None of the others come close; only Elizabeth Warren exceeds 5 percent to philanthropy, barely. All these candidates have average incomes over $200K. It's probably worth mentioning that Booker is both childless and unpartnered.Business Insider reported on Thursday that Booker donated $24,000 of his $152,639 income in 2018 to charity. And over the past 10 years, CNN reports that Booker has given about $460,000 to charity.
That's true, of course.[The contributions politicians] make as senators, Congress members, and governors are of far greater altruistic significance than where they donate. Booker’s 2018 donations, if he had given to the most cost-effective, high-impact charities, could at most have saved several lives; as a senator, he affects hundreds of millions of them.
From my removed vantage point on the civil rights trail, the Mueller report offered reasons for hope. ... Like the hotheaded [Sheriff Bull] Connor and [Sheriff Jim] Clark, whose clumsy responses to civil disobedience turned public opinion against them, the erratic Trump weakens his own cause.
We hear in Trump a refined version of Connor and Clark and George Wallace as he exploits racial fears that have always been with us. This time, it’s a fear of immigrants and minorities trying to “take away our history and our heritage,” as Trump says, leaving the “culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues” of Confederate heroes.
John Lewis stood against such ideas when he faced Clark’s thugs in 1965. I stand with Lewis today when he promises to cause all “necessary trouble” to face down Trump. “Whatever he tries to do, he cannot take us back,” Lewis says. “During the next few weeks and months and next year, there will be some setbacks. But the American people are not going back.”
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| Congressman John Lewis |
Yup, that's who is living around here these days.The Gallup report, in keeping with prior studies, found that younger Americans (defined in the report as those between the ages of 15 and 49) were the most likely to feel stressed, worried or angry. The American Psychological Association in 2018 found that Generation Z is the most stressed-out age group due to factors such as violence, political turmoil, finances and health. And Millennials and Gen Z are known to have disproportionately high rates of anxiety, loneliness and depression, which can be tied to stress.
H/t Grist.sets a goal of getting all of the Silver State’s power from carbon-free sources by 2050 and requires 50 percent of its supply to come from renewables by 2030, according to an e-mailed statement.
Nevada becomes the fourth U.S. state to commit to 100 percent clean energy, joining its bigger neighbor California as well as Hawaii and New Mexico.Bloomberg, April 22, 2019
The article goes on to report that 2018 was the deadliest year for civilians since the U.N. began counting in 2009. This is not getting better. There are 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 18 years of fruitless war.KABUL, Afghanistan — For the first time since the United Nations began documenting civilian casualties in Afghanistan a decade ago, more civilians are being killed by Afghan government and American forces than by the Taliban and other insurgents, according to a report on Wednesday.
... quarterly numbers may reflect an increasing reliance on airstrikes in a war in which Afghan security forces tend to hunker down in fortified bases rather than mount aggressive assaults against Taliban fighters. When attacked, Afghan forces often call for airstrikes by the American-trained Afghan Air Force to dislodge the enemy.
Aerial operations were the third-highest cause of civilian casualties, killing 145 civilians and wounding 83 during the quarter — a 41 percent increase for those type of casualties compared with the same quarter in 2018. The report attributed almost all of those casualties to American airstrikes.
“A shocking number of civilians continue to be killed and maimed each day,” Tadamichi Yamamoto, the United Nations secretary general’s special representative for Afghanistan, said in a statement. “All parties must do more to safeguard civilians.”
Good journalist that he is, he queried academics who study old people. A couple of comments:Can politicians our age be effective presidents?
My friend Ronni Bennett whose blog on aging is essential reading for anyone who cares about old people or is one, threw the issue open to her very smart, very generous, comment section. Two sage responses:
- “If talking about someone’s age is taboo and we are immediately accused of ageism, then that shuts down the discourse,” argues Jennifer Sasser, 52, a gerontologist at Oregon State University. A 70-year-old candidate “will have 20 more years of lived experience than a 50-year-old, and that translates not only into potential expertise but also a richer mind,” Sasser says. But “you can’t stay at the height of your capacity forever. That’s not the trajectory. We do become less energetic. Our bodies and minds do change.”
