ancianita
ancianita's JournalGod Bless Biden & Harris, God Bless Congress People of Good Will, God Bless Us, Every One.
May the Scrooges receive the gift of humanity.
The Jan 6 Select Committee Recommends Mark Meadows for Contempt of Congress -- full meeting
In 20 weeks of existence since July 1, the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack has
-- issued 51 subpoenas
-- gotten telecom records for 100 persons
-- interviewed over 300 people
-- issued three (?) Contempt of Congress recommendations
Robert Elder's biography of John C. Calhoun situates today's nullification in U.S. history.
Yes, WSJ. I make this one exception to post what I consider a pretty darned good book review for a biography of an historical figure who still drives the politics of today. This review (and WSJ) show that they recognize the intellectual roots of today's right wing, which we should not be ignorant of, either.
In writings published after his death, Calhoun said more about one particular concession he had begun to consider: a constitutional amendment that would transform the executive branch by giving each region of the country its own president and, thus, its own veto. In such a way, he believed, the U.S. would achieve the true aim of constitutional government: rule not by the numerical majority, which he believed would always result in one group wielding power to the detriment of another, but by the “concurrent majority,” an arrangement that would require the consent of all groups.
That Calhoun had the protection of slaveholders in mind has not stopped his theory from resurfacing in other contexts, as Mr. Elder tells us, from power-sharing proposals in post-apartheid South Africa to the peace process in Northern Ireland. In what Mr. Elder calls the “most fascinating twist,” traces of Calhoun’s arguments have even appeared in proposals for “exactly the opposite of what he wanted”—that is, special protections for racial minorities.
Attempts to make Calhoun fit neatly into our current politics miss the message of this much-needed biography. Calhoun “belongs at the center of the stories we tell about our past,” Mr. Elder writes. Ironically, Calhoun predicted that, if North and South ever split apart over slavery—as they did a decade after his death—future generations would tell a different story of our past, beginning with what he considered a disastrous error: the decision by Jefferson to include the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. Those words, as Lincoln would say, laid a foundation for slavery’s demise and marked the beginning of a country dedicated to principles more noble than we sometimes remember today.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/calhoun-review-the-nullifiers-mixed-legacy-11612541709
42.2 Million Americans Lack Internet and Wireless Access
This bears repeating. 2022 GOTV depends a great deal on our outreach. So we've got a reality problem. And a campaign outreach problem.
Note all the battlegrounds on this list.
I don't think we can trust current battlegrounds to spend the latest designated broadband money as the budget intended. IMO, the Biden administration should closely monitor battlegrounds to see that they're not diverting it to whoever.
The primary reason for the disparity between the reports is a flaw in FCC Form 477 reporting, according to BroadbandNow. The company states that if an ISP offers service to at least one household in a census block, then the Federal Communications Commission counts that entire block as being covered by that provider. Manually checking internet availability for each address therefore results in a more accurate estimation of broadband connections.
The report highlights the U.S. states where the most people remain unserved by speedy internet. Texas comes first with an estimated total of 4.17 million disconnected people while California and Arizona come second and third with 2.35 and 1.84 million respectively. Unsurprisingly, smaller states tend to have a higher connection rate and the lowest numbers of people lacking broadband access were recorded in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/02/07/report-42-million-americans-do-not-have-access-to-broadband-infographic/?sh=4668bd29b12a
James Baldwin With Dinner
Not a single thing James Baldwin says is outdated. All the more is the pity.Remove the Curse -- The Unjust Peace -- Once And For All
James Baldwin for breakfast.Today, Dec 5, Is the 66th Anniversary of The Montgomery Bus Boycott
From the Zinn Education Project:
Out of Montgomery’s 50,000 African American residents, 30,000-40,000 participated in the boycott. For 381 days, they walked or bicycled or car-pooled, depriving the bus company of a substantial portion of its revenue.
In order to maintain the boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association was born. The MIA created an elaborate carpool system, designating 40 pickup stations across town where people could go to get a ride. Police and local whites constantly harassed the car pool with tickets and violence. But the community pressed on.
One of the tactics the city used to try to derail the boycott was to dredge up an old law prohibiting organized boycotts. Hoping to break the carpool system and criminalize its leaders , at the end of February 1956, the city indicted 89 boycott leaders including Parks. As a show of power and support, many boycott organizers, including Parks and Nixon, chose to turn themselves in. . . .
Even after the boycott’s successful end, Rosa and Raymond Parks still couldn’t find work [they had both lost their jobs about five weeks into the boycott] and the family continued to get death threats.
It is important for students to know that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a demand for much more than desegregation, as described here by Danielle McGuire in “More Than a Seat on the Bus.”
In truth, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a protest against racial and sexual violence, and Rosa Parks’s arrest on December 1, 1955 was but one act in a life devoted to the protection and defense of Black people generally, and Black women specifically. Indeed, the bus boycott was, in many ways, the precursor to the #SayHerName twitter campaigns designed to remind us that the lives of Black women matter.
