Monthly Archives: April 2020

Creation in Confinement: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration – The New York Review of Books

Posted: April 30, 2020 at 5:42 am

Tameca Cole/Die Jim CrowTameca Cole: Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016

Incarceration has reshaped my family and my hometown in southwest Ohio. Countless relatives have been arrested and detained; some have been convicted and sentenced, while others have been held indefinitely and then let go. One cousin was held in a county jail for several months without any charges ever being filed. Some of us have been profiled by police and falsely accused of crimes. Others have been convicted of serious crimes and sentenced to long periods in prison. The same month that I graduated from college, two of my closest cousins were convicted and sentenced for involvement in the death of another young man from our community. There has never been a time in my life when prison didnt hover as a real and present threat over us.

I originally started working on Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarcerationa survey and analysis of visual art and creative practices among incarcerated artists, as well as art that responds to mass incarceration, which accompanies an exhibition that was scheduled to open at MoMA PS1 on April 5, but has been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemicas a way to deal with the grief about so many of my relatives, neighbors, and childhood friends who were spending years, decades, or life sentences in prison. It was also an effort to connect with others who are separated from their loved ones by prisons, parole, policed streets, and other forms of institutional and quotidian violence.

My family lived in a mill town that had experienced the woes of factories closing. The unionized manufacturing positions that had sustained our working-class and lower-middle-class black community for a couple of generations were no longer available. Studies of mass incarceration and the carceral state offer insightful explanations and historical accounts of what many of us witnessed and experienced in our communities: the mass removal of family members, neighbors, and friends, along with the permanent stigma on imprisoned people and their families.

As I came of age, in the 1980s and early 1990s, people around me, mainly young black men but also older women and men, were being shipped off to prison at such a frequency that their sudden disappearance and long-term absence became the norm. Boys my age who went to elementary and junior high school with my cousins and me were there and then gone, some never to return. They became invisible to us and hard to reach because of all the mechanisms the carceral state uses to separate imprisoned people from their families and communities. We had no words to describe the utter devastation, the despair.

Investigations of prisons from historical, legal, economic, and many other perspectives have analyzed the range of causes and implications of the rise in prison populations. Attacks on the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the War on Drugs, adverse consequences of the War on Poverty, the War on Terror, deindustrialization, neoliberal policies, law-and-order policing, segregated and punitive education, unemployment, the criminalization of poverty, austerity measures, and longstanding discrimination against nonwhite, queer, and gender-nonconforming peopleall contributed to an increase in the US prison population of more than 500 percent since the 1970s. This confluence of circumstances has resulted in the United States having the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 1,852 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and eighty Indian Country jails, as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and state psychiatric hospitals.

In popular entertainment, journalism, and documentaries, images of life behind bars fascinate, horrify, and titillate. They also offer a familiarity with prison as a cornerstone institution of modern life, but one that the majority of people never enter. The nonincarcerated public comes to recognize prison and the people in prison almost exclusively through a set of rehearsed images created by the state and by nonincarcerated image-makersimages like arrest photos, mug shots, the minimal furnishings of the prison cell, fortress-like walls, barbed wire, bars, metal doors, and the executioners chair. About this familiarity with the visual representation of prisons, Angela Davis writes:

The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us.

As prisons made more and more people invisible in the communities they came from, images were employed in communities like mine to justify mass incarceration. Pictorial representation was an essential tool used to support tough crime policies and punitive sentencing. Hostile and dehumanizing images, such as wanted posters, arrest photographs, crime-scene images, and mug shots circulated constantly in local and national media, and reinforced the practices of aggressive policing and dominant notions of black criminality. Stories circulated of the rampant devastation of the crack era, portraying young street dealers as monsters.

Opening our local newspaper was often cause for pain and embarrassment, as photographs of people we knew seen in handcuffs were all too common. Often, these were images of black children and teenagers, infamously referred to as superpredators in the 1990s by journalists and politicians, most notably Hilary Clinton. One of the best-known, most egregious examples was the portrayal of the so-called Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Fivefive black and Latino teenage boys who were falsely accused and convicted of raping a white womanas a wolf pack.

At the same time, there were other images being produced about mass incarcerationimages that rarely made the news and had little or no public circulation. They offered different stories about and interpretations of prisons and their impact. These were not journalistic, scholarly, or legal documents. They were a diverse assortment of artworks and illustrations that came from inside the prisons themselves: studio photos, handmade greeting cards, drawings, and other pieces of art made by incarcerated people.

