The Indivisible manual was written by former congressional staffers, who, as the Los Angeles Timeswrote this week, were "trying to deploy the same strategies against President Trump that made the anti-Obama tea party so successful." And now, branches of this indivisible movement—composed of many fledgling activists—are harnessing the tactics to target lawmakers in their home districts, on issues ranging from Trump's controversial immigration ban to his education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
Take Indivisible KC, where the local group on Tuesday targeted the Kansas City field office of Senator Roy Blunt and denounced the travel ban.
The building of the 3,000-strong group, said Indivisible KC organizer Allegra Dalton to local KSBH, "is just kind of happening organically." She added: "We may not have the power as progressives right now to set an agenda for a long time to come, so what we need to do is shine a light on the agenda that is being set."
In St. Charles, Ill., where about 20 people gathered last week to percolate their ideas for action for the Indivisible Illinois [Congressional] Districts 6 and 14, resident Tom Engelhardt described what drew him to return to activism after decades.
"I have not been active in a political organization since the Vietnam years," he said. "But everything is at risk, guys; everything is in play. It's now or never."
“It’s not about supplication, it’s about power. It’s not about asking, it’s about demanding. It’s not about convincing those who are currently in power, it’s about changing the very face of power itself.” — Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, 2012
At Daily Kos on this date in 2014—It's odd how managing the menfolk's sexytimes never turns into a movement:
You never seem to hear the conservative all-our-religion-is-belong-to-you outrage machine on this stuff.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services dispatched its Office of Inspector General to review Medicare payments for vacuum erection systems, less formally known as penis pumps.
Certainly, there may certainly be individual wags out there who are miffed that their tax dollars are going for medical treatments to allow older people to have sex. There may be cranky folks who do not think that anyone should be getting Viagra for any reason, because if God wanted them to have an erection God would have taken care of that already.
But it's not a movement. You don't see a dozen conservative women all lined up in a row to testify to Congress that allowing men past childbearing age to have sex is an abomination unto their Lord, or nationwide hobby supply shops demanding that the entire national health care system be restructured to allow them to personally decide which of their male employees ought not to be receiving medical care for insufficient sexytimes. Their religion may dictate that nobody have sex unless they are married, and unless they are fertile, but there is no nationwide, Fox-News-covered movement afoot to demand that the appropriate health care remedies be given only to married and fertile people. You don't hear the Fox News talking heads going on about that.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The chaos continues! Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter help document the atrocities. Advocacy vs. activism. Scientists to march. McConnell vs. Warren. ACA repeal loses another wheel. Trump swipes at courts, again, this time with the Neil Gorsuch nomination pending.
The North Carolina GOP still hasn't gotten the message that prohibiting transgender individuals from using the logical public bathroom and blocking anti-LGBTQ nondiscrimination measures statewide just isn't going to fly in the 21st Century. It wasn't enough for the NBA, ACC, and NCAA to all pull major events from the state this year, so the NCAA is reportedly very very close to doing something much more pointed. Matt Bonesteel writes:
The NCAA is on the verge of keeping its major events — 133 of them — out of North Carolina through 2022.
“Our contacts at the NCAA tell us that, due to their stance on HB2, all North Carolina bids will be pulled from the review process and removed from consideration,” Scott Dupree of the N.C. Sports Association and Greater Raleigh Sports Alliance wrote in a letter that will be sent to members of the North Carolina House of Representatives and General Assembly. “That process will begin in the various sports committees starting in 7 to 10 days and continuing through February. At that point, we will be faced with a six-year drought of NCAA championships in North Carolina.”
An NCAA drought through 2022 could cost the state $250 million in “potential economic impact,” Dupree writes.
The letter says the state is "on the brink of losing all NCAA Championship events for six consecutive years." A Raleigh News and Observer reporter writes that the GOP has just 12 days left to right their HB2 wrong by repealing the law before the NCAA pulls the plug on all the state’s event bids through 2022.
The last thing the world needs are more 3 AM Trump tweets. But Joe Romm at Climate Progress nevertheless posesan excellent rhetorical question: “Why didn’t Trump tweet that Tuesday’s warmth crushed the D.C. record by 9°F?” Why, indeed, since The Donald™has tweeted attacks on climate science more than 30 times in the past five years.
x
Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!
Of course, cold U.S. temperatures in the winter are no evidence against global climate change, as we’ve reportedrepeatedly — just as one isolated record heat wave doesn’t provide significant evidence for climate change.
