Independent News

This post was originally published on this site

In the post-Trump era, it seems like nothing can really shock Americans anymore. That is why Republican senators like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marsha Blackburn felt they could vomit up and spew whatever specious or scurrilous attacks that struck their fancy during the confirmation hearings for newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Pandering to a country with a thoroughly polarized electorate, they believed they’d face no significant consequences for their behavior, and even less from the Republican base whose votes sustain each of their perches in office. Personal nastiness has become a badge of honor among these types, ever since Donald Trump smoothed their paths with his own brand of arrogant, strutting insouciance and disrespect.

They also knew that once the hearings were over, the sheer ubiquity of our instant-gratification news media would immediately move on to the next outrage. That whatever the next shiny object du jour happened to be would swiftly relegate their shameful performance to that vast memory hole where egregious, hyperpartisan political behavior goes to die.

The sad aspect to all of this is that we are now at a point where such behavior by Republicans has become normalized. We already knew it would not have mattered whether President Biden had nominated a different Black woman to the court, one with a completely distinct background and life experience than Justice Jackson. For the vast majority of Republicans who voted against her confirmation—including the ones who simply, quietly voted “Nay” without ever making a spectacle of themselves like Cruz, Hawley, Cotton, and Blackburn—the only important thing for them was that she was nominated by a Democrat. That was all the reason they needed to oppose her, mainly because they believe Americans who make up their political constituencies would tolerate nothing less than complete rejection of an otherwise wholly, eminently, even superlatively qualified nominee. But the fact that she was also a Black woman provided the additional impetus for many of them to abandon any sense of decency whatsoever.

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

Now Republicans are doubtlessly ready to move on, most perhaps even feeling invigorated by their display of fealty to the Trump ethic as they recede into the warm cesspool of backwash provided by Fox News, the only major media outlet that treats them fawningly without ever criticizing them. But perhaps there is something that those Americans not thoroughly zombified and in thrall to right-wing media can take away from this display.

Anita Hill retains a place in the nation’s collective memory precisely because her vile treatment during Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings—at the hands of a Judiciary Committee, then an exclusively male club of U.S. senators—sparked a backlash that ultimately transformed that body and the House of Representatives as well, prompting Americans just one year later to elect five women to the Senate and 47 more to the House. The face of this country has not been the same  since that time, with women advancing to the speakership, the vice presidency, and winning the popular vote for the presidency. There are now more women in Congress than at any time in history, thanks in large part to the treatment afforded to Anita Hill.

On Thursday, Professor Hill authored a piece for The Washington Post, published before Justice Jackson’s confirmation, in which she argued for revisions to the Judiciary Committee’s rules on questioning nominees.  She states:

I know something about being mistreated by the Senate Judiciary Committee. During the confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, I was subjected to attacks on my intelligence, truthfulness and even my sanity when I testified about my experience working for the nominee at the Education Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In a spectacularly low moment, senators sought out slanderous statements from my former students.

She knew that Jackson, much like herself, would be compelled to face not only racist but sexist attacks, as well.  After initial media reports suggested “that Republicans would offer little resistance to Jackson’s confirmation,” Hill says she also knew, “from painful experience, that assessment was overly optimistic.”

Even so, I was shocked by the interrogation of Jackson, a nominee with stellar credentials and more judicial experience than any of the sitting justices when they were nominated. It was obvious that no matter how composed, respectful or brilliant her responses, her critics’ only goal was to discredit her. […]

Gotcha questions like how to define a woman, asked by Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R), have no place in the hearing room, and fall short of what should be expected of the Senate during its exercise of its advice and consent role. The same is true of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R) focus on how critical race theory is supposedly being taught in the private school on whose board Jackson sits. A confirmation hearing should be about learning how a person will judge, not how well she handles specious browbeating.

Realistically, Hill also probably knows that our political system is now so paralyzed that any change to the rules about questioning nominees is highly unlikely. She also realizes that the divisions in this country are now to a point where any transformation in the minds of the electorate about how women, particularly Black women, were treated during these hearings is likely to be measured, at best, blunted by the intractability of partisan divisions.

Still, Americans may not forget what they saw in Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination process. More Americans voiced their support of Justice Jackson than any of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, with polls showing very high levels of disapproval of the Republicans’ tactics. Importantly, the hearings provided a firsthand reminder for Americans about what the Republican Party really stands for. Black women, in particular, took serious notice of the mistreatment and hyperbolic abuse Jackson was subjected to.

Paul Waldman, writing for The Washington Post, believes the political consequences of Justice Jackson’s hearings may turn out to be significant. Waldman observes that the GOP did itself no favors with their references to “pedophilia” and “Nazism,” QAnon-esque tropes that do not resonate with the vast majority of the electorate. While they may have pleased the most hardcore of their base, that base is not embraced by the rest of the country. Nor did the Republicans’ constant interruptions, hectoring, and grandstanding toward Jackson escape the notice of women, particularly Black women. Waldman writes:

It will be some time before we can fully judge the political impact of this confirmation, though one clue as to how this will resonate in the future will be found in whether Democrats bring up this confirmation more often than Republicans do. But it undoubtedly intensified the currents already shaping our politics: Democrats reaching for the mainstream, and Republicans running eagerly to embrace their extremist fringe.