- “Age per se should not disqualify a candidate,” says Denise C. Park, 67, a psychologist who founded the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas. “Older brains are packed with knowledge and experiences that may constitute ‘wisdom’ and would help a president perform well in office,” she said, but she added that age obviously brings certain costs, “specifically in their capacity for quick processing of new information, remembering details, and the ability to process and use new information.” ... “All brains show some degradation over time, but the fact that older people have degraded brains does not necessarily mean [they have] less useful mental skills,” she observed. “The additional knowledge and experience that comes with age may compensate for this.”
I come to the question from the experience last fall of working on an election while 71. This was not running for office, but facilitating one tiny cog in the complex human machine that is a successful campaign. Nothing short of going to war or possibly professional athletic competition requires more concentrated focus and aggressive implementation than executing a campaign well.
- During the last presidential campaign, I kept asking how Trump and Clinton could keep up the pace of campaigning at their ages. My husband answered, "They have staff."
- Some people maintain a high level of mental functioning into their 80s and 90s. {May I be so fortunate!} Nobody maintains a high level of physical function so late in life.
Moyn contrasts "human rights" -- claims for equal treatment for all varieties of humanity -- with "economic and social rights" which imply a moral imperative for distributional equality.No one ought to be treated differently because of the kind of person they are -- on the basis of gender or race, for example. ... When it comes to what share people ought to get of the good things in life, however, consensus is much harder to achieve. ...
This is not the sort of stuff that gets us to the barricades -- but perhaps this is necessary intellectual armament for a long march.Human rights became our highest ideals only as material hierarchy remained endemic or worsened. It was both a breakthrough of conscience and an immense reversal. Human rights emerged as the highest morality of an unequal world ... Human rights will return to their defensible importance only as soon as humanity saves itself from its low ambitions. If it does, for the sake of local and global welfare, sufficiency and equality can again become powerful companions, both in our moral lives and in our political enterprises.
Can't do that. BDS is a non-violent response to violent oppression, well within anyone in this country's free speech rights.Last year, an Arizona federal court blocked the state from enforcing its anti-boycott law, ruling that the law — which requires government contractors to certify that they are not participating in boycotts of Israel or Israeli settlements in the West Bank — violates the First Amendment.
It would be wonderful if the Democratic presidential primary season were offering us all a chance to think about where we'd like the country to go and what policies would get us there.“Voters are still in the dating phase.” Democratic consultant Brian Brokaw
That is, don't believe everything you read; it may, or may not, have any factual basis.A reliable rule of thumb about nomination politics is that when voters are required to make an electoral choice among multiple candidates within the same party, their preferences will be relatively weak, unpredictable, based on limited information, and open to change up until the moment they cast their ballots.
It can be easy to impose a clever and plausible-sounding analytical structure on the process in advance, or to explain in retrospect why one candidate won more support than another. But in the midst of the action, there is plenty about nominations that resists straightforward interpretation or forecasting. And the larger the field of contenders, the more complicated things get.
We all need to take our best shot in the primary, and then put our shoulders to the wheel in 2020, working as if our lives and the lives of those we love depend on the outcome. It might.... there’s something inherently problematic in making judgments about electability. That’s not just because people are usually pretty bad at it, but also because it means that instead of deciding which candidate you like, you’ll base your vote on which candidate you think other people will like.
... But no matter how much you might want to defeat Trump, it’s a much better idea to think about which candidate you like, rather than try to predict which candidate might be able to appeal to some white guy sitting in a diner in Waukesha, Wis. That seldom ends well.
An Article I (of the Constitution) court can be created by Congress for a specific purpose outside, but alongside, the regular federal judiciary created by Article III.... we need to be free to be independent judges, not be monitored and rated like assembly-line workers. We must be allowed to use our expertise to decide our cases without interference. The current structure detracts from due process and makes people doubt the fairness of the courts we preside over. We need skilled, experienced, neutral managers who understand how to run a court and make transparency, independence and public access paramount — not administrators who want to keep the trains running on time above all else.
A number of lawyers’ organizations and scholars agree, and endorse the creation of an Article I Immigration Court. It would free our courts from the political influences of both the Justice and Homeland Security departments and the political whims of each new administration. It would allow a reliable funding stream from Congress to assure we have the resources needed to address our burgeoning caseload in a timely manner. It would mean that neutral judges would use their skills to make the rules and assure a level playing field for all. An independent immigration court will be an efficient and effective court that provides an example to the world of the superiority of the American justice system. We can and must fix this fatal flaw now.
