News flashes are swirling around the GOP finally realizing the mess that Trump has got us in. Time to work to fixing things. Need to work wisely for a normalcy.
| synonyms: | lout, boor, barbarian, Neanderthal, churl, bumpkin, yokel; More |
LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Queen Elizabeth II has cancelled a scheduled Friday meeting with Donald J. Trump after complaining of a "flare-up of bone spurs," Buckingham Palace has confirmed.
The announcement took many royal watchers by surprise, because in her sixty-six-year reign the Queen had never before complained of bone spurs.
But, according to the Queen's spokesman, Peter Rhys-Willington, Elizabeth had intentionally kept her chronic bone-spur condition a closely guarded secret until now. "Her Majesty is a very brave woman, and has not wanted to unnecessarily worry her subjects," Rhys-Willington said. "And so, for decades, she has suffered in silence."
The Queen referred to her bone spurs obliquely in an official statement issued on Thursday. "We are sorry to have to cancel the engagement, but we feared that meeting Donald Trump would be most painful," the Queen's statement read.
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"Everything is horrible—worse than we ever imagined—and there's not a damn thing we can do about any of it. But whatever happens, we can't give in to despair."
Considering recent events, it shouldn't come as a great surprise that the British are doing their best to guarantee that Trump is thoroughly humiliated during his scheduled visit this week.
CNN reported on Tuesday that "There's a British campaign to make Green Day's 'American Idiot' the No. 1 song when Trump arrives" on Friday.
For the past couple of weeks, a social media campaign has sought to make Green Day's classic 2004 jam "American Idiot" the No. 1 tune in the UK by the time Trump arrives Friday…. The campaign asks people to download "American Idiot" between Friday, July 6, and Friday, July 13, to push the 14-year-old single to the top of the Official UK Charts. So far the effort appears to be working, with the song checking in at No. 18 on the chart Tuesday.
British media giant, The Independent, elaborated on the effort, reporting:
"American Idiot" was originally written in part about President George W. Bush and features lyrics such as: "Don't wanna be an American idiot/One nation controlled by the media/Information Age of hysteria/It's calling out to idiot America."
It was recently referenced by Sen. Tim Kaine, who suggested that if the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, planned on gifting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with a CD of Elton John's song "Rocket Man", Kim should reciprocate with "American Idiot".
The Independent reported that "In January, Mr Trump reportedly told Theresa May that he would not visit unless she banned protests, which she said would be impossible."
Indeed there are multiple protests scheduled throughout the United Kingdom this week, with The Independent reporting that: "Activist Leo Murray successfully raised the necessary £16,000 to pay for 'Project Trump Baby' – a six metre-high inflatable baby resembling Trump, with unusually small hands and feet, which will be flown over London when the real-life version arrives."
The Guardian added that the "'angry Trump baby' balloon will fly over Westminster from Parliament Square after the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, gave permission for it, before mass marches begin at midday."
The Guardian also reported on other scheduled protests:
Thursday
Friday
The Guardian concluded their report, noting that: "There will also be demonstrations on Friday evening in Glasgow and on Saturday in Edinburgh at noon."
For anyone planning on being in the U.K. this week, the Evening Standard published an article detailing "where to peacefully protest" Trump's visit.
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| Axios AM | ||
| By Mike Allen ·Jul 11, 2018 | ||
Good Wednesday morning. It's 7/11. Situational awareness: To protect allergic passengers, Southwest Airlines "will stop giving away peanuts on flights next month, ending a tradition that goes back decades" ... Starbucks "will eliminate single-use plastic straws ... by making a strawless lid or alternative-material straw options available" ... "Alamo Drafthouse Leads U.S. Theater Chains in Eliminating Plastic Straws." | ||
| Trump unwinds the 20th century | ||
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Illustration: Lazaro Gamio/Axios | ||
As President Trump meets other NATO leaders in Brussels today, the backdrop is his role in tearing at the post-World War II order. But Axios future editor Steve LeVine writes that a picture is taking shape of an American future without many of the basic institutions that many consider 20th century advances:
The N.Y. Times' Peter Baker quotes Curt Levey, president of the conservative Committee for Justice, as saying the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh will mean "a conservative court, really [for] the first time since the 1930s."
Be smart: Karen Harris, managing director at Bain Macro Trends, tells Axios that the new order will be the U.S., Russia and China — "multiple parallel great powers pushing against each other in the two new borderlands of cyberspace and [actual] space."
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"I need somebody to come through here please, ASAP. Now. There's about eight people in a van, and they've been in the store for about an hour. They keep going back and forth to the bathrooms by my back door." That's the 911 call—obtained by WSB-TV Channel 2 Action News—from a Subway employee on a family of 6, Felicia and Othniel Dobson and their four children, ages 8, 12, 13, and 19. The family had stopped at the Subway in Coweta County, Georgia, on their trip back from South Georgia to their home state of North Carolina. They had been attending a grandparent's birthday party for the weekend.
The employee freaked out because this isn't some Cleaver family reunion! These people have high levels of melanin in their skin!!!!
A Newnan police officer showed up. The Dobsons said the officer apologized and told them the employee had said she was suspicious of the family and that she has been robbed before and thought they would rob her.
