Pass The For The People Act

 

Facts Is Facts

 

Tired of Waiting

 

Killing Americans Too!

 

Just An Unfriendly Reminder

 

Every SINGLE Republican in the US House voted AGAINST the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act yesterday. The bill would restore the Voting Rights Act. Every single one. Let that sink in 😤

Bravo

 

Alternative Solution

 

Weekend Humor

 

So Get Over It Already!

 

Breeding Ground

 

War (Easy to get in, Hard As Hell to get Out of)

 I didn't write this..but I'm all here for it..Check it out.

The Vietnam War lasted almost 20 years, from 1955 to 1975. Much shorter if you only count from the 1965 landing of 3,500 Marines in Da Nang to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Nixon gets a lot of blame for how the war ended. Ford gets his share, too. But the Vietnam War is Johnson’s fault. More than 300 bodies litter Mount Everest — avalanches, exhaustion, frostbite. You could say that’s a failure of the rescuers. Or you could say the climbers should have just kept their asses on the ground in the first place. The failure is NOT the way we END wars — it’s the way we START wars. 

By the end of 1965, that 3,500 troop number had swelled to 184,300. By the end of 1966 it was 385,300. In 1967 it was 485,600. It peaked in 1968 at 549,500. Nixon didn’t take office until January 20, 1969. We have far less control over getting people back home, than we do over sending them there in the first place. Sometimes we just need to keep our ass on the ground. The Paris Peace Accords signed January 27, 1973 established a cease-fire between communist-backed North Vietnam and America-backed South Vietnam and mandated full withdrawal of all US troops in 60 days. 

In March, Nixon said US forces would go back in if the North launched a full offensive into the South after we left. We were leaving them in good shape. As the calendar turned to 1975, the American-aligned South Vietnamese had twice as many combat troops as the communist-backed North. The South also had twice as many tanks and three times as much artillery. That was in January. By April, the South had collapsed. 

 The North Vietnamese and the communist-backed South Viet Cong had completely rolled over every front held by the South Vietnamese except Saigon, the South’s largest city, which now stood surrounded by 100,000 communist-backed troops. US helicopters desperately began evacuating US personnel and South Vietnamese allies who had befriended us. Operation Frequent Wind began on April 29 and operated continuously into April 30, helicoptering out 1,400 Americans and 6,000 South Vietnamese. Combined with the ones who self-evacuated, we brought 140,000 South Vietnamese into the US. ***

 Bush launched the War Against Iraq with no legal provocation; no act of war committed by Iraq; no justification under our own rules of engagement. The war was a total disaster — Bush committed crimes against humanity, carried out war crimes, squandered our moral authority, abdicated our just power derived from our example of integrity. 

And just before he walked out the door, he negotiated a binding agreement as to the date-certain for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and left it to President Obama to be falsely blamed for “cutting and running.”

We were leaving them in good shape. We had spent years and billions training and arming the Iraqi Army. And then as President Obama began following the binding Bush-negotiated troop-withdrawal agreement, “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” who had come to Iraq directly at the invitation of Bush’s honeypot challenge, changed its name to ISIS and said “boo” and the Iraqi forces threw down their guns and ran like spooked little schoolyard kids. *** 

After an initial military-advised troop-surge, President Obama began the final drawdown of troops from Afghanistan in 2014. We were leaving them in good shape. We had been there 13 years. We had spent billions training and arming the Afghan Army. 

 On May 27, 2014, President Obama announced America’s combat involvement would totally cease by the end of the year, with a residual force of 9,800 troops remaining in the country. And then… October 28, 2014… The United Kingdom and the United States handed over all bases to the Afghan military and ceased all military operations. On October 28, 2014. SEVEN YEARS AGO. 

We’re not “just up and leaving in the dark of night.” We’re not “abandoning our Afghan allies.” We’re not “breaking promises to those who helped us.” Why in the HOLY FUCK didn’t they get their asses on a plane during the last SEVEN FUCKING YEARS? The same thing that’s happening now, started happening seven years ago. 

So what did President Obama do? When all of the armchair quarterbacks who got their military science degrees from the same seat over the shit hole that present Trumpers got their degrees in immunology, caught a collective case of the vapors and commenced clutching their pearls and weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth over the poor little allies who we were “abandoning,” President Obama paused the drawdown and left more troops there to give our allies more time to leave. 

