Stacey Abrams has been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize for her work to promote nonviolent change via the ballot box. https://t.co/XPDzxaWFb6
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 1, 2021
01
Feb
21
112 Responses to “Black History: Change Maker!”
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Obama White House.gov
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The People’s View
- Follow me at my new venture: Reclaim the Fight Spandan Chakrabarti
- Ignore the bait: Why it’s the right strategy for Democrats to focus SCOTUS fight on health care Spandan Chakrabarti
- BIG: Judge halts Trump administration attempt to shortcut the census Spandan Chakrabarti
- Trump doesn't want peaceful transition of power. Legally, it doesn’t matter. Spandan Chakrabarti
- Fauci goes off on Rand Paul Spandan Chakrabarti
Smartypants
- Why Didn't Trump Sign the Executive Order Mobilizing the Military in His Attempted Coup?
- Who Knew Paul McCartney Was Such a Good Dad?
- The NYT Editorial Board's "Big Mac Test" Is One Hot Mess
- GOP Dysfunction on Display in Republican Primaries
- Some Perspective on Biden's Approval Ratings and What They Mean for the 2022 Midterms
Steve Benen
- Mayor Adams: NYC's plan against violence balances intervention and prevention
- Professor's civil rights lecture canceled over CRT concerns
- 8,500 U.S. troops now on high alert amid Ukraine crisis
- Georgia judge approves request for grand jury in Trump election interference probe
- Senators move forward with Electoral Count Act update
The Obama Diary 
Good Evening TODers!!! Thank you, Nerdy!!!
Good evening!
Hey Neighbor! 👋🏾
Hello to you, Neighbor!!! I trust you’re staying warm.
Most definitely 😁
I don’t understand why Republicans are still in charge of Senate committees.
Why though?
It’s something to do with the rules of understanding they both (McConnell and Schumer) have to agree to b/c it’s 50-50. I think this will lead to a vote getting rid of the filibuster more quickly than planned. McConnell is an evil bastard.
Okay. Thanks for the explanation.
My Grandmother just LOVED Tony! She passed on that enthusiastic love to my Aunt Edna and me. I used to serenade them with “I left My Heart in San Francisco…”
It IS hypnotizing. Thanks for sharing this.
Hahahaha
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-black-innovators-who-elevated-the-united-states-reassessing-the-golden-age-of-invention/
From 1870 to 1940, Black people living in the North were eight times more likely to be awarded a patent than Black people living in the South. White people in the North were three times more likely to invent a patented technology than white people in the South, but regional effects were weaker for white people and they were much less concentrated in the South than Black people.
In the North, Black people’s share of patents equaled their share of population. Black people accounted for 1.6% of the North’s population and 1.6% of patents across the decades studied. The rate of patenting per capita among northern Black and white residents was extremely high (0.31 per 1,000 residents for Black people and 0.39 for white people). Both of these rates exceed the U.S. rate of invention for most of the country’s history and approach the highest rates observed around the world today at the country level.[2]
With 50,000 total patents, Black people accounted for more inventions during this period than immigrants from every country except England and Germany. In our database, 87% of inventions were traced to people born in the United States, and 2.7% of the U.S. total were invented by Black Americans, which is a larger share than nearly every immigrant group. After accounting for patents during nondecennial years, we estimate that Black people accounted for just under 50,000 total patents during this period.
Ridiculous that the Judge would even consider her request.
Yet the rwnj’s are having conniptions over Ella’s modeling contract…
Good evening TODville.
Happy Black History month.
Stacey Abrams news re: Nobel nomination is fantastic. She deserves that and more. She is truly amazing. Her determination us admirable. Wishing you all the best Ms.Abrams.
What is this that I read that Lindsey Graham is still chairing his committee and that Merrick Garland has not gotten a hearing. Did Lindsey have an out of body experience and now thinks he is Mitch McConnell?
Never heard of her before. Brave.
The yakety-yak better end soon ….
And, THANK YOU AGAIN {{{{{{{Nerdy}}}}}}} for opening the TOD door!
Lindsey, you’re no longer chair of Judiciary Committee. Sit your sorry arse down. Yr 2-sided mouth speakeasy is over. Go away. Now isn’t soon enough.
DU’s very furst paper submitted to the renowned and reputed International Society of Nephrology and their research arm, Kidney International, got accepted today. She has published in many local forums but this is her furst international recognition. They said her study was novel and not been done before. 🙂 🙂 🙂
AMK, that’s effing brilliant news! Pardon my effs! But tried to find one word for “woo hoo, fireworks, raise the roof” etc. All blessings for DU! Please extend our congrats! 💞
Thanks, Gazelle. It’s a BFD indeed, as uncle Joe would say.
