August 28, 2022

Another way the US is divided: states that allow corporal punishment in schools

Readers: Please check the sidebar to see numerous other stories. They have many photo essays from trips around Portland, Oregon documenting beautiful scenery and reviewing many unique restaurants many of which are off the beaten path. You can click any photo to enlarge it. Unfortunately the sidebar has no easy reference titles to you have to click more or less at random to see the stories. For the most recent blog story click on the top of the right column.

 Here's my "about me" May 2018 biographical page.

 I'm taking some time off from posting on Daily Kos so I plan to write some of my thoughts about politics here and also post them on my public Facebook page. For a long period I didn't post any political stories on this blog.



Click image to enlarge

I watched an MSNBC story about how many schools allow and use corporal punishment and they flashed a map on the screen but I couldn't grab my iPhone to take a photo so I found a map online. It didn't surprise me how this map reflected the divisions in our country between the hard-right states and the more moderate to left and progressive states.

When I looked for some articles I found this from a few days ago:




On almost every measure of beliefs about matters effecting how people live their lives that touches even remotely on the extreme agenda of the right-wing form abortion to teaching about the role of racism in our history to anything having to do with LGBTQ+ issues, the country is divided like shown in this map. A few years ago terms like WOKE and CRT weren't even in the political lexicon. 

Now we have this new map that would like like a map of the old Confederacy.


Below: legend for map



Now if you compare the two maps you see how if we consider the map including states that allow corporal punishment to have many more beliefs and values in common with the Confederacy we may conclude that  in some ways the South has made major gains in their attempt to win the Civil War.

Note how Kansas, Colorado,Wyoming, and Idaho stick up west and north with Idaho abutting my state of Oregon.

With strict anti-abortion law now enacted or about to go into effect in Idaho, Oregon is gearing up by opening Planned Parenthood clinics in towns near the border. Unfortunately eastern Oregon is very conservative and residents along the Idaho border are to happy with this. For example:

In Oregon-Idaho border town, planned abortion clinic receives little welcome from locals

In our own way here in Oregon we are fighting our own civl way against the resurgent Confederacy.

For the first time since I moved to Oregon from progressive Massachusetts about 10 years ago I am very anxious about the outcome of of race for governor and several other positions. See: 

If Oregon independent governor candidate Betsy Johnson wins it may be a disaster for progressives






 

Some reflections on politics and being banned from Daily Kos

Readers: Please check the sidebar to see numerous other stories. They have many photo essays from trips around Portland, Oregon documenting beautiful scenery and reviewing many unique restaurants many of which are off the beaten path. You can click any photo to enlarge it. Unfortunately the sidebar has no easy reference titles to you have to click more or less at random to see the stories. Here's my "about me" May 2018 biographical page.

 I'm taking some time off from posting on Daily Kos so I plan to write some of my thoughts about politics here and also post them on my public Facebook page. For a long period I didn't post any political stories on this blog.

Today's featured story from the web (with my image) 

The ex-president is ready to "burn down the republic" if need be to stop prosecutors from going after him, according to a former GOP congressman.

Excerpt:

America can have peace and tranquility. Or it can have a criminal prosecution of Donald Trump. It cannot have both.

Presenting this mob-like ultimatum appears to have become the former president’s strategy as the FBI and the Department of Justice close in on Trump’s possession of and refusal to return top secret documents he took with him to his Florida social club when he left the White House following his failed coup attempt.

“Nice store you got here. Be a shame if something happened to it,” said Glenn Kirschner, a federal prosecutor who spend more than two decades in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., comparing it to “protection rackets” used by organized crime. “Nice country you got here. Be a shame if a civil war destroyed it.”

In near daily statements on his social media platform, in fundraising emails and in interviews, Trump has called law enforcement officials corrupt, illegitimate and reminiscent of Soviet Russia as he demands that prosecutors drop their investigations.

Even more ominously, Trump, via his legal team, delivered a message to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Aug. 11, three days after the search of his Mar-a-Lago residence, that might have been lifted from the film “The Untouchables”:

The HuffPost top story:







Click image to go to Facebook. I think you need to be a member to read it.




