Comments

1. KG says

   5 September 2021 at 2:07 pm

   UK Tories following the Republifascist playbook: photo IDs to “solve” a non-existent problem of voter fraud, and legislating for a government minister to have the power to issue orders to the currently independent Electoral Commission. They are also putting their cronies in powerful media positions, at the BBC and the communications regulator OfCom, bullying museums and universities to toe the Tory line in the culture wars they are prosecuting, pushing through new and oppressive legislation on demonstrations, official secrets and judicial review of the legality of government actions…

2. blf says

   5 September 2021 at 6:27 pm

   Pinal County [Arizona] Supervisors Vote To Reject $3.4 Million COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Grant (audio) (quoted in full):

   Last week, the Pinal County Board of Supervisors rejected a $3.4 million federal grant aimed at improving vaccine equity.

   The board voted 3–2 against accepting the grant money from the Arizona Department of Health Services.

   One board member cited the creation of a “vaccine equity coordinator” position, which is required to collect the grant, as a reason to vote against receiving the funds.

   A representative from Pinal County Public Health says the grant would be used to educate and provide vaccinations to underserved populations within the county, including rural communities without easy access to vaccines.

   Less than half of Pinal County’s population has been fully vaccinated, lagging behind both the state and national rates.

   There’s four(?) First Nations communities in the county. I don’t know to what extent they are affected by this absurdity.

3. blf says

   6 September 2021 at 5:23 am

   First Dog on the Moon in the Grauniad (please consider supporting the Grauniad if you can), I find being a cartoonist exhausting, so imagine having a real job in a pandemic! (cartoon): “Imagine being a supermarket or healthcare worker, or any other essential job right now”.

4. blf says

   6 September 2021 at 9:37 am

   Mars helicopter Ingenuity successfully completed its 13th flight. Data and images are still being downloaded. This flight was lower and slower than the 12th, but intended to again image the same interesting ridge features of South Séítah region, from a somewhat different angle, altitude, and position. I believe part of the intent is try and combine the new images with those from the previous flight to produce an even better stereoscopic (albeit not 360°) view of what has the scientists intrigued.

   Nasa / JPL has also officially extended Ingenuity’s mission “indefinitely” (the original(?) mission extension was to have ended about now-ish, if my memory is correct).

5. blf says

   6 September 2021 at 11:00 am

   Teh thug’s next tactic, Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot:

   […]
   Russian opposition politicians are used to finding spoiler candidates with identical surnames running against them in order to confuse voters at the polls. Now it appears that the impersonators are changing their faces as well.

   That’s what Boris Vishnevsky, a senior member of the liberal Yabloko party, is facing in his district in St Petersburg before municipal elections later this month.

   Vishnevsky already knew that two of his opponents had changed their names so that they were also called Boris Vishnevsky, an update on the common tactic of nominating a “double” to split the vote and deliver victory to another candidate.

   But when a district voting poster was revealed on Sunday, it showed something far more shocking: three nearly indistinguishable Boris Vishnevskys, all balding, greying, and sporting matching goatees. As a Facebook friend of Vishnevsky’s pointed out, the simplest way to spot the real Vishnevsky is that he was the only one who bothered to wear a tie.

   […]

   Vishnevsky’s opponents had grown their beards and moustaches for the photographs and may have also submitted photoshopped images to the electoral commission, Vishnevsky said. It also appears that at least one of the candidates had either shaved his head or digitally altered his hairline for the photograph.

   “I have never seen anything like it,” said Vishnevsky. Earlier, he called the “doppelgänger” tactics “political fraud”.

   At least one of Vishnevsky’s opponents, who until recently was named Viktor Bykov, is believed to have changed his appearance considerably for the photographs. In an official photograph used on a St Petersburg government website, Bykov had a full head of hair and looked years younger than the photograph submitted to the electoral commission.

   […]

   Less is known about the other opponent, who was previously named Alexei Shmelev and was reported to be a sales manager at a St Petersburg company. Neither of Vishnevsky’s opponents have campaigned publicly or had any public appearances. Until this week, it was unclear how they even looked, and it still is not entirely clear.

   Vishnevsky said he didn’t know the men’s motivations in running against him but said: “I don’t think they agreed to embarrass themselves like this for free.”

   [… T]he campaign against Vishnevsky stands out because his opponents legally changed their names (although the candidates still have different patronymics — middle names that are usually assigned to Russian children according to the name of one’s father), because there are two doubles rather than just one, and, of course, because the men had engaged in political cosplay to derail the vote.

   “Every time there are elections we say these are the dirtiest elections there have ever been,” said Vishnevsky, when asked about how this campaign compared to the past. “I’m sure we’ll say the same at the next elections, too.”

   Image at the link. As per the above excerpt, the original Vishnevsky is the one wearing a tie.

6. Lynna, OM says

   6 September 2021 at 12:14 pm

   Cartoon: Another trip to parallel Earth.

7. Lynna, OM says

   6 September 2021 at 12:40 pm

   Millions in U.S. lose jobless benefits as federal aid expires, thrusting families and economy onto uncertain path.

   Washington Post link

   More than 7 million out-of-work people across the United States are set to lose all of their jobless benefits this week as three federal programs expire on Monday, in what several experts described as one of the largest and most abrupt ends to government aid in U.S. history.

   Too much. Too big a change happening all at once. Not good.

   In addition to the more than 7 million people who will lose all their benefits, nearly 3 million more people will lose a $300 weekly boost to their state unemployment benefits.

   The cessation of this jobless aid, first put in place by Congress nearly 18 months ago, could upend the lives of millions of Americans still struggling to find work at a time when the pandemic’s delta variant is wreaking fresh havoc across a number of states. It could also lead to a sharp pullback in spending, particularly in certain areas of the country, impacting a wide range of restaurants and other businesses that rely on consumer dollars.

   “I don’t understand how anyone in Washington cannot know normal people, their friends, families, cousins who are going through this,” said Kathleen Fox, a producer in New York whose past work has been recognized with a prestigious Peabody Award but who has struggled to find work after the pandemic upended her industry. […]

   President Biden said in June that it “makes sense” for one of the programs, which boosted unemployment checks by $300 each week, to lapse in September, but senior aides have also called on states to reallocate other money in a way that would continue offering some support. No states appear inclined to take action, though, leading to this week’s sudden cutoff.

   Now there is heightened anxiety […] that pulling so many people off government support so abruptly could push millions of people into poverty and cut off access to food or nutrition for people caught on the wrong side of this uneven economy. The jobless rate has fallen and the stock market is near record levels, but many Americans have found themselves unable to recover from the pandemic’s devastating blow.

   […] some 7.5 million people will be cut off from aid on the programs’ expiration date. “If past periods have been an indicator, many will be caught in a spiral that will lead to a downward quality of life.” [chart available at the link]

   The programs initially boosted jobless benefits by $600 a week before Congress lowered the amount to $300 a week. They also expanded the pool of workers eligible for government aid and increased the number of weeks workers could draw on unemployment insurance. But this assistance has also emerged as a divisive flash point in a political debate over whether government assistance discourages people from returning to work.

   Republicans and numerous business groups have argued the extra benefits were contributing to a labor shortage and slowing the economic recovery, alleging it had become too lucrative for people to stay home rather than get a job. They have called for investigations of fraud in the programs, alleging hundreds of billions of dollars in unemployment aid may have been stolen.

   […] “It just feels like being discarded,” said Fox, who was set to see her new projects premiere at major festivals in 2020 before the coronavirus devastated those plans. Now, she applies for around three jobs per day, including ones where she would make far less money than in her last full-time position at an advertising agency, all to no avail. If she is unable to find a job after losing her benefits, she faces the prospect of being forced to sell her apartment.

   […] Over the summer, 26 states announced they would end these benefits early, providing a glimpse of what millions of other Americans will now face. Since then, economists have studied data on job gains and spending to see how local economies have reacted to the withdrawal of benefits amid a pandemic, and to determine whether the extra aid was holding back job growth.

   Their conclusions are ominous: one study found that for every eight workers who lost benefits, just one managed to find a new job, and found a dramatic reduction in spending, suggesting the people who lost benefits were left in a precarious financial situation.

   […] When they designed the aid package last year, lawmakers created a new type of unemployment aid called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which covers workers who normally wouldn’t qualify for unemployment insurance, such as gig workers, caretakers and the self-employed. Those workers tend to be younger and lower-income than those who received benefits from standard unemployment insurance, […] The expiration of that program this week means these workers — who make up about 40 percent of all UI claims during the pandemic — will no longer be eligible for any unemployment insurance programs.

   […] It is still unclear whether businesses struggling with labor shortages will find it easier to hire workers in the coming weeks, even as the benefits end. Argosy Cruises, a company offering boat tours in the Seattle area, had a pre-pandemic head count of around 250 people, before it was forced to lay off 85 percent of its staff in August 2020, said chief operating officer Molly Schlobohm. The company gradually relaunched in April, and hiring has been “incredibly challenging,” she said, despite wage increases and signing bonuses.

   […] “I don’t really think that the extended unemployment benefits are the sole reason for the labor shortage,” she said. “I’m seeing and hearing from candidates and employees that affordable, quality child care is more of an issue,” she said, along with affordable housing in the Seattle area.

   […] Workers still depending on the benefits described numerous obstacles to finding work, including industries that had not fully staffed back up to pre-pandemic levels and fear of contracting the delta variant.

   Bailey, 51, has a bachelor’s degree from Smith College and a master’s degree from Howard University. She is a Black woman — a demographic that faced an unemployment rate of 8.6 percent in August, significantly higher than the comparable national rate of 5.1 percent. […] She is fully vaccinated, but fears a breakthrough infection and would prefer to work from home.

   “I’m not afraid of death,” Bailey said. “I’m more afraid of long covid,” she added, referring to the prospect of weeks or even months of lingering illness after being infected by the virus.

8. Lynna, OM says

   6 September 2021 at 12:43 pm

   Panjshir Valley, last resistance holdout in Afghanistan, falls to the Taliban

   Washington Post link

   The Taliban on Monday seized Panjshir province, a restive mountain region that was the final holdout of resistance forces in the country, cementing the group’s total control over Afghanistan a week after U.S. forces departed the country.

   Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement that the Islamist group had “completely conquered” the Panjshir Valley. “Our last efforts for establishing peace and security in the country have given results,” he said.

   A senior official of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, confirmed that the Taliban had taken over. “Yes, Panjshir has fallen. Taliban took control of government offices. Taliban fighters entered into the governor’s house,” the person said.

   […] But on Twitter, the NRF said its forces remained “in all strategic positions across the valley to continue the fight” and that the “Taliban’s claim of occupying Panjshir is false.” And in a video recorded on Friday, Saleh said reports at the time that he had fled the country were “totally baseless,” although he added that the situation was “difficult.”

9. Lynna, OM says

   6 September 2021 at 1:09 pm

   Southern Republicans Cannot Be Trusted With Public Health

   New York Times link to an article written by Margaret Renki.

   For those of you keeping score at home, here is where things stand in the 2021 National Calamities Sweeps, Southern Division:

   In the ever-expanding Climate-Augmented Natural Disasters event, results cannot yet be tallied. Tennessee and North Carolina are both digging out from catastrophic flooding, while parts of Louisiana were flattened by Hurricane Ida, and most of New Orleans remains without electricity. Ida’s remnants also brought even more rain to areas of the South and beyond that were already dangerously waterlogged.

   In the Utter Failure to Understand What “Pro-Life” Really Means tournament, normally a very close battle in the red states, Texas is currently uncontested: Its leaders just made it easier to carry a gun and harder to end an unwanted pregnancy in the same week.

   Finally, in the Colossally Botched Medical Emergency competition, it’s neck and neck across the region as Republican governors double down on efforts to block mask and vaccine mandates, along with every other pandemic-mitigation attempt made by people who are not allergic to science.

   Every single one of these disasters is, at its heart, a public health emergency. And in every case our leaders have responded with disinterest and disinformation at best. In many cases they have worsened the emergency in every way imaginable.

   […]Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, actually signed this state’s new permitless-carry bill in a ceremonial event at a gun factory. […]

   Freedom from death is surely at the top of anybody’s priority list. […]

   Nevertheless, Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky, is more interested in investigating the Covid-treatment benefits of a horse dewormer — despite warnings about its dangers from the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association — than in getting his constituents vaccinated.

   For a few days last week, Tennessee had the highest Covid case rate — including the highest case rate for children — in the country. By Friday, South Carolina had taken the lead in overall cases, and Tennessee had dropped to second place, giving them the highest case rates per capita in the world, according to Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

   Hospitalizations for both adults and children in Tennessee have surpassed their previous pandemic record. School systems across the state keep shutting down because of outbreaks, using the few inclement-weather days already built into the school calendar because Mr. Lee [Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee] has not authorized days off for Covid outbreaks. Nor has he allowed school systems to pivot to online learning.

   And yet, despite these indisputable indicators of failed public policy, Mr. Lee has no intention of reversing course. Most Southern Republicans don’t, either, and that’s why Southerners will continue to die unnecessary deaths — if not from Covid, then from natural disasters, or self-administered abortions, or gun violence, or any number of other preventable tragedies.

   Whether you believe in climate change or not, living without access to electricity and safe drinking water is a public health emergency. Whether you need an abortion or not, living where it is difficult or impossible to obtain one is a public health emergency because clinics that provide abortions also provide crucial preventive care like mammograms and cervical cancer screening — services that will no longer be offered when those clinics close. Having more people carrying more guns into more public places is clearly a hair-on-fire public health emergency.

   […] heroes are working to get their communities vaccinated, to defend mask mandates in schools, to protect the environment, to increase access to health care, and to reform a hopelessly broken criminal justice system, just for starters. […] But every step of the way they are fighting against their own elected officials to accomplish anything. And it is long past time to recognize that some matters are too important to be entrusted to state governments anymore.

   If there is anything this pandemic has taught us, it’s that public health is not a local matter. When hospitals in the red-state countryside close, their patients arrive in blue-city hospitals, taking up beds and lifesaving equipment and putting health care workers at risk. When people in the red states aren’t vaccinated, the virus continues to evolve, creating variants that pose a health risk to people everywhere else.

   We don’t trust red-state governments to set baseline environmental-protection standards. That’s a responsibility of the federal government because air and water do not observe state borders. In the same way and for the same reasons, we can no longer trust Republican governors and legislatures to protect public health.

   […] We need to take health and public safety out of the hands of Republicans because this is not a game, no matter how often the people running things down here may behave as though it is. There are no winners in the National Calamities tournament of 2021. Here in the South, especially, there are only losers.

10. Lynna, OM says

    6 September 2021 at 1:12 pm

    AG Garland: DOJ Will ‘Provide Support’ For Abortion Clinics ‘Under Attack’

    […] Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday said that the Justice Department will work with law enforcement to ensure the safety of abortion clinics, following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Texas’ ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy stand.

    “While the Justice Department urgently explores all options to challenge Texas SB8 in order to protect the constitutional rights of women and other persons, including access to an abortion, we will continue to protect those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services pursuant to our criminal and civil enforcement of the FACE Act,” Garland said in a press release.

    Garland noted that the FACE Act, which was signed into law in 1994, already criminalizes the act of blocking access to an abortion clinic.

    “The FACE Act prohibits the use or threat of force and physical obstruction that injures, intimidates, or interferes with a person seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services. It also prohibits intentional property damage of a facility providing reproductive health services,” Garland said. “The department has consistently obtained criminal and civil remedies for violations of the FACE Act since it was signed into law in 1994, and it will continue to do so now.”

    Garland said that the DOJ is ready to “provide support” from federal law enforcement when an abortion clinic or reproductive health center is “under attack.”

    “We have reached out to U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and FBI field offices in Texas and across the country to discuss our enforcement authorities,” Garland said.

11. Lynna, OM says

    6 September 2021 at 1:17 pm

    A brief dispatch from the rural COVID front line

    Well, it’s official. Things at my little rural hospital, and in my office practice, are every bit as bad as they were back in December/January. Every bed in our ICU is full; we’re averaging at least one COVID death per day. Every floor bed is full. We are now boarding patients in the ER again because there’s nowhere to put them. One of the large waiting rooms is a de-facto COVID holding area for people waiting to get into the ER.

    Yesterday morning I spent an hour on the phone calling patients to inform them their COVID test was positive, and what they need to do. More phone calls all night from terrified people.

    I got called in this morning about 6:30 am because one of my COVID patients in the ICU developed a dangerous rapid heart rhythm. Got things slowed down a bit but he’s not out of the woods, and his respiratory status is still dire. And there are six more patients just like him in the ICU.

    We are seeing breakthrough infections; one of the ICU patients was fully vaccinated; but the overwhelming majority of folks getting sick have not been vaccinated.

    Our Northern Appalachian county has yet to crack the 60% mark for fully vaccinated status for adults. The next county over is stuck at 48%. So there really isn’t any reason for optimism right now. Things are going to get worse before (if?) they get better.

    Every single day in my office practice I try to persuade folks to get vaccinated. A few more accept every day. And every day I get swaggering, ignorant push-back from Trump supporters spouting the latest lies from Tucker Carlson, the latest racist rant that it’s all because of those immigrants from Mexico.

    One of my partners has had enough. He started here the same month I did back in the 1980s, but he’s done. He is retiring. I can’t blame him. Fortunately we have hired a new young doc to fill the gap; she’s had a trial by fire, caring for COVID patients as a senior resident while pregnant.

    I can’t say enough about the nurses at our little hospital. Their shifts are brutal, spending 12 hours in full protective garb caring for desperately ill and terrified COVID patients. I have eyes and hands on the patients every day, but they’re wading into the fire for hours at a time.

    My thoughts about the Republican neofascists who have brought us to this point with their vile lies about vaccines, their despicable sabotage of basic infection control measures, their de-funding of public health for a generation….are too dark to voice. I’m an atheist and a humanist; but this is one of those times when the belief in an afterlife might be comforting. I so want to believe there will be some kind of justice for the people who enabled this plague killing my patients.

    That’s a powerful conclusion.

12. LykeX says

    7 September 2021 at 5:52 am

    Twitter thread:

    People demand simple, cookie-cutter answers to problems from anarchists and abolitionists because simple, cookie-cutter “answers” is the comfort the state has always offered. Even if those “answers” are just organized violence that compounds the problems they claim to address.
    Perhaps stop to ask yourself if submitting to an order that offers one crisp, simple answer to incredibly complex, nuanced, and often irrevocably *contextual* problems isn’t a major part of what makes how we address harm under the current system so violent and ineffective?
    Additionally, those simple “answers” are not and have never been effective in addressing harm. The State says “we’ll throw anyone who’s poor and who we think (or at least can convince the public to think) committed a crime into a hole to rot and preform slave labor” and folks will hold that up as a standard all other solutions must meet because… it’s easy.

    More at the link and some decent comments, too.

13. snarkrates says

    7 September 2021 at 8:42 am

    LykeX, Mencken said it better: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

14. KG says

    7 September 2021 at 10:53 am

    LykeX@11,
    The best of the comments in response was this one (apar from the misues of the word “redress”:

    This is just a verbose way of saying that anarchists have no redress for any of the questions or critiques raised against their system(s) so they pretend that everyone else assumes a reductive position of how to order and structure society.

15. tomh says

    7 September 2021 at 11:55 am

    Metro News:
    Poll: Fewer than half of West Virginians believe legitimacy of 2020 presidential election
    By Brad McElhinny / September 6, 2021

    Fewer than half of West Virginians believe the 2020 presidential election was legitimate and accurate.

    That’s according to the latest MetroNews West Virginia Poll, which surveyed 400 registered voters August 20-25.

    Forty-four percent of respondents said the election result was determined legitimately.

    Forty-three percent said the result was the result of voting fraud and election rigging.

    And 14 percent said they aren’t sure.
    […]

    A Monmouth Poll from June showed that 32 percent of Americans continue to believe Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was because of voter fraud. Between 60 and 70 percent of Republicans nationally believe Biden won because of voter fraud, according to polling over a period of months….

    Fourteen percent of the American public said they will never accept Biden as president, according to the Monmouth Poll.

16. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 12:09 pm

    Bits and pieces of news, as summarized by Steve Benen:

    In case Arizona’s election “audit” weren’t already ridiculous enough, the Arizona Republic reported that GOP state senators have now hired “an election conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist to conduct its review of voter signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes in Maricopa County.” What could possibly go wrong.
    —————
    With time running out in California’s gubernatorial recall election, conservative talk-show host Larry Elder, the top Republican candidate, vowed to replace Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein with a Republican if given the opportunity. “[T]hat would be an earthquake in Washington, D.C.,” Elder boasted late last week.
    ———————–
    Vice President Kamala Harris will be in California tomorrow, hoping to rally support for incumbent Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. President Joe Biden is now expected to make the same trip early next week. Election Day is a week from today.
    ———————-
    Pro Publica published a striking report late last week, documenting the extent to which local Republican activists, loyal to Donald Trump, have adopted Stephen Bannon’s “precinct strategy” and begun filling key rolls in becoming poll workers, election inspectors, and GOP officials.
    ——————
    Donald Trump criticized Nikki Haley last week, telling Vanity Fair, “Well, every time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later.” I’m skeptical that “uncriticizes” is a word, but putting that aside, this is one of the more accurate things the former president has said in a while.

    Link

17. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 12:12 pm

    Anti-Abortion Snitching Site Keeps Getting Wrecked

    Sad!

    “Prolifewhistleblower.com,” a website run by Texas Right to Life aimed at collecting information on those suspected of helping to provide abortions, has been taken offline yet again.

    Texas Right to Life helped usher in the state’s Draconian new anti-abortion law that not only bans abortion after six weeks, but also essentially puts a $10,000 bounty on anyone who assists with providing access to abortions, including rideshare drivers.

    Their “whistleblower” website got kicked offline by Epik, a site hosting provider, on Saturday for violating the platform’s terms of service.

    Another hosting provider, GoDaddy, had already given the website the boot last week.

    Before all that, TikTokers spammed the website’s form with bogus “information.”

    One TikToker even created a special script to make it even easier to flood the website. [video available at the link]

    […] A spokesperson for Texas Right To Life said the spammers “worship at the altar of child sacrifice.”

18. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 12:28 pm

    No masks? Check. No vaccines? Check. No remote classes? Check. Public education ended? In progress

    Across the country, school boards—and school board members—have found themselves at the center of a firestorm. In a matter of months, meetings that would ordinarily have been sparsely attended have become full to overflowing. Boards that in a normal year might spend nights balancing the need to replace tattered textbooks against an always-too-tight budget have found themselves being screamed at over protests around a “critical race theory” that seemed to change definitions from one outraged speaker to the next. Even more, they’ve found themselves threatened, in every sense of that word, over efforts to simply do their best to protect the children placed in their care.

    There are two simple steps that schools can take to protect both students and staff against a virus that is still burning through communities across the nation: requiring that everyone wear masks, and requiring both staff and older students to be vaccinated. Those actions provide the very minimum level of discomfort while providing the best chance to not just keep children safe, but keep schools operating. Since governors and legislators in multiple states have made it more difficult to conduct any sort of distance learning, those already urgent goals have been given even greater weight.

    Then those school boards found themselves deluged by people screaming a mantra that somehow, in some unexplained way, equated masks with stripping away freedom and vaccination with Nazis. Meetings didn’t just become raucous, they became violent. Dangerous. Board members found themselves facing off with white supremacist militias, and with people whose anger followed them into the parking lot and back to their homes.

    But if the people behind these verbal and physical attacks seemed unfamiliar to board members, it’s because they are. Not only are these meetings being crammed with people who have no students or stake in local districts, they’re following scripts for creating disruption and fear that were crafted on a national level. Because this isn’t just about blocking masks, it’s about using this moment to destroy public education.

    […] As the New Hampshire Union Leader reported in July, board members have now found that rather than local parents, their meetings are being driven by members of white supremacist militias like the Proud Boys. Those militia members didn’t show up to talk about the lunch room budget, they came making claims about “Marxism.”

    […] three men attempted to zip tie and kidnap the principal of a Tucson, Arizona, high school. The incident came when the son of one of the men was asked to quarantine after being exposed to a known case of COVID-19. Two of the three men did not have children in the school—they just came for the violence.

    […] what’s happening in school board meetings isn’t a spontaneous movement of local parents concerned over the nonexistent threat posed by masks, it’s a coordinated attack by right-wing “think tanks” and media that have been coordinating this assault for months, driving home messages that masks are signs of oppression, not tools in blocking the spread of disease. Those messages make it clear that those coming to make threats don’t have to be a parent, and that if they don’t know what to say, they will be told.

    The message being spread to the right about masks is that they are useless, dangerous, “virtue signaling,” and a symbol of submission to unreasoning authority. But what’s going on at school board meetings, even those where masks become the subject of violent threats, isn’t really about masks. It’s more about this: Shutting down public schools and making it impossible for public education to operate.

    As the Texas Tribune reports, at least 45 school districts in Texas have been “forced to temporarily stop offering in-person classes as a result of COVID-19 cases.” Those shut downs came after over 20,000 Texas students tested positive for COVID-19 in the first two weeks of the school year.

    The same thing is happening in Florida, where the Florida Phoenix reports districts in five counties “drowning” in cases of COVID-19. With just six out of 67 districts reporting, 28,000 students and school staff were in quarantine after testing positive or being exposed to COVID-19. The result was a cascade of schools being forced to close as children became ill and there were insufficient staff and teachers to conduct classes.

    […] rules that allowed expanded distance education over the 2019-2020 school year have now ended. Boca News [Florida] reported as the start of the school year approached that it meant “distance learning is not an option when school begins.” Schools are required to conduct in-person learning. Texas also failed to provide any funding for remote learning, leaving students—even those with immune disorders placing them at high risk—with few options but to face COVID-laden classrooms.

    Those decisions were backed up by executive orders in both Texas and Florida that forbade school districts from requiring that either students or staff wear masks. Florida followed an executive order with legislation that requires that schools conduct in-person education except in the case of hurricane emergencies. That same bill also gives DeSantis the power to “invalidate” any local emergency order—so no matter how bad things become in a school district, DeSantis can order that in-person instruction continue. […]

    […] Conservative groups, including white supremacist militias, are bringing in people to disrupt local school board meetings and to generate fear among board members. […] The goal is to overwhelm these meetings, making ordinary school business impossible to conduct, as well as making board members fearful about staying in their positions.

    […] Conservative states are blocking schools from requiring vaccination of staff or older students for COVID-19, even though such vaccinations are a routine requirement against a whole host of other diseases […]

    Conservative states are requiring that schools conduct in-person classes, no matter how bad things get, and denying funding for remote learning. That’s being backed up with new legislation that strips cities and counties from exercising authority they always had in the past.

    That doesn’t look like conservatives being concerned about masks. It doesn’t look like conservatives being upset about vaccines. What it looks like is conservatives seizing this moment to assault school boards and make the operation of public schools difficult, if not impossible. […] The whole of public education will emerge battered and diminished.

    […] It’s about Republicans seeing a road to a goal they’ve wanted for decades—even if that road is paved with sick children.

19. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 1:13 pm

    Poll shows growing U.S. support for public vaccine requirements

    To hear many Republican politicians tell it, there’s broad public opposition to vaccine requirements. The latest polling report from Gallup tells a different story.

    Majorities of Americans now favor requiring people to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination to travel by airplane, stay in a hotel, attend events with large crowds, dine in a restaurant and go to their office or work site.

    Gallup specifically asked respondents, “Would you favor or oppose businesses requiring people to show proof of coronavirus/Covid-19 vaccination in order to do the following over the next several months?” The findings included:

    53 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to eat at a restaurant.

    53 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to stay in a hotel.

    56 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to go to work at an office or work site.

    58 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to attend events with large crowds.

    61 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to travel by airplane.

    The results are notable in their own right, but just as important is the shift in public attitudes over time: In nearly every category, the percentage of Americans expressing support for vaccine requirements has increased since the spring. […]

    Indeed, in some instances, public attitudes have flipped. In April, for example, Gallup found that a narrow majority opposed vaccine requirements to stay in a hotel, and now those numbers are reversed. Similarly, in April, 60 percent were against businesses requiring proof of vaccination before allowing people to eat at a restaurant, and now a narrow majority has the opposite position.

    To be sure, Gallup’s findings don’t point to overwhelming majorities. What’s more, there are predictable divisions over partisanship and vaccination status.

    But the fact remains that for months, more than a few Republican leaders have insisted that the public opposes vaccine requirements. “Vaccine passports,” despite their anodyne history, somehow became an ugly slur in conservative circles.

    The latest independent polling, however, suggests policymakers who want to side with the American mainstream should endorse more vaccine requirements, not fewer.

20. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 1:20 pm

    Update on job growth in the USA, and on reactions to the statistics:

    After robust job growth in the early summer, expectations were high that August’s totals would show continued momentum. That’s not quite what happened: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported late last week that the economy added 235,000 jobs in August, far short of projections.

    Under normal circumstances, if the U.S. economy were to add 235,000 new jobs in a month, it’d be considered great news, but the current circumstances are anything but normal: The economy is still digging itself out of the hole it fell into last year as the pandemic took its toll. August’s job numbers weren’t terrible on their own, but it was a small step in the right direction when Americans wanted a big step.

    To be sure, there was no great mystery behind the disappointing data: The Delta variant of the coronavirus […] very likely contributed to August’s tepid growth. We’ve known for a year and a half that there’s a direct connection between the pandemic and the economy, and Friday’s report was a timely reminder.

    At least, that’s how the job numbers were seen in reality. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel issued a statement late last week pushing a very different kind of argument:

    The latest jobs report is a huge miss and shows Joe Biden continues to squander the economic recovery he inherited. Because of Biden’s failed policies and reckless spending, there are fewer jobs and rising prices for everything from gas to groceries.

    […] There’s a Democratic president, so it stands to reason that his Republican detractors will make every effort to blame him in response to disappointing news.

    But what I find amazing is the selectivity of the GOP arguments.

    In May, when job totals fell short of expectations, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that President Biden’s economic policies had “stalled our recovery.” Around the same time, Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana argued that the White House’s agenda was sending the economy into a “tailspin.”

    The rhetoric appeared pretty foolish soon after, when the economy added over 2 million jobs across June and July, at which point Republicans literally found themselves at a loss for words.

    […] In June and July, [Republicans said] robust job growth wasn’t worth paying any attention to. And in August, Biden’s “failed policies” — the ones that Republicans conveniently overlooked in the early summer — were once again to blame for a subpar jobs report.

    This obviously doesn’t work. […] if the president’s economic policies are so awful, how does the RNC and its allies explain what happened in June and July?

    Link

21. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 1:24 pm

    Brazilian Authorities Question Jason Miller After CPAC Event In Brasilia

    Trump adviser Jason Miller claims he was questioned by authorities Tuesday as he prepared to board a flight to leave Brazil’s capitol.

    Miller said that he has attended the “CPAC Brasil Conference” in Brasilia before authorities questioned him for three hours, according to a statement obtained by TPM. CPAC Brazil bills itself as “The biggest conservative event in the world in Brazil.”

    “We were not accused of any wrongdoing, and told only that they ‘wanted to talk,’” the statement reads. “We informed them that we had nothing to say and were eventually released to fly back to the United States.”

    It’s not clear which authorities conducted the questioning or what the subject of the investigation was.

    GETTR, the right-wing social network which, per Miller, received funding from Chinese Billionaire Guo Wengui’s family foundation, issued the statement on Miller’s behalf. The CPAC Brasil 2021 website lists GETTR and Parler, another right-wing social network, as sponsors of the event.

    CPAC Brasil said on a website for the event that Miller was set to speak at the gathering, and listed other MAGA notables like Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Mark E. Green (R-TN) as attending.

    Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally of former President Trump who was planning to hold a Stop the Steal-style rally on Tuesday, the country’s independence day, faces re-election in October 2022. That’s reportedly led to Bolsonaro officials seeking help from Trumpworld in their effort to stay in power.

    Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo traveled to the United States last month, where he met with Trump and received a signed MAGA hat from the former president. […]

    On Aug. 11, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a Brazilian parliamentarian, attended MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s South Dakota symposium on wacked-out theories of cyber fraud in the 2020 election.

    Bolsonaro gave Lindell the MAGA hat.

    Reports from Brazilian media have suggested that prosecutors in the country have eyed the younger Bolsonaro’s planning for the 2022 election in the country, including his ties to former Trump campaign chair Steve Bannon. […]

22. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 1:38 pm

    Abbott signs Texas elections bill, Democrats file suit

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Tuesday signed a sweeping overhaul of his state’s election procedures after months of delay caused by Democrats […] (Democrats sought to block the bill they say will disenfranchise voters.)

    […] The legislature approved the bill last week and Abbott signed the measure in Tyler, accompanied by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) and Sen. Bryan Hughes (R), the lead Senate sponsor of the measure.

    “Election integrity is now law in the state of Texas,” Abbott said.

    Yeah. That’s the opposite of “election integrity.” Republicans are known for naming legislation with misleading titles.

    The measure bars round-the-clock polling stations and places new restrictions on drive-thru voting and voting by mail. It will give more authority to partisan poll watchers who can observe an election, and it increases the requirements for identification voters must show when they cast a ballot.

    The bill will also prevent elections officials from distributing vote-by-mail applications to voters who have not specifically requested them […] It requires the Secretary of State’s office to check voter rolls every month in an effort to identify non-citizens who have improperly registered to vote. [Oh, FFS!]

    […] “One thing that all Texas can agree and that is that we must have trust and confidence in our elections,” Abbott said Tuesday, adding the bill “ensures that every eligible voter will have the opportunity to vote.” [Utter bullshit.]

    […] The ink from Abbott’s pen had not yet dried when a prominent Democratic election lawyer announced plans to sue the state to block the law from taking effect.

    The lawyer, Marc Elias, said his team had sued on behalf of four Texas organizations: two Hispanic advocacy groups, a retiree organization and the state’s largest teacher’s union. The lawsuit will challenge the law under the First and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution, and under two sections of the Voting Rights Act.

    Hooray! Good for Marc Elias.

    “Year after year, Texas has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country, yet Republicans in the state remain intent on limiting access to the ballot box, particularly for voters of color,” Elias said in an email. “After Texas Democrats blocked the passage of past iterations fo the bill in the regular legislative session and the first special session, Republicans finally achieved their goal of enacting a law, Senate Bill 1, that limits almost every method of voting in the state.”

    Many of the provisions in the new law are aimed squarely at Harris County, Texas’s largest and the home of Houston. Harris County election officials infuriated state Republicans by holding polls open around the clock during early voting, and by encouraging voters to cast ballots from their cars at drive-thru stations.

    Harris County officials planned to send absentee ballot applications to every registered voter, though the Texas Supreme Court blocked the plan in the months before Election Day.

    Putting one sort of good thing in the bill, (expanded voting hours for 12 days right before election day), does not make up for the extremely bad measures in the bill. The early voting hours give Republicans a talking point that is misleading when you look at the overall effect of the bill, which is to disenfranchise voters.

23. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 1:52 pm

    Wonkette:

    Insurrection-friendly rightwingers are planning a “Justice for J6″ event on September 18, a week after the 20th anniversary of 9/11. […] January 6 […] a violent mob stormed the US Capitol at the behest of Donald Trump, who is still at large and still somehow a serious contender in the 2024 presidential race.

    The pro-coup rally will take place at the scene of the original crime, the Capitol grounds, and support the jailed insurrection suspects. Repulsively, the rally will supposedly honor the victims of 9/11, another dark day for America. We’re not sure you can simultaneously support and oppose terrorist attacks, but “J6″ is probably an overall “we don’t like brown people” rally so that might track.

    So far, hundreds of Trump’s supporters have been arrested for breaking into the Capitol on January 6 and, in many cases, later bragging about it on social media like morons. A growing rightwing narrative has emerged that these criminal suspects are actually “political prisoners,” because apparently breaking and entering and aggravated assault are partisan issues. White supremacist personality Tucker Carlson and even some Republican members of Congress, who are not any more reputable, have promoted this lunacy. […]

    “The big problem is, we don’t actually know where all the political prisoners are,” continued Cawthorn [Rep. Madison Cawthorn from North Carolina ]. “So if we were to actually be able to go and try and bust them out — and let me tell you, the reason why they’re taking these political prisoners is because they’re trying to make an example,” he said, cutting himself off.

    Yikes! Republicans in 2019 claimed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was radical because she thought we should address the climate crisis that would later flood her city. Cawthorn has only served in Congress for a few months but that’s usually long enough to know that busting domestic terror suspects out of prison is illegal. This is why you shouldn’t skip orientation. […]

    The Washington Post reports:

    Braynard’s [Trump’s former campaign operative Matt Braynard] followers believe many of the more than 570 people who have been charged with federal crimes in the attack were nonviolent and “reasonably believed they had permission” to enter the Capitol, according to a Jan. 29 letter Braynard sent to the Department of Justice and FBI. Braynard’s letter demands prosecutors drop all charges.

    Of course Trump’s former campaign operatives are involved. All the best people.

    The Big Lie is inherently reality refuting, but anyone who believes the January 6 attack was nonviolent probably also consumes horse paste over the counter. You can’t reasonably believe you have permission to enter a building where you’re climbing through broken windows and cops are ordering you to stand down. [video available at the link]

    Not to keep abusing Godwin, but the Big Lie has metastasized into a homegrown “stab-in-the-back myth.” The Nazis grotesquely claimed that Germany didn’t actually lose World War I but instead the nation was betrayed by a weak, disloyal citizenry and, of course, Jews. This lie became the “official history” of the 1920s as the Nazis accused the previous government of betraying the German people in order to seize power. This is not a roadmap to peace but Republicans are nonetheless following it to the letter.

    Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said Monday that law enforcement should take the possibility of further violence at the “Justice for J6″ rally “very seriously.”

    “In fact, they should take it more seriously than they took the same sort of intelligence that they likely saw on January 5,” McCabe, a CNN contributor, told CNN’s Poppy Harlow on “Erin Burnett OutFront.”

    A disproportionate number of former and active-duty law enforcement were on the wrong side of the January 6 mob, so law enforcement clearly does take the Big Lie seriously. They’re just more pro-coup than we’d prefer.

    The “political prisoners” are arguably small fish. The problem is that the ringleaders behind the insurrection and attempted coup, which is ongoing, went unpunished. The big fish need to fry or otherwise January 6 is destined to repeat itself.

    Link

24. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 1:57 pm

    Proud Boys Try To Storm Vancouver, WA High School Over Mask Mandate

    Friday, anti-mask protesters with ties to the extremist group the Proud Boys tried to escort a student who refused to comply with public health guidelines into Skyview High School in Vancouver, Washington. Patriot Prayer and other far-right groups had falsely claimed online that the student would face arrest if she entered the school without a mask. (She’d probably just be asked to leave or put on a mask, just like with any routine enforcement of a dress code.)

    The student’s mother, Megan Gabriel, had requested that her daughter, an incoming freshman, be able to opt out of the mask requirement because she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. […] The school denied the request, because you’d end up with half the students not wearing masks, which would put everyone at risk. Inevitably, there was an anti-mask protest outside the school, with parents of other Skyview students holding signs and demanding the student receive a medical exemption from cloth facial coverings.

    One of the assholes prayed over the young girl, asking their fascist God to “raise up the hedge of protection around her,” and urged men in the community to follow her example. This is a child, so we won’t share the video of him putting his grubby hands all over her. Suffice to say, the whole scene was more triggering than wearing a mask. [Other protest video is available at the link.]

    The protesters carried signs stating “Masking kids=abuse” and “Medical choice: Your body, your choice.” That last one is especially galling to see rightwingers proclaim right now. Reportedly, some of the protesters yelled slurs at female students, who were also children. Several of the protesters wore the Proud Boys’ yellow and black gang colors.

    The school’s security guards, who used to have a decent gig before the mass shootings and fascist uprisings, prevented the protesters from entering, but the disturbance was serious enough that Vancouver Public Schools put Skyview High, along with nearby Alki Middle School and Chinook Elementary, on lockdown.

    […] Gabriel claims she isn’t anti-mask or anti-vaccine. She said she wears a mask when indoors and her son wears a mask at school. But she insists that masks triggers panic attacks in her daughter. […] What’s happened lately is that almost half the nation wants to suddenly claim they have a pre-existing medical or religious reason for wantonly spreading COVID-19. School officials can’t rubber stamp these exemptions or schools will shut down again.

    […] Children are adaptable and could easily make it through this school year safely if their parents behaved like grownups, but we’re afraid this is just the start of a disturbing trend. Someone’s going to get seriously hurt.

25. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 2:13 pm

    Last week, your beloved Wonkette received a very serious letter accusing us of ALL THE LIBELSLANDER.

    Remember the CARES Act PPP loans for “small businesses” that ended up going to major corporations and Trump sycophants who gave lots of speech money to various Republican assholes?

    Well, back in April of 2020, Doktor Zoom wrote this lovely piece about how hotel mogul and Trump donor Monty Bennett was the largest recipient of funds from CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Plan, getting $96 million for his business empire from the Small Business Administration. Oh, and he did this while laying off 95 percent of his staff. […]

    Monty was, apparently, VERY UPSET that we wrote true, mean things about him. SO upset, in fact, that, 16 months after Dok’s post, he decided to have Holland & Knight partner Stephen Rasch (aka expensive big-firm lawyer) send us a letter, accusing us of defiling his good name. And our Editrix, Rebecca, asked me, a First Amendment attorney in recovery, to respond.

    I think I love you

    Dear Messrs Bennett and Rasch:
    Is it okay if I call you Monty and Steve? I’m gonna call you Monty and Steve. Before we move on, I would just like to take a moment to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for this beautiful, beautiful gift. I also have a question.

    You presumably came to our website at least once, to read all of the mean, true things you complain about in your letter. So you should have at least some concept of Wonkette’s tone.

    Even without doing a cursory google to see how we might respond to letters such as this, did the words “Streisand Effect” really never once come to mind?

    But, again, thank you. Truly. Last week was a very hard week and I was in great need of a little comic relief. And a defamation accusation containing such gems as the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “sleazy” was exactly what I needed.

    You may not know this about me, Monty and Steve. But responding to these kinds of threats and lawsuits is actually one of my favorite things.

    So what are you so afraid of?

    From your letter, it appears Monty is upset that we were mean to him. While that’s sad for Monty, I recommend he start his quest for redemption by acting like a decent human being, not threatening mommyblogs with bullshit lawsuits.

    But let’s not speak only in generalizations. Let’s get into the specifics of your letter. […]

    The article states that Mr. Bennett “exploit[ed] the ‘small’ business loan program” and that his actions were “sleazy as fuck.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “sleazy” is defined to mean “sordid, corrupt, or immoral.”

    I prefer Merriam-Webster, personally, but you do you. I’m a little sad you didn’t also give us a definition of “as fuck” to accompany it, though.

    As I once helpfully pointed out to one Mr. Bob Murray, you can’t sue someone for telling you to eat shit, and you can’t sue someone for calling you “sleazy.” That’s called an opinion, and it is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. […] truth is an absolute defense to a claim of defamation. Unfortunately, I do not have any artwork to use here, but I do really enjoy the part of your letter where you tell us that our reporting was correct, but defamatory nonetheless.

    The PPP loans obtained by hotel properties within Ashford’s portfolio were obtained lawfully and in a manner contemplated by provisions of the CARES Act. The article acknowledges the legality of the loan applications but falsely implies that there was some corruption in the loan application process.

    Defamatory implications! And we apparently did a lot of them!

    The article falsely implies that there was some deception in the loan application process.

    Just to clarify: We implied no such corruption in the loan application process, and we implied no deception in the loan application process. Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, though, got very GRR MAD that large huge HUGE corporations such as yours were taking advantage of it […] And indeed, you were eventually shamed into returning the money, because it was not the intent of the program, even if it was allowed! Is that our fault? […]

    I find it truly fascinating that the letter you sent us refers to Monty’s business empire as “the Ashford portfolio,” but you would like to make sure we affirmatively note that companies named things like “Ashford, Inc.” and “Ashford Hospitality Trust, Inc.” are, technically, separately and legally distinct entities. (Separate and legally distinct entities that are all run by Monty, here, but we are sure that, too, is just a coincidence.) So, sure, WE RETRACT AND ARE HEARTILY SORRY. We good?

    Oh! And it appears we were supposed to predict that, at some point after our post was published, Monty would be publicly shamed into returning the PPP loan money and rehiring some people?

    Further, Ashford subsequently returned all of the PPP loan funds and rehired many furloughed employees.

    Can I get your psychic’s number? It sounds like you might have a good one. And I am definitely very sure this was all out of the goodness of Monty’s heart and had nothing to do with the slew of stories about what a piece of garbage he is. (I’m sorry. That was mean to garbage.)

    You are also perturbed that we wrote about how Monty “had to console himself with some great big bonuses, plus huge dividends from his preferred stock” while laying off almost all of his staff. But we clearly never should have said such a thing, since, as you point out in your letter, “Mr. Bennett’s dividends from Ashford, Inc. were decreased as a result of the pandemic.” […] We really should have noted that Monty became slightly less filthy rich as a result of the pandemic and paid himself a measly $950,000 salary and $2.3 million bonus last year. He paid himself LESS “bonus” — generally considered to be appropriate compensation when a corporation is doing well, not “suffer[ing] enormous financial losses” as you, yourself, describe it — while laying people off and taking PPP loans. Congratulations, Monty. You’re a prince.

    As for your threat of punitive damages … for publishing true things … about a matter of public concern … Well, I have a question for you, Steve. Did you miss First Amendment day in law school? Or are you just so afraid of losing your ultra-rich client that you’ll put your name on anything?

    Like all truly great defamation threats, your letter also includes one of my favorite tropes: not just a retraction demand, but a demand to say … some random other shit.

    My clients further demand that Wonkette affirmatively state the truth about Mr. Bennett and Ashford, which is that they acted lawfully and ethically in obtaining PPP loans after having suffered enormous financial losses during the pandemic, that none of the PPP loan funds were retained by Ashford portfolio properties, and that Mr. Bennett’s compensation decreased as a result of the pandemic.

    Since Monty is known to pay conservative outlets to be nice to him, I guess it tracks that he thinks he can just bully or pay everyone off. But “ethically”?! SERIOUSLY?! (“After The Times presented evidence that [Bennett] directly ordered articles [contrary to Bennett’s spokeswoman’s flat denial], lawyers representing [the rightwing “news” publisher Brian] Timpone sent The Times a cease and desist letter, demanding that it not publish the information.” It’s what’s called “the kicker”: a vividly outrageous scene to end your story on a WTF note. And Timpone’s lawyers apparently didn’t threaten to SLAPP the New York By God Times about anything in the Times’s extremely damning story — other than their client’s relationship with Monty Bennett.)

    Oh, Monty and Steve. You know what? I’m going to put this in a way you might understand. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “ethical” as “conforming to accepted standards of conduct.” So we respectfully decline.

    Thanks but no thanks

    Thank you again for your correspondence dated August 25, 2021.

    Despite our disagreements, I’d like to acknowledge that I very much appreciate a comment at the end of the letter, where you say you “trust” that we “understand the seriousness of this matter.”

    We do understand the seriousness of this matter. We absolutely do. We know all too well about the scourge of frivolous litigation clogging our courts that seeks to do nothing more than stifle free speech. People who use the American legal system to silence others just because they don’t like what they say are abhorrent and should be ashamed of themselves. This is an epidemic among the mega-rich and rightwing politicians, and it must be stopped.

    As for your demand that we “retract and/or correct” some of the very BESMIRCH STATEMENTS we published about Monty, I believe we gave it the appropriate level of seriousness.

    Oh, and is this the right place for a reminder that your proposed lawsuit would involve digging into Monty’s reputation? Since he’s claiming we damaged it with our besmirches? That does sound fun for me, but maybe not so much for you. (And how is that SEC investigation going, by the way?)

    Anyway, guys, I appreciate you. I do. But I think you could both really benefit from a primer on defamation law and the First Amendment. May I suggest taking a look at this legal brief written by a very smart lady with the initials JLC?

    Again, thank you for your letter. I mean that.

    It really SLAPPs!

    XOXO,

    Jamie

    https://www.wonkette.com/monty-bennett-v-wonkette

26. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 2:36 pm

    What the Sturgis rally shows us about the delta variant.

    Washington Post link to an article by Ashish K. Jha.

    South Dakota has high population immunity — and still saw a huge covid surge in August.

    The annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota is America’s largest bike rally, a 10-day blowout, with attendance this year exceeding 250,000. It was also a serious pandemic stress test. By bringing together hundreds of thousands of people, Sturgis helps answer a simple yet critically important question: Are we at a point in the pandemic where we can safely stage big-crowd events?

    If there were a place where this could have happened, it should have been Sturgis. The best data suggests that at least 75 percent of the entire South Dakota population has some degree of immunity against the virus: About half of South Dakotans have immunity because they’ve been infected by covid-19, and about half of the population has been vaccinated — some of whom have already had covid-19 when they got their shot, so there is some overlap between these two groups. South Dakota, despite its middling vaccination rates, probably has among the highest levels of population immunity in the nation, driven largely by horrifying winter outbreaks.

    That’s what makes Sturgis an important test. If it had gone off without big spikes in covid cases, it would have provided strong evidence that this level of population immunity — around 75 percent — would allow us to get back to the way we did things in 2019. But unfortunately, that’s not what happened. In the weeks since the rally began in early August, infection numbers have shot up more than 600 percent in South Dakota. We can expect to see big increases in other states, too, since bikers returned home from the event. Last year, after Sturgis, we saw massive outbreaks across the Dakotas, Wyoming, Indiana, even Nevada. Much of the region was aflame because of Sturgis, probably causing thousands of deaths.

    […] we can look to other examples where high levels of vaccinations or other tools helped prevent a lot of illness and death.

    The first example is what happened in Provincetown, Mass., over the July 4 weekend. Provincetown unfortunately also led to a spike in cases — but the infection numbers peaked quickly, dwindled and were gone three weeks later. There were very few hospitalizations and no deaths. Why? Because most of the people in Provincetown were vaccinated. That may be an indicator that population immunity from vaccinations is better and more protective than immunity from infections.

    Consider also this summer’s Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago. All those attending were required to provide proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test. Anyone unvaccinated was required to wear masks throughout, even though the festival was outdoors. And those attending were asked to accept a “Lollapalooza Fan Health Pledge” promising they had not tested positive or been exposed to covid within two weeks or experienced any covid symptoms within 48 hours. The result? Of the hundreds of thousands of fans who attended the festival, only a few hundred have subsequently tested positive — and it is unclear whether any of them were infected at Lollapalooza.

    Eighteen months into the pandemic, we’ve learned that outdoor gatherings are reasonably safe — it’s the indoor activities that invariably follow that are deadly. At Sturgis, it is unlikely that the outdoor bike rallies were a problem. Most of the spread likely happened in the evenings, when people crowded into bars and restaurants, most unvaccinated, all unmasked. Large gatherings that work on keeping indoor spaces safe through vaccinations, masking, ventilation and other techniques can keep the entire gathering safer.

    Over the past year, every time we have tried to defy the virus by scorning precautions, the virus has won, and people have suffered and died: significant outbreaks, a lot of hospitalizations, too many deaths. […]

    The simple interpretation of the large outbreak after Sturgis is that big gatherings are just not possible during a pandemic. But that is the wrong lesson. It’s important for Americans to find ways to come together. So we should ask how we can make gatherings safer.

    Here, the pandemic playbook is straightforward: Ensure you have a highly vaccinated population. Verify people’s vaccination status. Require rapid and frequent testing, especially for the unvaccinated. Improve indoor air quality, and use masking intermittently when needed.

    None of these are difficult to achieve. And none of them should be particularly inconvenient. If we do all that, we can safely get back to the things we love and the events that bring us together, like music festivals, concerts and motorcycle rallies.

27. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 2:39 pm

    Taliban Names Top Government Officials as Protests Roil Afghan Capital

    New York Times link

    The Taliban, who promised an inclusive leadership, drew from its own ranks to fill key government positions. For the second time in less than a week, protests that included hundreds of women were crushed.

    The Taliban announced their choices for several acting cabinet positions on Tuesday, but while they held off on formally announcing a permanent government for Afghanistan, they did offer one surprise.

    Contrary to expectations, the mullah who had led the Taliban negotiations with the United States over its military withdrawal did not get the top post at the council of ministers. Instead, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was named as the acting deputy leader of the council. That makes him functionally deputy prime minister.

    The No. 1 at the council job went to Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, a founding member of the Taliban who served as foreign minister and deputy prime minister in the group’s first government in the 90s.

    Sirajuddin Haqqani, a deputy leader of the Taliban insurgency and the leader of the terrorist-listed Haqqani Network, was named as acting minister of the interior. And Mawlawi Muhammad Yaqoob, who is the oldest son of the Taliban’s founding leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, was named acting defense minister.

    Running a government will most likely prove more daunting than toppling one.

    To succeed, the Taliban will need to secure desperately needed aid, which has been frozen by the United States and other nations. Foreign governments and lenders are waiting to see the fate of the opposition and if rights for women and ethnic and religious minorities will be respected.

    Without that money, the government faces worsening challenges, including humanitarian and economic crises that have forced Afghans to flee. Basic services like electricity are under threat, and the United Nations warned that food aid would run out by the end of the month for hundreds of thousands of Afghans.

    The Taliban, notorious for their brutality when they ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, has pledged that this time they will put together a more inclusive government, possibly including some non-Taliban figures in informal advisory roles.

    But none of that has materialized yet, and people with knowledge of the Taliban’s deliberations said that the real decision making was an entirely internal process.

28. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 4:37 pm

    OMG. Texas governor bizarrely vows to ‘eliminate rape’ in barely coherent defense of abortion ban

    On Tuesday, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law created by right-wing think tank fascists making voting considerably harder in the second most populated state of the Union. […]

    During the press question and answer that took place after the signing, Abbott was asked about the draconian abortion laws his state is putting into practice. Specifically, a reporter asked about victims of sexual assault who may not want to carry a pregnancy that was traumatically forced upon them. The issue of sexual assault has been a long understood problem of the true morality of right-wing forced birther logic. Abbott, who has yet to have a meaningful answer to anything in the history of anything, decided he had the perfect word salad answer. No more rape!

    “It doesn’t require that at all, because obviously it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion. So for one it doesn’t provide that [sic]. That said, however, let’s make something very clear: rape is a crime and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going after and arresting them and prosecuting them. And getting them off the streets. So goal number one in the state of Texas is to eliminate rape, so that no woman, no person, will be a victim of rape.”

    The only thing in that bogus bit of incoherence that was true was the assertion that “rape is a crime.” […] Considering Abbott and the rest of the forced-birther movement has the kind of track record of serial sexual assault that only a rapist could believe in; and the people taking away women’s reproductive rights believe in a handful of scrolls-turned-into-bound-books that themselves report rapes from thousands of years ago, it’s quite a bit of hubris on the governor’s part to believe he can do what his God could not. But whatever! He isn’t even trying to make sense anymore.

    […] Texas still has well over 2,000 rape kits that have not yet been tested. Abbott himself has vetoed bills that would protect children from child sex trafficking (which includes a lot of sexual assault). While most of what transpires in the clip below is just an arrogant and ill-equipped politician trying to not answer a real question, the frightening part of this all is that Abbott—along with the rest of his Grand Old Party—may simply decide that the best way to get rid of all of these uncomfortable truths is just to eliminate “rape” altogether—as in the concept of it being a thing that even happens.

    The very real answer here is that right-wing evangelists, forced birthers, Abbott just don’t believe in rape. The trauma and results of rape are immaterial to the conservative movement. Like everything that so-called conservative Christians believe, if you go through the motions and do the least amount possible, pray and confess when needed, you can hack your way into heaven. What happens to the victims of rape or what happens to the unwanted child that is forced to birth doesn’t matter. You checked off one of your get-into-heaven-for-free game cards.

    The collective cult-clapping behind him is the great giveaway that the governor isn’t offering up anything of substance.

    Video is available at the link.

29. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 4:47 pm

    After months of coaxing students with thousands of dollars in prizes — everything from gift cards to sports tickets to free parking — colleges are starting to punish the unvaccinated.

    […] Now, as millions move back to campus, hundreds of schools are mandating vaccines and penalizing students who resist without a medical or religious reason.

    Quinnipiac University students who aren’t vaccinated will be fined up to $200 per week and lose access to the campus’ Wi-Fi until they get the shot. The University of Virginia booted more than 200 unvaccinated people from its rolls before the semester began. And Rutgers University, the first university in the U.S. to mandate vaccination for students, is threatening to disconnect email access and deny campus housing for students who don’t comply. Some colleges used similar tactics last year to get students to follow testing procedures.

    The hard mandates, which put colleges on the front line of the nation’s newest culture war, could help decide when the latest resurgence of the virus subsides — and when the next one arrives.

    Schools, risking conservative backlash, see the aggressive vaccines policies as a critical component of America’s effort to halt the progress of the virus. The institutions are uniquely situated to deal with the least vaccinated groups: young people.

    […] The Delta variant and low vaccination rates have fueled a summer surge of Covid-19 infections in young people, causing some college leaders to worry about needing another online-only semester. The incentives they’ve offered students to line up for a shot have helped boost vaccine rates at some institutions. But in many places, they aren’t enough.

    Teens and 20-something adults have some of the lowest vaccination rates among eligible populations, likely making them a larger factor in spreading the virus. About 60 percent of people ages 18-24 have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to about 95 percent of people 65-74, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    At The Ohio State University, the current vaccination rate of more than 70 percent was not enough to avoid a mandate. School officials are aiming for close to 90 percent.

    “Requiring the vaccine was the right thing to do,” said Benjamin Johnson, a spokesperson for the university. “This isn’t particularly new for us … We have mandated a number of different vaccines for students for years.”

    All Ohio State students, faculty and staff must be fully vaccinated by Nov. 15. Students who do not comply and do not have an approved exemption will not be eligible for in-person classes or on-campus housing in the spring, and their email and other electronic resources may be taken by the university.

    Some states — such as Florida, Texas and Arizona — have laws banning vaccine mandates, leaving colleges with incentives as their only lever to affect vaccination rates.

    In the absence of a mandate and with about 60 percent of students on the main campus vaccinated, Stetson University in Central Florida is relying on incentives to boost vaccination rates.

    They’re offering a chance to win a year’s tuition, $1,000 in cash and dozens of other prizes. Once a certain percentage of students are vaccinated, school officials have promised to loosen rules around large gatherings. University leaders keep compiling ideas — now with 70 in a spreadsheet — hoping each one will push more students to get vaccinated.

    […] Though far fewer students than officials hoped are vaccinated, Stetson’s incentives have caused more people on campus to report their vaccination status. In the two weeks after the incentives were announced in July, nearly 200 percent more students and employees reported their vaccination status compared to the two weeks before the incentives announcement. […]

    Link

30. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 5:07 pm

    Possible CA Governor Larry Elder Is Slavery Apologist Who’ll Replace Dianne Feinstein With Stephen Miller

    […] if incumbent [California] Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is successfully recalled, the likely replacement is Republican Larry Elder, who is all kinds of terrible.

    Elder, however, is a full-fledged MAGA asshole who might otherwise struggle to win statewide in an actual “purple” swing state, let alone one that rejected Donald Trump’s sorry ass by 30 points (twice!).

    It’s unclear why Democrats didn’t remove the undemocratic recall mechanism, which is like the random lever in a mad scientist’s laboratory that blows up everything. No good comes from keeping that around. For instance, a whopping 26 percent of likely voters in a recent poll support Elder, but that’s good enough for governor’s work if a clear majority don’t vote to keep Newsom.

    Elder feels confident enough about his chances that he boasted to conservative radio host Mark Levin about how he planned to replace Senator Dianne Feinstein with a Republican so Mitch McConnell could (officially) become majority leader again. […]

    Elder’s a horrible person, but on the upside, a Black man can’t just yell at Feinstein and make her go away. Believe me, I tried after she bear hugged Lindsey Graham during Amy Coney Barrett’s drive-through Supreme Court confirmation. However, Feinstein is 88 years old and, well, do I really have to explain human mortality to you people? Don’t accuse me of ageism just because I recognize that our elected officials aren’t Time Lords. If Elder wins the recall election and Feinstein dies or is otherwise unable to serve through 2024, then she’s regenerating into Stephen Miller. Yes, there is a non-zero chance that Elder would appoint that shit goblin to the Senate.

    Elder was once Miller’s mentor, which is embarrassing for everyone involved. Elder is more or less Black but he doesn’t care much for Black people. He had a mutual self-loathing session last weekend with Candace Owens where they defended slavery. Owens, who’s about as smart as rotten cabbage, claimed the United States was one of the first countries to ban the slave trade, when any reasonably educated cabbage knows that the US was one of the last countries to manage that impressive moral feat. […]

    Elder managed to out-gross Owens when he suggested that enslavers were owed compensation for their human rights violations.

    “When people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation? Like it or not, slavery was legal,” Elder said. “Their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War, so you could make an argument that the people that are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose ‘property’ was taken away after the end of the Civil War.”

    […] First place, abortion is legal and Elder, who’s predictably anti-choice, doesn’t think women should receive reparations for the loss of their bodily autonomy. Also, when you wage war against the US government, you usually don’t get to keep your shit. When Benjamin Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” he was acknowledging that if the colonists lost the Revolution, [the Brits weren’t] going to reimburse them for their war expenses. Their asses would get executed.

    Oh, and enslavers did receive reparations, because America. Forget the 40 acres, though, freed Black people didn’t even get their mules.

    Elder admitted back in 2011 on his radio show that he’d been twice accused of sexual harassment.

    In one instance, Elder recounted that, while he worked in private practice as an attorney in the 1980s, his employee accused him of hitting on her. Elder then defended himself by implying the woman was too unattractive for him to sexually harass.

    “This woman who tried to break the contract, not to compete and then accused me of hitting on her,” Elder said in one episode. “That’s how, that’s how she put it. If you had seen her, you would know that the picture would be a complete defense. I’m just saying.”

    The scumbag doesn’t understand how sexual harassment works. However, Trump said something similarly gross when accused of sexual assault. I didn’t know he was just using the patented Larry Elder defense.

    This is just a brief peek at the hell that awaits us if Elder replaces Newsom. However, if there’s any positive to the Texas abortion ban, Democratic voters are enraged and perhaps more appreciative of what’s at stake if a minority of voters make a rightwing zealot the governor of California.

    If you live in California, vote NO. This is not a drill nor a joke. This is the nation’s future.

    A video snippet of Larry Elder speaking is available at the link.

31. Lynna, OM says

    7 September 2021 at 5:10 pm

    Mexico decriminalizes abortion, a dramatic step in world’s second-biggest Catholic country.

    Washington Post link

    Mexico’s supreme court voted unanimously on Tuesday to decriminalize abortion, a striking step in a country with one of the world’s largest Catholic populations and a move that contrasts sharply with tighter restrictions introduced across the border in Texas.

    Eight of the 11 supreme court judges had expressed support for decriminalization in arguments that began Monday, making the decision virtually inevitable.

    The vote comes as a powerful women’s movement is transforming Mexico, where female politicians now make up half of Congress. While abortion remains illegal in most of Latin America, there has been a surge in demonstrations demanding more rights for women, particularly focused on rising violence.

    “This will not only have an impact in Mexico; it will set the agenda for the entire Latin American region,” said Melissa Ayala, coordinator of litigation for the Mexican feminist organization GIRE. She called the ruling “a historic moment for feminists and activists” who have pressed for women’s rights for years in Mexico’s state legislatures, health ministries and law schools. […]

32. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 11:28 am

    Lynna@18 quotes (regarding a poll in the States):

    53 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to eat at a restaurant.
    53 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to stay in a hotel.
    56 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to go to work at an office or work site.
    58 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to attend events with large crowds.
    61 percent support requiring proof of vaccination to travel by airplane.

    Here in France, there there has been the Health Pass (paper or app) proving full-vaccination, recent negative test, presumed immunity, etc., since early-August. It covers essentially all of the above (not sure about hotel stays, and does not cover all work / office, with the exception of medical and (long-distance?) transport staff). Despite a dwindling rabble of goosestepping loons every Saturday, it’s very popular, with (last I recall) somewhere around 67% supporting the measure. It’s certainly become quite routine (locally, at least) with people presenting their pass upon entering the restaurant, bar, or café or when the server approaches — the servers’s rarely (or so it seems) have to ask anymore. One notably good thing about the Health Pass, which I’ve flagged before, is it applies both indoors and outdoors (at restaurants, etc.). The current fully-vaccinated rate is almost 80% (of those eligible, i.e., over 12), according to the track-and-trace app (which is also the app version of the Health Pass); the Health Pass was introduced to increase the vaccination rate (then in the 40%’s with rate of jabs falling), an explanation made explicit at the time by President Macron.

33. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 11:44 am

    This could be interesting (for me, at least), SNCF set to lose bid for regional French railway line for first time ever (possibly paywalled, thelocal’s edits in {curly braces}):

    […]
    Officials in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur appear set to award the regional rail service between Marseille and Nice to the Transdev transport group for 10 years when the tender goes to its final vote on October 29th. [That is the local rail services which run via my village, hence my interest… –blf]

    If the vote goes as planned, it will be the first internal regional rail service in France that will not be operated by SNCF.

    “SNCF Voyageurs {which includes TGV, TER [current operators], Intercités and Transilien} wishes Transdev every success, in the interest of passengers and the development of rail transport in the region,” SNCF said in a press release, acknowledging the impending loss of the contract.

    […]

    Transdev — which already operates successful bus, coach and rail operations — has promised that regional rail traffic on the Marseille–Nice line will double from seven daily services to 14 by 2025. [Not quite sure where that “current-7” comes from, a quick checking using the ticketing app shows there are many many more than that, albeit there are a few notable “dry spots” with no trains for over an hour — but not all of the trains do the full Marseille–Nice distance… –blf]

    […]

    TER routes are France’s local trains, running slower services to small towns, in contrast to the high-speed TGV network which links up the cities.

    [… Compaints from some unions, albeit providing no reasons or details…]

34. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 12:29 pm

    Idaho enacts ‘crisis standards of care’ protocol to battle worsening Covid:

    […]
    Idaho public health leaders have activated “crisis standards of care” allowing health are rationing for the state’s northern hospitals because there are more coronavirus patients than the institutions can handle.

    The Idaho department of health and welfare […] publicly announced it in a statement on Tuesday morning […].

    The move came as the state’s confirmed coronavirus cases rocketed in recent weeks. Idaho has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the US [somewhere around 40% according to some quick searching –blf …]

    The designation includes 10 hospitals and healthcare systems in the Idaho panhandle and in north-central Idaho. The agency said its goal is to extend care to as many patients as possible and to save as many lives as possible.

    “Crisis standards of care is a last resort. It means we have exhausted our resources to the point that our healthcare systems are unable to provide the treatment and care we expect,” the Idaho department of health and welfare director, Dave Jeppesen, said in a statement.

    He added: “This is a decision I was fervently hoping to avoid. The best tools we have to turn this around is for more people to get vaccinated and to wear masks indoors and in outdoor crowded public places. Please choose to get vaccinated as soon as possible — it is your very best protection against being hospitalized from Covid-19.”

    The move allows hospitals to allot scarce resources like intensive care unit rooms to patients most likely to survive and make other dramatic changes to the way they treat patients. Other patients will still receive care, but they may be placed in hospital classrooms or conference rooms rather than traditional hospital rooms or go without some life-saving medical equipment.

    At Kootenai Health — the largest hospital in northern Idaho — some patients are waiting for long periods for beds to open up in the full intensive care unit, said Robert Scoggins, the chief of staff. Inside the ICU, one critical care nurse might be supervising up to six patients with the help of two other non-critical care nurses. That’s a big departure from the usual one ICU nurse for one ICU patient ratio, he said.

    [… similar stories…]

    The unfolding crush of patients to Idaho hospitals has been anticipated with dread by the state’s heathcare providers. Medical experts have said that Idaho, which has a population of around 1.8 millions, could have as many as 30,000 new coronavirus cases a week by mid-September if the current rate of infections lasts.

    The designation will remain in effect until there are enough resources — including staffing, hospital beds and equipment or a drop in the number of patients — to provide normal levels of treatment to all.

    More than 500 people were hospitalized statewide with Covid-19 on 1 September and more than a third of them were in intensive care unit beds. [In all of France, there were “only” 200 new ICU cases yesterday — roughly the same as Idaho, but out of a population of around 67 millions, almost 40 times larger, with almost 80% (of the eligible population) fully-vaccinated –blf]

    […]

    When the pandemic first came to Idaho at the start of 2020, [thug alleged-“Governor” Brad] Little ordered a partial shutdown of the state — ordering some businesses to temporarily close or shift to takeout-style services, banning some large gatherings and asking residents to stay home as much as possible.

    […]

    Little reopened the state in stages over a period of several months and has not reimposed restrictions limiting gatherings. Businesses are mostly operating as normal [sic (killing your customers is not normal) …]

35. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 12:44 pm

    Follow-up to Lynna@27, AOC on Texas governor’s ‘disgusting’ abortion remarks: ‘He is not familiar with a female body’ (Grauniad’s edits in {curly braces}):

    […] New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have decried Greg Abbott’s “deep ignorance” after the Texas governor inaccurately defended his state’s new anti-abortion law, saying that it does not require victims of rape and incest to carry pregnancies to term because it provides ample time for a person to get an abortion.

    The law, which took effect on 1 September, is the most extreme anti-abortion measure in the US and essentially bans most abortions, offering no exceptions for rape or incest.

    Asked by a reporter on Tuesday why he would “force a rape or incest to carry a pregnancy to term,” Abbott denied that was the case, saying the law doesn’t require that at all because, obviously, it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion.

    Ocasio-Cortez called Abbott’s remarks “disgusting,” adding: “I do know that he is not familiar with a female or menstruating person’s body because if he {was}, he would know you don’t have six weeks.”

    Cortez went on to explain the basic biology surrounding pregnancies, and that many pregnancies are often undetected at six weeks. She said: “In case no one has informed him before in his life, six weeks pregnant means two weeks late on your period. And two weeks late on your period, for any person with a menstrual cycle, can happen if you’re stressed, if your diet changes, or for really no reason at all. So you don’t have six weeks.”

    Cortez added: “He speaks from such a place of deep ignorance, and it’s not just ignorance. It’s ignorance that’s hurting people.”

    […]

    While defending the radical new law and its lack of exemptions for victims of sexual violence, the governor also vowed to purge the state of all rape and sexual assault.

    Abbott said: Rape is a crime and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting off the streets.

    In 2019, the Texas Department of Public Safety reported more than 14,650 cases of rape, constituting nearly a quarter of all violent crimes across the state. Fewer than 3,900 people were arrested for rape and other sexual offenses. [And it’s extremely likely many cases of rape, etc., are never reported, another point AOC raised (see linked-to article) –blf]

    Ocasio-Cortez fired back at Abbott’s comments about eradicating rapists, saying: “The majority of people who are raped or are sexually assaulted are assaulted by someone that they know. These aren’t just predators that are walking around the streets at night.”

    […]

    Texas state representative Gene Wu mocked Abbott’s answers, tweeting, “Governor Abbott had a solution to end all rape and he sat on it until now? Does it involve a horse dewormer?” […]

36. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 1:04 pm

    Orrin Heatlie, the Republican who’s served as the lead proponent of recalling Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom [California’s Governor], has been sidelined with the coronavirus. Heatlie is unvaccinated.

37. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 1:06 pm

    Upcoming super spreader events being planned by Trump: Trump’s political action committee yesterday announced upcoming rallies in Georgia on Sept. 25 and Iowa on Oct. 9. Both states will host key 2022 races and Iowa will hold the first presidential nominating contest in 2024.

38. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 1:08 pm

    Follow-up to comment 36: Literally two minutes after announcing the upcoming rallies, Trump’s political operation sent out a fundraising appeal falsely suggesting 15 million mail ballots went missing in 2020.

    https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1435421901380362242

    As noted on Twitter by Aaron Blake.

39. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 1:12 pm

    LAPD [Los Angles gestapo] officers told to collect social media data on every civilian they stop:

    […]
    The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has directed its officers to collect the social media information of every civilian they interview, including individuals who are not arrested or accused of a crime, according to records shared with the Guardian.

    Copies of the “field interview cards” that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in investigations, arrests, and prosecutions, and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete.

    The documents, which were obtained by the not-for-profit organization the Brennan Center for Justice, have raised concerns about civil liberties and the potential for mass surveillance of civilians without justification.

    […]

    The Brennan Center conducted a review of 40 other police agencies in the US and was unable to find another department that required social media collection on interview cards (though many have not publicly disclosed copies of the cards). The organization also obtained records about the LAPD’s social media surveillance technologies, which have raised questions about the monitoring of activist groups including Black Lives Matter.

    […] Last October, prosecutors filed criminal charges against three officers in the LAPD’s metro division, accusing them of using the cards to falsely label civilians as gang members after stopping them. That unit also has a history of stopping Black drivers at disproportionately high rates, and according to the LA Times, has more frequently filled out cards for Black and Latino residents they stopped.

    Meanwhile, more than half of the civilians stopped by metro officers and documented in the cards were not arrested or cited, the Times reported. The fact that a department under scrutiny for racial profiling was also engaged in broad scale social media account collection is troubling, said [deputy director at the Brennan Center, Rachel] Levinson-Waldman.

    […]

    “This is like stop and frisk,” [Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition] said, of the use of field interview cards. “And this is happening with the clear goal of surveillance.” The LAPD, he noted, has allowed officers to pose undercover to investigate groups, meaning officers can create fake social media accounts to infiltrate groups.

    Dr Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, said she had long suspected the LAPD conducted “targeted tracking” of specific groups or individual accounts, but was surprised to learn of the default collection of this information in everyday encounters. She fears this could be part of “a massive surveillance operation”.

    […]

    The copies of the cards obtained by the Brennan Center also revealed that police are instructed to ask civilians for their social security numbers and are advised to tell interviewees that it must be provided under federal law. Kathleen Kim, a Loyola law professor and immigrants’ rights expert, who previously served on the LA police commission, said she was not aware of any law requiring individuals to disclose social security numbers to local police.

    There’s an image of a card at the link. The SSN section is what really raised my eyebrows, since it purports the information must be provided (if asked for), unlike the social media details. What it asserts (my transcription) is […] Authority for requiring this information [SSN] is based on field interview procedures operational prior to January 1, 1975, which is basically gobbledygook.

    And she said she was shocked to learn about the social security section on the cards, noting that it was “so antithetical to the department’s own policies” and clearly violated the spirit of sanctuary laws, which are supposed to prevent officers from asking civilians their immigration status. The LAPD had previously taken steps to ensure it was not requesting place of birth information to improve trust with undocumented communities, she said.

    […]

    The Brennan Center obtained LAPD documents related to Geofeedia, a private social media monitoring firm that partners with law enforcement and has previously marketed itself as a tool to monitor BLM protests.

    One internal document, which is undated but appeared to be several years old, listed the “keywords” and hashtags that the LAPD appeared to be monitoring through Geofeedia — and they were almost exclusively related to Black Lives Matter and similar leftist protests. It included #BLMLA, #SayHerName, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, #fuckdonaldtrump and the names of people killed by LA police that prompted major protests.

    The list did not include any hashtags for rightwing demonstrations and far-right movements, which have grown increasingly violent in recent years in the region.

    [… other examples…]

    The Brennan Center’s records further revealed the LAPD is now seeking to use technology from a new company, Media Sonar, which also tracks social media for police. In the 2021 budget, the LAPD allotted $73,000 to purchase Media Sonar software to help the department address a potential threat or incident before its occurrence [That’s not necessarily a bad idea, but is way too prone to abuse and misinterpretation, hence the eejit quotes –blf].

    The extent of the LAPD’s Media Sonar use is unclear, but the company’s communications with the LAPD have raised questions. In one message, the firm said its services can be used to stay on-top of drug / gang / weapon slang keywords and hashtags. Levinson-Waldman said she feared the company or police would misinterpret “slang” or lack proper context on local groups and language, and she noted research showing that online threats made by gang-affiliated youth largely don’t escalate to violence.

    […] The firm also said it could provide a full digital snapshot of an individual’s online presence including all related personas and connections.

    The messages from Media Sonar suggested that the department needed significant safeguards to ensure that keywords didn’t disparately target marginalized communities and checks to ensure the data was accurate, Levinson-Waldman said. [Candidate for understatement of the year! –blf]

    Records show that the LAPD has requested federal funding for Media Sonar for terrorism prevention, but some advocates are concerned it would be used for protests. […]

40. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 1:17 pm

    Sigh.

    […] In California’s gubernatorial recall election, all of the recent polling suggests incumbent Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom will hold onto his job — which is causing some Republicans to recycle their rhetoric from last fall in the hopes of undermining public confidence in the integrity of our election system.

    Trump, for example, said last night that the California race is “probably rigged.” Several Fox News personalities are similarly touting baseless conspiracy theories about the recall election, as are rank-and-file GOP voters in the Golden State.

    Just to the east in Nevada, the Associated Press published this report this morning.

    More than 14 months before the midterm elections, the Republican frontrunner in Nevada’s U.S. Senate race is raising fears of voter fraud and talking about preemptively mounting legal challenges — a sign that the election denialism that marked the last cycle may carry over into the next. Adam Laxalt, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, is aiming to unseat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and thus swing power to Republicans in the now-evenly split chamber.

    “With me at the top of the ticket, we’re going to be able to get everybody at the table and come up with a full plan, do our best to try to secure this election, get as many observers as we can, and file lawsuits early, if there are lawsuits we can file to try to tighten up the election,” Laxalt said on a conservative talk show two weeks ago.

    The calendar adds important context: Nevada’s U.S. Senate primary election is still nine months away. The state’s general election is 14 months away.

    And yet, the likely Republican Party nominee in one of the nation’s most competitive 2022 Senate contests is already raising baseless concerns about election integrity and making plans to “file lawsuits early.”

    We don’t need a crystal ball to know what Laxalt and candidates like him will say if they don’t like the results of next year’s elections.

    What matters here is not just conspiracy theories, pointless litigation, and partisan whining about voters’ verdicts. Rather, the far more unsettling concern is the establishment of a new normal in Republican politics — one in which the only election results many in the GOP consider legitimate are the ones in which Democratic candidates lose.

    Link

    Gavin Newsom’s main Republican opponent in California, Larry Elder, urged his supporters to report “anything suspicious” in the recall vote. That’s right, he now thinks he is going to lose, so he is prepping everyone to think that his loss should be blamed of voting irregularities.

    “The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans. And my fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here and recall. So I’m urging people to go to ElectElder.com. Whenever you see anything, hear anything suspicious, go to my website. We have a battery of lawyers. We’re going to file a lawsuit in a timely fashion this time,” Elder said Sunday in an exclusive interview on Fox News “Media Buzz.”

    JFC.

41. tomh says

    8 September 2021 at 1:25 pm

    Re: #39
    Yeah, because in a state where it’s 2-1 registered Democrats over registered Republicans, the only way a Republican could lose is if there were fraud. That makes sense. And the Republican voters believe this!

42. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 1:27 pm

    For conservative vaccine skeptics, there’s one principal argument at the top of the list of talking points: The decision is private and personal, affecting no one but the individual. That argument is completely wrong, of course, but it’s become a staple for much of the right.

    “What do you care if your neighbor has one or not?” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson asked in April. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or not,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy added in July.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed a similar line at a press conference late last week, saying that vaccines help people, but adding a caveat. “It’s about your health and whether you want that protection or not,” the GOP governor told reporters. “It really doesn’t impact me or anyone else.”

    It is truly amazing that a year and a half into the crisis, after hundreds of thousands of deaths and tens of millions of infections in the United States, some in positions of authority are still struggling with the societal nature of a viral pandemic. [40 million+ cases of COVID in the USA so far, and there have been more than 648,000 deaths from the virus in the U.S. … so far. Numbers still rising. Link]

    The editorial board of The Miami Herald tried yesterday to remind DeSantis of the details he really ought to know, describing the Republican’s position as “a profile in selfishness.”

    [I]t’s the opposite of what he says. COVID’s spread actually is a community problem, and solving it starts with vaccines. Getting the vaccine certainly helps the person who gets the shot — the governor’s not wrong about that. It vastly reduces the chances of being hospitalized or dying of the disease. But it also reduces the spread of the virus to others. That’s the critical point that DeSantis is disregarding in his zeal to appeal to the freedom-at-all-costs far-right of his party as he heads into reelection and eyes the White House.

    Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease authority, echoed the point yesterday when asked about the Florida governor’s rhetoric. “If [DeSantis] feels that vaccines are not important for people, that they’re just important for some people, that’s completely incorrect,” Fauci explained, adding, “When you’re dealing with an outbreak of an infectious disease, it isn’t only about you. There’s a societal responsibility that we all have.”

    Immunology may be complicated, but this underlying principle is not: Covid-19 is a dangerous contagion. As we recently discussed, those who believe they’re taking a personal risk are actually creating a societal hazard – one that, among other things, fills hospitals, delays medical care for everyone, and needlessly extends the duration of the pandemic. [See blf’s comment 33.]

    What’s more, the longer the pandemic lasts, and the more people get infected, the greater the risk of new, dangerous variants.

    A Washington Post analysis added yesterday that there is such a thing as the common good: “Making the case to the unvaccinated that they would help their society, their neighbors or their family members — rather than just themselves — could seemingly be compelling to at least some of them. Telling them it’s all about them is one of the worst conceivable messages, because it’s wrong and because it absolves them of any feelings of social responsibility.”

    Eighteen months into the public health crisis, DeSantis either doesn’t understand these obvious truths or he sees political value in pretending the truths aren’t real. Either way, the Florida governor’s rhetoric is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

    Link

43. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 1:27 pm

    First Dog on the Moon in the Grauniad, Ozland’s alleged-“PM” Scott Morrison got to see his kids on Father’s Day and everyone is furious at him all the time now (cartoon): “I can only talk to my dad on the phone (when I answer his calls)”. As referenced in the cartoon, Morrison has a habit of this sort of thing, secretly vacationing in Hawaiʻi during the serious Ozland fires a few years ago, and more recently abusing teh “U”K’s Covid-19 restrictions (again, initially essentially secretly). I haven’t bothered to look up the details, but (vaguely) recall in both those cases, he initially lied / covered-up, and (judging by the cartoon) is doing so again this time. I assume both he and Ted Cruz attended the Monty Python “Run Away, Run Away” lesson, but replaced the vicious rabbit comedy part with vicious rabid wholesale corruption (it’s got some of the same letters, which is enough, ain’t it?).

44. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 1:36 pm

    London transport staff warned of razors inside Covid conspiracy posters:

    […]
    Staff on London’s public transport network have been warned that blades are being concealed inside posters promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and vaccinations.

    Transport for London (TfL) said there had been a number of reports of razor blades being attached to the back of the posters intended to harm anyone taking them down, and that at least one person was harmed in an incident outside its network.

    Trade union representatives for transport workers, who likened the tactic to that used in the past by fascists from the National Front, have raised the issue on a safety forum for staff and management and are to provide a warning to members.

    A bulletin sent by TfL said “propaganda posters” questioning the existence of Covid-19, spreading untruths about vaccinations or carrying other messages, had been placed in locations such as doors, lamp-posts and walls.

    The bulletin included two images, one of a poster saying Masks don’t work, and another showing its reverse spattered with blood and being held by someone carrying a bloodied tissue.

    [… Loons] have also filmed themselves pulling down public health information posters on the London Underground, where stickers spreading conspiracy theories about the pandemic have become increasingly commonplace.

    In a stunt last month a man wearing a high-visibility vest and posing as a Covid marshal was filmed walking through a carriage with a loudspeaker telling passengers their papers were to be checked to ensure they had been vaccinated.

45. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 1:39 pm

    Fist Fights Break Out At Missouri School Board Meeting After Universal Masking Vote

    Fights broke out and at least one person was handcuffed after a Missouri school board voted unanimously to mandate masking in schools amid a surge of coronavirus cases in the area.

    The scuffles were just the latest in a wave of backlash around the country as anti-mask parents object to schools tightening COVID protocols, in light of spiking cases and limited options for protecting unvaccinated children during in-person learning.

    It’s a scene we’ve watched play out in school board meeting rooms across the country since the beginning of August — and the backlash from anti-vax and anti-mask parents has become increasingly violent in recent weeks as more and more students are forced to quarantine over COVID exposure in mask-optional school districts.

    […] Sheriff’s deputies on the scene reportedly broke up the fighting and handcuffed at least one person.

    […] The police subsequently issued municipal citations for disorderly conduct, according to the statement.

    “All subjects in the school parking lot were then dispersed and asked to leave school property,” the statement added.

    A notice for the meeting posted Friday noted the mandate was being considered due to the amount of community spread impacting students.

    “We currently have over 200 students in quarantine due to close contact with a positive,” the notice read.

    The district currently has 21 recorded COVID cases as of Monday. Those cases, in the first nine days of the school year, outnumber the first half of the last school year, according to KMBC.

    Posted by readers of the article:

    Arrest them. Check to see if they have a kid in school. Ban them from the school grounds. I’m way past tired of their garbage.
    ——————
    a society rapidly unraveling where people now default to physical violence to justify their opinions and beliefs
    ———————–
    I can’t get over how strange it is to see a radical minority faction dedicated above all, in fact if not in their own words, to maximizing the death rate among themselves. It’s true that they also represent a real threat to the rest of the community. But it’s undeniable that, to the extent they get their way, the consequence is to maximize illness and death amongst themselves.
    ————————
    In Virginia, the Dem governor made masks mandatory in all schools, thus taking the issue away from local idiots and preempting or at least toning down many a would-be fraught school board meeting.
    ———————–
    Doesn’t help here in MO where we have an idiot Governor and most of the state legislature.
    ———————-
    I can’t help but notice the part where they were taken alive and weren’t swarmed by cops who tased them and beat the shit beat out of them.
    ————————
    Exploitation of the worst failings in human nature. Lies, racism, cult of charismatic demagogic leadership, greed, ignorance, dehumanization and scapegoating. With millions of it’s citizens dead, the nation occupied by foreign forces, cities, industry, infrastructure a smoking ruin:

    “A large part of the population clung sentimentally to their Führer right up to the end…They could not bear to lose their faith in him who had appeared to them as a mass redeemer. Nor could they give up their belief in the justification of the Hitler program.”

    The Curtain Falls, Last Days of the Third Reich, 1945 , Bernadotte.
    ———————
    Our enemies are loving this and Fox News and Rupert Murdock are brokering our countries demise for their own fun and profit.

46. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 1:48 pm

    When bad things happen, that’s tragedy. When people knowingly cause them to happen, that’s evil.

    The origin of evil is an issue that would seem as difficult to fathom as the meaning of life, or the purpose of the universe. It’s not. Evil is not simply when something bad happens. Hurricanes aren’t evil. Not even a disease is evil. Evil takes understanding. Evil is when someone displays indifference or experiences pleasure in the face of suffering.

    The worst sort of evil comes when empathy and consideration are replaced with a perverse joy, one that doesn’t just refuse to acknowledge someone else’s pain, but takes pride in dismissing the thought that others deserve consideration. And it looks like this.

    When a Rutherford County student tells the board his grandmother, a former @rucoschools teacher, died of covid because someone wasn’t wearing a mark … anti-maskers behind him laugh and interrupt him. [video available here: https://twitter.com/TheBoroHoller/status/1435381602499112962 ]

    What’s happening in that Tennessee school board meeting is a tiny subset, a pixel in the larger picture, of what’s happening on multiple issues across the country. […]

    As CNN reports, children too young to be vaccinated now make up 26% of all new cases of COVID-19 cases. That number has grown enormously as schools have reopened for in-person instruction in districts where masks are not mandated and vaccination for staff is not a requirement. In fact, the total number of children infected across the course of the pandemic has grown by 10% in just the last two weeks.

    That’s because the reopening of schools, especially in areas where school boards have bowed to pressure—or the executive orders of Republican governors—and refused to institute mask mandates or vaccination requirements and are seeing an “explosions of cases.” That explosion generated over 14,000 cases among students in Florida within the first week of classes. It resulted in thousands of cases in Texas, where district after district has been forced to suspend classes. […]

    What does evil look like? It looks like someone standing in front of a camera and saying that a decision that can cost the lives of thousands is a personal choice. It looks like that. [see comment 41]

    […] What does evil look like? It looks like a woman snickering at a child talking about his dead grandmother. It looks like a doctor knowingly passing along false information that places children and teacher in danger. Most of all, it looks like a governor denying that individuals have any obligation beyond self preservation, and that pretending that societal responsibilities do not exist.

    See also: https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/education/article253945878.html

47. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 1:58 pm

    Deranged and violent white man on a plane:

    Monday, some asshole threw a fit on an American Airlines flight landing in Salt Lake City from Los Angeles. The staff, which isn’t compensated nearly enough to host impromptu live productions of “The Jerry Springer Show,” identified the asshole as Timothy Armstrong, a 61-year-old grown ass man from Las Vegas.

    Multiple videos show Armstrong berating the flight crew at the front of the plane and growling like a mad dog while seemingly trying to eat his face mask. He screamed at the crew that they couldn’t “hold him” on the flight while it’s on the ground, but they were still in the air, as a crew member patiently explained. This was around noon so you wonder how drunk could he have been […]
    [video available at the link]

    Dennis Brauch, who recorded the incident, said:

    “He began by yelling at the Asian woman in front of me to sit down when she was standing to deal with a back issue,” he said. “He proceeded to tell multiple flight attendants that she and her companion ‘didn’t belong here.’ After asking him to calm down the man went into a complete meltdown of racist, sexist and belligerent comments, culminating in his arrest at the gate.”

    […] After he was ordered to sit down, he shouted “Joe Biden! Really?” for a while, which is about as coherent as the GOP presidential nominee will be in 2024.

    When the flight actually landed, the Salt Lake City Police boarded, took Armstrong into custody, and escorted him off the plane. Paramedics took him to the hospital. This is the sort of white-glove treatment you receive when you are deranged and violent on a flight while white.

    I usually don’t want to give too much attention to some random asshole when there are so many prominent assholes to rip apart, and airlines have long served as a microcosm of society that seems to bring out the worst in people. But lately, the escalating number of airplane rages and grocery store rampages feel purposeful, like a form of deliberate stochastic terrorism intended to keep us in a perpetual state of fear. Fox News’s white power hours are devoted to all the apparent crime in Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, or just about anywhere Black people gather in numbers larger than a single digit. […] [video available at the link]

    But very angry white people are freaking out in supermarkets, like the dullard in Nebraska recorded mocking the public health guidelines in a supermarket, the place where we keep our food.

    Even if Nebraska had better vaccination rates, it’s never ideal when strangers cough on you. I feel like if Americans visited a country for the first time and some asshole in a market deliberately coughed on them, they’d never shut up about it. When the cougher is called a “Karen,” which I admit is a little played out now, she said, “You’re such sheep!” and explained that she’s not wearing a mask indoors because she’s not sick and neither is the person she keeps coughing on. Germ theory probably isn’t one of her core competencies.

    Nebraska has no mask mandate, not that assholes like her would comply. She claimed she has allergies but that doesn’t excuse hacking all over the fresh produce.

    We’re just a few days away from annual 9/11-related jingoism but I’d feel more patriotic if I wasn’t worried that some of my fellow citizens might snap and kill me at Trader Joe’s.

    Link

48. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 3:47 pm

    Three Vermont state troopers accused of creating fake Covid-19 vaccination cards:

    […]
    Three Vermont state troopers have resigned after being accused of creating fake Covid-19 vaccination cards, state police announced on Tuesday.

    […]

    Shawn Sommers and Raymond Witkowski resigned on 10 August after a colleague raised suspicions about the alleged fraud to supervisors. A few weeks later, David Pfindel resigned on 3 September after Vermont’s department of public safety completed its investigation into the matter.

    […]

    The state police was unable to announce the troopers’ resignation before Tuesday or provide additional case details due to an ongoing investigation by the FBI. It remains unclear why and for whom the troopers allegedly fabricated the cards.

    In addition to the FBI, the matter has been referred to the US attorney’s office in Burlington.
    […]

49. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 3:53 pm

    Blow to DeSantis as judge rules Florida cannot enforce mask mandate ban:

    Judge rules against governor while appeals court decides whether ban on public schools mandating masks is ultimately legal

    […]

    The Leon county circuit judge, John C Cooper, lifted an automatic stay of his decision last week that the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and education officials exceeded their authority by imposing the blanket ban through executive order and hitting pro-mask local school boards with financial penalties.

    Cooper said the overwhelming evidence before him in a lawsuit by parents challenging the DeSantis ban is that wearing masks does provide some protection for children in crowded school settings, particularly those under 12 for whom no vaccine yet exists.

    […]

    “We’re not in normal times. We are in a pandemic,” Cooper said in a hearing held remotely. “We have a variant that is more infectious and dangerous to children than the one we had last year.”

    […]

    Jacob Oliva, public schools chancellor at the state education department, said in a notice last week to local superintendents that “enforcement must cease if the stay is lifted”.

    […]

    The core of the governor’s argument is that a recently passed Parents Bill of Rights gives decision-making authority to parents on whether their children should wear a mask to school.

    […]

    On the Parents Bill of Rights, Cooper said his previous order follows the law as passed earlier this year by the state legislature. The law, he said, reserves health and education decisions regarding children to parents unless a government entity such as a school board can show their broader action is reasonable and narrowly tailored to the issue at hand.

    The DeSantis order impermissibly enforces only the first portion of that law, Cooper said.

    “You have to show you have authority to do what you’re doing,” the judge said. “You cannot enforce part of that law but not all of it.”

    In a separate case, parents of special needs children have filed a federal lawsuit claiming the DeSantis school mask ban violates the Americans with Disabilities Act by placing their medically sensitive children in jeopardy. A federal judge in Miami was set to hold a hearing later on Wednesday.
    […]

50. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 5:02 pm

    Charming loons, Who Is Owed Reparations? Larry Elder Argues Slave Owners Whose Legal Property Was Taken Away’:

    Larry Elder becomes exasperated when a conversation arises about reparations — that is, whether African Americans are owed some compensation for centuries of slavery. But the Republican gubernatorial candidate in California’s recall election does think a case can be made that slave owners deserve reparations.

    Elder made such comments, which were first flagged by Resist Programming, on a July 18 episode on “The Candace Owens Show, broadcast on right-wing propaganda outlet PragerU. Elder told Owens that an argument could be made that reparations are owed to people whose ‘property’ was taken away after the end of the Civil War because like it or not, slavery was legal.

    The conversation began when Owens joked that she could support reparations.

    I think I could be pro-reparations, Owens said. I think we should allow people the opportunity or the chance to go back to Africa. I would sponsor that like you wouldn’t believe.

    [… impressively garbled history from teh loons…]

    Elder’s comments fall in line with others he has made on racism and slavery. According to The Sacramento Bee, the conservative radio host has stated that systemic racism is a lie, blamed rising crime on Black Lives Matter, and claimed that welfare is more harmful to Black families than slavery. He also supports banning “critical race theory” […] in schools.

51. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 5:09 pm

    Dear madam magic sky faeries, lightening bolts suggested… Hank Kunneman Says That Questioning His False Election Prophesies Is Grievous to God:

    Right-wing pastor Hank Kunneman has been one of the most obstinate of the self-proclaimed “prophets” who repeatedly guaranteed that former President[Wacko House squatter] Donald Trump would win reelection in 2020. For nearly a year, Kunneman has petulantly refused to apologize for his false prophesy, instead promising that God will reward those who stand with him while attacking those who have dared to criticize him.

    Despite the fact that President Joe Biden has been in the White House for more than eight months now, Kunneman continues to insist that his prophecies regarding Trump’s victory were accurate. [… On] Tuesday, Kunneman insisted that anyone who questions the accuracy of his prophesies or his standing as a prophet is insulting God and warned that God is testing people to see really who is on the Lord’s side right now.

    […]

    Kunneman claimed that on Aug 16, 2020, God prophesied through this vessel here that they would steal the election.

    […]

    Of course, if anyone watches the “prophecy” that Kunneman delivered on Aug 16, they will see that his message then was exactly the opposite of what he now claims it to be. He asserted at the time that God would thwart the plans of the enemy to sow chaos and steal the election.

    Kunneman nonetheless asserted Tuesday that anyone who calls him a false prophet is failing a test laid out by God.

    […]

52. blf says

    8 September 2021 at 5:35 pm

    US’s wealthiest 1% are failing to pay $160bn a year in taxes, report finds:

    This amounts to 28% of the ‘tax gap’, treasury report says, which Biden proposes closing by empowering IRS to pursue aggressively

    [… Deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, Natasha] Sarin said that tax gap — “the difference between taxes that are owed and collected” — amounted to “around $600bn annually and will mean approximately $7tn of lost tax revenue over the next decade.”

    The Biden administration proposes closing the tax gap by empowering the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to more aggressively pursue unpaid taxes, at a cost of $80bn and in the process helping fund the president’s ambitious domestic economic agenda.

    Republicans in Congress and lobbyists for business are united in opposition to the proposal to shore up tax enforcement.

    “The sheer magnitude of lost revenue is striking,” Sarin wrote. “It is equal to 3% of GDP, or all the income taxes paid by the lowest earning 90% of taxpayers.

    “The tax gap can be a major source of inequity. Today’s tax code contains two sets of rules: one for regular wage and salary workers who report virtually all the income they earn; and another for wealthy taxpayers, who are often able to avoid a large share of the taxes they owe.”

    The treasury report may also focus attention on Americans outside the top 1% but still well off. According to the report, the wealthiest 5% of US taxpayers account for more than 50% of lost tax revenue annually. For the top 20%, the figure is 77.1%.

    Sarin said that “for the IRS to appropriately enforce the tax laws against high earners and large corporations, it needs funding to hire and train revenue agents who can decipher their thousands of pages of sophisticated tax filings”.

    Former treasury secretary Robert Reich, now a Guardian contributor, called the report a “bombshell” and said: “The IRS must have the funds to beef up enforcement. Every additional $1 of IRS funding yields $3 of tax revenue, mostly from the very rich who illegally avoid paying taxes owed.”

    […]

53. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 6:21 pm

    Abbott Considering Other Measures to Prevent People from Ever Setting Foot in Texas, by Andy Borowitz

    Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that he was “actively considering” additional measures to prevent people from wanting to ever set foot in the state.

    Although he acknowledged that new laws banning most abortions, restricting voting, and allowing citizens to carry a gun without a permit or training would dissuade many from visiting Texas, Abbott said that “there’s more we can do.”

    “Maybe we pass a law that says when you have to go to bed every night, or when you’re allowed to use a hair dryer,” he said. “We need to put our thinking caps on.”

    “Just spitballing here, but what if we mandated that every visitor to Texas got bitten by a dog or poked with a stick of some kind?” he said. “I’ll be damned if that wouldn’t do the trick.”

    Even as he works overtime thinking up new ideas to alienate potential visitors to Texas, he admitted he was surprised that anyone still wanted to come. “Honestly, I thought me being Governor would be enough to keep people out,” he said.

    New Yorker link

54. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 6:23 pm

    NBC News:

    Solar power could provide nearly half of America’s electricity by the middle of this century, the Biden administration said in a study released Wednesday as it tries to prove its ambitious, zero-emissions goal can be reached by then.

55. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 6:29 pm

    The wealthiest 1% have robbed the nation with $7 trillion in tax evasion over the last 10 years

    The good news for the IRS is that most Americans pay their fair share of taxes. A new analysis of incomes and returns suggests that tax compliance for low- and middle-income workers is “high.” As The New York Times reports, the same can’t be said of the rich.

    Where the income received by the majority of Americans comes primarily in the form of paychecks, with taxes deducted at the time they are issued and totals reported directly to the Internal Revenue Service, that’s not true of the wealthy. Those at the top of the income pyramid are more likely to be rewarded in ways that aren’t as visible and certainly don’t have taxes carved out in advance. Add to that the number of loopholes and dodges available to those wealthy enough to employ experienced tax attorneys and accountants, and compliance among the wealthy is not high. It’s that other thing. The one that has created a “tax gap” with $7 trillion left on the table over the last ten years alone.

    That means that 18 months’ worth of the entire U.S. budget has been lost in a decade, simply to tax cheats. A new report from the Treasury Department gets more explicit about the source of this “tax gap” by pointing a finger right at the top of the income pyramid. It’s not just that the wealthy tend to underpay their taxes; the wealthiest tend to underpay by the greatest amount. That leaves the top 1% of Americans alone responsible for $163 billion a year that should be going to roads, schools, parks, and healthcare … but is instead going directly to their silk-lined pockets.

    The purpose of the Treasury report is not just to make it clear that America is failing to collect anything close to a fair amount from those who pay themselves through a nest of LLCs, remote accounts, and false fronts, but to end this deception is going to take a dedicated effort—and more resources at the IRS. And the report spells out explicitly why one group of Americans are demonstrably complainant, and a much smaller group is not.

    Today’s tax code contains two sets of rules: one for regular wage and salary workers who report virtually all the income they earn; and another for wealthy taxpayers, who are often able to avoid a large share of the taxes they owe.

    And yet, the way the current rules for the IRS are written, they’re required to spend a lot of their time picking for dimes in the returns of those who fall into the first camp, rather than searching for the billions being covered up in the returns of the later.

    The combination of an ever greater income gap and the IRS’ inability to direct its resources to focus on the wealthiest returns means that it’s increasingly easy for the wealthiest to hide larger and larger amounts away and for fewer of their efforts to get caught. As a result, the IRS estimates that the current resources miss about 15% of the taxes owed each year—almost all of that from the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers.

    That’s why President Joe Biden is currently pushing hard for additional funding at the IRS and for the ability to focus audits and investigations where they matter—on the people who have the money. It’s also why Republicans are pushing back, arguing that the IRS “can’t be trusted” and that attempting to secure the money owed is “an invasion of privacy.” [Oh, FFS]

    What’s being left on the table each year is enough to cover all unemployment payments, SNAP and other child nutrition programs, have a few billion left on the side for all foster care programs and children’s health programs—every one of which Republicans are sure to claim is too costly. What it would take to recover those funds is a tiny fraction of the benefits that would result.

    But somehow, Republicans—or specifically, Republican donors—don’t want the IRS to spend more time looking at the wealthiest 1%. And there are 7 trillion reasons why.

56. Lynna, OM says

    8 September 2021 at 6:38 pm

    Follow-up to comment 39.

    Yep, here come the lies.

    […] Media Matters reports that Fox News has already deployed a State Big Lie, telling its viewers that if Newsom defeats the GOP recall, it’s because Democrats cheated. Within a roughly two-week period, several Fox News personalities and guests, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, “painted a lurid picture of vast election fraud in California.”

    Some claimants tried to be slick, like Fox News Primetime rotating host and former MTV Real World San Francisco contestant Rachel Campos-Duffy. Media Matters reported that while she brought up supposed voter fraud during an interview with Elder this week, it was to merely say that he was the one who had supposedly been concerned about it. Elder had no specific examples when prompted—of course, he didn’t—but it didn’t really matter. Campos-Duffy talked about it, Elder talked about it, it doesn’t matter if the claims are bullshit, the job got done.

    Meanwhile, others were not so slick. Media Matters reports that Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren claimed on Outnumbered that “[t]he only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud,” and that “it’s going to have big consequences not only for that state but for upcoming elections.” Oh, so not only is there a State Big Lie, but they’re going to use it to further Future Big Lies. “It’s not just Tami—baseless allegations of cheating and voter fraud are all across Fox News’ discussions of the CA recall, laying the conspiratorial groundwork to allege it was stolen if it doesn’t go their way,” tweeted Media Matters’ Lis Power.

    […] the disgraced former House speaker [Newt Gingrich] was pushing these lies during an Aug. 22 appearance on Sunday Morning Futures, claiming Vice President Kamala Harris is “part of raising the money to pay for the cheating. I mean, it’s just that simple. It’s not complicated.”

    That’s a pretty big fucking claim, and a responsible journalist would ask for receipts. But this is Fox News, and, specifically, Maria Bartiromo. “That is so extraordinary,” she responded to Gingrich. “And that is the reason we continue to focus on all of these audits going on across the country. We want fair and free elections.” […]

    Maria Bartiromo is getting worse and worse. She recently asked Mike Pompeo if Joe Biden is mentally capable of being president. Is Maria Bartiromo mentally capable of being a journalist … or even a talking head “news” host?

    Video snippets are available at the link.

57. tomh says

    9 September 2021 at 12:13 am

    This is how you do it.

    United Airlines staff with vaccine religious exemptions face unpaid leave
    Noah Garfinkel

    United Airlines staffers who are granted religious exemptions for the company’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate will be placed on temporary unpaid leave starting Oct. 2, the airline told employees in a memo.

    United last month became the first major U.S. airline to institute a vaccine mandate for employees, and acknowledged then it would consider exemptions for religious, personal or medical exemptions.

    The unpaid leave rule applies to all employees who get an exemption, regardless of their role in the company, per the statement. It is in effect until “specific safety measures for unvaccinated employees are instituted,” the airline wrote.

    Employees who have requests for exemptions denied will be required to get their first vaccine dose by Sept. 27.

    “[We] can no longer allow unvaccinated people back into the workplace until we better understand how they might interact with our customers and their vaccinated co-workers,” states the memo.

58. raven says

    9 September 2021 at 4:05 am

    nbcnews.com

    Idaho begins rationing health care as Covid surge crushes hospitals
    Sept. 8, 2021, 4:22 AM PDT / Source: Associated Press
    By The Associated Press
    BOISE, Idaho — Idaho public health leaders announced Tuesday that they activated “crisis standards of care” allowing health care rationing for the state’s northern hospitals because there are more coronavirus patients than the institutions can handle.

    The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare quietly enacted the move Monday and publicly announced it in a statement Tuesday morning — warning residents that they may not get the care they would normally expect if they need to be hospitalized.

    The move came as the state’s confirmed coronavirus cases skyrocketed in recent weeks. Idaho has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the U.S.

    The state health agency cited “a severe shortage of staffing and available beds in the northern area of the state caused by a massive increase in patients with Covid-19 who require hospitalization.”

    The designation includes 10 hospitals and healthcare systems in the Idaho panhandle and in north-central Idaho. The agency said its goal is to extend care to as many patients as possible and to save as many lives as possible.

    The move allows hospitals to allot scarce resources like intensive care unit rooms to patients most likely to survive and make other dramatic changes to the way they treat patients. Other patients will still receive care, but they may be placed in hospital classrooms or conference rooms rather than traditional hospital rooms or go without some life-saving medical equipment.

    Idaho is now rationing health care due to an overloaded health care system. Overloaded with Covid-19 virus patients.

    This is happening in a lot of places. They usually don’t make public announcements though. The health care for patients just goes downhill because there are too many patients and not enough staff. My friend got an email from their local hospital a few weeks ago. It said basically, don’t get sick because we are full of Covid-19 patients and won’t be able to treat you.

59. tomh says

    9 September 2021 at 10:29 am

    Abortions in Indiana

    CHICAGO — The Seventh Circuit lifted a stay that had blocked certain provisions of an Indiana law limiting abortion access. The state will now be allowed to require a physician to be present while a patient ingests an abortion-inducing drug and will prohibit the use of telemedicine in abortion care — even to obtain informed consent or to conduct pre-abortion counseling sessions.

    Read the order here.

60. raven says

    9 September 2021 at 11:20 am

    It’s refrigerated truck time again. In Cowlitz county, Washington state.
    This county is in SW Washington, on the Columbia river near Portland.
    It is not a good sign when the refrigerated trucks show up in your neighborhood.

    Cowlitz County morgue overwhelmed by COVID-19 spike, searching for mobile morgue
    by Kellee Azar, KATU News Wednesday, September 8th 2021

    COWLITZ COUNTY, Wash. — Officials in Cowlitz County say the morgue is overwhelmed as the county faces a spike in COVID-19 cases that is stressing hospitals to record-breaking levels.

    Now, the Southwest Washington county is looking at refrigeration trucks to be used as mobile morgues. Area hospitals are also setting up mobile ICUs and even tents outside to expand waiting rooms.

    Cowlitz County Coroner Dr. Tim Davidson says between August 31st and September 6th, 8 people died in the county from COVID-19. That works out to an average of at least one death a day.

    This has been going on over a year, two years, it’s just sad that we are at this place that we are still losing people,” Cowlitz County Coroner Dr. Tim Davison said.
    For the county that’s the highest rate ever and for Davidson, it’s higher than they can handle. Usually, the morgue can hold 10 cadavers, on Wednesday morning there were 18.

    “We are using additional tables and we are just putting individuals on recovery gurneys and moving them into cold storage,” Dr. Davidson said.

    Now, he’s looking for help. As part of an emergency declaration, the county approved a mobile refrigeration unit to act as a pop-up morgue.

    I hoped it would never happen. But we are here and we have to take care of the deceased and get them back to their families,” Dr. Davidson said.
    Dr. Davidson has worked as the county coroner for 15 years, he and his small staff of just five people are working nearly 24/7 to keep up.

    “This is an emotional rollercoaster for my whole crew. We are sad because we are losing community members. I’m not going to get in the political stance, but we are losing people and we shouldn’t be losing people like this,” Dr. Davidson said.

    The positive news for Southwest Washington is that the area is seeing an uptick in the number of people getting their vaccine. While that doesn’t help in this moment, once more people are fully-vaccinated, it will, health officials hope.

61. snarkrates says

    9 September 2021 at 11:50 am

    Lynna: “Maria Bartiromo is getting worse and worse.”

    Yeah, that’s one I bet Joey Ramone wishes he could take back.

62. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 11:59 am

    Layoffs drop to pandemic-era low as U.S. economy improves

    The last time jobless claims were this low, the effects of the pandemic hadn’t even reached the United States yet.

    After months of hit-or-miss progress on weekly unemployment claims in the early part of the year, CNBC reported this morning on the newest data from the Labor Department, which offers the best news on layoffs we’ve seen in quite a while.

    First-time filings for unemployment claims in the U.S. dropped to 310,000 last week, easily the lowest of the Covid era and a significant step toward the pre-pandemic normal, the Labor Department reported Thursday. […] it was in March 2020 when jobless claims first spiked in response to the Covid-19 crisis, climbing to over 3 million. That weekly total soon after reached nearly 7 million as the economy cratered. For 55 consecutive weeks, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits was worse than at any time during the Great Recession.

    All of that appears to be behind us. Looking at today’s report, we haven’t seen data this good since before the pandemic began in earnest. Last week’s figures were encouraging, but given the sharp improvement, today’s new data is significantly better.

    To be sure, it’d be a mistake to see 310,000 jobless claims as good news on its own. […] In the early months of 2020, the U.S. average on unemployment claims was roughly 211,000 – well below the total from today’s report.

    But given what Americans have been dealing with throughout the pandemic, these new figures are worth feeling good about. A return to a “normal” number of first-time claims, which seemed difficult to even imagine in the recent past, now appears to be in sight.

63. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 12:08 pm

    Biden’s White House clears out Trump picks from military boards

    The Biden administration has quietly spent the year removing Trump appointees from government posts. It’s clearly taking a while.

    […] the outgoing president and his team focused on a lower profile goal: rewarding loyalists.

    […] the then-president spent his final weeks in the Oval Office “doling out plum spots on premier boards and commissions to his friends and supporters … who will serve fixed terms even after Mr. Trump leaves office.”

    [Trump] seemed wholly indifferent to qualifications and merit, which led him to appoint partisan operatives such as Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer to military service academy boards. Yesterday, as Politico reported, President Joe Biden and his team did some political housecleaning.

    The Biden White House has begun the process of removing Trump allies from military advisory boards, months after they were installed into those posts at the end of the last administration. On Wednesday, Cathy Russell, the director of the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office, sent letters to 18 individuals on three different boards, asking for them to resign. The list includes the Board of Visitors to the Air Force Academy, Military Academy and the Naval Academy, the White House said.

    Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, confirmed to reporters at a briefing yesterday that the president wanted to ensure that these advisory boards had personnel who are “qualified to serve” and are “aligned” with the administration’s values.

    And so, 18 Trump appointees were told they could either voluntarily step down or be fired. Many were defiant, including Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager, who complained that the Biden White House was failing to honor “presidential norms.” [Ha!]

    […] The president appears to have the legal authority to remove these appointees, and the Times reported overnight that Trump’s picks have, in fact, been “pushed out” of their posts.

    That includes retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a controversial far-right figure whom Trump tapped to serve on West Point’s advisory board, and who spent part of the spring pushing a conspiracy theory that said the Biden administration is bringing in nonwhite immigrants as part of a “grand plan” to have them outnumber white people in the United States.

    Just as notable is the degree to which yesterday’s developments are part of a larger pattern. In January, for example, the Biden administration fired Trump appointees at the National Labor Relations Board. A month later, the Democratic White House also dismissed Trump appointees serving on Pentagon advisory boards.

    In March, the Biden White House fired the Trump-appointed general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; in April, a high-ranking Trump appointee at the National Security Agency was forced out; in May, the administration ousted four Trump-appointed members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts; and in July, the president took steps to fire the Trump-appointed commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

    Yesterday served as a reminder that the efforts to remove Trump loyalists from government posts are ongoing.

64. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 12:24 pm

    Violence, lots of violence. And when the Proud Boys don’t get the violence they long for, they roam around in packs to create some.

    Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, the Northwest-based Proud Boys leader with a long history of violence, was shot in the leg this weekend in Olympia, Washington. If you were to only read the news accounts in local media, you would know that the shooting Saturday afternoon was the culmination of another confrontation between the far-right street brawlers and antifascists.

    However, that is a grossly incomplete picture of what happened. Videos and written accounts posted on social media—many of them posted by Proud Boys sympathizers—during the fracas show what really happened: When counterprotesters failed to appear at an anti-vaccination event for which they were providing “security,” frustrated Proud Boys formed a pack and began hunting for “antifa” on the streets of Olympia. They assaulted an independent female journalist who had to seek refuge in a local tavern. They also began assaulting random people on the street they identified as “antifa” and began chasing them with clubs, baseball bats, and Mace; in the end, one of their victims drew a gun at a bus stop and fired several rounds, one of which apparently struck Toese.

    Consistent with their post-Jan. 6 strategy of attaching themselves to local right-wing events, the ostensible cause du jour for the Proud Boys’ presence in Olympia on Saturday was an anti-vaccination “End the Mandates” protest organized by a local far-right political candidate, Candace Mercer, held on the Washington state Capitol grounds. However, despite repeated warnings by speakers at the event that “antifa is expected,” no counterprotesters appeared at the rally.

    So the Proud Boys, with Toese in the lead, went hunting for them, videos show. A group of about 50 of them, toting weapons like batons and bats and bear spray, marched through downtown Olympia toward Olympia City Hall, roughly a mile away, chanting “Fuck antifa!” as they went. Mercer was planning to shoot a video there later that afternoon, and the brawlers were responding to reports of counterprotesters at that location.

    Along the way, they apparently encountered various activists, as well as simply random pedestrians, they identified as “antifa,” and began harassing them. One of these was the Portland-based independent journalist Alissa Azar, who had covered this group of Proud Boys at street brawls in Portland previously and was there to monitor their activities Saturday. They apparently recognized Azar and surrounded her, pulling on her hair and mauling her. She screamed and ran away, finding safety in a nearby tavern.

    “I was at an intersection about to cross but when I looked to my right I saw that large group of Proud Boys,” she later tweeted. One of them, she said, shouted: “There’s Alissa! Get her!” She found herself surrounded by the men.

    “It was terrifying,” she wrote. “They had their hands all over me [and] some men [were] cheering on the violence [and] others encouraging more of it. It all happened really fast but also it felt like time was frozen. There was a moment where I could tell they were contemplating what to do [and] my heart sank.”

    She added: “I didn’t know what was going to happen but I also knew exactly what could happen. I remember seeing all the people on the street understandably confused and afraid, but I also remember just begging for someone to do anything but just watch me.”

    Fleeing on foot, Azar dashed inside a nearby bar, which then prevented any Proud Boys from following inside. She tweeted that she was “Safe now and have protection.”

    Random passersby were apparently assaulted as well. An African-American man with dreadlocks told a videographer that “I got a gun pulled on me by a Proud Boy earlier, for no fucking reason.”

    Videos show Proud Boys apparently running through Olympia side streets in pursuit of “antifa,” at the end of which gunfire can be heard. In apparently pursuing “antifa” suspects, the men had diverted off their path toward City Hall and wound up at the city’s main bus-transit depot downtown near State Street.

    It was there that Toese, as other videos show, encountered an antifascist who apparently took the baseball bat he wielded as a serious threat and opened fire. Video shows Toese limping away from the encounter, then collapsing on a nearby street corner and surrounded by people who provide him with medical attention.

    Toese was transported to a nearby hospital, treated for his wounds—which were deemed non-life-threatening—and released.

    […] Toese only recently ended his probation for his conviction in a previous assault. He has been heavily involved in recent violence in Salem, Oregon, and twice in Portland.

    After Saturday’s shooting, Mercer tried to claim that both antifa and Proud Boys had “crashed my events uninvited,” but then had also extolled Toese’s presence in a Medium post in which she claimed that “thirty antifa” had shown up at her video shoot and that “antifa made open plans to attack me and shut me down,” even though none had showed up for her event at the Capitol. [She lies big time, just like Trump]

    “A man was shot in Olympia today protecting me,” she wrote. “I did not ask for his protection but he took a bullet for me. He is a Proud Boy. Antifa were coming at my video shoot, and on their own initiative, the PB were blocking antifa from my event when Tiny got shot.” [Another fucking lie.]

    […] What became even more clear Saturday is that even when the “antifa” menace fails to materialize, the Proud Boys will go hunting for it, wherever they can find it. Moreover, these are men carrying weapons and threatening ordinary citizens, but local police forces are clearly failing to respond […]

    Many “Patriots” could be heard talking on social media and Telegram channels about retribution after Toese’s shooting.

    According to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, Proud Boys have been among some of the most active far-right groups nationally since January 2020. Nearly one-quarter of all demonstrations involving the group have turned violent.

    Link

65. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 1:39 pm

    The Proud Boys Say They Aren’t Coming. DC Is Bracing for Violence, Anyway. e

    Far-right groups are warning their followers that a September 18 rally could be a government trap. FFS. The “government” didn’t organize the rally.

    High-profile extremist groups are sending mixed signals about whether their members will actually show up to a DC rally this month intended to demand “justice” for people who have been charged with taking part in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol—but officials in Washington say that aren’t taking any chances.

    A group led by Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign employee, is seeking a permit for up to 500 people to demonstrate in front of the Capitol on September 18 for a so-called #JusticeForJ6 protest. The planned rally is part of a persistent effort by Trump backers to downplay the events of January 6. Braynard has said the upcoming demonstration will push back on the “the phony narrative that there was an insurrection” and has claimed the crowd that day was “largely peaceful.” […] Many on the right, including Braynard, have also embraced Donald Trump’s false claims that he was cheated out of an election victory, the same lie that incited the insurrection

    Law enforcement officials, caught off guard in January, are bracing for the prospect of violence. DC police have said they “will be fully prepared.” The US Capitol Police are reportedly considering reinstalling a fence around the Capitol complex. An intelligence assessment by the force, Roll Call reported Tuesday, states that although “outwardly Matt Braynard has instructed attendees to remain peaceful, given the propensity for this group to attract domestic extremists, their support for the insurrectionists, and their continued challenges to democratic institutions, it is not unreasonable to plan for violent altercations with those associated with this demonstration.”

    The Associated Press, citing federal intelligence findings, reported last week that far-right groups including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are planning to attend the rally. That has heightened concerns in Washington, since members of both groups are being prosecuted for allegedly taking part in the January 6 attack and conspiring beforehand to interfere with the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

    Publicly, however, members of those groups and other right-wing influencers deny any plans to mass in DC, and they’re trying to dissuade their followers from showing up. […]

    Through a Telegram account, the Proud Boys also disputed the idea that group members planned to attend en mass and suggested the rally was a law enforcement trap. “We aren’t going and you shouldn’t either because [everybody] going to jail. Sounds like bait,” the group warned.