Donald Trump may still hold sway over the Republican Party, but QAnon and its bizarre fantasies don’t appeal to the majority of the American public. Neither did the relentless, thoughtless abuse that was heaped upon Justice Jackson endear Republicans to anyone but their rabid base. Although we no longer live in a time where such tactics might galvanize an entire electorate, in the long run, the GOP’s cynical calculation may have done them much more harm than good.

This post was originally published on this site

This article was originally published at Prism.

The Supreme Court is set to hear a case on April 26 that will determine whether the Biden administration can repeal the controversial Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy. The policy, officially known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), forces asylum-seekers to stay in shelters at the Southwest border as they await their immigration proceedings in an already backlogged immigration system.

The Biden v. Texas case questions whether a part of the U.S. code requires the Department of Homeland Security to continue enforcing the policy. Biden initially suspended the program in February 2021 after pressure by immigration advocates, but after Texas and Missouri sued the federal government, a federal judge ordered it be reinstated in August. Now the Supreme Court will decide whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit erred by concluding that the decision by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to terminate MPP had no legal effect.  

“It’s clear to us that the Department of Homeland Security has rightly concluded that ‘Remain in Mexico’ is inherently flawed and puts the lives of people returned to Mexico in danger,” said Kennji Kizuka, ​​associate director of research and analysis for refugee protection at Human Rights First. “We hope the Supreme Court does the right thing and allows the department to end the policy.”

The court order reinstating the policy went into effect in December 2021 and was accompanied by an expansion to include all asylum-seekers from the Western hemisphere, namely Haitians.

Life at the border has proven to be dangerous. According to a joint report with Human Rights First, between February 2019 and February 2021 there were at least 1,544 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and other violent assaults against asylum-seekers and migrants forced to return to Mexico under this program. These attacks include 341 cases of children who were kidnapped or nearly kidnapped in an already backlogged immigration court system, leaving them in the extremely dangerous situations they were trying to escape.

According to data from the Department of Homeland Security, since the program was reinstated in December 2021, 1,569 asylum-seekers have been enrolled in the policy and are being processed in Mexico. Upon being entered in the program, Customs and Border Protection screens asylum-seekers for fear of returning to Mexico. If an asylum-seeker is found to have a reasonable fear of persecution or torture, or if they are particularly vulnerable (if they are LGBTQ+ or have health issues), then they are disenrolled from MPP. Once disenrolled, they are referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a custody determination, where they may be allowed to enter the country and stay with family or another host, or they will be placed in a detention center.

“It is an arbitrary decision, we have seen,” said Margaret Cargioli, directing attorney for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “Once they’re in that detention center, that’s where they have to await their removal proceedings with an immigration judge.”

Cargioli said she had one client who was bisexual, had a hearing disability, and had a sponsor in the U.S. But they were arbitrarily sent to a Louisiana detention center. Cargioli also said the program has caused harm to thousands of asylum-seekers and is riddled with access to counsel barriers and due process issues for those exercising their right to asylum in the U.S.

Julia Neusner, a refugee protection attorney with Human Rights First, interviewed people returned to Mexico under MPP in Juarez in December and has been observing MPP court in Tijuana since the policy was reinstated. Neusner has heard countless stories of people in Tijuana who are in MPP and have been beaten and robbed outside the shelter.

“People who have been returned under MPP have already been victims of violent crimes,” Neusner said. “People are afraid to leave the shelters. They know they’ve run a high risk of being kidnapped.”

As a result of the dangerous circumstances, many people have reported having symptoms of severe mental health issues to Neusner, including depression and anxiety. One person she spoke to reports they had never had insomnia before, and now he cannot sleep at all.

“It’s not a consequence just of the danger they face,” Neusner said. “But also the uncertainty and being isolated and in a country that’s not their own country without their network.”

Additionally, many people in MPP have difficulty accessing lawyers from Mexico since they need U.S. lawyers familiar with U.S. immigration proceedings. According to information from Trac Immigration, 63,295 asylum-seekers were unrepresented in their deportation proceedings during the first iteration of MPP during Trump’s presidency from 2019 until it was rescinded by Biden in February 2021. According to Neusner, there are not many U.S. lawyers who take MPP cases since they cannot meet in person in the border cities. The few nonprofits that do take MPP cases are overwhelmed. Neusner attended MPP hearings earlier this week and consistently heard people say they could not find legal representation.

Of the seven cases she observed, three were coming for their second hearing and had been in MPP for a month already. They were initially issued a continuance so they could find a lawyer but have not been able to find any representation. The judge issued them another month-long extension. The four other cases were also granted a month-long extension so they could find a lawyer. Initially, everyone in MPP is given a document with phone numbers for pro bono service providers, but asylum-seekers say they are overwhelmed with other cases.

“I would like to see this program end once and for all,” Neusner said. “It denies people their due process, right to seek asylum under U.S. and international law. The Biden administration did the right thing at the outset by getting rid of this policy.”

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This post was originally published on this site

Oh, you GQP. How you manage to screw up basic facts. That’s okay. On this one, I’m giving you a pass.

The Federalist led their coverage today with this blaring headline: “Cancel Your Disney Vacation And Go To Dollywood Instead.” What are they talking about? Why, Disney is that woke company that they want to punish because of all their pro-LGBTQ support, and they have had enough of it. 

From the author of that piece:

“It’s not just the recent visibility of the longstanding fact that Disney’s post-Walt corporate leadership works to undermine sexual wholeness, but also about the greedy commercialization of the Disney brand.”

Ok, there, so you are boycotting Disney by going to Dollywood because of Disney’s overly liberal values? Ooh boy. Do I have a surprise in store for you. 

