2022 elections. The steady march for sanity continues.

1212ham said:

I can't explaine ten cases of bananas.

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Beehive said:

It's always pissed me off that I have to consume to stay alive. Eating. Requirement of life.

One of you motherfuckers explain my grocery bill.

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Beehive said:

It's always pissed me off that I have to consume to stay alive. Eating. Requirement of life.

One of you motherfuckers explain my grocery bill.

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Steve Bannon is hoping to activate homeschooling moms to help Republicans take back congressional majorities next year.

The former chief strategist to Donald Trump has long pushed homeschooling to get around what he sees as liberal indoctrination in public schools, and he and other conservative activists are stoking outrage against anti-racism lessons and coronavirus safety measures to turn parents into right-wing activists, wrote columnist Heath Brown for The Daily Beast.

"The firestorm that you're about to see is the American mothers," Bannon said recently on his podcast. When you've got to go back to school and [Dr. Anthony] Fauci's been talking about vaccinating the kids and using the school, going back to school as a forcing function between the mask and the CRT (critical race theory)."

There are many echoes, both intentional and accidental, between these culture war battles and the violent Textbook War of 1974 in Kanawha County, West Virginia, where conservative parents revolted against readings that included civil rights leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X and influenced the separatist inclination for many homeschooling parents.

"Ultimately, whether it is 1974 or 2021, the conservative political movement has used schooling, especially homeschooling, as a cudgel in a larger political war over race, religion and sex," wrote Brown, an associate professor of public policy, at CUNY's John Jay College.

Conservative activists have long seen homeschooling parents as a voting bloc and their children as future activists, but Brown -- who wrote Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State -- says the reality is more complicated.

"Many homeschool parents aren't especially political and as a group they are far from an ideological monolithic," he wrote. "I found in researching my book, Homeschooling the Right, that just 60 percent of those parents voted for Donald Trump in 2020, about the same percentage as in 2016."

"But national advocates, especially the most conservative ones, see in homeschooling a tool of opposition to change," Brown added. "Opting out of a specific part of a curriculum, be it a textbook or a lesson on systemic racism, or public schooling altogether, serves them as one weapon in a larger war against demographic, cultural, and religious changes."

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hanimmal said:

View attachment 4886655

Chauvin was held accountable for murdering a man only because Minnesota elected Keith Ellison for Attorney General in a off year election.



Breonna Taylor was killed when police fired into her apartment while she slept.



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The people who murdered her will not face justice because Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron was also elected in a off year.

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Just a reminder that every election matters.

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President Donald Trump on Monday formally endorsed Mark Finchem for Arizona's Secretary of State, which would make him the chief elections official in the state.

Finchem is a particularly controversial endorsement, as he was a member of the Oath Keepers militia, which had many members who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In May, Politico reported on a list of Republican officials, like Finchem, who attempted to overturn the 2020 election and help the former president in a hostile takeover of the country. Now, those Republican officials are running to take over the administration of elections -- and could ensure Trump will prevail if he runs in 2024.

"Someone who is running for an election administration position, whose focus is not the rule of law but instead 'the ends justifies the means,' that's very dangerous in a democracy," said Bill Gates, the GOP vice-chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. "This is someone who is trying to tear at the foundations of democracy."

Finchem openly admitted he was an Oath Keeper in a candidate questionnaire posted to InMaricopa.com ahead of a 2014 election for the House of Representatives.

Responding to the question, "What differentiates you from your opponents," Finchem said he's not backed by big money, and it's "unacceptable influence over government."

"I'm an Oath Keeper committed to the exercise of limited, constitutional governance. I stand against policies that expand the role of government in our lives which include Common Core, Medicaid expansion, extinguishment of long-standing water and land-use rights," he also wrote. "I have offered up a solution for the funding of critical functions like education, infrastructure and public safety. My opponents (both Republican and Democrat) have not."

But Finchem has worried Republican leaders in the state, who think that his alliances will doom any chances they'd have in a general election. Arizonans are already furious at the GOP for embarrassing the state because of the fiasco of the Trump-backed state "audit," and some Republicans are even humiliated by the behavior of their own party leaders. There's a fear that there will be a backlash in 2022, wrote theArizona Republic. It could even cost the GOP's campaign take back Sen. Mark Kelly's (D-AZ) senate seat.

"If he wins the primary, we're done," one conservative Arizona GOP strategist told VICE News in April. The strategist said that Democrats and the media would make Finchem into the "gross uncle" of the Republican Party.

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When voters in some states created new commissions to handle the politically thorny process of redistricting, the hope was that the bipartisan panelists could work together to draw new voting districts free of partisan gerrymandering.

