Wednesday, August 7, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.
Meet Kamala Harris’ Running Mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Tim Walz, brilliant choice by Kamala Harris - very likable with strong good experience (social studies teacher and high school football coach for 2 decades, 12 years in Congress, 24 years in the National Guard, 2 time Governor), a Midwesterner with a homey style and sharp tongue.
He coined the word “weird” for MAGA, Trump and Vance.
Endorsed by David Hogg.
Walz and his wife Gwen have 2 children, Hope,23, and Gus, 17.
“My oldest daughter’s name is Hope,” Walz recently said. “That’s because my wife and I spent seven years trying to get pregnant, needed fertility treatments, things like IVF.”
Coach Walz joined the program of a losing football team at Mankato West high school in Minnesota and brought them to a state championship in just 3 years. The students in his schools named him “most inspiring teacher.”
While coaching football, Tim Walz became the faculty advisor for the first Gay-Straight Alliance at his school.
He publicly supported same-sex marriage in 2006. The Supreme Court decision making same-sex marriage legal nation wide occurred in 2015.
You would be happy to have him for a neighbor.
He praised Vice President Kamala Harris for bringing joy to the campaign.
Walz amplifies that.
Yesterday, when the Vice President introduced her running mate to Pennsylvania and America, Walz expressed what he called the MN golden rule, “Mind your own damn business.”
He always smiles.
One more thing. Or two.
Some of the policies Tim Walz signed into law in Minnesota:
- Stronger labor protections
- Stronger LGBTQ+ protections
- Protections for people seeking or providing gender-affirming health care
- Gun safety
- Paid leave/sick legislation
- 100% clean energy by 2030
- Abortion rights - there is no ban or limit on abortion in Minnesota based on how far along in pregnancy you are. Parental involvement is not required in Minnesota. Walz signed this legislation one month after Roe fell.
- $1B for housing
- Cannabis legalization
- Free college tuition for kids whose families have income < $125,000 and students attending public colleges.
- Cut child poverty by 1/3
-
Free School breakfast and lunch for all school children
USA's first female Native American Governor Peggy Flanagan will succeed him, when Tim Walz is elected Vice President.
Tim Walz is the highest ranking enlisted soldier EVER to serve in Congress. He enlisted in the Army National Guard at 17 and retired 24 years later as Command Sergeant Major and served in Operation Enduring Freedom.
Wisconsin and Michigan electoral outcomes are strongly correlated with Minnesota’s.
It is the honor of a lifetime to join @kamalaharris in this campaign.
— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) August 6, 2024
I’m all in.
Vice President Harris is showing us the politics of what’s possible. It reminds me a bit of the first day of school.
So, let’s get this done, folks! Join us. https://t.co/tqOVsw2OLM
— —
The disappointed but understanding and supportive others
What a pipeline we Democrats have!
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear
— —
The Great President who made this team possible expressed his enthusiasm for HarrisWalz2024.
— —
The weird opposition responded weirdly too.👇
Drilling down as we move to November 5.
44 days to go until the first votes will be cast.
90 days until Election Day.
What will you do to get out the votes?
Volunteer for the Harris-Harris team.
Click on this link.
— —
Early voting 2024.
Minnesota September 20, Home State of Vice President Tim Walz.
South Dakota September 20
Mississippi September 21
Vermont September 21
Virginia September 21
Wyoming September 21
Illinois September 26
As for the states of the Harris-Walz tour.
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Varies by county. Pennsylvania does not offer early voting, but counties may make absentee and mail-in ballot applications available to voters in person up to 50 days before Election Day… September 16.
Wisconsin, Eau Claire, October 21
Michigan, Detroit October 26
North Carolina, Durham October 17
Georgia, Savannah October 4
Arizona, Phoenix October 9
Nevada, Las Vegas October 19
(Source. Annette Niemtzow research. 🤔)
What’s all this GOP blather about childless women? It’s Fascism, my friends.
I see this as Familiar Fascism. Some say it’s pronatalism. Or is it just a plan to use women as baby machines?
