Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Two blonde babes on the issues. The difference here is that Ms. Allie's an intellectual. She's hot, but she's not only smart but she's book-learned, especially Bible-learned. Ms. Tomi's not stupid, but she's more of an enraging personality. She makes strong points and gets you fired up. Sadly though no one is buying her pro-choice positions. She sounds rather pathetic about it, in fact.
Oh, girl. The fact that you think overturning Roe v Wade has anything to do with religion shows how ignorant you are about the constitution & abortion itself.
Also, now YOU are dictating what conservatives should stand for? No thanks. https://t.co/TboXZQ37gI
I'm not sure where she got these weird ideas, but Ms. Tomi's definitely "out there" on the politics of abortion. President Trump won evangelicals because he credibly promised to appoint socially conservative jurists, and the pro-life stand is the sine qua non of social conservatism.
She's been attacked as a "liberal" this week on Twitter, and for good reason at this point. She's digging a hole for herself. I like her spunk. And she's a fox. But c'mon, you're not "conservative" if you're pro-choice. Libertarian maybe, but definitely not conservative.
Everybody's a NIMBY. I imagine I'm a NIMBY on some issues too. But I also think that the county's got a real crisis on its hands and the community needs to come together for solutions. Nobody --- not residents in Irvine, Huntington Beach, nor Laguna Niguel, among others --- wants to house the homeless within their city. But the homeless need help.
One by one, the buses pulled up to the Orange County Hall of Administration last week carrying posters with messages such as "No Tent City" and "No Homeless in Irvine."
Many of the hundreds on board were immigrants, and this would be their first experience joining a political protest.
A week earlier, county officials announced that they were considering placing emergency homeless shelters in Irvine as well as in Laguna Niguel and in Huntington Beach. All three cities immediately fought the plan, but the opposition was most fierce in Irvine.
Many of the loudest voices in the movement to block the shelter plan were Chinese Americans who came together through social media apps and various community groups. They were joined by immigrants from South Korea, India, Mexico and the Middle East, along with some whites.
They rallied to protect their community from what they see as the ills of homeless camps, which many argued don't belong in their famously clean, safe, family-oriented planned community. Their protests helped persuade the Orange County Board of Supervisors to overturn the shelter proposal, leaving the county without a homeless plan at a time when the population is growing and officials are shutting down tent cities along the Santa Ana River.
It was a big political victory for the diverse opposition from Irvine. But it also came at a price, with some accusing the residents of intolerance and simply wanting to keep the homeless out of their own cities without offering an alternative solution....
A regional problem, local politics
Officials in Santa Ana, where homeless camps have overwhelmed the Civic Center area, have argued that other communities need to help share the burden. Irvine is now the third-largest city in Orange County, behind Anaheim and Santa Ana. The sweeps of homeless camps along the Santa Ana River began after complaints of filth and crime by residents in the nearby cities of Santa Ana, Anaheim and Fountain Valley.
Lili Graham, a homeless advocate and litigation director for the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, described the Irvine effort as "amazing" but misguided. The proposed shelter site in the city had already been zoned "and determined to be appropriate for emergency shelters," she said.
"It was a loud group, but in a county of 3 million, it's one group. There was a lot of leadership there — and there needs to be a lot of leadership on the county level to solve this issue," she said.
But some Irvine residents said the solution should not include their city.
"They need to put them somewhere, maybe somewhere else in California," resident Angela Liu, who owns a legal services company, told the Board of Supervisors. "I really don't know where they can go. But Irvine is beautiful, and we don't want it to get destroyed."
Her view was far from isolated. Officials and residents in Huntington Beach and Laguna Niguel expressed similar sentiments. U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) said he joined "the outrage that we are assuming responsibility for homeless people, taking care of their basic needs and elongating their agony."
Irvine's working with the county to develop some kind of transitional housing, other than that, I don't see much effort or support for policies that will help these people. We're not talking about endless welfare. It's about helping people get cleaned up and healthy. Getting them some place to stay, a safe and dignified place, while helping them transition to long-term residential security.
I'm doodling around online and was looking at articles about the failure of progressive education models, and this piece came up at RealClearEducation.
Remember, this is the most progressive city in the state, and this whole state is supposedly progressive, run by so-called progressive Democrats in Sacramento. But everywhere you look, it's failure all the way down for impoverished minorities.
Black students in San Francisco would be better off almost anywhere else in California.
Many attend segregated schools and the majority of black, Latino and Pacific Islander students did not reach grade-level standards on the state's recent tests in math or English tests.
A local NAACP leader called for declaring a "state of emergency" for black student achievement, a problem the city's school board acknowledged. "The problem cannot be reduced to one sickness or one cure," said Rev. Amos C. Brown, San Francisco's NAACP branch president. "Black students have been underachievers. They're living in toxic situations. It's amazing they've done as well as they have done, but it's criminal that sophisticated children in progressive San Francisco are performing at these levels."
But is the solution to fix what's broken, or to start schools anew? Answering that question has unveiled a heated political debate in Northern California.
