Two relatively small things happened this week that strike me as being important, and I am worried that they, and the larger story they tell, might get lost in the midst of this week's terrible news. So ignore this at will, and I will put down a marker. At a press conference on Thursday, Representatives Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Daniel Goldman (D-NY), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Joaquin Castro (D-TX), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Joe Neguse (D-CO), Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Colin Allred (D-TX), Mike Levin (D-CA), Josh Harder (D-CA), Raul Ruiz (D-CA), and Senator Rob Menendez (D-NJ) announced they have formed the Congressional Dads Caucus. Ironically, the push to create the caucus came from the Republicans' long fight over electing a House speaker, as Gomez and Castro, for example, were photographed taking care of their small children for days as they waited to vote. That illustration of men having to adjust to a rapidly changing work environment while caring for their kids "brought visibility to the role of working dads across the country, but it also shined a light on the double standard that exists," Gomez said. "Why am I, a father, getting praised for doing what mothers do every single day, which is care for their children?" He explained that caucus "is rooted in a simple idea: Dads need to do our part advancing policies that will make a difference in the lives of so many parents across the country. We're fighting for a national paid family and medical leave program, affordable and high-quality childcare, and the expanded Child Tax Credit that cut child poverty by nearly half. This is how we set an equitable path forward for the next generation and build a brighter future for our children." The new Dads Caucus will work with an already existing caucus of mothers, represented on Thursday by Tlaib. Two days before, on Tuesday, January 24, the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor released its initial findings from the new National Database of Childcare Prices. The brief "shows that childcare expenses are untenable for families throughout the country and highlights the urgent need for greater federal investments." The findings note that higher childcare costs have a direct impact on maternal employment that continues even after children leave home, and that the U.S. spends significantly less than other high-wage countries on early childcare and education. We rank 35th out of 37 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) made up of high-wage democracies, with the government spending only about 0.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) compared to the OECD average of 0.7%. These two stories coming at almost the same time struck me as perhaps an important signal. The "Moms in the House" caucus formed in 2019 after a record number of women were elected to Congress, but in the midst of the Trump years they had little opportunity to shift public discussion. This moment, though, feels like a marker in a much larger pattern in the expansion of the role of the government in protecting individuals. When the Framers wrote the U.S. Constitution, they had come around to the idea of a centralized government after the weak Articles of Confederation had almost caused the country to crash and burn, but many of them were still concerned that a strong state would crush individuals. So they amended the Constitution immediately with the Bill of Rights, ten amendments that restricted what the government could do. It could not force people to practice a certain religion, restrict what newspapers wrote or people said, stop people from congregating peacefully, and so on. And that was the opening gambit in the attempt to use the United States government to protect individuals. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, it seemed clear that a government that did nothing but keep its hands to itself had almost failed. It had allowed a small minority to take over the country, threatening to crush individuals entirely by monopolizing the country's wealth. So, under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, Americans expanded their understanding of what the government should do. Believing it must guarantee all men equal rights before the law and equal access to resources, they added to the Constitution the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, all of which expanded, rather than restricted, government action. The crisis of industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century made Americans expand the role of the government yet again. Just making sure that the government protected legal rights and access to resources clearly couldn't protect individual rights in the United States when the owners of giant corporations had no limits on either their wealth or their treatment of workers. It seemed the government must rein in industrialists, regulating the ways in which they did business, to hold the economic playing field level. Protecting individuals now required an active government, not the small, inactive one the Framers imagined. In the 1930s, Americans expanded the job of the government once again. Regulating business had not been enough to protect the American people from economic catastrophe, so to combat the Depression, Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to use the government to provide a basic social safety net. Although the reality of these expansions has rarely lived up to expectations, the protection of equal rights, a level economic playing field, and a social safety net have become, for most of us, accepted roles for the federal government. But all of those changes in the government's role focused on men who were imagined to be the head of a household, responsible for the women and children in those households. That is, in all the stages of its expansion, the government rested on the expectation that society would continue to be patriarchal. The successful pieces of Biden's legislation have echoed that history, building on the pattern that FDR laid down. But, in the second half of his Build Back Better plan—the "soft" infrastructure plan that Congress did not pass—Biden also suggested a major shift in our understanding of the role of government. He called for significant investment in childcare and eldercare, early education, training for caregivers, and so on. Investing in these areas puts children and caregivers, rather than male heads of households, at the center of the government's responsibility. Calls for the government to address issues of childcare reach back at least to World War II. But Congress, dominated by men, has usually seen childcare not as a societal issue so much as a women's issue, and as such, has not seen it as an imperative national need. That congressional fathers are adding their voices to the mix suggests a shift in that perception and that another reworking of the role of the government might be underway. This particular effort might well not result in anything in the short term—caucuses form at the start of every Congress, and many disappear without a trace—but that some of Congress's men for the first time ever are organizing to fight for parental needs just as the Department of Labor says childcare costs are "untenable" strikes me as a conjunction worth noting. — Notes: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/wb/wb20230124 https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/NDCP/WB_IssueBrief-NDCP-final.pdf https://gomez.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=2737 https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3831875-house-lawmakers-launch-congressional-dads-caucus/ You're currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Tuesday, January 31, 2023
ANS -- January 28, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
This is an interesting article by Heather Cox Richardson, plus one of our readers sent me a copy of it, saying "you might be interested in this article." I am. It's about the ways the focus of the country, and the Constitution, have changed over our history - and may be changing now. Read it.
