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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Stephan: The attack on American democracy by the Republican Party is not only affecting the United States, it is also completely destroying our international reputation as a democracy. Here is how it looks in Great Britain. Now when an American preens about the quality of American democracy it should surprise no one if the response is a horse laugh. For this and other reasons I find the Republican Party despicable.
The Republican effort comes at a moment when the US supreme court appears wholly uninterested in protecting voting rights. Illustration: Sébastien Thibault/The Guardian
Fueled by Trump’s election lies, Republicans have doubled down on a brazen effort to restrict rights – and more danger lies ahead.
Twenty twenty-one should have been a year to celebrate for LaTosha Brown.
After decades of organizing Black voters in Georgia, Brown and other organizers in Georgia broke through. Defying expectations, turnout among Black voters surged in US Senate runoff races, powering two Democrats to historic victories. It came two months after Georgia saw record turnout in its November election, helping Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in nearly three decades.
This success story was mirrored across America. Despite a lethal pandemic, a staggering 159m votes were cast, 67% of eligible voters, the highest turnout in a presidential election since 1900. Such turnout is even more remarkable considering that millions of Americans adopted an entirely new way of voting, casting their ballots not on election day but ahead of time, either in person or […]
Stephan: Do you remember Trump University, a scam built on student debt, and one of Trump's many grifts? You may recall, he ultimately had to pay $25 million in reparations. Or perhaps you recall the scummy Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her schemes to privatize public education so that schools could be run for profit not education.
In contrast to all that Trumpian crime and corruption, here is good news that promotes wellbeing from the Biden administration. Given the amount of Trumpian sewage Biden and his people have to clean up just to get the federal government back on track and functioning, I am very impressed by how much good news has nonetheless been coming out since he took office two months ago.
Department of Education
The Education Department announced this week it would fully forgive the federal loans of borrowers who enrolled in schools that “engaged in certain misconduct.”
“Borrowers deserve a simplified and fair path to relief when they have been harmed by their institution’s misconduct,” said the new Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, in a statement. “A close review of these claims and the associated evidence showed these borrowers have been harmed and we will grant them a fresh start from their debt.”
In 2019, then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos faced intense scrutiny over her handling of the issue when she appeared before the House Education and Labor committee. The Education Department says it will now ensure borrowers with approved claims “have a streamlined path to receiving full loan discharges,” including individuals who previously received “less than a full […]
Stephan: America's gun psychosis is intertwined but not wholly dependent on the country's White male problem. There is no other developed nation on earth, not actively having a war on its soil, that has anything like the gun death rate of the United States. We train our children what to do if a mass murderer comes to their school -- think about that for a minute -- and now, I guess, we should train ourselves as to how to escape or hide if we are in our neighborhood grocery store or drugstore and a mass murderer comes in to randomly kill 5 or 15 of us. Yet the Republicans in Congress apparently don't see this as a problem.
Police respond at a King Sooper’s grocery store where a gunman opened fire on March 22, 2021 in Boulder, Colorado. Ten people, including a police officer, were killed in the attack. Credit: Chet Strange/Getty
Rght on the heels of last week’s horrific shooting spree by a 21-year-old at three Atlanta-area Asian day spas that left eight dead comes another mass murder, this time with a death toll of 10 at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. The suspect, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was reportedly armed with an AR-15. While everyone waits for an apparent motive (officials said an investigation would not take fewer than five days to complete) one thing is absolutely certain: Little will be done to address the primary cause of mass shootings. The ease with which any random man with an inchoate grievance can pick up a gun and rapidly snuff out the lives of strangers to make himself feel powerful will remain unchecked.
Stephan: The further they dig into the insurrection of 6th January, the more evidence emerges that the White militias the law enforcement agencies at the city, state, and national level are all too intertwined. We need to radically change the way any kind of police personnel are recruited and trained once recruited. There is no democracy on earth that has as many police killings each year as the United States. But will we? Only you can make that happen.
“We need to stop fighting Antifa in the streets where the cops are and start fighting them in bars and alleys,” Donohoe wrote back in 2019. “We need to stomp them. We need to ruin their lives physically like they have ruined ours financially with doxxing. We need to rack up their hospital bills. We need to use special operations tactics and lightning strike them.”
According to The Daily Beast, his previous profile photo on the encrypted social network featured him shaking hands with a member of the D.C. Metropolitan Police, later identified as Collin Cole, a Black police officer who served in the Marines with Donohoe.
