You appeared to agree very much with the retaliatory line.
If you didnât, then I donât understand your original argument.
Perhaps I lack the context, but best case, it is arguing for arguingâs sake. Youâve just said you donât have strong views. No dogs in the fight.
If youâre keen to avoid pointless arguments, I always find it best not to start them.
Hence giving this thread a swerve until your post popped up.
March 7, 2021 (Sunday)
Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the cityâs voting rolls were 99% white. So, in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but it did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma, a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, who was a part of the Dallas County Voters League but who, in this case, was acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to the city. King had become a household name after the 1963 March on Washington where he delivered the âI Have a Dreamâ speech, and his presence would bring national attention to Selmaâs struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to press the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2000 of them for a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a âliteracyâ test. Not a single person passed.
Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriffâs deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurantâs kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the communityâs anger by planning a long marchâ54 miles-- from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bull whips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewisâs skull, and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of âBloody Sundayâ on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. âTheir cause must be our cause too,â he said. â[A]ll of us⌠must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.â Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, and when Alabamaâs governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them, President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: âThe end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.â
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members tailing her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson recalled âthe outrage of Selmaâ when he said âThis right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.â
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down âregulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.â He called the right to vote âthe most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,â and pledged that âwe will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.â
But less than 50 years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, states have made it harder to vote. And now, in the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, legislatures in 43 states are considering sweeping legislation to restrict voting, especially voting by people of color. Among the things Georgia wants to outlaw is giving water to voters as they wait for hours in line to get to the polls.
Today, 56 years after Bloody Sunday, President Biden signed an executive order âto promote voting access and allow all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.â He called on Congress to pass the For the People Act, making it easier to vote, and to restore the Voting Rights Act, now named the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act after the man who went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia, bearing the scars of March 7, 1965, until he died on July 17, 2020.
The fact sheet from the White House announcing the executive order explained: âdemocracy doesnât happen by accident. We have to defend, strengthen, and renew it.â Or, as Representative Lewis put it: âNever, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.â
Interesting read.
Are the sands shifting?
April 11, 2021 (Sunday)
Congress has been on break since March 29, and tomorrow members will go back to Washington, D.C., to resume work. The next weeks are going to be busy for the lawmakers, not least because the political ground in America appears to be shifting.
In the two weeks the lawmakers have been back in their districts, a lot has happened. The Biden administration released the American Jobs Plan on March 31, calling for a $2 trillion investment in infrastructure. The plan includes traditional items like railroads and bridges and roads; it also uses a modern, expansive definition of infrastructure, including support for our electrical grid, green energy, and clean water delivery, as well as the construction of high-speed broadband to all Americans. The plan also defines childcare and eldercare as infrastructure issues, an important redefinition that will not only help more women regain a foothold in the economy, but will also help to replace manufacturing jobs as a key stabilizer of middle-class America. The administration is selling the infrastructure plan, in part, by emphasizing that it will create jobs (hence âAmerican Jobs Planâ rather than something like âAmerican Infrastructure Actâ).
President Biden has proposed paying for the plan by raising the corporate tax from 21% to 28% (it was 35% before Trumpâs 2017 tax cut) and by increasing the global minimum tax from 13% to 21% (so that companies cannot stash profits in low-tax countries). He has also proposed saving money by ending the federal tax breaks for fossil fuel companies and by putting teeth in the enforcement of tax laws against corporations who have skated without paying taxes in the past.
The president also put together a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission to look at the question of adjusting the Supreme Court to the modern era. While people are focusing on the question of whether the number of justices on the Supreme Court should be increasedâit has held at 9 since 1869, even as three more circuits have been addedâthe commission is also looking at âthe length of service and turnover of justices on the Court.â It is only very recently that justices grimly held onto a Supreme Court appointment until death; the positions used to turn over with some frequency. The commission is an astonishingly distinguished group of scholars, lawyers, and judges.
Nonetheless, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed the establishment of the commission displayed âopen disdain for judicial independence.â And yet, the Supreme Court itself undermined his position in favor of a nonpartisan judiciary late Friday night. It issued an unsigned opinion in which the court decided, by a vote of 5-4, that state restrictions on private religious gatherings during the pandemic infringed on peopleâs First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the minority.
Biden has also asked Congress to take on the issue of gun control, after yet more mass shootings in the country. And overshadowing all is the Democratâs demand for the passage of voting rights legislation that would protect voting, end gerrymandering, and curb the influence of big money in U.S. elections.
While the legislative world has been rocking, so has the world of the Republicans. The party is torn between the Trump wing and the business wing, and in the course of the past few weeks, that rift has widened and destabilized.
On March 25, Georgia passed a sweeping new voting restriction law. Legislators argued that they were simply trying to combat voter fraud, but the law, in fact, significantly restricts voting hours and mail-in voting, as well as turning over the mechanics of elections to partisan committees. The Georgia law came after a similar set of restrictions in Iowa; other states, including Texas, are following suit.
