August 29, 2023

Tuesday, August 29, 2023. Annette’s New Roundup.

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Joe and Kamala are always busy.

An ad on A Woman’s Right to Choose. Watch. 30 seconds. 👇 You will be glad you did.

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Joe is always busy.

Touch to watch the video.👇

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Kamala is always busy.

Harris praises 2022 WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces for 'grit and determination' on and off court.

Harris praises 2022 WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces for 'grit and determination' on and off court - ABC News

Vice President Kamala Harris has praised the 2022 WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces for showing “grit and determination” on and off the court

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A lawsuit has begun to make clear that Trump is not qualified to seek the Presidency in 2024 based on Article 14, Section 3 of the Constitution.

If Trump is disqualified, who is the GOP heir apparent?

Lawrence Caplan, a tax attorney in Palm Beach County, filed the challenge in federal court Thursday, pointing to a clause in the amendment that says those who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the government cannot hold office. (Source. The Hill) If Caplan’s wins his lawsuit, who is in standing in waiting as the GOP’s torchbearer?

Vivek Ramaswamy is America’s demagogue-in-waiting.

He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax, supports Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and would gladly pardon Donald Trump on day 1 of his would-be presidency. A wealthy biotech entrepreneur, the 38-year-old has never before run for public office.

Despite all of this (or maybe because of it), this week’s Republican debate became a national coming-out party for Vivek Ramaswamy.

Suddenly, this inexperienced and dangerous showoff is almost a household name.

Many in the Republican base ate up his showmanship and blatant fanboying of their hero, Donald Trump. In CNN’s post-debate focus group of Republican voters in Iowa, for example, Ramaswamy got the most favorable response.

Trump publicly applauded him. And many in the mainstream media declared him victorious. The Washington Post put him up high in its “winners” column, trailing only behind Donald Trump, who notably wasn’t even there. (Choosing not to enter this particular clown car showed some uncharacteristic good sense on the former president’s part.)

The New York Times analyzed the situation under a glowing headline “How Vivek Ramaswamy Broke Through: Big Swings With a Smile”, with emphasis on his style: “unchecked confidence and insults”.

For this millennial tech bro, his performance on the Fox News stage in Milwaukee couldn’t have gone much better.

As a glimpse of America’s future, it couldn’t have gone much worse.

“If you have wondered what Trumpism after Trump looks like, ask no further,” suggested the magazine writer David Freedlander on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. His prediction accompanied a debate stage photo of Ramaswamy with clenched fist.

Certainly, he has the essentials covered. No, not foreign policy chops or a background in public service, but a mocking aversion to social justice and equality.

The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, may talk a good anti-woke game but Ramaswamy wrote the book. His Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, published in 2021, takes aim at the nation’s “new secular religions like Covid-ism, climate-ism and gender ideology”.

His night in the spotlight, and its aftermath, shows that neither Republican voters nor many in the mainstream media have learned much since Trump came down the elevator in 2015 and proceeded to wreak havoc on the country.

In case there was any doubt, now we know: they will always fall for the attention-seeking, the policy-unencumbered, the candidate quickest with a demeaning insult. That’s a “winner”, apparently.

And it’s all too familiar.

“Ramaswamy is like Trump in the larva stage, molting toward the full Maga wingspan but not quite there yet,” wrote Frank Bruni in his New York Times newsletter. “His narcissism, though, is fully evolved.”

If Ramaswamy’s real aim – other than to bask in his own glorious reflection – is to get Trump to choose him as his running mate, he made progress toward that end.

The day before surrendering to Georgia officials on Thursday, the 91-times-indicted former president found time to praise the newcomer’s onstage statements. He was particularly pleased, of course, by Ramaswamy’s labeling Trump as “the best president of the 21st century”.

Faint-praise alert: there have been only three others, and two – Barack Obama and Joe Biden – are Democrats. But no matter, since rapturous approval, especially in superlative form – “the hugest inaugural crowd”, etc – has always been the way to Trump’s heart, such as it is.

“This answer gave Vivek Ramaswamy a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH,” Trump gushed in a social media post.

Not everyone in the media, of course, was buying it. Charlie Sykes, editor in chief of the right-leaning Bulwark, was blunt, calling Ramaswamy “facile, clownish, shallow, shameless, pandering”, but, then again, “exactly what GOP voters crave these days”.

Given that the Republican party – still firmly in the grip of a twice-impeached con man – has lost its mind, this craving makes a certain amount of sense.

But it makes the endless media normalization even more cringe-inducing. Shouldn’t mainstream journalists be able to step back a tiny bit, providing critical distance rather than the same old tricks?

How can there be “winners” in yet another milestone on the way to fascism?

