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1000 Days: This President Continues To Be An EmbarrassmentGARYWORDS by The Real GabbyGary – I’m sorry, but, any truly conscientious person who has been paying close attention to the daily, real news coming out of Washington, D.C., the home of the United States Congress, White House and various federal agencies, should already understand why the Impeachment Inquiry in the House of Representatives is […] ….. Read More.GARYTALK – Conversations & Commentary | This, That and The OtherWed, October 23, 20192 years ago

How Voting Rights Have Changed Since Martin Luther King’s PushWatch VideoPart of Dr. King’s dream for America is more relevant than ever now: the right to vote.Much of Dr. King’s advocacy for civil rights tied back to voting rights, like his 1957 “Give us the ballot” speech, his work in organizing the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march and his role in pushing for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But now in 2022, voting options are narrowing, and the voting process is getting tougher as many states put tighter restrictions in place. The burden for many of those changes is landing on voters of color. Right now 35 states have some form of voter ID on the books. Those laws usually don’t explicitly discriminate against voters of color, but they do place a burden on lower-income or more rural voters to take the time to get and/or pay for an ID. Even if…

The Rights ReversalThe great divergence is rapidly expanding—and President Joe Biden’s window to reverse it is narrowing.Since the 1960s, Congress and federal courts have acted mostly to strengthen the floor of basic civil rights available to citizens in all 50 states, a pattern visible on issues from the dismantling of Jim Crow racial segregation to the right to abortion to the authorization of same-sex marriage. But now, offensives by red-state governments and GOP-appointed federal judges are poised to retrench those common standards across an array of issues. The result through the 2020s could be a dramatic erosion of common national rights and a widening gulf—a “great divergence”—between the liberties of Americans in blue states and those in red states.This process is evident in the restrictive laws approved over the past year in many Republican-controlled states making it more difficult to vote and increasing opportunities for GOP partisans to influence the…

America Is Running Out of TimeHistory finds us two ways, to borrow from Hemingway: gradually, then suddenly. One year after Donald Trump led his supporters in an attempted coup against the United States, the nation is still very much in the throes of that attack.Despite blaring sirens and flashing lights, despite ever more visible signs of the fragility of American democracy, envisioning what America will become if we fail to prevent the next coup attempt is strangely, terrifyingly difficult. As my colleague George Packer argued recently, only by correcting this failure of imagination will we have a shot at crawling our way out of catastrophe. Those who seek to trample democracy in America have a coherent plan and are resolute in carrying it out. “They will certainly try again,” Barton Gellman wrote in his essential cover story about the coup attempt. “An unpunished plot is practice for the next.”It’s not…

Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 CampaignFLORENCE, Ariz.—Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is.“I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. “This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back.”Tonight’s rally was Trump’s first public event since July. On paper, the gathering was meant as his response to the anniversary of January 6, as well as an unofficial kickoff for his efforts to support Republicans in the midterm elections. But the event also served as the soft launch of Trump’s…

Coronavirus update: Supreme Court overturns vaccine mandate for businessesSome pharmacies are struggling to remain staffed By Mark Huffman of ConsumerAffairs January 14, 2022 Coronavirus (COVID-19) tally as compiled by Johns Hopkins University. (Previous numbers in parentheses.) Total U.S. confirmed cases: 64,084,673 (63,232,336) Total U.S. deaths: 846,506 (844,631) Total global cases: 320,852,830 (317,485,959) Total global deaths: 5,523,313 (5,516,175) Supreme Court blocks mandate for businesses The U.S. Supreme Court, on a six to three vote, has blocked the Biden administrations COVID-19 mandate for private businesses. Known as vaccine-or-testing rules, the mandate required large employers to vaccinate employees or test unvaccinated employees on a regular basis. At the same time, the justices did allow the administration to require vaccinations for health care workers if their facilities accept Medicare and Medicaid. That edict covers an estimated 10 million employees. The courts majority ruled that the Biden administration probably did not have the unilateral power…