The district's strategy targets changing instruction, hiring, school culture and instilling the belief that all kids can learn. Vincent Matthews, San Francisco Unified School District's superintendent since May, is expected to present a detailed strategy for improvement early in the new year. An opposing plan from a controversial nonprofit called Innovate Public Schools calls for starting new schools — traditional public or charter — from scratch.
For decades, San Franciscans have called attention to the achievement gap. Following an NAACP lawsuit regarding discrimination, the city entered into a 1983 consent decree mandating desegregation. Since then, the district has changed its school assignment rules.
More recently, a group of organizers from Innovate, which has brought some charter schools to the San Francisco Bay Area and receives money from the Walton Family Foundation, has been convening parents and calling renewed attention to the problem.
In September, Innovate released a report sounding the alarm on San Francisco's achievement gap — and called for the city to establish new schools as a remedy. Innovate's organizers and parents held a news conference outside City Hall and organized a parent meeting with Matthews.
On the most recent round of tests, 87% of San Francisco Unified's black students performed below standards in math, as did 79% of Latino students and 78% of Pacific Islanders. Ninety-six percent of districts in California that serve black students had better reading scores for low-income black students than San Francisco did, Innovate found. Many minority students attend schools that are highly racially concentrated in neighborhoods such as Bayview-Hunters Point, with high rates of staff turnover and relatively inexperienced teachers.
These factors, according to a recent district report, produce "a form of academic segregation that can be especially hard to overcome."
And after decades of gentrification and displacement by tech workers, black families are moving out: In the 1998-99 school year, black students comprised 16% of SFUSD's students, compared with just under 7% last school year.
Some parents were shocked when they saw these statistics — individually, they knew there were issues, but they didn't realize their problems added up to a larger whole. The poor educational outcomes stand in stark contrast to the reputation the city has built for itself as the country's center of technological innovation.
"It's been broken for a long time," said Geraldine Anderson, a mother of three who saw local schools cut back on hours from one child to the next. "I see IT companies coming to San Francisco and so much money coming in for the city, but our kids won't be able to live here or participate."
Innovate has found advocates in parents struggling to find adequate schooling...
It's criminal. Really. Progressives are criminal. Their policies are criminal. I have to shake my head: Ironically, Marx's idea of "false consciousness" explains how generations of disadvantage minority groups have been brainwashed to believe that leftist-Democrat institutions and leaders are protecting and promoting their best interests. Mind-boggling. Man.
Seven in 10 Americans say the nation’s political divisions are at least as big as during the Vietnam War, according to a new poll, which also finds nearly 6 in 10 saying Donald Trump’s presidency is making the U.S. political system more dysfunctional.
The Washington Post-University of Maryland poll — conducted nine months into Trump’s tumultuous presidency — reveals a starkly pessimistic view of U.S. politics, widespread distrust of the nation’s political leaders and their ability to compromise, and an erosion of pride in the way democracy works in America.
Trump’s arrival in the White House in January ushered in a period of big political fights — over issues including health care, taxes and immigration — and a sharp escalation in personal attacks on political opponents, over social media and elsewhere.
Seven in 10 Americans say the nation’s politics have reached a dangerous low point, and a majority of those believe the situation is a “new normal” rather than temporary, according to the poll.
The poll finds that 7 in 10 Americans view the Trump administration as dysfunctional. But dissatisfaction extends well beyond the executive branch: Even more Americans, 8 in 10, say Congress is dysfunctional, and there is limited trust in other institutions, including the media.
“It’s just messed up now,” said Patty Kasbeck, 37, a veterinary technician in Bartlesville, Okla., and a Democrat. “It’s not even a political system. It’s a reality show.”
In the poll, 14 percent of Americans say they view ethics and honesty of politicians as excellent or good, down from 25 percent in 1997 and 39 percent in 1987. And 12 percent say members of Congress base their policies on a set of core values, while 87 percent say they mainly “do whatever is need to win reelection.”
By and large, Americans are feeling frustrated not only with the country’s politics but their ability to talk about politics in a civil way.
“It seems the country is being divided on so many topics and on so many fronts at one time,” said Gene Gardner, a retired communications specialist in Blacksburg, Va., who said American democracy has become “a rock-throwing contest.”
“When people have an opinion, they don’t just say it to their spouse across the dinner table anymore,” said Gardner, 68, who is not registered with either political party. “They put it on Facebook. Everything gets amplified and more angry.”
Recent surveys have shown consumer confidence is up this year and stands at the highest levels in the past decade, so it does not appear that economic concerns are driving discontent with the nation’s political system.
Rather, Trump’s presidency appears to be a more critical factor in informing the way people feel about the state of American democracy.
While the poll finds similar levels of distrust in the federal government as before Trump took office, it also finds that pride in U.S. democracy is eroding. The share of Americans who are not proud of the way the country’s democracy is working has doubled since three years ago — from 18 percent to 36 percent in the new survey conducted among a nationwide sample of more than 1,600 adults by The Post and U-Md.’s Center for American Politics and Citizenship.
And nearly half of those who say they “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s job performance say they are not proud of American democracy today. That’s about twice as high among as those who “somewhat disapprove” of the president’s performance.
