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The GOP War On Women Demands A New Women’s Rights Agenda for America

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“Feminism” with a capital “F” is making a roaring comeback, thanks to the Republican War On Women: misogyny on steroids. It’s time we demand a new women’s rights agenda.

As a young girl growing up in basketball-crazed Indiana, I used to go to bed often crying myself to sleep as I was explicitly prohibited from playing on my school’s basketball team because I was a girl.

This was an enraging situation, indeed intolerable and I took action to level the playing field in a number of creative ways: I challenged every boy in the neighborhood — among them were Rocky Hollingsworth, Shorty Miller and John Patty ( real names) – to a game of “21.” I beat them methodically, recording their humiliating defeats for posterity in my first “little black book” of life.

It was 1966 — only two years after the Civil Rights Act became law and included sex as a protected class of Americans — when I ceremoniously confronted Mr. Willen, the principal of Lincoln Junior High School in Indianapolis, by thrusting my little black book into his face as prima facie evidence, arguing that if I can beat the boys, why can’t I join them too and proudly wear the uniform of the Lincoln Junior High basketball team? Why can’t I too feel the thrill of sinking a 15-foot jump shot from the corner before a cheering crowd?

In retrospect, the Willen encounter turned out to be my first lobbying experience (which has become a life-long avocation) and he compromised by inviting me to participate in an intramural sports wrestling program, an odious prospect I imagine he calculated to offer, thinking I would be dissuaded from pursuing my “ridiculous” goal of playing on the basketball team. But I leapt at the chance to demonstrate that I could play with the big boys, although it took me on a temporarily circuitous path away from my immediate goal of playing basketball.

My experience with Willen and the neighborhood boys taught me very early in life that girls were always a step down and you had to fight like hell to push against the invisible wall of sex discrimination. I experienced the searing taunts of “why do you want to be a boy?” and felt the loud silence of disapproval from my tongue-clucking teachers and classmates, who were horrified at my behavior and physically turned away from me because I sought to dribble and shoot a ball!

I did not ultimately benefit from the passage of the Title IX law that passed in 1972, the year I graduated from high school, but I have witnessed the thrilling transformation of women’s sports in America that has given girls the experience of physical discipline along with the special bonding with women teammates while playing for high school and NCAA titles and competing for Olympic medals in a multitude of sports.

There has been push back by the right wing on Title IX too, and who is surprised by it? Those of us who are the women of the “Baby Boomer” generation, who knew life before Title IX and were denied graduate school education via quotas which admitted minuscule numbers of women; who dodged and managed unplanned pregnancies before the Supreme Court decided in Griswold v. Connecticut which provided that women possessed the constitutionally-protected right of privacy to seek birth control for themselves and their families in 1965; and who were forced to seek illegal, back-alley abortions, while many died from botched abortions, before Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court in 1973, agreeing that women had the right to safe, legal abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy.

 


Consequently, these overt, sustained and outrageous attacks by elected officials of the Republican Party and their supporters—in Congress and state legislatures–on these hard fought gains is enraging and frightening for women’s rights advocates and has all the tell-tale signs of radicalizing a new generation of women, and some men, waking them up to the reality that misogyny has been openly tolerated by American society and its culture, writ large for a very long time.


 

A third, significant advance was achieved in 1994 when the domestic violence movement achieved passage of the first Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that was made federal law, marking 30 years of sustained advances on behalf of American women. Now Republicans in the Senate are blocking a floor vote on reauthorization of VAWA that extends protections to same-sex couples and illegal immigrants who may have been victimized by violent partners.

One of the first setbacks to women’s access to legal abortion was dealt by President Reagan in 1983 when he ordered military hospitals to no longer offer abortions to women service members or family members, effectively denying a constitutionally protected medical procedure to women who are serving our country, arguably putting them at great risk if forced to seek an illegal abortion, because medical privacy in the military is more permeable with real possibilities of misconduct charges for pregnancy out of wedlock, as an example.