In a Facebook post around that time, Donohoe spoke of counterprotests scheduled to take place in Downtown D.C. He tagged Cole, who responded to the post by saying, “I’ll be working downtown today for the protests.”
ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and DARIUS TAHIR, - Politico
Stephan: Here is a twist in the right of a woman to control her own body that I could see developing but did not fully comprehend as to its effect on Roe v Wade, just as the issue faces an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. This report lays it out.
Abortion rights demonstrators rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington on March 4, 2020. Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
The battle over abortion rights has a dramatic new front: the fight over whether the Biden administration will make pills available online.
Even as they keep a sharp eye on the increasingly conservative Supreme Court, activists, lawmakers and medical groups are pushing Biden’s FDA to lift restrictions on a 20-year-old drug for terminating early pregnancies. Such a decision would dramatically remake the abortion landscape by making the pills available online and by mail even if the Supreme Court overturns or cuts back Roe vs. Wade.
Pressure that had already been building for years over access to telemedicine abortions is reaching a peak, as patients fearful of Covid-19 are seeking to avoid in-person medical procedures whenever possible and demand for the drug has skyrocketed.
As the Biden administration deliberates on the federal rules on where, when and from whom patients can get the pills, with a federal court deadline looming in early April, conservatives are already erecting barriers. In court, in Congress and in statehouses across […]
Stephan: My view of these Ohio Republicans is that their existence is increasing the risk factor for society as a whole. They and those who think and act like them degrade our ability to control this virus. As I watch the politicization of a necessary medical intervention to get control of Covid-19, I am reminded of smallpox vaccination. If you were born before 1972 you have on one of your arms, up near your shoulder, a little scar from your smallpox vaccination. Every child got a smallpox vaccination, and it was not political. At the school I went to as a little boy your mother was contacted and she showed proof of vaccination. You could not go to elementary school public and private without having been vaccinated.
Nearly a third of Ohio Republican legislators told a newspaper they would not get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Ohio Republican legislator who will not get vaccinated. Credit: Raw Story
The Dayton Daily News asked 16 representatives and five senators from the Miami Valley whether they would be vaccinated against the highly contagious coronavirus, and 11 said yes but six said no, while another four declined to answer or didn’t respond.
State Rep. Nino Vitale (R-Urbana) a notorious anti-masker and coronavirus conspiracy theorist, would not tell the newspaper whether he would get the vaccine, but he doesn’t sound like he will.
“I’ve never vaccinated any of my kids,” Vitale said.
Nearly 1 million people in Ohio have been infected by the coronavirus, which led to more than 51,800 […]
Stephan: Evangelical christofascism is inextricably intertwined with White male terrorism as this report describes and details. Religious extremism has always been a part of our history, whole states were founded first and foremost on religious beliefs. Still, watching Christianity become a White Supremacy right-wing sex-obsessed cult is one of the great social tragedies of recent American history.
However, seven of the gunman’s eight victims were women; six were identified as Asian and at least four of those killed were of Korean descent. Their names were Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim and Yong A. Yue.
Despite the denials, the killings are a hate crime that exists at the intersection of misogyny, xenophobia and racism, and underpinning it is the toxicity of Evangelical purity culture. Long was a longtime member of Crabapple First Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist Church in Macon, and reportedly told police that he viewed the people who worked at the spas as “temptations” he needed to “eliminate,” indicating that he set out with the intention of attacking Asian women whom he perceived to […]
Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: The things that stand out for me about Evangelical preachers in the U.S. are that although they are fairly charismatic and learn how to quote the Bible, they are not very bright, and mostly grifters more interested in getting their private jet than actually promoting the substance of Jesus' teachings.
Rapper Kanye West sports Yeezy shoes during a meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington D.C. on Oct. 11, 2018. Credit: Calla Kessler/The Washington Post
From his couch in Dallas, Ben Kirby began asking questions about the lifestyles of the rich and famous pastors when he was watching some worship songs on YouTube on a Sunday morning in 2019. While listening to a song by Elevation Worship, a megachurch based in Charlotte, the evangelical churchgoer noticed the lead singer’s Yeezy sneakers were worth nearly the amount of his first rent check.
Kirby posted to his 400 followers on Instagram, “Hey Elevation Worship, how much you paying your musicians that they can afford $800 kicks? Let me get on the payroll!”
Plus, Kirby wondered, how could the church’s pastor, Steven Furtick, one of the most popular preachers in the country, afford a new designer outfit nearly every week?
With a friend’s encouragement, Kirby started a new Instagram account @PreachersNSneakers posting screenshots of pastors next to price tags and the street value of […]