In 1997, an interviewer asked Joe Azbell, former city editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, who was the most important person in the bus boycott. Surprisingly, he did not say Rosa Parks. “Gertrude Perkins,” he said, “is not even mentioned in the history books, but she had as much to do with the bus boycott as anyone on earth.” On March 27, 1949, Perkins was on her way home from a party when two white Montgomery police officers arrested her for “public drunkenness.” They pushed her into the backseat of their patrol car, drove to a railroad embankment, dragged her behind a building, and raped her at gunpoint.
Left alone on the roadside, Perkins somehow mustered the courage to report the crime. She went directly to the Holt Street Baptist Church parsonage and woke Reverend Solomon A. Seay Sr., an outspoken minister in Montgomery. “We didn’t go to bed that morning,” he recalled. “I kept her at my house, carefully wrote down what she said and later had it notarized.” The next day, Seay escorted Perkins to the police station. City authorities called Perkins’s claim “completely false” and refused to hold a line-up or issue any warrants since, according to the mayor, it would “violate the Constitutional rights” of the police. Besides, he said, “my policemen would not do a thing like that.”
But African Americans knew better. What happened to Gertrude Perkins was no isolated incident. Montgomery’s police force had a reputation for racist and sexist brutality that went back years, and Black leaders in the city were tired of it. When the authorities made clear that they would not respond to Perkins’s claims, local NAACP activists, labor leaders, and ministers formed an umbrella organization called the “Citizens Committee for Gertrude Perkins.” Rosa Parks was one of the local activists who demanded an investigation and trial, and helped maintain public protests that lasted for two months.
Biden vs Broadband
This bears repeating. Most Americans aren't aware that lack of access to Internet services has long been by corporate design.
One of the most insidious divide and conquer tactics in the corporate agenda to demolish democracy has been to deny telecom & broadband infrastructure to Americans -- block local attempts to establish their own ISP's -- then sit back as yokel radio fills the vacuum with immigration and abortion fear/hate; or narrates socialist commie Democrats' latest attempts to bring down freedoms; or as TV calms them down, reminds them of their 'remedies' for politics and culture wars.
U.S. telecom monopolies have often refused to deploy broadband into low ROI areas, despite billions in subsidization.
from Vice:
A new study by the Institute For Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) took a closer look at the data ISPs submit to the FCC, and found that carriers routinely over-state broadband availability. And because US broadband mapping is comically and historically terrible, it’s often impossible to accurately identify the areas most in need of subsidized network expansion.
The study notes that broadband mapping is so bad, the FCC declares an entire census tract served if just one home in that area can receive broadband. Since more accurate availability and pricing data would clearly illustrate broadband market failures, the broadband industry routinely lobbies against efforts to shore up data collection and publication.
The nation’s six biggest providers (Comcast, CenturyLink, Frontier, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter) have “invested the bare minimum to comply with requirements"
With modern technology, it should be trivial to develop a process that is easy for ISPs to use and less likely for monopoly ISPs to game, but we have not found a single person with deep knowledge of the FCC that believes it will happen in the near future,” notes the group.
Monopoly ISPs then use this inaccurate data to pretend that US broadband is faster and more widely-deployed than it actually is. They also work tirelessly to keep broadband pricing data out of the hands of the public, lest American consumers begin to understand just how soundly they’re being screwed by a broken market.
from Techdirt:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211129/07151348021/charter-spectrum-funds-front-group-to-try-kill-small-maine-towns-plan-better-broadband.shtml
Yet there is affordable and fast broadband for local budgets. I hope this is the kind of infrastructure help that Biden's $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill is giving for local governments to use. It's hard to unite a big country, but as climate disasters bear down, the Biden-Harris team must fight to get Americans out of the dark that corporations have put them in.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200616/08241944721/fastest-isp-america-is-community-owned-operated.shtml
Joy Reid and Legal Expert Elie Mystal SLAM the Conservative Politics of SCOTUS' Six Justices
THE argument against this case overturning settled law.
To define viability with full rights to constitutionally protected "liberty" at the expense of the prior rights of a woman or girl is to define pregnant and unpregnant women or girls as constitutionally unprotected.
With any overrule of Roe v Wade, this SCOTUS, unlike any other, states that constitutional Rights are not protected Rights for over half the U.S. population.
Reid:
The conservatives on the court... love to wrap themselves in Brown v Board. They love to quote Plessy.
That's one of the anti-abortion world's famous thing they love to go for.
But they're trying to wrap themselves in that because they understand that they are going against the vast majority of Americans' will when they subject women to the vicissitudes of their state and say the states decide what women do with their bodies.
Mystal:
Conservatives want you to think that a fetus that has pre-viability -- means it cannot exist outside of its mother, it cannot live outside of the womb -- has the same, should have the same legal rights as full grown black people in this country.
And that the fact that it doesn't is some kind of miscarriage of justice (no pun intended);
and that the people who shouldn't have the full rights are the women who are carrying the fetus.
Now I can prove that a fetus is not deserving of full personhood rights because if it were, they would be arguing that the fetus can be given citizenship.
They would be arguing that the fetus should be having other rights like a right to education, a right to health care. They would be arguing that I should be able to claim fetuses as dependents on my taxes -- which you'll note, they're not.
Their only concern about the right of a fetus is when that can be used to diminish the rights of women.
And that is what conservatives are all about on the Supreme Court...
Start 3:35
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,053
