Former Congressional Black Caucus Executive Director Angela Rye took issue on Sunday with white Americans who think they "allowed" Barack Obama to become president.
During a panel discussion about race in America, CNN host Fareed Zakaria noted that some pundits had speculated that "the fact that you have allowed in a member of an excluded minority in a strange way gives you license to continue the old pattern of discrimination."
"Does that make any sense to you?" Zakaria asked. "That the fact that you have elected an African-American actually could mean a certain reversion to patterns of discrimination?"
Rye immediately objected to the premise of the question.
"I think it's interesting even that you used the term 'allowed,' that he was allowed to be there," she said. "That's terminology that we would never use to describe the 43 presidents that preceded him."
"To see that this is still our reality today in 2016 when we may very well be on the verge of electing our first woman president is really disheartening," she continued. "And I do think that people thought that they were doing the right thing, 'I'll check the box and I will allow this black man to become president.'"
Rye said that some white Americans seemed to think that electing a black president "means that you all are equal and I don't have to deal with the pattern and practice of discrimination that has existed in this country for years or the vestiges of slavery."
"We would be remiss if we believed if that is in fact the case," Rye added. "If you compare Donald Trump and what he is allowed to do, compared to Barack Obama and what he can't do -- the things that are allowed to come out of Donald Trump's mouth that Barack Obama could never say -- I think that is illuminating in and of itself."
"The fact that his campaign slogan could be 'Make America Great Again' and that pains me and people who look like me to no end, the fact that he could reference something like Operation Wetback in a debate where hundreds of our Mexican brothers and sisters killed, slaughtered and taken out of this country because someone didn't allow them to be here anymore is exactly the problem."
Rye concluded: "The last time America was great, Fareed, was in 2008 when [Obama] was elected president. And we've been paying the price for that."
Watch the video below from CNN, broadcast July 10, 2016.
On Tuesday, The New York Timesreported on how Vernon Jones, a controversial former Democratic Georgia state representative who left the party to support former President Donald Trump, is floundering in his efforts to win the GOP nomination for a safely red House seat.
As the article noted, the House contest wasn't even Jones' first choice — he originally mounted a bid for governor, seeking to unseat incumbent Republican Brian Kemp as revenge for not illegally overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election and declaring Trump the winner.
But Trump decided instead to endorse former Sen. David Perdue for that race, reportedly telling Jones that if he dropped out he would have the former president's backing for Congress.
But things haven't worked out that way, reported Jazmine Ulloa.
"Now he is struggling to stay afloat in a crowded Republican primary for a House seat representing the state’s 10th Congressional District. Like the governor’s race, where Mr. Kemp has remained on top despite Mr. Trump’s endorsement of former Senator David Perdue, the 10th District race has exposed the limits of Mr. Trump’s sway," said the report. "Mr. Jones, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump early this spring after he agreed to drop his bid for the governorship, is running against seven other contenders for the seat representing a Republican stronghold, which stretches from suburban Atlanta to Augusta and includes Athens, a college town. He has struggled to raise money and earn the trust of voters, many who remained skeptical of his party affiliation."
"Among his toughest challengers is Mike Collins, the owner of a trucking company and the race’s top fund-raiser. He ran for the seat in 2014 and lost to Representative Jody Hice, a radio show host and political activist who is now challenging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger," noted the report. "Other contenders include David Curry, the state revenue commissioner, and Paul C. Broun, who represented the district from 2007 to 2014. Mr. Broun lost a 2016 House bid to represent the state’s Ninth Congressional District against Doug Collins, a Republican."
Jones has faced a number of controversies throughout his career in county and state legislative office, including a corruption scandal around the watershed department of DeKalb County and an allegation of rape, which he denies.
Ironically, Perdue, who beat out Jones for Trump's endorsement to take on Kemp, also appears on track to lose in Tuesday's primary, where polls have shown Kemp has a strong lead to be nominated for a second term, and even Trump appears to be abandoning the effort.
In 1921, he was studying radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, Germany, when he noticed something he could not explain. One of the elements he was working with wasn’t behaving as it should have. Hahn had unknowingly discovered the first nuclear isomer, an atomic nucleus whose protons and neutrons are arranged differently from the common form of the element, causing it to have unusual properties. It took another 15 years of discoveries in nuclear physics to be able to explain Hahn’s observations.
We are two professors of nuclear physics who study rare nuclei including nuclear isomers.
The most common place to find isomers is inside stars, where they play a role in the nuclear reactions that create new elements. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore how isomers can be put to use for the benefit of humanity. They are already used in medicine and could one day offer powerful options for energy storage in the form of nuclear batteries.
This video shows radioactive uranium-238 in a chamber full of mist. The streaks are created as particles are emitted from the radioactive sample and pass through water vapor.
On the hunt for radioactive isotopes
In the early 1900s, scientists were on the hunt for new radioactive elements. An element is considered radioactive if it spontaneously releases particles in a process called radioactive decay. When this happens, the element is transformed over time into a different element.
At that time, scientists relied on three criteria to discover and describe a new radioactive element. One was to look at chemical properties – how the new element reacts with other substances. They also measured the type and energy of the particles released during the radioactive decay. Finally, they would measure how fast an element decayed. Decay speeds are described using the term half-life, which is the amount of time it takes for half of the initial radioactive element to decay into something else.
