January 20, 2024

Saturday, January 20, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

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Joe is always busy.

Thanks to the Biden-Harris Adeministration, 38 million people have had $1.3 BILLION in student loans relieved. Some of the loan holders have been paying their whole lives. Many are even older than 65 years old.

As Senator Patty Murray (D-OR) said yesterday,”No one should have to spend a lifetime paying back their student loans—and @POTUS' announcement today is another huge step to getting student loan relief for thousands of teachers, firefighters, and other public servants. (Source. X).

Biden’s answer on Age.

This photo (#1) reminds you how fit our President is.

In response to endless carping about his age, Biden cannot change his birthdate, but he can project an image of vitality and vigor. Indeed, alert voters should have noticed by now the contrast between his cogent, policy-laden speeches and the increasingly unhinged, rambling screeds we get from the GOP front-runner. The contrast might sharpen as four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump launches more rants on more courthouse steps in the coming months.

In the new year, Biden already has made headway in blowing away the right-wing canard that he is enfeebled and out to lunch. The president’s strength and decisiveness in support of U.S. interests stand in stark contrast with Trump, who cozied up to dictators, undermined NATO and allegedly purloined national security secrets at the end of his presidency.

In the foreign policy realm, Biden answered the Houthis’ Red Sea attacks with military strikes. Decisive action and tough rhetoric undercut the claim that he is feeble. “The operation, short and limited to military targets, and in a nation that cannot control the piratical acts of an unwelcome group, falls well within the legal as well as the traditional requirements for the use of force by members of the international community,” military expert Tom Nichols wrote for the Atlantic. “So far, both American political parties, even with a bit of GOP grumbling, have made the right call to support action against the Houthis.” It didn’t hurt Biden that hysterical voices on his left flank made constitutionally unsupportable demands that he seek permission from Congress before acting.

Also, expect to see Biden’s whirlwind visits to war zones in Israel and Ukraine featured in more campaign ads and speeches. “Twice now President Joe Biden made the decision to visit active war zones not under U.S. military command,” professor and journalist Steven Beschloss wrote on Substack. “These trips, to Kyiv in February and to Tel Aviv … are without precedent in modern American history.” Beschloss added that voters can appreciate the “vigor and guts — and principle — it took to meet American allies in person to demonstrate American support, despite genuine danger.”

Punchy speeches with sharp barbs aimed at Trump also show the sort of instinct for the jugular rarely seen during Biden’s first three years in office. Delighting in calling Trump a loser, Biden no longer hides his contempt for his likely November opponent. During his speech last week at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., Biden declared, “Let me say what others cannot: We must reject political violence in America. Always, not sometimes. Always. It’s never appropriate.” He added about Trump, “Losers are taught to concede when they lose. And he’s a loser.”

The Biden campaign has also embraced the “Brandon” meme, transforming an obscene chant into a winking affirmation of Biden’s strength. As Axios reported, “‘Dark Brandon’ — an online meme that portrays the 80-year-old president as a two-steps-ahead Machiavelli — is driving the Biden campaign’s merchandise sales.”

Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign now openly mocks Trump for “confused,” rambling utterances. And when late-night comicspick up the refrain, news outlets and voters alike begin to look for more instances of unhinged, incoherent tirades.

Collectively, the predominant “narrative” might shift to match reality. Biden is old but sharp; Trump is out of shape and out to lunch.

This photo (#2) reminds you how fit our President is, and makes sure you don’t forget that.

One more thing. Or two.

1.Make this your mantra and your answer -

“Biden is old but sharp; Trump is out of shape and out to lunch.”

2. October 22, 2020: Trump said if Biden is elected, the stock market will crash.

January 19, 2024: The stock market reached a new record high as the S&P 500 closes at an all-time high of 4839.81.

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Pennsylvania is a state the President must win.

So far so good.

Want to learn more and help?

This from my friend Deborah Sale.