Losers? That’s easier. I think we already know who they are: Americans who care about democracy. (Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian)

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Trump’s January 6 DC trial is set.

Trump’s D.C. election-obstruction trial scheduled for March 2024.

The federal judge overseeing the case against former president Donald Trump for allegedly obstructing the results of the 2020 election said Monday she plans to begin his trial on March 4 — a date that collides with both Trump’s 2024 presidential bid and key dates in two other criminal cases against him.


March 4 is one day before Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states will hold primaries or caucuses to pick the Republican presidential nominee. It is not as soon as the Jan. 2 trial date proposed by prosecutors from the office of special counsel Jack Smith, but it is far closer than the April 2026 date Trump’s attorneys requested.


Chutkan said prosecutors had given her no example of such a high-profile case going to trial within five months of indictment, but she likewise had never seen such a case set for trial more than two years into the future. And she said Trump would have to “make the trial date work for his campaign schedule just like” any other high-profile defendant.



“If this case involved a professional athlete, it would be inappropriate to schedule a trial to accommodate her schedule,” Chutkan said. “Mr. Trump will be treated with no more or less deference than any other defendant.”

Trump, who did not attend the hearing, quickly took to his social media site Truth Social to say he was planning to appeal the trial date ruling. He called Chutkan “a biased, Trump Hating judge."


Legal experts told The Washington Post Monday that a date set by a trial judge cannot be appealed, though the government or the defendant can ask the judge to change the schedule if conflicts arise.


“Either party can move to modify a schedule based on events that come up,” said David Aaron, a formal federal prosecutor who worked on national security cases. “But once a district court sets a trial date, there is no higher court to appeal to and try to change it.”(Washington Post).

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As the School Year starts . . .

Teacher shortages have gotten worse. Here’s how schools are coping.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/08/24/teacher-shortages-pipeline-college-licenses/

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Meet the dads choosing caring for kids over careers: ‘Men are starting to realize that missing crucial morning time and bedtime adds up’

Who stays at home? The stay-at-home dad has long been an outlier compared to the stay-at-home mom. But, as my colleague Orianna Rosa Royle reports for Fortune, there’s a major difference when it comes to today’s stay-at-home fathers.

Dads in heterosexual marriages who decide to stay home with their kids are increasingly doing so as a proactive choice—not as a fallback option. While some fathers have always opted to stay home, often they’ve made the jump initially because of a layoff, retirement, or illness. During the 2008 financial crisis, for example, the number of American stay-at-home fathers surged, according to Pew Research Center.

Those are no longer the only situations compelling dads to take care of their kids full-time; 18% of stay-at-home parents in the U.S. today are fathers, compared to 5% two decades ago. During the pandemic, the number of stay-at-home dads increased by a third in the U.K.

“Men are starting to realize that missing crucial morning time and bedtime adds up,” Dave Murray Jones, an ad sales professional-turned-stay-at-home-dad, told Orianna. His stay-at-home fatherhood has led to the ultimate coup: His kids’ teachers finally started calling him, not just his wife, when something went wrong at school.

Women who stay in the workforce while raising kids often encounter the “motherhood penalty“—fewer and lower raises and promotions as bosses assume she’s busy being a mom and not focused on work. Women who leave the workforce to care for children often have a hard time reentering—and lose out on accruing long-term retirement benefits while out of the workforce.

Anecdotally, the fathers Orianna spoke with haven’t had much trouble returning to the workforce. Some easily went back to their old jobs, got new ones, or picked up gig economy jobs on the side. While society has stigmatized stay-at-home fathers in the past, the transition in and out of primary caregiving seems to be a smoother one for many dads today.

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Descendants of a British owner of slaves in Guyana apologize as Caribbean nation seeks reparations.

Descendants of a British owner of slaves in Guyana apologize as Caribbean nation seeks reparations | AP News

The descendants of a 19th century Scottish sugar and coffee planter who owned thousands of slaves in Guyana have apologized for the sins of their forefathers and called slavery a crime against humanity.

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Minnesota’s first black Chief Justice.

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More murders, these in Jacksonville, Florida.

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Last night this happened at the U.S.Open.

All Eyes on the Same Prize: The U.S. Open celebrates the 50th anniversary of equal pay for men and women and its overall impact.

Equal prize money changed tennis and all sports and the world.

The U.S. Tennis Association is celebrating the 50th anniversary this year of introducing equal prize money to the men’s and women’s draws at the U.S. Open in 1973. Fittingly, it will do so with a purse of $65 million at this year’s tournament which begins this week — an all-time high and 8% increase from $60 million in 2022.