Incarcerated relatives sent home graphite drawings and birthday cards designed by artists in prison. Some prisons permitted us to take photographs together when we visited our relatives and friends. The visiting rooms where we sat with our imprisoned relatives and friends often displayed paintings, miniatures, and sculptures made by incarcerated people. These objects were not new forms of prison art, but as the size of the prison population boomed, the visual culture of mass incarceration grew along with it.

I began what would become Marking Time by displaying photos of incarcerated relatives around my apartment, partly as an attempt to work through my own discomfort with the pictures of them in prison, and to bring their presence into my daily life. At first, I was afraid that it would be too emotionally challenging for my family and me if I focused on a project about incarceration and the visual. But after a first presentation at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in 2012at which I spoke about my incarcerated relatives and the visual records of their incarceration: family photos, cards, drawings, and paintings on bedsheetssomething unexpected happened, something that would continue to happen over the years of lecturing and doing research on prison art.

People came up to me afterward to describe how they were directly impacted by prisons, how they had been incarcerated themselves or had loved ones in prison. They described the shame and emotional difficulty of talking about these experiences in public. Some shared photos and art that came from prison. This is how the project grewby word of mouth and by connecting with others. I began to build community around our collective pain and survival, the many millions of families affected by incarceration, the many millions held captive by prisons and other carceral institutions. Under the grief and rage was a sense of solidarity with others who shared the experience of watching their communities devastated by the various tentacles of what we call mass incarceration, the impact of which goes far beyond prisons.

Marking Time grew out of nine years of researching and archiving, and draws on multiple sources: interviews, site visits, personal collections, institutional archives, family narratives, and the growing scholarship in critical prison studies, black cultural theory, and visual culture. I have traveled to several states to meet formerly and currently incarcerated artists. I have interviewed more than seventy people, including imprisoned artists, teachers, nonprofit administrators, prison staff, activists, and the loved ones and relatives of imprisoned people.

Marking Time is about both the centrality of prisons in contemporary art and culture and the robust world of art-making inside US prisons. I set out to engage the politics of this art-making in prisons, and, more expansively, art as politics in an era of extensive human caging and under other forms of carceral power. How has the colossal reach of the prison industrial complex shaped contemporary art institutions and art-making? And how does visual art help to reveal the depth of devastation caused by our nations punishment system?

In Ronnie Goodmans 2008 painting San Quentin Arts in Corrections Art Studio, the artist is alone at work in a studio. The self-portrait shows him inside a cavernous space of multistoried walls and beamed ceilings. We see him in profile, from the knees up, dressed all in blue and bent slightly forward, studying a print. On the walls, dwarfing him and above his reach, are portraits, landscape paintings, and still-life renditions. The details of the workspacethe light, the height, and the open floor planall suggest an idyllic scene for the creation of art. Indeed, Goodmans painting references and inserts itself into a long tradition of documenting the artist at work in a studio, art class, museum, or other institutional setting, such as Samuel Morses Gallery of the Louvre (18311833) and Kerry James Marshalls Untitled (Studio) (2014).

Goodman made the painting while he was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison and a participant in the Arts in Corrections workshop run by the William James Association, a nonprofit organization that provides art classes in prisons throughout California. The prison studio, in Goodmans painting, is a space of imaginative possibility, as well as a place constrained by his incarceration and the layered history of the carceral state. His painting is a reflection on the conditions under which art is made within prisons, while also reimagining the space. It foregrounds how art emerges in relation to institutions, whether ones commonly associated with art, like ateliers, conservatories, museums, and galleries, or sites like primary schools, subway stations, public streets, and even prisons.

Goodmans work is an example of what I call carceral aesthetics, ways of envisioning and crafting art that reflects the conditions of imprisonment. Every year, incarcerated people create millions of paintings, drawings, sculptures, greeting cards, collages, and other visual materials that circulate inside prisons; between incarcerated people and their loved ones; in private collections of people in prison, prison staff, teachers, and others; and more recently in public domains and institutions like museums, libraries, hospitals, and universities. The majority of art-making in prisons takes place in cells and prison hobby shops, where incarcerated people improvise and experiment with numerous constraints.

One of the challenges of writing about this has been that many of the artists, whether currently or formerly incarcerated, do not have possession of their art, nor any documentation of their work, nor knowledge of how and where their art has circulated. For reasons that have to do with the inequality and exploitation that incarcerated people suffer, art made in prison may be sent to relatives, traded with fellow prisoners, sold or gifted to prison staff, donated to nonprofit organizations, and sometimes made for private clients. There are people I interviewed who described their work and practices to me but had nothing to show.