Doubts about democracy are not limited, however, to strong Trump critics. The poll finds that 25 percent of his supporters are not proud of the way democracy is working. That’s a higher figure than for the general public since at least the 1990s, polling shows.
“I think that since Trump’s election, there’s a spotlight on Washington and how it really works: that politicians are out for themselves and beholden to special interests,” said Nola Sayne, a paralegal in Logansville, Ga., who supported Trump and says she tends to vote Republican.
Sayne, 54, partly blames the dysfunction on how the Washington establishment has reacted to Trump. “People just flip out at everything he says,” Sayne said.
Elizabeth Johnston, a worker benefits specialist in Paradise, Calif., said she’s “embarrassed for the country” and primarily blames Democrats for the nation’s current political dysfunction.
“They’re acting like the mean kids in junior high,” Johnston said. “They’re all helping to make sure that the president doesn’t succeed.”
Johnston, 58, a registered independent, said there are some things she doesn’t like about Trump, like his “childish tweets.” But she said the country needs to give him a chance. “I love it that he hears us,” she said. “I love it that he wants to cut taxes.”
Strong majorities in both parties say the political divisions today are at least as strong as during the Vietnam War, a period of protest and unrest that is widely viewed as a dark chapter in American political history.
Seven in 10 Americans overall hold that view, but it is particularly strong among those who experienced the Vietnam War era firsthand. Among those who were adults in the 1970s, more than three-quarters say political divisions today are at least as big.
“I’m old enough that I remember the Vietnam War,” said Ed Evans, 67, a lawyer in Sioux Falls, S.D., and a Democrat who was a college student in Missouri at the time. “With Vietnam, at least it was focused on one issue. Here, it’s all over the place. In some ways, this is deeply more troubling.”
Ellen Collins, a retired data architect in Dayton, Ohio, said she remembers hearing her brother, who was in the Army returning from Vietnam, say that he was spit upon in the airport during a layover in San Francisco in March 1968. Still, she is among those who say political divisions in the country are worse today.
“This country is a mess,” said Collins, 69. “There’s no civility. Friends are now enemies. These issues have made people angry.”
She blames Trump in large part, saying he has used divisions “to his benefit, to play on people’s fears.”
Collins cited Trump’s recent sparring with Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) over the president’s condolence call to the widow of a soldier killed in Niger.
“He has an inability to say, ‘My bad,’ and he just keeps going and going,” Collins said. “He’s childish, and he’s a bully.”
Majorities of both Democrats and Republicans say America’s politics have reached a dangerous low point, though more Democrats (81 percent) than Republicans (56 percent) hold that view.
OHIO VALLEY — A clip of Martha Plimpton's exuberance over the "best" abortion she ever had played out on the television overhead of a gas-station counter somewhere along U.S. Route 422 between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
A woman with a name tag noting her as the manager rolled her eyes and said to no one in particular as she went about stacking the shelves behind the counter, "And they wonder why people don't vote for Democrats around here anymore."
Plimpton, 46, is best known for her role in the 1980's Steven Spielberg classic kid adventure movie "The Goonies." She made her remark in an interview with Dr. Willie Parker at a #ShoutYourAbortion event in Seattle in June.
After saying Seattle was the home of some of her family, she went on to cheer what she did in her teens: "I also had my first abortion at the Seattle Planned Parenthood. Yay!"
With equal exuberance, she also revealed her Seattle abortion wasn't her last.
Actions like Plimpton's do not help the Democratic cause in achieving power and influence back in Washington, D.C. At least not with Main Street voters. Nor does it help Democrats win local races.
"Democrats used to debate the legal right to have one, and that was a point of view that was shared by most voters," said Michael Wear, a theologically conservative evangelical Christian and Democrat who served in Barack Obama's faith outreach office in the White House.
"I don't understand why, 14 months before a midterm election, why would you push 20 percent of voters who would love to support Democrats out the door? Better yet, why would you speak of pro-life Democrats as though they were some extraterrestrial who just landed on earth?" he said.
It is rare that anyone who has had an abortion celebrates it — Plimpton seems to fail to understand few in this country do. Maybe the privileged class celebrates abortions? Even if they did, that won't help the Democratic Party win back voters. Or is it the intellectual class that celebrates them? Even if they did, that doesn't win back majorities either. Or maybe it's the celebrity class that does? If so, there's not enough of them to win back the House or Senate.
In short, this is not the message you want to win every down-ballot seat the party has let waste away under the thrust of identity politics...
I hate to hate, but I do hate Democrats, and on this issue particularly.
The Freedom Caucus is the tail that aspires to wag a whole country though it represents just a sliver of Americans. Even within the House it's outnumbered by moderate centrists.
As a citizen, I’m thrilled by the lightning round between the Republican president and his two Democratic amigos. It feels strange but wonderful to get hurricane aid, keep the government in business and increase the U.S. borrowing limit (sparing the world a financial crisis) — all before we even began to type our traditional angst-ridden headlines about polarization, paralysis and brinksmanship.
As a liberal, I’m also pretty psyched. If Pelosi (the House Democratic leader) and Schumer (her Senate counterpart) are even half the geniuses Republicans seem to think they are, Democrats may be well positioned to help protect undocumented young immigrants in a program Trump just canceled, and to keep a lid on the deliverables to rich people who are anticipating huge tax cuts.
