#affiliated with their government and were judged entirely by their nationality

[salvadorbonaparte]

Is Mona Baker's anti-semitism in reference to her support of palestine or is there something I'm missing

Have you seen her twitter account lately lmao

[terraxtant]

Isabella Costa / Magma

Character Form

OVERVIEW 

FULL NAME : Isabella Costa

NICKNAME : Bella, Belle

TITLE/ ALIAS : Magma

BIRTHDATE : 2003

NATIONALITY : Brazilian

AFFILIATION : X-Men

BASE OF OPERATIONS : L-Mansion

BODY : tall, slender, evey skinny

APPEARANCE

HAIR : straight, dark brown, almost blackish hair, down to her waist

EYES : honey-brown

PERSONALITY

UNUSUAL FEATURES : When using her powers, Bella's body is transformed into a "Magma state," where her body and its organic matter are composed of magma, and her hair is replaced by strands of fire. In this form, she is immune to any fluctuations with temperature and pressure, can heal herself at a significantly accelerated rate, and can also raise the temperature of any given space she occupies to dangerous levels.

FACECLAIM : Zendaya

Bella is extremely shy and quiet by nature. She is an introvert at heart and dislikes attention, and hates making any kind of decisions at all. But having said that, she is also one of the most selfless and kind people you will come across.

Idealistic and optimistic, she truly believes and tries to see the goodness in people and refuses to gossip and judge anyone. Because of this, Bella is often regarded to be trustworthy and usually has a very large circle of friends. Bella is also extremely loyal and does not take people's trust lightly - another reason for her popularity.

However, Bella, if you were to go ask Bella to describe herself, it would be exceedingly negative. Her humbleness sometimes borders on self- deprecation as it's rooted in insecurities. Over the years, she has become more confident and outspoken, but she still tends to be exceedingly critical of herself.

POWERS AND ABILITIES

Geokinesis: Bella can psionically control the movement of tectonic plates within the Earth's crust. This ability is of relatively short range, probably no more than a radius of a city, but within this area, she can create both small and large earthquakes.

Geo-thermokinesis: She can cause magma, molten rock from deep within the earth, to rise and break through the surface, forming miniature volcanoes. She can also turn nearby rock molten and telekinetically project fiery blasts of magma at targets. Bella's power to create small or large earthquakes and volcanic eruptions is very much linked to her emotions.

Pyrokinesis: Bella can create flames and project blasts of heat that do not contain any molten rock. These flames and projections are similar in nature to Alex's optic blasts.

Regenerative healing factor : can heal herself at an accelerated rate, especially in her Magma form

HISTORY

Bella was born to David and Gabriella Costa in a small Brazilian village located on the foothills of Pico de Capugi, an extinct volcano. Bella, for the most part, enjoyed a happy childhood filled with laughter, family and friends.

The village she was brought up in revered mutants and celebrated their abilities. Because of this, growing up around mutants was incredibly normal to Bella.

At the age of 15, Bella was offered a scholarship for a summer program at NYU at no cost - and while she was reluctant to attend, her parents pushed her to do so. New York, however, was overwhelming for Bella for various reasons - she had never left her village in her entire life, and navigating a city as large as New York proved to be difficult. She was not used to the culture or the language. But the biggest adjustment was the anti-mutant stigma - she had grown up in an environment where mutants and their powers were celebrated, so it proved difficult for her to understand why it wasn't the same in New York.

Bella noticed that the longer she remained in New York, the more depressed she got. And that affected her control over her abilities greatly. Of course, the increasing tectonic activity in New York attracted the attention of government agencies as well as the surviving X-Men who invited her to join them at L-Mannor.

Bella declined their offers, wanting to return to her family in Brazil. Unfortunately for Bella, her parents refused to accept her back - they cited increasing anti-mutant sentiments and raids and wished for her to remain in a peaceful and safe space. Therefore, Bella reluctantly accepted the X-Men's proposal to join them in Canada.

In many ways, the L-Mannor felt like home to Bella - mutants were free to be themselves, and no one hid their abilities. In fact, they were proud of them. Even so, Bella struggled with not being close to her parents and family, and that greatly affected her control over her abilities as well. Often erratic and unpredictable, Bella was assigned Alex Mastronadi as a mentor to help her regain control.

When Bella met Alex, he was still incredibly depressed and just annoyed at the world. Based on whispers from the other X-Men, Bella gathered that he had lost his girlfriend somehow in an invasion along with many other students. Naturally, Alex was in no position to mentor anyone, but even so, he took it upon himself to mentor Bella.

Alex, as a mentor, was probably one of the best things that could have happened to Bella. Previously, it was very difficult for her to explain her abilities in words, but Alex seemingly understood them, often times better than she did. She found that his abilities were also very similar to her own, and because of that, he was able to give her constructive advice on how to control her powers and Abilities.

Over the years, Bella's control over her abilities improved, making her a valuable member of the X-Men. And even though she doesn't need a mentor now, she still remains incredibly close to Alex, regarding him as her older brother in many ways.

RELATIONSHIPS

MATERNAL FAMILY

Mother - Gabriella Costa

Bella was very close to her mother, being the only daughter in the Costa family born that generation. In many ways, she inherited her mother's features and temperament. Moreover, she also inherited her mutant abilities from her mother. Leaving her parents was probably the most difficult for Bella, especially because she was unable to contact them as frequently as she would have liked at L-Mannor.

Based on her mother's stores, Bella remembers her mother's line being renowned for energy manupilation, and Pyrokinesis - several of her cousins, uncles, and aunts. also displayed similar abilities.

Alexander Mastronadi

Bella is closest to Alex at the L-Mannor. She was assigned to be mentored by him, given the similarity in nature of their abilities. When they were first introduced, Rosaria's loss was still fresh for Alex. Because of that, Alex was brooding, depressed, and just annoyed at the world.

However, training and mentoring Bella gave him something to focus on other than Roasaria, and he channeled the entirety of his energy towards this. Of course, for Bella, this meant years of seriously intense training. But it paid off as Bella has mastered control over her abilities and is significantly more confident today as well.

Bella was also able to help Alex heal a little, helping him process his emotions and thoughts and helping him grieve. This really brought both of them closer - today, Bella sees Alex as her older brother.

PATERNAL FAMILY

Father - David Costa

Bella is equally close to her father. As his only daughter, David doted on Bella, and Bella rarely ever left his side.

Bella inherited her father's passion for gardening and his mutant abilities of geokinesis.

Her father's family is significantly larger as compared to her mother's. Bella grew up with most of her cousins on both sides of the family in the same village and is exceedingly close to her father's side as well.

FRIENDS

Rosaria Huntington

So far, Bella has never met Rosaria in person, although she's heard plenty about Rosaria from Alex and other X-Men members who knew her. At first, Bella walked on eggshells around Alex (but to be honest, so did everyone) anytime Rosaria was mentioned. Over time, Alex was more forthcoming about Rosaria with Bella, often telling her small stories here and there about her.

Over the years, although Bella has never met Rosaria in person, it does feel like she has known her all her life. Bella is unsure of Rosaria's status, but having become so close to Alex, she truly does believe that if he feels so strongly about something, there has to be a reason for it. All she hopes for is that the Rosaria he knew is the Rosaria somewhere out there.

Francesca Moreno

Bella actually really likes Francesca. She finds Francesca to be unintentionally funny and finds her to be really kind and generous under her superficial and vain exterior and loves spending time with her.

ROMANCE

James "Jimmy" Huntington

TRIVIA

second cousin to Alex on her mother's side but does not know of it yet.

She hates all forms of transport that are not via ground - she gets seasick and gets sick while flying as well. She loves road trips and train rides though

She loves Brazil and misses her village terribly and often gets very homesick

She hates the winter and rain and finds it to be gloomy

She loves gardening and is extremely passionate about organic farming - had she not been in the X-Men, she had dreamed of opening a flower shop or running a farm stand at her village.

She is very passionate about science and finds it to be very interesting.

[my-state-mls]

Engineering Segregation Through Real Estate

The court ruled in March that a judge within the Northern District of Illinois allowed an action for class arbitration to move towards the National Association of Realtors, the trade association that is the most significant lobbying expenditure within the US.

The group, together with seven sizeable real estate corporations that are the partners of Moehrl and Co., could receive between $13 billion and 40 billion dollars in damage. (The suit is one of two similar class-action suits pending before the legal system.) This case is about how NAR makes use of local board members in control of 97 percent of the multiple listing system to enforce guidelines regarding the set commissions in the manner that, as the suit mentions, US homebuyers and sellers have commission rates that are near twice the rates of peers in other countries.

The legal hazard that the NAR has to face could transform the way US real estate is purchased and sold. Numerous believe this group's chances of winning on the court are meager. What is truly ironic about this suit is that possible beneficiaries will not be the group most affected by the actions of the NAR; however, homeowners of white ethnicity who are a segment who have historically enjoyed the benefits of the discriminated and unjust housing market that the group of trade associations helped to establish.

The NAR was, at the time, The National Association of Real Estate Boards has helped to encourage homeownership as the cornerstone in living the American Dream through its lobbying activities and the establishment of housing experts with the Federal government in the 1920s until the 40s. It also actively undermined Black homeownership. From its role in the dissemination of exclusionary zoning laws as a result of covenants on racial discrimination in zoning and its involvement in the promotion of the redlining process and steering race as essential elements of the emerging real estate industry in the first half of 20th century until its lobbying efforts later against the 1967 Fair Housing Act, organized real estate may be the most accountable party in the ongoing racial discrimination and housing gaps that mark the American residential environment.

It's one of the conclusions we came to from our experience with the Redress Movement. This nonprofit was founded on the interest generated by the 2017 publication The Color of Law. We support multiracial organizing and immediate action from the bottom upward to end racial inequality. One of these initiatives is the study: Through our research, we've discovered the vast impact of the NAR and its affiliates on the local history of segregation, in addition to the national methods of segregation that the federal government endorses.

In Milwaukee, for example, we found realty board members advocating for the creation of an entirely Black district in the 1920s, well after the Supreme Court outlawed the practice of racial zoning back at the time of 1917. (Cities such as Atlanta, New Orleans and Winston-Salem attempted to adopt laws on racial discrimination in the 1930s.)

In Charlotte, North Carolina, the real estate board found several ways to earn money from the city's urban renewal plan, which wiped out the city's most significant Black area, Brooklyn, in the early 1960s. Certain received federal aid to help create privately owned affordable housing specifically for Black residents in place of housing in public, and some agents earned "finder's fees" for relocating residents into these and other privately owned properties and commissions that were from the authorities to dispose of the land that was recently rejuvenated.

In Denver, Our colleague Addison Quin Petti from the Denver Public Library observed that the majority of the restrictive racial covenants that were registered in 1931 came from an official on the real estate board of the city, which was also responsible for encouraging homeownership in the city in the 1920s and 1910s in which both Bombings and zoning for racial reasons of Black houses were used to encircle the city's Black inhabitants to the Five Points neighborhood. One of the factors that created Five Points, the new center of Denver's Black community, as we observed, was the eradication of a Black neighborhood located in Lower Downtown during the 1910s, which was a scheme formulated by a group comprised of real estate agents who refer their group in the 1910s as "The Cronies" and advanced by Mayor Robert Speer (who worked in real estate before entering politics).

The list continues. If you research the background of why your community is like it does, odds are that your local real estate board played some involvement in the process. The segregation didn't just flow downwards from federal policies such as redlining. It resulted from the work of real estate experts in the local area who created segregation from the bottom. The industry's members assisted in creating maps of neighborhood-level mortgage risks that federal officials utilized for redlining and disseminating restrictions on covenants, which were crucial to the underwriting requirements that the Federal Housing Administration set. Additionally, they were on city-level zoning and urban renewal commissions, which facilitated modern-day segregation.

In 2020, for the first time in the NAR's long history, the NAR publicly apologized for this part of its past. "Because of our past mistakes, the real estate industry has a special role to play in the fight for fair housing," stated the former president of the NAR, Charlie Oppler. The NAR also introduced an initiative to promote fair housing in the year 2000 and is now required to complete two or three hours of training in fair housing each year in its member. (As an observer has humorously stated, it takes nearly nine years more education to become a barber or hairdresser in Colorado than it takes to sell houses through a realtor.)

Despite these efforts to compensate some compensation, the NAR persists in perpetuating inequality through its member's ways of life apology and declarations of solidarity are not the same as a change in the system in the face of clearly systemic issues. It is time to shift into the process of redress.

Redress, like segregation, can shift from the base upwards. In Washington, real estate professionals from local communities have testified in support of a recently approved law that will make use of the new fees for documents to offer an annual amount of $100 million for down payment aid for those who are denied homeownership due to racially restrictive covenants that were previously present within the state. For instance, in Los Angeles, an extensive range of citizens supported a referendum to introduce an additional tax on affordable housing and assistance with housing and tenants sold at or above five million dollars. Just by dropping any existing arguments against the statute and protesting against individuals who attempt to evade the law, the organized real estate industry in California may play a significant role in the securing of the 600 million to $1.1 billion that this measure is expected to bring in annually -- money that will significantly benefit families of people of color who are disproportionately affected through previous discrimination.

On a national scale, Imagine if the NAR only devoted half the greater than $80 million they spent on the federal lobbying effort from 2022 onwards to promoting universal housing vouchers, extending the availability of affordable housing as well as offering the federal government down payment assistance to first-time buyers and the people that are impacted by segregation.

Based on our research our calculations, real estate professionals were able to reap at most 10 billion dollars over last year due to commissions on the exaggerated valuations of houses that were bought in white areas, and the top bound of this figure surpassed the total annual budget for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

No matter if the plaintiffs succeed in these significant pending cases before the courts, it is not enough to let the NAR free of responsibility for what has been and will continue to be the most prevalent and fatal forms of misconduct. It is a matter that deserves a unique type of group action, namely racial reparation and the right to redress.

[gemsofgreece]

10 Greatest archaeological discoveries in Greece the previous decade (2010 - 2019)

*You can see original Greek article by Pengy Riga here. This is a summary of what I read there translated in English and closer to my personal tone. 

10. Possibly the oldest Homo sapiens skull in Europe (2019).

The skull was found in the caves “Apedema” in Mani and it was estimated to be 210.000 years old, five times older than any other Homo sapiens skull found in Europe. According to another research the skull comes from a transitive phase between Neaderthals and Homo erectus. This discovery invites the reexamination of the time the first men left Africa and spread to Europe and Asia as it might have happened way before we thought. 

9. Ancient wooden artifacts (2011, 2013, 2014).

These include a wooden statue of a woman found in the Temple of Artemis in Brauron (5th Century BCE), the coffin of a young person from the Archaic Era (610 - 480 BCE), a small statue of Hermes and more than 550 other wooden artifacts and objects from the Hellenistic Era (150 - 86 BCE) in Piraeus. What is so important about all these findings is that they are made of wood, which naturally decomposes easily and quickly, so wooden archeological findings are very rare. 

8. Neikó, the possessed lady of Síkinos (2018).

In the remote island of Sikinos there is an impressive mausoleum of the late antiquity. It was turned into a church during the Byzantine Era and remained a functional church till recently, when it closed for the public because it needed extensive restorations. During the restoration project, archaeologists found for the first time the unlooted tomb of a high-class woman, to whom this mausoleum was apparently dedicated. The woman was buried with all her dearest and most precious belongings but the tomb was so well hidden that it escaped all three known invasions throughout the centuries and was found accidentally when a wall collapsed in 2018. The tomb was not in the regular crypts of the mausoleum but hidden in a blind spot between two walls within the building. Her tomb was also sealed tightly, her skeleton was found in an unusual position and sulphur and tar were placed on her chest. It seems that she was believed to be possessed so they had taken precautions to ensure she wouldn’t rise after death. Nevertheless, she was loved by her family, judging from the beauty of her Mausoleum as well as the memorial scripts found in the monument. Her name was Neikó.

7. Ceramic plaque with verses from Homer´s Odyssey (2018)

The plaque was found in Ancient Olympia and has 13 verses from the Odyssey. It is estimated to originate from the Roman Era, before the 3rd Century AD. It might be the oldest Homeric text of that length found in the Greek territory  and the only one carved into pottery. It was included in “Archaeology” magazine’s list of the 10 most important discoveries for 2018.

