[…] “Voices for Long COVID” features testimonies from “long-haulers” between the ages of 18 and 29 in which they discuss a multitude of issues they’ve faced after testing positive for the coronavirus, including memory loss, brain fog and chronic fatigue.
The website focuses on conveying the message that some people who developed COVID-19 early in the pandemic “still have symptoms of long COVID, more than a year after their initial infection.”
“Anyone who has had COVID-19 can develop long COVID, including people who have had mild or asymptomatic COVID-19. Long COVID symptoms can include fatigue, shortness of breath, ‘brain fog,’ gastrointestinal problems and loss of taste and smell, among many others,” the website said.
“Tens of thousands of Americans are struggling to manage Long COVID while doctors and medical researchers are learning more about the condition and how to treat it,” it added. […]
“Thousands of Americans struggle with Long COVID every day. Their stories are important reminders that vaccination is our best tool to prevent this potentially life-altering condition,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, in a statement. […]
The ISS seems fine after a Russian weapons test blew up a defunct satellite, but these incidents could become more common.
Russia shot down one of its Soviet-era satellites in a weapons test on Monday, sending more than 1,500 pieces of trackable debris into space. This forced astronauts on the International Space Station to shelter for about two hours in two spacecraft that could return them to Earth in the event of an imminent collision. While the ISS appears to be in the clear for now, experts say the situation is still dangerous. Satellite operators will likely need to navigate around this new cloud of space junk for several years and possibly decades.
In fact, Russia’s latest missile test may have increased the total amount of space junk, including discarded pieces of rockets and satellites in Earth’s orbit, by as much as 10 percent. These shards are spinning at incredibly fast speeds and risk hitting active satellites that power critical technologies, like GPS navigation and weather forecasting. Space debris like this is actually so dangerous that national security officials are worried it could be used as a weapon in a future space war. In fact, the State Department has already said the Monday missile test is evidence that Russia is more than willing to create debris that jeopardizes the safety of all countries operating in low-Earth orbit, and even risks disrupting the peace in space.
These risks have only heightened concerns that we’re far from solving the space junk problem, especially as private companies and foreign governments launch thousands of new satellites into orbit — inevitably creating even more space junk.
Monday’s events, however, were more politically fraught than your average space debris incident. The Russian government launched a so-called antisatellite test (ASAT), which, as the name implies, is designed to destroy satellites in orbit. Launched from a site a few hundred miles north of Moscow, the missile struck a non-operational Russian spy satellite called Kosmos-1408 that had been orbiting the Earth since 1982.
[…] “I’m outraged by this irresponsible and destabilizing action,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “With its long and storied history in human spaceflight, it is unthinkable that Russia would endanger not only the American and international partner astronauts on the ISS, but also their own cosmonauts.” Nelson added that Russia’s actions were “reckless and dangerous” and also imperiled those aboard China’s Tiangong space station. […]
Wonkette: “Jim Bob Duggar So Mad Son Canceled Just For ALLEGED Child Porn That He Is Running For Office”
Hey guess what, there’s a person named “Duggar” running for political office. No, not the one charged with all the kiddie porn named Josh, but rather the one named Jim Bob, who is the father to the one charged with all the kiddie porn. […]
Yes, Jim Bob Duggar is running for the Arkansas state Senate. […] And his platform — or at least part of it — is “cancel culture.” Yes, with everything that’s going on with his family right now. He’s really saying this, on his campaign website.
After telling his boring-ass story about how he married a person and they decided to start a birthing farm for 20 children, Jim Bob starts in with the whiny whiny whiny whiny white-ass man whining that typifies Republican white men these days.
He whines about “NWA families and small businesses” — that’s Northwest Arkansas, not the rappers — “who are too often bullied by giant businesses and government mandates that violate their conscience.” He whines about “government leaders act[ing] like dictators, shutting down small businesses and telling the masses to comply with their mandates or get arrested.” He whines about “our freedom of speech [being] censored on social media if we dare question the liberal left’s propaganda.”
And now!
Now we are seeing President Biden advocating for forced vaccines for our children—with an experimental, untested shot! Parents, not the government, should make decisions for their own children. The liberals scream “it’s my body” when they want to end the life of an unborn child but would gladly force mandatory vaccines upon everyone without hesitation.
Wait what is his firstborn son charged with again? Oh yeah. Plz tell us more about protecting the kids from “vaccine.”
Is it fair for us to keep bringing up Josh Duggar’s little problems? Oh, we think so, considering how we could have all seen this fame-obsessed family’s current predicament coming YEARSFUCKINGYEARS ago, when all the sibling-molesting scandals involving Josh Duggar started coming to light, and we really got a good look at the Duggar-style Christian worldview that arguably contributed to all those scandals.
But Jim Bob himself is bringing it up on his campaign website. That’s where he goes really hard into the “cancel culture” schtick. And that’s why it’s absofuckinlutely fair game.
Jim Bob whines:
I will not allow the liberal left, social media, or fake news to define me and my family. Like so many other families, we too have faced crises, difficulties, and heartbreak. “Cancel culture” and the radical left want to keep us from being involved in politics. They say because our family has faced problems we should shrink away—this is why they are often so relentlessly unkind, but we cannot sit on the sidelines during a time when one of America’s most important battles is taking place! We are devoted to doing our part and making a difference for our children and grandchildren.
Is the liberal left, social media and the fake news the one that arrested Josh Duggar for kiddie porn? Or was that just the po-lice?
Fuck this guy, is our point.
In other Duggar news, Josh Duggar’s kiddie porn trial is in two weeks and his wife literally just gave birth to their seventh child […]
Some good economic news from the Washington Post, albeit a little damn late: It turns out that for four straight months, from June through September, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics “sharply underestimated job gains,” missing a total of 626,000 new jobs in those four months. It’s the biggest gap between actual job growth and the BLS’s initial monthly jobs reports since 1979. As the Post’s Andrew Van Dam puts it, “If those revisions were themselves a jobs report, they’d be an absolute blockbuster.”
It’s not because anyone was asleep at the switch; the article goes into quite a bit of detail to explain how careful BLS statisticians are to account for variables. Rather, it’s a matter of how the BLS figures out the data for its monthly jobs reports — as we’ve noted previously, the sampling system works pretty well in normal economic times, but it’s not terribly effective when employment numbers are rising or falling quickly, as has been the case in our weird pandemic economy. In this case, reports of a stagnant non-recovery were greatly exaggerated.
As Van Dam explains,
[…] The missing jobs surfaced through revisions to the widely watched non-farm payrolls number that BLS releases each month. The data is considered preliminary until it has been revised twice. The fixes are typically minor, but recent revisions have been big enough to turn a substantial slump into a surprising surge.
So what went wrong? Basically, the numbers were off because the monthly payroll reports rely on data that businesses provide to government surveys. In this case, “businesses have been slow to respond to government surveys amid the chaos of the pandemic,” meaning that they were hiring people but slow in reporting the new hires to the BLS. In fact, Van Dam notes that as many as a quarter of responses from the more than 697,000 businesses the BLS surveys were submitted late in one recent month.
[…] The story these latest revisions tell is a heck of a lot better economic news than the earlier reports of disappointing job growth suggested, particularly for August of this year:
[…] Unfortunately, by the time the more accurate jobs numbers were posted, Biden’s polling was already beginning to suffer, in part because of the COVID resurgence, and in part because of what was being called the dismal jobs numbers. […]
Gosh, next we’re probably going to find out that nobody was sitting around on their butts collecting emergency unemployment, oh wait, we already knew that!
[…] hooray for the number crunchers, and we now vow to refer back to this article whenever weird one-month economic numbers raise their bizarre fuzzy heads. Also, get ready for a bunch of doofuses to continue insisting that even though the economy is showing very good growth, typical families with nine kids can’t afford the 12 gallons of milk they need every week and everything is terrible we’re doomed.
Followup to comment 490 in the previous chapter of this thread.
“Chuck Todd Pretty Sure Biden’s Historic Infrastructure Bill Is DOOOOOM For Democrats, DOOOOOM.”
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (or BIF) that President Joe Biden signed into law Monday will do a lot of great things for the country, but Chuck Todd thinks it’s too little too late. Yesterday, the “Meet the Press” host explained why the White House bill signing ceremony was like the sad final days of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. [video available at the link]
TODD: Look, yesterday that event … I’ll be honest, it felt like — it just felt like an event out of time. That event might have been impactful in August or September, or October. It feels more like an epilogue to the ending of what’s going to — might not be a good story for Democrats in 2022.
Yes, the guy who infamously claimed Hillary Clinton was “overprepared” for a presidential debate now insists that passage of a historic infrastructure bill marks the beginning of the end for Biden and the Democrats. He declares this without any facts to back up his dire prediction. […]
It’s true that the fundamentals point to Democratic losses in the midterms. Republicans have already gerrymandered themselves a House majority before a single vote’s been cast. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate a bill that will positively impact American lives, even if those same voters don’t appreciate it and hand control of the nation to the book-burning party.
Todd is from the Mark Halperin school of game theory politics. All that matters is how policies and legislation “sell.” It’s cynical and amoral, and if it’s Sunday, that’s what you’ll get on “Meet the Press.”
[…] BIF is expected to create almost one million new jobs over the next decade, but Todd dismisses its impact because a few dozen Democrats might lose their jobs next year. The 2010 Tea Party shellacking was also not a “good story” for Democrats, but they passed the Affordable Care Act, which literally saved people’s lives. Democrats should do all the good they can, for all the people they can, in all the ways they can, as long as they can. […]
Todd isn’t a passive observer. He’s theoretically a journalist who helps craft the political narrative. If people only see stories about how the Democratic-controlled government is failing them and whatever Biden achieves doesn’t matter, they will react accordingly at the ballot box. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. […]
there’s no question that the country’s in far better shape than it was exactly a year ago. While Democrats should shoulder some blame for less than ideal messaging, mainstream media has helped promote the GOP’s doom-and-gloom narrative, and Chuck Todd is perhaps the worst offender.
Kyrsten Sinema Would Like To Thank Kyrsten Sinema For Her Hard Work Passing The Bipartisan Sinema Bill
President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure deal into law Monday, and there was much rejoicing, especially from Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who took the stage to declare BIF peace in our time. […]
SINEMA: How many times have we heard that bipartisanship isn’t possible anymore, or that important policy can only happen on a party line? Our legislation proves the opposite, and the senators who negotiated this legislation show how to get things done.
First place, Speaker Nancy Pelosi got this legislation passed. Period. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s contribution was agreeing not to filibuster the bill dead. When Pelosi was herding cats and making deals, Sinema pouted and insulted Democratic leadership from the comfort of her most recent big-money fundraiser. […]
Sinema is straight-up wrong when she claims BIF disproves that “important policy can only happen on a party line.” This legislation is a Democratic achievement that a few Republicans hopped onto because it was in their best interest. […] Sinema’s the annoying person at the party who prances around while her friend gets everything ready. Then once the guests arrive, she gives a long, self-congratulatory toast.
She fails to mention that Democrats needed control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to pass this legislation, and ultimately only 32 out of the 250 Republicans currently serving in the House and Senate supported the bill. That’s pretty close to a party-line vote. […]
While Sinema was taking her Ironman victory laps, McCarthy was fending off revolt from his caucus members who are less than thrilled with all this bipartisanship. Some conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus want to officially sanction the 13 members who broke ranks and voted for BIF. The caucus apparently has a selective definition of “freedom.” […]
Kyrsten Sinema’s vanity parade of bipartisanship isn’t helpful and is almost more useless than she is.
Usually when hero patriot Christian inspiration prophet painter Jon McNaughton releases one of his little paintings, we let Doktor Zoom review it. You know, like when he paints “Duck Dynasty” riding on Donald Trump’s muscular back while they do sexual anger tangos with Robert Mueller, to show him who’s boss. […]
Anyway, there is a new release from America’s Greatest Artist, and it is McNaughton’s favorite presidents cosplaying as the co-stars of some kind of military-themed superhero gay porn or something. It’s called “The Magnificent Seven.”
[…] Of course, because McNaughton has such a well-documented love for Donald Trump, he puts Trump in the middle and paints Abraham Lincoln next to him all sassy like he and Washington are Trump’s sidekicks. This is also likely why McNaughton paints Trump to look like he’s about 174 years younger than he actually is. […]
The others in the painting, according to McNaughton, and we guess we’re just gonna have to trust him here, are, from left, Thomas Jefferson, St. Ronald of Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK. […]
There have been 46 US Presidents since George Washington: some good, others not so much. As the artist, I decided to put together my team of the most magnificent seven Presidents. How did I choose this motley crew? Each was loved and hated for different reasons, but all stood against the establishment and to fight for American ideals. These are – The Magnificent Seven!
OK.
We don’t want to read too much into how skillfully McNaughton paints each president, and we don’t want to mine these images for secret messages, because Occam’s Razor says he’s just not that good at painting and that’s why JFK looks weird as shit.
[…] But what did Trump and his Six Sidekicks destroy in that painting, and why are they standing in rubble? Maybe woke cancel culture. Maybe just THE WORLD.
Before we leave this post, just want everyone to also know that McNaughton is selling a wall calendar of his most favoritest paintings, which might be nice for holiday gift-giving, or if you need a calendar to remind you when to get abortions and do critical race theory.
Belarus used buses Wednesday to move hundreds of migrants from the Polish border to a nearby warehouse, providing temporary shelter amid freezing temperatures and potentially easing a standoff with the European Union.
The Belarus decision comes a day after violence erupted along the border, where migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere have been stranded. For months, Belarus has opened routes for migrants to reach E.U. borders in retaliation for European sanctions.
Polish authorities used water cannons to push back the migrants, an escalation they said was overseen by Belarusian forces.
[…] Attempts at a diplomatic resolution have ramped up. The E.U. on Monday agreed to impose new sanctions against Belarus, which it accuses of using vulnerable refugees and migrants to launch a “hybrid attack” on its borders since the summer.
[…] Belarusian officials were also hit with sanctions last year for a crackdown on peaceful protesters after a presidential election in which Lukashenko claimed he swept to victory. The vote has been widely denounced as rigged.
[…] migrants can be trapped and pushed back and forth between the two countries for weeks, during which time they say they have little access to food and water. Polish police said they found the body of a young Syrian man in the woods near the border last week.
Water cannons were used against migrants that were already freezing, with some of them dying from the cold.
Lukashenko is cynically using migrants to gain a political advantage in negotiations with the E.U.
For now, it looks like international outrage against the inhumane conditions for migrants has forced a small improvement.
blfsays
Lynna@8, Any suggestions on how I can unsee that McNaughtonian faeces?
[…]
Prosecutors had asked US district judge Royce Lamberth to impose a longer 51-month sentence on Jacob Chansley, who pleaded guilty in September to obstructing an official proceeding when he and thousands of others stormed the building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s election.
The sentence matches one imposed by a judge on a former mixed martial artist filmed punching a police officer, who was sentenced last week to 41 months in prison.
[…]
Chansley’s attorneys asked the judge for a sentence of time served for their client, who has been detained since his January arrest. […] While in detention, Chansley was diagnosed by prison officials with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. When he entered his guilty plea, Chansley said he was disappointed Trump had not pardoned him.
[…]
I do hope European readers are going to be able to access this article. Do you have computers where you live? What about electricity? Are there shops where you can buy newspapers? I vaguely recall seeing such things during my travels on the pale continent, but perhaps I was mistaken. A recent Bloomberg op-ed, titled Americans need to learn to live more like Europeans, suggests Europeans live deprived lives with limited access to modern conveniences — and argues that, owing to supply-chain issues, Americans may have to get used to doing the same. “Store shelves are emptying, and it can take months to find a car, refrigerator or sofa,” the article opined. “If this continues, we may need to learn to do without — and, horrors, live more like the Europeans.” The horrors, indeed!
As someone residing in France, sometimes considered to be in Europe, except when it’s confused with Réunion, which is part of France but a hemisphere away and listed as a separate location, uninhabited until 1665, meaning France was vacant until then, which would be a surprise to a lot of French. And most everyone else. Anyways, no, there aren’t any “computers” here, except for badly-paid young ladies graciously granted an education. I’m reading baked clay tablets imported from Londinium via the Germanic tribes (need anything, even a monk, hire a Norseman!), and replying with the older, more trustworthy, technology of chiselled stone. Perhaps you’re thinking of papyrus, albeit I didn’t think that had made it into the frozen wastelands to the north. Wasn’t too sure people had either. There is a plentiful supply of chains here, along with our own kookery of loons.
I’m not sure whether the Bloomberg headline was explicitly designed to trigger transatlantic anger and start an online culture war, but that’s exactly what it did. To be fair, it doesn’t take much to make the internet irate. You can write a light-hearted article about how you like cheese and, whoops, you’ve started a no-gouda, very bad culture war. Someone on Twitter will explain that your joke about brie was classist; someone else will say that your omission of cheddar was a violent act of erasure, and someone with a username like @DairyPatriot69 will tell you to go back to where you came from and eat whatever horrible cheese they make there. And if your article is somewhat more serious? If your article should suggest that Americans might learn a thing or two from other people? Well, the Maga crowd will track you down and denounce your opinions with all-caps inanities.
Don’t mention the cheese, you British Industrial Cheddar mongers! The mildly deranged penguin will soon fly over and explain at great length, LOUDLY!, that not only is your cheeseboard not up to snuff, not even being fit a mushy pea, you don’t know how to spell “whiskey”. And if you mention it’s spelled the same incorrect way here in France, I mean Réunion, she’ll point you also don’t know how to spell “ghoti”.
Which, of course, is exactly the fate that befell the Bloomberg piece. Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, for example, who is famous for loving guns and sympathising with QAnon, indignantly tweeted that if she wanted to live like a European she would move to Europe (which, famously, is a single, homogeneous country [located in the Indian Ocean]). Let’s … keep our AMERICAN dream, thank you, she exclaimed.
Meanwhile, the former Ukip MP and Brexiter Douglas Carswell, who now heads a conservative thinktank in Mississippi, tweeted: If Americans lived like Europeans, the world would still be using Nokias, printed encyclopaedias, diesel cars, waiting for a Covid vaccine and at the mercy of Russia for energy needs. The world is a better place because America is not like Europe. (Supply chains might be messed up right now, but congratulations to the UK on managing the successful export of one toxic politician.)
The American right […] routinely jump on every opportunity they can find to portray Europe as a socialist nightmare. The US, they would have us believe, is the land of choice and prosperity. But, as Carswell may well have discovered in his move to America, free markets often work rather better in “socialist” Europe.
I live in New York, where I pay way more for my mobile phone plan and internet than I would for comparable services in the UK or anywhere in Europe.
If we may interrupt this snark, yeah, that’s a point which continues to astonish me. I have a plan with provides mobile, landline (not really used), and optical fibre-into-the-lair (at fabulously fast down- and up-load speeds with a huge limit), for only a few dollars more than what the author says they’re paying…
There are effectively two companies I can choose between for my (pretty mediocre) home internet and they both cost around $80 (£60 [€70]) a month. That’s because the sort of deregulation that figures such as Carswell champion produces very little competition within the US broadband market.
If Americans lived like Europeans, they wouldn’t have to learn to do without, as Bloomberg suggests; they would learn that they didn’t have to pay some of the highest prices in the world to access basic necessities. If Americans lived like Europeans, their life expectancy might be higher: a recent study showed that Americans had shorter lives than similarly situated Europeans. If they lived like Europeans, they might not have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. If they lived like Europeans, they would likely be a lot happier than they are now. Even if their refrigerators were smaller.
What’s this “refrigerator”?
Bloomberg’s opinion column (linked embedded in first excerpt) seems very largely reasonable. Albeit with the caveat of speaking from experience (decades on both sides of the pond), even the title seems reasonable.
blf in comment 10: “Lynna@8, Any suggestions on how I can unsee that McNaughtonian faeces?”
OMG, I have been trying and failing for hours. My next plan is to inundate my eyeballs with images I actually like, Ile aux Fleurs Near Vetheuil for example, and hope that works as the visual equivalent of cleansing one’s palate.
Saturday should have been a banner day for my family.
I brought my 10-year-old son to West Middle School in Lawrence, where he received his first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The school gymnasium was quiet but cheery, with parents and children waiting patiently after the shots. A magician performed, and one table offered stickers, buttons, T-shirts and treats.
Outside the school, however, was a different story. There, according to reporting from Mackenzie Clark of the Lawrence Times, “a man who has become well-known in Lawrence for his protests of mask mandates was arrested Saturday morning for allegedly threatening people with a sign post as they attempted to enter a vaccine clinic for kids.”
Thankfully, my son and I left shortly before the arrest.
On that tranquil November day, an increasingly radical fringe movement clashed with reality. I wish I could say that reality is winning easily.
[… V]accines, created in record time, all but eliminate the risk of death and substantially reduce illness and transmission. If you want to end the pandemic, the single best thing you can do is get vaccinated and make sure your family and friends are as well. The vaccines are free and widely available.
For parents like me, these facts had posed a challenge for much of 2021. Sure, my husband and I were vaccinated. So were my siblings and father. Without our 10-year-old being inoculated, however, the virus still threatened.
The CDC’s approval of vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds changed all that. Finally.
After 20 months of remote learning, hybrid school and tentative face-to-face instruction, children’s vaccinations are a vital piece of restoring safety and security to our school system. They’re a vital piece of restoring equilibrium for families across Kansas. I was proud to bring my son to the vaccine site, and he put up with my pride, complaining only of a sore arm for a couple of hours afterward.
That’s not remotely how the people who packed hearing rooms at the Kansas Statehouse see the pandemic, however. That’s not how protesters who picketed the Lawrence school district offices and an elementary school see it.
To this over-passionate clique, vaccines and attempts to control the virus are proof of a worldwide plot against freedom. Pharmaceutical companies and public health officials, politicians and neighborhood school teachers, all are collaborating in an attempt to overthrow our country.
How do they imagine a children’s vaccine clinic?
Do they suppose everyone bows to gargantuan portraits of Bill Gates on one wall and Anthony Fauci on the other? Do they believe tiny microchips swirl around each bottle of vaccine? Do they assume children are screaming and crying as heartless adults held them down, forcing poison in their veins? As we drive home, do they figure we play the Chinese national anthem over our car speakers?
[…]
There is reality, and there is fantasy.
Anti-vaxxers support a self-destructive goal. The more people believe their conspiracies, the more COVID-19 will spread. The more people will die of a preventable disease. The pandemic will grind on for months or years longer. That’s hardly a rational method of building political power. Anger and fear always attract adherents, though, especially after nearly two years of societal disruption. […]
It was the obvious next step after the space lasers.
[…]
Because the Rothschilds are an actual firm, they will continue to engage in regular business activities that conspiracy theorists can hold up as evidence of something suspicious. In June, Arielle Malard de Rothschild, the managing director at Rothschild & Co., visited the Republic of Georgia [not the state in the States, the independent country in Euroasia –blf], where she met with the government to discuss investment opportunities. This is a completely normal thing to happen.
This month, the Republic of Georgia announced it will institute a “green pass” system starting in December that will give people who are “fully vaccinated, have recovered from COVID-19, or have taken a PCR test within the last 72 hours or an antigen test within 24 hours” access to an array of indoor venues. This news raised the antenna of Christina Pushaw.
Who is Christina Pushaw? She is a paid spokesperson for Florida governor Ron DeSantis. (Pushaw got her job by being such a DeSantis superfan that he offered her a position and hired her at $120,000 a year.) […] DeSantis has obsessively attacked local governments and businesses that try to require it while promoting anti-vaccine nuts, including one he hired for the state’s top medical job.
Pushaw, learning through Twitter that a country that had implemented a COVID pass had also met with the Rothschilds, put two and two together [my transcription –blf]:
Georgia decided to enact a “Green Pass” system (biomedical security state). Immediatedly after that the Rothschilds showed up to discuss the attractive investment opportunities in Georgia (lol). No weird conspiracy stuff here!
First of all, the timing is completely wrong. Georgia did not announce its green-pass system “immediately” after meeting with the Rothschilds. The Rothschild meeting occurred five months ago.
Second, many countries have implemented COVID pass systems. A handful of Asian countries, as well as Europe [sic] and, um, Israel, are setting up passport systems that will allow people to gather in public indoor spaces.
DeSantis and his spokespeople are furious about this because they believe people who refuse vaccinations should not be denied any privileges, either by a government or a private company. Indeed, this has become DeSantis’s defining agenda.
This agenda is the context for Pushaw’s tweet. Georgia is doing something sinister by making it easier for vaccinated people to resume normal life. Georgia supposedly did the terrible thing right after meeting with a Rothschild. Suspicious!
[…] Pushaw almost certainly stumbled onto this news because some conspiracy theorist in her social network brought it to her attention. The anti-vaxx movement is filled to the brim with conspiracy theorists, and conspiracy theorists have a deep attraction to anti-Semitism.
One can easily predict that the next turn of this story will be that Pushaw and DeSantis angrily deny that her Rothschild conspiracy tweet had any anti-Semitic connotation. She will probably change the subject to DeSantis’s right-wing stance on Israel, which conservatives generally treat as a hall pass to engage in anti-Semitic rhetoric. But the larger point is that DeSantis is gleefully swimming in a sea of conspiracy nuts, and those conspiracy nuts are inevitably going to include a healthy share of anti-Semites.
[…]
Apparently, Pushaw has since claimed an absurd explanation (something about the Georgian government trolling anti-vaxxers), see the article…
Jones, who believes tap water has made most of America’s frogs homosexual, asked Simmons: Are you stupid or are you consciously evil?
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has blasted KISS frontman Gene Simmons for his comments on the unvaccinated. Simmons expressed support for getting vaccinated against COVID-19, and compared those who refuse the shot or disbelieve death numbers to those who believe the Earth is a flat disc.
[…] Jones endorses a swathe of other baseless or disproven theories such as the idea that the US government staged the Sandy Hook mass shooting, the 11 September attacks and the moon landings.
Jones’ views on vaccination predate COVID-19 — he has long been a proponent of the dangerous and unproven theory that vaccines cause autism, alongside a mostly inconsistent smörgåsbord of related theories.
In a video uploaded to the Banned.Video website Jones stated: I’ve got a very important message for Gene Simmons or, as he’s known, the Demon. You claim that we’re evil because we don’t want you and Big Pharma to literally rape us with your Frankenshot GMO. And then you claim that we’re gonna get you sick and you’re gonna die if we don’t take the shot. I thought the shot protects you. They admit it doesn’t protect you. That was all a lie. In fact, it doesn’t give you a little bit of protection. It actually lowers your immunity. That’s in the real studies.
It’s important to note here, as is the case with a lot of Jones’ statements, the real studies he is talking about are either nonexistent or just as conspiratorial and unproven as his other statements. Medical authorities across the world, not just in the US, report that the rate of hospitalisation, deaths and infection are lower for the vaccinated. Side effects are reported as less of a risk than the alternative: catching COVID-19 without being vaccinated.
[…]
The above clarification is unlikely to change the mind of Jones, however, as he often frames any reporting on ‘official’ advice as the product of the mainstream media’s vague but nefarious ulterior motives.
So, I ask the question: are you stupid or are you consciously evil? Either way, it doesn’t matter, because you’re literally out there promoting to the world that I need to be forcibly injected with this garbage, Jones added. That is a declaration of war against humanity, Simmons, and you’re on the wrong side of history.
In a sense, Jones’ response has helped Simmons’ case: Simmons initially compared conspiracies surrounding COVID-19 to the flat Earth belief. Now, one of the most notorious conspiracy theorists in the world has “declared war” on Simmons for his views, lending weight to the idea that those who cast serious doubt on the generally-accepted truths about COVID-19 are also proponents of other nonsensical or dangerous conspiracies.
Committee hearings on [Florida] Gov Ron DeSantis’ legislative response to the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates ran heavy on alarmist claims of impending fascism and endorsements by medical experts of unproven COVID-19 treatments including ivermectin.
During some four hours of hearings Monday before the Senate Commerce Committee, for example, conservative political activists joined forces with vaccine-resistant first responders, plus doctors who flew in for the occasion from as far away as Hawaii.
Taken together, they portrayed the COVID-19 vaccines as actively dangerous and lavished praise on natural immunity, hydroxychloroquine, and ivermectin […]
[…]
Among the organizations that sent representatives to the House hearing to support the bill were the Eagle Forum, which pushes to stop mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, according to its website, and Florida Right to Life.
Members also heard from firefighters and a nurse who face job losses for refusing local mandates to get vaccinated.
By contrast, no doctors supporting federal health authorities appeared. The League of Women Voters of Florida and the American Lung Association did show up to urge the measure’s defeat.
That left the floor to people like Dr[quack] Gene Posca of the Cleveland Clinic’s Indian River Hospital, who called the vaccines a dangerous and experimental drug being imposed by fascists from DC and added: Their blitzkrieg against our freedom will continue.
Dr[Quack] Jeffrey Mueller, in family practice in Orlando, said he has been treating COVID-19 patients with ivermectin and called it an incredibly effective therapeutic. By contrast, he said this of the vaccines: What do we know about it? We have months of data — that’s nothing. […]
Ah yes, there’s centuries of data for both ivermectin (discovered in 1975) and hydroxychloroquine (1955), to treat Covid-19 (2019), albeit not the virus causing it (SARS-Cov-19, 2019). The vaccines, specially designed to combat the virus, have been available for almost a year, and zillions of over 4 billion people jabbed have turned into Gates’s Magnetic Monster. Clearly dangerous and experimental!
And oh, b.t.w., whilst the vaccine is free, the costs of hospitalisation (potentially including an ICU stay), long-Covid, etc., is not. Clearly, it’s more cost-effective to get sick, and possibly die or suffer for (potentially) years, then get a jab. Makes perfect sense!
The vote on censuring Paul Gosar was obviously about his indefensible video, but it was also about overdue accountability for an odious public figure.
Before today, only 23 U.S. House members have ever been censured by their colleagues, and over the last three decades, it’s only happened once: New York Democrat Charlie Rangel was censured in 2010 after having been accused of, among other things, misusing his office for fundraising.
Today, the list grew a little longer. NBC News reported:
The House on Wednesday voted to censure Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., after he posted an animated video that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and attacking President Joe Biden.
The final tally was The House voted 223 to 207.
For those who may need a refresher, it was 10 days ago when Gosar thought it’d be a good idea to release a new online video. In the edited anime clip, the Arizonan is depicted as a character who kills Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacks President Joe Biden. […]
More background on Arizona Republican Paul Gosar: He publicly associated with white nationalists, and he praised insurrectionist rioters. Gosar told voters that President Joe Biden is a “fraudulent usurper.” The most recent revelation of his rotten core became public via a threat to murder AOC, (with the threat thinly disguised as a cartoon). Gosar also fantasized about killing President Biden.
It says a lot about the former president that the man who served at his side for a year and a half seems to hold him in barely contained contempt.
John Kelly served as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff for 17 months, and after parting ways with the Republican president, the retired Marine general said very little about his former boss and place of employment.
His reticence did not last. Business Insider reported this week:
John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, did not mince words about his ex-boss as rioters violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, according to a new book. “If he was a real man, he would go down to the Capitol and tell them to stop,” Kelly said of Trump to ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl during a phone call as the insurrection was taking place.
According to Karl’s new book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” Kelly said the Jan. 6 riot was so serious, and the then-president’s handling of the crisis was so indefensible, that the cabinet would’ve been justified in trying to remove Trump from office.
“If I was still there, I would call the cabinet and start talking about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” Kelly told Karl. (Then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin also reportedly broached the subject with other cabinet members about this in January.)
What strikes me as notable about this is that Kelly got to know Trump very well. The retired general first joined the then-president’s cabinet as the Homeland Security secretary, and then ran Trump’s White House for a year and a half — longer than any other of Trump’s chiefs of staff. If anyone got a first-hand look at how Trump works, thinks, acts, and processes information, it’s Kelly.
And Kelly concluded that Trump is not a “real man” — but he was a man who should’ve been removed from office before the end of his tenure.
It took a while for Kelly to reach this point, though he’d taken some prior steps in this direction. Last year, for example, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, wrote a rather extraordinary rebuke of Trump, condemning the then-president for being divisive, immature, and cavalier about abusing his powers. Soon after, Kelly publicly endorsed Mattis’ criticisms.
Kelly added at the time, “I think we need to look harder at who we elect. I think we should look at people that are running for office and put them through the filter: What is their character like? What are their ethics?”
By January, Kelly saw far less need for subtlety, accusing Trump of “poisoning” people’s minds. Kelly added that Trump is “a very, very flawed man … who has got some serious character issues.”
It says a lot about the former president that the man who served at his side seems to hold him in barely contained contempt.
[…] n a fervent House floor speech during the debate over a resolution to censure Gosar and remove him from House committees, Ocasio-Cortez implored lawmakers to make clear that they won’t tolerate depictions of violence toward members of Congress.
“What is so hard about saying that this is wrong? […] this is about what we are willing to accept,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez rejected Gosar’s claims that the video was “symbolic” of the debate over immigration, arguing that fantasizing about murdering a political opponent still has real-life consequences.
“I have seen other members of this party advance the argument, including Rep. Gosar himself, the illusion, that this was just a joke. That what we say and what we do does not matter so long as we claim a lack of meaning,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Now, this nihilism runs deep. And it conveys and betrays a certain contempt for the meaning and importance of our work here. That [what] we do, so long as we claim that it is a joke, doesn’t matter. That what we say here doesn’t matter. That our actions every day as elected leaders in the United States of America doesn’t matter. That this chamber and what happens in it doesn’t matter. And I am here to rise to say that it does,” she continued.
“Our work here matters. Our example matters. There is meaning in our service. And as leaders in this country, when we incite violence with depictions against our colleagues, that trickles down into violence in this country. And that is where we must draw the line, independent of party, identity or belief,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke moments after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) warned that Democrats were setting a bad precedent and cautioned that Republicans might also censure or take away Democrats’ committee assignments if they win back the House majority.
McCarthy said that “I do not condone violence,” but argued that the video didn’t merit the punishment being considered on the House floor.
“It is sad,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It is a sad day in which a member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong.”
Moments after Ocasio-Cortez spoke, Gosar defended the video and said it “directly contributes to the understanding and the discussion of the real-life battle resulting from this administration’s open-border policies.”
Gosar also notably did not apologize for the video.
“I do not espouse violence towards anyone. I never have. It was not my purpose to make anyone upset. I voluntarily took the cartoon down, not because it was itself a threat, but because some thought it was. Out of compassion for those who generally felt offense, I self-censored,” Gosar said.
In his latest attack on a fictional character beloved by children, Senator Ted Cruz has lambasted Bob the Builder for spreading what the legislator called “blatant pro-infrastructure propaganda.”
Cruz said that Bob, who originates from the United Kingdom, should “stop throwing his precious wrench into the American economy by supporting runaway government spending.”
“Whenever you see Bob the Builder, he’s maniacally building something,” Cruz said. “Our children are being exposed to his sick and twisted message that functional infrastructure is good.”
Because of Bob the Builder’s “extreme pro-infrastructure views,” the senator said that he has banned Bob’s program from the Cruz household.
“Sorry, Bob the Builder, but I like my TV shows without the stench of socialism,” Cruz said.
Here’s one more tacky-ass news giblet for you from Jonathan Karl’s new book […]
The day after January 6, […] there was something on Ivanka Trump’s calendar, and also the calendar of her husband, Jared Kushner. We imagine it had been planned for months, this engagement. And despite how Ivanka and Jared spent all of January 6 with Father, despite how they stood by and did the bare minimum while white domestic rage terrorists threatened members of Congress and sought out Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence with intent to kill, despite how Father had literally spent that day trying to overthrow the United States of America …
Well, Ivanka and Jared had this dinner party planned.
And the crumpets were getting stale.
[…] So …
President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, hosted a fancy dinner party for members of the Trump administration and invited guests just hours after a deadly siege at the US Capitol resulted in the death of a police officer, while more would die in the coming weeks.
[…] According to the book, while Trump people were resigning left and right on January 7, Vanky and the Brain were saying “I’ll take your coat and put it on the bed in the guest bedroom” and other quotes that were maybe also 14 words long to their guests. You know, dinner party arrivals talk.
They didn’t talk about the resignations at dinner, though, apparently. They didn’t even talk about the resignation of Stephanie Grisham, who had served them all so lovingly for so long. Here’s what they talked about instead:
Instead, the party focused on ideas about the formation of a free-market-espousing think tank with the goal of appealing to Democrats and pulling their opponents away from an embrace of left-leaning economic policies that has overtaken the party’s base in recent years.
Annnnnnnnd Jared Kushner served one final “OH I BET I KNOW WHAT DEMOCRATS WOULD LIKE!” idea directly into the net! “Hey, Democrats, I’m Jared! Wanna come to my think tank? I made it just for you!”
The report says you can’t tell from Karl’s book whether Donald Trump knew about this dinner party, but that quotes from Jared to Karl made really clear that Trump was only keeping the company of his closest sycophants in those hours after the attack he incited, and that Jared was making himself scarce.
“We’ll just get in a fight if I go over there,” said Mr Kushner [to a House Republican], according to Mr Karl, referring to the Oval Office.
But that’s OK, because back at his house where he lived with Ivanka, there were friends!
“Among those who attended were Larry Kudlow and Brooke Rollins, who were still working as senior officials in the Trump White House. Kevin Hassett, who had served as one of Trump’s top economic advisors until the summer of 2020, was also there.”
And they talked about Jared Good Think Tank For Benefit Of Democrats! And nobody talked about January 6. […].
Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, published a tweet this morning, alerting the public to some developments along the U.S./Mexico border:
“899 lbs of fentanyl and 15,631 lbs of methamphetamine were seized at the southern border in October alone. That much fentanyl is the equivalent of 204 MILLION lethal doses. We need border security!”
Of course, part of the problem is that the third sentence doesn’t quite match the first: If all of these illegal drugs were seized at the border, then we clearly already have quite a bit of border security.
[…] what’s especially odd about this is how often Republicans push this message, seemingly indifferent to its implications.
In July, for example, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona complained via Twitter, “Under Joe Biden, enough fentanyl to kill 238 million Americans was seized at the southern border last month. Where’s the outrage in the media?”
It was hard not to wonder whether the congressman — the outgoing chair of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus — had thought this through. Why would anyone in the United States, other than drug dealers, complain about officials seizing fentanyl at the border? Biggs asked about the missing outrage, leading to the obvious question as to why anyone would be outraged that U.S. officials had successfully done their jobs.
[…] a variety of other congressional Republicans — South Carolina’s Ralph Norman, Texas’ Brian Babin, Texas’ Beth Van Duyne, Texas’ August Pfluger — have all criticized the Biden administration over fentanyl shipments seized at the border.
A few weeks ago, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa joined them, highlighting fentanyl shipments that have been seized by Customs and Border Patrol. “Welcome to President Biden’s America,” the GOP senator wrote in a tweet.
[…] criminals have tried to smuggle illegal drugs into the United States for many years. It’s happened during Republican administrations; it’s happened during Democratic administrations. […]
For Republicans to criticize the seizures is a little weird. In fact, common sense suggests GOP officials should focus attention elsewhere, since the seizures disprove one of the party’s favorite talking points: If the president had implemented an “open-border” policy, as the right routinely claims, U.S. Customs and Border Protection wouldn’t have stopped these shipments before they entered the country.
If GOP officials want to argue that the shipments represent only a fraction of a larger whole, and that there are other shipments that border officials aren’t catching, they’re certainly welcome to make that case and present the evidence, to the extent that it’s available.
But that’s not what Republicans are saying. Instead, they keep complaining about U.S. successes, which is a tough sell from a public-relations perspective.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates recently asked via Twitter, “Wait, Republicans are now attacking us for stopping fentanyl trafficking?” It’s hardly an unreasonable question given the circumstances.
The Kaiser Family Foundation published its latest report on the domestic vaccination rate and found a partisan gap that’s existed for months: Republican voters are three times more likely to be unvaccinated against Covid-19 than Democratic voters.
The KFF findings added that when predicting whether someone’s vaccinated, it’s not age, race, education, or insurance status that matters most — it’s party affiliation.
But as discouraging as this persistent trend is, it also leads to questions about the degree to which this dynamic might affect other areas of public health. CNN’s Harry Enten made the case this week that partisan attitudes toward Covid-19 shots appear to have transferred to decisions about annual flu shots.
Take a look at two recent polls that have asked about whether or not people have gotten the flu shot: Axios/Ipsos and Kaiser Family Foundation. By assessing two polls instead of one, we know what we’re seeing is a real phenomenon and not statistical noise. According to the Ipsos data, 68% of Democrats said they have gotten a flu shot or are very likely to get one. Just 44% of Republicans said the same. This 24-point gap is very similar to the 30-point gap for Covid-19 vaccines. The Kaiser poll shows basically the same thing.
The same analysis reviewed Americans’ attitudes toward flu shots from recent years — before the Covid-19 crisis — and found there was no meaningful difference between Democratic and Republican voters.
In other words, there’s evidence to suggest that the pandemic has created a partisan gap on flu shots that didn’t exist before 2020. […]
That’s just peachy. It means that not only do I live in a state where fewer people are vaccinated against Covid, but I will also live in a community where more people refuse to get the flu vaccine.
I would not say that “the pandemic has created a partisan gap on flu shots.” The partisan gap on flu shots is sludge comprised of willful ignorance, misinformation being distributed relentlessly, and herd mentality focused around the Trump cult.
tomhsays
Record-setting judicial nominees weather GOP bluster Four prospective federal judges are the latest to face down Republican criticism that their histories as public defenders and advocates will produce bias on the bench.
Rose Wagner / November 17, 2021
WASHINGTON (CN) — As the Senate Judiciary Committee met Wednesday to advance a crop of President Joe Biden’s federal court picks, they were confronted by legal arguments and advocacy statements made early on in their careers, a tactic the GOP hopes will slow down what has been the fastest nominating pace by a president in history.
Biden has announced 62 judicial nominees to date, placing an emphasis on speed and racial and gender diversity in an attempt to counteract the court-packing of former President Donald Trump that gave lifetime appointments to the least-diverse group of federal judges since the Reagan administration.
The nominees each have been endorsed from bipartisan nominating commissions at the state level, and they have the support of their home-state senators, but Republican members of the committee question their ability to rule fairly.
“I find them a little concerning,” GOP Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said Wednesday of arguments that one nominee to the Northern District of Ohio made in 2014 when he was a federal defender representing a grandfather convicted of child pornography involving his step-granddaughters.
Charles Esque Fleming represented the defendant in United States v. Brown during a three-decade career as a federal public defender. He told the committee Wednesday that it was his job to represent his client and that he was fulfilling that duty when he mounted an argument that raised questions about whether the pornography could be considered interstate commerce and thus lead to higher federal charges.
[…]
Fleming was one of 10 names in Biden’s eighth judicial-nomination rounds. Another pick from the same list, John Chun, is poised now to be the first Asian American man to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
A judge today on the Court of Appeals for Washington state, Chun faced inquiries Wednesday from Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee about his participation as an attorney on an amicus brief in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger. The brief urged the Supreme Court to uphold affirmative action in college admissions, a position Blackburn contorted to equate racial diversity efforts with racial discrimination.
“Do you believe discrimination on the basis of race is permissible in college admissions?” the senator asked Chun. “Is it OK to discriminate on the basis of race in hiring?”
Chun agreed to submit a written statement to the committee on his position, noting that he was serving as an advocate for the King County Bar Association along with a group of other attorneys when the brief was written.
The hand-wringing over Chun struck Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii as uneven, barely a year after the committee saw multiple Trump nominees with politically complicated pasts make their way to confirmation.
“I would like the note the many times that we have sat here listening to my Republican colleagues talking about how lawyers represent their clients not necessarily sharing the views or the behavior of their clients,” she said.
When it comes to U.S. ambassadors serving abroad, there are few diplomatic posts as challenging as serving as ambassador to China. It’s why President Joe Biden chose carefully before nominating Nicholas Burns for the job.
Burns is a career diplomat, having served as ambassador to Greece in the Clinton administration and ambassador to NATO in the Bush administration. He’s done Foreign Service work in Africa and the Middle East, and held top positions in the State Department.
When the White House announced his nomination to serve in Beijing […] it was widely assumed that Burns would be among Biden’s least controversial picks. […]
Even Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who’s imposed a blockade against too many of the administration’s ambassadorial nominees, recently announced he’d make an exception for Burns. Axios reported soon after, “Cruz’s decision not to delay Burns’ confirmation … reflects the bipartisan consensus that the threat posed by an increasingly assertive Chinese government is too important to ignore.”
And yet, as Axios added yesterday, there’s a problem.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) announced Tuesday he had placed a hold on President Biden’s nominee for ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, over concerns about Burns’ business relationships in China….Burns is a widely respected former career diplomat who was expected to receive overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate.
During a Senate confirmation hearing last month, Burns argued that China poses “the greatest threat to the security of our country and the democratic world” in the 21st century. That, evidently, wasn’t a hard enough line for Rubio, who said Burns doesn’t understand “the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” at least not to the Florida Republican’s satisfaction.
[…] Rubio’s political antics will only exacerbate an ongoing problem. As 2021 nears its end, the Biden administration only has four ambassadors to foreign countries — and before a few weeks ago, the total was just one. For comparison, at this point in Donald Trump’s first year as president, the Senate had already confirmed 22 ambassadors.
For the most part, Cruz’s blockade is the principal problem, and as The Washington Post recently reported, Democratic senators’ usual irritation with the Texas Republican has “reached new levels.”
“This risks being hyperbolic, but it’s like negotiating with a terrorist,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said of Cruz, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with past and potentially future presidential ambitions. “He is not the secretary of state. The people of this country did not elect him or his party to represent us abroad. And what he’s asking for is to control American foreign policy.”
The Connecticut Democrat added, “Public diplomacy is neutered when you don’t have an ambassador. When six months or a year goes by without a U.S. ambassador, they infer that it’s a value judgment being placed on the relationship.”
[…] As the Post’s report added, “In some countries, high-ranking government officials will not meet with anyone short of a formal U.S. ambassador, shunning the chargés d’affaires who have taken over in the interim.”
Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is well aware of the problem — and he appears eager to make it worse. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has also had a role in making sure the United States is shorthanded in foreign affairs.
As a procedural matter, these GOP senators are not in a position to defeat every relevant Biden nominee on their own. But by abusing the chamber’s dysfunctional rules, the Republicans can force Democratic leaders to jump through a series of time-consuming hoops to confirm qualified nominees that the Senate has traditionally advanced in an efficient manner. At the same time, the more the governing majority is forced to clear these procedural hurdles, the less it’s able to do other legislative work. […]
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), shortly after being censured by the House for posting an anime video of him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), retweeted a post with the video on Thursday before apparently unretweeting it.
The Associated Press, the New York Times and multiple Twitter observers noted that on Thursday evening, Gosar retweeted a post from a right-wing commentator at the Blaze that captioned the video “Really well done. We love @DrPaulGosar, don’t we folks?”
The retweet was deleted from the GOP lawmaker’s feed after a couple of hours, per receipts provided by ProPublica.
Gosar’s repost came after he had defended himself during the censure vote by pointing out that he had deleted the video “out of compassion for those who genuinely felt offense.”
“I voluntarily took the cartoon down not because it was itself a threat, but because some thought it was,” the far-right congressman said in his prepared remarks on the House floor. At no point during the speech did he apologize for the video. […]
Well, after losing his committee assignments, he’s got a lot more time on his hands.
Expect more and more of his childish bullshit
————————
The man is not well. He exhibits not one ounce of remorse. McCarthy knows Gosar is sick and continues to enable him and the other deranged members of his caucus.
———————–
‘I’m so INNOCENT that I’ll post it AGAIN
———————-
Gosar reposted it! GOSAR REPOSTED IT! He is a terrorist
————————-
Rittenhouse resonates with Republicans because they are absolutely celebrating, with varying degrees of common sense to keep quiet about it, their ability to groom and egg a dumb teenager on, until he actually goes through with what they ALL WANT and have all fantasized about for years. They want AOC dead. They want Rep. Omar dead. AOC asked on the House floor what’s so hard about condemning violence; it’s hard because they SUPPORT violence so strongly it’s difficult to keep under wraps.
————————
AOC’s speech about this yesterday was really, really good…she was the target and she really got into why this was such a bad thing. It’s such a mismatch…you have people like her advocating to spend more money to help people at one extreme, and then you have people like Gosar advocating to kill her based on propaganda told about her.
At some point someone is going to be attacked over this, Republicans are creating an atmosphere of violence purposefully to try to force everyone else to do their bidding…it’s working on Republican politicians who think this stuff is garbage but refuse to stand against it. The question is if it’s going to work on the rest of the nation and they do get to take over and suppress dissent with violence.
The trial of three white men accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery began on Thursday with the cross-examination of defendant Travis McMichael, who testified a day earlier that he shot Arbery. Travis; his father, Gregory McMichael; and their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan (who recorded the moments leading up to Arbery’s death) were indicted on charges of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, attempt to commit a felony, and false imprisonment.
Before the jury was seated, the defense attempted to ban the prosecution from asking if Travis called Arbery a “f—king n—-r,” a statement only Bryan heard. The issue is Bryan is not expected to testify. Judge Timothy Walmsley said he would not render a decision at the start of trial proceedings, but would decide before the end of testimony. […]
Bryan’s attorney, Kevin Gough, continued what has become a tradition of his in filing motions to ban high-profile Black pastors from attending the trial—a request the judge has denied time and time again. It didn’t hold up court proceedings for long on Thursday, and prosecutor Linda Dunikoski was able to continue her cross-examination of Travis.
He admitted that he “assumed” Arbery was the same man who had recently caused trouble in the Satilla Shores neighborhood, including breaking into Travis’ truck and walking through a home under construction in the community. […]
Travis repeated statements he made during the defense’s questioning on Wednesday. He said that when he encountered Arbery on Feb. 23, 2020, the day of his death, Travis only wanted to question him and stop him for police. Dunikoski pointed out that Travis grabbed his shotgun before asking his father if he had called the police.
She also asked Travis if it was correct that Arbery indicated three times—by running away—that he didn’t want to talk to Travis, and the defendant said that was true. She also asked if Arbery threatened Travis, and he testified that Arbery did not. […]
Dunikoski spent several minutes asking Travis why he perceived Arbery as the threat in a situation in which Arbery was running away while two trucks were following him. Travis said it’s when Arbery started running toward him that he felt threatened and worried about his father’s safety because he was still in the pickup truck. Dunikoski pointed out that Travis never mentioned to police the day of Arbery’s death that he was worried about his father, and Travis said he guessed he didn’t. […]
Dunikoski changed her focus at one point to Travis’ thoughts on vigilantism, which he had articulated in multiple Facebook posts. He said he had a recollection of writing “arm up” in one post. But when Dunikoski asked if Travis remembered telling another Facebook user that his “old man” was the same as her old man, “slap crazy, old as dirt, and not afraid of going to jail,” Travis said he didn’t remember. But when Dunikoski read more of the conversation, Travis said he did remember that conversation. […]
In September, Josh Mandel called the director of the Anti-Defamation League a “kapo.” The leading Republican candidate to replace retiring Ohio Senator Rob Portman was pissed that the ADL had condemned him for likening Biden’s mask mandate to the Nazi secret police.
“I call on my fellow Americans: Do not comply,” Mandel tweeted over a video of himself standing in a corn field next to a Trump sign. “Do not comply with the tyranny, and when the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”
“These comparisons are beyond the pale and need to stop,” the ADL tweeted, demanding an apology.
At which point, Mandel, both of whose maternal grandparents are Holocaust survivors, responded that it was the ADL and “kapo @JGreenblattADL that should apologize.”
The term “kapo” refers to Jewish prisoners in concentration camps who were deputized to help Nazi guards. They horribly abused their fellow Jews, and were sometimes tasked with choosing who would be killed. It’s a deeply offensive term which has come to mean “Jews who would sacrifice other Jews’ well-being for their own advancement.” Or, if you’re a Republican, it’s a catch-all phrase for any Jew who votes with Democrats.
“As you guys play footsie with Jew-haters, I will keep fighting alongside Patriots like @Cernovich and @JackPosobiec as we defend the Judeo-Christian bedrock of America,” Mandel continued, throwing his lot in with alt-Right shit-stirrers who routinely tweeted the (((Echo))) meme at Jewish journalists so their followers would know whom to harass.
Not that there was ever any confusion on this score. Just last week Republican also-ran Mark Pukita ran a truly filthy ad about Mandel in which an actor asked, “Are we seriously supposed to believe the most Christian-values Senate candidate is Jewish? I am so sick of these phony caricatures.”
Pukita defended himself at a candidate forum, saying, “In terms of antisemitism, all I did in an ad was pointed out that Josh is going around saying he’s got the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other. But he’s Jewish, everybody should know that though, right?”
Not to be outdone, Mandel is now hitting the same anti-semitic hot buttons.
“Liberal Jews and radical Muslims are irrelevant to our campaign,” he tweeted yesterday. “Evangelical Christians, Jewish conservatives and devout Catholics are our army.”
[…] We’re leaving aside for the moment the truly disgusting attack on Muslims, which is nothing new for a guy who ran ads in his 2010 campaign for state treasurer depicting his Black, Christian opponent as a Muslim.
Mandel, who happily tosses around the term “kapo” to smear all critics, is now deciding who the “good Jews” are. […]
And Josh Mandel is raising an “army” of like-minded Christian fundamentalists to attack us.
The jury in a federal courtroom listened as a longtime researcher of far-right movements parsed the style guide of the infamous neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer.
“The tone of the site should be light. Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, nonironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” according to a guide section titled “Lulz” — an acronym for laugh out loud. Continuing with a derogatory term for Jews, it read, “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas k—s. But that’s neither here nor there.”
This evidence, introduced in an ongoing civil trial against organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, appeared to highlight a sinister strategy expert witness Pete Simi was trying to teach the jurors: the ways in which white supremacists employ humor to shield their calls for violence, in an effort to render them legally ambiguous.
As jurors consider the plaintiffs’ accusation that the rally organizers conspired to foment racial violence, they have been presented with a trove of evidence that includes messages laced with slurs, memes of using cars to run over protesters and calls for cracking skulls. Over the past four weeks, plaintiffs’ attorneys have tried to make their case by carefully breaking down the jokes and catch-phrases favored by far-right extremists, in an effort to teach jurors how to decode white supremacists’ secret vocabulary of hate.
Whether the jury takes this evidence literally or views it as exaggeration is the crux of many arguments in this trial.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys have called in experts to help the jury understand what is sinister about the numbers 1488 — which refer to “14 words,” a popular white supremacist slogan, and “Heil Hitler,” because “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet. They have translated the phrase “RaHoWa,” which may sound like gibberish to outsiders but among hate groups stands for “racial holy war.” And they explained how a question that seems innocuous — “Did you see Kyle? — is actually a play-on-words for the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil.”
White supremacist movements use “lots of insider language and codes and specific references that would require kind of an insider’s knowledge,” Simi said in the courtroom. “They can talk about violence, they can advocate for violence, and then say, ‘Well, it was just a joke.’” […]
“I’m not even a Hitler-ite, but I’m like ‘Okay, let’s f—–g gas the k—s and have a race war,’” Cantwell said. He then laughed.
“Can you explain, professor, what’s going on in that clip?” plaintiffs’ attorney Roberta Kaplan asked Simi.
Simi pointed to the eerie juxtaposition of Cantwell’s laughter after his call for mass murder: “I can’t tell you how many times over the last 25 years I’ve seen similar instances where violent references, violent rhetoric is … cloaked with some reference to humor.”
[…] Schoep replied: “So just keep in mind that we have ceased use of the swastika as of November 2016 so you will see swastikas in some of the videos which were filmed below before.”
Simi said this was a straightforward example of that “front stage, backstage” behavior: The National Socialist Movement did not stop using a swastika as their symbol because they disavowed it, Simi testified, but because of the optics. […]
“…The man allegedly claimed to be a producer with MSNBC.
“Judge Bruce Schroeder responded by barring MSNBC from the courthouse for the remainder of the trial. NBC News responded by acknowledging that a freelancer received a traffic violation near the jury bus but had no intent to contact or photograph the jurors…”
Despite the majority of Republicans voting against his censure, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is reportedly, at minimum, annoying top Republicans, who supposedly complain that the Arizona congressman has “lost it.”
Appearing on CNN on Wednesday night, ABC News’ Jon Karl said that top Republicans privately bashed the GOP lawmaker, who has ties to the far-right, while Karl was conducting reporting for his new book.
“The way Republicans would talk about Gosar privately is entirely different from what you saw — the spectacle today of coming in and effectively defending him,” Karl said, likening Republicans’ private remarks on Gosar to the scathing criticism that some of the GOP lawmaker’s family members have publicly aired.
Karl claimed that Republicans privately vented that Gosar has “lost it” long before most of them ultimately voted against his censure.
“I’ve had top Republicans tell me about Gosar specifically before this episode, you know, ‘He’s not all there,’” Karl said.
Asked whether these top Republicans are keeping their criticism of Gosar to themselves because of the fear of being primaried, Karl replied that it’s a “real fear,” citing the backlash received by the handful of Republicans who voted to impeach former President Trump. During a speech at CPAC in February, Trump called out by name each of the 17 Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach or convict him and urged Republicans to “get rid” of them. The GOP lawmakers who bucked Trump and are up for re-election next year have since been met with pro-Trump challengers and death threats.
Karl then suggested that more Republicans may have been willing to come forward to support the censure resolution against Gosar if it didn’t strip him of his committee assignments.
“I would have loved to have seen a vote that didn’t strip the committee assignments just to see how many Republicans would have refused to actually simply condemn his words,” Karl said. […]
The intended audience for this deliberately leaked message is the donor class. No money, no runney in 2022. This is why I think Gosar will be primaried in 2022.
——————-
Gosar and the other deplorables are not afraid to say any manner of outrageous things about anyone including other Republicans. The so called “leadership of the Republican Party cannot say anything critical of Gosar or other deplorables for fear of being cast out of the Party.
the only thing that would make it more obvious that this judge is a right-wing troll would be if he wore a MAGA hat in court. we already know his ringtone is the Trump theme song
This is in reference to what stroppy mentioned in comment 37.
“No one from MSNBC News will be permitted in this building.”
— Judge Schroeder bans MSNBC journalists from the courthouse after reports that they followed the Rittenhouse jury bus, although he admits “I don’t know what the ultimate truth of it is.”
Know that thing about how, despite how godawful Fox News has been over the years about climate change, Rupert Murdoch is not actually a denier, which is one of the only times we’re aware of that Murdoch has been personally right about a thing? (We are not counting, of course, how Murdoch has been correct for years that if he creates a fake news network that only exists to make white racist misogynist homophobes shit their beds at night in fear, he will make gabillions of Australian ameros.)
Well move over, climate change, because Murdoch’s brain has made room for a new correct fact, and it is that it’s time for Donald Trump to get the fuck over it, loser.
According to the Guardian, Murdoch was doing the yearly News Corp stockholders meeting on Wednesday when he said a whole passel of mean words about Trump. “The current American political debate is profound, whether about education or welfare or economic opportunity,” said Murdoch, explaining that, “It is crucial that conservatives play an active, forceful role in that debate.” However, he added that it “will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past. The past is the past, and the country is now in a contest to define the future.”
In other words, you lost, loser, now get over it.
As you’ll see, he did not say the actual words “loser” or “get over it.” (The Guardian reminds us that Murdoch has reportedly in the past called Trump a “fucking idiot,” in those very words, per Michael Wolff.) But he’s definitely saying that white conservatives are going to have a really hard time destroying America if Donald Trump is still the center of their attention and the object of their affection, as he whines and cries and whines and cries about how everything is so unfair and rigged.
[…] These comments will certainly anger the Grumpster of Mar-a-Lago, and we’re sure he’ll send out some weird shouty message from his untrafficked website in his trademark stunted English. We doubt we’ll hear about it, because that’s kind of how deplatforming works, but it’ll probably include Trump whining with his head buried up his ass and stuck in the past about that time Fox News correctly announced early and often that Trump lost Arizona like a common loser.
[…] As for other Rupert comments in the News Corp meeting, it apparently was largely about how Big Tech is doing cancel culture to Fox News and other wingnuts, and that Facebook and Google are trying to “silence conservative voices.” To which we reply GFY, Rupert, because Facebook is a catastrophic superspreader of conservative fake news, and it’s ruining the world, just like Rupert Murdoch is ruining the world when he allows Tucker Carlson to create January 6 Truther documentaries about how the Capitol terrorist attack was a false flag or a planned demolition or whatever the hell it was.
In summary and in conclusion, Rupert Murdoch was right about a thing, but just one thing, the end.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is currently on a media rehabilitation tour as possible preparation for a second failed presidential run. CNN’s Dana Bash mostly treated him with kid gloves, but he wasn’t so lucky when he appeared on MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” Tuesday. Host Nicolle Wallace curb stomped Christie without breaking a nail. It was Must-See TV. [Video is available at the link.]
Christie started the interview with his self-serving stump speech about restoring the party to the quiet, polite racism of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Wallace just sort of nodded and occasionally said “uh huh” with this unwavering “You ain’t shit” expression on her face.
He tried to “both sides” the growing threat from white supremacists, which Donald Trump enabled, and Wallace wouldn’t have it.
WALLACE: [FBI Director] Christopher Wray’s testimony though … is that [domestic terrorism] is the greatest threat to the homeland, and within that bucket, by far the largest group is white supremacy, so white supremacists didn’t threaten Portland and New York. What are you saying?
Christie mentioned “extremist groups on the Right and the Left,” and like an actual journalist, Wallace asked him to name the so-called extremist groups on the Left. When he said “antifa,” Wallace laughed in his face … well, it was more a restrained chuckle, but still she clearly thought he was full of shit. She countered that FBI Director Christopher Wray had testified that antifa isn’t an actual organization, even if Republicans want to label every violent goofball in ninja gear “antifa.”
[…] Christie’s pushing his new book, Republican Rescue: Saving the Party from Truth Deniers, Conspiracy Theorists, and the Dangerous Policies of Joe Biden. Wallace didn’t hesitate to point out that Christie, a noted coward, is very selective in which “truth deniers and conspiracy theorists” he targets. […]
WALLACE: The book is about conspiracy and lies and you really don’t take on Fox News, why not?
Oh, she knows why not, Chris. It’s a trap! He tried to stumble his way through an answer and she slams him with: “Have you seen the Tucker Carlson program?”
CHRISTIE: No, I don’t watch it, but the book …
WALLACE: Are you aware of what he does?
CHRISTIE: Not really. I don’t pay a lot of attention to it.
Christie wants us to believe he’s unaware of the most-watched show on cable news, as if it’s some low-rated prestige series no one’s actually seen except the Emmy Award judges. If that’s true, Christie’s book is doo doo that’s not worth anyone’s time. Wallace expertly worked Christie into a corner where he further reveals his moral cowardice. Then she put on her “I’m gonna fuck you up” glasses and just started whaling on him.
WALLACE: It’s a book with “truth deniers, conspiracy theorists” on the cover and you attack CNN, the New York Times, and MSNBC but not Fox?
CHRISTIE: I don’t attack them as being conspiracy theorists or truth deniers. I talk about bias.
WALLACE: Is bias more dangerous to the country than conspiracy theorists?
Christie sheepishly admitted that it’s not. She asked him point blank if he believes “Fox News in prime time is good for the country or not.” He said there are shows that he likes and shows that he doesn’t like, which presumably are hosted by white supremacists whose name he’s afraid to say out loud.
CHRISTIE: I don’t consider Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham purveyors of …
WALLACE: I didn’t say either of their names. I said Tucker Carlson.
CHRISTIE: You said the evening news programs on Fox News.
WALLACE: The 8 p.m. hour …
CHRISTIE: I don’t watch the show. I don’t know what Tucker does from night to night. If I’m watching anything at night in news … most of the time I’m watching sports … I’m usually watching Sean and Laura.
I’m not sure why Christie believes Laura Ingraham is significantly less of a racist conspiracy theorist than Tucker Carlson, but that’s what he’s going with, we guess. […]
Christie thought he could rebrand himself as Trump without the insurrectionist baggage, but Wallace revealed the pathetic sycophant behind the curtain. He even refused to say he wouldn’t support Trump in 2024, because we all know he will.
The location of early coronavirus infections in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, suggests the virus most likely spread to humans from a market where wild and domestically farmed animals were sold and butchered, according to a peer-reviewed article published Thursday in the journal Science that is the latest salvo in the debate over how the pandemic began.
The article, by University of Arizona evolutionary virologist Michael Worobey — a specialist in the origins of viral epidemics — does not purport to answer all the questions about the pandemic’s origins […]
Worobey has been open to the theory of a “lab leak.” He was one of the 18 scientists who wrote a much-publicized letter to Science in May calling for an investigation of all possible sources of the virus, including a laboratory accident. But he now contends the geographic pattern of early cases strongly supports the hypothesis that the virus came from an infected animal at the Huanan Seafood Market […]
Worobey notes that more than half of the earliest documented illnesses from the virus were among people with a direct connection to the market, and argues this was not merely the result of the early focus on the market as a potential source of the outbreak. He concludes that the first patient known to fall ill with the virus was actually a female seafood vendor at the market who became symptomatic on Dec. 11, 2019.
That contradicts a report earlier this year from investigators for the World Health Organization and China, who concluded that the first patient was a 41-year-old accountant with no connection to the market who became sick on Dec. 8. But Worobey said the accountant’s medical records reveal he visited the dentist that day to deal with retained baby teeth that needed to be pulled, but did not show symptoms from the coronavirus until Dec. 16, and was hospitalized six days after that.
The stealthy nature of the virus, which can spread asymptomatically, makes it highly likely that the pathogen began to spread many weeks before any of the cases that were identified. Worobey said the locations and occupations of the first known patients point to a market origin, with the virus radiating outward into the sprawling city of 11 million.
“It becomes almost impossible to explain that pattern if that epidemic didn’t start there,” Worobey said in an interview. […]
More at the link, including additional links embedded in the Washington Post article to lead readers to more information.
There’s what John Eastman says … and then there’s reality:
John Eastman, the conservative legal scholar who drew up a full scheme to have then-Vice President Mike Pence throw out certain states’ 2020 electoral votes to steal the election for Donald Trump, reportedly took his ideas straight to at least one Republican leader in a state Trump lost.
According to the Arizona Republic’s latest report in its multi-part series on Trumpworld’s efforts to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona, Eastman reached out to state House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) personally on Jan. 4 to pitch a legal theory on how Arizona’s electors ought to be tossed away before Congress certifies the electoral votes on Jan. 6.
Eastman has claimed he was only ever offering hypotheticals and had no intention of overturning the election. But Jan. 4 — the day he spoke to Bowers — was also the day he presented his election-stealing scheme to Pence.
Both reported examples show Eastman pressing Republicans to subvert the election, not simply offering disinterested legal advice.
Bowers reportedly asked Eastman during their talk, “Has this ever been done before?”
The lawyer said no, but told Bowers he ought to do it anyway and let Trump’s legal team deal with whatever litigation might arise from the gambit, the Arizona Republic reported.
But the GOP leader reportedly wasn’t sold.
“It’s never been done in the history of the country, and I’m going to do that in Arizona?” he asked, according to the Arizona Republic. “No.”
Eastman’s reported conversation with Bowers fell on the same day as the attorney’s Oval Office meeting with Pence, during which Eastman laid out his now-infamous memo explaining how the vice president could hijack Congress’ certification process to keep Trump in power. Eastman proposed that Pence throw out electors from the swing states Biden had won, including Arizona, and let the GOP-controlled state legislatures or U.S. House Republicans choose new electors.
Since details about Eastman’s blueprint for his proposed coup came out this September, the lawyer has publicly insisted that he never thought that the memo’s legal theories carried any weight and that it was only intended to detail “available scenarios that had been floated.”
But Eastman’s denials utterly collapsed in late October, when the lawyer told an undercover progressive activist that he absolutely believed his reasoning in the memo was solid.
The Arizona Republic’s new report on Eastman apparently trying to personally lobby an individual state Republican leader reveals the extent to which the lawyer tried to make his cloak-and-dagger scheme, which was fully backed by Trump, a reality.
House Republicans have been previewing their midterm platform and, instead of hailing issues, it’s nothing but a sea of threats aimed at their Democratic colleagues over perceived grievances.
No governing, no solutions. Just promises of retribution for Democrats seeking lawful, constitutional forms of accountability over things like death threats made by GOP members and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made it exceedingly clear on Tuesday that he not only won’t hold his caucus accountable for making violent threats against other members of Congress, but he will actively seek revenge against anyone who insists on the accountability he refuses to provide. […]
these GOP threats of retribution are all par for the course now. The party is effectively filled with a bunch of lawless gang members who foment violence, flout the law, and trample the Constitution, and when anyone threatens to rein them in, the GOP’s knee-jerk responses are promises of revenge.
Last week, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio pledged to get even with Democrats after the Justice Department indicted Trump henchman Steve Bannon on Friday.
[…] reality isn’t really at issue for Republicans. The game is all about training their voters to believe they have been slighted and disrespected, that Democrats have committed an unforgivable abuse of power, and that Republicans will make them pay for it. That is the GOP platform, and Republicans keep running that play over and over again because their low-information voters aren’t capable of seeing past it. In fact, the GOP’s politics of revenge are exactly what the base craves—it’s among their main reasons for living, breathing, and voting. […]
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 44
You see, this is what the Democrats and American liberals just can’t wrap their heads around: It’s not just their political opponents disagree with Democrats/liberals/leftists, but they violently HATE them. The Republicans fervently believe that Democratic policies are morally depraved, totalitarian, and in the case of the more religious ones, literally diabolical. Therefore anything that happens to the Dems is not only justified, but a moral imperative; a righteous blow against the forces of “evil.”
Of course, my suggestion would be to hate them back and do onto others before. they do it on to you, but nooooooo. The Democrats and liberals still operate under the delusion they can reason with the Right, and if you just say “pretty please” enough they’ll see the light.
This is not some genteel debate club. This is war, start acting like it.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the benefits in this legislation will be life-changing for millions of families. It’s a transformative bill.
[…] after months of unglamourous and difficult negotiations, the [Democratic] party actually had some success. NBC News reported:
The Democratic-controlled House passed sweeping legislation Friday aimed at expanding the social safety net and tackling climate change, a major step that moves a top legislative priority of President Joe Biden closer to his desk. The House voted 220 to 213 to pass Biden’s Build Back Better bill, with one Democrat joining all Republicans in opposing the measure.
Oddly enough, this bill would’ve passed last night, but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy delivered the longest floor speech in recorded House history, which may have inadvertently done Democrats a favor: Instead of passing a big bill in the middle of the night, the governing majority was able to advance their popular legislation, live on television, in the light of day.
Ha! McCarthy shot himself in the foot.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chaired the proceedings and banged the gavel at 9:46 a.m. eastern. As she exited the dais, the California Democrat was greeted by celebrating colleagues who chanted, “Nancy! Nancy!” as she walked through her assembled colleagues.
The bill now heads to the Democratic-led Senate, where members are all but certain to make at least some changes to the bill. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer intends to hold a final floor vote by Christmas, at which point the House will almost certainly have to vote again.
Because the Build Back Better legislation is being pursued through the budget reconciliation process, it cannot be filibustered by the Republican minority. It can, however, be derailed by Democratic senators such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema.
For now, however, Democrats have reason to feel good about today’s breakthrough success. Congress considers all kinds of legislation, ranging from awful to great, but it’s not at all common for lawmakers to take up transformative legislation.
The Build Back Better Act — the largest part of President Joe Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda — qualifies for the label. Among its key provisions:
Universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds
Funding for child care for roughly 20 million kids
An extended and expanded Child Tax Credit
Extended subsidies to make Affordable Care Act coverage more affordable
Closes the Medicaid coverage gap in red states, pushing the country closer to universal coverage
New benefits for Medicare beneficiaries, including caps on annual out-of-pocket prescription drug costs
Housing aid, including rental assistance, public housing, and down-payment support
A significant increase in Pell Grants
A half-trillion-dollar investment to combat climate change, including massive clean energy tax credits
This really is just a sampling. I could keep going, pointing to investments in child nutrition, V.A. facilities, recruiting and training school teachers, electric vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service, and on and on. […]
If Sen. John Kennedy’s line of questioning against Saule Omarova sounded familiar, it’s probably because it echoed Joe McCarthy’s tactics.
Senate fights over the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are not especially common, but the dispute over Saule Omarova’s nomination is proving to be unusual.
At face value, Omarova’s story reads like a classic American story. She was born in Kazakhstan, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. She immigrated to the United States, studied law and business, became an American citizen, took on a role in the Bush administration’s Treasury Department, and ultimately became a law professor at Cornell University.
President Joe Biden nominated her for a position in which she’d be responsible for regulating bank assets — she specializes in financial regulation — and yesterday, Omarova’s nomination arrived at the Senate Finance Committee for a confirmation hearing.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana [total dunderhead] apparently thought it’d be entertaining to take aim at her personal background, starting with this question: “You used to be a member of a group called the Young Communists, didn’t you?” The Washington Post took it from there:
But this isn’t where Kennedy was headed. Instead, he spent his designated time suggesting that Omarova was a communist sympathizer, beginning with that loaded question. Omarova indicated that she wasn’t sure what group he was referring to, a bit of caution that Kennedy wasn’t interested in. Kennedy, reading from handwritten notes, identified the group by name: “the Leninist Communist Young Union of the Russian Federation,” also known as the Komsomol.
As a child in a USSR country, Omarova’s participation in Komsomol was not optional. The professor patiently tried to explain this to the Republican senator, who didn’t seem overly concerned about the relevant details.
“I don’t mean any disrespect — I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade,” Kennedy said.
Of course, why would anyone find such nonsense disrespectful?
As part of the line of questioning, the Louisiana Republican sought proof that Omarova “resigned” from the school program as a child. She explained that participants didn’t have to formally quit the group, since they simply “grow out of it with age.”
Kennedy, either confused or willfully ignorant, wasn’t satisfied, seeking some kind of letter of resignation. No such letter existed, because the question didn’t make sense.
The Post’s analysis added, “It’s safe to assume that Kennedy, who attended Oxford University during the Cold War, is aware that Soviet youth were conscripted into party organizations and that socialist views are not communist ones. But he is a politician representing a deep-red state, and he clearly understands that it’s easier to submarine a presidential nominee using old-school Red scare tactics than it is to challenge her actual belief systems one by one.”
It was notable in large part because contemporary examples of McCarthyism usually aren’t this literal. Kennedy was, for all intents and purposes, on the lookout for communists. If that meant unfairly smearing a qualified nominee — who is not, in reality, a communist — so be it.
“My family suffered under the communist regime. I grew up without knowing half of my family. My grandmother herself escaped death twice under the Stalin regime,” Omarova explained. “This is what’s seared in my mind. That’s who I am. I remember that history. I came to this country. I’m proud to be an American, and this is why I’m here today, senator. I’m here today because I’m ready for public service.”
It was a good answer to a bad question.
[…] visitors to the Louisiana Republican’s website this morning were greeted with one prominent headline, splashed across the homepage near the top: “Kennedy questions Biden nominee on membership in communist organization.”
It was cheap and ugly — and for Kennedy, a source of pride.
As midnight approached, journalist Aaron Ruper tweeted an excerpt from his remarks and noted, “Kevin McCarthy’s brain is just randomly firing now. He’s yelling whatever fragment of a thought enters his head.”
President Joe Biden is slated to announce on Friday that he won’t keep a top ally of controversial Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on the U.S. Postal Service board of governors next month, according to the Washington Post.
The ally, USPS board chair Ron Bloom, reportedly will not be renominated to the nine-member board when his term ends next month. Though Bloom is a Democrat, he supports DeJoy, who was appointed by ex-President Donald Trump and has implemented USPS policies that have slowed down deliveries while hiking up prices.
Bloom’s critics have pointed to a potential conflict of interest between the chair and DeJoy, who has bought more than $300,000 in bonds from Bloom’s asset management company.
Removing Bloom from the board, the only institution that can oust a Postmaster General, allows Biden to appoint a governor who could provide another vote with the three other Democratic members to get rid of DeJoy. The President has filled three slots on the board since he entered office.
The board currently holds four Democrats, four Republicans (all of whom were appointed by Trump), and one independent.
Biden has faced deep pressure from progressives to clean up the board and have DeJoy, a Trump donor, removed after changes last year became an election flash-point, hampering mail-in voting as Trump repeatedly attacked voting by mail.