I got banned from posting anything on Daily Kos for a week. It came out for something I put in the above story. I can't post a story nor can I post comments to any story for a week. This is because I put a link to a misogynist phrase (b---h on wheels - what was I thinking? I wonder if I called her a harridan if I would have been banned) noting that it was sexist in the story. You can read the story and see what you think.

This is what got me banned:

The mother of seven is married to Jesse M. Barrett, an attorney. I don’t know anything about her home life but I rather doubt she assumes the handmaiden role with her husband at home. I don’t want to be sexist here but I have a feeling she can fit this definition at times.


They are really scrupulous if they found this on their own (hard to believe as it means they have people reading every story) or a regular reader flagged me, or they have a sophisticated algorithm that follows links which is possible.
The is no appealing such bans. They also keep the story on the website despite objecting to something which is in it.
Coincidentally I really messed up with the original story because I based it on a satire which I was fooled by. Commenters pointed thus out. Fortunately I had a chance to put an explanation on the story before I was banned from posting.

So what would I be thinking of writing about this morning if I could post there? I always attempt to write from an original perspective or on a subject few if any others are writing about.

There's the bass drumbeat, the thump, thump, thump of Trump, Trump, Trump and as I listened to pundits on MSNBC and read the columns in The New York Times and The Washington Post (WaPo) as well as progressive websites which publish opinion like Salon I find numerous good article offering an original slant. I also find clever satire by the Dana Milbank and Alexandra Petri on WaPo.

I laughed out loud at Milbank's OpEd:
 

Herschel Walker’s anti-tree campaign is genius

It is time for us to harden our hearts against the hardwoods, and we shouldn’t go soft on the softwoods, either. Of course, that’s easy for me to say given my profession’s tree-killing heritage; we in the newspaper business still coldly refer to the print paper as the “dead-tree edition.” But trees have been a green, leafy menace for humans ever since Adam and Eve ate forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

George Washington may not have chopped down the cherry tree, but he should have: Japanese cherry blossoms now cause massive traffic jams in the capital every spring. True, an apple falling from a tree tipped Isaac Newton off to gravity, but it just as easily could have concussed him.

Cats get stuck in trees. Tree branches knock out our power lines. Those forest fires devastating the West? Wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have trees. And, without trees, we wouldn’t have to rake the forest anymore, the way they do in Finland.

We are training, but there is no sign yet of my AR-15. Instead, we watched a long PowerPoint about keeping people’s data private and how to use the computer system. It was very frustrating because it contained over 85 slides, and each slide I thought to myself, “This will be the one with the AR-15 and glorious battle plan,” and then it was just about how to remove staples and then add them back later, and this happened 85 times. I asked when we would get to torment the middle class with audits, but Gregory Dunbar (who will sit next to me) said that there is nothing in our mission about that and actually having discretion to audit people who don’t report above $400,000 in income is good because otherwise tax cheats would just all report $399,999, which had not occurred to me. All the computers here are very old and there are big piles of paper everywhere.

Training is ended, they say. Still no AR-15. I tried to ask, but people kept saying, “You mean a Form 1015?” Instead, I am seated at a desk, where I have to manually enter data from tax forms into a very, very old computer. The last person who occupied this desk was somebody named Phyllis, and there is a card wishing her a happy retirement left behind on the desk and a drawing by her grandson taped to the monitor. I do not see the swelling ranks of an 87,000-person army. I asked where the others were and Gregory said, “What others?” I hope they give me my weapon and my mission soon. I told Gregory that and he laughed. After lunch, he gave me a rubber hat to put on my finger to protect it from paper cuts. “There,” he said, “now you are properly armed for your task.” It does really help, though.

With creative satirists like this it is difficult for me to come up with ideas that come close to their's in originality, let alone be able to write as well as they do.

Here are some of the recent stories I posted on Daily Kos. You can see approximately how many people read them in the column with the left curved arrow which shows the umber of comments. Note the story about Pabst had 226 comments. This suggests readers liked y story but in fact none of the comments had to do with the point of my story. They alll had t do with debating beer.

The stars indicated how many people recommended a story. As you look down the list you can see which stories had the most readers and see that it is is mixed bag as to the topics that interest reader of this very popular progressive website.

Other recent stories below. All 1,400 plus of my Kos stories here.


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