“Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.”
Another corrupt cabinet member goes down. I don’t think it’s a coincidence they’ve all been women so far.
It’s not impossible for Dems to recapture the Senate this year.
I dislike gerrymandering congressional districts for political gain. But as Republicans refuse to give up the practice, I’m pleased Dems are willing to do it too. And in Virginia we won, nullifying last year’s Republican gerrymanders elsewhere. Extra pleased as I contributed GOTV postcards to the effort (a small contribution, but still).
Hungary kicked the autocrat out.
“The people who we are memorializing in these Confederate monuments went to war with their own countrymen over slavery. Over the right to own another person, to force women to have babies and breed, to buck-break Black men.” — from a speech by Georgia Democrats opposing a bill that would anyone to sue over the removal of Confederate monuments. The state House is Repub-controlled but they still couldn’t pass the bill. I also like this quote from historian Kevin Leman at the link; “If you need a law to protect a statue, it’s very likely the case that the problem is the statue.”
The Onion is one step closer to buying InfoWars.
“For the sisters and those volunteers, accompaniment can mean many different things. It can mean bouncing a newborn while the mother organizes her paperwork at immigration court, driving a truck to the owner in Juarez, Mexico, after they’re deported, sending a WhatsApp voice message to a worried mother in Brazil explaining how to find her son through the online ICE locator or preparing a backpack of clean clothes to hand off to someone before their deportation.”
“We know that mass violence happens when people learn to dehumanize “the other,” and when good people decide they can’t be bothered to do anything. There may be a time when it is dangerous to resist, but right now it isn’t. Instead, it is the perfect time to educate yourself and run interference on behalf of those targeted.”
“Arguments about things like birthright citizenship are ultimately really arguments about whether the Constitution should be interpreted as a white supremacist charter, or a rejection of that fundamental interpretive understanding of the meaning of America. And it should be unnecessary to point out that any strictly formal legal answer to that question is necessarily a form of question-begging, since it attempts to enlist norms of formal legal description for normative rather than descriptive ends.
And this is a fancy way of saying that anybody who makes a historical argument for the claim that the 14th amendment doesn’t legalize birthright citizenship is, as a practical political matter, making an argument for white supremacy.” — something for us to keep in mind if we get into that argument.
“When Austin’s kids were born, he stepped back a bit from organizing, but President Donald Trump’s brutal immigration agenda drew him in again. “When I see people kidnapped by ICE, that affects me, because I know what it’s like to be kidnapped by federal agents,” he says. “It affects me physically, like a burning feeling in my stomach.” He worries about the potential impact on his family, but the price of inaction feels steeper. “My kids are teenagers now. I want to be that example to them that despite threats of retaliation and violence, you’ve still got to stand up and fight back.” — from a profile on an activist working against ICE.
Slimy theocrat Roy Moore liked to hit on teenage girls when he was in his thirties. A court just overturned his $8 million defamation lawsuit win on the subject.
The Toddler’s SAVE Act repressing the vote died in the Senate. Though as noted at the link, the Toddler could try an end run.
“NPR received its largest-ever donation from a living donor this week when billionaire philanthropist Connie Ballmer gave $80 million to the media organization. Ballmer — a former member of the NPR Foundation’s board told the Wall Street Journal that she poured money into NPR because “we need fact-based journalism, and we need local journalism.” Money matters. Donations matter.
Republicans continue promoting trans hate and anti-trans policies. Kudos to the judges who push back.
Rats like Tucker Carlson are starting to leave the sinking ship of the Toddler administration. As Michelle Goldberg points out, they’re not admitting the Toddler was always a disaster — it’s the Jews or the liberals who made him a train wreck. “In reality, Trump is in charge: not some fantasy alpha-male version playing 12-dimensional chess, but an unstable reality TV huckster with a lust for defiling everything he touches. He’s never been better than this, and he didn’t need to be manipulated to make everything in America worse.”
“I think one of the key challenges of living in an era of internet alienation and rising authoritarianism is finding the will to be sincere, to embrace a certain unvarnished and earnest form of expression in a world where affect and posturing predominate. This means foregoing an aura of coolness or detachment in favor of emotionalism and vulnerability. It means resisting the impulse to cruelty and snark and instead opting for restraint and compassion. And it means being unembarrassed and authentic. In short, it’s not only helpful but vitally important to be cringe.”
