Goal is not destruction of GOP

The destruction of the GOP is not my goal; it may be collateral damage for which I will not mourn. My goal is to advance what I believe is the primary function of government: the protection of the nation which creates that government.

A nation consists of people, the space they require to live, and the framework of rules by which they regulate their interactions. Protecting a nation is not limited to arms for defense. A government which does not protect individuals within a nation is failing its duty. A government which does not protect the space -- air, land, water -- its people require to survive is failing its duty. A government which distorts the framework of rules regulating the interactions of its citizens in order to favor one group of citizens over others is failing its duty.

Our government is failing its duty. We need to wrest control of government from those who are using it for their own selfish benefit. We need to then make our government do its best to protect our nation, equally and zealously. We can't survive as a nation if we do not protect our people -- regardless of economic status, race, religion, gender, culture -- and protect what humans need for survival and protect our laws.

This is not a short term struggle. It's a long term fight for positive goals.

Those who fight to use our government to suppress, exploit or destroy some of our nation in order to secure wealth or power to themselves should be no more than obstacles in the way of a government of, by, and for everyone who wants and works for an ideal government. Removing those obstacles is not the end goal; it's just one more step along the way.

plus playing to base

I had a female assistant years ago. She was excellent at warning me about snakes. She loved biscuits and belly rubs. She never liked wearing a collar, though.

I will be happy when we fire our male servant. Amoral Mitch has not been a good waterboy for the people of Kentucky. He consumes too much for himself and carries too much to those who did not hire him and do not pay his wages. He has also managed to taint and corrupt too much of the commons, spreading bad water to the whole nation.

There were probably 2 reasons for Kentucky's poorly performing waterboy to emphasize the gender of the attorney: 1. To impress his base voters with how fair and balanced GOP would treat Dr. Ford; 2. To disarm and preempt any arguments from Democrats that the all-male Republican side of the judiciary committee might have or represent any hint of misogyny.

Our waterboy in the Senate is a failure. I beg the country's forgiveness on behalf of those in my state who are not part of the Fox Cult of Disinformation.

Fox Bible, Book of Sessions, Messiah TrumPutin

King James version of Holy Bible, Book of Luke:

"But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God."

Fox Bible, Book of Sessions:

And Messiah TrumPutin said unto the hordes, 'Make the children suffer and Make America Great Again! Terrorize the mothers and the children and let their screams of grief make you strong! They are not like us; they deserve their treatment!'

Iowas found a new, likely legal way to ignore Obamacare

By Sarah Kliff 4, 2018

Iowa is moving forward with a controversial new plan to exempt certain health plans from Obamacare regulations.

Two days ago, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill that allows certain health plans to discriminate against those with preexisting conditions and exclude certain benefits, anything from prenatal care to prescription drugs.

It does this in a way that most experts think is perfectly legal — by making clear in new legislative language that these products are not health insurance. The insurance department in Iowa won’t regulate these plans as health plans. Therefore, they don’t have to play by Obamacare rules.

So while Idaho had its plan for expanding non-Obamacare plans rebuffed by the federal government, Iowa seems to be pursuing a more legal path to a similar outcome. It’s one that other conservative states are likely to notice and possibly replicate.

Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurers aren’t allowed to screen enrollees for certain health conditions. They’re barred from rejecting patients who they expect will have especially high costs.

Iowa’s new plan creates a carve-out for the Iowa Farm Bureau, a long-standing agricultural association that has historically served the state’s farming communities. It says organizations like this one can offer something called a “health benefit plan” that is explicitly not health insurance. So it can do things like offer coverage for doctor visits — but it won’t have to abide by Obamacare insurance rules.

[...]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/4/17199858/iowa-legal-way-ignore-obamacare

Flint residents are being punished for not paying for poisoned water

The ‘fix’ for Flint promised by politicians never came, instead residents face a final indignity – residents’ water supply is being cut off for unpaid bills for water that made them sick

Anthony Baxter Wed 4 Apr 2018

Nakiya Wakes, who lives in Flint, refuses to pay for the water supply that made her family sick. “I refuse to pay for poison,” she told me. Because she owes $1,983.59 to the city of Flint in unpaid water bills, the city cut off her water supply last month. She turns the taps, and they run empty.

