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becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys · 2 years

Note

Is there any chance we could have a round up of the Circus? I am so lost on how the dominoes fell over the last 40 days

Okay this is not comprehensive, because (a) my husband the politics nerd is currently on his way to a gig in west Wales somewhere and so cannot chime in and also (b) all our political journalist friends are understandably quite busy right now doing political journaling, but I seem to have an influx of new followers who are also very confused and don't understand what's going on, so I shall try.

Alright so what we're seeing here is the Second Clownfall of 2022, the hotly anticipated sequel to the Adventures of Big Dog the Clown. However it revolves around the character of Liz Truss, and will use some terminology, so

Previous Reading

Important Terminology - Required Reading

What is a Whip?

How do Whips work?

Shadow Cabinet

Front Benchers, Back Benchers and the Cabinet

What do we need to call an early General Election?

The Adventures of Big Dog the Clown - Suggested Reading

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Elanor's Guide to Liz Truss - Suggested Reading

Character-based prequel

...okay I think that's everything. On with the show!

The Premiership of Liz Truss (2022-2022)

Week One

We begin our tale on September 5th, 2022. Coincidentally, that was also the date that I personally started my new job. Let's see which of us does better!

The Daily Mail is delighted, and runs a headline proclaiming "Cometh the hour, cometh the woman". Tory rag in a frock coat the Financial Times runs an op-ed:

So the results ARE IN! She will definitely fuck us up! But that's a good thing for vague reasons! Blitz spirit everyone. Tally ho, pip pip, shoot a servant and have sex with a wall, hey what. Good old Blighty.

(That's my best impression of Tories I'm good at their accents I hope you like it)

Truss does an interview with Laura Kuenssberg, and fellow guest and comedian Joe Lycett wildly and effusively applauds her every word. Even Liz realises no one would sincerely applaud her. Bafflingly, the entire right wing press and every member of the Tory party freak out about this, because they don't understand the function of a satirist and don't know how to defend against it. It is extremely funny. Joe Lycett announces he's a right-wing comedian now, and begins a new extended career bit effusively and sarcastically praising right wing politicians. They all cry extensively and call him mean.

SO, it's been a long hard leadership campaign! But she made it. For years, Tories have been blighted by the curse of the PM/Chancellor relationship, backstabbing and cheating and lying about each other to try and get power. But not our Liz, oh no; her Chancellor is Maths Mate and BFF Kwasi Kwarteng, an insipid and poisonous gnome known for three (3) things:

He once wrote a stupid book with Liz Truss about his stupid opinions on how he thinks economics work and everyone laughed at him and stuffed him in a locker

On the night of the Brexit vote he was overheard by a journalist gleefully saying “Who cares if sterling crashes? It will come back up again“ which are of course the words of a man who knows all about economics and how they work

This fucking bullshit back in July:

But hey IT'S OKAY! Everything is fine! Because Liz and Kwasi are BFFs who certainly never had an affair and are marching in lockstep and have each other's backs and both love maths more than their own children if they had any! Maths Friends!

Multiple resignations immediately follow.

Among them is Ben Elliot, the Tory Party chair, which is a pretty big deal from a man who just lived through the Johnson years; also, shockingly, Priti Patel, the deportation-happy Home Secretary, decides that even as an animatronic goblin she cannot support this nonsense.

It's not a resignation per se, but at ten to seven in the evening it's announced that Andrew Bridgen, the Troy MP for Leicestershire North West, has been evicted from his home and ordered to pay £800,000 in legal costs, and a possible £244,000 in rent arrears. Also described as "dishonest" by a judge.

This is not directly relevant to Liz Truss but look, it was a staggeringly weird day and this was basically the topper.

Anyway.

Liz goes to the Palace and is duly sworn in by the Queen, who promptly keels over and dies the very next day. Parliament is instantly shut down for mandatory mourning. As omens go, this one was not subtle.

This triggers the circulation of some very awkward footage of Young Truss talking about how she thinks the Monarchy should be abolished for being a gross relic of horrifying social stratification. However you must understand that it's not awkward because anyone thinks she murdered the Queen. It's because Liz Truss's attempts at public speaking are like sitting through a children's Christmas play when you're the only person in the audience and they can all see your face so you have to look encouraging for four hours when inside you are shrivelling into something approximating an apricot pit travelling to the core of Jupiter.

Take a look at her acceptance speech and wither.

Anyway we're now several MPs and a queen down so she's got to get on replacing those so she can focus on her real love: the much-anticipated mini-budget that she is preparing with Kwasi to save the UK from the harrowing quagmire of crippling poverty that Big Dog managed to drive us into (all while pretending it wasn't Big Dog who did it.)

Fortunately, she does not need to replace the queen! Monarchies take care of themselves, which many people would argue is very much the problem, of course. They had a proper reunion with Meghan From Suits and Meghan From Suits' husband, both of whom were banned from visiting Balmoral, and also the Nonce flew in, who was allowed to visit Balmoral. Such heartwarming scenes.

But the Cabinet, that's another matter. That's something Liz DOES have to do, and it's important she gets it right, Tumblrs, because you see, every time a Cabinet minister is replaced it's expensive and a hassle and it weakens a government by making them look all crumbly, like a packet of biscuits that's been rammed against a wall and now someone is opening it and everyone is bracing for Crumbs.

So, step forward to the Cabinet soulless ghoul Suella Braverman, the new Home Secretary. She immediately distinguishes herself by trying to legalise torture.

And then, naturally,

YEAH THAT'S RIGHT IT'S TICK TOCK TERF O'CLOCK also FUCK the sovereignty of the Scottish Parliament amirite ladies lol Girl Power uwu

Not that she can actually do anything at this point, of course. As I say: Enforced Mourning is in process, which means Parliament is shut down for ten days. No work, no speeches, no appearances, no announcements, just taxpayer's money going on legal fees to see if she can interfere with another nation's elected government in order to strip away the human rights of queer people.

However, while we all weep over the corpse of Queen Lizzie Two and beat our breasts in grief, the already-beleaguered pound is slowly bleeding out through this inaction. And this, to the Maths Mates, is unacceptable.

Two things get quietly slid into the news cycle.

Thing the First:

BIG YIKES LADS

Thing the Second:

Fracking ban in England lifted in bid to boost UK gas supply - BBC News

For those who don't know, fracking is an energy extraction process. Water, gas and dust are pumped at high pressure into shale bedrock to crack it open, releasing pockets of natural gas that can then be harvested for fuel. It's environmentally disastrous for multiple reasons, both direct (earthquakes, groundwater pollution, social impacts) and indirect (IT'S STILL A FOSSIL FUEL YOU STUPID CUNTS ARE YOUR SKULLS FUCKING EMPTY). The Welsh and Scottish governments have both banned it outright, a straight-up "Foot down no, petal". England, though, is the Tory paradise, so the ban was less complete.

However, this is still a Huge Deal - the 2019 Tory manifesto was very clear that fracking would only be unbanned IF "the science shows categorically that it can be done safely". In fact, most Tories don't like it either. Their constituents REALLY don't. Also in March Kwasi Kwarteng literally went on record and said it wouldn't lower European gas prices anyway; but not anymore! Now he thinks it's a zippy idea. Just spiffing. Top hole, pip pip (I'm so good at their accents :))

Scientists who have been studying the environmental impacts of fracking produce their report -

And it is quietly buried, so as not to offend the corpse of Lizzie Two.

Here ends the first four days of the Reign of Liz Truss.

Second Week

Anyway, royalists have gone insane and started a REALLY BIG queue to see a box that supposedly contains the rotting cadaver of the old queen. Multiple people have to be hospitalised because they join the Queue and don't take food, water, warm clothes, or essential daily medications with them, even though the Queue is literally days long. Some die. Many take the ashes of their own loved ones so they can wave them at the box for the thirty seconds they get to be in front of it, like a sort of play date for ashes.

Prince Charles, now King Prince Charles, starts swanning about as King, demanding everyone be sad for him and clap him to cheer him up. Someone holds up a sign saying 'Not my King' and gets arrested. This triggers a whole wave of protests and arrests as free speech slides out the window, until the Met Police chief has to step in and explain to the police like they're five-year-olds that they can't do that, actually, and need to cut that shit out.

But we can't wholly blame the police, because the main pressure to clamp down on protestors actually came from...

The government.

Meanwhile the country goes bat shit fucking insane. In order not to offend the fragile sensibilities of royalists, now so brittle they need to be treated with the same delicate touch normally reserved for unstable nitroglycerin, the UK sees supermarkets lowering the volume of self-serve checkout desks, people's funerals cancelled, vital operations and other medical interventions postponed, Centre Parcs cancelling holidays, FOOD BANKS CLOSING, Nintendo Direct cancelling its live stream in Britain (but not cancelling the release of the recording onto You Tube an hour later because as we all know Queen Elizabeth II was a MASSIVE livestream fan and would have been DEVASTATED to miss it but she was very 'meh' about YouTube), cycle racks being closed, and this unhinged shrieking harridan:

Very normal, lads. Very normal.

Oh and also they cancelled Owain Glyndwr Day so as a Welsh person I am now legally allowed to forcibly ram a daffodil into the urethras of the landed English gentry.

However, the protests grow as the suppression wanes. By the time King Prince Charles comes to Wales, he is met with silent protests, this guy who learned a sentence in Welsh specially for the occasion, and a petition to abolish the Prince of Wales title.

Except government is still shut down, so the petitions are all suspended.

But not to worry! That gives the Maths Mates more time to work on their special mini-budget.

Week Three

More of the same at first, really, but she finally addresses the nation to announce that the Queen was the "rock" on which "modern Britain was built".

Also someone finally spots that the necklace she always wears is a day collar, so that was fun.

BUT THEN

The moment we have all been waiting for, with baited breath.

On the 23rd September, 2022, the mini-budget finally arrives. The golden egg of Kwasi and Liz, their beloved, beautiful child, the crowning glory, the culmination of their economic beliefs and values. They are so proud of it, so sure of it, that they do not even submit it for the approval of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Why should they? This is the moment Kwarteng can finally show the world that he was right; that this is the way to do economics after all; that he alone in his brilliance and genius has reinvented the field and will lead the country to a new era of riches and prosperity.

