Friday, March 15, 2024

Something to Know - 15 March

California is a very large state, with something for everyone.  Mountains, deserts, ocean, rivers, beaches, urban centers, and rural communities; it's all there.   To get a flavor of it "all", here is an article from today's Los Angeles Times that highlights a section of the RED state.  California is noted as being a very progressive and BLUE part of the United States, but this is just to let you know that there is a very vocal and vibrant characteristic that some people may not be familiar with:

Is Donald Trump a new King David? Ask California's right-wing Sons of Liberty

 JEFFREY FLEISHMANSTAFF WRITER 


HANFORD, Calif. —  Before the 1776 Sons of Liberty meeting got underway at the Elks Lodge, Adam Medeiros, a hairdresser for 44 years, sat in a folding chair and referred to the Bible to explain his politics: "I don't think I'd have liked King David," he said. "He was an adulterer and a murderer, but God chose him to rule a nation. "
Medeiros paused and added: "I believe Donald Trump was anointed by God to save this country."
The man across the table, Brian Gogue, a pest control advisor for farms in the Central Valley, nodded. "Sometimes," he said, "God uses imperfect people for his perfect work." Both men smiled. It was almost 7 p.m. Men in ball caps and jeans, including veterans and at least one pastor, filed into the lodge, where they, along with Medeiros and Gogue, stood in a circle and pledged allegiance to the flag. They prayed and the meeting commenced.

"The California GOP is crooked," one man said.
"America is not ready for a woman president," another said.
"Our hospitals have half the number of doctors and nurses we're supposed to have," a third said. "It's a problem."
Another night in rural America. Stars in the sky, snow on the mountains. Homeless people in the alleys. Migrants at the borders. A feeling of unease in a restless nation of splintered identities and conflicting creeds. The Sons of Liberty — 28 men and seven women — felt this foreboding as they shared grievances about who would protect the Constitution from what they see as progressive wackos, Marxist democrats, storytime drag queens, globalist provocateurs and a Biden White House that has weaponized the Justice Department against Trump, the only man who, despite the 91 criminal charges he's facing, can fix what's wrong.
How a showdown between Central Valley Democrats could help the GOP keep control of Congress

"I'm a huge Trump supporter," said Medeiros, a neatly pressed man who cuts 15 to 20 heads of hair a day, some of them graying classmates from his days at Hanford High School. "Back in 2016, I thought he was a little too brash and talked like a conceited New Yorker. I wasn't going to vote for Hillary [Clinton], though. I voted for Trump and saw that, yes, this is how it's supposed to be. Run the country like a business. Put America first. That's when I became a true believer."
The 1776 Sons of Liberty — named for the colonists who helped instigate the American Revolution — was founded in Kings County in 2020 as a protest to Trump's first impeachment. Most of its members, including John Darpli, an alfalfa broker and softball coach, and Jeff Mora, a DJ and podcaster, are conservative constitutionalists who argue that the government is perverting the ideals of the Founding Fathers.

Calling themselves "warriors of liberty and seekers of truth," the Sons believe they are representative of disaffected Americans opposed to gun restrictions, open borders, "liberally indoctrinated schools," foreign wars and what they see as the overreach of the state and federal governments into the lives of citizens. They support Trump, but it's their disdain for Democrats and President Biden that fuels much of their passion.

For the Sons, most Republicans are sellouts, except for the ultra-right Freedom Caucus, a band of congressional disrupters that has wreaked legislative havoc and forced then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) from his post as speaker of the House last year. But their concerns go deeper. They center on a political establishment they see as undermining patriotism, hard work and Christian ethos at a time when identity politics, rising immigration and technology are reshaping an America that they no longer recognize.
The Central Valley gives California a recall rarity: a squeaker of a race

"They've taken God out of schools," Darpli said the day after the meeting, eating breakfast with Mora at the Green Valley Cafe, where waitresses hurried with refills and political chatter veered well into the morning. "They're mutilating teens with gender conversions. They're threatening the Constitution. There's no moral structure anymore. No sense of a shared American identity.
"The immigrants coming now are not proud to fly the American flag. They're coming here and raising the flag of where they came from. It's somehow racist these days to be a proud, white patriotic citizen."

