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Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile: Trash attacks against VP Kamala Harris get ratioed. Luv it. More please. [1]
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Date: 2022-11-22
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I don’t know how many times I’m gonna have to state this. Madame Vice President Kamala Devi Harris plays a key role in preserving Democracy in this nation, and has broad cross sectional appeal to diverse Democratic constituencies, with one exception — media punidjits who pound the anti-Kamala drum almost daily on cable news, in newspapers and on certain self-appointed “liberal” and “progressive” blog spaces. Those media bloviators who aren’t dissing her, are ignoring the key work she has been doing, both nationally and internationally.
I was elated to see this diary from BlackGrannyRising, "Dump President Biden in 2024?" Will Y'all PLEASE Get tf REAL!," addressing the abject stupidity of certain folks purportedly on “our side,” who are talkin’ out the sides of their necks on this issue, and I have joined in (again) with folks from #BlackTwitter and #KHIVE and other allies, to address the trashing of our Madame Vice President Kamala Harris.
It happens here at Daily Kos too, in some comments sections, though not here in Black Kos. As you may or may not know, each Black Kos diary, in the Twitter Roundup in the comments section, includes a section on “MVP Harris,” making readers aware of what she has been doing (see this link) The problem is that so few people read and participate in Black Kos that it doesn’t filter over to the outer site. I would like to see “more and better Kamala coverage” here, however I don’t have the time to do it myself, so I’m asking for your help. Time for y’all to get to writing.
On Twitter (which may be ending soon) the attacks against her continue, but not without significant pushback. The most recent atrocity from a misogynoir minion came from Slate Magazine senior writer, Christina Cauterucci. (I’m not linking to the heifer)
x This captures your idiocy, misognoir, and ugliness. It also captures why VP Kamala Devi Harris will remain VP and you will remain queen of clowns:
https://t.co/vLsuMBJryw — President Kamala’s Hand (Again) (@myronjclifton) November 21, 2022
Author Myron J. Clifton wrote in response to the garbage from Slate’s latest, greatest racist hits:
While 81 million Americans breathlessly waited days to confirm that 81 million votes was in fact more than 72 million votes, the media helped Trump “Almost” overthrow the government formally known as the most stable democracy in the world. Undaunted, VP Harris took on multiple difficult assignments that prior vice presidents could only dream of… and run away from. Displaying the range that California voters know about and her senate peers on both sides of the aisle praise her for, Harris allowed her political cup to runneth over by leading every key initiative for the President. She is quite literally the face of the administration.
He went on to say:
VP Harris has provided guidance to cabinet members, support to senators and representatives, and traveled the country visiting blue, red, and purple districts while touting one or many administration priority initiatives. And make no mistake about it, where she goes, excitement, energy, and local appreciation follows. The general population love her. As do kids of all ages and races. Though there’s something wonderful seeing her get on the level of little Black girls whose eyes sparkle with light dampened only by the light of their little smiles as VP Kamala embraces, encourages, hugs, and imparts warmth and love like no other Vice President or President in American history, save for President Obama and First Lady Michelle. The local coverage and headlines are almost universally positive when she visits, and all the interviews with people she met and interacted with show the overriding admiration for the nation’s first woman second in command, including republicans who do not deny her force of will, tenacity, honestly, and ability to grasp issues and win hearts, minds, and leverage in heretofore unlikely places.
The Slate trash got soundly ratioed (for those of you who don’t do Twitter-speak that means it received more pushback than applause)
x We're not doing this again, Slate. This publication on the left was consistently offensive toward Kamala Harris during the veepstakes. It's an offensive publication w/ clear biases. pic.twitter.com/BwseBoUTff — @
[email protected] (@david_darmofal) November 20, 2022
There were lots of tweets, like this one, from folks who don’t have “Blue checks” next to their names — you know, regular folks who are voters, not verified media, or “influencers.”
x This is trash. The audacity to advocate for the replacement the most effective VP in recent history who is also the first female and black VP (Quayle, Mondale, Cheney, Gore, Pence have NOTHING on VP Kamala Harris). This article is straight trash. pic.twitter.com/fdukenNQeg — THEE Mrs. Hollist 💛🐝⚖️ (@HollisticViews) November 21, 2022
People did point to writing that was not trash.
