There is an emerging narrative that the changes to the Georgia voting laws aren’t really that bad and Democrats are being hysterical for cynical political purposes. It’s not true. There are some very, very disturbing components of the new laws that should make anyone who cares about democracy shutter.
Go page by page through Georgia’s new voting law, and one takeaway stands above all others: The Republican legislature and governor have made a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections, making absentee voting harder and creating restrictions and complications in the wake of narrow losses to Democrats.
The New York Times has examined and annotated the law, identifying 16 provisions that hamper the right to vote for some Georgians or strip power from state and local elections officials and give it to legislators.
Republicans passed and signed the 98-page voting law last week following the first Democratic victories in presidential and Senate elections in Georgia in a generation. President Biden won the state by just 11,779 votes out of nearly five million cast. The new law will, in particular, curtail ballot access for voters in booming urban and suburban counties, home to many Democrats. Another provision makes it a crime to offer water to voters waiting in lines, which tend to be longer in densely populated communities.
Below is The Times’s analysis of the law, including the specific provisions and some struck-through language from the state’s previous voting legislation.
They have devolved the oversight of elections to GOP partisan players in the state legislature. There is only one reason for that. And I think you know what that is.
As partisan conflicts over voting access take center stage in Congress and in scores of states around the country, the share of Americans who say “everything possible” should be done to make voting easy has declined since 2018 – with the decrease coming entirely among Republicans.
Currently, a majority of U.S. adults (59%) say that everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote. A smaller share (39%) says that citizens should have to prove they really want to vote by registering ahead of time, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early March.How we did this
Republicans and Democrats take dramatically different positions on this issue. An 85% majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say everything possible should be done to make voting easy.
By contrast, just 28% of Republicans and Republican leaners say everything possible should be done to make voting easy, while a majority (71%) say citizens should have to prove they really want to vote by registering ahead of time.
There are also substantial partisan differences on whether changing election rules to make it easier to vote would also make elections less secure. Overall, 61% of Americans say it would not make elections less secure if election rules were changed to make it easier to register and vote. But while 82% of Democrats hold this view, fewer than half as many Republicans say the same (37%). A majority of Republicans say that elections would be less secure if voting rules were changed to make it easier to vote.
The share of Republicans who say everything possible should be done to make voting easy has declined 20 percentage points since 2018, while Democrats’ opinions are virtually unchanged since then.
In 2018, Republicans were divided in views about making it easy to vote. Then, about half of Republicans (51%) said that citizens should have to prove they really want to vote by registering ahead of time, while nearly as many (48%) said that everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote.
Today, that balance has shifted dramatically. More than twice as many Republicans say citizens should have to prove they really want to vote by registering ahead of time (71%) than say all possible efforts should be taken to make it easy to vote (28%). Democrats continue to overwhelmingly say everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote.
There also are wide demographic differences in these opinions. While 84% of Black adults and 69% of Hispanic adults say everything possible should be done to make it easy to vote, only about half of White adults say the same.
Views about ease of voting are also correlated with age. Younger adults – especially those under the age of 30 – are particularly likely to say election policies should make it easy for every citizen to vote. Older adults are more divided. For example, 51% of adults 65 years of age and older say everything possible should be done to making voting easy; 49% say citizens should have to prove they really want to vote.
There are also divides among partisans by ideology. Conservative Republicans are significantly more likely than moderate and liberal Republicans to say citizens should have to prove they really want to vote by registering ahead of time (79% vs. 56%, respectively).
Among Democrats, liberals are more likely than conservative and moderate Democrats to say everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote (93% vs. 78%).
Views of possible trade-offs between voting access and election security have shown less change in recent years, though partisan differences have widened in these attitudes as well.
This is mostly attributable to movement among Democrats over the past three years. In 2018, 76% of Democrats said it would not make elections any less secure if election rules were changed to make it easier to register and vote. Today, 82% of Democrats hold this view. Just 16% say if election rules were changed to make it easier to vote, that would make elections less secure.
Views among Republicans have been more stable. Two years ago, 57% of Republicans said that if election rules were changed to make it easier to vote, elections would be less secure. Today, 61% of Republicans say this; a much smaller share (37%) say it would not make elections any less secure if voting rules were changed to make it easier to register and vote.