Mora sensed other designs at work. "It's part of a globalist plan for a one world government." he said. "Billions of dollars spent on Ukraine when more could be done here to help Americans."
He believes — despite court evidence and the convictions of hundreds of perpetrators — that the Jan. 6 insurrection "was orchestrated by the FBI to get rid of Trump and make us look like a crazed group of extremists. The whole thing was a farce, a tourist attraction gone awry."
When asked how a group that reveres the Constitution could support a man who said that if reelected he'd act like a dictator on his first day in office, Darpli laughed and said, "He just says stuff. He doesn't mean it. If Trump tried to become a dictator, I'd be the first one to boot him out. I started watching him years ago on his TV show, 'The Apprentice,' I liked the way he just fired people. He has common sense. That's why I want him to be president."
:::
The November election is certain to further inflame the country's divisions and distort its realities. In a time of lies, misinformation and growing suspicion of institutions — including colleges, Congress and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — confidence in democracy has been shaken by extremist political elements on the right and left.
Like many Sons of Liberty members, Gogue leans on his faith to cope with the disarray. He was raised a Catholic but at the urging of his wife, he switched to a nondenominational church, where, he said, God penetrated his heart and changed him completely. But he worries about what will come in the autumn.
"If Trump wins, riots will break out across the country," he said. "There are guys on the right [militias] who will lose it if Biden wins. There will be fireworks on both sides."

"It could get ugly," said Medeiros, a trustee for the county's board of education.
California is a stronghold of liberalism, but the Central Valley, where the scent of manure rims the highways and cattle ranchers tend winter grass, is a redoubt of conservatism. In 2008, 73.7% of Kings County — one of the state's highest percentages — voted against same-sex marriages. Sixty-four percent of voters in Kings County, which has a population of about 153,000, voted to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in 2021. Trump had won 55% of the county's vote in the presidential election a year earlier.

Ultraconservatives in this town about 80 miles north of Bakersfield see the former president as an antidote to the liberal forces that have forsaken them, a billionaire chaos agent who has upended the system with nationalist fervor and a showman's entourage. He is a vessel for their anger, the talisman of their grievances. He is flawed, they say, but who isn't, and his threats to bend the government to his whims, which have alarmed Democrats and world leaders alike, are to his supporters the stuff of a robust, uncontainable personality.
The Sons have grown to about 100 members. They are more hard-line and politically active — sponsoring debates and candidate nights — than many Republicans. A number of them said they would vote for Trump, who recently was ordered to pay more than $450 million in a civil fraud case, even if he were convicted of charges related to the Jan. 6 uprising and other criminal counts against him.

"Love him or hate him, Trump brought results," said Larry Faria, 47, a public safety worker and former Sons president. "The economy was strong. He didn't get us in any wars. He's brutally honest and speaks plainly. His abrasiveness got him elected. The Democrats have gone for too many niche issues. They forgot about the working class. ... Trump spoke to them. If he's elected he'll halt the immigrant invasion, cut inflation and stop sending money to other countries."

A few hours before the Sons meeting at the Elks Lodge, Faria drove his pickup around Hanford, which is the county seat with a population of about 58,500. He pointed to where he hunted doves and rabbits as a boy. The fields are now home to Walmart, Target and other big-box stores that lend an air of sameness in countless communities across the U.S. It's a corporate imagining of national identity, which to Faria amounts to a kind of loss: "We're in the industrial machine, losing the small town touch," he said. "It's the story of America."
He grew up on a dairy farm that survived the Great Depression but shut down about 10 years ago when milk prices fell. Big farms, government jobs and six prisons within an hour of Hanford propel much of its economy today. The county's median household income is $68,540 — compared with the state median of $91,905 — and about 18% of people are poor. The official poverty level for a family of four is an income below $29,678.
Faria said the high cost of living in California has spurred a "mass migration of the middle class out of the state to Texas, Tennessee, Utah and other places. They're taking their knowledge and tax base with them and we're getting back-filled with people not of the same caliber."
The state's population fell by more than 117,000 between 2021 and 2022. On the other hand, nearly two-thirds of those moving to California from another state in 2022 — and more than half of those emigrating from others countries — had a bachelor's degree or higher.
Thousands of California wells are at risk of drying up despite landmark water law

Faria turned toward downtown, mentioning that business owners are trying to hang on but that the old granary by the railroad tracks closed not long ago. This land is accustomed to hard times and competing interests, he said, noting that there was trouble when the railroad first arrived. In 1880, five ranchers and two deputy U.S. marshals were killed in a battle between settlers and the Southern Pacific Railroad over land rights.
Faria made a left. A homeless man rummaged around a trash can across the street from the old stone and brick jail, known as "The Bastille."