Nakiya showed me the boxes of bottled water stacked up on her porch outside. The state has shut a number of free bottled water pick up sites in Flint – or PODs as they’re known here locally. It is feared the remaining four will soon face the axe. That means more residents are forced to buy the bottled water they need.

Nakiya and her son begin to pour bottle after bottle of Nestle water into the cistern of their toilet. “It takes two cases of bottled water for just one flush,” Nakiya tells me. “And so we can wash, I pour bottled water into a pan and heat it up in the microwave.” Those costs add to Nakiya’s $180 a month bill for power and light. And the trash in Nakiya’s bathroom is overflowing with crushed plastic bottles.

Nakiya, who holds down a low paid part-time job and lives paycheck to paycheck, stopped making any further payments on her outstanding water bill over a year ago. She and her family underwent tests which revealed an alarming rise in the level of lead in their blood. Her son has learning difficulties. Her daughter has suffered a seizure. Nakiya blames drinking Flint’s poisoned water – as she does for the loss of her unborn twins.

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/04/flint-residents-punished-poisoned-water

Mississippi Inmates Lawsuit Describes Violence and Neglect in a Private Prison

“This is a trip back to the old days of prison conditions.”

Madison Pauly Apr. 4, 2018

Last August, when Terry Beasley and other inmates noticed a man had died in his cell, they pounded on the window of their dayroom for at least 30 minutes. “Still wouldn’t nobody come on the zone,” Beasley recalled. Finally, an officer opened the door to their housing area, allowing an inmate to slip past and run to get help from the guard captain. Knowing how long it took to get help in an emergency “made me feel kind of scared,” Beasley said, “because I’m a diabetic, and you don’t know when my sugar might drop.”

Beasley described life inside the East Mississippi Correctional Facility during the first week of a federal trial over conditions at the for-profit state prison located 90 miles east of Jackson. EMCF is the state’s designated facility for inmates with psychiatric needs, and around 80 percent of the prison’s roughly 1,200 inmates have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Five years ago, prisoners there sued the Mississippi Department of Corrections, claiming that its top officials had failed to keep tabs on the prison’s corporate operators and allowed dangerous conditions to go unaddressed. The prisoners’ class-action lawsuit describes a crumbling facility with broken locks on cell doors, frequent assaults by inmates, and a critical shortage of guards and medical staff.

“What I’ve seen at East Mississippi Correction Facility, I have not seen for decades,” said Elizabeth Alexander, one of 13 attorneys representing the inmates. “This is a trip back to the old days of prison conditions.” The case went to trial in March after multiple failed attempts to settle outside of court, according to American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Carl Takei. It’s being heard by US District Judge William H. Barbour, Jr., who will decide whether the state has been “deliberately indifferent” to conditions at EMCF that posed serious risk of harm to inmates.

[...]

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/04/mississippi-inmates-lawsuit-east-mississippi-mtc/

Responsibility Deflected, the CLOUD Act Passes

[I missed seeing this evil little mess before, in all the other distractions.]

UPDATE, March 23, 2018: President Donald Trump signed the $1.3 trillion government spending bill—which includes the CLOUD Act—into law Friday morning.

“People deserve the right to a better process.”

Those are the words of Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts and member of the House of Representatives Committee on Rules, when, after 8:00 PM EST on Wednesday, he and his colleagues were handed a 2,232-page bill to review and approve for a floor vote by the next morning.

In the final pages of the bill—meant only to appropriate future government spending—lawmakers snuck in a separate piece of legislation that made no mention of funds, salaries, or budget cuts. Instead, this final, tacked-on piece of legislation will erode privacy protections around the globe.

This bill is the CLOUD Act. It was never reviewed or marked up by any committee in either the House or the Senate. It never received a hearing. It was robbed of a stand-alone floor vote because Congressional leadership decided, behind closed doors, to attach this un-vetted, unrelated data bill to the $1.3 trillion government spending bill. Congress has a professional responsibility to listen to the American people’s concerns, to represent their constituents, and to debate the merits and concerns of this proposal amongst themselves, and this week, they failed.

[...]

Make no mistake—you spoke up. You emailed your representatives. You told them to protect privacy and to reject the CLOUD Act, including any efforts to attach it to must-pass spending bills. You did your part. It is Congressional leadership—negotiating behind closed doors—who failed.

