Kudos to the Next Generation, TikTok crew, and Virginia Teen Democrats! They campaigned for people to flood the CRT tip line set up by Virginia's new Gov. Youngkin--by sending messages of how great the teachers are doing!
I missed the story about the CRT tip line. It is eerily reminiscent of how the Stasi turned German citizens into police informers against family members and friends. Unbelievable.
I don’t know why we can’t prosecute Carlson for sedition. O(f course, we are not at war with Russia (yet, and hopefully never) but with our European allies in miind, he seems at least as culpable as Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose. Thanks as always for keeping our chins up, Robert.
Our country is cursed by Trumpism without Trump! TFG did everything because it benefitted himself! He favored Putin for some reasons we know and some we'll never know. But it has to do mainly with personal financial gain! Now we have Tucker Carlson visiting Hungary and praising its autocratic leader; we have Carlson praising Putin, the worst autocrat of the world! What does Carlson hope to get by tying himself to Trump's slavish treatment of Russia and Putin? Carlson and Chamberlain share more than the first letter of their last names!
What a crazy world we are living in! Tucker Carlson extols the virtues of Hungary under Viktor Orban, sides with Putin in his aggression towards Ukraine and is seriously mentioned as a viable presidential candidate. Trump's Republican Party is a nest of loonies, grifters, and sycophants with no morals or principles.
Tucker Carlson can be made to look the fool (or worse). All it would take is other media personalities (or FSM forbid..."reporters"!!!) to do some stories on Putin - the murders, his KGB history, his commitment to vengeance (see Fiona Hill's references) for the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Make no mistake about it, that is Putin's goal: establishing a new powerful Russia that can wreak havoc on the US. Payback is his goal.
And behind all this is his paranoia. Russia is only feeding it's people because of fossil fuel revenue. That is doomed as the world shifts away from it. He needs to gobble up larger populations to extract wealth from. Of course, he could have followed the example of Saudi Arabia and diversified. But that I guess that would not be a traditional Russian approach.
And I am applauding the administration's handling of this threat from the Russian bear. Isn't it nice to have an experienced hand in the WH who is surrounded by real experts?
While I don't feel powerless when it comes to helping save democracy - thanks to your regular opportunities and the great organizations I work with - I do feel powerless when it comes to Fox news. What they are doing is beyond dangerous, and being a puppet to Russia is a new and scary low.
It is incomprehensible. But let's remember that before WWII, Hitler had support in the U.S. Some people romanticize what it would be like to live in an autocratic society because it would (allegedly) address some of the their pet peeves among societal problems. Of course, once you empower someone like Putin, there is no line that he won't cross. Tucker Carlson and his supporters must not understand history.
There is a really good book by Lynne Olson titled "Those Angry Days" about the period just before World War II. It's well worth reading because elements of today's politics feel very much like that period and the author provides a lot of valuable context. Point being, we've been here before and survived before.
Robert-Thanks especially for today's newsletter - I have forward the Podcast info on youth and references to the youth leaders here. You are such a help! Thanks! Bill Leeds
The reactionary response to Putin's maneuvers on Ukraine simply reflects back to the reactionary response to Hitler's maneuvers in Saar and in the Sudetenland. The sole take of Tucker Carlson, Paul Gosar and Saagar Enjeti is that power is king. If Putin's forces are, someday, occupying Berlin, Istanbul or Rome, the Coughlins and Lindberghs of our time will be nowhere to be found. That scenario won't happen as long as a responsible administration is in the White House, as is presently the case.
Robert, Before turning to my primary reason for writing, I would be remiss were I, first, not to express gratitude for your newsletter that increasingly has become a daily test of my own spirit.
Still, when you write, relative to voter suppression, that “Democrats are outraged (understandable) and panicked (unnecessarily),” I fear that your omission of the more egregious GOP state-level voter nullification measures diminishes the threat that election subversion legislation poses to protecting the key mechanisms of American democracy. On a personal note, I worry that downplaying the urgency of salvaging democracy could deflate emerging grassroots efforts to press for inclusion of safeguards against election subversion as part of the bipartisan endeavor currently underway to reform the Electoral Count Act. As always, thank you for listening.
