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brotheralyosha · 3 years

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Rick Hasen isn't getting much sleep these days.

One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose.

To understand this fragile moment for American democracy, you could take a 30,000-foot view of a nation at the doorstep of a constitutional crisis, as Robert Kagan recently did for the Washington Post. Or you could simply look around you at what’s happening at the ground level, in broad daylight, visible to the naked eye, as Hasen has been doing. As he sees it, it’s time for us all to wake up.

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this — they range from the legal to the political, and are the subject of a major conference that took place Friday at the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, which he co-directs at UC Irvine. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus.

“I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act,” he says. “The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

If the same state and local election officials are in place in 2024 as in 2020 — many of them Republican — Hasen is confident they would be able to stand up to Trump’s pressure to disregard the vote count and declare him the winner. But Hasen isn’t confident they will be in place. Many election officials are fleeing and, he says, are “being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process.” (We got a taste of that this week, when Texas announced an “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties some eight-and-a-half hours after Trump publicly called for one despite no serious evidence of problems.)

Or consider how things might’ve played out in January if Congress’s makeup had been different. “What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House?” Hasen asks. “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

What realistically can be done to secure American democracy at this fragile moment? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Hasen this week to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation follows, condensed and edited for length and readability.

When we spoke 17 months ago, you outlined a “nightmare scenario” for the 2020 election: That the pandemic would disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans, voting processes would be overwhelmed by absentee ballots, Trump would declare victory based on early returns and then once the absentees were counted and Biden was the victor, he’d claim fraud. I get the sense that the nightmare now is much worse. How did 2020 alter the way that you think through all of this?

In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, “I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.” A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was “scared shitless” — the anchor badgered me into saying those words on cable TV. But I’m even more frightened now than in those past months because of the revelations that continue to come to light about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

In 2020, there was a massive shift to absentee balloting; Donald Trump did denigrate absentee balloting despite using it himself and despite having his own ballot harvested for the primary; he lost the election but claimed he actually won; he made hundreds of false statements calling the election results into question; he’s convinced millions of people that the election has been stolen from him, and he is continuing to not only push the lie that the election was stolen, but also to cause changes in both elected officials and election officials that will make it easier for him to potentially manipulate an election outcome unfairly next time. This is the danger of election subversion.

The reason I’m so scared is because you could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal. And I’m afraid that with all of these people being put in place… when you’ve got Josh Mandel in the Senate [from Ohio] and not Rob Portman, I’m really worried.

Let’s dig into that. Traditionally, we talk about voter suppression. But what you’re describing is this whole other thing — not suppression, but subversion. Can you walk through that difference?

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now.

Given that shift from suppression to subversion, do you think the purpose of claims of voter fraud changed during the Trump era?

Sure. In two books of mine, I argue that the main purpose of voter fraud arguments among Republicans was twofold: one was to fundraise and get the Republican base excited about Democrats stealing elections; the other was to delegitimize Democratic victories as somehow illegitimate.

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

#yup!!!!!#it seems very very possible that at least a few states will straight up change the election results in 2024 #like it's not a secret! the state republican parties are actively setting up the infrastructure to do this #kind of unreal that the democratic party isn't doing anything about it tbh!!!#us politics #politico #long post

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keenainthecity · 4 years

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Recovery is an Evolution: Our COVID 19 Recovery Must Include a Revolution to Demand Change for the Black Community

Red Cross workers during the Influenza Pandemic (”Spanish Flu”) of 1918. Picture from Canva 2020.

April 25, 2020

At some point, we have to learn from mistakes in history in order to evolve as a people. COVID-19 will need to be that revolutionary moment for Black America.

The most catastrophic pandemic in history was the Influenza Pandemic or “Spanish Flu” of 1918; it was unrelenting in that it killed an estimated fifty million people worldwide and 675,000 people in the US during a two year span. The response was questionable at best-- experts pinpoint the lack of scientific information about influenza, slow efforts to contain the illness, lack of a nationwide mandate to stay indoors, opening up cities before the disease was contained, the lack of data broken down into racial demographics and the layer of overt racism as the Red Cross refused to allow trained Black nurses to participate in recovery efforts at first as the biggest mistakes leaders should learn from to lead a country through a pandemic. Some of this should sound familiar in 2020. Even though significant shifts have been made scientifically, COVID-19 continues to echo many of the shortcomings of the political response to pandemics in regards to ignoring lessons from history and refusing to explore data arising from our most vulnerable populations: minorities, the elderly, those incarcerated and those who are homeless.

COVID killed my grandmother Rose. Born in March 1919 during the second wave of the 1918 pandemic, she died on April 16, a little over two weeks after she celebrated her 101st birthday in isolation in her apartment in a nursing village in Michigan. In my grief, I am continuously astonished that she was born during one historical health pandemic just to lose her life in the most deadly one since; I am also moved by the audacity of states with large Black populations that have Republican governors (GA, SC, TN, MO, MS, FL and TX) who plan to plow forward with "reopening" their states for business with no significant decreases in new cases or death rates. This irrational push to “re-open” in these states exposes to me the temerity of the privileged to risk the lives of Black populations to make a few dollars while they safely quarantine at home with their families--I halfway believe there are more sinister motives behind these specific states opening, but I will spare you my conspiracy theories against the Black race.

I must admit that I am very angry about my Grammy’s very unexpected and abrupt passing. I am angry that the unprecedented numbers of deaths occurring in nursing homes--on April 17 the NY Times reported the death toll was at 7,000-- has not yielded any specific or swift precautions nursing homes should take at this time. The story of the NJ nursing home where seventeen bodies were discovered brought to the forefront what we have known all along-- that nursing homes have been plagued with lack of protective equipment and shortages of workers. The same can be said about information coming from prisons and within homeless populations--COVID-19 is literally exposing how unfair the care system is in this country for our most vulnerable--those not in position to care for themselves. I am also bothered that even with the calls for data to be improved in cities with Black populations, this data is still sparse.

It is clear that we have not used history to our advantage to fight these systemic ills in our society. It is also clear that the privileged and the rich are still the only voices being heard while our communities deal with trauma spreading rapidly with no word on how it will be dealt with. This is problematic. It is time we used history to navigate the present and force some different outcomes.

My understanding of racial inequities throughout history was developed by how keen of a woman my grandmother had been-- as a Black woman who lived to remember the Great Depression, participated in the Great Migration, lived in both the South and the North during the fight for civil rights and, lived when voter disenfranchisement, redlining and gerrymandering was the law-- she ensured consistent application of what she learned throughout history to defy the odds of racism for herself and her family. She had the foresight to understand how money works by acquiring equity and using her credit as a means towards wealth. She understood how inheritance clears a path towards wealth in this country and made it a priority to leave this for her family. She remembered the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and refused to receive vaccinations, instead imploring her family to respect how diseases spread and to stay away from her when ill. My grandmother paid for her funeral in 2008-- I remember how upset I was at the eerie foreshadow of her death, but I see now that she was attempting to bar our family from the struggle to bury their loved ones. The last time I saw her on February 23, she talked to me about how proud she was that she could afford to pay professionals to care for her as so many families struggle with the affordability of care for their elderly parents. She was by far the most proactive person I have ever known--history was not lost upon her, and I am thankful that she was adamant that we never forget the ways this country works so hard to disenfranchise us.

And, while my family has lost our matriarch, it doesn’t speak to the friends, friends of friends, scores of friends' grandparents, parents and other close family members that have been lost to this epidemic with long lasting hurt being the reality for so many Black families in America especially with “re-opening” businesses in Black areas on the horizon. How are we reopening and many of us cannot even attend funerals of our loved ones? Our communities stand to be ravished by this plague in a more deadly wave of death in coming months and we haven't even healed from the first wave. This begs the question--what is the Black community going to do in light of what we know from history and what outcomes will we fight for?

Beyond getting out the information to our people about doubling down on social distancing in states “re-opening”, who is talking about mental health? The inability to bury loved ones in traditional funerals, losing multiple family members at one time, the absence of proper farewells or even hugs, healthy cries, and goodbyes by the entire family has the potential to explode instances of depression, anxiety, and other disastrous effects within our communities. What are we doing to combat this? What are we demanding from those we elected to represent our interests?

Now is the time that we create an agenda of action to make sure that Black people collectively think through ways to evolve and never repeat the effects of this pandemic again. Examples of what this could look like?

Black mental health professionals beginning free healing circles virtually or doing more videos on helpful ideas for pushing through the six stages of grief

Blacks challenging our local governments to track demographic data very thoroughly so we can learn why our communities suffered so heavily and enforce supplies are earmarked for the communities hardest hit

Blacks vocally pressing for task forces (such as what is being developed in Michigan) that specifically collect data and use it to devise recovery efforts lead by diverse health and economics experts

Blacks demanding politicians widen access to mental health professionals locally through grants for free sessions on grief and coping

Blacks demand equitable support specifically for health facilities, nursing homes and prisons with more humane supports for those who are homeless

Blacks demanding an extension on the 2020 census in order to collect more information prior to redistricting taking place

And one note on this election: if Joe Biden cannot speak out against the reopening of places with high Black populations who delivered the nomination to him handily, we must broach this topic with him as he cannot be president without Black people voting in large numbers. The reality is that a huge chunk of two generations of Blacks stand to be wiped out in this pandemic which cripples voting in the fall as those two generations were our biggest voting populace; if he plans to win, he’d better be vocal about this in republican states who are strategically risking Black lives. We have to raise our voices now to demand we get something specifically for us in exchange for our votes. It is now or never.

The effects of this pandemic will not only change the shape of our families, but extends far into our economy and political future. Therefore, those of us who know better must demand better. We cannot sit back and accept how the government and the privileged attempt to define this epidemic for us. Instead, we must work to demand an evolution within so many structures of this country to begin needed change, including attention to the unimaginable and heartbreaking grief many, many Black families are experiencing. We must educate our people that recovery is an evolution--for ourselves, for our communities and for this country. There will be no evolution from this pandemic without revolution. It is time that the revolution be televised by raising our voices and demanding action.

