ancianita
ancianita's JournalA Happy Fathers Day Wish
Incredible photography and new systems analyses make this series beyond anything of its kind before.
Every episode awes the eyes, and surprises with new information.
David Attenborough's subtly warm voice reminds us of Earth's dynamically interlocking ecosystems, how we can help preserve them and ourselves.
In a time of exhausting political battle, this series broadens outlooks, calms the heart, and raises the spirit.
I Repeat: Inslee Is NOT a "Single Issue" Candidate.
Let's take Governor Jay Inslee, who many hide behind the "single issue" label in order to hide their opposition to -- not even support -- which is what we should be doing with all our candidates.
Climate change as a policy priority of a Democratic candidate is the issue that supports all the issues that the Democratic Party claims to support.
Making Climate Change the top priority of an Inslee presidency that will impact ALL THE ISSUES of this election
-- foreign policy and state department work with our NATO allies and southern neighbors in this hemisphere
-- immigration policy that deals with reform of restrictive asylum and immigration laws
-- economic policy that reflects the infrastructure projects of the Green New Deal, protects job training transition projects and grows the overall economy, saving patchwork spending on disasters that are no longer "natural
-- social policy which improves the voting rights of all citizens no matter race, sex or religion
-- education policy which increases support for science based policy
I could go on.
Inslee's transition plan will be a scale up of Washington's transition plan that protects workers by training them, subsidizing business creation that includes building solar plants, among other projects.
It's health care, national security with climate refugees at our border, an economic issue of preventing cascading climate disasters.
Jerry Carcetti, Jerry Brown, the Pentagon, Greenpeace, NARAL and immigration organizations agree that without climate change as a top priority of the next president -- diminished and denigrated here as a MERE single issue strategy of an unnamed Democratic candidate -- other issues will also take a back seat, and problems of this country will not get solved, except by piecemeal effort.
Do not keep beating this drum. It amounts to the zero sum politics of blowing out any candidate's candle, as if the others' candles will shine brighter. They won't. Keep it up and DU gets darker.
The Democratic goal of beating Trump in 2020 is not by promoting just a frontrunner's "electability," but to make the party's plan for promoting a cleaner, greener future for a country awash in Big Oil's pollution because of its lobby and campaign money onslaught.
Support Inslee by a) giving him a chance, or b) saying nothing if you can't stay positive.
I've argued hard and long on behalf of our women candidates, Biden and others. There's no reason for me or anyone to dedicate a label of "single issue" to any candidate, anywhere in DU. It's wrong.
"Single issue" is what Republicans campaign on. Not Democrats. And not this Democratic governor.
Inslee Keeps Trump Rollbacks on Environment Front and Center
From Inslee's Facebook page:
"The president doesn’t care about what’s best for the Americans. He has chosen polluters over people at every turn."
Stop obsessing over your environmental "sins." Fight the oil and gas industry instead.
A good article for those of us feeling helpless about climate change.
This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/28/18629833/climate-change-2019-green-new-deal?fbclid=IwAR2MUCfPZ-_341SObBun_Yr0C8NLV3NYfTS-kQa92ODOHhEjHhxIpkkpDHw
I don’t need you to be all-solar-everything to be an environmentalist. I don’t need you to be vegan-er than thou, or me, for that matter. I don’t care if you are eating a burger right this minute.
I don’t even care if you work on an oil rig. In some parts of the country, those are the only jobs that pay enough for you to feed your family. And I don’t blame workers for that. I blame their employers. I blame the industry that is choking us all, and the government that is letting them do it.
All I need you to do is want a livable future. This is your planet, and no one can advocate for it like you can. No one can protect it like you can.
We have 11 years — not to start but to finish saving the planet.
I’m not here to absolve you. And I’m not here to abdicate you. I am here to fight with you.
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Jay Inslee Is Actually Taking the Climate Refugee Crisis Seriously
Washington State governor and White House hopeful Jay Inslee might be that leader. This week, Inslee became the first U.S. presidential candidate to include immigration policy in a formal climate plan. Released Wednesday, the Global Climate Mobilization Plan details his international policy approach to climate change, including how climate change is exacerbating the world’s refugee crisis and will continue to do so.
It’s right in line with Inslee’s $9 trillion climate plan to transform the U.S. economy to one revolved around clean energy and equity. He wants to make sure the U.S. isn’t the only one that makes it out of this mess in one piece. And less developed countries are even more vulnerable.
While the new plan mentions national security, it isn’t a plan meant to protect the United States per se, but vulnerable communities around the world. Whether you support Inslee or not, you gotta give the man credit for that. It’s easy to sell something on the premise that it’s good for the U.S.; it’s harder to sell it on the premise that it’s good for, well, outsiders.
But it’s way too soon to speculate on that as the polls show less than 1 percent of voters have their eyes set on him. And other Democratic candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden have released their own climate plans, too.
Now, how about that climate debate to hear what they all got to say?
https://earther.gizmodo.com/jay-inslee-is-actually-taking-the-climate-refugee-crisi-1835293779?fbclid=IwAR3t4A9enfjaPkAfgMCnLgPvMxYrauXObFVMDdO7ZMdVSwcZErNH31F9mvI
Climate Crisis Is Already Behind Migration At The US Border
Nicholas Kristof's NYT Report
https://www.marshallnewsmessenger.com/opinion/columns/nicholas-kristof-guatemalans-can-watch-crops-wither-and-die-or/article_2af84ed4-8800-11e9-8105-630fafcae82a.html
“The great majority of these kids will migrate,” Luis Armando Jiménez, principal of a rural middle school, told me as he pointed to his students in the courtyard. “There is not enough rain, so their only option is to migrate.”