If I were a centrist Republican, I’d be intrigued by this hint of bipartisanship. Could it be that the GOP fever is finally breaking, five long years after Barack Obama predicted it would? If so, all it has taken is Obama’s exit from the stage, absolute Republican power, and a president like Trump.
It turns out that a lot of what Obama did wasn’t so god-awful. The problem was who did it (him) and in some cases how he did it — executive actions or, heaven forbid, party-line votes. Quick, pass the smelling salts.
The latest of many examples is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. In the absence of congressional action on a new immigration law, Obama unilaterally started a permit system so people brought here illegally as children could work and study without fear of deportation. The conservative backlash was ferocious.
But now that Trump has canceled it, with a six-month grace period for Congress to “do your job,” as he put it, a growing number of Republicans — including Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan — are looking for an escape hatch. Whose idea was it, anyway, to destroy the lives of some 800,000 young people who are working, studying and have never broken the law? Who are engines of our economy, or could be, if we let them stay? It turns out it’s not popular to kick the “dreamers” out of America.
Turns out as well that repealing the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is not popular either — especially when the Congressional Budget Office has found that every variation on a replacement would cost people more, take away consumer protections, and insure far fewer — up to 24 million fewer in one case. Those protesting repeal at town meetings included conservatives and Trump voters as well as liberal Democrats. Those seeking a bipartisan compromise to stabilize markets and improve the law include more than a few Republican senators and governors. Those trying to get Congress to abandon repeal and move on include … Trump. At least as of Friday.
It wasn’t popular to pull America out of the Paris climate agreement, as Trump has done. It wouldn’t be popular to weaken fuel efficiency standards developed by the Obama administration, with consumers or even apparently with the auto industry.
And it won’t be popular if, as expected, the tax “reform” push by Trump and congressional Republicans turns out to be mostly about tax cuts for the rich. Three-quarters of Americans say Trump should not lower taxes on the wealthy and close to that many said a year ago that taxes should be raised on the wealthy.
Buoyed by gerrymandering and cultural shifts, Republicans have had years of success winning elections at every level. They have mistaken that as popular support for free-market health care, trickle-down economics, extensive deregulation and callous social policies. Will months of failure on Obamacare repeal, capped perhaps by a groundswell of support for DACA, finally drive the message home?
The aggressively conservative House Freedom Caucus has been like the tail wagging the GOP and aspiring to wag the whole country. But its three dozen hard-core conservatives don’t represent anything close to a majority of Americans. Even within the House, they may be outnumbered by the moderate centrists of the Tuesday Group, estimated to have as many as 50 members...
Trump needs to get Democrats to bend toward his will, not the other way around.
Bipartisanship is fine, as long as it tilts conservative.
That said, I like how Trump is going rogue. He's amazing sometimes.
I actually really liked "skinny repeal." It would have removed ObamaCare's individual and employer mandates, and it would have rescinded the medical device tax. I've said all along that protections for pre-existing conditions should remain. Plus, since I have a 21-year-old kid, I can see how allowing young people to remain on their parents insurance can be helpful (even though I still shake my head sometimes to think that 26-year-old Americans should be dependent on their parents, but wtf?).
In any case, even the skinny repeal got rejected, owing a lot to Sen. John McCain, who's generated some enormous animosity since last night.
WASHINGTON — The Senate in the early hours of Friday morning rejected a new, scaled-down Republican plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, derailing the Republicans’ seven-year campaign to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health care law and dealing a huge political setback to President Trump.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, who just this week returned to the Senate after receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer, cast the decisive vote to defeat the proposal, joining two other Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, in opposing it.
The 49-to-51 vote was also a humiliating setback for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has nurtured his reputation as a master tactician and spent the last three months trying to devise a repeal bill that could win support from members of his caucus.
As the clock ticked toward the final vote, which took place around 1:30 a.m., suspense built on the Senate floor. Mr. McCain was engaged in a lengthy, animated conversation with Vice President Mike Pence, who had come to the Capitol expecting to cast the tiebreaking vote for the bill. A few minutes later, when Mr. McCain ambled over to the Democratic side of the chamber, he was embraced by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. A little later Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, put her arm around Mr. McCain.
The roll had yet to be called, but the body language suggested that the Trump administration had failed in its effort to flip the Arizona senator whom President Trump hailed on Tuesday as an “American hero.’’
Many senators announced their votes in booming voices. Mr. McCain quietly signaled his vote with a thumbs-down gesture. He later offered an explanation on Twitter:
Skinny repeal fell short because it fell short of our promise to repeal & replace Obamacare w/ meaningful reform...
After the tally was final, Mr. Trump tweeted:
3 Republicans and 48 Democrats let the American people down. As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!
The truncated Republican plan that ultimately fell was far less than what Republicans once envisioned. Republican leaders, unable to overcome complaints from both moderate and conservative members of their caucus, said the skeletal plan was just a vehicle to permit negotiations with the House, which passed a much more ambitious repeal bill in early May.
