The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights, which was added to the Constitution in 1791. The Second Amendment reads:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

The Second Amendment has been the subject of much debate and controversy over the years, particularly regarding the interpretation of its language and its application in modern times.

One interpretation of the Second Amendment is that it guarantees an individual right to own and carry firearms for self-defense and other lawful purposes. This interpretation has been affirmed by several Supreme Court decisions, including the landmark 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller.

However, others argue that the Second Amendment only protects the right to bear arms in the context of a well-regulated militia, and that it does not grant an unrestricted right to own and carry firearms.

The issue of gun control has also been a major point of contention in recent years, with some advocating for stricter regulations on firearms in order to reduce gun violence, while others argue that such regulations infringe on their Second Amendment rights.

Overall, the Second Amendment remains a subject of ongoing debate and interpretation in the United States, and its meaning and application are likely to continue to be a source of controversy and discussion in the years to come.

There are many reasons why some Americans have a strong attachment to guns. These reasons vary from person to person and include cultural, historical, and political factors.

One reason is the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right to bear arms. This amendment is often cited as a source of pride and identity for gun owners who believe in the importance of individual freedom and self-protection.

Another reason is the frontier mentality that pervades American culture. The idea of self-reliance and the ability to defend oneself is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, and for many, owning a gun is seen as a way to ensure personal safety and security.

Additionally, guns are often associated with hunting and recreational activities such as target shooting and sport shooting. For many Americans, these activities are a cherished part of their lifestyle and identity.

There are also those who see guns as a symbol of power and control. They may see owning a gun as a way to assert their dominance and authority over others.

It's important to note that not all Americans love guns, and there is a growing movement in the country to regulate firearms more strictly. However, the reasons for the strong attachment to guns in some parts of the country are complex and multifaceted.

Gun violence is a significant problem in many countries, including the United States. Gun violence can take many forms, including homicides, suicides, accidental shootings, and mass shootings.

In the United States, gun violence is a particularly pressing issue, with tens of thousands of people killed or injured by firearms each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were over 43,000 firearm deaths in the United States in 2020, including homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings.

The causes of gun violence are complex and multifaceted, and include factors such as poverty, mental illness, domestic violence, and access to firearms. Research has shown that areas with higher rates of gun ownership tend to have higher rates of gun violence.

Efforts to reduce gun violence have been the subject of significant debate and controversy in the United States. Some advocate for stricter regulations on firearms, including background checks, bans on certain types of firearms, and restrictions on access to firearms for individuals with a history of violence or mental illness.

Others argue that such regulations violate the Second Amendment and that the focus should be on addressing the root causes of gun violence, such as poverty, mental illness, and social inequality.

Regardless of the approach taken, addressing the problem of gun violence is an important challenge that requires a concerted effort from policymakers, law enforcement, mental health professionals, and the broader community.

I’ve recently seen posts encouraging people to support Romani/Roma people in the Balkans and that’s supreme!!! With that in mind, I wanted to post about how the Roma identify in Greece (I repeat, this is solely for Greece). The dominant voices on this site are from the US, so we mostly hear about the identification of Romani / Americans with Romani heritage. But what is used by the Rom in Greece might surprise you.

I will use “Rom” as the proper identification for Roma/Romani in my text. For non-Rom people I will avoid using the Romani word gadje / gadjo / gadji, as it’s derogatory towards non-Rom people (it means “being of lower social class”, “barbaric”, “peasant”, used in a belittling way). I see Rom from other countries here using it often and that’s perhaps the meaning has been lost for them, but I don’t feel comfortable using it. In some Rom communities of Greece there is still some belief that being “pure”/”true” Rom by blood ratio is better, and I don’t want to enforce that either.

For the non-Rom I won’t use the words balamos (μπαλαμός) (m) / balami (μπαλαμή / μπαλαμοί) (f. / pl.) either because it means “White” and we all know that is a complicated issue for this site. But it’s worth mentioning that Greeks are usually considered “Whites” by the Rom of Greece, so balamos (m) / balami (f. / pl.) apply. I use the term “non-Rom”, as I think it’s better suited for an English text and for readers of different cultural backgrounds.

I will also use the full words of identification and slurs for educational purposes only and with no ill intent. If you don’t know much about Rom identification, you can’t know what words not to use if you don’t see anything more than the first letter! (And also “just google it”, especially for information on the communities of Greece, rarely helps foreigners). Also, whatever I am writing comes from my own experiences and may not apply to all the Rom communities of Greece.

The popular identification and self identification of the Rom in Greece is  tsiganos (τσιγγάνος) (m), tsigana (τσιγγάνα) (f), tsigani (τσιγγάνοι) (pl.). Yes, I know, it’s the word Rom from many countries tell you to never use. And please, don’t use it for Rom from the US or anywhere else Rom don’t want to be called that! But in Greece the identification has stuck and it’s not a slur (as of 2021). In fact, it’s currently acceptable for Rom and non-Rom to use in private and public life. This is how they introduce their heritage, or, if offer a service/sell anything they have made, they use the term to describe it - when speaking in Greek.

I will give examples from a PDF availiable online, the Greek-Romani Lexicon, written by the Rom (and Rom speaker) Ioannis. Georg. Alexiou. (2000s) (Find it >> here <<). He has collected phrases and words from different Rom communities in Greece and he includes the entry Τσιγγάνος (tsiganos) as simply meaning “Rom” and. He repeatedly uses the word Tσιγγάνος for any Rom (seen in the pic) , “Τσιγγανιά” for “Romanipen” (seen in the pic), and “Τσιγγάνικη” to describe the language, when he describes in the Greek language.

One of the many examples is the introduction of a Rom contestant in Greece’s Next Top Model (2020), where she identifies herself as “tsigana” and the other Rom women as “tsiganes” more than five times (0:13, 4:23 ++) and there is also no problem when non Rom use the term for her in front of her (5:12, 7:04, 7:08 ++) Yes, the judges are not the most knowledgeable people when it comes to the Rom culture(s) in Greece but I am using the example for demonstration purposes. Also notice all the people in the comments who use it naturally (search the words “τσιγγάνα”, “τσιγγάνοι”). No, they are not hate comments and they don’t use it as a slur. (Google translate exists, just translate them to make sure). >> Link to the video <<

Using it is not offensive to the Rom of Greece. It’s likely the most suitable word, as of 2021. (You will see later why the other terms don’t apply that much and/or might be confusing). Tsiganos is a word like any other, and yes, it can be used in a derogatory way, the way the word “woman” can be used in a derogatory way by sexists. It’s only about the tone and intent, and not about the etymology of the word. And, speaking about the etymology, you might already know that the word “tsiganos” comes from the Greek word αθίγγανος (athiganos) can mean “untouchable” / “not to be touched”. But it might not have come from the (indeed) bigoted Greeks around them.

The Greek philologist Dikaios Vagiakos (Δικαίος Βαγιακάκ��ς) tells us that Athigganoi was called the religious group Melchizedekites (Manichaists) or Katharoi in Greek (”Clean ones”). The Athiganoi were practicing divination, and so it came that whoever was practicing divination at the time was also called Athiganos. (The word just stuck and the meaning left, because a divination practitioner wasn’t considered actually unclean). When the Rom came to the area, they also practiced divination, so they also were given that name. (Source in Greek - sorry it was super hard to find anything in English, as many parts of Greek history are obscure to the world).

No matter the origins, people in Greece (including the Rom) rarely know what it means (if you live in Greece, you must be very interested in linguistics to dig it up), as the meaning has been been lost in time for the Greek residents. It’s like the world “girl“ (κοπέλα) in Greece, which comes from the word “slave”, but Greek speakers use it because they have forgotten the meaning and have no idea where it comes from.

Roma (f) / Romis (m) / Rom (m. / pl.), Romalen (pl.), is many times the term the Roma of Greece use to refer to themselves in their own language (Romani / Tsigganika). In this article (where the word tsigganos / tsigganikos is again used casually, as various Greek articles) we find the word “Ρόμης” for the Rom man (and it can also be used as “husband”).

Greek speakers don’t use "Rom” and when they hear it they mostly get confused. “Rum” was the name of the regions were Greeks lived inside the Ottoman empire so that complicates things further for Greek speakers, as Rom and Rum sound very similar. What is more, the Hellenic region of the Byzantine Empire was called Romania, adding another “Rom-” to the Greek history.

“Roma” (singular and plural) is gaining popularity amongst the Greek Rom and Greeks alike. But still falls far behind “tsiganos“.

“Gyftos” (Γύφτος) (”Gypsy” in English) is a negative/derogatory term for the Greek Rom. Implying someone is from Egypt is not bad on its own, but the word has been weaponized against the Rom of Greece by the Greek speakers. What is also important, is that a lot of times “gyftos“ ISN’T meant to describe a Rom. This doesn’t make it any less of a slur against the Rom, but let me explain its other use. Greeks often use it for dirty, homeless people (and not those who beg for money necessarily). Of course, that is probably because historically the Greeks saw Rom people that way, and then they attached the stereotypical negative traits to other people. What is peculiar is that I’ve heard Greeks say “gyftos is the guy you see with rags on the street, Greek or not. The nomadic people are called Tsigganoi! It’s a different thing!”. So yes, anyone, even a super pasty Greek can also be called “gyftos”. It’s just worth mentioning that some Greek speakers have the word “gyftos” detached from the Rom (because meaning is lost and diverted as time passes) and so if you hear that word from a Greek, better ask them what they mean and if they know the origins of the word. There is a chance they might not actually know.

To my knowledge, the word “Romani” is not often used to identify a Rom person in Greece. I’ve only heard it for the language. But, again, I can’t know what happens in all Rom communities of Greece (and there are many, with different linguistic influences). “Romani” as someone’s identification is very slowly gaining some popularity among the Greeks because it’s used in nearby countries - and even because of the influence from the US. But still, it’s mostly among the Greeks and not the Rom. (At this point, I should also say that many Rom feel Greek and most have a Greek citizenship, I just that that distinction inside the Greek borders for simplicity’s sake.)

That’s all! Keep in mind that the identification of Rom in Greece might change the next decades, so always be aware of the changes and, if you can’t find any information simply ask the Rom person how they wish to be called!

>> Anyone can interact but if you are not part of or not close to a Rom community of *Greece*, I advise you against of trying to “correct” anything. This isn’t about your experiences or ways of expression. It’s about the Rom of Greece.

>> Rom from Greece or/and people close to a Rom community of Greece can, of course, add or correct stuff - always with respect to Rom sources and voices from Greece.

Just Friends|Part 5

A Timothée Chalamet Imagine: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

THIS TOOK ME SO LONG FOR NO REASON. Okay well lots of reasons. Distance learning is destroying me. Anyway I hope you enjoy!!!!

Female!Reader, Dancer/Actress!Reader, CoStar!Reader, FrenchSpeaking!Reader// 4,656 Words

Summary of part one, two, three, and four// Reader and Timothée are best friends. They are going to be costars on a new movie where Y/n plays a dancer and has a small, but still important, role, and Timothée’s a lead. There’s a storm and Y/n’s hotel is having issues, so she has to stay in Timothée’s apartment. She stays with him really realizes she likes him, then he starts dating Lily, asks to go out to dinner so everyone can meet her. Then they break up, boom Timothée and Y/n kiss. Now Y/n has been asked to go on Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts with James Corden, but their relationship is still secret.

Warnings// Grammar/spelling and lack of proofreading. FLUFFFFFFF!!!

Key: French writing (english translation), Y/n/n-Your nickname, Y/f/n-Your first name, Y/l/n-Your last name

(Added July 2020) Note: this whole series was written before Ansel Elgort’s allegations arose, and honestly, in the most disrespectful way possible: I hope he rots in hell. I ALWAYS stand with the victim, and if that’s going to be a problem, find another series to read. If the mention of his name is triggering to you, PLEASE do not read. If you or anyone you know has been sexually assaulted or abused, do not be afraid to speak up, but if that’s not the route you personally want to take: you can call 1-800-656-4673, available 24 hours every day and 100% confidential.

Not my gif (but isn’t it absolutely adorable): enjoy!!!!

It was 2:00 AM and you were pacing around the kitchen, but what you were really doing, was overreacting. And while you were overreacting, you definitely weren’t being irrational. This was a problem. You’d just gotten off the phone with Kelsey, you’re publicist who was in Rome with your assistant, Kelly, and she was beyond happy to inform you she’d already talked to Zendaya’s publicist and the both of you would be joining James Corden next week on his show. This would be completely fine if it was just a normal interview, you’d done many TV interviews, but no, Kelsey didn’t just sign you up for a normal interview, she signed you up for spill your guts or fill your guts.

It’d been almost a week and a half since Timothée had pushed you up against a wall and finally did what the both of you had been aching for almost a full year. You were going to tell Kelsey, not like you had any choice anyway: you guys were practically sisters, except it was also her job to know everything happening in your life. 

Why you hadn’t told her about it though, that was for two reasons. One being, you didn’t know how combined with the fact that she was in Rome and there was a six hour time difference. Not to mention you were barely able to tell Z and Ansel, who probably would’ve been able to figure out just by looking at you. The other reason being that you were just stubborn. You were annoyed everyone was right, especially Kelsey. You would never forget it if you picked up the phone, dialed her number, and spoke, “Oh hey Kels, yeah that interview you signed me up for, can’t do that. Why you ask? Well, it turns out you, my mom, all of my friends, our fans, and the whole word was very, very right. Timmy and I? Yeah, we sucked face the other day. You and I both know I have the world’s weakest stomach, so if I get forced to choose between downing a shot of blended salmon or answering a question about Timothée, we’re going to need to figure out how we wanna address everything. Because while I would hate to lie on national television, I would rather perjure myself in front of the supreme court than bite into an animal dick.” As for you and Timothée, it had only been ten days, five of which you spent together. To be completely honest, you were absolutely terrified the night after he kissed you. 

“YOU WHAT?” You backed your phone away from your ear as Zendaya screamed into it from the other line, “I’m coming over.” She hung up before you could say anything else. About ten minutes later your door opened. You were laying face up on your hardwood floor, staring at the ceiling, contemplating your existence. Ansel laid down on the right side of you, Z taking your left.

“So...where is he,” Ansel asked, Z. They were both giddy, and you were laying there like an idiot, unable to get the smile off of your face. 

“He has a photoshoot,” you sighed out, “he’s very pretty, needs to be photographed for the world to see.” 

“So what happens now?” Z asked the question that a voice in the back in your head had been screaming as she poked into your side; you instantly started laughing at the poke in your weak spot. That was your one worry, what did happen now? The kiss was quick, but you both knew it meant something, and you were beyond happy, but that didn’t stop your worrying. Worrying about the same reason that stopped you from making a move earlier. You wish you didn’t worry, but you did, the public had been shipping you guys together almost since before you met, but what about your friendship? It seemed easy, it really did, you were already practically dating, just without the kissing, the sex, and the formal dates or announcement, but what was going to happen when things got complicated?

Soon, your worries started to simmer down. The next day, you and Timothée went out to breakfast, as usual, trying to keep to your hands to yourselves as much as possible. Lily already released a short twitter statement, saying that the relationship just didn’t work out, but swearing that they were both on great terms and planning to stay in touch throughout their careers. She said she’d be disgusted by any comments coming after how fast or slow her and Timothée moved on from their relationship, considering the fact they weren’t even officially in a relationship or anything, and considering all the hate she’d received while being involved with him. You’d called her shortly after, checking up to make sure she was alright, already feeling pretty guilty even though you knew their breakup technically wasn’t your fault. She’d told you she was alright, excited to start her new modeling campaign, even telling you not to tell anyone but she was starting a clothing line. She also lightly hinted towards you and Timothée, acknowledging the way he looked at you, her little way of giving you both her blessing. A couple had speculated this was your doing, earning you some lovely little DMs on Instagram calling you a home-wrecker. You and Timmy talked, for a while, and you were just happy it wasn’t awkward. After that you walked for a little bit, deciding you would take your day off as a shopping day. He kept his arm on your back as he usually did when you walked around the streets of New York, even though all you wanted to do was hold his hand. You knew what you both wanted. It was a tiny jump, barely existent, the jump from friends to more for you guys. It was obvious how close you were, and dating wouldn't change much, but really all you wanted was one thing. Time. Not away from Timothée, or your friends, or any of that, but just time to be happy together before you guys told the public. A week and three days was simply not enough time. 

You had to have only been pacing for a couple of minutes when Timothée made his way over to you. You went over to his apartment a little bit after lunch. You were beyond tired after a physically and mentally draining Giselle practice, so the first thing you did was shower and put on the comfiest clothes of his you could find. He turned on a movie, and you fell asleep super fast, snuggled in his arms under a pile of blankets on his couch. But of course, you were both awoken by your phone ringing, and with a groggy voice, you excused yourself into the kitchen to answer Kelsey’s call. 

Timothée’s hands scared you, causing you to shiver at his cold touch. He placed them on your shoulders, stoping your pacing, “What’s up?”

