Last Call For Climate Of Disaster, Con't

As the death toll from Saturday's massive tornado outbreak here in Kentucky continues to mount, with entire towns "gone" according to Dem Gov. Any Beshear, Republican members of Congress are quick to say that President Biden needs to give the state millions now in emergency aid before more perish in the cold without power, nevermind the fact that people like Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie repeatedly voted against such aid for anyone other than their own constituents, calling it a "waste".

Throughout his two terms in the U.S. Senate, Paul has prided himself as a Tea Party fiscal conservative willing to say no to the most milquetoast causes if federal spending is involved. Opposing federal disaster relief is one of his pastimes.

In 2017, Paul was one of just 17 senators to oppose an emergency $15.3 billion federal relief bill for victims of Hurricane Harvey. It had wreaked havoc similar to Friday’s tornado, but not in Kentucky.

In 2013, Paul was one of 31 Republican senators who voted against a $50.5 billion relief aid package for Hurricane Sandy -- “after previously disaster aid for their home states,” as reported by ThinkProgress.org.

In 2011, Paul’s first year in the Senate, he was among 38 Republicans voting against a major FEMA funding package despite the fact -- not lost upon publicintegrity.org -- that his own state of Kentucky had been the nation’s largest recipient of FEMA funding ($293 million), mostly because of a 2009 ice storm.

A decade later, Paul wrote to Biden like the two were old liberal spendthrift friends.

“Last night and early this morning devastating storms swept across multiple states, including Kentucky. A single tornado from that system may have been on the ground for over 200 miles, and a large swath of the Commonwealth has been severely hit.

“As the sun comes up this morning we will begin to understand the true scope of the devastation, but we already know of loss of life and severe property damage.

“The governor of the Commonwealth has requested federal assistance this morning, and certainly further requests will be coming as the situation is assessed. I fully support those requests and ask that you move expeditiously to approve the appropriate resources for our state.”

Paul’s stinginess with federal aid to people outside of Kentucky has hardly been limited to aid responding to physical disasters.

In the very first coronavirus Senate aid package -- a mere $8 billion passed on March 5, 2020 -- Paul stood out as the lone Senator to vote no.

His complaint: Congress never cuts other spending as the direct offset he insists upon having for federal aid not earmarked for Kentucky:

“This isn't the first time we've had emergency money,” Paul complained after the first COVID-19 spending passed. “This is probably the tenth time we've done emergency money in the past two or three years. So everything is an emergency."

 

As for Massie, all he is willing to offer is "thoughts and prayers". 

Stop voting for Republicans who want you dead.

The Big Lie, Con't

The cancer of the Big Lie is now spreading unchecked throughout the American body politic, and the only question is if we can survive what's coming as Trump Cultists take over any and every local, state, and federal office they can find with the intent of completely excising The Other from the political process, from the debate over the country's future, and eventually from the country itself.

When thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington on Jan. 6 for the Stop the Steal rally that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, one of them was a pastor and substitute teacher from Elizabethtown, Pa., named Stephen Lindemuth.

Mr. Lindemuth had traveled with a religious group from Elizabethtown to join in protesting the certification of Joseph R. Biden’s victory. In a Facebook post three days later, he complained that “Media coverage has focused solely on the negative aspect of the day’s events,” and said he had been in Washington simply “standing for the truth to be heard.”

Shortly after, he declared his candidacy for judge of elections, a local Pennsylvania office that administers polling on Election Day, in the local jurisdiction of Mount Joy Township.

Mr. Lindemuth’s victory in November in this conservative rural community is a milestone of sorts in American politics: the arrival of the first class of political activists who, galvanized by Donald J. Trump’s false claim of a stolen election in 2020, have begun seeking offices supervising the election systems that they believe robbed Mr. Trump of a second term. According to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than 60 percent of Republicans now believe the 2020 election was stolen.

This belief has informed a wave of mobilization at both grass-roots and elite levels in the party with an eye to future elections. In races for state and county-level offices with direct oversight of elections, Republican candidates coming out of the Stop the Steal movement are running competitive campaigns, in which they enjoy a first-mover advantage in electoral contests that few partisans from either party thought much about before last November.

And legislation that state lawmakers have passed or tried to pass this year in a number of states would assert more control over election systems and results by partisan offices that Republicans already decisively control.

“This is a five-alarm fire,” said Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, who presided over her state’s Trump-contested election in 2020 and may face a Trump-backed challenger next year. “If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ’24.”

