My New Year’s Resolutions (since everyone keeps asking):
» I won’t be suckered into believing any bogus conspiracy theories. I will only be suckered into believing the real ones.
» I shall continue to remember that, in addition to everything else, the Biden administration is still in full fix-it mode after the four disastrous years that preceded it. (And, for that matter, the eight disastrous years that preceded the twelve years that preceded it.)
» I shall try to see the world from Madison Cawthorn’s point of view by spending some quality time acting like a soulless, thick-as-a-brick demon child.
Continued…
» I shall peacefully resolve Daily Kos pie fights with my superior negotiating and arbitration skills, just as soon as we resolve our 20-year pie fight over the shape of the negotiating table.
» I shall think more about world peace, economic justice and environmental health…or my insatiable need for cheap consumer goods that’ll be thrown out the moment they get a scratch on them or the batteries need changing, whichever comes first.
» I shall reduce the number of distractions in my life by
As always, I shall continue firming and toning my person using only the finest in cutting-edge fitness accoutrements.
» I shall continue my 57-year streak of not putting a hole in someone with a firearm. Sorry, but I can’t make the same pledge about lawn darts.
» I shall do more good deeds. Starting with deprogramming the old lady across the street from drooling whenever I ring her doorbell.
» I shall remember what is best in life: “Destroy the Republicans, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentation of the House Freedom Caucus.”
» I shall make myself available as a strongman in any nation with plunderable resources.
» I shall carefully watch my waistline. Specifically, I shall carefully watch my waistline expand.
» Last but not least, I vow to continue getting my motherf*cking boosters as needed and wearing my motherf*cking mask, just as I hope you’ll vow to continue pardoning my French.
Wish me luck. And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, January 4, 2022
Note: Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, eyes and ears and mouth and nose, plus Allison with sports and Dave’s weekend forecast tonight on NewsCenter at 6 and 11.
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By the Numbers:
6 days!!!
Days ’til Houseplant Appreciation Day: 6
Latest estimate of the world’s population, an increase of 74 million from a year ago according to the U.S. Census Bureau: 7.8 billion
U.S. population, an increase of 707,000 screaming babies all on the same #!!%&! plane: 332.4 million
Rate at which the U.S. is admitting migrants:1 every 130 seconds
Percent less energy used during water-based aquamation—which the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu opted for—than flame-based cremation: –90%
Percent increase in 2021 for, respectively, the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Dow Industrials: 27%, 21%, 19%
Number of followers Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene had when she was banned by Twitter on Sunday for chronically spreading disinformation:475,000
CHEERS to making the evildoers nervous. As Thursday’s anniversary of the Republican insurrection against the U.S. government looms, it sounds like the months of detective work on the part of the commission tasked with investigating it are starting to form a cohesive picture of the chaos:
The House select committee probing the January 6 insurrection is signaling that it has penetrated Donald Trump’s wall of obstruction about what was going on inside the White House and his own family while he refused to stop the mob attack onthe US Capitol a year ago this week. […] Vice Chair Liz Cheney…told ABC News of “firsthand testimony” that Trump’s daughter Ivanka, then a West Wing adviser, twice asked him to intervene in a melee in which police officers were beaten by his crowd.
Not nearly enough Republicans responsible for the insurrections have been tossed into one of these yet. That better change this year.
There were additional signs on Sunday that the committee is making inroads into tracing the funding of the rally at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, that Trump addressed with his inflammatory lies about election fraud on January 6. Thompson raised concerns on “State of the Union” about the possibility of financial fraud in relation to the event.
The chairman also notably refused to rule out the notion that the committee could take the extraordinary step of making a criminal referral of Trump to the Justice Department.
Wow. Possible criminal referral. This raises all kinds of legal questions. Top of the list: Who will be the poor soul who has the unenviable task of waking up cranky Merrick Garland?
JEERS to our microscopic overlords. As we ring in a new year, Covid-19 continues baffling and beating the snot out of us. As the CDC, WHO, and other health organizations and governments continue monitoring the situation, Cheers and Jeers will continue providing timely updates so you can stay armed with the cutting-edge knowledge you need to stay healthy and alive. Here’s what we know as of today, Tuesday, January 4th, 2022: the cult of the unvaccinated can go f*ck themselves. Join us for our next update tomorrow morning, which will probably look a lot like today’s.
CHEERS to quick follow-ups. At C&J, we let nothing slip through the cracks except our phone, our glasses, our Frisbee, and the occasional unruly toddler. And that fact makes people like ancient Pat Robertson very nervous. Even though he’s no longer hosting The 700 Club, I bet he’d rather we not bring up that time 11 years ago when he informed the world that God told him to start spreading this news:
Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson says God told him that the U.S. is bankrupt and heading into economic turmoil, but there won’t be a global nuclear holocaust.