Do they remember when Dolly stood up against marriage bans for LGBTQ Americans?

Parton is a longtime ally of the LGBT community, with many considering her a gay icon. She supported same-sex marriage in the United States as early as 2009. She has advocated for trans people regarding North Carolina’s bathroom bill. Not to mention, she has often dedicated her smash hit “Jolene” to the drag queens who dress like her at her concerts.  

Do they recall how she supported feminist icons and pushed back against conservative ideas, going on CNN to talk about the bathroom bans being bad legislation?

Did they forget her contributing an Oscar-nominated hit song to Transamerica?

Or maybe they were not aware of Dolly Parton’s plan to provide the employees of Dollywood a no-expense college education.

Vivian Topping, director of advocacy and civic engagement at the Equality Federation, and Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights

Just wanted to let you know, kind folks at The Federalist, that if you want to punish Disney, this is a silly way to do it. I trust Dolly Parton to use your money for good causes, though, so go ahead! Travel to Dollywood. In that, I am agreed.

This post was originally published on this site

There is nothing that can match hearing jazz performed live, in a club; I say that as a longtime collector of recorded music, a jazz radio listener, and a former DJ. I’m not talking about concert venues, where you sit in your seat and applaud politely (or enthusiastically) after each set—though they too have their place in history, as do the big outdoor “jazz festivals.”

Like so many businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic put a serious crimp in attendance at jazz clubs across the country and sadly, some longtime venues have had to close. April is Jazz Appreciation Month in the U.S, and when pondering this installment of Black Music Sunday, I got to thinking about the venues where I’ve done a lot of appreciating jazz myself: the jazz clubs of New York City. The city of my birth was where I first got to experience live jazz, and plays a major role in that history, so it’s our focus this week. But fear not: In Sundays to come, you can expect visits to other cities and their jazz scenes.

The name that inevitably pops up in any conversation about New York’s jazz clubs is the iconic Cotton Club. It’s a venue that featured a who’s who of the jazz elite during the Harlem Renaissance, including Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, The Mills Brothers, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Adelaide Hall, and tap dancers like the Nicholas Brothers.  And yet the other side of the Cotton Club’s history points to an underbelly of racism and segregation which is often unacknowledged, brushed over, or overshadowed by the luster, fame, and talent of the Black stars who performed there. 

This compilation offers an aural glimpse of what live music sounded like in the Cotton Club back then … though I certainly cringed when I heard Duke Ellington introduced as “the greatest living master of jungle music.”

You can find the track list from Jazz Essential here.

The Cotton Club opened in December 1923, after prominent British bootlegger Owney Madden took over the club from boxer Jack Johnson, who opened the space as Club DeLuxe in 1920.

Jazz and classical music streamer service Vialma has more:

[Madden] had his eyes set on using the club to bring the thriving Harlem music scene to a whites-only audience. This experience would be accompanied by ‘Madden’s Number One’ booze, a luxury to the Prohibition-struck upper-class white population of New York.

Upon taking over, Owney set about swiftly rebranding the Club DeLuxe, which included increasing its capacity from 400 to 700 and installing an entirely new décor built around the exotic plantations and jungles which purportedly reflected the origins of the black population of the Harlem neighbourhood of New York. The staff were hired and dressed to serve this offensively inaccurate aesthetic, with a dark-skinned waiting team in smart red tuxedos and a young, light-skinned troupe of tall dancers in skimpy showstopping attires. His final stroke before the club opened was to rename it the Cotton Club after the light brown colouring of raw cotton.

Langston Hughes was a “rare” Black patron allowed into the club. As the African American Registry notes, he made it clear in his autobiography, The Big Sea, that he was not a fan.

Following his visit, Hughes criticized the club’s segregated atmosphere and commented that it was “a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites”. In addition to the “jungle music” and plantation-themed interior, Hughes believed that Madden’s idea of “authentic black entertainment” was similar to the entertainment provided at a zoo and that white “strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers – like amusing animals in a zoo.”  Hughes also believed that the Cotton Club negatively affected the Harlem community. The club brought an “influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang.” Hughes also mentioned how many of the neighboring cabarets, especially black cabarets, were forced to close due to the competition from the Cotton Club. These smaller clubs did not have a large floor or music by famous entertainers like Ellington.  

Additionally, Hughes wrote, Black folks in Harlem “did not like the Cotton Club.”

[N]ow the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers–like amusing animals in a zoo.

The Negroes said: “We can’t go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won’t even let us in your clubs.” But they didn’t say it out loud–for Negroes are practically never rude to white people. So thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses.”

Hughes also noted that some Black-owned clubs made the “grievous error” of emulating the Cotton Club’s segregation policies—to their own peril.

Claudia Roth Pierpont, writing about Duke Ellington for The New Yorker in 2010, minced no words.

More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, if not by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. Ellington had to ask permission for friends to see his show. Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers, singers, miscellaneous acts, entr’actes, and theatrical revues.

These two film clips—which I believe to be from a season four episode of American Experience titled “Duke Ellington: Reminiscing in Tempo”—set the scene at the Cotton Club when Duke Ellington’s band was hired.

Kareem Abdul- Jabbar also took a scathing look at the Cotton Club’s history in his book, On the Shoulder of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, cited here in an NPR review.