Hi, Barbara. Voter nullification efforts are a serious threat to democracy. But we shouldn't panic or exaggerate those efforts either. It is one thing to assert that the state legislatures have a constitutional right to select electors (they do), it is another thing to throw out the results of an election in violation of existing state statutes that prescribe how a state selects electors. The Supreme Court has addressed this issue once already, and indicated that it would be a grotesque violation of 14th Amendment to allow citizens to vote according to one set of rules and then change the rules AFTER citizens have voted. That is the basic premise of election nullification. The courts will not countenance it, and Kamala Harris will preside over the counting of electors. And you assume that citizens will simply accept the decision of legislatures to overthrow the results of an election. It is not an easy thing to do; just ask the Cyber Ninjas and the Senate Republicans in Arizona. They set out to discredit the 2020 election and resorted to voodoo in an effort to do so, and failed. Again, we should take election nullification efforts seriously, but we should not exaggerate those threats. And let's not talk about those efforts as though they are monolithic, uniform, ubiquitous threats. Which laws? Which states? Under what conditions? Sticking to the facts can help us assess the true scale and immediacy of the threats.
Robert, I am deeply grateful for your thorough response to my concerns. Still, I would be remiss, amid current efforts to remove state personnel who were unwilling to submit to directives in 2020 meant to decertify votes, were I not to press for enacting safeguards to guard against GOP controlled state legislatures I understand are passing bill after bill changing election rules to change who can be in charge, how votes are counted, and how votes are certified at the state level. Clearly, I believe it is right to conclude that last time was mere practice for the next time unless we engage now in the necessary actions to protect our democracy.
It came to me like a proverbial light bulb going off in my mind: I believe you are dead wrong in your diagnosis of the situation with Russia. It's about oil, nothing less. Germany gets its oil from Russia. France gets theirs from north Africa. England and the USA get theirs from Saudi Arabia. England, France, and the USA do not want Russia to sell to German or anywhere in Europe. And Germany wants to continue getting theirs from Russia. Oil has a pretty bloody history. And I suspect someone is holding a gun to Biden's head to create this situation. Plus, in the past, all a president had to do to get the country to support him was start a war. This looks like nothing has changed.
Call me a pathetic excuse of a human, but I for make it a point to summon all of the schadenfreude I can muster whenever right-wing Texans mess on themselves. Yee-Haw! It's Hee-Haw time in Austin!
Kudos to the Next Generation, TikTok crew, and Virginia Teen Democrats! They campaigned for people to flood the CRT tip line set up by Virginia's new Gov. Youngkin--by sending messages of how great the teachers are doing!
https://twitter.com/CorceliusMusic/status/1486033463014793223?s=20
https://twitter.com/Out5p0ken/status/1486173242838638598?s=20
https://twitter.com/VATeenDems/status/1486025543363530758?s=20
I missed the story about the CRT tip line. It is eerily reminiscent of how the Stasi turned German citizens into police informers against family members and friends. Unbelievable.
Yep, you’ll appreciate this one:
“ Youngkin needs a catchy name for this tip line to report your fellow citizens.
Maybe the "Schools Teaching Academic Subjects Inappropriately" hotline?
No, too long. Perhaps an acronym would be shorter.”
https://twitter.com/jwolffh/status/1485799506428010497?s=21
I don’t know why we can’t prosecute Carlson for sedition. O(f course, we are not at war with Russia (yet, and hopefully never) but with our European allies in miind, he seems at least as culpable as Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose. Thanks as always for keeping our chins up, Robert.
Our country is cursed by Trumpism without Trump! TFG did everything because it benefitted himself! He favored Putin for some reasons we know and some we'll never know. But it has to do mainly with personal financial gain! Now we have Tucker Carlson visiting Hungary and praising its autocratic leader; we have Carlson praising Putin, the worst autocrat of the world! What does Carlson hope to get by tying himself to Trump's slavish treatment of Russia and Putin? Carlson and Chamberlain share more than the first letter of their last names!
What a crazy world we are living in! Tucker Carlson extols the virtues of Hungary under Viktor Orban, sides with Putin in his aggression towards Ukraine and is seriously mentioned as a viable presidential candidate. Trump's Republican Party is a nest of loonies, grifters, and sycophants with no morals or principles.
The tragedy is that so little history is taught in schools that followers of Tucker Carlson are blindly echoing his views about Russia and Putin.
Tucker Carlson can be made to look the fool (or worse). All it would take is other media personalities (or FSM forbid..."reporters"!!!) to do some stories on Putin - the murders, his KGB history, his commitment to vengeance (see Fiona Hill's references) for the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Make no mistake about it, that is Putin's goal: establishing a new powerful Russia that can wreak havoc on the US. Payback is his goal.
And behind all this is his paranoia. Russia is only feeding it's people because of fossil fuel revenue. That is doomed as the world shifts away from it. He needs to gobble up larger populations to extract wealth from. Of course, he could have followed the example of Saudi Arabia and diversified. But that I guess that would not be a traditional Russian approach.