x A great article about the VP that lacks the misogynoir from this Slate writer is found here:
https://t.co/zmjIOCAnmg — LL Gill (@LLGILL) November 20, 2022
Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham wrote:
In the tense months leading to the midterm elections, no member of the Biden administration spent more time talking about the erosion of reproductive rights than Vice President Kamala Harris. Pundits implored Democrats to shift focus from what a writer for Vox called “the fizzling issue of protecting abortion rights” to inflation and the economy. Even after the conservative-led Supreme Court overturned nearly 50 years of settled law in June, many polls did not rate abortion as a pressing issue for voters. [...] Harris never wavered. In a late October speech at Bryn Mawr, the women’s college in Pennsylvania, she said: “There was a movement that was started by people generations ago that culminated in Roe v. Wade. It is now incumbent on us, who are under this roof together right now, to pick that movement up and to carry it forward.” But absent in post-election discussions about the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing are mentions of how Harris centered reproductive rights as crucial to millions of voters, especially women. Then again, Harris as vice president rarely gets the credit and respect she deserves. Malcolm X famously said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”
In case you’re curious, here’s some of what VP Harris has been doing, via recent tweets
x To answer the "Where's Kamala" questions: right now is in on the Philippines, finishing up a week long Asia trip, which is her 8th international trip as VP. Despite the nonsense she gets from the US media, @VP maintains strong trust and approval overseas to handle world affairs. pic.twitter.com/JodSBH1SDQ — What Biden Has Done (@
[email protected]) (@What46HasDone) November 22, 2022
x "The question is: what will we do with the time when we carry the baton?"
My favorite line from US @VP Kamala Harris at today's #WomenForgingTheFuture townhall in Manila, Philippines. pic.twitter.com/IX4MMnzXd7 — Bianca Gonzalez (@iamsuperbianca) November 21, 2022
x Vice President Kamala Harris will become the highest ranking U.S. official to visit Palawan, an island of the Philippines, as part of her latest trip to Asia.
Here’s why she’s going.
https://t.co/O2L6yR6DpG — NPR (@NPR) November 21, 2022
x I met with Vice President Duterte-Carpio in Manila. We discussed education policy and ways we can improve literacy and access to high-quality education for children in the Philippines. pic.twitter.com/gh7vD7GJF7 — Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) November 21, 2022
x To fully understand the impacts of the climate crisis, and to develop enduring solutions, we need all voices at the table. Women and girls are on the frontline of this crisis, and their leadership is critical to our future. pic.twitter.com/NoEITRyBIN — Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) November 21, 2022
I’ll stop here, with just one more comment. Trash MVP at your peril. We won’t stay silent and few of our clapbacks will be polite. Those of us supporting Biden-Harris 2024, and Harris plus another solid Democrat in 2028 are not going to go away. And keep that ratio coming.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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“[He’s] always prepared and cares about our future as a country more than his future as a public servant,” former Congressman Cedric Richmond tells theGrio. The Grio: Who is Hakeem Jeffries, the next likely Democratic leader in the US House?
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The Democratic Party is witnessing a generational passing of the torch after the history-making speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced on Thursday that she will step down from leadership after shepherding the party for two decades.
Pelosi’s decision to not to seek reelection as party leader has opened a new pathway for U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who formally announced on Friday his bid to lead the party in the lower chamber. If elected by his Democratic peers, Jeffries would become the first Black person to ever lead a major political party in Congress.
Jeffries, 52, is the current chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and is expected to run unopposed for House minority leader later this month. The Brooklyn native has represented New York’s 8th Congressional District for five terms.
Jeffries, who before Congress served in the New York State Assembly, completed his undergraduate studies at Binghamton University and received advanced degrees from Georgetown University and New York University School of Law. He is also a married father of two and a member of the historically Black fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, Inc. Jeffries entered Congress in 2013, filling the vacant seat left by retired Congressman Edolphus Towns.
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The 90’s featured a number of laws that are still devastating black families. Slate: The Clinton-Era Adoption Law That Still Devastates Black Families Today
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This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. Promoted as a way to rescue children—especially Black children—languishing in America’s overloaded foster system, ASFA has had the opposite impact. By speeding up termination of parents’ rights, it has dramatically increased the chances that Black families, which are disproportionately separated by state child welfare authorities, will be permanently torn apart. The dissolution of children’s legal relationship with their parents is known as the civil death penalty because it is the ultimate punishment family courts can impose. ASFA was marketed using racist rhetoric that vilified impoverished Black mothers and demeaned their bonds with their children. Its passage was part of a legislative assault on government assistance to Black families that held out adoption as the solution to Black children’s hardships. I have investigated the harms the child welfare system inflicts on Black families for more than two decades and have witnessed how ASFA intensifies the system’s targeting of Black communities for disruption. It is time to repeal this destructive law.
ASFA played an integral, though largely overlooked, role in the Clinton-era federal consolidation of welfare retrenchment and carceral expansion. In the late 1990s, Congress passed back-to-back major legislation that simultaneously intensified law enforcement surveillance of Black communities, stripped away support for struggling parents, and sped their children into adoptive homes. First came the controversial Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which imposed harsher prison sentences for federal offenses and showered states with funds to expand their police forces and build more prisons. In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, ending the federal guarantee of cash assistance to families living in poverty and giving states wide latitude to decide how to implement extensive welfare reform policies.