"We've got 400 homeless people in this county," he said. "Twenty years ago, we had one homeless person — the lady in the park everybody knew."

Faria said immigration, mainly from Spanish-speaking countries — Kings County's Latino population jumped from 43% in 2000 to 57% today — is changing the country. The scenes of migrants at the Texas border with Mexico, he said, amount to "an invasion that neither party wants to fix. The Republicans want cheap labor and the Democrats want to import the next generation of Democrat voters. It's the people like us who lose."
"I'm not against immigration," he said, "but it's got to be done right."

He passed a church and drove along open land. The farmers in this region have long contended with drought and falling groundwater tables from over-pumping. When he was younger, he said, he'd drive past the farms in a valley layered in fog. The mist is not so thick anymore; he didn't know exactly why, only that things never stay the same.
He accelerated.
"If Biden gets elected," he said, "it will be a tragedy."
:::
Cars arrived at the Elks Lodge at nightfall. A couple sat at the bar in low light, and the place, for a moment, carried the feel of another time, like a scene in an old black-and-white movie. The Sons of Liberty dispatched to a meeting room. A woman noted attendance and sold ball caps. Members thumbed through ballots and talked local politics and how tough it was being a conservative in California.
Medeiros, who was a child when his family emigrated to the U.S. from the Azores, said these days he's troubled by liberal attitudes around homelessness. "We're becoming a community of enablers. A lot of the homeless are posers. They smoke pot and charge their cellphones at their moms' houses. We'll help the legitimate homeless, but we can't get to them through the cloud of abusers."
The members sat in a circle. Trump challenger Nikki Haley's name came up.
"Older men my age will not vote for her," one man said.
Others politely suggested that such thinking was out of date and that it didn't matter whether a candidate was a man or a woman so long as they'd protect the Constitution.
Heads nodded.

Talk veered to McCarthy, whose district included part of Kings County. McCarthy was never conservative enough for the Sons; to their mind he did not focus enough on Central Valley issues and was too enamored with appearing on Fox News. But they acknowledged that McCarthy's resignation from Congress last year cost the region a direct connection to Trump.
"We don't have an insider anymore," one man said.
The conversation went on for a while, a small group calculating the odds of who might win in November, a chorus moving toward a nation's political reckoning. When the last bit of business was done, the parking lot emptied and the Sons drove home, past a closed-up downtown and fields that stretched quietly to the mountains.




--
****
Juan Matute
     (click on it)
― The Lincoln Project


Thursday, March 14, 2024

Something to Know - 14 March

Sorry - not much time to expand on any story this morning.   However, a quick glance at HCR, and enough to pass on:


Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American heathercoxrichardson@substack.com 
Unsubscribe

Mar 13, 2024, 11:54 PM (7 hours ago)
to me
View in browser

After yesterday's primary contests, we appear headed toward a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. But this year's election is an entirely different kettle of fish than that of 2020.

In 2020 there were plenty of red flags around Trump's plans for a second term, but it was not until after it was clear he had lost the election that he gave up all pretense of normal presidential behavior. Beginning the night of the election, he tried to overturn that election and to install himself as president, ignoring the will of the voters, who had chosen Joe Biden. His attack on the fundamental principle of democracy ended the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power established in 1797 when our first president, George Washington, deliberately walked behind his successor, John Adams, after Adams was sworn into office.

Trump then refused to step aside for his successor as all of his predecessors had done, and has continued to push the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. His loyalists in the states have embraced that lie, undermining faith in our electoral system, although they have never produced any evidence for their claims of voter fraud. (Remember the Cyber Ninjas who handled the election "audit" in Arizona? The company went out of business in 2022.)  

Then, a year after he left office, news broke that Trump had compromised the country's national security by retaining highly classified documents and storing them in unsecured boxes at Mar-a-Lago. When the federal government tried to recover them, he hid them from officials. In June 2023 a grand jury in Miami indicted Trump on 37 felony counts related to that theft. 