#COVID19 #keenainthecity Blackresistance

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queen-mabs-revenge · 5 years

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Tom Perez’s stunt with the absolute fucking ghouls he’s named to the DNC staff for the convention this year is p much a line in the sand for me. The establishment DNC just declared war on the progressive wing of the party from within the actual power structure, and they’re going to stop at nothing to get to a brokered convention so they can install their chosen chump. I am 100% expecting voter suppression tactics the likes of which would make Republicans blush and 2016 look like a masterclass in honesty.

Obv the first priority is to get 51%+ of pledged delegates with such overwhelming numbers that any corruption would be too damaging for them to get away with, but in case they’re just flagrant, there has got to be an organized plan for any possibility.

Fuck vote-blue-no-matter-who if it’s just the same disgusting, corrupt disenfranchisement that that unity tactic supposedly protects us from. What the fuck does that line even offer the voter if it just means the popular vote being violently denied and a corporate stooge put forward as nominee to protect the halls of capitalist power -- just the same as the Republican party?

Loyalty is a fucking two way street.

#i'm livid #not surprised but livid at the sheer audacity

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Why Are Democrats And Republicans So Divided

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-are-democrats-and-republicans-so-divided/

Why Are Democrats And Republicans So Divided

Us Election Shows Perilous Divide Between Republicans And Democrats: Experts

The fascinating psychology behind why we’re so divided right now.

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Presidential elections can be revealing moments that convey the wishes of the American people to the next wave of elected officials. So far, the big reveal in the contest between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden is the extent of the cavernous divide between Republican and Democratic America, one that defines the nation, no matter which candidate ultimately wins.

Voters from both parties turned out in droves to pick the next president, but as they did so, they found little agreement about what that president should do. Democrats and Republicans prioritized different issues, lived in different communities and even voted on different kinds of ballots.

Read more: Trump makes baseless allegations over U.S. election, prompting Republican rebukes

Whoever emerges as the winner, that division ensures that the next president will face significant gridlock in Congress, skepticism about the integrity of the vote and an agitated electorate increasingly divided by race, education and geography. Even the vote count itself threatens to further split Americans.

Two days after polls closed, neither Trump nor Biden has earned;the 270 electoral votes;needed to win the presidency. The Republican incumbent is encouraging his supporters to protest outside counting locations still sorting through mail ballots the method of voting preferred by many Democrats while pursuing an aggressive;legal strategy;that could lead to further delays.

America’s Political Divide Intensified During Trump’s First Year As President

Republicans and Democrats have grown further apart in their political views during the first year of the administration, the Pew Research Center finds.

Disagreement among Republican and Democratic voters on a range of political issues has risen sharply in recent years, a political divide that intensified during the first year of President Trumps administration, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

The divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political valueson government, race, immigration, national security, environmental protection, and other areasreached record levels during Barack Obamas presidency, Pews report states. In Donald Trumps first year as president, these gaps have grown even larger.

Political Parties: What Is Divided Government

In a rare instance of united rather than divided government, members of both major political parties put aside partisan differences to show support for those injured at the Republican party practice session earlier in the week. Republicans and Democrats came together. Not just for a baseball game. We came together to express our gratitude to law enforcement, show our support for those who were injured, and also to unite as a nation in the face of such tragedy, wrote Speaker Paul Ryan about the 2017 Congressional Baseball Game on June 16, 2017. He is seen in this photo thanking Special Agent Crystal Griner of the Capitol Police.

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The 2016 Rebellion Is Ongoing

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, the leaders of the Democratic party favored Hillary Clinton and Republican leaders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush.

They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would shake things up or make the system work again or stop the corruption or end the rigging.

In the following year, Sanders a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasnt even a Democrat until the primaries came within a whisker of beating Clinton in Iowa, routed her in New Hampshire, and ended up with 46% of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality-TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican party and who lied compulsively about everything won the primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America .

Something very big had happened, and it wasnt due to Sanders magnetism or Trumps likability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They prefer to attribute Trumps rise solely to racism.

Television And The Internet

A 2013 review concluded that there is no firm evidence that media institutions are contributing to the polarization of average Americans. No evidence supports the idea that longstanding news outlets are becoming increasingly partisan. Analyses confirm that the tone of evening news broadcasts remained unchanged from 1968 to 1996: largely centrist, with a small but constant bias towards Democratic Party positions. However, more partisan media pockets have emerged in blogs, talk radio, websites, and cable news channels, which are much more likely to use insulting language, mockery, and extremely dramatic reactions, collectively referred to as “outrage”. People who have strongly partisan viewpoints are more likely to watch partisan news.

Furthermore, a 2018 study highlights that there is no correlation between increased media and Internet consumption and increased political polarization. The data confirms a larger increase in polarization among individuals over 65 compared to those aged 18â39, revealing that Internet consumption is only a small factor in calculating the cause of political polarization.

Also Check: How Do Republicans Really Feel About Trump

Healing The Political Divide

How did we become such a divided nation, and how can psychologists help us bridge the gap?

Vol. 52 No. 1

Monitor on Psychology52

With votes now tallied, and in some cases, electoral outcomes having been determined by extremely narrow margins and marked by legal challenges, there is no doubt that the political divide in the United States is a central trait of the country. And as this divide seems likely to continue to grow, for many of us it feels uncrossable. Yet psychological science suggests that it is both possible and imperative for members of our society to find common ground.

Why We Should Not Tolerate Any Voting Errors

Nonetheless, the refrain seems to run that any problems seen in 2020 would not have changed the outcome of the election. First, that is not necessarily true.

Second, so what? Every fraudulent and illegal vote disenfranchises a legal voter, and just as we as a country would not tolerate the disenfranchisement of any voters by locking the ballot box to them, we should not tolerate the disenfranchisement of any legal voter by acquiescing to the stuffing of the ballot box by a non-dispositive number of voters.

Third and most importantly, our country is too divided to survive unless both the right and the left trust the outcome of the election. Here, we are not merely talking about the presidency. Since Republicans victory in 1994 gaining control of the House for the first time in 40 years, a slim margin has separated the majority and minority parties in both the House and the Senate.

Further, with enough individual House and Senate races to flip the majority having been by narrow margins of victory, confidence in election results is imperative. Such trust in election results proves especially important given the deep divide on not just matters of policy and priority, but core American values.

Elections are too tight and the populace too divided for close enough for government work to cut it anymore. The American voting system must be reformed to ensure security, transparency, replicability, and election officials uniform compliance with state election law.

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The Big Lie Claim Is A Dodge

Before these filings, Biden had attacked Georgias voting-integrity law as Jim Crow in the 21st century. While Democrats current focus is Georgia, the talking-point of the party is that voting rights are under attack by GOP-controlled states after Republicans seized on former President Donald Trumps false claim of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election as a pretext for passing new legislation curtailing ballot access.

Biden later repeated the Jim Crow canard in pushing H.R. 1, the so-called For the People Act, which could gut many mainstream state statutes designed to ensure voting integrity, such as voter ID laws. In a speech in Philadelphia earlier this month, after branding state election-integrity laws a 21st-century Jim Crow assault, the president sought to connect Trumps attacks on the validity of the 2020 electioncalling it both the Big Lie and the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil Warthe January 6, 2021 storming of the capitol, and the supposed imperative for passage of H.R. 1.

There is a dangerous confluence of factors at play here that has permeated the press coverage of election-related matters. By coloring all criticism of the 2020 election as part of The Big Lie, the left allows itself to ignore evidence of actual fraud, widespread illegal voting, violations of the Electors Clause, and, frankly, just plain incompetence.

From Republicans To Democrats: America Is Deeply Divided

Schumer: Republicans Are ‘So Divided’ They Cannot Come Up With A Coronavirus Plan | MSNBC

The past week of news has shown just how entrenched the state of polarization is in the United States today

The early 20th-century American entertainer and social commentator Will Rogers once observed: Im not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. Rarely has that aphorism seemed as appropriate as in the wake of this weeks botched Iowa Democratic caucuses.

I stayed up half the night waiting for the Iowa election results, only to find that none would be forthcoming, largely on account of a faulty app. With the results still trickling in days after they should have been tabulated, it appears that Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders are in a virtual dead heat for the lead, with Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar rounding out the second tier.

The reception of Trumps address illustrated the almost complete polarization that prevails in America today. Republicans considered the address a thoroughly appropriate perfect, one might say extended boast about the economic success under his watch. Democrats considered it a divisive, mean-spirited barrage of lies and slander. By the same token, your partisan affiliation will probably determine whether you thought Pelosis tearing Trumps speech text apart was an outrageous and disrespectful breach of decorum or a dissent against demagoguery.

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Cpac And The Broader Republican Party Agree: Its Trumps Party For Now

Its part of our long era of partisan stalemate. The question, of course, is how much longer can this last? And is there any resolution in sight?

History holds, at best, a half lesson here. This current period of partisan stalemate stands out in a few respects when we consider Americas long history with partisan conflict. For starters, the period we find ourselves in now is unique in that the national partisan balance of power is extremely close , even as most states and most voters are either solidly Democratic or Republican. Whats more, the national outcome often hinges on just a few swing states and districts. This period is also unique in the extent to which America is divided. Hatred toward the other party drives our politics. This produces a deeply polarizing and highly destructive form of partisan trench warfare that threatens to erode the very legitimacy of American democracy.

Consider just a few record-setting patterns in the last several elections:

Nine presidential elections in a row without either party experiencing a landslide , eclipsing the previous record of seven in a row .

Seven presidential elections in a row where fewer than a quarter of states changed parties, well eclipsing the previous record of three in a row.

And now the question is, how do we get out of this current stalemate? Once again, we can turn to the hyper-partisanship of the Gilded Age for clues.

Why Democrats Massive Effort To Suppress Election Concerns Is Dangerous

Americans should see 2020 and the January 6 riots as a wake-up call to the future our nation faces should election integrity not be restored.

By: The Federalist, January 35, 2021:

This man was elected president of the United States of America, Joe Biden of Al Gore during a 2013 campaign event when introducing George W. Bushs Democrat opponent.

Theres no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didnt actually win the election in 2016, former President Jimmy Carter proclaimed during a 2019 panel discussion sponsored by his nonprofit organization.

