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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 united States is faced with an existential crisis, even larger than the Covid-19 pandemic, indeed, the pandemic is part of this larger trend -- climate change. What we have seen in the past month alone is that the Republican ideology is simply inadequate to deal with this challenge to human civilization in the United States. And yet about a third of the American population simply does not seem capable of recognizing the facts of that reality.
Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty
The U.S. is expected to cross a grim milestone on Monday that was unimagined by even the worst projections from the beginning of the pandemic nearly one year ago: Half a million dead from COVID-19. And those are just the direct deaths from recorded instances of the disease. Excess mortality rates show that for every two official COVID-19 deaths, there’s another excess death, likely due to myriad related causes, from increased rates of poverty to strains on the health care system to undiagnosed cases. What is clear, however, is that the past year has exposed the rot of GOP ideology that led to such excess death and despair.
While Republicans love to quibble to muddy the waters around pandemic failure assessment, there is no denying that Donald Trump’s approach to the coronavirus — do as little as possible, push for premature re-openings, hide the evidence by discouraging testing — led to hundreds of thousands more dead Americans than we would have seen under a […]
Stephan: Thousands of us, tens of thousands of us, died as a result of deliberate calculated disinformation spread by Trump, the Republicans in Congress and the Rightwing media fantasy machine. When I think of those deaths I remember that most of the dead Americans were part of a social node of family and friends, four, five, six, 10 men, women, and children those dead left behind whose lives are forever changed.
As the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus pandemic approached the half-million mark, one of the nation’s top doctors on Sunday tied the politicization of mask-wearing—for which former President Donald Trump and various other Republicans have been widely criticized—to “tens of thousands” of deaths nationwide.
“The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease. And yet, with a variety of messages through a variety of sources, mask-wearing became a statement about your political party or an invasion of your personal freedom,” National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told “Axios on HBO.”
“A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific, and, frankly, dangerous,” he said. “And I think you could make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result.”
While in office, Trump at times mocked mask-wearing and refused to don one himself despite expert conclusions that face coverings and social distancing could save many lives. As president, he was diagnosed with Covid-19 and hospitalized in early October, but eventually recovered; critics
Stephan: North Dakota, a state controlled by Republicans because a majority of the state voters are Republicans, is a classic example of willful ignorance as a social trend. Masks, social distancing, vaccines? Not me, not ever. This seems to be that state's mindset. It proves you just can't reach people who choose to live in a fantasy world. It also means this pandemic is going to drag on far longer than it needs to and more people are going to die than need to.
A notably stupid and willfully ignorant North Dakota resident
Mask-hating North Dakota Republicans this week passed a bill that would make mask mandates in their state illegal.
Local news station KFYR-TV reports that North Dakota House of Representatives moved to ban implementing mask mandates, no matter how severe future pandemics might be.
“Our state is not a prison camp!” Republican North Dakota State Rep. Jeff Hoverson fumed arguing in support of the legislation.
According to the Bismarck Tribune, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum implemented a mask mandate last November in an effort to contain surging COVID-19 hospitalizations in his state.
The governor has since dropped the mask mandate now that hospitalizations have fallen significantly from their peak, but that apparently isn’t good enough for Republican hardliners in the state who want to make sure the governor never does anything to protect public health again.
The bill, which passed by a slim margin of 50 to 44, now heads to the North Dakota State Senate.
Michael Li, Senior Counsel - Brennan Center for Justice
Stephan: This is one of the most important articles I will publish this year. We, in the United States, have reached a crossroads. We have one party, the Democrats who may be flawed by occasional bouts of human greed, stupidity, and incompetence, as all political parties experience, but that remains deeply committed to democracy. And another party, the Republicans, who have become a White supremacy christofascist anti-democratic cult defined by its corruption, incompetence -- just look at Texas -- outright criminality, and committed to destroying our democracy. How our future is going to go as a country is largely going to be determined by the coming redistricting of congressional districts
This is the best article I have read on this subject, and I urge you to read it, and make it clear to your local leaders that you are committed to the protection of democracy, and that everyone regardless of race, gender, or wealth should not only be allowed to vote but that we should make it easy to do so, and we should encourage every voter to understand the importance of doing so.
Under the best of circumstances, the redrawing of legislative and congressional districts every 10 years is a fraught and abuse-prone process. But the next round of redistricting in 2021 and 2022 will be the most challenging in recent history. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, intense fights over representation and fair maps were all but certain in many states due to rapid demographic change and a weakening of the legal framework governing redistricting. Invariably, communities of color would bear much of the brunt, facing outright discrimination in some places and being used as a convenient tool for achieving unfair partisan advantage in others.