Art made by people in prison can even be lucrative for some institutions, and art workshops and education can function as ways of managing people held captive so that they do not challenge prison authority. At Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, prison art is sold at the biannual rodeo show, bringing in significant profit to the institution, with a percentage for the incarcerated people, who can use it toward commissary or send it home to relatives.

Art made in prisons is commonly described under the rubric of outsider art or folk art. Other studies have focused on art programs and workshops based on models of art therapy, which grow out of the disciplines of psychology, education, and criminology and which promote exploring creative outlets as forms of healing and rehabilitating people. My main concern about a rehabilitative framework is that in its primary focus on changing the individual, it does not offer an analysis or critique of how the carceral state relies on producing criminal subjects. My engagement with art is through an abolitionist perspective, and while I do not write about prison art as necessarily therapeutic or rehabilitative, I do acknowledge and respect that many incarcerated artists use and understand art-making as part of their healing and coping inside prisons.

Prison art practices resist the isolation, exploitation, and dehumanization of carceral facilities. They reconstitute what productivity and labor mean in states of captivity, as many of these works entail laborious, time-consuming, and immersive practices and planning. Art-making in prison is also important to consider as part of the larger contemporary art world, although prison art rarely appears in public galleries or museums. But like art made in other arenas, prison art exists in relation to economies, power structures governing resources and access, and discourses that legitimate certain works as art and others as craft, material object, historical artifact, or trash. And visual art, the focus of Marking Time, is of course just one form in a broader world of cultural production in prisons, including literature, music, and theater.

Prison art can shift how we think about art collections and art collectors. The primary collectors of art made in prison are other imprisoned people and their loved ones. Substantial collections exist inside cells, storage units, and classrooms of carceral facilities. Prison staff are also collectors of art made inside. Employees of prisons often deliberate with incarcerated people to make art on their behalf and agree on rates within the prison economy, deals made off the books and between people occupying very different positions of power. For this reason, commission and negotiation are fraught terms to describe arrangements in which unfree artists are asked by people who hold authority over their livelihood to make art in exchange for money, goods, or special treatment.

Generally, when discussing artists, I do not state why an artist was sentenced and imprisoned, unless the artist has requested that I include this information or these details are primary to their story as they tell it. I am not invested in categories of guilt and innocence, which are perilous because they can reproduce carceral logic. My intention is not to play into binaries about good versus bad prisoners, innocent versus guilty people, or those who are deserving of sympathy and recognition versus those who are not. At the same time, not to acknowledge the claims of innocence and eventual exoneration or release of some would be to betray these artists who have entrusted me with their stories and art.

At least four of the artists in my book identify as being wrongfully convicted. Two of them have, in fact, been exonerated by the Ohio Innocence Project, and two were released for time served, negotiated by their attorneys. For each of these artists, their imprisonment for crimes they did not commit propelled their art-making and their political consciousness and critique of prisons, so I speak of their wrongful conviction, exoneration, or release in this context.

I credit my methodology in creating Marking Time to the practices of care and collective survival among black women from whom I have learned my entire life. I recall the Sunday visits with my mom, when I was a young child, to see my uncle, who was locked away in a prison thirty minutes from our hometown. Looking through files after my grandmother died, I was struck by how many times she had borrowed on the surety of her modest home in order to bail out a relative.

My aunt Sharon and cousin Cassandra also exemplified a steadfast commitment over the twenty-one years they spent visiting and supporting their son and brother Allen during his imprisonment. What that entailed for them was laborious, and financially and emotionally taxing. Their care, to which I cannot do justice in these few sentences, included paying monthly phone bills, which sometimes amounted to thousands of dollars because of the exorbitant rates charged by prison phone vendors; ordering an endless array of goods for Allen, again from exploitive vendors; hiring attorneys to review his case; helping to support his daughter, who was only a couple of months old when he went to prison; and journeying at least monthly to wherever he was housed to sit in a prison visiting room across from him. They did it together. They supported each other. They listened to each other and cried when they needed to. This is the foundation of the contemporary movement that is working not only to end mass incarceration, but to do away with prisons and caging entirely.

Adapted from Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, published by Harvard University Press.On April 28 at 8PM, a conversation between Nicole R. Fleetwood, poet and scholar Fred Moten, and artists Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter and Jesse Krimes will be hosted on Zoom to celebrate the books publication. The exhibition by the same name will be rescheduled when MoMA PS1 reopens.