Robertson said God told him that America’s lenders will demand repayment—not this year, but in 2012—and the U.S. won’t be able to pay, resulting in currency collapse, rampant unemployment and riots.
Nothing about lifting up the poor. Nothing about healing the sick. Nothing about feeding the hungry. Nothing about improving the lot of the less-fortunate and the oppressed. Nope. God’s mindset was all about misery, hardship and senseless death due to the impending collapse of civilization. So it goes without saying that none of that came to pass in 2012. Whenever the Lord goes all Old Testament on a random late-night call, it’s a safe bet He’s drunk.
— Physics & Astronomy Zone (@zone_astronomy) January 2, 2022
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END BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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CHEERS to 84,904 square miles of madcap fun. Happy 126th Birthday to Utah—aka the “Beehive Hairdo State”—which entered the union on January 4th, 1896. The state animal is the Rocky Mountain Elk. The state gem is topaz. The state bird is, oddly, the California Sea Gull. And the state fossil remains, of course, the Mitt Romney.
Scientists say that 1.6-foot-long impressions discovered on a beach in Wales may actually be footprints of dinosaurs. The “rare” tracks, they said, are 200 million years old, indicating that dinosaurs from the late Triassic period once roamed the area.
The footprints were found by a member of the public near the shoreline on a beach at Penarth in 2020 and reported to London’s Natural History Museum. Paul Barrett, a palaeobiology researcher at the museum, helped lead a study of the tracks, which was published in Geological Magazine on December 29.
Upon further inspection, it was discovered that there were originally two sets of footprints, which suddenly became one set, leading the researchers to conclude that when the dinosaur got tired Jesus carried it the rest of the way.
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Ten years ago in C&J: January 4, 2012
CHEERS to lookin’ out for #1. Yesterday in Shaker Heights, Ohio (my grandparents’ old stomping grounds) President Obama said enough is enough and recess-appointed former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as America’s first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The woman who created the position, U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, haz a happy:
This is a big deal for middle class families…across our nation. For more than a year, we’ve seen and heard reports exposing how some of America’s largest financial institutions broke the law. Maybe that’s why Wall Street continues to set new spending records hiring lobbyists to shift attention away from their wrongdoings.
Ten years later the current director, Rohit Chopra, is rebuilding the CFPB after four years of Republican neglect.
As a result, those who broke our economic system haven’t been subject to full scrutiny. But with Richard Cordray in place at the CFPB, we can start moving toward real accountability over the big banks.
Obama also recess-appointed the National Labor Relations Board back to its five-member capacity, thus ensuring it will continue to function normally. So today our government works a little better than it did yesterday on behalf of average Americans. Or as Republicans call it: a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.
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And just one more…
CHEERS and JEERS to the speech spankers. Right on schedule, Lake Superior State University’s annual “banished word list” popped up on the scene to give the cable news anchors a “kicker” story over which to hone their phony-chuckling skills. Sure, we’re happy to see terms like “At the end of the day,” “That being said” and “Asking for a friend” on the list. But C&J—thin-skinned as we are—will never shake the bitterness that infused our lives on that dark day in 2005 when they went off the linguistic deep end:
BLOG – and its variations, including blogger, blogged, blogging, blogosphere. Many who nominated it were unsure of the meaning. Sounds like something your mother would slap you for saying.
“Sounds like a Viking’s drink that’s better than grog, or a technique to kill a frog.” Teri Vaughn, Anaheim, Calif.
“Maybe it’s something that would be stuck in my toilet.” – Adrian Whittaker, Dundalk, Ontario.
“I think the words ‘journal’ and ‘diary’ need to come back.” – T. J. Allen, Shreveport, La.
So, for the seventeenth year in a row (and until they apologize for being such meanies), C&J humbly keeps these four words on our own banished list: Lake Superior State University.
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
“The question isn’t whether this Cheers and Jeers was necessary. It wasn’t. It never justifies its existence beyond padding Bill in Portland Maine’s pockets.”
We begin today’s roundup with Justin Rohrlich’s piece at The Daily Beast on the continued search for those perpetrated the January 6th attack on the Capitol:
A year after a pro-Trump mob bent on overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election sacked the U.S. Capitol, the hunt for suspects is nowhere near over.
In fact, the feds are still actively searching for hundreds of known rioters. […]
Authorities are still looking for the person they say planted pipe bombs near the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the night of Jan. 5, and have not slowed in their efforts. Meanwhile, two-thirds of Republicans continue to believe Donald Trump’s so-called Big Lie that the election was somehow stolen from him, and nearly 40 percent of that group think violence is the only way to “save” the country, according to recent polling.
Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone reports on how Peter Navarro concocted wild and false conspiracy theories about a stolen election and presented them to Donald Trump at the White House:
Unlike most amateur-hour election sleuths, however, Navarro had direct access to the aggrieved president. In an extended interview with Rolling Stone, Navarro revealed that he personally briefed Trump on his research in the Oval Office — and that Trump directed, on the spot, that Navarro’s findings be distributed to the entire GOP conference on Capitol Hill.
That advocacy by Trump helped Navarro, along with close ally Steve Bannon, prepare for a Jan. 6 plot they hoped could overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Together with Bannon, Navarro developed a plan to block the Electoral College vote count, called the Green Bay Sweep after a daring football play run by the NFL’s Packers in the Vince Lombardi era. (Bannon did not respond to a detailed list of questions about his involvement in this effort.)
The intelligence failures that left police officers, members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence at risk are now well documented. Three days before the attack, an internal police intelligence report described what would occur with almost prophetic accuracy: “Unlike previous postelection protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counterprotesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th. Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members and others who actively promote violence may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike.” Yet the agency failed to distribute such intelligence warnings to rank-and-file officers; to fully staff the force for what was increasingly predicted to be a large and unruly event; to allow officers to use their most powerful crowd-control weapons, like stun grenades, to confront the mob, or even to train enough officers on those weapons; to equip enough of the force with riot gear; or even to produce a plan for the situation. Given the obvious and disastrous failures, Chief Steven Sund, who was in charge of day-to-day force operations, resigned shortly after the riot, as did the sergeants-at-arms of the Senate and the House, figures elected by the leaders of each chamber to serve on a board that oversees the Capitol Police force and is ultimately responsible for the building’s security.
On a final note, here is Eugene Robinson’s analysis of the investigation so far:
[C]ongress as a whole must shore up the weaknesses in our transfer-of-power process exposed by the insurrection. The mob’s aim was to halt the official counting of electoral votes — and the mob succeeded, at least for several hours. Even the libertarian Cato Institute agrees that the 1876 Electoral Count Act is “a mess of ambiguities and contradictions” and needs to be reformed. Legislation to do so should begin making its way toward Biden’s desk.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department must continue to press criminal charges against the insurrectionists. It is not enough to prosecute and sentence those who participated bodily in the assault. The puppet masters who assembled the crowd and sent it off to sack the Capitol must be held to account as well.
And no one, including Trump, can be considered above the law.
In the news today: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis finally made an appearance after two weeks of silence as his state yet again descended into pandemic crisis. His spine, however, remains unaccounted for; Bargain Bin Trump’s only response to the new surge was to claim that none of it is his fault, again disparage pandemic safety measures, and again suggest he doesn’t intend to do a damn thing to keep Americans from dying because … um … The Aristocrats!?
In other news, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 coup attempt now has firsthand testimony as to how Donald Trump responded to the violence—no prizes for correct guesses—and his adult children are now also saying they’ll be defying subpoenas, this time in a New York criminal probe of the family’s business dealings And there doesn’t seem to be anything in the world Sen. Joe Manchin hates more than giving food aid to children.
Hey, here’s a question the political press might want to start asking historians, during this week of New Year’s reflections: Have we reached the point where the nation is simply too corrupt to function? Because there doesn’t seem to be a single national story that doesn’t revolve around a self-absorbed political figure with sketchy finances working to sabotage the public good for murky personal reasons.
With the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempted coup fast approaching, NBC’s and ABC’s Sunday morning news shows both devoted significant time to the Big Lie, Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to subvert Western democracy, and the Republican Party’s shameful support of his dangerous, anti-democratic delusions.
In fact, NBC’s Meet the Press devoted its entire broadcast to Trump’s continuing threat to our republic. The program drew a clear, bright line from Trump’s past whingeing about the outcomes of free and fair elections (starting with his goofball assertion that Ted Cruz stole the Iowa caucus from him in 2016), continuing through to his anti-democratic messaging about 2020 mail-in ballots, then focusing with laser precision on his incitement of the Jan. 6 bumblefuck putsch, and ending with the unnerving fact that Republicans, and Trump, are far less chastened today—and in a better position to permanently end America—than they were a year ago.
It’s almost as if this is actually an important story or something. And they stayed with it for a full hour! Chuck Todd must have taken his Ritalin. Or else an intern was pouring hot wax on his balls for the duration to help him focus—and, naturally, the wax was roughly the same price as last year at this time, because if not it would have assuredly been the subject of a 20-minute segment on Biden’s failure to unclog the crucially important scalding-ball-wax supply chain. (Yeah, Chuck, I see you.)