The nation will have its first woman president on Friday, albeit for just a short while, when President Joe Biden visits Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Friday for a colonoscopy and routine physical.
In a message distributed to the press corps Friday morning, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that Vice President Kamala Harris will have the powers of the presidency transferred to her for a “brief period of time” as Biden goes undergoes the procedure.
“As was the case when President George W. Bush had the same procedure in 2002 and 2007, and following the process set out in the Constitution, President Biden will transfer power to the Vice President for the brief period of time when he is under anesthesia. The Vice President will work from her office in the West Wing during this time,” Psaki said.
The White House will also issue a written statement summarizing Biden’s physical later Friday.
[…] The president injured his foot playing with his dog last November, but a check-up in February determined the fracture had fully healed.
As for Biden’s colonoscopy on Friday, the procedure is of critical importance.
According to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer diagnosed in the United States. In 2021 alone, 104,270 new cases of colon cancer were identified and 45,230 new cases of rectal cancer. The lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 1 in 23 for men and about 1 in 25 for women.
In America, colorectal cancer is not only the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in both men and women, but it is the second-most common cause of cancer death when men and women are combined. The American Cancer Society predicts that in 2021, colorectal cancer will have caused about 52,980 deaths.
Biden is not overweight or obese and keeps fairly active, two elements key in preventing colorectal cancer.
Though getting a colonoscopy can be somewhat anxiety-inducing given the preparation that goes into it, things have changed dramatically in recent years, making the process less harrowing and well worth the rewards of staying healthy and cancer-free.
Last night, Americans were treated to the longest lunar eclipse in 500 years. Watching it required a good deal of patience as the orb floated slowly across the sky, apparently unchanging from moment to moment. However, eventually, there was real progress and beauty, as the full moon trimmed down to a tiny fingernail sliver, its shaded face barely visible in reflected Earth-light, then brightened against the pitch black of the sky before being dimmed by the rising sun.
And at every stage, it was more lively, more interesting, and infinitely more attractive than the eight-hour-plus speech that GOP leader Kevin McCarthy delivered on the House floor overnight to delay the final House vote on the Build Back Better legislation.
Goaded by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ suggestion earlier in the day that Donald Trump should be named speaker if Republicans win the House in 2022 because McCarthy fails to provide the party with any leadership, the House minority leader attempted to free his inner Trump. The result was a speech where “rambling” doesn’t begin to cover the incoherent and disconnected claims, stitched together by occasional arm waving and table-pounding designed to show that McCarthy is just as angry, vindictive, and nonsensical as Trump.
As Rep. Jaime Raskin reported mid-way through this event, McCarthy managed to speak for over four hours without producing “a single memorable phrase, original insight, or even a joke.” And then he did it for four more hours. Which makes it even more … is there a word that means something is remarkable for being absolutely unremarkable?
Yes, Republicans are using McCarthy’s stunt for fundraising, but for the most part everyone is just making fun of McCarthy.
Given the “magic minute” to speak at any length desired, McCarthy set his sights on besting a record speech delivered by Nancy Pelosi in 2018 in which she spoke movingly and eloquently on the plight of “Dreamers” and the danger and stress they had been placed under by the anti-immigrant actions of Trump and the Republican Party.
Breaking that record gave the GOP a kind of instant fundraiser in the form of emails streaming out to watch “McCarthy beat Pelosi.” But if McCarthy had any goal other than showing he could stay upright for the same period that Pelosi didn’t just speak, but stayed focused on a single topic, it didn’t show. The whole episode reeked of Stunt Politics in which the “McCarthy blocks bill” headline in right-wing media was the entire goal. The content of McCarthy’s looping tirade might as well have been random words fished from a Bingo barrel.
[…] sleep-deprived Republicans can pat themselves on the back for allowing America to start the day with the news that House Democrats have passed this bill.
On Wednesday, Jacob Chansley, the QAnon mascot, was sentenced to 41 months in jail. Chansley, sans painted face and buffalo headdress, told the courtroom that he was sorry for his actions: “I am not an insurrectionist. I am certainly not a domestic terrorist. I am a good man who broke the law.” U.S. District Senior Judge Royce Lamberth told Chansley during the steep sentencing: “What you did was terrible. You made yourself the epitome of the riot.”
Chansley’s lawyer, Albert Watkins, argued throughout the proceedings that people like his client were easily fooled by Donald Trump. Watkins position was that Chansley’s ridiculous look was proof that he could not be taken seriously and therefore couldn’t be convicted of “leading” anything on Jan. 6. After the sentencing, Watkins spoke to the press outside of the courthouse, and boy did he have some things to say.
I will preface this by saying that Watkins is a colorful speaker who likes to wear colorful ties. He has a style of talking that reminds me of New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s. Watkins was asked by one reporter what might be a proper level of “accountability for former president Donald Trump”? Watkins began by saying his “opinion is meaningless,” but that he would want to sit down “over a beer” with the disgraced president, at which point, “I’d tell him, you know what? You’ve got a few fucking things to do.”
Just in case you hadn’t gotten the exclamation point on that first sentence, Watkins went on: “Including clearing this fucking mess up.” Got it yet? “And take care of a lot of the jackasses that you fucked up because of January 6.” Watkins ended by saying he might try to continue forward in a conversation with Trump about some of the “things I agree with him on, but my opinion doesn’t mean shit.”
“Jesus Goat Cheese-Gobblin’ Christ, this shit is bonkers.”
Representative Lauren BOEBERT [Republican and crackpot doofus extremis]: “Democrat policies are so pathetic and have done so poorly that the left has nothing else to do but troll the internet looking for ways to get offended, and then try to target members and strip them of their committees. This is a dumb waste of the House’s time. But since the speaker has designated the floor to discuss members’ inappropriate action, shall we? The jihad squad member from Minnesota has paid her husband—and not her brother-husband, the other one—over a million dollars in campaign funds. This member is allowed on the Foreign Affairs Committee while praising terrorists. A Democrat chairwoman incited further violence in the streets outside of a courthouse. And then the cherry on top. My colleague, and three-month presidential candidate from California [Eric Swalwell], who is on the Intelligence Committee, slept with Fang Fang, a Chinese spy. Let me say that again. A member of Congress who receives classified briefings was sleeping with the enemy. This is unacceptable and this would never see …”
Commentary:
[…] Dartagnan has already dispensed with the nonsense about Ilhan Omar (the “jihad squad member from Minnesota”) here, but there’s still plenty of mind detritus to sift through. Namely, the bit about Fang Fang.
Here’s how The Washington Post characterized Rep. Eric Swalwell’s relationship, such as it was, with alleged Chinese spy Christine Fang, aka Fang Fang. (Swalwell is the “three-month presidential candidate from California” Boebert refers to in her rant.)
Axios reports that U.S. officials don’t think Fang ever got classified information as she cozied up to politicians, including from Swalwell. He is not accused of any wrongdoing. After U.S. intelligence officials briefed him in 2015 on their concerns about Fang, he cut off ties with her. Swalwell said in a statement to Axios this week that he provided information to the FBI about her and that he hasn’t interacted with her in six years. Fang has left the country.
So that’s not great, but it doesn’t appear as if Swalwell did anything wrong. He certainly didn’t tweet about Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s whereabouts during the violent siege of the Capitol on Jan. 6, for instance. […]
And, naturally, Rep. Swalwell took Boebert’s bilious eruptions as a teaching moment of sorts.
Weird. If I had done anything wrong the FBI would have raided my house. They didn’t (and went as far to issue a statement saying I did nothing wrong). BUT yesterday they did raid the home of @laurenboebert’s campaign manager. They’re always projecting.
[…] Yes, that’s true. Boebert’s former campaign manager, Sherronna Bishop, saw her home raided by the FBI yesterday as part of a probe into an alleged security breach in Mesa County, Colorado’s voting system. (Bishop was whining about it last night on Pillow Man Mike Lindell’s sprawling glitch of a website.)
[…] Boebert isn’t talking to people with intelligence or common sense. She’s talking to people who think Donald Trump is going to alight from a cloud any day, retake the White House, and resume fucking up the country.
[…] Boebert isn’t exactly interested in making a cogent point. Nor can she.
Norway’s government announced Friday that it would soon be implementing more measures to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, including tighter border controls and advising people against handshakes as the country sees a fresh surge of cases.
Beginning Nov. 26, both foreign travelers and citizens of Norway have to register online with the government at least three days prior to entering the country, The Associated Press reported. Officials at border checkpoints can ask for a person’s registration.
Forbes noted the measure was being used to help with contact tracing, the practice of determining who an infected individual may have come in contact with.
Norway’s health minister, Ingvild Kjerkol, also announced the country would also start testing people once they arrived. Exceptions would only be made to those who recovered from COVID-19 within the last year or have already received the vaccine […]
The United States, where only 59 percent are fully vaccinated, has also been seeing an uptrend in cases in recent days. The U.S. saw more than 107,000 cases on Wednesday; comparatively it reported several days of cases above 20,000 in October and November.
[…] Eventually, McCarthy, apparently running out of anything to fearmonger about, was reduced to a bad excuse for observational comedy, wondering whether McDonalds still has its dollar menu, and then, somewhere around 3 a.m. explaining that there’s no such thing as baby carrots, because they’re “just big carrots they chop up and charge you more.” We swear we are not making this up.
We’ll give the win to this tweet from Rep. Jamie Raskin of California:
I must admit Kevin McCarthy has accomplished one thing. America is no longer woke.
[…] this morning, just before the vote, Nancy Pelosi began her own “magic minute” by saying, “As a courtesy to my colleagues, I will be brief,” to applause from Democrats. […]
Federal regulators on Friday authorized Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccine boosters for all adults, a one-size-fits-all strategy designed to shore up Americans’ defenses against a tenacious virus and reduce confusion over guidelines that have varied based on people’s age, occupation and where they live.
The Food and Drug Administration cleared the boosters for people 18 and older who are at least six months past their second shot of the two-dose vaccines. The move reflects an urgent effort to encourage millions of Americans to get the boosters to bolster waning immunity heading into the winter holiday season when millions will travel to see friends and family. It’s also an attempt to put in place a coherent federal approach as about a dozen states move ahead on their own to grant broad access to boosters. […]
As we previously discussed, the House censured Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, and stripped him of his committee assignments. Yesterday, Donald Trump issued a statement giving Gosar his “Complete and Total Endorsement!” Random capitalization is still a Trump thing.
I guess Trump likes it when people threaten to kill AOC with a sword.
The Nazis on trial in Charlottesville Thursday had three and a half hours between them to make the case as to why they shouldn’t be blamed for the violent “Unite the Right” rally they planned [in 2017]
Instead, many of these white supremacists tried to make it seem as if they’re one of the “good” ones, unlike some of those other white supremacists. Literal Nazi attorney James Kolenich, who represents Nazis Jason Kessler and Nathan Damigo, and the Nazi group Identity Evropa, claimed that his clients only perpetrated acts of physical violence sans automobile, and said young people are spry enough to bounce back from being shoved around.
He equated the Nazi groups and individuals he’s defending with a softball league in which alt-right assholes are the players, the police are the umpires, and Antifa inexplicably hates softball and came to protest their game. Oh, but for some reason, James Fields drove his car into the field while Antifa celebrated the dissolution of the softball game. Kolenich stressed that those bats and balls (i.e, the shields and flagpoles Nazis used to attack counter-protesters) are all part of the game. As if his defense wasn’t bad enough for his clients, Kolenich wrapped up his remarks by saying it was a pleasure to be a part of this case.
David Campbell, attorney for James Fields, was up next. He argued that his client should be spared a civil judgment against him because he’s already serving multiple consecutive life sentences and, well, gestures vaguely at other Nazis. Campbell has honestly no good reason to pretend Fields’ brutal attack was a “lone wolf” incident, and actually may have made things worse for Fields’ fellow Nazis by citing Fields stomping around with a Vanguard America shield.
After a lunch break, Richard Spencer began his ill-conceived closing arguments. He quoted a general who influenced Nazi policy in Germany, and whose name was used as a codeword when Nazi Germany attempted to defend Berlin as World War II entered its final stages. Spencer tried to pass off Carl Von Clausewitz as merely “a historian.”
Spencer labeled the trial a form of “character assassination” yet doubled down on his white supremacist beliefs and claimed that the Unite the Right rally was supposed to be an extension of his 2017 tour. He flat-out told the jury he believes in the cause of white supremacy, but there’s really no such thing as pure intentions making for a goodly Nazi.
Spencer really couldn’t stop himself as he cited Donald Trump’s infamous “good people on both sides” comment, before earning a scolding from Judge Norman Moon, who noted that Trump’s words weren’t entered into evidence. Nonetheless, Spencer does believe there are good people on both sides. Inspiring.
The true highlight of Spencer’s Nazi-branded narcissism was an exchange in which he appeared close to comparing himself to Jesus before the judge once again reprimanded him. […]
Spencer called for “Newtonian justice” and if that’s not a coded phrase to get someone to pelt you with apples, I don’t know what is.
Attorney Bryan Jones, who represents Michael Hill, Michael Tubbs, and the League of the South, tried to do his job by claiming the racist organization Hill and Tubbs co-founded had nothing to do with the tiki torch march or the car attack but quickly lost the plot as he ranted about alleged conspiracy theories, blamed a counter-protester for being brutalized by his clients, then compared the whole rally to going fishing and reeling in a big catch. […]
Chris “Crying Nazi” Cantwell closed things out on the defendants’ side with an incredible display of whiny obfuscation in which he was clearly still upset that counter-protesters crashed his members-only meet-and-greet in a Walmart parking lot, and that no one gives a shit about whatever bodycam footage he shot in said parking lot. Cantwell screamed his way into overtime as he continued quoting from his blogs and podcasts and condescending to the jury you’d think he’d try to win over.
This is a slam-dunk case for Integrity First for America’s lawyers, who have masterfully exposed the Nazi defendants for who they are while successfully advocating on behalf of plaintiffs whose lives will never be the same after the 2017 “Unite the Right” event. It’s only right that the Nazis in the Sines vs. Kessler case pay up for all the damage they’ve caused.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 46
Now, let’s watch as this “success” get’s tuened into bitter failure as Manchin and Sinema vote against it.
A jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who fatally shot two protesters in Kenosha, Wis., and wounded a third, of all charges on Friday, including intentional homicide.
After three-and-a-half days of deliberation, the unanimous jury found Rittenhouse not guilty of all five counts that he had been facing, bringing an end to a controversial trial that has polarized the country.
Rittenhouse, then 17, shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and wounded a third protester last year amid demonstrations against police brutality in Kenosha, where police had shot and paralyzed a Black man named Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse has maintained he shot the men in self defense.
The teen would have faced the possibility of life in prison if he had been convicted on the intentional homicide count.
Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley said in a statement Friday that his office respects the jury’s verdict.
“Certainly, issues regarding the privilege of self-defense remain highly contentious in our current times,” Graveley said. “We ask that all members of the public accept the verdicts peacefully and not resort to violence.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) had activated about 500 National Guard members this week in preparation for the verdict.
The trial’s outcome is likely to further inflame national debates over civil rights. It comes less than a year after Kenosha County prosecutors chose not to charge the white police officer who shot Blake in August 2020. […]
lotharloosays
Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty. It was not surprising at all. He was following the law. The stupid law that allows him, a private citizen, to carry assault rifles and shoot people as soon as he feels a tiny with threatened.
Groups like the Proud Boys and supporters of QAnon see the Rittenhouse verdict as a “precedent” for further acts of violence.
Telegram channels affiliated with the Proud Boys lit up on Friday after the verdict was announced, with some seeing it as setting a precedent for future street violence.
“Sets precedent for rioters this weekend in Kenosha, defend your lives citizens,” read a post on one Proud Boys-affiliated channel. Another message on Patriot Streetfighter, a right-wing Telegram channel with 174,000 followers, read, “it is all falling apart for the liberals/communist/socialists on every front. Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges!”
This heartbreaking verdict is a miscarriage of justice and sets a dangerous precedent which justifies federal review by DOJ. Justice cannot tolerate armed persons crossing state lines looking for trouble while people engage in First Amendment-protected protest.
That last paragraph/tweet is from Representative Jerry Nadler
Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two men and maimed another when he was scared they would kill him just because he was shooting them, has been acquitted by a Wisconsin jury on all charges.
[…] We have come to an era in our country, ushered in by the NRA, in which fear for your life is grounds to kill someone who is trying to defend themselves from you threatening their life. Two national trials explored that this week; Ahmaud Arbery’s killers in Georgia are insisting they did it in self defense (while standing over his body yelling the n-word) because he grabbed at the gun they were pointing at him.
And the Supreme Court is presumably about to make it even worse, when it rules that any state regulation on who can carry lethal weapons, when, and how, are unconstitutional.
Even Antonin Scalia, God rot his soul, when he found for the first time in Heller that there was a constitutional right to personal arms, insisted that states could still regulate them.
Everyone knew in their bones Rittenhouse would be acquitted, after he crossed state lines with a semiautomatic weapon it was illegal for him to carry, and then shot the people who were trying to disarm him after he shot someone who threw a plastic bag at him.
Everyone knew it, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. The Right has a new hero, one whose thirst to shoot people the jury was not allowed to see because it was prejudicial, one whose cold-cocking of a girl, just weeks before, the jury was not allowed to see because it was prejudicial, one whose new bosom friends the Proud Boys and gun maniacs are thirsting to shoot some leftists themselves.
And it’s open season.
We all knew it, but here’s a funny (“funny”) tidbit from the article below the verdict in the Washington Post’s stream:
A man who caused a ruckus Wednesday when he showed up outside the Rittenhouse trial armed with a rifle and chanting against the Black Lives Matter movement is a former police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
The man, identified as Jesse T. Kline, had been dismissed from the force several years ago, Ferguson Police Chief Frank McCall Jr. confirmed to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Thursday. Kline later confirmed his identity to the Washington Post.
In recent days, reporters outside the Kenosha County Courthouse have reported seeing Kline acting bizarre as he mingled with the onlookers who awaited the Rittenhouse verdict. Then on Wednesday, Kline showed up to the courthouse with a long gun, prompting law enforcement officials to check his identification before requesting that he disarm himself.
He was fired — from the Ferguson PD! — after he “allegedly stalked a woman, who he had been in a romantic relationship with, to another man’s home. Kline then allegedly threatened the man by poking his chest with the barrel of his gun, according to KSDK.” The charges were dropped when his ex and her boyfriend refused to testify.
That man, with that record, can only be “requested to disarm himself” outside a public courthouse. That’s who’s carrying rifles around, to make a point about “self defense,” we guess.
[…] In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.
This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe. […]
[…] While that Kenosha, Wisconsin jury declared that Kyle Rittenhouse, now 18, was not guilty of murdering Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, injuring Gaige Grosskreutz, and other crimes in August 2020, their verdicts do not make that soulless, gun-toting disaster innocent. He’s just the latest killer to walk free, with a lot of help from Judge Bruce Schroeder.
In a nation where horrific violence is increasingly acceptable to one part of the country—most visibly represented by white male Christian supremacists, and the white women who will do anything to remain adjacent to their desperate, angry, and declining power—sometimes we who know the right wing is very, very wrong need something to soothe and encourage us in the face of such hatred and refusal to evolve and embrace their neighbors.
Nearly a decade ago, I got a tiny tattoo on my right wrist. Written in my own handwriting at the shop, and drilled into my skin in ink that only I can see, just two words hover over a hesitation scar I carved into my skin when I was 15: Keep going. I don’t know who needs to read that, but consider the words on my wrist to be yours today.
In one of the most powerful clips to come out of reasonable media in the wake of this absolute failure of our legal system, comedian Amber Ruffin offers, in a brief but must-see monologue, two more important words we all need to hear right now, and perhaps every day.
For those unfamiliar, Ruffin is the brilliant host of The Amber Ruffin Show, available on the NBC streamer Peacock. The Emmy-nominated show tackles the news with a comedic voice we don’t tend to see in the monochromatic world of late night television.
Ruffin makes no secret of the responsibility that comes with such a platform, and works hard to use her reach to make the world a better place. With that in mind, let’s get right to Ruffin’s powerful words—which are clearly so hard for her to say—in the wake of the devastating news that an 18-year-old killer strolled out of that courtroom and into a lifetime as a folk hero for the worst of America. […]
You guys, because I have my own show, I have a responsibility to say things that people need to know, that aren’t being said. It’s a cool opportunity that I don’t take lightly. There are very big, obvious truths that no one wants to say on TV, but I will.
Now, just a few minutes before we started taping this show, Kyle Rittenhouse, the man accused of shooting three people during a Black Lives Matter protest, was declared not guilty on all charges. So, I can’t believe I have to say this, but …
It’s not okay for a man to grab a rifle, travel across state lines, and shoot three people—and then walk free.
It’s not okay for the judicial system to be blatantly and obviously stacked against people of color.
It’s not okay for there to be an entirely different set of rules for white people, but I don’t care about Kyle Rittenhouse. I don’t care about that racist judge. And I don’t care about how fucked up that jury must be.
White people have been getting away with murder since time began. I don’t care about that.
I care about you. And I can’t believe I have to say this, but you matter.
You matter.
Every time one of these verdicts come out, it’s easy to feel like you don’t, but I’m here to tell you that you do, you matter. You matter so much, that the second you start to get a sense that you do, a man will grab a gun he shouldn’t have in the first place, and travel all the way to another state just to quiet you.
A power plant that buys coal from a company controlled by Sen. Joe Manchin’s family is fighting to stay alive by generating electricity for superfast data computing, after being on the brink of financial collapse for years.
If the proposal by the Grant Town power plant near Morgantown, W.Va., is successful, it would preserve the lucrative Manchin family business of selling coal waste to the power plant for generating electricity. The facility is the main customer of Manchin’s family company called Enersystems, which has paid the senator $5 million over the last decade, according to financial disclosures.
The timing of the proposal collides with the apex of climate legislation on Capitol Hill. Manchin has scaled back the sprawling $1.7 trillion social spending package that Democrats are racing to pass as the pillar of President Joe Biden’s aggressive climate agenda. Manchin’s efforts to jettison a clean energy program that threatened the fossil fuel industry come as his family’s business continues to sell coal to the Grant Town power plant.
[…]
The Grant Town facility….is one of the smallest plants in the state — and it’s the only one that still burns waste coal, some of the dirtiest fuel in the U.S.
And it plans to stay that way.
The plant’s owner revealed a proposal in state documents last Friday to continue burning a mix of discarded shale, clay and slurry dug out of nearby coal mines that closed years ago……
Manchin, meanwhile, recently threatened to vote against the “Build Back Better” spending bill if one of its strongest climate provisions wasn’t removed. The Clean Electricity Performance Program in that legislation would have rewarded utilities for selling more clean energy, putting pressure on coal plants to close.
“Why pay the utilities for something they’re going to do anyway, because we’re transitioning,” Manchin told reporters recently.
That’s not happening at Grant Town.
Its use of waste coal, also called gob, makes it one of the dirtiest plants of its size in West Virginia. Burning waste coal can be more expensive than using other forms of fuel, like natural gas, and keeping the plant running has driven up utility rates in one of the country’s poorest states.
…..Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute said, “The continued reliance on coal waste is just costing ratepayers more money so it’s pretty hard to justify. Which makes the fact that he is still making money off of coal more concerning.”
[…]
More on coal waste and the Manchin family at the link.
[…] Mike German, a former F.B.I. special agent who once worked undercover to expose neo-Nazis and is now a fellow at N.Y.U.’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me that domestic extremists have learned that they can receive more “aboveground” support by calling themselves patriots and peacekeepers. Yet, German emphasized, “you can’t just nominate yourself as a security provider.” He compared this approach to tactics in prewar Germany, “when Nazi thugs rallied where they knew they had political opposition—they could attack and get media coverage, and gain a reputation for being tough and scary.”
Militias often outfit themselves with variants of the AR-15, a high-velocity rifle that has become both a popular sporting gun and a favored weapon of mass shooters. Since 2017, such firearms have been used in at least thirteen mass-casualty incidents. Only a handful of states prohibit citizens from openly carrying AR-style weapons. Even the National Rifle Association once called it unsettling to “see someone sidle up next to you in line for lunch with a 7.62 rifle.” This observation was published on the N.R.A.’s Web site in 2014, at a moment when Texans were ordering coffee at cafés while carrying battle-grade firearms. Two years later, a sniper in Dallas shot and killed five police officers during a B.L.M. demonstration. The city’s police chief publicly reiterated the reason that so many law-enforcement officials oppose open-carry laws: the profusion of visibly armed civilians complicated the task of quickly identifying the shooter.
[…] According to a theory of social psychology called the “weapons effect,” the mere sight of a gun inspires aggression. In 1967, the psychologists Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage wrote, “In essence, the gun helps pull the trigger.” Their methodology had flaws, but later studies verified their premise.[…] Brad Bushman, an Ohio State researcher who served on President Barack Obama’s committee on gun violence, told me, “We’ve found that it really doesn’t matter if a good guy or a bad guy is carrying the gun—it creates the bias to interpret things in a hostile way.” Citizens who openly carry firearms “think that they are making the situation safer, but they are making it much more dangerous.”
[…] Among the crowd was an agitated bald guy in his mid-thirties, with a ginger goatee and an earring. He was wearing a maroon T-shirt, and had brought a plastic shopping bag containing socks, underwear, and deodorant. The man, who suffered from bipolar disorder, had recently been charged with domestic violence, and then had attempted suicide. Hours before the protest, he had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital. He apparently had wandered into the melee on the street, where it was difficult to perceive anything but his rage. At the Ultimate Convenience Center, he confronted the armed men, screaming both “Don’t point no motherfucking gun at me!” and “Shoot me!”
A man yelled, “Somebody control him!”
During the chaos, Rittenhouse moved down the street toward Car Source’s second mechanic shop, where rioters had been smashing car windows. He crossed paths with the angry bald man, who chased him into the shop’s parking area. The man now wore his T-shirt as a head wrap and face mask, leaving his torso bare. Screaming “Fuck you!,” he threw his plastic bag at Rittenhouse’s back. Rittenhouse, holding his rifle, reached some parked cars just as a protester fired a warning shot into the sky. Rittenhouse whirled; the bald man lunged; Rittenhouse fired, four times. The man fell in front of a Buick, wounded in the groin, back, thigh, hand, and head.
The nearest bystander was Richie McGinniss, the video chief at the Daily Caller, the online publication co-founded by Tucker Carlson. McGinniss, who had been covering protests all summer, had been following the chase so closely that he had nearly been shot himself. He removed his T-shirt and knelt to compress the man’s wounds. Dying, the man breathed in a horrifying growl.
Rittenhouse stood over McGinniss for half a minute. Amid the sound of more gunfire, he didn’t stoop to check on the injured man or offer his first-aid kit. “Call 911!” McGinniss told him. Rittenhouse called a friend instead. Sprinting out of the parking lot, he said, “I just shot somebody!”
Demonstrators were yelling: “What’d he do?” “Shot someone!” “Cranium that boy!” Rittenhouse ran down the street toward the whirring lights of police vehicles. To those who had heard only the gunfire and the shouting, he must have resembled a mass shooter: they tend to be heavily armed, white, and male.
[…] Two men were fatally shot. A third was maimed. Everyone involved in the shootings was white. The astonishing fact that Rittenhouse was allowed to leave the scene underscored the racial double standard that activists had sought to further expose: the police almost certainly wouldn’t have let a Black man pass.
[…] Carlson, on Fox News, declared, “How shocked are we that seventeen-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” […]
The money angle:
[…] Pierce met with the Rittenhouses on the night of August 27th. Pierce Bainbridge drew up an agreement calling for a retainer of a hundred thousand dollars and an hourly billing rate of twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars—more than twice the average partner billing rate at top U.S. firms. Pierce would be paid through #FightBack, which, soliciting donations through its Web site, called the charges against Rittenhouse “a reactionary rush to appease the divisive, destructive forces currently roiling this country.”
Wisconsin’s ethics laws restrict pretrial publicity, but Pierce began making media appearances on Rittenhouse’s behalf. He called Kenosha a “war zone” and claimed that a “mob” had been “relentlessly hunting him as prey.” He explicitly associated Rittenhouse with the militia movement, tweeting, “The unorganized ‘militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least seventeen years of age,’ ” and “Kyle was a Minuteman protecting his community when the government would not.”
Wendy often appeared with Pierce as a “momma bear” defending her son. “He didn’t do nothing wrong,” she told an ABC affiliate. “He was attack by a mob.” She publicly threatened to sue Joe Biden for using a photograph of Rittenhouse in his campaign materials, promising, “I will take him down.”
Such partisan rhetoric rallied support among conservatives convinced that liberals were destroying American cities with impunity. As donations streamed into #FightBack’s Web site, other contributions were offered directly to the family, for living expenses. Certain donors further yoked Rittenhouse to the militia movement: in September, the group American Wolf—self-appointed “peacekeepers” in Washington State—presented Wendy and Pierce with fifty-five thousand dollars in donations, after having taken a twenty-per-cent cut.
[…] Lin Wood, [Lin Wood!] who became #FightBack’s C.E.O. on September 2, 2020, attempted to turn Rittenhouse’s legal case into a cultural battle, calling him a “political prisoner” and comparing him to Paul Revere. He tweeted, “Kyle Rittenhouse at age 17 warned us to defend ourselves.” Wood implied that patriots were needed for an even bigger fight—a looming “second civil war.” His Twitter bio included the QAnon slogan #WWG1WGA—“Where we go one, we go all”—and he became a leading promoter of a conspiracy theory claiming that a secret group of cannibalistic pedophiles has taken control of the United States.
[…] The foundation paid Pierce and produced a publicity video, “Kyle Rittenhouse—The Truth in 11 Minutes,” which framed the case as one with “the power to negatively affect our lives for generations.” A narrator intoned, “This is the moment when the ‘home of the brave’ rise to defend ‘the land of the free.’ ” Wood called the case “a watershed moment” for self-defense; Pierce tweeted, “Kyle now has the best legal representation in the country.”
[…] In mid-November, Wood reported that Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow, had “committed $50K to Kyle Rittenhouse Defense Fund.” Lindell says that he thought his donation was going toward fighting “election fraud.” The actor Ricky Schroder contributed a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Pierce finally paid Rittenhouse’s bail, with a check from Pierce Bainbridge, on November 20th—well over a month after #FightBack’s Web site indicated that the foundation had the necessary funds.
The Rittenhouses had accepted #FightBack funds without hesitation, but they were growing uncomfortable with Pierce. They say that he drank excessively in front of Wendy’s kids; called Faith, who supported Bernie Sanders, a “raging liberal”; and billed the family for time spent shopping for a shirt to wear on Tucker Carlson’s show. Pierce also appeared determined to monetize Rittenhouse’s story, and had been exploring book and film deals. […]
About “self-defense” and “stand your ground””
[…] Thirty states have adopted “stand your ground” laws, further institutionalizing civilian use of lethal force. Robyn Thomas, the Giffords Law Center’s executive director, told me that such laws urgently need to be repealed, because, among other things, they distort the notion of civic responsibility: “You have this misconception of a hero with a gun being the answer to public safety, when it’s exactly the opposite.” Armed civilians assume that they are “doing good” partly because “the system propagates that mythology, by passing laws that allow for it.”
In Wisconsin, determining if someone acted in self-defense involves the question of who initiated the aggression. But, as in many states, there is no clear definition of provocation. As John D. Moore explained in a 2013 article in the Brooklyn Law Review, in some parts of the country a person forfeits the privilege of self-defense merely by having shown up at a “foreseeably dangerous situation.” Moore argued that the varying standards make it harder for citizens to “fairly distinguish between the vigilant and the vigilante.” Wisconsin’s law favors someone who “in good faith withdraws from the fight,” yet there is not always a duty to retreat. […]
hanks to the opportunists who have seized on the Rittenhouse drama, the case has been framed as the broadest possible referendum on the Second Amendment. No other legal case presents such a vivid metaphor for the country’s polarization. Many of Rittenhouse’s supporters have described the shootings almost in cathartic terms, as if they were glad that he killed people […] With a jury [appearing] to sanction vigilantism, it seems likely that more altercations between protesters and counter-protesters will turn deadly.
Thomas sees the case as “a bellwether,” putting “guns at the forefront of the stability of our democracy.” Protecting citizens’ safety “is a primary function of our government,” she said. “Yet it’s gotten to the point where this idea that you have a right to carry a loaded weapon is starting to literally overtake other rights—the right to express your vote, the right to assemble without fear.”
Nasa/JPL released two videos of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity’s 13th flight (on September 4th, prior to solar conjunction (apparently, the data has only recently been downloaded)), shot with the two-camera Mastcam Z on the Perseverance rover, NASA’s Perseverance Captures Challenging Flight by Mars Helicopter (two videos). One is a relative close-up showing take-off, part of the flight, return, and landing; the other video is a wider-angle capturing most of the flight. The 13th flight did some additional surveying of Séítah, and the close-up Perseverance video was to observe the dust kicked up.
The next flight (16) will occur any time “now”, possibly even today (Nov 20th).
tomh @67, that is very concerning. It looks like, to at least some degree, Joe Manchin is protecting his income instead of working to address climate change. That is so short sighted.
The fate of the Build Back Better legislation, including the future of U.S. participation in attempts to limit the impact of the climate crisis, may depend on one of the weirdest phenomena of the modern world. It’s a trend that crosses an outdated technology from a dying market with a still-growing craze which baffles much of the public. And it all comes down to putting money in the pocket of one man.
The outdated industry is coal-powered electrical plants. The growing craze is cryptocurrency. And the man is, of course, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
Stitch that all together, and you get a Politico report on how the Grant Town power plant near Morgantown, West Virginia has put forward a proposal to turn itself into a giant, coal-powered, cryptocurrency “mine.” If that proposal moves forward, it could ensure that the lone contract that defines Manchin’s “coal brokerage firm” will continue to hand him over $500,000 a year for doing very close to nothing. Then maybe we can all have nice things. Or, if the crypto-plant proposal fails, Manchin could still hold the entire bill hostage to his personal interest in fossil fuels.
Not only does all of this represent a massive conflict of interest, the timing of events serves to showcase what may be the height of placing individual greed above the greater good.
Cryptocurrency is a still a phenomenon that leaves many people scratching their heads. Whether it’s a Bitcoin or a Sol, cryptocurrency doesn’t exist as a block of gold in a vault, a physical coin in a drawer, or a promissory note backed by a government. It’s a series of numbers embedded in a blockchain, which is itself a kind of storage system for these numbers that makes it very difficult to falsify or alter information. The numbers can’t be guessed, and don’t follow a regular pattern. They can only be calculated using a laborious set of equations that can discover the next sequence in a process popularly called “mining.” Through mining, new “blocks” of verified transactions are added to the blockchain. Those blocks are owned by the miners.
In the early days, discovering these sequences was relatively easy and could even be done on generic desktop computers. But finding new crypto “coins” rapidly becomes more difficult, and the equations aren’t really optimized to work on the kind of generic microprocessors at the heart of most laptops and desktops. Systems expanded to allow many computers to work together in discovering a block. Then computer gamers and graphic artists found that the dedicated graphics cards they needed were simply unavailable, because cryptocurrency miners had discovered that the type of processors on these cards was much better suited to digging up that next coin. That’s still true today to some extent, but in large part, crypto mining has moved on to even more specialized hardware, designed expressly to deal with the particular equations involved in uncovering a new transaction. This dedicated hardware has taken crypto mining well beyond the limits of what many early adherents of Bitcoin or other currencies thought to be practical.
Over time, the real cost of mining a new block has become defined by one thing: power. Anyone trying to mine a Bitcoin at home these days is almost certain to spend more money on the power it costs to mine that coin than the coin is actually worth. At the other end of the mining spectrum, rooms full of specialized mining machines, all digging away at the blockchain, consume a lot of energy, but the cost of the power is still lower than the profit that can be returned—especially when the crypto market is surging.
Rather than the cost of power, the availability of power has become a constraint on these high-end mining operations. There are systems out there that need more power than a mid-sized town to handle their ongoing search for that next transaction. So where do they get it? They buy a power plant.
There are some rather ingenious alternatives being put forward—including solar-powered EV charging stations that would use all solar power to mine for cryptocurrency using any excess energy—but all too often, the easiest form of power for the crypto-hungry to find can be defined in one word: coal.
Across the nation and in many parts of the world, coal power plants are closing for the simplest reason: They cost too much. The cost of operating a coal-powered plant is now so far above adding new power in the form of solar or wind, that systems are finding it cheaper to overbuild renewables and close down the aging coal plants. Some plants are being converted to burn natural gas instead. Others are just being shuttered.
A plant that’s about to be written off and remaindered is a great target for a crypto operation. Using that dedicated hardware, they can afford the higher cost of the coal-based power. That’s led to crypto miners buying up multiple plants in Pennsylvania and in New York. That New York plant had been used as a “peaker” plant, filling in when there was high demand on the grid. Its continuous use in powering crypto mining has reportedly made a nearby glacial lake used to cool the plant “feel like a bathtub.”
In the case of the Grant Town plant in West Virginia, operating it for power no longer makes any sense. It’s a relatively small power plant, only 80 megawatts. It’s also the only plant in the state that still burns “waste coal.”
Coal mines often generate a spoil pile of mostly non-coal material that is picked off the conveyor belt, often by hand, and pitched aside. Before the coal is sent to the power plant, it is often sent through a “prep plant,” where the coal is crushed to a more uniform size and sent through a series of chemical baths in which the lighter coal floats, while heavier minerals—especially those rich in sulfur—sink. This leaves behind a second spoil pile of waste material.
Producing waste coal requires going back through the spoil piles for coal that was missed the first time. That coal is worse in almost every way than what was produced on the first pass. It contains more non-coal material, lowering the energy output and increasing the amount of ash. It also contains more sulfur and heavy metals, creating toxins that either go up the smokestack or into the coal slurry at the plant.
All coal is dirty, but waste coal is the dirtiest form of coal. Waste coal is what Joe Manchin sells.
Using waste coal made a tiny amount of sense in 2008, when the coal market was at its peak and supply was having a hard time keeping up with demand. It makes no sense now, when a majority of mines have been idled and there is still enormous overcapacity. But Manchin has a contract, and that contract has netted him over $5 million in the last decade.
The result of all this is that Grant Town isn’t just the dirtiest plant using the dirtiest fuel, it’s also the most expensive plant in the state, in terms of dollars per megawatt. That plant has lost $117 million in just the last five years while paying Manchin $500,000 a year—not even for the waste coal itself, but just to manage the contract that delivers the waste coal.
Joe Manchin is almost singularly responsible for removing $1.8 trillion in funding from the Build Back Better legislation. Thanks to Sen. Manchin’s refusal to support the bill as it was originally proposed, dozens of major programs have already been reduced in scope or eliminated completely. Some of the things that were removed—including two years of free community college—seemed like complete no-brainers which would have not only decreased the debt students now face upon emerging from college, but given the U.S. a competitive advantage by creating a more educated work force.
The funds for climate change included in the legislation that just passed the House are much smaller than those included in the original proposal that came from the White House. However, they do include over $500 billion in funds dedicated to expanding the use of renewable energy and electric vehicles. Funds for the creation of the Civilian Climate Corps are also still in there, which would create jobs dedicated to restoring and maintaining lost areas of forest and wetland.
Also still included is a program that will give utilities a bonus for the switching production to renewable power. As Popular Science explains, that program could be a massive game-changer when it comes to transitioning not just coal plants, but also natural gas-powered plants, to solar or wind. Manchin has specifically opposed that program, saying, “Why pay the utilities for something they’re going to do anyway, because we’re transitioning?”
This is why. Because the program supporting those increased payments is expected to speed the transition by 4% a year. And that adds up.
A 4 percent yearly increase would get the energy mix to about 70 to 80 percent in 2030, whereas business as usual would put Americans around 48 percent by the same date.
If the U.S. is even going to come close to meeting the goals that must be met to ward off the worst of the climate crisis, it needs Manchin to vote for inclusions of the Clean Energy Performance Program as part of Build Back Better.
And getting that vote may depend on whether or not the Grant Town plant gets turned into a dedicated crypto mining plant … all so that Joe Manchin can continue to sell the dirtiest coal, to the dirtiest plant, to line his pocket with the dirtiest money.
Racism and bigotry were the jet fuel that launched Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin to his gubernatorial victory earlier this month. Somehow, he got the fuel mix right, adding just enough incendiary nonsense to his campaign speeches while keeping obvious, bona fide racists—such as [Trump]—at arm’s length. This cynical two-step allowed Youngkin to benefit from thinly veiled racism while also suppressing suburban voters’ all-too-fresh memories of Donald Trump’s infamous Hitler Goof rallies.
It worked, and I could not be more depressed that it did. In what fucked-up world is a deadly virus that’s raged out of control for nearly two years—largely because of right-wing resistance to basic public health precautions—less frightening to parents than a course of study that’s pretty much only taught in graduate schools?
Of course, Youngkin’s deft—and deeply dishonest—straddling of two worlds may eventually prove unsustainable. How does one man in a fleece vest keep a fractious coalition of suburban mothers and fire-breathing MAGA mites together for the long haul? […] judging by early reactions to some of Youngkin’s more “moderate” decisions, the MAGA crowd looks ready to pillory the man.
The Daily Beast reports that many MAGA conservatives who helped put Youngkin in office are already experiencing “buyer’s remorse.”
Over the past week, outrage has bubbled over among right-wingers and TrumpWorld allies alike, who are under the impression Youngkin has insufficient MAGA loyalty, citing his hiring of an LGBTQ staffer and his refusal to block COVID-related local mandates.
Oh, do tell.
[…] he declared he would not attempt to block local vaccine and mask mandates across the Old Dominion—a break from more hardcore Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis.
The death cult demands a sacrifice, Glenn. Did you really think you could govern as a Republican in the Year of Our Lord 2021 without genuflecting to fake phlegmy freedom?
Right-wing media figures almost immediately began publicly bashing the governor-elect. Judicial Watch founder Tom Fitton railed against Youngkin for refusing to stand up against “abusive” mask mandates, while right-wing outlet The Federalist tossed him under the bus for not being a “strong conservative governor.”
Ouch. Youngkin hasn’t even moved into the Executive Mansion yet and he’s being deemed a failure.
[…] John Fredericks, who hosts a radio show on Real America’s Voice (which also airs Steve Bannon’s War Room), recently stated, “Two weeks, post his election, here we go: Once again with another RINO alert.” It seems to me that someone who defers to local control vis-à-vis public health dictates would actually be a true Republican, but these folks stopped trying to make sense years ago.
But it isn’t just insufficient fealty to the novel coronavirus that’s got Republicans in a lather. It’s also the fact that Youngkin hired a staffer “with pronouns” who (gasp!) appears to identify with LGBTQ causes. […]
As shocking/not shocking as Youngkin’s victory was, it may be tough for him to hold his fragile voting base together. And if right-wingers are this suspicious of him before he even takes office, maybe Youngkin’s double-sided shtick isn’t the magic way for Republicans to sway purple state voters in the future. After all, if Republican candidates can’t be trusted to be little Despicable Him minions, what good are they?
Boston’s first woman, person of color, and Asian American mayor is wasting no time.
On Tuesday, Michelle Wu made history in Boston when she was sworn in as the City on the Hill’s first woman, first person of color, and first Asian American popularly elected mayor. After she was sworn in, Mayor Wu told reporters, “We have so much work to do.” The Boston Globe pointed out that Wu is the “youngest mayor leading one of the nation’s 25 largest cities.”
On Wednesday, Wu announced plans to “make Boston’s 23, 28 & 29 bus lines fare-free for a 2-year period” as part of an $8 million pilot program. The plan is to use some of the infrastructure funds and money allotted toward COVID-19 recovery to help make this happen. The general plan for more progressive city officials across the country is to make public transit more affordable, if not free, for everyone living in a major city. The three proposed bus lines are used predominantly by low-income people of color, according to the Globe.
[…] Mayor Wu says she is building off of the success of the fare-free pilot program and provided even more robust data she believes will build momentum toward a public transit system that everyone can afford. Worcester Mayor Joe Petty told the Globe, “I’m very pleased with this. I think people need to invest in public transportation whether it be the state or the federal government. As you see gas prices rise and the effects of climate change, this is important.”
[…] In January 2020, The New York Times estimated that “around 100 cities in the world offer free public transit, the vast majority of them in Europe, especially France and Poland.” And while the United States has lagged behind, the problem remains: Many people cannot afford public transportation, and many people with cars should use public transportation more as it would save municipalities and taxpayers in the long run via lowering carbon emissions, wear and tear on roads, and the medical and emotional costs of vehicular accidents.
One of the things that most Americans don’t realize is that the funds generated by fares, even in cities like Boston, are usually not that much more in comparison to the costs of collecting and processing that money. […] the progressive movement is using these pilot programs to do two things: prove that the policies that most Americans want actually work, and give Americans a chance to know what they have been missing.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on Sunday that he hoped U.S. athletes “go over there and kick their commie asses” at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
“I also think it’s important we do two things at the Olympics in China: Number one, that we actually show the courage the Women’s Tennis Association is showing to call out the murder, the genocide, the torture, the lies, the complicity in COVID-19 of the Chinese Communist government, to speak the truth,” Cruz said during “Face the Nation” on CBS.
“And then number two, I really hope our young men and women – that they go over there and kick their commie asses – we need to win in the Olympics,” Cruz said. […]
….Even as Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, both Democrats, have drawn fire from the left for their efforts to shrink and reshape Mr. Biden’s proposals, they have won growing financial support from conservative-leaning donors and business executives in a striking display of how party affiliation can prove secondary to special interests and ideological motivations when the stakes are high enough.
Ms. Sinema is winning more financial backing from Wall Street and constituencies on the right in large part for her opposition to raising personal and corporate income tax rates. Mr. Manchin has attracted new Republican-leaning donors as he has fought against much of his own party to scale back the size of Mr. Biden’s legislation and limit new social welfare components.
[…]
This month, the billionaire Wall Street investor Kenneth G. Langone, a longtime Republican megadonor who has not previously contributed to Mr. Manchin, effusively praised him for showing “guts and courage” and vowed to throw “one of the biggest fund-raisers I’ve ever had for him.”
[…]
Cash has also poured in for Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema from political action committees and donors linked to the finance and pharmaceutical industries, which opposed proposals initially included in the domestic policy bill that the lawmakers helped scale back, including changes to Medicare and the tax-rate increases.
[…]
Way too much detail to quote, but the bottom line is obvious. Millions are flowing to Manchin and Sinema. Obstructing the Democratic agenda is a very lucrative tactic.
Wonkette:” Pillow Guy, Kid Rock, Proud Boys: It’s A Big Weekend For Terrible Men Doing Weird Shit”
Clearly, the combination of International Men’s Day and the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has shaken something loose in the conservative male psyche, because a whole bunch of these tools are going right off the goddamned deep end this weekend. It was hard to pick just one to write about this morning, so I figured I’d do a rundown.
MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell announced during his “broadcast” last night that he plans on doing a demonstration outside of Fox News. It’s not clear what it is he wants to accomplish by doing this, if anyone will be joining him or if he will just be standing outside with a bullhorn, carrying a sign reading “The End Is Nigh.”
Via The Daily Beast:
MyPillow CEO and 2020 dead-ender Mike Lindell has announced plans to organize a protest outside Fox News’ New York City headquarters. “We are going to do something out in front of Fox News, I think we should have—you know, if people want to go down there, maybe we should give out Frank Speech signs,” Lindell stated on his Friday evening broadcast. “They [Fox News] are a big part of our country being taken from us,” he continued, before calling the network he built his pillow empire by advertising on “controlled opposition,” which he said is the “worst” he has “ever seen in history.”
I swear. The number of people who are having “their country” taken from them gets smaller every day. Pretty soon it’s just gonna be Mike Lindell and a bunch of custom human shaped pillows. […]
This Jan. 6 Rioter/Proud Boy Claims He Should Go Free, Because Of How He Is Just Like Kyle Rittenhouse […] We knew this was going to happen, right? Or something like it?
Lawyers for Zachary Rehl, the leader of the Philadelphia Proud Boys, filed a nonsense motion a day after the Rittenhouse verdict claiming that charges against their client should be dropped because of how he is just like Kyle Rittenhouse and was in DC to “defend vulnerable demonstrators.” This, to be clear, was the exact opposite of what Kyle Rittenhouse did or even claimed to do. He was in Kenosha, supposedly, to defend a vulnerable used car lot. […]
The motion, first reported by Scott MacFarlane, reads:
Actually, the Proud Boys primarily came to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, to patrol the perimeter of the crowds and the places where crowds were gathered to defend vulnerable demonstrators against violent attacks from ANTIFA, not unlike what Kyle Rittenhouse did in Kenosah(sic), Wisconsin. The Government argues that the best evidence of what these proud boys planned to do is what they actually did. What did they do? What they actually did, as shown in one 1:40 hour segment of the Eddie Block raw video for his documentary was stand around, smoke a cigarette, take pictures facing away with the Capitol over their shoulder and patrol around a large rectangle around Capitol Hill taunting Antifa and chanting once at D.C. police “DO YOUR JOB!”
What they actually planned to do and did was make sure that the defenseless Trump supporters in the gun free zones of D.C. did not get jumped and stabbed by the rioters who had run amok all during 2020, as ANTIFA had stabbed people on December 12, 2020. However, within the terms of what the Indictment alleges, the Indictment admits that Zachary Rehl’s intentions with regard to the Joint Session of Congress was for Congress to debate and resolve disputes about the Electoral College votes from disputed votes.
Well that last sentence is certainly something.
Rehl has not only been charged with “conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting, destruction of government property and aiding and abetting, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly conduct in a restricted building or grounds,” for his actions on January 6, he is also one of the named defendants in a lawsuit brought by Capitol Police officers against those they blame for the injuries and trauma they sustained during the riots. He has not been charged, to anyone’s knowledge, with protecting “defenseless Trump supporters.”
And Now, Kid Rock, Wearing A Very Large Fur Coat, Yelling About Snowflakes
Conservatives love to whine about left-wing celebrities, crying “Just shut up and entertain us!” every time one voices an opinion they don’t care for. The Left doesn’t have that luxury with right-wing celebrities, as we would generally prefer they abstain from attempting to entertain us. […] they tend not to be very good at it. Unfortunately for all of us, going full wingnut has sustained (or semi-revived) a career that by all rights should have ended decades ago.
Such is the case with Kid Rock, whose entire fanbase consists of people who are just glad to have anyone on their side that they are willing to pretend that obviously terrible songs are great.
Like his latest song “Don’t Tell Me How To Live” (featuring Monster Truck), which is practically a parody of itself in both content and production value.
It’s so bad. It’s just so, so bad. And they’re just pretending we all got totally owned by this terrible terrible song.
“So glad the Bull God is back,” said some dude who apparently talks about wrestling for a living, “All you young millennials (a generation who by now are age 30 and above) can chew on this!” [video available at the link]
I would not like to chew on that, as I have no interest in picking fake fur out of my teeth for the next week. Ew.
The song — which also came highly recommended by Barstool Sports, if that tells you anything — hits pretty much all of the marks for a MAGA anthem. It included calling people snowflakes, yelling about participation trophies and, naturally, the phrase “soar like an eagle.” [video available at the link]
They love it when eagles soar.
It’s almost kind of cute that they think we’re all gonna be like “Oh no, we’re so owned! We have been read for filth by this man, despite the fact that we can’t even remember what the hell his one hit wonder even was! No one has talked to us like this before!” or something. Or it would be if they were not all raging sociopaths who never stop crying about other people being snowflakes and screaming for their own participation trophies. […]
“To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form would be a short-sighted blunder that future historians will forever puzzle over.”
Over the summer, as Democrats debated how to approach the For the People Act, more than 100 American scholars who specialize in democracy studies unveiled a joint public statement. Their warning was unsubtle: The United States’ system of government, the experts said, is “now at risk.”
As part of their efforts, the scholars, many of whom have devoted much of their lives to studying the breakdowns in democracies abroad, pleaded with lawmakers to act. “We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary — including suspending the filibuster — in order to pass national voting and election administration standards,” the experts wrote.
[…] West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin derailed the For the People Act soon after.
[…] Manchin and a sizable group of other Senate Democrats reached a compromise agreement on a legislative alternative called the Freedom to Vote Act.
[Now] an even larger number of democracy scholars are effectively pleading with the governing majority to pass the bill. Axios reported over the weekend:
“Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act. But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching,” according to more than 150 top scholars of U.S. democracy in a new push to temporarily suspend the Senate filibuster and pass voting rights protections on a simple majority vote.
The full letter from the scholars is online, and it’s explicit in its endorsement of the Freedom to Vote Act, which they describe as “the most important piece of legislation to defend and strengthen American democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
The experts explained, “This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy. It is a moment of great peril and risk. Though disputes over the legitimacy of America’s elections have been growing for two decades, they have taken a catastrophic turn since the 2020 election.” [snipped excerpt from the letter]
The question, of course, is not whether Senate Republicans will act to protect our democracy — they’ve already said they will refuse — but rather whether Senate Democrats are prepared to carve out an exception to the chamber’s filibuster and pass the legislation through majority rule.
[…] A growing number of Democratic senators, including many centrists, have come to a similar conclusion. Delaware’s Tom Carper, for example, recently wrote, “No barrier — not even the filibuster — should stand in the way of our sacred obligation to protect our democracy.” Maine’s Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, also said, “[I]f forced to choose between a Senate rule and democracy itself, I know where I will come down.”
What’s less clear is whether Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema are prepared to come down the same way. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that Sinema supports the For the People Act, but she’s prepared to give the Republican minority veto power over the legislation, “signaling that a planned last-ditch voting rights push that party leaders and activists are planning for the closely divided Senate in the coming months is likely to fail.”
Sinema specifically added that “bipartisan” changes are the ones that “stand the test of time” — despite the fact that the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was approved in a partisan fashion in 1869, and it’s stood the test of time just fine.
The fight isn’t officially over just yet, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has signaled his intention to “restore” majority rule to the chamber, at least on this one fundamental issue. But if Sinema doesn’t budge, the For the People Act will die, and democracy’s midnight will draw even closer.
Over the course of 2021, there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of trials involving defendants accused of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6. In many instances, judges have condemned the seriousness of the insurrectionist violence in no uncertain terms, while taking rioters to task for participating in an attack against our democracy.
What we haven’t heard are judges, as part of these legal proceedings, admonishing the former president who helped incite the violence.
Late last week, a Donald Trump supporter named John Lolos conceded in court that he entered the Capitol through a broken window on Jan. 6, though he emphasized that he didn’t personally break the window. The defendant, against the advice of counsel, also told the judge about the many conspiracy theories he’d seen online about the 2020 election, which he apparently still believed as of Friday.
Lolos’ misguided monologue did not work: He was sentenced to two weeks in prison. But just as notable was the degree to which the judge in the case argued that the rioters weren’t the only ones responsible for the attack. Politico reported:
A federal judge on Friday squarely placed the blame for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack on Donald Trump, suggesting that the former president’s role in seeding lies about the 2020 election — and the effect it had on his followers — has been an underappreciated part of the entire episode. Judge Amit Mehta issued his commentary as he delivered a 14-day jail sentence to Jan. 6 rioter John Lolos — a sentence Mehta said he shortened in part to reflect the fact that Lolos was responding to Trump’s call.
The federal judge made the case that that Lolos and others who participated in the Capitol assault “were called to Washington, D.C., by an elected official, prompted to walk to the Capitol by an elected official.”
Mehta added, “People like Mr. Lolos were told lies, told falsehoods, told our election was stolen when it clearly was not. We’re here today deciding whether Mr. Lolos should spend 30 days in jail when those who created the conditions that led to Mr. Lolos’ conduct, led to the events of Jan. 6 [haven’t been] held to account for their actions and their word.” […]
Following the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Rep. Madison Cawthorn told his allies, “Be armed, be dangerous and be moral.”
When many of us hear the words “armed” and “dangerous,” we think of criminal activity: Police officers are often told to be on the lookout for suspects — accused of serious felonies — who are armed and dangerous, and are therefore threats to public safety.
What’s far less common are instances in which elected officials suggest being armed and dangerous is a good thing. The Charlotte Observer reported:
Following a not-guilty verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse on Friday, Rep. Madison Cawthorn offered the 18-year-old an internship and told people on Instagram to “be armed, be dangerous and be moral.” … On Instagram, Cawthorn said in a video: “Kyle Rittenhouse is not guilty, my friends. You have a right to defend yourselves. Be armed, be dangerous and be moral.”
To be sure, Cawthorn was not the only GOP official in a celebratory mood after a jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on Friday. He was, however, the only member of Congress who thought it’d be a good idea to encourage his allies to be both “armed” and “dangerous.”
The fact that the congressman added “moral” to the mix did not negate the importance of the other adjectives.
What’s more, this wasn’t the first example of Cawthorn raising eyebrows with the language of violence. […]
[…] Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, two longtime contributors on Fox News who were fine with the misinformation the network has peddled up until now, announced yesterday on their right-wing media site that they’re leaving Fox because “the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible.”
Hayes and Goldberg pointed directly at Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation “documentary” on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack that fully aims to whitewash the events of that day. The ex-contributors called it a “collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.”
Carlson’s documentary is just the worst example of a “longstanding trend” of Fox twisting facts to suit Trump’s agenda, Hayes and Goldberg wrote.
[…] Trump Jr. wasted no time following the verdict, going on Twitter to amplify a far-right gun group’s campaign to send Rittenhouse a free rifle as a sort of congratulatory award.
“Gun Owners of America is sending Kyle Rittenhouse an AR-15. Sign the card in support of Kyle,” Trump Jr. wrote in a since-deleted tweet, urging his 7.1 million followers to add their name to a virtual card showing their appreciation of Rittenhouse. The gun lobbying group had stated that the AR-15 was a “thank you” gift to Rittenhouse “for being a warrior for gun owners and self defense rights across the country!” In another tweet, Trump Jr. shared an article that referred to Rittenhouse as a “badass” for the “near flawless” way he handled his gun on the night he shot three people. “Worth the read,” Trump Jr. wrote. […]
[…] Daily COVID-19 cases rose by 29 percent in the past 14 days with the country reporting more than 93,000 cases per day.
White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci on Sunday warned of a possible spike in coronavirus cases as the U.S. heads into the winter months.
Fauci told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday that people moving indoors, waning vaccine-born immunity, and millions of unvaccinated Americans creates a potentially dangerous situation.
“And that results in the dynamic of virus in the community that not only is dangerous and makes people who are unvaccinated vulnerable, but it also spills over into the vaccinated people, because no vaccine is 100 percent effective,” Fauci said. […]
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) could be in serious trouble with Democratic voters when she goes up for reelection in 2024.
Too fucking late to save our democracy.
A new Arizona Public Opinion Pulse conducted by Phoenix-based OH Predictive Insights found that nearly three-quarters of Arizona Democratic voters — 72 percent — want a Democrat other than Sinema as their U.S. senator. Only 26 percent say they would prefer Sinema.
That finding bears out when Sinema’s strength is tested against a handful of potential primary rivals.
In a hypothetical primary match-up, Sinema trails Rep. Ruben Gallego 24 percent to 47 percent, according to the poll. Rep. Greg Stanton leads Sinema by a similar margin, while state Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman holds a 20-point edge over Sinema.
“Sen. Sinema’s growing unpopularity with voters from within her own party could prove fatal in 2024 when she will have to ask for Democrats’ support for re-nomination,” Mike Noble, the chief of research at OH Predictive Insights, said. […]
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 82
It’s already well past midnight, and dawn is rising on our new, hellish, fascist future.
stroppysays
Lynna, OM @85
IOW, “responsible” propaganda is 1% less obvious than 100%, unadulterated Fox-pucky. Such discriminating taste rises to the level of true connoisseurship.
Team Trump isn’t just trying to hide Jan. 6 information from Congress, it’s also trying to hide information about the federal response to Covid-19.
[…] There’s also a House select panel investigating the Covid-19 crisis and the government’s response to the pandemic. […] Bloomberg News reported over the weekend:
Former President Donald Trump told his former White House trade adviser to defy a House committee that subpoenaed him in a probe into the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The Communist Democrats are engaging in yet another Witch Hunt, this time going after my Administration’s unprecedented and incredible coronavirus response,” the former president said in a strange written statement. “I’m telling Peter Navarro to protect executive privilege and not let these unhinged Democrats discredit our great accomplishments.”
For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that Team Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis, in reality, was neither “incredible” nor “great.” Let’s also skip past the points that Democrats aren’t communists and examining how well officials responded to a pandemic is not a “witch hunt.”
[…] Vanity Fair reported a few years ago that in 2016, then-candidate Trump directed Jared Kushner to help bolster his views on China. His son-in-law went to Amazon.com, where he was struck by the title of one book, ‘Death by China,’ co-authored by Peter Navarro. He cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser.”
[…] for reasons that went unexplained, Trump tapped Navarro to serve on the White House Coronavirus Taskforce — where he picked strange fights in the Situation Room over hydroxychloroquine.
Not surprisingly, the panel investigating the response to the pandemic wants to chat with Navarro. When he refused to cooperate voluntarily, the select subcommittee, chaired by House Majority Whip James Clyburn, subpoenaed the former trade adviser, directing him to produce relevant materials and appear for a deposition in December.
Navarro said late last week that he intended to defy the subpoena and would instead provide congressional investigators a copy of his book. It was a day later when Trump directed his former adviser to “protect executive privilege.”
[…] It’s possible that Navarro believes congressional subpoenas are optional and there are no consequences for ignoring them. The example of Steve Bannon, however, should probably give the former White House adviser pause.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, formally approved his state’s partisan congressional district map on Saturday. Thanks to GOP abuses, Republican state policymakers are likely to win 12 of Ohio’s 15 seats — 80 percent of the power — despite receiving roughly 54 percent of the statewide vote.
Yes, some of the January 6 insurrectionists were armed with guns:
A Jan. 6 defendant who’s been charged with illegally possessing a loaded firearm at the Capitol gave a chilling portrait of his intentions when he allegedly broke into the building that day, according to a newly unsealed filing in the case.
A complaint by a special agent with the U.S. Capitol Police stated that a USCP officer spotted a gun fall out of the waistband of an insurrectionist who allegedly attacked him at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The gun was traced to Mark Mazza of Shelbyville, Indiana, who had reported the firearm as stolen to local authorities three days after the attack, according to the complaint.
Mazza admitted during an interview in March that he had lied in his initial report, and that he had omitted the fact that he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the complaint stated.
During the interview, Mazza mentioned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), saying he “never did get to talk to Nancy … I thought Nan and I would hit it off.”
“And I was glad I didn’t because you’d be here for another reason,” Mazza added.
Then he insisted he wasn’t violent.
“I’m nonviolent,” Mazza said. “I’m a patriot, and it pisses me off to see where we’re at.”
Mazza also told investigators that he had attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse.
The complaint included several images from Mazza’s social media accounts and Capitol surveillance cameras that purportedly show him attempting to break into the Capitol with the rest of the mob of Trump supporters and attacking police officers.
Mazza has been charged with disrupting Congress, obstructing the grand jury investigation into the insurrection, assaulting federal officers and carrying a firearm in D.C. without a license. […]
The Supreme Court issued one ruling Monday, a unanimous decision in an interstate groundwater dispute, and nothing else. That means one more week will pass in which pregnant Texans are denied their constitutional right to a safe, legal medical procedure. The Court is still leaving SB8, the Texas law that bans the procedure after six weeks of gestation for all but the most limited of cases—a medical emergency, in place. Another week will pass in which desperate Texans will have to figure out how to scrape up the resources and time to travel out of state to get an abortion and have to figure out where to go.
Some have the resources and the help, and it’s still a gut-wrenching experience. Like the woman who wrote an open letter, as yet unpublished, “To the Male Politicians Controlling My Uterus.” The 30-year old Texan talked about her ordeal to the Austin American-Statesman, about finding out the fetus she was carrying and wanted had an aggressive case of a rare chromosomal disorder, Turner’s Syndrome. Fluid was filling its vital organs, and by 20 weeks, its heart would be filled and stopped. If she carried it, she would have a stillbirth. Or she could travel out of state and have the abortion.
Out of compassion for the fetus inside her body, out of compassion for herself, she decided to have the abortion. She had to leave her home, her state, to get the health care she needed and has a constitutional right to.
“We had gotten four doctors to confirm that if I had continued with the pregnancy, it would have caused suffering for the baby,” she told the paper. “I don’t understand in what world that would be okay.” At 12 weeks, fluid was already building up in the fetus’ neck, reaching the brain and lungs. She and her husband talked to a genetic counselor. “She said at this phase, about 12 weeks, it was the most intense case that she’d ever seen,” she said of the counselor. “In retrospect, I do feel really grateful for the clarity that we got there. … She said, ‘I’m going to help you, and we’re going to talk about every option possible […]
None of her doctors were willing to attest that she was experiencing a medical emergency, the one exception to SB8. They are too concerned about being taken to court by a bounty hunter, a “concerned citizen” who would sue them for “aiding and abetting” what the state has unilaterally deemed an illegal procedure. “It felt like everyone was supportive of my decision, all of the medical personnel that we worked with, but they didn’t want to get involved. They didn’t even want to potentially open the conversation of, ‘Is this something we can file as an exemption?’”
[…] She was lucky in that she has no other children to worry about caring for on a trip out of state, the resources to secure the procedure, and family to stay with in California, where she got the abortion. She, and others who have taken the same path know how privileged they are.
A Texas woman who suspected she was pregnant early, but not early enough, traveled 1,500 miles for her abortion. She told People magazine that she felt she had an “immense privilege.”
“I have the luxury of time and a job that was understanding. That played a huge role in making this possible. […] I have the resources and ability to travel out of state to get an abortion, and a lot of people will not. […]
Kathaleen Pittman, the clinic administrator [in Shreveport, Louisiana], said that before the law was enacted in Texas, about 20% of her clients were from the state, but now it’s 60%. She told AP she had recently spoken to a Texas mother whose 13-year-old daughter had been raped and was pregnant. There isn’t an exception for that in the law. “She’s a child,” Pittman said. “She should not have to be on the road for hours getting here. It is absolutely heartbreaking.”
[…] population size is the issue—Texas had something like 56,000 abortions provided in 2019, compared to 10,000 in Colorado and 2,700 in New Mexico. “That’s an order of magnitude difference … that’s a tall order to absorb all of that patient volume. We’re all working every day to try to meet that need, but it certainly is impacting wait time and availability.” Vicki Cowart, the president and CEO of PPRM, said, “I want to be clear, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains will do everything we can to serve the patients who turn to our region for care.”
“We are working overtime to do this. But with numbers like these, that won’t be enough. There will be patients who simply cannot access care, and that is the core of the injustice created by Senate Bill 8.”
It’s an injustice perpetuated by the Supreme Court.
[…] This Supreme Court has already taken abortion away from tens of thousands of people, and they’re not finished yet. Republicans aren’t going to play nice.
“[…] CBS gave Ted Cruz time to spew 2020 election denial and bullshit talking points without pushback from Margaret Brennan. […]
On NBC’s Meet The Press, Chuck Todd gave North Dakota GOP Senator Kevin Cramer space to make excuses for Kyle Rittenhouse.
[…] On “Fox News Sunday,” Bret Baier took his turn in the “rehabilitate Chris Christie” tour. ”
Dana Bash is trending, I’d like to weigh in on this pathetic excuse for journalism. It’s the kind of crap that makes my blood boil. She’s letting that con rebrand himself from former guy flunky, to “cool, tough, Jersey fighter”. And that’s bullsh*t.
Ted Cruz, a literal insurrectionist, was invited on @FaceTheNation yesterday to face the super accountable questions like “will you run for president” and “sounds like you’ve got a good campaign slogan”
Law enforcement identified a suspect who allegedly drove through a Christmas parade after fleeing from a knife fight in Waukesha, Wis., on Sunday, killing at least five people and injuring at least 48 — a violent end to a festive scene where children danced in the street and a marching band played “Jingle Bells.”
A law enforcement official told The Washington Post that suspect Darrell E. Brooks, Jr., 39, was at the scene of a reported knife fight, then sped away in the red SUV when police arrived at that scene. Brooks was allegedly behind the wheel when it drove into the parade route. Authorities identified Brooks as the “lone subject” during a Monday afternoon news conference, adding he “drove right through the barricades and the officers” at the scene.
Waukesha Police Chief Dan Thompson identified the four women and one man killed as 52-year-olds Tamara Durand and Jane Kulich; LeAnna Owen, 71; Virginia Sorenson, 79; and Wilhelm Hospel, 81.
[…] Police are referring five counts of first-degree intentional homicide, with additional charges possible “based on the investigation. But those will come in time,” Thompson said during a Monday afternoon news conference.
He said 48 people were injured, including 2 children in critical condition — but that number could still rise.
Officials did not comment on a possible motive. The FBI said it was assisting local authorities in the investigation.
The law enforcement official told The Post that Brooks has a number of prior criminal arrests, but investigators have not yet found anything tying the vehicular violence to any sort of terrorism or ideology. So far, it appears his main intent was to escape the police at the prior incident, the official said.
[…] Officials said that 22 patients were transported by fire crews to six area hospitals. Additional people were transported to medical facilities by the police and bystanders. One hospital said Monday that 18 children had been brought to its emergency department alone.
[…] By the morning after the parade, only some of the prior night’s chaos had been cleared. The trail of stray gloves, overturned chairs and abandoned drinkware grew denser the closer to Barstow Street, while Lollipops and wrapped candy were still scattered on the grassy parkway where families had gathered hours earlier for the parade themed “Comfort and Joy.” An image from the aftermath showed a jogging stroller, decorated with red and silver tinsel, now abandoned and missing a wheel.
[…] Court records appear to show that Brooks had a lengthy criminal record, including a case filed earlier this month alleging battery, domestic abuse and recklessly endangering safety. According to the court records, he pleaded not guilty and posted cash bond. He was ordered not to possess any dangerous weapons, including firearms. […]
injuries ranged from facial abrasions and broken bones to “serious head injuries,” the hospital said. Hospital officials said 10 patients were admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit.
Three sets of siblings are currently hospitalized at the facility. […]
More than 90% of federal workers received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by Monday’s deadline set by President Joe Biden…. In all, more than 95% of federal workers are in compliance with the Biden mandate, the official said, either by being vaccinated or having requested an exemption.
While Trump administration officials argued that moving the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] West would put employees closer to the lands they manage — primarily located in 12 Western states — current and former employees have described how, in fact, the move derailed the agency by breaking up teams that once worked closely together and scattered people across several Western cities. Most of those ordered to move West chose to quit or retire rather than accept new jobs.
Now, as Covid cases climb once again, more companies are putting aside carrots and turning to sticks in an effort to protect their workers. From Utah grocery chain Harmons to Wall Street banking giant JPMorgan Chase, companies are telling their unvaccinated workers to get the shots or pay more for health insurance.
[…] earlier this month Brooks was arrested for intentionally running over a woman in a gas station parking lot after chasing her to the gas station after a fight. Brooks posted a $1,000 bond for the attack at the gas station and was released from the Milwaukee County Jail on November 16th, last Tuesday.
And just to confirm that you did read that right: Brooks was released on bail less than a week earlier for intentionally running over someone else.
The Milwaukee County DA released a statement today in which he called the $1,000 bail “inappropriately low.” […]
The fascists over at the Washington Examiner are claiming that a “BLM activist” says that the Waukesha incident was retaliation for the Rittenhouse verdict.
Trump said the Jan. 6 rioters posed “zero threat.” Ron Johnson said they weren’t really “armed.” Reality tells a different story.
When much of the Republican Party decided to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 attack, partisans tried to recast the rioters as harmless “tourists.” It’s a foundational claim: If the insurrectionists weren’t dangerous, then the assault on the Capitol was little more than a messy spectacle. And if the assault was unimportant, then there’s no need for investigations, indictments, and so on.
It’s why Donald Trump insisted in late March that the rioters posed “zero threat” to anyone on Jan. 6. A month earlier, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin dismissed the idea that the attackers were part of an “armed insurrection,” because as far as he was concerned, the rioters weren’t actually “armed.”
Reality tells a different story.
Even when folks like Trump and Johnson made these claims, they were clearly mistaken. Not only was the mob armed with bats, clubs, and flag poles, The Associated Press pointed to court filings in February that said rioters were caught with guns, bombs, stun guns, and other weapons.
But as the year progressed, similar reports came to the fore. We learned in May, for example, about a Justice Department indictment alleging that Christopher Alberts carried a semi-automatic handgun onto the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. As Politico reported yesterday, new allegations are among the most serious to date.
An Indiana man charged with carrying a loaded firearm to the Capitol on Jan. 6 told investigators that if he had found Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “you’d be here for another reason,” according to court documents posted over the weekend…. In this case, [Mark Mazza] allegedly carried a Taurus revolver known as “The Judge,” which is capable of firing shotgun shells — two of which were in the chamber, along with three hollow-point bullets. A Capitol Police sergeant obtained the weapon after allegedly fending off an assault from Mazza.
And what did this 56-year-old Indiana man intend to do with the handgun capable of firing shotgun shells? According to the newly filed court documents, Mazza was apparently prepared to shoot the Speaker of the House.
In fact, the accused seems to have been quite forthcoming about his intentions. When Capitol Police investigators visited Mazza at his home in March, he not only acknowledged his attendance on Jan. 6, he also said he intended to have a confrontation with Nancy Pelosi.
“I thought Nan and I would hit it off,” Mazza said. “I was glad I didn’t because you’d be here for another reason and I told my kids that if they show up, I’m surrendering, nope they can have me, because I may go down a hero.”
As Rachel emphasized on last night’s show, the accused didn’t say this in some encrypted forum that law enforcement just gained access to — this guy apparently said it out loud to investigators who showed up at his house.
This is the same man who also allegedly assaulted a police officer during the assault on the Capitol. Politico’s report noted that it was during the violence that a Capitol Police sergeant “obtained the weapon after allegedly fending off an assault from Mazza.” Law enforcement then used the gun and traced it back to its owner.
The article added:
Though reports of rioters charged with carrying firearms have been limited, the number has been steadily climbing. A former DEA agent brandished his service weapon outside the Capitol. A Texas man was charged with bringing a handgun as well. Leaders of the Oath Keepers charged with conspiring to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election aren’t facing firearms charges, but prosecutors have pieced together evidence suggesting they kept a stockpile of weapons at a hotel in nearby Arlington, Va.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump told the public that the rioters posed “zero threat” and Ron Johnson questioned whether the attackers were “armed.”
Some of the attorneys who wasted everyone’s time with baseless pro-Trump, anti-election litigation are now facing meaningful consequences.
It’s no secret that in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat, conspiracy-minded lawyers filed misguided lawsuits, hoping to help the former president. It’s also no secret that those cases failed spectacularly.
What’s less known is the fact that the demise of those cases was not the final word on the subject. On the contrary, some of the attorneys who wasted everyone’s time with baseless litigation are now facing meaningful consequences.
In Michigan, for example, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration and the city of Detroit sought penalties against nine attorneys — a group that includes prominent Trump allies Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — who filed an absurd anti-election case last December. A few months ago, a federal judge agreed and sanctioned the conspiratorial lawyers.
U.S. District Judge Linda Parker concluded in August, “[D]espite the haze of confusion, commotion and chaos counsel intentionally attempted to create by filing this lawsuit, one thing is perfectly clear: Plaintiffs’ attorneys have scorned their oath, flouted the rules and attempted to undermine the integrity of the judiciary along the way. As such, the court is duty-bound to grant the motions for sanctions.”
As The Washington Post reported, there’s a similar story unfolding in Colorado.
A federal judge has ordered two Colorado lawyers who filed a lawsuit late last year challenging the 2020 election results to pay nearly $187,000 to defray the legal fees of groups they sued, arguing that the hefty penalty was proper to deter others from using frivolous suits to undermine the democratic system.
Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter wrote, “As officers of the Court, these attorneys have a higher duty and calling that requires meaningful investigation before prematurely repeating in court pleadings unverified and uninvestigated defamatory rumors that strike at the heart of our democratic system and were used by others to foment a violent insurrection that threatened our system of government.”
He added, “They are experienced lawyers who should have known better. They need to take responsibility for their misconduct.”
[…] Yesterday, as the Post’s report explained, the federal jurist went further, ordering the Colorado lawyers to pay nearly $187,000. Neureiter defended the severity of the penalties by pointing to “the severity of the violation” and because the lawyers had solicited donations from the “arguably innocent and gullible public” to fund their suit.
