Give me your tired…JK

Vox reports four leaked drafts that say According to Vox: In all, the combined documents would represent one of the harshest crackdowns on immigrants — both those here and those who want to come here — in memory. This is catastrophic for refugee efforts. Now’s a good time to contact your legislators. You can do so here.

More in the good news/bad news realm of thinking

The new Congress is pretty much the same as the old Congress when it comes to religion, and when it comes to gender. According to that last link at Vox: The 115th Congress, which was officially sworn in on Tuesday, will be the most racially diverse Congress in history. Gender diversity, though, is another story. While 14 non-incumbent women …

And another thing…

The Olympics are over, but the coverage thereof leaves a certain…taste…in the mouth, yes? And thanks, Enza, for the link.

Why aren’t there more women in Congress?

Vox seeks to answer the question here. Just click on the link. It’s an awesome graphic.

Donald Trump hates the media

He also spends 3.5 times more tweets on the media than he does on big-ticket, big policy issues. He’s also a Negative Nellie. You can read more here, from Zachary Crockett, at Vox, who spent months analyzing Candidate Drumpf’s Twitter feed.

In the absence of adequate mental health facilities…

…let’s use our prisons. Read this Vox piece, on how law enforcement deals with people who have mental illnesses. The article includes: It’s a terrifying statistic: Someone with an untreated mental illness is 16 times more likely to be killed by police than other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement, according to a 2015 …

Congress’s polarization over the last 60 years

You can read more here, from Vox.

On leading tours through a Southern plantation

A 100 years ago, I went to Savannah with a friend. We both had always wanted to go — for me, I’d wanted to see the lush city since reading “Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil” — but what I found at the actual town was a white-washed (literally) view of the Old …

How Section 8 became a slur

In the recent McKinney, Texas, pool fight that resulted in charges of police brutality and one police officer quitting the force, one of the slurs yelled by white residents included Section 8 housing. Here’s Vox’s take on what that means. And here’s the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, which contains this gem: In a broad sense, this …

“But I don’t see color” serves no one

Ebony sends this, an interesting Salon essay about the dangers of color blindness among popular progressive politicians. Presidential candidate and Vt. Sen. Bernie Sanders is saying a lot of good and meaningful stuff in relation to wealth and income inequality, but this Vox piece suggests he might be a 1930s radical (not so concerned with …