6. Tomb of Casta in Amphipolis (2014)

Easily the discovery that drew the most attention worldwide and a neverending archaeological and political thriller to this day. This is the largest burial monument ever found in Greece, in east Macedonia. It has a perimeter of 500 meters, four underground rooms, sphinxes in the entrance, two big Caryatids that would block the intruder from entering the last room with their arms, a beautiful large mosaic that depicts Hades kidnapping Persephone and finally four skeletons, belonging to two men, one old woman and a child. The excavation drew so much attention that it was abused for political reasons and it basically happened livestream, as the entire nation would watch the progress in the news every day. This inflamed the war between the two leading political parties, it messed up the excavating process itself and it caused unprecedented animosity amongst archeaologists and historians. The greatest reason for the fights was the initial disagreement for the dating of the monument as well as the identity of the dead found in it. Depending on their political affiliations, half the politicians and scientists would jump to wondrous conclusions without evidence while the other half would downgrade the importance of this discovery beyond belief. When the government changed, the Tomb of Casta was inexplicably and mysteriously abandoned. Only the local people kept protesting and pushing the authorities to continue the excavations. Since then, the leading party has changed again and the new government promises to continue the work as quickly and efficiently as possible so that the monument will open to the public until 2022. The scientific community has at least agreed that the tomb dates back to the late 4th - early 3rd Century BCE. There are many extremely optimistic estimations about the identity of the dead and equally many counter-arguments.  Hopefully, we’ll eventually get some objective answers as the excavations continue. It’s been realised that excavations should continue in all the area as it is suspected that the Tomb of Casta is not the only monument waiting to be unearthed there. 

5. Daskalió of Keros (1963 - 2018)

Daskalió is a settlement on the westmost cape of Keros island. Multiple excavations have taken place there from 1963 to this day by the University of Cambridge and the British School of Athens. The excavations have revealed a prehistoric shrine and settlement, densely and skillfully built. The shrine and the artifacts found in the excavations date to the 3rd millenium BCE, which makes Daskalió according to Cambridge professor Colin Renfrew the oldest known coastal shrine in the world. The findings suggest this was the work of an expert architect and the infrastructure on the location was based on a well planned project. Furthermore, there are indications that Daskalió was an important center of metallurgy. However, they imported the metals they used from other islands which also suggests nautical expertise. 

4. The eternal couple of Dirós (2015)

The skeletons of two young adults, a man and a woman, were found in an embrace in a hill in Dirós. Double burials with the dead embracing are extremely rare and this one is one of the most ancient found, if not the oldest, dating back to 6000 - 3800 BC. 

3. The Underground of Thessaloniki (1986 2013 till forever)

If Amphipolis is a political thriller, then the underground of Thessaloniki is the national comedy. Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece and thus has a bad need for a subway. The creation of a subway began in the 80s and... it’s still in the process, making the (future) subway of the city a Greek meme and a joke everyone at this point understands. However, there is a solid reason for this delay. Back in 2004 the archaeologists warned that the subway routes that were planned to be dug under the city’s central part should be modified because the area was of extreme archaeological interest. They were ignored and eventually the works were interrupted by the unavoidable discovery of Ancient Thessaloniki. Some of the most impressive findings are the largely intact main roads of the city, such as the Roman built Decanus Maximus and the Byzantine built Middle Avenue, which survived till the 18th century. Crossroads, houses, shops, graveyards and monuments have also been found. Scratches on the roads made by carriages can be seen. More than 300,000 artifacts were discovered, such as statues, jewels and other small objects. Now the fate of the underground has also become a political game as the two leading political parties fight on whether the artifacts should remain on their spot undisturbed which would make the subway’s creation harder and more dangerous or they should be removed until the subway is complete and then returned to their original place with a claimed accuracy of 90%. What’s certain is that when (or if) the subway is complete, the ancient city will be easily accessed via the metro, visible from its windows and there will also be the option to walk on the ancient roads. 

2. The Tomb of the Griffin Warrior (2015)

A grand tomb was found next to the Mycenean palace of Nestor in Pylos. A skeleton was discovered in the tomb along with no less than 3500 burial gifts. The gifts were weaponry, jewels and other objects exclusively made of valuable metals and stones. Not a single plain object was found, such as a ceramic amphora for example. Many of the artifacts are made in typical Minoan style which invites a reevaluation of the relations between the Minoans and the Myceneans. The monument took its name from an ivory plaque depicting a griffin, a power symbol for both Pylos and Minoan Crete. The tomb dates back to 1500 BC and it is the best evidence of wealth in prehistoric Greece found in the last 63 years. The most important finding however is that of a tiny seal, which is unique because it’s a masterful work of miniature art that resembles the much later classical Greek art. Archaeologists deem impossible the creation of this gorgeous piece of art without a magnifying glass. The art depicts two warriors, one slitting the other’s throat with his sword. The imagery has elements that suggest an event resembling those from the Iliad - which suggests that this event depicted on this tiny seal in the Griffin Warrior’s tomb was part of the inspiration of the oral lore of the Homeric epics that began in the following centuries. It is obvious that the dead man was a  most influential figure of his era. 

1. Necropolis of Fáliron (2012-2016)

The most macabre discovery makes it to the first place. The largest part of the necropolis, a mass graveyard, was found already in 1913.  Numerous people were executed there with the violent method of Apotymbanismós (Αποτυμπανισμός) that might have inspired the Roman crucification. A century later, in 2012, the excavations expand and unearth thousands of different burials spanning from the 8th - 4th century BCE. The most sensational discovery would happen in 2016 though; a mass burial of no less than 80 prisoners, tied and placed next to each other. All were young men of good health and were not executed with the method of apotymbanismos. Based on the evidence, the mass execution took place in the middle of the 7th Century BCE and these men must have tried to take over the rule of Athens. This was an unstable political era in the Athenian history indeed. This discovery was included in the 10 Greatest Discoveries for 2016 in the magazine Archaeology. 

[marshmallowprotection]

I just realized I’ve yet to say a word about Lucretia, well at least I’ve yet to go in-depth into her character just yet. I went in-depth with Eros already so I’m going to do that with Lucretia now.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Have you ever heard of the “Truth Princess”?”

“Whose that?”

“I hear it’s a pretty girl who tells the truth!”

“Whatever do you mean by that?”

“Did you not hear? The Truth Princess writes anonymous articles and submits them to newspapers to spread the word, the truth, of everything!”

“But why is she called the ‘Truth Princess’? How do we even know she’s a she?”

“Well, we don’t. She signs her papers with the alias “Truth Princess”, which is why she’s called that in the first place. So far she’s turned out to be correct in everything she writes.”

“Really now?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. I wonder who this Truth Princess is…”

“I kind of doubt we’ll ever know, bud.”

“Still…I can’t help but wonder…”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Name: Lucretia

  Aliases (If Any): Marie-Elise Pierre (Current Identity)

“Truth Princess”

Delilah Dubont (Previous Identity)

Adelphia Malinac (Previous Identity)

Cindera Dew (Previous Identity)

Maria Lamogre (Previous Identity)

Helia Tanya Vesper (Previous Identity; Maiden Name Helia Tanya Levintheim (Pronounced as “Levin-th-eim”)

  Age: 2,099 (Physically Looks 25) [As of 1545 T.C.]

2,624 (Physically Looks 25) [As of 2070 T.C.]

  Date of Birth/Birthday: 555 B.T.C.

  Zodiac: None

  Status: Alive (Faked Her Death Several Times)

  Species: Demi-Goddess (Masquerades As An Elf)

  Magic: Goddess Magic

  Height: 5’4 (162 Centimeters)

  Ethnicity (The Ethnicities She Claims To Be Throughout Her Various Identities As She Has No Actual Ethnicity): Mercenian (As Marie-Elise; Currently)

Ibisian (As Delilah)

Erisian (As Adelphia)

Omnian (As Cindera)

Vesperian (As Maria And Helia)

  Relatives: Eros (Mother; Comatose)

Unnamed Father (Deceased)

The Other 11 Goddesses (Technical Aunts)

  Birth Place: Parie, Continent of Alluria

  Nationality/Current Residence: State of Mercenia, Continent of Theda

  Religion (Which Goddess Do they Worship?): None

  Occupation: “Truth Princess” (As “Marie-Elise Pierre”)

Journalist (As “Marie-Elise Pierre”)

Archbishop of The Allurian Church (Formerly; As Herself)

President of The United Republic of Ibis (Formerly; As “Delilah Dupont”)

[Elected] Empress of The Erisian Empire (Formerly; As “Adelphia Malinac”)

Judge In The Omnian Empire (Formerly; As “Cindera Dew”)

Mayor of Elvara City (Formerly; As “Maria Lamogre”)

Princess of The Vesper Empire [By Marriage] (Formerly; As “Helia Tanya Vesper”)

And Many, Many, Many More; The Above ^ Are Just Some Notable Ones

  Affiliations: Allurian Church (Formerly)

Parie (Formerly)

Elvara City (Formerly)

Vesper Empire (Formerly)

Omnian Empire (Formerly)

Erisian Empire (Formerly)

The United Republic of Ibis (Formerly)

Thedian Rebels (From 1545 T.C. - 1547 T.C.)

  Marital Status: Single (Several Previous Relationships)

  Sexuality: Pansexual

  Likes: Nature, Reading, History, Music, Dancing, Nature, Rain, Libraries, Quietness, Lakesides, Practicing Magic, Researching

  Dislikes: Her Mother, People Who Ignore Both Sides of Each Person, People Who Blindly Follow The Goddesses, People Who Blindly Believe in Anything, Dealing With Nobles and Royalty, The Church System Itself

  Role: Secondary Character

  Debut: Chapter ??? The Monochromatic “Truth Princess” (As Marie-Elise Pierre)

Chapter ??? The Lady of Verdant Green (As Herself)

  Lucretia is the daughter of Eros and a human male I have nicknamed B. Since her birth, Lucretia has had to hide who she was from the world until she was around 5. Even then she had to pretend to only be Eros’s adoptive daughter and her father had to pretend to be Eros’s servant. Lucretia frequently argued with her mother about the situation, asking her why she even married B or had herein the first place if all she was going to do was pretend they didn’t exist almost all the time, and make them hide who they truly were. If she knew the consequences then why would she take such a huge risk? Lucretia considered her mother a stupid fool who didn’t properly think through any of her actions, and constantly called her out on her foolishness. Eventually, she just stopped talking to Eros entirely because she realized that it was too late; Eros was just not going to listen to her. 

When her father died when she was 15 years old, and Eros decided to put herself into a self-inflicted coma, she felt abandoned by her mother since her mother was just pushing her responsibilities onto Lucretia and running away from her problems. But in the end, she could do nothing about it and took up Eros’s duties anyway. She immediately realized her mother’s incompetence in running the church as archbishop of the Allurian branch, as she realized that everything was working inefficiently and there were mountains of work her mother had put off for whatever reason. She became known in history as the one who heavily reformed the way the church worked and became known as “Lucretia The Reformist”. She faked her death about 50 years later and went into hiding as she realized that due to her never aging past the age of 25 as she inherited her mother’s immortality and eternal youth that eventually everyone would figure out that “HEY SHE AIN’T MORTAL!” and so decided to fake her death. About a century later she took on her first alias and used a spell to make herself look different. She began to live out the life of the identity she had created and then fake her death after several years. She became several different historical figures from one of the greatest empresses of the Erisian Empire to currently being the mysterious “Truth Princess” who releases anonymous articles through continental-scale newspaper companies and reveals the corrupt truth of governments all over the world but mainly in Theda, especially in the Vesper Empire. 

Over the years Lucretia started to lose her sense of self, as she took on so many identities and lived through several different things as each, met so many different people, and watched them die out over time, overall she just became fatigued from it all. Tired of changing herself all the time. But due to her immortality, there was nothing she could do as no one of the humanoid races on the planet were truly immortal, and because she heavily resembled an elf and overall just wasn’t able to look like nor act like another race besides a human or elf she couldn’t masquerade as a long-lived race like the Ange. 

In 1545 T.C. upon the breakout of the Second Great Theda Civil War, Lucretia (as Marie-Elise Pierre or “Truth Princess”) ended up protecting the young Alia Hallow from a Sylvannese soldier who almost took Alia’s life. She later decided to join the rebellion because she was bored. After the war was won she continued her work as the Truth Princess before faking her death in 1613 T.C. and went into hiding yet again. For the next 500 years, she would continue pretending to be several different people and faking her death several times before Aya became a problem in 2070 T.C. She would finally reveal herself to be the thought of dead Archbishop Lucretia and that she was actually the daughter of Eros. She would end up seeing her mother again for the first time in over 2,000 years, and all she had to say to her was this:

“You ran away from everything, for what? And now your awake, and now the world has changed, and guess what? You still haven’t changed one bit. Your still the same. And the only reason your choosing to stay awake is to eliminate this threat. I have nothing else to say to you.”

Lucretia would be amongst the group who defeated Aya and witness to Nymeria’s sacrifice in 2070 T.C. and would witness the remaining 10 goddesses go into a deep sleep to avoid destroying the world. 

She honestly didn’t feel any empathy or sympathy for her mother, no, not after everything.

In the end, Lucretia would continue to fake her death and pretend to be several different people for centuries to come, but would several times secretly destroy records of the goddesses’ existence and the fact that the world really truly actually faced an actual threat to its existence and that the goddesses if awakened could end up destroying the world as she didn’t want anyone to attempt to awaken the goddesses just to force them to destroy everything, similar to what Aya wanted. She wanted the goddesses to fade into myth where she believed they now belonged for how much they screwed over the world. She believed the world was better without them, and so she acted accordingly.

  Lucretia is honestly a sort of no-nonsense, serious person. While she has pretended to have several different personalities she really is the type of person who just doesn’t joke around, and in the first place, her humor is kind of bad. Her idea of a joke is pretty dark, and anytime she’s asked to make a joke it’s usually an extremely dark one. 

While Lucretia isn’t self-deprecating, she often feels unwanted due to her belief that her mother didn’t think through what it entailed to have her and so believed (and didn’t bother to confirm whether it was true or not by asking her mother mostly because her mother was unavailable and she just couldn’t stand being around her) that her mother now didn’t want her and only kept her now out of obligation to not throw her onto the streets. And so she often needs to feel as if she is needed, and always tries to take on jobs where she would become irreplaceable and takes it extremely badly whenever she’s fired because it makes her feel like she’s simply a replaceable tool. 

Lucretia despises religious people who blindly follow the goddesses because after she studied more history she realized the goddesses were overall more of a harm than good for the world, and she was aware that the goddesses would eventually destroy everything due to inevitable insanity. And so she despises anyone who believes in the goddesses blindly. While she has pretended to believe in the goddesses whilst taking on different identities, she actually despises the goddesses overall even though she’s technically the niece of them all (except Eros of course, whose her mother).

Lucretia has genuinely fallen in love before with several different people as she took on different identities over the years but has resolved herself to never get too attached because she knows she’ll have to fake her death anyway and watch them move on from her if they don’t die before her. She also has accepted the fact that she has to let go of everything because of her immortality, and that she can’t let herself get too attached due to knowing she’ll lose everyone eventually whilst time will continue to go on and she’ll continue to live.

It’s the same tragedy, over and over; the pain of being immortal, a tragedy which many of my characters face, whether they only have an extended life span or are full-out immortal.

And so, fate continues to change, but the destined result is the same-

~An Ever Changing Fate~

  Concept Art of “Truth Princess”, aka “Marie-Elise Pierre”.

Also, “Elise” is not a middle name, it’s part of her first name, just saying because thats a misconception a lot of people have about hyphenated first names.

Lucretia used a spell to full out change her appearance, however it’s a pain to both cast and uncast but she kind of has no choice because she doesn’t want anyone to recgonize her as Lucretia the Archbishop of Alluria or as any of her previous identities. Also, due to Lucretia being part human she has to eat and sleep and all of those human needs which is why she is sleeping in one of the little sketches above. I used a monochromatic-ish color pallet for Marie-Elise because I wanted her to seem mysterious and stuff, and apparently black represents mystery but I didn’t want her to just be all black so thus monochrome colors. Also, the reason there are white roses behind her name in the picture is because they can apparently mean “truth” which is awfully fitting for her profession as a anonymous journalist who goes by the alias Truth Princess and submits articles telling of the behind the scenes truth of the governments all across Theda and even the world. How she knows all this? Hehe, thats a secret (ok well over 2,000 years travelling across the world lets you find out about alot of things, ok? She also has access to invisibility spells and she even has a spy network and everything known as “Royals De Verite” which is French for Truth Royals, and because her home continent Alluria is heavily inspired by France thats why I used the French words for her spy network’s name)

- Submission

It’s actually kind of interesting that this character has been around for so long that they’ve amassed the start of energy and power underneath their belt. So, it’s very clear that she’s not all-powerful because there’s just such a gap between how much of her power that she can expand how much she cannot. The way that you framed her in the drawing as well as just something that makes it have the sort of longing sense to it that I cannot put into words. Like, it feels like I’m such a depth here that even I’m not grasping. There is definitely a reason for that though she clearly doesn’t want to be found out.