Though a majority of Americans overall say it would not make elections any less secure if election rules were changed to make it easier to register and vote, there are sizable divides on this question by race and ideology.
White adults stand out for their views on election security and voting access: 40% say elections would be less secure if rules about registration and voting were eased, compared with 23% of Black adults and 34% of Hispanic adults. Still, majorities in each group say easing voting restrictions would not make elections any less secure.
There are also ideological differences among members of both parties. Conservative Republicans are significantly more likely than moderate and liberal Republicans to say elections would be less secure if voting rules were changed (67% vs. 51%, respectively).
And though large majorities of Democrats across the ideological spectrum say it would not make elections less secure if election rules were changed to make it easier to register and vote, a larger share of liberal Democrats say this compared with conservative and moderate Democrats (90% vs. 75%, respectively).
In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called “a shellacking.” And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name—and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.
Retaking control of the House of Representatives put me in line to be the next Speaker of the House over the largest freshman Republican class in history: 87 newly elected members of the GOP. Since I was presiding over a large group of people who’d never sat in Congress, I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way.
He’s right about that. He’s also right that Ailes went nuts right along with the rest of them and it set the table for the full conspiracy theory radicalization of the American right:
At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes….[He went] on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.
“They’re monitoring me,” he assured me about the Obama White House. He told me he had a “safe room” built so he couldn’t be spied on. His mansion was being protected by combat-ready security personnel, he said. There was a lot of conspiratorial talk. It was like he’d been reading whacked-out spy novels all weekend.
And of course he hates Cruz. Who doesn’t?
Under the new rules of Crazytown, I may have been Speaker, but I didn’t hold all the power. By 2013 the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash.And now they had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn’t even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz. He enlisted the crazy caucus of the GOP in what was a truly dumbass idea. Not that anybody asked me.
That’s the least of it:
When @SpeakerBoehner was recording his audiobook I was told by sources that during these wine-soaked sessions he would deviate from the book’s text and insert random violent attacks on @tedcruz. Well, here’s some tape (listen to the end): pic.twitter.com/NFCQ2QFdTT
The former top GOP leader is “one of the worst Republican speakers in history,” who reeks of “cigarette smoke and wine breath,” Hannity wrote in a Twitter tirade.
In excerpts published Friday from his upcoming book, titled On the House: A Washington Memoir,Boehner dishes on what he calls the GOP’s “crazy caucus” and how conservative media—specifically including Hannity—helped embolden right-wing ideologues such as Sen. Ted Cruz and former Rep. Michelle Bachmann, eventually paving the way for a President Donald Trump.
In response to the released excerpts, Hannity took to Twitter on Friday to fire back at the former GOP leader.
“John Boehner will go down in history as one of the worst Republican speakers in history,” Hannity tweeted. “He’s weak, timid and what’s up with all the crying John? There was not a single time I was around him when he didn’t just reek of cigarette smoke and wine breath.”
The Fox News host also snarked that he was glad Boehner “finally found his true calling in life in the ‘weed industry,’” referencing the former speaker’s post-congressional career as a pitchman for a marijuana investment firm.
Hannity further promised that he would have more to say on the subject when he is back on the air Monday.
The Fox star seemed to be reacting to book excerpts quoted by Axios, in which Boehner wrote that while they had once been on good terms, Hannity at one point decided to place a target on his back, which resulted in the disintegration of their relationship.
“Places like Fox News were creating the wrong incentives,” he wrote. “Sean Hannity was one of the worst. I’d known him for years, and we used to have a good relationship. But then he decided he felt like busting my ass every night on his show. … At some point I called him a nut. Anyway, it’s safe to say our relationship never got any better.”
Elsewhere in the book, Boehner complained that Fox News pushing birther conspiracies and fringe characters made his job as the top House Republican nearly impossible as he tried to reign in the antics of his own caucus. At one point, Boehner recalled in excerpts quoted by Axios, he confronted the late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes—who was ousted from the network in 2016 following multiple sexual-misconduct allegations—and pleaded “with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air,” only for Ailes to go down his own conspiratorial rabbit holes.