Instead, cooperation has proved elusive.

In New York, Ohio and Virginia, commissions meeting for the first time this year have splintered into partisan camps to craft competing redistricting maps based on 2020 census data. The divisions have disappointed some activists who supported the reforms and highlighted how difficult it can be to purge politics from the once-a-decade process of realigning boundaries for U.S. House and state legislative seats.

As a result, the new state House and Senate districts in Republican-led Ohio will still favor the GOP. Democrats who control New York could still draw maps as they wish. And a potential stalemate in Virginia could eventually kick the process to the courts.

“It’s probably predictable that this is sort of how it’s panned out,” said Alex Keena, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University who has analyzed redistricting and gerrymandering.

Redistricting can carry significant consequences. Subtle changes in district lines can solidify a majority of voters for a particular party or split its opponents among multiple districts to dilute their influence. Republicans need to net just five seats to regain the U.S. House in the 2022 elections, which could determine the fate of President Joe Biden’s remaining agenda.

Throughout most of American history, redistricting has been handled by state lawmakers and governors who have an incentive to draw lines favoring their own parties. But as public attention to gerrymandering has grown in recent decades, voters in an increasing number of states have shifted the task to special commissions.

Some commissions — such as those in Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan — consist solely of citizens who hold the final say on what maps to enact. But others, such as in Ohio and Virginia, include politicians among their members or require their maps to be submitted to the legislature for final approval, as is the case in New York, Virginia and Utah.

If New York’s Democratic-led Legislature rejects the work of the new commission (consisting for four Democrats, four Republicans and two independents), then lawmakers can draft and pass their own redistricting plans.

The prospects of that increased last week, when Democrats and Republicans on the commission failed to agree and instead released competing versions of new maps for the U.S. House, state Senate and state Assembly.

State Republican Party Chairman Nick Langworthy blasted the Democratic maps as “wildly gerrymandered” and accused Democratic commissioners of refusing to compromise.

State Democratic Party Chairman Jay Jacobs countered that there was no reason to “bend over backwards” to try to draw as many Republican seats as possible. He added: “We’ll be fair, but to a point.”

The commission’s division frustrated Jennifer Wilson, deputy director of the League of Women Voters of New York. The organization supported the 2014 ballot measure that created the commission and encouraged people to testify at the panel’s public hearings this year.

“It almost feels like a slap in the face to us and to all those people who spent the time to go and submit comments -- took time out of their daily lives to do that -- when it’s very obvious there was no regard for any of those comments,” Wilson said.

Frustration also is mounting in Ohio, where a commission dominated by Republican elected officials voted this past week to adopt a state legislative redistricting plan they favored. Because the plan had no Democratic support, the state constitution limits it to four years.

Democrats on the panel called the maps unfair. But Republican Senate President Matt Huffman asserted that special interests pressured Democrats not to back a redistricting plan that could have lasted the entire next decade.

Huffman said the new map likely would produce 62 Republican seats in the Ohio House and 23 in the Senate — down just a couple in each chamber from the current GOP supermajorities. Experts estimate the state’s voters are more evenly divided, around 54% Republican to 46% Democratic.

The partisan map came despite more than a dozen public hearings dominated by testimony from Ohio residents who said the current gerrymandered maps have left them out in the cold.

“Too many of us have had little say in who represents us and watched helplessly as laws are passed that hurt our families and ignore our needs,” Areege Hammad, of CAIR-Ohio, a civil rights organization for Muslims, testified.

She said the neighborhood around the Islamic Center of Cleveland, one of the region’s largest Muslim populations, is fractured into multiple congressional and statehouse districts.

“Because of the way that districts are drawn, our elected officials have no incentive to be receptive, responsive or accessible to us or our concerns,” she said.

Michigan’s citizen redistricting commission released its first draft of a new state Senate and U.S. House map this past week and is still working on a state House map. It’s planning to take more public comment on its proposals with a goal of finalizing maps by the end of the year — blowing past the Nov. 1 deadline set in the constitutional amendment approved by voters.

But the Michigan panel of four Democrats, four Republicans and five independents has so far avoided devolving into partisan encampments. One reason may be that Michigan’s commission includes no politicians and no ability for the Republican-led Legislature to override its work, Keena said.

In Virginia, two separate mapmakers hired for Democrats and Republicans are to submit rival plans for consideration this coming week by the 16-member commission, which has four lawmakers and four citizens from each major party. If the commission can’t agree — or the Democratic-led General Assembly rejects its maps — the decision will fall to the state Supreme Court, which is dominated by GOP-appointed judges.

How commissioners respond to the two maps will determine whether the reform effort works, said Liz White, executive director of OneVirginia2021, which supported last year’s ballot measure creating the commission. She hopes panelists find a way “to marry” the two proposals.