More than two thirds of students who voted approved of the fee. (Tuition was over $50K per academic year in 2019.) It will be up to the administration to implement the measure -- or not. The student vote should create plenty of pressure here.proposes a fee, starting with $27.20 per student for the fall 2020 semester, that would raise an estimated $400,000. The student fee would increase with inflation and would fund a nonprofit led by a board of students and descendants, who would give money to charitable causes directly benefiting descendants of the 19th-century sale.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Trump administration, is continuing to target local residents and families severely destabilizing them and causing great harm to their small children especially, but to their whole families as well. ...
“So many children are now languishing in ORR custody that the agency has begun detaining children at unlicensed, “influx” facilities….These policies and practices have increased the suffering of immigrant children and families, while increasing the burden on taxpayers as well,” says Lewis Cohen, [spokesperson for the National Center for Youth Law]. Media release
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| In what sort of country do teenagers enact locking babies in cages? |
Goldberg is not ready to let Nielsen prance off gaily, now that Trump has given her the hook. And she hopes that citizen mobilizations can prevent many of Trump's cast-offs from finding cushy landing spots, at least those who were not millionaires before they came in and might try to resurface in corporate and academic settings.Nielsen did not create Trump’s monstrous policy of separating migrant families, but she should be known forever as the person who carried it out. She put babies in cages, traumatized children for life, and then appears to have lied to Congress about what she had done. She did this evil work with either blithe incompetence or malicious sloppiness, failing to create a system to properly track kids who were ripped from their families. On Friday, the Trump administration said it could take up to two years to identify thousands of separated migrant children.
I have no beef with making life uncomfortable for these people and the institutions that might hire them, but I have trouble believing that such campaigns are enough.“Allowing her to seek refuge in a corporate corner office or a boardroom, university, speaking agency or elsewhere poses a significant reputational risk for those involved,” said Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Restore Public Trust, the group organizing the campaign.
... There are plenty of places that will hire a disgraced child-torturer — private prisons, which often hold undocumented immigrants, are a big business. And Henry Kissinger’s storied social life shows that America’s elite is far from inhospitable to ghouls. But as the country hurtles into a dangerous new phase of unbound Trumpism, those who want to say no need to muster whatever leverage they can, including public shame and economic sanctions. Either the leaders of corporate America and academia want to be associated with terrorizing toddlers, or not.
The work is the sole remedy for the pain.We desperately need to reawaken the spirit of 2018, when Democrats won resoundingly from coast to coast at every level of the ballot because progressives invested themselves everywhere. We need to take back the Senate, protect the House, flip and defend state legislatures, and, yes, win a bunch of state Supreme Court races.
But more than that, we have to root out the disease of Trumpism—the corruption, the rot, the violence, the disregard for the rule of law, the abject cruelty, all of it. Donald Trump himself is a symptom and an accelerant, but he’s not the cause. If we defeat him but leave the rest of the apparatus that props him up in place, we’ll again find ourselves in the same situation before long, only worse.
Message received by the powers that be. No more fines! You would think they actually people to read books. ...We found that approximately 5 percent of all library cardholders have their cards blocked because of overdue fines.
Library borrowers regardless of income miss return deadlines at similar rates. About one-third of borrowers owe overdue fines or fees at any time.
However, lower income people have a harder time paying fines for overdue items. In the Bayview branch, which serves a lower-income area, 11 percent of people have their cards blocked. That’s three times as high as at branches in many high-income areas.
Library branches serving areas with larger numbers of African Americans and people without college degrees also had higher debt levels and more blocked accounts from overdue fines.
Simply put, charging overdue fines works against the library’s mission of free and equal access to information.
Well maybe. A less credulous article in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects surveys a range of efforts along these lines. While insisting that further study is needed, fast, these architects find the prospect of incorporating negative emission technologies in their buildings enticing:Blue Planet’s process starts with collecting CO2 and dissolving it in a solution. In the process, the company creates carbonate that reacts with calcium from waste materials or rock to create calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate happens to be the main ingredient in limestone. But rather than superheating it to create cement (which would release all that CO2 right back into the atmosphere), Constantz and his team turn the resulting stone into pebbles that serve as aggregate.