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Creation in Confinement: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The New York Review of Books

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Mastroianni elected to 4th term as chairman of North Stonington Republican Town Committee – The Westerly Sun

Posted: at 5:41 am

NORTH STONINGTON Brett Mastroianni has been elected to serve a fourth term as chairman of the North Stonington Republican Town Committee.

Mastroinni was reelected unanimously by members of the committee this week during a special meeting, which was held through a conference call to allow for members of the committee to continue to practice social distancing. Members also voted to elect Salvatore Cherenzia IV as vice chairman and Lisa Mazzella was elected to serve in a dual post as both secretary and treasurer for the committee.

Its an honor to be re-elected chair of the Republican Town Committee and I look forward to continuing the growth and diversity that we have seen over the last few years," Mastroianni said "We also plan to continue our Republican outreach efforts through community events and fundraisers.

The terms are effective immediately and will run through spring 2022, the committee said in a press release.

Jason Vallee

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Mastroianni elected to 4th term as chairman of North Stonington Republican Town Committee - The Westerly Sun

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Economists urge Republicans to ignore the deficit – POLITICO

Posted: at 5:41 am

But economists from a broad range of ideological backgrounds are encouraging Congress to keep spending to combat catastrophic job losses and say now is not the time to focus on the deficit. They emphasize that the federal government can borrow at near-zero interest rates, as investors seek the safety of U.S. bonds and the Federal Reserve buys up tens of billions of dollars worth of Treasury securities each week.

GOP concerns over the deficit will play a central role in negotiations as lawmakers begin working on the next emergency spending bill and Democrats push for more funds for state and local governments.

Meanwhile, because so much normal economic activity has evaporated because of safety fears and stay-at-home orders, the threat of a crippling drop in prices is perhaps more of a concern than inflation, many economists say.

Im a fiscal hawk from way back, and all of my heebie-jeebies are going off when I see these numbers, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican who used to head the Congressional Budget Office and is president of American Action Forum. But then I look at the scale of the problem, and I think, yeah, thats that. Gotta do it.

Senior Republicans have signaled that they are willing to spend far more money to help the neediest Americans, especially as more than 26 million Americans have filed for unemployment claims in recent weeks. But it's clear that much of the GOP's patience is diminishing as the price tag for the tranches of coronavirus aid amounts to trillions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is insisting that any future package needs to have more guardrails, including protections for health care workers, businesses and employers from lawsuits.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo

I would question the credibility of any economist who thought that borrowing $2.8 trillion was a great idea except in a pandemic, McConnell said in an interview. If we borrow any more it will include reforms.

Republicans say they also want to see how the money Congress has already approved is playing out before deciding on where to allocate more resources to combating the virus and shoring up the economy.

Democrats have pounced on the GOPs growing unease over the deficit, which they say has surfaced only after Republicans secured hundreds of billions for businesses including some with massive cash flows and savings accounts.

When we talk about tax cuts and when we talk about loopholes for real estate developers, it's utmost urgency, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told reporters in the Capitol last week. But when we talk about rent and mortgage relief for working families, now we're worried about the deficit.

Among the sticking points for the next phase of negotiations is a push from Senate Democrats for money directed toward state and local governments facing a steep drop in revenue as they attempt to battle the virus. McConnell suggested this week he is open to aid for local governments as long as his conditions are met.

I dont think you can indefinitely kind of extend what weve done over the last couple months, said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) when asked about the next phase. That has to be looked at in a very hard fashion to see how we can do it in a more affordable and a smarter way.

The Republican Study Committees Budget and Spending Task Force also put out a blueprint this week to flatten the debt curve. The proposal calls for Congress to offset the effect of future coronavirus packages on the debt by cutting and capping spending.

Some experts say interest payments could eat up an unsustainably high portion of the federal budget down the road, particularly if the economy has a strong recovery that leads rates to rise. Similarly, as the economy improves, high levels of government spending could feed aggressive price increases.

Theres a real danger that at some point were going to create serious inflation and seriously higher interest rates, Toomey said. And the problem is, we dont know when well hit that point.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

But some economists caution that even those worries could be overblown; widespread inflation fears after the Great Recession of the late 2000s never came true, and structural economic factors have led to a steady decline in rates over the past few decades.

Interest rates could rise a fair bit from where they are now and still be lower than they were for most of the last half century, said Doug Elmendorf, a Democrat who served as CBO director until 2015 and is now dean of faculty at Harvard Kennedy School.

And inflation oil prices were briefly negative last week, he added. We are much more worried now about a deflationary spiral from weak economic activity than we are about high inflation.

