January 16, 2024

Tuesday, January 16,2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

In Philadelphia, President Joe Biden marked the [MLK] holiday by volunteering at Philabundance, a nonprofit food bank. He stuffed donation boxes with apples and struck up casual chatter with workers at the organization, where he volunteered for the third year in a row to mark the January day of service. (Source. Associated Press).

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Liz Cheney spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlantic yesterday, at the invitation of Reverend Bernice King.

Liz Cheney delivers speech at 2024 MLK Day service

Liz Cheney, former representative for Wyoming's at-large congressional district, delivers address during the 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

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Bill Ackman, hedge-fund billionaire who overthrew Harvard President Claudine Gay, now, it turns out, has set his sights on overthrowing Joe Biden.

Billionaire mega-donor Bill Ackman to donate $1M to Biden challenger Dean Phillips.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman said he plans to donate $1 million to a political action committee backing Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.) — the Democrat who launched a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden last year.

In a lengthy post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Ackman said Phillips would be “a truly outstanding President of the United States,” adding that he believes he has a “credible path” to the nomination. He said he will donate $1 million to the We Deserve Better PAC this week.

On Tuesday, I am wiring $1 million to wedeserve.org, a political action committee that supports Dean’s run. This is by far the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office, and I am making this investment at a high-risk, but critically important moment for his campaign,” Ackman wrote on X.

Phillips is trailing far behind Biden in the poll as he pushes forward with his campaign for the nomination. According to RealClearPolitics’s polling average of the Democratic primary, Biden is polling at nearly 70 percent support, followed by author Marianne Williamson at nearly 8 percent and Phillips at about 3 percent.

Ackman said Phillips has a way forward in the primary if he does well in New Hampshire. He also said Biden’s “numbers are only going to get worse as he ages.”

“As Dean rises in the polls and Biden deteriorates, the Democratic party is going to have to choose a candidate that can beat the Republican nominee. If by then, as I expect, Dean is polling substantially better than Biden against Trump, I predict that the party will choose Dean Phillips over Biden,” he wrote. “The party will have no choice.”

Biden will not appear on the state’s Democratic primary ballot because the Democratic National Committee is not recognizing the primary this year. Despite Biden not being on the ballot, a recent poll found that nearly 64 percent of Democrats said they would vote for Biden as a write-in candidate over someone else.

Ackman had previously signaled support for Phillips’s bid for the White House, saying he was “impressed” by the congressman last year. He also said it was time for Biden to “step aside” in the primary.

“I think Biden’s done a lot of good things. But I think his legacy will not [be] a good one if he is the nominee,” Ackman said in an interview in November with Bloomberg Television’s “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations.” “I do think the right thing for Biden to do is step aside, and to say he’s not going to run, and create the opportunity for some competition.” (The Hill).

Reality.

Read the last column. 👇

Joe Biden closes out 2023 with a strong $97 million fundraising haul.

His reelection effort has seen a growing fundraising pace as his Republican rivals spend heavily on ads against each other.

President Biden’s campaign effort raised $97 million in the last three months of 2023, a sign of accelerating donor interest in his campaign that notched more money than former president Barack Obama during the same period of his reelection.

The fundraising total includes donations to Biden’s campaign account and affiliated state and national party committees, giving the president a significant advantage over his potential Republican rivals who continue to battle each other for the nomination.

“This historic haul — proudly powered by strong and growing grassroots enthusiasm — sends a clear message: the Team Biden-Harris coalition knows the stakes of this election and is ready to win this November,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.

Flush with resources, the Biden campaign has started to move more aggressively to staff up at its headquarters in Wilmington, Del., and in battleground states around the country. Some Democrats, however,have worried that the campaign had been moving too slowly to hire staff in key states, missing opportunities to engage with voters and sell Biden’s accomplishments.

Obama raised $68 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, a sum that would have the spending power of $92.4 million today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Obama campaign’s approach to fundraising was less reliant on party committees, which can accept more money from individual donors.

But Biden’s advisers say their current email list is larger than any Democratic president on record, with a 15 percent growth in the active subscriber base in the last three months of the year. He previously reported fundraising $143 million in the second and third quarters of 2023 in all of his affiliated accounts.

Biden’s campaign said that more than 1 million supporters had made a contribution by the end of the year. At the same point in 2012, Obama’s campaign claimed 1.3 million donors. The overall Biden effort held 39 of its 110 fundraising events in 2023 during the last three months of the year, the campaign reported.

Biden’s various entities ended the year with $117 million in cash, the campaign said, after keeping most off-year expenses well below the campaigns of Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2020. Biden and his affiliated committees have chosen an early emphasis on advertising instead of staff-hiring. The effort spent nearly $28.5 million on ads last year, according to the tracking firm AdImpact.