“Nothing’s up. I’m just thinking,” you put on your best fake smile, but your best wasn’t good enough. 

“You’re pacing in circles. When you’re in deep thought, you pace in straight lines, but when something’s bothering you, you pace in circles,” he lightly rubbed your tense shoulders, calming you down, before lightly kissing your lower neck. You sighed, pissed off he knew you as well as he did. 

“Z and I have to go on James Corden,” he backed away from you, and his face burst into a bright smile. He instantly knew what was going on.

“Kelsey? Elle ne le ferait pas...(she wouldn’t...)” he was full-on laughing at this point.

“Oh, she did,” you covered your face with your hands, trying to hide a laugh. 

“Spill your guts or fill your guts? There’s no fucking way...” if anyone knew how weak your stomach was, it was Timothée. About three weeks after meeting him, you, Z, Ansel, and he all had drinks at Ansel’s apartment. You usually didn’t drink more than one glass, because of your weak stomach, but Z had just been nominated for an award. So, you had three, maybe four, and then threw up all over Timmy’s shoes. You were mortified, the event has happened in the early stages of your friendship, where you still had that little celebrity crush, but he just laughed really, really hard. 

“Stop, I already feel nauseated just thinking about it. What am I supposed to say about us?”

“You don’t even know if they’re gonna ask...”

“We both know something about you is going to be asked.”

“You’re right, but people want us to date, and Lily’s in Italy right now, I’m almost positive she has an Italian boyfriend there, so we don’t have anything to worry about,” he wrapped his arm around your waist, and your head found its way to his chest. You both stayed there for a while, thinking before he reached in your back pocket for your phone, he opened the phone app and handed it to you.

“I just...je voulais du temps,” (I wanted time).

“Moi aussi,” (Me too) he sighed, “here, you should call Kelsey back,” you backed away to meet his eyes, sighing as you typed in her number in from memory. He didn’t move from his position, keeping his arms around your waist and hands resting on your exposed back.

“Hey Kels,” you were hesitating, and she could tell.

“Y/n...what did you do?”

“Um, am I on speaker?” It wouldn’t have been the first time 

“Kelly’s with me, what’s going on?” Kelly was gonna love this. 

“Timothée and I...um,” dead silence on the other side of the phone, you knew she knew where you were going with this, she just wanted to here you struggle to spit it out, “we’re...together,” you heard a little yelp come from Kelly, she might be your assistant, but just like Kelsey, she’s only a year apart in age difference, which means she was also like another friend to you.

“Oh my- Y/n?! How long?” Kelsey must’ve been pacing now, you could hear the sound of her heels click-clacking back and forth. 

“Only a little over a week, I swear, I was waiting to tell you, and I thought I had time, but then that interview, and...yeah,” the sound of her heels stopped, and you heard her trying to stifle a laugh, “Okay, let’s hear it,”

“Y/n Chalamet, Y/f/n Y/m/n Chalamet,” Kelsey could barely get it out, and you could hear Kelly’s wheezing laughter in the background. 

“Kelsey!” You looked up to see Timothée smiling, you reached up to cover his mouth with your hand.

“No, no wait, she’s definitely a hyphen kinda girl,” Kelly grabbed the phone out of Kelsey’s hand and spoke, you were blushing hard now, “Y/n Y/m/n Y/l/n-Chalamet, I like the way that sounds,”

“That’s enough-” your voice was interrupted by Timothée’s laugh, your hand wasn’t enough to stop him. You were never gonna hear the end of this.

“Oh my god is he there?” Kelsey yelled into the phone. You removed your hand from his mouth. 

“Hey Kelsey,” you glared at Timothée, hating how he was just egging them on. 

“He’s in your apartment?!” Oh god. This is probably the best day of Kelsey’s life. 

“Um no, I’m in his apartment,” not like that was any better.

“Is he...naked?” Kelly whispered through a giggle, earning another laugh from Timothée.

“No, oh my god. Focus, we have a real issue here.” You spoke through laugher.

“Okay, okay, we’re flying in tomorrow. Once we’re all settled and well-rested we’ll come over and draft a statement or something, and we’ll do some interview prep.”

“Great, I’ll see you then, bye,” a weight had been lifted off of your shoulder.

“Bye, oh yeah and...bye Timothée,” you hung up as fast as you possibly could. 

“What are we gonna say? The media will eat this up, twist it, and then spit it back out, and we’ve only had like a week to ourselves, and everyone’s gonna think you and Lily broke up because of me, no matter what Lily says, she can’t stop that response, and-” you were rambling again. 

“Y/n/n, it’s gonna be fine, I swear. We’re gonna figure out what to say if anything gets leaked. If anyone can handle this, it’s you and Kelsey.” He lifted you up by your waist and spun you around, making you laugh as he spoke, “Everyone thinks we’re dating anyway, so we’ll just explain that we were in denial, which we definitely were by the way, and then it’ll be fine, we’ll be happy, and the whole world will be sunshine and rainbows.” He was laughing with you now, as he continued to spin you in his arms. 

“Timothée.” you giggled and he put you back down, “Je suis serieux.” (I’m serious.)

“Je sais, je sais,” (I know, I know) his smile faded and he stared at you for a second before pulling you in for a hug and muttering in your ear, “mais tu es fou si tu pense que j'attends une autre année pour être avec tu,” (but you’re crazy if you think I’m waiting another year to be with you) You smiled and playfully rolled your eyes at his corniness, knowing the Y/n from a year ago would be going crazy if she saw this. 

“Can you still walk me home?” Growing up in the city still didn’t change the fact that walking home alone at 2:00AM would be terrifying.

“Mhmm,” he snuggled his head into your neck, “do you have rehearsal tomorrow?” 

“Nope,” you shook your head, trying to ignore the fact that he completely dodged your question, “les entraînements de fin de semaine sont annulés pour ce mois.” (weekend practices are cancelled for this month.)

“Then...you can stay here tonight and I’ll walk you home in the morning,” he presented the idea with a few nerves in his voice, you’d spent the night at his place before, but never without Z or Ansel, and definitely not in his bed.

“Okay.”

“Vraiment?” (Really?) You were quick to answer, maybe too quick. He almost thought you were joking for a second.

“What?”

“Well if I knew it’d be that easy to get you into bed I would’ve done it a long time ago,” you laughed and slapped his arm, pretending to be angry, “oh that’s how it’s gonna be?” He lifted you up and ran into his room, laughing as he playfully slammed you into his very comfortable bed. He climbed over you, pinning you down by the shoulders and attacking you with his lips, leaving wet kisses all over your face. One he finished his kiss assault on your face, his lips met yours for a moment, stopping your giggling at it source.

“If you snore, I’ll suffocate you with a pillow,” you pulled away for a second, threatening him against his lips.

“Considering you’re a dancer, I thought you mind find a more creative way to take me out.”

“Very funny,” you said it sarcastically, kissing him once again. You both naturally pulled away, fatigue kicking into your system. You fell asleep with your head against his bare chest, the sound of his heartbeat lulling you to sleep. When you woke up Timothée walked you back to your apartment. A day passed and Kelsey called you once again, saying she and Kelly were coming over to your apartment for interview prep. You decided not to release a statement or anything, which was not exactly what you wanted. You weren’t exactly the most go with the flow kind of person, you wanted a plan, and you didn’t exactly get one. To be fair, there wasn’t exactly a way for you to just say “no comment” on national television without being obvious about what was going on. 

When the night of the show came you were doing it again, pacing, but this time in your dressing room. You were extremely nervous, and Z was beyond tired of it.

“The sound of your heels is giving me a headache,” you stopped for maybe three seconds to glare at her before continuing, “it’s going to be fine, how much damage can you do in a ten-minute interview?”

“We’ve all seen people destroy their careers in less than thirty seconds,”

“Yeah, but you’re not an idiot, do you wanna call Timothée?” Her request was genuine.

“Hell no, that’ll make me ten times more nervous,” talking to Timothée now would only drive you more insane, he might know how to calm you down, but hearing his voice right before speaking in front of millions would be a dangerous game to play. 

“Whatever happens we know how to go into damage control mode, we’re prepared for this kind of thing,” Kelly spoke from across the room, “...not that that’ll be necessary.” For an expert in public speaking, her eloquence was largely lacking today. 

“Ladies, we need to take you over to the stage entrance.” Kelly fixed your hair, gave you a quick hug, and sent you and Z on your way. You heard your names being presented and felt your knees go weak. Z linked arms with you as you walked across, you put on the best smile you could and made your way to the table. James gave you a quick hug as you greeted him. You sat down and took a deep breath.

“Nervous?” James smiled at you, way too happy about this.

“A little...um...I have a pretty weak stomach,” you spoke through clenched teeth. Zendaya tried to hold back a laugh as you spoke.

“Weak stomach is an understatement...,” you gave her an angry look as the audience laughed along with James.

“I’m just admiring what I got myself in to,” you locked eyes with the fish eyes across the table right in front of you, “Is it okay if I...” you slowly turned the table over a little bit so the bird saliva was right in front of you instead, still not appetizing, but better than eyes. James and Z laughed at you and you laughed along before James went along with the introduction.

“So here’s how this game works, even though I’m sure Y/n watches lots of this in her free time,” he turned to you and laughed as you shook your head and sucked on your lower lip, a nervous habit of yours, “we have platters of lovely food here,” he turned the table and presented all of them, Z jabbing you with her elbow when he presented the salmon smoothie, “we are each gonna ask each other questions. We’ll choose the food, then ask. I will ask to Y/n, Y/n to Zendaya, and Zendaya to me. If you don’t answer, then you eat. If you don’t want to eat, you just answer the question. It couldn’t be simpler.”

“Okay Y/n, I am going to give you...”

“What’re you going to torture me with James?”

“I can practically feel how nervous you are, so I’m going to be nice and give you the shot of hot sauce, how’s that?” You winced a little bit, knowing it wasn’t the worst, but knowing you’d take any chance to get out of it, “You like spicy food?”

“About as much as I like stubbing my toe, James,” you laughed a little, earning laughs from the audience and Zendaya as well.

“So the question is...” he let out a little giggle as he read, pausing for dramatic effect, “You are very close to Ansel Elgort,” you smiled and nodded, knowing he was crying laughing at his television with Timothée right now, “which is your least favorite movie of his?” The audience let out a little oooh. You stared at the drink in front of you. You started to reach for it and James let out a laugh.

“Really?” Zendaya said, .

“Your hand is shaking, look at her hand shaking,” he motioned to the audience, really soaking this up. You picked up the glass before sitting it back down.

“You know, I’ve never been the biggest fan of Paper Towns,”

“That’s such a cop-out, that’s one of his smallest roles!” James poked fun at you. 

“What can I say? I love his movies. Cara’s lovely in Paper Towns, and it wasn’t a bad movie or anything, I just wanted them to end up together, not that that makes a bad movie, I was just disappointed with the ending...” you were rambling at this point and Zendaya was giggling at you try to justify yourself and not get a text from Cara Delavinge later, “I’m just a hopeless romantic okay?”

“That’s for sure.” Z was taunting you at this point, enjoying this way too much. 

“Okay then Z, let’s see..., what should I give you?” You had a mischievous smile on your face.

“Oh no...” Z could’ve begged, but she knew the damage was already gone. 

“I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking bull penis?” You rotated the table, feeling less nervous as you knew you were only a couple questions away from ending the show, “and you’re question is...ah!” You let out a laugh.

“Spit it out, Y/n,” she playfully glared at you.  

“If you had to choose one cast member of the Greatest Showman to recast, who would you recast, and who would that be wi-” You didn’t finish as she picked up one of the bull penis and dropped it in her mouth. An uproar of applause came from the audience.

“Damn Z,” “Okay James, what should I give you?” She smiled at you before turning the table to James, hitting him with the scorpion. The next couple of questions were quick, you were only asked decently easy questions and were able to curve most of them, only having to drink a hot Cheeto smoothie, which wasn’t that bad. 

“Okay Y/n, you will be the last question of the night, and since you haven’t had to eat anything but that hot Cheeto smoothie, I think,” he turned the table, his eyes on the fish smoothie.

“No, James, I am begging you,” the pink drink sat in front of you. 

“Relax, you don’t even know what the question is and you look like you’re going to faint.” Zendaya squeezed your shoulder as James spoke through a laugh.

“She absolutely hates seafood. I tried to get her to eat shrimp the first night I met her and she was too sweet to say no, so she swallowed the whole thing and to this day I still have never seen anyone else regurgitate a whole shrimp, and I never want to, ever again.” You remembered that day, it was a rough, and embarrassing, night.

“It was so veiny and...shrimpy,” you nudged the smoothie away from you, earning some laughs from the audience.

“Okay Y/n, just answer the question and it’ll be fine,” he picked up the card, read it, and instantly burst into laughter.

“Oh no...”

“Y/n, you have been faced with dating rumors involving you and Timothée Chalamet for a very long time, and you have denied all of them,” you gulped as a pit formed in your stomach, “Lily-Rose and Timothée have concluded their relationship of maybe three weeks, so now that they are broken up, were you lying about your relationship with Timothée beforehand, and did it have anything to do with the break up of Lily and Timothée?” You sighed, maybe this question was easier than you thought.

“Wow, saving the longest one for last, huh? Well, Lily and I still talk and as far as I know, their break up was solely based on the fact that Lily was offered an exceptional job, and they just didn’t connect well, but really you should ask them about that, it’s barely my business,” you smiled, happy you were able to successfully answer the second half of the question, “and, as for the rumors: no, no I wasn’t lying. Every time I denied it, it was true.” 

“Was?” You gasped, not even realizing you’d made that mistake.

“Oh god, Y/n,” Zendaya sighed out through a laugh. She genuinely couldn’t believe you’d made it this far and then slipped up like that. You were asked a question about your past exes, only having a couple while in the public eye, and you still managed to curve it, so she had no idea how you possibly messed this one up.

“Oh shit,” you clapped your hand over your mouth after you realized what you said, and the audience up-roared into applause and gasps. Then, you remembered you cursed, and even though you cursed online, you weren’t supposed to curse on live television, and you were usually so good about it, “I am so sorry, I just cost the network money didn’t I?”

“Just a little bit,” this wouldn’t have been the first time a celebrity had cursed on his show, “don’t try to change the subject here,” his face was red from laughing.

“I’m not, I swear, I just don’t like being interrogated James,” you were laughing, but your heart was beating at a mile a minute. 

“So you and Timothée Chalamet are finally together?”

“Woah! Slow down James, I don’t remember saying that-”

“You didn’t deny it did you?”

“Wow, you should be a detective,” you giggled as you tried to figure out what to say here, “I...um...”

“You have such a way with words, Miss Valedictorian,” Z interrupted you and laughed, giving you a couple seconds to think. 

“I guess you could say...we’re...um...testing the...waters?” You were mortified. 

“Oh Y/n, come on, this is the most we’ve ever gotten out of this segment, you’ve gotta give me something here. I don’t even know what that means.” His face was red from laughing at this point.

“To be honest, I don’t either. I think I’ve already said wayyy too much. All I know is I don’t have to drink that disgusting cup of blended fish guts, and that is all that matters to me,” you sighed in comfort, even though your whole world was crashing down right in front of you, making the audience laugh.

“You got lucky with that one,” Zendaya was enjoying this too much. 

“You’re calling what just happened lucky?” The audience loved you laughing at yourself.

“And on that note, we are out of time for today. Zendaya and Y/n everyone!” The audience clapped and you quickly hugged James before getting off the stage as fast as you could. The second you made it back to the dressing room you plopped down on the couch and covered your face with your hands. Z was still laughing at you.

“How? How did you do that?” she was crying laughing at this point.

“It wasn’t that bad, right? Right?” 

“Y/n, it was hilarious, people are going to eat that shit up, Y/n”

“It’s all okay, Kelsey’s on the phone for you?” Kelly entered the room.

“Okay Kels, you’re on speaker. Give it to me straight, how bad?” 

“Bad? Oh Y/n, honey, people are in love with you and Timothée. Absolutely. In. Love.”

“Really?”

“There’s a video on twitter of you stuttering over your words and laughing and people are absolutely in love with it, over three million views already and it was just posted by someone a couple of minutes ago,” you could practically hear her beaming, “and then there’s another video of your eyes widening when James says Timothée, two million views. I already talked to Celine, she said Timothée’s going to release a statement on twitter tomorrow,” you sighed out of relief, “I told you Y/n: you’re loveable, Timothée’s loveable. No matter what you think, people want to see you two together. Now call him.”

“I will, thanks Kels,” you handed Kelly her phone back and picked up your own, dialing Timothée’s number in, he answered immediately, “Heyyyy Timmy,” you giggled into the phone.

“Hey Y/n/n, so much for time huh?”

“Yeah, so much for time.”