So why the fuck didn’t they? They have had seven years. Why is everyone acting like we handed control of the country over to the Afghans just yesterday? They’ve had SEVEN FUCKING YEARS. If we sent another 100,000 troops back into Afghanistan to stay for seven more years to allow for an “orderly withdrawal” they are just going to stay the fuck where they are and then do a last minute run for the border when we leave in seven years. 

 This is cultural. They don’t WANT to leave. They want us to stay there forever to fight their battles for them while they use the 45-year-old specter of a rooftop in Saigon to force us to strain and drain our resources until we’re fucking bankrupt. 

 We should have left in 2014. And Biden has no choice. Because Trump did to Biden in Afghanistan, exactly what Bush did to President Obama in Iraq. In February of 2020, Trump reached a deal with the Taliban that required the US to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. Trump reached a troop-withdrawal agreement and left it to his Democratic successor to execute it. Trump had FOUR YEARS — from January 20, 2017 until January 20, 2021 — to conduct an orderly withdrawal. But he both sent in more troops and set a date-certain for someone else to bring them all home.

 Leaving a country always poses a huge risk. That’s why we leave behind equipment and supplies — “moving day” is too dangerous. There was very little we could have done differently in Saigon. There is nothing we can do now except postpone this exact same scene to a future date. The lessons we thought we learned last time and the lessons we need to learn this time are not lessons about withdrawal. The lessons we need to learn are about how to avoid going in the first place. Sometimes we just need to keep our asses on the ground.”

 - Cree Hardegree

What I Wished They'd Teach in High School

 

Intubation

 

Hittin A Snag

 

Who Do You Believe?

 

The First Pandemic

 This Photo was taken over 100 hundred years ago, in 1919.. during the first Pandemic.. The Spanish Flu.... There was no Fox News.. No Trump led Republican party that was filled with idiots telling people not to wear masks and not to get vaccinated.  People trusted science and longed for a vaccination and stood in lines to get it when it became available. 

Thus we don't have anymore "Spanish" Flu.

Today with all of our advance technology and scientific know how  it seems we are filled with selfish whiny babies who think a mask is putting them out too much, moronic politicians who are following the example of a twice impeached , one term president, (who by the way got vaccinated) and telling other people that they don't have to be vaccinated if they don't want to and death in the droves..

I think the people who endured the first pandemic were smarter....Don't you?

You're Not Bulletproof(Get The Vaccine Stupid!)

 

Protect Voting Rights

 

How Sad is That?

 

Here We Go Again

 Ever Watch a Horror Movie?

There comes a point in every awful horror movie where a character does something so careless and shortsighted a viewer loses faith in the storyteller.There's the hapless victim who can't flee the monster without falling, the stubborn homeowner who won't move out of a haunted house, and my favorite: the person who walks toward, not away, from a sinister noise at night while asking, "Hello, is anyone there?"

That's the part where you throw both of your arms up in the air and sigh...because you know what is going to happen next!

As you watch some Democrats handle the voting rights issue, I'm seeing a replay of a 19th-century political horror story. It ended with Black voters losing faith in the leaders who were supposed to protect them. President Biden has called voting rights "the single most important" issue and described a wave of voter restriction bills recently passed by Republican legislatures across the US as "Jim Crow on steroids." Yet he has refused to throw the full weight of the Oval Office behind passing two pending voting rights bills in Congress. 

He has stopped short of embracing calls to jettison the filibuster -- the parliamentary tactic Republicans can use to halt a voting rights bill -- because he says it would "throw the entire Congress into chaos."

He's focused instead on passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that could rejuvenate the economy and appeal to a broad swath of voters. But for anyone who knows this country's shameful voting rights history, Biden is following a script that once doomed Black voters and made the rise of Jim Crow possible. 

President Biden and Democratic leaders who prioritize infrastructure in part to broaden their appeal to reluctant White supporters are making the same mistake White political allies of Black voters made in the late 19th century. 

That's when the more progressive American political party of that era -- the Republican Party --believe it or not, abandoned Black voters to focus on an economic agenda that emphasized infrastructure and uniting a country that was bitterly divided by race. 

 That blunder gave us a century of Jim Crow segregation, reduced the Republican Party to a "dying institution" 'in the South and forced countless Black Americans to confront an uncomfortable truth that many are now facing again: Our White political allies are rarely willing to match the intensity and cunning of our political opponents. 