But let’s put our picayune differences aside, shall we, Chuck? This was some good, bracing, vitally important journalism. It was so good, in fact, it made me wonder why we’re not seeing more of it.
While ABC’s This Week didn’t devote its entire program to the Republican threat to democracy, its coverage was similarly robust. And Jan. 6 committee vice-chair Liz Cheney pointed out that not only does the committee have proof that Trump was in his private dining room watching TV during the unpleasantness, he could have easily walked just a few feet away and ended it.
CHENEY: “The committee has firsthand testimony now that he was sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office watching the attack on television as the assault on the Capitol occurred.
“We know, as you know well, that the briefing room at the White House is just a mere few steps from the Oval Office. The president could have at any moment, walked those very few steps into the briefing room, gone on live television, and told his supporters who were assaulting the Capitol to stop.
“He could have told them to stand down. He could have told them to go home — and he failed to do so. It’s hard to imagine a more significant and more serious dereliction of duty than that.”
On ABC, Liz Cheney says Jan 6 committee has first-hand testimony that Trump watched assault on the Capitol on TV & resisted pleas from McCarthy & Ivanka asking he call for a stop to the violence. Cheney adds that she thinks Trump returning to office could be the end of democracy pic.twitter.com/iz8Ibydb3u
It’s no surprise that Grampa Rage Diapers was watching teevee during one of the most shameful chapters in our nation’s history. I mean, what else would he be doing? The path from his television to the toilet probably looked like an Oregon Trail wagon wheel rut by the end of his first (and, with Quetzalcoatl’s help, only) stint in the White House. But now that the committee has the receipts, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for Republicans to defend his behavior on that fateful day. It will, that is, if the media keeps the heat on.
Naturally, the anniversary of the bumblefuck putsch provides journalists a perfect news peg for revisiting Jan. 6 and the still-precarious position our nation finds itself in today. But what will they do between now and Nov. 2022? And Nov. 2024? Will they strive to place the news in proper perspective going forward?
Will they indulge Republicans’ attempts to paint Joe Biden as an ineffectual leader who somehow couldn’t solve the entire global supply chain crisis with a wave of his hand? Or will they keep their eye on the septic ballsack that is Donald Trump?
Time will tell—but all kidding aside, these are smart people. They need to ask themselves the same question Republican legislators asked themselves over the course of the past year: What’s more important—my short-term career goals or the long-term viability of Western democracy?
In 2021, the vast majority of Republicans failed that simple test, and so now the media is one of our few remaining bulwarks against tyranny. Meet the Press and This Week did a great job today, but it won’t mean shit if they can’t maintain that focus. Every GOP legislator needs to be challenged on Trump’s Big Lie every time they appear on the air. If they’re going to play games with the legitimacy of the November 2020 election, they need to back up their bullshit. Full stop.
I doubt Chuck Todd read past the part about his intern scalding his gonads—either because it was way beyond the pale or far too close to the truth—but I implore him and the rest of the inside-the-beltway media: we’re counting on you. Do your jobs like you did Sunday or we won’t have a free press or a country to go back to after this is all over.
UPDATE: Here’s the full program, in case you missed it. (via jamess):
Cynthia Harris, a Black homeowner in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C., did something that a lot of heirs in her situation simply do not do: She held on to her inheritance. Harris, who was left a home her parents paid about $23,000 for in 1969, told NPR that she thought about selling it 15 years ago and even reached out to a realtor. But when he advised against the sale of the home, which was on a corner lot and valued at about $220,000, she took his advice.
That property is now worth $1.2 million, according to an estimate NPR obtained. “I feel real good about it,” Harris said, laughing. “And actually I ended up marrying the realtor. We live in the house together.”
She told NPR she’s now hoping to sell the home, feeling like she’s done what she intended to do. “We’re city people,” Harris said. “We didn’t get 40 acres and a mule, (and) we had no place to call home, except this corner in Petworth. I always wanted my family to have someplace where they can say, ‘Yeah, that’s where I’m from. That’s my home.’
And that’s why I held on to it.”
She said she’s now selling it to downsize to a condo. “In all likelihood, we will offer it to family first at market value,” Harris told NPR, admitting that she doubts her husband’s daughter will be able to afford it.
It’s not a unique conundrum for Black homeowners looking to sell in this market. “The pandemic ignited a home-buying frenzy as the decade-long housing shortage converged with historically-low mortgage rates, shifting workplace dynamics and new opportunities for young buyers to pursue their first homes,” senior Forbes contributor Brenda Richardson wrote.