These legal advances have taken decades to manifest which now reflect equal access for women in education, who have higher enrollments in colleges than men and have achieved parity in professional and graduate schools, save hard sciences; had achieved women’s access to birth control and safe, legal abortion procedures that was private and negotiated between a woman and her doctor and advances that have provided some protection and legal advocacy, albeit imperfectly, to women and some men, who are survivors of domestic violence.

Consequently, the overt, sustained and outrageous attacks by elected officials of the Republican Party and their supporters—in Congress and in state legislatures–on these hard fought gains is enraging and frightening for women’s rights advocates and has all the tell-tale signs of radicalizing a new generation of women, and some men, waking them up to the reality that misogyny has been openly tolerated by American society and its culture, writ large for a very long time.

“Feminism” with a capital “F” is making a roaring comeback, thanks to Republican misogyny on steroids.

Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh’s over-the-top attacks on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, labeling her a “slut” and “prostitute” for her advocacy before Congress calling for universities, including religion-affiliated ones, to provide insurance covered contraceptives for women’s health, may mark a turning point in American social and cultural history.

Limbaugh’s sustained efforts to paint Fluke as a modern-day Hester Prynne, the fictionally created “Scarlet Letter” adulteress of the 18th century, backfired against him, causing a firestorm and uprising by women and their supporters who effectively pressured more than 100 advertisers to drop Limbaugh’s show in less than two weeks. This could be a watershed moment in America, which has marked a momentary wholesale rejection of misogyny and sexism in the Fluke example. I hope it is such and time will tell if my supposition is true.

But a focus on Republican transgressions does not give Democrats a pass, which are not exempt from infection by this disease and should not get a pass when it is warranted. Bill Maher, a so-called comedian who appears regularly on HBO, customarily refers to women as “twats” and c_ _nts, contributed $1 million to the Obama Super PAC.  Maher waded into the Limbaugh firestorm by defending his lame apology to Fluke. Since then, David Axelrod, the Obama campaign manager who was scheduled to appear on Maher’s show has since indicated he will not be appearing for the time being. Nonetheless, the Obama Super PAC has accepted the money and does not appear it will be returning it anytime soon.

 


Women still earn less than men in America–making 78 percent of what men earn on average, according to the 2010 census.

The Senate has yet to ratify the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). We share this sad exception with countries such as Iran, Somalia and Sudan (and two small Pacific island countries).

The United States also has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the Western Hemisphere and the only modern democracy that has not ratified CEDAW.

The U.S. is ranked 78th by the International Parliamentary Union (tied with Turkmenistan) in women’s elected representation in Congress—16.8 percent are women (73) in the House of Representatives and 17 percent (17) in the Senate.

We are one of the lowest ranking Western democracies in the world with respect to women holding elected office.


 

With every challenge, there is opportunity and in this moment, we need to fight like hell. The state-by-state efforts to roll back access to legal abortion and now incredulously, these new obstructions to birth control medication too, reminds of the virulent attacks against the LGBT community who has been forced to fight these vigilantes similarly in a protracted battle to protect gains or fend off anti-homosexual measures on a state-by-state basis for years.

These tactics are not new strategies, but in the moment, there is an energized new coterie of right wing legislators who are initiating these rollbacks from Arizona to Pennsylvania. They must be stopped and turned out of office now and should be replaced with pro-choice women and men, who are across the board the most progressive lawmakers in support of policies and programs that uplift “others” in our society– those who have been left out of the American political compact–like the LGBT community, for example. Now more than ever, we need to elect many more pro-choice women to elective office.  It’s as if the Republic hangs in the balance amid this craziness that feels run-amuk and out-of-control. We don’t have another second to waste.

So in this election year it’s time to pull out our little black books, tell our stories and bring to bear not only the law, but also our votes. Civil disobedience actions have to be put on the table as a strategy that goes into the mix. It was effectively used in Virginia recently when demonstrators forced Gov. Bob McConnell to withdraw his support of state-sanctioned rape that would have required women to undergo a transvaginal sonogram prior to exercising their legal right to an abortion.