Meanwhile, some progressive economists go even farther, suggesting deficits dont pose nearly as many problems as claimed by mainstream economists.

Republicans renewed worries about the national debt come after a GOP-led Congress in 2017 added more than $2 trillion to the deficit through tax cuts and increased spending, at a time when the U.S. economy was relatively healthy and interest rates were higher. Republicans argued that the tax cuts would pay for themselves by generating enough economic growth, a goal that has so far fallen short.

We shouldve been doing deficit reduction when the economy was good, said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Now is not the time.

That does not mean we should waste dollars. It does not mean we should spend infinite amounts, he added. But, its a worthwhile tradeoff to have more debt today, which isnt free, to not go into a depression.

Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP, a research firm specializing in U.S. government financing, also pointed out that ballooning deficits could increase pressure to roll back those tax cuts going forward and suggested that might be a motivating factor for Republicans to be cautious. This is defending the signature achievement of the Trump era, he said.

The $2 trillion CARES Act passed by Congress last month amid the pandemic will increase federal deficits by $1.8 trillion over a decade, according to the CBO. That estimate doesnt project any losses from the Feds emergency lending programs because the central bank is planning to lend largely to creditworthy businesses and municipalities.

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Economists urge Republicans to ignore the deficit - POLITICO

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Republicans clash with Governor’s Office on reopening businesses – Santa Fe New Mexican

Posted: at 5:41 am

House Republicans are calling on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to ease public health restrictions in counties that are less affected by the novel coronavirus, a notion the Governors Office rejected as premature.

As businesses in Georgia and other states begin to open again despite ongoing risks of contracting and spreading the virus, Republican leaders in New Mexico are for the first time urging the governor to open up areas of the state that have seen few or no cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Four lightly populated counties have had no cases: Sierra, Hidalgo, De Baca and Mora, according to data from the state Department of Health.

House Minority Leader Jim Townsend, R-Artesia, said the governor should look at counties with few cases and follow the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He mentioned the four counties with zero cases and a dozen with low occurrences along with southeast New Mexico as a whole as areas that should be reopened.

He urged the Governors Office to let the data guide them during a news conference Tuesday.

Townsend and the 23 other House Republicans signed a letter sent to Lujan Grisham on Tuesday, urging the governor to work with local community leaders to keep the situation from devolving into social chaos.

But the Governors Office said the data does not support opening any areas of the state right now. COVID-19 cases are ravaging San Juan, McKinley, Sandoval and Bernalillo counties. And although other areas such as Otero County or Quay County only have several cases, those numbers could still quickly rise, a Lujan Grisham spokeswoman said.

Areas with few reported COVID cases are not immune, spokeswoman Nora Meyers Sackett said. The virus does not recognize county lines. The fight against COVID-19 is the same in every part of the state, whether there are three positive cases in a certain community or 300. Three cases becomes 300 very quickly.

Sackett added state government and health officials already are making plans for when, where and in what capacity public health restrictions could begin to be lifted. The Governors Office remains in constant communication with local partners as we all navigate this public health emergency together, she said.

Republicans argue that if the governor waits, it may be too late for many businesses and smaller communities hurting from decreased demand and a public health order that shut down nonessential businesses, including most retail, to slow the spread of the virus.

If we delay much longer, this is going to have drastic effects on New Mexico and particularly in rural New Mexico, acutely, said state Rep. Greg Nibert, R-Roswell. I believe were on the precipice of a real economic collapse in the state if this goes on much longer. Our citizens are not prepared for a depression.

House Minority Whip Rod Montoya, R-Farmington, said the restrictions are spurring some county commissioners to declare an economic disaster in their communities and said he hopes to avoid anywhere in New Mexico having a Kent State situation, referring to the 1970 Ohio National Guard shootings of unarmed college Vietnam War protesters.

Im worried of a situation as has been reported where a state police officer goes to someones business and tells them, Youve got to close down or threaten arrest, as has been done, or threaten these $5,000 fines and all these folks really want to do is protect their property and their civil liberties, Montoya said. The folks that were protesting at Kent State, and the police officers that went there that day, I dont believe had any thought that what would take place would take place. But thats what happens when emotions run high.

The Republican Party of New Mexico in a statement Tuesday supported the House Republican Caucus and doubled down on the claim that the governor is trampling on peoples civil rights through intimidation during this pandemic by issuing fines for businesses violating the public health order that temporarily shuts down businesses not deemed essential.