I thought this was adorable, and i am SO SORRY FOR HOW LONG THIS TOOK. I think this is going to be the last chapter, unless you guys have suggestions for anything else I think this is a good conclusion. Seriously though, thank you all so much for the love on this, I can’t wait to write more, leave me some requests :)

Taglist: (THANK YOU ALL) @sspidermanss @fandom-food-fire​ @gigi-maria-argu @meaganl124 @danidomm​ @ewistel @booklover240​ @daygiowvibe​ @spiderdudetom​ @tom-hollond​ @ilsolee​ @iidontgiveafuckuniverse​ @plsdontfindthisblogpeople @antoouu​ @xahnah @ethevenly​ @doobdabdib @ahoyparkwr​ @ilikealotofpeople-younotsomuch @bilesxbilinskixlahey​ @babybloomer​ @bluemoonsnail​ @kenny-0909​ @mysticalinsomniac​ 

Delay in census results threatens 2021 redistricting

The drawing of electoral districts has a huge influence on the future of minority voters. Their adequate representation in politics depends on the census count.

Redistricting in the US, which only happens once every 10 years, is threatened by delays in delivering the 2020 census data that took place in the middle of the pandemic.

Originally the United States Census Bureau, would provide the decennial survey data for redistricting to states by March 31, but due to the coronavirus setbacks, it may not be available in a user-friendly format until September 30.

“The risk is that you end up not having communities of color adequately represented in Congress, in state legislatures, and that then leads to different agendas being pursued within those policymaking bodies,” warned Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), during a recent press briefing hosted by Ethnic Media Services.

“As we become more partisan and polarized, we are going to have very close elections in the House and Senate … and if we fail to create majority-minority districts where warranted by the Voting Rights Act, there will not be adequate representation,” he insisted. .

In these majority-minority districts, racial or ethnic minorities make up a large enough portion of the electorate to ensure that the community can elect the candidate of their choice regardless of race.

In this context, the census has two explicit purposes: one is to count every inhabitant of the country to reallocate the 435 seats in the House of Representatives among the states, according to their population. The other is redistricting not only for Congress, but also for state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, county boards, boards of education, community college boards, etc.

“After 1960, the Supreme Court concluded that each state and each locality must redraw their lines after the census to make the districts relatively equal in population,” Saenz explained.

The data extracted from the census determines the reallocation of $ 1.5 trillion in federal funding to the states on an annual basis, for services such as hospitals, schools and the like. And redistricting determines who lives in the district, who is running for public office, and how those officials can respond to community needs on issues such as security, or housing and immigration policies.

The census count was carried out amid attempts by the Donald Trump administration to include a question about citizenship, and to create a database of citizens to exclude undocumented people. Although the effort was not fruitful at the federal level, it echoed in jurisdictions where the right wing has sought for years to equate the database for redistricting with the voting age population rather than total population.

“That would have a devastating effect on communities of color for two reasons,” Saenz explained. “First, because particularly Latino and Asian-American communities have higher proportions of non-citizens… (Second), because it would exclude every person under the age of 18… and all communities of color have higher proportions of those under 18 than white populations.”

Gaining seats

Projections say that Texas and Florida may gain more than one seat when the official census count is turned in, and that California might lose a seat in the House of Representatives for the very first time in that state’s history.

Traditionally battlefield states like Texas, Georgia or Louisiana have been challenged in court by organizations like MALDEF because of the lines adopted by Republican legislatures and governors, who have sought to suppress the rights of minority voters.

In the past decade, Texas won four seats in the House of Representatives thanks to population growth, 80% of which came from black and brown communities. But none of the seats were assigned to minority communities, which had to be challenged in court.

“In some local jurisdictions there is not a partisan fight, but an incumbent fight against the minority communities that are emerging in that local jurisdiction, when it’s in their interest to preserve their own power,” said Justin Levitt, professor of law at LMU Loyola Law School.

“The changes to the Voting Rights Act make it even harder than usual to combat some of this discrimination in local communities.”

In 2013 the Supreme Court declared section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, which required some states and localities to obtain federal prior authorization before they could implement redistricting plans. Without this oversight, the maps drawn can diminish the ability of Black, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, and other minority voters to participate.

Levitt explained that those who draw the maps may consider race, ethnicity or party when drawing districts. These approaches are not entirely unconstitutional, and furthermore it is “impossible to tell” when this is the consideration, which can lead to “racial manipulation,” Levitt observed.

However, the Voting Rights Act has another provision in section 2, to attack dilutive redistricting plans, those that seek to manipulate the lines to entrench politicians in power. This vote dilution, explained Leah Aden, deputy director of litigation at NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, occurs when redistricting seeks to prevent minority voters from having the same opportunities as the majority of voters, generally white, to elect their candidate of choice.

“Vote dilution typically arises in the context of something called at large elections that happen when a 50% + 1 majority of voters, (usually white) control the outcome of elections for all the seats in a particular body,” Aden said.

“Vote dilution can also occur when you crack voters of color among various electoral districts to avoid creating majority-minority districts,” she added.

That is why it is relevant that communities work on their own illustrative maps to show that it is possible to draw lines in districts where minority voters share things in common and thus fight the discriminatory practices that have traditionally been used also to define housing policies.

“Some of the excuses for (politicians) doing this are ‘to protect my party’ and we should be wary of those excuses because they’re basically excuses for racial discrimination,” Aden said.

Community participation

Another consequence of the delay in the census data is that it could mean less time for court challenges, candidates filing for upcoming elections, ballot creation, and community participation.

“One of the potential problems for the delay is that the time crunch could be used as an excuse by some jurisdictions to minimize or truncate the opportunity for the public to be involved in the redistricting process,” said Terry Ao Minnis, senior director of Census & Voting Programs at Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC).

“What people can do is make sure they understand how redistricting will take place where they live… to learn the rules, get together with interested neighbors or organizations… This could result in potentially drafting maps that could better represent your community’s interest,” she said.

The panelists were optimistic about the discussion in Congress of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which seeks to restore the full protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This bill comprises a list of categories of changes in voting rights that states can only exercise with federal authorization.

Originally published here 

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here 

When Will a Stand Be Taken Against the Promotion of Murder? - by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

In civilized societies action should be taken against anyone who expresses the desire to commit murder. The Iranian government, Hamas, Hezbollah, various clerics, and other influential figures within the Muslim world, as well as neo-Nazis and other extreme rightists, openly proclaim their desire to commit murder or even genocide against Jews and Israel. Many in the Western world either refuse to heed these statements or actively support them. Many others relentlessly criticize Israel and remain completely silent about Palestinian promotion of the killing of Jews.

Civilized societies should not be silent when people state their intention to murder even a single person, let alone commit genocide. Many Western politicians and other prominent members of society do not seem to agree with this fundamental truth. In the non-Western world, many people have no inhibitions about saying, directly or indirectly, that they approve of murder in some cases and would personally commit it if the occasion arose. This is most easily seen when the potential victims are Jews. The leaders of Iran, for example, have spent four decades frequently and explicitly expressing their zeal to commit mass murder via the total destruction of the State of Israel. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has used familiar language to state this desire. Earlier this year he employed the phrase “final solution” on his website in yet another call for Israel’s destruction. Perhaps reminded of the phrase��s genocidal origin as the Nazi euphemism for the extermination of European Jewry, Khamenei later invoked a classic antisemitic trope by claiming that the extermination of the predominantly Jewish population of Israel would have nothing to do with Jews. “Eliminating the Zionist regime doesn’t mean eliminating Jews,” he said. “We aren’t against Jews. It means abolishing the imposed regime…Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians [would] choose their own government and expel thugs like [PM Benjamin] Netanyahu.” This Western-friendly waffling notwithstanding, Khamenei has made no attempt to conceal his true feelings. He has spoken of Israel as a cancer that must be forcibly cut out. In 2018 he tweeted: “Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.” Other leading Iranian figures have spoken out in favor of the destruction of Israel, some explicitly mentioning the leveling of Israeli cities. Yet Iran is allowed to remain an unhindered member of the United Nations. The Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas—elected as the majority party by the Palestinians in 2006—also openly and frequently discusses its desire to commit genocide against the Jews. This aspiration is clearly stated in its charter, which states: “Hamas looks forward to implementing Allah’s promise however long it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: ‘The [Day of Judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!’” Senior Hamas officials occasionally call publicly for the murder of Jews. In 2019, Fathi Hammad, a member of the Hamas Politburo, urged members of the Palestinian diaspora to kill Jews around the world. Hammad said: “You have Jews everywhere and we must attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing if God permits.” The Palestinian Authority (PA) provides generous financial payments to terrorists and their families. It thus creates a huge incentive for Palestinians to murder Jews in Israel. Nor are these pensions limited to the murderers. If Palestinians are killed in an attempt to murder Jews, the financial benefits they would have received accrue to their families. This amounts to a “pay for slay” policy—in other words, the PA actively promotes and encourages the murder of Jews. In 2019, the PA spent 570 million shekels (about $160 million) on rewards to terrorist prisoners. By August 2019, the Palestinian terrorists who in 2001 killed 15 Israeli civilians—about half of them children—and wounded many more in the Jerusalem Sbarro restaurant bombing had received more than $900,000 from the PA. In May 2020, the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah terror organization, Hassan Nasrallah, referred to the creation of Israel as “the establishment of this virus of an entity, this cancerous tumor amidst our umma.” He added, “Israel has no legitimacy to exist at all and must be destroyed.” Clerics and other influential figures within the Muslim world also call for the extermination of Israel and Jews. Some of these figures have a very broad and influential platform. In 2012, the cleric Futuh Abdel Nabi Mansur officiated at a nationally televised service at the Cairo Tenaim Mosque. The service was attended by then Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi. The cleric said, “O Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters; O Allah, disperse them and rend them asunder; O Allah, demonstrate your might and greatness upon them.” Morsi could be seen saying “Amen.” There is also prominent support for murderers elsewhere in the Muslim world. On November 18, 2014, two Muslim terrorists from East Jerusalem murdered six people at a Jerusalem synagogue, including a heroic Israeli Druze policeman. The terrorists were killed. The next day, Jordanian parliamentarians held a moment of silence for the murderers. They read aloud verses of the Quran “to glorify [the terrorists’] pure souls and the souls of all the martyrs in the Arab and Muslim nations.” The Jordanian PM, Abdullah Ensour, sent a condolence letter to the families of the terrorists in which he ”[asked] God to envelop [the terrorists] with mercy.” Neo-Nazis and other extreme rightists also call publicly for “death to the Jews.” Some have carried this out, as was seen in massacres at two US synagogues. In a similar case in Germany in October 2019, only a strong door stood between Jews praying inside the Halle synagogue on Yom Kippur and a man who had come to slaughter them. These murderous individuals, while very dangerous, have only local capabilities as yet and are thus not in the same criminal league as Muslim countries and major terrorist organizations that promote murder and genocide. Beyond the would-be mass murderers themselves are those who finance and promote them. Iran and Qatar make money available to Hamas that enables the group to finance its anti-Israel operations—money that it withholds from its own population to further its own ends. Several Western and other countries give money to the PA, a body that openly promotes murder. They claim their money is not being used to pay pensions to terrorists and their families, but they have no way of ascertaining this. The PA can use whatever funds it has available, including donor funds, to pay Palestinians to kill Jews. In the Western world, a variety of senior figures and bodies exhibit the opinion that when Jews are the target, the promotion of murder or genocide ceases to be objectionable. Some of them go so far as to directly promote the interests of the murderers. A striking example is former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who welcomed representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah to the House of Commons and called them his “friends” and “brothers.” Others include former US President Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2014, they co-signed an op-ed in The Guardian suggesting that Europe and the US should recognize Hamas as a political movement. They failed to mention that Hamas is an organization with genocidal aspirations. This was a showcase of senior human rights advocates promoting the interests of would-be mass murderers. The Dutch government advisory body Adviesraad Internationale Vraagstukken (AIV, or Advisory Council of Foreign Affairs) is in the same category. It issued a report in 2013 recommending contacts between the EU, the Netherlands, and Hamas. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) wrote to Dutch PM Mark Rutte to disband the AIV for this recommendation, which would obviously come at Israel’s expense. The AIV’s recommendations were not accepted, but the organization was not disbanded. Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, does not bother to conceal his comfort with the extermination of the State of Israel. He said in an interview: “Iran wants to wipe out Israel. Nothing new about that; you have to live with it.” Another category—a major one—is those who freely criticize Israel but never mention the criminality of the major Palestinian bodies. They certainly never acknowledge those bodies’ open promotion of murder and genocide. If they criticize the Palestinians at all, they do so superficially and focus on other issues. One influential person who does this is US Senator Bernie Sanders, a Jewish politician who was a leading contender for the US Democratic presidential nomination. When he addressed the Israeli-Palestinian problem during his campaign, he spoke of the Palestinians’ dignity and called the Israeli government “racist.” European parliamentarians regularly criticize Israel while averting their eyes from Palestinian invocations of genocide and murder. In the Netherlands, at least one-third of the 150 parliamentarians have done this. In the Swedish and Norwegian governments the percentage is probably higher. Then there are those who unintentionally help would-be genocidal murderers. In 2015, then US President Barack Obama initiated the extremely flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement with Iran, which enabled the Iranians to sustain their quest for nuclear weapons with impunity and intensify their subversive and terrorist activities in the Middle East. In the context of this analysis one should also look at what is often called “Holocaust inversion.” This is exhibited by people who claim Israel intends to exterminate the Palestinians and/or that Israel is like the Nazis. In 2020, the Hungarian Action and Protection League commissioned a report by Hungary’s Inspira Ltd in which interviews were held with members of the adult population between the ages of 18-75 in 16 European countries. Twenty-four percent said they believe Israelis behave like Nazis toward the Palestinians. The main representative study before Inspira was published in 2011 by the University of Bielefeld on behalf of the German Social Democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Their research was undertaken in seven European countries. The interviewers polled 1,000 people per country over the age of 16 in the fall of 2008. One question was whether they agreed with the assertion that Israel is carrying out a war of extermination against the Palestinians. The lowest percentages of those who agreed were in Italy and the Netherlands, with 38% and 39% respectively. Other figures were Hungary 41%, the UK 42%, Germany 48%, and Portugal 49%. In Poland, the figure was an astonishing 63%. It is not only Europe’s leaders who have lost their moral grounding. These results reflect the profound moral decay of major segments of the population of the European continent.

DACA: Here To Stay?

It was a warm and cloudy morning on September 5, 2017. As I woke up, all the news outlets were flooded with breaking news. DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was rescinded by President Donald Trump. Hundreds of thousands of DACA Recipients also known as “Dreamers,” were left with confusion, uncertainty and their legal status left in limbo. As a DACA recipient myself, little did I know that this decision would be met with pushback and legal challenges would proceed. A roller coaster of emotions were set in motion for dreamers. 

DACA is a program that protects undocumented youth from deportation. This program was created by an executive order mandated by President Barack Obama on June 15, 2012. DACA recipients were brought to America at a young age and this country is the only place they know as their home. DACA enables immigrant youth to come out of the shadows, go to college and work legally. Recipients undergo background checks and other procedures by the USCIS to ensure eligibility. In order to maintain DACA status renewals are required every two years.

In January 2018 an order by U.S. District Judge William Alsup gave hope to DACA recipients as he ordered for DACA renewals to be put back in place. Nearly 690,000 dreamers, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, were safeguarded from deportation. However, The Trump Administration didn’t concede defeat. The battle to terminate DACA ensued. 

On June 18, The Supreme Court ruled to reinstate DACA as it was a violation of law to end it. According to an article titled “News Tip: Scotus’ DACA Decision Major Win For Young Immigrants, Experts Say” in the Duke Today, “efforts to end it had been arbitrary and capricious. The Trump administration’s error, the court ruled, was procedurally unsound, a kind of power grab that violated institutional norms and administrative culture by not addressing the policy consequences of changing DACA.” It was a huge victory for DACA recipients, immigrant families and everyone that supports the program. 

According to an article titled “Are DACA Students Still Safe to Stay?” dated April 25, 2017 in the New England Journal of Higher Education, from 2012 to 2016 the DACA program received approximately a million initial applications nationwide. Only 752,154 were successfully approved. 

In Nevada, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, there are 12,100 recipients as of March 31, 2020. Of those, there are 9,700 in the Las Vegas Valley. 

Some of those recipients go to school at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

UNLV Student Juan Pablo Plascencia,  recalled that day, “Well when President Trump rescinded DACA, I didn’t get scared because I knew there was a long, legal battle going on. There are amazing people in our community who fight for us specifically Senator Dick Durbin who I think is a great man. There are a lot of amazing lawyers that see us for who we are. We’re human beings and not just a pawn to be played with when politics come around.” 

Plascencia doesn’t shy away from reality, “My mentality is pretty simple on this. I know my parents broke the law to bring me here. I was a child when I was brought here. I have no idea what happened. One day I was in Mexico. The next day I’m here in Las Vegas. It’s like time travel. That’s the way I explain it to people when they ask me but the thing is that my parents had to do something that even though it wasn’t legal, morally it makes sense.” 

