Julie Zebrak

4 weeks ago | contrarian.substack.com | Joyce Vance |Joshua Kolb |Julie Zebrak |Lily Beau Conway

Remember in “Mary Poppins” when Julie Andrews sings, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down…In a most delightful way?” How she made us feel like we could get through an unpleasant task with a positive attitude? This week, the news is pretty awful, and we at the Democracy Index won’t sugarcoat it for you. But we are here, alongside all of you, as together we run a no-holds-barred temperature check on our country’s democratic institutions.

1 month ago | contrarian.substack.com | Joyce Vance |Joshua Kolb |Julie Zebrak |Lily Beau Conway

This week, the vision of our democracy that emerges is of one that is battered but still resilient. The wellsprings of resistance, of democracy itself, are continuing to bloom, in the middle of the serious damage this administration is trying to inflict on it. The Democracy Index takes stock of both forces. Trump’s economically inexplicable moves on tariffs make sense when they are viewed as part of our throughline that watches Trump continue to seize power for himself. As Sen.

Mar 15, 2024 | washingtonmonthly.com | Julie Zebrak

In 2022, two enlightened white, middle-aged “Never Trump” former Republican friends of mine from the Atlanta suburbs candidly shared their surprise at the Supreme Court’s decision to eviscerate a half-century-old Constitutional right to an abortion. Back in 2016, these two fathers of daughters, who consistently followed the news, had not appreciated that if Donald Trump won the presidential election, girls and women would lose the right to an abortion.

Nov 30, 2023 | news.yahoo.com | Dahlia Lithwick |Mimi Rocah |Tamara Sepper |Jennifer Taub |Joyce White Vance |Julie Zebrak

Of all of the horrors coming out of the Israel-Hamas conflict, among the most horrible are the barbaric murders, rapes, sexual assaults, and kidnappings of women and young girls in Israel during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. And yet, deepening this distressing event, there has been a disheartening silence about, or worse, denial of these evils; reticence from the voices here at home in the U.S. who have, in the recent past, embraced other women who needed their support.