    […] Some of the Proud Boys Telegram groups tried to get ahead of any potential violence by sharing a message that read, “Whatever this rally is in DC, it definitely isn’t going to be a Proud Boy rally. No doubt there will be some boomers in black and yellow gear calling themselves Proud Boys though.”

    Ron Watkins, the co-founder of 8chan, the key imageboard in facilitating the QAnon conspiracy movement, issued a similar message on his Telegram own channel, calling the event a likely “false flag” and saying that he hopes none of his followers attend. A prominent QAnon Telegram channel with more than 100,000 followers and other pro-Trump and pro-QAnon channels with large followings reposted Watkins’ message.

    Others on the online right are spreading similar messages off Telegram. Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft speculated that the event could be “FBI manufactured.” The far-right social media site Gab urged its users not to attend. “Do not take the bait,” the platform posted on its Twitter account. “They are losing the narrative on January 6th so this is why the CIA mockingbird media is pushing this. No one serious or smart is going.”

    The remnants of The_Donald subreddit, which has moved between homes since being banned from Reddit, was a large hub for planning in advance of the original January 6 riot. But a recent search of the community yielded few results for the September 18 rally. Most of those that do show up call it a false flag and encourage others not to attend. […]

    The Harrington Hotel, a Proud Boys favorite, is completely sold out of rooms for the weekend of September 18 and 19, according to its bookings website. A hotel employee confirmed this over the phone.

    Contrary to Tarrio’s claims, another Proud Boy, speaking at an event in Portland in August, urged group members and supporters to attend the DC rally. […]

    Weirdness all around. They don’t really know what they are doing. Whatever happens, the rightwing extremists will spin it as an FBI or “government” false flag event. Doofuses and dunderheads.

66. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 1:46 pm

    At least 200 Afghan dual nationals, including Americans, leave from newly reopened Kabul airport.

    Washington Post link

    The first international commercial flight out of the Afghan capital since last month left Thursday evening with about 200 dual nationals aboard, marking a reopening of the airport after it was damaged in the chaos following the Taliban takeover.

    Roughly 200 people — including about 30 Americans — were granted permission to leave the country Thursday, as the airport was declared repaired and ready for some commercial flights.

    The manifest for the Qatar Airways flight granted permission for 211 passengers to leave from Kabul, according to diplomats in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. It was not immediately clear how many passengers made it to the airport to board the flight, but footage showed a group of men, women and children boarding the plane.

    The Taliban was pressed to allow the departures by U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad, said an official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters. The dual nationals on the manifest also included passport holders from Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Canada and Germany.

    Qatari and Taliban officials gathered on the tarmac in Kabul on Thursday to announce that the airport was nearly fully operational after significant repairs were made after the Taliban came to power. They also confirmed that Americans and other Western passport holders were on the flight. […]

67. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 1:48 pm

    Republican infighting:

    […] After months of searching, Trump on Thursday announced his endorsement of Harriet Hageman, an attorney who resigned earlier this week as Wyoming’s national GOP committeewoman. […] Hageman was a delegate for Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign.

    “Harriet has my Complete and Total endorsement in Replacing the Democrats number one provider of sound bites, Liz Cheney,” Trump said an emailed statement on Thursday.

    Cheney responded to the statement with a tweet: “Here’s a sound bite for you: Bring it.”

    Link

68. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 1:51 pm

    Biden to expand vaccine requirements to frontline health workers

    The six-part plan will include the order that all executive branch federal workers get vaccinated.

    […] Biden last month said he would impose staff vaccination requirements on all federally funded nursing homes, a directive expected to cover roughly 15,000 facilities employing 1.3 million people. Now, he is poised to extend the order to a far wider group of providers, including major hospitals across the nation that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding.

    The requirement is part of a broader six-part plan for combating the pandemic that Biden is set to unveil later this afternoon, with a range of new initiatives aimed at boosting vaccinations, access to testing and aiding the Covid-19 fight abroad.

    Biden is expected to issue an executive order requiring that all federal workers get vaccinated against Covid-19, with no option for being regularly tested as an alternative, people familiar with the plan said. That’s an escalation from his earlier encouragement that the federal workforce seek vaccination or be subject to a range of restrictions.

    The president in his speech also plans to call on governors to get all teachers and school staff vaccinated, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, as well as encourage schools to institute regular testing regimes. He will urge employers over a certain size to institute requirements that employees get vaccinated or submit to regular testing.

    And in an effort to build out the administration’s pandemic response abroad, Biden is expected to call for a global summit on Covid-19 to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly later this month.

    […] The federal vaccination requirement will apply to all executive branch workers and contractors, bringing the rest of the government in line with the tougher requirements adopted earlier by the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs and parts of the health department.

    Until Thursday, the rest of the federal workforce had the option to submit to regular testing, mask-wearing and restrictions on travel rather than get vaccinated. That clause will now be eliminated, bringing the entire government in line with the approach that Biden has pushed private-sector companies to adopt.

    Biden during his speech is also expected to urge schools to implement regular testing for all students, teachers and staff, two people familiar with the matter said.

    The White House earlier this year allocated $10 billion to help schools create Covid-19 testing regimes, but few took advantage of the opportunity amid a lull in cases earlier this year. Now, as the Delta variant fuels a resurgence and children return to classrooms, Biden will press schools to refocus their efforts on regular testing.

    Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said the effort to implement testing in schools across the country is a good idea. Public health experts have raised concern in recent weeks that infections among children are rising as they head back into classrooms for the start of the school year.

    “I have been surprised at how many are not testing routinely,” Plescia said. […]

69. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 1:59 pm

    Wonkette:

    This week, a very holy man went viral on TikTok after he was filmed lecturing a group of women for wearing bathing suits in public. Were they in a church? No. At a funeral? No. In a business meeting? No. They were at the beach, a place where most people would not be surprised to see a group of women sitting around wearing bathing suits. In fact, most people probably even expect that when they go to a public beach, in the United States, they will see women wearing bathing suits.

    But not Logan Dorn.

    Dorn walked right up to these hussies and asked them, “Why do you dress this way?” to which one of them responded, “I’m hot and I like women, so please leave us alone.” Rather than doing just that, Dorn continued to lecture them, saying, “That’s a thong and that’s a bra. Take young eyes into consideration, they don’t need to see pornography.” The women informed Dorn that they were not bothering him and, again, encouraged him to go away, to which he said, “You’re flaunting your stuff!” One woman, sensing Dorn’s religiosity, suggested that he gouge out his eye out if she bothers him.

    Dorn explained that he doesn’t have to do that because there is “free will” in America, though apparently not for women, and “freedom of speech,” which means that women have to listen to him. “If men of God don’t stand up, then our society’s gonna go down the drain because there’s no morality,” he said, leading the women to tell him that they are atheists and do not believe in God.

    After several minutes of Dorn ranting about why it was bad for them to wear bathing suits at the beach, the women suggested to Dorn that he go lecture a shirtless man wearing a bathing suit, but he said “That’s a lot different.” [video is available at the link]

    Towards the end of the video, a woman who is apparently with Dorn and also wearing a bathing suit (though apparently not a “pornographic” bathing suit), joins him and lectures the girls about swearing in front of her kids and tells them that they don’t respect themselves, due to the kind of bathing suits they are wearing.

    Dorn responded to the viral video with his own video explaining his bullshit, which is somehow even worse than the original lecture. He says that he came out of the water and saw that his family members were getting ready to move their things, explaining to him that they had to move because there were college-age women who were “showing too much” and he just felt a “righteous anger” come over him and a “boldness by the holy spirit to go and confront these ladies to speak truth that ‘Hey, what you’re wearing is not okay for a nine-year-old boy or a six-year-old boy.'”

    His family members had the right idea. If you don’t like seeing women wearing bathing suits, if you don’t want your children to see women wearing bathing suits, don’t go to the beach or don’t take your kids to the beach, or leave the area of the beach where all the heathen Jezebels are.

    Dorn claims in the video to have been introduced to pornography at a young age and “it destroyed me.” Which seems like another him problem. He is also very sure that this whole thing will be a problem when the young women he lectured “come face to face with God,” who will surely demand an explanation for what they were doing wearing bathing suits at the beach that one time back in 2021.

    Dorn also goes on quite a bit about “truth,” which really is a hell of a thing to call your weird, misogynistic beliefs about what women who don’t follow your religion are allowed to wear at the beach.

    UPDATE: Logan Dorn has been fired from his job at “Mighty Hand Construction,” which does not condone the harassing of women trying to enjoy a nice day out at the beach.

    Link

70. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 2:07 pm

    Trump wants all your money … again.

    Donald Trump just can’t stop writing me.

    “Friend, Did you see my email from a few days ago?” he asked on Tuesday. It was, I believe, the sixth message I’d gotten from him since Labor Day — a.k.a. Monday. All addressed to “Friend.” […]

    Anyhow, all of these letters involve fund-raising. And great deals! Contribute any amount to Trump’s joint fund-raising committee, Save America, and “your gift will be INCREASED by 500%.”

    Extremely unclear where that extra cash will be coming from. Maybe a rich person who agrees to match donations, the way some do during the very, very, very much more modest fund-raising drives for places like public radio stations? Maybe a miraculous money tree?

    “We have a CRITICAL End-of-Month fundraising deadline coming up, and each day when I ask my team who has stepped up, they NEVER mention YOUR NAME. Why is that, Friend?” the wounded former president demanded.

    […] Trump hasn’t said whether he’ll be running again in 2024. He’s plenty busy with other stuff, like holding rallies, playing golf and spending the anniversary of 9/11 providing commentary for a boxing match at a Florida casino.

    And he’s hardly the only major political name out beating the bushes for donations. Nancy Pelosi was in my inbox Wednesday with a letter decrying the new Texas anti-abortion law and with a petition […] on the plus side, Pelosi indicated she’d be very happy with just $20. And she did get in my actual first name.

    Pelosi’s correspondence isn’t nearly as … energetic as you-know-who’s. “Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY and your gift will be INCREASED by 500%,” writes “Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States.” Just in case you’d forgotten.

    Any amount? Sextupled by magic? “There’s no way to know what they mean by that,” said Robert Kelner, a Washington lawyer who’s an expert in campaign finance issues.

    Well, it’s certainly impressive how urgent Trump makes it all sound. During the Labor Day barrage he announced that “your 400% impact offer has been extended” and that if you just “CONTRIBUTE NOW,” a $250 contribution will count as … $1,250!

    If you’re interested, please make sure it happens only once. As Shane Goldmacher reported in The Times this spring, a 63-year-old cancer patient in hospice donated what was just about his last $500, and then discovered $3,000 had been withdrawn by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days, leaving his account empty and frozen. The campaign, you see, had set up a default system that siphoned new money every week from donors who didn’t realize they had to make a special effort to opt out.

    Very tricky business, that. Another Trump letter includes boxes — prechecked for your convenience — with rousing statements like: “President Trump, I need you right now. This is where we step up and show the left-wing MOB that REAL Americans are REJECTING JOE BIDEN’S corrupt agenda.” Said box quietly ends, “Make this a monthly recurring donation.”

    […] Many of the Trump emails suggest he needs money to challenge those evil, wrongheaded, “Biden won!” election results. Doesn’t seem like all that great a legal investment. Although probably better than those lawsuits Rudy Giuliani announced in a parking lot next to a porn store in Philadelphia.

    Some of the money that goes to Trump’s PAC is used to underwrite his travel around the country and — if he happened to be in the mood — could be used to pay salaries for his family members or pricey events at, say, a Trump hotel.

    No small matter, that. Think about Trump Tower. On the one hand, it’s in even worse shape than most Manhattan real estate, carrying a name not all that useful as a New York brand. On the other, his PAC has reportedly been shelling out more than $37,000 a month for office space in Trump Tower. Not at all clear what said space is needed for, politics-wise, but if Trump ever decides to reboot “The Apprentice” with a pandemic flair, he’s got the set ready.

    New York Times link</a.

71. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 2:13 pm

    Officials face ‘a sustained campaign of intimidation’ from the far-right

    There’s a “sustained campaign of intimidation” from the far-right against election officials. And public health officials. And educators. And lawmakers.

    It was a year ago this month when Donald Trump and Joe Biden met for the first presidential debate of the 2020 cycle, which proved to be memorable for unfortunate reasons. As regular readers may recall, it was the event in which the Republican incumbent expressed indifference toward potentially violent radicals.

    Trump telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” for example, jolted American politics and sparked celebrations among extremists.

    But as part of the same sentence, the then-president quickly added, “This is not a right-wing problem; this is a left-wing problem.” At the same debate, when asked if he was willing to condemn white supremacists and fringe militia groups, Trump shrugged and said, “Sure, I’m willing to do that – but I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.”

    The then-president’s point – Trump wanted Americans to see a far-left menace that eclipsed anything seen on the right – came to mind when reading Reuters’ latest report on the “sustained campaign of intimidation” against U.S. election officials at the state and local level.

    The unprecedented torrent of terroristic threats began in the weeks before the November election, as Trump was predicting widespread voter fraud, and continues today as the former president carries on with false claims that he was cheated out of victory…. In addition to the messages that threatened violence, hundreds of others contained harassing language that was disturbing, profane and sometimes racist or misogynistic. The intimidation has affected all levels of election administrators, from rank-and-file poll workers to secretaries of state.

    The terrifying threats against election officials who did nothing wrong are not to be confused with the far-right intimidation efforts targeting public health officials. CBS News reported in June:

    Nearly a quarter of public health workers report feeling bullied, harassed or threatened due to their work as the pandemic was unfolding, with 1 in 8 saying they had received job-related threats. That’s according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    USA Today published a related report in July, noting that public health officials “have faced doxxing, online harassment and other threats” stemming from their efforts to address the Covid-19 crisis.

    […] Anne Lutz Fernandez, high school English teacher, recently wrote a piece for NBC News educators having to deal with “verbal and physical attacks.”

    Protestors burning masks, ripping masks off educators’ faces and hurling obscenities have disrupted and derailed education board meetings nationwide this summer as local officials have sought to allow in-person learning despite a new wave of Covid-19 cases powered by the delta variant of the coronavirus.

    The terrifying threats against education officials who did nothing wrong are not to be confused with the far-right intimidation efforts targeting members of Congress. Axios reported in April:

    Members of Congress are spending tens of thousands of dollars on personal security for them and their families in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot, according to an analysis of first-quarter Federal Election Commission reports by Punchbowl News…. Private security expenditures were especially common among anti-Trump Republicans and high-profile Democrats who earlier this year voted to impeach and convict the former president for inciting the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, signaling they fear for the safety of themselves and their families.

    The terrifying threats against lawmakers who did nothing wrong are not to be confused with the far-right intimidation efforts targeting Capitol Hill. Roll Call reported late yesterday:

    As Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger prepares to brief congressional leaders on a potentially violent rally scheduled for Sept. 18, an internal department assessment reveals more violent online discussion around the event and increased attendance numbers for the demonstration. The intelligence assessment, dated Sept. 7, notes that in recent days, the department and partner agencies have found more violent online talk surrounding the #JusticeForJ6 rally, organized by Look Ahead America. The event seeks to support pro-Trump rioters who were jailed for their roles in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

    A year ago this month, Trump may have said, in reference to violent threats, “This is not a right-wing problem; this is a left-wing problem,” but reality is telling a very different story.

72. Lynna, OM says

    9 September 2021 at 2:15 pm

    Former President Barack Obama is featured in a new 30-second television ad in California people to vote “no” on the state’s recall ballot.
    Link

73. tomh says

    9 September 2021 at 7:50 pm

    @ #71
    I saw it last night on the local ABC station–pretty effective. I think Democrats are waking up to the danger. It’s looking like very little chance of the recall succeeding.

74. Akira MacKenzie says

    9 September 2021 at 9:43 pm

    @72

    DON’T GIVE ME HOPE!

75. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:27 am

    Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:

    After a statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from Richmond, Virginia, Donald J. Trump offered to buy the monument for his bedroom at Mar-a-Lago.

    “It’s a beautiful statue of a beautiful man, and, quite frankly, there’s no one I’d rather wake up to every morning,” he said.

    Stating that the removal of the statue “should never have been allowed to happen in this country,” Trump said that he had offered Virginia a statue of himself in return.

    “I can’t think of a better person to take Robert E. Lee’s place than Trump,” he said. “I’ll even throw in free shipping, like that loser Bezos.”

    Asked why he had decided to place the Civil War statue in his bedroom, Trump said that his wife, Melania, had asked him to put it someplace where she wouldn’t see it.

    New Yorker link

76. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:30 am

    Justice Department sues Texas over restrictive abortion law

    The Biden administration is filing a lawsuit against Texas challenging its near-total ban on abortions, which the Supreme Court declined to block last week.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday that the Justice Department filed the suit against Texas over its law, which he called “clearly unconstitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent.”

    “The United States has the authority and the responsibility to ensure that no state can deprive individuals of their constitutional rights to a legislative scheme specifically designed to prevent the vindication of those rights,” Garland said at a news conference.

    The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Texas, argues the law is unconstitutional and was enacted in open defiance of the Constitution.

    The DOJ seeks a declaratory judgment that the law, known as Senate Bill 8, is invalid under the Supremacy Clause and the 14th Amendment, is preempted by federal law and violates the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity.

    […] After the Supreme Court’s decision last week, President Joe Biden vowed a “whole-of-government” response to try to safeguard access to abortions in Texas. Biden directed White House legal and gender policy advisers, the DOJ and his Health and Human Services Department to evaluate what “legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”

    Garland said DOJ’s decision was not based on pressure from lawmakers or the White House.

    “We carefully evaluated the law and the facts and this complaint expressed our view of the law and the facts,” said Garland.

    The administration’s move comes as the conservative 6-3 Supreme Court majority is expected to take up a case from Mississippi in its term beginning this fall that challenges Roe v. Wade.

77. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:41 am

    Chris Wallace is the Fox News host who has the program on Sundays where they don’t even have a cooking segment for Best New Fall Recipes To Feed A Crowd Some Horse Deworming Paste For Football Watching Parties. […]

    POINT IS, Chris Wallace is one of the few actual journalists in Fox News’s employ, which means he is very bad at being a Fox News host. And he went on Stephen Colbert’s liberal agenda program last night to shill his new book, and he had this thing to say about Republicans who are just trying to destroy American democracy so that Dear Leader Donald Trump may be restored to his rightful position in the White House and also as a bigger and better replacement for the highly overrated Jesus Christ, who isn’t near as good a savior as Trump is: [video is available at the link]

    WALLACE: There are plenty of people who were the leaders in the Congress of challenging [the election] that I just have not had on the show ever since [January 6], and have purposefully not had on the show, because I don’t frankly wanna hear their crap.

    But having said that, there are some leaders that you have to ask them questions. There are people in leadership and the Senate and I won’t let them come on without putting them through the wringer.

    Wallace told Colbert he’s seen a lot of bad shit in his time, but nothing like what we deal with now, with people lying about the election being stolen and lying about the terrorist attack Trump incited on January 6, which Wallace called “one of the worst days” he’s ever experienced in Washington. He said he was “sickened” by it.

    Of course, a lot of the people Wallace works alongside every day were decidedly not sickened. We do wish he’d talk about that. We wish he’d talk about what it’s like to pass Tucker Carlson in the hallway, that guy who devotes so much of his on-air time to outright lying about the nature of January 6, and who the insurrectionist terrorists were that day. We wish he’d say what that feels like.

    But oh well, he didn’t say anything about that. Still, it was nice to see one of Fox’s most important hosts tell those Republicans on live liberal agenda TV that he literally doesn’t want to hear their shit, and that’s why they haven’t been invited on his show.

    Would be nice to hear it from more “good” Fox News hosts, haha just kidding there aren’t any, the end.

    Link

78. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 11:47 am

    Pennsylvania Republicans launch election ‘review’

    Even after the Arizona Republicans’ election “audit” was exposed as an utterly bonkers exercise, there was little doubt that GOP officials from other states – many of whom traveled to Phoenix and took notes – would try to export the fiasco. The question wasn’t whether we’d see some Arizona-style election “investigations”; the question was where and when. […]

    Wisconsin Republicans are moving forward with their own taxpayer-financed election examination, and as Reuters reported, Pennsylvania Republicans are doing the same.

    Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania kicked off an “election integrity” review with a public hearing on Thursday, joining partisan efforts in other battleground states to cast doubts on former President Donald Trump’s November election loss. […]

    To the extent that the hearing itself was relevant, state legislators heard from a Republican county commissioner who didn’t see any evidence of election wrongdoing or fraud. It led Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic state attorney general, to describe the event as “a complete dud.”

    But the quality of the hearing is less important than its existence: Pennsylvania Republicans are conducting a “full forensic investigation” for no good reason.

    The state Senate’s top Republican, President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, recently told a conservative media personality that he and his GOP colleagues are justified in this partisan exercise, not because there’s evidence of wrongdoing, but because they think evidence of wrongdoing might emerge if they keep looking for it. […]

    literally no one has produced any evidence of “many problems” in Pennsylvania’s 2020 elections. A couple of Trump voters were caught trying to cast illegal ballots on behalf of dead relatives, but in a state in which roughly 7 million Pennsylvanians voted, the vanishingly small number of Republicans who tried and failed to commit fraud was inconsequential.

    […] voters in Pennsylvania had the audacity to support the Democratic ticket – just as Pennsylvania voters did in 2012. And 2008. And 2004. And 2000. And 1996. And 1992.

    Indeed, as the NBC News recently reported, after the official tally showed President Joe Biden winning the Keystone State, “Pennsylvania conducted two-post election audits confirming the accuracy of last fall’s count, and the results were certified.”

    And yet, here we are, watching a wildly unnecessary “review” get underway anyway.

    Proponents have said the review is necessary to look for irregularities that exist in the minds of conspiracy theorists. But as the circus in Arizona has made clear, the actual goal of these endeavors is to undermine public confidence in American elections and create a pretense for additional anti-voting measures.

79. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:04 pm

    Kevin McCarthy wages a strange crusade against proxy voting

    House Republicans were so outraged by proxy voting, they literally made a federal case out of it. Kevin McCarthy wants the Supreme Court to weigh in.

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has spent the last year making strange and unfortunate decisions, and as NBC News reported yesterday, the California Republican added to the list with an unnecessary appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the proxy voting rules that the House implemented because of the pandemic, a tool that Republican lawmakers have taken advantage of themselves…. It’s unclear if the Supreme Court will even respond to McCarthy’s request.

    This isn’t likely to go well.

    Let’s recap how we arrived at this point. As regular readers may recall, as the Covid-19 crisis started taking a severe national toll last year, House Democratic leaders came up with a temporary fix intended to limit lawmakers’ exposure. Under the plan, lawmakers who hoped to avoid the floor of the Capitol – because they were experiencing symptoms, because someone in their household was ill, etc. – could cast votes by proxy.

    It wasn’t complicated: Members could reach an agreement with like-minded colleagues, who in turn would agree to vote on their behalf. The system ensured that many representatives could participate in the legislative process during a pandemic without endangering themselves or their colleagues.

    For reasons I’ve never fully understood, Republicans were outraged – or at least said so in public. It led McCarthy and 20 other GOP House members to file a federal lawsuit in May 2020, challenging the constitutionality of proxy voting.

    A district court rejected the case, concluding that it wasn’t up to the judiciary to intervene in how the legislative branch established its own procedural rules. In July, a federal appeals court unanimously agreed and threw out the case. Even a Trump-appointed appellate judge concluded that the case deserved to be rejected.

    And yet, the House minority leader is fighting to keep the case alive anyway.

    There is a degree of irony to the circumstances. While GOP lawmakers initially cried foul when Democrats created the proxy system, many Republicans have since embraced the model with some enthusiasm.

    Indeed, though the system was intended to address the Covid-19 crisis, some Republicans haven’t just accepted the proxy rules, they’ve also abused them – voting by proxy while appearing at events such as the Conservative Political Action Conference. McCarthy and other GOP leaders – the ones who literally made a federal case out of the temporary model – said very little when their own members started taking advantage of the system.

    […] the Supreme Court appears unlikely to take the case. McCarthy probably knows this, but he may hope to get another couple fundraising appeals in front of prospective donors, boasting about taking a fight against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s policy all the way to the highest court in the land.

    As for Pelosi herself, when the proxy system was first created, it was designed to be temporary, with the House Speaker in a position to extend the emergency authority every 45 days.

    Last month, Pelosi extended proxy voting through at least Oct. 1. The sooner more Americans get vaccinated and the country returns to normal, the sooner McCarthy’s lawsuit will become moot.

80. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:11 pm

    Florida’s controversial ‘anti-riot’ law blocked by a federal court

    A federal judge has blocked enforcement of Florida’s “anti-riot law,” saying it “encourages arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” Yep. Ron DeSantis gets slapped down by the courts … again.

    […] several Republican-led states embraced anti-protest measures, which were designed to punish those who take to the streets to dissent. It wasn’t exactly a secret that GOP officials were motivated in large part by last year’s social-justice protests, held in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minnesota.

    Florida officials went further than most, creating a controversial “anti-riot” law in April, which faced long odds in the courts. Indeed, as The Miami Herald reported, a federal judge yesterday blocked Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida sheriffs from enforcing a key portion of the state statute.

    A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked Gov. Ron DeSantis and three Florida sheriffs from enforcing a key portion of the state’s so-called anti-riot law, in part, because it “encourages arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” The definition of what constitutes a riot under a new state law pushed by the governor is too vague “to the point of unconstitutionality,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker of Tallahassee wrote in his preliminary injunction order.

    […] one of the most obvious problems with the statute was its provision that said if someone feels intimidated by three people, that may constitute “mob intimidation,” which can be punished by up to a year behind bars.

    As Paul Waldman explained, that was really just the start. The same law “forbids people charged under the law from being released before their first court appearance, forcing them to languish in jail potentially for days, even if they would have otherwise been quickly processed and released.”

    Florida’s policy said those who topple monuments could face lengthy prison sentences. If protesters block a road, Florida drivers who plow into them, claiming self-defense, were given civil liability protection by the GOP-created statute.

    The same state law made it practically impossible for local communities to reduce their police budgets, regardless of their fiscal circumstances, while also making local governments potentially liable for damages as a result of riots or unlawful assemblies.

    […] Republicans hoped to create a chilling effect for Floridians inclined to exercise their First Amendment rights.

    As a Washington Post analysis put it in April, “If you’re a protester in Orlando, you might think twice about organizing a protest if you know that police have expanded powers to declare riots and impose felony punishments. Much less if you know that drivers will feel fewer constraints about how they respond if confronted with a protest.”

    Making matters just a bit worse, in July, when Cuban-American protesters shut down a Florida highway to protest developments in Havana, Florida didn’t enforce the law – perhaps because it was the governor’s political allies who were the ones in the streets.

    Yesterday’s ruling was a preliminary injunction order, blocking enforcement of the state law because, as the judge put it, it’s “a likely unconstitutional statute.” DeSantis said he hopes to prevail on appeal.

81. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:14 pm

    Follow-up to comment 75.

    […] Will the Justice Department’s lawsuit work?

    There is relevant precedent to draw upon. […] when Arizona Republicans approved their infamous anti-immigration law in 2010, the Obama administration’s Justice Department sued, insisting that the state statute conflicted with existing federal law – and GOP state policymakers couldn’t effectively undo federal law on their own.

    Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court largely agreed, striking down the bulk of Arizona’s policy. Now, it looks like federal prosecutors hope to run a similar plan, arguing in its new lawsuit that Texas’ abortion ban is plainly at odds with federal law, as defined by existing Supreme Court precedent.

    Time will tell, obviously, whether the federal judiciary agrees. The Justice Department filed suit yesterday in Texas’ capital, but there’s trouble on the horizon: The Lone Star State is in the 5th Circuit, and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals is, by most measures, the nation’s most conservative and reactionary circuit, stacked with conservatives tapped by Republican presidents.

    That said, if federal prosecutors can find some relief at the district court, it might lead to a temporary halt to Texas’ abortion ban.

    Link

82. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:21 pm

    Why Republicans hope to derail Biden’s bold new vaccine policy

    Republicans opposed to Biden’s vaccine plan aren’t saying the policy won’t work — because for the GOP, whether the plan is effective or not is irrelevant.

    Leading voices throughout the public health community have been increasingly candid of late: The United States simply is not winning the fight against Covid-19. The White House has clearly come to the same realization, and […] President Joe Biden is responding with an aggressive new policy.

    President Joe Biden on Thursday issued two executive orders mandating vaccines for federal workers and contractors and announced new requirements for large employers and health care providers that he said would affect around 100 million workers, more than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce.

    […] The Biden administration has implemented an effective plan to make vaccines readily available for free nationwide, and it’s waged a public information campaign designed to encourage Americans to do the smart and responsible thing, but much of the country still won’t roll up their sleeves.

    The result is a prolonged pandemic, overflowing hospitals in unvaccinated areas, thousands of preventable deaths and a weakened U.S. economy.

    And so, Biden is kicking things up a notch with a bold new approach, which will likely add tens of millions of workers to the vaccinated ranks.

    “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the president said in his White House remarks yesterday. “And it’s caused by the fact that despite America having an unprecedented and successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months free vaccines have been available in 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot. And to make matters worse, there are elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against Covid-19. Instead of encouraging people to get vaccinated and mask up, they’re ordering mobile morgues for the unvaccinated dying from Covid in their communities.”

    Biden added, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”

    In the same remarks, the president went on to say, “[W]hat makes it incredibly more frustrating is that we have the tools to combat COVID-19, and a distinct minority of Americans — supported by a distinct minority of elected officials –—are keeping us from turning the corner. These pandemic politics … are making people sick, causing unvaccinated people to die.”

    […] Republicans rushed to tell the public how desperate they are to block the White House’s plan to end the pandemic, embracing the same “pandemic politics” that are making Americans sick.

    The Republican National Committee, for example, announced plans to file a lawsuit to derail Biden’s policy, which the RNC called “unconstitutional.” At the same time, Republican governors in Texas, Missouri, Georgia, Arizona, Alabama, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming, among others, denounced the president’s proposals and vowed to fight back against them.

    […] none of the Republicans opposed to the White House’s initiative have said it won’t work. Indeed, true to […]

    It doesn’t matter if Biden’s policies will save lives. Or ease the burdens on hospitals and morgues. Or help end the public health crisis. Or give the economy a boost. Or even receive a warm welcome from the American mainstream.

    What matters for the president’s Republican opponents is whether the policies are ideologically satisfying and pleasing to their party’s rabid base. The RNC will no doubt seize on its lawsuit as a fundraising opportunity, and ambitious Republican governors are likely preparing to run political advertisements, boasting about standing up to that rascally American president who’s daring to help rescue his country from a deadly pandemic.

    The question then becomes whether the nation’s conservative federal judiciary will side with precedent or endorse the Republicans’ political ploy.

83. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:30 pm

    Giuliani Pal Admits To Funneling Foreign Money Into U.S Political Campaigns

    An associate of Rudy Giuliani’s told a federal judge on Friday that he solicited campaign contributions from a wealthy foreigner as part of a bizarre plot to get political juice for a marijuana business.

    Igor Fruman, 56, who spent part of 2019 attempting to dig up dirt on the Bidens on Giuliani’s behalf, told U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken for the Southern District of New York that he had asked a foreigner to contribute $1 million during the 2018 midterms as part of an effort to secure cannabis licenses.

    Red in the face and speaking through a thick Ukrainian accent, Fruman pleaded guilty only to one count of an October 2018 indictment that charged he and ex-Giuliani buddy Lev Parnas with crimes relating to a marijuana scheme and to an alleged plot to have the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine removed at the direction of a Ukrainian official. Parnas maintains his innocence and is headed to trial next month.

    Fruman only pleaded guilty to a solicitation of foreign contribution count related to the pot plot, saying that he asked a foreign national to contribute $1 million to a series of state-level campaigns during the 2018 midterms. The scheme was part of what Fruman described as a “business venture” to buy cannabis licenses in a series of western states.

    “I deeply regret my actions and I apologize to the court and the United States government for this conduct,” Fruman said at the change-of-plea hearing.

    Fruman did not sign any cooperation agreement with prosecutors. He agreed to a maximum sentence of 46 months behind bars as part of the agreement.

    Well, that’s strange. What happened to the money? Did it go to a trumpian political candidate or not? What about the charges related to Giuliani’s efforts to have Ukranian’s manufacture dirt on Joe Biden’s son?

84. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 12:34 pm

    Follow-up to comment 81.

    The Governor of South Carolina promised Holy War in his response to President Biden’s vaccine mandates.

    South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R), whose state has reached record-breaking levels of COVID-19, tweeted “Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian” after Biden announced his executive order.

    The Palmetto State topped the entire country in COVID-19 case rates last week and continues to do so, per local news outlet WBTW’s analysis of CDC data.

    McMaster lifted South Carolina’s state of emergency in June, claiming at the time that “we’ve worked our way very well.”

    Link

85. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 1:02 pm

    Some thoughts on President Biden’s recent actions:

    […] Rather than hold out an olive branch to Republican politicians who are endangering the lives of local citizens, Biden came straight through them. He defended local school officials who were trying to protect children through masks and vaccines, called out attempts to take money from schools and officials who did the right thing, and promised that the federal government has their backs.

    Defcon 1 level of response from Fox News and Republicans at both state and federal levels shows just how shocked they were by a Biden that came out not just swinging, but ready to shove them all aside. And responses like that from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are left not just looking powerless, but pitiful in their hypocrisy. This is, after all, the man who just signed an order saying that businesses are not allowed to require vaccination, claiming that it’s a “power grab” to say that businesses must require vaccination.

    Republicans have spent the last year eroding the authority of school boards, city, and county officials by passing laws that strip away their authority to deal with emergencies and protect both children and adults. Biden just took that ball away from them and threw it far downfield.

    What President Joe Biden has demonstrated in both the war in Afghanistan and in the ongoing fight against COVID-19 is that when push comes to shove, he’s willing to shove harder than any Democratic president in 50 years. He’s stood firm in the face of political opposition, and moved forward with surprising vigor and inventiveness. It’s clear that ending the war in Afghanistan mattered to Biden, and he ended it. It’s clear that fighting the pandemic matters to Biden, and he’s fighting. It also seems that Biden is equally serious about battling the climate crisis, and the plans he’s pushing there are—finally—at a level that approaches dealing with something that’s truly an existential challenge. When something matters enough to President Biden, he takes action that is astoundingly bold and refreshingly clear of concern about the political consequences.

    Now if he would only feel that way about the filibuster, the Supreme Court, and protecting the rights of women.

    Link

86. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 1:09 pm

    Hurricane Ida Left a Huge Water Crisis in Her Wake

    Hundreds of thousands of people still lack safe drinking water.

    It has been a week and a half since Hurricane Ida hit the Gulf Coast and the devastating impacts of the Category 4 storm are still being felt throughout the region. Some 418,000 people in Louisiana remain without power, unable to run air conditioning units to deal with scorching late summer temperatures or keep food fresh in homes and grocery stores. The storm has also forced hundreds of municipal water systems offline, creating a drinking water crisis that officials warn could last weeks.

    As of Tuesday, 51 water systems across Louisiana, each serving between 25 to 20,000 people, remained shut down due to Ida. Another 242 remained under boil water advisories. Around 642,000 people remain without access to clean water, according to the Louisiana Department of Health. […]

    “There is no particular timeframe for all systems to come back up to 100 percent,” Kevin Litter, a spokesperson for Louisiana Department of Health, said in an email. “This will be different for every system and also based on location.”

    The reasons for the immediate water crisis are two-fold: Across Louisiana and Mississippi, Hurricane Ida ripped down power lines, leaving water systems unable to get the electricity they needed to pump groundwater or to run treatment facilities. Even though Louisiana mandates that all water systems have backup, fuel-powered generators, many don’t comply with the rule, Litter explained. Those who do have backup pumps are being affected by the extended blackout still crippling parts of the Gulf a week post-storm—a situation that has created fuel shortages that leave generators useless. Flooding on roads can also leave critical infrastructure, like water wells or pump stations, out of reach, making it impossible to fix storm damage. Lastly, the destruction of roads and bridges has literally ripped apart water pipelines, disrupting the whole system.

    Intensified by climate change, Hurricane Ida is one of the strongest storms on record to hit the Gulf Coast. But the 150-mile-per-hour winds that took down electric lines, trees, and homes, as well as the powerful storm surge that briefly reversed the flow of the Mississippi River, can’t fully explain the state’s water systems failures.

    Underlying the immediate devastation is the fact that Louisiana has one of the worst water systems in the country, which has left it vulnerable to storms like Ida. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers, or ASCE, gave the state’s drinking water system a D- in a recent infrastructure report card. “We have an antiquated water supply and water pumping system,” Craig Colten, professor emeritus of geography at Louisiana State University and an expert on resilience, told Grist. “Our sewage treatment system is aged, and our infrastructure has not been maintained.” […]

    Infrastructure, infrastructure , infrastructure.

87. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 1:14 pm

    Follow-up to comment 85.

    About 60 percent of Louisiana’s water systems are more than a century old. Even before Hurricane Ida, many of Louisiana’s water systems were cited for routinely violating drinking water standards. About 40% of the systems that violated the law serve populations with high percentages of people of color.

    Even worse:

    […] problems go beyond power and pipelines. With rising sea levels, approximately 30 percent of the state parishes are at risk of saltwater entering the wells and aquifers where they source their wate […] The Investigative Reporting Workshop and WWNO/WRKF found that many aquifers in the state are shrinking fast, mainly because agriculture and oil and gas industries are over-pumping groundwater reserves. […]

88. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 1:25 pm

    Stuff of nightmares.

    […] while a lot can still happen between now and 2024, Trump’s increasingly aggressive flirtation with a third presidential run has caught the attention of his would-be rivals.

    “I think [Trump running] feels like more of a possibility now than it did before,” an aide to one Republican eyeing a 2024 run said. “That doesn’t mean you stop what you’re doing altogether. Until he says what he’s going to do, that’s not an option.” […]

    Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign and a close associate of the former president, said in an interview with Cheddar’s J.D. Durkin last week that the likelihood that Trump will run again is “somewhere between 99 and 100 percent.”

    […] Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), one of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress, was also recently recorded in an undercover video saying that Trump was virtually guaranteed to run for president again […]

    Even with his outsized influence over the GOP and near-universal name recognition, Trump still has a set of challenges to contend with.

    For one, he’s been banished from both Facebook and Twitter, once his social media site of choice, and his online presence has been reduced mostly to sporadic emailed statements. He has also continued to cling to his baseless assertion that the 2020 election had been rigged against him, a claim that even some Republicans are uneasy about.

    “The further removed we are from him being in the Oval Office, the harder time he’s going to have making news,” one Republican strategist and presidential campaign veteran said. “He just doesn’t have the platform he used to have and that naturally makes it harder to get people to pay attention.”

    Link

89. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 2:04 pm

    ESPN college football and basketball reporter Allison Williams won’t be reporting from the sidelines this season after deciding not to get vaccinated against the coronavirus because she’s trying to get pregnant.

    The Walt Disney Company, a co-owner of ESPN, announced all salaried and non-union employees needed to get vaccinated against the coronavirus within 60 days.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doctors and scientists have said that COVID-19 vaccines are safe for those who are pregnant, breastfeeding, and trying to get pregnant.

    Tweet:

    This will be the first fall in the last 15 years I won’t be on the sidelines for College Football.
    My heart hurts posting this but I’m at peace with my decision.

    She went against CDC guidelines. Getting infected with Covid is a greater risk that getting the vaccine, and that is true for pregnant women, or for women trying to get pregnant. “There is currently no evidence that any vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, cause fertility problems in women or men,” the CDC said.

90. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 2:19 pm

    Wonkette:

    Our COVID roundup for today starts with gladsome tidings: On the same day that Joe Biden mandated wide-ranging vaccines for private businesses (yes, he can do that, because OSHA), the Los Angeles Board of Education announced that by January 1, 2022, all students 12 and older will have to be fully vaccinated to attend school in the LA Unified School District. The only exceptions would be for kids unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons, since California did away with vaccine exemptions for “conscience” or “religious” reasons in 2015.

    This is a pretty big deal, since LAUSD is the nation’s second-largest school system. Earlier in the pandemic, LA schools were also ahead of much of the nation in testing and mask mandates, too. The LA Times notes that New York City, the country’s biggest school district, so far only mandates vaccinations for students who play contact sports, although both New York and Chicago schools do mandate vaccinations for all employees. Now that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has full FDA approval for those over 16, it’s likely other school districts will start requiring vaccines as well.

    […] US News reports that “More than 1,400 schools across 278 districts in 35 states that began the academic year in person have closed” already […] a surprising 40 percent didn’t actually have any kind of plan in place for online instruction, because apparently they were just sure the pandemic was over or they’d just keep the schools open no matter how many teachers keeled over.

    The numbers of kids infected after schools opened with mask-optional policies are at first astonishing and then disgusting, because what did those states’ Republican leaders fucking expect?

    Texas: 51,000 students have tested positive since schools opened in August. Mississippi: 20,000 kids. And it just gets worse and worse:

    Meanwhile, in Florida, more than 26,000 children tested positive just last week, and children under the age of 12 became the age group with the highest new COVID-19 case count. In Georgia, cases in children 11 to 17 years old quadrupled over the last month since schools reopened. According to the state’s public health officials, Georgia is experiencing the highest number of COVID-19 outbreaks since the pandemic began – more than half of which are connected to K-12 schools.

    It’s almost as if all that blather about freedom and individual responsibility doesn’t do jack shit to control a highly infectious virus. […]

    Texas: Mask Mandates Work? […] Austin TV station KXAN did some number crunching, comparing school districts in Central Texas that had mask mandates in place at the start of the school year with districts that began classes without a mandate […] And son of a gun, it turns out that schools with mask mandates had way fewer cases of COVID among students and staff than the districts that opted for freedom and hoping for the best.

    Currently, 11 of the 20 districts analyzed require masks.

    Of those districts, the three with the highest percentage of students and staff cases do not require masks.

    Of those three, Lago Vista ISD, about 20 miles from Austin, had the highest number of cases per capita out of the 20 districts KXAN looked at, with

    more than one in every 13 students and staff members infected this school year.

    The surge caused district leaders to shut down the high school for the rest of the week. Students there will instead learn online until they can return to campus Monday.

    A quick look at the Repository of All Knowledge shows Lago Vista is 94 percent white, and that the annual median family income is a fairly comfortable $72,114, compared to the statewide median family income of $61,874. […]

    The four districts with the lowest percentage of cases (Austin, Round Rock, Manor, and San Marcos) all required masks before the school year started.

    […] UPDATE: Goddamn it, Kentucky Republicans Just Hate Kids Or Something

    Just after this story posted, we found out we missed a schools and covid story: Republicans in both houses of the Kentucky legislature voted last night to override Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s vetos of two bills that restricted the state’s ability to order mask mandates in schools and elsewhere. The upshot is that the state board of education’s mask mandate is gone, although individual school districts will still be able to mandate masking.

    Worse, schools will only be allowed 10 days of “non-traditional instruction days” for an entire district. That oughta teach the virus to not keep spreading! School districts would be allowed to move particular groups of students to online learning for up to 20 days (until December 31, by which time we guess the Lege will demand the virus to go away forever), but district-wide online classes will only be allowed for a total of 10 days. That way a certain percentage of kids will be in school where they can be exposed to the virus as God intended.

    The bill also eliminated mask mandates for daycare centers, for freedom. Perhaps the goal is to increase child mortality rates to those seen at the time of America’s founding. Another provision in the bill would allow students who have been in close contact with someone who tests positive for COVID-19 to keep attending school, as long as the student tests negative daily. The bill contained an emergency clause, so it will go into effect immediately. […]

    Link

91. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 2:28 pm

    Wonkette:

    Last night, President Joe Biden announced a series of vaccine mandates that quite frankly should have already been implemented months ago. Naturally, this has led to a number of rightwing zealots crying that the president has “declared war on the unvaccinated.” It has also, unfortunately, led to Zeke Miller of the Associated Press claiming that the president has “declared war on the unvaccinated.”

    Oh, the poor dears.

    In an article literally titled “Analysis: Biden’s war on virus becomes war on unvaccinated,” Miller suggests that Biden’s pushing these mandates was driven by self-interest and a desire to weaponize the frustration of the vaccinated in some capacity, rather than, you know, preventing more people from dying.

    […] It’s hardly Biden’s fault that people are hoovering horse paste because they think the vaccine is filled with Satanic microchips. The reason we have had a major spike in cases is because restrictions were relaxed as a result of the vaccine and those who did not get the vaccine felt just as entitled to enjoy that as those who did get it — which we can plainly see led to a whole lot of them getting COVID and filling up our ICUs and emergency rooms. If the vaccine did not exist, these same restrictions would still apply to all of us for literally the same reasons they are currently being applied to the unvaccinated.

    […] most people are just going to read the headline and think, “See, even the AP thinks that Biden is ‘declaring war on the unvaccinated.'” Except he’s not doing that. If one considers “killing people” a primary feature of war, the only people declaring war on anyone are the unvaccinated themselves. They’re spreading a disease that kills people. They’re taking up beds in ICUs, which is also killing people. Preventing them from doing that is not an act of war, it’s defending the nation.

    Fox News’s Jesse Watters, too, is crying that Biden is declaring war on the unvaccinated. [video available at the link]

    The government, however, is not the only entity “declaring war on the unvaccinated,” if that’s what we’re calling vaccine mandates. Fox News itself — which just so happens to employ Jesse Watters — already requires employees to either get vaccines or mask up and has for quite some time now. […]

    You will notice that Watters is not complaining about this, probably because he likes feeling relatively safe when he goes to work every day.

    Utah Rep. Chris Stewart claimed that Biden had no right to mandate the vaccine, tweeting, “The government’s duty is to present the facts, then trust people to make their own decision.” It is worth noting that this is not the case for literally any law or issue regarding public health or safety. The government does not give people the facts about murder and then allow them to make their own decisions about whether or not to kill people, or give people the facts about salmonella and then allow companies to make their own decisions about whether or not to recall tainted foods. In fact, I am having a lot of trouble trying to come up with a single instance wherein it is the government’s duty to “present the facts, then trust the people to make their own decisions.” […]

    Stewart also tweeted that “An American’s ability to work and earn a living should not be threatened by an arrogant federal government,” which is great because that’s not what is happening here. People who work at companies with more than 100 employees will either have to provide proof of vaccination or weekly tests showing that they don’t have COVID. Given that the vaccine is the entire reason people are able to go back to work, this is quite rational. As for federal workers and contractors being required to get the vaccine? Well, the United States government is their employer and therefore has a right to make that decision.

    […] If an employer can fire someone because they’re having a bad day and feel like taking it out on someone or because they don’t like someone’s socks, then surely they can dismiss them for making the workplace less safe for other employees.

    […] Fighting for your right to spread COVID, get food poisoning, get your arm hacked off, or die in an industrial fire in a room with locked doors is Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who yesterday announced that he is filing a bill to gut OSHA. […]

    This is patently absurd, as there is nothing preventing Americans who wish to get food poisoning from getting it on their own, without putting anyone else at risk. They can undercook chicken in their own homes any time they like, no one is stopping them. I assure you I would be the last person to tell Madison Cawthorn that he can’t shove raw chicken down his gullet with unwashed hands. That is none of my business at all.

    Similarly, no American is being “forced” to get a vaccine, they are just not being allowed to threaten the health and safety of others quite as wantonly as they were doing. They’re already causing enough harm to us all simply by taking up all of the ICU beds.

    […] We can say, “Fuck it, who cares how many people die anyway, or how badly they overload the hospitals, so long as people who don’t get vaccinated feel good about themselves,” we can all go back to restrictions as they were before the vaccine, or the people who didn’t get the damn vaccine can go back to things as they were before the vaccine. […]

    It’s one thing for the usual suspects to go off the deep end and claim that this is an attack on people who just believe differently rather than a straightforward health and safety measure, but journalists and pundits not of that ilk have a responsibility to have cooler heads and not frame this as anything but that.

    Link

92. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 2:40 pm

    Katie Porter! One of the good ones.

    Childcare is a necessity, and not just for those who have children and need it. It’s a necessity for people who wish to have employees, it’s a necessity for people like me who don’t have kids but rely on goods produced and services rendered by those who do — and who also believe, […] that the children are our future.

    As such, it actually makes no logical or logistical sense whatsoever for this to be a thing we do piecemeal, with parents struggling to afford care for their children while they work jobs we need them to work and caregivers still making nowhere near enough money for a service we need them to perform. Thus, Democrats have included funding for paid leave and childcare in the $3.5 trillion (over 10 years) reconciliation “Build Back Better” bill.

    In an appearance on MSNBC yesterday, California Rep. Katie Porter discussed why it is necessary for that funding to be included in the bill rather than as a stand-alone bill, despite the fact that Democrats like Joe Manchin have said they won’t support it. Porter explained that the reason it needs to be included in a human infrastructure bill is that one of the lessons we learned during the pandemic is that not having childcare hurts our overall economy. [video available at the link]

    Specifically, she said:

    I am going to be honest, I have no earthly idea where the stand-alone bill is coming from. Chris Cuomo asked me about it last night. I have no idea who has given you this crazy talking point. Let me be clear. Women, parents, childcare aren’t some special need, they’re a building block of our budget and of our economy in the exact same way that environmental standards are, the exact same way that dealing with clean energy investment, dealing with health care. This needs to go in the same bill because it is about the same things.

    Well that does seem fairly obvious. MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle, however, pressed Porter on the fact that Joe Manchin might not be the only Democrat out there who doesn’t want to vote in favor of the bill, and perhaps there are other Democrats who are afraid to speak out and are letting him do so in their place.

    One of the reasons it needs to be in the reconciliation bill, Porter explains, is that if it’s a “stand-alone bill,” it will be just as easy for many politicians to ignore as it has been for them to ignore the issue of childcare for the last several decades.

    Let me take it in two separate pieces. The first piece, why should childcare be part of the bill. I partially addressed this. Let me make a practical point to you, Stephanie. If we had the men who have run this country for hundreds of years, the wealthy men whose wives and others have taken care of childcare, so convinced it was important, we would have done something about child care 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago when other countries did it. So, I am not today all of a sudden convinced we have the will to deal with childcare when we put off the issue decade after decade after decade.

    Porter then noted that her colleagues love to talk about families and children and childcare, love to bring up equal pay, and that this bill offers them a perfectly lovely opportunity to actually do something about those issues. She also explained that passing the bill, along with the childcare component, is a hell of lot more “fiscally responsible” to raise money to pay for these things by requiring corporations to pay their fair share of taxes than it is to just ignore all of these things we desperately need.

    With regard to Senator Manchin and others that want to talk about the price tag for this. Let me be clear, you’re a business person, you get it, you can do the math. If something costs ‘A,’ you have two options. You can negotiate down from ‘A’ or find the money. We have revenue options on the table. There are a huge number of corporations that pay zero taxes and by making savvy revenue choices, for example, using real corporate profit approach to dealing with those corporations that pay zero, we can generate $700 billion. If we use the corporate minimum tax approach, we generate $40 billion. Right there. Right there, Senator Manchin, right there.

    Anyone that’s worried about spending, we can generate revenue so it isn’t about $3.5 trillion in spending. We will generate revenue to pay for things. I have the will to do it. The question is does Senator Manchin or is he more concerned about his corporate donors, including the oil and gas industry, big pharmaceutical industry and others getting away with paying nothing under the current tax system.

    This is something Manchin ought to be a little careful about in light of the news that his daughter was responsible for hiking up the cost of Epipens, creating a monopoly on them by bribing Pfizer not to make a generic version, and requiring people to buy two at a time. He owes us. He owes the American people for having raised the kind of monster that would gouge people like that, and perhaps the best way to start to make up for that is by voting for this bill, which will actually do something to improve all of our lives.

    Let us also note that a key component of this bill is a provision that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, preventing them from at least gouging Medicare recipients in this manner. So that might have somewhat more to do with Manchin’s opposition to the bill than simply thinking Americans [do not deserve] the kind of subsidized childcare people in other countries enjoy.

    […] This is not a spending bill, it’s an investment bill. It’s an investment in our future and in our quality of life and it will save us all money. It will lead to people being able to earn more money themselves, meaning that they will then pay more in taxes. It will lead to more Democratic victories as well, because once people have things like subsidized childcare, they’re not going to want to give them up. […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/katie-porter-childcare-msnbc

93. Lynna, OM says

    10 September 2021 at 6:03 pm

    Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:

    Calling President Joe Biden “an authoritarian dictator of the most reprehensible kind,” Fox News has accused him of using the power of the federal government to improve the country.

    “Joe Biden came into office claiming that he wanted to be the President of all the people,” Sean Hannity said. “Now, however, his real agenda has become clear: he wants to increase Americans’ life expectancy.”

    “How long one lives should be a personal choice,” Hannity continued. “But not if Joe Stalin-slash-Biden has anything to say about it.”

    Tucker Carlson agreed, arguing that Biden’s push for a $3.5 trillion spending package “is no more and no less than a totalitarian dictator’s plot to raise the nation’s standard of living.”

    “To those of you who think I’m being an alarmist, let’s learn a lesson from history,” he said. “This is exactly like what happened in Germany under Angela Merkel.”

    New Yorker link

94. blf says

    10 September 2021 at 6:43 pm

    Magic sky faeries (ordered us to) did it! Israel to prosecute Hasidic pilgrims who faked negative Covid tests to fly home:

    Dozens of Hasidic Breslov pilgrims boarded planes in Ukraine with bogus paperwork, border officers say

    […]

    Between 25,000 and 30,000 pilgrims, largely from the Breslov sect, visited Uman in central Ukraine this year. Israel’s Magen David Adom medical service told the Jerusalem Post that up to 14% of those returning had tested positive for Covid.

    The medical service, which had set up testing centres in Uman and at the airport in Kyiv, said 2,000 pilgrims coming back from the Ukrainian city had tested positive for Covid. […]

    After a tipoff, police identified pilgrims with fake paperwork as they arrived in Israel, escorting them home for mandatory quarantine amid fears that hundreds could have procured bogus tests.

    The Israeli border and immigration service said it had received information that dozens of people who tested positive in Ukraine had boarded planes with false negative tests. On just one flight from Kyiv, 13 passengers were found to have forged tests […]

    [The prime minister, Naftali] Bennett said anyone caught using forged paperwork would be prosecuted, including potential charges of fraud, forgery and deliberately spreading disease.

    […]

    According to reports in Israeli media, pilgrims who had received positive Covid tests at crowded testing centres in Uman before returning home were later approached with offers of forged documents for their journey.

    The health ministry director general, Nachman Ash, said: “We are hearing that there are not a small number of infected people, those that tested positive over there, and we expect more people to be diagnosed here, too.”

    […]

    Congratulations to whoever tipped off the police in time to catch teh plague rats before they could further spread the infection.

95. tomh says

    10 September 2021 at 7:18 pm

    Sixth Circuit upholds block of Tennessee abortion ban
    ROSANA HUGHES / September 10, 2021

    (CN) — The Sixth Circuit on Friday upheld a federal judge’s decision to block a Tennessee law banning abortions as early as six weeks.

    The law, passed last year, makes it a Class C felony if a doctor performs an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected or at six weeks or later, and imposes a so-called reasons ban — the criminalization of the procedure if a woman is seeking an abortion because of the fetus’ race or sex or if the fetus was diagnosed with Down syndrome.

    At the time of its passing, Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, called the legislation the “strongest pro-life law in our state’s history.”

    Within a month, the law was blocked after reproductive rights groups challenged it even before the governor signed it.

    In blocking the law, U.S. District Judge William Campbell Jr., a Donald Trump appointee, said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in challenging the law and that portions of the statute — the ban based on discrimination — were so vague that the law was unconstitutional.

    “When a law threatens criminal sanctions, such vague provisions and potential varied interpretations cannot stand,” he wrote.

    A 2-1 majority of the Sixth Circuit agreed Friday, after hearing oral arguments in the case in April.

    “The district court properly issued a preliminary injunction … because the provisions are constitutionally unsound,” Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey, a Bill Clinton appointee, wrote for the majority….

    The Cincinnati-based appeals court’s ruling comes at a time when Republican state lawmakers across the country are enacting anti-abortion laws, many of which are meeting swift legal challenges.

    Daughtrey noted as much in her majority opinion, writing that “state legislatures recently have passed more anti-abortion regulations than perhaps at any other time in this country’s history.”

    “However, this development is not a signal to the courts to change course,” she added. “It is, in fact, just the opposite. The judiciary exists as a check on majoritarian rule. It has a duty to protect the constitutional rights, including privacy and bodily autonomy, of those within its borders, even — or especially — if the relevant class of people ‘has been subjected to a ‘tradition of disfavor’ by our laws.’”

96. Lynna, OM says

    11 September 2021 at 11:51 am

    blf @93, religious extremists became a literal plague.

    tomh @94, The Sixth Circuit had more sense than the conservatives on the Supreme Court.

    In other news: Health care staffing CEO resigns after ties linked him to anti-mask group

    On Friday, Overland Park, Kansas-based company Krucial Staffing announced that CEO Brian Cleary would be stepping down. The company provides emergency health care staffing. Cleary’s ties to anti-mask group Mask Choice 4 Kids are very close; Cleary’s 19-year-old son founded the group. Krucial Staffing is making a ton of money during the global pandemic, unfortunately, as anti-vaxx areas of the country have seen surges in COVID-19 cases and, naturally, health care worker shortages.

    The Kansas City Star reports that Krucial Staffing officials had accepted Cleary’s resignation and further distanced themselves from Cleary, writing, “Obviously being in the health care staffing business, we understand the importance of masks in hospitals and any medical setting. As a company, we work to ensure that all our health care personnel have the best protective equipment to keep them safe in their working environment.”

    The Star reports that Jacob Cleary, Brian’s son, “relinquished his supposed leadership role with Mask Choice 4 Kids” just hours after the newspaper contacted Krucial Staffing to ask about their CEO’s relationship to the organization. The key purpose of Mask Choice 4 Kids, of course, is to get students to protest mask mandates in schools by uncovering their faces in protest during class.

    Jacob Clearly posted a video on Sept. 7, handing over his organization’s leadership to Tana Goertz. If that name is familiar to you, maybe it is because she is the former The Apprentice TV show contestant and MAGA-supporter, Tana Goertz. [All the best people.]

    According to the Shawnee Mission Post, the Mask Choice 4 Kids group on Facebook is labeled a “youth organization.” While 19-year-old Cleary definitely seemed like a “youth,” Ms. Geortz seems like something else. Over the Labor Day weekend, the Mission Post reported that thousands of “Mask Choice 4 Kids” signs appeared illegally “on major roadways and intersections in northern Johnson County.” Because they were illegally posted, it seems citizens who actually live in the county removed them—which is legal to do.

    The only word from the former CEO has been a social media post he made last Sunday.

    In a message on a separate Facebook group, Blue Valley Parents for In-Person Learning + Parent Choice, Brian Cleary wrote Sunday that it was his 19-year-old son who’d come up with the idea of Mask Choice 4 Kids, “then a bunch of parents have run with it.”

    “Follow us on social media, we are going to be having a rally outside of the next board meeting” on Monday, saying that he expected up to 1,000 people to attend. The Blue Valley district requires everyone to wear masks in school buildings.

    Brian Cleary was interviewed on KSHB41 local news about the delta variant surge in COVID cases in July. At the time, his business was getting to see a surge in staffing opportunities. He told the news that “If 2020 was a house on fire, this may be just kind of the garage on fire, so nothing of that level yet, and I hope we don’t get there.” Of course, mask mandates and other safety measures like that might stomp out that fire too fast, leading to less staffing business for the Kansas-based company.

    Krucial Staffing did not provide any information on whether or not Cleary would continue to maintain an ownership stake in the company.

97. KG says

    11 September 2021 at 12:05 pm

    More interesting stuff from The Intercept on US-funded virus research in Wuhan. Difficult to summarize – no specific evidence that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, but a lot that makes the possibility more plausible, and that raises questions for Fauci.

98. Lynna, OM says

    11 September 2021 at 12:27 pm

    […] To remind everyone of the status quo: hundreds still die daily from a disease with three, count ‘em THREE fucking vaccines, because a bizarre, quasi-religious culture has congealed around zany, suicidal ideas like “medical science is bad, actually,” and “reality is optional.”

    Oh, and when they’re not busy spreading disease, adherents of this batshit new faith (their highest deity is a game show host who cannot, for reasons doubtless lost to the fog of prehistory, pick out pants that fit) work diligently to end American democracy, and replace it with a permanent dictatorship of the loud, angry, and stupid.

    I mention this because, right here, in the midst of this shitstorm of historic proportions, the New York Times figured it was the ideal moment to administer the “both sides” treatment to Normal Human Empathy so vigorously Chuck Todd is expected to sue for gimmick infringement.

    You see, some profoundly damaged shitbag scrawled a sad, mean little op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, shitting on President Biden for using his own grief to connect with Gold Star families, and the pearl-clutchers at the Times dutifully transcribed that cynical bullshit as a thoughtful argument offered in good faith, rather than simply one more strand of outrage spaghetti flung at the fridge in the Ministry of Propaganda’s break room, and goddammit, it’s well past time y’all in the press wised up to the way these asshats manipulate you.

    Because if commiseration and compassion have indeed become partisan, you aren’t dealing with a polite disagreement between reasonable folk, you’re talking about a movement seeking to replace civilization with sociopathy. And history shows us, without much subtlety, how that shit works out.

    The truth is, Republicans despise Biden’s decency because it shames them, and they fear it because it’s what enabled him to defeat their Crotchrot Emperor in the first place. I’m sure these fucks would love nothing more than to turn Smilin’ Joe’s greatest asset into a liability, and it sure would be cool if the “paper of record” could replace a few of these docile stenographers with real reporters while the republic still stands.

    Because decency IS partisan in America right now. From the halls of Congress to the Fux Nooz boardroom to each individual, personalized, wingnut rabbit hole, Republicans are united in their efforts to roll back hard-won human rights,and prolong this interminable fucking pandemic, spreading disease, suffering, and death, especially amongst children too young to vaccinate.

    “Well DANG, CAP, that is one inflammatory accusation!” It is. Notice any lies?

    If it’s confirmation you’re after, well, take a look at the Laboratory of Kakistocracy some call Texas, where voting is for white people, and women just got legally downgraded from “human” to “host body.”

    Confronted about a particularly draconian aspect of his theocratic crackdown on female autonomy, Governor Greg Abbott claimed it would be silly to worry about the lack of exemption from his abortion ban for rape victims, cuz he’s gonna snap his fingers and eliminate rape completely, easy peezy.

    […] Texans are experiencing a quality of life that shouldn’t be possible in a nation as advanced and wealthy as the United States. You transformed your state’s energy grid into a warped experiment in mad libertarian science, allowing oligarchs to gleefully extract billions from the plebs while an expendable handful (just a couple hundred human beings, whatevs) FROZE TO DEATH IN THEIR OWN HOMES.

    Your public health policy reads like it was crafted by coronavirus lobbyists, like pestilence’s own personal ALEC. You’re setting records for pediatric hospitalizations, Greg. Because you have chosen to value the esteem of maniacs over the lives of children, tens of thousands of kids have contracted Covid-19 on your watch. Dozens have died.

    Did everybody catch that? I feel like we’re numb to these statistics, but as of last Friday, September 3rd, Texas had reported over 50,000 child coronavirus cases, and 59 deaths. Certainly more by now, and more to come. I bet I could come up with a really fantastic joke about the dark irony of these child-murdering bastards’ sanctimonious “pro-life” branding, but I’m too busy projectile vomiting.

    Anyhoo, problem-solving doesn’t really seem to be your “thing,” Gregward, so forgive my skepticism regarding this secret plan to end rape forever. While we’re exchanging glove slaps, I may as well call into question the purity of your intentions, what with the LITERAL BOUNTIES you just authorized on women who exercise their reproductive rights. Texas actually leads the nation in rape, by the way, so heckuva job so far.

    Word on the street is, Democratic strategists have finally begun embracing the political gifts that fall into one’s lap when one’s opponents deliberately cause thousands of senseless, preventable deaths, setting up a major midterm collision between the apocalyptic fatalism of Tate Reeves’ “what is a pandemic really but an opportunity for folks to get a head start on the afterlife?” and the politics of common fucking sense. I’m feeling optimistic, but far from cocky.

    Jim “What if ringworm had a safely gerrymandered seat in the U.S. Congress” Jordan says, “vaccine mandates are un-American,” and call me old-fashioned, but I think once you formally vote to side with terrorists against your own country and Constitution, you waive all future participation rights in the “what counts as patriotism” debate.

    Members of the Proud Boys, that delusional incel brigade you may remember from such terrorist attacks as the Capitol Riot, attempted to invade a high school full of children in Vancouver, Washington, enraged that the district had taken simple, scientifically sound measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19 through their student body. This story barely made a ripple at the national level, cuz we live in this fun, safe, extremely healthy culture that has normalized shitty white boy violence.

    It will no doubt shock you to learn Senator Lindsey Graham (R-the Military-Industrial Complex) is already positively horny to re-invade Afghanistan. […]

    In a thuggish attempt to bully their way out of the legal consequences of their treachery, a group of House Republicans (Gaetz, Brooks, Taylor Greene, Gosar…you know, the Nazis) sent a petulant, threatening letter to the CEO of Yahoo!…who hasn’t worked there in four years. I feel like I could almost handle the tyranny of the minority, if they weren’t so aggressively, defiantly subpar. The plot against America is being carried out on a third-grade reading level, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

    […] The Biden Administration’s ongoing fumigation of the executive branch finally dislodged a few celebrity squatters from their lame duck appointments to the advisory boards of the nation’s military academies, prompting some mildly amusing theatre. Lots of melodramatic wailing about “norms” from the likes of Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway? Okay, sure. Congrats on slithering your way back onto page 12 for a day […]

    Looks as though Joe Biden finally had his fill of the dewormer-guzzling plague dispenser crowd, and their insistence on the right to not just die, but kill. GOOD.

    […] the President announced a new set of You’ll Fight Covid and Like It, Mister measures, including overdue mandates for millions of workers, to either take their pick of the three safe, effective vaccines, or submit to weekly testing, a common sense policy designed with the once-non-controversial goal of reducing sickness and death.

    There are a lot of “overdue” descriptions floating around, but I think that Biden acted fairly quickly after the official approval for the Pfizer vaccine was issued by the FDA on August 23rd. I admit to being relatively ignorant when it comes to what the Executive Branch can do, and cannot do, when it comes to issuing vaccine mandates.

    […] Carrot Time is over. We had Carrot Time for a long-ass time. Lotta people died to give these colicky toddlers all the Carrot Time anyone could reasonably expect. So, it’s Stick Time now. Half past Stick Time, if you ask me.

    Instead of the “now that you mention it, saving lives and moving past the motherfucking pandemic both sound great; thanks, Joe!” response you’d expect from sane, rational beings, Republicans offered only “full on revolt” against these (checks notes) necessary public health measures, vowing scorched earth opposition to this intolerable violation of the coronavirus’ inalienable right to be escorted, classroom by classroom, though the entire fucking country, until every school has its very own mobile morgue parked out front to handle the surge in expendable kid corpses.

    Sharing America with a death cult is like being trapped in an episode of The Odd Couple scripted by Cormac McCarthy during a bath salts overdose. I confess I do not care for it. […]

    Link

99. Lynna, OM says

    11 September 2021 at 2:08 pm

    If there is one thing I feel strongly about, it is giving people credit when they are right, even if they are a person who is normally wrong about things. In fact, especially if they are a person who is usually wrong about things. As much as I get the bitterness about not wanting to give people cookies for basic human decency, I am happy to give out all of the cookies on earth if it makes people better.

    And I would like to dole out a dozen cookies to Ben Domenech for his wise and cogent statements about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Honestly, I’m just so very impressed. Let’s take a look at some of these very fine quotes from his article in The Federalist titled “The Insane Vaccine Debate,” shall we?

    [V]accination is not about protecting the vaccinated so much as it is about protecting others from disease-carriers. Vaccines are properly understood not on the basis of narrow self-interest but as a defense of the human species.

    Fundamentally, the protection against life-threatening plague is one of the original reasons government exists.
    We’ve had mandatory vaccines for schoolchildren in America since before the Emancipation Proclamation. The Supreme Court has upheld that practice as constitutional for over a century, and only the political fringes believe there ought to be a debate about such matters. This is one of the few areas where government necessarily exercises power.

    [C]onceding that parents have the right to delay these shots is not the same as saying they should have the right to prevent such vaccination altogether without consequences.

    If you choose not to vaccinate, private and public institutions should be able to discriminate on that basis. Disneyland should be able to require proof of vaccination as a condition of entry, and so should public schools.
    You shouldn’t be compelled to vaccinate your child, but neither should the rest of us be compelled to pretend like you did.

    I’ve just gotta pause here because wow that is just what I was saying earlier today. The unvaccinated want to enjoy the benefits and the freedom of being vaccinated without getting vaccinated themselves, and that’s just not right. It’s not fair to the rest of us who did the responsible thing and got vaccinated.

    If the decline in […] vaccination continues, perhaps the federal government could take the step of making access to the child tax credit contingent upon vaccination. If we’re going to have redistributive social engineering in the tax code, it may as well be for children who aren’t carrying disease around Disneyland.

    That is certainly an idea!

    Domenech also shared a very interesting quote from Richard Epstein, writing for the rightwing think tank The Hoover Institute, noting that it is the government’s responsibility to protect citizens from communicable disease in this manner, as citizens have no other legal recourse against those who infect them with communicable diseases:

    The basic soundness of the constitutional recognition of a police power to deal with communicable diseases is beyond dispute. Even in a free state, quarantines are the only reliable remedy to protect the health of the public at large from the spread of disease. It is sheer fantasy to think that individuals made ill could bring private lawsuits for damages against the parties that infected them, or that persons exposed to imminent risk could obtain injunctive relief against the scores of persons who threaten to transmit disease. The transmission of disease involves hidden and complex interconnections between persons that could not be detected in litigation, even assuming that it could be brought in time, which it cannot.

    He also shared another quote from a conservative thinker, writing for Reason magazine:

    Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated a good libertarian principle when he said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” […]

    Some people object to applying Holmes’ aphorism by arguing that aggression can only occur when someone intends to hit someone else; microbes just happen. However, being intentionally unvaccinated against highly contagious airborne diseases is, to extend the metaphor, like walking down a street randomly swinging your fists without warning. You may not hit an innocent bystander, but you’ve substantially increased the chances. Those harmed by the irresponsibility of the unvaccinated are not being accorded the inherent equal dignity and rights every individual possesses. The autonomy of the unvaccinated is trumping the autonomy of those they put at risk.

    Wow, again, those are just some really great points. Isn’t it nice when we can find common ground?

    Unfortunately, all of these quotes are from an article Domenech wrote during a measles outbreak in 2015, when he associated anti-vaxxers with the Left, noting that “i]t’s telling that refusing to get your kids vaccinated is the trendy thing among the California elite, even as they decline to embrace other aspects of the Amish lifestyle.” All of them are just as true today as when he wrote them six years ago — the only thing that has changed is Domenech himself, who now frequently claims that vaccine passports, like the one he suggested one might use at Disneyland, “are a violation of individual freedom and a dangerous privacy risk regardless of the entity mandating their use.” […]

    Oddly enough, Domenech now claims that that there is no discrepancy between what he believed then about vaccines and what he believes now, but that the Biden administration is doing something totally different from what he was talking about. […]

    Domenech is now trying to make the case that the difference is that it is one thing for public or private institutions to require vaccine passports, but another for public institutions to compel private institutions to require them. This might be a point if the Biden administration were doing that, but they are not. The only workers required to get a vaccine in order to keep their jobs are federal workers or those who work for federal contractors that are free to give up their federal contracts should they prefer not to comply with that rule. Other companies with more than 100 employees are simply required to test unvaccinated employees every week, which seems like a fairly reasonable request when we are talking about a virus that kills people — and people can skip that weekly testing if they are vaccinated.

    There is no universe in which someone capable of understanding why vaccines are necessary and why the government has a compelling interest in protecting people from communicable diseases cannot understand why these measures are necessary. For someone like Domenech, opposition to these measures has more to do with being a team player for the Right than any sincerely held belief he might have about anything. […].

    Wonkette link

100. Lynna, OM says

     11 September 2021 at 2:09 pm

     How Will Jen Psaki Try To Justify Joe Biden’s Vaccine Tyranny?

     ‘It’s safe, effective, and free, and it will keep people from dying. Next question?’

     https://www.wonkette.com

101. Lynna, OM says

     11 September 2021 at 2:22 pm

     Biden’s vaccine push wins cautious business support as political opponents fume

     Even in deep red Texas, some employers embrace the president’s vaccine strategy.

     Bob Harvey’s phone did not ring.

     In Washington, a political furor had erupted over President Biden’s new coronavirus vaccine and testing mandate for businesses, with Republicans howling about an unconstitutional power grab and vowing to challenge him in the courts.

     But in Houston, where Harvey heads the city’s largest business group, employers took the news in stride.
     “I have not heard from my members today, which is interesting. I think the reason is what he announced is so in line with the conversations we’ve been having,” Harvey, the chief executive officer of the Greater Houston Partnership, said Friday. “This will come as a relief to the business community, to have an order that requires all of them to move together.”

     The president’s decision to require medium and large companies to subject their employees to mandated vaccination or weekly coronavirus testing represents a sharp expansion of the federal government’s workplace powers, according to political scientists and legal experts.

     […] Biden’s action was welcomed by many bosses.

     Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called Biden’s move “an assault on private businesses,” but businesses in his state’s largest city did not see it that way.

     “The context in which this is occurring really matters,” said Harvey, a former energy industry executive. “We’ve been hit hard by this fourth wave [of the virus] … and employers simply must play a role in addressing this problem. We’ve tried it every other way.”

     In a recent survey, 23 percent of partnership members already required coronavirus vaccines for some or all employees and an additional 30 percent were considering doing so. Of the remaining 46 percent that were not, most said they feared that some workers would quit rather than submit.

     The president’s blanket order, applying to all companies with at least 100 employees, eliminated that worry, Harvey said.

     Texas is a hotbed of resistance to pandemic health measures. Its vaccination performance — 58.6 percent of those 12 and older are fully vaccinated […]

     “The reality is there are a number of businesses that are wanting the government to step in. This gives them the cover to do what they want to do anyway,” said Charles Shipan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.

     […] Houston is a largely Democratic city. But Harvey’s group has members in 11 counties, nine of which backed former president Donald Trump last year, and includes numerous companies in traditionally conservative industries, such as oil and banking. Among them: ExxonMobil, Chevron, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo.

     Biden’s new covid plan also drew backing from some national business groups, such as the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Apparel and Footwear Association.

     And the president cited the example of several large companies that already require employees to be vaccinated, including Disney and United Airlines and “even Fox News.” (The cable network actually required employees to disclose their vaccination status, not get vaccinated, according to published reports.)

     “We’re going to reduce the spread of covid-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America,” Biden said, speaking in the State Dining Room.

     […] Several Republican governors, including in Texas, Georgia, and South Dakota, vowed to fight the mandate in court.

     […] Even before the president spoke on Thursday afternoon, the Federalist, a right-wing publication, assailed the vaccine-and-testing plan as “a fascist move.”

     J.D. Vance, a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, called for “mass civil disobedience,” urging Americans to refuse to comply with any new requirement or to pay any subsequent fine. And Josh Mandel, another Senate aspirant in Ohio, warned that Biden would use “the Gestapo” to enforce his directive.

     Social media chatter about workers quitting their jobs rather than complying with the new federal mandate has left Wall Street economists unimpressed. Michael Feroli of JPMorgan Chase called it “noise,” pointing out that employees who quit are not eligible for unemployment insurance. […]

     Washington Post link

102. Lynna, OM says

     11 September 2021 at 2:39 pm

     Unvaccinated are 5 times more likely to be infected, and 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19

     […] The latest data from Civiqs shows that 91% of Democrats fall in camp “Already Vaccinated,” with another 4% saying they intend to be vaccinated. That’s the kind of number that keeps measles and mumps in check, and both of those diseases are much more transmissible than any form of COVID-19. If everyone was vaccinated the way Democrats are vaccinated, we would not be having a new wave of infection.

     Of course, we are having a new wave of infection; one that, on Friday, saw the U.S. rack up another 171,000 cases and 1,761 deaths. Florida and Texas once again led the way, as Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott continue their neck and neck competition to be the worst governors in America. However, they face some stiff competition from someone who hasn’t gotten nearly as much press—Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.

     Tennessee is home to that school where men followed a doctor into the parking lot and threatened his family because the doctor had the audacity to simply testify and answer questions for school board members. That school, Williamson County, was out all last week after so many kids and staff members came down with COVID-19 that classes became impossible. […].

     But that’s not all. In a hearing this week, Gov. Lee’s ban on school masks went to court after parents of immunocompromised students sued the state for putting their kids in danger. As education site Chalkbeat reports, the attorney for the state argued that schools should use “creative scheduling” to see that those kids could attend classes without encountering any children who were intent on being free to spread disease. Because sure, schools have no problem re-scheduling classes and moving students around based on who is or isn’t wearing a mask on a particular day.

     […] Tennessee has actually moved to the top of the pack when it comes to the number of COVID-19 cases by population. For a long time, the Dakotas hung tight to that spot, along with Rhode Island, which got battered in the initial outbreak, but now Tennessee has surged ahead. A full 16.5% of Tennesseans have now tested positive for COVID-19, and with a statewide rate of positive cases at 21%, there’s no doubt that number still has room to grow.

     But DeSantis is not going to be dismissed so easily. Florida has also surged ahead (literally) of North Dakota and now holds the number two spot with 16.1% of the state’s population having tested positive. In terms of raw numbers, it’s no competition, Florida has had 3.4 million cases to Tennessee’s 1.1 million. Still, it seems that the Sunshine State might have a little trouble making the top of the sickest state chart, since it’s positivity rate is down to “only” 14% and it’s actually vaccinated at a rate quite a bit higher than Tennessee.

     With just 43% of the state’s population vaccinated, several counties below 30%, red hot levels of positivity, and Bill Lee running point on terrible policies, it seems there is a good chance that Tennessee might hold onto the crown as America’s Sickest State. […]

     Common sense should be way, way more than enough. However, the well known problem with common sense is just how uncommon it can be.

     Oh, and while 5x better odds than the unvaccinated are great … wear your mask.

103. Lynna, OM says

     11 September 2021 at 2:43 pm

     “Woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks”

     So we had another klannish gathering here in Loudoun County to rail against Critical Race Theory and urge a vote for the Republican candidate for governor, one Glenn Youngkin, a former Black Rock finance guy. Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson was the celebrity keynote speaker. […]

     Naturally the speakers evinced not a clue as to what CRT is actually about. A deluded Chinese immigrant said it was “communist tactics.” A Christian-fundy teacher charged that it encouraged kids “to discriminate against each other.” Best of all was a local African-American podcaster: “If you want to be around Black people — Africa. There’s like 28 countries over there. In our country, things are on the line.”

     The reporter parenthetically added, “There are 54 independent countries in Africa, according to the World Atlas.”

     We’re getting close here to telling black folks to go back to Africa.

     The GOP campaign has mostly been about law n’ order, not pausing to dwell on the display of adherence to the law on display this past January 6th in Washington, D.C.

104. raven says

     11 September 2021 at 11:48 pm

     Another day, another 1,600 unvaccinated Covid-19 virus patients die.
     This is what the heatlh care workers see a lot of.
     Covid-19 virus deniers/antivaxxers in the hospital, very sick, about to die, and still don’t believe the Covid-19 virus exists or that the vaccine is worth getting. And then they go on to die. The staff everywhere are demoralized.

     They don’t make a point of it, but the ventilators have their problems. The highest survival I’ve seen is 75%. It can be as low as 5%. A general ballpark figure is 50% live, 50% die.

     Even on their death beds, some COVID-19 patients in Idaho still reject vaccination
     ARIELLE MITROPOULOS Sat, September 11, 2021, 7:01 AM·5 min read

     Just a few months ago, there were only five COVID-19 patients, at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho. As of Thursday, there were more than 45.

     Nearly all of these patients are not vaccinated, a reflection of “the amount of misinformation that’s being absorbed, and taken as truth in our community because people are convinced that they don’t want to be vaccinated, and then they end up here,” Dr. Meghan McInerney, the intensive care unit’s medical director, told ABC News.

     Given the influx of patients, beds do not stay empty long.

     “We are overwhelmed. We have so many patients with COVID, who are unvaccinated,” said McInerney. “On top of an already busy ICU, you add the volume of COVID patients that we’re seeing now and yes, it’s just added a different level of busy, a different level of crazy. … It’s a lot. It’s a lot.”

     Hospitals across the state of Idaho are now facing their most significant surge yet, as COVID-19 patients flood into emergency departments.

     Statewide, more than 600 patients are now hospitalized with the virus, the highest on record, and less than 13% of the state’s ICU beds remain available.

     Earlier this week, in an effort to address the ongoing surge, state health officials in Idaho announced that they had activated a “crisis standards of care” for the state’s northern hospitals, which will allow hospitals to ration care given the increased demand and a “severe staffing shortage.”

     The rapidly spreading delta variant has rendered the job of these front-line workers even more difficult, McInerney explained. Idaho currently has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the U.S., with less than 40% of the state’s total population fully vaccinated; the national rate stands at 53.6%.

     “It’s really hard to be a physician at the front lines, doing this every single day and living in a state where the vaccination rate is so low,” McInerney said.

     In fact, all of the patients who are critically ill from COVID-19 and currently under care in Saint Alphonsus Boise have not been vaccinated, ICU nurse Jessica Parrott told ABC News, while “the people who are not getting critically ill, are the people who have the vaccine,” she added.

     The virus is also landing much younger people in the ICU, some of whom are in their early 20s. This particular wave of infections feels more “aggressive,” than those treated during the surge in 2020, said Dr. Carolyn McFarlane, a hospitalist at Saint Alphonsus Boise.

     “The deaths within our system in the past 24 hours are a 30-year-old and another in their 50s. It feels preventable,” McFarlane said.

     Staff are completely overworked and overwhelmed, McInerney said, and teams are facing a staffing crisis. Nurses are being increasingly asked to pick up extra shifts due to the influx of patients coming from all over Idaho, and even from outside the state.

     “We don’t have the hands that we need to take care of everyone. And it is incredibly frustrating for all of those involved on every level, between [administration] down to environmental services,” said Alicia Luciani, a COVID-19 charge nurse at Saint Alphonsus Boise. “It’s affecting everyone and affecting how our patients are getting care. And we do our utmost to provide all that we can for these patients.” However, she added, “It’s incredibly frustrating. Everyone is so tired.”

     In addition to the physical and emotional exhaustion from working shifts that feel like a “silent battleground,” medical staffers at Saint Alphonsus said they are disheartened by the continued unwillingness of some Idaho residents to get the vaccine.

     MORE: COVID patients overwhelm Texas hospitals, amid ‘hair on fire’ crisis

     Although a number of patients do express regret that they have not received or sought out a vaccination, some even apologizing for it, according to nurse educator Monica Brower, others remain contentious, even after being on a ventilator and confronting the stark reality of their mortality.

     “Don’t tell me I have COVID. I don’t believe in COVID,” patients have told McFarlane, who teared up as she recounted combative patients.

     “There is an almost adversarial tone to things when we ask, ‘Did you get vaccinated?'” McFarlane said. “It creates a rift in the tone of the room, because it’s a feeling of ‘well you’re going to treat me differently because I didn’t get vaccinated,’ and that is far from the truth.”

     In fact, said McFarlane, “It almost gets to a point where you read the tone in the room and you shy away from even asking about vaccination status, because you want to be able to focus on saving the person’s life, not going into the politics behind the vaccine.”

     As more unvaccinated patients fill hospital beds, Luciani said it has become “really hard to maintain a level of hope.”

     “They stick to their guns,” Luciani explained, and even on their death bed she’s had to listen to people deny that they have the virus, while maintaining their fervent anti-vaccine sentiment. “In my mind, that life is essentially over as we know it. … Some people just refuse. And it’s kind of like a slap in the face.”

     MORE: Front-line workers in Nevada say they are ‘reliving 2020’ as new infections surge to highest point in 5 months

     “They don’t get to see how hard we’re working to try to keep them alive. … This is the real deal. This is what it looks like,” McInerney said.

     When asked what keeps them going, McFarlane’s answer resonates.

     “We are taking care of our communities, family members, people that are acquaintances, neighbors. … We will do everything we can to care for them, because we care, because we have taken an oath, and it’s the time for us to rise to the occasion. And we are here for our community.”

     Even on their death beds, some COVID-19 patients in Idaho still reject vaccination originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

105. raven says

     11 September 2021 at 11:57 pm

     I just found out someone I know slightly had Covid-19 virus and ended up in the hospital. He wasn’t antivax and in fact, had his first shot of two.

     He was on a ventilator for a month and is very lucky to be alive.
     After a month on a ventilator, they start thinking seriously about turning you off. Literally. At that point for a lot of patients, they can’t get off of the ventilator any more.

     He is OK considering what he went through and is even back to work. He is also very paranoid about catching the Covid-19 virus again.

106. Trickster Goddess says

     12 September 2021 at 2:00 am

     A very dear friend of mine finally got her first shot yesterday. Her hesitance wasn’t political or conspiratorial but rather stemming from past mistreatment by the medical establishment from a time when she had been hospitalized and forced to take psychiatric drugs against her will with no warning of the side effects and not being listened to when she complained about the negative effects.

     What changed her mind was BC’s vaccine passport coming into effect this week. As she put it, she was pretty reluctant to get the vaccine, but not reluctant enough to disrupt her life.

     I’m very relieved.

107. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 4:59 am

     Trickster Goddess@105, Congratulations to your friend ! You write, “What changed her mind was BC’s vaccine passport coming into effect this week. As she put it, she was pretty reluctant to get the vaccine, but not reluctant enough to disrupt her life.”

     Here in France, the same sort of thing happened when the Health Pass was introduced: Paper or app proving you’ve been fully-vaccinated, recently tested negative (with charges now being introduced for “convenience” testing), should be immune, etc — and is necessary to visit (inside or outside) a restaurant, bar, café; take a long-distance train; etc., and the staff now also must(?) be vaccinated. At the time the Health Pass was announced, around 40% were vaccinated and the vaccination rate was dropping, but within a week about four million signed up to be vaccinated, and now, about five weeks after it came into effect, just over 80% of the eligible population is fully-vaccinated. New cases are around 10,000 per day, and R has finally dropped to less than one (just below 0.8). All this also shows a famous poll at the end of last year which found only c.40% would get the vaccine was, fortunately, incorrect. Eyeballing the current trends graph suggests the rate is holding steady; and at the current time, the unvaccinated are about ten times more likely to test positive or wind up in ICU then the (fully?-)vaccinated. Current concern is the start of the school year and in-classroom learning, albeit masks are mandatory for both staff and students.

     Every Saturday, there’s still some goosestepping eejits protesting the Health Pass, vaccines, President Macron, immigrants & other “others”, and the Chicago Cubs winning the 2016 World Series, but those protests have been a declining trend and were never very big (by French standards). Indeed, last figure I saw, about 67% approve of the Health Pass, and it’s use has become routine. There was another such stumbles here in the village yesterday; I missed it, but it didn’t sound very large and I heard some booing.

108. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 8:04 am

     Chris Riddell in the Grauniad on teh “U”K’s alleged-“government”, The Tory cabinet of mediocrities (cartoon): “They all seem to be making it up as they go along, from immigration to social care”. Obviously “U”K-specific, but for most of it, the grist should be fairly obvious (“Where is Raab?” refers to the current alleged-FM, Dominic Raab, who all-but-disappeared as Afghanistan was collapsing and dogs & some people were being evacuated).

109. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 8:22 am

     Republicans once called government the problem — now they want to run your life:

     […]
     I’m old enough to remember when the Republican party stood for limited government and Ronald Reagan thundered Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.

     Today’s Republican party, while still claiming to stand for limited government, is practicing just the opposite: government intrusion everywhere.

     Republican lawmakers are banning masks in schools. […]
     Republican states are on the way to outlawing abortions. […]
     Republican lawmakers are forbidding teachers from telling students about America’s racist past. […]
     […] Republican lawmakers are making it harder for people to vote. […]

     [… T]hese Republican lawmakers have a particular ideology, and they are now imposing those views and values on citizens holding different views and values.

     This is big government on steroids.

     Many Republican lawmakers use the word freedom to justify what they’re doing. That’s rubbish. What they’re really doing is denying people their freedom — freedom to be safe from Covid, freedom over their own bodies, freedom to learn, freedom to vote and participate in our democracy.

     […]

     Today, Republican politicians have no coherent view. They want only to be re-elected, even if that means misusing government to advance a narrow and increasingly anachronistic set of values — intruding on the most intimate aspects of life, interfering in what can be taught and learned, risking the public’s health, banning what’s necessary for people to exercise their most basic freedoms.

     This is not mere hypocrisy. The Republican party now poses a clear and present threat even to the values it once espoused.

110. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 9:22 am

     I was browsing the front page of The Irish Times and noticed their tracker says almost 90% have been fully-vaccinated. Congratulations! (I didn’t check if that’s for the Republic (probably) or entire island, nor did I check if that’s of the eligible or total population — any which way, it’s very impressive.) It’s not the best in Europe, several small locales (Gibraltar, etc.) and countries (famously Portugal, but also Denmark, Malta, etc.) have done better. In fact, Denmark lifts all Covid restrictions as vaccinations top 80% [of eligible], a snippet:

     However, the wearing of face coverings is still mandatory at airports and people are advised to wear one when at the doctor, test centres or hospitals. Distancing is still recommended and strict entry restrictions still apply for non-Danes at the borders. The outbreak is still considered “an ordinary dangerous illness”.

     The Danish health minister, Magnus Heunicke, said in August that “the epidemic is under control”, but warned “we are not out of the epidemic” and the government would act as needed.

     Denmark is also apparently no longer requiring their equivalent of the (French) Health Pass in any circumstances.

     World-wide, only about 30% are fully-vaccinated.

111. raven says

     12 September 2021 at 9:48 am

     We all know what the female slavers/forced birthers have done with the Texas abortion law.
     This is right up there with the crimes against humanity of Romanian dictator Ceausescu and his abortion prohibition law. The women denied abortions are more likely to be poorer, life limited, have health problems, mental healthy problems, and be victims of domestic violence.
     And victims of the fundie xians and the state of Texas.

     .1. The study found that people who were denied an abortion had almost four times greater odds of being below the federal poverty level.
     .2. did not terminate their pregnancy five years after seeking abortion care, found that patients who gave birth were more likely to describe their health as “poor” and reported higher rates of chronic pain.
     .3. More likely to suffer from stress and mental health problems.
     .4. More likely to be the victims of domestic violence. ​

     NBCNews.com
     Lifelong consequences’: What happens to people who can’t get abortions
     Sept. 12, 2021, 1:30 AM PDT By Chloe Atkins

     On the morning Texas’ restrictive new abortion law took effect, an ultrasound examination of Marva Sadler’s first patient showed fetal cardiac activity, rendering the woman ineligible for a legal abortion.

     Sadler, senior director of clinical services for Whole Woman’s Health, said the woman was a single mother of two and had just started a new job. She didn’t have anyone to take care of her children and couldn’t take off work to travel to another state to get an abortion.

     “It was the first real blow of ‘I really can’t fix this.’ How do you answer that? And that conversation quickly took over to us figuring out how to get her prenatal care,” Sadler said.

     In the 48 hours leading up to Sept. 1, Whole Woman’s Health in Fort Worth, Texas, provided 66 abortions a day on average. But during the first three days of the law being in effect, the clinic provided 11 abortions a day on average.

     “The women who not only live in this state — but who work, pay taxes, vote, pray and are raising the future leaders of this community — are being denied their very basic right to health care,” Sadler said.

     In Houston, Doris Dixon, director of patient access at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, said call centers for abortion services have turned into help lines, where staff members are “walking patients through this new law” and helping “them navigate where they can go.”

     “Patients are struggling, and the staff is struggling,” Dixon said.

     Since the law took effect, Dixon said most of the patients she has observed seeking care at Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston are ineligible for an abortion.

     “Some of this is just outside of our ability to help,” Dixon said. “There are no babysitting services for people to send their children to while they go out of state, and there’s no guarantee that they won’t lose their jobs because they would be gone for two or three days. The issue is a lot bigger than even just finding resources for them to go elsewhere.”

     “People will fall through the cracks and wind up having to carry their pregnancies to term,” she added.

     The new law forbids abortions once cardiac activity is detected, usually at around six weeks of pregnancy, before most people know they are pregnant. The law allows no exceptions for rape or incest. Texas is the first state to effectively outlaw abortion at this point in pregnancies since Roe v. Wade.

     Many won’t be able to get an abortion outside of Texas because of financial or circumstantial challenges, including the cost of travel, difficulty taking time off from work or securing child care.

     Abortion-rights advocates and providers say Senate Bill 8, as the new law is known, will probably lead to an increase in patients carrying unwanted pregnancies to term. Consequently, many will feel the financial and health impacts of being turned away from a clinic for years to come.

     Denial of abortion leads to economic hardship
     While people of all socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds get abortions, about half of all individuals who obtain one live below the federal poverty level. When someone already struggling financially is denied care, it puts them in an even more difficult economic situation, said Diana Greene Foster, a professor in obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

     Foster is the leader of the Turnaway Study, a nationwide project that examined the long-term effects of either having an abortion or being turned away. The study found that people who were denied an abortion had almost four times greater odds of being below the federal poverty level.

     When individuals are blocked from obtaining care, she said, they are more likely to struggle to afford basic living expenses like food, housing and transportation.

     Meanwhile, people who carried an unwanted pregnancy to term experienced a 78 percent spike in debt that was a month or more past due after the time of birth and an 81 percent increase in reports of bankruptcies, evictions, and tax liens, compared to others who had access to abortion care. Individuals who are denied an abortion are also three times more likely to be unemployed than those who obtained one.

     “Laws that limit abortion access have a huge economic impact,” said Kate Bahn, director of labor market policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “It’s not just the year-over-year financial hardship associated with having children, but it also affects people’s career trajectories.”

     “If you don’t have certainty over family planning, you’re much less likely to move into a higher-paid occupation and complete education,” Bahn added.

     A likely increase in mental and physical health consequences
     Being denied an abortion can significantly increase mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and low self-esteem in the months after abortion denial and may cause life-threatening physical health outcomes that last years.

     Before the law took effect, Dr. Bhavik Kumar, a staff physician at Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston, typically saw 20 to 30 abortion care patients a day. On Sept. 1, he saw only six, and half were past the new legal limit and had to be turned away.

     Kumar cautioned that the patients denied care could face “lifelong consequences.”

     “The folks that will suffer are going to be low-income folks that already have poor access to health care, and people of color, especially Black women,” he said.

     One analysis of Turnaway Study data, which examined the physical health of those who did and did not terminate their pregnancy five years after seeking abortion care, found that patients who gave birth were more likely to describe their health as “poor” and reported higher rates of chronic pain.

     The physical and mental toll of childbirth plays a role in those adverse health outcomes, said Dr. Nisha Verma, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health and an OB-GYN who provides abortion care in the Washington, D.C., area. Those who carry to term could face excessive bleeding during delivery, postpartum depression, gestational diabetes and hypertension.

     “When we’re thinking about people’s health care, their pregnancies and their lives, every person is different, and no law like [S.B. 8] can take each unique situation into account,” Verma said.

     Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term is far riskier to someone’s physical health than having an abortion. About 700 people in the United States die each year as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the maternal mortality rate is 20.1 deaths per 100,000 live births. The total abortion-related complication rate is estimated to be about 2 percent, and death occurs in less than 1 out of every 100,000 abortions.

     Domestic violence is also common among people seeking abortions, with between 6 percent and 22 percent reporting recent violence from an intimate partner. Those who are turned away from getting an abortion are more likely to stay in contact with a violent partner, and they are more likely to raise the child alone.

     “These are personal, intimate decisions, and if the government interferes, it changes people’s ability to take care of themselves, their children and even to have future children under better circumstances,” Foster said. “It’s not just political maneuvering; this is real people’s lives.”

112. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 10:22 am

     The question GOP critics of Biden’s vaccine policy won’t answer:

     […]
     The question I’d love [numerous thugs] to answer is simple: How would mass civil disobedience help end the pandemic? To borrow the South Carolina [alleged-“]governor[” Henry McMaster]’s line, how would fighting the Biden administration’s vaccine policies “to the gates of hell,” bring this public health nightmare to an end?

     The answer, of course, is that it wouldn’t, and therein lies the problem: For far too many on the right, ending the pandemic isn’t the principal goal.

     Indeed, it’s why of all the Republicans who condemned Biden’s policy yesterday, none of them said it would be ineffective in combatting the public health crisis. They instead bypassed the efficacy question altogether, since it’s simply not part of their political offensive.

     The president and his detractors are having two very different kinds of conversations. Biden’s focus is on ending the pandemic and saving lives. His Republican critics are focused on amorphous concepts of freedom — as defined by conservative ideologues [hence the eejit quotes –blf] — and exploiting political opportunities for partisan gain.

     When it comes to Covid-19, public-health steps can be reduced to a simple question: Will the decision help end the pandemic or help extend it? The fact that so many Republicans find this binary dynamic irrelevant helps explain why the United States is still struggling so badly with the crisis.

113. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 10:28 am

     Oh FFS! Jefferson County [Colorado] shuts down mobile vaccine sites after drivers repeatedly harass staff:

     […]
     The executive director of Jefferson County Public Health, Dr Dawn Comstock, had to shut down several of mobile vaccine clinics after one driver ran over their sign, others screamed profanities at the vaccine staff and one driver even threw water on a nurse.

     “Unfortunately, this isn’t new,” Comstock said. “We’ve had someone throw live fireworks. We’ve had someone drive up onto a curb toward a vaccination staff member.

     Comstock says she’s fed up.

     “I respect everyone’s right to their own opinion. What I do not respect is violence and contempt and acting abusively toward Jefferson County Public Health staff,” Comstock said.

     […]

     “I’m tired of being polite and calling it misinformation,” Comstock said. “It is lies, and those lies are contributing to continued loss and suffering in our community.”

     […]

     Because, obviously, preventing everyone from being vaccinated is gonna scare the virus away and end the pandemic.

114. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 10:39 am

     An opinion column from Hawaiʻi, No Honor In Standing Up For What Is Wrong:

     Anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and Covid-deniers have been treated with kid gloves by everyone, but they are the draft-dodgers in the war against Covid.

     The vaccinated have had enough.

     As President Joe Biden put it in his speech this week announcing a new round of vaccine mandates:

     “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us.”

     […]

     They see the anti-vaxxers parade around town and they shake their heads and roll their eyes. They hear the anti-mask debate and think privately to themselves, “Wow, that’s madness standing right here in this grocery store line. Maybe you don’t care about dying, but I do. What about my rights?”

     But mostly, it’s past frustrating. It’s past impatience. It’s on to the disgust of witnessing a minority made up of self-important, wrong-thinking, antisocial hypocrites drag us to more deadly variants and more overloaded hospitals.

     […]

     Maybe if the virus was huge and covered with spiked and mossy scales like a dinosaur in the Jurassic Park series or a Star Wars sand worm, there would be pride and esprit de corps in all of us joining together to combat the scourge with guns and baseball bats and home-made rocket launchers.

     Because who doesn’t like a good old-fashioned ass-kicking? […]

     Instead, the fight against Covid-19 is nerdy and complicated and rooted in science, the class that was only truly fun when the Bunsen burners were involved.

     I’m not saying the anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-vaccine-passport people aren’t intellectual. No, wait. I am.

     How else would one describe those inexplicably clinging to false information and disproven conspiracy theories and their misuse of the idea of personal freedom to mean, I get to make my own rules regardless of how that affects my community and I’d rather die than admit I was wrong?

     […]

     The fight against Covid-19 […] is both wonky and gritty, involving both intellect and gut, both head and heart. It is super patriotic. It is supremely American — smart and determined and united for the greater good. It is absolutely like taking up arms against a vicious invader threatening our children’s future and our way of life.

     The anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and conspiracy theorists are the villagers who sit in their houses and refuse to join the fight. They’re the draft dodgers during the war. Their cry of personal choice is as anti-American as lying about bone spurs.

     History will not look back on them kindly, but that is a small concern at this point. The greater problem is the fake equivalency the anti-crowd has enjoyed from media outlets who treat their concerns as having equal weight to the advice of the medical community and who don’t question the larger implications of the skewed idea of personal freedom.

     What of the personal choices of those who took the vaccine because they don’t want to die?

     Biden addressed that, too.

     “For the vast majority of you who have gotten vaccinated, I understand your anger at those who haven’t gotten vaccinated. I understand the anxiety about getting a breakthrough case, but as the science makes clear, if you’re fully vaccinated, you’re highly protected from severe illness even if you get Covid-19 … You’re as safe as possible, and we’re doing everything we can to keep you that way, keep it that way, keep you safe.”

     There is also fake equivalency perpetuated by those in power who don’t like to be yelled at or called out on Twitter. Government officials and elected leaders have been so careful about giving lip service to “respecting personal choice” and providing expensive and cumbersome testing options to those who just refuse to do the right thing. The vaccinated masses are getting tired of that too.

     Stop kid-gloving these hold-outs. They’re exacerbating the worst thing that will happen in many of our lifetimes. […]

     Biden closed his remarks with a whispery, kind of creepy plea to “get vaccinated,” like some sage grandpa advice […].

     He should have yelled.

115. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 10:52 am

     In Mississippi, doctors who spread misinformation about COVID could lose their license:

     Strong words from the board charged with holding doctors accountable in Mississippi: if you put out misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine, your license could be in jeopardy.

     The move by the Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure comes as misinformation regarding the virus and vaccine aren’t just spreading on social media, but also in some doctors’ offices across the country.

     “I’ve seen many comments about Dr Dobbs[†] and some about me, saying that we’re just motivated by greed and money and power,” said Dr Mark Horne, who served as past president of the state’s medical association.

     […]

     “It’s offensive to me to look at the last month and know that over 1,000 Mississippians died in August, from COVID-19 related complications, and that the vast majority of those people did not need to die,” Horne said. “I find that it’s just deeply painful.”

     Four days ago, MSBML published a policy on misinformation, telling physicians across the state that if they generate and spread vaccine misinformation, they’re risking disciplinary action which could include suspending or revoking their license to practice medicine.

     The board’s policy states doctors licensed in Mississippi have an ethical obligation to ensure the medical information they provide is accurate and whether physicians recognize it or not, they possess a high degree of public trust because of their training and expertise, which gives them a powerful platform.

     […]

     The state’s medical board can only investigate once a complaint is filed. If you know a doctor who’s spreading misinformation, you can file a complaint with the agency by calling 601-987-3079.

     So it seems the Mississippi board has the same (self-perceived) problem as all(? most?) other health boards in the States: They “cannot” do anything except when there is a specific complaint.

       † “Dr Dobbs” does not seem to be identified in the article, but is very probably Dr Thomas Dobbs, the State Health Officer.

116. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 11:20 am

     COVID-19 conspiracy theorists ‘shamelessly’ using 9/11 anniversary to spread misinformation, experts say:

     […]
     I News report[ed] that Telegram channels […] are sharing messages conflating the two events, describing the pandemic and the terrorist attack as the elites waging a biological and genetic war against the population.

     The paper states that one message reads: Right now, with the excuse of a false pandemic crisis, we find ourselves in a similar situation, where our freedoms and constitutional rights are being threatened worldwide, in order to impose a toxic gene-therapy vaccine, using bribery.

     […]

     Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told I News: “Conspiracy theorists shamelessly recycle outlandish claims to fit the story of the day-whether it’s the anniversary of 9/11, the pandemic or any other major news story.

     “Their propaganda has been given new life by technology owned by companies that turn a blind eye to the spread of hate and misinformation.”

     […]

     From the I News report, Covid conspiracy theorists ‘shamelessly’ using 20th anniversary of 9/11 to spread pandemic falsehoods:

     Covid skeptics and conspiracists are drawing parallels between 9/11 and Covid-19, claiming the attack provided the blueprint for how governments ‘orchestrated’ the pandemic

     […]

     Key figures in the conspiracy movement including David Icke and the people behind a separate website which hosts Covid disinformation content are trying to use the anniversary of the attack two decades on to undermine the legitimacy of Covid-19.

     […] Icke, who has falsely claimed the pandemic was part of a plot by governments to destroy the economy and conduct mass surveillance, has released a video linking Covid-19 to 9/11 in the run up to Saturday’s anniversary.

     Another separate Covid-sceptic website, which promotes the work of prolific disinformation figures and anti-vaxxers, has released a video series citing similar false comparisons titled “Covid-19/11: Narratives Intertwined”.

     The series interviews key figures within the 9/11 and anti-lockdown conspiracy movement, and includes Robin Monotti, who previously compared lockdowns to Nazi eugenicist programmes, and runs a Telegram channel with Michael Yeadon who was a former vice president of Pfizer and has promoted disinformation about the Covid vaccine’s risk to pregnant women.

     Mr Monotti repeats a false conspiracy claim that BBC journalists had prior knowledge of 9/11, and claims that people should similarly distrust Government narratives on the pandemic.

     […]

     US journalist Mike Walter, who saw the third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, revealed last week in a new BBC documentary, Surviving 9/11, that he had invited truthers into his home to try to understand them.

     He said that despite telling them exactly what he saw, they suggested his eyes were playing tricks on him.

     The dismissal of his experience is a devastating insight into the impact of disinformation on people, and that twenty years on, the pandemic has shown that conspiracy theories can still prove dangerously potent.

     I don’t recall hearing of the Yeadon kook before. Apparently, he’s very possibly the origin of teh vaccines make woman infertile nonsense. Reuters has a long story about him, The ex-Pfizer scientist who became an anti-vax hero (March 2021). A snippet:

     Earlier this year, a group of Yeadon’s former Pfizer colleagues expressed their concern in a private letter, according to a draft reviewed by Reuters.

     “We have become acutely aware of your views on COVID-19 over the last few months … the single mindedness, lack of scientific rigour and one sided interpretation of often poor quality data is far removed from the Mike Yeadon we so respected and enjoyed working with.”

     Noting his “vast following on social media” and that his claim about infertility “has spread globally,” the group wrote, “We are very worried that you are putting people’s health at risk.”

     He apparently wanted all vaccine trials stopped, and, according to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge, he has “alleged that vaccines were part of a deliberate attempt at mass depopulation, saying recipients would die within two years.”

117. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 11:28 am

     Conspiracy theorists protest COVID measures in Slovenia:

     For months, journalists from the Slovenian public broadcast network, RTV, had been complaining that anti-vaccination protesters had been harassing, insulting and threatening them outside of their building in the capital, Ljubljana. The broadcasting network owns the building, but since the property around the offices is state-owned, protests and gatherings are allowed.

     […]

     The employees’ complaints went largely ignored by authorities — that is until last Friday, when when a group of anti-vaccination protestors and opponents of coronavirus-related restrictions stormed RTV Slovenia’s building.

     The night of 3 September […] about 20 people, who believed that the coronavirus did not exist, entered the building despite the security guards’ warnings. They made their way into the broadcasting studio, sharing live footage from their Facebook page. While RTV staff filmed them, the intruders insisted that they broadcast them live on the national news to address the country’s citizens.

     The police arrived — the protesters yelled at them, refusing to leave. Finally, special forces were called in to throw out the protestors. […]

     Slovenia’s current vaccination rate of 48 percent is lower than the European Union’s average of 65 percent. […]

     […] That same night, a container near the vaccination center was set on fire and put out by firefighters. Nearby, anti-governmental flyers were found. They read: The people will judge you very soon and For freedom and against COVID-passes terror.

118. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 11:44 am

     Oh FFS! QAnon Conspiracy Theorists Harass [Chicago] Northwest Side Hospital That Rejected Unproven Ivermectin Treatment For COVID Patient:

     AMITA Resurrection Hospital has gotten “hundreds” of calls and emails after a local woman hospitalized with COVID-19 claimed she was denied the drug, which is used to treat livestock with worms.

     […] Veronica Wolski was hospitalized two weeks ago after contracting COVID-19, according to VICE. She claims she asked a doctor to administer ivermectin and was refused, according to Wolski’s social media posts reviewed by VICE.

     […]

     Wolski, known for demonstrating on a bridge over the Kennedy Expressway [see below], has been chronicling her hospitalization via Telegram, according to VICE. After she was refused ivermectin, her friends urged supporters to protest outside the hospital earlier this week. Then, a prominent QAnon influencer encouraged supporters to call the facility and demand physicians agree to Wolski’s request for ivermectin, VICE reported.

     Asked about the VICE article, hospital spokeswoman Olga Solares confirmed the hospital has received “hundreds” of “phone calls and emails associated with this patient’s care.”

     […]

     A security guard [said] three or four people showed up to a planned protest Monday and the demonstration quickly “fizzled out.”

     Veronica Wolski is known for her so-called, People’s Bridge, where she drops anti-vaccine disinformation leaflets off a bridge in Chicago. She has been in the hospital with covid for two weeks.

     […]

     Arthur Caplan, the director of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, told CBS this week using ivermectin with its side effects is like throwing a “100-pound rock” that will hasten the death of an already sick person.

     “I know people are desperate, looking around for treatments, want to do something, anything they can think of. They see something promising on the internet and they believe it,” Caplan said. “Look at the side effects of ivermectin, look at the damage being done. Then you look at the vaccine and the problems it has — which are next to nothing. Take the vaccine, don’t get into the position where you need to use something like ivermectin.”

     Dr Allison Arwady, head of the Chicago Department of Public Health, has said 95 percent of Chicagoans hospitalized with and dying from COVID-19 recently are not vaccinated.

     The doctor has urged all people to take precautions, like wearing a mask indoors in public, to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

     And on Tuesday, she urged people not to take ivermectin to treat COVID-19.

     “In no case should anybody try to take a veterinary formula, ever, of any medication. And, unfortunately, this is what we’ve been seeing: People have been trying to buy veterinary formulations of this deworming medication,” Arwady said.

     People have been reported taking ivermectin in very large doses, leading to liver problems, nausea and “all kinds of issues,” she said.

     […]

     Perhaps anti-vaccine kooks have worms for a brain, hence the veterinary ivermectin… which makes about as much sense as using it to “treat” a case of Covid-19, rather than (usually) prevent a case, and (almost always) prevent any case from becoming serious, by using something jabbed over 5 billion times around the world. Gotta kill off all those worms that ate all teh brain cells !

119. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 11:59 am

     A Florida councilman who denied the pandemic was real has been hospitalized with COVID-19:

     […]
     Fred Lowry, a Florida councilman who denied the coronavirus pandemic was real, has been hospitalized with COVID-19.

     […]

     Lowry, who is also a senior pastor at the Deltona Lakes Baptist Church, faced calls for his resignation in June for his remarks during a sermon on May 30, the Daytona Times reported.

     […]

     We did not have a pandemic, folks. We were lied to, Lowry said, per the News-Journal,

     He also questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election, denied that climate change was man-made, and repeated the belief espoused by QAnon that a cabal of Democrats run a child abuse rings, per the News-Journal.

     This is supposed to be rampant I hear in Hollywood and among the elite. I don’t know if it’s true, but where there’s smoke…, he said, the News-Journal reported.

     Per the News-Journal, Lowry mocked White House chief medical advisor Dr Antony Fauci […], calling him Dr Falsey.

     I did not mispronounce that. That’s the way I wanted to say it,[†] he said, the News-Journal reported.

       † Despite being plausible, set in eejit quotes since he’s an eejit — and apparently a very Very sick fool, with double pneumonia, “a lung infection that affects both lungs at the same time and can develop in cases of severe COVID-19.”

120. tomh says

     12 September 2021 at 12:03 pm

     Texas attorney general sues schools for requiring masks
     CAMERON LANGFORD / September 10, 2021

     (CN) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued several school districts Friday for making their students and staff wear masks. He claims they are flouting the governor’s executive order intended to let Texans make health decisions free from government control….

     Governor Greg Abbott issued a mandate in July 2020 requiring Texans to wear masks in all buildings and crowded outdoor spaces during a surge of Covid cases.

     But after Texans started receiving Covid vaccines early this year, Abbott repealed the mask order and took up the mantra of personal responsibility.

     He issued executive order GA-38 in June barring government entities from forcing anyone to get vaccinated, and any jurisdiction from forcing people to wear masks, while encouraging residents of areas where Covid is spreading rapidly to wear them.

     Abbott did not budge even as the delta variant caused the number of Texans hospitalized with the virus to jump from around 1,600 on July 1 to 13,790 on Sept. 1….

     Abbott and Paxton convinced the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court on Aug. 15 to block the counties’ mask orders while the cases play out before lower courts.

     Just five days later, however, the state supreme court refused to block temporary restraining orders granted by a Democratic judge in Travis County, in the state capital Austin. The order allowed several school districts and the state’s most populous county Harris, whose seat is Houston, to proceed with mask edicts.

     Paxton’s lawsuits filed Friday against the Galveston, Richardson, Round Rock, Elgin, Spring and Sherman independent school districts will likely add more confusion and conflicting orders to the legal battle over masks.

     “Defendants are deliberately violating state law. In flouting GA-38’s ban on mask mandates, defendants challenge the policy choices made by the state’s commander in chief during times of disaster,” opens Paxton’s lawsuit against Round Rock ISD, its superintendent and school board members….

     Paxton and Abbott are also eager to sue President Joe Biden over his new push to get shots in the arms of 80 million unvaccinated Americans.

     “Biden’s new nat’l vaxx mandate on private biz may be the most unconstitutional, illegal thing I’ve ever seen out of any Admin in modern American history,” Paxton tweeted Friday. “This is an egregious, tyrannical power grab that stands no chance in court. I’ll be suing this disastrous Admin very soon.”

     More than 58,000 Texans have died from the coronavirus, there are an estimated 308,340 active cases in the state and 306 children are hospitalized with the virus, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

121. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 12:25 pm

     Why vaccine skeptics are all in on ivermectin:

     […]
     How have unapproved remedies that do not show signs of working and could be harmful instead come to be in high demand among people who reject vaccines and other tested preventive strategies? It’s a question of trust and distrust — and of which experts people listen to.

     Rogue remedies like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are most popular among people who are skeptical of vaccines and other treatments — precisely because those treatments haven’t gone through the same process of scientific and expert review that they distrust. For people who are suspicious of mainstream scientific thought, information that appears to come from other sources often seems independent, insightful and brave. These skeptics insist that they can evaluate health information themselves, and contested claims from nonofficial sources let them feel like they’re doing so, which can paradoxically make those claims seem truer and therefore more appealing than the mainstream ones.

     […]

     Doing your own research[†] sounds compelling. People commonly “research” appliances, new restaurants or consumer products. This kind of “research” is a process of gathering information, reading others’ personal experiences and impressions and evaluating their relevance. However, none of that is actually what science involves. Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge using systematic methodologies based on evidence. Science is slow and methodical, and it aims to create knowledge that is generalizable, beyond the individual interpreting it.

     For people who largely trust government agencies, expert panels that review research and make recommendations, and peer-review processes, “follow the science” seems like a clear mandate. The idea is that expert knowledge, derived from rigorous methods, should guide policy and practice. Vaccines against the coronavirus, for example, were systematically tested in tens of thousands of volunteers, and they’re trustworthy because of the processes by which they were evaluated. Some clinical trials of vaccines failed to show efficacy, making the ones that succeeded compelling. All are continually monitored with ongoing data analysis of vaccine safety and efficacy. For those who trust science, the systems work.

     In the case of ivermectin, scientists found that the medication could kill the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a laboratory setting. But to be useful in practice, this finding had to be studied in actual people and with methods that allow for a causal relationship between the drug and the improvement in the people who take it to be measured. Although there were initial positive reports that ivermectin could help, those studies did not adhere to the methodological expectations of good science, and some have been found to have had issues with the data. Overwhelmingly, there is consensus among scientists that ivermectin does not cure covid. “Following the science” leads to the conclusion that the drug should not be taken to treat covid.

     For those who do not trust the agencies and scientists who decide what standard should be used in research, though, the conclusion that ivermectin should not be used to treat covid feels untrue. Some are reading online accounts of individuals who took ivermectin and recovered — anecdotal evidence that is devalued in clinical trials and outcomes research but is nonetheless compelling to readers. Others listen to medical practitioners who speak out against mainstream science and medicine, seeing them as a kind of scientific whistleblower, speaking truth to power.

     For example, Pierre Kory, an American physician who testified before Congress in December 2020 that ivermectin is a miracle drug for treating covid, insists that the lack of support for the medicine as a covid treatment is financially and politically motivated. Why, he and others suggest, would companies support repurposing existing drugs when they could develop new, more expensive drugs and increase profits? Many label Kory’s statements misinformation, to which he responds, It’s because I’m providing information that is not supported by the establishment, right? So anything that doesn’t agree with them is misinformation, but what they do is disinformation. … The science around ivermectin is up against one of the largest and most powerful disinformation campaigns, I think almost ever.

     FFS, even if fad-of-the-day is an effective treatment, it shouldn’t be Plan A. Plan A is an effective prevenative, which also happens to be safe and free. Weirdly, none of those fads du jour ever seem to be free…

     […] Merck, a large manufacturer of ivermectin that does not have a vaccine against covid and which seemingly could profit from the treatment’s growing demand, issued a statement [Merck Statement on Ivermectin use During the COVID-19 Pandemic] denouncing its use for covid.

     But that statement, which cuts against the drugmaker’s profit motives, doesn’t seem to have dampened the desire for its product. Nor does the fact that many marginalized expert voices have their own profits at stake, too. For example, Joe Mercola, a physician[quack] and longtime opponent of vaccines, has amassed millions selling purported alternatives to vaccines. Subscriptions to sites that promise information to avoid covid, telemedicine visits that promise access to ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, or templates and tools for vaccine and mask exemptions are big business. And the business model is predicated on furthering distrust of science rather than dialogue about it.

     […]

     Desperation to save a loved one is understandable, as is a desire to find solutions that seem novel and miraculous. A purported miracle drug sounds better than the alternative: accepting that following the science is often messy and slow. But that slow process is what provides the best path to finding new answers to complicated questions — and ultimately, it’s worth trusting.

       † Set in eejit quotes because in the vaccine / virus context, it very often seems to mean finding some fool of a quack or other bogus expert — or anecdotal unverified claims — to validate presuppositions or pre-formed “conclusions”.

122. KG says

     12 September 2021 at 12:54 pm

     Why, he [Pierre Kory, ivermectin fan] and others suggest, would companies support repurposing existing drugs when they could develop new, more expensive drugs and increase profits? – blf@120

     Odd that the evil Big Pharma companies have not even attempted to block the use of dexamethasone, a cheap and fairly effective treatment in severe cases of Covid-19. But I’m sure Kory can explain that.

123. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 1:03 pm

     FFS (but not unexpected)! Joe Rogan doubles down on unproven ivermectin after bout with COVID-19:

     Joe Rogan returned from his battle with COVID-19 on Tuesday and began spreading misinformation[, pushing] anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and touted ivermectin, a drug with no proven ability to treat the coronavirus.

     […] He claimed that he was treated with monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, Z-Pak, prednisone, everything. I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip and I did that three days in a row.

     […] Rogan insisted on Tuesday that it was the ivermectin that cured him, without presenting specific evidence. He also blasted media reports and public health advice that contradicted his claims.

     They tried to make it seem like I’m doing some wacky s*** that’s completely ineffective, Rogan said. What they didn’t highlight is that I got better.

     […]

     Rogan said his doctor[quack] prescribed him ivermectin, and that he got the human-safe version of it from Dr[quack] Pierre Kory, who has pushed the drug on The Joe Rogan Experience in the past. Kory is the co-founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, a group that is aggressively pushing ivermectin online.

     Kory has claimed that he is being censored after a journal rejected his paper about ivermectin due to several unsupported claims. “In our view, this paper does not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution,” the journal [Article rejection: Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19] said in March.

     Rogan also falsely claimed on his show that Japan had approved ivermectin for treating COVID-19. He appeared to be referring to comments made by Haruo Ozaki, chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, which has no say in the decisions of the Japanese government.

