Good morning everyone!
I am beginning this morning with Dan Rather and Steady Team on what the Republican party is attempting with their increasing attempts— and successes— at voter suppression.
This Steady newsletter is barely 6 months old, and already we have written about disenfranchisement and the injustices it embodies many times. At some point, what more is there to say that hasn’t been said before? And yet, weariness, fatalism, and hopelessness is exactly what the forces that are seeking to once again tilt the balance of power in this nation by limiting the vote instead of winning debates want us to feel.
This is the intended response —to be too tired to fight. This is Mitch McConnell’s grand plan —do whatever he could to entrench the courts. And Chief Justice John Roberts has made it very clear that he has no problem with his legacy being the man who undermined some of the most significant progress on our nation’s tortured and uneven path towards greater racial justice.
The vote is everything. It is the means by which we can make change without violence. It is the way that our country can grow, can evolve, and can lock in progress. It is the ultimate belief that the will of the people should be honored. But which people? The Republicans want it to be the “right” ones, their people. To accomplish this, they are playing to the deep sins of exclusion, marginalization, and inequality that have been a hallmark of this nation since its founding. And the Supreme Court, bolstered in its majority by the destructive obstructionism of McConnell, is eager to play along.
Peniel E. Joseph of CNN captures the significance of journalist and Project Creator of “The 1619 Project” Nikole-Hannah Jones’s decision to teach at Howard University.
Howard University endured since its founding in 1867, forming the crowning jewel of the archipelago of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that dotted the former Confederacy and border states such as Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Howard University, with a medical school and law school established by the 20th century, would become in many ways Black America's intellectual mecca, the proving ground for literary, scientific, legal and cultural innovation and excellence that produced Black Power icon Stokely Carmichael, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and Vice President Kamala Harris -- among many others.
Hannah-Jones' decision to accept a position that would enable her to found a Center for Journalism and Democracy at an institution that has always recognized the value of Black life is instructive. It's also part of a wider and growing national awareness of the importance of Black history to shaping, for good and ill, larger narratives of American democracy and understanding of a shared national identity.
One thing that I would like to note is that one of the major reasons that I admired Toni Morrison a lot was that prior to her careers as an author, a Princeton University professor, and as an editor at Random House, she taught at Texas Southern University and Howard University, both HBCU’s.
Natalie Jackson writes for FiveThirtyEight that, yes, there is increasing evidence that Republicans are turning to media sources to the political right of Fox News.
OANN and Newsmax still make up just a small sliver of Americans’ overall media diet, and there’s, of course, a lot of overlap in viewership between those two networks and Fox News. But there are some signs that OANN and Newsmax are replacing Fox News as the primary news sources for at least some Republicans. I’m the research director at the Public Religion Research Institute, and in a March survey we conducted with Interfaith Youth Core on COVID-19 and conspiracy beliefs, we found that Fox News had fallen in popularity among Republicans, with just 27 percent saying it was their go-to news source versus 40 percent last September. What’s more, 7 percent of Republicans listed a far-right news network they preferred instead. That means they took the time to type in an “other” response in our text-box field, as it was not provided as a choice.1 Only a handful did this in September 2020.
To be sure, this shift is small — Fox News is still king among Republicans. But the growing popularity of OANN and Newsmax is important: According to our research, Republicans’ stances on certain issues might be better predicted by their television news habits than by whether they identify as conservative, moderate or liberal.2
Katherine Landergan of Politico on the dilemma now facing the state’s governors: how to spend the surplus money that they now have as a result of the American Rescue Plan.
Governors and lawmakers, who months ago thought they would be making deep cuts to their budgets, are instead facing the very unusual problem of how to spend bundles of money. These state leaders, emboldened by the brighter tax revenues and the hundreds of billions of dollars provided by the federal government, are launching transportation projects, cutting stimulus checks and even paying down debt.
“No one would have ever dreamed that we would have this kind of funding,” said New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Democrat whose state just enacted a budget with a multibillion-dollar surplus.
That’s not to say the needs weren’t significant, or that every state has since seen the same surge in revenue. All incurred massive costs from the pandemic, and the need for social programs only increased as the poorest Americans were hit the hardest.
But from coast to coast, governors and lawmakers who were preparing to make difficult, politically-challenging moves are now faced with a surprise windfall. This is leading to partisan and intraparty feuds in statehouses over what to spend the cash on, and when, and setting up kitchen-table debates over what’s more important: Spending money now to boost the economy or saving for future problems.