[…] There may very well be some who believe there’s no harm in filing frivolous anti-election litigation. Even if they expect the cases to fail, lawyers may assume they’ll raise some money, get some exposure in conservative media, and take their chances before a judge.
The more attorneys face serious sanctions for such efforts, the fewer cases we’re likely to see.
The state attorney general’s race in Texas was already generating national attention. Incumbent Republican Ken Paxton is seeking a third term, despite the fact that he was already under indictment on felony securities fraud charges when members of his own team made multiple criminal allegations against him.
His leading primary rival is George P. Bush, who embarrassed himself trying to curry favor with Donald Trump, despite the former president’s attacks against the Bush family, only to see Trump endorse Paxton anyway.
Yesterday, as NBC News reported, the contest became even more complicated.
Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert announced Monday that he is running for attorney general of Texas, throwing his hat in the ring for what’s expected to be one of the most closely watched state races in 2022.
[…] Time will tell, of course, who emerges from the crowded primary in Texas, but yesterday’s news appears to carry a larger significance: Louie Gohmert, a ridiculous congressional fixture for the last 17 years, is apparently ready to exit Capitol Hill.
For those of us who’ve marveled at the Republican lawmaker’s capacity for making utterly bonkers comments, this is no small development. Capitol Hill watchers have come to expect “Gohmert Hour” on a regular basis: The congressman is known for giving strange special-order speeches on the House floor after legislative business for the day has wrapped up, and those speeches have repeatedly featured Gohmert’s often laughable ideas on a great many subjects.
As a result, the Texas Republican has earned an unfortunate reputation as one of Congress’ least respected members. His greatest hits package is far too lengthy to reference here, but just off the top of my head, I’m reminded of the time he suggested addressing climate change by moving Earth’s moon. And his fear of “terror babies.” And the time he compared opponents of marriage equality to the victims of Nazi atrocities.
And his willingness to raise the prospect of violence in response to his conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s defeat. […] As Gohmert eyes a new office, it’s as if he’s passing the torch to a new generation of outlandish members of Congress.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Redistricting Action Fund filed suit yesterday challenging Ohio’s new congressional map. The litigation was filed in state court, alleging that the new district lines violate the Ohio’s state constitution.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) continues to act like he’s being ambushed anytime he’s pressed on details of his conversations with […] Trump on Jan. 6.
In an interview with Spectrum News last week, Jordan was asked whether he had checked exactly how many times he spoke with Trump that day and when those conversations occurred, as the timing could be a crucial component of congressional investigators’ interest in their insurrection day interactions.
“Nope,” Jordan said.
Jordan also wouldn’t commit to cooperating with the Jan. 6 select committee if the panel subpoenaed or requested anything from him.
“Depends what it is,” Jordan said. “I mean, I’m not going to answer hypothetical questions, but I just think this is a complete sham, what these guys are doing.”
Jordan also dismissed the possibility of sharing phone records with the committee if asked.
“Same response I gave you before,” Jordan said. “This is a total political committee.”
This isn’t the first time Jordan — a top Trump ally who helped challenge Joe Biden’s electoral victory on Jan. 6 — has done anything but clear up lingering questions about his whereabouts and conversations on the day of the Capitol insurrection.
In the past several months, Jordan has gotten attention for his noncommittal responses when asked about how many times and when he had spoken to Trump on Jan. 6.
During an interview on Fox News in July, Jordan gave a meandering response to questions about his conversations with Trump and struggled to answer how many times he was in touch with the former president on that day.
“I mean — I’ve talked to the President so many — I can’t remember all the days I’ve talked to him, but I’ve certainly talked to the President,” Jordan told Fox News in July.
A month later, Jordan wouldn’t confirm to Politico whether he had at least one additional phone call with Trump as the deadly Capitol insurrection unfolded. Last August, Politico reported that after a group of lawmakers evacuated the House chamber and took shelter in a safe room on Jan. 6, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) joined Jordan on a call with Trump to urge the then-President to tell his supporters to stand down.
Jordan told Politico at the time that he’d “have to think about it” when asked to confirm the call he shared with Gaetz, citing many conversations he had on Jan. 6. Jordan reportedly said phone calls to Trump occurred more than once on the day that a mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol as Trump refused to concede the election.
“Look, I definitely spoke to the President that day. I don’t recall — I know it was more than once, I just don’t recall the times,” Jordan told Politico Playbook.
Fast forward to last month, when during a House Rules Committee hearing Jordan still couldn’t get his story straight about whether he spoke to Trump on Jan. 6 and when that might have happened.
“I talked to the President after the attack,” Jordan said during the hearing last month, with exasperation: “I’ve been clear about that.”
Jordan also refuted Politico’s report on him speaking to Trump during the insurrection.
“During?” Jordan said last month. “No, I did not speak to the President during the attack.” […]
Donors to the Republican National Committee (RNC) might believe that their dollars are going to support congressional campaigns in 2022 or creating a war chest for the next GOP presidential candidate in 2024. But a lot of those dollars are being spent right now on something that most contributors might not expect: Donald Trump’s legal costs. Trump, who is neither a holder of any office nor an announced candidate for any race, is collecting six-figure payments from the RNC to cover the cost of legal fees.
That’s a highly unusual, and possibly unique, situation all on its own. However, as The Washington Post reports, the payments being made to Trump aren’t even connected to his ongoing efforts to withhold information from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6. The payments aren’t even in connection to Trump’s long-running effort to block the House Ways and Means Committee’s legal right to see his tax returns. The RNC has actually paid out at least $121,670 to a law firm trying to protect Trump from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James in their criminal investigation of Trump’s financial activities in New York.
It’s astounding evidence of how the Republican Party currently serves as a front for Trump—and it comes as The Washington Post is also reporting an expansion into the investigation of Trump’s endless grifting.
In 2018, Donald Trump was forced to fold his family foundation for “persistent illegal activity.” Included in that activity was repeated use of the foundation to act as a slush fund for Trump’s legal issues, including paying off a suit related to a lost golf bet. That same foundation was also used as a source of funds for Trump’s campaign, as well as a means of funneling money back to Trump through payments to one of his 500+ companies.
Now it appears that the RNC has replaced the foundation as Trump’s all-purpose source of cash. In an interview with Bloomberg, the attorney involved made it clear he was being paid “to represent Donald Trump,” not in any official capacity, but as an individual. Bloomberg calls these payments “likely legal under FEC precedents.” That’s because while the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has enforced rules against candidates using their own campaign funds for personal expenses, there is no history of such payments coming from a party committee.
The job of that attorney is only getting bigger as it’s now clear Trump is being investigated for one of his most conspicuous abuses of the system: inflating the price of his properties when reporting their worth to obtain loans and investments, then drastically reducing their reported worth when paying his taxes. […]
The RNC is paying Trump’s personal legal fees for crimes he allegedly committed before he was even a candidate for president. Trump has thoroughly conned the RNC.
Programme to allow those with prestigious global prizes to get fast-track visas dismissed as ‘elitist’ and a ‘joke’
A post-Brexit scheme to draw the world’s most celebrated academics and other leading figures to the UK has failed to attract a single applicant in the six months since it opened, it has been reported.
The visa route open to Nobel laureates and other prestigious global prize winners in the fields of science, engineering, humanities and medicine — among others — was described as a joke by experts after ministers admitted its failure to garner any interest.
“Chances that a single Nobel or Turing laureate would move to the UK to work are zero for the next decade or so,” the Nobel prize winner Andre Geim told New Scientist magazine, which first reported the news.
The University of Manchester academic, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2010 for his work on graphene, added: “The scheme itself is a joke — it cannot be discussed seriously. The government thinks if you pump up UK science with a verbal diarrhoea of optimism — it can somehow become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
[…]
“Frankly, having precisely zero people apply for this elitist scheme doesn’t surprise me at all,” the magazine quoted Jessica Wade, a leading scientist at Imperial College London, as saying. “UK scientists’ access to European funding is uncertain, we’re not very attractive to European students as they have to pay international fees, our pensions are being cut and scientific positions in the UK are both rare and precarious.”
[… M]ore than 1800 scientists to express initial interest in applying. “I think it’s hard to find too many downsides to living in Paris for a little while,” [Cornell University’s Louis Derry] says.
Ultimately, 450 researchers were deemed eligible to apply for the grants, and 255 submitted applications. Ninety were then invited to submit proposals in collaboration with a French institution. The French National Research Agency ultimately received 57 proposals, which were reviewed by a nine-member international panel chaired by Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK. The proposals were “high quality and in cutting-edge fields,” Le Quéré says.
[…]
That particular French scheme was set-up in response to hair furor’s tantrum at the Paris Climate Accord, and was largely targeting environmental / climate scientists in the States. I do not know if the scheme is still running, or how many in total have been accepted to-date (the 18 quoted above was the very first tranche).
[…]
Seven anti-vaccine doctors fell sick after gathering earlier this month for a Florida “summit” at which alternative treatments [sic] for Covid-19 were discussed.
I have been on ivermectin for 16 months, my wife and I,Dr[quack] Bruce Boros told the audience at the event held at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, adding: I have never felt healthier in my life.
The 71-year-old cardiologist and staunch anti-vaccine advocate contracted Covid-19 two days later, according to the head event organizer, Dr[quack] John Littell.
Littell, an Ocala family physician, also told the Daily Beast six other doctors among 800 to 900 participants at the event also tested positive or developed Covid-19 symptoms “within days of the conference”.
Littell raised the suggestion the conference was therefore a super-spreader event but rejected it, vehemently saying: No.
I think they had gotten it from New York or Michigan or wherever they were from, he told the Beast. It was really the people who flew in from other places.
[… S]ources close to Boros said he was gravely ill at his Key West home.
[…]
Boros has claimed ivermectin is working where it’s being used around the world as a Covid treatment.
In the same Facebook post, he condemned Dr Anthony Fauci […] as a fraud and said big pharma is playing us for suckers.
In a July interview with Florida Keys Weekly, Boros responded to criticisms of his post, saying: It breaks my heart that a town like this has made something so political and hateful. What’s wrong with people? I just want to help patients and keep them from dying[make lots of money, which you cannot do with a free vaccine that is safe and effective].
He also claimed that he gave a seriously ill Covid-19 patient ivermectin and within six hours he was talking without coughing.
At the summit in Ocala, Boros criticized his 97-year-old father for getting a Covid vaccine, saying: He had been brainwashed … He got it. He didn’t tell me. I was very upset. I wanted to give him a spanking. He got both jabs.
[…]
Full congratulations to quack Boros’ father for being double-jabbed (presuming teh quack isn’t lying).
[…]
A German football [soccer] coach who resigned over allegations that he forged his vaccine certificate has drawn condemnation and derision after it emerged that he attended a carnival party this month that was exclusive to people who had received the jab or recovered from the virus.
Markus Anfang announced his resignation as the head coach of German second division club Werder Bremen on Saturday morning after the state prosecutor in the northern city revealed there were doubts about the authenticity of the document supposedly proving the 47-year-old had received two doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine.
[…]
When Anfang joined Werder Bremen in the summer, he said he had not yet had the chance to be vaccinated but would soon do so. In August the club checked on his vaccination status after one of its players tested positive for Covid, and told him to quarantine after it emerged he had not yet received a jab.
When another Bremen player tested positive in November, Anfang was suddenly able to brandish a certificate supposedly proving he had been vaccinated twice — first in April and then in June.
The location and timing in the document aroused suspicion. Anfang claimed to have received his first dose in Cologne on the same day his then club Darmstadt played a match in Würzburg, 200 miles south-east of the city.
The batch number on the certificate could not be matched to the central database, and the vaccination centre in Cologne said it had no records of Anfang’s visit, the senior public prosecutor Frank Passade told the Werder Bremen news portal DeichStube.
[…]
Shortly after the Bremen coach’s resignation on Saturday morning, football fans reacted with mockery. At that afternoon’s match against Schalke 04, visiting supporters chanted “Markus Anfang no longer has a vaccine pass” to the tune of Belinda Carlisle’s song Heaven is a Place on Earth.
However, the mood changed on Monday when several German media outlets published pictures showing Anfang at a carnival party on 11 November wearing a chef’s costume. In keeping with new restrictions in several regions around Germany, the Cologne carnival event was held under so-called “2G” rules, meaning only those who had been vaccinated or recovered from the virus could attend.
“His visit to the carnival in the middle of the pandemic is absolutely irresponsible”, wrote the tabloid Bild. “It doesn’t get more brazen that that, Mr Anfang!”
Days after his acquittal and as protests continued, he likened his jail cell to “a one-star hotel” and lashed out at the American legal system.
Ever since Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and injured a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during racial justice demonstrations last year, legions of conservatives and far-right extremists have celebrated an 18-year-old as both a hero and a victim. Soon after receiving a “not guilty” verdict last Friday, Rittenhouse attempted to take part in his own beatification.
[…] Rittenhouse appeared in his first national television interview on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight after a Wisconsin jury acquitted him on all charges in the August 2020 shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injury of Gaige Grosskreutz. […]
the court proceedings were often deeply unserious, starting with Judge Bruce Schroeder declaring that the attorneys in the case were not allowed to refer to Rittenhouse’s victims as “victims.” […]
Contrary to that weepy court testimony, Rittenhouse mostly spoke with a calm voice as he swung at Carlson’s softballs. The host did his utmost to center Rittenhouse’s trauma and pain, teeing him up to lash out at President Joe Biden and invoke incorporeal forces like a “mob mentality” that he blamed for his legal plight.
His guest also said that he supported Black Lives Matter and that those committing violence during the demonstrations following Jacob Blake’s shooting by Kenosha police were “opportunist, taking advantage of the BLM movement.”
It was odd to hear Rittenhouse say that, particularly in the middle of a Fox News interview. Stating one’s social-justice bonafides serves, for white liberals, to signify allyship. But for conservatives or people playing to that audience’s sympathies, doing so is often a move to seek cover from charges of racism. The resurgence of extremist, white supremacist violence and intimidation during the last several years has been, in their view, an act of self-defense.
How, then, in that context, are we to take it when we see Rittenhouse argue to Carlson, “It wasn’t Kyle Rittenhouse on trial in Wisconsin; it was the right of self-defense on trial”? When the same people who support Rittenhouse believe the country needs defending from people who aren’t white and don’t believe in defending Black lives, he can say he supports Black Lives Matter all he wants.
[…] True to his program’s formula, Carlson’s hour was devoted to stoking misguided cultural grievances on Rittenhouse’s behalf. Known for its reckless demagoguery and fabulism, Tucker Carlson Tonight regularly focuses on convincing his heavily white audience that they’re right to fear a society supposedly out to get them (and only them). Throughout the broadcast, the host promoted a forthcoming documentary about Rittenhouse’s trial […]
Acquittal, in the Fox News arena, became absolution. “What a sweet boy,” Carlson remarked about the 18-year-old before a commercial break.
It was the seventh anniversary of the day that an actual boy, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, was mistaken for a man by Cleveland police before an officer shot him dead. […]
“I’m not a racist person,” Rittenhouse said […] He likely won’t dissuade his critics in the press and elsewhere who have labeled him a white supremacist, nor the self-identifying neo-Nazis celebrating his acquittal. More interesting, however, was how Rittenhouse described being affected by his time spent within American jurisprudence.
Rittenhouse had already twice stated his support for the Black Lives Matter movement (which strongly rebuked him in a tweet about the interview) when he took note of the inequities and degradation he experienced while in jail.
“I believe there needs to be change,” Rittenhouse said, “I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct — not just in my case, but in other cases. And it’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of somebody. If they did this to me, imagine what they could have done to a person of color who doesn’t maybe have the resources I do or isn’t widely publicized, like my case.”
Rittenhouse spoke of a jail cell he likened to “a one-star hotel,” where he had a mobile phone and tablet, but allegedly no running water. He didn’t shower for nearly a month, he told Carlson. Though he complained of being pepper-sprayed in Kenosha, Rittenhouse spoke glowingly of law enforcement — even thanking the guards at his first jail and praising their professionalism. But he also detailed how he spent more than 80 days in jail due to a problem too many defendants have: incompetent counsel. His allies at the time included QAnon conspiracy theorist Lin Wood; Rittenhouse alleged Wood exploited his case after Wood sought to claw back money raised for Rittenhouse’s bail. […]
[…] Carlson’s only reference to the man whose shooting prompted the Kenosha protests where Rittenhouse fired on the three men was a baseless claim that “the media lies about the shooting of Jacob Blake.”
[…] it’s foolish to expect Carlson, known for his openly racist appeals to white grievances, to recognize what’s wrong with America without peering through the lens of victimhood.
[…] For all of Rittenhouse’s recognition of America’s faulty system of criminal punishment, the two still failed to acknowledge that it was the AR-15-style rifle he wielded that instigated the intimidation and harassment. Had they, the ridiculous spectacle on Fox News might have come close to having some worth.
Wonkette: “Seven Magnificent COVID Deniers Somehow Get COVID After Florida COVID Denial Conference”
Earlier this month, a few hundred [people], including a number of actual MDs who should know better, held a gathering in Ocala, Florida, to gripe about how the COVID-19 virus is no reason to get all worried about things, because vaccines are useless and you should take the horse dewormer ivermectin instead.
Do we need to repeat to you that it’s still useless in prevention or treatment of COVID? (Yes, yes, it’s used in humans to fight parasites and head lice. It’s also used against mange, so you can at least die with a glossy pelt.) They called the gathering the “Florida COVID Summit,” and because they either have no sense of irony at all, or the grimmest sense of humor, the confab was held at Ocala’s “World Equestrian Center.” [lol]
Surprise, surprise! Dr. Bruce Boros, a retired cardiologist and one of the docs who proclaimed ivermectin a miracle preventative and cure at the conference, is now seriously ill with COVID-19, as are at least six others who attended it, the Daily Beast reports in the sort of follow-up to CovidCon that only seems inevitable. Boros, 71, fell ill just two days after the one-day conference.
Also too, CovidPalooza ’21 organizer Dr. John Littell told reporter Michael Daly that while “people are considering if it was a superspreader event,” his own opinion is that it absolutely was not, and the only possible explanation is that all seven of the attendees who got sick must have been infected sometime before they arrived, for reasons. […]
Fortunately, the people who got sick are taking extra doses of the useless miracle drug, and “Everybody so far has responded to treatment with ivermectin… Bruce is doing well.”
At the conference, Boros explained that “I have been on ivermectin for 16 months, my wife and I, [and] I have never felt healthier in my life.”
Daly reports that, as of his reporting, “Boros remained seriously ill at his Key West home, according to people who know him but who asked not to be identified.” The doctor didn’t return phone messages or emails, not even by tapping one hoof.
[…] The local paper said Boros had created a “Category 5 social media storm” with a post proclaiming Anthony Fauci a “fraud.”
[…] at the gathering of the Horse-alos this month, masks and social distancing were pretty much nonexistent.
[…] Boros was so convinced that ivermectin was a brilliant alternative to actually proven vaccines that he put his 97-year-old father, Carl Arfa, on it along with himself. His father, sensibly, then decided to get something proven to work against COVID: the vaccine.
“He had been brainwashed,” Boros said at the summit. He recalled, “He got it. He didn’t tell me. I was very upset. I wanted to give him a spanking. He got both jabs.”
Arfa caught the virus, which officials say is still spreading because so many people refused to get the vaccine. While the shot has proven to prevent serious illness and death in the overwhelming majority of those who get infected, Arfa—like some elderly patients or those with underlying health problems—became critically ill from COVID.
Shortly before the Doctors Who Should Know Better summit began, Boros’s father died from the disease, so like any great clinician and son, Boros worried at the conference that it was the vaccine, not the virus, that killed him, and that maybe Arfa might have survived if Boros hadn’t stopped giving him useless deworming treatments when he found out Arfa had been vaccinated. […]
“We’re seeing astronomical numbers of deaths in people that have been vaccinated, particularly the older people,” he said.
In conclusion, this is all very sad and we’re glad that Mr. Arfa at least took the smartest course available to him, because it gave him a far better chance of survival than his weirdo son’s cockeyed ministrations would have, the end.
[…]
Senator Gerard Rennick’s use of Facebook to push unverified stories about vaccine side-effects is potentially dangerous, a top health expert has warned, as fresh doubt is cast on the legitimacy of a story he helped promote.
Rennick, an LNP senator, has vastly increased his Facebook following in recent months after posting a deluge of stories about the Covid-19 vaccine, which he concedes he does not know are true.
On Tuesday Guardian Australia revealed that in one now deleted post, he boosted a letter falsely linking vaccines with still births from a “retired GP” as a credible source of information, despite her calling for the execution of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern over her government’s vaccination program four weeks earlier. Rennick said he was unaware of the woman’s comments about Ardern, and conceded he “should have” checked the source of the letter before sharing it.
Rennick also conceded to Guardian Australia that he does not verify the accuracy of the dozens of third-party claims he has published about severe vaccine side-effects before publishing them, despite the posts being shared thousands of times among vaccine-hesitant groups online.
In one example earlier this month, Rennick published an account from a woman which claimed she had developed severe neurological side-effects “caused” by her Pfizer vaccination.
[… weird claims about this alleged case of side-effects…]
[… T]he post has been cast in serious doubt thanks to a “clarification” from an online fundraising platform.
[…]
“{Her} symptoms did start after receiving the Covid vaccine however her doctors have not yet conclusively determined if all her symptoms are a reaction to the vaccine or not — it was previously stated on the page that doctors had confirmed this,” the post from the company stated.
The clarification raises serious questions about the claim in the post that the woman’s illness was caused by the vaccine, although there is no suggestion that the woman, her mother or the fundraisers have deliberately posted false information.
[… Rennick’s] posts — which have variously linked vaccines to appendicitis, stutters, seizures, among other things — have frustrated health experts, who warn they are without evidence and threaten to undermine public confidence in the vaccine.
[…]
The AusVaxSafety program conducts surveillance for vaccine injuries or side-effects in the Australian population. It has surveyed four million recipients.
There was no evidence of vaccines causing appendicitis or stutters.
[…]
West Australian president of the Australian Medical Association, Mark Duncan-Smith, the said posts about vaccination side-effects should be left up to the experts.
He said it was crucial to remember that just because something happened after a vaccine, it was not necessarily caused by it.
[…]
Asked whether his posts were dangerous, Rennick said it was his duty as a politician to present two sides of the story.
[…]
Rennick said he accepted that not everything that happened after a vaccine was caused by it.
But he said he was operating on the balance of probabilities, unlike the medical indemnity scheme.
Medical doctors are saying you’ve got to conclusively prove that it was the vaccine, where I’m saying it should be the balance of probabilities, he said.
[…]
Originally reported by City News Edmonton, partygoers at the event held around two weeks ago had supposedly attended the gathering with the specific intention of contracting Covid-19 to achieve natural immunity against the SARS-CoV2 virus, with “several” of them ending up in hospital including some in ICU in Edmonton.
“I am demoralized and infuriated that people would intentionally add fuel to the inferno, risking onward transmission to others, and potentially landing in the ICU at a time when we have literally a handful of beds left for the entire province,” said Dr Ilan Schwartz, MD, PhD, an infectious diseases physician and assistant professor at the University of Alberta.
For what should be obvious reasons, it is not recommended to achieve ‘immunity’ to the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus via natural infection. These reasons include the risk of being hospitalized with Covid-19, dying from Covid-19, experiencing the menagerie of chronic symptoms associated with “long Covid” and also transmitting the virus to others. None of these are a risk with immunity acquired via immunization with Covid-19 vaccines, which are widely available all over Canada and are free.
Although clearly unwise at any time, the timing of the misguided gathering could not be any worse for Alberta, which is experiencing a significant surge in Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths after relaxing many pandemic control measures during the summer months. With the highest rate of new Covid-19 cases in Canada, a state of public health emergency has been declared, with healthcare authorities creating extra spaces for ICU beds and freeing up extra staff by cancelling all other elective surgeries to cope, but this ‘surge capacity’ is quickly being depleted.
“People’s cancer surgeries are being canceled because we cannot cope with the volume of patients needing ICU care, and they {the Covid party participants} are intentionally putting themselves and others in a position to use up those precious resources. Its unforgivable,” said Dr Schwartz.
The province has recently brought in some further public health restrictions such as a ban on private gatherings for unvaccinated people with other households, vaccine passes to access non-essential businesses and the closure of the inside of bars and restaurants, irrespective of patron vaccination status. […]
A snipped from the 5th September Forbes article about the lack of antibodies in people who have recovered from Covid-19 (link embedded in above excerpt):
[… R]elying solely on supposed immune protection from a previous Covid-19 coronavirus infection could be like relying solely on a thong when going on a date or a job interview. The bottom line is that both can still leave you quite exposed, and the amount of exposure can vary quite a lot from person to person. [… A]nother reason to get vaccinated is that natural immunity differs from a smartphone. You don’t know how long it may last. In the case of the smartphone, the answer may be “one day after the warranty expires,” whereas the duration of protection offered by natural immunity may be all over the place. Even if you do have antibodies today, it is difficult to say how long such antibodies will remain present.
By contrast, the Covid-19 vaccines offer a much more controlled and consistent amount of exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. While person-to-person immune responses to the vaccine may vary as well, clinical trials are following thousands of people who have gotten the vaccines. Therefore, researchers can get a better idea of what kind of immune protection the vaccines may offer you and how long this may last. If you want to hold a rabbit rave, it may be much more effective to go to a pet store than to go to the woods with sign that says, “have carrots, let’s party.” Similarly, if you want immune protection against Covid-19, vaccination may be much more likely to give you what natural infection may or may not be able to offer.
[…]
Support for a domestic air travel vaccine mandate has remained strong and steady since summer, and has even ticked upward. In an early-August Harris Poll survey, 64% [now 66% –blf] of Americans supported introducing a vaccine passport for flying on an airplane. Those who “strongly supported” such an initiative outnumbered those who “somewhat supported” it by more than two to one.
[…]
But over the weekend, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg threw cold water on such a mandate during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” When asked why there wasn’t a vaccine mandate for passengers flying domestically in the US, Buttigieg said that other strategies were highly effective, including mask requirements and vaccine mandates for travel industry workers, which is creating a very safe travel environment for Americans.
WHO is advising a “vaccine-plus” strategy, that is, vaccines plus other measures (especially masks), not vague handwaving.
[…] What we’re doing right now is working to make air travel safe, insisted Buttigieg. Between the masking and the other mitigations, we’re very confident in the safety of air travel.
Throughout much of the pandemic, US airline executives and airline union leaders[biological war advocates] argued that any additional Covid-19 restrictions for domestic flyers would be bad for business, resulting in fewer people willing to fly, and ultimately putting jobs at risk.
Back in August, United CEO Scott Kirby told MSNBC that a mandate for domestic travel was logistically impractical […].
Yet since November 8, US airlines have been vetting the Covid-19 vaccine credentials of travelers flying into the country.
There is no national contact tracing program in place for airline passengers flying within the United States, and no way for Americans flying domestically to know whether they may have been exposed to a fellow passenger infected with Covid-19.
Here in France, there is a national track-and-trace app, which is also the famous Health Pass, showing proof of full-vaccination (soon to include boosters). You must show it for many things, including long-distance travel (trains and all(?) flights). Vistors to France are not exempt (some foreign proof-of-vaccination is easy to convert into a Health Pass, others… not so much; the French Health Pass is compatible with the EU(-wide?) scheme).
That is in stark contrast to Canada, where contact tracing information for travelers is readily available on a public database run by the Canadian government since the beginning of the pandemic. The data includes inbound and outbound international flights and all domestic flights within Canada.
When Canadian health authorities receive a report that a recent traveler tested positive, the flight is entered into the database. This allows recent travelers to look up whether anyone on their flight tested positive so they can watch for symptoms. (Canadians can also check cruises and trains, too.)
Currently, the Canadian database for international flights shows that during the five-day period from November 8 through November 12, at least eight flights originating in the United States carried passengers to Canada who later tested positive for Covid-19. These flights flew out of an array of US airports […] and were operated by [multiple airlines].
In an urgent measure to combat surging gas prices, President Biden has authorized the emergency release of oil from Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.
According to oil-industry experts, Gaetz has the third-largest supply of petroleum reserves in the world, less than Saudi Arabia but more than Canada.
After tapping the oleaginous Gaetz, Biden said that crude from the Florida congressman could start flowing throughout the United States by the end of the week.
Speaking at the White House, the President said that he regretted not authorizing the release of oil from Gaetz earlier. “This could solve our energy needs for decades,” he said.
Sometimes, people make mathematical mistakes that reverberate in important ways. About a decade ago, for example, then-House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan used a prominent economic analysis to make the case for austerity measures. What the Wisconsin Republican didn’t realize is that the authors of the report made a coding error in an Excel spreadsheet.
At the time, Kevin Drum called it the “Excel Error Heard Round the World.”
Last year, members of Donald Trump’s White House team made projections about Covid-19 fatalities based on a “cubic fit” model they clearly did not understand.
This year, Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation recently released an analysis of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better package and concluded that the Democrats’ plan would lower taxes on millionaires. It led to quite a bit of negative press for the legislation, with critics — including Republican lawmakers — pointing at the JCT findings as proof that the bill went too far to help those who didn’t need another tax break.
Today, as NBC News reported, the Joint Committee on Taxation issued a correction.
President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better package would raise, not lower, taxes for millionaires, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation in a major correction from the group’s original analysis. The JCT, an official scorekeeper of tax-related legislation, originally estimated that the $1.7 trillion safety net and climate change bill would give millionaires’ a net tax cut in 2022, but the revised estimates released Tuesday shows millionaires’ average tax rate going up by 3.2 percentage points next year.
In other words, the original criticisms got it backwards, because the JCT made a mistake.
When the House narrowly passed the Build Back Better Act last week, every Democrat in the chamber voted for it, except one: Maine’s Jared Golden, who represents a relatively conservative New England district, which twice supported Donald Trump, broke ranks and opposed the legislation.
Pressed for an explanation, Golden’s office issued a written statement explaining that the Maine Democrat opposes, among other things, “tax giveaways to the wealthy” and “tax breaks for millionaires.”
But that was before the Joint Committee on Taxation issued its correction — which concluded that the Build Back Better package would raise, not lower, taxes for millionaires. […]
The Proud Boys continued to deploy their post-Jan. 6 strategy—that is, focusing their organizing around local right-wing protests and attaching their neofascist presence by providing “security”—this week by showing up to anti-vaccination marches in New York City and Los Angeles. They also turned up at a local school board meeting in a suburban Illinois village to intimidate officials over LGBTQ-friendly books in their school library.
Their presence, as always, was intended to send a message of intimidation. […]
The march in New York, which called itself the Worldwide Freedom Rally, attracted several hundred marchers, with a large contingent of Proud Boys in their black-and-gold garb and carrying various anti-vaccine and pro-Trump banners. Some of them could be seen flashing the white-nationalist “OK” symbol. At one point, a contingent of Proud Boys stopped to pose for photos in front of Donald Trump’s hotel in Manhattan.
Another video showed Proud Boys entering New York subways through an unlocked emergency exit, thereby evading fares. A Proud Boys group from Miami boasted afterward on Twitter that the exit door had been held open for them by New York Police Department officers: “It’s a good thing that the New York City Police open the door for us, so we don’t have to pay the subway tolls,” he said, adding “not only do we live rent-free in antifas head we also ride free in New York City subways courtesy of the blue.”
The march in Los Angeles also was an anti-vaccine-mandate protest, though the Proud Boys’ presence, while noticeable, was not as dominant. Among them were at least one Jan. 6 insurrectionist and a videographer who was present among the rioters that day.
Marchers carried Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, “Fuck Biden” banners, and other so-called Patriot Movement and Proud Boys symbols, along with signs with slogans like “No Vaxx” and “No Jabs 4 Jobs,” as well as others demanding “End Child Porn” and “Stop Human Trafficking,” both references to QAnon conspiracy theories. One, an apparent reference to Rittenhouse, read “Support Our Heroes.”
These local COVID-denialist rallies are only one of the multiple ways that Proud Boys are insinuating themselves, following the same blueprint. Others have been showing up increasingly to school board meetings to intimidate local officials discussing racial education, LGBTQ-friendly library offerings, and vaccine mandates and masking measures.
[…] One student told the Sun-Times that a man he identified as Kramer began harassing him after he addressed the board. He said Kraemer repeatedly told him, “You’re a pedophile. You promote pedophilia,” and threatened to call police. He said Kraemer later accosted him in the parking lot.
This is part of a repeated pattern manifesting the Proud Boys’ current strategy for recruitment and organizing. They already had marched and engaged in street violence in Los Angeles as part of an anti-transgender protest outside a local spa. Earlier this month in Beloit, Wisconsin, their plans to protest a local school masking policy led to the local district shutting down all schools that day out of “security concerns.”
Proud Boys also showed up at a meeting of the Portland Public School board in Oregon in late October at which a vaccine mandate was being discussed.
And in New Hanover County, North Carolina, a group of ten Proud Boys—all of them masked—turned up at a meeting to discuss mask mandates and stood threateningly in the back of the meeting room, arms crossed. One of them, who identified himself as “Johnny Ringo,” chastised the board for failing to open the meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance.
Afterward, the Cape Fear Proud Boys who had attended the meeting explained that their presence was part of a larger strategy to “ramp up the pressure.”
“If our presence escalates that pressure and makes it to the point where we become a distraction to conducting business, and they just change the mask mandate so we go away, that’s a win,” said one of the members.
KGsays
The leaders of the German Social Democrats, Greens and “Free Democrats” (neoliberals) have reached a coalition agreement. This has to be approved by the SPD and FDP party conferences, and a vote of the Green membership. Supposedly combating climate change will be central to the coalition programme, but since the FDP, who oppose both tax rises and increasing government debt, have secured the finance ministry, it’s not clear where the money for any serious attempt to do this would come from.
It was six months ago when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters, “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the [2020] presidential election.” During a brief Q&A in front of the White House, the House GOP leader added, “I think that is all over with.” [raised eyebrows]
[…] Donald Trump’s latest written statement about his defeat from last year:
“Whatever happened to the Rigged and Stolen Arizona Presidential Election that is being investigated, or maybe the words should properly be ‘looked at,’ by Attorney General Mark Brnovich? When will the legislature vote to decertify? People are very upset in Arizona that it is all taking so long, especially when the findings of the State Senate’s Forensic Audit were so conclusive, not even including the recent revelation of 35,000 fictitious votes in Pima County, and precincts with over 100 percent turnout (how do you like that one?). The people of Arizona are anxiously awaiting the decision of the Attorney General. They know what really went on during that Election!”
Obviously, the sheer volume of nonsense over the course of the former president’s 109-word statement is amazing. In reality, for example, the election was neither “rigged” nor “stolen.” The Arizona state Senate’s sham “audit” was an absurd fiasco that actually made things worse for Trump and his party. The idea that there were 35,000 “fictitious votes” in Pima County is a ridiculous claim that has already been examined and discredited.
But the part of the Republican’s weird written rant was the question packed amidst the nonsense: “When will the legislature vote to decertify?”
In case anyone’s forgotten, there has never been 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. Then there was a not-at-all-independent audit, which backfired on the GOP.
The facts are unambiguous: President Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump in the Grand Canyon State 12 months ago.
[…] in September Trump said, “Arizona must immediately decertify their 2020 Presidential Election Results.” Two months later, he’s still pushing the idea.
Trump also recently wrote to Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, urging him to “start the process of decertifying the 2020 Election.”
[…] This is utterly bonkers — and according to the Department of Homeland Security, potentially dangerous — but the problem clearly isn’t improving as Election Day 2020 gets further away.
The new tallies on initial unemployment claims aren’t just better now than before the pandemic, they’ve actually improved to a 52-year low.
The week before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, weekly unemployment claims were still a painfully high 886,000. CNBC reported this morning on the newest data from the Labor Department, which offers the best news on layoffs since before I was born.
The ranks of those submitting jobless claims tumbled to their lowest level in more than 52 years last week, the Labor Department reported Wednesday. New filings totaled 199,000, a number not seen since Nov. 15, 1969, when claims totaled 197,000. The report easily beat Dow Jones estimates of 260,000 and was well below the previous week’s 270,000.
[…] 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.
Thankfully, all of that appears to be behind us.
[…] When unemployment claims finally dipped below 1 million last August, it was a step in the right direction. When they fell below 800,000 in February, it offered similar evidence of slow, gradual progress. Fortunately, the pattern continued: Totals fell below 700,000 in March, below 600,000 in April, below 500,000 in early May, and below 400,000 in late May.
In early October, jobless claims finally dipped below 300,000 — putting us within shouting distance of the levels seen before the Covid-19 crisis began in earnest — and now, finally, we’ve dipped below 200,000, which hardly seemed possible in the recent past.
[…] As a political matter, it’s also a reminder that the economic conditions that are acting against Democrats now are improving in ways that are likely to help the incumbent governing majority.
[…] Some congressional Republicans not only saw Rittenhouse’s acquittal as validation of a conservative worldview, they wanted to be personally and directly associated with the defendant. Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, for example, invited the Wisconsinite to become one of his interns. (In the same video, the GOP lawmaker urged his allies to be “armed” and “dangerous.”)
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida also offered Rittenhouse an internship, at which point Rep. Paul Gosar published a tweet that read, “I will arm wrestle [Gaetz] to get dibs for Kyle as an intern.”
[…] as the HuffPost noted, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado took this to a new level yesterday during an interview on Newsmax.
“Now I do have some colleagues on the Hill who have, just like me, offered Kyle Rittenhouse an internship in their office,” she told host Sebastian Gorka, a former aide to Donald Trump. “And Madison Cawthorn, he said that he would arm wrestle me for this Kyle Rittenhouse internship. But Madison Cawthorn has some pretty big guns, and so I would like to challenge him to a sprint instead.”
Boebert, laughing, added, “Let’s make this fair.”
In case this isn’t obvious, Cawthorn uses a wheelchair. Competing in a sprint isn’t much of an option.
Given his attorney’s recent comments, it seems unlikely that Rittenhouse will intern for any of these GOP officials. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s unsettling to see them compete for his affection in increasingly bizarre ways.
[…] Two weeks ago, CNN ran a segment that was supposedly about how families are “constrained by inflation” and that this is putting “a burden” on their lives. In the segment, CNN’s Brianna Keilar throws over to reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro with an expression of deep concern about how inflation is affecting how families “feed their kids.” McMorris-Santoro, handily standing in front of a gas station sign, moves directly into how gas is “up by more than a dollar since last year” without noting that the prices in 2020 were heavily depressed by the pandemic. He then goes on to interview his typical American family in Texas—who have nine kids and buy 12 gallons of milk each week.
Most of the criticism about the story has focused on that astounding number. Any family that buys 48 gallons of milk each month is pretty far from typical in our 1.23 children per family on average society. But that’s not the problem. And it’s not just CNN.
The problem with that original report on CNN isn’t the family, and it’s not their fondness for milk. The problem is how McMorris-Santoro enthusiastically passes along misinformation without correction.
“I think that probably in June, a dollar was worth a dollar,” says the mother in the interview. “And now that dollar is worth about seventy cents.”
The inflation rate over the last few months may have been higher than Americans are used to over the last decade, but a dollar in June is actually worth about $0.97. The actual rate of inflation is 10 times smaller than the number that was passed along with comment. McMorris-Santoro doesn’t make that correction.
Then comes that citation for a gallon of milk, with a claim that it was $1.99 at some unstated time in the past, but is now $2.79. Both of those prices are not only well below the average cost of a gallon of milk in America, the lower value hasn’t been seen since around 1994.
The truth is that milk prices are almost completely divorced from inflation. That’s because they are set by Federal Milk Marketing Orders that were last revised in 2000. That system generates a complex, regional pricing system that results in milk being extremely cheap in the Upper Midwest, with prices increasing as you move away from that area—to sites such as Texas. Stores can, and do, advertise and sell milk at lower prices. They do this as a loss leader to bring people into the store. But the actual cost of milk now is lower than it has been for most of the last two decades.
None of this gets explained. Instead, the segment goes to lengths to point out the large consumption of this exceptionally large family. If the numbers provided are accurate, all that milk works out to about $10 a week in extra expense. Or $40 a month.
However, the segment completely fails to mention that, even if the one child the family is fostering isn’t included, they would still be receiving at least $2,000 a month in new child tax credits that President Joe Biden began issuing in July. That’s right. June, the month that is set up in the interview as the Last Good Month before things went to hell, was actually the last month before they began getting monthly benefits as large as their family.
Inflation over that period wasn’t 30%. It was 3%. Milk prices over that period didn’t increase $0.80 nationally, they went up by just $0.11. And all of that was a blip compared to the $2,000 check that began rolling out to the family in the interview every single month. But that’s not how it got presented.
[…] The remainder of the piece focuses on how the family has to clip coupons, look for bargains, and bypass things they’d like to have. That’s before the final statement in which we’re told that their total bill—$310—would have been “$150 or $200” back in March. In other words, the CNN story is now pushing the idea that there has been 107% inflation since March. No one corrects this. In fact, The CNN segment doubles down, saying that the family is “feeling the inflation squeeze to a tune of an extra hundred dollars a week.”
They’re not. But even if they were, they would be coming out $400 a week ahead thanks to those child tax credits. […]
The reason this interview became infamous may be for the 12 gallons of milk, but it should be disdained for using the Big Two distortions when it comes to selling Americans on a disaster that didn’t happen.
It treats the exceptional as if it’s average.
It passes along gross exaggerations without correction.
And all that would be true even if the child tax credit is ignored. Which it shouldn’t be.
So … here’s a story from The New York Times that ran on Saturday, written by Emma Goldberg, Coral Murphy Marcos, and Kellen Browning. See how it lines up on those points.
That story starts out just like the CNN piece, by telling us that, “The national average for a gallon of gas is $3.41, which is $1.29 more than it was a year ago, according to AAA.” But it fails to point out that those low prices in 2020 were actually the cheapest gas has been in any November since 2008. The article, like many others, starts off by comparing current prices to prices that were depressed by the worst impacts of the pandemic, generating the maximum apparent increase. That’s step one.
But that’s just a baby step compared to what comes next.
While consumers are seeing a steady rise in the prices of many goods and services, the cost of gas is especially visible. It is displayed along highways across the country, including in areas where a gallon has climbed as high as $7.59.
Where is gas $7.59 a gallon? Not in any state listed by AAA. The most expensive grade in the most expensive state is $5 a gallon. Where does the $7.59 number come from? Who knows. The Times article certainly doesn’t bother to provide that information.
But hang on, we’re not done.
Aldo McCoy, who owns an auto repair shop in Toms River, watched the numbers on a gas pump flash higher Wednesday as he filled up the tank of his 1963 Chevrolet Impala. He recalled recently filling his 2003 Cadillac Escalade and seeing the price go above $100, where it used to be $45.
This paragraph manages to check both of the Big Two in as many sentences. It not only treats an absolutely exceptional circumstance—a guy who owns a 58-year-old muscle car and a massive 18-year-old SUV as if this makes him a great example, but it also passes along something this driver “recalls” that simply can’t be true.
Even assuming that Mr. McCoy’s Escalade topped off at exactly $100, that would make his $45 fill up 222% more expensive than whenever “used to be” might be. How far back do we need to go to get that number? Try 2002. Which would be a year before that Escalade rolled into the showroom.
You might think that a claim that gas prices have increased by 222% might merit at least some incredulity on the part of the Times. Or that such a claim might at least require some definition of how far back “used to be” might be. It does not. Instead, they get right into the burden that this incredible, amazing, increase in price has placed on McCoy and his cohorts.
[…] Just like the family in the CNN story, here’s an ordinary American, in a typical situation, facing a huge and unreasonable burden because of massive inflation. Except it’s absolutely none of those things.
Instead, it’s the Times article passing along unverified numbers, all of which are clearly exaggerated, in the way that generates maximum drama, without bothering to ever check for reasonableness.
[…] In both cases, CNN and the TImes avoid directly making false claims themselves. They just let the people they’re interviewing make those claims, and let them go uncorrected.
Which makes you wonder how many interviews they went through until they came up with someone who gave them the kind of scare quotes they wanted. […]
A jury in Brunswick, Georgia, on Wednesday afternoon found all three defendants involved in the 2020 shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery guilty of murder. Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan Jr., were all convicted on multiple felony homicide counts.
Likened by some to a modern-day lynching, Arbery’s shooting was one of several high-profile killings of Black Americans that triggered nationwide protests for racial justice across the 2020 summer.
On Feb. 23, 2020, Arbery, a 25-year-old former high school football star, was jogging in the rural town of Satilla Shores when the three men began to pursue him in two trucks, one of which was decorated with a confederate flag vanity plate. After Arbery was boxed in by the vehicles, a struggle ensued, and Travis McMichael shot him three times, once at point-blank range.
It took 74 days for Bryan and the McMichaels to be charged and arrested. The first prosecutor to handle the case, Jackie Johnson, recused herself over her connections to Gregory McMichael, who had previously worked as an investigator in the Brunswick district attorney’s office and as a police officer. Shortly after the shooting, McMichael allegedly called Johnson and left a voicemail asking for her advice, although it’s not clear whether or not she responded. In September 2021, Johnson was indicted by a grand jury for allegedly “showing favor and affection” to McMichael and directing police officers not to arrest his son. (Her case has yet to go to trail.) Johnson’s replacement also advised police not to arrest the three men before recusing himself over his son’s ties to Gregory McMichael, according to documents obtained by the New York Times.
Two months after the shooting, as graphic video of the killing began to spread on social media platforms, the three men were finally arrested. The harrowing footage, which Bryan filmed on a cellphone, shows Arbery being confronted by the McMichaels. Arbery begins to wrestle with Travis McMichael over a shotgun when a shot goes off and the two men leave the frame. Two more gunshots are heard, and Arbery staggers and falls while trying to flee. […]
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
This is GOOD
The three white men who fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery after chasing down the 25-year-old Black man as he was running along a two-lane Georgia road were found guilty of felony murder on Wednesday.
Arbery was killed in February 2020, just months before the nation experienced a reckoning on police violence against Black men and women, and his death prompted protest of another aspect of racial inequality in the justice system. Though the unarmed man was gunned down in broad daylight, the men who admitted they had chased him in their trucks and killed him were not immediately arrested.
It wasn’t until video of the shooting became public, drawing sharp questions about how local authorities handled the investigation that the three men were charged with murder.
Olaf Scholz to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor.
Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, will serve as Germany’s new chancellor, replacing Angela Merkel and marking the first time in 16 years that the country will have center-left leadership.
In the time since the Sept. 26 election, Scholz has worked alongside the progressive Greens and pro-business Free Democrats in secrecy on a 177-page governing agreement. The three party leaders announced the deal on Wednesday, according to The New York Times.
“We are united in a belief in progress and that politics can do good,” Scholz said, according to the Times. “We are united in the will to make the country better, to move it forward and to keep it together.” […]
Wonkette: “Stupid White Murderers Who Murdered Ahmaud Arbery Almost All Guilty On Almost All Counts!”
We interrupt some dumb Thanksgiving recipe posts to bring you welcome, excellent news: The three white men who chased down Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and murdered him for the crime of jogging have been found guilty on almost all counts. The piece of shit son was guilty on all; the piece of shit father was guilty of all except “malice murder,” as he was not the one standing over Arbery shouting the n-word; and the third guy was guilty of a significant number of murder charges, although he was clearly less culpable than Bigot and Son. Still, he helped, and he’s guilty.
While their defense attorneys tried to call their trial a “modern-day lynching,” an almost-all-white jury refused to have their intelligence insulted, or insult ours. Seems to me like it might be a New Georgia these days.
There was absolutely no question of “self defense,” though they tried to play that too: Chasing him down in a truck as he jogged, holding him at gunpoint, they tried to claim that Arbery defending himself by grabbing at their long gun was reason to defend themselves from him defending himself. It worked for Kyle Rittenhouse, sure, but … fuck it. It didn’t work this time, is what we are saying.
This has been a day when criminal justice has gone some way toward criminal justice.
In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, it became common to hear from members of Congress who shared an uncommon emotion: fear. […]
The deadly insurrectionist riot left many members afraid of another attack. And of some of their extremist colleagues. And of weapons possibly being carried onto the floor of the U.S. House. And possible violence targeting their families.
The environment on Capitol Hill was unlike anything any living members have ever seen — as CNN reported yesterday, conditions have not improved.
Many members within the House of Representatives have told CNN in recent days that they find themselves in a toxic work environment, wrought with bitter exchanges, threats and fears about what the erosion of decorum in the chamber will mean for a body that has still not recovered 10 months after the Capitol Hill riot. In interviews with more than a dozen members, CNN heard from Democrats and some Republicans who say things are as bad as they can remember, with no sign things will get better soon, and the fears and concerns aren’t just coming from members, but their families as well.
Clearly, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona releasing a video depicting himself killing one of his Democratic colleagues — something that led to his censure — only made matters worse.
Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois said, “January 6th made things so much worse. I was on the floor that day. That was a forever life-changing moment on a personal level, but it was also a moment that changed Congress. It started with the incessant lies that weren’t challenged and were amplified to January 6th to a member of Congress threatening lives of friends and colleagues.”
What struck me as amazing, though, was a quote from Rep. Chip Roy. The Texas Republican told CNN that part of the problem is that members have not moved on from January 6th.
“People here need to get thicker skin,” Roy said. “At some point here, you gotta let some things roll.”
This is a difficult perspective to understand, and it helps explain why the toxicity on Capitol Hill continues to linger.
One can imagine, in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, Democrats and Republicans putting aside their differences and agreeing that the assault on the Capitol was an indefensible attack on democracy. In this hypothetical scenario, officials from both parties also agreed to denounce those responsible for inciting the riot, and reject the anti-election lies that fueled the rioters.
[…] Except, none of that happened. The imagined hypothetical is a foolish mirage.
Chip Roy wants his colleagues to “let some things roll,” which might be a more credible appeal if much of his party hadn’t spent 2021 defending Jan. 6 rioters, undermining public confidence in their own country’s electoral system, convincing the Republican base that Biden’s presidency is suspect, failing to take governing seriously, and genuflecting towards the corrupt former president whose Big Lie has corroded our politics.
People on Capitol Hill “need to get thicker skin”? That’s certainly one way of looking at the problem. An alternative is for some people on Capitol Hill to show some genuine contrition over what created the toxic work environment in the first place.
News summarized from a Wall Street Journal article:
Roughly 30 election officials in Pennsylvania have quit this year. Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt, who serves as vice chairman of the city’s election board, recently explained, “What was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children.”
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he’s chosen Shalanda Young to direct the Office of Management, and Nani Coloretti as Deputy Director. Young has been serving as Acting Director since March. “Both Young and Coloretti have been confirmed by the Senate in the past,” the White House statement says.
“If they are confirmed again, OMB would be led by two history-making women of color who are experienced and highly qualified. Young, who has served as Acting Director since being confirmed as Deputy Director by the Senate in a bipartisan 63-37 vote on March 23, 2021, would be the first Black woman to lead OMB. Coloretti would be one of the highest-ranking Asian American, Native Hawaiians, or Pacific Islanders serving in government.”
In a a video announcement of the nominations, Biden said “The Office of Management and Budget has been called the nerve center of our government. This is an agency that not only helps me create the budget, but also makes sure that your tax dollars are spent efficiently and effectively and exactly as the law requires.”
[…] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn issued a statement at the time, citing Young’s “intellect, deep expertise on the federal budget and her determination to ensure that our budget reflects our values as a nation.” Her nomination Wednesday brought praise from Pelosi. […]
Among the most serious of the former president’s potential legal liabilities has to do with — of all things — property valuations.
Though much of the political world is no longer capable of being surprised when it comes to Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee, new reporting this week on the RNC helping pay the former president’s legal bills raised a few eyebrows.
After all, not only is Trump out of office, he’s also dealing with legal troubles that are unrelated — and in fact, predate — his White House tenure. The RNC is nevertheless helping pick up the former president’s legal tab for matters related to, as The Washington Post put it, “investigations into his financial practices in New York.”
And what financial practices might those be?
To be sure, the list of Trump’s legal troubles is not short. He is, after all, facing a criminal inquiry, multiple civil suits, and criminal charges against his private business. […] among the most serious […]— property valuations.
The New York Times reported today that a New York criminal investigation into Trump and his business operation has led investigators to issue “new subpoenas for records about Mr. Trump’s hotels, golf clubs and office buildings.” The article added:
The developments […] show that the Manhattan prosecutors have shifted away from investigating those tax issues and returned to an original focus of their three-year investigation: Mr. Trump’s statements about the value of his assets. In particular, the people said, the prosecutors are zeroing in on whether Mr. Trump or his company inflated the value of some of his properties while trying to secure financing from potential lenders. If [outgoing Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr., the prosecutor overseeing the inquiry] concludes that Mr. Trump intentionally submitted false values to potential lenders, prosecutors could argue that he engaged in a pattern of fraud.
As Trump controversies go, this one may not seem nearly as provocative as inciting an insurrectionist riot, trying to leverage aid to get a foreign country to help him cheat in an election, or paying illegal hush money to a porn star, but it might nevertheless be among the most serious legal headaches the former president has ever had.
The Washington Post reported this week, for example, on the Trump Organization’s office building in Manhattan, which the company told lenders in 2012 was worth $527 million. A few months later, when listing the same building’s value for property tax officials, the Trump Organization said it was worth just $16.7 million.
The stunt was transparent: When trying to impress potential lenders, the business tried to make its assets look valuable, but when trying to avoid hefty tax bills, the Trump Organization did the opposite — to a dramatic degree.
What’s more, there’s a larger pattern of accusations that extend well beyond this property in Manhattan. The Post’s report added, “Investigators seem focused on the valuations of at least four Trump properties,” including a golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, the Seven Springs estate in New York, and the Trump National Golf Club Westchester […]
[…] deliberately misvaluing property, in order to evade taxes, is illegal. Looking for ways to reduce tax burdens is fine, criminal misconduct is not.
That said, no charges have been filed against the Trump Organization […] given the available details, there’s a reason the former president has hired several attorneys for the RNC to pay.
[…] The subpoenas issued this week […] reveal where Congress is looking next. In this case, it’s the assortment of far-right provocateurs like Alex Jones and Roger Stone that breathed life into the Big Lie, MAGA operatives who helped stage the rally on the ellipse on Jan. 6 at which Trump spoke, and organizations like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys whose members were willing to use violence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s win.
Here’s what the committee wants to learn from each.
Alex Jones
The panel wants to learn about Jones’s role in organizing the Jan. 6 Women for America First rally at which then-President Trump spoke.
The organizers reportedly denied Jones a slot at the Jan. 6 event, but, at Trump’s request, he spoke at an event at Freedom Plaza held the previous day.
The panel wants to know about planning for both events, and any involvement that Jones may have had in raising funds for them. He reportedly facilitated a large contribution from Publix heiress Julie Fancelli to the events.
Jones also used his Infowars platform to promote the Big Lie, memorably describing Trump’s tweet that Jan. 6 would “be wild” as “one of the most historic events in American history.” […]
Roger Stone
According to the subpoena, the committee is interested in Stone’s activities in D.C. on Jan. 5 and 6.
The GOP provocateur was in Washington and attended the Jan. 5 Freedom Plaza rally, and had been scheduled to speak at the Jan. 6 ellipse rally.
Of interest to investigators is Stone’s participation in those two events, but also that he reportedly used Oath Keeper members as security guards while in the Capitol. Stone also said that he was invited to “lead a march to the Capitol” on Jan. 6 — another statement of interest to the panel.
Taylor Budowich
Budowich, who is now Trump’s spokesman, played a behind-the-scenes role in organizing the Jan. 6 ellipse rally, according to the subpoena.
The panel is interested in a $200,000 contribution that Budowich allegedly steered to an unnamed 501(c)4 non-profit, in service of a “social media and radio advertising campaign” promoting the Jan. 6 rally.
The money could help answer questions about who funded the rally and the effort to promote it.
Dustin Stockton
Stockton, a We Build The Wall member who helped organize rallies in support of the Big Lie after the 2020 election, spoke with the committee earlier this month.
According to the subpoena, the panel wants records from Stockton as well as a deposition about his involvement in planning the rallies, which included Women for America First’s ellipse event.
Stockton had an inside look at how Women For America First officials may have communicated with the White House, and how the same WFAF officials may have also been in touch with event speakers like Roger Stone and Alex Jones; themselves, in turn, potentially in touch with members of the crowd on Jan. 6 who breached the Capitol.
Stockton himself reportedly warned that the rally could turn unsafe before Jan. 6, a warning that one WFAF leader said she would communicate to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Jennifer Lawrence
The panel is also interested in Stockton’s fiance, Jennifer Lawrence.
Along with Stockton, Lawrence worked on post-election rallies aimed at subverting the result. Three days before the insurrection, Lawrence tweeted that “we have been marching all around the country for you Mr. President.”
“Now we will bring it to DC on Jan 6 and PROUDLY stand beside you!” the tweet read.
Proud Boys
Video of the insurrection showed Proud Boys members taking the initiative in storming the Capitol, attacking Capitol police officers and breaching the building itself.
[…] The subpoena notes that 34 members of the group have been charged in connection with the riot, and that indictments have noted extensive efforts at “prior planning and coordination.”
Enrique Tarrio
Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader, never made it to the fight on Jan. 6 itself.
Rather, he was arrested on a federal indictment on Jan. 4, related to his burning of a Black Lives Matter flag from a D.C. church at a pro-Big Lie rally in December 2020.
His subpoena mentions this, and alludes to the fact that “Proud Boys leaders advanced pointed, specific calls to violence related to the November 3, 2020 election leading up to January 6, 2021.”
It also quotes from a December 29 Parler message that Tarrio posted, as lawmakers continue to search for evidence of pre-planning and coordination with others.
“We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow,” Tarrio wrote. “We will be incognito and will spread across downtown DC in smaller teams….who knows…we might dress in all BLACK for the occasion.”
Oath Keepers
The committee is focusing on the Oath Keepers as a source of evidence that the attack was planned and coordinated in advance.
Oath Keepers traveled to the Capitol with firearms, body armor, and radio equipment […]
The subpoena describes statements from Oath Keeper leaders that the group would use violence to help Trump stay in office, and also notes that members of the group were bodyguards for Roger Stone. […]
Stewart Rhodes
It’s Stewart Rhodes who helmed the Oath Keepers throughout the Big Lie and Jan. 6, and it’s he who repeated that the group would “engage in violence to ensure their preferred election outcome.”
Rhodes stated multiple times during the run-up to Jan. 6 that violence would be necessary to ensure Biden would be prevented from taking office. In December, he called for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — an idea under discussion in the White House at the time.
And, on Jan. 4, Rhodes called on Oath Keepers to “fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup, through the massive vote fraud and related attacks on our Republic,” saying that they should come to D.C. on Jan. 6. […]
Rhodes stayed in contact with group members as they breached the Capitol building on Jan. 6. In one exchange cited by prosecutors, he posted a photo taken by a group member at the Capitol doors that was sent to him.
First Amendment Praetorian
Last but not least is First Amendment Praetorian. Founded in 2020 by veteran and author Robert Patrick Lewis, the group aims to provide muscle […], to provide security for those at risk of what they see as leftist attacks.
According to a permit, the group provided security for the Jan. 5 rally at Freedom Plaza, where Alex Jones spoke.
The panel wants to learn what relationship the group had with the Oath Keepers. Lewis said on Jan. 7 that his group’s members wear body cameras — the House mentions that fact in its subpoena.
The panel also expressed interest in the group’s apparent foreknowledge of violence on Jan. 6, and how it reacted once that violence began.
“Today is the day that true battles begin,” the group tweeted on Jan. 6, as people were first breaching the Capitol.
You have to just laugh at the idiots referring to themselves as the personal bodyguards of an emperor while subverting a Republic to try to install one.
————————-
Assuming committee ultimately gets responses to its subpoenas, think it has two challenges:
Complete its report before this Congress ends in December 2022.
Write a report with a crystal clear storyline and unambiguous conclusions—not the bafflegab Mueller gave us hoping everyone would see what he meant.
——————-
There is no right to counsel when appearing before congress. Letting you bring a pet lawyer making faces while sitting behind you is merely a courtesy.
Burner phones: more details that reveal coordination behind the January 6th insurrection:
A new scoop at Rolling Stone adds to what we know about coordination between Jan. 6 “rally” organizers and the Trump White House—and it might be a very big deal. Hunter Walker reports that “March for Trump” planners purchased and used so-called “burner phones” to communicate with those close to Trump just days before Jan. 6; those contacted include Eric Trump, Laura Trump, Katrina Pierson, and, significantly, Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Organizers Kylie Kremer, Amy Kremer, and an unknown third person received the phones, and they were specifically purchased “to communicate with high-level people,” according to an anonymous March for Trump team member: “Any conversation [Kylie] had with the White House or Trump family took place on those phones.”
The link between the Trump White House and organizers of the Jan. 6 rally that led to a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in the precise minutes lawmakers were assembled to formally recognize Donald Trump’s election loss is one of the most significant points of inquiry for the House select committee investigating the attempted coup. We already know, as fact, that Donald Trump aggressively promoted the rally, calling it a “march.” We know as fact that it was planned to exactly coincide with the joint session of Congress’ formal counting of the electoral votes, and that the speaking program on the day was timed, almost to the minute, in such a way as to allow those assembled to demand nullification of Trump’s election loss to arrive at the Capitol immediately before the process began.
We know as fact that Trump himself specifically told the assembled crowd to “march” on the Capitol, and that when the violent attack was underway, Trump watched it on television but did nothing, despite pleas from staff and those inside the building to stop it.
What is still unknown is the extent to which the members of the Trump White House, including Meadows, were themselves involved in gathering up a crowd that day and setting it loose on the Capitol, but this new evidence adds to a significant pile suggesting that Trump’s staff played an active role in planning the event so it would provide a crowd of bodies at the precise hour and place needed to threaten lawmakers directly. All evidence suggests that Trump himself saw the crowd as a militia, and that he promoted the gathering and rallied the crowd for the explicit purpose of intimidating or outright threatening the gathered lawmakers.
[…] he had already confronted multiple state officials with demands that they alter vote totals on his behalf and, clearly, sought to use the gathered crowd to intimidate national lawmakers into doing the same.
Trump intended the event as the gathering point for a coup. He truly intended to topple government with a show of force […]r. One of the most pressing questions for the House select committee is pinning down who, among his advisers and top members of his administration, assisted that effort.
We now know that Meadows was in communication with “rally” organizers in the days before the violence. There is no privilege claim that can shield him from testifying as to what conversations he had with political operatives planning a pro-Trump event, and attempts to claim so would be asinine. He can, however, invoke his Fifth Amendment rights if he sees fit. The same goes for Trump’s family members. The same goes for Steve Bannon, who was promoting the day as something that could successfully alter the election’s result.
Which of these figures assisted Trump in gathering a crowd specifically for the purpose of interfering with the peaceful transfer of power between administrations? It was a crowd radicalized by election hoaxes spread by the Trump White House, Trump allies, the Republican Party, and many of the specific Republican lawmakers assembled that day—lawmakers who themselves told crowds that the election should be challenged.
[…] Some may have been gullible. Others appear to have gathered the crowd specifically as weapon in a would-be political coup. It is an unforgivable betrayal, and those figures should be exposed and punished not as bad political actors but as seditionists—to be held responsible for every death.
[…] Multiple sources told Rolling Stone that Kylie Kremer, an organizer for the rally that took place at D.C.’s Ellipse park, had an aide buy three burner phones a few days before Jan. 6. Kremer said that it was “of the utmost importance” that the phones be purchased with cash, one source, who was a member of the March for Trump team, told the magazine.
Kremer kept one of the phones herself, while another was reportedly given to her mother, Amy Kremer, who was also an organizer of the rally. Sources could not say who the third was given to.
According to Rolling Stone, the phones were used to communicate with high-ranking members of Trump’s inner circle, including his son Eric Trump, daughter-in-law and former campaign official Lara Trump, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson.
Speaking of when Kylie Kremer bought the phones, the March for Trump member said, “That was when the planning for the event on the Ellipse was happening, she needed burner phones in order to communicate with high-level people is how she put it.” […]
[…]
Italy is to bar unvaccinated people from popular social and sports activities, as governments across Europe scramble to tighten Covid-19 restrictions amid record-breaking numbers of infections in parts of the continent.
The Italian “super green pass” will take effect from 6 December and require people to prove they are vaccinated or have recovered from Covid to access cinemas, theatres, gyms, nightclubs, ski lifts and stadiums, as well as to be served indoors at bars and restaurants.
Current rules in Italy and many other EU countries with health passes also allow people who provide proof of a negative test taken within the previous 48 hours to use recreational venues, a regime that has become known as 3G, but the Italian “super green pass” removes that third option.
The Netherlands and France are among those thought likely to also adopt a stricter so-called 2G regime within days. 3G refers to the German words geimpft (vaccinated), getestet (tested) and genesen (recovered); 2G is vaccinated or recovered.
I hadn’t heard that Franc was perhaps about to (mostly?) abolish the getestet loophole — in principle, I approve (concern here is about those who cannot be vaccinated for a valid medical reasion (or who are not eligible)) — but on the other hand, France24’s journalists (in France?) are apparently on strike…
[…]
France will announce new Covid containment measures on Thursday, a government spokesperson, Gabriel Attal, said. While aiming to avoid “major curbs on public life”, the government has said stricter social distancing requirements and tougher health pass rules are inevitable.
“We must protect the French people by building on what we have, to save the end-of-year festivities and get through the winter as well as possible,” Attal said. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has said the pass, which currently applies 3G rules, is a key reason why France is doing better than some of its neighbours.
Locally, I’ve noticed that after a considerable slacking-off in checking my Health Pass, many establishments are checking it again. I’ve no idea precisely why (I fully approve, however); my guess is the police have gone round and had a word in their ear… Mask-wearing continues to be erratic, and proper mask-wearing rare, with social distancing all-but-absent…
It occurs to me one possible “new” (actually, renewed) restriction is a requirement to wear masks except when seated (to eat / drink); apparently, that requirement was dropped sometime ago.
Italy introduced its green pass in August and made it mandatory for workplaces in October. The workplace mandate intensified protests across Italy, especially in the northern city of Trieste, where there has been a sharp rise in infections and hospital admissions in recent weeks. Calls for tighter rules have been led by Massimiliano Fedriga, the president of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the region surrounding Trieste.
This month Fedriga, a politician with the far-right League, described the anti-vaccination and anti-green pass protests as “idiocy”. He said on Sunday the super green pass was not discriminatory and the only alternative would be another lockdown.
Umberto Lucangelo, the head of an intensive care unit at a hospital in Trieste, recently said 90% of Covid patients were unvaccinated and many had been involved in the protests.
The tougher rules have been supported by regional presidents from across the political spectrum. Stefano Bonaccini, the centre-left Democratic party president of Emilia-Romagna, told Ansa: “I think people who are vaccinated should have a preferential path in those places of social and cultural life, in particular, in order to prevent them from having to close.”
Giovanni Toti, the Forza Italia president of the Liguria region, said any further restrictions should apply to “people who have not had the vaccine, not to people who have done so correctly”.
As of Wednesday just over 84% of Italy’s population over the age of 12 were vaccinated.
Unseasonably grim weather over the summer has limited cheese production in France with a potentially disastrous effect for end-of-year festivities.
Heavy rains over the summer have lead to a particularly poor hay harvest, meaning that cows – who usually get extra nutrition from hay — have produced less milk than usual.
“So far, in terms of collected volume {of milk}, we have seen a decrease of 15 to 20 percent,” said Arnauld Dischamp, vice president of Dischamp cheese makers.
Dischamp is concerned over getting enough milk to make the cheese usually ordered in bulk for Christmas and New Year celebrations.
“All winter, we risk having a lack of volume and availability,” he warned […]
What this really means — according to the mildly deranged penguin — is that brexit, and possibly Covid-related restrictions, have interfered with the cheeses’s migratory patterns.
As an event dreaded by millions draws near, Dr. Anthony Fauci is urging all Americans to use COVID-19 as an excuse to skip Thanksgiving with horrible relatives.
Speaking from his office at the National Institutes of Health, Fauci said that the COVID-19 excuse could help prevent a seasonal surge in exasperation and seething rage associated with the Thanksgiving holiday.
“COVID-19 could get you off the hook this year,” Fauci said. “Consider this a doctor’s note from me.”
By using the pandemic as justification for skipping Thanksgiving, Americans can spare the feelings of relatives they despise, the esteemed virologist said.
“Tell your aunt from West Virginia that you’ll miss her, but you’ll look forward to reading her QAnon theories on Facebook,” he advised.
For his part, Fauci said that he intends to employ COVID-19 as an excuse to exempt himself from other unpleasant activities. “I plan to use it to avoid seeing Rand Paul,” he said.
The American Library Association, which monitors ‘challenges’ to books, says social media have amplified protests to the highest number for decades
[… T]he American Library Association is charting an unprecedented rise in attempts to ban books in libraries — many of which it believes are fuelled by organised conservative campaigns.
“It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen in my time at the ALA &mdsh; the last 20 years. We’ve never had a time when we’ve gotten four or five reports a day for days on end, sometimes as many as eight in a day,” says ALA director Deborah Caldwell-Stone. “Social media is amplifying local challenges and they’re going viral, but we’ve also been observing a number of organisations activating local members to go to school board meetings and challenge books. We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books dealing with LGBTQIA themes and books dealing with racism.”
[… multiple examples, such as] a southern Pennsylvania district banned a lengthy list of titles almost entirely by or about people of colour, by acclaimed authors including Jacqueline Woodson, Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X Kendi. (The all-white school board said it was coincidence that almost all the material banned was by or about people of colour. [ha!])
[…]
In Spotsylvania in Fredericksburg, Virginia, meanwhile, parents have protested about the availability of LGBTQIA fiction to children. One school board member called for the offending books to be burned. I think we should throw those books in a fire, he said. I guess we live in a world now that our public schools would rather have kids read about gay pornography than Christ. The school board subsequently ordered that sexually explicit books be removed from district libraries.
Caldwell-Stone pointed to conservative grassroots organisations such as Heritage Action and the Heritage Foundation, which she said were driving the attempts to censor materials dealing with racism and Black American history, as well as materials “they deem to be inappropriate for minors, which seems to encompass the entire canon of books dealing with LGBTQIA themes”.
“We’ve seen a number of these parents’ rights groups that have arisen in the last year get involved in these challenges, and their local chapters are turning out to attend school board meetings and challenge books. It really has sparked a rise in challenges,” she said.
“When you have organisations like Heritage Foundation and Family Policy Alliance publishing materials that instruct parents on how to challenge books in the school library or the public library, right down to a challenge form enclosed in the booklet so they can just fill it out, you’re seeing a challenge to our democratic values of free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of belief.”
Caldwell-Stone said she was particularly concerned about the fact that elected officials were now pursuing the same agenda — “officials who in theory are bound by first amendment, who are forbidden from engaging in official government censorship of ideas or viewpoints, but you have the governors of Texas and South Carolina declaring that they’re going to scrub school libraries of pornography without defining what they mean by that.”
Librarians are fighting back against challenges. The Spotsylvania school board last week voted to rescind its order […]
Don’t mess with the librarians. Oook.
[…]
“We’re seeing a disregard for policy and a kind of a moral panic over a number of novels and graphic novels that are in school libraries that are intended for adolescents to access and read, without regard for the agency or first amendment rights of the young adults involved, or the choices of parents who may make different choices about what books they would like students to be able to read and access in libraries,” said Caldwell-Stone. “We’re seeing censorship to impose particular agendas, representing particular political or religious beliefs. It’s really disheartening.”
blfsays
Last Sunday (21st November), Nasa/JPL’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity made its 16th(!) flight as it heads back to the original on-Mars testing ground (Wright Brothers Field) to rendezvous with the Perseverance rover, whence both will head north and, eventually, west, to the Jezero ancient river delta. This latest flight was a shot hop (just over 100 metres in about as many seconds), but it did take some colour images, which haven’t yet(?) been returned to Earth.
EU regulator approves Pfizer vaccine for children aged five to 11
The European Medicines Agency, the European Union’s drug regulator, has approved the use of Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid vaccine on children aged five to 11. […]
France will make Covid-19 booster jabs available to all adults and reduce the gap from the last jab to five months, Health Minister Olivier Véran announced on Thursday, ruling out curfews and lockdowns to curb a fifth wave of infections.
So I only have to wait until December, rather than January, to become eligible for a booster.
[…]
The health minister said booster jabs would be available to all people aged 18 or above “as of Saturday”, adding that France had sufficient supplies of vaccines.
From January 15, Véran added, booster shots will become a requirement for a valid health pass, which is required in France to enter restaurants, cafés, cinemas and museums, among other public venues.
The minister said health regulators will examine whether or not children aged five to 11 should have the Covid-19 vaccine, though adding that no decision will be made before 2022.
The minister’s press conference was before the EMA’s announcement.
[…]
The seven-day moving average of daily new cases […] stands at a three-month high of 21,761 and has almost quadrupled in a month.
The number of people treated in intensive care for Covid-19 is nearly 1,500, a figure last seen at the end of September.
France, along with Spain, Portugal, and Italy, is one of the “safer” EU countries, in that the fifth wave doesn’t seem to as bad as it is in, say, Germany or Austria — two countries with notably lower vaccination rates than the beforementioned four.
(And it appears the strike at France24 is over?)
blfsays
me@142, Oops! The missing first link should be “the Grauniad’s current pandemic live blog“.
South Africa has confirmed around 100 specimens as B.1.1.529, but the variant has also been found in Botswana and Hong Kong, with the Hong Kong case a traveller from South Africa, reports Reuters. As many as 90% of new cases in Gauteng could be B.1.1.529, scientists believe.
Gauteng is the smallest, but also most populated, province in S.Africa, containing the cites of Johannesburg and Pretoria.
[…]
The country has requested an urgent sitting of a [WHO] working group on virus evolution on Friday to talk about the new variant.
From the earlier article about the new variant (link embedded in above excerpt):
Scientists have said a new Covid variant that carries an “extremely high number” of mutations may drive further waves of disease by evading the body’s defences.
Only 10 cases in three countries have been confirmed by genomic sequencing, but the variant has sparked serious concern among some researchers because a number of the mutations may help the virus evade immunity.
The B.1.1.529 variant has 32 mutations in the spike protein, the part of the virus that most vaccines use to prime the immune system against Covid. Mutations in the spike protein can affect the virus’s ability to infect cells and spread, but also make it harder for immune cells to attack the pathogen.
The variant was first spotted in Botswana, where three cases have now been sequenced. Six more have been confirmed in South Africa, and one in Hong Kong in a traveller returning from South Africa.
Dr Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, posted details of the new variant on a genome-sharing website, noting that the “incredibly high amount of spike mutations suggest this could be of real concern”.
In a series of tweets, Peacock said it “very, very much should be monitored due to that horrific spike profile”, but added that it may turn out to be an “odd cluster” that is not very transmissible. “I hope that’s the case,” he wrote.
[…]
The first cases of the variant were collected in Botswana on 11 November, and the earliest in South Africa was recorded three days later. The case found in Hong Kong was a 36-year-old man who had a negative PCR test before flying from Hong Kong to South Africa, where he stayed from 22 October to 11 November. He tested negative on his return to Hong Kong, but tested positive on 13 November while in quarantine.
[…]
Scientists will be watching the new variant for any sign that it is gaining momentum and spreading more widely. Some virologists in South Africa are already concerned, particularly given the recent rise in cases in Gauteng […], where B.1.1.529 cases have been detected.
Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at Cambridge University, said work in his lab found that two of the mutations on B.1.1.529 increased infectivity and reduced antibody recognition. “It does certainly look a significant concern based on the mutations present,” he said. “However, a key property of the virus that is unknown is its infectiousness, as that is what appears to have primarily driven the Delta variant. Immune escape is only part of the picture of what may happen.”
Prof Francois Balloux, the director of the UCL Genetics Institute, said the large number of mutations in the variant apparently accumulated in a “single burst”, suggesting it may have evolved during a chronic infection in a person with a weakened immune system, possibly an untreated HIV/Aids patient.
“I would definitely expect it to be poorly recognised by neutralising antibodies relative to Alpha or Delta,” he said. “It is difficult to predict how transmissible it may be at this stage. For the time being it should be closely monitored and analysed, but there is no reason to get overly concerned unless it starts going up in frequency in the near future.”
blfsays
Quack Scott Atlas, the “neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s rightwing Hoover Institution, where he works on healthcare policy [… but despite having] no expertise or experience in infectious diseases or epidemiology” was hair furor’s special “advisor” on the pandemic, “attack[ing] public health measures such as masks, stay-at-home orders and social distancing [and] called on residents of Michigan to rise up against restrictions put in place by Governor Gretchen Whitmer” — remember that loon (quack Atlas, not Gov Whitmer)†? — is about to release a lie-fest, Former Trump adviser claims to expose unvarnished truth of Covid in new book:
[…]
In a new book, former Trump adviser Scott Atlas [who resigned after four months] blames Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci for headline-dominating debacles about quack cures for Covid-19 — but omits to mention the chief proponent of snake-oil treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and disinfectant, was the US president he loyally served[Wacko House squatter whose boots he loyally licked].