And the pound does this:

Yikes.

Truss goes into hiding for a day and a half, during which time her aids claim all her relatives have died so she won't have to speak to the press, which is obviously a simply fantastic quality in a Prime Minister. Finally, she resurfaces by doing a series of radio interviews for regional stations around the UK, hoping they'll be easier on her, starting with Radio Leeds. The good journalists of Yorkshire eviscerate her and strew her corpse through Adel Woods. It's downhill from there.

Week Four

One poll puts Labour 33 points ahead of the Tories.

It can be a little difficult to translate polls, because the electoral system is complex, so I asked my journalist friends. They cheerfully informed me that, if translated into a General Election, the Tories would have just 3 seats left.

Except! Of course, naturally, that is me reporting naught but the most extreme result, Tumblrs, dancing upon the bones of my enemies as I chant the rites to make the Tory party die faster. If I were to be fair about this - and I am, of course, a journalist of Integrity and Morals - I would actually give the average poll result. And I am wise and fair to all, ancient rites aside, so I shall.

The average poll result is still 19 points ahead.

Tony Blair's landslide Labour victory in 1999 was 12 points.

Rounding off the day, Labour declare that they are backing a change to a proportional representation voting system in place of the UK’s archaic first past the post system. Funny that.

Anyway, that mini-budget is going poorly. Realising unlimited borrowing rather than tax cuts for the rich is maybe Bad Actually, the Maths Mates decide to get the money for their bail-outs some other way. Can you guess, Tumblrs? Can you guess where they decide to get the money from?

Naturally.

Week Five

In a fascinating little twist, the papers claim Liz banned King Prince Charles from going to the Climate Summit in Egypt. This is interesting for about a billion reasons, not least of which is that the papers seem very angry about this and yet also that it's an unsubstantiated rumour - the phrase "it's understood that _" gets a hell of a workout.

She then does not go herself. Makes sense. They'll probably be mean to her about the fracking.

She then loses the support of the Daily Mail, a paper that five weeks before were ecstatic about her rise to power :( so sad. But why? What made them change their minds?

Well. What else from Truss, but a massive and catastrophic u-turn on the economy?

And she does! The absolute nutter!

Plans to cut the 45p tax rate for those earning upwards of £150,000 were abandoned, as were:

abolishing the planned rise in corporation tax

cutting the basic rate of income tax

the two-year energy bill support plan

scrapping the planned dividend tax hike

VAT-free shopping for international tourists

freezing alcohol duty

easing of IR25 rules for the self-employed

ALL GONE! All gone. The mini-budget is not working so lol jk we'll think of something else, that's how government works, right? The pound promptly implodes further. Of all people, Nadine Dorries is the one to criticise

WE ARE IN A TOPSY TURVEY UPSIDE DOWN WORLD

The Daily Mail still finds a way to say it's all Michael Gove's fault, though.

Anyway, the 5th October dawns bright and beautiful and YouGov polls rural voters:

THIS IS HUUUUUUUUUGE, because farmers just will not fucking stop voting Tory, AND YET. Wowsers. Not just popularity. Voting intention. She might as well have personally infected every farm in the South Downs with foot and mouth disease.

Truss realises her popularity is plummeting and she needs a new audience. She tries to appear down with the kids and declares that she's the only PM to have gone to a comprehensive school.

This is not true. Gordon Brown and Theresa May both did. However, it's certainly true that all three of them became PM by ousting a sitting PM, so there's that I guess.

Week Six

At this point I can start putting in PRECISE DATEs just call ME Robert Peston.

13th October

News reporters start speculating that she'll be done by the end of the month as the first rumoured letter of no confidence reaches us. People realise that her competition for shortest serving PM was a guy who died in office of TB at about the four month mark RIP king sorry about your lungs.

(A reminder - normally, if MPs want to oust a party leader, they must send in 54 letters of no confidence. This makes the 1922 Committee - a bunch of back benchers who preside over this shit - hold a vote of no confidence. A leader who loses gives way - this is very rare. A leader who wins is then immune to another such vote for 12 months, but they almost always crumble within a month or two anyway - this is much more common.)

This is extremely funny, because a newly-elected leader of the party has a 12 month immunity to votes of no confidence, same as people who've won such a vote. Likes charge reblogs cast apparently. MPs are getting desperate.

Pressure mounts. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announces that he is "Not going anywhere."

14th October

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is sacked and blamed for the entire economic mess.

Incredibly, Liz does this without first planning a replacement, so it's several hours before Jeremy Cunt suddenly reappears like the spectre at the fucking feast.

Meanwhile here's Ed Milliband on Twitter

Seven and a half years he waited to retweet that. Seven and a half long years, look, to have the last laugh.

In the end, he still went too soon.

15th October

Deputy PM and also Health Minister Therese Coffey (side note - have they always doubled up in roles like that? Or are there just not enough of them anymore?) announces that she loves antibiotic resistance and dead kids and also breaking laws:

16th October

The Sunday Times calls for Extremely Corrupt Former Grand Vizier Rishi Sunak to take over, and then a General Election so that Labour can take the reins.

The SUNDAY TIMES

Calling for LABOUR

The Sunday Mail tries to stir up support for Ben Wallace taking over, because no one has heard of Ben Wallace so he needs the boost, but then accidentally publish their front page with a different man

In another YouGov poll for the Times, not a single political group, age group, area of the country, gender, or other demographic said that Liz Truss was the right choice for PM

This is the new predicted election graph:

Yikes

17th October

The projected election results are a Labour victory so complete the opposition would be the SNP. Legend suggests Nicola Sturgeon's cackle on finding out was so powerful she accidentally resurrected a witchfinder.

18th October

Meanwhile in the Senedd, Welsh Tory leader Andrew RT Davies, a sort of humanoid boil dressed in ham, tries to accuse placid and gentle First Minister for Wales Mark Drakeford's Labour of being responsible for long ambulance waiting times.

T'was a mistake.

youtube

19th October

Oh boy.

Well, first of all, Suella Braverman sends an official email from her private email address, and then promptly leaves the Cabinet at cannonball speeds as though she's seen a brown child about to be given citizenship. Was she quietly fired by Jeremy Cunt? Did she do it deliberately to resign? On her way out, she blames the true source of our problems - the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating Wokerati.

Nigella Lawson spends the day tweeting tofu recipes.

Meanwhile, Graham Brady, the Chair of the 1922 Committee, comes to Liz Truss to inform her that he has in fact now received 54 letters of no confidence. Normally, of course, that would be considered enough to trigger a vote in her leadership; but not now.

However, these are unprecedented times. So he changes the threshold - if half of the Tories send him letters, her immunity will be revoked.

But the thing is, Tumblrs, the thing is...

It is all about to kick off in the most spectacular and catastrophic fireworks since Guy Fawkes had a dream.

Because Ed Milliband, once accused of leading the country to chaos and now riding high on the joy of his well-timed Twitter jab of Some Days Ago, wakes this morning and chooses violence.

He has spotted, of course, that no one likes fracking; even the Tories are against it.

He has also spotted that Liz Truss is very stupid.

So he goes into the House of Commons, and he digs a big pit and covers it over with twigs and leaves so it can't be seen, and he bakes a big cake and he places it in the middle of the twigs, and he sets up a net to fall as well and a big stick of ACME dynamite, and he hammers in little signs everywhere saying CAUTION - TRAP, by which I am of course being metaphorical because what he actually does is table a motion to extend the moratorium on fracking. The signs aren't necessary, really. This trap is easy to avoid.

All Liz Truss has to do, you see, is not use a three-line whip on this vote.

The three-line whip, as you'll all recall, is the highest level of coercion. MPs cannot defy a three-line whip. MPs cannot even abstain on a three-line whip. MPs have two choices on a three-line whip: to vote as they're told, or to be removed from the party. You obey or resign. That's all.

For this reason, it's sometimes called a 'confidence vote', as it is effectively a stand-in for one. The vote is not about the issue at hand - this is now a vote of confidence in your leader.

(He's also laid lesser traps. Years back when fracking was first being heavily discussed, Ed was Labour leader and one of the main figures in those discussions. During today, before it all Kicks The Fuck Off, a Tory stands and challenges him on previous statements about fracking, trying to accuse him of hypocrisy.

He was fucking ready for it.)

Graham Brady pops his head back around the door. He's changed his mind - a third of the party is all that's needed now to trigger a vote of no confidence in Liz Truss. And legend says he's only 17 off.

This is presumably the reason for what comes next.

Liz panics. Liz sees she's desperately unpopular. Liz sees that she has to do something to shore up support; and she sees that her important fracking rule, which her party hates her for, is now being challenged by a former Labour leader, and if he wins (which he will) she'll lose all credibility and maybe they'll take her nice office away and tell her she was a Bad Girl.

And so, with the inevitability of gravity on the now-leaden pound sterling, she makes it a three-line whip, and a confidence vote in her government.

INSTANT CHAOS.

There is uproar! There is rage! There is blinding fury! Tory MPs are standing up in the Commons and snarling and pissing and moaning! No one likes fracking except Jacob Rees Mogg! For TWO HOURS they shriek and scream and gnash their teeth, yelling at Liz Truss, demanding to know why this is happening.

(Legend has it chaos-deity Ed Milliband simply leaned back, put his feet up on the chair in front, and made Christian Wakeford hand-feed him grapes and fan him with a palm leaf, but this is unsubstantiated.)

And then, at 6.55, FIVE MINUTES before voting is ready to begin, the Tory Minister for Climate Graham Stewart stands up and declares that everyone should vote how they want because it's not a confidence vote.

Did I say there was chaos before?

Lol. Lmao, even. Rofl, in fact.

Now Tories leap to their feet and basically all scream one long, unending breath of WHAT-DO-YOU-MEAN-IT'S-NOT-A-CONFIDENCE-VOTE-WHAT-THE-FUCK-IS-HAPPENING-IS-IT-OR-IS-IT-NOT-A-CONFIDENCE-VOTE and so Stewart gets up again and says, right to everyone's faces, "It's not for me to say whether it's a confidence vote or not," which is an even faster and more spectacular u-turn than Truss herself could pull off given that he literally just said it wasn't and did so while being a minister.