Covid-19, however, has further upended the redistricting cycle by delaying the release of data needed by states to draw maps, and in turn delaying redistricting.
This report looks at the upcoming redistricting cycle through the lens of four factors that will influence outcomes in each state: who controls map drawing; changes in the legal rules governing redistricting over the last decade; pressures from population and demographic shifts over the same period; and the potential impact of the Covid-19 […]
Stephan: Democracies only work when everyone agrees that democracy is the road they choose to travel. We are now facing a situation where that is no longer the case. The only thing that is going to change this is the American voters voting en masse and making it clear by their choices that they want democracy. Texas made a different choice and you can see what has happened there.
Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Donald Trump Credit: Salon/Getty
Donald Trump may be spending his post-presidency golfing at Mar-a -Lago but he remains front and center in the hearts and minds of millions of Republican voters, as evidenced by the 46% who said in a new Suffolk University/ USA Today poll released over the weekend that they would join a Trump Party if he decided to split off from the GOP. A whopping 80% of Republican respondents said they support punishing any Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He is still their Dear Leader even in exile.
So the GOP still has a Trump problem. If it loses 20-30% of its voters, it will prove difficult to win any elections whether it’s called the Trump Patriot Party or the plain old GOP. That is because the polarization that powers the extreme right-wing under Trump depends upon having every last self-identified Republican vote their way. There are no more crossovers when it comes to Donald Trump.
This is the dilemma now Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., finds himself trying to navigate as […]
Joya Misra, Professor of Sociology & Public Policy, University of Massachusetts - Amherst - The Conversation
Stephan: The United States has a shameful record of child poverty and hunger. One in 8 minor children in the country faced hunger and food scarcity in 2020. We like to talk about American exceptionalism, but we lack the courage to really define where we are exceptional, child poverty and hunger being an example of exceptionalism one rarely hears mentioned. There are solutions, but we seem to lack the compassion to implement them.
Which former president pitched a Family Assistance Plan to the American people that would have provided many families with children a monthly stipend?
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While the success of one of these measures or something similar is not assured, I believe that, thanks to the pandemic, there’s a good a chance the United States will finally begin building the foundation that Nixon called for and that families still need.
Stephan: I have known, liked, and respected Bruce Greyson for decades and along with other friends, Ray Moody, Pim Van Lommel and others, he has produced the impeccable data which has taken the idea of the soul out of religion and placed it in science providing the factual research upon which our understanding of the continuity of consciousness is based. Once you add that to the reincarnation work begun by Ian Stevenson, and continued for a second generation by Jim Tucker you begin to realize that an eternal part of you existed before you incarnated and will continue after you are physically dead, and that you will have to deal with the choices you made in this life in the next. It changes your perspective radically.
Credit: Shutterstock
About fifty years ago, Dr. Bruce Greyson was eating pasta in the hospital cafeteria when his beeper went off. Startled, he dropped his fork and left a drop of spaghetti sauce on his tie.
Greyson, a psychiatrist, was urgently needed in the ER to treat a college student who had overdosed. With no time to change his dirty tie, he grabbed a white lab coat and buttoned it up to hide the stain.
In the ER, he found the student unconscious on a gurney, her breathing slow but regular. He called her name — “Holly” — and tried to rouse her. But she didn’t stir.
Greyson left Holly and met her roommate, Susan, at the end of the hall in the lounge. Unbuttoning his coat, he sat down and asked Susan to recount everything that had happened.
The next morning, Greyson returned to work at the hospital. Though Holly was awake, she was also groggy, her eyes closed.
Stephan: More good news from the Biden administration. Biden is committed to stopping and, indeed, reversing, the callous rape of our national lands by Trump and his ogres.
Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument Credit: Getty
The Biden administration says it has begun reaching out to elected officials, Native American tribes and other stakeholders as part of its review of the Trump administration’s controversial rollback of national monuments, kick-starting a process that is widely expected to result in President Joe Biden fulfilling a campaign promise to restore the protected sites.
As part of a sweeping first-day executive order to “protect public health and the environment and restore science,” Biden ordered the Interior Department to review President Donald Trump’s proclamations to dismantle three protected monuments, two in southern Utah and one off the Atlantic coast. Biden has slammed the monument cuts as among Trump’s “assaults on America’s natural treasures.”
In 2017, the Trump administration launched a review of recent national monument designations made under the Antiquities Act of 1906. That process featured administration officials cozying up to monument opponents, cherry-picking data and dismissing overwhelming public support for maintaining protected sites, and ended with Trump carving more than 2 million acres away from two sites in southern Utah.
