Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet:
GOP Wants to Wish Trump Away
The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins writes about an epidemic of wishful thinking among Republican leaders.
“Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump.
But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him. Maybe he’ll flame out early in the primaries, or just get bored with politics and wander away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He’s old, after all—how many years can he have left?
This magical thinking pervaded my recent conversations with more than a dozen current and former elected GOP officials and party strategists. Faced with the prospect of another election cycle dominated by Trump and uncertain that he can actually be beaten in the primaries, many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will make him go away. And they would strongly prefer not to make it happen themselves.”
I guess we won’t need another volume of Profiles in Courage any time soon.
Republicans have had repeated opportunities to leave Trump behind. I believe they would be in a better electoral position had they taken any one of the possible offramps, especially the one available to them with the impeachment that followed the January 6 Insurrection.
Instead, they hope for his death to free them. I hope our democracy can survive their cowardice.
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Time for Real Reforms
The police murder of Tyre Nichols is the latest atrocity to spark a conversation about reforming the police to prevent these killings.
We ask the police to take on activities beyond their training and expertise. Armed people focused on the “warrior mentality” shouldn’t be handling mental health crises or routine traffic stops.
I dont think Americans realize how dystopian it is to get pulled over and effectively detained by a gov’t agent with a gun who runs through your entire criminal history before issuing you a ticket (or worse) for a traffic violation versus just getting a ticket in the mail.
— Darrell Owens (@IDoTheThinking) 4:19 PM ∙ Jan 30, 2023
Thom Hartmann argues that it is time for the federal government to regulate local and state police departments, end policing for profit, and roll back the militarization of the police.
He writes: “You and I are 30 times more likely to be killed by police than are citizens of Germany or Great Britain. In 2018, for example, police killed over 1000 people in America. In Germany cops killed 11; in Australia 8; in Sweden 6; in the UK it was 3 people; and cops killed only 1 person in New Zealand.
The reasons for this disparity are deeply systemic.
At the top of the list is the fact that the United States is the only developed country in the world lacking national standards for hiring, training, supervising, and disciplining police across the 18,000 departments in the country.
While it takes years to become an officer on the street in most developed countries, the average cop in America spends about as much time training as does a barber. Many small police agencies require little to no training.”
I would love to find an alternative to the current policing model because of its history of racism and control over local governments. Enacting that kind of change isn’t likely in the short term. Hartmann’s proposals are the minimum response we should accept now.
Students Ask for Mental Health Services;
To Receive Guns on Campus Instead
West Virginia University students last May talked to members of the state’s legislature about the need for increased mental health services on campus.
But, as the Mountain State Spotlight’s Ian Karbal reports, there has yet to be any follow-up about those needs. Several student mental health care bills stalled in the legislature despite bipartisan sponsors. But a bill concerning the campus appears likely to pass despite opposition from students and university leaders.
“Yet the campus carry bill is moving. It would allow students to carry concealed weapons on most areas of campus, and require schools to provide secure storage of those weapons in dorms and residential facilities. It passed the Senate last week, but still has to pass the House.
Sen. Rupie Phillips, R-Logan, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in an interview that he does not see the issue as connected to concerns about mental health, and has been trying to get a similar law passed since well before the calls for campus mental health funding increased during the pandemic.”
Phillips has his agenda, and he isn’t interested in any facts.
“Notably, research has repeatedly shown that access to firearms is one of the leading predictors of suicide, and in West Virginia suicides account for a majority of firearms deaths.
Phillips said that he doesn’t believe data linking gun access to suicide.
“I can write anything down and call it data,” Phillips said.”
Abortion, Every Day
Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Today she highlights another example of why exceptions to abortion bans may provide a public relations boost but won’t meaningfully help people who can become pregnant.
“I’ve been writing a lot about how Republican lawmakers across the country are suddenly very interested in adding exceptions to their abortion bans as a way to pretend like they give a shit about women: It’s a win-win for conservatives, who know that abortion exceptions aren’t real but that voters overwhelmingly support rape and incest victims having access to care. This kind of strategic PR play is especially important in places like Tennessee, where the abortion ban is so strict that it doesn’t have an exception for women’s lives. That’s why Republican Sen. Ferrell Haile has introduced legislation that he says would create an exception for rape and incest victims. But if voters catch on to what Haile’s bill actually does, the legislation may blow up in his face.”
Proposition 28 Protects Arts Education
This year’s California budget debate provided an immediate example of why passing Proposition 28 last November to guarantee funding for the arts in our schools was so important.
Governor Newsom’s initial budget includes a $1 billion cut to a block grant that included arts funding in its title. The funding provided by Proposition 28 should offset that cut should it comes to fruition in the final state budget bill in June.
