CCDW NEWSLETTER
Cabarrus County Democratic Women
PO Box 443, Harrisburg, NC 28075
Volume 3, Number 2 February 2017
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February Meeting
The Cabarrus County Democratic Women will meet at a different location for our February meeting. The Conversation Peace Restaurant is located in the Food Lion shopping center on South Union Street.
Where: Conversation Peace Restaurant, 846 Union Street South, Concord, NC
When: Thursday. February 23, 2017
Dinner: If desired, a buffet is offered for $10.00
Time: Dinner at 6:30pm, Meeting starts at 7:00pm
Apparently grabbing women by their lady parts is common practice in state legislatures
From www.dailykos.com on Tuesday, February
14, 2017
Women generally know that there are very few places where we are safe in public. Just leaving our homes makes us targets for sexual harassment and our work lives are no exception. In the “old boys’ club” known as politics, where women are grossly underrepresented in positions of power, we are particularly at risk. And recent incidents with lawmakers who can’t seem to stop themselves from preying on the women they work with, shows we have good reason to worry.
Sexual harassment isn't uncommon in state legislatures, although the number of complaints has never been compiled. Men hold, on average, more than 75 percent of the seats, along with most of the positions of power, while women compose a high percentage of staff members, office employees, interns and lobbyists.
In the last month, legislators in Oklahoma and South Dakota have resigned after complaints of sexual harassment and other inappropriate contact with female employees. Last year, one lawmaker in Tennessee was expelled after having reportedly made advances toward more than 20 women. And in recent years, there have been sex scandals in at least eight other statehouses. And those are only the ones which are documented.
Yet, there are few procedures in place to address sexual harassment and to keep women safe in state legislatures.
Despite persistent incidents, many legislatures lack formal procedures for dealing with sexual harassment. While corporate America, colleges and government agencies have established processes for investigating complaints, state legislatures remain an often murky domain in which top leaders have broad latitude over how or whether to pursue allegations and can sidetrack them if they choose.
...State legislatures are an ideal environment for covering up sexual improprieties, so women are reluctant to report incidents, said Maya Raghu, a Washington, D.C., attorney specializing in women's issues who has conducted research on workplace sexual harassment. It’s quite telling that a body whose very job it is to make policy and law can’t be bothered to figure out how to stop this from happening.
Some legislatures have adopted systems for reviewing and investigating complaints, but at least 10, including Oklahoma's, have none at all.
"As I understand it now," said Democratic Rep. Emily Virgin, one of 13 women in the Oklahoma House, "it's completely up to the speaker whether anything happens or not."
This is not only an embarrassment—it’s downright dangerous. It leaves women with almost nowhere that is safe. And with an unabashed misogynist and serial groper in the highest political office in the country, sadly, it seems like men in state legislatures have all the license they need to continue with this disgusting behavior.
Oklahoma and Wyoming Republicans agree women aren’t people, disagree on just what they are
From www.dailykos.com on Monday, February 13, 2017
Republicans in Wyoming and Oklahoma are starting to drop the pretense that they consider women to be human beings. In Wyoming, the state Senate is considering three bills that would restrict women’s abortion rights. Two of them are being considered by the agriculture committee.
[Senate President Eli Bebout] said the labor and health committee is busy with a number of bills and the ag group had more time to thoroughly vet them.
Allegations that women are being equated to cattle are ridiculous, the Riverton Republican said.
Dude, you’re the one who handed the job of limiting what medical care women can get to the agriculture committee. In Oklahoma, Rep. Justin Henry isn’t trying to be even that subtle as he pushes a bill requiring women to get male approval for abortion. He’s ranking women somewhere below cattle:
Ultimately, he said, his intent was to let men have a say. “I believe one of the breakdowns in our society is that we have excluded the man out of all of these types of decisions,” he said. “I understand that they feel like that is their body,” he said of women. “I feel like it is a separate — what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’ And you know when you enter into a relationship you’re going to be that host and so, you know, if you pre-know that then take all precautions and don’t get pregnant,” he explained. “So that’s where I’m at. I’m like, hey, your body is your body and be responsible with it. But after you’re irresponsible then don’t claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you’re the host and you invited that in.”