     Ozaki has said there is not enough evidence to prove that ivermectin does or does not work, but he’s cautiously suggested it’s worth trying due to the COVID-19 “crisis,” the AFP reports.

     […]

     A snippet from that rejection of quack Kory’s “study” (link embedded in above excerpt):

     [… T]he article made a series of strong, unsupported claims based on studies with insufficient statistical significance, and at times, without the use of control groups. Further, the authors promoted their own specific ivermectin-based treatment which is inappropriate for a review article and against our editorial policies.

     In our view, this paper does not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution to the evaluation of ivermectin as a potential treatment for COVID-19. Frontiers’ has published more than 2,000 rigorously peer-reviewed articles on COVID-19 since the pandemic erupted via our Coronavirus Knowledge Hub, and we are acutely aware of just how critical high-quality, objective research in this area is at this time. Frontiers takes no position on the efficacy of ivermectin as a treatment of patients with COVID-19, however, we do take a very firm stance against unbalanced or unsupported scientific conclusions.

     Sounds somewhat similar to what quack Didier Raoult in Marseille did with hydroxychloroquine — not objective or balanced, poor (and also nonexistent) controls, etc. Quack Raoult also did a Wakefield, with essentially-nonexistent ethics, “experimenting” on young children. Apparently, quack Raoult then also falsely-labelled his “studies” as retrospective, avoiding the need for ethical review. And like Wakefield, quack Raoult sicced his rabid followers on critics, reviewers, etc. (I also have a very vague memory that quack Raoult had some financial ties involving hydroxychloroquine — again, very Wakefield-ish, who was trying to discredit the MMR vaccine in favour of his(?) vaccine. However, I’ve not been able to confirm that recollection with some admittedly quick searches.)

124. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 1:12 pm

     Some snippets from Northern Idaho’s anti-government streak hinders fight against Covid:

     State representative Heather Scott, a Republican from Blanchard in the northern part of the state, refused an interview request, saying reporters were liars. Scott promoted mask-burning protests around northern Idaho and the rest of the state earlier this year. She is also among the lawmakers that have frequently pushed misinformation about Covid-19 on Facebook.

     Last year, armed groups patrolled the city’s [Coeur d’Alene] downtown core to protect against non-existent Black Lives Matter protesters.

     Covid-19 has thrived in this environment.

     Kootenai Health has 200 beds for medical or surgical patients. On Wednesday, Kootenai Health’s doctors and nurses were caring for 218 medical and surgical patients, aided by military doctors and nurses called in to help with the surge.

     On Friday, the hospital tallied 101 Covid-19 patients, including 35 requiring critical care. The hospital normally has just 26 intensive care unit beds.

125. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 1:21 pm

     Google Cuts Off Ad Money To ‘Gateway Pundit,’ A Haven For Vaccine And Election Misinformation:

     Google has finally pulled the plug on the ad dollars flowing to the Gateway Pundit, a leading source of false information about covid-19, vaccines and the 2020 presidential election.

     Google’s decision to demonitize Gateway Pundit likely represents a major blow to the site. An analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate had previously estimated that Gateway Pundit had earned over a million dollars using Google’s AdSense from November 2020 through last June. Destinations like Gateway Pundit struggle to bring in traditional advertising because of their controversial content, and its status within Google’s Adsense seemed unusual given what it published on its site. […]

     Gateway Pundit’s place online — and its ability to earn money through mainstream, reputable sources like Google AdSense — highlighted how widespread misinformation on the web has gotten, spreading far beyond darkened corners and private groups on social media. It can just as easily exist out in the open, sucking up advertising dollars from companies like Patagonia, Canon cameras and Columbia University through Gooogle [sic] AdSense. (An important note: Those businesses didn’t deliberately choose to place their marketing material on Gateway Pundit. Those advertisers pay to place their ads in AdSense, but it’s up to AdSense’s software then to determine where they’ll go.)

     Unsurprisingly, the lost funding hasn’t changed Gateway Pundit’s editorial mission. Its most popular story on Friday was about a boat party for Trump supports in Florida. The second- and third-most-popular stories again focused on false conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.

126. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 1:28 pm

     Opinion column in Colorado, Anger is the only reasonable response to COVID obstructionists:

     We want mandates

     [… N]ow, as we suffer through a second summer of illness and death, we find ourselves confronted with a category of people whose behavior is despicable — the COVID obstructionists, the ones who not only refuse to protect themselves but actively prevent others from doing so.

     There’s no point trying to understand them, no reasoning with them. They deserve no patience, no forbearance. The only reasonable response to these miscreants is anger. White hot anger.

     Last weekend, Jefferson County Public Health staff were forced to close a mobile vaccination clinic after medical professionals were harassed and threatened. [see @112 …]

     Colorado has long had its own COVID deniers, like Republican state Rep Patrick Neville, who sued the governor over mask mandates, and various sheriffs who refused to enforce mask rules, and Republican US Rep Lauren Boebert, who defied a public health order when she kept her Rifle restaurant open for sit-down service in May 2020.

     Such tantrums set the tone for what was to come.

     […] Eleven states have prohibited mask mandates. And there are innumerable individual acts of obstruction of the sort witnessed in Jefferson County last weekend.

     To what end? The country is gripped by a fourth wave of infections, and hospitals in many parts of the country, including Colorado, are approaching or exceeding capacity as unvaccinated patients pour in.

     In the beginning of the pandemic, it was easier to tolerate ignorance and stubbornness. Not anymore, not with nearly 700,000 or more dead and the highly-contagious delta variant tearing through the population. Now we want severity. We want mask requirements. We want vaccine mandates. We want crisis standards of care that prioritize vaccinated patients.

     We will grieve for the unvaccinated who don’t make it, but there’s only so much room in our hearts, because we’re grieving the loss of our own loved ones who did not have to die. They could still be with us, and we are angry that they’re not.

127. Lynna, OM says

     12 September 2021 at 1:37 pm

     Even in red states, colleges gravitate to requiring vaccines and masks

     As students head to college this fall, hundreds of schools are requiring employees and students to be vaccinated against COVID-19, wear masks on campus, or both.

     But at some schools, partisan politics have bolstered efforts to stymie public health protections.

     […] As the fall semester approached, Richard Creswick, an astrophysics professor at the University of South Carolina, was looking forward to returning to the classroom and teaching in person. He felt it would be fairly safe. His graduate-level classes generally had fewer than a dozen students enrolled, and the school had announced it would require everyone on campus to wear masks indoors unless they were in their dorm rooms, offices or dining facilities. For Creswick, 69, that was important because he did not want his working on campus to add to the COVID-19 risk for his wife, Vickie Eslinger, 73, who has been undergoing treatment for breast cancer.

     But state Attorney General Alan Wilson weighed in early in August, sending a letter to the school’s interim president, Harris Pastides, that a budget provision passed by the state legislature prohibited the university from imposing a mask mandate. Pastides, who previously served as dean of the university’s school of public health, rescinded the mask mandate, although he encouraged people to still use them.

     […] After the university revoked its mask mandate, Wilson sent out a campaign fundraising letter within days touting his intervention in public health measures and stating, “The fight over vaccines and masks has never been about science or health. It’s about expanding the government’s control over our daily lives.”

     Creswick and Eslinger, who felt strongly that the mask mandate was indeed about health, filed a lawsuit, arguing that the legislative provision cited by the attorney general did not prohibit a universal mask mandate. The state Supreme Court took up the case on an expedited basis and on Aug. 20 ruled 6-0 in their favor.

     The school immediately reinstated its mask mandate and other colleges in the state followed suit. [Good news!]

     […] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone at colleges and universities wear masks indoors, even if they are fully vaccinated, in locales with substantial or high transmission of the coronavirus. Most of the country meets that standard at this point. The CDC also recommends that colleges offer and promote COVID-19 vaccines.

     […] As of Aug. 26, the Chronicle of Higher Education had tallied 805 campuses that require at least some employees or students to be vaccinated. Most schools grant exemptions from the vaccine mandate, often for religious or medical reasons. And hundreds of colleges are requiring students and staff members to wear masks on campus this fall, according to a running tally by University Business.

     Still, 12 conservative-leaning states prohibit vaccine mandates at higher education institutions, according to an analysis by the National Academy for State Health Policy. […]

     At Indiana University, a group of students challenged the school’s vaccine mandate on the grounds it violated their constitutional right to “bodily integrity, autonomy and medical choice.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit refused to block the school’s policy. The court reasoned the universities can decide what they need to do to keep students safe in communal settings. The students then appealed to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who refused without explanation to block the mandate.

     […] for teachers, whose professions are rooted in encouraging the pursuit of learning and knowledge, prohibitions that fly in the face of science and jeopardize public health can be tough to swallow.

     “It’s completely demoralizing to realize that our health and safety has been trumped by politics,” said Becky Hawbaker, an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa, who is president of United Faculty, the union representing 600 faculty members at the school. “It seems like you know a train wreck is coming and you’re sounding the alarm, and no one seems to listen.”

     […] In May, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, signed a law prohibiting mask mandates at K-12 schools, and within city and county governments. A few days later, the Iowa Board of Regents, which oversees the University of Northern Iowa, the University of Iowa, and Iowa State University, lifted emergency rules that had been in place the previous year requiring indoor masking and physical distancing at the colleges.

     The University of Northern Iowa held classes in person throughout the past school year without major problems, using those mask and distancing requirements, Hawbaker said. But with the rise of the delta variant and the increase in COVID-19 cases in the community, now is not the time to remove safety restrictions, the union asserts.

     So far, more than 200 people have signed an August letter sent by the union to the Board of Regents requesting mask and vaccine mandates on campus, and classroom changes to allow physical distancing, Hawbaker said. […]

     Some of those colleges had to fight really hard for their mask and/or vaccine mandates.

128. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 1:41 pm

     Opinion column in Alaska, Hospital vaccine mandates make sense:

     […]
     Responding to record high COVID hospitalizations last week, Foundation Health Partners mandated employees be vaccinated at its three Fairbanks area health care facilities. On Wednesday in Anchorage, Mayor Dave Bronson claimed his email box is blowing up with people who are health care professionals and who refused to take the vaccine, and to the point where they’ll walk away from their job.

     Whilst the claim by the alleged-“Mayor” is, sadly, possibly plausible (this is Alaska!), I decided to set it in eejit quotes because some quick research shows he is indeed an eejit — e.g., from Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge, “Bronson has refused to enact mask or vaccine requirements, saying that it was a matter of personal choice. He said he would not get a vaccine, calling it experimental.”

     In this disagreement, there’s no reason to side with the politician unless he produces the goods.

     Now, I understand the privacy concerns related to the individual decisions of health care providers. But I think the public ought to hear why any of them told Bronson they’re prepared to quit their jobs if their employer requires that they get vaccinated.

     So, starting with one the most bizarre conspiracies circulating in the social media swamps, let’s run through why some people are opposed to getting vaccinated.

     A year ago, Tucker Carlson warned his Fox News viewers that Bill Gates would push mandatory vaccinations as a pretext for mass social control. That morphed into a plot to use the vaccines to implant microchips in people.

     I’m confident there aren’t any health care professionals who believe such nonsense. But if that’s why some refuse to be vaccinated, the public would be better served if they left the medical profession entirely.

     There’s a lot of Americans who believe the threat from COVID-19 has been exaggerated by politicians, medical experts, and the mainstream media. Anyone working in a health care facility right now should know that’s not true. And they don’t belong there if they’re telling anyone it is true.

     […]

     Another vaccination concern originates with distrust for the government agencies responsible for approving them, the companies that helped develop them, and America’s medical institutions. But any doctor or nurse who feels that way is unlikely to be working alongside others who put so much trust in the profession as a whole.

     […]

     Essentially, I’m arguing that doctors, nurses, radiologists, lab technicians and pharmacists need a legitimate scientific reason to refuse to be vaccinated. And if they think the vaccines were hastily approved, production wasn’t adequately controlled, or that we’re being misled about the side effects, that belief must be based on well-documented, accredited research.

     It’s in the public interest that such information not be withheld solely to protect their employment status or privacy rights. But at a minimum, they should voluntarily share the fact they’re not vaccinated and the reason they made that choice with any patient they treat.

     As for Bronson, if many of the emails he received raised serious medical concerns about being vaccinated, then he has a responsibility to obtain permission to share that information with their names. Otherwise, instead of duly informing the public of the vaccines’ serious risks, he’s offering little more than hearsay.

     My suspicion, however, is that most objections were not based in medical science. And the only reason he used his bullhorn to spread their message is it suited the political agenda he established during his campaign for office.

129. Lynna, OM says

     12 September 2021 at 1:42 pm

     Trump’s 9/11 Statement is a Disgusting Display of Narcissism and an Insult to America

     […] On September 11, 2001, the nation was changed in ways it could not have previously imagined. It was a day of unthinkable loss. But it was also a day that was followed by weeks and months and years of inspiring expressions of heroism, hope, and unity.

     On this day of remembrance, four American presidents of both political parties – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – came together to pay tribute to those who were lost and those who worked tirelessly and selflessly to save lives and rebuild.

     Unfortunately, there is another former president who simply doesn’t have the compassion to participate in such displays of empathy and patriotism. On this day Donald Trump released a statement that affirmed his utter absence of the basic human decency that defines America in times of hardship.

     Trump’s offensive “tribute” to the victims and heroes of 9/11 lasted for about 24 seconds of the video that ran 1:44. He then spent the remainder of his remarks attacking President Biden. He began by blaming Biden for how the war in Afghanistan ended, despite the fact that it was Trump’s plan that led to the Taliban’s victory. He released 5,000 of their fighters and lifted all of the financial sanctions in what his own National Security Advisor lambasted as a “surrender agreement”.

     Here’s a taste of Trump’s self-serving and anti-American ranting on a day that should be a solemn occasion (posted here by his spokes-shill, if you have the stomach for it):

     “The leader of our country was made to look like a fool, and that can never be allowed to happen. It was caused by bad planning, incredible weakness, and leaders who truly didn’t understand what was happening. This is the 20th year of this war and should have been a year of victory, honor and strength. Instead Joe Biden and his inept administration surrendered in defeat. We will live on, but sadly our country will be wounded for a long period of time. We will struggle to recover from the embarrassment this incompetence has caused. Do not fear however. America will be made great again.”

     […] He soiled the seriousness of the day with his jealousy and bitterness because Biden was able to accomplish goals that he could only whine about. […]

     Also on this day, Trump thought it would be appropriate to “honor” its memory by partying with his boxing pals as he serves as the featured commentator for an exhibition match at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. For fifty bucks a pop Trump is turning this anniversary into another opportunity to fleece his cult disciples.

     By contrast, President Biden is visiting all three sites that were struck on 9/11. He is paying his respects to the fallen, their families, and those who sacrificed in rescue, recovery and rebuilding efforts. […]

     The differences between Biden’s respectful and hopeful message, and Trump’s selfish, envious, and hate-filled harangue, could not be more distinct. But it is also no more than we expect from a lying, unpatriotic, greedy, sociopathic, narcissist, who couldn’t care less about this country or its people.

130. Lynna, OM says

     12 September 2021 at 1:50 pm

     Another home-grown terrorist pleads guilty, but claims he was just engaging in “political hyperbole.”

     A man who officials say traveled to Washington, D.C. for Jan. 6 and threatened to shoot Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the head on live television pleaded guilty Friday.

     Cleveland Meredith Jr., 53, pleaded guilty to one count interstate communication of threats because of a text message he sent to a relative on Jan. 7.

     “Thinking about heading over to Pelosi C—’s speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV,” it read, according to authorities, followed by a purple devil emoji.

     He admitted to sending the text message in a plea deal, but argued that it was “political hyperbole.” […]

     He had a Tavor X95 rifle, a Glock 9mm handgun and roughly 2,500 rounds of ammunition with him, officials said.

     Agents spoke with Meredith at his hotel in Washington on Jan. 7, and he agreed to let authorities search his hotel room, his truck, a trailer and his telephone.

     He was charged with interstate communication of threats, possession of unregistered firearms, possession of unregistered ammunition and possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device. […]

     In other text messages sent on Jan. 7 with the same relative, Meredith wrote: “I’m gonna run that C— Pelosi over while she chews on her gums,” according to court documents. […]

     He is the 65th of roughly 600 defendants charged to plead guilty in connection to the riots.

     Link

     “He had a Tavor X95 rifle, a Glock 9mm handgun and roughly 2,500 rounds of ammunition with him …” That doesn’t back up his claim of hyperbole. He was prepared to shoot Nancy Pelosi.

131. Lynna, OM says

     12 September 2021 at 1:58 pm

     Wonkette: Trump Spent 9/11 Teaching The Moonies A Thing Or Two About Brainwashing

     Most of us, probably, did not do anything too fabulously important yesterday. […] but I am not a former US President. Donald Trump […] decided to commemorate 9/11 in part by giving a speech to the Moonies and making an appearance at some kind of MMA thing.

     The speech occurred during the Unification Church’s latest “Rally of Hope” event, and involved Trump praising the Church itself, current leader Hak Ja Han and her deceased husband, the notorious Reverend Sun Myung Moon. He praised Moon in particular for “founding The Washington Times, an organization for which I have tremendous respect and admiration.” [video is available at the link]

     Trump had nothing but praise for the church, stating

     What they have achieved on the [Korean] Peninsula is just amazing. In a few decades, the inspiration they have caused for the entire planet is unbelievable, and I congratulate you again and again. In less than one lifetime they took a war-torn land and turned it into one of the great nations and great democracies of the world, while standing as America’s friend and ally. Their example reminds all of us who strive for peace and a better future, that we should never give up and never, ever lose hope.

     He’s not the first Republican to speak at one of these shindigs. He’s not even the first person from his own administration. That honor belongs to Mike Pence, who appeared at their Rally of Hope last year.

     The Moons are known in the church as the “True Parents” and are indeed considered literal deities. Adam and Eve were the original True Parents but they screwed everything up by eating an apple, which the Church considers a metaphor for having had sex before they were supposed to. Then Jesus was supposed to come down and save everybody, but he failed because he got crucified before he could do that. The Moons are just the latest in a series of divinely created beings meant to lead people to God and what they call the “spirit world.” They also believe that the children who are the products of the mass public arranged marriages are “blessed children” born without original sin, which is why it’s super awkward for them when those kids leave the church or turn out to be gay, which the church frowns upon. [Twitter responses to Trump’s ridiculous speech are available at the link]
     […]

     Trump as a Moonie is weirdly appropriate.

132. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 2:02 pm

     Bulgaria, EU’s least vaccinated nation, faces deadly surge:

     Standing outside the rundown public hospital in Bulgaria’s northern town of Veliko Tarnovo, the vaccination unit’s chief nurse voices a sad reality about her fellow citizens: “They don’t believe in vaccines.”

     Bulgaria has one of the highest coronavirus death rates in the 27-nation European Union and is facing a new, rapid surge of infections due to the more infectious delta variant. Despite that, people in this Balkan nation are the most hesitant in the bloc to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

     Only 20% of adults in Bulgaria, which has a population of 7 million, have so far been fully vaccinated. That puts it last in the EU, which has an average of 69% fully vaccinated.

     […] Sibila Marinova, manager of Veliko Tarnovo’s intensive care unit, says the full Covid-19 ICU ward in her hospital shows [an eejit’s claim I don’t believe vaccines work is] simply not true.

     “100% of the ICU patients are unvaccinated,” she told the AP, adding that staff shortages are only piling on more pressure.

     And she said she’s angry that so many Bulgarians are refusing to get jabbed.

     Bulgaria has access to all four of the vaccines approved by the EU — Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson. But since the start of the pandemic, more than 19,000 people in Bulgaria have died of Covid-19, the EU’s third-highest death rate, behind only the Czech Republic and Hungary. In the last week, an average of 41 people have died each day.

     […] 71-year-old retiree Zhelyazko Marinov doesn’t want to get vaccinated.

     I think[hallucinate] I’m healthy enough and have a good natural immunity, he said, adding that he could be persuaded to get vaccinated if he couldn’t travel without a vaccine certificate.[←Powers-that-be, take notice!]

     Mariya Sharkova, a public health law specialist, believes that Bulgaria’s worryingly low vaccine uptake is the result of residents’ low trust in official institutions, along with fake news about the shots, political instability and a weak national vaccination campaign.

     “In Bulgaria, we don’t have good health literacy,” she told the AP. “Many people choose to believe conspiracy theories and fake news.”

     Only vaccines that are mandatory in Bulgaria — such as measles, mumps and rubella — have a high uptake. Sharkova said some blame has to lie with the government’s vaccination program.

     “They didn’t build any strategy on how to fight vaccine hesitancy,” she said. “We didn’t have any real information campaign for the vaccines. The ministry of health relies mainly on announcements on the ministry’s website [Good grief!], and I don’t think anyone actually goes on and reads it.”

     “The best policy for such hesitant countries and populations as ours are mandatory vaccines,” said Sharkova, who is dismayed that national TV channels often invite vaccine-skeptic doctors[quacks] to be on their programs.

     […]

     Hriska Zhelyazkova, a 67-year-old military officer from the coastal city of Burgas, says she distrusts vaccines because they were created so quickly[†] — apparently unaware that years of research laid the groundwork for the vaccine shots, which now have been used in hundreds of millions of people with exceedingly rare serious side effects. [Billions of people, actually…]

     Still, she said she may get vaccinated if authorities slap tougher restrictions on unvaccinated people.[←Powers-that-be, take notice!]

     Back at the Veliko Tarnovo hospital, pro-vaccination drawings colored by children hang on the walls. “You are our superheroes,” one caption read.

     […]

       † Set in eejit quotes because whilst the Covid-19 vaccines were developed at unprecedented speed, that never has been a good or sensible reason to be suspicious of them; e.g., the approval procedures for an EUA are essentially-identical to those for a full license. In addition, as the article notes, zillions of people have been safely vaccinated, and the vaccines are working.

133. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 2:15 pm

     Lynna@130, “Trump as a Moonie is weirdly appropriate.”

     Hair furor would insist on both being Moon (the founding nutcase, not the Massive Orbital Cheese Vault) and teh messiah / nouveau Adam the cult is waiting for who will “become the new head of the human race” (according to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge). They’ve also apparently got some weird idea about “indemnity”, which hair furor would further misconstrue to his own advantage.

134. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 2:39 pm

     What would it take for antivaxxers and climate science deniers to ‘wake up’?:

     […]
     In 1927, an article in the venerable medical journal the Lancet commented on the opposition to smallpox vaccination in terms that have an eerie resonance today.

     “We still meet the belief … that vaccination is a gigantic fraud deliberately perpetuated for the sake of gain … The opposition to vaccination … like many emotional reactions, is supported by a wealth of argument which the person reacting honestly believes to be the logical foundation of his behaviour.”

     When I first read this, I was researching climate science denial. But it fits the fervent beliefs of Covid deniers and antivaxxers just as well.

     Prone to “conspiracist ideation”, many anti-vaccination activists appear to believe Covid-19 is a hoax. They dismiss experts as frauds lining their pockets, refuse to accept any evidence that contradicts their beliefs, and create their own world of self-reinforcing truth.

     Antivaxxers seize on an occasional dissenting study and exploit it for all it’s worth even after it has been discredited. A one in a million chance of an adverse effect is confirmation of everything they’ve been saying, even though many medical interventions […] have higher risks. A single anecdote is enough to invalidate a mountain of carefully collected scientific evidence.

     In the same way, climate science deniers seize on an unseasonable snowstorm or a year that bucks the warming trend as vindication. One dissenting study, even if invalidated, is enough to disprove an entire IPCC report.

     [… other parallels…]

     While the paranoid mindset and arguments of antivaxxers and climate deniers can appear very similar, there are important differences between the politics of the two phenomena.

     Firstly, while climate science denial is found mainly on the right of the political spectrum, antivaxxers can be found at both ends. […]

     Second, while antivax activism is not respectable in the political mainstream, climate denial is rife, although thinly concealed. The influx of deniers into [Ozland’s] Liberal and National parties has set the political agenda for years. […]

     Third, while the mainstream media treat Covid deniers and antivaxxers with disdain, sections of the media have for years actively promoted climate science denial. The Australian has published hundreds of news stories disparaging climate science and hundreds of opinion pieces packed with misinformation, and conspiracy.

     Fourth, while Covid denial and antivax conspiracy theories have grown organically, climate science denial was manufactured and spread by powerful interests. […]

     What would it take for antivaxxers and climate science deniers to “wake up”? Studies have shown that facts are puny against the carapace of denial when people’s sense of self is at stake.

     However, in the case of antivaxxers, imminent death seems to do the trick. In the US, the death-bed conversions of a number of high-profile antivaxxers who caught the virus has attracted attention, and mockery. [And elsewhere, measures like France’s Health Pass have boosted vaccination rates (also see @131) –blf]

     […]

     A large majority of the public has always supported climate action, though mostly without much conviction. That is now changing, which may explain why [Ozland’s alleged-“PM”] Scott Morrison is trying to recalibrate and the Murdoch media are said to be changing their position on climate action.[†]

     If true, it only confirms that they pick and choose from the science to suit a political agenda.

       † In both cases, as I currently understand it, the claim is Morricoal and Murderall are tepidly moving to consider claiming to support net zero (carbon) emissions (possibly as soon as 2050), albeit only for a few weeks until teh rabble looses interest.

135. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 2:48 pm

     Salesforce offers to help staff leave Texas as abortion law takes effect:

     […]
     The cloud-based software giant Salesforce is offering to help relocate employees out of Texas following the state’s enactment of its extreme new abortion law.

     Referring to the “incredibly personal issues” that the law creates, a message to the company’s entire workforce sent late on Friday said any employee and their family wishing to move elsewhere would receive assistance.

     […]

     The ride-share companies Lyft and Uber have both said they will pay the legal costs of any drivers sued for transporting women to or from procedures. Meanwhile, Match Group, which owns the dating app Tinder, and its rival Bumble, which is also based in Texas, have set up funds for employees seeking abortions out of state.

     “The company generally does not take political stands unless it is relevant to our business. But in this instance, I personally, as a woman in Texas, could not keep silent,” the Match chief executive, Shar Dubey, said in a memo to workers.

     [… Salesforce] has a history of involvement in politics. In 2015, [CEO Marc] Benioff said Salesforce was “dramatically reducing” its investment in Indiana in protest against a religious freedom law that critics said promoted discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.

     The state’s then governor and later US vice-president[ranting poodle], Mike Pence, was forced to sign a “clarification” to the law after a fierce backlash from companies and gay rights activists.

136. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 3:10 pm

     White House Doesn’t Deny Vaccine Mandate for Domestic Flights Could Be Coming:

     COVID-19 vaccine mandates for domestic air travelers could be next on President Joe Biden’s agenda, after he announced sweeping mandates on the US workforce this week.

     […]

     “We didn’t anticipate that when there was a vaccine approved under a Republican president — that the Republican president took — that there would be such hesitation, vehement opposition in some cases, from so many people of his own party,” [White House press secretary Jen] Psaki said of the [recent mandates]. “We didn’t anticipate that.”

     […]

     Here in France, you need the Health Pass to travel on long-distance trains (e.g., TGV). Probably also applies to (long-distance) buses and (all?) domestic flights (I’m uncertain), and (with a few exceptions) cross international (intra-EU) borders.

137. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 3:18 pm

     An opinion column in Arkansas, Exasperated and frustrated:

     “I’ve about had it,” an Arkansas executive told me a few days ago, exasperated by the refusal of many of his coworkers to accept the COVID-19 vaccine that could save them days, weeks of agony, even spare their lives. Whatever the basis of their reluctance […] they were exposing themselves and their colleagues (and their families) to an invisible invader that has sickened hundreds of thousands of their fellow Arkansans, many of them fatally. Too, they were damaging the enterprise that employed them, that put food on their tables and paid their mortgages, that provided them with group health insurance that some of them needed as never before. Coronavirus infections had stretched an already stressed staff and promised to thin it still further.

     […]

     The state’s hospitals and their personnel keep hitting their limits — of COVID-19 intensive care beds, of rooms for patients with other clinical issues, of ambulances and EMTs and emergency room bays, of nurses and technicians. Arkansas’ inventory of respirators, the only means of keeping advanced coronavirus cases alive, is not unlimited; and on many days we have come perilously close to being without. In fact the state’s health care system is holding together now only because corridors have been converted to triage centers and trauma is being treated in what were closets.

     […]

     The delta variant has also altered the epidemic’s demographics, and in a manner that should scare the daylights out of every parent and grandparent, assuming they view the coronavirus as a real threat and not a deep state hoax. Across the nation, coronavirus targets are increasingly the young. In Arkansas today, one of every three active cases is age 18 or younger, driving that bracket’s share of the cumulative state case total to about 20%. The trend line of new cases among Arkansas youth is essentially straight up. The school year and its attendant congregate activities (athletics and assemblies, classrooms and cafeterias) is less than a month old, the debate over masking mandates is a political, legal, social and cultural disgrace and we are, at a minimum, weeks away from federal authorization for the coronavirus immunization of youngsters.

     […]

     Frustrated and increasingly concerned for the impact of the coronavirus on its bottom line, corporate America is becoming steadily more aggressive with not only its customers but its workforce. Some major corporations are demanding their employees either “take the jab” or pay significantly higher medical insurance premiums; others insist it’s the vaccine or the job. […]

     The stridency with which anti-vaccine, anti-masking forces reject the best thinking of the best scientists and physicians, including those in Arkansas, is a reflection of our toxic times. Emblematic, but not excusable. Not alone in exasperation are managers and educators and clinicians. […]

138. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 3:29 pm

     Why Henry Ford employees suing over vaccine mandate pulled suit:

     Henry Ford Health System employees challenging the company’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate submitted a notice of voluntary dismissal to a federal judge Friday, hours before they were to participate in a hearing seeking a halt to the hospital’s policy.

     […]

     On Friday, the deadline for Henry Ford’s vaccine mandate, the health system said 92% of its employees were fully vaccinated and another 3% had received their first dose. The health system promised to “work in good faith” with people who have a “change of heart.”

     No employees were fired Friday, but they will face suspension through Oct 1 and then “voluntary resignation”[eh?] if they remain unvaccinated, according to the hospital system.

     […]

     The lawsuit filed Monday in Detroit argued that employees would be subjecting themselves to potential harm and death by getting the vaccine and cited death and injury data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to support their reluctance to get the vaccine.

     In other words they hired failed clowns for lawyers. That’s not what VAERS is for, not how it should be used, and I vaguely recall every suit attempting to use it in such a manner has been bounced out of court so fast their alleged-“lawyers” are probably still suffering whiplash.

     The suit argued that the policy violates the employees’ 14th Amendment right to bodily integrity and personal autonomy. It also said the denial of medical treatment is a fundamental right.

     I don’t grok what that last sentence is trying to say. Refusing medical treatment is a fundamental right? Or being refused medical treatment is a fundamental right? Or worms ate my brain cell so I need some ivermectin? Or…?

139. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 3:46 pm

     Follow-up to @137, Some snippets from an earlier article, 51 Henry Ford employees sue hospital system over vaccine mandate:

     Many of the 51 employees involved in the suit are registered nurses, of which the hospital is experiencing a shortage. Last month, hospital Chief Operating Officer Bob Riney said the hospital system was “several hundred” nurses short.

     There’s some creative legal and scientific reasoning which could win some fiction awards:

     Defendants claim the protection of their patients as a goal for the mandate, but this argument is illogical, the lawsuit said. If the ‘vaccines are effective,’ the vaccinated bear no risk created by the unvaccinated.

     First off, the patients are unvaccinated. So are the alleged-“nurses”. So what is this gibberish about someone being vaccinated? Second, ever hear of breakthough infections? Third, the vaccinated can still be carriers, infecting others, even if not sick. Fourth, the vaccines are effective. And safe. (And free!) Fifth, the virus evolves. Providing new hosts for it to mutate and evolve in is so obviously counter-productive even a stooopid clown of a lawyer and nursesquacks should be able to see that from lightyears away. Sixth, getting sick is expensive. The vaccines are free. Also, seventh, even if the mandate is illogical, it does not cause harm. Grrrr!

     (The “denial of medical treatment is a fundamental right” claim is also made, but again without any explanation.)

     In June, more than 150 employees resigned or were fired from the hospital system Houston Methodist after a Texas federal district judge dismissed a lawsuit by a nurse who alleged the policy was unlawful.

     Less than a month later, the US Department of Justice opined in a legal opinion that the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act does not prevent entities from imposing vaccine mandates, including when a vaccine only has approval for emergency use.

     About 56%, or about 4.8 million people, over the age of 12 in Michigan are fully vaccinated, according to state data.

140. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 4:23 pm

     Opinion column in San Francisco, As a doctor, I don’t hate the unvaccinated. But I rage at COVID disinformation profiteers:

     As a doctor who has spent much of the past 20 months working with COVID-19 patients, let me assure you, there isn’t a single person in health care who derives any joy from seeing story after story of anit-vaxxers [sic] gasping for breath in the ICU. Nurses who watch their young pregnant patients on heart-lung machines, as they help deliver soon-to-be-motherless babies, feel no twinge of “told-you-so” for these dying unvaccinated moms.

     Instead, our rage is directed at the disinformation profiteers — those bad actors with the big platforms who are behind each and every one of these deaths. Some of them run state governments, some have MD next to their names, others are millionaires who smugly sit on their Fox News perches and some spew bile from their radio pulpit. They are the ones who have helped drive us back into the throes of this pandemic. They helped us reach almost 3,000 daily COVID deaths for the first time in months. They should be blamed when feverish little boys with brain cancer are forced to sit in the parking lot instead of being admitted to hospitals. All because living in the land of the free means you get to stay unvaccinated and then steal a bed from a kid with cancer when you inevitably get sick.

     […]

     A friend who is a family doctor told me that she, uncharacteristically, almost lost her temper at one of her patients last week. The patient was an unvaccinated oncology nurse.

     I immediately understood. Unvaccinated oncology nurse — three words that should never hold hands in any sentence. The nurse[quack] later tested positive for COVID.

     I know of practices where half of the clinicians are not vaccinated, and following this example, the majority of their staff are not either. Unwitting patients are coming in for treatment with these health care providers[plague rats], many with risk factors that put them in danger of poor outcomes should they contract COVID-19.

     […]

     Sen Ted (Cancun) Cruz doesn’t want Texas schools to require masks but sends his kids to a $30,000-per-year private school that mandates them. Texas Gov Greg Abbott wants to spout personal freedom while he had three vaccine shots and access to expensive and often hard to obtain monoclonal antibody treatment the minute he contracted COVID.

     The kids and families who live in Texas, Florida or Arkansas matter just as much as my patients in Oakland. But here we have mask and vaccine mandates, higher vaccination rates, and continued capacity in our ICUs while those states don’t.

     […]

     During a recent four-hour stretch of work, I sent three COVID-positive patients to the emergency room, all of whom could not get a full sentence out without gasping for breath and losing their words. None were vaccinated.

     A recent patient, an elderly pastor in a low-income, highly COVID-impacted community, insisted he didn’t need the vaccine because a doctor in an online video assured him that his natural immune system would be enough to fight the virus. When he told me it was Sherri Tenpenny, I recognized her as one of the disinformation dozen, a folksy Midwesterner who manages to keep her medical license despite her endless lies.

     I told him, “She is the doctor who says vaccines magnetize people, and keys will stick to your forehead once you get it. Please don’t pay her any mind.” He was taken aback and instantly disarmed of his opposition to the vaccine.

     […]

     I need to consciously take calming breaths throughout these vaccine counseling conversations to avoid losing my cool. And I always keep the faces of the bad actors burned in my brain, so as not to leak out any of my frustration on the often hapless and misinformed patient in front of me.

     […]

141. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 4:53 pm

     Chinese exile Guo Wengui uses misinformation network to push unproven drugs to treat Covid (CNBC edits in {curly braces}):

     Guo Wengui, a wealthy businessman who fled China in 2014 and is linked to several high-profile far-right personalities in America, has been using his online network to promote unproven drugs to treat Covid-19 while spreading misinformation about the vaccines used to combat the disease.

     As recently as Sunday on a livestream, Guo used his show […] to push ivermectin, […], and malaria drug artemisinin as ways to battle the coronavirus.

     […]

     Guo on Thursday equated vaccinating children with murder. Please do not take your children to get vaccinated anymore. It is not about getting a shot that simple but equivalent to murder, he said in a translated video post […]. Those who were vaccinated might face an unpredicted severe consequence.

     […]

     Guo has been close to former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon for years. A foundation linked to Guo recently hosted an event that featured remarks by Bannon and others tied to former President[Wacko House squatter] Donald Trump, including lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former national security advisor Michael Flynn and MyPillow CEO and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.

     Guo fled China in 2014 in anticipation of corruption charges. After Guo criticized China’s leaders, warrants were reportedly issued for his arrest on charges that included corruption and bribery. […]

     Remember, artemisinin, ivermectin, dexamethasone, oxytetracycline, hydroxychloroquine, and zinc are the necessary medicines to fight the CCP {Chinese Communist Party} virus. These few medicines will eradicate the virus, Guo said during his Sunday [(in translation) …]. Also, artemisinin is effective for those who have had one shot of the vaccine, but not the second or third shot, he added.

     […]

     Beyond Guo and [Joe] Rogan, others have pushed ivermectin to Covid patients. Conservative radio host Dennis Prager said on his podcast in late July that he used ivermectin as a prophylaxis and, after the FDA came out against the use of ivermectin to treat Covid, accused the agency of killing tens of thousands of Americans with that statement.

     I put it to you pretty starkly. Either the FDA is misleading you, or I’m misleading you, Prager told his audience.

     Oooooh, aaaahh, well, geesh, that’s a very difficult one to answer. I’ll go with you (Prager) are lying for 5 billion jabs, please, and behind the closed door, 99% of Covid cases in ICU being unvaccinated.

     […]
     Guo has also focused on artemisinin in his recent episodes.

     […]

     Mr Miles Guo [one of Guo’s aliases] affirmed that Artemisinin, discovered and extracted by Nobel laureate Tu Youyou, is more than 99% effective in curing the CCP virus, the translation says. He also reiterated again that all chaptors [sic must stock up on the Ivermectin, Azithromycin, and Oxytetracycline.

     Not at all sure what that chaptors nonsense is about.

     The WHO has said artemisinin, which is an antimalaria drug derived from the artemisia plant, will be tested on hospitalized Covid patients. The WHO said there has yet to be proof of artemisia-derived products being effective in treating Covid-19, the BBC reported.

     Guo’s campaign to push ivermectin and artemisinin amounts to the latest example of his misinformation tactics, according to new research from Graphika.

     “In promoting artemisinin, Guo and his media network are relying on tactics Graphika and the Virality Project have observed in the amplification of other unproven Covid-19 treatments,” the researchers say […]

     A snippet from Ye Pffffft! of All Knowledge (their(?) edits in {curly braces}):

     In April 2017, an Interpol notice was issued for Guo’s arrest, requested by the Chinese government. In June 2017, staff of one of Guo’s other investment vehicles, Pangu Investment, were charged for scamming banks on loans. The staff members accused all alleged that they were under the orders of Guo.

     By June 2017, the Chinese government sent U.S. President Donald Trump a letter, delivered by casino businessman Steve Wynn, requesting for Guo to be deported to China. Unnamed sources “familiar with {a} meeting” allege that Trump was inclined to deport Guo, a member of his Mar-a-Lago resort, but that his advisors opposed deporting him by reasoning that he could be used for political leverage against China.

     Another oof alls teh besteristings, this loon with chaptors.

142. blf says

     12 September 2021 at 5:11 pm

     Ha! Statement by Commissioner Nikki Fried on Governor Ron DeSantis Pushing COVID Vaccine Disinformation (a PR quoted essentially in full):

     […] Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried released the following statement on reports that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has spread disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine multiple times in recent days:

     “It’s extraordinarily dangerous and irresponsible for Governor DeSantis to continue to lie about the vaccine — which he’s done twice in as many days. By saying vaccines don’t help anyone but the recipient (not true) and that breakthrough cases among vaccinated aren’t rare (also not true), he’s continuing to impede the health and economic recovery of our state. No news outlet should broadcast the governor’s misinformation without immediate editorial correction with the facts.”

     Commissioner Fried, an independently elected member of the Florida Cabinet, has been providing regular COVID-19 updates, holding briefings across the state to provide timely public health information as well as encouraging science-based virus-mitigation efforts, including vaccination, mask-wearing, social distancing, and testing after known exposure or symptoms.

     Ms Fried is apparently running for Governor. Some snippets from Politico, She could take down Ron DeSantis. But that doesn’t mean the left likes her (June 2021):

     [… O]ver the two-and-a-half years she’s been in office, they [“Florida’s environmentalists and progressives”] say she hasn’t acted on left-leaning policies like climate change and energy efficiency or fought hard enough against Republicans.

     Environmentalists were especially angry in 2019 after Fried supported utilities such as Florida Power & Light Co and Duke Energy Florida that were asking the state to sharply lower or eliminate their energy conservation goals. She went so far as to say Florida’s energy conservation rule should be scrapped.

     Environmentalists for decades have also increasingly hammered what they say is the state’s hands-off approach to groundwater pollution from farms that has fouled natural springs and other waterways.

     Fried has said she’s is laser focused on protecting Florida’s waterways and has worked for updates to state agricultural best management practices designed to reduce water use and runoff from farms.

     But Ryan Smart, executive director of the Florida Springs Council, said that Fried in 2020 supported legislation that was supposed to protect springs but was weakened to allow pollution from farms to continue. His group opposed the measure after it was rewritten.

     […]

     This is not to say DeSantis has impressed other environmentalists more. The Sierra Club in March gave Fried a C-minus in its first ever report card for her positions on climate change, but the organization gave DeSantis a D-minus.

     Progressives, like Florida Democratic donor John Morgan, were especially livid over Fried’s non-committal position on a proposed $15 minimum wage. Fried doesn’t have control over the state’s minimum wage, but as the state’s top elected Democrat, activists looked to her for moral leadership.

     Business interests had lined up against the wage bump and as the increase was being fought, Fried told the Tampa Bay Times that she was undecided.

     Morgan publicly decried Fried’s “very weak, tepid response” in support of the measure right before voters approved it last November — an example of Fried leading from behind.

143. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 7:24 am

     Covid 19 Delta outbreak: Anti-vaxxers plan to take over Aussie town:

     Conspiracy theorists have flagged running for council and pushing out the sheep in [Ozland]’s anti-vax capital.

     Mullumbimby, near Byron Bay, is home to Covid-19 deniers, anti-maskers and conspiracy theorists who believe the pandemic was deliberately created and 5G technology transmits coronavirus.

     Childhood vaccination rates in the New South Wales town are among the lowest in Australia, with 68.2 percent of one-year-olds fully immunised, compared with 94.9 percent nationwide.

     Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge adds, “The Byron Shire, in which Mullumbimby is situated, is also the only remaining local government area in the Northern Rivers region to reject fluoridation of its water supply.”

     The town has now been singled out as a perfect location for a free society. There have previously been 5G protests there, as well as banning vaccinated people from shops.

     The Free People movement is a conspiracy theorist group against mandatory vaccinations and other regulations that have been introduced to stop the spread of Covid.

     […]

     They are just the latest iteration of the anti-vax movement, which constantly rebrands itself.

     Through private groups, other online conspiracy theorists against mandatory vaccinations have flagged the idea of moving to the town in the Northern Rivers, NSW.

     One member suggested taking over and forcing those who disagree with them out of the town. [I guess that’s what one does in a free society? –blf]

     […]

     Various anti-vax groups and influencers already call the Northern Rivers their home and throughout the pandemic, there have been issues with compliance in these areas.

     Australia Post stores in some areas are now being manned by security guards after an alarming number of customers failed to comply with Covid-19 protocols.

     At least a third of customers are estimated to have refused to wear masks, use hand sanitiser or check in to the Mullumbimby and Byron Bay stores before the drastic measure despite the region being included in the statewide lockdown.

     Earlier this year, businesses in the area temporarily barred vaccinated people from entering.

     A hairdresser, yoga studio and massage therapy business erected signage banning people from entering in case they shed the virus.

     If you have had a Covid-19 vaccine we ask you to attend online, reschedule or practice at home for a studio minimum of two weeks, or longer until any symptoms subside, one of the signs read.

     The mildly deranged penguin’s alternative sign, “If you think my being vaccinated is dangerous to you, please flush your head in the toilet until all the worms you use as brain cells have been shed. Please do not use ivermectin to treat your worm-ridden brain unless you are horse.”

144. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 8:23 am

     Greece begins mandatory testing for unvaccinated workers:

     Greece on Monday introduced mandatory weekly testing for all unvaccinated workers as it struggles to boost vaccination rates that are lagging the European Union average.

     Public and private sector employees will have to pay for weekly tests or carry a vaccination certificate to gain access to their place of work, while unvaccinated children at high schools which reopened Monday are being given test kits distributed at government expense.

     Similar restrictions will also apply at sports stadiums, museums and archaeological sites, as well as indoor leisure areas like cinemas and restaurants.

     Some 56% of Greece’s residents have been fully vaccinated, while the average rate in the EU is just over 60%.

     Greece has imposed vaccine mandates for health care workers and allows the vaccination of children starting at age 12.

     [… Development Minister Adonis Georgiadis:] “Unfortunately this de-escalation [signs of a decline in cases†] is accompanied by the deaths of our fellow citizens who are unvaccinated. It hurts me to know that these people could have lived, but they fell victim to conspiracy theories.”

       † I think that’s what the Minister meant, despite the horrible translation and not-too-informative article. Whilst the site (EuroNews) is perhaps Ok (as in not “fake”), the short articles seem rather often to be badly written, often just being (as in this case), wire reports (this one is from AP, so it’s perhaps AP which botched the clarity, not EuroNews).

145. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 8:43 am

     I just got an SMS from my mobile operator saying 5G is now available in the village. That means the previous-injected graphene oxide microchips, which have most just been idling (except for reporting my location to the GPS & trying to convince me peas are diabolically dangerous), will now+++ ACTIVATE=blf
*** ACTIVATED
+++ PEAS ARE EDIBLE
!!! ERROR - NEED CHEESE
+++ WHAT?
!!! NEED MOAR CHEESE
+++ FROM=bgates TO=blf "Take your horse dewormer and reboot."
/// PENGIUN CONFUSED WARNING
+++ REBOOT! REBOOT!
*** "She's the greatest
She's fantastic
Wherever there's danger she'll been there
She's the ace
She's amazing
She's the strangest she's the quirkest she's the best
Penguin
Mild Penguin
MILDLY DERANGED PENGUIN"
+++ TERMINATE LINK
*** ENDI… activate. Soon. Any time now…

146. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 12:22 pm

     me@144, …trying to convince me peas are diabolically dangerous → trying to convince me peas are not diabolically dangerous…

     Probably a glitch whilst repportinininning mmmyyyy positran position to GPS.

147. Lynna, OM says

     13 September 2021 at 12:39 pm

     blf @132: “Hair furor would insist on both being Moon (the founding nutcase, not the Massive Orbital Cheese Vault) and teh messiah / nouveau Adam the cult is waiting for who will “become the new head of the human race” …” Right. Thanks for that clarification. Cult. More cult. Maximum cult.

     In other news: In California, the stakes are high, and the process is weird

     If recent polling is correct, the incumbent governor is likely to keep his job, but the stakes are high, and the process is weird.

     President Joe Biden is scheduled to appear in California this evening, where he’ll campaign alongside Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom ahead of tomorrow’s recall election. If recent polling is correct, the incumbent governor is likely to keep his job, but the stakes are high, and the process is weird. Let’s review some the basics.

     How in the world did this happen?

     California’s recall laws are badly in need of reform, but for now, a Golden State governor’s opponents can force a statewide recall election by collecting enough petition signatures. The threshold isn’t that high: It takes 12 percent of the turnout from the most recent gubernatorial race. If roughly half of California’s electorate voted in the last election for governor, for example, that means 6 percent of state can force a recall election.

     Ordinarily, recall supporters have 160 days to gather the required number of signatures, but in this case, a state judge gave Newsom’s opponents extra time because of the pandemic. (The same judge later prevented the governor from including his party identification on the ballot.) [Nefarious shenanigans making a weird situation even worse.]

     How many questions are on the ballot?

     Just two: (1) Should Newsom be recalled? 2) If a majority votes to recall the governor, who should replace him?

     What does the governor have to do to win?

     If a majority of voters oppose the recall, Newsom will remain in office and the drama will end. If the incumbent governor falls short, even a little, Newsom will be recalled and the new governor will be the candidate who receives the most number of votes on the ballot’s second question.

     How many other candidates are running?

     There are 46 replacement candidates on the ballot, including conservative media personality Larry Elder, who’s widely seen as the top Republican contender.

     With 46 replacement candidates, won’t it be difficult for any one candidate to generate significant support?

     It’s one of the more obvious flaws in the state’s system: Elder, for example, could become the next governor if he wins 20 percent of the vote, even if 49.9 percent of Californians decided to keep Newsom in office.

     Is there talk of overhauling this process?

     Yes, but that will have to wait. The focus in the short term is on tomorrow’s election, though there’s ample talk of reforming the status quo.

     Does Newsom have a major Democratic opponent?

     No. In fact, this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the California state party. While there are some lesser-known Democrats running, the party rallied behind Newsom and created a system in which parties were effectively told, “If you recall the governor, you’ll be left with a conservative Republican as California’s new chief executive.”

     What happens if Newsom loses?

     The stakes are quite high. Elder, for example, has already vowed to govern as a very conservative Republican on practically every issue, including the Covid-19 crisis. What’s more, while incumbent Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has said she intends to remain in office, if she were to give up her U.S. Senate seat for any reason, Elder has vowed to replace her with a GOP senator, who in turn would flip control of the Senate to Republicans and put Mitch McConnell in charge of the chamber.

148. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 12:55 pm

     School vaccine campaigns targeting students face blowback:

     Fearing his parents wouldn’t approve of his decision to get a COVID-19 vaccine but needing their signature, Andrew signed up for the appointment in secret, and then sprang it on them at the last minute.

     They said no. Andrew cursed at his mother and father and called them idiots. Andrew’s dad grabbed him by the shirt collar.

     “He said, You’re not getting this damn vaccine; you need to lower your voice. Watch your tone when you talk to me. It was, it was the first time my dad had ever done something like that — he grabbed my shirt and yelled in my face,” said Andrew, a 17-year-old student in Hoover, Alabama.

     In most states, minors need the consent of their parents in order to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Navigating family politics in cases of differing views has been a challenge for students and organizers of outreach campaigns, who have faced blowback for directly targeting young people.

     […]

     In Tennessee, […] Republican lawmakers accused the health department of “peer pressuring” children to get the vaccine and criticized a top official who sent a memo to vaccine providers explaining that they could legally waive parental consent under Tennessee law.

     […]

     In Molalla, Oregon, the mayor pressured a high school to cancel a vaccine drive on campus this semester, citing a $50 gift card incentive he equated with bribery. Many who called for an end to the vaccine drive expressed opposition to the vaccines, although Mayor Scott Keyser [presumably lied and] said he’s not against them.

     School officials in Kettering, Ohio, received death threats in August after TikTok videos baselessly claimed the suburban Dayton district was vaccinating children without parental consent.

     There was no truth to the claims — they came out before the school year began, and spring vaccine clinics required parents to be present — but they caused “huge hysteria” in the community nonetheless, according to Kettering City Schools superintendent Scott Inskeep.

     […]

     In a total of eight states, all in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest, providers can waive parental consent requirements — Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama, according to a May review by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

     […]

     In May, officials in two Oregon counties barred health officials from giving vaccines to kids without parental consent. Yamhill County Commissioner Lindsay Berschauer and the mother of three teenagers defended the move saying, Our children are not the property of the State of Oregon. [They are also not your property! –blf]

     But the counties backed down after state health officials issued a legal opinion affirming consent rights for children 15 and older. Berschauer continues to advocate[rant] against vaccine incentives for teens, calling the programs “peer pressure.” [And that is a bad thing, in this situation, exactly how? –blf]

     On paper, Alabama’s law is one of the more liberal, allowing minors like Andrew to get the vaccine on their own. In practice, that’s nearly impossible. The Alabama Department of Public Health requires parental consent as a matter of policy, and so do major pharmacies.

     The day after the argument with his parents, Andrew’s father took him to the pharmacy and signed [YEAH!], without saying a word. Andrew’s father confirmed his son’s account but declined to be interviewed. Andrew asked that his last name not be used out of fear of further upsetting his parents.

     Pediatricians in some cases try to facilitate conversations between children and parents and promote the COVID-19 vaccine. But it doesn’t always work, even with parents who have accepted their pediatrician’s recommendation on other vaccines, including for HPV and the flu.

     I’d have guessed people opposed to the Covid-19 vaccines who also be opposed to the HPV vaccine, in part since the objections to the HPV vaccine are absurd (it turns my precious child into an immoral painted jezebel! (not the butterfly (presumably))).

     “They look at me like I’m suggesting that they feed their childhood poison when I’m recommending a COVID vaccine,” said doctor Katrina Skinner, President of the Alabama Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

     Andrew’s Hoover High School does not promote COVID-19 vaccinations on its website or social media channels, and there’s no indication the school will host a vaccine clinic. School officials did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment.

     Andrew isn’t the only teenager with sense:

     Alabama state health officials have been encouraging the vaccines among young people with a contest on the social media app TikTok that awarded $250 for the best video promoting COVID-19 vaccinations.

     One of Andrew’s schoolmates, Rotimi Kukoyi, 17, was one of four contest winners. He shared the video with his 18,000 followers, built over two years by making jokes.

     “I showed the CDC explaining how the vaccine is safe, and how it’s effective, and then I linked resources for people to sign up to get the vaccine,” Rotimi said.

149. tomh says

     13 September 2021 at 1:04 pm

     NBC News
     Alabama heart patient dies after hospital contacts 43 ICUs in 3 states, family says
     Sept. 12, 2021, 8:14 PM PDT
     By Tim Stelloh

     An Alabama antiques dealer died this month of a “cardiac event” after the emergency staff at his local hospital contacted dozens of intensive care units in three states and was unable to find him a bed as Covid-19 cases surged, his family said….

     …he died at Rush Foundation Hospital in Meridian, Mississippi, after staff members at Cullman Regional Medical Center contacted 43 ICUs and were unable to find him a bed….

     According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Alabama has one of the highest rates of new Covid-19 cases in the country, with about 541 per 100,000 people having tested positive in the last seven days.

     It’s time to move unvaccinated Covid cases down the list relative to normal emergencies, such as this heart attack.

150. Lynna, OM says

     13 September 2021 at 1:24 pm

     Support for Trump, Big Lie defines Republican politics

     Democrats can (and will) continue to run against Donald Trump because he and his GOP loyalists have made it so easy to do so.

     The latest national CNN poll found that most Republican voters still want Donald Trump to lead their party, which is notable in its own right. But just as important is how this belief shapes what it means to be a Republican in 2021:

     Most Republicans also consider support for Trump – and his false claim to have won the 2020 election – to be an important part of their own partisan identity alongside support for conservative principles.

     [willful ignorance, stubbornly ignorant]

     According to the poll’s internal data, a combined 61 percent of the party’s voters believe supporting the former president is either very or somewhat important in defining what it means to be a Republican. A combined 59 percent said the same thing about believing that Trump won the 2020 election, which he lost in reality.

     An even higher percentage of Republican voters – 63 percent – said Trump should remain the GOP’s principal leader.

     At face value, there’s something rather extraordinary about so many voters from a major party standing by a failed former president who was impeached twice, and whose brief political career is defined by scandal, corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, and multiple criminal investigations.

     But there’s another dimension to this that’s likely to remain relevant for quite a while. The Washington Post reported yesterday on the three Democratic-led states — California, New Jersey, and Virginia — holding statewide elections this year:

     In each state, party leaders acknowledge that in past elections Trump polarized and motivated voters that they had never won before his presidency. Democrats worried that his absence from the ballot, along with their party’s historic difficulties in turning voters out in nonpresidential elections, would threaten their chances. Yet in all three, Democrats say they think that the ex-president, who has hinted at a third run in 2024, still has power to mobilize liberal voters and keep suburban moderates in the Democratic tent, even if he is no longer on the ballot or in office.

     […] The qualitative differences in the post-Trump era, however, are dramatic. Most modern presidents, after leaving the White House, actually go away. They don’t try to run their political parties; they don’t demand fealty from rank-and-file voters; they don’t orchestrate misinformation campaigns; they don’t set out to destroy the careers of intra-party detractors; and they don’t openly discuss the possibility of seeking national office again. […]

151. Lynna, OM says

     13 September 2021 at 1:27 pm

     Follow-up to blf in comment 134.

     […] The Chicago Tribune reported that World Business Chicago, the public-private operation that serves as the city’s economic development arm, took out a full-page ad in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News, “inviting corporations to head north for the warm business climate and stay for the more liberal abortion and voting laws — a swipe at restrictive legislation [Texas] passed on both fronts in recent months.”

     Among the stated reasons businesses should relocate to Chicago: The city believes in “science to fight COVID-19.”

     This morning, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s Democratic 2021 gubernatorial nominee, added, “My message to companies like Salesforce is clear: come to Virginia – where we remain open and welcoming, and opposed to dangerous abortion bans that put women’s health and lives at risk – all of which Glenn Youngkin would enact as governor.”

     It’s difficult to even guess whether we’ll see departures from Texas in any significant numbers, but the state’s Republican leaders have certainly opened the door to departures – and would-be suitors seem only too pleased to roll out some welcome mats.

     Link

152. Lynna, OM says

     13 September 2021 at 1:34 pm

     Why Amy Coney Barrett’s new rhetoric is so hard to take seriously

     Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is the wrong messenger, with the wrong message, speaking at the wrong place.

     It’s been nearly a year since Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the U.S. Supreme Court, and the conservative jurist is apparently concerned about public perceptions regarding the high court.

     Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressed concerns Sunday that the public may increasingly see the court as a partisan institution. Justices must be “hyper vigilant to make sure they’re not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too,” Barrett said at a lecture hosted by the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center.

     She added that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.”

     There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s focus on three core problems.

     First, the justice’s message was literally unbelievable. Ideally, justices would be indifferent toward political considerations, but in recent years, the public has seen far too much contrary evidence. Consider, for example, the overtly political speech Justice Samuel Alito delivered last fall to the Federalist Society.

     Second, Barrett may not appreciate the extent to which she’s a poor messenger. It was in late-October 2020 – while voting in the presidential election was already underway in many states – when a divided Senate, voting along largely partisan lines, confirmed the conservative jurist to the nation’s highest court. Her first decision was not a judicial ruling; it was a choice to participate at a White House political event the evening of her confirmation.

     As we discussed at the time, Donald Trump hosted a prime-time spectacle with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: Barrett stood in the spotlight, on a White House balcony in front of the presidential seal, alongside Trump who beamed with pride before an applauding audience, which included Republican senators who ignored their ostensible principles while confirming her.

     Barrett was aware of the electoral context; she knew this prime-time celebration would give the appearance of a political victory party; and she chose to participate anyway, indifferent to public perceptions about the politicization of the judiciary.

     In the months that followed, Barrett voted largely as she was expected to, including in the recent case that ended Roe v. Wade protections in Texas.

     But let’s also not overlook the context of her remarks yesterday: Barrett appeared in Kentucky, where she was introduced by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican who’s done more to politicize the federal judiciary than any living American.

     During her remarks at the McConnell Center, Barrett spoke just feet away from the GOP senator who was responsible for orchestrating the brazenly partisan scheme that led to her confirmation.

     If the justice is concerned about the public perceiving the Supreme Court as a partisan institution, she should’ve turned down McConnell’s invitation instead of making the problem worse.

     Clueless. Amy Coney Barrett is clueless.

153. Lynna, OM says

     13 September 2021 at 1:38 pm

     Follow-up to tomh in comment 148.

     […] there’s one detail about this story – or at least tied to the story – that the Post doesn’t mention. Cullman, Alabama was the site of what the Alabama state GOP billed as the largest political rally in Alabama history just a couple days before DeMonia went to the hospital. The state GOP claimed 50,000 turned out for the rally in Cullman. Few if any seemed to be masked.

     The August 21st rally in Cullman was actually the one where Trump made a low energy pitch for vaccinations only to get booed by the crowd. He appeared to back away from it in real time in response to the crowd. You probably remember it. DeMonia was admitted to Cullman Regional Medical Center two days later on August 23rd. He died at a hospital in Mississippi on September 1st.

     Given the short gap in time, clearly Trump’s visit didn’t cause the surge in hospitalizations that forced DeMonia’s doctors to evacuate him west to Mississippi. But there’s no doubt the climate of COVID denial and lo-fi anti-vaccine politics Trump has brought in his wake did contribute mightily to it. Alabama is the fourth least vaccinated state in the country. And Trump’s visit probably didn’t do any favors for Alabama hospitals in the subsequent three weeks.

     DeMonia was 73 and, according to his daughter, was fully vaccinated.

     https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-rest-of-the-story-4

154. Lynna, OM says

     13 September 2021 at 1:44 pm

     Follow-up to blf in comment 140.

     Bannon, Guo-Linked Media Company Part Of $539 Million Settlement In SEC Probe

     A firm linked to former Trump campaign chairman Stephen K. Bannon was part of a $539 million deal to settle charges emanating from an alleged illegal stock offering scheme, the SEC said on Monday.

     Three companies, all linked to eccentric exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, agreed to pay the massive half-a-billion-dollar settlement to resolve the allegations.

     Bannon was listed as a director of one of the three firms, GTV Media Group, the Wall Street Journal reported last year, while company documents named Guo as an “adviser.”

     […] The agency said that two websites linked to the companies – GTV.org and Gnews.org – promoted illicit offerings of stock and digital currency. The companies have been accused of spewing herculean amounts of disinformation, including a supposed “dossier” that purported to document Hunter Biden’s ties to China during the 2020 election.

     […] Guo and Bannon have spent part of the past year promoting a Chinese government-in-exile called the New Federal State of China, and held a rollickingly bizarre event in June for the event, which featured Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and others.

     But the past year has also seen Bannon indicted and arrested while aboard Guo’s yacht on charges relating to the We Build The Wall alleged fundraising scam. […] Trump pardoned Bannon for those charges.

     At the center of the media ecosystem that pushes Guo’s message out to millions of people is GTV, a Chinese news and social media platform operated by GTV Media Inc.

     The SEC accused the firm of failing to register a share offering that took place between April and June 2020 with the SEC. The civil regulator said that two other firms – New York City-based Saraca Media and Arizona-based Voice of Guo – participated as well.

     The SEC also charged GTV and Saraca with illegally offering an unregistered digital asset – in this case, that refers to GTV’s G-Coins and G-dollars.

     The regulator cited a memo that touted GTV as ““the first ever platform which will combine the power of citizen journalism and social news with state-of-the-art technology, big data, artificial intelligence, block-chain technology and real-time interactive communication,” saying that it had planned on becoming “the only uncensored and independent bridge between China and the Western world.”

     The SEC said in a statement that its investigation is continuing. The WSJ reported last year that the FBI was reviewing the offering.

     The companies pay the fines, but Bannon and Guo get off scot free.

155. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 1:45 pm

     This isn’t actually a terribly good opinion column, in that it contains some non-rhetorical errors (including about its subject matter), but does contain some decent snarking, I have a better term for the ‘vaccine-hesitant’:

     […]
     The principle behind [using the term] “vaccine-hesitant” seems to be that giving offense to these ignorant people might result in greater social disruption, civil war, etc — that if we got these people really mad, they might start indiscriminately coughing or vomiting or wiping their noses on strangers.

     That might be the reason some organisations use the term, but the medical community uses it to help distinguish those with doubts about vaccine (no matter how ludicrous the doubts) from those adamantly opposed (the “hardcore anti-vaxxers”). The difference is the merely hesitant can be convinced to change their opinion, and / or (rather more importantly), get vaccinated. The hardcore anti-vaxxers are probably a lost cause.

     To me it is a ridiculous euphemism, the way you might refer to cannibals as “practitioners of nontraditional culinary adventuresomeness.” I propose, instead, as I have just made clear, “idiots.” (Some people — those with legitimate medical or religious reasons to hesitate — are hereby officially exempted from contempt.)

     A “religious reason” is a valid reason to not be vaccinated? Besides going against the advice of most(?) tithe-gatherers (so-called “religious leaders”), and vaccination not being banned by any(?) religion (even the JW’s are apparently Ok with the Covid vaccine (unconfirmed)), it simply fails the most basic checks. E.g., doesn’t follow the science. Or, suppose a large religion with hundreds of millions of followers banned abortion, I mean vaccination… the results would not be good. (Several commentators take the author to task over this inclusion of “religious reason” as a valid reason to not be vaccinated.)

     Back in the 1950s, there was little or no “vaccine hesitancy” to the inoculation against polio. That is because, back then, people trusted science. We were on the brink of the Space Age. We had conquered smallpox.

     Smallpox existed in the wild until the late 1970s. Even in the 1960s, there were outbreaks in Europe. According to Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge, “In the early 1950s, an estimated 50 million cases of smallpox occurred in the world each year.” Yes, a vaccine existed (and had, in one form or another, since about 1800), but with 50m cases annually, saying “[w]e had conquered smallpox” is like saying “hair furor won the election” albeit not as false.

     As an aside, I rather doubt there was “no” opposition to the polio vaccine (albeit the author does admit there might have been some, and it does seem to the case the vaccine was enthusiastically welcomed). And unlike most(? all?) other vaccine rollouts, there were problems: First, the live (attenuated) polio vaccine does shed, and even now (it’s still in use since it’s easy to transport into rugged / remote areas), occasionally causes polio; and Second, in the famous “Cutter incidence” in 1955, a manufacturing error resulted in an (insufficiently attenuated) live polio vaccine, with numerous cases resulting.

     Today a substantial subset of people seem to regard science as the equivalent of necromancy or alchemy, or, like, Rumpelstiltskin. Anthony Fauci, a doctor who has literally […] saved hundreds of thousands of lives, is regularly portrayed by the idiots as some sort of maniacal dictatorial quack, a cross between Hitler and surgeons from the 16th century […] who would operate on mentally ill people to remove, from their brains, the “stone of madness.”

     […] I am merely saying that we are in the middle of a pandemic, and seemingly at the mercy of incredibly stupid people who are so medieval they won’t be happy until a hollow-eyed man with black crummy teeth in a burlap robe is wandering the streets clanging a bell and yodeling, “Bring out your dead.” [That’s an idea… albeit teh eejits would probably miss the point –blf]

     Whilst referring to the vaccine hesitant, and the hardcore anti-vaxxers, as “eejits” (however you care to spell it) is understandable, always using that insulting term for both without acknowledging the differences, seems, well… idiotic.

156. Lynna, OM says

     13 September 2021 at 1:47 pm

     Man With Weapons And Allegedly Spouting White Supremacist Rhetoric Arrested Near DNC

     A California man who allegedly had a machete and bayonet in a truck with white supremacist symbols on it was arrested late Sunday night near the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.

     Donald Craighead, 44, of Oceanside, California, was arrested for unlawful possession of banned weapons, Capitol Police said in a press release Monday announcing the arrest.

     An officer pulled over Craighead once he spotted that his Dodge Dakota did not have a license plate, only an American flag, police said.

     Craighead “began talking about white supremacist ideology and other rhetoric pertaining to white supremacy” upon his arrest, the USCP said, and he also claimed that he was “on patrol.”

     The USCP tweeted photos of the interior and exterior of the truck, which appear to show the machete and swastikas drawn on the rearview mirrors: [photos available at the link]

     The arrest comes days before a pro-Trump rally that will be held in D.C. on Saturday in support of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, whom ex-President Donald Trump and his allies have tried to rebrand as political prisoners.

     The DNC headquarters are located just a few blocks away from the Capitol. […]

157. Lynna, OM says

     13 September 2021 at 1:58 pm

     blf @154, “Whilst referring to the vaccine hesitant, and the hardcore anti-vaxxers, as “eejits” (however you care to spell it) is understandable, always using that insulting term for both without acknowledging the differences, seems, well… idiotic.” Yep. I like the “plague rats” description.

     In other news: Biden admin appeals DACA ruling as Democrats make legislative case to parliamentarian

     The Biden administration has appealed the July court decision that ruled the popular and successful Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to be unlawful […] That ruling, issued by anti-immigrant federal judge Andrew Hanen, ground all new applications to a halt, including at least 81,000 first-time forms that had been backlogged due to agency delays. Currently, only renewals may go forward.

     That will likely continue to be the case for the time being. The Biden administration’s appeal goes to the 5th Circuit, “an extremely conservative appeals court,” […]

     This appeal of the DACA ruling to the 5th Circuit only stresses the importance of major legislative advancements made within the past several days. The Senate parliamentarian on Friday heard arguments over the inclusion of immigration provisions—including a pathway to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants—in Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending package. President Joe Biden had notably endorsed reconciliation following Hanen’s decision, saying in a statement that “[i]t is my fervent hope that through reconciliation or other means, Congress will finally provide security to all Dreamers, who have lived too long in fear.”

     […] Since December alone, the program and its beneficiaries have seen a tumultuous timeline where DACA was fully reopened under court order, but then encountered massive agency-wide delays, and then was partially shut down under court order.

     […] Astrid Silva, DACA recipient and Big Dream Nevada founder, told MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez she’s been waiting for decades for her chance to become an American on paper: [Tweet available at the link.]

     […] immigration provisions advocates and Democrats are seeking to pass through the reconciliation process that could permanently protect up to 8 million people, with markup beginning in the House on Monday [today]. Advocates are urging that legislation remain as inclusive as possible. “We believe that passing this legislation through reconciliation is permissible because the bill’s budgetary effects are a substantial, direct and intended result, and that the non-budgetary effects do not so disproportionately outweigh the budgetary effects as to make them merely incidental,” a Democratic aide said in the report.

     Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough’s decision could be out within days, and Democrats should remember that her opinion is just that: an opinion. “The presiding officer ‘may accept or reject’ that advice,” Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter wrote in July. “Senators are free to run their chamber as they see fit,” Daily Kos political director David Nir tweeted. ”Elizabeth MacDonough is not their boss—it’s the other way around.” While this fight to pass permanent relief continues, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and co-counsel at Ropes & Gray are also appealing the Hanen’s decision on behalf of nearly two dozen DACA recipients.

     […] MALDEF Vice President of Litigation Nina Perales said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “For this reason, DACA is an important part of the immigration system and should be upheld as lawful.” MALDEF President Thomas Saenz said “[w]e look forward to a successful appeal on behalf of our courageous clients, even as we urge Congress to act to prevent the necessity of this appeal.”

158. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 3:08 pm

     Follow-up to @117, Veronica Wolski, Woman[plauge rat] Who QAnoners Demanded Hospital Treat COVID With Ivermectin, Dies:

     […]
     Her death was announced on Telegram by conspiracy theorist Lin Wood, one of the biggest and most influential QAnon supporters. Wood previously urged his 814,000 Telegram followers to ring up the Amita Health Resurrection Medical Center and demand that Wolski be treated with ivermectin instead of approved and tested drugs or vaccines. [Vaccines would not have helped her by then, FFS! Vaccines are a preventative, not a treatment –blf]

     […]

     In his post on Telegram, Wood claimed that Wolski had been murdered by the hospital for refusing to treat her COVID with ivermectin.

     […]

     Just hours before reporting her death, Wood posted a video online where he called hospital staff and demanded that she be released from hospital, claiming the person on the call would be guilty of murder if she did not.

     Wood also made a similar statement late on Sunday night, claiming he had spoken to Wolski’s power of attorney and that Amita Resurrection Hospital and its medical providers would be complicit in murder if they do not immediately release Veronica to receive the medical treatment she is requesting.

     Wood once again shared the hospital’s phone number while encouraging his hundreds of thousands of followers to call it and let his[?] hospital hear your voices NOW.

     Other popular QAnon supporters who encouraged their followers to harass the hospital staff into treating Wolski with ivermectin include Sidney Powell, who along with Wood attempting to claim the 2020 election was rigged with the widely dismissed “kraken” lawsuits, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

     […]

     Bingo! An entire card of crackpot plague rats.

     Spotted via https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com/post/veronica-wolski-64-chicago-il-qanon-conspiracy-theorist-anti-vaxxer-died-from-covid (a snippet):

     I’m sure NOW these people will use Veronica as their Martyr and create an Ivermectin army and start attacking more and more hospitals. Maybe this can replace “The Storm” as something for them to be Patriots about? We’ll see.

159. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 3:54 pm

     Related to @120, Ivermectin frenzy: the advocates, anti-vaxxers and telehealth companies driving demand:

     […]
     At the top of a Florida-based telehealth website that promises quality meds with fast shipping[†], above a menu of skin care products, erectile dysfunction medications and hair loss treatments, sits a bright orange banner with bold lettering: LOOKING FOR IVERMECTIN? CLICK HERE, it reads.

     The telehealth site is one of numerous online providers that have moved to capitalize on the surge in demand for ivermectin as Covid-19 cases rise across the US. […]

     Driving the ivermectin frenzy is a cottage industry of advocacy groups, anti-vaccine activists and telehealth companies. Touting the drug as a miracle cure for Covid-19, these groups have rapidly risen to prominence, finding a fervent audience among conservative media figures, the vaccine-hesitant and people desperate to treat loved ones suffering from the virus.

     […]

     Despite outstanding questions over ivermectin’s efficacy, several advocacy organizations have been on a nearly year-long campaign to mainstream the drug. Two of the most prominent groups backing ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment are the UK-based British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (Bird) and the US-based Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC).

     […]

     Doctors[Quacks] in both groups have been on a media blitz during the last year, publishing protocols and promotional material on ivermectin, giving interviews to news outlets, holding panels and appearing on podcasts.

     But other doctors have cautioned the groups have relied on weak data, ignored studies that show ivermectin is not effective and made numerous misleading claims in their push for the drug — such as FLCCC tweeting last month that this could all be over by the end of August and one founding member comparing restrictions on ivermectin to genocide.

     Both the FLCCC and Bird have drawn further scrutiny from other[real] medical professionals for affiliating with prominent anti-vaccine organizations. In September, the FLCCC and Bird sent open letters to health departments in Australia, New Zealand, Iceland and the Cayman Islands advocating for the use of ivermectin for a variety of Covid-19 treatments. Listed as partner organizations on the letters were several international anti-vaccine groups, including the organization of prolific anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr.

     “For an organization that is not anti-vaxx it seems to be incredibly comfortable co-promoting organizations that are anti-vaxx,” said Dr Kyle Sheldrick, a Sydney-based doctor who has raised alarm over unethical conduct in pro-ivermectin studies. “As a doctor myself, I would not be part of any group that keeps the sort of company that FLCCC keeps.”

     Co-founder and president of FLCCC, pulmonary care specialist Dr[quack] Pierre Kory [see @120, @121, and @122], has also found allies among influential politicians and media figures who have spoken critically of Covid-19 vaccines.

     At a December 2020 hearing chaired by Senator Ron Johnson, who has falsely claimed that natural immunity is better than vaccine immunity and made misleading statements about vaccinations causing death, Kory called ivermectin the solution to Covid-19. The appearance boosted Kory’s online following and led to appearances on several popular podcasts that have questioned vaccinations. In June, Kory was a guest on Joe Rogan’s top-rated podcast[rampant liefest], telling Rogan’s millions of listeners that his dream is that every household has ivermectin in the cupboard while suggesting that technology companies were censoring discussion of the drug [and the Chicago Cubs did not win the 2016 World Series].

     […]

     Public interest in ivermectin ballooned following Joe Rogan’s podcasts. […]

     As interest in ivermectin spread, opinions on the drug became subsumed into a broader culture war. As health authorities dismissed it, some advocates increasingly claimed that there was a wide-ranging conspiracy against the drug, accusing tech platforms and big pharma of censorship. Some FLCCC members appeared in YouTube videos promoting conspiracy theories, with titles such as Exposed! FDA, CDC & WHO is hiding this from you? In one video, the hosts claimed, There is a conspiracy to block and ban discussion of treatments that will not make any money for the big pharmaceutical companies. [So why does Merck, who makes ivermectin (and so would profit), does not have a vaccine, and is part of Big Pharma, say to not use it for Covid-19? –blf]

     Fox News hosts, including Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, featured guests promoting the drug and deriding public health officials for cautioning against its use. Conservative radio hosts joined in recommending the drug, including [someone named by Daily Beast who won’t let me see] who has since died of Covid-19.

     As ivermectin turned into a conservative rallying point, some groups began to take advantage of its new audience. At least three telehealth sites offering ivermectin have ties to America’s Frontline Doctors […]

     Dr[Quack] Stella Immanuel, another member of America’s Frontline Doctors, posted on her medical practice Facebook page this month that we went from 100 to 700+ a day signing up for telehealth in three weeks and are totally swamped[ creatures that need draining]” with patients seeking ivermectin.

     Immanuel became infamous last year as a high-profile promoter of hydroxychloroquine […], as well as for her claims that common illnesses were the result of people having sex with demons in their dreams and that reptilians run the government. […]

     […] On Telegram and other messaging platforms, pro-ivermectin communities have become hubs for anti-vaccine misinformation, with members sharing tips for pharmacies and telehealth providers who will order them the drug. In pro-ivermectin Facebook groups, members have promoted the drug’s use, condemned its opponents and discussed taking legal action against doctors who won’t administer it.

     […]

     Barring new data that proves ivermectin’s efficacy in treating Covid-19, many health experts view the drug as a potentially dangerous distraction.

     “There are lots of promising treatments that are much farther along the research and development pipeline than ivermectin,” said Dr Jorge Caballero, co-founder of Coders against Covid, an organization that analyzes Covid data. “Let’s focus on the library of things that we do know work. We know that vaccines work.”

     […]

       † The unnamed site may, on alternate Mondays for precisely 3 minutes starting at a different time each alternating Monday, be a honest trustworthy firm. But I doubt it, hence the eejit quotes.

160. blf says

     13 September 2021 at 4:23 pm

     Biden’s hard line on vaccine mandates draws praise and pushback:

     […]
     “​​What we need is things that work right now,” Dr Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health, told reporters of the announcement from the White House. “So I actually think it will make a big difference.”

     […]

     The US has a long history of mandating vaccines [America mulls vaccine mandates — will they work?]. But previously, vaccinations were required only for government entities or on the state level. This is the first vaccine mandate that extends to so many Americans. However, legal scholars say the mandate falls within the power of federal agencies.

     “We are at a critical moment,” Jha said. “If we did not really begin to implement these things — if we did not substantially ramp up vaccinations, make testing much more widely available — we’re looking at thousands of people dying every day for weeks and months on end.”

     […]

     Some snippets from the referenced history of vaccine mandates in the States (link embedded in above excerpt (August 2021, my added emboldening)):

     The US has a long history of requiring vaccines. In winter 1777, George Washington required smallpox inoculations for all soldiers fighting the British. In 1809, Massachusetts passed a law requiring proof of inoculation against smallpox.

     By 1980, schools in all US states had laws requiring vaccinations for students. Some places offered religious or philosophical exemptions. Such rules were put to the test in a measles epidemic in Philadelphia in 1991, when 1,400 cases and nine deaths were mainly clustered in two churches whose members requested exemption from vaccination.

     “Philadelphia was a feared destination,” said Dr Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Schools canceled trips to the city. People were afraid to come.”

     The measles vaccine became compulsory. “Everyone in those schools had to be vaccinated, even though the parents didn’t want them to be,” Offit said.

     One pastor asked the American Civil Liberties Union to represent the churches but it declined, Offit recalled, on the grounds that “while you are at liberty to martyr yourself to your religion, you are not at liberty to martyr your child”.

     In the grip of the Covid pandemic, mandates seem a logical next step, experts say. Vaccines are safe and effective, widely available and more needed than ever as the Delta variant spreads.

     […]

     Allowing the virus to circulate will put those not eligible for vaccination, like children, and those who not protected well, like the immune-suppressed, at risk. Unchecked spread means more variants will emerge, probably making vaccines less effective.

     There’s also an ethical imperative to mandate vaccines, [founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, Dr Ruth] Faden said.

     “There’s an awful lot of good, an awful lot of human welfare that could be promoted here, a tremendous burden of disease and death could be prevented.”

     […]

     Much like laws about wearing seatbelts and against driving distracted or drunk, vaccine mandates help the world function. As Faden puts it: “I can’t just go through a traffic light because I’m in a hurry.”

161. tomh says

     14 September 2021 at 2:41 am

     Texas judge issues injunction against anti-abortion group on enforcing new law
     By Jessica Schneider and Ariane de Vogue, CNN
     Updated 4:06 PM ET, Mon September 13, 2021

     (CNN)A Texas state judge issued an injunction
     against anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life, blocking it from trying to enforce the new six-week abortion ban against Planned Parenthood in Texas.

     The injunction, issued by Judge Karin Crump of the Travis County court, applies to anyone affiliated with the group and stops them from filing a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood for any potential violation of SB8, the law that effectively bans most abortions in Texas. The law gives private citizens the power to enforce it.

     This order applies only to Texas Right to Life and is part of a larger — and piecemeal — approach by abortion rights advocates to try to blunt the effect of the law. Other short-term temporary restraining orders are in place against other anti-abortion advocates, and more permanent injunctions are being sought in those cases….

     The injunction against Texas Right to Life is effective immediately and replaces a temporary restraining order that was issued earlier this month. It will remain in effect until at least April 2022, when a trial is scheduled on the merits of the case.

     .

162. blf says

     14 September 2021 at 10:36 am

     Unvaccinated conservative talk show host and pastor, dies of COVID-19:

     Conservative firebrand Bob Enyart, the pastor of the Denver Bible Church and indelible talk show host, has died from COVID-19, his radio co-host announced Monday on Facebook.

     “Bob Enyart was one of the smartest, and without question, the wisest person I’ve known,” Fred Williams, Enyart’s co-host on the Real Science Radio show, said in a post[, proving both of them are complete eejits].

     Enyart and his wife refused to get the vaccine due to abortion concerns, he said on his website[, so add a third eejit (presuming he(?) wasn’t lying)].

     In October, Enyart successfully sued the state over mask mandates and capacity limits in churches, a rare legal victory against broad public health mandates instituted during the pandemic[, adding multiple additional eejits to the heil coronavirus goosesteppers, namely some judges and lawyers].

     [… Enyart] once traveled to New Zealand for the sole purpose of being arrested with a Clinton is a Rapist banner, according to a 1999 Westword profile.

     On his old TV show, Bob Enyart Live, the host would “gleefully read obituaries of AIDS sufferers while cranking ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ by Queen,” Westword reported.

     I am therefore very Very happy that this genocidal-promoting nazi is fecking dead. Unfortunately, he’s probably rich enough to afford a funeral, rather than having his plague-ridden corpse incinerated as hazardous biological waste. (See below if you think this is “too” harsh or violates guidelines.)

     […] He claims to be in the top 5% of all authors for book and video sales.

     Enyart also served as the spokesman for American Right to Life, which bills itself as the abolition wing of the pro-life movement.

     […]

     From the Encyclopedia of American Loons (#651, August 2013):

     [… Bob] Enyart is an absolutely inane and insane fundie talk radio host, author, and pastor and a self-proclaimed “right-wing religious fanatic”. He is, perhaps, particularly well known for his views on homosexuality and abortion (whom among these aren’t), for picketing the homes of doctors performing abortions, and for reading the obituaries of AIDS victims on the air calling the deceased people sodomites. He has also led residential protests against executives of a company that provided construction services for Planned Parenthood offices, and is a proponent of the corporal punishment of children, saying that their hearts are lifted by spanking (he was himself convicted for misdemeanor child abuse in 1994 after beating his girlfriend’s child with a belt so hard that the beating broke the skin). Yes, Enyart is that kind of person, if “person” is the right kind of word. […]

     […]

     Diagnosis: Apparently absolutely devoid of any redeemable personality traits or positive human characteristic; yet this zealous bag of bigotry and denialism may nevertheless actually enjoy some listeners. Exasperating.

     sorryantivaxxer.com is also utterly unsympathetic, Bob Enyart, 62, Another Conservative Radio Host, anti-vaxx. “Another one bites the dust” with COVID (minor edits, unmarked, for formatting reasons):

     [… His] claims:

     (1) Babies are being killed to do vaccine research. This is wrong. The stems cell lines come from fetuses from the 1970s and are thousands of generations removed. See: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/you-asked-we-answered-do-the-covid-19-vaccines-contain-aborted-fetal-cells

     (2) mRNA could change our genome. This is false. See: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-covid-mrna-gene/fact-check-mrna-vaccines-are-distinct-from-gene-therapy-which-alters-recipients-genes-idUSL1N2PH16N

     (3) Quantum Dots being used to mark and trace peoples vaccine history this is false currently although possible in the future.

     Anyway, Bob is dead from COVID because he didn’t get vaccinated.

     It’s entirely reasonable, and possible, to feel sorry for the dying & dead unvaccinated, even if they refused the proven safe & effective preventative due to misinformation. Some of the misinformers also deserve sympathy, perhaps especially (albeit not exclusively) if they recant. Enyart is none of these cases. Besides being a denier and scientifically illiterate (he also denied evolution), he celebrated the death of people from AIDS, and promoted the torture of children (being convicted of doing so himself!).

163. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 11:43 am

     On Covid-19 crisis, Florida’s DeSantis starts to lose the plot

     Instead of maintaining a vaccines-and-freedom-are-both-good posture, DeSantis participated in a deeply problematic press conference.

     As a practical matter, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t investing much energy into efforts to end the pandemic. The Republican governor is, however, actively involved in standing in the way of others who are trying to end the pandemic.

     For example, as the number of Covid-related child deaths in Florida grows, DeSantis and his administration continue to fight against policies that would require mask protections in schools. As President Joe Biden takes steps to ensure vaccinations among public sector employees, the Republican governor yesterday vowed to fine local governments “$5,000 for each employee who is required to be vaccinated.”

     How would any of this help bring about an end to the deadly public health crisis? It wouldn’t, but like too many in his party, ending the pandemic isn’t DeSantis’s principal concern.

     It was against this backdrop that the GOP governor held a press conference yesterday on vaccines. As The Tampa Bay Times reported, it didn’t go well.

     Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stood silently Monday as employees for the City of Gainesville repeated misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines during a news conference set up by his office. “The vaccine changes your RNA,” said Darris Friend, who said he’s about a year and a half away from retirement after 22 years with the city. Another implied that the vaccine could kill her.

     Ideally, the governor, in a position of authority and ostensibly aware of reality, would’ve explained to the public that vaccines do not change people’s RNA and do not put anyone’s lives in danger.

     But as the Times’ report added, DeSantis “shifted his feet in apparent discomfort” but did not correct the obvious misinformation being peddled by confused people speaking alongside him.

     And for the Florida Republican, this was an unfortunate turning point.

     For much of the year, DeSantis has tried to thread a needle, telling the public that vaccines are good, while simultaneously insisting that they remain entirely voluntary. The former was intended to make the governor appear reasonable in the eyes of the reality-based community, while the latter would keep the ambitious politician popular with his party’s rabid base.

     For all intents and purposes, the strategy unraveled over the summer as Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and fatalities spiked, and the governor struggled to justify his passivity in the face of an ongoing public health disaster. […]

     DeSantis […] participated in a press conference in which the public was told bizarre nonsense about the one thing that can help end this nightmare.

     As Jon Chait explained, “[…] The Republican party didn’t set out to position itself with vaccine skeptics. But they have found themselves, once again, standing shoulder to shoulder with the absurd, looking down at their feet and pretending it isn’t happening.”

164. snarkrates says

     14 September 2021 at 11:43 am

     blf, Maybe we could open up an franchise specializing in asparagus and diuretics in the vicinity of Enyart’s grave.

165. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 11:48 am

     Yes, President Biden’s plan to increase the number of vaccinated Americans is popular.

     […] A Politico/Morning Consult poll released yesterday found the president’s policy receiving generally “high marks.” Politico reported these results:
     – Requiring all employers with 100 or more employees to mandate Covid-19 vaccinations or weekly testing: 58 percent support, 36 percent oppose
     – Requiring federal workers and contractors to get vaccinated for Covid-19, without an option to opt out through regular testing: 57 percent support, 36 percent oppose
     – Requiring most U.S. health care workers to get vaccinated for Covid-19, without an option to opt out through regular testing: 60 percent support, 34 percent oppose

     An Axios/Ipsos poll, released this morning, pointed in a similar direction:

     Just days after President Biden announced new vaccine requirements for federal employees and businesses with 100 or more workers, the latest Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index (conducted after Biden’s announcement) finds that 60 percent of Americans support the federal government implementing these new policies.

     CNN’s newest national poll, meanwhile, also found narrow majorities endorsing vaccine requirements for “office workers returning to the workplace” (54 percent), “students attending in-person classes” (55 percent), and “patrons attending sporting events or concerts” (55 percent).

     When Republican officials responded last week with hysterical apoplexy, it’s possible they assumed the American mainstream was already on the GOP’s side. It’s also possible that Republicans believed they could help steer public attitudes with over-the-top condemnations.

     […] the American mainstream is more interested in ending the pandemic than going along with a partisan crusade against the president.

     Link

166. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 12:01 pm

     https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1437583096849866765

     Here’s Tucker Carlson reading Nicki Minaj’s “testicles became swollen” tweet out loud: “My cousin trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you’re comfortable with ur decision, not bullied.”

     Video is available at the link.

     Ted Lieu:

     I just want to note that sexually transmitted diseases are not side effects of the COVID vaccines.

     Nicki Minaj has over 20 million followers on Twitter. Joy Reid took her to task for disseminating disinformation.

     “You have a platform, sister, that is 22 million followers,” Reid said Monday during a discussion on her program about vaccine mandates and misinformation. “I have 2 million followers … you have 22 million followers on Twitter. For you to use your platform to encourage our community to not protect themselves and save their lives … my God sister, you could do better than that.”

     Reid added Minaj’s massive following stemming from her music career is “a blessing,” telling the hip-hop star that “people listen to you more than they listen to me.”

     “For you to use your platform to put people in the position of dying from a disease they don’t have to die from, oh my God,” Reid continued. “As a fan, as a hip-hop fan and as somebody who is your fan, I am so sad that you did that, sister. Oh my God.”

     Minaj responded with more tweets, some doubling down and some accusing Joy Reid of going after another black woman “at the request of a white man.” So, Minaj is digging that hole deeper.

167. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 12:30 pm

     George W. Bush condemns ‘violent extremists,’ Trump pushes back

     What does it say about Donald Trump that every time he hears condemnations of hatred and extremism, he instinctively assumes he’s the target?

     Exactly 20 years after the Sept. 11 attack, George W. Bush delivered remarks in Pennsylvania, from the field where Flight 93 crashed. The former president’s speech was poignant, and in many ways, important.

     “[W]e have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within,” the Texas Republican said. “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

     Bush added, “A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”

     The former president was deliberately vague about his rhetorical targets. He mentioned no one by name and was unspecific about parties and ideologies.

     But the only other living former Republican president was nevertheless outraged. In a written statement released yesterday, Donald Trump lashed out at Bush directly:

     “So interesting to watch former President Bush, who is responsible for getting us into the quicksand of the Middle East (and then not winning!), as he lectures us that terrorists on the ‘right’ are a bigger problem than those from foreign countries that hate America.”

     Trump went on to say Bush “led a failed and uninspiring presidency,” and he “shouldn’t be lecturing anybody!”

     As a factual matter, Bush did not single out terrorists on “on the ‘right,'” or say that they pose a more serious threat than foreign attackers. Trump just made that up.

     But perhaps the most amazing thing about Trump’s angry response is its existence: Bush denounced “violent extremists,” and those who appeal to “anger, fear and resentment,” which led Trump to assume that he was the intended target.

     […] it was in February 2019, for example, when filmmaker Spike Lee said in his Academy Awards acceptance speech, “Let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate.”

     The then-president was outraged, taking great offense and describing Lee’s comments as a “racist hit” on Trump.

     Lee hadn’t mentioned Trump’s name — or said anything racist, for that matter — but […] Trump immediately felt insulted.

     Something similar happened during John McCain’s memorial services a year earlier. Trump’s name was not uttered, but many who eulogized the late senator went out of their way to contrast his lifetime of service with those who, in Barack Obama’s words, are “small and mean and petty.”

     People close to Trump said he “fumed” during the event, and “grew angry” with the veiled criticisms. The then-president’s name didn’t come up, but confronted with oblique references to dishonorable people of weak character, he assumed the worst.

     In the final full month of his presidency, Barack Obama spoke at an event at Pearl Harbor and told attendees, “Even when hatred burns hottest, even when the tug of tribalism is at its most primal, we must resist the urge to turn inward. We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different.” Trump, naturally, assumed the Democratic president was directing the comments at him.

     Three years later, Obama urged Americans to reject those who feed “a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments.” Trump was offended by this, too.

     What does it say about Trump that every time he hears condemnations of hatred and extremism, he instinctively assumes he’s the target?

168. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 12:40 pm

     Larry Elder Campaign Touts Website Already Saying Newsom Won Via Voter Fraud

     The campaign of Larry Elder, the hard-right radio host who’s been leading the pack of Republicans working to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in today’s recall election, is promoting a website that curiously already states the results of the election even though it, uh, hasn’t started yet!

     The campaign’s website has a “Stop Fraud” link leading to “StopCAfraud.com,” which has a petition that demands the California state legislature “investigate and ameliorate” the “twisted results” of the election. [There are no results! Not yet anyway. As Rachel Maddow said last night, there are no results twisty or not twisty. Elder’s campaign put that nonsense up online more than 26 hours before election day.]

     The linked website claims that unspecified “statistical analysis used to detect fraud in elections held in 3rd-world nations” have detected fraud “resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor.” [Ha! Rampant bullshit.]

     On the linked website site is a disclaimer that it was paid for by the “Larry Elder Ballot Measure Committee Recall Newsom,” and indicates that group received major funding from … wait for it … the Elder campaign.

     What’s incredible is that the site is still up even after the Elder campaign was asked about it by news outlets. Elder spokesperson Ying Ma acknowledged in a statement that the campaign has “provided a link to an outside website that is providing an avenue for voters to document irregularities they encounter in this election” but “we believe that Larry will win.” [More bullshit. Elder himself has been spouting comments that reveal his is worried/afraid/sure that he will lose.]

     Elder refused to commit to accepting today’s election results yesterday, saying instead that “we all need to be looking at election integrity”: [video available at the link]

     Trump also put out a rant baselessly claiming (again) that the recall election is “rigged” and that the mail-in ballots “will make this just another giant Election Scam.”

     Biden warned Californians that Elder was “the closest thing to a Trump clone that I have ever seen” during his stump speech for Newsom yesterday in Long Beach, California.

     Yep. Biden is right. See comments 29, 39 and 49.

169. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 12:49 pm

     Idaho Republicans sent their state into pandemic crisis. Now it’s spreading over state borders.

     […] the state of Idaho’s near-complete incompetence at dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in adjacent Washington State hospitals having to pick up the slack. Northern Idaho hospitals are now so inundated with patients that crisis rationing of health care was announced last week. In Washington, the new flood of Idaho pandemic patients is resulting in postponed brain cancer surgeries and overwhelmed emergency rooms.

     […] Republican Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s clownish pandemic incompetence is flat-out killing people, and not all of them are in Idaho. It’s yet another case of a red-state Republican government completely botching—on purpose—the response to a public crisis while leaving it to the public and to nearby better-run governments to clean up the wreckage. Again. And Americans have every right to be pissed off about it.

     […] Idaho’s 40% vaccination rate is among the nation’s lowest, and Little is among the Republican governors who—of course—bellowed that he would be taking legal action to make sure the federal government couldn’t mandate vaccinations for employees […] There’s similarly no plans to take other measures to reduce the pandemic’s spread in the state.

     The Little plan appears to be akin to Republican plans in Florida and elsewhere and can be roughly described as ”If we claim it’s patriotic not to try, then nobody can blame us for the staggering numbers of deaths.” Like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, Little also attempted to portray pandemic safety measures as a Democratic attack on “freedom,” specifically the freedom to spread a deadly disease if you damn well want to, anywhere you want to, because screw everybody else.

     At this point it’s hard to blame this entirely on Donald Trump. His thickheaded incompetence was the reason Republicanism first came to insist that competence, actually, was the real enemy here, but Trump is retired now and the rest of these clowns are still in the center ring. […]

     Little’s incompetence at managing what’s now a state emergency is risking lives in Washington State and in any other state now having to accept an influx of ventilator-reliant Idaho freedom-havers. It’s the same dynamic that’s played out time and time again, as Republican ideologues make a catastrophe […] then rely on the nation’s not-Republicans to attempt to patch up the damage without them.

     […] In Republican governance you can fill hospitals to overflowing, fill them further until crisis protocols must be enacted, fill them further still so that hospitals in neighboring states are also seeing an influx of your state residents, and still nobody in the party will question whether or not Republicanism should be doing something more substantive than bupkis in response.

     […] Recent history suggests that each freedom-loving Republican will regret their past actions if and only if a member of their own family kicks the pandemic bucket. If a member of your family gets infected and dies, they don’t care. If it’s your cancer surgery that has to be delayed, allowing the cancer to further grow so that hospitals can free up rooms and doctors for unvaccinated anti-mask belligerents now sucking air through a tube while their families search local livestock supply stores for veterinary dewormers, they don’t care.

     Maybe Washington State needs to implement vaccine passports for crossing its state borders.

     […] Getting vaccinated is free. Being treated in an emergency room for even a “mild” case of COVID-19 infection is not only not free, it remains heart-stoppingly expensive. Spend a night or 10 in an ICU and even with insurance, many Americans will still face a mountain of unpayable bills.

     What will be the long-term economic effects in places like Florida and Idaho after a sea of unvaccinated patients live through the pandemic, only to see their savings wiped out and then some from the costs of keeping them alive? What will the long-term effects on local health care systems be from that many bills going unpaid?

     […] Keep your patriotic deaths to yourselves and leave the rest of us out of it, Republican do-nothings. These are your bills to be paid, not ours. Stop relying on everyone else to bail you out of every catastrophe […]

170. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 1:00 pm

     Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. […] I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country. […]

     These people’s faith leaves plenty of room open for fear. Fear of scary immigrants. Fear of liberals. Fear of being replaced by Black and brown people. Fear of “Chinese Communists.” Fear of critical race theory. Fear of masks. Fear of vaccines. The list is endless.

     This isn’t a question of “faith over fear.” It’s some weird, perverted, bizarre interpretation where their faith is suddenly incompatible with taking a free, lifesaving vaccine. […]

     Taking the vaccine was somehow rejecting “faith” for “fear.” And so here we are: a big chunk of the family going down with COVID-19. […]

     These people consistently vote against a party that would provide universal health care, meaning an unforeseen hospitalization wouldn’t bankrupt their family. This is all so easily avoidable, and this situation is nonexistent in other countries. Yet here they are, collecting pennies on a GoFundMe fundraiser that will never even cover medical bills, much less replace whatever income she was providing to the family (“a huge role,” according to this very fundraiser). […]

     But yeah, “faith over fear,” or something. […]

     Can you imagine being an overworked doctor or nurse laboring in this most difficult, emotionally wrenching environment, and having to deal with people who think they know better because of some meme they saw on Facebook?

     COVID-19 attacked her lungs and her heart. Hospitals have a protocol they follow in these cases, which is based on over a year of experience in seeing what improves the chances of survival the most. And these assholes are screaming at them about hydroxychloroquine because of Donald Trump, and ivermectin horse dewormer because Facebook said so.

     COVID-19 creates dangerous systemic inflammation. Steroids help lower that inflammation. Are they ideal and free of side effects? No! No drug is when treating this disease. But you know what else has severe side effects? COVID-19! […]

     “Whether to vaccinate is a deeply personal matter, but here, let me tell the world about my wife’s bodily fluids while on her death bed.”

     I get that these people are in severe, panicked distress. Their reactions aren’t going to be rational, and let’s be honest, there wasn’t much rationality from this guy even before this tragedy. But hospitals are messy, gross places in the best of times. Now emergency rooms are overflowing with avoidable COVID-19 cases, and hospitals have to deal with staffing shortages from burnout, illness, and even staff quitting over vaccine mandates. So yeah, maybe patients are shitting their beds and things don’t get cleaned up until staff has time to get to it. It’s not ideal. It’s likely horrible.

     But that’s why, you know, we smart ones try to avoid the place by, you know, vaccinating. […]

     COVID-19 will do this cruel twist of the knife: The patient will seemingly improve, and then a day or two later, she or he dies. I hate it—the false hope it brings. It makes the end even more painful. And it happens all the freakin’ time. […]

     Such a waste. So avoidable. [Spoiler: Natalie died.]

     Enter Chadwick: [Post available at the link]

     So many of these COVID-19 dead leave behind children. They’re so wrapped up in their “my body, my choice” delusion that they’re willfully blind to the devastation their potential death (or incapacitation) can have on their families. No GoFundMe site will make those families whole. Not financially, and certainly not emotionally.

     It’s simple math: Even if the disease only kills 0.1% of all Americans, that’s still 3.3 million Americans. What makes them so sure they won’t be one of those? Yet they’ve convinced themselves—thanks to Facebook, the conservative movement, and their right-wing churches—that the vaccines don’t work, or that they have mind control chips in them, or that they’re “experimental.” Meanwhile they themselves are somehow protected from this deadly pandemic. Because of faith.

     And time and time again, they’re proven wrong. […]

     Link

171. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 1:05 pm

     Texas school district that closed down after two teachers died from COVID reopens with mask mandate

     On Aug. 30, after two junior high school teachers passed away due to complications from COVID-19, Connally Independent School District (ISD) in Texas announced that its schools would be closing down for the rest of the week and through the Labor Day weekend. Connally ISD is based in McLennan County, and Texas is ruled by a Republican governor who is trying to make public health steps illegal.

     Last week, Connally ISD Superintendent Wesley Holt wrote an email to parents and employees explaining that “As educators, it is our duty to keep our students safe and healthy. We feel instituting a mask mandate is a step towards doing this.” This decision is a very easy one from a humanitarian, intelligent, and educational perspective, but because it was made by a person working in the Lone Star State in 2021, Holt’s email will now likely be a part of twice-indicted fraudster and State Attorney General Ken Paxton’s potential lawsuit against the Connally ISD.

     […] Texas Attorney General Paxton posted this threat on Facebook:

     In light of our coming legal action, three school districts smartly rescinded their mask-mandates: Trenton, Calvert, and Los Fresnos ISDs. In doing so, they’ll save taxpayer dollars in futile litigation expenses AND come into compliance with state law. MANY more ISDs are still breaking the law. Lawsuits are coming against them THIS WEEK. Rescind now or see you in court!

     A reminder: Ken Paxton logged “more than 22,000 staff hours” on Texas taxpayers’ dime working on ‘voter fraud’ cases just last year. Paxton is easily one of the most wasteful attorney generals in the country as his office seems to specifically chase ghosts and sue children.

     CNN reports that McLennan County has 37,492 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 572 deaths—four of which happened on Sunday alone. The infection rate in the approximately 250,000-person county is above 15%. Waco and McLennan County’s official COVID-19 health page reports that the total death count to date is 578. According to the health officials on the ground, they have had 181 new cases, with 202 hospitalized patients,and 39 patients on ventilators.

     If anything can be called a silver lining in all of this, it’s that the seriousness of getting vaccinated has been impressed on those closely touched by these tragic loses. Natalia Chansler’s sister, Annice, told CNN that some of her family had been on the fence about getting vaccinated. “They’ve made that move and I’m so proud of them for doing that. I hate that it took Natalia’s passing for them to understand how important it is, but I’m just glad they’ve done it.”

172. johnson catman says

     14 September 2021 at 1:18 pm

     re Lynna@169:

     It’s simple math: Even if the disease only kills 0.1% of all Americans, that’s still 3.3 million Americans.

     Apparently, it is not-so-simple math to the author of the article. Multiply 330 million (330,000,000) times 0.1% and you get 330,000 not 3,300,000.

173. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 2:22 pm

     johnson catman @171, thank you for the correction. So far, more than 600,000 people have been killed by the disease. Even the math illiterate should be able to understand that.

     In other news: Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is just trolling us at this point

     The newest member of the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is reportedly “concerned” that the American public unfairly suspects the Supreme Court to be a partisan institution.

     […] we know this because Barrett said so in a speech on Sunday at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, founded by Sen. Mitch McConnell, after being personally introduced by Mitch McConnell himself, after Mitch McConnell pushed Barrett’s nomination through the Senate in a matter of weeks after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, after Mitch McConnell blocked a previous Supreme Court confirmation for more than a year to prevent the seat being filled by a Democratic president’s nominee.

     Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was buried. And Mitch McConnell is extremely partisan. No Supreme Court Justice should accept a speaking gig at the McConnell Center.

     Whether Amy Coney Barrett reflected on any of this as she awaited backstage for Mitch McConnell to finish her glowing introduction is unknown. Whether she considered even for a moment whether answering Mitch McConnell’s call to speak to McConnell backers at the McConnell Center would further fuel, in the public mind, suspicions that the Supreme Court was at this point nothing more than an extension of Republican politics with members of the judiciary working hand in hand with Republican political activists is also a mystery.

     But it is highly likely that she is just f–king with us because nobody could be that obtuse unless it was on purpose. Amy Coney Barrett appears to now be just openly trolling people as she brags about the comity on the court and how, actually, justices are “hyper-vigilant” not to let “personal biases” influence their rulings no matter how much it might look like a newly emboldened partisan majority is playing Magic 8 Ball with precedent to rewrite, in some cases, a century’s worth of established law.

     It’s possible, in Amy Coney Barrett’s mind, that she actually thinks she’s gracious in explaining this to us at all. […]

     I’m meeting you halfway here, Barrett seems to be saying. I’m going to continue declaring that all of my excruciatingly predictable rulings providing near-uniform backing to Republican Party priorities are a “judicial philosophy,” albeit one that seems to change its core presumptions from each case to the next as the court’s conservatives Jenga their way to predetermined ideological outcomes. And you are going to sit there listening to Mitch McConnell introduce me at the Mitch McConnell Center for Republican Judicial F–kery, and it is all just an amazing coincidence.

     […] Now that we’re at the point of seriously (ostensibly) pondering whether states can farm out the enforcement of new civil rights-limiting laws to private bounty hunters in order to evade constitutional prohibitions against doing those things, however, it’s becoming increasingly impossible to tease out just what “philosophy” is at work here other than a general decision that Republican Party-backed ideologues will support any Republican Party-backed scheme presented, in the effort to limit American democracy, backtrack on civil rights, […] back gun vigilantism over public safety, and so forth.

     Barrett shouldn’t be asking whether the public believes the Supreme Court to be a partisan entity now. It’s unquestionably a partisan entity. […] A Republican Senate shoved Barrett’s own confirmation through a mere week before a presidential election, gleefully putting a thumb in the eye of any press rube gullible enough to believe their previous outrage over doing the same thing even in the same calendar year as an election was sincere.

     […] The question Amy Coney Barrett should be asking is not whether the public believes the court is partisan. The question is whether the public still believes the rulings of the court to be legitimate.

     […] Does the public believe the Supreme Court will stand firm if Republicans declare a future election to be invalid after the Republican candidate does not win? Or does the public believe that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority would eagerly back even a fraudulent hoax undermining democracy itself if the result meshed with the personal preferences of its members?

     Republican-led states are engaging in those precise preparations even now, as state after state installs new restrictions on the right to vote explicitly premised on false propaganda. On hoaxes. On Republican-backed, partisan mirages of supposed “fraud” that exists nowhere, resulting in new Jim Crow laws tamping down on votes, a push that began immediately after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority removed state restrictions on doing so with the implausible and now disproven claim that the Jim Crow era had passed. New laws include means by which the Republican Party can install partisan acolytes to challenge the vote tallies of counties that vote against them.

     Does the public believe the Supreme Court will stop them, or help them? […]

174. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 2:35 pm

     Wonkette: Did You Forget How Crazy Trump Was? Bob Woodward Will Remind You.

     Excerpts from Bob Woodward’s latest book Peril are dropping, and SPOILER ALERT, Donald Trump is fucking crazy.

     Most surprising detail: We have Vice President Dan Quayle to thank for saving the Republic.

     Because when fellow Hoosier Mike Pence was looking to phone a friend for sage advice on whether to toss out swing state ballots as Trump and the MAGA goons demanded, he couldn’t think of anyone better than the learned scholar who got into a fight with a fifth grader over the spelling of the word “potato.” And even that guy said hell to the no.

     Tell us, CNN:

     “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,” Quayle told him.

     Pence pressed again.

     “You don’t know the position I’m in,” he said, according to the authors.

     “I do know the position you’re in,” Quayle responded. “I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power.”

     And even though Donald Trump screamed and shouted that “I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this!” (no, really) and “You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were nothing,” Mike Pence actually stuck to his guns.

     […] Least surprising detail: Bob Woodward tries to bothsides it by shoehorning the first four months of the Biden administration into a book about Trump. This is Bob Woodward we’re talking about here.

     Runner up for least surprising detail: It was that chaos weasel Steve Bannon who convinced Trump to go all in on January 6.

     On December 30, Bannon convinced Trump to come back to the White House from Mar-a-Lago to prepare for the events of January 6, the date Congress would certify the election results.

     “You’ve got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today,” Bannon told Trump, according to the book. “You’ve got to call Pence off the fucking ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis.”

     The authors write that Bannon told Trump that January 6 was “the moment for reckoning.”

     “People are going to go, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ ” Bannon believed. “We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th, fucking bury him,” Bannon said.

     It’s always the ones you most suspect!

     But whatever you can say about Woodward, he does get the goods, releasing new details on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley’s actions after the January 6 insurrection when he “was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.”

     So Milley rounded up all the top military guys at the Pentagon and told them in no uncertain terms that no matter what batshit order came out of the White House, nothing happened without his approval. No nuclear war with Iran, no invasion of China, no mass movement of American troops — no wagging the dog whatsoever.

     Which was apparently a good thing, because that fucking lunatic Trump signed an executive order right after the election mandating that all American troops had to be out of Afghanistan by January 15, 2021, before Biden was even sworn in. He was later persuaded to rescind it, but please keep that in mind when Republicans tell you that their withdrawal from Afghanistan would have gone smoothly and left no one behind.

     After he got through with the top brass, Milley got on the horn with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to assure her that he wasn’t going to let the maniac president launch a coup or a nuclear war.

     “What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?” Pelosi demanded, adding, “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.”

     “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything,” Milley said, according to Woodward and his co-author Robert Costa.

     And it wasn’t just Pelosi freaking out. The Washington Post quotes excerpts describing two phone calls Milley made to his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, assuring him that the US wasn’t about to strike China based on the whim of a madman.

     “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said on October 30. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”

     On January 8, Milley went back to Li to promise that America wasn’t about to descend into utter chaos and civil war.

     “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes,” he said.

     Remember when Trump said that no one would be laughing at us when he was president?

     There is so much more, including Trump losing his shit after Defense Secretary Mark Esper refused to invoke the Insurrection Act against BLM protesters.

     “You’re all fucked up,” he screamed. “Everybody. You’re all fucked. Every one of you is fucked up!”

     Yes, we were all fucked up. And we’re still all fucked up. But a little less than we were on January 20.

175. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 2:39 pm

     Wonkette:

     […]

     TUCKER CARLSON: I mean I lie if I’m really cornered or something. I lie. I really try not to. I try never to lie on TV. I just don’t — I don’t like lying. I certainly do it, you know, out of weakness or whatever.

     He lies if he’s cornered. He tries not to. He tries not to lie on TV. Note he doesn’t say he succeeds when he tries not to lie on TV. He doesn’t like lying. But he does it, because he’s weak.

     […] There was a lot more context to the discussion, and all of it was uninteresting, but if you really want to know, Media Matters gotchu, since we’re pretty sure you’re also not going to watch that video above. The short version is that Rubin and Tucker were talking about how DON LEMON and BRIAN STELTER are big liars, and then Tucker just went and told us his heart feelings, about why and when he lies.

     And look, we all know that Tucker lies just CONSTANTLY on his show, to the point that Fox News lawyers in court have had to argue (we are paraphrasing) that any idiot should know Tucker is not to be relied upon for Knowledge Truths … but this whole time he was just feeling scared and cornered, like a stinky rodent animal with rabies and masculinity issues in the corner of the attic?

     […] We’re just saying. Because he really does lie a lot on TV, so he must be just shivering in fear pretty much from the time his producer whispers in his ear to say he’s live.

     Does Tucker know he actually doesn’t have to go on TV, if it scares him so much he has to just constantly lie? He could do a different job. […]

176. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 2:52 pm

     Link for text quoted in comment 174.

     Wonkette: “AOC Went To Met Gala Last Night Just To Hurt Conservative White Male Feelings”

     […] Lotta people have opinions about Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez going to the Met Gala, where she wore a dress by a Brooklyn designer what said “TAX THE RICH” on the back.

     Depending on your viewpoint, you might think Ocasio-Cortez is a hypocrite for schmoozing with the rich even though she LITERALLY HATES the rich. (Because she wants to tax them, this means she hates them, just like if you want to teach all of American history, even the parts where white people didn’t comport themselves with the utmost in moral character and dignity, that means you literally hate all white people. This is how Republicans think.) Maybe you think she is being a hypocrite because she accepted the gift of a free ticket to the Met Gala or a borrowed dress. (In which case you’ve definitely been Doing Your Own Research on how fundraisers and gifts to politicians work!) Maybe you think she is being a traitor to The Cause because “reason.” (You’re just jealous, most likely.)

     Let’s look at some of our favorite conservative men melting down about the pretty lady they’re all scared of going to the fancy place they’d never be invited to. […] [snipped some Twitter responses, including Benny Johnson noting the price of a ticket to the Met Gala, etc.]

     It’s funny because AOC likely didn’t have to pay for literally any of it. She was invited as a New York politician to the very fancy New York fundraiser, and teamed up with an up-and-coming designer who made her a fancy dress that just so happened to get everybody talking about taxing the rich. New York Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney wore a dress that said “Equal Rights for Women,” but Republican men aren’t screaming at her right now because they aren’t as panty-pissing scared of/fixated on her like they are with AOC. [snipped Trump’s ridiculous response, as posted on Twitter by Donald Junior]

     “Authoritarian mask Karen.” Good one, Junior.

     Of course, you had to be vaccinated to go to the Met Gala […] Also, New York is a very vaccinated city, and the whole point of getting people vaccinated (instead of dewormed) is so we can get past this damn pandemic and back to normal life, and so we don’t have to be authoritarian mask Karens anymore.

     Here’s Ted Cruz, who is having similar brainworms to Junior up there, these boys really need to take their Ivermectin chewables: [Cruz’s stupidity can be viewed at the link.]

     […] Ditto for House Republicans, who could have actually sought out some information about the party they weren’t invited to, but tweeted stupid quotes from poorly written and researched Fox News articles instead: [Stupidity can be viewed at the link.]

     So many white men, so many feelings.

     So did AOC really completely own the libs last night, specifically HERSELF the lib?

     As the congresswoman noted in an Instagram story, there was a surge in searches for “Tax the rich” last night while she was showing off that dress. And she did it at the rich people party! So that seems to be a win.

     Also newsflash to the confused: AOC is definitely not rich, particularly by the standards of members of Congress, or by the standards of other attendees at the Met Gala. But she sure does advocate people paying their fair share. And oh look, she talked about that on the red carpet standing next to the designer of the dress, whom AOC brought as her guest: [video available at the link]

     For more on what a coup this really was for the message AOC came to deliver, read Amee Vanderpool.

     AOC also explained Met Gala Tickets, How Do THEY Work, for any who are curious [Tweet available at the link]

     So we’ll call this one a win for AOC.

     And of course, that means this is yet another loss for conservative men. Poor things. In all this business they’ve also been too distracted by AOC to even be triggered by Megan Rapinoe looking like a badass and carrying an “In Gay We Trust” clutch at the party Megan Rapinoe also got to go to and they didn’t. […]

177. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 3:00 pm

     Follow-up to comment 173.

     “Top general was so fearful Trump might spark war that he made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, new book says.”

     Washington Post link

     Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.

     In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.

     One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President Trump, and the other on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol siege carried out by his supporters in a quest to cancel the vote.

     The first call was prompted by Milley’s review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack. That belief, the authors write, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea, and deepened by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward China. [See comment 173]

     In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

     Li took the chairman at his word, the authors write in the book, “Peril,” which is set to be released next week.

     […] Li remained rattled, and Milley, who did not relay the conversation to Trump, according to the book, understood why. […]

     Believing that China could lash out if it felt at risk from an unpredictable and vengeful American president, Milley took action. The same day, he called the admiral overseeing the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the military unit responsible for Asia and the Pacific region, and recommended postponing the military exercises, according to the book. The admiral complied.

     Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order — but, crucially, that he, Milley, also had to be involved. Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood, the authors write, in what he considered an “oath.” […]

     Though Milley went furthest in seeking to stave off a national security crisis, his alarm was shared throughout the highest ranks of the administration, the authors reveal. CIA Director Gina Haspel, for instance, reportedly told Milley, “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.” […]

178. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 3:04 pm

     VoteVets, the nation’s largest progressive veterans’ organization, this morning launched a national ad campaign in support for Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan. YouTube link

179. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 3:05 pm

     Louisiana was scheduled to hold a series of local elections in a few weeks, including municipal races in New Orleans, but Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards agreed to delay the elections while the state continues to recover from Hurricane Ida.

180. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 5:40 pm

     […] recent report comes to us from the World Bank, suggesting that by 2050, a worst-case scenario of the climate crisis could force more than 200 million people to leave their homes […]

     Why? A gradual decrease in crops, rising sea levels, and a lack of clean water could lead to millions of people needing to evacuate from their homes. The report suggests this trend could occur in many regions, including North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, and East Asia, and the Pacific. When researchers looked at the climate crisis from a best-case scenario lens, they found that more than 40 million people may need to relocate within their own countries due to climate change. As well as economic and security concerns, this is also undeniably an example of collective trauma.

     So, what can be done? According to researchers, we need to be taking action now to determine possible hotspots for migration, prepare for where people in need will move to, and support people who are not able (or choose not to) migrate elsewhere. […]

     In terms of climate change itself, researchers stress the importance of collective action to reduce emissions and development.

     […] This particular survey included residents of more than 15 countries in Asia, Europe, and North America, with about 20,000 people. Most people surveyed—including most Americans—claim they would be open to making changes in how they live to help reduce climate change. Unsurprisingly, younger generations on the global scale are more concerned about how climate change may affect them personally when compared to older folks. Also unsurprisingly, progressives worldwide say they are more willing to make those personal changes to combat climate change.

     Now, individual choices are critical, but it’s really corporations that need to make large-scale changes. Clearly, most corporations aren’t willing to do that independently, so we need our elected officials (and the general public) to hold them accountable and push for better.

     Link

     See also: Associated Press link

181. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 5:43 pm

     Follow-up to comment 165.

     Chief White House medical advisor Anthony Fauci responded to Nicki Minaj’s vaccine worries after her comments on Twitter sparked controversy on Monday. […]

     CNN’s Jake Tapper questioned Fauci about the tweet, asking whether there is any evidence that vaccines approved for use in the U.S. could cause such problems.

     “The answer to that, Jake, is a resounding no,” Fauci responded. “There’s no evidence that it happens, nor is there any mechanistic reason to imagine that it would happen, so the answer to your question is no.”

     “She should be thinking twice about propagating information that really has no basis as except a one-off antidote and that’s not what science is all about,” Fauci added.

     […] Fauci said it is “very difficult” to combat the misinformation and the only way to counter falsities is to “provide a lot of correct information” and “debunk these kinds of claims.” […]

     Link

182. tomh says

     14 September 2021 at 7:51 pm

     Arizona takes on Biden administration over vaccine mandate
     BRAD POOLE / September 14, 2021

     (CN) — Arizona and its Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued President Joe Biden on Tuesday, claiming the president’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for large employers discriminates against U.S citizens because the vaccine is not mandated for immigrants who enter the country illegally.