EdSource’s Karen D’Souza explains why ongoing funding for arts and music education needs to be a priority: “Once considered a cornerstone of any comprehensive education, the arts have long been scrubbed in California classrooms in favor of math and science. But the pandemic exposed the urgent need to help children cope with trauma and find ways to heal, experts say, amid what many see an escalating youth mental health crisis.
“The pandemic has taught us a lot about all the things the arts offer in terms of social-emotional well-being and student mental health,” said DeCaigny. “If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that there needs to be some joy in our lives, and we’ve always known that the arts provide that.”
Arts advocates also point to the power of the arts to boost student achievement. Despite the fact that students with access to the arts are five times less likely to drop out of school and four times more likely to receive a bachelor’s degree, nine out of 10 California schools, research shows, fail to meet the state mandate to provide arts education in schools. This is an equity issue, experts say, because it’s generally only affluent students who receive ongoing exposure to the arts.
Building student engagement may also be crucial to combating learning loss, many suggest, as students struggle to rebound from the academic setbacks triggered by the pandemic.”
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An Early Preview of the 2024 California Ballot
CalMatters’ Dan Walters takes a peek at the high-impact propositions that already seem likely to make the November 2024 ballot in California.
I discussed the referendum coming about the law seeking to improve working conditions for fast food workers in the January 28, 2023, edition of this newsletter.
Walters provides updates on five other measures that already seem likely to make that ballot: including a referendum against a law creating a buffer zone for oil and gas drilling, a business-backed effort to overturn the Private Attorney Generals Act, a tax on upper incomes to fund pandemic preparation, an attempt to overturn a state Supreme Court decision lowering the voter-approval threshold required to pass local special purpose taxes, and an increase in the minimum wage.
Quick Pitches
After three years of implementing a strict zero-COVID policy, the Chinese government made a snap decision to drop the restrictions after protests in November. But local officials were not prepared, partly because “[a]ny preparations for ending zero-Covid would be seen as a vote of no confidence in both the policy and Xi – an act of political suicide.” Now many Chinese are wondering if all of the sacrifices were worth it and how all this will impact Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin, The Guardian)
Efforts to ban TikTok in the United States have to overcome a 1988 United States law known as the Berman Amendments, which “took away the president’s authority to regulate or ban imports of “informational materials” from adversarial nations such as Cuba, and shielded those who produced such works—and their U.S. distributors—from penalties for violating economic sanctions.” (John D. McKinnon, Wall Street Journal)
Representative Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) became the first Member of Congress to deliver a speech partially written by artificial intelligence on the floor of the House. “The speech was written using ChatGPT, and is as dull and anodyne as you might expect for a political speech filtered through an AI system based on probabilistic averages. That’s not to say AI text tools can’t generate unusual and creative outputs, but that usually requires a little bit more imagination in both the prompting and the subject matter.” (James Vincent, The Verge)
Margaret Sullivan is one of my favorite media critics, and she is not happy with how the media has covered the revelations that President Biden’s offices improperly possessed classified documents. “Finally, all this coverage seems to say, a chance to get back to the false equivalence that makes us what we truly are! And make no mistake, any effort to equate Biden’s sloppy mishandling with former president Trump’s removal of hundreds of classified documents to his Florida hangout at Mar-a-Lago is simply wrong.” (Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian)
I’m a couple of weeks late to this, but the On with Kara Swisher podcast featured a great conversation about Prince Harry’s recent book release. Swisher interviewed journalist and King Charles III biographer Catherine Mayer and PR executive Patrick Harverson, who served as a communications advisor to the then Prince of Wales and Dutchess of Cornwall.
John Adams, who was famous in baseball circles as the fan who played the drum at Cleveland baseball games for nearly 50 years, has passed away. (Paul Hoynes, Cleveland.com)
Some people were skeptical when, in 2020, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny purchased Wrexham, a Welsh team playing in the fifth division of England’s soccer pyramid. It’s a captivating story and the subject of a wonderful FX documentary. Here’s a story about all of the improvements in Wrexham as Reynolds and McElhenny seek to keep their promises and get the world’s third-oldest professional club back in the Football League. (Stuart James, The Athletic)
Jonah Furman recaps the week in U.S. unions at Who Gets the Bird?
The European men’s soccer winter transfer window SLAMMED SHUT yesterday. Men in Blazers recaps all of the transfers, including some intriguing moves for U.S. Men’s National Team players.
This report is good news.
Snowpack data courtesy of CDEC/DWR: cdec.water.ca.gov/snowapp/sweq.a…
#CAwx
— NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) 1:00 AM ∙ Feb 1, 2023
We sadly have many reasons to start using this word.
Word of the day is ‘malverse’ (17th century): to act corruptly in a position of trust.
— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) 9:03 AM ∙ Jan 30, 2023
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