Many DACA recipients grew up unaware that they were undocumented. The harsh reality of who they are came at a young age. Many wanted to start employment or travel outside of the country. 

Leslie Vazquez, University of Washington Tacoma student with DACA status recalled, “I first realized I was undocumented when I was in middle school. I actually wanted to travel to Mexico and my mom had to have a conversation with me about me not being able to leave the country.” 

Growing up unsure of what the future has in store is terrifying. President Trump’s antics fueled fear and unpredictability. 

“I felt like I couldn’t breathe and enjoy living in America. I could empathize with jewish people. I understood how they felt, be extra careful. Don’t say anything, don’t post anything. That might be used against you.” Plascencia said. “It was hard. As a history teacher, one of the things I always tell my students is to love your country. Love your country enough for when you see an issue, you want to go and fix it. I think President Trump is a hypocrite. He tells us that he’s going to treat DACA with kindness and a lot of heart. It’s a good thing for the DACA kids. He then puts his foot in our butt and files to remove DACA. Loses the court case and then he states he will file the proper paperwork to get this over. I’m sorry sir, am I just a pawn to you? Is my humanity not real? Are my efforts not good enough for you?”

Joe Biden became the U.S. President-elect earlier in November. Biden has been vocal about his support on DACA. On November 2, 2020, Biden tweeted, “Dreamers are Americans -- And it’s time we make it official.” 

Vazquez said, “I am excited to know that Biden has won the presidency and I remain hopeful that he will be able to help us ‘Dreamers.’ It's easier to believe Biden when he says he will help us gain citizenship because we’ve had four years of someone who has consistently put us down. However, I am not going to get my hopes up until action is done.”  

Although hope is not lost, it has dissipated for many DACA recipients.

“I saw who he appointed for his cabinet. He appointed the same woman that approved for family separation at the border under the Obama Administration. I just hope it’s not the same thing. Which it’s looking like it might be.” Plascencia said. “Personally, I have hope but at the same time I’m not holding my breath anymore. I’m not going to wait to live my life. I’ll do the best that I can under the system that I’m in. At the end of the day, I’m not going to beg for scraps. I’m a productive member of this society. I don’t see immigration being on top of Biden’s list. Right now we are in a pandemic and after the pandemic it’ll be the economy and after the economy we have another two year election.” 

Furthermore, Plascencia explains his thoughts on DACA, “I did what I was asked to do, I signed up for DACA. I have done everything right, I’ve never broken the law but what I want is for politicians to make this right. We passed the test. DACA is a smashing success. There are 95 percent of us that are excelling in the program. Five percent have been sent back. That’s good, this is an audition. We have to prove to the American people but at the same time I’m not begging for scraps. I don’t beg for scraps but at the same time it has to be done in a way that makes sense. DACA to me makes perfect sense. You put us young people to audition. What was the audition? Exactly what it says on the applications. I think instead of democrats and republicans promising the world to us, I’d rather see some action. I need to see some movement.”  

However, those that oppose the DACA program state that illegal immigration is being encouraged through its’ policies. According to an article titled, “Are DACA and The Dream Act Good For America?” in the Britannica ProCon, Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) said that DACA “encouraged more illegal immigration and contributed to the surge of unaccompanied minors and families seeking to enter the U.S. illegally.” In the same article, according to Karl Eschbach, PhD, “DACA will increase the undocumented population because those who don’t qualify for DACA will stay in the hopes of qualifying eventually, and more people will immigrate assuming coverage by DACA or a similar program.”

In addition, according to an article titled, “It’s Time to End DACA -- It’s Unconstitutional Unless Approved by Congress” in the Heritage, “Providing amnesty and potential citizenship to DACA recipients and other illegal immigrants before we have a secure border will only encourage even more illegal immigration, just as the 1986 amnesty in the Immigration Reform and Control Act did. That law provided citizenship to almost 3 million illegal immigrants and was supposed to solve the problem of illegal immigration. Yet within 10 years, there were another almost 6 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.

The federal government should be concentrating on enhancing immigration enforcement and border security to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the country and reduce the number of them already in the interior of the U.S.”

As DACA continues to hang in the balance politically, recipients continue setting goals for their futures optimistically. 

“I would love to graduate with a PHd in Neurological Psychology,” Plascencia said. “I would love to go to Medical School to practice Psychology. That’s something I believe I would be really good at. Again I’m not hoping for it, I’m just waiting to make my moves. When my parents came to America they had ten dollars in their pockets. Now, I’m about to purchase my own house, I have my own car.”

Additionally Plascencia added that he is working on his third degree at UNLV. He will be graduating with his Masters in Curriculum/Instruction in Secondary Social Studies. He is a social studies and history teacher at the Las Vegas Academy Performing Arts. 

Plascencia reflects, “Education is the most powerful and important thing. I think that as a person I want to be more educated. I would love to become a citizen because I do want to vote. As a teacher it’s ironic I can’t vote but I teach my students how to.”

Vazquez is currently in the last quarter of obtaining her Bachelor’s degree in accounting at the Milgard School of Business. Vazquez and her parents own their own Mexican restaurant which has been open to the public for three years. “I hope that I will remain in the country for years to come. My ultimate dream is to get my CPA degree to help our community.”

As the uncertainty is still not over, recipients contemplate their decisions with valor. 

“As a person who has DACA, I’m pretty much at the end of my road. I could go teach at the University in Canada, I could teach in a University in England, I could go live in Spain, Germany. But instead I’m choosing to stay because this is the only country that I know about,” Plascencia said. 

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Family Mediation In Leeds.

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Nine Steps To Take Advantage Of Mediation At The Workplace.

Phone around to find the best rate, but remember the cheapest may not be the very best. You don't require to go to mediation to help you end your partnership. There are someexceptions when you don't have to go to the MIAM prior to litigating- for instance, if you have actually endured domestic misuse. If you go to a lawyer first, they'll most likely speak with you regarding whether utilizing mediation initially could help. We make use of cookies to enhance your experience of our website.You can figure out more or opt-out from some cookies. Our workplace mediation solutions solve complicated as well as difficult conflicts quickly, successfully and with as little disturbance as possible.

By following this method, we can make sure that things get off to the perfect begin, that everyone comprehends the process, and that every person is collaborating towards that objective that we're all searching for. As long as individuals are interacting well, assisting each other out, and drawing in the same direction, then the job obtains done and also everybody wins. Stay in touch with the current mediation as well as ADR news as well as assuming using social media sites, plus our regular article as well as podcasts.

Family Members Mediation In Leeds.

Jan is the Chair of The University of Mediators as well as in 2018 won Family members Conciliator of the Year at the National Mediation Honors. Legal Help is often readily available to those who get on a low earnings or on certain advantages, such as Universal Credit report. To see if you qualify, complete our cost-free online Lawful Help analysis type. If you make an effective Legal Help application, there will certainly be on the house for your MIAM and also mediation sessions. In addition to this, it will certainly also pay for the MIAM and initial mediation session with your ex-partner.

Simply intended to thank you for browsing me as well as 'A' through some actually difficult problems. Your involvement has actually brought us all to a location we couldn't have gotten to without your assistance.

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Out of these, the cookies that are classified as required are saved on your web browser as they are essential for the working of standard functionalities of the website. However opting out of some of these cookies may affect your surfing experience. The board participants bring a wide range of experience to the company, with supervisors' backgrounds varying from organization to community service. She was previously the Director of the Household Mediators Association and a Member of the Ministry of Justice Family Mediation Guiding Team.

It's a great suggestion to talk to a solicitor prior to picking settlement - they can tell you if it's appropriate for you, as well as might be able to recommend a good neighborhood family mediator. A simple settlement case might cost ₤ 1,000, but you could end up paying a lot more - the precise quantity depends where you live and the length of time it requires to reach an arrangement.

Household adjudication is one more alternative if you want to avoid of court. You ought to ask your lawyer to give you a written estimate of just how much your lawful costs will certainly be. If you're not yet prepared to obtain a divorce or finish your civil partnership, they can record your setups as a 'splitting up contract' rather.

MV Mediation program takes on evictions - Martha's Vineyard Times

MV Mediation program takes on evictions.

Posted: Wed, 30 Dec 2020 08:00:00 GMT [source]

You'll each need to pay your lawyers' fees, which can be costly. How much you'll pay at the end relies on how much time it considers you as well as your ex-partner to get to a contract. This is a created or on-line record of how you and your ex-partner intend to take care of your children.Find out even more about making a parenting plan on the Children as well as Family Court Advisory and also Assistance Solution website. Courts generally will not determine who a kid lives or hangs around with if they assume the parents can arrange points out themselves. Your conciliator will certainly write a 'memorandum of understanding' - this is a document that reveals what you have actually concurred. Think of what you intend to leave mediation prior to you begin. https://workplacemediations.co.uk/conflict-resolution/reading/ is more likely to succeed if you can spend the sessions concentrating on things you really disagree on.

I just wished to leave a message to state a Thank you to the woman on the front desk, I rated with a lovely smile and also a pleasant, kind expert service. We have our own devoted mediation properties in a silent yet central area, with 3 mediation spaces, different waiting locations, a function area with added seating and also a back workplace. If you would certainly prefer us not to share this comments details with the moderator concerned, please tick this box. Tiny Claims Court Genie is a trading style of SV Legal Training Ltd|Our site only relates to the courts in England & Wales|Copyright 2020. If you want to give on your own the best chance of being successful, download our supreme overview. It takes you with the procedure detailed and in plain English. There is absolutely nothing to quit the events attempting again to reach terms of settlement between the two of them prior to test.

The moderator is a court staff member that is learnt mediation skills.

There is mediation readily available for insurance claims outside the small cases track such as fast-track and also multi-track track insurance claims.

There are a large number of moderators around, both independent as well as mediation bodies.

This indicates that your divorce, or separation, will certainly be a lot much less burdensome in regards to financial repercussions for your kids.

You will discover that with mediation there is a great deal more money which is left over for the essentials of life.

Meetings are exclusive and at the arbitrator's office or a neutral venue. We'll call you to discuss your client's needs as well as figure out whether an online MIAM is best for them. Then, you can either schedule a meeting on your client's part or we'll contact them and keep you in the loophole.

Our lawyers compose your contract into a separation arrangement which you sign as well as witness. We can resolve your financial, residential property or parenting concerns agreeably, price effectively and also rather. Mediation is when a neutral person - learnt managing tough conversations between 2 opposing sides - acts like an umpire in a conflict. We can't reply, so if you require assist with an issue learn exactly how you can get advice from us. You can likewise find a household mediator online on the Institute of Family members Regulation Arbitrators internet site.

Jess works in our head office as well as is in charge of our legal bundles and also customer relationships. Belinda runs our head workplace as well as guarantees you receive an expert and also thoughtful solution. Advise an independent barrister to tell you what would be a most likely result at court on your case.

Our team of professional and skilled workplace moderators deal with all parties in a conflict to establish their underlying needs as well as passions, encourage discussion as well as eventually, help with a mutually appropriate resolution. When workplacemediations.co.uk business mediation services bournemouth: full feature set introducing a mediation programme, there are three ways a work attorney's duty is most likely to be valuable.The first is that no person is much better placed to encourage making use of mediation. Any kind of practitioner that has experience of basic complaint and corrective procedures will certainly recognize just how binary the outcomes tend to be and the method which events often tend to come to be adversarial. If you can find more information on workplace mediations's mediation services here. was not nearly enough, when litigation occurs, they observe carefully the stress and anxiety produced and also are totally involved in drawing away supervisors from their key duties to prepare for hearings.

Can you bring evidence to mediation?

Although mediation is confidential, if you show evidence to the other party, there is nothing to stop them using this evidence if your matter later goes to court and they can find the evidence in another way.

Nonetheless, if terms can not be reached, a Judge will certainly make a decision the issue at test. It is likely nonetheless, that to get to a negotiation, both events will certainly require to endanger as well as make concessions. The moderator will focus on striking an offer, rather than entering into the detail or trying to determine who is appropriate or wrong. As opposed to apportioning blame, he will certainly aim to restore the connection if ideal. We after that examine back in with the celebrations after 6 weeks to see just how things are going and to guarantee that whatever is running smoothly. Every circumstance is various though, as well as among the primary reasons we are so effective is that we are flexible in our method to mediation. However, normally speaking, this bypassing structure works extremely well.

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Editor’s note: This story includes a historical quote that uses a racial slur.

Election Day 1981 was ugly in some largely Black and Hispanic districts of Trenton, New Jersey. Ominous signs hung outside several polling places:

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THIS AREA IS BEING PATROLLED BY THE NATIONAL BALLOT SECURITY TASK FORCE.

IT IS A CRIME TO FALSIFY A BALLOT OR TO VIOLATE ELECTION LAWS.

That National Ballot Security Task Force was made up of county deputy sheriffs and local police who patrolled the polling sites with guns in full view. A court complaint later lodged by the Democratic Party described the members of the task force “harassing poll workers, stopping and questioning prospective voters … and forcibly restraining poll workers from assisting, as permitted by state law, voters to cast their ballots.”

The National Ballot Security Task Force was not some rogue enterprise, or an ill-conceived product of a few extremist thinkers. It was funded by the Republican Party.

While the group’s goals were ostensibly to prevent illegal voting, it was difficult to take that at face value — it looked a lot more like a coordinated intimidation effort. Republicans hadn’t been afraid to say publicly that they didn’t want certain people to vote, after all. Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said in a speech in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote. … our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

It wasn’t just Weyrich, either. During the 1971 Supreme Court confirmation hearing of future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, civil rights activists testified that he had run “ballot security” operations in Arizona and had personally administered literacy tests to Black and Hispanic voters at Phoenix polling places. Nor are these sentiments just a relic of a bygone era: In March of this year, President Donald Trump dismissed out of hand Democratic-backed measures that called for vote-by-mail and same-day registration to help ensure people could vote amid the COVID-19 pandemic: “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The political wisdom is ingrained at this point: Black and brown people don’t vote for Republicans.

From that principle flows all manner of Republican strategy. Sometimes the efforts are less legalistic and more shock jock — in 2016, the Trump campaign described “suppression efforts” aimed at Black voters, which included placing ads on radio stations popular with African Americans that played up Hillary Clinton’s 1996 comments about “superpredators.” More often, though, these moves by Republicans involve accusations of widespread voter fraud, battles over voter registration, and court challenges to laws meant to protect the franchise of America’s minorities. Talk of “election integrity” by the Grand Old Party is inextricably intertwined with its modern history of pandering to racist elements of American life; any attempt to disentangle these stories and tell them separately is disingenuous, even if it angers partisans.

Voting in person during the COVID-19 pandemic has raised safety concerns and intensified the push for vote-by-mail, a measure President Trump has derided.

JESSICA KOURKOUNIS / GETTY IMAGES

Efforts to tamp down the number of minority voters will likely continue this election. Following the abuses in Trenton in 1981, the Republican National Committee entered into a court-enforced consent agreement that it would not engage in voter intimidation efforts like the ones seen in Trenton — efforts the court deemed racially motivated. In 2018, the RNC was released from that consent agreement, and in May 2020, the RNC and the Trump campaign announced that they would spend $20 million to litigate initiatives like vote-by-mail and that they would recruit 50,000 poll watchers across 15 states. ”The RNC does not want to see any voter disenfranchised. We do not. We want every voter who is legally able to vote to be able to vote,” said RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel on a call with members of the press in May. “But a national vote-by-mail system would open the door to a new set of problems such as potential election fraud.” All this effort despite little conclusive evidence that voting by mail benefits one party over the other.

But it wasn’t always the case that the GOP looked to suppress the franchise, and with it minority-voter turnout. In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter introduced a package of electoral reforms, the chair of the RNC supported it and called universal, same-day registration “a Republican concept.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower won nearly 40 percent of the Black vote in 1956, and President George W. Bush secured about the same share of Hispanic votes in 2004.

Yet in 2016, Trump won just 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 8 percent of the Black vote.

The GOP’s whitewashed political reality is no accident — the party has repeatedly chosen to pursue white voters at the cost of others decade after decade. Since the mid-20th century, the Republican Party has flirted with both the morality of greater racial inclusion and its strategic benefits. But time and again, the party’s appeals to white voters have overridden voices calling for a more racially diverse coalition, and Republicans’ relative indifference to the interests of voters of color evolved into outright antagonism.

When I asked Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief strategist, how he thought the current GOP could go about appealing to minority groups, he declined to take the bait. “Thanks for trying to get me into the here and now, but I’m not going to get in there.”

I tried again. Bypassing Trump, did a Republican Party eight or 10 years into the future have a chance with minority voters?

“They’d better wake up to the necessity of doing it,” Rove said. “It’s a lost opportunity if we don’t.”

It’s not the first time Republicans have heard that sort of thing. But apparently it’s hard advice to take.