[…] Its publisher is Bombardier Books, an imprint of PostHill Press, a conservative outlet that will also publish a memoir by Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s fourth press secretary.
[… Atlas bellowed there was] a shocking lack of critical thinking about the science … a reckless abuse of public health and a moral failure in what should be expected from public health leaders. […]
A GoFundMe Page for the man suspected of driving an SUV through a holiday parade in Waukesha, Wisc., was removed on Wednesday, and its creator was banned from the platform.
A GoFundMe page was started for Darrell Brooks, who is charged with five counts of first degree intentional homicide. The fundraiser was first reported by Law Enforcement Today.
Brooks allegedly drove into the parade on Sunday, injuring at least 40 people and killing six.
[…] The person who started the GoFundMe is banned from the platform. The company says it does not allow money to be raised for suspects of a violent crime. […]
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced a bill on Tuesday to award Kyle Rittenhouse the Congressional Gold Medal for “protecting the community of Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) riot on August 25, 2020.”
The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest honor Congress can award an individual or institution. It is highly unlikely the bill will go anywhere in the Democratic-controlled House and Senate, and it has no co-sponsors.
Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two protesters in Kenosha and wounded a third, was acquitted last week by a jury of all charges, including intentional homicide.
“Kyle Rittenhouse deserves to be remembered as a hero who defended his community, protected businesses, and acted lawfully in the face of lawlessness. I’m proud to file this legislation to award Kyle Rittenhouse a Congressional Gold Medal,” Greene said in a statement to The Hill. […]
Less than 24 hours after at least 27 migrants died while trying to cross from France to Britain by boat, in the worst migrant tragedy in the English Channel in years, the two countries were sparring on Thursday over who was to blame and what should be done going forward.
Britain, for its part, reiterated calls for joint patrols along the French coast in hopes of stopping migrants from making a perilous journey across the English Channel, while France just demanded more support from its neighbors.
[…] Similar proposals had already raised concerns over sovereignty in France, where the government blames Britain for its lack of action against traffickers and businesses employing migrants. On Thursday, the French called for more European and British support for their efforts to combat human trafficking along the channel.
In a phone call with Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday evening, French President Emmanuel Macron “underlined the shared responsibility” and urged the British to “refrain from exploiting a dramatic situation for political purposes,” the Élysée presidential palace said early Thursday.
Speaking on French radio on Thursday morning, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said “pregnant women, children died” in the incident. A local prosecutor told the Agence France-Presse news agency that 17 men, seven women and three presumed minors were among the victims. An investigation to identify the victims and their countries of origin was still ongoing.
Two people, from Iraq and Somalia, survived and were being treated for hypothermia, according to Darmanin.
[…] charities and aid agencies on both sides of the channel have long called on the British government to open safe routes to the country for asylum seekers. Currently, the migrants who are in France can only apply for asylum in Britain if they are physically there — meaning they have to take deadly risks in rickety boats with people smugglers. […]
When the asteroid struck the ocean off the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago, a rain of molten glass and flaming rocks spread around the planet. The last day of the dinosaurs that populate childhood imaginations, and adult fascination, didn’t drag things out. They were dead in hours. Maybe minutes.
But some time after the ash settled and the fires went out, a small dinosaur stepped from the wreckage. With feathers and a toothless beak, this dinosaur was already a solid member of the surviving dinosaurs that we call “birds.” More than that, this was a heavy-bodied, stout-limbed bird that was more at home on the ground than in the trees. The kind of bird that can fly, but would really just prefer to walk. It was a Galliformes, the group that contains the modern turkey. And that group was already at least 20 million years old.
That’s right. The group that includes the bird on your Thanksgiving plate was around not just before the asteroid fell, but long before Tyrannosaurus rex evolved.
[…] The Galliformes survived. So did the ratites, another group of mostly ground-loving birds like ostriches, emus, and other big flightless birds today. […]
Galliformes pretty much had their role down from the beginning. Think about this lineup: quail, partridge, pheasant, chicken, guinea fowl, turkey, peafowl. From medium-small to medium-large, they’re all birds that stalk around forest and grasslands on foot, taking to wing mostly as a means of escaping predators. They’re all Galliformes.
One of these, the Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus), better known to your local colonel as a chicken, is now the most common bird on the planet. At last count, there are about 24 billion of them — all but a tiny handful of which are caged up for human consumption. […]
Thanks to a tough disposition, an omnivorous appetite (turkeys will eat seeds and berries, but also insects and snakes), and a surprising ability to get their heavy bodies up and out of there when need be, they’ve been one of the more successful large species across America for better than 2 million years. Turkey bones are even one of the most common finds in the La Brea tar pits, though that particular species, Meleagris californica, is now extinct.
[…] Starting around 2,000 years ago—and maybe a good deal earlier—turkeys were domesticated in Mexico. And that is where your turkey comes from. Mexico. Indirectly, every single grocery store turkey found chilling in the freezer today is descended not from a wild turkey someone cooped up in New England, but from a group of domesticated birds that Spanish conquistadors took from the Aztecs and shipped back to Europe.
[…] There’s one slight variant on this. Narragansett turkeys are said to be the result of cross-breeding one of these spoils-of-war turkeys with wild relatives.
[…] The turkeys pardoned by President Joe Biden this year—named Peanut Butter and Jelly—are of the currently most common Broad Breasted White variety. By weight, they’re about twice as heavy as their wild relatives, topping out at around 40 pounds. They’re also structurally different, with breast bones that are proportionally shorter supporting breast muscle that is considerably larger.
[…] They’ve gone from a few million birds walking around one continent to numbering in the billions and having a world-wide presence. On a planet where 96% of all large animals are either humans or the animals they have domesticated for consumption, that’s a win. The world is populated by the things we eat. Everything else, from antelope to lions to blue whales, has to squeeze into the remaining 4%.
[…] A note to the one of you who is preparing to slap me for mixing up clades, families, and orders in laying out those evolutionary connections: slap away. But I already know.
In my travels around Idaho I have seen dozens of wild turkeys.
Paul Ksays
blf @ 140: My wife is a children’s librarian, and I’m on our local school board. It’s weird to think we’re on the front-lines of defending democracy, but here we are.
On November 30th, Barbados will become a republic. Queen Elizabeth II will cease to the Queen of Barbados and the country’s head of state. She will be succeeded by the current Governor-General, Sandra Mason, who will herself transition into the country’s first elected President. Prime Minister Mia Mottley will remain Prime Minister in the transition to republican government. Barbados gained its independence in 1966. Prince Charles will represent Queen Elizabeth at the transition ceremonies which will kick off on the evening of the 29th.
Taking time to thank the people who have to work on Thanksgiving Day:
[…] take a moment to think about people who have to work on the holiday. This year, the pandemic has altered that landscape […]
A number of retail chains that in recent years just couldn’t wait until Black Friday, and had opened on Thanksgiving, will be closed on Thursday this year. They didn’t necessarily do it out of the goodness of their hearts—many of those companies are struggling to find workers and burning out the ones they have probably won’t help them with staffing. […]
Some jobs need to be worked 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without regard to holidays. Nurses. Doctors. Paramedics and EMTs. Firefighters. This year, many of those workers have spent more than a year and a half working through a pandemic that has made their jobs more difficult, more dangerous, more relentless. More than 3,600 health care workers died of COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic, and while vaccines have done a lot to protect them from serious illness and death over the past eight months or so, they have still been forced to preside over enormous amounts of suffering and death, most of it preventable.
So on this day of giving thanks, remember to thank the people who’ve gotten us this far, who’ve put their health and their lives on the line to care for our sick or make sure there are groceries on the shelves. But remember how much of that risk and brutal work shouldn’t have been necessary—or should have been done in the context of employers and a society that valued the workers and the work more highly.
● Bank starts probe on analyst note questioning Covid-vaccines
● Analysis published on Sunday also contained a Nazi reference
Nordea Bank Abp retracted a controversial research note where senior analysts referred to governments battling Covid-19 as lockdownistas and questioned the efficacy of the vaccines.
The Nordic region’s biggest bank on Wednesday said it’s starting an investigation into a note, Nordea weekly: Papers please, and how to trade them! after taking it down from its website. The analysis, published on Sunday, caused a stir on Twitter after a member of the Finnish parliament, Mikko Karna, questioned its contents.
It used to be ‘two weeks to flatten the curve,’ but somehow it has developed to ‘imprison the unvaccinated (or worse)’, Chief Analyst Martin Enlund and Global Chief Strategist Andreas Steno Larsen wrote in the note. The vaccine is apparently so good that you need to force people into taking it.
They also made a Nazi reference and suggested booster shots actually increase transmission of the coronavirus. […]
The Bank and its two “analysts” have gone silent, “No further comment was available from a Nordea spokesman contacted by Bloomberg and the bank declined to say whether the analysts are still employed at the bank.”
[…]
Following the initial peak of COVID-19 vaccine uptake among healthcare personnel (HCP) in the U.S. hospital system in early 2021, rates quickly decreased in the second half of the year. Currently, as much as 30% of HCP remain unvaccinated.
Data analysis from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Unified Hospital Data Surveillance System from January–September 2021, collected from over 3.3&bsp;million HCP across 2,086 hospitals, found that as many as 30% of workers were unvaccinated.
[… The] analysis included children’s hospitals, short- and long-term acute care hospitals (ACH), and critical access hospitals. […] HCP working in children’s hospitals had the highest vaccination rates at 77%, followed by short- and long-term care ACHs at 70.1% and 68.8%, respectively. Critical access hospitals had vaccination rates of 64%.
[…]
While the researchers did not delve into the reasons individual HCP remain unvaccinated, they echoed previous research that cites several factors. Reses outlined to Medical News Today the four primary concerns:
● COVID-19 vaccine efficacy
● adverse reactions after vaccination
● the speed of vaccine development
● lack of trust in regulatory authorities and the government [I understand this one — the authorities are allowing these fools to treat / be near patients! –blf]
Due to the higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and transmission within hospitals […] experts continue to explore measures to increase uptake.
[… Lead researcher and an epidemiologist in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion at the CDC, Hannah] Reses cited “vaccine mandates and investments in educational and promotional activities” as effective means of achieving this goal.
The study also notes that vaccinated HCP could help influence other HCP and communities to have the vaccine. They were more likely to recommend it to patients, friends, and family.
The researchers found that reluctant HCP placed greater trust in the recommendations of medical professionals versus regulatory authorities or the government. This collegial approach might enhance compliance while dispelling misinformation.
[… Professor of medicine from the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Dr William] Schaffner then described the resolutions Vanderbilt put in place to overcome the stalled uptake. This included vaccine mandates and intensive educational outreach with a strong focus on diversity inclusion.
He emphasized several points:
There is no perfect vaccine that is risk-free. Yet, the safety standard for any vaccine is already much higher than it is for pharmaceuticals that receive FDA approval. And risk must always be put into context. Yes, COVID-19 vaccines do have small cardiac and clotting risk in the 3-to-5 per 1 million range, but in the face of a pandemic that was causing over 2,000 deaths worldwide on a daily basis, there is almost no comparison.
[…]
The findings are part of global research conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, which looks at how different countries perceive a variety of conspiracy theories. According to the research, at least one-fifth to one-third of respondents said they were convinced that the truth about vaccines was being withheld from the public in 20 of 23 countries surveyed.
“Taken together, these findings emphasize the extent to which conspiracism has entered the mainstream politics of numerous electorates around the world,” Dr Joel Rogers de Waal, YouGov’s academic director, said in a statement. “The same research also points to a new and deeper form of partisan antipathy, where people are divided not merely by policy preference or political identity but also by their fundamental perceptions of reality. Overall, 43 percent of adults surveyed in the US said they did not believe that the harmful effects of vaccines were being withheld from the public. A closer look at the breakdown of responses within the US shows that attitudes toward vaccines are clearly divided along partisan lines: just 9 percent of people who voted for President Biden in the last election said they believe the public is being misled about the dangers of vaccines, while 47 percent of Donald Trump voters said they believed this to be true.[” there’s a closing-quotemark missing, and I’m unsure if this is the correct place –blf]
[… T]he recent survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project found that “Nearly all countries demonstrated significantly lower willingness to believe that COVID is a myth than to believe in a cover-up about vaccines in general.”
[…]
One notable data point that seems to offer a measurement of a particular group’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories is their ability to say for certain that something is not true. For example, in Denmark, where vaccine skepticism is less common, 42 percent of people said it is “definitely false” that the harmful effects of vaccines are being deliberately hidden from the public, compared to just 8 percent of people in Kenya who said the same.
This same disparity also exists between different political factions in the US. On the question of whether the harmful effects of vaccines are being hidden from the public, 60 percent of Biden voters said this statement is “definitely false” compared to just nine percent of Trump voters who said the same.
A closer look at the results of the survey in the US suggests that people’s political affiliations are directly linked to their willingness to believe certain conspiracy theories but not others.
In addition to showing more of a tendency toward vaccine skepticism, large portions of Trump supporters also said they believed in other conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the world is run by a hidden cabal who secretly control events and run the world together (42 percent) and that man-made global warming is hoax that was invented to deceive people (45 percent). Support for these theories was much smaller among Biden voters […]
Not all of the responses were split along partisan lines, however. Support for several other theories were similarly low across the political spectrum: 15 percent of Trump voters and 14 percent of Biden voters said they think it’s definitely or probably true the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks; 9 percent of Trump supporters and 8 percent who voted for Biden were similarly inclined to believe that the official account of the Nazi Holocaust is a lie and the number of Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II has been exaggerated on purpose; and the notion that the moon landings were faked resonated with 9 percent of Trump voters and 6 percent who backed Biden.
More details at the link.
quotetheunquotesays
@Lynna OM #151
Go, them! Congratulations, Bajans.
Wish Canada could do that. We’ve even graduated to having a G-G who’s First Nations, she’d make an excellent President.
Lying liars try to troll Representative Ilhan Omar … again:
Another day, another desperate crusade for outrage: Far-right extremist Lauren Boebert (R-CO) proudly tells a Totally Real Story in a viral video about her calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “the jihad squad” to her face in a Capitol elevator earlier this week.
Omar responded to the clip on Thanksgiving via Twitter saying that Boebert is 1) making the whole thing up and 2) is actually terrified of even looking at her in the halls of Congress.
[…] During an interview with MSNBC this week, Fauci went after his critics, accusing them of “killing people” as they “weaponize lies” about basic public health measures needed to pull the U.S. out of this pandemic. He named Carlson specifically.
“I’m trying to save lives and the people who weaponize lies are killing people. … So the only question I have is that when you show Tucker Carlson and Peter Navarro criticizing me, I consider that a badge of honor.
“They always throw up those people that make those ridiculous statements, you know, they’re telling people to do things that they’re going to die from and they’re telling me I should go to jail. As they say in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, ‘Give me a break will you?’”
Talking about the differing vaccination rates in counties where Biden won versus counties where Trump won:
“You should never have, looking at a map, and seeing that people who are vaccinated fall heavily into one group and people who are unvaccinated fall heavily into another group,” Fauci said. “That is so antithetical with what public health should be, which should be a concerted effort on the part of the entire population.”
And earlier this month, Fauci told CBS that he’s not planning to leave his position until he feels he’s done his job, again going after pundits who have painted him as some sort of COVID-19 boogeyman.
“I’m going to keep doing that until this COVID-19 outbreak is in the rearview mirror, regardless of what anybody says about me, or wants to lie and create crazy fabrications because of political motivations,” he said, pouring cold water on any speculation he might soon retire.
G.O.P. Cements Hold on Legislatures in Battleground States Democrats were once able to count on wave elections to win back key statehouses. Republican gerrymandering is making that all but impossible.
Nick Corasaniti / November 25, 2021
Republicans are locking in newly gerrymandered maps for the legislatures in four battleground states that are set to secure the party’s control in the statehouse chambers over the next decade, fortifying the G.O.P. against even the most sweeping potential Democratic wave elections.
In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia, Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.
Although much of the attention on this year’s redistricting process has focused on gerrymandered congressional maps, the new maps being drafted in state legislatures have been just as distorted.
And statehouses have taken on towering importance: With the federal government gridlocked, these legislatures now serve as the country’s policy laboratory, crafting bills on abortion, guns, voting restrictions and other issues that shape the national political debate.
[…]
Wanda Traczyk-Stawska is an outspoken 94-year-old Polish freedom fighter. She is a veteran of the Warsaw uprising, joining the resistance when she was 17 years old. Her youth and small stature earned her the nickname “Doughnut” within the resistance. She was a hardcore anti-fascist. She still is a hardcore anti-fascist. That fight extends today to the rights of women, migrants, and refugees.
Earlier in November, Wanda was given the title of Warsaw Citizen of the Year, voted on by citizens of Warsaw. According to the mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, Traczyk-Stawska received the most votes of any awardee ever. During her acceptance speech, Traczyk-Stawska called on women to reclaim the rights that have been whittled away by conservatives over the past decades:
“I accept this honor to tell you that we women by the 31st Order were granted the same rights as men. We had military ranks and decorations. We were treated the same as men. And now, in free Poland, this right has been taken away from us, so that we would have a decision that belongs to us, whether we want to be mothers or not.”
And she isn’t done.
In October, as Poland struggles like the rest of Europe (and the world) with rising neo-fascism in its forever cloak of “nationalism,” Traczyk-Stawska appeared during a rally in support of Poland’s continuing membership in the European Union (EU). Speaking in front of tens of thousands of people to strengthen the fight against the nationalist ruling party’s attempts to pull Poland back into 1939’s blatant bigotry and evil, Traczyk-Stawska is a reminder of the human spirit’s resilience. […]
A new, possibly more infectious coronavirus variant, with an unusual number of mutations, had scientists sounding the alarm, countries moving to impose travel bans and financial markets tumbling on Friday, as the world feared another setback on the long road out of the pandemic.
Major questions remain about the variant’s transmissibility, whether it might make people sicker and whether it might be able to evade vaccines, but Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser to Britain’s Health and Security Agency, warned that the new variant found in southern Africa is the “most worrying we’ve seen.”
The variant, known as B.1.1.529, was first detected in Botswana, but scientists in South Africa convened a news conference Thursday and said they had linked it to an exponential rise of infections in their country. Cases have also been identified in Hong Kong and Belgium.
By the next morning, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged about 800 points or 2.2 percent, the S&P 500 index fell 1.5 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index was off 1.1 percent. Crude oil prices tumbled as well.
France, Britain, Japan and Israel began to ban or order quarantines for air passengers arriving from the southern African region. The European Union is also expected to also propose a ban on air travel arriving from southern Africa.
“Our view is very clear,” Dana Spinant, deputy chief spokeswoman for the European Commission, said at a news conference Friday. “We need to act very fast, we need to be vigilant, and we need to take all measures that are appropriate at this stage to prevent this virus from entering Europe.”
Anthony S. Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease official, said banning flights to the United States from southern Africa is a “possibility,” but that a decision has not been made yet.
“There is always the possibility of doing what the U.K. has done, namely block travel from South Africa and related countries,” Fauci said Friday morning in an interview on CNN. “That’s certainly something you think about and get prepared to do … But you want to make sure there’s a basis for doing that.”
Top South African health officials said they began researching the possibility of a new variant when they discovered a fast-growing cluster of cases in Gauteng, the country’s biggest province. Officials said they do not yet know where it originated
.
“Unfortunately, we have now detected a new variant, which is a reason for concern in South Africa. What we have done is to act very quick,” Tulio de Oliveira, a scientist in South Africa, said at the news conference. “We are trying to identify what we are facing. The main message today is that we have to know the enemy that we fight.” […]
Biden has delivered a wealth of accomplishments in one year.
[…] Democrats have positive things to sell concerning the economy: wages are up […] and Biden has posted record job growth in the first year of his presidency.
The problem is, every time someone fills up their gas tank or runs to the grocery store, they are reminded that something is still very wrong with this pandemic economy. This coming winter will likely only exacerbate that perception as home heating costs are expected to spike.
Some of these issues—gas prices, in particular—are mostly out of a president’s control. That said, Democrats could develop a message along the lines of: We understand you are hurting and the pandemic is still squeezing people’s pocket books, which is exactly why we passed the American Rescue Plan, cut $1,400 checks to people, gave parents and families a big tax cut through the child tax credit, and delivered a major jobs growth package.
[…] the notion that Biden isn’t delivering seems almost purely a product of anemic messaging after Democrats spent months trying to coalesce around the infrastructure bill and Biden’s family/climate plan. However, passage of the infrastructure bill has already given the president an opportunity to move past the dysfunction narrative and rally around a giant job-creation measure that is good for families, the economy, and American competitiveness.
[…] the notion that Biden hasn’t delivered anything is entirely fixable as job growth booms, nearly 230 million Americans have gotten the jab, and Democrats have enacted two separate trillion-dollar stimulus packages during Biden’s first year in office.
President Biden and his allies have already hit the road to sell his latest accomplishment, but congressional Democrats must spend the lion’s share of next year wrapping up their entire package of goods in a bow for voters.
The Biden administration has reversed the termination of two little-discussed but very significant immigration programs, including a policy that allowed Filipino World War II veterans to petition to bring loved ones to the U.S. while they wait for their visas.
Both the Filipino World War II Veterans Parole Program and Haitian Family Reunification Parole were terminated by the previous administration in 2019. But in recent announcements, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said both programs will come back.
“The FWVP program was established in June 2016 to allow certain Filipino World War II veterans and their U.S. citizen and lawful permanent resident spouses to apply for parole for certain family members,” USCIS said. “If approved for parole, family members could come to the United States before their immigrant visas became available.” […]
Meanwhile, legislators had urged the Biden administration to reinstate Haitian Family Reunification Parole, as part of a response to the devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake that hit the small nation this past summer. […]
“The reinstatement of these programs is an important step in the right direction,” Cruz concluded in her post. “The Biden administration should do all it can to ensure these programs are operating at full capacity so families can be reunited in the shortest amount of time possible.”
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
One way to disrupt the supply chain:
Hundreds of FedEx packages are found in Alabama woods
11/26/2021 17:04 -0500
HAYDEN, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama sheriff is trying to figure out how hundreds of FedEx packages ended up dumped in the woods.
An estimated 300 to 400 packages of various sizes were found in a ravine near the small town of Hayden on Wednesday, the Blount County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Deputies were sent to guard the scene until FedEx workers could arrive to pick up the packages, Sheriff Mark Moon said. FedEx sent multiple trucks and drivers from across the South to load up the packages, Moon said.
Photos posted on the sheriff’s Facebook page show the packages strewn about the forest and piled at the bottom of a wooded hillside.
Natasha Abney told WBMA-TV that her neighbor found the boxes on his property.
“I mean it was just a river of boxes,” Abney said. “Some busted open, some not.”
It wasn’t clear why the packages were in the ravine, the sheriff said, but he hoped to have some answers soon.
“The security of our customers’ shipments is a top priority and we are committed to treating our customers’ packages with the utmost care,” Memphis, Tennessee-based FedEx said in a statement provided Friday.
“We are taking steps to recover and transport the affected packages as quickly as possible,” the company said. “In addition to cooperating with law enforcement, we are conducting a review of this situation and will take the appropriate action.”
The site where the packages were found is about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Birmingham.
[…] there is no evidence that vaccine immunity is seriously threatened.
To start with, it appears that while “Nu” is outcompeting Delta, it is doing so in regions where Delta is more dormant and with low vaccination rates. […] Concerned, evaluating, and being responsible, but we are not to the “send in the HAZMAT suits and lock the town down” stage. […]
the bottom line is your ability to defeat a variant is multi-pronged, so panic about vaccine escape, while it is possible, is not warranted. We also have no firm evidence it is able to outcompete Delta, as it is spreading in areas where, like I said, Delta does not seem to be competing with it. All of this is subject to change with new data, however.
There is other good news, in a sense. I have several sources of confirmation that the six cases of breakthrough transmission with the Nu Variant, all are said to be asymptomatic. […] the travelers, Pfizer vaccinated, tested positive for it. […]
These travelers have a high viral load but as previously mentioned, are said to be asymptomatic. This could be seen as positive-if you are vaccinated, and you have no comorbidities. Vaccinated people will get variant infections, it will happen, so if Pfizer is working to prevent severe disease, that is a key “Can we sleep tonight?” question.
It is not the only “Can we sleep tonight?” question. One of the things that gets overlooked are the aforementioned comorbidities. These can have the practical effect of being unvaccinated, so a highly transmissible variant with similar virulence, that does little to prevent transmission from the vaccinated is a noteworthy concern.
So far we have uncovered no symptomatic cases of the new variant among those who are vaccinated. With enough volume, that will almost certainly change, but if breakthrough is not drastically different than Delta this is still something the current game plan can handle.
[…] the variant may not seriously sicken the vast majority of the vaccinated, but the vaccine may do next to nothing with this one to prevent transmission from the vaccinated. Again, a lot we don’t know. […]
the early signs seem to imply solid protection if you are vaxxed. Again, very early in this discovery process. […]
I suppose the easiest way to describe this post, is think of the virus as knocking on doors, looking for a party. The virus might sneak into the vaxxed, but will quickly get thrown out. Eventually it will find its way into unsecured (unvaxxed) doorways and tear up your house. […] the bulk of concern is focused on the health risk to the unvaccinated or immunosuppressed. […]
We have entered another wave as it is, and it is likely this variant will have an impact, but it is just as likely that you will be protected by being fully vaxxed, from severe disease. And that is the best we can hope for. While there is a lot of talk about “breakthrough” infections, this misses the point. The point is at some point all of us are likely to be exposed to a variant that we would show positivity for. This does not mean the vaccine is not working.
Keeping us alive is the vaccine’s job. It was never realistic to expect perfect immunity, and the media did a grave disservice in hinting at that possibility.
The ultimate goal is not to expect to never get Covid, but to survive it with reasonably minimal effects. But that goal is only feasible long term-If you are vaccinated.
Unvaccinated people causing severe stress on Michigan’s hospital system:
At Spectrum Health, a major health-care system here, officials spent part of last week debating whether to move to “red status” in a show of how strained hospitals had become.
A flood of mostly unvaccinated covid-19 patients was arriving at emergency departments already packed with people suffering other medical issues, sending capacity to unprecedented levels. The only hesitation for Spectrum’s decision-makers? Data suggested the covid surge was not over.
“We don’t have a darker color,” said Darryl Elmouchi, president of Spectrum Health West Michigan. “So if we’re red now, what are we in two weeks?”
He and other leaders ultimately decided Thursday to make the change, upgrading the health-care system to the most serious tier for the first time since the pandemic began. In recent days, the state had emerged as a new covid hot spot, leading the nation in new infections and hospitalizations. By the end of last week, its seven-day average of new cases had hit a pandemic high. State leaders asked the U.S. Department of Defense to provide emergency hospital staffing to handle the surge — a request granted Wednesday. […]
One rescuer was found alive at a Siberian coal mine Friday after an explosion that killed 51 coal miners and rescuers the previous day.
The man found alive, Alexander Zakovryashin, 51, was a doctor on a rescue team sent into the mine Thursday, […] He was in serious condition and had no memory of what had happened, doctors told journalists Friday.
[…] In video aired by the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency, the weeping widow of one of the dead miners, Boris Piyalkin, said alarms on methane detectors that miners are required to wear were ignored. Her name was not given.
She said a fire broke out in the mine last week, a complaint that other miners have made to local media.
“On the 15th, they [the miners] didn’t hesitate and extinguished the fire in the mine themselves, by their own efforts. A few days went by, and now my husband is gone. And everyone knew it,” she told local media, wiping away tears.
Recent safety checks by authorities achieved nothing, she said. Her husband and others had to keep working, even as methane detectors warned of high gas levels.
[…] The Listvazhnaya coal mine in Belovo in southwestern Siberia, which started operating in 1956, had been through a period of strife over the last year. It was inspected by multiple agencies for safety and fire violations, forced to shut down nine times and fined more than $55,000 […]
Russian authorities have launched a criminal case against the mine director, his deputy and the foreman over suspected negligence and breach of safety procedures.
[…] The blast underscored the difficulties Russia has faced in imposing modern safety standards in a dangerous sector in which fatal blasts have been common and are often blamed on lax safety standards or outmoded equipment.
In 2016, Russian authorities weighed the closure of 20 dangerous coal mines but ruled it out because of cost and the risk of coal shortages.
[…] there were few other well-paid jobs available in the region.
Under Russian safety rules, mines are supposed to stop work if methane concentrations get too high, but miners, declining to be named, told local media that work at the mine often continued. […]
miners are not paid when they have to stop because of high methane levels, local media reported. […]
Nerd @165, Yikes! We have enough problems with the supply chain. We don’t need people dumping packages into a ravine.
I need to have some repairs done in my bathroom. I had to put down a deposit with the plumbers just in order to get on a waiting list for repairs in March.
A “variant of concern” is the World Health Organization’s top category of worrying Covid variants.
The decision adds weight to the mounting scientific worry about the potential of this new variant, but it doesn’t change any of the facts.
The variant has an astounding collection of mutations which are thought to increase its ability to spread and bypass some, but not all, of the protection from vaccines.
However, we still don’t have the clear real-world data.
We don’t know for sure that it spreads faster, makes vaccines or drugs less effective or whether it leads to more severe disease.
The WHO have also given it a name and ended days of speculation that we would end up in the slightly ridiculous position of calling the new variant the “Nu variant”.
There have even been arguments about the correct pronunciation of the Greek letter Nu (it’s technically a “Nee”).
It occurs to me the WHO’s skipping of (to quote the BBC (see @170)) “the slightly ridiculous position of calling the new variant the ‘Nu variant'” to call it Omicron will fuel — if it hasn’t already — some “entertaining” conspiracy theories. The mildly deranged penguin has, therefore, decided to start her own: WHO promised it would name so-called variants after consecutive letters of the Greek alphabet — but “skipped” Nu to call the latest scare-mongering Omicron. So what is the Nu ? If must exist as promised !
Obviously, Nu’s a stealth so-called ‘variant’, clearly polluting your precious bodily fluids by the so-called ‘booster’ injections — so widely rejected around the world by the now-clewed-in sheeple They are having to use FEMA concentration camps to forcibly inject teh kids & other brave resistors! Nu contains not only 5G nanobots, but 6G picobranz, able to act without GPS contact nor instructions from Bill Gates.
The picobranz are tied to the Reptilian spider hive, as their plan to enslave all sheeple progresses with the aid of traitors like “Dr” Fakci and “President” Bidelection continues to block our only true savi(message ends in slobbering and burps)
Actually, I distracted her with a piece of cheese…
Back in 2018, a group of determined Idahoans hit the road in a couple of old RVs they painted green, taking on the herculean task of getting a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid in the state. […] the Republican legislature here created what they thought would be an insurmountable barrier to getting an initiative onto the ballot. They didn’t expect Reclaim Idaho, who figured out all of those hurdles and organized their way around them.
Medicaid expansion did get on the 2018 ballot, and it absolutely crushed with 61% of the vote. The legislature, of course, came back the next year with two more attempts to kill the initiative process in the state, both surprisingly vetoed by Republican Gov. Brad Little. When they came back in 2020 with yet another effort, Little signed this one, fruitlessly hoping to stave off a primary challenge from his right. Reclaim Idaho, working on a new initiative to fund education through tax increases on the wealthiest residents, sued the state and won.
Now their volunteers are out in Idaho neighborhoods collecting signatures for that effort. And here’s where we get to the really great stuff.
“I don’t even know his name, but I’m alive because of him and his friends,” a Boise resident posted on Nextdoor. ”I was working in my yard a couple weeks ago when a man approached with a clipboard asking for signatures for Idaho education funding. He asked did I know about Medicaid expansion and what ‘they’ had done to get Idahoans covered in 2018. I looked him in the eye and said, ‘Yes. I am alive today because of it.’”
She goes on to tell her harrowing story: “I have a rare condition known as Idiopathic Subglottic Stenosis. The cause is unknown, and there is no cure. It is terminal: without frequent ongoing surgeries scar tissue cuts off my airway and I suffocate to death slowly.” It very nearly did kill the single mom of four, uninsured after leaving an abusive partner, and put her deeply in debt. “And then … Idaho passed Medicaid Expansion. The day my best friend told me I called. Surely, it was too good to be true. The woman on the other end joyfully informed me 5 mins into the call that yes I was now enrolled and had free health care. Free. Health care.” In her words:
I explained this story briefly to this man with his clipboard. He told me he and his friend, Luke, were the ones who fought for it. I stood there dumbfounded. What is the protocol for suddenly finding that the human in front of you, a stranger, saved your life? I stammered thanks, I told him I wouldn’t be alive without them… and he said he would tell Luke, and I signed his petition for Idaho education, and… he walked away. And I just stood there, in my flowerbed, in awe.
She continued, “I really love being alive. And I am incredibly thankful that some privileged white men used their voice when I didn’t have one, to keep me alive.”
The first cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant have been identified in the United Kingdom, the country’s health officials announced Saturday.
Two Omicron coronavirus cases have been found in the U.K., according to the country’s Health Security Agency.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the two cases were found in Chelmsford and in Nottingham, and both patients as well as their households are under quarantine, BBC reported. Further testing and contract tracing will be done to determine if more cases have entered the U.K.
The newly identified cases make the United Kingdom the latest in a growing list of countries that have known Omicron variant cases. […]
Botswana, Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel have had cases of the new variant as of Saturday morning. […]
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) declared a state of emergency to prepare for a new coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa.
Hochul’s declaration on Friday is one of the first emergency steps taken by a state in the U.S. against the new variant, known as omicron, whose discovery was announced Thursday.
The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, said in an interview Friday with CNN that there have been no omicron cases detected in the U.S., although he acknowledged that doesn’t rule out the possibility the variant could be in the country.
“We continue to see warning signs of spikes in COVID this winter, and while the new Omicron variant has yet to be detected in New York State, it’s coming,” Hochul said in a tweet. […]
The executive order, in effect until at least Jan. 15, allows nonessential procedures to be postponed in hospitals in order to increase hospital capacity.
Hochul is urging residents to wear a mask, get vaccinated and get a booster shot to combat the new variant. […] scientists and medical professionals are racing to study the new strain […]
North Korea has banned leather coats that copy the style of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, multiple sources told Radio Free Asia.
Kim popularized the leather jacket in 2019. It was initially worn by rich people who could afford the pricey item.
However, fake leather was soon imported so the jacket could be worn by those with less money, which frustrated the North Korean leader.
“When these leather coats became popular, the law enforcement authorities went after the companies that made the coats that look too much like the Highest Dignity’s,” one source said.
A military parade in North Korea in January showed all the high-ranking officials wearing leather jackets, sparking even more interest in the material. However, literal fashion police have worked to confiscate the fake leather jackets in markets and from people wearing them.
Citizens have complained, saying it is not fair to take a jacket they paid for.
“The police respond to the complaints, saying that wearing clothes designed to look like the Highest Dignity’s is an ‘impure trend to challenge the authority of the Highest Dignity,'” another source said. “They instructed the public not to wear leather coats, because it is part of the party’s directive to decide who can wear them.”
The leather jacket has also been worn by Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister, who is speculated to be his chosen successor, according to the outlet.
“So now the leather coat has become a symbol for powerful women too,” the first source said.
Wonkette: “Right-Wing Conspiracists Come Up With Most Moronic Theory Yet”
[Image showing Greek alphabet is available at the link] One of the main things that make conspiracies “work” for those who believe them is a fervent belief that everything those who are conspiring against them in whatever capacity do is symbolism. That way, everything those people so or say is “proof” of whatever evil think you think they are doing. In fact, almost no conspiracies make sense unless you think that “they” are literally sitting around all day Herman Melville-ing it up in hopes of making the sheeple look foolish. One of the big Q sayings, even, is “Their need for symbolism will be their downfall.”
The idea is that the whole evil cabal either gets together at Bohemian Grove and decides “OK! So here’s what we’re gonna do — we’re gonna wear red shoes to symbolize our love of eating babies in Satanic rituals and then laugh and laugh and laugh about how we are rubbing our love of eating babies in everyone’s face and they don’t even know it! Because that is a good time for adults.” It’s like a never-ending game of updog. […]
[…] Now that the latest COVID variant has dropped, all of the aspiring Robert Langdons out there cannot believe how blatant the cabal is getting … by calling it the Omicron variant. And why are they doing this? Because omicron is an anagram for moronic and literally no other reason. They just want to laugh at the idiots going along believing that this is a real pandemic that is happening, just because people keep dying of an easily transmissible virus. […]
But not everyone fell for their evil wordplay tricks. [At the link there are several examples of conservations posting something similar to “Omicron is an anagram for Moronic.”]
This one is my favorite, as it gets real deep, noting that the Omicron variant dropped 666 days after the WHO declared COVID-19 a global threat. 666 being Satan’s favorite number and all. [details shown at the link]
That’s not exactly true. COVID-19 was actually declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, but whatever that number is is probably not good for symbolism purposes. And you know how we Satanists love our symbolism […]
It’s also not exactly true that the evil cabal chose Omicron because it is an anagram for “moronic” so much as it is the Greek letter “O,” and all of the variants have been Greek letters. The WHO skipped over Nu because it sounds like New and skipped over Xi to avoid confusion with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. […]
Of course, it is entirely possible that the Ancient Greeks were up to some shit in calling the letter O omicron, in anticipation of Henry H. Goddard coining the word “moron” in 1910 and also in anticipation of a fake pandemic naming variants of the fake virus after letters in the Greek alphabet, because they too wanted to troll people three thousand years in the future. It does make a certain amount of sense. […]
The concept is called “predictive programming” where the conspiracy implant symbolism into the media to get the benighted masses to subconsciously accept their imminent tyranny.
Alex Jones takes it further by claiming that the universe operate on some sort of spiritual contract law. In order for Satan to triumph, humans must willinglyreject Gawd. Therefore, the satanic globalists “promote” witchcraft and pedophilia in the media to make the people reject Christianity and agree to allow Satan to oppress them.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but that’s to be expected from these loons,
As you probably all know by now, Stephen Sondheim died. Here are some excerpts from a remembrance written by Michael Schulman:
My family was watching old home movies, in a post-Thanksgiving time warp, when I found out that Stephen Sondheim had died, at ninety-one. In the jump from one VHS tape to another, I had just seen myself go from seven to fourteen: the years in which Sondheim taught me how to be a person. First, it was “Into the Woods,” the gateway Sondheim musical for most people born after 1980—a gateway to adulthood, really, just as its characters Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack (of the beanstalk) go into the woods as wishful storybook characters and come out understanding disappointment, regret, compromise, loss. “Isn’t it nice to know a lot?” Little Red Riding Hood sings, having survived ingestion by a wolf. “And a little bit not.” It was the apple from the tree of knowledge, that show. You couldn’t unbite it.
Then “Merrily We Roll Along,” which charts the same journey in reverse: three friends go from jaded, wounded adults to hopeful college kids, gazing up at Sputnik. A lesson in broken promises, in holding on to yourself, in callow phonies. (“It’s called letting go your illusions,” one character advises.) Then “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”: a gleaming razor, a rolling pin, revenge, lust, murder. (“How delectable!”) “Company”: a woman with a vodka stinger, sizing up all the women she loathes, including herself. (“Another chance to disapprove, another brilliant zinger.”) “A Little Night Music”: love and sex, ill-timed. (“Isn’t it rich?”) Feeding my brain, I borrowed those cast albums from my school library so many times that the librarians finally let me keep them.
In his great, long life, Sondheim did for the Broadway musical what he did for me: brought the art form from adolescence into maturity, infusing it with complicated, sometimes curdled emotions that Broadway hadn’t dared to sing about before. This was, in large part, his way of honoring and overthrowing his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, whom Sondheim met as a child, around when his parents divorced. “If he’d been a geologist,” Sondheim liked to say, “I would have been a geologist.” Hammerstein was, in fact, the lyricist of such genre-defining musicals as “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” and “South Pacific,” in which he rhymed “dope” and “hope.” Decades later, in “Company,” Sondheim rhymed “personable” and “coercin’ a bull.” That time jump, not coincidentally, spans America’s loss of innocence, from the postwar era to Vietnam: Hammerstein’s bright golden haze on the meadow had become a miasma.
By then, Sondheim had already written the lyrics for two classics, “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” both before he was thirty, […] But “Company,” which opened in 1970, was his break from linear plot, tidy resolutions, and romantic platitudes: it’s about a man who wants to be single and in love at the same time. […]
His characters were imbued with panoramic intelligence, a self-awareness that played out in dazzling internal rhymes that landed like triple axels […] As he rewrote the Broadway landscape, in shows as different as “Follies” and “Pacific Overtures,” Sondheim was sometimes criticized as cold and cerebral, a better lyricist than he was a musician. But it’s hard to contemplate a song more passionate or more melodic than “Johanna,” “Losing My Mind,” or “Unworthy of Your Love,” all of which are sung by characters making some lovestruck, wrongheaded move. […]
Uncertainty, self-delusion, disillusionment: Sondheim knew that they could be as deeply felt as the primary-color emotions. His characters sang to think and to feel at the same time.
There are too many lyrics with which to eulogize him: on art, on show biz, on mothers, on grief. […]
No wonder performers loved him. Bernadette Peters, Elaine Stritch, Zero Mostel, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Ethel Merman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Adam Driver, and Madonna are just a few who’ve famously sung Sondheim, and his songs seemed to give them trickier, more rewarding assignments than they’d had elsewhere. […]
In “Sunday in the Park with George,” the Sondheim musical that perhaps most directly explained Sondheim, he wrote about how art isn’t easy, about how pretty isn’t beautiful, about how artists are always “standing by, mapping out the sky,” often at their personal expense. […]
A researcher from The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University has published data at LA Progressive Newsletter detailing the vast sums of cash that private prison profiteers like GEO Group, CoreCivic, and Management and Training Corporation sunk into the 2020 campaign.
[…] the vast majority went to Republicans. “During the 2020 election cycle, GEO gave $818,100 to Republican candidates and affiliated PACs and organizations, and $46,978 to Democratic candidates and affiliated PACs and organizations.”
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University’s Dr. Austin Kocher, a researcher working with Peca, pointed out the individual recipients of GEO Group’s donations during the election season. […]
Trump Victory Fund $180,000 […]
“Campaign finance can have a massive impact on the accountability of public officials and the transparency of campaigns,” Peca said. “As constituents, we have the right—arguably the responsibility—to scrutinize not only our public officials but also those that believe that they can buy power and influence through massive campaign donations.”
One private prison profiteer, MTC, donated to a PAC associated with Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema (a Democrat). She has not explained why she is getting so much money from for-profit immigrant detention contractors.
KGsays
Lynna, OM@180,
The real question is how to pronounce “Omicron”. The image at your link has “o-me-cron”, but that itself is ambiguous: is the “o” pronounced as in “mole” or as in “troll”? Is the stress on “o” or on “me”, or even on “cron”? This link gives different pronunciations for American and British English. Until we know the correct pronunciation, how can vaccination against it possibly work???
I also note that your link explains that “Xi” was omitted from the roster of variants in order to avoid confusion with Xi Jinping. Could there be any clearer proof that Covid-19 was personally developed and unleashed on an unsuspecting world by Xi, who no doubt grew a moustache to twirl for the occasion?!?!?!!
Cruelty … during the holiday season. Unethical money-making schemes … during the holiday season. This time the emphasis is on prisons.
Nancy DeNike remembers one of the few uplifting moments during her five-year sentence at Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida’s Miami-Dade County: hearing her name announced at mail call. For her, and for other incarcerated people, it was a moment of connection to the outside world, to hold a picture of loved ones or feel the indentations of a handwritten letter. But across the nation, that tactile connection is becoming a thing of the past. On Oct. 11, Florida became the most recent in a growing number of states to ban physical routine mail. The decision, which will go into effect Nov. 29, is right in time for the holidays, when the desire and need for communication is critical for incarcerated people’s mental health.
[…] Under the new system, incarcerated people will have to pay $0.25 a page for black-and-white scanned printouts of their mail and $1.00 a page for color printouts, or $0.39 per email to access electronic formats available on provided tablets or kiosks. The system is operated by JPay, the prison industry’s largest financial services company,
While the Florida Department of Corrections claims the move will be beneficial for incarcerated people since the price per email is $0.16 less than the cost of a first-class stamp, the decision will only add to an already growing revenue stream for Aventiv, JPay’s parent company, which controls three of the largest telecommunications, media, and money-wiring companies that profit directly off of over a million incarcerated people in over 3,500 correctional facilities across North America.
The push to ban physical letters has been ongoing since 2013 when jails began experimenting with a postcard-only policy that was deemed unconstitutional by a federal court. The Prison Policy report found that physical mail bans hurt the efforts to reduce recidivism and go against correctional best practices.
In 2020,[…] Trump started a pilot program for mail scanning in federal prisons through the telecom company Smart Communications’ “MailGuard” service. The Biden administration has yet to reverse the program, despite criticism that the program raises privacy and surveillance concerns for incarcerated people, as well as exorbitant price gouging. Now, states like Pennsylvania and Florida have followed suit with similar mail-scanning programs in prisons.
The Florida Department of Corrections claims the push to digitize mail prevents contraband materials, including sprayed drugs, from being delivered, but there is little evidence to back this claim. In fact, reports since 2003 confirm that corrections officers are the main source of contraband in prisons.
“Contraband materials are always going to find their way in,” says Fletcher Everett, a formerly incarcerated organizer with Beyond the Bars Miami, a grassroots organization that supports people impacted by incarceration and advocates for prison reform. “It’s all about the market. Because if they did care, they wouldn’t take away the letters.”
Everett similarly recalls hearing his name called at mail time as the one time a day he could be distracted from the tension and suffering around him.
“In prison, all you have is your mail, everything else they own,” he says.
Kathie Klarreich, the executive director of Exchange for Change, a nonprofit that offers semester-long writing classes in South Florida correctional institutions, relies on the provided JPay tablets to work with her students. In her experience, the JPay tablets have frequently not worked, leaving program participants without access to the program’s materials for months at a time. […]
As the Department of Corrections in Florida and others across the country transition from receiving mail in person to scanning the mail on tablets, nonfunctioning tablets and broken kiosks would mean a complete lack of connection to the outside world. […]
Additionally, scanned mail quality can be very low resolution, making it illegible for people with visual disabilities. In one example of a scanned photo, the darkened shadows render the image unrecognizable. When a piece of paper is all an incarcerated person has to connect them to the outside world, holding the original makes all the difference.
So the scans are low quality, and the tablets on which digital mail is supposedly displayed often don’t work. Worse and worse.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Moderna says an omicron variant vaccine could be ready in early 2022
Moderna’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Burton said Sunday the vaccine maker could roll out a reformulated vaccine against the omicron coronavirus variant early next year.
It’s not clear whether new formulations will be needed, or if current Covid vaccinations will provide protection against the new variant that has begun to spread around the globe.
“We should know about the ability of the current vaccine to provide protection in the next couple of weeks, but the remarkable thing about the MRNA vaccines, Moderna platform is that we can move very fast,” Burton said on BBC’s “Andrew Marr Show.”
“If we have to make a brand new vaccine I think that’s going to be early 2022 before that’s really going to be available in large quantities,” the Moderna chief added.
Omicron has been classified as a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization, meaning it is more contagious, more virulent or more skilled at evading public health measures, vaccines and therapeutics. The variant contains 30 mutations to the spike protein that allows the virus to enter the body. Officials have warned that many of these mutations could lead to increased antibody resistance and transmissibility, which could limit the effectiveness of existing Covid vaccines.
The vaccine maker “mobilized hundreds” of workers starting early Thursday morning, on Thanksgiving, to start studying the new variant, the company said in a statement.
Current vaccines could provide some protection, depending on how long ago a person was injected, Burton said. Still, he said unvaccinated people should get vaccinated or receive their booster shots, if eligible.
Update on what Dr. Fauci is saying regarding Omicron:
Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that the omicron COVID-19 variant will “inevitably” hit the United States, noting that it has already been detected in several other countries.
During an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Fauci if the newly detected variant had been detected by officials in the U.S.
“No, we have not, George, and we have a pretty good surveillance system. But as we all know, when you have a virus that has already gone to multiple countries, inevitably it will be here,” Fauci, who serves as President Biden’s chief medical adviser, answered. […]
Fauci also argued during the interview that travel restrictions imposed by the Biden administration and other countries could buy nations time to better respond to omicron, which the World Health Organization called a “variant of concern” last week.
“Travel bans, when you have a highly transmissible virus, never completely would … prevent it from coming into the country. No way that’s going to happen,” Fauci said.
“But what you can do is you can delay it enough to get us better prepared. And that’s the thing that people need to understand. If you’re going to do the travel ban the way we’ve done now and that we’re implementing right now, utilize the time that you’re buying to fill in the gaps,” he added. […]
Capitol Hill was quiet last week, as members returned home for their Thanksgiving break. As NBC News reported, that tranquility is poised to come to a rather dramatic end, as Congress confronts a series of deadlines.
Congress will confront a packed agenda when it returns from Thanksgiving recess, from facing hard deadlines to keep the federal government running to passing President Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion safety net and climate legislation.
[…] the next five weeks will be among the most hectic of the year. Consider lawmakers’ to-do list:
Government funding: […] funding for government operations expires this Friday at midnight. That’s the bad news. The good news is that no one seems to think a government shutdown is likely, and we’ll likely see a stopgap spending measure (called a “continuing resolution” or “CR”).
Debt ceiling: Originally, officials agreed to a debt-ceiling extension through Dec. 3, but the strength of the economic recovery ended up pushing the default deadline to Dec. 15. No one seems able to say with confidence what’ll happen between now and then, though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently told reporters, “[W]e’ll figure out how to avoid default. We always do.”
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA): Over the course of the last six decades, Congress has passed a defense package every year. The NDAA is partly a spending bill, but it also includes a great many policy provisions, including how the military addresses sexual assault allegations. The House passed its version in September, but the bill has been delayed in the Senate for a variety of reasons, including efforts to link it to the US Innovation and Competition Act, questions about repealing earlier war resolutions, and the overall size of military spending. Senators expect the bill to pass before end of the calendar year.
Build Back Better: The Democratic domestic investment package recently passed the House, and Senate leaders intend to pass their revised version of the legislation by Christmas. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia recently said he was on board with that schedule, but he’s reportedly planning to push the debate into the new year.
Nominations: The United States still has only four ambassadors to foreign countries, and key national security posts throughout the executive branch don’t have Senate-confirmed nominees. Don’t be surprised if Democratic leaders try to force the issue in the coming weeks.
Freedom to Vote Act: As democracy scholars plead with senators to rescue democracy, the Freedom to Vote Act faces an uncertain future. On the one hand, it has 50 votes and a vice president who would gladly break a tie in its favor. On the other hand, a small handful of Senate Democrats are prioritizing the filibuster rule over democracy itself, indifferent to the consequences. Despite the crowded calendar, some kind of resolution on this issue is still a possibility before year’s end. […]
In Texas, actor Matthew McConaughey has decided not to run for governor. The political neophyte, who said in the spring that he was “absolutely” considering the statewide race, said yesterday that politics is “a path that I’m choosing not to take at this moment.”
Other news:
The Associated Press had a striking report over the weekend, noting the bizarre misinformation campaign targeting Latino voters, including a conspiracy theory pushed via Spanish-language radio warning that a brooch worn by Lady Gaga during President Joe Biden’s inauguration signaled that the Democrat “was working with shadowy, leftist figures abroad.”
If Trump were to reclaim power, he’d consider rehiring his former national security advisor.
Michael Flynn has had quite a year. It was the day before Thanksgiving 2020, for example, when the former White House national security advisor received an extraordinarily corrupt presidential pardon from Donald Trump.
Less than a month later, Flynn plotted with the outgoing president in the Oval Office, exploring ways to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The retired general reportedly raised the prospect of seizing voting machines, deploying U.S. troops, and declaring martial law as part of the anti-election scheme.
[…] In the late summer, Flynn suggested people may be exposed to Covid-19 vaccines by way of salad dressing.
A couple of weeks ago, he made the case that the United States should have a single religion. Presumably, Flynn’s faith tradition would be the one receiving special recognition.
And as the HuffPost noted, the retired general is still at it:
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and pardoned felon, Michael Flynn, has offered up his latest batch of conspiracy nonsense, this time suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic was orchestrated by unnamed “global elites” who could be preparing to unleash a new virus on humanity.
Sitting down with Alex Jones, Flynn said unnamed nefarious forces had a “little plan with Covid,” which was thwarted by “digital warriors.” He added that he’s nevertheless concerned about the possibility of conspirators unleashing “another type of virus” that he fears might be “imposed on the public.”
[…] Every time I see reports like these, my first instinct is to look back and marvel at the fact that, just four years ago, this guy had access to the nation’s most important and sensitive secrets — before he became a convicted felon for lying about his secret communications with Russia.
But we need not be entirely retrospective about the retired general. It was just last year when Trump — during his re-election campaign — told reporters that he was open to re-hiring Flynn. Asked specifically if he might invite Flynn back into the executive branch, the then-president replied, “I would certainly consider it, yeah. I would. I think he’s a fine man.”
Chances are, Flynn’s days in a position of authority are over. But as he goes over the edge, and descends deeper into the political fringe, it’s worth remembering that if Trump were to reclaim power, the Republican may yet want to find a place for his disgraced former White House national security adviser.
Beware. If Trump returns to power, so will all the best people, like Michael Flynn.
[S]ome RNC members and donors accused the party of running afoul of its own neutrality rules and misplacing its priorities. Some of these same officials who spoke to CNN also questioned why the party would foot the legal bills of a self-professed billionaire who was sitting on a $102 million war chest as recently as July and has previously used his various political committees to cover legal costs.
[…] A former top RNC official said, “This is not normal. Nothing about this is normal, especially since he’s not only a former president but a billionaire. What does any of this have to do with assisting Republicans in 2022 or preparing for the 2024 primary?”
Another questioned why the RNC is “having to pay for this when you have these super PACs taking in unlimited money for Trump.”
One RNC official told CNN the relationship between Trump and the national party is effectively “a hostage situation”: The RNC simply can’t afford to make the former president unhappy, so it pays these bills to prevent Trump from retaliating against the party.
One Republican official even went on the record:
Bill Palatucci, a national committeeman from New Jersey, said the fact that the RNC made the payments to Trump’s attorneys in October was particularly frustrating given his own plea to party officials that same month for additional resources as the New Jersey GOP sought to push Republican Jack Ciattarelli over the finish line in his challenge to incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
Palatucci noted that New Jersey Republicans “sure as heck could have used” the money the RNC instead sent to law firms representing Trump. […]
The more Republicans succeed in extending the Covid-19 crisis, the more the party blames the president for the fact that the pandemic isn’t over.
Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming appeared on Fox News yesterday morning and eagerly reminded viewers that “more people have died of Covid under President Biden than did in all of 2020.” During his eight-hour speech two weeks ago, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pushed the same talking point.
“I took President Biden at his word; I took him at his word when he said he was going to get Covid under control,” the California Republican said. “Unfortunately, more Americans have died this year than last year under Covid.”
It’s an exasperating argument that’s part of a larger, bewildering scheme. On the one hand, President Joe Biden is doing everything possible to address the pandemic through vaccinations, mandates, and an aggressive public health campaign. On the other hand, Republicans have pushed back aggressively, taking steps to undermine the administration’s campaign on several fronts, from undermining public confidence in vaccines to filing lawsuits against White House policies to paying people who make dangerous and irresponsible decisions.
[…] Making matters worse is the degree to which some GOP officials continue to give the public bad information. Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina appeared on Fox News yesterday morning and said, “In some studies that I have read, natural immunity gives you 27 times more protection against future covid infection than a vaccination. And so we need to take all of the science into account and not selectively choosing what science to follow when we are making policy decisions.”
JFC!
The Washington Post explained why the congresswoman’s argument was such a mess.
Mace is likely referring to one Israeli study (not “studies”), which did indeed find what she claimed. But speaking of “selectively choosing what science to follow,” Mace didn’t mention that other studies have found the opposite. More broadly, pitting natural immunity against vaccination is itself misleading Americans. As The Post recently reported, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review of more than 90 studies and papers found that “for people who have been infected … vaccination provides a boost in the immune response and further reduces the risk of a repeat infection.” To imply that people should become infected rather than getting a shot is dangerous — especially when the former comes with a massive death toll.
[…] The more the public receives misguided information from those in positions of authority, the more many Americans will make the wrong choices. To blame this on the White House, instead of those pushing the misguided information, is ridiculous.
Representative Ronny Jackson is pushing COVID misinformation:
The former White House doctor who raved about Donald Trump’s “excellent” health to a skeptical public is now claiming that the disturbing new COVID-19 variant omicron is nothing but a midterm election ploy by the Democrats. Dr. Ronny Jackson, now a Republican MAGA congressman from Texas, scoffed at the variant the World Health Organization has deemed “highly transmissible” and “concerning.”
(Text above is from HuffPost).
More: In a tweet published over the weekend, Jackson wrote, “Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!”
Commentary:
[…] how exactly did Democrats manage to coordinate this amazing conspiracy with the World Health Organization and public health networks across the planet? Are nations around the globe shutting down flights and scrambling to prepare because they’re focused on mail-in balloting in the United States 11 months from now?
As the world learned of the omicron variant, responsible figures considered the strain’s transmissibility, severity, and strength relative to existing vaccines. The congressman from Texas’ 13th district skipped these concerns and went straight to voter suppression.
The fear, of course, is that there will be some Americans who don’t realize that Jackson’s conspiracy theory is absurd. They’ll see his background, consider him credible, and believe his bonkers ideas about elections and viral variants have merit.
They do not. What they instead do is perpetuate a problem that leads too many people to make dangerous choices related to public health and democracy.
A new […] book details former President Trump’s “difficult” transition after winning the 2016 presidential election, a tension the bureau largely attributed to Trump’s fraught relationship with the intelligence community that he derided publicly throughout his campaign and presidency.
In a newly released chapter, John Helgerson, a former intelligence officer, writes that Trump’s administration was ill-prepared for the presidential transition from Barack Obama because the former president apparently did “not expect to win the election.” The book is part of a broader CIA publication called, “Getting To Know the President,” which was first published in 1996. (The new chapter on Trump is included in the fourth edition of the tome.)
Even when the transition process began, Trump notably took an unprecedented approach with his interactions with intelligence officials and agencies.
Here are some key takeaways from the Helgerson chapter:
Trump publicly bashed the intel community (IC) while privately walking back his remarks
During a briefing on Sept. 2, 2016:
“Trump told the briefers that he valued the first session in August and their expertise. They were surprised when he assured them that “the nasty things he was saying” publicly about the Intelligence Community “don’t apply to you.”
Trump drew outrage from IC even before he won the election
Trump sparked outrage among former intelligence officers during a debate on Sept. 7, 2016, when Trump referenced intelligence briefers’ “body language” in suggesting that they were “not happy” with policies of the Obama administration, according to an excerpt.
With Presidential Daily Briefings, Trump ‘doesn’t read much’
Asked how closely Trump read the daily briefing itself, CIA analyst Ted Gistaro recalled: “He touched it. He doesn’t really read anything.”
Then-DNI head James Clapper agreed: “Trump doesn’t read much; he likes bullets.” […]
[…] Trump sought to discredit CIA after it determined Russia’s interference in the 2016 election
After the press reported in early Dec. 2016 that the CIA determined that Russia had intervened in the election to boost Trump’s candidacy:
In response, Trump sought to discredit the competence of the Agency. “I don’t believe it. These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” In a press interview, he also stated that, as president, he would not take the intelligence briefing on a daily basis, as his predecessors had. He said he would take it when he needed it, adding, “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.… If something should change…I’m available on a one-minute’s notice.”
Trump accused the IC of being ‘out to destroy him’ after Steele dossier leaked to the press
Trump vented to Gisaro during a PDB briefing session that the IC was “out to destroy him,” despite the intel community’s denial of responsibility for the dossier:
[…] Separately, in a social media tweet, Trump wrote, “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” After the news conference, Clapper promptly telephoned Trump to explain that the offending document was not a product of US Intelligence and that he did not think the leak came from the IC. He said the IC had not made any judgment about the reliability of the information contained in the dossier and did not rely on it in any way in reaching its own conclusions about Russia’s actions.
[…] Trump was prone to ‘fly off on tangents’ around IC officials,
Trump’s visit to the CIA headquarters on first full day of office was a doozy:
The president made no mention of the sacrifices of those whose stars were on the wall. Rather, he devoted most of his speech to attacking the media for allegedly creating the myth of his feud with the IC. Trump also dwelled on the size of the crowd at his inauguration the previous day and said, incorrectly, that he had been on the cover of Time magazine more often than anyone else. Those in attendance were puzzled by these remarks and, according to one senior officer, returned to their offices shaking their heads.
Despite Trump’s occasional praise of the IC and its personnel, then-DNI Clapper said that Trump was prone to rambling about irrelevant topics during intelligence briefings:
On some occasions, Trump praised the IC and its personnel, thanking them for their service to the nation. DNI Clapper found that Trump could be courteous, affable, and complimentary of the IC—he praised the briefers and twice thanked Clapper for a handwritten note the DNI had sent congratulating the president-elect on his election victory and offering the continued services of the IC. At the same time, Clapper recalled, Trump was prone to “fly off on tangents; there might be eight or nine minutes of real intelligence in an hour’s discussion.” The irreconcilable difference, in Clapper’s view, was that the IC worked with evidence. Trump “was ‘fact-free’—evidence doesn’t cut it with him.”
Conclusion: Trump transition was ‘most difficult’ since Nixon
Helgerson concluded the chapter by writing that the most comparable presidential transition to Trump’s was that of former President Nixon:
For the Intelligence Community, the Trump transition was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents. The only (and imperfect) analogue was the Nixon transition, when the president-elect effectively declined to work with the IC, electing, instead, to receive intelligence information through an intermediary, National Security Advisor-designate Henry Kissinger. Trump was like Nixon, suspicious and insecure about the intelligence process, but unlike Nixon in the way he reacted. Rather than shut the IC out, Trump engaged with it, but attacked it publicly.
Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, inflicted on us by the state of South Carolina, has been running a bold new online ad condemning Democratic plans to boost funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Why, you might ask?
“Biden’s policy will double the size of the IRS at the cost of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes. We should stabilize our nation’s economy first.” […]
At the … cost? But going after tax cheats is widely recognized as being a net federal win, because just a little money allocated to investigating the most prolific tax-dodgers results in much larger revenues when the dodged taxes actually get paid, so—ooh. Ooooooh. […]
What the House Republican is saying here is, of course, boosting IRS capabilities will “cost” the wealthiest tax dodgers in the country billions of dollars, and forcing rich tax cheats to pay what they owe will harm the economy so very much that we shouldn’t even think about it until we’ve “stabilized” everything else first.
You’ve heard of trickle-down economics? This is trickle-down tax fraud. If we don’t let rich Americans who have more offshore bank accounts than you have spoons get away with their current level of financial crimes it is all of you who will suffer, because that money being paid in taxes won’t be going to buying new yacht chandeliers, or underwater television sets, […]
Instead, that money will be going to the government, and the government will probably waste it on stupid things like rebuilding roads in places you don’t live, or saving coastlines you don’t visit, or giving you better childcare options […]
In any event, what Mace is suggesting is that American financial criminals have been hiding so very damn much money that attempting to collect it could destabilize our nation’s very economy. Shouldn’t be done! Too dangerous!
Oooookay?
See, our problem here is that we’re taking a Republican message literally instead of treating as the propagandistic word salad it is intended as. It’s not meant to make sense. Mace may or may not distance herself from the premise of her own self-promoted statement after she’s gotten sufficient mockery for it, but it was crafted not to make an actual argument but to burp scary-sounding words at Republican base members primed to react to them without thought. “At the cost of billions” is meant to invoke the notion that it will be costing the nation money, rather than bringing it in. “Stabilize” is meant to invoke the notion that the nation’s economy is currently not stable, when all the facts and figures suggest that the economy is now actually in pretty darn good shape.
[…] The “Biden’s policy” bit is also rote party schtick: While nigh-on everybody who is not personally evading taxes or being lobbied by people who do all agree that returning IRS funding to something approaching normal is both necessary to curb now-rampant tax dodging by the wealthy and an enormous government gain, calling it “Biden’s policy” is intended to portray the move as partisan rancor, or spreading socialism, or otherwise controversial.
[…] All that said, we’re not going to get anywhere if we ignore it all and let the Maces of new Republicanism fire off chaff meant to invoke primal reaction while breezily evading the part where nothing they said made any actual sense. So we’re all ears, Rep. Nancy Mace.
You say going after tax cheats will “cost billions”—who ya aiming that statement at, representative?
Because the only people who will see a “cost” when going after prolific tax fraud are the folks doing the actual crimes. Is that who you’re going to bat for here? Did they send someone to your office to make that case?
And you’re saying American tax cheats are costing the rest of us so much money that making them actually pay it would threaten to destabilize the entire economy?
[…] Please explain, representative. Give it your best shot.
Powerful Variant of Stupidity Identified in Texas.
What is being called a “troubling variant of stupidity” has been identified in Texas, Dr. Anthony Fauci has confirmed.
Although the powerful variant of stupidity is not new, it has recently displayed alarming virulence, the esteemed physician said.
“What’s concerning about this variant is that it appears to have developed immunity to all information,” Fauci said. “Of the many mutations of stupidity found in Texas, this one stands out.”
The immunologist urged that steps be taken to prevent this variant of stupidity from spreading. “We know that it has travelled as far as Cancun,” Fauci said.
President Joe Biden urged vaccinated Americans to get their Covid booster shots and once again pleaded with those who have yet to be vaccinated to get their first dose in remarks Monday amid growing concerns about the potential threat posed by the new omicron variant.
NBC News:
Administration officials have said it could be several weeks before they know whether the variant has the ability to erode the protection offered by the vaccine and what level of severity and transmissibility it has. In the meantime, public health officials have said they believe the surge in antibodies created by a booster shot could offer one of the best defenses for the time being.
Kansas City News:
A federal judge in St. Louis halted enforcement Monday of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for most health care workers in Kansas and Missouri, a week before the deadline for staff to get their first shot under the rules.
That judge was appointed by Trump.
NY Times:
The pharmaceutical company Merck said on Friday that in a final analysis of a clinical trial, its antiviral pill reduced the risk of hospitalization and death among high-risk Covid patients by 30 percent, down from an earlier estimate of 50 percent.
A Black man is suing Miami police after body-camera footage the agency released showed officers handcuffing the man and accusing him of stealing his own 2006 Jeep Compass, according to Miami New Times. “Imma read you your rights real quick,” an officer in the video can be seen telling Samuel Scott Jr. on Jun. 1, 2018.
“I’m telling you, you guys got the wrong guy,” Scott responded. “I can confirm where I was, and I can even confirm my activities.” He explained that before calling the police, he had just logged off of the VPN, which stands for virtual private network, at his job. At that point, an officer can be heard telling Scott that “the description of the guy that took off in your car is just like yours.” Scott responded: “But that’s half of Miami, bald-headed with a beard?”
The officers named in the suit filed in federal court on Nov. 13 are Jonathan Guzman, Michael Bloom, Brandon Williams, Miguel Hernandez, and Randy Carriel, Miami New Times reported.
Guzman first encountered Scott’s Jeep being driven 20 mph over the speed limit, according to an arrest report New Times obtained. Guzman accused the driver of attempting to flee on foot after the Jeep crashed with another vehicle. The driver was described in the report as a heavy-set “Black male, bald, about 6’2″, wearing a white tank top.”
Officers encountered Scott, who is four inches shorter than the height listed in the suspect description, at his aunt’s house about two miles away from the crash site. At that point, one of the officers warned Scott of the consequences of making a false report, Scott claims in the lawsuit. Another officer asked if Scott’s car was repossessed, and another later pulled a Taser out, according to the lawsuit.
Officers said in the arrest report that they found a gun and four plastic bags in Scott’s car that contained “green spots with suspected marijuana.” Scott was charged with falsely reporting a crime, possession of marijuana, failure to provide a concealed-weapon license, and leaving the scene of an accident, but the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office eventually dropped all charges against Scott, Miami New Times reported.
Scott accused the cops of unlawfully searching him, falsely imprisoning him, and maliciously prosecuting him. Faudlin Pierre, Scott’s attorney, told New Times they are seeking $500,000 in damages. “He reported to the cops because he believed that the cops were actually going to assist him,” Pierre said. “And then it turns out that they racially profiled him.”
Pierre said that, while he did have a gun in his vehicle, his client has a concealed-weapon permit. The attorney said he doesn’t know how the marijuana charge came about. “That was just adding to the fantasy we call this arrest,” Pierre told New Times.
Another unexplained element in the case is where Scott’s wallet and cellphone ended up. Attorney Bradley Pepper, who represented Scott in the criminal case against him, told Atlanta Black Star Guzman was shown in body-camera footage to be in possession of Scott’s items but they were never turned in. “I filed a motion to return property, which still hasn’t yielded any results because there’s really no record of those items, as far as what the police did with them or what happened to them,” Pepper said.
Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel found in February of 2020 that Guzman was negligent in the line of duty and had turned off his body camera repeatedly during the incident with Scott, Atlanta Black Star reported. “It all seemed very suspicious,” Pepper said. “To this date, we don’t really know what the answer is or why the officer even turned it off in the first place.”
The article above is misleading. Mr Scott was not driving the vehicle when arrested. According to Mr. Scott:
– cops saw car driving 20 mph over speed limit, and gave chase.
– car crashed. Suspect fled on foot. Suspect was black, male. bald, wearing white tank top.
– Scott was at his aunts house, came out, saw his car missing.
– called 911 and reported car missing.
– cops ran plates on the car they were chasing showed up at Scott’s aunt’s house and arrested him for allegedly filing false police report and fleeing the scene of an accident.
– Scott is black, bald, was wearing a black shirt over white tank but shorter than suspect and claimed he could prove he was working via company VPN at the time of the alleged accident.
———————
The story is very confusing. The headline is clickbait, insinuating that Scott was arrested while driving his own car. It also makes it sound as if this just happened. The only thing that just happened is the lawsuit. This needs to be completely rewritten.
———————–
Now we have “calling 911 while black” to all of the other “…while black” notions
———————
someone else stole the man’s car, crashed it after being spotted by police, and ran away on foot. Meanwhile the car’s owner found the car missing, reported it to 911, and then was arrested and charged with multiple crimes that were later dropped.
———————–
He wasn’t driving while black because his car had been stolen. He was reporting a crime while black.
————————-
Someone stole Scott’s car. By the time Scott reported it, the guy who stole the car had already crashed it and ran off on foot. When the cops showed up at Scott’s house, they assumed that it had been him driving the car and that he made up the theft to try to get off. But the reality is he didn’t make up the theft, and it was not him speeding in the car and crashing it.
William Hartmann made headlines when he, along with fellow canvasser Monica Palmer, voted to block the certification of Wayne County, Michigan’s 2020 election results. Wayne County encompasses the predominantly Black city of Detroit. Hartmann, an overtly racist MAGA supporter with a social media presence populated by equally racist propaganda, only seemed to have a problem with Black votes but said he was fine with certifying white, more conservative areas. After being pressured by everybody to do the right thing, Hartmann and Palmer relented; and then, like any pair of MAGA narcissists, having realized that deplorables everywhere were thrilled with their racism, they attempted to fight to have hundreds of thousands of the votes of Michigan’s Black voters nullified.
Hartmann has gone on to continue his fight against good sense, promoting the big lie, and questioning the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Detroit Metro Times, Hartmann is now fighting for his life as a result of contracting … COVID-19. The media outlet says Hartmann’s sister Elizabeth told them that her brother, the former vice chairman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, has been in ICU on a ventilator since Nov. 6. The outlet was reportedly also able to locate other sources who confirmed Hartmann has been in the ICU since “the beginning of November.”
[…] Since the beginning of the pandemic, Wayne County has had at least 224,000 cases of COVID-19 with almost 6,000 deaths. As with many places across the country, Michigan has seen a steady rise in COVID cases. As the delta variant has spread, schools and workplaces have returned to full-time operation, and vaccination rates are still below what we hoped they would be (in no small part due to people like Hartmann). Over the last two weeks, Wayne County has reported 131 deaths due to COVID-19. […]
Far-right pundit Éric Zemmour — twice convicted for hate speech — announced on Tuesday that he would run for the French presidency in the 2022 election, in a YouTube video heavy on anti-immigrant warnings and pledges to restore the country’s grandeur on the world stage.
It is no longer the time to reform France, but to save it, Zemmour said, claiming that many voters no longer recognise your country.
The man sometimes described as “France’s Trump”, 63, made a dramatic entrance into politics in September when he began a nationwide book tour that served as thinly disguised campaigning.
Acid-tongued[Delusional and rude], intense[wobbly-eyed loon] and with two convictions for hate speech, Zemmour is hoping his radical pitch to voters on curbing immigration and Islam in France will appeal to conservatives in a country riven with racial and religious tensions [eh? riven? teh le penazis and others have been attempting to stir things for a long time now, with ultimately almost no electoral success… which is not to say there isn’t vitriolic bigotry — just ask the Roma, as one example — and I could be mistaken, but the racial and religious tensions don’t dominate political discourse or actions… policing is another matter, however… –blf].
[…]
Pundits have speculated for months about the impact of Zemmour’s decision to give up his lucrative career as a media pundit and author in favour of becoming a wildcard in the presidential race.
One possibility is that he and Le Pen eliminate each other by splitting the far-right vote in the first round on April 10, although no polls currently indicate this is likely to happen.
Le Pen is sounding newly confident, claiming that the dust is starting to settle after an early media blitz by her rival, who is the son of Algerian Jewish migrant parents.
I think he’ll end up below 10 percent,[†] she told AFP on November 20th.
Zemmour might end up being a stroke of luck, she said. With the violence and brutality that he expresses, he makes my project seem more reasonable and implementable.
As well as facing softening polling numbers, the amateur historian has been plagued by difficulties in recent weeks.
At the weekend, he was photographed giving a middle finger to a protester who approached his car.
Real deep! he was overheard saying in a gesture that made headlines around the country and led to suggestions he might have alienated some of the elderly, conservative Catholic voters who form his core support.
Celebrity magazine Closer also reported last week that the married father-of-three was expecting a baby with his 28-year-old chief advisor Sarah Knafo — which he denounced as an invasion of privacy, but did not deny.
Other influential far-right figures have distanced themselves from him in recent weeks, and his campaign team is said to be riven with infighting and dominated by young activists with little political experience.
He is one of France’s best-known[loudest] and most controversial commentators who has made his name by warning about the colonisation of the country by Muslims whose religion he views as incompatible with French values.
He has also popularised a conspiracy theory backed by white supremacists known as “the great replacement theory” which posits that native Europeans are being deliberately replaced by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.
The great replacement is neither a myth, nor a conspiracy, but a relentless process, he wrote in his latest book entitled France Has Not Said Its Final Word.
French far-right pundit Éric Zemmour announced on Tuesday that he will run for president in next year’s election, staking his claim in a video peppered with anti-immigrant rhetoric and warnings France must be saved from decline.
Zemmour, 63, is the most stridently anti-Islam and anti-migrant of the challengers seeking to unseat President Emmanuel Macron […]
He said he had joined the race so that our daughters don’t have to wear headscarves and our sons don’t have to be submissive.
He added that, if elected, he would banish gender studies from French schools, slash the public debt and win back France’s sovereignty from European technocrats and judges.
Both The Local and France24 misspelled the nutters name; I’ve corrected it (no markings).
† It is Le Pen, hence an automatic eejit quotes, even if she might be expressing a plausibility.
According to this article [Coronavirus in Austria. Johann Biacsics is dead. The anti-vaccine movement leader has died from COVID-19] Johann died due to complications from COVID and possibly bleach poisoning. Seems Johann didn’t understand the basics of virology. Johann got COVID in October. He was admitted into the Hospital in November but checked himself out because he wanted to be treated by Chlorine Dioxide (CDL), enema style. He died two days later. Johann was one of Austria’s best known anti-vaxx campaigners. […]
Some snippets from the referenced article (link embedded in above except; reliably uncertain):
[…] Johann Biacsics had been ill since October, and his condition worsened – he had diarrhea, fever and cough. He was hospitalized in early November. Despite testing positive for the coronavirus, Biacsics told doctors that it has already beaten COVID-19. Although he had trouble breathing, and his condition worsened and was life-threatening, he was discharged home from the hospital.