This is easiest to do where there’s lots of CO2 — smokestacks at factories, refineries and power plants, for example — but it can also come from “direct air capture,” using less concentrated air anywhere, a technology whose costs are rapidly declining.
Do this on a large scale, Constantz said, and you could help satiate the growing global demand for rock and sand, and make a massive dent in the climate crisis at the same time: Every ton of Blue Planet’s synthetic limestone contains 440 kilograms of CO2. While it still needs to be mixed with cement (the goopy stuff) to make concrete, using this in place of gravel or stone that needs to be quarried and crushed creates a finished product that is carbon neutral, if not carbon-negative, according to the company.
In the coming years, buildings may share the burden of achieving negative carbon emissions—attending to client needs as well as global imperatives. Exactly how they can meet this challenge represents both a significant test and a grand opportunity for architecture.
Detroit Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who had served in the Michigan legislature and both won and lost in primaries before winning her current seat, offered her $.02:“We reject the D.C.C.C.’s attempt to hoard power, which will only serve to keep that talent pool — and Congress itself — disproportionately white and male,” MarÃa Urbina, the national political director for Indivisible, a progressive grass-roots group, said of the campaign committee. “Incumbents who engage fully with their constituents shouldn’t fear primaries and shouldn’t rely on the national institutions like the D.C.C.C. to suppress challenges before voters ever have a say.”
That seems right.I’ve experience being primaried. It’s s part of being kept in check with the folks you serve and always working hard for them. If anything, it reminds you to focus on your district all day, every day.
There's a fluency I wish I had here in California. No wonder Noah knows how to talk to Ammurricans.I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast -- give you the program in your own tongue. I'd get suspicious looks from people just walking down the street. "Where are you from?" they'd ask. I'd reply in whatever language they'd addressed me in, using the same accent they used. There would be a brief moment of confusion, and then the suspicious looks would disappear. "Oh, okay. I thought you were a stranger. We're good then."
He does not sweeten the moral horror of the system under which he was raised:The fact that I grew up in a world run by women was no accident. Apartheid kept me away from my father because he was white, but for almost all the kids I knew on my grandmother's block in Soweto, apartheid had taken away their fathers as well, just for different reasons. Their fathers were off working in a mine somewhere, able to come home only during the holidays. Their fathers had been sent to prison. Their fathers were in exile, fighting for the cause. Women held the community together. Wathint' Abafazi Wathint' imbokodo! was the chant they would rally to during the freedom struggle. "When you strike a woman, you strike a rock." As a nation, we recognized the power of women, but in the home they were expected to submit and obey.
Yet for all this, Noah found a generous moral center. An enormously talented young man, he could easily have ended up just another casualty of poverty without considerable luck, his imaginative ambition, and the moral compass his mother had beaten into him. During a time when he was making a living fencing stolen goods in a black township, he recalls acquiring a digital camera -- a camera that still had on its chip the pictures belonging to the family that had "lost" it. He describes understanding vividly that his hustle was hurting others he never had seen.Apartheid was a police state, a system of surveillance and laws designed to keep black people under total control. A full compendium of those laws would run more than three thousand pages and weigh approximately ten pounds, but the general thrust of it should be easy enough for any American to understand. In America you had forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.
After the period chronicled in this book, Noah left South Africa for Los Angeles when he'd been threatened by his mother's violent second ex-husband who had repeatedly attacked his mother. We have been lucky to have attracted this migrant.In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don't see the person it affects. We don't see their face. We don't see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable.
We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don't live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place. ... That camera made me confront the fact that there were people on the other end of this thing I was doing, and what I was doing was wrong.
Advocates do not usually call out judges by ascribing their decisions to simple, blind, prejudice. We like to think judges are ruling based on their understanding of law. Simply prudentially, lawyers who might have to argue before judges again don't want to break the illusion and get judicial backs up. But when the law turns ugly, there is no other recourse but to tell the truth and go to the consciences of the people.Two Rulings Strengthen Perception of Anti-Muslim Bias in Supreme Court
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled to delay the execution of Patrick Murphy, a Buddhist inmate in Texas, until his spiritual advisor could be present.