Incumbent presidents historically gain a significant advantage in the year before their reelection because they do not have to spend heavily to win their nominations. Biden faces primary challenges from Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) and author Marianne Williamson, but neither has shown much strength in public polling.

Both have been campaigning in New Hampshire, which is holding the nation’s first primary on Jan. 23, but Biden’s name will not appear on that ballot and the results of the election will have no direct impact on delegate selection for the Democratic convention. The first officially sanctioned Democratic contest will take place Feb. 3 in South Carolina.

“The Biden-Harris campaign and the DNC are working as one team with a single mission: to build a winning campaign that has the resources to send Joe Biden and Kamala Harris back to the White House, and elect Democrats up and down the ballot,” Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said in a statement. (To read the whole Washington Post article, click on the title above).

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Iowa.

Last night, this happened.

Source. New York Times.

Fewer than 100,000 people caucused in Iowa last night. 2,094,770 people voted in Iowa in the Presidential Election of 2020.

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Marco Rubio endorses Donald Trump.

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Nikki Haley is not likely to be the Republican candidate for President in 2024.

But it is eye-opening to think about her life in the segregated South, just a few years ago.

What Nikki Haley — and I — Learned at a Segregation Academy.

After her failure to identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War generated a wave of criticism last month, Nikki Haley assured her potential constituents that she had Black friends and that she understood the war’s origins. She said that in South Carolina, “literally in second and third grade, you learn about slavery.” Conveniently producing Black friends is, alas, not surprising, but claiming she learned that the Civil War was a battle over slavery in second and third grade is.

Ms. Haley attended a segregation academy, a type of private school established in the years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education by white parents who did not want their children attending school with Black children.

By 1975, the number of private schools in South Carolina grew more than tenfold, enrolling as many as 90 percent of the white children in some majority Black counties. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that discrimination on the basis of race wasn’t legal at private schools, either, but even today, many segregation academies remain overwhelmingly white.

Ms. Haley graduated in 1989 from Orangeburg Preparatory School. Orangeburg was the product of a merger between Wade Hampton and Willington Academy, also segregation academies; Hampton was named after one of the largest slaveholding families inSouth Carolina. At one point, graduates of Hampton received Confederate flag lapel pins, which were meant to symbolize resistance to integration. The year Ms. Haley graduated, her high school yearbook featured, at most, a handful of Black students.

I attended a segregation academy, too: Edgewood Academy in Elmore, Ala., from first grade until I graduated in 1995. Though the town was about 30 percent Black, none of the 33 people in my graduating class were. My parents say they sent my two younger brothers and me there because they thought we’d get a better education and because it was affordable (annual tuition is now $6,210, which would have been roughly $2,000 the year I matriculated), an important consideration for a family whose sole breadwinner was a lineman for Alabama Power.

When I was at Edgewood, there were no A.P. classes, no college test prep and no real expectation that any of us would go to college unless we really wanted to (which, for the girls, would be largely to find husbands). The science teachers taught us creationism, and the principal used a big wooden paddle on misbehaving students, no matter how young or old they were.

Our history textbooks positioned the Civil War as a states’ rights issue, a narrative that was reinforced by teachers, many of whom — as Ms. Haley suggests — did mention slavery but said the idea that it was a root cause of the war was liberal propaganda. We were told that some slaves had good relationships with their owners and were grateful to be taken care of, as if they had been awarded cushy jobs with excellent benefits instead of being torn from their families, abused and treated as if they were subhuman. We took field trips to the Confederate Memorial Park in Marbury but not to the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, which was the same distance from us.

My fifth-grade teacher told us that if Jesus had been alive in Alabama, he would have been a white Dixiecrat, that God frowns on what she called race mixing and that children who are the products of interracial marriages are to be pitied because they’re mistakes. (I wonder now how she would have treated me if she knew that I was the product of an interracial marriage — which, as an adoptee, I found out only well after I graduated.)

I don’t know which textbook Ms. Haley’s school used, but I know just by virtue of the fact that she attended a segregation academy that her understanding of the Civil War was shaped by white teachers and administrators who were not inclined to grapple with the evils of slavery.

When conservatives talk about education and indoctrination, I think of it as the most obvious kind of projection, because the environment in which I was educated was carefully constructed to give me the message that white, conservative, Christian Southerners were the true Americans, chosen by God.

My real education about American history happened at the public library where my mother used to drop me off while she ran errands and later in college. If you want to understand why evangelical conservatives are waging war on public libraries and universities, it’s precisely because they expose kids to facts that undermine the kind of indoctrination I received.