J. D. Vance and the Right’s Call to Have More Babies.
By the close of his second week as Donald Trump’s running mate, Senator J. D. Vance’s 2021 comments about the “childless cat ladies” allegedly leading the Democratic Party had entwined themselves around him, like hungry felines harking to a can opener. Vance, in an interview with Tucker Carlson during the 2022 Senate campaign, had dissed Democrats who hadn’t reproduced, citing Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as examples, on national television.
On July 26th of this year, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Vance said that all the flak he’d been taking for his remarks was unfair. He had “nothing against cats,” he emphasized. He blamed the media for reporting what he’d said three years ago. He did not apologize to Harris, whose stepdaughter and her mother had rushed to the defense of their blended family, or to Buttigieg, who, with his husband, Chasten, had been in the process of adopting in 2021 and now has twins. (Perhaps these are simply not the sorts of families that count from Vance’s perspective.)
Vance told Kelly that he had not been “criticizing people who for various reasons didn’t have kids”—although he had described them as “miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and wanting “to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He’d been “criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”
What qualifies for Vance’s party as pro-family and pro-child? Not the policies that Democrats advocate for—and that the majority of Americans back—which support existing families. Not paid parental leave guaranteed by the federal government, which the United States almost alone among wealthy countries still lacks. Not universal preschool. Not an extension of the expanded child-tax credit that lifted millions of children out of poverty during the pandemic. Not, of course, access to contraception and abortion, though both allow many people to build the families they envision, at points in their lives when they are able to take care of children.
It would be more accurate to describe Vance’s pro-family views as pronatalist. He has said, for instance, that the votes of people with children should count for more than those of nonparents. His definition of a mother—given that he excluded Harris from the category—would seem to exclude those who have not given birth. And pronatalism, as it’s been developing lately in certain conservative circles, has much in common with some of his opinions. Pronatalism typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.
It’s an old idea, with roots in early-twentieth-century eugenics and anxieties about national fitness, and, in this country, the spectre of native-born white populations being swamped by waves of immigrants. Now the idea has been newly branded, with inspiration from the right-wing great replacement theory (which posits that nonwhite migrants to Europe and the U.S. intend to overwhelm and replace white populations) and a whole lot of fretting about gay and trans people and women who don’t marry or give birth to children early enough for the new traditionalists’ liking.
Taylor Swift, for instance. A male columnist for Newsweek, now a right-wing publication, recently decried the idea of Swift as a role model for our “sisters and daughters to emulate,” when, at the age of thirty-four, she “remains unmarried and childless.” (And yes, as the Internet was quick to point out, she has cats.)
The movement includes tech-bro types who want to spread their supposedly superior DNA (Elon Musk, a father of twelve, has tweeted that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming”); bemoaners of modern innovations such as no-fault divorce, online dating, and career-minded women; assorted white supremacists; genetic tinkerers who want to breed “better” babies; and that bespectacled, vaguely hip-looking Pennsylvania couple, Malcolm and Simone Collins, who have become natalist celebrities. (A profile of the family in the Guardian in May chronicled their infant-maximizing ideology and child-rearing habits, which include having the toddlers wear iPads strapped around their necks.)
Reporting for Politico on a conference of mostly right-wing natalists—NatalCon—held in Austin last year, Gaby Del Valle described a scene where, “over and over,” worries about declining birth rates “gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters.” One of the speakers, who goes by the name Peachy Keenan, of the Claremont Institute, called on the audience to “seize the means of reproduction,” by which she apparently meant making enough babies to outbreed liberals. “We can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage,” she said.
I don’t know if Vance would embrace the term pronatalism, and he has explicitly rejected the great replacement theory. In a debate during the 2022 Senate campaign, he declared himself outraged when his opponent, Tim Ryan, said that he was “running around with” advocates of the theory. Vance’s wife, Usha, is the daughter of immigrants from India, and he noted that he was “the father of three beautiful biracial babies” and called the theory “disgusting.” But he is yoked to a Presidential candidate he once denounced, who uses very particular language to evoke illegal immigration, saying that it is “poisoning the blood of our country,” and singling out for castigation people coming from Africa and Asia.
