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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jul 23, 2019 4:05:29 GMT
You guys, I literally cannot stop laughing. John Kennedy GOP described the squad as the four horsemen of the apocalypse! That's right. Apparently they are the divine wrath of God....bwahahaha... I'll join you laughing!! There are ONLY FOUR of them. How can they be so threatening to the great GOP?!?!
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 5:41:53 GMT
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cycworker
Pearl Clutcher
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Jun 26, 2014 0:42:38 GMT
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Post by cycworker on Jul 23, 2019 5:50:39 GMT
is this the same Jim Bakker from the PTL club? Of Jim & Tammy Faye fame? He had a few loose screws back then in the 80’s and he began his ‘apocalypse crap’ right around his divorce in the 90’s The world didn’t end then. I doubt it’s going to now. But I guess if you keep saying it eventually you’ll be closer to correct? Didn’t he go to jail? Full disclosure: They were my mothers only other ‘vice’ that she spent money on. And the amount she sent them sometimes rivaled her smoking. I’m very bitter about some of the grocery short cuts she made to ‘save’ money for either cigarettes or PTL club. I feel they literally took food from our mouths because she literally bought less groceries to have $10-$20 to send to PTL after she bought her cigarettes. At the time $10-$20 was a lot of food we could have been eating. I dislike Jim Bakker as much as I dislike cigarettes and I think he’s as crooked as big tobacco conglomerates I found it *ironic* when he divorced Tammy Faye after years of preaching otherwise. Such a ‘virtuous’ Dude 🙄 The frightening thing is I know Christians with such big persecution complexes that they absolutely are gullible enough to believe that if a Democrat is elected, they'll immediately start rounding up Christians & killing them.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 5:51:51 GMT
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 5:52:39 GMT
is this the same Jim Bakker from the PTL club? Of Jim & Tammy Faye fame? He had a few loose screws back then in the 80’s and he began his ‘apocalypse crap’ right around his divorce in the 90’s The world didn’t end then. I doubt it’s going to now. But I guess if you keep saying it eventually you’ll be closer to correct? Didn’t he go to jail? Full disclosure: They were my mothers only other ‘vice’ that she spent money on. And the amount she sent them sometimes rivaled her smoking. I’m very bitter about some of the grocery short cuts she made to ‘save’ money for either cigarettes or PTL club. I feel they literally took food from our mouths because she literally bought less groceries to have $10-$20 to send to PTL after she bought her cigarettes. At the time $10-$20 was a lot of food we could have been eating. I dislike Jim Bakker as much as I dislike cigarettes and I think he’s as crooked as big tobacco conglomerates I found it *ironic* when he divorced Tammy Faye after years of preaching otherwise. Such a ‘virtuous’ Dude 🙄 The frightening thing is I know Christians with such big persecution complexes that they absolutely are gullible enough to believe that if a Democrat is elected, they'll immediately start rounding up Christians & killing them. Of course they do. They project onto the rest of the world their own craven ideologies.
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cycworker
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 4,375
Jun 26, 2014 0:42:38 GMT
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Post by cycworker on Jul 23, 2019 6:26:30 GMT
casii - so very sorry about your mom. hop2 and lucyg - can't lose hope. If you do, they win. Read Teri Kanefield on Twitter
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Post by lucyg on Jul 23, 2019 6:32:04 GMT
Good lord. Jim Bakker is still around?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 12:45:55 GMT
We won't. I've said this over and over. Trump is the beginning of the end of US democracy. It was never a fair democracy and always influenced by money. But after Trump, it's purely up for whatever foreign money wants to buy the US and sink it.
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Post by kmcginn on Jul 23, 2019 14:20:23 GMT
I am embarrassed to say I live in New Orleans. John Kennedy is an ASS and I have e-mailed him several times to let him know what I think of him and his policies - and also Steve Scalise, my representative in Congress.
I'm glad those police officers got fired. It's what they deserve.
If Trump wins in 2020 we are doomed!! I'm not sure the nation will ever fully recover.