He knows hes an illegitimate president, Hillary Clinton seethed when asked about Donald Trump during a CBS interview nearly two years ago, later telling the audience the election was stolen from her.

Rush thought we won, and so do I, Trump said in an interview with Fox News following radio personality Rush Limbaughs death in February 2021, later the contest the fraudulent presidential election of 2020.

Three different presidential elections and four different presidential candidates all claimed the man inaugurated commander-in-chief stole the election. Yet while tolerating claims that Clinton and Gore actually won the White House, the corrupt media immediately co-opted the Nazi comparison Joe Biden deployed in response to Trumps claims of fraud, branding his charges The Big Lie.

Also Check: What Republicans Are Voting Against Trump

Why America Should Suddenly Prepare For A Billion

The problem is that previous models fail to take in proper empirical data and do not account for voters picking candidates that are good enough without obsessing over details. Furthermore, they do not take into account misinformation, missing information, decision fatigue and other things that can stand in the way of an optimal decision.

Yang and her team,;which includes Daniel Abrams, Associate Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University, Adilson Motter, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Physics at Northwestern University, and Georgia Kernell, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Communication and Political Science at UCLA,;created a model that works a little differently. They took all of those factors into account along with 150 years-worth of U.S. Congressional voting data from the American Nation Election Study. They then compiled all of this information using complex mathematical formulas and came out with something that explains why politicians are becoming more polarized.

How it Works

First, we must understand the shape of the American political system and how parties shape themselves to function within it. The graphic below sheds some light on this subject.

Kander10 Designs

With this information and a lot more the model created by Yang and her team have been able to predict the movement of the parties away from the center.

KAnder10 Designs

My two cents

Why Democrats Share The Blame For The Rise Of Donald Trump

I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause

An impeached president who is up for re-election will this week deliver a State of the Union address to the most divided union in living memory.

But why are we so divided? Were not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. Were not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but weve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?

Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists, keeping almost everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division.

But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.

In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

Also Check: Do Republicans Support The Death Penalty

What Is Political Polarization And Is The United States Becoming More Polarized

The United States has two main political parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. In the early 1990s, the two parties had more similar policy agendas than they do today. Over the last 25 years, the Democratic Party has moved more to the left, while the Republican Party has moved more to the right.1

Building Back Better: Bipartisanship In A Divided Nation Is An Attractive Mirage

With Donald Trump now largely absent from the national stage, there has been greater talk of the potential for a return to;bipartisanship;between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. As part of our;Building Back Better;series,;David T. Smith;writes that while there has been a brief revival of;bipartisanship;in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in partisan polarization over the last three decades means that cooperation in Congress on;anything;else is very unlikely.

Joe Biden;repeatedly;promised;a return to;bipartisanship;in his 2020;presidential election;campaign. Claiming decades of experience in negotiating with his Republican opponents;in the US Senate, Biden appealed to;people;exhausted;by political polarisation.;He urged Republicans;along with other Americans;to reject Trumps re-election;and return to;political normality, where civility reigns and cooperation is possible.

But polarisation;in;the Trump era wasnt an anomaly. It was a continuation of trends that have been visible for decades, and;it;wont be reversed by;Trumps exit from the White House.;Polarisation is;even;worse;in Congress than outside it, and;with the;smallest Congressional majorities now operating;since the 1930s, there;is;acute;pressure on both sides not to break ranks.

Figure 1 ;Liberal-conservative partisan polarization by chamber

Source:;Voteview;

P20210223AS-0017 by;The White House;is United States Government Work

Shortened URL for this post:;

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thinkveganworld · 7 years

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This is long, but I thought I’d post just on the outside chance anybody might find it worth reading. It’s part three of a series of articles I wrote years ago, and it includes information on modern day politicians’ use of political propaganda. I might post the other parts later.

Goebbels and mass mind control: Part Three

How PR opinion-shapers undermine the people's political power

In parts one and two, we compared the methods of Hitler's propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, with the PR techniques of today's corporate spin doctors. We also looked at the ways in which corporate PR spin works against the public interest regarding health care and the environment. Now we'll explore the ways that corporate propaganda undermines the political power of ordinary citizens.

Journalist Frank Rich wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece that he felt he was living through a Twilight Zone episode when he read the Palm Beach Post's scoop saying that Palm Beach's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore "about 6,600 votes, more than 10 times what he needed to overcome George W. Bush's slim lead in Florida." Rich said the reason it felt as if he had entered the Twilight Zone, was because, beyond Palm Beach, he could find no sign such a thing had happened.

"I turned on my TV," writes Rich, "and had to search to find a mention of the Post's story. It might as well have been a hallucination."

In an article entitled "The Invisible People," (The Progressive, March 2001) June Jordan writes about Election 2000's disenfranchised African-American voters and the corporate-owned news media's neglect of the story. Jordan, a noted author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, says, "We have moved from The Invisible Man to The Invisible People. It's a raging and a sorrow at the terrible meaning of that discount - for us, and for democracy itself."

The corporate-owned news media "invents reality," as author and educator Michael Parenti has said, by instructing the American people on which news stories are real, and which facts to ignore. Parenti has also written (Land of Idols, St. Martin's Press, 1994) that our political system can be seen in one of three ways:

1. "A conservative celebration of the wonders of our free-market society, coupled with an insistence that capitalism would be still more wonderful were it not for meddlesome government regulations and the demands of undeserving, low-income people who feed out of the public trough."

2. A liberal complaint about "aberrant problems that remain in an otherwise basically good System."

3. A radical analysis "that sees ecological crisis, military interventions, the national security State, homelessness, poverty, an inequitable tax system, and undemocratic social institutions, such as the corporate-owned media, not as irrational outcomes of a basically rational system, but as rational results of a system whose central goal is the accumulation of wealth and power for the few."

Parenti adds that if you take the radical analysis perspective, you "cross an invisible line and will be labeled in mainstream circles a 'conspiracy theorist.'" He notes that Abraham Lincoln might today be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, because Lincoln once observed in a speech, "These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people."

However, Parenti adds that the corporation/ruling class's mode of operation is systemic and institutional rather than conspiratorial. The fact that corporate domination is built into our existing political system, and into many of our institutions, makes it a more daunting problem than a grand and aberrant conspiracy might be.

In a brilliant article for Online Journal (4/24/01), Scott Morschhauser took up the same issue, pointing out that the label "conspiracy theory' is used by those defending corporate interests the same way they use the label 'communist.' If you are successful at pinning a person or idea with a negative label, then the public will ignore the message. It doesn't matter whether or not the label fits. The facts don't matter. All that you have to do is accuse."

When corporate PR teams are able to confuse the public by spinning citizen dissenters as "conspiracy theorists" or as "wacko, tree-hugging environmentalists" or as "extremist fringe," they are able to marginalize activists and dilute their political effectiveness. Journalist Norman Solomon once suggested that rather than succumbing to media manipulation, we can "tune up our personal and collective 'radar screens' to track unidentified flying propaganda."

In False Hope, (Common Courage Press, 1994) Solomon also discusses the subject of public confusion. He writes about the various ways in which corporate PR spin and media "illusion-making" confuse the public. Solomon quotes Anne Wilson Schaef on the results of this kind of confusion:

"First, it keeps us powerless and controllable. No one is more controllable than a confused person; no society is more controllable than a confused society. Politicians know this better than anyone, and that is why they use innuendo, veiled references, and out-and-out lies instead of speaking clearly and truthfully.

"Second, it keeps us ignorant. Professionals give their clients confusing information cloaked in intimidating language that lay-people cannot understand. They preserve their one-up status while preventing us from learning about our own bodies, our legal rights, and our psychology.

"Third, it keeps us from taking responsibility for our own lives. No one expects confused people to own up to the things they think, say, or do . . Fourth, it keeps us busy. When we must spend all our time and energy trying to figure out what is going on, we have none left over for reflecting on the system, challenging it, or exploring alternatives to it."

A confused person will stay stuck within the corporate-dominated system, because creating new options requires mental clarity. Confusion also causes numbness and political passivity.

Frank Rich's "Twilight Zone" experience of the media's ignoring the butterfly ballot story, and June Jordan's sense that African-Americans have become invisible, are normal, healthy responses to the corporate media's lying about reality. When the people see one reality with their own eyes, and simultaneously the corporate media denies that reality, the effect is gas-lighting.

People need truthfulness about politics in order to operate powerfully in the world. Truth is one of psychologist Abraham Maslow's "meta-needs." It has always been a high priority for the world's spiritual and philosophical thinkers. Factual information is a necessary foundation in order for ordinary Americans to set priorities for political action and organize accordingly.

A high priority concern might be weighing corporate interests against the public interest. Another priority might be clearly deciding what our values are. Corporate spokespeople sometimes try to blur the distinction between, for example, good-versus-harmful effects on the environment, or good-versus-harmful health care proposals.

Some corporate spokespeople claim terms such as "good" or "truth" or "justice" can only be vague, misleading "weasel words," despite the fact that philosophers from Aristotle, to the various Enlightenment-era philosophers, to today's best political thinkers have used such terms freely, and have helped clarify their meaning.

For example, the dialogues of Plato explore the meaning of the word "justice." Harvard Professor John Rawls has said, "A just basic structure will be one which produces a proper distribution of prospects of obtaining primary goods, such as income and health care."

How do we define "good" or "harmful" for purposes of the subject at hand? Let's just play with possible working definitions, for the sake of argument. Those options which are "good" could be defined as options that promote health, safety and well-being for the largest number of people, in a kind, egalitarian manner, without discrimination against race, sexual orientation, religion or lack of religion.

Those options which are "harmful" might be defined as ones that destroy health, safety and well-being for large numbers of people in order that corporations can increase their profits, without regard for kindness, egalitarianism, and with (at times) discrimination based on race (as during the Florida election debacle, racial profiling, etc.), sexual orientation, religion or lack of religion.

Are there gray areas within those definitions? Yes. Are there complexities, and is there room for debate? Of course. However, the lines between good and harmful; right and wrong; public health and public detriment are not as blurry as many corporate spokespeople would have us think . . . or, more precisely, would "confuse" us to think.