Trump is not the same as he was in 2020, and in the past three years he has transformed the Republican Party into a vehicle for Christian nationalism. 

In 2016 the Republican Party was still dominated by leaders who promoted supply-side economics. They were determined to use the government to cut taxes and regulations to concentrate money and power among a few individuals, who would, theoretically, use that money and power to invest in the economy far more efficiently than they could if the government intervened. Before 2016 that Reaganesque party had stayed in office thanks to the votes of a base interested in advancing patriarchal, racist, and religious values. 

But Trump flipped the power structure in the party, giving control to the reactionary base. In the years since 2020, the Republican Party has become openly opposed to democracy, embracing the Christian nationalism of leaders like Hungary's Viktor Orbán, who maintains that the tenets of democracy weaken a nation by giving immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women the same rights as heterosexual, native-born white men. 

Rather than calling for a small federal government that stays out of the way of market forces, as Republicans have advocated since 1980, the new Trump Party calls for a strong government that enforces religious rules and bans abortion; books; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and so on. In 2022, thanks to the three extremists Trump put on the Supreme Court, the government ceased to recognize a constitutional right that Americans had enjoyed since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision: the right to abortion.  

Last week, Trump formally took over the apparatus of the Republican Party, installing loyalists—including his daughter-in-law—at the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and purging the organization of all but his own people. Indicating its priorities, the RNC has hired Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, former correspondent at the right-wing media outlet One American News Network and promoter of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, as senior counsel for election integrity. 

In Congress, far-right Trump supporters are paralyzing the House of Representatives. The Republicans took power after the midterm elections of 2022 and have run one of the least effective congresses in history. Far-right members have refused to agree to anything that didn't meet their extremist positions, while first Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and then Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to reach out to Democrats to pass legislation except for must-pass laws like appropriations, when Democrats provide the majority of the votes that keep the government functioning. 

The result has been a Congress that can get virtually nothing done and instead has focused on investigations of administration officials—including the president—which have failed spectacularly. Republican members who actually want to pass laws are either leaving or declining to run for reelection. The conference has become so toxic that fewer than 100 members agreed to attend their annual retreat that began today. "I'd rather sit down with Hannibal Lecter and eat my own liver," a Republican member of Congress told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios.

Meanwhile, Trump has promised that if he returns to office, he will purge the nonpartisan civil service we have had since 1883, replacing career employees with his own loyalists. He has called for weaponizing the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, and his advisors say he will round up and put into camps 10 million people currently living in the U.S., not just undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers but also those with birthright citizenship, tossing away a right that has been enshrined in the Constitution since 1868.

Internationally, he has aligned with dictators like Russia's Vladimir Putin and Hungary's Viktor Orbán and has threatened to abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security pact that has protected the U.S. and like-minded nations since 1949. 

If Trump has descended into authoritarianism since 2020, Biden has also changed. For all his many decades of public service, it was unclear in 2020 what he could actually accomplish as president, especially since Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had weaponized the filibuster to stop Congress from passing anything on the Democrats' wish list. But on January 5, 2021, in a special election, Georgia voters elected Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and the Democrats took control of the Senate as well as of the House. 

In Biden's first two years—with the help of then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who managed a squeaky-small House majority—Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic majority, and on occasion, a few Republicans set out to demonstrate that the government could work for ordinary Americans. They passed a series of laws that rivaled President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s. 

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan rebuilt the economy after the worst of the coronavirus pandemic; the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) is rebuilding the nation's roads and bridges; the $280 billion Chips and Science Act invests in semiconductor manufacture and scientific research; the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act enables the government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and invests in programs to combat climate change. Projects funded by these measures are so popular that Republicans who voted against them are trying to claim credit. 

Biden, Harris, and the Democrats have diversified the government service, defended abortion rights, reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, relieved debt by enforcing the terms of student loans, passed a gun safety law, and reinforced NATO.

They set out to overturn supply-side economics, restoring the system on which the nation had been based between 1933 and 1981, in which the government regulated business, maintained a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. The result was the strongest economic recovery from the pandemic of any country in the world.  

