Stephan: Here is some excellent good news. Biden with help from Schumer has been able to appoint more federal judges than any president since Kennedy, and two-thirds of them are racial or ethnic minorities, and three-quarters are women. This means that the Republican MAGAt attempt to take over the federal judiciary has failed. They have the Supreme Court because no one has the courage to remove the Trump appointees and Clarence Thomas, but maybe something can be done after November if the Democrat majority can be increased in the Senate. That is up to you and me, and how we vote. WE know MAGAts constitute about a third of the voters, but that won't matter if the other two-thirds vote for Democrats. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
President Joe Biden has appointed more judges to the federal courts at this stage in his tenure than any president since John F. Kennedy, and his appointees include a record number of women and racial and ethnic minorities, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Judicial Center.
As of Aug. 8, the first day of the U.S. Senate’s August break, Biden has successfully appointed 75 judges to the three main tiers of the federal judicial system: the district courts, appeals courts and U.S. Supreme Court. That’s far more than the number appointed by Donald Trump (51) and Barack Obama (42) at the same stage in their presidencies, and slightly more than the number appointed by several other recent presidents – including George W. Bush (72), Bill Clinton (74) and Ronald Reagan (72) – by this point in their tenures.
Among all presidents going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, only Kennedy had appointed more federal judges than Biden at the same stage of his tenure. Kennedy had appointed 102 […]
Stephan: Healthcare in America is so bad compared with the other developed democracies you would think we would be embarrassed. Biden and most of the democrats -- not Manchin and Sinema -- are trying to do something to improve this miserable system while the Republicans are doing everything they can to make it worse, particularly in Red states. And yet millions routinely vote Republican. It is a historically sad trend.
A coalition from DirectCare, who care for people with disabilities, protest for competitive wages prior to the start of then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State addresses in Albany, N.Y., Jan. 11, 2017. Credit: Hans Pennink / AP
Private agencies that provide services for the intellectually and developmentally disabled have long warned that, without fresh state and federal funding, they would be unable to provide housing and staff support to the growing number of Americans who need care.
Over the last 12 months, the Covid-19 pandemic’s lingering effects and once-in-a-generation inflation have turned dire predictions into sobering truths, and agency directors, who for years hobbled along on shoestring budgets, have done in 2022 what not long ago would have been unthinkable: closed their doors.
Todd Goodwin, CEO at the John F. Murphy Homes in Maine, has closed four group homes over the past 18 months. Until this year, residents of a home that was closing would be transferred to another home with open beds. But in February, he couldn’t make the staffing ratios work — two […]
Stephan: This is Sean Hannity. and the sad truth is for the MAGAts what he says is probably true. They would vote for Trump even if he were in prison. This is America, in the midst of the Great Schism Trend which shapes American culture today. A tragic truth.
Fox News Channel and radio talk show host Sean Hannity (L) interviews U.S. President Donald Trump before a campaign rally at the Las Vegas Convention Center on September 20, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Credit: Ethan Miller/Getty
On Friday’s episode of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Sean Hannity Show, the host claims that Trump being sent to jail would not necessarily be a road block of any kind in terms of him deciding to run for president in 2024.
Going over possible scenarios for what’s to come, Hannity says “What do you think the next thing that happens here is, do you think that they would try and indict the former president in the hopes of convicting him and having him in jail at the time of the next election to prevent him from running . . . Because a conviction by the way, constitutionally, would not prevent him from running for office.”
Following the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago to search for sensitive documents that Trump took from the White House, Marc Elias, top lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, tweeted […]
Stephan: Not one Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest and most important act ever passed for combating climate change. The legislation will fund more than $370 billion for climate and energy programs aimed at helping the United States cut greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. It will also extend for three years subsidies to help people afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act, as well as lower the cost of prescription drugs by allowing Medicare to directly negotiate prices and capping recipients’ annual out-of-pocket costs.
Do you get that? Get very clear. The Republicans to a person couldn't care less about your wellbeing, or the world we will pass on to our children. They are just whores working to support their corporate clients who pay them so much.
Republican christofascist RepresentativeKevin McCarthy who seems incapable of telling the truth. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
House Republicans are planning to try to open up Democrats’ $740 billion tax, climate and health care bill to a legal challenge after it passes, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The move is Republicans’ way of showing their base that they’re going to great lengths to kill the legislation, which is likely to be unanimously opposed by House Republicans.
“I would be shocked if anybody [in the GOP] voted for it,” said Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.), the House Republican chief deputy whip.
Driving the news: Republicans, led by members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, plan to get “as many members as possible to vote by proxy” in order to deny Democrats a physical quorum, two senior Republican aides told Axios.
The bill would still pass, but Republicans hope a company affected by the tax provisions in the bill will then sue to challenge the law’s constitutionality.
Fueling their plan is the fact that so many members are voting by proxy: there […]
Stephan: Historians of the American Republic, I know from talking with several of them, are running around with their hair on fire for the same reason I have been so alarmed on SR. The Republican MAGAts are doing everything they can to destroy American democracy, and turn the country into a White supremacy, male dominant, christofascist anocracy, and about a third of Americans are onboard with that. Democracy hangs by a thread, and November's election will tell us whether it will survive.
President Joe Biden met with historians at the White House last week, The Washington Post reported.
People familiar with the conversation said they warned Biden about the rise of totalitarianism around the world.
They also made comparisons to before the Civil War and pro-fascism sentiments around World War II.
President Joe Biden privately met with a group of historians at the White House last week who warned him about ongoing threats to democracy, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Sources familiar with the August 4 meeting, which lasted nearly two hours, told the outlet the experts described the current moment as among the most dangerous to Democracy in modern history.
The people in the meeting included Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz, University of Virginia historian Allida Black, journalist Anne Applebaum, and presidential historian Michael Beschloss. Also in the meeting was speechwriters for Biden, including Vinay Reddy and Jon Meacham, and White House senior adviser Anita Dunn.
The small group almost exclusively discussed totalitarianism around the world and threats to American democracy, according to The Post.