In March, SCOTUS rejected a similar appeal made from Domineque Ray, a Black Muslim inmate in Alabama also facing execution. Ray’s case was rejected for making the request “too late,” whereas Murphy’s request was given with less notice and accepted. This is a double standard. On the heels of last June’s SCOTUS ruling in favor of the Muslim Ban, the inconsistent rulings only strengthen the perception of an anti-Muslim bias in the Supreme Court.
... The Supreme Court is fundamentally a deliberative body made up of people with biases, ideological dispositions and juridical styles — a fact made clear during every confirmation proceeding, but perhaps made most apparent during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. The integrity of our judicial system rests on the assumption that a judge’s beliefs and ideologies does not bear on the ability to consistently interpret the law. The Court’s decision in the Muslim Ban case and the flip between the Ray and Murphy cases are clear examples of how Justices’ personal and discriminatory biases can still generate inconsistent judicial rulings between cases. ...
After each phrase, the crowd shouted Schiff's meme: "It's not okay."You might think its okay that the Russians offered dirt on a Democratic candidate for president as part of what was described as the Russian government’s effort to help the Trump campaign ... When that was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, the president’s son did not call the FBI, he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help. Instead that son said that he would love the help of the Russians. ... Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, someone with great experience in running campaigns, also took that meeting…. The president’s son-in-law also took that meeting…. They concealed it from the public…. Their only disappointment after that meeting was that the dirt they received on Hillary Clinton wasn’t better. ...
Frankly I would hope this would be a minimum Democratic program. Objective number one has to be ensure realism, humanity, and compassion in our government's immigration policy.Castro says his plan is premised on the idea that the southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. The former head of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and mayor of San Antonio would end border wall construction, allow deported veterans who honorably served to return to the United States, increase refugee quotas and make it easier for family members to be reunited with relatives who are U.S. residents. He would ask Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including young people who received protections under the Obama administration and those covered by the Temporary Protected Status program.
He said he would also create a “21st-century Marshall Plan” for Central America to attack the woeful conditions there, seen as the root cause of the recent increase in asylum seekers. For those who reach the country’s interior, he would reconstitute the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, by reassigning its interior enforcement functions to other agencies, including the Justice Department. He would also re-prioritize Customs and Border Protection efforts to focus on drug and human trafficking instead of interior law enforcement.
Castro said he would impose a civil legal process for sorting out refugee applications and deportations, with an emphasis on jailing and removing only those with criminal records.
As opportunities to get rich in China proliferated, Chinese students who came to the U.S. increasingly went back after graduation. But now the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut is hitting a rough patch. ... The country [China] is growing increasingly repressive, not just toward the Uighurs and other minorities, but toward the general public. Even discussion of economic policy is now often off-limits. The country may yet regain its economic footing and resume opening up, but for now all of the trends look bad. ... That there are so many elites who lack confidence in China’s stability and prospects should be a warning for the regime, but for the U.S. it could provide an unexpected bounty. If the U.S. were to welcome those Chinese people and make them Americans, it would receive a healthy dose of entrepreneurial talent.
... open borders isn’t just a good plan — it’s the only chance we’ve got. America is an aging nation with a stagnant population. We have ample land to house lots more people, but we are increasingly short of workers. And on the global stage, we face two colossi — India and China — which, with their billions, are projected to outstrip American economic hegemony within two decades.
How will we ever compete with such giants? The same way we always have: by inviting the world’s most enthusiastic and creative people — including the people willing to walk here, to risk disease and degradation and death to land here — to live out their best life under liberty.
We can either blunder toward this reality unconscious and unwarned -- or we can demand our leaders help the country rise to the challenge.Like other species on this planet, human beings are a migratory type. When they suddenly find themselves in desperate need of physical safety or economic opportunity, they leave home and start over somewhere new. It has always been this way. The earliest stories we tell ourselves are stories of displacement: Adam’s fall from Eden, Moses’ flight from Egypt, Muhammad’s hegira to Medina. Trying to stop this process through the building of walls strikes me as both ineffective and unnatural — like trying to stop a river from flowing.
I use the simile deliberately. ... As much as it is an economic, a social and a foreign-policy issue, migration is a climate issue.
Those who are safe from displacement — at least for the moment — must confront the roles they want to play in this unfolding global story. What responsibility do people in America, for example, have toward those who live in places that have been ravaged by wars the American government has started or abetted? What responsibility do they have toward those who have benefited least from industrialization but stand to suffer most? And how do they plan to adapt to global migration?