In some areas, new political battlefields are opening up where none existed before.

Until this year, races for administrative positions like judge of elections were noncompetitive to the point of being more or less volunteer opportunities. Candidates ran unopposed, or sometimes not at all: The seat that Mr. Lindemuth ran for had been technically unoccupied before his election, filled by appointment by the County Board of Elections.

“There’s a lot of apathy here,” said Lisa Sargen Heilner, a former Republican committeewoman in Mount Joy Township, who resigned her post shortly after local Republicans endorsed Mr. Lindemuth and his wife, Danielle, in a concurrent school board election in which they both won seats. “I just kind of wanted to disassociate myself from them,” Mrs. Heilner said.

After Mr. Lindemuth won the G.O.P. primary for judge of elections in the spring, local Democrats struggled to find a candidate until Mike Corradino, an academic dean at a local community college, volunteered. “Like a lot of people, it troubles me what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Corradino said. He lost with 268 votes to Mr. Lindemuth’s 415.

Kristy Moore, the local Democratic committeewoman and a seventh-grade English teacher who ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Lindemuth in the school board race, said she had tried to attract the attention of county and state Democrats, but to no avail.

“I’m not sure what the Democratic Party was worried about, but it didn’t feel like they were worried about school board and judge of elections races — all of these little positions,” she said.

 

The time to start worrying about these positions was a decade ago. Nearly Two-thirds of Republicans at this point believe there's no way a Democrat can win an election without it being stolen, and that justifies their own election theft on a grand scale.

 

America is increasingly unready for the moment ahead, and tens of millions will be made to suffer as a result unless we get our shit together. 

Get involved at Run For Something. Get involved at Act Blue. Get involved in your local government and school board and county elections.

They are. And in many cases they are all but unopposed.

Get involved. I beg of you. While we still actually have elections.

Sunday Long Read: X Marks The Art

Writer Laura Hoffman brings us this week's Sunday Long Read as her essay explores the numerous looks inside of her body by medical professionals as she has dealt with a lifetime of medical issues, and how the X-ray may be the one true unflinching view of ourselves in a way.

In front of the mirror, I touch my forearm and my ribs that jut out like bulbous rock formations. My left arm, shoulder, and chest are smaller than my right. The bones and muscles are misshapen or missing altogether, and an implant fills in for my left breast that never grew. I have no feeling in the skin where I am touching, so there’s the peculiar sensation that I am touching someone else’s body and not my own.

I’m 14, 23, 31. Still, getting out of the shower, I hustle into a robe or T-shirt, turning away from the mirror. It is a trick I developed as a girl: if I disregard my body’s differences, maybe others will too. When I do dare to look, I’m struck by my body’s oddity as if discovering it anew each time: the centipede-like scar on my forearm, the thin skin rippling over my implant like the silken surface of water, the bones in my shoulder that rub together like a sack full of stones. The mirror provides one way to glimpse how others see me, to learn how to see myself. When I look for too long, panic wells in my chest.

I don’t ever talk about my body, not even to my sister or close friends. I can’t. I would lose my balance, my structural integrity. Instead, for years now, I have been trying to write about it. As Richard Rodriquez wrote: “There are things that are so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers” (200). Sitting at my desk, I cross my arms to grasp opposite elbows. I hunch over the keyboard. I long to excise the words. To get them to lie down legibly on the page. To stand in for me when I cannot.

Putting words to the experiences my body holds, the back braces and wrist splints, the stitches and scars, the filling of the absence in my chest—the props that grant me passage to the world—feels impossible. Sometimes it feels like every other second I have to call my attention back to the page. I grow impatient with myself. Can’t you just say it? Instead I look down at my hands. In the yoga I practice and teach, we say the body speaks by way of sensation. My hands tense up. My breath is shallow inside my ribs. My jaw clenches. The tiny muscles around my eyes feel strained. Instead of pushing it away, I am learning to experience my avoidance, to see what it has to teach me. What is this resistance protecting me from feeling? When did I learn that my body is something I have to hide, even from myself? I know I won’t be able to see myself clearly if I keep refusing to look.

When I feel stuck, I make lists in my notebook, arranging the parts of my body in different orders as if there is a code to decipher, a language running underneath the language I am using. Arm, spine, breast, skin, voice. I scar the pages so deeply the swerves of my pen can be felt through the underside of the paper. It feels as if I’m carving these words from bone.

 

Set aside some time for this one, it's a gorgeous piece.