And then the voting starts. MPs are now milling about like chickens who've sighted the hawk, clamouring to know if they're going to lose their jobs unless they vote for Satan. The Whips - specifically Chief Whip Wendy Morton and Deputy Chief Whip Craig Whittaker - descend upon them like fucking wargs on the hunt. They don't just spit vitriol and blackmail into MPs ears. They fucking bodily drag people into the right voting lobby. MPs are legitimately screaming. Grown men are crying literal tears. Labour's Chris Bryant reports holding multiple Tory MPs as they sob into his shoulder. Multiple MPs report similar scenes.

And Tories still don't know if this is even a damn confidence vote, or if they should just knock the Chief Whip's teeth out.

And then the Whips, filled with bloodlust and frenzy, suddenly realise that NO ONE IS LISTENING TO US, YOU'RE ALL SUPPOSED TO LISTEN TO US SO WE FEEL POWERFUL -

Cue sudden meeting in a locked room with Liz Truss. For over HALF AN HOUR.

So is it a confidence vote? No one is sure. Deputy PM Therese Coffey thinks so, so in the absence of the Whips she decides physical assault is her job now and is seen by David Linden MP (SNP) physically carrying someone into the voting lobby. Jacob Rees Mogg thinks not and starts yelling "It's not a confidence vote!", to which his colleagues reply, "Fuck off." Meanwhile the Whips have possibly resigned, no one is sure. It is still uncertain if this was a confidence vote.

And Ed Milliband basks in the chaos, playing the fiddle while it all burns around him.

Finally, voting concludes. The Whips reappear to lurk.

The votes are in - the government wins, and fracking will go ahead. But.

32 MPs abstained.

And one of those is Liz Truss.

Which is WILD??!? What possible benefit could she get from that??? No one knows. Everything is uproar again. Guess who else abstained? Well, riveted reader, here's a list with important names highlighted:

Nigel Adams, Gareth Bacon, Siobhan Baillie, Greg Clark, Sir Geoffrey Cox, Tracey Crouch, David Davis, Dame Caroline Dinenage, Nadine Dorries, Philip Dunne, Mark Fletcher, Vicky Ford, Paul Holmes, Alister Jack, Boris Johnson, Gillian Keegan, Kwasi Kwarteng, Robert Largan, Pauline Latham, Mark Logan, Theresa May, Priti Patel, Mark Pawsey, Angela Richardson, Andrew Rosindell, Bob Seely, Alok Sharma, Chris Skidmore, Henry Smith, Ben Wallace, Sir John Whittingdale, and William Wragg.

Kwasi still smarting about that p45, I see.

In any case it then turns out that Liz DID vote, but incompetently, because her voting card didn't read properly, which is actually fair given that she was being screamed at by angry Whips waving Graham Stewart's severed dick and balls around while they demanded power and authority. While she's clearing that up, the press are understandably waiting open-mouthed for comment, but don't worry Liz! Your old pal Jacob Rees Mogg is here to fill in for you!

And thus it is that JRM willingly chooses to go on the live news and calmly confirm to the nation that no one knows if it was a confidence vote or not.

Chaos. Chaos again. Unbridled chaos. The Whips are furious. Everyone is furious. The rebels are now in limbo, unsure if they're now out of a job. Tories are weeping, trying to work out if Rees Mogg WANTS to sink the party. Back bencher Charles Walker MP delivers a frank interview to the press absolutely SHIVERING with rage, like the drummer in a Fleetwood Mac concert. Ex-Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, a bland man known only for the time he himself willingly chose to go on the news and calmly explain that he's a homophobe without provocation, tweets that Liz Truss is a Lib Dem sleeper agent they sent in to destroy the Tories, sparking what is likely to be a whole slew of conspiracy theories by next week. No one knows what is going on. They all decide to sleep on it.

The good folks at Wikipedia ultimately decide to make three separate pages for the UK 2022 government crisis, and to label them with the month "to leave room for another by the end of the year."

Ed Milliband skips all the way home, and treats himself to a bacon sandwich.

20th October

Okay, Liz thinks, the morning after. Okay. Last night was bad. But today will be better.

So first... the vote.

Because there's bad news for Tories who like money and good news for people who like liveable planets - there are problems with the vote. For one, the vote counts are being called into question. Are the results reliable?

For another, the Speaker of the House of Commons calls for an investigation into the reports of, um, assault. So will the result stand?

It's so unclear! And so is that ongoing issue of whether or not the damn thing was a confidence vote. Angry whips say YES, JRM says NO, Downing Street refuses to pick up the phone to the BBC, but does send ITV's Robert Peston a text at 1am to say it was definitely a confidence vote and, unrelatedly, the Whips aren't resigning :)

I think we have found the price paid to keep the Whips.

Meanwhile. Let's see what this has done for Liz's leadership stability!

13 letters of no confidence are confirmed submitted by Sky, 5 of which came in overnight. The 1922 Committee reconvenes the coven to discuss matters. Simultaneously, the One Nation Conservatives reconvene their coven to discuss the same. Presumably there is much "Girl what are YOU doing at the Devil's Sacrament?"-ing and "Same cloak, how embarrassing"-ing. MPs are CLAMOURING for her head. It is VICIOUS. It's like cartoon piranhas in a supervillain's lair; which is highly appropriate, because that's exactly what Tory MPs are.

Graham Brady, head jester of the 1922 Committee, demands to see Liz Truss.

He walks into a room with her, and the doors are closed. Half an hour later, he walks back out of the room.

Ten minutes later, she calls a press conference.

45 days after being appointed, Liz Truss breaks the record, and becomes the shortest-serving British Prime Minister.

#politik #the second clownfall of 2022

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justinspoliticalcorner · 1 month

Text

WaPo: How car bans and heat pump rules drive voters to the far right

Shannon Osaka at WaPo:

More than a decade ago, the Netherlands embarked on a straightforward plan to cut carbon emissions. Its legislature raised taxes on natural gas, using the money earned to help Dutch households install solar panels. By most measures, the program worked: By 2022, 20 percent of homes in the Netherlands had solar panels, up from about 2 percent in 2013. Natural gas prices, meanwhile, rose by almost 50 percent. But something else happened, according to a new study. The Dutch families who were most vulnerable to the increase in gas prices — renters who paid their own utility bills — drifted to the right. Families facing increased home energy costs became 5 to 6 percent more likely to vote for one of the Netherlands’ far-right parties. A similar backlash is happening all over Europe, as far-right parties position themselves in opposition to green policies. In Germany, a law that would have required homeowners to install heat pumps galvanized the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, giving it a boost. Farmers have rolled tractors into Paris to protest E.U. agricultural rules, and drivers in Italy and Britain have protested attempts to ban gas-guzzling cars from city centers.

That resurgence of the right could slow down the green transition in Europe, which has been less polarized on global warming, and serves as a warning to the United States, where policies around electric vehicles and gas stoves have already sparked a backlash. The shift also shows how, as climate policies increasingly touch citizens’ lives, even countries whose voters are staunchly supportive of clean energy may hit roadblocks. “This has really expanded the coalition of the far right,” said Erik Voeten, a professor of geopolitics at Georgetown University and the author of the new study on the Netherlands.

Other studies have found similar results. In one study in Milan, researchers at Bocconi University studied the voting patterns of drivers whose cars were banned from the city center for being too polluting. These drivers, who on average lost the equivalent of $4,000 because of the ban, were significantly more likely to vote for the right-wing Lega party in subsequent elections. In Sweden, researchers found that low-income families facing high electricity prices were also more likely to turn toward the far right. Far-right parties in Europe have started to position themselves against climate action, expanding their platforms from anti-immigration and anti-globalization. A decade ago, the Dutch right-wing Party for Freedom emphasized that it wasn’t against renewable energy — just increasing energy prices. But by 2021, the party’s manifesto had moved to more extreme language. “Energy is a basic need, but climate madness has turned it into a very expensive luxury item,” the manifesto said. “The far right has increasingly started to campaign on opposition to environmental policies and climate change,” Voeten said.

The pushback also reflects, in part, how much Europe has decarbonized. More than 60 percent of the continent’s electricity already comes from renewable sources or nuclear power; so meeting the European Union’s climate goals means tacklingother sectors — transportation, buildings, agriculture.

[...] Some of these voting patterns have also played out in the United States. According to a study by the Princeton political scientist Alexander Gazmararian, historically-Democratic coal communities that lost jobs in the shift to natural gas increased their support for Republican candidates by 5 percent. The shift was larger in areas located farther from new gas power plants — that is, areas where voters couldn’t see that it was natural gas, not environmental regulations, that undercut coal.

Gazmararian says that while climate denial and fossil fuel misinformation have definitely played a role, many voters are motivated simply by their own financial pressures. “They’re in an economic circumstance where they don’t have many options,” he said. The solution, experts say, is todesign policies that avoid putting too much financial burden on individual consumers. In Germany, where the law to install heat pumps would have cost homeowners $7,500 to $8,500 more than installing gas boilers, policymakers quickly retreated. But by that point, far-right party membership had already surged.

The Washington Post explains what may be at least partially causing the rise of far-right extremist parties in Europe, Conservatives in Canada, and the Republicans in some parts of the US: rising energy costs that low-income people are bearing the brunt of.

In the US, right-wing hysteria about gas stove bans and electric vehicles are also playing a role.

#Climate Change #Energy #Environmentalism #Europe #United States #Coal #Electric Vehicles #Fossil Fuels

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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California's antitrust case against Amazon

California’s antitrust case against Amazon feels anachronistic, like a witchcraft charge, or some other ancient crime that we no longer prosecute. It’s true, antitrust spent 40 year in a coma! The Amazon case neatly illustrates how it was sedated, and why it finally roused.

Back in the Reagan years, antitrust underwent a profound change. For 90 years, America’s trustbusters had pursued monopolists under the theory of “harmful dominance” — the idea that when companies get big enough, they can inflict harms on workers, communities, customers and the political process. They become “too big to fail” and “too big to jail.”

Senator John Sherman said it well, when campaigning for his landmark 1890 Sherman Act, America’s first comprehensive antitrust law: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life.”