According to sorryantivaxxer.com (first excerpt), teh eejit discharged himself, which strikes me as highly plausible (see the eejit’s posts, etc., I’ve elucidated from that first excerpt).
Despite the positive test results, the man’s family does not believe that he died from the coronavirus. Officially, he will be included in the statistics as a victim of the crown. But I know better, wrote the deceased’s son […]
I have absolutely no idea what is meant by the (presumably coded) phrase victim of the crown.
A relevant twittering thead… this eejit is a shoo-in for the Darwin Award. Supposedly, some other eejits hallucinate he was purposely poisoned, which the thread’s commentators point out he did it himself.
As international nuclear talks with Iran continue, Donald Trump’s spectacular failure in this area is coming into sharper focus.
Two and a half years after the Trump administration abandoned the international nuclear agreement with Iran, diplomats returned to the negotiating table yesterday in Vienna, hoping to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
The odds of success aren’t great. When the historic agreement was reached in 2015, Iran was led by a government that was ready to reach a deal. More than six years later, Tehran is led by a more conservative government, which began making unrealistic demands before yesterday’s talks even got underway.
What’s more, as The New York Times reported, the Iranian negotiator has indicated that Tehran is prepared to “further escalate its nuclear program” if its demands go unmet.
All of which is to say, it’s probably best to keep expectations low.
That said, as the latest round of diplomatic talks continue, Axios reported that Israel has shared intelligence with Western powers that suggested Iran “is taking technical steps to prepare to enrich uranium to 90% purity — the level needed to produce a nuclear weapon.”
[…] There is no civilian use for 90%-enriched uranium. In case this isn’t obvious, it’s worth emphasizing that it takes more than enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb, and by most accounts, Iran is still a year or two away from having the technical wherewithal to produce such a weapon.
[…] it’s difficult to say with any confidence whether the intelligence from Israel is reliable. What’s far easier to say is that we wouldn’t be in this position at all if Donald Trump hadn’t failed so spectacularly.
[…]. As we’ve discussed, the Iran deal did exactly what it set out to do: The agreement dramatically curtailed Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and established a rigorous system of monitoring and verification. Once the policy was in place, each of the parties agreed that the participants were holding up their end of the bargain, and Iran’s nuclear program was, at the time, on indefinite hold.
And then Trump took office.
One of my favorite stories about the Iran deal came a few months into Trump’s term, when the then-president held a lengthy White House meeting with top members of his national security team. Each of the officials told Trump the same thing: It was in the United States’ interest to preserve the existing JCPOA policy.
The Republican expected his team to tell him how to get out of the international agreement, not how to stick with it. When his own foreign policy and national security advisers told him the policy was working, Trump “had a bit of a meltdown.”
Soon after, he abandoned the deal anyway, not because it was failing, but because Trump was indifferent to its success. The effective policy was soon replaced by a new strategy known as the “maximum pressure” campaign.
Iran almost immediately became more dangerous, not less. If Axios’ report is accurate, the threat — which had been contained — is even more serious now.
In Republican circles, it’s simply assumed that the Obama-era Iran deal “failed.” That gets reality backwards: The real failure is the policy Trump tried to implement, not the policy he tried to replace.
Restoring what worked may prove impossible, but there should be no question as to who’s responsible for making this mess in the first place.
Not wise: Red states appear ready to reject funds for universal pre-K.
Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans at the state level had a curious habit: Federal officials would offer considerable resources that would create jobs and boost state economies, at which point red states would say they didn’t want the money.
This happened at the height of the Great Recession, for example, with some GOP governors saying they didn’t want Recovery Act resources. It happened again when the Obama administration made money available for high-speed rail, at which point Republicans like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker said no. It happened once again after the Affordable Care Act became law, and red states refused to accept the funds for Medicaid expansion.
More than a decade later, we’re starting to see evidence of a similar phenomenon. In March, for example, Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida thought it’d be a good idea to urge state and local governments to reject Covid-relief funds available through the American Rescue Plan.
Now, Democrats are moving forward with plans to pass the Build Back Better package, which includes funds for universal pre-kindergarten. As The Washington Post reported, several red states have already indicated they plan to reject this money, too.
Republican lawmakers in Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina and Minnesota told The Post that they will reject or are troubled by aspects of Biden’s proposed pre-K expansion. GOP state lawmakers in Texas and Arizona have also strongly criticized the plan, according to conservative advocacy groups working closely with officials in those states.
The article added that Republican lawmakers “expressed concern” about the federal education standards, as well as fears that Congress may eventually scrap pre-K funding.
All things considered, much of this is premature. We don’t know whether conservative Democrats will let the Build Back Better Act pass, or how the Biden administration would implement the policy even if the bill is signed into law. Some of the Republican resistance to the idea seems more like posturing than policy.
But if the debate continues on this path, I don’t imagine Democrats in these red states will hesitate to tell voters, “President Biden and I offered funds for universal pre-K, but local Republicans refused.”
But even with a second election, labour experts say a union victory is a long shot as Amazon will likely appeal and try to delay another vote.
[…]
The rare call for a do-over was first announced Monday by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which spearheaded the union organising movement. A National Labor Relations Board spokeswoman confirmed the decision but did not yet provide details.
The RWDSU charged Amazon with illegal misconduct during the first vote. In August, the hearing officer at NLRB who presided over the case determined that Amazon violated labour law and recommended that the regional director set aside the results and direct another election.
The main reason for the determination was a US Postal Service mailbox that Amazon installed in the parking lot ahead of the election, which could have left the false impression that the company was running the election. Security cameras in the parking lot could have scared off workers who thought Amazon may have been watching workers vote. About 53 percent of the nearly 6,000 workers cast ballots during the first election.
[…]
This is the second unionising attempt by Amazon workers in the past year.
A group of Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York withdrew its petition to hold a vote to unionise early in November. The workers, however, can refile a petition.
The organising effort in New York City is working without the help of a national sponsor and is being spearheaded by a former Amazon employee, Christian Smalls. He said he was fired just hours after he organised a walkout last year to protest working conditions at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.
[…]
Lara Logan, a host on the Fox Nation streaming service, was discussing Omicron on Fox News Prime Time on Monday night.
[… Logan burbled:] You just have to look at Africa. They didn’t have the death rates from Covid that were predicted. And what is happening over time, is that the entire response to Covid and everything that we were told about it from the beginning, is being exposed and it’s falling apart, the lies are coming apart.
And really now there’s no justification for putting people out of their jobs or forcing vaccine mandates for a disease that ultimately is very treatable … and has death rates that compare very much to seasonal flu.
And so in that moment, what you see on Dr Fauci, this is what people say to me, that he doesn’t represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele […] who did experiments on Jews during the second world war and in the concentration camps, and I am talking about people all across the world are saying this.
[…]
Logan’s baseless claim that the Omicron variant is made-up echoed a rightwing talking point voiced, in varying forms, by figures including the former White House doctor[quack] turned Texas congressman Ronny Jackson.
[…]
blfsays
Authorities here in the EU (and probably Europe more generally) are extremely fed-up with anti-vaxxers. Austria will make vaccination mandatory, Greece will now apparently fine (older) unvaccinated people 100€ / month (the Grauniad’s pandemic live blog), apparently Germany’s chancellor-to-be Olaf Scholz ‘backs mandatory Covid jabs’, and so on… Here in France, the highly-successful Health Pass has been tweaked so that once a person becomes eligible, they have a reasonable amount of time to get a booster or else the Pass becomes invalid (I believe my own “Pass booster clock” starts ticking in about a week’s time?). Most of the beforementioned measures predate Omicron, but I am aware there are additional measures being added in response to concerns about Omicron (e.g., in teh “U”K (or at least England), MPs vote for stricter Covid rules on mask-wearing and isolation in England, and ‘If it prevents lockdown, I’ve no problem’: England wakes to mask mandate).
It’s funny that so many of those who bang on about the ‘war effort’ seem unable to do something minor for the public good
While the scientists work out how bad the Omicron variant is or isn’t, the government has reimposed mask-wearing in shops and on public transport for at least the next three weeks. Consequently, a number of prams have been swiftly emptied of all toys. Across the airwaves — and up and down the train carriages and the supermarket aisles — you can find multiple refuseniks who suffer from the pandemic version of that old sexual problem: being “too big for condoms”.
[…] This really isn’t the attitude that won us the war.
As for mentioning the war, forgive me. Around 70,000 Britons died in second world war bombing raids, most of them in the blitz, while 145,000 have thus far perished from Covid. Yet somehow there does seem to be a large intersection between the Venn diagram sets “People who bang on endlessly about WW2” and “People who cannot cope with having to take a relatively minor public health measure for the greater good”.
Of course, in London, both positions have links with the tube. In December 1940, you’d have been snatching a couple of hours’ troubled sleep on the underground platform while Hitler blew up your house. In December 2021, you’d be on your way to Oxford Street on the Central line to sample the pre-Christmas enticements of JD Sports. Yet still, somehow, managing to see a few minutes of mask-wearing in a non-ventilated space as an outrageous imposition on your personage, with which you — a stone-cold hero — simply shouldn’t be involved.
[…]
As they shout — or type in capitals — the words THE BRITISH PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH, it’s intriguing to remember that chaps like this really fancy their chances at having been able to cope with the blitz. Picture this person, this person who wets their pants and goes full online Braveheart over being asked to wear a mask between Liverpool Street and Holborn. Assuming they didn’t think air raid sirens were part of some “great reset” and ignored them (fatally), try to imagine this person trudging out of the tube station after the air raid. Try to imagine them discovering they didn’t have a street any more, having to remake their lives and those of their family in an anguished instant, by migrating somewhere else in the country in the clothes they stood in. Or try to imagine them having been taken in by friends or relatives, and turning straight back up to the bomb site with a broom to assist in clearing the rubble. [… I]f you lose your mind over being asked to pop on a face covering in Boots, I honestly don’t think you’d be up to a whole lot of the above.
[…] I appreciate that many people would prefer to hear public safety advice from Winston Churchill rather than Boris Johnson. […] How would these people have coped with rationing, for years and years on end? Being told by the state how many ounces of basic ingredients you were allowed per week feels a bit more of a pisser than being told to wear a mask while you load up your trolley with pounds and pounds of the stuff in Asda. (I know it’s kilos these days, but I didn’t want to send them really off the dial.)
[…]
As one commentator put it, “I’m not switching MY lights off during this air-raid. I’ve got rights!“
[…]
An internal European Commission document advising officials to use inclusive language such as “holiday season” rather than Christmas and avoid terms such as “man-made” has been withdrawn after an outcry from rightwing politicians.
The EU executive’s volte-face over the guidelines, launched by the commissioner for equality, Helena Dalli, at the end of October, was prompted by an article in the Italian tabloid il Giornale, which claimed it amounted to an attempt to cancel Christmas.
A series of politicians on the right […] subsequently jumped on the issue to voice their opposition to the absurd advice.
Inclusion does not mean denying the Christian roots of {the EU}, [a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, Antonio] Tajani tweeted.
[…]
Officials […] were advised to avoid assuming that everyone is Christian, white and married. Rather than refer to Christmas, officials should say “the holiday season”, the document suggested.
Officials were advised to avoid gender-specific pronouns and gendered words and phrases such as “chairman”, “ladies and gentleman” or “man-made”.
It was suggested that officials ask people what their pronouns are and to be careful using terms such as “gay” and “lesbians” as a noun. “Transgender, bi or intersex are not nouns.” … “Say trans people, gay person, etc or refer to the person explicitly,” it was suggested.
[…]
Sadly, the commissioner for equality, Helena Dalli, didn’t tell teh nazis to feck off, but instead withdrew the advice. (A revised version might be issued in the future, albeit I don’t see anything objectionable in the recommendations quoted in the excerpt.)
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 205
THIS is why the Left’s dismissal of “culture war” issues in favor of economic reform to win over the Red States is foolish. They don’t want pre-K education, they want to end abortion rights. They don’t want national health care, they want to end same-sex marriage. They don’t want infrastructure improvements, they want to put mandatory prayer back in public schools and Creationism into the biology classes. If anything the progressive reforms are just as much a part of the culture wars as the moral and religious issuers because the right associates those policies with “godless communism.”
It’s not that the citizens of the Red States are “voting against their best interests.” It’s that they have a very different idea of what is in their best interests in the first place.
[…] Biologists don’t “debate” creationists because there’s no value in elevating anti-science voices with actual experts. Astronauts do not “debate” those who don’t believe in the Moon landing. Historians don’t “debate” Holocaust deniers. Nonsense and ugly lies are simply unworthy of serious people’s time.
All of this came to mind this week after Donald Trump issued a statement welcoming a televised debate with “the heads of the various papers or even far left politicians” over his anti-election conspiracy theories.
When his desperate plea for attention went ignored — the “heads of the various papers” apparently didn’t see the point of giving the former president a forum to spew discredited garbage — the Republican claimed victory in a follow-up statement, marveling that there were “no takers” to his challenge.
“[T]hink of it, zero takers for the so-called ‘ratings machine,'” Trump added. “The reason is, they know they can’t win. All I have to do is lay out the facts — they are irrefutable.”
Of course, the former president hasn’t laid out these facts yet. He’s had a year to substantiate his conspiracy theories and back up his attacks on the elections, but he’s done nothing of the kind. The political world has effectively endured a 12-month public “debate,” unveiled in slow motion, during which time Trump has offered literally nothing to bolster his ridiculous anti-election assertions.
In other words, we’ve already had the debate. Trump […] lost.
A Washington Post analysis summarized the Republican’s misguided motivations.
[T]here are two obvious advantages for Trump. The first is that it gets him back on TV, something he’s been itching for ever since he left the White House — or, more accurately, since he got booted from social media in the wake of that violence on Jan. 6. The other is that it gets TV to treat his claims about the election seriously, as a serious subject worthy of debate, which it is not.
In Texas, Mark Middleton was indicted earlier this year for allegedly assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Dallas Morning News reported yesterday that Middleton has launched a Republican state legislative campaign.
Former President Donald Trump took his effort to block a Jan. 6 committee subpoena of his presidential records to a federal appeals court Tuesday. Oral arguments began at 9:30 a.m. ET and lasted for more than three hours. […]
One persistent theme in the hearing was the court’s skepticism of Donald Trump’s power as an ex-president. In particular, their ears perked when Trump lawyer Justin Clark said that incumbent and former presidents should be given equal deference in disputes before the court.
“There’s no deference given to the current president because he’s current?” Judge Jackson asked Clark. When Clark agreed, Judge Millett noted Nixon v. GSA, in which the Supreme Court found that the former president’s interests, in Millett’s words, are “diminished.”
“It sounds to me like that counts for something,” she said, describing the Nixon case. She added later: “We have one president at a time under our constitution.”
If the court moves past Trump’s statutory objections — such as his assertion that Congress doesn’t have a good reason for seeking the records — and simply evaluates the competing claims of the current and former presidents, “you lose,” Millett told Clark.
“Not you,” the judge chuckled to the lawyer. “The former president loses.”
[…] That was a meandering hearing, full of asides and hypotheticals lobbed by the three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals
But at the end of the day, there wasn’t a lot of good news for the former President: During his legal team’s extended argument before the court, the judges repeatedly noted that Trump hadn’t put forth any specific objections to individual records being released.
They also pressed Trump’s team on their interpretation of the Presidential Records Act, with Judge Jackson saying at one point, “It makes me worried that the circumstance that you are trying to have the statute give you a cause of action to proceed under really is not what’s going on here at all.”
As many suspected from the outset, travel bans against South Africa and neighboring countries could turn out to be little more than a case of punishing the whistleblower. […] Dutch health authorities are now reporting that the omicron variant was found in the Netherlands as far back as November 19, well before scientists in South Africa and Botswana first sounded the alarm about the highly-divergent new form of COVID-19. Similar tests in Belgium and Germany have also indicated the presence of the variant in those nations previous to the announcement out of South Africa.
This news is not likely to generate an immediate lift of the travel ban. That’s because the significant number of omicron cases in the area around Johannesburg represents the largest known outbreak of this new variant, and limiting travel to and from that region may hold some value. But the news out of Europe is another demonstration that South Africa is paying the price both for having one of the best systems for conducting genetic analysis, and for being transparent about the results of its analysis. The reaction to that transparency is troubling in terms of what happens the next time someone detects a particularly interesting variant — or a wholly new infectious agent.
In some ways, the not-unexpected news that omicron has been around longer than we thought could be good; because it could indicate that when it comes to outcompeting delta to become the dominate variant, omicron is not moving as quickly as some feared. On the other hand, the fact that is has now turned up in at least 20 nations (as of Tuesday morning), is a strong indicator that this variant can be easily transmitted through casual contact.
When it comes to the three big questions: How contagious is it? How evasive is it? How virulent is it? The answer to all three is the same. We still don’t know. But we are getting a few clues.
As of Tuesday morning, there’s some bad news and some potential good news on omicron.
The bad news, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, is absolutely expected. Early tests of monoclonal antibody treatments, like the one manufactured by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, appear to be significantly less effective against the omicron variant. The same thing applies to a similar treatment from Eli Lilly.
Scientists expected this as soon as the high level of mutations in the omicron variant, and particularly the changes in the critical spike protein, became clear. Antibody treatments like those from Regeneron and Eli Lilly are, in a sense, frozen in time, targeting the version of the virus first sequenced by Chinese scientists in January 2020. The Emergency Use Authorization from Eli Lilly’s antibody cocktail, bamlanivimab, was suspended in the fall after it proved to be relatively ineffective in fighting delta.
Unlike these treatments, vaccines produce a much broader series of immune responses. That’s part of why vaccines have a much better efficiency rate of preventing hospitalization and deaths than antibody treatments. States like Texas and Florida, where governor’s Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have been heavily leaning on antibody treatments while fighting against vaccine mandates, are going to see their already bad policies made worse
[…] However, there’s also a ray of sunshine amidst all the gloom. Bloomberg reports that at least one physician dealing with omicron patients in South Africa is seeing radically different symptoms.
Patients who contracted it complain of fatigue, head and body aches and occasional sore throats and coughs, said Angelique Coetzee, who is also chairwoman of the South African Medical Association. Delta infections, by comparison, caused elevated pulse rates, resulted in low oxygen levels and a loss of smell and taste, she said.
So far, the cases of omicron have been described as less life-threatening than delta. “I don’t think it will blow over,” said Dr. Coetzee, “but I think it will be a mild disease hopefully. For now, we are confident we can handle it.”
This is still extremely early. Most patients who die from COVID-19 do so after a struggle of weeks, and right now South Africa is looking at what seems to be a small number of verified omicron patients who had been symptomatic only for a few days. That said, it’s a hopeful sign. It’s certainly better than signals that omicron could be worse.
As omicron begins its spread, there’s been a resurgence of the myth that, over time, viruses decline in virulence until they become “just colds.” On the surface, this seems to make a kind of sense. After all, viruses need a host to replicate, and if that host is dead, their ability to spread is limited. So keeping the host alive and relatively healthy seems like a competitive advantage for the virus.
In the real world, there are multiple reasons why keeping the host around long term is such a minor factor as to be completely unimportant. The only evolutionary pressure present on a virus is reproduction. In a sense, that’s the only pressure on any organism, but in complex organisms, other behaviors can disguise that basic fact. In viruses, replication is all they do, and they can’t even do that without the help of a host organism.
In the case of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, what makes it so successful when compared to close relatives SARS and MERS is that SARS-CoV-2 is contagious even before symptoms appear.
SARS hits peak levels of virus in the respiratory system a couple of days after cough, fever, and other symptoms appear. So does MERS. When it comes to stopping an epidemic, the early presence of symptoms allows health care workers, as well as the infected, to make decisions that limit exposure of others.
But SARS-CoV-2 has “front-loaded” the period of contagion. The peak levels of infection for COVID-19 come right around the point of first symptoms. That includes a day or two before symptoms appear. The delta variant improved on this by significantly increasing the level of virus present in the respiratory tract. So people infected with delta literally walk around leaving plumes of virus particles, often at a point when they feel just fine. That’s the recipe for the mess we’re in right now.
Maximizing the period of contagion into the first few days of infection makes it possible for COVID-19 to spread not just before people are aware they are sick—and before the body can mount a successful counteroffensive. That front-loading of contagion also means that what happens next has almost no value to the virus. COVID-19 spreads fast and early. Patients could go on to completely recover. They could experience spontaneous combustion. Either result would have only a tiny effect on the overall level of spread. […]
In any case, there is such a small evolutionary pressure on the “get milder” side of the scale that it might as well not exist. An effect that can be seen in decades of dealing with HIV, centuries of battling polio, and thousands of years of smallpox. Despite appearing sometime around 10,000 BCE, smallpox still killed 300 million in the 20th century alone. How contagious is smallpox? Its rate of transmission is almost identical to that of the delta variant. How much did it decline in potency over a period of 12,000 years? Not at all. […]
More at the link, including a detailed debunking of the idea that we can simple wait COVID-19 out until it doesn’t matter, or becomes a mild flu-like illness.
Wonkette: “Crap Words From Dr. Oz’s Senate Announcement, Or Crap Medical Advice He Gave On His Show? A QUIZ!”
[…] “How can we acknowledge that Dr. Oz is running for Senate in Pennsylvania,” we asked ourselves, “without actually giving that fucking clownfuck any more of our time than he deserves?” And the answer we arrived at was to make you a quiz.
The rules are simple: We will type a line of text, and you have to decide whether it was some dumb shit he said in his Senate announcement, or some dumb medical advice shit he actually told people on his show, or maybe on Fox News, because of how he’s such a quack.
It’s going to be extra hard, because a lot of the things from his Senate announcement are Oz whining and bitching about lockdowns and whining his mouth off about “elites.” But HELPFUL HINT THAT MIGHT HELP YOU, the odd numbers are from the Senate announcement, and the evens are his shit “medical” advice.
1. COVID-19 became an excuse for the government and elite thinkers who controlled the means of communication to suspend debate.
2. One time Dr. Oz scared people with news that suggested that mouthwash causes high blood pressure.
3. Dissenting opinions from leading scholars were ridiculed and canceled so their ideas could not be disseminated.
4. Then there was the time he said the “magic weight-loss cure for every body type” was “this little bean,” which was green coffee extract. Who doesn’t love Dr. Oz’s little bean!
5. Instead, the government mandated policies that caused unnecessary suffering. The public was patronized and misled instead of empowered. We were told to lock down quietly and let those in charge take care of the rest. When we tested positive for the virus, we were also told to wait at home until our lips turned blue and we got sick enough to warrant hospitalization.
6. Hydroxybonercream is his FAAAAAAAVORITE treatment for COVID, he loves it soooooo much, he wants to marrrrrrrrrry it.
7. Elites with yards told those without yards to stay inside, where the virus was more likely to spread. And the arrogant, closed-minded people in charge closed our parks, shuttered our schools, shut down our businesses, and took away our freedom.
Hold on, what the fuck is he talking about? You have no idea either? OK just checking. Moving on.
8. Know what cures restless leg syndrome? Some lavender soap under your covers […]
9. Although we had some moments of brilliance, such as the gift to the world of mRNA vaccines made possible by President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed …
10. MAYBE “the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat” is something called “raspberry ketones,” sure why not, it had never been tested on humans, but that’s just a detail.
11. Equally concerning, we cannot even say what we see anymore, which is a suffocating feeling. Doctors are trained to tell it like it is because you deserve to hear our best advice and make your own decisions. It’s why I have fought the establishment my whole career.
12. Can your astrological sign tell you a whole bunch about your health? Yes, or ZOMGYES?
In a now-deleted tweet, Oz said astrology could help people understand their personal health.
“For centuries, we have used astrological signs to examine our personality and how we interact with those around us,” he said. “However, these signs may reveal a great deal about our health as well.”
13. We must confront those who want to change the very soul of America and reimagine it with their toxic ideology. We need to fight for the benefit of our descendants. We have fumbled the baton we’re supposed to pass to our children. And I want to pick up that baton and start racing toward our promising future.
Fox News hosts can’t seem to keep their metaphors straight as they fulminate about the untold horrors the government may impose on Americans in response to the newly recognized Omicron variant of the SARS CoV-2 virus. In mere reality, the nation’s public health experts are saying it’s concerning, but we need to know more about Omicron (particularly how transmissible it is, and how well current vaccines work against it) before we make any policies to deal with it. There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know yet, but we do know for certain that the Delta variant is still killing people, so the best thing people can do is get vaccinated or get their booster shots.
Fortunately, wingnut media is happy to fill the current lack of certainty with extra-large helpings of speculation and conspiracy theories, like the loony notion that there is no new variant of the virus at all, it’s all just an excuse to steal the 2022 midterms, because somehow South Africa and the world medical community are secretly run by Nancy Pelosi.
So now Fox News faces a bit of a rhetorical dilemma. The network gets its highest ratings when people are terrified, but since it’s also committed to insisting that COVID-19 is a big nothingburger (but the vaccines are scary), Fox can’t go the easy way and hype the potential threat of Omicron. Instead, Fox is back to its usual game of hyping the threat that the government is just itching to use Omicron as an excuse to impose lockdowns, force everyone to wear a mask in their own homes, take your guns, and have Taylor Swift write a new woke national anthem. For starters.
As usual, Fox has gone in for another round of demonizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, who just might be the greatest threat to America since Critical Race Theory and the War on Christmas combined! Monday evening, Fox Nation host Lara Logan carefully explained that Fauci was exactly like Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi who carried out horrifying experiments at Auschwitz (and was also involved in deciding which arriving Jews would be sent to slave labor, and who would go straight to the gas chambers). Not to be outdone, Tucker Carlson, in a long rant that was incoherent even for him, kept up his insistence that people who refuse to be vaccinated are now being targeted for extermination, just like the Kulaks were in Soviet Russia. Unable to stick with a simile for more than a fruit fly’s heartbeat, Carlson then proclaimed Fauci to be not like Joseph Stalin, but instead “an even shorter version of Benito Mussolini,” even though Mussolini was 5′ 7″ and Stalin more around 5′ 4″ (or 5′ 5″, or even 5′ 6″, according to the googles).
Fauci is 5′ 7″, in case you were wondering. No, Carlson didn’t explain what exactly made Fauci into Mussolini, except for pointing out that in a “60 Minutes” interview, Fauci referred to himself in the third person and pointed out that rightwing media have an easier time attacking people than science, so the attacks on science tend to come in the form of attacks on Fauci. The nerve of that guy, saying that he personifies science! [video available at the link]
“Clearly, something deep inside Tony Fauci has changed. The man now believes he’s a deity, accountable to no one,” Carlson outgassed very convincingly.
Why, Fauci even laughed at Ted Cruz for saying Fauci should be prosecuted, even though Cruz was elected to office and therefore is much more of an authority about things. Fauci brushed off the comment (with, yes, a tu quoque fallacy, shame on him) by suggesting that if anyone should worry, maybe it’s members of Congress who egged on the January 6th insurrection. Carlson pretended that wasn’t Fauci’s point, possibly because Latin confuses Tucker even more than logic, and claimed that Fauci believes that anyone who questions Mad King Fauci is trying to bring down the government.
Sorry, got all rhetoric-y there. TL;DR: Tucker Carlson is a asshole whose dishonest distortions might make for a dandy dissertation, provided the poor grad student managed not to be driven mad by pondering them, like a character in Lovecraft.
Lara Logan, that great war correspondent who was shitcanned by “parted ways with” CBS News after a fake Benghazi story that embarrassed “60 Minutes,” brought her great knowledge of world history to an appearance on Fox’s “Prime Time” in which she explained that Fauci was actually a lot more like Josef Mengele, what with all the choosing who lives and dies, the obscene medical experimentation on humans, and the telling Americans to get a free, safe, effective vaccine to protect against serious infection or death. The parallels between Mengele and Fauci really are astonishing! Everyone tells her so, […] [See blf’s comment 207]
Reuters is reporting that the rightwing thugs who illegitimately seized power in Honduras in 2009 and have illegitimately clung to it since are conceding their overwhelming loss in the presidential election to Xiomara Castro.
Lynna,OM@215,
That’s an excellent refutation of the “viruses evolve towards mildness” fallacy so favoured by the pseudo-sophisticated. Smallpox is always my go-to counterexample. Meanwhile Nigeria’s CDC has identified the Omicron variant in a sample taken in October – also apparently from a traveller to the country, but where from is unspecified.
SC@218,
That’s good news! Less good news a week or so ago, when the fascist candidate narrowly came top in the first round of Chile’s Presidential election. He’s in a run-off with a progressive this month.
Donald Trump tested positive for Covid-19 three days before his first debate against Joe Biden, the former president’s fourth and last chief of staff has revealed in a new book.
Mark Meadows also writes that though he knew each candidate was required “to test negative for the virus within seventy two hours of the start time … Nothing was going to stop [Trump] from going out there”.
Trump, Meadows says in the book, returned a negative result from a different test shortly after the positive.
Nonetheless, the stunning revelation of an unreported positive test follows a year of speculation about whether Trump, then 74 years old, had the potentially deadly virus when he faced Biden, 77, in Cleveland on 29 September – and what danger that might have presented….
A federal labor relations official has ordered a second union election at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Ala., after finding that the tech giant interfered and violated workers’ labor rights during a high-profile, but unsuccessful, union drive earlier this year.
The decision by National Labor Relations Board Region 10 Director Lisa Henderson largely rests on the e-commerce giant’s decision to install a mailbox in front of the fulfillment center to collect employees’ mail-in ballots for the union election.
“By causing the Postal Service to install a cluster mailbox unit, communicating and encouraging employees to cast their ballots using the mailbox, wrapping the mailbox with its slogan, and placing the mailbox at a location where employees could reasonably believe they were being surveilled, the Employer engaged in objectionable conduct that warrants setting aside the election,” Henderson wrote in the order Monday directing a new election.
“The Employer’s flagrant disregard for the Board’s typical mail-ballot procedure compromised the authority of the Board and made a free and fair election impossible,” Henderson said.
…
The union lauded the move, saying it confirmed the objections they raised about Amazon’s behavior throughout the union drive.
“Amazon’s intimidation and interference prevented workers from having a fair say in whether they wanted a union in their workplace — and as the Regional Director has indicated, that is both unacceptable and illegal,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the union, said in a statement. “Amazon workers deserve to have a voice at work, which can only come from a union.”…
Amazon still has options to challenge this. At the same time, unionization efforts at Amazon facilities in the US are gaining steam.
ravensays
NBC News Anti-vaccine Christian broadcaster Marcus Lamb dies at 64 after contracting Covid
Tim Fitzsimons Tue, November 30, 2021, 9:49 PM
Marcus Lamb, a co-founder and the CEO of the conservative Christian Daystar Television Network who vocally opposed Covid-19 vaccines, has died at 64, weeks after he contracted Covid-19, the network said.
and
There is no doubt that this is a spiritual attack from the enemy, Lamb’s son Jonathan said…
As much as my parents have gone on here to kind of inform people about everything that is going on with this pandemic and some of the ways to treat Covid-there’s no doubt that the enemy is not happy about that.
Another antivaxxer dies from Covid-19 virus.
Marcus Lamb was one of the worst of a bad lot.
One of the most prominent televangelists with his own broadcasting company, he spent huge amounts of time lying about the pandemic and promoting ineffective quack cures.
And, his family didn’t learn one single thing about watching him take several weeks to die on a ventilator. They still don’t believe in modern medicine.
The xian babble about the “enemy” is just pure Dark Ages superstition.
Marcus Lamb killed himself by his own stupidity by drinking his own Kool-aid.
No, satan doesn’t invent pandemics and no he doesn’t care about you one bit. Satan doesn’t even exist and if he did, you would be on his side anyway.
ravensays
I’d never heard of this guy, Marcus Lamb.
He is the CEO of Daystar Television Network, the second largest xian TV network in the world.
Lamb is also what an inept lizard person trying to imitate a human would look like.
The world is a better place with him gone.
As the pandemic goes on and on, the patients who end up in the ICU are getting dumber and more ignorant. They are frequently hostile and combative, accuse the health care workers of trying to kill them etc.., and sometimes attack them.
Most of them have been treating their illness with Ivermectin horse paste and are surprised that it didn’t work like they read on Deathbook.
Quite a few of them don’t even make it to the hospital any more and are found dead at home with their supply of…horse dewormer.
Ah, so great to see raven and SC posting here today. I am having a difficult and busy time with my work-for-actual-money, so I haven’t been able to give this thread as much attention as I’d like.
KG @219, you’re right. And it has become increasingly important to debunk the “viruses evolve towards mildness” fallacy.
After a difficult year of defeats, Team Trump’s Sidney Powell has a new problem: Her non-profit is reportedly facing a federal criminal investigation.
About a year ago, Sidney Powell’s bizarre legal antics in support of Donald Trump reached an extraordinary point: Rudy Giuliani, of all people, concluded that Powell had become a little too ridiculous, even for Team Trump.
First, Powell was fired for pushing conspiracy theories considered so hysterically ridiculous that the then-president’s other attorneys showed her the door. Soon after, Giuliani went so far as to say her ideas exceeded “the bounds of rationality.”
This, however, was not the low point for Powell’s career trajectory. Over the summer, a federal judge concluded that an anti-election lawsuit that Powell helped file was so patently absurd that the conduct from the lawyer and her colleagues warranted “a referral for investigation and possible suspension or disbarment.”
But as embarrassing as that must’ve been for Powell, things may yet get even worse. The Washington Post reported yesterday:
Federal prosecutors have demanded the financial records of multiple fundraising organizations launched by attorney Sidney Powell after the 2020 election as part of a criminal investigation, according to a subpoena reviewed by The Washington Post.
[…] At issue is an apparent federal investigation into a collection of groups, including Defending the Republic — a 501(c)4 non-profit organization founded by Powell — and a political action committee of the same name.
According to the Post’s reporting about the subpoena, Powell is accused of creating a non-profit group that solicited funds to file anti-election lawsuits, but as Rachel noted on last night’s show, federal prosecutors appear to be looking into whether she, in fact, used a lot of those donations for herself.
If so, it would mean Powell allegedly defrauded her donors and potentially even defrauded the government by possibly misrepresenting the nature of the work conducted by her non-profit organization. […]
Of course. They all defraud their donors for the most part. Trump is still defrauding his donors. It’s past time for the donors to wise up. Would love to see Sidney Powell do some jail time.
We’re not just seeing House Republicans go after one another, we’re also seeing evidence of Kevin McCarthy being too weak to do anything about it.
As the current Congress got underway earlier this year, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stressed the importance of Republican unity. As far as the California congressman is concerned, having a unified GOP conference is critical to winning back the House majority in the 2022 midterm elections.
With this in mind, in early February, McCarthy’s office declared with pride, “Our conference is united.”
[…] As 2021 has unfolded, GOP lawmakers have spent much of the year going after one another. Wyoming’s Liz Cheney has been a popular target for her Republican colleagues, as has Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger. There’s been some intra-party grumbling about Arizona’s Paul Gosar, too. More recently, the 13 House Republicans who voted for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package faced an intense backlash from their ostensible partisan allies.
But by most measures, this week’s feud between two first-year GOP members — Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and South Carolina’s Nancy Mace — is qualitatively different.
The dispute stems from Rep. Lauren Boebert and her bigoted rhetoric directed at a Democratic colleague. Mace denounced the Coloradan’s anti-Muslim smear, and Greene denounced Mace for having criticized Boebert.
The dispute took an unfortunate turn yesterday, as Greene described Mace as “the trash of the GOP Conference,” adding a personal attack related to abortion, while the South Carolinian responded with a tweet that used emojis to call Greene a “bats— clown.” The right-wing Georgian took her concerns to Donald Trump, as if he were the grown-up.
OMFG. All the children are in the sandbox throwing shit at each other. And … Trump as “the grownup” …. LOL.
[…] this may seem like a pointless political spat, but it took on greater significance when Kevin McCarthy personally intervened, tried to lower the temperature, and failed. Politico reported overnight:
The California Republican implored Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), in separate private meetings, to stop attacking one another after their back-and-forth online spat dragged on for hours earlier Tuesday. After speaking with the GOP leader, Greene said she told McCarthy that she would quit attacking Mace. But as she was leaving the meeting, Greene suggested to CNN that she was interested in seeing Mace get a Republican primary challenger, something former President Donald Trump has called for.
Around the same time, as the day wrapped up, Mace told reporters, “All I can say to Marjorie Taylor Greene is, ‘Bless her f—ing heart.'” The South Carolinian added that Greene is a “grifter,” who has “nothing going on in her life,” and someone who “takes advantage of vulnerable Americans and vulnerable conservatives.”
Meanwhile, other Republicans started taking sides, with Kinzinger coming to Mace’s defense, while Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida promoted online content referring to Mace as a “scam artist.”
The New York Times added, “The carnival-like behavior would amount to little more than a sideshow if it did not have real implications for midterm campaigns and, possibly, a fractured Republican majority in 2023.”
[…] when McCarthy tried to show some leadership yesterday, and spoke directly to Greene and Mace about calming the waters, they proceeded to largely ignore his plea, as if the minority leader’s wishes were irrelevant.
The result isn’t just a messy intra-party feud, it’s also fresh evidence of McCarthy’s weakness, even among his own members.
The U.S. Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 and for nearly a half-century this decision has served as a central pillar of politics in the United States.
The question now is whether a very different Supreme Court, now dominated by Republican-appointed conservative justices, will knock that pillar down. NBC News reported this morning:
The Supreme Court will take up the most direct challenge to Roe v. Wade in nearly three decades when it hears oral arguments Wednesday over a Mississippi abortion law. The showdown, which centers on whether the Constitution provides a right to seek an abortion, focuses on a 2018 Mississippi law, blocked by lower federal courts, that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, allowing them only in medical emergencies or cases of severe fetal abnormality.
[…] After Donald Trump and GOP senators added new conservatives to the Supreme Court, several Republican-led state governments started advancing new abortion bans. Mississippi Republicans were especially aggressive on this front, approving the “Gestational Age Act,” which banned abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
[…] The Center for Reproductive Rights filed suit, challenging the constitutionality of the state measure; a district court agreed and struck down Mississippi’s policy; and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision.
In May, the high court announced it would hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, creating the first reproductive rights showdown since conservatives gained a dominant, six-member majority on the nine-member bench.
Note, the Supreme Court actually struck down abortion restrictions in Louisiana last summer, in a 5-4 ruling in which Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the more progressive justices. But since then, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has passed and been replaced by Barrett, who hasn’t been shy in her condemnations of abortion.
All of which suggests the Roe v. Wade precedent is facing a serious threat.
[…] the Supreme Court often takes up cases when there are divisions among appellate courts on the same issue. That doesn’t apply here: At least four justices agreed to take up this case because they wanted to, which probably shouldn’t ease the minds of reproductive rights advocates.
There’s also a political context to all of this. The justices will hear oral arguments in the case this morning and will likely issue a ruling in the early summer. Or put another way, we’re faced with the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade — in part or in its entirety — just in time for the 2022 midterm elections.
[…] What happens if/when Republicans become the dog that catches the car? In an election year? With polls showing broad support for the Roe v. Wade precedent?
Postscript: Oral arguments began this morning around 10 a.m. eastern. The cab listen to the proceedings live through the Supreme Court’s website, by clicking on the “live audio” link.
Lawyers arguing for the Mississippi abortion law have, so far, spent a lot of time decrying the “damage” done since 1973 when all of those “human lives were ended.”
ravensays
Lynna lives in Idaho.
I’m not sure how she does it though.
An Idaho professor at Boise State wants women to be kicked out of engineering, medical, and law schools so they can bake cookies and push out babies.
BTW, more than half of all medical school (50.5%) and law school (52.4%) students are…women.
It is amusing that the Idaho lieutenant governor is Janice McGeachin, a far right wingnut kook.
The Daily Beast:
A political-science professor at one of Idaho’s top universities has sparked outrage after openly calling for women to be kept out of engineering, medical school, and law so that they can instead focus on “feminine goals” such as “homemaking and having children.”
Boise State University professor Scott Yenor, who previously served on far-right Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin’s task force investigating right-wing claims of “indoctrination” in schools, made the bizarre declaration during the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando in late October, the Idaho Statesman reports.
After his comments went viral on social media this week, female students and female lawmakers alike in Idaho said they are utterly freaked out.
“He has power. He has power to issue a grade. It’s disgusting. He needs to come into the current century, but it doesn’t sound like he will,” Boise State MBA student Emily Walton told the Statesman.
Yenor’s comments at the Oct. 31 event went well beyond sexist stereotypes, with the professor suggesting a nation could only be “great” if men and women were kept apart in their respective spheres.
“Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children,” he told the crowd. “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade,” he said.
Lynna lives in Idaho.
I’m not sure how she does it though.
Living here can be very disconcerting at times. Yenor sounds über Mormon.
For the most part, I survive by limiting my interactions with my fellow human beings in Idaho. Not all Idahoans are like Yenor or McGeachin … just too many of them.
ravensays
Living here can be very disconcerting at times. Yenor sounds über Mormon.
Well, on the bright side, when Idaho gets to be a bit much, you can always cross over the border into…Utah.
I can well imagine, having spent a fair amount of time in Utah. It’s one of my favorite places but the Mormons are not the best part of it.
Yenor sounds Mormon and I would expect that at BYU Rexburg. Actually he is Lutheran.
My first reaction was that Boise State should fire him. I don’t think even tenure will protect him here.
Then, that is clearly what he wants. If you read further on The Beast, he even gets worse as he goes along.
He wants to be a martyr to misogyny and get into the big money with talk radio or Fox NoNews. I would simply take away all his real classes, assign him to xian extremism 101, non-credit, pay him his salary, and ignore him until he retires and dies.
The Universities always have some way far gone old guy with tenure stuck away somewhere, that they ignore, and wait for them to die. I knew at least three at my undergraduate university.
Commentary from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
With all the rush of new news and information I wanted to flag something for your attention that is at least slightly under the media radar. All signs point to a strong Republican midterm election in 2022, with the House the better prospect for Republican control. That means Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy becomes Speaker. Or actually maybe it doesn’t. A bunch of Republicans have started making clear that’s not at all a sure thing.
Needless to say they’re Trumpers, various versions of the ex-President’s men. And because of that they’re using the tactics of their movement: a mix of taunts and ‘jokes’ meant to add menace with nominal deniability, put McCarthy off balance and simply make clear who’s boss.
Former Rep. Mark Meadows was Trump’s last Chief of Staff. He’s teetering on the edge of a criminal contempt citation from the Jan 6th Committee. He remains very close to Trump, acting as something like his cat’s paw . A few weeks ago Meadows suggested that Trump should become Speaker of the House if Republicans take power in January 2023. (Remember, the Speaker does not technically have to be a member of the House.) This was half joking, or presented as such. But that is the style. Just joking. But not joking.
Over the same few weeks there’s been a rising chorus of support for an alternative candidate for Speaker. Maybe Jim Jordan of Ohio. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, notionally a half-defrocked member of the caucus but in fact one of its leaders, has been pushing the idea that McCarthy won’t cut it.
Then on Monday Meadows showed up on a rightwing talk radio show in Bakersfield, California taking the ‘GOP congressional leadership’ to task for being RINOs and weaklings.
“I think probably the biggest thing is, is that a lot of times we legislate to the middle and we think that we’ve got to go to our least common denominator and and appease the most moderate Republican member in the House … What I’ve often said is, ‘Listen, let’s start with who we are as conservatives and as constitutional lovers of freedom. And let’s start there and then we work towards the middle,’” Meadows told host Terry Maxwell, according to Punchbowl News. “It does take leadership, sometimes it takes boldness, other times, it takes a willingness to go home [and] do what your constituents want you to do.”
The two discussed Jordan, Meadows and even Trump as potential Speakers in 2023, just not McCarthy.
[…] part of two broader processes. One is McCarthy’s on-going process of dignity loss which has been a feature of his House tenure almost from the beginning. This isn’t the first time McCarthy was supposed to become Speaker.
[…] when Boehner retired [in 2016], House Republicans balked at McCarthy’s succession to the Speakership. Part of it was a mini-controversy in which McCarthy went on Hannity and said the Benghazi committee had succeeded in damaging Hillary Clinton. He said what was obvious too openly […] the House Freedom Caucus – Meadows and Jordan’s group – withheld their support. McCarthy ended his own campaign for the Speakership before it came to a vote. […] Ouch.
McCarthy has been an absolute stalwart supporter of Donald Trump. But remember that there’s no elected official of any standing in the United States, in either party, who’s said something about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia even close to what McCarthy has. In a GOP leadership meeting in June 2016 McCarthy told colleagues “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Speaker Ryan immediately jumped in and cut off the conversation and swore the rest in the meeting to secrecy. (The whole thing was caught on tape.)
My point here isn’t that this is proof that McCarthy was right. It’s more evidence of his endless ability to swallow his words, swallow his dignity and swallow whatever else might be required in the service of getting a promotion or maintaining his status as bestest friend of Donald Trump. There’s even a minor echo of this in the fact that during the January 6th insurrection McCarthy was apparently one of the few GOP leaders in Washington to tell Trump in real time to F off and call off his goons. But he quickly got right with Trump, proceeding to become the most dutiful Jan 6th downplayer running point to prevent Republicans from supporting any efforts to investigate the incident or the former President.
Kevin McCarthy leaves no dignity on the field. He’s dedicated that way.
This brings us to the other part of the equation: Trump’s desire not just for a loyalist as Speaker but one who is powerless in the face of Trump. Trump knows his marks. He’s always sought out those who don’t fight back against his humiliations and treats them to yet more humiliations for their loyalty. That’s Kevin McCarthy. Trump himself being Speaker seems too absurd. It would be more work than he’d want in any case. […]
It all seems like a [recipe for] an arrangement in which purportedly mainstream Republicans had nominal leadership while in fact the House was governed from the Freedom Caucus, a group which was cofounded by Mark Meadows.
[…] John Boehner, whatever his other faults, eventually tired of this, said F it and went off to sell weed and drive the great American open highway. I don’t get the sense Kevin McCarthy ever will. I don’t know if he’ll ever be Speaker, even with a strong 2022.
A Michael Jackson impersonator who is accused of participating in the US Capitol riot has clashed with a judge after rejecting the court’s authority.
James Beeks was accused of “gobbledygook” by the judge after claiming he had divine authority.
Also an actor, Mr Beeks was arrested after FBI agents went to several of his performances of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
[…]
Prosecutors were not seeking pre-trial detention for him at Monday’s hearing in Washington DC, but he was nearly remanded in custody after a courtroom outburst.
The defendant, of Orlando, Florida, argued that he had divine authority, and that he could not serve as his own lawyer in a trial.
I cannot represent myself because I am myself, he said.
After Mr Beeks claimed to be exempt from the US legal system, the judge told him: “That’s all gobbledygook.”
“A defendant who rejects the jurisdiction of the court, rejects being subject to the laws of the United States, rejects the rule of law is not typically released pre-trial because that person cannot be trusted to comply with the conditions of pre-trial release,” Chief US District Judge Beryl Howell warned him.
Mr Beeks denied being an adherent of the so-called sovereign citizen movement, rejecting the label as an “insult”.
The judge eventually allowed him to be released on condition that he wear a GPS tracking device, does not possess firearms, and avoids all contact with Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia of which he is alleged to be a member.
[…]
He was among the first rioters to enter the Capitol building, according to an FBI affidavit[, and brought a homemade shield].
Several other alleged Capitol rioters have also argued that the sovereign citizen movement makes them immune from prosecution.
[…]
Pauline Bauer, who is acting as her own lawyer, quoted Bible verses in court and interrupted the judge while claiming that she was a free living soul not subject to US laws.
She also argued that she does not legally qualify as a “person” and is instead a vessel or living embodiment of God’s creation.
Um… if not subject to US laws then why travel to DC and invade the building / institution which produces those laws?
Would congressional Republicans shut down the government to derail vaccine requirements during a pandemic? For some in the GOP, the answer is yes.
Eight years ago, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz had a provocative idea. The Texan, just nine months into his congressional career, believed he and his party could derail implementation of the Affordable Care Act by shutting down the federal government.
[…] GOP lawmakers embraced [the plan] and shut down federal operations for about two weeks. Eventually, Republicans realized that Cruz’s strategy didn’t really make any sense, and the party ended the crisis.
The senator’s chief of staff at the time was Chip Roy, who “served as the conductor behind the scenes,” helping steer Cruz’s doomed gambit.
Eight years later, Roy is now an elected member of the U.S. House, where he apparently wants to borrow a page from his 2013 playbook. Here’s the message the Texas congressman pushed on Fox News this morning:
“Congress needs to man-up, stand up, and fight for the American people — and that means, don’t fund a government that is tyrannically forcing people to get a vaccine that they don’t want to get.”
First, there’s nothing “tyrannical” about the Biden administration’s vaccine policy. Second, people who don’t want to get the free, safe, and effective vaccine can instead get regular testing.
But it was Roy’s rhetoric about not funding the government that mattered most.
[…] Congress is facing a shutdown deadline this week: Without a stopgap spending measure by Friday night — roughly 60 hours from right now — there will be the latest in a series of Republican-imposed shutdowns. Up until very recently, the assumption has been that members will avert a crisis; the only disagreement was over how long the stopgap measure would last.
But Roy’s rhetoric signaled a new partisan strategy. Politico reported this morning:
Conservatives on both sides of the Capitol are privately plotting to force a government shutdown Friday in an effort to defund the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate on the private sector…. Capitalizing on a last-minute scramble to fund the government, a group of Senate conservatives is planning to object to quick consideration of a stopgap measure to extend funding into early 2022 unless Democratic leaders agree to deny money to enforce the mandate. Because of the tight schedule — and Senate rules that require unanimous consent to move quickly — the senators believe they’ll be able to drag out the process well past midnight Friday, when funding officially expires.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah acknowledged the plan, telling Politico, “I’m sure we would all like to simplify the process for resolving the [continuing resolution], but I can’t facilitate that without addressing the vaccine mandates.” Roy added that Lee and allied senators have “leverage.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hinted yesterday that there may be a problem. “To avoid a needless shutdown, Republicans will have to cooperate and approve the government funding legislation without delay,” the New York Democrat told reporters. “If Republicans choose obstruction, there will be a shutdown entirely because of their own dysfunction.”
[…] the legislative arithmetic matters: Passing a temporary spending measure will require 60 votes in the upper chamber, which means at least 10 Senate Republicans would need to side with the Democratic majority on a clean stopgap bill (known as a “continuing resolution” or “CR”).
Will those votes be there before Friday’s deadline?
Listening to the oral arguments this morning was seriously depressing. I long for the days when Thomas kept silent. And I feel dumber for listening to Kavanaugh (who got Susan Collins to vote for him by assuring her that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”)
There seems little doubt that the decision will limit abortion, probably not by overturning Roe this time, but by allowing states to put and keep severe restrictions on it, such as the Texas six week limit. Down the road Roe will disappear, though it won’t matter much by then.
[…] Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a consistent supporter of reproductive rights, challenged Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart late Wednesday morning about even taking up and overturning precedents that have been set by both Roe and the 1992 landmark Supreme Court case Casey vs. Planned Parenthood in which the court reaffirmed the 1973 Roe ruling. She then set her sights on just how damaging the present case could be to not just the court itself, but to the constitution and the country, as well.
“What hasn’t been at issue in the last 30 years is the line that Casey drew of viability. There has been some difference of opinion with respect to undue burden, but the right of a woman to choose, the right to control her own body, has been clearly set since Casey and never challenged. You want us to reject that line of viability and adopt something different. Fifteen justices over 50 years have, or, I should say, 30 since Casey, have reaffirmed that basic viability line. Four had said no, two of them members of this court, but 15 justices have said yes, of varying political backgrounds. Now, the sponsors of this bill, the house bill in Mississippi, said we’re doing it because we have new justices,” Sotomayor said. […]
Audio recording is available at the link.
[…] Once again, Sotomayor noted that the bill’s sponsor said they pushed the legislation through because “we have new justices on the Supreme Court.”
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible. It’s what Casey talked about when they talked about watershed decisions. Some of them, Brown vs. Board of Education it mentioned and this one, have such an entrenched set of expectations in our society: If this is what the court decided, this is what we will follow. That we won’t be able to survive if people believe that everything, including New York vs. Sullivan,” Sotomayor noted, referring to a 1964 First Amendment case that restricted defamation lawsuits from being filed by public officials. “I could name any other set of rights, including the Second Amendment by the way.”
[…] “If people actually believe that this is all political, how will we survive? How will the court survive?”
“How is your interest anything but a religious view?” Sotomayor asked of the state’s attempt to define when life begins. Sotomayor also fought back against Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s comments on precedent. And she asked Stewart when the life of a woman and the risk she endures come into the calculus: “The state is saying to these women that we can choose to not only physically complicate your existence, put you at medical risk, make you poorer by the choice, because we believe…what?”
Democratic senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy, calls out Republican hypocrisy:
[…] “You care about life?” Murphy continued. “Then get these dangerous military-style weapons off the streets, out of schools.” He told Republicans it’s also time to require that everyone buying a gun goes through a background check.
Murphy went on to stress that tragedies like this happen in the United States because we “choose to let it happen.” He stressed that we as a nation are not “lucky” but rather that this is a “purposeful” choice made b the nation to “sit on our hands and do nothing.” He said his peers send a “silent message of endorsement” by not doing more to prevent gun violence.
“When Congress, the highest, most important, most powerful leaders in the land do nothing shooting after shooting,” he said. “You can understand why those broken brains imply that as an endorsement.”
“If you’re going to come down here and talk about the sanctity of life,” he continued, “explain to the American people why the gun lobby matters more than the safety of our children who are walking into school every day fearing for their life.”
Murphy shared a clip of his remarks on Twitter, where it’s been viewed more than 2.3 million times. […]
Wonkette: “Democracy Had Good Run, But Trumpy Ratf*kers Now Taking Over Running Local Elections”
Rarely is the question asked: Is our Republican electoral ratfuckers learning? At first you might think they aren’t, since so many believers of Donald Trump’s Big Lie are still insisting on holding Arizona-style “audits” of elections in states where the votes have been tallied and retallied and there’s still no proof of fraud. But while Republican ratfuckers may be idiots who are disconnected from reality, they also know that the attempt to throw out the results of the 2020 election was thwarted in part because state and local election officials insisted on doing their jobs and running clean elections, which is why it’s so important to harass them until they resign in fear for their lives. […]
As the Washington Post reports, Republican ratfuck enthusiasts are also working like crazy to take over the machinery of running elections wherever they can. Most noticeably, a lot of committed Trumpers are running for statewide office; WaPo has tallied up “10 running for secretary of state and eight running for attorney general” across the country. Beyond that, Republicans are also working to get Trump loyalists and Big Lie advocates working at the local level in administering elections and counting and certifying the votes.
Citing the need to make elections more secure, Trump allies are also seeking to replace officials across the nation, including volunteer poll watchers, paid precinct judges, elected county clerks and state attorneys general, according to state and local officials, as well as rally speeches, social media posts and campaign appearances by those seeking the positions.
Now, such jobs have traditionally been seen as nonpartisan, technocratic positions. But that might mean Democrats still win elections by getting more votes […] so it’s only fair that Republicans balance things out by making sure only legal Republican votes count.
[…] It’s also the same “logic” that drives a lot of rightwing media: The mainstream press has a liberal bias, so of course news needs to be given a rightward slant, even if it’s dishonest. […]
“The attacks right now are no longer about 2020,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D). “They’re about 2022 and 2024. It’s about chipping away at confidence and chipping away at the reality of safe and secure elections. And the next time there’s a close election, it will be easier to achieve their goals.”
And so you have states like Michigan, where Republicans are dedicated to not allowing any more of that nonpartisan independent crap in vote counting ever again. You’ve got Matthew DePerno, one of the leaders of the failed lawsuit to overturn the election results in Antrim County (where Trump won) running for attorney general. Another Trumpenloon, Kristina Karamo, who claimed she saw absolutely true but unprovable fraud in the vote count in Detroit, is running for secretary of state. Both have been endorsed by Trump.
But Republicans are also pushing to get loyalists on local canvassing boards, which count and certify the vote. […] Count your blessings, Detroit; they didn’t go with the lady who attended the January 6 rally or the other lady who was a “witness” at Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre post-election parade of people telling a Michigan state Senate committee they all saw something nasty in the vote shed.
But wait, there’s more!
In Michigan’s third-largest county, Macomb, Republican officials appointed to the canvassing board a former Republican poll challenger, Nancy Tiseo, who tweeted shortly after the 2020 election that Trump should suspend meetings of the electoral college and have “military tribunals” investigate claims about election fraud.
Thank heaven serious people will be doing serious things with the 2022 and 2024 votes.
There’s plenty more where that came from, in plenty of other states, too […]
For instance, while a Steve Bannon fan shared an opening for an “IT Technical Project Manager” in the Colorado Secretary of State’s office on a Let’s Audit Everything channel on Telegram, Griswold reassured WaPo that
she was “aware that election conspiracists are encouraging people to apply for jobs in our office.” But she added that safeguards are in place that will screen out such applicants.
“Many of the positions require a high level of expertise or skill that just can’t be falsified,” she said. “Positions are available only to Colorado residents. You have to pass reference checks and background checks.”
So hooray, those jobs will only be available to highly skilled computer users, and what are the chance of them being Trumpist whackaloons?
20:00 Paris time [about ten minutes ago]: First confirmed US case of Omicron identified
The first confirmed case of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 has been detected in a person in California, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.
“The individual was a traveler who returned from South Africa on November 22, 2021,” the agency said.
“The individual, who was fully vaccinated and had mild symptoms that are improving, is self-quarantining and has been since testing positive. All close contacts have been contacted and have tested negative.”
Chief Medical Officer Dr Anthony Fauci said this person had not had a booster shot yet. […]
(CN) — California’s ban on large-capacity gun magazines which hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition “interferes only minimally” with the Second Amendment right to self-defense, an en banc Ninth Circuit panel found Tuesday in upholding the voter-approved Proposition 63.
While the law which amended California penal code to prohibit possession of large-capacity magazines frequently used in mass shootings has been hotly debated since voters overwhelmingly approved it in 2016, one thing is for certain: it aimed to save lives.
“The statute outlaws no weapon, but only limits the size of the magazine that may be used with firearms. Accordingly, the ban on legal possession of large-capacity magazines reasonably supports California’s effort to reduce the devastating damage wrought by mass shootings,” U.S. Circuit Judge Susan P. Graber, a Bill Clinton appointee, wrote in the 35-page order upholding the law.
Graber noted the case record showed “there is no evidence that anyone ever has been unable to defend his or her home and family due to the lack of a large-capacity magazine” ….
The 7-4 en banc decision was split among party lines, with Democrat-appointed judges upholding the large-capacity magazine ban….
[…]
In his dissent, U.S. Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke suggested the appellate court was “possessed … by a single-minded focus on ensuring that any panel opinions actually enforcing the Second Amendment are quickly reversed.”
[…]
In his own opinion concurring with the majority’s ruling upholding Proposition 63, U.S. Circuit Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz — a Barack Obama appointee — said VanDyke “has no basis for attacking the personal motives of his sisters and brothers on this court.”
“The people of California should not be precluded from attempting to prevent mass murders simply because they don’t occur regularly enough in the eyes of an unelected Article III judge.”
[…]
California Rifle & Pistol Association [one of the plaintiffs in the case] president Chuck Michel said in a statement. “We will be appealing to the Supreme Court for a final determination because gun owners deserve to have someone fighting for them and their rights. The Second Amendment is a fundamental right, and it is time that courts stop treating that right like a second-class gift from government.”
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 240
Giving sole responsibility to the states to run elections. Just one of the many stupid fuck-ups or our beatified “Founding Fathers.”
“Trump didn’t just fail to deal responsibly with the national public health crisis, he also failed to deal responsibly with his own personal health crisis.”
It was on Oct. 2, 2020, when the public first learned that Donald Trump had contracted Covid-19. Later that day, the then-president was hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center.
It was entirely unclear, however, even at the time, exactly when the Republican tested positive for the virus. According to a new report in The Guardian, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows wrote in his new book that Trump first tested positive on Sept. 26 — three days before his first presidential debate against Joe Biden.
Mark Meadows also writes that though he knew each candidate was required “to test negative for the virus within seventy two hours of the start time … Nothing was going to stop [Trump] from going out there.” … The public, however, was not told of the president’s tests.
Before digging in on this, let’s note a few things. Right off the bat, I should mention that The Guardian’s report on Meadows’ as-yet-unreleased book has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News. That said, The New York Times ran a related report this morning, quoting two former officials who also said the then-president first tested positive on Sept. 26.
What’s more, according to Meadows’ telling, Trump tested negative shortly after testing positive. At that point, the then-president almost certainly should’ve taken a PCR test. That apparently didn’t happen.
Let’s also note that the former president denied the accuracy of the story this morning. That said, Trump lies uncontrollably, and he’s denied plenty of claims that proved to be true.
[…] what’s the significance of the new revelations, assuming they’re true?
It’s extraordinary to realize just how many people Trump knowingly put at serious risk at the first 2020 presidential debate, including his own staff, his own Secret Service detail, and the man who would soon succeed him in the Oval Office.
The Guardian report added that Fox News’ Chris Wallace, who moderated the event, “later said Trump was not tested before the debate because he arrived late. Organizers, Wallace said, relied on the honor system.”
Those counting on Donald Trump to be honorable are almost always going to be disappointed.
They’re not the only ones the Republican put at risk. The evening after the apparent positive test, Trump headlined a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The next day, he also met with military families at the White House. The then-president actually complained last fall that the grieving Gold Star families got too close to him — he effectively accused them of infecting him — but it now appears Trump endangered them, not the other way around.
Indeed, the list of people he put at risk just keeps growing.
Finally, there was also something odd last fall about the timeline. Trump acknowledged the infection the morning of Oct. 2, only to be hospitalized that afternoon? I won’t pretend to be an epidemiologist, but for most people, a patient’s condition doesn’t deteriorate nearly that quickly.
If, however, Trump first tested positive on Sept. 26, then he was hospitalized six days later, which makes far more sense.
As for the bigger picture, at the risk of making a reductive observation, these revelations suggest that the former president didn’t just fail spectacularly to deal responsibly with the national public health crisis, he also failed to deal responsibly with his own personal health crisis.
The suspected shooter at a Michigan high school has been identified as 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley, according to officials.
Crumbley will face charges including a count of terrorism causing death, four counts of first degree murder, seven counts of assault with intent to commit murder and 12 counts of possession of a firearm in commission of a felony, Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald said on Wednesday at a press conference.
McDonald added that she intended to charge Crumbley as an adult.
“This is unspeakable. We send our kids to school. We think that they’re going to be safe, so the only thing that I can do as the prosecutor is ensure that I will do everything I can to prosecute this case and pursue justice for these victims but also to speak out and say that we need better gun laws,” McDonald said.
Crumbley is suspected of killing four students and injuring seven other people in a shooting at Oxford High School on Tuesday. He was a sophomore at the school.
The victims in the shooting included 17-year-old Justin Shilling, who died Wednesday, as well as 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana, 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin and 16-year-old Tate Myre, all of whom died Tuesday.
[…] She went on to say that she could not comment on Crumbley’s potential motive at this time, but referenced a “mountain” of evidence in the case.
Other news outlets are reporting that the shooter’s parent bought the gun during a Black Friday sale. There is some discussion of charging parents who do not properly store firearms in the home. State laws regarding proper, locked storage vary state by state.
johnson catmansays
re tomh @243:
We will be appealing to the Supreme Court for a final determination because gun owners deserve to have someone fighting for them and their rights. The Second Amendment is a fundamental right, and it is time that courts stop treating that right like a second-class gift from government.
The second amendment was ratified in 1791. At the time, the vast majority of firearms were of the single-shot variety. The contention that huge magazine capacity must be legal is a stretch for second amendment fanatics.
A character played by an actor in a fat suit shovels food in his face, unable to restrain himself in a fit of rage. Another falls, too lazy and out-of-shape to get up without the aid of others. And yet another loses weight and avenges the anti-fat bullying she faced growing up, finally earning respect as a thin person.
We see all of these tropes ad nauseam in film, television, literature, and other forms of arts and pop culture. They’re a manifestation of a deep cultural hostility toward fat people – one that perpetuates a centuries-long stigma that both reduces them to their size and their eating habits, with little curiosity about any other facets of their lives, and equates their bodies with the sins of sloth, greed, and gluttony.
The results: degradation, dehumanization, and a constant, unrelenting message that fatness is a moral failure. Whether in 19th Century sideshows and cartoons presenting fat people as the object of humiliation and scorn, sitcoms and movies of the 1990s using fat suits for a cheap laugh, or new dramedies that continue to miss the mark, the characterization of fat people as sin incarnate has hardly changed, thanks to a virulent and complex nexus of racism, classism, and misogyny.
On this episode, we explore how mass media perpetuate anti-fatness in Western, and especially American, culture, examining the ways in which imperial conquest and capitalist development laid the foundation for hostility toward fat people; how even supposedly enlightened liberals use the thin patina of public health to mask routine anti-fat bullying; and the methods Hollywood and other sources of cultural products use to present fat characters as punchlines and nuisances who can only be kooky best friends or degenerate villains.
Our guest is Professor Amy Erdman Farrell, author of Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture.
[…] when describing politicians such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, it seems fair to use words like “radical” and “extremist.” After all, the Georgia Republican, even before taking office, was recognized as a supporter of the deranged QAnon conspiracy theory.
[…] Earlier this year, the public learned of Greene’s record of dismissing 9/11 and school massacres as hoaxes. And harassing at least one survivor of a school shooting. And targeting religious minorities. And peddling bizarre claims about fire-causing space lasers.
Perhaps most importantly, in 2018 and 2019, the Georgia Republican expressed support for violence against Democratic elected officials. This included an instance in which she liked a social-media comment about removing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from office by way of “a bullet to the head.”
If anyone in American public life deserves to be seen as a radical figure on the political fringe, it’s Greene. And yet, the GOP congresswoman published this tweet this week:
“There are a lot of people that need to hear this. We Conservatives in the [House Republican conference] aren’t the fringe. We actually represent the base of Republican voters, which is approximately 70%. And when the party learns to represent Conservative Americans, we will never lose again.”
She took a nearly identical message to Steve Bannon’s podcast, boasting, “We are not the fringe; we are the base of the party.”
[…] What if Greene’s right? […]
The Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago that Donald Trump — by most measures, the leader of the contemporary Republican Party — maintains close contact with several congressional loyalists, but he’s spoken with Greene the most.
[…] A national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll produced similar findings, with 75 percent of Republican voters embracing the Big Lie as if it were true. Looking ahead to the 2024 presidential election, nearly two-thirds of GOP voters said they won’t trust the results if their preferred candidate loses.
[…] These are utterly bonkers ideas, embraced by outlandish figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, but they’re also accepted by most Republican voters, suggesting the line between the GOP mainstream and the GOP fringe has grown awfully blurry.
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who revealed in his upcoming book that Trump had tested positive for COVID-19 three days before his presidential debate with Biden, tried to moonwalk away from his bombshell report last night after his ex-boss called it “fake news.”
“The president’s right, it’s fake news,” Meadows told Newsmax.
Meadows accused the media of ignoring how his book had also reported that Trump gotten a negative test result after receiving the positive one–except the media isn’t ignoring that part at all.
Two former Trump officials subsequently confirmed Meadows’ account to the New York Times.
Meadows also not-so-subtly tried to temper Trump’s fury, making it a point to tell Newsmax that his book has “a lot of great stories” that “candidly talk about the miraculous work, the historic work that Donald Trump did.”
From Justin Baragona’s Twitter feed:
Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt: “I believe the president said it’s fake news. What’s the story here?”
Mark Meadows: “Well, the president’s right, it’s fake news.”
Democrats and Republicans in both chambers have settled on an agreement on a spending bill that would keep the government open through mid-February, according to party leaders.
House Appropriations Committee chair Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said on Thursday morning that the deal “allows the appropriations process to move forward toward a final funding agreement which addresses the needs of the American people.”
Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Richard Shelby (R-AL) signaled his approval. “I’m pleased that we have finally reached an agreement on the continuing resolution,” Shelby said, adding that now lawmakers “must get serious” about completing the bills for fiscal year 2022.
Now the proposal can be brought to the House floor on Thursday as the Friday deadline looms closer. However, the bill faces serious turbulence in the Senate, where several Republicans threaten to hold it hostage to force Democrats to defund President Joe Biden’s vaccine and testing mandate. While such a move would not block the plan indefinitely, it could delay its passing for days.
Republican senators want to force a shutdown of the government because Joe Biden is trying to save the lives of their constituents. So much for being pro-life.
—————–
Don’t we have to look at this through the lens of Republicans delaying everything they can to delay the BBB vote?
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The Republican party has staked out its pro-covid position. They want their constituents to have the right to get sick and die.
————————
The problem with a continuing resolution is it freezes spending at current levels.
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The Republicans have to pander to the anti-vaxxers. But becoming the Covid party is hardly a popular stance.
House and Senate negotiators have moved closer to averting a government shutdown at midnight Friday—close enough that the House will vote Thursday on the continuing resolution. The agreement between House and Senate appropriators will extend funding until Feb. 18. That’s a minor win for Republicans who want to deny President Joe Biden and majority Democrats the ability to spend money on the programs they prioritize, forcing them to continue to operate on 2021’s budget, approved in 2020 and therefore a “Trump budget.” […]
House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro announced the agreement with Senate appropriators Thursday morning, saying it “includes virtually no changes to existing funding or policy,” but does include $7 billion for resettling Afghanistan refugees. As to the Feb. 18 deadline, she said: “While I wish it were earlier, this agreement allows the appropriations process to move forward toward a final funding agreement which addresses the needs of the American people.”
[…] Speaking of assholes, there’s the gang still trying to force a government shutdown, egged on by Trump surrogate and former Trump budget official Russ Vought since [Trump] is still banned on Twitter.
.
@SenMikeLee @RogerMarshallMD & @SenTedCruz are courageously fighting to defund the vaccine mandate in the Senate. They should not be so alone. Thank you senators! More later on why those calling for use of the congressional review act are wrong and engaged in a fake fight.
Those guys have little support from other Republicans in the Senate, who have seen the results of this game before and don’t want to go there again. “I think shutdowns almost never work out very well,” Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairman Roy Blunt told The Hill Wednesday following a lunch when Republicans fought this out. “There was not full agreement, that’s for sure,” he said on whether to try to force a shutdown.
McConnell, who didn’t bother to engage in that debate, insists the shutdown isn’t going to happen. “We’re not going to shut the government down,” he said on Fox Thursday. “That makes no sense for anyone. Almost no one on either side thinks it’s a good idea.”
The handful of Republicans are holding out the threat of blocking a quick vote on government funding, trying to get a simple majority vote on an amendment to end the vaccine mandate on private companies, and the assholes are getting encouragement from somewhere. Gee, wonder how that could be. Oh right, the Democratic asshole.
New – Manchin doesn’t rule out supporting amendment to DEFUND vaccine mandate on businesses. This is why Republican Sens. Marshall and Lee are demanding a 51-vote threshold. Says he backs mandate on feds but tells us he’s “less enthused” with business mandate
Once again, Joe Manchin is screwing his Democratic colleagues and his president, apparently just because he can. His enabling of the Republicans makes it that much more likely the bill doesn’t pass by Friday at midnight, and ensures that there’s at least a short shutdown over the weekend
The Biden administration plans to distribute an additional 25 million free tests to community sites in order to expand access to at-home tests in underserved communities.
“The fact is that people should wind up getting vaccinated and boosted if they’re eligible for a boost. I keep coming back to that because that’s really the solution to this problem,” Fauci said.
Biden will announce today that the U.S. is extending the mask requirement for domestic flights, rail travel and public transportation through March 18.
An emboldened religious right wants the public to pay for its schools.
The plaintiffs in Carson v. Makin, a case being heard next Wednesday, December 8, begin their brief to the Supreme Court with an absolutely ridiculous historical comparison.
“In the 19th century, Maine’s public schools expelled students for adhering to their faith,” they claim, citing one example of a Catholic student expelled for not completing lessons off a Protestant bible. Now, according to the brief, Maine is committing a similarly repugnant sin against religious people by refusing to pay state residents’ tuition at private religious schools.
Under this reasoning, there is no relevant difference between denying a public education to a Catholic student and refusing to pay for private religious education. […]
Carson […] moves the battleground from whether religious conservatives can seek exemptions from individual laws to whether they can also demand that the public actively fund their faith.
[…] Carson claims the state of Maine must spend existing tax revenue from its secular residents to pay the private school tuition of some religious students. No one in Maine is prohibited from sending their children to a religious private school. The plaintiffs in Carson already send at least one child to such schools. The question is whether the Constitution requires the government — and, by extension, anyone who pays taxes to that government — to subsidize religious education.
Notably, the state could also wind up having to pay for hate speech in the process. According to Maine’s brief, both of the plaintiff families in Carson want the state to pay for tuition at schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students and teachers. […]
Carson also involves Maine’s fairly unusual public school vouchers program, so it’s unclear what immediate impact a victory for the plaintiffs in this case would have in other states. Although much of Maine operates ordinary public schools run by local school districts, some students — predominantly those who live in sparsely populated areas where there is no local school — are not assigned to a particular school. Instead, the state offers to pay the private school tuition of those nearly 5,000 students, who would otherwise have no access to a free education.
Only “nonsectarian” schools are eligible for this subsidy. Parents can still choose to send their children to an institution that seeks to inculcate those children into a particular religious faith, but they won’t receive state funds to do so.
[…] Just last year, the Court took a significant step toward tearing down the distinction between laws that impose unwanted obligations on people of faith and laws that merely deny taxpayer dollars to religious institutions. In a worst-case scenario for the separation of church and state, Carson could obliterate that distinction.
[…] Barely two decades ago, there was a serious constitutional debate about whether states are even permitted to fund religious education. As established in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), longstanding precedent holds that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” In 2002, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris asked the court to consider a school voucher program that primarily benefited religious schools. Though a majority of the Court abandoned Everson’s strict approach in this case, four justices dissented and would have applied the stricter rule.
Yet even after Zelman, the Court largely viewed the question of whether to subsidize religious education as a matter within lawmakers’ discretion.
Until the Roberts Court.
Most notably, in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), the Court held that states must subsidize religiously affiliated schools under certain circumstances. Espinoza held that a state may not deny a subsidy to a religious institution “simply because of what it is” — that is, simply because the institution identifies with a particular faith.
[…] Suppose, for example, a state provides grants to help set up food banks and soup kitchens. If a church wishes to set up a soup kitchen and is otherwise eligible for the grant, it can’t be denied the grant solely because it is a religious institution. Its “status” as a Christian-affiliated entity is not a valid basis to deny a grant under Espinoza.
Now imagine a slightly different church, that wishes to use the state-funded grant to purchase Bibles that will be distributed to people at the soup kitchen. In this scenario, the church is no longer just providing a secular service, food for the hungry. It’s providing an inherently religious service, the distribution of a holy text. This kind of inherently religious activity is what the Court meant by religious “use,” and Espinoza suggests states may still be allowed to deny funding to such activities […]
And this distinction between religious “status” and religious “use” is now front and center in the Carson case.
Although the tuition program at the heart of the Carson case predates Espinoza, it might as well have been designed specifically to survive judicial review after that decision. As the state explains in its brief, Maine determines whether a particular school is “sectarian,” and therefore ineligible for state subsidies, by asking if it “promotes the faith or belief system with which it is associated and/or presents the material taught through the lens of this faith.”
[Carson claims] that policies which require religious families to “choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit” are unconstitutional — and that Maine’s tuition program forces these families to choose between “their right to tuition assistance or their right to freely exercise their religion.”
It’s a deeply radical argument, […] if the Constitution does not permit states to force families to choose between receiving a free education and a religious one, then any public school system is potentially at risk.
[…] Espinoza was also a 5-4 decision, before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death gave Republican appointees a supermajority on the Court. […]
it’s hard to draw a principled line between a school voucher program that excludes religious education and a traditional public school system that excludes religious education. In the likely event the Carson plaintiffs prevail before the Supreme Court, it is probably inevitable that someone in a traditional public school district will file a new lawsuit claiming they are also entitled to have their private school tuition paid for by their state’s taxpayers.