But that’s the point. The scientific evidence for long-term human-caused global warming is overwhelming and unimpeachable.
Rational people might think that the documented vulnerability to sea level rise of Trump’s oceanfront club at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach would be enough to persuade the guy to change his tune.
We face a lot of challenges with the new global economy and the race for talent and multiple humanitarian crises happening overseas. Per usual, the GOP has no solutions. Instead, they’re angling to rip apart families and constrict innovation so we become a dumber, duller, drabber and more dismal version our current selves. #MAGA. That's where Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia come in with a brand-new bill. Caitlin MacNeal writes:
Currently, U.S. citizens and permanent residents can sponsor family members to obtain green cards, but this bill would only allow someone's spouse or child who is an unmarried minor to sponsor them for a green card, according to Politico. The bill would also allow for children to bring over elderly parents, per Politico.
The legislation would also limit the refugee program to 50,000 people per year and eliminate the diversity lottery, which sets aside 50,000 visas each year to citizens from countries from which few people immigrate to the U.S., per Politico.
Cotton's office told Politico that the bill would reduce legal immigration by about 40 percent in the first year of implementation and by 50 percent over ten years.
Perdue thinks the action will help "improve the quality of American jobs and wages." Translation: We just really need to choke off innovation so those tech companies quit taking away manufacturing jobs and creating jobs that require different skills. This is, in fact, a challenge in our country—training people so they have the necessary skills to fill jobs in an evolving work environment. But trying to hobble innovation isn't the right prescription, unless you want our country to go from being a global leader to becoming a less prosperous chaser of global trends. That really will slow down immigration. And when people stop wanting to immigrate here, that’s when our country really will be in the crapper.
President Trump and Republican lawmakers have never been able to explain how they would improve on the Affordable Care Act, which they’ve promised to quickly repeal and replace with something better. Now, it’s increasingly evident that they have no workable plan and might never come up with one.
Congress blew past a self-imposed Jan. 27 deadline to introduce legislation to end the health law. Mr. Trump told Fox News in an interview that ran Sunday that a replacement for the health law might not be ready until next year. Meanwhile, Republican senators like Lamar Alexander and Orrin Hatch have started talking about “repairing” the A.C.A., or Obamacare, rather than removing it root-and-branch. And while House Speaker Paul Ryan still insists that Congress will repeal and replace it this year, his wishful statements are clearly meant in large measure just to placate the burn-it-all-down wing of his caucus.
After campaigning for years against the health care law, Republicans seem to be realizing that it will be incredibly difficult to deliver on Mr. Trump’s promise of providing a program that is better, cheaper and covers more people.
All of this has always been true. For six years, the House maniacs have insisted that they will accept nothing but total destruction of the law. The non-maniac Republicans were content doing small destructive things to it, knowing they would be safe from actually having to come up with an actual replacement plan because they weren’t going to regain the White House. Well, guess what?
But now they all have a big problem: one of those maniacs is probably going to be confirmed as Trump’s HHS secretary this week. That maniac, Rep. Tom Price, is going to be in a position to do drastic harm to the law, whether Congress actually repeals it or not. And then they’ll all be in a real pickle: a crumbling ACA and no plan at all for picking up the pieces for the 30 or more million people whose insurance they took away.
President Donald Trump wants to rebuild the nation’s roads and bridges, boost military spending, slash taxes and build a "great wall." But Republicans on Capitol Hill have one question for him: How the heck will we pay for all of this?
GOP lawmakers are fretting that Trump’s spending requests, due out in a month or so, will blow a gaping hole in the federal budget—ballooning the debt and undermining the party's doctrine of fiscal discipline.
Trump has signaled he's serious about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, as he promised on the campaign trail. He also wants Republicans to approve extra spending this spring to build a wall along the U.S. southern border and beef up the military—the combined price tag of which could reach $50 billion, insiders say. And that's to say nothing of tax cuts, which the president's team has suggested need not necessarily be paid for.
Easy, say the likes of Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker and House Speaker Paul Ryan: take it out of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. "Trump, meanwhile, has made clear he has little interest in tackling the biggest drivers of the national debt: entitlements." Trump, however, has also shown little interest in any policy that doesn’t involve white nationalism, so his disinterest isn’t necessarily reliable. A massive national backlash against cuts to social insurance programs is. The calls they got for the DeVos nomination are just a warm up to what would happen as soon as Social Security goes on the chopping block.