Every New Mexican is essential when it comes to making our state run, party Chairman Steve Pearce said in a written statement. We are now in a steady free fall because the governor wont look at the fiscal and economic health thats gone to ruins. Outside states are gobbling up our local dollars while mom and pop business remain shuttered and Main Streets become ghost towns.

The governor must look at what areas can slowly open, areas where there are few and no cases of COVID-19 to start with, Pearce continued.

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Other Republicans Fold to Trump Every Time Because Most of Them Are Chickensh*t – Esquire

Posted: at 5:41 am

There may never be an answer to the question, Why is the Republican Party so determined to die on the Great Orange Hill? However, any serious search for an explanation has to factor in the answer, Because most of them are chickenshit motherfckers, thats why. Politico illustrates.

You may recall that, on Monday, Politico reported that, back at the beginning of April, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had circulated a memo to Republican senatorial candidates that advised them to go on the attack against China when discussing the pandemic, but not to defend the president* other than the China ban. In other words, defend the racism, but not the racist.

Looked at from the malignant perspective of modern Republican realpolitik, this advice makes perfect sense. Engage the fundamental xenophobia of the partys base without reminding them of the president* that this produced last time. If I were a Republican senator, prior to my hurling myself into the Bay of Fundy in a grand act of self-loathing, I would take this advice. However, the Trump campaign found this approach to be something up with which it would not put.

You would think that, by now, this kind of clumsy shakedown wouldnt work any more, but that would mean that the Republican Party was not being run by chickenshit motherfckers, and that would mean you were very, very wrong.

Like a cheap suit. Like a two-dollar accordion.

Were I running a Republican senatorial campaign, especially were I running one on behalf of a particularly endangered incumbent, Id tell old Justin Clark to go whistle up a fish and follow the committees original advice. But the real story here is how thoroughly the Republican Party has adopted the administration*s Piranha Brothers approach to political strategy, even unto its most distant parts. Every piece of advice carries a threat. Every bit of help implies a debt. Nice little campaign you have there. Be a shame if anything happens to it.

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Other Republicans Fold to Trump Every Time Because Most of Them Are Chickensh*t - Esquire

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Pa. Senate Republicans to vote on subpoenas to Gov. Wolfs administration over closing businesses – PennLive

Posted: at 5:41 am

Senate Republicans plan to vote Thursday on issuing subpoenas to Gov. Tom Wolfs administration to learn more about business closures prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Senate Republicans, who hold the majority in the chamber, said they have been frustrated what they view as a lack of transparency from the Democratic governor. GOP lawmakers have been pressing for answers from the Wolf administration in deciding which businesses had to be shut down.

Wolf ordered the closure of businesses that werent deemed life sustaining" to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Republican lawmakers and business trade groups have demanded to know why some businesses had to close their doors and some received waivers from the Wolf administration to remain open.

The Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee plans to meet at 1 p.m. Thursday to consider the subpoenas.

State Sens. Mike Regan, a York County Republican, and Tom Killion, wrote letters to the governor and the state Department of Community and Economic Development to get more information about the closures. They said they got no response to the letters, which were sent April 24.

Lawmakers held a hearing with Wolf administration officials last week but found their answers lacking.

We held a hearing during which DCED and the administration had the opportunity to provide clarity about their methodology behind granting waivers to some employers and not others, Regan said in a statement. We then sent a letter requesting the same information and did not receive it. Tomorrow we will be taking definitive action.

Tens of thousands of businesses sought waivers to keep their doors open. Some argued they performed critical services and could open safely with measures to protect workers and consumers. Trade groups assailed the waiver process as being too arbitrary.

For example, a Franklin County builder was denied a waiver to complete work on a home to replace one a family lost in a fire. Some garden centers have complained they couldnt get waivers, while other garden centers were allowed to reopen.

State officials have said they aim for consistency on waiver decisions but rely on information provided by businesses on their applications.

The Wolf administration has said its aimed to be as transparent as possible. Casey Smith, a DCED spokeswoman, said earlier this week that the administration is aiming to address the concerns of businesses and lawmakers.

Throughout the duration of the waiver process, DCED has been dedicated to responding to businesses in short order, as addressing the needs of Pennsylvanias business community while protecting public health and safety has been a priority," Smith said in a statement. "The administration is reviewing the letter and will determine how best to respond in light of the extensive resources that have been devoted to addressing this disaster.

To date, the Wolf administration has not disclosed detailed information about the waiver program.

PennLive and other media organizations have submitted Right-to-Know requests for information about the program. The media groups have been told the offices are closed and the requests "will be received and processed upon our offices reopening.