     “The Executive Branch has adopted an unconstitutional policy of favoring aliens that have unlawfully entered the United States over actual U.S. citizens, both native and foreign born, with the inalienable right to live here,” Brnovich argues in the 15-page complaint.

     The mandate, which the Biden administration will enact through Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules, will force companies with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccines for employees.
     […]

     “Public health, safety, welfare were left to the states,” Brnovich said. “I think the president’s actions over the last eight months and especially this executive order relating to vaccine mandates indicate that his administration is undermining federalism and undermining the laboratories of democracy.”

     The attorney general demurred when asked whether the federal government has the authority to impose safety mandates like helmets and breathing masks for some workers. Lawsuits challenging the OSHA rules will come later, he said.

     “This is just the first of many lawsuits to come,” he said.
     […]

     The state wants a federal judge to declare it unconstitutional to have differing vaccine policies for unauthorized aliens and U.S. citizens or lawful residents.

183. Lynna, OM says

     14 September 2021 at 9:44 pm

     Bits and pieces of news, most of which are summarized by Steve Benen:

     [NBC News] More than half a million customers in Texas were without power Tuesday after Tropical Storm Nicholas made landfall there, threatening parts of the Gulf Coast with up to 20 inches of rain.
     ————————-
     [NBC News] The Justice Department on Tuesday announced new limits on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, but stopped short of banning the controversial law enforcement tactics that critics say have led to unnecessary deaths.
     ————————-
     [Washington Post] Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday unveiled new rules governing federal monitors responsible for overseeing police reforms in local jurisdictions, including setting limits on the watchdogs’ tenure and budgets and requiring them to undergo more training.
     ————————-
     [NBC News] The Department of Homeland Security is estimating roughly 700 people will attend the ‘Justice for J6’ rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday and has taken steps to make sure law enforcement is better prepared than it was prior to Jan. 6, said Melissa Smislova, deputy undersecretary for intelligence enterprise readiness. [Really? Only 700? That could actually be some sort of good-ish news.]
     ————————
     [NBC News] All active duty soldiers are expected to be vaccinated by Dec. 15, the U.S. Army said Tuesday. “This is quite literally a matter of life and death for our Soldiers, their families and the communities in which we live,” Lt. Gen. R. Scott Dingle, the Army’s surgeon general, said in a statement.
     ———————–
     [NBC News] The number of Americans living in poverty declined overall during the Covid pandemic due to the massive stimulus relief measures Congress enacted at the beginning of the crisis, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
     ———————–
     [Des Moines Register, re news that was also covered by Teen Vogue] […] a seventh-grade English teacher in Winterset, Iowa, had been placed on administrative leave on Aug. 31 after he included a Pride flag in a presentation to introduce himself to his students. However, the school district says the issue actually rested in a personality quiz he assigned to students. On Saturday, the teacher resigned, citing his mental health.

     What started all of this, according to the students? Students viewed the Powerpoint presentation, asked about the Pride flag, and Kaufmann answered honestly that he is bisexual. From there, he was allegedly put on leave. And both middle and high school students walked out of school on Tuesday in support of their teacher.

     What is the school saying? In a statement to Teen Vogue, Winterset Community School District Superintendent Justin Gross explained that the district became “aware of concerns” related to the content of a “personality survey” shared with students and placed Kaufmann on leave while they investigated. […] the personality test [a parent said] was given by Kauffman to students, in which they’re asked about how they’d feel loved in their ideal relationship. An option includes “initiates sexual intimacy,” which is undoubtedly inappropriate to give to seventh-graders.

     […] Mind you, teachers (and frankly, people in most professions) discuss their sexuality all of the time. People in heterosexual-presenting marriages often have photos from their wedding on their desk, pictures from family vacations, births, or holidays. When talking about what people did over a holiday break or even a regular weekend, folks often share about their activities and (whether thinking about it or not) signal to their orientation via pronouns, names, or labels like “husband” or “partner.”

     It’s only when people signal queerness, apparently, that some parents have an issue.

     In the end? Kauffman resigned on Saturday, telling the Des Moines Register that he was not leaving in place of being fired. Kauffman told the outlet the district had reassured him that termination was not actually on the table. Still, he wanted to resign to “protect my own mental health and well-being,” as well as ensure students would not be distracted from their work in the classroom. He described the public backlash as an “enormous burden.”

184. raven says

     15 September 2021 at 1:08 am

     Looks like Newsom, governor of California won the recall.
     Not only that, it wasn’t even close, 2 to 1.
     The likely GOP challenger was Trump+, opposed abortion and the minimum wage. In a state that has a high cost of living, the minimum wage doesn’t go very far. Without the minimum wage, a lot of people would be below a survivable wage without some sort of government aid. Which means the government ends up subsidizing low wage businesses by paying their wage bills.

     CNBC

     With 64% of the expected vote in, Newsom led with 5,562,954 votes, or 66.6%, against removing him from office, compared with 2,787,227 votes, or 33.4%, in favor of the recall.

185. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 10:26 am

     Follow-up to @161 & @163, A snippet from the Gruniad’s Colorado radio host [Bob Enyart] who urged boycott of vaccines dies of Covid-19:

     Enyart also called for women who had abortions to face the death penalty.

     Regarding Covid-19 vaccines, Enyart said people should boycott the shots because … they tested these three products on the cells of aborted babies.

     As the Washington Post explains, Conservative radio host who spurned vaccines, mocked AIDS patients dies of covid-19:

     […] Earlier this year, some Catholic leaders who were engaged in philosophical debates on how central the use of fetal cell lines were in the production of the vaccines came out to say the shots were moral and essential in the fight to save lives. The lines in question were essentially reproductions of fetal cells from abortions done in the 1970s and 1980s, and the vaccines themselves don’t contain fetal cells.

     […]

     When it came to the coronavirus, Enyart promoted falsehoods about the virus, masking and vaccination on his show, Real Science Radio, website and social media pages.

     I took a brief look at that site (which I’m not linking to), and “promot[ing] falsehoods” is another candidate for the Understatement of the Year Award.

186. lumipuna says

     15 September 2021 at 11:14 am

     johnson catman @171, thank you for the correction. So far, more than 600,000 people have been killed by the disease. Even the math illiterate should be able to understand that.

     I just saw a Finnish news photo, from this March, of some covidiot brandishing a protest sign that says covid is 99.97 % survivable. These sort of claims float around, varying in specific number, and hardly anyone bothers to discuss them seriously. Probably covidiots themselves don’t bother to care what the percentage is supposed to be, as long as the risk of death looks incomprehensibly small to borderline innumerate people and “no worse than flu” to the more educated people.

     Anyway, it occurred to me that by March, covid had already killed far more than 0.03 % of entire population in many countries. For example the US was then well past 0.1 %, and now at 0.2 %, with estimated less than half (?) of population gone through infection.

187. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 11:21 am

     Follow-up to @175, Ben Jennings in the Grauniad, On Boris Johnson at the Met Gala (cartoon). The background is that, in teh “U”K, alleged-“PM” Borris is proposing eliminating a pandemic-related increase in benefits, and also raising certain taxes. Steve Bell skewers some of this, On Thérèse Coffey and the universal credit cut (cartoon), apparently that alleged-“Minister” said all people had to do was work an extra two hours a week to make up for the benefits cut.

188. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 11:42 am

     In dog bites man news (or, in this case, rabid loon barks news), Trump aides seek to build opposition to Afghan refugees in US:

     Trump anti-immigration tsar[brownshirt] Stephen Miller is among those seeking to puncture broad support for resettling Afghans.

     As tens of thousands of Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban arrive in the US, a handful of officials of former US President Donald Trump[Wacko House squatter hair furor] are working to turn the conservative[rabid nazi] Republican party against them.

     The former officials are writing position papers, appearing on conservative television outlets, and meeting privately with GOP lawmakers — all in an effort to turn the collapse of Afghanistan into another opportunity to push a hardline immigration agenda.

     It is a collaboration based on mutual conviction, said[bellowing between barks] Stephen Miller […]

     My emphasis has been in talking to members of Congress to build support for opposing the Biden administration’s overall refugee plans.

     […] The strategy relies on tactics that were commonplace during Trump’s tenure and that turned off many voters, including racist tropes, fear-mongering and false allegations.

     […]

     From a political standpoint, cultural issues are the most important issues that are on the mind of the American people, said Russ Vought, [completely ignoring the pandemic, inadequate incomes, etc.,] Trump’s former budget chief and president of the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit group that has been working on building opposition to Afghan refugee settlement in the US — along with other hot-button issues, such as critical race theory, which considers American history through the lens of racism.

     His group is working, he said, to kind of punch through this unanimity that has existed that, despite the chaotic withdrawal, Afghan refugees deserve to come to the US.

     […]

     With the US confronting a host of challenges, it is unclear whether voters will consider immigration a leading priority next year.

     It was a key motivator for voters in the 2018 midterm elections, with four in 10 Republicans identifying it as the top issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast data.

     But it became far less salient two years later, when only three percent of 2020 voters — including five percent of Republicans — named it as the number one issue facing the country amid the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic woes.

     When it comes to refugees, 68 percent of Americans say they support the US taking in those fleeing Afghanistan after security screening, according to a Washington Post / ABC News poll in late August and early September. That includes a majority — 56 percent — of Republicans.

     […]

     Other former administration officials strongly disagree with such inflammatory language.

     “Some of the people who’ve always been immigration hardliners are seeing this wrongly as an opportunity ahead of the midterms to, lack a better term, stoke fear of, ‘I don’t want these people in my country,’” said Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon press secretary who also served as White House communications director under Trump.

     Farah said she has been working to “politely shift Republican sentiment” away from arguments she sees as both factually false and politically questionable.

     The Republican Party, she noted, includes a majority of veterans — many of whom worked closely alongside Afghans on the ground and have led the push to help their former colleagues escape — as well as evangelical Christians, who have historically welcomed refugees.

189. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 11:58 am

     The price of a cafe, Who are really the rudest — the French, tourists or Parisians? (possibly paywalled):

     What is the price of rudeness? Between 90 centimes and €1.40, according to a sign in a café close to my home […]

     […] The sign read:

     Tarif du café.
     Un café! 2€50.
     Bonjour, un café! 2€.
     Bonjour un café, s’il vous plaît 1€10.[†]
     [Merci! 😉]

     [… discussion about politeness in France…]

     Who was the sign aimed at? Locals? Foreigners? Parisians? Did the café owners enforce their “fines” for being impolite?

     Remembering to say bonjour and s’il vous plaît, I ordered a coffee. I introduced myself. I showed the patronne my tweet and told her how successful it had been. She was mildly amused that her little, chalked sign had made a virtual tour of the world.

     It turned out that she was the grand-daughter of a former mayor of my village […]. Clémentine Dubois, 35, has run the bar and PMU (betting shop) in Clécy for two years.

     “We put up the sign soon after we started,” she said. “There were some people who came in here who were very abrupt with me. I didn’t think that was right. Manners are important. They are the basis of everything we do together.”

     Were the offenders foreign tourists? Or Parisians maybe?

     “No, not at all,” Clémentine said. “They were local. Old men mostly. They are very off-hand with me — bossy. I thought the sign would be a good way of reminding them to be polite.”

     Does she enforce the price-differential? “No. It’s just a joke… but, you know, I think it has worked. We get very little rudeness now.”

     So there you are. The French politeness code is not universally known or respected even by the French — or not the grumpy, old, male, rural French. […]

     How much did I pay for my coffee […]? Nothing. Clémentine refused my €1.10.

       † Just to be pedantic, the sign reads (there’s an image at the link), « Bonjour, un café s’il vous plaît », which is certainly closer to how I say it (the, comma was misplaced).

190. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 12:43 pm

     NBC Boston:

     In New Hampshire yesterday, state Rep. Bill Marsh announced that he’s changing his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat. The legislator, who’s also a physician, said the GOP’s opposition to vaccine policies pushed him over the edge. “I cannot stand idly by while extremists reject the reasonable precautions of vaccinations and masks,” he said in a statement. Republicans maintain a modest majority in the legislative chamber.

     Good News.

191. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 12:45 pm

     Oh, FFS.

     Posted by Aaron Rupar on Twitter:

     “Obama is probably running the government now anyway, according to many” — Donald Trump on Newsmax

     https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1437903781270855681

192. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 12:53 pm

     Why Trump is calling one of his handpicked generals a ‘dumbass’

     Earlier this year, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley feared Trump was dangerously unstable. Trump is now calling Milley a “dumbass.”

     […] conditions throughout our government were dire toward the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. What’s unsettling is the stream of revelations that continue to come to light, documenting the extent to which things were worse than we knew.

     Take yesterday’s revelations, for example. NBC News reported:

     Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took steps to prevent then-President Donald Trump from misusing the country’s nuclear arsenal during the last month of his presidency, according to a new book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa […]

     It sounds like outlandish fiction, but it was apparently our reality – not in some long-ago past, before the United States became the world’s preeminent superpower, but earlier this year.

     As Rachel noted on last night’s show, two days after the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Milley – a man who was tapped by Trump to serve as the nation’s senior military officer – had a difficult conversation with his counterpart in China, who feared that the United States had become an unstable power that could collapse. Indeed, Beijing wasn’t even sure whether Trump might start some kind of war – perhaps even targeting China – as part of a wild bid to hold power.

     Milley tried to convince his counterpart in Beijing that the United States remained a steady and stable democracy, but according to the Woodward/Costa book, the general didn’t really believe his own assurances. On the contrary, Milley feared that the Republican president was in serious mental decline, and his most rabid followers wanted to overthrow the government.

     On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly also spoke to Milley in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, and the California Democrat also expressed concern that the erratic and unhinged president might launch some kind of dangerous military strike.

     […] It was around this time that the general, according to the book, summoned senior officers from the National Military Command Center, telling them to call him directly before acting on suspect orders from the then-president.

     In reality, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not in the chain of command before a military strike, but Milley was so concerned about Trump’s stability, he was effectively adding himself to the process as a way of preventing a dangerous president from doing something catastrophically insane.

     Late yesterday, Trump was apparently made aware of the book’s revelations, leading the Republican to issue a written statement in which he called Milley, whom he handpicked to serve as the Joint Chiefs chairman, a “dumbass.” Though the former president described the book’s reporting as “fake news,” he also suggested Milley may need to be “tried for TREASON” for having communicated with his Chinese counterpart “behind the president’s back.”

     Yeah, yeah. Blather and bluster away Hair Furor. You have nothing to add, but you did confirm that you are the dumbass.

     […] it wasn’t that long ago when Trump held Milley in high regard, even treating the general — and not the secretary of defense — as the top decision-maker at the Pentagon.

     That did not last. In June 2020, for example, Milley publicly expressed regret for his presence during Trump’s Lafayette Square debacle. The Republican wasn’t pleased by the general’s reaction, deeming it a betrayal. Soon after, as the then-president tried to discredit his own country’s electoral system, and raised the prospect of ignoring election results he didn’t like, the Joint Chiefs chairman made explicit that the armed forces would not be involved in the electoral process or resolving an election dispute.

     As Election Day 2020 neared, the Trump campaign even included Milley in a commercial, without the general’s consent or approval, despite the military’s strict rules.

     The former president apparently settled on the “dumbass” assessment quite recently.

     […] there was one thought I couldn’t shake while reading the latest reporting: Trump remains the prohibitive favorite for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

193. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 1:01 pm

     What makes Josh Hawley’s latest political stunt such a bad idea

     The United States has key national security positions that need confirmed officials. Josh Hawley wants to prevent that from happening.

     When the 9/11 Commission investigated the attacks, it identified a series of problems and missteps that helped make the terrorism possible. Among them was an underappreciated personnel issue: Throughout the Bush/Cheney administration, there were vacancies in key, Senate-confirmed national security positions.

     It’s impossible to know whether the attacks could’ve been prevented by qualified officials serving in these posts, but the point the 9/11 Commission hoped to make wasn’t subtle: National security vacancies can be dangerous and policymakers should take steps to avoid them.

     Twenty years after the attacks, the United States finds itself facing similar conditions – which by some measures are worse than they were in the runup to 9/11. The New York Times reported a few days ago, “Only 26 percent of President Biden’s choices for critical Senate-confirmed national security posts have been filled, according to a new analysis by the Partnership for Public Service.” For comparison purposes, note that 57 percent of key national security positions were filled ahead of the 2001 attacks.

     […] A group of Republican senators, led in part by Texas’ Ted Cruz and Florida’s Rick Scott, have used procedural tactics to slow down the confirmation process for nominees […] it’s a problem Missouri’s Josh Hawley is eager to make worse. The Washington Post reported yesterday:

     Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has pledged to hold up all of President Biden’s nominations to the State Department and the Pentagon unless the top official at both departments resign in the wake of the chaotic U.S. exit from Afghanistan.

     [Oh, FFS!]

     […] it’s important to emphasize that Josh Hawley, perhaps best known as a champion of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, cannot block President Joe Biden’s nominees indefinitely.

     As the Post’s report added, “Because Democrats control the Senate, Hawley can effectively only delay Biden’s nominations, but his move will force Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to go through procedural hurdles on the Senate floor, rather than move quickly with a pro forma vote that is more common for nominees to lower-profile posts.”

     […] To hear Hawley tell it, the State and Defense Departments are responsible for important mistakes in Afghanistan. His solution is to keep the State and Defense Departments understaffed for as long as possible – as if this might help prevent future mistakes.

     […] We are, after all, talking about a Republican who pushed for a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan when he thought it was Donald Trump’s idea. Indeed, as recently as April, the senator was outraged by the Biden White House’s plans to leave Afghanistan by September, not because Hawley wanted to maintain a military presence, but because the Democratic president wasn’t ending the war fast enough.

     […] even if we put all of these relevant concerns aside, let’s also not overlook the obvious fact that the senator’s over-the-top demands will go unmet. Remember, Hawley isn’t just standing in the way of key confirmations as a stand-alone tantrum; Hawley says he’ll relent if Secretary of State Antony Blinken resigns. And Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin resigns. And White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan resigns.

     Hawley also wants Biden to resign, though that doesn’t appear to be part the senator’s new stunt.

     None of this will happen, no matter how long Hawley stomps his feet and folds his arms. Indeed, the fact remains that if anyone should be resigning in disgrace, it’s the senator who’s calling on others to resign […].

     Hawley is throwing a tantrum.

194. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 1:07 pm

     An opinion column from Canada, A medical officer of health with no public health qualifications: Matt Strauss is an absurdly political hire:

     [… T]he anti-lockdown, anti-restriction, anti-public health doctor[quack Matt Strauss] was hired in early September to be the new interim acting medical officer of health in Haldimand-Norfolk in southwestern Ontario; that appointment was upheld 8–1 by the local board of health Monday night, which is also the local county council. […]

     It is an absurd, backwards, political hire. Strauss is not trained in public health; he is an ICU doctor, but more prominently, he is a guy who has spent the pandemic condemning lockdowns and praising Florida and saying in a since-deleted tweet he would rather give a child COVID than a Happy Meal. Maybe he doesn’t know Happy Meals come with apple slices now, and yogurt. Or that communicable diseases are communicable.

     Mostly, Strauss is a doctor[quack] pretending to be a more qualified doctor who has also flirted with anti-mask sentiments […], who has since descended into something like full-on lunacy.

     This hiring is clearly the work of a political agenda from a part of Ontario represented by conservatives and dominated by the farming industry. The previous MOH, Dr Shanker Nesathurai, had to fight to protect migrant workers with proposed two-week quarantines, or by limiting how many could sleep in a single bunkhouse. (A legal challenge from farmers briefly overturned the move, before an appeal restored it.[)] Indeed, Nesathurai tried to protect his constituents at large, and caught hell for it. Tobacco country may not care enough about what’s good for you.

     So led by Norfolk County Mayor Kristal Chopp, the counties clearly sought out an anti-lockdown voice instead. […]

     […]

     And so, we come to [Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr Kieran] Moore. He has the power to not just rescind Strauss’s appointment but to suspend the board of health if he sees a risk to the public health of the region. Haldimand-Norfolk has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the province, at 74.4 percent of those above the age of 18 who are fully vaccinated; beyond that, migrant workers have been poorly protected there before, and one died in the summer of 2020 as part of a massive outbreak. Strauss couldn’t lift a lockdown, but he can mismanage who is and isn’t considered a high-risk case, and could muck up case and contact management in many ways.

     “We will first provide guidance and support,” said Moore. “He may be new to outbreak management and to the immunization strategy and we’ll be monitoring adherence to best practices in that region. And if I have any concerns regarding the safety and health of that community, I can step in as the chief medical officer of health, and will.”

     But by that measure, Moore should rescind the hire now. […]

     [… One medical officer of health who requested anonymity:] “How will he handle promoting healthy babies and healthy children? How will he handle the human health hazards and environmental investigations? Has he ever done one? Has he ever run any outbreak response, or even a COVID response? What’s he going to do about a restaurant adulterating food? Does he even know the regulations? These are some real questions. Public health is more than just COVID, but (that) is the only reason he’s being hired.

     “Public health units have essentially been utterly destroyed. We have staff that are completely burnt out. None of our other programs are running the way that they should. We’re going to have to rebuild from the ground up once this is done. So if he’s the guy, I hope he has some help, because there’s a ton of work to do.”

195. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 1:11 pm

     Follow-up to raven @183.

     I was glad to see the Republican challenger (46 challengers, but really only one main guy, Larry the Doofus) in California go down in such an obvious defeat.

     Looking at the bigger picture: Gavin Newsom’s victory matters (and not just in California)

     GOP operatives at the national level harbored hopes of turning the California race into a bellwether. So much for that idea.

     Headed into Election Day in California’s gubernatorial recall race, there was some uncertainty about when the public would learn the results. If the early tallies were close, and incumbent Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared to be in real trouble, it could take weeks to know the outcome.

     As is turns out, the results were so one-sided, the public didn’t have to wait long at all. The NBC affiliate in Los Angeles reported overnight:

     Gov. Gavin Newsom cruised to victory in the recall election and will stay in office, […]’ As early returns were released Tuesday night, the question of whether Newsom should be recalled was met with a resounding “no,” with nearly 70 percent of early ballots rejecting the move.

     [Yay!]

     […] Californians voting to keep Newsom in office outnumbered recall supporters by nearly 30 points. The governor’s detractors needed to get more than 50 percent of the vote, and as things stand, they didn’t quite get to 36 percent.

     The election was, in other words, a landslide. The wealthy Republicans who helped bankroll the recall campaign saw no returns on their investment.

     [Republicans thought that] the more Newsom struggled in the country’s largest blue state, the more Republicans could credibly claim that Democrats in the Biden era are in serious trouble and facing dramatic electoral headwinds.

     As the dust settles in the Golden State, all of that talk has evaporated.

     There will be plenty of commentary fleshing out the implications of the results, but there are three angles of particular interest:

     1. The pandemic matters.

     The Democratic incumbent focused much of his message in recent months on the importance of combatting Covid-19 […] Newsom’s principal Republican rival, conservative media personality Larry Elder, did the opposite. […]

     2. The California Republican Party is a mess.

     […] There was a scenario in which the state Republican Party might have rallied behind Faulconer [former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer] as a credible and mainstream alternative to the status quo, while dismissing other GOP contenders as irrelevant oddballs. Instead, the Trumpified party ignored the qualified contender, coalesced around a conspiratorial talk-show host […]

     3. In some states, rallying the GOP base simply isn’t enough.

     In theory, Republicans had a plan: The GOP would rally the base, get rank-and-file Republicans excited about a Trump-like candidate, and rely on Democratic passivity and indifference to create a real contest.

     […] The GOP’s unqualified Trump-like candidate woke up Democrats, alienated swing voters, and helped generate a lopsided result .[…]

196. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 1:24 pm

     Covid kills a 9/11’s worth of Americans every three days. The vaccine mandate shouldn’t be controversial:

     […] By one estimate, the Biden vaccine mandate will mean 12 million more Americans get the jab. That’s 12 million more people who will then be extremely unlikely to be hospitalized or die of Covid-19. It’s 12 million more people who can help keep the US economy afloat, and who are helping to keep their communities safe.

     The new Biden vaccine rules also reflect this administration’s insistence on responding effectively to a complicated reality instead of reacting to those who yell the loudest. It is true that there is a subset of the US population — disproportionately white, Trump-voting evangelicals — who strongly object to the Covid vaccine and say they will refuse to get it, requirements be damned. But there’s also a group of people who simply haven’t gotten their act together, or haven’t felt incentivized to get inoculated. There’s a lot to say about these folks — that they’re selfishly putting their communities at risk, that they aren’t being good citizens […]

     But the Biden administration isn’t in the business of finger-wagging; it’s in charge of making effective policy. And the vaccine rule is exactly that: it gives people an excellent reason to choose vaccination […]

     Resurgent Covid numbers are dragging the US economy down, and Biden is looking at a dark winter if more Americans don’t vax up. March 2020 kicked off an unprecedented financial disaster […] We know now that lockdowns didn’t primarily cause this massive economic contraction; fear of Covid did. And we know that the economic growth we’ve seen since Biden took office is partly credited to his administration’s massive vaccine rollout coupled with much-needed financial assistance to most Americans, which got inoculations into arms and people back into the streets, on to airplanes, and into restaurants with money to spend.

     The vaccine rollout gave Americans the choice to get the jab and protect their communities and their country, or forego it out of political obstinacy. (Some people, of course, cannot get the vaccine for health reasons, but those people are a small minority and not the ones dragging down the US’s stagnated vaccination numbers.) Shamefully, a huge number of Americans have refused to do the right thing. […]

     [… M]any mainstream media sources have focused on the objections and the potential political blowback instead of the necessity of this rule, and the leadership that implementing it exemplifies.

     […] Cynical conservatives have realized they can turn even the most commonsense measures into convenient political footballs, sending political reporters and talking heads scrambling to analyze the political fallout of rational rules and good policy. That in turn only reinforces the power of these bad actors.

     We don’t have to fall for it. Many Americans would surely agree that we want leaders who follow the scientific consensus and make decisions based on what is best for public health and the country’s economic wellbeing, even when those decisions are hard. Most of us would surely agree that we want leaders who lead instead of spinelessly acquiescing to the whims of those who throw the biggest tantrums.

     […]

197. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 1:32 pm

     Mike Pence didn’t stand up to Trump, he tried ‘over and over’ to find a way to reverse the election

     […]

     Trump: “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?”

     Pence: “I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority.”

     Trump: “But wouldn’t it be almost cool to have that power?”

     Pence: “No. I’ve done everything I could and then some to find a way around this. It’s simply not possible.”

     Trump: “No, no, no! You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”

     This segment brings home what may be the most astounding realization possible: We’ve all overestimated the emotional maturity of Donald Trump. Everyone who ever compared Donald Trump to a third-grader needs to start writing now, because there are a lot of third-graders in this country, and they all deserve a personal apology.

     Trump’s response to learning that Pence wouldn’t break the Constitution for him is a threat that most people haven’t heard since they were old enough to switch from regular diapers to pull-ups. Not only is there an amazing level of infantile petulance in this “I don’t want to be your friend anymore” ploy, the fact that Trump said this aloud, in front of other people, displays a level of self-awareness that’s usually reserved for animals that can’t recognize their own face in a mirror.

     Trump didn’t even let up after deploying his sandbox-worthy threat. He phoned up Pence as the Jan. 6 rally was about to get underway, and as the Congress was about to get around to logging the count of Electoral College votes, and tried a different angle.

     “If you don’t do it,” said Trump, “I picked the wrong man four years ago. You’re going to wimp out,”

     This would be the moment in which Trump attempts to shame Pence for briefly placing the Constitution ahead of his personal loyalty to Trump. For Trump, failing to bring down the Republic if you have an opportunity to is “wimping out.”

     But, believe it or not, there’s a moment that comes between these two Trump-Pence interactions that may be even more frightening. That’s because Pence seems to have seriously considered the idea of using his non-existent power to halt the count. In fact, under pressure from Trump, Pence seems to actively seek ways in which he can disrupt the process and overturn the election.

     However, the truth is that Pence’s power in the process is purely ceremonial. Unable to come up with a means to give Trump what he wanted, Pence sought out someone he knew who had been in a similar situation … former vice-president Dan Quayle.

     According to Woodward and Costa, Pence asked “over and over” if there was “anything he could do” to give Trump the outcome he wanted on his call to Quayle.

     […] On the one hand, there’s a deeply black comic moment in thinking that the future of the nation rested with Dan Quayle in January of this year. However, the truth is less comedic and a good deal darker.

     What these conversations show is that Trump’s playground taunting of Pence worked. Pence didn’t do the right thing out of some finally tapped well of moral resistance; he did the right thing only after he exhausted every way he could to do the wrong thing. Pence didn’t stand up to Trump; he tried “over and over” to find a way to give Trump exactly what he wanted.

     Mike Pence tried to throw the nation to the same mob that was outside chanting for his death. He didn’t suddenly develop a trace of a spine. He didn’t discover his inner love for the Constitution. He just couldn’t think of a way to turn his ceremonial role into the democracy crush that Trump wanted.

     And Dan Quayle … Dan Quayle is a heroe.

     Author’s note: Though I couldn’t resist the joke, the truth is that screwing up the spelling of a single word is probably the worst possible reason to dislike or make fun of Dan Quayle. There are a lot of reasons not to like Quayle. A lot. That’s just not one of them.

198. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 1:38 pm

     Simone Biles tells Congress ‘entire system’ enabled Nassar abuse

     Olympic gymnastics star Simone Biles on Wednesday blamed the “entire system” for enabling the abuse by disgraced gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar.

     In emotional testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biles said that she didn’t want another young athlete to experience the horror that she and hundreds of other gymnasts endured.

     Biles, who has been open about being abused by Nassar, said that circumstances that led to her abuse came about because multiple entities — including USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee — “failed to do their jobs.”

     “I don’t want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day,” Biles said.

     “To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar — and I also blame an entire system that perpetrated his abuse,” she continued.

     The Judiciary panel is holding the hearing following the release of a Justice Department inspector general report that faulted the FBI for not responding to the allegations against Nassar with the urgency they required.

     Biles explained that she didn’t understand the magnitude of Nassar’s abuse until the Indianapolis Star published an article in the fall of 2016 explaining the abuse.

     She said that while she was competing in Rio as part of the 2016 Olympic team, neither USA Gymnastics nor the FBI ever contacted her parents that investigations were ongoing.

     She said that those who were tasked with ensuring the safety of gymnasts “failed to do their jobs.”

     “Nassar is where he belongs, but those who enabled him deserve to be held accountable,” she continued. “If they are not, I am convinced that this will continue to happen to others across Olympic sports.”

199. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 1:50 pm

     Marco Rubio being a total dunderhead:

     […] he wrote a big mad huffy letter to President Joe Biden, like he’s a real grown-up or something, demanding Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley be fired for undermining former barely elected clownfuck president Donald Trump, as Bob Woodward’s new book reports […]

     Of course, Milley was reportedly undermining Trump in order to protect America and the world from getting literally blown up because Trump’s fragile ego was having a temper tantrum, but Rubio does not choose to huff and puff about that, because Milley is not Rubio’s daddy, Trump is.

     Here is some text from Rubio’s whiny letter:

     I write with grave concern regarding recent reporting that General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, worked to actively undermine the sitting Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces and contemplated a treasonous leak of classified information to the Chinese Communist Party in advance of a potential armed conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These actions by General Milley demonstrate a clear lack of sound judgement [sic], and I urge you to dismiss him immediately.

     It has been reported that General Milley spoke with his counterpart in the People’s Liberation Army after learning the PRC was worried about escalating tensions as a result of military exercises conducted in the South China Sea. Reportedly, General Milley told his counterpart: “[y]ou and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.” I do not need to tell of you the dangers posed by senior military officers leaking classified information on U.S. military operations, but I will underscore that such subversion undermines the President’s ability to negotiate and leverage one of this nation’s instruments of national power in his interactions with foreign nations.

     All of that might be true, but don’t y’all love how he’s just glossing over how the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt the need to reassure China that we would not be starting a hot nuke war, on account of Trump […] feeling extra-wounded that day? None of this would have happened if America had at the time had a legitimate president worthy of global respect and capable of doing the job. Had we had a real president, nobody would have had to wonder if we might be GOING TO WAR WITH FUCKING CHINA, MARCO.

     Even more egregiously, reports indicate that General Milley interfered with the procedures by which the civilian commander-in-chief can order a nuclear strike. He purportedly instructed officials not to take orders without his involvement and forced them to take an oath to that effect. A senior military officer interfering with that civilian-controlled process is simply unacceptable at best, and at worst, would cause ambiguity which could lead to war.

     Another thing that could have led to war would have been Trump ordering a nuclear strike […]

     General Milley has attempted to rationalize his reckless behavior by arguing that what he perceived as the military’s judgement [sic again] was more stable than its civilian commander. It is a dangerous precedent that could be asserted at any point in the future by General Milley or others. It threatens to tear apart our nation’s longstanding principle of civilian control of the military.

     We agree. It’s terrifying that in this case, it could have been credibly argued that the military’s judgment was better than the civilian president’s. […]

     Of course, we disagree with Marco on how to make sure that never happens again. We think we should never again allow authoritarian fascists who happen to be the stupidest person ever to escape from God’s throwaway pile to become president of the United States. Rubio, on the other hand, thinks the solution is:

     You must immediately dismiss General Milley. America’s national security and ability to lead in the world are at stake.

     Get fucked.

     To be clear, it’s not that everything Marco Rubio is saying is untrue, it’s just that he hasn’t earned the right to make the point, because he’s been slobbering over the crumbs in Donald Trump’s happy meal ever since Trump humiliated him in the 2016 GOP primary.

     […] “the rules weren’t written for the situation our country faced.”

     […] To laugh in the general direction of Marco Rubio even thinking he’s got a seat at this grownups’ table, stay right here.

     Link

200. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 1:56 pm

     Follow-up to comment 197.

     This morning, NBC News reported that the FBI has fired an agent for not properly investigating allegations from American gymnasts that they were being sexually abused by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar.

     The firing of the agent, Michael Langeman, came after a Justice Department inspector general report released in July criticized him and his boss, agent in charge Jay Abbott, for their handling of the case. It said they failed to respond to allegations by gymnasts that they had been sexually abused by Nassar “with the urgency that the allegations required.”

     Langeman was a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Indianapolis field office when he interviewed Olympic medalist McKayla Maroney in 2015 about her allegations of abuse by Nassar. The inspector general report said that he and Abbott lied to investigators from the inspector general’s office about their actions and that they never officially opened an investigation.

     […] it’s timely that the Senate Judiciary Committee [held] a hearing this morning on the FBI’s royal fucking up of the Nassar investigation. Gymnasts Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Maggie Nichols, and Aly Raisman [testified]. Current FBI Director Christopher Wray — who didn’t run the FBI when this all started — and Inspector General Michael Horowitz also testified. […]

     Link

     Video is available at the link. Christopher Wray apologized, and he said the FBI will learn from and will correct their mistakes.

201. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 2:35 pm

     At a shall-remain-unnamed kook site I somethings visit (with suitable protections) to see what the hallucination de jour is (within that echo chamber), some new batshitery cropped up: Supposedly, because California has been thug for a long time until recently, the elections there must have been faked since, well, for a long time.

     Just going by the list of past-Governors, Former California Governors, there hasn’t been an extended period of a thug-as-Governor since the 1950s. Figures. “Recently” means anything after the McCarthy era, or “Ronaddled Raygun’s backwards-looking rose-tinted glasses” (paraphrasing) as Garry Trudeau once put it in Doonesbury.

202. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 3:01 pm

     Job offer for Taliban, Lauren Boebert Says Government Should Be Run by Righteous Men and Women of God (my added emboldening):

     Republican Rep Lauren Boebert of Colorado [bellowed to] a crowd of conservative Christian activists gathered in the auditorium at [right-wing pastor Andrew] Wommack’s Charis Bible College, [calling] on the audience to put faith into action by calling on God to remove ungodly leaders in Washington DC, and replace them with righteous men and women of God who realize that the government should be taking orders from the church.

     When we see Biden address the nation and the world and show more contempt and aggravation and aggression towards unvaccinated Americans than he does terrorists, we have a problem, Boebert said. And that’s why I have articles of impeachment to impeach Joe Biden, Kamala Harris.

     Reality interrupts to point out the pandemic is, as per @195, killing “a 9/11’s worth” of USAians every three days. And that it is now, in the States, a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Why shouldn’t people be angry at the selfish stoopid louts who don’t or won’t realise you’re a flaming eejit (or, with only a tiny adjustment, who can take the preventive jabs but refuse to)?!

     We cannot take another 18 months, we cannot take another three years of this poor, failed leadership, she continued. […]

     [… she then goes even further off the rails, if that’s possible…]

203. raven says

     15 September 2021 at 3:13 pm

     Idaho is once again leading the way. The Idaho GOP put an antivaxxer quack doctor on their largest public health board and just recently, a week ago, September 7. This guy is just repeating mindless antivax talking points that are completely false.

     At the time the Idaho GOP did this, their hospital system overloaded and failed because it was overrrun with Covid-19 virus patients. They are now exporting their problem to Washington state which is being overloaded with patients from Idaho.

     How a rogue doctor who called the vaccine ‘needle rape’ was made an Idaho public-health official in its worst COVID crisis yet
     Mia Jankowicz Wed, September 15, 2021, edited for length

     Dr Ryan Cole, a pathologist with no public health experience, was championed by the GOP.
     His victory came as Idaho was overrun with severe COVID-19 cases, its lowest ebb in the pandemic.

     In Boise, Idaho, a doctor in a lab coat offered comforting words to concerned parents and school governors about COVID-19 restrictions for the new semester. “There’s really statistically no efficacy in masks,” Dr. Ryan Cole said airily, and incorrectly, on an August 26 Zoom call with Peace Valley Charter School, which was deciding what measures to implement when lessons restarted.

     Cole’s specialism is dermopathology – a discipline focused on diseases of the skin which has little relevance to respiratory conditions like COVID-19.

     Nonetheless, Cole is a celebrated figure among anti-vaxxers. He made headlines in July by calling the vaccine the “clot shot” and “needle rape” in a presentation to America’s Frontline Doctors (AFD), a group known for COVID-19 misinformation.

     Two weeks later, that system broke. Ten of the state’s hospitals were put under crisis protocols, under which patients are told they may get care below the usual minimum standard, like being treated in makeshift wards or without proper equipment.

     On the same day, Idaho’s largest public health board, the Central District Board of Health (CDH) announced that Cole would become its seventh member.

     Cole made it onto the board thanks to a backlash against CDH restrictions which propelled coronavirus skeptics into positions of power.

     Vaccines ‘a poisonous attack’
     In an interview with Insider, Cole denied being anti-vaccine, saying that he supports vaccination in general and has had many himself.
     But he said he has not had the COVID-19 shot, and argued that geting it should be a personal choice. He did not address his “needle rape” remarks.
     He has also derided the vaccine as “experimental,” a common insult among anti-vaxxers. All vaccines used in the US went through extensive clinical trials before being given temporary authorization. The Pfizer vaccine has since got full approval from the FDA.

     He has also spoken on the podcasts of lawyer and conservative talk show host Daniel Horowitz, and anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist Dr Sherri Tenpenny.

     “This is no longer good science. This is a poisonous attack on our population,” Cole said of the vaccination campaign at the AFD summit, to loud applause. “And it needs to stop now.”

     He also told Insider he is concerned that the vaccine is causing mutations like the Delta variant, a false claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

     Cole has instead promoted the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. The drug is currently considered, at best, unproven and at worst a dangerous distraction from better treatment, as The Guardian reported.

     Insider spoke to one of the leading voices in opposition to Cole’s appointment, Dr David Pate. He is the former CEO of the non-profit St Luke’s Healthcare System, which operates in Idaho and other states.

     He is also a good friend and co-author with Dr. Ted Epperly, whom Cole unseated on the CDH board.

     Pate told Insider that the ideas Cole promotes are “simply not consistent” with the science of public health. “And it’s undermining our public health efforts,” he said.

     Opposition to Cole’s appointment came from the Idaho Medical Association, several of the state’s medical experts, the editorial board of the Idaho Statesman, and local campaigners – but ultimately achieved little.

204. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 3:22 pm

     Nonsense: The Unifying Theme Behind Greg Locke’s Conspiracy Theories:

     […] One of [radical right-wing pastor Greg] Locke’s favorite methods of dismissing anything that contradicts his narrow worldview is to dismiss it as nonsense.

     For instance, Locke insists that the idea that Joe Biden is the president is nonsense. [examples…]
     Locke also believes that dangers posed by the COVID-19 virus are nonsense. [examples…]
     According to Locke, participating in social distancing and mask wearing in an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is likewise nonsense. [examples…]

     One of the unifying themes of Locke’s rants is essentially that anything he doesn’t like is nonsense, but the reality seems to be that the things he dismisses as nonsense are really just things that he doesn’t understand.

     On Monday night, Locke […] dismissed math, of all things, as nonsense after admitting that he simply is not very good at it.

     nonsenseI’m dumber than a box of rocks in a lot of[all] areas, Locke said. nonsenseI graduated from high school almost two years late with an eighth-grade bonehead math degree. I failed pre-algebra two years in a row. I’ve never had business math, consumer math, I never even made it past pre-algebra, I never had real algebra. I hate math. I get nervous when the Holy Spirit wants me to preach out of the Book of Numbers. I hate math. It’s nonsense.
     […]

     Numbers is not a mathematics textbook. As Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge points out, “The name of the book comes from the two censuses taken of the Israelites.”

     The mildly deranged penguin points out he’s rather good at counting, or at least collecting, tithes:

     According to several sources, Pastor[swamp creature] Greg Locke’s net worth is an estimated $129 million. His wealth comes from a variety of sources.

     Pastor[Swamp creature] Locke is the head pastor of Global Vision Bible Church, operating out of Nashville, Tennessee. The church holds sermons and religious services for thousands of Tennesseans.

     Besides being a pastor [oozing slime], Pastor[swamp creature] Locke also travels the world and holds speaking arrangements in college campuses, religious workshops, and seminars.

     Additionally, he has a line of women’s and men’s apparel and drinks shakers, which cost anywhere from $17.76 to $29.99.

     Furthermore, Pastor[swamp creature] Greg has published two bestselling books, undoubtedly with tens of thousands of copies sold worldwide.

     […]

     He recently called the COVID-19 pandemic a hoax pandemic and went on an anti-vaccination rant. He was rightly raked over the coals by the scientific community and members of his congregation. Greg was also caught threatening bodily harm to a Dunkin’ Donuts employee over their mask policy.

     Furthermore, Pastor[swamp creature] Greg also implemented a no-mask policy for people frequenting his congregation. Consequently, his audience became divided over his radical views.

     Despite that, the incident brought Pastor[swamp creature] Greg Locke to the forefront of American news media. As a result, his congregation grew in attendees, and he had to move to a larger venue to accommodate his growing audience.

205. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 4:53 pm

     GOP senator embraces the wrong anti-Biden theory at the wrong time

     There’s supposed to be a line between the cranks and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Jim Risch [Idaho!] seems eager to erase that line.

     The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held an important hearing yesterday, pressing Secretary of State Antony Blinken on U.S. policy in Afghanistan and the end of the war. There’s been plenty of debate about the withdrawal of U.S. forces, and this hearing was the panel’s first real opportunity to get answers from the nation’s top foreign policy official.

     Before the examination could even begin, it was easy to imagine the lines of inquiry. Was the withdrawal handled responsibly? What are the security implications? What is the status of efforts to remove Americans and our allies who are still on the ground in Afghanistan?

     But Republican Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the committee’s ranking member, had a very different kind of question in mind. As the HuffPost reported:

     Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) had a burning question for Secretary of State Antony Blinken at Tuesday’s anticipated oversight hearing on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan: Who keeps silencing Joe Biden? Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted in the hearing that someone in the White House hit a “button” to stop Biden from speaking at a Monday event on the threat of wildfires in Idaho.

     JFC! I heard that part of the hearing. Risch just would not let it go. He asked Antony Blinken over and over again who was given the task of turning off Biden’s microphone every time they wanted to silence him. Bogus story. Risch claims he saw it himself, that everyone has seen it, that it has happened multiple times in the past. Risch seems to think that Biden is such a fool that someone in the Democratic administration is tasked with periodically shutting off his microphone. Totally fucking batshit bonkers. Also, wildly off topic for that hearing.

     The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips noted that this was “an odd, factually inaccurate assertion” that “sounded more at home in a Donald Trump 2020 campaign attack than a serious hearing about U.S. foreign policy.” Pointing to Risch’s questions, Dana Milbank added, “This is what happens when an entire political party takes leave of reality.”

     The story – to the extent that “story” is even the right word in this context – stems from a presidential event in Idaho on Monday. Biden was speaking with local officials when media access to the discussion ended, as often happens. There wasn’t anything remarkable about it.

     But the Republican National Committee’s Twitter feed suggested someone on the president’s team cut Biden off mid-sentence, and some conservative media personalities concocted conspiracy theories about White House officials controlling the president’s ability to speak in public.

     It was all quite nutty, but that didn’t stop the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from taking the nonsense very seriously.

     Indeed, it was an unusually ugly effort to smear the president. “[Biden] can’t even speak without someone in the White House censoring it or signing off on it,” the senator claimed. “As recently as yesterday, in mid-sentence, he was cut off by someone in the White House who makes the decision that the president of the United States is not speaking correctly…. This is a puppeteer act.”

     Soon after, Risch, indifferent to reality, asked the secretary of state, “It’s been widely reported that somebody has the ability to push the button and cut off his sound and stop him from speaking. Who is that person?”

     Blinken replied that he had no idea what the senator was referring to. The nation’s chief diplomat answered with a grin, implicitly making clear that he found the line of inquiry to be laughable, but Risch did not appear to be kidding.

     Which is a shame, because the display was a sad joke.

     It’s difficult to choose which dimension of this was the most disappointing. Risch’s embrace of an obviously foolish conspiracy theory? His willingness to peddle such nonsense in public? His decision to put aside questions about U.S. policy in Afghanistan to push such an absurd question? The senator’s expectation that the secretary of state would have a detailed understanding of how White House communications operations work?

     Perhaps most important is simply the fundamental lack of seriousness with which the Idaho Republican approached his responsibilities. It’s one thing for conservative media outlets and the RNC’s Twitter feed to dip their feet in the fever swamp, but there’s supposed to be a dividing line between the silly cranks and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

     Risch reminded all of us yesterday that the line no longer exists.

206. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 5:00 pm

     Milley Defends Efforts To Keep Trump From Potentially Nuking China

     Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley stands by his decision to privately reach out to senior military officials and his Chinese counterpart in an attempt to keep then-President Donald Trump from dragging the U.S. into war.

     Milley’s chief of staff, Col. Dave Butler, said in a statement that the official’s calls with China in October and January were “in keeping with” his “duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.”

     Butler also defended Milley’s discussions with senior officials in which he reportedly ordered them to involve him in decisions regarding the country’s nuclear arsenal after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection that Trump fomented.

     “The meeting regarding nuclear weapons protocols was to remind uniformed leaders in the Pentagon of the long-established and robust procedures in light of media reporting on the subject,” Butler said.

     Milley “continues to act and advise within his authority in the lawful tradition of civilian control of the military and his oath to the Constitution,” the spokesperson added.

     Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their new book that Milley contacted his Chinese counterpart, Li Zuocheng, in October and January to reassure him that the U.S. was not planning on striking China. Milley also reportedly gathered senior military officials two days after the Capitol insurrection to make sure he would get involved in case Trump ordered a nuclear strike, according to Woodward and Costa.

     The response from Trump and his allies has been predictably explosive: On Tuesday night, the ex-president called Milley a “dumbass” who ought to be tried for “treason,” and denied expressing a desire to attack China.

     […] Trump’s foot soldiers in Congress have seized on initial analyses, demanding Milley’s ouster and similarly accusing the general of treason.

     “If the allegations are true, Gen Milley should go down in history as a traitor to the American people,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-TX) tweeted.

     “These actions by General Milley demonstrate a clear lack of sound judgement, and I urge you to dismiss him immediately,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden.

     Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested that Milley be “court martialed.”

207. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 5:05 pm

     Follow-up to comment 205.

     Posted by readers of the article:

     It doesn’t sound like this was a one-on-one “secret call” at all.

     https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/claims-that-milley-made-secret-calls-to-chinese-leaders-exaggerated-sources-say

     “A defense official familiar with the calls said that description is “grossly mischaracterized.”

     The official said the calls were not out of the ordinary, and the chairman was not frantically trying to reassure his counterpart.

     The people also said that Milley did not go rogue in placing the call, as the book suggests. In fact, Milley asked permission from acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller before making the call, said one former senior defense official, who was in the room for the meeting. Milley also briefed the secretary’s office after the call, the former official said.”
     ————————
     Thank You General Milley
     A nuclear war can just ruin your day
     ————————–
     Milley did nothing to undermine civilian control. He didn’t make anybody swear an oath that they would refuse SecDef or Blobbo’s lawful orders. He asked to be kept informed, for the obvious reason that he wanted to have the opportunity to talk Trump out of doing anything too apocalyptic.

208. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 5:10 pm

     Pennsylvania GOPers Now Seek Personal Information From Voters In Sham ‘Audit’

     Pennsylvania state Senate Republicans on Wednesday took their long-delayed “audit” of the 2020 election results up a notch by authorizing subpoenas for personal information on every registered voter in the commonwealth.

     On Wednesday, the state Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee voted 7-4 along party lines to authorize 17 subpoenas that allows the panel to seek information from Gov. Tom Wolf’s (D) administration on registered voters’ names, addresses, driver’s licenses and partial social security numbers from last November. The GOP-led subpoenas also request lists of voters who participated in the 2020 elections and the May 2021 primary — a move that Republicans claimed would help verify the identity of voters.

     The subpoenas additionally request all email and other written communications between the Department of State and elections officials in every Pennsylvania county.

     […] this is an escalation. Senate officials indicated that the personal information from voters would be turned over to an unnamed private company that would proceed with the review. State Sen. Cris Dush (R), who’s leading the effort, declined to provide detail on which companies he is considering for the task.

     Dush told Democratic senators during questioning on Wednesday that the yet-to-be-identified private company would receive compensation from taxpayer dollars, according to Spotlight PA, which noted that top Senate officials did not provide a specific budget nor a spending ceiling for their review earlier this week.

     […] The Associated Press noted that state law bars the public release of some of the information requested in the subpoenas, such as driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. Democrats said they plan to take the issue to court […]

     […] The committee vote to pursue the information followed a previous (and unsuccessful) effort from the Trumpy state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) to obtain even more information from three Pennsylvania counties.

     In July, Mastriano sent letters to the counties, including Philadelphia, demanding pages of information on everything from ballot paper samples to “access or control of ALL routers, tabulators or combinations thereof (some routers are inside the tabulator case) in order to gain access to all the system logs.”

     The counties balked: For one thing, the election equipment Mastriano wanted included sensitive security details that could compromise the machines — as happened to counties in Arizona and Colorado from similar efforts to push the narrative that the 2020 election was stolen.

     Mastriano’s effort took another hit when Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of the commonwealth, Veronica Degraffenreid, ordered that machines in another county that had seen meddling from Mastriano, Fulton County, be replaced. A contractor that had had access to the machines, Wake TSI, had “no knowledge or expertise in election technology access” and subsequently compromised the system, Degraffenreid said.

     As Mastriano pushed for compliance from the counties and threatened subpoenas, cracks in his façade emerged; he seemed to lack support from his fellow Republicans.

     “Sen. Mastriano’s proposed audit has been handled very poorly,” Jeff Piccola, a former decades-long state legislator who’s now chair of the York County Republican Committee, told TPM last month. York was one of the counties from which Mastriano sought information. […]

209. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 5:15 pm

     LOL.

     Fox News host Tucker Carlson acknowledged on Tuesday night that his show had made a factual error when it put up a chyron attributing allegedly swollen testicles to the wrong person in rap star Nicki Minaj’s orbit.

     Carlson issued the correction the day after he reported on Minaj’s tweet in which she claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine caused her cousin in Trinidad’s friend’s testicles to swell.

     “We put the graphic on the screen, and we suggested that Nicki Minaj’s cousin is the one with the swollen testicles in Trinidad, and we were wrong and we want to admit it,” the Fox host told his viewers on Tuesday. “We henceforth correct the record.”

     “Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s testicles are not swollen,” he continued. “As far as we know, he’s fine. It’s Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s testicles who are swollen from taking the [vaccine], that’s the claim.”

     Carlson rarely corrects his false reporting, which has included disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine and lies about white supremacists’ role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. […]

     Link

210. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 5:25 pm

     The nation is now used to seeing political standoffs whenever the time again comes to raise the now-infamous “debt ceiling.” The nation is also generally aware of the dynamic that plays out each time the United States needs to raise the artificially set debt cap in order to keep paying the bills that Congress itself ordered the nation to pay: During times of Republican governance, Republicans hand out tax cuts to whoever the steady rotation of lobbyists in their offices tell them to, draining federal coffers. During times of Democratic governance, Republicans scream loudly about the money being spent on Actual Things, proclaim themselves outraged at federal deficits, and vow that they will absolutely not be a part of this fine mess that their yesterday selves got us into.

     I’m not sure there’s been any past Republican effort as lazily nihilistic as the one that’s currently forming, however. The seemingly unanimous take of Senate Republicans, as guided by (of course) Sen. Mitch McConnell, is that the debt ceiling of course needs to be raised as rote responsibility of government—and that Republicans will absolutely block attempts all attempts to do so so that Democrats have to do it without them.

     […] On Tuesday, Sen. McConnell turtled to reporters that Senate Republicans were “united in opposition to raising the debt ceiling.” Party cranks had previously promised to filibuster any legislation raising the ceiling, thus cutting off both the notion that the ceiling could be raised with Republican votes and the ability of Senate Democrats to even bring such a bill for a vote.

     […] Republicans don’t intend to use their position to negotiate anything. They just don’t wanna do it so they’re not going to. […]

     See, I worry here that I’m not fully conveying the full asininity of the Senate Republican position. They’re in broad agreement that the nation can’t default on its debts, they’re in broad agreement that therefore the debt ceiling should be raised as it has been every other time it has come up, and they’re in broad agreement that they’re going to sit in a corner screaming song lyrics and pressure cooker recipes while everybody else gets on that. As legislators, they don’t want to do this bit of government so they’re just not gonna, la la la, the rest of you are suckers for caring. […]

     O … kay?

     Oh, they still get their paychecks either way, of course. […]

     In any event, because none of this would be complete without Republican lawmakers simply lying their asses off about even the most basic functions of government, Republicans do intend to pretend that the debt ceiling is tied to new Democratic spending and not past congressional edicts. CNN gives us the immediate example of Sen. Joni Ernst blubbering that with new Democratic budget proposals this new hit on the debt ceiling is “their own making.” Yet again, for the people in the cheap seats, this ain’t so. The debt ceiling is governed by spending authorized by Congress in the past. […] Sen. Joni Ernst is just lying on this one, as is the party’s current style.

     So far, all of this looks like it will be turning out extremely Stupid […] It does look like Democratic leaders intend to force a Senate vote on the debt ceiling, Republicans intend to filibuster it, we will gradually inch toward the crisis of government not being able to pay its bills, and at the last minute or shortly thereafter Democrats will construct some mechanism for getting it done […]

     […] It turns out governance, like health care, is a lot cheaper when you don’t wait for every last bump and nick to turn into a full-blown emergency before dealing with it.

     End this farce. Republicans cannot govern, Republicans don’t want anyone else to govern, Republicans continue to flip random levers of government in the hope that the damage done will be something non-Republicans cannot easily fix. There is Too Much Shit these days for this little comedy routine to still be a core part of the national lineup. We need this time for debating more important things, like seawalls and pandemics and an explanation as to how the most incompetent White House in a century managed to come so very close to orchestrating a coup.

     Link

211. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 5:30 pm

     Wonkette: Trinidad And Tobago Makes Important Announcement On Nicki Minaj’s Cousin’s Friend’s Balls

     […] the case of Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls what are actually in the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, and whether they became super-sized by the COVID vaccine — and there’s an important update.

     Last night, Tucker Carlson offered, like the important journalist he is, to travel in an aeroplane over the sea to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, to stick a microphone down Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s pants to see if that cousin’s friend’s balls were very big because of the COVID vaccine. “Hello there, Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls!” Tucker would say enthusiastically, like he was greeting the Hungarian prime minister.

     As of that publishing, we did not know whether Tucker would end up making that journey. And we still don’t.

     But the internet is telling us that the minister of health for Trinidad and Tobago, whose name is Terrence Deyalsingh, felt compelled to address the size of Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls in his COVID update, because of how misinformation is such bullshit. He said they “wasted so much time yesterday running down this false claim,” and concluded that there is no known side effect to the COVID vaccine that includes your balls or Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls getting OMG BIG. (It can be a side effect of chlamydia and gonorrhea, though, by the way.)

     Clearly annoyed that he was even having to spend more time on this, Deyalsingh said, “There is absolutely no reported such side effect or adverse event of testicular swelling in Trinidad or […] anywhere else in the world.”

     […] From what we can tell, this is all real and true and not some amazing parody. Terrence Deyalsingh is definitely the minister of health for Trinidad and Tobago. And WHATEVER caused Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls to have all the problems, it wasn’t the COVID vaccine.

     Of course, Tucker will probably tell us tonight that Deyalsingh is part of the Deep State (of Trinidad and Tobago) and demand to know what Dr. Fauci knew and when he knew it about Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls.

     And then maybe Tucker can have Glenn Greenwald on and they can talk about how maybe Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls might just need a spoonful of horse dewormer to return to their usual size. (Glenn is mad about the cancel culturing of horse dewormer.)

     What? Sounds about as reasonable as whatever else they talk about together.

212. blf says

     15 September 2021 at 7:05 pm

     Russia slams New York’s vaccine requirement for UN general assembly:

     […]
     All diplomats attending the UN general assembly in New York next week will have to provide proof of vaccination, the city government has confirmed, prompting an angry response from Russia.

     Delegates must be vaccinated to enter the debate hall, the mayor’s office told the assembly president in a letter dated 9 September.

     They must also be vaccinated if they want to eat or exercise indoors, the letter added.

     New York began enforcing a vaccine mandate on Monday, requiring proof of at least one shot for many indoor activities, including restaurants and entertainment venues.

     The letter signed by New York City’s health commissioner and confirmed by his spokesman said the UN debate hall was classified as a “convention center”, meaning all attendees must be vaccinated.

     […]

     Vassily Nebenzia wrote to assembly president Abdulla Shahid Wednesday saying he had been “very much surprised and disappointed” by a letter Shahid wrote to members in which he supported the proof of vaccination requirement.

     […]

     He described it as “a clearly discriminatory measure”, adding that preventing delegates to access the hall was a “clear violation of the UN charter”.

     The letter [presumably either NYC’s or Shahid’s –blf] also reminded diplomats that New York state requires everyone to wear masks on public transport.

     […]

     New York accepts all vaccines that have been approved by either the World Health Organization or America’s federal Food and Drug Administration.

     I suspect (part of) what is really going on here is Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine still hasn’t received WHO approval (as of 19 August (PDF)), and last year the FDA (and EMA?) said they were concerned about a lack of data and thought it unlikely it would gain EUA (perhaps even more unlikely now since there now is a fully-approved vaccine?).

213. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 7:30 pm

     Despondent after yesterday’s recall election, millions of California Republicans are fleeing the state for Florida and Texas in search of dumber governors.

     The Republicans are choosing to leave their lives in California behind rather than put up with another year and a half of a governor who oppressively follows science.

     Harland Dorrinson, a real-estate agent in Orange County, said that he was leaving for a new life in Florida with little more than the Rolex on his arm.

     “I looked at myself in the mirror and asked, Can I really live under the tyranny of a governor who blindly adheres to verifiable reality?” he said. “I decided I’d be better off with Ron DeSantis.”

     Although he is excited about starting over in the Sunshine State, Dorrinson said that choosing between Florida and Texas was “one of the toughest decisions” of his life.

     “With Governor Abbott and Governor DeSantis, you really can’t go wrong,” he said. “Both of them oppose mask mandates. Both of them oppose vaccine mandates. But DeSantis has actually had his videos banned from YouTube for spreading covid misinformation. That was the tiebreaker for me.”

     New Yorker link

     DeSantis has earned the nickname Ron DeathSentence.

214. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 7:36 pm

     Alaska News:

     Alaska’s largest hospital is now implementing crisis standards and rationing medical care amid a crush of COVID-19 patients and staff shortages that have forced providers to prioritize patients most likely to recover.

     Link

     […] Providence Alaska Medical Center’s chief of staff announced the decision in a two-page letter Tuesday that urges Alaskans to wear masks regardless of their vaccination status, get tested, get vaccinated if eligible and avoid potentially dangerous activities or situations that could result in hospitalization. […]

     “We’re out of beds. Life saving measures are not going to be possible in every case,” said Dr. Leslie Gonsette, an internal medicine hospitalist and member of Providence’s executive committee board who helped draft the letter. “And that’s what we’re trying to emphasize.”

     […] Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson has made it clear he opposes such requirements.

     […] Bronson praised the municipality’s work on testing and monoclonal antibody treatment sites and reiterated his opposition to any vaccine requirements as the meeting got underway. Several people testified in opposition to vaccination and other mitigation policies. At least one suggested the virus was nothing to be afraid of.

     “We are in a crisis at the hospital,” Solana Walkinshaw testified, meaning care had to be rationed. “That means when we have four patients and two machines, two people are not getting that care. It’s happening now.” […]

     “I would just briefly respond to this suggestion that we should not be afraid,” he said. “I would say that we are terrified as physicians and nurses. What we’re terrified of is being faced with two or three or four patients, and not having the resources that we need to take care of them.”

     […] The Providence letter describes an emergency room overflowing, with patients waiting in their cars for hours and heart attack patients sometimes denied timely life-saving care. Providence now often declines transfer requests from outlying rural hospitals trying to move accident or stroke victims and has instituted strict visitor restrictions. […]

215. Lynna, OM says

     15 September 2021 at 7:40 pm

     This pastor will sign a religious exemption for vaccines if you donate to his church.

     Washington Post link

     A pastor is encouraging people to donate to his Tulsa church so they can become an online member and get his signature on a religious exemption from coronavirus vaccine mandates. The pastor, Jackson Lahmeyer, is a 29-year-old small-business owner running in the Republican primary challenge to Sen. James Lankford in 2022.

     Lahmeyer, who leads Sheridan Church with his wife, Kendra, said Tuesday that in the past two days, about 30,000 people have downloaded the religious exemption form he created.

     “It’s beautiful,” he said. “My phone and my emails have blown up.”

     The rules around religious exemptions for coronavirus vaccines vary widely as each state or institution often has its own exemption forms for people to sign. Experts on religious freedom claims say that most people do not necessarily need a letter from clergy for a religious exemption.

     Some institutions request a signature from a religious authority, but Charles Haynes, senior fellow for religious freedom at the Freedom Forum in Washington, said that those institutions could be on a shaky ground constitutionally. Haynes said that if a person states a sincere religious belief that they want to opt out of vaccination, that should be enough.

     “He’s not really selling a religious exemption,” said Haynes, who compared Lahmeyer’s exemption offer to televangelists who sell things like prayer cloths. “He’s selling a bogus idea that you need one.” […]

     WTF?

216. Rob Grigjanis says

     15 September 2021 at 8:16 pm

     Just came across an absolute gem of a cryptic crossword clue (Guardian Cryptic Sep 15);

     Silly bugger whose next-but-one successor was worse (6,1,4).

217. The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) says

     16 September 2021 at 3:42 am

     @#215, Rob Grigjanis:

     If there weren’t letter counts associated with it, you could fill it in with the name of nearly any politician from the US of the last 50-odd years. The same would be true if you omitted “next-but-one”.

218. blf says

     16 September 2021 at 10:21 am

     As part of the implementation of France’s Health Pass related measures, all(?) healthcare workers had to be (fully?-)vaccinated by September 15. From memory, the original plan was to fire any who weren’t, but the constitutional review modified that, so it’s (for the moment) suspension without pay. Which has happened, France suspends 3,000 unvaccinated health workers without pay:

     […]
     France’s national public health agency estimated last week that roughly 12 percent of hospital staff and around six percent of doctors in private practices have yet to be vaccinated.

     “Some 3,000 suspensions were notified yesterday to employees at health centres and clinics who have not yet been vaccinated,” [Health Minister Olivier] Veran told RTL radio.

     He added that “several dozens” had turned in their resignations rather than sign up for the jabs. […]

     That compares with 2.7 million health workers overall, Veran said, adding that “continued healthcare is assured.”

     “A large number of these suspensions are only temporary” and mainly concern support staff, with “very few nurses” among those told to stay home, he said.

     […]

219. LykeX says

     16 September 2021 at 10:33 am

     This year’s ozone layer hole bigger than Antarctica:

     The hole in the ozone layer that develops annually is “rather larger than usual” and is currently bigger than Antartica, say the scientists responsible for monitoring it.
     Researchers from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service say that this year’s hole is growing quickly and is larger than 75% of ozone holes at this stage in the season since 1979.
     …
     Vincent-Henri Peuch, the service’s director, told the Guardian: “We cannot really say at this stage how the ozone hole will evolve. However, the hole of this year is remarkably similar to the one of 2020, which was among the deepest and the longest-lasting – it closed around Christmas – in our records since 1979.
     “The 2021 ozone hole is now among the 25% largest in our records since 1979, but the process is still under way. We will keep monitoring its development in the next weeks. A large or small ozone hole in one year does not necessarily mean that the overall recovery process is not going ahead as expected, but it can signal that special attention needs to be paid and research can be directed to study the reasons behind a specific ozone hole event.”

     You know, just the other day, I was thinking to myself: “Why can’t we get our shit together on climate change? We managed with the ozone layer, so we should be able to do more.” And then I learn that while we may have cut back on emissions of CFCs, the hole is still there. And apparently still getting worse.
     Yay humanity. What a bunch.

220. Rob Grigjanis says

     16 September 2021 at 11:15 am

     The Vicar @216: But it has to make sense as a cryptic clue. The answer is an anagram of ‘bugger whose’ – George W Bush.

221. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 11:33 am

     Georgia’s Governor Kemp spurns Covid solutions, but invites ‘good ideas’

     “If you have any good ideas on how we can further slow the spread, I’d be open to it,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said. If only he meant it.

     The cover of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution yesterday featured two big reports on the pandemic in Georgia. On the right side of the page was a discouraging article about the sharp increase in Covid-19 infections among children in the state as schools reopen. Several hundred Georgia kids were hospitalized just last week.

     This news appeared alongside a competing article, alerting readers to a very different kind of development. The headline read, “Kemp avoids strong steps to stem COVID-19 spread.”

     As Georgia sees some of its highest numbers to date of infections, hospitalizations and fatalities, the Journal-Constitution reported that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is among the GOP governors sticking to a passive approach to the pandemic.

     When [Kemp] went on national television to talk about the new school year, he spoke of masks as tools of government overreach, accusing the CDC of doublespeak. We don’t need mandates to know what to do, he said on Fox and Friends. His refrain there and at press conferences: We need to trust people to do the right thing. In the days following, Kemp told Georgians to follow scientific guidance. But he also said it was up to every individual whether to wear masks or get vaccinated.

     The report added that it was just a month ago, as cases in Georgia grew, when the Republican governor “signed an order allowing businesses to ignore any local COVID restrictions.”

     Asked if he’s doing enough to address the public health crisis, Kemp immediately responded, “If you have any good ideas on how we can further slow the spread, I’d be open to it.”

     […] Nearly 25 years ago, there was an episode of “The Simpsons” in which viewers saw Ned Flanders’ parents struggling to deal with Ned’s temperament issues when he was a child. They went to a therapist and said, “You’ve got to help us, doc. We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”

     Of course, it’d be an unfair overstatement to say the Georgia governor has tried literally nothing, but the line from the “The Simpsons” nevertheless rings true for a reason.

     There are plenty of constructive steps Kemp could take that would likely help make a significant difference. He could create vaccine requirements. He could mandate mask protections in schools. He could rescind his recent order and direct businesses to honor local Covid-19 restrictions. As the Journal-Constitution’s article added, Kemp could “offer incentives to younger people to get vaccinated and vastly expand mobile clinics.”

     The governor could also barnstorm the state, touting the importance of vaccines and pleading with Georgians to do the right thing in order to protect themselves, their families and their communities.

     But Kemp isn’t doing any of these things. […].

222. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 11:43 am

     Biden’s ACA special enrollment period brought coverage to millions

     Biden’s decision to create a special ACA enrollment period proved to be a striking success. It’s part of the ACA’s very good year.

     Just one week after his inauguration, President Joe Biden did what his predecessor would not: He issued an executive order to create a special enrollment period through the Affordable Care Act, citing a need created by the pandemic. Donald Trump was expected to do something similar last year, but he refused, because he didn’t want people turning to “Obamacare” for help during a crisis.

     […] Biden’s decision to do the right thing proved to be a striking success. The Associated Press reported yesterday:

     Nearly 3 million consumers took advantage of a special six-month period to sign up for subsidized health insurance coverage made more affordable by the COVID-19 relief law, President Joe Biden said Wednesday…. ‘That’s 2.8 million families who will have more security, more breathing room, and more money in their pocket if an illness or accident hits home,’ Biden said in a statement. ‘Altogether, 12.2 million Americans are actively enrolled in coverage under the Affordable Care Act — an all-time high.’

     […] As HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn recently added, “So this is what it looks like when the people in charge of ‘Obamacare’ want to enroll as many people as possible.”

     […] the ACA is having a very good year. Not only did the U.S. Supreme Court shield the ACA from its latest Republican attack a few months ago, but the open enrollment data coincides with expansive new benefits included in the Democrats’ Covid relief package. Some have seen their premiums cut in half, while many have seen their premiums fall to literally zero, thanks entirely to the investments in the president’s American Rescue Plan.

     There are, however, some clouds on the horizon. As regular readers know, the ACA-related benefits included in the American Rescue Plan are, at least for now, temporary. The White House and Democratic leaders want to make the current benefits permanent, and they intend to include funding for this in the Build Back Better infrastructure bill taking shape on Capitol Hill.

     Whether a small group of centrist and conservative Democrats will allow the legislation to proceed remains an open question. […]

223. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 11:49 am

     Nearly a year after Trump’s defeat, Republicans in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are launching unnecessary and utterly ridiculous election “investigations.”

     Arizona Republicans’ utterly bonkers “audit” of the 2020 presidential election has become the stuff of legend — but not in a good way. As a bipartisan group of local officials in Maricopa County put it in May, the outlandish process is a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” adding, “Our state has become a laughingstock.”

     But with so much of the GOP fully invested in the Big Lie, Republican officials elsewhere remain eager to repeat Arizona’s mistakes nearly a year after Donald Trump’s re-election defeat.

     In Wisconsin, for example, GOP legislators recently agreed to spend up to $680,000 — in taxpayer money — on an entirely unnecessary investigation into ballots that have already been counted multiple times. Making matters worse, the Associated Press reported this week that the state’s election clerks reacted “with a mixture of concern and confusion to the first inquiry made by a special investigator hired by Republicans to examine” the state’s 2020 election.

     As Rachel explained on Tuesday’s show, the inquiry came in the form of a strange email from an unofficial account and an unknown sender, requesting the preservation of election records. Not surprisingly, several Wisconsin counties said they intended to ignore the mysterious correspondence and await official instructions. [LOL]

     The investigation is being led by former conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who made up his mind about far-right conspiracy theories before his examination even began: Gableman is a “Stop the Steal” activist who’s publicly sought to undermine public confidence in the election results.

     While these developments unfold in the Badger State, Pennsylvania Republicans, also invested in the Big Lie, have moved forward with their own “review” of the election — despite the fact that the state has already conducted post-election audits confirming the accuracy of the results.

     The Washington Post reported yesterday on GOP state legislators approving subpoenas for “a wide range of data and personal information on voters.”

     Among other requests, Republicans are seeking the names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses and methods of voting for millions of people who cast ballots in the May primary and the November general election.

     That’s quite a list. Remember, there’s literally no evidence of election improprieties in the Keystone State. There was an election; the votes were tallied; the results were certified; and audits found no irregularities in the vote count. No one, anywhere, has produced any credible proof of problems with the state’s balloting.

     A couple of Trump voters were caught trying to cast illegal ballots on behalf of dead relatives, but they were easily caught, and in a state in which roughly 7 million Pennsylvanians voted, the vanishingly small number of Republicans who tried and failed to commit fraud was inconsequential.

     […] the state Senate’s top Republican, President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, recently told a conservative media personality that he and his GOP colleagues are justified in this partisan exercise, not because there’s evidence of wrongdoing, but because they think evidence of wrongdoing might emerge if they keep looking for it.

     “I don’t necessarily have faith in the results,” Corman said last month. “I think that there were many problems in our election that we need to get to the bottom of.”

     By all appearances, Corman lacks “faith in the results” because voters in his state had the audacity to support the Democratic ticket — just as Pennsylvania voters did in 2012. And 2008. And 2004. And 2000. And 1996. And 1992. His hunch has nevertheless led to expansive subpoenas for millions of voters’ personal information.

     Marian Schneider, an elections lawyer for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told The New York Times, “That’s a really bad idea to have private information floating around in a Senate caucus. And it’s really not clear how the data is going to be used, who’s going to be looking at it, who can have access, how it’s going to be secured. And it’s unclear to me why they even need the personally identifying information.”

     Court fights over these subpoenas are inevitable.

     Link

224. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 12:04 pm

     In April, a national poll found 70 percent of Republicans rejecting the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency. Five months later, it’s even worse.

     […] The fact that this problem persists — and by some measures, is getting worse — underscores a more serious problem.

     A new national CNN poll, released yesterday, asked respondents whether President Joe Biden legitimately defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election. For most Americans the answer is obvious; for most Republican voters, it is not.

     Among Republicans, 78 percent say that Biden did not win and 54 percent believe there is solid evidence of that, despite the fact that no such evidence exists. That view is also deeply connected to support for Trump.

     At face value, it’s astonishing that nearly four in five GOP voters believe the president did not win the election, reality be damned. […] In other words, since the spring, GOP voters have become even more hostile toward their own country’s electoral reality.

     To be sure, 78 percent is an unusually high number — the highest I’ve seen in major independent polling — but there have been a variety of surveys in recent months pointing in similar directions.

     Over the summer, the Associated Press and Monmouth separately released poll results showing roughly two-thirds of Republicans coming to the same misguided conclusion.

     […] I initially hoped that reality would set in gradually over time. […] Many GOP voters were led to believe that Trump would win, so perhaps their rejection of Biden’s legitimate victory was little more than reflexive anger.

     In the same vein, as the nation’s focus shifted to post-inaugural governance, it seemed possible, if not likely, that voters would accept reality in greater numbers as post-election drama faded from view.

     Except, that’s not happening — in part because the post-election drama hasn’t faded from view. Trump lies with great regularity about his defeat, and much of his party plays along, either because GOP officials believe the nonsense or because they’re afraid of what will happen to them if they tell the truth. Absurd election “audits” are still ongoing — and in some states, just getting started.

     Rank-and-file Republican voters, meanwhile, don’t know they’re being deceived, and the result is widespread confusion about reality.

     […] If the CNN polling is correct and the problem is actually getting worse nearly a year after the election, that’s a problem for the entire political system

225. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 12:16 pm

     Twenty-four Democratic Attorneys General filed an amicus brief backing the Department of Justice’s challenge to the recent Texas abortion ban.

     […] In their amicus brief, the group led by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey argued that Texas’ new six-week abortion ban is in “direct contravention” of the Supreme Court precedent affirming the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability, which the court recognized in its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

     “Today, virtually no one can obtain an abortion in Texas,” the brief reads. “In order to obtain abortion care, patients now have to travel out-of-state, which makes abortion for many people too difficult, too time-intensive, and too costly.”

     The group noted that residents of their respective states may require an abortion while in Texas, which could include workers, visitors or students from out of state.

     Additionally, they expressed concerns for Texans who are now seeking abortions outside of the Lone Star state as a result of a ban, and how that could potentially add more burdens onto already strained health care systems in their states.

     “In New Mexico, for example, an influx of patients from Texas has already strained provider resources and made it more difficult for New Mexico residents to receive timely care,” the brief reads. “Similar impacts are being seen or expected to be seen in other Amici States, including California, Colorado, Illinois, and Nevada.”

     The amicus brief’s Wednesday filing was issued after the Justice Department filed an emergency request late Tuesday night to freeze Texas’ anti-abortion law. Instead of immediately acting on the request, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Pitman agreed to the state’s request to hear arguments before ruling, and scheduled a hearing on Oct. 1 to consider temporarily blocking Texas’ six-week abortion ban.

     The Texas law needs to be stopped now! What’s with this fucking delay?

     […] The DOJ’s lawsuit, which was filed in Austin last week, seeks a judgment deeming the law invalid under the Supremacy Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, and for an order blocking anyone from carrying it out.

     “The United States has the authority and responsibility to ensure that Texas cannot evade its obligations under the Constitution and deprive individuals of their constitutional rights by adopting a statutory scheme designed specifically to evade traditional mechanisms of federal judicial review,” the DOJ’s lawsuit reads. “The federal government therefore brings this suit directly against the State of Texas to obtain a declaration that S.B. 8 is invalid, to enjoin its enforcement, and to protect the rights that Texas has violated.”

     The DOJ’s lawsuit also took aim at the Texas law for allowing individuals from anywhere in the country to sue anyone who performs post-six week abortions, or who “aids or abets” it — which could net the plaintiff a $10,000 bounty and all legal fees paid for by the defendant.

     “It takes little imagination to discern Texas’s goal—to make it too risky for an abortion clinic to operate in the State,” the DOJ’s lawsuit reads.

     The DOJ’s lawsuit claims that the state is the rightful defendant.

     “The United States therefore may sue a State to vindicate the rights of individuals when a state infringes on rights protected by the Constitution,” the DOJ’s lawsuit reads. “Such an effort is particularly warranted where, as here, private citizens are—by design—substantially burdened in vindicating their own rights.” […]

     Link

226. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 12:24 pm

     Follow-up to comments 165 and 208.

     […] You might be thinking, “Cristina, are you seriously talking about this Nicki Minaj testicle thing for a third day in a row?” and I regret to inform you that yes, I am, and that’s because the White House actually got involved yesterday.

     Minaj claimed she had been invited to the White House to discuss the COVID-19 vaccine amid what she dubbed “#BallGate,” the backlash over her allegation that the vaccine had caused her cousin’s friend’s testicles to swell.

     The White House said the rapper hadn’t been offered an invite, but they had reached out to her to make sure she knows the vaccine doesn’t, you know, do that.

     “As we have with others, we offered a call with Nicki Minaj and one of our doctors to answer questions she has about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine,” the White House said in a statement.

     And now Trump stooges have found their patron saint in Nicki Minaj:

     Nicki Minaj is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.

     One of them is censored by the regime. The other promoted by it. [tweeted by J.D. Vance]

     Link

     At the link, you can also see tweets documenting the many ways in which Fox News is promoting the “Nicki Minaj was censored” falsehood.

227. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 12:36 pm

     Oh, FFS.

     Violent insurrection? What violent insurrection? The Jan. 6 Capitol attack was more like “a couple of boomers doing a self-guided tour of a public building.”

     At least, that’s according to Matt Braynard, the former director of data and strategy for the 2016 Trump campaign and the organizer behind a protest at the Capitol Saturday on behalf of Jan. 6 “political prisoners.”

     […] “What happened on the sixth, by and large, was just an aggressive exercise of First Amendment rights in a public building,” Braynard told the conservative Catholic outlet Church Militant recently. [Teaming up with “conservative Catholic” outlets!?]

     […] Reframing the Capitol attack as fundamentally peaceful is central to his political project.

     Beyond the so-called political prisoners, Braynard is trying to convince conservatives that the mainstream media’s depiction of Jan. 6 as a “white supremacist insurrection” threatens to provide the foundation for gun grabs, purges from the military, and even critical race theory.

     […] Saturday’s rally will likely be a quieter event than the attack that aimed to overturn American democracy. Donald Trump, for one thing, isn’t beckoning his millions of supporters to the nation’s capital. What’s more, some of the groups under the heaviest scrutiny for that riot have said they’re staying away from D.C. this time.

     Far-right leaders and their rank-and-file believers have determined, at least publicly, that the event will be rife with “glowies,” or undercover federal agents.

     “[…] Sounds like bait,” the Proud Boys account on Telegram announced earlier this month, as the Washingtonian noted. Oath Keepers lawyer Kellye SoRelle, who herself had a recent encounter with federal law enforcement, told Mother Jones, “I do not know of any specific plan to attend, other than what we are watching the media fabricate.”

     But bringing out the muscle, at least for one day in September, isn’t the point. Rather, Braynard wants to change the narrative of the Capitol attack, softening the spotlight that for months has pointed at the violence on display that day.

     “This is really about fighting the narrative about what actually happened on Jan. 6,” he told Steve Bannon in one recent interview, adding later: “This protest is not about elections, it’s not about who won, it’s not about voter fraud. It’s about the abuse of these political prisoners and the scapegoating of them for this grand insurrection narrative.”

     […] “This is a tactic we’ve seen from the far right throughout the Trump years,” said Michael Edison Hayden, a spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, who compared the effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 to similar historical revisionism after the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

     “It is to broaden the appetite for violence. If you don’t feel a sense of disgust and horror — if you consider this to be normal politics — then you’re willing to accept much more.”

     Jared Holt, a researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told TPM that Braynard could use an uneventful protest to his advantage. Holt has criticized reporting on the upcoming event, largely based on law enforcement sources, that has cast Braynard’s crew as a second-coming of the Capitol attackers.

     “If things go smoothly, and people who attend his rally comply with police and behave themselves, Matt Braynard will be able to turn around and use that to be able to further his own attempts to recast Jan. 6,” Holt said.

     “If they lied about us,” Holt speculated the organizer might say, “do you think maybe they lied about Jan. 6?”

     […] Ashli Babbitt, who became a right-wing martyr after she was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer while trying to storm a hallway mere feet from evacuating lawmakers, was actually “sort of trying to reach over a door or something,” Braynard told Church Militant.

     And while Capitol rioter Roseanne Boyland was declared dead of an amphetamine overdose by the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office — and video from the event showed her being trampled by fellow rioters — Castronuova asserted in the Gateway Pundit last week that video showed a Capitol Police officer beating an unconscious Boyland with a stick. [OMG, so many lies, so much bullshit.]

     […]

     Link

228. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 12:50 pm

     A reusable Falcon 9 rocket launched four civilians into orbit Wednesday.

     The Crew Dragon capsule settled into orbit about 360 miles above the Earth’s surface.

     The mission is the first time that a launch was guided without an astronaut on board.

     […] Elon Musk’s SpaceX made history after successfully launching an all-civilian crew into Earth’s orbit for the first time ever.

     A reusable Falcon 9 rocket launched Chris Sembroski, an aerospace data engineer, Jared Isaacman, a billionaire tech entrepreneur, Sian Proctor, a geoscientist, and Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, from Cape Canaveral Wednesday evening as part of the Inspiration4 mission.

     The Crew Dragon capsule settled into orbit about 360 miles above the Earth’s surface, higher than the pathway taken by the International Space Station, and will orbit the planet for three days. The crew will then splash down at one of several possible landing sites off the Florida coast.

     […] The mission comes after billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson both launched to the edge of space in spacecraft manufactured by their aerospace companies as part of efforts to ramp up the space tourism industry.

     Link

     Video taken from capsule’s cupola is available at the link.

229. blf says

     16 September 2021 at 1:38 pm

     The Nasa/JPL Mars helicopter Ingenuity’s 14th flight (possibly tomorrow, Friday) will be to test higher rotor speeds in preparation for seasonal atmospheric pressure differences (even lower density) on Mars. As explained in Flying on Mars Is Getting Harder and Harder, Ingenuity has now been operating for six months(!), well beyond its planned or expected lifetime, and is now having to deal with the seasons changing on Mars: “With Ingenuity in its sixth month of operation, however, we have entered a season where the densities in Jezero Crater are dropping to even lower levels. In the coming months we may see densities as low as 0.012 kg/m3 (1.0% [lower than the designed-for 1.2%–1.5%] of Earth’s density) during the afternoon hours that are preferable for flight.” One way of dealing with the problem is to spin the rotor faster than it’s ever been tested before (not even on Earth!), up to about 2800 rpm, or 0.8 Mach (on Mars), or about 10% faster than the usual operating speed.

230. blf says

     16 September 2021 at 1:59 pm

     Alberta [Canada] reverses hands-off approach to Covid to tackle ‘crisis of unvaccinated’:

     […]
     Alberta’s premier has announced sweeping new restrictions to combat the spread of the coronavirus, admitting the Canadian province was gripped by a “crisis of the unvaccinated”.

     The new measures marked a major reversal from Jason Kenney’s hands-off approach to the pandemic previously, and come amid warnings from frontline medical workers that the province’s healthcare system is on the verge of collapse.

     Kenney admitted as much when he outlined the province’s new restrictions, telling the public that Alberta may run out of intensive-care beds and staff to care for ICU patients within 10 days.

     Alberta currently has the worst coronavirus outbreak in Canada.

     Kenney, whose government consists of moderate and far-right conservatives, has previously resisted vaccine passport systems, citing privacy concerns. But on Wednesday evening, he admitted he had little choice.

     “The government’s first obligation must be to avoid large numbers of preventable deaths. We must deal with the reality that we are facing. We cannot wish it away,” he said. “Morally, ethically and legally, the protection of life must be our paramount concern.”

     Beginning late this month, Albertans must show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test for restaurants, bars and indoor organized events. Businesses that choose not to ask for vaccination status will have a separate, more strict set of regulations they must follow. For example, if restaurants opt out of the vaccine passport system, they must close their indoor dining rooms and limit outdoor service to tables of six people, all of whom must be from the same household.

     […]

     In his remarks, Kenney also apologized for treating Covid-19 as something that was not an immediate threat to the lives of Albertans. In July, officials had said Alberta was open for summer and the governing United Conservative party began selling hats proclaiming 2021 was the Best Summer Ever. Those hats are no longer for sale.

     “It is now clear that we were wrong — and for that, I apologize,” said Kenney.

     The Alberta Health Services head, Verna Yiu, had dire warnings for the province on Wednesday, saying that her agency will soon ask other provinces if they have ICU space to care for Albertans. AHS will also ask other provinces if they have frontline medical staff who could be deployed to assist in Alberta.

     The province has already cancelled surgeries to increase ICU capacity. As of Tuesday, 270 people were in Alberta’s ICUs, far more than the limit of 173. More than 90% of patients in the ICU are unvaccinated or partly vaccinated.

231. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 2:19 pm

     blf @229, wow. Kenney has really changed his tune. About time. I wish some conservative politicians in the USA would follow his example.

     May be relevant: There are 82,436 mormons in Alberta according to LDS church membership records. This may not count mormons who live in Alberta but who are members of even more fundamentalist versions of the LDS church (polygamists). They are very conservative.

232. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 2:22 pm

     $99 billion in damages. That’s what Biden says extreme weather cost USA taxpayers last year. He expects that amount to go up this year. Biden says that for every dollar of infrastructure and other preventative measures the government spends, we get $6 back in savings. So, yeah, he is right. We need to make those investments.

233. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 2:28 pm

     Sigh. Some madness from Fox News, plus commentary from Stephen Colbert as a palate cleanser.

     LARA LOGAN: This is really the moment to unite. Because we’re seeing is that these issues were never about Left and Right. They’re about right and wrong and good and evil and there’s nothing more threatening to them than saying you’re going to pray for something.

     TUCKER: It’s totally true! This isn’t even about vaccines, or about COVID! It’s about your dignity! And if they can force you to violate your own conscience, to put something in your body you don’t want, you are done, you have no more dignity, they control you, and that’s why they’re so insistent on doing it.

     Stephen Colbert segment on YouTube

234. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 2:54 pm

     Why Mitch McConnell is threatening to hurt the economy on purpose

     A full decade after the nation’s first-ever debt ceiling crisis, Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans are gearing up for a dangerous sequel.

     In most legislative fights, Democrats and Republicans operate in competing versions of reality. From health care to taxes, climate to immigration, the major parties often can’t agree what to do because they can’t agree on what’s real.

     But the debt ceiling is qualitatively different.

     Both parties are well aware of the fact that raising the debt ceiling allows the United States government to meet its fiscal obligations. Both parties fully understand that if the country fails to raise the debt ceiling, and our government defaults on its obligations, the results would be disastrous.

     This isn’t one of those fights in which Republicans struggle with substantive details, ignore the experts and concoct a weird alternate reality. GOP officials and Democratic officials are on the same page: Congress must pay its bills to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.

     The problem right now is that Republicans are simply refusing to govern responsibly. NBC News reported yesterday on

     A battle over the debt limit on Capitol Hill is intensifying after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans dug in this week against voting to raise it…. “Let me be crystal clear about this: Republicans are united in opposition to raising the debt ceiling,” McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters after a Senate GOP caucus meeting Tuesday.

     The Kentucky senator justified his position — conceding that he’s voted for plenty of other debt-ceiling increases — by arguing that Democrats are pursuing an ambitious economic agenda that Republicans don’t like.

     That’s a justification? Doesn’t sound like one to me.

     The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent described the GOP leader’s position as “lunacy,” which is more than fair given the circumstances.

     Republicans are not against a debt ceiling increase. Rather, they’re against voting for a debt ceiling increase. That’s ridiculous, of course, but it’s made worse by GOP plans to filibuster the vote when Democrats try to take the obvious step.

     In other words, the Senate Republicans’ position can be reduced to three straightforward points:
     – Congress must raise the debt ceiling.
     – Democrats must do this on their own.
     – Republicans won’t let Democrats do this on their own.

     […] This morning Punchbowl News noted in passing that “both sides” are “dug in” over the issue. The New York Times added that Democrats “do not appear to have a strategy” to get the job done.

     Aiyiyiyi. Don’t “both sides” this issue.

     […] One side of the political divide wants the United States to pay its bills; the other side is threatening to deliberately crash the economy as part of a political game.

     This shouldn’t be seen as a standoff in which “both sides” are “dug in”; this should be seen for what it is: a scandal in which a major political party says it’s prepared to hurt Americans on purpose.

     […] Wait, do we really have to talk about the debt ceiling again?

     I’m afraid so. No one wants to have this conversation — now or ever — but Senate Republicans are picking the fight, so it’s important for the public to understand what’s at stake.

     […] In our system of government, Congress has the “power of the purse” and appropriates federal funds, but it’s the executive branch that actually spends the money. For the most part, this works relatively smoothly, though there’s an important sticking point: the executive branch lacks the legal authority to spend more than the country takes in.

     Since the United States nearly always runs an annual budget deficit, this means administrations have spent decades going back to Congress and asking lawmakers to extend the nation’s borrowing limit — in effect, getting permission to spend the money lawmakers already allocated.

     This model seems badly flawed.

     It is. In fact, no major economy on the planet operates this way.

     What happens if the United States fails to extend its borrowing authority?

     Nothing good. Failure would result in the world’s largest economy defaulting on its debts and obligations, which would likely spark a global crisis. […]

     But for most of modern history, this hasn’t made much of a difference, right?

     Right. Lawmakers in both parties have occasionally used the process of raising the debt ceiling for grandstanding, but neither party had ever seriously entertained the possibility of trashing the full faith and credit of the United States government.

     And then?

     And then Republicans won control of the U.S. House in the 2010 midterms, and got to work launching a first-of-its-kind debt ceiling crisis in 2011. GOP lawmakers told the Obama White House that they would refuse to extend the nation’s borrowing limit — which is to say, refuse to cover the debts the nation had already accrued — until Democrats met the Republican Party’s non-negotiable demands.

     You make it sound as if GOP elected officials held the nation hostage.

     Because they did. In fact, McConnell himself described his party’s tactics as a “hostage” strategy at the time. Soon after, then-Vice President Joe Biden reportedly told congressional Democrats, in reference to GOP lawmakers, “They have acted like terrorists.”

     When GOP lawmakers created this crisis in 2011, did it really make a difference?

     Yes. The fact that Republicans were prepared to crash the global economy, on purpose, did not go unnoticed. Just as the nation was finding its footing after the Great Recession, the GOP’s debt-ceiling crisis slowed job growth in the United States to a crawl, did real harm to the nation’s global reputation, and led to the first-ever downgrade to our debt rating.

     Why didn’t Republicans pay a price for engaging in such scandalous tactics?

     Largely much of the Beltway media covered the story as just another fiscal fight between Democrats and Republicans. It’s likely why Republicans feel comfortable giving this another try now.

     So why has it been a decade since I last heard about this?

     Because when Republicans tried to launch additional debt-ceiling fights after 2011, then-President Barack Obama drew a line in the sand from which he did not deviate: He would not negotiate with those threatening Americans with deliberate harm. GOP lawmakers made post-2011 threats, and put together ransom notes, but when the Democratic White House refused to engage, Republicans ultimately had no choice but to approve clean debt-ceiling increases.

     And what about during the Trump era? Did Democrats try to borrow a page from the GOP’s playbook?

     No. During Trump’s term — a four-year period in which Republicans forgot to pretend to care about the deficit and spending concerns — Congress raised the debt ceiling three times without incident. Two years ago, Trump went so far as to declare, “I can’t imagine anybody using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge.” The Republican went on to describe the debt limit a “sacred thing in our country.”

     Evidently, the GOP has changed its mind now that there’s another Democratic president.

     Evidently.

     What’s on the Republicans’ list of hostage demands this year?

     For the most part, nothing. GOP leaders aren’t making specific demands, so much as they’re saying they’ll simply refuse to engage in responsible governing on this issue. The White House, meanwhile, is saying it wouldn’t matter if McConnell & Co. came up with a ransom note, because the president won’t negotiate with those threatening to harm Americans on purpose.

     How many Senate Republican votes does the Democratic majority need?

     In theory, none, since there’s a Democratic majority, but in practice, Democrats will need at least 10 GOP votes to overcome a Republican filibuster.

     Are there are any Senate Republicans prepared to approach this in a responsible way?

     Not yet. The grand total of GOP senators who’ve said they’ll vote for a debt-ceiling increase is, as of this morning, zero.

     How much longer until the deadline?

     The Treasury Department hasn’t yet identified a drop-dead deadline, but Yellen has told Congress that members will have to act by next month.

     Do Democrats expect Republicans to come around before it’s too late?

     Yes, but that’s a risky assumption and McConnell insisted yesterday that he and his members will refuse to be responsible.

     And if McConnell’s right?

     Democrats can try attaching a debt ceiling increase to some other bill; they can create a new exception to the Senate’s filibuster rules; or they can blame Republicans for doing enormous harm to the nation’s economic health and stability.

235. raven says

     16 September 2021 at 3:36 pm

     Oregon counties requesting emergency help getting mobile morgues
     by Genevieve Reaume, KATU Staff Wednesday, September 15th 2021

     Several hospitals have already brought in trailers to act as mobile morgues, including Providence Portland and Providence St. Vincent. Now, other counties and hospitals are asking for similar assistance from the state.

     Josephine, Tillamook and Lane counties have asked for trailers to help store bodies. Tillamook and Josephine’s requests have been fulfilled and Lane’s request, which the county notes is proactive, is still pending.

     In the Portland-metro area, OHSU and Legacy Mount Hood Medical Center have also asked for mobile morgues. According to OEM, OHSU’s ask was “fulfilled via hospital-to-hospital mutual aid agreements with Kaiser Permanente.”

     Legacy’s request is also pending.

     It’s refrigerated truck time again. A lot of hospitals in Oregon are getting refrigerated trucks.
     It is not a good sign when the refrigerated trucks show up in your neighborhood.

     I keep wondering what goes through the antivaxxers minds when the antivaxxers around them are all getting sick and dying.
     It really doesn’t look like it bothers them all that much.

236. raven says

     16 September 2021 at 3:49 pm

     All of Idaho now under Crisis Standards of Care as COVID-19 surges
     by KBOI StaffThursday, September 16th 2021

     BOISE, Idaho (KBOI) — The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare has activated Crisis Standards of Care across the entire state of Idaho due to the state’s massive influx of COVID-19 patients being hospitalized. The surge, IDHW says, has exhausted existing resources in all areas of Idaho.

     Further, 83 percent of patients in St. Luke’s intensive care unit beds are COVID patients. Of those, 98 percent are unvaccinated.

     The hospital systems in all of Idaho have basically failed.
     This isn’t even news any more.
     Idaho’s last great move was to appoint an antivaxxer doctor to their Central Health Board.

     They have also been exporting patients to neighboring states and their hospitals are now full as well.

237. Lynna, OM says

     16 September 2021 at 11:32 pm

     raven @236, I have friends who live in Washington State. They tell me that it is causing real problems to have all of the hospital beds in Washington filling up with COVID patients from Idaho.

     It’s a complete disaster. And, you are are right to say that Idaho appointed a doofus to their Central Health Board. The guy called vaccines “needle rape.” From the Washington Post:

     […] Ryan Cole, a doctor [he is a diagnostic pathologist] — backed by the Ada County Republican Party — who has called coronavirus vaccines “fake.”

     The Republican commissioners of the county — which encompasses the state capital, Boise — said they welcomed Cole’s “outsider” perspective and willingness to “question” established medical guidance. They appointed him over the protests of their lone Democratic colleague.

     […] “To watch my state implode over political decisions that have adverse consequences on health is horrifying to me. … That’s the tragedy that I’m watching unfold,” said Ted Epperly, Cole’s predecessor on the Central District Health Board, which can make broad rules such as mask mandates but had some of its authority stripped this year.

     David Pate, a friend of Epperly and a former CEO of Boise-based St. Luke’s Health System, said that if there is no political will or ability to enact mask mandates, authorities need to at least give people good information. He said the combination of decreasing public health officials’ powers and then allowing them to spread falsehoods is “the worst possible outcome.” He just learned that a charter school he successfully urged to require masks has changed course after hearing a presentation from Cole.

     A lifelong Republican and member of the governor’s coronavirus advisory group, Pate marveled that a segment of the right has been spreading misinformation that he said will be most deadly to their shot-spurning base.

     About 40 percent of Idaho’s population is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, one of the lowest rates in the country and significantly below the national figure of 54 percent.

     […] Cole is a pathologist who runs a medical testing center in Boise and whose public appearances have come to focus on covid-19. The doctor — who, according to his résumé, used to present mostly to medical conferences — has made most of his 2021 appearance at statehouses and on right-wing media, often disparaging the shots proved safe and effective in large trials.

     It started with a March talk at the Idaho Capitol, for a series hosted by the lieutenant governor, where Cole said mRNA vaccines using similar technology to coronavirus shots have led to cancer and autoimmune diseases. Asked for evidence later by a fact-checking site, he cited a paper whose lead author emphatically rejects Cole’s claims.

     […] “A fake vaccine,” Cole said. “Okay. I can — the clot shot, needle rape, whatever you want to call it.” […]

     Perhaps even worse:

     […] other elected officials are sowing misinformation.

     A recent newsletter from Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin (R) […] claimed falsely there is “clear” evidence that people “may be significantly worse off health-wise if they get vaccinated.”

     News outlets quickly pointed out that she was misreading data. People without full vaccination this spring and summer were 11 times more likely to die of covid-19 than the vaccinated, according to studies published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

     But McGeachin — who is running for governor with the slogan “Make Idaho Free Again!” — has not backed off.

     “I remain clear in my position on the vaccines. If you want the vaccine, got get the vaccine,” she said in a statement to The Post […] [And she didn’t address the fact that she misread the data and was spreading lies.]

     The office of Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R), who has urged vaccinations but denounced mandates, did not respond to requests for comment. […]

     Washington Post link

238. snarkrates says

     17 September 2021 at 9:01 am

     Given the longstanding connection between Rethug operators and outright fraud (Faux News fan/email lists are highly coveted by fraudsters everywhere, Rush Limpdick, Jim Bakker and many others promote(d) frauds on their broadcasts…) there is NO WAY I want them having any of my personal info.

     Rethugs–It’s fraud all the way down.

239. KG says

     17 September 2021 at 10:09 am

     Good news from the UK: Appeal court overturns UK puberty blockers ruling for under-16s. The original ruling had prevented the prescription of puberty blockers to under-16s (and of course that’s when they are of most benefit to young transgender people). I expect the case to be appealed again, to the Supreme Court.

240. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 11:58 am

     Despite court rulings, South Dakota’s Governor, Kristi Noem, pushes for school prayer

     It’s hardly a secret that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is trying to raise her national visibility and score points with the Republican base ahead of the 2024 election cycle. What’s of greater interest, however, is how the GOP governor is trying advance her ambitions.

     In July, for example, Noem spoke at an event in Iowa, where she told conservatives she doesn’t recognize the United States anymore. “When I grew up, people were proud to have a job,” the governor said. “They weren’t confused on the difference between boys and girls. We prayed in schools – which by the way, in South Dakota, I’m putting prayer back in our school.”

     The South Dakotan took a similar message to a conservative outlet called Real America’s Voice, arguing yesterday that Americans should look at officials’ actions to determine whether they “line up with the word of God” and “see if they’re Biblical.”

     Of course, given that the United States is a democracy, and not a theocracy, officials’ actions are supposed line up with the Constitution and the rule of law, not how some people interpret scripture.

     But in the same interview, Noem went just a little further. Right Wing Watch posted this excerpt:

     “We’ve seen our society, our culture, degrade as we’ve removed God out of our lives…. When I was growing up, we spent every Sunday, every night, every Wednesday night in church. Our church family was a part of our life. We read the Bible every day, as a family, together…. I don’t know if families do that as much anymore, and those Biblical values are learned in the family, and they’re learned in church…. We in South Dakota have decided to take action to really stand for Biblical principles…. I have legislation I’ll be proposing this year that will allow us to pray in schools again.”

     The governor, wholly indifferent to the separation of church and state, added that an emphasis on “Biblical principles” will help “re-center” children who attend public schools.

     […] the Republican’s position is badly flawed and in need of a fact-check.

     For example, when Noem said she’ll introduce a proposal to “allow us to pray in schools again,” she’s pushing for a right that already exists. Voluntary school prayer was never removed from schools.

     What the governor seemed to be suggesting, however, isn’t a system in which students pray on their own, but one in which school officials intervene in children’s religious lives. In the United States, that’s not legal: As my friends at Americans United for Separation of Church and State recently explained, “The South Dakota Supreme Court struck down mandatory recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the state’s public schools in 1929. The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools in 1962 and ’63.”

     Noem may believe the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority is open to dramatic societal changes, but there is no scenario in which the federal judiciary allows a state to try to “re-center” children through the imposition of “Biblical principles.”

     But perhaps most important is the degree to which the governor’s argument contradicts itself. At one point in yesterday’s interview, Noem argues, “Biblical values are learned in the family, and they’re learned in church.” Moments later, the governor – who is ostensibly a proponent of small government – added that she believes it’s important for the government to get into the religion-promoting business. […]

241. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 12:05 pm

     Oh, FFS.

     Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, abandons moderation, warns of a ‘permanent election insurrection’

     For much of the American mainstream, the “great replacement” conspiracy theory is probably too obscure to even be recognized, though for much of the right, it’s increasingly popular.

     The basic idea behind the conspiracy theory is that nefarious forces – Democrats, globalists, immigration advocates, et al. – intend to systemically replace white people in the United States by welcoming people of color from other countries. To varying degrees, the ugly concept has been embraced by some conservative media personalities and assorted Republicans in Congress.

     […] The Washington Post reported yesterday:

     Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), the No. 3 House Republican, is pushing the notion in Facebooks ads that President Biden and fellow Democrats are seeking a “permanent election insurrection” by expanding pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

     One of the ads from Stefanik’s political operation, the public is told, “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION…. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

     Though the New York Republican didn’t explicitly reference race in the advertising, the Post’s report added that her message “echoes” the language of “replacement theory” proponents.

     Part of what makes this notable is Stefanik’s position as a House GOP leader. In recent years, we’ve come to expect many rank-and-file House Republicans to denounce pathways to citizenship for immigrants, relying on words like “amnesty,” as part of a predictable political posture.

     But it’s qualitatively different – and considerably more offensive – when the House Republican Conference chair starts complaining about a “permanent election insurrection,” as part of a Democratic scheme to “overthrow our current electorate.”

     Just as notable is Stefanik’s background – because she hasn’t traditionally been this kind of Republican.

     It may seem like ancient history, but it was just a few years ago when Stefanik opposed Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. As yesterday’s Post report added, the New Yorker even co-sponsored the bipartisan Farm Workforce Authorization Act, which included a pathway to citizenship for undocumented migrant farmworkers.

     That was when Stefanik was eager to be seen as one of Congress’ more mainstream Republican members. During her 2016 campaign, she was reluctant to even say Trump’s name out loud for fear that voters might see her as a Trump ally.

     Stefanik eventually concluded, however, that to get ahead in GOP politics, she would need to put her principles aside and start embracing partisan nonsense.

     By last year, the young New Yorker had adopted an entirely new persona, even going so far to as to vote against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election after the Jan. 6 riot.

     Stefanik’s ugly rhetoric about immigration is disheartening, but her willingness to dabble in conspiratorial nonsense didn’t come out of nowhere.

242. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 12:11 pm

     Ahead of rally, Trump goes to new lengths to defend Jan. 6 rioters

     In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, Donald Trump was watching enough television to realize the gravity of the situation and the degree to which mainstream Americans were recoiling in response to the insurrectionist riot. The then-president even pretended to share the public’s outrage.

     “Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem,” the Republican said on Jan. 7, describing the events from a day earlier as a “heinous attack.” Reading from a prepared text, Trump added, “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy…. To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction: You do not represent our country, and to those who broke the law: You will pay.”

     Five days later, the then-president condemned the “mob [that] stormed the Capitol and trashed the halls of government.” On the final full day of his term, again reading from a script, Trump added, “All Americans were horrified by the assault on our Capitol. Political violence is an attack on everything we cherish as Americans. It can never be tolerated.”

     But in the months that followed, far-right Republicans tried to rewrite the history of Jan. 6, recasting the villains as the heroes and law enforcement as the antagonists. By March, Trump was suggesting the rioters weren’t so bad after all. By July, he was defending the “loving crowd” that attacked his own country’s Capitol.

     It led The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson to note in a column, “There is … no doubt that all Trump’s thoughts and prayers are with the violent rioters of Jan. 6.” Yesterday, the former president removed any ambiguity, becoming explicit in new and unsettling ways with this written statement:

     “Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election. In addition to everything else, it has proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice. In the end, however, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL!”

     Part of what makes a statement like this amazing is the rapid evolution in Trump’s thinking. Eight months ago, he assured the public that he was “outraged” by the “heinous attack.” The rioters would be held accountable for having “defiled the seat of American democracy.” Their “assault,” he said, would not be “tolerated.” Now that so much of the Republican Party no longer believes any of this, Trump has dropped the pretense. The rioters he denounced in January deserve his support in September.

     […] As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote in a 2018 op-ed for The New York Times, “If all that matters when it comes to ‘law and order’ is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption. And this is what ‘law and order’ means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law.”

     But perhaps most important is the timing of the former president’s statement. There is a rally scheduled for tomorrow in Washington, D.C., in which far-right activists will express support for those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. The gathering is known as the “Justice for J6” rally, and the Department of Homeland Security has issued warnings about the potential for violence.

     To that end, security fences have been erected around key buildings in the nation’s capital. Reluctant to be associated with an event that may become violent, many GOP officials have decided to keep the rally at arm’s length. Unlike on Jan. 6, Republicans have not agreed to deliver speeches to attendees.

     It was against this backdrop that Trump decided to make things worse, effectively endorsing the rally’s purpose by claiming the Jan. 6 rioters are “being persecuted so unfairly.”

     It’s as if the former president was trying to make a potentially dangerous situation worse on purpose.

243. Isilzha Mir says

     17 September 2021 at 12:19 pm

     @239

     When I was growing up, we spent every Sunday, every night, every Wednesday night in church. Our church family was a part of our life. We read the Bible every day, as a family, together…. I don’t know if families do that as much anymore…

     What I’d really like to see someone ask Gov. Noem is: do you still do this? Do you still go to church twice a week? Do you read the Bible with your kids every day? Or are you one of those families that don’t do that as much any more? How much of a hypocrite are you?

244. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 12:29 pm

     Another “Karen” is caught on video being horrible.

     Calls to arrest a woman who chose violence are trending after a video of a woman assaulting a U.S. Navy sailor went viral. Police officials looked to social media to identify the woman and are in contact with the suspect after receiving multiple tips, the Berlin Police Department in Connecticut said. The woman was captured both verbally and physically assaulting the sailor, identified as Sean Nolte Jr., as he waited for some pizza on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

     The incident began after the woman stormed into Central Pizza and accused Nolte Jr. of being a fake soldier. She not only cursed at Nolte Jr., who stood his ground, but threw his cap on the floor and slapped his face. “She storms out of the pizzeria, and storms right back in, progressively screaming at me ‘You disgust me, you son of a b—-,’ grabbing my uniform and throwing my cover on the ground, not aware that I am a real service member,” Nolte Jr. wrote in a Facebook post.

     Alongside his recollection of the incident, Nolte Jr. shared a video. He noted that the woman got violent after staring at him for several minutes. […]

     According to his Facebook page, he is a submarine electronics fire control technician. The Navy confirmed that he is a sailor assigned to training at the Naval Submarine School in Groton.

     Despite showing his ID to the woman, the woman discredited him and claimed his ID was fake, yelling: “This is what your ID should look like,” in the process of showing him a dependent military ID.

     That’s when things got physical. “This is disgusting,” the woman said to Nolte Jr. in the TikTok video. “You disgrace the USA,” she said while yelling other profanities.

     Despite the harassment he faced, Nolte Jr. stood calm. “Being in uniform, I must maintain professionalism, so I stand there and proceed to wish her a nice day,” Nolte Jr. said on Facebook.

     In the video, the restaurant employees can be heard telling her to leave, yet she doesn’t seem to care

     “Ma’am, you’re on camera — I would leave now before I call the police,” the off-camera worker warns. The woman then comes closer and the employee can be heard saying: “Ma’am, you’re not allowed to grab my phone, you’re not permitted to grab his hat.”

     […] Social media users were not only appalled at the woman’s actions but the fact that she harassed a person in uniform on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. After being posted on TikTok, the video garnered thousands of views. Police noted that other videos were also taken from surveillance cameras in the lobby of the restaurant, but those were not made public due to the ongoing investigation.

     In response to the incident, the owner of Central Pizza said he was shocked by what he saw. “I have never seen something like that,” Jason Bikakis told WGN-TV. Bikakis shared that he saw the woman slap Nolte Jr. “Slap him, yes, in the face like she knows him for a long time,” Bikakis said.

     According to the Hartford Courant, this isn’t the first time Nolte Jr. has made headlines. In July, a local TV station saluted him and thanked him for his service and volunteer work.

     “Sean’s a really good guy. He joined us right out of high school and we’re lucky to have him,” Chief Nick Wachter of Rescue Fire Company 37, a volunteer fire and EMS department in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, told the Hartford Courant. […]

     In regards to pursuing charges, Berlin Police Chief Chris Ciuci said the woman is in their custody and charges are forthcoming. “She was in a public restaurant and she created alarm by her language and by assaulting someone,” Ciuci said. “So, there are charges related to breach of peace and assault in the third degree that we’re pursuing.”

     Link

     See also: https://www.facebook.com/sean.nolte.3/posts/395019982142386
     The video is posted in the comments.

245. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 12:53 pm

     Wonkette:

     […].today we got the especially brilliant My Husband’s A Vaccinated Doctor. Here’s Why I’m Not Getting A COVID Shot from Grace Emily Stark, who has written several other articles for The Federalist, including the hilariously titled If You Love Romance And Adventure, Ditch Feminism.

     While we have mostly heard the other arguments before — the “people aren’t getting vaccinated because vaccinated people aren’t being nice enough about people being unvaccinated” in particular — this is definitely a new one. Stark’s reasoning is that she’s pregnant and she thinks that Democrats hate babies and also want all of the babies to be transgender.

     We know she is a health expert, of course, because she immediately states that although medical consensus is that the vaccines have not been shown to have any ill effect on pregnancy, those who are hip to VAERS, a reporting system where literally anyone can say anything is a side-effect of vaccines, know that that may not be entirely true.

     Despite no consensus of new, peer-reviewed clinical data on pregnant women and the vaccine, seemingly overnight all of the major health authorities suddenly coalesced from their muddled opinions into a united front, and started urging pregnant women to get the shots. Indeed, emerging data from various population-based databases was (and continues to be) encouraging on the safety of the vaccine in pregnancy, but anyone who knows anything about public health databases like the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) also knows that their data have to be taken with a few hefty pinches of salt.

     For the record, while nothing has shown that there is any danger in pregnant people getting the vaccine, studies have shown that having COVID-19 during a pregnancy is actually quite dangerous. COVID-19 infections have in fact been the cause of many maternal deaths over the last year and a half, and have been known to cause premature births. (Or premature C-sections in the ICU, racing against the clock because the mother is about to die.)

     But the term “pregnant people” is one of the very reasons why Emily Stark won’t get a vaccine. Because she does not want to take medical advice from “the highest and purportedly best medical authorities in the land” if they believe that transgender, intersex and non-binary people exist.

     What’s more, the health authorities who manage those databases and run all of our major health institutions are not actually urging pregnant “women” to get vaccinated, but pregnant “people.” That’s right, “people,” because as we are reminded again and again by the highest and purportedly best medical authorities in the land, “Women aren’t the only ones who can get pregnant, you know.”

     Because they’re … not?

     Stark’s other issue is that many of these medical authorities also believe in reproductive rights.

     These authorities who are seemingly incapable of accepting the very basics of human anatomy and biology are the same ones in utter hysterics over Texas’s heartbeat law. They assure me they will continue to fight for my “right” to dispose of the child within my womb, no matter the reason, and no matter the cost. They insist she is only a human person worthy of protection from bodily harm if and when I decide that she is — which, of course, is subject to change based upon my individual situation and preferences until she has fully exited my womb (and as some would have it, not even then)

     .
     To her, this means that none of them care about her baby, and, in fact, probably want her baby to die.

     So, if you want to know why I, at nearly 30 weeks pregnant and married to a fully vaccinated doctor, am not yet vaccinated against COVID-19, suffice it to say that I have determined there is a possibility that our major health institutions might not have my unborn daughter’s best interests at heart. They, after all, would neither admit that she is a human nor a girl at this point.

     That’s certainly a take.

     Curiously, despite her avowed anti-feminist stance, she does not mention how her “physician husband,” who — like 96 percent of doctors — is vaccinated, feels about this whole thing. […].

     Link

246. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 1:18 pm

     Sigh.

     A hostess at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was assaulted by three tourists from Texas after she asked to see their proof of vaccination on Thursday, the police said, four days after enforcement of the city’s vaccine mandate for indoor diners began.

     The altercation occurred after a hostess at the restaurant, Carmine’s, asked the tourists to show her proof they were vaccinated against the coronavirus before entering for dinner, the police said. New York City requires people to prove they have received at least one dose of a vaccine before dining indoors.

     The tourists, who were identified as Kaeita Nkeenge Rankin, 44, and Tyonnie Keshay Rankin, 21, of Humble, Texas, and Sally Rechelle Lewis, 49, of Houston, began to argue with the hostess over the requirement, the police said. […]

     As the argument escalated, the women began punching the hostess, who is 24, breaking her necklace during the assault. The hostess was left bruised and scratched up by the attack, the police said.

     All three women were arrested and charged with assault and criminal mischief before being given desk appearance tickets and orders to return to court.

     Last month, New York City became the first city in the country to require proof of at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine for indoor dining and other activities, like live performances, gyms and movie theaters. Enforcement of the policy began on Monday. [video is available at the link, shot from a distance and not really clear, but obviously violent]

     “It’s a shocking and tragic situation when one of our valued employees is assaulted for doing their job — as required by city policies — and trying to make a living,” a spokesperson for Carmine’s said in a statement. “Our focus right now is caring for our employee and the rest of our restaurant family. We are a family-style restaurant, and this is the absolute last experience any of our employees should ever endure and any customers witness.” […]

     NY Times link

247. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 1:25 pm

     Sneaky, unethical doofuses.

     How one state’s GOP created a case study in ugly gerrymandering

     In theory, Ohio ended gerrymandering abuses. In practice, Republicans want to make sure the abuses continue.

     In theory, voters in Ohio shouldn’t have to worry too much about excessive gerrymandering in the Buckeye State. After all, the state twice approved amendments to the Ohio Constitution that appeared to be designed to produce fairer and more representative district maps.

     In practice, it’s not quite working out that way.

     With Ohio voters giving Republican legislative candidates roughly 54 percent of the vote, one might expect to see a state map in which the GOP was on track to hold roughly 54 percent of the seats. But according to the plan created by the Republican-led redistricting commission, the legislative map will position GOP legislators to enjoy supermajorities in Columbus.

     But what about the state law that says maps “must correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio” based on results from the past 10 years’ worth of elections? That’s where the amazing part begins: Republicans are arguing that they won races 81 percent of the time, which matters more than winning 54 percent of the vote. As a Washington Post analysis explained:

     To recap, [Republicans on the state’s redistricting commission] say winning 81 percent of statewide races suggests the state’s preference for Republicans is as high as 81 percent, even though voters give those Republicans only around 54 percent of the vote in those races…. By this logic, you could seemingly draw up to 81 percent Republican districts, because that would fall within the range of statewide preferences.

     WTF?!

     In fact, we can extend that logic further. As Daily Kos Elections noted this morning, based on the Ohio GOP’s reasoning, Democrats in states like California and Virginia would be justified in giving their party 100% of the seats since Democratic candidates have won 100% of the statewide races over the last decade.

     Indeed, the Post’s analysis added, “Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. Does that mean ‘the nationwide proportion of American voters favoring Democratic presidential candidates is as high as 87.5 percent’? Of course not. But perhaps Democrats would be justified in overhauling the electoral college or redrawing state lines to better reflect that obvious and strong nationwide preference for their candidates.”

     Litigation is inevitable, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine doesn’t seem optimistic. “We know that this matter will be in court,” the governor said this week. “What I am sure in my heart is that this committee could have come up with a bill that was much more clearly constitutional. I’m sorry that we did not do that.”

     But the fact that GOP legislators are trying to pull off such a gambit anyway says a great deal about the party’s tolerance for abuses.

     As for efforts at the federal level, the Senate Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act would end partisan gerrymandering, but only in federal elections. Problems like the one Ohio Republicans are eager to create would persist even if the legislation were to become law.

248. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 3:43 pm

     One in five hundred Americans has died in the pandemic, and Republicans are actively rooting for the country to fail.

     New Yorker link

     […] Biden’s September reset, after a traumatic August in Afghanistan and a catastrophic spike in covid deaths at home, includes a more aggressive approach to fighting the pandemic by pushing businesses toward vaccine requirements favored by solid majorities of Americans. In a speech on Thursday, Biden was in hard-sell mode for his three-and-a-half-trillion-dollar everything-but-the-kitchen-sink spending proposal, as Congress returns from summer recess and prepares to make crucial decisions about it. […]

     He came into office promising an end to the pandemic and a return to competent, commonsense governance. It’s why he beat Trump. But his first nine months in office have shown pretty conclusively that it is not possible to beat covid in a political environment that has arguably got worse, not better, since January. Consider the news this week that now one in five hundred Americans has died in the pandemic; total deaths in the country approach seven hundred thousand. What’s worse, covid deaths—the vast majority of them preventable, avoidable deaths, now that science and the federal government have provided us with free vaccines—are continuing to rise across large swaths of vaccine-resistant Trump country. This is not a tragic mistake but a calculated choice by many Republicans who have made vaccine resistance synonymous with resistance to Biden and the Democrats. The current average of more than nineteen hundred dead a day means that a 9/11’s worth of Americans are perishing from covid roughly every thirty-eight hours. To my mind, this is the biggest news of the Biden Presidency so far, and it has nothing to do with Afghanistan, or the fate of the budget-reconciliation bill, or Bob Woodward’s new book.

