Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Alan Feuer, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan:
It is amazing and very depressing to me, and perhaps to you, that day after day, week after week, month after month, a constant litany of the criminality of the Trump and Kushner families emerges in the press, involving almost everyone who worked or was associated with Donald Trump. And yet none of them are in prison. The absurd Trump trials just drag on, even has he makes threats against the judges, prosecutors, and their staffs. Nothing happens. I don’t know whether the courts are frightened of Trump, but they certainly display again and again a lack of courage to hold him accountable. It is destroying the respect Americans have for our judicial system.
In April 2022, Jonathan Braun, left, and his wife, Miriam, visited a Trump resort in Florida. Mr. Braun said they ran into the former president by coincidence. Credit: The New York Times
Jonathan Braun of New York had served just two and a half years of a decade-long sentence for running a massive marijuana ring, when Mr. Trump, at 12:51 a.m. on his last day in office, announced he would be freed.
A Staten Islander with a history of violent threats, Mr. Braun had told a rabbi who owed him money: “I am going to make you bleed.” Mr. Braun’s family had told confidants they were willing to spend millions of dollars to get him out of prison.
At the time, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department and federal regulators, as well as New York state authorities, were still after him for his role in an entirely separate matter: his work as a […]
Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Reporter - Microsoft Start / The Washington Post
Stephan:
Here is an aspect of The Great Schism Trend that doesn’t get much media coverage. In many Red states their large cities are Blue. So in Red states all across the country Republican Red statehouses and governors, are trying to take autonomy away from the governments of their Blue cities. I think this is going to produce and increase of emigration, as individuals, families, and even some companies leave those Red states, as has happened in Florida already.
Antagonisms flare as red states try to dictate how blue cities are run Credit: Advocate Staff Photo By Leslie Westbrook / FTWP
Despite long advocating small government and local control, Republican governors and legislators across a significant swath of the country are increasingly overriding the actions of Democratic cities — removing elected district attorneys or threatening to strip them of power, taking over election offices and otherwise limiting local independence.
State lawmakers proposed nearly 700 bills this year to circumscribe what cities and counties can do, according to Katie Belanger, lead consultant for the Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization focused in part on ending the overreach it calls “abusive state preemption.”
The group’s tracking mostly found “conservative state legislatures responding to or anticipating actions of progressive cities,” she said, with many bills designed to bolster state restrictions on police defunding, abortion, and LGBTQ and voting rights. As of mid-October, at least 92 had passed.
In Florida, for instance, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed sweeping measures that empower the state attorney […]
I keep telling readers that policies that foster wellbeing are always the best option because they are more efficient, more effective, more fostering of social wellbeing, more productive, nicer to live under, and always cheaper. Here is an example that you probably won’t hear about on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, or any of the big newspapers, that illustrates exactly what I mean. It also shows, as usual, that in this area of fostering wellbeing the United States has been embarrassingly second rate.
Illustration: Shoshana Gordon / Axios
Spending quality time with a newborn can shape new fathers’ brains and have a lasting impact on their parenting instincts, new research shows.
Why it matters: The transitional period into parenthood is key for “building the fathering brain,” researchers found, but the U.S. lags behind most of the rest of the world in its paternity leave policies.
“Spending engaged time with your new baby is a rare opportunity for long-term success in fatherhood,” the Harvard Business Review wrote.
“This short-term time investment has the potential to pay a lifelong dividend in dad instincts.”
What they found: Early stages of parenthood are significant for adult neuroplasticity, or the brain’s structural changes in response to experiences, according to University of Southern California researchers.
By spending quality one-on-one time with the newborn, the changes observed in fathers’ brains corresponds with a similar change in mothers’ brains in response to parenting, caregiving, pregnancy and lactation, said psychologist and researcher Darby Saxbe.
Stacey E. Rosen, MD, Senior Vice President of the Katz Institute for Women's Health and Professor of Cardiology at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell University - MedPageToday
Stephan:
Here is some good news from the Biden administration. Joe Biden is actually going to fund and emphasize women’s healthcare, something no Republican President has ever even considered.
President Biden signs Women’s Healthcare Initiative Credit: White House
Stand-up comics aren’t usually my go-to source for making a professional point. But a searing insight from Amy Schumer has me reconsidering. In her most recent comedy special, Schumer discusses her complicated 2019-2020 pregnancy.
“I had this awful condition while I was pregnant called hyperemesis gravidarum. Severe nausea and vomiting the whole pregnancy,” she explains. “I was so relieved when I was diagnosed … 6 months in I was like, ‘Okay, we know what it is. What do we do?’ And they explained to me, ‘Well, we haven’t been able to study it because it only happens to women.’”
In one mic-drop moment, Schumer nailed both the laugh and the scientific problem. Her bit also made me wonder: Did men hear the punchline or is this an echo chamber?
Thankfully, it seems President Joe Biden heard it. With First Lady Jill Biden next to him, the president established the “first ever” White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. It will bring […]
The MAGAt Republican hysteria and fear about LGBTQ folk I see as a form of mental illness, and this Tennessee story is an example of how extreme and out of touch with reality it gets. It is also yet another part of the Great Schism Trend that is creating two countries in one nation. I predict you are going to see a big emigration of LGBTQ people out of Tennessee and the other states where this is going on, as well as a notable decrease in societal creativity in those Red states.
The ordinance in Murfreesboro was essentially a covert ban on LGBTQ+ existence. Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty
Republican lawmakers in the US are leaning into outdated definitions of obscenity to outlaw drag and ban books too.
For five months this year, homosexuality was prohibited in a Tennessee college town.
In June, the city council of Murfreesboro enacted an ordinance outlawing “indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct”. The rule did not explicitly mention homosexuality, but LGBTQ+ people in the town quickly realized that the ordinance references 21-72 of the city code, which categorizes homosexuality as an act of indecent sexual conduct.
The ordinance was essentially a covert ban on LGBTQ+ existence.
Erin Reed, one of the first and only national journalists to cover the ordinance earlier this year, noted that Murfreesboro isn’t “the only community that has these old archaic bits of code that target homosexuality”.
Earlier this month, following a legal challenge from the ACLU of Tennessee, the government of Murfreesboro removed “homosexuality” from the list of acts defined as “public indecency” […]
