The Mamas & The Papas - Monday Monday

GA-SEN: These counties will decide who wins the Georgia Senate runoff

Georgia voters are heading to the polls one more time to weigh in on the consequential election between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) and Republican Herschel Walker, and all eyes are on key counties in the Peach State to see how they perform.

Warnock outperformed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in predominately Democratic counties like DeKalb, Fulton and Clayton. Meanwhile, Walker underperformed Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in predominately GOP counties like Forsyth, Cherokee and Hall. Experts say the key test will be how well both campaigns turn out those reliably blue and red counties.

“If there is anything to look at, I would be paying attention to if we see anemic turnout in traditionally Republican areas versus anemic turnout in traditionally Democratic areas, because whichever group has the most anemic turnout is probably going to be the side that loses,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University.

Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, said that Democrats’ focus on the large metro counties will be especially important.

“For a Democrat, that’s absolutely essential. Can’t make up the votes anyplace else,” he said.



https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3760234-these-counties-will-decide-who-wins-the-georgia-senate-runoff/

Our Best-Case Scenario: A Negotiated Breakup

While a national breakup would amount to the Civil War redux in fundamental cultural ways, it’s important to distinguish between history repeating and merely rhyming. This time around, no single irreconcilable moral issue equivalent to slavery is driving us toward a breakup—and no remotely equivalent economic stakes. In the antebellum South, enslaved Black people constituted half of the aggregate wealth of white people, and their labor generated a quarter of all white income; emancipation instantly reduced the median net worth of Southern white households by 38 percent, and of affluent ones by 75 percent. More than a third of American men (and boys) of military age, from 13 into their 40s, enlisted. I really don’t think tens of thousands of twenty-first–century Americans would be willing to kill or risk dying—let alone have their children die—in an insurgency to fight wokeness or to avenge the persecution of the former president, or for unfettered abortion rights, or to preserve the union.

But I do think things will get much worse—more abandonment of reality on the right, more political crises rooted in our inherently undemocratic electoral system, more violence—before they get better. Might a brief, shocking period of extreme civil disorder finally move the right’s elite enablers (Fox News, the donor class) to rein in or cut off or crush their most reckless nihilists and fantasists, leading to some restoration of the pre-radicalized Republican status quo ante? After watching them gradually (since the 1990s) and then suddenly (since 2016) become a party all about embracing liars and freaks and crooks, I’m not hopeful.

A citizenry’s extreme polarization doesn’t usually lead to civil war, but it does correlate strongly with a withering of democracy. A Georgia State University political scientist used a global historical database of democracies to study the ones that had become “perniciously polarized” since 1950. Through 1990, U.S. polarization was rated around one on a zero-to-four scale, about the same as in Canada, Western Europe, and Japan. But during the 1990s, the U.S. number increased, moving well beyond our peer countries and continuing to climb—in 2015 achieving a three rating, the political scientist’s threshold for “pernicious.” Today, those other rich democracies still hover around one, while we’re closing in on four. The report found more than 50 episodes of pernicious polarization around the world, and in two-thirds of the instances where it didn’t subside quickly, the country’s political system morphed from a democracy to an autocracy. Among the 10 that today remain both hyperpolarized and democratic, the only rich, developed one is the United States.

So it seems we may indeed be at a crossroads from which we can’t or won’t turn back to a more tranquil yesteryear, that ahead is either a grossly undemocratic 50-state union or a negotiated breakup.




https://newrepublic.com/article/168877/best-case-scenario-negotiated-breakup?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=EB_TNR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1670216782

9 trans lawmakers will serve on state legislatures against a backdrop of anti-LGBTQ bills

he historic number of bills targeting LGBTQ rights coincided with a record number of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer political candidates: At least 1,065 LGBTQ people ran for office this year, with an estimated 416 running for seats in state legislatures, according to an October report from the LGBTQ Victory Fund, an organization that supports queer people running for office. Of these 416 candidates, 281 made it to the general election, and 185 won — an Election Day win rate of 66%, its post-election analysis found.

The success of these candidates means that more openly LGBTQ people, including more transgender and nonbinary people, will hold office in state legislatures than ever before. Once all of the newly elected officials are seated, there will be nine transgender state legislators (up from eight this year) and nine nonbinary state legislators across the U.S., according to the LGBTQ Victory Institute, the group's research arm.

One of those new legislators will be New Hampshire’s James Roesener, a Democrat, who became the first transgender man elected to a state legislature in the U.S. this month, according to the group.

The 26-year-old said he decided to run for office due, in part, to the wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation introduced in states across the country, including in New Hampshire.

“Especially as a trans person, seeing all of the new political action happening towards my community really kind of inspired me to be a voice for trans people to be visible and help be a concrete part of making these decisions,” he said.




https://www.yahoo.com/now/recently-elected-trans-lawmakers-anti-151240576.html

Georgia candidate makes history as first known Muslim and Palestinian woman elected to state House

Ruwa Romman remembers the sadness she felt as an 8-year-old girl sitting in the back of a school bus watching classmates point to her house and erupt in vicious laughter.

“There’s the bomb lab,” they jeered in yet another attempt to brand her family as terrorists.

On Tuesday, the same girl – now a 29-year-old community organizer – made history as the first known Muslim woman elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, and the first Palestinian American elected to any office in the state.

After 10 months of relentless campaigning, the Democrat said she is eager to begin representing the people of District 97, which includes Berkeley Lake, and parts of Duluth, Norcross, and Peachtree Corners in Gwinnett County.