Thomas Jefferson said repeatedly that democracy could work only if the electorate were "fully informed." He said, "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome direction, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

Thomas Paine, in "The Rights of Man," urged "education for one million and thirty thousand children," saying that "the poor laws, those instruments of civil torture will be superceded" by an informed public given a modicum of "comfortable provision" by government.

Paine also wrote that as a result of a better informed and educated public, and of government's providing some assistance for the poor, "The hearts of the humane will not be shocked by ragged and hungry children, and persons of seventy and eighty years of age begging for bread. The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to breathe their last . . . The poor as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults will cease."

Some media propagandists such as Rush Limbaugh and his many clones often say, in their usual Orwellian style, that government assistance for the poor actually hurts the poor. Never mind that the Limbaugh types also generally claim to be of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's interesting to contrast their "screw-the-poor" comments with those attributed to Christ, such as, "What you do for the least of these, you do for me," or with a typical Hebrew proverb, such as, "When a needy man stands at your door, God stands at his side." And, of course, to corporate mouthpieces such as Limbaugh, agnostic or "pagan" humanists (such as Thomas Paine) who might suggest assisting the poor don't count at all.

Former radio talk show host, Neal Boortz, has said, "That bum sitting on a heating grate, smelling like a wharf, is there by choice. He is there because of the sum total of the choices he has made in his life." ("The Terrible Truth About Liberals," Longstreet Press, 1998.) Boortz implies people are never poor due to being laid off from a job by a corporation that moved offshore in order to pay slave wages; or due to sudden overwhelming medical bills; or, least of all, due to flaws within the corporate-dominated system itself.

Boortz also says this country is a republic rather than a democracy. He claims that the view that this country is meant to be a democracy is an "insidious idea planted by the Left, by liberals anxious to expand the role of government and their own power." Limbaugh often says the same about democracy, and such antidemocratic views have been popular among many right-wing groups in recent years, just they were in Nazi Germany.

The fact is, America is not merely a republic, but a democratic republic. This country has a strong democratic lineage. The above comments by Jefferson and Paine have to do with enhancing American democracy. Activists who worked toward civil rights, women's rights, labor rights and many other social causes, have helped strengthen democracy within the nation.

In parts one and two, we showed that Hitler and his propagandist, Goebbels, worked to dismantle democracy. They accomplished their goal in part by using PR spin, in order to confuse the people and convince them that democracy wasn't good for them. Through propaganda, Goebbels created a national "Twilight Zone," making the Jewish people invisible, marginalizing dissenters and rendering potential activists powerless.

Somehow, it has turned out that corporate America's PR spin has also taken aim against democracy, confused the people, created a national "Twilight Zone," made ordinary Americans (especially Jewish and African-Americans) invisible, marginalized dissenters and rendered potential activists powerless.

Ordinary Americans have been rendered at least so powerless that we have not yet found a way to persuade our elected representatives to enforce laws that would curb corporate excesses when it comes to polluting the environment; to create legislation that would give this country affordable pharmaceutical drugs or a good health care system; or to bring back the Fairness Doctrine or create similar new legislation, so that our nation's news media is not entirely corporate-controlled.

In a Showtime movie aired this week, Varian's War, the lead character (played by William Hurt) helped bring around 2,000 artists and intellectuals to America, to escape the Nazi Holocaust. A character played by the actor Alan Arkin described the Nazis as "destroying everything they do not understand, which is everything that makes life beautiful and sweet and pure."

Corporate polluters, health care opponents, and illusion-makers, probably don't understand that they are contributing to the destruction of (almost) everything that makes life beautiful, sweet and pure. However, it is up to ordinary Americans with clear vision to toss a little light on the subject. In our proposed working definition of "good," working to preserve the beautiful, sweet and pure things in life has to figure in somewhere. It is a better way to spend a life than screwing the poor, plundering the earth and grubbing for corporate profit.

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Last month, during a CNN town hall featuring several Democratic candidates, Sen. Bernie Sanders helped reignite a national conversation when he said people in prison should have the right to vote. It’s a controversial question, even within the Democratic Party. At the same town hall, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said that he does not support extending voting rights to the incarcerated, drawing applause from the largely Democratic audience.

Despite the issue’s recent rise to prominence, the question of whether and when felons should be allowed to vote has been percolating at the state level for a while now, as it overlaps with a broader progressive voting-rights agenda, criminal justice reform efforts, and pushes for racial equality (felon disenfranchisement disproportionately affects black Americans). A handful of states have recently restored certain felons’ right to vote, most notably Florida, where the passage of Amendment 4 in the 2018 midterm elections restored voting rights to an estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million people.1 But how big an impact would restoring the vote to felons really have, and how much support is there for it?

To answer that question, first we need to take a step back and get a better sense of what voting rights felons are granted at the state level. Each state has different rules for whether felons are allowed to vote, and those rules vary widely. Only two states allow all felons, even those who are currently incarcerated, to vote: Maine and Vermont. Fourteen states, plus the District of Columbia, bar prisoners from voting but automatically restore their right to vote when they are released. Twenty-two states restore felons’ right to vote only after they complete their full sentences, including prison and parole; four of those states allow people on probation to vote, while the other 18 do not. Ten of the remaining 12 states permanently disenfranchise some felons, while Iowa and Kentucky do not restore voting rights to any felons except on a case-by-case basis.2 But even within these categories there are differences: For example, some states treat violent offenders (murderers and sex offenders, for example) differently from nonviolent ones. So felon re-enfranchisement proposals could take many forms, but the more sweeping a proposal is, the less popular it tends to be.

The farthest-left position — Sanders’s — is to follow in the footsteps of Maine and Vermont by never stripping felons of their voting rights to begin with. Adopting that policy nationwide would have a bigger electoral impact than other ideas that have been floated over the years. A 2016 study by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform group that opposes felon disenfranchisement, estimated that 6.1 million felons (including 2.2 million African Americans) were disenfranchised nationwide,3 although that research was done before Florida’s re-enfranchisement amendment passed last year. (A few other states have also made changes that put a smaller number of felons back on the rolls in the intervening years.) But the idea of allowing all felons to vote does not have much public support. In a March 2018 poll for HuffPost, YouGov found that 24 percent of U.S. adults supported restoring felons’ voting rights while they are in prison and 58 percent opposed it, including 41 percent who were “strongly” opposed. And a Quinnipiac poll conducted just last week found that only 31 percent of registered voters support allowing prisoners to vote — 65 percent were opposed.

As of now, at least, full re-enfranchisement doesn’t seem like a winning issue for Democrats. For example, President Trump’s re-election campaign attacked Sanders for his stance in the days after the town hall, calling it “deeply offensive” and pointing out it would allow domestic terrorists like the surviving Boston Marathon bomber to vote. Even among Democrats, the idea is controversial. The HuffPost/YouGov poll found that Democrats opposed Sanders’s position 46 percent to 38 percent; Quinnipiac found that Democratic voters were about evenly divided on the issue. Bills to eliminate felony disenfranchisement failed to pass the legislature this year in both New Mexico and Hawaii, where Democrats have full control of state government. And no other Democratic presidential candidate has yet joined Sanders in calling for all prisoners to be allowed to vote.

But the public is more likely to support restoring the right to vote for felons who have been released from prison, even if they are on probation or parole — 38 percent of adults supported the idea in the HuffPost/YouGov poll, while 44 percent were opposed. According to that Sentencing Project study, if a measure like that had passed in 2016, it would have restored the right to vote to all but 1.4 million of the people who were disenfranchised at the time.

Although the public at large is narrowly opposed to letting people on probation or parole vote, the HuffPost/YouGov poll did indicate that the idea was a fairly mainstream position among Democrats (who supported it 58 percent to 30 percent). That might explain why there has been some momentum on this front in Democratic-controlled legislatures this year. Both chambers in Colorado have passed a bill to allow parolees to vote (Colorado already allows people on probation to vote), and if Gov. Jared Polis signs it, it will grant the vote to an estimated 10,000 more people. A similar bill has passed the Nevada Assembly, and Connecticut is considering a bill that could enfranchise 4,600 parolees and thousands more people facing trial.

But the easiest proposal to pass might be one that simply returns the ballot to felons after they have completed all parts of their sentence, as a plurality of states currently do. (Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have all said they’d support voting rights for people who’ve been released from prison, though it’s unclear if that includes parolees and people on probation.) According to the Sentencing Project report, that would have re-enfranchised about 3.1 million people in 2016. However, at the time, Florida alone accounted for nearly half of all felons who had completed their sentence but still could not vote, according to the report, and it has since restored voting rights to many of those people. To get a rough idea of how many people might be eligible to have their voting rights restored if this kind of bill passed, we subtracted state-by-state estimates of how many people have been re-enfranchised in the last three years from the Sentencing Project’s 2016 estimate and got a ballpark figure of about 2 million.4 And crucially, it is downright popular as a policy: 63 percent of adults told HuffPost/YouGov that they supported restoring the vote to felons who had completed their sentences. Just 20 percent were opposed.

That support cuts across all demographic groups, too — men and women, whites and nonwhites, young and old voters, Democrats and Republicans all favor it.5 Indeed, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, announced earlier this year that restoring the vote to people who have completed their sentences was one of her top priorities. The state House overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that would have achieved her goal, but it died in committee in the state Senate. But a February poll, conducted by Selzer & Co. for the Des Moines Register, found that 64 percent of Iowa adults favored Reynolds’s proposal and only 29 percent opposed it. And Florida’s Amendment 4, which re-enfranchised people who had served their full sentences, passed with 65 percent of the vote.

Crucially, though, that Florida amendment carved out an exception for those convicted of murder or felony sexual offenses. In that HuffPost/YouGov poll, people who said they supported the restoration of felon voting rights were split about evenly between believing rights should be restored to all felons and believing they should only be restored to people convicted of nonviolent felonies, so limitations like these probably do make the idea a safer political proposition. Perhaps not coincidentally, that seems to be where lots of 2020 presidential contenders have landed too — neatly avoiding the threat that their opponents will run attack ads saying they would restore rights for the imprisoned Boston Marathon bomber. In the aftermath of Sanders’s proclamation, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro said they were willing to grant prisoners the right to vote, but only those who had been convicted of nonviolent crimes. Sen. Kamala Harris said, “Do I think that people who commit murder, people who are terrorists, should be deprived of their rights? Yeah, I do.” And Rep. Eric Swalwell believes that “some people, like the Boston Marathon bombers, those individuals should never vote in America again.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nathaniel Rakich

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dustinczarny · 4 years

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Sunday Thoughts: The Federal Government needs to fund Elections to protect voters this fall.