Democratic control of the Senate will depend on the re-election of Bob Casey.  Susan Wild, Matt Cartwright, and Chris Deluzio must retain their seats in Congress if Hakeem Jefferies is to become Speaker with a Democratic majority. Pretty simple.  The stakes are clear.

Please join the NY Buddy Group on Wednesday, January 24th at 6:00pm EDT [by zoom] for a conversation with Senator Bob Casey and representatives Susan Wild, Matt Cartwright and Chris Deluzio moderated by former congressman Conor Lamb.

There is no minimum to attend, but we hope you will give as generously as you can.

Please feel free to share this invitation with others.

You can RSVP here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/nybg-jan-pa

See you there.

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The Maine Secretary of State continues to resist having Trump on the ballot.

Maine secretary of state wants quick decision in Trump 14th Amendment case.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows on Friday asked the state's highest appeals court to consider her decision to bar former President Donald Trump off of Maine's GOP primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment -- before the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the Colorado 14th Amendment case disqualifying Trump.

In a news release, Bellows said, "Maine law provides the opportunity to seek review from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court," something she requested on Friday.

Her request comes after Maine's Superior Court on Wednesdaydeferred ruling on Bellows' earlier decision, which was appealed by Trump's team, until the U.S. Supreme Court settled the Colorado case. (ABC News).

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Update on the Israeli-Hamas War.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the idea, advanced this week by U.S. officials, that postwar plans should include a pathway to creating a Palestinian state. “Israel must have security control over all the territory west of the Jordan,” he said.

As Netanyahu and the U.S. tussle over postwar plans, he’s also confronting conflict within his own government over management of the war. A Wednesday report on Israeli TV said Netanyahu had unilaterally decided to change the parameters of a potential deal for the release of the hostages remaining in Gaza, angering war cabinet ministers. One of those ministers, Gadi Eisenkot, blasted Netanyahu in a Thursday interview, and called for new elections within a matter of months — a challenge to Netanyahu’s assertion that new elections should only take place after the war. (The Forward).

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Dictators always target the weak, the disabled, anyone different from them.

World leaders, American leaders all should have fought back loudly when Trump mocked a disabled reporter during the 2016 election fight.

This 👇 is where that leads.

The GOP Doesn’t Want to Punish Trans People—It Wants to Eradicate Them.

This year, more than 200 anti-transgender bills have already been filed in the states. They are extreme. And many will pass.

In 2023, the Republican Party dropped any pretense of being willing to tolerate transgender people. Almost 600 anti-transgender bills were filed in the states in 2023, and 85 passed. This was a sharp rise from previous years, but also continued a trend going back to 2018. Most of these bills were bans on health care, athletics, and bathrooms for transgender youth. The GOP clearly signaled an intent to go much further, however.

At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Michael Knowlestook the main stage and called for the “eradication of transgenderism from public life” to a standing ovation. Not long after, Project 2025 (led by the Heritage Foundation) published the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900-plus-page blueprint for the next Republican administration. The first legislative item in the executive summary declares that “transgender ideology” is a form of pornography, and that all pornography should be outlawed. It then goes on to call all trans people “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.” It further demands that anyone who is a “purveyor of transgender ideology” be put on sex offender lists and imprisoned.

This an explicit call to make being transgender illegal, and to put anyone who fails to flee or detransition in prison, or maybe camps if there are too many for the existing system to handle. This is already the solutionDonald Trump is proposing for other “undesirables.” It’s not coming from fringe organizations: This is the mainstream of the GOP. When Trump promises to be a dictator on day one, it’s so that he can implement draconian policies and laws like these. Average Americans might think, “Surely we would never go this far? This sounds positively Naziesque, and it is, and we’re better than that, right?”

Wrong.