Michigan Gov. George Romney, a moderate Republican, lost out on the 1968 GOP presidential nomination but warned of the divisions that the “Southern strategy” would create in the party.

PICTORIAL PARADE / ARCHIVE PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES

1968 The moderates’ last stand

Conservative Barry Goldwater’s decisive presidential loss in 1964 led to a bevy of Republican primary candidates in 1968. Everyone wanted to save the party from ruin. Michigan Gov. George Romney emerged as the golden boy — the media golden boy — of the group, a successful Republican in a Democratic state who championed civil rights for Black Americans and opposed the war in Vietnam. Talking about the latter quickly got him into trouble, though, as he was a foreign policy neophyte and almost-debilitatingly earnest. While explaining his former support for the war during a 1967 interview, Romney said: “When I came back from Vietnam [in 1965], I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.”

Claiming the American military and diplomatic establishment brainwashed you wasn’t a particularly welcome thing to say back then. (Or now.) Historians mark this blunder as the beginning of the end of Romney’s chance to become the Republican candidate in 1968. And looking back, it was the beginning of the end of any liberal Republican standing a chance at winning the party’s nomination. (When Romney’s son Mitt ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, he called himself “severely conservative.” In the general election, he got 6 percent of the Black vote and 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.)

Romney fell from great heights. In 1966, Time magazine put him on its cover under the tagline “Republican Resurgence,” along with Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the country’s first Black senator since the Reconstruction Era, California Gov. Ronald Reagan and three other rising stars. Running on a strategy of courting the South, Goldwater had been flattened by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 general election, and more moderate candidates like Romney and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller were seen as the plausible Republican future. The promising candidates were, by and large, Time wrote, “moderates with immoderate ambitions.” But Romney was the man who got the most early attention. In a 1966 Harris Poll that asked who voters wanted to see as the Republican nominee in 1968, Romney beat out former Vice President Richard Nixon by 6 percentage points, Reagan by 14 and fellow moderate (and eventual vice president under a President Nixon) Rockefeller by 13.

Romney had pushed for the adoption of a civil rights plank to the 1964 Republican platform, but his efforts failed miserably. Instead, Goldwater’s nomination marked a full embrace of a strategy that sought to win the votes of white Southern Democrats disillusioned by their party’s embrace of reforms aimed at racial equity. Today’s GOP is still informed by this “Southern strategy.”

In her book, “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” Harvard professor Leah Wright Rigueur describes the treatment of the few Black delegates at the 1964 convention, several of whom were detained by security for talking to the press about their anti-Goldwater sentiments. One man’s suit was set on fire, and another “ran sobbing from the convention floor, crying that he was sick of being abused by Goldwater supporters. ‘They call you “nigger,” push you and step on your feet,’ he muttered to reporters, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘I had to leave to keep my self-respect.’”

Gov. Romney’s embrace of the civil rights movement would eventually put him at odds with Richard Nixon-era Republicans.

ARCHIVE PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES

Romney, for his part, was disgusted by the nominee and his stance on race. His moral high ground was notorious — years later, when his son Mitt ran for president, a former aide to George Romney told New York magazine that the elder Romney was “messianic,” adding “This guy was John Brown.”

Black voters might have been more circumspect. When violence broke out in a Black area of Detroit in 1967, Romney and Johnson each had a role to play, with Romney as governor and Johnson as president. They circled each other as they considered the response. “Neither wanted to take responsibility for installing martial law in an American city,” historian Rick Perlstein wrote in his book “Nixonland.” And Detroit was a heavily Black city, no less. Romney lost the game of chicken and eventually sent in the National Guard. Later in the campaign he toured the Watts neighborhood of Detroit and asked his driver what the word was that everyone kept calling him. “Motherfucker, sir,” he was told.

Romney, despite his best intentions, was part of a political party that had been slowly losing Black support for decades. While African Americans had long felt a sense of comity with the party of Lincoln, Republicans had been trying their patience for much of the 20th century. In 1940, Black party identification was split evenly at 42 percent. Eisenhower received a large share of the Black vote, in part because of voters’ disillusionment with Southern Democrats’ anti-civil rights beliefs.

But even those inside Eisenhower’s administration knew something was off about the GOP’s relationship with Black voters. His adviser E. Frederick Morrow, the first African American to serve in an executive staff position at the White House, was frustrated with the GOP’s often-indifferent efforts to court Black constituencies. In 1959 he gave a speech that decried the party’s apathy toward Black voters: “Republicans could not expect Negroes to be extremely grateful for what Lincoln did, since in effect he had merely returned to them their God-given rights of freedom and personal dignity.”

In 1962, Nixon told Ebony magazine that he owed his 1960 loss of the presidency to this kind of complacency: “I needed only five per cent more votes in the Negro areas. I could have gotten them if I had campaigned harder.” The African American vote was still a bloc that Republicans saw as gettable — Martin Luther King Jr.’s father was going to vote for Nixon until his opponent, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy, called King while he was detained in an Atlanta jail.

Romney’s disastrous “brainwashing” quote exposed the weakness of his campaign, and Nixon acted swiftly to shiv Romney’s underbelly of naivete. Nixon had long understood that the racist forces in the Republican Party that brought Goldwater the nomination remained a center of power despite Goldwater’s defeat. Nixon acted quickly to play to them, tying Romney to the violence in Detroit — he was governor after all. Nixon went further, arguing that “the primary civil right” in America was “to be protected from domestic violence.” White voters’ fears of Black Americans’ demands for civil rights made them uncomfortable with politicians who might support those rights — politicians like Romney. As Time had pointed out in 1966, the Democratic Party’s FDR-era coalition was fragmenting: “Negro militancy has siphoned off much support from urban Italians, Irish and Slavs.” Nixon, who would famously run as a “law and order” candidate, wanted those white votes.

Delegates at the 1968 Republican National Convention show their support for Nixon, who went on to secure the party’s nomination with the help of avowed segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES

Nixon got the nomination after a contentious convention, one fought over how tightly the party should be tied to its Southern base. Reagan led a last-minute push for the nomination that was quashed only when South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond stepped in on Nixon’s behalf, while moderate delegates tried to make Romney, not the South-approved Spiro Agnew, vice president. Reflecting on the party’s turmoil, Romney deployed a graphic metaphor for the GOP, warning that, “to prevent this abscess from re-forming [Nixon and Agnew] must make the party leaders from the states that must win the election for them at least as important as Mr. Nixon made the leaders of the South and Southwest in winning the nomination.”

More than half a century later, the abscess is still there. Over and over again, Republicans have faced the choice between a big-tent strategy and specific appeals to white voters — appeals that over time have become tantamount to bigotry.

And it wasn’t as if people weren’t pleading for Republican racial attitudes to change.

THE LATE 1970s “The Republican Party needs 
black people”

In 1978, Republican party chairman Bill Brock invited Jesse Jackson to talk to party notables in Washington, D.C. An intimate of King’s, Jackson was a political whirlwind who had proved to be a dynamic civil rights organizer. “He is one of the few militant blacks who is preaching racial reconciliation,” New York Times reporter John Herbers had written of Jackson in 1969. His address trafficked in the language of incremental advantage so beloved by electorally avaricious political strategists. Seven million unregistered Black voters were waiting to be wooed by the GOP, Jackson said. “The Republican Party needs black people if it is to ever compete for national office — or, in fact, to keep it from becoming an extinct party.” The New York Times wrote that “Jackson’s proposition seems realistic enough” given that “thirty percent of Northern and 20 percent of Southern blacks already consider themselves independents.”

Jackson got a standing ovation from the crowd, and the good feelings of the day prompted Brock to say that the “right” 1980 presidential candidate “could hope for anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the Black vote.”

Reagan would go on to win only 14 percent.

For a fleeting political moment in the wreckage of Watergate, the GOP seemed to be open (once again) to the idea that their future could lie with voters of color. The conventional wisdom of that brief period, Perlstein told me in an email, “was that the Republicans would go the way of the Whigs unless they recouped their appeal to blacks.” (Perlstein has a forthcoming book that covers this period. Called “Reaganland,” it’s the latest volume in his multipart history of modern American conservatism.)

Jesse Jackson, in the Oval Office with President Jimmy Carter, ran for president as a Democrat in 1988 but worried for years that the party took the Black vote for granted.

AFRO AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS / GADO / GETTY IMAGES

In the late 1970s, Jackson made the argument that Black voters should want the two parties to compete for their votes to attain greater political leverage. He worried that the Democratic Party would come to take Black voters for granted. (More than 40 years later, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would tell a Black radio host, “I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”) Jackson’s own personal conservatism could be seen as emblematic of that of Black Americans, ones who could be potentially courted by the GOP. A 1979 profile of Jackson by the journalist Paul Cowan described him at an anti-abortion rally: “[He] denounced abortion as ‘murder,’ he insisted that ‘when prayers leave the schools the guns come in’ … he suggested that, while he supported women’s liberation, his wife at least should stay in her place — his home.”

But the good vibes after Jackson’s speech in 1978 did not last long. Republican bureaucrats in the Reagan era coalesced around the idea that minority voters were unwinnable.

A few months before Jackson’s speech in Washington, President Carter had introduced electoral reforms — an end to the Electoral College and same-day universal voter registration — that were met with praise from Brock, the RNC chair. But an essay that soon appeared in the conservative publication Human Events expressed an opposing view in the party. Writer Kevin Phillips said that Carter’s proposal “could blow the Republican Party sky-high” given that most of the new voters in a higher-turnout election would be Democratic.

Phillips, who worked for Nixon’s 1968 campaign, was the author of the 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” which articulated a road map for the GOP to sweep up white voters. Or as a 1970 New York Times profile of the Bronx native with “a visage that looked half scholar and half black-Irishman” put it: “Political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices, a circumstance which at last favors the Republicans.”

Phillips was one of many loud, young voices on the “New Right” that saw Reagan as the Republican future. Reagan said the Carter proposal might as well be called “The Universal Voter Fraud Bill,” and pressured Brock into reneging on his support for it, which he did. (Google NGram mentions of the term “voter fraud” spike starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s.)

“The Republican Party needs black people,” Jackson said in 1978. Two years later, Ronald Reagan would go on to win only 14 percent of their votes.

BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES

Brock’s flip-flop embodies a contradiction inherent in many of the internal GOP struggles of the past few decades, and ones that continue today: Should the party invest in appeals to new voters or pluck racism’s low-hanging electoral fruit? Brock availed himself of the latter in his 1970 Tennessee Senate race. His “victory could be credited almost entirely to his sophisticated attempts to play on Tennessean’s [sic] racial fears and animosities,” according to the Almanac of American Politics. Often, the party has attempted to play both strategies, though the racial one usually seems to blot out the more ecumenical approach.

By the time Reagan appeared at a 1980 campaign stop at the National Urban League, the prominent civil rights organization, his appearance wasn’t to win over Black voters so much as to “show moderates and liberals that Reagan wasn’t anti-black,” one aide later said.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush ran for president as a “compassionate conservative,” and reached out to constituencies beyond those traditional to the Republican Party.

MATT CAMPBELL / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

THE 2000s Double-talk

In 2005, RNC chair Ken Mehlman appeared at the NAACP national convention to formally apologize for the GOP’s Southern strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

It seemed an act befitting a party whose sitting president, George W. Bush, had run for office as a “compassionate conservative.” The branding was no accident. In 2018, Bush articulated why he felt the need to convey a more explicitly empathetic message. “I felt compelled to phrase it this way, because people hear ‘conservative’ and they think heartless. And my belief then and now is that the right conservative philosophies are compassionate and help people.” Rove put it a bit more bluntly when he explained that “compassionate conservatism” helped Bush “indicate that he was different from the previous Republicans.”

It was an extension of Bush’s past success with people outside the party’s usual base. When he was governor of Texas, he won more than 50 percent of the Mexican American vote. “He was comfortable with Hispanic culture. His kids went to a large public high school in Austin that was very Hispanic,” former adviser Stuart Stevens said. “Much of his appeal among Hispanics in Texas was attributed to his personal charm and charisma,” Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University, writes of Bush in his book, “The Hispanic Republican.” “He spoke Spanish, ate Mexican sweetbreads in border cities, and for Christmas he made enchiladas and tamales that he, unlike President Ford, shucked before eating.” Rove said the Hispanic population in Texas was “highly entrepreneurial,” signed up for the military at high rates, and was religious, “so they tend to have socially traditional values,” particularly on the abortion issue. “What’s not to like about that profile if you’re a Republican?”

Bush’s focus on reforming education and immigration was key to his “compassionate conservative” appeal.

BROOKS KRAFT LLC / CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Bush’s platform aimed to be inclusive. Stevens pointed to the potential of No Child Left Behind as one example, an education program that increased funds for low-income schools, many of them home to Black and Hispanic students. Bush signed the program into law with the support of liberal icon Ted Kennedy — there’s a picture of Kennedy standing behind Bush as he puts pen to paper. Two Black children stand directly behind the president. “This is the kind of thing that the current Republican Party would present at a war crimes trial,” Stevens said of the show of bipartisanship. These days Stevens, who also served as Mitt Romney’s chief strategist during the 2012 presidential campaign, is disillusioned with the Republican Party and has a book (his eighth) all about it, “It Was All a Lie,” due out in August.

Progress with new, diverse coalitions could have been possible, Stevens said, but “you need to have changed the substance.”

But for many in the Black community, the substance boiled down to what Kanye West said during a live 2005 telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Despite the compassionate conservatism rhetoric, the GOP of the Bush era continued to pursue policies hostile to Americans of color. The party deployed a warm and fuzzy message that belied the actions it took on voting rights. It tried to turn out Hispanic voters while tapping into efficient ways to shut down minority voting under the “voter fraud” umbrella. The abscess that George Romney had warned about not only had re-formed, it had grown.

“The first stirrings of a new movement to restrict voting came after the 2000 Florida election fiasco, which taught the unfortunate lesson that even small manipulations of election procedures could affect outcomes in close races,” Wendy Weiser, head of the Democracy Program at the left-leaning advocacy group the Brennan Center, wrote in 2014. As Carol Anderson of Emory University writes in “One Person, No Vote,” during the Bush years and beyond, Republicans who were “respectable members of society leveled the charges [of voter fraud] — U.S. senators, attorneys with law degrees from the Ivy League.”

The 2000 election, which brought Bush to office, marked a new era of focus on ballot rules.

ROBERT KING / NEWSMAKERS

John Ashcroft led a Department of Justice that took up a full-throated rallying cry against voter fraud. He had some of his own skin in the game — Ashcroft lost a 2000 Senate election in Missouri in which Republicans alleged mass voter fraud in Black precincts of St. Louis. A newspaper investigation later found the claims to be all but nonexistent. The Bush-era Civil Rights Division had the distinction of filing the first voting-discrimination suit on behalf of white voters in the history of the Voting Rights Act.

Perhaps no figure from the Bush Civil Rights Division emerged who was more controversial and long-lasting than Hans von Spakovsky. He promoted voter ID laws in his home state of Georgia starting in the 1990s, and gained infamy once he landed at the Justice Department for pseudonymously writing a law review paper under the name “Publius,” which promoted voter ID laws. Later, his identity revealed, he refused to recuse himself from a controversial case involving voter ID in Georgia. The case, which was handled under the auspices of the Voting Rights Act, led career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division to resign and, as journalist Ari Berman writes, “VRA enforcement came to a standstill. From 2001 to 2005 the DOJ objected to only forty-eight changes out of eighty-one thousand submitted, ten times fewer than during the first four years of the Reagan administration.”

Von Spakovsky has proved a durable advocate for his cause. Now the head of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation, he served on Trump’s now-disbanded Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission was created to investigate whether Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because of widespread voter fraud. No evidence for the claim has yet to be produced.

When I spoke with von Spakovsky, I asked him if it disturbed him that so-called voter fraud protection efforts disproportionately affect minorities — academic studies in various states have shown this, as has a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. He told me my assumption was wrong, and said there were studies on voter ID and election turnout that found ID requirements had had no adverse effect. He also pointed to the greater number of VRA cases brought by the Bush administration compared with the number undertaken during the administration of Barack Obama.

But Democrats don’t see it as quite that simple. “Counting up the number of cases isn’t really meaningful,” Justin Levitt, who worked in the Civil Rights Division during Obama’s presidency, wrote in an email when I asked him about von Spakovsky’s claim. “It’s a little bit like counting up the number of reps in a workout at the gym to try to figure out who’s more physically fit, without asking which exercises, which weights, which degree of difficulty. Or counting up the number of words in a piece to try to figure out which is the best reporting.”

The movement to require an ID at the ballot box began in earnest during the Bush administration. Voting rights activists have long called the laws racially biased and unnecessary.

JOHN FITZHUGH / BILOXI SUN HERALD / TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Testing claims about the effect that voter ID laws have on election turnout is tricky. Findings about their effect have varied from state to state, which likely has to do with the nature of state laws and their voting populations. But a measure like turnout also doesn’t take into account how the laws push some people to go through greater effort to cast a ballot successfully.