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jul 23, 2019 15:26:32 GMT
At it again! Go after those in need. (CNN) The Trump administration wants to tighten the rules governing who qualifies for food stamps, which could end up stripping more than 3 million people of their benefits.The Agriculture Department issued a proposed rule Tuesday that curtails so-called broad-based categorical eligibility, which makes it easier for Americans with somewhat higher incomes and more savings to participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the formal name for food stamps. It is the administration's latest step to clamp down on the food stamps program, which covers 38 million Americans, and other public assistance services. It wants to require more poor people to work for SNAP benefits, and it is looking to change the way the poverty threshold is calculated, a move that could strip many low-income residents of their federal benefits over time. ** www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/politics/trump-snap-food-stamps/index.html
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 15:41:07 GMT
From CNN - Yet another example of trump’s way of #MAGA.
“Trump administration proposal could kick 3 million off food stamps”
“CNN) The Trump administration wants to tighten the rules governing who qualifies for food stamps, which could end up stripping more than 3 million people of their benefits.
The Agriculture Department issued a proposed rule Tuesday that curtails so-called broad-based categorical eligibility, which makes it easier for Americans with somewhat higher incomes and more savings to participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the formal name for food stamps.
It is the administration's latest step to clamp down on the food stamps program, which covers 38 million Americans, and other public assistance services. It wants to require more poor people to work for SNAP benefits, and it is looking to change the way the poverty threshold is calculated, a move that could strip many low-income residents of their federal benefits over time.
Broad-based categorical eligibility allows states to streamline the food stamps application process for folks who qualify for certain benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Some 40 states, plus the District of Columbia, use this option, which lets them eliminate the asset test and raise one of the income thresholds.
Republicans have long argued that this expanded eligibility option is a "loophole" that permits those with higher incomes and assets to get public assistance. GOP lawmakers have tried to limit it several times -- including in last year's farm bill, though it didn't make it into the final version. The proposed USDA rule is expected to save $2.5 billion a year.
"For too long, this loophole has been used to effectively bypass important eligibility guidelines," said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who pointed out on a call with reporters that a millionaire in Minnesota recently enrolled through the option to highlight the problems with it. "That is why we are changing the rules, preventing abuse of a critical safety net system, so those who need food assistance the most are the only ones who receive it."
Consumer advocates, however, say that the option helps low-income working Americans get the help they need. They still must meet the disposable income threshold for the food stamp program, though they can have a higher gross income (before deductions such as child care costs are taken into account).
The option is "an opportunity-oriented policy to promote work and promote savings," said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.“
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Post by crimsoncat05 on Jul 23, 2019 15:53:18 GMT
I heard this on Rachel Maddow last night- I swear, the obviousness of it all is getting worse and worse! Pretty soon we'll see Scooby, Shaggy, and the whole Mystery Machine gang trying to find the villain. (Rachel Maddow couldn't help but laugh as she told this story; it was funny - and tragic at the same time) One America News (Trump's new favorite 'pro-Trump' news network) reporter also on Kremlin payroll full-time. eta: he writes for Sputnik, which is a Kremlin-owned news wire that played a role in the Russian interference in the 2016 election. At the SAME time he is also reporting on US politics.
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jul 23, 2019 16:15:12 GMT
Whether you agree with their goal or not, this took courage. look out for you neighbors! (CNN)When US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers tried to take a Tennessee man into custody early Monday morning, the man's neighbors stepped up to stop them, CNN affiliates WTVF and WZTV reported. An ICE vehicle had followed the man's van, trying to pull it over, and then blocked it in when the van driver pulled up to a house in Hermitage, near Nashville, the affiliates said. The driver alerted immigrants rights advocates and neighbors, and they rallied, bringing the man and his son - who was in the van with him - water, gas and food so they could stay in the van and avoid possible detention, the affiliates reported. The standoff lasted for hours. Nashville police were called, but stood by "to keep the peace if necessary," the police department said in a statement. At some point, the neighbors formed a human chain around the man and his son, who weren't identified to the media, allowing them to get into a house, and later to get from the house to a car and drive away. "I was real scared about what was going on," said neighbor Felishadae Young in an interview posted on Facebook by CNN affiliate WZTV. "It put a lot of fear in me, because it could be me, it could be my family. It could be anybody. It could be your neighbors, just like it was my neighbor today." Young said she had known the family for 14 years. "ICE officers chose to depart the scene today without making an arrest to de-escalate the situation," ICE spokesman Bryan Cox told CNN in an email. ** www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/us/nashville-neighbors-help-prevent-ice-arrest/index.html
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jul 23, 2019 17:54:34 GMT
Mueller has requested to take someone to the hearing with him.............