The Cotton Club was part of a bizarre tradition in Harlem that included other fancy clubs such as Connie’s Inn and Small’s Paradise. These clubs, though operating in the heart of black Harlem, catered exclusively to white customers. Yet, in their shows and decor they still promoted an idealized but wholly inaccurate black lifestyle similar to those in minstrel shows. Menacing bouncers were stationed at the doors to make sure no black faces were admitted to the establishments, located on the same blocks where these black men and women lived. Eleven such segregated clubs were listed in Variety, but the most famous and popular of the group was the Cotton Club, the largest, fanciest, highest-priced, which featured the most extravagant shows.

[…]

Duke Ellington and his orchestra were the house band from 1927 to 1931, and again in 1933. Between 1931 and 1933, Cab Calloway took over as bandleader. 

Other Harlem clubs trying to compete with the Cotton Club were sometimes met with violence. The Plantation Club tried to imitate the Cotton Club’s style and venue by hiring Cab Calloway and his orchestra away from the Cotton Club. Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” routine was famous and a big attraction. Cotton Club owner Madden was not pleased, so he sent a few of his men over to the Plantation Club to break up the place. They destroyed tables and chairs, shattered glasses, and dragged the bar out to the curb. Calloway returned to the Cotton Club.

Here’s that famous Calloway routine:

The BBC’s 1985 documentary, The Cotton Club Remembered, doesn’t focus on the racial segregation at the club, though at one point, the Nicholas Brothers disagree with Cab Calloway about whether Black customers were allowed.

The Cotton Club, of course, was far from the only club in Harlem.

Things were very different at the Savoy Ballroom, which was integrated.

If I could take a time machine back to Harlem, I’d be at the Savoy, not the Cotton Club—even if it weren’t segregated.

Harlem offered many more places to go—just take a look at this 1932 nightclub map of Harlem (see a larger version at the Library of Congress).

Please Join me in the comments section below for even more music from the Harlem Renaissance period, and feel free to post your favorites from the era.

This post was originally published on this site

We begin today with Sabrina Tavernise of The New York Times writing about the shattering of the illusions about a country that she loves.

I lived in Russia for nine years, and began covering it for The New York Times in 2000, the year Mr. Putin was first elected. I spent lots of time telling people — in public writing and in my private life — that Russia might sometimes look bad, but that it had a lot of wonderful qualities, too.

But in the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, I have felt like I am watching someone I love lose their mind. Many of the Russian liberals who had turned to “small acts” are feeling a sense of shock and horror, too, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a Russian anthropologist.

“I see lots of posts and conversations saying these small deeds, it was a big mistake,” she said. “People have a metaphor. They say, ‘We were trying to make some cosmetic changes to our faces, when the cancer was growing and growing in our stomachs.”

I began to wonder whether Russia was always going to end up here, and we just failed to see it. So I called Yevgeniya Albats, a Russian journalist who had warned of the dangers of a K.G.B. resurgence as early as the 1990s. Ms. Albats kept staring into the glare of the idea that at certain points in history, everything is at stake in political thought and action. She had long argued that any bargain with Mr. Putin was an illusion.

Those “small acts” that Ms. Tavernise refers to are Russian liberals that decided to drop away from electoral politics after the failure of the 2012 protests against Putin and turned, instead to working with and for “nonprofits and local governments.”

Anton Troianovski, also of The New York Times, writes about the ever-deepening culture of person-to-person surveillance within Russia.

With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.

The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.

There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.

Oh, that sounds familiar.

David Masciotra of the Daily Beast laments the lack of national coverage of the trial of the Wolverine Watchmen who threatened to kidnap, rape, and assassinate Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

The contemporary landscape features Donald Trump’s Jonestown-like personality cult, brazenly white nationalist Republican members of Congress, and right-wing pundits, like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, who sound like street-corner skinheads. As a consequence, it is hardly a surprise that threats of violence against public officials have become alarmingly routine.

In only a small sampling of districts, Reuters found 220 examples of death threats against school board members. Similarly, the Brennan Center for Justice reports that one in six election officials have received direct threats against themselves and their families since November 2020. Hopped up on their own “stop the steal” supply, right-wing activists have become vicious and devoted to the point that USA Today reports political intimidation might “jeopardize the 2022 midterms,” due to widespread resignation of election officials.[…]

Threats of violence against Whitmer did not begin with the unsuccessful plot, but with the storming of Michigan’s capitol building in Lansing in April of 2020. President Trump instructed lunatic supporters to “liberate Michigan,” and on cue, they obeyed his order—carrying firearms into the rotunda, surrounding police officers, and shouting for the deaths of Whitmer and other state officials in “protest” at COVID-19 restrictions against businesses. The same Wolverine Watchmen who would later discuss plans to assassinate Whitmer participated in the siege.

Susan J. Demas of Michigan Advance wonders how many LGBTQ children will have their lives destroyed by the Republicans.

While many stuffy legal scholars and political analysts sniffed that liberals were ridiculous to suggest that Obergefell would be overturned after former President Trump reshaped the court, it’s now almost a foregone conclusion. After all, the court has signaled its eagerness to wipe away 50 years of precedent on abortion rights with Roe v. Wade. And many Republicans, including all three Michigan attorney general candidates, are comfortable dumping the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalizing birth control.

But Republicans aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to commence the great rollback on LGBTQ+ rights. One of their key 2022 election themes is using gay and trans kids as punching bags.