But this attack on voting rights is not playing well with the corporate leaders who, in the past, tended to stand with the Republicans. Leaders from more than 170 corporations condemned the new Georgia law, saying, âWe stand in solidarity with voters ä¸ and with the Black executives and leaders at the helm of this movement ä¸ in our nonpartisan commitment to equality and democracy. If our government is going to work for all of us, each of us must have equal freedom to vote and elections must reflect the will of voters.â Major League Baseball grabbed headlines when it decided to move this summerâs All-Star game out of the state.
Following the corporate pushback over the Georgia law, the leader of the business Republican faction, Mitch McConnell, said that it was âstupidâ for corporations to weigh in on divisive political issues, although he specified he was ânot talking about political contributions.â Republican lawmakers have said that corporations should not take political stances, a position that sits uneasily with the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which said that corporate donations to political candidates were a form of political speech and could not be limited by the government. The so-called âCitizens Unitedâ decision opened up a flood of corporate money into our political system.
Yesterday, more than 100 corporate executives met over Zoom to figure out how to deal with the voter suppression measures coming out of Republican legislatures. They discussed that political unrest is bad for business (this is very true-- one of the key reasons the American South had insufficient capital investment after the Civil War was that investors could not be sure their money wouldnât disappear during social unrest) and are calling for corporations to continue to take a stand against voter restrictions, including by withholding money from Republican candidates.
This puts the Republicans in a bad spot. The insistence of state Republican legislators that they must protect against voter fraud reflects their determination to clingâwithout evidenceâto the argument Trump lost the election only because the Democrats cheated. This is not true and has been thoroughly debunked. But, having sold their voters this Big Lie, they now need to follow through.
And yet, backing Trump right now is a dicey proposition. Since the lawmakers have been in Washington, D.C., more and more information has come out about key Trump supporter Republican Matthew Gaetz (R-FL), who is alleged to be involved in a number of shady deals in Florida, includingâallegedlyâbeing party to moving underaged girls across state lines for sex. While Gaetz insists he is a victim of âleaks and⌠lies,â it is notable that only Trump Republican Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have come to his defense. Others are remaining gingerly silent, which has only permitted the story to snowball.
Trump himself continues to make trouble for the party. He continues to raise money for his own coffers and last month demanded that the Republican National Committee stop using his name or picture on fundraising materials. It appeared he was reconciling with the party when he agreed to give a speech at the end of the RNCâs donor summit.
Instead, on Saturday night, at an invitation-only meeting of top donors at Mar-a-Lago, the former presidentâs Florida resort, Trump abandoned his scheduled calls for unity and instead used a speech to the attendees to reiterate that the 2020 election was stolen from him and to attack party members whom he considers insufficiently loyal, including Mitch McConnell.
Meanwhile, there were âWhite Lives Matterâ rallies planned by neo-Nazis and Proud Boys for today in cities across the country to promote white nationalism and, as one organizer said, make âthe whole world tremble.â But, in the end, virtually no one showed up. With the Justice Department indicting the January 6 insurrectionists and popular voices turning against the forces Trump encouraged, the angry Trump base appears to be going underground.
So, in the face of remarkably popular Democratic proposals to rebuild the country-- proposals that will kill the central principle of the Republican Party since the time of President Ronald Reagan that the government must get out of the economyâRepublicans are split between their voting base, which wants Trumpian voter restrictions, and their donor base, which recognizes that those restrictions will destabilize the country.
The spring is going to see a remarkable game of political chess.
Thanks, a good read
Not impressed with this old duffer, especially with all this sabre-rattling over Ukraine. Puts the Afghanistan withdrawal in a different context.
Perhaps someone should remind our trigger happy friends that the last country to truly fuck with Russia wasnât allowed to be a country anymore for forty years.
Of course, itâs all fine for the Americans. Far away from the havoc they create.
Dear Mods.
If this bloke hangs around weâre gonna need more & bigger 
âs
Come back Donald. All is forgiven.
Phil is getting out of Krakow
Bidenâs coming
Make of that what you willâŚ
You never see Phil and Biden in the same room together!!
HomonymâŚsnigger 
I think you mean âsnickerâ. 
Pedant alert!!!
No, thatâs singular for a peanut/chocolate based snack product.
Obviously we have wall to wall coverage of the visit going on.
And I mentioned Pizzagate.
But, I have to say Joe was meeting members of the 82nd Airborne and the whole thing was remarkable, natural, taking the selfies, meeting every table, just talking shit with the team.
What a contrast to Trump and Boris.
Not a side we ever see of him. The squaddies face when he sat down and grabbed a slice of pizza showed that wasnât staged
(Much)
Heâs a fucking loon.
Doesnât know what heâs saying and the scariest thing is that his VP isnât any better on that front.
And if by some miracle we swerve Kamala, then Nancy Pelosi is waiting in the wings
Heâs the consequence of a Democratic Party that didnât want Sanders and finally twigged that they couldnât have Hillary.
A dangerous mediocrity. The hinting at regime change in Russia is going to be seized on by Putin and worked into his own propaganda. And why wouldnât he?
Biden left him an open goal just by opening his gob.