(CNN)Special counsel Robert Mueller made a last-minute request to have his deputy sworn in for Wednesday's House Judiciary Committee hearing in case he needed to answer any questions the special counsel could not fully answer himself, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Republicans on the House Judiciary committee immediately raised concerns that Democrats may allow Mueller's deputy Aaron Zebley to testify alongside the special counsel at the hearing, one of two public hearings Mueller is testifying at Wednesday.
Democrats so far have not agreed to this request. A spokesman for House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler said the only witness for the hearing, at the moment, is Mueller.
Democrats have pushed to hear from Zebley along with James Quarles behind closed doors after Mueller testified. But the Department of Justice resisted that request.
The committee's top Republican, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, released a statement about the potential addition to the panel, saying that allowing Zebley to testify would be a "unprecedented decision to allow a witness's counsel to both advise him privately and simultaneously testify alongside him."
"If Democrats believe it is the special counsel's responsibility to testify to his report, they have no ground for outsourcing that duty at the expense of our committee's integrity," Collins said in the statement.
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lizacreates
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 3,856
Aug 29, 2015 2:39:19 GMT
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Post by lizacreates on Jul 23, 2019 19:33:29 GMT
What craziness is this? Zebley is not Mueller's counsel; he's Mueller's deputy. And no grounds for outsourcing that duty? WTH. The Repubs outsourced their responsibility of questioning Blasey-Ford to outside counsel!
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jul 23, 2019 19:57:13 GMT
What craziness is this? Zebley is not Mueller's counsel; he's Mueller's deputy. And no grounds for outsourcing that duty? WTH. The Repubs outsourced their responsibility of questioning Blasey-Ford to outside counsel! Well the GOP can do what ever they want....... I am thinking he will be extra ears and might curtail missteps?! Although he might give more.... Who knows!
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lizacreates
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 3,856
Aug 29, 2015 2:39:19 GMT
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Post by lizacreates on Jul 23, 2019 20:06:15 GMT
What craziness is this? Zebley is not Mueller's counsel; he's Mueller's deputy. And no grounds for outsourcing that duty? WTH. The Repubs outsourced their responsibility of questioning Blasey-Ford to outside counsel! Well the GOP can do what ever they want....... I am thinking he will be extra ears and might curtail missteps?! Although he might give more.... Who knows! We'll soon find out. What time will it be tomorrow? I think we’re already aware of the genesis of this. Barr is attempting to gag Mueller. Him being a by-the-book kind of guy will most likely acquiesce. Mueller and Zebley are private citizens now, and really, neither of these individuals is constrained by DOJ policy anymore. In fact, it’s a requirement that witnesses be candid in their testimonies. What are Repubs concerned about? That Mueller and Zebley will tell the truth? That they’ll give their legal opinions? If they agree with Trump that he’s TOTALLY EXONERATED!!, then they have nothing to worry about, right?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 21:30:25 GMT
Rand Paul...
”While I support our heroic first responders, I can’t in good conscience vote for legislation which to my dismay remains unfunded. We have a nearly trillion dollar deficit and $22 trillion in debt. Spending is out of control.”
“As I have done on countless issues, including disaster relief and wall funding, I will always take a stand against borrowing more money to pay for programs rather than setting priorities and cutting waste.”
Now if I was a first responder in his hometown I would think once, twice, three times before responding to any emergency at his home...
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2019 21:44:20 GMT
Bill Kristol...
”Two notes on Trump’s embarrassing Afghanistan comments: 1. He shows no respect for soldiers and Marines who’ve courageously fought there and achieved much while obeying the laws of war. 2. He assumes immoral orders from him would be obeyed; they wouldn’t be and he’d be impeached.”
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jul 23, 2019 22:28:04 GMT
Rand Paul... ”While I support our heroic first responders, I can’t in good conscience vote for legislation which to my dismay remains unfunded. We have a nearly trillion dollar deficit and $22 trillion in debt. Spending is out of control.” “As I have done on countless issues, including disaster relief and wall funding, I will always take a stand against borrowing more money to pay for programs rather than setting priorities and cutting waste.” Now if I was a first responder in his hometown I would think once, twice, three times before responding to any emergency at his home... Ah....... but Sen Paul, you didn't object to the tax cuts for you and your rich friends!!