Vance, like the pronatalists, clearly does not see immigration as the answer to an aging population, dwindling labor force, or shrinking tax base—legitimate concerns raised by falling birth rates. In June, he told Fox News that he favors “large-scale deportations” for immigrants who came here illegally. And, as Melissa Gira Grant points out in The New Republic, Vance has praised the autocrat Viktor Orbán’s drive to raise Hungary’s birth rate. “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked at a 2021 campaign event. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”
Pronatalism doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with fascism or white supremacy. Some of its advocates will name-check the kinds of critiques that leftists would also endorse, of consumer society, workplace demands in a neoliberal economy, and exorbitant housing prices—all forces that could make young people reluctant to have children. (What pronatalists do not tend to cite is a reason I hear often from people in their twenties: climate change and the environmental future of the planet.)
The percentage of Americans under the age of fifty who say it is unlikely that they will ever have children has been rising—from thirty-seven per cent in 2018 to forty-seven per cent in 2023. That’s striking, and, for the people in that group who actually want children but feel that they won’t be able to have them, sad. The situation deserves serious discussion, compassion, and curiosity, not snarky rabble-rousing about cat ladies.
And it’s important to remember all the ways in which pronatalism has been intellectually entangled with racist and fascist ideas. On the international stage today, its most vocal proponent is Orbán, who speaks explicitly about “the great European population replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations.”
He is not the only one on the broadly populist right to promote prolific baby making and rigid policing of traditional gender roles for ethnonationalist reasons. In November, Vladimir Putin told an audience of conservative religious and political figures at the Kremlin palace that “many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more,” he said. “We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions.”
The Washington Post reported this week that women in Russia “are being told to forgo education and careers to prioritize child-rearing, even as the war in Ukraine drains men from the workforce, creating critical labor shortages.”
The authoritarian populist President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has urged Turkish women to have at least three children, saying those who eschew motherhood and domestic duties are “incomplete” and “deficient.” In Nazi Germany, the government instituted strict new penalties for abortion, and handed out medals to “genetically healthy” married mothers of “German blood”: bronze for four children, silver for six, and gold for eight. American eugenicists encouraged genetically “fitter” white families, the bigger, the better, with similar prizes. Putin is now offering a “Soviet heroine” medal for mothers with more than ten children.
It’s also worth remembering that explicitly pronatalist policies generally show weak results. In recent years, fertility rates have continued to decline in countries, from Hungary to Japan and South Korea, that instituted measures designed to increase the birth rate—tax credits or loans that favor couples that stay married, for instance. Whatever states do or don’t do, the decision to have children remains intimately tied to the domestic sphere and the private lives of individuals. Policies that help families, including ones that promote affordable child care, might result in more babies. But that’s not the reason to put them in place.
The reason is to make people’s—and especially children’s—lives better, more equitable, and less arduous. In the meantime, politicians might want to refrain from making normative pronouncements about families whose struggles and stories they cannot know.
When Pete Buttigieg was asked on CNN to comment about Vance’s citing of him as problematically childless, he had this to say: “The really sad thing is that he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey. He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.” ♦ (The New Yorker)
Your daily reminder.
Trump is a convicted felon.
On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.
The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September 18th.
The line of yesterday’s HarrisWalz2024 rally was delivered by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice presidential choice.
“Make no mistake,” Walz said, “violent crime was up under Donald Trump ... and that’s not even counting the crimes he committed.”
The 12,000 person crowd roared.
Olympics update.
The U.S. women’s national soccer team continued its undefeated streak at this year’s Olympics with a 1-0 win against Germany on Tuesday to advance to the gold medal match Saturday.
Gold for Gabby Thomas in electrifying 200m victory at the Paris Olympics.
The full August 6 historic and electrifying HarrisWalz2024 rally in Philadelphia. 👇
Enjoy.