Grounding out a strategic women’s rights agenda in America must be sought with elevated efforts led by the president of the United States in view of these recalcitrant and calculated attacks on women’s lives and their bodies.

No one could be more proud of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s paradigm-shifting women and girls global agenda-setting at the State Department intended for the world, beyond America’s shores. And even though then-First Lady Hillary Clinton electrified the world’s women in Beijing in 1995 when she uttered “women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights,” America does not measure up to international human rights standards when it comes to women’s rights, where we decidedly lag behind Northern Europe and a number of Western European countries, in everything from political elected leadership to family medical leave and child care support.

Women still earn less than men in America–making 78 percent of what men earn on average, according to the 2010 census. And although women live longer than men in America, they are charged more for health insurance, which is to be remedied within two years by the Obama healthcare act. The Senate has yet to ratify the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). We share this sad exception with countries such as Iran, Somalia and Sudan (and two small Pacific island countries). The United States also has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the Western Hemisphere and the only modern democracy that has not ratified CEDAW.

The U.S. is ranked 78th by the International Parliamentary Union (tied with Turkmenistan) in women’s elected representation in Congress—16.8 percent are women (73) in the House of Representation and  17 percent (17) in the Senate.  We are one of the lowest ranking Western democracies in the world with respect to women holding elected office.

All of us–women, people of color and LGBT people are intertwined in this struggle–those of us who seek to tangibly manifest the pursuit of happiness; the promise of America’s Declaration of Independence is to seek civil rights and human rights predicated on  America’s political compact that it has carried out during the past 235 years–to bend toward freedom and  the arc of justice and to flourish in all our diversity–to this we strain and struggle toward and shall not yield.

Images by DonkeyHotey: Aspirin, Chastity Belt

Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.

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‘Antisemitic’: Trump Blasted for Attack on Jewish Democrats

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Donald Trump is attacking Jews who vote Democratic, barely days after the criminally-indicted ex-president threatened there would be a “bloodbath” if voters do not put him back in the Oval Office. His remarks, which include claiming Jews Democrats “hate” Israel and their own religion, were quickly labeled antisemitic.

“I actually think they hate Israel,” Trump on Monday told far right wing radio host Sebastian Gorka, who alleged the Biden administration and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “hate” Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

“I think they hate Israel. And the Democrat Party hates Israel,” Trump, upping the ante, responded. Gorka is his former White House aide who served briefly in the Trump administration before reportedly being “ousted.”

“I really believe they hate Israel,” Trump also said, and accused Majority Leader Schumer, a Democrat who has represented New York for the past quarter-century, of appearing to hate Israel, for “votes.”

READ MORE: ‘Easy Mark’: Why Trump’s $464M Bond Failure Makes Him a ‘Massive National Security Risk’

“I think it’s votes more than anything else, because he was always pro-Israel. He’s very anti-Israel now,” Trump continued, before declaring: “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”

Haaretz reports, “Trump’s comments follow similar comments made during a Fox News interview, where he accused Israel of ‘being loyal to a fault’ for hoping to maintain bipartisan support within the United States.”

Trump, under tremendous fire for his “bloodbath” remarks, was immediately denounced for his comments.

“Another day, another depraved antisemitic screed from Donald Trump, who has repeatedly vilified the overwhelmingly majority of American Jews,” observed Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “He first called us ‘uninformed or disloyal’ in 2019 and essentially repeated it today. The feeling is mutual. 79% of Jewish voters have an unfavorable view of Trump according to @pewresearch.”

The Times of Israel’s Sam Sokol writes, “Trump said that ‘any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.’ That’s a majority of US Jews. Gentiles don’t get to decide who is a good Jew. That kind of rhetoric is in itself antisemitic.”

The Biden campaign was quick to post a clip of trump’s remarks. Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

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‘Easy Mark’: Why Trump’s $464M Bond Failure Makes Him a ‘Massive National Security Risk’

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National security, legal, and political experts are lining up to sound the alarm about the potential national security risks swirling around Donald Trump, and those warnings are getting stronger.