--Kim
Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>Unsubscribe
To:kimc0240@yahoo.com
Sat, Jan 28 at 9:35 PM
Saturday, January 28, 2023
ANS -- The Week in Tweets and Memes
This is a page full of short comments and very short videos that are mostly hilarious, and somewhat political. I recommend going to the page to see the videos, since it's unlikely they will email properly.
--Kim
The Week in Tweets and Memes
9 hr ago
Each Saturday, I do a round-up of the amazing and often humorous takes I come across while doing my research. This is a bonus offering to thank my paid supporters, but it's here for everyone to enjoy for at least the next few installments.
Some weeks the Internet makes you smile and laugh, and some weeks it makes you grieve and think. We got a bit of both this week, so let's take a gander.
The horrifying release of videos, one showing five Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols to death and the other a home intruder assailant striking Paul Pelosi with a hammer, left the nation stunned. Well, most of the nation. It didn't stop some very bad takes from emerging from the places we have come to expect.
Memphis hasn't even released the bodycam footage of Tyre Nichols' death and Fox's Brian Kilmeade is already trying to both-sides it: "Does it bother you that you don't have the cops' perspective at all? It looks overwhelming, I get it. But don't we need both sides?"
As actor Jon Cryer quickly pointed out,
Police bodycam footage is *literally* the "cop's perspective".
Kat Abu @abughazalehkat
The right was quick to latch onto the idea that this police homicide couldn't be "racist" because the five officers were themselves Black. Let me stop you right there, said political commentator Mondaire Jones:
If you think the Memphis police officers had to be white in order to exhibit anti-Blackness, you need to take that AP African American Studies course Ron DeSantis just banned.
The killers were part of an elite police force in Memphis called "Scorpion" which was created supposedly to suppress crime. But this was a traffic stop, and they dragged a man from his car to kill him and attempted to cover it up. Some thoughts on this and how to reform it:
1. Don't create "elite" police units who get special privileges, less oversight, and get to take shortcuts. 2. Definitely don't give those units names like "Scorpion." 3. The cops who really, really want to work on those units are the last cops who should be working on them.
[police forces full of punisher logo tattoos and things called scorpion teams] how does this keep happening??
To be clear, the Memphis PD is just as responsible for the murder of Tyre Nichols as those 5 officers. 5 cops didn't randomly decide to murder him. They committed a murder they assumed would be sanctioned by the department. The surveillance video screwed them. Not their actions.
The release of the violent video itself was treated with breathless anticipation in the media, which is itself a really disturbing problem.
The way they've spent days & hours emphasizing the violence of Tyre Nichols' murder like it's a countdown to a movie release tells you everything about the depravity of the system we live under.
We didn't share the video on our social channels, but we did uplift a video about the life and beauty of Tyre Nichols life. You can see it here. If the video doesn't load due to size, click through to the tweet.
I'm not sharing or watching the video of Tyre Nichols having his life stolen. This is how we should remember him — as someone who was loved and who mattered. He should be alive and the work must never stop to ensure more lives aren't brutally taken.
As for the Paul Pelosi attack video, you know we're in the upside down when Geraldo Rivera is among the voices of reason:
Every journalist/host who sowed doubt and ridicule on the bonafides on the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi should feel a tinge of shame and regret. But you won't.