[beginagainhq]

Mutants rose up against the systems that had been discriminating against them for centuries, with leader Erik Lehnsherr demanding a safe space for mutants to exist without human interference, and reparations for his people’s suffering. With the United Nations building infiltrated and a prominent member assassinated, as well as Avengers Tower being taken and used as a mutant stronghold, the government was under pressure to provide a peace agreement that would satisfy both sides.

An answer came from an unexpected source. Dr. Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Ross, former professor of biochemistry and cellular biology at Culver University turned strong political advocate for enhanced individuals be it through birth or circumstance, presented in front of the Panel headed by her father, Colonel Thaddeus Ross. Her vision for the future came in two distinct parts: first, a provision of land for mutantkind as was requested and secondly, a more thorough ratification of the Sokovia Accords and Accountability Process created in development with several focus groups and aligned with heroes on the front line themselves.

As always with plot drops, there will be a period of two weeks to read through information and ask questions before the events are canon. See more information below!

GENOSHA

The Panel collaborated with Erik Lehnsherr, Jean Grey-Summers and Julio Richter, among other mutants, to use their powers and raise an ‘island’ in New York Bay. This island is exclusive to mutants and metahumans, specifically metas who were born with their abilities, or whose powers originate from their genetics. Those who developed powers as a result of experiments, etc. can be considered on an individual basis and will be provided with a Genoshan visa/citizenship.

Genosha will operate as its own devolved government, with power separate from the United States. It will function under a council headed by Erik Lehnsherr. Further details about the ministers of this council can be found on our Genosha FAQ page.

Genosha, similar to states such as Wakanda, Atlantis and Themyscira, will provide its citizens with diplomatic immunity. This means their transgressions would not be investigated by the Accords and Accountability Panel, but rather by an in-state justice system founded and run by fellow Genoshans. 

Construction on Genosha will begin immediately and will be entirely governed by mutantkind, allowing all mutants and metas to establish homesteads and businesses as they wish, using their abilities freely to assist if applicable.

ACCORDS RATIFICATION

The Accords were ratified once more and now have several amendments added. Now, instead of individuals being registered for enhanced activity, teams take responsibility as private agencies. The leaders of these groups are responsible for representing their people’s interests towards the Panel, which will now be governed by elected leadership. Betsy Ross will lead in the interim until polls can be held. The Panel will supervise the movement of certain groups, allowing coordination of fighting forces, but do not have authority to dictate where they go, what battles they fight, etc.

For the most part, the Panel will act as a supervisory organisation, something similar in function to a police Ombudsman. If there is an incident such as Ultron, for example, or what occurred in Lagos prior to the ‘Superhero Civil War,’ the Panel will have to intervene to independently investigate complaints. This ensures accountability without intensive oversight and one organisation controlling all power. 

Teams can be defined as either superhero groups such as the Justice League or Avengers, or alternatively schools, universities, institutions such as Xavier’s, community groups, etc. Any group of people that gathers with special abilities count under this ratification. If someone wishes to remain independent and not join a group, they can still register as an individual, allowing them to use their abilities but have the protection of the Panel should anything go awry.

The Panel will also provide special training programmes, both independently and through their various superhero group affiliates, allowing younger heroes to be mentored or explore their abilities through a safe and supportive medium.

As part of the peace process, the Sentinel programme will be scrapped and the technology used will be demilitarised. Instead, the track and trace technology will be provided to the leaders of Genosha, who can then use it to track mutants and metahumans and offer citizenship, expanding their numbers. 

As stated above, certain groups such as those from Wakanda, Themyscira, Genosha, Atlantis etc. will be provided with diplomatic immunity. This does not mean they will not receive consequences for their actions or investigation -- merely that the investigation would happen under their own governing bodies, and they will be judged by their peers instead of the Panel.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE RP?

In short, the Panel will no longer be directly involved in dictating where heroes go and fight. They will be in a supervisory role, intervening when there is an incident, misuse of power, significant injury, etc. They will be led by an elected group of individuals, and all investigations will be open, transparent, and findings made readily available to the public. 

Characters will no longer be registered or unregistered. Characters will instead be able to use their abilities independently, if they choose to do so (technically ‘registered,’ but the Panel is merely a protective force if something goes wrong), or work as part of a team. Any who do not register with the Panel independently or as part of a team will be treated as a vigilante, and pursued by local law enforcement as has been the case in the past. The Panel can preserve confidentiality when it comes to identities, etc, allowing people to remain masked if they wish.

Sentinels are ceased, bounties are dropped, and certain crimes committed during the time of the previous Accords (arrests for enhanced behaviour while unregistered, for example) will be expunged from records. This means the following pages are no longer in use: bounties and registration. 

The following pages have been updated: plot summary, Accords FAQ and masterlist (registered/unregistered has changed to team affiliated/independent/vigilante). Our app has also updated to reflect these changes!

The following pages have been added: Genosha FAQ and teams.

We will be putting a link to the template in the OOC blog and Discord for people to send in regarding their characters’ places on teams, whether they’re independent or a vigilante. This is all you’ll need to do to update your character information regarding this plot drop!

POTENTIAL PLOTS

The Panel has been entirely restructured, meaning they need more heroes and civilians alike to assist. Your character could petition to be on the new council, could be a part of the focus groups, or start up their own training / mental support programme for young people with abilities.

The shift in dynamics between enhanced and non-enhanced individuals will affect everyone in the RP, including civilian, metahuman, mutant and enhanced. Maybe your character finally gets to use their powers in public for the first time without fearing the same level of discrimination -- maybe they face more backlash from people who aren’t too thrilled about the decisions made by their government during the peace process.

In fact, many anti-mutant and anti-enhanced groups will spring up throughout the city in the wake of the ratified Accords, or gain traction if they existed before. Perhaps your character helps fight these off, maybe they get taken or injured, maybe they join these groups to sow chaos or as an undercover agent.

Genosha is a new world, and everyone can have a hand in helping to build it. Perhaps your character has always dreamed about having their own home or business -- now they can! We may develop a locations page specific to Genosha within the next few weeks, so if you want to participate, please feel free to message the main or any of the admins and we can talk this out and add you in, opening up potential connections and arcs for your character!

[englishchinesetranslations]

Tulsi Gabbard: Wake Up And Smell Our $6.4 Trillion Wars

REALISM & RESTRAINT

Tulsi Gabbard: Wake Up And Smell Our $6.4 Trillion Wars

Meanwhile, her fellow Democrats appear abysmally unconcerned about the human and financial toll.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in August 2019. (Flickr/Creative Commons/Gage Skidmore)

NOVEMBER 29, 2019

DOUG BANDOW

The Democratic establishment is increasingly irritated. Representative Tulsi Gabbard, long-shot candidate for president, is attacking her own party for promoting the “deeply destructive” policy of “regime change wars.” Gabbard has even called Hillary Clinton “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.”

Senator Chris Murphy complained: “It’s a little hard to figure out what itch she’s trying to scratch in the Democratic Party right now.” Some conservatives seem equally confused. The Washington Examiner’s Eddie Scarry asked: “where is Tulsi distinguishing herself when it really matters?”

The answer is that foreign policy “really matters.” Gabbard recognizes that George W. Bush is not the only simpleton warmonger who’s plunged the nation into conflict, causing enormous harm. In the last Democratic presidential debate, she explained that the issue was “personal to me” since she’d “served in a medical unit where every single day, I saw the terribly high, human costs of war.” Compare her perspective to that of the ivory tower warriors of Right and Left, ever ready to send others off to fight not so grand crusades.

The best estimate of the costs of the post-9/11 wars comes from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. The Institute says that $6.4 trillion will be spent through 2020. They estimate that our wars have killed 801,000 directly and resulted in a multiple of that number dead indirectly. More than 335,000 civilians have died—and that’s an extremely conservative guess. Some 21 million people have been forced from their homes. Yet the terrorism risk has only grown, with the U.S. military involved in counter-terrorism in 80 nations.

Obviously, without American involvement there would still be conflicts. Some counter-terrorism activities would be necessary even if the U.S. was not constantly swatting geopolitical wasps’ nests. Nevertheless, it was Washington that started or joined these unnecessary wars (e.g., Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen) and expanded necessary wars well beyond their legitimate purposes (Afghanistan). As a result, American policymakers bear responsibility for much of the carnage.

The Department of Defense is responsible for close to half of the estimated expenditures. About $1.4 trillion goes to care for veterans. Homeland security and interest on security expenditures take roughly $1 trillion each. And $131 million goes to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which have overspent on projects that have delivered little.

More than 7,000 American military personnel and nearly 8,000 American contractors have died. About 1,500 Western allied troops and 11,000 Syrians fighting ISIS have been killed. The Watson Institute figures that as many as 336,000 civilians have died, but that uses the very conservative numbers provided by the Iraq Body Count. The IBC counts 207,000 documented civilian deaths but admits that doubling the estimate would probably yield a more accurate figure. Two other respected surveys put the number of deaths in Iraq alone at nearly 700,000 and more than a million, though those figures have been contested.

More than a thousand aid workers and journalists have died, as well as up to 260,000 opposition fighters. Iraq is the costliest conflict overall, with as many as 308,000 dead (or 515,000 from doubling the IBC count). Syria cost 180,000 lives, Afghanistan 157,000, Yemen 90,000, and Pakistan 66,000.

Roughly 32,000 American military personnel have been wounded; some 300,000 suffer from PTSD or significant depression and even more have endured traumatic brain injuries. There are other human costs—4.5 million Iraqi refugees and millions more in other nations, as well as the destruction of Iraq’s indigenous Christian community and persecution of other religious minorities. There has been widespread rape and other sexual violence. Civilians, including children, suffer from PTSD.

Even stopping the wars won’t end the costs. Explained Nita Crawford of Boston University and co-director of Brown’s Cost of War Project: “the total budgetary burden of the post-9/11 wars will continue to rise as the U.S. pays the on-going costs of veterans’ care and for interest no borrowing to pay for the wars.”

People would continue to die. Unexploded shells and bombs still turn up in Europe from World Wars I and II. In Afghanistan, virtually the entire country is a battlefield, filled with landmines, shells, bombs, and improvised explosive devices. Between 2001 and 2018, 5,442 Afghans were killed and 14,693 were wounded from unexploded ordnance. Some of these explosives predate American involvement, but the U.S. has contributed plenty over the last 18 years.

Moreover, the number of indirect deaths often exceeds battle-related casualties. Journalist and activist David Swanson noted an “estimate that to 480,000 direct deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, one must add at least one million deaths in those countries indirectly caused by the recent and ongoing wars. This is because the wars have caused illnesses, injuries, malnutrition, homelessness, poverty, lack of social support, lack of healthcare, trauma, depression, suicide, refugee crises, disease epidemics, the poisoning of the environment, and the spread of small-scale violence.” Consider Yemen, ravaged by famine and cholera. Most civilian casualties have resulted not from Saudi and Emirati bombing, but from the consequences of the bombing.

Only a naif would imagine that these wars will disappear absent a dramatic change in national leadership. Wrote Crawford: “The mission of the post-9/11 wars, as originally defined, was to defend the United States against future terrorist threats from al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. Since 2001, the wars have expanded from the fighting in Afghanistan, to wars and smaller operations elsewhere, in more than 80 countries—becoming a truly ‘global war on terror’.”

Yet every expansion of conflict makes the American homeland more, not less, vulnerable. Contrary to the nonsensical claim that if we don’t occupy Afghanistan forever and overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, al-Qaeda and ISIS will turn Chicago and Omaha into terrorist abattoirs, intervening in more conflicts and killing more foreigners creates additional terrorists at home and abroad. In this regard, drone campaigns are little better than invasions and occupations.

For instance, when questioned by the presiding judge in his trial, the failed 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, a U.S. citizen, cited the drone campaign in Pakistan. His colloquy with the judge was striking: “I’m going to plead guilty 100 times forward because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims.”

Ajani Marwat, with the New York City Police Department’s intelligence division, outlined Shahzad’s perspective to The Guardian: “’It’s American policies in his country.’ …’We don’t have to do anything to attract them,’ a terrorist organizer in Lahore told me. ‘The Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the innocents who live in Waziristan and the media broadcasting this news all the time, the sympathies of most of the nation are always with us. Then it’s simply a case of converting these sentiments into action’.”

Washington does make an effort to avoid civilian casualties, but war will never be pristine. Combatting insurgencies inevitably harms innocents. Air and drone strikes rely on often unreliable informants. The U.S. employs “signature” strikes based on supposedly suspicious behavior. And America’s allies, most notably the Saudis and Emiratis—supplied, armed, guided, and until recently refueled by Washington—make little if any effort to avoid killing noncombatants and destroying civilian infrastructure.

Thus will the cycle of terrorism and war continue. Yet which leading Democrats have expressed concern? Most complain that President Donald Trump is negotiating with North Korea, leaving Syria, and reducing force levels in Afghanistan. Congressional Democrats care about Yemen only because it has become Trump’s war; there were few complaints under President Barack Obama.

What has Washington achieved after years of combat? Even the capitals of its client states are unsafe. The State Department warns travelers to Iraq that kidnapping is a risk and urges businessmen to hire private security. In Kabul, embassy officials now travel to the airport via helicopter rather than car.

Tulsi Gabbard is talking about what really matters. The bipartisan War Party has done its best to wreck America and plenty of other nations too. Gabbard is courageously challenging the Democrats in this coalition, who have become complicit in Washington’s criminal wars.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author ofForeign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

[didanawisgi]

William Barr Has Suddenly Become Chatty—and He’s Provided Quite an Information Dump

By Sharyl Attkisson

“In each of two video appearances, on NBC News and at Wall Street Journal’s “CEO Council,” Attorney General William Barr provided the same basic information and views about the U.S. intelligence community’s actions against the Trump campaign in 2016 and 2017. A criminal investigation is underway and being led by U.S. Attorney John Durham.

Barr was motivated to make the public statements, he said, by the misreporting and confusion surrounding Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report issued on Dec. 9. It found serious government surveillance abuses but no evidence of political bias on the part of the offending FBI officials and agents.

Below are 24 points Barr felt the need to make after the release of the Horowitz report. (All of the information is attributed to Barr.)

1. Don’t expect Durham’s findings to be announced before late spring or summer 2020.

2. The FBI did spy on the Trump campaign. That’s what electronic surveillance is.

3. Regarding the FBI’s actions in surveilling Trump campaign associates, it was a “travesty” and there were “many abuses.”

4. From “day one,” the FBI investigation generated exculpatory information (tending to point to the targets’ innocence) and nothing that corroborated Russia collusion.

5. It’s a “big deal” to use U.S. law enforcement and intelligence resources to investigate the opposing political party, and I cannot think of another recent instance in which this happened.

6. Evidence to start the FBI’s investigation into Trump associates was “flimsy” from the start and based on the idea that Trump aide George Papadopoulos expressed he may have had pre-knowledge of a Democrat National Committee computer hack. However, it was actually just an offhand barroom comment by a young campaign aide described merely as a “suggestion of a suggestion, a vague allusion” to the fact that the Russians may have something they can dump. But by that time, May 2016, there was already rampant speculation online and in political circles that the Russians had hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2014 and that they might surface. So the idea that Papadopoulos’s comment showed pre-knowledge of the Democratic National Committee hack and dump “is a big stretch.”

7. It was “wrong” for the FBI to presume the Trump campaign was part of a plot. They should have gone to the campaign and discussed their suspicions.

8. The normal thing to do would be to tell the campaign that there could be attempted foreign interference. There is no legitimate explanation as to why the FBI didn’t do this. The FBI’s explanation for this was that they only do “defensive briefings” if they’re certain there’s no chance they’re tipping someone off. But this simply isn’t true, isn’t plausible, and doesn’t hold water because our intelligence officials and President Barack Obama repeatedly contacted the Russians, the guilty party, to tell them to “cut it out.”

9. If the purpose were to protect the election, you would have given the Trump campaign a defensive briefing. You could have disrupted any foreign activity in time to protect the U.S. election.

10. As to the FBI’s motive, “that’s why we have Durham.” I’m not saying the motivations were improper, but it’s premature to say they weren’t.

11. The inspector general operates differently as an internal watchdog. Horowitz’s approach is to say that if people involved give reasonable explanations for what appears to be wrongdoing, and if he can’t find documentary or testimonial evidence to the contrary, he accepts it.