“When I put it to him like that, he didn’t have much to say,” Boehner wrote. “But he did go on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.”
Boehner also noted that Bachmann, described as a “lunatic” by the ex-speaker, once demanded that she be placed on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, only for Boehner to turn her down. In response, Bachmann threatened to go on Hannity’s show and say “this is how John Boehner is treating the people who made it possible for the Republicans to take back the House.”
He added: “I wasn’t the one with the power, she was saying. I just thought I was. She had the power now. She was right, of course.”
This isn’t the first time that Boehner has called out Hannity in the press, only for Hannity to respond in kind. In a lengthy Politico profile published in October 2017, Boehner unleashed on right-wing media, blaming figures such as Hannity and radio host Mark Levin for further polarizing America.
“I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, ‘Listen, you’re nuts.’ We had this really blunt conversation,” Boehner told Politico at the time. “Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.”
In response, the Fox News star insisted that “conversation never happened” and that the ex-speaker was “bitter,” all while asking Boehner if he was “sober when you said this.”
Lol. The entire party is now “right-wing idiots.”
I wasn’t a fan of Boehner, obviously. He’s a very conservative Republican and people like him laid the groundwork for the GOP lunacy we have to day. Some of us were warning about how that was going a long time ago. But he wasn’t stupid, evil or crazy. And that’s highly unusual in the Republican Party today.
The U.S. economy added 916,000 jobs last month, as coronavirus vaccine distribution improved, Congress approved a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, and states across the country lifted restrictions on businesses.
The report comes a year after the pandemic threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin.
The labor market recovered about 12 million of the 22 million jobs lost in the first two months of the pandemic by October. But the pace of the recovery had slowed drastically by then, and it churned sluggishly through winter as the virus surged through the holidays and into the New Year.
The March data — showing the largest number of jobs added since August and the third-straight month of growth — may signal a turning point. The survey was taken the week of March 12th, the same week that the stimulus package passed by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate was signed into law by President Biden.
I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to a little “happy days are here again” feeling.
If people will just hang on a little bit longer, we might just be able to avoid a whole lot more deaths over the next few months and then have a very good year. Fingers crossed.
But it’s not over yet:
President Biden: "After a year of devastation, there are still 8.4 million fewer jobs today than there were last March." pic.twitter.com/EhzFE0GNct
Former Vice President Joe Biden serves soul food in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw district, July 2019. (Photo via KNX 1070 .)
“Order up!” shouts President Joe Biden.
Biden is serving up a heaping helping of “large-scale public investment paid for with highly progressive taxation” not seen since the ’50s, says Paul Krugman:
The Biden administration infrastructure fact sheet alludes to part of that history, declaring that the plan “will invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the space race.” Indeed, one way to think about the Biden program is that it’s an attempt to bring back the Dwight stuff — that is, in fiscal terms it would represent a partial return to the Eisenhower era, when we had much higher government investment as a share of gross domestic product than we do now, and also much higher tax rates on both high-income individuals and corporations.
The era of big government investment and high taxes on the rich coincided, not incidentally, with the U.S. economy’s greatest generation — the postwar decades of rapidly rising living standards.
That would be the economy succeeding generations felt Boomers hogged for themselves, leaving none for their kids.
We’ve relied on government infrastructure investment to jump-start economic growth ever since the construction of the Erie Canal between 1818 and 1825. Unlike the privately owned canals that had proliferated in 18th-century Britain, the Erie Canal was built by the government of New York State, at a cost of $7 million. This may not sound like a lot, but the economy was vastly smaller then, and prices much lower too. As a share of state G.D.P., the canal was probably the equivalent of a $1 trillion national project today.
And a big public role in infrastructure continued down the generations. Land grants were used to promote railway construction and higher education. Teddy Roosevelt built the Panama Canal. F.D.R. brought electricity to rural areas. Eisenhower built the highway network.
So when Republicans denounce the American Jobs Plan as an “out-of-control socialist spending spree,” remember, large-scale public investment is the American way.
That’s how this Boomer remembered it in 2013 (below).