Minnesota on Thursday became the second U.S. state to confirm a case of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
The variant was discovered in an adult male resident who had recently visited New York for the Anime NYC convention, the Minnesota Health Department said in a news release. He is fully vaccinated and developed mild symptoms on Nov. 22, one day after the conclusion of the convention, which was held at the Javits Center from Nov. 19 to 21. He was tested Nov. 24 and advised to isolate from others; his symptoms have since resolved.
Gov. Tim Walz (D) called on Minnesotans to get vaccines and boosters and to get tested and wear masks indoors.
“This news is concerning, but it is not a surprise,” he said. “We know that this virus is highly infectious and moves quickly throughout the world.”
Because of the Minnesota patient’s presence at the convention, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said in a statement that New Yorkers should “assume there is community spread of the variant in our city.” He noted that the event required masks and vaccination. Attendees should get tested and take additional social-distancing precautions, the mayor said, adding that contact tracers would be reaching out.
A day earlier, the nation’s first case was discovered in a San Francisco resident who had returned from South Africa on Nov. 22, began feeling ill around Nov. 25 and got tested Nov. 28. The patient, who is in self-isolation, has mild symptoms that are improving.
The Minnesota Health Department said its omicron case was found through its variant surveillance program, adding that the program “allowed MDH to quickly identify omicron once it entered the state and made it more likely that Minnesota would be among the first states to find the variant.”
Minnesota epidemiologists are continuing to investigate the case alongside New York City and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. […]
[…] Multiple news organizations, including The Post, have now confirmed from former Trump aides that he tested positive for coronavirus on Sept. 26, 2020, three days before his Sept. 29 debate with Joe Biden. So he had reason to believe he might have been infected heading into the debate.
Trump was informed of the positive test on Air Force One on Sept. 26, en route to a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the book says. But the White House concealed this from the public and from debate organizers, even though he was “tired” and had a “slight cold.” [Lies. Trump had coronavirus symptoms, as SC pointed out in comment 220.]
Instead, Trump took a second test that came back negative, and Meadows called Trump to inform him of it. The Guardian reports that the book then relays the following:
Meadows says Trump took that call as “full permission to press on as if nothing had happened.” His chief of staff, however, “instructed everyone in his immediate circle to treat him as if he was positive” throughout the Pennsylvania trip.
In other words, everyone around Trump was apparently told he was potentially contagious, and he even appeared potentially symptomatic […] If this is right, then what happened at the debate is even worse than you thought.
That’s because multiple people around Trump, including his wife, Melania Trump, and his kids Donald Jr. and Eric, all sat maskless at the Sept. 29 debate, according to contemporaneous reports, despite the fact that debate attendees were required to wear masks.
As numerous reporters personally witnessed at the time, Trump’s family members did this after rebuffing a direct request to mask up from a doctor with the Cleveland Clinic, which helped organize the debate. That doctor even offered them masks, and they declined. […]
Indeed, Melania Trump and numerous other people in Trump’s inner circle were both with Trump in the days after he tested positive and then subsequently tested positive themselves […]
And on the same day Trump tested positive, he held a reception announcing Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett — with Melania Trump in attendance — after which numerous people present then tested positive.
It’s hard to know which of Trump’s family members and top aides might have been told at the time of Trump’s positive test. But it’s extremely likely that some or all of them knew about it, especially since Meadows apparently put out word that Trump should be treated as positive.
Also note that the Cleveland Clinic required all attendees to test negative before the debate, but the campaigns were responsible for testing their own candidates and their entourages. As Eric Boehlert notes, this neatly demonstrated how our institutions utterly failed to treat Trump as the malevolent force that he was — and remains. […]
Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat whose narrow loss in the governor’s race in 2018 catapulted her to national prominence as a voting rights advocate, said Wednesday that she would run again for governor in 2022, setting up a high-profile potential rematch with Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.
Three years after Ms. Abrams lost to Mr. Kemp — a longtime political rival — by about 55,000 votes, her candidacy ensures that voting rights will remain at the center of the political conversation in Democratic circles and in Georgia, where Republicans enacted a sweeping law of voting restrictions this year.
Ms. Abrams’s campaign also carries historic significance: If she is successful, she would become the first Black governor of Georgia and the first Black woman to serve as governor of any state. […]
Followup to comment 259: In related news, Donald Trump responded to Abrams’ announcement by saying he intended to defeat her: “I beat her single-handedly, without much of a candidate, in 2018. I’ll beat her again.” The former president added, however, that he won’t support Kemp’s re-election campaign, because the GOP governor didn’t help him overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
Between 2010 and 2018, Arizona’s Wendy Rogers ran for elected office in every election cycle. It didn’t go well: After five attempts, she lost five times.
But in 2020, the far-right Republican was elected to Arizona’s state Senate, where she helped champion the state’s utterly bonkers election “audit” and became one of Donald Trump’s favorite allies.
[…] Mediaite noted this week:
Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers tweeted a photo of late U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy on Saturday, with text encouraging people to follow in his footsteps of getting, “rid of the communists.”
The Republican legislator specifically urged people to “be more like” Joe McCarthy, which is a phrase that was quite uncommon in American politics up until recent years.
Indeed, this is the latest reminder that for much of the right, McCarthyism isn’t a bad thing, and seeing McCarthy as a villain is a mistake.
Steve Bannon, for example, has praised McCarthy’s radical campaign against communist infiltration, and as we’ve discussed, he’s not alone.
A reporter from the Dallas Morning News told Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2013 that he’d been compared at times to McCarthy. The Texan said the criticism might be “a sign that perhaps we’re doing something right,” which seemed like a curious response given the context.
Asked specifically, “Is McCarthy someone you admire?” Cruz wouldn’t answer.
A few years earlier, conservative activists rewriting Texas’ state’s curriculum briefly recommended telling students that McCarthy was a hero who’d been “vindicated” by history.
When thinking about the differences between the contemporary Republican Party and how much it’s changed over the last generation, look no further than those who’ve decided McCarthyism wasn’t so bad after all.
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — There’s a new chief judge at the helm of the nation’s largest federal appeals court as Chief Judge Emeritus Sidney Thomas passed the gavel on Wednesday to Mary Murguia.
Murguia is the second woman, and first Latina, to hold the position, which she takes by virtue of seniority and will hold for a seven-year term….
A Kansas native, Murguia is one of seven children born to Mexican immigrants. Her brother Carlos is a former federal judge and her twin sister Janet is president of the civil rights organization UnidosUS, formerly the National Council of La Raza.
[…]
As a circuit judge, Murguia penned several noteworthy opinions centered around immigration, including Grigoryan v. Barr in 2019, where she and three colleagues held that the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals deprived three Armenian asylum seekers of their due process rights by revoking their asylum and ordering their deportation without allowing them to rebut accusations of fraud.
[…]
She recently sat alongside her predecessor Thomas on an 11-judge “en banc” tribunal that on Tuesday upheld California’s ban on large-capacity gun magazines…..
[…]
France’s prominent Le Petit Robert dictionary, considered a linguistic authority in the country, recently added a new pronoun to its online edition. The word is « iel », a gender-neutral merging of the masculine « il » (he) and the feminine « elle » (she). This new pronoun, intended for those who identify as neither male nor female, is already used online and by younger generations. But the move to include it in the dictionary provoked a backlash from politicians and linguists. One vocal critic of the new pronoun is French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer. He says it’s the latest expression of “wokism” which, he claims, threatens France’s universalist model[fiction]. […]
As the video notes, and something people (including myself) have been pointing out for years, it’s illegal in France to gather statistics related to (as one example) racism. That means what data which does exist about the problem is largely inferences and proxy-measurements. So it’s rather like asserting vaccines don’t look by only examining data from countries where few are vaccinated… there is no racism because none has been measured.
blfsays
me@263, Oops! it’s rather like asserting vaccines don’t look → it’s rather like asserting vaccines don’t work…
chigau (違う)says
Today’s date is
2x11x29x79x401
blfsays
Today’s date, 20211202, is also a palindrome (when either multiplying out The Chigau Primes, or writing it in that ISO-like notation).
chigau (違う)says
I noted the palindrome so I started by dividing by 11, and carried on from there.
[…] Dale Ho is a civil rights lawyer nominated by President Biden to the federal bench in New York. Until his nomination, Ho was the ACLU’s lead lawyer on voting rights. He’s been a central figure in many of our voting rights stories over the past few years. Here Ho is taking on Kris Kobach over his controversial proof-of-citizenship voter registration law, in a case where Kobach was sanctioned and ordered to take legal education classes. Here is Ho taking Trump’s citizenship question on the census all the way to the Supreme Court, and winning. You get the idea. Ho is smart, effective, and a prime target for Republican senators considering his nomination.
Enter Ted Cruz.
Ho’s confirmation hearing was Wednesday. And Cruz took his best shot. By his own comms guy’s telling, Cruz mopped the floor with Ho.
But give the exchange a look. I found the whole thing amusing. Cruz is throwing punches like windmill, but Ho calmly keeps him at arm’s length and the punches don’t land. Cruz at first seems perplexed, then starts to seem intimidated, like he’s bitten off more than he intended. The most Cruz can muster is harrumphs. Ho remains unperturbed. That’s my sense of it. You can decide for yourself: […]
Study turns up amazing evidence of how mask mandates save lives and is immediately covered up.
At the request of Gov. Mike Parson, the Missouri Department of Health conducted an analysis of COVID-19 infections and deaths in those cities and counties that implemented mask mandates compared to the rest of the state. As The Missouri Independent reports, the results of that analysis were clear: During every part of the pandemic, mask mandates worked to reduce rates of infections and prevent deaths.
The department then sent an email to Parson’s office reporting that the mandates worked, complete with a pair of graphs showing the results of their analysis. From of April through October, areas with mask mandates averaged 15.8 cases per day for every 100,000 residents. Those areas without a mask mandate had 21.7 cases per day over the same period. The difference in the rate of deaths is even more stark. Deaths in areas without mask mandates occurred at a rate three times higher than in those areas with masks.
The difference between the results is consistent over the course of the entire pandemic, through both peaks and valleys of infection in the state. The mask-gap is there before vaccines become available, after vaccines become available, and right through the period in which delta becomes dominant. At the very end of the study period, mandates are saving lives more effectively than ever, with a death rate in masked areas that’s literally fifteen times lower than in unmasked areas.
So naturally, Parsons did what any good Republican governor would do when confronted with information that could save thousands of lives in his state—he buried it.
Despite being instructed to collect this information the results were not made public. It took a Sunshine Law request from the Independent and the Documenting COVID-19 project to obtain charts and emails connected to the analysis. Those emails show that the analysis was actually performed by Assistant Bureau Chief Nathan Koffarnus, who forwards the results back to Department of Health Director Donald Kauerauf. While acknowledging that other variables are to be considered, Kaurauf makes this statement in his response.
“I think we can say with great confidence reviewing the public health literature and then looking at the results in your study that communities where masks were required had a lower positivity rate per 100,000 and experienced lower death rates.” […]
The head of popular mixed martial arts organization UFC said he tested positive for COVID-19 and that he’s turning to a controversial figure for advice.
Dana White, president of UFC, spoke on “The Jim Rome Podcast” on Wednesday and revealed that he tested positive for COVID-19. White confirmed that he was vaccinated and he temporarily experienced a loss of smell, which he regained within 48 hours.
White also said that he consulted with Joe Rogan, host of the popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” for advice on what to do about his diagnosis.
Rogan has been known to spread controversial ideas about the COVID-19 vaccines, like how young people don’t need to get vaccinated against the virus.
That prompted the White House to respond, with communications director Kate Bedingfield telling CNN in April, “I guess my first question would be, did Joe Rogan become a medical doctor while we weren’t looking? I’m not sure that taking scientific and medical advice from Joe Rogan is perhaps the most productive way for people to get their information.”
Rogan himself contracted COVID-19 in September and said he tried a variety of treatments, including ivermectin, despite the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) saying the drug should not be used to treat or prevent COVID-19.
Now White has tested positive for the virus and, according to ESPN, told “The Jim Rome Podcast” that he called Rogan immediately after his positive test. He has taken a monocular antibody treatment, NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) drip, vitamin drip and ivermectin.
[…] The UFC president hopes to test negative very soon so he can attend the UFC Fight Night event on Saturday in Las Vegas.
According to ESPN, White was one of the most aggressive commissioners in sports during the coronavirus pandemic. UFC was able to keep its events going on Fight Island in Abu Dhabi during the pandemic in 2020 by working with the United Arab Emirates government. It also managed to continue hosting events in Las Vegas at its Apex facility.
Wonkette: “Laura Ingraham Just Gently Threatening Conservative Justices If They Refuse To Overturn Roe”
Wow, who knew Laura Ingraham was so vehemently against women’s rights, hahahahaha just kidding everyone did.
After yesterday, when Mississippi’s douchebro solicitor general Scott Stewart told the six conservative partisan hacks on the Supreme Court why fascist white men should be in charge of all the uteruses in Mississippi, Ingraham’s show last night was a doozy, especially when she started gently threatening the Court’s conservative justices.
Media Matters, as usual, with some transcript and video: [video available at the link]
Ingraham’s long-winded rant was long and winded, but the really good part came at the end:
INGRAHAM: The left claims to care about democracy, so let’s let the people decide the important questions presented by abortion and if a court with the majority of six Republican appointees fails to put Roe to rest, then it should expect a conservative-led movement to shrink the court’s power. Oh, and it would also mean adios to The Federalist Society. And that’s the angle.
That’s right, if the partisan hack judges fail to do what they were partisan hack-ily hired to do, then conservatives will take away the Supreme Court’s power. And destroy the Federalist Society, because what is it even for if the judges who make it to the Court don’t follow orders? What do they think they are, some kind of independent judiciary?
Ingraham really underlined this point during an interview with Senator Ted Cruz, seditionist of Texas, saying, “Senator, if we have six Republican appointees on this court, after all the money that has been raised, the Federalist Society and all these fat cat dinners, I’m sorry, I’m pissed about this.” She’s pissed, y’all! After ALL THIS MONEY!
So that was the quiet part loud.
But really, the entire clip above is so bizarre, if you want to waste seven minutes of your life.
Ingraham was really upset that Justice Sonia Sotomayor told the Mississippi douchebro to have several seats when he started barfing out unscientific conspiracy theories about fetal pain. […]
Ingraham did her eye-rolling scoffing thing at Sotomayor’s suggestion that the Court will end up with (even more of) a “noxious stench” on it if it acts like the paid-for clique of partisan hacks Ingraham wants it to be and overturns Roe. Ingraham — again, an idiot conservative ideologue — relied on rotting dead conservative ideologues like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia to argue that AKSHULLY the Court got the stain on it when it decided Roe in 1973.
[…] a new poll says only 24 percent of Americans want Roe overturned […]
Coronavirus cases in South Africa nearly triple in three days as fears over omicron grow.
South Africa’s new daily coronavirus cases have almost tripled in three days, according to new figures released Thursday, raising alarms over the possible spread of the new omicron variant recently detected by the country’s scientists.
New daily confirmed cases rose to 11,535 on Thursday from 8,561 on Wednesday and 4,373 the previous day, according to official statistics. The cases represent a 22.4 percent positivity rate of people tested for the virus, up from 16.5 percent on Wednesday, a massive jump from a 1 percent positivity rate in early November, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases said.
The majority of new infections were in the populous Gauteng province around the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area, with 8,280 cases, the NICD said.
“Omicron is probably the fastest-spreading variant that South Africa has ever seen,” said Tulio de Oliveira, the director of the Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University, reacting to news of the increase in cases.
Although scientists are warning that it is still too early to say for sure that omicron is behind the surge in cases, the rapid rise means omicron might already be overtaking the delta variant, experts said.
While the delta variant was dominant in all provinces until the end of October, the NICD said omicron was present in 74 percent of the genomes it sequenced in November.
Shabir Madhi, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said all indications were that omicron could be more transmissible than delta.
“The majority of cases are currently presenting as a mild illness,” he added. […]
Facing a huge coronavirus surge, Chancellor Angela Merkel, her successor, Olaf Scholz, and state governors agreed on tough new restrictions on people who have not been inoculated.
Germany announced tough new restrictions on Thursday to exclude unvaccinated people from much of public life, seeking to break a soaring fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic and blunt the worrisome new Omicron variant.
The new rules, which stopped short of enforcing a complete lockdown on the unvaccinated, followed an agreement hammered out between Chancellor Angela Merkel, her successor, Olaf Scholz, and state governors.
Under the new rules, those wishing to go to bars and restaurants, or shop anywhere but in stores carrying basic necessities — like pharmacies or grocery stores — have to present proof of vaccination or documentation of recovery from a recent coronavirus infection. Some of those restrictions have been in effect already in some states; the agreement sets a uniform nationwide standard.
With the new rules, and a promise by Mr. Scholz this week that he would push a law making vaccinations mandatory, Germany is following the path of Austria, which recently mandated that all adults be inoculated by February. It comes as both countries contend with strident anti-vaccination sentiment in their populations that have kept vaccination rates low compared with other western European countries.
[…] In addition to the restrictions on shopping by the unvaccinated, states may also require under the new rules that negative test results be presented in addition to proof of immunity at events, restaurants, bars or even shops.
In a throwback to earlier lockdowns, those who can’t prove they have recovered from the illness or that they have been vaccinated will be restricted to meetings or gatherings, whether at home or in a public space, of only two households.
However, the restrictions stop short of requiring the unvaccinated to stay at home, in contrast with the stricter Austrian restrictions.
[…] Schools will remain open, but masks will be made mandatory.
[…] Austria, the only European country to order mandatory vaccinations, has almost twice as many cases per capita as Germany. But Austria’s caseload, still among the world’s highest, has started to decline, while Germany’s has not. […]
One day after an initial “informal” meeting, Senate Democrats again met with Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough to officially make the case for the inclusion of temporary immigration protections in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. This is now the third attempt.
”Under the so-called Byrd rule, reconciliation bills, which can pass with a filibuster-proof majority, must primarily impact the federal budget,” Roll Call reported. Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter noted that MacDonough didn’t endorse or reject the proposal following Tuesday’s informal meeting. Roll Call reports that aides at Wednesday’s official meeting said it was a “productive conversation.”
Under the plan passed by House Democrats last month, more than 7 million immigrants could be eligible for work permits, deportation protections, and international travel authorization for a period of up to 10 years. “The original proposal included a path to citizenship for approximately 8 million undocumented immigrants,” McCarter noted, but has sequentially been watered down as MacDonough, an unelected Senate staffer, has issued nonbinding opinion after nonbinding opinion against protections.
But the report indicated there could still be more “revisions” to satisfy MacDonough, who, once again, was elected by no one and whose opinions are nonbinding and can be overruled. “This is the formal Byrd bath, not the final Byrd bath,” Immigration Hub Deputy Director Kerri Talbot told Roll Call. “There will have to be some adjustments,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said in the report. “We’re gonna go to the parliamentarian first and then adjust.” […]
“Budget reconciliation is the only means, as of now, by which Democrats can pass substantive legislation because it is not subject to the filibuster,” McCarter noted. “Absent an agreement from a few Democratic senators to end the filibuster, this is the only game in town for fulfilling a decades-long promise.” […]
Dr. Oz Hopes to Replace Rand Paul as Biggest Quack in Senate
Explaining his decision to enter the political sphere, Dr. Mehmet Oz said that he hopes to oust Rand Paul as the biggest quack in the United States Senate.
Oz said that Paul, a former ophthalmologist, has shown an impressive obliviousness about medicine while serving in Washington, but added, “I think I can out-quack him.”
“In the many times he’s grilled Dr. Fauci, has he ever asked him about the health benefits of magic coffee beans or umckaloabo-root extract?” Oz said. “I think America deserves a senator who will ask those tough questions.”
Paul, speaking to reporters, seemed unfazed by Oz’s determination to supplant him as the Senate’s top quack.
“I respect Dr. Oz as a fellow-charlatan, and the competition can only light a fire under me to become a bigger charlatan myself,” he said. “But if, in the end, he winds up besting me, I’ve had a good run.”
The first major infusion of federal cash from the bipartisan infrastructure law is on its way to states across the U.S. to overhaul the nation’s aging water infrastructure and dangerous lead pipes.
The Biden administration announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency will distribute $7.4 billion to states, tribes and territories for 2022 focused on water infrastructure grants and loan forgiveness. The funding is part of a broader $50 billion investment in water infrastructure from the infrastructure law, which will be doled out over five years.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in an interview that it is the “single largest investment in water infrastructure” in the history of the federal government.
“This law’s investment in water is nothing short of transformational,” Regan said. “We’re less than three weeks post the president signing this, and we’re hitting the ground running.” […]
A New Hampshire man who threatened to hang six members of Congress if they did not ‘get behind Donald Trump’ will spend 33 months in federal prison, according to officials.
Ryder Winegar, 34, of Amherst, was sentenced for six counts of threatening members of Congress and one count of transmitting interstate threatening communications, acting U.S. Attorney John J. Farley for the District of New Hampshire announced Wednesday in a news release.
Winegar left voicemails at the offices of three U.S. senators and three representatives in the early morning hours of Dec. 16, 2020, according to court documents and court statements.
That was two days after the electoral college confirmed President Joe Biden won the election.
He identified himself by name or by his telephone number in some of the messages, according to the news release. Prosecutors said Winegar threatened to hang the officials and included specific threats of violence.
“I got some advice for you,” he said in one voicemail, according to prosecutors. “Here’s the advice: ‘Donald Trump is your president. If you don’t get behind him, we’re going to hang you until you die.'”
In another, Winegar said: “It really, really, it boils down to two camps. You either support our president, support liberty … or you’re not.” The messages included profane language that threatened to kill the lawmaker and criticized vaccinations. […]
Gov. Ron DeSantis over the summer sent dozens of Florida law enforcement officers and equipment to the southern border in Texas, and racked up a taxpayer-funded bill that so far amounts to at least $1.6 million but is expected to keep growing. […]
Batshit bonkers Lara Logan goes a bit further to prove her bonafides as the worst of the worst.
Once-respected 60 Minutes journalist turned right-wing fear-mongering shill Lara Logan is doubling down on her assertion that Dr. Anthony Fauci can be compared one-to-one with the Nazi “Angel of Death.” Earlier this week, Logan made news after her appearance on a Fox News’ segment with host Pete Hegseth, when she said, “What you see on Dr. Fauci—this is what people say to me: that he doesn’t represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele.”
The Auschwitz Museum responded with a tweet: “Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic, and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful. It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.” Shortly thereafter, the Auschwitz Museum also said that Ms. Logan had blocked their account. Since that time, Logan and Fox News have refused to say much of anything about her statement.
Let us remember this: According to Lara Logan, she knows exactly who Dr. Josef Mengele was. In fact, when she made her first claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci and his calls for public health policies that would require people to get vaccinated and wear masks to mitigate a pandemic that has killed three-quarters of a million Americans in just over a year and a half, she explained that that people “all across the world are saying” that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “response to COVID” reminds them of “Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps.” And somehow, the blame of “suffering that has been created because of this disease is now being seen in the cold light of day,” falls on Dr. Fauci’s shoulders because … something-something Nazis.
As the Washington Post points out, Mr. Pete Hegseth and his other guest (let’s call him Complicit Coward #2) show not a whisper of a reaction to the abhorrent and inflammatory statements being made by Logan. […]
the reason she was let go from her prestigious job at 60 Minutes was because of a fake news-laden story on the Benghazi attacks. […]
Logan’s recent appearances on Fox News have included the promotion of xenophobic conspiracy theories that migrants seeking entry into the United States are an attempt by foreign regimes to launch a secret “virus attack” on the U.S. She followed this with assertions that immigration is the real reason for “spikes” in COVID-19 cases in red states. There is the old saying that you couldn’t write this stuff, but included in that is how much these “theories” sound like rejected 1990s action film ideas that even straight-to-video production companies wouldn’t touch.
Logan isn’t done. The day after spewing her nonsense, she spent her time on her social media accounts, pushing out truly bananas conspiracy theory bullshit, with caveats that she had “reviewed” things. One of her reviewed items? The false claim that “HIV does not cause AIDS,” and, in fact, the drugs given to treat HIV are the real killers. […]
Her Twitter feed is filled with misinformation about the efficacy of mask-wearing [etc. and fucking etc.]
Fox News and Logan have refused to apologize for the insensitivity and historical inaccuracy of the statements. In response, Anti-Defamation spokesman Jake Hyman told CNN Business: “Logan and the network seem to be immune to shame and allergic to remorse. It’s equally disturbing, yet also not surprising, Logan would double-down this morning on Twitter. Make no mistake, these odious comparisons only serve to trivialize and distort the meaning and memory of the Holocaust.”
Michael Bornstein, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp where Mengele practiced his atrocities on Jews, told CNN Logan’s comments were “disgusting,” saying that “there is absolutely zero comparison” between a Nazi who murdered and tortured children and the guy telling Americans to get vaccinated and wash their hands.
It is important to contextualize history whenever possible. It is also important not to be reductive in order to compare apples to Nazi monsters. But if the right-wing-o-sphere must reduce their criteria in order to speak to their rabid zombified audience, here’s a simple way to think of things: If millions of people weren’t killed and raped and tortured due to an ethnic cleansing campaign in the thing you are talking about, don’t compare it to the Nazis’ treatment of European Jews. […]
Jim Jordan apparently sees the pandemic as a fad that Americans can collectively grow tired of. That’s not how any of this works.
Six months ago, Republican Jim Jordan was asked about Covid-19 vaccinations. The Ohio congressman responded as if the pandemic was old news unworthy of ongoing discussion.
“Look, I think we’re way past this,” the far-right lawmaker said. “I think the country is ready to move on and we’re done with this, but you guys just keep wanting to talk about it.”
In context, “you guys” seemed to refer to journalists, who continued to cover the ongoing public-health crisis, to Jordan’s apparent frustration.
Yesterday, as HuffPost noted, he pushed a similarly misguided line.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) declared Thursday that “real America” is done with COVID-19 ― a day after the first case of the new omicron variant was found in the U.S. and as coronavirus infections rise around the country, including in his own state. “Real America is done with #COVID19,” Jordan tweeted, ignoring data, experts and reality. “The only people who don’t understand that are Fauci and Biden.”
Let’s note for context that Jordan is currently a member of the select congressional panel investing the coronavirus crisis and the federal response to the pandemic. He is, in other words, in a unique position to understand the seriousness of the current situation, with exceptional access to data, officials, research, and evidence.
[…] Part of the problem here is with the Republican congressman’s blithe indifference to ongoing events. Tens of thousands of Americans are currently hospitalized as a result of Covid-19 infections. The pandemic claimed the lives of a thousand Americans yesterday, and we’re likely to see similar numbers today, tomorrow, and the day after.
Whether Jordan understands this or not, these Americans are “real,” and while I’m sure they and their loved ones would love to be “done with” Covid-19, they’re confronting a tragic reality anyway.
Also note the degree to which the GOP lawmaker seems to think a nation can simply grow bored with a deadly contagion. We’re “way past” the pandemic. We’re prepared to simply “move on” as if the crisis has passed. Those who are “real” are “done” with Covid-19.
[…] I’m curious about Jordan’s vision for the near future. If [Jordan] is right, and “Real America is done” with Covid-19, what does that mean in practical terms? Does he envision a national landscape in which “real” people simply pretend the crisis is over?
Because if so, a lot of “real” hospitals are going to overflow, a lot of “real” morgues are going to fill, and a lot of “real” families are going to suffer horrible losses.
Mitch McConnell has told colleagues and donors Senate Republicans won’t release a legislative agenda before next year’s midterms, according to people who’ve attended private meetings with the minority leader…. Every midterm cycle, there are Republican donors and operatives who argue the party should release a positive, proactive governing outline around which candidates can rally. McConnell adamantly rejects this idea, preferring to skewer Democrats for their perceived failures.
[…] as the shutdown deadline approached, a handful of Senate Republicans made a rather specific threat: They were prepared to force a shutdown unless members voted, up or down, on an amendment that would’ve defunded the administration’s vaccine policy.
Eager to avoid a dumb crisis, Democrats agreed to the deal, confident that the amendment wouldn’t pass. That assumption was accurate: The amendment needed a simple majority to pass, but it ended up with 48 votes.
In fact, literally every Senate Republican on the floor at the time — including the ostensible “moderates,” such as Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski — voted for the amendment to defund Biden’s policy, regardless of its efficacy. […]
let’s not brush past the extraordinary details: Republican lawmakers were so outraged by a policy that’s proven effective at mitigating the spread of a deadly contagion that they were prepared to shut down their own country’s federal government.
[…] The next shutdown deadline is Feb. 18. Good luck to us all.
Fauci ‘Astounded’ By Fox’s Silence After Host Compared Him To Nazi Doctor
Top White House COVID-19 expert Dr. Anthony Fauci put Fox News on blast Thursday night for staying quiet after Fox Nation host Lara Logan compared him to sadistic Nazi doctor Josef Mengele earlier this week.
“What I find striking, Chris, is how she gets no discipline whatsoever from the Fox network, how they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action,” Fauci told MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “I’m astounded by that.”
The doctor slammed Logan’s “absolutely preposterous and disgusting” comparison.
“It’s an insult to all the people who suffered and died under the Nazi regime in concentration camps,” he said. “It’s unconscionable, what she said.”
Fauci also took aim at how Logan downplayed the severity of COVID-19 by claiming the coronavirus was “very treatable” and falsely comparing its death rate to that of the flu (more than 770,000 Americans have died from the virus).
“She absolutely has no idea what she’s talking about,” the doctor told Hayes. “She’s completely incorrect in everything she says.”
Logan’s comments marked an appalling escalation of conservatives’ sustained smear campaign against Fauci for advocating for mask mandates and other COVID-19 safety measures that have become central to right-wing culture wars.
Jewish organizations have been blasting the Fox Nation host, who has flatly disregarded their criticism to the point of blocking the Auschwitz Memorial on Twitter.
Hmmm…astounded that the company which aided and abetted the deaths of three quarters of a million Americans is tone-deaf about the Nazis they’ve hired?!
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Fox News isn’t a real news organization. it is a cancer on the fabric of America.
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These idiots at FOX have decided to take on an enemy with an unusually formidable intellect and strong will. They’re going to pay for it.
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I don’t think anything will come of attacking Faux Noise. They insist on defending themselves as an entertainment channel and not a news channel, yet they benefit from cable fees that are afforded to news channels.
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Right-wing propaganda network that whips voters into an anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, White Nationalist fervor compares someone else to the Nazis?
Jan. 6 committee members on Thursday told Politico that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows may have poked holes in his argument for withholding his contacts with former President Trump on the day of the deadly Capitol insurrection by revealing selected details in his book set to be released next week.
“It’s … very possible that by discussing the events of Jan. 6 in his book, if he does that, he’s waiving any claim of privilege. So, it’d be very difficult for him to maintain ‘I can’t speak about events to you, but I can speak about them in my book,’” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), one of the panel’s nine members, told Politico. […]
What else might people do to prevent COVID-19—aside from taking a free, safe, effective, FDA-approved vaccine? Horse paste was all the rage for a while. Bleach injections never really took off, despite the ocher abomination’s imprimatur. Oh, I know, maybe we can prank them into eating handfuls of dirt!
Nah, too ridiculous. Even MAGAs have a limit, right? Right? Oh, dear God, tell me I’m right.
Looks like we’ve crossed the Rubicon for about the 832nd time since the Trump era began, and on the opposite bank they’re scarfing dirt like popcorn shrimp […] What the hell, anti-vaxxers? Did you think Jesus handed out loam and fishes to the hungry masses? […]
Posted by Ben Collins on Twitter:
Antivaxxers have been eating (yes, eating) “Magic Dirt” called BOO, claiming it’s a miracle cure for hair growth, various diseases, and even changing your eye color.
Turns out it’s just dirt from a plot that borders a landfill.
[…] a company called Black Oxygen Organics (BOO) has been selling dirt to people and marketing it as a panacea. And it’s not cheap. Because if you’re going to fill bags with dirt and sell them to fuckwits, you might as well swing for the fences. […]
[…] the product is dirt—four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. “A gift from the Ground,” it reads. “Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.”
BOO, which “can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals,” according to the company, claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health, and ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides, and parasites.
Yeah, that’s just bonkers. But it gets worse.
Teams of sellers in these private Facebook groups claim that, beyond cosmetic applications, BOO can cure everything from autism to cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. Conveniently in these times, BOO proponents say it also protects against and treats Covid-19, and can be used to “detox” the newly vaccinated, according to posts viewed by NBC News.
[…] Naturally, Black Oxygen Organics is sold via a multilevel marketing scheme, because there weren’t already enough red flags slapping these gormless gooberoos upside the head … warning them that a $110 literal dirtbag may not be the holy grail they think it is.
As you probably expected, magic dirt groups have proliferated on Facebook, helping to boost BOO’s fortunes among the already credulous. According to NBC’s reporting, the groups have become inundated with anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers, “including prominent activists who sell the product to raise funds for anti-vaccine efforts.” In fact, one top BOO seller recently noted that COVID has “been kind of a blessing” for their business.
Some Republicans ignoring Trump: In Alabama’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, Donald Trump has told local GOP voters to back Rep. Mo Brooks as retiring Sen. Richard Shelby’s successor. But as Politico reported, much of the party at the national level is ignoring the former president’s choice and instead backing Katie Britt, the former president of the Business Council of Alabama, whom Trump has disparaged.
Five Republican senators — Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) — have donated to Britt’s campaign from their leadership PACs. None of them have done so yet for GOP Rep. Mo Brooks, who Trump endorsed in April to replace the retiring Shelby (R-Ala.).
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a Trump ally who won his seat in 2020 with Trump’s backing, attended a Wednesday night D.C. fundraiser for Britt, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) who served as the event’s “special guest,” according to the invitation. […]
The financial support for Britt, the former president of the Business Council of Alabama, comes in spite of Trump’s disparaging comments about her.
“I see that the RINO Senator from Alabama, close friend of Old Crow Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby, is pushing hard to have his ‘assistant’ fight the great Mo Brooks for his Senate seat,” Trump said in a July statement. “She is not in any way qualified and is certainly not what our Country needs or not what Alabama wants.” […]
Britt has outraised Brooks by more than 2-to-1, bringing in $3.7 million to date, compared to his $1.7 million. […]
In the wake of this week’s deadly mass shooting at Oxford High School, a Senate Democrat tried to advance a background checks bill. It didn’t go well.
In the wake of this week’s deadly mass shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut went to the Senate floor yesterday and asked for unanimous consent on legislation to expand background checks.
“I want to tell you why I’m making this request,” the senator said on the chamber floor. “I understand the low likelihood of success, but I hope many of my colleagues took a minute to watch the cellphone video from the school shooting in Michigan.” He added that the footage was “absolutely terrifying to watch.”
As The Hill reported, his appeal didn’t work.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Thursday blocked a request to proceed to legislation passed by the House in March to expand background checks for gun sales, a priority that has languished in Congress for years.
Murphy’s effort focused on a bill called the Bipartisan Background Checks Act (H.R. 8), which would require background checks on practically all firearm purchases. […]
The bill passed the Democratic-led House in March, with eight Republicans breaking ranks and supporting the legislation, but to advance in the Senate, it would need to overcome a GOP filibuster. No one believes that’s realistic given the state of the minority party.
Also of interest yesterday was the Senate Republican who happened to be on the floor to object to Murphy’s effort: Iowa’s Chuck Grassley happens to be the senator who sponsored the measure a few years ago to make it easier for the mentally impaired to buy guns.
[…] Murphy told his colleagues yesterday, “[T]he reason that we can’t get anything done in the Senate is not because there is a disagreement amongst our constituents about what to do. Our constituents, Republicans and Democrats, support measures like universal background checks. In fact, there’s almost nothing in the political world that enjoys such high support as universal background checks.
“But we can’t get it done because it seems as if many of my colleagues here care more about the health of the gun industry and their profits than they do about the health of our kids. Gun industry profits are being put ahead of the safety of my children, of our children. Shooting after shooting, Republicans in this body have refused to do anything meaningful that would reduce this pace of carnage both in our schools [and] on the streets of America.”
The parents of a teenager accused of killing four students at a Michigan high school were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter Friday, the prosecutor told The Associated Press.
Jennifer and James Crumbley were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter. James Crumbley purchased the weapon for his son days before shooting, according to the sheriff. Under Michigan law, an involuntary manslaughter charge can be pursued if prosecutors believe someone contributed to a situation where harm or death was high. If convicted, they could face up to 15 years in prison.
Ethan Crumbley, 15, has been charged as an adult with two dozen crimes, including murder, attempted murder and terrorism, for the shooting Tuesday at Oxford High School in Oakland County, roughly 30 miles north of Detroit.
In an appearance on NBC News NOW, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said Thursday that it is “clearly a crime” if someone gives a firearm to a minor.
In a separate appearance on MSNBC, the top prosecutor in Oakland County said Thursday that the teen appeared to have “free access” to the gun.
“If you own a weapon or possess a weapon and you knowingly allow someone to have free access to it, who you have reason to believe might use it to injure somebody, that is willful and it’s gross negligence and there are lots of criminal consequences for that,” prosecutor Karen McDonald said. […]
blfsays
KG@281 asks, “When’s the next palindromic date? I make it 21011012. Since I’d be 147 on that date, I suspect I’ve lived through my last palindrome!”
It depends on how you write it (i.e., the notation). E.g., using the (rare?) MM-D-YY 5-digit notation, that the first nine (9) days of this month are palindromes: 12-1-21, 12-2-21, … 12-9-21. With the 8-digit ISO-like notation YYYYMMDD, then I believe the next one is 2030-03-02, with the pattern repeating, e.g., 2040-04-02, 2050-05-02, … (those examples also work in the very(?) unusual 8-digit YYYYDDMM notation, albeit designate different days, and that notation adds yet other days, such as 2022-22-02 and 2031-13-02). And since it’s all depends on notation (and calendar), then very Very probably by using a different base (radix), and / or different calendar, there are yet other palindromic dates.
As an aside, this year’s USAian Presidential inauguration date was a palindrome when written MDDYY, 1-21-21. And as Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge points out:
A notable palindrome day is this century’s 2 February 2020 because this date is a palindrome regardless of the date format by country (yyyy-mm-dd, dd-mm-yyyy, or mm-dd-yyyy) used in various countries. For this reason, this date has also been termed as a “Universal Palindrome Day”. […]
(Apologies for any mistakes! I’ve just returned from the pub, a pair of very nice pints, and hopefully no Covid…)
Two Georgia women, who’d done nothing wrong, were terrorized, because of a conspiratorial pro-Trump lie. Now, they’re filing a lawsuit.
It was about a year ago when the nightmare began for a clerical worker in a county election office in Georgia and her mother. Donald Trump and some of his rabid followers decided that Shaye Moss and mother, Ruby Freeman, who’d taken a temp job helping count 2020 ballots, were directly and personally responsible for including fake ballots in Georgia’s election tally.
In fact, unhinged Republicans claimed to have proof in the form of a video in which Moss and Freeman could be seen doing their jobs. What conspiracy theorists said were “suitcases” of bogus ballots were really just standard boxes used locally to transport actual ballots.
The video — which showed nothing nefarious or untoward — nevertheless made the rounds in conservative media and in far-right circles, with Republicans insisting that the images showed election fraud, reality be damned. Trump even put it on screen during one of his post-defeat political rallies. In fact, the former president went after the two Black women, by name, repeatedly, which in turn led Republican activists to threaten the women’s lives and show up at their homes.</b?
Freeman, a retiree who started a small boutique business selling fashion accessories, was forced to flee her house, close her business, and move to an undisclosed location on the advice of the FBI for her own safety. Her daughter dramatically changed her appearance so people wouldn't recognize her and started avoided going out in public.
These women, who'd done nothing wrong, were terrorized, in part because of a ridiculous lie, and in part because Trump's followers helped expose them, putting them at risk.
This week, as The Washington Post reported, the women filed a lawsuit.
Two women who were Georgia election workers in 2020 are suing the far-right conspiracy website Gateway Pundit for defamation, alleging that the site and its owners knowingly published false stories about them that instigated a relentless campaign of harassment and threats.
According to their lawsuit, on Jan. 6, as Trump’s followers launched an attack against the U.S. Capitol, other Trump followers surrounded Freeman’s home, unaware that she’d already fled.
“Lies like those that The Gateway Pundit knowingly told about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss cannot be divorced from the devastation they leave behind — both for the targeted individuals and for our democracy itself,” Brittany Williams, an attorney with the nonprofit Protect Democracy, which is representing the women, said in a statement.
For those unfamiliar with the website, the Post’s report added, “For years, Gateway Pundit has promoted a dizzying array of falsehoods, including the conspiracy theory that students who had survived the Parkland, Fla., school shooting were paid ‘crisis actors’; the baseless claim that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States; and stories incorrectly identifying the gunman in the 2017 Las Vegas concert mass shooting and the driver who killed a woman who was protesting a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville.”
The New York Times added that the right-wing website, which “published dozens of false stories” about Moss and Freeman, acknowledged the lawsuit yesterday and asked readers to send them money to help finance a legal defense.
Two hippopotamuses at a zoo in Belgium have tested positive for COVID-19.
Antwerp Zoo announced Friday that the country’s national veterinary lab confirmed two hippos contracted the disease and that the zoo would be closed until further notice, The Associated Press reported.
The infections appeared in a 14-year-old hippo named Imani and a 41-year-old hippo named Hermien.
The zoo said the animals are doing well besides having runny noses, which is what first prompted zoo employees to get them tested.
Zoo employees who worked with the hippos have tested negative for the virus and now have to disinfect their shoes, wear masks and put on safety goggles before handling the infected animals, the AP noted.
The zoo will reportedly reopen once the hippos test negative for the coronavirus.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday proposed reestablishing a World War II-era civilian-military force that he would control.
DeSantis pitched the idea of creating the Florida State Guard, which would be independent of federal control, while speaking about his military budget proposal.
The Guard would consist of 200 volunteer civilians “trained in the best emergency response techniques” that would aid in the event of natural disasters or other state emergencies, according to a press release.
The Florida State Guard was initially created in 1941 to fill in for National Guard members deployed during World War II. It was later disbanded in 1947.
DeSantis said the proposed unit would “not be encumbered by the federal government,” adding that this force would give him “the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible.”
DeSantis is asking for $3.5 million from the state legislature to establish the unit. […]
A response from Charlie Crist: “No Governor would have his own handpicked secret police.”
Jennifer and James Crumbley, parents of Oxford school shooter Ethan Crumbley, have each been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, prosecutor Karen McDonald announced in a press conference on Friday morning.
In addition to buying their child a gun, taking him to a shooting range and keeping that gun unlocked, it appears the Crumbleys aggressively ignored all possible warning signs that their son might do something like this — warnings they had received up to and including that very day. When a concerned teacher called them about how their son was searching for ammunition in class, Jennifer Crumbley responded by telling Ethan to be better about not getting caught and assured him he wasn’t in trouble. When — that morning — the school called them in to discuss their son’s horrific and violent drawings, they insisted he not be sent home from school. Hours later, he killed four kids and traumatized God knows how many others. […]
All of this happened within four days, via CNN:
Nov. 26: Ethan Crumbley’s father, James Crumbley, purchased a gun with his son present.
On or about Nov. 26: Ethan Crumbley posted photos of a semi-automatic gun on social media with a caption: “Just got my new beauty today. SIG SAUER 9mm.”
On or about Nov. 27: Jennifer Crumbley, Ethan Crumbley’s mother, made a social media post that read, “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present.”
Nov. 29: A teacher at Oxford High School observed Ethan searching for ammunition on his phone and reported that information to school officials. His parents did not reply when the school attempted to contact them. Later, Jennifer Crumbley exchanged texts with Ethan stating, “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”
Nov. 30: On the morning of the shooting, Ethan’s teacher came across a note that “alarmed her to the point that she took a picture of it on her cell phone.” The note contained “a drawing of a semiautomatic handgun pointing at the words ‘the thoughts won’t stop. help me.’” Also included in the note was a drawing of a bullet with “blood everywhere” written above it. Between the gun and the bullet is a drawing of a person who appears to have been shot twice and bleeding with a laughing emoji under it. The note also has “my life is useless” and “the world is dead” scrawled on it.
The parents were “immediately summoned to the school.” A school counselor removed Ethan from class with his backpack and obtained the note, but the drawings of the gun, bloody figure and writings were all “altered.” At the meeting with school officials, his parents were shown the drawing and were told they had to submit their son to counseling within 48 hours. His parents did not ask the whereabouts of the gun and did not to inspect his backpack for the gun which he had with him, according to McDonald. His parents “resisted” the idea of taking Ethan out of school and left without him.
While it seems unusual to hold parents responsible for a school shooting, there is a very clear case to be made that the Crumbleys acted with an egregiously reckless disregard of the children their son hurt and in fact facilitated his ability to hurt others. They were the ones who bought him a gun he was legally too young to own and use without adult supervision. They were the only ones who had the full picture of what was going on with their son and what he was capable of and they didn’t bother doing anything. The school should have sent him home immediately regardless of what they said — that’s a “universal position” the prosecutor agreed — but the school didn’t know he had access to a gun.
Jennifer Crumbley literally texted “Ethan, don’t do it” to her son when she heard there was an active shooter and James Crumbley called the police saying that his son had taken his gun. Most parents in that situation would be scared that their child could have been a victim, but they knew right off that their kid was the shooter. And they didn’t want to take him out of school or get him psychological help.
Michigan does not have any safe storage laws or child access prevention laws — meaning that, technically, parents can leave loaded guns out anywhere they like. However, it’s not entirely unprecedented for parents there to be charged with manslaughter in these scenarios. As Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Gun Sense noted in a tweet, “in 2000, a Flint-area man pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to two years in prison after a 6-year-old boy who was living with him found a gun in a shoebox and killed a classmate at school.”
During the press conference, prosecutor Karen McDonald suggested that perhaps Michigan might want to look into safe storage laws, so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again. The fact that we can’t even have reasonable gun regulations like that — one the NRA called for and then fought when Colorado tried to take them up on it — is a very big part of why these things keep happening, why kids are able to go and shoot up their whole school, why toddlers are accidentally killing/injuring themselves and others with guns their parents left lying around.
Much has been made of Jennifer Crumbley’s nauseating letter to Donald Trump, in which she thanks him for protecting her right to bear arms (and also claims she can’t be racist because she is at least part Italian, which I assure you is not a thing). She said she needed a gun, as a real estate broker, to protect herself in case someone she showed a house to had “bad intentions” — and as much as I hate guns, that is not an unreasonable fear, especially with open houses. But she raised someone who had “bad intentions” and left a gun around him, not caring about the people he might hurt. The “Second Amendment People,” as Trump called them, love to claim that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, but in this scenario, a parent who locks up their gun and doesn’t buy one for their obviously disturbed child would have been a whole lot more effective.
For the second time this week, a lawyer close to Donald Trump has told the Jan. 6 committee that he will plead the Fifth.
It was just a couple of days ago when Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who tried to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election, told the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack what it didn’t want to hear. Through his attorney, Clark said he’d sit down with investigators tomorrow, at which point he’d “claim Fifth Amendment protection” against self-incrimination.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the bipartisan panel, explained on the [Rachel Maddow] show soon after that given the nature of the Fifth Amendment, “Obviously, [Clark] is aware that something went on that is illegal.”
It’s against that backdrop that a different lawyer from Donald Trump’s team is also prepared to plead the Fifth. Politico reported:
John Eastman, the attorney who helped former President Donald Trump pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election, has asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, according to a letter he delivered to the Jan. 6 committee explaining his decision not to testify…. Eastman’s decision is an extraordinary assertion by someone who worked closely with Trump to attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.
[…] it was last summer when Eastman published a bizarre piece that argued that Vice President Kamala Harris was ineligible for national office because her parents are immigrants. Soon after, he began working with Trump — the then-president saw him on Fox News and was impressed — and as part of that work, Eastman filed the brief last December on Trump’s behalf that asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (It was filled with factual errors — including an obvious one literally on the first page.)
Soon after, he authored what’s become known as the Eastman Memo, which fleshed out a ridiculous six-step scenario in which then-Vice President Mike Pence, rather than honor the results of the election, would exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act and set aside the Electoral College votes of seven states. That would put Trump in the lead, but it would also leave both candidates short of a majority.
From there, under Eastman’s reported plan, the election would shift to the U.S. House, where Republicans controlled enough state delegations to keep Trump in power, despite his defeat.
This was, in other words, an apparent document — written by a lawyer representing the then-president — that effectively outlined how Republicans could execute something resembling a coup. Eastman even pushed his vision on Jan. 6, speaking at the pro-Trump rally ahead of the insurrectionist riot.
And now, rather than cooperate with the bipartisan congressional investigation, Eastman is pleading the Fifth.
“While Dr. Eastman emphatically denies committing any illegal acts, he nonetheless has a reasonable fear that the requested information could be used against him in court,” his lawyer wrote.
Remember, as recently as 2016, it was Trump himself who derided those who asserted their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. “The mob takes the Fifth Amendment,” the then-candidate said. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
[…]
The parents of a boy who is accused of killing four students at Oxford high school are missing and being searched for by law enforcement after the pair were also charged as part of the investigation into the mass shooting in Michigan.
Jennifer and James Crumbley were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
But in a shock twist, authorities then revealed that the whereabouts of the Crumbleys were not currently known, prompting law enforcement to effectively launch a manhunt for them with the Oakland county fugitive apprehension team.
The Oakland county sheriff, Michael Bouchard […] said that he did not know if the Crumbleys were armed but cautioned members of the public not approach them. “I would not encourage anybody to approach them. I think it would be unlikely {that they are armed}, but we’re not going to take that chance. We’re going to go get them” […]
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 299
Expect the right-wingers to start in with the “false flag” nonsense again.
Expect them to also scream that the parents are being “persecuted” for being pro-gun, Trump-supporting, “Patriots.”
KGsays
blf@292,
Of course, how did I miss 20300302? I have a pretty good chance of seeing that one.
YYYYMMDD is the only rational way of turning dates including year, month and day into a single number. Of course there’s also the “Julian Day” system, in which 2021/12/04 is day 2459553 (actually, I think that’s only so from 12.00 UCT, so as I write this, it’s day 2459552 – and it turns out we had a palindrome just 10 days ago, and there will be another on J.D. 2460642 or 2024/11/27.
The Biden administration announced Friday that it is sending 9 million Covid vaccine doses to Africa amid growing concerns about the omicron variant. The new shipment brings the total U.S. donations to Africa to 100 million vaccines, the White House said. An additional two million vaccines will be sent elsewhere in the world.
President Joe Biden signed into law on Friday a bill to keep the government funded through mid-February, avoiding a shutdown ahead of a midnight deadline.
A photoshopped poster advertising a non-existent film called ‘The Omicron Variant’ has duped some social media users into thinking the namesake coronavirus variant was planned.
Wow. This guy. Seriously. I know that the potentially seismic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case could vaporize Roe v. Wade and its precedents once and for all, so this is the anti-choice crowd’s Empire Strikes Back moment, but sheesh. Is this really the way to reach out to women who may be feeling just a bit marginalized as the 66% Catholic Club (aka SCOTUS) signals it will likely, at the very least, sand Roe down to a nub?
All y’all with female partners: What do you think would happen if you called her an “earthen vessel,” even in jest? […]
Then again, I’m not nearly as savvy as North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn. [video is available at the link]
Transcript!
CAWTHORN: “Madam Speaker, imagine you’ve just walked out of this chamber and outside is a gorgeous sunset. You have a Polaroid camera and you snap a beautiful picture, and a great photo prints out the front. You hold it and shake it, waiting for the picture to appear, but suddenly someone walks by and snatches your photo, ripping it to shreds. You’re stunned. You cry, ‘Why did you destroy my picture?’ The person replies, ‘Oh, it wasn’t a picture. It wasn’t fully developed yet.’ All of us in this room realize how asinine that reasoning is. That photo was transforming into a beautiful image. This illustration by Seth Gruber is simple, but it’s what our nation has done to the most precious image of all—the image of God. Madam Speaker, a silent genocide has slipped beneath the conscience of America. Precious works of our creator, formed and set apart, meet death before they breathe life. Eternal souls woven into earthen vessels sanctified by almighty God and endowed with the miracle of life are denied their birth by a nation that was born in freedom. God’s breath of life blown away by the breath of man. This cruel and fallen world may seem too filthy for their very presence, but these precious temples are crafted in the image of God himself. One day, perhaps when science darkens the soul of the left, our nation will repent. But until then the carnage of this unconscionable deed will stain the fabric of our nation. I hope that the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. I hope that we stop the genocide of abortion in this country. With that, I yield back.”
Oh, did I fail to mention that he also compared fetuses to undeveloped Polaroid pictures? Yeah, that too. Of course, the analogy would only hold up if people spontaneously induced abortions in strangers they passed on the street. Or if roughly 50% of all Polaroids failed to develop at all, even when they’re not being torn up. Or if … if …
Damn, did he really say “earthen vessels?” I really want to put that in a Match.com ad and see what happens.
So while Cawthorn is very solicitous when it comes to nonsentient fetuses and Polaroids that just want to live, he’s never been all that magnanimous with earthen vessels (aka “women”).
Here’s how Caitlin Coulter, a former classmate of Cawthorn’s at Virginia’s Patrick Henry College, described his past behavior:
“His MO was to take vulnerable women out on these rides with him in the car, and to make advances,” Caitlin Coulter, one of Cawthorn’s former classmates, told CNN in an interview.
Coulter said she was taken on something Cawthorn called a “fun drive,” where he asked about her purity ring and her sexual experiences. She says she felt something was off and shut down the conversation.
“He got really upset. And he whipped the car around and started going back to campus at 70-80 miles an hour on these one-lane roads,” she said. “And it was — it was really scary.”
Charming. I guess it’s pretty clear why young Madison would prefer to relate to women as inanimate objects.
Oh, and this bit from The Washington Post sounds almost, dare we say, Trumpian?
Cawthorn’s election also came despite an extraordinary effort by former classmates and other alumni of Patrick Henry College urging that the voters of North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District reject him on grounds of alleged sexual misconduct. Three women told The Post in on-the-record interviews that they objected to Cawthorn’s behavior, with one saying he tried forcibly to kiss her after she rejected his advance.
What might Jesus say about these allegations, Madison? I’m guessing he’d be less than impressed by your performative mewling. Then again, the Jesus you believe in still lives, so you can just ask him the next time you’re at Mar-a-Lago.
Until then, maybe think about sharpening your rhetoric. Or at the very least making it a wee bit less vomit-inducing.
Jeffrey Clark, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department under Donald Trump, played a key role in Trump’s conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. And new evidence obtained by the House committee investigating the January 6th insurrection suggests he was working more closely with the White House than was previously known.
In late December 2020, Clark drafted a letter that he wanted the Justice Department leadership to send to election officials in Georgia falsely stating that “the Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States” and recommending that Georgia’s legislature convene to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
When DOJ leadership refused to send the letter, Trump considered replacing Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Clark. He backed down at the last-minute, but Clark’s maneuvering at the Justice Department amounted to an unprecedented attempt at interference in the 2020 election.
[…] Among the key questions the committee wants answered: to what extent did Clark coordinate his election subversion letter with the White House?
“I also wanted to ask him about metadata in that draft letter that indicates some involvement with the White House Communications Agency [in] the drafting or preparation of that letter,” the January 6 committee’s chief counsel said at a November 5 deposition for Clark, which was first reported by Rachel Maddow on Friday night. [Video available at the link.]
This suggests that the White House may have played a role in crafting Clark’s letter, which was drafted shortly before Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, and told him to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s victory in the state—a call that is now under criminal investigation by the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia.
Clark was expected to plead the Fifth Amendment—a possible acknowledgment of having knowledge of criminal activity—in response to the January 6th committee’s subpoena during a scheduled deposition on Saturday, but due to a “medical condition” the meeting has been postponed until December 16.
A federal grand jury on Friday indicted a South Carolina nurse on two counts of producing fake vaccine cards, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Carolina announced.
Tammy McDonald, 53, of Columbia, was also charged with lying to federal investigators, according to a press release from the attorney’s office.
[…] “The indictment alleges McDonald defrauded and endangered the public by creating and distributing fake COVID-19 vaccination cards,” he said in a statement. “Engaging in such illegal activities undermines the ongoing pandemic response efforts.”
McDonald was the director of nursing services at a hospital in Columbia. She allegedly created the fake vaccine cards on days in June and July, distributing them to patients she knew were not vaccinated, according to the indictment.
[…] She faces up to 15 years in prison for both counts of producing fake vaccine cards and up to five years for lying to investigators.
[…] In May, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland created the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to combat fraudulent activity during the pandemic. The DOJ also charged a Baltimore man on Friday for allegedly distributing fake vaccine cards.
As of March, there were 1,200 sellers of fake vaccine cards in the U.S. and Europe, according to Checkpoint Software Technologies, a global security firm investigating the amount of fraudulent activity during the pandemic.
Welcome to the homepage of Lawfare’s January 6 Project: our coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and its response. Here you will be able to find Lawfare articles and podcasts exploring the many legal and policy issues arising out of the attack, as well as a repository of significant documents, congressional hearings, case information and other related materials.
Use the buttons to navigate Lawfare’s collection of primary source documents relating to the congressional response and the criminal prosecutions. And find Lawfare’s analysis and commentary at the links below. This information will be updated continually.
[…] Who thinks ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine represent miracle COVID-19 cures? People who listen to Donald Trump or to the many, many grifters who duct-taped themselves to Donald Trump in order to boost their own fortunes. People who believe Facebook-promoted conspiracy theories. People who listen to malignant conniving jackass Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, or other Trumpian figures who have attempted to convince their supporters that the entire medical profession is wrong and the real COVID-19 remedy is either the drug being boosted by a major donor in case A, or realizing that dying of COVID is just God’s way of stamping you as a true patriot in case B.
Few of us can imagine just how very tired hospital workers must be from treating people who show up at the hospital demanding, essentially, not to be treated. It’s assuredly one of the reasons those professionals are quitting in droves. Even those of us only on the outskirts of the battle are—and I think I speak here for every American who doesn’t have their own set of attached snow-white wings—extremely damn tired of attempting to convince hyperpartisan conspiracy theorists that no, really, a newly emerged infectious disease is not just a plot by world elites to sell face masks, and no, just because you heard some enormous asshole say that drinking bleach, aquarium chemicals, horse dewormers, or a slurry of freshly killed mosquitoes is the new miracle cure does not mean that you, a person with a functioning brain of your own, have to believe them.
What are we to do at this point? […]
I’m at an absolute loss, and at this point all I can propose is that hospitals just leave out a basket of horse dewormers in the emergency room lobby. Want to be treated by medical professionals? Sign your name and take a seat. Want to get the treatment you saw posted on Facebook, the one all your archconservative pandemic disbeliever friends say is the Real Deal, For Sure This Time? Grab a tube and leave us alone.
[…] It’s a difficult problem, mainly because it’s difficult to understand why ivermectin buffs are showing up in emergency rooms in the first place if they don’t want any treatment other than being dewormed. It would be absolutely ghastly to require medical professionals to provide a treatment that does nothing to combat the virus but stands a good chance of further weakening the body of the patient demanding it.
[…] Reducing the potential for patient-on-doctor violence is nothing to cough at, you know.
Cawthorn’s rant is certainly weird, but I think he’s referring to fetuses as “earthen vessels”:
Eternal souls woven into earthen vessels sanctified by almighty God and endowed with the miracle of life are denied their birth
Why he should complain, since “almighty God” can do whatever it likes with these “Eternal souls” (send them straight to heaven, stash them in limbo, weave them into another “earthen vessel”…) I’ve no idea. I wonder if anyone has asked him.
KG @312, that’s what I thought at first too. Careful reading shows that women are the earthen vessels into which the eternal souls of babies are woven. Either way, Cawthorn’s rant is not just weird, but offensive.
CNN Fires Chris Cuomo After ‘Additional Information’ Emerges
CNN announced on Saturday evening that anchor Chris Cuomo has been fired from the network, following “additional information” that came to light after the major TV news organization said that he had been suspended indefinitely.
CNN’s firing of Cuomo comes days after the network suspended its star anchor, citing the New York Attorney General’s release of documents that raised “serious questions” about his involvement in the defense of his brother, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), against allegations of sexual harassment.
[…] In a statement issued Saturday evening, CNN said it retained a respected law firm” to review Cuomo’s involvement in his brother’s defense against sexual harassment allegations and that “in the process of that review, additional information has come to light.”
[…] Although CNN did not detail the “additional information” related to Cuomo, the network issued another statement to the New York Times shortly before midnight on Saturday, saying that while “Chris’s conduct with his brother’s defense” had already given the network “cause to terminate,” CNN took “new allegations” that came to the network this week “seriously, and saw no reason to delay taking immediate action.”
CNN’s late-night statement followed the Times’ report of Cuomo’ firing. According to the Times, Debra S. Katz, a prominent employment lawyer, informed CNN of a client with an allegation of sexual misconduct against its star anchor on Wednesday. Katz told the Times in a statement on Saturday that the allegation against the anchor, which was made by a former junior colleague at another network, was “unrelated to the Gov. Andrew Cuomo matter.”
[…] The Times noted that Katz also represents Charlotte Bennett, a onetime aide to Andrew Cuomo who accused the former governor in February of sexual harassment.
A spokesperson for Chris Cuomo, Steven Goldberg, told the Times on Saturday that “these apparently anonymous allegations are not true.”
According to the Times, Katz said that her client “came forward because she was disgusted by Chris Cuomo’s on-air statements in response to the allegations made against his brother, Gov. Andrew Cuomo.”
Katz pointed to a broadcast on March 1 in which Chris Cuomo said: “I have always cared very deeply about these issues, and profoundly so. I just wanted to tell you that.” […]
Chris Cuomo lamented his termination from CNN on Saturday evening. […]
I’d like for you to meet Lisa Leisy, of Idaho. As you can see from her now locked Twitter account bio [image available at the link] she is a self identifying patriot and God fearing Christian. She is also the Power County Campaign Chair for Janice McGeachin’s campaign for Governor. McGeachin is running on a campaign asserting that the current Republican Governor of Idaho is just not Trumpy enough.
Having met Leisy I’d like for you to watch a brief, 15 second, Hershey’s chocolate commercial that originally aired in 2020 but is also going around this year. The commercial is a derivative of the classic where the holiday wrapped chocolates play as Christmas bells. It features only two people, a father and a daughter, who are celebrating the holidays together by making Christmas cookies. [video available at the link]
Do you see anything wrong with that commercial? Alas, Republican Lisa Leisy does. You see, the problem with that commercial is that it has the effrontery to feature two black people. Yes, I’m serious, and she actually did this publicly, on Twitter.
I don’t support the new and improved @Hersheys #christmas black only commercial. Classic #commercial and they ruined it. [followed by 3 vomit emojis]
Yes, that commercial is so far off the charts disgusting, what with those black actors and everything pretending to be a wholesome, Christmas celebrating family, that it warrants three vomit emojis. In fact, it is so disgusting that it warrants boycotting (i.e. cancelling) television in general. Ms. Leisy could not let someone defending the commercial get away with it.
[…] I no longer watch much current tv cause black only supporting Racist commercial if only supports backs only.
I’d like to say something about her statement that the commercial is racist if it “only supports blacks only” (redundant “only” apparently added for emphasis). The commercial features two people, a father and daughter who happen to be black. In its brief 15 seconds it supports family, it supports Christmastime and the Christmas spirit, and it supports the love a father and daughter have for each other, and it supports fun. That is supporting a lot more than “blacks only.” It is supporting and celebrating everyone.
Of course, if the commercial featured only two people who were white Ms. Leisy would take no offense. In the party of Trump is anyone really surprised that Leisy believed she could tweet this with no consequence? Idaho is the most white state in America, 91% caucasian and only 0.7% black. Ms. Leisy figures that if she doesn’t see black people in life she sure as Hell shouldn’t have to tolerate seeing them on TV.
Ms. Leisy regards herself a patriot and God loving Christian. Can you imagine a reaction to this commercial that is more un-American, more lacking in Christian love and charity, and more antithetical to the spirit and message of Christmas? […]
Built on the ashes of 10 years of war in Syria, an illegal drug industry run by powerful associates and relatives of President Bashar al-Assad has grown into a multibillion-dollar operation, eclipsing Syria’s legal exports and turning the country into the world’s newest narcostate.
Its flagship product is captagon, an illegal, addictive amphetamine popular in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Its operations stretch across Syria, including workshops that manufacture the pills, packing plants where they are concealed for export and smuggling networks to spirit them to markets abroad.
An investigation by The New York Times found that much of the production and distribution is overseen by the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother and one of Syria’s most powerful men.
Major players also include businessmen with close ties to the government, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and other members of the president’s extended family, whose last name ensures protection for illegal activities, according to The Times investigation, which is based on information from law enforcement officials in 10 countries and dozens of interviews with international and regional drug experts, Syrians with knowledge of the drug trade and current and former United States officials.
The drug trade emerged in the ruins of a decade of war, which shattered Syria’s economy, reduced most of its people to poverty and left members of Syria’s military, political and business elite looking for new ways to earn hard currency and circumvent American economic sanctions.
Illicit speed is now the country’s most valuable export, far surpassing its legal products, according to a database compiled by The Times of global captagon busts.
In recent years, the authorities in Greece, Italy, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have seized hundreds of millions of pills, most of them originating from one government-controlled port in Syria, some in hauls whose street value could exceed $1 billion, according to law enforcement officials.
[…] Even more concerning to governments in the region, the Syrian network built to smuggle captagon has begun to move more dangerous drugs, like crystal meth, regional security officials say.
The biggest obstacle in combating the trade, officials said, is that it has the backing of a state that has little reason to help shut it down.
“The idea of going to the Syrian government to ask about cooperation is just absurd,” said Joel Rayburn, the U.S. special envoy for Syria during the Trump administration. “It is literally the Syrian government that is exporting the drugs. It is not like they are looking the other way while drug cartels do their thing. They are the drug cartel.”
[…] The security bureau of the Fourth Division, headed by Maj. Gen. Ghassan Bilal, provides much of the network’s nervous system. According to regional security officials and a former Syrian military officer, the bureau’s troops protect many of the factories and ease the movement of drugs to Syria’s borders and the port.
“The division’s presence in the region is dangerous,” said Col. Hassan Alqudah, the head of the narcotics department for Jordan’s Public Security Directorate. “Captagon factories are present in the Fourth Division’s areas of control and under their protection.” […]
WASHINGTON (CN) — As school boards across the nation erupt with parents demanding more influence over their children’s education, the Supreme Court will hear a case on Wednesday over whether parents can use public funds to send their children to religious schools.
The case stems from a unique issue affecting parents in Maine school districts but could have ripple effects throughout the country.
[…]
As the majority of school districts in Maine do not have their own high schools, the state will reimburse parents for their children’s education in a public or private school of their choosing. Maine stipulates, however, that it will not provide reimbursements for sectarian schools with religious affiliation.
The policy spurred a lawsuit from two sets of parents….Though a federal judge ruled that the parents had Article III standing, he nevertheless rejected their constitutional claims on the merits.
[…]
“Sectarian schools are denied funds not because of who they are but because of what they would do with the money — use it to further the religious purposes of inculcation and proselytization,” U.S. Circuit Judge David Barrow wrote for the panel.
[…]
“Religious schools are excluded because the education they provide is not equivalent to a public education,” state Attorney General Aaron M. Frey said in an email. “Religious schools can and do advance their own religion to the exclusion of all others, discriminate in both the teachers they employ and the students they admit, and teach religious views inimical to what is taught in public schools. Parents are free to send their children to such schools if they choose, but not with public dollars.”
The two schools to which the Maine parents want to use public funds to send their children to have religious-based requirements for student admissions and faculty hires. Both schools will not admit children who identify as homosexual, and one will not admit students whose parents are in a same-sex marriage. One of the schools teaches that men are the leaders of the household, while the other requires parents to sign an agreement in line with the school’s beliefs on abortion, the sanctity of marriage, and homosexuality…..
[…]
The case has attracted attention from numerous religious and conservative groups who have filed briefs in the case. The case also captured the attention of 11 Republican senators — including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — who filed a brief arguing that Congress has long been in favor of providing funding for religious education.
[…]
The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers also filed a brief in the case, arguing that states should be able to condition public funds on nondiscrimination standards.
“While private schools are entitled to have different values, they are not entitled to the government’s financial assistance in such discrimination,” their brief states.
Religion has been on an extraordinary winning streak at the Supreme Court. Studies shows an 81% success rate in favor of religion from the Roberts Court. And that was before Barrett, who attended a high school much like the ones described above, arrived.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Sunday said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has assured her that “decisive action” will be taken next week against Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), following the far-right extremist’s refusal to issue a public apology after insinuating that the Minnesota Democrat is a terrorist.
Appearing on CNN, Omar said that after a recent conversation with Pelosi, she is “very confident” that the House speaker will “take decisive action” against Boebert next week.
“As you know, when I first got to Congress, I was worried that I wasn’t going to be allowed to be sworn in because there was a ban on the hijab. She promised me that she would take care of it. She fulfilled that promise,” Omar said. “She’s made another promise to me that she will take care of this. And I believe her.”
Omar also took aim at Boebert for her “shocking and unacceptable” comments, referring to the Colorado Republican telling a false story about getting into an elevator at the Capitol with a Capitol Police officer and supposedly joking that “the jihad squad decided to show up for work today” when Omar entered. She also claimed she told the officer that they were safe because Omar wasn’t wearing a backpack.
Last week, Omar hung up on Boebert after the far-right lawmaker doubled down on her non-apology — saying that she apologizes to the Muslim community for her remarks, but not to Omar herself — over the phone.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has continued to defend Boebert. During a press conference on Friday, McCarthy said he would not sanction Boebert, insisting that she apologized “publicly” and “personally” to Omar.
Omar swiped at McCarthy for defending Boebert during her appearance on CNN.
“McCarthy is a liar and a coward,” Omar said. “He doesn’t have the ability to condemn the kind of bigoted Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric that are being trafficked by a member of his conference.”
[…] “And we have to be able to stand up to them,” Omar said. “And we have to push them to reckon with the fact that their party right now is normalizing anti-Muslim bigotry.”
[…] If Boebert is stripped of her committees, it would make her the third House Republican this year to lose committee assignments. Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) were stripped of their committees over social media posts musing about violence against Democratic lawmakers. McCarthy, however, has promised to give Greene and Gosar their committee seats back if the GOP retakes the majority next year.
I’m losing my Covid patience🧵 I’ve tried to reason with the unvaxxed. I’ve directed some to medical pros. I don’t judge but hear them out and steer them to facts. The unvaxxed love to say it’s about choice. But you know who doesn’t have a choice? My 3 kids under 5.
[…] blah blah you have a right to not get vaxxed. Fine. Then business and government have a right to tell you that you’re not welcome to patronize or you can’t get on a plane. Because what right do you think you have to expose my kids to your Covid? As parents, let’s own the outrage. The looney carnival barkers at the school board meetings DO NOT reflect where most parents are. Your unvaxxed status is creating new variants. So get your damn shot. Or, stay inside your house. But don’t mess with my kids.
Commentary regarding Eric Swalwell’s statement (see comment 319):
[…] I really don’t give a shit about foolish personal choices that don’t affect me, like playing Russian roulette or sharing an unventilated room with Steve Bannon. But because the vaccines offer less than 100% protection—and even that fades over time—the unvaxxed among us do affect me. And you. And everyone else. Not only that, they occupy hospital beds that could be accommodating people who choose not to be dyspeptic fuckwits.
But who’s getting all the attention these days? Screeching banshees at school board meetings whose behavior wouldn’t pass muster in a kindergarten classroom. […]
But … but … freedom! Freedom to spread death. Freedom to infect other people’s children. Freedom to paralyze our hospital system. Freedom to fuck up our economic recovery. Freedom to sow chaos in order to grease the skids for the return of their ocher overlord.
Yeah, you have those freedoms, and others should have the freedom to make you pariahs—at which point you have the freedom to accept the all-too-predictable consequences of your actions and shut the fuck up for once.
Yes, I know. Natural selection is sorting this out as we speak, but that doesn’t mean we need to be happy about it. After all, as Swalwell makes clear, we’re the real victims, not them.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded we’ve heard an awful lot from the right—a near-constant refrain, in fact—about their “freedom.” The word itself has become a shibboleth, wielded like a bludgeon against any attempts to rein in the virus: Vaccine mandates? An infringement on our freedom! Closure of businesses? They’re killing our freedom! Masks? Social distancing? How dare you impose on our freedom? […]
So many freedoms are being claimed by these people, it’s getting hard to keep up. Interestingly, the word “freedom” never appeared in the original Constitution of 1787 (the watchword for that document was “liberty”) but was added in the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment, to apply to various universal principles such as the “free” exercise of religion and freedom of speech. The Second Amendment, according to the founders, was necessary to ensure the security of a “free” state, but beyond those two amendments there was really nothing explicating exactly what “freedom” was supposed to mean.
As explained by Gene Slater writing for The Atlantic, that omission left a considerable degree of latitude in defining what “freedom” actually portends in this country. Slater notes that in the mid-1960s during the heyday of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and others embraced “freedom” as the purpose of the movement’s struggle against discrimination and racism. In that context, given the nation’s lengthy history of slavery, white-inspired terrorism, and Jim Crow laws, the demand for justice and freedom was nearly impossible to refute, and for those who had a vested interest in opposing equality and civil rights, that presented a very serious problem: No one could risk being tarred as standing against such a bedrock principle as freedom, even if there was a whole lot of money and power put at risk. So the question for conservatives became: How do we maintain and exert control over groups whose own desire for equal rights served to challenge the traditional status quo, the established pecking order?
As Slater points out, the reaction of conservatives was to co-opt the term “freedom” itself:
The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after King’s speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that one’s own freedom depended on everyone else’s. This wasn’t an organic response. Rather, conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests.
“Protecting their own interests” meant preserving the riches and wealth that flowed from the practices of discrimination and injustice, and nowhere was such discrimination and injustice more profitable than in the housing market. In fact, it was viewed as a necessity. As discussed by Slater, the relationship between racial segregation and the value of real property was well-established in this country long before the civil rights movement. The routine and accepted imposition of racial restrictions and the practice of “redlining” (denying credit, loans, insurance, and other services to Black and other ethnic neighborhoods because of perceived risk) were all well-established practices with the effect of permanently segregating minority populations from whites, thus preserving a regime of persistent, institutionalized inequality that haunts the country to the present day.
For realtors and the high-value white property owners they coveted, the rationale for such practices was the “idea that anyone selling to minority families was destroying the future of all the neighbors.” As Slater explains, even after racial covenants in real estate transactions were outlawed, the realtors’ practice of “steering” whites to white neighborhoods, Blacks to Black neighborhoods, and denying Blacks and other ethnic minorities access to better housing in white areas continued unabated, such that by the mid-1960s “Black Americans were excluded from 98 percent of new homes and 95 percent of neighborhoods.”</b?
But these practices were faced with a mortal threat in 1963 when California passed a law known as the Rumford Act […] intended to curb discrimination in the sale and rental of homes. As Slater explains, in response, the state’s 40,000-strong contingent of realtors introduced Proposition 14, which in both word and effect explicitly permitted discrimination against ethnic and minority populations in housing.
The key language of that Proposition, which was duly approved by 65% of California voters, was this:
“Neither the state nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall deny, limit or abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person who is willing or desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline to sell, lease or rent such property to such person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.”
You may want to read that language again, because it illustrates how American conservatives first co-opted the terminology of “freedom” by transforming it into an expression of individual rights—or so-called “freedoms”—in this case, a freedom (or license) to discriminate. […] By perversely couching the right to discriminate against others in terms of freedom, conservatives knew they could rely on the relative ignorance of American voters to get their measure passed. […] Notably, the word “discrimination” never appears. Not surprisingly, the Proposition earned the support of the American Nazi Party and other white supremacist organizations.
Proposition 14 was deemed unconstitutional in 1966 by the California Supreme Court, a decision subsequently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. But the seeds for every subsequent right-wing perversion of the word “freedom” had been firmly planted. Slater explains how the president of the California Real Estate Association, Spike Wilson, had advised realtors to lobby for the Proposition’s passage:
The first step was inventing what became known as “color-blind freedom” to justify discrimination. […] this is the same type of “color-blind” analysis espoused by current members of the United States Supreme Court in arguing, for example, against affirmative action. As Slater notes, what the proponents of Proposition 14 argued was not that Blacks or minorities were “bad,” but that allowing the government to protect them amounted to conferring “special privileges” on them: Proposition 14, realtors claimed, was not about race but about “the rights of the individual.’”