The “skinny repeal” bill, as it became known at the Capitol this week, would still have had broad effects on health care. The bill would have increased the number of people who are uninsured by 15 million next year compared with current law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Premiums for people buying insurance on their own would have increased roughly 20 percent, the budget office said...
After reading about homelessness, you find there are some people who don't want to be institutionalized. They don't want all the fancy rehab treatments and shelters. They want to be free, even with psychiatric problems. So, at some level you'll always have street-people. What to do? Well, for the City of Anaheim, remove more and more of the bus benches near Disneyland, lest you give the homeless too comfortable a shelter for the night.
I guess this is just one of those shake your head stories. I don't know.
Sweat rolled down Ron Jackson’s face as he pondered, as he does every day just steps from “the Happiest Place on Earth,” where he would sleep.
The homeless man’s hangout in Anaheim had until recently been a grimy bus bench across the street from Disneyland.
Then, one day, the benches around the amusement park — including his regular spot outside of a 7-Eleven at Harbor Boulevard and Katella Avenue — disappeared.
Soon, people were competing for pavement.
“No more sleeping spot. Just concrete,” Jackson, 47, said on a sweltering day. “There were already people claiming the space.”
The vanishing benches were Anaheim’s response to complaints about the homeless population around Disneyland. Public work crews removed 20 benches from bus shelters after callers alerted City Hall to reports of vagrants drinking, defecating or smoking pot in the neighborhood near the amusement park’s entrance, officials said.
The situation is part of a larger struggle by Orange County to deal with a rising homeless population. A survey last year placed the number of those without shelter at 15,300 people, compared with 12,700 two years earlier.
Desperation amid Orange County’s riches
In a wealthy county known for suburban living and sun-dotted beaches, the signs of the homeless crisis are getting harder to ignore.
At the county’s civic center in Santa Ana, homeless encampments — complete with tents and furniture and flooring made from cardboard boxes — block walkways and unnerve some visitors. Along the Santa Ana River near Angel Stadium, whole communities marked by blue tarp have sprung up. In Laguna Beach, a shelter this summer is testing an outreach program in which volunteers walk the streets offering support and housing assistance to homeless people.
Cities across California — notably Los Angeles and San Francisco — are dealing with swelling ranks of the homeless. But officials in Orange County said most suburban communities simply don’t have the resources and experience to keep up.
Susan Price, Orange County's director of care coordination, said officials are trying to build a coordinated approach involving all of the more than 30 disparate cities that takes into account the different causes of homelessness, including economic woes, a lack of healthcare and recent reforms in the criminal justice system.
Most cities "don't have capacity to respond to all the issues of homelessness effectively. That's why we need a regional strategy,” Price said. "Every city has been grappling with this issue and not all cities are full-service so that means we need to find out what each other is doing and figure out how to combine resources.”
The homeless problem often stands in stark contrast to the perceptions many have about Orange County...
Come to think of it, though, sounds like some of the people, just drinking and smoking pot, maybe need to just get cleaned up and find a job. You can't just be bumming for handouts all the time, panhandling and causing "broken windows" style crimes. If that's so, perhaps a city crackdown is indeed a remedy.
But it's like I said, I'm not sure what to do about this. Seems like homelessness took off in the O.C. after the Great Recession hit, and it hasn't subsided much with the so-called economic recovery.
And interestingly, articles like this one, as true and tragic as they are, tend to perpetuate Native American stereotypes. Devon Mihesuah's work attempts to dispel such stereotypes, while others have argued that the reservation experience is the template for understanding the structural epistemology of American Indians.
WHITECLAY, Neb. — This town is a rural skid row, with only a dozen residents, a street strewn with debris, four ramshackle liquor stores and little else. It seems to exist only to sell beer to people like Tyrell Ringing Shield, a grandmother with silver streaks in her hair.
On a recent morning, she had hitched a ride from her home in South Dakota, just steps across the state line. There, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, alcohol is forbidden. In Whiteclay, though, it reigns supreme.
“You visit, you talk, you laugh, you drink,” said Ms. Ringing Shield, 57, as she stood on the sidewalk with friends, chain-smoked Montclair cigarettes and recounted her struggles with alcoholism, diabetes and cirrhosis. “It makes you forget.”
Now many residents of Nebraska and South Dakota are pushing for the liquor stores of Whiteclay to be shut, disgusted by the easy access to alcohol the stores provide to a people who have fought addiction for generations. The Nebraska authorities, in turn, have tightened scrutiny of the stores, which sell millions of cans of beer and malt liquor annually. Last year, for the first time, the state liquor commission ordered the stores’ six owners to reapply for their liquor licenses.
The fate of the stores could be decided next month, when the three-member commission holds hearings in Lincoln, the state capital.
The issue has left people in South Dakota and Nebraska deeply divided. Most agree that alcohol abuse on the reservation is an entrenched problem, but they are unsure of the solution — and who is responsible.
The grim scene in Whiteclay has scarcely changed for decades. Particularly in the warmer months, Native Americans can be seen openly drinking beer in town, often passed out on the ground, disheveled and ill. Many who come to Whiteclay from the reservation spend the night sleeping on mattresses in vacant lots or fields.