About two-thirds of that total will be handed out on the singles side, where the men’s and women’s champions will earn $3 million and the runners-up $1.5 million. It’s a far cry from 51 years ago, when men’s singles champion Ilie Nastase took home $25,000, and women’s singles champion Billie Jean King got $10,000, in the final year before the tournament became the first Grand Slam to offer equal winnings.

That landmark decision was spurred by King, who demanded equal prize money for both pools after that tournament and facilitated the change with the financial backing of a sponsor, Ban deodorant. This was a transformational period for women’s sports, with Title IX passing in 1972, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) forming — in another effort led by King — ahead of the 1973 Wimbledon Championships, and King’s iconic victory over Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes match in September 1973.

It was also among the first major milestones in the decades-long fight for equal pay in men’s and women’s sports.

Today, there is progress. All four of tennis’ Grand Slams offer equal prize purses, with Wimbledon the last to adopt the practice in 2007. Last May, the U.S. Soccer Federation ended a six-year campaign by the women’s national team by guaranteeing equal pay for them and for the men’s side when competing in international competition.

But there is no shortage of instances in which the fight continues. A 2021 report by the law firm of Kaplan Hecker & Fink, for example, found “stark differences in spending and staffing” in the NCAA’s treatment of championships in which one is viewed as a significantly higher revenue-driver than its gender counterpart. The sport of tennis is subject, too; even at this year’s Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati, the men played for a purse nearly $4 million larger than the women — $6.6 million to $2.8 million.

The U.S. Open will be intentional about celebrating its positioning relative to the progress that has been made at this year’s tournament. In the run-up, the USTA pushed for King to become the first female athlete to receive the Congressional Gold Medal with a bill introduced in March (presently awaiting a vote). During the tournament, it will host a panel — sponsored by Cadillac, which also sponsored the Battle of the Sexes broadcast in 1973 — between King and Venus Williams that will be followed by an award ceremony in which King will receive a lifetime achievement award.

U.S. Open 2023 Prize Money

SINGLES
TOTAL: $22,350,000 ($44,700,000)

DOUBLES
TOTAL: $3,566,800 ($7,133,600)

OTHER

GRAND TOTAL:$65,000,000

“We feel confident, and the numbers back it up, that the demand for top women’s tennis on the biggest stage in the world is equal to and sometimes surpasses the demand for the men’s matches,” said USTA Chief Commercial Officer Kirsten Corio. “We’ve demonstrated as a business that equal pay is good business. Equal pay and equal exposure are good business. We do it not only because it’s the right thing, but because it’s the right thing for the business.”

In that vein, the U.S. Open is also introducing new elements as a part of its increased compensation, including a player travel voucher of $1,000, an additional hotel room per night, increase in meal allowance to $125 per day, and five free rackets strung per round. Benefits will be available in the singles, doubles, mixed doubles and wheelchair championships.

Added USTA CEO and Executive Director Lew Sherr: “Whether you’re looking at participation, whether you’re looking at viewership, attendance, prize money at the U.S. Open, we are 50-50 down the middle in every aspect. When you look at how we schedule matches, we’re conscious of who’s playing in prime time, who’s on Arthur Ashe, are we treating all of our athletes, male or female, equally in that presentation of the sport.

“The presentation of the sport and equal prize money being secured 50 years ago has come a long way as to why women in tennis have achieved what they’ve achieved. If you were to look, you publish a list of the 10 highest-paid female athletes in sports, my guess is eight or nine of them are probably … tennis players. That’s a function of the decision that was made 50 years ago, now what has transpired since.”

It is a moment to reflect on how far the sport has come but also foster excitement for where it is going.

“This celebration is not just about 50 years of equality, but really using it as a moment,” said Stacey Allaster, USTA’s chief executive of professional tennis and U.S. Open director. “We have three weeks of your coverage, our broadcast coverage in the United States and around the world to celebrate women, female athletes and talk about the importance of equality for all female athletes and all women on and off the court.” (Sports Business Journal).

A special guest was there last night to honor Billie and fairness. “This is far bigger than a champion’s paycheck. This is how women are valued in the world.”

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Yes, it’s Borowitz.

Giuliani Requests Change of Trial Venue to Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

PHILADELPHIA (The Borowitz Report)—Rudolph Giuliani has requested that his election-interference trial be moved from Georgia to the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

The former New York mayor made the request from the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

“Conducting a trial behind closed doors is a travesty of justice,” he said. “This trial must be held out in the open, in a parking lot.”

“Jurors can watch the proceedings from the comfort of their cars,” he said. “And if they need a drink, they can just start up their engines and go to a liquor store. There’s one right around the corner from here. Great selection. Good guy runs it—his name is Dave or Mike or something. I’m heading over there now.” (New Yorker).

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