By the 1920s, physicists had discovered some radioactive substances with identical chemical properties but different half-lives. These are called isotopes. Isotopes are different versions of the same element that have the same number of protons in their nucleus, but different numbers of neutrons.
Uranium is a radioactive element with many isotopes, two of which occur naturally on Earth. These natural uranium isotopes decay into the element thorium, which in turn decays into protactinium, and each has its own isotopes. Hahn and his colleague Lise Meitner were the first to discover and identify many different isotopes originating from the decay of the element uranium.
All the isotopes they studied behaved as expected, except for one. This isotope appeared to have the same properties as one of the others, but its half-life was longer. This made no sense, as Hahn and Meitner had placed all the known isotopes of uranium in a neat classification, and there were no empty spaces to accommodate a new isotope. They called this substance “uranium Z.”
The radioactive signal of uranium Z was about 500 times weaker than the radioactivity of the other isotopes in the sample, so Hahn decided to confirm his observations by using more material. He purchased and chemically separated uranium from 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of highly toxic and rare uranium salt. The surprising result of this second, more precise experiment suggested that the mysterious uranium Z, now known as protactinium-234, was an already known isotope, but with a very different half-life. This was the first case of an isotope with two different half-lives. Hahn published his discovery of the first nuclear isomer, even though he could not fully explain it.
The discovery that the nucleus of an atom is made of both protons and neutrons allowed physicists to explain isotopes as well as uranium Z.
At the time of Hahn’s experiments in the 1920s, scientists still thought of atoms as a clump of protons surrounded by an equal number of electrons. It wasn’t until 1932 that James Chadwick suggested a third particle – neutrons – were also part of the nucleus.
With this new information, physicists were immediately able to explain isotopes – they are nuclei with the same number of protons and different numbers of neutrons. With this knowledge, the scientific community finally had the tools to understand uranium Z.
In 1936 Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker proposed that two different substances could have the same number of protons and neutrons in their nuclei but in different arrangements and with different half-lives. The arrangement of protons and neutrons that results in the lowest energy is the most stable material and is called ground state. Arrangements resulting in less stable, higher energies of an isotope are called isomeric states.
At first nuclear isomers were useful in the scientific community only as a means to understand how nuclei behave. But once you understand the properties of an isomer, it’s possible to start asking how they can be used.
Technetium-99m is an isomer that is commonly used for diagnosing many diseases, as doctors can easily track its movement through the human body. This photo shows a medical professional injecting technetium-99m into a patient.
Isomers have important applications in medicine and are used in tens of millions of diagnostic procedures annually. Since isomers undergo radioactive decay, special cameras can track them as they move through the body.
For example, technetium-99m is an isomer of technetium-99. As the isomer decays, it emits photons. Using photon detectors, doctors can track how technetium-99m moves throughout the body and create images of the heart, brain, lungs and other critical organs to help diagnose diseases including cancer. Radioactive elements and isotopes are normally dangerous because they emit charged particles that damage bodily tissues. Isomers like technetium are safe for medical use because they emit only a single, harmless photon at a time and nothing else as they decay.
Isomers are also important in astronomy and astrophysics. Stars are fueled by the energy released during nuclear reactions. Since isomers are present in stars, nuclear reactions are different than if a material were in its ground state. This makes the study of isomers critical for understanding how stars produce all the elements in the universe.
Scientists are also investigating whether nuclear isomers could be used to build the world’s most accurate clock or whether isomers may one day be the basis for the next generation of batteries. More than 100 years after the detection of a small anomaly in uranium salt, scientists are still on the hunt for new isomers and have just begun to reveal the full potential of these fascinating pieces of physics.
Former President Donald Trump has thrown the Georgia Republican Party into turmoil, and there's diminishing chances for unity following a bruising primary election.
The former president is waging a grievance campaign against GOP officials who refused to help overturn his 2020 election loss, but not all of the candidates he has backed are expected to win -- and some of them have alienated party bosses, reported Politico.
“If Herschel [Walker] were to be the nominee, people who have endorsed him are going to have to explain why they got behind a guy who choked his wife unconscious and threatened shootouts with police," said Dan McLagan, communications director for agriculture commissioner Gary Black. "That would be … uncomfortable for them.”
Trump personally recruited Walker, a former University of Georgia and NFL star with no political experience, to challenge Sen. Rafael Warnock -- a race that Black had already been running -- and the former president endorsed former Sen. David Perdue to challenge incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp, who is expected to easily win.
“I know there’s been mutterings of a unity rally with us and whoever wins governor and potentially inviting some out of state Republican bigwigs down as well," said Mallory Blount, spokesperson for Walker. "Herschel would be involved and invite people from all parts of the party."
But GOP operatives see little chance for unity after the primary.
“I don’t think that these Trump-endorsed candidates are going to show up at a unity rally, if they lose," said one person working with several GOP candidates, "and I don’t think [Attorney General] Chris Carr and Brad Raffensperger are going to show up at something like that, if they were to lose."
“I don’t see John Gordon showing up for Chris or Chris showing up for John Gordon, or Hice and Raffensperger," that person added. "I don’t see Purdue showing up for Kemp. I don’t think that this is necessarily a good idea if, the visual is, the people who lose don’t show up, and I think that’s a distinct possibility.”