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

For American competition regulators, the problem with big companies was that they usurped the power of democratically accountable law. The executives who commanded these firms became “autocrat[s] of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”

But for the business lobby, the ability to be an autocrat — to impose your will on your workers and suppliers and customers without interference by elected lawmakers or the regulators who report to them — was a feature, not a bug. The power of a monopolist to take away others’ freedom to trade, work and live as they choose was essential to “liberty.” That’s why, as self-proclaimed “libertarian” Peter Thiel has it, “Competition is for losers.”

Under Reagan, the business lobby got its way. Their champion was Robert Bork, Richard Nixon’s disgraced solicitor general, whose book, “The Antitrust Paradox,” was a kind of gnostic reading of US antitrust law, insisting that the lawmakers who voted for the Sherman Act and its successors actually liked monopoly:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

These lawmakers, Bork said, viewed monopolies as beneficial, thanks to the efficiencies they realized by not having to engage in wasteful competition. The FTC, DoJ and the courts had been misapplying antitrust through its history. The only time the state should act against monopolies is when they use their market power to raise prices.

This “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust was the poison dart that plunged trustbusting into a 40-year coma. Bork and his cronies at the University of Chicago School of Economics — the cradle of neoliberalism — set up a sweet side-hustle, building complex mathematical models that only they understood.

These models were used to prove that every monopoly was untouchable under consumer welfare enforcement standards — even if a company bought all its competitors and then increased prices 1,000% (as Luxottica-Essilor did for eyeglasses, after buying nearly every eyeglass brand, retailer, insurer and lens-maker), it was still untouchable.

The Bork models could “prove” that these price-hikes were the result of “exogenous” factors — increasing wage bills, oil shocks, or just because the moon was in Venus. Price-gouging could be blamed on anything except corporate greed.

This highly technical change in antitrust enforcement is one of the most consequential, worst-understood shifts in our society. Today’s headline inflation numbers rarely mention the monopoly CEOs who gleefully notify their shareholders that they’ve been able to raise prices far in excess of their costs, simply because they lack meaningful competition:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

It was obvious from the start that “consumer welfare” was a scam, a ruse designed to let monopolies flourish and to install “autocrats of trade” on their thrones. Despite its ideological bankruptcy, “consumer welfare” was able to repel its critics for decades, because it had deep-pocketed backers — no different from tobacco-cancer denial or climate denial.

But, as with cancer and climate denial, inaction on antitrust created mounting harms that made it increasingly obvious that the story was a lie. In 2017, we reached a turning point when a third-year law student published “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in Yale Law Journal, which demolished Bork’s arguments so comprehensively that today, that former law student is the chair of the FTC: Lina Khan.

Khan’s leadership — and that of her colleagues, Robert Kanter at the DoJ and Tim Wu in the White House — have been nothing short of inspirational, an object lesson in the prospect that “personnel are policy.” But they are not alone — they are part of a raging current sweeping through state governments and legislatures all over the world, from the EU to China.

And state houses, too. Which brings me back to California’s antitrust case against Amazon. Amazon exerts serious harmful dominance, of course — you can’t have missed the way that its conduct erodes local tax bases, immiserates workers, inflicts climate harms, wrecks local businesses and independent firms that rely on its platform.

But none of that is in the California case against Amazon. Rather, the case focuses on a narrow, and ingenious “consumer welfare” theory of how Amazon has raised prices — the one thing that consumer welfare claims to defend us from:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62908412

Amazon is a classic “chokepoint capitalism” business. The company’s “Prime” program and other lock-in tactics were deliberately and explicitly designed to ensure that the majority of customers for the majority of goods turn to Amazon first. It worked:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie

That means that any business that wants to sell anything had better offer those goods on Amazon, or forfeit a large portion of its market — perhaps the majority. When large firms like Birkenstocks held out and refused to sell on Amazon, the company tacitly encouraged counterfeiters to sell substitute goods to customers searching on its site:

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/birkenstock-announces-it-will-leave-amazon/

The result is that nearly every firm was corralled into Amazon’s walled garden, and as those firms disappeared behind Amazon’s walls, more customers bought into Prime and found themselves locked into Amazon’s walled garden, too. Amazon is quite explicit about this strategy, which they call “the flywheel”:

https://twitter.com/rgibli/status/1561761732108107777

That meant that instead of competing in the market, these Amazon suppliers competed on Amazon. Amazon created a $31b/year “ad” business mainly made up of payola that Amazon vendors spend to rise to the top of the Amazon listings:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns

Even after spending $31b, independent merchants find themselves unable to make a go of it on Amazon’s platform. Desperate, they sell out to “gators” — aggregators who professionalized the business of navigating Amazon’s Byzantine rules and scams, spawning a multi-billion-dollar, socially useless industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gator-ade

But no matter how much you spend on Amazon “ads,” and no matter how skilled you are at avoiding Amazon’s other traps, you will struggle to top the listings unless you purchase a slew of Amazon “services” — most notably, “fulfillment by Amazon” and Amazon Prime Fulfillment.

All told, a successful Amazon seller is likely handing over 35–45% of the purchase price to Amazon in fees and commissions. That vastly exceeds the profit margin on many goods, which presents merchants with a stark choice: lose money on every sale, or charge more for everything sold on Amazon.

No business can survive for long if it loses money on every sale (at least, not without the backing of the Saudi royals — looking at you, Uber). So Amazon sellers hike prices, just to cover the vig extracted by Amazon itself.

You might be thinking that this is an opportunity for Amazon’s rivals: if your local retailer (or even Walmart) opted not to charge all those fees, then the same merchants could offer the same products on their shelves at a 35–45% discount and still make the same amount of money. As habituated as we are to Amazon, as much as Prime means we turn to it first, a 45% discount would surely tempt some of us to shop elsewhere.

But Amazon’s thought of that too, which is why they make every merchant that sells through their platform sign a “most favored nation” guarantee that they will not charge less for their products anywhere else — which means that the price is the same everywhere.

And that’s the heart of the California antitrust case against Amazon: Amazon’s market dominance makes it impossible to survive without offering your products on Amazon; to succeed there, you must turn over 35–45% of your gross to Amazon. That leads to higher prices on Amazon, and, thanks to the most favored nation deal, it pushes those same higher prices to every other retailer.

Amazon, in other words, is undermining “consumer welfare” by forcing up prices — not just on Amazon, but everywhere.

This is sleazy as hell of course, but, as noted, it is just one of Amazon’s myriad of sins, and far from the worst one. California AG Rob Bonta has managed to thread the microscopic eye of Robert Bork’s needle — but like busting Capone for tax fraud, the need to pursue this strategy reveals the poverty of our other enforcement regimes.

“Consumer welfare” was always a lie and a sham. The harms inflicted by chokepoint capitalists — to workers, suppliers, and our politics and regulation — are not limited to making us worse off as “consumers.” No one is a mere “consumer” — a kind of ambulatory wallet. We are also workers, citizens, and residents. Even when monopolies make our prices go down, they also make our wages stagnate, lowering our overall purchasing power.

It’s heartening to see California take on one nodule of the Amazon cancer, but that can only be the start. Even if Amazon is forced to stop price-gouging us, it will still inflict innumerable harms. This needs to be seen as the first step in taming monopolies — not as an end in itself.

[Image ID: The flag of California. It has been altered so that the bear is rearing on its hind legs, and its forelegs are crushing an Amazon lower-case 'a' logo. The 'smile' beneath the Amazon logo has been inverted into a frown. Atop the California bear stands a trustbuster-era editorial cartoon illustration of Roosevelt, swinging his 'big stick.' From the star in the California flag emanates a read beam-weapon that is bathing the Amazon 'a' with lethal rays. The 'a' is wreathed in flames.]

#pluralistic

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whatsuphoneybee · 1 year

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i wanted to piggyback off this very good tweet and remind everyone that-

Ohio's current voting maps are fucked!

The maps that were used in Ohio's 2022 election were ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court. And were found to be gerrymandered in favor of the Republican party (surprise surprise).

So the government currently in charge of handling the East Palestine disaster was elected unconstitutionally! :)

You can read up about that here! [1] [2] [3] [4]

Additional fun facts about Ohio's government! - A former members of said government's political party is currently on trail for corruption! - They slipped in a bill banning trans women from competing in school sports at 11:56 PM, putting it into an unrelated bill, so it couldn't be reviewed! (it was later shot down but they still used a shitty tactic to try and get it passed)

So yeah! Fuck the "Elect shitty people, live with the shitty results" attitude that's use to downplay and victim blame people living in rural, blue collar, "republican" states.

#Ohio #East Palestine #politics #current events #sorry to be political on fandom blog #we've just been living in this constant hellstate #Ohio has been a fucking meme everywhere but no one is talking about our fucked political state.#i haven't seen much about the train situation on tumblr and i wish more people would talk about it

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phoenixyfriend · 5 months

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the state of israel MUST be dismantled for a free palestine. jews existed and lived in ME before the existence of Israel, and jews will continue to live in ME but Israel as a state has to go. israel didnt bring the jews to ME.

See... the whole "Jews will continue to live" thing is what I'm not so sure of.

I understand where people are coming from when they talk about how Israel as a nation-state must be dismantled. It was established by outside forces, maintained by those outside forces, and has in past decades engaged in some truly heinous behavior.

However, that behavior was enacted by the government, which is not all of Israel, nor even all of the Jews in Israel. That government's behavior also reflects on those people of Israel, and any revenge against the government--which is likely if dismantled--is likely to land on the shoulders of the people of Israel who may not have anything to do with it.

There are pacifists and children in Israel, just as there are in Palestine. There are people protesting the conflict in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Over half of the Jews in Palestine are of a Mizrahi background, and either came to Israel from Arab countries that wanted them gone, or are the descendants of the people who did so. The establishment of Israel by the Sykes-Picot agreement resulted in many countries having a place to send their unwanted Jewish population to, and those countries now had the option of driving out, or at least 'encouraging,' those populations to leave. Operation Magic Carpet wasn't driven solely by the Imam of Yemen; Israel played its own role in it, as did the US and UK, but the result was a mass exodus of Jews. In 2022, there were a total of six Jews in Yemen. Now, there is only one.