[…] Freedom of choice required the right to discriminate.
[…] this type of “freedom” language has been formulated and weaponized by conservatives to apply to any issue they choose: “abortion, guns, public schools, gender rights, campaign finance, [and] climate change.” In fact, as Slater observes, the more issues they apply it to, the stronger it becomes. Moreover, by framing it as a struggle between individuals and government, they could recruit allies from every social strata and political persuasion. Some version, some strain of this essential argument can be seen in every utterance and action by today’s Republican Party: “This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of others—without directly saying so.”
The consequences of this perversion of freedom are what we’ve seen from the foot soldiers of the right ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Because it is such a universal threat, any attempt at a unified response by the government was bound to run smack into this myopic and self-serving attitude cultivated by the Republican Party to justify its existence for the past five decades. It bleeds down into every Facebook post, every anti-vaxx meme, every protest against masking or social distancing, and it is echoed by every right-winger who invades a local school board meeting to bray about supposed infringements on his/her purported freedoms. And it’s the same rhetoric that corrupt and ideologically compromised judges use against any action taken by the Biden administration to contain the pandemic. From internet chat rooms to the federal courts, “freedom” is constantly trotted out by conservatives as a justification for not doing anything that might benefit Americans other than themselves.
It’s the same principle that drives legislation targeting trans youth under the phony rubric of “parental rights.” It’s the same rhetoric that supports bogus right-wing think tank-sponsored industry arguments against environmental protections. […] And it’s the same rationale that motivated some of the country’s worst specimens to attack the U.S. Capitol and members of Congress on Jan. 6.
This corruption of freedom by the right wing is fundamentally incompatible with democratic institutions or democracy as we know it. As the COVID-19 pandemic has amply demonstrated, it’s also incredibly dangerous to human lives. But the reality—for those willing to face it—is that the Republican Party stopped caring about such things a long time ago.
Careful reading shows that women are the earthen vessels into which the eternal souls of babies are woven. Either way, Cawthorn’s rant is not just weird, but offensive.
[…] before he’d wrapped up the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, Donald Trump was eager to convince his party’s base that he was no longer a proponent of abortion rights. [Trump] raised the prospect of not only banning abortion, but also criminalizing efforts to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
There “has to be some form of punishment,” the future president said at the time.
It was a reminder that in some GOP circles, overturning the Roe v. Wade precedent is a critically important goal, but it would be the first in a series of steps — one of which may include punishing women.
Nearly five years later, as the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears likely to turn back the clock to before 1973, the public conversation is starting to focus on what Republican policymakers will do — or at least try to do — once Americans’ reproductive rights under the Constitution no longer exist.
Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana sat down with NBC News’ Chuck Todd yesterday and explored this in more detail. Talking Points Memo noted:
During an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Braun argued that when it comes to abortion laws, “it’s time to turn it back to the states.” Braun went on to say that he is “perfectly comfortable” with criminalizing abortion, but supposedly “just not at the level where everybody’s got to live with the same thing.”
In fairness, the GOP senator went on to say, “[W]hen you talk about criminalizing it, then all you’re doing is taking this to a logical extreme that you’ll never get to anyway.” In other words, Braun suggested he sees it as unlikely that all Americans would be subjected to criminal penalties for trying to end unwanted or dangerous pregnancies.
But Braun nevertheless said he’s “perfectly comfortable” criminalizing abortion, and he supports a system in which the matter is sent to state legislatures to do as they please.
Coming soon to a state capitol near you.
On the same episode of “Meet the Press,” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said that if Republican-appointed justices overturn Roe, “the best way” forward is to codify abortion rights into federal law. She added, “We even have some pro-choice Republicans that have signaled interest in doing that.”
Klobuchar was likely referring to Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, whose office last week endorsed codifying abortion rights. That said, to overcome a GOP filibuster, such a bill would need 60 votes, and proponents are nowhere close to reaching that level of support.
Donald Trump seemed to volunteer to Fox News that the FBI was on his trail, so he fired the FBI director in order to save his own skin.
It was on May 9, 2017, when Donald Trump fired James Comey as the director of the FBI. […] he ousted Comey six years before the end of his 10-year term.
A few days later, Trump sat down with NBC News’ Lester Holt and effectively confessed that he fired the FBI director in order to undermine the investigation into the Russia scandal. It was a rare instance in which a sitting president willingly raised the prospect of obstructing justice during a national television interview.
Four years later, [Trump] is apparently still confessing.
In an interview that aired last night, Trump sat down with Fox News’ Mark Levin, apparently to help promote a new book with photographs from his time in the White House. Their discussion turned to the Russia scandal, which the former president said may have been made up in Hillary Clinton’s kitchen. He added:
“[A] lot of people say to me, ‘How you survived is one of the most incredible things.’ Don’t forget, I fired Comey. Had I not fired Comey, you might not be talking to me right now about a beautiful book of four years at the White House. And we’ll see about the future. The future’s going to be very interesting. But I fired Comey, that whole group, and now that group is coming back again. I mean, it’s not believable. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”
The host tried to change the subject, but later in the interview, Trump seemed eager to talk about this some more.
“I was going to say before, if I didn’t fire Comey, they were looking to take down the President of the United States. If I didn’t fire him, and some people said, ‘He made a mistake when he fired Comey.’ And now those same people said it was the most incredible instinctual moves that they’ve ever seen, because I wouldn’t — I might be here with you, perhaps we’ll be talking about something else. But I don’t think I could have survived if I didn’t fire him, because it was like a hornet’s nest.”
It was three years ago when The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote, “Donald Trump can’t stop telling on himself.” A year later, Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, said, “What he’s been saying in public is the kind of thing I used to prosecute people for doing in private.”
To be sure, the former president has earned a reputation for breathtaking dishonesty, but it’s also true that he has a weird habit of publicly disclosing his own misdeeds.
And now we have a striking new example. Unprompted, Trump seemed to volunteer to Levin that the FBI was on his trail, so he fired the FBI director in order to save his own skin.
Legal experts can speak to this with more authority than I can, but his on-air rhetoric sounded an awful lot like someone acknowledging — if not overtly bragging about — obstruction of justice.
In case anyone’s curious, the statute of limitations for federal obstruction of justice is five years. Trump fired Comey four and a half years ago.
Rep. Thomas Massie (a Republican from Kentucky) tweeted the a photo on Saturday, with the message: “Merry Christmas! 🎄 ps. Santa, please bring ammo. 🎁”
The photo is available at the link. It’s seven family members smiling, Christmas tree in the background, everyone cradling a gun. At least six of the guns look like weapons of war, not hunting rifles.
After three years and the efforts of a multi-agency investigation, dozens of victims of human trafficking are free from the fetters of “modern-day slavery” on South Georgia farms.
The over 100 victims were smuggled from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras and brought to the farms where they were “imprisoned” under “inhumane” and “brutal” conditions, and forced to work for little or no money. At least two workers died, and one was allegedly raped repeatedly.
The indictment is dubbed “Operation Blooming Onion,” and a spokesperson from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia told VICE News, it may be one of the largest-ever human trafficking and visa fraud investigations in the country.
According to the 54-page, newly unsealed indictment, workers were often required to dig onions with their bare hands and were paid only 20 cents for each bucket harvested. They were threatened at gunpoint and held in fenced-in work camps in “cramped, unsanitary quarters” and given “little or no food, limited plumbing,” and no safe water.
Two dozen accused members and associates of the “Patricio” crime ring face myriad felony charges. The alleged scheme netted over $200 million, laundering the funds through cash purchases of land, homes, vehicles, and businesses, after buying cashier’s checks and then funneling the millions through a casino.
The defendants are additionally accused of “raping, kidnapping, and threatening or attempting to kill some of the workers or their families.” In many cases, victims were sold or traded to other conspirators.
[…] although this bust in Georgia is significant, according to Solimar Mercado-Spencer, a senior staff attorney at the Farmworker Rights Division of the Georgia Legal Services Program, a nonprofit law firm that represents low-income farmworkers in Georgia, “This has been happening for a long time.”
[…] “Because it’s happening in rural areas, nobody sees the victims. All you see is, you know, your onions at Kroger. You can go buy them. You don’t know where they came from. But this is happening, and nobody notices it. And these are essential workers that have been keeping us fed through the pandemic.”
[…] The indictment alleges that in or before 2015, the conspirators and their associates “engaged in mail fraud, international forced labor trafficking, and money laundering, among other crimes,” fraudulently using the H-2A work visa program to smuggle foreign nationals into the U.S. under the pretext of serving as agricultural workers.
The AJC reports that the bust is part of a shift in priorities by President Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Instead of targeting undocumented workers via raids on workplaces, today, authorities are targeting “exploitative employers” and businesses that violate labor laws.
“We will not tolerate unscrupulous employers who exploit unauthorized workers, conduct illegal activities, or impose unsafe working conditions,” Mayorkas said in a news release about the shift.
We’ve long known that the national COVID-19 pandemic has been transforming into a predominantly Republican disease, with infections in Republican-voting, Republican-governed counties far outstripping those in less Republican regions. We also know that anti-mask, vaccine-hostile Republican states have been begging their better-governed neighbors to take COVID-19 patients after their own hospitals filled with unvaccinated cases.
A new NPR analysis answers the only remaining question: Are Americans in Republican-voting counties now dying more than Americans in other parts of the country? The answer, after a grueling summer of surges that didn’t have to happen, is now a resounding yes. Republican-voting counties across the nation have been seeing death rates several times higher than those in Democratic-voting ones.
[…] Doctors have gotten better at treating severe COVID-19 cases than they were early in the pandemic, there’s now better access to drugs that help prevent those serious cases, we now have mountains of data showing which safety measures work and how well—but in many parts of the country still loyal to Republicanism, hospitals are still full of dying patients.
The data collected by NPR shows that new COVID-19 fatality rates are strongly correlated to a county’s support for Donald Trump in the 2020 elections. In counties where Trump gathered 60% or more of the vote, death rates since May—the first month of widespread vaccination efforts—were 2.7 times higher than in those that voted for Biden. Even that may be underselling things: NPR cites COVID-19 tracker Charles Gaba (who has been highlighting similar statistics for months now), who reports that death rates in the “reddest tenth of the country” have in recent months been between 5.5 and 6 times those of the “bluest” tenth.
It was already established that living in a Republican-voting, Republican-governed county means you’re at much greater risk of contracting COVID-19 than other Americans. Now the data is there to show that residents of Republican-held counties are substantially more likely to die from the disease as well.
[…] low county vaccination rates correlate strongly to Republican support, and Republican leaders and networks have been relentless in spreading pandemic disinformation while attacking public safety measures. Republican leaders (and, of course, Fox News) have been spreading dangerous conspiracy theories elevating fake cures while belittling actual pandemic safety measures.
Republicans have even been actively hostile towards efforts to encourage vaccination of children.
[…] the transformation of a national pandemic into one that primarily targets Americans in Republican strongholds ought to be astonishing. Early pandemic deaths were in places like New York City, where population density and frequent international travel conspired to create conditions ideal for viral spread. The images of tented emergency hospitals, of trucks doubling as mobile morgues—most of those images were from “Democratic”-leaning cities and states.
But despite all we now know about COVID-19 and how to stop it, Republican-held counties have now topped, and lapped, pandemic death rates dating back to those months when experts were still arguing over whether the virus was “airborne,” whether masks worked, and whether you could catch the virus from touching your mail or groceries.
[…] There’s been no stronger correlation for dangerous pandemic behaviors than loyalty towards Republicanism, and now the movement is literally dying for that cause.
[…] Is there any point at which Tucker Carlson will consider the deaths of his own viewers as net disadvantage, compared to whatever advantage he believes he’s getting from stoking disinformation about the vaccine that would prevent them?
[…] you know what group is least motivated of all? Dead people. Once you’ve reduced a loyal viewer to a corpse, they’re not going to be motivated about anything. Corpses don’t buy overpriced pillows, gold coins, or “survival buckets.” And corpses don’t give a damn whether you’re running for president.
A North Carolina brewery this month introduced its newest beer — Don’t Be Mean to People: A Golden Rule Saison — in response to Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s comments made over the summer that the LGBTQ+ community was “filth.”
A portion of the brew’s profits will be donated to LGBTQ+ organizations in Robinson’s name.
Robinson in October, after a video of his earlier comments went viral, doubled down on them, telling a reporter he would “absolutely not” use any other word to describe the LGBTQ+ community. […]
[…] “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” Robinson, 53, said during his speech. “And yes, I called it filth. And if you don’t like it that I called it filth, come see me and I’ll explain it to you.”
The word “transgenderism” is not one commonly used by the trans community, and was coined by anti-transgender activists to dehumanize trans people and make being transgender sound like a condition […]
“The Lt. Governor said some not very nice things,” the fundraiser’s website [Durham brewery Ponysaurus] reads. “But Don’t Be Mean to People believes in the goodness of everyone. So we know in his heart he doesn’t believe other North Carolinians are ‘filth.’ We’re so sure of it, we’re helping to fund the good work that could be his greatest act in public office.”
Don’t Be Mean to People, with notes of tangerine, pineapple, and banana, is available for purchase on Ponysaurus’ website, in packages of four or 24 or in one-sixth or one-half barrel kegs.
Anyone who picks up the brew is encouraged to “post a toast to the Lt. Governor, thanking him for all the work he’s doing through the #fundforthefabulous.” [LOL]
[…] “There’s no debate here. This is open discrimination. It is completely unacceptable,” State Sen. Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter at the time. “Mark Robinson should resign.”
The Human Rights Campaign also called for Robinson to resign, and his comments were condemned by White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates, who is from North Carolina, according to USA Today.
Later, in an October interview with the NBC-affiliate WRAL-TV in Raleigh, Robinson was asked whether he would now use a different word besides “filth.”
Svalbard: “To visitors, the Norwegian archipelago can seem both ethereal and eternal. But climate change all but guarantees an eventual collapse of its vulnerable ecosystem.”
[…] Except to keep track of mealtimes, watches were irrelevant; in the summer, this far north of the Arctic Circle, the sun never goes anywhere near the horizon.
And yet Svalbard, though seemingly timeless, is perhaps the closest thing we have to a ticking clock.
[…] With a population of around 2,400 people, Longyearbyen is the archipelago’s largest settlement. It is a decidedly quirky place. Named after an American mine owner, John Munro Longyear, the town is home to a mostly dismantled coal-mining industry, a university campus, a global seed bank and a small but thriving tourism industry that’s focused almost exclusively on Svalbard’s natural beauty.
Viewed from the sea, Svalbard seemed to be the very epitome of wilderness: a vast expanse of largely untouched water, ice and islands, free from human habitation and infrastructure, aside from the occasional passing boat. This, of course, was why I was unable to tear myself away from the deck, wolfing down meals and sleeping as little as possible.
[…] Unfortunately, climate change all but guarantees an eventual (and probably fairly imminent) collapse of what is, in fact, an exceptionally fragile ecosystem. The 29 national parks and other protected areas that cover two-thirds of the Svalbard archipelago can protect its wild inhabitants from hunting and pollution, but not from increasing water and air temperatures. Every year brings us further news of ever-shrinking glaciers and reduced ice cover — ice upon which the 3,000 polar bears who live in the Svalbard archipelago and Barents Sea depend for their survival.
“The map has been completely redrawn during my time here,” said Fredrik Granath, an author, photographer and expedition leader who has 20 years of experience working on Svalbard. “Routes we used to travel on foot or by snowmobile only 10 years ago are now accessible only by boat. It gets worse every year.”
[…] “You cannot describe the brutality of what is happening with images or words alone,” Mr. Granath says. “Svalbard is at a tipping point. Some people need to experience it first hand, or this incredibly important story will unfold unseen.” […]
After eight years in the trenches, Ukrainian soldiers are resigned to the possibility that the Russian military, which dwarfs their own in power and wealth, will come sooner or later.
Machine gun fire broke the stillness just after 8 p.m. when Capt. Denis Branitskii was midway through the evening patrol. The shots came in sporadic bursts and were close by, fired by Russian-backed separatists whose positions were obscured in the darkness. Only when the flash of a rocket-propelled grenade illuminated the newly fallen snow did Captain Branitskii break his stride, briefly pausing to take cover before moving on.
“This happens every night,” said Capt. Branitskii, a cleft-chinned company commander with the Ukrainian military’s 25th Airborne Brigade, positioned along the front lines in eastern Ukraine. “Sometimes it’s much heavier, sometimes it’s like tonight. Tonight, this is fine.”
This is what the war has been like for years, a slow, bloody grind that set in after both sides fought to a stalemate over territory seized by Russian-backed forces in 2014. Now Ukrainian and Western officials say something more ominous could be building.
In recent weeks, they have warned that Russia was erecting the architecture for significant military action, possibly even a full-fledged invasion. U.S. intelligence officials have assessed that Moscow has drawn up plans for a military offensive involving an estimated 175,000 troops to begin as early as next year. Recent satellite photos show a buildup in equipment, including tanks and artillery.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has countered that it was the Ukrainians with their American and Western European backers who were instigating a war, citing what he calls security threats to Russia, including NATO exercises in the Black Sea. [JFC]
Amid mounting anxiety, Mr. Putin and President Biden will speak by video conference on Tuesday. The White House said Mr. Biden would “reaffirm the United States’ support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
Mr. Putin has made his position clear. “It is not we who are threatening anyone,’’ he said last week, “and accusing us of this, given the reality on the ground, or as we say to shift the blame from the person who’s sick in the head to the healthy one, is at minimum irresponsible.” […]
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 is badly in need of an overhaul. There are hints of bipartisan support for making that happen.
It’s no secret that John Eastman, a Republican lawyer on Donald Trump’s team in the aftermath of the former president’s defeat, wrote an infamous memo intended to help overturn the results. What’s less known is why Eastman thought his scheme would work.
As the GOP attorney saw it, then-Vice President Mike Pence, rather than honor the results of the election, could exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and set aside the Electoral College votes of seven states.
As The New York Times reported, the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack believes those ambiguities need to be resolved, sooner rather than later.
Members of the select congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol are pressing to overhaul the complex and little-known law that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election, arguing that the ambiguity of the statute puts democracy itself at risk.
Part of this matters because it demonstrates that the House select committee’s work has an obvious legislative purpose, which will matter in the courts as the panel’s investigation moves forward.
But it also matters because the Electoral Count Act of 1887, passed in the aftermath of a brutally messy election controversy, and designed to establish a congressional process for certifying electoral votes, really does need to be addressed. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, who’s been banging the ECA drum for months, pointed today to hypothetical scenarios in which a Republican-led Congress could try to reject a Democratic ticket’s electors and/or accept a rogue set of electors appointed by GOP state legislators.
So Congress could raise the threshold for congressional objections to electors to much higher than one member from each chamber. It could clarify what constitutes grounds for such an objection, which is now very vague. And Congress could clarify the ECA’s “safe harbor” provision to make it absolutely clear that if a state resolves disputes over electors, Congress must count them.
Clarifying the vice president’s ceremonial role in the certification process would also be wise.
As is usually the case when public discussion turns to worthwhile federal legislation, an uncomfortable question hangs overhead: Is Congress capable of passing legislation to overhaul the existing Electoral Count Act?
In the House, progress appears likely — with at least some modicum of bipartisan backing. The Times’ report noted that Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the Jan. 6 committee’s co-chair, is on board with reforms.
In the Senate, Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic chair of the Rules Committee, added, “The antiquated law governing the Electoral College vote count is too vague and ripe for abuse, and it resulted in baseless objections that delayed the democratic process. It’s time to update this law to safeguard our democracy.”
The problem — and you surely knew this was coming — is the inevitable Republican filibuster, and the challenge that comes with convincing 10 GOP senators to do the responsible thing.
In theory, this shouldn’t be an especially heavy legislative lift. The existing flaws in the system are not inherently partisan or ideological. Indeed, the Times’ report added that there’s “significant support among Republicans outside of Congress for overhauling the Electoral Count Act.” Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, “said in an interview that he was concerned that, without changes to the law, there would be future attempts to exploit it by both parties.”
I’m honestly hard pressed to think of what the GOP talking points against ECA changes would look like, aside from, “Democrats think it’s sensible, so we’re saying no.”
Trump got caught up in a double-negative on Saturday, issuing a statement that read, “Anybody that doesn’t think there wasn’t massive Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election is either very stupid, or very corrupt!”
The government is funded as of last Thursday despite ridiculous Republican tricks, leaving Congress to get on with the next bunch of ridiculous antics, like raising or suspending the debt limit in the next eight days. The Treasury Department says they have until Dec. 15 to get it done, or risk sending the nation into default for the first time ever. That’s the most looming crisis for Congress, but passing the defense authorization bill is a close second, followed by President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better (BBB) bill in the Senate, which passed the House last month.
Last week, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio made passing the National Defense Authorization Act in the Senate impossible after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had agreed upon the amendments that would be offered. Rubio’s amendment isn’t among them because it created a procedural problem that would have forced the House to redo the bill (it passed it already, back in September), so Rubio blew up the deal, refusing to allow the Senate to move forward on it. Because it’s the Senate and one minority member can do that.
The result of this is that the House has work on the bill again, but while they’re doing that, they are figuring out if they can take care of the debt ceiling simultaneously. The defense bill is now off the Senate floor officially, along with the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate defense committees. House Chair Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington State, is aiming to have the bill negotiated and ready to print by the end of the day Monday so that it can be done in both chambers before the end of this week.
But that will depending in part on whether they can get an agreement on the debt ceiling and potentially another looming crisis that they created for themselves a decade ago in the 2011 Budget Control Act: Automatic cuts in Medicare reimbursements will kick in on Jan. 1 if they haven’t passed something to avoid them. “Leadership’s trying to figure out how to get all this stuff done,” Smith told Politico. […]
The Department of Justice is suing the state of Texas over its 2021 redistricting plans, which were approved by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in October.
Attorney General Merrick Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta announced the lawsuit during a press conference Monday. The complaint, filed Monday in U.S. district court in the Western district of Texas, alleges that both the new congressional map and the new state House map out of Texas are discriminatory.
“The newly-enacted redistrictng plans will not allow minority voters an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice,” Gupta said at the press conference.
The suit, like other lawsuits over the maps in recent months, began by pointing out that 95% of Texas’ population growth over the past decade came from Latinos, African Americans and other minority groups.
Texas gained two new U.S. congressional seats from that population growth — and yet “Texas designed the two new seats to have Anglo voting majorities,” the DOJ suit says.
The Justice Department listed several opportunities the Texas legislature could have taken — but didn’t — to draw congressional and state House districts that would have reflected the state’s growing Hispanic population.
Among other things, according to the suit, the legislature “surgically excised minority communities from the core of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (DFW) by attaching them to heavily Anglo rural counties, some more than a hundred miles away, placing them in a congressional district where they would lack equal electoral opportunity.”
At the state House level, the suit alleged, “Texas also eliminated Latino electoral opportunities in the State House plan through manipulation or outright elimination of districts where Latino communities previously had elected their preferred candidates.” […]
Jenna Ryan, the insurrectionist who flew in on a charted private jet in order to participate in an act of treason at our nation’s Capitol building on Jan. 6, is going to jail soon. You may remember Ryan as the Texas MAGA real estate broker who said publicly that she was “Definitely not going to jail. Sorry I have blonde hair white skin a great job a great future and I’m not going to jail. Sorry to rain on your hater parade. I did nothing wrong,” a few months before being sentenced to 60 days in jail.
The day of Ms. Ryan’s reckoning is fast approaching, and she has been working to line up her narcissistic persecution-complex brand. She has made some appearances at the right-wing outlet you would expect: Newsmax. Her angle is that she is was sentenced not because she filmed herself breaking the law, […] but because of her tweet above saying she would not go to prison. You see, this is all left-wing woke mob virtue signaling by the famously pro-liberal and pro-Black Lives Matter law enforcement and judicial system.
But before Ms. Ryan surrenders herself to authorities, she has decided she is going to continue to make the kinds of videos that prove she not only has zero remorse for her actions, she also does not believe she is guilty of anything. Oh, and yeah, she wants protein shakes and I suspect a professional-quality blender when she goes to prison in Jan. 2022.
[…] But don’t you worry, Jenna has ideas about prison! While she is not sure “what you do in prison,” she imagines that you “do a lot of yoga. You work out. Read a book. Write a book. I already have a book written.” She goes on to say she has a literary agent and she’s excited about her book project and she just has to finish writing “a little piece of it.”
Maybe that “little piece” is the whole chapter about how recording yourself being an ignoramus and breaking laws on federal land is just an opportunity, like Trump and the rest of the corrupt MAGA landscape, to sell some books. She says it could even be a movie someday.
[…] On Sunday, Ryan posted a new video titled “Keep Positive- Prison Fit Check,” in which she explained the optimistic outlook for her prison stay. “The only thing I can see that’s good about going to prison is that I’m going to be able to work out a lot, and do a lot of yoga, and detox.” That’s a positive attitude. “And also I can’t eat because the food is awful and, there’s just no food.” Interesting. Maybe she has read some of my articles about how Alabama, Sheriff Todd Entrekin pocketed around $750,000 from the prison food fund over a three-year period? Maybe she’s mixing up her ideas with the food given to high school students in predominantly Black areas?
[…] “How to lose 30 pounds in 60 days by participating in an insurrection, getting arrested, and going to federal prison”?
Former South Carolina GOP Gov. Nikki Haley reminded everyone she still exists Sunday. Maybe she felt a little jealous because Senator Tim Scott is considered a top contender for the GOP vice presidential slot in 2024. She’s not content to just fade into the background as a loyal Donald Trump enabler who casually suggests President Joe Biden is senile. She’s also demonstrating that she’s just as gross as GOP sedition caucus members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.
Here’s what Haley tweeted on Sunday, God’s day for watching football:
HALEY: When I was governor, I worked with Democrats who still believed in America. I didn’t share their views on policy, but at least we agreed on some basic principles. Those days are over. The Democratic Party has become the Socialist Party.
Yep, when Haley was elected governor in the distant past of 2010, Democrats still believed in America, that shining city on a hill. Now the Democratic Party is the Socialist Party, led by noted socialist Joe Biden from Stalingrad and his radical Senate accomplices Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Bolsheviks all.
Back in the real world, the Democrats are not a socialist party. Yes, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Jamal Bowman are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. That’s five Democrats out of 222 in the House of Representatives. There were also six self-identified DSA members in the Democratic caucus well before 2010. We’re hardly witnessing a socialist takeover of the party that twice rejected Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, both of whom Republicans still insisted on calling socialists. It’s as if the word doesn’t mean anything, other than as convenient shorthand for “n-word lover.”
Meanwhile, 139 out of 213 House Republicans voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install Trump as the forever president. A clear majority of Republicans is openly opposed to democracy. […]
Haley’s lying, of course, and she’s not alone. GOP Senator Marco Rubio from Florida tweeted that Biden’s Build Back Better agenda “isn’t socialism. It’s Marxism.” (It’s possible he doesn’t understand the meaning of either word.) […]
Trump’s MAGA mob stormed the Capitol on January 6. It wasn’t just a riot, but an attempted insurrection against the government. When Haley and other Republican opportunists claim Democrats are fundamentally anti-American and an existential threat to our way of life, they implicitly justify violent resistance. The MAGA thugs already consider themselves “patriots” fighting for their “true” president.
[…] Haley believes she can appease Trump supporters with this vicious rhetoric, but it’s likely to have the opposite effect. Haley openly criticized Trump after January 6 and said she was “disgusted” by his actions after Election Day. The MAGA faithful will point out that if Haley genuinely believes Democrats are an existential threat, why would she oppose Trump’s efforts to subvert the election?
As Bootsy Collins said, “If you fake the funk, your nose will grow.” Haley can tweet lies about Democrats, but she’ll never convince anyone she’s a true believer. She’ll still end up running from the MAGA mob.
Wonkette: “Conservatives Cry ‘False Flag’ Over Known White Supremacist Group’s DC Rally”
On Saturday evening, about 100 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front poured out of their traditional U-Hauls, wearing their traditional khakis and gaiters, and marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Arlington bridge, waving American flags and chanting “Reclaim America. [video available at the link.]
This is not the first time they’ve done this. Earlier this year they tried to do the same thing in Philadelphia, where they were very much not welcomed with open arms by the good citizens of the City of Brotherly Love. [video available at the link]
Patriot Front is a well-established group — perhaps one of the most active of these groups in the nation at the moment. We know who they are. We know they started out as Vanguard America and then rebranded after Charlottesville, where James Alex Fields Jr. murdered activist Heather Heyer with his car. As ProPublica and several other sources explain, he wasn’t a confirmed member of the group, but he sure was photographed carrying their shield and wearing their uniform. We know they’ve “provided security” for neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. We know they are led by 23-year-old Thomas Rousseau. [photo available at the link]
[…] There are absolutely zero questions about who these people are and what they are about.
Alas, several prominent conservatives have been claiming on Twitter this weekend that the whole darn episode was just a false flag perpetrated either by “antifa” or the FBI itself, to make the right look bad. […]
Dinesh D’Souza found it suspect that no one was giving Rousseau and his group free airtime and publicity. […]
Marjorie Taylor Greene knew for sure it was fake because who has ever heard of a “patriot group” “cover[ing[ their faces like they’re scared.” Except, you know, for a very famous “patriot group” with a remarkably similar ethos to this “patriot group,” called the KKK. […]
Jim Thompson at RedState wrote a whole entire article titled “Feds in Khaki Pants March In DC” about how this was clearly all set up by the feds and no one even knows what Patriot Front is, except for all the people who know exactly who and what they are. He acknowledged that some of them may be actual members of this group, but still insisted that “at least 20 percent of them were Feds,” because how else would they all afford those khaki pants?
He even did a little cartoon. [cartoon available at the link — it’s stupid]
[…] Several randos speculated that perhaps it was the Lincoln Project pulling some more extremely unhelpful bullshit, but again, we know who these people are. […] And, of course, there were those who went old school and claimed George Soros was behind it all.
Ironically, the only “false flag” type event in this whole thing was perpetrated by Patriot Front themselves. They set up a fake Twitter profile with an AI-generated photo of a person who does not exist to post video of their march, claiming there were over 500 of them (which there very clearly were not). People who are better at this kind of thing than I am quickly identified the photo as a fake, after which the account was swiftly turned into a pro-Patriot Front Twitter account. […]
I will say that these conspiracists come in two categories: those who know they’re full of shit and those who don’t. The fact is, conservatives have claimed for years now that anything they think makes them look bad — school shootings, Nazi rallies, and even, ironically, conspiracies like QAnon — is a false flag. Similarly, they have been claiming for years that left-wing protests are filled with George Soros’s legions of “paid protesters.”
[…] It’s part of the whole “it wasn’t me” ethos that allows the American Right to avoid culpability in pretty much any given situation. […]
This way, they don’t have to openly criticize groups like Patriot Front and alienate those who agree with them, while maintaining a level of plausible deniability to those who might be repulsed by such a display but are not constantly paying attention to politics and current enough to know that it’s bullshit.
Luckily for us, the right’s habit of insisting that every time they get toilet paper stuck on the bottom of their shoe it was actually a George Soros-planted lookalike is pretty easy to ridicule, and we should do it more often, to the point where it is no longer a useful tactic for them.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) plans to leave his seat at the end of this month to become CEO at a new media company founded by former president Donald Trump, the company announced Monday….
Nunes, who was first elected to Congress in 2002 at age 30, was reelected to his seat last year for a 10th term, which ends in January 2023. A news release Monday said Nunes would be joining the Trump Media & Technology Group as its chief executive starting in January.
[…]
By leaving Congress, Nunes will set up an early 2022 race for his seat. According to state election law, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) must call a special election within 14 days of Nunes leaving office, and a primary must be held 18 to 20 weeks later. The top two vote-getters in the primary would head to a general election, meaning that the Nunes seat could be vacant until midsummer.
Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, is reportedly cooperating with the Jan. 6 select committee, according to CNN on Monday.
CNN reported that Short was subpoenaed by the committee a few weeks ago.
Short is amongst Pence’s closest advisers and could potentially offer insight into Pence’s whereabouts on the day of the deadly Capitol insurrection, including the then-VP’s interactions with former President Trump amid his demands for Pence to not certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory on Jan. 6.
Short accompanied Pence for most of Jan. 6, including after the VP was evacuated from the Senate chamber and moved to a safe location beneath the Capitol as Trump supporters breached the Capitol building amid the then-President’s refusal to concede. Some insurrectionists chanted “hang Mike Pence” as the VP defied Trump’s bogus claims of a “stolen” 2020 presidential election by proceeding with the certification of Biden’s electoral victory.
Short was also a firsthand witness to Trump and conservative attorney John Eastman’s attempts to pressure Pence into delaying the count of the Electoral College votes during a meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 4. Trump reportedly told others that he banned Short from the White House after the Capitol insurrection because he was angry with Short’s role in Pence’s defiance of Trump.
A source told CNN that the committee is getting “significant cooperation with Team Pence.” Another source reportedly told CNN that Short’s cooperation exemplifies the “momentum” behind the committee’s investigation into the events of Jan. 6.
[…] Prior to serving as Pence’s chief of staff, Short worked as Trump’s legislative director for the first 18 months of his presidency.
[…] Additionally, Pence’s former chief of staff Nick Ayers, former legislative affairs director Chris Hodgson, political adviser Marty Obst, and former special assistant Zach Bauer are also reportedly of potential interest to the committee.
[…] Eric Metaxas is one of the Christian right-wingers who has been around peddling pretty abhorrent drivel pretending American Christians have been persecuted in our country for decades. His reading of American history includes the belief that the millions of Native Americans who died as a result of European war and disease were simply the trinkets of Christian deliverance in the New World. Unsurpringly, Metaxas has been an anti-vaxxer in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic—being anti-vaccine is where the money is made these days for libertarians and right-wingers. Guess who got COVID-19? I’ll give you four guesses.
If you said Eric Metaxas, his wife Susan, and both of his parents, ding ding ding! Metaxas spoke on his show after an absence. In the clip below, he explains that he’s been dealing with a lot of COVID-19 in his life.
ERIC METAXAS: I got COVID. Suzanne got COVID. I don’t know if she gave it to me, or I gave it to her. But then she went to visit my parents and gave it to them. And my mother got it. And my father got it. And my current daughter—I won’t use her name on the air—let’s just say Hortense, went to nurse my parents.
So this has been the craziest time in the Metaxas family, folks. If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, I have no idea where I’ve been. I’ve been in a perspiring haze for days and days and days. Obviously I’m mostly out of it. The fact that I can be functional and talk here for the first time in two weeks. But the fact that my parents were ill was very upsetting to me. My dad had to go to the emergency room, again, so it’s been a really crazy time … and obviously when your dad’s 94 and he has COVID, and other health issues, it’s just been very stressful I have to say.
No idea what “current daughter” means in any context. Metaxas could simply be exhausted and historically he speaks in a strange way […] The Metaxas’ family revelations come after months of Metaxas giving his expert opinion on Steve Bannon’s show, where he explained that not taking a vaccine was a way to rebel against … something.
“The bottom line is, questions come up about the vaccine. People say, ‘I’m not going, this is experimental. I’ve watched this pandemic roll out and I’m not afraid of getting it, my kids are not afraid of getting it. This is not a big deal for us, I’m not going to put some experimental thing in my system, when we literally don’t know what could happen.’” Metaxas went on to juxtapose people afraid of the vaccine with “some other people” saying that “you must do it,” and that the “government is telling you you must do it.”
His convoluted point being that … take a breath … ”Americans need to understand that if the government, or everybody, is telling you you have to do something, we don’t have dissent, no dissent, you need to understand that’s not the American way, folks. And if only to be a rebel, you need to say, ‘I’m not going to do that.’” This isn’t the only time Metaxas spent trying to get some of that right-wing anti-vaxx traction.
A couple of days before Halloween, just over a month ago, Metaxas, who was probably trying to scare your children, gave one of those classic analogies to the Holocaust that is so bananas offensive that either someone is a rabid antisemite or they have very little brain function, or both. On right-wing clown Dave Rubin’s Rubin Report, he explained that the COVID-19 vaccine has opened his eyes to what he says has been happening every time he’s been put on shows for the past decade or so. Comparing anti-vaxxers’ “demonization” and “marginalization” to Jews under the Nazis, he reveals: “The vaccine idea, the idea that you can tell people, ‘Listen, yes this was made because of aborted fetuses; but you know, what if it was made with the bodies of Jews we murdered in the concentration camps who cares we’re telling you, you need to get it whether you have an objection to murdering Jewish children, we don’t care. We’re going to tell you what to do.” […]
Today in Finnish political discourse: What’s the suitable homecoming time for a 36 year old mom who works two jobs as a parliament member and prime minister? Apparently, it’s 11 PM.
Incidentally, on Saturday, The Guardian published this rather generic “rare” interview with the Finnish PM Sanna Marin:
(Generally speaking, it’s rare enough that international papers would want to interview a Finnish leader. Marin has the media appeal of a good-looking young woman leader who’s also relatively progressive.)
On the evening of that same Saturday, Marin made the faux pas of going to a nightclub despite knowing she’d been exposed to Covid-19 on Friday (in a meeting with the foreign minister Pekka Haavisto, who tested positive shortly afterwards). Since Marin is vaccinated, some doctor had decided (according to standard practice) that there was no strict need for her to isolate after exposure.
During the evening, some cabinet security officials decided it’d be good idea and responsible to isolate anyway, or at least avoid parties. They first tried to call Marin’s secure cabinet phone, which she is supposed to carry at all times. There was some difficulty in reaching her, since as it turned out she was only carrying the separate parliament-issued phone, which she apparently uses as the primary work phone. That’s another faux pas.
All this was heavily criticized on social media, and analyzed in the news by Monday, which also incidentally was Independence Day (though the PM has no visible role in the public ceremonies, since those belong to the president). For the last couple months, Marin has been visibly more relaxed than she used to be in her approach to Covid-19 and partying, on the general principle that vaccinated people should be able to live normally and vaccine refusers can go fuck themselves. This principle is somewhat controversial, as infections have been steadily increasing and the strain on healthcare system is growing.
Partying out late is currently entirely legal for vaccinated people, but many commenters feel Marin should be more exemplary in her personal behavior, especially considering the recent covid exposure. There’s also been some general sniping and handwringing on Marin’s occasional appearances in public as the “partying prime minister”, on the account that she should be “more focused on working” or “more respectable in her public conduct” or somesuch. This is the sort of petty scandalism that USians might remember from Obama era, when the leader of the country is relatively free of real scandals and also not a white man.
In this analysis piece from today, legal experts weigh in on the latest “scandal”:
The three law professors agree that no laws were broken, and the controversy is mostly made up, though some criticism is deserved on Marin’s part on both the phone issue and the covid precaution issue. One of the three men (Seppo Koskinen, a retired labor law professor) notes that the recent media attention on Marin’s partying is indeed odd, but he then recommends that Marin should try to avoid these kind of scandals by acting in a more dignified way. Specifically, she should go home by 11 PM rather than in the wee hours. Koskinen also weirdly suggests that a scandal would have been more justified if Marin had gone partying on her own, rather than with her husband.
It’s breathtaking in its brazenness: Republicans are doing what they can to undermine Biden’s efforts, while complaining about the efficacy of the efforts.
To prevent a government shutdown last week, a group of far-right Senate Republicans demanded a vote on defunding a key element of the White House’s vaccination policy. It may have been an idea from the fringe, but the proposal ended up with unanimous GOP support in the chamber.
This was not, however, the end of the party’s legislative efforts. Politico reports that 100 percent of Senate Republicans and nearly 98 percent of House Republicans intend to use a Congressional Review Act resolution in the hopes of blocking President Joe Biden’s private sector vaccine requirements.
It’s not that GOP lawmakers believe the policy is ineffective. In fact, Republicans don’t appear to care whether Biden’s policy works or not: The objection is that the White House is infringing on the GOP’s vision of private sector “freedom,” which trumps efforts to address the deadly pandemic.
Noting last week’s developments, The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson noted in his new column:
This indicated a political party now so intimidated by its liberty caucus that senators such as Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine felt compelled to bend the knee. It was a collective declaration of utter madness. This is the strangest political cause of my lifetime.
Broadly speaking, there are three angles to this, each of which are bewildering in related ways. The first is the degree to which Republican officials are, to borrow Gerson’s phrasing, “actively discouraging citizens from taking routine medical precautions for their own welfare.”
It’s a multifaceted strategy that includes trying to gut the Biden administration’s vaccine policies, filing lawsuits to block implementation of Biden’s policies, and in some red states, effectively paying people not to get vaccinated. At the same time, many Republicans are undermining public confidence in vaccines and mask protections, while promoting ineffective treatments and dangerous ideas about “natural immunity.”
All of which leads to the second angle: While Republicans undermine the response to the public health crisis, the party also blames the president for the fact that the crisis isn’t yet over. [snipped examples]
[…] Finally, let’s not overlook the policy asymmetry: The Democratic president has unveiled a series of sound strategies, each of which are designed to save lives and curtail the crisis. It’s hard not to notice that the post-policy GOP is offering plenty of complaints about the White House’s agenda, but the party doesn’t have an agenda of its own.
[Devin Nunes is] nevertheless giving up on his electoral career, at least for now, to become the CEO of Trump’s new media entity. What does Nunes know about overseeing a media company? At first glance, nothing, though the outgoing congressman has been prolific in filing weird lawsuits against Twitter, the Washington Post, McClatchy, CNN, and Hearst Magazines, among others.
Perhaps he plans to build on that.
What’s more, Nunes’ job will change, but his responsibilities may not be that different. The GOP congressman has spent the last several years working for Trump and pushing a pro-Trump message via conservative media to Trump’s followers.
As CEO of the Trump Media and Technology Group, the Republican appears likely to do more of the same.
That said, Nunes’ new job might be a bit more difficult than he realizes. NBC News reported yesterday that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating one of the companies involved in Trump’s recently announced social media deal. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which typically investigates things like insider trading, is also scrutinizing the entity.
Worse and worse. At least Eastman leaves no doubt as to what kind of person he really is.
Former Trump legal adviser John Eastman, aka the attorney who tried to mastermind a coup to keep a president who definitively lost an election in power, is simply appalled by the House Jan. 6 select committee using its authority to get to the bottom of him trying to mastermind a coup.
Speaking to a sympathetic Tucker Carlson on Fox News Monday night, Eastman accused the committee of “shredding the entire Constitution” by sending subpoenas for his testimony and telecommunication records.
“This group that wants to advance a Soviet Communist-style agenda… we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re using Soviet Stalinist tactics to do it,” said Eastman, who wrote a blueprint on how Mike Pence could hijack the 2020 election certification process for Trump. [JFC]
Playing along with Eastman’s performative outrage, Carlson asked the lawyer why he was complying with the “Soviet show trial.”
“Why would the rest of us have any kind of obligation to play along with it, honestly?” asked the Fox host, whose producers had put up a chyron declaring that “WHAT IS HAPPENING IS SICKENING AND SCARY” a few minutes before.
Eastman argued that he “shouldn’t” comply with the committee, but Congress has the authority to pursue criminal contempt charges like those against ex-White House senior strategist Steve Bannon.
The lawyer complained that the Jan. 6 committee has “forced” him to try and block “these unbelievably expansive and unconstitutional subpoenas of our private records and communications.”
Last week, Eastman informed the committee that he was pleading the Fifth instead of testifying.
[…] Nunes, an ardent Trumper, has spent 10 terms in Congress. His main social media qualification seems to be that he likes to hold a petty grudge. During his tenure as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he released a memo alleging that the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia was politically motivated. After his district’s biggest newspaper, the Fresno Bee, called him a “Trump stooge” in 2018 (they had endorsed him in every election from 1996 to that point), he waged war on them. Solid stuff—none of which stopped him from continuing to be reelected. But nothing shows that Nunes has the aggrieved mentality of the chronically online quite like the issue of a certain fake cow.
In 2019, Nunes took offense to a number of satirical Twitter accounts, including one purporting to be his cow, and sued both the platform and several individual users for defamation.
That’s the stuff.
Now, Nunes will lead Trump’s social media company, despite having no previous experience in tech. His departure from the House comes on the heels of new draft maps of California congressional districts that would have likely made his reelection campaign much more competitive.
Wonkette: “Devin Nunes Quitting Congress To Graze In Trump’s Pastures. That’s It, That’s Your Final Cow Joke.”
There was a time when Devin Nunes mattered. That time is not anymore.
There was a time, when Republicans ran the House after Donald Trump was installed in office thanks to Russia and our poorly built electoral system, when there was a need for guys like Devin. He was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, after all, and everybody was pretty sure Russia had just helped steal an American presidency, but nobody was yet sure how. Trump needed butt-sniffing loyalists like Devin in powerful places — guys who weren’t that bright, guys people made jokes about how they weren’t bringing potato salad to the MENSA orgies, guys who would dropkick their own bodies out of Ubers in the middle of the night to take secret intelligence from the White House to the White House to prove that Barack Obama was the real Wire Tapps, or whatever the hell it was.
Now Devin is just, you know, old cows. In a House GOP caucus that’s all about letting Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert dutch oven the American experiment possibly out of existence, where is there even a place for Devin?
So it stands to reason that Devin has found a new, shittier pasture to graze in, announcing that he’s quitting Congress basically right now — at the end of this month — to go “run” Donald Trump’s new “social media company,” which IS TOO a real job. It is a billion-dollar company! Allegedly!
And sure, we see you all out there being Naysaying Normans, reminding us what happened to Donald Trump’s last “social media company,” by which we guess you mean that blog he started last year and couldn’t keep going for more than a month. We’re not saying you’re wrong […]
Trump Media & Technology Group said in a statement Monday that Nunes would become CEO of the company in January.
“The time has come to reopen the Internet and allow for the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship,” Nunes said in the statement. “The United States of America made the dream of the Internet a reality and it will be an American company that restores the dream.”
Stop laughing, it’s not funny.
And it TOTALLY makes sense for Devin to quit Congress, where he might have been selected to chair the Ways and Means Committee if Republicans took back the House. This is totally a better gig.
First of all, Devin IS TOO qualified to run an allegedly “billion”-dollar social media company that is real. Yes! A man who sued an imaginary Twitter cow for hurting his feelings. Top of the list for a “job” like that!
And Devin will definitely end up doing a real “job” at Donald Trump’s real social media company that is real. […] Why, it will probably be as real of a “job” as Devin’s long dairy farming career, which is in California!
By the way, it looks like at least part of why this is happening may be because early drafts of California’s new district maps make Devin Nunes’s district a lot more Democratic than it currently is right this second. So it stands to reason why Devin would immediately run to Mar-a-Lago for “job.” Of course, there is no stupider move on the planet than going to work for Donald Trump, so it makes sense that this is a news story about “Devin.”
The California Democratic Party’s response to the news was nice:
“Devin Nunes has long been an embarrassment to California,” the party said in a tweet. “It’s only fitting that he now leaves Congress to debase himself even further to Donald Trump.”
Indeed.
Don’t nobody tell him how good Trump is at paying people. Don’t want him getting so excited he forgets to quit Congress entirely.
The total number of reported coronavirus cases in the United States marched toward 50 million early Tuesday, as New York City imposed a vaccine mandate for all private employers, federal health authorities warned against travel to several European countries, and more nations tightened restrictions on the unvaccinated.
The omicron variant of the virus, which is possibly more contagious than the widespread delta variant, had been found in 19 U.S. states as of Monday — just five days after the first known case in the country emerged in California. That number reflected the potentially heightened transmissibility of the newest variant and an improved system for detecting it.
But public health experts nationwide are stressing that the overwhelming majority of the nation’s coronavirus cases are still caused by the highly transmissible delta variant, which has led to some of the worst spikes of the pandemic. By early Tuesday, the United States had tallied nearly 49.3 million coronavirus cases and more than 786,000 deaths since the first infection surfaced in January 2020, according to Washington Post tracking. […]
Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff under […] Trump, on Tuesday informed the committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol that he was no longer willing to cooperate with its investigation, reversing a deal he reached with the panel just last week to sit for an interview and provide documents.
“We now must decline the opportunity to appear voluntarily for a deposition,” Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, wrote to the committee.
Instead, he proposed that Mr. Meadows answer questions in writing through what he called an “orderly process” that would create a “clear record of questions and related assertions of privilege.”
The turnabout was the second in two weeks by Mr. Meadows, who had initially refused to comply with a subpoena from House panel in line with a directive from Mr. Trump, but told the panel last week that he would be willing to provide documents and sit for a voluntary interview.
In his Tuesday letter, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Meadows’s lawyer made a litany of complaints against the select committee, saying that it did not appear to respect Mr. Trump’s assertion of executive privilege and had issued a wide-ranging subpoena for Mr. Meadows’s communications that would include personal conversations.
“We agreed to provide thousands of pages of responsive documents and Mr. Meadows was willing to appear voluntarily, not under compulsion of the select committee’s subpoena to him, for a deposition to answer questions about non-privileged matters,” Mr. Terwilliger wrote. “Now actions by the select committee have made such an appearance untenable.”
Mr. Terwilliger said the material sought by the committee includes “intensely personal communications” with no relevance to any legitimate investigation.
“With the breadth of its subpoenas and its pugnacious approach, the select committee has made clear that it does not intend to respect these important constitutional limits,” Mr. Terwilliger wrote.
Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, called Mr. Meadows’s demands “imperious and highhanded.”
“I can’t imagine we will accept it,” said Mr. Raskin, adding that he was speaking only for himself and not the full committee, which has yet to discuss Mr. Meadows’s latest move. “We’ve got to decide what to do. Our witnesses do not dictate the terms of our investigation.”
The committee has now interviewed more than 275 witnesses and is receiving cooperation from some members of former Vice President Mike Pence’s inner circle, including his former chief of staff Marc Short, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
Posted by a reader of the article:
Until these witnesses see some serious consequences of their actions they will continue to play the waiting game, hoping they can hold out until a new GOP congress is installed and everything stops. What a travesty. […]
This is probably obvious to many of you. But Donald Trump’s new ‘Truth Social’ media company, formed with a blank check SPAC vehicle, is essentially an open invitation to foreign bribes and payoffs. It’s no surprise the investor list is secret.
The one constant in Trump’s business history is that investors get screwed and he walks away unscathed. Given Trump’s political following, a social and media venture seems like it could be quite profitable. But most people can succeed with casinos too. Just not Trump. And those were the days of formal investments, prospectuses, business plans, formal commitments. A SPAC is a blank check. Invest now. Find out what you’re investing in later. No one with big money would invest in such an enterprise with the hope of financial returns.
There has to be a different kind of payoff. And the obvious one is political: the friendship of the possible future President of the United States. Or protection from the future President of the United States.
Even if Trump doesn’t get elected again or even run, his power out of office and hold over one of the two major political parties makes his friendship of immense value. A 100 million check from the Saudis or another Gulf emirate or various others heads of state or ruling families is a bargain for what it can buy.
And the magic of it is there’s absolutely no law that prevents any of this or forces any kind of disclosure. Nor does it have to be only foreigners. As big of a clown as he may be Donald Trump controls the GOP. His power makes his friendship almost infinitely valuable to the right people.
[…]
[Hair furor]’s plan to launch Truth Social, a special purpose acquisitions backed social media company early next year may have hit a roadblock after US regulators issued a request for information on the deal on Monday.
The request from the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for information from Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a blank-check SPAC that is set to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, […] relates to DWAC board meetings, policies about stock trading, the identities of certain investors and details of communications between DWAC and Trump’s social media firm. It comes three weeks after Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren asked the SEC to investigate possible securities violations at the company.
Warren quoted news reports that said DWAC “may have committed securities violations by holding private and undisclosed discussions about the merger as early as May 2021, while omitting this information in {SEC} filing and other public statements.”
But investigations into the Trump project appear to predate Warren’s request.
[…]
Last week, Reuters reported that Trump’s new company is trying to raise up to $1bn by selling shares to hedge funds and family offices at a price higher than the SPAC pre-merger valuation of $10 a share.
It also comes as the launch of the Trump media venture failed to meet a November deadline to release an invitation-only beta version of the platform.
In October, soon after the deal was announced, shares in DWAC soared by more than 1,200%, suggesting the implied value of the enterprise could reach $8.2bn. Trading in the company was halted 12 times as Trump fans pumped the stock on Reddit and StockTwits, pushing Trump’s 58% stake in the combined TMT-DWAC company to $4.8bn.
DWAC shares were trading at $43.19 per share on Monday morning, down almost 3% on news of the filing, even as equity markets broadly were higher.
[…]
Milos Vulanovic, an expert in SPAC deals at the Edhec Business School in Nice, France, told the Guardian that Trump’s politically-orientated media venture could bring “new investors who may not fully understand how SPACs work” into the market. “I don’t see why Trump-sponsored media couldn’t take 10% of the social media market and make huge money for Trump and his investors.”
If a global pandemic makes any lasting, collective change, I personally really hope it has to do with health care, and specifically, the cost of health care and the impossibility of access here in the United States. No matter how hard certain people (Republicans) don’t want to acknowledge it, the pandemic has highlighted all of the ways our country is behind when it comes to basic rights, protections, and opportunities, whether that’s linked to affordable child care, paid sick leave, or (gasp) affordable, safe, accessible health care for all.
With this in mind, though, it’s important to remember that we have more than one pubic health crisis at play here in the U.S. As Vice President Kamala Harris marked on Tuesday, Dec. 7, for example, reforming and centering maternal health in the U.S. is an “urgent” challenge. She’s introducing the very first White House Maternal Health Day of Action, attempting to rally both public and private sectors in a nationwide action, and the overall push for the Senate to pass the Build Back Better Plan ASAP.
“In the United States of America, in the 21st century, being pregnant and giving birth should not carry such great risk,” Harris stated during her opening remarks in Washington, D.C., noting that pregnant people die not only during childbirth but both before and after. Harris went on to describe maternal mortality and morbidity as a “serious crisis” that affects both public health and the economy.
[…] things in the U.S. have gotten worse in the last few decades. As of today, we have the highest maternal mortality rate of any nation of similar wealth in the entire world. Put another way, this means that more people in the U.S. die of pregnancy-related causes (whether during the birth itself or after birth) than any other country of similar income</b?. […]
Harris also acknowledged—very importantly—that this issue is not one size fits all. Disturbingly, pregnant people of color—specifically Black and Native pregnant people—are more likely to suffer from systemic inequities even in childbirth and maternal health care, potentially leading them to be mistreated or unsupported during childbirth. […]
Black pregnant people are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications, and Native pregnant people are twice as likely. Harris also pointed out that pregnant people in rural areas are about 60% more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than pregnant people in urban areas.
[…] So, what can be done? Well, once passed, the idea is that Build Back Better (once passed by the Senate, that is) will offer some extremely important provisions for maternal health. For example, all states will have to offer continuous Medicaid coverage for a full year postpartum […] This sort of health care could include, for example, vaccines, pelvic exams, and screening for postpartum depression. Right now, the standard is only two months of continued coverage […]
As a note, while the action is called the Maternal Health Day of Action, I made an effort to use gender-inclusive language throughout this piece, which is why you’ll see references both to maternal health, for example, as well as pregnant people or birthing people. Nonbinary people and trans men absolutely can (and do!) become pregnant and give birth, and are absolutely at risk of the same issues as pregnant women, if not even more, due to systemic transphobia in medicine. […]
Video of Vice President Harris speaking is available at the link.
[…] Manchin has reverted to that complaint [that the Build Back Better bill will worsen inflation] despite the fact that it has been debunked loudly and repeatedly for weeks now, and that economic indicators point to inflation cooling along with the supply chain getting back to normal function. Manchin apparently has extremely selective senses when it comes to reality. “I haven’t seen that. I’ve heard that. I don’t know how you control inflation when there’s the first year of spending that will be quite large. It’s an awful lot more federal dollars going at a time of uncertainty.”
There’s a damned good reason for Congress to get this done before the end of the year—the expanded Child Tax Credit payments will end as monthly payments with the checks sent Dec. 15 unless this is done before then. The stakes are pretty huge for the majority of America’s families.
Manchin has reverted to that complaint despite the fact that it has been debunked loudly and repeatedly for weeks now, and that economic indicators point to inflation cooling along with the supply chain getting back to normal function. Manchin apparently has extremely selective senses when it comes to reality. “I haven’t seen that. I’ve heard that. I don’t know how you control inflation when there’s the first year of spending that will be quite large. It’s an awful lot more federal dollars going at a time of uncertainty.”
There’s a damned good reason for Congress to get this done before the end of the year—the expanded Child Tax Credit payments will end as monthly payments with the checks sent Dec. 15 […]. The stakes are pretty huge for the majority of America’s families.
A large group of House Democrats is reminding the Senate of that deadline. Ninety-five Democrats, including members beyond the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), are urging the Senate to move quickly. […]
“American families cannot afford to lose this critical middle-class tax cut, which has cut child poverty in half and helped millions of families afford childcare, pay their bills, and put food on the table.” […]
The results of the program have been profound. It boosts families’ incomes every month, allowing them to pay rent, utilities, groceries, transportation […] Significantly, the program was extended to families with no earnings, or low earnings—they get the full benefit as well. That scooped in some 27 million children, “including roughly half of Black and Latino children and half of children in rural communities,” that had been left out of the program previously. […]
If the program ends, the maximum annual credit will be cut by $1,000 per school-aged child, $1,600 for young children. The payment will cease to be sent out every month, and those lowest-income families will lose out. […] “If the credit’s expansions are taken away, poverty rates among Black, Latino, and AIAN children would be an estimated 8 to 9 percentage points higher than what they would have been with the expansions still in place — 22 percent rather than 13 percent for Black children, 21 percent rather than 12 percent for Latino children, and 18 percent rather than 10 percent for AIAN children,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates.
CBPP breaks down the numbers by state, finding that 346,000 children under age 18 will lose out in Manchin’s West Virginia if the program isn’t extended. That’s 93% of the state’s children, 50,000 of whom are at risk of slipping back below the poverty line or deeper into poverty. That’s what’s at stake here: The ability of American families to continue to survive the ongoing pandemic and the economic difficulties it’s created.
A new filing suggests deep flaws in a key prosecution brought by the Bill Barr-appointed special prosecutor John Durham, who is charged with investigating the investigators of the Trump-Russia scandal.
The filing came from defense attorneys for Michael Sussman, a former attorney for a law firm known for representing the DNC, and which represented the Clinton campaign in 2016.
Sussman faces a single count of making false statements in a case brought by Durham in September 2021. Durham alleged that Sussman misled the FBI about his client.
It was an odd case from the beginning, and one that’s gotten even stranger. Defense attorneys for Sussman now say that they have received evidence that the single witness for the false statements claim — a former FBI general counsel — gave conflicting accounts in other Justice Department interviews.
The upshot? There may be evidence to suggest that the case’s star witness has a faulty memory of the alleged lie that the prosecution wants to prove took place.
“It makes the defense’s case for them,” Randall Eliason, a former D.C. federal prosecutor and GW Law lecturer, told TPM. “How do you go to a jury, ask them ‘find out precisely what Sussman said,’ when your only witness to what he said has given a different version of what he said?”
Sussman’s case goes back to the 2016 presidential campaign and questions of Russian interference.
Perkins Coie, the law firm at which Sussman was employed, was continuing its longstanding and well-known relationship with the Democratic Party that year and, among other clients, was representing the DNC.
At the same time, the FBI had begun to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and Moscow was waging a campaign to interfere in the 2016 election. That effort would dominate American politics for the next two years, with Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort going to prison for charges emanating from the investigation.
But in September 2016, the details of what was taking place remained unclear. In that month, Sussman met with FBI general counsel James Baker, offering him information: internet researchers had found evidence of a comms link between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Org.
At the time, it was an explosive allegation. The theory has since been called into question, and the underlying data remains a mystery.
Durham makes an allegation broadly in line with Trump’s attacks on the Trump-Russia inquiries: that Democratic operatives orchestrated the scandal.
Days before the five-year statute of limitations expired, Durham secured a grand jury indictment against Sussman, charging him with concealing from Baker that he was giving him the information on behalf of a client during the September 2016 meeting.
The indictment charges the following:
Specifically, SUSSMANN stated falsely that he was not doing his work on the aforementioned allegations “for any client,” which led the FBI General Counsel to understand that SUSSMANN was acting as a good citizen merely passing along information, not as a paid advocate or political operative.
In the indictment, Durham cited notes taken by then-assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap, to whom Baker recounted the conversation during a phone call after the meeting.
There’s a problem, however.
The new filing suggests that Baker provided conflicting accounts of the meeting. Sussman’s lawyers attached two separate DOJ documents in which Baker appears to offer differing descriptions of what took place.
Specifically, in a July 2019 interview with the DOJ inspector general, Baker contradicted the crux of the indictment: he said that Sussman informed him that he was working on behalf of a client.
“So Michael came in and met with me [a]nd he had some amount of information . . . that he said related to strange interactions that some number of people that were his clients, who were, he described as I recall it, sort of cyber-security experts, had found…”
In the other, a memorandum of a June 2020 meeting that Baker had with Durham’s office, the former FBI general counsel said that the meeting lasted a maximum of 20 minutes, and that he did not inquire as to whether Baker was there on behalf of a client.
Taken together, the two documents suggest that, over the past five years, Baker’s recollection of details of the meeting has diverged.
They also may undermine the core argument of the indictment: that Sussman said he was giving the information “not for any client.”
Discovery is still being released in the case, but the filing suggests that the special prosecutor had multiple separate accounts available to him.
“I think that suggests that this prosecution was fatally flawed from the start, and raises the question of why they were so eager to charge it,” Barb McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, told TPM.
McQuade added that Baker’s conflicting accounts cast doubt on how useful he might be on the witness stand at Sussman’s trial.
“You have to prove that he made a false statement — I don’t know that he can prove [Sussman] made any statement,” she added. […]
Trump, Durham and Bill Barr were desperate to come up with something … and this paltry, unprovable and minor infraction (if it even exists!) is all they could come up with?
The prosecution is the punishment.
——————-
The only remaining question is how long Garland is going to let Durham waste DOJ time and resources on fatally flawed prosecutions.
——————
I believe that Garland was letting Durham hoist himself on his own petard. And Barr instructed Durham to investigate the investigators of the Russian-Trump scandal. At the time, and still now I think it’s appropriate to see how big of wedgie can Durham inflict on himself.
———————
John Henry Durham – strident conservative Republican – 71 years old
relentless pursuer of a preconceived outcome
embraces a desired conclusion & then scavenges for fragments and shards of dubious information to craft a flimsy framework to destroy others’ lives and prop up his narrative.
————————
Seem to be saying something akin to this alot lately, but…this strikes me as a disbarrable offense. Durham is a long-time, sophisticated prosecutor and knows better than this. He just didn’t care because he’s a Republican stooge who’s clearly sold his soul and abandoned all meaningful brain activity to the Trump KKKult and the project of dismantling democracy to gain permanent minority rule for his tribe.
The fact that he could have at least 3 conflicting statements from the same witness who’s memory is the entire case and yet still get a grand jury indictment makes me wonder whether he even presented the grand jury with the 2 inconvenient statements. The fact that he followed it up with a lengthy, conspiracy-oriented pro-Trump “speaking indictment” suggests that feeding that into the far right cultural resentment propaganda messaging cannon was the whole point of rushing to get the indictment in before the deadline. And the fact that he’s now trying to get at all the attorney-client privileged records of Sussman’s representation of DNC suggests that to be the overarching goal of the entire abusive endeavor.
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We need to sanction prosecutors who bring cases like this in bad faith. I don’t care how special he is, Durham is corrupt. He needs to be fired, sanctioned, and possibly disbarred.
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Durham muddies the whole indictment, and wants to delay and delay, to avoid us every learning why Alpha bank was routinely communicating with Trump Tower.
Durham was hoping the shiny thing would distract everyone from the real issue.
Representative Devin Nunes has announced that he is leaving Congress to run Donald J. Trump’s media company in the idiotic belief that Trump will pay him.
As news broke of Nunes’s decision, thousands of venders who have waited decades for Trump to pay them expressed bafflement that the California congressman would make such a boneheaded career move.
“It’s inconceivable to me that he thinks he will get paid,” Carol Foyler, one of the unremunerated venders, said. “Has he even Googled Trump?”
As Nunes packed his bags, his soon-to-be-former colleagues in Congress celebrated his departure into the wee hours of the morning.
Representative Adam Schiff, however, sounded a cautious note. “It’s essential that Devin not find out that he won’t get paid,” Schiff said. “He might change his mind and stay here.”
The big story in the Yoo-Kay today is what I’m calling “Crackergate”. A video has been leaked of Johnson’s staff joking about a Christmas Party held last year, at a time when all such gatherings were banned, and people were not being allowed to see family members dying of Covid. The recording is of a mock-up press conference, and includes a reference to a “fictional” party, but it was taken a few days after the date that such a party has already been reported to have taken place. Johnson has denied that any regulations were broken, but has been obviously shifty, squirming to avoid either affirming or denying that there was a party until, shortly before the vido leaked, he came down on the side of denial. This morning, government ministers are completely absent from the airwaves, Tory backbenchers are reported to be furious. Johnson is due in the Commons for Prime Ministers’ Questions in a few hours. Will he be able to marshall his lies into an alert and disciplined formation* in time??
*H/t Robert Graves in I, Claudius: a description of the talent for lying of Sejanus, minister for the Emperor Tiberius.
KGsays
Further to #359 – apparently Johnson himslef has continued to avoid explicit denial that there was a party, but “No. 10” has done so – and obviously, would not have done so without Johnson’s approval.
blfsays
Nasa/JPL’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity apparently successfully completed its 17th flight on Sunday (5th Dec), albeit there was a lost of telemetry between the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity during the final stages of the flight, Flight 17 — Discovering Limits. Ingenuity appears to have landed safely — communications were restored several minutes later and seem to be nominal — but the “missing” telemetry data is useful to confirm. As the link explains, the lost-of-contact is not a technical glitch. The rover was not where it was expected to be to, resulting in a hill blocking the line-of-sight at the end of the flight. The rover, which has priority, had been driven to a slightly different spot than anticipated for its science mission.
The “missing” data should still be on-board the helicopter, and hence can be downloaded to Earth. As the link notes, lost of communications is to be expected, and the systems were designed to cope with the situation.
The current batch of Covid-19 virus patients in the ICU are the hard core antivaxxers. They are almost all fundie xians. They are also dumb, not educated, hostile, combatative, and often violent.
Health care workers have been burning out and quitting often because of this. My friend is now working in a Covid-19 virus ICU. She wasn’t supposed to be there because she has multiple comorbidities. She is there because there is no one else left.
Here is one doc’s story about his last day at work. An antivaxxer patient died on a ventilator. His family accused him of being a murderer and physically attacked him, leaving him seriously injured.
I’m not copying this because it isn’t my story to tell. The link takes you to a Reddit thread. Trigger warning!!! This is not an easy story to read so you need to think about whether you even want to know.
The current group of suicides by ICU antivaxxers are not sympathetic victims of a pandemic.
They really are the bottom quarter or so of our society in terms of cognitive capability.
Almost all organ transplant programs require patients to be vaccinated against about everything.
Organ transplants require good compliance to be successful and a lot of medications that leave patients vulnerable to diseases. There is also a huge shortage of transplantable organs so patients are chosen carefully.
Quite a few antivaxxer patients are refusing to get the Covid-19 virus vaccine.
These are sick patients that will die and usually soon without a new kidney, lungs, or whatever.
They still won’t get the vaccine and they get dropped from the waiting lists.
If you don’t care enough to take basic care of your health, we don’t care enough to spend over $1 million for a lung transplant that someone else can make better use of.
Many of the Biden administration’s recent legal setbacks have something important in common: judges appointed by Donald Trump.
Republican policymakers have taken a variety of steps to undermine the Biden administration’s pandemic policies, but the White House’s agenda has also faced judicial pushback. NBC News reported yesterday:
A federal judge on Tuesday issued a nationwide injunction against a vaccine mandate for federal contractors, ruling that President Joe Biden probably exceeded his authority by imposing the requirement. Judge R. Stan Baker, who’s based in Georgia, temporarily blocked implementation of the administration after a lawsuit from numerous states and a trade group argued that letting the mandate take effect on Jan. 4 would cause “irreparable injury” to workers who could be forced out of their jobs.
The White House indicated yesterday that it still expects to prevail in this case, and the Justice Department will continue to defend the underlying policy, but the injunction was a disappointing setback.
But it turns out that this is more than just a story about the judiciary and a public-health crisis. As a political matter, it’s worth noting for context that District Court Judge R. Stan Baker was chosen for the federal bench by Donald Trump.
In fact, if this dynamic seems at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. It was just last week, for example, when Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a preliminary injunction halting the president’s vaccine requirements for health care workers. It expanded a separate order issued by Judge Matthew T. Schelp a day earlier, which blocked Biden’s policy in 10 states.
Both Doughty and Schelp were also Trump appointees.
Last week, the Biden administration was also compelled to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy at the insistence of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Kacsmaryk was also appointed by Trump.
This coincided with the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, at which time a trio of Trump-appointed justices signaled their willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A few years ago, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts told the Associated Press that it’s wrong to think about jurists through a partisan or presidential lens. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
I have always wanted to believe this. Lately, that’s been awfully difficult.
Over the summer, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida unveiled a curious fundraising strategy. The Floridian told prospective donors in July to think of “how great it will feel when … we make our next Speaker of the House Donald J. Trump.”
The appeal for a donation included a big red button: “Join me: Let’s get Trump as Speaker.”
Yesterday, as Forbes reported, the far-right congressman went a little further.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said Tuesday he’s spoken directly with former President Donald Trump about installing Trump as House speaker if Republicans win control of the chamber in the midterms, reviving an idea he pushed over the summer that was largely dismissed by all but the most extreme right fringes of the GOP.
Responding to a question from a Capitol Hill reporter, Gaetz said he not only supports the idea of electing Trump as Speaker, he’s also spoken directly to the former president about the idea. […]
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes added on Twitter soon after, in reference to Republicans’ chatter about making Trump Speaker, “They’ve floated this a bunch and it’s usually taken as a troll, but it will absolutely become a very real thing, I think.”
[…] it was Steve Bannon — who used to advise the former president, and who benefited from a presidential pardon after his first federal indictment — who helped get the ball rolling on this earlier this year, touting a scenario in which House Republicans win back the majority and elect Trump as their new Speaker. This is technically possible: Under House rules, members can elect anyone as Speaker, not just sitting members.
Under the fanciful hypothetical, once Trump held the gavel, he could start exacting revenge against those who defeated him, launching investigations into imagined scandals, and even initiating impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
In June, the former president himself was asked about the idea and replied, “That’s so interesting…. Yeah, you know it’s very interesting…. It’s very interesting.”
[…] former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — Trump’s fourth and final right-hand man in the West Wing — also talked up the idea. “I would love to see the gavel go from Nancy Pelosi to Donald Trump,” Meadows told Bannon. “You talk about melting down, people would go crazy!”
At a certain level, it would be a drama worthy of Shakespeare if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, after all of the sycophantic support he’s offered Trump in the hopes of advancing his own personal ambitions, failed to get the job he wanted because the former president took it for himself.
[…] That does not mean, however, that the chatter is irrelevant. Much of the political world has largely assumed that the 2022 midterm elections would be the first cycle since 2014 in which Trump wasn’t directly relevant. The louder the conversation about him possibly eyeing the Speaker’s gavel, the more it’ll seem as if Trump is effectively on the midterm ballot. […]
The Jan. 6 select committee on Tuesday informed former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ lawyer that it has been “left with no choice” but to advance contempt proceedings against his client, after the panel warned that the former Trump official would be referred for contempt if he failed to show up for his deposition.
In the committee’s letter dated Tuesday, chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) also detailed the materials that Meadows has offered up thus far during his short-lived stint of engaging with the committee, which, Thompson said, include communications documenting an early White House effort to push for the appointment of “alternate slates of electors” on the day networks called Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Among the text messages that Meadows handed over, according to Thompson, was a Nov. 6 message from an unnamed member of Congress who texted Meadows about appointing alternate slates of electors in certain states. The lawmaker, Thompson said, acknowledged that doing so would be “highly controversial” — to which Meadows allegedly replied “I love it.”
Other text messages produced by Meadows, according to Thompson, include an early January text exchange between Meadows and an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally held hours before the Capitol insurrection and text messages about the need for former President Trump to issue a public statement to put an end to the attack.
According to Thompson, Meadows also provided the committee with an email from Jan. 5 regarding a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” that was to be provided “on the hill” and another email on Jan. 5 about having the National Guard on standby during the joint session of Congress certifying Biden’s electoral victory.
Additionally, Thompson said, the committee had obtained data from Meadows’ personal cell phone. Meadows lawyer, George Terwilliger III, also produced a “privilege log” indicating that he withheld more than 1,000 text messages from Meadows’ personal cell phone based on “similarly broad claims of executive, attorney-client and other privileges,” Thompson said.
Thompson, in his letter, is not pleased with Meadows’ decision to go back to stonewalling the committee after he had begun engaging with the committee late last month. Terwilliger told CNN at the time that thousands of documents had been handed over and that the former Trump White House official had agreed to appear for an interview.
But on Tuesday morning, Terwilliger told the committee in a letter that Meadows took issue with the panel’s treatment of his’ “executive privilege” defense, and said that he objected to so-called recent “wide ranging subpoenas” sent by the committee to an unnamed third party communications provider.
“Contrary to your assertion, that information does not implicate privilege, but rather concerns the date, time, and dialing information about calls and messages sent or received by the specific phone numbers indicated on the subpoena,” Thompson wrote. “Moreover, production of that information does not impact Mr. Meadows’s production of documents and text messages, which are the areas we seek to develop during his deposition tomorrow.”
After noting Meadows’ stated refusal to appear for a deposition and arguing that there is “no legitimate legal basis” for Meadows not to do so, Thompson wrote that the committee is “left with no choice” but to “advance contempt proceedings” and recommend that the House refer Meadows for criminal prosecution.
[…] “According to the companies’ preliminary data, a third dose provides a similar level of neutralizing antibodies to Omicron as is observed after two doses against wild-type and other variants that emerged before Omicron.” […]
So, with all the caveats about preliminary data from a lab setting only and lack of peer review, if you get a booster shot you should have protection against Omicron that is comparable to the protection two doses gave you to the original virus that emerged two years ago in Wuhan. So that’s pretty good.
A few important housekeeping details. This study is being reported all around. But the information comes from this press release. Science by press release is suboptimal. But I pass it on on this basis. Additionally, what’s being measured here is essentially your immune system’s first line of defense. It is still broadly assumed by expert opinion that either prior infection or the original two dose mRNA regimen will continue to provide significant protection against severe illness. But these studies of neutralizing antibodies don’t look at that question.
On Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a virtual appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Summit where he called for the government to end subsidies for something that might seem surprising—electric cars. But that opposition to supporting a product sold by his own company seems a lot less puzzling when expressed in these terms: Now that he has climbed to the top, Musk is extremely anxious to burn the ladder below him.
The Build Back Better bill which passed the House and is now under consideration in the Senate, with hopes of final passage before the end of the year, provides as much as $12,500 in incentives for the purchase of an electric vehicle. That bill would also provide monies for building out the charging infrastructure that give consumers the confidence to replace gas-powered vehicles with electric alternatives as their primary means of getting around.
But Musk is against both of those things. In fact, he calls for an end to all government subsidies … which is a quite a statement considering that Tesla built its business on subsidized vehicles. Not to mention that the company itself was built on a government loan that it received at a critical point in the company’s history. Without government funding and subsidies, there would be no Tesla. The same is true of Musk’s other company, SpaceX, which not only developed its rockets on the back of government funding, but is still getting subsidies for it’s Starlink space-based internet service and seeking even more.
In both cases, Musk did what America so often applauds entrepreneur for doing—he took tremendous risks and succeeded, making himself enormously wealthy in the process. But Musk was only able to succeed because of government loans and subsidies. Without them, he would be Elon who?
[…] Back in 2015, the Los Angeles Times detailed the billions in government funding that had underwritten Musk’s efforts. That includes tax abatements that saw a Tesla HQ avoid property tax for 20 years. Musk’s connection to government subsidies has continued, right up to funds that are right now subsidizing SpaceX’s space-based internet gamble:
The battery factory that Tesla has in Nevada was built on hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies.