“I understand that they feel like that is their body.” Take a second with that one. “This is my body” is not a fact, it is a thing that women feel. In reality, though, women are merely “hosts.” And they should have realized that they were mere hosts before their birth control failed or they were raped or they or the fetus had a health problem that made abortion the best choice for them.
Also, when we talk about bodies being hosts, we’re usually talking about parasites, which isn’t super flattering to fetuses, either. That said, can someone get this guy a tapeworm or three?
Judges slap down North Carolina law usurping governor’s power, GOP throws tantrum
From www.dailykos.com on Wednesday, February 8, 2017
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper
If Donald Trump is an irascible overgrown man-child (and he is), his political progeny are the Republican lawmakers who control North Carolina’s legislature. So naturally, when a three-judge panel held that GOP lawmakers overstepped their authority in usurping many of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's executive powers, Republicans threw a fit. The AP writes:
A North Carolina court temporarily blocked a new state law on Wednesday that stripped the new Democratic governor of some of his powers. [...]
Legislative leaders lashed out at the three judges, calling their decision "a blatant overstep of their constitutional authority."
House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger said in a joint statement the "judges are not legislators, and if these three men want to make laws, they should hang up their robes and run for a legislative seat."
Aww, ain't that cute. Just like daddy, state GOP lawmakers don't think the courts have the right to perform a check on their authoritarian rule. Remember when Gov. Cooper said, "They will see me in court, and they don’t have a very good track record there"? LOL. The law will remain suspended until the court hears more arguments Friday.
Perhaps the NC GOP should quit whining and start repealing their discriminatory bathroom bill since the NCAA gave them less than two weeks to dismantle it. Can’t wait to hear what their constituents have to say if the state gets blackballed from hosting NCAA events for six full years.
Tick tock, NC GOP, tick tock.
Did Ted Cruz just call Coretta Scott King a Liar?
From www.dailykos.com on Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions
Ted Cruz is a champion debater, so when he thinks the best way to defend Jeff Sessions from Coretta Scott King’s charges of racism (as read by Elizabeth Warren) is to change the subject and attack Democrats as the real racists, you know he’s got nothing to work with on actually defending Sessions. Appearing on Fox News Wednesday morning, Cruz hit the wayback machine:
I’ve got to say by the way the charges she was making against Jeff Sessions are demonstrably false, they're slanderous, they’re ugly. It is one of the crutches. When the left doesn't have any other arguments they go and just accuse everyone of being a racist and it is an ugly, ugly part of the modern Democratic party. Jeff Sessions is an honorable, decent person. The charges that she was recounting, you know, Senate judiciary committee, we had extensive hearings, we heard from witnesses, people involved in these false charges.
And I'll point out, listen, the Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan. You look at the most racist—the Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, who imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan. ... Yet now the Democrats just accuse anyone they disagree with of being a racist. That was a false smear of Jeff Sessions and I think he will make an extraordinary attorney general. After eight years we deserve an attorney general who’ll be faithful to the law and faithful to the Constitution.
Cruz is aggressively, desperately changing the subject here. Elizabeth Warren read Coretta Scott King’s words, but he needs it to be about Warren. In 1986, both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee decided Jeff Sessions was too racist to be a federal judge, but it’s ugly, demonstrably false slander to say he has a race problem, let alone to read what Coretta Scott King had to say about him at that time.
When was the Klan founded? About 100 years ago. What has happened in the intervening 100 years? The Democratic Party has moved from being a heavily southern party backing segregation to being the party that fought segregation and promoted civil rights—the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s championing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—and as the Democratic Party has made that shift, it has lost the South. All those people in the South who used to be pro-segregation Democrats? They’re Republicans now. And there’s a reason African American voters have moved from being heavily Republican to overwhelmingly Democratic.
Dear Ted, It is 2017, not 1917 or 1947. The Democratic Party has changed. And so has the Republican Party—it’s moved backward on race and specifically on Jeff Sessions’ racism since 1986. Thirty years ago, Republicans could say that even though Sessions was one of their own, his views were unacceptable. Today, Republicans are fiercely defending him, to the extent of silencing Elizabeth Warren and trying to erase Coretta Scott King’s words from the record. Congratulations, Ted. Even as you pretend that the Democratic Party’s past is its present, you are trying to drag the entire nation backward.
Cartoon: President Bannon?
From www.dailykos.com on February 8, 2017
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