"Now, the general election truly begins, and the contrast could not be clearer," Harris wrote after Biden secured the nomination. "Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and our fundamental freedoms. He is proud of his role in overturning Roe, and has talked openly about plans for a nationwide abortion ban. He routinely praises authoritarian leaders and has himself vowed to be a dictator on Day One. Just this week, he said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare would be on the table if he receives a second term. Each of these stances ought to be considered disqualifying by itself; taken together, they reveal the former President to be an existential danger to our country.

"With his State of the Union speech last week, President Biden passionately presented our alternative vision. We will reduce costs for families, make housing more affordable, and raise the minimum wage. We will restore Roe, protect voting rights, and finally address our gun violence epidemic. The American people overwhelmingly support this agenda over Donald Trump's extreme ideas, and that will propel our campaign in the months ahead."

It appears that Biden and Trump will square off again in 2024 as they did in 2020, but the election is not a replay of four years ago. Both candidates are now known quantities, and they have clearly laid out very different plans for America's future. 

Reminder: These letters are available in a free audio version at Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Notes:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/cyber-ninjas-company-led-arizona-gop-election-audit-shutting-down-n1287145

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/12/politics/rnc-trump-takeover-lawyers-election/index.html

https://apnews.com/article/trump-documents-investigation-timeline-087f0c9a8368bb983a16b67dd31dcd4c

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-classified-documents-indictment-c15a5f36e4e83417805718d81a035441

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/12/house-republican-retreat-infighting

https://punchbowl.news/article/never-ending-impeachment-inquiry/

Twitter (X):

Acyn/status/1768084013799932213

david_darmofal/status/1767735412158570604/photo/2

Victorshi2020/status/176796502


--
****
Juan Matute
     (click on it)
― The Lincoln Project


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Something to See - 13 March

If you have not seen this video, it the Oscar winner for the Best Documentary (short subject).   The Last Repair Shop is about the repair of musical instruments for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District - if features the students and the dedicated repair technicians (who are an amazing force themselves).   It is 40 minutes long, and well worth your time.


--
****
Juan Matute
     (click on it)
― The Lincoln Project


Something to Know - 13 March

Democrats would be wise to stick with those issues that marginalize the MAGA folks.   No need to call the opposition The GOP and the MAGA wing as two operatives.   The Republican Party is all MAGA now.   Here is the way to call them out - pin their unpopular and selfish agenda in ways that embarrass them in the eyes of the average citizen, and keep it up all the way through the political campaign.   It is uncomfortable for the truth to be told.   MAGA folks do not support programs that support health for all.   "It costs too much money"....really?    Instead...they want to cut more taxes and drastically cut Medicare and other programs.   Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times clearly points that out.  Calling out Hypocrisy is good journalism.

Column: Republicans would rather keep poisoning children with lead than pay for a fix

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach

Kansas 
 MICHAEL HILTZIKBUSINESS COLUMNIST 

MARCH 11, 2024 9:25 PM PT

Here are a few things we know about lead in drinking water:

◆ There is no known safe level. More than a decade ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ceased setting minimum acceptable standards for children's blood lead levels.

That was because scientific studies couldn't identify any concentration that didn't have "deleterious effects" on children's health. The only proper approach, the CDC said, is prevention "to ensure that no children in the U.S." face any exposure to lead.

Lead exposure causes damage to the brain and kidneys and may interfere with the production of red blood cells that carry oxygen to all parts of the body.

— Environmental Protection Agency


  ◆  Removing all the sources of lead exposure is expensive, but over the long term a sound investment, for it eliminates long-term effects that lead to massive healthcare costs, cognitive deficits and higher crime rates.

 ◆ Children in low-income and minority neighborhoods are the most seriously affected, because their families have few options to avoid exposure. The lead crisis in Flint, Mich., erupted as a national scandal in 2011, but it was the tip of the iceberg.

 ◆ Industry has been opposing abatement programs for decades — in California, for instance, three companies that produced and promoted lead paint for homes fought a 19-year legal battle to evade the costs of residential abatement. They finally reached a $305-million settlement with several counties and cities in 2019.

That brings us to the latest initiative by the Republican attorneys general of 15 red states, aimed at stifling a lead abatement initiative of the Biden administration.