12. Contrary to much reporting, Horowitz didn’t rule out improper motive; he didn’t find documentary or testimonial evidence of improper motive. Those are two different things.

13. Instead of talking to the Trump campaign, the FBI secretly “wired up” sources and had them talk to four people affiliated with the Trump campaign, in August, September, and October 2016.

14. All of the information from this surveillance came back exculpatory regarding any supposed relationship to Russia and specific facts. But the FBI didn’t inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, which approved wiretaps against former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page four times.

15. At one point early on, the FBI didn’t have enough probable cause for a wiretap warrant, so it took the “Steele dossier” information against Trump, “which they’d done nothing to verify,” and used that to get the wiretaps.

16. The wiretaps allowed the FBI to go back and capture Page’s communications, emails, and other material from weeks, months, and even years ago.

17. Should the four FBI applications to wiretap Trump campaign aide Carter Page have ever been made, considering there were 17 critical omissions or errors by the FBI making it appear they had better evidence than they had? This is the meat of the issue, and “if you spend time to look at what happened, you’d be appalled.”

18. The FBI withheld from the court all of the exculpatory information and the lack of reliability of the main FBI source, Christopher Steele, who was being paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to find evidence connecting Trump to Russia.

19. The major takeaway is that after the election in January, the FBI finally talked to one of Steele’s important sources to try to verify some of the “dossier” information and sourcing, as they’re required to do. This Steele source told the FBI he didn’t know what Steele was talking about in the dossier, and that he’d told Steele that the information he’d provided was “supposition” and “theory.” At that point, “it was clear the dossier was a sham.” Yet the FBI didn’t tell the court, and continued to get wiretaps based on the dossier.

20. Further, the FBI falsely told the court that Steele’s source had been proven reliable and truthful. In fact, what the source had told the truth about was that “the dossier was garbage.” It’s hard to look at this “and not think it was gross abuse.”

21. Were the four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act judges who approved the four wiretaps against Trump associate Carter Page badly misled by the FBI? Yes.

22. Are people going to be held accountable, including at the very top of our intelligence agencies and FBI? Well, they’re all gone.

23. The whole Russia collusion hype was a “bogus narrative hyped by an irresponsible press” that proved entirely false in the end.

Are former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI official Andy McCabe and others implicated in the Durham investigation? I think there was a failure of leadership in that group. Quoting the inspector general, the explanations he received “were not satisfactory. You can draw your own conclusions.”

24. Why haven’t we already thrown people in prison? “These things take time.” The government has to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt before we indict; it’s a substantial hurdle. Nobody is going to be indicted and go to jail unless that standard is met.

In his interviews this week, Barr provided a treasure trove of information about what stands to be one of the most important investigations into our U.S. intelligence community of our time. His signposts indicate that we can expect a shakeup of a system that may have been broken for decades.”

Sharyl Attkisson is the New York Times bestselling author of “Stonewalled,” a five-time Emmy Award winner, and the host of Sinclair’s national investigative television program “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson”. She is a recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting and has reported nationally for CBS News, PBS, and CNN.

[buzzdixonwriter]

America: Not The New Jerusalem, Merely Another Rome

”When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” -- Paul the Apostle (1 Corinthians 13:11 KJV)

”And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” -- Jesus Christ of Nazareth (John 8:34 KJV)

Ronald Reagan, tending the garden of thorns Dick Nixon had sown, referred to America as “a city on a hill”, thus appropriating Jesus’ words via John Winthrop through John F. Kennedy.

It’s interesting to chart the progression.  Let’s do so in reverse.

Reagan: ”I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.”

Kennedy: ”I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before…’We must always consider…that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us’. Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities…History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required…”

Winthrop: ”Now the only way to…provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God, for this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, we must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body, so shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace… for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak…curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whether we are going”

Jesus: ”Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” (Matthew 5:14 KJV) 

Go back and read Reagan’s statement.

While I’ve trimmed Kennedy and Winthrop’s quotes and edited the latter for clarity (God bless Noah Webster for standardized spelling!), there’s a striking difference between what they saw as a city on a hill and what Reagan saw.

Reagan operates under the presumption that of course we’re the best, of course everyone else will look up to us, of course we are the New Jerusalem referenced in the Bible.

We are God’s anointed, His new chosen people.  America is God’s Promised Land, a nation to which all other nations can merely hope to aspire to be.

Our shitte truly stinketh notte.

Reality?   We have fucked up and we have fucked up badly.

Compare Reagan’s self-congratulatory, ignorant nostalgia with the dire warnings of Kenney and Winthrop.

Yes, there is great promise.

Yes, there is great potential.

Yes, we are a city on a hill.

But Kennedy and Winthrop both cautioned that history and the world would not be kind if we failed to live up to our own grandiose promises.

 (And, yeah, there’s irony in that, considering how both failed to make good on those promises, ///but at least they knew the danger was there///.)

Look at Matthew 5:13, the verse immediately preceding Jesus’ original “city on a hill” reference: ”Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.”

America is no New Jerusalem, no Holy Israel of the New World, no Promised Land.

Rather, we are the New Rome, an empire built on greed and ruthlessness and blood and genocide.

And slavery.  Let us never omit that original sin, or its bastard step-sibling, white supremacy.

As long as the history of this nation was written by the Parson Weems of the world, be they well meaning hagiographers or unprincipled propagandists, it was the history of white Christianist* men of property succeeding because God and / or providence had deemed them the masters of the universe, the unquestioned rulers of the earth.

(Oh, there might be a mean one once in a while, maybe an occasional bad one, but it was a white man with money’s world, and if non-whites and non-males wanted to enjoy even the slightest taste, the first thing they had to doo was make sure white Christianist male supremacy reigned supreme.)

Our nation has been at war virtually its entire existence.

It has slaughter and subjugated literally millions of people around the world.

Don’t give me that bullshit about the American Revolution being a good and just war -- Canada stayed under British rule and did just fine, thank you, and although they have their own problems, a far less bloody history than the United States.**

Don’t give me that bullshit about the Civil War being a good and just war -- there shouldn’t have been any need for a civil war if the first shipload of African slaves to arrive in North America had simply been seized and freed.

Don’t give me that bullshit on World War Two being a good and just war -- if Hitler hadn’t declared war on us, we would have never gotten involved in Europe.***

America has waged incessant war against other nations and native peoples in order to make a few wealthy people even wealthier.

Can we justify the War of 1812?  No.

Can we Justify the Mexican War?  No.

Can we justify the Spanish-American War or the too numerous to recount Latin American bush wars?  No.

Can we justify the Philippines, or Korea, or Vietnam?

Don’t even pretend we can justify what we’ve done in the Middle East.

And as terrible as those are, those are the crimes we’ve committed against others.

Look at how terribly we treat one another.

After centuries of enslavement, African-Americans then needed to endure the humiliation of segregation.

Hispanic Americans who can trace their ancestry in this land much further back than any Anglo found themselves aliens in their own country.

Women and non-Christians and anybody outside of toxic white male heterosexual norms declared unfit and excluded from the public sphere.

And we allowed the tiny greedy few at the very top to rob us and pick our pockets and let our families and children suffer because they promised us if we did so, they’d let us feel that we were the best simply because we were white Christianist males.

We are long overdue for our moment of clarity, our agonizing reappraisal, out “come to Jesus” moment when we recognize our sins and shortcomings.

We gotta stop eating our own bullshit and recognize ourselves for the villains we are.

Only by identify the source of the contagion and draining the virulent infection can we hope to cure it.

”Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

”And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.” -- Jesus Christ of Nazareth (John 8:44-45 KJV) 

 © Buzz Dixon

 *  “Christianist” is a term coined by the political commentator Andrew Sullivan to refer to those people who are culturally Christian, who may even think of themselves as Christian, but in reality are as far from the teachings of Christ as is possible and just use their so-called Christian identity as an excuse to do whatever the fuck they feel like doing because “God loves us and forgives us and wants us to be in charge”.

**  The taxation in “no taxation without representation” referred to England trying to get the colonies to take at least partial responsibility for triggering the bloody Seven Years War (in the U.S., the French & Indian War) that virtually drained England’s treasury and wrecked a couple of European empires in the process.  One may argue the crown made a fatal misstep in not allowing token colonial participation in parliament, but you can’t say they were unfair in wanting the colonials to help pay for a war ///we started/// in direct violation of international treaties.

***  Not only were many prominent Americans against getting involved in European affairs, but a large number were pro-Nazi to boot, and they went to ground only when Hitler made it impossible to defend him any longer. And while we’re at it, let’s dispel with the myth that Hitler and the Axis would have won if the U.S. hadn’t stepped into the fray; Hitler lost WWII on June 22, 1941 when he invaded Russia. Contrary to the popular culture of the US and western Europe, it was Russia that took on the brunt of the German war machine, and Russia that painstakingly ground them down at great cost. To put it simply, Russia would have still beaten Germany without the help of the Allies; the Allies might not have beaten Germany without the help of the Russians.  And while Japan was reeling from saturation bombings and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russia declaring war on them was the moment they realized there was no hope left.

[ruminativerabbi]

Looking Back and Ahead

So the much-anticipated midterm election came and went, leaving all Americans, regardless of party affiliation or political orientation, finally united on at least one point: that the Congress, now a bicameral house formally divided against itself, will accomplish nothing at all for the foreseeable future...unless its members can find it in their hearts to compromise with their opponents and to craft legislation so little extreme and so overtly and appealingly reasonable that people on both sides of the aisle will fear angering their constituencies by not supporting it. How likely is that to happen? Not too!  Still, that thought—that in the absence of flexibility, tractability, and generosity on the part of all, nothing at all will be accomplished and no one will have a record (other than of obstructionism) to run on in future elections—has a sort of silver lining in the thought that whatever legislation is passed by the new Congress will have to be of the rational variety that Americans of all political and philosophical sorts can support. So there’s at least that!

As my readers all surely know by now, my training—my academic training, I mean, as opposed to my spiritual training in rabbinical school—is in ancient history and the history of ancient religion. And I’ve been reading just lately some interesting analyses of the mother of all democracies, the one set in place to govern the city-state of Athens, and the specific way our American democratic system does and doesn’t preserve its ancient features and norms. Obviously, a long road stretches out between them and us! Even so, however, there are at least some features of Athenian democracy that are definitely worth revisiting.

Some of the specifics will be unexpected to most. Ancient Athens was governed by a council of 500 called the boulé whose members were chosen—not by an informed electorate casting ballots for the candidate of their choice—but by lots so that fifty men chosen at random to represent each of the ten tribes of ancient Athenians were put in place and handed the reins of government. Each served for one year, but no one could serve more than once a decade nor could any citizen serve more than twice ever. The boulé had its own hierarchy, however: its in-house leadership—called the prytany—consisted of fifty men, also chosen by the casting of lots, who served for one single month and were then replaced.  The idea was simple—and not entirely unappealing: by choosing both the people’s leaders and those leaders’ leaders at random, it was certain that the power of governance would specifically not rest neither with power-hungry people eager to rule over or to dominate others nor with anyone motivated by the possibility of personal gain through service to the nation. The leaders of Athens were thus disinterested parties, people with no specific yearning to be in charge yet whom fate somehow arbitrarily put into positions of leadership nonetheless. Yes, it was surely true that the inevitable blockhead would occasionally end up chosen to serve, but such a person would be vastly outnumbered by more thoughtful, more reasonable individuals. (The boulé did have five hundred members, after all.) The system has an antique feel to it, the specific point of keeping power out of the hands of people who lust after it and firmly in the hands of people who would be happier doing something else entirely, not so much!

The situation that prevailed in ancient Athens appeals in other ways as well. The boulé, for example, lacked the power to make any final decisions on its own. To do that, all citizens were invited to participate in a forum called the ekklesia that met every ten days for the specific purpose of ratifying any of the boulé’s decisions before they became law. (This body met on the Acropolis as well, in an area called the Pnyx.) All citizens were automatically members of the ekklesia and were welcome to speak up and participate in pre-vote debate and discussion. So the power was thus fully vested in the people—the boulé could pass all the bills it wanted but none of them could become law until the people signed on.

Etymologically, the “demo” in “democracy,” from the Greek demos, references the full citizenry, the people of the nation who self-governed not by electing people to govern them, but by governing the governors and by requiring that the decisions of the boulé be ratified by the public. Is this sounding at all appealing to you? The more I think of it, the more remarkable it sounds to me…and, yes, in some ways intensely appealing. Would this work in a nation of 328 million citizens like our own? Not without some serious adjustment—but the notion that the very last people to whom power should ever be granted are those specific individuals who yearn the most intensely for it, that idea has some serious merit in my mind!

And then there was the concept of “ostracism,” which I think we should definitely consider bringing back. The English word means exclusion from a group, usually because of some perceived scurrilous misbehavior. But the word goes back to Athens, where it denoted something far more specific: the right of the citizenry, the demos, one single time in the course of a year to vote to expel from the city for a period of ten years anyone perceived as having become too powerful—and thus who merely by being present in the city weakened the democratic principle of power being vested fully in the hands of the people. It didn’t happen every year, but once the decision was taken—and if more than six thousand citizens voted to ostracize by writing the name of the individual they wished to see gone on a piece of broken pottery called an ostrakon—then the “ostracized” individual was forced to leave the city and not permitted to return for at least a decade. There was no possibility of appeal. Ostracized individuals were then given ten days to organize their affairs and then to leave and not to return for ten years. There was a certain risky arbitrariness to the whole process—there was no obligation for any citizen to state why he was voting to ostracize whomever it was he was voting to exile and there was no judge or jury—but also something exhilarating about a procedure designed to place the power in the hands of the people to exile anyone at all (including civic leaders, generals, the wealthy, and the city-state’s most influential citizens) for fear that that specific individual was exerting a malign influence on the right of the people to self-govern. And there was at least one profound safeguard against abuse in the fact that the ostracized individual had to be voted off the island by six thousand citizens. Even so, the procedure eventually died out. (The last known ostracism was towards the end of the fifth century BCE.) But it is also thrilling to imagine a democratic city-state in which anyone who yearns for power must temper such yearning with the knowledge that being perceived to be acting other than in the best interests of the people could conceivably lead to being sent away regardless of the immensity of one’s fortune or the breadth of one’s influence. 

There were darker sides to Athenian democracy as well. Citizenship was limited to males over the age of eighteen; women were completed excluded both from membership in the boulé and from participation in the ekklesia.  Nor did all citizens choose to participate fully in their fully participatory democracy. Indeed, most citizens failed to show up most of the time. To increase attendance, in fact, a decision was made around 400 BCE to pay citizens who showed up for their time, thus making it more reasonable for members of the working class to take the time off to attend. But the fact remains that, just as in our American republic, the power was in the hands of those who chose to exercise their civic right to participate and not in the hands of those who chose to express themselves merely by complaining about the status quo. Is that a flaw in the system? I suppose it would depend on whether you ask the voters or the complainers!

This isn’t ancient Greece. But what we can learn from considering the political heritage bequeathed to us by the Athenians is that democracy is not manna from heaven offered to some few worthy nations and not to others, but an ongoing political theory that needs constantly to be revised and reconsidered as it morphs forward through history. There is no end to the books I could recommend to readers interested in learning more, but I can suggest two titles that I myself have enjoyed and that would be very reasonable places to start reading: A.H.M. Jones’ book, Athenian Democracy, first published back in 1986 by Johns Hopkins University Press and read by myself years ago, and also a newer book, Democracy in Classical Athens by Christopher Carey, published in 2000 by Bristol Classical Press in the U.K.  

[xtruss]

Since 9/11, US Muslims Have Gained Unprecedented Political, Cultural Influence

— By Steve Friess | 09/01/21

It's been an impressive 2021 so far for Muslim Americans. The U.S. Senate, that bastion of partisan gridlock, overwhelmingly confirmed the nation's first Muslims as a federal district court judge and to chair the Federal Trade Commission. Legislatures in five states swore in their first Muslim members, including a nonbinary, queer hijab-wearing representative in, of all places, Oklahoma. Three Detroit suburbs are poised this fall to elect their first Muslim mayors. The New York Jets tapped Robert Saleh as the first Muslim head coach of any American pro sports team. CBS premiered, then renewed The United States of Al, the first broadcast network sitcom with a Muslim lead character. And Riz Ahmed, star of Sound of Metal, became the first Muslim nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor.

"Everywhere I look, I see firsts happening," says MLB Tonight sportscaster Adnan Virk, who in 2012 became the first on-air Muslim host on ESPN.