At the elementary school level, books that mention race or, in some cases, simply include Black protagonists have been banned because they might cause white children discomfort. At the university level, activists like Christopher Rufo have labeled any frank discussion of race as critical race theory, a distortion that serves to, in Mr. Rufo’s own words, make the topic “toxic” and contribute to “negative perceptions.”

Many Republican politicians like to couch American history as an uninterrupted parade of greatness and righteousness, without mention of the atrocities we committed along the way. They regard that perspective as a kind of patriotic optimism, but it’s not. It is fragile and cynical.

That perspective presumes that our nation will crumple under any scrutiny of the racist systems that persist. It suggests that the only way we can be a great nation now is to delude ourselves into believing we are not inherently capable of evil.

My view is more optimistic. I don’t need to believe that America is unblemished and inherently good to believe in its potential and its ability to be better and stronger. If we cannot — or will not — do the sometimes uncomfortable work of reckoning with our past, America’s destiny is small, mean and weak. An unwillingness to tell the truth about the past serves only a shrinking number of Americans who wish to live within the distorted understanding of the world that segregation academies created for their students: an America only for some and with a very limited future. (New York Times).

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Kate Cox, who was forced to leave Texas to have an abortion, spoke out on Sixty Minutes on Sunday.

An important interview.

Kate Cox on her legal fight for an abortion in Texas - CBS News

Last August, tests revealed that Kate Cox, a mother of two in Texas, was pregnant with a child that had Trisomy 18, a genetic condition that causes severe developmental problems. According to Cox's doctors, the prognosis for the baby was death before or shortly after birth, and Cox's future fertility was at risk. She sued to receive an abortion under Texas law which bans the procedure in nearly all cases, but found herself caught in a legal battle with the state's attorney general. Correspondent...

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A beloved member of the theatre and entertainment community has died.

Joyce Randolph Dead: Trixie on 'The Honeymooners' Was 99.

Joyce Randolph, a veteran stage and television actor whose role as the savvy Trixie Norton on The Honeymooners provided the perfect foil to her dimwitted TV husband, has died. She was 99.

Randolph died of natural causes Saturday night at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, her son Randolph Charles told the Associated Press on Sunday.

She was the last surviving main character of the beloved comedy from television’s golden age of the 1950s.

“The Honeymooners” was an affectionate look at Brooklyn tenement life, based in part on star Jackie Gleason’s childhood. Gleason played the blustering bus driver Ralph Kramden. Audrey Meadows was his wisecracking, strong-willed wife Alice, and Art Carney the cheerful sewer worker Ed Norton. Alice and Trixie often found themselves commiserating over their husbands’ various follies and mishaps, whether unknowingly marketing dogfood as a popular snack or trying in vain to resist a rent hike, or freezing in the winter as their heat is shut off.

Gleason noticed her in a commercial and cast her in “The Honeymooners” in 1951. It first appeared as a sketch on “Cavalcade of Stars” and “The Jackie Gleason Show,” then ran as a standalone sitcom in 1955 and 1956 on CBS. Though the show produced just 39 episodes, its popularity has endured and it influenced generations of sitcoms with its portrayal of squabbling working class families.

Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton on the classic sitcom “The Honeymooners,” and was the last surviving member of the cast, died Saturday in New York City. She was 99.

Randolph was in hospice care at the time of her death and died of natural causes, her son, Randy, told TMZ.

Randolph’s character was married to Art Carney’s Ed Norton on “The Honeymooners.” They were the neighbors of Ralph and Alice Kramden, played by Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows.

Born Joyce Sirola to a Finnish American family in Detroit, she got her start in show business when she joined a touring production of “Stage Door” while working at a department store, then moved to New York where she acted in theater and on television in shows such as “Buck Rogers.”

Though she didn’t appear in later revivals of the series, Randolph became so identified with the role of Trixie that she found it difficult to get other roles after the series ended. She made an appearance on the meta sitcom “Hi Honey I’m Home” in 1991, which featured numerous former TV stars, and appeared in one episode of the earlier TV drama “The Doctors and the Nurses.”

Randolph was never sure why she was referred to as “the Garbo of Detroit” in early press reports. “Why Garbo? Well, she was Scandinavian — and so was I,” she told the New York Times.

The fondly-written 2007 profile also said that despite the show’s wide influence, Randolph didn’t receive any residuals from the original 39 episodes, though she later received some from the “lost episodes” that were part of the variety hours.

She is survived by a son, Randolph Richard Charles, from her marriage to Richard Lincoln Charles, who died in 1997.

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