     […] the continuing loss of life is a result of G.O.P. political strategies that intentionally undermine the success of Biden’s policies. How can this President, or any President, reset from that?

     Biden’s challenge seems all the more clear to me after spending a few weeks away from the daily noise of politics to work on a book about his divisive predecessor. Trump is out of office, but Trump-style politics have decisively won over the Republican Party. A new CNN poll this week found that seventy-eight per cent of Republicans subscribe to Trump’s Big Lie that Biden was not legitimately elected—more than in some polls in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s traumatic exit. […]

     The partisan split has also translated into a deadly divide in vaccination rates—a tragedy given that vaccines are, for now, the only real way out of this mess. And no wonder this divide persists. It is not an accident or an immutable fact of American political life; it’s a fire built and stoked by Trump and his supporters. Among the top stories on Fox News’ home page on Thursday, I could not find a single reference to the pandemic, and little sense that covid even existed, beyond a link to a video headlined “Liberal host torched for labeling GOP ‘COVID-loving death cult’ in bizarre rant.” As I was writing this column, I received an e-mail from one Donald J. Trump. The subject was “Biden’s vaccine mandate.” “I totally OPPOSE this liberal overreach that requires Americans to be vaccinated,” Trump wrote. “The Left is working overtime to CONTROL you, Friend,” he warned. Biden, he added, “doesn’t care about you or your freedoms.”

     As a matter of politics, of course, this is not necessarily a winning strategy for the Republicans. In California on Tuesday, Governor Gavin Newsom defeated a Republican effort to recall him by running a campaign painting the G.O.P. candidate as a Trump-loving extremist who would undo public-health measures to fight the pandemic. […] Even some conservatives have come around to the idea that, as Rich Lowry, of National Review, put it, “the stolen-election myth has become an albatross for the GOP.”

     […] The tragic triumph of Trumpism is not that he has persuaded all Americans, or even a majority of Americans, to reject their way out of the pandemic; it’s that he has persuaded just enough of them to keep the disease wreaking havoc on the country.

     The G.O.P.’s desire to see Biden fail has become a willingness to let the country fail. Nine months into Biden’s Presidency, the bottom line is that the Republican war on Biden’s legitimacy and the war on Biden’s covid policies are now inextricably linked. The consequences of this are so hard to contemplate that we often do not do so: a politics so broken that it is now killing Americans on an industrial scale.

249. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 3:50 pm

     Biden resumes Haitian deportations despite quake, unrest. ‘We are in utter disbelief,’ advocates say

     Immigrant and human rights advocates expressed outrage on Thursday amid news that the Biden administration deported nearly 90 people—including a number of children under age 3, advocates said—back to Haiti despite political unrest and a devastating 7.2 earthquake.

     ”We are in utter disbelief that the Biden administration would deport Haitians now,” Haitian Bridge Alliance executive director Guerline Jozef said in a statement […] “Hours after the 7.2 magnitude earthquake, President Joe Biden released a statement saying that the United States was a ‘friend” of Haiti. A friend does not continuously inflict pain on another friend.”

     Haitian Bridge Alliance was among the hundreds of organizations that last month called on the Biden administration to halt deportations, citing August’s earthquake and the July assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. In their letter, the nearly 350 organizations cited past precedent for instituting such a pause, noting the federal government halted deportations following Haiti’s 2010 earthquake for a year.

     Officials have the ability to do this again. But Haitian Bridge Alliance said on Wednesday that the administration had carried out a deportation flight to Haiti earlier that day anyway, later confirmed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

     […] Advocates and legislators have slammed the Biden administration’s deportation flights to Haiti for months now, including an ICE flight that deported more than 20 babies and children in February. They’ve noted that Haiti still hadn’t fully recovered from 2010’s earthquake. Then came this summer.

     […] this week the administration still “sent a plane full of families to Haiti under Title 42, including children under the age of three, without offering them legal protection and the opportunity to file for asylum,” she continued.

     Adding further outrage is that Haitian families have been deported under an anti-asylum policy that was blocked in federal court this week. A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Biden administration to stop deporting asylum-seeking families under the unsound, Stephen Miller-pushed Title 42 policy. “The court ruled the plaintiffs were likely to prevail in the case, finding the Title 42 expulsion policy to be in clear violation of U.S. law and recognizing the grave harms suffered by families and children who have been subject to it,” migrant, civil, and human rights groups that sued over the policy said […] “The preliminary injunction temporarily halting the policy will take effect in 14 days.”

     The Biden administration is also deporting people to Haiti when it has already acknowledged instability there, advocates have noted. “In May 2021, the Biden administration designated Haiti for TPS, recognizing that a growing political crisis, serious security concerns, and an increase in human rights abuses, among other factors, prevented Haitian nationals from safely returning,” America’s Voice said.

     Halt these deportations now, Mr. President. “Conditions in Haiti remain acutely unstable, and our government has recognized this,” National Immigration Law Center director of federal advocacy Avideh Moussavian said. “It is unacceptable that the administration authorized the deportation of dozens of Haitian people back to danger under these circumstances. The Biden administration must demonstrate a commitment to ensuring vulnerable immigrants are treated with dignity and can safely access protection.”

250. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 3:58 pm

     Wonkette:

     It is September 17, 2021, and former President Babyshits is still whining that he wants back in the White House right now. Just look at this pathetic nonsense. [image of letter from Trump is available at the link]

     “Large scale Voter Fraud continues to be reported in Georgia. Enclosed is a report of 43,000 Absentee Ballot Votes Counted in DeKalb County that violated the Chain of Custody rules, making them invalid,” begins the letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger under a lightly modified presidential seal. [LOL. Trump is not president. He should not be using a seal similar to the presidential seal. Pathetic.]

     The “report” is an article from the astroturf news site “Georgia Star News.” As multiple legitimate news sites have reported, Georgia Star is part of the Star News Network, a group of pro-Trump websites set up to look like local news outlets in 11 swing states. And while Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is (at least theoretically) made up of actual journalists, the Star sites are run by political activists with an avowed MAGA agenda.

     Naturally Steve Bannon, everyone’s favorite chaos monkey, loves this Star Chamber propaganda shit. NPR reports:

     Steve Bannon, a former strategist for former President Donald Trump, described The Georgia Star News in a radio interview as content “you can’t get anywhere else.”

     “We’re not Conservative Inc.,” he said. “It’s very populist, it’s very nationalist, it’s very MAGA, it’s very American First.”

     Laura Baigert, the author of the piece referenced by the former leader of the free world, describes herself as “a senior reporter at The Star News Network, where she covers stories for The Georgia Star News, The Tennessee Star, The Ohio Star and The Arizona Sun Times.”

     Here’s how Snopes described Baigert, who was a 2016 RNC delegate for Ted Cruz:

     Laura Baigert, listed as a Tennessee Star “senior reporter,” also serves as the treasurer for a group called the Roving Patriots PAC. Her husband, Kevin Baigert, who was at one point also a writer for the Star, is that PAC’s director. On their PAC’s website, the couple say they “are a couple of Roving Patriots, and when you get one, you get both of us!” No firewall is apparent between the work of the PAC and the Tennessee Star. For example, on 7 July 2017 the PAC shared an article on their Facebook page written in the Tennessee Star about the PAC’s launch. “We are grateful for the work they are doing at The Tennessee Star,” the PAC said of the media outlet that both members of the PAC currently or previously worked for.

     According to their website, Roving Patriots PAC is “focused on achieving, supporting and maintaining a true conservative majority within the Tennessee House of Representatives.”

     [All the best journalists.]

     And if that’s not the bio of a trustworthy authority on election law, then what is, right? So when this person tells you that there were chain of custody issues with 46,000 drop box ballots, and the law demands that Georgia simply toss out those votes, you can just take her word for it. Never mind that this is an entirely invented remedy that some blogger from Tennessee just pulled out of her ass. And while we’re disregarding objective reality, there’s no mechanism to determine who those votes were for, even if we did invalidate ballots 10 months after an election — which we do not.

     But back to Trump’s lazyass letter!

     “I would respectfully request that your department check this and, if true, along with many other claims of voter fraud and voter irregularities, start the process of decertifying the Election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner,” he whined from the golf course. […] “As stated to you previously, the number of false and/or irregular votes is far greater than needed to change the Georgia election result.”

     He stated it previously, you blockhead! Why didn’t you overturn the election already?

     The letter ends with some more abuse of Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who “are doing a tremendous disservice to the Great State of Georgia, and to our Nation — which is systematically being destroyed by an illegitimate president and his administration,” before signing off with “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

     Because he is one polite motherfucker.

     […] Meanwhile, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is still investigating whether Trump and his cronies broke the law with their pressure campaign and the infamous phone call where they tried to get Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” and warned that he was “taking a big risk” by not prosecuting the “criminal offense” which caused him to lose the election.

     “What I can tell you is that the Trump investigation is ongoing. As a district attorney, I do not have the right to look the other way on any crime that may have happened in my jurisdiction,” Willis told CNN this week. “We have a team of lawyers that is dedicated to that, but my No. 1 priority is to make sure that we keep violent offenders off the street.”

     And that is not fake news.

     https://www.wonkette.com/trump-still-whining-about-georgia

251. blf says

     17 September 2021 at 4:00 pm

     The Onion, Study Finds Virus Frequently Fooled By Fake Vaccine Card:

     A new study released Friday by researchers at Johns Hopkins University revealed that the novel coronavirus Covid-19 was frequently fooled by fake vaccine cards. “We found that when presented with a counterfeit vaccination card, Covid-19 was unable to distinguish it from the real thing approximately 7 out of 10 times,” said researcher Sharon Hirschinger, who noted that the study provided “strong and promising evidence” that the falsified records could provide significant protection against the novel coronavirus when presented by unvaccinated individuals […] At press time, the FDA had granted fake vaccine cards emergency use authorization in the fight against Covid-19.

252. Lynna, OM says

     17 September 2021 at 4:09 pm

     An Unvaccinated Laura Loomer Says Her COVID Diagnosis Proves Vaccines Don’t Work

     Laura Loomer has COVID. In a post to Telegram yesterday, the alt-lite whatever-it-is-that-she-is-now wrote that she was just really, really sick and feels like she “got hit by a bus,” while making sure to compare it to “a bad case of the flu” and letting everyone know that she hasn’t been vaccinated and does not intend to be.

     Yesterday I was feeling ill. I had a fever, chills, a runny nose, sore throat, nausea and severe body aches that made my whole body feel like I got hit by a bus, and after sleeping for a few hours, my symptoms started to remind me of how I felt when I had a bad case of the flu a few years ago.

     So I took a COVID test and it came back POSITIVE.

     I have not taken the COVID-19 vaccine, and I don’t plan on ever taking it because it is unsafe and ineffective.

     Yes, she believes it is unsafe and ineffective, unlike hydroxychloroquine — which has actually proven to be unsafe and ineffective — and Azithromycin, which makes absolutely no damn sense, since that is an antibiotic that treats bacterial infections and does not do anything for viral infections. In fact, it is dangerous to take antibiotics unnecessarily, because the more you take them, the less effective they become. This is part of why (aside from some not-so-great side effects and a better understanding of the science) doctors don’t prescribe Z-Packs as often anymore.

     Today, I immediately started a treatment of Azithromyacin and Hydroxychloroquine. I’m also taking the OrthoMune dietary supplement.

     I wanted to get ivermectin but I couldn’t get it. Doctors are really weird about prescribing it, which pisses me off.

     Doctors are “weird” about prescribing ivermectin because ivermectin is used to treat parasitic infections. While we can’t claim that Laura Loomer doesn’t have a parasitic infection or is not, herself, a parasitic infection, a doctor isn’t going prescribe it for something that is not a parasitic infection. COVID, again, is a viral infection.

     Luckily, I live in Florida where Governor DeSantis has opened statewide Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment centers. This morning I received the Regeneron treatment for COVID.

     I still have symptoms and my body is in a lot of pain, so I will be sleeping and taking my COVID-19 treatment.

     As the days progress, I’ll be sure to let you know how I feel.

     The Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment, unlike everything else here, has actually been shown to work.

     In a later post, Loomer asked people to pray for her because of how much pain she was in, from the COVID.

     Just pray for me please. Can’t even begin to explain how brutal the body aches and nausea that come with covid are. I am in so much pain. This is honestly the worst part about it.

     Aw, the poor baby. You mean the hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotics aren’t helping? […] [I snipped one of Loomers loony posts about food poisoning.]

     This morning, Loomer got up and told a whole story about how COVID symptoms are worse for people who have been vaccinated, which is pretty objectively not true.

     When I went to receive the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatments yesterday, there were people there getting it who had already taken the COVID vaccine, but they got COVID anyway.

     Turns out if you get the COVID vaccine and you get COVID after taking the vaccine, your symptoms are actually worse than if you don’t take it.

     In other words, the COVID vaccine does not work, and that’s why I’m never going to take it.

     […] if all of these breakthrough infections are actually worse than regular infections, how is it that the only people claiming this are people who have not been vaccinated?

     […] And speaking of conspiracy theories:

     COVID is a bio weapon that was made inside a lab in China and there is something very sinister about this vaccine that doesn’t do anything to protect you from COVID.

     If the vaccine worked, people who had COVID and got the vaccine wouldn’t be getting COVID again… [big fucking stupid batshit bonkers misunderstanding of how vaccines work, how math works, how everything works …]

     Clearly this “vaccine” isn’t about COVID. They don’t want you to know what it really does, and that’s why the government is so eager for people to take it.

     […]She does claim in a follow-up post that the vaccines are “a control mechanism for the federal government to track and surveil you.”

     I have COVID, and I don’t regret not taking the vaccine. I will never take the vaccine. I will now have natural immunity, Regeneron antibodies, and within a few days of rest along with my ZPACK, the HCQ, combined vitamin supplements (zinc, C, D, NAC), and hopefully some ivermectin soon, I’m confident I will have a speedy recovery.

     These COVID vaccines are poison to your body and a control mechanism for the federal government to track and surveil you.

     Think for yourself.

     If you are thinking for yourself and this is the conclusion you come to, you should probably consider outsourcing your thought process to someone who has at least heard of Occam’s Razor. Are “they” really going to put all of that effort into creating a microchip so tiny that it can be injected through a vaccine when we have phones and Alexas all over the place?

     Now, because we all would just really appreciate it if everyone could stop being ridiculous and get vaccinated, Loomer’s COVID infection has been trending on Twitter today — which she has chosen to interpret as the Left “celebrating” her diagnosis.

     The best part is, however, that Loomer, an unvaccinated person who has not taken ivermectin, hopes that her diagnosis “raises awareness” of how the vaccine doesn’t work and ivermectin does. […] Logic!

     We wish Laura Loomer all the best in her COVID recovery and that she and whoever it is that is still listening to her someday gain the ability to draw the correct conclusions from the information at hand.

253. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

     17 September 2021 at 5:01 pm

     FDA panel rejects Pfizer Covid Booster shot for the general public, but approves it for oldsters like me at 65+.
     Link

254. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

     18 September 2021 at 11:00 am

     Amid COVID surge, states that cut benefits still see no hiring boost

     The August slowdown in U.S. job creation hit harder in states that pulled the plug early on enhanced federal unemployment benefits, places where an intense summertime surge of coronavirus cases may have held back the hoped-for job growth.

     New state-level data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the group of mostly Republican led states that dropped a $300 weekly unemployment benefit over the summer added jobs in August at less than half the pace of states that retained the benefits.

     Elected leaders in those states argued the payments, in place since spring of 2020 to help families through the pandemic, were discouraging people from work and holding back an economic recovery that seemed to be gathering steam earlier this year when the impact of vaccines was taking hold and coronavirus cases were falling.

     But some of those same states, notably Florida and Texas, are also hotbeds of opposition to government health mandates like mask wearing, and the surge of infections there in July and August appeared to dent hiring across the sorts of “close contact” businesses that have suffered most during the health crisis and had begun to recover quickly.

     Overall employment in the leisure and hospitality fell about 0.5% in the 26 states that ended benefits, and rose 1% elsewhere.

     The rethugs won’t learn from their cruelty.
     More at the link.

255. johnson catman says

     18 September 2021 at 11:54 am

     re Nerd @253:

     The rethugs won’t learn from their cruelty.

     Learn?!!! The cruelty is the point.

256. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 12:29 pm

     Josh Marshall:

     I’ve now read up a bit more on the particulars of the blow up between the US and France. It basically comports with my original understanding. Australia feels increasingly threatened by China. The Australians contracted with the French five years ago, in a significantly different and less threatening security environment. There were already significant delays and cost overruns with the French subs. But the key is that what the US could offer was demonstrably and critically better technology. A central attribute of attack submarines is that your adversary doesn’t know where they are. The French subs are louder. The Australians had good reason to believe they’d be obsolete on delivery.

     To the Australians this must have seemed an open and shut case of critical national security interests against which the anger of the French was an unfortunate but inevitable and acceptable byproduct. A more capably armed Australia, meanwhile, fits neatly into what the Biden White House has made a central feature of its national security policy: countering Chinese ambitions to challenge or displace the US Navy as the dominant naval power in East Asia.

     […] The question is why we appear to have blindsided the French and let their inevitable anger become a major blow up. Ironically, it seems a bit like what the establishment insiders have been wrongly saying about Afghanistan for the last six weeks: the right policy, poorly executed. But reading the latest reporting the US and Australia seemed to believe that if they didn’t act in secret the French and China would find out and work to sabotage the deal. So the US made the decision – quite simply – to act behind France’s back. Where we erred, if we did, is not realizing just how angry the French would get.

     How did we miss that? Again, if we did? It seems clear the French-Australian deal was on the rocks. The French seem to have been in some denial about that. We seem to have expected they’d be upset but not terribly surprised. […] The US told the Australians it was on them. The Australians seem to have told the US that the French saw the writing on the wall.

     Who knows who has the worst part of this miscommunication and interlocking pattern of denial? Big picture it’s beside the point. For decades the US saw its central security interests in Western Europe, NATO countering the USSR. The US conversation about ‘traditional allies’ still largely focuses on NATO. But here we were willing to act behind the back of a key – if often ambivalent – NATO ally and risk this kind of breach because we see our most important interests in Asia.

     […] This is what I was getting at yesterday about a crumbling firmament. We are still in many ways living through the crumbling or inertia of the security commitments of the Cold War. The US departure from Afghanistan bookends twenty years of intensive US military involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia. Whether that was a grand diversion and folly is a separate point. That was the central focus of US foreign policy for two decades. Departing the country where it started is a capstone to it.

     To the best of my knowledge France has never recalled its ambassador from the US. Sure, it’s symbolic. But it’s big, almost shocking symbolism. The whole thing is silly at one level. But decaying certainties often break free for reasons that are contingent or even trivial in themselves. It is a broader part of a world that is unmoored and uncertain.

     https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/crumbling-firmament-2

257. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 12:35 pm

     Vaccine requirements work: Raiders report more than 6,000 fans got the shot on game day

     In the middle of August, as the delta variant of the COVID-19 virus surged through our country, the Las Vegas Raiders became the first team in the NFL to announce that anyone attending Raiders football games this season would be required to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination. The announcement included the caveat that with vaccinations, masks would not be required in the stadium. Raiders owner Mark Davis released a statement saying, “After consultation with Governor Sisolak and other community leaders, this policy ensures that we will be able to operate at full capacity without masks for fully vaccinated fans for the entire season.” Children under 12, who cannot yet receive a COVID-19 vaccine, are allowed to attend but must wear a mask.

     To that end, the Raiders’ season opener on Monday night, Sept. 13, included onsite vaccination sites. According to the team, almost 300 fans received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine at the stadium on Monday, while more than 6,000 people made sure to get their first dose on game day before showing up at the stadium. According to 8 News Now, more than 10,000 people got shots within three days of attending Monday night’s game. […]

258. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 12:44 pm

     Apple shut down a voting app in Russia. That should worry everyone.

     Critics say Apple is not keeping its promise to hold fast when faced with government pressure.

     Apple and Google shut down a voting app meant to help opposition parties organize against the Kremlin in a parliamentary election in Russia that’s taking place over the weekend. The companies removed the app from their app stores on Friday after the Russian government accused them of interfering in the country’s internal affairs, a clear attempt by President Vladimir Putin to obstruct free elections and stay in power.

     The Smart Voting app was designed to identify candidates most likely to beat members of the government-backed party, United Russia, as part of a broader strategy organized by supporters of the imprisoned Russian activist Alexei Navalny to bring together voters who oppose Putin. In a bid to clamp down on the opposition effort, the Russian government told Google and Apple that the app was illegal, and reportedly threatened to arrest employees of both companies in the country.

     The move also comes amid a broader crackdown on Big Tech in Russia. Earlier this week, a Russian court fined Facebook and Twitter for not removing “illegal” content, and the country is reportedly blocking peoples’ access to Google Docs, which Navalny supporters had been using to share lists of preferred candidates. […]

     Critics say the episode serves as an example of why Apple, specifically, can’t be trusted to protect people’s civil liberties and resist government pressure. The company strictly controls the software allowed on to millions of devices and has recently faced allegations of monopolistic behavior with regard to how it manages its App Store, which is the only way people can install apps on iPhones and iPads. While Google is also being accused of caving to censorship demands, Android users can still access the Russian voting app without relying on the Google Play store, though it’s more difficult.

     “Android users in Russia can find other ways to install this app, whereas Apple is actively helping the Russian government make it impossible for iOS users to do so,” Evan Greer, the director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, told Recode. “Apple’s top-down monopolistic approach is at the root of their harm.” […]

259. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 12:51 pm

     Wonkette: Texas Abortion Ban Architect Just Really Wants Everyone To Stop Banging, OK?

     In the beginning of this month the Supreme Court decided to allow Texas to essentially ban abortion by outsourcing enforcement of the law to “citizens” willing to snitch on people they believe may have helped someone have an abortion after six weeks. Now, Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who designed the law, has set his sights on overturning Roe v. Wade entirely.

     Mitchell said the quiet part out loud when he argued this week in a Supreme Court brief that one of the reasons that without Roe, “women can “control their reproductive lives” without access to abortion; they can do so by refraining from sexual intercourse.”

     This, really, has always been what the anti-abortion shit has been about. It was never about the babies, it was always about reversing course on the sexual revolution. Which Mitchell in fact addresses in the next few sentences, with the kind of resentment that is traditionally only seen in incel forums.

     What the Casey plurality meant to say is that women (and men) should have the right to freely engage to sexual intercourse while having abortion available as a fallback method of birth control. But that has nothing to do with “reliance interests”; it is an ideological assertion that the cause of sexual liberation should take priority over the lives of unborn human beings. Many supporters of abortion share that view, but it has no place in an analysis of stare decisis.

     Yes, Mitchell, people should be allowed to have sex without it ruining their entire lives or their bodies. That is not a radical notion. And yes, it should take priority over the “lives of unborn human beings” when said “unborn human beings” are not yet human beings and cannot survive outside of the womb.

     He also argues that “the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights have nothing to do with sexual liberation or reproductive freedom,” but does not say where in the Bill of Rights it gives anyone a right to force someone to give birth. In fact, abortion was legal at the time the Bill of Rights was written and remained so in this country until about 1873-1880, depending on the state. In fact, it was extremely common, with about 1 in 5 women having had at least one and at least 20-35 percent of all pregnancies during that era ending in abortion. The reason it was outlawed, by the way, had nothing to do with the morality surrounding it, but rather due to the newly-formed American Medical Association not wanting to compete with midwives and to prevent women from going to college to study obstetrics and gynecology.

     While people of all genders can get pregnant and have babies, there is no question that pretty much the entire history of anti-abortion nonsense (as well as much of the history of trying to destroy the social safety net) has been about controlling women.

     But back to the brief! Mitchell is not just coming for heterosexual non-procreative sex. He notes in his argument that people worry that overturning Roe and Casey could lead to cases like Loving v. Virginia (legalized interracial marriages), Texas v. Lawrence (legalized “sodomy”) and Obergefell v. Hodges (legalized same-sex marriage) being overturned as well.

     Mitchell explained that it wouldn’t affect Loving, ostensibly because he’s not quite ready to start throwing blatant racism into this juggling act … but WHOOPS. Same sex marriage and non p-in-v sex may have to go, because people don’t really have a “right” to those things any more than people have a right to abortions. According to Mitchell, anyway.

     The news is not as good for those who hope to preserve the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage. These “rights,” like the right to abortion from Roe, are judicial concoctions, and there is no other source of law that can be invoked to salvage their existence. Mississippi suggests that Obergefell could be defended by invoking the “fundamental right to marry” which is ” ‘fundamental as a matter of history and tradition.’ “. But a “fundamental right” must be defined with specificity before assessing whether that right is “deeply rooted” in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Otherwise, long-prohibited conduct can be made into a “fundamental right” that is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” so long as a litigant is creative enough to define the “right” at a high enough level of abstraction. The right to marry an opposite-sex spouse is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”; the right to marry a same-sex spouse obviously is not.

     He does, however, note that SCOTUS does not have to throw these rulings out right away.

     This is not to say that the Court should announce the overruling of Lawrence and Obergefell if it decides to overrule Roe and Casey in this case. But neither should the Court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread. Lawrence and Obergefell, while far less hazardous to human life, are as lawless as Roe.

     None of this was ever about the babies. It was always about creating the society that the Christian Right wants but can’t have because they keep losing the “culture war.” They don’t want LGBTQ+ people to exist, and they want all women, gay or straight, as well as those assigned female at birth to be virgins until entering into a heterosexual marriage, become homemakers and pop out babies one after another. That’s the goal. That’s what they want. And if they can’t get it through purity balls, abstinence-only education and bigotry, they’re going to keep trying to fashion some kind of Frankenstein’s Stepford Wife through legislation.

260. blf says

     18 September 2021 at 1:19 pm

     (Accidentally originally posted to poopyhead’s Anti-vaxxers are murdering children current thread; this is a reconstruction…)

     Oh FFS, Albanian Broadcasters Happy to Host Antivaxxer Conspiracy Theorists:

     Albania is trailing much of the rest of Europe in vaccinating its citizens against COVID-19, yet the country’s main television channels see little wrong in giving airtime to the most outlandish anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.

     The March 18 interview with Alfred Cako on Albanian ABC News began amicably, with anchor Enkel Demi asking whether the rumour he had tested positive for COVID-19 was true.

     Cako, a 55-year-old former publisher and MP candidate, assured him the reports were lies. Then the gloves came off.

     Cako launched into a tirade against what he said was a plot involving the novel coronavirus to depopulate the world. He pointed the finger at […] Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease doctor, and questioned the efficacy of masks and vaccines in stopping the spread of COVID-19.

     Among his false claims were that Fauci was the first president of Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that produces one of a number of COVID-19 vaccines, and that Moderna, another vaccine manufacturer, was owned by late US financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

     I never say things that are not confirmed, Cako said, before adding that Fauci was in fact the illegitimate son of Mother Theresa […].

     Previously in this series of poopyhead threads, that nonsense has been dealt with. In brief: Whilst biologically possible, Anjezë Bojaxhiu is not known to have been in the States prior to the 1950s(?), making it impossible teh horrible superstitionalist theocrat was Dr Fauci’s mother.

     Such claims might sound outlandish, but the YouTube video of the interview published by Albanian ABC News has since been viewed more than 800,000 times, eliciting over 1,500 comments, most of them lauding the conspiracy theorist.

     [… I]n Albania conspiracy theorists such as Cako have been embraced by the country’s main broadcasters, making dozens of television appearances since the start of the pandemic in early 2020.

     National broadcaster Top Channel has even given him a weekly slot on the Sunday afternoon talkshow ‘Rrethi Katror’.

     […]

     With vaccination rates in Albania lagging behind much of the rest of the Balkans, not to mention Europe, communications experts have accused Albanian broadcasters of irresponsibly giving space to debunked conspiracy theories for the sake of their own commercial interests.

     “The case of Alfred Cako is the most blatant: a media operating with a national licence has opened the doors of its studios repeatedly and continuously, almost each week, to a person who, in my opinion, is causing great damage,” said Erlis Çela, a professor of Communication and Media at Tirana’s Beder College.

     […]

     COVID-19 has killed a little over 2,500 people in Albania. Out of a population of some 2.8 million, just over 693,000 are fully vaccinated, putting the country behind its regional peers and far behind the European Union average in the race to get on top of the virus.

     […]

     The problem is not the availability of vaccines but in the uptake, a fact some experts blame in part on the media space afforded to conspiracy theories. The broadcasters in question, however, say they are simply giving airspace to all sides of the debate.

     We give space to alternative voices, said Eduard Manushi, director of the ‘Rrethi Katror’ show where Cako appears as a pundit once a week. He has personal responsibility for what he says and doesn’t represent the editorial line of the channel over vaccines.

     […]

     The vaccine is a project of Illuminati, he said. The vaccine is a 3 mm microchip that will save all our data in a computer of the Illuminati society.

     The CDC says Covid-19 vaccinates are delivered by a gauge 22–25 needle, which are less than 1 mm in diameter. It’s possible Albanian millimetres are different than ISO’s, but only in a suitable modified space-time reality (possibly the same one hair furor imagines he inhabits?).

     The mildly deranged penguin says teh lluminati confirms they aren’t interested in the vaccine’s microchips, already having full control of all Wifi, 5G, GPS, and SoC manufacturing… they not only know where you are, were, and will be, but you have, are, and will think, as well as the most important thing of all, what you’ll eat for breakfast tomorrow. Bill Gates, she says they say, is yet again so far behind the curve he thinks digital watches are yet to be invented (apologies to Douglas Adams).

     [… more details and quotes…]

     [An editor of Propacientit publication, a specialised healthcare news service, Denisa] Canameti said the conduct of broadcasters, “for commercial reasons”, was undermining efforts of public bodies and civil society to educate and inform Albanians about COVID-19 vaccination, telling BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network): “The larger the audience, the more people at risk.”

261. blf says

     18 September 2021 at 1:37 pm

     Rabid wild-eyed loons roaming loose and off-leash, No, COVID wasn’t planned by FEMA to kill thousands and open concentration camps:

     A clip from a 2010 episode of the truTV series Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura has resurfaced […], and it’s being used to claim that COVID-19 was planned by the government.

     The clip […] shows former Minnesota governor and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in Madison, GA, hiding behind trees next to a plot of land filled with what they called hundreds of thousands of plastic coffins.

     While looking over the scene, the two men discussed claims that the government was holding these coffins in preparation for a biological pandemic, which would be used to kill thousands of dissidents and send people into concentration camps owned and operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

     […]

     The containers were being stored in Madison, but these claims surrounding them are false. […] The containers in the video are called burial vaults, or grave liners, and they’re made by a company called Vantage Product Corp. The vaults are meant to protect interred caskets. They also keep the ground from caving in at burial, said the company’s vice president, Lisa Barlow.

     “The majority of cemeteries across the United States require the use of a burial vault when a body is interred,” Barlow said.

     This isn’t the first time this claim about the caskets being for nefarious purposes has arisen. In 2008, Madison-based newspaper the Morgan County Citizen, debunked the claim and stated that Vantage leased the land and used it to store burial vaults.

     Vantage’s then-Vice President of Operations Michael Lacy said that the vaults are stored for people who pre-arrange for their funerals. It’s common practice for people to make their funeral arrangements before death, including selecting a casket and burial vault.

     [… Barlow] also noted that there were 50,000 vaults stored on the property—— far fewer than the hundreds of thousands that Jones had described[hallucinated] in the video.

     […]

     We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

262. blf says

     18 September 2021 at 1:55 pm

     The French TGV (high-speed trains) turned 40 years old recently. A really groovy video (apparently, SNCF’s most recent ad), https://twitter.com/ChatardMaxime/status/1430946400993529873 (in French, but that doesn’t matter). Found via 9 things you might not know about the TGV as France’s high-speed train turns 40 (possibly paywalled).

263. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 1:57 pm

     More wild-eyed loons (credit to blf for the descriptive phrase) sound off:

     Pauline Bauer is a piece of work, and it seems the justice system has had enough of her bullshit. It’s hard to keep track of all the insanity, stupidity, and white privilege that Jan 6th insurrectionists display when they get busted. And there are so many lunatics that they all begin to blend into one amorphous blob of ignorance, hate, and inanity. But Pauline Bauer is almost an avatar for what we in the reality based community want to happen to all the insurrectionists. Translation: she screamed bloody murder when a federal judge sent her back to jail for giving the middle finger to the court.

     I’m just sorry it wasn’t on tape.

     To recap, here is the back story of insurrectionist Pauline Bauer:

     Bauer was arrested in May along with Blauser, a Vietnam War veteran and retired mail carrier. Surveillance video shows the two of them entering the Capitol through an east Rotunda door where at least three police officers were trying to block entry. Video from a police officer’s body camera captured Bauer saying to bring out Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House.

     “Bring them out now. They’re criminals. They need to hang,” she said. [Yeah, she made her intentions very clear.]

     Trump received nearly three-quarters of the votes in the 2020 election in the county that incudes Kane, a borough in northwest Pennsylvania with roughly 3,500 residents, over 97% of whom are white. Many homes and businesses in town are still decorated with Trump signs and flags. A warehouse adorned with pro-Trump posters also has one that reads “Burn Loot Murder,” a derisive reference to the Black Lives Matter movement….

     Before the riot, most Kane residents knew Bauer for the deep-dish pizza and ice cream she has been serving since she bought the restaurant 15 years ago. That began to change as the coronavirus pandemic temporarily closed her business along with many others in the small town on the edge of the 517,000-acre Allegheny National Forest.

     She became an outspoken critic of COVID-19 lockdown measures that cost her business and drove a wedge between neighbors who clashed on social media. She complained about a mask mandate during a school board meeting two weeks before her arrest, The Kane Republican newspaper reported.

     Last year, as her business suffered, Bauer also began to embrace an ideology that appears to comport with the “sovereign citizens” extremist movement’s belief that the U.S. government is illegitimate. Bauer says she is a “sovereign people,” not a sovereign citizen, and refers to herself as “Pauline from the House of Bauer.”

     Bauer has been combative with the judge presiding over her case and claimed the court has no authority over her. She was jailed for one night in June after she refused to answer a magistrate judge’s routine questions. During a recent hearing, she told U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden that she doesn’t want an attorney to represent her “or any lawyering from the bench.”

     “I do not recognize your bar card, sir,” she told McFadden, who appointed a lawyer to act as her standby counsel.

     She also told the judge that she wouldn’t allow a pretrial services officer to inspect her home, in person or virtually. The judge warned her that she could be jailed again if she refused to comply. He also denied her request to dismiss her charges, which include obstruction of an official proceeding and disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds.

     “On what terms?” she asked.

     “You know what? You don’t get to demand terms from me,” the judge replied.

     It got worse.

     Bauer submitted a 114 page document to the court that essentially said that she is a “free living soul,” and in the document is filled with so called Biblical quotes on how the court has no jurisdiction over her. It’s been described as gibberish.

     Anyway, she didn’t even do the minimum to stay out of jail before her trial. She repeatedly snubbed the bail office. And she kept claiming that the court was violating her rights.

     WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal judge voiced concern for the Pennsylvania pizzeria owner’s livelihood but said he had no choice but to send her to jail Friday after a frazzling hearing where she refused to abide by the conditions of release.

     “You’re a small business owner. I don’t want to lock you up. I don’t want you to lose your restaurant,” U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden said at an in-person court hearing for Pauline Bauer on Friday. “I’m not concerned about you being a danger to the community but I am very concerned about you being willing to comply with your conditions of release.”

     McFadden asked if she would just be willing to check in with her pretrial officer once a week.

     “I feel like it’s a violation of my rights, sir,” responded Bauer, who is representing herself against misdemeanor federal charges.

     McFadden revoked Bauer’s release, and Bauer was taken out of the courtroom crying and screaming: “No! I’m not going back to jail! Why are you doing this?”

     “I don’t like doing this, but you have made it clear that you feel you are above the law,” McFadden said.

     […] It appears that it is likely that Bauer will lose her restaurant because she cannot find someone to keep it open while she is in jail. And this wouldn’t happen if Bauer wasn’t such a complete asshole. And remember, she wanted to kill Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, so I think she needs to suffer the consequences of her actions.

     Link

264. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 2:07 pm

     blf @261, that’s a great advertisement.

     In other news about wild-eyed loons: Alaska Airlines banned a rude anti-mask lawmaker.

     Alaska lawmaker Lora Reinbold is quite upset because she can’t get out of the state capital after the latest legislative session after being banned by Alaska Airlines in April. I will leave out Reinbold’s political party because I’m fairly certain you can figure it out.

     Unfortunately for Reinbold, Juneau is only accessible by air or sea. While Delta offers seasonal flights, Alaska Airlines is the only airline with year-round service between Juneau and Anchorage. Reinbold represents the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River, so without access to air travel, she has to travel over 19 hours by car and ferry to get from her district to the capital, crossing through Canada’s Yukon Territory along the way.

     Why was Reinbold banned from the airline in April? She accosted Alaska Airlines ticketing agents in the Juneau airport when asked to wear a mask, and wear it properly. Reinbold is an anti-masker who previously harassed an Alaska flight crew when asked to comply with the mask mandate during a November 2020 flight. She photographed the flight attendants, posted their photo to Facebook, and described the incident as “mask tyranny.”

     Like most COVID-19-deniers, Reinbold didn’t consider the consequences when she decided to harass Alaska Airlines employees who were doing their jobs.

     In the video below, Alaska Airlines staff professionally tell Reinbold she needs to put her mask over her nose. She allegedly threw a tantrum before demanding their names, the officer’s badge number, and recording them on her phone. [video available at the link]

     Airline employees across the nation have faced unprecedented intimidation by anti-maskers, with flight attendants facing the bulk of the abuse. Alaska Airlines executives had enough, and told the senator she is persona non grata.

     We have notified Senator Lora Reinbold that she is not permitted to fly with us for her continued refusal to comply with employee instruction regarding the current mask policy. This suspension is effective immediately pending further review.

     Federal law requires all guests to wear a mask over their nose and mouth at all times during travel, including throughout the flight, during boarding and deplaning, and while traveling through an airport.

     The April incident wasn’t the first time Reinbold acted out. […] Reinbold has falsely claimed that masks don’t work by saying “I saw no research on cloth, silk, cotton face coverings … that they prevent COVID.”

     After the November 2020 incident, Reinbold sent an apology cake. Of course, in the ultimate sorry-not sorry move, she didn’t admit she was wrong or behaved badly, but faulted them for being offended by her tantrum. […]

     In case you haven’t figured it out, Reinbold is a bit of a jerk. She has gotten into fights with figures in her own party, and is so toxic that back in February, she was admonished by the state’s Republican governor for spreading misinformation about COVID-19. […]

     The state’s chief medical officer was also frustrated with Reinbold’s spreading of debunked rumors on her Facebook page. Reinbold responded with, “I think that definitely contradicts things that I’ve definitely been following online.” So glad she found information on YouTube that every top scientist and doctor missed …

     In the end, Reinbold did find options to get back to Anchorage, and her fellow Republicans did excuse her from the legislature for the upcoming session, which I think is inexcusable. She is responsible for her own behavior, and needs to be replaced. I’m not alone in my thinking here. […]

265. blf says

     18 September 2021 at 2:13 pm

     Follow-up to me@38, in which I noted:

     There’s an image [of the LAPD’s “field interview”] card at the link. The SSN [social security number] section is what really raised my eyebrows, since it purports the information must be provided (if asked for), unlike the social media details. What it asserts (my transcription) is […] Authority for requiring this information [SSN] is based on field interview procedures operational prior to January 1, 1975, which is basically gobbledygook.

     I’m not alone in noticing that, LAPD to stop requesting civilians’ social security numbers after backlash:

     Department says it will remove social security numbers from ‘field interview cards’, which Guardian investigated in recent report

     Cheeky of the Grauniad there, from memory, I don’t recall them pointing out the highly-problematical SSN or bogus justification… they aren’t saying they did, but that synopsis is so easily misunderstandable…

     The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has moved to end its practice of requesting the social security numbers of civilians officers question, after immigrants’ rights advocates raised concerns about potential violations of sanctuary laws meant to protect undocumented residents.

     The Guardian reported last week on internal documents showing that LAPD was instructing officers to collect civilians’ social security numbers via “field interview cards”, which police complete after they stop or question someone, including civilians who aren’t under arrest.

     Copies of the cards, obtained through a public records request by the Brennan Center for Justice, further showed that the department had advised officers to tell interviewees that the social security numbers must be provided under federal law. Experts, however, said there was no law requiring this disclosure to local police in everyday encounters.

     […]

     After the Guardian’s recent report, the LAPD released a statement defending the cards, saying: Social media handles can be critical pieces of contact information [my added emphasis, and hence the reason for the eejit quotes –blf]. In Friday’s policy update, LAPD said it was maintaining the social media section, but did not address the backlash.

266. blf says

     18 September 2021 at 2:29 pm

     Lynna@263, re @261, “that’s a great advertisement.”

     One thing I learned from it is there is a Gare Rosa Parks (Rosa Parks Train Station), in Paris. It’s not actually a TGV station, but as the linked-to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge article says:

     Explaining the name, Annick Lepetit, deputy of Bertrand Delanoë (Mayor of Paris from 2001 to 2014) in charge of transport, stated: “We wanted at least 50% female names. There has been much debate, especially with RATP [Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens], which favors existing place names, but for Rosa Parks there was a consensus: this is necessary for a tram station, it is a strong symbol”.

     I don’t know if TGVs run through Gare Rosa Parks, but certainly applaud both the station’s name and its inclusion in the advert.

267. blf says

     18 September 2021 at 3:28 pm

     Dealing with a wild-eyed loon (note Lynna@262, Thanks for the credit, but that is a tamer version of “swivel-eyed loon” from c.2013), The moment QAnon took the person I love most:

     […]
     It was January 2021 when Nicole’s 14-year-old son took her to a hospital emergency room. Hours earlier, Nicole had been driving out of her small hometown in Kansas when she started having palpitations, and her arm and face went numb. “I thought I was having a heart attack.”

     Nicole had experienced a panic attack after 10 months of watching her mother disappear into her phone screen, and a world of conspiracy theories. Specifically, QAnon […]

     Doctors at the hospital told Nicole that they knew what she was going through. They, too, had heard about QAnon, as it had swept through the small towns in her state.

     […]

     To Nicole, QAnon is completely ludicrous. But to her mother, the theories were hard facts, and by refusing to believe that, her daughter was choosing to side with an evil cabal over her. Though they had not been close when she was young, they had come to have a warm relationship in recent years, after Nicole had children.

     […]

     When Nicole started studying at university as a mature student, her mother would brag to her friends about how proud she was. It was the relationship Nicole had grown up wanting with her mum. Then last year, Nicole’s mother watched a film called Out of Shadows, which accuses the media of widespread manipulation.

     There seems to be quite a number of things called “Out of Shadows”. Nicole / BBC is very probably referring to some 2020 nonsense, about which I haven’t been able to find a suitably scathing takedown (after some admittedly quick searching, trying to keep my eyes from over-swiveling).

     “And that was it. She was instantly into this QAnon world.”

     Nicole initially tried to humour her mother’s new beliefs. When she’d send her an article and ask her what she thought, Nicole would read it and try to refute it in a respectful way. Though she thought the articles she was being sent were “out there”, with their claims about fake news and media manipulation, she didn’t realise exactly what her mother was getting sucked into.

     Then one day last year, her mum sent her an article with a list of more than 100 celebrities who opposed then-president Trump. These celebrities, the article claimed, were going to get arrested and executed on live TV.

     “I was like, why would you want this? Why would you even want to see this?” Nicole said.

     Nicole’s mother replied that the celebrities listed, like Beyonce and Ellen Degeneres, harvest children’s blood for youth and energy. “That’s when I knew she was in a cult. A death cult.”

     […]

     Studies by political scientists have also found similarities between how political communities and conspiracy theories operate. For example, Republicans in the US are more likely to believe conspiracy theories about the government when a Democrat is president, and vice versa. QAnon is slightly different, in that it is a right-wing conspiracy theory that flourished under a Republican president.

     For loved ones watching this happen from the outside, it can be devastating.

     “People often contact me to talk about family members they have ‘lost’ to conspiracy theories,” Prof [Karen] Douglas[, a social psychologist at the University of Kent who specialises in the psychology of conspiracy theories,] said. “They often ask me what they can do to ‘find’ their friend or loved one again”.

     […]

     For Lauren [(name changed)], her parents’ obsession with QAnon has meant that they won’t be coming to her wedding this year.

     “I grew up very religious, my parents are evangelical Christians and they adhere to that quite a bit,” Lauren told the BBC. “They later deviated from the religious aspect, but they still wanted that sense of community — and then they found it elsewhere.” In 2016, Lauren’s dad became engrossed in “Pizzagate” […]

     Now Lauren’s father believes Covid vaccines are government trackers that are going to kill us all. Lauren’s fiancé is immuno-compromised, so she wanted everyone at the service to have been vaccinated. She knew this was a tough conversation she would have to have with her parents.

     “I talked to my mom about it… my mom is just more uninformed, and I think she’s more amenable.” She hoped that her parents would be willing to compromise, and wouldn’t miss what would be one of the most important days of their daughter’s life. But her hopes were dashed.

     Her mother told her: I understand where you’re coming from, but we’re not getting vaccinated.

     On the morning of 6 January, Nicole noticed a cryptic Facebook post from her mum. She had no idea what it was referring to, but for some reason it made her feel uneasy. Unlike her mother’s usual long, rambling posts, this one was only one sentence: Wait for the show. It was followed by bomb emojis.

     [… more similar stories…]

     Jitarth Jadeja, a 33-year-old from Sydney, Australia, spent 18 months engrossed in QAnon theories. It was all he thought about, all he would read — and eventually he was unable to hold a conversation with anyone, even his closest family, that wasn’t about QAnon.

     That is until one day, in June 2019, he “essentially rebooted”.

     At the time he had started a course of treatment for a previously-undiagnosed mental health condition, and his perspective was becoming clearer.

     “I was sitting in front of my computer… and I thought, ‘What do I do now… I was wrong. That’s the fundamental thing, I was wrong.'”

     As his health improved and he became more used to life post-QAnon, he reflected on what a devastating effect the past 18 months had had on his family. He posted about his experiences on Reddit — “it just sort of spilled out, all my feelings and emotions”. He expected to be “ripped apart” but, he said, “the complete opposite happened”.

     “It was like these guys gave me permission on behalf of society, like, ‘you messed up, it’s OK, you’re human’. They put me back together again, and gave me permission to retain some dignity and self-respect. If they hadn’t done that, I don’t know what would’ve happened — I wouldn’t be here.”

     About a month later he found out about a new forum on Reddit to help support people whose loved ones had been radicalised by QAnon. He joined, and started posting about his experiences on there. According to Jitarth there were only about 400 users when he joined two years ago. Now, there are more than 180,000.

     After a while, because of all the help and support Jitarth had given people on the forum, he was made a moderator — a role he still holds. Above everything else, he wants to give people on there hope that their loved ones will, like him, become their normal selves again.

     For Nicole, however, that hope is thin.

     “I never knew my own dad, so the only person who was actually present in my life, no longer is. I’m going through the mourning process of losing my mom before she’s actually passed away. And I just don’t see myself having her in my life and feeling safe right now,” she said.

     […]

     I had a very disturbing conversation with a friend in the village today. I’ve always(?) known they have some fringe beliefs — ancient astronauts comes to mind — but are a stable single-parent with a lovely teenager. Today, however, we got into a disagreement about the now-“pandemic of the unvaccinated” (they claim to be vaccinated, which I believe). They cited a friend of theirs in the local health services, who claimed most local Covid-19 patients were vaccinated. That’s not impossible — if almost everyone is vaccinated, you’d expect to eventually see that — to which I replied it might the case locally, I don’t know, but is not the case nationally or (meaning in countries with large-scale vaccination programmes) internationally. They disagreed, albeit I don’t know their “reasoning” (we both had to leave at about that point for differing reasons).

268. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 4:59 pm

     Low expectations for Sept. 18 rally turn out to be not low enough, but meanwhile …

     Since Jan. 6 demonstrated decisively that Trump supporters are a bunch of violent, authoritarian white supremacists more than willing to smear excrement on the halls of Congress and search the Capitol for government officials suitable for hanging, no one seems anxious to play with them anymore.

     Though police came out in force for Saturday’s rally […] the actual attendance is far lower than even the 700 that organizers, led by former Trump staffer Matt Braynard said they anticipated. The majority of speeches given weren’t so much about their support for Jan. 6 insurgents, but more prolonged claims about how this has become a country where people are afraid to turn out to protest. The whining about how more people would show up if they were not so afraid of the police was punctuated by repeated insistence to law enforcement that attendees were “not your enemies.”

     […] right-wing media featured claims for week that the Sept. 18 rally was a “false flag operation” intended to snare Trump supporters and catch them committing violent acts. This circulated so widely on social media that it seems many of the most devout white supremacy groups decided to give Washington, D.C. a total skip. Besides, it’s Saturday. There aren’t even any representatives or staff to terrorize. What fun is that?

     Of course, this doesn’t mean that these groups have decided to retire from being violent jackasses. They’re just busy beating people bloody in L.A.—for the crime of trying to protect children from COVID-19.

     Not only has the Sep. 18 rally turned out produce fewer people in support of those jailed over Jan. 6, it also turned out to be extraordinarily … brief. […] Though since so much of this event involved handfuls of people wandering around on the grass, it’s a little difficult to tell. […]

     Total attendance has been estimated to be around 300. So expect lots of references to Thermopylae when this event is remembered in the sacred halls of Q-dom. […]

     Not only were the protesters outnumbered by police, it appears they were outnumbered by the media in attendance. This seems like the kind of thing that, in Germany, would deserve a new word. Something like pitifulputsch. And somehow, the mostly Black security detail defending the stage didn’t look all that convinced that the people who kept shouting “we’re on the same side,” even as they celebrated the deeds of white supremacists who injured the police, were actually on their side.

     Where was everyone? Well, it seems that at least some of the Proud Boys were across the country in L.A. where they had joined up with anti-vaxxers to rally in opposition to mask mandates. And there, they demonstrated more of the behavior that everyone has come to expect from Trump supporters. […]

     Some photos and video snippets are available at the link.

269. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 5:03 pm

     Regarding the Proud Boys beating people up in LA (see comment 267), the video shows them shouting “USA” repeatedly while they beat people up.

270. Lynna, OM says

     18 September 2021 at 5:15 pm

     Apple and Google Go Further Than Ever to Appease Russia

     WIRED link

     AS VOTING BEGAN on Friday for Russia’s lower house of parliament or State Duma, Google and Apple quietly pulled a beleaguered anti-establishment voting app from their app stores. It’s just the latest in a series of concessions that Apple in particular has made to the Kremlin—whose demands seem likely to become only more aggressive from here.

     As the tech industry grapples with how to address a host of complicated human rights and safety issues, the incident underscored the uncomfortable compromises that many tech companies strike in order to operate in certain regions, as well as the increasingly brazen demands of authoritarian governments.

     The Russian government had pressured Apple and Google to take down the voting app for weeks, threatening fines and even accusing the companies of illegal election interference. Created by associates of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, it offered recommendations across each of Russia’s 225 voting districts for candidates with the best shot of defeating the dominant United Russia party in each race. Voting is open through the weekend, but the app is no longer available for download, and misleading imposter apps have already started to pop up in its place.

     Representatives from the two tech companies met with Russian Federation Council officials on Thursday, according to the Associated Press, after which the Council said in a statement that Apple would comply with the takedown demand. A person with knowledge of Google’s decision to remove the app said that Russian authorities threatened specific Google employees with serious criminal charges and prosecution, forcing the company’s hand.

     […] “Removing the Navalny app from stores is a shameful act of political censorship,” tweeted Ivan Zhdanov, a Navalany ally, on Friday. Zhdanov also tweeted a purported screenshot of an email from Apple to the creators of the voting app that described Navalny’s opposition movement and its backers as “extremists,” and said that the app “includes content that is illegal in Russia.”

     Apple also reportedly disabled its new iCloud Private Relay feature today in Russia, which masks users’ IP addresses and browsing activity to counter mass surveillance. The service is currently available in beta, but Apple never offered it in countries like China, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and Belarus for “regulatory reasons.” It had, however, launched it in Russia.

     The action Russia took against the voting app is part of a larger trend. In April, iPhones and other iOS devices sold in Russia started coming with an extra step in the setup process that prompts users to install a list of apps from Russian developers. The apps aren’t pre-installed, and users can choose not to download them, but Apple made the change as a concession to Russian law.

     […] [snipped other examples of tech companies caving when pressured by authoritarian governments]

     The human rights implications of tech companies’ actions reverberate around the world. But there have been few easy answers about how to proceed in dealing with authoritarian regimes. And it seems unlikely that international companies will withdraw from established markets in protest of restrictive laws.

     […] Given that authoritarian regimes like Russia and Iran are increasingly focused on building total state internet control and even launching their own apps and app stores, there are still security and privacy benefits to having mobile devices and operating systems made by international tech companies in the hands of local users. For example, even constrained versions of Google Play and the App Store give people some access to international apps, and standbys like iMessage offer end-to-end encryption. And in the case of the opposition voting app, the fact that Android is the dominant mobile operating system in Russia means that users can still potentially download it from third-party app stores.

     Linzer also notes that while the takedown is a brazen act of censorship that may set a dangerous precedent, Apple and Google did achieve something by defying the Russian government’s requests until voting had already started and many people had already downloaded it. [Interesting.]

     […] Linzer says, “So keeping up this pressure on tech companies to protect free expression is key. Authoritarian governments are watching around the world to see what’s happening. And we need to make sure that this precedent isn’t accepted.”

     Apple’s and Google’s resistance to Russian takedown orders bought time for the Navalny app to proliferate before the election. But the companies did eventually acquiesce, which ultimately doesn’t bode well for other demands that will inevitably be coming.

271. KG says

     19 September 2021 at 6:52 am

     I recently watched a Channel 4 documentary Did Covid Leak for a Lab in China?. You have to create an account to watch it on catch-up, but AFAIK this can be done from outwith the UK. No “smoking test tube” (as is admitted at the start), but enough circumstantial evidence that I’m persuaded that it probably did. No suggestion, I should add, that the virus was developed as a weapon, or deliberately released. Much of the same information is available in this Vanity Fair article.

272. Lynna, OM says

     19 September 2021 at 12:16 pm

     California is ending a rule that helped cause its housing crisis

     Gov. Newsom signed bills ending single-family-only zoning, a step toward addressing the housing crisis.

     […] Single-family-only zoning laws make it illegal to build anything but a single-family home on a particular lot of land. Now (with small exceptions like for fire-prone areas) it is also legal to build duplexes.

     That change was part of a suite of housing production bills Newsom signed into law on Thursday, continuing a years-long trend of California pushing forward as one of the few states attempting to tackle the housing supply crisis.

     […] California’s housing affordability crisis and resulting homelessness crisis were key parts of the frustration building in a state where Zillow says the typical home is valued at $708,936 (more than double the typical US home value of $303,288).

     While overhauling single-family-only zoning might sound revolutionary, the bills are gentle attempts at increasing density: legalizing duplexes and quadplexes and making it easier to build small apartment buildings that provide up to 10 homes. This doesn’t mean single-family homes are outlawed or can no longer be built, but it provides homeowners the option to convert their homes into duplexes or sell their homes to people who want to do so. Before now, it was illegal for someone to convert their home to a duplex on a lot zoned for single-family zoning. Not anymore.

     This isn’t a panacea for housing production. UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that SB 9 (the bill that legalizes duplexes) will “modestly accelerate the addition of new units relative to the status quo.” Other laws that restrict the building of new and more affordable homes are still in effect — in particular, local laws around minimum lot sizes will continue to make it illegal to turn single-family homes into duplexes if the existing lot is too small to subdivide while still adhering to the size regulations.

     However, the Terner Center finds that “approximately 700,000 new, market-feasible homes would be enabled under SB 9.” […] the new units unlocked by SB 9 would represent a fraction of the overall supply needed to fully address the state’s housing shortage.”

     Previous incremental progress on housing production came in the form of ADU (accessory dwelling unit) legalization — for constructing backyard apartments or converting garages into homes. This added more than 20,000 new homes to the state’s housing supply.

     […] Ending single-family-only zoning had long been thought of as impossible. California is pushing the possibilities frontier of states taking action where localities have failed with respect to producing enough housing for their populations. And they’re not the first to pursue a policy in this vein: In 2019, Oregon passed a bill mandating that any city with over 10,000 people allow duplexes in areas zoned for single-family-only housing. This effectively banned single-family-only zoning in that state as well.

     This achievement was hard-won by legislators and pro-housing advocates who helped elect them, and it signals a shift in who is deemed responsible for fixing the housing crisis. Housing is still largely seen as a local issue, but as the regional and even national effects begin to be widely recognized, states are feeling the pressure to take action. […]

273. tomh says

     19 September 2021 at 12:50 pm

     WaPo:
     Opinion: Why I violated Texas’s extreme abortion ban
     Alan Braid / September 18, 2021
     Alan Braid is a physician who provides abortion care in San Antonio.

     Newly graduated from the University of Texas medical school, I began my obstetrics and gynecology residency at a San Antonio hospital on July 1, 1972.

     At the time, abortion was effectively illegal in Texas — unless a psychiatrist certified a woman was suicidal. If the woman had money, we’d refer her to clinics in Colorado, California or New York. The rest were on their own. Some traveled across the border to Mexico.

     At the hospital that year, I saw three teenagers die from illegal abortions….

     In medical school in Texas, we’d been taught that abortion was an integral part of women’s health care. When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, it enabled me to do the job I was trained to do.

     For the next 45 years — not including the two years I was away in the Air Force — I was a practicing OB/GYN in Texas, conducting Pap smears, pelvic exams and pregnancy check-ups; delivering more than 10,000 babies; and providing abortion care at clinics I opened in Houston and San Antonio, and another in Oklahoma.

     Then, this month, everything changed. A new Texas law, known as S.B. 8, virtually banned any abortion beyond about the sixth week of pregnancy. It shut down about 80 percent of the abortion services we provide. Anyone who suspects I have violated the new law can sue me for at least $10,000. They could also sue anybody who helps a person obtain an abortion past the new limit, including, apparently, the driver who brings a patient to my clinic.

     For me, it is 1972 all over again.

     And that is why, on the morning of Sept. 6, I provided an abortion to a woman who, though still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit. I acted because I had a duty of care to this patient, as I do for all patients, and because she has a fundamental right to receive this care.

     I fully understood that there could be legal consequences — but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested.
     […]

     Several times a month, a woman confides that she is having the abortion because she has been raped. Sometimes, she reports it to the police; more often, she doesn’t.

     Texas’s new law makes no exceptions for rape or incest.

     Even before S.B. 8, Texas had some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country……

     And yet, despite the restrictions, we were always able to continue providing compassionate care up to the legal limit of 22 weeks. It meant hiring more staff, everything took longer, but we managed.

     Until Sept. 1.

     Since then, most of our patients have been too far along in their pregnancies to qualify for abortion care. I tell them that we can offer services only if we cannot see the presence of cardiac activity on an ultrasound, which usually occurs at about six weeks, before most people know they are pregnant. The tension is unbearable as they lie there, waiting to hear their fate…..

     I understand that by providing an abortion beyond the new legal limit, I am taking a personal risk, but it’s something I believe in strongly. Represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, my clinics are among the plaintiffs in an ongoing federal lawsuit to stop S.B. 8.

     I have daughters, granddaughters and nieces. I believe abortion is an essential part of health care. I have spent the past 50 years treating and helping patients. I can’t just sit back and watch us return to 1972.

274. Lynna, OM says

     19 September 2021 at 12:51 pm

     Say what now? From Wonkette: Breitbart Columnist: Liberals Trying To Trick Trumpists Into Not Getting Vaccine So They Die

     Pack it in, everyone. Breitbart’s John Nolte is onto our dastardly plan. He’s figured out our secret plan to kill off the Right by encouraging them to get the vaccine. Is this because he thinks the vaccine is part of Bill Gate’s plot to depopulate the world? Or that it’s poison? No! He says he is vaccinated himself and is a great proponent of the vaccine. He just thinks that we’re encouraging conservatives to get the vaccine because we know that if we tell them to get the vaccine, they will deliberately not get the vaccine just to spite us — and has been pushing this theory in several columns as of late.

     This is from one column where he claims that Howard Stern mocked some anti-vaxxers who died of COVID in order to reverse psychology Trump supporters into not taking the vaccine, so they all die.

     Do you want to know why I think Howard Stern is going full-monster with his mockery of three fellow human beings who died of the coronavirus? Because leftists like Stern and CNNLOL and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated. Nothing else makes sense to me.

     In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?

     If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!

     Would it though? Is that really a normal human response to things, or are Republicans just assholes?

     No one wants to cave to a piece of shit like that, or a scumbag like Fauci, or any of the scumbags at CNNLOL, so we don’t. And what’s the result? They’re all vaccinated, and we’re not! And when you look at the numbers, the only numbers that matter, which is who’s dying, it’s overwhelmingly the unvaccinated who are dying, and they have just manipulated millions of their political enemies into the unvaccinated camp.

     According to the CDC, 99.5 percent of those dying of the China Flu are unvaccinated. So even if they’re lying or exaggerating, even if it’s 75 or 80 percent, those numbers are pretty stark.

     Could it be…? Could it possibly be that the left has manipulated huge swathes of Trump voters into believing they are owning the left by not taking the life-saving Trump Vaccine?

     That would be quite the theory, except we all started out very nice and excited for the vaccine, hoping (and in fact kind of assuming) that most everyone would get it and we’d all be able to go back to our lives. It’s the refusal of these dopes to get vaccinated that has ruined that, so yes, we’re all a little peeved. I can’t personally bring myself to be snide about anyone dying […]

     In another article this month, Nolte suggested that Biden was purposely trying to get the Right to own us by not taking the vaccine as well, when he said that he needed to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.

     I am strongly pro-vaccine and now believe that Biden, the media, Hollywood, and the left, in general, are deliberately being as nasty as possible as a way to use reverse psychology against Trump supporters.

     They know that the uglier they get, the more unvaccinated Trump supporters will dig in and refuse to get vaccinated. Well, I think that’s the plan. They’re vaccinated. We’re not. The unvaccinated are almost exclusively the ones dying. Who’s winning that debate? Who’s owning who?

     I mean, I don’t know that we care about owning anyone?

     The irony is — I have occasionally considered creating a sock puppet account and floating this exact theory in some of the far-right message boards I monitor. Why? Because I actually really do want people to get the vaccine and apparently the only way they will do anything is if they think they are “owning us” by doing so.

     […] I would also really hate it if they all decided to stop being super racist and believing in batshit conspiracy theories, and also support reproductive rights, single payer health care, unions, just cause terminations, ending right-to-work laws, prison abolition, subsidized childcare, subsidized college and everything else that is good. I would hate it so much! Argh! Also, just in case this shit works, I really hope none of them give me a million dollars. That would just be the worst. […]

275. Lynna, OM says

     19 September 2021 at 1:08 pm

     Bankruptcy due to medical bills is going to be a major news story … again.

     The days of full covid coverage are over. Insurers are restoring deductibles and co-pays, leaving patients with big bills.

     Washington Post link

     Large insurance companies waived cost-sharing for coronavirus care in 2020, but it has been reinstated for 2021.

     Jamie Azar left a rehab hospital in Tennessee this week with the help of a walker after spending the entire month of August in the ICU and on a ventilator. She had received a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in mid-July but tested positive for the coronavirus within 11 days and nearly died. [Doctors say she was likely already infected before she was vaccinated.]

     Now Azar, who earns about $36,000 a year as the director of a preschool at a Baptist church in Georgia, is facing thousands of dollars in medical expenses that she can’t afford.

     “I’m very thankful to be home. I am still weak. And I’m just waiting for the bills to come in to know what to do with them,” she said Wednesday, after returning home.

     In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100 percent of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

     But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for covid patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available. The companies imposed the costs as industry profits remained strong or grew in 2020, with insurers paying out less to cover elective procedures that hospitals suspended during the crisis. [Greed!]

     Now the financial burden of covid is falling unevenly on patients across the country, varying widely by health-care plan and geography, according to a survey of the two largest health plans in every state by the nonprofit and nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

     If you’re fortunate enough to live in Vermont or New Mexico, for instance, state mandates require insurance companies to cover 100 percent of treatment. But most Americans with covid are now exposed to the uncertainty, confusion and expense of business-as-usual medical billing and insurance practices — joining those with cancer, diabetes and other serious, costly illnesses. […]

     A widow with no children, Azar, 57, is part of the unlucky majority. Her experience is a sign of what to expect if covid, as most scientists fear, becomes endemic: a permanent, regular health threat. […]

     The carrier for her employee health insurance, UnitedHealthcare, reinstated patient cost-sharing Jan. 31. That means, because she got sick months later, she could be on the hook for $5,500 in deductibles, co-pays and out-of-network charges this year for her care in a Georgia hospital near her home, including her ICU stay, according to estimates by her family. They anticipate she could face another $5,500 in uncovered expenses next year as her recovery continues.

     Bills related to her stay at the out-of-network rehab hospital in Tennessee could climb as high as $10,000 more, her relatives have estimated, but they acknowledged they were uncertain this month what exactly to expect, even after asking UnitedHealthcare and the providers. […]

     Last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 88 percent of people covered by private insurance had their co-pays and deductibles for covid treatment waived. By August 2021, only 28 percent of the two largest plans in each state and D.C. still had the waivers in place, and another 10 percent planned to phase them out by the end of October, the Kaiser survey found. Its survey this year of employer-sponsored plans reflected similar patterns.

     “For some people, deductibles can be over $8,000 for a hospital stay,” Amin said. “It will really depend on what plan they have.”

     […] “The inhumanity of our health-care system and the tragedies it creates will now resume and will now cover this one group that was exempted,” he [Marvin Mallek, a doctor who treats covid patients at Springfield Hospital in Vermont,] said. “The U.S. health-care system is sort of like a game of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs, and some people are going to get hurt and devastated financially.” […]

276. tomh says

     19 September 2021 at 1:37 pm

     Arizona Republic:
     Arizona election audit report expected to be made public Sept. 24
     Ryan Randazzo and Mary Jo Pitzl / Sep 16, 2021

     The Arizona Senate will receive the audit report on the Maricopa County election on Sept. 24 at 1 p.m. in a public presentation on the floor of the chamber, Senate President Karen Fann said.

     Her announcement was sent to fellow senators after a judge on Thursday pressed a Senate attorney to tell him when the “final” report would be available.

     Fann, R-Prescott, said the long-awaited audit will cover all three aspects of the examination of the county’s election results:

     >A hand count of the 2020 results for president and U.S. Senate, done by the Senate’s contractor, the Cyber Ninjas;

     >A machine count of the ballots Fann ordered in July to check against the Ninjas’ count, as she said at the time the Ninja count does not match the official results; and

     >A review of mail-in ballot envelopes for missing or illegible signatures.
     […]

     The Senate also will release the report publicly that day, Fann said in an interview.
     […]

     As far as she’s concerned, Fann said, next week’s release is the final version of the audit. A Senate demand for the county’s routers and passwords used to access the Dominion voting machines is still outstanding and the county faces a Sept. 27 deadline to hand them over or face financial penalties.

     If the Senate does receive those materials, the Ninjas can go back and amend their report, Fann said.
     […]

     Also yet to be released are documents in possession of Cyber Ninjas and other contractors. The Senate fought all the way to the Arizona Supreme Court to try to keep those documents secret, losing that battle this week.

277. Lynna, OM says

     19 September 2021 at 4:19 pm

     Putin’s party expected to maintain its grip on the Duma as opposition complains of stolen vote.

     Washington Post link

     President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party is expected to maintain its grip over the State Duma, or lower house, exit polls in the country’s parliamentary elections showed Sunday, amid complaints by opposition parties and independent observers of widespread fraud.

     Early results released after polls closed in the three-day vote also put United Russia ahead of the Communist Party and other rivals. The polling agency Insomar predicted United Russia would win with 45 percent of the vote.

     Opposition parties and observers reported ballot stuffing and other tampering during the three days.

     “The elections are being stolen from us,” said Mikhail Lobanov, 38, a university lecturer running with the Communist Party in southwest Moscow.

     Ella Pamfilova, chief of the Central Elections Commission, said the number of violations was lower than in previous elections. She said 12 cases of ballot stuffing had been confirmed. Mikhail Davydov, the head of the Interior Ministry’s main department for the protection of public order, said there were no violations significant enough to affect the elections.

     The vote was held amid a sweeping, months-long crackdown on the opposition.

     Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is in jail. His electoral network was declared an extremist organization in June and effectively banned. Its leaders, other opposition figures, human rights activists, human rights lawyers and independent journalists have been arrested or fled the country. Dozens of opposition candidates were barred from running or withdrew under threat of arrest.

     Results were expected to be announced on Monday.

     Navalny’s network on Sunday urged Russians to turn out and vote against United Russia. […] The network urged Russians to follow voting recommendations published on its “Smart Voting” list, a tool to direct votes away from Putin’s party. […]

     Multiple videos surfaced that appeared to show ballot stuffing and other tampering. The nonpartisan election monitor Golos on Sunday reported nearly 3,800 possible violations, including ballot stuffing and possible vote buying.

     […] Videos of units for overnight storage of votes showed that seals on rear doors could easily be peeled off and replaced.
     Golos also reported intimidation of observers by elections officials or thugs.

     […] In Bryansk, southwest of Moscow, official video taken at a polling station appeared to show people having difficulty stuffing wads of votes into the ballot box. At least two videos taken in Kemerovo in southwest Siberia appeared to show a hand emerging from behind a curtain to stuff multiple votes into a ballot box. They were reported by the opposition Yabloko party.

     A video allegedly taken in Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East appeared to show a person marking multiple ballot papers.

     At a polling station in Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow, an observer reported Saturday that 200 more ballots were cast than there were total voters. In Samara, east of Moscow, Yabloko observers said 1,680 people were reported as voting at a polling station over five hours, yet video recorded just a slow dribble of voters during that time. […]

     Golos co-founder Grigory Melkonyants said United Russia was treated to five times more airtime on state television before the elections than all the other parties put together. He said more than 9 million people were ineligible to run, for example, due to past offenses such as protesting.

     The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe did not send observers because Russian authorities imposed restrictions on their activities.

     It’s the authoritarian governments that engage in election fraud and/or in voter-suppression activities.

278. Lynna, OM says

     19 September 2021 at 4:24 pm

     How Accounting Giants Craft Favorable Tax Rules From Inside Government

     New York Times link

     Lawyers from top accounting firms do brief stints in the Treasury Department, with the expectation of big raises when they return.

     For six years, Audrey Ellis and Adam Feuerstein worked together at PwC, the giant accounting firm, helping the world’s biggest companies avoid taxes.

     In mid-2018, one of Mr. Feuerstein’s clients, an influential association of real estate companies, was trying to persuade government officials that its members should qualify for a new federal tax break. Mr. Feuerstein knew just the person to turn to for help. Ms. Ellis had recently joined the Treasury Department, and she was drafting the rules for this very deduction.

     That summer, Ms. Ellis met with Mr. Feuerstein and his client’s lobbyists. The next week, the Treasury granted their wish — a decision potentially worth billions of dollars to PwC’s clients.

     About a year later, Ms. Ellis returned to PwC, where she was immediately promoted to partner. She and Mr. Feuerstein now work together advising large companies on how to exploit wrinkles in the tax regulations that Ms. Ellis helped write.

     Ms. Ellis’s case — detailed in public records and by people with direct knowledge of her work at the Treasury and at PwC — is no outlier.

     The largest U.S. accounting firms have perfected a remarkably effective behind-the-scenes system to promote their interests in Washington. Their tax lawyers take senior jobs at the Treasury Department, where they write policies that are frequently favorable to their former corporate clients, often with the expectation that they will soon return to their old employers. The firms welcome them back with loftier titles and higher pay, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with current and former government and industry officials.

     From their government posts, many of the industry veterans approved loopholes long exploited by their former firms, gave tax breaks to former clients and rolled back efforts to rein in tax shelters — with enormous impact.

     After lobbying by PwC, a former PwC partner in the Trump Treasury Department helped write regulations that allowed large multinational companies to avoid tens of billions of dollars in taxes; he then returned to PwC. A senior executive at another major accounting firm, RSM, took a top job at Treasury, where his office expanded a tax break in ways sought by RSM; he then returned to the firm.

     Even some former industry veterans said they viewed the rapid back-and-forth arrangements as a big part of the reason that tax policy had become so skewed in favor of the wealthy, at the expense of just about everyone else. President Biden and congressional Democrats are now seeking to overhaul parts of the tax code that overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans. […]

279. The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) says

     20 September 2021 at 3:49 am

     Just stopping by quickly to pass along this… interesting? Alarming?… news story:

     Stanford has issued a press release saying they have found that 1 in 5 hospitalized Covid patients has self-attacking antibodies. (More specifically: 20% of hospitalized Covid patients have enough self-attacking antibodies that, under other circumstances they would be diagnosed with an autoimmune syndrome.) I don’t know that that’s actually worse than otherwise, but it feels scary. I just hope it leads to a better understanding of autoimmune disease, because that stuff is horrifying anyway and it would be great if the medical efforts against Covid led to breakthroughs on that, too.

280. blf says

     20 September 2021 at 1:01 pm

     A snippet from 6 reasons France’s Covid vaccination programme improved so dramatically (possibly paywalled):

     [… B]y far the biggest single impact on vaccination rates was president Emmanuel Macron’s announcement of the health passport, the impact of which can be seen in the below graph of vaccine appointments being booked immediately after his speech on July 12th.

     261 000 personnes ont pris rendez-vous pour se faire vacciner, hier (2 semaines après l’allocution d’E. Macron), sur Doctolib. Moins que le lundi précédent (325 000), mais toujours davantage que fin juin/début juillet. https://twitter.com/nicolasberrod/status/1419892987614597120

     The idea of showing proof of vaccination (or a test or Covid recovery certificate) to enter a bar, cinema or hospital has been controversial, but while 250,000 people took to the streets to protest [initially-ish, it’s been declining, and even that 250k was a nothing by French standards –blf], more than 13 million people have been vaccinated since the president’s announcement in the middle of July.

     It lead to another round of French jokes, the gist of which were that when you tell the French they might die of a deadly virus they shrug, but when you tell them they can’t go to a restaurant, they queue up to get vaccinated.

     Indeed, as I keep saying, one of the clever things about the Health Pass is it’s needed to participate in important parts of what makes France France. France is now one-of the most-vaccinated nations in the EU, ahead of both the States and “U”K (exact figures depend on baseline and other details, the app is currently-reporting a week-old figure of 82% fully-vaccinated, with more recent data suggesting about 90% have now received at least one jab (both figures use a baseline of the eligible population (which, I believe, is 12+ years old here in France)).

281. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 1:09 pm

     Oh, FFS. The photo alone is disturbing. Elevating total doofus Mike Lindell to royalty-like status. Sheesh.

     Top Alabama Officials Roll Out Red Carpet For MyPillow Guy’s Voter Fraud Road Show

     The CEO of MyPillow was treated like a visiting dignitary in Alabama Friday, meeting with the state’s governor and secretary of state during the latest stop on his futile months-long effort to demonstrate hijinks in the 2020 election.

     MyPillow honcho Mike Lindell “was very impressed by our efforts and said that Alabama had the best election system and the safest procedures he had seen in America!” the state’s top elections official, Secretary of State John Merrill, wrote on Facebook after the meeting, attaching pictures showing Lindell and his team presenting a graph on a laptop. “We look forward to our next meeting!”

     The pillow magnate later claimed without any basis that despite Alabama’s best efforts, 100,000 votes had been “flipped” in the state during the 2020 election. Lindell, who has spent months and millions of dollars pushing false claims of voter fraud in the last election, also purchased a copy of Alabama’s voter rolls and plans to perform “tests” on the data, Al.com reported.

     Photos from the meeting show that Lindell was accompanied by Douglas Frank, the former math and science department chair at a Cincinnati high school whose viral, smoke–and–mirrors claims about the 2020 election have made him a minor celebrity in the election truther world.

     […] Speaking on his show “The Lindell Report” after the visit, Lindell granted that Alabama ran a “tight ship” when it came to elections — but then added, “they were hacked, just like every other state was.”

     “According to my packet captures, and the numbers, we have approximately, almost 100,000 votes were flipped in Alabama,” he said later.

     Like all of his other claims of election fraud, Lindell did not provide evidence on air. “Packet captures,” or PCAPs, are snapshots of internet traffic that Lindell has said for months will show that the 2020 election was spoiled by Chinese hackers. He promised to show this PCAP evidence at a “Cyber Symposium” he organized last month but… it was a total flop.

     “All day Mike Lindell has been on stage saying the cyber experts are happily working on packet captures. We are not. We haven’t been given the packet captures we were promised,” one cybersecurity expert at the symposium lamented at the time. Even people on Lindell’s own cybersecurity team panned the symposium material, with one telling The Washington Times mid-event that he did not have confidence in the information.

     So, why did Alabama’s top political figures meet with the millionaire pillow CEO despite his negative credibility on the election integrity issue?

     A spokesperson for Gov. Kay Ivey (R) told AL.com that Ivey met “briefly” with Lindell “to welcome him to Alabama.”

     “She shared with him how successful Alabama is in running elections,” the spokesperson added. “It was a good, casual conversation. Secretary Merrill wanted to introduce them, and she is always proud to welcome visitors to Alabama.”

282. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 1:15 pm

     Follow-up to comment 280.

     Posted by readers of the article:

     Obviously, the PCAPs of the votes that the Italian military satellite “flipped” are stuck inside the Maricopa County routers. If only the cyber ninjas could get to the techno-whurgle blamafizzits, they’d blow the whole garbledy cokesnort wide open. What are they hiding?

     (ETA: What I just typed above actually makes more sense than what MyPillow Dude keeps saying.)
     ——————
     Maybe his old cocaine dealer can do another intervention and cut him off?
     ———————-
     Memaw Ivey [Governor Kay Ivey] is running for re-election. Scolding the unvaccinated while snubbing the Biden administration efforts to get people actually vaccinated has some perils at a time when there are zero ICU beds available in the state, and the ones that are being freed up are because people in them are dying. This [Mike Lindell circus] is a safe way to indicate her Trumpist credentials and, if she can, change the subject.
     ———————–
     Ah yes…Alabama…where the deaths in 2020 outnumbered the births
     ————————
     We need to figure out some way to get them to pronounce routers with the British/EU variant, just so we can hear them all talking about “the rooters” instead.

     It’s hard enough to get a usable packet capture when you WANT to, this whole discussion just makes me want to bang my head on the desk.
     —————————
     Relevant: the PCAP data that WAS actually presented at the August Lindell symposium was useless: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/prime/outtakes-from-big-liars-attempts-to-make-random-data-look-like-nefarious-election-schemes/sharetoken/UWkApkwNx957

283. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 1:20 pm

     blf @279, hooray for that success. I love it.

     In other news, Trump Org CFO Expects More Indictments, Lawyer Says

     The lawyer representing Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, is prepared for prosecutors to hand down even more criminal indictments in addition to the 15 fraud charges he’s already facing.

     Bryan Skarlatos, Weisselberg’s attorney, told the New York State Supreme Court during a pre-trial hearing on Monday that “We have strong reason to believe there could be other indictments coming,” per CNN.

     Weisselberg has been slapped with 15 criminal charges ranging from tax fraud, conspiracy, grand larceny, and falsification of records in what Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s office alleges to be a 15-year long tax evasion scheme with the Trump Organization, which was also indicted in the criminal case against the executive.

     Vance, who has been investigating the Trump Organization for three years, alleges that Weisselberg and the company worked to dodge paying taxes by giving the executive huge perks, which included an apartment at a luxury building in Manhattan and two Mercedes-Benz cars, in addition to a salary.

     Both Weisselberg and the Trump Organization have pleaded not guilty.

     Prosecutors have reportedly been putting the squeeze on Weisselberg in a (so far unsuccessful) effort to get him to flip on ex-President Donald Trump, who has not been charged with any crime in Vance’s investigation.

     Posted by a reader of the article:

     due to a box of tax documents found in the basement of a co-conspirator. Possibly Calamari or his deputy. https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-prosecutors-find-new-evidence-in-donald-trump-organization-case

284. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 1:24 pm

     Amid surge of kids with COVID-19, Pfizer offers a ray of hope with vaccine news

     Pfizer and BioNTech have good news for parents who want to protect their children aged 5 to 11 from COVID-19: The companies’ coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective for children in that age group, they announced in a press release Monday.

     The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will obviously look at much, much more data than a press release when Pfizer and BioNTech apply for emergency use authorization, a move that’s expected to come by the end of the month. But data so far reportedly shows that the smaller dose of the vaccine being given to younger children—just one-third of that given to older kids and adults—is producing a comparable antibody response to the older groups, with low levels of side effects. The vaccine trial has involved 2,268 children aged 5 to 11, two-thirds of whom received the vaccine and one-third of whom received a placebo.

     […] kids could potentially be eligible for vaccination by Halloween, a huge relief to parents who understand that COVID-19 is dangerous to their kids while vaccines have an excellent safety record.

     Results for children younger than 5 are not expected until later in the year.

     The news of the vaccine’s efficacy comes as concern rises about children and COVID-19. Children’s hospitalizations surged massively over the summer. The last week of August and first week of September brought the pandemic’s first and second highest total coronavirus diagnoses for children, totaling close to 500,000. […]

     Vaccines for children are badly needed, in other words. But stopping this surge of infection, and in too many cases hospitalization, among kids requires not just vaccines but vaccination. Many of the hospitalizations have been of unvaccinated children older than 12—kids who are eligible for vaccination, in other words. Once again we’re likely to see vaccination be taken up in some areas of the country, further protecting the population in those places, while other areas let the coronavirus rage out of control rather than accepting a free, safe shot.

     Speaking as the parent of a 5-year-old, though … can we just fast-forward to the day my kid gets his shot?

285. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 1:26 pm

     Cartoon: The cycle of wingnuttery.

286. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 1:43 pm

     A Wildly Popular App for Churches Is Now an Anti-Vax Hotbed

     The Christian tech company is spreading misinfo along with the Good News.

     Tim and Kristy Turner believe they were called to spread the word of Jesus through apps. In 2005, the pair founded Subsplash, a technology company whose mission, as stated on its website, is “to glorify God and proclaim Jesus is Lord by building a great company that drives for humility, innovation, and excellence to delight the millions of people on the Subsplash Platform.” […]

     Today, Subsplash has offices in three states and counts among its 14,000 clients the largest churches in the country, small congregations in rural communities, and even a few synagogues. The company has expanded its platform and added new features: Pastors can now use Subsplash to host podcasts, videos, and a tithing and charitable giving widget that allow users to easily donate to the church or other causes. Subsplash apps can send congregants push notifications with service times, daily Bible verses, or anything else their pastors deem worthy. The pandemic has accelerated Subsplash’s growth: In March 2020, the company acquired a live streaming service that allowed churches to broadcast services as lockdowns began.

     […] “The Lord is in control, and it can be especially fun if we can be submitted to that,” Turner says in a video Subsplash produced in 2019 about the company’s history. The company’s name, he explains, reflects this ethos: “Sub” is short for “submitting to God,” and “splash” is a reference to innovation. […]

     In its promotional materials, Subsplash promises to give individual churches full control over their content. […]

     But there’s a dark side to the company’s hands-off approach. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Subsplash has given voice to and amplified messages from many religiously affiliated anti-vaccine activists. […] In a video from a few weeks ago, featured guest chiropractor Dr. Bryan Ardis insists, “The Delta variant is not dangerous.” The Church of Glad Tidings’ “Free and Brave” video series hosted by Subsplash features noted anti-vaccine advocates, including Judy Mikovits, the personality behind the “Plandemic” conspiracy theory video. A September 12 video from Subsplash-hosted site Good Life Broadcasting spins theories about ominous connections among vaccines, the government, Bill Gates, and the Chinese Communist Party. […] Some sites hosted by Subsplash also promote misinformation around the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, suggesting that it can prevent hospitalization. Other Subsplash sites host videos devoted to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

     Oh, look, all the misinformation in one convenient-to-use app. It’s concentrated Stupid, and it is being fed directly into god-addled brains nationwide.

     Subsplash’s hosting of anti-vaccine ideology isn’t limited to churches. In addition, the company also developed an app for Texans for Vaccine Choice, a powerful anti-vaccine PAC that has helped Republican state representatives who oppose vaccines to win elections. […]

     […] Eric Goldman, a law professor who co-directs Santa Clara University’s High Tech Law Institute, argues that Subsplash can’t be held legally responsible for the content that individuals who use the platform put forth. He believes the ethics are different from those around Facebook, which employs vast teams of monitors who act as moderators for questionable posts, because Subsplash does not curate the content. “I would like to think that Subsplash would recognize that it’s become a channel for the broadcasting of misinformation,” he noted, “and it might choose to intervene on that basis, but it has the legal discretion not to.” [head/desk]

     Yet Kolina Koltai, a University of Washington researcher who studies the anti-vaccine movement’s use of social networks, was more emphatic in her belief that Subsplash has a duty to weed misinformation out of its platforms. “These types of platforms, when they begin to be developed, should take into consideration: What are the ways that misinformation can be shared on this platform?” she says. Koltai pointed to other examples of web hosting companies booting sites that they found ethically problematic. For example, earlier this month, the hosting company GoDaddy announced that it would stop hosting a Texas anti-abortion site set up to collect anonymous tips about healthcare workers […] In 2019, another web company, Cloudflare, booted the extremist forum 8chan from its client roster, calling it a “hate-filled community.” Koltai, who also collaborates with the vaccine misinformation watchdog group the Virality Project, said that she’s noticed an uptick in purveyors of disinformation deliberately exploiting web platforms that aren’t tightly controlled to spread their messages, especially as major players like Facebook and Twitter have ramped up their monitoring efforts. [Predictable.]

     […] “QAnon, the anti-vaxxer movement—they have realized that evangelicals are fertile hunting grounds for their theories, because they are already primed to be distrustful of institutions, and so they can be easily kind of recruited into their deep conspiracies of distrust,” he [Curtis Chang] said. [And yet, evangelicals have complete, illogical trust in their church institutions.]

     Now, with cases from the Delta variant surging and the proliferation of federal and local COVID vaccine mandates, some public health experts are concerned that exemptions for “religious beliefs” could be exploited. [Already happening!!] Some workers who don’t want the shots “are submitting letters from far-flung religious authorities who have advertised their willingness to help,” the New York Times reported. Indeed, a recent episode of the American Pastors Network’s Subsplash-hosted podcast “Stand in the Gap” contained instructions for how to “prepare your religious exemption letter” for vaccine requirements.

     […] “It’s troubling to see businesses that ultimately are profiting off of the dissemination of this information or harmful content,” he says. Because of that financial incentive, adds Koltai, “There’s never enough pressure on these organizations.”

287. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 2:46 pm

     ‘Devastating’: Florida Republicans worried about 2022 as they crafted election law

     Florida Republicans this spring insisted a contentious new election law curtailing access to ballot boxes was needed to prevent electoral fraud. It was not, they said, an attempt to gain a partisan advantage.

     But a raft of internal emails and text messages obtained by POLITICO show the law was drafted with the help of the Republican Party of Florida’s top lawyer — and that a crackdown on mail-in ballot requests was seen as a way for the GOP to erase the edge that Democrats had in mail-in voting during the 2020 election. The messages undercut the consistent argument made by Republicans that the new law was about preventing future electoral fraud.

     The law — labeled “Jim Crow 2.0” by some Democrats — was passed at the strong urging of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the bill at an exclusive event aired by Fox News. [Fox News!] It advanced even as local election officials, including Republicans, criticized the measure after running a trouble-free election in 2020. […]

     Florida was just one of several GOP-controlled states that enacted voting restrictions in the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s loss and his unsubstantiated complaints about voter fraud […] When debating the bill in the waning moments of this year’s legislative session, Republican Party of Florida chair and state Sen. Joe Gruters repeatedly said the bill would “make it as easy as possible to vote, and hard as possible to cheat.”

     Yet in one remarkable text exchange obtained by POLITICO, Gruters and lead House sponsor state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia (R-Spring Hill) went back-and-forth over proposals to shorten how long mail-in ballot requests are valid.

     Gruters defended a Senate proposal to cancel all existing mail-in ballot requests, saying that it would be “devastating” for Republicans to keep them valid heading into the 2022 election when DeSantis and other state GOP officials are up for reelection. More than 2.18 million Democrats used mail-in ballots compared to 1.5 million Republican voters during the 2020 election where Trump easily won Florida. […]

     “We cannot make up ground. Trump campaign spent 10 million. Could not cut down lead,” Gruters wrote to Ingoglia, who had been chair of the Republican Party of Florida before Gruters.

     Gruters (R-Sarasota) also said it would hurt the GOP in non-partisan races, noting that “our school board member got killed” in a local race. Gruters this week filed legislation that would ask voters to make school board races partisan.

     […] Republican lawmakers still shortened the time the requests [for mail-in ballots] would remain valid from two election cycles to one.

     […] The emails and text messages obtained by POLITICO were handed over as part of an ongoing lawsuit by several groups — including the League of Women Voters of Florida — challenging the newly-enacted law that put in new restrictions on the collection of mail-in ballots and the use of drop boxes. The groups contend the new law illegally targets elderly and disabled voters, as well as minority voters. […]

     […] Included in the records were several emails between Ingoglia and Ben Gibson, an attorney for the firm of Shutts and Bowen who has been chief counsel for the Republican Party of Florida the last two election cycles. […]

     one [provision] that would have given additional power to Florida’s secretary of state to investigate local election supervisors [did not make it into the bill]. […]

     Ingoglia also brushed aside the back-and-forth with Gruters. He said he was “very clear from the beginning” that allowing mail-in ballot requests to remain valid for two election cycles “was too long.”

     “I was on record for this well before any text message was received,” Ingoglia said. “This was a policy decision all along and had nothing to do with partisan reasons.” [Bullshit]

     Democrats who sharply criticized the voting legislation said they were not surprised that it was drawn up with the assistance of a top Republican attorney.

     […] State Sen. Annette Taddeo (D-Miami) said that if legislators wanted to improve Florida’s elections they would have relied more on local supervisors.

     “If this was truly about democracy and integrity of elections we would be taking the advice of experts,” Taddeo said. “Clearly this shows this was partisan — where they were colluding to undermine democracy.”

288. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 2:52 pm

     The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments about Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban on December 1. Link

     Graham found Trump election fraud arguments suitable for ‘third grade’: Woodward book. Link

     […] After Giuliani and Trump’s legal team provided Graham with documents that allegedly raised questions about vote totals in several states, Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, sent them to the Lee Holmes, the panel’s top legal counsel, Woodward and Robert Costa write, according to the Post.

     “Holmes found the sloppiness, the overbearing tone of certainty, and the inconsistencies disqualifying,” the authors added. “The memos, he determined, ‘added up to nothing.’ ” […]

289. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 3:01 pm

     Wonkette: “Tampa Officials Shocked To Learn Evicting Black People For Basically No Reason Miiiiight Be Considered Racist”

     https://www.wonkette.com/tampa-eviction

     So it turns out the Tampa, Florida, police department has been encouraging landlords to evict their [usually Black] tenants, in the name of “crime prevention.”

     Because, as we all know, making people homeless is a great way to reduce crime.

     Oh wait, it’s not? We, in fact, live in a country with a huge homeless to jail pipeline? And homelessness leads to people being cited and arrested for minor offenses while just trying to live their lives? Was the city of Tampa just ruining people’s lives for funsies, in the names of racism and gentrification? You know, ALLEGEDLY?

     […] Last week, the Tampa Bay Times published a detailed exposé about how the Tampa Police Department was intentionally making people homeless. It is shocking, and Wonkette is not often shocked.

     WTF?

     In 2013, Tampa police created what they call the “Crime-Free Multi Housing Program.” As part of the program, the Tampa Police Department sent notices to participating landlords when their tenants were arrested. Many of these tenants and their families were subsequently evicted or forced to move.

     Very dangerous and serious crimes cops decided to inform people’s landlords about included shoplifting and driving with a suspended license. An entire family was evicted after a teenager was accused of stealing $4.44 in change from parked cars. One man had a notice sent to his landlords after being arrested for panhandling (which, it should be noted, is an activity protected by the First Amendment).

     Ninety percent of the 1,100 people narc-ed on to their landlords were Black. Three-quarters of the apartment complexes in question were majority Black — the largest of which was the Tampa Bay Housing Authority, where some of the city’s most at-risk residents live.

     Police reported more than 100 people arrested for misdemeanors. In dozens of cases, the people in question had the charges against them dropped. That’s right — people were evicted because of alleged “crimes” that were never even prosecuted. Although the program was supposed to be about crime happening at the residences, at least 140 people were reported for alleged crimes that happened nowhere near their residences. And, incredibly, it gets worse, as some people were reported to their landlords for things that didn’t even result in an arrest.

     Jasmine Backer, a single mother who suffers from anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder, was taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation. Police sent her landlord a “Tenant Criminal Violation” and she was evicted. She was homeless and her kids had to stay with relatives for more than a year. At one point, she slept on a park bench while five months pregnant.

     Darryle Jackson and his two-year-old daughter were evicted from their Robles Park home after Darryle’s brother was arrested for possession of marijuana. His brother hadn’t lived in the apartment for six months. The charges were eventually dropped. […]

     Entirely unsurprisingly, most of the reports and evictions have been at Robles Park Village, an area the city and developers are working to gentrify.

     The eviction program didn’t just operate as a nice, easy way to attack Black people, it also helped pave the way for the city and developers to gentrify Robles Park. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that rent in the Tampa Bay area is rising faster than in any other metro area in the country.

     According to the Tampa Housing Authority’s descriptions of the plans for Robles Park Village, “85 percent of the new development will be ‘affordable rental housing,’ while the remaining 15 percent is set to be at market-rate or higher with 77 luxury townhouses lining the property.” Local residents say they have been told essentially nothing about what’s going to happen to them. One resident says she thinks the entire project is “designed to push us out as far as possible,” with the next closest Section 8 development a half-hour drive away.

     Evicting low-income people of color to make way for rich white people is nothing new. Last year, a former Atlanta PD officer wrote about how he left the force after realizing he was being told to aggressively police a specific Midtown Atlanta area just to make room for a new development.

     Isn’t this fucking illegal???

     Yes. Yes it is.

     The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing, including actions that have a disproportionate impact against a group based on protected categories like race. As the notices the Tampa PD sent were about Black people a whopping 90 percent of the time, we would say that prooooooobably qualifies.

     The day after the Tampa Bay Times report came out, a bunch of civil rights groups, including the NAACP, ACLU, ACLU of Florida, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and NYU Law Civil Rights Clinic sent a letter to Castor and the city council demanding the city end the program. City council member Orlando Gudes, a former police officer who represents an area largely impacted by the program, sent a letter to Castor, asking her to suspend the program.

     The ACLU has filed lawsuits challenging similar programs in other cities around the country.

     But wait!

     Something good already happened in response to the Tampa Bay Times investigation!

     On Saturday, Castor announced that the city’s program is being reformed. Under the new requirements, the police will only tell landlords about “certain serious drug and violent felonies” that occur on their properties. A police captain will have to sign off on all notices sent.

     That’s great! But it’s not enough. The Tampa PD is still going to report people for arrests, not convictions, which ipso facto means they will still be targeting people who are legally presumed to be innocent.

     Like Yvette Lewis, the Hillsborough County NAACP president said, “This program needs to be stopped. You’re treating housing as though it’s a privilege.”

290. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 3:15 pm

     Josh Marshall: “Kyrsten Sinema’s Final Senate Term”

     Like many people I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Kyrsten Sinema’s motivations this year. […] what I’ve focused on more recently is that as near as I can see, unless she shifts her stance pretty dramatically the odds of Sinema being elected to a second Senate term in 2024 are pretty poor. […] does she just misread the politics of her situation that badly or is she not planning on running?

     […] 2020 was the last election cycle in which it was possible to run for Senate as a Democrat and support retaining the legislative filibuster in something like its current form. That may not apply in West Virginia. But I’m pretty sure it applies in the 49 other states. […] among active politically engaged Democrats it is close to the central issue of politics. And it’s really not a left-right thing. It’s that central because pretty much whatever your big issue is it’s the filibuster that stands in the way – whether it’s climate, jobs and fiscal policy, choice, immigration, labor. Anything and everything.

     I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on the dynamics of Democratic primaries. And I think the debate in which you say that you support the filibuster because we’ve all got to come together and bipartisanship … well, I think that’s the day your campaign ends.

     Some incumbents might be able to slip through with some weasel words. But basically 48 senators are down with some kind of significant reform of the filibuster. […]

     So that’s my premise and I think it’s a strong, almost inarguable one.

     But she’s an incumbent and Dems can’t spare any Senate seats, you say. Absolutely. And those who know me will know I virtually never favor primarying incumbents. Why? Because the things that get partisans mad at them are almost always things they’re doing because they know their districts or states. […]

     Given what has already happened and especially if infrastructure, democracy protection, immigration and a lot else goes down in flames, it seems like a moral certainty that Sinema will face a primary challenger and I think she’ll have a run for her money at best.

     […] Let’s say things more or less come together on infrastructure but voting rights and a bunch of other stuff goes down in flames. She and Joe Manchin will be the main reasons for that. How well will Sinema be able to sell that record in a Democratic primary? I wouldn’t want to be in charge of running that campaign. What’s her argument exactly? This is wildly more so if her antics crater this infrastructure package.

     […] I’m not saying she can’t win a second term. But the odds seem long to me. I mean, even if she were the most popular Democrat in the country that would be a challenging race.

     Now the best rejoinder to this is, ‘Josh, please, that’s three years from now, an eternity in politics.’ No doubt. But some memories don’t fade quickly. It’s certainly possible that she ends up shifting and helps pass some key legislation in this Congress. Maybe infrastructure/reconciliation comes together and then she sees the light on the filibuster and a democracy bill passes. That all shifts things pretty significantly. But if there’s some reason to think that’s going to happen … well, I’d love to see it.

     […] There’s also a decent chance that Democrats will have lost control of Congress. So what didn’t get done in 2021 and 2022 can’t happen until 2025 at the earliest and maybe not even then. It just seems to me that a lot of Democrats will be looking for someone to blame. And the best option for who to blame is the person who actually is to blame: Kyrsten Sinema.

     Now what about Joe Manchin? Why does he get a pass?

     Well, obviously he doesn’t get a pass. But Manchin is in a very, very different position. First of all he’s 74. It’s not certain he’ll even run again in 2024. And any Democrat who has a clue knows that he is the only Democrat who can hold a Senate seat in West Virginia. Donald Trump got 69% of the vote there in 2020. 69%!!!! Manchin may suck and he may drive you crazy. But all his actions have a strong logic given his state. And clearly he has years of goodwill built up there. Primarying Joe Manchin would be a joke and if somehow you managed to beat or damage him you lose the seat anyway.

     […] Joe Manchin is sui generis as a Democrat in West Virginia. Kyrsten Sinema just isn’t that in Arizona at all.

     […] in a state like Arizona for a Democrat to win they’ve got to have the whole Democratic coalition united. United and pumped. Again, that’s hard for me to see. And that’s why I don’t see her getting a second term.

     […] A really neat and economical explanation for all this is that she does not plan on running for a second term.

     I can’t makes sense of her motivations. But I do feel like I have a sense of Democratic primary electorates and what a candidate needs to do to win in a closely divided purple states. And neither makes me think she has a political future, at least as a Democrat, after 2024.

291. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 3:22 pm

     You know how conservatives claim to be “the party of personal responsibility”? Obviously, it’s a crock. But at the very least, it’s fun to see the extremes they go to in refusing responsibility for their own actions.

     As you are likely aware, conservatives are killing themselves off in frightening numbers by refusing to vaccinate and take the COVID vaccine seriously. […] And it’s not just anecdotal. The evidence is clear. [chart available at the link]

     In short, the redder the county, the higher the death toll. At this point, it’s intuitive and common sense—the people who refuse to accept the pandemic reality are the same people doing the dying. Now imagine places like Florida, suffering around 2,500 dead per week, and how that might impact the state’s historically tight elections? The official margin in the 2000 presidential election was 537 votes, statewide. In the 2018 governor’s race, Gov. Ron DeSantis, merchant of death, won by just 32,463 votes. In that same year’s Senate race, Sen. Rick Scott won by just 10,033.

     Republicans are literally murdering their margin of victory.

     So if you’re a conservative and maybe don’t want your people to extinguish themselves—not because it’s the human thing to do, but because it might affect you electorally—what do you do? Well, you can’t look in the mirror or to Donald Trump, Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, the entire AM talk radio sphere, and a vast online network of misinformation and disinformation sites peddling the anti-vaxx gospel. Nah, that would be too much like “taking personal responsibility.”

     It’s much easier to blame the liberals. [See comment 273.]

     […] There is no reason or logic that will appeal to that crowd. They respond to one thing: raw, ugly, emotion. And thus, suicide by COVID isn’t the fault of a vast conservative movement and a former president that created the conditions for vaccine skepticism to rise. Instead, it’s the fault of those dastardly liberals.

     Why, liberals know that conservatives will always do the opposite of what they say! If a liberal said, “please conservative friend, get chemotherapy to try and beat this cancer,” the conservative would immediately sniff out the trickery! “Aha! Nice try, liberal fiend! I will not get chemotherapy!”

     So while liberals desperately clamored to get the life-saving jab (because being in the hospital on life support for an avoidable disease is stupid, and dying even more so), conservatives saw all of that—and smelled a rat. […]

     The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.

     […] It doesn’t want to feel like a “cuck.”

     It doesn’t want to feel like it’s “caving” to liberals.

     Why, they’d rather be owning the libs! Rolling coal around Priuses and cyclists. Wearing MAGA hats. Serving Papa John’s pizza at weddings. Everything Marjorie Taylor-Green does. The antics of James O’Keefe. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reading Green Eggs and Ham. That’s the stuff that gets them excited, not a treatise on economics from the Heritage Foundation. In a piece aptly titled “Hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism,” Paul Waldman wrote, “the one thing that unites the right and drives the GOP is hatred of liberals. That hatred has consumed every policy goal, every ideological principle and even every ounce of commitment to country.”

     Hate is a feeling. It’s literally all they have left.

     […] Vaccines came out early this year. No one was bullying or taunting or ridiculing anyone. We were all too busy refreshing vaccination site websites, desperate to score our jab appointments. The science was in, the results were available, and millions were getting vaccinated on a daily basis if anyone wanted to take a “wait and see” attitude before taking their own plunge.

     Yet when the dust settled, vaccination rates trailed off, and we got to look at who was left, it turns out it was conservatives. And so everyone asked them nicely. Heck, even Donald F’n Trump asked them. And they booed him. […]

     Conservatives have no agency. They have no ability to think for themselves. They are driven by “feelings” of being mocked or ridiculed. They are so weak that they would rather die than listen to sage medical advice. […]

     I didn’t realize we had that massive power, to exterminate an entire political movement by simply asking them to not die. […]

     Link

292. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

     20 September 2021 at 4:49 pm

     4 sequoias survive KNP Complex blaze after being wrapped in fire-resistant material.

     Four famous giant sequoia trees survived the KNP Complex fire after being wrapped in fire-resistant material, authorities said, according to the Associated Press.
     The fire reached the edge of Giant Forest in California’s Sequoia National Park, but the Four Guardsmen, a group of trees that form a natural entryway on the road to the forest, were unharmed. The base of the trees had been wrapped in fire-resistant material and nearby vegetation had been removed, the firefighting management team said in a statement Sunday.
     There has been concern over the safety of the largest tree in the world, the General Sherman tree, which is also in Giant Forest, as the wildfires threatened the national park. As of Monday, the General Sherman and the Four Guardsmen have remained unharmed.

     I saw the General Sherman in person in 1960. Very impressive.

293. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 5:57 pm

     NBC News:

     The Biden administration will require all international travelers coming into the United States to be fully vaccinated and tested for Covid-19 under a new system that will open up air travel to vaccinated foreign nationals from dozens of countries for the first time since the early days of the pandemic.

     Wall Street Journal:

     The Biden administration will extend the open enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act by 30 days, giving people more time to sign up for coverage as the worsening Covid-19 pandemic contributes to upheaval in the job market where many get health insurance.

294. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 5:59 pm

     Another cruel ploy from Republican governors that did not work:

     States that ended federal unemployment benefits earlier this summer saw August job growth at less than half the rate of states that retained the benefits, according to new data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. […]

     Axios link

295. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 6:03 pm

     blf @291, glad to hear those trees survived!

     In other news: Democratic Leadership Calls GOP Bluff: Vote For Bill, Or Risk Shutdown AND Debt Default

     Democratic leadership on Monday tied suspending the debt ceiling to keeping the government funded.

     The two will be wrapped together in the same continuing resolution, challenging Republicans to either vote for it, or risk sparking a government shutdown and economic global catastrophe stemming from the United States defaulting on its debts. The government funding would last through December of 2021, and the suspended debt ceiling through December 2022.

     “Addressing the debt limit is about meeting obligations the government has already made, like the bipartisan emergency COVID relief legislation from December as well as vital payments to Social Security recipients and our veterans,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote. “Furthermore, as the Administration warned last week, a reckless Republican-forced default could plunge the country into a recession.”

     The Democrats added, pointedly, that suspending the debt limit through December 2022 would be a period commensurate with the debt incurred by the COVID relief package that was written by Republicans and signed into law in December 2020 by former President Donald Trump.

     President Joe Biden endorsed the plan Monday afternoon.

     […] Congressional Republicans have played games with the debt ceiling before in an attempt to extract concessions from the Obama administration. While they never followed through on ultimately refusing to raise the debt ceiling, such antics in 2011 resulted in a downgrade of the United States’ credit rating.

     Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has made the media rounds in his eagerness to put raising the debt ceiling squarely on Democrats’ shoulders. He made remarks from the Senate floor Monday afternoon.

     “Senate Republicans would support a clean continuing resolution that included appropriate disaster relief and targeted Afghan assistance,” he said. “We will not support legislation that raises the debt limit.”

     In an ironic pivot, he also chided Democrats for putting “partisan wish lists” over “basic government duties.”

     If Republicans torpedo the bill, though, Democrats do have another option to avert catastrophe. Though Democratic leadership is loath to do it, they could address the debt ceiling in the reconciliation package — something McConnell has clearly been gunning for from the start. It would inflate the package’s topline cost, already a tension point with Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and threaten its passage.

     That backup option, and the knowledge that Democrats have historically been less inclined to flirt with complete economic collapse to score some political points, will likely give Republicans a comfortable escape route from voting for the continuing resolution.

296. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 6:08 pm

     Apologies. That was Nerd who alerted us to the survival of those magnificent trees. See comment 291.

297. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 6:12 pm

     Wonkette:

     […] What amount of money would it take for you to sit maskless across the table from that nutbag Mike Lindell? Quite aside from the wisdom of giving official sanction to this charlatan, it’s grossly irresponsible for elected officials to be appearing maskless and in a closed room with visitors from other states. Particularly when the state’s hospitals are still overwhelmed with COVID patients and the only state with a lower rate of vaccination than Alabama is West Virginia.

     But whatever germs he did or did not bring with him, Mike Lindell was there in his regular capacity as a superspreader of election misinformation. Preaching the gospel of pillows and PCAPs, Lindell promised to “audit” the state’s voter rolls to see if there were any dead people casting ballots. Which sounds nefarious, but if that freakshow wants to cough up $37,000 just to embarrass himself some more — that’s a penny per record for every registered voter in the state — he can have at it.

     “We know we don’t put people on the voter rolls unless they’re qualified to be on the voter rolls,” Merrill told AL.com.

     Lindell also made claims about the vulnerability of Alabama’s voting machines to hackers, although without presenting any evidence, as is his wont.

     “He still believes there’s a potential to hack some equipment, even though we assured him none of our equipment is connected to the internet,” Merrill said, according to AL.com, pointing out that Alabama’s machines don’t even have modems.

     “You can’t impact any of our equipment that way, but he believes it’s possible to hack into our system, so he’s going to run some tests,” he added.

     Ah, yes, Mike Lindell and his tests. He is very good at the cyber and will definitely deliver the goods. You know, unless he’s thwarted again by Antifa armpit ninjas.

     After a productive meeting with the SOS, Commander Pornstache headed down the hall for a grip and grin with Gov. Kay Ivey. Because Republicans have lost their damn minds and refuse to tamp down these fraudulent claims of fraud, even after our seat of government was literally attacked by crazy people who buy into that shit.

     Indeed, Merrill refused to say whether he believes President Joe Biden was legitimately elected, although he insisted his state’s ballot was totally secure.

     “I know that our election administration is the best in the nation,” he said, going on to congratulate himself on having passed the Mike Lindell Gooder Electioning Test. “As far as our state’s concerned, we moved light years ahead of where we were in his mind before he came to Alabama today.”

     We are sooooooooo fucked. […]

     Link

298. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 6:19 pm

     […] Mississippi, with its highest poverty rate in the nation, highest infant mortality rate, and its 39th place in education, has added a new “badge of honor”: the highest death toll per capita from COVID-19 in the entire United States. With that in mind, CNN host Jake Tapper invited Mississippi GOP Governor Tate Reeves to appear on “State Of The Union” this weekend.

     Tapper played a clip of President Joe Biden vaguely alluding to Reeves, who called Biden’s vaccine mandates “a tyrannical-type move,” and then asked an obvious question. [video is available at the link]

     TAPPER: [S]tepping aside from the idea of President Biden imposing this, why are you and the Mississippi legislature willing to impose mandates for other vaccines, but not when it comes to the COVID vaccine that you yourself have gotten?
     Reeves poorly tried to explain why mandates are OK for other vaccines but not for COVID, and tried to downshift to what we’re guessing is some sort of Fox News or OAN talking point:

     REEVES: The president does not have the authority to do this. He knows he doesn’t have the authority to do this, in my opinion, but he wants to change the political narrative away from Afghanistan and away from the other issues that are driving his poll numbers into the ground and focus on anything, particularly a political fight, other than those issues.

     Tapper countered by pointing out 660,000 Americans have died and that Biden is using the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to keep employees safe. Rather than having an argument for these facts, Reeves responded with a hollow “thoughts and prayers” for those that died while making BS “slippery slope” arguments about vaccine mandates.

     Tapper then tried pointing out that if Mississippi were a country, it would be the second worst in the world for per capita COVID deaths. Reeves responded with some weirdo folksy conservative malarkey about how maybe the country would be better off if Congress was part time like Mississippi’s legislature. We didn’t say it made sense. […]

     TAPPER: [W]ith all due respect, Governor, your way is failing. Are you going to try to change anything to change this horrible statistic from what you’re doing already?

     REEVES: Yes, well, obviously, the — in Mississippi, our legislature is a part-time legislature. I — sometimes, I wonder if in America if our Congress was part-time, we wouldn’t be in a better position. But let’s talk a little bit about…

     TAPPER: Better position than what?

     REEVES: … Mississippi and where we are with the virus.

     TAPPER: Your state is second worst — second worst in the world. I mean, I — how can you say that?

     The reason Reeves could say that is because Republicans don’t get what an oxymoron that is. They constantly speak about how “government is bad, so elect me to fix it” then proceed to break it more.

     After Reeves compared Mississippi to other states having spikes in COVID cases and incorrectly claiming Biden thinks only red states are affected, Tapper point blank asked Reeves for a simple answer to a simple question.

     TAPPER: What are you going to do to change this?

     REEVES The best way that Americans — the best way — the best thing for Americans to do to protect themselves from the virus — and, again, we believe in personal responsibility. Individual Americans and individual Mississippians…

     TAPPER: So, you’re not going to change anything?

     REEVES … can take — make those decisions to take care of themselves.

     You could tell at this point that Tapper was getting exasperated. It was not made better when Reeves tried the “look over there!” trick.

     REEVES: If you want to talk about cases right now, talk about Kentucky or West Virginia or what’s happening in North Carolina, or moving into Southern Virginia. This virus is very transmissible.

     TAPPER: I’m asking you about your state. But — I’m not going to ask you about West Virginia or Kentucky. I’m going to ask you about your state. […] I’m saying to you, your way’s not working. […] Mississippi now has, if it were its own country, the second worst per capita death rate in the world, behind only Peru. And I’m saying, are you going to try to do anything to change that? And I’m — I’m not hearing an answer.

     REEVES: Well, what I have said to you repeatedly, Jake, is that Mississippi has taken action. […] In these other states that you refuse to talk about, perhaps because they have Democrat governors, you don’t want to talk about them. But the reality is that you and the president and so many other people want to make this about politics…

     TAPPER: The governor of West Virginia is a Republican.

     REEVES: …This virus is not just attacking Republicans in red states. This — this virus is not just attacking Republicans in red states. This virus is attacking Republicans and Democrats in red states and in blue states. […] And what we ought to be talking about is, what can we do to minimize the deaths going forward? The president’s not focused on saving lives. The president’s focused on a — taking unilateral action to show — to show his power, to show that he’s doing something, but that’s not going to solve things.

     TAPPER: […] The governor of West Virginia’s a Republican. But, Governor Tate Reeves, I’m obviously not going to have a governor come on to talk about other states. I’m going to talk about your state.

     It shouldn’t be surprising that Republicans never take responsibility. Especially a clown like Tate Reeves. We wish Republicans would elect better people, but they’re getting worse, not better.

     Link

299. tomh says

     20 September 2021 at 6:21 pm

     Re: #272

     WaPo:
     Texas doctor who violated state’s abortion ban is sued, launching potential first test of constitutionality
     By Ann E. Marimow / September 20, 2021

     A lawsuit that could test the constitutionality of the nation’s most restrictive abortion ban was filed in Texas Monday against a doctor who admitted to performing an abortion considered illegal under the new law.

     The details of the civil suit against Alan Braid, a physician in San Antonio, are as unusual as the law itself, which empowers private citizens to enforce the ban on abortion once cardiac activity has been detected — often as early as six weeks into pregnancy.

     Braid stepped forward last week to say that he provided an abortion to a woman who was in the early stages of pregnancy, but beyond the state’s limit. Despite the risks, Braid said he acted because of his duty as a doctor and “because she has a fundamental right to receive this care.”…

     On Monday, an Arkansas man said he decided to file a lawsuit to test the constitutionality of the Texas measure after reading a news report about Braid’s declaration. Oscar Stilley, a former lawyer convicted of tax fraud in 2010, said he is not personally opposed to abortion, but believes that the measure should be subject to judicial review.

     “If the law is no good, why should we have to go through a long, drawn-out process to find out if it’s garbage?” Stilley said in an interview after filing the complaint in state court in Bexar County, Tex., which includes San Antonio.

     He also noted that a successful lawsuit could result in an award in court of at least $10,000 for the plaintiff.

     “If the state of Texas decided it’s going to give a $10,000 bounty, why shouldn’t I get that $10,000 bounty?” said Stilley, who is currently serving his 15-year federal sentence on home confinement.
     […]

     Braid, whose clinics are represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, declined to comment through the legal organization.

     “S.B. 8 says that ‘any person’ can sue over a violation, and we are starting to see that happen, including by out-of-state claimants,” Marc Hearron, the group’s senior counsel, said in a statement.

     So the first lawsuit to enforce this law comes from a convicted felon in Arkansas serving a 15 year federal sentence.

300. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 6:27 pm

     Follow-up to tomh in comment 272.

     Texas doctor who violated state’s abortion ban is sued, launching potential first test of constitutionality.

     Washington Post link

     A lawsuit that could test the constitutionality of the nation’s most restrictive abortion ban was filed in Texas Monday against a doctor who admitted to performing an abortion considered illegal under the new law.

     The details of the civil suit against Alan Braid, a physician in San Antonio, are as unusual as the law itself, which empowers private citizens to enforce the ban on abortion once cardiac activity has been detected — often as early as six weeks into pregnancy.

     Braid stepped forward last week to say that he provided an abortion to a woman who was in the early stages of pregnancy, but beyond the state’s limit. Despite the risks, Braid said he acted because of his duty as a doctor and “because she has a fundamental right to receive this care.”

     […] On Monday, an Arkansas man said he decided to file a lawsuit to test the constitutionality of the Texas measure after reading a news report about Braid’s declaration. Oscar Stilley, a former lawyer convicted of tax fraud in 2010, said he is not personally opposed to abortion, but believes that the measure should be subject to judicial review.

     “If the law is no good, why should we have to go through a long, drawn-out process to find out if it’s garbage?” Stilley said in an interview after filing the complaint in state court in Bexar County, Tex., which includes San Antonio.

     […] “If the state of Texas decided it’s going to give a $10,000 bounty, why shouldn’t I get that 10,000 bounty?” said Stilley, who is currently serving his 15-year federal sentence on home confinement.

     That the first legal challenge to the Texas law came from a convicted felon in Arkansas was somewhat surprising. The antiabortion group Texas Right to Life has been gatheringanonymous tips about potential violations, but had not yet filed a lawsuit — in part because abortion providers and clinics said they were complying with the law. The group has also been temporarily barred by state court decisions from suing certain providers in parts of the state.

     […] The Texas law took effect Sept. 1 and was designed to avoid judicial scrutiny by barring state officials, who would typically be the target of lawsuits, from enforcing the ban.

     Instead, private citizens are charged with enforcing the ban by filing civil lawsuits against anyone who helps a woman get an abortion.

     Abortion providers sued to try to stop the law, saying it is at odds with the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a right to abortion before viability, usually around 22 to 24 weeks into pregnancy. But the high court allowed the measure to stand while litigation continues.

     […] the justices said opponents, who sued state judges and court clerks, had not clearly shown that their lawsuit targeted the right people because government officials cannot enforce the law.

     Separately, the Biden administration sued the state of Texas this month to block the law. A judge in Austin has set a hearing in that case for Oct. 1.

     Until Braid’s public admission, abortion clinics in Texas said they were abiding by the new restrictions and sending women to Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico to terminate their pregnancies. The law bars abortion at a time when many women do not yet realize they are pregnant. There are no exceptions in the law for rape, sexual abuse or incest.

     Braid, who owns Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services, said in his column that since the law took effect, he has discussed with patients how they might access abortion services in another state.

     He advised one woman, who is 42 with four children, to travel to Oklahoma — a nine-hour drive one way — and offered to help with funding.

     “She told me she couldn’t go even if we flew her in a private jet,” he wrote. “‘Who’s going to take care of my kids?’ she asked me. ‘What about my job? I can’t miss work.’ ”

301. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 6:28 pm

     tomh @298, Ha! Great minds are synchronized.

302. tomh says

     20 September 2021 at 7:59 pm

     Re: 300
     :)

303. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 9:45 pm

     https://twitter.com/johnholman100/status/1439948289680363527

     “This is why your country’s shit, because you use your women for this!” — mounted Border Patrol officer to Haitian migrant he was riding down, as he sheltered with his family.

     Video at the link.

304. Lynna, OM says

     20 September 2021 at 9:48 pm

     https://twitter.com/SawyerHackett/status/1439976012188692496

     Border patrol is mounted on horseback rounding up Haitian refugees with whips.

     This is unfathomable cruelty towards people fleeing disaster and political ruin. The administration must stop this.

     Photos and video at the link.

305. blf says

     21 September 2021 at 11:13 am

     Lynna@294, Thanks… 😁

     I don’t specially recall ever being to see to General Sherman or the Four Guardsmen, albeit I have been in the vicinity.

     I am happy to hear they — and other trees — are not currently in danger, albeit I presume the risk hasn’t passed&helllip; and the mildly deranged penguin is also happy, albeit the trees do not harbour any cheeses. (I think I need to have another talk with her about priorities, pyrotechnics, and walruses.)

306. quotetheunquote says

     21 September 2021 at 11:17 am

     Meanwhile, in Canada…

     … a federal election that really had no point has just concluded; minority Liberal government out, new Liberal minority government in. I’m just happy that we’re not stuck with a Conservative government this time, it’s quite a relief.*

     One unalloyed bit of good news came out of this election – the Green party candidate won in my riding! That’s a first, I actually got the MP I voted for!
     “the”

     *(Their campaign slogan, for those outside of this country, was a vaguely sinister, dog-whistle-y “Secure the Future”; not exactly Nazi, but definitely Nazi-adjacent).

307. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 12:00 pm

     Ten years after the demise of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Biden administration is making discharged veterans eligible for benefits.

     It was nearly three decades ago when the Clinton administration, in the clumsy pursuit of some kind of compromise, created the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for openly gay Americans who volunteer to serve in the military. To put it mildly, it was not altogether effective, and thousands of servicemen and women were discharged unfairly.

     […] the Biden administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs issued new guidance, making veterans who were discharged under the old policy eligible for benefits.

     In a blog post on the V.A.’s website, Kayla Williams, the assistant secretary for public affairs in the V.A.’s Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, said that veterans who were given other than honorable discharges based on homosexual conduct, gender identity or H.I.V. status “are considered veterans” who may be eligible for all V.A. benefits. The “other than honorable” discharge blocked tens of thousands of veterans from obtaining the full range of services and care.

     Williams, herself a bisexual veteran, explained, “L.G.B.T.Q.+ veterans are not any less worthy of the care and services that all veterans earn through their service, and V.A. is committed to making sure that they have equal access to those services.”

     The Times report added, “Those affected by the policy may now qualify for benefits including guaranteed home loans, compensation and pension, health care, housing assistance and burial benefits, barring any statutory or regulatory issue with their military record.”

     […] In November 2010, the Department of Defense released the results of its yearlong study, which found that more than 70 percent of respondents were comfortable with ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

     […] A GOP filibuster was narrowly defeated on Dec. 18, 2010, and the Democratic-led Senate approved the repeal of the policy soon after. It passed on a 65-to-31 vote, which may seem lopsided, but note the context: Even after every question had been answered, even after every concern was addressed, even after every “scary” scenario was examined and discredited, three out of four Senate Republicans voted against it anyway.

     […] Pentagon leaders scrutinized the post-DADT military, and examined the concerned predictions raised by the right: There would be weakened recruiting, poor morale, a breakdown in unit cohesion, and an inevitable lack of readiness. Defense Department officials found each of these to be wrong once openly gay Americans were able to serve.

     There’s no word from the 31 Senate Republicans — many of whom are still in the chamber — about whether they have any regrets for trying to derail DADT’s repeal.

     At the signing ceremony 10 years ago, Obama noted before signing the bill, “No longer will our country be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans who are forced to leave the military — regardless of their skills, no matter their bravery or their zeal, no matter their years of exemplary performance — because they happen to be gay. No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder in order to serve the country that they love.”

     Good news.

     In the past, Republicans were on the wrong side of the issue. They still are.

308. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 12:07 pm

     Ted Cruz plans to filibuster an extension of the debt ceiling. His rationale is based on a rather obvious lie.

     In theory, there’s no cause for alarm. Congress needs to prevent a government shutdown, address the debt ceiling and provide emergency disaster relief funding, which is why Democratic leaders have packaged the priorities into one bill that they intend to pass before the deadlines. The circumstances are identical to those seen four years ago this month, when the issues were resolved — in a bipartisan way — without drama.

     In practice, however, Congress’ Republican minority has said it will not support the bill, regardless of the consequences for the country. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reiterated again yesterday, “I’ve explained this clearly and consistently for over two months: We do not have divided government. Democrats do not need our help. They have every tool to address the debt limit on their own.”

     That’s partially true. Democrats have a majority in the House, a majority in the Senate and control of the White House. If Republicans, for whatever petty reason, insist on withholding GOP support from the must-pass bill, the measure can still pass.

     That is, unless Republicans in the Senate filibuster the bill, effectively telling Democrats, “You must pass this legislation on your own, and we won’t allow you to pass this legislation on your own.”

     Sen. Ted Cruz indicated last week that he intends to push the nation closer to a deliberate, self-imposed crisis, and as NBC News reported yesterday, the Texas Republican isn’t backing away from his threat to crash the economy on purpose.

     Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, promised to filibuster it, saying there is ‘no universe’ in which he would consent to allowing a simple majority vote on extending the debt limit.

     The GOP senator added that extending the debt limit would make it “easier for [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer and the Democrats to add trillions more in debt.”

     That doesn’t make any sense.

     There are plenty of members of Congress who are badly confused about the substantive details of governing. As a rule, Cruz isn’t one of them. I’ve long argued that the Texas Republican’s principle political problem is not that he’s dumb, but rather, that he assumes everyone else is dumb.

     His comments on the debt ceiling capture the problem nicely. As Cruz surely knows, raising the debt ceiling allows the United States to pay its bills, not to clear the way for new spending. The process is about paying for the stuff Congress already bought in the past, not giving lawmakers approval to buy new stuff in the future.

     The GOP senator, in other words, is preparing to block important legislation — a bill that would prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations for the first time in our history — based on a rather obvious lie.

     If Cruz follows through on his gambit and his effort succeeds, the results would be catastrophic. As The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell explained in her new column:

     The government would have trouble paying Social Security checks, military salaries and all the creditors who’d previously lent money to Uncle Sam. A default would also violate the Constitution, which says ‘the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.’ Finally, it would trigger chaos throughout the global financial system. Financial markets currently treat U.S. debt as virtually risk-free, with all other assets benchmarked against it. If we demonstrate that our debt is not really risk-free — that we’re instead cavalier about repaying our creditors — panic would tear through other markets as well.

     Again, Cruz knows this. So do McConnell and many other congressional Republicans. They’ve decided to play with matches anyway, even if it’s their own country’s economy that burns.

     […] Cruz can play his dangerous game, but it’ll fail if other GOP senators derail his scheme and allow Democrats to hold an up-or-down vote on the bill before it’s too late.

309. tomh says

     21 September 2021 at 12:10 pm

     Re: #299
     Another disbarred lawyer (this one from Illinois) has filed suit re: the Texas abortion ban, although this one asks the Bexar County Court to declare the law in violation of Roe and therefore unconstitutional. Apparently, disbarred lawyers have a lot of time on their hands.

     These lawsuits are not what the anti-abortion forces envisioned. “Neither of these lawsuits are valid attempts to save innocent human lives,” said John Seago, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, which lobbied for the new abortion law. “Both cases are self-serving legal stunts, abusing the cause of action created in the Texas Heartbeat Act for their own purposes.”

310. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 12:41 pm

     Texas restaurant owner doubles down on anti-mask policy after kicking out mask-wearing parents

     Another Doofus-Dunderhead-Death Cult report.

     As the nation continues to face the novel coronavirus pandemic, we’ve seen states and cities address mask requirements in a number of ways. The safest option, of course, has been to either entirely close recreational businesses, like restaurants and bars, or to go take-out only. In areas where case numbers have reduced, many places have moved to ask for either proof of vaccination, proof of a negative COVID-19 test, or ask all folks to wear masks while dining or picking up items inside.

     On the opposite end of the spectrum, however, one restaurant and bar in North Texas apparently has a policy in which no customers are allowed to wear masks while inside the establishment. […] one couple learned this the hard way when visiting Hang Time bar in Rowlett, Texas, with a few friends. Though the couple says they are both fully vaccinated, they wanted to wear masks inside to better protect their immunocompromised baby. Within 30 minutes of the time they sat down, however, they were asked to remove the masks or leave.

     “Our waitress came over, sat down next to me, and said, ‘Our manager told me to come over because I am nicer than he is… But this is political and I need you to take your masks off,” Natalie Wester told the outlet. Interestingly, the outlet reports that there is no sign outside the business informing potential customers about the mask policy. Instead, the hostess tells all customers who wear one that they have to take them off at the door.

     According to Natalie, she and her husband heard the hostess say something about masks when they entered the establishment but assumed she was asking them to lower their masks so she could check their IDs properly. Once at their table, she says the couple and their friends ordered drinks and appetizers. Within about half an hour, their waitress came over and gave them the ultimatum about keeping the masks on or leaving. Natalie adds that after explaining they have an immunocompromised baby, the waitress offered to wrap up their bill. The couple says they paid and left.

     Webber recounted her interaction with the employee in a Facebook post that has gained serious traction. “She then told me that masks are not allowed in their building,” Wester wrote. “And they can make the rules because they are private business.” Wester alleged that the hostess told them that masks don’t provide people with enough oxygen and that they don’t work.

     “I feel the overall reaction with masks is ridiculous in the United States right now,” Tom, the owner of the restaurant, told the outlet in an interview. He added that he’s put blood, sweat, and tears into his business, and he doesn’t want masks in there. Tom told the outlet he didn’t know the couple had an immunocompromised baby, but that he stands by his policy, and says the restaurant will continue to enforce it.

     That this policy should exist anywhere is concerning, period, but it’s especially so given the state of COVID-19 in Texas. We know, for example, that more than 90 hospitals in the state were out of ICU beds, according to federal data. People between the ages of 30 and 49 are being hospitalized in Texas at a concerning rate, almost doubling the previous high for the age range due to COVID-19 back in January. We also know that more public school students in Texas tested positive for the coronavirus in one week than at any time in the last school year, coming in at more than 20,000 cases since the academic year began.

     Video is available at the link.

311. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 12:49 pm

     Yeah, its always worse than we thought.

     […] CNN has made public a six-point memo from one of the attorneys who represented Trump in his failed lawsuits against various states, John Eastman. Eastman was previously best known for writing an op-ed claiming that, somehow, Kamala Harris was not an American citizen and was ineligible to be vice president. That op-ed was initially run by Newsweek, which then scrambled to issue an apology after other outlets made clear how Newsweek was spreading racism, xenophobia, and lies that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t provide citizenship to the children of immigrants.

     In the 2020 election, Eastman met with Pence and Trump in the White House and put forward a six-point plan where some previous speculation over what Trump wanted out of Pence assumed that the goal was to halt the count and turn the process into chaos, allowing Trump to litigate the election before the freshly-stocked-with-conservatives Supreme Court. That turns out not to be the case.

     The goal on January 6 was to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner of the election by simply leaving out seven states. And if anyone objected to that tactic, there was a backup plan for Pence to hand Trump the election through a second route.

     Eastman’s plan for Pence was simple: in his role as the president of the Senate, Pence was to call the roll of states normally until he got to Arizona, at which point Pence was to claim “that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States.” Pence was then to repeat this claim for the seven other states that Trump lost but claimed to have won.

     When the count was complete, this would mean that only 454 of the electors had been recognized. Pence was then to say that, of this 454, Trump had won 232. So, big smack of the gavel, Trump wins.

     Eastman’s memo anticipates “Howls, of course, from the Democrats.” However, Pence was to quiet any howling by moving to elect Trump through another means. That involved declaring that “no candidate has achieved the necessary majority” and taking the 12thAmendment remedy of polling the states by asking for a single vote from each slate of representatives. Since Republicans have a majority of House representatives in 26 states, and they were all expected to fall in line, Trump wins again.

     All of this was based on not one but two Big Lies.

     First, they required Pence to pretend that there was some question about the outcome in the seven states. There wasn’t. Pence knew there wasn’t. And that undisputed outcome gave President Joe Biden a decisive victory. In fact, Biden’s 306 to 232 victory exceeded Trump’s margin in 2016.

     Second, they required Pence to ignore the Electoral Count Act, in effect since 1887, which has no provision for Pence to take any of the actions in Eastman’s memo. When coming to Arizona or any other state, Pence’s total options under the Act are to call the name and listen to the results. The whole declaration of “multiple slates,” or the idea that any state could just be set aside, is not allowed.

     That was okay, according to Eastman, because Trump’s team believed the 134-year-old law, the law which has governed every election since that of Benjamin Harrison was unconstitutional. In pointing out why he considered the law unconstitutional, Eastman uses the same arguments about how state electors are certified by the governor that had already been rejected in dozens of court hearings.

     The goal wasn’t just to turn the Jan. 6 electoral count into chaos—though that certainly would have been the result—but to turn it into chaos while allowing Republicans to walk out of the room claiming that Trump won the election. And to litigate any follow-on action with Trump sitting in the White House.

     All of it was illegal as hell. However, it’s not as if there was someone on hand who could have easily said “no.” It’s not as if Nancy Pelosi could have raised her hand, explained the actual law, and seen the Republicans slink away in shame. Republicans in the Senate like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz came prepared to defend nonsensical claims about Trump’s “victory.” All but a handful of Republicans in the House had already demonstrated that they were on board. There is no doubt that the plan put forward in Eastman’s memo is illegal, unconstitutional, and nonsensical. There’s also no doubt that, had Pence moved to enact even the first step, the results would have been an insurgency inside the House chamber every bit as real as the one boiling up the steps outside the Capitol.

     […] Eastman is a former clerk for Clarence Thomas, the former dean of Chapman University School of Law (a private law school for those whose primary qualification is having enough cash to pay the tuition—i.e. Hugh Hewitt’s alma mater), and is the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the conservative Claremont Institute. Claremont, as The Daily Beast reported in July of 2020, “has arguably done more than any other group to build a philosophical case for Trump’s brand of conservatism.” And what is that case? As Slate explained one month later, Claremont “masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp.”

     […] Claremont is the intellectual center of Trumpism, and it is a racist fever swamp. From the swamp, John Eastman plotted how to overthrow the United States.

     And it’s all too easy to see how that might have resulted in Donald Trump, ensconced in the White House, a series of nonsense cases trotted out to a Supreme Court, and an American public left angry and confused at how easily their government fell.

     Link

312. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 12:58 pm

     Teachers dying:

     […] Before the first day of school in Florida, four teachers died from COVID-19 in the Broward County school system. […] since the start of the school year, 1,273 students and 435 employees have tested positive for COVID-19. This reported number is, naturally, lower than the actual numbers. Action News in Jacksonville, Florida, reports that since July “at least 15 teachers, staff from Jacksonville area have died of COVID-19.” Six of these teachers died within the last 30 days. Most of the teachers were in their 30s or 40s, some were in their 50s, and two were in their 60s and 70s respectively.

     Tennessee has seen at least 14 employees of their public schools die from COVID-19 since the start of the school year. […]

     […] States like Texas have no state agency tracking school employee deaths due to COVID-19. […] In May, news outlet WFAA began combing through “news reports, obituaries, fundraising accounts and social media posts,” and found “more than 80 Texas teachers, coaches, custodians, cafeteria workers, counselors, administrators, librarians, bus drivers, and other school employees who died from the coronavirus.”

     That was in May.

     WSBTV reports that since the start of this school year, “more than 35 Georgia teachers” and staff have lost their lives due to COVID-19. […] the exact vaccination status of the deceased is not known, but in the majority of cases where it is known, the person had not gotten a shot.

     […] Whether you believe in teacher unions or not, we can all get behind the concept that teachers dying preventable deaths is tragic. According to Education Week, which has been trying to update the numbers of educators and personnel who have passed during the pandemic: “As of Sept. 17, 2021, at least 1,116 active and retired K-12 educators and personnel have died of COVID-19. Of those, 361 were active teachers.”

     Link

     How this happened (in part, it is anti-mask and anti-vaccine activism, plus lack of support for testing and contact tracing):

     […] Places like Tennessee, Florida, and Texas have seen vitriolic protests by right-wing subsidized activists along with smaller groups of parents pushing against safety measures such as mask mandates on school campuses. The results have been predictable. […]

313. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 1:13 pm

     Oh, FFS. Haven’t they already gone too far with anti-abortion legislation?

     Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) last week signed a new abortion bill into law, further restricting access to the procedure in the state.

     Senate Bill 4 — which the Texas Legislature approved during the special session that ended on Sept. 2 — bans the use of abortion-inducing drugs in the state seven weeks into a pregnancy, according to The Dallas Morning News.

     The bill also allows people who “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” breach the law to be criminally charged, according to The Dallas Morning News. The penalty for such an action would be a state jail felony, which comes with fines of up to $10,000 and between 180 days and two years in prison.

     The law takes effect in December. […]

     Link

314. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 1:23 pm

     Follow-up to comment 310.

     Wonkette:

     The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reportedly obtained a memo from Trump legal advisor John Eastman that outlined the scenario in which then-Vice President Mike Pence would throw out the election results on January 6 and keep Donald Trump president, to the apparent delight of an overwhelming minority of Americans.

     Eastman [is] the same guy who pushed the racist argument that Kamala Harris wasn’t legally eligible to serve as vice president; [he served] as board chairman of the extremely extremist National Organization for Marriage, he had an awful lot of thoughts on homosexuality’s “barbarism” and supported Uganda’s kill-the-gays law; and he eagerly offered Trump a draft for the next Civil War.

     The memo proposed that Pence would claim that there were multiple slates of electors for Arizona. However, only President Joe Biden’s electors from that state were legitimate. If the fake electors Trump’s cronies in Arizona put forward counted, then Democrats could’ve just sent fake electors from Florida and Texas. Participation trophies for everyone!

     Election lawyer Marc Elias believes Eastman should be disbarred for sending this memo. We agree. […] https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1440146040607232007

     From CNN:

     3. At the end, [Pence] announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment — is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.

     There was no “ongoing dispute” in seven states. Trump lost every legal suit he filed, plus a few extra ones, and the Supreme Court ignored his more pathetic pleas to overturn the election. It’s also banana pants to think that Pence — who was on the presidential ballot and would directly benefit if Trump remained in office — could unilaterally reject the official Electoral College results. It’s not like he’s the Senate Parliamentarian. Besides, if the vice president were so empowered, Al Gore could’ve saved us a lot of trouble and declared on January 6, 2001: “The Supreme Court might’ve stopped the Florida recount, making Bush the technical winner, but we can change all that. You know why? Because I’m the president!”

     […] The key to this election heist apparently was that Pence not ask permission but just bum rush the show and let “the other side” (i.e. Americans, specifically the 81 million who voted for Joe Biden) challenge this in court. You might think, “Wait, the courts already rejected Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud, so they’ll just as easily tell him to GTFOH,” but implicit in this insidious plot is that Trump was betting on a violent response. […] even relatively minor unrest in city streets would’ve proven sufficient justification for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. […]

     I’ve already seen folks on Twitter suggesting that the coup only got as far as it did because the Electoral College results were “close” […] the 2020 election wasn’t “close” by any historical measure. Besides, MAGA didn’t embrace the Big Lie because it was plausible. […]

     The clock is ticking for us to hold every one of these motherfuckers responsible for their attack on democracy and forestall another coup. This is not a battle that we can win on the teeming fields of bipartisanship.

315. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 1:36 pm

     Follow-up to comment 306.

     Wonkette: “Did Joe Biden Ban High Testosterone Christians From Army? Tucker Carlson Says, Sure!”

     Tucker Carlson made it weird again. And, you know, it’s one thing when he’s outright lying about vaccines to people who freely choose to watch him and listen to his bullshit. […] It’s another when he’s railing against vaccine mandates for the US military. (By the way, men who never served, like Tucker, may not be aware of this, but there are a lot of vaccine mandates in the military. Literally the week you get to basic training, it’s just like WHOA HEY, here’s some needles!)

     Of course, once the Pfizer vaccine had full FDA approval, it was added to the mandatory vaccine list for the military. Anyone who thought it wouldn’t be is a goddamned idiot. But in Tucker’s mangled brain, it’s a “new political purity test.” [video available at the link]

     “This was specifically designed to separate the obedient from the free,” the Fox host grumbled on Monday night. “Can’t have any of the latter category.”

     Indeed, what is this new Biden military, where everybody is expected to be “obedient”?

     Like we said, Tucker didn’t serve. Clearly.

     Anyway, the whole segment is pretty great. First Tucker did his pointy white hood thing whining about the military trying to root out white supremacists, then he did some white male supremacist grievance about some idiot who was fired from Space Force. Typical Tucker. Then he said the thing about Biden’s tyrannical Defense secretary requiring obedience. In the military.

     And he continued:

     TUCKER: [Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin said he planned to fire anyone in the entire armed services who would not submit to the COVID-19 vaccination shot. Didn’t matter whether they had natural immunity or not, which many of them do.

     According to Doctor Tucker, who knows who has permanent natural immunity […]

     TUCKER: Their personal religious or moral objections were totally irrelevant.

     Fuck your “religious or moral objections,” considering how you’re all literally making them up as you go along. You know, unless we’re all supposed to believe you’re Christian Scientists now, literally all of you […].

     TUCKER: The point was to bow before his authority and the authority of the Democratic Party, no excuses, no exceptions.

     […] Anyway, Tucker lied some more, saying there is “zero scientific basis” for any of this, which is totally to be expected, because Tucker is an admitted liar, and he lies about COVID vaccines a lot.

     TUCKER: The fighting strength of the military is young, healthy people, virtually all of them at extremely low risk of dying from COVID. In fact, to this day, only 46 members of the entire U.S. military have died from the coronavirus over the last year and a half.

     All were unvaccinated. Strangely the numbers have really been jumping since August. And actually, 473 people involved with the military in some form or fashion have died. Maybe some or all of them would still be alive if Tucker had decided at some point in the last year to shut his fucking mouth.

     […]Finally, we come to the best part, how this is an attack on baby Jesus.

     TUCKER: The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks …

     Jesus the anti-vaxxer LOL.

     TUCKER: the free thinkers …

     He means people who dId tHeIR oWn rEsEaRcH, and now their neighbors say “bless his heart, he did his own research” after they read their obituaries in the paper.

     TUCKER: the men with high testosterone levels …

     Holy shit, that veered into Tucker’s well-known masculinity issues suddenly and out of nowhere. You literally never know when he’s going to jerk the car in that direction, but you should always expect it.

     TUCKER: and anyone else who doesn’t love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately. It’s a takeover of the US military.

     By tyrants who want to make the troops follow orders.

     Tucker was not done making it weird.

     Carlson then claimed he obtained a U.S. Army PowerPoint presentation that was meant to address service member concerns about vaccines, including a slide that sarcastically read: “How many children were sacrificed to Satan because of the vaccine?”

     “Then the presentation proceeds to list the so-called tenets of Satanism which are taken from the Temple of Satanism website. So here you have the United States Army doing p.r. for Satanists,” Carlson fumed, framing the slide as proof the military was rooting out Christians.

     OMG LOL what?

     You just have to watch it, it’s so stupid. He freaks out about some “military presentation” that is definitely trying to ban Christians from the military with the power of Satan. He [complains] that the same presentation says only three people have died because of the COVID-19 vaccine, lying once again to his viewers and saying it has actually killed “thousands.” We’ve been over this before many times, but Tucker does this by lying about the VAERS reporting system. Look how breathtakingly constructed this Tucker Carlson lie is: “Reports collected by the Biden administration itself indicate that number is in the thousands.” […]

     The segment ends with Tucker having a conniption tantrum because all the Navy SEALs are going to get fired now, we guess because they don’t like this new policy where they have to get vaccines and follow orders.

     Again, Tucker’s never served. Obviously.

316. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 1:45 pm

     Link for text quoted in comment 314.

     In other news: Fox News Idiot Wishes Biden Didn’t Constantly Ride Bike Like Old Sad Frail Dead Bike Riding Person

     Hey, does everybody remember Donald Trump’s theory of exercise? Namely, that you shouldn’t do it, because it will deplete your body of all its energy and resources and kill you?

     We always have to wonder just how brainwashed his sycophantic followers really are these days, how far they’re really willing to follow him, which cliffs they’re willing to hurl their bodies off of to prove their allegiance. But we do know that one of the many, many Fox News idiots, Rachel Campos-Duffy, was reporting on President Joe and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden taking a bike ride in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, this weekend, and decided to lob some zingers in the president’s direction. You know, because he was exercising. Like an old person. Exercising. What a senior citizen. On a bike. […] [video available at the link]

     CAMPOS-DUFFY: Being the leader of the free world has to be the most demanding job in the whole world and he simply does not have the mental or physical stamina to do this job. That is why his handlers and his wife, who by the way increasingly look more like Visiting Angels, have to schedule in these senior breaks for him so he can take naps and go for bike rides because he can’t concentrate on the job the way he should.

     Everybody who’s ever been in the position of caring for a loved one who’s very sick and frail remembers the day the patient came downstairs and said “Hey I’m going for a bike ride” because they knew it meant the end was near. When you have to start taking “senior breaks” like that, for vigorous exercise …

     CAMPOS-DUFFY: I mean, just compare it to President Donald Trump …

     Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

     CAMPOS-DUFFY: Who worked these long, long hours, and, um …

     Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
     […]

317. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 1:51 pm

     Biden, at U.N., calls for unity in addressing the pandemic and climate change.

     Washington Post link

     President Biden made a case Tuesday that the United States can compete with China economically and ideologically while cooperating to confront global threats like climate change and the coronavirus […]

     In his first address to the United Nations as president, Biden also defended the messy end to nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan, affirmed U.S. support for the United Nations and an alphabet soup of international partnerships and pledged support for poorer countries often disproportionately affected by climate change.

     “We’ve ended 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan and as we close this era of endless war we are opening an era of endless diplomacy,” Biden said in a measured address notable mostly for its contrast to the boastful tone and sour reception accorded President Donald Trump.

     Challenges that require a united response include “ending this pandemic, addressing the climate crisis, managing shifts in global power dynamics, shaping the role of the world on vital issues like trade, cyber and emerging technologies and facing the threat of terrorism as it stands today,” Biden said.

     […] Biden persuaded ambivalent allies to take a slightly tougher public line against China over human rights and economic practices during his first trip abroad, in June. But he has gotten little public backing for his broader argument that China could pose an existential threat to democratic governments in the future, and that old conflicts such as Afghanistan are a distraction. […]

     As the U.N. event in Scotland approaches, world leaders have faced intense pressure to commit to more concrete, ambitious, near-term plans to cut greenhouse gas pollution in coming years.

     Collectively, the world remains far off target from the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and remains on a trajectory that scientists and many policymakers alike have described as “catastrophic.”

     Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris compact; Biden won goodwill among major allies for rejoining it as one of his first actions as president.

     But distrust and exasperation persist among small, developing nations that have done little to cause climate change but often have been most ravaged by its impacts.

     Developed countries pledged more than a decade ago to begin providing $100 billion annually by 2020 to help the most defenseless nations deal with the deepening consequences of sea-level rise, heat waves, intensifying hurricanes and other effects of warming — and to hasten the transition away from fossil fuels as those economies grow.

     That money has never fully materialized. […]

318. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 2:04 pm

     More criminals and dunderheads from the Trump cesspool:

     Two Republican operatives were charged this month with a scheme to funnel money from a Russian businessman into former President Trump’s 2016 campaign, a document unsealed on Monday reveals.

     D.C. federal prosecutors allege that Jesse Benton, who was campaign manager for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’s 2014 re-election run, conspired on the scheme with Doug Wead, a conservative author who […] helps manage a multi-level marketing firm in Russia.

     The 19-page indictment was filed nearly five years after some of the conduct alleged in the document. The pair are charged with six counts related to the allegations, including conspiracy, false record-keeping, making political contributions by a foreign national, and acting as an illegal straw donor.

     […] Prosecutors say in the indictment that Benton and Wead “concealed” the alleged scheme from Trump, which involved taking $100,000 from an unnamed Russian businessman in exchange for a photo op with Trump himself.

     The photo op, prosecutors say, took place in Philadelphia on Sept 22, 2016.

     But Benton and Wead allegedly only siphoned off $25,000 of the Russian’s money into an unnamed political committee. Federal elections records show an Oct. 27, 2016 contribution to Trump Victory by “Jesse Bentor,” a misspelling referenced in the indictment.

     […] Benton and Wead were presented with three options for a Trump meeting: one cost $100,000, another cost $50,000, and another cost $25,000.

     The pair of GOP operatives allegedly chose the $25,000 option, before creating an invoice for $100,000 in “consulting services” that they sent to the Russian businessman.

     The full $100,000 was wired from Vienna, Austria on Sept. 21, and the photo op with Trump took place the next day. Trump was campaigning in Philadelphia, visiting a beloved local cheesesteak spot.

     Prosecutors say that Trump fundraisers had to spend the next month haranguing Benton to get him and Wead to pay up for the $25,000 photo op. Benton eventually charged the $25,000 to his credit card, before, in the indictment’s words, “retain[ing]” the remaining $75,000.

     This isn’t Benton’s first run-in with the law. […] Benton was forced to resign from managing McConnell’s re-election campaign in 2014 over allegations around a pay-for-votes scam in 2012 in Iowa. Rand Paul then hired him, before Benton was indicted the next year on charges relating to the Iowa scandal.

     The Kentucky operative allegedly worked on the Russian straw donor scheme as he faced sentencing for the Iowa bribery scandal.

     […] Trump pardoned Benton for those crimes in December 2020. […]

     Link

319. Lynna, OM says

     21 September 2021 at 5:16 pm

     Follow-up to comment 310 and 313.

     […] Crucially, the memo was the culmination of months of work aimed at the Jan. 6 certification date, pulling together Trump’s win-at-any-cost strategy with the then-President’s willing accomplices in Congress. In the end, it represented the last known attempt Team Trump made at peacefully stealing a second term.

     After Pence rejected that effort, Trump’s mob went after him and Congress. […]

     Axios reported on Dec. 22 that Trump had grown angry with Pence, and that “Pence’s role on Jan. 6 has begun to loom large in Trump’s mind.” Trump would see Pence validating the election results as “the ultimate betrayal,” the outlet reported.

     […] on the day of certification itself, Jan. 6, Eastman was standing on a stage outside the White House to tout the memo’s theory. He was joined by Giuliani, who demanded “trial by combat!” over Trump’s election lies.

320. raven says

     21 September 2021 at 11:14 pm

     A new poll shows that Americans oppose the Texas female slaver/forced birther law. No surprise. Polls usually show 60-70% of Americans want abortion as it is now to be legal.

     And so what. A study from Princeton years ago showed that what American citizens support has little to do with what laws get enacted and enforced. Whereas the 1% usually gets what they want.

     Americans *hate* the Texas abortion law
     Chris Cillizza Updated 6:30 PM ET, Tue September 21, 2021

     (CNN)Texas Republicans’ decision to pass the nation’s most restrictive abortion law earlier this month has landed like a lead balloon with voters nationally.

     At the core of the law is the empowerment of private citizens to bring lawsuits against people who assist someone in getting an abortion after the state’s six-week window. It also provides monetary rewards of up to $10,000 for those who bring the suits.
     People really don’t like either of those provisions, according to new national polling from Monmouth University.
     Fully 70% of Americans disagree with the idea of allowing private citizens to bring lawsuits against abortion providers. That numbers includes 9 in 10 Democrats, yes, but also more than 4 in 10 Republicans.
     Opposition to paying off these complainants is even higher in the poll, with 81% disapproving of the idea — including 2 in 3 (67%) of self-identified Republicans.

     Those sorts of overwhelming majorities — particularly on an issue as divisive as abortion rights — are essentially unheard of, but speak to a bipartisan sense in the public that Texas Republicans went too far.
     Remarkably, in spite of those numbers, at least seven other Republican-controlled states have expressed interest in following Texas’ lead on its abortion law.
     And in Missouri, a federal judge is expected to rule on Tuesday as to whether a 2019 law that effectively bans abortion after eight weeks can begin to be implemented.
     The Point: At minimum, the Texas law will serve as a base-motivating tool for Democrats who are in search of energy in advance of the critical 2022 midterms. At most, the law — and other potential copycats around the country — could jeopardize the GOP’s ability to win over swing voters.

321. raven says

     21 September 2021 at 11:20 pm

     …but speak to a bipartisan sense in the public that Texas Republicans went too far.

     Hard to believe.
     GOP legislators in several states have proposed bills that would make getting an abortion a death penalty offense. Including Texas, Idaho, and Alabama.

     Which makes sense.
     If a zygote is a legal person, than abortion is murder 1.

     A whole lot of forced birthers can’t wait to start executing women and abortion providers. There were 56,000 abortions in Texas last year, which is going to result in a lot of executed women. Because nothing says jesus loves you like piles of dead bodies, rivers of blood, and mass executions.

322. raven says

     21 September 2021 at 11:52 pm

     Here is another one, dead antivaxxer.
     This has happened tens of thousands of time in the last 2 months.
     What is noteworthy here is how they ended up in the ICU, at high risk of dying (ca. 50%), and still wouldn’t get the vaccine. Then they die.

     Some of these patients have close family members who keep posting antivax lies while they are in the ICU. Then they die. And their family members keep on posting antivax lies. If watching family members die won’t motivate people to get vaccinated, what will?

     Idaho nurse who refused COVID vaccine dies: brother
     David Matthews, New York Daily News Tue, September 21, 2021,

     An Idaho nurse who refused the COVID-19 vaccine, and encouraged her family to do the same, even after her COVID-infected mother went into a coma, has died, according to her brother.

     Daryl Rise told CNN that his older sister Natalie Rise was a victim of disinformation.

     “She was telling me not to get vaccinated,” Daryl Rise said. “I think it was from misinformation, I think it was falling into negative social media and bloggers, YouTubers.”

     Idaho currently lags behind the rest of the United States, with only 40.8% of the population fully vaccinated compared to the nation’s still-meager 54.7%.

     The COVID crisis came at the Rise family swiftly.

     Daryl Rise told KXLY his mom was hospitalized with COVID pneumonia on Aug. 10 after a week of illness and trouble breathing. She was intubated and put into a medically induced coma. Days later, his sister became ill and was hospitalized “right down the hall” from her mother.

     Even while in the hospital and receiving oxygen, the former nurse told her younger brother not to get vaccinated.

     Natalie Rise, a 46-year-old mother of 10-year-old twins with special needs, died Aug. 22 in Coeur d’Alene, which is still seeing a surge in cases as the entire state has become overwhelmed. A day later, the Food and Drug Administration gave its full approval to Pfizer vaccine, the same day Daryl Rise said he got his first jab.

     “I got it out of fear,” he said.

     The Idaho man said his mother, who is recovering and out of her coma, has not decided on whether to get vaccinated.

     Whether or not his mother follows his lead, Rise is encouraging others to get vaccinated already.

     “We’re hearing from all these doctors and professionals who have all this education and they’re basically begging us to get the vaccination. The people that are telling us not to, they’re not as educated as these doctors, and they’re following social media. It doesn’t matter if we’re a donkey or an elephant. It is a personal choice, but the numbers don’t lie,” Daryl Rise told KXLY.

323. blf says

     22 September 2021 at 4:27 am

     More nazis overlapping with anti-vaccination loons… Far-right AfD campaigns on anti-vax platform in Germany’s Bautzen (video):

     As Germany prepares to vote in the September 26 general elections, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is staging a comeback with an anti-vax, anti-mask agenda. FRANCE 24 reports from Bautzen in eastern Germany, which recorded the country’s highest ever Covid infection rate and where the AfD performed best at the last election.

     [… T]he anti-Islam, anti-mask party has lagged in the polls as Germany reels from the Covid-19 pandemic.

     The party is now trying to stage a comeback ahead of Sunday’s elections by opposing measures like vaccination and mandatory face masks.

     Although this stance is a minority concern amongst the German electorate at large, many voters in the eastern German town of Bautzen are anti-mask — despite the town recording Germany’s highest ever Covid infection rate in December 2020.

     I don’t know of anyone who’s died from Covid, said one resident. But I do know lots of people who were really sick or even died after getting vaccinated.

     The local MP, the AfD’s Karsten Hilse, won 37 percent of the vote in this constituency at the last election in 2017 — the extreme-right party’s highest score in the country. He stands a good chance of being re-elected on the party’s anti-mask, anti-vax platform.

     The incidence rate has been manipulated to scare the population, Hilse said. It’s unbearable to see what they’ll do to make people panic.

     Around 1,000 people in the area have died from Covid, which makes the AfD’s approach even more worrying, said Claus Gruhl, the administrator of a local parish and Green Party councilor: “A party which denies the reality of the pandemic and encourages people to reject vaccines is something I consider to be really dangerous.”

324. Lynna, OM says

     22 September 2021 at 12:05 pm

     How many “moderate” Republicans are there? That number has to be really small.

     […] Zero House Republicans voted for the American Rescue Plan that provided Covid relief funds. Zero House Republicans voted for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement act. Zero House Republicans voted last night for a stopgap measure to prevent a government shutdown and a debt-ceiling crisis.

     There weren’t 60 GOP votes for a non-partisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack. There weren’t 60 GOP votes to hold Donald Trump accountable for his role in instigating an insurrectionist riot. There weren’t 60 GOP votes for the Equality Act. There weren’t 60 GOP votes for the Paycheck Fairness Act. There weren’t 60 GOP votes for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

     The idea of a Main Street Caucus made up of pragmatic House Republicans certainly sounds great. But given what we’ve seen from the actual House GOP Conference, I’d recommend some skepticism about the group’s capacity to serve as a “centrist counterweight.”

     Link

325. Lynna, OM says

     22 September 2021 at 12:12 pm

     Former GOP Treasury secretaries try to steer McConnell away from cliff

     Former GOP Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Steven Mnuchin tried to nudge Mitch McConnell. It didn’t work.

     […] most observers seem to assume that the GOP won’t actually impose a deliberate recession on the United States, but we’re all running out of time as the debt-ceiling deadline approaches. Not surprisingly, history is repeating itself, with powerful private-sector players making their voices heard. The Washington Post reported this morning:

     Two former GOP treasury secretaries held private discussions this month with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hoping to resolve an impasse over the debt limit that now threatens the global economy, according to four people aware of the conversations. The previously unreported talks involving the GOP economic grandees — Henry Paulson, who served as treasury secretary under President Bush; and Steven Mnuchin, treasury secretary under President Trump — did not resolve the matter and the U.S. is now racing toward a massive fiscal cliff with no clear resolution at hand.

     In case this isn’t obvious, Paulson and Mnuchin are not just former cabinet members from Republican administrations. Paulson was the CEO of Goldman Sachs and currently leads a multi-billion-dollar investment fund. Mnuchin was also an executive at Goldman Sachs, before taking leading roles at several hedge funds. Just this week, Bloomberg News reported that Mnuchin is taking the lead with a new multibillion-dollar private equity fund.

     In other words, guys like these have an added incentive to steer Republicans away from efforts to crash the economy on purpose: Paulson and Mnuchin aren’t just former officials who led the Treasury Department, they’re also financiers whose investments might be destroyed by their own party.

     According to the Post’s reporting, both men had separate, private meetings with McConnell recently, and both came away with the impression that the Senate minority leader is not bluffing — Republicans really are prepared to hurt Americans deliberately. Paulson and Mnuchin have since conveyed their impressions to Democratic officials, explaining that the governing party will have to act unilaterally to prevent a global financial crisis.

     Of course, that would be far easier if GOP senators were not also vowing to filibuster debt-ceiling extensions, making it vastly more difficult for Democrats to rescue the country from the Republicans’ scheme.

     As for McConnell’s thinking, common sense might suggest that the GOP leader and his colleagues would worry about a political backlash if Republicans imposed a recession on the world on purpose. But Politico reported this morning, “The latest weekly Politico/Morning Consult poll is out this morning and finds that more voters would blame Democrats than Republicans if the U.S. were to default on its debt…. Asked which party they would blame more, 33% said Democrats, 42% said both parties, and only 16% said Republicans.”

326. Lynna, OM says

     22 September 2021 at 12:51 pm

     Mary Trump offers pointed response to Donald Trump’s new lawsuit

     The New York Times and Mary Trump exposed Donald Trump as a financial fraud. Three years later, the former president is responding with a dubious lawsuit.

     It was three years ago next week when The New York Times published one of the most devastating reports I’ve ever seen. In the first real breakthrough on understanding Donald Trump’s controversial finances, the newspaper exposed evidence of “dubious tax schemes” and “outright fraud” that [Trump] exploited to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from his father.

     The findings painted a picture in which the then-president, far from the self-made man he pretends to be, relied heavily on legally dubious family handouts. As regular readers may recall, it was the first of three brutal reports on Trump’s financial history, leaving little doubt that he’s spent much of his adult life meandering between failures and fraudulent endeavors.

     It’s an open question as to whether the revelations from three years ago affected the former president’s political standing — many of Trump’s loyal followers still refuse to recognize the evidence that he’s a con man — but we were reminded last night that [Trump] is still outraged that the Times and its source exposed him as a fraud. NBC News reported overnight:

     Former President Donald Trump filed a $100 million lawsuit Tuesday against his niece, Mary Trump, and the New York Times, claiming they conspired to obtain his tax returns for the paper’s Pulitzer-winning story on his undisclosed finances. The lawsuit asserts that Mary Trump and three New York Times reporters — Susanne Craig, David Barstow, and Russell Buettner — were engaged in what the suit calls an “insidious plot” and an “extensive crusade” to obtain Trump’s taxes.

     The Times issued a statement last night, explaining that it will fight the lawsuit. “The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes helped inform the public through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest,” the statement read. “This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”

     Mary Trump had a similar reaction, though her phrasing was a bit more pointed. “I think he is a f***ing loser,” she told The Daily Beast, in reference to her uncle.

     In a statement Mary Trump added, “[The lawsuit is] desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”

     As for the underlying legal claim — the former president believes his niece breached a confidentiality agreement when she exposed the truth — there are legal experts who can speak to this with more authority than I can.

     That said, on last night’s show, Rachel asked Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney, about the case’s legal prospects. “Good luck,” Vance responded, expressing skepticism.

327. tomh says

     22 September 2021 at 1:38 pm

     Biden Puts Another Former Public Defender Onto A U.S. Appeals Court
     By Jennifer Bendery

     The Senate voted Monday night to confirm Veronica Rossman to a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit making her the only former public defender on that court and one of just a handful within the entire U.S. appeals court system….

     Rossman’s confirmation is a win for President Joe Biden on two fronts. She adds to his current record of confirming more judges than any president in the last 50 years by this point in their terms. And she is the latest example of Biden following through on a promise to bring badly needed diversity to the nation’s courts both in terms of demographics like race and gender but also in terms of professional backgrounds.

     Rossman, 49, has spent most of her career as a public defender, representing people in court who could not afford an attorney. Public defenders are hugely underrepresented on the nation’s courts; the vast majority of federal judges are former prosecutors and corporate attorneys. Rossman brings a much different perspective to the bench, having defended more than 250 indigent clients in her more than 10 years at the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Districts of Colorado and Wyoming.
     […]

     Rossman is now one of just eight active judges in the entirety of the U.S. appeals court system with experience as a public defender. That’s out of a total of 174 currently active judges on U.S. appeals courts.

     Biden is responsible for nominating four of those eight U.S. appeals court judges, just eight months into his presidency. The other four were nominated by President Barack Obama over the course of his eight years in the White House.

328. SC (Salty Current) says

     23 September 2021 at 2:16 am

     Respectful Insolence – “Gov. Ron DeSantis further embraces the Great Barrington Declaration by appointing Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida Surgeon General.”

329. blf says

     23 September 2021 at 10:59 am

     Having just returned from a decent lunch with vin, and then a few beers, I was vastly amused to read The 5 French habits that everyone should adopt (possibly paywalled):

     […]
     (1) Picking up fresh bread every morning
     […] The day gets off to a much better start if you’re well-fed, and what better breakfast than fresh bread? [Penguin eggs (e.g., a cheese omelet), or if she’s being non-cooperative, fresh fruit and yogurt; both with cafe? –blf]

     (2) Making the most of your lunch break
     [… T]he lunch break is also a time for eating well. It’s not uncommon to see culinary masterpieces coming together in a shared office kitchen, or groups of colleagues heading out to a local restaurant, and nothing breaks up the day quite like a delicious filling meal. (burrpppphhhh!! yeap)

     (3) Wandering aimlessly through the streets
     [… F]lânerie — strolling the streets with no aim other than observation — is worth studying.

     [… F]lânerie offers great opportunities for discovery — both personal and external. Strolling without any specific direction, you’ll likely come across beautiful corners you’d never otherwise have noticed and get to know your neighbourhood far better than if you’re always walking a pre-planned Google Maps route. [Pre-planned? Generalissimo Google? Just a printed Falkplan†, for emergencies… –blf]

     (4) Swapping big supermarkets for specialist stores
     [… Absolutely! –blf]

     (5) Saying what you mean
     […]

     And about those after-lunch beers, Artisan ales: How France became a nation of beer lovers (possibly (hic!)walled):

     It may be famous for its wine, but France is also the country with the largest number of breweries in Europe. […]

     France’s Anosteké blonde beer was crowned the “world’s best pale beer” at the 2021 World Beer Awards, proving once again that French brewers can mix it with the best.

     The beer was created by the Brasserie du Pays Flamand brewery in Merville, close to Lille, but it wasn’t the only French beer to receive an award. The Goudale Printemps came out on top in the “world’s best pale seasonal” sub-category, and the Mascaret, Vexin, and Cap d’Ona breweries also collected prizes.

     […]

     It shouldn’t come as a surprise to see French producers doing well on the international stage. The number of microbreweries here has exploded over the past decade. The country went from having 442 active breweries in 2011, to 2,300 today, meaning no country in Europe has more breweries than France, according to the trade union Brasseurs de France.

     “In France, twenty years ago, beer had a completely different image,” Jacqueline Lariven, the association’s director of communications told The Local. “It was a very standardised product, usually a low-alcohol lager. It was a man’s drink, and not very refined.”

     While there is a long tradition of beer in eastern and northern France, due to proximity with Germany and Belgium, the drink is now gaining ground all over the country. Today, the region with the largest number of breweries is Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, in southeastern France.

     That’s not quite where I live, but is basically just to the North of me. I’ve been in France for sufficiently long now I can confirm the existence and availability of artisan French beers has exploded recently… The village’s own beer specialist bar (not a microbrewey, albeit there are some in the area) is hosting its second annual bierfest soon, which, judging by the first, should be grand (hic!)…

     The article goes on to discuss the reasons behind the explosion, concluding:

     [… I]t is common for French beers to make use of local ingredients.

     “If you’re in Brittany you might use buckwheat; if you’re in Lorraine, mirabelle plum country, you have mirabelle beers,” Lariven added.

     However, in terms of consumption habits, France is still lagging behind its neighbours when it comes to beer.

     They may have the most breweries, but the French drink less beer than every other European country, according to Brewers of Europe. The French came in last in 2019 with 33 litres per capita, far behind the Czechs who drank 142 litres each, and Austrians who consumed 107 litres.
     […]

     Ireland is about 93, the States almost 73, and “U”K(? Britain) “only” 70 (from Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge, which puts the Czechs at 188, but agree the Austrians are 107 (all figures for 2019)).

       † I think Falkplan is still around, and even still making printed origami maps… They’ve always been hard to find, expensive, awkward if you can’t visualise infinite transdimensional folding (a Tardis helps!), and mostly only work at close-up scales… but were(? are?) brilliantly-designed and informative.

330. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 11:41 am

     Trump-backed Republicans want to oversee upcoming state elections

     For most American voters, secretary of state is probably a fairly obscure government office. There’s a reason that’s about to change.

     […] In much of the country, these officials work behind the scenes on unglamorous tasks such as election administration, and few reach the household-name level.

     But in the wake of the Republican Party’s Big Lie, and Donald Trump’s ongoing fixation on installing allies in key positions, secretaries of state — and upcoming campaigns to elect secretaries of state — have taken on extraordinary importance.

     For example, the former president has already endorsed three far-right candidates in 2022 secretaries of state races: Georgia’s Jody Hice, Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, and Arizona’s Mark Finchem. There’s no great mystery as to what the three have in common: Each have been deeply critical of the 2020 presidential election and eager to lend credence to ridiculous conspiracy theories about Trump’s defeat.

     Hice, a sitting Republican member of Congress, refused to vote to certify President Joe Biden’s victory; Karamo has falsely claimed there’s “overwhelming evidence” that raise doubts about Biden’s win in Michigan; and Finchem, a state legislator, is a notorious “Stop the Steal” activist. Trump, of course, wants them to win so that his loyal allies will be responsible for administering upcoming elections in key states.

     But they’re not alone. As Rachel noted on last night’s show, Reuters published an important special report yesterday on the “wider group of Republican secretary-of-state contenders in America’s swing states who have embraced” demonstrably false claims about Trump’s defeat.

     Their candidacies have alarmed Democrats and voting-rights groups, who fear that the politicians who tried hardest to undermine Americans’ faith in elections last year may soon be the ones running them — or deciding them, in future contested votes.

     Not “running” them, “ruining” them.

     […] When the people running elections are the same people who believe false claims about election results, that’s a serious problem for our democracy.

     And yet, here we are. Reuters interviewed nine of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada — and concluded that 10 of them “have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.”

     How many of the candidates accepted the legitimacy of Biden’s victory? Two.

     Significant amounts of money are pouring into these contests — again, races that are typically low-profile, down-ballot affairs — as GOP candidates run on platforms that would make it more difficult for voters to participate in future elections.

     It’s hard to overstate how consequential these races may become. Reuters’ report focused special attention on the GOP candidates in Arizona:

     In addition to promoting voter-fraud claims and calling for Arizona to decertify Biden’s win, Finchem has expressed views linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which casts Trump as a savior figure and elite Democrats as a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and cannibals. Finchem was a featured speaker at the Jan. 5 “pre-rally” in Washington, a warm-up for the bigger gathering at which Trump himself spoke. “When you steal something, that’s not really a win; that’s a fraud,” Finchem said. Addressing members of Congress, he said: “This ain’t going away.”

     One of his GOP primary rivals for Arizona secretary of state is a state legislator who introduced a bill to empower the Republican-led legislature to revoke the secretary of state’s election certification. She also “signed onto a resolution in December urging Congress to award Arizona’s Electoral College votes to Trump, despite his loss to Biden by more than 10,000 votes.”

     Voters inclined to focus on top-of-the-ballot contests in upcoming elections, overlooking races for secretary of state, need to rethink that strategy.

331. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 12:21 pm

     John Cornyn claimed that Democrats have “refused” to work with Republicans “on a bipartisan basis.” That’s amazingly wrong.

     Senate Republican leaders held a Capitol Hill press conference yesterday and did their very best to pretend they’re not to blame for their own debt-ceiling crisis. Texas Sen. John Cornyn summarized the issue this way:

     “Well, this impending train wreck, which is the Democratic agenda, is entirely predictable, and it’s entirely of their own making. [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell has told them since July that because they have refused to work with us on a bipartisan basis, and they’re determined to spend as much as another $5.5 trillion in borrowed money, that there needs to be some accountability.”

     There was no shortage of errors over the course these two sentences. The idea that Democrats created the GOP’s debt-ceiling crisis is more than a little bonkers. The claim that Democrats intend to spend “another $5.5 trillion in borrowed money” is just demonstrably ridiculous, as the Texas Republican almost certainly knows.

     What’s more, the idea that the GOP crashing the economy on purpose represents some kind of “accountability” seems incredibly odd. [Also fucking batshit bonkers.]

     But what stood out for me was Cornyn’s claim that Democrats have “refused” to work with Republicans “on a bipartisan basis.”

     Right off the bat, there was a degree of irony to the partisan whining: In recent years, whenever the GOP held power, Republican leaders’ interest in bipartisan governing did not exist. For some mysterious reason, the party only seems to rediscover the benefits of consensus-building when it finds itself in the minority. It’s quite a coincidence.

     Just as importantly, at the heart of the GOP’s complaints is the fact that Democrats are pursuing — or at least trying to pursue — much of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda through a reconciliation process that excludes Republicans. And while GOP senators are using this as the basis for angry complaints, it was GOP senators who also recommended Democrats pursue this course of action. […]

     Now that Democrats are following this precise model, GOP senators claim to be outraged.

     But perhaps the most important thing about Cornyn’s claim that Democrats have “refused” to work with Republicans “on a bipartisan basis” is that it’s spectacularly wrong.

     In fact, right around the time Senate GOP leaders were decrying the Democrats’ uninterest in bipartisan policymaking, the bipartisan talks over policing reforms were collapsing — because Republicans kept rejecting Democratic offers.

     It was a familiar dynamic. Democrats tried to strike a bipartisan deal on voting rights, and Republicans said no. Democrats tried to strike a bipartisan deal on immigration, and Republicans said no. Democrats tried to strike a bipartisan deal on an independent Jan. 6 commission, and Republicans said no. Democrats tried to strike a bipartisan deal on a Covid-relief package, and Republicans said no.

     Who’s “refusing” to work “on a bipartisan basis”?

     Link

332. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 12:27 pm

     Here come the copycats: Floridian unveils Texas-style abortion ban

     Texas’ abortion ban is obviously a problem for reproductive rights. Copycats in other states are likely to make that problem vastly worse.

     It’s been three weeks since five Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices gave the green light to Texas’ new abortion ban, effectively ending Roe v. Wade protections in the nation’s second largest state. In a dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts warned that the state law could serve as “a model for action in other areas.”

     We didn’t have to wait too long to see evidence to bolster the point. NBC News reported yesterday:

     A Florida state representative filed a bill Wednesday similar to one recently passed in Texas that would ban abortions as early as six weeks, before many women even know they are pregnant. The bill, filed by Webster Barnaby, a Republican, would fine physicians at least $10,000 for each abortion performed. It would also allow people to sue anyone who helps end a pregnancy in violation of the law.

     […] It’s too soon to say whether Florida’s Republican-led state government will approve a Texas-style abortion ban, and it’s possible that this new bill will fail.

     That said, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters earlier this month that he considers Texas’ law “interesting,” adding, “I am going to look more significantly at it.” The head of the GOP-led state Senate made related comments.

     […] Two days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling, The Washington Post reported:

     GOP officials in at least seven states, including Arkansas, Florida, South Carolina and South Dakota, have suggested they may review or amend their states’ laws to mirror Texas’s legislation, which effectively bans abortions after six weeks. Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Ohio and more are expected to follow, after a year abortion activists have deemed “the worst legislative year ever for U.S. abortion rights.”

     The list is likely to grow. Nevada’s Dean Heller, a leading Republican candidate for governor, this week endorsed Texas’ abortion ban and vowed to pursue “the most conservative abortion laws that we can have in this state” if elected. […]

333. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 12:34 pm

     Republicans are obstructionists … again.

     […] House Democrats approved the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in March, which covered quite a bit of policy ground: The measure was designed to ban neck restraints, prohibit “no knock” warrants in drug cases at the federal level, reform qualified immunity, and end discriminatory profiling, among many other priorities.

     It, of course, landed in the Senate with a thud. As everyone involved in the process understood, there was simply no way the progressive legislation would be able to overcome a Republican filibuster. But what if some other version of the bill could? What if there were bipartisan negotiations over policing reforms that might actually pass?

     A group of congressional Democrats — led by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and California Rep. Karen Bass — began talks with Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, and for five months, it appeared a breakthrough was at least possible. Yesterday, as The Wall Street Journal reported, the negotiations collapsed.

     Bipartisan talks aimed at overhauling police tactics and accountability have ended with no agreement, the top Democratic negotiator said, with lawmakers unable to reach a compromise following nationwide protests sparked by the killings of Black Americans by law-enforcement officers. Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) said Wednesday that he called Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) to tell him the Democrats were done negotiating after Mr. Scott didn’t accept their final offer.

     Let no one say Booker and Bass didn’t go out of their way with good-faith efforts. For five months, the Democratic negotiators expressed optimism that if they just kept trying, their GOP counterparts would eventually budge. As recently as early June, Capitol Hill sources confirmed that some of the key sticking points had been “mostly” resolved, and Scott confirmed to reporters that the gap between the parties was closing.

     Facing a self-imposed deadline, lawmakers directly involved in the talks pressed on, determined to succeed. In late June, Scott issued a written statement that read in part, “After months of working in good faith, we have reached an agreement on a framework addressing the major issues for bipartisan police reform.”

     […] This week, Booker and Bass offered what NBC News described as a “drastically scaled-back proposal,” which the GOP nevertheless rejected.

     The proposal included the minimum that Democrats were willing to accept and left out controversial provisions like qualified immunity, the criminalization of excessive use of force and no-knock warrants. The proposal included provisions to address mental health for police officers, a database of police misconduct and terminations, the militarization of police departments […]

     With this in mind, the White House issued a statement yesterday, complaining, “Regrettably, Senate Republicans rejected enacting modest reforms, which even the previous president had supported, while refusing to take action on key issues that many in law enforcement were willing to address.”

     Booker added that he intends to “explore all other options to achieve meaningful and common sense policing reform,” but so long as the Senate’s filibuster rules remain intact, progress in this Congress appears impossible.

     […] There’s real work that needs to be done on this issue, and GOP obstinacy means the work will not happen, at least at the federal level.

     […] as a political matter, the collapse of the negotiations also offers a timely reminder of a political dynamic some refuse to see. There’s a school of thought, generally espoused by centrist and conservative Democrats, that if the governing party makes a good-faith effort at striking compromises, hears Republicans out, engages in lengthy negotiations, and accepts meaningful concessions in the interest of making a deal, GOP lawmakers are willing to work in constructive way.

     […] those assumptions have been proven wrong — again.

     Link

334. Akira MacKenzie says

     23 September 2021 at 1:00 pm

     @332

     those assumptions have been proven wrong — again.

     And the Democrats won’t learn from this experience – again.

335. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:01 pm

     Josh Marshall:

     […] The word I got from inside yesterday’s meetings was cautiously optimistic. No breakthroughs. But some of the prerequisites to a breakthrough. This write-up from Politico is pleasantly free of the standard Manchin-fluffery and I think gets to some of the key points. The biggest takeaway is that the President insisted and the Manchiners seemed to concede that they have to come up with a counter-proposal. This has freaked out a number of readers since it seems to concede that the topline number will be less than $3.5 trillion. But the demand for a counterproposal is a good thing not a bad thing.

     As we noted yesterday, the real impasse at the moment is that the two sides aren’t even speaking the same language. We may get to an impasse over specifics. But we’re not there yet. So the problem is both worse and better than it seems on the surface. The Manchiners are demanding everyone else vote for their bill in exchange for a bunch of hand waving and goalpost moving. That won’t work. It’s not negotiable – literally – since it amounts to an existential threat. If that’s the deal at least a lot of folks from the Progressive Caucus (and I suspect many more) will vote to kill the bipartisan mini-bill and they will be totally right to do so.

     The simple reality is that there was a cross party deal: the mini-bill and the reconciliation bill pass together. It wasn’t a deal for $3.5 trillion but it was for something in that ballpark. After the Manchiners got their vote in the Senate they tried to break the deal. Manchin tried to break it. Sinema tried to break it. And Josh Gottheimer and his crew in the House operating as the cat’s paws of Mark Penn and whoever is funding him tried to break it. There’s no ambiguity about that.

     The challenge now is to put things back together. When two sides lack trust you often have intermediaries who act as escrow agents for the things of value. The President and Speaker Pelosi were playing that role. Now they need to get back to playing that role. The Manchiners need to put a proposal on the table. Once they move from hand-waving to a proposal there’s going to need to be some tough negotiations to see if both sides can get to numbers they can live with. Whether they can isn’t clear. But if they can the President will then need to find a way to guarantee the deal. Because right now almost no one trusts the Manchiners. […]

     If you can get a framework for a deal then there are various ways you can guarantee it and get the timing to work. But the minimum is that you need a deal based on specifics. So it’s really in the Manchiners court … since they broke the deal.

     Link

336. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:02 pm

     https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1440811702740656134

     breathtaking incoherency and shamelessness

337. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:09 pm

     A staffer for the right-wing group FreedomWorks was arrested last week and charged for his alleged involvement in the Capitol attack, court documents unsealed Thursday show. [Photo from the insurrection is available at the link.]

     Brandon Prenzlin, who had been listed as a “grassroots coordinator” on the FreedomWorks staff page as recently as two weeks ago, had been removed from that page Thursday.

     An FBI agent’s affidavit in support of the charges against Prenzlin cites multiple stills from surveillance video on Jan. 6, alleging that the video showed Prenzlin was allegedly inside the Capitol for 3 minutes and 35 seconds.

     Prenzlin entered the building on its southeast corner and exited with “a number of individuals” known to law enforcement as being present in the Speaker’s Lobby when Ashli Babbitt was shot by a Capitol Police officer, the affidavit alleged, before noting that Prenzlin likely did not reach the scene of Babbitt’s death.

     Prenzlin is charged with four misdemeanors: Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds; and parading, demonstrating or picketing in any of the Capitol buildings.

     Prenzlin was arrested in Arlington, Virginia Friday […]

     […] Before FreedomWorks, Brandon worked on numerous state legislator races through the East Coast and the South for another nonprofit. […]

     A Twitter account for Prenzlin, as identified in the affidavit against him, promoted FreedomWorks activities until mid-July, when it stopped posting. [video at the link]

     Link

338. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:12 pm

     Abbott [Governor Greg Abbott, Texas] Is Using Cars For A Border Wall And It Looks Pretty Stupid

     […] has engineered a “steel wall” of Texas Department of Public Safety vehicles at the Del Rio area of the southern border, which has seen a major influx of Haitian migrants in recent days. […]

     Abbott bragged about the “wall” on Fox News earlier this week […]

     See also: https://twitter.com/TxDPS/status/1439358139455918082

339. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:20 pm

     Federal judge rules against DeSantis ban on so-called sanctuary cities, noting hate group ties

     A federal judge this week struck down key portions of Florida’s ban on so-called sanctuary cities, “declaring portions of a law unconstitutional and tinged with ‘discriminatory motives,’” Miami Herald reports. The court’s ruling cites “biased and unreliable data generated” by two notorious anti-immigrant hate groups founded by white nationalist and eugenicist John Tanton. Notably, the judge’s decision refers to these organizations as hate groups.

     […] “This law was clearly developed to encourage racial profiling, civil rights violations, isolation of immigrant communities, and unjust deportations. It did more harm for the causes of public safety than good. […]”

     DeSantis and state Republicans had an agenda to pass, and they did with the help of Tanton groups Federation For American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). This would lead to some of the bill’s undoing in court.

     “Allowing anti-immigrant hate groups that overtly promote xenophobic, nationalist, racist ideologies to be intimately involved in a bill’s legislative process is a significant departure from procedural norms,” wrote U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom, an Obama appointee. “This involvement strongly suggests that the Legislature enacted SB 168 to promote and ratify the racist views of these advocacy groups.” She further noted that even after the bill’s sponsor and supporters were confronted about these extremist organizations, “there is no record evidence establishing any effort to renounce these discriminatory views.”

     Bloom notes that lawmakers then continued to publicly affiliate themselves with anti-immigrant groups like Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, including speaking at a “Victims of Illegal Immigration Day” event […]

     “[…] hostile and harmful narratives that were promoted by these groups against individuals they described as ‘illegals,’” Bloom continued.

     […] DeSantis’ office will appeal.

     “Advocates proved that the law … undermines public safety and increases racial profiling, and that it was designed with the consultation of anti-immigrant hate groups,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Community Justice Project, and University of Miami School of Law’s Immigration Clinic said in the press release. They sued on behalf of nine organizations, including Florida Immigrant Coalition, Farmworker Association of Florida, WeCount!, Americans for Immigrant Justice, Hope Community Center, QLatinx, Westminster Presbyterian United Church, The Guatemalan-Maya Center, Inc., Family Action Network Movement and the City of South Miami.

     While we’re on the topic, CIS and FAIR have been among the anti-immigrant groups cited hundreds of times by mainstream outlets since 2019, a Media Matters report said earlier this year. CIS leader Mark Krikorian in fact once commented that the scrawling of the white supremacist terrorist who went to El Paso to kill Mexicans was “remarkably well-written for a 21-year-old loner.” Yet, major news outlets keep going to these groups for comment on immigration policy as if they’re legitimate. The judge’s ruling correctly labels them as anti-immigrant hate groups, because that’s exactly what they are. It would do well for media to avoid them.

340. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:29 pm

     Oh, FFS.

     Mike Flynn warns the world of dark forces putting vaccines in your salad dressing

     For a brief period, Michael Flynn was the actual national security adviser to an actual U.S. presidential administration. He left in disgrace (i.e., was fired) after lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. Ultimately, he was fired by Donald Trump. For being a liar.

     Let that sink in for a moment. Trump fired a guy for telling one lie. […]

     Anyway, after being unceremoniously cut loose, Flynn became a hero of the bonkers far-right, and he’s still plying his trade as a purveyor of pernicious piffle. The latest? Well, if you laid down a big bet on “the libs want to put vaccines in your salad dressing because they hate our freedoms,” well, you’re about to be a very wealthy individual. […]

     Video of Flynn saying that the Deep State medical establishment is planning to secretly put the covid vaccine in salad dressing is available at the link.

     FLYNN: “Somebody sent me a thing this morning where they’re talking about putting the vaccine in salad dressing. … And I’m thinking to myself, this is the Bizarro World, right? This is definitely the Bizarro World. … These people are seriously thinking about how to impose their will on us in our society, and it has to stop.”

     Yes, this is very much the Bizarro World. You sure got that one right, Mike.

     The kernel of truth which is actually good news, and which may be what Flynn twisted into a crazy conspiracy theory:

     Researchers at the University of California-Riverside are working on a way to grow edible plants that carry the same medication as an mRNA vaccine.

     The COVID-19 vaccine is one of the many inoculations which use messenger RNA (mRNA) technology to defeat viruses. They work by teaching cells from the immune system to recognize and attack a certain infectious disease. Unfortunately, mRNA vaccines have to stay in cold storage until use or they lose stability. The UC-Riverside team says if they’re successful, the public could eat plant-based mRNA vaccines — which could also survive at room temperature.

     Thanks to a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers are now looking to accomplish three goals. First, the team will try to successfully deliver DNA containing mRNA vaccines into plant cells, where they can replicate. Next, the study authors want to show that plants can actually produce enough mRNA to replace a traditional injection. Finally, the team will need to determine the right dosage people will need to eat to properly replace vaccinations.

     Link

     Commentary:

     […] So great news, right? While it appears this technology is a long way from coming to fruition—assuming anything comes of it at all—it would be a great way to encourage vaccination, especially among the needle-phobic (like, for instance, me). Who wouldn’t rather tuck into a hearty and delicious bowl of romaine (with croutons!) than tromp into a doctor’s office for a needle jab?

     But, naturally, if you’re predisposed to thinking the government is out to get you—and to get that Bill Gates Windows patch into you by any means necessary—your mind is naturally going to gravitate toward the serial depredations of killer salads.

     But how many people will see the original story Flynn’s cockeyed comment was based on? How many will understand that if the government—which regularly inspects our food—wanted to poison us, it could readily do so? Besides, if the government wanted to ensure Trump supporters got the vaccine, the last place they’d put it is in a salad. […]

     But then, where’s the fun in spreading rumors that the government cares about you and wants to save your life? Especially when you can trash well-meaning scientists and researchers more than you already have?

     That said, if Flynn is right and the government does want to spike my salad, I’ll take the pomegranate vinaigrette. And please don’t skimp on the kalamata olives […]

341. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:32 pm

     Biden administration begins reimbursing Fla. school officials penalized over mask mandates

     The Biden administration on Thursday began to reimburse Florida school board members who were financially penalized for requiring masks in districts against Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) executive order.

     The Department of Education announced in a release that it gave almost $148,000 in funding to the School Board of Alachua County as part of its Project to Support America’s Families and Educators (Project SAFE) grant program.

     Alachua County Public Schools board is the first to receive the grant funding from the program designed to compensate school districts that have their money withheld by the state for instituting an indoor mask mandate. […]

342. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:34 pm

     Bannon says he discussed how to ‘kill this administration in the crib’ with Trump before Jan. 6

     Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon admitted on his podcast that he told President Trump to “kill this administration in the crib early on” ahead of the Biden presidency and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

     “We said and told President Trump you need to kill this administration in the crib early on just by its own incompetence and its illegitimacy,” Bannon said on Wednesday’s episode of his podcast.

     “It killed itself,” Bannon continued. “Just let this go with what this illegitimate regime is doing. It killed itself. We told you from the very beginning. Just expose it. Just expose it. Never back down. Never give up. This thing will implode.” […]

343. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:39 pm

     Wonkette: “Susan Collins Opposes Abortion Rights Bill Based On Thing She Totally Made Up”

     In case you hadn’t noticed, reproductive rights are not long for this world. At least in this country. At least in states where those in charge just really, really, really want to force people to give birth against their will. In an attempt to fight this encroachment on our liberty, Democrats are once again pushing to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, authored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, which would codify Roe into law and ensure that abortion rights are protected for everyone in this country, regardless of where they happen to live.

     The House bill, sponsored by Judy Chu with 48 Democratic co-sponsors, is expected to be approved on Friday, and would legalize abortion in all states up until fetal viability (when a fetus can survive outside the uterus) and prevent states from enacting laws restricting or banning the procedure.

     Now, you would think that Susan Collins, one of the two remaining pro-choice Republican senators, someone who very much claims to care deeply for reproductive rights even as she signed off on Brett freaking Kavanaugh, would agree to vote to save reproductive rights from state-level sabotage. You would be wrong. She says she will vote against it. In an interview with the LA Times, Collins explained her reasoning.

     [I]n a brief interview, Collins said the bill goes further than that by interfering with existing law that ensures health professionals who object to abortion are not required to participate in it.

     “I support codifying Roe. Unfortunately the bill … goes way beyond that. It would severely weaken the conscious [sic] exceptions that are in the current law,” Collins said, adding that she found parts of the bill’s language “extreme.”

     Collins said the bill would weaken the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which protects a person’s ability to exercise their religion. She cited the past support for the act by Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and President Biden when he was in the Senate.

     “This ‘carve out’ would be unprecedented, and I do not believe it is necessary to codify Roe,” she said in a follow-up statement.

     Well, now we know why Collins never gives specific reasons beyond “I have concerns” for opposing anything one would assume she would support. Because when she does get into specifics, she’s just plain wrong.

     There is literally nothing in the WHPA that would require anyone who does not want to “participate” in an abortion to participate in one — not that this would even be much of a concern, since it seems highly unlikely that anyone who does not want to participate in an abortion would be working in an abortion clinic, which is where the vast, vast majority of abortions are performed. Instead, the Women’s Health Protection Act bars the government from limiting health care providers from performing abortions before viability, including with made-up rules regarding unnecessary medical tests (your transvaginal ultrasounds and such) or rules about how wide the hallways must be at abortion clinics, etc. It confirms a health care provider’s right to perform an abortion; it doesn’t mandate that anyone do so.

     […] It would be lovely if Collins could be a tad more specific, because it is possible that she is just confused. […]

     Unfortunately, we kind of need Collins’s vote. It’s likely that Democrats Joe Manchin and Bob Casey will vote against the bill, as they are both extremely anti-choice, so in order to even get a simple majority, we’d need both Collins and Murkowski to sign on. And that’s just assuming that Kyrsten Sinema would vote with Democrats. She’s had a good record on abortion rights so far in her career, but we wouldn’t put it past her to suddenly change her mind or decide she doesn’t really want reproductive rights after all if Republicans think they are bad.

     So if it means getting Collins’s vote, perhaps Democrats can throw in a little “And we promise not to force anyone to perform an abortion against their will” amendment in there for her benefit, since that’s not anything anyone cares to do anyway.

     Link

344. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 1:45 pm

     Pillow Idiot Says Bluetooths Stole 100K Alabama Trump Votes And Alabama Sec Of State Is MAD NOW

     Last week, the very serious Alabama secretary of state, whose name is John Merrill, who is very serious, took a very serious meeting with Mike Lindell, the very serious president-and-also-a-client of MyPillow. You know, about the election fraud.

     It appeared to have gone well. […]

     Lindell complimented Merrill. Said he had really impressive elections. All good. Sure, Lindell had told Merrill he was pretty sure the hackers could hack Alabama’s machines, and Merrill had tried to explain that the machines weren’t on the internet, but otherwise everything went just swell.

     Merrill, who once yearned for less gay buttsex and more “Gunsmoke” on the television, and who had to pre-emptively pull out of Alabama’s GOP Senate primary this year because he got caught gunsmoking in the sex way with somebody who was not his wife, presumably thought everything was fine afterward. It was not fine afterward.

     Because, you see, Mike Lindell left Alabama with other ideas. Mike Lindell said sin libels about Alabama. Said Merrill’s elections maybe aren’t that impressive after all. […]

     Specifically, Lindell made a video that said Alabama’s election was correct and all — hello, Donald Trump won! — but still nonetheless the devil cyber hacker bad guys stole 100,000 of Trump’s Alabama votes and gave them to Joe Biden. How? The Bluetooths.

     In a video posted online Sunday, Lindell said while Alabama is a “role model as to how elections should go,” its voting system was “hacked…just like every other state,” possibly by accessing machines remotely through Bluetooth technology. […]

     “This was the one time we’re going to have to do a little bit of a deeper dive here. On the surface you can’t see where it happened,” Lindell said. “What I guarantee they’ve had to do in Alabama is the bad people…went deeper into the well. Very deep into the well of how they did the flips.”

     Mike Lindell cannot see it but he knows it is there, in fact he guarantees the bad people went very deep in Alabama’s well and did the flips.

     Imagine how it must feel to be John Merrill, happily sitting in your secretary of state office and thinking about how gays are gross and “Gunsmoke” is awesome, and hearing that Mike Lindell the Pillow Man is guaranteeing that bad people went very deep in Alabama’s well and did the flips.

     Merrill is mad:

     “All our (voting) machines are custom-built. There’s no modem component. You can’t influence them through a cell phone or a landline. There’s no way they can be probed or numbers manipulated,” Merrill told AL.com.

     Merrill said Lindell purchased a copy of Alabama’s voting rolls, a service that’s available to anyone. Any analysis that shows manipulation is wrong, he added.

     “We didn’t have any vote changes. Zero. It’s not possible to have any vote changed,” Merrill said.

     […] John Merrill will not have some pillow charlatan coming in here and saying Deep State Hugo Chavez stole any of Alabama’s Christian votes for Donald Trump! […]

     Mister Pillowfucker is of course invited back:

     Lindell is expected to return to Alabama to examine the equipment and talk to probate judges, Merrill said.

     Everything continues to be fine in America.

345. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 3:24 pm

     Mike Pence Brags To Hungarian Fascist Pals About Births American Fascists About To Force

     Last time we talked about Hungary, it was because Tucker Carlson had gone over there on some kind of pilgrimage, we guess to lick the ground white fascist Hungarian leader Viktor Orban walked on, […] and maybe get some tips for helping speed along his white supremacist Christian nationalist crusade back home. We talked about what Orban has done to destroy democracy in that otherwise nice country over the past decade, to deny people’s human rights, to discriminate against LGBTQ people, to demonize immigrants. […]

     Anyway, it’s time to talk about Hungary again, because Mike Pence just told the Budapest Demographic Summit (yes it’s really called that) that he is personally [delighted] over how America is about to outlaw abortion and take all the uteruses by eminent domain:

     Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that he is hopeful the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court created during his and President Donald Trump’s administration will soon overturn abortion rights in the United States. […]

     “We see a crisis that brings us here today, a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself. The erosion of the nuclear family marked by declining marriage rates, rising divorce, widespread abortion and plummeting birth rates,” Pence said. […]

     Pence praised how abortion rates have fallen under Orban’s leadership. And he voiced hope that things would change in the U.S. as well, recalling that the administration in which he served as vice president appointed 300 conservative judges to the federal courts, including three new justices to the Supreme Court.

     “We may well have a fresh start in the cause of life in America,” Pence said. “It is our hope and our prayer that in the coming days, a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States will take action to restore the sanctity of life at the center of American law.”

     Mike Pence is so excited he got to be a part of making “The Handmaid’s Tale” a reality in the United States, by helping Donald Trump shove all those disgusting, unqualified 24-year-old white wingnut judges on the bench.

     Orban reportedly told Pence — who apparently thinks there’s a place for him in the Republican Party if Donald Trump, with his “Hang Mike Pence” supporters, enters the 2024 primary — that he “[wishes you] a comeback as soon as possible.” Orban also reportedly said some Nazi Handmaid’s Tale shit of his own […].

     Orban also described how Hungary, under his rule since 2010, has used the state “to shape demographic processes” by restricting migration and using tax breaks and other state instruments to ensure that having children is beneficial economically for families.

     Neat. Always a good reminder that when these people start freaking out about birth rates, what they mean is they are freaking out about birth rates among white people. That’s why they’re restricting migration and doing tax breaks for white people to have babies.

     Oh by the way it was announced yesterday that they’re having CPAC in Hungary next year.

346. raven says

     23 September 2021 at 5:20 pm

     Xpost
     Here is what it is like in Fox NoNews land, Idaho. They are now triaging patients. In one major hospital 50 out 51 Covid-19 patients are unvaccinated.
     The governor recently signed a law forbidding vaccine mandates and Boise appointed an antivax quack to their Central Health board.
     A lot of the patients are hostile and sometimes attack the health care workers. They are also being threatened by the families of the patients.

     “An Unprecedented Event In Modern Medicine”: What Happens When A State Fails To Flatten The COVID Curve
     David Mack Wed, September 22, 2021, Buzzfeed News edited for length

     She thought of the abuse she’d received from one man’s angry family members, who had berated her for not treating him with ivermectin, a deworming drug falsely promoted as a cure in conspiracy circles but that the FDA has warned against using in COVID patients. She thought of how police had had to remove the man’s family after his son-in-law told her, “If you don’t do this, I have a lot of ways to get people to do something, and they’re all sitting in my gun safe at home.”

     Like other medical workers in her state, Carvalho is exhausted and exasperated. Idaho currently has the lowest vaccination rate in the country, and the number of vaccine doses administered hasn’t been climbing significantly — but infections have. As of Saturday, there were 686 patients hospitalized in the state with COVID, 180 of them in ICUs. That’s hundreds more than what flooded hospitals during the previous surge in December 2020, before safe and effective vaccines were widely available.

     Currently, 50 of the 51 COVID patients in ICUs part of the St. Luke’s Health System — a chain covering southeastern Idaho, eastern Oregon, and northern Nevada — are unvaccinated.
     Hospitalizations have soared. In July, there were 33 patients with COVID across all the St. Luke’s hospitals. This week, there were 289. Currently, more than two-thirds of all patients in St. Luke’s facilities are being treated for the same virus,

     Idaho is what a state looks like when it fails to flatten the curve.
     The crisis standards apply to all patients — not just those with COVID-19.
     Keller said. “We have not yet hit our peak.”

     …and require more mechanical ventilation, they are staying in the ICU longer, and they are dying more frequently (the ICU mortality rate has jumped from 28% to 43%).

     Misinformation is also rampant. Republicans in one county that includes Boise this month voted to appoint a fringe doctor who has called vaccines “fake” to a regional health board.

347. tomh says

     23 September 2021 at 7:27 pm

     Texas sued over social media censorship law
     KIRK MCDANIEL / September 22, 2021

     AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — Two internet trade groups that represent the largest tech companies in America filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday challenging a new Texas law meant to curb censorship of political speech by social media users.

     NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association, or CCIA, advocate for the free enterprise and expression of internet companies and consumers and lobby for limited government regulation of the internet.

     Their lawsuit filed in Austin federal court against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton challenges House Bill 20, a law that regulates social media companies’ ability to remove users from their sites.

     Signed into law by Republican Governor Greg Abbott earlier this month, HB 20 asserts that social media platforms are common carriers and are open for all to use as a public forum. The bill requires platforms with over 50 million active users, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, to disclose all information regarding how they target users, promote content, moderate users and use algorithms.

     In addition, platforms must publish a biannual “transparency report” that discloses instances that the site was alerted to illegal activity and the number of times the platform took action to remove content or users due to violating the platform’s content policies…..

     “There is a dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas,” Abbott said in a statement after signing HB 20 into law…..

     NetChoice President and CEO Steve DelBianco told reporters Wednesday that social media platforms “can’t be forced to carry content that violates the community standards that they use to curate a community of online content that suits their advertisers and audience.” ….

     A similar law in Florida was also challenged earlier this year by NetChoice and the CCIA, using largely the same arguments as the case in Texas. Florida’s Senate Bill 7072 gives the attorney general or citizens of the state the ability to file suit against social media sites for removing content or users. A judge hearing that case blocked the law from being enforced.

348. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 9:59 pm

     PALM BEACH (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump filed a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit after finishing a New York Times story that he started reading in 2018, the former President has confirmed.

     “When I started reading the story three years ago, I saw my name in the headline and it made me happy,” Trump told reporters. “It said ‘Trump.’ I thought, This is probably going to be a good story.”

     As he continued reading the story in 2019, he said, “It still didn’t seem so bad to me. I spent that year reading three or four paragraphs, and I didn’t really get the entire gist of the article.”

     In 2020, Trump said, “I was busy with the election, so I didn’t get to read as much of the article as I would’ve liked. I maybe got through five, six more sentences. It mentioned my name a lot. ‘Trump.’ Still seemed O.K.”

     Though Trump was ultimately able to finish the Times article this week, he accused its authors of making it intentionally difficult for him to read.

     “Those so-called writers used many, many long words that I didn’t know—and Jared didn’t, either,” he said. “We had to ask Ivanka what they meant, and, quite frankly, she had to look a lot of them up. And those jokers won the Pulitzer for this crap? That should never be allowed to happen in this country.”

     New Yorker link

349. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 10:02 pm

     From text quoted by raven in comment 345:

     She thought of the abuse she’d received from one man’s angry family members, who had berated her for not treating him with ivermectin, a deworming drug falsely promoted as a cure in conspiracy circles but that the FDA has warned against using in COVID patients. She thought of how police had had to remove the man’s family after his son-in-law told her, “If you don’t do this, I have a lot of ways to get people to do something, and they’re all sitting in my gun safe at home.”

     That just leaves me speechless. Going from awful to worse.

     The only good news in there is that the police removed the guy making the threats.

350. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 10:05 pm

     Tennessean:

     Thirteen people were shot and one killed in what Police Chief Dale Lane called ‘the most horrific event that’s occurred in Collierville history.’ The shooter is also dead, killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Lane said. Law enforcement are still working some active scenes, including waiting on equipment to search the shooter’s car and some property of the shooter.

351. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 10:05 pm

     NBC News:

     The Food and Drug Administration authorized a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine Wednesday for emergency use in people ages 65 and up, as well as those 18 and older at high risk of exposure to the coronavirus or severe illness. Boosters are to be given at least six months after people get their second doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
     […]
     A key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory group voted Thursday to recommend distributing Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 booster shots to older Americans, nursing home residents and other vulnerable Americans, clearing the way for the agency to give the final OK as early as this evening.

352. Lynna, OM says

     23 September 2021 at 10:07 pm

     Oh, FFS.

     Washington Post:

     A leading asthma patient group has issued a warning against an unproven coronavirus treatment circulating on social media that is leading some people to post videos of themselves breathing in hydrogen peroxide through a nebulizer.

353. Trickster Goddess says

     24 September 2021 at 3:34 am

     Anti-vax intersecting with misogyny. (Square brackets in the original)

     Man assaults Sherbrooke nurse after she vaccinated wife without his ‘consent,’ police say

     Police in Sherbrooke, Que., are looking for a man they say assaulted a nurse after telling her she needed his permission to give a COVID-19 vaccine to his wife.

     The attack allegedly happened on Monday morning, at the Brunet pharmacy located near the corner of 12th Avenue North and du 24-Juin Street.

     “[Once there], the man quickly accuses the nurse of vaccinating his wife without [his] consent and then hits her several times to the face,” said Martin Carrier, a spokesperson for Sherbrooke police.

     Carrier says the man then ran away. The nurse, a woman in her 40s, was treated in hospital for injuries to her face and a possible concussion. She’s now recovering at home.

354. blf says

     24 September 2021 at 4:49 am

     Lynna@351, That (quack use of H₂O₂) sounded familiar, from Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge (my added emboldening):

     Practitioners of alternative medicine[Quacks] have advocated the use of hydrogen peroxide for various conditions, including emphysema, influenza, AIDS, and in particular cancer. There is no evidence of effectiveness and in some cases it has proved fatal.

     The practice calls for the daily consumption of hydrogen peroxide, either orally or by injection, and is based on two precepts. First, that hydrogen peroxide is produced naturally by the body to combat infection; and second, that human pathogens and tumors […] are anaerobic and cannot survive in oxygen-rich environments. The ingestion or injection of hydrogen peroxide therefore is believed to kill disease by mimicking the immune response in addition to increasing levels of oxygen within the body. […] Both the effectiveness and safety of hydrogen peroxide therapy is scientifically questionable. […]

355. blf says

     24 September 2021 at 5:12 am

     Mike Lindell moves the reinstatement goalposts again — now Trump will be back by Thanksgiving (Salon edits in {curly braces}):

     That is locked in stone, everybody, says MyPillow Guy, despite no evidence, no paperwork and no legal case

     [… E]lection truther Mike Lindell has revised his prediction, yet again, as to when the US Supreme Court will hear his undisclosed legal argument that the 2020 election should be overturned.

     […] Lindell originally predicted that the high court would overturn the election and return Donald Trump to the White House by August. But of course that dream did not come to fruition, mostly because Lindell has presented no actual evidence but also because the Supreme Court has no authority to do any such thing. […] That prompted Lindell to move the goalposts and claim that Trump’s second coming would occur by year’s end.

     On Tuesday, however, Lindell made an excited announcement that his mysterious legal team has fast-tracked internal research, claiming that its thus-far-imaginary Supreme Court case is now ahead of schedule.

     […]

     Originally, I had hoped for August and September. I asked all the lawyers just yesterday, Lindell said. We are taking this case to the Supreme Court before Thanksgiving. Now maybe Fox {News} will report that today. That aside was a reference to the pillow king’s feud with Fox News, which has generally ignored his recent claims and refused to cover his August [bouncy castle fun fair] “cyber symposium” in South Dakota.

     This evidence is 100% non-subjective evidence, Lindell continued, and that the Supreme Court, they’re going to vote 9–nothing to take it in. We will have this before the Supreme Court before Thanksgiving. That’s my promise to the people of this country. We’re all in this together. We worked very hard on this!

     […]

     Lindell has not released or filed any documents intended to support such a hypothetical case, nor has he explained what legal mechanism he believes might allow the Supreme Court to take action on his unfocused claims of election fraud. Lawsuits do not go directly to the Supreme Court without working their way through the federal court system first. No suit aiming to overturn the 2020 election currently exists, and it’s not clear who the plaintiff would be, or what standing they might have to make such grandiose claims.

     In the wake of Lindell’s failed South Dakota [bouncy castle fun fair] “cyber symposium,” Salon reports have revealed that Lindell has paid at least $3 million to “cyber experts” who provided him with no real evidence of widespread voter fraud.

     […]

356. blf says

     24 September 2021 at 5:19 am

     The Onion, Unvaccinated Mom Wants To Know If You’re Coming Home For Covid This Year:

     Saying she can’t remember the last time you visited during a lethal surge of the highly contagious virus, local unvaccinated mom Carol Napier asked Wednesday if you were planning to come home for Covid this year. “It would just be nice to have the whole family here so we could be together for a debilitating respiratory illness,” said Napier, who has reportedly ignored her doctor’s urgent recommendations to take the vaccine and wear a mask, adding that she would love it if you made it home for a good long bout of the disease currently killing 2,000 Americans per day. […] Napier added that it was up to you, of course, but to let her know what you decided so she could make sure there were enough ICU beds for everyone.

357. blf says

     24 September 2021 at 5:23 am

     More from The Onion, Democrats Face New Hurdle After Republicans Gerrymander All Left-Leaning Voters Into Single House District:

     Scrambling to respond to the sudden shift in electoral realities, Democrats reportedly faced new hurdles Wednesday after Republicans gerrymandered all left-leaning voters into a single House district stretching across the country. “Democrats were already looking at significant headwinds going into the midterms, and that won’t be helped by having all of their voters gerrymandered into a new transcontinental district stretching from California to southern Maine,” said FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver […]. “[… Y]ou can certainly see how Republicans might exploit the 434–1 advantage to move the legislature in a conservative direction.” At press time, DNC chair Jaime Harrison had released a press statement framing the new ultra-blue district’s single guaranteed seat as a major win for the nation’s progressives.

358. blf says

     24 September 2021 at 5:39 am

     Lynna@339, A brilliant reader’s comment to Newsweek’s Michael Flynn Spreads Conspiracy Theory on Deep State Putting Vaccines in Salad Dressing:

     Mike Flynn also believes a colony of goblins does his laundry; space elves mow his lawn; talking tacos are replacing teachers in schools across the nation teaching critical race theory; the Loch Ness Monster was just elected Mayor of the Lost City of Atlantis; Lord of the Rings is a documentary; JFK actually shot himself; if you say “Candyman” three times in a dark bathroom, you’ll erase the National debt; the Moon is made of BBQ spare ribs; Jupiter, Florida is actually a portal to Hades; Sean Hannity is Sasquatch in disguise; Area 51 is just a cover-up for Area 52 where the REAL aliens are; if you watch every episode of South Park backwards, you get detailed engineering schematics to build a Star Gate to a dimension where everyone is made out of pizza; ducks don’t quack but rather speak an ancient dialect of Aramaic and are quoting end-times scripture; every computer on Earth emits a frequency that makes you 2 inches shorter; a cabal of powerful mecha-ninjas from the Arby’s corporation put special sauce in the drinking water to dumb down the population to become Marxist; Tupac and Biggie are still alive and preside over the Galatic Senate from Star Wars; Mitch McConnell sees dead people; and finally the orange stuff on Trump’s face is ground-up Oompa Loompas.

359. snarkrates says

     24 September 2021 at 11:11 am

     blf@354, regarding Lindell and the other false prophets:
     If you need me, I’ll be out in my garden gathering stones. I imagine I’ll have quite a pile by the end of November.

360. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 12:18 pm

     blf @353, all down side, no up side. And people do it anyway. Almost sounds like the excerpts you posted from The Onion. Hard to tell the real stupidity from the satire.

     In other news: Panel investigating Jan. 6 subpoenas top members of Trump’s team

     Among the revelations from the new book from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa is a striking story about Steve Bannon. According to the authors’ reporting, Bannon was in communications with Donald Trump in the runup to the Jan. 6 attack.

     As Costa explained during an MSNBC interview this week, Bannon, the Trump campaign’s chairman in 2016, “[I]t’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” The former Trump campaign chairman soon after played the clip on his podcast, effectively confirming the story.

     This led some observers, including Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, to publicly question whether Bannon could credibly be accused of participating in a criminal conspiracy.

     At a minimum, the revelations served as a reminder that Bannon and others like him appear to have key insights into the events of Jan. 6 and would be in a position to shed light on the insurrectionist violence. It’s against this backdrop that NBC News had this report overnight:

     The congressional committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas Thursday to some of former President Donald Trump’s closest advisers. The committee subpoenaed and set a date for sworn depositions for former White House strategist Steve Bannon, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former social media director Dan Scavino and Kashyap Patel, who was chief of staff to Trump’s defense secretary.

     […] The members of the former president’s team have been given two weeks to comply with the panel’s request.

     […] the National Archives and Records Administration has started to produce materials for the congressional panel. The Biden White House is also reportedly preparing to cooperate with the probe.

     Donald Trump and his team, who appear to have quite a bit to hide, have already objected to the release of relevant information. A fight in the courts now appears inevitable.

     In the meantime, the former president’s freak-out is ongoing. [Trump] issued a new written statement last night that rambled on for a few hundred words, while referring to the select committee as the “Unselect Committee.”

     After complaining about Black Lives Matter activists, Trump offered another tacit defense of the Jan. 6 rioters, adding, “Hopefully the Unselect Committee will be calling witnesses on the Rigged Presidential Election of 2020, which is the primary reason that hundreds of thousands of people went to Washington, D.C. in the first place.”

     The former president concluded that he wants the American public to “see the real facts,” even while vowing to hide the facts from the congressional panel and the public.

361. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 12:25 pm

     Schadenfreude moment: Sham audit backfires on Arizona GOP, Biden won by a wider margin>

     There was never any reason to question the election results out of Arizona. There was an official count of the state’s ballots, followed by an official recount. There was an independent audit, which found literally nothing untoward. The facts were unambiguous: President Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the Grand Canyon State last fall.

     But Republican conspiracy theorists — from Phoenix to Mar-a-Lago — were nevertheless convinced that the vote count, recount, and independent reviews weren’t quite good enough. What the GOP needed was a strange company called Cyber Ninjas, led by a guy who promoted QAnon content, which had no relevant experience, to conduct yet another review of the ballots from Arizona’s most populous county.

     Republicans in the state Senate, who authorized the fiasco, said it would take a few weeks. Five months later, according to multiple accounts, the endeavor appears to have backfired spectacularly. The Arizona Republic, among many other news organizations, reported overnight:

     A monthslong hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2020 vote confirmed that President Joe Biden won and the election was not “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, according to early versions of a report prepared for the Arizona Senate. The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results. The data in the report also confirms that U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly won in the county.

     [Ha,ha,ha,ha]

     The official results won’t be released until this afternoon, at a presentation scheduled for 4 p.m. eastern, but not surprisingly, the findings appear to have leaked.

     […] if the overnight reporting is correct, and the “audit” showed the Democratic ticket winning by an even wider margin than previously known, the Arizona Republicans’ multi-million-dollar process will soon enter the American Politics Hall of Shame as one of the most brutal own goals of all time.

     The degree to which Trump will be crushed is difficult to overstate. In the spring, the Republican spoke to a group of supporters and sounded like a politician who expected the “audit” to tell him he’d won the race he’d actually lost. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump asked soon after, “This appears to be Trump at Mar-a-Lago telling his customers that the bizarre Arizona recount will be the first domino to fall in apparently somehow undoing the election?”

     The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman also noted in May that Trump had told people the Arizona audit “could undo” the 2020 presidential election.

     Even at the time, that was insane. It’s much worse now.

     I fully expect both the Cyber Ninja doofuses and Republicans nationwide to spin this embarrassing conclusion of the Fraudit into something that augers well for Trump. It’ll be difficult, but I still expect them to do it.

362. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 12:31 pm

     GOP Senate hopeful characterizes pregnancies from rape as ‘inconvenient’

     The 2012 election cycle was a difficult one for Republican candidates, though it was made vastly more challenging by a handful of GOP candidates who shared their ideas about pregnancies resulting from rape.

     In Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Todd Akin famously declared, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Two months later, in Indiana’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Richard Mourdock argued that when a woman is impregnated by a rapist, “it’s something God intended.”

     Akin and Mourdock were conservative candidates running in red states. They nevertheless both lost. It was hardly a secret that their rhetoric about rape and pregnancies was directly responsible for their defeats.

     […] The Daily Beast reported yesterday on the related rhetoric from a prominent U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio.

     In a local news interview published Wednesday, author and venture capitalist turned Senate candidate J.D. Vance suggested he would support prohibiting abortion even in cases of rape and incest—and dismissed those catalysts as “inconvenient.” Asked by Curtis Jackson of Spectrum News 1 in Columbus, OH, whether a woman should be forced to give birth even if the pregnancy was the result of incest or rape, Vance replied that “the question betrays a certain presumption that’s wrong.”

     Vance argued, “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question to me is really about the baby. We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life.”

     […] The GOP candidate offered praise for state’s abortion ban, adding, “[I]n Texas, they’re trying to make it easier for babies to be born.”

     […] telling women impregnated by rapists that their circumstances are “inconvenient,” and the government will require them to continue with the pregnancies against their will, is likely to be a tough sell, even in Ohio.

363. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 12:39 pm

     Sometimes you have to wonder if Florida Republicans don’t long for the good ol’ days of iron lungs and kids with braces. Forget “Make American Great Again,” today it’s “Make America Sick Again.”

     Following in the footsteps of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senator Manny Diaz Jr., who himself had COVID-19 last winter, says he intends to review the state’s vaccination mandates, including those required in schools. Needless to say, he has not gotten a COVID-19 vaccine and he’s working to help the governor get monoclonal antibody treatments to those who test positive for COVID-19. [making money for their big donors]

     According to The Washington Post, the Biden administration intends to take charge of the distribution of monoclonal antibody treatment, and restrict its distribution from those states prioritizing it over using vaccines – causing outrage, particularly in Southern states.

     Remember, Florida is the state that passed a bill fining businesses and governments that require proof of COVID-19 vaccines from customers or members of the public.

     […] Diaz is ready to “review” those mandates [vaccination requirements for school children]—including, but not limited to, mumps and measles. He does acknowledge the difference between what he calls “long-tested vaccines” versus the new COVID-19 vaccine.

     “I think there’s a distinction when you have something that is proven to work and doesn’t have any side effects,” Diaz said.

     This has become the mantra of the Republican Party: COVID-19 vaccines need more testing. So far, 6.06 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been distributed worldwide across 184 countries, according to data collected by Bloomberg. If there was an issue, we’d all see it by now.

     The Miami Herald reports that in the past seven days, on average, Florida has added 376 COVID-19 deaths and 9,020 cases per day. The state’s seven-day death average has held at 376 deaths per day over the last three days, which is Florida’s highest seven-day death average.

     Link

     Anti-vax to the max. Sure, bring back mumps, measles and polio. Sheesh!

364. Brony, Social Justice Cenobite says

     24 September 2021 at 12:49 pm

     This looks like an interesting study.
     https://cpost.uchicago.edu/research/domestic_extremism/
     “Statistical analysis of the 250 unique counties compared to over 3,200 other counties in the United States shows that for every one percent decline in the non-Hispanic white population, a county was over six times more likely to send at least one insurrectionist.
     In a representative survey of 1,000 Americans in March, believing that the rights of Hispanic and black people are overtaking white people increases odds of being in the insurrectionist movement three-fold.
     In a separate survey of 1,000 conservative Americans in February, fear that Hispanic and black people will have more rights than white people increases odds of being in the insurrectionist movement two-fold.”
     Seems about white.

365. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 12:50 pm

     Ted Cruz makes the mistake of asking a law expert which voter ID laws are racist on live TV

     It is very hard to come up with descriptors for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. He is a truly loathsome human being. The levels of bigotry, hypocrisy, and legislative malfeasance he has participated in over the last decade are hard to categorize with a few words. His fellow GOP sociopaths dislike him because he is a detestable human being to be around. His one guiding principle is power for himself, and his intellectual bankruptcy begins and ends with first-year high school debate rhetoric. The illusion, however meager, of Cruz’s intelligence and rhetorical talent was exposed as fraudulent […]

     On Wednesday, during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, Sen. Cruz was doing his best to misrepresent reality and Republican racist voter suppression tactics, questioning professor Franita Tolson of the University of Southern California’s law school. […]

     Cruz began by asking whether or not voter ID laws are racist. It’s the kind of sweeping generalization that racists with a third-grade education consider the best way to argue about things. If you answer yes, then the rest of the questions Ted Cruz will send your way will point out the nuances of racism, and in so doing, make your argument seem unsophisticated.

     PROF. FRANITA TOLSON: Thank you for your question. So, it depends. One thing we have to stop doing is treating all voter ID laws as the same—

     SEN. TED CRUZ: –Okay, so your answer—I want to move quickly. So “it depends” is your answer.

     PROF. TOLSON: Yes, that’s my answer.

     […] Cruz, having been stopped at his opening gambit, an old-timey lawyer trick of trying to get someone on their heels by, in essence, telling them to speed up, is forced to ask a secondary question.

     SEN. CRUZ: Okay, so what voter ID laws are racist?

     PROF. TOLSON: Apologies, Mr. Cruz. Your state of Texas, perhaps?

     SEN. CRUZ: Okay, so you think the entire state of Texas is racist? What about requiring an ID to vote is racist?

     Once again, Cruz is attempting to put sweeping generalizations into the mouths of other people. Unfortunately for Ted Cruz, this isn’t a third-grader being asked about their favorite ice cream flavor. The people at the hearing are accomplished professors who have, unlike Ted Cruz, continued their education past the fragile ego of a 14-year-old in the middle of puberty.

     PROF. TOLSON: So I think, sir, that’s pretty reductive. I’m not saying the entire state of Texas is racist.

     Calling Ted Cruz “reductive” is something every person having an exchange with Ted Cruz should do. It will forever be applicable to any conversation with him. Calling him “intellectually vacuous” would be good, too.

     SEN. TED CRUZ: You just said my state of Texas. So you tell me what about the Texas voter ID laws is racist.

     PROF. TOLSON: Absolutely. So the fact that the voter ID law was put into place to diminish the political power of Latinos, with racist intent, and has been found to have racist intent—

     Prof. Tolson is referring to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Texas’ 2011 voter ID law resulted in a violation of the Voting Rights Act because of its “discriminatory effect.” That’s a fact. In fact, that’s the evidence Ted Cruz was implying didn’t exist. Cruz, having just run into a wall of reality, farts his way forward by reasserting that Prof. Tolson said that all voter ID laws are racist. He asks Asian Americans Advancing Justice President John Yang what his opinion on the matter is. Mr. Yang, like Tolson, isn’t a dunderhead […] and can see exactly what Sen. Cruz is very messily trying to accomplish, and responds beautifully: “I agree with Professor Tolson. Voter ID laws can be racist.” The “can” in that sentence is a reminder that Ted Cruz is still full of shit.

     Cruz moves on to President of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Thomas Saenz, who replies, “There are some voter ID laws that are racially discriminatory in intent.” The “some” in that sentence is a reminder that Ted Cruz is full of shit. At this point, Sen. Cruz, having gotten exactly none of the results he was looking for, tries again to illustrate that left-wing communists are calling all Americans racist.

     SEN. CRUZ: How about in practice? In intent, fine, you say there’s some racist with a malevolent intent lurking in the back of their mind. But let’s just talk about as a practical matter. When I go to vote, they ask me for my ID. I pull out my ID. I show it to them. I vote. Is that racist?

     […] Saenz begins to reply: “If the law that requires you to do that was motivated by racially discriminatory intent, under our Constitution—“ but Cruz interrupts him at the word “motivated” to perform an exercise of rhetorical theatrics, asking, “What about the effect? Set aside intent. Set aside intent, I’m asking about the effect.”

     Saenz goes back to finishing his response:

     MR. YANG: Yes, in effect, I think that there are discriminatory effects from a number of voter ID laws.

     Having completely lost his attempts to hide how goddamn racist he and the Republican Party are, Cruz goes in on a full make-em-up of what just transpired.

     SEN. CRUZ: The record should reflect all three of the Democratic witnesses invited by the chairman maintained to this committee that voter ID laws can be, in many instances, in most instances—I think are the various ways they formulate it—are racist.

     The record doesn’t reflect that, nor should it. Cruz is a one-trick pony who says sophomoric things for the cameras. […]

     Cruz finishes by just misrepresenting facts, saying that “35 states” have voter ID laws, and adds that Democrats and “radical” leftists are attacking the will of the people. As of this story, only seven states have strict photo ID laws, and only four have strict non-photo ID laws. The movement by conservatives to enact dozens of new voter restrictions and more severe voter ID laws that disproportionately suppress the voting rights of communities of color is not something the majority of Americans support.

     Video is available at the link.

366. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 1:39 pm

     According to Mary Trump, it’s Junior

     We all have that one relative whose brain is nothing but spackle, expired haggis, and unnecessarily circuitous termite tunnels, and presidents are no different. […]

     If there’s one exception to this rule, it’s Mary Trump—the Lisa Simpson to Donald Trump’s evil Homer. Mary Trump—who’s back in the news thanks to her newly released book The Reckoning and the $100 million lawsuit her dimwit uncle filed against her for giving his tax records to The New York Times—has assessed the relative “intelligence” of the folks who share her surname and some of her (apparently latent) DNA. She’s decided the stupidest of them all is … Donald Trump Jr.!

     Appearing on this week’s episode of the “UnPresidented” podcast, Trump, a psychologist who has written a highly-critical book about former President Donald Trump, referred to her cousin Donald Trump Jr. as “weak” and “the stupidest one” in her family.

     “Donnie is a deeply unintelligent person. I’ve been asked this, who’s the stupidest one, and it’s him,” Mary Trump said.

     “He has no core. He has no ideology,” Trump added, before saying her cousin has an ability to “out-racism anybody, he’ll out-misogyny anybody, he’ll shoot as many innocent animals as possible to get whatever passes for affection in my family.”

     […] In fact, according to his cousin, sitting back was always Junior’s life plan, even though his sister is his father’s favorite son.

     “He had no intention of striking out on his own. He had no intention of doing anything but sucking up and toeing the line, and the problem is — one of the problems is — and who knows how this happens — but kind of the same problem that happened to him happened to my dad. My grandfather, for whatever reason, didn’t like my father and saw something in his sibling Donald, and the only thing that’s weird is that Donald did the same thing but with Ivanka.”

     In honor of his “Stupidest Trump” award from Cousin Mary, let’s review some of Junior’s greatest hits, shall we?

     There was the time he compared Syrian refugees to Skittles. That was a classic. And remember when he urged his followers—twice—to get out and vote for a Republican gubernatorial candidate the day after the election?

     And then there are the tweets where his stupidity folded into his awfulness like a fluffy omelet. […] [He was jealous of gay guys who were affectionate with their female friends.]

     And the time he excoriated a fellow tweeter’s bad grammar with an ungrammatical tweet of his own […] [Can’t tell the difference between “your” and “you’re,” and wrongly corrects others about their proper use.]

     […] This is far from a comprehensive list […]

367. johnson catman says

     24 September 2021 at 1:52 pm

     re Lynna @365:

     She’s decided the stupidest of them all is … Donald Trump Jr.!

     Not that her opinion makes Eric any smarter, but that would have to sting Jr’s fragile ego if he had any self-awareness.

368. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 1:54 pm

     […] religious exemption is simple a convenient loophole through which to dodge externally imposed vaccine requirements. Medical exemptions can be hard to come by—they require a documented diagnosis of one of the very few conditions that prevents someone from getting vaccinated. Religious exemptions are easier: They rarely require proof that an employee belongs to an organized religious group that opposes vaccines. (Few faiths do.) Rather, the onus of explaining the religious beliefs is left to the individual—and the employer must then decide whether the belief they describe is sincere […]

     As more employers adopt vaccine mandates, a growing number of vaccine-hesitant workers are trying to figure out how to use religious exemptions to keep their jobs without getting the jab. Many are taking to online Facebook groups to strategize around how best to persuade their bosses. Their conversations, which I have observed over the last few weeks, reveal a grassroots online movement gaining traction. Every day, I watched the groups grow, from hundreds to thousands of members, as exemption seekers all over the country organized, collaborated, and shared resources. The groups have an overall Christian flavor—members often quote scripture and urge each other to consult with pastors. But not all the conversation revolves around religion—there is also a strong anti-government strain. Members talk about their “medical freedom” and they rail against “tyranny.” […]

     Though most of the religious exemption social media groups are only a few weeks old, it’s clear that they have already become powerful sources of camaraderie and identity. Members bond over what they perceive as the injustice they are experiencing, forging alliances and even friendships in the comments section. They invite each other to antivaccine rallies, offer prayers, and praise each other’s fortitude. They accuse their employers of discrimination, of trampling on their free speech. When a group member posted that she was pregnant and worried about being terminated from her flight attendant job, one commenter wrote, “I love your mama bear protection for your unborn child and I love that you stand against tyranny.” Another chimed in, “Stay strong and believe that there are many other people like you putting their foot down and saying NO! Our unity will bring them down.”

     Many of the discussions in the group focus on strategy. Some members post screenshots of the forms their employers ask them to fill out to obtain a religious exemption and asked the community for advice. A member wondered how she should respond when her employer wondered if she had received vaccines in the past. “If they come back and want to know why you are refusing this vaccine despite getting vaccinated in the past, just tell them that you were only made aware of vaccine ingredients and where they come from recently,” offered one commenter. In response to a similar post in another group, a commenter recommended side-stepping the question altogether and replying, “I believe this is moving to a personal medical discussion and not a religious discussion.”

     […] members debated the merits of citing in their religious exemption requests vaccine researchers’ use of cell lines from aborted fetuses. “Only one of the (beep) have fetal cell lines so was advised not to use,” observed one commenter. Instead, the commenter recommended, “Find verses of the Bible that talk about our body being the temple of God.” Another commenter disagreed: “I used the fetal cell line government documents that state they are used in the testing, production of the jabs plus my Bible verses to reinforce my beliefs, and mine was approved. […]

     Another option relies on obscure Biblical scholarship. One member initially suggested that employees should ask to “see the credentials” of people who are evaluating religious exemptions—but there’s more. “Better yet,” the member added, “submit their scripture rebuttal in Koine Greek or Hebrew and ask for the companies’ reasoning for denial in a biblical language.” A member who identified himself as a pastor advised employees to refuse to answer any questions at all, and instead just hand over a Bible. “Unspiritual people cannot understand spiritual things. This is why you just hand them a Bible and let them figure it out. You just give the Bible scriptures. They are simply trying to trap people with wording!!” the member wrote. He claimed that he’s helped 75 people use this technique, and not one of their requests was denied.

     Sometimes, members of the group expressed anxiety about their employers’ other COVID-19 mitigation policies, as well, with regular testing for those who refuse to be vaccinated as a particular point of concern. “People are reporting that they’re getting sick after taking the test,” one recent post said. “I’m in a health-oriented group and have learned that the swabs are sterilized with ethylene oxide, which is a cancer-causing agent,” a commenter responded.

     […] Some pastors have said they are willing to sign religious exemption requests for free, while a cottage industry of “consultants” will offer their expert advice for a fee. Several members recommend The Healthy American, where seekers of religious exemptions can select from three tiers of consulting services. For a mere $175, the top-of-the-line “concierge packet” promises customers “exact step-by-step instructions for what to do” and a buffet of options for letters signed by a pastor.

     […] “We would love to see legal action against these people, but the truth is it would be really hard to do that. They would present it as, ‘We’re not helping people to lie. We’re just helping people navigate the complex legal system.’”

     […] In September, Troup [Conway Regional Health System CEO] announced that any employee who requested a religious exemption on the basis of fetal cell lines would also have to submit a form attesting that they didn’t use any other drugs developed with the cell lines—including Tylenol, aspirin, and Tums. “A lot of this, I believe, is a hesitancy about the vaccine,” Troup told a local NBC affiliate, “and so that’s a separate issue than a religious exemption.” […]

     Link

369. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 1:59 pm

     johnson @366, ha! Good point.

     In other news: Burnout and fatigue hobble CDC’s pandemic response

     Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are increasingly reluctant to join the agency’s pandemic response team, citing debilitating burnout and fatigue after 19 months of fighting Covid-19.

     CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is trying to build up the response team after paring it down last spring as part of a broader agency reorganization amid optimism the pandemic would ebb. But with the rise of the Delta variant, and projections that cases and hospitalizations could begin to rise again this fall and winter, Walensky is again asking agency staff to help — a plea many are spurning.

     […] While the CDC has played a central role in the U.S. fight against Covid-19 for nearly two years, sources said the last several months have been particularly difficult. They described an intense summer marked by demands to digest complex data in record time as the government raced to update policies on vaccines, masks and travel in the face of Delta.

     Many of the epidemiologists, scientists and statisticians on the CDC’s Covid-19 response team — which collects and analyzes Covid-19 data, drafts scientific reports and coordinates agency policy recommendations — have been putting in 15-hour days since the pandemic began. […]

     “It’s been really difficult for people and with Delta, it just felt like we were back at the start of things,” one CDC official said. “And not everyone wants to work on the pandemic response because they know how crazy things are and what long hours they would have to pull. So that means that others who have already put in their time have to continue working.” […]

370. Pierce R. Butler says

     24 September 2021 at 2:13 pm

     Lynna … @ # 360: I fully expect both the Cyber Ninja doofuses and Republicans nationwide to spin this … into something that augers well for Trump.

     Thereby once again, as is their compulsion, violating the First Rule of Holes.

371. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 2:21 pm

     Pierce @369, all too true.

     Actually, even Trump hasn’t come up with any convincing spin. He is relying on his old tactic of blaming the media. He blathered on and blustered about “Fraud” that we can’t see, but really he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

     […] In a statement issued through his leadership PAC, Save America, the former president called the audit report, which is slated for release Friday afternoon, a political bombshell that “has uncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD.”

     “Huge findings in Arizona! However, the Fake News Media is already trying to ‘call it’ again for Biden before actually looking at the facts—just like they did in November!” Trump said, invoking once again his baseless claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

     “This is a major criminal event and should be investigated by the Attorney General immediately,” he added. “The Senate’s final report will be released today at 4:00PM ET. I have heard it is far different than that being reported by the Fake News Media.”

     In a subsequent statement, Trump went into even more detail, claiming that the audit uncovered evidence of so-called “phantom voters” – mail-in ballots from voters who no longer live at the address on their voter file – as well as people who cast ballots in multiple counties.

     “This is not even the whole state of Arizona, but only Maricopa County. It would only get worse!” Trump said. “There is fraud and cheating in Arizona and it must be criminally investigated! More is coming out in the hearing today.” […]

     While the draft report notes that 23,344 mail-in ballots were voted from a prior address, that doesn’t necessarily indicate intentional wrongdoing. For example, more than 15,000 people who voted by mail from a prior address moved within Maricopa County prior to the registration deadline, according to the draft.

     […] In fact, [the report] showed the president winning 99 more votes than he did in the certified ballot count last year. Trump, meanwhile, came up 261 votes short of where he stood in last year’s official results.

     Despite that, the draft report refrains from saying the findings are conclusive and recommends a series of legislative reforms to address some issues with the elections system. Nevertheless, the draft report doesn’t contain evidence of the kind of widespread voter fraud that Trump and his allies have alleged.

     Link

372. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 2:24 pm

     Fox News bans Rudy Giuliani

     Fox News has banned Rudy Giuliani and his son from appearing on its network, Politico Playbook reported on Friday.

     Giuliani, who served as a personal attorney to former President Trump, has reportedly been banned for close to three months and only learned of the move by the news network right before Sept. 11, the news outlet reported.

     Prior to a scheduled appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Sept. 11, “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth apparently called the former New York City mayor the night before and apologized, telling him he had been canceled from their guest list.

     A source close to the former New York City mayor told Playbook that Giuliani was upset by the decision because he had “done a big favor” for Fox Corp. founder and Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

     “He was instrumental in getting Fox on Time Warner so it could be watched in New York City,” the source told Playbook.

     A spokesperson for Fox denied Politico’s report that Giulani had been scheduled to appear on “Fox & Friends” on Sept. 11, but that person declined to comment on whether there was a ban for the former New York City mayor.

     Additionally, Giuliani’s son, Andrew Giuliani, has also been reportedly banned, though it is unclear when that ban would have started. Since his New York gubernatorial campaign was initiated in May, Andrew Giuliani has not appeared on the network, Politico Playbook reported.

     The news outlet reported that the Giulianis were told that the ban had come from the top of the network. […]

373. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 2:30 pm

     https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1441431615394168840

     .@MTG [Marjorie taylor Green] and @RepDebDingell just got into screaming match on steps of Capitol after MTG heckled Democrats holding a press conf after passing legislation responding to Texas abortion law

     Four videos are available at the link. Majorie Taylor Greene shouted, among other things: “Try being a Christian!” “You try being a Christian!” Dingell interjected, repeatedly jabbing the air with her finger. “And try treating your colleagues decently!”

374. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 2:39 pm

     Yikes! Selling people online?

     This week, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation revealing that Apple threatened to remove Facebook and Instagram from its app store, following a BBC report on how people in several Middle Eastern countries were using the apps to sell their maids online.

     “The fuck?” you say?

     Yes. This was a whole thing. And it’s something that Facebook was apparently aware of before Apple threatened them, but until then “don’t let your platform be used to sell enslaved people” just wasn’t a priority.

     Via The Wall Street Journal:

     The company took down some offending pages, but took only limited action to try to shut down the activity until Apple Inc. threatened to remove Facebook’s products from the App Store unless it cracked down on the practice. The threat was in response to a BBC story on maids for sale.

     In an internal summary about the episode, a Facebook researcher wrote: “Was this issue known to Facebook before BBC enquiry and Apple escalation?”

     The next paragraph begins: “Yes.”

     Facebook, apparently, decided that it ought to be real delicate when telling people “Hey, don’t sell your domestic workers on Instagram,” because being too rude about it would “alienate buyers.”

     One document from earlier this year suggested the company should use a light touch with Arabic-language warnings about human trafficking so as not to “alienate buyers”—meaning Facebook users who buy the domestic laborers’ contracts, often in situations akin to slavery.

     Of course, they swear they never went through with that plan.

     I tend to not be a very big fan of the term “human trafficking,” largely because it’s such a vague term, covering many disparate issues, is frequently applied to consensual sex work; and is frequently abused by people and organizations spreading misinformation. I like specifics. But there really is not a better or more specific term to describe what was and is going on here. It was and is quite literally human trafficking.

     So What The Hell Is/Was Going On Here?

     Many countries in the Middle East have what is referred to in English as the “Kafala system.” The way migrant workers come to the country is by being sponsored by their employers, almost like an adoption, which is what Kafala literally means. People pay for a visa sponsorship for their desired employee and then bring them over.

     These workers are then legally prohibited from quitting their jobs or even leaving the country without the express written consent of their employer. While they initially, at least, start these jobs voluntarily and are paid — or they’re supposed to be, because there are a lot of issues there as well — the system has been (fairly) compared to slavery by human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and pretty much anyone who is not a monster.

     Workers can only leave their employer if their employer “allows” them to leave or sells their visa sponsorship to another person, who then becomes their employer. This is what was going on on Instagram, as well as several other buying and selling apps.

     The system is rife with abuse, sexual abuse and rape in particular. Workers who try to report their employers find that there is no recourse for them. Not only are they not believed, but because many countries in the Gulf region have zina laws, criminalizing pre-marital sex, if they report their rape to authorities and are not believed (which they usually will not be), the authorities will consider that a confession to consensual sex outside of marriage and the women will go to prison.

     Traditionally, employers confiscate their employees’ passports and don’t let them have any days off. Some of this changed in recent years, with Bahrain claiming to have eliminated the practice and Saudi Arabia “easing” restrictions on employees leaving their employer. The government of Qatar has instituted some labor reforms, but the population has been slow to catch up. Technically, Kuwait modified their system after a Kuwaiti couple was found to have tortured, strangled, and murdered Joanna Demafelis, their Filipino maid, and left her in the refrigerator of an abandoned building. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, in an unusual act of not being in favor of human rights abuses (which he normally loves), responded by barring Filipinos from working in Kuwait and demanding all current workers come home. As part of resolving the international incident, Kuwait instituted regulations on domestic workers, requiring that they be allowed to keep their passports, given an hour break for every five hours of work, one day off a week, a mobile phone and 22 vacation days (that sure is embarrassing for the US, where no one has guaranteed vacation days).

     Unfortunately, many people openly flout these laws, and those who are buying and selling their domestic workers online are some of those doing that. The BBC investigation that led Apple to threaten to ban Facebook from their app store showed these “sellers” — including a cop — bragging about how, despite the new laws in Kuwait, they don’t give their workers control of their own passports, give them any time off, or do literally any of the things they are supposed to be doing. And by “selling” these visa sponsorships online rather than going though more official channels, they’re also making the system a lot murkier and making it a whole lot easier for employers to deny workers their legal rights.

     […] “Following an investigation prompted by an inquiry from the BBC, we conducted a proactive review of our platform. We removed 700 Instagram accounts within 24 hours, and simultaneously blocked several violating hashtags.”

     The following month the company said it removed more than 130,000 pieces of Arabic-language speech content related to domestic servitude in Arabic on both Instagram and Facebook.

     It added that it had also developed technology that can proactively find and take action on content related to domestic servitude – enabling it to “remove over 4,000 pieces of violating organic content in Arabic and English from January 2020 to date”.

     Well, that’s good, and hopefully Apple holding them accountable will help to curb this issue in some small way. […]

     Link

375. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 2:47 pm

     Kraken Lawyers Forced To Pay Back Taxpayers For Legal Bills In Crap Election Suits

     Sidney Powell was told there would be no math. Or if there was math, it would be confined to wholly fantastical numbers made up by her own expert witnesses, not a detailed accounting of what it cost taxpayers to fend off her garbage Kraken lawsuits.

     But those nerds in Detroit and the Michigan statehouse […] turned in an actual accounting of their time spent protecting democracy after US District Judge Linda V. Parker told Powell and the derp squad to cough it up for spamming the docket with bogus affidavits and prolonging their attempt to overturn the election after the electoral votes were certified on January 6 […]

     So now Our Sid and her lawyer are asking the judge not to be so literal about those numbers.