Aerial photo of the California Aqueduct at the Interstate 205 crossing, just east of Interstate 580 junction. (Photo by Ian Kluft (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Has America – and the American Dream itself – gone into retreat? Once the largest, most prosperous in the world, the American middle class is faltering, crumbling like our nation’s schools and bridges.
Flag-pin-wearing American exceptionalists tell crowds this is the greatest nation on Earth, and then repeat “we’re broke.” They hope to dismantle safety net programs, telling Americans working harder than ever – at jobs and looking for jobs – that they don’t have enough “skin in the game.” Wake up and smell the austerity. America can no longer afford Americans.
Some of us remember a time when America’s dreams were boundless.
One summer when I was a child, I traveled with my grandparents to visit my aunt and uncle in Lawton, Oklahoma. My uncle was serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Sill. They lived off-base with their toddler son. The apartment backed up to a drive-in theater. “Old Yeller” was playing.
We left from Chicago driving Route 66. (The Nelson Riddle theme to the TV show is still the hippest ever.) The trip took a couple of days. The highway was still two lanes as you went further west. That was already changing.
Beside Route 66 and elsewhere, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System – the vast system of roads most of us take for granted – was taking shape from border to border and from coast to coast. It was a national project worthy of a great nation. The country was on the move.
Astronaut Alan Shepard was a national hero. Our parents wanted us to go to college. Our president wanted us to go. Our country wanted us to go. Getting an education was not just a key to a future better than our parents’. It was a patriotic duty. Not just something you could do for you, but what you could do for your country.
America was going to the moon by the end of the decade. We needed scientists and engineers and new technologies. Between the G.I. Bill and government-backed student loans, America was making it more affordable than ever to get an education. It was good for you. It was good for your community. It was good for all of U.S.
On another trip last month through California’s dry Central Valley, I rode past miles and miles of crops and orchards. Tomatoes. Lettuce. Vegetables. Strawberries. Walnuts. Cherries. Pistachios.
San Joaquin Valley agriculture accounts for more than 12 percent of the nation’s output by dollar value, according to Associated Press. It produces 25 percent of America’s food on about one percent of U.S. farmland.
What goes onto your dinner plate and into your mouth is made possible in large part, not by daring, bootstrap entrepreneurs, but by the huge public works project we saw on our journey. Sierra snowmelt harnessed to grow food on dry lands. Dams. Reservoirs. Pumps. Pipes. Aqueducts.
And beside those canals, farms providing food and jobs along 700 miles of the California Aqueduct and the Central Valley Project. Begun during the Great Depression. Built with public money. By Americans. For Americans.
But today, that America is in retreat. Its dreams are shriveled. Instead of investing in public infrastructure like aqueducts, highways and bridges, we watch ours collapse as China’s rise. In Washington, pundits and politicians wring their hands over nickels and dimes for Americans while spending hundreds of billions of deficit dollars to maintain a global empire. Almost 900 overseas military bases? Was that our Founders’ vision of greatness?
Meanwhile, tax cuts starve cities and states of revenue until grasping investors – foreign and domestic – can gobble up public infrastructure built with your sweat equity. The privateers hope to extract the last drop of value out of what we, our parents, and our grandparents built to benefit all Americans. These patriots will hide their gains offshore and whine about tax rates they don’t pay while pocketing billions in public subsidies.
Tom Sawyer conned friends into paying him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence. Tom Sawyer, Inc. is not far behind. These guys won’t be satisfied until we are paying them to work for them.
When they have stripped America bare, the vulture capitalists will move on. Hands over their hearts, still waving their flags and humming the national anthem, they’ll move on, leaving America to crumble to dust. And they will shake the dust from their feet.
Anti-masker in Alaska gets kicked out of Walmart & has a public meltdown (August 2020).
“Freedom? Freedom? That is a worship word. Yang worship. You will not speak it.” — Cloud William, after he hears Kirk say “freedom” (“The Omega Glory,” Star Trek TOS)
A large faction of Americans inhabit a cult of many colors, just not of the race, color, or national origin kind. In some ways, the United States is devolving into the world of Omega IV, on which people fought the biological war Earth avoided. The Yangs, an analogue of Yankees, have over generations forgotten the meaning of their “holies.” Words like freedom and phrases like “We the People” have been reduced to empty tribal markers. Shibboleths without meaning.