As they see their own crops wither, families watch luckier households build new homes or buy motorcycles because of money sent back by a relative working in the U.S. Some of these new homes have U.S. flags painted on them.
Guatemalans understand the peril — in Jorge Jorge’s village, six people have died recently while traveling to the U.S. But the risk is preferable to remaining in a desiccating land that seems without a future.
There’s some evidence that aid programs can help farmers adjust to climate change and reduce the desire to emigrate. But Trump is choosing the worst combination of responses: cutting those aid programs while denying climate change.
Jill Lapore: The Founders Wrote That America Is A Nation of Asylum -- Were They Right Or Wrong?
The following short history of Americanism comes from Jill Lepore's newest book, This America -- The Case For The Nation(2019). I highly recommend that DU read this
short, pithy, good framing of how we've seen and could see our nation. It follows upon her longer, but amazing These Truths: A History of the United States (2018).
My summary of her major ideas:
Thomas Paine in Commons Sense called America "an asylum for mankind."
The Declaration Of Independence cites as one of the abuses of the king, his having discouraged and even prevented people from coming to the colonies by "Obstructing Laws for Naturalization" and "refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither."
George Washington wrote in 1788: "I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong."
Thomas Jefferson in 1817 described the United States as offering "a sanctuary for those whom the misrule of Europe may compel to seek happiness in other climes."
Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing wrote in 1823, "We love our country, but not blindly...In all nations we recognize one great family"
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1858: "We are the Romans of modernity... a great assimilating people."
It was in this tradition that Barack Obama introduced himself to America in 2008: " I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. These people are part of me. And they are a part of America.... I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins and uncles of every race and hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."
The word "nationalism" never existed either in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution or America's first dictionary. The word didn't exist until the end of 18th Century, and the thing itself not until the 19th Century.
Today, people confuse nationalism with patriotism. There's nothing wrong with loving the place where you live and the people in it, and in that sense, the two words meant more or less the same thing.
Liberal nationalism is patriotism. Illiberal nationalism is not.
But in the 20th and 21st Centuries, nationalism has come to mean somethign different from patriotism, something fierce...violent -- less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a a hatred of people within your own country who don't belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority.
Immigration policy is a topic for political debate; reasonable people disagree. But hating immigrants, as if they were lesser humans, is a form of nationalism that has nothing to do with patriotism.
Trade policy is a topic for political debate; reasonable people disagree. But hating globalists, as if they were fiends, is a form of nationalism that has nothing to do with patriotism.
Historians who tried to write histories of liberal nationalism failed to account for all our racism. When, in the 70's, they realized that they would be accused of complicity, American historians have backed away from defining what America is.
A clear-eyed reckoning of a "new Americanism" would be a clear-eyed reckoning with its history of sorrows no less than its glories. Looking backward and forward, a new history would know that right wrongs no man.
But if liberal nationalists do not start asking and answering our questions about who we are, illiberal nationalists will. They will call America, as Hannity said, "a carnage." They'll call immigrants "animals" and other countries "shitholes." They call themselves nationalists.
In the drive toward the 2020 presidential election, we express frustration about who gets to define this country.
Because that is our nation's big question.
Can we see our history as a definitional fight?
Can we see that America IS a fight?
We here know we're not "at the end of history," and so who will write our history.
If we, as liberal nationalists, want Lapore's "New Americanism," to prevail, should we assume that the Founders were right or wrong to frame our nation as a nation of laws? or an idea? or a work in progress? or racist?
Can the Law survive the 40-year nationalist assault (with multiple foreign state incursions) that we've now come to see in its entirety?
We might not discuss these ideas fully; still, the questions they raise are worth our thought.
Time Is Up. Gradualism Won't Save Us.
https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/climate-emergency-campaignhttps://www.theclimatemobilization.org/solution
David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, discusses future of climate suffering from the actions we must take and costs we must bear.
Reposting from LBN: Biden says he no longer supports the Hyde Amendment
I suppose we can carry on, yes?
Source: CNN
The Hyde Amendment is a four-decade-old ban on federal dollars being used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the woman's life is in danger.
"But circumstances have changed. I've been working through the final details of my health care plan like others in this race and I've been struggling with the problems that Hyde now presents," Biden said.
He said he wants to achieve "universal coverage" and "provide for the full range of health services women need" through the continued expansion of Medicaid and offering a "public option" that would allow people to join Medicare.
"I can't justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to ... exercise their constitutionally protected right," he said.
"Folks, the times have changed. I don't think these guys are going to let up," Biden said, referring to Republicans.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/06/politics/biden-no-longer-supports-hyde-amendment/index.html
Biden says he no longer supports the Hyde Amendment, reversing his long-held position
Source: CNN
"If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's ZIP code," he said.
The Hyde Amendment is a four-decade-old ban on federal dollars being used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the woman's life is in danger.
"But circumstances have changed. I've been working through the final details of my health care plan like others in this race and I've been struggling with the problems that Hyde now presents," Biden said.
He said he wants to achieve "universal coverage" and "provide for the full range of health services women need" through the continued expansion of Medicaid and offering a "public option" that would allow people to join Medicare.
"I can't justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to ... exercise their constitutionally protected right," he said.
"Folks, the times have changed. I don't think these guys are going to let up," Biden said, referring to Republicans.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/06/politics/biden-no-longer-supports-hyde-amendment/index.html
Enough. Let's move on in a more perfect union!
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,143