Like a brilliant sun rising into Montana’s cerulean sky, comes the decision to halt the oil and gas leases in the Badger-Two Medicine area, the sacred center of the Blackfeet tribe, bringing hope in a very dark time.
As the Missoulian’s Rob Chaney reported last week, “the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overruled a judge’s 2018 decision that had allowed a Louisiana company to keep its lease within the Badger Two-Medicine area of Lewis and Clark National Forest.”
Bloomberg: Epstein victims get chance to claim share of $600 million estate
Bloomberg: Trump Family Suit to Block Niece’s Tell-All Tossed by Court
Even though conservatives win elections, they gradually lose the deeper culture war over public values. Ever since The Enlightenment, the tide of civilization flows left. Human decency wins. Abraham Lincoln called it “the better angels of our nature.” Martin Luther King Jr. said the moral arc of the universe “bends toward justice.” This month’s Supreme Court ruling was another step in the slow advance.
June 26 (Reuters) - Georgia Governor Brian Kemp on Friday signed a hate crimes bill into law, adding penalties to criminals motivated by race, color, gender or sexual orientation.
This whole thread is wow.
tl;dr
Back in the day (in the U.S.) when cops were expected to drive people to the hospital, Black men trained as ambulance drivers were able to provide such solid positive outcomes and standards of care that they ended up creating what we now experience today as EMT services.
I’d caution that this sounds more than a little like summer 2016…
The normally self-assured president offered a tacit acknowledgment that he might lose when he said that Joe Biden is “gonna be your president because some people don’t love me, maybe."
…but I LOL’d at this, anyway:
In the hours after the interview aired, questions swirled within his inner circle about whether his heart was truly in it when it comes to seeking reelection.
Gorgeous. 'Grats.
Interesting history lesson, but I still believe defunding is a good next step. Emergency health services aren’t the main section of police budgets protesters want to eliminate.
Weren’t there friends of his who said he never wanted to be POTUS in the first place? I remember speculation that he was terrified during the transition process for that reason. So, he’s learned “acting presidential” is hard, and people don’t love him. Can’t wait for him to take his ball and bat and go home.
If I understood the article correctly, it was the partial defunding of the police budget in Philly in the first place in '67 that brought about positive change.
FTA:
…so problematic that in 1967, black leaders in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, created Freedom House Ambulance Services and approached Peter Safar, a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had lost his 12-year-old daughter to an acute asthma crisis. … With a shared purpose of improving emergency medical response, Safar trained 25 black men from that neglected community––many of whom did not have a high school diploma––as emergency medical technicians, skilled in this new thing called CPR. … With two donated police vehicles, Freedom House Ambulance Services began to save lives at such a rate, that they became the gold standard for emergency response training in the US and the model for EMTs we now take for granted in every community. … Despite the success of FHAS, police and fire departments resisted retraining their personnel, so the city reallocated funds to create a separate EMT service. (A new mayor cut funding to Freedom House in 1975 and seized their assets, but that’s another story). … When people think defunding the police will lead to anarchy, they’re not understanding that change rarely happens from within, and that resources reallocated to community-based services can not only improve neglected neighborhoods, but create innovations that help us all.
(my emphasis in bold)
I never said that protesters were focused on EMS budgets or that they conflate EMS budgets with police budgets.
I posted a historical example–proof positive–demonstrating the validity of the entirely reasonable proposal to take money from the “police” column in a city’s ledger and put the money in other more productive, more just columns of that ledger.
Yes to ending mass criminalization and incarceration.
Yes to ending hunger.
Yes to re-directing city/county/state financial and other resources to support Head Start and free school lunch programs, free community college attendance, expanded mental health services, addiction treatment programs, affordable housing programs, affordable healthcare programs, equity programs for POC and LBGTQA+ folks, independent monitors and ombudsman who work to dismantle white supremacy, dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline, environmental justice in low-income areas, etc.
My comment was based on the title of the thread, which has a question mark in it. That made it seem like it was being challenged instead of championing it.
Defund the police? vs.
Defund the police!
I thought it was an odd pairing with the content of the article, too. The only thing made sense to me was combined funding. In my municipality, current funding would have to be reallocated to better separate the two.
This along with Roberts’ defection on the same day. The reaction of a lot of edgelords today:
Of all the Dem candidates, I think McGrath has the best chance of ousting McConnell. She’s a former Marine fighter pilot… and I hope she goes in with guns blazing (so to speak).
Yeah. I like Booker’s politics better, but I do think McGrath has a better chance of ousting McConnell.
She proved to be the biggest money magnet among the candidates, and that should continue and then translate to more and more ads.
