Salon: Constitutional collapse: Why we could be on the verge of a democratic apocalypse

Republicans now control 32 state legislatures and 33 governorships. They have majorities in both state legislative chambers as well as the governorships in 25 states. The Democrats have total control in only six states and legislative control in two more.

If Republicans achieve veto-proof control in 38 states, they can do something that has never been done before — hold a constitutional convention, and then ratify new amendments that are put forth. To date, all amendments have been initiated from Congress where two-thirds of both houses are required. In either case, 38 states would be needed to ratify the amendments. The Republicans are well on their way. [...]

Ask the corporate Democrats who have turned losing into an art form. Since 2008, they have lost 917 state legislative seats. Explanations range from Koch brothers funding to gerrymandering to voter suppression to the rise of the Tea Party. All partially true.

The Democrats also shoulder a good deal of the blame. Ever since Bill Clinton triangulated into NAFTA and away from working people, the Democratic Party’s embrace of financial and corporate elites has become the norm.

Hillary Clinton took $225,000 per speech from Goldman Sachs not because she was corrupt, but because this is simply the way the political game is played. You raise money from rich people, and then you back away from attacking their prerogatives while still trying to placate your liberal/worker base. [...]

We need to turn the marvelous anti-Trump resistance into a common national movement that binds us together and directly confronts runaway inequality. We need to come out of our silos because nearly every issue we work on is connected by growing inequality.

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Bloomberg: Dutch Election: A Who's Who Guide to the Candidates

Dutch voters head to the polls on March 15, with a whopping 28 parties vying for the right to form a new government. Given the fractured political environment, it could take as many as six different groups to form a ruling coalition, making this year’s race the most complicated—and pivotal—in years.

Here are the main players, their party associations and the number of seats each currently holds in Parliament:

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National Public Radio: How America's Idea Of Illegal Immigration Doesn't Always Match Reality

The total number of people living in the country illegally — about 11 million — has made headlines recently, because immigration advocates suggest that under the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policies, almost all of them could be targeted for deportation. (More than 700,000 "DREAMers" — immigrants who were brought into the U.S. illegally or overstayed their visas as children — are still temporarily protected from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.)

A large majority of those people currently living in the U.S. illegally have been here for a decade or longer, which is a major shift from the situation at the turn of the millennium.[...]

Of people living in the U.S. illegally, more than half are from Mexico. The population from that one country far outnumbers the population from entire continents. But there are fewer people of Mexican origin living in the U.S. now than there were a decade ago.[...]

But there just aren't very many farming jobs in the U.S., overall. So farming is not a common industry for the 11 million — only 4 percent of people living here illegally work in agriculture.

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Los Angeles Times: In Belarus, a rising fear: Will we be the next Ukraine?

At the heart of the feud is the status of what is quietly referred to here as the “oil for kisses” deal, in which Russia supplies Belarus with subsidized oil and gas in exchange for Minsk’s loyalty.

When Russia in 2015 refused to lower its gas prices to reflect a decrease in global oil prices, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko began exploring closer relations with the West.

Lukashenko has refused so far to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Last year, he said no to a Kremlin proposal to build a Russian air base in eastern Belarus.

Lukashenko, who has ruled this former Soviet republic with an authoritarian grip for 22 years, bowed to Western pressure in 2015 to release six prominent political prisoners, and ushered in a period of “softening” against political dissent and public gatherings. This earned him cautious praise from Western governments, which subsequently lifted sanctions on Belarus.[...]

In recent weeks, public protests have sprung up in Minsk and a few regional cities against an unpopular law instituting a yearly flat tax on the unemployed. So far, the protests have been small, and authorities have not cracked down on demonstrators, a rarity in Lukashenko’s tightly controlled Belarus.

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Time: Judge: Gender Laws Are at Odds With Science

This physiological truth is unrelated to whether someone is straight, gay or transgender. Many individuals are born with sex chromosome, endocrine or hormonal irregularities, and their birth certificates are inaccurate because in the United States birth records are not designed to allow doctors to designate an ambiguous sex. Countless people likely have no idea that they fall into this group. The more we learn about our DNA, the more that biological sex — from the moment of conception — looks like an intricate continuum and less like two tidy boxes. This understanding makes it virtually impossible for judges to consistently apply a law that permits or prohibits conduct based on whether someone is a man or a woman. [...]