That includes Republicans like Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock spreading bizarre memes falsely claiming schools are offering litter boxes to kids who “identify as cats.” That isn’t a thing, despite what your cranky uncle posted on Facebook, but it is a great way to stigmatize trans students.[…]

It’s almost as though the far-right is trying to redefine what it means to be a bad parent. You might think someone doing everything they can to ensure their children (and others) contract COVID makes them a poor candidate for being Mom of the Year. But Republicans are countering that really, the worst thing a parent can do is just have an LGBTQ+ kid.

Michelle L. Norris of The Washington Post grounds incoming Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court in a centuries-long history that Republicans would rather not be taught in schools.

Jackson was born in 1970, when the victories of the civil rights movement were beginning to manifest themselves in housing, employment, sports, education and entertainment. But racial divisions remained stark after decades of legally sanctioned segregation that followed 250 years of legal enslavement of Blacks.

Because neither the passage of laws nor the dismantling of racial codes erased the deeply ingrained narrative of racial inferiority. America had long been invested in the separation of races and, to be more specific, the automatic privilege that comes with White skin. The vestiges of slavery and segregation are still with us, and yet we find ourselves in a time when the party that so viciously opposed Jackson’s nomination wants to eviscerate the teachings and discussions of our nation’s racial history and focus instead on the progress America has made.

They argue that we should not dwell on all that old-timey stuff like chains and shackles, dogs and hoses, or white hoods and black bodies swinging from trees. Well, to understand and fully appreciate the progress we’ve made, you need more than a passing understanding of the dark places Americans dwelled within the sanction of law to keep bodies in bondage, to keep people oppressed, to keep human beings in a subjugated state that mocks the core tenets of our Constitution.

Monica L. Wang writes for the Boston Globe that investments in behavioral research are essential for public health.

Human behavior, such as the choice not to vaccinate (or worse, actively propagate misinformation designed to stoke unsubstantiated fear), is central to the nation’s most prevalent, obstinate conditions, including heart disease and obesity. To successfully improve health outcomes, reduce costly chronic disease management, and prevent infectious disease outbreaks, it is imperative to understand the link between what drives health behavior (our thoughts) and what catalyzes behavior change (our choices). And understanding the science of human behavior means investing in it. Unfortunately, social and behavioral health scientists remain the minuscule minority in the pool of externally funded scientific investigators.

Federal funding of social and behavioral science is about $2 billion, with the Department of Health and Human Services (primarily NIH) providing the lion’s share of investment. To put that number in context, the total research budget of NIH is over $40 billion. Widening the aperture to include investments in prevention and public health (of which behavioral research closely aligns), we find that the funding allocation is actually declining. In the two decades preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, preventive care spending by the government as a share of total national health expenditures dipped below 3 percent.

This should be deeply concerning to the public.

First, all roads of medical research inevitably require some form of behavior change on the part of individuals. From the life-saving to the banal, medical interventions require people to actually engage in choices or changes. This might mean making dietary changes, scheduling an appointment for a cancer screening, swapping out smoking for a nicotine patch, taking medication as directed, or opting to vaccinate. Short of widespread strategies such as adding fluoride to drinking water or mandating seatbelt use (which, notably, still requires human adherence), improving public health means that decision-makers in government and health care need to understand and apply the science of how to shift behavior at the population level.

Marc C. Johnson writes for Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune that disinformation has become the hallmark of this era.

Russian television, a veritable Fox News of lies and distortion and totally controlled by Putin, dishes a daily misinformation diet to people who have been lied to for so long that many have given up trying to ascertain the truth. While it would be foolish to put much faith in public opinion polling emanating from a country so thoroughly brainwashed, it appears most Russians, without ready access to independent reporting about the war, believe the lies pushed by the former KGB agent who is responsible for this madness.

Here’s how this disinformation reality connects to domestic politics, and the clear and present danger it presents to American democracy. For a decade or more, the politics of the United States have been swamped by a deluge of lies with much of the lying amplified by people in high places and by cynical and manipulative media figures. […]

The purpose of all this lying is, of course, to fuel grievance — make people mad — but also to confuse. Is there really a world-wide child sex abuse network, as QAnon has claimed? Did presidential election ballots disappear in Michigan? Was COVID-19 a Chinese communist plot?[…]

The disinformation — the lies — have become so prevalent that it is nearly impossible to keep track, and that is another aspect of what one-time Donald Trump “strategist” Steve Bannon infamously called “flooding the zone with s#@t.”

Mr. Johnson’s editorial is good from beginning to end.

Fact: The only politician more popular in Ukraine than Boris Johnson is Volodymyr Zelensky.

Part of the reason is that Britain trained much of the Ukrainian army even prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Elisa Braun and Maïa de La Baume of POLITICO Europe explain that part of the reason for the tightening polls in today’s French elections is that French President Emmanuel Macron spent too much time… being president and not enough time campaigning..

Observers say the president is in trouble because he’s pursued a strategy that has cast him too much as an above-the-fray father of the nation and global crisis manager — trying to mediate in the war in Ukraine, for example, rather than engage in the rough and tumble of a traditional campaign, when French voters want to hear directly from the candidates.

“In a way, the war suited him perfectly at first: We were going to have something in a form of non-campaign, with a president who had to show himself as supervising everything, as a protective father,” said Raphaël Llorca, a communications expert and author of a book entitled “The Macron Brand.”