Wow! That is brilliant! Congratulations on having such a fantastic daughter! She’s very lucky to have such a supportive father!
Thanks, mtm. We are all proud of her hard work and resulting achievements.
AMK … Congratulations to your daughter and you, for job well done and for this extremely proud moment.
Cheers to an even brighter future.
Thank you, jey.
Fabulous! Congratulations to her for all her hard work. This is a BFD, indeed:)
It is indeed. Thank you.
congrats to DU and her supportive family amk!!!
Thank you.
Where do you get Stevie Wonder & Bill Withers & John Legend on same stage. (OK, let me back up on John, he’s everywhere! 😂) 💞
GOP may be using numbers from the Congressional Budget Office to justify lowering the amount of President Biden’s Relief Package. IMO (and I am not an economist) these numbers are like looking at the stock market as an indicator of economic wellness. It means NOTHING to MAIN STREET…people who are unemployed, struggling to feed their families and provide them with basic needs, people who are facing eviction. Does the CBO take these factors into account?
President Biden’s package is looking at the REALITY OF NOW. He is addressing an issue that is happening now and has already been pushed out longer than it should have been.
“Economy Rebounding More Quickly, CBO Says, Clouding Biden Plans”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-01/cbo-sees-a-stronger-u-s-recovery-after-stimulus-moves-in-2020
The Congressional Budget Office predicted the U.S. economy will recover faster than previously expected from the pandemic slump — an upgrade that could make it harder for President Joe Biden to win support for his $1.9 trillion relief plan.
The CBO, a nonpartisan arm of the legislature, forecast that gross domestic product will increase at an average annual rate of 1.7% between 2020 and 2024, according to its economic outlook released Monday. That’s 0.7 percentage point higher than the last estimate in July. Since then the rollout of vaccines has begun, bringing the pandemic’s end into clearer sight.
Georgia Republicans did not take the recent losses (wins in my book) very well.
If we’re lucky, she won’t be a member for long.
Good Morning Family! One of the many things I always loved about Forever POTUS is his love of independent bookstores. 😍
Good Morning, 🍑Peach Neighbor!!! How are you doing this blustery 🌬🌬frosty morning?
Trying to stay warm, Girl! Brrrrr!
I know that’s right!!!
Donald tRump attempted to overthrow an election and install himself as an autocrat.
This is an inconvenient truth for congressional Republicans who were complicit in the scheme—the 147 representatives and senators who joined in objecting to the Electoral College vote, plus the many others who helped propagate Trump’s lies—so they want his impeachment trial to be about something else. Anything else.
Some of them want to raise process questions, using constitutional mumbo jumbo …
Some of them want to turn the proceedings into a circus.
This is the turf where the Republicans think they win. The pedantic. The preposterous. The political gamesmanship.
The turf where they lose? Donald Trump’s actions. His ongoing refusal to own up to his lies.
That’s why the Democratic senators should call Lindsey Graham’s bluff. If Trump’s defense team wants to call pro-coup witnesses, have at it. But Donald Trump himself should be one of them.
Absofuckinglutely!
Absolutely love this!
Humanity in a finer moment.
Transfixed
Brian Sicknick, Capitol Police officer who died from riot injuries …
“Victimating” …..
😀😀 So cute.
LIVE NOW…
Two FBI agents were killed and three others wounded in a shooting Monday morning that occurred as law enforcement officers were trying to serve a search warrant in a “violent crimes against children case” at an apartment in Sunrise, Fla., the bureau said. The suspected shooter was also killed, the FBI said.
The FBI said in a statement that a team of law enforcement officers was at the apartment, located near 10100 Reflections Boulevard, to serve the warrant.
“77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election” (NYT)
by Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and
Michael S. Schmidt
“Hours after the United States voted, the president declared the election a fraud — a lie that unleashed a movement that would shatter democratic norms and upend the peaceful transfer of power.”
“A New York Times examination of the 77 democracy-bending days between election and inauguration
shows how, with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.
In the aftermath of that broken afternoon at the Capitol, a picture has emerged of entropic forces coming together on Trump’s behalf in an ad hoc, yet calamitous, crash of rage and denial.
But interviews with central players, and documents including previously unreported emails, videos and social media posts scattered across the web, tell a more encompassing story of a more coordinated campaign.
Across those 77 days,
the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.”
(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/us/trump-election-lie.html)
—wow, as in wow.
“New Reporting Shows White House Role In Directing Trump Mob To Capitol”
“Jim Rutenberg, writer-at-large for the New York Times, talks with Rachel Maddow about new reporting from the New York Times that the January 6th Trump rally was not meant to end in a march on the Capitol until the Trump White House took over the planning.”
