Mexico is famous for its macho culture. Women here didn’t win the right to vote for president until 1953 — three decades after their U.S. counterparts. As recently as nine years ago, there wasn’t a single female state governor.
Yet Mexico has just elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in what was essentially a race between two women engineers. As the United States gears up for another two-man contest for the presidency — Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump — Mexico is eclipsing its northern neighbor on gender parity in government.
Today, women hold half the seats in Mexico’s legislature — roughly double the percentage in the U.S. Congress. Women lead Mexico’s Supreme Court and central bank. While the United States has a record number of female governors — 12 — the percentage here is higher.
How did Mexico do it?
Female politicians and activists lobbied for years to force parties to set quotas for female candidates. As in other parts of Latin America, when a wave of authoritarian governments crumbled in the 1980s and 1990s, activists sold the idea that real democracy meant equal participation for women.
So many senior positions in government here are held by women that gender wasn’t a big topic in the presidential race. There was, of course, recognition of the historic nature of the campaign. Sheinbaum’s slogans included “It’s time for women,” and runner-up Xóchitl Gálvez proclaimed she had the “ovaries” to take on organized crime. Yet there was nothing like the sense of anticipation that accompanied Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2016.
“For most of the population, the gender theme isn’t all that important in and of itself,” said Lorena Becerra, a prominent pollster. “We had already internalized the idea that the next president would be a woman.”...
President- elect Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, is also Jewish in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. She is expected to continue the policies of current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, vowing "We are democrats, and by conviction, we would never establish an authoritarian or represssive government.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) likened Donald Trump’s view of judges to the mafia on Saturday following the former president’s guilty verdict in his New York hush money trial.
After he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, Trump exited the New York courtroom and spoke on the decision.
“This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt as a rigged trial, a disgrace,” he said. “They wouldn’t give us a venue change. We were at 5% or 6% in this district, in this area. This was a rigged, disgraceful trial.”
While speaking with Raskin, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi pointed to Trump’s remarks and brought up former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann’s take on the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, who noted that Trump “cannot imagine that a jury can actually do its job.”
“In Donald Trump’s world, everything is politically black and white,” Velshi said. “This was a Democratic district, and hence these jurors could not have actually been able to be jurors and do their job and adjudicate this case fairly.”
“I mean, this is like an Atlantic City mob understanding of people who go into federal or state courts as judges, that somebody owns them,” Raskin replied.
“I think Trump’s position is either he owns the judge, he controls the judge — he feels that way about [Judge] Aileen Cannon, obviously — or there’s someone who can’t be trusted, they’re a political enemy,” he continued. “The whole world is friend or foe, which, of course, is a fascist way of looking at things.”
Raskin went on to say that people used to believe that there was a rule of law that included judges who would be trusted to interpret and apply the law “to the facts.” However, he feels this has changed because of Trump.
“I’m just afraid that his kind of authoritarian, extremist approach to jurisprudence has begun to infect judges and justices, as well as large parts of the population,” Raskin said. (our emphasis)
It's an extremist approach going far beyond jurisprudence, of course.
South Korea said Sunday it'll soon take "unbearable" retaliatory steps against North Korea over its launch of trash-carrying balloons across the border and other provocations.
In the past week, North Korea floated hundreds of huge balloons to dump rubbish on South Korea, simulated nuclear strikes against its neighbor and allegedly jammed GPS navigation signals in the South in an escalation of animosities between the rivals.
South Korea's national security director Chang Ho-jin said Sunday that top officials at an emergency meeting decided to take "unbearable" measures against North Korea in response to its recent series of provocative acts.
Chang called the North's balloon campaign and its alleged GPS signal jamming "absurd, irrational acts of provocation that a normal country can't imagine." He accused North Korea of aiming to cause "public anxieties and chaos" in South Korea. [snip]
Earlier Sunday, South Korea's military said that more than 700 balloons flown from North Korea were additionally discovered in various parts of South Korea. Tied to the balloons were cigarette butts, scraps of cloth, waste paper and vinyl, but no dangerous substances, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It was North Korea's second balloon activity in less than a week. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, South Korean officials said they had found about 260 North Korean balloons carrying trash and manure...
Trash and manure balloons? What will the Malignant Loser's pal and inspiration Kim Jong Un come up with next?
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