“But the big mistake was to consider that this momentum would last until April,” Llorca said.[…]

By contrast, many experts say, Le Pen is coming across as a skilled communicator, who campaigned relentlessly in France’s heartlands and focused on everyday issues, above all the rising cost of living. “Le Pen did a proximity campaign, visiting a lot of small towns and villages,” said Mathieu Gallard, research director at polling firm Ipsos. “Her trips were not very much covered by the national press but had a big echo in local media.”

“She gave an impression of proximity, which is very important for French voters,” Gallard said.

Finally today, Secunder Kermani of BBC News explains some of the reasons why Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan lost a no-confidence vote in Pakistan’s Parliament yesterday.

Mr Khan has insisted his focus is on improving governance, and he has made some impressive expansions to the social welfare system, introducing a health insurance scheme in large parts of the country, for example.

However, in other areas he has faltered. His decision to appoint an inexperienced and underqualified political newcomer to a key position, chief minister of Punjab, the country’s most populous province, was widely ridiculed.

At a loss to explain why Mr Khan refused to replace his appointee, Usman Buzdar, despite overwhelming criticism, rumours spread that the prime minister’s wife, a spiritual guide of sorts, had warned him Mr Buzdar was a good omen and – if he were to be sacked – his entire government would collapse.

There were other challenges, too. The cost of living in Pakistan has been rocketing up, with sharp rises in food prices and the rupee falling against the dollar.

Imran Khan’s supporters blame global conditions, but public resentment against him has been rising. “The Sharifs might’ve filled themselves up, but at least they got work done,” has become a common grumble.

Everyone have a great day!

This post was originally published on this site

This article was originally published at Prism.

Over 430,000 affirmative asylum-seekers have been subject to a processing policy referred to as “Last In, First Out” (LIFO) that prioritizes recently submitted applications over older cases. A person who applies for affirmative asylum this year should have their interview within 45 days, but the wait is averaging 1,621 days. For those who applied in 2015, 2016, or 2017 when the backlog began, the delay has lasted seven years.

Former President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency responsible for processing affirmative asylum applications, to reinstate the LIFO system in 2018. According to USCIS, the policy was originally introduced in 1995 by then-President Bill Clinton to reduce the backlog and deter asylum-seekers who apply as a means to obtain work authorization. LIFO was in place for 20 years until December 2014, when then-President Barack Obama’s administration temporarily adopted a “First In, First Out” (FIFO) scheduling system, processing applications as they arrived. However, according to immigration advocates, the policy has failed to reduce the backlog, with the backlog increasing by 450,000 cases from 163,000 in 2017, which was right before LIFO was reinstated, to 614,000 in 2020.

The wait has also forced thousands of asylum-seekers to live in constant uncertainty about their status.

Erez, a Kurdish asylum-seeker from Turkey, applied in 2016 and has been waiting for an interview ever since. Erez was a college student at the time, and police were attacking Kurdish students. Erez fled Turkey and came to the U.S. to find safety. Erez said he has had to reapply for a work permit every two years but has yet to receive his most recent work authorization card because of the backlog. On March 29, Biden announced actions to address the work permit backlog and immigration applications, but the measures do not apply directly to processing affirmative asylum cases.

“There’s uncertainty,” Erez said. “I’m not sure when they will address my application; after all this time, I’m just waiting.”

Andrea Barron, the advocacy program manager for Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, said asylum-seekers and torture survivors are suffering the most from LIFO. Many applicants are separated from family members who are still in their home countries. According to Barron, applicants report that their children experience ongoing violence and are punished for their parents being known as dissidents. One applicant was a mother with a 14-year-old daughter in Ethiopia. Her daughter was raped as punishment for her mother being a known dissident. According to Barron, had her mother gotten an interview, she could have brought her daughter to the U.S. and prevented the attack.

“Torture survivors have experienced significant trauma and are left in limbo, often separated from their families, and this exacerbates the trauma,” Barron said. “These tragic outcomes could have been avoided had their applications been processed promptly.”

Barron has been advocating for a concrete solution to the problem. She suggests that USCIS hire asylum officers designated to address asylum applications that were filed five or more years ago. While USCIS says they have increased the number of authorized asylum officers from 273 in 2013 to 771 in 2019, Barron said this increase has had hardly any effect on increasing the number of interviews for torture survivors and other asylum-seekers waiting more than five years for an interview.

“The big question is, how are you going to use those asylum officers?” Barron said. “Are any of them going to be able to interview the people who are waiting five years for their interview?

Barron suggests a portion of asylum officers should work back to front. Her suggestion was supported by Rep. Jerry Nadler and 39 other members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a letter they sent to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and USCIS Director Ur Jaddou on Sept. 9, 2021.

“USCIS wants to make it look like they’re trying to solve the problem,” Barron said. “It will not solve the problem, the problem will be solved only when there is a designated number of asylum officers to work on these long-term cases.”

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This post was originally published on this site

Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, whom God created to conclusively disprove white supremacy, is trying to explain away his video appearance at shrieking anti-Semite Nick Fuentes’ white power-palooza carnival in February, and that explanation is just as craven as you might imagine. 

Gosar, who has the intellectual heft of chilled monkey brains and looks like he cuts his own hair with an intermittent series of controlled burns, seems to think white people are superior to other races. Now, that’s an assertion that might seem slanderous if not for his repeated participation in white supremacist events. And now, more than a month after appearing via video at Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference, Gosar is addressing the controversy—by blaming his staff. What a standup fella, huh?

What’s the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on my underpaid, overworked staff, who should have recalled from my appearance last year that this was a white nationalist event.