And I am applauding the administration's handling of this threat from the Russian bear. Isn't it nice to have an experienced hand in the WH who is surrounded by real experts?
While I don't feel powerless when it comes to helping save democracy - thanks to your regular opportunities and the great organizations I work with - I do feel powerless when it comes to Fox news. What they are doing is beyond dangerous, and being a puppet to Russia is a new and scary low.
It is incomprehensible. But let's remember that before WWII, Hitler had support in the U.S. Some people romanticize what it would be like to live in an autocratic society because it would (allegedly) address some of the their pet peeves among societal problems. Of course, once you empower someone like Putin, there is no line that he won't cross. Tucker Carlson and his supporters must not understand history.
There is a really good book by Lynne Olson titled "Those Angry Days" about the period just before World War II. It's well worth reading because elements of today's politics feel very much like that period and the author provides a lot of valuable context. Point being, we've been here before and survived before.
Robert-Thanks especially for today's newsletter - I have forward the Podcast info on youth and references to the youth leaders here. You are such a help! Thanks! Bill Leeds
The reactionary response to Putin's maneuvers on Ukraine simply reflects back to the reactionary response to Hitler's maneuvers in Saar and in the Sudetenland. The sole take of Tucker Carlson, Paul Gosar and Saagar Enjeti is that power is king. If Putin's forces are, someday, occupying Berlin, Istanbul or Rome, the Coughlins and Lindberghs of our time will be nowhere to be found. That scenario won't happen as long as a responsible administration is in the White House, as is presently the case.
Robert, Before turning to my primary reason for writing, I would be remiss were I, first, not to express gratitude for your newsletter that increasingly has become a daily test of my own spirit.
Still, when you write, relative to voter suppression, that “Democrats are outraged (understandable) and panicked (unnecessarily),” I fear that your omission of the more egregious GOP state-level voter nullification measures diminishes the threat that election subversion legislation poses to protecting the key mechanisms of American democracy. On a personal note, I worry that downplaying the urgency of salvaging democracy could deflate emerging grassroots efforts to press for inclusion of safeguards against election subversion as part of the bipartisan endeavor currently underway to reform the Electoral Count Act. As always, thank you for listening.
Hi, Barbara. Voter nullification efforts are a serious threat to democracy. But we shouldn't panic or exaggerate those efforts either. It is one thing to assert that the state legislatures have a constitutional right to select electors (they do), it is another thing to throw out the results of an election in violation of existing state statutes that prescribe how a state selects electors. The Supreme Court has addressed this issue once already, and indicated that it would be a grotesque violation of 14th Amendment to allow citizens to vote according to one set of rules and then change the rules AFTER citizens have voted. That is the basic premise of election nullification. The courts will not countenance it, and Kamala Harris will preside over the counting of electors. And you assume that citizens will simply accept the decision of legislatures to overthrow the results of an election. It is not an easy thing to do; just ask the Cyber Ninjas and the Senate Republicans in Arizona. They set out to discredit the 2020 election and resorted to voodoo in an effort to do so, and failed. Again, we should take election nullification efforts seriously, but we should not exaggerate those threats. And let's not talk about those efforts as though they are monolithic, uniform, ubiquitous threats. Which laws? Which states? Under what conditions? Sticking to the facts can help us assess the true scale and immediacy of the threats.
Robert, I am deeply grateful for your thorough response to my concerns. Still, I would be remiss, amid current efforts to remove state personnel who were unwilling to submit to directives in 2020 meant to decertify votes, were I not to press for enacting safeguards to guard against GOP controlled state legislatures I understand are passing bill after bill changing election rules to change who can be in charge, how votes are counted, and how votes are certified at the state level. Clearly, I believe it is right to conclude that last time was mere practice for the next time unless we engage now in the necessary actions to protect our democracy.
It came to me like a proverbial light bulb going off in my mind: I believe you are dead wrong in your diagnosis of the situation with Russia. It's about oil, nothing less. Germany gets its oil from Russia. France gets theirs from north Africa. England and the USA get theirs from Saudi Arabia. England, France, and the USA do not want Russia to sell to German or anywhere in Europe. And Germany wants to continue getting theirs from Russia. Oil has a pretty bloody history. And I suspect someone is holding a gun to Biden's head to create this situation. Plus, in the past, all a president had to do to get the country to support him was start a war. This looks like nothing has changed.
Am I wrong?
Mary Elgabalawi
Call me a pathetic excuse of a human, but I for make it a point to summon all of the schadenfreude I can muster whenever right-wing Texans mess on themselves. Yee-Haw! It's Hee-Haw time in Austin!