Rachel Maddow gave a good account of the games Republicans played with President Obama when he tried to get bipartisan support with some of his bills. It is also a reminder of why we should not play the game now.
Republicans are not actually trying to negotiate in any kind of ordinary sense. They are trying to sabotage Biden’s presidency and manipulate the media. So long as the GOP remains a party of conspiracy-mongering insurgents trying to overthrow democracy, there can be no real bipartisanship.
These Republicans are not carrying out their half of the negotiation ritual. They simply took what Biden wants and lopped off more than two-thirds without so much as a whisper of serious justification — cutting the $1,400 direct assistance checks to $1,000 and further limiting who would receive them, cutting the boost to unemployment insurance by $100 and making it three months shorter, and slicing out the $15 minimum wage and aid to state and local government entirely. (This latter omission should be a complete deal-breaker by itself.)
Whereas the Biden administration has a lengthy justification for every item in its package (and again, if anything, it is too small), these Republican senators have only expressed some vague, phoney-baloney worries about the deficit.
Most Republican members of Congress could not articulate clear, logical objections to Biden’s bill if their lives depended on it, nor come up with a list of reasonable legislative priorities they actually support — and even if they could, trying to actually get half a loaf as part of a good-faith bargain with Democrats would instantly cause right-wing media to brand them as sellout traitors. What this group is doing is trying to trick Biden into cutting down the size of his pandemic rescue package, so he cannot get credit for fixing the economy, and trying to trick the media into blaming their inevitable refusal to compromise on Biden instead of themselves. Even better if it distracts from the ongoing plot to rig future elections with extreme gerrymandering at the state level.
And the fab Senator Durbin cannot be serious that GOP might vote for the Bill after watering it down.
History has shown us otherwise – like a trillion times.
Dems have to stop reminiscing about the bygone days. We have to learn from our experiences and realize that times have changed and it’s not the GOP you used to know.
He may have said it knowing full well…but as a nod to good faith.
NEIL KATYAL,
fmr Acting Solictor General of the United States, to Williams about the Impeachment Trial:
“We don’t know exactly what that new legal team will be arguing,
but we do it’s certainly possible that trump will push them again to argue the Big Lie and all of that.
We do know they are going to also argue ‘that you can’t impeach a former president’.
And here I think everyone should keep their eye on McConnell and not Mitch McConnell. But the other McConnell, the prominent conservative jurist Michael McConnell. He’s made a powerful argument. And look, you know if a former official can’t be barred from future office holding, that would just put pressure on all the other things in our system of government that would go after a lawless official like Donald Trump. But that would mean criminal prosecution. Because the founders were all about checks and balances and the provision of a remedy.
And it just can’t be that Donald Trump:
A) can’t be impeached for Ukraine – because they said ‘America should wait for the election’.
B) can’t be impeached for January 6th because ‘He’’ll soon be out of office’.
People like this have to face a tribunal.
You don’t get to attack or precipitate a violent attack on a co-ordinate branch of government, and get to go retire in Florida peacefully.”
https://help.twitter.com/using-twitter/how-to-tweet#source-labels
Neil Katyal also said about Marjorie Greene,
that stripping her of committee is not enough. That it doesn’t reflect the gravity. He said there are 2 ways to remove her: Article 1, section 5, each House can expel with two thirds Vote. Also the 14th Amendment, she engaged in Insurrection, that one by majority vote. He said we should welcome the process.
AOC Instagram Live
Describes TERRIFYING Capitol Final Moments in emotional video
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did an instagram live stream where she described what she felt would be her last day on earth during the events at the capitol via Trump’s cronies. She also suggested that she was a survivor,
and that if she passed, she would have felt like she served her purpose as a leader of a progressive movement that would continue beyond her.”
No one should downplay what happened that day and AOC’s IG.
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez hid in Congresswoman Katie Porter’s office for 6 hours, along with others.
AOC went through all the cupboards looking for a place to hide. They stayed in the dark and silent,
hoping the mob would pass on by. There had been no directions for where to shelter after the meeting room was evacuated. Rep. Porter recounted AOC saying,
“I hope I get to be a Mom, I hope I don’t die today.” And “I knew I shouldn’t have worn heels.”
—Unforgettable. Will congressionals and state legislators get danger money going forward?
—Lock up all the seditionists and traitors and throw away the key! Don’t tell me after going through some version of this themselves and hearing this terrifying account, that McConnell & Co will fail to act.
Rep. Porter spoke about this to O’Donnell last night. And someone on that show talked about how much violence we’re seeing towards women eg. Speaker Pelosi. AOC knew she’d be violently attacked if the insurrectionists found her: Fox News made very sure of that.
A truly terrifying experience
New post.
https://obamadiary.wordpress.com/2021/02/02/star/