The Dobson family told the Channel 2 Action news that their 19-year-old is going to college this year, the kids are upstanding young folk, and there had been nothing to indicate there was an issue. Subway headquarters says they are "investigating," and the owner of this particular franchise called the family to apologize and say the woman had been put on "administrative leave."
I reached out to Felicia Dobson and she sent this statement from the family.
It can be dangerous to make a call to law enforcement with blatantly false information for people of color. The employee's voice was quivering as she described my family as non-customers, more women than men, and hanging around a back door eventually describing us as being suspicious and possibly going to rob her to an officer. This call came after we purchased several footlong subs and one addition while she took a smoke break outside of the store. We have no words for her action. Our kids were stunned to see their parents speaking with an officer following what they thought was a normal dinner followed by using a single stall bathroom one at a time. Our hope is that this one day stops happening to people in this country. Discrimination is never ok. We pray that love will prevail.
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By Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott and Annie Hardison-Moody
Ms. Bowen, Ms. Elliott and Ms. Hardison-Moody are professors who have conducted a study on child hunger.
We first met Maylee's family in 2012, when we began a five-year study about food and poverty in North Carolina. Over the course of the project, we conducted multiple interviews with more than 100 poor and working-class mothers of young children, including Maylee's mother, Ashley Taylor. We also made ethnographic observations of 12 families: accompanying them on trips to grocery stores and food pantries, tagging along during school lunches and doctor's visits, and spending time in their homes as they cooked and ate. And in 2017, we interviewed the kids in each family.
Four months before we interviewed Maylee, her family's food stamps had been cut off because of an administrative error. Ashley still hadn't been able to get it straightened out. "It's been tough," said Ashley. She regularly went to food pantries, and Maylee and her younger sister received backpacks filled with food from their school. Ashley was always looking for sales and recipes that she could make on a budget, and she had cut back on the size of her own meals. But even with all her efforts, there just wasn't enough. "The kids don't eat the way that I'd like," Ashley said.
In 2016, children in 3.1 million households experienced food insecurity at some point during the year. Whether temporary or chronic, food insecurity is devastating for kids. As a nation, we have historically tried to align our policies with the belief that we should do what we can to prevent children from being hungry. When he signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946, President Truman said, "In the long view, no nation is any healthier than its children." Almost 20 years later, President Johnson argued that the food stamp program represented a way of "apply[ing] the power of America's new abundance to the task of building a better life for every American."
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Our national policies have long reflected, imperfectly, the moral imperative that children deserve adequate food. Until now.
The draft of the farm bill that was passed by the House on June 21 entails an important change in the rules governing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps). SNAP is the country's most important food assistance program, serving one out of every eight Americans.
While SNAP already has work requirements for able-bodied adults without children, the House's proposal imposes an even harsher policyand extends it to parents of school-age children. It would require that most adults provide monthly proof that they are working or enrolled in at least 20 hours of work force training per week in order to receive support. Those who can't comply — whether it's because they can't find a job or their work hours drop below 20 hours a week — could be locked out of the program for three years.
The Senate's bipartisan version of the bill, passed last Thursday, does not include those changes to SNAP. As the House and Senate now try to reconcile their differences, a major question is whether the stricter work requirements that will leave more kids hungry will become law.
Tightening SNAP's eligibility rules is one of the Republicans' central goals. President Trump offered his support, as did the White House, for stricter work requirements in the farm bill, and the House Agriculture Committee chairman, Michael Conaway, predicted that the new work requirements would make it into the final version of the bill.
Analysts estimate that the new rules would impose large administrative costs on states and lead to more than one million people losing their food stamps. On average, each of those people would lose $1,816 in SNAP benefits annually. And because a majority of the people at risk are in households with children, the result would be more hungry kids.
The United States has held on to a tenuous agreement over recent decades that children deserve to have enough to eat, no matter what their parents do. The House proposal puts us in jeopardy of losing even this modicum of decency. Although the new rule technically targets adults, children will suffer as a result of it.
Eleven-year-old Avery, one of the kids in our study, knew that her dad sometimes skipped meals because he wanted "to make sure us kids get full." Avery also said that when she got hungry, she went outside and ran around, or drank "bottles and bottles of water," until the feeling went away.
Some kids talked about going to neighbors' houses and asking for something to eat. Eight-year-old Clayton proudly explained that he collected cans and bottles to help pay for food for his family.
"If you could tell the president something about food, what would it be?" we asked dozens of the kids we interviewed. More than one child wanted to tell the president about their favorite food. Eight-year-old Phoebe's answer has stayed with us: "That I don't have enough."
Millions of children in the United States are like Phoebe. The new SNAP rules proposed by the House would drastically cut many families' SNAP benefits, making an already harsh reality even worse for kids in food-insecure households. SNAP should not be restricted; to the contrary, it should be expanded, so that fewer families — and especially kids — are hungry.
Columbia. Annie Hardison-Moody is assistant professor of agricultural and human sciences at North Carolina State University.
Sarah Bowen is associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. Sinikka Elliott is assistant professor of sociology at the University of British