As the 20th anniversary of September 11 approaches, the recent rise of many Muslim Americans to positions of power and influence—in Washington and in statehouses, on big screens and small ones, across playing fields and news desks—is a development that few in the U.S. would have predicted two decades ago, Muslims included. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks by the radical Islamic sect Al-Qaeda, anti-Muslim hate crimes exploded and the ensuing global "war on terror" to root out jihadists created a "climate of discrimination, fear and intolerance," as one think tank described it, that surrounded people of Islamic faith in this country and lasted for years. Then, just as heightened anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. seemed to be subsiding, Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 on an agenda overtly hostile towards Muslims, and revved it up again.

It is the experience of coming of age in this post-9/11 environment, experts say, that drew a new generation of young Muslims to activism, and motivated them to use their voices in political and cultural arenas to debunk misinformation. That they've found a receptive audience beyond the Muslim community suggests to some observers that many Americans now understand that the anti-Islamic rhetoric they've been served in recent years is based on myths and untrue. As Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who in 2007 became the first Muslim sworn in as a member of Congress, tells Newsweek, "The haters have been proven to be liars."

Maybe. But trend data suggests the answer is not that simple and anti-Islamic sentiment remains a factor 20 years after 9/11. Anti-Muslim hate crimes, for instance, are second only to anti-Semitic incidents, FBI statistics show. And in a Gallup poll, one-third of Americans, and a full 62 percent of Republicans, said they'd never vote for a Muslim candidate for president, by far the least support for people of any religion in the survey.

Anti-Islamic sentiment remains a factor 20 years after 9/11. President Donald Trump's ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries didn't help (here, protestors make their feeling about the ban known). Jack Taylor/Getty

Is the recent rise of Muslim Americans to positions of prominence a temporary surge forged during the backlash of the Trump era or a permanent change in American consciousness? Are the constant, often viciously personal attacks on Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—the most famous Muslims in American politics as well as two of the nation's most strident progressives—a last gasp of Islamophobia or proof that, in some quarters at least, it's never going away? If, in fact, the political and cultural shift toward Muslims has staying power, what will the impact be?

The answers are still unfolding. "Muslims are becoming more a part of the American tapestry, but they are still a marginalized group," says political scientist Youssef Chouhoud of Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. "The question now is, OK, so you have these Muslims in public office, in the public eye, on commercials, on TV shows. But does it stick? That's TBD."

Identity Forged in Adversity

When the attacks by Al-Qaeda occurred 20 years ago, the makeup of the Muslim community in the U.S. was much different than it is today: significantly smaller, older, more conservative, less organized, and made up of more Black Americans and far fewer recent immigrants.

In 2001, roughly 1 million Muslims lived in the U.S., according to the Association of Religious Data Archives, versus 3.5 million recently. As a group, they formed a solid Republican voting bloc, with the immigrant community in particular drawn to the GOP's messages of self-reliance, small government and conservative social policies on issues like abortion and gay rights. George W. Bush won 72 percent of Muslim votes in 2000, according to the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR; other polls put the figure lower by still showed a big GOP tilt. After 9/11 that support plummeted, with just 7 percent backing Bush in his 2004 face-off with Democrat John Kerry.

Party affiliation wasn't the only shift among Muslims in the U.S. in the post-9/11 years. Before the attacks, Muslim Americans seldom saw themselves as a single community bound by a common faith as much as a disparate collection of distinct ethnic groups—Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Pakistani and Egyptian among many others—that kept to and fended for themselves, says Niloofar Haeri, chair of Islamic Studies in the anthropology department at Johns Hopkins University. The other large bloc of Muslims in the country were Black Americans who saw the Islam of Malcolm X and boxer Muhammed Ali as both a religion and a political identity used to advocate for the poor and marginalized. That application of the faith, says Haeri, unsettled many immigrant Muslims who came to the U.S. to escape theocracies.

Many Black Americans saw the Islam of Malcolm X (pictured here) and boxer Muhammed Ali as both a religion and a political identity used to advocate for the poor and marginalized. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Then came the ferocious backlash after the September 11 attacks, marked by a wave of physical and verbal assaults on Muslims and anyone who "looked" Muslim. According to the FBI, there were 28 reports of anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2000; in 2001, that number had climbed to nearly 500. Although then-President George W. Bush had initially urged people not to take out their fear and anger Muslim Americans, his administration later went on to surveil mosques and college Muslim organizations looking for terrorists and invaded Iraq in 2003 on later-debunked claims of involvement with Al-Qaeda and plans to build weapons of mass destruction. Many Christian religious leaders during this period made harsh anti-Islamic remarks as well.

Conservative politicians also spent several campaign cycles in the post-9/11 period ginning up public fear that Muslims wanted to impose Sharia in America—that is, turn religious strictures of Islam into laws akin to those of some Middle Eastern theocracies. "For a while Republicans were all about banning Sharia law, which doesn't exist anywhere in America that I'm aware of," Ellison says. "In another way, every Muslim does 'Sharia law' every day. When I pray, that's Sharia. When I fast for Ramadan, that's Sharia. When I don't eat pork, that's Sharia. And these are the people who say they defend religious freedom."

All of this stoked fear of unwarranted reprisals among Muslim Americans and helped forge a generation of young activists who are now winning political office from city council to Congress, Chouhoud says. By 2007, 84 percent of 12- to 18-year-old Muslim Americans said they had experienced at least one act of anti-Islamic discrimination in the prior year, a New York University study found. In 2009, more than 82 percent of Muslims in the U.S. reported feeling unsafe, an Adelphi University survey found.

Muslim Americans faced a choice: Grin and bear it or band together and respond, Haeri says. "One of the most consequential changes that happened in various Muslim communities post-9/11 was that those Muslims who were not religious and did not identify as Muslim before 9/11 were suddenly being treated as Muslims whether they wanted to be or not and were asked questions about Islam," Haeri recalls. "Muslim communities filled with newly self-identifying Muslims. There was a lot of soul searching: Why are we shunning this heritage entirely?"

Meanwhile, more religious Muslim Americans, especially the ones who fled autocratic regimes and failed economies, baffled over questions about their patriotism. "We had to redefine ourselves and push back against injustice—from our country, from the government, from the media, from popular culture," says Nihad Awad, co-founder and executive director of CAIR. "We felt the pain about 9/11 that everyone felt but more pain than many because we were blamed for what happened—something we had nothing to do with."

Adversity fused a far-flung gaggle of nationalities into a coalition of necessity, says Democratic Representative Andre Carson of Indiana, who in 2008 became the second Muslim elected Congress. "This role was paved decades ago by the indigenous African-American Muslim community, but 9/11 allowed the immigrant Muslim community to see that the African-American Muslim community was right all along in calling out racial injustices, calling out governmental excess as it relates to violations of civil liberties and spying on fellow U.S. citizens," says Carson, who is Black.

At the same time, throughout the Bush and Obama years, the pace of immigration to the U.S. from Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East, Asia and Africa surged. Between 2002 and 2016, the number of Muslim refugees accepted into U.S. rose 627 percent—from about 6,000 a year to almost 40,000—which, along with the highest birth rate of any religious group, caused the sharp increase in the Muslim population. The influx has since stopped, as the Trump administration cut the number of refugees accepted into the U.S. to an all-time low of fewer than 12,000 in total, almost all of whom were Christian, according to State Department data.

During the period, Muslim visibility in everyday life increased for many because of where they live now: the suburbs. Nearly half of mosques are now in bedroom communities outside major cities, up from 38 percent in 2010, according to a July report from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, which researches trends in American Muslim life. At the same time, the actual number of mosques rose dramatically, more than doubling from 1,209 to 2,769 since 2000.

The number of mosques in the U.S. has more than doubled, to 2,769, since 2000. Here, an outdoor prayer event at Masjid Aqsa-Salam mosque, Manhattan's oldest West African mosque. Spencer Platt/Getty

"The age-old pattern of immigrants achieving financial success and moving away from cities seems to be repeating itself in the American Muslim community," ISPU notes.

By the election of Trump, who as a candidate in 2015 called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," the American Muslim community was bigger, brasher and uniformly unwilling to roll over. Indeed, observes MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi, Trump's effort to ostracize Muslims, and a subsequent rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate crimes to levels not seen since 2001, lit a spark.

"Something is happening right now," says Velshi, who is believed to be the first Muslim to helm a cable network news program. "It feels like a flourishing of Muslims across industries and across platforms."

Running While Muslim

The arc of Sadaf Jaffer's adult life—from college freshman at Georgetown during 9/11 to the nation's first female Muslim mayor in 2019—offers a useful road map of what has happened to Muslims in U.S. politics over the past two decades and, particularly, recently.

The 38-year-old, who was born in Chicago to immigrants from Pakistan and Yemen, had planned to be a U.S. diplomat and interned at both the State Department and the Marine Corps. But she became increasingly distressed by the anti-Islam sentiment rising across the U.S. and, in 2007, shifted her focus, enrolling at Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy focused on Islamic cultures in South Asia. Her goal: "Understanding Muslim societies better so I could teach about Muslim societies in their complexity."

By 2017, she was a professor at Princeton University so alarmed by the election of Donald Trump that she decided to go into politics by running for a seat on the Montgomery Township Committee, the governing council for a wealthy, fast-growing New Jersey burg of 24,000 residents about 20 miles north of Trenton. Even on such a small scale, the notion terrified her family. "My parents told me, 'Shouldn't we lie low and not draw attention to ourselves right now?' but I felt like if we don't stand up for our rights now, who's to say that we'll even have rights moving forward," Jaffer says.

Jaffer won that seat and, in 2019, was elevated to mayor. Her status as the nation's first female Muslim mayor, she says, was blared in foreboding tones across pro-Trump news sites and Twitter. "That caused an avalanche of hate mail—violent ones, too, about how all of us should be removed from the planet," she says.

It didn't deter her from seeking higher office. This June, she won the Democratic nomination for a seat in the New Jersey Assembly; if she wins this fall, she'll be the first Muslim (and first Asian American) in the Garden State's legislature. She is bracing for some anti-Muslim sentiment but also views her campaigns as a chance to debunk constituents' misconceptions about Islam.

"Those person-to-person connections are really important," she says. "They're about getting to know people as human beings."

If Jaffer wins, she'll follow on the success in the 2020 election that brought the first Muslim legislators to capitols of Delaware, Oklahoma, Colorado, Florida and Wisconsin, and the first re-election of Omar and Tlaib. There are other firsts likely to come this fall too; the top vote-getters in the August primaries for mayor of Detroit suburbs Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck—enclaves with large Muslim populations—were all Muslims.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi administers the oath of office to members earlier this year, including Representatives Andre Carson, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, three of only four Muslims who have served in Congress. Erin Scott/Getty

In all, a record 170 Muslim candidates were on ballots in 28 states in 2020, up from 57 in 2018, and 62 of them won. Exit polling showed that more than 1 million Muslims voted last year, also a record.

"When Trump won, it was a wake-up call for the community," says Wa'el Alzayat, the CEO of Emgage, an organization promoting civic engagement among Muslim American communities.

Also notable: Almost all of these winners are Millennials; Tlaib, at 45 and slightly older than that cohort, is an exception. And most of these Muslim politicans report being the target of some form of anti-Islam sentiment while running.

"They sent out emails connecting me with Ilhan Omar and accusing all the Muslim candidates running across the country of being Islamist or Jihadists," says Delaware state Representative Madinah Wilson-Anton, 27, who ousted a 20-year Democratic incumbent in 2020 to become her chamber's first Muslim. "I was door-knocking and someone was like, 'Go back to your country.'"

Wilson-Anton is not the only Muslim candidate whose religion is used by opponents as grounds to call their qualifications for office into question. In June, GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia sent a fundraising email attacking Omar as a "terrorist-supporting member of the Jihad Squad." Sam Rasoul, the first Muslim to run for lieutenant governor in Virginia, was asked in May by a debate moderator whether he could reassure voters he would "represent all of them, regardless of faith or beliefs." And Joe Biden's nominee for deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration, health care executive Dilawar Syed, is in confirmation limbo after two GOP senators objected to the fact that he is on the board of Emgage, the Muslim nonprofit. (He says he'll resign if confirmed.)

In each of these recent cases, though, a broad spectrum from various religious and ideological groups have joined Muslims to object to how the candidates are being treated. An opponent of Rasoul's, for instant, lambasted the debate moderator from the stage for asking the question and social media scorn was so swift that an anchor for the TV station, WJLA, apologized that night on the air. In Syed's case, several Jewish groups are rallying to his side.

"Overall," says Emgage CEO Alzayat, "things are moving in the right direction."

People protest the Muslim travel ban outside of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC on June 26, 2018. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty

A Growing Impact

In office, many of these legislators can point to measures influenced directly by their Muslim backgrounds. Wilson-Anton in June pushed through a new law requiring schools to excuse student absences for religious observances such as Muslim or Jewish holidays. Saqib Ali, who at age 31 in 2006 was elected Maryland's first Muslim state legislator, co-sponsored a law with a Jewish colleague allowing for the licensure of funeral directors who do not embalm bodies because observant members of both faiths do not do so. After someone left a slab of pork on a Muslim family's car in her town, Jaffer started the Montgomery Mosaic, a monthly series of community-wide events to combat hate crimes.

More broadly, Chouhoud says, having more Muslims in the halls of power has changed some conversations. In May, when violence erupted between Israel and Palestine, for example, several Democratic leaders in Washington expressed concern about Israel's aggressive response and the plight of Palestinians. That, he says, was due in part to the activism of Omar and Tlaib. "It's pretty undeniable that the presence of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib in Congress has given voice to opinions that other Congresspeople in the past have either shied away from or found to be outside of the bounds of what they can actually say, even if they personally held those positions," he says.

Indeed, the congresswomen, both of whom declined Newsweek's requests for interviews, are considered inspirational trailblazers by many within the American Islamic community who see them exploding myths about Muslim women being docile and submissive, Haeri says. Even their differences—Omar wears a hijab, Tlaib is famous for her penchant for swearing—shows "the diversity of Muslim women in a way that surprises and educates a lot of people," Haeri says.

Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan (left) and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota are considered inspirational trailblazers by many within the American Islamic community. Tom Williams/Getty

Virtually every Muslim elected to state legislatures—and all four who have ever been elected to Congress—are progressive Democrats; Carson, the Indiana congressman, was among the first elected officials to endorse Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist, for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders held firm to that support four years later; a CAIR survey in February 2020 found 39 percent of Muslim Democrats supported Sanders versus 27 percent for Biden. For many Americans, this alignment defies well-worn stereotypes about Muslims as extreme social conservatives who would not support a pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ Jewish candidate.

Yet the Omar-Tlaib approach is offensive and troubling for some politically conservative Muslims, who object to what they say is an underlying message that Muslims are badly-treated victims of bias. "The experience of American Muslims is one that's overwhelmingly positive," says Omar Qudrat, 40, of California who in 2018 was the first Muslim to win the GOP nomination for a seat in Congress. (He lost by 23 points.) "Many of us reject the victimhood narrative. Do we have problems? Absolutely. But it would be tragic for any young American Muslim to believe all they amount to is being a victim of this great country."

Qudrat and prominent Muslim conservative Zuhdi Jasser defend Trump's policies as being in the interest of national security and praise him for brokering treaties between Israel and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. "I'm not embarrassed of my faith," says Jasser, a Phoenix physician appointed by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell in 2012 to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. "But I understand the mindset of a country that was attacked. Those wounds are still very deep."

Gold medalist, Dalilah Muhammad of the United States, poses on the podium during the medal ceremony for the Women's 400m Hurdles on Day 14 of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at the Olympic Stadium on August 19, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. David Ramos/Getty

There is an audience for this view: Trump modestly increased his share of the Muslim vote in 2020 to 17 percent from 13 percent in 2016, CAIR reports.

"Muslims are still a relatively socially conservative population," Chouhoud says. "Certain values and priorities do overlap between Muslims and Republicans. It's just that there's the sense that there is no place for Muslims within the Republican Party."

Jasser maintains the GOP is not as anti-Muslim as progressives believe, citing the confirmations earlier this summer of Lina Khan to chair the FTC and Judge Zahid Quraishi to the federal bench, by wide bipartisan margins. Awad, of CAIR, counters by citing Republican opposition to other Muslims nominated by Biden for positions within the administration, such as Reema Dudin as deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, and the long GOP-led delay on Syed's bid for an SBA post.

"To dismiss the rest of the Muslim community's concerns about discrimination, they must be living on the moon," Awad says. "I have not met a Muslims since 9/11 who has not experienced some form of discrimination."