“There’s certainly a concern that two balanced sides just end in gridlock,” White said. “The hope really is that the citizens are there to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Even if the commission stalemates, the new process still could be considered an improvement over the previous one, because the public is getting to see deliberations and divisions that might otherwise have been kept behind closed doors, said Keena, of Virginia Commonwealth.

“We’re going to be able to look back on this sort of experiment and see what works and what doesn’t work,” he said. “Hopefully, that will lead to better reforms in the future.”

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hanimmal said:

What kind of shit do you think this insurrectionist would allow to take place in Az if he wins the election?
https://www.rawstory.com/mark-finchem-arizona-oath-keeper/View attachment 4986775

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PJ Diaz said:

Analysis: This poll should terrify Democrats ahead of 2022

It's the rare poll that makes an entire party sit up and take notice. The new Iowa poll is one of those polls.

www.cnn.com

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PJ Diaz said:

Analysis: This poll should terrify Democrats ahead of 2022

It's the rare poll that makes an entire party sit up and take notice. The new Iowa poll is one of those polls.

www.cnn.com

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printer said:

Actually would be a good thing.

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hanimmal said:

How so?

I really don't see anyway that would be a good thing to let a insurrectionist decide which cases get prosecuted for all of Arizona.

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printer said:

The democrats can hold him up as what the Republican party really stands for.

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hanimmal said:

I don't think that would be worth him emboldening insurrectionists to fuck more shit up. Or allowing things like beating immigrants or torturing them like what Arpio did to the prisoners.

As much as it might seem like a fun idea to allow the Republicans to prove their shitty-ness by 'owning the libs', it is not worth the price the people of Arizona would have to pay.

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WALSH: Other people have more colorful descriptions of it, Scott.

DETROW: That's as colorful as we can get for now on the podcast. We'll see how the week develops, though. But I say that, and other people say that, because not even including everything, we've got a government funding deadline, a looming debt ceiling and two massive bills that together encompass just about every single item of President Biden's domestic political agenda. And all of these things are really up in the air right now. So, Mara, let's start with this. The last couple of months have been pretty rocky for Biden. We've talked a lot about that. What are the stakes for him and for Democrats in general this week?

LIASSON: Well, the stakes couldn't be higher. Obviously, they have to pass a bill to fund the government. And obviously, they, since Republicans won't help them, are going to have to raise the debt ceiling - and we'll talk about that a little later in the program - so that the United States doesn't default. But the Biden agenda is also hanging in the balance. He and the Democrats have to negotiate among themselves and come to a compromise so they can pass two big pieces of legislation. One is a hard infrastructure bill - roads and bridges. The other is an even bigger, what you could call soft infrastructure, human infrastructure - expanding the social safety net, climate, education, health care - that bill.

If they fail to pass those bills, they will be in effect driving a stake through the heart of the Biden presidency and going into the next two election cycles as the party that believed that government could help people but failed to deliver. And I think they would be really sealing their fate. And I think they'd lose the next two elections if they don't pass these bills.

DETROW: Deirdre, do you agree with Mara? Because that is some high stakes.

WALSH: I do agree. I mean, I've talked to Democrats on the Hill, and they, over and over, say failure is not an option. And they do believe that it will trigger midterm losses for them and potentially a loss for Biden for a reelection in 2024. So I think that everybody knows what the stakes are here. The problem is that nobody's sort of moved past the political discussion and done the sort of hard work of negotiating the details of the broader bill that Mara mentioned - the $3 1/2 trillion package.

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With Biden's Legacy Teetering, Democrats Struggle To Overcome Divisions : The NPR Politics Podcast

Democratic Party discord threatens what amounts to nearly all of President Biden's domestic agenda, from childcare to climate. Compounding the challenge: looming government funding and debt deadlines.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, acting congressional correspondent Deirdre...

www.npr.org

Dryxi said:

It could be going better... Somebody is going to have to give on the red lines in the sand.

THE NPR POLITICS PODCAST
< With Biden's Legacy Teetering, Democrats Struggle To Overcome Divisions
September 27, 20214:42 PM ET

With Biden's Legacy Teetering, Democrats Struggle To Overcome Divisions : The NPR Politics Podcast

Democratic Party discord threatens what amounts to nearly all of President Biden's domestic agenda, from childcare to climate. Compounding the challenge: looming government funding and debt deadlines.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, acting congressional correspondent Deirdre...

www.npr.org

(There is more substance in the podcast. I didn't paste the entire transcript. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1040987189)

Some criticism of Biden in there for not doing enough to push his agenda through direct involvement.

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