I was curious whether her situation was an obscure medical anomaly that was statistically and legally irrelevant. It wasn’t. A regularly cited 1991 study of nearly 35,000 newborn children found that 1 in 426 did not have strictly XX or XY chromosomes. In addition, the World Health Organization reports that 1 in every 2,000 births worldwide are visibly intersex, because the child’s genitals are either incomplete or ambiguous, which equates to five newborn Americans a day. This represents a sizable U.S. population that cannot be ignored by the law. [...]

The United States’ stringent adherence to a two-sex paradigm is inconsistent with science and incongruous with the historic and modern understanding of sex throughout many regions of the world. Dating back to 2000 B.C., three or more sexes can be found in classical Greek, Sanskrit and Hindu texts. Currently, numerous countries recognize a third or indeterminate sex including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Nepal and New Zealand. If the bill introduced into the California state legislature in January 2017 passes, California will be the first state in the U.S. to recognize a third, non-binary gender, for birth certificates and driver’s licenses.

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Deutsche Welle:Pope Francis tells German newspaper that he is a sinner

"Zeit" published a preview of an interview with Pope Francis, in which the pontiff highlighted the importance of taking a critical approach to matters of faith. Francis told the weekly newspaper that any kind of faith that didn't face times of crisis "remains infantile. [...]

"We mustn't forget that any form of idealization of a human being always brings a subliminal brand of aggression with it as well. If I am idealized I feel under attack," the Pope said, rejecting the personality cult that some members of the Church are cultivating.

Francis also told "Zeit" that he does not consider himself to be special in any way, saying about himself: "I, too, am a sinner, and am fallible." [...]

"Populism means using the people," Pope Francis said, adding that it would always seek its justification in a compulsion to preserve the identity of the people. Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, had previously compared the trend of growing populism with the rise of Hitler in Germany. He further said that populism always required "a messiah" figure to succeed, hinting at its incompatibility with Christian values and highlighting its foundation in fear while spreading a message of hope for people living under growing oppression:

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FiveThirtyEight: Purple America Has All But Disappeared

President Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was among the narrowest in history, and the country is deeply split on his job performance so far. But if you feel like you hardly know anyone who disagrees with you about Trump, you’re not alone: Chances are the election was a landslide in your backyard.

More than 61 percent of voters cast ballots in counties that gave either Clinton or Trump at least 60 percent of the major-party vote last November. That’s up from 50 percent of voters who lived in such counties in 2012 and 39 percent in 1992 — an accelerating trend that confirms that America’s political fabric, geographically, is tearing apart.

Of the nation’s 3,113 counties (or county equivalents), just 303 were decided by single-digit margins — less than 10 percent. In contrast, 1,096 counties fit that description in 1992, even though that election featured a wider national spread.¹ During the same period, the number of extreme landslide counties — those decided by margins exceeding 50 percentage points — exploded from 93 to 1,196, or over a third of the nation’s counties.

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The New York Times: China and North Korea Reveal Sudden, and Deep, Cracks in Their Friendship

Earlier this month, the North issued a more indirect takedown of Beijing in its government newspaper Minju Joson, signaling a growing rift. Shortly afterward, China announced the suspension of coal imports.

The burst of criticisms from Pyongyang — coupled with Beijing’s coal ban — suggested boiling tensions between China’s president, Xi Jinping, 63, who sees himself as a global leader, and Mr. Kim, 33, an eccentric dictator.

Mr. Xi is said to have low regard for Mr. Kim, who has not visited China and is not known to have been invited.

Despite past periods of turbulence, including under Mao Zedong, both sides have more or less tried to preserve a polite public veneer of amity. But the friendship was a myth, said Shen Zhihua, a professor of history at East China Normal University. [...]

It was not immediately clear how much China’s ban on coal imports would affect North Korea’s ability to look after its population. And at least publicly, China said that it was imposing the ban only because it had already fulfilled its coal quota allowed under United Nations sanctions.

That seemed to suggest that Beijing may have already paid Pyongyang for the coal it imported in the first 50 days of this year, money that would go to the North’s cash-starved government, experts said.

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