Even under the chill of winter, people huddle outside the liquor stores, silver beer cans poking from coat pockets. The street, busy with traffic from customers, is littered with empty bottles and scraps of discarded clothing.
“It promotes so much misery, that little town,” said Andrea Two Bulls, 56, a Native American on Pine Ridge, who added that she hoped the state would revoke the licenses. “My brother used to go to Whiteclay all the time, and we’d have to go look for him. People sit and drink until they pass out. They just succumb.”
Over the decades, there have been frequent protests outside the stores. Lawsuits against the retailers and beer distributors have been filed. Boycotts of brewers that sell to the stores have begun with enthusiasm. All those efforts have sputtered, though, and little has changed...
If signed, the order would create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity.
leaked copy of a draft executive order titled “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom,” obtained by The Investigative Fund and The Nation, reveals sweeping plans by the Trump administration to legalize discrimination.
The four-page draft order, a copy of which is currently circulating among federal staff and advocacy organizations, construes religious organizations so broadly that it covers “any organization, including closely held for-profit corporations,” and protects “religious freedom” in every walk of life: “when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.”
The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act. The White House did not respond to requests for comment, but when asked Monday about whether a religious freedom executive order was in the works, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters, “I’m not getting ahead of the executive orders that we may or may not issue. There is a lot of executive orders, a lot of things that the president has talked about and will continue to fulfill, but we have nothing on that front now.”
Language in the draft document specifically protects the tax-exempt status of any organization that “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.”
The breadth of the draft order, which legal experts described as “sweeping” and “staggering,” may exceed the authority of the executive branch if enacted. It also, by extending some of its protections to one particular set of religious beliefs, would risk violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
“This executive order would appear to require agencies to provide extensive exemptions from a staggering number of federal laws—without regard to whether such laws substantially burden religious exercise,” said Marty Lederman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on church-state separation and religious freedom.
The exemptions, Lederman said, could themselves violate federal law or license individuals and private parties to violate federal law. “Moreover,” he added, “the exemptions would raise serious First Amendment questions, as well, because they would go far beyond what the Supreme Court has identified as the limits of permissive religious accommodations.” It would be “astonishing,” he said, “if the Office of Legal Counsel certifies the legality of this blunderbuss order.”
The leaked draft maintains that, as a matter of policy, “Americans and their religious organizations will not be coerced by the Federal Government into participating in activities that violate their conscience.”
It sets forth an exceptionally expansive definition of “religious exercise” that extends to “any act or refusal to act that is motivated by a sincerely held religious belief, whether or not the act is required or compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.” “It’s very sweeping,” said Ira Lupu, a professor emeritus at the George Washington University Law School and an expert on the Constitution’s religion clauses and on the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). “It raises a big question about whether the Constitution or the RFRA authorizes the president to grant religious freedom in such a broad way.”
In particular, said Lupu, the draft order “privileges” a certain set of beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity—beliefs identified most closely with conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians—over others. That, he said, goes beyond “what RFRA might authorize” and may violate the Establishment Clause.
Lupu added that the language of the draft “might invite federal employees,” for example, at the Social Security Administration or Veterans Administration, “to refuse on religious grounds to process applications or respond to questions from those whose benefits depend on same sex marriages.” If other employees do not “fill the gap,” he said, it could “lead to a situation where marriage equality was being de facto undermined by federal employees, especially in religiously conservative communities,” contrary to Supreme Court rulings...
Opinions have changed very little since 1985, the last time thus survey was conducted.
And social welfare programs have failed to lift millions out of poverty. The number of Americans living below the poverty line is about 15 percent, and it's been stuck there since about 1970, five years after the start of the Great Society.
How much have we spent? It's in the trillions. And leftists still think we aren't doing enough. And if you look at the headline at the piece, the Times used the results to take a jab a Donald Trump's white working-class supporters. It's too predictable.
Canadians may support a guaranteed minimum income in principle, but they don’t want to pay for it and they suspect it may turn people into shiftless louts, according to a new survey by the Angus Reid Institute.
As many as 67 per cent of respondents backed a guaranteed income set at $30,000, provided that the payment would “replace most or all other forms of government assistance.”
However, nearly as many (66 per cent) said they would not be willing to pay more taxes to support such a program, and 59 per cent said it would be too expensive to implement.
A further 63 per cent said it would “discourage people from working.” Among Conservative voters, this sentiment jumped to 74 per cent of respondents. But even in the NDP camp respondents were split 50-50.
“It’s not as though you see people on the left of the spectrum incredibly supportive of this,” said Shachi Kurl with the Angus Reid Institute.
At various times in the last 100 years, the concept of a guaranteed minimum income has been embraced by everyone from hardline conservatives to hardline progressives.
Conservatives, including U.S. president Richard Nixon, have touted it as a way to dismantle the welfare state by merely cutting the poor a cheque each month.
Progressives, meanwhile, counter that it’s a necessary way to support workers idled by outsourcing and automation.
Indeed, the Angus Reid survey even hinted that this issue could rise in prominence as more and more jobs are taken by robots...