A year later, President Bill Clinton signed ASFA after directing the federal government to take steps to double the number of foster children adopted annually by 2002. ASFA prioritized getting foster children adopted over reunifying them with their families through a set of mandates and incentives to state child welfare departments. Falsely equating permanency with adoption, the law loosened the requirement that agencies make “reasonable efforts” to keep families together and established swifter timetables for terminating parents’ rights, shifting the presumption in favor of termination when children have spent more than 15 of the previous 22 months in state custody. Some states have established even shorter timelines for termination. ASFA also offers financial incentives to states to increase the number of children adopted out of the foster system, with no comparable incentives to increase family preservation. By 2014, the federal government had handed states $424 million in adoption incentive bonuses, exceeding the amount saved in foster care costs. The coinciding passage of the welfare and adoption laws marked the first time in modern U.S. history that the federal government mandated that states protect children from parental neglect—centered on taking them from their families—but failed to guarantee a minimum economic safety net for impoverished families.
Racist mythology about Black families, such as the “welfare queen” and the “crack baby,” helped to fuel these punitive bipartisan measures. When ASFA’s backers argued for increasing adoptions to reduce the mushrooming foster population, Black children were four times as likely as white children to be removed from their homes and made up the largest group in the foster system. Advocates portrayed Black families’ ties as the chief impediment to permanency for children in foster care. The solution, they argued, was to “free” Black children from their mothers by permanently extinguishing their legal bonds to make them available for adoption. Some transracial adoption advocates portrayed expedited terminations of Black mothers’ rights as a means for facilitating adoptions of Black children by white couples.
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It took an entire lawsuit, but Georgia Democrats have managed to undo a dumb law. The Root: Georgia Judge Allows Saturday Voting Following Thanksgiving Holiday, A Win for Democrats
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It’s a win for Georgia Democrats this week as a Fulton County judge ruled on Friday that early voting in the state’s runoff elections could in fact take place the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This comes after arguments made that such an action was barred under state law.
A 2016 state law—which prohibits early voting on the second Saturday before a runoff election if that day falls one or two days after a federal holiday—was argued by Georgia Democrats to disenfranchise voters who cannot participate in early voting during weekday hours. This population, which is largely made up of students, low income voters, and people of color tend to vote Democratic.
According to the New York Times, Judge Thomas A. Cox of the Superior Court of Fulton County issued a 10-page order which ruled that the law did not specifically apply to runoff elections, and that Saturday voting should be considered “an essential component” of the election process. This is especially true considering the window for runoff elections in Georgia is not shorter under the major voting law which the Republicans passed last year. The runoff this year will be held on December 6th.
Furthermore, Judge Cox ruled that without Saturday voting, Democratic groups and their constituents would “suffer immediate and irreparable harm.”
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Mattel plans to roll out a fully updated line of Eason’s multicultural action figures in 2023. The Root: Black Action Figure Pioneer Sees A Shift on The Horizon in The Toy Industry
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Yla Eason, the creator of the first Black superhero figure, says she’s excited to see Afro-futuristic toys roll out this season more than ever before. Sun-Man, the Black action figure she designed in the 80’s, has been growing in popularity over the last several years, an industry shift she believes is in due in large part to the Black Panther fandemonium.
“For boys toys especially, there’s lot of Black animation, gaming that’s being developed, drawn from comic books and sci-fi. It’s characters looking like you and being futuristic and magical and mystical, it’s part of the genre right now. And I’m seeing a mass of it, not just a one-off,’’ Eason told Rutgers University.
Eason, who is also a professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers Business School in Newark, founded Olmec Toys in 1985. With this company the entrepreneur developed an entire multicultural line of action figures. Eason says that she was motivated to get to work after her three year old son told her he would never be able to become a superhero because he was Black.
“If you can see yourself as powerful, you can be powerful,’’ explained Eason. “If you have to limit your fantasy world, your imagination, that’s frightening.’’
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After deforestation for cocoa and goldmining reached alarming rates, the African country set up a security team with a mission to stamp out illegal activity. The Guardian: Gold, guns, gangs: on patrol with the elite unit saving Ivory Coast’s forests
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About an hour before dawn, Lt Mahi Landry and his team of rangers find the illegal goldmine they’ve been looking for deep in Téné forest, in south-central Ivory Coast.
It has been raining heavily for most of the night and the only light is from the beams of a few torches. The team, accompanied by the Guardian, has to dodge felled branches, taking care not to fall into holes that have been dug in the earth. Cigarette packets, empty bottles of alcohol and the odd shoe are strewn across the forest floor.
A couple of rangers start uncovering a pit that has been sealed with pieces of wood overlaid with material and sand. They throw a rock into the hole and it takes about three seconds to hit the bottom. “It’s deep, probably about 25 metres,” says Landry. “That would have taken about two to three weeks to dig.”
Landry is chief of the Service de Contrôle Forestier, an elite unit of 10 men whose mission is to defend Ivory Coast’s 234 classified forests from illegal goldminers, loggers and cocoa farmers, and to safeguard reforestation efforts.
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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY PORCH
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