Led by Kansas Atty. Gen. Kris W. Kobach, they've taken aim at a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency to order the removal of some 9 million lead water lines across the country. The rule conforms with an action plan Biden issued in 2021 aimed at replacing 100% of the lead water lines serving homes in the U.S.


You may remember Kobach's name from his adventures waging various right-wing culture battles, all of which he lost — often at the expense of the localities that followed his lead as Kansas secretary of state. These included failed efforts to enact draconian anti-immigration ordinances.

In 2018, Kobach suffered a mortifying defeat at the hands of a federal judge who overturned a Kansas law he championed that required proof of citizenship to vote. The judge further held him in contempt for repeatedly flouting courtroom procedure.

Kobach lost races for governor in 2018 and the U.S. Senate in 2020, but managed to win a race for attorney general in 2022. From that perch he has been pressing his new cause — exposing Kansans to lead in their drinking water.

In a comment letter to the EPA, Kobach and his colleagues call the proposed rule "unworkable, underfunded, and unnecessary." They also say the benefits "may be ... entirely speculative."

They suggest it's an infringement of states' rights, which is an argument that has seldom been heard since the Civil War.

The Kobach cabal, which encompasses the attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming, further asserts that private homeowners would "bear the brunt of the costs."

With one exception, all these claims are false. The one true assertion is that the mandate is underfunded. Estimates of the cost of meeting the EPA's proposal run from about $45 billion to $60 billion.

Biden's 2021 infrastructure bill allocated $15 billion for the purpose — but he originally proposed $45 billion, which was pared down in congressional negotiations.

As for the rest, obviously the rule isn't "unworkable." The EPA proposes to give localities and utilities 10 years to complete the mandated replacements, averaging 10% of the work per year. The red states say that's an unreasonably "tight timeline." But the rule makes municipalities with especially numerous lead pipes, such as Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Detroit, eligible for extensions.


The technology and engineering necessary for the job are well understood. Newark, N.J., replaced its more than 23,000 lead water lines via a three-year, $170-million program that commenced in 2019, all at no direct cost to homeowners — despite what Kobach et al. claimed. Green Bay, Wis., completed the replacement of its 2,000 lead lines in 2020, after a five-year effort that also required no out-of-pocket spending by homeowners.

Is it "unnecessary"? Are the benefits "speculative"? Surely not.

The adverse health impacts of lead in drinking water are absolutely indisputable. The EPA's proposed rule spelled them out, with citations to the relevant scientific data.

"Lead exposure causes damage to the brain and kidneys and may interfere with the production of red blood cells that carry oxygen to all parts of the body," the proposal stated. "The most susceptible life-stages are the developing fetus, infants, and young children.... Because they are growing, children's bodies absorb more lead than adults do, and their brains and nervous systems are more sensitive to its damaging effects. As a result, even low-level lead exposure is of particular concern to children."

As for the special vulnerability of children in low-income communities to these conditions, a 2021 study in JAMA Pediatrics found that children in those communities are nearly 2.5 times as likely to have elevated blood lead levels compared with those in low-poverty areas.

Another 2021 study found that Black infants suffered a 50% higher average loss of IQ points attributable to blood lead than white or Hispanic infants, costing them an estimated loss in lifetime earnings of more than $47,000.

These considerations should make the eradication of lead from drinking water a major goal for a party that claims to be devoted to the health and welfare of children, even before infancy. But actions speak louder than words, and the actions of Republicans tell us that they care a lot more about money than about children.

Let's start with the lead water pipe rule that the new EPA proposal aims to replace. The old rule was promulgated by the EPA under Trump. It was issued on Jan. 15, 2021, five days before Trump left office.



The Trump rule left in place a preexisting standard of 15 parts per billion of lead in water that had been the trigger for lead pipe removal. That was three times the level deemed the maximum allowable in Canada and the European Union, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported.

The Trump rule also extended the deadline for pulling out lines in the most heavily contaminated systems to 33 years, from 14. The NRDC estimated that the weakened standards would leave more than 5.5 million people exposed to heavily contaminated drinking water for decades to come.

The Biden administration suspended the Trump proposal upon taking office. That won support from the attorneys general of eight states, including California and the District of Columbia, who rightly labeled exposure to lead "a public health issue of paramount importance."