Into John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property,” Thomas Jefferson substituted “pursuit of happiness,” another Locke formulation, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Still, the defense of property for many conservatives remained a bedrock principle. Property = happiness. “Pursuit of happiness” just sounded loftier in Jefferson’s rendering.
David Frum remarks on the erosion of the defense of property among American conservatives. Older ideals have lost their meaning. What once were principles now are contingent, to be marshaled when convenient and ignored when they are not.
Several red-leaning states have over the last couple of decades passed laws limiting the rights of property owners to control their premises. Business owners, specifically, have been banned from prohibiting firearms on their premises. Not just inside them, but in parking lots they own. The rights of gun-owners to carry weapons in their vehicles trump the rights of property owners to ban them from private property.
The laws were leading indicators of a trend in which radical (not rugged) individualism has supplanted mutual respect and deference to one’s neighbors. Frum explains that first with guns, then with social media, and now with proposed “vaccine passports” for admission to private businesses, conservatives insist that when in conflict their individual rights are superior to others’ property rights. Republicans will muster state power to enforce them. Because freedom means my rights trumps yours. Especially, my right to trample yours.
“But the point is not to win the fight,” Frum writes, “or even really to fight the fight. The point is to announce the fight, and to keep raging about it, even if you do not in fact fight it very hard.” It’s all about the look. As the last four years taught Republicans, bluster sells:
To appease those cultural blocs, Republican politicians must be willing to sacrifice everything, including what used to be the party’s foundational principles. To protect the gun, or to avoid contradicting the delusions of anti-vaccine paranoiacs, property rights must give way, freedom to operate a business must yield. The QAnon-curious Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed the new mentality when she took to Facebook to denounce vaccine passports as “corporate communism.” It sounded crazy. But if you understand that she interprets communism to mean “any interference in the right of people like me to do whatever we want, regardless of the rights of others”—then, yeah, the property rights of corporations will indeed look to her like a force of communism.
A sizable minority of Americans want to use airplanes belonging to others, theme parks belonging to others, sports stadiums belonging to others—without concession to the health of others or the property rights of owners. With guns, with COVID-19, with tech, the new post-Trump message from the post-Trump GOP is: Private property is socialism; state expropriation is freedom. It’s a strange doctrine for a party supposedly committed to liberty and the Constitution, but here we are.
“Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” Spock says in The Wrath of Khan. Among the freedomistas that spirit is replaced by a warped idea of freedom without responsibility and by a narcissist’s insistence on having every want.
It is clear that Republican governments are just factoring in unnecessary deaths in order to ignore science, pad the pockets of their favored industries and keep from having to deliver government programs to people who needs them. We’ve reached the point at which it is no longer an abstract proposition. They are doing it. People are dying:
The deaths of nearly 200 people are linked to February’s cold snap and blackouts, a Houston Chronicle analysis reveals, making the natural disaster one of the worst in Texas this past century.
The tally, which is nearly double the state’s official count, comes from an investigation of reports from medical examiners, justices of the peace and Department of State Health Services, as well as lawsuits and news stories.
The state count, which is preliminary, has yet to incorporate some deaths already flagged by medical examiners as storm-related.
The 194 deaths identified by the Chronicle so far include at least 100 cases of hypothermia that killed people in their homes or while exposed to the elements, at least 16 carbon monoxide poisonings of residents who used dangerous methods for heat and at least 22 Texans who died when medical devices failed without power or who were unable to seek live-saving care because of the weather.
Sixteen deaths were from other causes, such as fires or vehicle wrecks, while the remaining 40 were attributed by authorities to the storm without listing a specific cause.
“This is almost double the death toll from Hurricane Harvey,” said State Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas. “There was no live footage of flooded homes, or roofs being blown off, or tidal surges, but this was more deadly and devastating than anything we’ve experienced in modern state history.”
The toll is almost certain to grow in coming weeks as death investigators in the state’s most populous counties clear a backlog in cases from the cold snap. The Travis County medical examiner alone is investigating more than 80 deaths between Feb. 13 and Feb. 20.