Those Mizrahi Jews are also by and large not part of the Israeli government.

Many of the others in Israel are holocaust survivors, or the descendants of such.

It is not a stretch to say that Israel is, statistically, a country of refugees and their children.

Many of the powers most vocal about dismantling Israel are also the most vocally antisemitic. The most obvious example is the Yemeni Houthis, who have "death to all Jews" as a slogan. Hamas is aligned with them, and both are aligned with Iran, and Hezbollah. None of these specific groups want Jews in the ME, period. Some have made it very clear they don't want Jews to live at all, anywhere. It's not 'Jews who support the Israeli state' that they object to, it's Jewish people, period.

My hesitation about the argument to dismantle Israel is that I haven't seen anyone yet talk about how to go about doing it without a risk that there is another mass exodus or mass murder.

Un-fucking-fortunately, that possible result is also what Israel's government is using as their justification for war against their neighbors, and what it has been using for the better part of eighty years.

I am not defending Israel's actions. I do not condone what they are doing in Gaza. I do not condone what they are claiming about Gaza, and I have heard some truly horrifying propaganda that is getting fed to Zionists to keep the fervor up. I do not think that what they are doing in the Occupied West Bank is ethical. I do not think the Israeli government has a leg to stand on in terms of morality and ethics.

I also think that people who say "Israel should be dismantled" are looking at the past and turnabout as fair play without actually asking 'what will happen to the people who live there if a group like Hamas or the Houthi rebels or Hezbollah uses a weak transition period or sudden collapse as a chance to enact that revenge.

I don't know what the correct solution is. Rebuilding a government with both Israeli and Palestine officials in a joint system, unifying the two regions with the UN enforcing a fair and equal election and representation system? The two-nations solution that people have been talking about for ages, booting Israel from the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, and demanding they pay reparations to the people of Palestine? I don't think withdrawing all international interest and support to let them work it out among themselves is the right call. I don't think having Israel take over completely, or Palestine take over completely, is going to end well for whichever community ends up Not In Charge.

I don't know what can be done. I just know that the short, sweet, pithy 'dismantle Israel' and 'Zionism is bad' statements only sound good until you ask 'but where will the Jews, hated by most of the ME for what their government has been doing, and hated for millennia before that for existing, go?'

Which sucks, because Israel's government sure as hell didn't ask where the people of Palestine would go when they started pushing them out.

It's not fair! It's not fair to Palestine that this all is happening. It is not fair that the founded but unrealized risk to Israeli lives is being weighed against the fully realized and ongoing threat to theirs. It is not fair that thousands of children are dying of air strikes and hunger.

Palestine is undergoing a massacre at the hands of the Israeli government.

It is entirely possible that Israel will undergo that same massacre at the hands of Hamas and its allies if the 'dismantling' happens without safeguards.

Israel needs to stop. People are dying in the tens of thousands in Gaza because of their completely disproportionate response. A ceasefire is unquestionably needed and the ongoing refusal of the US government to help enforce one by pulling support from the IDF is a failure.

(No, not the Houthi strikes. That is a related, but distinct situation.)

But 'dismantle Israel' tends to come with few ideas on how to do so without risking the same situation as now, but in the other direction, and with the same or larger possibility of escalating into a wider regional conflict.

I don't know. I don't fucking know. But please understand that I am coming at this from a place of attempted compassion and concern. I am not trying to be dismissive of people's claims. I do not support Israel's actions. I don't even necessarily think Israel, as it is and as it was founded and as it acts, deserves to remain the power and government that it currently is. Restructuring, renaming, integrating, all these things are options, maybe even necessary ones.

I just don't think 'deserve' is the only consideration when the past seventy-odd years have been spent sowing the seeds of hate and revenge, and so many military groups in their area have expressed a desire to see all of them dead.

If you know of a 'dismantle Israel' plan by Palestinians, rather than some random Western Leftist, that includes plans on how to integrate the people that have in some cases been there for decades, and in some cases ended up there because they were driven or 'encouraged' out of neighboring Arab states...

Let me know.

But please recognize that I am trying my best to base my opinions on compassion and ethics and morality and awareness, not just parroting the news without thought, or my echo chamber, or whatever the first take to come to mind is. I am not trying to be malicious. I am not trying to be ignorant. I am not trying to 'stan America' or whatever people have been saying in my ask box.

They bombed me, too.

#Anonymous #I didn't start talking about the conflict in my own words until I felt I had a strong enough grasp on the facts and propaganda #to know what I was even saying.#phoenix answers asks #politics #current events #palestine #israel #gaza #death tw #antisemitism #islamophobia #death mention #genocide mention #ethnic cleansing

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batboyblog · 2 years

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Governors 2022: You'd Better Vote!

A few days ago I made and blazed a post on important US Senate races but also coming up on November 8th there are equally (if not more) important races for Governor across the country. Since the Supreme Court overruled Roe V Wade its thrown abortion rights to the states. Who you vote for in this election will determine what abortion rights look like in your state, will they be protected? or will abortion be banned? up to the voters this election. Democratic Governors in red states have served as the thin blue line protecting the right to choice, vetoing radical anti-abortion laws and refusing to enforce antiquated 19th century anti-abortion laws.

Republican Governors however have declared open season on trans students in sports the families of trans children health care for trans kids trans healthcare for poor adults drag queens LGBT books the use of pronouns any conversation of race in school we can go on but it's clear that Republican state governments in 2022 have declared war on Queer people and Queer life, Trans people in particular and trans children most of all.

Finally many of the Republican candidates in 2022 are election deniers, they do not believe Joe Biden legally won the 2020 election and have made it clear that if they're in charge come 2024 they won't allow their states votes to be counted for any one but Donald Trump. How we vote in 2022 decides if we have a free and fair democratic election for President in 2024. So PLEASE look at this close Governor's elections, if you live in these states VOTE VOTE VOTE. But more than vote, volunteer your time, even if you don't live in this states you can call or text voters for a campaign. If you have even one dollar to spare for these campaigns give it to the candidate you like best. A lot of them also have merch stores you can buy stuff if you'd rather.

Arizona

Katie Hobbs (flip)

Arizona Security of State Katie Hobbs is running to replace term-limited Republican Governor Doug Ducey. As Security of State in charge of Arizona's elections Hobbs was in the center of the 2020 "stop the steal" conspiracy theory. In the face of death threats, doxxing of her home address and children's phone numbers, and armed protests in front of her home Hobbs did her job and made sure all of Arizona's votes were counted. Before becoming Security of State Hobbs was a social worker, a State Senator and Leader of the State Senate's Democrats. In the State House she helped push through medicaid expansion making Arizona one of the few Republican controlled states to do so. Republicans have nominated former news caster, Kari Lake for governor. Lake rose to prominence by being a vocal supporter of election conspiracy theories. Lake has called for Hobbs to be jailed for her role in the election as Arizona Security of State. She called for the Arizona election results to be decertified even after Biden took office, and for Trump to be re-instated as President. She declared she would not have certified the 2020 election result if she'd been governor at the time, bring what she'd do in 2024 as governor into question. Lake also called abortion "ultimate sin" and wants it banned in all cases, she wants to ban trans people from using the bathroom that conforms with their gender rather than assigned sex at birth, she declared she wouldn't follow/enforce federal gun laws, she wants to use Arizona state resources to deport undocumented people without federal government involvement, and to use Arizona tax payer dollars to finish Trump's wall. Also Lake has been vocal about Covid-19 conspiracies, supporting fake treatments, being against vaccine or mask mandates and being proudly not vaccinated herself. Lake would ban abortion, deport people illegally, victimize trans people, and can't be trusted with elections or public health, Katie Hobbs is 100% pro-choice, has already protected our democracy and isn't a bully, the choice is clear.

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Florida

Charlie Crist (flip)

Congressman and former Governor Charlie Crist is running to unseat one term Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. Crist served as Governor of Florida as a Republican from 2007 till 2011. When Crist decided to run for the US Senate in 2010 as a Republican. However hardcore Republicans were outraged at him for his support of environmental policies, his appointing of a black Justice to the state Supreme Court, his expressing a willingness to give President Obama "a shot", and his support of Obama's 2009 Recovery Act. Republicans backed Marco Rubio. Crist ran any ways as an Independent but due to vote splitting Rubio won with 48% of the vote. Crist endorsed Obama's re-election in 2012 and became a Democrat. He ran for Governor as a Democrat in 2014 and lost by 1%. In 2016 Crist ran for Congress becoming the first Democrat to represent St. Petersburg Florida in 62 years. While in Congress Crist has supported bills to legalize Marijuana, and introduced a bill to make it illegal to fire or not hire federal employees for using cannabis. Crist has also supported a federal assault weapons ban and other gun control measures. Crist has centered standing up for LGBT rights and Abortion rights as main issues in his 2022 campaign for Governor. Current Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is running for a second term after a narrow, 0.4% win in 2018. DeSantis has made an all out assault on the rights of LGBT people and reproductive rights the center of his re-election campaign. On June 1st 2021 DeSantis signed a law banning trans girls from participating and competing in middle-school and high-school girls' and college women's sports. He supported and signed the Florida "Don't Say Gay" bill banning any conversion of LGBT issues in younger grades. The Don't Say Gay bill has inspired a wave of banning LGBT related books from school and public libraries around America. DeSantis' Department of Health is in the process of banning transitioning, both medical AND social transitioning for minors in the state. DeSantis' Department of Health has already banned Florida Medicaid from covering medical transition/trans health care in the state. DeSantis is also 100% against abortion and is currently fighting in court to ban it totally in the state. He also took the extraordinary step of firing the elected Democratic State Attorney for Tampa for saying he would not enforce not yet passed laws against trans medical treatment for minors, as well as abortion. Florida in 2022 is the front line of LGBT rights and trans rights most of all. If DeSantis wins he'll try to ride bullying queer people, queer kids, to the White House. If you're queer, if you have any LGBT loved ones, if you care about LGBT rights, dig deep give Charlie Crist a dollar, if you're in Florida please do whatever you can to stop DeSantis.