Well, dismantling the welfare state would be good, but then if everyone's getting a basic income, you'd dismantle the workforce as well, heh.
LOS ANGELES — They lean unsteadily on canes and walkers, or roll along the sidewalks of Skid Row here in beat-up wheelchairs, past soiled sleeping bags, swaying tents and piles of garbage. They wander the streets in tattered winter coats, even in the warmth of spring. They worry about the illnesses of age and how they will approach death without the help of children who long ago drifted from their lives.
“It’s hard when you get older,” said Ken Sylvas, 65, who has struggled with alcoholism and has not worked since he was fired in 2001 from a meatpacking job. “I’m in this wheelchair. I had a seizure and was in a convalescent home for two months. I just ride the bus back and forth all night.”
The homeless in America are getting old.
There were 306,000 people over 50 living on the streets in 2014, the most recent data available, a 20 percent jump since 2007, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They now make up 31 percent of the nation’s homeless population.
The demographic shift is mirrored by a noticeable but not as sharp increase among homeless people ages 18 to 30, many who entered the job market during the Great Recession. They make up 24 percent of the homeless population. Like the baby boomers, these young people came of age during an economic downturn, confronting a tight housing and job market. Many of them are former foster children or runaways, or were victims of abuse at home.
But it is the emergence of an older homeless population that is creating daunting challenges for social service agencies and governments already struggling with this crisis of poverty. “Baby boomers have health and vulnerability issues that are hard to tend to while living in the streets,” said Alice Callaghan, an Episcopal priest who has spent 35 years working with the homeless in Los Angeles.
Many older homeless people have been on the streets for almost a generation, analysts say, a legacy of the recessions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, federal housing cutbacks and an epidemic of crack cocaine. They bring with them a complicated history that may include a journey from prison to mental health clinic to rehabilitation center and back to the sidewalks.
Some are more recent arrivals and have been forced — at a time of life when some people their age are debating whether to retire to Arizona or to Florida — to learn the ways of homelessness after losing jobs in the latest economic downturn. And there are some on a fixed income who cannot afford the rent in places like Los Angeles, which has a vacancy rate of less than 3 percent.
Horace Allong, 60, said he could not afford a one-room apartment and lives in a tent on Crocker Street. Mr. Allong, who divorced his wife and left New Orleans for Los Angeles two years ago, said he lost his wallet and all of his identification two weeks after he arrived and has not been able to find a job.
“It’s the first time I’ve been on the streets, so I’m learning,” he said. “There’s nothing like Skid Row. Skid Row is another world.”
The problems with homelessness are hardly uniform across the country. The national homeless population declined by 2 percent between 2014 and 2015, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Some communities — including Phoenix and Las Vegas — have declared outright victory in eliminating homelessness among veterans, a top goal of the White House.
But homelessness is rising in big cities where gentrification is on the march and housing costs are rising, like Los Angeles, New York, Honolulu and San Francisco. Los Angeles reported a 5.7 percent increase in its homeless population last year, the second year in a row it had recorded a jump. More than 20 percent of the nation’s homeless lived in California last year, according to the housing agency.
Across Southern California, the homeless live in tent encampments clustered on corners from Venice to the San Fernando Valley, and in communities sprouting under highway overpasses or in the dry bed of the Los Angeles River. Their sleeping bags and piles of belongings line sidewalks on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Along with these visible signs of homelessness come complaints about aggressive panhandling, public urination and disorderly conduct, as well as a rise in drug dealing and petty crimes...
Chris Matthews has the Hillary Clinton interview at the clip, and Bernie Sanders is the topic du jour, you might say. If you want, scroll forward, to about 8:00 minutes or so, and listen to Matthews say to Clinton, "Now, you're offering a lesson in civics, I wonder if you could do that in that in a couple of weeks ... I could look at the history of the Democratic Party, your party, not Bernie Sanders', he's not a Democrat Party member. Your party has produced the New Deal, it produced the progressive income tax, came from Wilson, and Social Security came from your party, the party of Roosevelt, and Harry Truman started the fight for health care, civil rights, and all these good things that led to the Affordable Care Act, and it's always been Republicans voting against it to the last person ..."
Oh boy. Where to begin? Just note that Matthews is clearing the deck, doing ideological battlespace preparations for Clinton, to inoculate her from charges of socialism, from charges that she's no different from Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Matthews, more of a Democrat Party operative with a journalist's byline than almost anyone in the corrupt leftist media complex, knows full well that he's got to whitewash Hillary's radicalism. This is a woman who's come out for every leftist development under the sun. She backed the Houston city ballot measure to allow grown men dressed as women to use restrooms with your pre-teen daughters. She's been trying to coopt the crypto-communist Black Lives Matter movement forever, and may still do so, with her formidable black support in the Southern states. Remember, the Clintons are Southern Democrats, and they'll milk the black vote, pretending to be "black" to keep that constituency down on the leftist plantation. Matthews knows they've got to come across, in the end, as centrist, and thus he mainstreams the left's stealth 20th-century socialism through the institutional Democrat Party machinery as American as apple pie. The Founders of this nation would be shocked at the transmogrification of our political regime into the collectivist dependency monstrosity it's become.