The deaths come from 57 counties in all regions of the state but are disproportionately centered on the Houston area, which at times during the crisis accounted for nearly half of all power outages. Of the known ages, races and ethnicities of the victims, 74 percent were people of color. Half were at least 65. Six were children.
Those deaths could have been avoided, disaster and medical experts say, if Texas leaders had ensured the state’s energy infrastructure could withstand severe winter weather, had informed the public that sustained blackouts were possible, or had a comprehensive plan to protect vulnerable residents during extreme cold events.
After I got the shot, I left Javits Center in such a good mood. I realize now I had some sort of contact high from experiencing something communal and in public that worked, and did exactly what they said it was going to do. Haven't seen anything like that in years, literally.
As eligibility expands to all adults in many states, a new poll shows an increase in Americans who want to get a shot. Chile’s surge in cases, even as more than a third of the population has received at least the first dose of a vaccine, serves as a cautionary tale for other nations.
Schwarzenegger weighs in on the right wing attempt to recall Gavin Newsom because, of course, he’s an expert on recalls because he won one and he was in a movie called …”Total Recall.” He says it’s good that Newsom is getting around the state being see and is handling the crisis well. But then he adds this:
Schwarzenegger says the current governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, is doing something “very smart” in that he has responded to the recall by getting out of Sacramento.
He sees both the 2003 recall and the current one in terms of “dissatisfaction” rather than political parties. Indeed, one of Newsom’s greatest advantages is that there is no challenger with name recognition, so inertia is on his side. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released Wednesday supports that idea.
And party affiliation won’t help much, Schwarzenegger says.
“The Republican party is, like I have said, dying at the box office. This is the crazy thing here, when they say it’s a ‘power grab’ of the Republicans. Let me tell you, the [California] Republicans couldn’t even get anyone elected. It’s ludicrous — the Republican Party doesn’t exist. These are the signatures of the ordinary folks that have signed on.”
So then, as Arnold notes, the lack of contenders, political party influence and the short runway to the likely November vote clears the path for an outsider, like Schwarzenegger himself, to enter the fray. And he has some suggestions.
“What would happen if George Clooney would run for the governorship? What if Brad Pitt would run? If Oprah Winfrey would run?” said the former governor. “We don’t know, so there will be an interesting answer to do a poll like that.”
Maybe we could recruit Meghan Markle to do it! Or, I know, how about Kanye West, he’s totally into running for something, although Governor of California may not be good enough for him.
This is stupid. California has a petition process in which rich people pay to get something on the ballot by employing petition gatherers to stand outside grocery stores and misrepresent the purpose of the petition because they get paid by the signature. It causes a lot of stupid stuff to get on the ballot, including this ridiculous thing. He’s right that “ordinary people” signed on. But there are plenty of Republicans in this state. It’s a big state. And I’m sure a few Democrats were waiting in line outside Ralphs because of the COVD restrictions and were annoyed enough to sign it. It means nothing.
A majority of likely California voters would keep Gov. Gavin Newsom in office if a recall election were held today, according to a new poll conducted as vaccinations in the state increase and the Democratic governor ramps up his campaign to fight the effort to remove him.
Among the 1,174 likely voters surveyed by the Public Policy Institute of California, 56% said they oppose the recall and 40% support it, with the remaining undecided. More than three-quarters of likely voters said the worst of the pandemic is over.
The results of the poll, conducted March 14-23, are a reflection of more Californians beginning to see “the light at the end of the tunnel” in the COVID-19 pandemic, said Mark Baldassare, president of the institute.
“The support for keeping Gov. Newsom has become much more optimistic about where things are headed with COVID than they were in January,” Baldassare said. “All of these things work to the benefit of keeping the status quo.”
I loved Dr. Seuss when I was a kid. (You can imagine how a cat-loving little girl worshipped “The Cat in the Hat”, even though that cat is a bit of an asshole.) But I’m quite sure that whatever racist influences I had growing up back in the dark ages came from the openly racist behavior of just about everyone I knew. If you are a young person today you simply cannot imagine how bad it used to be and that’s totally understandable considering how bad it is now. But it was very, very bad, so bad that even as a child I was grossed out by it and grew up to be a liberal in a very conservative family.
