Americans eligible to vote in November. We will be the margin of difference in your defeat in several battleground states.

So keep up with the “Kung Flu.” Your words aren’t nearly as powerful as our votes.

July 2, 2020

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/

July 2, 2020

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/

July 1, 2020

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/

July 1, 2020

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/

June 30, 2020

Carl Bernstein: Trump Was 'Delusional' And Outmatched In Calls With Putin And Erdogan

(HuffPost) One source described the nature of the calls between Trump and Putin as sounding like “two guys in a steam bath.”

President Donald Trump was so unprepared for calls with the leaders of Russia and Turkey that he regularly threatened U.S. national security while boasting about his achievements, CNN’s Carl Bernstein reported Monday.

Over hundreds of calls cited by anonymous sources, Bernstein reports, Trump almost never read briefing material prepared by intelligence agencies and would often take unplanned calls from foreign leaders, flabbergasting top national security advisers.

Two unnamed sources told Bernstein the regularity of the calls and Trump’s behavior led them to believe the president was “delusional” and thought he could charm or bully other leaders into doing what he wanted. At times, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Trump at least twice a week, and there were standing orders to put the calls straight through to Trump. Sources said Trump was almost never prepared and was vulnerable to being taken advantage of.

In regular calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump “mostly talked about himself,” Bernstein reported, while “courting Putin’s admiration and approval.”

“[Trump] gives away the advantage that was hard won in the Cold War,” one official told CNN. “He’s given Russia a lifeline ― because there is no doubt that they’re a declining power. ... He’s playing with something he doesn’t understand and he’s giving them power that they would use [aggressively].”

One source described the nature of the calls between Trump and Putin as sounding like “two guys in a steam bath.”

(Read More) https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-putin-erdogan-cnn-carl-bernstein_n_5efa9d24c5b612083c51d964

June 30, 2020

Supreme Court Decision 5-4 will allow govt funds to go to religious schools

https://twitter.com/search?q=supreme+court+decision&ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Esearch


NPR Politics
@nprpolitics
#BREAKING: In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Montana’s exclusion of religious schools from a state scholarship program funded by tax credits violates the U.S. Constitution.

June 30, 2020

So Bolton briefed trump March 2019 about bounty and in Sept 2019 he invited Taliban to Camp David?

Ok, so Putin paid the Taliban to kill our soldiers and Trump wanted to invite the very people doing the killing to Camp David on the anniversary of our September 11 Attacks??? My head is spinning.

June 30, 2020

Team Trump wants to kill off Stars and Stripes. Congress isn't likely to let them

*sure, why not - just cancel the soldier's newspaper and maybe they'll never learn you looked away as putin put bounties out on their heads....

(Daily Kos) Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper may or may not have been feeling some public heat lately from his sycophantic backing of Trump's every norm-breaking move, whether it be Trump reaching down to protect war crimes or Trump tear gassing a protest to go for nice little walkies, but none of it is evident in his behavior. Among Esper's other newly held beliefs: The administration is right to demand the total budgetary zeroing out of Stars and Stripes, the armed forces' own newspaper.

The Washington Post notes Esper's support in a piece describing congressional skepticism for the proposal, with Esper claiming that the military should be spending the $15 million per year on "higher-priority issues." The Defense Department budget is $700 billion per year, though, so it ain't that.

The White House proposal to drop federal support for Stars and Stripes to 0%, which would effectively slash the paper's total budget by half, is transparently part of the wider Republican fascist move to eliminate sources of skeptical journalism. In the case of a newspaper devoted to issues faced by troops throughout the world, it means zeroing out the budget; in the case of Voice of America (VoA), the government broadcast effort aimed at providing neutral and accurate news overseas, it has meant installing far-right toadies while stripping authority from the VoA journalism team. We saw it in Vice President Mike Pence's early order for government health experts to route pandemic news through his office, and in the relentless Republican repetition of the truly insane Trump insistence that all news personally embarrassing to him is actually "fake."

Nobody is proposing the elimination of the military's embedded journalism team because they need that $15 million for new cases of fighter jet wax. It's just another move to kill off an outlet that gets too many embarrassing stories, and has the anti-fascist audacity to write them down.

The Post also notes that Congress isn't likely to go along with this move, just as they have been skeptical of every other Team Trump effort to zero out you-name-it in budgets even when Republicans, rather than Democrats, were in charge. But that doesn't mean we should ignore Team Trump's attempt to do it. There's nothing Trump's underlings have touched that they haven't tried to screw up; it is not governance, but orchestrated sabotage.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/6/28/1955636/-Team-Trump-wants-to-kill-off-Stars-and-Stripes-Congress-isn-t-likely-to-let-them