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jul 23, 2019 22:30:22 GMT
What time will it be tomorrow? Mueller is to appear at 8:30 am... ABC in NY will be on at 8:15, CNN and probably others will start at 8am...
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lizacreates
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 3,856
Aug 29, 2015 2:39:19 GMT
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Post by lizacreates on Jul 23, 2019 22:45:00 GMT
What time will it be tomorrow? Mueller is to appear at 8:30 am... ABC in NY will be on at 8:15, CNN and probably others will start at 8am... Thanks!
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 24, 2019 1:40:39 GMT
trump...
”Just got back only to hear of a last minute change allowing a Never Trumper attorney to help Robert Mueller with his testimony before Congress tomorrow. What a disgrace to our system. Never heard of this before. VERY UNFAIR, SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED. A rigged Witch Hunt!”
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Post by ntsf on Jul 24, 2019 1:44:32 GMT
rachael asked the usual experts about the extra guy coming with mueller.. after their descriptions, I wouldn't worry about him. not a political appointee.. described as humble, honest, upright.. so I feel better about that.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 24, 2019 1:49:59 GMT
linkPresident Obama... ”Here are a couple of articles backed by new research that are worth taking a look at: A new study on the Medicaid expansion my administration fought for under the Affordable Care Act—and how these policy decisions affect lives in real terms:” From Vox.. “Study: the US could have averted about 15,600 deaths if every state expanded Medicaid”“The real impact of Republican’s rejection of Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. The United States could have averted about 15,600 deaths if all 50 states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, new research suggests. The Affordable Care Act initially expanded Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income people, to everyone making less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line. But a 2012 Supreme Court ruling weakened the policy, allowing states to reject the expanded program. As of 2019, 36 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Medicaid expansion, and 14 have not. Four researchers — University of Michigan economist Sarah Miller, University of California, Los Angeles public health scholar Laura Wherry, National Institutes of Health’s Sean Altekruse and Norman Johnson with the US Census Bureau — used that difference to study what happened to people’s health outcomes in states that expanded the program compared to those that did not. A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research details their results. They found that by the fourth year of Medicaid expansion, mortality rates in states that expanded the program were 0.2 percentage points lower than in states that did not. The study linked data from the American Community Survey between 2008 to 2013 to Social Security Administration, focusing on American citizens between 55 and 64 years old in 2014 who either had less than a high school degree or lived in households with income at or under 138 percent of the federal poverty line. The researchers found that states that expanded Medicaid saw higher rates of enrollment and lower rates of uninsurance. Among the 55- to 64-year-olds studied, researchers found, receiving Medicaid “reduced the probability of mortality over a 16 month period by about 1.6 percentage points, or a decline of 70 percent.” Based on their findings, they estimate that states’ refusal to expand the program led to 15,600 additional deaths. This is in line with a growing body of research that shows Medicaid expansion has not only vastly increased access to health insurance, but also improved health outcomes. About 13.6 million adults gained Medicaid coverage under Obamacare. One 2018 study found Medicaid expansion improved access to surgery and increased the probability that patients seek care before their conditions become complicated. Another 2018 study found Medicaid expansion saved patients with kidney disease starting dialysis. As Sarah Kliff reported for Vox, Medicaid recipients have also report having an easier time paying medical bills and carry less debt. Miller said the results of this preliminary study are actually conservative. “It’s very likely that younger adults were affected too, or people that were high income in our data, but could have lost a job,” Miller said. In all, this is yet another piece of data showing that expanding Medicaid has not only improved livelihoods, but actually saved lives. Medicaid expansion has been very popular. It’s also recently been under threat. Obamacare was intended to make Medicaid expansion mandatory. But that was challenged in a lawsuit questioning the health care law’s constitutionality. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of conservative states. Vox’s Dylan Scott explained the backstory: On the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts, according to CNN’s Joan Biskupic, initially ruled that Medicaid expansion could be required, as the ACA originally prescribed. But as he looked for a way to uphold the rest of the law — including the individual mandate, which he initially voted against — Roberts ended up negotiating with the liberal justices, trading the individual mandate for the expansion. The mandate was allowed to stand, and the rest of the law with it, but Medicaid expansion was ruled to be optional. States couldn’t be forced to accept it — and for the past seven years, it has been a major point of debate in statehouses.