Thomas Holley, the longtime owner of a Crown Heights brownstone in New York, told The New York Timeshe is planning to purchase a condo in Florida and would like to sell his home to another Black person, but gentrification has caused home prices to inflate beyond what is attainable for the Black people he knows.
The dwindling number of Black homeowners in communities like Holley’s can have real social effects. “I noticed a neighbor putting up something out front and I was curious,” Holley said of his experience with a white neighbor. “I went over to strike conversation and before I could finish a sentence, he told me that he didn’t have any money.”
Even before gentrification and its effects were commonly reported on, developers looking to establish middle class communities sought to separate them from Black people. In Detroit, Teresa Moon, president of the 8 Mile Community Organization and a community resident for 59 years, said she learned in school that a wall she could see from her childhood home was built in 1941 to keep Black people outside of a neighboring all-white community. She told WBURthe wall was built when a developer seeking to build houses couldn’t access the capital he needed because Black people lived near the area he targeted. “Our parents didn’t talk about it,” Moon said. “I guess it was taboo to say what it was. When I was about 12 or 13, I found out … We found out it was a segregation wall. And why it was put up, you know, to separate Black people from white people.”
That history of discrimination has had trickle-down effects. The Brookings Institution, a research think tank, published an analysis in 2020 examining the wealth gap between Black and white Americans. The typical white family brought in $171,000, almost 10 times what the average Black family earned in 2016, the institute reported.
Sunny Jones, a real estate agent in southern Los Angeles, told NPR some Black homeowners realize the complexity of rising home prices and are “flabbergasted at how much more their home is worth than when they purchased their home,” she told NPR. “Some people are just excited that they made a smart investment and get to basically capitalize on that now,” Jones added, “and then others … they know what that means, and that might price even their own kids out of the market.”
Jones told NPR she tries to encourage thoughtful financial decisions that keep in mind a home’s worth and its ability to create generational wealth. “When that property is passed on to the next generation, it’s important that that person receiving the property has some sort of financial education on what makes sense, in order for it all to have been worth it,” she said. “I’ve seen some really sad stories about what happens to grandma’s house and what happened with the proceeds from the sale. And then I’ve seen some really good stories where it did exactly what it was supposed to do.”
And that is to arm families with enough cash to invest in ways that produce greater returns than holding that family home. If selling is a better means to accomplish generational wealth, then do sell, and do sell smartly. That sometimes means ignoring those cold calls from investors and opting to sell on the open market, where homes typically go for more. It also means ensuring a will, or better yet, a trust is in place to protect gains from the sell.
Danaya Wright, a law professor at the University of Florida, told NPR that in his research of what becomes of properties when owners die without a will in place, the homes of owners with no will in place sold for “significantly below fair market value … They were much more likely to be lost at foreclosure and tax sale — four times more likely, for instance,” Wright said.
A trust protects the property from losing value while legalities are worked out among siblings, for example. Wright explained that typically in a trust, a successor trustee is assigned, and that person has the legal right to sell or transfer the property in question.
“Even if Grandma said, ‘I want my house to be sold and split three ways among my three kids,’ it can be done. It can be done right away so that the house doesn’t deteriorate. And we’re not relying on those three heirs to actually do this process. We’ve got a designated trustee who’s going to do it, and it’s one person,” Wright told NPR. “As a legal matter, it’s much easier for that person to do.”
Wright’s advice is particularly relevant as we move further into the year 2022, during which experts are predicting a “whirlwind” housing market with home prices expected to increase another 2.9% on top of highs in 2021, Forbes reported. Hispanic homeowners are expected to grow by 4.8 million and Black homeowners by 1.2 million, according to an Urban Institute report Forbes cited. “Despite home-buying optimism, there are still barriers that exist to prevent people—particularly Black and Latin/Hispanic communities—from accessing and sustaining homeownership,” Richardson wrote. “Many of these families may be home buyer-ready today, but the challenge is making sure they know that—and ensuring that we have the home financing products and services that fit the needs of this new set of home buyers.”
Sean Grzebin, head of consumer originations for Chase Home Lending, recommended a Beginner to Buyer podcast launched last year. I haven’t listened to that one, but I can highly recommend the multifamily investing course from entrepreneur and real estate investor Jullien Gordon. It’s not free, but it’s been well worth it for me along my journey to home ownership. The BiggerPockets wealth with real estate investing podcast is a free resource I use often as well. What I’ve learned so far is that buying a home is not easy. It takes a concentrated effort to save the needed funds, and it takes a resource that is even more valuable than money. That is time—time to research lending options, time to get prequalified, and time to view homes. Being the spark that can offset the financial trajectory for multiple generations is not going to be easy, but it is worth it.