The Covid-19 crisis has had a detrimental effect on just about every aspect of our society. Its insidious and prevalent nature has changed how we interact with each other in every facet of life. This is especially true in our most basic tenant of our Democracy, the right to vote. Election Boards, inspectors, campaigns, are trying to ensure we can still exercise the franchise while providing a safe environment for voters and poll workers. The voice from Boards of Elections throughout New York State and the country is clear, we need help and financial support.

The current crisis has had unique and unforeseen costs to our current operations. The public’s rightful demand for safe and accessible absentee voting does not come without a cost. Participation in absentee voting has increased dramatically for the June primary. Typically Onondaga County could expect an average of 3 -5k absentee ballots and for the June primary we received over 24k absentee ballots. There is no reason to believe the fall general election won’t see a similar increase demand, however instead of 26k absentees we could see well over 100k absentees.

This comes with an increase costs for the boards. Increases in printing, postage, are a given, however, providing funds to allow for voters to participate in this process with prepaid postage for ballots and even applications for absentees will drive up the cost further. In addition, the purchase of PPE equipment and need for extra personnel to sanitize polling places and monitoring social distancing has also strained our budgets. Finally there needs to be a robust voter outreach effort to educate the public who may be voting by absentee for the first time and risk disenfranchisement if not ballots are not properly returned.

The $400 million Congress passed in the CARES Act was barely adequate to cover increased costs during our recent primaries and in many areas of the country fell well short. As we face a Presidential election that is predicted to break all turnout records in November, we need immediate and robust funding to serve voters while keeping them safe. The $3.6 billion in election spending in the HEROES Act would go a long way to helping local boards meet this challenging moment. Congress, and specifically the United States Senate, must meet this moment by providing the resources we need to serve the citizens of our great nation. Failing to do so is putting the unique experiment of our American Democracy at risk not just now, but perhaps permanently.

Finally, elections do not operate in a vacuum. Most Election Boards are hosted and funded by county and city governments. COVID-19 has had a disastrous effect on their budgets as falling sales tax revenue, as well large amounts of unemployment, have emptied their coffers. Funding for state and local governments is just as large of a priority. Election Boards cannot operate effectively if the government structure around them is in constant turmoil. Only the Federal government has the resources and legal authorities to be able to provide this vital assistance. It should be done as soon as possible, and be as generous as possible, to allow our country the resources needed to live with and eventually defeat this epidemic.

Dustin Czarny

NYSECA Democratic Caucus Chair

Commissioner, Onondaga County Board of Elections (D)

#lte #elections #funding #heroes act

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madness-narrative · 7 years

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Either we realize the truth of this — that we are going to fail without a new strategy — or we risk betraying the trust and hope that people have put into us as leaders for reform. We risk becoming a professional complainer class — funded and salaried ‘advocates’ calling for change who have no real incentive to switch strategies when the reforms fail, because the money and influence for being a professional complainer continue to flow. I have no intention ten years from now of writing another essay or making another speech or doing another training or making another film about how the “system has to change.” I”m just not interested. I don’t want to be a professional advocate and reformer. I WANT TO WIN. If you think it’s not possible, if you think a real total transformation of our mental health system is not possible, then you have no business advocating for change in the first place. It’s hypocritical, and you should get out of the way of people who are taking real change seriously. And if you do think real change is possible — I mean real change, such as an end to homelessness in the US, widespread trauma prevention programs, Open Dialogue style response as the standard of care, a drastic curtailment of toxic meds, an end to forced treatment, the disappearance of diagnosis as the gatekeeper for services, truly caring dedicated compassion when people are in crisis — if you DO think these and other basic minimums of an effective mental health system are possible, then you can’t continue to support the present failed strategy of reform. Because we will just continue to fail. I’ve been advocating for system transformation for more than 15 years, when I started waking up to mental health politics and we developed Freedom Center as a support community and multi-issue social justice organization. I’ve devoted countless volunteer hours to this cause. My life has been in this cause. I’ve worked with dedicated, caring people around the world to bring forward this vision and call for common sense — again and again, for 15+ years. Yes, today our voices are louder and our movement bigger, and yes there are always “signs of hope.” Yes there are “small steps.” But come on people, let’s be honest — our movement has been a failure so far. (And please note the “so far.”) 15 years later we don’t have a transformed mental health system. It’s not here. Instead we have the same abusive failed system that harvests and processes “psychotics” like agribusiness harvests and processes factory farm animals. And we actually have worse than just a failure to transform the US system. What we have is that the US pioneered system is poised to spread globally and wreak havoc around the world, which it is already doing. And I do I wish the “peer movement” aspect of our work was actually achieving real change. But traveling around the US and taking a look at what counts as peers hired in the mental health system? It’s just not real change. What’s happening in the “peer” world is very far from the Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community’s vision of peer leadership. And my colleagues at WMRLC will be the first to point out that their work is limited by the need for larger social change. No, it’s clear that we have — so far — failed. So what do we need to do instead? The way forward is clear. The US, the richest and most powerful country in human history, fails to make any headway on real issues — from the environment, to health, to peace, to racism and to caring for our children — because we no longer have a democracy in this country. “One person, one vote” — a cherished ideal people in the labor, abolition, and women’s movements gave their lives for — became one dollar one vote. Republican, Democrat: it’s the same pitch-to-the-rich money-raising mockery of real democratic process. Slavery era mechanisms like the Electoral College and Senate, gerrymandered voting districts, special interest lobbying, voter disenfranchisement — what we have today in the US bears no resemblance to democratic governance. We have a money-driven circus posing as democracy. And the result is clear: no amount of “advocacy,” no amount of convincing or educating or proposing or promoting to get our ideas out there will ever make a bit of difference. It just doesn’t matter if 25%, 45%, 65%, even 99% of all citizens in the US agreed with the agenda of the mental health reform movement — the 1% still runs the show at the end of the day. Persuading public opinion to be on your side only makes sense as a strategy if public opinion translates into public policy. It doesn’t. Public opinion counts for nothing. The opinion of money is what counts in what our country has as a democracy. If you don’t think this will change, then you don’t believe real mental health reform is possible. Because getting money out of politics and returning to one person one vote is what it will take to achieve real mental health reform in this country. We have to end the corruption of our public priorities — including our health priorities — by private monied interests. And I don’t mean Democrat vs Republican. Both are corrupted by money. (Ask anyone serious about educational reform, for example, about the role of teacher’s unions blocking any initiative from the Democrats). I’ve written about this before on Mad In America ("Thinking Upstream: Winning Real Reform"). I’ve been talking about it every chance I get, and have remained committed to no longer advocating single-issue change but always pointing out the deeper, upstream issue of money corrupting democracy. I’ve met with mental health advocate leadership across the country and around the world. Here is what I usually encounter. The leadership of our mental health advocacy groups agree that yes, money has corrupted democracy in the US and this has resulted in blocking potential for real reform. But they aren’t willing to actually act on connecting their small single-issue efforts with the larger movement against the corruption of our democracy. Why? This is where we see the corruption of our own movement. Because instead of following through on the implications of money in politics blocking the possibility of real reform, leadership continues to advocate in the narrow way. Reforming democracy is not on the agenda. So leadership continues promising what cannot be delivered, pushing small change as presumably the idea that will catch on but never does, and setting us up for more failure. And in so doing, we have to ask: has the leadership of mental health reform organizations become a leadership class of professional complainers? Getting the grants and donations, stirring hopes and making promises, but really focused on fulfilling contracts and job descriptions and keeping the money and influence flowing? Is our leadership actually presenting a winnable strategy? Or are we setting ourselves up for more failures as a movement? As I’ve written about there are many initiatives on getting money out of government that we can link up with — both on the liberal and the conservative side. One of the national leaders of anti-corruption work is Lawrence Lessig, whose efforts I have just given some money to. I want to ask you: are you serious about transforming the mental health system? Not just complaining and getting a few small changes here and there, but really and truly winning a society that meets people’s needs when they go into emotional crisis and distress? Are you? One current initiative Lessig is leading is a legal challenge to winner-take-all electoral college voting. The electoral college effectively robs voters not in “swing states” (both Democrat and Republican) of any influence in choosing a president. Lessig has a strategy to change that, and it has far-reaching implications for the possibility of any future mental health reform. What’s your strategy?

Will Hall, Our Movement Has Failed (So Far)--Here's How To Change That

#radical mental health #will hall

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marcjampole · 7 years

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Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains fills in blanks in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money narrative

According to the standard leftwing narrative about the current dominance of Republicans on both the state and national levels is that the economic rightwing has contrived a deal with racists and social conservatives (among which groups there is some but not complete overlap) by which the ultra-wealthy have manipulated poor and middle class whites to vote against their own economic interests while seeking to disenfranchise large groups of left-looking voters. It’s a storyline which I think pretty accurately describes American politics over the past three decades.

Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean, however, makes a strong case in Democracy in Chains, that the techniques for gaining absolute power and the ultimate objective of the Koch, Mercer, Anschutz, Bradley, DeVos, Prince and other ultra-rich, ultra-right families derive from the original racist reaction to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed segregation of the races in public schools.