Last week, Wolf said the administration is still reviewing the 40,000-plus waiver requests it received before the waiver period ended on April 3.

Republican lawmakers have been battling the Wolf administration over the scope of the shutdown of the states businesses. GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate have said the governor has erred in shutting down whole sectors of the economy, such as the construction industry, which has been brought to a virtual standstill. Republican lawmakers argued more businesses can get back to work without threatening public health.

The governor has vetoed bills passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly that would have broadly reopened businesses. Wolf and Democratic lawmakers have argued a wide reopening of businesses could undo the states progress in slowing the spread of the virus and cost lives.

Wolf has also argued that new spikes in COVID-19 cases from lifting restrictions too broadly could do more economic damage to the state in the long term.

Still, Wolf has recently made some concessions on business.

Wolf said construction activity can resume, with some restrictions, beginning Friday. Some of the state rules will require limits on the number of workers on certain job sites. The governor also recently allowed online auto sales to begin again.

Like other states, Pennsylvanias economy is reeling due to the closure of businesses. More than 1.6 million Pennsylvanians have filed for unemployment.

Pennsylvania remains under a statewide stay-at-home order to slow the spread of the virus. More than 44,000 people have contracted the virus and nearly 2,200 have died.

The governor said he plans to begin lifting restrictions on some regions in early May. On Friday, the Wolf administration is slated to announce the first counties to be lifted from the stay-at-home order.

Those counties, which Wolf has said will likely be in northcentral and northwestern Pennsylvania, will see the stay-at-home order lifted on May 8.

Republicans call for reopening Illinois legislative session – The Southern

Posted: at 5:41 am

I just want to clarify and make sure everyone understands that what we're talking about here is the governor's authority to go past that 30 days of emergency power, Davidsmeyer said. Whether you agree with the governor or disagree with the governor, we believe that a separate but equal branch of government, the General Assembly, should have input in the direction of the state of Illinois.

They are just part of a growing chorus of GOP lawmakers who argue the General Assembly should be part of any decision to extend the stay-at-home order as well as when and how to reopen the states economy.

On Monday, a circuit judge in Clay County ruled in favor of Xenia Rep. Darren Baileys lawsuit claiming Pritzkers executive order will infringe on his civil rights. And while that decision applies only to Bailey, and it is being appealed, Rep. John Cabello, of Machesney Park, filed a second lawsuit Wednesday, this time seeking an injunction to prevent another stay-at-home order from going into effect.

Pritzker on Wednesday called the latest lawsuit irresponsible and an attempt at grandstanding.

Rep. Deanne Mazzochi, R-Elmhurst, has been urging Pritzker to call lawmakers back into session because those lawsuits, if ultimately successful, could put the state in financial jeopardy.

If the governor believes his actions are best for the state, he should have the Legislature confirm it, and if he can't or won't, it calls everything he has been doing into question, she said in an email Wednesday. It is also putting the entire state at risk and the state of Illinois on the hook for untold damages. Do it lawful, do it right, and be transparent about it.

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Republicans call for reopening Illinois legislative session - The Southern

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Democrats and Republicans have argued about China for 150 years – Axios

Posted: at 5:41 am

China will likely be a major issue in the 2020 presidential election, as the coronavirus crisis continues to paralyze large swaths of the U.S. economy. But even without a global pandemic ramping up the geopolitical stakes, Democrats and Republicans have long disagreed over how to deal with the world's most populous country.

Why it matters: Debates from decades ago still echo in today's partisan divide over China policy, revealing entrenched attitudes that complicate America's search for a sustainable relationship with Beijing.

What's happening: Republicans are coming down harder than ever on China, and there are almost no political downsides for them in this campaign season.

Democrats, meanwhile, are experiencing a kind of paralysis.

Details: Partisan issues dating as far back as the 19th century still inform the national conversation today:

The 1870s and 1880s: The Chinese Exclusion Act

Since Trump's election, Chinese-American groups have pointed to similarities between the political environment in the 1880s and today.

The 1940s and 1950s: The Chinese Communist victory and the start of the Cold War

That was the moment "China became a sensitive domestic political issue," said Chang. To this day, Democrats have remained deeply fearful of a return to Cold War-era suspicions, which makes them loathe to echo some of the more hardline Republican rhetoric that has become mainstream since 2016.

The 1990s: Appeasement after the Tiananmen massacre

The bottom line: The divide between Republicans and Democrats on China policy runs deep.