We already have the first state proposing bills to do exactly this (and more) less than a week into the new legislative year. By January 17, more than 200 anti-transgender bills have already been filed. West Virginia’s Senate Bill 197 defines the existence of transgender people as “obscene” and bans them from being within 2,500 feet of any school. Senate Bill 194would not only ban all transition-related care for anyone over the age of 21, but would also require that all providers (including therapists of all types) attempt to “cure” them. It would define being transgender as a “sexual deviation,” like pedophilia, exhibitionism, masochism, sadomasochism, or fetishism. Senate Bill 195 in West Virginia would declare that any material related to being transgender is obscene, which would have far-reaching implications for the internet and the First Amendment.

Florida is also taking a swipe at freedom of speech when it comes to transgender people. Senate Bill 1780 would mandate a $35,000 penalty for accusing anyone of transphobia. It would also exempt people from defamation lawsuits by trans people if their views are based on their “scientific or religious” beliefs. Which is to say, you could call a specific transgender person a child molester without evidence and not be liable to the same civil suit risks you would be if you did the same to a cisgender person. This expands protections on speech for one class of people, while restricting them for the minority they’re attacking.

Part of the First Amendment is the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Florida is attempting to abridge this as well. House Bill 599 would ban any state employee or contractor from changing their pronouns or using pronouns other than those associated with their sex at birth. It would also forbid other state employees or contractors from using their preferred pronouns. H.B. 599 goes a step further: It bans all nonprofits from “training, instruction, or other activity on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” This would effectively ban all LGBTQ organizations in the state from operating. The effect is that LGBTQ people could no longer organize to petition the government, or peaceably assemble to discuss matters related to their organizations’ core missions.

When the bills banning health care for trans youth started coming up a few years ago, proponents swore that these were only about protecting children, and that adults were of course free to do what they wanted with their bodies. After the end of Roe v. Wade, they have dropped this pretense. Florida has enacted Targeted Restriction of Abortion Provider-style, or TRAP, policies on access to adult care that requires transgender people to see doctors in person for hormone prescriptions (when in the past nurse practitioners and physician assistants could do it via telehealth, which was how 80 percent of Floridians did it).

Now Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio has issued an executive orderrequiring that all trans health care for adults be signed off on by a psychiatrist, an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist. Insurance won’t cover this, and doctor’s offices, hospitals, and clinics do not have such teams. This is equivalent to the TRAP laws that required all abortion providers to also have level-one trauma facilities on site, as well as admitting privileges. It is a de facto ban on all health care for trans adults in Ohio.

There are also bills in several states that would make it impossible for trans people to obtain an accurate driver’s license and are likely to set up a full faith and credit clause fight in the Supreme Court. Florida House Bill 1233 would create government-held lists of transgender people by forcing them to sign affidavits of “biological sex” to obtain a driver’s license and face criminal penalties for fraud if they are transgender. Where the constitutional issue comes in will be when someone shows up at the DMV with a passport, birth certificate, and out-of-state driver’s license attesting that they are one sex and they are forced to put down another. This would seem to violate the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, which requires states to respect the laws and judgments of courts in other states. But we’ve already been down this road with same sex marriage.

Some might argue that these bills are “extreme” and have not passed yet. However, they follow the pattern we have seen since around 2020. The Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, another group central to these efforts, state their intentions. Ultraconservative legislators start introducing test bills in a few states. And within a couple of years, the “extreme” bills are the law of the land in nearly half the states in the land. Heritage has stated that its goal is to ban pornography, and that transgender people are inherently pornographic.

Then there’s the laughable notion that these sorts of bills will fail to pass. Once Heritage and ADF have made it unthinkable to oppose such bills, legislative hearings become a kangaroo court. During the last hearings to ban health care for trans youth in South Carolina, the ADF couldn’t even be bothered to send anyone to support the bill because its leaders already knew that passage was a forgone conclusion. Everyone who testified in person was both a South Carolinian and opposed to the bill. And yet, it was still voted out of committee on a 4–1 party-line vote.

The extreme bills in Ohio, Florida, and West Virginia are almost certain to end up being passed in half the country within the next two years. We’ve seen this happen again and again with sports, health care, and bathroom bans over the past four or five years. They’ve told us what they plan to do, and now they are starting to do it, and it will happen even if Joe Biden wins reelection.