The City Council for New York City cast its final vote in 2021 in favor of renaming and co-naming 199 streets in honor of prominent New Yorkers from the past, including Frances Perkins and Eric Garner. Some groups like Avenues for Justice, which provides services to at-risk youth who may be facing incarceration, were also honored. The block named Avenues for Justice Way on Avenue B includes the organization’s Robert Siegal Community Center. Siegal was a co-founder of Avenues for Justice and opened his home to neighborhood youths while attending NYU. The building was Avenues for Justice’s first community center space and is still in operation. Its Andrew Glover Youth Program located at the community center is named for a police officer who was friends with Siegal and also dedicated his time to helping adolescents in the area.
In choosing the locations of renamed and co-named streets, the legislation ties the person being honored with places that are significant to their lives. In the case of Perkins, who was pivotal in establishing social security, the 40-hour workweek, and other major labor reforms, Frances Perkins Place spans the same block where Perkins once resided—Hartley House, a settlement house that has been in operation for more than 120 years and provides the community with resources for children, adults, and senior citizens. Throughout her life, Perkins fought for better working conditions and was an outspoken advocate for workers’ rights following her witnessing the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. She ascended from her position with the Committee on Safety of the City of New York, which was established in the wake of the disaster that killed 146 people, to becoming the first female Cabinet member in U.S. history. Perkins was the longest-serving Labor Secretary after being tapped for the role by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
Eric Garner Way is located on the corner of Victory Boulevard and Bay Street in Staten Island. It sits along the same block where Bay Beauty Supply is located, which is where Garner died after being illegally choked by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who has since lost his job with the New York Police Department, though both a grand jury and the Justice Department refused to indict him. Garner, who was considered a “peacemaker,” was harassed by police after breaking up a fight outside the beauty store. The conflict escalated and Pantaleo placed the 43-year-old in a chokehold, which ultimately resulted in Garner’s final words: “I can’t breathe.” Pantaleo’s partner, Justin D’Amico, later admitted to crafting an exaggerated police report and claimed that he believed Garner was “playing possum” and not actually in any danger. Despite witnessing the illegal chokehold used by Pantaleo, D’Amico is somehow still on the police force. Garner was a father and a grandfather; his legacy not only lives on with his family but with the foundation they’ve created in his honor, fittingly named Garner Way, or E.R.I.C. The foundation provides resources on counteracting police brutality and helps families and victims who have been impacted by abuse of power from law enforcement.
Also honored with streets named after them are the many diverse communities that make up New York City. In Queens, the intersection at Homelawn Avenue and Hillside Avenue will now be known as Little Bangladesh Avenue, and is situated in the heart of the Bangladeshi community. The corner of 70th Street and Roosevelt Avenue will now be known as Little Manila Avenue for the Filipino community in the area. Little Manila is surrounded by a bevy of Filipino restaurants and businesses and locals have been lobbying to preserve the area for its importance to the community. Also renamed in honor of its community is Little Liberia Way, located at Sobel Court and Park Hill Avenue on Staten Island. The area boasts the largest concentration of Liberians outside of Liberia and is the home of thousands of Liberians who fled civil war and conflict in hopes of seeking a better life in the U.S.
The renaming of streets aligns with the vision of many New Yorkers, including incoming Mayor Eric Adams, who previously vowed to rename streets and buildings that honor slaveholders. Adams has yet to cite examples or name potential replacements for streets like Houston Street, which is named after slaveholder William Houston, but he likely has support from constituents. A recap of one of the mayoral primary debates with leading Democratic candidates revealed that all five candidates supported renaming locations named for slaveholders.
On Monday, Brody went to his Twitter account where he traditionally posts all kinds of bad takes to send what appeared to be a screen shot of his phone’s camera (yes, he messed up taking a straight photo), seemingly showing a very snowy road, purportedly in Washington, D.C., from inside of a car he was driving. He wrote: “Today in DC. They knew a snowstorm was coming for days. Apparently ‘black lives matter’ but the lives of people driving in a snowstorm don’t.” It is hard to impart how absolute the incoherence of this attempted political opinion is without crossing one’s eyes. The levels of what was wrong with the image and the tweet and the contents and the logic of everything was more blinding than a whiteout snowstorm. The internet responded to help.
First, a visualization to help us understand the twisted logic of the right-wing fanatic.