The proposal being challenged by the Republican attorneys general is its replacement. It accepts no compromise in pulling the most dangerous sources of lead poisoning out of the ground.

No one disputes that eliminating lead from drinking water is an expensive undertaking. But if Kobach and his colleagues are really concerned that the EPA rule is an "unfunded mandate," as they label it in their comment letter, there's an obvious solution: They should turn their political influence to persuading their congressional delegations to funding it.

Those 15 states have 30 senators among them (all but three Republicans) and 118 House members (83 of whom are Republicans). That would be a good start at getting billions more appropriated to cover removal of every lead pipe in the country. If they truly care about the children, what are they waiting for?



--

--
****
Juan Matute
     (click on it)
― The Lincoln Project


Saturday, March 9, 2024

Something to Know - 9 March

The reviews and opinions on Biden's speech the other night are all over the place, with mostly great approvals.   The record of the Biden administration has received accolades on most issues, however it is hesitant refusal to fully support the Palestinians in Gaza that brings him down.   The continuing carnage and bloodshed of innocents is a disgrace to all, and the leadership of the United States needs to act.   With regard to issues at home, he did very well in driving the wedge into the GOP by pointing out the miserable and old-fashioned opinion of Republicans and their regard of women's rights.   The Senator from Alabama was obvious in her support for women who need to stay at home and be homemakers preparing food for their husbands who come home from work.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzmKa73egxA


Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American heathercoxrichardson@substack.com 

to me

Last night, Republicans and Democrats offered very different visions of the roles and rights of women in American society. 

In the State of the Union address, President Joe Biden thanked Vice President Kamala Harris "for being an incredible leader defending reproductive freedom and so much more." Biden condemned "state laws banning the freedom to choose, criminalizing doctors, forcing survivors of rape and incest to leave their states to get the treatment they need," and he called out Republicans "promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom."

Biden quoted back to the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, sitting in front of him in the chamber, their words when in June 2022 they overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.

The justices wrote: "Women are not without electoral or political power." 

Biden responded: "You're about to realize just how much you were right about that." "Clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women. But they found out. When reproductive freedom was on the ballot, we won in 2022 and 2023. And we'll win again in 2024." Biden promised to restore Roe v. Wade if Americans elect a Congress that supports the right to choose.

Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) gave the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union address. Sitting in a kitchen rather than in a setting that reflected her position in one of the nation's highest elected offices, Britt conspicuously wore a necklace with a cross and spoke in a breathy, childlike voice as she wavered between smiles and the suggestion she was on the verge of tears. 

"What the hell am I watching right now?" an unnamed Trump advisor asked Nikki McCann Ramirez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone.

Britt's performance was the logical outcome of right-wing demonization of women's rights advocates since the 1960s. That popular demonization began soon after women calling for "liberation" from the strict gender roles of the post–World War II years protested the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The protesters tossed items related to women's roles as homemakers and sex symbols—bras, girdles, pots and pans, and Playboy magazines—into a trash can. That act so horrified traditionalists that a journalist likened the women to young men burning their draft cards, starting the myth that the protesting women had burned their bras. 

Two years later, with his popularity dropping before the 1972 election, President Richard Nixon wooed Catholic Democrats by abandoning his support for abortion rights. The following March, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, declaring that "[e]quality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex," and sent it off to the states for ratification. 

Advocates of traditional gender roles used abortion as a proxy to attack women's rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not mention fetuses, but instead attacked "women's lib"—the women's liberation movement—which she claimed was "a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society." 

The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, including women in the ranks of marginalized Americans whose civil rights were protected by the federal government. Since the 1950s, opponents of such federal protection for Black and Brown Americans had tied such federal action to communism because it meant the government used tax dollars for the benefit of specific groups. In their minds, this amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers to undeserving special interests. 

The cultural backlash to the idea of women's equality strengthened. In 1974 the television show Little House on the Prairie, based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, began its nine-year run. It portrayed western women as wives and mothers cared for by menfolk, complementing the image of the cowboy individualist championed by the antigovernment right wing. 

As historian Peggy O'Donnell noted in Jezebel in 2019, prairie dresses, with their image of "traditional" femininity and motherhood, the female version of cowboy clothing, became fashionable, even as the era's popular televangelists railed against feminists. 