Because of this failure, U.S. and foreign police will have new mechanisms to seize data across the globe. Because of this failure, your private emails, your online chats, your Facebook, Google, Flickr photos, your Snapchat videos, your private lives online, your moments shared digitally between only those you trust, will be open to foreign law enforcement without a warrant and with few restrictions on using and sharing your information. Because of this failure, U.S. laws will be bypassed on U.S. soil.

[...]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflected-cloud-act-passes

The Unfulfilled Promise of Fair Housing

Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an integrated America was about creating a more equal society, but to many white homeowners, it was a threat.

By Abdallah Fayyad 31 Mar 2018

Editor’s Note: Read The Atlantic’s special coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.

“Kill him,” a white mob chanted as Martin Luther King Jr. marched across Marquette Park in the late summer of 1966. King had recently moved to Chicago, and on that August afternoon, he joined a Chicago Freedom Movement march to demand that realtors not discriminate against black residents seeking to live in white neighborhoods. But a group of white counter-protesters grew violent and started hurling rocks, bottles, and bricks at the demonstrators, eventually striking King in the head. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago,” he said, shining light on a problem that white Northern liberals had ignored and let fester for far too long: de facto segregation.

Up until the civil-rights era, segregation was largely reinforced, if not promoted, by federal and local governments. In the 1930s, for example, the Federal Housing Administration incentivized developers to build suburbs for whites only, and the Public Works Administration built separate and unequal housing projects. After a series of Supreme Court cases deemed segregation unconstitutional in the 1940s and ‘50s, American neighborhoods continued to segregate without legal recognition, in a system known as “de facto.” And like de jure segregation—when the government legally engineered ghettos into existence—de facto segregation continues to exacerbate wealth and racial inequality today.

[...]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-unfulfilled-promise-of-fair-housing/557009/

Voting Rights Advocates Just Won a Big Victory in Court

The ruling is a setback for conservative groups trying to purge voter rolls across the country.

Pema Levy Mar. 30, 2018

A conservative legal group’s crusade to purge voter lists across the country hit a setback Friday when a federal judge in Florida ruled that Broward County was already adequately maintaining its voter file. In doing so, the judge rebuffed the group’s efforts to force the heavily Democratic county to implement procedures that voting rights advocates say could have resulted in eligible voters being removed from the rolls.

The case is one of many filed by the American Civil Rights Union, which claims that numerous counties throughout the country are shirking their duty under federal law to remove ineligible voters. One of the leaders of the effort is J. Christian Adams, a former member of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission. Adams, a conservative legal activist, claims that voter fraud exists in the United States on a large scale, particularly among non-citizens, though his research on the matter has proved dubious at best. (The overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that voter fraud is extremely rare.) Adams is an ally of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and both have advocated for laws that force voters to show proof of citizenship in order to register.

In her decision Friday, Judge Beth Bloom rejected key arguments put forward by ACRU.

[...]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/voting-rights-advocates-just-won-a-big-victory-in-court/

Teens started March for Our Lives, but all ages participated

A new survey of the Washington, DC, protest suggests that the demonstrations have reached much further than young people.

By German Lopez Mar 30, 2018

The March for Our Lives was launched by a bunch of bold teenagers — particularly survivors of the Parkland, Florida, shooting like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg. But a survey of participants in the Washington, DC, protest suggests that these teens have attracted a much broader kind of crowd.

Dana R. Fisher, a University of Maryland professor who studies protest movements, found that the majority of participants at the march in Washington were 26 years old or older. Of the 308 people sampled, 40 were 19 or younger (13 percent) and 52 were 25 or younger (17 percent).

“The youth really sparked people’s interests,” Fisher told me. “I think what they’ve done is captured the imagination of the general population.”

Fisher’s survey, which she first detailed in the Washington Post, was conducted at the DC march — in which her team sampled every fifth person at designated areas, getting them to fill out a questionnaire on a tablet.

Fisher noted a few caveats: A lot of teens were concentrated in a single area near the stage, and the survey ended at 1 pm, potentially undercounting the number of teens and kids by a small amount. Many of the children also may have attended the event with parents, slightly inflating the true level of adult interest.

[...]

Attendees were often interested in more than gun violence

[...]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/30/17177432/march-for-our-lives-gun-control-children-age