I’ve noticed that typically when the news reports on the upcoming climate apocalypse, the focus is more often than not on the oceanic coasts. Here, Dan Egan of the New York Times focuses on The Great Lakes and, most specifically, Chicago.
But the same waters that gave life to the city threaten it today, because Chicago is built on a shaky prospect — the idea that the swamp that was drained will stay tamed and that Lake Michigan’s shoreline will remain in essentially the same place it’s been for the past 300 years.
The lake may have other plans.
Climate change has started pushing Lake Michigan’s water levels toward uncharted territory as patterns of rain, snowfall and evaporation are transformed by the warming world. The lake’s high-water cycles are threatening to get higher; the lows lower. Already, the swings between the two show signs of happening faster than any time in recorded history.
A series of ferocious storms in recent years has made it clear that the threat this poses to a metro area of 9.5 million people is not abstract.
“There are buildings just teetering on the edge of the lake. A few years ago, they had a beach. Now the water is lapping at their foundations,” Josh Ellis, a former vice president of Chicago’s 87-year-old, nonprofit Metropolitan Planning Council, said this year. “This is an existential problem for those neighborhoods and, ultimately, for the city.”
Alexa Ura of the Texas Tribune reports on the upcoming voting restrictions that will probably pass in an upcoming special session of the Texas Legislature.
The failure of Texas Republicans to pass new voting restrictions, while conservatives with less of a stranglehold on power in other states succeeded, was a remarkable stumble in the GOP’s nationwide response to the 2020 election and former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that its outcome was undermined by fraud.
Beyond Trump, Texas Republicans have their own incentive to tighten voting rules. With their statewide margins of victory eroding, they have two opportunities this year to pass laws that might prolong their hold on power. The second, drawing Congressional and state legislative districts, won't be engaged until a later special session this year.
But the first effort, passing new voting restrictions under the banner of "election integrity" that appear likely to make voting harder predominantly for Democratic voters — including urban voters of color and other marginalized groups — begins in earnest again Thursday.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday indicated Republicans would proceed swiftly in their second bid to pass the restrictions, with a Senate committee meeting as soon as Saturday on the voting bill that’s expected to be reconstituted as Senate Bill 1. During the regular session, the Senate started with a much broader bill compared to the slimmer set of restrictions favored by the House.
Now in the aftermath of yesterday’s assassination of Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse, Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times lists some of the reason why, over the years, foreign aid has spectacularly failed to politically stabilize Haiti.
Although they deny it, Haitian politicians, including the government, have traditionally relied on gangs to sway elections in their favor and to expand their political turf. In the last three years of Mr. Moïse’s term, more than a dozen massacres by gangs linked to the government and police forces have killed over 400 people in anti-government neighborhoods and displaced 1.5 million people, yet no one has been held accountable for the crimes.
When a political or human rights scandal erupts, the U.S. government issues paper tiger-like condemnations.
Instead of embracing the long road to reforms and creating a system that works, Haitian civil society leaders contend, the United States has propped up strongmen and tied the fate of the nation to them. Many Haitians repeatedly denounced the United States’ support of Mr. Moïse but said they had little power to stop it.
I’m pushing fair use a bit here on Ben Coates’s story for Politico-Europe on the circumstances surrounding the Dutch drug crime wave that probably resulted in the attempted murder of Dutch crime journalist Peter R. de Vries to provide the probably unfamiliar contexts (at least to an American audience) of the story.
There’s clearly a huge difference between scorning journalists like this and shooting them, and many of those who usually enjoy taunting the press have been quick to condemn this week’s attack. But it’s also clear that the Dutch media climate is increasingly fraught: According to one government minister, reported threats and acts of aggression against journalists roughly trebled between 2019 and 2020 alone.
A couple of years ago, someone even fired an anti-tank rocket at the Amsterdam headquarters of a crime magazine. Against that backdrop, incidents like this week’s shooting feel less surprising than they should.
At the time of writing, De Vries is fighting for his life and police have arrested several suspects, but much else about the case remains unclear. However, it’s widely assumed that De Vries was attacked not simply for being a journalist, but because of his role as a confidant of a key witness in a major drug gang trial — one of a series of high-profile incidents which have exposed some other dark elements of Dutch society.
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The stereotypical coffee shop in Amsterdam or elsewhere looked less like a seedy drug den and more like a friendly neighborhood establishment, run by a cheerfully rumpled proprietor who’d been sitting there for decades.