Constantly evoking the image of the western cowboy, Ronald Reagan won the White House. Four years later, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish "pro-choice" women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother and were demanding rights they didn't need or deserve.

Increasingly, Republicans portrayed women who demanded equality as a special interest made up of feminist scolds who wanted federal support they did not deserve. In 1984, when Democratic presidential candidate Walter "Fritz" Mondale tapped the very well qualified Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate, opponents circulated fake campaign buttons backing "Fritz and Tits," and even 60 percent of Democrats thought Ferraro was there only because Mondale was under pressure from women's groups who wanted special legislation. 

Powerful women either fell out of public view or were pilloried for intruding on a man's world as those opposing women's equality portrayed women either as wives and mothers, who looked to their husbands for financial security and safety, or as sex objects available for men's pleasure. 

By 1988, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had begun to demonize women's rights advocates as "feminazis" for whom "the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur." After the 1993 siege of the headquarters of a religious cult near Waco, Texas, that left 76 people dead and inspired the rise of right-wing militias to resist the federal government, Limbaugh emphasized that the attorney general who ordered the operation was the first female attorney general: Janet Reno.

Such rhetoric turned out Republican voters, especially the white evangelical base, and after it launched in 1996, the Fox News Channel (FNC) reinforced the idea that individualist men should be running society. Most FNC personalities were older men; the network's female personalities were young, beautiful, and deferential. (FNC chair and chief executive officer Roger Ailes resigned in 2016 after accounts emerged of alleged sexual harassment.) 

By 2016 the competing ideologies concerning the role of women in American society were encapsulated by the contest between Donald Trump and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton was highly educated and extremely well qualified. She advocated protecting the rights of women and minorities and warned that Trump would pack the Supreme Court with extremists who would undermine abortion rights. She provided detailed policy papers. 

Trump, in turn, bragged of sexual assault and called for Clinton to be arrested: "Lock her up!" became the call and response at his rallies. Ending access to abortion had become the rallying cry for the evangelicals who supported Trump, and he promised to end those rights, even flirting with the idea of criminal punishments for women seeking abortions. Far from being disqualifying, Trump's denigration of women embodied the sort of traditional gender roles fundamentalists embraced.

Once in office, Trump nominated and the Republican-dominated Senate confirmed three radical Supreme Court justices who in June 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, taking away the recognition of a constitutional right Americans had enjoyed for almost 50 years. 

When Britt delivered the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union from a kitchen, wearing a cross and using a submissive speaking style, she represented the outcome of the longstanding opposition to women's equal rights in the United States.

The Democrats' position last night was a sharp contrast. Biden stood in front of the nation's first female vice president as he denounced the Republican assault on women's rights. He warned the country: "America cannot go back."

Perfect timing for today's celebration of International Women's Day.

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2024/

The View from Rural Missouri by Jess Piper
I was about to head to bed after the State of the Union last night, when I heard a voice coming from my television that stopped me in my tracks. I didn't know who was speaking, but it really didn't matter—I recognized the voice. It was so many voices from my childhood. It was so many Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. It was potlucks, and baby show…
16 hours ago · 258 likes · 53 comments · Jess Piper

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/katie-britt-sotu-rebuttal-torched-republicans-1234983528/

https://www.npr.org/2008/09/05/94240375/pageant-protest-sparked-bra-burning-myth

Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, "Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash," The Yale Law Journal, 120 (June 2011): 2028–2087, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/41149586

https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2016/02/02/whats-wrong-with-equal-rights-for-women-1972/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/01/feminazi-feminists-women-rights-feminism-charlotte-proudman

Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (University of California Press, 1984).

https://www.jezebel.com/the-settler-fantasies-woven-into-the-prairie-dresses-1831746430

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/08/katie-britt-sotu-reaction

https://www.npr.org/2016/09/02/492443262/allegations-reveal-how-roger-ailes-ran-fox-news-by-projecting-power

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/roger-ailes-resigns-fox-news-ceo-n614396

https://www.statista.com/statistics/691173/share-of-women-in-us-cabinet-positions-johnson-to-trump/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election/clinton-warns-of-possible-trump-supreme-court-nominations-idUSKCN0WU16O/




--
****
Juan Matute
     (click on it)
― The Lincoln Project