So you know what happens next, right?
“If there is a temporary increase in the deficit to get our economy growing, I think my fellow Republican members are willing to look at the long game,” said Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), a Trump loyalist. “A growing economy and growing our way to success and financial stability is what we want to see.”
Republicans don't want you to know things like this.
Republicans don't want you to know things like this.
As of January 1, companies will have to make public how much their CEOs make compared to what their average workers make. They don’t like that rule so much—enacted thanks to Dodd-Frank—and they might be able to get it killed.
On Monday, the acting chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Michael Piwowar, called for reconsideration of the rule that went into effect on January 1, hinting that it could be reversed.
“[I]t is my understanding that some issuers have begun to encounter unanticipated compliance difficulties that may hinder them in meeting the reporting deadline,” he wrote. So he called for a new period of public input over the next 45 days, after which he will direct the SEC staff to “reconsider the implementation of the rule based on any comments submitted and to determine as promptly as possible whether additional guidance or relief may be appropriate.”
Translation: Companies don’t want people to know how much more their CEOs make than the median worker, and rather than admitting that they don’t want people to know that, they’re calling it “unanticipated compliance difficulties.”
This rule isn’t something Republicans can just kill off immediately, but that’s clearly the direction they’re headed. Businesses have a lot to hide, after all. Like how CEOs make 276 times more than typical workers, while the corporate world lobbies against policies that benefit workers, like paid sick leave, paid family leave, or increased minimum wage.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is stocking his cabinet with former CEOs.
Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey may have been re-elected in a state that also went narrowly for Donald Trump last November, but his constituents aren’t going to let him get comfortable:
“Tuesdays With Toomey” began relentlessly the moment U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., won re-election in November — a protest by dozens that in two months has grown to hundreds of people gathering weekly outside his office in downtown Philadelphia to ask a simple question:
“Do you hear me now?” [...]
The public pressure has been so great that last week protesters gathered outside the Delaware County Republican Finance Committee Annual Chairman’s Club Dinner to pressure Toomey, the guest of honor. He was a no-show at the event.
This Tuesday, Toomey’s vote in favor of Betsy DeVos for education secretary drew boos from the group. One Philadelphia woman had drawn attention to the $60,050 in contributions Toomey has gotten from the DeVos family by starting a GoFundMe page to “buy Sen. Toomey’s vote”—the page raised $72,697. (But since it’s illegal to bribe a senator outright vs. buying influence gradually over years as the DeVos family has done, the money will be donated to three nonprofit organizations.)
While Toomey isn’t up for re-election until 2022, the 2018 elections will decide who’s in the governor’s mansion and the state legislature when the next round of redistricting rolls around.
If Donald Trump’s support really did come from his supporters’ economic anxiety, and not rage at uppity brown and black people, well … sorry, folks. You’re likely to take a hit. A lot of people got insured under the Affordable Care Act, for instance, and:
Odds are, a large number of those newly insured were Trump voters: An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 6.3 million of the 11.5 million Americans who used the ACA marketplace to buy their insurance last year live in Republican Congressional districts.
Policy analysts say that a rollback of the ACA would hurt older and rural Americans — two populations that favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
And that trade war with Mexico Trump is itching to start by paying for his wall with a big tariff on Mexican imports?
"When you look at what Trump wants to do by restricting imports, your mind first goes to consumers. If you put a 20 percent tariff on goods coming from Mexico, it's a complete fallacy that this will be felt only in Mexico," Brown said. "These are products from cars to tomatoes — everyone's going to feel that effect," he said.
Brown and other trade experts point out that the brunt of this will be borne by lower-income families, since poorer people spend a greater percentage of their income on goods than their wealthier peers. And rural Americans, living in places with less population density and less retail competition as a result, are more likely to notice those increasing prices.
Of course, economic anxiety wasn’t the biggest part of Trump’s appeal—or anyway, the economic anxiety in question was anxiety that black and brown people might be doing too well—and people deep in the Trump mindset aren’t going to let themselves notice or accept that the bad stuff coming is because of their guy. So I wouldn’t look for a widespread change of heart just because Trump voters end up suffering in the Trump economy. It’s sad, because a lot of people are going to be hurt. But it’s more sad because they didn’t all vote for this.