POLITICO:

Gosar’s denial — among the first public remarks he’s given on the matter — comes nearly a month after the furor over his appearance at Fuentes’ event consumed the House GOP. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Gosar both appeared at Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference. Greene spoke in person, while Gosar’s office sent in a video.

What he’s saying: “It wasn’t supposed to go to Nick’s group,” Gosar told POLITICO, noting that a staffer “misconstrued” directions from his chief of staff. The tape was intended to go to other groups as a general “welcome video,” he added.

According to Gosar, his staff is currently shorthanded, and “there was a miscommunication.” Which is odd, because after he spoke in person at the same conference in 2021, you’d think he might have put his foot down and removed the white nationalist group from his iPhone or Rolodex or fish pail full of Post-It Notes or whatever the disgraced dentist uses to organize his contact list.

Famously, Gosar claims he “didn’t know anything about the group” before speaking at the event last year;  Rep. Greene made a similar comment following her appearance at the conference this year. That might pass as an explanation if not for this:

The first results when you Google Fuentes’ name identify him as a white nationalist who has compared baking cookies to the Holocaust’s mass murder of Jews, among other incendiary and discriminatory statements.

And Fuentes isn’t just content to marginalize the vast majority of humans. He also managed to slip in some Putin praise at the AFPAC as Greene awaited her turn to speak. Remember, this came shortly after Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Transcript!

FUENTES: “You know they say about America, they say diversity is our strength. And I look at China, I look at Russia. Can we give a round of applause for Russia? [Crowd cheers and chants ‘Putin, Putin, Putin!’] Absolutely, absolutely.”

And as Tim Wise notes, Greene still came on out.

While House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has vowed to give both Greene and Gosar (another) stern talking-to, the Republican Party appears unwilling to expose them to censure—an extraordinary disciplinary measure they appear to reserve solely for members who investigate coups against the legitimate government of the United States. 

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast with Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld

Meanwhile, according to POLITICO, both Gosar and Greene have apparently lost the benefit of the doubt among most congressional Republicans, who would likely prefer they keep their racism cloaked behind a thin veneer of respectability.

And, of course, Gosar and Greene were among the 63 House members (all Republicans) who on Tuesday voted against a resolution supporting NATO—which is likely the biggest gift they can get away with giving Putin at the moment.

Yes, the GOP is indeed the party of Putin and white nationalism. It’s past time we hang those moldering albatrosses around their treacherous necks, don’t you think?

This post was originally published on this site

Transgender rights are consistently being threatened, with a record number of anti-trans bill being filed in just the first few months of this year alone. According to NBC News, nearly 240 such pieces of legislation have been filed, ranging from bills that target trans athletes and youth to restricting health care access and barring students from learning about LGBTQ issues. As part of Daily Kos’ commitment to better covering trans issues and uplifting the trans experience, the Daily Kos Equity Council on Thursday facilitated a discussion with three panelists about trans rights. Hosted by Trending News writer Marissa Higgins (she/her), staff heard from KB Brookins (they/them), Holiday Simmons (he/him), and S. Leigh Thompson (he/they).

Brookins, whose book of poetry How to Identify Yourself With a Wound delves into intersectional inquiry, expertly answered questions about the trans experience and offered fantastic advice for those looking to be better allies. When the subject of health care arose, Brookins was able to connect the medical system that fails us all with trans-specific issues in that space. Brookins discussed a piece they wrote for the Huffington Post about their experience seeking care from a gynecologist as a Black trans man in Texas and the power imbalance between providers and patients. “If you have someone in front of you who has the power to alter the experience of your body or your mind, that is a large responsibility and I think it’s super important that people are competent around giving health care to trans folks,” Brookins said. “This is a thing that absolutely everybody should care about, because having legislation that hinders how you can support your child is an issue that everyone should care about. And the misconception is, I think, that people think it’s a trans issue. I think it’s a human rights issue.”

RELATED STORY: Daily Kos Equity Council presents a panel on trans rights

Thompson, a consultant and facilitator whose creative work offers an inspiring chance for intersectional dialog, was well-equipped to provide a thoughtful answer about trans health care issues. They briefly brought up the trauma of their first OB/GYN visit, further highlighting the fact that seeking out gender-affirming care should only strengthen the argument that trans rights are human rights. “This just underpins that health care for anybody is hard in the United States, right? It’s already hard,” Thompson said. “So, like, who actively desires to engage more in the health care system just for funsies? It’s so, so rare that that happens. People are struggling to actually get any care whatsoever, and so for trans people to take the extra effort to seek out actual care  […] to affirm and to support their experience and their identity in the world, that’s not something that just happens on accident. It’s through great consideration and great deliberation.”

That certainty is something cisgender folks rarely are forced to reckon with, even when those folks choose to seek care that is itself gender-affirming. Both Brookins and Simmons brought up the fact that hormones are prescribed for a variety of reasons for folks across the gender spectrum. “We’re all transitioning, throughout life,” Simmons explained. “A personal story is when I was earlier on in my medical transition, I was not seeing some of the physical changes that I wanted and I asked my doctor, ‘Should I get a higher dose?’ And I go to a queer medical place,” Simmons said. “He’s like, ‘I got big burly bears who have low testosterone levels and little skinny twinks with testosterone through the roof.’ It’s really not correlated, and also, maybe let’s interrogate this.”