That decision has left more than 1 million people without health care coverage. Medicaid expansion has proven to be incredibly popular. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found 77 percent of Americans found the policy favorable — including 77 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans. Last November, three conservative states, Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah all passed ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Despite the mandate from voters, Republican lawmakers in those states have been trying to roll back Medicaid eligibility. On the federal level, Republicans spent the majority of their first year with control of Congress and the White House trying to repeal and replace Obamacare with a program that, in every iteration, cut Medicaid. House Republicans passed a bill that phased out Medicaid expansion and ultimately cut the program by $880 billion. That policy push failed in Congress, but the vision hasn’t changed. Quietly, President Donald Trump’s administration has made it easier for states to restrict access to Medicaid. And Trump’s 2020 budget proposal included Medicaid cuts, including a repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. It proposed transform the current pay-as-needed system to a block grant, where states are given a capped lump-sum fund that wouldn’t grow with increased need or rising costs. The proposed cuts rounded out to about $777 billion, which could leave millions more uninsured.As the NBER study and others have shown, that could have real life-or-death consequences.
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pyccku
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 2,817
Jun 27, 2014 23:12:07 GMT
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Post by pyccku on Jul 24, 2019 1:50:20 GMT
humble, honest, upright.. Soooo...basically the opposite of Trump? No wonder Trump is freaking out tonight.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 24, 2019 2:05:04 GMT
linkPresident Obama... ”Economist Raj Chetty is not only identifying the decline in opportunity we’ve seen in recent decades—but trying to reverse it. Inequality, like many problems we face, is as vast as it is complex. But this article left me a little more hopeful:” The Atlantic... From the article.. “The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream” Since then, each of his studies has become a front-page media event (“Chetty bombs,” one collaborator calls them) that combines awe—millions of data points, vivid infographics, a countrywide lens—with shock. This may not be the America you’d like to imagine, the statistics testify, but it’s what we’ve allowed America to become. Dozens of the nation’s elite colleges have more children of the 1 percent than from families in the bottom 60 percent of family income. A black boy born to a wealthy family is more than twice as likely to end up poor as a white boy from a wealthy family. Chetty has established Big Data as a moral force in the American debate. “Raj chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly. But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived. Anbu excelled, and so began a rapid upward trajectory. She enrolled in medical school. “Why,” her father was asked, “do you send her there?” Among their Chettiar caste, husbands commonly worked abroad for years at a time, sending back money, while wives were left to raise the children. What use would a medical degree be to a stay-at-home mother? In 1962, Anbu married Veerappa Chetty, a brilliant man from Tamil Nadu whose mother and grandmother had sometimes eaten less food so there would be more for him. Anbu became a doctor and supported her husband while he earned a doctorate in economics. By 1979, when Raj was born in New Delhi, his mother was a pediatrics professor and his father was an economics professor who had served as an adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. When Chetty was 9, his family moved to the United States, and he began a climb nearly as dramatic as that of his parents. He was the valedictorian of his high-school class, then graduated in just three years from Harvard University, where he went on to earn a doctorate in economics and, at age 28, was among the youngest faculty members in the university’s history to be offered tenure. In 2012, he was awarded the MacArthur genius grant. The following year, he was given the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most promising economist under 40. (He was 33 at the time.) In 2015, Stanford University hired him away. Last summer, Harvard lured him back to launch his own research and policy institute, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Chetty turns 40 this month, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential social scientists of his generation. “The question with Raj,” says Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, one of the country’s leading urban economists, “is not if he will win a Nobel Prize, but when.” The work that has brought Chetty such fame is an echo of his family’s history. He has pioneered an approach that uses newly available sources of government data to show how American families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin. In 2013, Chetty released a colorful map of the United States, showing the surprising degree to which people’s financial prospects depend on where they happen to grow up. In Salt Lake City, a person born to a family in the bottom fifth of household income had a 10.8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. In Milwaukee, the odds were less than half that. Now he wants to do more than change our understanding of America—he wants to change