     “The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has made it clear that courts need not act as ‘green eyeshade accountants’ when reviewing sanctions requests,” she whined, citing a 2017 Supreme Court opinion in support of the proposition that “Sanctions under the Court’s inherent authority should be compensatory rather than punitive.”

     But no math should be used to determine appropriate compensation, because UGHHH SHUT UP DORK.

     “[T]he primary concern is deterring future misconduct,” said the person who just said sanctions should be compensatory rather than punitive — and oh, who just yesterday claimed that two people in Georgia were murdered to scare Gov. Kemp off conducting an audit of the state’s election results. […]

     And while Powell objects to those government bean counters being too precise about their time, she’s also pissed that they’re not being precise enough about the minutes and hours they spent kicking her ass in this case. She’s mad that the City of Detroit billed in 15-minute increments, rather than 10, and she’s mad that they used block billing to aggregate a bunch of tasks into a larger time period, and she wants the city to take a big haircut on its bill for not using sharp enough pencils, those slackers. […]

     there was shambolic racing from the Sixth Circuit to the Supreme Court, vomiting nonsense petitions that went nowhere, then back to Judge Parker to file a hasty motion to dismiss in an attempt to ward off these very sanctions.

     And while we are noting inconvenient facts, let us point out that Powell is clearly feeling no economic pain from this debacle, having just paid $1.2 million in cash for an office in Alexandria, the better to ply her trade in DC and its environs. Something to keep in mind when Powell demands her right to dine and dash, leaving Michigan taxpayers with the $220,000 legal bill.

     Hey, remember when Judge Parker said these sanctions had to hurt a little to act as deterrence, since these crap lawsuits functioned as a de facto grift machine?

     The Court is troubled that Powell is profiting from the filing of this and other frivolous election-challenge lawsuits. See https://defendingtherepublic.org (website of company run by Powell on which donations are solicited to support the “additional cases [being prepared] every day”). Other attorneys for Plaintiffs may be as well, given that their address (according to the filings here) is the same address listed on this website. What is concerning is that the sanctions imposed here will not deter counsel from pursuing future baseless lawsuits because those sanctions will be paid with donor funds rather than counsel’s. In this Court’s view, this should be considered by any disciplinary authority reviewing counsel’s behavior.

     […].

     So sad. They had to pay. Not enough, in my opinion.

376. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 2:54 pm

     House Democrats pass new bill to codify Roe v. Wade protections

     The Women’s Health Protection Act has gone from an afterthought in Democratic politics to a new staple of the party’s legislative agenda.

     On Sept. 1, five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices gave the green light to Texas’ new abortion ban, effectively ending Roe v. Wade protections in the nation’s second largest state. On Sept. 2, the morning after the ruling, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not only denounced the policy, she also announced plans to bring the Women’s Health Protection Act to the floor.

     The point of the legislation is simple: The bill would enshrine reproductive rights into federal law, codifying Roe’s. This morning, as NPR reported, it passed the Democratic-led House.

     The U.S. House on Friday approved a bill that Democrats say will protect a person’s access to abortion. Passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act to floor is a response to S.B. 8, a Texas law that bans abortion after six weeks, before most people realize they are pregnant.

     The final tally in the chamber was 218 to 211: Literally zero Republicans voted for it, and it passed with the support of all but one House Democrat. (Texas’ Henry Cueller broke ranks.)

     It’s a breakthrough moment of sorts for the bill’s chief sponsor, Democratic Rep. Judy Chu of California, who first introduced the bill in 2013. The congresswoman proceeded to introduce the same measure in the next Congress, and the one after that, and the one after that.

     Before this year, Chu’s bill never even received a vote in committee. This morning, it nevertheless passed the House with the near-unanimous support of her Democratic colleagues.

     For reproductive-rights advocates, that’s the good news. The bad news, there’s a whole other chamber on the other side of Capitol Hill.

     There is a companion version of the Women’s Health Protection Act in the Senate — Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal is the chief sponsor — and it has 47 co-sponsors. That’s a relatively impressive number, but it’s also the ceiling: Every senator inclined to vote for the bill has already endorsed it, and 47 isn’t enough to get the legislation across the finish line.

     Ordinarily, the problem is the 60-vote threshold created by the filibuster, and to be sure, that is relevant: Proponents would need at least 10 votes from Senate Republicans, and they have zero. Even Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, ostensibly Congress’ most pro-choice Republican, announced her opposition this week to the Women’s Health Protection Act.

     But even if the filibuster didn’t exist, the bill still wouldn’t pass because a handful of Senate Democrats, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, oppose abortion rights.

     In other words, while today’s House vote was a notable step, the bill almost certainly will not become law this Congress.

     That said, President Joe Biden has extended his enthusiastic support to the proposal, and it’s fair to say the Women’s Health Protection Act has gone from an afterthought in Democratic politics to a new staple of the party’s legislative agenda.

     Fight on.

377. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 2:56 pm

     Follow-up to comment 370.

     Last night, Donald Trump issued a written statement celebrating the “highly respected auditors” reviewing election ballots in Arizona. As of this morning, that statement has apparently been deleted from the former president’s website.

     https://twitter.com/jonkarl/status/1441399510123483148

     “Highly respected auditors” makes me laugh.

378. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 2:57 pm

     Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the current chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NBC News yesterday that his party intends to run attack ads targeting Democrats for extending the debt ceiling, as lawmakers from both parties have done for generations. “Oh, you better believe it,” the Republican senator said.

379. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 3:02 pm

     Good point:

     [Trump] can’t call on it [executive privilege] from beyond the political grave. As Rep. Jamie Raskin said in response to the missive from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s thoughts on executive privilege aren’t particularly meaningful at this point “because there’s no president involved—there’s no such thing as a former president’s executive privilege.”

     The one person who decides what information gets shared now is the actual president. And no matter what the MAGA crowd might think, the actual president is Joe Biden. […]

     Link

380. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 4:52 pm

     Latest evidence shows Trump’s team knew election lies weren’t true

     Late last year, Team Trump examined election conspiracy theories and discredited them. Others on Team Trump peddled the bogus claims anyway.

     Over the course of the year, the public has learned quite a bit about the ways in which Donald Trump and his team tried to overturn the 2020 election results and lied about the Republican’s defeat. Some of the revelations have come from investigators, some from journalists, and some former officials who were part of the administration.

     But some of the latest information has come from, of all things, a defamation lawsuit.

     The New York Times published a striking front-page report this week with a headline that read, “Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows.” The article noted an infamous press conference in which the then-president’s lawyers peddled a bizarre series of election conspiracy theory. It added:

     But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening. By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.

     We know this because of the Coomer vs Trump Campaign case, filed against the Republican’s operation by someone who worked for Dominion — the company that pro-Trump conspiracy theorists targeted after President Joe Biden’s victory.

     The plaintiff and his employer were singled out for highly provocative allegations, which led to a defamation lawsuit. It also, we now know, led to some relevant disclosures, such as the Trump campaign’s internal document disproving some of the very claims Trump’s lawyers took to the public.

     Indeed, the then-president’s political team actually examined many of these allegations and privately determined that they simply weren’t true. That did not, however, stop other parts of Trump’s operation from running with the discredited and nonsensical claims anyway.

     As a Washington Post report added, the documents generated by the defamation suit “reveal that as early as mid-November, staffers for the Trump campaign formally vetted and disproved key allegations that later fueled efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory.”

     Or put another way, the public now has documented evidence, not only of Trump trying to overturn the results of an election he lost, but also of Trump’s political operation pushing bogus allegations — in multiple forums — the Republican’s own team knew to be lies.

     At face value, this seems like the sort of detail that’s likely to be relevant in the ongoing defamation litigation, but let’s not forget that this case may very well have more to offer.

     As Rachel noted on the show this week, this same lawsuit has produced depositions from a variety of political players who were also involved in propagating nonsensical claims about the 2020 election. They’ve already answered questions, under oath, about their role in spreading conspiratorial falsehoods.

     Want to bet on whether the depositions will shed even more light on what happened?

381. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 5:02 pm

     Wailing And Gnashing Of Teeth: Trumpers React To Draft ‘Audit’ Report Showing Biden Win

     Trump supporters — particularly those with large platforms and, often, something to sell — spent months hyping up the sham “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s election results as the first domino to fall: First Arizona, then Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and so on would acknowledge that Trump, in fact, had been robbed of a second term in office. Perhaps, they mused, the audit would even result in a “decertification” of the election.

     But, according to drafts of the final audit tally circulating Friday, the report offered little comfort: Biden won, according to the inexperienced and politically biased auditors’ work, by more votes than the official count.

     That left the most fervent election truthers in a difficult position: What to say?

     Some trashed the process as impossibly biased from the start.

     “When the audit began, it was clear the boxes had a possibility of being compromised,” Liz Harris, a right-wing activist whose own door-to-door canvassing effort in Arizona was cited in the audit report, wrote on Telegram. [Ha! So now they are concerned about compromised ballot boxes?]

     Many audit supporters gravitated towards sections of the report that claimed the number of “potential ballots impacted” by various problems numbered in the tens of thousands.

     Peter Navarro, a former White House advisor who for months has claimed there was widespread election fraud in 2020, jumped on those figures to try to sell yet another book, “In Trump Time.”

     “Results of the official Arizona audit confirm that there were over 50,000 potentially illegal ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County alone,” he said — before bragging the numbers “closely match” theories espoused in his new book. […]

     But even there, the report is weak on its own terms. The largest single number of in-question ballots, 15,035, comes from “mail-in votes from voters who moved within Maricopa County prior to the registration deadline.” In other words: Maricopa County voters who voted… in Maricopa County. The auditors also admitted to be using “commercially available data” rather than the official county records to cross-check voters, a practice that one elections consultant told the Arizona Republic was sloppy. [And now they are also concerned that the entire Fraudit was sloppy?]

     Other efforts by Trump fans to dig up some MAGA-world positives in the report were similarly meager.

     Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington, for example, noted that the report found 10,342 Arizona voters with the same names and birth years. She claimed, and the report implied, that this showed people who “voted in multiple counties.” But there’s a simpler explanation: Lots of people share names and ages. The Washington Post on Friday found four 43-year-old John Smiths living in Arizona, for instance. Maricopa County itself responded to the report in part by noting the 12 voters statewide with the name Maria Garcia who were born in 1980. […]

     In this sense, the audit failed: Not only did it count Biden’s victory, but even its attempts to sow doubts about its own findings and the official results are fairly weak and rehearsed.

     But for Trump supporters desperate to keep the fiction going — particularly those who’ve staked their political campaigns on the Big Lie — the show needed to go on.

     Responding to the disappointing report, they ignored the bad news and acted as if it had affirmed their prior assumptions. And, therefore: Audits, forever and always.

     “Now that the audit of Maricopa is wrapping up, we need to Audit Pima County – the 2nd largest county in AZ,” Mark Finchem, a member of the state legislature and the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona secretary of state tweeted. He urged readers to sign his “petition” for a Pima County audit — one that would give his campaign their personal information. […]

     A state representative from Florida used the report to call for audits in every state in the country. […]

     As did Eric Greitens, the disgraced former governor of Missouri now running for U.S. Senate. […]

     Okay, that’s more like it, Republicans. I expected you to come up with something similar to “this only proves that we should do more audits … audits for everyone! Audits everywhere!” Doofuses.

382. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 5:13 pm

     U.S. falls to last place in vaccination among G-7 nations, pays a price in human lives

     Earlier this year, Japan was notably slow in getting its citizens vaccinated. […] the rollout of vaccines in Japan started months after first doses were delivered in the U.S., U.K., and many other nations. The nation is also plagued by decades-old scorn for vaccines that goes back to an unfortunate court ruling in the 1990s that gave anti-vaxx sentiment a huge platform—and made it nearly impossible for the government to conduct anything close to mandatory vaccination at any level. In May, with the Olympic Games just weeks away, the vaccination rate in Japan was an amazingly low 1.6%. At that point, the United States had already vaccinated 46% of the total population and over 55% of the adult population.

     On September 12, Japan announced that over 50% of the total population had been vaccinated. A few days later, the vaccination rate there passed that in the United States. Of all the nations in the G-7, the United States now ranks dead last when it comes to vaccination rate.

     Though the start of the delta wave saw vaccination rates in the U.S. move up slightly from the low point in July, the number of people joining the ranks of the fully vaccinated in the United States is now increasing at a rate of 0.1% a day. This means reaching even the current rate of vaccination in nations like France or Canada is unlikely before the end of the year.

     And that difference in vaccination rate means that, while all the nations of the G-7 may be seeing an increase in cases with the spread of the delta variant, the results are very different in the United States when compared to other wealthy nations.

     The difference in the percentage of people vaccinated doesn’t seem that extreme, even when looking at the biggest gaps. [chart available at the link]

     […] the effect of these differences can be extreme. As an example, here are the number of new daily COVID-19 diagnoses in the United States compared to those in Germany, where the difference in vaccination rate over the last few months has been between 8% and 10%. [charts available at the link]

     Both nations saw a new burst of cases as the delta variant became dominant in the last few months. However, in Germany, that new wave crested at about 40% of the midwinter peak. In the United States, the delta peak reached 65% that of the worst of past surges. It also started earlier and stayed higher for longer. And that’s in spite of a much, much more rigorous testing regime in Germany.

     However, that’s not the biggest difference. [charts available at the link]

     Since the first of July, Germany has seen a case fatality rate about half that in the United States. That’s especially notable because, in past waves, the death rate in Germany was much worse than it was in America. But as the rate of vaccination has increased, the death rate in Germany has steadily declined. […]

     The same results can be seen in Canada. Or in Italy. And while the United Kingdom has seen a much larger delta surge than the other nations on the chart—helped along by “Freedom Day” dropping masking, gathering, and other social distancing requirements just as the delta wave reached its peak—the death rates there have also been sharply lower. Not just lower than in the United States, but much lower than they were in the same nation during previous periods. The case fatality rate in the U.K. over the last two months was just 0,26%. That makes it about one-quarter the rate in the U.S. [chart available at the link]

     Since mid-April, vaccination rates in the U.S. have fallen to less than a third of what they were at their peak […]

     b> what the United States is seeing is an ever more radical right taking extreme steps to make sure that the death rate stays high. As NBC News reports, that includes dragging people out of ICUs to “save” them from treatment.

     Consumed by conspiracy theories claiming that doctors are preventing unvaccinated patients from receiving miracle cures or are even killing them on purpose, some people in anti-vaccine and pro-ivermectin Facebook groups are telling those with Covid-19 to stay away from hospitals and instead try increasingly dangerous at-home treatments.

     This is now a step beyond claims that hospitals are inflating death numbers. As Markos has documented, Republicans have crossed over into a world where doctors are “crisis actors.” Or more like “crisis murderers,” out to deny people miracle cures and force them to take deadly drugs in the name of Dr. Fauci. [JFC]

     Even the monoclonal antibodies pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott aren’t immune to suspicion, as the deepest rungs of the Trumpspiracy now believe these treatments, along with the antiviral Remdesivir, are directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

     […] All those people who were claiming they were waiting for the FDA to approve the vaccine fully? They were lying. [chart available at the link]

     At the moment, cases in the U.S. are continuing to demonstrate a slow decline, and the most consistently accurate projections show that decline continuing for months to come. But the U.S. is already paying an ugly toll for Republican vaccine hostility and mass delusional behavior. That’s one thing that can’t be expected to improve.

383. Brony, Social Justice Cenobite says

     24 September 2021 at 6:01 pm

     @Lynna 380
     That’s the problem with a “fishing expedition”. They are looking for things they believe are there with no fixed idea about what looks like. So as a group and in individuals some keep fishing, some decide to stop looking.

384. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 10:00 pm

     Bits and pieces of news.

     Washington Post:

     The Trump Organization must move faster to supply documents sought by the New York attorney general or face the prospect of an outside company searching the company’s files instead, a judge warned in a newly unsealed court order.

     8 News Now in Nevada:

     Clark County has declared misinformation about COVID-19 a ‘public health crisis.’ A tweet from Clark County Commissioner Justin Jones states that misleading information about COVID-19 ‘has only made matters worse.

385. Lynna, OM says

     24 September 2021 at 10:04 pm

     Kayleigh McEnany targets Biden, accidentally makes Trump look worse

     Kayleigh McEnany wanted to blame Joe Biden for last year’s U.S. murder rate. But Biden wasn’t president last year — but McEnany’s former boss was.

     Last year was difficult for the United States in a great many ways, and this week, we were confronted with data pointing in another unsettling direction. According to the FBI, the nation saw the sharpest increase in murders since the bureau started keeping track 60 years ago.

     The murder rate is still vastly better than it was 30 years ago, but the increase raised a series of questions about the possible cause of the painful trend.

     Alas, that’s not the question that came to Kayleigh McEnany’s mind. As HuffPost noted:

     Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted a graphic on Thursday showing a rise in murders in 2020 and blamed it on Joe Biden, who became president in 2021. “The U.S. murder rate under Joe Biden…” she wrote, alongside a graphic showing a nearly 30% spike in murders last year, when she was a spokesperson for then-President Donald Trump. […]

     McEnany, a former Republican campaign operative who now works in conservative media, quietly deleted her missive yesterday, though by that point the damage was done.

     In this case, the details were unambiguous: The FBI was clearly referring to 2020, not 2021. In fact, it’s impossible to tally the murder rate from the first year of President Joe Biden’s term because — and this is important — Biden’s first year isn’t over yet. […]

386. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 11:41 am

     Lauren Boebert really wants to impeach Biden, but she should have hired a proofreader first

     The campaign finances of Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado have been the subject of a lot of speculation. The seemingly corrupt and possibly illegal ways she has used her campaign’s finances to pay for personal items—like $20,000 worth of gasoline and rent. She’s not particularly bright, but neither are most of her colleagues. She’s petty, suspected of being tied up deeply in the Jan. 6 attempted coup d’etat, and practices a substance- and fact-free style of political theater that was employed most successfully by Donald Trump in 2015.

     On Friday, Rep. Boebert did her best impression of whatever it is the GOP think public servants look like and sent out a press release calling for the impeachment of President Joe Biden. Why? Who cares. What is Rep. Boebert offering to do for her constituents? Nothing. Did Lauren Boebert send out this news release with big capitalized signage that reads “IMEACH BIDEN”? Yes. Yes, she did. And while she has since tried to hide this glaring mistake, the internet is forever.

     Let us start with a caveat: We are laughing at Lauren Boebert because she’s a crap person. People with GEDs, a group to which Boebert reportedly belongs, are not stupid.

     Boebert’s issues are specific to her profession and political party. Whatever education she has had does not seem to make her any less “smart” than Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his carefully scheduled Yale legacy. It makes her no less intelligent than suspected sex trafficker and William and Mary Law School alum Rep. Matt Gaetz. And while Marjorie Taylor Greene is nine years older than Boebert, there does not seem to be much of a difference between the two when it comes to maturity.

     So let’s focus on the gaffe, and avoid punching down on the millions of people with GEDs who aren’t Lauren Boebert.

     Without further ado, I bring you epic typo political theater! […]

     Examples of responses are available at the link, including southpaw’s “Rep. Boebert confounds constituents by making a sign declaring she’s “each Biden.” And from Brooklyn Dad: ” I’m reading “I’m each Biden” to the tune of “I’m every woman,” but it hits different.

387. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 11:54 am

     […] This state of affairs [results from the Arizona fraudit plus congressional subpoenas of his associates] has sent Trump into a ferocious frenzy as he feebly tries to fit the facts into a constructed reality that he, in his narcissistic stupor, can comprehend. And, true to form, his main method for doing that is to flood the zone with wild, nonsensical outbursts that serve no purpose other than to satiate his mammoth ego and to inflame his followers.

     To that end Trump had his spokes-shill, Liz Harrington (whose proxy Trump tweeting is violating Twitter’s rules against circumventing a ban) post a statement asserting that the subpoenas of four of his closest associates (Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Steve Bannon, and Kash Patel) were merely a diversion from the the Cyber Ninja fraudit report.

     Trump, via Harrington, pounded out a manic maelstrom of 55 tweets alleging election fraud, in spite of the results in the official review. He hasn’t had a Twitter tirade like that since before he was banned. It was a bizarre hodge-podge of unsupported claims with no factual basis or verifiable evidence. For instance,
     in one tweet Trump delusionally claimed that the “Lamestream Media are feeding large-scale misinformation to the public about the Arizona Audit. The Audit was a big win for democracy and a big win for us.” In another tweet he simply demanded that “Arizona must immediately decertify their 2020 Presidential Election Results.” He recently made the same demand of officials in Georgia.

     It only got worse from there. It just doesn’t matter to Trump – or his cult followers – if the evidence matches his assertions. It doesn’t even matter if his blathering has any resemblance to reality. Trump just lets his rhetorical rambling pour out with the confidence that his simple-minded pawns will obediently buy into it. And he hits them with wave after wave of muddled meanderings to keep them off balance and incapable of noticing that none of it has any intelligible meaning. And, sadly, for some small, pathetic portion of the populace, it’s actually working for him.

     Link

388. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 12:04 pm

     Chris Hayes presented an excellent segment on his “All In” show last night.

     “Many people have been shocked by how audaciously racist this argument is—and it is indeed,” says Chris Hayes on right-wing anti-migrant rhetoric. “But it is also worth actually confronting it because it is not just racist—it is also stupid.”

     The whole segment is excellent. The video is just over 8 minutes long. In that time, Hayes covers the historical background, Tucker Carlson’s push of replacement theory, and the current influx of Haitian immigrants (and the mistreatment of those Haitians).

389. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 12:12 pm

     Wonkette: “The Arizona Fraudit Proved NOTHING, DO NOT TAKE BAIT.”

     Stop saying that the Arizona fraudit “proves” that Biden won Maricopa County. Stop saying that Biden “expanded” his lead over Trump. Stop giving this pack of incompetent charlatans your stamp of approval as they attack the underpinnings of our democracy. This preposterous exercise proves nothing, and we should not treat it as legitimate simply because it failed to call for the overturning of this election.

     […] Cyber Ninjas, the Florida company with exactly zero election experience, [presented] its homework in to the Arizona GOP today, just five months and $5.7 million dollars after they started this pathetic circle jerk. And in case anyone is suffering from amnesia as to the corruption of this entire process, let’s take a little trip down memory lane, shall we?

     Before the Cyber Ninjas’ fraudit even got under way, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors had already conducted multiple audits confirming President Joe Biden’s 45,000-vote win, including a hand recount of two percent of all precincts. But thanks to pressure from Trump and his henchmen, Republicans in the legislature, led by Senate President Karen Fann, hired outside groups to count some more based solely on their subjective belief that they could not possibly have lost.

     Cyber Ninjas, in addition to being wholly unqualified and having submitted no written bid, had far too many conflicts to conduct a non-partisan, objective audit — even if it knew how, which it did not. Its CEO Doug Logan had publicly endorsed Trump’s Big Lie fraud claims, including appearing in a “documentary” about election fraud directed by the Overstock nutjob Patrick Byrne. In fact, Logan worked with Byrne and Sidney Powell to help craft their disastrous Kraken election suits. And it was a good thing that he had all those rich friends, since Byrne and Powell turned around and funded this bloody debacle, after the $150,000 the state Senate handed over to Logan disappeared in the first eight minutes.

     […] And the Kraken Krew weren’t the only ones playing both sides of the table. Voices and Votes, a “non-profit” led by OANN personalities Christina Bobb and Chanel Rion, raised $605,000. Coincidentally, OANN got exclusive coverage rights of the event, with other media observers relegated to the balcony if they were let in at all. America’s Future, the group helmed by martial law and hydroxyhorsepaste lover Mike Flynn, kicked in almost a million dollars.

     And sure it’s hilarious that these fucking idiots were shining UV lights on the ballots looking for Chinese bamboo fibers. But that’s the least of the problem with this debacle which damaged $2.8 million of election equipment during “testing.” This was a bloody clown show holding itself out as a “forensic audit” while allowing a former state rep who was defeated in this very election to count votes.

     […] Part 1 of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’s report on problems with this “audit.” It’s 122 pages. Here’s the section from the Executive Summary on “Lack of Security and Chain of Custody Procedures:”

     ● Observers noted that there was no security presence preventing entrance into the venue or access to the areas where ballots were being stored on the first day of the review.
     ● Throughout the ballot review, ballot counters were seen with both black and blue pens. In a credible election audit, black and blue pens are prohibited because this ink can be read by ballot tabulators and used to alter ballots. As a result, there is no way to confirm if the original ballots that were being reviewed were altered or destroyed.
     ● Any participant using a computer could access critical systems housing tally data and ballot images because each computer had a single login, shared passwords, and no multifactor authentication.
     ● Observers noted that ongoing chain of custody interruptions for both the data and the equipment, including when voting system software and ballot image data was sent to a location in Montana, compromised the data integrity.

     Neat-o!

     That last bit about “a location in Montana” refers to a hard drive of election data that the audit’s tech guru Ben Cotton personally drove to a so called “lab” in Montana that turned out to be his own vacation cabin. […]

     Because nothing about this fiasco is credible, and we should draw no conclusions from its bogus report. Particularly since these hacks are going to take whatever blessing we give them by trumpeting their “results” and use it to suppress the vote in Arizona and other states that are giddily taking the Arizona fraudit model and running with it. We are not helping by boosting their conclusion that they “found” votes for Biden […] Doug Logan [appeared] with Shiva Ayyudarai — someone who literally claims to have invented email — to spew lies about “election integrity.”

     But, hell, don’t take it from us. Here’s veteran Arizona reporter Brahm Resnik, telling you the same thing.

     Here’s why I’m not posting the Cyber Ninjas’ draft reports: Many of the conclusions are objectively wrong. The drafts reflect CN team’s well-documented lack of knowledge about how our elections work. I try very hard not to post incorrect information.

     This is BULLSHIT. Do not take the bait.

     https://www.wonkette.com/the-arizona-fraudit-proved-nothing

390. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 12:53 pm

     Dying crops, spiking energy bills, showers once a week. In South America, the climate future has arrived.

     Washington Post link

     Sergio Koci’s sunflower farm in the lowlands of northern Argentina has survived decades of political upheaval, runaway inflation and the coronavirus outbreak. But as a series of historic droughts deadens vast expanses of South America, he fears a worsening water crisis could do what other calamities couldn’t: Bust his third-generation agribusiness.

     “When you have one bad year, you can face it,” Koci said. Some of his 20,000 acres rest near the mighty Paraná River, where water levels have reached lows not seen since 1944. On the back of two years of drought-related crop losses, he said, the continuing dryness is now set to reduce his sunflower yields this year by 65 percent.

     […] From the frigid peaks of Patagonia to the tropical wetlands of Brazil, worsening droughts this year are slamming farmers, shutting down ski slopes, upending transit and spiking prices for everything from coffee to electricity.

     So low are levels of the Paraná running through Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina that some ranchers are herding cattle across dried-up riverbeds typically lined with cargo-toting barges. Raging wildfires in Paraguay have brought acrid smoke to the limits of the capital. Earlier this year, the rushing cascades of Iguazu Falls on the Brazilian-Argentine frontier reduced to a relative drip.

     […] “It’s an escalating problem, and the fact that we’re seeing more and more of these events, and more extreme events, is not a coincidence,” said Lisa Viscidi, energy and climate expert with the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue. “It’s definitely because we’re seeing the effects of climate change.”

     The region is one of many across the globe being struck by severe drought. Hot spots severe enough to cause widespread crop losses, water shortages and elevated fire risk are now present in every continent outside Antarctica. Farmers in Arizona are curbing water use amid a catastrophic decline of the Colorado River. California melons are withering on their vines. The drought in Madagascar is being partly blamed for what the United Nations is calling the world’s first climate famine.

     Such disasters, scientists say, will worsen as the planet warms. The latest climate assessment from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that one-third of global land areas will suffer from at least moderate drought by the end of the century.

     […] The impact of the droughts are threatening to soar into the billions of dollars. Across the region [South America], the price of historic dryness is being measured in lost crops, a slowdown in mining, surging transportation costs and shortages of energy in a region heavily dependent on hydropower.

     In Chile, a nation caught in the vortex of a 13-year drought, its longest and most severe in 1,000 years, a “blob” of warm water in the southwest Pacific the size of the continental United States is disturbing rain patterns, pushing storm tracks southward over the Drake Passage and Antarctica. Scientists say greenhouse gases have exacerbated the drying trend, putting Chile at the forefront of the region’s water crisis. […]

     More at the link.

391. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 1:15 pm

     Follow-up to tomh’s comments 272 and 298, and to comment 299.

     Alan Braid is known for defying the Texas abortion law. He’s spent years challenging antiabortion laws.

     Washington Post link

     Earlier this month, Alan Braid did what no other surgeon in Texas had dared: He violated his state’s ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Then he announced it to the world. In a Sept. 18 op-ed in The Washington Post, Braid explained that he’d performed the procedure on a woman who was in her first trimester but beyond the state’s new limit, because she had a “fundamental right to receive this care.”

     Afterward, antiabortion groups circulated pictures of Braid on Facebook. Hundreds of people who’d never met him started calling him a “hero.” To others, the 76-year-old OB/GYN was “an example of evil.”

     Among abortion providers in Texas, Braid is known as a tireless doctor who has challenged many of the antiabortion laws that have surfaced from the state’s conservative legislature, said Antonio Cavazos, a retired OB/GYN who worked alongside Braid in San Antonio from 2016 to 2018. Now, Braid has stepped up to lead the charge against one of the greatest threats to abortion access in decades.

     “I fully understood that there could be legal consequences,” Braid wrote in the op-ed, “but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested.”

     […] The San Antonio Coalition for Life has seen an uptick in volunteers eager to protest outside Braid’s clinic since he published his op-ed, said Amy Voorhees, the group’s founder.

     […] Twelve other states have passed similar six-week abortion bans. But before those laws took effect, courts sided with abortion rights groups and ruled them unconstitutional. Texas’s law succeeded where others have failed due to its unique enforcement mechanism: Because the law empowers citizens to sue those who help facilitate an illegal abortion in Texas, abortion rights groups could not anticipate who would enforce the ban and file a lawsuit.

     To successfully challenge the law in court, abortion rights advocates needed someone to perform an illegal abortion, and someone else to sue them over it. In his op-ed, Braid admitted to providing an abortion on Sept. 6 to a woman who was past the legal limit, essentially baiting antiabortion advocates to file a lawsuit against him. Sure enough, when courts opened on Monday, two people — a disbarred lawyer serving a federal sentence in Arkansas and another man in Illinois — sued him for the violation.

     “He will do what he feels is right,” Cavazos said. “He’s going to go down swinging.”

     Before the ban took effect, Braid used to take breaks, he said in a phone interview on Sept. 17. Every few weeks, he would switch off with another doctor so he could have some down time.

     […] But that doctor chose to leave the clinic after the ban, Braid said, because she was concerned about potential legal liability. Since then, more people have been making appointments earlier in their pregnancies. They seem to know they are running out of time, he said.

     […] Some patients start sobbing when he tells them they are too far along, he said. Others cry with relief when he says they’re under the legal limit.

     When he has to turn a patient away, Braid says he discusses how they might access an abortion out of state.

     […] When Braid enrolled in medical school at the University of Texas in 1968, abortion was not yet legal across the country. Some states, including California, Colorado and New York, allowed the procedure under limited conditions, but in Texas — unless a woman’s life was in danger — doctors had to turn patients away.

     Still, Braid’s professors taught him that abortion was “an integral part” of women’s health care, he recalled in the op-ed.

     When he began his obstetrics and gynecology residency at a San Antonio hospital in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade was decided, he found that patients were pursuing abortions, whether or not it was legal. Some had crossed the border into Mexico, he said, and others had tried to perform the procedures on themselves. In the first year of his residency, Braid said he saw three teenagers die after having illegal abortions.

     In 1973, he recalled, he saw one patient who had a rubber catheter in her uterus after a self-managed abortion. “Her vagina was packed with rags,” he said. “She was septic.”

     Braid spent the next four decades as an OB/GYN in Texas, conducting standard Pap smears and pelvic exams. He delivered more than 10,000 babies. Whenever he could, he performed abortions at clinics in the area. For years, he worked for Marilyn Eldridge, a lawyer who opened Texas’s first independent clinic after Roe v. Wade. Eldridge challenged antiabortion restrictions that emerged in Texas, and eventually opened other clinics across the state and one in Oklahoma.

     Kathy Kleinfeld, who runs the abortion clinic Houston Women’s Reproductive Services, said Eldridge was Braid’s inspiration. “He refers to her as his Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” Kleinfeld said.

     Braid took over the clinic in 2012. Eldridge died in 2019 at 81.

     […] For the past decade, Braid has thrust himself into legal battles against antiabortion legislation. In 2011, Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a regulation that required patients seeking abortions to view a sonogram of the fetus. Two years later, Braid’s clinic was among those who sued to stop H.B. 2, a law which required Texas abortion clinics to comply with a host of new restrictions that was ultimately overruled by the Supreme Court. Under that law, abortions had to be performed in hospital-like ambulatory surgical centers, by doctors with admitting privileges at local hospitals.

     […] Half the clinics in the state were forced to close as soon as the law took effect. Most providers waited anxiously for the issue to resolve itself in the courts, Kleinfeld said.

     Braid was in his late 60s then, and some of his colleagues figured he would retire. Instead, he took out a loan and began building a $3 million, state-of-the-art facility to comply with the new regulations. Kleinfeld said he was the only abortion provider in the state who built a brand new surgical center in response to the law.

     […] Braid never seemed to regret the decision, Kleinfeld said. He had readied himself for this outcome, and focused on what the new facility would enable him to do. Because Braid’s clinic is now an ambulatory surgical center, Kleinfeld said, high-risk pregnancy doctors in the area can refer patients to him.

     Cavazos said many doctors in the area wouldn’t perform abortions when a patient’s life was in danger. “But [Braid] would,” Cavazos said. “And he’s to be admired for that big time.”

     […] ‘Well I’m thinking about retiring,’ ” Cavazos recalled. Braid shook his head no. He was a decade older than Cavazos, but he was still working. “You’re too young to retire,” he told Cavazos. “Come work with me.”

     Cavazos wanted to travel, but he agreed to start part-time at Alamo. […] Cavazos left Alamo in 2018 and moved to Oregon. When Texas passed the six-week ban, Cavazos again thought of his old friend. Braid is “an excellent golfer” who likes to host parties at his house, Cavazos said.

     “I thought, ‘Okay, now he’s going to retire,’ ” Cavazos said. “And then I see his name on the national news, and I thought, ‘Yep, that’s Alan.’”

     […] “Alan Braid has shown himself to be an arrogant and yet desperate individual,” he said. “He has made a living from harming women, killing babies and destroying families. He needs his abortion business to continue to maintain his lifestyle.” [said antiabortion advocate Patrick Von Dohlen, an effing dunderhead]

     Kleinfeld said Braid fills an essential role in Texas abortion care — not just as a legal advocate, but in his daily work at the clinic. He is part of a group of male doctors in their 70s and 80s who perform a large portion of abortions in the state, refusing to retire because they remember a time before Roe.

     […] Now the lone doctor at Alamo, Braid refuses to close the clinic, even for a day. He has already recruited a friend to fill in for him when he attends his nephew’s wedding in October. His friend is 81. […]

     That’s a crisis.

392. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 1:19 pm

     Hundreds protest in Moscow claiming Russia’s election was rigged

     […] The around 400 protesters organized by the Communist Party say the pro-Kremlin United Russia party rigged the online ballot, The Associated Press reported.

     Online balloting made up around two million votes in Moscow in an election that gave the United Russia party more than two-thirds majority in parliament, enough to change the constitution.

     The Communist party said 60 of its activists were arrested before the protests, with many released after a couple of hours. There were no arrests at the protest itself.

     The United Russia Party took 324 seats out of 450 in the election. The Communist Party received 57 seats and three other parties claimed the rest, according to the AP.

     Many in Russia are saying the election was rigged, with top opposition leader Alexei Navalny saying it did not surprise him that “Putin forged the results.”

     The Russian government crackdown on opposition leaders and media in the months leading up to the election. The government labeled Navalny’s organization an extremist group and banned anyone who was ever associated with the group from running for office.

     Tech companies such as Google and Apple also complied with Russia’s demand to take down a voting app associated with Navalny that promoted opposition leaders.

     “If something surprised me in the latest elections, it was not how Putin forged the results, but how obediently the almighty Big Tech turned into his accomplices,” Navalny said last week. […]

393. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 1:25 pm

     Anti-Discrimination Law Inconveniences Bigot, Hate Group Demands Justice

     Since the very dawn of anti-discrimination laws (which, unfortunately, was not all that long ago), bigots have been trying to figure out ways to skirt the law so they can continue to discriminate. In some cases — private clubs, colleges willing to forego any federal funding, etc. — they were able to do this. In other cases — chicken restaurants, florists, bakers — it hasn’t gone so well. And yet, they don’t give up.

     The anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom is petitioning SCOTUS to hear the case of Colorado web designer Lorie Smith who has been repeatedly told by the court system that she, like all of the other bigots, does not get a special dispensation to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people because of how very holy she is.

     Via The ADF:

     Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing a website designer have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a 2-1 decision by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit which concluded that the state of Colorado can force her to design and publish websites promoting messages that violate her religious beliefs. The panel majority also said that Colorado can prohibit the designer, Lorie Smith of 303 Creative, from even explaining on her company’s website which websites she can create consistent with her religious beliefs.

     Yes, and she probably can’t put up an “Irish Need Not Apply” sign either. Imagine that!

     The 10th Circuit issued an unprecedented decision in the case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, holding that Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act both forced Lorie “to create websites—and thus, speech—that [she] would otherwise refuse,” and also created a “substantial risk” of removing “certain ideas or viewpoints from the public dialogue,” including Lorie’s beliefs about marriage. Despite that, the 10th Circuit said it’s fine for the law to compel Lorie to speak messages with which she disagrees because she created “custom and unique” expression.

     Unlike Masterpiece Cakeshop, Arlene’s Flowers and other companies that have fought for (and lost) the right to discriminate against customers due to their very special religious beliefs, no one has actually asked Lorie Smith to make a website for them. And if you look at her own site, it is not hard to see why — it’s really quite janky. And I am actually not just saying that to be mean. Every time I did a Google image search on one of the pictures in her “portfolio,” I’d go back to the site and it would be frozen and I’d have to refresh to get it to scroll again.

     Still, the ADF filed a lawsuit because Smith says she wants to add wedding sites to her repertoire but can’t do that because then godforbid a gay couple might ask her to design their wedding site for them and doing that would violate her religion. And if she refused, she could be sued.

     It is, of course, not possible for there to be a religious exemption for anti-discrimination laws, for the very simple reason that anyone can say that literally anything is against their religion, which would then render all anti-discrimination laws meaningless.

     When arguing the case before the 10th Circuit, Smith said “I will not be able to create websites for same-sex marriages or any other marriage that is not between one man and one woman […] Doing that would compromise my Christian witness and tell a story about marriage that contradicts God’s true story of marriage.”

     There is a very simple solution to that problem, and that is for Smith to keep doing what she is doing now and making all kinds of other sites (allegedly) but not doing wedding websites. Yes, that is an inconvenience for her, but being a bigot is inconvenient at times and she will simply have to live with that should she decide to continue on living this way. It would also be inconvenient for LGBTQ+ people or any other group of people to have to check every time they want to do something to see if they can’t use a particular service because the owner is a bigot who won’t serve them. It is only fair that the person who wants to discriminate is the one who gets inconvenienced.

     Link

394. tomh says

     25 September 2021 at 1:56 pm

     Re: Lynna @ #390
     there are still heroes…

395. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 3:46 pm

     tomh @393, right. That’s what I was thinking.

     In other news, here’s an “Oh, FFS!” moment:

     A white mother of three is angry about how race is taught in the public schools in her Tennessee county, and between the details of her campaign and Reuters’ reporting, it is a recipe for a head explosion. Let’s start with this: Robin Steenman is a mother of three … but her only school-age child attends private school.

     And what is Steenman angry about? The teaching of children’s books about Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruby Bridges, which she argues violates a recently passed Tennessee law against teaching critical race theory, including the idea that anyone is “privileged” because of their race, or any teaching that makes any child feel “discomfort, guilt [or] anguish” because of their race or sex.

     It is just about impossible to overstate how far from actual critical race theory these second-grade-level books are. […] millions of dollars in education funding are at stake for Tennessee schools found to have violated the state’s law against the teaching of critical race theory.

     “Critical race theory is an advanced concept rarely encountered outside law schools,” Reuters’ Gabriella Borter notes, […] “Educators say the lessons about race in most U.S. primary and secondary schools involve basic American history about slavery, post-slavery segregation and the long struggle for racial equality,” she continues, while “Critics of the new teaching laws say Republicans are exaggerating the prevalence of critical race theory to use it as a wedge issue to court suburban women, in particular—a group that cares deeply about education and which has shifted Democratic.”

     Educators say. Critics say. Are there no ascertainable facts here? You’re really going to spend 1,700 words on a white lady’s crusade against critical race theory and/or a children’s book about Martin Luther King Jr. and not pause to investigate whether the former exists in the second grade classrooms in question, beyond a passing “rarely encountered outside law schools”?

     Here’s how Borter describes the books in question: “Written in simple language and framed largely as stories of perseverance, the books show some of the bigotry experienced by their Black protagonists. Images include a period photo in the King book of firemen blasting Black civil rights protesters with the spray of a fire hose, and an illustration in the Bridges story of the child being escorted to school by U.S. Marshals through a crowd of jeering white people.”

     You … can’t really tell the story of Ruby Bridges without mentioning the U.S. marshals or why they had to be there. But according to Steenman, it’s divisive. […]

     This is, by the way, happening in a county where, in 2019, two teachers required eighth-graders to imagine themselves as slave-owners and “Create a list of expectations for your family’s slaves.” […]

     Steenman is using the Tennessee law basically as designed, taking off from the fact that some scholars have argued that racism is embedded in U.S. laws to make the jump to claiming that teaching almost any verifiably true facts about racism in U.S. history is unacceptable because it makes white kids feel bad about themselves. […]

     People like Steenman could hardly make it more clear that what they’re opposed to is not the teaching of critical race theory or any other serious anti-racist teaching. They’re opposed to teaching that racism has ever been a part of U.S. history, full stop. […] this is one of the big Republican wedge issues of the moment […] This is what they’re trying to use to win in 2022. […] while the overt racism on display here might be better for Democrats at the polls, it’s a disaster for the kids in any state where Republicans have passed their don’t-teach-about-racism laws.

     Link

396. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 3:57 pm

     Steve Bannon needs to be behind bars

     When it comes to events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection, there are some whose involvement remains unclear. […] There are others who will pretend that their calls to storming the Capitol and spilling a swimming pool of patriotic blood were purely metaphorical. […]

     And then there’s Steve Bannon.

     The Trump campaign chair, shining with the glow of his last-minute pardon from the fraud he definitely committed, didn’t just assist a few would-be Mike Pence-hangers. […] He worked to create both the political crisis and the maddened crowd that placed the United States within a few seconds, and a handful of steps, of seeing members of Congress marched to a gallows on the Capitol lawn.

     On Friday, Bannon was the undoubtedly proud recipient of one of the first four subpoenas handed out by the House Select Committee. However, giving the head of a Brussels-based fascist movement—tastefully called “The Movement”—a couple of weeks to decide whether he wants to make an appearance before a Congress he dismisses, or a court system he sneers about, seems like far too mild an approach.

     Here’s a checklist of “fun” Steve Bannon moments, over just the last couple of years.

     There was the time when Bannon coached Jeffrey Epstein on on how to look less threatening in a television interview.

     The time he explained to right-wing leaders in Europe that the Pope is the enemy and insisted that they attack him “frontally,” an effort to be helped along by a documentary the supposedly Catholic Bannon hopes will bring down the Catholic church.

     His ongoing effort to start a literal school for fascists in the literal home of fascism, an academy where Bannon plans on producing the nationalist leaders of the future.

     His efforts to unify nationalist candidates from Marine LePen to Nigel Farage under the banner of a single fascist movement—with help from pal Vladimir Putin.

     That time he hooked up with a Chinese businessman in an attempt to sell a non-existent television network and ended up charged with multiple counts of fraud.

     His warning that Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner are involved in a money laundering scheme that could easily be sniffed out by investigators.

     And, of course, his indictment for fraud and money laundering in connection with a fake effort to “build the wall”—an indictment that got neatly cleaned up when Donald Trump added Bannon to his big list of friends who don’t have to obey the law.

     But that’s just the small stuff. Because Bannon’s involvement in the events around Jan. 6 easily trumps even trying to abscond with an 800-year-old monastery as a base for bringing down the Catholic church and creating baby Hitlers.

     To a large extent, the whole idea of using Jan. 6 as a lever to tip over democracy came from Bannon. As the recent book Peril reported, Bannon called up Trump on Dec. 30 and told him, “’You’ve got to call Pence off the f**king ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis.”

     The point of dragging Pence back—which happened—was to explain how Jan. 6 could be turned into “a reckoning.” Bannon explained to Trump how upsetting the prescribed process on Jan. 6 could “cast enough of a shadow over Biden’s victory” that it would cause millions of Americans to consider Biden an illegitimate president. They didn’t actually have to prove any election fraud. They only had to create a spectacle that would destroy faith in the system.

     “People are going to go, ‘What the f**k is going on here?'” said Bannon. “We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th, f**king bury him.”

     […] Bannon himself just keeps talking about it.

     Bannon met with Trump and Rudy Giuliani in advance of the insurgency, with an open goal of destroying the American government.

     As Newsweek reports, Bannon’s open admission is that he told the others “it’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” On his podcast platform, Bannon went on to brag about the success of his plan, claiming that “42% of the American people think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately”—a belief supported by the actions on Jan. 6 to deliberately undermine that presidency.

     As professor Lawrence Tribe points out. “It’d be hard to justify DOJ inaction in the face of this rapidly mounting evidence of a criminal conspiracy to commit sedition against the US Government and to give aid and comfort to an insurrection. See 18 USC secs. 2383 & 2384.”

     […] there’s no misinterpreting what Tribe is saying here […] [excerpts from 18 USC are available at the link]

     Bannon, Trump, Giuliani, Eastman … they all engaged in a seditious conspiracy, a plan that Bannon spelled out with the declared intent of destroying the lawful government of the United States.

     It’s worth noting that, in their schemes, neither Bannon nor Eastman even attempted to make a case that Trump had actually won, or that there had been anything like the level of fraud Giuliani was claiming. Both plans were simply to cripple the United States by creating confusion and distrust.

     It’s almost what you might expect from someone who said this:

     “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

     It’s past time to stop sending Steve Bannon subpoenas and start sending him to jail. Let Eastman fight with Giuliani over who has be his cellmate.

397. blf says

     25 September 2021 at 4:15 pm

     Lynna@394, I haven’t checked, but this sounds like the same(-ish) pack of loons, Laugh at the outrage over ‘sexy seahorses’ — but there’s nothing funny about conservatives trying to rewrite history:

     The rightwing playbook: outrage, leading to the passage of deliberately vague laws and advocacy groups diligently weaponizing those laws

     As we all know, there is nothing right-wingers love more than free speech and nothing they detest more than cancel culture. People should be able to say whatever they like without fear of censorship, conservatives are constantly squealing. Except, of course, if those people happen to be saying things they don’t agree with. In which case: silence them immediately and ban their books!

     The latest absurd example of conservative cancel culture comes to us courtesy of Moms for Liberty, a rightwing advocacy group who are trying to dictate what books Tennessee public school kids can read. I don’t know if any of these moms own a dictionary, but they might want to look up the definition of “liberty”. And then they might want to change their name to Moms for Thought Control.

     The moms have been very methodical: they’ve sent the Tennessee Department of Education a detailed spreadsheet outlining their complaints about the books being foisted on their children. It makes for unintentionally hilarious reading. A book about Galileo is anti-church. A book about seahorses contains too many details about the mating rituals of seahorses. A book about Native Americans is divisive and paints white people in negative light. A book about Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate an all-white public elementary school, is divisive. (Racists love using the word “divisive”, have you noticed? How dare you bring up slavery and segregation! You’re being divisive!) A book about Greek mythology is a little too graphic and scary. A book about Martin Luther King contains photographs of political violence. The whole thing reads like the unhinged ravings of a book club from hell.

     There are, of course, pushy parents everywhere. If Moms for Liberty were just a fringe group of overly-involved mothers their beef with the Tennessee Department of Education wouldn’t really matter. Alas, their attempts to rejig the Tennessee curriculum is part of a much wider effort to rewrite American history. Over the past year, US conservatives have become obsessed with “critical race theory” (CRT) […]. None of the people raving about CRT are actually able to explain what the academic concept means; to them it just means anything that is less than complimentary about white people. Which, they reckon, they should be illegal. At least eight Republican states (including Tennessee) have introduced laws restricting how race can be taught in public schools this year; the Brookings Institute notes that nearly 20 additional states have introduced or plan to introduce similar legislation. […]

     Far from being a kooky fringe group, Moms for Liberty are part of a very well-coordinated culture war. […] “We are seeing what appear to be coordinated efforts to challenge books, not purely based on the content of the individual book, but based on the fact that they teach history from a particular viewpoint,” an executive from the National Coalition Against Censorship, told The Daily Beast. “We’re also seeing entire lists of books being challenged, as opposed to individual titles.”

     So what’s the moral to this story? Essentially, it’s that you shouldn’t underestimate the right. It’s very easy to laugh at a bunch of rightwing moms clutching their pearls over sexy seahorses — but there’s nothing funny about the systemic, organised way in which conservatives are trying to rewrite history and restrict freedom of speech.
     […]

     Sexy Seahorses Matter!

398. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 4:25 pm

     blf @396, it scares me that these doofuses are methodical and organized.

399. Lynna, OM says

     25 September 2021 at 4:31 pm

     Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) on Friday joined other Democrats in slamming the Biden administration over its treatment of thousands of mostly Haitian migrants who recently arrived at the southern border, arguing that it “didn’t have to happen.”

     In an op-ed published by El Paso Matters on Friday, O’Rourke wrote that the administration “should have seen them coming and ensured that the people of Del Rio, the women and men of the Border Patrol and especially the refugees themselves would not have to endure what has shocked the world over the last week.”

     “What has happened in Del Rio is wrong,” he said. “It didn’t have to happen.”

     Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Friday that out of about 15,000 Haitian migrants who gathered under a bridge connecting Mexico with Del Rio, Texas, in the past week, roughly 2,000 had been deported through repatriation flights under Title 42, a policy continued from the Trump administration that allows immediate expulsion of migrants amid the pandemic.

     Roughly 8,000 migrants voluntarily returned to Mexico, and another 5,000 are currently in Customs and Border Protection custody, Mayorkas said. [Yeah, but some of those 8,000 returned to Mexico because they were afraid of being flown back to Haiti.]

     Outrage among Democrats escalated this week when photos and footage circulated of agents on horseback chasing down some of the migrants, with one image showing an agent aggressively grabbing one asylum-seeker and other agents appearing to swing their reins while trying to detain them.

     O’Rourke argued that the administration should have been better prepared for the surge in migrants, given the economic and political instability that has plagued Haiti over the past decade.

     […] once the Haitians arrived, why was our government so slow to respond, leaving the people of Del Rio and the Border Patrol to their own devices?” he questioned.

     O’Rourke went on to say that “the disregard for border communities, and the over reliance on already stressed federal law enforcement, produced conditions that ultimately led to the unforgettable and unforgivable scene of mounted officers charging into the mass of unarmed immigrants.”

     The former congressman said the country is in need of “some leadership at this moment” and “not the quickie deportations that will only exacerbate the problems in Haiti and likely produce more outbound refugees who will appear on our border in a future year.”

     Link

     Does it matter if the Haitians were whipped with reins or with actual whips? People keep trying to make that distinction. If you are whipped with leather reins it still hurts.

400. blf says

     25 September 2021 at 4:33 pm

     Martin Rowson in the Grauniad, On the Tories’ immigration hokey-cokey (cartoon). Hokey Cokey is that ryhme “You put your left arm in / Your left arm out / In, out, in, out / You shake it all about …”, which is a rather good synopsis of about all teh “U”K’s alleged-“government” ever does (incompetently). In this case, the problem is a shortage of truck (lorry) drivers, due a mixture of brexit, the usual non-investment in training, the usual very poor pay and astonishingly poor working conditions, older drivers retiring, and the pandemic (which has delaying the testing / issuing of appropriate driving licenses). Brexit means it’s all-but-impossible to recruit such drivers overseas, with teh “government”, until recently, refusing to ease the post-brexit visa rules. Whilst the government has, to their credit, pointed out the shite pay and worse conditions, they haven’t actually done much-of-anything. They did recently announce a temporary(?) visa change in an effort to entice drivers from the EU, but as many people are pointing out: Why go for a short time and bad pay to a place which is going to throw you out again?

401. Pierce R. Butler says

     25 September 2021 at 7:49 pm

     blf @ # 396: … too many details about the mating rituals of seahorses.

     Please recall that, in (at least some species of) seahorses, the males end up carrying the gestating young in bodily pouches. Any lifestyle so flagrantly defying The Creator’s Plan™ presents a direct and unholy challenge to Traditional Gender Roles® and the American Way of Life©!

402. Akira MacKenzie says

     25 September 2021 at 10:08 pm

     @ 396

     The article linked to the spreadsheet, one of the books these fascist hausfraus object to is a book on emotions entitled “Feelings.” Why?(Sorry, I don’t know how to insert idjit quotes.)

     Full of anger, hate, and other negative emotions—Page 8-9
     No bullying / mean behavior, Page 9. Dark content, Extreme jealously, Unfiltered anger, Death of a pet,Insecurity, Name calling

     A book on Greek mythology is singled out because it mentions “cannibalism.” They go after books that are “sad” or “depressing.” It’s not just racism and Christians fanatucism, these Stepford Wives want to erase anything in their child’s life that might be sad or scary. And they have the gall to claim leftists are emotionally fragile snowflakes who are easily triggered.

     Man, the people behind Banned Books Month would have a field day with this list.

403. Akira MacKenzie says

     25 September 2021 at 10:12 pm

     Correction, that’s Banned Books Week, which I discovered starts tomorrow.

404. blf says

     26 September 2021 at 5:31 am

     Akira MacKenzie@401, “Sorry, I don’t know how to insert idjit quotes.”

     Like this: <q class="creationist">eejit quotes</q>
     Produces: eejit quotes

405. blf says

     26 September 2021 at 5:48 am

     In me@399, I gave a synopsis of the current “U”K lorry (truck) driver shortage, without citing any sources. Today there’s a confirmation of my synopsis and analysis in the Grauniad, Emergency visas won’t tempt European lorry drivers to UK, say haulage chiefs:

     ‘Much more’ needs to be done to resolve transport crisis, government told as poll shows majority blame Brexit

     The government’s emergency programme to issue temporary visas to thousands of lorry drivers is far too little to resolve Britain’s supply-chain crisis and is unlikely to attract them to the UK, haulage chiefs have warned.

     Downing Street on Saturday night confirmed hastily compiled plans to add 5,000 HGV [Heavy Goods Vehicles (tractor-trailer trucks, usually) –blf] drivers and 5,500 poultry workers to a visa scheme until Christmas, to help the food and fuel industries with shortages.

     However, even as the plans were formally announced, Marco Digioia, the head of the European Road Haulers Association which represents more than 200,000 trucking companies across the continent, told the Observer that “much more would be needed” than a temporary relaxation of immigration rules. “There is a driver shortage across Europe,” he said. “I am not sure how many would want to go to the UK.” [I’d heard there was also an EU-wide problem, but don’t know any details… –blf]

     Andrew Opie, from the British Retail Consortium, said the 5,000 limit would “do little to alleviate the current shortfall”.

     […]

     Digioia said European driver salaries were generally higher than in Britain; new EU rules had improved working conditions; and billions of euros had been offered to fund parking areas and support companies.

     “The UK doesn’t have access to any of that,” he said. “Tempting European drivers back to the UK when they also have to face the reality of customs and border checks, all the uncertainties of Brexit … We have to be realistic.”

     Higher salaries, and perhaps tax incentives, might help in the short term, he said, but “a lot of money is being thrown at this whole problem in Europe right now. There’s a level playing field [in the EU], and none of the Brexit-related hassle”.

     […]

     The generally-quoted estimate for teh “U”K is a shortage of 100,000 drivers; e.g., How serious is the shortage of lorry drivers?:

     […]
     There is now a shortage of more than 100,000 drivers in the UK, out of a pre-pandemic total of about 600,000, a Road Haulage Association survey of its members estimates.

     That number included tens of thousands of drivers from EU member states who were living and working in the UK.

     Even before Covid, the estimated shortage was about 60,000 drivers.

     […]

     There is evidence of HGV driver shortages across Europe, but the UK has been among the hardest hit by the problem.

     This was because many European drivers went back to their home countries, or decided to work elsewhere.

     When the UK was part of the single market, they used to be able to come and go as they pleased.

     But the additional border bureaucracy after Brexit meant it was too much hassle for many of them to drive into and out of the UK.

     Many drivers are paid by the mile or kilometre rather than by the hour, so delays cost them money.

     Also, the decline in the value of the pound against the euro since the Brexit vote has meant that being paid in pounds has been less attractive for EU nationals.

     There have also been tax changes making it more expensive for drivers from elsewhere in Europe to work or be employed in the UK.

     […]

406. Akira MacKenzie says

     26 September 2021 at 7:40 am

     @ 403
     Duuuuuuh… Okay.

407. Lynna, OM says

     26 September 2021 at 12:25 pm

     Cheney Jabs Trump After Bizarre Photoshop Attack: ‘I Like Presidents Who Win Re-Election’

     Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) on Sunday hit back at former President Trump ahead of her upcoming fundraiser that former President George W. Bush will headline, following the Arizona sham election “audit” that unsurprisingly confirmed Joe Biden’s victory once again.

     On Thursday night, Trump’s Save America PAC blasted out an email to its subscribers with the subject line: “ICYMI: Must-See Photo.” The email, which was issued a day after news broke of Bush’s scheduled appearance at a fundraiser for Cheney next month, only contained a Photoshopped image of Bush’s face on Cheney’s head.

     https://twitter.com/NikkiSchwab/status/1441162998052114434

     A few days later, Cheney shot back at Trump by tweeting a picture of Bush with the caption: “I like Republican presidents who win re-election.” Cheney posted her tweet days after the sham “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona merely proved that Biden earned more votes than the official result. […]

408. Lynna, OM says

     26 September 2021 at 12:32 pm

     Republicans’ silence on memo that proves Trump’s Big Lie was a lie is deafening—and telling

     The New York Times reported Tuesday that, as part of a filing in his defamation suit against much of the deplorable ecosystem, former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer entered into the record an internal Trump campaign memo from November 2020. That memo debunked the most outlandish claims about election fraud that had been percolating in Trumpworld and the deplorable tubes. The fun part? It came two days before Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a now-infamous press conference repeating those very claims.

     And yet, as of this writing, this best characterizes the response from anyone in a position of power in the Republican Party: silence. Unacceptable silence.

     This memo proves not just beyond reasonable doubt, but beyond ALL doubt, that the Trump campaign knew that the Big Lie was indeed a lie. More importantly, it proves that the insurrection was underway long before Jan. 6. […]

     What’s more, we already know that a number of senior Republicans knew damn well that the Big Lie was, well, a lie—and yet, they remained silent. Back in January, Cook Political Report editor Dave “I’ve seen enough” Wasserman recalled that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had told him several times after the election that Joe Biden had indeed won. And yet, McCarthy had no qualms about objecting to the certification of Electoral College results, even after the insurrection, and is tripping all over himself to lead the GOP effort to whitewash the horror of Jan. 6 today.

     We also know that Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee had reviewed Trump campaign claims of fraud for themselves and concluded they were bogus. Yet it took until Jan. 6 for Graham to publicly break with Trump, while Lee claimed Trump deserved a “mulligan” for his incendiary speech before the rioters swarmed into the Capitol.

     And yet, all three of these gentlemen—a term that, in this case, we must apply in its loosest possible sense—have said nary a word since this memo dropped. Nor has Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, or anyone else that passes for leadership in the GOP.

     I’ve been reluctant to cull any Trump supporters from my Facebook friends list, unlike some of my Democratic and never-Trumper friends. Instead, I reserve my ire for “leaders” like McCarthy, Graham, Lee, and any other Republican elected official who failed to speak up and condemn this pigweed. They not only failed to make the decision they should have made, but failed to make the decision that they were morally, legally, and constitutionally required to make. I also reserve my ire for the likes of McDaniel and others in the GOP who don’t have the guts to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that their standardbearer lied to the American people, and damned well knew he was lying to the American people.

     […] The longer the GOP remains silent, the longer we must ask whether we have one party actually committed to the integrity of the system—and one party that isn’t.

     We don’t need to ask. We know the answer.

409. Lynna, OM says

     26 September 2021 at 12:38 pm

     […] State Rep. Merill Nelson is trying to fight a decision made by the Utah Supreme Court back in May. At the time, the court ruled in favor of two openly trans plaintiffs who sued after a judge gave permission for their name changes but not to update their gender markers on their birth certificates. So for example, this could look like me changing my first name to “Ben,” but the sex on my birth certificate still reading “female.”

     Who really cares about birth certificates? When it comes to legal processes, a lot of people. Think about how often you need your birth certificate whenever you need to do something “official”—say, applying for your passport, replacing a lost copy of your social security card or license, or getting married. Sure, there are times when you can substitute one document for another, but it’s inarguably a valuable source of identification. And not having your correct gender marker listed essentially “outs” you as trans to whoever is reviewing the document, even if it has nothing at all to do with the situation at hand. That’s potentially dangerous and opens people up to possible discrimination.

     […] In Utah, one cannot change the gender on their birth certificate without a court order.

     Now, Rep. Nelson is arguing that folks should not be allowed to update the sex on their birth certificates. “I don’t think it’s sound public policy to equate biological sex with gender identity,” he said on Wednesday, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune. “I think they are two different things.”

     […] Like many who push anti-trans legislation, Nelson also insists that he isn’t transphobic and that it’s not even about trans folks. According to the Tribune, he said he doesn’t think trans people should have to go to court to “declare their gender identity.”

     “I think they should be free to declare it anytime, any place, and be respected in that gender identity,” he stated. “But as far as a birth certificate, that’s a different document, and sex [is] different from gender identity.”

     As mentioned before, legal documents are important, necessary, and if incorrect, can expose an already vulnerable population to discrimination and violence. In this case, part of having one’s gender identity be “respected,” as Nelson put it, involves updating official documentation. Instead, Nelson’s bill would essentially erase trans people.

     One frustrating part of arguments like Nelson’s is that they decenter the core point and potentially legitimize anti-trans rhetoric in the ideas of moderate (or even progressive) people. It’s frighteningly easy for well-intentioned, educated people to start talking about the difference between “sex” and “gender,” for example, and all of a sudden back discriminatory legislation without realizing the full harm they’re perpetuating.

     At the real center, we know trans people—like everyone else—should be able to update their legal documents without qualm, harassment, or controversy. There is nothing scary, strange, or dangerous about trans folks having accurate, up-to-date information reflected on their legal, identifying documents. The fearmongering is a distraction, and, even worse, adds to the demonization of an already marginalized group.

     Link

410. Lynna, OM says

     26 September 2021 at 12:43 pm

     Biting Hospital Security Guard’s Thumb To The Bone.

     […] Man charged with assault after biting security guard’s thumb over hospital mask policy

     A man is in the Wichita County Jail facing a third degree felony charge after police say he attacked a security guard at Kell West over the hospital’s COVID-19 mask policy. It happened around 11: 45 a.m. Wichita Falls Police went to Kell West about a disturbance between 37-year-old Chad Staelens and the security guard. Police were shown security footage of Staelens trying to enter the hospital without a mask.

     They say he was told multiple times by the security guard, ‘it’s hospital policy to wear a mask inside’ before Staelens continued inside where he was confronted by the security guard again.

     [… The guard put his hands up to keep Staelens from poking him in the face and that’s when police say Staelens bit the guard’s left thumb causing it to bleed and exposing the bone.

     This is no laughing matter to the security guard, who might be permanently affected by a raging maskhole trying to eat him. He will probably need extensive treatment, and we all know that a hand is nearly useless with no thumb.

     Just remember, there is no bottom with the behavior of maskholes, and the possibilites range from being punched, to shot, to stabbed, to being eaten. I personally can not countenance a polite society allowing instances where humans start eating each other, as that will make for uncomfortable situations in lines in public places, like the DMV.

     Not to mention what could spiral out of control if middle fingers turn into portable snacks in New York traffic. Nope, eating other people has to be nipped in the bud. […]

411. Lynna, OM says

     26 September 2021 at 1:20 pm

     Here in America, we are so used to Europe being so extremely far ahead of us socially that we sometimes forget that not every country is ideal in all areas. For instance! Ireland like, just legalized abortion a few years ago, and Switzerland is now just getting around to legalizing same sex-marriage.

     Although the country has had “civil unions” since 2007, they did not confer all of the same rights as “marriage.” Specifically, they did not allow couples to adopt, allow lesbians access to sperm banks, and will make it just as easy for their partners to become Swiss citizens as it is for heterosexual couples.

     The government actually approved legislation to make same-sex marriage legal last year, but anti-LGBTQ bigots collected enough signatures to push for a voter referendum. Alas, they failed — 64 percent of voters voted in favor of legalization. It’s not a great percentage, but it’s a majority. It’s also likely to improve, once weirdos realize that their own marriages don’t suddenly feel less special. […]

     Via New York Times:

     “It is clearly discrimination based on sexual orientation,” said Maria von Känel, who is a president of the committee leading the “yes” campaign and is herself in a same-sex partnership with two children.

     “Everyone should be treated equally,” she said. […]

     Despite the changes to the marriage law, Ms. von Känel said there were still a few important points that it did not take into account, such as if both parents would be entitled to parental leave, including in situations where couples undergo reproductive assistance or fertility treatment abroad.

     She noted that there was also a lot of work to be done to increase the rights and social acceptance of L.G.B.T.Q. people in Switzerland. This includes creating safe learning environments for L.G.B.T.Q. youth and banning conversion therapy, Ms. von Känel said.

     Now there is only one country in Europe that has only civil unions … and that’s Italy. I find this embarrassing, but not surprising, because Catholicism and machismo.

     Switzerland has traditionally been a little behind the times, socially, compared to the rest of Europe. The New York Times notes that they “did not grant women the right to vote until 1971 and until 1985 required wives to get permission from their husbands to work outside the home.” And of course there was that whole thing with the Nazi bank accounts, which was not great. Far-right extremism has become a pretty serious problem as well.

     One article describing Switzerland as not particularly liberal notes that new parents have only 14 weeks of maternity leave. Of course, in the US we have zero weeks of parental leave, so I guess we don’t get to judge that.

     Still, this is a great day for same-sex couples in Switzerland. Let us celebrate with yodeling [yodeling videos are available at the link]

     Link

412. Lynna, OM says

     26 September 2021 at 1:27 pm

     Thousands of people have fled their homes to escape a wildfire engulfing a forest in California’s north, which authorities believe was sparked deliberately.

     Police have arrested a 30-year-old woman on charges of igniting the Fawn fire. Workers at a quarry in Shasta County said they saw the woman trespassing last Wednesday before the fire erupted in a remote canyon, according to Cal Fire, the state’s forestry and fire protection department.

     As firefighters battled the flames through the night, she walked out of the shrubs toward them, looking for medical help, the statement issued Thursday said.

     Law enforcement officers interviewing the woman, whom the district attorney said at a news conference had a lighter in her pocket, later suspected arson.

     Smoke has since painted the sky orange as the blaze swallowed homes near the city of Redding.

     In Shasta County, which is north of the city and was already hit by a drought, the fire department sent teams out over the weekend to determine how many buildings had burned. They found 131 destroyed structures so far, though that figure was expected to rise with the Fawn fire threatening hundreds more.

     It is the latest in a string of raging infernos — helped by severe weather like drought and record heat — that tore through forest land in California this summer and in other parts of the world, draining firefighters and raising alarm about climate change.

     Six of the seven largest fires in California’s history have hit since August last year.

     With rain expected in the next few days, Cal Fire said calmer weather could help firefighters who have so far reined in just 25 percent of a fire that has so far scorched almost 8,500 acres.

     At least 4,000 people have evacuated, with the fire affecting 30,000 residents, the county sheriff’s office said in a statement earlier this week.

     Some evacuation warnings have now been lifted. Still, the fire department warned residents in potential danger zones on Saturday to stand ready to leave if the fire picks up near them.

     Washington Post link

413. blf says

     26 September 2021 at 1:54 pm

     Follow-up of sorts to Lynna@410, Iceland first country in Europe to have more female than male MPs:

     […]
     Iceland has become the first country in Europe to have more women than men in parliament, a day after a general election that left the future of the prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, in doubt despite her left-right coalition winning a clear majority.

     Of the 63 seats in the Althing parliament, 33 — or 52% — were won by women, projections based on the final results showed on Sunday. No other European country has had more than 50% female lawmakers, with Sweden coming closest at 47%, according to data compiled by the World Bank.

     […]

     Unlike some other countries, Iceland does not have legal quotas on female representation in parliament. The Nordic country has long been a pioneer in gender equality and women’s rights and has topped the World Economic Forum’s ranking of most egalitarian countries for the past 12 years.

     Iceland was the first country to elect a woman as president in 1980. “I am 85, I’ve waited all my life for women to be in a majority … I am really happy,” Erdna, a Reykjavik resident, told AFP.

     […]

     During her four-year term, Jakobsdóttir has introduced a progressive income tax system, increased the social housing budget and extended parental leave for both parents. Broadly popular, she has also been hailed for her handling of the Covid-19 crisis. The country, with a population of 370,000, has recorded 33 deaths.

     Jakobsdóttir said on Saturday that if returned to power, her party would focus on the “huge challenges we face to build the economy in a more green and sustainable way”, as well addressing the climate crisis, where “we need to do radical things”.

     Much of the text in above excerpt I’ve elected to elude concerns parliamentary calculations about whether or not PM Jakobsdóttir will be able to form a government.

414. blf says

     26 September 2021 at 2:52 pm

     Unsung hero: how ‘Mr Radio Philips’ helped thousands flee the Nazis:

     In June 1940, a Dutch salesman, acting as a consul in Lithuania, issued Jewish refugees with pseudo visas to escape Europe. His remarkable story is only now being told

     He helped save more Jewish lives than Oskar Schindler, but while the brave deeds of the German industrialist were known around the world because of an Oscar-winning film, few know the name Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch radio salesman who helped thousands of Jews flee Nazi-occupied Europe.

     Now a book by the celebrated Dutch writer Jan Brokken seeks to rescue Zwartendijk from obscurity, as well as other courageous officials who bent the rules to help several thousand Jews trapped between Nazi Europe and the Soviet Union.

     The Just, published this year in English, recounts how up to 10,000 men, women and children fled the Holocaust. At the heart of the story is Zwartendijk and the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who improvised an improbable escape route from Lithuania to the Japanese port of Tsuruga and beyond. Over 10 frantic days in the summer of 1940, the two men issued “visas” to 2,139 people. Researchers estimate 6,000 to 10,000 may have escaped, as women and children often travelled on male relatives’ documents.

     Yet while Sugihara became a national hero, featuring on Japan’s school curriculum and with three museums dedicated to his life, Zwartendijk was forgotten. His youngest son, a baby in the Lithuanian years, knew nothing of his father’s actions until he was in his 30s. “He never spoke about this period,” said Rob Zwartendijk, 81, speaking to the Observer from the North Holland town of Blaricum.

     “And whenever it cropped up, he said: ‘Ah, that’s not very important, everyone would have done those things if they had been in this position’. Which you and I know is not true.”

     Jan Zwartendijk was an accidental diplomat. When war broke out in 1939, he was head of the local Philips branch in Kaunas, then the capital of Lithuania, which sold radios, gramophones and lightbulbs. […]

     As a reliable company man, Zwartendijk was asked by the Dutch government in exile to step into the unpaid position of consul in Kaunas, as the previous occupant was suspected of Nazi sympathies. Expecting only to assist a few Dutch citizens, Zwartendijk was soon confronted with a dangerous choice. He was not a born hero, writes Brokken, but made a snap decision to help Jewish refugees who came knocking at his door: they had fled to Lithuania after the Nazi invasion of neighbouring Poland in September 1939.

     […] Approached by a couple of refugees with a plan, Zwartendijk agreed to write in their passports that no travel document was required to travel to the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. This was technically true, but withheld the detail that permission from the island’s governor was required. Zwartendijk was counting on no one checking the entry requirements for a tiny island on the other side of the world. And nobody did. This pseudo visa unlocked the door to leaving. Armed with the “Curaçao visa”, Jewish refugees could petition Sugihara — and the foreign-currency hungry Soviet authorities — for transit papers. Word about “Mister Radio Philips” began to spread.

     Although they lived less than 300 metres apart, Zwartendijk and Sugihara never met. But they spoke on the phone sometimes. Sugihara urged his Dutch colleague to slow down issuing visas. While Zwartendijk wrote his visa with a fountain pen and green-ink stamp, Sugihara composed his with more laborious ink and brush. Both ran a huge risk. Sugihara defied his bosses in Tokyo, while Zwartendijk would have been in mortal danger had the Nazis found out when he returned to his occupied home country.

     They also risked the attention of the Soviet police, who noticed long queues outside the Philips office that served as the Dutch consulate. One evening, Zwartendijk received a visit from a Russian officer, who ordered soldiers to block the pavement to the office. Accusing Zwartendijk of endangering public safety, he threatened to close the consulate immediately. The Dutchman offered him a Philishave, the brand-new electric razor the company had introduced in 1939. Given a quick demonstration of the gadget, the officer declared it a miracle and let Zwartendijk carry on.

     A close shave? (Sorry, sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

     [… L]ong after the war, when the scale of the Holocaust was well known, Zwartendijk was never feted. In 1964, he was even reprimanded by the Dutch foreign ministry after a newspaper report about the mysterious “Angel of Curaçao” emerged. Brokken suggests that Zwartendijk’s heroism may have shamed his contemporaries.

     Zwartendijk was furious about the reprimand, but he was tormented by not knowing how many had escaped on his Curaçao visas. In later years, in failing health, he never stopped asking what became of the people who had stood before him in that light-brown panelled office in Kaunas. […]

     In 1976, researchers assessed that 95% of Jewish refugees with Zwartendijk’s papers survived the war. The news arrived at the Zwartendijk house the day after Jan’s funeral.

     […]

     Sugihara died in 1986, two years after being recognised as “Righteous Among the Nations” — the highest honour accorded to non-Jews who risked everything to save Jewish lives. Zwartendijk was not given the same honour until 1997 […]

     Recognition is finally coming. In the Netherlands, in 2018, Brokken’s book prompted an official apology to the Zwartendijk family, describing the 1964 reprimand as “completely inappropriate”. Last year, the then foreign minister, Stef Blok, praised Zwartendijk and Sugihara’s “extraordinary partnership”, who “at great personal risk dedicated themselves to humanity”. […]

     The city of Kaunas has honoured Zwartendijk with a memorial in front of the Philips office. Suspended between trees is a spiral of 2,139 passports. When evening falls, the ever-changing colours — ocean blue, rose pink and forest green — light up the darkness.

     Whilst the story of Chiune Sugihara is vaguely known to me, at the moment I have no recollection of Jan Zwartendijk. (Indeed, Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge‘s current article is very brief.)

415. blf says

     26 September 2021 at 3:46 pm

     Whilst perhaps an obvious article, nonetheless some good retorts, Some say COVID-19 vaccine is the mark of the beast. Is there a connection to the Bible? (my added emboldening):

     […]
     Emergency room physician Stephen Smith at Hennepin Healthcare told USA TODAY he hasn’t heard the mark of the beast as a reason to not get vaccinated but a few other outlandish reasons.

     Smith said one woman brought her child in for a fever and cough, and he explained that the toddler might have COVID-19. When he asked the mother if she had been vaccinated, Smith said her response was Oh no, that turns you into a zombie.

     Other reasons Smith has heard for not getting vaccinated include: not wanting to get microchipped, it’s outside their world view, vaccines were developed too fast, they haven’t gotten sick, they’re not high-risk, they don’t trust the government and they read that people have died from the vaccine.

     All that makes perfect sense, of course: The microchips turn you into a magnet, but that proven effect is fictional because no-one knows how magnets work — common sense which clearly shows the developers had no idea what they were doing, and who have suspiciously never gotten sick despite working with high-risk dangerous microchips, and killing off many of their BLM-guarded FEMA camp prisoners in the process. (So no need for any testing.) Oh, and hair furor personally designed the vaccines but Biden fecked-up the distribution despite pocketing zillions in bribes (and entire harems of brides), and appointed Dr Fauci as supreme commandant of those camps, supplying Big Pharma’s gestapo with billions of addition experimental subjects (including fully-formed healthy babies forcibly-aborted by AntiFa), all kidnapped in the middle of the night by secret black UN / WHO helicopters piloted by lizard people.

     Obviously.

     “Social media plays a 100% role in the misconceptions about the vaccine,” Smith said. “They get all their information off Facebook and get all this garbage.

     “Anyone who is telling you not to get the vaccine is either lying to you or an idiot or a combination of the two.”
     […]

     👏🏻👏🏽👏🏿👏🏾

416. Lynna, OM says

     26 September 2021 at 4:11 pm

     ‘Irresponsible Beyond Words’: Pelosi Doubles Down On Slamming GOP’s Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship

     House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Sunday reiterated her criticism of Republicans’ brinksmanship on the debt ceiling amid their refusal to help their Democratic colleagues with suspending it, despite having voted to raise the debt ceiling throughout the Trump administration.

     Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” Pelosi was asked whether she has confidence that the government will avoid default, given how Republicans have made clear that the suspension of the debt ceiling through Dec. 2022 is dead on arrival in the Senate.

     Pelosi replied that Republicans’ standoff on the debt ceiling is “irresponsible beyond words.”

     “The full faith and credit of the United States should not be questioned,” Pelosi said. “That’s in the Constitution of the United States, the 14th Amendment. Go look at that. It’s in the Constitution of the United States.”

     Pelosi insisted that the votes are there to raise the debt ceiling, citing the three times Democrats voted alongside Republicans in lifting it during Trump’s presidency.

     “Even to have the discussion that it could possibly be in default, it lowers our — it did the last time lowered our credit rating,” Pelosi said.

     Pelosi then jabbed at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by pointing out the irony in his remarks last week telling Democrats to not play “Russian roulette” with the economy and to raise the debt ceiling on their own.

     Pressed on whether Democrats can pass a suspension of the debt ceiling on their own, Pelosi replied that Democrats would prefer to raise the debt ceiling in a bipartisan manner, which is why it wasn’t included in the reconciliation bill.

     “That would have been a decision we had to make when we wrote the budget out,” Pelosi said. “But nonetheless, the decision was made that it would always be bipartisan, whether on our part as we have cooperated in the past with Republican presidents or on their part.”

     Pelosi reiterated that Republicans’ standoff on the debt ceiling is “totally irresponsible” and that she hopes that the business community would speak out on the impasse due to its “devastating impact” on the country’s credit rating as well as global economy.

     “So let’s hope that the Republicans will find some — enough of them, find some level of responsibility to our country to honor what’s in the Constitution, that we not question the full faith and credit of the United States of America,” Pelosi said. “They know full well what the consequences are. They preached it when the former president was in office, and we always cooperated. It’s always been bipartisan, and it should be again.”

     […] “The full faith and credit is a national debate. Why should it be that we as Democrats always come to the rescue when it’s a Republican president?” Pelosi said. “We’re not coming to the rescue of the President — we’re coming to the rescue of our economy, of families and the interest they pay on loans, and their job security and the rest of that. That’s the debate that we have to have.”

     Video is available at the link.

417. blf says

     26 September 2021 at 4:15 pm

     And it gets even stooooopideeer… ‘Vigilante treatments’: Anti-vaccine groups push people to leave ICUs:

     […]
     Anti-vaccine Facebook groups have a new message for their community members: Don’t go to the emergency room, and get your loved ones out of intensive care units.

     Consumed by conspiracy theories claiming that doctors are preventing unvaccinated patients from receiving miracle cures or are even killing them on purpose, some people in anti-vaccine and pro-ivermectin Facebook groups are telling those with Covid-19 to stay away from hospitals and instead try increasingly dangerous at-home treatments, according to posts seen by NBC News over the past few weeks.

     […] And it’s something that some doctors say they’re seeing manifest in their hospitals as they have filled up because of the most recent delta variant wave.

     [… There are] various local reports about growing threats and violence directed toward medical professionals. In Branson, Missouri, a medical center recently introduced panic buttons on employee badges because of a spike in assaults. Violence and threats against medical professionals have recently been reported in Massachusetts, Texas, Georgia and Idaho. [links at the link]

     […] In recent weeks, some anti-vaccine Facebook groups and conspiracy theory influencers on the encrypted messaging app Telegram have offered instructions on how to get family members released from the hospital, usually by insisting they be transferred into hospice care, and have recorded those they’ve successfully removed from hospitals for viral videos.

     Some people in groups that formed recently to promote the false cure ivermectin, an anti-parasite treatment, have claimed extracting Covid patients from hospitals is pivotal so that they can self-medicate at home with ivermectin. But as the patients begin to realize that ivermectin by itself is not effective, the groups have begun recommending a series of increasingly hazardous at-home treatments, such as gargling with iodine, and nebulizing and inhaling hydrogen peroxide, calling it part of a protocol [to turn into a corpse toxic to worms].

     […] Harvard Medical School physician Aditi Nerurkar calls [this nonsense] “vigilante medicine,” wherein patients are deferring potentially lifesaving care from doctors to try unproven cures pushed on Facebook.

     “It’s vigilante medicine: medicine being practiced by laypeople who are reading groups created by other laypeople in echo chambers and silos that, likely, someone in the anti-vax movement is profiting from,” she said.

     […]

     Anti-vaccination activists falsely believe that ivermectin is a secret miracle cure for Covid. Prescriptions for the drug have skyrocketed, despite some pharmacists refusing to fill them. Horse owners are facing a shortage of dewormers, which contains ivermectin, because anti-vaccine influencers and Facebook groups have falsely claimed that the drugs are effectively the same.

     Many users in the Ivermectin groups push conspiracy theories about how Food and Drug Administration-recommended treatments frequently used by doctors and nurses in hospitals are secretly killing patients, and some have implied doctors and nurses are killing patients on purpose so they can receive government payouts.

     Conspiracy theorists have pushed the idea that the antiviral drug remdesivir and the use of ventilators are “drowning” unvaccinated Covid patients. In reality, unvaccinated patients are dying of the debilitating effects Covid has on the lungs.

     […]

     Nerurkar said patients are often understandably seeking immediate answers and relief once they contract Covid, but unlike snake oil and false miracle drugs, proven treatments for the virus can take days to be effective, “which has been a source of great frustration for clinicians, and also for patients and families.”

     […]

     [ICU doctor and professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Wes] Ely said one particular patient who had been misinformed stuck with him. The woman who had Covid arrived in his ICU about five months pregnant. Ely said the woman was not vaccinated and refused any treatments that would help fight the virus.

     “Why? Because, to her, it’s not real,” he said. “So now we’re dealing with a woman in the ICU, the baby too young to live. We’ve got to make it several more weeks for the baby to be viable.”

     […] “When people get this sick, they are very likely going to die, and almost all pregnant moms in this situation lose their babies. So we have two people dying without treatment for Covid.”

     Ely said this patient was not alone, and that some of those who refuse the vaccine “just keep denying until they’re dying.”

     “And let me say, this is not rare. You asked me what I’m hearing, and this is happening. Real time. Right now.”

     The mildly deranged penguin suggests pointing out that drinking napalm and then lighting a match is a proven cheap (it’s easy to make a napalm-like substance) and effective method of eliminating any SARS-CoV-2 virus inside you or in your vicinity. The main problem, she suspects, is at least some people have an idea what napalm is (a morning air freshener), a problem solved by renaming it as, e.g., Own-A-Liberal™: Drink Own-A-Liberal, then Have a Cigar to Celebrate and Watch the Snowflakes Explode as You Conclusively Prove There’s No Covid Here! (I point out that if some does drink napalmOwn-A-Liberal, they probably won’t be able to ignite that all-important match / cigar, and anyways, this plan will cause a run on flamethrowers, causing problems in keeping the evil equine empire bayingat bay.)

418. Lynna, OM says

     26 September 2021 at 4:16 pm

     Hobby Lobby’s Museum of the Bible forced to give Iraq back prized stolen religious artifact

     Hobby Lobby has been one of the powerhouses behind muddying our country’s separation of church and state. Before the Supreme Court became stacked with radical right-wing legal embarrassments, it was still a painfully conservative court. In 2014, they handed down a decision allowing Hobby Lobby and other privately owned corporations to hide behind sexist religious beliefs in order to deny women federally mandated contraception coverage in their health care. Steve Green is the president of Hobby Lobby, which he inherited control over back in 2004 from its founder, his father David Green.

     Steve has in turn done all kinds of wondrous things (including the aforementioned fighting against women’s reproductive rights), like founding—and mostly paying for—the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Green did this because his family has been collecting an outrageous volume of ancient artifacts since 2009, and they wanted to show to the world the relics of their wealth and religious worldview. Of course, since 2015, Green and his Bible museum have been under investigation for both the authenticity of some of the artifacts, as well as the legality of their acquisition by these Christian crusaders. And since those investigations began, Hobby Lobby has been forced to give back tens of thousands of stolen artifacts.

     On Wednesday, Hobby Lobby agreed on parting with one of their most prized, and stolen, possessions.

     The Museum of the Bible will be returning the Gilgamesh Tablet to Iraq ”after the Justice Department concluded it was stolen around the start of the Gulf War and sold illegally in the U.S. market.” Known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, the clay artifact is about 3,500 years old and considered to be one of the oldest preserved religious texts and works of literature. Hobby Lobby bought the tablet for $1.67 million in 2014 in order to put it in Green’s Museum of the Bible. It is believed to have been looted from an Iraq museum in 1990.

     A big part of starting a Bible museum is getting Bible-times stuff. Unfortunately for Green, most ancient Bible-days artifacts can only be found in the areas around where that famous Palestinian Jew, Yeshua of Nazareth, lived. Double unfortunately, getting one’s hands on thousands of artifacts from not in your literal backyard usually requires lots of looting. In a series of decisions and settlements, Hobby Lobby has had to pay hefty fines and return tens of thousands of artifacts in a couple of different decisions.

     In August, it was reported that Iraq had repatriated around 17,000 stolen artifacts from the United States, 12,000 of which came from Hobby Lobby’s Museum of the Bible. At the time, the Gilgamesh Tablet was not among the repatriated items. The museum had received so many items in such a short time that thousands of those items had yet to be researched and it is still unknown what exactly they had.

     This wholesale approach to artifact collection has also led them to reportedly purchase stolen artifacts not just from looters but from a scholar who has been disgraced for both bad scholarship as well as robbery.

     Christ Church professor Dirk Obbink was arrested on 2nd March 2020 for alleged theft of ancient papyrus from the Sackler Classics Library in Oxford. Professor Obbink was suspended from his duties at the University in October 2019 following allegations that he had stolen up to 120 pieces of ancient papyrus owned by the Egypt Exploration Society collection, housed in the Sackler Library.

     One of the things Obbink ended up passing along to Hobby Lobby was a fragment from the Gospel of Mark that Obbink had made scholarly waves with by claiming he could date it to the first century CE—potentially making it an incredibly important piece.

     According to Obbink, the words might have been copied down within 30 years of the date of the original biblical manuscript. There are no known biblical manuscripts from earlier than the second century, so this was a major discovery. (The fragment is now believed to date to the second or third century.)

     In the Green’s defense, investigators say that the provenance of various artifacts, including the Dream Tablet, were misrepresented to Hobby Lobby buyers by the auction house they bought them through, and Obbink was a well-known professor at the University of Oxford before his downfall. Not in the Green’s defense, they amassed what amounted to be the largest private collection of rare biblical texts and artifacts in less than a decade. Hobby Lobby has launched a lawsuit against the auction house. […]

419. blf says

     26 September 2021 at 4:45 pm

     Lynna@417, The Gilgamesh tablet was seized by the Feds in 2019, “and New York’s eastern district court ordered its forfeiture on Tuesday [27 July 2021]”, Ancient Gilgamesh tablet seized from Hobby Lobby by US authorities; “The DoJ said that Hobby Lobby had consented to the forfeiture, ‘based on the tablet’s illegal importations into the United States in 2003 and 2014’.” Which presumably means Hobby Libby / teh fake museum / Steve Green, etc., have had no say in what happens… and according to Gilgamesh Dream Tablet to be formally handed back to Iraq, “The formal handover ceremony will take place at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC on 23 September” (the date of the article cited in @417), which is what happened.

420. KG says

     27 September 2021 at 5:28 am

     blf@412,
     Recounts mean Iceland doesn’t have a majority of female MPs. The current ideologically disparate coalition may continue, but the progressive element in it, the Left Green Party, lost 3 seats.

     Meanwhile in Germany, the “centre-left” SPD (“Parlour Pinks” as the Stalinist-adjacent father of a friend of mine would call them) have narrowly beaten the “centre-right” CDU-CSU to first place, but neither is anywhere near a majority. Plausible coalitions are a continuation of the current “Grand Coalition” (CDU-CSU + SPD), or either of the two biggest parties with the Greens (who came third) and the neoliberal FDP (fourth). The FDP leader wants CDU-CSU + Greens + FDP, the Greens have been vague (the German Greens have moved a long way right from their radical roots, but might still prefer to work with the SPD, particularly as the CDU-CSU had a disastrous election, gaining their lowest share of votes and seats since WWII, while the SPD gained votes and seats). Arithmetically, a right-wing coalition between the CDU-CSU, FDP and Nazis (AfD – fifth) would have a majority, but it’s unlikely either of the other parties would work with the Nazis. An SPD + Green + Linke (“Left” – sixth) coalition would be a few seats short of a majority, I don’t know offhand whether it could function. My guess is that the final result will be SPD + Greens + FDP, but substituting the CDU-CSU for the SPD is almost as likely.

421. KG says

     27 September 2021 at 6:20 am

     A Guardian “explainer” of the process of trying to form a coalition in Germany. If all attempts fail, the President can call a new election.

422. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 11:34 am

     A snippet from The US has terrible family policies. How do expats fare abroad? (“Three American families in three countries [Netherlands, Ireland, and Japan] are delighted to find more generous leave and support in their new homes”):

     The US is a global outlier on family policy: out of 193 countries, 182 have paid sick leave, 185 have paid leave for mothers and 108 have paid leave for fathers, according to the WORLD Policy Analysis Center. “These are very, very widespread policies and guaranteeing three months or more is very common,” said Dr Jody Heymann, founding director of the WORLD Policy Analysis Center.

     In June, Unicef ranked US national childcare policies 40th out of 41 wealthy countries because of its weak investments in leave and childcare.

423. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 11:45 am

     Nicola Jennings in the Grauniad, Limited utilities (cartoon). As multiple readers have pointed out, “sorry” is not something in alleged-“PM” teh Borris’ vocabulary.

424. Akira MacKenzie says

     27 September 2021 at 11:56 am

     @ 421

     The trouble is that here in the States there are a vast number of voters who don’t measure things like literacy, health care outcomes, infant mortality, education, social benefits to judge the success of a society. (If anything, countries that have strong social welfare policies are really totalitarian hell holes that tax their citizens into poverty and take away their guns.) The only thing that matters to them is if the America GDP is high and the military is huge. Those make the USA “number one.”

425. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 11:58 am

     Follow-up to @422 (and @399 / @404), If only the UK could panic-buy prime ministers who know what they’re doing:

     […]
     Is the government’s fabled Nudge Unit on a paddleboard somewhere in Crete? You have to ask, after Downing Street urged people not to panic-buy petrol, a piece of behavioural science almost guaranteed to make people panic-buy petrol. If only there’d been some kind of rehearsal event last year, when telling people not to fight over bog roll generated counterintuitive scenes of Andrex-fuelled violence in the supermarket aisles.

     [… Onwards] to the sunlit uplands / this septic isle, facing the possibility of shortages of commodities as diverse as gas, petrol, carbon dioxide, beer, lorry drivers, chicken, hospitality staff, care workers, turkeys, and prime ministers who understand economics. The last one could turn out to be a particular shitter.

     It’s only Friday, but you may already have lost count of how many “perfect storms” have gathered on the horizon this week. You may even be starting to think this phrase doesn’t mean what they think it means. I’m picturing the first little pig failing to evacuate in timely fashion because he was so busy briefing journalists. “What you have to understand is that this is a ‘perfect storm’, entirely unrelated to the fact I spent no more than three minutes building my house out of a famously windborne agricultural byproduct before kicking back with a nice pint of what-could-possibly-go-wrong. Now I’m sorry, I’m going to have to terminate this interview because a wolf has just eaten half my face.”

     [… more snarking on teh “U”K’s supply problems…]

     Despite questionable attempts to sell Johnson’s NYC jolly as a triumph, seeping out overnight was the claim from Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, that Johnson had sought an emergency food deal with Brazil, supposedly for “some kind of food that is lacking in England”. The British embassy in Brazil says this differs from their recollection of what was said — then again, Johnson claimed he and the US president, Joe Biden, didn’t discuss the Northern Ireland protocol during their meeting last week, when the White House readout very clearly states that they did.

     […]

426. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 11:58 am

     What Republicans choose to forget about their regressive tax breaks

     Pat Toomey said it’s “an indisputable fact” that 2017 tax breaks created “the strongest economy” in generations. That’s demonstrably wrong.

     Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania sat down with Jake Tapper yesterday, and when the discussion turned to the debt ceiling, the host reminded the retiring senator that the nation added nearly $8 trillion to the debt during Donald Trump’s presidency — which is obviously relevant now. Toomey tried to argue in response that the GOP is blocking the nation’s borrowing authority over concerns about “future spending.”

     Whether the Republican wants to admit this or not, extending the debt ceiling is about paying the nation’s bills. It is not intended to clear the way for new spending. This is a basic truth some in the GOP acknowledge when it suits their purposes.

     But yesterday’s interview touched on a related point that stood out as even more notable. From the transcript:

     TAPPER: When it came to, for example, the Trump tax cuts, that was about $6 trillion. Most of it was paid for one way or another, but not $2 trillion of it. That was not paid for in any way. You supported that. And that created the debt as well.

     TOOMEY: Well, yes, Jake, it also created the strongest economy of my lifetime. That’s just an indisputable fact.

     No, it’s not.

     The Pennsylvania Republican added that Democrats shouldn’t “undo the very tax regime that helped enable that tremendous economic growth.”

     Rehashing the debate over the efficacy of the Republicans’ regressive tax breaks from 2017 may seem trivial, but Democrats are currently in the process of deciding whether, and to what degree, Congress should roll back some of these tax cuts. If it’s “an indisputable fact” that these tax policies created “the strongest economy” in generations, and were directly responsible for generating “tremendous economic growth,” that would he highly relevant information.

     But Toomey’s rhetoric was plainly wrong. The senator pointed to job growth and GDP growth, so let’s consider both in more detail.

     […] according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy created 3 million jobs in 2014, 2.72 million jobs in 2015, and 2.34 million jobs in 2016. The combined total for the final three years of the Obama/Biden era: a little over 8.06 million jobs.

     Meanwhile, according to the same data, the U.S. economy created 2.11 million jobs in 2017*, 2.31 million jobs in 2018, and 2.13 million jobs in 2019. The combined total for the first three years of the Trump/Pence era: a little over 6.55 million jobs.

     Republican tax cuts created “the strongest economy” in Toomey’s lifetime? In reality, the tax cuts didn’t even fuel job growth stronger than Americans saw earlier in the decade.

     As for GDP, U.S. economy growth under during Trump’s presidency fell short — before the pandemic — both of growth rates from Barack Obama’s second term and of growth rates Trump promised to create before taking office.

     […] Toomey was mistaken; the data proves he was. […]

427. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 12:29 pm

     Despite investigation, Trump boasts about pressuring Georgia’s Kemp

     Trump is under investigation for allegedly interfering in Georgia’s election process. Why is he boasting about interfering in Georgia’s election process?

     Donald Trump headlined a campaign rally in Georgia on Saturday night and shared a lengthy anecdote about his post-election efforts. If the former president’s attorneys were listening, it’s a safe bet they weren’t pleased.

     Trump described in some detail a narrative in which he dispatched his “people” to speak with Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, about “election integrity.” When his aides told him that the governor wouldn’t cooperate, the then-president, according to the story, told them to call him again. By Trump’s telling, the governor still refused.

     And that’s when the former president got to the most notable part of the story:

     “I said, ‘Let me handle it. This is easy.’ I got this guy elected…. I was going to show [the aides] how good I am. ‘Let me handle it. I’ll call them up.’ I said, ‘Brian, listen, you know you have a big election integrity problem in Georgia. I hope you can help us out and call a special election.'”

     By Trump’s telling, Kemp told him, “Sir, I’m sorry. I cannot do that.” It led the former president to say at Saturday night’s rally that Georgia’s GOP governor is “a disaster” and “horrible.”

     In the interest of clarity, it’s probably worth emphasizing that at Trump’s weekend event, he repeatedly said he wanted Georgia to hold a “special election.” I have a hunch he meant “special session” of the legislature, though it’s entirely possible the former president doesn’t know the difference.

     In any case, that was Trump’s story: As Georgia was in the process of certifying its election, the then-president’s staff tried to intervene, and when that didn’t work, Trump personally contacted Kemp and asked the governor to “help us out.”

     I’m not in a position to say with certainty whether the conversation Trump described actually occurred in reality. In fact, Trump has a lengthy history of describing the details of conversations that happened only in his mind […] Sharing quotes from made-up conversations is one of his weirder idiosyncrasies.

     But if the former president’s story is true, it may be of interest to prosecutors.

     […] he’s currently facing an ongoing criminal probe in Georgia, where members of a grand jury are considering evidence about the former president’s alleged efforts to intervene in the state’s 2020 vote count.

     CNN reported just last week that criminal investigators in the state “have been quietly conducting interviews, collecting documents and working to build a line of communication with congressional investigators as they aim to build a case against” Trump.

     In fact, the day before Saturday night’s rally, The Washington Post published an opinion piece on the controversy from four legal experts. “[T]here is no doubt that attempting to subvert democracy — to effectively disenfranchise millions of Georgians, and particularly Georgians of color — is not just wrong; it is potentially criminal,” they wrote. The piece added:

     The centerpiece of Trump’s Georgia interference is his now infamous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump repeatedly insisted that he had won Georgia “by hundreds of thousands of votes” and demanded that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” — exactly one more vote than the margin of Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in the state. But Trump’s actions went far beyond his solicitations and threats on this one call. He also personally contacted other officials in Georgia — including the governor, the attorney general and the secretary of state’s chief investigator — to urge them to alter the election outcome.

     After the authors of the piece concluded that Trump’s interference in the election process may very well have crossed the line into criminal misconduct, the former president boasted to supporters that he personally lobbied the governor — in order to interfere in the election process.

     No one should wonder why he struggles to hire and maintain defense attorneys.

     Trump should shoot himself in the foot a few more times.

428. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 12:36 pm

     Why Biden says his plan costs ‘nothing’ (and why he’s right)

     When the president insists the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion plan will cost “nothing,” he has a point. It all comes down to net and gross costs.

     There’s some disagreement about what to call the ambitious Democratic legislation pending on Capitol Hill. The breadth of the legislation — touching on everything from health care to education, climate to housing — makes it difficult to label. I tend to like the “safety net and climate” plan, but it’s admittedly a little clunky.

     Some call it the “reconciliation” bill, since that’s the legislative process Democrats are trying to use to pass it, while others refer to it as the “Build Back Better” bill. The trouble, of course, is that much of the country has no idea what those labels mean.

     […] The fact that the investments would be spread out over the course of the decade is sometimes lost in the shuffle, but the topline total is a detail that often dominates the conversation, even overshadowing what the bill would do and the extent to which families would benefit.

     […] Would the plan really “cost” $3.5 trillion? According to President Joe Biden, whose domestic agenda is tied up in the legislation, the answer is no.

     “We talk about price tags. It is zero price tag on the debt we’re paying. We’re going to pay for everything we spend. … [E]very time I hear, ‘This is going to cost A, B, C, or D,’ the truth is, based on the commitment that I made, it’s going to cost nothing.”

     I can appreciate why any discussion based on the nuances of the word “cost” are going to cause some to roll their eyes, but it’s important to acknowledge the fact that Biden’s argument is sound.

     The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell has been working on this for weeks, explaining the difference between net and gross costs. (Some conservative media figures, who really ought to know better, appear to be struggling with the concept.)

     But the math isn’t that complicated. For example, when we look at the Republicans’ 2017 package of regressive tax breaks, we see a plan that cost roughly $2 trillion. Some on the right might be inclined to look at that total and see Biden’s safety-net-and-climate plan as costing even more.

     Except, the Trump-era tax breaks would’ve come with an even higher price tag were it not for other provisions, such as the cap on state and local tax deductions, that helped offset the overall cost. The $2 trillion figure refers to the net cost: That’s $2 trillion, after offsetting revenue is included in the mix, that the United States was supposed to have, but which Republicans instead put in the pockets of the wealthy and big corporations.

     The pending Democratic plan appears to carry an even greater price tag, but the $3.5 trillion figure is a gross cost, which doesn’t include proposed tax increases on the wealthy and big corporations to help pay for the domestic investments. As far as the White House is concerned, that makes a world of difference: If Democrats intend to invest $3.5 trillion, but they also intend to pay for all that without adding to the national debt, then for all intents and purposes, the package costs nothing — since unlike the GOP’s 2017 tax breaks, the safety-net-and-climate plan will be deficit neutral.

     Now, some will argue that the Democratic legislation may not be entirely paid for, and the party may rely on a few budget games here and there. We haven’t seen a final bill, but it’s likely that some of those criticisms will be fair.

     But in broad strokes, the bottom line remains the same: Biden and his party are making a good-faith effort to pay for practically all of these new investments, which is far more than anyone can credibly say about Republicans and their recent initiatives. When the president insists his plan will cost “nothing,” he has a point.

429. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 12:43 pm

     Republicans become more brazen about embracing ‘replacement theory’

     It’s jarring to see such a racist conspiracy theory make the transition from the political fringe to prominent Republican voices.

     For most Americans, the “great replacement” conspiracy theory probably remains an obscure and unfamiliar concept. For a growing number of Republicans, however, the idea is moving quickly from the fringe to the GOP mainstream.

     […] the basic idea behind the conspiracy theory is that nefarious forces — Democrats, “globalists,” immigration advocates, et al. — intend to systemically replace white people in the United States by welcoming people of color from other countries. Not surprisingly, the ugly idea has been popular in white-supremacist circles.

     But this year, it’s prominent Republican voices who’ve been pushing the theory with increased vigor.

     Last week, after the network assured the Anti-Defamation League that Tucker Carlson had no use for replacement theory, the Fox News host warned viewers that the Biden administration intends to change the nation’s “racial mix.” Carlson added, “This policy is called the ‘great replacement.'”

     As Business Insider reported yesterday, it wasn’t long before the host received support from a Republican member of Congress.

     Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida appeared to endorse a white nationalist conspiracy theory that Tucker Carlson promoted on his Fox News show last week. ‘[Carlson] is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,’ Gaetz, a Republican, wrote in a tweet Saturday.

     […] While Gaetz went further than most in the GOP by explicitly using the “replacement theory” phrase, the congressman is hardly the first prominent Republican official to push the concept.

     […] House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik started running online ads warning voters that Democrats want “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by expanding pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The New York congresswoman added that Democrats would “overthrow” the existing U.S. electorate by extending “amnesty” to “illegal immigrants.”

     Last week, Rep. Brian Babin, a Texas Republican, pushed a similar line, telling a television audience, “They want to replace the American electorate with a Third World electorate that will be on welfare.” […]

     […] evidenced by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s recent rant on the subject.

     It’s jarring enough to see such an idea make the transition from political extremists to prominent GOP voices, but just as notable is the fact that theory doesn’t reflect reality in any way. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes explained, “Many people have been shocked by how audaciously racist this argument is — and it is indeed. But it is also worth actually confronting it because it is not just racist, it is also stupid.”

     See also comment 387.

430. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 12:59 pm

     Booker Rips GOP’s ‘Kabuki Theater’ On Debt Ceiling

     […] “I’m sitting here kind of stunned … I just want to make the point — Donald Trump ran up profligate spending, $8 trillion worth of debt,” Booker said.

     […] “So for people who ran up that, who voted for it, suddenly to say, I’m not going to raise the debt ceiling on debt that we voted for we supported, is, to me — Jake, it’s the Kabuki theater I think that frustrates a lot of folks,” Booker said.

     […] “The thing about Washington that frustrates many people is, under Donald Trump, there were certain rules. But now they don’t want to do the same thing here,” Booker said. “It is bad for the economy. It is bad during this time we are struggling with a pandemic. These are the kinds of things that should be pro forma.”

     Booker’s criticism of the GOP’s brinksmanship on the debt ceiling was made shortly after Toomey voiced his opposition to Democrats’ two-track plan of linking a government funding bill with the suspension of the debt ceiling through Dec. 2022 during an appearance on CNN.

     […] On Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) doubled down on her criticism of Republicans’ standoff on the debt ceiling during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” Pelosi said that Republicans’ refusal to help raise the debt ceiling is “irresponsible beyond words.” […]

431. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 1:04 pm

     Mitch McConnell’s hijacking of the Supreme Court is backfiring bigly

     On second thought, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to overturn a 50-year-old Supreme Court precedent on abortion in the dead of night via an unsigned opinion.

     After a fourth poll in the span of a couple weeks found the Supreme Court’s job approval plummeting, it’s becoming crystal clear that the nation’s high court is suffering from a supreme loss of confidence among the American people. Gallup, which has been tracking the court’s approval rating since 2000, found public approval of the Supreme Court took a precipitous tumble from 58% approval in 2020 to a 20-year low of 40% now.

     The decision by the court’s conservative majority to let a Texas abortion ban abruptly go into effect earlier this month resulted in chaos in the nation’s second-largest state along with neighboring states […] But it also appears to have marked an inflection point for a court that now carries the stench of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s politicization.

     And everyone knows it. Over the last several weeks, three justices have pleaded their case publicly that the court isn’t packed with a bunch of conservative political hacks but rather a group of people following their judicial philosophies. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett along with liberal justice Stephen Breyer have all given that ridiculous defense of a court that was highjacked by McConnell and his Senate Republicans after they stole two seats in a row that should have been appointed by Democratic presidents.

     The court’s partisan leanings were on full display in August and September as the justices torpedoed President’s Joe Biden’s pandemic-related eviction moratorium, forced the reinstatement of the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, and took a hatchet to Roe v. Wade.

     “Whatever people might have seen as moderation on the court over the past year was followed by these three rulings, right in a row and close together, that all took a conservative tilt,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told The Washington Post. […]

     “I think these last few years have really been very dangerous and potentially devastating to the Supreme Court’s credibility because the public is seeing the court as increasingly political, and the public is right,” said Blumenthal [Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut ], who served as a Supreme Court clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun. “The statements by Thomas, Barrett, Breyer, you know, give me a break … they are just inherently noncredible.”

432. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 1:10 pm

     Follow-up to @399, @404, et al., EU lorry drivers will not help Britain ease its fuel crisis, union says:

     […]
     HGV drivers from the European Union will not come to the UK on short-term contracts to ease the fuel crisis under government proposals announced at the weekend due to poor working conditions in the industry, a union official in Europe has warned.

     “The EU workers we speak to will not go to the UK for a short-term visa to help the UK out of the shit they created themselves,” said Edwin Atema, the head of research and enforcement at the Netherlands-based FNV union, which represents drivers across the bloc.
     […]

     Related, UK suspends competition law to get fuel to petrol stations, which basically “allow[s] companies across the oil industry to work together to keep petrol stations topped up, sharing information and optimising supply without risking breaching competition rules.”

433. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 1:22 pm

     Can we get rid of Justice Brett Kavanaugh?

     […] As the novelist Greg Olear, who has devoted thousands of words to Kavanaugh’s finances on his Substack, explained after the Texas abortion decision:

     “[T]here is nothing we can do about Barrett, Alito, or Gorsuch, and not much we can do about Thomas…But Kavanaugh is different. There is a clear playbook to removing him from the bench. And this is what must be done. Not because we don’t like his politics, although we don’t; not because we think he’s an asshole, although he is; not because he had a hissy fit at his confirmation hearing, although he did. No, we must remove him because at least twice in his life, some unknown entity endowed him with major infusions of cash, and Kavanaugh lied, under oath, about the provenance of that cash.”

     Jon Cooper, a former Democratic majority leader of the Suffolk County Legislature in Hauppauge, NY, and a bundler for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, went so far as to offer a reward this month for anyone who could identify Kavanaugh’s benefactor. “I’ll donate $5,000 to the charity of their choice of any investigative reporter who finds out who paid off Brett Kavanaugh’s $200,000 credit card debts and $92,000 country club fee,” he tweeted to his 833,000 followers a few days after the abortion decision. Former Will & Grace star Debra Messing retweeted him, exclaiming, “I will MATCH that. Let’s go! If there is corruption in our highest court, the People must know.” Crime novelist Don Winslow went even farther, offering to add $50,000 to Cooper’s bounty. […]

     […] Before […] Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, he had a lot of debt. In May 2017, he reported owing between $60,004 and $200,000 on three credit cards and a loan against his retirement account. By the time Trump nominated him to the high court in July 2018, those debts had vanished. Overall, his reported income and assets didn’t seem sufficient to pay off all that debt while maintaining his upper-class lifestyle: an expensive house in an exclusive suburban neighborhood, two kids in a $10,500-a-year private school, and a membership in a posh country club reported to charge $92,000 in initiation fees….No other recent Supreme Court nominee has come before the Senate with so many unanswered questions regarding finances.

     The vanishing debts, and their size, raised enough suspicion that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) even asked Kavanaugh in written follow-up questions whether he might have a gambling problem. (He said no.) Further concerns involved the purchase of his tony Chevy Chase, Md., house in 2006 for $1.225 million. How did Kavanaugh come up with a $245,000 down payment at a time when his financial disclosure forms indicated that he had a mere $10,000 in the bank outside of his federal retirement account?

     As it turned out, there were rather simple answers to most of those questions. Kavanaugh explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee that much of his credit card debt stemmed from either work on his fixer-upper mansion or buying Nats season and playoff tickets for himself and a handful of dudes who’d been going to the games together for years. They had paid him back in full, the White House said at the time. As for the rest, while he was maddeningly obtuse in admitting it, Kavanaugh seems to have gotten lots of money from his parents.

     […] gifts from family don’t have to be reported on federal judicial disclosure forms, and Kavanaugh’s family had deep pockets. He’s the only child of a “swamp creature,” Ed Kavanaugh, a longtime lobbyist for the cosmetics industry who spent his career schmoozing with Beltway insiders to fend off health and safety regulations and dueling with activists who wanted to ban cosmetic testing on animals. When the elder Kavanaugh retired in 2005, his compensation package that year from the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association totaled $13 million, according to the nonprofit group’s IRS filing.

     Kavanaugh’s parents ensured he had a privileged upbringing […] Their largesse seems to have followed him into adulthood. As Kavanaugh explained in his written answers to Whitehouse: “We have not received financial gifts other than from our family, which are excluded from disclosure in judicial financial disclosure reports.” […]

     The basic theory goes something like this: Kavanaugh’s debts and mortgage down payment were paid for by some shadowy rich benefactor, as yet unknown, but possibly the Mercers, or maybe Leonard Leo, the vice president of the Federalist Society. A more elaborate version suggests Kavanaugh’s debts were only paid off after the suspiciously timed retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose son worked at Deutsche Bank for a guy who approved loans to Donald Trump […]

     After the abortion decision this month, liberal media critic Eric Boehlert wrote a column on his Substack, PressRun, slugged, “We still don’t know who paid Kavanaugh’s $92,000 country club fee.” He blamed an “incurious press” for not digging further to find out the truth. “[S]ome deep-pocketed patron, or patrons, over the years have clearly covered Kavanaugh’s personal finances,” he wrote. “Someone erased all of the many financial pitfalls he faced, including tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, while setting up him for a luxurious lifestyle well beyond what he could afford on the salary of a federal judge.” […]

     Bush nominated him again in 2003, 2004, 2005, and again in 2006, leading Sen. Dick Durbin to dub him the “Forrest Gump of Republican Politics.” On the last go-around, the American Bar Association downgraded their assessment of him to merely “qualified” for the job after interviewing a bunch of his former co-workers and judges he’d appeared before who took the opportunity to anonymously bash him as a condescending jerk who didn’t know his way around a courtroom. One judge he’d appeared before called him “sanctimonious” and said he demonstrated “experience on the level of an associate.” A lawyer said he’d “dissembled” in court, and another interviewee confirmed suspicions that he was a die-hard ideologue, noting that Kavanaugh was “immovable and very stubborn and frustrating to deal with on some issues.”

     […] Kavanaugh persisted. Eventually, on the fourth try, he finally landed on the DC Circuit. That same perseverance in the face of public shaming was on full display during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing […] As a Supreme Court justice, his salary is $268,300 a year, which in the elite rungs of the legal profession ain’t much. […]

     Kavanaugh, however, did not have to sacrifice his elite lifestyle—the country club, the Nats’ playoff tickets, the kids’ private schools, and whatnot—for this dream job, thanks to his family money. That’s why it’s improbable that he’s been bought off by the Koch Brothers: He doesn’t need the Koch brothers.

     […] Bribing a federal circuit judge isn’t a very reliable way of getting the outcome you want in court. Appellate judges are randomly assigned to cases. They work in three-judge panels, and there’s always the possibility of an en banc rehearing or a Supreme Court ruling that can overturn them. Why would anyone illegally funnel money to an individual federal appellate judge? To do what? Reverse an EPA regulation? That’s probably why only two federal judges in the past 100 years have been impeached for bribery, and they were district court judges, where an individual judge has a lot more influence over a single case, criminal convictions, and potentially millions in verdicts.

     A far more effective, and legal, strategy for swaying the courts in your favor would be to simply promote hundreds of predictably conservative judicial nominees at all levels who will vote exactly as you want in every single case, without needing cash under the table. And that’s exactly what corporate America has done over the past 40 years, funneling millions upon millions of dollars into groups like the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network to push reliable anti-regulatory, anti-abortion, pro-gun conservatives exactly like Kavanaugh on to the federal bench. Indeed, Donald Trump literally had 21 potential conservative candidates on his Supreme Court shortlist in 2016 that initially didn’t even include Kavanaugh.

     Fueled by $22 million in anonymous donations, the Judicial Crisis Network pledged to spend as much as $10 million backing Kavanaugh’s confirmation. […]

     Link

     The answer is, “No.” We can’t rid of Kavanaugh.

434. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 1:27 pm

     Cheney allies flock to her defense against Trump challenge

     Allies of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) are starting to make a concerted effort to boost her reelection bid as she wages the fight of her political life against a Trump-backed challenger.

     Former President George W. Bush will hold a fundraiser for Cheney next month […] handing her a boost with the traditional wing of the GOP. But backers say they expect more Republicans aligned with Cheney’s brand of conservatism to get off the bench to help her in a primary knife fight against attorney and erstwhile ally Harriet Hageman.

     “I’ll knock on doors, I’ll make calls if I have to, I’ll use my social media presence, professionally and personally,” said state Rep. Landon Brown (R), a Cheney ally.

     “I think it’s going to be much more than many people anticipate,” he added. “You’re gonna see a lot of the people that are out there that do support her and recognize her value … and it’s just going to be a matter of who shows up more and who can get more people to the polls.”

     The Dallas fundraiser Bush is hosting with GOP strategist Karl Rove next month is thus far the biggest show of support for Cheney from a slice of the party that’s been increasingly sidelined as […] Trump tightens his grip on the party.

     The Wyoming Republican has also gotten money and support from former Speakers Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and John Boehner (R-Ohio), as well as Country First, the outside group helmed by Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), another vociferous Trump critic within the GOP.

     Allies say that help, and more, could be key to keeping her seat, both in raising the millions it will take to fend off Trump’s financial juggernaut and exciting her own voters.

     “For Rep. Cheney to have support of true conservatives that had represented the party for decades, I think it is helpful. Rep. Cheney has been successful with fundraising in the past, and having stalwarts of the party like President Bush speak up is only going to help that,” said Joe McGinley, the former chair of the Natrona County, Wyo., GOP. […]

435. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 1:28 pm

     There’s no Covid-19 here, said the police, so take down your post saying you have it, Judge rules in Wisconsin teen’s favor after sheriff threatened jail over Covid post:

     […]
     A federal judge ruled that a Wisconsin sheriff violated free speech protections guaranteed by the first amendment when he asked a teen to remove an Instagram post about Covid-19 that “upset” local parents in March last year.

     The teen, Amyiah Cohoon, and her parents sued the sheriff’s department after a deputy threatened to arrest family members if Amyiah did not delete an Instagram post which described her experiences when possibly infected by Covid-19. She was 16 at the time.

     […]

     In his ruling, issued on Friday, [district court judge Brett] Ludwig wrote: “Defendants may have preferred to keep Marquette county residents ignorant to the possibility of Covid-19 in their community for a while longer, so they could avoid having to field calls from concerned citizens, but that preference did not give them authority to hunt down and eradicate inconvenient Instagram posts.”

     […]

     Across two Instagram posts, Amyiah described her experiences, first telling followers she was forced to “self-quarantine” due to “having the Covid-19 virus”.

     Having to stay in hospital overnight because she had difficulty breathing, she posted again, this time a selfie in an oxygen mask. She told followers she had “beaten” the coronavirus and they should “be safe”.

     After receiving calls from members of the public, county health officials referred the matter to the sheriff’s office. It sent a deputy to the Cohoon household, where Amyiah’s parents were told to have her remove the post or the deputy would issue disorderly person’s citations if not start taking people to jail.

     Amyiah took the posts down. She was then the subject of an update to parents from the local school district which described her posts as baseless rumors and a foolish means to get attention.

     Judge Ludwig compared the case to famous free speech cases involving Vietnam war protesters, and ruled that the sheriff’s department clearly violated the teen’s rights.

     “Even if short and often grammatically scurrilous, social media posts do not fall outside the ambit of the first amendment,” Ludwig wrote. “To the contrary, they are exactly what the first amendment seeks to protect.”

     […]

436. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 1:30 pm

     “Saturday Night Live” is adding a comedian to its cast who’s been dubbed the world’s greatest impersonator of former President Trump.

     The long-running NBC sketch comedy series announced Monday that James Austin Johnson would be joining the show for its 47th season.

     Johnson has been called the “best Trump impersonator of all,” […]

     Link

     See also:
     https://twitter.com/shrimpJAJ/status/1366170100588404737
     Video is available at the Twitter link.

437. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 1:33 pm

     Trump administration mulled kidnapping, assassinating Julian Assange

     A report from Yahoo News published Sunday says that the Trump administration and CIA considered kidnapping WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2017 and even raised the prospect of assassinating him amid concerns he may be planning an escape of his own.

     Citing conversations with more than 30 former U.S. intelligence and security officials, Yahoo reported that “sketches” and “options” for how an assassination operation could be carried out were requested. One former official told the site that these conversations were taking place “at the highest levels.”

     Though the CIA had been monitoring Assange for many years, the U.S. government reportedly ramped up its campaign against him following the “Vault 7” data leak of CIA hacking tools and Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential race.

     Assange is currently imprisoned in London after being arrested in April 2019.

     According to the Yahoo report, former CIA director Mike Pompeo wanted revenge on Assange and was described by one Trump national security official as being “completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7.”

     “There was an inappropriate level of attention to Assange given the embarrassment, not the threat he posed in context,” one official said. “We should never act out of a desire for revenge.” […]

     According to Yahoo, there was no indication that the most extreme measures meant to target Assange were ever approved, largely due to objections from White House lawyers.

438. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 1:40 pm

     Wonkette: “Anti-Vax A-Holes Blow Droplets All Over Staten Island Mall, FOR FREEDOM!”