Levitt, who is now a constitutional law scholar at Loyola Marymount University, did an investigation into cases of election fraud that could have been stopped by the use of voter ID, and found, out of about a billion ballots cast, only 31 instances from the period of 2000 to 2014. The analysis and its results prompt an obvious question: If fraud is so rare, what’s the actual purpose of ID laws?

Attacks on voter franchise are more broad than voter ID laws, of course. Voter roll purges have moved front and center in recent years thanks to events like the controversial 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. And last year, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis found that the closure of polling places across the state had made it more difficult for Black voters to cast their ballots.

In 2005, after Mehlman’s mea culpa to the NAACP, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that he found the RNC chair’s remarks disingenuous: “My guess is that Mr. Mehlman’s apology was less about starting a stampede of blacks into the G.O.P. than about softening the party’s image in the eyes of moderate white voters.” For all of Bush’s campaign rhetoric about compassionate conservatism and his focus on Hispanic outreach, his Republican Party had remained as devoted as ever to the cause of suppressing the franchise of people of color.

“If the apology was serious, it would mean the Southern strategy was kaput,” Herbert wrote. “And we know that’s not true.”

Donald Trump’s election came only three years after an RNC-commissioned report called for a new, more welcoming approach to immigration from the party.

ADRIA MALCOLM / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

THE 2010s Self-reflection

The loss of the 2012 election prompted a crisis of confidence among GOP leadership.

“I was close to RNC chairman Reince Priebus. He came to me right after the election and was like, ‘We need to do some soul-searching,’” Henry Barbour, a Mississippi political strategist, told me recently. Along with four others, he would go on to author what became glibly known as the 2012 Republican autopsy report — officially the “Growth and Opportunity Project” — that placed the GOP’s institutional problems in stark terms: “Many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

Yet three years after the report’s publication, the GOP nominated Donald Trump, an anti-immigrant, race-baiting candidate. “How did people abandon deeply held beliefs in four years? I think the only conclusion is they don’t. They didn’t deeply hold them. They were just marketing slogans,” Stuart Stevens said. “I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who thought we were beating the market.”

Priebus, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, did not respond to my requests to talk about the report he commissioned, and what has happened in the party since.

What has happened is a circling of the wagons around Trump and his race-baiting rhetoric and policies. Gone are the days of articulated philosophies like “compassionate conservatism.” Now, the GOP relies on contrarianism to distinguish itself and stoke good feelings among its core members. Just look at the ease with which ideologically driven leaders like former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney have been cast aside. Romney called Russia “our number-one geopolitical foe,” yet the party is now led by a president who repeatedly heaps praise on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

The one thing that the party has stayed true to is its reliance on the politics of race and racism. While membership in the party wanes and America grows more diverse, the GOP has become practiced at speaking to its core members’ desire to maintain a white-centric American society. Trump’s appeal relies heavily on attacks against the media and “PC culture,” the medium and mode of expression, respectively, of a diversifying country.

Republicans know the bargain they’ve made. A 2007 Vanity Fair profile of Arizona Sen. John McCain during his presidential run speaks to an acute awareness that the short-term strategy of placating a white base would be damaging to the GOP’s long-term demographic expansion. In the story, McCain is asked about the political ramifications of the immigration debate: “‘In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base,’ he said. ‘In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you’ll pay a heavy price.’ Then he added, unable to help himself, ‘By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.’”

During his 2010 Senate reelection campaign at the height of the Tea Party movement, McCain cut a TV spot meant to annihilate any ambiguity over immigration that he might have expressed during his presidential run. In the ad, McCain strolls along the U.S.-Mexico border, saying “Complete the dang fence,” to which a white sheriff responds, “Senator, you’re one of us.” It is perhaps the least subtle advertisement involving a politician since Bob Dole and Britney Spears appeared in that 2001 Pepsi commercial.

The post-2012 election report urged Republicans to return to what sounded a lot like Bush-era immigration stances and semantics: “We are not a policy committee, but … we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”

The strategist types I spoke with all seemed in agreement on the wisdom of this: “You grow a party with addition,” Barbour told me. “Politics is ultimately about addition, not subtraction,” Stevens said. “It’s completely dumb and destructive for their interests every time you say you’re going to target a smaller and smaller pool of voters to win,” was former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd’s take. Both he and Rove seemed irritated at what they thought was a popular misrepresentation of their infamous “base strategy” that used issues like same-sex marriage to generate the high turnout of core Republican constituencies, like evangelical voters. “You win an election by having enthusiastic turnout in your base, by swiping people from the opposition and doing well among the independents,” Rove said. To suggest otherwise was “ridiculous.”

So, had other Republicans misinterpreted that strategy as an excuse not to go after voters outside the traditional GOP core? “Oh, yeah, absolutely.” Rove answered. “Look, we lost the popular vote in 2000. What were we going to do, win again that way?” Trump had, I pointed out. “Yeah, well, and look, it’s happened five times in American history,” Rove said, reeling off the dates from memory. I asked whether he was saying it’s a fluke of history. “Oh, yeah,” he replied. So, Trump would need to win the popular vote in order to win this time around, I asked, knowing I’d pushed a little too close to the present day.

“Look, stop it, stop it, stop it,” Rove said. The conversation ended soon afterward.

In the midst of racial unrest following the police killing of George Floyd, Trump has called protesters “thugs” and provoked rebukes from a small number of Republicans.

JOSE LUIS MAGANA / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Republicans with more immigrant-friendly views remain on the outs in an era when the party has focused on things like a family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are reports that Bush won’t vote for Trump in the fall. It feels as if a breaking point has been reached, given the pandemic and the paroxysms of protests and violence following the police killing of George Floyd. Trump’s leadership has been called into question, especially on race: 58 percent of Americans in a recent poll said they disapproved of how Trump was handling race relations in the country. The number is remarkable, if only for the fact that these days it’s difficult to get 58 percent of Americans to agree on anything except perhaps distaste for airline travel and love of Dolly Parton.

As the booming economy crumbled in the midst of the pandemic, so did many more moderate Republicans’ support for the president. As Trump tweeted about “thugs” and dispersed peaceful protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the move wasn’t reflective of “the America that I know,” while Bush issued a rare public statement sympathizing with the plight of Black Americans: “Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions.”

The country has taken note, and Trump’s poll numbers — for the time being — remain consistently below Biden’s, sometimes showing the Democrat with a double-digit lead. But there’s no sure thing in American politics these days. The election itself could be a chaotic, unpredictable enterprise.

The unprecedented circumstances of November’s election have prompted widespread concern that millions of Americans could be disenfranchised. Long lines at voting sites during primary voting in some states only exacerbated those fears.

SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES

2020 Crisis

The potential for disenfranchisement is very real in the upcoming presidential vote. The pandemic has given experts real concern that a poorly administered election could see thousands who want to vote essentially denied the right to do so. With that, seeds of distrust will be sown in the outcome. Just this week, Trump tweeted: “RIGGED ELECTION 2020: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”

“I am most worried in places that have had the lowest levels of mail voting, where the election officials are least prepared, where they don’t have the resources and where the rules are also hotly contested. So, states like Wisconsin, states like Georgia, where the political culture has been voting in person, there have been a lot of fights over voting access, where the rules need a lot of adjustment in order to have fair access to mail voting,” Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center told me.

Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in legal battles in various states over the rules that will govern November’s election, which could largely take place by mail. It is a fractured process and the types of cases litigated cover mail ballot deadlines, early voting access, ballot collection, prepaid postage and a host of other issues. So many separate litigations are underway that each side has their own website with clickable maps showing what fight is happening in each state. “Across the country we’ve seen Democrats under the guise of [the] COVID-19 crisis in a wholesale way try to change the election to fit their election agenda items that have existed long before this crisis,” RNC Chair McDaniel said. “We believe that many of the lawsuits they have initiated would destroy the integrity of our elections, so we’re fighting back.”

One complication of mail-in ballots could arise during their validation, which often requires a signature. Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center told me that young and Black voters tend to experience higher rates of ballot rejection based on that requirement. “Young people and minorities are less likely to have a signature on file with the state,” he said. Plus, young people might have not developed a good cursive signature, and there might be an implicit bias on the part of poll workers if an African American or Hispanic name is less familiar to them. Marc Elias, who got his start as a recount lawyer and is now directing the Democrats’ broad expanse of election-related litigation, told me that differential rejection rates on ballot signatures “has always been the silent epidemic of American voting.” The COVID-19 pandemic just helped make more people aware of it.

Von Spakovsky, for his part, told me that concerns for voting in person were overblown this year. “I think you can safely hold an election under these circumstances,” he said, pointing to the precautions taken in places like grocery stores, as well as for a recent election in South Korea.

But not all Republicans share that sentiment. “I think our messaging is all wrong, frankly,” Barbour said. There are legitimate concerns being expressed by Republicans over a largely vote-by-mail election, he said. But in the midst of a pandemic, people’s fears of infection should be taken into account. “Forget the political angle, eligible voters must be able to vote.”

Some Republicans do try to intimidate people at the voting booth, Barbour said. He recounted his own experience in the 2014 primary race between Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel.

“There was this runoff — we knew we were probably going to lose if we didn’t treat it like a general election,” he said of the Cochran campaign. They courted all voters, Black, white, and Democratic. “People were furious. ‘How dare y’all?’” Barbour said of the reaction to the strategy. “All these people came out from Georgia, saying, ‘We’re going to be at these polling places, and if you show up, you’re not going to be able to vote.’ I will say, as a Republican, I was embarrassed.”

“I kind of got a taste of what it’s like to be on the other side, seeing that happen, and I found it offensive and clearly wrong.”

TGCF Story Arcs: Least to Most Favorite Part 1/3

Part 2

Important Disclaimer: I'm yet another white, Western, woman writing about a Chinese story, written by a Chinese woman, and using Chinese themes and tropes. If my opinions: are based on mistranslations in the English text, ignore important cultural relevance, or in other ways are racially and culturally insensitive, I WILL listen and do my best to understand/make amendments. Take any and all with a grain of salt. However, this is all my personal opinion. Disagree, agree, I don’t mind. I’ll delete on sight any rude or ad hominem attacks in my inbox. 么么哒, darlings.😘😘😘

With that in mind, here's my way too long-winded opinion on the Tian Guan Ci Fu story arcs, broken down into 10 and using the help of https://winkblooteatime.wordpress.com/2020/08/13/tgcf-extensive-timeline/ )

#10. fetus spirit... everything. Firstly, I dislike this because there's yet another... questionably respected female character in the middle of this. mxtx has a huge problem with writing relatable or likeable female characters. (I purposefully love all of them without restraint. Yes, even you Xuan Ji, you crazy bastard. One day you'll realize PM sucks and date a woman who respects your work ethic and devotion.) Jian Lan (Lan Chang) was utterly shafted by the narrative. She was a royal concubine, proud and clever, who fell in love with a really good guy. Then, she pushed her love away for his sake, only to die horribly and lose the baby she was desperate to keep in his name. And then she spent all of her ghostly afterlife being a prostitute and searching for?? mourning?? her lost baby. Her story arc ends... bittersweet. She regains her dignity? and baby, but does not get the happy ending with the man she loved/loves. Because... well, she's a "gross ghost lady with a gross ghost baby", doncha know, she'd just drag his beautiful heavenly self down. She deserves some dignity and he deserves... his job?? She and Feng Xin don't even have a heartfelt moment to discuss this as two adults who have suffered and missed each other FOR CENTURIES. w.t.f. LanXin deserved better than this, and so did Cuocuo. Speaking of.

The fetus, Cuocuo, was portrayed as GRUESOMELY as possible. In fact, all children or childlike characters in tgcf, had terrible fucking stories. Leave the Babies Alone, mxtx! The main issue is that the suffering and pain and TERRIBLE of this poor wretched broken family dragged on and on and on and on ad nauseam. Cuocuo was used by the main villain for the villain's own selfish ends. He constantly ran away from a mother that adored him and, by the end, was barely bonded with her except through violence (constantly biting and tearing at her). There's a good chance that's just how he'll be until he... I dunno gets exorcised? He was born in violence and blood, and he exists in violence and blood. And that is a TERRIBLE theme. Very reminiscent of the idea that Tom Riddle could never feel love because he was a child of rape. That's awful. Children shouldn't bear the scars of their parents mistakes or choices in ways that irrevocably change them into evil creatures?! But Cuocuo only EXISTS to be a symbol of violence and suffering!!

He also never has a resolution with his father. His father that tried, just once, near the end, to act like a true father. But was interrupted and there was no time to continue it. You know, until the end, when he should've run after Lan Jian and Cuocuo. XIE LIAN IS DATING A SUPREME GHOST KING, WHYTF CAN'T FENG XIN BE WITH THE ONLY WOMAN HE'S EVER LOVED AND HELP THE SON HE NEVER KNEW EXISTED AND WAS USED AS A WEAPON AGAINST THEM?!?

I just. /sigh/ everything about this arc makes me SAD and MAD. For all three of them. This family deserved better, even if they couldn't have that perfect "hetero ideal", they deserved a resolution between them. Honest communication and respect. Instead of... Feng Xin conveniently being absent from the scene as Jian Lan and CuoCuo sneak away. I love Feng Xin, he's one of my favorite characters by the end. He deserved to be happy with his family. He deserved love and devotion and he deserved to grow as a person by finding happiness in his own life, rather than shadowing the steps of his former master. /sigh/ (I'm not saying that because "everyone should be paired up at the end", I'm saying that because he loved her so much that he was torn between her and his duty to Xie Lian. No other woman or man ever came close to dividing his loyalties. Which means he wants and deserves love. He's not ace or aro, and that romantic relationship would've made him happy.)

9. Cannibal Lair: Look, I'm saying it. I hate Qi Rong. He has all of Jin Ling's bad traits (from cql/mdzs), and none of his good. I think a lot of what happens and is found out is important in this arc. Xie Lian deserved to be absolved of the guilt he carried, whatever he said, and LQQ deserved to know the truth of what happened to his family. However, every scene Qi Rong is in makes my face grimace automatically. He talks in all caps, in all curse words, while spouting lies and nonsense and "woe is me why don't you treat me better" teenager angst even 800 years later. while eating people. EATING PEOPLE. and threatening a child's life and later using the child's father's body as a shield. Cannibal Lair is good for plot and I like the prison breakout Hua Cheng conducted. Very flair. Much hero. so sexy😏😏

8. Final Arc: Yeah... that's not a typo. I think this story should've ended a lot sooner after the major climax(es?) of Mt Tong'lu, which was PERFECT AND AMAZING AND BREATHTAKING. *ahem*

In CQL (and mdzs, though I only know this from my friend who read it), and TGCF, mxtx has a problem with... climaxes. She gets to the HEIGHT of the story, everything is EXCITING and WILD and plot twist after perfectly timed plot twist and and and- it stops. and.... the rest of the climax drags on into unending exposition. Villain monologues, extra characters filling in missing pieces awkwardly and clunkily, main couple interrupting the flow with heartfelt confessions.(Though this was timed better in tgcf, thankfully!) She writes out every little detail and plot point and backstory that we haven't seen yet in painstakingly long dialogues that utterly destroyed the flow and pace of the story. mxtx, you had a perfectly good climax...

you just left it behind about 500 pages ago. wateryoodoingnooooooo

THE 2020 ELECTION

Again, everyone and their gerbil is chiming in about the upcoming election, so I figure I should join in, too. Before continuing, you should know I haven't been studying anyone else's reasoning for which candidate they'll support. What I'm writing now is something I've been planning on doing for several weeks. So enough with the preliminaries, let me come right out with it.

I'll be voting for Trump and Pence this election. As I've said before, there are some of Trump's tweets that makes me wince, and certain public spats he gets involved in which I sometimes find completely unnecessary. But it's my opinion that the Trump/Pence ticket is the best choice for America at this point in time.

I suppose I could focus on the positive things Trump has done and act as a cheerleader for his campaign. But there are people who get paid to do that. And besides, you can look all that up for yourself (although you may have to do some digging, considering how the mainstream media hardly talk about it). But right now I'm going to mostly focus on something else, on why I can't vote for the Democrats.

First of all, it took far too long for the Biden campaign to denounce the violent protests that occurred throughout America over the past summer. In fact, some of Biden's staffers even chipped in to provide bail for the destructive anarchists who were causing the damage. So that makes me seriously wonder about their commitment to peace and whether their campaign will engage in machiavellian tendencies to anarchy, which you know I can't support.