Alzayat of Emgage, for one, hopes the GOP does, in fact, become more hospitable. "There will come a day when we have Muslim Republicans running, Muslim Democrats running, Muslim independents running, and they can have healthy disagreements about policies," Alzayat says. "That would be good for the community and good for democracy."

The Stars and the Crescent

This moment of ascendence for American Muslims is not only about political achievements. Popular culture, too, is seeing a sharp increase in Muslim representation, and the two trends feed each other. Movies and television offer familiarity that helps fuel acceptance, allowing many non-Muslim Americans who don't personally know anyone who practices Islam to see Muslim characters woven into the fabric of everyday life.

"It's an opportunity to create greater empathy for and less prejudice towards Muslims off-screen," says Arij Mikati of Pillars Fund, a Muslim philanthropy that next year will award $25,000 grants to 10 Muslim TV or movie storytellers.

Among those helping to drive this new level of cultural visibility: Ramy Youssef, who won a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award in 2020 for Ramy, a half-hour Hulu dramedy about a first-generation Muslim-American millennial struggling with his faith. Also in the cast for the show's second season was Mahershala Ali, the first Muslim actor to win an Academy Award, for his supporting roles in Moonlight (2016) and Green Book (2018). Disney+ is due this fall to drop Ms. Marvel, introducing Marvel's first Muslim superhero, a shapeshifting, bubble-gum-chewing Pakistani-American teen from New Jersey. And there are past and present recent series like Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and United States of Al, a CBS sitcom about a U.S. war veteran who helps his Afghan interpreter move to Ohio.

The Netflix series "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" is one of a number of shows that helped to bring Muslim actors and storytellers a new level of cultural visibility. Matt Doyle/Getty

Jaffer, the Montgomery Township mayor, says she's also noticed greater Muslim visibility on kids' shows like Sesame Street and Peg Plus Cat, and it's extended to her daughter's first-grade classroom, where the teacher this spring read a book about Ramadan to students. "Those things seem like little victories, that our celebrations are being recognized as part of America,'" she says. "It's nice, because as a child, I had to explain everything. Just imagine asking a six-year-old to answer, 'What is Christmas?'"

Some Muslim actors and celebrities say they try to advance the ball, talking openly about their faith and cultural identity when asked—or not asked. Adnan Virk, while still at ESPN in 2016, recalls being asked to help anchor coverage after boxer Muhammed Ali died. "One of our producers called and said, 'Hey, we don't know anything about Islamic funerals. Could you come in?'" Virk recalls. "That made sense. They wouldn't know. Open casket, closed casket? What prayers are they reciting? Why is he draped in white? That was a cool moment."

Comic Negin Farsad, a frequent panelist on the NPR quiz show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, says she takes "any occasion I can when it fits organically in the joke to make mention of being Muslim. I do that to let people know that one of their favorite radio comedy shows has a Muzz on it and it's cool."

And MSNBC's Velshi says he intentionally tries to bring on guests and experts who are Muslims and of other marginalized communities to talk about topics unrelated to their identities. "It's the simplest thing in the world to do to break down barriers, to cause people to open their minds," Velshi says. "I want my roster of guests to look like the full breadth of America. Familiarity breeds understanding."

But while there are undeniably more Muslims in higher visibility and breakthrough roles, experts in and outside of the American Islamic community note that the numbers and depictions still don't come close to fair representation. A USC Annenberg study this June of 200 popular global movies from 2017 to 2019 found that just 1.1 percent of the speaking characters in U.S. films and 1.6 percent overall were Muslim, still frequently stereotyped as outsiders, threatening or subservient, particularly to white characters.

"More than half of the primary and secondary Muslim characters were immigrants, migrants, or refugees, which consistently rendered Muslims as 'foreign,'" says Al-Baab Khan, one of the study authors. "Film audiences only see a narrow portrait of this community, rather than viewing Muslims as they are: business owners, friends and neighbors whose presence is part of modern life."

Islamic Center Of America on July 17, 2014 in Dearborn, Michigan. Raymond Boyd/Getty

A Long Road Ahead

The challenges Muslim Americans face in popular culture in many ways mirror the political environment: The gains are real, increasingly visible and more prominent, but for now at least, still relatively modest—and, Muslim activists worry, too easily at risk of being erased.

They point out, for instance, that there's never been a Muslim in the U.S. Senate, elected as governor or appointed to a Cabinet position. Another major terrorist attack involving extremist Muslims, a successful White House comeback for Trump or the election of a similarly-minded candidate could once again sour public opinion or create new dangers.

"Trump was able to capitalize on bigotry, on ignorance and racism, on fear," said CAIR's Awad. "He mobilized it, weaponized it, made it official. His impact is still with us. And he might come back."

Still, the progress thus far has Muslim leaders cautiously optimistic and thirsting for more. Haeri hopes to see more taught in schools about Islam's history, noting the contributions of Muslim scientists and artists are absent from the education of most American children. Carson, the Indiana congressman, looks forward to the day he can donate to the first Muslim to run for president. Farsad just wants better roles to play. "I'm both ashamed and unashamed to admit that I have auditioned for the wife of a terrorist," she says. "That's what was available."

"We've been so underrepresented for so long, we're just working to even out the odds," Emgage's Alazayat says. "The question is not, 'Wow, look at how much we've done.' We should expect more."

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Some Hotels Are Mandating Vaccines. Will Others Follow? (NYT) As travelers prepare for their next vacation, among the essentials to take—along with items such as a toothbrush, wallet and phone charger—could be proof of vaccination for COVID-19, depending on where they are booked to sleep. As coronavirus cases surge again across the country, driven by the highly contagious delta variant, a small number of hotels in the United States have announced that they will require proof of vaccination from guests and staff. The precedent for hotels requiring vaccination is already being set beyond the contiguous United States. In August, Puerto Rico issued an islandwide vaccine mandate that requires guests and staff at all hotels, guesthouses and short-term rentals, including Airbnb, to provide proof of vaccination or a negative PCR or antigen test taken within 72 hours before their visit. Although European destinations are rolling out various vaccine mandates, hotels are mostly not requiring proof of immunization. In Portugal, however, hotel guests need to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test.

Louisiana gets a first look at the devastation caused by Hurricane Ida (Washington Post) People clung to rooftops awaiting rescue, entire towns were cut off from communication, and more than a million faced the prospect of days—even weeks—without power as Louisianans awoke Monday and began to take stock of the devastation caused by Hurricane Ida. Parts of the state remained unreachable, making it impossible to fully assess the damage. Four deaths were confirmed, but Gov. John Bel Edwards said he expected the toll to be “considerably” higher. Ida, which made landfall just before noon Sunday local time as a Category 4 storm, the most powerful storm to hit the area in over a century, continued to batter the region well into Monday. While New Orleans was spared the worst, thanks in large part to the $14.5 billion federally funded levee system built after Hurricane Katrina, communities west and south of the city were completely routed by the storm. There were widespread reports of downed power lines and trees, levee failures and flooding, collapsed buildings and people trapped in flooded homes. Utility officials said it would take days just to assess the damage before repairs could begin. Meanwhile, gas, food and water supplies were affected, with several communities instituting “boil water” advisories.

The World Is Still Short of Everything. Get Used to It. (NYT) Like most people in the developed world, Kirsten Gjesdal had long taken for granted her ability to order whatever she needed and then watch the goods arrive, without any thought about the factories, container ships and trucks involved in delivery. Not anymore. At her kitchen supply store in Brookings, S.D., Ms. Gjesdal has given up stocking place mats, having wearied of telling customers that she can only guess when more will come. She recently received a pot lid she had purchased eight months earlier. She has grown accustomed to paying surcharges to cover the soaring shipping costs of the goods she buys. She has already placed orders for Christmas items like wreaths and baking pans. “It’s nuts,” she said. “It’s definitely not getting back to normal.” The challenges confronting Ms. Gjesdal’s shop, Carrot Seed Kitchen, are a testament to the breadth and persistence of the chaos roiling the global economy, as manufacturers and the shipping industry contend with an unrelenting pandemic. Delays, product shortages and rising costs continue to bedevil businesses large and small. And consumers are confronted with an experience once rare in modern times: no stock available, and no idea when it will come in.

US judge revokes mother’s right to visit son over her refusal to get Covid vaccine (Guardian) A judge in Illinois revoked a mother’s right to visit her 11-year-old son because she refused to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. In what is believed to be an unprecedented ruling, Cook county judge James Shapiro said Rebecca Firlit, 39, who shares custody of her son with her divorced husband, could not see the boy again until she had taken the shot. “I was confused because it was just supposed to be about expenses and child support,” Firlit told the Chicago Sun-Times about the virtual court hearing, which took place earlier this month. “One of the first things he asked me when I got on the Zoom call was whether or not I was vaccinated, which threw me off because I asked him what it had to do with the hearing. “He said, ‘I am the judge, and I make the decisions for your case.’” Firlit’s lawyer, Annette Fernholz, said she had filed a legal challenge to the state appellate court, noting that the boy’s father had not been seeking such a ruling. Firlit, who has not said if she will get the vaccine, told the judge her decision not to take it was not political. “I’ve had adverse reactions to vaccines in the past and was advised not to get vaccinated by my doctor,” she said. “It poses a risk.” Her son, she said, was upset at not being allowed to see her and cries when they speak by phone.

Colombia’s Troubles Put a President’s Legacy on the Line (NYT) Iván Duque swept into Colombia’s presidency in 2018 as a young, little-known technocrat riding a surging right-wing movement. He tapped public anger against a peace deal that he said had treated the country’s deadly insurgents too softly. And he warned that the proposals of his left-wing opponent could stifle steady growth. Three years and a global pandemic later, it is Mr. Duque who is presiding over high unemployment and an angry electorate—and who is on the defensive about the steps he has taken to tame persistent violence by militants. Colombian voters go to the polls in May, when Gustavo Petro, a former presidential candidate, previous mayor of Bogotá and a onetime guerrilla member, could become the country’s furthest-left leader in its history at a time when leftists are again claiming victories across South America.

China limits children to 3 hours of online gaming a week (AP) China is banning children from playing online games for more than three hours a week, the harshest restriction so far on the game industry as Chinese regulators continue cracking down on the technology sector. Minors in China can only play games between 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends and on public holidays starting Sept. 1, according to a notice from the National Press and Publication Administration. That limits gaming to three hours a week for most weeks of the year, down from a previous restriction set in 2019 that allowed minors play games for an hour and a half per day and three hours on public holidays. The gaming restrictions are part of an ongoing crackdown on technology companies, amid concerns that technology firms—many of which provide ubiquitous messaging, payments and gaming services—may have an outsized influence on society. A state-affiliated newspaper has criticized the gaming industry and called games “spiritual opium.”

Taliban declare victory from Kabul airport (AP) The Taliban triumphantly marched into Kabul’s international airport on Tuesday, hours after the final U.S. troop withdrawal that ended America’s longest war. Standing on the tarmac, Taliban leaders pledged to secure the country, quickly reopen the airport and grant amnesty to former opponents. Getting the airport running again is just one of the sizeable challenges the Taliban face in governing a nation of 38 million people that for two decades had survived on billions of dollars in foreign aid. Just hours earlier, the U.S. military had wrapped up its largest airlift of non-combatants in history. On Tuesday morning, signs of the chaos of recent days were still visible. In the terminal, rifled luggage and clothes were strewn across the ground, alongside wads of documents. Concertina wire stills separated areas while overturned cars and parked vehicles blocked routes around the civilian airport—a sign of measures taken to protect against possible suicide car bombers entering the facility.

Moscow and Afghanistan (Washington Post) Russia’s ban on the Taliban as a terrorist group has not stopped Moscow officials from stepping in to support it by calling for the freeze on Afghanistan’s financial reserves to be lifted and for Western countries to lead a global conference to help rebuild the country’s economy. Russia’s presidential envoy for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said Monday that the international community should unfreeze the Afghan government’s reserves or risk a spike in illegal narcotics and arms traffic. Speaking to state-owned television, he also called for an international conference to support Afghanistan’s recovery under the Taliban’s leadership, so that the United States and its allies could “correct at least some of the mistakes they have made” in the past 20 years. Last week’s suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, claimed by the Islamic State-Khorasan, threw Russia’s fears about Afghanistan into sharp relief—that the Taliban’s governance effort could fail, that extremists affiliated with the Islamic State could gain a stronger foothold and that the country could slide into chaos, destabilizing Russia’s neighborhood. Moscow has been calling on the West to “accept the reality” of the Taliban’s victory, while pressing the Taliban to form a government that includes different political and ethnic groups. At the same time, Russian officials are warning that no one should expect the Taliban to meet Western standards for democracy and cultural and religious practices.

The Great Resignation is here (Wired) When Ashley was offered a job at a digital agency over Zoom during the last lockdown, they thought they had found the perfect set-up. Flexitime would be a given. Working from home would continue post-pandemic. The office would be a place to pop in only occasionally. By the time they’d started the new role six weeks later in Leeds, everything had changed. Cast iron guarantees of flexible hours had melted away. Promises of remote working had crumbled. Even before social restrictions had ended, staff were expected to be in the office every day, from 9am until 5.30pm. “It was incredibly frustrating,” Ashley recalls. “All these changes were done between my interview and my first day—and my new boss decided they didn’t need to explain their decision making.” Rather than ride out the disappointment and stick with the new role, Ashley decided to join ‘The Great Resignation’ and the millions of others who have quit their jobs over the spring and summer months. Workers are drafting up resignation emails, handing in their notices and heading for the exit door in their droves. The trend is worldwide. In the UK, job vacancies soared to an all-time high in July, with available posts surpassing one million for the first time. In the US, four million people quit their jobs in April—a 20-year high—followed by a record ten million jobs being available by the end of June. A Microsoft study has found that 41 per cent of the global workforce is considering leaving their employer this year. As more of the economy reopens following Covid vaccinations and the end of social restrictions, demand for talent is fast outstripping supply—it’s now an employee’s market.

[patriotsnet]

How Many Republicans Voted In The Texas Primary

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-republicans-voted-in-the-texas-primary/

How Many Republicans Voted In The Texas Primary

Senate Republicans Block Landmark Voting Rights Bill In Significant Setback For Democrats As It Happened

All 50 Republicans voted against advancing the legislation

Manchin tells Chuck Schumer he will vote to advance legislation

Senate Democrats to fall short of 60 votes needed to begin debate

New Yorkers vote in Democratic primary for New York mayoral pick

Wed 23 Jun 2021 01.27 BST First published on Tue 22 Jun 2021 13.58 BST

01:03

Million Voters Registered In Texas After 2016 Raising Democrats’ Hopes Of Flipping Texas In 2020

October 13, 2020 / 9:22 AM / CBS News

Biden leads in Michigan, Nevada, tied in Iowa…06:04

Texas has seen one of the highest upticks in newly registered voters in the nation,with over 3 million people who registered after the 2016 election. 

That means about 1 in every 5 voters in Texas in 2020 were not registered in 2016 and Democrats are betting the surge could help flip Texas this year. 

As of Monday, Texas’ secretary of state lists more than 16.9 million registered voters in its database, a state record and a net gain of 1.8 million since 2016.

President Trump won the state by 807,179 votes in 2016. Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke lost his statewide race by 214,921 votes.

While registration gains ebbedin March and April, at the beginning of the pandemic, more than 585,000 new voters have registered since September 1. 

The Census Bureau says Texas’ population has grown by 3.85 million since 2010, 2 million of whom are Hispanic.

Early voting in Texas kicks off Tuesday. More than 1.8 million Texans voted early in the March primaries, about 45% of the total turnout. Including mail votes, over half of Texans voted early or by mail during the primary.  

Texans aren’t required to designate a party when they register, but Democratic operatives anticipate at least 60% of these new voters are Democrats because so many of them are young and from communities of color. 

Adam Brewster and Kabir Khanna contributed reporting.

Republican Projected To Beat Democrat For Texas State House In Race Watched For 2020 Clues

Lauren Egan

WASHINGTON — A Republican candidate for a Texas state House seat beat his Democratic rival, in a special election Tuesday which had been closely watched for a glimpse as to just how competitive the delegate-rich state might be in the presidential election, according to unofficial results.

Gary Gates, a self-funded businessman, beat Democrat Eliz Markowitz, an education specialist, for the House District 28 seat, according to unofficial results. The margin, according to those unofficial results, was 58.05% to 41.95%.

The Republican State Leadership Committee tweeted that “Gary Gates defeated the entire national Democratic party tonight.”

Gates, speaking to supporters at around 9 p.m. Tuesday, said “They thought this was a seat they could flip,” according to The Texas Tribune.