     Saturday, a few dozen entitled jerks barged into the food court at the Staten Island Mall. They shouted “USA!” and waved anti-vaccine mandate signs. The media has described them as protesters instead of people who refuse to obey simple laws, but these creeps somehow see themselves as part of the next Civil Rights Movement, even though it’s debatable whether they would’ve supported the first one at the time.

     New York requires proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for anyone who wants to eat indoors. The pro-COVID crew believes this is somehow similar to when Southern restaurants wouldn’t serve Black people, but Blackness is not a disease […] COVID-19 is […].

     Now, during the real Civil Rights Movement, Black people, often students, would quietly sit down at restaurants and coffee shops and politely request service. They didn’t bum rush the joint like these assholes. [Video is available at the link.]

     The jerks weren’t even masked inside the food court where people were trying to eat. They loudly shouted, “My body, my choice,” a grotesque co-opting of an expression in support of reproductive freedom. Do these assholes think people have abortions in public food courts?

     One woman shouted, “Everybody, get food and eat. That is what we’re here to do … Go into the food court area and sit our butts down.”

     There was one older man wandering around wearing a “Q sent me” t-shirt, because, as my wife said, “we’re living in a Borat sketch.” A young man kept saying “All we did …” without finishing what we’re sure was a well-considered thought. Here’s what we think he and his anti-vaccine buddies actually achieved: They likely greatly increased their own exposure to COVID-19 while jeopardizing the safety of any immunocompromised people or unvaccinated children in the vicinity.

     Diners at a food court didn’t come for a protest rally. They certainly weren’t in the mood for maskless morons clapping their hands in unison like they’re at at a sporting event and shouting, “Fuck Joe Biden!” One old guy added “Trump won!” to the anvil-head chorus, and he wore a “Trump Won” shirt as further evidence of his disconnect from observable reality.

     […] Civil rights activist and Freedom Rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, who’s still with us and as badass as ever, described the scene at the sit-ins, which were serious business, not a self-indulgent stunt. They faced arrest and bodily harm. […] Mulholland is white, but she willingly put herself in harm’s way along with her fellow Black protesters. […]

     The anti-vaxxers who crashed the food court at the Staten Island Mall clearly enjoyed the disruption they caused and the fear they invoked among vaccinated patrons. Their demonstration had nothing to do with freedom, and everything to do with feeling unjustly powerful in their ignorance.

439. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 1:40 pm

     A snippet from End to freedom of movement behind UK fuel crisis, says Merkel’s likely successor [Olaf Scholz]:

     Libération, a French newspaper, ran a front page earlier in the week with an empty toilet paper roll bearing the words: “Brexit: Les lendemains qui déchantent”. (The tomorrows that failed to deliver).

     À la une de Libération ce vendredi :
     🇬🇧 Brexit : les lendemains qui déchantent
     https://twitter.com/libe/status/1441114659008876548

440. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 1:46 pm

     When Trump says the U.S. ‘will not survive,’ don’t look away

     It was an opinion that was designed to raise eyebrows — and it worked. The Washington Post published an op-ed late last week from Robert Kagan, a conservative at the Brookings Institution, with a headline that read, “Our constitutional crisis is already here.”

     Kagan’s first sentence read, “The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”

     For those who take such warnings seriously, it’s discouraging to know there’s no shortage of experts ringing similar alarms. Rick Hasen, one of the nation’s leading election-law scholars, told Politico last week, “In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, ‘I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.’ A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was ‘scared s—less’ …. But I’m even more frightened now.”

     Political scientist Daniel Ziblatt, the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” recently told The New Yorker, “Turns out, things are much worse than we expected.” He added that current conditions in the United States are “much more worrisome.” Around the same time, more than 100 scholars of democracy signed a joint statement of principles, warning that the United States’ democracy “is now at risk.”

     It was against this backdrop that Donald Trump, who’s chiefly responsible for fueling fears over the nation’s future, sat down with a conservative media outlet over the weekend and poured some fuel on the fire:

     [Democrats] cheat on the elections. They don’t need votes. They cheat on the elections. I mean, you look at 43,000 votes were found last night. They cheat on elections. When you cheat on elections you don’t have to destroy the country. They are destroying our country. Our country will not survive this. Our country will not survive.

     […] as we’ve seen in recent months, Trump and his allies have done quite a bit, from trying to overturn election results to launching a campaign of new voter-suppression tactics to delegitimizing elections they disapprove of.

     But as Yale’s Timothy Snyder has warned, the rhetoric of democracy’s opponents isn’t irrelevant. When a former American president — who may yet run again and who continues to lead a major political party — tells a national audience that the United States “will not survive” because of election crimes that exist only in his mind, I’m not inclined to look away.

441. Lynna, OM says

     27 September 2021 at 1:49 pm

     Follow-up to comment 439.

     Speaking of Trump, he said that Fox News worked against him last year [LOL] and that voters in the USA can’t be sure Barack Obama won re-election in 2012.

442. lumipuna says

     27 September 2021 at 1:59 pm

     [… more snarking on teh “U”K’s supply problems…]

     “Wanna trade a full canister for empty minister?”

443. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 2:10 pm

     San Marino, a microstate (which is not in the EU (nor EEA?)) completely surrounded by Italy, is all-but-controlled by teh raping children cult. Despite furious opposition from teh cult and the ruling Christian Democratic Party (which has very Very close ties to teh cult), and a long history of misogyny, San Marino referendum ends with 77% voting to end abortion ban:

     […]
     Over 40% of the population of about 33,000 in the tiny state […] participated in the referendum, with 77.3% voting in support of allowing abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, according to results published by San Marino TV.

     Beyond the 12th week, the procedure would only be permitted if the mother’s life is in danger or if there are foetal abnormalities.

     San Marino, where abortion has been illegal since 1865, was one of the last places in Europe that maintained a total ban on abortion and the practice was punishable by between three and six years’ imprisonment.

     […]

     San Marino is ruled by the Christian Democratic party, a political force with close ties to the Catholic church. It had appealed to people to vote against legalising abortion. Pope Francis recently reiterated that abortion was murder.

     Church bells rang out on Sunday morning as a signal to the faithful to vote against lifting the ban. Opponents of abortion also held vigils in recent days, praying that the referendum was defeated.

     […]

     San Marino has long lagged behind other European countries on women’s rights. A referendum in 1982 — the first held in the state &mdsh; to scrap a law that took away citizenship from women who married a foreigner was defeated. The law was eventually revoked by parliament, but not until 2000. Women were only given the right to vote in 1964, while divorce was made legal in 1986.
     […]

444. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 2:26 pm

     France to make tips paid by card tax free (possibly paywalled):

     French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that customer tips in cafés and restaurants will no longer be subject to tax, in an effort to make the industry more attractive to potential employees.

     The tax exemption will come into effect “in the coming months”, Macron announced on Monday while visiting the Salon international de la restauration, de l’hôtellerie et de l’alimentation in Lyon.

     “The idea is that in a restaurant you can leave a tip with a bank card, rounded up or more, because we’ve seen coming out of the crisis that people are using less and less cash.”

     He added that businesses would not need to pay insurance contributions on tips, and employees would not be taxed, thus boosting their spending power.

     […]

     Until now, tips paid by card were automatically declared, and therefore taxed, while most waiters do not declare cash tips.

     Many visitors to France are surprised to learn that tipping is not considered to be a requirement, since restaurants and cafés already add a 15 percent service charge to the bill, but it is common to leave whatever change is left over when paying by cash.

     I didn’t realise the auto-15% was taxed !

445. blf says

     27 September 2021 at 2:40 pm

     As part of the next step in encouraging people to be vaccinated here in France, France to end free Covid tests for all in October (possibly paywalled):

     The French prime minister [Jean Castex] has confirmed that Covid tests will no longer be free for all residents of France from the middle [15th] of October.

     […]

     After that date only tests done for medical reasons — people with symptoms or contact cases — will be free. Unvaccinated people will need a prescription to obtain a free test, vaccinated people will not need a prescription. [what about people who cannot be vaccinated? –blf]

     Castex told Les Echos: “The tests will continue to be reimbursed for medical reasons, either without a prescription for those already vaccinated, or with a prescription for others. In concrete terms, if you have a fever or symptoms corresponding to Covid-19, your test will still be free.”

     The Health Ministry later clarified: “The idea is to encourage the vaccinated population to remain vigilant and to go and be tested in case of symptoms.”

     The Ministry also clarified that pre-departure travel tests for fully vaccinated residents of France will remain free. These are less common since they are not required when travelling within the EU and from October 4th will not be required for trips to the UK, but are still applicable for some countries.

     […]

     The main aim of the new policy is to discourage unvaccinated people from using regular tests to access the health passport, since they will now have to pay, and get vaccinated instead.

     “It is no longer legitimate to pay for convenience tests to excess at the expense of taxpayers,” added Castex.

     Tests are capped at €29 for an antigen test or €49 for a PCR test, the same price as tests for tourists, who have been charged since July.

     […]

     The track-and-trace app is currently reporting almost 83,7% of the eligible (12+ years old) population as fully-vaccinated.

446. lumipuna says

     27 September 2021 at 3:54 pm

     blf:

     After that date only tests done for medical reasons — people with symptoms or contact cases — will be free. Unvaccinated people will need a prescription to obtain a free test, vaccinated people will not need a prescription. [what about people who cannot be vaccinated? –blf]

     That’s odd. In Finland, only medically indicated tests have been free all along. We also recently shifted to a model where fully vaccinated people are less likely to be indicate for testing, depending on symptoms and known exposure. (Reportedly, private market testing here costs at least 100 euro. I once saw a news story comparing that to the free and tourist priced testing in France specifically)

     The much-talked about covid passport is still under legislative process. Apparently, it will be only used in limited circumstances, and unvaccinated people should only rarely need testing for public access. Nevertheless, some covid-19 sympathizers here complain that the passport would make vaccination “de facto mandatory”. When I open YouTube and see the generic recommendations for my area (after clearing my browser history), one of the current recommendations is a certain infamous rightwing-contrarian MP ranting about the “nazi passport”.

     The track-and-trace app is currently reporting almost 83,7% of the eligible (12+ years old) population as fully-vaccinated.

     That’s pretty good. Finland will likely reach about that level eventually, based on first shots. The government recently announced that over 80 % fully vaccinated (expected by late October) should be enough to allow ending basically all restrictions and declaring the pandemic over. Let’s hope so.

447. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 9:57 am

     lumipuna@445, “In Finland, only medically indicated tests have been free all along.”

     My guess (comparing Finland to France) is that, despite both countries English names having an F and an an (and we get some more “an”s please, I thing we’re close to exhausting the global supply!), is the situations where(? and are?) rather different: France has a much larger population which is notoriously vaccine hesitant. A famous poll at the end of last year said only c.40% were willing to be vaccinated — which seemed to be the case until the the Health Pass was introduced, leading to the joke mentioned in @279, “when you tell the French they might die of a deadly virus they shrug, but when you tell them they can’t go to a restaurant, they queue up to get vaccinated”. There are probably other factors as well, including, as one speculative example, France being the world’s top tourist destination (pre-pandemic), meaning They™ had to keep an eye on what was happening: The apparently imported cases / variants as well as the possibly exported…

448. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 11:02 am

     More on teh “U”K’s self-inflicted (and somewhat imaginary) fuel “crisis”, Petrol station chaos worsened by motorists filling up with wrong fuel (“More than five times as many people as usual in the UK put diesel in their petrol engine or vice versa”). I’ve seen an eejit do that — and simply don’t understand how it can happen, except for colossal stooopidy which should be grounds for permanent revocation of driving license and insurance: The pumps and hoses are clearly labelled, have a different standardised(?) colour (from memory, black for diesel, whilst petrol (gasoline) is, depending on grade, green or other), and the nozzle sizes are different, making it (again, from memory) impossible to fit petrol into a diesel (I may have that backwards). Any my own diesel (albeit in the States) had clearly marked “diesel only” in multiple obvious places (I think this tends to be true in teh “U”K but am uncertain). In the case of teh “U”K eejit I saw, their car was brand new and they weren’t yet accustomed to the difference — an excuse which is barely creditable, given the multiple precautions.

449. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 11:32 am

     To defend legislative failure, Tim Scott condemns an idea he endorsed

     Tim Scott said he supported conditional grants for police departments. He changed his mind when Democrats agreed with him.

     For five months, there were bipartisan negotiations over a bill to reform law enforcement policies and tactics. For five months, a group of congressional Democrats — led by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and California Rep. Karen Bass — made a series of offers as part of a lengthy set of talks. For five months, Republicans, led by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, said the offers weren’t good enough.

     Last week, the negotiations collapsed, touching off a new debate over who’s to blame.

     The GOP senator wants the public to believe Democrats aren’t just responsible for failure, they also deserve blame for having pushed a radical idea. CBS News reported:

     “We said simply this: ‘I’m not going to participate in reducing funding for the police after we saw a major city after major city defund the police.’ Many provisions in this bill that he wanted me to agree to limited or reduced funding for the police, ” the Republican from South Carolina said Friday during an interview with CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent and “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan.

     “Here’s what we know,” the senator added. “We have about $1 billion in grant money that goes to police. When you start saying, ‘In order to receive those dollars, you must do A, B and C. And if you don’t do a B and C, you literally lose eligibility for the two major pots of money … when you tell local law enforcement agencies that you are ineligible for money, that’s defunding the police, there’s no way to spin that.”

     Scott was describing a policy known as “conditional grants”: The U.S. government makes funds available to other state agencies, but there are strings attached. If the agencies meet the conditions, they get the money; if they refuse to accept the conditions, they don’t get the money.

     In this case, conditional grants were at the heart of the federal efforts to reform police tactics. Proponents wanted to see a series of systemic changes — banning neck restraints, prohibiting “no knock” warrants in federal drug cases, reforming qualified immunity, etc. — that police departments would adopt because they’d have a financial incentive to do so.

     According to Scott, such an approach should be seen as “defunding the police.”

     At least, that’s what he’s saying now.

     New York magazine’s Jon Chait noted yesterday that when the South Carolina Republican first started tackling possible legislation on reforming police tactics, he seemed to endorse the same idea he now opposes. PBS’s Judy Woodruff asked Scott last year, for example, “Senator, as you know, Democrats are calling for an outright ban on certain measures, like a choke hold or the so-called no-knock warrant. In your proposal, you are saying these things should be tied to federal funding, that, if departments go ahead with them, they risk losing funding.”

     Scott replied, “Yes.” In the same interview, the GOP senator added, “My legislation gets us to the position where, if you are in a law enforcement department that does not already have a ban on choke holds, you do not have access to the federal funding.”

     Or put another way, Scott endorsed the same conditional approach he now condemns.

     the broader takeaway is that Scott is demonstrating why bipartisan policymaking so often fails in contemporary politics.

     As we recently discussed, there’s a school of thought, generally espoused by centrist and conservative Democrats, that if the governing party makes a good-faith effort at striking compromises, hears Republicans out, engages in lengthy negotiations, and accepts meaningful concessions in the interest of making a deal, GOP lawmakers will work in constructive and bipartisan way.

     But we’re now confronted with fresh evidence to the contrary. Democrats worked on important legislation built around an idea that their Republican negotiating partner had already endorsed — publicly and on national television. When they agreed with him, that same Republican negotiating partner rejected their overtures and denounced the idea he said he supported, deeming it dangerous and radical. […]

450. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 11:37 am

     Associated Press:

     Just days after a South Dakota agency moved to deny her daughter’s application to become a certified real estate appraiser, Gov. Kristi Noem summoned to her office the state employee who ran the agency, the woman’s direct supervisor and the state labor secretary. Noem’s daughter attended too.

     Commentary:

     […] There’s a handy description for stories like these: They’re called allegations of abuse of power.

     The governor taking an interest in her daughter’s real estate career is one thing; it’s something else when the governor organizes an in-person meeting with the state official who certifies real estate appraisal applications, her supervisor, the South Dakota labor secretary, and her daughter.

     Making matters just a bit more complicated, according the AP’s report, Noem’s daughter ended up getting the certification she sought, at which point the state labor secretary demanded the retirement of the relevant agency head.

     […] The AP’s report added:

     While Peters was applying for the certification, Noem should have recused herself from discussions on the agency, especially any that would apply to her daughter’s application, said Richard Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who was the chief ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush. “It’s clearly a conflict of interest and an abuse of power for the benefit of a family member,” he said.

     Naturally, I was eager to see how Noem would respond, since it’s possible there was a benign explanation for all of this. The governor’s spokesperson got the ball rolling by accusing the Associated Press of “disparaging the governor’s daughter in order to attack the governor politically.”

     That’s quite odd. The AP’s report pointed to evidence of the governor misusing the powers of her office; it did not “disparage” the governor’s daughter.

     And yet, Noem published a tweet yesterday afternoon pushing the same line: “Listen I get it. I signed up for this job. But now the media is trying to destroy my children.”

     This could’ve been very simple. If the Republican governor didn’t pressure state officials, Noem could’ve simply said so. But instead of denying the core allegations, she’s pretending that the claims have somehow been directed at her adult daughter.

     If the story isn’t true, Noem should have every opportunity to discredit it. Her eagerness to pretend the allegations have been directed at someone else, rather than at the governor herself, reinforces concerns that the South Dakotan did exactly what she was accused of doing.

451. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 11:54 am

     NBC News:

     The Senate failed on Monday to pass a key procedural vote to advance the House-passed short-term government funding bill as the deadline to avert a shutdown looms at the end of the week. The Senate voted 48 to 50 on the procedural motion, with Republicans opposing the stopgap measure because it included an extension of a debt ceiling.

     Commentary:

     […] the contents of the bill aren’t exactly controversial. At issue is legislation, which the House has already passed, that would prevent a government shutdown, extend the debt ceiling, and fund both disaster relief and Afghan resettlement. Republican leaders have said they support each of these four goals. Indeed, GOP senators have conceded that shutting down the government and defaulting on our debts would be a disaster for everyone.

     Republicans filibustered anyway, telling Democrats they not only have to extend the debt ceiling on their own, but also that Democrats must follow a specific legislative course the GOP believes may prove politically damaging for the governing majority.

     Immediately after the vote, Schumer said on the Senate floor, “I want to make sure everyone understands exactly what has happened here on the Senate floor.”

     “The Republican Party has now become the party of default, the party that says America doesn’t pay its debts. Our country is staring down the barrel of two totally Republican-manufactured disasters: a government shutdown and a first-ever default on the national debt. The impacts of both would gravely harm every single American in this country. Republicans would let the country default for the first time in history.”

     This has the benefit of being true. Nevertheless, shortly before the vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered remarks of his own in which the Kentucky Republican accused Democrats of imposing “one self-created crisis after another” on the nation.

     McConnell proceeded to accuse Democrats of engaging in “odd tactics” and questioned whether members of the majority party “actually want to govern.”

     He did not appear to be kidding. McConnell, with a straight face, accused Democrats of doing what he’s doing […]

     Lauren Duca explained a few years ago that to “gas light” is to “psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity.”

     The more McConnell tries to argue that it’s his opponents, and not his party, who are responsible for “unnecessary self-created crises,” the more the GOP leader appears to be engaged in an exasperating display of gaslighting.

     Link

452. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 11:59 am

     Washington Post:

     One message advocated “occupying election offices.”

     Another warned of “coronavirus tyranny.”

     The calls to action came not in anticipation of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Rather, they emerged this month in Germany, within a far-right group on the messaging app Telegram, where neo-Nazis and doomsday preppers foresee what’s known as “Day X” — the collapse of the German state and assassination of high-ranking officials.

     Such apocalyptic messages — posted in the run-up to German elections on Sunday — import conspiratorial, anti-government rhetoric broadcast in the U.S., according to screenshots of the since-deleted chatroom reviewed by The Washington Post. […]

     A dangerous contagion spread from the USA to Germany.

453. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 12:00 pm

     New York Times:

     A wave of misinformation touting the deworming drug ivermectin as a Covid treatment appears to be showing no signs of abating, with calls about the drug to poison control centers surging, and officials in New Mexico saying misuse of the medication contributed to at least two deaths. […]

454. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 12:15 pm

     Things just went from bad to worse for MAGA election officials in Colorado

     This past week, the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office asked a judge to ban Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters from the upcoming November election. This comes more than a month after reports surfaced that Colorado officials were investigating a “serious breach” of elections security by Peters. This came after delicate information and passwords were leaked on a random elections conspiracy theorist website. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced that as a result of an investigation the county would have to “replace 41 pieces of election equipment and get them certified by Aug. 30, or hand count ballots in the next election, because the security of the voting systems cannot be verified.”

     Subsequently, it became clear that the breach was not simply a matter of neglect on the part of the MAGA-leaning Republican official, but an active breach of security protocols. Secretary of State Griswold filed a lawsuit earlier this month to have Peters removed from her position overseeing the upcoming elections. Tina Peters’ attorneys responded by going full Big Lie and saying the secretary of state’s office is the one guilty of wrongdoing and that the “security breach” Peters was involved in was a technicality but shouldn’t matter, because she was trying to ensure that important election records weren’t wiped out by Dominion Software.

     Peters’ attorneys’ response comes just after her coworker, Mesa County Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley, already suspended for engaging “in inappropriate, unprofessional conduct in the workplace,” was charged with felony burglary and a misdemeanor cybercrime. The charges allege that Knisley was futzing around with Tina Peters’ work computer after Knisley had been suspended from her position and barred from having access to things like Tina Peters’ computer. And while those charges are independent of the current Peters security breach investigation, Knisley and Peters seem to be as thick as thieves.

     “It appeared Knisley was using Peters’ Mesa County work station to access the secure Mesa County computer network while she was in Peters’ office earlier on 8/25/21,” the affidavit adds. “Upon further investigation, Mesa County IT discovered that during the 08/25/21 session logged into Peters credentials, items were sent to the print server, but were not ultimately printed. What those items were was not immediately clear and remains under investigation.”

     […] According to Secretary of State Griswold, Peters allowed a person, Gerald Wood, into a secure space by passing him off as having security clearance, and let him copy important election machine software. […]

     Oh, and she made sure to turn off security cameras beforehand. […]

     Peters and her lawyers are now pushing forward with this QAnon-level conspiracy that “nearly 29,000 election files were deleted during a routine upgrade” of the election machines that Peters’ security shenanigans have now gotten decertified—which Mesa County will have to pay to replace.

     […] Douglas Frank, a scientist and physics teacher who is folded into the Mike Lindell Big Lie camp, reportedly convinced Tina Peters that his abusively bad math claims were proof of election fraud. She in turn tried to get people under her to buy into this bulls!@†. Also forgot to mention that Douglas Frank, the math guy with the bad election fraud claims, told the Post that he put Peters in touch with Mike Lindell’s folks after he had convinced her that Dominion software’s upcoming upgrade could erase evidence of fraud.

     […] According to state officials, the files deleted were common log files, the kinds of computer files that are deleted and replaced every time one does an upgrade to any software. […] The state is saying that when you upgrade, all kinds of old, frequently redundant files are deleted.

     As news of Peters’ dubious reporting and clerking began coming out, she was whisked away to perform at MyPillow conman Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium bafoonery emporium. Lindell reportedly gave Peters a private plane ride to the event and has housed her out of state while she’s laid semi-low. Her return comes along with a new lawsuit brought against Secretary of State Griswold by Tina Peters and Belinda Knisley claiming that their illegally copied hard drives proved election records were destroyed in “violation” of state law. As the Denver Post reports:

     Griswold’s office said counties are directed to save a copy of data needed to audit and verify a previous election before the routine upgrade. The data can be restored after the upgrade, according to the office. In a court filing, the secretary of state’s office says there’s no proof in the report that election records were deleted.

     This new information paints the very real conspiracy of GOP officials and conspiracy theorists working, very deliberately, to subvert election law in order to prove something they have no rationale for in the first place.

     So far, Peters’ only real response has been very conservative Christian hypocrite of her, hoisting herself up on a cross of her own creation: “They will stop at nothing to shut this up. I’m willing to go as far as it takes to do what needs to happen. I mean, God’s called me, He’ll sustain me and He’s surrounding me with His people. So, I feel very good.”

     God called her. Called her up and said: Turn off those cameras!

455. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 12:21 pm

     Gerrymandering in Texas:

     TX Republicans: Texas Republicans released a draft congressional map on Monday that represents an extreme partisan gerrymander designed to insulate GOP incumbents from increasing diversification and hostility from suburban voters. […] the plan locks in an outsize Republican advantage that would all but assure the party of winning at least 63% of House seats despite the fact that Donald Trump carried the state just 52-46 last year. […]

     The proposal does so in large part by grafting rural red areas on to suburban seats that are otherwise trending away from the GOP. A good example is the 24th District, which is currently located in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and hosted the closest race in the state last year, won 48.8 to 47.5 by Republican Beth Van Duyne. Joe Biden carried the 24th 52-46, but under the new GOP map, it would have voted 55-43 for Donald Trump, according to Dave’s Redistricting app. This transformation is accomplished by excising the most Democratic-leaning and heavily Latino precincts in the city of Irving and adding further-flung regions that are whiter and more Republican. As a consequence, the district’s eligible voter population would leap from 59% white to 74% white.

     […] the Texas Tribune’s Abby Livingston says that unnamed GOP sources tell her that every Republican member of the state’s congressional delegation has given their approval to this plan. It’s therefore likely that this is the map that will become law and, barring unlikely criticism from an extremely conservative federal judiciary, be used in elections for the next 10 years.

     Link

456. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 12:23 pm

     Sheesh.

     […] FedEx announced that a driver is no longer working for the company after a TikTok video posted by the driver in question went viral. In the video, the driver, identified as Vincent Paterno, claimed he wouldn’t deliver packages to homes with signs supporting Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Black Lives Matter.

     The video posted on Sept. 16 features Paterno in his FedEx uniform. He noted that he would not only skip deliveries at homes that support Biden, Harris, and BLM but he would also ignore homes that “don’t have a flag in front,” allegedly referencing the American flag. The packages he chose not to deliver he would bring “back to the station,” he said. […]

     Link

457. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 12:31 pm

     It’s only after viral video shows cops letting dog maul handcuffed Black man that FBI investigates

     OMFG. Trigger warnings for racism and wanton violence.

     It is both disturbing and refreshing that accountability for police violence often only comes after a story picks up media interest. Refreshing, because at least accountability is even approached at all. For decades, stories like that of a handcuffed Black man shown in witness video being attacked by a police dog were buried off-camera and easily overlooked. That is not happening after a recording featuring three Missouri police officers taking turns holding the man and controlling the dog was posted to Facebook last Monday and viewed some 8,700 times. That’s one single post. It was also picked up and shared on other social media sites by reporters, activists, and attorneys, including noted civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

     “K9 dogs only attack on command, so it was NO accident when a K9 near St Louis viciously mauled a Black man multiple times while 3 cops stood & watched,” Crump tweeted on Sunday. “This cruel & unusual punishment is FAR TOO similar to the use of dogs against civil rights protestors in 1960s South!” The FBI has since launched an investigation into the violent arrest, which the applicable Woodson Terrace Police Department is assisting in, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

     Derk Brown, an on-air personality at 96.3 The Lou, shared the video with a warning about its graphic nature. […] “The video shows police allowing a K-9 dog to continue biting a man after he gave up and not resisting.” […]

     The police lied in their official report:

     […] The subject got up and attempted to flee from the officers and the K9 was released again biting the suspect on his leg. […]

     More commentary:

     It began with police allowing the dog to bite the man’s foot while he’s restrained on the hood of a car. The dog is then shown biting the man for about 10 seconds before an officer tries to pull him back, but the dog continues gnawing at the man’s foot. “Help,” he yelled repeatedly. The dog continued biting the man even as officers arrested him, with the mauling lasting more than 25 seconds.

     Michael Gould, a K-9 expert with more than 35 years of experience in handling police dogs, told NBC-affiliated KSDK the video is “problematic.” “The fact of the matter is, it’s a human reflex response, you can’t have an 80-pound dog puncturing your skin and be compliant,” he said. “It’s virtually impossible.” […]

     Video is available at the link

458. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 1:09 pm

     I just watched excerpts from Jimmy Kimmel’s show of yesterday (Trump STILL Won’t Concede, Biden’s Shockingly Hairy Shoulders & Chris Pratt Super Mario Outrage (video)), and he had a zinger. Apparently, Ben Garrison, an anti-vaxxer and nazi cartoonist, has, perhaps predictably, Covid-19. He and his wife are both apparently rather sick, albeit not hospitalised, and “the couple remain adamant they won’t accept the vaccine or hospital treatment” (Anti-vax cartoonist treats ‘rough’ case of Covid-19 with Ivermectin, zinc and beetroot juice). As Kimmel remarked (paraphrasing from memory), “Apparently, if you say Beetjuice Beetjuice Beetjuice three times, the cure for Covid appears.”

     The mildly deranged penguin tried saying Cheese Cheese Cheese three times, felt hungry, and ate all the remaining cheese.

     What do you say three times to stop the hiccups from laughing, that’s what I need…

459. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 1:37 pm

     Wonkette: “Newsmax Idiot, Dennis Prager Wish US Could Marry Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Have All His Dictator Babies”

     Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is a climate-denying, anti-gay bigot who supports political violence, so of course American conservatives would dig him. Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield gushed over Bolsonaro Monday night. It was shocking and embarrassing, but only if this was your first time watching Newsmax.

     Stinchfield kicked off the segment by (correctly) observing that this is America, but “they” (Democrats) have passed legal vaccine mandates, similar to the ones that have existed in this country since literally before it was a country, so how is this America at all if entitled white people are expected to obey the law?

     STINCHFIELD: Their mandates and their threats are un-American, leaving me dismayed that we now need to take cues from a nation that was once plagued by corruption and on the brink of socialism. We need to take cues from Brazil.

     Stinchfield played a clip of Bolsonaro publicly loving on God in a speech before declaring that “in Trump-like fashion, [Bolsonaro] has turned his nation around by embracing freedom.” Bolsonaro embraces freedom so much he recently declared that only God could remove him from office.

     Bolsonaro’s popularity in Brazil is at an all-time low, as a result of a tanking economy, high unemployment, inflation, and probably the crazy God talk. He’s also under investigation for corruption and has attacked the nation’s judiciary, which he claims is out to get him. I suppose that is all very “Trump-like.”

     However, Human Rights Watch, a slightly more credible source than Stinchfield, declared Bolsonaro a threat to democratic rule in Brazil.

     On September 7, 2021, during speeches at rallies in Brasilia and São Paulo, President Bolsonaro attacked the Supreme Court and warned that Brazilians “could not permit” the existing electoral system to remain in place and that there “could not be elections that create doubts among voters,” citing unproven claims of electoral fraud. Congress had rejected a bill promoted by Bolsonaro to change electoral processes based on these claims. The recent speeches are part of the president’s pattern of actions and statements that appear designed to undermine fundamental rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law in Brazil.

     Yep, Bolsonaro is a lot like Donald Trump […]

     Regardless, Stinchfield praises Bolsonaro for “restoring gun rights” (the number of firearms sold during his time in office so far has increased 65 percent, which experts believe will only lead to more violence). Stinchfield also wished America had a president who, like Bolsonaro, respected freedom of religion and expression, which we actually do. He praised Bolsonaro for not imposing vaccine mandates. However, he admits that more than 90 percent of eligible Brazilian adults are vaccinated, while neglecting to mention that Biden was forced to issue federal mandates after willingly unvaccinated dullards (mostly Trump supporters) kept face-planting into COVID-19. It’s easy for a nation to conduct business normally without vaccine passports or even mask mandates when its citizens get fucking vaccinated.

     Bolsonaro is supportive of crap COVID-19 treatments like Ivermectin because it’s mostly academic when most of your country’s vaccinated. “Yeah, sure, drink some unicorn piss and hop on one leg for all I care.” While visiting New York, Bolsonaro’s wife didn’t chow down on horse paste, she got her ass vaccinated.

     Stinchfield went on to repeat the silly argument that the Left would’ve opposed vaccine mandates if Trump had ordered them. This is so stupid. If Trump had the same policy positions as Barack Obama, we would’ve happily spent his presidency making fun of his hair. We wouldn’t suddenly oppose the Affordable Care Act and DACA out of spite. Liberals fundamentally don’t operate that way. […] However, there are Trump supporters on record saying they won’t get vaccinated because Biden might benefit from their continued health.

     Conservative radio host Dennis Prager, who runs a fake college, joined Stinchfield’s Brazilian lovefest.

     PRAGER: I am going to go on the Internet right after your show, and I am going to get the transcription of his talk. and then edit it and play it on my show. It is remarkable to hear what the man says. I hate to say this because I so love this country; it makes me want to learn Portuguese and move there.

     […] Prager suggested that right now, this instant, is the “first time in American history free speech is threatened.” John Adams would like a word. He denounced New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s vaccine mandates for health care workers who spend all day breathing on sick people.

     PRAGER: They are more interested in power, than in your living. That’s what people must understand. By the way this makes me think we must abolish emergency powers. It should no longer be allowable in this country. That is how Hitler took power – with emergency powers in the in the elections of the–right after the Weimar Republic. We must abolish emergency powers because the Left will misuse it as all fascists do.

     Republicans can’t decide if Biden is Jimmy Carter, Neville Chamberlain, or Adolf Hitler. Maybe he’s all of them at once. He just has tremendous range. […] Stinchfield and Prager are certain at least that Biden is no Jair Bolsonaro.

460. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 1:44 pm

     Wonkette: “Seriously, At This Point, Would You Buy A Used Car From Kyrsten Sinema?”

     Kyrsten Sinema, the senior senator from Arizona, is a holdout for now on President Joe Biden’s full $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Agenda. This is for highly principled “centrist maverick” reasons her donors will probably explain to her at a fundraiser Tuesday afternoon.

     The New York Times reports:

     Under Ms. Sinema’s political logo, the influential National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and the grocers’ PAC, along with lobbyists for roofers and electrical contractors and a small business group called the S-Corp political action committee, have invited association members to an undisclosed location on Tuesday afternoon for 45 minutes to write checks for between $1,000 and $5,800, payable to Sinema for Arizona.

     Full vaccinations for the coronavirus will be required, according to the invitation.

     This event is jam-packed with right-leaning lobbying groups who reportedly “fiercely oppose” Biden’s ambitious investment in human infrastructure. The timing is bizarre, though perhaps predictable. This week is key in Democratic negotiations over the reconciliation bill and the more lobbyist-friendly one that Sinema helped negotiate.

     […] Sinema has privately told Democrats she’s “averse” to corporate and individual tax increases on those individuals making more than $400,000 a year. She’s just looking out for corporations and the nation’s top income earners. If she doesn’t, who will?

     Sawyer Hackett from Julian Castro’s People First People noted that each of the PACs at the event “honoring” Sinema “overwhelmingly support Republicans over Democrats.” […]

     The guests at the fundraisers are expected to cry poverty, while writing Sinema checks for as much as $5,800. Apparently, their accountants checked the numbers and buying an off-the-rack senator is more cost-effective than rescuing millions of children from poverty. S-Corp PAC claims the proposed rate increases “would kneecap private companies.” [Your editrix Rebecca, the president of an S-corp, would like to point out that in fact there is no corporate tax on S-corporations; instead, S-corps’ owners are taxed only at whatever their normal individual tax rate would be.] Meanwhile, Eric Hoplin, the chief executive of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, has whined: “Passing the largest tax increase in U.S. history on the backs of America’s job creators as they recover from a global pandemic is the last thing Washington should be doing.” I’ve emphasized the excessively violent imagery, as if pre-Trump tax rates are somehow equivalent to waterboarding.

     Look, it’ll cost money to pursue aggressive action on housing, climate change, and health care. Sinema ran on protecting and improving the Affordable Care Act, which the Build Back Better reconciliation bill does. The National Association of Wholesale-Distributors supported the GOP’s attempted ACA repeal in 2017, just like the National Retail Federation, which also now supports Sinema.

     […] Sinema assumes no one can see through her obvious song-and-dance routine. […]

     She uses the term “good faith” as if she deserves a cookie. We expect her to negotiate in good faith, but she often defines herself by how she’d like people to perceive her. That’s preferable, I suppose, to judging her based on her actions. Someone on Twitter shared a clip of Sinema stating with practiced earnestness, “I’m trying really hard to be a person of character and integrity.” No honest person says this. […]

461. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 1:49 pm

     Seems like a good idea:

     Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new state law yesterday that will make permanent a pandemic-era change: As the Associated Press reported, from now on, “every registered California voter will get a ballot mailed to them in future elections.” Several other western states, including Utah, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, already have such a model.

462. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 2:42 pm

     Right-Wing Media, Activists Slam Biden for Replacing Lee Greenwood on National Arts Council:

     Right-wing country singer Lee Greenwood has served on the National Council on the Arts since the George W Bush administration, and some right-wing activists and media outlets seem to think he has a right to a lifetime position. Greenwood, who is best known for his 1984 song “God Bless The USA,” was reportedly notified last week that President Joe Biden was nominating eight people to the National Council on the Arts, and that one of them, theater director Kamilah Forbes, would replace Greenwood, whose term expired in 2014. The new nominees were first announced by the White House in June.

     While “Fox & Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt claimed that Greenwood had held the seat for 20 years, he was first appointed to a six-year term in 2008 by then-President George W Bush. He continued to serve on the council throughout the Obama and Trump[squatter’s] administrations.

     Greenwood, who said he was quite hurt that he had been notified of Biden’s decision via email, complained last week to more than one Newsmax host, saying that it was “obvious” that the Biden administration is “cleaning house” and getting rid of all conservatives in the government. Last Thursday, “Fox & Friends” gave Greenwood a platform, which he used to complain that Biden has fired the patriot […].

     […] Greenwood’s song has long been deployed as a partisan anthem by conservative politicians, from Ronald Reagan playing it at the Republican National Convention in 1984 to former President Donald Trump[Wacho House squatter hair furor] frequently playing it at his campaign rallies. Greenwood has said he didn’t want the song to be seen as political, but he performed it as part of Trump’s inaugural celebrations, as he did for three other Republican presidents, Reagan and both Bushes. Greenwood performed at a Trump campaign rally as recently as October 2020.

     Right-wing activists seemed eager to make Greenwood’s replacement after more than a decade on the council somehow emblematic of the conservative persecution narrative they have been peddling. [examples…]

     Earlier this year, Greenwood began promoting a $59.99 God Bless the USA Bible.

463. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 2:52 pm

     The Onion, GOP Stalls Government Funding Bill By Detonating 50 Tons Of Explosives Inside Capitol Building:

     In a maneuver that experts suggest could represent a significant setback for the legislative ambitions of Democrats, the GOP reportedly stalled an upcoming government funding bill Tuesday by detonating fifty tons of C-4 explosives inside the Capitol building. “This was a make-or-break week for Democrats, and the complete destruction of both Congressional chambers alongside the death of several sitting progressives is just going to make passing the Biden agenda even harder,” said political expert Andrew Srinivasan […]. “[… T]he coordination required to blow up the Rotunda alone shows how much better Republicans are at marching in lockstep and toeing party lines.” At press time, several pundits had praised the Republicans for their restraint in avoiding the nuclear option of obliterating Washington DC with a tactical warhead.

     I’ve been trying to think up a Guy Fawkes joke / snark, but sofar my powder barrels are all damp…

464. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 3:05 pm

     More from, amusingly(ironically?), The Onion, ‘Bon Appétit’ Publishes Blank Issue After Nothing Sounded Good:

     Following a lethargic editorial meeting in which it was decided there was absolutely nothing to eat, popular food magazine Bon Appétit published a completely blank issue Tuesday, with staff confirming they had considered many different recipes, but none of them sounded very good right now. “We just couldn’t find anything we were in the mood for,” editor-in-chief Dawn Davis said […]. “We considered a feature on spicy braised eggplant noodles, but we just did that, like, two issues ago. […] Everyone has been feeling a little queasy ever since that August piece on tuna tartare nachos! We also thought about bone broth, but that’s such a hassle — we probably would have ended up snacking while waiting for it to finish, and then we wouldn’t have been hungry anymore. To be honest, we’re pretty much sick of everything.” A visit to Bon Appétit’s website confirmed it had been deleted entirely and replaced with a link to Grubhub.

     The mildly deranged penguin points out cheese works with nachos, and tuna, and tartare, and crunchy bones, and as a snack, and and and… she’s wondering what the problem is? (Other than the eggplant, of course, which like zucchini (courgette) and peas, is best killed on sight and never eaten. (My salad at lunch today contained peas… fortunately, they had been very thoroughly killed & defanged, and smothered in cheese, anchovies, and other stuff / veggies with taste and texture.))

465. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 3:53 pm

     Urging the German people to “stop the steal,” Donald J. Trump claimed that he was elected Chancellor of Germany over the weekend.

     Trump said that, once the official vote tallies have been recounted, it will be clear that he won the German election by a “landslide.”

     Reflecting on his purported win, Trump said, “I’ve always wanted to be the Chancellor of Germany. That’s a title that’s been held by some very fine people.”

     He revealed that he planned to send the former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani to Germany to contest the election results. “He hasn’t been disbarred there yet,” Trump said.

     For his part, Giuliani said that he relished his latest mission on Trump’s behalf. “I can’t wait to get to Germany,” he said. “When does Oktoberfest start?”

     New Yorker link

466. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 4:12 pm

     “Now Election Deniers Are Circulating A Fake Arizona Audit Report To Attack 2020 Results”

     There’s apparently a phony copy of the final report from the sham Arizona “audit” floating around that advises lawmakers not to certify the 2020 election.

     […] the state’s governor already did so — nearly 10 months ago.

     The inexperienced, politically biased “auditors” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results announced in a final report that, yes, Joe Biden won the election. Then, they spent the majority of their report flagging easily explained “anomalies” to provide grist for Trump and others’ quest to undermine confidence in the democratic process.

     But that apparently wasn’t enough material for some Big Liars, who’ve begun circulating, knowingly or not, a fake report that claims the entire election should be trashed — a development Cyber Ninja’s spokesperson warned the media about Tuesday.

     The fake report asserts that based on its findings, “the election should not be certified, and the reported results are not reliable.”

     “Source confirms this is the REAL #AZ #audit report being censured in #Arizona. The election should not be certified,” Matthew DePerno, a candidate for Michigan attorney general who for months pushed conspiracy theories about the vote totals out of Antrim County, Michigan, tweeted on Friday. […]

     Trump endorsed DePerno’s candidacy earlier this month. Doug Logan, the lead auditor in Arizona, was a listed “expert” of DePerno’s in a lawsuit over Antrim County’s results that was dismissed in May.

     But on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Logan’s company Cyber Ninjas, Rod Thompson, said in an emailed statement that “There is a false version of the Executive Summary of the Maricopa County Forensic Election Audit report that is circulating.”

     “This false version claims to be an earlier version of the Cyber Ninjas Executive Summary, but because of supposed threats from the Senate, it was not used,” Thompson said. “This is absolutely false.”

     “Specifically, this false version of the Executive Summary states, ‘the election should not be certified,’” he explained.

     Thompson linked to a document on Scribd containing the fake report, which the website data showed was uploaded by Jim Hoft, founder of the popular conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit.

     “The exact origins to the Executive Summary found at the following scribd link are unknown,” Thompson said. “But it was not written by Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, nor was it in any version that was ever sent or shown to the Senate for review.”

     Gateway Pundit had multiple live articles up Tuesday referring to the fake report.

     “For some reason, this did not make any headlines!” one of the articles exclaimed.

     Another Gateway Pundit article took the Republican establishment to task for not circulating the fake report.

     “The GOP webpage DID NOT have a single mention of the explosive findings!” the story raged, adding: “At some point, you start to see that these people are working for the other side!”

     […] “This is a fake document,” Senate audit liaison and former Arizona GOP chair Randy Pullen told the Capitol Times. “There was never a discussion about decertifying.”

     Link

     Oh, FFS.

467. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 4:19 pm

     Follow-up to comment 465.

     Posted by readers of the article:

     So is a fake of a fake like a double negative? It’s so confusing…
     ———————
     “It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”
     ———————-
     When all else fails, just make stuff up.
     ———————
     The fascist cult, the republican party, is in the enviable position of having a base that not only thrives on lies, they actually demand lies from their ‘leadership’.
     ——————–
     It’s just really, really fake.
     —————-
     The only question is whether someone at Gateway Pundit made the fake report or are they laundering the fake report from someone else.

468. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 4:31 pm

     […] The entire video, which you can see below, covers all kinds of conspiracy theories, tying COVID into abolishing the Second Amendment. But one of the many egregious things Gosar says, in an eight-minute run that could be titled “This man is unfit for office,” is an assertion of hearsay evidence from secret folks in the government that massive voter fraud has taken place.

     He begins by referencing the Cyber Ninja Arizona elections “audit,” the one that only seems to have proven that Donald Trump probably lost by more votes than previously reported, saying vaguely that we need to “follow through” with it. Like any good conspiracy theorist and conman, he then pretends to be offering up special info, matter-of-factly, that does two things: it stokes the deep state imagination while also making Gosar seem important and plugged into power.

     GOSAR: If it’s what I’ve been told—and I had people come to me early hours of the day after [election day?] from the security exchange fraud department to the CIA fraud department—that between 450 and 700,000 ballots were altered in the state of Arizona.

     Gosar proceeds to push the idea that, across the state, 3% of all votes were either turned from Donald Trump to Joe Biden or just not counted for Donald Trump. He references the HBO Documentary “Kill Chain,” telling everybody they need to watch it so they can realize how this happened. Of course, Rep. Gosar forgets to mention that the main issue that the documentary brings up is something that election security officials have sounded alarms over for a couple of decades and that Republicans have deliberately worked against fixing for decades.

     Rep. Gosar builds the made-up case, saying that as they looked into more voting machines in Maricopa County, Arizona, there was a 17% error rate. Once again, these claims were debunked months ago. More importantly, if you really want to create a conspiracy theory, how about we follow the money? The Cyber Ninjas report, dubious at best as they tried their darndest to prove election fraud, showed that Biden won Maricopa County by 45,000 votes.

     “We haven’t learned anything new,” said Matt Masterson, a top U.S. election security official in the Trump administration. “What we have learned from all this is that the Ninjas were paid millions of dollars, politicians raised millions of dollars, and Americans’ trust in democracy is lower.”

     […] Rep. Paul Gosar goes on to say that he has friends working on a “forensic audit” of the votes in Fulton County, Georgia—you know, where white folks are a minority—and they have error rates of “60%.” It is difficult to overstate how racist this is. Gosar is banking on the fact that this all-white group of Arizonans isn’t going to know or care about the rights of people living in, as Gosar says, “the Atlanta area.” Gosar then asserts that, in a county where an estimated 528,777 of 806,451 registered voters cast their vote, 60% of votes were either switched or deleted. That is so crazy-fucking racist it’s hard not to throw a keyboard out of a window.

     By the way, this GOP false flag election fraud lie was debunked by the GOP-controlled audit. […]

     To be clear, this bananas set of statements comes after he’s already outlined how the Republican minority in the House can hijack and, in essence, depose Speaker Nancy Pelosi, roll back committee assignments, scuttle all legislation, and then keep Congress from passing laws until the next election. That piece of frighteningly fascist think-tankery is followed by Gosar talking about defending Jan. 6 MAGA types who have been charged in the insurrection—claiming that all of the video is being collected “somewhere” and going to be used to get these trespassers, vandals, and coup d’etat attempters freed.

     […] The Republican base is a minority who have been told half-correctly that their power is disappearing as more voices are demanding that their participation in our democracy be recognized.

     […] They may not understand that the entire system that tells them they are better than the rest is still designed to keep them groveling for scraps from billionaires’ tables and dying for billionaires’ wars

     Here’s a longer version with Gosar opening with a platitude and a quote, and then just talking about how to run an oligarchy of fascism while selling it as Democracy. […]

     Watch Arizona Congressman just tell GOP voters big lie after big lie after big lie

     Videos are available at the link.

469. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 4:45 pm

     Wonkette: “Climate Vs. Jobs? Ford And Its New $11.4 Billion EV And Battery Plants Say STFU.​”

     Ford Motor Company announced yesterday that it’s partnering with South Korean energy firm SK Innovation to build two new factories in Tennessee and Kentucky to manufacture electric vehicles and the batteries that go in ’em. The two complexes — wait, they’re “hubs!” — will employ some 11,000 workers total when they open in 2025.

     The Detroit News reports the plant in Tennessee, to be called “Blue Oval City,” will manufacture Ford’s new electric F-series pickups in a

     “vertically integrated ecosystem” consisting of a vehicle assembly plant, a battery plant jointly operated by Ford and SK, as well as facilities for suppliers and battery recycling operations. Ford says the new assembly plant will be carbon neutral with zero waste to landfill when it’s fully operational in 2025.

     Ford says it will be “among the largest auto manufacturing campuses in US history.”

     Ford and SK will also construct two battery factories in Kentucky, which will produce batteries to be used in Ford and Lincoln EVs built at other assembly plants around North America. […]

     The press release said the new plants are part of a more than $30 billion investment in EVs, and that it “expects 40% to 50% of its global vehicle volume to be fully electric by 2030.”

     […] Marketing bafflegab aside, Ford’s green bafflegab about the Tennessee plant sounds pretty darned impressive:

     Through an on-site wastewater treatment plant, the assembly plant aspires to make zero freshwater withdrawals for assembly processes by incorporating water reuse and recycling systems. Zero-waste-to-landfill processes will capture materials and production scrap at an on-site materials collection center to sort and route materials for recycling or processing either at the plant or at off-site facilities once the plant is operational.

     That sounds pretty good, as does the goal of “localizing the supply chain network, creating recycling options for scrap and end-of-life vehicles, and ramping up lithium-ion recycling,” which Ford says is vital to making EVs a sustainable business. Seems like a good idea to focus on. You certainly wouldn’t want to have too many lithium ions in the fire.

     […] You know what would be pretty damn nice? For Congress to pass the Build Back Better reconciliation bill and get a bunch of EV recharging infrastructure and grid upgrades built, plus tax credits for people buying all those EVs.

     If we get to feeling all socialisty, we can even fantasize about future legislation that would make it easier for lower-income folks to trade their gas guzzlers for an EV. Like Obama’s cash for clunkers, but juiced. […]

470. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 5:00 pm

     Opinion column from Kansas, At anti-vax medicine show, plenty of hokum, grift and conspiracy mongering:

     The same day that US deaths from COVID-19 passed the toll of the Spanish[1918] flu pandemic, a modern-day medicine show rolled into Lenexa.

     Like the entertainments of old, this medicine show boasted cure-alls, rousing oratory, and shameless self promotion. Unlike those showcases, it didn’t sell high-octane patent medicine to get you drunk or high. Speakers proffered a new generation of cures: ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, the Republican Party. Don’t forget the grift: The Freedom Revival in the Heartland charged concert ticket prices of $89 per person[, the competing “Vaccines Work Safely” show costs $0, nothing].

     The Sept 20 confab wasn’t just about fictitious vaccine dangers, though. Oh, no. That would be too focused for a medicine show, then or now. The day’s event was also about government overreach, the redeeming power of religion and Black Lives Matter protesters. Disjointed, perhaps. Hard to follow, absolutely. That was the point of the exercise — keeping the audience terrified, ready to both buy and believe. At least they had raffles and food trucks.

     Let’s listen to a few raised voices from the day’s entertainment, ably captured by the Kansas Reflector’s Tim Carpenter. (You can watch the event [link-to at site], but I wouldn’t recommend doing so without a bottle of Scotch nearby.)

     ● Lee Merritt, orthopedic surgeon[quack] from Iowa: If you think we’re fighting a virus, you’re going to be a victim. If you understand that we’re fighting a war, then you have a chance at survival.
     ● Kansas state Sen Mike Thompson, Johnson County Republican: They don’t want to hear the facts. It is purely about control. It is purely about money. I’m sick and tired of it.
     ● Del Bigtree [of the notorious dozen], from the CBS show The Doctors[!]: They could still only push this virus to a death rate of less than a quarter of 1%. This was a Nothingburger.
     ● Karladine Graves, family medicine physician[quack] in Kansas City, Missouri: We are on a quest to save humanity. Don’t let them take your reasoning. Don’t be intimidated by the enemy.
     ● Doug Billings, host of The Right Side podcast: You have a generation of people who will burn and topple cities and statues and try to crucify Jesus in the public square.

     I don’t know how a rational person could respond to some of these statements, let alone figure out how they connect to the pandemic. I do know that lifesaving, free vaccines have a lot less to do with power and control than these speakers imagine. For that matter, the COVID death rate in the United States works out to be 1.6%. But facts aren’t the point.

     What unites these speakers is a queasy combination of gumption and nihilism, of big talk mixed with denial, of chest thumping shot through with apocalyptic visions of a woke future. Meanwhile, they ignore the fact that modern medicine and health care have built the foundations of our society.

     […]

     When the original medicine shows were popular, let’s say 1890, the average US life expectancy was 44 years. Diseases struck children and adults down in their prime, with doctors helpless to intervene. Prayer and booze were all they had [slight exaggeration there, but not much… –blf].

     In the 130 years since, our life expectancy has shot up to nearly 79 years. Once-fatal diseases have been all but eliminated — thanks to vaccinations and other treatments — and we enjoy a standard of living our forebears could only dream about.

     Which brings us one high-profile guest of this medicine show. In 1890, he might have been called the “professor,” the storyteller who knit the whole evening together.

     Today, we simply call him Kris Kobach, former Kansas secretary of state and current candidate for attorney general. Defeated in runs for governor and US Senate, Kobach knows all about failing upward, about taking a losing situation and making it sound preordained. Like the professors of old, he gets the grift.

     He understands a crowd eager to be exploited.

     […]

     Kobach said the US Constitution defended against vaccine mandates (it doesn’t — the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the issue more than a century ago [and vaccinations have been mandated since before the Constitution, or country, existed –blf]) and implied that he was among the virtuous unvaccinated who packed the church.

     That’s concerning. Kobach is a type 1 diabetic and only alive and healthy today because of breakthroughs in medicine. Given his diagnosis, which puts him at higher risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes, I certainly hope his talk of us unvaccinated was gentle fibbing. His family deserves to have their husband and father present and healthy.

     Kobach was key, though, the man who united the flimflam of the past with the pretensions of the present. He’s more than willing to benefit from medical technology while exploiting partisan divides and disinformation for personal gain. […]

471. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 5:19 pm

     The Rise of the Liberal Latter-day Saints

     Washington Post link

     And the battle for the future of Mormonism

     In August, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the religion colloquially known as Mormonism, issued a statement to its 19 million adherents around the globe: “We want to do all we can to limit the spread of these viruses,” wrote Russell M. Nelson, the church’s president, along with the two most senior apostles. “[W]e urge the use of face masks in public meetings whenever social distancing is not possible. To provide personal protection from such severe infections, we urge individuals to be vaccinated.”

     To Lisa Mosman, a 59-year-old Latter-day Saint who drives a Subaru covered in anti-Trump bumper stickers around her neighborhood in Orem, Utah, the statement was a welcome surprise. “It’s actually kind of brave, because it’s going to p— off a bunch of people that they normally don’t p— off,” she told me.

     In the weeks since, the statement has caused Latter-day Saints on the far right, long accustomed to having their beliefs reflected by church leaders, to face the kind of cognitive dissonance that liberal members have had to contend with for decades. “They’re having to ask themselves who they trust more — the prophet or Tucker Carlson,” Mosman told me, then sighed. “This is new territory for them.” [LOL]

     Her brother Matt Marostica, a Latter-day Saint high priest living in Berkeley, Calif., also welcomed the statement. Throughout his decades as a religious leader, his congregation has served as a home for people who don’t always feel welcome in most Latter-day institutions. […] Marostica, a soft-spoken political scientist who works as an associate university librarian at Stanford University, honed his liberal worldview as a church missionary in Argentina during that country’s “dirty war.” He told me that the Berkeley Latter-day Saint congregation, called a ward, welcomes everyone — openly gay members, atheists, followers of other faiths, undocumented immigrants and even people with very conservative politics — with acceptance and love. […]

     His ward has long served as a liberal counterweight to many conservative pronouncements made by church leaders, which in recent years have predominantly concerned homosexuality. In 2008, Berkeley, along with other liberal communities in the San Francisco Bay area, was a site of severe pushback to the church’s push to pass Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that sought to limit marriage to a man and a woman. In 2015, when church policy was changed to prevent children of same-sex couples from being baptized, Marostica’s community was outraged once again. (That policy was reversed four years later.) And more recently, there was a profound sense of betrayal when apostle Jeffrey Holland — long considered one of the more liberal leaders of the church — urged the faculty of Brigham Young University, the flagship campus of the university run by the church, to take up metaphorical “musket fire” against peers who show public support for gay Latter-day Saints.

     […] Marostica holds out hope that his community’s open-tent interpretation of what it means to be a Latter-day Saint might become more common […]

     Berkeley, of course, is an outlier — one of the most left-wing communities in America […] But when it comes to the direction of the church, it’s not as much of an outlier as you might think. Long identified with conservative theology and Republican politics, the church now finds itself at something of an inflection point. More so than in other conservative religious institutions, liberals — or at least those disaffected from conservatism — are making their presence known inside and on the perimeters of the church, provoking something of a Latter-day Saint identity crisis.

     […] fewer Latter-day Saints are following behavioral mandates like the prohibition against alcohol and coffee. […] In perhaps the most dramatic break with the past, the partisan identification gap among millennial church members is narrow — 41 percent Democratic, 46 percent Republican — and a plurality of members under 40 voted for Biden.

     The church as an institution is by no means on the brink of reinventing itself as a progressive force. But it is struggling with how much and whether to accommodate liberals, and the result has been substantial internal division. […]

     it wasn’t until 1978 that a prophetic revelation officially declared Black men equal to White men — a move that had been previously considered doctrinally impossible.

     […] a highly organized, immensely wealthy and powerful institution, with 31,000 wards, 3,500 stakes (organizing chapters similar to Catholic dioceses) and 168 temples around the world. Its assets are worth more than $100 billion. In the United States, it has 6.5 million adherents, constituting 2 percent of the country’s population, and it is vastly overrepresented in the halls of influence: Latter-day Saints help lead corporations including American Express, Citigroup, Black & Decker, Dell, Deloitte, JetBlue and Marriott. And it wasn’t long ago that the country’s most famous member of the church, Mitt Romney, was the Republican nominee for president.

     It’s an institution, in short, that has excelled at survival and, often, reinvention. Part of the reason may be a uniquely Latter-day Saint theological mechanism called personal revelation, by which individual members can receive direct divine instruction without having to go through the institution or its authority figures. […] “People have lost confidence in not only the traditional authority in society, but they’ve lost confidence in the fact that one can actually know what is real or true.”

     One can see these tensions on display in even the most conservative places in the Mormon world. Rexburg, Idaho, is among the most reliably Republican towns in America. Its population is over 95 percent Latter-day Saint, and it is home to the Idaho campus of Brigham Young University. BYU-I — semi-satirically known as “BYU I Do” because of the pressure undergraduates feel to get engaged — is widely considered more conservative, both politically and theologically, than the school’s flagship campus in Provo, Utah. […]

     […] Once a week, a group of young Latter-day Saint men meet in an undisclosed location in Rexburg to process their attraction to other men. The group is affiliated with BYU-I and is “church-affirming,” meaning that its leaders cannot endorse that anyone leave the faith. The night I attended, there were 11 men sitting in a circle. Only two were White; the rest were Black, Asian or Latino. Some were public about their sexuality; others had barely begun to come out. All have a relationship with their religion that might best be described as complicated. As one member told me: “Every good thing in my family’s lives comes from the church. But the same thing that brings them a lot of good brings me a lot of turmoil.”

     […] After the meeting, I was surprised that nearly all the men approached me, wanting to share their stories. The next day, I visited Jason Holcomb, a member of the group, at his airy, modern apartment in one of Rexburg’s sprawling complexes. He is 24, with sparkling blue eyes, and he had decorated his space with LGBT symbols: a Pride-themed Lego set, a rainbow hat placed just-so on the living room couch. When I sat down in the living room, I noticed two artfully framed plaques, on which were inscribed the Family Proclamation, the church’s 1995 statement emphasizing that only heterosexual marriage could qualify a believer for the celestial kingdom, the highest tier of heaven — and that “disintegration” of this traditional structure would result in “calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”

     Jason saw me looking at it. “I know,” he said, shaking his head. He laughed cynically. “But it’s the only thing I still have from my marriage.” I asked him if he believed in its message. He thought for a long moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said. He let loose a single, hard laugh. Then he paused. “No, I don’t.”

     Jason told me about growing up in a large, devout family in Arizona: […] Like many other members of the support group, he planned to continue to look only to God — and not church leaders — for guidance.

     That perspective is shared by Jackson Taylor, a 19-year-old from nearby Idaho Falls who was not a member of the support group but had met many of its members through social activities for young gay Latter-day Saints. Despite growing up in a devout, politically conservative family, Taylor, an effervescent, baby-faced young man with a spiky blond haircut, told me he has always known he doesn’t fit into what he describes as the LDS mold — and he doesn’t believe the church has the authority to tell him whether his identity will determine his ability to join his family in the celestial kingdom.

     […] like many gay Latter-day Saints who eventually depart to one degree or another, he left behind family members who are committed to staying — but who are also committed to using their power as rule-abiding congregants to attempt to change the institution from within. (As one support group member put it, “There’s a saying that there are only two types of Mormons: Mormons who are against gay rights, and Mormons who have never met a gay person.”) […]

     […] When Nancy Saxton, who is descended from the church’s pioneer founders, was growing up in a rural, conservative town in Northern California in the 1960s, the church had not yet become the powerful global institution — or, in the United States, the avatar for the Republican Party — that it is today. […]

     After a few years living in Salt Lake City, Saxton’s faith, and politics, began to liberalize. In the 1970s, she married a Presbyterian minister and went to her local ward with women active in feminist movements both within and outside the church: They were fighting not only for a more inclusive Latter-day Saint institution and theology, one that would celebrate a Heavenly Mother in addition to a Heavenly Father, but also to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. […]

     […] In the past six years, many Latter-day Saint women took up another cause: fighting Donald Trump and what they see as the worrying direction of the Republican Party. In 2017, immediately after Trump’s inauguration, a group of Latter-day Saint women formed a national organization called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which now counts over 7,000 members and champions causes including immigration, anti-racism, sustainability and the environment, and voting rights.

     […] While Mormon Women for Ethical Government is officially nonpartisan, its founding was clearly a reaction to Trump’s election, and many in the group are wrestling with their political identities. “We formed as an all-female organization to give space for women to speak and not get drowned out by men’s voices, as is often the case, especially in our culture,” senior director Rachel Fisher Scholes, who lives in Tucson, told me. […]

     Republicans, were unjust, even cruel. And she realized, in time, that other issues she cared deeply about, such as environmentalism and universal health care, were not represented by the men for whom she’d voted without question all her life.

     Eventually, she recalls, “I couldn’t call myself a Republican anymore. […]

     Scholes’s point of view is shared by many Latter-day Saint women whose accumulating life experiences, coupled with their visceral aversion to Trump, have caused them to realize that, despite their religion’s decades-long alliance with the Republican Party (and, in some cases, the unchanged political allegiances of their husbands), a number of social values they’ve long ascribed to their faith just might place them squarely in tune with, well, Democrats. […]

     There are Latter-day Saint communities in which a progressive theology and way of life, and a strong allegiance to the Democratic Party, is nothing new. These tend to be in areas known for their liberal politics — places like New York and Cambridge, Mass. Most, but not all, of these places are outside the West’s “Mormon Corridor” […]. None of these places, however, is quite the same as Berkeley. […]

     When I attended Sunday services in Berkeley, I saw attire you’d be hard-pressed to find in Latter-day Saint services in the rest of the country, from flip-flops to tank tops. Multiple men in attendance wore beards, which are prohibited for missionaries and on BYU campuses, and are controversial in many other Latter-day Saint circles. And in another conspicuous flouting of norms, the newly elected leader of the elders quorum, the ward’s organization of priesthood holders, wore shoulder-length hair.

     Matt Marostica, who was the ward’s bishop from 2008 to 2015, sees his politics as inextricable from his faith. “Mormons are like, ‘We really, really value the Constitution.’ Like, God had a hand in creating the Constitution! Well, if you really believe that, then you cannot support the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is actively subverting the Constitution. So, you know, like, in terms of the question of how can you be a Latter-day Saint and support the Republican Party? You cannot.”

     […] People like Jason Holcomb, the 24-year-old recent graduate of BYU-Idaho, aren’t waiting for an apology. After Elder Holland’s recent speech about “musket fire,” Holcomb told me that he had decided to identify as an inactive member. “An organization is not needed for me to have a proper relationship with God,” he told me.

     […] Patrick Mason, the Utah State professor, offers a bolder forecast — one that may give heart to liberal Latter-day Saints who are desperate for change within the church, as well as those who are quietly debating whether, or to what extent, they can justify staying. “People have already started to do the work to sketch out a theological rationale that would allow for the kind of revelation that allows for women’s ordination, for same-sex marriage, all kinds of things,” he says. And, he adds, with the passage of time “what was once possible then becomes probable.”

     I’ll believe it when I see it.

472. Lynna, OM says

     28 September 2021 at 5:22 pm

     blf @469, this phrase from the text you quoted is a good summary: “a crowd eager to be exploited.”

     That entire article was really disturbing.

473. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 5:22 pm

     To Serve and ProtectShoot and Infect, Massachusetts Police Union Claims Dozens Leaving Over Vaccine Mandate, But State Police Say Only One Has Quit:

     An upcoming vaccine mandate for Massachusetts State Police that won’t allow the option of submitting negative Covid test results to keep working has led to dozens of state troopers resigning, according to the union that represents them, but state police say they’re only aware of one trooper who is actually planning to leave because of the mandate so far [and that trooper is planning to retire].

     […]

     In a statement, union president Michael Cherven slammed the mandate, calling it one of the “most stringent vaccine mandates in the country” [which it apparently is –blf] and saying it will further thin a police force that is already critically short-staffed.

     [… A]bout [20%] State Police employees remain unvaccinated, the union — which represents about 1,800 members — told WBZ-TV.

     […] According to the Mayo Clinic, 67.8% of Massachusetts residents are fully vaccinated.

     […]

474. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 5:38 pm

     Perhaps not a surprise, Unvaccinated Americans Blame Everyone But Themselves — Children, Vaccines And Not Wearing Masks — For Covid Surge, Poll Finds:

     While most Americans blame vaccine holdouts for surging coronavirus cases, rationed medicines and overwhelmed hospitals, few unvaccinated people feel any responsibility, according to new polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, underscoring the tough barriers officials must overcome as they seemingly hold anyone and anything other than themselves responsible for the dire outbreak.

     […]

     Just 12% of unvaccinated adults believe people refusing the vaccine is a major factor behind the high case numbers, the poll found, with the majority (58%) thinking the surge is driven by vaccines being less effective at preventing the spread of Covid-19 than scientists initially thought.

     Unvaccinated people even cited vaccine holdouts last among all reasons driving the high case numbers polled by Kaiser, including children who aren’t eligible for vaccination (15%), governments lifting restrictions too soon (27%), the infectiousness of the delta variant (35%), people not taking enough precautions (37%) and immigrants and tourists bringing Covid-19 into the country (40%).

     […]

     Just 11% of vaccinated people thought breakthrough cases indicate the vaccines aren’t working, Kaiser found, and 19% thought the same of booster shots.

     […] Consistently, Republicans have been less likely to accept the vaccine and more likely to question the public health measures put in place to end the pandemic. This latest Kaiser poll is no different: Republicans (32%) were the least likely to cite people refusing the vaccine as a major reason for high cases when compared to Democrats (87%) and Independents (54%) and the most likely to blame immigrants and tourists bringing Covid-19 into the country (55% of Republicans versus 21% of Democrats and 34% of Independents).

     Despite 77% of vaccinated people holding the unvaccinated responsible for the rise in cases, just over half (51%) said they were angry with them. Unsurprisingly, only 3% of the unvaccinated said they were angry with people who hadn’t gotten a Covid-19 vaccine. […]

     […] The vast majority of hospitalizations and nearly all deaths from Covid-19 are in unvaccinated people, who have cost the healthcare system at least $5.7 billion in the last three months alone. The huge surge in demand for what few medicines are licensed to treat Covid-19 in the US has triggered nationwide shortages and rationing of scarce supplies, with some areas prioritizing scarce supplies for unvaccinated patients.

475. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 6:01 pm

     Forbes gets snarky, The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper Takes On Anti-Mask, Anti-Covid-19 Vaccine Rallies (videos (plural)):

     [… T]he first protester featured on the [anti-mask eejits] segment was wearing a blue T-shirt that read I Don’t Co-Parent With The Government. She emphasized that she’s against all mandates. Against all mandates? [R]eally? Wait till she hears about the “must wear clothes while in public” mandate or the “use toilet and not the floor” mandate.

     The segment shifted quickly to [a] man who confidently said, Masks will never protect America, and then to a third protester [… who] claimed that her child was suffering from wearing face masks. When Klepper asked, “what kind of issues has he had?” [s]he replied that he has had acne on his face from, you know, the mask covering and not letting his skin breathe. Egads! Acne?!? How is someone ever supposed to recover from having had acne as a child?

     Another protester […] claimed that you’re breathing in the toxins that your body is trying to get rid of. When Klepper asked, “how do surgeons do it,” this protester responded with “that is a good question.” Now, it’s not clear what the protester may have said right after that, because the segment was edited. But that is a good question, why have many surgeons and other doctors and health professionals worn face masks for years without showing any real ill effects?

     The segment included a man claiming that the impact of Covid-19 is being overblown, saying, I’ve walked through the hospitals, I’ve video taped inside hospitals, and guess what? They aren’t full of Covid patients. To that Klepper responded, “now I’m worried about Covid and security measures at North Carolina hospitals.” After all, it may be a bit disconcerting for patients and their families to hear that some random guy is walking around the hospital filming everyone.

     [… The toxins lady] said that wearing face masks is a sign of slavery. Gee, wonder what people who have actually had to endure slavery would say about that?

     She added, I’ve discovered in my research also that Satanists stand six feet apart. They wear masks during rituals. It’s not clear what she meant by “research.” Scrolling through Facebook posts is not research. What would you do if your lawyer or doctor told you, “I’ve done some research on your case, and looks like Uncle Morty shared something on Facebook that told me what to do.”

     [… snarking based on an earlier, anti-vaccination eejits, video… O]ne protester claimed that women are miscarrying. People are having their DNAs wiped out, as a result of the Covid-19 vaccine. Holy smokes! DNA wiped out? That would constitute a very bad day. If that were the case, you’d be hearing a whole lot more of, “I was supposed to meet Marcus yesterday but he got the Covid-19 vaccine and got his DNA wiped out. I asked him if he wanted to re-schedule but didn’t hear back from him.”

     […]

476. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 6:49 pm

     Florida Moves Forward With Punishing Local Governments Over Vaccine Mandates (Forbes edits in {curly braces}):

     Florida Gov Ron DeSantis’ [mal]administration is pushing forward with plans to penalize local governments that have Covid-19 vaccine mandates in place, as the mayor [Jerry Demings] of Orange County, which includes Orlando, said Monday he had received a letter from the state[, which claims the county’s vaccine mandate is a discriminatory policy that infringes upon the fundamental rights and privacies of Floridians,] threatening the county with fines for its vaccine requirement.

     […]

     The Department of [Anti-]Health alleges the vaccine mandate goes against a Florida state statute that prohibits governmental entities from requiring proof of Covid-19 vaccination, or else face a fine of $5,000 per infraction — which could add up to millions of dollars if local governments are fined for each employee.

     According to the county’s own site, there are “more than 8,000 employees”… 8000 × 5000$ = 40,000,000$.

     The department told Demings the county is now subject to the fines because of its policy, and asked the county to immediately provide the number of employees subject to the vaccine policy, according to a copy of the letter provided to Forbes.

     […]

     “We’re on firm legal ground with this vaccine mandate that we have put in place,” Demings said, citing federal law that supports employer vaccine mandates and criticizing the state statute as “arbitrary, capricious {and} overbroad.” The mayor […] also suggested the state’s threat “has some political overtones” from Republican DeSantis, but noted taxpayers would ultimately be the ones who would be punished since their funds would be used to pay any state-ordered fines.

     […]

     Florida has also used its ban on providing proof of vaccination to try and block cruise ships from mandating Covid-19 vaccines, despite protests from both the cruise industry and its passengers. The state has so far lost that fight, however, as a judge ruled Norwegian Cruise Line could demand proof of vaccination despite the state policy, and other cruise lines have used that decision to follow suit.

     [… It’s unknown if] DeSantis’ [mal]administration will similarly try to go after private employers that require proof of vaccination — particularly Disney, which has imposed a vaccine mandate for its employees and has a significant presence in Florida. […] DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw told the [Orlando Sentinel], Regarding private businesses, we’re looking at all legal options to protect the rights of[kill] employees.

477. blf says

     28 September 2021 at 7:42 pm

     A snippet from the Grauniad’s editorial on teh “U”K’s continuing fuel shortage, On fuel shortages: this crisis needs management:

     [The alleged-“government” is] shamefully unprepared, hastily offering 5,000 three-month visas that haulage companies and unions believe most European drivers will simply reject. As one driver told a journalist: “Why would you want to go to Britain, jump all these hoops, face all this hostile environment, if you could go to Ireland or Holland and earn more, be respected, drive on nicer motorways with nice truck stops, and be a free European citizen, not a second-class citizen?”

478. raven says

     29 September 2021 at 10:39 am

     More on the Covid-19 virus long haulers. When this pandemic winds down, if it ever does, this is going to be the next problem. I’ve certainly seen it myself many times already.

     My friend lost parts of both lower limbs to Covid-19 blood clots. She now walks on artificial feet and says it is harder than it looks. She is never going to get completely over from getting Covid-19 virus.
     This study is saying around 33% of the patients show long hauler syndrome.

     Long Covid is a bigger problem than we thought
     By Ivana Kottasová and Isabelle Jani Friend, CNN
     September 29, 2021
     Experts: Up to one-third of Covid-19 cases become ‘long Covid’

     Chimére Smith, 39, has been struggling with long Covid since she was sick in March 2020. She underwent numerous neurologic tests, including electroencephalogram, to evaluate her problems with short-term memory, mobility and vision.

     A large study has revealed that one in three Covid-19 survivors have suffered symptoms three to six months after getting infected, with breathing problems, abdominal symptoms such as abdominal pain, change of bowel habit and diarrhoea, fatigue, pain, anxiety and depression among the most common issues reported.
     Researchers at the University of Oxford, the National Institute for Health Research and the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre studied symptoms in more than 270,000 people recovering from Covid-19 and found that the nine features of long Covid were detected by clinicians more frequently in those who had been hospitalized, and slightly more often in women.

     But Dr. Max Taquet, National Institute for Health Research academic clinical fellow and one of the authors of the study, said the results show long Covid affects a significant proportion of people of all ages. “We need appropriately configured services to deal with the current and future clinical need,” he said.
     The study did not explain what causes long Covid symptoms, how severe they are or how long they will last, but it did show that people recovering from Covid were more likely to suffer long-term symptoms than those who had the flu.
     Dr. Amitava Banerjee, a professor of clinical data science at University College London who was not involved in the study, said this finding is “yet another arrow in the quiver against bogus ‘this is just like flu’ claims.”

     The symptoms people experienced varied, and many patients experienced more than one. Older people and men were more likely to have breathing difficulties and cognitive problems, whereas young people and women reported more headaches, abdominal symptoms, anxiety and depression.
     The authors stressed that although the number of such incidents was higher among the elderly and those with more severe initial illness, people who had suffered a mild disease, children and young adults also experienced long Covid.
     The accompanying data showed that as many as 46% of children and young adults between the ages of 10 and 22 had experienced at least one symptom in the six months after recovering.

     This risk of long Covid highlights why is it so important to protect children and young people from the coronavirus, even though the study said most don’t suffer from severe illness.
     Cases among children have been soaring in the US since the more contagious Delta coronavirus variant became the country’s dominant strain in July. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported 206,864 weekly cases among children on Monday. That was a slight decline compared to the previous week, but a 188% increase since the week of July 22.
     The data comes as Pfizer/BioNTech said Tuesday that they had begun submitting vaccine data on children aged 5 to 11 to the US Food and Drug Administration for review, and expect to submit a request for emergency use authorization in the coming weeks.
     The next key question is whether parents will want to get their kids vaccinated. Parents of 5-to-11-year-olds are split on the issue, with 44% saying they are likely to do so and 42% saying they are unlikely to, according to poll results from Axios-Ipsos published Tuesday.

479. blf says

     29 September 2021 at 10:45 am

     First Dog on the Moon in the Grauniad, The ancient battle continues between birds just being alive and humans arsing about in space (cartoon), “Everyone is excited about South Australia’s bird-murdering space programme…”, but “They’re not even planning to fill the rockets with billionaires and fly them into the Sun!”

480. blf says

     29 September 2021 at 11:04 am

     Oh FFS, Madrid leader takes issue with pope’s apology for ‘painful errors’ in Mexico:

     […]
     The rightwing president of the Madrid region has taken issue with the pope’s recent apology for the church’s “very painful errors” in Mexico, and said Spanish conquistadors brought Catholicism, civilisation and freedom to Latin America.

     Teh raping children cult is not something useful, there were multiple civilisations in the Americas at the time, and the invaders (both teh militrary / “explorers” and teh cult’s fanatics) promptly enslaved the First Nations.

     There’s a lot more fact-free / -misleading ranting by this nazi, her current and previous führers in the Vatican, and other eejits in the article.

481. blf says

     29 September 2021 at 11:31 am

     YouTube deletes RT’s German channels over Covid misinformation:

     […]
     YouTube has deleted Russian state-backed broadcaster RT’s German-language channels, saying they had breached its Covid misinformation policy.

     […]

     RT’s German channel was initially issued a strike for uploading content that violated YouTube’s Covid misinformation policy, resulting in a suspension of posting rights on the platform for a week.

     During that suspension, the Russian broadcaster tried to use another channel to circumvent the ban on uploading.

     “As a result both channels were terminated for breaking YouTube Terms of Service,” said the spokesperson.

     […]

     Putin is making threats as a result, Russia threatens to restrict YouTube over blocking of two German-language channels:

     Russian media watchdog[censor] Roskomnadzor on Wednesday threatened to restrict access to YouTube after the video-sharing platform blocked two German-language channels of state broadcaster RT.

     […]

     Roskomnadzor said it had sent a letter to YouTube’s owner Google demanding that all restrictions be lifted from the two channels […] as soon as possible.

     It added that the restrictions violate the key principles of free dissemination of information and are an act of censorship against Russian media.

     […] Russia’s foreign ministry accused YouTube of an unprecedented act of media aggression which it said[absurdly asserted] was likely aided by German authorities.

     The adoption of symmetrical retaliatory measures against German media in Russia… seems not only appropriate, but also necessary, the ministry said in a statement.

     We believe these measures are the only possible way to stimulate our partners’ interest in a constructive and meaningful dialogue around this unacceptable situation, it said[bellowed …]

482. blf says

     29 September 2021 at 11:54 am

     Nasa/JPL’s Ingenuity helicopter did not make its planned 14th(!) flight, albeit is safe. The flight, attempted on the 18th, was to test higher rotor speeds to deal with the seasonal thinning of the Martin atmosphere. Pre-flight tests passed, but on on the day, before liftoff, an anomaly was detected with the servos which control the blade angles and the flight auto-aborted. The problem isn’t (yet) understood, post-flight tests have (all?) passed. Ingenuity is well-past its planned, expected, and design lifetimes (at most 5 flights during 30 days of optimal flying conditions over “safe” terrain), and is now (trying to operate) outside of Earth-tested parameters.

     Mars is now entering solar conjunction, when the Sun will be between Earth and Mars, basically blocking communications. This will last about two weeks, until 16th October or so, during which time Perseverance, Ingenuity, Curiosity, the orbiters, et al., will basically talk to themselves and negotiate with the Martians. They also all be doing some observational science (monitoring the weather, etc.), recording the observations for later transmission to Earth.

483. Lynna, OM says

     29 September 2021 at 12:25 pm

     Small bit of good news, however slim:

     […] the latest Quinnipiac poll found that 51 percent of Texans do not believe Republican Gov. Greg Abbott should be re-elected.

     https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3821

484. Lynna, OM says

     29 September 2021 at 12:32 pm

     […] the House passed a bill on a contentious issue with bipartisan support, […] encouraging to see the EQUAL Act clear the chamber with relative ease yesterday. Reuters reported:

     The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill to permanently end the sentencing disparities between crack cocaine and powder, a policy that has led to the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. In a bipartisan vote of 361-66, the House approved the EQUAL Act, short for Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law.

     […] In the Reagan era, sentencing disparities in drug crimes reached levels that were difficult to believe. As the Associated Press reported several years ago, “[A] person selling five grams of crack faces the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence as someone selling 500 grams of powder cocaine.”

     The racism at the heart of the policy was unsubtle, since most crack convictions involved Black defendants.

     In 2010, at then-President Barack Obama’s urging, congressional Democrats successfully reduced the disparity, though a Senate compromise prevented them from eliminating it altogether. This was an important step — it was the first time in four decades that Congress had repealed a mandatory minimum — but it was incomplete.

     President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are eager to finish the job. […]

     Despite the controversy over the issue in years past, the debate has shifted to such a degree that the House passed the EQUAL Act yesterday with 143 Republicans joining a unanimous Democratic conference. Sure, 66 GOP members voted to leave the racist sentencing disparity in place, but they were heavily outnumbered.

     The bill now heads to the Senate, where it will obviously face a Republican filibuster, but it’s not outlandish to think there will be enough support to overcome the GOP opposition. The companion bill in the upper chamber is sponsored by Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, but it already has three Republican co-sponsors — Ohio’s Rob Portman, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — and there’s no reason to assume that number can’t grow.

     Reuters’ report added, “If the EQUAL Act becomes law, it would permanently and entirely eliminate the crack-cocaine disparity, and it would retroactively apply to those who were previously sentenced, allowing people to take advantage of the new law.”

     Link

     blf @481, thank you for keeping us up to date regarding Nasa/JPL’s Ingenuity helicopter. I’m a fan of that little helicopter.

485. Lynna, OM says

     29 September 2021 at 12:38 pm

     WTF

     USPS advances DeJoy’s plan to make mail delivery ‘permanently slower’

     Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan for the USPS is moving forward. Among the changes: Some mail service will be “permanently slower.”

     It was six months ago when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled his “strategic plan” for the future of the United States Postal Service, which was not well received. The Republican donor, chosen for the job by Donald Trump despite his lack of postal experience, presented a blueprint that included, among other things, higher rates, slower services, and reduced post office hours.

     […] over the summer, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which plays a USPS oversight role, was sharply critical of DeJoy’s plan, questioning its core assumptions.

     As USA Today reported yesterday, his changes are nevertheless being implemented, and those changes including making some mail service “permanently slower.”

     Americans who have been frustrated with the slow service of the U.S. Postal Service since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic probably won’t be thrilled to hear this: The service is about to get even slower…. The changes mean an increased time-in-transit for mail traveling long distances, such as from New York to California.

     […] Complicating matters is the fact that DeJoy’s many controversies haven’t gone away.

     We learned in June, for example, that the postmaster general is facing an FBI investigation over a campaign-finance scandal. […] a Washington Post analysis noted last year, “Chief executives have gone to federal prison for similar schemes.”

     But it’s not the only controversy. As Rachel noted on the show last night, the first sign of trouble came last summer, when DeJoy announced plans to scrap mail-sorting machines just as millions of Americans prepared to vote by mail.

     This year, the USPS also ramped up its business with a company DeJoy used to run. It’s also a company he holds a financial stake in.

     The fact remains that President Biden cannot fire the postmaster general, though he probably wants to. […] The governing board of the U.S. Postal Service can remove DeJoy, and the confirmation of Biden’s nominees to the board increased the odds that it might take such a step, but for now, there’s little to suggest his job is in serious jeopardy.

     One of the Democratic board members is Ron Bloom, a Trump appointee who’s expressed support for DeJoy. In the spring, Bloom, who currently chairs the USPS board, told The Atlantic, in reference to the controversial postmaster general, “Right now, I think [DeJoy is] the proper man for the job. He’s earned my support, and he will have it until he doesn’t. And I have no particular reason to believe he will lose it.”

     Rachel Maddow’s segment discussing DeJoy’s unfitness for the job, and the ways in which he has damaged the United States Postal Service, is available at the link.

486. Lynna, OM says

     29 September 2021 at 12:44 pm

     Say what now?

     Mississippi AG: Curtailing reproductive rights will empower women

     Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch believes women will be empowered if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

     In just a couple of months, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that will test the constitutionality of Mississippi’s latest abortion ban. It’s the first key showdown on reproductive rights since conservatives gained a dominant, six-member majority on the high court.

     It’s also, of course, a case that puts the future of the Roe v. Wade precedent in great jeopardy.

     As The Mississippi Free Press reported this week, Mississippi’s Republican attorney general is already imagining the societal landscape in the event the justices scrap the nation’s existing reproductive rights.

     Ending most legalized abortions will “empower” more women to pursue careers while also raising children, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch told a Catholic television host late last week. She is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that guarantees women the right to abortion before fetal viability, when the state defends its 15-week abortion ban in December.

     “Think about this: the lives that will be touched, the babies that will be saved, the mothers that will get the chance to really redirect their lives,” Fitch said last week. “And they have all these opportunities that they didn’t have 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, professional women, they really wanted you to make a choice. Now you don’t have to. Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be. You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.”

     The Mississippi attorney general added, “Just think about the uplifting, the changing of course for women that have for these new babies, these women. And everyone knows it’s all right, it’s acceptable. You can have these beautiful children and you can have your careers. And so this really gets into, how do we empower women? How do we prepare for that next step? And we have to look at it with this whole vision and strategy. And I just think God has given us this opportunity to be here.”

     In other words, women will have amazing choices just as soon as the government forces them to remain pregnant against their will. The key to “empowering” women, the argument goes, is to curtail their reproductive rights.

     At the heart of Fitch’s argument appears to be a degree of confidence in societal progress. […]

     There’s no shortage of problems with such an argument, starting with the obvious fact that the fight is not solely one over financial and societal benefits. The core question is whether the government should have the authority to dictate Americans’ reproductive choices, not whether those Americans will maintain life choices in response to a government fiat.

     But making matters worse is that Fitch’s pitch overlooks the fact that millions of women in the United States continue to face dire financial circumstances, with limited access to affordable childcare, and no paid maternity leave. This isn’t a relic of some regressive past; it’s the status quo.

     New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore added, “As it happens, Mississippi is the only state that has no equal-pay law prohibiting gross discrimination against women — with or without children — in the workplace. It is probably the last place in America where it can be credibly argued that women have such an idyllic existence that there are no choices to be made and thus no need for a ‘right to choose.’ It has the highest poverty rate, the highest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest per capita income of any state.” […]

487. Lynna, OM says

     29 September 2021 at 1:18 pm

     In court case, Giuliani shed new light on the Big Lie’s origins

     Rudy Giuliani confirmed under oath that when he peddled election conspiracy theories, he didn’t check to learn whether they were true.

     The New York Times published a striking front-page report last week with a headline that read, “Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows.” As the article detailed, Donald Trump’s political operation carefully examined key election conspiracy theories, found them to be baseless, and prepared an internal memo on the findings.

     Trump’s lawyers, of course, pushed the falsehoods anyway.

     We learned of this, not through a whistleblower or investigative reporting, but because of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems employee, who was targeted by the former president’s team.

     […] there’s no reason to believe this memo will be the only relevant revelation. On the contrary, the Coomer vs Trump Campaign case has also produced depositions from a variety of political players who were also involved in propagating nonsensical claims about the 2020 election. They’ve already answered questions, under oath, about their role in spreading conspiratorial falsehoods.

     Take Rudy Giuliani, for example.

     […] attorneys sat down with Donald Trump’s infamous lawyer last month and asked about the origins of the Republican conspiracy theories, specifically related to voting machines — a core element of the GOP’s anti-election push. […]

     The core question for the former New York City mayor was simple: Where did all this weird stuff come from? Giuliani was asked, for example, about media reports in which he said he’d relied on some media accounts and social media posts in order to go after a Dominion Voting Systems executive. Giuliani responded that he couldn’t remember if it was Facebook or some other platform. “Those social media posts get all one to me,” he said.

     Giuliani added that he couldn’t think of anything else “that I laid eyes on.” This was itself amazing: Before going public with anti-election conspiracy theories, Giuliani’s due diligence involved reading some stuff via social media — though he’s not sure which platform.

     The former president’s lawyer also told the public he knew of a witness who could bolster the allegations against Dominion. In the deposition, Giuliani conceded that he didn’t actually speak to the alleged witness, but he thinks someone else on Team Trump probably did.

     Giuliani also said he didn’t have any information about the alleged witness’ credibility, and didn’t make an effort to check. From the transcript:

     “It’s not my job in a fast-moving case to go out and investigate every piece of evidence that’s given to me. Otherwise, you’re never going to write a story.”

     He added that he didn’t have the time to check whether the alleged witness’ claims were reliable before sharing them with the public.

     Rachel summarized Giuliani’s message this way: “I read some stuff — I think it was maybe on Facebook — I laid it out to the public as what we knew to be the facts, and no, I had no idea if it was true or not. I didn’t even try to check. Why would I try to check? You wouldn’t have a story then.”

     At face value, it’s tempting to laugh at the absurdity of Giuliani’s deposition. […]

     But let’s not forget that the bonkers conspiracy theories Giuliani and his associates pushed weren’t just lies, they were toxins that entered the political world’s bloodstream. The political system’s resulting sickness isn’t going away.

488. Lynna, OM says

     29 September 2021 at 1:25 pm

     blf @480, if Russia, (and Putin in particular), are threatening “retaliatory measures” that’s a sign that the disinformation campaign about COVID is important to them. They really think that disinformation campaign will weaken Germany, the USA, and all of the western allies. Putin thinks it is working and he wants to keep it going.

489. Lynna, OM says

     29 September 2021 at 1:37 pm

     Wonkette: “Dipsh*t Governors Showing Their Asses, Again, On Coronavirus, Again!”

     […] Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp would sure like to have an effective response to the pandemic as long as it doesn’t involve requiring masks, vaccines, or anything else that might upset rightwing Georgians and make them vote for one of his farther-right challengers in next year’s gubernatorial primary. Lately, Kemp has taken to claiming that vaccine mandates don’t work, because just look at how mandating the AIDS vaccine didn’t work. The problem with that, of course, is that there is no such thing as a vaccine for HIV/AIDS at all, and also no government mandates for that nonexistent vaccine.

     Here’s video, via Now This News, with an OMGWTFGFOH reply from Georgia State Rep. Sam Park: [video available at the link]

     Georgia Public Broadcasting has the details:

     “Just like the AIDS vaccine; mandating it didn’t work,” Kemp said in a Sept. 13 interview on Fox Business News.

     Kemp repeated the assertion last week on the podcast of Macon-based conservative pundit Erick Erickson. There he argued the best path to more COVID vaccination is through public education.

     “That’s basically how the AIDS vaccine worked,” Kemp said. “I mean, people wouldn’t take it early on because it was mandated.”

     Neither on Fox Business News nor the Erick Erickson podcast did the interviewer attempt to correct Kemp.

     Kemp also made the claim in September 2020, only that time he was comparing the nonexistent AIDS vaccine to mask mandates, not vaccines.

     But don’t you worry, kids, Kemp’s office has an easy and absolutely credible explanation for why Kemp keeps saying the “AIDS vaccine” mandate never worked! It’s been telling media outlets that Kemp simply meant the vaccine against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which causes cervical cancer.

     Nice save! Except for how it’s transparently bullshit, since Kemp never once said “HIV,” […] And it’s also true that Republicans hate the HPV vaccine too […]

     Mind you, Kemp’s just-so story about this supposed failure of a vaccine mandate doesn’t make any sense, either for HPV or for HIV/AIDS. For one thing, only five jurisdictions (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington DC) in the US actually mandate the HPV vaccine for school attendance. Georgia is not among them, as astute readers might notice. As GPB points out, Georgia actually lags behind the national average for HPV vaccination, too. […]

     And of course, the good news is that Kemp’s just plain wrong about the effectiveness of vaccine mandates: They work just great for childhood immunizations, and already during this pandemic, compliance with employer and governmental mandates has been very good. F’rinstance, of its 67,000 US workers, United Airlines announced today that it will begin the process of firing just 593 employees who refuse to get vaccinated. Hey, over 99 percent compliance is pretty darn good! […]

     Florida: Ron DeSantis Declares War On Australia, Which Might Be China

     One of the ways that Australia has kept its death toll from the pandemic low — just 1,256 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic — has been an aggressive use of localized lockdowns in cities where there have been outbreaks. Back in July, when the Delta variant led to an outbreak involving some 3,000 cases and nine deaths, unarmed Australian soldiers were brought in to help police enforce the lockdown in Sydney. With the pandemic now waning, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced that after Sydney phases in an end to its lockdown, between October 11 and December 1, people will need to show proof of vaccination to enter stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues.

     The Australian lockdowns prompted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to wonder yesterday why the United States even maintains diplomatic relations with such a totalitarian place, which is surely exactly as opposed to freedom as Communist China. Speaking at a boat show, DeSantis lamented conditions in the Australian gulag-cities:

     “That’s not a free country. It’s not a free country at all,” DeSantis said. “In fact, I wonder why we would still have the same diplomatic relations when they’re doing that. Is Australia freer than communist China right now? I don’t know. The fact that that’s even a question tells you something has gone dramatically off the rails with some of this stuff.”

     While he was at it, DeSantis took the opportunity to attack Dr. Anthony Fauci, lying through his teeth and claiming Fauci wants to reimpose lockdowns, because after all, isn’t telling people to wear masks exactly the same thing? DeSantis asserted that Fauci wanted to override people’s freedoms just like those commie Australians, and urged them to go have fun instead, because “this idea that Fauci says just stay in your house and never leave, that is just so destructive to people’s overall well-being.” Again, Dr. Fauci has called for people to get vaccinated and to wear masks in indoor public settings. That’s actually different from sitting in your house and never leaving. It is also not China!

     We should also note that, in comparison to Australia’s total of 1,256 COVID deaths during the entire pandemic so far, Florida notched up nearly double that number, 2448 deaths, between September 3 and September 9 of this year. […] the state’s total death toll of 54,067 […]

     Alabama: COVID Relief Funds Going To Build Prisons

     Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama defended her decision to use roughly $400 million in assistance from the American Rescue Plan to build and renovate several prisons in the state, because what good is getting funding to help with the pandemic if you can’t construct places where the next pandemic can spread?

     […] House Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen calling for an investigation, because how the hell are prisons related to dealing with the pandemic? [WaPo (No paywall)]

     Texas, South Carolina: Judges Tell GOP Govs To GTFO With Mask Mandate Bans

     Two separate state courts in Texas ruled yesterday that local officials can order temporary mask mandates for city and county buildings and in public schools, Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order banning such mask mandates notwithstanding. […] schools in all five of Texas’s largest cities are now defying Abbott’s mask mandate ban. […]

     And in South Carolina, a federal judge suspended South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster’s ban on school mask mandates yesterday, saying the decision wasn’t even a close call, you dipshit. US District Judge Mary Geiger Lewis agreed with the ACLU that the ban on masking discriminates against the need to provide equal education for kids with disabilities, also you dipshit:

     “It is noncontroversial that children need to go to school. And, they are entitled to any reasonable accommodation that allows them to do so. No one can reasonably argue that it is an undue burden to wear a mask to accommodate a child with disabilities,” Lewis wrote.

     Lewis compared the General Assembly preventing mask requirements to telling schools they can no longer install wheelchair ramps.

     “Masks must, at a minimum, be an option for school districts to employ to accommodate those with disabilities so they, too, can access a free public education,” the judge wrote.

     A spokesturd for McMaster said the governor would fight the decision all the way to the US Supreme Court if he has to, because liberty […]

     Link

490. Lynna, OM says

     29 September 2021 at 5:14 pm

     Cartoon: “The shortages are all British made and British owned, and that’s something we can be incredibly proud of.”

     New Yorker link

491. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 4:13 am

     FFS, I bought a fake health pass … and then I caught Covid-19 (France24 edits in {curly braces}):

     When France this summer introduced the Covid-19 health pass, 25-year-old anti-vaxxer Lexa[name changed] decided to circumvent the rules by buying a fake health pass on social media. Shortly after having been fraudulently registered as inoculated, she fell severely ill with Covid-19. […]

     Even at the height of France’s Covid-19 pandemic, when the country’s death toll was topping 500 per day, 25-year-old Parisian Lexa never really believed in the dangers of the coronavirus. At least not for young people like herself. For me, it was something that only affected old people. And if you were young, like me, you might have two or three symptoms to show if you caught it, but that was it.

     For Lexa, getting vaccinated against Covid-19 has never been an option. I have plenty of reasons for[delusions about] why I don’t want to get vaccinated, but the main reason is that I don’t think it has been researched enough. It’s come about too fast, and in my opinion, it takes years to invent a {safe} vaccine[, and the over 5 billion jabs given worldwide prove I know what I am talking about — the Chicago Cubs did not win the 2016 World Series because Danger Mouse was eating you-know-who’s cheese].

     [… W]hen the government this summer introduced the Covid-19 health pass […] to access public spaces such as bars, restaurants and cinemas, Lexa felt authorities had gone too far, interfering way too much in her personal life and decisions.

     I couldn’t even go to the gym, said a frustrated Lexa, who [wears seatbelts, etc.]

     A friend of mine told me she knew someone at the social security services and who could sell me a ‘real’ health pass, so I added him to my Snapchat contacts. Shortly after adding the person to her network, Lexa said she received at least 10 other friend suggestions, from government agency employees to doctors, also selling fraudulent health passes.

     When you start looking for them, they’re everywhere, she said of the fake health pass providers […]

     Whilst some of Lexa’s statements are plausible, they are all being set in eejit quotes for reasons that will become obvious (with my added emboldening)…

     […]
     A few weeks after having bought the health pass, Lexa, who thanks to the document had finally been able to resume her long-missed gym workouts, was suddenly hit by vertigo.

     I was in the gym, working out on the exercise bike and my head started spinning so much I just had to stop. Then, when I walked down the stairs, I was so dizzy I could barely hold on to the railing.

     A PCR test revealed that Lexa had been infected with the coronavirus and developed Covid-19. The next few days passed by in a haze, with Lexa showing all the symptoms of a severe case of the illness: Fever, muscle ache, headache, loss of taste and smell, and a difficulty breathing.

     I was floored. I could only walk a few steps at a time, and for every sentence I spoke I had to catch my breath, she recalled, noting that even a month after recuperating from Covid-19, she still hasn’t recovered her sense of taste or smell. I would say it’s only at about 15 percent of what it is normally.

     The experience scared Lexa, who now says she has changed her mind about the seriousness of Covid-19.

     It really hit me hard, in a way I didn’t think it would. I’m not about to go scaremongering or anything by saying it’s super super dangerous {for young people}, but if you’re over 40 or have another kind of pathology I think it is, she said, adding it probably would have taken out my mum who has a heart condition.

     Lexa hasn’t changed her mind about not getting the inoculation, however. No, it still scares me, she says. But even if she backtracks on the issue, her registration as “vaccinated” is likely to cause her trouble, since she would first have to come clean to a health professional who is then obliged to report the fraud[, facing a potential penalty of up to €45,000 in fines and three years in prison].

     […]

492. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 4:26 am

     Brazil hospital chain accused of hiding Covid deaths and giving unproven drugs (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):

     […]
     One of Brazil’s biggest healthcare providers has been accused of covering up coronavirus deaths, pressuring doctors to prescribe ineffective treatments, and testing unproven drugs on elderly patients as part of ideologically charged efforts to help the Brazilian government resist a Covid lockdown.

     Prevent Senior, a health maintenance organization with a chain of hospitals and more than half a million members, is in the crosshairs of a congressional inquiry into Brazil’s coronavirus crisis and the highly controversial response of President Jair Bolsonaro.

     Last month a group of whistleblowing doctors handed a 10,000-page dossier to investigators containing a series of incendiary allegations against the São Paulo-based firm that caters to senior citizens.

     The dossier contained claims that elderly patients had been used as “human guinea pigs” for the testing of unproven Covid “remedies” without giving their full consent.

     […]

     They included claims that:

     ● Prevent Senior doctors were pressured into giving patients a cocktail of ineffective drugs, including the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and the anti-parasitic ivermectin, in what was referred to as the “Covid kit”.

     ● The decision to promote hydroxychloroquine as a supposedly effective Covid treatment was partly designed to help government ideologues who allegedly wanted to use such information to convince Brazilians there was no need to stay at home during the pandemic. […]

     ● The use of such unproven medicines was also part of “a cost-reduction strategy” on the part of Prevent Senior. […]

     ● Coronavirus deaths had been concealed in order not to compromise the results of Prevent Senior tests allegedly designed to show “Covid kit” drugs were effective against the disease. “This is fraud,” said the inquiry’s vice-president, Randolfe Rodrigues.

     ● Prevent Senior doctors had supposedly received instructions to reduce the oxygen supply to seriously ill Covid patients who had been in intensive care for more than 10 or 14 days. “The expression I heard repeated on numerous occasions was: ‘Deaths free up beds too,’” [ the lawyer representing the whistleblowers, Bruna] Morto said.

     […]

     [Daniel Dourado, a public health expert and lawyer from the University of São Paulo: T]here were disturbing signs that Prevent Senior may have formed an “alliance” with some government officials and informal advisers “to create a narrative that was used to trick the Brazilian population into becoming infected” with Covid. “These accusations are extremely serious,” Dourado said.

     Chrystina Barros, a member of the Covid-19 taskforce at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University, agreed that the accusations, if confirmed, were grave.

     “If it happened as is claimed, it is like telling patients … that they were not being treated by the doctors in front of them. {That actually} those doctors were following a script laid out by an administrative office that was motivated either by cost reduction … or political purposes,” Barros said.
     […]

493. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 5:06 am

     There are twice as many Ohio school board candidates than four years ago. Is COVID-19 responsible? (my added emboldening):

     […]
     Races that were once sleepy, uncontested events are now hard-fought elections where people steal campaign signs, sling accusations and drop some serious cash.

     That’s unusual, said Ohio Education President Scott DiMauro.

     “Those kinds of partisan fights are breaking out in non-partisan school board races in a lot of places around the state,” DiMauro said.

     The number of candidates for school board seats has doubled since 2017, according to the Ohio School Boards Association. And this year, the majority of folks on the ballot are new — 1,277 incumbents and 1,351 newcomers.

     “Something is happening that is increasing the interest,” association President Rick Lewis said.

     And the response to the question, “what made you decide to run for office?” has overwhelmingly been COVID-19.

     […]

     “Emotions are running very, very high,” Lewis said. “It’s almost to the point where the lack of civility can become concerning.”

     The Columbus suburb of Worthington curtailed a September school board meeting after a group of attendees refused to wear masks and two people gave a Nazi salute. Board members in a Colorado mountain town needed a police escort to their cars after a particularly contentious meeting in August. And a fistfight between multiple people broke out in the parking lot of a recent Missouri school board meeting.

     “This is the first time I’ve seen it at the local level like this,” said Aryeh Alex, a Franklin Township Trustee who ran the Democratic state House campaigns in Ohio last year. “The level of national toxicity seeping into our local meetings. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

     Local government meetings used to be about potholes and making sure the school bus showed up on time. Now they’re about COVID conspiracies and the president’s agenda.

     [… various loons running…]

     Candidates who oppose mask mandates aren’t the only political newcomers in this election cycle.

     Kelley Arnold is running for one of those open seats in Hilliard, and she’s been supportive of the way her district navigated the pandemic.

     “I’m not an epidemiologist. I have to rely on the science,” Arnold said. “It’s so crucial we listen to our children’s hospitals when they ask schools to mandate masks.”

     But there’s no guarantee that’s going to happen.

     School boards across Ohio could flip control in November. Off-year elections have much lower turnouts and small, highly motivated groups can sway their outcomes.
     […]

494. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 5:42 am

     Top Republicans rub shoulders with extremists in secretive rightwing group, leak reveals (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):

     […]
     A leaked document has revealed the membership list of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP), showing how it provides opportunities for elite Republicans, wealthy entrepreneurs, media proprietors and pillars of the US conservative movement to rub shoulders with anti-abortion and anti-Islamic extremists.

     The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors rightwing hate groups, describes the CNP as “a shadowy and intensely secretive group {which} has operated behind the scenes” in its efforts to “build the conservative movement”.

     The leaked membership list dates from September last year, and reveals the 40-year-old CNP put influential Trump administration[hair furor dalekocrazy] figures alongside leaders of organizations that have been categorized as hate groups.

     The group was founded in 1981 by activists influential in the Christian right[taliban], including Tim LaHaye, Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich, who had also been involved in founding and leading the Moral Majority. Initially they were seeking to maximize their influence on the new Reagan administration. In subsequent years, CNP meetings have played host to presidential aspirants like George W Bush and 1999 and Mitt Romney in 2007, and sitting presidents including Donald Trump[squatter hair furor] in 2020[last year!].

     In videos obtained by the Washington Post in 2020, the CNP executive committee chairman, Bill Walton, told attendees of the upcoming election: This is a spiritual battle we are in. This is good versus evil. [We must make a profit no matter who wins, and it’s more profitable to keep the battle going so we can price-gouge both sides.]

     The CNP is so secretive, according to reports, that its members are instructed not to reveal their affiliation or even name the group.

     […some of the members listed, including (but not limited to) Frank Gaffney, Tony Perkins, Matthew Staver (the worst lawyer not named Larry Klanman or Orly Taitz (don’t know of either of those two is listed)), …]

     Also, there are members of organizations listed as anti-immigrant hate groups, including James and Amapola Hansberger, co-founders of Legal Immigrants For America (Lifa).

     Additionally, the list includes members of groups that have been accused of extremist positions on abortion. They include Margaret H Hartshorn, chair of the board of Heartbeat International, which has reportedly spread misinformation worldwide to pregnant women.

     Several high-profile figures associated with the Trump administration, or conspiracy-minded characters in Trump’s orbit, are also on the list, such as Jerome R Corsi, who has written conspiracy-minded books about John Kerry, Barack Obama and the September 11 attacks. Corsi is listed as a member of CNP’s board of governors.

     Along with these representatives of extremist positions, the CNP rolls include members of ostensibly more mainstream conservative groups, and representatives of major American corporations. Other still come from the Republican party, a network of rightwing activist organizations, and the companies and foundations that back them.

     A newcomer to the group since a previous version of the member list was exposed is Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA […]

     Conservative movement heavyweights in the group include Lisa B Nelson, chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC]; Eugene Mayer, president of the Federalist Society; Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Return [sic (thanks, it wouldn’t be the Grauniad without a typo (it’s Reform))]; Daniel Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the CPac conference; […]

     One member, Lawson Bader, is the president of Donor’s Trust and Donors Capital Fund, non-profits that disguise the identities of their own donors, and whose largesse to rightwing causes has seen them described as “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement”.

     Another member, Richard Graber, is the president and chief executive of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Bradley foundation has long bankrolled conservative movement causes, including Donors Trust, and has reportedly also sponsored widespread efforts to discredit the election of Joe Biden in 2020.

     Conservative media figures are also on the list: Neil Patel, co-founder and publisher of the Daily Caller; Larry Beasley, chief executive of the rightwing newspaper the Washington Times; […]

     Pro-gun groups are also represented, with NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre and Gun Owners of America founder Tim Macy each listed as members.

     The 220-page document — which includes a statement of principles and an indication of members’ policy interests alongside a complete member list — was leaked and provided to journalists via transparency organization, Distributed Denial of Secrets.

     Emma Best from that group said in a messenger chat that CNP was “a secretive forum for ultra-wealthy and elite conservatives to strategize and form long-term plans that have national and international impact”. Therefore, she said, “any opportunity to shine a light on their members, activities and interests is clearly in the public interest”.

     The Guardian repeatedly requested comment from CNP staff, including Executive Director Brad McEwen, and other groups mentioned in this story but received no immediate response.

495. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 5:58 am

     From the Grauniad’s current pandemic live blog:

     [… A] second hospital in Alaska is rationing health care as the state deals with a spike in coronavirus cases.

     Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corp, in Bethel, announced the move on Wednesday as it reported it is operating at full capacity.

     Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, which is the state’s largest hospital, has already been rationing care.

     Coronavirus infections in Alaska have risen 42% in the past week.

     The president of the Bethel region hospital says it did everything possible to delay rationing but had to take the step.

     Hospital CEO Dan Winkelman urged “every resident of the Yukon-Kuskokwim region to get vaccinated, wear a mask in indoor public areas, and social distance.” He warned that “this is our last stand against this virus.”

     Loosely related, The California region where Covid ‘just isn’t slowing down’:

     California has the lowest coronavirus case rate in the country. But within the state, the agricultural Central Valley and rural north remain overwhelmed.

     Resistance to vaccines and public health mandates, combined with the advance of the Delta variant, have triggered an explosion of cases that are pushing already strained public health systems to the brink. In some counties, the case rate per 100,000 people is three or more times that of the state.

     At some healthcare facilities, critically ill patients have waited for days to be transferred from the emergency department to the ICU. Throughout the valley, hospitals have reported having less than 10% ICU capacity available since the beginning of September. […]

     On a typical day at the Community Regional medical center, a hospital in Fresno, Dr Kenny Banh says, patients are lined up outside on ambulance gurneys, because there are no hospital beds available. When he gets inside, even more patients in gurneys line the hallway.

     […]

     The deluge of illness and death had been especially difficult to fathom because the surge “was preventable”, said Banh. The region has much lower vaccination rates than the Bay Area or Los Angeles, and Banh regularly sees patients who are on ventilators and still do not believe they have Covid-19.

     The vast majority of hospitalized Covid-19 patients were unvaccinated, Banh said, and nearly all the others had been immunocompromised people […] for whom the vaccines are not as protective.

     […] In recent weeks, ambulance staff have increasingly had to treat patients and keep them stabilized for hours while they wait for hospital beds to vacate.

     […]

     “Your heart gets pounded by death after death after death,” said Mary Lynn Briggs, an ICU nurse at Mercy hospital in the valley town of Bakersfield.

     Hey! I had a (minor) emergency operation at Mercy once. There was a very nice nurse who looked after me while I was there (overnight), albeit due to the timeframe I doubt it was Ms Briggs.

     […] She wished the blissfully unaware public outside the hospitals could take a peek inside, she added, “and realize — this is what happens when you make the decision not to get the vaccine, and don’t wear a mask”.

     The valley and rural northern California — which have been rocked by volatile anti-mask protests and fury over pandemic business restrictions — were among the regions with the highest support for a gubernatorial recall campaign that sought to unseat the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom […].

     Meanwhile, agricultural workers […] have been the hardest hit. The rate of Covid-19 test positivity in farmworkers in California was four times that of the rest of the country, according to a report published in Jama Network Open earlier this month. Throughout the state, Latino and Black residents remain disproportionately affected by the pandemic — Black residents have the highest rate of hospitalization in Los Angeles county.

     But while coastal metropolises have the resources and staffing to cope with surges, rural California’s health system is faltering. […]

496. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 6:21 am

     More from the Grauniad’s current pandemic live blog:

     […]
     Charity food banks in Britain are “preparing for the worst” as the government starts winding up emergency aid measures put in place to cushion the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on millions of workers and low-income households, Reuters reports.

     An extra weekly payment of £20 (US$27) to support the country’s poorest families will be cut next month, and more than a million workers face an uncertain future as Britain becomes the first big economy to halt its Covid jobs support scheme.

     Food banks, which hand out staple goods from dried pasta to baby food, are especially concerned about the loss of the top-up to the Universal Credit (UC) benefit, which is claimed by almost 6 million people, according to official statistics.

     […]

     Nationwide, more than 800,000 people will be pushed into poverty by the benefit cut, according to British think-tank the Legatum Institute.

     A fifth of the benefit’s claimants said they would “very likely” need to skip meals once the uplift is withdrawn, found a survey of more than 2,000 people carried out for the Trussell Trust.

     A similar number said they would struggle to afford to heat their homes.

     The lazy buggers can get a job driving lorries, said a Minister between smokes of his cigar in one of Parliament’s many bars. When asked about training to drive fuel lorries, he snorted, They can learn on the job. That’s cheaper, faster, more effective — real-world, you know, not some made-up course in a back lot. Lot more bang for the pound, none of this euro nonsense. Waiter, more brandy! Snap to it, man! Now where was I? Ah yes… trying to decide whether to go to Monaco and then sail on my yacht to Fiji — or maybe Tahiti — or have the yacht meet me there, for Christmas this year. Decisions, decisions. Where’s my brandy? Bloody waiter is as lazy as those job-shy lorry drivers, on the dole, sitting in pubs all day whilst being paid!

497. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 6:51 am

     Got him! Again. Former French President Sharkoführer, Nicolas Sarkozy given one year in prison for illegally financing 2012 election:

     The former French president Nicolas Sarkozyhas been sentenced to a one-year prison term after a Paris court found him guilty of illegally financing his unsuccessful 2012 re-election effort.

     Sarkozy, who was not in court for the verdict, has denied wrongdoing and is expected to appeal.

     The court, in handing down the sentence, said it could be served at home and under electronic surveillance. [exasperated sigh]

     Prosecutors said almost twice the maximum permitted amount of €22.5m (£19.4m) was spent on the campaign, in an election he lost to the Socialist party’s François Hollande.

     He told[lied to] the court in June he had not been involved in the logistics of the campaign or in how money was spent. The court said he had been made aware of the overspending and it was not necessary for him to have approved each individual payment to be responsible.

     Prosecutors had sought a one-year jail term, half of it suspended [extremely exasperated sigh …].

     Sarkozy was found guilty in a separate trial in March of trying to bribe a judge and peddle influence in order to obtain confidential information on a judicial inquiry.

     The former president was sentenced to three years in jail in that trial, two of which were suspended, but has not actually spent time in prison yet, while his appeal is pending. [more exasperation …]

     Some snippets from France24, Former French President Sarkozy sentenced to one year for illegal campaign financing:

     He became nevertheless France’s first post-war president to be handed a custodial sentence. Before him, the only former leader to be sentenced at trial was Sarkozy’s predecessor Jacques Chirac, who received a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for corruption over a fake jobs scandal relating to his time as Paris mayor.

     Sarkozy […] has accused the judiciary of hounding him since he lost his presidential immunity […].

     In addition to the former president, 13 other people went on trial, including members of his conservative Républicans party, accountants and heads of the communication group in charge of organising the rallies, Bygmalion[, the public relations firm that set up a system of fake invoices to mask the real cost of the election events]. They face charges including forgery, breach of trust, fraud and complicity in illegal campaign financing.

     Some have acknowledged wrongdoing and detailed the system of false invoices that aimed to cover up the overspending.

     Sarkozy […] is still playing a role behind the scenes. French media have reported that he is involved in the process of choosing a conservative candidate ahead of France’s presidential election next year.

     That last snippet makes me wonder… Sharkoführer’s party Conservative Les Républicains forgo primary to choose candidate at party convention. A snippet:

     Saturday’s vote was about modifying a 2015 party statute that dictated that the LR party candidate would be nominated through a primary election open to all French citizens. That led to bitterness in 2016 over the elimination of Nicolas Sarkozy, which only worsened when the primary winner, François Fillon, failed to make it to the presidential election’s second round.

     The party members decided this time to reserve the voting rights to LR members “who have paid their party dues by 15 days before the vote” […]

     It’s fairly easy to imagine Sharkoführer being one of the powers-that-be behind the “no primary” stunt. Les Républicains have a habit of selecting the corrupt, Fillion’s “2017 bid for presidency was torpedoed by a fake job scandal involving his wife”, clearing the way for the current President, Emmanuel Macron. (Albeit to be fair, Chirac wasn’t Les Républicains.)

498. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 7:15 am

     My anonymous “Minister” in @495 is not-so-far from reality, from the Grauniad’s current business live blog:

     Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab has suggested offenders who have been given community sentences could be used to address the country’s lack of HGV drivers, amid the ongoing fuel shortages.

     PA Media explains:

     Mr Raab […] has dismissed Labour’s call for 100,000 migrant visas to be issued to provide sufficient drivers.

     The former Foreign Secretary said the move would leave the country reliant in the long term on labour coming from abroad, and instead suggested the gap could be filled in another way.

     We’ve been getting[enslaving] prisoners and offenders to do volunteering and unpaid work, Mr Raab told The Spectator, in comments carried by The Times.

     Why not if there are shortages encourage them to do [poorly-]paid work where there’s a benefit for the economy, benefit for society[my shareholdings]?

     [… H]aulage firms and retailers have warned that training up new staff will take time.

     Plus, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) already has a backlog of HGV licence applications to process.
     […]

     As I was em explaining, slurred the Minister, der problem ist ease–easy–easyilyyy solved. More port! Waiter, another port. Make it a bog–dog–dig fecking hell, big one this time. Port! Ports, that’s its, it’s, er it, ports… we can export — ha, ha, see my joke there, port, export — export all those surplus new lorry drivers. Da EU needs ’em, ya know. « S’il vous plaît, puis-je avoir d’autres chauffeurs de camion, Monsieur ? » they all be begging us.

499. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 7:32 am

     ‘Prickles down the neck’: project reveals unsung female heroes of Sutton Hoo dig:

     […]
     It was 12 years ago that conservator Anita Bools first laid eyes on photographs which had been left in a plastic bag at the reception of the National Trust site Sutton Hoo by a mystery donor.

     She remembered they were laid out on tables for her to see and decide how important they might be. “It was one of those moments you get prickles down the back of your neck. I thought ‘my goodness … this is the genuine thing’. It almost felt like the archaeological discovery itself.”

     The hundreds of images in meticulously prepared albums were from August 1939. In fascinating detail they captured the excitement of one of the most extraordinary archaeological digs in British history.

     On Wednesday, the trust announced it had completed a project conserving, digitising and making the photographs taken by Barbara Wagstaff and Mercie Lack, two schoolteachers and friends with a passion for photography and archaeology, publicly available.

     Lack was staying with her aunt on holiday when she heard about the discovery of an Anglo Saxon ship at nearby Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. She visited the site and got permission to return with her friend Wagstaff to photograph the dig.

     Remarkably, Lack and Wagstaff also managed to obtain rolls of 35mm German Agfa colour slide film which became briefly available before war broke out. The trust believes the resulting images are among the earliest surviving colour photographs of any major archaeological dig.

     “Through their contacts, they somehow got hold of the film,” said Bools. “I don’t think we’ve quite worked out how they got hold of it.”

     The mystery donor of the albums turned out to be Andrew Lack, the great-nephew of Mercie. He later formally gifted the 11 albums of black and white photographs, one colour album and various other loose prints to the trust.

     Over the last three years every image has been conserved, catalogued and digitised and from Wednesday will be available online and to visitors.

     […]

     In the film [The Dig] the photographer is a fictional man played by Johnny Flynn. Lack and Wagstaff are not characters in the film although it could be argued that it covers the uncovering of the treasures, events which they did not photograph.

     Whatever the rights and wrongs of that, the National Trust now hopes the names of Lack and Wagstaff will also be properly recognised as heroes of the Sutton Hoo story.

     “They made such a valuable contribution,” said [archaeology and engagement manager at Sutton Hoo, Laura] Howarth. “It has been such a privilege working with their collection, you kind of feel you know them a little bit and one of the great things now is to share that with other people.”

     National Trust synopsis of the conservation effort, Historic image digitisation at Sutton Hoo, with a link to the now-online results.

500. blf says

     30 September 2021 at 8:28 am

     A snippet from How France plans to tackle its lorry driver shortage (possibly paywalled):

     Drivers in France already enjoy relatively good facilities with a network of stops with free parking, showering facilities and the Les Routiers restaurants that offer good quality but cheap hot food to drivers.

     There’s nothing at all like that in teh “U”K — an example of the worse conditions (in addition to low(er) pay) for lorry (truck) drivers.