According to MacLean, the key figure in transforming the reactions of segregationists to the working game plan of the 21st Republican Party was James McGill Buchanan, who stands out among Nobel Prize winners for Economics for his focus on theory and disuse of empirical evidence. His great contribution was to bring economic ideas into the realm of politics, primarily through what is called the “public choice theory,” primarily the idea that individuals always behave in politics in their own best interests. While at the University of Virginia, Buchanan put together the plan in Virginia to resist segregation by ending public schools and giving parents vouchers for private schools. Later he founded the Center for the Study of Public Choice, into which the Koch brothers poured millions of dollars. Once Buchanan transferred the program to George Mason University, the focus shifted from educating thinkers to dispute the constitutional thought that led to Brown v. Board to training operatives for the far-flung network of think tanks and lobbying groups funded by the Kochs and their pals. This network, which includes the Cato Institute, the Mt. Pelerin Society, the Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Reason Foundation, among others, spews out deceptive information and ideas on a variety of matters such as healthcare policy, gun rights, climate change, school policy and public sector employment. You see their bogus work all the time as opinion or expert pieces in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Atlantic and elsewhere.

Underlying the convoluted gobbledygook of public choice theory is the basic belief that the majority should never constrain the minority. Public choice theory “elevates property rights as to paralyze the use of government for democratically determined goals,” as MacLean puts it. At the same time, public choice theory insists on the primacy of individual players, believing that collections of individuals, such as unions and other special interest groups, too often get their priorities approved by government, a terrible situation for Buchanan, Koch and others if it leads to any constraint on property. Buchanan and his ilk (disciples all of Hayek and Milton Friedman) want the government to operate like an absolute free market—each entity representing only itself, even if a small number of ultra-wealthy entities can therefore control everything.

Constraint of the majority was the original Southerners’ idea during the debate on the Constitution to prevent the growing, non-slave-owning North from gaining too much power through the federal government, leading to the Electoral College, Senate and the counting of slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. Later it became the basis for all segregationist arguments, and still later the rationale for the opposition to environmental regulations, higher taxes on the wealthy, LGBTQ rights and a variety of other policies approved by a majority of Americans. In its extreme, as presented by Buchanan (and co-author Gordon Tullock) in The Calculus of Consent, it means that only those who agree to being taxed for public schools or building a road should pay and only programs with unanimous consent of all governed can be implemented by the government.

MacLean reports that after losing the battle against integration, Buchanan and some associates used what she calls Leninist ideas to put together a stealth plan to inject public choice theory into the mainstream of American political thinking and to turn the United States into the type of oligarchy that existed in Virginia and other southern states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The plan seems to follow the lead of corporate mobilization called for in Lewis Powell’s famous 1971 memo in which the future Supreme Court Justice calls for corporate American take a more aggressive role in shaping America’s social and political ideas. It’s not mentioned by MacLean, but the process that Buchanan outlined and the Kochs and their pals funded seems right out of socialist G. William Domhoff’s public policy model. In simplified terms: rich folk put together foundations and think tanks, which propose ideas that rich folk find politicians to endorse; once elected, the politicians form commissions and committees on which sit the rich folks’ experts to promulgate the policies and laws that the rich folk wanted in the first place. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/Sounds like the plot of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, required reading for anyone interested in learning why our democracy has been commandeered for the benefit of a few ultra-wealthy and very selfish families.

Right-wingers have panned MacLean’s book, asserting that she made a selective use of Buchanan’s work, citing what damned him as an anti-democratic racist and ignoring other evidence that suggests otherwise. But as with the more than 150-year-old defense of the racist and strategically mediocre Robert E. Lee, the defense is based on snippets in an ocean of information. Democracy in Chains joins Dark Money, Domhoff’s Who Rules America Now and The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy and C. Wright Mill’s The Power Elite as essential reading to understand how rich folk manage to always get their way in the United States, even if their way hurts just about everyone else.

#democracy darkmoney @republicans

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hellofastestnewsfan · 4 years

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When the United States Postal Service’s internal watchdog published its assessment in August of what had gone wrong with mail-in ballots during this year’s primary season, its first recommendation was for federal Postal Service leadership to improve its communication with state and local election officials.

That hasn’t happened.

Since Postmaster General Louis DeJoy took the reins in June, multiple state officials tell TIME that communication from federal leadership has gotten both markedly worse—and more ham-fisted. Much of the outreach from federal USPS officials to both state officials and their constituents has resulted in fierce pushback and occasionally litigation. “It’s really been since DeJoy’s tenure that this has suddenly become a major issue, from a national perspective,” says Nellie Gorbea, a Democrat and Rhode Island’s Secretary of State.

“Historically, my office has had a good relationship with our local postmaster,” she says. “It’s not like we woke up this year and because we’re doing predominantly mail in ballots…we suddenly discovered we need to talk to the Postal Service.”

In interviews this week, half a dozen Secretaries of State told TIME that while they valued their partnerships with local Postal Service officials, communication problems with Washington were rife. “I distinguish between people in Minnesota who have been helpful and innovative,” says Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “The higher ups at the federal level in Washington seem tone deaf.”

One significant example of this failure of communication occurred earlier this month, when USPS began sending, without prior warning to Secretaries of State, millions of postcards to every voter nationwide, urging them to request a ballot at least 15 days before election day, mail their ballots at least seven days before and, if necessary, to make sure their envelopes were postmarked. The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), a bi-partisan organization was not informed of the mailing beforehand, according to the organization’s spokeswoman, Maria Benson. The information was inaccurate in some states.

Republican and Democratic election officials across the country—including in swing states like Nevada—urged their constituents to ignore the federal mailings. In Colorado, where every registered voter automatically receives a ballot, Jena Griswold, the Secretary of State, promptly filed a lawsuit alleging that USPS’ outreach will confuse and disenfranchise her constituents. A Colorado district judge subsequently issued an injunction, noting that the USPS’s postcard “provides false or misleading information about the manner of Colorado’s elections” and “will sow confusion amongst voters by delivering a contradictory message.”

Even officials in states like Minnesota and Iowa, who say the information on the USPS postcard is largely pertinent in their states were befuddled by USPS officials’ failure to inform them of the mailing ahead of time. “It could have been handled better,” says Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican.

“This is my third statewide election and I’ve never seen this absence of coordinated communication from the top,” says Minnesota’s Simon, a Democrat, who found out about the USPS postcard when he found one in his own mailbox.

In a statement to TIME, USPS spokeswoman Martha Johnson that the mailer was intended to be general all-purpose guidance on the use of the mail, not guidance on state rules” and that the organization has provided links for voters to check the regulations for their individual states. “We have not done an Election Mail public information campaign on this scale before. However, for every election cycle we employ a robust and proven process to ensure proper handling of all Election Mail, including ballots. This includes close coordination and partnerships with election officials at the local and state levels,” she says.

On Thursday, DeJoy will host a conference call with all Secretaries of State. Griswold says she doesn’t expect anything “except excuses” from the conversation. Jim Condos, Secretary of State for Vermont, questioned whether he would even “show up” for the call.

Alexi Rosenfeld—Getty ImagesA man at the “Save The Post Office” rally outside a post office building on August 25, 2020 in New York City.

Ronald Stroman, the former Deputy Postmaster General at USPS who resigned in June after nearly a decade at the organization, says USPS’s recent national outreach strategy marks a departure from previous years. During his tenure, Stroman recalled, USPS “had a very good working relationship with the states.” He was frequently in touch with Secretaries of State about mail-in-voting and would regularly brief election officials before voting started, he says.

The lack of communication this election cycle has led to distrust among state election officials, Stroman added. He described the working relationship between state election officials and USPS as a “toxic environment.” “If you have no trust, it’s hard to work through problems,” he says.

An internal USPS election playbook for this year, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit Protect Democracy, highlights the need to communicate with state election officials. When asked about the implications for the November election of this shift in communication, Stroman wasn’t optimistic. If things stay as they are, he say he foresees problems.

Stroman notes another recent example of poor communication from federal Postal Service officials: a series of letters that USPS general counsel Thomas Marshall sent in late July to 46 states and Washington D.C., warning them that some components of their election laws may be “incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.” Stroman says that USPS has sent similar letters in past election cycles; his office did so during his tenure. But in the past, federal USPS leadership always discussed the contents of the letter, and their implications, with state officials prior to mailing.

“Unfortunately, it appears that there was little if any communication with state election officials about the content of the letter before it was sent,” says Stroman. “This lack of communication resulted in varying interpretations about the meaning of the letter.”

After the letter was circulated, NASS, the bipartisan organization for Secretaries of State, requested a meeting with DeJoy to discuss the USPS’ plans for the election. On August 27, DeJoy and Marshall held a conference call with the group’s leadership. During the conversation, NASS members offered to review election communications before USPS sent them out. Iowa’s Pate, who was on the call, recalls DeJoy being receptive to concerns. “He didn’t just say elections were a priority, he implied they were the priority,” he says.

But it’s unclear if the conversation had an impact. USPS did not take NASS up on its offer to review election communications, and the surprise postcards were mailed two weeks later.

The deadline for requesting ballots in most states is the end of October. Stroman says there is still time to rectify the lack of communication between state officials and USPS leadership, and to secure a successful mail voting process. DeJoy and the USPS election-mail task force, he says, need to communication to state officials concrete measures, like evaluating the readiness of processing plants for an election-mails urge; ensuring that all political and election mail are cleared from processing plants every night; informing all employees in writing that ballots should be processed as First-Class mail; and providing weekly performance data for First-Class and marketing mail. “You need employee-level specificity,” he adds, “otherwise it’s going to be confusion.”

from TIME https://ift.tt/2H3gV3P

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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New story in Politics from Time: After a Chaotic Primary, New York Scrambles to Reset for the 2020 Election

New York state Senator Zellnor Myrie cast his ballot in person during the early vote period in his state’s June primary. He’d applied for an absentee ballot —which didn’t arrive in his mailbox until a day before the election. So rather than hold out for it, he decided to go in to ensure he would get the chance to vote, figuring he wasn’t at too much additional risk of contracting the coronavirus.

But for the thousands of other New Yorkers who, like Myrie, reportedly didn’t receive their absentee ballots in a timely fashion or at all, weighing their right to vote against the public and personal health risks of going to a polling station may not have been so easy. It’s a choice voting access advocates say no one should have to make.

New York’s June 23 primary did not go smoothly. The issues election officials and voters faced were wide ranging, but hinged mostly on a massive number of absentee ballots flooding a system that was simply unequipped to process them. In the 2016 primary, New York state had 157,885 requests for absentee ballots; this year, the state, which at one point was the epicenter of the deadly battle against COVID-19, received more than 1.7 million requests.