In recent years, however, the Dutch drug trade has been transformed. The oddities of the gedoogbeleid mean that while soft drug use is tolerated, supplying larger quantities remains illegal. This means that the main source of large quantities of marijuana is, by definition, criminal organizations.
As demand for drugs in Amsterdam has soared due to tourism, many of the rumpled old coffee shop owners have been forced out, and professional criminal gangs have moved in, running supply networks that are headed by rich foreign masterminds and stretch across Europe.
G. Daniela Garza, a food critic for the Washington Post, takes the stance that all of us should stop calling food “exotic.”
“I have never heard the word exotic used in reference to something that is White,” says Chandra D. L. Waring, professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Lowell. “You know that exotic means ‘other’ or ‘different’ from a dominant-White perspective because no one ever says, ‘I’m going to go on an exotic vacation, I’m going to Lowell, Mass.’ No one ever says, ‘Let’s go to that exotic new restaurant, let’s go to McDonald’s.’” I can’t imagine anyone calling a Big Mac an exotic sandwich, even if, when it was first introduced to countries outside North America, it may have been viewed with skepticism.
Like ethnic and alien, the word exotic was invented to describe something foreign. It comes from the Greek prefix, “exo,” or “outside.” It used to mean something “alien” or “foreign,” and though this is an archaic definition, it’s part of the word’s legacy. According to Merriam-Webster, in reference to food, its modern-day usage may describe something “introduced from another country,” “not native” or something “strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different.” The problem is that it’s a definition that changes based on the user’s perspective.
Today, only a few things are still consistently described as exotic including: animals; places (see: exotic vacations); cars; women; and, of course, food.
Hearing something described as exotic conjures a few specific images: An explorer peeking through a dense jungle with binoculars, peering curiously at the people or flora or fauna in a clearing. Hunters in pursuit of wild game or hides. The facial expression of a television host tasting a certain food for the first time.
The Angry Grammarian, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, delivers the surprising bit of news that former president George W. Bush is a fellow angry grammarian...in some respects, at least.
Nevertheless, George W. Bush has a grammatical pet peeve: the abuse of literally. And it’s not just because Bush wants us to speak properly; it’s part of his masterful image rehabilitation to make him seem like America’s kindly old uncle who does paintings and corrects others’ grammar, and not a guy whose errors, linguistic and otherwise, cost thousands of lives from New Orleans to Afghanistan.
“I just have been on a campaign to get people to use literally less,” Bush said when his daughter cold-called him during her hosting segment on Today last week. Bush knows about campaigns: He had two successful campaigns for president, one of them so successful that he also won the popular vote.
In his literally campaign, Bush is outside the mainstream. Most people who complain about literally object to its usage as a synonym for figuratively, as in, “My mind is literally exploding right now.” (Unless you’ve hit an IED on a road outside Kabul, your mind probably isn’t literally exploding.) Bush doesn’t stop there — he doesn’t want literally used, period. Unless you’re talking about literature, Bush argues, literally is almost always unnecessary.
“It’s misunderstood,” he told Hager on the air. “It’s become a convenient habit.”
He’s not wrong. Most people misuse literally, and even when they’re using it correctly, they could probably do without it.
Finally today, author John Edgar Wideman writes, for the New Yorker, a “flash fiction” meditation about George Floyd.
I will not pretend to bring G.F. to life. Nor pretend to bring life to him. G.F. gone for good. Won’t return. No place for G.F. except the past. And the past is not even past, a wise man once declared. Same abyss behind and in front of us is what the wisecracker writer signifying, I believe, and, if I truly believe what he believed, where would I situate G.F. if presented with an opportunity to put him somewhere alive? Not here. Not here in this story where I know better.
Better to forget G.F. Better to let go, or simply leave G.F. alone, thank you, than attempt to invent the point of view of a person not here, not where I am, a person who somehow possesses the power to see G.F. breathing, moving around, to hear G.F.’s thoughts. A person also able to observe me here, myself performing this grief, this terror and anger, this attempt to console myself and define and control and locate myself, establish myself as one who is offering a story about G.F., a true story confirming my suffering, my connection to him, a story about who he is, who I am, a story about myself, as if I am not here where I am and he is not where he is. As if the two of us not permanently separate as life from death. As dreams from objects dreamed.
Everyone have a good morning!