Simmons’ work as the Resident in Resilience and Healing at the Campaign for Southern Equality is pivotal in helping LGBTQ+ folks get the medical care they need. The Campaign for Southern Equality maintains a provider directory so those seeking care can do so in a respectful environment that doesn’t pose a danger to them—a very pressing concern Simmons noted in his experience of, say, simply going to urgent care for a COVID test. “Even if it’s the most affirming urgent care place, I still have to do that work to figure out if it’s safe to [out myself] and if I want to do that labor,” Simmons said. “Even if we create the best systems, this is still something trans people have to navigate.”

An unwelcoming environment isn’t just at the doctor’s office, unfortunately, but rather can be felt across many interactions. Panelists provided tips for those who may struggle with misgendering trans and nonbinary folks. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to get better with using different pronouns is a tool any language learner is familiar with: practice. Brookins describes giving one of their plants ze/hir pronouns, while Thompson gave their cat they/them pronouns to not only help them practice but teach their child about pronoun usage. Brookins also brought up mypronouns.org, which offers a collection of resources in one place.

Perhaps the best tools for honoring trans folks and combatting transphobia are cold, hard facts. All three panelists easily tore apart made-up scenarios about one of the most pressing issues trans folks face today: discrimination in sports and through legislative actions. Thompson suggested that, for those who engage in a lot of “what if” questions, it’s about finding out what information that person is truly seeking and helping them get to the heart of why they may have some confusion around trans athlete issues.

“We can ‘what if’ any scenario,” Thompson said. “And, for some people, it’s a helpful thing for them to start to learn the boundaries of an idea or of an issue, and so they’re trying to figure out, ‘What are the edges of this conversation?’ As a person who trains on these issues, I approach it a little bit differently at times. Which is just to remind people, to really help folks understand that, often if people are trying to ‘what if,’ they really are trying to learn where the extremities are of this thing.” Thompson continued:

“Some people are literally trying to ‘what if’ in order to tank the issue. And so trying to lean into the ally space of people who actually really want to support and health. And if that’s really what you want to do, I try to get to what’s at the core of the ‘what if.’ Like, are you really trying to understand this issue more? Because we can come up with a scenario, anybody can actually pretend to be anyone else in order to defraud a sports team. Anybody can pretend to be somebody else in order to do harm, or because they have a whim, or because they have an issue and they really hate all girls in sports and want to screw them over. There are so many possibilities. Those are possible. They’re not likely. We don’t have any experiences of them actually happening. Let’s actually instead of focusing on the one maybe, let’s focus on all of the thousands and thousands of trans young people who are trying to engage in sports and need to do so in a supportive way. […] And so really supporting people and saying, ‘This is the pathway that can actually get to the place that we want to go.’”

A helpful list of resources is below for those interested in learning more about accessible health care for trans folks, pronouns, and more about the panelists themselves.

• KB Brookins’ website
• S. Leigh Thompson’s website
• Holiday Simmons’ website
• mypronouns.org
• How to add your pronouns to Zoom
• Brookins’ article on seeking health care as a Black trans man in Texas
• World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare
• A trans athlete’s guide to writing about trans athletes
• National Center for Transgender Equality ally guide

This post was originally published on this site

Captive audience meetings are one of the major tools of corporate union-busting efforts, in which management intimidates workers in person, on the clock, with the knowledge that their responses are being watched. Now, Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, is asking the board to classify most captive audience meetings as an unfair labor practice based on coercion in violation of workers’ rights.

“I will urge the Board to correct that anomaly and hold that, in two circumstances, employees will understand their presence and attention to employer speech concerning their exercise of Section 7 rights to be required: when employees are (1) forced to convene on paid time or (2) cornered by management while performing their job duties,” Abruzzo wrote in a memo this week. “In both cases, employees constitute a captive audience deprived of their statutory right to refrain, and instead are compelled to listen by threat of discipline, discharge, or other reprisal—a threat that employees will reasonably perceive even if it is not stated explicitly.” 

Workers seeking to unionize are subjected to captive audience meetings in 90% of all organizing drives, according to studies. In recent high-profile cases, that’s included workers at Starbucks and Amazon. And while those union efforts have been successful, it doesn’t mean that the workers don’t feel the effects of the intimidation. Taking away this tool in the union-busting arsenal would be a very big deal.

● More than 50 gig workers have been killed on the job since 2017, according to a report from Gig Workers Rising, and more than 60% of those killed were people of color.

● This is a beautiful video:

● The Senate reached a deal to avert the layoffs of dozens of food service workers in the Senate itself.

● MIT graduate students voted to unionize, 1785 to 912.

● A grocery worker strike was imminent. Then came a 30-hour bargaining marathon.

● 

● Jaya Saxena reports on what Amy’s Kitchen workers are fighting for:

“The primary issue for every worker is workplace injuries,” says Ricardo Hidalgo, the Western Region organizing coordinator for the Teamsters, which is behind the union effort at the Santa Rosa facility. According to the Cal/OSHA complaint, Amy’s employs around 2,000 people at its four production facilities, which, according to the company’s 2019 fact sheet, cook up to 1 million meals a day (160,000 hand-rolled burritos among them). The complaint also says around 550 employees work at its Santa Rosa plant — the company’s first, opened in 1987 — though Hidalgo says the number is now around 700, making it the one of the town’s largest and most reliable employers. “I have never, in my career, seen the level of workplace injuries that I’m seeing now,” Hidalgo says.

● What are the 26 jobs you are most likely to quit?