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Georgia

Stacey Abrams (flip)

Former Georgia State House Minority Leader and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams is running to unseat one term Republican Governor Brian Kemp. A rematch of their painfully close 2018 election face off in which it is widely believed Kemp used his then office of Security of State to weight the odds against Abrams. Kemp closed over 200 polling places in poor and minority areas thought to be strong for Abrams causing longer lines and longer trips to a polling place for her voters. He also purged over 600K voters from the voting rolls and slowed down processing of new voter registration. After her painful 2018 defeat Abrams launched Fair Fight Action. Fair Fight works to register people to vote, to fight unfair voting laws in court, and to boost turn out. It's understood Abrams tireless organizing in Georgia was key to Joe Biden's narrow 2020 win in the state and as well as the Senate run-off wins of Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock that gave Democrats control of the Senate. Expanding Medicaid is one of Abrams top goals for her governorship as Georgia is one of the last states to have not expanded coverage. If elected Abrams will not only be Georgia's first black governor, she'll be the first black woman governor in America. Since taking office Kemp has kept up his voter suppressing ways, signing laws that limit absentee voting, giving the Republican controlled legislature the right to overrule and replace local elected elections officials, and making it a crime to give food and even water to people waiting in line to vote. Kemp also banned mask mandates during Covid even banning local governments in Georgia from enacting them. He lifted the stay at home order in early 2020 against the advice of the CDC and again overruling Democratic mayors in his state. The result was Georgia having some of the worst Covid numbers of 2020. Georgia doesn't need more election suppression, support Abrams.

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Kansas

Laura Kelly (re-elect)

Governor Laura Kelly was elected in an upset win in 2018 and is running for her second term in office. Before 2018 Kansas suffered 8 years under Republican Governor Sam Brownback and the "Kansas experiment". Under Governor Brownback taxes on the wealthy and corporations were slashed in some of the biggest tax cuts in American history. The result was an implosion of the state budget and deep cuts in all services and the near collapse of Kansas' education system. Governor Kelly campaigned to reverse the effects of the "Kansas experiment" and drew wide support even from Republicans alarmed by the effects of Republican tax policy. In office Governor Kelly worked to push through Medicaid expansion through the Republican controlled legislature. Thanks to Kelly over 100,000 Kansans got health coverage through Medicaid. Kelly has managed to fully fund Kansas' schools and balance Kansas' budget. Her first official act in office was to sign an order protecting LGBT state workers from discrimination, something Governor Brownback had eliminated in 2015. Governor Kelly was a leading figure in the campaign to protect abortion rights in Kansas through the ballot referendum and she opposes any new restrictions on abortion. Republicans have nominated Kansas' Attorney General Derek Schmidt to try to unseat Governor Kelly. Schmidt has been Kansas' Attorney General since 2011. During the Obama Administration Schmidt sued the Obama EPA to try to block regulation of oil and gas companies, green house gases, and to block Obama's clean power plan. Schmidt sued the Obama Administration to try to overturn Obamacare, and also DACA. Schmidt even took part in an official Kansas government panel which heard "evidence" that President Obama was not an American citizen and shouldn't be allowed on the ballot in Kansas in 2012. In 2020 Schmidt joined other Republican AGs to sue to try to overturn the results of the Presidential election. Since Biden has taken office Schmidt has sued the Biden Administration over its climate change policies. Governor Kelly has been a common sense problem solver and the line of protection for LGBT people and abortion rights in Kansas, Kansas needs a second term of her, not another Republican.

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Maine

Janet Mills (re-elect)

Governor Janet Mills was elected in 2018 and is running for her second term in office. Mills is the first woman governor in Maine and was also the first woman Attorney General of the state. On her first day in office Mills signed Medicaid expansion into law. The Medicaid expansion had been passed by citizen vote on a ballot measure but vetoed by the Republican governor. This brought health coverage to 90,000 low income Mainers. Mills has pushed for aggressive climate action putting forward a plan to make the state carbon-neutral by 2045. In 2022 the Maine climate council reported the state had over shot its goals. Mills stand on climate change lead to her being invited to address the United Nations on the topic in 2019. A life long feminist, a co-founder of the Maine Women's Lobby Mills has pledged to veto any restriction on abortion and voiced support for changing the state's constitution to protect abortion rights. Mills also declared she would work to make sure it was safe for people from outside of Maine to come to the state seeking an abortion that might be illegal in their home state. Republicans have nominated former Governor Paul LePage to try to unseat Mills. LePage was governor from 2011 to 2019 winning two elections with split voting. LePage earned national attention for his regularly inflammatory and often racist comments such as declaring "New York Drug Dealers" were coming to Maine to sell drugs and "impregnate a young, white girl before they leave" and "black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers". When a Democratic state rep called him a racist LePage called him in the middle of the night and left a voice message in which he called the state rep a "little son of a bitch" and a "cocksucker" repeatedly, later LePage challenged the rep to a dual. When Maine voters passed ballot measures to expand Medicaid and legalize marijuana LePage vetoed the bills that would implement the will of the voters. He also vetoed a bill that would have banned conversion "therapy" for Minors, Governor Mills signed the bill a year later. LePage cut and restricted welfare in Maine resulting in the state leading the nation in food insecure children by 2018. Maine need a climate change world leader as governor not a racist.

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Nevada

Steve Sisolak (re-elect)

Governor Steve Sisolak was first elected in 2018 and is running for his second term in office. Since taking office Sisolak has focused on climate change and protecting Nevada's fragile ecosystem. He appointed the first climate czar for the Governor's office in the history of the state. Under his leadership Nevada has become a world leader in solar power. Governor Sisolak set a goal of 50% of Nevada's power from renewables by 2030 and the state is on track to meet those goals. Sisolak stood up for Nevada's election integrity in the face of 2020 election conspiracies that heavily focused on the state. Since Roe V Wade was overturned Sisolak has spoken out in support of abortion rights. Sisolak worked to repel the state's anti-abortion law before Roe was struck down thus protecting abortion rights in the state now. Republicans have nominated Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo to try to unseat Governor Sisolak. Lombardo is against most if not all gun control measures. He worked to eliminate Clark County's (Las Vegas) gun registry even after the 2017 mass shooting, the deadliest in American history with 57 deaths. Lombardo also supports people being able to 3D print their own "ghost guns". Lombardo wants to get rid of Nevada's long standing system of universal mail in ballots and make it harder for people to vote. Lombardo bluntly declares himself "pro-life". Nevada can keep moving forward and be a climate leader or go backward and make it harder to vote.

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Pennsylvania

Josh Shapiro (hold)

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is running to replace term-limited Democratic Governor Tom Wolf. Shapiro has been Attorney General since 2017. During his term in office Shapiro was a consistent opponent of the Trump administration. Shapiro sued the Trump administration over it's travel ban and also sued the Trump administration over its plan to allow employers to not cover birth control in their health insurance plans. Shapiro pushed the federal government to ban the blue prints for 3D printed guns. He supported the legalization of marijuana in 2019, but despite support from Governor Wolf and other leading Democrats is still being blocked by Republicans in the state legislature. Shapiro conducted a extensive investigation into child sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania. Shapiro's report uncovered over 1,000 cases of sexual abuse by over 300 priests and an extensive cover up by Church leadership. Republicans Nominated state Senator Doug Mastriano to face off with Shapiro in November. Mastriano is seen as a leading figure on the Christian Nationalist right who has worrying ties to far-right organizations and terrorist groups. Mastriano is known to have organized bus rides for Trump supporters to come to DC on January 6th. Mastriano and his wife were shown in video has being present when barricade around the US Capitol was breached and they can be seen passing beyond the barricade. It is unclear if Mastriano himself entered the Capitol building during the riot. Mastriano has refused to cooperate with the Congressional investigation into January 6th or with the FBI criminal investigation. Mastriano's campaigned paid to have Gab, the racist far-right alternative to Twitter, make it so all new Gab users automatically fallowed Mastriano's account. Gab CEO Andrew Torba declared that electing Mastriano was his number one goal for the 2022 election. Torba also declared he had a personal policy that he didn't "conduct interviews with reporters who aren't Christian" and that he knew "Doug has a very similar media strategy where he does not do interviews with these people." Attorney General Shapiro is Jewish. It appears that members of Mastriano's security detail were also members of the far-right extremist militia group the Oath Keepers. Mastriano supporters at a public event he attended carried flags for another far-right militia, the Three Percenters. Both groups were involved in the January 6th rioting. Mastriano is a dangerous far-right anti-democracy candidate who was involved in the January 6th riot and hangs out with right wing terrorist groups, don't let him in office.

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Texas

Beto O'Rourke (flip)

Former Congressman Beto O'Rourke is running to unseat 2 term Republican Governor Greg Abbott. O'Rourke represented El Paso Texas in Congress from 2013 till 2019. O'Rourke won his first election to Congress in an upset primary win. His campaign centered on his support for LGBT rights and drug liberalization two issues that would remain major themes for O'Rourke in future campaigns. While in Congress O'Rourke was a social supporter of LGBT rights, abortion rights, and gun control, taking part in a sit in with Congressman John Lewis inside the House chamber to try to force the then Republican controlled house to vote on gun control. In 2018 O'Rourke left the house to run for the US Senate in an effort to unseat Senator Ted Cruz. Many thought O'Rourke's campaign was a hopeless long shot but in the end it was a photo finish with Cruz 50.9% to O'Rourke's 48.3%. While he didn't win O'Rourke netted more votes then any Democrat in Texas history and energized long hopeless Texas Democrats. O'Rourke has run an aggressive no holds barred campaign, centering upholding LGBT rights, abortion rights, and even directly confronting Governor Abbott to his face over the failed response to the Uvalde shooting. Gregg Abbott has been governor of Texas since 2015. Abbott's reaction to mass shooting events in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022 has been to uniformly reject tighter gun laws and call for prayer. Abbott was quick to endorse a false narrative of police heroism in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting in line with his "back the blue" ideology. After the 2021 ice storm left most of Texas without power in the record cold Abbott still refuses to consider integrating the state's power grid into one of the two national grids for ideological reasons. Abbott has been aggressively anti-abortion his whole career. Texas' aggressive anti-abortion bill is what lead to the Supreme Court case overturning Roe. Under the law not only is abortion illegal it empowers random citizens to sue those who get or those who preform an abortion. Abbott has also targeted the trans community. in 2022 Abbott ordered the state child welfare agency to treat gender affirming treatment of trans children as child abuse and investigate parents of trans children, which is happening now. Greg Abbott thinks he can bully trans kids and ultra ban abortion his way to re-election, Texas can prove it doesn't want a bully and wants someone to keep the lights on this winter.