As an immigrant, the granddaughter of Palestinian refugees, and a Muslim woman who wears the hijab, or Islamic headscarf, the road to political office hasn’t been easy, especially in the very Christian and conservative South.



https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/politics/ruwa-romman-elected-muslim-palestinian-georgia-house-of-representatives-ctrp/index.html

Meet the 23-year-old Indian American who flipped a Republican Illinois district

Nabeela Syed, 23, came of age during the Trump administration. An Indian Muslim American who wears a hijab, she remembers the former president’s 2016 Election Day with perfect clarity. She was a a senior at her high school in Palatine, Illinois, and the racist, Islamophobic rhetoric being parroted around her sealed her first political memory.

“The day Trump got elected, I remember I cried in every single one of my classes,” she told NBC News. “I felt like this country was not for us. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I belong here.’ This is the only home I’ve ever known, and I was questioning whether or not I belonged here.”

Six years later, in November 2022, another election has come to mean something entirely different for Syed.

This year, her name was on the ballot as a representative for the Illinois General Assembly, and she won. In doing so, Syed flipped the Republican-held 51st District, in which she was born and raised. In January, she will become the youngest member of the assembly.




https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/meet-23-year-old-indian-american-flipped-republican-illinois-district-rcna56669

Muslim Americans make historic gains in midterm elections

Nabeela Syed made history in this year’s midterms when she defeated a Republican incumbent in Illinois’s 51st District, making her the youngest member of the Illinois General Assembly and among the first Muslims elected to the state legislature....

Syed is among a cohort of candidates who made history this year by becoming the first Muslim Americans to be elected to the state legislature in states including Texas, Illinois, Georgia and Minnesota. All of them are Democrats, many are women and a rising number are Somali Americans......

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the 2022 midterms have been a historic election: It tracked a record-breaking 145 American Muslim candidates running for local, state and federal office, including 48 state legislative candidates in 23 states.

As a result, more than 80 Muslim candidates won local, state, federal and judicial seats in over 20 states, according to a report from CAIR and the Jetpac Resource Center, a nonprofit that works to increase Muslim representation in U.S. government and politics. This signals the highest number of electoral wins among Muslim Americans since Jetpac and CAIR began tracking. In 2020, 71 were elected.

Jetpac also documented a record number of Muslims running for state legislative seats, including: 20 Muslim incumbents who successfully ran for reelection; two appointed lawmakers who ran for a full term and made history as the first Muslims elected to their respective state legislatures; plus 17 new Muslim candidates who won their campaigns.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/11/14/muslim-americans-make-historic-gains-midterm-elections/

BLACKPINK "WHISTLE" COACHELLA WEEKEND 1

Blackpink review - K-pop juggernaut with world-beating attitude

The four entertainers do not disappoint. From 2020’s The Album, Pretty Savage boasts a nagging motif and Korean-English raps, encapsulating the appeal of this most successful of girlbands: tough-girl “attitude”, but delivered with big, soaring choruses and sharp choreography. Every accusation that critics can level at pop – that it is mass-produced, that its cookie-cutter blandness feels unchallenging and repetitive – goes double for a lot of K-pop. But the very best of the genre (and Blackpink are huge for a reason) simply does away with everything musically boring. Soppy ballads are the very worst thing about pop. There are none here.

Tally, a banger from Born Pink, moves the attitude plot along significantly. “No one’s keeping tally, I do what I want with who I like,” sing Blackpink, boasting of their sexual freedom in a lyric liberally sprinkled with F-bombs. K-pop contracts are infamous for their restrictiveness, with trainees allegedly prevented from having relationships, and reportedly banned from fraternising with the opposite sex in the talent academies, allegedly until three years after their debut. Six years in, Blackpink are well clear of that clause (on paper at least), but tonight it feels as if they may still be singing this particular song from the heart.

Alternatively, they might just be very good at cosplaying a lot of swagger derived from US hip-hop and R&B. K-pop has long had huge issues with cultural appropriation that it has yet to satisfactorily resolve. Although not on a par, the band’s playful attempts at British accents tonight are pretty cringey too. You’re just grateful they don’t twerk.

For the uninitiated, there are introductions. Rosé – part-raised in Australia, her hair a pinky-blond colour – does a lot of the talking in between songs. Lisa, from Thailand, is one of Blackpink’s two rappers and seems to embody the Blackpink USP of sleek pugnaciousness a little more naturally than the others. The demure, enigmatic Jisoo draws particular affection from both the crowd and her bandmates, while rapper Jennie, who spent some years in New Zealand, handles more fan niceties. “Show me all your energy!” she asks.





https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/dec/03/blackpink-o2-arena-london-review-born-pink-k-pop-juggernaut-with-world-beating-attitude

Leading Economist Believes U.S. Will Avoid Recession

Inflation is cooling. Consumers are still spending. And hiring is slowing — but not collapsing. That’s why Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi is increasingly confident that the American economy will — narrowly — escape a recession.

“It’s going to be a struggle. It’s going to feel uncomfortable. But I think we are going to thread the needle,” Zandi told CNN Business in a phone interview earlier this week.

Zandi, whose forecasts are often cited by the White House, pointed to recent economic and market indicators that suggest the economy is not falling off a cliff despite widespread fears of a recession.

“The data over the last couple of months have been better than I would have thought. None of the financial market indicators suggest we have a recession dead ahead,” Zandi said.

New numbers released on Thursday show inflation, as measured by the Federal Reserve’s favorite metric, eased in October. That is raising hopes the US central bank can slow the pace of its massive interest rate hikes as soon as this month.



https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/01/economy/zandi-us-could-avoid-recession/index.html