The wife of a non-evangelical Protestant minister who reads SR sent me this saying, “You say you ‘cover trends that are shaping the future.’ Well, here is a trend you ought to be covering. It has affected my husband’s congregation, and it is affecting all of Protestantism.” I read the article and understood why she had sent it. I suggest you read it as well.
The “good” wife: In recent decades, marriage manuals aimed at conservative Christian women emphasize a submissive vision of femininity Credit: The Nation.
hen Ruth was 21, she put on a wedding dress; it was high time, her parents and everyone else around her had said, for her to be married.
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Ruth (a pseudonym to protect a victim of abuse) had been told over and over what it meant to be a woman—and marriage was at the center of it all. In Sunday school and Bible study, she had been taught that a wife’s role is to be submissive and accept her husband’s headship. Women were not allowed to address the congregation at her church. The faith she had grown up in was a “dark and bloody” one, she told me; in her Sunday school lessons, she had been taught to expect an imminent apocalypse that would annihilate the faithless and wreak vengeance on God’s foes.
In her community, dating was forbidden before the age of 16; at that point, young congregants […]
I have been going between networks listening to what is happening to our country. Fox, of course, is just lying, but MSNBC, CNN, and BBC, are actually shocking and scary. What Trump and his MAGAts are trying to do is create a post-Constitutional governmental system, as Thom Hartmann, describes. We have become a nation that has little or nothing in common with what the Founders created. If you are a fertile woman, particularly in a Red state, I would buy, and put away some misoprostol and mifepristone. If you have been considering any large purchase of something like a washing machine or dishwasher I would buy it now if you can. Everything I read, and see, tells me that prices of everything are going to go up. Day-to-day costs of groceries are going to go up seriously, perhaps to levels we have never before seen. It isn’t clear to me what is going to happen to Medicaid and Medicare, but I don’t think benefits are going to go up. Although he may try I don’t think Trump is going to be able to end social security, because even the spineless Republicans in Congress, will fear that could hurt their own chances in 2026. Of course, that is assuming there is an election in 2026.
Donald Trump holds a baseball bat while looking at exhibits during a Spirit of America Showcase in the Entrance Hall of the White House July 02, 2020 in Washington, DC. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
Alexander Hamilton thought he (and the others who wrote the Constitution) had it all figured out.
He and his colleagues never imagined that a group of billionaires would spend 43 years and billions of dollars to seize the US Supreme Court, which would then legalize political bribery.
They never conceived of a foreign billionaire family coming to American and building a nationwide media ecosystem that was capable of convincing Americans that up was down, wrong was right, and a convicted fraudster and rapist would be a noble president.
They would’ve laughed at you if you told them that the richest man in the world would come from apartheid South Africa to hook up with a grifter billionaire to become co-president.
“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not […]
With almost no awareness on the part of the vast majority of Americans, the news media in the United States is undergoing dramatic change. Hundreds of local newspapers have gone out of business, so objective information about that locality has disappeared. Billionaires have been buying large newspapers. One family, the Murdochs, have created a major propaganda network in support of transforming the United States into a christofascist nation. Other billionaires now own dozens of local TV net. Sinclair, Inc., doing business as Sinclair Broadcast Group, is a publicly traded American telecommunications conglomerate that operates 294 television stations across the country and is controlled by the descendants of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. All of this is occurring as simultaneously the country is being flooded by deliberate misinformation. Getting accurate objective information is becoming ever more difficult, as I experience every day as I prepare SR for you.
The Comcast NBC logo is shown on a building in Los Angeles, California Credit: Reuters
Comcast said on Wednesday that it plans to spin-off the bulk of its fading NBCUniversal cable TV networks, including MSNBC and CNBC, as the company said it is repositioning itself for growth in the streaming era.
Shares of the company were off less than 1% after the announcement that Comcast would separate its entertainment and news channels, including USA Network, Oxygen, E!, Syfy and Golf Channel, into a new, publicly traded company.
Comcast will retain the core of NBCUniversal’s entertainment assets, including its NBC broadcast network, sports and news, its film and television studios, and the Bravo network, which are seen as fueling growth for its Peacock streaming service. It also plans to keep the expanding theme park business.
Cowen & Co analysts in a note said the spin-off may well be a precursor to Comcast combining with another pay TV provider, such as Charter Communications, by shedding “toxic” cable channels that might be an obstacle to regulatory approval under the incoming Trump administration.
Cable television pioneer John Malone earlier this month […]
Robert Reich, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Robert Reich is absolutely correct as to where we stand in terms of being a country with a free press. I also agree with him that The Guardian, run by a British non-profit, is an honorable ethical publication, and that is an increasing rarity.
Come 20 January, Trump and his toadies – including billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – will have total control over the executive branch of the US government.’ Credit: Carlos Barría/Reuters
During the US presidential campaign, legacy mainstream media – who mostly answer to corporate or billionaire ownership – refrained from reporting how incoherent and bizarre Donald Trump was becoming, normalizing and “sanewashing” his increasingly wild utterances even as it reported every minor slip by Joe Biden.
The New York Times headlined its report on the September 2024 presidential debate between the president-elect and Kamala Harris – in which Trump issued conspiracy theories about stolen elections, crowd sizes, and Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs – as: Harris and Trump bet on their own sharply contrasting views of America.
Trump also used virulent rhetoric towards journalists. He has called the free press “scum” and the “enemy within”. During his campaign, he called for revoking the licenses of television networks and jailing journalists who won’t reveal their anonymous sources.
Come 20 January, Trump and his toadies – including billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek […]
The United States population is already the least literate and least numerate population in any developed democracy. As I have noted before 54% of us cannot read past sixth-grade level, and 43% can’t even read past fifth-grade level. Fewer than half of Americans can even name all three branches of government. Under Trump, I predict, this social outcome data is going to become even worse because I think he intends to gut the Department of Education. Just as the Supreme Court did in its Dobbs decision, Trump wants to send control of schools back to the states. What will come out of this is the same thing that came out of Dobbs. The Red states already significantly inferior in the quality of life of its citizens will become even more poorly educated, and schools in those states will become institutions indoctrinating in christofascism instead of educating.
President-elect Donald Trump will nominate his transition co-chair Linda McMahon for Education secretary, according to two people familiar with the transition discussions.
McMahon, 76, gained prominence as a powerful force in making World Wrestling Entertainment a multibillion-dollar enterprise before she led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term. She remained an important player in the president-elect’s orbit after he left the White House in 2021.
McMahon was appointed to the Connecticut state Board of Education but resigned roughly a year later in 2010 when she made a failed run for the Senate. She is a graduate of East Carolina University, with a bachelor’s degree in French and is certified to teach the language. She has minimal education experience but is the board chair of the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank stocked with other Trump insiders, and she’d likely sail through her Senate confirmation.
“For the past four years, as the Chair of the Board at the America First Policy Institute, Linda has been a fierce advocate for Parents’ Rights,” Trump said in a statement. “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand “Choice” to every State in America, and empower parents to […]