America itself. His new Harvard-based institute, called Opportunity Insights, is explicitly aimed at applying his findings in cities around the country and demonstrating that social scientists, despite a discouraging track record, are able to fix the problems they articulate in journals. His staff includes an eight-person policy team, which is building partnerships with Charlotte, Seattle, Detroit, Minneapolis, and other cities. For a man who has done so much to document the country’s failings, Chetty is curiously optimistic. He has the confidence of a scientist: If a phenomenon like upward mobility can be measured with enough precision, then it can be understood; if it can be understood, then it can be manipulated. “The big-picture goal,” Chetty told me, “is to revive the American dream.” Last summer, I visited Opportunity Insights on its opening day. The offices are housed on the second floor of a brick building, above a café and across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard’s columned Widener Library. Chetty arrived in econ-casual: a lilac dress shirt, no jacket, black slacks. He is tall and trim, with an untroubled air; he smiled as he greeted two of his longtime collaborators—the Brown University economist John Friedman and Harvard’s Nathaniel Hendren. They walked him around, showing off the finished space, done in a modern palette of white, wood, and aluminum with accent walls of yellow and sage. Later, after Chetty and his colleagues had finished giving a day of seminars to their new staff, I caught up with him in his office, which was outfitted with a pristine whiteboard, an adjustable-height desk, and a Herman Miller chair that still had the tags attached. The first time I’d met him, at an economics conference, he had told me he was one of several cousins on his mother’s side who go by Raj, all named after their grandfather, Nadarajan, all with sharp minds and the same long legs and easy gait. Yet of Nadarajan’s children, only Chetty’s mother graduated from college, and he’s certain that this fact shaped his generation’s possibilities. He was able to come to the United States as a child and attend an elite private school, the University School of Milwaukee. New York Raj—the family appends a location to keep them straight—came to the U.S. later in life, at age 28, worked in drugstores, and then took a series of jobs with the City of New York. Singapore Raj found a job in a temple there that allows him to support his family back in India, but means they must live apart. Karaikudi Raj, named for the town where his mother grew up, committed suicide as a teenager. I asked Boston Raj to consider what might have become of him if that wealthy Indian businessman had not decided, in the precise year his mother was finishing high school, to create a college for the talented women of southeastern Tamil Nadu. “I would likely not be here,” he said, thinking for a moment. “To put it another way: Who are all the people who are not here, who would have been here if they’d had the opportunities? That is a really good question.” Charlotte is one of America’s great urban success stories. In the 1970s, it was a modest-size city left behind as the textile industry that had defined North Carolina moved overseas. But in the 1980s, the “Queen City” began to lift itself up. US Airways established a hub at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, and the region became a major transportation and distribution center. Bank of America built its headquarters there, and today Charlotte is in a dead heat with San Francisco to be the nation’s second-largest banking center, after New York. New skyscrapers have sprouted downtown, and the city boundary has been expanding, replacing farmland with spacious homes and Whole Foods stores. In the past four decades, Charlotte’s population has nearly tripled. Charlotte has also stood out in Chetty’s research, though not in a good way. In a 2014 analysis of the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Charlotte ranked last in ability to lift up poor children. Only 4.4 percent of Charlotte’s kids moved from the bottom quintile of household income to the top. Kids born into low-income families earned just $26,000 a year, on average, as adults—perched on the poverty line. “It was shocking,” says Brian Collier, an executive vice president of the Foundation for the Carolinas, which is working with Opportunity Insights. “The Charlotte story is that we are a meritocracy, that if you come here and are smart and motivated, you will have every opportunity to achieve greatness.” The city’s true story, Chetty’s data showed, is of selective opportunity: All the data-scientist and business-development-analyst jobs in the thriving banking sector are a boon for out-of-towners and the progeny of the well-to-do, but to grow up poor in Charlotte is largely to remain poor. To help cities like Charlotte, Chetty takes inspiration from medicine. For thousands of years, he explained, little progress was made in understanding disease, until technologies like the microscope gave scientists novel ways to understand biology, and thus the pathologies that make people ill. In October, Chetty’s institute released an interactive map of the United States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods. This, he says, will be his microscope. Drawing on anonymized government data over a three-decade span, the researchers linked children to the parents who claimed them as dependents. The atlas then followed poor kids from every census tract in the country, showing how much they went on to earn as adults. The colors on the atlas reveal a generation’s prospects: red for areas where kids fared the worst; shades