Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

[Sixties Fan]

The rabid Georgia congresswoman behaved so abysmally during a House hearing that she was barred from speaking by the REPUBLICAN chair after she accused Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of having “a sexual relationship with a Chinese spy" and screamed at Homeland Secretary Mayorkas that he was a "liar." Afterwards, a furious Greene accused her Republican colleague of doing the bidding of Democrats and went straight to the manager (Kevin McCarthy) to complain. It is political malpractice to let this woman have the floor ever again.

MTG shut down by GOP committee chair after she calls Mayorkas a ‘liar’ at hearing

Ms Greene was barred from speaking further during the hearing

www.independent.co.uk

 

[Sixties Fan]

So-called 'Don't Say Gay' rules expanded through 12th grade in Florida

The Florida Board of Education approved a rule that limits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. It expands the so-called 'Don't Say Gay' law.

abcnews.go.com

 

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Texas House approves sweeping limits on local regulations in GOP’s latest jab at blue cities

City officials say the full scope of the legislation advanced Tuesday is still unclear, but it would limit their ability to issue worker protections, water restrictions and more.

www.texastribune.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Florida Prosecutor's 'Racism Policy' Leaked

An attorney whistleblower from State Attorney Jack Campbell’s office alleges widespread racism throughout Jefferson County office.

ourtallahassee.com

 

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Tennessee moves to protect gunmakers from mass shooting lawsuits

Bill from Republican lawmakers comes only weeks after a gunman killed six people in a Nashville elementary school.

www.cbsnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

We can’t go to the bank. Can’t go to work, to the grocery store, to the airport, to our places of worship, to a farmer’s market, a concert, a nightclub, a dance hall, a movie or a doctor’s office. Our kids can’t go to a parade, to the mall or to school. You can’t ring the wrong doorbell, pull down the wrong driveway or accidentally hop in the wrong car, without fear of being shot. Shot and killed. In a nation with more guns than people, this has become our reality. But it is not normal. And it sure as shit is not ok.

 

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Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday defended a non-binary Navy officer Tuesday against criticism from Republicans who have used a video of the officer describing their first deployment to question the sea service’s warfighting priorities.

In a video that the Navy Judge Advocate General Corps posted to its Instagram account earlier this month, Lt. j.g. Audrey Knutson described participating in an LGBTQ spoken-word night while deployed aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford and sharing a personally written poem with the ship.

Knutson, who identified as non-binary in the video, called the experience the “culmination of the whole deployment.”

“I’ll tell you why I’m particularly proud of this sailor,” Gilday said. “Her grandfather served during World War II, and he was gay, and he was ostracized in the very institution that she not only joined and is proud to be a part of, but she volunteered to deploy on Ford. And she’ll likely deploy again next month when Ford goes back to sea.”

The video had prompted Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who has never served in the military, to tweet Wednesday that, “While China prepares for war this is what they have our @USNavy focused on.”

Admiral defends non-binary officer against attacks from GOP lawmakers

This month, Lt. j.g. Audrey Knutson described participating in an LGBTQ spoken word night and sharing a personally written poem with the ship.

www.navytimes.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Justice Samuel Alito, probably: “Just to make sure everyone knows how much I hate when women make their own health decisions, I’m gonna use activist anti-abortion language in this Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which gets especially violent with its singular use of a certain noun.”

Judge — not doctor — Matthew Kacsmaryk, probably: “Hold my beer.”

And faster than Justice Brett Kavanaugh could say, “You got it, boss,” Kacsmaryk’s anti-scientificruling against the abortion pill mifepristone ran where Dobbs walked.

Two weeks ago, Kacsmaryk — who is not a doctor — ruled the FDA’s September 2000 approval of the pill was invalid. In doing so, he jeopardized the availability of mifepristone nationwide.

Questionable language abounds in not-doctor Kacsmaryk’s decision, but perhaps none so rankling as his persistent use of the word abortionist — 11 times in the document’s 67 pages.

I read all of them. It’s very Handmaid’s Tale, though at least Margaret Atwood is a better writer.


When Alito’s Dobbs decision leaked almost exactly a year ago, I wrote why the term abortionist (as opposed to abortion doctor or abortion provider) was so explosive: The abortion part of abortion doctoris a modifier, so the term is softer. Any straight, unmodified noun — like abortionist — hits harder than one that’s qualified with a modifier. “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” Strunk and White admonished in their Elements of Style. “It is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.” Anti-abortion activists want abortion to sound more vulgar than medical; abortionist helps.