(I didn't even get to Matthews' lies about the Republican Party, who had more votes in Congress for civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s than the Democrats ever did, to say nothing of the filibusters from white supremacists like Strom Thurmond and so forth. They're racist Dixiecrats, the lot of them. These people are rank, despicable partisan liars and crooks.)
Man, we're completely screwed if the American public falls for this again. Hillary wants to complete the Radical-in-Chief Barack Hussein's "fundamental transformation," and she's got the collective media to lie and sugar coat for her. It's so bad that even Orwell would be flabbergasted.
After winning the Iowa caucuses by a margin so slender that her underdog challenger appeared stronger as a result, Hillary Clinton is trying to figure out if Bernie Sanders remains a contender for weeks, or for months.
New Hampshire could be the high point of Sanders’ presidential bid, considering the hefty lead he has racked up in Granite State polls, or it could put revolutionary fever on ice as the Democratic contest moves past the tiny, liberal and overwhelmingly white New England state to venture into more diverse, populous territory.
Clinton and the Vermont senator flew to New Hampshire, determined to press ahead to that state’s Feb. 9 contest, then to Nevada’s caucus Feb. 20 and the regionally important South Carolina primary Feb. 27.
“I have to really get out there, make my case, which I intend to do this week,” Clinton said Tuesday during an MSNBC interview. “I feel really good about my campaign in New Hampshire … We're not leaving anything on the ground. We're moving forward. And I think we'll do well.”
Sanders currently enjoys an 18-point lead over the former secretary of state in New Hampshire, where Clinton won in 2008 following her memorable burst of teary-eyed candor following a loss days earlier to Barack Obama and John Edwards in Iowa.
With expectations of a Sanders victory there, the two foes are mulling three challenges.
First, do they have the right messages for New Hampshire?
Clearly, Sanders’ rallying cries to think “big” and triumph over a rigged political system and an economy tilted to advantage the “billionaire class” drew young liberals, first-time participants, and the less affluent during the Iowa caucusing. The senator channels the angst of fed-up idealists and reflects the aspirations of struggling families. His message will not change in New Hampshire.
Clinton’s campaign pitch, on the other hand, could get retooled. Her message is often perceived to be about herself, more than about the electorate. And the former first lady is arguing she is steeped in policy, tough enough to trounce a GOP nominee, and seasoned on the world stage.
Her counter arguments to Sanders’ aspirations for free college tuition, a Medicare-for-all health system, and higher taxes on the wealthy are intended to be pragmatic and deliverable. Some Democrats pointed to the Iowa results to wonder if Clinton’s rationale for the presidency comes off as pale beige in a wild-paisley kind of race.
“I just want them to understand what I'm offering, what I believe we can do,” Clinton told MSNBC about New Hampshire voters. “You know, ideas that sound good on paper but can't create results for people are just that -- good ideas on paper. I have a track record of producing results.”
When New Hampshire Sen. Jean Shaheen was asked Tuesday if Clinton needed to alter her campaign message, the senator fell back on talking points about experience often used by the former secretary of state’s political advisers.
“This is a long campaign. People are just beginning to pay attention. And I think when those young people hear the differences between Hillary and her opponents, that she's going to come out on top,” Shaheen said.
Second, how are the two candidates playing the expectations game?
Campaigning in New Hampshire after her Iowa squeaker, Clinton lowered expectations for victory, while Sanders behaved as if he has the home-field advantage. Anything Clinton can do to readjust expectations may help ease the vapors among her Democratic base of supporters, as well as with voters in the contests that follow New Hampshire, and among the media (up to a point).
Having represented nearby New York, won the New Hampshire primary once and watched her husband declare himself the “comeback kid” there in 1992, Clinton is not exactly a stranger to the Granite State. But she’s begun to define it as Sanders’ turf...
Simendinger's quoting Hillary from the very same Chris Matthews interview seen above. Notice how it's all of a piece? Paint Hillary as the pragmatic one, the one who can get things done, when the facts are she can't get things done (hello Benghazi). She's a rank partisan operative who'll bend her political image to the goals of the ideological program. She wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley, entitled "There Is Only the Fight," on Saul Alinsky. She knows as well as anyone that you've got to play sneaky and underhanded to keep pushing the revolution from within, to keep marching through the institutions to achieve that fundamental change that Barack Hussein wasn't shy about proclaiming just days before election 2008.
People have really got to pay attention to how this all plays out through the spring. Remember Mother Jones' secret videos of Mitt Romney and the 47 percent? If the Republicans aren't ready to play hardball like that, to go toe-to-toe on down-and-dirty politics, they're going to lose again. Chris Matthews is devious. He's a devious mofo, and as Hillary warms up to his ideological subterfuge-signaling the video, she plays the moderate card to the hilt.
I just don't see Clinton winning in the Granite State. Sanders holds a 63-to-30 percent lead in that UMass Lowell poll I blogged last night.
And Bernie is so on point and message-disciplined, it's going to be a matter of just how big a blowout New Hampshire's going to be for him. If Hillary can keep the damage minimal, beating expectations, then she'll fly out of there with something of a win.