of orange, yellow, and green for middling locales; and blue for spots like Salt Lake City’s Foothill neighborhood, where upward mobility is strongest. It can also track children born into higher income brackets, compare results by race and gender, and zoom out to show states, regions, or the country as a whole. The Opportunity Atlas has a fractal quality. Some regions of the United States look better than high-mobility countries such as Denmark, while others look more like a developing country. The Great Plains unfurl as a sea of blue, and then the eye is caught by an island of red—a mark of the miseries inflicted on the Oglala Lakota by European settlers. These stark differences recapitulate themselves on smaller and smaller scales as you zoom in. It’s common to see opposite extremes of opportunity within easy walking distance of each other, even in two neighborhoods that long-term residents would consider quite similar To find a cure for what ails America, Chetty will need to understand all of this wild variation. Which factors foster opportunity, and which impede it? The next step will be to find local interventions that can address these factors—and to prove, with experimental trials, that the interventions work. The end goal is the social equivalent of precision medicine: a method for diagnosing the particular weaknesses of a place and prescribing a set of treatments. This could transform neighborhoods, and restore the American dream from the ground up. If all of this seems impossibly ambitious, Chetty’s counterargument is to point to how the blue is marbled in with the red. “We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable or has never happened,” he told me over lunch one day. “It happens just down the road.” Yet in Charlotte, where Opportunity Insights hopes to build its proof of concept, the atlas reveals swaths of bleak uniformity. Looking at the city, you first see a large bluish wedge south of downtown, with Providence Road on one side and South Boulevard on the other, encompassing the mostly white, mostly affluent areas where children generally grow up to do well. Surrounding the wedge is a broad expanse in hues of red that locals call “the crescent,” made up of predominantly black neighborhoods where the prospects for poor children are pretty miserable. Hunger and homelessness are common, and in some places only one in five high-school students scores “proficient” on standardized tests. In many parts of the crescent, the question isn’t What’s holding kids back? so much as What isn’t holding them back? It’s hard to know where to start. The most significant challenge Chetty faces is the force of history. In the 1930s, redlining prevented black families from buying homes in Charlotte’s more desirable neighborhoods. In the 1940s, the city built Independence Boulevard, a four-lane highway that cut through the heart of its Brooklyn neighborhood, dividing and displacing a thriving working-class black community. The damage continued in the ’60s and ’70s with new interstates. It’s common to hear that something has gone wrong in parts of Charlotte, but the more honest reading is that Charlotte is working as it was designed to. American cities are the way they are, and remain the way they are, because of choices they have made and continue to make. Does a professor from Harvard, even one as influential and well funded as Chetty, truly stand any chance of bending the American story line? On his national atlas, the most obvious feature is an ugly red gash that starts in Virginia, curls down through the Southeast’s coastal states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—then marches west toward the Mississippi River, where it turns northward before petering out in western Tennessee. When I saw this, I was reminded of another map: one President Abraham Lincoln consulted in 1861, demarcating the counties with the most slaves. The two maps are remarkably similar. Set the documents side by side, and it may be hard to believe that they are separated in time by more than a century and a half, or that one is a rough census of men and women kept in bondage at the time of the Civil War, and the other is a computer-generated glimpse of our children’s future.
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Deleted
Posts: 0
Apr 26, 2024 18:00:11 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Jul 24, 2019 2:11:46 GMT
Paul Waldman in the Washington Post...
“Trump is building a chaos machine”
“In 2016, it was common for everyone watching the presidential campaign — operatives, pundits, journalists, voters — to remark that the whole thing was just crazy. Donald Trump had smashed all the spoken and unspoken rules about how a mature democracy was supposed to conduct an election, leaving much of the country shaking their heads in wonder, alternately amused and bemused, when perhaps more of us should have reacted with horror and panic.
But that was nothing. For his 2020 reelection campaign, Trump is building an engine of chaos. That engine has the president at its head but will also rely on the efforts of his allies, the media outlets that have devoted themselves to his cause, and in all likelihood more help from abroad, especially the Russian government.
All these participants will try to convince voters that Trump has been an excellent president who deserves reelection, but alongside that straightforward attempt at persuasion will be a comprehensive and far-reaching effort to sow mayhem and madness across the entire political landscape so that lies swallow truth and nobody has any idea what to think.
That effort is just beginning to roll, but we can already see it at work in the political story of the moment.