One month after Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to announce his run for president, CNN reported on the real estate mogul’s repeated claims of great wealth. At one point Trump told supporters he was worth “well over $10 billion.” At other points Trump says, “I’m very rich,” and “I’m really rich.” CNN’s John King noted, “some voters see this as a virtue, in the sense that they think politicians are too beholden to special interests.”

Days later Politico ran with this headline: “Donald Trump’s new pitch: I’m so rich I can’t be bought.”

Fast forward nearly a decade later.

Donald Trump’s attorneys declared in court documents Monday that 30 companies all refused to secure a $464 million bond for Trump, which he owes the State of New York after losing his civil business fraud trial.

The sirens are now wailing.

READ MORE: ‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

Citing a Washington Post report, MSNBC’s Steve Benen writes, “it’s now ‘expected’ that Manafort will be hired” to work on the Trump 2024 presidential campaign, “at least in part because the former president is ‘determined to bring Manafort back into the fold.'”

Manafort is Paul Manafort, Trump’s former 2016 campaign chairman who in 2017, “surrendered to the F.B.I. and pleaded not guilty to charges that he laundered millions of dollars through overseas shell companies,” according to a New York Times report in October of 2017.

The Times also noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “announced charges … against three advisers to President Trump’s campaign,” including Manafort, “and laid out the most explicit evidence to date that his campaign was eager to coordinate with the Russian government to damage his rival, Hillary Clinton.”

In 2019, NPR reported, almost as a footnote, that “a court filing that was inadvertently unsealed earlier this year, revealed that Manafort shared polling data with a business associate who has ties to Russian intelligence services.”

In his MSNBC report, Benen noted, “the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Manafort ‘represented a grave counterintelligence threat‘ in 2016 due to his relationship with a Russian intelligence officer.”

“’The Committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign,’ the Senate report added.” Benen also reported: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report literally pointed to a ‘direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services,’ it was referring in part to Manafort ‘directly and indirectly’ communicating with an accused Russian intelligence officer, a Russian oligarch, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.”

Benen reinforced his thesis, writing on social media: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed to a ‘direct tie’ between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence services, it was referring in large part to Paul Manafort — who’s reportedly now headed back to Team Trump.”

Add to all that this plea from The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.

READ MORE: ‘Next Up – Property Seizures’: Experts Analyze ‘Unbankable’ Trump’s $464 Million Bond Crisis

“According to reports last week, the U.S. intelligence community is preparing to give Donald Trump classified intelligence briefings, a courtesy every White House extends to major-party candidates to ensure an effective transition. An excellent tradition—but not one that should be observed this year,” Nichols wrote at The Atlantic in a piece titled, “Donald Trump Is a National-Security Risk.”

“Indeed, if Trump were a federal employee, he’d have likely already been stripped of his clearances and escorted from the building.”

After discussing “Trump’s open and continuing affection” for authoritarian dictators, Nichols notes, “even if Trump could explain away his creepy dictator crushes and clarify his byzantine finances, he is currently facing more than half a billion dollars in court judgments against him.”

“That’s a lot of money for anyone, and Trump’s scramble to post a bond for even a small portion of that suggests that the man is in terrible financial condition, which is always a bright-red light in the clearance process.”

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg on Monday warned: “If Trump is given access to national security briefings he will now have someone with a proven history of selling stuff to the Russians on his team to help facilitate the movement of our intel to our adversaries.”

Also on Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote on X: “We cannot emphasize this enough: Trump’s mounting court fines make him a massive national security risk.”

“After multiple losses against E. Jean Carroll and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Donald Trump is facing judgements that could end up costing him upwards of $600 million,” CREW reported February 29. “But these rulings are more than a financial headache for Trump, they are an unprecedented opportunity to buy influence with a leading presidential candidate and a sitting president should he be re-elected.”

Diving deeper, CREW notes, “Trump left the presidency with at least $1.1 billion dollars in debt tied to the COVID-weakened commercial real estate market, the vast majority of which would come due in a hypothetical second term in office. These rulings would make that number 50% higher.”