If Malcolm X were alive he;d say this is " When chickens ask foxes for help "

Evoking Jim Crow may cause some people to cringe because the comparison seems overblown. No White vigilantes are gunning down or lynching would-be Black voters.(At least not yet!!)

 No White mobs are brazenly murdering Black elected officials or launching what's been described as the nation's only successful coup -- against a Southern city filled with Black leaders.(Again, at least not yet!)

 All of this happened during that era. .But there are two lessons today's Democratic leaders can learn from the mistakes their White counterparts made in the late 19th century: Economic appeals to White voters driven by racial resentment have limited value. And when you refuse to go all out to protect your most loyal voters, the results can be disastrous. 

 These aren't abstract lessons for me. I am a Black voter in Philadelphia ,PA. One of the Cities that delivered Joe Biden's Presidential victory.

 Frederick Douglass became a strong supporter of the Republican Party in the late 19th century. 

I watched Black voters save Biden's presidency during his primary run last year. I glowed with pride when he picked Kamala Harris, I watched Black voters flood voting precincts in a pandemic and honk their horns in jubilation after they delivered the Oval Office and control of Congress to the Democrats. What I am seeing now, though, is a rising sense of betrayal among Black voters. Many don't think Democratic leaders are pushing hard enough on voting rights. More are frustrated by Democratic leaders like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who says he won't support gutting the filibuster and insists on Republican buy-in to support a new voting rights bill. (He did propose a compromise on voting rights legislation that won the support of voting rights activist Stacey Abrams.) Leonard Pitts Jr., a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, captured some of this bitterness when he called Manchin's reasoning "nonsensical." Pitts also alluded to the "For the People Act," a bill to expand voting rights, when he posed a rhetorical question to Manchin: "Would you decline to support a For the Chickens Act solely because the foxes refused to sign on?" 

 Why some White voters won't care if you build them a bridge A Black voter who voted Republican in the late 19th-century South could have related to some of Pitts' sarcasm. Black voters in the South were then the most loyal supporters of the Republican Party. The Republicans were the party of Abraham Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," and the driving force behind Reconstruction, which lasted roughly from 1865 to 1877. It was the nation's first genuine attempt to build a multiracial democracy. Those Republicans were strong supporters of Black voting rights. Black Americans were so loyal to the party that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and civil rights icon, once said, "The Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea around us." 

 But as White resistance to Reconstruction grew, the Republican Party gradually began to treat Black voters as castaways. GOP leaders said that the party shouldn't become too dependent on Black voters and should craft an economic message that would appeal to more White voters, says Richard White, author of "The Republic for Which it Stands," an acclaimed book that explores US history from Reconstruction to the end of the 19th century. 

 A central part of Republicans' economic message to reluctant White voters was infrastructure: They vowed to rebuild the roads, railways and ports throughout the South. a person sitting on a bench in front of a building: An ex-slave and his wife on the steps of a decaying plantation house in Greene County, Georgia. Many Black Southerners saw their rights gradually eroded in the late 1800s.

Many Black Southerners saw their rights gradually eroded in the late 1800s. "They said we're going to give you economic opportunity," says White, a professor of American history at Stanford University. "We're going to build an economic infrastructure you can use. You are going to be able to increase your standard of living. And that's why you're going to join the Republican Party." That approach didn't work in the South. Racism trumped economics. 

Many White Southerners from the Civil War generation saw the Republican Party as "an alien embodiment of wartime defeat and black equality," the historian Eric Foner said in his classic book on that era, "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution." a person holding a sign: Democratic caucus members of the Texas House join a rally on the steps of the Texas Capitol to support voting rights on July 8, 2021, in Austin.© Eric Gay/AP Democratic caucus members of the Texas House join a rally on the steps of the Texas Capitol to support voting rights on July 8, 2021, in Austin. White resistance to Black voting rights ground down the will of many Republican leaders. Black political power was crushed by a combination of White terrorism, a wave of voter suppression laws and an indifferent Supreme Court that turned a blind eye to injustice. 

 Reconstruction roughly ended with the disputed presidential contest of 1876. An election too close to call was resolved after candidate Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to a backroom deal that resulted in him pulling troops out of the South in exchange for the presidency. The Republican Party ceased being a major player in the South. Democrats became so dominant that the region became known as the "Solid South."