Right now Trump is whipping up racist animosity against four Democratic congresswomen while simultaneously arguing that his attacks have nothing to do with race. When, for instance, he argues that he never spoke about them with the aid of talking points, though there are photographs of him holding the talking points, it’s hard not to think he’s trying to send the media chasing one bizarre lie after another, to drive us all mad.
He’s also fabricating and distorting quotes the congresswomen allegedly said, and those are being repeated and magnified on the news outlets that have devoted themselves to Trump’s service.
You know about Fox News, and you may know about the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative company that requires many of its stations to air pro-Trump commentary. But there’s also the One America News Network, a more recent addition to the cable dial that is almost comically pro-Trump, which he has repeatedly promoted on Twitter.
Kevin Poulsen of the Daily Beast reports on this colorful aspect of OANN’s coverage:
If the stories broadcast by the Trump-endorsed One America News Network sometimes look like outtakes from a Kremlin trolling operation, there may be a reason. One of the on-air reporters at the 24-hour network is a Russian national on the payroll of the Kremlin’s official propaganda outlet, Sputnik.
That’s right, a “reporter” who is literally on the Kremlin payroll works at a news network endorsed by Trump, where he airs stories alleging bizarre conspiracy theories, including one claiming that “Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifa through her political action committee.”
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed reports that major Republican donors with ties to Ukraine are still working with Rudolph W. Giuliani in an effort to convince that country to help dig up dirt on Joe Biden.
Now let’s step back for a moment. One of the things that emerged from the Mueller investigation was that the joint effort by the Russian government and the Trump campaign was not a “conspiracy” in the way the movies have taught us to think about it, a tightly choreographed and highly efficient operation. They both pursued the same goal, but in many ways it was haphazard and ad hoc, involving a lot of people of varying levels of knowledge and competence.
If anything, the 2020 Trump reelection effort will likely be even more randomly organized, a seething carbuncle of misinformation oozing out in all directions. Some of it will come directly from Trump himself, some will come from his campaign, some will come from the army of trolls and bots that Russia will likely employ on his behalf once again. At times it will seem formless and random, with no clear intent other than the creation of mass confusion and uncertainty.
Much of it will be directed at the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, a cloud of conspiracy theories and ludicrous allegations intended to follow them wherever they go. And while I’m sure the Trump campaign will be happy if it can create a new version of But Her Emails, a single unifying attack that the mainstream media enthusiastically amplify, the Trump campaign may be almost as happy just to create that cloud.
As of yet we’ve seen no evidence that either the Democratic Party or the media themselves have any idea how to to deal with that kind of campaign. They’re both still built for a more “normal” affair, in which the two sides offer biographical stories and policy arguments, and yes, there is deception and demagoguery from time to time, but it’s kept within reasonable limits and we’re able to maintain something resembling an agreement on what’s true and what isn’t.
Now imagine it’s October of 2020. Every day, Trump comes out with some preposterous new lie about the Democratic nominee, making up things they supposedly said and did. As soon as he does so, the lies are pushed through every arm of the conservative media and repeated by Republican politicians. And while news organizations are dutifully writing their factual rebuttals, Trump debuts another, even more preposterous lie a day later.
Meanwhile, voters’ social media feeds are inundated with fake organizations and fake people offering a dizzying array of misinformation, leaving them stumbling from one supposed blockbuster revelation to the next and utterly unable to figure out what is real. The whole thing begins to take on a feeling of madness, where the only safe harbor lies is in the tribe that offers you belonging and the conviction that the people you hate are even worse than you thought.
That’s what’s coming. And it hasn’t even begun.
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jul 24, 2019 2:26:24 GMT
”Just got back only to hear of a last minute change allowing a Never Trumper attorney to help Robert Mueller with his testimony before Congress tomorrow. What a disgrace to our system. Never heard of this before. VERY UNFAIR, SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED. A rigged Witch Hunt!” Ah, but dt, you couldn't even appear and speak to anyone......... and your written answers: I don't remember, I don't know and on and on.......
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lizacreates
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 3,856
Aug 29, 2015 2:39:19 GMT
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Post by lizacreates on Jul 24, 2019 3:20:09 GMT
humble, honest, upright.. Soooo...basically the opposite of Trump? No wonder Trump is freaking out tonight. Lol. Clever.
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