“Giving the highest and most powerful office in the land to someone deeply in debt and looking for ways to make back hundreds of millions of dollars he lost in court is a recipe for the kinds of corruption that aren’t theoretical when it comes to Trump. There’s a reason that you can’t get a job in the military or the financial services industry, or even referee a major sporting event, if you have a massive amount of debt. And you certainly aren’t getting a security clearance because you become too big of a target for corruption.”

Bloomberg Opinion senior executive editor Tim O’Brien, an MSNBC political analyst and author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” observed, “Trump’s financial trap — he can’t come up with the cash to appeal his $454 million civil fraud judgment — may ravage his business. More directly: It intensifies his threat to national security by making him an easy mark for overseas interests.”

“There’s no reason to believe that Trump, whose businesses collected millions of dollars from foreign governments and officials while he was president, won’t have a for-sale sign out now that he’s struggling with the suffocating weight of court judgments,” O’Brien continues at Bloomberg. “Trump is being criminally prosecuted for allegedly misappropriating classified documents and stashing them at Mar-a-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida. Without a trial and public disclosure of more evidence, Trump’s motivations for taking the documents are unknown, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether he pondered trying to sell them. Monetizing the White House has been something of a family affair, after all. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been busy trading financially on his proximity to the former president, for example.”

O’Brien concludes, “the going is likely to get rough for Trump as this plays out, and he’s likely to become more financially desperate with each passing day. That’s going to make him easy prey for interested lenders — and an easy mark for overseas interests eager to influence US policy.”

READ MORE: FBI Agent Furious Over MAL Search Thought Trump Would Return Classified Docs if Just Asked

 

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‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

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Award-winning presidential historian Michael Beschloss sounded the alarm after Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” threat over the weekend, warning that his remarks echo those that led to the rise and installation of fascism in pre-World War II Germany and Italy.

“That’s how fascism and totalitarianism and in Germany’s case the Holocaust came to Germany, which had been a country where there were big institutions of democracy until, as you well know, the early 1930s,” Beschloss said on MSNBC Monday to “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski (video below). “In a way of Donald Trump has done us all a favor, because if you and I had been talking, Mika, let’s say 20 years ago, and they’ve been talking about what would have seemed like a very abstract and distant subject of how fascism and dictatorship might come to America, you probably would have been more wiser.”

“I would have said, you would have had some smiling person pretending to be a normal candidate like all the candidates for president who had gone before all the way back to 1789. And suddenly, after getting elected, that person would use the enormous powers of the presidency, that are given to that person, by their constitution,” Beschloss continued.

READ MORE: ‘Next Up – Property Seizures’: Experts Analyze ‘Unbankable’ Trump’s $464 Million Bond Crisis

“In a way Donald Trump has made it easier because when he tells you he’ll be a dictator for a day, we all know that dictators don’t resign after a day. When he uses the word bloodbath. Yes, it was in the context of an automobile industry speech, but he knew exactly what he was saying, When he talks about suspending the Constitution, or migrants as animals, this is him. He’s telling you what this choice is,” He continued, adding there is no “precedent for this.”

“I hate it when people treat this race as if it’s just one more presidential campaign. And there was lots of jokes, you know, both sides, you know, flaws and both candidates. Yes, these are two old candidates. One of those that is mentally stable, Joe Biden, whom I saw give a great speech at the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday night. Donald Trump, if you look at one of his speeches of these rallies, this is not someone who seems to have all his marbles.”

Beschloss says, “it’s important to know as we talk about this campaign, as it unfolds, we have never seen anything remotely like this in American history: a major party candidate is saying, you elect me, there’s going to be dictatorship, bloodbath, violence, retribution against my political enemies, that equals what we saw in Italy, in Germany and other places. If Americans do not get that if they choose that voluntarily, then this country has changed in a way that I do not understand.”

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Bloodbath’: Psaki Slams Trump Over ‘Embrace of Political Violence’

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