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When lawmakers fall weirdly out of step with their party’s history and the will of the country

When lawmakers fall weirdly out of step with their party’s history and the will of the country

Posted by | Apr 11, 2021 |

I spent much of April 5 thinking about the Republican Party. Its roots lie in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in spring 1854, when it became clear that elite southern slaveholders had taken control of the federal government and were using their power to spread their system of human enslavement across the continent. At first, members of the new party knew only what they stood against: an economic system that concentrated wealth upward and made it impossible for ordinary men to prosper. But in 1859, their new spokesman, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, articulated a...

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A tragic cost of failure: Proof that the federal government has a role in combatting the pandemic

A tragic cost of failure: Proof that the federal government has a role in combatting the pandemic

Posted by | Apr 10, 2021 |

The 1918 influenza pandemic killed at least 50 million people across the world, including about 675,000 people in the United States. And yet, until recently, it has been elusive in our popular memory. America’s curious amnesia about the 1918 pandemic has come to mind lately as the United States appears to be shifting into a post-pandemic era of job growth and optimism. A year ago, I noted that we were approaching 17,000 deaths from Covid-19. Now our official death count is over 560,000. If anyone had told us a year ago that we would lose more than a half...

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The politics of bigotry: Why Republicans still fabricate conflicts without proof in order to stoke fear

The politics of bigotry: Why Republicans still fabricate conflicts without proof in order to stoke fear

Posted by | Apr 7, 2021 |

There is no ‘surge’ of migrants at the border and there is no huge voter fraud problem, there is only an attack from the Republican hard-right. Republicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declared it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration.” The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claimed, “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.” Donald Trump demands the Biden...

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Wisconsin NAACP condemns Senator Ron Johnson for behavior that disqualifies him to hold a public office

Wisconsin NAACP condemns Senator Ron Johnson for behavior that disqualifies him to hold a public office

Posted by | Apr 7, 2021 |

On March 27, Wendell J. Harris, President of the NAACP Wisconsin State Conference released a scathing statement about the state’s Republican senator. Founded in 1909 as a response to the ongoing violence against Black people around the country, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is the largest civil rights organization in the nation. “Had the tables been turned and President Donald Trump won the election and those were thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters I would have been concerned,” Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson stated about the January 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol....

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Splinter Groups: America’s far-right factions have gotten more extreme after the Capitol insurrection

Splinter Groups: America’s far-right factions have gotten more extreme after the Capitol insurrection

Posted by | Apr 7, 2021 |

As the United States grapples with domestic extremism in the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, warnings about more violence are coming from the FBI Director Chris Wray and others. Matthew Valasik, a sociologist at Louisiana State University, and Shannon E. Reid, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte, explain what right-wing extremist groups in America are doing. The scholars are co-authors of Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White, published in September 2020; they track the activities of far-right groups like the Proud Boys. What are U.S. extremist groups doing since...

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The Moral Universe: Evaluating progress across the arc of MLK’s Dream to America’s reality today

The Moral Universe: Evaluating progress across the arc of MLK’s Dream to America’s reality today

Posted by | Apr 6, 2021 |

April 4 marked the 53d anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. Over half a century. Has America come any closer to his dream? He would be pleased at some of our progress. Segregation is no longer the law of the land. The Voting Rights Act helped open doors. Dr. King would be pleased that a majority of Americans joined to elect and re-elect an African American president. Georgians just elected a black minister from Dr. King’s own historic church to the U.S. Senate. There are now 60 African American members of Congress, 54 Latino members, 20 Asian American...

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Knezelism