What followed was a century of Jim Crow segregation throughout the South that only ended with the rise of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. That's when the Democratic Party began attracting massive numbers of Black voters because of its support for civil rights. The reasons why Reconstruction ended are complicated. But one lesson contemporary Democratic leaders should take from that era is simple: An economic appeal to White voters consumed by racial grievances can only go so far. 

 Many Southern White voters were willing to sacrifice the economic benefits of Reconstruction -- the regions' first public schools, rebuilt roads and railroads, the construction of public hospitals -- to prevent what some called "Negro Rule." a sign in front of a brick building: 

 Southern states began enacting such laws in the late 1800s to restrict Black residents' rights 

 Southern states began enacting such laws in the late 1800s to restrict Black residents' rights. White, the historian, says Democratic leaders touting the crossover appeal of the infrastructure bill "sound like moderate Republicans during Reconstruction." "That's why I think the infrastructure argument is ridiculous, because in the South they were more than willing to hurt themselves if in fact they could hurt Black people more," White says.

That impulse among some White voters survives today. Look at the resistance to Obamacare. The Democratic Party's passage of a national health care law that helps many struggling White families did not turn many conservative White voters into Democrats. Many red states still won't accept the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare despite the financial and health benefits.

 

. Or consider the impact of Biden dispatching stimulus checks to White voters. 

A Washington Post reporter recently traveled to an impoverished, rural Ohio county whose White voters overwhelmingly voted for former President Trump. Though virtually all of them said they benefited from Biden's stimulus checks, virtually none said the help would lead them to support Democrats. The lesson: Building a new road won't build a new bridge to reluctant White voters who despise Blacks.

 Both parties have taken Black voters for granted The White political allies of Black voters made another big mistake that Democrats may be making now. They're forgetting to "Dance With the One That Brought You." That's the title of a song by country music star Shania Twain. The title also reflects a popular sports expression which advises coaches to stick with the players that helped them win. The Republican Party in the 19th century ignored that rationale. Black voters in the South were crucial to Republicans' success in the early days of Reconstruction. They were the party's most loyal supporters. At one point in the late 19th century, there were an estimated 2,000 Black Republicans holding office throughout the South. As White resistance to Reconstruction mounted, though, Republican Party leaders shifted their emphasis from racial equality to big business. "Republicans started taking the Black vote for granted, and the Republican Party were always divided," The historian, Foner, said in a USA Today interview. "There were those who said, 'We got to really defend the Black vote in the South.' And others said, 'No, we've got to appeal to the business-minded voter in the South as the party of business, the party of growth." 

Many Black supporters of the Republican Party felt betrayed. They were the backbone of the GOP in the South but watched Republican leaders do nothing as Black Southerners were being slaughtered while trying to vote. 

 Henry Adams, an ex-slave who fought for the Union in the Civil War, once told congressional investigators in 1880: "The whole South — every State in the South — had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves." When a political party allows its political opponents to restrict access to the vote, the impact can last for multiple generations. That happened in the Jim Crow South. The US didn't become a genuine democracy until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Voting rights advocates warn that some version of a Jim Crow 2.0 could repeat itself today -- minus the raw violence but with an array of new tactics that restrict voting by Black Americans. 

 Nse Ufot, a voting rights advocate in Georgia, said that if Democratic leaders can't replicate the staggering turnout from last November's presidential election, then "We're fucked." She used another f-word when she talked about Biden's recent speech on voting rights. "When I think about the f-word that cannot be said on television, I didn't think it was the filibuster," she said

. Ufot says she and other Black voters have often felt that the Democratic Party takes their vote for granted. Many now also face the dilemma Black voters faced in the late 19th century South -- the alternative is worse. They can't envision voting for today's Republican Party, which they view as dominated by White supremacists. Still, some Black voters could make a third choice that should frighten Democrats: to not vote at all. 

 Ufot says if the voting rights bill fails, many Black voters in swing states like Georgia may wonder if standing in long lines and taking time off for work to navigate a thicket of voting restrictions is worth it. "We run the risk of people withdrawing from the process because the cost of participation is too high and they don't feel like any party represents their interests and will fight for their agenda and priorities," she says. The potential death spiral facing the Democratic Party Black voters won't be the only ones hurt if Democratic leaders don't go all out to protect voting rights. 