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Wisconsin

Tony Evers (re-elect)

Governor Tony Evers was first elected in 2018 and is running for his second term in office. Before becoming governor Evers was Wisconsin's statewide Superintendent. In his role as head of schools in the state Evers focused on expanding mental health excess for students. He regularly clashed with Republican Governor Scott Walker, who he beat in the 2018 election, over the school system's budget. Since becoming Governor Evers has championed Wisconsin's school passing the first budget increase in years, moving the state from 18th to 8th in the nation, and overseeing the first increase in spending on special ed in decades. Evers has also focused on rebuilding and repairing Wisconsin's crumbling roads and bridges after years of Republican neglect. One of Evers first actions as Governor was to withdraw Wisconsin from a Republican lead law suit against Obamacare. Evers supports expanding Medicaid in the state but has been blocked so far by a Republican legislature. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe Governor Evers joined Wisconsin's Attorney General in suing to try to stop the state's antiquated 1849 anti-abortion law from coming into effect. Evers has stated if the law does come into effect he will pardon any doctor convicted under it. Republicans have nominated perennial failed candidate and businessman Tim Michels to try to unseat Governor Evers. Michels has declared on abortion "The 1849 law is an exact mirror of my position, and my position is an exact mirror of the 1849 law,". Michels stated he believes marriage is "between one man and one woman". Michels also supports plans to make voting harder in Wisconsin and would not commit to certifying the 2024 Presidential election results if Trump doesn't win the state. Wisconsin can pick a common sense Democrat who will protect the right to choose and our elections, or a candidate that wants to use 19th century laws against peoples bodies and won't protect our elections, choice is clear.

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Thank you SO much for reading all this! To keep an already very long post to a readable length I had to make some choices about which races to cover, so please check out Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Tim Walz (Minnesota), Michelle Lujan Grisham (New Mexico) and Tina Kotek (Oregon) They need your support and your votes as well.

If you don't live in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin or New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio (Senate list) Please look up your state/local Democratic Party I GUARANTEE there is an important winnable election going on in your state right now that needs your attention, your vote for sure, but also your volunteer hours, and your money if you got ANY to spare even a dollar is worth giving to a winnable race and a good candidate.

Trust me when I say if you feel hopeless, upset, frustrated, feel like you're going crazy, volunteering, going out for a lovely walk knocking on doors and talking to real people is the best best best therapy there is, every time I feel 1,000 better and I'm NOT a social butterfly.

If you care about LGBT rights, you care about trans people, this is the election to vote and get involved, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott both think abusing trans people, particularly trans children, is their road to re-election and if they win it'll only spread and get much much worse. If you're Queer, or you care about LGBT people vote hard, and talk to everyone, have that hard awkward conversation with a family member about what voting Republican really means, talk till they understand guys. This is also true on Abortion Republicans everywhere are running on extreme total bans, we're talking pregnant teenage, pregnant 10 year old, rape and abuse victims being forced to carry their rapist baby to term when they're physically too young to give birth even close to safely.

finally thank you to @dduane one of my favorite childhood authors (I fangirled hard) and everyone else for helping my Senate post go viral, I hope this one does as well

VOTE NOVEMBER 8TH!

#election #vote #voting #LGBT #LGBT rights #trans #trans rights #abortion #politics #Texas #Florida #Georgia #Pennsylvania #Arizona #Democrats #don't say gay #Ron DeSantis #Greg Abbott #beto o'rourke

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simply-ivanka · 3 months

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To Understand Trump’s Staying Power With the White Working Class, Look at Michigan Supporters remain loyal to former president’s policies, personality

Tuesday February 27, 2024 Wall Street Journal

By Jimmy VielkindFollow and Ariel Zambelich

DEARBORN, Mich.—At its peak, more than 100,000 people streamed in and out of the massive

Ford Motor factory here along the Rouge River. In addition to cars and trucks, the behemoth plant helped mint the American middle class.

The thousands of people who still work here and at other factories across Michigan and other Midwest states helped forge those states’ politics. These blue-collar voters were for many years reliable Democrats, but in 2016 a big group of them, mostly white, helped Donald Trump capture the presidency—including an unexpected win in Michigan.

His supporters said they remain loyal to him thanks to a mix of economic policy proposals and a unique personality that they haven’t seen from many other Republicans, according to recent interviews conducted by The Wall Street Journal for its “Chasing the Base” podcast series.

His policies? They shined. They shined…I made more money than I ever had. My money went further.— James Benson

I just love Trump’s enthusiasm and positivity, he’s positive, he’s enthusiastic…But I like to see an American leader that says we can be great again, we��can be number one.— Joe Pizzimenti

The United Auto Workers endorsed President Biden in January, but union officials acknowledge that a sizable portion of their members back Trump. More than 100,000 people in the Detroit metro area work in auto manufacturing alone. It is still home to the headquarters of marquee American auto brands such as Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

Trump lost Michigan to Biden in 2020. Democrats made up the difference in white-collar suburbs, including Oakland County northwest of Detroit. They made some inroads in blue-collar areas like Macomb County, northeast of Detroit, but Trump still carried the day.

So did former Rep. Andy Levin, a Democrat who won the portion of his district in that county by 36,000 votes. He said Democrats need to be bolder to blunt the GOP. (Levin lost his seat in 2022 due to an intraparty fight following redistricting.)

Republicans were able to peel off people over culture war issues like abortion and guns and LGBTQ rights… They wouldn’t have succeeded if Democrats had—if the average workingclass person could say, well obviously I know what side my bread is buttered on.— Former Rep. Andy Levin

There are other dynamics that will be important in the general election. Biden has dispatched foreign-policy and political advisers to meet with Muslim and Arab-American leaders upset with the administration’s handling of the war in Gaza. The mayor of Dearborn, home to a major Arab-American population, has said the Biden administration “failed to act to protect the lives of innocent men, women and children.”

John Sellek, a Republican political consultant, said a loss of support from Arab-American and younger voters over the Middle East conflict was as important for Trump as his continued hold on the white working-class.

Macomb County is a bastion of the latter group. It is home to strip malls, sports bars and massive auto plants that cropped up as people moved from Detroit to the suburbs in the latter part of the 20th century.

Trump brought many new voices into the Republican Party here, and that has caused a fight about who controls it at the state level. Stacy Van Oast, 59 years old, said at a monthly coffee hour held at the Macomb County GOP office that one result has been dysfunction.

Peter Kiszczyc emigrated from Poland in 1984 and worked for decades at area factories. He said it was great that the former president has broadened the party’s appeal.

He’s changing the party…He’s appealing to many blue-collar workers especially, not only [in] Macomb county, but Michigan So I am Christian, [a] patriot, and I support Donald Trump 100%.— Peter Kiszczyc

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ukrfeminism · 1 year

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3 minute read

Right now it feels like every public service employee is having to resort to strike action to gain acceptable standards of employment. Who’s next? If we’re talking about labour that is woefully undervalued and unsupported, it should be mums.

Statutory maternity pay, at £156.66 per week, is less than half of minimum wage (£384 for a standard 40-hour week). New mothers (and their child) have to survive on 41 per cent of the minimum we consider acceptable to live on. 30 hours per week of subsidised childcare is available for three-year-olds, but maternity pay ends at 39-weeks-old. During that two-year gap, nursery fees cost 65 per cent of the average parent’s wages, and many mothers are falling into debt, or dropping out of the workforce, as a result.

Moreover, 54,000 women lose their jobs in the UK every year because of maternity discrimination. Maternity is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, but only for the first 26 weeks. Any claim for maternity discrimination must be brought within three months – almost impossible in the midst of the physical and mental upheavals of matrescence. During which time, 31 per cent of mothers didn’t have confidence in their postnatal care. And, according to the Office of National Statistics, in heterosexual couples women still perform 77 per cent more childcare and 62 per cent of the domestic work.

Surely that’s reason to strike!

There is precedent. In Iceland in 1975, women refused to go to work, cook, clean or perform childcare, during what was termed “the long Friday”. Many schools and nurseries had to close, forcing fathers to bring their children to work. Banks, factories and shops simply couldn’t function. Even the next day’s newspapers were shorter than usual.

Ninety per cent of women in Iceland took part and the next year Iceland’s parliament passed a law guaranteeing equal rights to women and men. Five years later, Vigdis Finnbogadottir became Iceland’s president – the world’s first democratically elected female head of state. She insists this couldn’t have happened without the strike, which paralysed the country and demonstrated women’s importance to society. She served for 16 years, and, having introduced initiatives such as all-women shortlists and paid paternity leave ahead of the curve, Iceland became known as the world’s most feminist country.

Collective action amongst mothers is happening here. Women’s Strike asked women to refuse all work on International Women’s Day 2022. Then, just six weeks ago, charity Pregnant Then Screwed led 15,000 parents onto the streets across the UK in March of the Mummies. Founder Joeli Brearley told me, “There is such power in protesting. We were under no illusion that the Government would immediately fix the issues, but it is a signal that unless they act soon they will lose votes at the ballot box. Make no mistake – Westminster heard us that day.”

So, what do we want? I propose: maternity pay brought in line with minimum wage; childcare free for parents (and properly paid for by the Government) from birth until starting school; parenthood made a protected characteristic for life; and parents given 12 months to bring discrimination claims. When you consider that more mothers in work could be worth £28.2 billion to the UK economy, this is just sensible. The birth rate has now dropped below the level needed for a stable population, fuelling fears of economic decline. We need investment in motherhood.