If you're concerned about censorship in social media or in other aspects of life, then you may want to reconsider supporting a Democrat in the 2020 election. If you recall, the tech companies who have been engaging in censorship of conservative content or content that could potentially harm Democrat candidates are the same ones who were nearly brought to tears when Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016. They've made no secret of their support for left-leaning causes and candidates, and if Biden & Harris are elected, I suspect dissidents and people with what they consider the "wrong ideas" will likely experience censorship on a more widespread level. I heard a report that the Biden campaign actually requested that Facebook begin to censor the Trump campaign. And remember, the left is the party that in some quarters declared that "speech is violence" and actively engaged in silencing speakers (sometimes violently) on American campuses. Freedom of speech is a bedrock of America. If you value it, then you should really stop and consider which candidates will fight for it and which ones will casually erode our treasured freedoms without even batting an eye.

I cannot support the left's abhorrent disregard for human life and I can never forget Governor Northam's talk about keeping a newborn baby "comfortable" while the parents gibly decide whether to keep it alive or not. Infanticide is still infanticide no matter how you may describe it. Many Democrats support unlimited abortion (or infanticide) for any reason, and I can't embrace that. And as for the thousands of elderly coronavirus deaths from nursing homes in Democrat-run states, that's an issue for another day that deserves its very own post.

The left has repeatedly made clear their disdain for people of faith. Just look at how Democrats treated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing in 2019 and how they treated Amy Coney Barrett during her previous confirmation. Take some time and do research on how many companies & organizations besides Amazon follow the Southern Poverty Law Center's guidelines for charity giving, etc. According to them and others, many faith-based organizations are considered some kind of threat to society for simply believing (as I do) that marriage is defined as a relationship between a man and a woman. And does anyone remember how some Democrat localities and states treated churches & people who tried to attend services during the pandemic? It's just a hunch, but I have a feeling that would likely continue and possibly increase under a potential Democrat administration.

I know there are some Republicans who pay lip service to faith, if only just to gain votes. And I'm not terribly concerned about either the right or the left trying to stamp out people of faith. God is sovereign and He's in control of it all, not them. Christianity & Judaism have persevered for centuries despite severe persecution at times. God's kingdom is the rock from the vision of the book of Daniel, the heavenly kingdom that will supersede and outlast all earthly kingdoms. I speak out for freedom of religion because I don't want to see America become another communist China or socialist Venezuela where both Muslims & Christians alike are targeted for what they believe.

This not-so-recent behavior of the left to attempt to change the rules if you don't like how something turns out is another reason why I can't vote Democrat this election. Look, I'm not naïve enough to believe that Democrats are the only ones who are willing to do this. Republicans have likely also been guilty of this in terms of redistricting of voter precincts, etc. But I'm just a bit astounded (and not astounded) by the fact that Nancy Pelosi & others have proposed creating an oversight committee to decide any President's fitness for leadership, and by the various calls from the left to literally pack the Supreme Court by adding more than nine judges (and likely potentially left-leaning judges). Presidents are decided by the public & the electoral college, not by a Congressional committee & unelected board members, and the Supreme Court isn't meant to be some kind of factory for churning out legislation. They're there to evaluate laws, not make them.

And I know I'm being long-winded here, but if you would just bear with me for just a little more. The progressive left have made it public that electing Joe Biden is "a doorway to a destination". In other words, Biden isn't liberal enough for them, and if he is elected, they'll push to enact their own aggresively liberal agenda in all of its toxic forms. In my opinion, there are too many far-left liberals in all aspects of government already who have done lasting damage to America. Do you really think Lt. Col. Vindman is the only liberal in the military who strives to advance their own agenda at the expense of the country? What could have been if Lt. Col. Vindman & the Democrats in Congress had chosen to focus on preparing for this pandemic instead of spending time on an unnecessary impeachment in November & December of 2019? And do you really think Sheriff Scott Israel is the only liberal in law enforcement who would rather talk about gun control instead of focusing on the real causes & other potential solutions to society's problems? I know there are good people who work in government, but I've seen others who have become nearly psychotic in their pursuit of baseless investigations and mindless causes, so much so that I'm truly concerned about our national & local security with some of these types of people in charge. And heaven help us if green new deal subjects like cow flatulence become a top priority for America in 2021 and beyond.

Unfortunately, many of these people, or liberal activists to be more accurate, can't be voted out. But that's why I'm voting for Trump & Pence this election. I believe they're the best chance we have for addressing the problems & excesses of unelected bureacrats in government. I know that Republicans sometimes give a free-pass to certain organizations. And I realize that conservatism doesn't always equal Christianity. Sometimes they do a disservice to America's other immigrants by lumping the bad ones with the good ones. The Bible says to lookout for the alien or immigrant (...but I agree with Republicans that doesn't mean open borders or being lax on immigrants who have committed heinous crimes.) And sometimes conservatives become far too chummy with corporations at the expense of the common people, when they should be fighting injustice wherever it's found. But this is how I'll be voting in this election. Of course there are some local Republicans I still can't support, and if the Republican party ever veers off into a completely crazy zone, I'll drop my support. I'm not bound to one party or the other.

And I hope you'll take what I've written today and evaluate it for yourself. Don't let me or anyone else do your thinking for you. Do your own homework, look at the issues, and cast your vote. Future generations will thank you for it.

Since I’m getting at least one reply-via-comment which actually kind of needs a longer reply, here’s a post for it:

The only bad thing Trump has done which is actually new is to announce policies on Twitter. (And even that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although it is the way he does it, without talking to anybody first.) There is nothing in his record, otherwise, which was not at least strongly foreshadowed in the the previous two administrations.

I’m a lot older than the average Tumblr user — I can remember the Reagan years — and I can tell you that all of this bullshit we are facing from Trump has its roots not just in Republican pushing to the right but in Democratic refusal to push back. And Biden didn’t just refuse to push back, he was worse than many Republicans and is directly responsible for a lot of our current problems, in a demonstrable way. (The crime bill he let the police write in 1994, the bankruptcy bill of 2005, the scuttling of Anita Hill to get another right-wing Supreme Court justice, etc.) He isn’t “the lesser of two evils”, he is genuinely as bad as Trump, but less personally obnoxious.

You know the voter suppression the Democrats are now complaining about? That was a major topic in the news back around 2004. The Democrats knew it was happening, they took Congress in 2006 and did nothing about it. They added the Presidency to their control in 2008 and still did nothing. (And the reason they did nothing, it has been more than hinted, is because the right-of-center crooks in the party like Joe Manchin, who reliably votes for Republican causes — remember the Kavanaugh confirmation? — and is deeply involved in the unreasonably high price of things like insulin, can only stay in office by using the same tactics.)

Police brutality? Nearly all those riots are against police in cities with Democratic mayors, usually in states with Democratic governors as well. Minneapolis? Democratic mayor, Democratic governor. Chicago? Democratic mayor, Democratic governor. Portland? Democratic mayor, Democratic governor. New York?… you get the idea. The Democrats not only are not interested in addressing the problem, they are actively giving the orders to carry out police brutality.

DHS and ICE? The Democrats not only went for those, but the 2016 and prospective 2020 nominees supported it. (Hell, Biden helped Obama oversee an expansion of ICE, and the renewal of all the contracts for the people running detention centers who had already caused lawsuits because they were already treating immigrants as badly as Trump does.)

The Democrats spent the Obama years desperately trying to avoid taking action. Have you noticed that the Republicans don’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but they’re still passing bills? Under Obama, the lack of a 60-vote supermajority was used as an excuse to avoid even introducing any bills to address issues. No matter how critical the issue was or how much support the public showed for it — and if you’ve forgotten, when Obama took office, over ninety percent of the public was in favor of breaking up the Too Big To Fail banks and smacking down Wall Street for the 2008 meltdown; even 90% of Republicans wanted him to do it — the Democrats deliberately avoided even trying to fix anything.

And now, when Trump has demonstrated that everything the Republican Party stands for is just outright wrong, to such a degree that anybody with an IQ above single digits can’t deny it without also ludicrously insisting that nearly the entire world is involved in a conspiracy, the party has insisted on nominating the furthest-right member it has, a man who has deliberately sabotaged the public through his entire career, and refuses to even make a symbolic stand in their platform.

Why bother voting for them? If the Democrats win we will still get Republican policy — we just won’t get it with Trump’s rudeness; it will happen “naturally”, without any opposition except a token show from the Republicans because they automatically fight anything the Democrats do, even when it’s their own ideas being put into action. (NAFTA and the ACA, for example, were both originally Republican plans, which right-of-center Democrats took up and sold to the idiots in the Democratic base as great ideas. NAFTA was a Republican idea under Reagan, specifically to bust unions, and the ACA was originally a plan from a right-wing think tank as an example of how you could avoid universal healthcare.) We won’t even save the Supreme Court — Biden is the guy who gave us Clarence Thomas, the furthest-right current member, by sabotaging the resistance to him. A vote for a Democrat is a wasted vote. Moreso than voting third-party knowing you will lose. At least with a third party, you stand some tiny, remote chance of getting somebody into office who will try to solve problems; the Democrats have now made it official that they will not even try, because they are so afraid of offending the rich.

Fuck ’em all. And fuck absolutely anybody who says “Blue No Matter Who” unironically — you are the toxin which has rotted the party and made it worthless. The US is a hellscape because you were willing to support godawful candidates on the basis of partisanship.

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What the Ginni Thomas text furor warns about an outsize role of faith in politics - Michael Gerson in the Washington Post via /r/atheism

What the Ginni Thomas text furor warns about an outsize role of faith in politics - Michael Gerson in the Washington Post

Among the many disturbing revelations in the post-2020-election text-message correspondence between Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is their tone of religious certainty.

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” wrote Meadows. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing.” In another, Thomas threatens: "You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all.”

There is an air of absurdity in attributing a win to God only when Donald Trump is victorious. But Thomas and Meadows were deadly earnest. It is not enough to exercise power in their attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. Their efforts must be covered in a thick goo of spirituality. The conspirators believed they were doing God’s work. But really, they were attempting to make the Creator of the universe into a partisan hack who favored their (half-baked) political ambitions. In the process, they demonstrated the manifold dangers of the religious impulse in the public realm.

Some of the problem is simple hypocrisy. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, Thomas wrote an apology of sorts to her husband’s former clerks. “I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions,” she explained in an email. This month, she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon that “a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability.”

In her texts with Meadows, however, we see a significantly different attitude toward democratic dissent. Thomas passed along a report that had circulated on right-wing websites that the “Biden crime family” and “ballot fraud co-conspirators” were being arrested and sent to barges floating off Guantánamo Bay for eventual judgment by military tribunals. “I hope this is true,” she added.

It might be difficult to conduct rational debate above the din of waves near Gitmo. But given another sentiment Thomas passed along, it is probably not necessary. “The most important thing you can realize right now,” the text read, “is that there are no rules in war.” This was Thomas’s Christian contribution near the center of a political crisis fraught with threats of violence: “There are no rules.”

If not rules here, there might be some lessons to be taken from the Thomas-Meadows exchanges. They illustrate many of the reasons that people — including religious people — get disturbed by an outsize role of faith in politics.

· The Christianization of politics makes people in a democracy less persuadable. It is more difficult to question your cause if you regard it as a holy cause. And it becomes harder to see any glimmer of truth in your opponents’ views.

· A religious certainty on uncertain matters can blind people to difficult and complex debates. Look how conservative religion has encouraged, of all things, skepticism about vaccines. It is the deification of ignorance.

· Religious passion in politics can easily become tribal, as opponents are transformed into infidels. And this can provide an opening for racism and antisemitism.

· Religious passion can lower the standards to which we hold leaders, since the only real political choice is between a favorable strongman and the social abyss. This can reveal and encourage a dangerous authoritarian streak.

· Religious passion in politics can encourage an apocalyptic tone that drives out real deliberation. (To Thomas, we were seeing “the end of America… the end of Liberty.”)

I say all this as a religious person. I say all this because I am a religious person. I believe that religion can raise the moral sights of politics (see the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) and root our belief in human dignity. But it is the very power of religious conviction that can make people co-opt it with their own passions and beliefs. Instead of being judged and challenged by the best of their faith, they use their faith to judge others. And they move closer and closer toward blasphemy.

The Christian writer and lay theologian C.S. Lewis wrote: “I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. … The inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust for power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.”

The rest of the essay is available at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/28/ginni-thomas-text-messages-religion-dangerous-role-public-life/

Submitted March 29, 2022 at 06:50PM by the_y_of_the_tiger (From Reddit https://ift.tt/sI2ZtEd)

Seattle Community Police Commission indicates it has abandoned police accountability

October 5, 2021 -- During the regular semimonthly September 15, 2021 Seattle Community Police Commission's (CPC) meeting, two commissioners indicated that police accountability was not something they either expected or demanded of the SPD, or of the entities created in Seattle for police accountability. This stunning revelation was made in comments by two commissioners, without any other commissioner objecting or responding to these comments.

There are three parts to the City of Seattle police accountability system that are, supposedly, independent of the SPD: the CPC (the voice of the community and the body critiquing and creating new policies), the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA, the city department responsible for investigating complaints and misconduct), and the Office of Inspector General (OIG, the city department responsible for making sure the OPA does its job and for identifying systemic dysfunction).

Below I detail what is captured on the video recording of the September 15, 2021 CPC meeting.

In summary, two commissioners admitted that no part of the existing Seattle police accountability structure will hold police accountable for the misconduct, harms, and killings committed by the Seattle police over the last few years. In fact, these commissioners suggest that in the case of one specific police killing, as noted in my public comment (the SPD killing of Iosia Faletogo), that a past community centered process and a future inquest by King County are the routes by which accountability and justice might be served in some manner. Both of the processes that the CPC commissioners note are completely independent of any City of Seattle agency, process, or law. This is a de facto admission that justice and accountability, if they are found anywhere, will be found outside the City of Seattle.

This admission by the CPC is not unusual when one considers that during the August 10, 2021 Federal Court hearing (on the ongoing US Department of Justice federal consent decree to reform the SPD) the CPC requested that the court do their job for them, appealing to the powers of the court and bureaucrats instead of the community. The CPC has always been playing an insider game, hoping to curry favor with those in power and with the SPD, ignoring the community and instead embracing fealty to power. The CPC preserves its status, money, and false sense of power by occasionally playing the victim.

Below are the specifics, with transcripts, audio, and video recordings provided to substantiate my claims and provide full context.

My public comment at the September 15th meeting elicits the revelation

During public comment at the September 15 meeting I said:

“In November of 2019 the CPC listened to [Office of Police Accountability Director] Andrew Myerberg explain how the SPD execution of Iosia Faletogo was ‘Lawful and Proper,’ with no commissioner questioning this conclusion and no commissioner having read the [Office of Police Accountability] OPA report. In February of 2020 Myerberg released his report on the SPD murder of Ryan Smith, again declaring it "Lawful and Proper," though this time the CPC didn't even bother with the charade of considering the investigation. Then, at your last meeting the CPC once more listened to Myerberg present his findings in the investigation into the SPD murder of Terry Caver [go to time mark 00:15:05], once again declaring it "Lawful and Proper," and even going so far as to declare that Caver made choices and decisions that led to his death.

These egregious miscarriages of justice were approved of by the CPC through either your complete silence or your failure to ask any probing questions.”

(My comment occurs at time mark 00:17:15 to 00:19:14 in this video recording of the meeting. There is no audio because I am both speaking and recording -- the closed caption option will provide a transcription.)

After my and one other person’s public comment, CPC Executive Director Brandy Grant responded by saying, in part:

"I just want to make sure you know as the ED, I ask that, I'm hoping, with great clarity, that when people quote us or discuss things that the CPC is doing that, you know, I really implore you all to make sure that you're quoting us in our entirety and being clear and transparent about all of the pieces that you are referencing"  (comment at time mark 00:21:21 in this video recording of the meeting)

As can be seen from my above comment, and the comments made on September 1, 2021 by ED Brant (see time mark 0:09:31 on this video), my comments are accurately sourced and as fully contextualized as possible in the two minutes I am allowed to speak. Grant is attempting to deflect criticism by arbitrarily claiming it is out of context.

Response to my public comment by two CPC commissioners reveals their abandonment of accountability from the SPD or the city

In response to my above noted public comment at the September 15th meeting, CPC Commissioner (since July 2018) Joseph Seia said (transcribed in full with most filler sounds removed and emphasis added):

“Yeah, I mean I'll reiterate what you're saying ED Brandy. Yeah, to Dr. Gale, about the lack of response around the Iosia Faletogo, I mean that's just to me like not an honest statement or comments because our community, the Pacific Island community, was very much activated at the front of that process, walked our community through the process, supported the family as they were looking for social and support, uh, you know, due to Iosia’s um uh killing, and also after the process, when the findings were presented to our Pacific Islander community. So I just I wanna reiterate that, you know, if we're gonna bring up issues, that we acknowledge that there's work being done in communities of color that you might not be involved in and and to please respect that. Thank you.”  (comment at time mark 00:22:41 in this video recording of the meeting)

Note that no part of my September 15th public comment referenced people, organizations, or communities outside of the CPC or the formal City of Seattle police accountability structures (OPA and OIG).