Immigrant and Latino communities are mourning the loss of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who died last week at the age of 82. As previously outlined by Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter, Reid’s accomplishments while in the Senate were truly historic, from the passage of the Affordable Care Act to leading the repeal of the anti-gay Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.
But the boy from Searchlight, Nevada, was also a champion when it came to immigration, including the 2013 passage of a comprehensive immigration reform package that would have put millions of undocumented families on a pathway to citizenship. That historic bill would be blocked by former Republican House Speaker John Boehner. A deeper look also shows Reid wasn’t just a leader on immigration policy; he was a friend to the community.
Astrid Silva, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient and executive director of Dream Big Nevada, in 2009 wrote to Reid “expressing the pain she felt for not being able to be with her grandmother at the end of her life because she was undocumented,” Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. The DACA program now protecting Silva and hundreds of thousands of other young undocumented immigrants would not roll out for several more years.
“Reid soon became an ally of Silva’s,” with continuing pressure from other young undocumented leaders convincing Reid that putting legislation legalizing young immigrants up for a vote during his 2010 re-election campaign was the right thing to do.
I composed myself to pick up his call, Noah’s little voice, “Titi, are you ok? I am watching the news, I saw our Abuelito…” OUR. I know his legacy will continue. For every child who came from nothing, whom he made feel we mattered. Abue, the light we were searching for.💜 pic.twitter.com/ARYTZyyDr1
At the time of that 2010 re-election campaign, Reid was running against anti-immigrant Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle. Remember her? She’d notably told a group of Latino children that they looked Asian. What a time. Anyway, political strategists had told Reid to stay far away from immigration issues. In fact, former advisor José Dante Parra told Vox in 2015 that Reid was warned to “not touch the DREAM Act with a ten-foot pole, and informed he would “lose white independents and the election.’” But Reid ignored that faulty advice, leaned in, and won his race.
“His words to me, back then, and to other staffers, were: ‘You know what? The people who are going to vote against me are going to vote against me. And the people who are going to vote for me, I need to give them a reason to vote for me,’” Parra continued to Vox. “Latinos turned out in droves to support Reid, helping him win re-election with the help of the Culinary Union,” The Nevada Independent reported.
A lot of Hispanics first became politically mobilized in 2010 US Senate Race including myself. Many political people tried convince Harry Reid to backoff from Immigration Reform because it was a political death sentence in 2010. He decided to double down on it, and it won.
But while Reid won, the DREAM Act didn’t see similar success. Though it passed the House, it failed in the Senate, falling “just five votes short of the 60 needed to proceed in the Senate,” American Immigration Council said last year. More than a decade later, young immigrants and their advocates are still fighting for permanent relief. Reid continued his support for young immigrants into his retirement from politics, in 2020 joining a campaign urging DACA recipients to renew their protections.
Reid’s transition into immigration champion is all the more notable considering that, like other Democrats of yesteryear, he’d vocally expressed pretty anti-immigrant views. That included 1993 legislation and rhetoric targeting birthright citizenship, “a speech cited years later by then-President Donald Trump as justification for a wall along the southern border,” Las Vegas Review-Journal noted. But Reid not only regretted his actions, he changed course. Silva told the outlet that Reid had told her, “You always are able to learn more things and meet different people and expand outside of kind of your circle.”
Reid was also an early advocate for changing which states vote first during presidential primaries, to more accurately reflect the diversity of the Democratic Party (a position later also championed by 2020 presidential candidate Julián Castro). When that pissed off folks in very-white New Hampshire, Reid responded in true Harry Reid form:
A classic Harry Reid moment. In 2015, he said IA and NH shouldn’t vote first because they’re small and don’t reflect the demographics of the US (an obvious play to elevate his home state of Nevada). When Granite Staters demanded he retract, this was Reid’s “apology”: pic.twitter.com/dnNz4CEMSH
“Harry Reid was a stalwart advocate for immigrants, and more broadly for all the people of a rapidly changing and diverse state,” UNLV Immigration Clinic tweeted following his death. “We thank him for his support for @unlvlaw and our clinic. Like many others, we will remember him as we continue to work for the people of Nevada.”
“We are proud to have worked alongside Senator Reid in the fight for comprehensive worker-centered immigration reform and protecting workers’ rights,” Culinary Workers Union Local 226 said. “We treasure the memory of when he said, ‘There is only one way to win a campaign, you fight and you win. You don’t lay down. You stand firm and do what you say you are going to do.’”
Reid would cite his own 2010 victory in pushing Congressional Democrats to act on immigration last year. “If my 2010 re-election to the Senate proved anything, it was that Democrats can fight and win on immigration,” he said according to The Hill. “It makes policy sense and political sense and not just with Latino voters, but also with Americans of all backgrounds. However, the operative word is ‘win.’ With Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House, Americans expect Democrats to deliver this time on sensible immigration policies.” Thank you, Harry.