As Iceland showed, when women stop, everything stops. In the UK, women are the vast majority of childcare workers, administrative staff, care workers, cleaners, hospitality staff, HR professionals, teachers and nurses. If they refused to work for just 24 hours, the impact for society and the economy would be crippling. Then there’s women’s domestic work, which is estimated to be worth 56 per cent of GDP. Strike once – that includes paid employment as well as cleaning, childcare, cooking, organising and so on – and it’s unlikely we would need to again.

What made Iceland’s strike so successful was so many women took part. But mobilising primary care givers is a nightmare, given the burden of domestic responsibility. We’re missing the cornerstone of effective industrial action – a union. Unions provide support, mobilise large disparate groups, and lobby for members’ rights. We need a union for parents. There are amazing campaigning charities, but unions are protected by legislation, forcing employers (or governments) to negotiate, and keeping workers’ jobs safe if they strike. Unions have teeth.

When do we want it? According to research from YouGov more than half of women say they do the majority of Christmas tasks, 51 per cent of women feel stressed at Christmas and according to Action for Children one in six parents said they would cancel the whole thing if they could. Ancient Anglo-Saxons celebrated Modranicht (“mother’s night”) on 24 December. What if mothers honoured themselves this Christmas Eve by doing absolutely nothing?

No last minute shopping. No festive food preparation. No present wrapping. No stuffing of stockings. No ringing round to coordinate family members or clarifying dietary requirements. Just putting our feet up with a mulled wine and watching It’s a Wonderful Life while someone else takes responsibility for the over-excited, sugar-hyped children. We baulk at the idea, because Christmas would fall apart. But isn’t that exactly the reason to do it? To show how much motherhood matters.

Allegra Chapman is a diversity and inclusion consultant, and co-founder of Watch This Sp_ce.

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rudrjobdesk · 2 years

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रामपुर और आजमगढ़ में मिली जीत पर सीएम योगी ने कहा- 2024 में जीतेंगे यूपी की 80 में से...

रामपुर और आजमगढ़ में मिली जीत पर सीएम योगी ने कहा- 2024 में जीतेंगे यूपी की 80 में से…

Image Source : TWITTER/@MYOGIADITYANATH CM Yogi Highlights आजमगढ़ में निरहुआ ने सपा के धमेंद्र यादव को 10 हजार वोटों से हराया रामपुर में बीजेपी के घनश्याम लोधी ने सपा के आसिम राजा को 42,048 वोटों से हराया इस जीत ने साल 2024 के लिए एक बड़ा संदेश दे दिया है: सीएम योगी By Election Result: यूपी के रामपुर और आजमगढ़ लोकसभा उपचुनाव में मिली जीत से बीजेपी उत्साहित है। इस जीत पर सीएम योगी ने कहा, ‘ये…

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benandstevesposts · 4 months

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State Police Were Sent To Help - Beatings Followed!

SAGINAW, MI – John Haynes wasn’t having it.

The 69-year-old Saginaw handyman, who is Black, let Michigan State Police troopers know precisely how he felt when they pulled him over in his van a few years ago, according to a video of the encounter obtained by MLive.

“I have been getting stopped all damn week,” Haynes says irately after he’s placed in a patrol vehicle. “For what? You looked through my van; you didn’t find any drugs. You (are) just interrupting a good person’s life, and I’m tired of getting stopped … Is that what we’ve got to go through to live in America?”

Haynes ultimately filed a complaint and a lawsuit. His complaint is one of more than 80 filed in the last two years against the Michigan State Police in so-called “Secure Cities” like Saginaw and Flint – cities with existing police forces but not enough resources. Troopers, like those Haynes encountered, were brought in to help as part of a multi-million-dollar statewide program.

Complaints, criminal charges and lawsuits have piled up against state troopers in cities that participate in the Secure Cities Partnership, many of them racial in nature. Experts and law enforcement officials interviewed for this story said it’s the result of sending officers from an outside agency – mostly white state troopers – into predominantly Black cities, stoking existing, well-documented conflicts between Black people and white police officers.

Since the program launched in 2012, three residents have been killed in high-speed crashes and a teen died after being Tased while riding his ATV. At least six lawsuits have been filed, costing Michigan more than $27 million in payouts. And most recently in Saginaw, three white state troopers were criminally charged in two separate beatings of Black men caught on camera.

Related: Michigan State Police trooper pleads to beating handcuffed Saginaw man, agrees to stop being cop

Residents and activists have told MLive they want Michigan State Police out of their towns.

“Personally, I think it should it end,” Jeffrey Bulls, president of the Saginaw nonprofit Community Alliance for the People, said about the Secure Cities program. “If I truly believed more police equaled more safety, I would increase Saginaw police, the ones we know.”

But elected and law enforcement officials say local departments are underfunded and their cities wouldn’t be able to function without their help.

“State police is doing a great job,” Saginaw police Chief Robert M. Ruth said. “We work together as a team. The resources they provide to us are tremendous to keep citizens safe.”

youtube

‘He was calling me ‘boy’ the whole time’

In 2022, two disturbing videos of white police officers beating Black men in Saginaw emerged. Three Michigan State Police troopers were charged in the two separate beatings – criminal cases that are still winding through the court system. Resignations and reassignments of superior officers followed.

You can visit the originating site here if you'd like to read the complete report.

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 10 months

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By Jess Coleman

When, in December 2021, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin announced he would vote “no” on President Biden’s signature legislative proposal, the Build Back Better Act, the reaction boiled down to: “Well, what did you expect?” After all, Manchin, despite being a Democrat, is from deep-red West Virginia, and politicians from deep-red states simply cannot vote in favor of major progressive policies championed by the leader of the Democratic Party. That’s just politics, dummy. That Biden and his fellow Democrats even tried was treated in some circles as painfully naïve: Unless Democrats learn that basic lesson and bring centrists into the fold, they’ll never achieve a vibrant, sustainable majority. Or so sayeth the conventional wisdom.

So when Manchin announced last week that he is considering leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent, his rationale was hardly difficult to predict. “The brand has become so bad,” he said, drawing on the oft-repeated talking point that the Democrats have lept too far left. In other words—and in contravention of all logic, given the results of the 2022 midterms—Manchin simply cannot in good conscience remain with a party that, in substance and style, provides no room for leaders seeking to appeal to a moderate, bipartisan electorate.

Don’t be fooled. Manchin’s charade is hardly one of principle. It’s one of total desperation.

There are no secrets about Manchin’s political situation at home. After being reelected in 2018 by just 3%, in a year in which Democrats vastly outperformed expectations nationally, Manchin has an enormous hill to climb with his reelection looming in 2024. But the West Virginia Senator doesn’t seem to have much interest in taking responsibility for the electoral crisis in which he has enmeshed himself. Instead, he’d like us to believe the political forces around him have simply left him no choice: Both sides have drawn too far to the extremes, leaving no political home for the critical mass of centrist West Virginians who sent him to Washington. Hence the need to chart a new path on his own.

The framing echoes a convenient perspective that is adored by the media and political establishment: Elections are not won with base voters, but through a small slice of persuadable, moderate swing voters, perpetually lurking just outside of frame. Democrats, in turn, need to have some Joe Manchins—those politicians who embody the voters who are key to electoral success—lying around to be taken seriously. The failure to keep these soi-disant moderate saviors on hand reveals a fundamental structural deficiency for the party writ large.

But if it’s true that Manchin is such a political genius—uniquely capable of surviving as a Democrat in a deep red state—you would expect that his victory is owed to a broad cross section of voters from a variety of political camps. Alas, that’s the complete opposite of what happened in 2018. According to CNN exit polls, Manchin garnered the votes of 64% of those who identify as moderates, and just 23% of conservatives. Those numbers are roughly in line with what New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand achieved that same year: 70% and 18%, respectively. The reality is Manchin barely made it over the finish line in roughly the same way Democrats all around the country win their seats: by running up the numbers with voters on the political left—Manchin won 80% of self-identified liberals in 2018.

Indeed, as The New Republic’s Alex Pareene observed in 2021, Manchin is actually far more reliant on Democratic voters than many of his blue state counterparts. While someone like Gillibrand can afford to lose large swaths of Democrats in a state where they are in ample supply, Manchin needs to pull virtually every registered Democrat in his state to win. Against all logic, Manchin approached Biden’s first term as if the rules that governed his electoral hopes were precisely opposite to reality. Instead of rewarding his most loyal voters—dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrats—by delivering for them in Washington, Manchin has spent his latest term going out of his way to alienate his base and position himself in a political no man’s land: personally steamrolling key Democratic priorities while siding with his party on most routine issues and appointments.

In short, Manchin made a bet. He believed he could rely on the support of Democrats and spent nearly all his time trying to appeal to a tiny, if not nonexistent, group of voters who are up for grabs and have no real allegiance to either of the two dominant political parties. It hasn’t worked out the way Manchin anticipated, and this is where he now finds himself—orchestrating a last-ditch, hopeless effort to create a new political reality from thin air.

It is possible Manchin never had a shot at reelection, had fortune and circumstance not permitted him to avail himself of 2018’s political trends, we’d already have a Republican holding that West Virginia Senate seat. But the broader lesson is crucial for those in the media and elected leadership who constantly insist that disregarding the Democratic base in service of pursuing the allegedly vast rewards that come from focusing solely on the views of the so-called centrist, swing voters is the only viable path to victory in American politics. Those who subscribe to this view should explain why the two most notable Democrats who aggressively pursued this approach—Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin—are currently fighting for their political lives, while other red-state Democratic senators such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana have consistently survived—and remain loyal to the party’s big priorities even when their electoral hopes face massive headwinds.

Mostly, we have to understand something simple about Manchin: We are not watching a political genius at work. He’s not on the verge of revealing a masterful plan to pull off another miracle in West Virginia. This is a desperate politician squirming for his political life after making a series of catastrophic political decisions. Manchin has hardly proven that the Democratic Party is mortally wounded due to its failure to leave room for the center left. All he’s done is reinforce a very basic rule in politics: Doing the opposite of what your voters want is an idiotic election strategy.

#us politics #news #the new republic #2023 #west virginia #sen. joe manchin #biden administration #president joe biden #Democratic Party #Democrats #centrists #independents #2024 elections #sen. Kirsten Gillibrand #Alex Pareene #Sen. sherrod Brown #sen. Jon Tester #Jess Coleman #op eds

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