Trans people have already begun fleeing hostile states en masse, and it is only going to get worse. Transgender students effectively can no longer get a public education in half the states. This was deliberate and has direct analogies to German school policies in the 1930s. The Republican Party, and Donald Trump, have made it clear that they intend to seize power and spread this to the rest of the nation. The idea that our institutions will save us is ridiculous, as Trump’s lawyers are literally arguing at this moment that he has the right to have Supreme Court justices, senators, and representatives executed on a whim (presumably for opposing him acting like a dictator).

It is happening here. (Bryan Tannehill, The New Republic).

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This, my dear readers, is how we win back Democracy.

It also will help us win back the House in 2024.

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2 Exhibits of Justice Ginsburg’s collars happening now.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Collars, Captured by Camera.

In the soft stillness of a museum gallery, you could forget that the photographs on the walls around you were shot under time pressure.

Six minutes each, the photographer Elinor Carucci told me.

The photographs, on view at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, are haunting, almost three-dimensional images of collars and necklaces that belonged to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court.

They stamped her personality in the public consciousness, making her recognizable beyond the court, so much so that the first poster for the film “RBG” showed nothing but a collar with the title.

But Ginsburg’s collars were not just about a look. They conveyed meaning — without words — in a way that fashion accessories usually don’t.

Ginsburg had a “majority” collar that she wore when delivering opinions that became the law of the land.

She also had a “dissent" collar for when the vote among the justices had not gone her way. She wore that collar on the day after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election — when no decisions were announced by the court.

And there was a “court” collar that she wore during her final term on the bench — and while lying in state after her death in September 2020.

Carucci was stunned when she learned that Ginsburg had died. In “The Collars of RBG: A Portrait of Justice,” a book written with Sara Bader and published last year, Carucci wrote that the news came when she was at an aunt’s house in Kew Gardens, Queens, and that her teenage daughter “cried on the F train all the way from Queens” home to Manhattan.

Carucci wrote that the assignment by Time magazine to photograph the collars had called for “still-life photography, not my specialty.” She told me she was most comfortable photographing people — “people crying, people fighting.”

But she could not turn down an assignment that she called “the equivalent of documenting a superhero’s costume.” So she began preparing for the shoot in Washington, with her husband, Eran Bendheim, accompanying her.

Based on the time allotted by the Supreme Court, “we knew we would have six minutes per collar,” she told me. “By the time you take the collar out, it’s not a lot.” She took test shots with a collar she made from a paper towel, figuring it would be about the same color as the white collars in Ginsburg’s collection.

Then she and her husband went to the Supreme Court. They were checked by guards and sniffed by security dogs. So was her camera equipment. “That is very different from photo shoots I am used to,” she said.

Once they set up her strobes and the cabinet containing the collars was wheeled in, one collar almost stopped her.

It was embroidered with a quote from Ginsburg’s husband, Martin: “It’s not sacrifice, it’s family.” (Martin Ginsburg had moved to the capital when she became a federal judge in 1980, leaving behind his career as a well-connected lawyer and law school professor in New York.) His quote came 13 years later, when she was nominated to the Supreme Court, and was preceded by: “I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me.” That part of the quote did not make it onto the collar.

“I started to cry,” Carucci said. “My husband was like, ‘Get hold of yourself. Stop crying. We have four minutes left and you’re crying. Four minutes. No crying.’”

She said that the collar was commissioned for the justice’s 85th birthday and was made by the New York fashion house M.M. LaFleur. “I think they went twice to the Supreme Court for fittings,” she said. “It’s complex and has many layers, and then on the back there’s the quote when they asked him about moving from New York to Washington. He was talking about doing things for one another. That was where I cried. It had so much meaning.” (New York Times)

The exhibit at the Jewish Museum (December 15-May 27), 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, NYC, runs concurrently with another exhibit of photographs of RBG’s collars at the Edwynn Houk Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street, NYC.

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