Babbitt, 35, was an Air Force veteran who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police police officer as she attempted to climb through a broken window of a door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the U.S. Capitol during the terrorist attack on Jan. 6.
Since her death, former President Donald Trump has praised Babbitt, calling her an “innocent, wonderful, and incredible woman,” taped a posthumous video for her birthday, and demanded the Justice Department reopen an investigation into her death. Trump supporters idealize her as a soldier for justice who was wrongfully murdered. Her name and photo have been emblazoned on T-shirts and flags at Trump rallies.
However, Associated Press spoke with a woman by the name of Celeste Norris who says the Babbitt she knew was dangerous and violent. “I lived in fear because I didn’t know what she was capable of,” Norris told the AP. “I was constantly looking over my shoulder.”
Norris’ first encounter with Babbitt took place on July 29, 2016, when Norris says Babbitt rammed her SUV in a road-rage incident in Prince Frederick, Maryland.
“She pulls up yelling and screaming,” Norris told AP. “It took me a good 30 seconds to figure out who she was. … Just all sorts of expletives, telling me to get out of the car, that she was going to beat my ass.”
Norris says Babbitt had been having an affair with her boyfriend, so Norris called Babbitt’s husband and told him.
Norris was in a six-year relationship with Aaron Babbitt when she discovered he’d been having an affair with Babbitt, who then went by her married name Ashli McEntee. Her ex-husband’s name is Timothy McEntee.
“He was telling me about this foulmouthed chick that’s on his shift, blah, blah, blah,” Norris said. “Come to find out a few months later … they were basically having this relationship while they were at work.”
On the day that Norris was hit by Babbitt, she told AP she was sitting at a stop sign. A white Ford Explorer passed her going in the opposite direction. The SUV made a U-turn and then began speeding up behind her, forcing the car between them to move aside. When Babbitt got behind Norris she rammed her rear bumper, and then again and then again all while the two SUVs drove down the road.
Babbitt got out of her car and began banging on Norris’ window. Norris says she had no idea initially who Babbitt was, so she called 911. Deputies arrived within minutes.
On the day of the altercation, Norris says she was so shaken by the event she went with a friend and filed a peace order, a kind of restraining order, against Babbitt.
Babbitt initially claimed the accident happened because Norris had backed her car into her SUV, but once the case went to trial, Norris told AP, Babbitt admitted to colliding with Norris but alleged it was an accident.
AP reports that Babbitt was issued a criminal summons on charges of reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor defined under Maryland law as engaging in conduct “that creates a substantial risk of death or serious physical injury to another” and is punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. She was also charged with malicious destruction of property for the damage to Norris’ SUV, and later reckless driving, negligent driving, and failure to control a vehicle’s speed to avoid a collision.
A year later, Norris filed another restraining order against Babbitt citing harassment and stalking. Norris says Babbitt called her repeatedly in the middle of the night and was following her.
In 2019, Norris filed a personal injury suit against Babbitt seeking $74,500 in damages. The case was settled with Babbitt’s insurance.
AP reports that in the months prior to her death, Babbitt had become obsessed with the “big lie,” and made numerous violent threats on her now-defunct social media platforms. She railed against Democrats and was a devout anti-masker, QAnon follower, and xenophobe.
The day before the insurrection, Babbitt tweeted, “Nothing will stop us,” and “They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours….dark to light!”
Aaron Babbitt’s attorney, Terrell Roberts III, has said the shooting “was tantamount to an execution without trial.” Adding: “Given her background as a 14-year veteran of the Air Force, it is likely that Ashli would have complied with simple verbal commands, thereby making the use of any force unnecessary.”
Roberts has raised over $375,000 via a Christian crowdfunding site and has threatened to file a wrongful lawsuit against the Capitol Police for his Babbitt’s death, AP reports. Roberts alleges that Babbitt, a 5-foot-2 and 115-pound former military police officer, “could have been stopped by a single trained officer” and that Babbitt “was entitled to a warning and chance to surrender before she was shot to death.”
Lt. Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot Babbitt, was cleared by both the U.S. Capitol Police and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, finding that he acted in defense of members of Congress and in self-defense.
“I tried to wait as long as I could,” Byrd told NBC News. “I hoped and prayed no one tried to enter through those doors. But their failure to comply required me to take the appropriate action to save the lives of members of Congress and myself and my fellow officers.”
We’re curious, do you have friends or family who have been affected by right-wing disinformation? Let us know!