Tuesday’s election was a runoff to replace Rep. John Zerwas, a moderate Republican who is not running for re-election.

In the November election, Markowitz, the only Democrat in the race, won 39.1 percent of the vote. Gates received 28.4 percent, while three other Republicans split the remainder of the vote.

The legislative stakes of the runoff in House District 28, a rapidly diversifying suburb of Houston, are relatively low.

Gates will most likely not even cast a single vote before they have to face re-election in November, as the Legislature does not meet this year. And even had Markowitz won, Texas Republicans would still have controlled the House by eight seats.

Is It Common For Democrats To Participate In The Republican Primary And Vice Versa

In short, no. According to Elizabeth Simas, a political science professor at the University of Houston who spoke about this with Texas Standard, cases of strategic voting don’t happen much in primary elections. “Certainly, there are people who do it … but we just don’t see it happening as much as there’s potentially this fear for it to happen,” Simas said.

In areas dominated by one party, especially rural areas, voters might cross party lines in the primary to have more of a say in their local races.

“In my county, all the local races are Republican. Judges, sheriff, district attorney,” Martha Mims, a Democratic voter who lives Williamson County, wrote in The Texas Tribune’s Facebook group, This is Your Texas. “If I want to have a say in local government, I have to vote in the Republican primary.”

Voters like Mims can do that, thanks to Texas’ open primary. Do you have more questions about voting in Texas? Submit them to our Texplainer series.

Disclosure: The University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Texas Early Voting Tops 2016 Total With More Than 9 Million Ballots Cast

Texas has surpassed its total 2016 voter turnout with four days until Election Day, according to data released by state election officials Friday morning.

Polling suggests Texas could be a battleground in 2020, as shifting demographics have given Democrats hope in the presidential race between President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Texas does not report party affiliation of early voters, making it difficult to predict how parties’ voter shares are shaping up so far.

Texas has surpassed its total 2016 voter turnout with four days before Election Day, according to data released by state election officials Friday morning.

Voters have cast more than 9 million ballots in person and by mail so far, setting a new record in the state. In the 2016 presidential election, 8,969,226 Texans voted, according to the state’s official tally.

The milestone reflects high turnout across the country for the presidential race between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, as the coronavirus pandemic has created an unprecedented demand for early voting.

Since the last presidential election, Texas has gained about 1.9 million registered voters, The Texas Tribune reported. About 53% of registered Texas voters have cast their ballot in 2020 so far.

The state’s 38 electoral votes are considered a must-win for Trump. In 2016, Trump won Texas over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by 9 points.

Markets and Politics Digital Original Video

Republicans Want To Change State Election Laws Heres How Theyre Doing It

Comparing the proposed law in Texas to the one that passed in Georgia reveals five key areas targeted since former President Trump’s defeat.

Pedestrians pass signs near a polling site in San Antonio on Feb. 28, 2020. | Eric Gay/AP Photo

06/05/2021 07:00 AM EDT

Link Copied

Passing new election laws has been one of the top priorities for Republican state legislators in 2021 — and they are working from similar playbooks to tighten or restrict the old policies even in states with very different election systems.

The latest flashpoint in the GOP drive to change voting rules came in Texas, where Democrats temporarily blocked a sweeping new bill this week that touched many of the same voting policies that drew wide notice in Georgia earlier this year. Republicans across the country have proposed significant changes to their states’ election rules after former President Donald Trump promoted conspiracy theories and spread false claims that he’d been robbed of victory there and elsewhere by massive fraud.

Together, Texas and Georgia show which areas Republicans are focused on after Trump’s 2020 loss. Texas’ mail voting policies were already very tight, but both states sought to make their absentee policies stricter. Both states specifically targeted new voting policies piloted by big, blue counties in 2020. And Republicans in both states sought to impose new limits on election officials — and expose them to new criminal penalties for wrongdoing.

___

They Call It Texodus: Why Some Texas Republicans Aren’t Running For Re

“The fundamentals in the district right now favor the Republicans,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, Austin.

But the greater Fort Bend area tells a different story: Hillary Clinton won the county in 2016 by almost 7 percentage points, and O’Rourke beat Cruz in 2018 by 12 points. Texas Democrats point to census data suggesting that the electorate is more diverse than ever — residents of Fort Bend County are now roughly 32 percent white, 25 percent Latino, 21 percent Asian and 20 percent African American — suggesting that the rest of the county will soon be trending blue, too.

“The question about a district like this is, how are the changes of the composition of the electorate changing what our expectations should be,” Henson said.

Democrats have poured resources into the race, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of Markowitz. Forward Majority, a Democratic super PAC focused on flipping state houses, says it alone spent $400,000 on the race, including airing an ad that resurfaces allegations from 2000 that Gates abused his children. Child Protective Services ultimately dropped the case against him.

Even Democratic presidential candidates, otherwise preoccupied with their own primary race, have chimed in.

More Democrats Than Republicans Voted In Texas’ Super Tuesday Primary

Pexels

Texas Secretary of State reports

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Texas Democrats Shatter Voter Turnout Record In Ominous Sign For Gop

The traditionally Republican stronghold could be a battleground state in 2020.

Democrats turned out in record numbers for Tuesday’s primary runoff in Texas, doubling turnout from 2018.

Nearly one million Democrats voted Tuesday, according to the secretary of state’s office, far surpassing the previous record of 747,000 set in 1994.

The record-setting turnout “showed that Texas Democrats are fired up and are ready for change,” Gilberto Hinojosa, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a press release on Wednesday.

Texas has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Jimmy Carter carried the state 44 years ago. Republicans currently hold all major statewide offices, control both chambers of the state Legislature, occupy both U.S. Senate seats, and make up a majority of the state’s House delegation.

But election experts see an opportunity for Democrats in 2020.

“It’s pretty clear looking at the data that Texas is a swing state in the 2020 election,” CNN polling expert Harry Enten wrote on Sunday.

In June, Bob Stein, a political analyst for KHOU, said Republicans were in danger of losing the state.

“I’m not ready to predict Democrats will win Texas,” Stein said, “but it won’t surprise me” if it happens.

An average of state polls since late June show Donald Trump with a slim 0.2% lead over presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Beyond the race for the White House, Texas also has one of the nation’s most-watched Senate races.

TAGS

Results Of The 2020 Republican Party Presidential Primaries

Republican National Convention

  First place by first-instance vote

  Donald Trump

e

Below is a detailed tally of the results of the 2020 Republican Party presidential primary elections in the United States. In most U.S. states outside New Hampshire, votes for write-in candidates remain untallied.

Primary elections and caucuses can be binding or nonbinding in allocating delegates to the respective state delegations to the Republican National Convention. But the actual election of the delegates can be at a later date. Delegates are elected at conventions, from slates submitted by the candidates, selected by the party’s state chairman or at committee meetings or elected directly at the party’s caucuses and primaries. Until the delegates are apportioned, the delegate numbers are by nature projections, but it is only in the states with nonbinding caucuses where they are not allocated at the primary or caucus date.

Results Of The 2016 Republican Party Presidential Primaries

Republican National Convention

  delegate

  Donald Trump

e

This article contains the results of the 2016 Republican presidential primaries and caucuses, the processes by which the Republican Party selected delegates to attend the 2016 Republican National Convention from July 18–21. The series of primaries, caucuses, and state conventions culminated in the national convention, where the delegates cast their votes to formally select a candidate. A simple majority of the total delegate votes was required to become the party’s nominee and was achieved by the nominee, businessman Donald Trump of New York.

The process began on March 23, 2015, when Texas SenatorTed Cruz became the first presidential candidate to announce his intentions to seek the office of United StatesPresident. That summer, 17 major candidates were recognized by national and state polls, making it the largest presidential candidate field for any single political party in American history. The large field made possible the fact that the 2016 primaries were the first since 1968 in which more than three candidates won at least one state.

Texas Smashed Early Voting Records Which Party Will Benefit

With a record number of ballots cast during the early voting period in Texas, candidates, strategists and political analysts are poring over the numbers, looking for clues as to which way the state might go on Election Day.

Roughly 57% of registered voters in the state voted early, shattering previous turnout records with one day of voting ahead. More than 9.6 million Texans voted early, a 47% increase from the number of early voters in the 2016 general election. About 735,000 more people voted early this year in Texas than voted in the entire 2016 presidential election, including on Election Day.

For decades, general election turnout in Texas has been among the lowest in the country as most statewide contests have been foregone conclusions. The last time a Democrat won statewide office was in 1996, and the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry Texas was Jimmy Carter in 1976.

But this year is different, at least according to Democrats who are optimistic that the surge in early voting signals greater numbers of Democrats turning out to the polls, raising the possibility of Democratic victories up and down the ballot. In addition to the state’s 38 electoral votes, control of the Texas House is also at stake. And Democrats are targeting several GOP-held congressional seats anchored in the suburbs of the state’s biggest cities, including four in the Austin area.

He added, “I think sometimes we get a little too cute with the data.”

Running the numbers

11th hour push

They Predicted A Trump Coup Attempt Hear What They Say Now

Thirty-five House Republican broke ranks Wednesday evening to support legislation that would establish an independent commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

GOP resistance is growing.

Liz Cheney of Wyoming

Tom Rice of South Carolina

Dan Newhouse of Washington

Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington

Peter Meijer of Michigan

John Katko of New York

David Valadao of California

Tom Reed of New York

Don Bacon of Nebraska

Andrew Garbarino of New York

Tony Gonzales of Texas

Dusty Johnson of South Dakota

David Joyce of Ohio

Chris Smith of New Jersey

Van Taylor of Texas

Chris Jacobs of New York

David McKinley of West Virginia

Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska

Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida

Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa

Candidates Are On Ballot For Open Texas Congressional Seat

The front-runner in Saturday’s election is Susan Wright, who has been endorsed by Donald J. Trump and is the widow of Representative Ron Wright, who died of Covid-19 in February.

AUSTIN, Texas — Not long ago, Texas’ Sixth Congressional District seemed to be securely in Republican hands. Ron Wright, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was poised to advance the G.O.P.’s agenda after he was elected in 2018.

But this year Mr. Wright, who had lung cancer, contracted the coronavirus and became the first member of Congress to die from Covid-19. His unexpected death led his wife, Susan Wright, to run for his seat, and she was expected to take her husband’s place in Washington with little pushback.

Instead, a field of 23 candidates crowded into Saturday’s special election, all competing for a spot in a likely runoff if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote.

Mrs. Wright, long considered the front-runner, is seeking to capitalize on a recent endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump to establish herself as the undisputed favorite among 11 Republicans, some of whom were also hoping to be anointed by the former president.

Ten Democrats led by Jana Lynne Sanchez, who ran against Mr. Wright in 2018, are tapping into a reservoir of Hispanic and African-American growth that has stirred hopes among party leaders in a district that Mr. Trump won by only three percentage points in the 2020 election.

The race also includes a libertarian and an independent.

The Republicans Who Are Primary Challenging Greg Abbott

TheDemocrats aren’t the only ones Gov. Greg Abbott has to worry about in 2022. Not all Republicans are happy with his leadership and some have already announced primary challenges. While Abbott’s popularity within the GOP means that a fellow Republican is unlikely to unseat him, primary challenges can still cause problems. An attack from his right flank could force Abbott to take positions that will make it harder for him to win over centrist voters in the general election, and it could also force him to expend resources that he would rather save for his Democratic adversary. 

The Signal has put together a list of the Republicans who are challenging Abbott in the Texas GOP primary, which will occur in March next year. This list will be updated as more candidates enter the race. 

Don Huffines, Former State Senator for District 16

Don Huffines announced on May 10 that he was running for governor. “Together we will finish the wall, lower our taxes, and protect our elections,” Huffines tweeted. “It’s past time to root out corruption in the Austin swamp.” Huffines is the first Republican with prior political experience to challenge Abbott. 

Shortly after his loss he reportedly attended a meeting in a hangar with a group of Republicans alleging widespread voter fraud . Although these Republicans tried to convince him that there were signs of voter fraud in his election loss, Huffines ultimately decided to challenge the results. 

Kurt Schwab, Military Veteran

Eyes Turn To Texas As Early Voting Surge Surpasses 2016

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas has already cast nearly 7 million votes, more than anywhere in America, and Glen Murdoch couldn’t get his ballot in fast enough after becoming a U.S. citizen this summer.

“I was champing at the bit,” said Murdoch, who moved to Austin from Australia shortly after President Donald Trump took office, and cast a ballot last week to vote him out.

It’s a rush to the polls in Texas like seldom seen before.

Ten days before Election Day, Texans have already cast as many early votes as they did in 2016 and are nearly 80% of the way toward hitting the total — both early and on Election Day — counted four years ago. The voting bonanza has some Democrats optimistic that decades of low turnout and undisputed Republican dominance may soon be a thing of the past.

But what that it all means for Texas is far from clear. Voters don’t register by party in the state, making it difficult to know which party or presidential candidate has an edge. Polls are unusually close in Texas, but neither President Donald Trump or Democrat Joe Biden has swung through Texas, focusing on clear battleground states instead like Arizona and Florida.

The striking numbers are across the board — in big cities that are solidly Democrat, in tipping-point suburbs where Republicans are losing ground and, to a lesser extent, in heavily Latino counties along the border. In Harris County, home to Houston, more than 1 million votes have already been cast.

___

Texas Governor Vetoes Bill Protecting Dogs From Abuse

Sarah Betancourt

The governor of Texas has pulled a surprise move, vetoing a bipartisan bill that would have provided greater protections for dogs against human abuse.

The Republican governor, Greg Abbott, vetoed a bill on Friday that would have made unlawful restraint of a dog a criminal offense, sending animal rights activists and legislators on both sides of the aisle into a fray and spurring the hashtag #AbbottHatesDogs.

State senate bill 474, dubbed the Safe Outdoor Dogs Act, aimed to ban the use of heavy chains to keep dogs tethered. The bill had bipartisan support in the legislature, passing the house 83-32 and the senate 28-3.

In his veto, Abbott said state statutes already existed to protect dogs from animal cruelty, and the penalties proposed in the bill of $500 to $2,000, and jail time of up to 180 days, were excessive. The bill said that dog owners could have dogs outside but could not restrain them with short lines and chains or anything that could cause injury and pain to the dog.

Dog owners would have faced a $500 penalty for a first offense and class C misdemeanor, and the next penalty would have been a class B misdemeanor, for a fine of up to $2,000 and up to three months in jail.

Abbott said Texas was not a place for that kind of “micro-managing and over-criminalization”.

Read more:

22:04

April 2014 January 2015: Jeb Bush Leading The Polls

In April 2014, Robert Costa and Philip Rucker of The Washington Post reported that the period of networking and relationship-building that they dubbed the “credentials caucus” had begun, with prospective candidates “quietly studying up on issues and cultivating ties to pundits and luminaries from previous administrations”.

Though Bush often polled in the low double digits, he was considered a prominent candidate due to his high fundraising ability, record as governor of Florida and apparent electability. By November 2014, Bush had finally solidified his lead in the polls. Around this time there were talks of the possibility of Romney making a third run for the presidency. During this period from November 2014 until late January 2015, the speculation fueled Romney’s rise in many national polls as well, challenging Bush. Although Romney admitted he was entertaining the idea after initially declining, he ultimately reaffirmed his decision not to run on January 30, 2015.

Summary Of Changes To Election Dates And Procedures

Texas modified its absentee/mail-in voting, candidate filing, and early voting procedures for the November 3, 2020, general election as follows:

Absentee/mail-in voting: Local election officials could not reject an absentee ballot due to a perceived signature mismatch unless the voter was given a pre-rejection notice of this finding and a “meaningful opportunity to cure his or her ballot’s rejection.” Return locations for absentee/mail-in ballots were limited to one per county.

Candidate filing procedures: The petition deadline for independent candidates for non-presidential office was extended to August 13, 2020.

Early voting: Early voting began on October 13, 2020.

For a full timeline about election modifications made in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, .

Senate Votes To Kill Debate On Voting Rights Bill

Republican senators voted against debating Democrats’ election and voting reform legislation, as expected.

Sixty votes are required to open debate on any measure under the Senate’s filibuster rules – and in a 50-50, evenly divided Senate – all 50 Republicans voted against advancing and debating the legislation.

“We can argue what should be done to protect voting rights and safeguard our democracy, but don’t you think we should be able to debate the issue?” said Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer.

It’s unclear where Democrats can go from here. Progressives have pushed to end the filibuster, which would allow them to vote and narrowly pass voting rights reform without Republican support. But moderate Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have rejected the idea.