(full article online)

âAbortionistâ is a dehumanizing term. Any judge who uses it has an agenda. | The Grammarian

The use of "abortionist" and "unborn human" has a clear purpose: Readers are meant to infer that while the fetus is a human, the doctor is not.

www.inquirer.com

 

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[Sixties Fan]

In so many of the places our ancestors lived, all around the world, you knew a certain small number of people. And people you didn’t know were danger. People from another village: danger. People from another caste: danger. People who didn’t look like you: danger. And it’s easy to forget that the great accomplishment of so many modern societies has been to build institutions and sources of security and safety so that people don’t have to know other people personally, or know their grandmother, to trust each other. We are human, so we continue to fail at this all the time, and some groups bear the brunt of this mistrust. And yet, more often than we even think about, it works in ways that would have befuddled our forebears. We write checks to people we don’t know, share our addiction stories with people we don’t know, hire babysitters we don’t know from websites, eat semi-cooked meat and raw fish prepared by people we don’t know, live in houses engineered and built by people we don’t know, fly in planes and leap down from bungee platforms led by people we don’t personally know.

And it works. Most of the time, it works. And if you’ve lived and traveled in other places where anonymous trust is weaker, where people need to place you and know who exactly you are, all the way back to before you existed, to do business with you or have you over or talk to you at a party, you recognize the miracle.

My parents, immigrants from India, recognized the miracle. They were surprised, having migrated from India to the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, that people just said hi to you on the street. People don’t say hi to people they don’t know on the street in India. It’s just not a thing. But in Ohio they did, and my parents got used to it and loved it. They loved anonymous trust.



I tell you this because when I heard of these shootings in New York State and in Missouri, they made me think that our predicament now is deeper than we sometimes realize. We don’t just have a gun crisis, although we have a gun crisis of epic proportions. We don’t just have a polarization problem, or a disinformation problem, or a right-wing extremism problem, although we have all of these problems, and they are severe.

The particular details of these two shootings seemed to point to something even more fundamental. Not least because of these various other problems, we have entered into a state in which that foundational modern achievement of anonymous trust is cracking.

We are not merely divided; we are un-developing. We are — not all of us, thankfully, but many in this country — reverting to those eras of history in which anyone outside your circle had to be murdered if they came past your moat, because the presumption was that they would destroy you if you didn’t destroy them. Reverting to the purity-and-contamination framework of caste societies: my people are not just of similar mind and values and history; they are clean and safe, and others imperil me. Reverting to people getting their information from charlatans and god men and people they happen to know, not from empirical reality. Reverting to where the default assumption many people would make about why a strange person would go up their driveway is that they are coming to attack them.

In these two incidents, perhaps isolated but also emblematic, there is a certain vision of the world: Nothing and no one can be trusted, you and people like you are self-deputized law enforcers, and everyone in the world from beyond your moat is a suspect. This, I think, helps explain the spread of the thin-blue-line flag across much of the country. People aren’t just supporting the police. No one reveres anyone else that much. They are telling you that, in their own minds, they are the police. They are flying the flag of themselves.


(full article online)

Kaylin, Ralph, and the death of anonymous trust

A reflection on two shootings

the.ink

 

[Sixties Fan]

Texas Republicans have recently amped up their efforts to undermine the democratic process by advancing a barrage of legislation aimed at locking in their control over state government. These bills would make voting more difficult, withdraw the state from a national organization that helps ensure the accuracy of voter rolls, and even enable GOP officials to replace locally chosen election administrators and potentially invalidate election results in a Democratic stronghold.

One bill advanced in the Senate enables the Republican Secretary of State Jane Nelson to take away control over how elections are run from county officials, who are elected or appointed locally. The bill relies on a vaguely worded standard of whether the secretary "has good cause to believe" that voting and election administration problems exist—not hard proof that they do, let alone whether they actually prevented people from voting. One of the reasons listed includes merely the delayed reporting of election results.


(full article online)

Texas Republicans fire the latest salvo in their war on voting

Texas Republicans have recently amped up their efforts to undermine the democratic process by advancing a barrage of legislation aimed at locking in their control over state government. These bills would make voting more difficult, withdraw the state...

www.dailykos.com

 

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[. Suppression of votes =. Winning elections ]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Transgender lawmaker silenced by Montana House speaker

Montana's House speaker is refusing to allow a transgender lawmaker to speak on bills for the rest of the session until she apologizes for saying lawmakers would have “blood on their hands” if they supported a bill to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Speaker Matt Regier...

apnews.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

A presentation by Cleta Mitchell at a donor retreat urged tougher rules that could make it harder for college students to cast ballots

The presentation — which had more than 50 slides and was labeled “A Level Playing Field for 2024” — offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic.


(full article online)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/cleta-mitchell-voting-college-students/?link_id=5&can_id=6e84143cce349aec0c9a0b4e4a28c9c6&source=email-when-the-media-bow-to-trump&email_referrer=email_1889634&email_subject=top-gop-lawyer-decries-ease-of-campus-voting-in-private-pitch-to-rnc

 

[Sixties Fan]

Forward or Backward? The Descent of the GOP Into A Reactionary Mess

My long form magazine essay on the GOP's worrisome embrace of a dangerous, reactionary politics - from 2012. In Spanish and English.

simonwdc.substack.com

 

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