Stephan: More good news. The Biden administration is making serious moves to upgrade America's aging rail infrastructure, as this report describes.
A passenger line extension in central Florida, removal of at-grade crossings in Texas and a new engineering program at a historically Black university in Baltimore are all beneficiaries of more than $368 million in railroad infrastructure grants being announced Thursday by the Biden administration.
A Union Pacific freight train passes an at-grade railroad crossing in Nipton, Calif. Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
The administration is billing the funding as a way to help fight inflation in the shipping business.
“We’ve got the largest and most extensive rail network in the world here in the U.S., and Americans deserve world class rail service to go with it. So it’s urgent for us to modernize our railroad infrastructure to get people and goods where they need to get faster, safer and more affordably,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg told reporters on a White House call Wednesday previewing the grants.
Buttigieg joined with White House infrastructure coordinator Mitch Landrieu and Federal Railroad Administrator Amit Bose in previewing the funding recipients from the final batch of Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements funding […]
Stephan: At least 319,000 people in the United States who volunteered to join the American anti-vaxxer death cult who ought to be alive are, instead, dead leaving at least a million three hundred thousand to grieve and mourn them. And that is just in the U.S.
Based on the hard data I have come to think of the anti-vaxxer movement as a manifestation of pure social evil. An evil that not only killed its own cult members but, through its dispersal of false information, killed millions more around the world. A clear example of bad karma, and who knows what they will have to deal with in subsequent incarnations. It's not going to be pretty or pleasant.
Last year, SaphinahKenyando was struggling to decide whether to get vaccinated against Covid. Kenyando, who is 38 and teaches chemistry and biology at a high school in Kenya, had read about horrifying side effects—blood clots, long-term disabilities—that sounded worse than the virus itself. She watched a (possibly doctored) clip from former US President Donald Trump saying that the effects included gruesome facial deformities that develop as a person ages. And she wondered whether the rumors circulating on Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube were true—that a person could take the jab and drop dead shortly thereafter.
In addition to her academic role, Kenyando also serves as the school chess coach, a duty she takes very seriously. She believes the game imparts valuable lessons to students: Make the right move, and you’ll reap the benefits. Make the wrong one, and you’ll be forced to deal with the fallout. “Chess is life,” she says. “Every decision we make in life is about the game of chess.” That’s how Kenyando framed her own decision on whether to get herself and her children […]
Stephan: Here is an interesting commentary on what is happening with democracy in America. It makes what I think is a important, yet rarely discussed or understood point about minorities and majorities in the U.S. I see what is happening with our democracy as an issue of a minority -- bitter angry Whites guided and funded by the oligarchs -- working together, whether knowingly or not, to make America a minority-controlled nation.
Civil Rights demonstrators in the 1950s Credit: Bettman/Getty
Conventional wisdom says that the rule of the majority is in unavoidable tension with the rights of the minority.
The great genius of the American system, seen in this light, is that it tempers, restrains and moderates the majority for the sake of minority rights. To that end, our system makes it extremely difficult for a majority to control simultaneously all of the institutions it needs to carry out its preferences.
There has even been an argument, made throughout our history, that this is still inadequate and that our system could and, in fact, should do more to restrain majorities. The South Carolina slaveholder, politician and theorist John C. Calhoun, who might be the most infamous proponent of this view, wanted to give a “concurrent voice in making or executing the laws or a veto on their execution” to every “division or interest” in the country. It was only then, he thought, that the nation would restrain the menace of majority rule once and for all.
Stephan: The alarm bells are going off all over the media about the Republican attempt to rig the 2022 election. It is a measure of how badly the Congress operates, and how extreme is the schism in both houses, that there is no effort being made to stop what is happening and to rectify what has been done. Our democracy hangs by a thread and I do not notice much response from the American public.
Credit: Jeff Swensen/Getty
When Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to demand that he “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” hinting at criminal prosecution, he was joined by a surprising participant: Cleta Mitchell.
Mitchell has long been a prominent right-leaning attorney, representing the National Rifle Association as well as senators like Oklahoma’s James Inhofe and Florida’s Marco Rubio. She was a partner in the DC office of influential law firm Foley and Lardner, until the firm ousted her for her involvement with Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. She is a serious lawyer. Trump and Mitchell’s phone call is now the subject of a grand jury probe in Atlanta.
Mitchell, meanwhile, hasn’t given up trying to politicize and undermine our elections.
This week, the New York Times published a story detailing Mitchell’s far-flung campaign to assemble an army of hyper-partisan poll watchers that will disrupt, discredit, and intimidate election officials. Among other things, the trainees are encouraged to research the backgrounds of historically nonpartisan election officials and categorize them as “friend or foe.”
Stephan: Here is more on the Republican nationwide effort at both the federal and state level to destroy American democracy. That millions of Americans either don't get this, or are happy to have the country turned into an anocracy with the Republicans in permanent control I find one of the most chilling events of our history. We are at a moment of schism as great as the prelude to the Civil War.
A man fills out a ballot at a voting station in Mt. Gilead, N.C., on May 17. Credit: Sean Rayford/Getty
Just how far will Republicans go to thwart the will of the people?
South Dakota is one of only 12 states where, a dozen years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are still blocking the expansion of Medicaid. But Medicaid expansion is popular among South Dakotans, who are on the cusp of approving it this year by a ballot initiative, the same tool used to overcome Republican lawmakers’ obstruction in six other states.
So Republicans in the South Dakota legislature came up with a novel solution: They are moving to enshrine minority rule in the state constitution. Worse, they are attempting to force through their constitutional amendment imposing minority rule by holding the vote on a day when only hardcore Republican voters are expected at the polls.
South Dakota’s GOP-controlled legislature put its Medicaid-expansion-killing amendment on the ballot for June 7, the state’s primary Election Day. Because