Presidential Election Voting Record In Texas 1900

Between 1900 and 2016:

Texas participated in 30 presidential elections.

Texas voted for the winning presidential candidate 66.67 percent of the time. The average accuracy of voting for winning presidential candidates for all 50 states in this time frame was 72.31 percent.

Texas voted Democratic 53.3 percent of the time and Republican 46.67 percent of the time.

Presidential Candidates On The Ballot In Texas

See also: Pivot Counties: The counties that voted Obama-Obama-Trump from 2008-2016

Ballotpedia identified 206 counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 after voting for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, in 34 states. Collectively, Trump won these Pivot Counties by more than 580,000 votes, and had an average margin of victory of 11.45 percent. The political shift in these counties could have a broad impact on elections at every level of government for the next four years.

Republican Party Primaries In Texas 2020

Poll times: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Date of Texas presidential primary: March 3

State political party revenue

This page focuses on the Republican primaries that took place in Texas on March 3, 2020. for more information about the Democratic primaries.

Note that the dates and terms of participation for presidential preference primaries and caucuses sometimes differ from those that apply to primaries for state-level and other federal offices, which are the subject of this article. For more information on this state’s presidential nomination process, .

Early March 2016: Between Super Tuesdays

After Super Tuesday voting, but before winner-take-all voting was to begin, nine states, two territories and Washington, D.C. held their primaries and caucuses. During this period, 377 delegates were at stake. On March 3, 2016, the day before Carson dropped out of the race, Romney criticized Trump in a heavily publicized speech. Later that day, there was another GOP debate, which again featured Trump, Cruz, Rubio and Kasich. Carson did not participate in the debate, as he announced the suspension of his campaign the next day, narrowing the field to four; he subsequently endorsed Trump on March 10, 2016, the day after Fiorina endorsed Cruz. Meanwhile, as the prospect of a Trump nomination became more imminent, establishment Republicans pressured Romney or House Speaker Paul Ryan to enter the race; Romney had already decided not to enter the race on January 30, 2015, while Ryan announced he would not enter on April 13, 2016.

Mike Huckabee

In the Virgin Islands caucuses on March 10, a slate composed wholly of uncommitted delegates was initially elected. However, the entire slate was later disqualified by the territorial party and was replaced by the elected alternates – two uncommitted, two for Rubio and one each for Cruz and Trump. The dispute later went to court. Also on March 10, there was a debate in Florida between the four surviving candidates, which was conducted in a more civil tone than prior debates.

March 5–12 results Candidate

Delegates won:1

Republican Party Presidential Primaries

2016 Republican Party presidential primaries

Republican National Convention

  delegate

  Donald Trump

Presidential primaries and caucuses of the Republican Party took place within all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories between February 1 and June 7, 2016. These elections selected the 2,472 delegates that were sent to the Republican National Convention. Businessman and reality television star Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

On July 19, 2016, Trump and his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, were officially nominated as the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates at the Republican National Convention. Trump and Pence went on to defeat the Democratic ticket of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine in the general election on November 8, 2016.

May 2016: Trump As Presumptive Nominee

142 delegates were awarded between the Indiana primary and the final primaries in June; however, with Trump the only candidate remaining, Washington, Oregon, West Virginia and Nebraska became essentially uncontested, although Cruz and Kasich remained on the ballot. Trump won handily in West Virginia, Nebraska and Oregon, although Kasich received one delegate from West Virginia and five in Oregon, while Cruz took five in Oregon as well. The next week, Trump won decisively in Washington State, taking 76% of the vote and 41 of 44 delegates, with the other three uncommitted.

May 10–24 results 11% –

After becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Trump said regarding the Republican primaries: “You’ve been hearing me say it’s a rigged system, but now I don’t say it anymore because I won. It’s true. Now I don’t care.”

On May 26, 2016, the Associated Press announced that Trump had passed the threshold of 1,237 delegates required to guarantee his nomination, thanks to unbound delegates from North Dakota who declared their support for Trump.

How Many People Voted Early In El Paso

According to numbers reported by the El Paso County Elections Department, 18,304 people voted in person during early voting. There are 14,007people who voted at early voting locations in the runoff compared to 4,297 in the Republican. 

As of Friday, 8,310 people had returned ballots by mail —7,563 in the Democratic runoff and747 in the Republican. 

The early voting numbers have not yet been finalized and could change to account for additional mail-in, curbside or provisional ballots.

There are 474,367total registered voters in the county, according to the elections department. Roughly 5.6% percent of registered voters voted early in the primary runoffs, based on the unofficial numbers from the department.

[itsfinancethings]

New story in Technology from Time: Facebook’s Ties to India’s Ruling Party Complicate Its Fight Against Hate Speech

In July 2019, Alaphia Zoyab was on a video call with Facebook employees in India, discussing some 180 posts by users in the country that Avaaz, the watchdog group where she worked, said violated Facebook’s hate speech rules. But half way through the hour-long meeting, Shivnath Thukral, the most senior Facebook official on the call, got up and walked out of the room, Zoyab says, saying he had other important things to do.

Among the posts was one by Shiladitya Dev, a lawmaker in the state of Assam for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He had shared a news report about a girl being allegedly drugged and raped by a Muslim man, and added his own comment: “This is how Bangladeshi Muslims target our [native people] in 2019.” But rather than removing it, Facebook allowed the post to remain online for more than a year after the meeting, until TIME contacted Facebook to ask about it on Aug. 21. “We looked into this when Avaaz first flagged it to us, and our records show that we assessed it as a hate speech violation,” Facebook said in a statement to TIME. “We failed to remove upon initial review, which was a mistake on our part.”

Thukral was Facebook’s public policy director for India and South Asia at the time. Part of his job was lobbying the Indian government, but he was also involved in discussions about how to act when posts by politicians were flagged as hate speech by moderators, former employees tell TIME. Facebook acknowledges that Thukral left the meeting, but says he never intended to stay for its entirety, and joined only to introduce Zoyab, whom he knew from a past job, to his team. “Shivnath did not leave because the issues were not important,” Facebook said in the statement, noting that the company took action on 70 of the 180 posts presented during the meeting.

Eric Miller—World Economic ForumShivnath Thukral at the Moving to Better Ground session during the India Economic Summit in Mumbai, November, 2011.

The social media giant is under increasing scrutiny for how it enforces its hate speech policies when the accused are members of Modi’s ruling party. Activists say some Facebook policy officials are too close to the BJP, and accuse the company of putting its relationship with the government ahead of its stated mission of removing hate speech from its platform—especially when ruling-party politicians are involved. Thukral, for instance, worked with party leadership to assist in the BJP’s 2014 election campaign, according to documents TIME has seen.

Facebook’s managing director for India, Ajit Mohan, denied suggestions that the company had displayed bias toward the BJP in an Aug. 21 blog post titled, “We are open, transparent and non-partisan.” He wrote: “Despite hailing from diverse political affiliations and backgrounds, [our employees] perform their respective duties and interpret our policies in a fair and non-partisan way. The decisions around content escalations are not made unilaterally by just one person; rather, they are inclusive of views from different teams and disciplines within the company.”

Facebook published the blog post after the Wall Street Journal, citing current and former Facebook employees, reported on Aug.14 that the company’s top policy official in India, Ankhi Das, pushed back against other Facebook employees who wanted to label a BJP politician a “dangerous individual” and ban him from the platform after he called for Muslim immigrants to be shot. Das argued that punishing the state lawmaker, T. Raja Singh, would hurt Facebook’s business prospects in India, the Journal reported. (Facebook said Das’s intervention was not the sole reason Singh was not banned, and that it was still deciding if a ban was necessary.)

Read more: Can the World’s Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi Government?

Those business prospects are sizeable. India is Facebook’s largest market, with 328 million using the social media platform. Some 400 million Indians also use Facebook’s messaging service WhatsApp — a substantial chunk of the country’s estimated 503 million internet users. The platforms have become increasingly important in Indian politics; after the 2014 elections, Das published an op-ed arguing that Modi had won because of the way he leveraged Facebook in his campaign.

But Facebook and WhatsApp have also been used to spread hate speech and misinformation that have been blamed for helping to incite deadly attacks on minority groups amid rising communal tensions across India—despite the company’s efforts to crack down. In February, a video of a speech by BJP politician Kapil Mishra was uploaded to Facebook, in which he told police that unless they removed mostly-Muslim protesters occupying a road in Delhi, his supporters would do it themselves. Violent riots erupted within hours. (In that case, Facebook determined the video violated its rules on incitement to violence and removed it.)

WhatsApp, too, has been used with deadly intent in India — for example by cow vigilantes, Hindu mobs that have attacked Muslims and Dalits accused of killing cows, an animal sacred in Hinduism. At least 44 people, most of them Muslims, were killed by cow vigilantes between May 2015 and December 2018, according to Human Rights Watch. Many cow vigilante murders happen after rumors spread on WhatsApp, and videos of lynchings and beatings are often shared via the app too.

Read more: How the Pandemic is Reshaping India

TIME has learned that Facebook, in an effort to evaluate its role in spreading hate speech and incitements to violence, has commissioned an independent report on its impact on human rights in India. Work on the India audit, previously unreported, began before the Journal published its story. It is being conducted by the U.S. law firm Foley Hoag and will include interviews with senior Facebook staff and members of civil society in India, according to three people with knowledge of the matter and an email seen by TIME. (A similar report on Myanmar, released in 2018, detailed Facebook’s failings on hate speech that contributed to the Rohingya genocide there the previous year.) Facebook declined to confirm the report.

But activists, who have spent years monitoring and reporting hate speech by Hindu nationalists, tell TIME that they believe Facebook has been reluctant to police posts by members and supporters of the BJP because it doesn’t want to pick fights with the government that controls its largest market. The way the company is structured exacerbates the problem, analysts and former employees say, because the same people responsible for managing the relationship with the government also contribute to decisions on whether politicians should be punished for hate speech.

“A core problem at Facebook is that one policy org is responsible for both the rules of the platform and keeping governments happy,” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, tweeted in May. “Local policy heads are generally pulled from the ruling political party and are rarely drawn from disadvantaged ethnic groups, religious creeds or castes. This naturally bends decision-making towards the powerful.”

Some activists have grown so frustrated with the Facebook India policy team that they’ve begun to bypass it entirely in reporting hate speech. Following the call when Thukral walked out, Avaaz decided to begin reporting hate speech directly to Facebook’s company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. “We found Facebook India’s attitude utterly flippant, callous, uninterested,” says Zoyab, who has since left Avaaz. Another group that regularly reports hate speech against minorities on Facebook in India, which asked not to be named out of fear for the safety of its staffers, said it has been doing the same since 2018. In a statement, Facebook acknowledged some groups that regularly flag hate speech in India are in contact with Facebook headquarters, but said that did not change the criteria by which posts were judged to be against its rules.

Read more: Facebook Says It’s Removing More Hate Speech Than Ever Before. But There’s a Catch

The revelations in the Journal set off a political scandal in India, with opposition politicians calling for Facebook to be officially investigated for alleged favoritism toward Modi’s party. And the news caused strife within the company too: In an internal open letter, Facebook employees called on executives to denounce “anti-Muslim bigotry” and do more to ensure hate speech rules are applied consistently across the platform, Reuters reported. The letter alleges that there are no Muslim employees on the India policy team; in response to questions from TIME, Facebook said it was legally prohibited from collecting such data.

Facebook friends in high places

While it is common for companies to hire lobbyists with connections to political parties, activists say the history of staff on Facebook’s India policy team, as well as their incentive to keep the government happy, creates a conflict of interest when it comes to policing hate speech by politicians. Before joining Facebook, Thukral had worked in the past on behalf of the BJP. Despite this, he was involved in making decisions about how to deal with politicians’ posts that moderators flagged as violations of hate speech rules during the 2019 elections, the former employees tell TIME. His Facebook likes include a page called “I Support Narendra Modi.”

Former Facebook employees tell TIME they believe a key reason Thukral was hired in 2017 was because he was seen as close to the ruling party. In 2013, during the BJP’s eventually successful campaign to win national power at the 2014 elections, Thukral worked with senior party officials to help run a pro-BJP website and Facebook page. The site, called Mera Bharosa (“My Trust” in Hindi) also hosted events, including a project aimed at getting students to sign up to vote, according to interviews with people involved and documents seen by TIME. A student who volunteered for a Mera Bharosa project told TIME he had no idea it was an operation run in coordination with the BJP, and that he believed he was working for a non-partisan voter registration campaign. According to the documents, this was a calculated strategy to hide the true intent of the organization. By early 2014, the site changed its name to “Modi Bharosa” (meaning “Modi Trust”) and began sharing more overtly pro-BJP content. It is not clear whether Thukral was still working with the site at that time.

In a statement to TIME, Facebook acknowledged Thukral had worked on behalf of Mera Bharosa, but denied his past work presented a conflict of interest because multiple people are involved in significant decisions about removing content. “We are aware that some of our employees have supported various campaigns in the past both in India and elsewhere in the world,” Facebook said as part of a statement issued to TIME in response to a detailed series of questions. “Our understanding is that Shivnath’s volunteering at the time focused on the themes of governance within India and are not related to the content questions you have raised.”

Now, Thukral has an even bigger job. In March 2020, he was promoted from his job at Facebook to become WhatsApp’s India public policy director. In the role, New Delhi tech policy experts tell TIME, one of Thukral’s key responsibilities is managing the company’s relationship with the Modi government. It’s a crucial job, because Facebook is trying to turn the messaging app into a digital payments processor — a lucrative idea potentially worth billions of dollars.

In April, Facebook announced it would pay $5.7 billion for a 10% stake in Reliance Jio, India’s biggest telecoms company, which is owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. On a call with investors in May, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke enthusiastically about the business opportunity. “With so many people in India engaging through WhatsApp, we just think this is going to be a huge opportunity for us to provide a better commerce experience for people, to help small businesses and the economy there, and to build a really big business ourselves over time,” he said, talking about plans to link WhatsApp Pay with Jio’s vast network of small businesses across India. “That’s why I think it really makes sense for us to invest deeply in India.”

Read more: How Whatsapp Is Fueling Fake News Ahead of India’s Elections

But WhatsApp’s future as a payments application in India depends on final approval from the national payments regulator, which is still pending. Facebook’s hopes for expansion in India have been quashed by a national regulator before, in 2016, when the country’s telecoms watchdog said Free Basics, Facebook’s plan to provide free Internet access for only some sites, including its own, violated net neutrality rules. One of Thukral’s priorities in his new role is ensuring that a similar problem doesn’t strike down Facebook’s big ambitions for WhatsApp Pay.

‘No foreign company in India wants to be in the government’s bad books’

While the regulator is technically independent, analysts say that Facebook’s new relationship with the wealthiest man in India will likely make it much easier to gain approval for WhatsApp Pay. “It would be easier now for Facebook to get that approval, with Ambani on its side,” says Neil Shah, vice president of Counterpoint Research, an industry analysis firm. And goodwill from the government itself is important too, analysts say. “No foreign company in India wants to be in the government’s bad books,” says James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj. “Facebook would very much like to have good relations with the government of India and is likely to think twice about doing things that will antagonize them.”

The Indian government has shown before it is not afraid to squash the dreams of foreign tech firms. In July, after a geopolitical spat with China, it banned dozens of Chinese apps including TikTok and WeChat. “There has been a creeping move toward a kind of digital protectionism in India,” Crabtree says. “So in the back of Facebook’s mind is the fact that the government could easily turn against foreign tech companies in general, and Facebook in particular, especially if they’re seen to be singling out major politicians.”

With hundreds of millions of users already in India, and hundreds of millions more who don’t have smartphones yet but might in the near future, Facebook has an incentive to avoid that possibility. “Facebook has said in the past that it has no business interest in allowing hate speech on its platform,” says Chinmayi Arun, a resident fellow at Yale Law School, who studies the regulation of tech platforms. “It’s evident from what’s going on in India that this is not entirely true.”

Facebook says it is working hard to combat hate speech. “We want to make it clear that we denounce hate in any form,” said Mohan, Facebook’s managing director in India, in his Aug. 21 blog post. “We have removed and will continue to remove content posted by public figures in India when it violates our Community Standards.”

But scrubbing hate speech remains a daunting challenge for Facebook. At an employee meeting in June, Zuckerberg highlighted Mishra’s February speech ahead of the Delhi riots, without naming him, as a clear example of a post that should be removed. The original video of Mishra’s speech was taken down shortly after it was uploaded. But another version of the video, with more than 5,600 views and a long list of supportive comments underneath, remained online for six months until TIME flagged it to Facebook in August.

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