Anyway, we are in a time of reckoning and social change and it’s overdue. We may have come a long way but we have a very long way to go and we must finally deal with the systemic forms of discrimination and oppression and recognize the ways in which our culture perpetuates it in both overt and subliminal ways.
Having said that, I thought that Katha Pollit’s column about the Dr Seuss controversy was worth contemplating:
Never mind Dr. Seuss’s six discontinued books. For the record, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is a work of considerable genius, despite the offending cartoon of a Chinese man eating rice, and McElligot’s Pool is pretty great too, despite its use of the outmoded word “Eskimo,” complete with clichéd depiction of an Inuit in fur-lined parka. How hard could it have been to replace the few offending pictures and words? Many other classic children’s books—Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, for example—have been quietly edited to remove racist content, and that’s good.
However, as many have pointed out, the rights are owned by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and if it doesn’t want to keep the books in print, that’s its privilege, just the way Amazon is within its rights to drop When Harry Became Sally and keep Mein Kampf. True, it’s a little odd to find progressives defending capitalist values, as if there were no considerations other than property rights where culture is concerned. It’s a bit too close to how Nelson Rockefeller felt about his right to destroy the socialist mural that Diego Rivera was in the midst of painting in Rockefeller Center. “After all,” E.B. White put it in a humorous poem at the time, “it’s my wall.”
If we really get serious about removing from the market, or dropping from the curriculum, or banning from polite society books of the past (choose your own words—just don’t say “canceling,” because cancel culture does not exist), there won’t be much left. Classic children’s literature is full of racial, ethnic, class, and gender stereotyping, and the outdated language that goes along with that. Some of that can’t be fixed with a few cuts. A friend who is reading her granddaughter The Secret Garden, one of her favorite books when she was in elementary school—and recently the subject of a movie adaptation—finds herself “cringing” at “racial elements and also class elements that are really awkward to explain to a 5-year-old.” And if the books are not problematic, the author may be. Roald Dahl not only fat-shamed an overweight child in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and portrayed the Oompa Loompas as happy slaves, he was so anti-Semitic his family felt it needed to apologize 30 years after his death.
It took a pandemic to pass the American Rescue Plan, which allots billions for schools and libraries and direct payments to parents and is expected to reduce child poverty by 40 percent. When that money is gone, we’ll see if the ARP represents the beginning of a serious commitment to children, parents, and communities. Ten years from now, will we look back on the Dr. Seuss kerfuffle as part of a broad social transformation or as a symbolic protest against conditions that did not change all that much?
I too find Dr. Seuss imperfect. Beyond the racial caricatures, it irks me that the featured children are almost all boys, plus the occasional little sister like Sally in The Cat in the Hat. The one girl with a book named after her, Daisy-Head Mayzie, is an idiot. But this is where grown-ups come in. You’re not a cassette tape; you can comment and question and explain. I have no problem talking about the lack of girls when I read Dr. Seuss’s books (or anyone else’s) to children, any more than my parents, who were atheists, had problems giving me a book of Bible stories.
Children are not passive recipients, either. Bible stories did not make me a believer. The only thing I remember from that book is that there was a kind widow who let Elijah stay with her when he came to town. I can still see that picture of his room—the striped blanket on the bed, the window open to the turquoise sky. What kids take from Dr. Seuss is his hilarious, inventive language and pictures, the permission he gives children to let their imaginations run wild.
My husband and I just finished reading D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths to our 8-year-old granddaughter on FaceTime. The stories are somewhat sanitized—Aphrodite is not born from the castrated testicles of Uranus; instead we are told “nobody knew from where she had come.” But Cronus still eats his children, Pandora’s curiosity (like Eve’s) still brings destruction on humanity, and jealousy between goddesses still sparks the Trojan War, which is still fought over a woman’s fatal beauty.
The myths contain deep truths, but they are not modern, democratic, progressive ones—on Olympus or off, not everyone is beautiful or wise or strong in their own way.
She’s got a point. The human species is … complicated. There are very few saints among us.