CPC Commissioner (since the CPC started in 2013) Rev. Harriett Walden responded to my comment and Seia’s by stating (transcribed in full with most filler sounds removed and emphasis added):

“I just wanted to, I actually echo, I echo Joseph, because I, we, it was a lot of, a lot that was going on, and it was in that, in that community, with great respect, and I really want to thank Joseph for his leadership on that, on that. And also we did have questions about that shooting. I mean, I know that the partners meet all the time and that was one of the shootings that I've had lots of questions about. And of course the inquest process is still going to happen, I mean because, I mean the final say is not here. I mean, because the new inquest process it's going to be a lot different going forward. I mean, and Mr. Gale might be aware of the new inquest process, that there was a nine to zero ruling on the supreme court to go forward that will give the families, like the Faletogo families, be able to have greater access in this process. They'll have, they'll have their, they'll have representation, unlike the old inquest that family will have representation, they'll have, they'll have an attorney, new information will be able to be presented. In the past it was no new information, the family's attorney had to absolutely just just questioned what was already presented by the Seattle Police Department attorneys. This is a new day here in Seattle in King County with this new ruling and, so no matter what this other finding was, it's not the final finding. And now let's be clear about that, and maybe we could have, have a, you know, some findings, have a presentation about what the new inquest process mean to Charleena Lyles’ family, all of these families. It's not over, yet that other process, and we might have some attorneys on the line, or other people, who who can speak to this, but it's not over yet, and that for it infers that it's over, but there's another level and we don't know down the road these same officers, even if they've gone to another department, we don't know, but they could still be held liable for the deaths for that shooting, see.”  (comment at time mark 00:23:43 in this video recording of the meeting)

CPC commissioners have formal roles, as part of their regular paid employment and often in leadership positions, in community organizations outside of the CPC. I have never questioned or commented on those roles. The question here is not what CPC commissioners have done as either individuals outside of the CPC or as representatives for these other community organizations. We hold our Washington state legislators responsible for the legislation they craft and for the way they vote, and they do not get a free pass because they somehow do good work in their day jobs outside of the legislature.

The fact remains that, as a body, the CPC failed to properly review, publicly weigh in on, or promulgate policy changes in response to, the Faletogo killing almost three years ago.

The CPC, for over eight years, has always pushed back on it’s almost total lack of meaningful response to the 26 SPD related killings since the CPC started meeting by claiming that they are prohibited by both federal court order and the 2017 Seattle police accountability ordinance from commenting on these cases. I discuss the defensive absurdity of this position here, but it is worth noting, at a minimum, the CPC could convene a public forum (which they are required to do by law and have failed to do so for all except two of their nine years) where these cases could be publicly discussed and the problems with both the killings and the investigations could be made public.

It is the statement made by CPC commissioner Walden, and the total lack of response from any other commissioner, that accurately indicates the CPC’s abandonment of Seattle based police accountability: “This is a new day here in Seattle in King County with this new ruling and, so no matter what this other finding was, it's not the final finding.” This is a Hail Mary pass by the CPC to players that are not only not part of the City of Seattle police accountability system, but are players who are not even a part of the city. It’s as if the Hail Mary pass was thrown into the stands of another stadium.

For the CPC to place its hopes on a non-City of Seattle process, of uncertain outcome which, under the best of circumstances, cannot levy any criminal indictments or punishments, seems to be the final indication that, in its ninth year of failing to reign in SPD abuses, the CPC has truly given up, without the ability to be transparent about admitting that to the public.

What Do Republicans Think About Healthcare

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-do-republicans-think-about-healthcare/

What Do Republicans Think About Healthcare

Republicans On The Affordable Care Act

Warren Buffett says GOP health reform bills are relief for the rich

In the 2012 Republican Part Platform, Republicans spoke out against the Affordable Care Act, stating that the Democrats used it more as an assertion of power than they used it to improve health care conditions in this country, and in doing so they detrimentally damaged the health of this nation. The Republican Party views the requirement for United States citizens to purchase health insurance as an attack on the Constitution. They believe that the financial burden it would bring upon the country, and specifically on individual states, through the expansion of Medicaid is unsustainable, and will harm the nation as a whole. The act was so firmly opposed by the Republican Party that not a single Republican voted for the final version that Obama signed into law.

Obamacare Repeal Requires Replacement After 2016 Election

Republicans had spent eight years trashing the Democratic health care overhaul, but now that they were in power, they ran up against the same political winds that forced ObamaCare tolook like such a political Frankenstein’s monster to begin with. Conservatives wanted a complete and total repeal of the law; moderative Republicans wanted to protect certain pieces of it.

Do Americans Like Socialism

In a list of ten ideologies;YouGov;put to Americans, socialism ranked fifth in terms of favorability. Three in ten Americans have a favorable view of socialism, while 47% do not. Another 13% arent sure, and 10% dont know what the term means in the first place.;

Least;favorable;are totalitarianism , fascism and authoritarianism .;

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the popularity;of self-proclaimed;democratic socialist Bernie Sanders,;Democrats take a more;favorable;view of socialism, and Republicans less so. Half of Democrats have a;favorable;view, while just over a quarter;;have an;unfavorable;one. Among Republicans,;11% have a;favorable;view and 75% an;unfavorable;one.;

Don’t Miss: Why Is There Republicans And Democrats

Nbc News/commonwealth Fund Health Care Poll

Three in 10 likely voters are worried about being able to afford health insurance and costs for prescription drugs and other health care over the next year; among most worried are Democrats, blacks, Hispanics, and people earning under $50,000

Nearly 80 percent of likely voters believe reducing health care costs should be a high priority for the next president

Three in 10 likely voters are worried about being able to afford health insurance and costs for prescription drugs and other health care over the next year; among most worried are Democrats, blacks, Hispanics, and people earning under $50,000

Nearly 80 percent of likely voters believe reducing health care costs should be a high priority for the next president

Press Release

In next weeks Super Tuesday primaries, voters in 14 states and American Samoa will cast their ballots for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. Health care has emerged as one of the top issues in the 2020 election, at times dominating the Democratic presidential debates.

Controlling Drug Prices Top Issue For Republicans

Controlling drug prices is a top health care priority of the Trump administration, says James C.

Capretta, a resident fellow and the Milton Friedman Chair at the right-leaning think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. In the healthcare sphere, drug pricing would be number one, he said. Then other issues, such as price transparency and health reimbursement accounts, would follow behind that.

If Trump wins re-election and the Republicans control at least the U.S. Senate, then its safe to say that past will be prologue for 2021 if not longer, Capretta observes.

The agenda for Republicans is almost certainly going to remain as it has been since 2017, he notes. By that I mean there will be a focus on administrative action related to loosening regulations.

If there is a second Trump administration, executive orders and administrative changes are likely to be the main tools of its healthcare policies because Democrats are expected to retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives regardless of how the presidential vote turns out and whether the Republicans keep their current 53-47 hold on the Senate.

The idea of any kind of Trump legislative initiatives making it through the Congress seems quite remote, Capretta continues. Moreover, I don’t think they have a legislative health agenda that they would be ready and wanting to push as a priority.

Recommended Reading: Who Won More Democrats Or Republicans

Republicans And Democrats Think With Different Parts Of Their Brains

American liberals and conservatives use different parts of their brains when assessing risks, a new study finds.

A new study says that the brains of American Democrats and Republicans are wired differently, and that they use entirely different sections when making risky decisions.

Let the debates commence.

Liberals show a higher level of activity in the left insula, a portion of the brain associated with self-awareness, social cues, addiction, emotional processing, empathy, and even orgasms .

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to weigh risk in the right amygdala, an area of the brain that aids in survival, including reacting to violations of personal space and controlling social interaction, fear, and aggression .

These conclusions were drawn from a study of 82 people performed by political scientists and neuroscientists at the University of Exeter and the University of California, San Diego. The study was published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

George W Bush On Health Care

During his time in office, George W. Bush advocated for HIV/AIDS relief, HIV prevention, and abstinence-only education. He implemented the ABC method of HIV prevention . He also worked towards HIV relief and prevention through efforts that emphasized regular testing, early diagnosis, ongoing monitoring, and the elimination of HIV/AIDS in newborns. He also increased the amount spent on abstinence-only education. Bush also restricted federal funding for stem cell research and created a ban on human cloning and the creation of human embryos that were solely for experimental purposes. During his time in office, he also restored a policy that banned the use of controlled substances for assisted suicide.

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Trump And Republican Health Care Reform: The Republicans’ Irrational Opposition To Medicaid

President Trump and almost all Congressional Republicans have consistently opposed Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

Their opposition is irrational.

It is also unpopular with voters. In dark red states like Nebraska, Idaho and Utah voters recently went over the heads of their Republican legislators and governors by approving referendums to expand the program. And, Kansas is about to become the 37th state to expand Medicaid under Obamacare after a bipartisan agreement between the Democratic governor and Republican leaders in the legislature.

While Obamacare’s individual health insurance reforms and subsidies have been a disaster for the middle class , the Medicaid expansion in the states that have approved it has covered millions of people that would never have been covered otherwiseat a cost that could never have been less.

Republican opposition has centered around a number of arguments. Let’s take a look at each of them.

We can’t afford such a massive expansion of the welfare state and the impact that would have on deficit spending.

Our rapidly exploding deficits are a big issue we seem to have recently forgotten about.

But blowing up the deficit over health care didn’t bother Congressional Republicans in 2003 when they created the Medicare Part D drug benefit and didn’t pay for it adding $700 billion to the deficit over the following ten years . But that unpaid-for entitlement expansion helped a big Republican constituencyseniors.

Why Do Republicans Oppose Obamacare

Why Do Republicans Think Socialists Are Anti-Gun?

Patrizia Rizzo, SEO Reporter

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REPUBLICANS have campaigned against Obamacare ever since it was signed into law in 2010.;

But with a change in presidency ahead, the Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including;key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Also Check: Who Raises Taxes More Democrats Or Republicans

Challenges Under The Affordable Care Act

Also known as Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010. The measure was an attempt by former President Obama to give every American access to affordable health insurance. At the time, 39 Democrats and 178 House Republicans voted against the ACA. The remaining 218 Democrats in the House voted for the ACA. The Senate passed the ACA with a 68-30 vote, with 68 Democrats and two Independents voting yea and 39 Republicans voting nay. The party-line vote exposed the ideological differences between the two sides on healthcare.

Despite widespread support among Democrats for the ACA, Obamacare has not lived up to some of its hype, and even those on the left agree that the law hasnt accomplished its full potential over the last seven years.

Here are some of the challenges that Obamacare faced:

Many Americans found it difficult to understand why the law required them to acquire insurance or face a fine. To further compound the problem, most people did not understand how the law imposed the fine. Plenty of taxpayers were surprised when they got charged an additional fee during tax time.

Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare

The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.

The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.

Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.

A decision is expected by late spring.

Also Check: Are There Any Republicans Running Against Donald Trump

Obama And Trump Healthcare Policies Compared

There could not be a more radical divide between administrations than there is between these two. The Obama administration worked against almost insurmountable opposition from the GOP in order to pass the ACA. The Trump Administrations quest is to dismantle everything the Obama Administration has done. They even have court cases pending in order to do so.

Republicans Have A Health Plan Finally

The House Republican Study Committee has come out with a viable plan.

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For the past ten years Republicans in Congress have been largely AWOL on health care.

If memory serves, there has never been a hearing to showcase the victims of Obamacare. Nor has there been a hearing to show how sensible reforms could make the lives of those victims better.

When it came to legislation, the GOP only had two ideas: either abolish Obamacare entirely or toss it to the states. Neither approach actually solved a health care problem. They just allowed Republicans in Washington to wash their hands of the issue and pass the problems along to someone else.

Until now.

The House Republican Study Committee has accepted the challenge and delivered. In a 68-page document, it identifies the worse problems in our health care system and shows how they can be solved.

The proposals are bold, impactful and easy to understand. Here is a quick summary.

Personal and portable health insurance. In an ideal world, if people like the insurance they get from an employer, they would be able to take it with them from job to job and in and out of the labor market. Under the Obama administration, this practice was not only illegal, employers who bought individually owned insurance for their employees faced huge fines.

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Religion And The Belief In God Is Vital To A Strong Nation

Republicans are generally accepting only of the Judeo-Christian belief system. For most Republicans, religion is absolutely vital in their political beliefs and the two cannot be separated. Therefore, separation of church and state is not that important to them. In fact, they believe that much of what is wrong has been caused by too much secularism.

Those are the four basic Republican tenets: small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority. Below are other things they believe that derive from those four ideas.

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Despite what they say on television about protecting the most vulnerable, one by one the Republican senators are all getting in line behind Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. We don’t yet know who that is, but we can assume how he or she will vote on Obamacare.

People with pre-existing conditions like me are again terrified of losing our insurance, this time in the midst of a pandemic. We’ve lived through years of scary uncertainty and now months of sheltering in place. Enough is enough. We are all health care voters now. We’ll see whether our wavering senators are health care voters, too.

Laura Packard is a Denver-based health care advocate and cancer survivor. She is the founder of Health Care Voices, a non-profit grassroots organization for adults with serious medical conditions, co-chair of Health Care Voter, and runs the pharma accountability campaign for Hero Action Fund. Follow her on Twitter:

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Groups Opposing The American Health Care Act

Over 50 organizations oppose the proposed healthcare plan that will make Americans will pay more for less.;The list includes nurses, doctors, hospitals, teachers, churches, and more. You can see a few here:;

AARP: AARP opposes this legislation, as introduced, that would weaken Medicare, leaving the door open to a voucher program that shifts costs and risks to seniors.

Before people even reach retirement age, big insurance companies could be allowed to charge them an age tax that adds up to thousands of dollars more per year. Older Americans need affordable health care services and prescriptions. This plan goes in the opposite direction, increasing insurance premiums for older Americans and not doing anything to lower drug costs.

On top of the hefty premium increase for consumers, big drug companies and other special interests get a sweetheart deal.

Finally, Medicaid cuts could impact people of all ages and put at risk the health and safety of 17.4 million children and adults with disabilities and seniors by eliminating much-needed services that allow individuals to live independently in their homes and communities. Although no one believes the current health care system is perfect, this harmful legislation would make health care less secure and less affordable.

AARP stands ready to work with both parties on legislation that puts Americans first, not the special interests.

That just wont do.

That is, above all, why physicians must be involved in this debate.

Universal Coverage Vs Market

What Virginia’s poorest citizens want from health care reform

Democrats generally continue to support the Affordable Care Act , but would like to fix its flaws and generally improve the law. Democrats want to empower states to use innovation waivers to create their own approaches to healthcare reform that are as good asor better thanthe current system. Many Democrats also support fixing the ACA’s “family glitch” by basing affordability calculations for employer-sponsored coverage on family premiums rather than employee-only premiums, and most also support expanding premium subsidies to higher income ranges in order to soften the subsidy cliff.

But increasingly, Democrats are also getting behind the idea of a transition to some sort of universal coverage system. All of the Democrats who ran for the 2020 presidential nomination were in favor of universal coverage, although they had differing opinions on whether we should transition entirely to a single-payer system or use a combination of government-run and private health coverage .

Biden’s healthcare proposal also calls for an end to surprise balance billing, premium-free coverage under the public option for people who are caught in the Medicaid coverage gap , and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.

The Republican Party has not rolled out a new healthcare platform for 2020, and is instead utilizing the same platform they had in 2016. So in general, their approach can be expected to be the same as it has been for the past several years.

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Paging Cooler Heads Can We Meet Somewhere In The Middle Please

The solution to healthcare reform isnt easy, but it lies somewhere in the middle of these extreme ideologies. GOP leadership has been working on swaying members of its own party, but perhaps a different approach one that includes leftwing support would fare better in the long run. The ACA was passed without conservative support, and now, seven years later, the country is on the brink of a healthcare overhaul once more. Unless politicians work toward reaching middle ground, its unlikely that reform will be effective regardless of whos in charge.

Premium Subsidies And Affordability

The ACA’s premium subsidies were designed to keep health insurance affordable for people who buy their own coverage in the individual market. Premiums for individual market plans increased alarmingly in 2017 and 2018, although they were much more stable in 2019 and 2020, and rate changes for 2021 appear to be mostly modest. But premiums for people who aren’t eligible for premium subsidies can still amount to a substantial portion of their income.

The individual market is a very small segment of the population, however, and rate increases have been much more muted across the full population .

Democrats have proposed various strategies for making coverage and care affordable. Joe Biden’s healthcare proposal includes larger premium subsidies that would be based on the cost of a benchmark gold plan and based on having people pay only 8.5% of their income for that plan . Biden’s proposal would also eliminate the ACA’s income cap for premium subsidy eligibility and provide subsidies to anyone who would otherwise have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for a benchmark gold plan. This would eliminate the “subsidy cliff” that currently exists for some enrollees.

The 2020 Democratic Party platform calls for a “public option” health plan that would compete with private health insurance carriers in an effort to bring down prices, and lowering the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60.

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