Continued here:

Democrats and Republicans have argued about China for 150 years - Axios

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Conservative Republicans say COVID spending must consider growing debt | TheHill – The Hill

Posted: at 5:41 am

Top members on the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) say future spending measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic should be offset with spending cuts to control the deficit.

In a letter sent to the top four leaders in both chambers,Rep. Mike JohnsonJames (Mike) Michael JohnsonConservative Republicans say COVID spending must consider growing debt House GOP lawmakers urge Senate to confirm Vought Top conservatives pen letter to Trump with concerns on fourth coronavirus relief bill MORE (R-La.), who chairs the RSC, and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) argued there is an urgent need" to address the debt.

The lawmakers said that while they understand the need to help Americans weather the financial hit caused by the pandemic, they feel the fiscal health of our nation cant be ignored.

Annual deficits were already expected to surpass $1 trillion for FY 2020 and only grow in perpetuity," they wrote, referring to the current fiscal year. "Recent COVID-19 legislation will now add trillions more debt in the next several years while federal revenues will nosedive in the midst of an economic downturn.

Congress should offset future COVID-19-related deficits. Given the present fiscal crisis, the thought of any more debt-financed spending seems unimaginable," they wrote.

The group is proposing that the growth of future spending be limited to 60 percent of the growth in federal revenue, which itself would be capped as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP).

It also suggested a "debt brake" that ties spending to potential GDP.

Other proposals the group supports include automatic votes to consider the deficit reductions in budget resolutions, expanding the reconciliation process to include on and off-budget items and discretionary spending and requiring a super-majority to pass emergency spending.

It also said mandatory budget cuts through sequestration could be considered.

To rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic, it will take the collective strength and effort of our entire nation, the letter reads.That same resolve will be needed to overcome the threat posed by our seemingly insurmountable debt. It is not too late for us to take the actions necessary to secure the future of America and our posterity but that work must begin now.

Banks said hes spoken with a number of his Republican colleagues in the House who have also expressed a sense of unease over the spending levels in recent bills, adding he believes there will be a stronger pushback on future coronavirus stimulus measures that dont include provisions to limit its impact on the debt.

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Conservative Republicans say COVID spending must consider growing debt | TheHill - The Hill

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Its starting to feel like Republicans want to have a chickenpox party for coronavirus in the whole of Washington state – The Seattle Times

Posted: at 5:41 am

The tale of two cities told in a national magazine this week was summed up well in the headline: Seattles leaders let scientists take the lead. New Yorks did not.

The article, in The New Yorker, heaped praise on our regions spotlight-loving politicians and corporate leaders for doing an unusual thing when the coronavirus outbreak first hit two months ago. They got out of the way.

The coherent, science-based messaging that resulted may explain why our per capita death rate from COVID-19 is, so far, one-tenth that of New Yorks.

King County Executive Dow Constantine recalled it in a bucolic-sounding quote:Everyone, Republicans and Democrats, came together behind one message and agreed to let the scientists take the lead.

It rings pretty true to the spirit of what was going on here back in February and early March. But alas, those halcyon days definitely are over.

Increasingly, local Republicans seem to be concluding that, science be damned, its time we man up and let the virus run.

Its not necessarily a bad thing for more people to be exposed to the virus, Washington state Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, told The Columbian newspaper this week. It will speed our path, frankly, toward herd immunity.

This notion of easing up and possibly letting society get the virus sort of a chickenpox party for the state, which scientists say could lead to thousands more deaths was memorialized Monday by the entire state Senate GOP caucus in a tweet that got mocked so much for callousness it was later deleted.

Who is the COVID virus killing in WA state? the GOP senators asked. 53% are 80 or older. Lets protect our older neighbors at home and look at different rules for others.

Monthly Archives: April 2020

Creation in Confinement: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration – The New York Review of Books

Mastroianni elected to 4th term as chairman of North Stonington Republican Town Committee – The Westerly Sun

Economists urge Republicans to ignore the deficit – POLITICO

Republicans clash with Governor’s Office on reopening businesses – Santa Fe New Mexican

Other Republicans Fold to Trump Every Time Because Most of Them Are Chickensh*t – Esquire

Pa. Senate Republicans to vote on subpoenas to Gov. Wolfs administration over closing businesses – PennLive

Republicans call for reopening Illinois legislative session – The Southern

Democrats and Republicans have argued about China for 150 years – Axios

Conservative Republicans say COVID spending must consider growing debt | TheHill – The Hill

Its starting to feel like Republicans want to have a chickenpox party for coronavirus in the whole of Washington state – The Seattle Times

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