[News] Post a Political News Story

thrawn82 wrote:

Kildaire Farm Road is the kind of place you would go to film The Stepford Wives, or photograph for the cover of Better Homes and Gardens Magazine. In other words it's not a place known to have high crime rates or graffiti or regular vandalism, it represents a real new resurgence in hostility.

BTW, if you liked The Stepford Wives, and want to see a thriller that has some things to say about racism, you should definitely watch Get Out.

thrawn82 wrote:

Mixolyde wrote:

thrawn82 wrote:

Kildaire Farm Road is the kind of place you would go to film The Stepford Wives, or photograph for the cover of Better Homes and Gardens Magazine. In other words it's not a place known to have high crime rates or graffiti or regular vandalism, it represents a real new resurgence in hostility.

BTW, if you liked The Stepford Wives, and want to see a thriller that has some things to say about racism, you should definitely watch Get Out.

That's the one written/produced by Jordan Peele right? Horror ins;t usually my thing but that one is on my list.

Written/produced/directed, and it was amazing. Still my movie of the year.

The statement was simple. Factual.

A Kansas spokesperson was acknowledging that the state highway department didn’t have the money to rebuild a dangerous stretch of Interstate 70 that had been the scene of multiple wrecks and a grisly motorcycle fatality caught on video.

“KDOT has lost a lot of money over the last few years,” the spokesperson said. “There’s just no funding at this point.”

Simple, yes. But in Gov. Sam Brownback’s cash-strapped administration, those were fighting words. Days later, the spokesperson was fired.
Kansas runs one of the most secretive state governments in the nation, and its secrecy permeates nearly every aspect of service, The Star found in a months-long investigation.

From the governor’s office to state agencies, from police departments to business relationships to health care, on the floors of the House and Senate, a veil has descended over the years and through administrations on both sides of the political aisle.

What’s hidden are stories of regular Kansans who have suffered inside the silence.

In the course of its investigation, The Star found that:
▪ Children known to the state’s Department for Children and Families suffer horrific abuse, while the agency cloaks its involvement with their cases, even shredding notes after meetings where children’s deaths are discussed, according to a former high-ranking DCF official. One grieving father told The Star he was pressured to sign a “gag order” days after his son was killed that would prevent him from discussing DCF’s role in the case. Even lawmakers trying to fix the troubled system say they cannot trust information coming from agency officials.

▪ In the past decade, more than 90 percent of the laws passed by the Kansas Legislature have come from anonymous authors. Kansans often had no way of knowing who was pushing which legislation and why, and the topics have included abortion, concealed weapons and school funding. Kansas is one of only a few states that allow the practice.
▪ When Kansas police shoot and kill someone, law enforcement agencies often escape scrutiny because they are allowed to provide scant details to the public. The release of body-cam video has become common practice around the country after several high-profile, police-involved shootings. But in Kansas, a new state law is one of the most restrictive in the nation, allowing agencies to shelve footage that could shed more light on controversial cases.

▪ Kansas became the first state to fully privatize Medicaid services in 2013, and now some caregivers for people with disabilities say they have been asked to sign off on blank treatment plans — without knowing what’s being provided. In some of those cases, caregivers later discovered their services had been dramatically cut...

Kansas is one of four states that do not require public notice of all regular public meetings, according to a Star analysis of the 50 states’ open meetings laws. The Kansas Open Meetings Act only requires notice be given to individuals who have requested it.

And Kansas and Arkansas are the only two states that do not require minutes to be kept of a public meeting...

The state also grants tax breaks worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year to lure businesses. Trouble is, you’ll never know who got those credits or how much. The state does what most states do not: It forbids the disclosure — even to lawmakers — of the recipients and how much they received. In Missouri and other states, that information is available online.

Aside from using “gut-and-go” measures and anonymous bills, lawmakers also can keep their votes from being disclosed to the public in committee meetings where much of the legislative work is done.

House rules don’t require committee votes to be logged unless a member requests his or her vote be recorded. The Senate only requires that the number of votes for and against an action be recorded.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday he did not doubt the accusations leveled against the man running to fill his old seat in the Senate.

"I have no reason to doubt these young women," Sessions told Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, as she held up visual aids during a hearing of the House judiciary committee.

According to this, so far only 3 have actually asked for their names to be removed from the list.

Yeah the headline's pretty misleading

It is often said that the left won the culture war and the right won the economic war. From the point of view of angry young white men, however, neither side has scored any victories. A generation ago, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher championed the individual and the market, while liberals abandoned institutions like religion, national pride, even the nuclear family in favor of individual freedom. Together, right and left created a world in which a young person could invent his own identity and curate his own personal brand online, but also had dimmed hopes for enjoying what used to be considered the most basic elements of a decent life—marriage, a job, a house, a community. (Liberalism claimed that a village could raise a child, but never got around to building the village.)

Amid this desert of meaning into which Millennials were born, the new far right expertly pinpointed the existential questions, particularly for those who couldn’t be permitted a collective identity, namely straight white men: Who are we? What is our story? What is our future?

He also arrived at a more fortuitous moment. Anglin and his ilk like to talk about the Overton Window, a term that describes the range of acceptable discourse in society. They’d been tugging at that window for years only to watch, with surprise and delight, as it flew wide open during Donald Trump’s candidacy. Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been. Anglin is the alt-right’s most accomplished propagandist, and his writing taps into some of the same anxieties and resentments that helped carry Trump to the presidency—chiefly a perceived loss of status among white men.

Six days into his Whitefish campaign, Anglin announced phase two: an armed protest. “Montana has extremely liberal open carry laws,” he wrote on The Daily Stormer. “My lawyer is telling me we can easily march through the center of the town carrying high-powered rifles.” He scheduled the event for January 16, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and predicted that about 200 people would show up for a “James Earl Ray Day Extravaganza” in honor of King’s assassin. He promised to bus skinheads in from the Bay Area.

As national news outlets picked up the story, frightened Whitefish residents gathered for a community meeting, where Dial, the police chief, saw a 90-year-old Jewish couple trembling with fear. Some people had alarm systems installed. A rabbi had paranoid visions of skinheads in the woods with night-vision goggles and scoped weapons. The police increased patrols.

Montana’s governor, Steve Bullock, swooped into town, as did representatives of the Anti-Defamation League. The president of the World Jewish Congress demanded that authorities halt the march, calling it a “dangerous and life-threatening rally that puts all of America at risk.” Anglin stoked the hysteria by claiming that European nationalists, along with a Hamas representative and a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, were coming too. “Nothing can stop us,” he declared.

In the end, no one showed up—no European nationalists, no Hamas representatives, no armed skinheads. There was no “March on Whitefish.” Instead Anglin slunk away, having panicked a small town for a month. The Whitefish attack cemented his reputation as the trollmaster of the alt-right. But it left some wondering about the movement’s commitment to its cause. Was this all just a sick joke?

Over the coming months, however, Anglin continued to build his audience and urge his followers to take their hate offline, into the real world. In August, when white nationalists actually did stage a major rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, many of his readers were there, chanting slogans he had coined. The alt-right, it became clear, was coming off the message boards and into the streets.

By then, I’d spent months reporting on Anglin, trying to understand who he was and how he’d built such a following, as well as how serious a threat he and the rest of the alt-right actually posed. Anglin’s path to white nationalism was disturbing, and more circuitous than I could have imagined. But it fit a pattern that scholars have identified, in that he seems to have been driven, at least initially, more by a desire for status and belonging than by deeply held beliefs. Anglin wanted to be somebody, and the internet gave him a way.