The long, controversial path of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III from senator to United States attorney general will forever be overshadowed by the words of civil rights icon Coretta Scott King, words Senate Majority Mitch McConnell tried to silence. These words:
I write to express my sincere opposition to the confirmation of Jefferson B. Sessions as a federal district court judge for the Southern District of Alabama. My professional and personal roots in Alabama are deep and lasting. Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts. Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. For this reprehensible conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship.
Actually, that's not precisely true. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren attempted to read that statement, she was censured, told to shut up and sit down and barred from speaking about Sessions' nomination again. But when a handful of white guys did the same thing and read those words on the floor, not a peep from McConnell or any other Republican. That, says New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, is a problem. "Silencing Sen. Warren under the guise of following Senate rules is hypocritical, and rightfully leads some to question whether the Majority Leader may have a different standard of expected conduct for female senators compared to their male counterparts."
Warren, of course, got her revenge. More than 8.8 million people have seen her read the Scott King letter on Facebook. And Mitch McConnell unwittingly, stupidly, disastrously gave the left its new rallying cry: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."
He has his 51 votes. Only Manchin broke ranks. Just enough for McConnell to point at it and say “see—bipartisan” with every single scandal the Trump DOJ creates.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz wants Pr*ident Trump to rescind President Obama's designation of Bears Ears National Monument where this cliff dwelling is among 100,000 American Indian archeological sites.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz wants Pr*ident Trump to rescind President Obama's designation of Bears Ears National Monument where this cliff dwelling is among 100,000 American Indian archeological sites.
Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) usually appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the January 25 Green Spotlight. More than 26,365 environmentally oriented stories have been rescued to appear in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.
OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES
The House Science Committee’s’ new go-to source for science. The front page of today’s Daily Mail, in which the “ClimateGate 2” story appears. The story may be found after the sex scandal pages.
BoGardiner writes—Retired NOAA scientist feels slighted, sets world afire in revenge: “Take a good look at the front page of today’s Daily Mail. Yes, children, this august institution is now to be our nation’s primary science source, driving the well-being of the planet and all who dwell upon it: The House Science Committee today erupted in an ecstatic tweetstorm when the Daily Mail screamed this morning that “ClimateGate 2” had been uncovered: Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data: The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change. A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.The scientific community is outraged, and response has been swift. Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist and energy systems analyst at Berkeley Earth, who worked on providing independent verification of the data Rose attacks, writes at CarbonBrief.”
ban nock writes—House Eviscerates Land Use Rules - Where Are Environmentalists?“The BLM has spent years updating it’s planning process to be more inclusive, transparent, and collaborative. The changes are collectively called 2.0. Last night the House decided they didn’t like those rules, now things move to the Senate. [...] The proposed changes support the BLM’s shift to science-based, landscape-scale approaches to resource management while increasing opportunities for early engagement by state and local government, Tribes, partner agencies, stakeholders, and the public. This was not some sort of end of the year rule change, the consideration of these changes have been years in the making and incorporate things that have been found to work. The BLM has established a new persona amongst rural westerners of late. Someone that can get along, someone that people can work with rather than the enemy. It will take years to overcome the bad feelings that gave rise to the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Bundys, and it takes time, The BLM was on it.”
Students in Rochester, New York, will have a Black Lives Matter Day in school on Feb. 17
Students in Rochester, New York, will have a Black Lives Matter Day in school on Feb. 17
Last week, educators in Rochester, New York, officially joined the resistance against bigotry, hatred, ignorance, and basically everything that is the Trump agenda by declaring Feb. 17 as a district-wide day that Black Lives Matter will be observed in schools. Officially titled “Black Lives Matter at School: A Day of Understanding and Affirmation,” the purpose of the day is to highlight the value of black lives and acknowledge the impact of historical experiences of black people in the U.S. who have consistently been denied freedom and human rights.
Resolutions were passed by the Rochester Board of Education, Rochester Teachers Association and Association of Supervisors and Administrators of Rochester stating that schools, “should be places for the practice of equity, for the building of understanding, and for the active engagement of all in creating pathways to freedom and justice for all people.”
The day is not mandatory for those teachers who don’t wish to participate and was created through collaboration between parents, school staff, and the community. It is also not officially affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the letter, the District explains that teachers have a choice of whether or not to participate "in a way that makes sense for students." They detail different ways that teachers can participate, including designing lesson plants and facilitating conversations among students and colleagues about race. Another way the District proposes teachers become involved is by inviting local activists and experts in as guest speakers.
There is a long history of public school teachers functioning as change agents, although many have come under fire recently for teaching about social justice.