The party itself could suffer from a modern version of the death spiral that doomed Republicans in the Jim Crow South. If the Democratic Party doesn't pass new voting protections, it could lose the House, Senate and White House within the next four years, says Ronald Brownstein, a senior political analyst at CNN, in a recent Atlantic magazine essay. 

 He says the country is facing a 'turning point" in the voting rights battle that will determine whether its democracy "grows more inclusive or exclusionary." He writes that Republican voter restrictions "amount to stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change" and that millennials and Gen Zers represent the most racially diverse generation in American history. If Republicans eventually impose red state voting rules on blue states, Democrats may not be able to pass national voting rights rules "for another 50 years," said one Democratic senator quoted in Brownstein's essay. For Democrats, passing a new voting rights bill is a question of survival, 

Elie Mystal, a writer with The Nation magazine, said during a recent interview with Slate. "There are entirely too many Democratic senators and establishment folks who do not see the existential threat to their own jobs if these voter suppression laws are allowed to stand," she said. "They think they can still convince that middle-of-the-road White person that left the party during the Reagan years... They don't understand that the base of their party is these Black and brown people who turn out for them. They don't understand that they cannot win if they do not have overwhelming turnout from Black and brown communities." Other voting rights advocates are less pessimistic. They say that voter suppression laws aimed at Black voters can sometimes backfire. "Black people have a history -- when you make us mad, we turn out," says Timothy McDonald, an Atlanta pastor who founded the African American Ministers Leadership Council, the group which created the "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote movement among Black churches nationwide. McDonald says it's time to do away with the filibuster if it's used to stop a new voting rights bill. But he also supports the Biden administration's focus on passing what could possibly be two major infrastructure bills. New construction offers tangible signs of progress that could even cause some White, conservative voters to switch their votes to Democrats, he says. 

 "Even Bubba might say, 'I don't like Democrats,' but that's a good thing there," says, McDonald, referring to infrastructure improvements such as new roads and bridges. "When he goes into the voting booth, he's not going to tell his buddies who he's voting for but don't be surprised." But the expectation that Blacks can counter voter suppression by turning out in record numbers amounts to a cruel double standard, Michael Arceneaux argued in a recent column for The Week entitled, "Biden's voting rights betrayal." "White voters are never asked to 'out-organize vote suppression," he wrote. Why the time is never 'right' for a voting rights bill As I hear Democratic leaders rationalize why now is the wrong time to get rid of the filibuster or push aggressively for voting rights, a question comes to my mind: When did White political allies of Black people ever say the time was "right" for us to demand our equal rights? The time wasn't right to reclaim Black voting rights in the South until Americans were horrified by images of White state troopers beating marchers in Selma in 1965. The time wasn't right to press for police reforms until Americans were horrified by the video of George Floyd being murdered on camera in 2020. 

 The time isn't right to get rid of the filibuster and pass a new voting rights bill now, even though a recent Pew Research Center survey revealed that 48% of White Americans now say that voting is a "privilege," not a right. Politics, it's been said, is the art of the possible. But determined political leaders can often make things happen if they're passionate enough. The Democratic Party used to know this. When a senator warned President Lyndon Johnson that if he pushed for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act the Democratic Party would "lose the South forever," Johnson's response was resolute, according to a passage in historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, "Leadership In Turbulent Times." "You may be right," Johnson said. "But if that's the price I've gotta pay, I'm going to gladly do it." When it seemed like the passage of Obamacare was doomed, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a nervous Democratic leader who wanted to pursue a less ambitious health plan focused on children that she wasn't going to settle for "kiddie-care." There are some issues that are so fundamental to a party's identity and survival that there is no middle ground, no way to finesse a hard choice. As one voting rights activists recently tweeted: "I am uncompromising on voting rights because there is no middle point between the arsonist and the fireman." 

Black voters like Henry Adams, the courageous soldier who tried to organize Black voters in the South, had that attitude. But their White political allies took their vote for granted and treated them, in the words of Frederick Douglass, like "field hands." 

 If the Biden administration doesn't pass a new voting rights bill after Black voters help give them the White House and control of Congress, the sense of jubilation I witnessed firsthand on the streets of Philadelphia and Washington D.C.  will evaporate. 

 And if more White Americans continue to regard voting as a privilege rather than a fundamental right, more Black voters will ask Democratic leaders a variation of a question that was first posed by their ancestors in the Jim Crow South: What's the use of building a new bridge or road when you don't protect the voting rights of those people who gave you the power to do so in the first place?