The sunniest interpretations of the primary have focused on participation being high because voting by mail was made more accessible. But state officials are anxious about the host of problems that came up, and what they could mean come November. An unclear number of voters were disenfranchised due to technicalities, like missing signatures, or the government’s inability to expeditiously get ballots in the hands of voters.

One New York state Board of Elections official, Douglas Kellner, estimates tens of thousands of eligible voters were disenfranchised, and notes the bulk of the state’s problems occurred in New York City and Westchester County. Processing the huge number of absentee ballots has caused a long delay in election results. More than a month later, some results, including those of high-profile congressional races, are still not decided.

“If we do not fix the logistical problems, it is going to be a recipe for confusion and chaos leading up to the most consequential election of our lifetimes,” says Myrie. “It is incumbent on the state to make this a top priority.”

Now New York officials are scrambling to avoid a similar situation in November, when the pandemic is still expected to affect the general election. Kellner, who is the Democratic co-chair and commissioner of the New York State BOE, says he’s “very frustrated in dealing with the senior staff at the [New York City] board of elections to get them to recognize what they need to do to get this job done. And they are very frustrated because what we’re asking them to do is very hard.”

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In July, the state legislature passed a slate of reforms aimed at avoiding some of the problems encountered in the primary, which are now pending the governor’s signature. The state BOE, which oversees the local boards, is expected to testify before state lawmakers on August 11 about what went wrong. And advocates are saying more needs to be done ahead of the general election, including putting in place an aggressive voter education campaign and allocating additional funds so things run more smoothly on November 3.

“I think the June primary occurred under extraordinary circumstances, but the reality is that we collectively failed as a state to sufficiently plan ahead and also to safeguard every single voter’s safe access to the polls,” says New York state Senator Alessandra Biaggi.

New York is reliably blue and unlikely to have much to do with the larger outcome in the presidential race. But it is an alarming case study of a state that had a lot go wrong in the primary and has a lot of to do to fill a gap in preparedness before November. Several states that held primaries after the pandemic hit saw those races as a test run ahead of the high-stakes general election. In November, many more voters are expected to turn out, whether by mail or in-person. Failure to anticipate problems and adjust could result in more disenfranchised voters.

There’s also a concern that any lack of preparedness in handling a larger volume of mail-in ballots could feed into President Donald Trump’s false narrative that mail ballots are insecure. (Past races and research show that vote-by-mail is reliable.) Trump has already painted a target on New York’s back: On July 29, he tweeted about the “disastrous” primary, suggesting incorrectly that it was a rigged election and planting another early seed of doubt about the results of the presidential election.

“Hyperbolic rhetoric about the integrity of New York City’s elections plays into the hands of Donald Trump, who would love nothing more than to delegitimize vote by mail,” says New York City council member Ritchie Torres, a young Democratic star who ran in the June primary. “There’s a difference between administering an election imperfectly and rigging an election.”

Torres ran for a seat in one of New York’s two congressional primaries that have yet to be called. He’s the expected winner in his Bronx congressional district, and is poised to be the first openly gay, Afro-Latino man in Congress. He admits the delay has been frustrating. Though he initially told TIME that he would wait to declare victory until the results were finalized, he has since gone ahead after broadening his lead.

The other outstanding House race is between U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Suraj Patel in the 12th congressional district, which the Washington Post reported had “well over” 50% of the vote cast by absentee ballots. Patel, who is trailing Maloney, refuses to concede. Instead, he is now among several plaintiffs suing the New York State BOE and other officials, claiming an executive order from Gov. Andrew Cuomo created confusion among voters and at the U.S. Postal Service.

The order was intended to expand access to absentee voting, in part by providing voters with pre-paid, business class envelopes for people to return their ballots in. But the lawsuit charges that in the process of switching away from voters paying for the envelope, thousands of voters’ ballots were invalidated because postal workers didn’t postmark the envelopes, as absentee ballots are required to be. Kellner, who is named in the suit, says the postmark issue brought up by the lawsuit did not occur on the scale that is suggested in the complaint.

“People’s fundamental right to vote cannot just be discarded willy nilly because of a snafu,” says Ali Najmi, an election attorney representing the plaintiffs. “People’s votes were not counted because of issues related to postmarks and delivery, which are not in control of the voters.” The case was heard this week, and the judge is set to rule on it shortly.

In response to the problems that surfaced during the primary and in preparation for November, the state legislature passed several election reform bills last week. Among their provisions were ensuring that once again coronavirus would be a valid reason for a voter to request an absentee ballot this fall, allowing voters to request absentee ballots more than 30 days in advance of the election, and giving voters notification to “cure” technical errors such as unsigned envelopes.

The slate of reforms have been passed by both the state Senate and Assembly, and are now awaiting the Governor’s signature. “We are reviewing the bills – and as the Governor has said we are working with stakeholders, including the Legislature and Board of Elections, to make sure everything runs smoothly in November and if necessary we will take additional actions,” said Caitlin Girouard, Cuomo’s press secretary, in a statement to TIME.

It’s not clear, however, if the measures passed by the legislature will be enough. Though several elected officials expressed interest in passing legislation that would allow for ballot counting to begin earlier when asked about it, there appears to be no movement underway to make that a reality. And though many want additional resources to be allocated to running the election, it’s unclear whether that will happen.

Who is to blame for the way the primary played out depends on who you ask: It was Cuomo! The U.S. Postal Service! The State Board of Elections! The local Board of Elections! Trump! “If the President wanted to be helpful he could be helpful with the post office, right?” Cuomo said on a recent press call. “Because that was the single largest cause of delay. And I understand their situation also, but if you want to start pointing fingers that’s where you’d have to point fingers first.”

While a lot of the blame was placed on the BOE, nearly everyone also sympathized with their impossible task of streamlining a cumbersome process on an impossible timeline while strapped for resources. Asked what additional changes he would like to see made before November, Kellner answers quickly, “Nothing.”

“There’s no more time to make these changes,” says Kellner, laughing. “We’ve now got to work with what we have. Any tinkering this close to the election may cause more problems than it solves.”

—With reporting by Madeleine Carlisle

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kansascityhappenings · 4 years

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Here’s why Kansas City is taking down MLK street signs in midst of nationwide protests

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Voters approved changing the name back to The Paseo to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard last November. Signs just started coming down again Saturday.

One parks commissioner would like to see the JC Nichols Found at the Country Club Plaza renamed for Dr. King.

“JC Nichols was a racist individual, an openly known racist. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a man who stood for fairness and love and peace,” KC Parks and Rec Commissioner Chris Goode said Wednesday a day after he requested the street and fountain bearing his name have their names changed.

City leaders first approved the name change of The Paseo to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. early last year.

But Kansas City is only taking down signs for one of those men right now, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“I never had a problem with it changing over it was going to be a tribute to someone who had a great impact on our social and civil rights in this country,” said Shari Young, who formerly owned a business on The Paseo.

A group called Save the Paseo formed out of concern for the disenfranchisement of voters during the initial renaming process and historic preservation. They successfully petitioned to let voters decide, and in November Kansas City made headlines by deciding to take back down those Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard signs.

With no deadline the city first concentrated on snow removal and fixing potholes, and was just working their way South putting Paseo signs back up when the coronavirus pandemic hit. So Saturday as protests about racial equality took place in Kansas City and across America, city crews started taking down MLK signs again.

“I feel like with the social climate right now and with the tension across the nation, I feel like that probably should not have been a priority, there’s other things like the reform on the police department and other things that they could have been focusing on besides the actual signage,” Monika Samuels, owner of a salon on the street said.

“After the November election, Mayor Lucas established a public process for community input through the Parks Board. We have yet to hear of the top recommendations received. Our group remains committed to working with Mayor Lucas and the Parks Board to find the best honor for Dr. Martin Luther King, with engagement from the community.” leaders of Save The Paseo said in a statement Wednesday,

Goode says he expects a very different debate with renaming the fountain and J.C. Nichols Blvd. than what transpired renaming The Paseo. He suggests renaming the street for King and the fountain “Dream Fountain”

“These are two polar opposite conversations because the move to rename J.C. Nichols Pkwy and J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain is simply about fairness and doing what’s right.” Goode said.

Some people feel like ultimately happened with The Paseo they should get a voice now, other than proposed community input sessions.

“To have that right to change it it should be up to the voters of Missouri. The plaza has been there forever leave it alone,” Carolyn Cascone wrote in a Facebook post in response to the newest potential name change.

Paseo signs have been replaced as far south as 41st Street so far with crews working on Saturdays on the project. The city expects to have the remaining MLK signs down by the end of the month.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/news/heres-why-kansas-city-is-taking-down-mlk-street-signs-in-midst-of-nationwide-protests/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2020/06/11/heres-why-kansas-city-is-taking-down-mlk-street-signs-in-midst-of-nationwide-protests/

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therealreverendchris · 5 years