In other matters, Kat Abu (the first tweet in this thread) did a great summary of Fox News's priorities for the week, which were really something else:
Which leads us into the more bizarre antics of the right this week, beginning with the Vaccine Shakes. What are those? Anti-vaxxers on the internet have been posting videos of themselves supposedly shaking uncontrollably after having the Pfizer vaccine, which is weird because why did you take it if you're an anti-vaxxer?
Republicans: We refuse to get the vaccine but also we are all also having uncontrollable tremors from the vaccine that we didn't get.
This same logic applies to the death of "Diamond" of "Diamond and Silk" fame—two Black, right- wing, Trump-loving sisters infamous for peddling conspiracies including around vaccines. Diamond died from a heart condition, but Silk still alleged without basis that it was from the vaccine. This again makes zero sense if she had refused to take it. But that didn't stop Marjorie Three Names from chiming in:
I demand an IMMEDIATE investigation into Covid vaccines and the dramatic increase of people dying suddenly! This can no longer be ignored and is NOT political. https://t.co/5vOfMFJ57c
RSBN 🇺🇸 @RSBNetwork
(There is of course no dramatic increase of people dying suddenly except as it appears on social media through right wing propaganda.)
Trump made an awkward appearance at the funeral, at which he delivered this memorable line:
After Silk goes on and on about how much she loves Trump and all the great times they had together, Trump gets up and says this: "I knew Diamond, but I didn't know Silk at all. I just learned about Silk. You're fantastic."
Anyway, back to the shakes. Here is an example of what the internet was flooded with over the week:
@elonmusk @ScottAdamsSays This is me after 1 dose of Pfizer on 1/5/2021 in the hospital. I was a very healthy 45 year old who managed a surgery center. Two years later I am still having major issues
Yes, it got 13.8 million views. To address the absurdity of this and other copycat videos (and they were myriad), the internet went to work. Here are some of my favorites.
The makers of M&Ms succumbed to the political pressures exerted by the likes of Tucker Carlson and announced that the product's new spokesperson would be Maya Rudolph instead of the famous candies themselves. This led to some observations about that choice.
Maya Rudolph is a living legend, but I'm genuinely curious if they considered Eminem because... well... you know.
I don't think they realize that the people mad about the color of an m&m will also be mad at the color of maya rudolph
Ma&Ya's @mmschocolate
The other outrage, following on last week's fake outrage over natural gas ovens, is about natural women. Specifically, Aretha Franklin's iconic hit, "Natural Woman," which a small comedy / parody site in Norway demanded be taken off of Spotify as being anti-Trans. That's pretty funny, but not apparently to conservative media like Sky News of Australia, the UK's Daily Mail, and the New York Post, which ran the story as if the entire trans community had lost its damn mind and they were coming for Aretha.
A person created an obvious parody twitter account calling themselves 'Trans Cultural Mindful Alliance' (there's your first clue), and tweeted that trans people hate the song 'Natural Woman' by Aretha Franklin, and the press diligently 'reported' it as what trans people think. 1/
We should be greatly concerned that so many media outlets are reporting that the Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance has an issue with Aretha Franklin's song"Natural Woman," but not a single one visited the Twitter page to see that "parody/satire" are in the bio.
Outraged members of the right, including Don Jr., cited the incorrect reporting as they decided they would be the last defenders of black music from the civil right era.
Junior has become the latest right-winger to fall for the Norwegian parody account's post demanding Apple & Spotify remove Aretha Franklin's Natural Woman: "I stand with Aretha Franklin. I stand with classic, American, legendary songs."
The discovery of classified documents at Mike Pence's house took the pressure and spotlight off of President Biden for a spell, but it also produced this classic from Andy Borowitz of The New Yorker:
And now for some internet potpourri I stumbled across to brighten your day:
Learning that Paprika is just dried and crushed red bell peppers was really shocking. Like I dunno why I thought there was a Paprika tree somewhere
Click through if the video doesn't play, it's worth it:
And who among us hasn't…
I'm sorry, but you can't *always* be experiencing a higher volume of calls than average. That's not how averages work.
For some nostalgia, I remember the @ wars
The following is an amazing display of the prowess and dystopia of ChatGPT, asking it to compose a downsizing email whilst promoting executives, and using a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
And I would def watch this show:
Finally, for you grammarians, the AP Style Guide issued something so controversial it eventually had to delete it entirely. Because, you know, the French.
I saw this earlier and thought "surely this is a parody account. Surely. The placement is just too on the nose for a parody account." I am shocked to find out it was real.
That's it for the week! Have a great weekend and I'll see you Sunday night with a quick view ahead.
— Jay
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