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Whoa. Reddit AMA. I am equal parts excited and terrified, but ask away! Ask me anything! I'm not afraid to be honest and vulnerable.To get the formal background stuff out of the way: Call me Jojo! I work as a nurse in Philadelphia and live in the Kensington neighborhood. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BSN in 2014 and an MSN in Health Leadership in 2019. I'm the daughter of Filipino immigrants, the middle child of three siblings, and recently married my best friend and partner-in-crime, Jamie. Congress was never the plan but, as any nurse will say when they tell you their life story, the stars sort-of aligned and it all just happened. I love research. Some day I'll go back to pursue a PhD in health policy but not until I fix a couple systemic issues first!Stop by my [Website](https://www.mantilla2020.com/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jojoforcongress), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/jojoforcongress/), [Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/mantilla2020) OR check out our video-podcast series, ["Jojo Runs for Congress!" on YouTube.](https://youtu.be/KozcttCWS2Y)My not-so-secret agenda in Congress is to establish health care as a basic human right and move our health care system to one that is high-quality, free, and accessible. I started this journey by asking a lot of questions. What does a happy, healthy life look like? Why don't we have it? What are the barriers and opportunities to change? What would we want our health care delivery system to look like? Over the past five years I've listened to thousands of patients tell me their life stories at the bedside, often at the most vulnerable points in their life. Hospitals and prisons have become our social safety nets when our current systems are unable to meet our needs. Carving a pathway to a healthy and happy society means we must focus on the social and economic factors that influence us outside the hospital - also known as [the social determinants of health](https://ift.tt/2vh9wIE is more than a campaign. It is a mission to build the world we want to live in by organizing and mobilizing people on the ground. It's a mission to fight voter apathy. It's a mission to fight structural racism, oppression, and heal the wounds from America's traumatic relationship with slavery. It's a mission to build a world where diversity is not only desired, but celebrated. Above all, this is a mission to bring hope back to the most vulnerable, forgotten, and disenfranchised communities of the district. I suppose one could say I'm out to change the culture of policymaking in Congress to one that values the people over profit in both word and action. Grassroots campaigning is the term du jour, but I like to think of this campaign as a public health, outcomes-driven initiative born out of my experience as an advocate for patients in health care. I'm a big systems- thinker, always looking at all the elements that influence a problem. I'm here to advocate for sustainable solutions, but such solutions can only exist if we change the culture of Congress itself. The U.S. is at a crossroads. After all the industrial and technological advancements that brought us our modern-day standards of living, we are now fighting for the right to live our lives as humans and not as cogs in a machine. Why not the incumbent? First, I believe we deserve more than one option at the polls. Best case scenario - we have more than one good candidate and either one would serve their constituents well. Second, I don't believe the incumbent Congressman is a bad person, but he is not, in my eyes, what the district needs right now. When I started thinking about running for public office, I thought hard about what would make me feel served by my representative. Families are struggling to make ends meet with competing financial priorities and communities have suffered enough from deep generational poverty, economic uncertainty and pure emotional, social, and economic trauma. We need to heal. We deserve a leader that is unafraid to speak about the intrinsic social issues that preceded our current issues, such as systemic racism, police brutality, and economic disinvestment as a result of valuing profit over people. We need someone who can initiate the tough conversations and bring us together as we work for change. I always start by asking questions - what are people struggling with and what are they afraid of? And in our district it's education, opioids, job security, housing access, health care, and criminal justice reform. I want to do more than vote, I want to write policies to lay the groundwork for the bigger, systemic changes needed ahead. Why me? Why now? I do think you have to be a little bit crazy to think you're good enough to run for Congress. I haven't held public office before, but I am here to build bridges and strengthen coalitions. I am here to listen. The defining characteristic that sets me apart from my challenger is my ability to connect with people and communicate with others. I am ready to have tough conversations and put the hard work into thinking out-of-the-box for creative solutions within the realm of possibility. I'm currently writing what I call my "Blueprint for Change" which will specifically address how I plan to lead the district and how I will hold myself accountable and measure success after two years in office. My hope is to set-up a strong, responsive, activism culture and leadership within the district so that whoever takes over after my term ends will already be set-up for success. I believe in supporting the grassroots efforts of people and organizations on the ground. I will support the efforts of local government in their efforts to enact positive change. I learned this from working in a hospital, if you want to improve patient outcomes it starts by listening to the stories of people on the front lines and prioritizing their concerns. I don't intend to be in Congress forever, nor do I look at it as an eternal job. Someday I do hope to complete a PhD, infuse life into the music scene in Philly, open a Jazz club, and be the lead singer of my own big band!On days when I'm struggling to balance this campaign, my emotions, and the rest of my life truly, this campaign feels like an expression of everything I am and the person I hope to become. At the end of the day, all I have to throw into the combat ring is myself - my passion and dedication, my hope for the future, and as much compassion, empathy, and love as I can give. I know I will be outspent by my challengers and that's okay. I've accepted that. But if you should know one thing about nurses, we're pretty good at working with what we've got to accomplish a goal. I'm not accepting corporate donations and I most certainly do not have a network of wealthy donors or businesses at my disposal. Money comes with strings attached and I'm not here to play that game. I'm here to get shit done. Despite the obvious factors, such as money and political influence, what I do have is an extremely perceptive, focused mind that's ready and excited to work!Alright Reddit, I'm here for you! Ask me anything! My favorite topics: trying to stay organized, work-life balance (does that even exist?), imposter syndrome, and Philly!If you made it to the end of this post, thank you! I appreciate you. I am not known for brevity and I definitely was not made for the 280 characters on Twitter. Quick shoutout to my family and friends who have relentlessly supported me throughout this crazy endeavor. I would not be here without you.Love always,JojoProof: https://twitter.com/jojoforcongress/status/1231714377935572993 via /r/politics

#reverend chris #politics

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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'It could be a zoo': Nevada on edge as caucus day arrives

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/it-could-be-a-zoo-nevada-on-edge-as-caucus-day-arrives/

'It could be a zoo': Nevada on edge as caucus day arrives

Concerns linger as some volunteers say they haven’t received hands-on training with the iPads the party purchased to help tabulate results. Other volunteers are worried about executing the caucus’ new voting alignment system, which includes the extra complication of adding early-vote totals to day-of results — a step that even Iowa, with all its problems, didn’t have to deal with.

Multiple presidential campaigns are anxious that the state party won’t finish tabulating the enormous number of early votes by Saturday — and they want more transparency on how those votes will be divvied up to individual precincts.

Finally, there are signs the state party is worried about unflattering internal details about the caucus being divulged. On Thursday night, the Nevada Democratic Party sent an email to volunteer precinct chairs in rural areas asking them to sign a non-disclosure agreement and simultaneously offering a stipend.

The email to rural site volunteers offered a $50 stipend to precinct chairs and $90 to those who serve as a “site lead and temporary precinct chair.” The NDA stipulates that volunteers are “not authorized to speak to the press unless given permission by the Executive Director or Communications Director.”

One volunteer called it a strange request, interpreting the email as a cash offer in exchange for signing the NDA.

But Forgey, the party spokeswoman, said the stipend is not contingent on signing the NDA. She said “it is standard for the party to request staff and volunteers who have access to sensitive information to sign one.” Other volunteers working at sites around Las Vegas have not been asked to sign an NDA.

The Nevada Democratic Party is well aware of the national scrutiny of its caucus, and officials are working hard to avoid a repeat of Iowa. That fiasco undermined confidence in the entire process, obscuring the real-time picture of how candidates performed and inviting mockery from Republicans.

Nevada Democrats say they’ve held 50 training sessions with more than 1,400 volunteers in the past week, and are continuing to do “rigorous trainings” until caucusing begins.

“What we’ve been saying is that our No. 1 priority is getting this right,” Forgey said, and ensuring that “when results come out, that they’re accurate.” She added, however, that the party expects results on Saturday.

Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders, is unsettled by the party’s preparations ahead of the caucus.

“They’ve released the number of voters in the early vote, [but] they have not released all the data on the early voters, something they said they would do,” said Weaver. “So that begs the questions about whether they’re able to process all these — there’s been a huge early vote total. Are they able to process that in time for the caucus?”

The early votes have to be tabulated and reallocated to the correct precinct sites. They will be entered into Google forms pre-installed on iPads being used at each precinct. “I’m concerned about the efficient execution of this rather complicated system they have set up,” Weaver said.

A state party official said ballots are being processed and full early-voting information will be provided to campaigns as soon as it’s available. “We are on track to hold a successful caucus on Saturday,” the official said.

But an official with Joe Biden’s campaign voiced frustration with the state party over the number of ballots that were voided during the first two days of early voting. According to data provided to the campaign by the state party, about 776 ballots from early voting ballots on Saturday and Sunday — or 3 percent of the total — were scrapped because a voter failed to sign the ballot. (The state party provided more updated figures: Of the more than 36,000 ballots that were cast through Monday, 1,124 ballots have been voided, still about 3 percent.)

“If that percentage holds across all early voting days, more than 2,100 voters will have been disenfranchised because of lack of signature,” Biden’s general counsel wrote in a letter to the state party Thursday. “This is not a fair or defensible outcome … We ask that the state party ensure that these votes are counted.”

In an emailed response to the Biden campaign, Alana Mounce, executive director of the Nevada State Democratic Party, said the party gave campaigns guidance “some time ago regarding the processing of early vote ballots,” including details that ballots without a voter signature would be voided. The party said signatures are an “important security component.”

“Since that time, our early vote volunteers and campaigns were given repeated instructions to inform early voters to sign their ballots,” Mounce wrote. “As a result, we saw a steadily-diminished number of ballots being processed that lacked signatures.”

In a second letter, Biden’s general counsel argued that the guidance mentioned by the state party was released “the day beforeearly voting started, with no time for objection and minimal time for training. The campaigns were first briefed on itthe day afterearly voting started, after more than 20,000 ballots had been cast.”

The state party is notifying people whose early-voting ballots have been voided and urging them to attend a caucus on Saturday, the Nevada Independent reported. The party is standing by its decision to void ballots without valid signatures.

The meltdown in Iowa last month has Nevada party leaders and volunteers on edge because the process in the two states is so similar. Like in Iowa, three different counts — an initial raw vote total; a second raw vote total after it’s determined which candidates clear a 15 percent viability threshold; and a delegate total — must be calculated and reported. The complications of the system seem likely to add to confusion.

Nevada Democrats are already warning that the initial results expected to be reported on Saturday will reflect whatever precincts chairs report to them, even if they contain obvious arithmetic mistakes that can be fixed at a later date. “If there are any math questions or other issues on caucus reporting sheets, they will be addressed subsequent to caucus day according to our established results review procedures,” Alana Mounce, the executive director of the state party said in a memorandum on Friday.

Four years ago, Hillary Clinton’s narrow victory over Sanders was projected within just a few hours of the caucuses commencing. But, back then, the state party and its network of volunteers spread across the state only had one result to report, from a race with just two candidates.

Bruce Huyghue, 83, who will be a caucus precinct chair in the greater Las Vegas area, said he planned to be trained on the iPads and Google Forms before Saturday. But new technology aside, Hughue expects the Saturday caucus to be more work and messier than in 2016.

“It’s chaotic with two. It could be a zoo with five or six” candidates, Huyghue said Thursday night after a caucus training.

Steven Shepard and Holly Otterbein contributed to this report.

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