The launch tower that SpaceX is building right now in Texas is being built using $20 million in subsidies.
Every car that Tesla sold from 2008 right up through 2020 came with a government subsidy.
As finical analysis firm Space Angels pointed out in 2019, SpaceX was just one of 67 space companies which together received $7.2 billion in government funding between 2000 and 2018.
[…] There are forms of government subsidies—such as tax abatements for locating factories or offices within a specific state or area—that have no redeeming value. In fact, these subsidies reward companies while creating tremendous burdens. Tax abatements don’t unlock a competition to create new technologies, or even generate economic improvement. They’re just a competition between politicians eager to talk about “job creation” that ultimately carries a price tag far above their worth.
Also, like any portfolio of investments, the subsidies that government provides need constant review. We’re long past the day when we should be providing assistance to oil, gas, and coal industries. One day, we’ll be past the point where we need to provide subsidies to accelerate the use of renewable energy or encourage the move to electric vehicles. We’re just not there yet.
And we shouldn’t let the man who has the most to gain by locking in the status quo determine when that day comes. That’s especially true given that the subsidies in Build Back Better provide support for something else that Musk really doesn’t like—union jobs that provide fair wages, good benefits, and job safety.
Four horsemen of the dumbocalypse hold outrageously ignorant press conference on Jan. 6 insurrection.
On Tuesday, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and Louie Gohmert held a press conference where they defended the Jan. 6 insurrection, promoting every conspiracy theory under the sun and attacking anybody who dares call into question the actions of the people we all saw on television, on our computers, and on our mobile devices attacking the Capitol building. Any one of the three on the podium during today’s press conference could create a misinformation swarm larger than the rings of Saturn, and all four together did not disappoint their master, Donald Trump.
All of the people on the dais are under investigation for potential complicity in the planning and possible coordination of a treasonous attempt to change the results of our national election in order to install a dictator into the White House. Greene and Gaetz have tough campaigns ahead […]
Not unlike Donald Trump, these elected officials have made it their brand to lie in almost every setting as they use their positions of power to do virtually nothing to promote a better, more prosperous American citizenry. The only difference in how we all receive their singular form of narcissism is how they come across. Donald Trump’s strength is that he comes across as someone who very transparently does not care about anything or anyone that isn’t Donald Trump, and that bizarre balance has made him king of these sociopaths.
All four come across as angry, cruel, and terrifying, but in slightly different ways. Greene, with her aggressive Crossfit-style anger, comes across as single-minded in her determination to create some bizarre ethnostate. Gaetz and his silver-spooned arrogance combine with his low-IQ statements to come across more whimsically reckless in his cruelties and say-anything demeanor. Gosar is the three sentence embodiment of a sniveling Dickens character. Gohmert just comes across like someone who doesn’t know much of anything […].
First up was Greene, who told the world that the Jan. 6 defendants were being tortured and persecuted and forced to submit to critical race theory brainwashing. No, she didn’t kind of say that. She literally said that. [video is available at the link]
Then came Gaetz to promise kangaroo courts and Benghazi trials while also pretending that Benghazi investigations were mishandled because they found nothing. “We are going to take power after this next election. When we do, it’s not going to be the days of Paul Ryan, and Trey Gowdy, and no real oversight, and no real subpoenas. It’s going to be the days of Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Dr. Gosar, and myself.” [video is available at the link]
Alexander Nazaryan, the senior White House correspondent for Yahoo, reports that at the press conference, Gaetz told him “that if Republicans win the House in 2022, he will move to install Trump as House Speaker.” […]
Then Gosar came up to make a series of statements about the cruel conditions of the incarcerated Jan. 6 defendants. Calling them human rights violations, Gosar made sure to explain how white these defendants are. They aren’t those “hardened criminals” people (the ones Gosar and Greene and Gohmert and Gaetz never speak up for), “they’re fathers.” […].
Then it was Gohmert’s turn. Gohmert has recently decided to leave Congress in the hopes of taking control of the Texas attorney general’s office, announcing his bid against the publicly corrupt Ken Paxton last month. Gohmert’s job was to promote the conspiracy theory that the only people who should be charged with insurrection should be the FBI. Literally—that’s his fact-free conspiracy vomit into the public sphere for the day. [video is available at the link]
During the press question section of the conference, a reporter pointed out that Greene seems to defend Jan. 6 insurrectionists and hold press conferences for them, but not for the Capitol Police. Greene answered that with a tremendous series of lies, including the statement that she and Gohmert wanted to give the Capitol Police medals of honor. Sadly, Texas’ Gohmert, Georgia’s Greene, Florida’s Gaetz, and Arizona’s Gosar were four of the 21 Republicans who voted against the House bill that would award Capitol Police officers present during the Jan. 6 insurrection with Congressional medals of honor.
Below is the full press conference. Warning: It is about 40 minutes long and every moment you spend watching it is a moment you may never get back. [video is, alas, available at the link]
The House of Representatives was busy last night! Not only did it pass — on an almost party-line vote — a bill that will probably get us past the stupid debt limit stupidity for another year, it also checked off one more of its annual chores, passing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), so we can have Pentagon and Pentagon Accessories for another year.
The $768 billion defense spending bill — yes, the military price tag for one year is double what they’re [complaining] is too much debt over 10 years for Joe Biden’s Build Back Better — passed on a bipartisan vote of 363 to 70, and is expected to easily pass the Senate as well. The Troops must have money, not to mention the patriotic defense contractors who make America what it is today: a bloated global arms merchant and purveyor of colonial ambition. Oh yes, and bastion of freedom, we hear.
Military Pay Raise and Parental Leave!
The bill includes a 2.7 percent pay raise for servicemembers, and will for the first time take a whack at reforming the way the military deals with sexual assault crimes, although a more thorough reform of the military justice system was axed to speed the passage of the bill, despite its having bipartisan support. To ensure passage in the Senate, the bill also left out House proposals to repeal the 2002 authorization for the Iraq War, which has been used by subsequent presidents of both parties to pursue other wars in the Middle East, and it got rid of a provision that would have required women to register for the draft as well. On the up side, the bill will fund 12 weeks of parental leave for all service members, a first.
Gillibrand’s Sex Assault Trial Reforms
The changes to the military justice system represent a partial sort of victory for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who has fought for reform of how the military handles sexual assault for about as long as I’ve been at Wonkette. Roll Call explains the bill will empower special victims prosecutors in each of the services, who’ll be largely independent of the chain of command, to decide whether to prosecute sexual crimes and related cases, as well as charges of murder and kidnapping. It takes the decision to prosecute out of the hands of commanding officers […]
Afghanistan War Commission
The NDAA also establishes an independent Afghanistan War Commission to review the US’s longest foreign war.* Introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Roll Call reports the commission would
look at the complete history of U.S. government failures over two decades of conflict. Anyone who was in a decision-making or policymaking role related to Afghanistan would be ineligible to serve on the 16-member panel, so it would not include any former generals, anyone who served in Congress at any time during the war or any former senior administration officials whose portfolios included Afghanistan.
*Our great nation’s genocidal 19th Century Indian Wars actually ran longer and were technically against sovereign nations. The Apache Wars alone were fought actively from 1849 to 1886, with skirmishes into the early 20th century, and didn’t formally end until 1924. But who’s counting? No commission on those, but at least Duckworth’s provision means the commission will examine the entire 19-year mess in Afghanistan, and not just last summer’s withdrawal and government collapse as some Republicans had hoped. […]
Fabulous New Wars!
In terms of getting ready for some fabulous new wars, the NDAA boosted funding for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative,” an existing Pentagon plan to deter “Chinese aggression,” giving the program $7.1 billion, a good $2 billion more than the Biden administration had asked for […] It’ll also pump up military aid to Ukraine by $300 million, in hopes that Russia may decide not to invade that country. No word on whether any of the new funding would go to expand Ukraine’s meme war capabilities, which are already impressive. Yes, that really is the official Ukrainian government Twitter account. [graphic representation of “Types of Headaches” is available at the link: migraine, hypertension, stress, living next to Russia]
Happily, this year the NDAA does not have to deal with the question of holding big grand military parades in Washington DC to prove we can be just like North Korea or Russia, so count your blessings as you find them, the end.
Last night, Tucker Carlson had another of his weird segments where he’s on Russia’s side and not on America’s side, and he says all this OUT LOUD. He especially does not understand why we would support Ukraine, a democracy, when there is an authoritarian white ethnostate right next door that we could support instead. Tucker is “totally confused” lately [about] why Ukraine would be our ally, and not Russia.
This is generally agreed upon in American foreign policy, some weird shit during the Trump years notwithstanding. But Tucker is still confused, which is what led him last night to make his little piggy face into a sneer and call GOP Senator Joni Ernst a “child” who “has no idea what she’s talking about, but keeps talking anyway.”
No, really: [video available at the link]
Obviously all this happened after yesterday’s big bilateral video meeting between President Joe Biden and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, which was apparently pretty testy.
As the clip above continues, Tucker mocks Ernst for saying we will defend Ukraine, asking “what happens if we don’t defend Ukraine, Joni Ernst? Will kids in Des Moines grow up speaking Russian?” Tucker concluded that Ernst, GOP Senator Roger Wicker, and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff are all reading the same talking points, which were paid for by Ukraine’s lobbying campaigns in America, cough cough nudge nudge HUNTER BIDEN.
Seriously, these are words that were said last night on Fox News, the GOP’s primary propaganda organ, by its top rated host, about GOP senators.
The full clip is even more batshit. Tucker baselessly claimed America is trying to instigate a war against Russia, a completely blameless nation that’s simply involved in a minor “border dispute” with Ukraine. (Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and stole large swaths of its land and has been occupying it ever since. “Border dispute.”) Tucker said poor sweet Putin “just wants to keep his border safe.”
Tucker doesn’t think Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO, comparing it to a scenario where Mexico and Canada became “satellites” of China. He said the “neocons” who advise Biden support it, just like they support “every sinister and stupid idea,” but he also lambasted Mike Pompeo and GOP Senator Rob Portman for supporting the very sinister, stupid idea. He declared that “At this point, NATO exists primarily to torment Vladimir Putin, who, whatever his many faults, has no intention of invading Western Europe.” […]
Here, watch Tucker’s 14-minute infomercial for buying timeshares on Vladimir Putin’s taint. [video available at the link]
Of course, Tucker is lying or stupid, as usual, when he suggests that President Biden, Joni Ernst, Adam Schiff, Roger Wicker, or any others are trying to start a hot war with Russia. They are indeed trying to keep Russia from invading Ukraine. Biden reportedly told Putin yesterday that there would be serious consequences for Russia if they did.
But Tucker doesn’t side with actual Americans on this. Putin is spreading propaganda saying he’s not doing anything aggressive toward Ukraine right now, but simply responding to being provoked by Ukraine, the US, and NATO. Tucker seemingly agrees with Putin’s propaganda, and his monologue last night was full of many more conspiracy theories that would make the Kremlin proud.
Makes you wonder what kind of active measures Russia’s got going these days and how far into rightwing media they’ve spread.
Apropos of nothing, here’s Newsmax magazine’s new Christmas issue: [image available at the link, which shows a magazine cover featuring Putin with a glass of champagne. Text on the cover: “Vlad the Great,” and “Post Trump, Putin Becomes Master of the World.”]
[…]
The ‘Negative 48’ cult seen from multiple perspectives: Katy Garner, who lost her sister to the cult, researcher ‘2021_Karma’ who has been listening in on their unending telegram voice chats, and Steven Monacelli, a journalist covering them on the ground in Dallas. We try to figure out what the hell is up with the gematria-based QAnon-supporting cult of ‘Negative 48’ AKA Michael Protzman, who continue to gather in Dallas awaiting the return of JFK, JFK Jr, and an array of other dead celebrities.
I listened to this as I decorated my tree. Turned out to be much sadder than I was expecting.
Three days after Rosanne Boyland dies at the Capitol riot, host Ayman Mohyeldin gets a message from an old high school friend, Justin Cave. Justin tells Ayman that he’s Rosanne’s brother-in-law, and says the family believes she was radicalized in just a few months. Now they want to know how it happened—and they ask Ayman for help….
Apropos of nothing, here’s Newsmax magazine’s new Christmas issue: [image available at the link, which shows a magazine cover featuring Putin with a glass of champagne. Text on the cover: “Vlad the Great,” and “Post Trump, Putin Becomes Master of the World.”]
!!!
ravensays
The Omicron variant is starting to come into focus.
It is apparently a partial immune escape variant that is still blocked by the vaccines.
It is probably 4 times as infectious as Delta.
This is ominous because Delta is already one of the most transmissable viruses we know of.
This study is preliminary so you can’t take it as the final word.
But it is consistent with what we’ve been seeing. In two weeks, the Omicron variant is showing up everywhere. It is the reverse of, Where’s Waldo.
Claims are milder disease.
Not enough data for this property.
Considering how pathogenic Delta is, this might not make much difference.
Bloomberg.com December 08, 2021
Omicron Four Times More Transmissible Than Delta in New Study
December 8, 2021, 7:21 PM PST
Japanese scientist analyzed genome data from South Africans
Variant ‘transmits more and escapes immunity’: study
The omicron variant of Covid-19 is 4.2 times more transmissible in its early stage than delta, according to a study by a Japanese scientist who advises the country’s health ministry, a finding likely to confirm fears about the new strain’s contagiousness.
Hiroshi Nishiura, a professor of health and environmental sciences at Kyoto University who specializes in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, analyzed genome data available through November 26 in South Africans in Gauteng province.
“The omicron variant transmits more, and escapes immunity built naturally and through vaccines more,” Nishiura said in his findings, which were presented at a meeting of the health ministry’s advisory panel on Wednesday.
Concerns are swirling globally that omicron could deal the world a bigger blow than even delta, and the World Health Organization has cautioned that it could fuel surges with “severe consequences.” But a jump in cases in South Africa in the wake of the variant’s emergence hasn’t yet overwhelmed hospitals, leading to some optimism that it may only cause mostly mild illness. Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE also said this week that a booster dose of their vaccine could fortify protection against the strain.
Nishiura’s study hasn’t been peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal. The new analysis was conducted using the same method he used in a July study published by the Eurosurveillance medical journal on delta’s predicted dominance ahead of the Tokyo Olympics.
Hundreds of researchers globally are racing to understand the new variant, which is the most differentiated strain yet among the five variants of concern identified by the WHO since the pandemic began.
Cases in South Africa have rapidly increased to as many as nearly 20,000 a day since the country first reported omicron’s discovery two weeks ago. The number of Covid cases in the nation had remained low in the preceding weeks, despite only 26% of the population being fully vaccinated, according to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker.
“The vaccination rate was less than 30% and many people were probably naturally infected,” Nishiura said. “We need to pay close attention to future trends to see if the same thing will happen in countries where mRNA vaccines are used at a high rate.”
The new tallies on initial unemployment claims aren’t just better now than before the pandemic, they’ve actually improved to a 52-year low.
The week before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, weekly unemployment claims were still a painfully high 886,000. CNBC reported this morning on the newest data from the Labor Department […]
Weekly jobless claims tumbled last week, reaching a fresh 52-year low as the U.S. jobs market climbs out of its pandemic-era hole, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Initial filings for unemployment insurance totaled 184,000 for the week ended Dec. 4, the lowest going back to Sept. 6, 1969, which saw 182,000.
If this sounds familiar, it’s not your imagination. Two weeks ago, jobless claims also reached a 52-year low, but this new report shows the figure improving a little more.
[…] For nearly two years, the goal was to reach a number that resembled normalcy. In the early months of 2020, the U.S. average on unemployment claims was roughly 211,000, and many have wondered how long it would take to get back to such a total. […]
The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared likely to rule that state programs providing money to parents for their children’s high school tuition cannot exclude schools offering religious education. Such a ruling would loosen longstanding restrictions on using taxpayer money to pay for religious instruction, further lowering the wall of separation between church and state.
Commentary from Steve Benen:
At one point yesterday, Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the outnumbered progressive minority, said, “We don’t want to get into a situation where a state will pay for the teaching of religion.”
But by some measures, that’s precisely the “situation” some on the right, including Breyer’s colleagues, are looking for. “The parents are seeking equal treatment. They’re saying, ‘Don’t discriminate against me because I’m religious,'” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.
If that means that taxpayers have to subsidize religious education against their will, so be it.
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern noted that Maine officials filed a brief with the justices, highlighting the policies at Bangor Christian School and Temple Academy — the two schools that would be in a position to receive taxpayer subsidies if the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs. From Stern’s article:
Bangor Christian School expels all students who identify as gay or transgender, or who display any gender-nonconforming behavior, on or off campus. Children who profess to be gay are expelled even if they swear to remain celibate.
BCS compels all teachers to affirm that they are a “Born Again” Christian and an “active, tithing member of a Bible believing church.” It will not hire teachers who are gay, transgender, or gender-nonconforming.
BCS explicitly denounces non-Christian faiths; in social studies class, for example, ninth grade students are taught to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion with the truth of God’s Word.” All students are instructed that men serve as the head of the household.
Temple Academy has a “pretty hard lined” rule against accepting non-Christian students. It will not admit students who are gay or transgender. Every student’s parents must sign a “covenant” affirming their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Students must sign a “covenant” promising to glorify Jesus Christ and attend weekly religious services.
TA rejects any student with same-sex parents, even if the student is not LGBTQ.
To work at TA, instructors must acknowledge “homosexuals and other deviants” are “perverted.” The school only hires born-again Christians, even for custodial positions, and openly discriminates against LGBTQ applicants.
JFC. As a taxpayer, I don’t want to subsidize that.
The point is not that these schools should be prohibited from espousing such beliefs or adopting such employment practices, offensive as they are. The schools are part of private religious institutions, and these policies are protected under the First Amendment.
The point, rather, is that taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to subsidize these schools — and the Supreme Court’s dominant conservative majority is likely to do exactly that.
Hundreds of researchers globally are racing to understand the new variant, which is the most differentiated strain yet among the five variants of concern identified by the WHO since the pandemic began. – Bloomberg quoted by raven@375
This means that the virus has (to anthropomorphise) the opportunity to explore a new part of the “fitness landscape”. Omicron is unlikely to sit right on a local peak, so we can expect to see more variants, some of them more transmissable andor better able to evade existing vaccines andor immunity acquired by inection than Omicron itself.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) recommended mouthwash as a treatment for the coronavirus during a town hall meeting Wednesday, immediately drawing criticism for suggesting gargling would offer protection.
Commentary:
[…] The Post’s report quoted a variety of experts, each of whom, not surprisingly, expressed deep skepticism about Johnson’s recommendations. While mouthwash can partially kill off parts of the coronavirus in a person’s mouth, most infections occur through the nose. “Even if gargling kills some of the virus, it won’t be able to clean the nasal area, nor the viruses that’s already penetrated deeper into the body,” said Kim Woo-Joo, an infectious-disease expert at Korea University.
Raymond Niaura, interim chair of the epidemiology department at New York University, told the Post that gargling wouldn’t hurt — if accompanied by vaccination. “That way, one would be at reduced risk for infection and have good smelling breath,” he said.
And while that’s funny, it dovetails with the larger significance of Johnson’s unfortunate comments: The senator has been eager to recommend all kinds of medicinal responses to Covid-19, except the safe, free, and readily available life-saving vaccines.
The Wisconsin Republican has touted hydroxychloroquine, despite its ineffectiveness. He’s pushed ivermectin, despite its ineffectiveness. YouTube found it necessary to suspend the senator’s account in June because of his videos filled with misinformation about treatments. Now, evidently, he’s even on board with a mouthwash-based strategy.
But all the while, Johnson has also spent months desperately trying to undermine public confidence in the vaccines people need to get in order to deal with the pandemic. […]
Cases are at record or near record levels in a lot of states right now.
To the point where they are calling out the National Guard.
“Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said Wednesday he thinks the whole country will see Covid-19 case numbers go up in coming weeks. Already 23 states have had more than a 20% increase in case numbers in just the last two weeks.” The biggest problem are the antivaxxers.
It’s going to be another long and ugly winter for all of us.
And Omicron is just getting started. 99% of all cases are still Delta.
Three Northeast states deploy National Guard amid medical capacity crisis due to pandemic By Evan Simko-Bednarski and Amy Simonson, CNN Updated 11:09 AM ET, Thu December 9, 2021 edited for length (CNN)The governors of Maine and New York deployed the National Guard in response to dangerously low capacity at statewide medical facilities due to the pandemic.
The New York National Guard announced Wednesday that it had deployed 120 medics and medical technicians to a dozen long-term care facilities statewide. The deployment came at the behest of Gov. Kathy Hochul, who issued the order last week in response to staffing shortages.
Service members deployed to facilities in Syracuse, Rochester, Albany, Buffalo, Utica, Plattsburgh, Uniondale, Liberty, Vestal, Olean, Lyons and Goshen, the Guard said in a statement.
Hochul has indicated that she may deploy the Guard to hospitals as well — as of last week, some 50 hospitals in northern New York had less than 10% bed capacity in large part due to lack of staff.
In Maine, Gov. Janet Mills activated the National Guard following a spike in Covid-19 cases.
“I do not take this action lightly, but we must take steps to alleviate the strain on our health care system and ensure care for all those who need it,” Mills said in a statement.
The state reported a record-high of 379 people hospitalized with Covid-19 as of Wednesday, 60 of whom were on ventilators.
Mills’ office said in a statement Wednesday that Maine had only 42 ICU beds available statewide.
Some 73% of Maine residents have received a full initial dose of Covid-19 vaccine, according to state data, with 16% of the population receiving a booster shot.
Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said Wednesday he thinks the whole country will see Covid-19 case numbers go up in coming weeks. Already 23 states have had more than a 20% increase in case numbers in just the last two weeks.
There have been surges in the Northeast and the surges in the upper Midwest have been “dire,” said Osterholm.
“But we expect to see other areas of the country also light up in the next several weeks,” Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
The biggest problem are the unvaccinated. “We have tried everything from public relations to incentive offers, to just having people see what’s happening in our intensive care units and we still have that reluctant group of individuals that just won’t get vaccinated,” said Osterholm.
The country also has work to do to convince more people to get a booster. Only about 26% of adults have gotten booster shots and that’s a problem, he said.
“Currently there are 462 people hospitalized statewide with COVID-19, and unfortunately, we have 11 new deaths from COVID-19 to report today, bringing the total number of people that have died from COVID-19 to 1,768.”
Rogue ‘Canvassers’ Are Still Going Door-To-Door In Search Of 2020 Fodder (for the Big Lie)
As state legislators across the country continue to push for so-called “audits” and other investigations into the 2020 election, some independent groups are taking it upon themselves to hit the pavement — going door-to-door and asking people about their vote in the last presidential election.
The Salt Lake Tribune has the latest out of Utah, where a group calling itself the “Utah Voter Verification Project” (UVVP) is knocking on doors in search of non-existent evidence of widespread election irregularities. Complaints lodged with the state noted that the canvassers did not wear name tags and refused to identify themselves.
And a handbook for the group published by the paper instructs volunteers not to wear any specifically political clothing — “please look and act as ‘Team America’” — and tells volunteers, correctly, that Utah law allows them to record their conversations without the consent of any other party. […]
The goal is, reportedly, to produce an evidence trail: Affidavits or recordings reflecting “discrepancies” in the election tally that can be used to prop up theories about election fraud.
[…] In Arizona, after the so-called auditors ditched their own plans for a door-to-door canvass following a warning from the Justice Department, right-wing activists pursued their own independent canvassing operation. A report on the effort published by onetime state legislature candidate Liz Harris made wild claims about election shenanigans — but included no evidence supporting them. […]
Separately, there were isolated reports of Pennsylvanian members of an “Election Integrity Committee” knocking on doors over the summer.
[…] “This is not unique to UT,” wrote Matthew Masterson, the former head of election security at the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency, which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, said of the Tribune report.
“It’s happening across the country,” Masterson said. “It’s dangerous. People are harassing neighbors and friends in pursuit of lies they have been told by a bunch of grifters making a living off damaging American democracy.”
[snipped details about canvassers in Colorado]
USEIP and UVVP also have ties to Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who’s spent millions of dollars pushing nonsensical claims of election shenanigans. Multiple members of the Colorado group are now leading a Lindell-funded effort called Cause of America. And the Tribune noted that Moore produced several videos for a recent Lindell “Thank-a-thon” event.
The canvassing efforts provide a challenge for election authorities: Unless canvassers are violating voters’ civil rights, they are free to go door-to-door asking about voting histories.
“It’s creepy,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson (R), who oversees the state’s elections, told the Tribune. “I hope people don’t answer these questions. But unless they’re doing something like targeting protected groups of people, there’s not much I can do.”
Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed during a Fox Nation interview with former Brexit leader Nigel Farage yesterday that he knew of someone who became “emasculated” and “weakened as a man” by contracting COVID-19.
The coronavirus “does tend to take away the life force” from people, Carlson argued very scientifically, and therefore “it does feminize people. No one ever says that but it’s true.”
Literally what is he talking about? [video is available at the link]
Also, try to imagine Carlson telling Trump to his face that he lost his manhood when he got hospitalized for the virus last year.
Following the recent anti-Muslim remarks made by Rep. Lauren Boebert toward Rep. Ilhan Omar, more than 400 congressional staff members are calling on House leaders to “categorically reject the incendiary rhetoric” in the workplace. At least 50 Muslim aides signed the letter, which is set to be released Wednesday. The letter comes days after Omar shared chilling voicemails and threats she received following Boebert’s Islamophobic comments.
“[…] the recent remarks by Rep. Boebert have heightened the climate of Islamophobia on the Hill, creating a feeling of anxiety and fear for many Muslim staff, our families, and communities, and leaving many of us to look to our congressional leaders for support.”
[…] On Wednesday, Rep. Ayanna Pressley introduced a resolution condemning Boebert’s Islamophobic rhetoric that would also remove her from her current committee assignments.
[…] “For a Member of Congress to repeatedly use hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobic tropes towards a Muslim colleague is dangerous. It has no place in our society and it diminishes the honor of the institution we serve in,” Pressley said in a statement.
“Without meaningful accountability for that Member’s actions, we risk normalizing this behavior and endangering the lives of our Muslim colleagues, Muslim staffers and every Muslim who calls America home. The House must unequivocally condemn this incendiary rhetoric and immediately pass this resolution. How we respond in moments like these will have lasting impacts, and history will remember us for it,” Pressley added. […]
“Congress cannot forgo accountability when a Member engages in hate speech that dehumanizes not only a colleague, but an entire people,” the co-sponsors said in a statement last week. “We cannot be complicit as members of this body, who swore an oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States, trample on the fundamental right of religious freedom.” […]
“There must be consequences for vicious workplace harassment and abuse that creates an environment so unsafe for colleagues and staff that it invites death threats against them,” Jayapal said. “There must be consequences for elected representatives who traffic in anti-Muslim and racist tropes that make all Muslims across the country less safe.” […]
Boebert’s non-apology came after videos were released in which she called Omar, a Muslim Congresswoman, “a terrorist” and member of the “Jihad squad,” not once but on at least two separate occasions. […]
But of course, that’s not all. After an exchange with Omar, instead of apologizing Boebert continued her anti-Muslim rhetoric. […]
As of Wednesday GOP House leadership has declined to take any action against Boebert.
Ali Alexander, a far right conspiracy theorist and organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, is scheduled to lie to the House Select Committee on Thursday morning.
That he will lie not a presumption. Alexander has already provided his opening statement, in which he claims to have “nothing to do with any violence or lawbreaking that happened on Jan. 6.” He also denies that he had anything to do with the planning or preparation for the insurgency. Instead, says Alexander, he was on the side of the angels. In videos of the events that day, Alexander claims that his group can be seen, “working with police to try to end the violence and lawbreaking” as well as “yelling and screaming at people to stop trying to enter the Capitol.”
Alexander will claim that while there is plenty of evidence of his innocence, the Select Committee is “looking for a boogeyman” and that “as a Black and Arab man, it is common for people who look like me to be blamed for things we didn’t do.” That last statement is certainly true. Unfortunately for Alexander, it may be just about the only truthful moment in his opening statement. […]
Alexander’s group included InfoWars hosts Alex Jones and Owen Shroyer. They weren’t sitting back with “their feet up,” they were actively marching on the Capitol, and actively moving the crowd to violence.
As Marcy Wheeler points out, the claims made by Alexander aren’t exactly things the Select Committee will have to investigate, because the DOJ has already investigated the actions of Alexander and his group. Those show Alexander’ and other members of the group aren’t just lying to the Committee today, they even lied to the Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
They actively led a large group to the Capitol, paused for a speech inside the restricted area, then directed the crowd around police barriers, promising them that Trump would be there to speak to them again. As they walked, Shroyer continued to shout at the crowd, using words that are captured in the government’s response to Shroyer’s call for dismissing charges against him.
“The traitors and communists that have betrayed us know we’re coming. We’re coming for all you commie traitors and communists that have stabbed us in the back. You’ve stabbed us in the back one too many times! We will not accept the fake election of that child-molesting Joe Biden, that Chinese Communist agent Joe Biden, we know where he belongs and it’s not the White House!”
Alexander’s group then tried to negotiate with the police, promising that they would help to deescalate, if they were given access to the east side of the Capitol building. But rather than going where the police asked them to go, the group circled the building.
Along the way, members of Alexander’s group repeatedly talked with police, promising that if they could get Alex Jones in front of the crowd, he would help to calm things down. It’s undoubtedly these videos that Alexander wants to enter as evidence that they were only trying to help.
In his call for dismissal, Shroyer claimed that once they reached the east side, the group made a call for protestors to back away, with Jones reportedly telling people “We can’t do this, stand down, don’t go in.” But what videos of the event actually show is Shroyer moving to the top of the stairs to lead chants of “1776!” Which, the DOJ argues, “does not qualify as de-escalation.”
As The Washington Post reported, Shroyer also told the crowd, “We literally own these streets right now.”
So Alexander, along with Alex Jones and Owen Shroyer, led a large crowd to the Capitol, encouraging them to violence all along the way, then told police they were there to help. Instead, they led that crowd away from the area police instructed them to go, stepped over police barriers, mounted the steps of the Capitol, and led chants to further incite the crowd.
[…] two weeks before Jan. 6, Alexander’s speech to the crowd at another rally let them know that the time to be violent was coming.
“We’re going to convince them to not certify the vote on January 6 by marching hundreds of thousands, if not millions of patriots, to sit their butts in D.C. and close that city down, right?” said Alexander. “And if we have to explore options after that…‘yet.’ Yet!” In response, people at the rally chanted “noose.”
California plans to be abortion sanctuary if Roe overturned State lawmakers may help pay for people from other states to come to California for abortions if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade
By ADAM BEAM Associated Press
December 8, 2021, 5:00 PM
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — With more than two dozen states poised to ban abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court gives them the OK next year, California clinics and their allies in the state Legislature on Wednesday revealed a plan to make the state a “sanctuary” for those seeking reproductive care, including possibly paying for travel, lodging and procedures for people from other states.
The California Future of Abortion Council, made up of more than 40 abortion providers and advocacy groups, released a list of 45 recommendations for the state to consider if the high court overturns Roe v. Wade — the 48-year-old decision that forbids states from outlawing abortion.
The recommendations are not just a liberal fantasy. Some of the state’s most important policymakers helped write them, including Toni Atkins, the San Diego Democrat who leads the state Senate and attended multiple meetings.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom started the group himself and in an interview last week with The Associated Press said some of the report’s details will be included in his budget proposal in January.
“We’ll be a sanctuary,” Newsom said, adding he’s aware patients will likely travel to California from other states to seek abortions. “We are looking at ways to support that inevitability and looking at ways to expand our protections.”
[…]
California already pays for abortions for many low-income residents through the state’s Medicaid program. And California is one of six states that require private insurance companies to cover abortions, although many patients still end up paying deductibles and co-payments.
[…]
The report recommends funding — including public spending — to support patients seeking abortion for travel expenses such as gas, lodging, transportation and child care. It asks lawmakers to reimburse abortion providers for services to those who can’t afford to pay — including those who travel to California from other states whose income is low enough that they would qualify for state-funded abortions under Medicaid if they lived there.
[…]
And, of course:
Abortion opponents in California, meanwhile, are also preparing for a potential surge of patients from other states seeking the procedure — only they hope to convince them not to do it.
Jonathan Keller, president and CEO of the California Family Council, said California has about 160 pregnancy resource centers whose aim is to convince women not to get abortions. He said about half of those centers are medical clinics, while the rest are faith-based counseling centers.
Donald Trump said Sidney Powell was never part of his team. That’s ridiculously untrue, but it’s also part of an amazing pattern.
It’s clearly been a tough year for Sidney Powell and her bizarre anti-election conspiracy theories. She was fired from Team Trump; one of her big lawsuits became a fiasco; and federal prosecutors are demanding financial records from her operation as part of a reported criminal investigation.
Powell’s position didn’t improve when The Washington Post reported this week that her non-profit, Defending the Republic, raised more than $14 million by spreading obvious election falsehoods — and questions about where the money was going led many members of the group’s staff and board to resign.
It was against this backdrop that Donald Trump sat down with conservative media figure Hugh Hewitt this week, and the host asked about the controversial lawyer’s recent troubles. As the transcript shows, the former president responded as if he barely knew Powell.
“No, she was, she didn’t work for me. She was a lawyer that was representing General [Mike] Flynn and some others, and she never officially — now she was on our side from the standpoint, I guess, you know, from the standpoint of what she was doing, but she didn’t work for me as per se. She worked for General Flynn and others. And I disagree with some of the things that she’s doing, and some of the statements that she made, as you know.”
[…] There are, of course, a couple of problems with this. The first is the mountain of evidence that makes clear that Powell was very much a part of Trump’s team.
[…] she was a high-profile member of the then-president’s legal team — described at the time as one of Trump’s “senior lawyers” — whom he identified by name as one of his attorneys.
Even after she was ousted, Powell remained a member of Trump’s inner circle. As he grew desperate to keep power after his defeat, Powell made multiple visits to the White House, and Axios reported that among Trump aides, there was a “consensus” that the then-president was “listening to Sidney Powell more than just about anyone who is on his payroll, certainly more than his own White House Counsel.”
[…] Powell “didn’t work for” Trump? Please.
But just as amazing is the larger pattern. As we discussed last summer, after Steve Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury — the first time, not to be confused with his more recent indictment — the then-president acted as if he barely knew Bannon, saying he’d merely worked “for a small part of the administration.”
He was hardly alone. In late 2019, Trump described then-U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland — part of “a small cadre of ambassadors who enjoy direct and frequent access to Trump” — as “a really good man” and a “great American.” Soon after, when Sondland got caught up in the Ukraine scandal that led to the then-president’s impeachment, Trump said, “Let me just tell you, I hardly know the gentleman.”
A month earlier, Trump said he didn’t know Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas after their arrests, despite his previous interactions with them.
What’s more, after his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, was indicted, the then-president argued, in reference to the former vice president of the Trump Organization, “Michael Cohen was a PR person who did small legal work, very small legal work.”
Around the same time, in the wake of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Trump reportedly told associates he “barely knows” Mohammed bin Salman.
When Paul Manafort was indicted, Trump’s former campaign chairman became some random staffer “who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.” When White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign in disgrace, Team Trump decided he was “a former Obama administration official” who did some “volunteer” work for the president.
Carter Page was described as someone Trump “does not know.” George Papadopoulos was dismissed as a “coffee boy.” Trump World even tried to downplay its association with Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign’s data firm.
Let this be a lesson to Trump’s associates: If you run into trouble or become inconvenient, your loyalty will not be rewarded.
Donald Trump downplayed injuries troops suffered at the Al Asad Air Base and they didn’t receive Purple Hearts. The Army is now putting things right.
There are dozens of American servicemen and women who earned, but didn’t receive, Purple Hearts after a ballistic missile attack early last year. As CBS News reported yesterday, it looks like the Army is putting things right.
The Army will award the Purple Heart to dozens of additional soldiers injured when Iran struck their airbase in Iraq with ballistic missiles in January 2020. The shift comes after a CBS News investigation last month found these same soldiers had not been recognized with the award and denied the medical benefits that come with it, despite appearing to qualify. In a statement to CBS News, a spokesman said the Army’s Human Resources command, which oversees awards, approved 39 Purple Heart submissions for soldiers wounded in the attack. The command notified these soldiers on Wednesday.
[…] It was early last year when the United States launched a drone attack that killed a powerful Iranian general, Quasem Soleimani [during the Trump administration]. Days later, Iran retaliated, launching a massive ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops stationed at the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq.
Fortunately, there was enough good intelligence about the impending strike that Americans were able to get to bunkers before the missiles hit, and no U.S. troops were killed in the attack. In fact, Donald Trump, starting his final year as president, also assured the public at the time that “no Americans” had been “harmed” in the attack. [Lie!]
That wasn’t true. As regular readers know, a week later, the administration clarified that 11 U.S. servicemembers had been transported to two hospitals for treatment for brain injuries. Soon after, that number was revised, climbing from 11 to 34. The tally was then revised again, from 34 to 50. By late January, the total number climbed once more, from 50 to 64. A month later, it was up to 109.
An NBC News report explained that a lot of TBI symptoms develop late and manifest themselves over time. Or put another way, the number of injured servicemen and women kept rising, not because there was an attempt to deceive, but because officials were gradually hearing from troops whose symptoms were not immediately apparent.
[…] Trump refused to back off from his false claim. In fact, when pressed for some kind of explanation for why he’d said “no Americans were harmed” when that wasn’t true, the then-president downplayed the troops’ brain injuries. The Republican went so far as to tell reporters that he’d heard that some of the servicemen and women had experienced “headaches,” but he didn’t “consider them very serious injuries.”
Remember, we’re talking about troops whose brain injuries were considered serious enough that the military airlifted them to hospitals.
It’s possible Trump didn’t want to admit he was wrong. It’s also possible he couldn’t bring himself to admit that his Iran policy had led to American troops’ injuries. Maybe the guy just didn’t know what he was saying.
Whatever the explanation, the Veterans of Foreign Wars denounced Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the troops’ brain injuries and called for a presidential apology. Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America soon followed with a similar message of its own. The then-president ignored them.
The story took an awful turn several weeks ago, with reports that troops were “discouraged” from filing the paperwork for the Purple Hearts to which they were entitled.
[…] The report added, “The soldiers CBS spoke with said after the attack, there was pressure to downplay the growing injuries to avoid a further escalation with Iran and avoid undercutting former President Trump.”
In other words, Trump downplayed the seriousness of American injuries, which led to pressure within the military not to contradict the president who was wrong.
Remember, the Purple Heart is a sacred commendation, but as Rachel noted on last night’s show, it also comes with practical benefits, including priority medical care at the V.A.
These new medals are overdue, and it’s heartening to know they’ll reach the service members who deserve them.
Josh Duggar, the oldest child of the family featured in the TLC show “19 Kids and Counting” and a one-time conservative celebrity, was found guilty of possessing child pornography by an Arkansas jury on Thursday.
A federal grand jury in Arkansas indicted Duggar in April on two counts: receipt of child pornography and possession of child pornography. The jury found him guilty on both.
Duggar pleaded not guilty to the charges during his arraignment after being arrested by U.S. Marshals in Arkansas.
According to the Associated Press, prosecutors during the trial presented evidence relating to a computer at Duggar’s used-car dealership in Arkansas. They alleged that Duggar used his work computer to send personal messages, download child porn and save pictures […]
Experts testified that Duggar’s computer was split into two operating systems, with one designated for business and a “hidden” section for illegal material. A Justice Department computer expert, James Fottrell, testified that sexually explicit photos and videos of children were found on Duggar’s computer, according to the AP. […]
It actually seemed like it was going to be a relatively quiet War on Christmas this year — the Christians seemed to be happy with their Starbucks cups, and increased online shopping meant fewer salespeople to berate for saying “Happy Holidays” — but then Tucker Carlson had to go and claim that whoever set fire to the Fox Christmas tree was doing a hate crime to Christians, so I guess we’re doing this. Again. [video available at the link]
And as usual, the Liberty Counsel — an anti-gay litigation non-profit best known for having represented former Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis, led by professional hatemonger Mat Staver — kicked off the War on Christmas Season by releasing its annual “Naughty and Nice List.”
Oh joy.
On the “Nice” list are companies that incorporate Christmas into their advertising, store display and store merchandise, with extra credit for nativity scenes and other things that give them that “We live in a theocracy where everyone is legally required to be a Christian” tingle.
Bealls department store, for instance, got high marks for being clear that their decorative pillows were decorative CHRISTMAS pillows, not to be used for any other purpose.
The Bealls’ website has many items that say “Merry Christmas” or are labeled as Christmas decorations, including things like ornaments, decorative pillows and clothing. Call Bealls at 800-569-9038 to thank them for celebrating Christmas!
Unsurprisingly, Hobby Lobby also won their approval, having a sufficient number of things that say “Merry Christmas” on them and also many nativity scenes — but also probably because they took out a whole ass newspaper ad this year explaining how, actually, America is supposed to be a theocracy.
Staying true to their Christian values, Hobby Lobby celebrates Christmas in the best way. Their homepage prominently advertises Christmas products and they carry many products printed with “Merry Christmas.” Many other items are actually labeled as “Christmas” decorations and there is a large selection of Nativity scenes. Contact Hobby Lobby or call them at 800-888-0321 to say thank you for celebrating Christmas!
Of course, even some companies that made the Nice list had room for improvement. For instance, not enough designated Christmas merchandise at American Eagle Outfitters, which apparently still exists and is selling the exact same clothes they sold my sophomore year of high school.
While there are not many Christmas-themed items on the American Eagle website, the term “Christmas” is used often in their product titles and descriptions. […]
[…]
Sears — there are 26 Sears stores still in existence — made it onto the Nice list, but there was some concern about the Nativity scene selection.
Sears does not use the word “Christmas” to label their categories on the website as much as other stores, although they do have a “Christmas” section under the “Seasonal” items tab. However, there are very few Nativity scenes to choose from and few things that say “Merry Christmas.” Overall, Christmas is mentioned but the word and references to Christ could stand to be more prominent. […]
Look, Mat Staver — Sears is just trying to get by right now. Times are tough! One would imagine they don’t have a very large selection of anything, never mind a large selection of Nativity scenes. They don’t need people calling them to “step up their Christmas game,” they’re depressed enough as it is!
Then there was the naughty list. This is a list of stores that the Liberty Counsel pretends is oppressing them and other Christians by not stocking enough specifically Christmas-themed merchandise, or by saying “Holiday” instead of Christmas, thereby acknowledging that there are in fact other holidays around this time. Apparently everyone is supposed to pretend Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and New Year’s don’t exist in order to make Mat Staver and friends feel special.
They are super mad at Burlington Coat Factory, which is not offering enough Bible-based outerwear this season.
Burlington made the Naughty list this year, featuring “Hot Holiday Deals” and gift cards emphasizing “Happy Holidays.” In addition, they lack any emphasis on gift giving for the season and severe lack of Christmas advertising with biblical meaning. […]
Good lord — imagine working in the Burlington Coat Factory customer service center and not only having to deal with actual customers and their problems all day, but then having to listen to some weird old bigot yell at you to make the stores more Christmassy. That is just cruel.
The Liberty Counsel was also quite peeved at Dick’s Sporting Goods for not centering Christ in their seasonal marketing plan. […]
Also on the Naughty List is The Limited.
The Limited is about winter and gift giving, but any Christmas reference is vague. […]
Perhaps this is because The Limited shut down all of its stores in 2017 and no longer exists as a retailer. They are still a brand, however, exclusively distributed by Belk Department Stores — which was actually on the “nice” list this year. […]
My own favorite stores — TJ Maxx and Marshall’s — made the naughty list as well. […]
The thing is, if you actually go into Marshall’s or TJ Maxx [or HomeGoods! A place your Editrix loves!], they’re brimming with Christmas crap and have been since well before Thanksgiving. Hell, they had Christmas outfits for sale a couple months ago, even, which I remember because my sister had to talk me down from buying a miniskirt with Christmas bows all over it and garland at the bottom that I thought was very Fran Fine (neither of us are Christian, sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate a festive ensemble). I guess they don’t have giant displays labeled “Christmas Crap,” but they don’t do that for any holiday. Jeez.
Lord & Taylor made the Naughty List because Not Enough Nativity. […]
The real victims/heroes in all of this, however, are the customer service representatives who are going to be forced to listen to these assholes and their ridiculous complaints or even their ridiculous compliments, which are probably equally annoying. We salute you and are thinking of you this holiday season.
Liberty Counsel helpfully provided phone numbers to call and many email addresses as well so that retailers could be endlessly harassed by Christian fanatics.
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz: “Putin Believes Negotiating with U.S. Would Be Easier if He Had a Pee Tape of Biden”
Vladimir Putin thinks that negotiating with the United States would be “so much easier” if he possessed a pee tape of President Joe Biden, the Russian leader has confirmed.
Speaking to reporters about his lengthy phone conversation with Biden regarding Ukraine, Putin said, “I kept thinking to myself, I wish I had a pee tape of this guy.”
After hanging up with the U.S. President, Putin ordered Russian intelligence officials to scour their archives for a Biden pee tape, but they came up empty.
“They mainly found a lot of footage of him saying things he didn’t mean to say,” Putin said. “Nothing great.”
The Russian President said that the absence of a Biden pee tape will make Russia’s dealings with the United States “more challenging.”
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that former President Donald Trump cannot prevent the House Jan. 6 committee from getting hundreds of documents created when he was in the White House.
A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that although Trump retained some authority to claim executive privilege, it was not strong enough to overcome President Joe Biden’s decision that Congress has a legitimate need for the material.
“The executive privilege for presidential communications is a qualified one that Mr. Trump agrees must give way when necessary to protect overriding interests. The president and the legislative branch have shown a national interest in and pressing deed for the prompt disclosure of these documents,” wrote Judge Patricia Millett for the court.
Trump’s lawyers will likely now file an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court in an effort to block the release. The court put a 14-day hold on its own ruling to give his lawyers time to pursue an appeal.
[…] Millett closed her ruling by quoting Benjamin Franklin’s words that we have “[a] Republic”—“if [we] can keep it.”
“The events of January 6th exposed the fragility of those democratic institutions and traditions that we had perhaps come to take for granted,” she wrote. “In response, the President of the United States and Congress have each made the judgment that access to this subset of presidential communication records is necessary to address a matter of great constitutional moment for the Republic.”
Lawyers for the House have said the Jan. 6 committee needs the records to complete a thorough investigation into “how the actions of the former president, his advisers, and other government officials may have contributed to the attack on Congress to impede the peaceful transfer of presidential power.” […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday signed off on booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for 16- and 17-year-olds for emergency use. The final approval, from CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, came hours after the Food and Drug Administration authorized third shots for the age group.
tomhsays
Re: #391
The NBC story doesn’t do justice to the 68 page opinion by the three judge panel, 2 appointed by Obama, one by Biden. For example:
“Lives were lost, blood was shed; portions of the Capitol building were badly damaged; and the lives of members of the House and Senate, as well as aides, staffers, and others who were working in the building, were endangered,” the court said, adding, “There is a direct linkage between the former President and the events of the day.”
As hospital beds in Massachusetts fill up, experts are trying to predict how bad the winter surge could be, and the state’s wastewater could hold the key.
The Boston-area wastewater tracker is showing the highest level of the virus that has been seen so far this year, about as high as last winter’s spike reached.
“Right now, we are seeing another spike,” said Mariana Matus, the CEO and founder of Biobot Analytics.
Her team is doing sequencing to try and find out the source, but medical experts said there already takeaways.
“What it tells me is that COVID is out there, but it may be asymptomatic in patients that have been vaccinated,” Dr. Ali Raja said.
Raja said it supports the case to continue to wear masks in public indoor settings and for getting the booster, especially as hospital beds start to fill up across the state.
“Our hospital is packed. I just walked down the hall to the ER and we are stuffed to the gills of really sick patients,” Raja said.
With plenty of kinetic activity on Capitol Hill this week, the House vote on the Protecting Our Democracy Act was largely lost in the shuffle, which is a shame because there’s a lot to like in this bill. Roll Call reported:
Seeking to avoid a repeat of the scandal-plagued Trump presidency, House Democrats approved a bill almost entirely along party lines Thursday that would put new limits on executive branch power and subject presidential candidates to more disclosure.
The vote on the legislation was 220 to 208, with every Democrat in the chamber voting for it, along with Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. Every other GOP member on the floor yesterday opposed the bill.
But it didn’t have to be that way.
To be sure, the bill’s Democratic architects had Donald Trump’s abuses in mind while crafting the legislation. For example, the former president refused to disclose his tax returns, so the Protecting Our Democracy Act would require future presidents to share the materials with the public. Team Trump was indifferent to Hatch Act violations, so the bill would give teeth to federal ethics laws.
Similarly, Trump issued corrupt pardons, so the bill intends to make it easier to hold presidents accountable for issuing corrupt pardons. Trump has been accused of several crimes, so the Protecting Our Democracy Act suspends the statute of limitations for any federal offense committed by a sitting president. Trump was indifferent to the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses, so the bill is designed to give Congress new mechanisms to ensure the law’s enforcement. Trump fired inspectors general who stood in his way, so this proposal would offer IGs new protections.
Trump benefited from foreign election interference, so this proposal requires political committees to report foreign contacts to domestic law enforcement. Trump denied his success a peaceful transition of power, so the Protecting Our Democracy Act imposes new instructions on the General Services Administration to make the process more efficient. Trump redirected funds away from their congressionally approved purpose, so the bill would make that far more difficult in the future.
[…] identifying what went wrong and approving reforms to prevent similar abuses. With this in mind, it may not seem especially surprising that far-right House Republicans, desperate to appear loyal to the former president, voted against the legislation.
But let’s not forget that while Trump may have inspired the package of reforms, the Protecting Our Democracy Act would apply to all future presidents, regardless of party. At its core, this is an effort to restrain presidential power and prevent possible abuses.
There’s nothing inherently partisan or ideological about it. Republicans could’ve supported it and said their sole concern was curbing President Joe Biden and future Democratic presidents.
Nevertheless, more than 99 percent of GOP representatives voted against it anyway.
The bill now heads to the evenly divided Senate, where a Republican filibuster awaits. That said, The New York Times reported, “[S]upporters of the bill envision breaking it up and attaching different components to other legislation in the Senate in a bid to regain bipartisan backing for elements that Republicans have supported in the past.”
The Supreme Court is allowing opponents of Texas’ abortion ban to challenge it in court, but the ban will remain in effect as the case is litigated.
For the second time in four months, the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on Texas’ six-week abortion ban. As was true the first time, the justices’ approach is a little complicated. NBC News reported this morning:
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that a lawsuit by abortion providers challenging Texas’ near-total ban on the procedure can move forward, a victory for opponents of the law…. The justices did not decide whether the law violates the Constitution, an issue that was not presented in the case.
Some context is probably in order. As we’ve discussed, unlike the usual abortion bans approved by GOP policymakers, Texas Republicans tried to shield their ban by shifting enforcement of the law from the state to ordinary citizens.
The result is effectively a vigilante system: If some random person learns that a Texan had an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — before many women even know they are pregnant — he could file suit against the physician who performed the procedure. And the nurse who was in the room. And the friend who drove the woman to the health clinic. And the family member who gave the woman some money to help pay for the trip.
According to the Lone Star State’s abortion ban, a random person, effectively deputized by Texas Republicans, could sue any of these people for $10,000 — plus attorneys’ fees — turning anti-abortion activists into bounty hunters.
The goal was to create a legal barrier of sorts: Texas would have the courts believe that since the state isn’t directly responsible for enforcing the law, Texas can’t be sued for having created the law, even if it’s plainly at odds with existing precedent. In fact, some have suggested that the law can’t be challenged at all, since it only empowers private citizens and not the state.
It’s this question that the U.S. Supreme Court helped resolve today: In Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson, the justices concluded that opponents of the law can, in fact, challenge it in court. For critics of Texas’ abortion ban, that certainly looks like a step in the right direction.
But at its core, this is a procedural step, not a ruling on the merits. The justices didn’t say Texas’ law is unconstitutional; they said the law can be challenged in court.
What’s more, while those legal challenges proceed, the justices said the state abortion ban can remain in effect — just as they ruled when the case first reached the high court in September.
As a practical matter, that means the Roe v. Wade protections that ended in Texas four months ago remain suspended today, and will remain suspended while the legal process proceeds.
Finally, with the Republican-appointed justices likely to overturn Roe v. Wade in the coming months, there’s no reason to assume that those challenging the state law will succeed when testing S.B. 8 on its merits.
I don’t doubt that proponents of Texas’ abortion ban would’ve preferred to see the Supreme Court rule the other way this morning, and say the law can’t be challenged in court, but all things considered, those same proponents are likely optimistic about their chances of prevailing in the overall legal fight.
[…] Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman was one of those innocent bystanders who became the target of death threats and harassment tied to a conspiracy theory that she had helped steal the presidential election in Georgia for Joe Biden.
On January 4th 2021 – two days before the Capitol insurrection – a woman named Trevian Kutti knocked on Freeman’s door and told her she was in danger. If Freeman didn’t confess to the truth of Trump’s election rigging charges within 48 hours unidentified persons would come to her home and Freeman along with members of her family would be sent to jail.
Kutti is a publicist and head of Trevian Worldwide, a PR firm. As of 2018 she is also the “Director of Operations” for Kanye West, a friend and political ally of Trump. […] She was there as West’s employee but only identified herself as the emissary of a “high profile” individual with an urgent message and an offer of help.
At various points, Kutti suggested Freeman was in physical danger. Sometimes the threats targeted only her, at other times members of her family. At some points the people out to get Freeman were described as “federal people”. At other points they seemed to be Democrats. “You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up.” Threats of violence? Being disappeared? Sent to prison? It doesn’t seem to have been clear – only that Freeman had to confess if she wanted help from Kutti and the “high profile individual”.
Freeman called police saying she felt threatened and things kind of went downhill from there, with Kutti repeating her mix of threats and offers of help. A police officer eventually suggested that everyone take the meeting down to the local police station. The mix of threats and offers of assistance continued and Kutti eventually arranged a conference call with someone identified as “Harrison Ford” (but apparently not that Harrison Ford) who “had authoritative powers to get you protection” and who quizzed Freeman and tried to get her to admit to her role in the election rigging plot.
Kutti repeatedly told Freeman: “If you don’t tell everything you’re going to jail.”
According to Reuters, which broke the story, police took no action and did not further investigate the incident. According to Freeman, two days after Kutti’s visit on January 6th, a large group of Trump supporters did descend on her home with bullhorns. Freeman had already fled her home because of a January 5th tip from the FBI.
Top Trump allies Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and ex-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon mulled a plan on Thursday to establish thousands of “shock troops” to go after their political enemies.
During an interview on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Gaetz argued that “stagecraft is statecraft” and “sometimes you’ve got to raise your voice to raise a ruckus and to raise an army of patriots who love this country and will fight for her.”
“And if we get more of them in Congress, then that’s exactly what we’re gonna do,” the Republican lawmaker declared. “We’re gonna operationalize the performance to go right after the people who are imposing the vaccine mandates, who are enriching themselves and who are selling out the country.”
Bannon praised Gaetz’s “theory of governing” as “fresh and new.”
“This is Trumpism in power,” the former White House adviser said. “That’s when we went to the 4,000 shock troops we have to have that’s going to man the government, and get them ready now. We’re going to hit the beach with the landing teams and the beachhead teams and all that nomenclature they use when President Trump wins again in 2024, or before.”
“You’re going to have those as the 4,000 political appointees […] No more powderpuff derby,” Bannon continued. “This is going to be hardcore accountability at every committee.”
“Yes,” Gaetz agreed.
Ex-President Donald Trump has not confirmed whether he’ll run for reelection in 2024, though he’s strongly hinted that he might.
Gaetz and Bannon both eagerly fueled Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election and peddle the Big Lie, which ultimately led to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. The day before the riot, Bannon told his listeners that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow” and “strap in […] tomorrow it’s game day.”
That rhetoric made Bannon a major target in the House Jan. 6 Select Committee’s investigation into the attack, but the former Trump official has refused to cooperate with the probe, prompting the Justice Department to charge him with criminal contempt. Bannon has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
As for Gaetz, his comments on Thursday weren’t the first time the congressman has flirted with endorsing political violence: During a rally in May, Gaetz declared that the Second Amendment was about “maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government.”
Wonkette: Missouri AG Orders County Health Dept To Do Nothing At All To Stop COVID, Hooray Freedom!
A health district in rural Missouri announced yesterday that it had been ordered by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to stop doing anything at all to contain the coronavirus pandemic, thanks to a ruling in a state court last month which held that since the Missouri legislature hadn’t explicitly given public health agencies the power to issue health orders for COVID-19, all such health orders were “null and void.”
Yes, really.
[…] The Facebook announcement also noted that the AG was “upholding” the court order, too, and that the health department was therefore
forced to cease all COVID-19 related work at the current time. This includes: case investigations, contact tracing, quarantine orders, and public announcements of current cases/deaths, etc. While this is a huge concern for our agency, we have no other options but to follow the orders of the Missouri Attorney General at this time.
[…] The health department added that while it was waiting on further information from Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS), it had “no timeline or expectations that this ruling will be changed.” People seeking information on COVID should, the announcement said, check the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website and of course their local health provider. The health department also helpfully referred folks to the phone numbers for Missouri’s COVID Hotline, which appears to at least still be up and running, and also to Schmitt’s office. It closed with a warning that
While our agency remains determined to protect the health of our county residents, it should be understood that this ruling greatly affects how we will be able to proceed with ALL highly communicable diseases in the future.
[…] Say, did we mention that AG Schmitt is one of the Republican fuckwads running for the US Senate seat that Roy Blunt will be retiring from next year? Clearly he has a very important mission here, a matter of principle, because anyone who goes into a 2022 primary with a record of trying to slow the pandemic will be toast. Currently, Schmitt is polling roughly even with allegedly sex-assaulty former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, and everyone in the race wants Donald Trump’s endorsement.
In his letter to county health agencies, Schmitt emphasized that there was no wiggle room on the matter, so knock it off immediately with the public health, you monstrous health tyrants:
Under this judgment, all mask mandates, quarantine orders, and other public health orders that are based on any of the invalidated regulations or issued outside the protections of the Missouri Administrative Procedure Act are null and void. You should stop enforcing and publicizing any such orders immediately.
Failure to follow the court’s judgment may result in enforcement action against you to remove orders the court has determined are unconstitutional and illegal. We encourage you to take immediate action to remove all unconstitutional and illegal orders.
[…] The Springfield News-Leader reports that Schmitt “sent a similar letter to Missouri school districts this week” telling them that they had to drop any mask mandates they might have, too, citing the same case. School officials in Springfield, at least, said they won’t comply with Schmitt’s demand, and that masks would still be mandated in city public schools until more kids get vaccinated […]
Schmitt’s office declined a request by the News-Leader for an interview with the virus-friendly AG, but did at least issue a statement saying that the court’s order absolutely barred public health and school authorities from doing a darn thing to prevent the spread of COVID, apart perhaps from nice happy thoughts and good wishes, and that the AG’s office is “grateful that the Laclede County Health Department has ceased their COVID-19 public health orders like their quarantine order.”
So far, the paper says, the county has seen 149 deaths from COVID since the pandemic began, and 16 deaths in the past week. Only 34.8 percent of county residents are fully vaccinated.
[…] That Trump endorsement is surely on the way, unless Greitens tries to upstage Schmitt by personally spreading the disease to Missourians after he’s tied them up naked in his sex basement.
[…] The Cavazos family can trace ownership of their 77-acre plot all the way back to a Spanish land grant in the 1760s, but in 2017 the Trump administration began trying to seize a 6.5-acre chunk of it, which would have split their land in half and cut off their access to the Rio Grande river […]
When Trump lost the 2020 election, the Cavazos family thought their fight to keep their property near Mission, Texas, was safe, since one of Joe Biden’s first acts in office was to cancel WALL construction. Ah, but bureaucracy can be a terrible thing, as Business Insider reports, because in April, a federal court — acting on an eminent domain lawsuit started under Trump — ruled that the US government could take “immediate possession” of the 6.5 acres.
[…] Tuesday, in a court filing, the Biden administration said nah, our bad, here’s your land back, as part of an agreement to cancel WALL construction in the Rio Grande Valley. So yay for people not having their land taken for some bullshit. […]
As the Washington Post reported in 2018, the land the Trump administration wanted for its big beautiful WALL would have bisected the Cavazos land, cutting straight through their “barn, through their rental house, and through a field where they grazed a small herd of longhorn cattle.” It would have blocked access to the river, where the cattle drank, and where the family managed to make some extra income by “renting out a few dozen recreational fishing camps on the river for $100 a month, earning just enough to get by.”
No, the WALL plans didn’t include a big beautiful door to let them get to the river, either.
[…] cousin Rey Anzaldua, who lives on another section of inherited riverfront land several miles away, had a similar fight with the feds. That fight eventually ended with a section of fencing built in his back yard, but at least it didn’t follow the original route, which would have required tearing down his house. Living on the border has involved a long series of losses for the family.
The family cemetery was lost to a government floodway in the 1950s, and the former hunting grounds were now a high-end golf course. “We’ve lost so much land already,” [Anzaldua] said. “To me, that’s what makes the wall such an insult.”
A retired Customs agent, Anzaldua noted that smugglers and undocumented migrants found creative ways to circumvent the 18-foot wall on his property and believed that the wall had only succeeded in “[preventing] his family’s access to the riverfront that was once rightfully theirs.”
[…] At the time of his own fight for his land, Anzaldua had already concluded, based on his experience in law enforcement and as a landowner, that tougher enforcement wouldn’t do a damned thing about illegal border crossings:
“If people could find a way to cross a river 150 yards wide and evade the U.S. government — if they were willing to risk death by walking through miles of brush in 120-degree heat — they would find a way to scale a wall.
A pointless and wasteful exercise,” Rey had written to the government at the time. “It’s supply and demand. Why not spend the money on drug treatment and reducing the need for cheap labor?”
Those still seem like pretty good ideas to us, so we will end it there.
Good news, I think: New York Attorney General Tish James said yesterday that she’s ending her Democratic gubernatorial campaign. “I have come to the conclusion that I must continue my work as attorney general,” James explained in a statement. “There are a number of important investigations and cases that are underway, and I intend to finish the job.”
The Spalding board’s new chairman has endorsed former president Donald Trump’s false stolen-election claims on social media.
Protesters filled the meeting room of the Spalding County Board of Elections in October, upset that the board had disallowed early voting on Sundays for the Nov. 2 municipal election. A year ago, Sunday voting had been instrumental in boosting turnout of Black voters.
But this was an entirely different five-member board than had overseen the last election. The Democratic majority of three Black women was gone. So was the Black elections supervisor.
Now a faction of three white Republicans controlled the board — thanks to a bill passed by the Republican-led Georgia legislature earlier this year. […]
The panel in Spalding, a rural patch south of Atlanta, is one of six county boards that Republicans have quietly reorganized in recent months through similar county-specific state legislation. The changes expanded the party’s power over choosing members of local election boards ahead of the crucial midterm Congressional elections in November 2022.
The unusual rash of restructurings follows the state’s passage of Senate Bill 202, which restricted ballot access statewide and allowed the Republican-controlled State Election Board to assume control of county boards it deems underperforming. The board immediately launched a performance review of the Democratic-leaning Fulton County board, which oversees part of Atlanta.
The Georgia restructurings are part of a national Republican effort to expand control over election administration in the wake of Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. [snipped examples from other states]
The stakes are high in Georgia, which last year backed a Democrat for president for the first time since 1992. Its first-term Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock will be up for reelection in 2022, a contest that could prove pivotal to which party controls Congress. […]
[Snipped what Republicans said. Basically, they shouted, “Election integrity,” while planning to destroy election integrity.]
In five of the Georgia counties that restructured election boards — Troup, Morgan, Pickens, Stephens and Lincoln — the legislature shifted the power to appoint some or all election board members to local county commissions, all of which are currently controlled by Republicans. […]
The county election boards have broad authority over voter access, such as polling locations and early-voting procedures. They also have considerable sway over post-election provisional-ballot tallies, audits and recounts.
Reconstituted boards in two of the six counties have already moved to restrict voting access. In addition to Spalding’s termination of Sunday voting, Lincoln County has proposed consolidating its seven precincts into one voting center, which critics say would discourage voting by people traveling from remote areas. […]
The changes come in the wake of Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Trump won Spalding County with 60 percent of the 2020 vote. But his margin of victory declined by 4 percentage points from 2016 as turnout among Black voters jumped 20 percent in a county where the population is 35 percent black.
Trump supporters rifled through the dumpsters behind Spalding’s election office, looking for tossed ballots. None were found. Others demanded to watch the vote-counting. Sheriff’s deputies had to escort election workers to their cars. In Georgia and nationwide, some Trump supporters have threatened election officials with violence.
With conservative judges now choosing the county election board’s fifth member, the previous fifth member, Vera McIntosh, a Black Democrat, has been ousted. She was replaced by James Newland, who is also vice-chair of the county Republican Party. In September, he voted to end Sunday voting.
The board’s new chair is Ben Johnson, a former official of the county Republican party. Johnson declined to comment on his social media posts endorsing Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. […]
McIntosh, the ousted Democrat, called the changes a “power grab” by local Republicans who wanted to “go back and prove the ‘Big Lie’ was real,” referring to Trump’s election-fraud claims.
[…] The law restructuring Spalding’s board also required the elections supervisor to live in the county, a change that forced out the incumbent supervisor, Marcia Ridley. Two other Black Democrats on the board quit: Margaret Bentley and Glenda Henley, who cited objections to the law and harassment from Trump supporters.
Henley said the board’s meetings were increasingly attended by Trump supporters crying fraud. She called the tensions “exhausting” and said: “I have never been afraid in this town, but I am now.”
[…] In western Georgia’s Troup County, the Republican-controlled county commission now appoints all election board members, a power previously shared by three cities and the two political parties.
Lonnie Hollis, one of two Black female members, will leave the board at year-end. Hollis, who has served since 2013, said the restructuring was aimed at unseating her because she fought to increase voter access. Her efforts included advocating for the first voting location in a predominantly Black church in the county, which she said has multiple precincts in predominantly white churches.
[…] In Morgan County, two Black Democrats on the board, Helen Butler and Avery Jackson, were removed after the new law eliminated political-party appointments and handed appointment power to the Republican-dominated commission. Butler and Jackson sought reappointments but were denied.
[…] Butler warned that the restructurings could “enable members of the majority party to overturn election results they do not like.”
Under normal circumstances, senators can filibuster efforts to raise the debt ceiling. It’s precisely why Republican hostage crises over the last decade have been so dangerous: Democrats have had the capacity and will to pay the nation’s bills, but the GOP counterparts have stood in the way of up-or-down votes.
But as it turns out, the current circumstances aren’t normal at all. In a newly passed bill, there’s a special provision that will allow the Senate — just this once — to extend the debt ceiling with a simple majority. The filibuster won’t be an option.
And this temporary carveout to the institution’s filibuster rules apparently gave Sen. Elizabeth Warren an idea. The Massachusetts Democrat wrote on Twitter yesterday:
“Let’s be clear what this is: an exception to the filibuster. Today’s vote is proof that it’s possible to create exceptions to the filibuster and move forward when it’s important. We did it this time, let’s do it again.”
[…] Last week, in the stopgap spending package needed to prevent a government shutdown, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah wanted a vote on his amendment to defund the Biden administration’s private-sector vaccine requirements. Ordinarily, such an amendment would require 60 votes.
But Lee said he wanted an exception. “A simple up-or-down, yes or no, a simple-majority vote,” the Utahan said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
The GOP senator realized that this isn’t how the Senate generally operates, but he saw the filibuster rules as an impediment to his plans, so he asked members to put aside the rules — and they did.
Which brings us back to Warren’s point: It really is possible “to create exceptions to the filibuster and move forward when it’s important.”
There’s no shortage of members, including a handful of Democrats, who routinely argue that in the interest of protecting democracy, bipartisan comity, and the integrity of Senate as an institution, the filibuster must remain intact. To abandon the 60-vote threshold, they claim, is to invite political ruin.
What this argument tends to overlook is the fact that the Senate already makes all kinds of exceptions to the filibuster rule. The 60-vote threshold doesn’t apply, for example, to budget bills. Or judicial nominees. Or executive branch nominees. Or the War Powers Resolution. Or the Congressional Review Act. Or trade promotion authority. Or the latest bipartisan debt-ceiling fix. Or last week’s continuing resolution amendment that GOP senators liked.
All of this is true, and the Senate has not collapsed. Political ruin has not overcome Capitol Hill.
If Warren is right — and she most certainly is — why not create more exceptions to the filibuster “and move forward when it’s important”? Why can senators agree to a carveout to the rule to extend the nation’s borrowing authority, but refuse a comparable carveout to protect voting rights?
In a blazing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the conservative bloc to task for laying federal supremacy vulnerable to tactics she compares to those of pro-slavery crusader John C. Calhoun.
“This is a brazen challenge to our federal structure,” she writes of the Texas law. “It echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to “veto” or “nullif[y]” any federal law with which they disagreed.”
The six-week abortion ban out of Texas, S.B. 8, is cloaked in a unique enforcement mechanism meant to make it impossible for opponents to sue preemptively. It outsources enforcement of the law to private individuals, a scheme crafted to avoid lawsuits against state officials that would block the ban. Instead, abortion providers would have to wait to challenge it until they got sued by an individual, putting them on the hook for endless lawsuits and potentially ruinous associated costs.
[…] “By foreclosing suit against state court officials and the state attorney general, the Court clears the way for States to reprise and perfect Texas’ scheme in the future to target the exercise of any right recognized by this Court with which they disagree,” Sotomayor writes.
She notes the dramatic and dangerous knock-on effects the court’s decision could have, barring federal courts from intervening when a state passes an unconstitutional law.
“The Court thus betrays not only the citizens of Texas, but also our constitutional system of government,” she warns.
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito ruled that abortion providers in Texas can sue a limited number of executive licensing officials — regulators at state medical entities — but not state clerks or the Texas attorney general. The liberals plus Chief Justice John Roberts argued that providers should be able to sue the latter two categories as well. Justice Clarence Thomas said the providers should be allowed to sue no one.
While these suits move forward in lower courts, the effective ban on abortion after six weeks will remain in place.
Sotomayor adds that Texas has already succeeding in making abortion virtually illegal in the state for months. “These consequences have only rewarded the State’s effort at nullification,” Sotomayor seethes.
Chief Justice John Roberts also wrote in dissent, albeit taking a milder tone than Sotomayor’s.
“The clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings,” he writes.
“The nature of the federal right infringed does not matter; it is the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system that is at stake,” he adds, in a seeming plea to his fellow conservative justices. […]
While the court ruminates on that decision, the action in Texas will drop back down to the state level for now.
“The Court should have put an end to this madness months ago, before S. B. 8 first went into effect,” Sotomayor lamented. “It failed to do so then, and it fails again today.”
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 405
Yeah, I’m not going to hold my breathe until that comes along.
Wonkette: “Tucker Carlson Accuses Mitch McConnell Of ‘Crushing The Weak Because He Can,’ But Like In A Bad Way”
Don’t you just hate it when you’re trying like hell to make something NOT A STORY, and then your efforts to be discreet wind up featuring on Tucker Carlson’s White Power Hour?
[…] It all started when Senator Bob Dole up and died on Sunday. His widow, Liddy Dole — a former senator herself — turned to her usual crew to plan a big funeral. That crew included one Tim Unes, founder and president of Event Strategies Inc., a DC party planning company. As the New York Times reports, Unes was a known quantity to the Dole family, having served as tour director for Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. But there were a few things about Unes of which Mrs. Dole appears to have been unaware.
To wit, she may not have realized that Unes was recently subpoenaed by the House January 6 Select Committee for documents and testimony regarding his role in planning the coup rally.
“According to documents provided to the Select Committee, press reports, and statements by Women For America First (‘WFAF’), you assisted in organizing a rally held on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, in support of then-President Trump and his allegations of election fraud,” Committee Chair Bennie Thompson wrote on September 29.
“On subsequent permitting paperwork submitted by WFAF, you were described as the ‘stage manager.’ The contact information in the permitting paperwork including an email address affiliated with your company, Event Strategies, Inc.,” he continued. “According to press reports, those working with you and WFAF to organize the January 6th rally collectively communicated with President Trump, White House officials including chief of staff Mark Meadows, and others about the rally and other events plan to coincide with the certification of the 2020 electoral college results.”
Unes appears to have testified some time shortly thereafter.
Mrs. Dole failed to grok that her old buddy Tim was under a cloud, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell knew that allowing him to be associated with the event would associate Dole with the insurrectionists. So his people made a discreet call to her people, and Unes got the axe. So far, so DC.
But then the Times got ahold of the story, which meant that Carlson got ahold of it. […] [Video is available at the link]
Now technically Mitch McConnell is the Republican leader of the United States Senate. But in real life — and everyone in Washington knows this — on the issues that matter, Mitch McConnell is an instrument of the Left. [LOL]
Uh oh, must be Shark Week.
McConnell knew that Tim Unes had helped organize Donald Trump’s political rally in Washington this January. There was nothing illegal or immoral about doing that. If anything it’s a constitutionally protected behavior, it is organizing a political rally. It is why we have the Bill of Rights.
But the partisan lunatics on the January 6th committee don’t acknowledge the Bill of Rights and they objected to this, and then Mitch McConnell aggressively took their side as he has from the very beginning. So, McConnell then convinced the Dole family to cancel Tim Unes’s contract and disinvite him from the funeral.
Does BILL OF RIGHTS protect the right to overthrow the government? And not for nothing, but there was clearly some jiggery pokery going on with those permits.
Then McConnell made sure the story made the New York Times, and when he did that he knew perfectly well that a piece like this would completely destroy Tim Unes’s life, which unfortunately it definitely will. It will mean no more corporate clients, no more income for Tim Unes.
So even by Mitch McConnell’s usual standards of viciousness, and in Washington he’s known as the nastiest old woman in town, this was an incredibly cruel thing to do. It was crushing the weak on behalf of the strong, and for no real reason, simply because he could and doesn’t like Trump.
GOD DAMMIT!
First these assholes make us side with Liz Cheney, and now Mitch McConnell and Liddy Dole?
Okay, first of all, Mitch McConnell did Liddy Dole a favor by pointing out that Mommybloggers like us were going to write a mean story about the Insurrectionist Party Planner Sending Bob Dole Off In Style, and maybe she didn’t need the headache. Second, Mrs. Dole fired Unes, not McConnell. Third, doesn’t McConnell have a First Amendment right to say, “Hey, sorry your husband died, but perhaps don’t court drama by associating yourself with someone who may be called to testify publicly about this whole riot thing?” And doesn’t Mrs. Dole have a First Amendment right to say, “Thanks, for the heads up, Mitch,” and then choose not to associate with Unes? Isn’t that part of BILL OF RIGHTS?
And finally, LOL forever at the idea that Tim Unes is going to be eating from a dumpster because he didn’t get to plan Bob Dole’s funeral. There have been exactly zero negative consequences for people associated with this attempted coup. In fact, they seem to be raking in the bucks right and left from the grifters, and the only Republican getting tossed out of MAGA world is Mike Pence, because he refused to either go along with the coup or let Unes’s party guests hang him.
Why is Tucker Carlson calling Mitch McConnell an old woman. Does Carson think that calling a man a woman is the ultimate insult?
Kansas City Landlords About To Find It A Lot Harder To Throw Families Into The Street.
It’s turning out to be a big week for small but important victories for the little guy!
Kansas City, Missouri, will now provide universal legal representation to tenants facing eviction — meaning that instead of just being thrown out of their homes with no recourse, evicted tenants will now actually have the right to due process, regardless of their financial situation. The measure passed unanimously out of committee on Wednesday, with the council chamber filled with supporters in red and yellow T-shirts cheering as they heard the news.
Universal legal counsel for tenants is already a reality in Washington, Maryland (just this fall!), and Connecticut, as well as in 12 individual cities, but Kansas City’s ordinance would be the first one like it in the Midwest.
[…] Only about 10 percent of tenants regularly have counsel when they’re facing eviction proceedings; with a lawyer, tenants go from being evicted in 95 percent of cases, to staying in their homes a supermajority of the time, per the ACLU. Which is why an affirmed right for tenants to have counsel when they’re at risk of losing their homes is such a big, important damn deal.
[…] The Star reports that the new policy will cost the city an estimated $2.5 million, which will go to training and paying lawyers and other initiatives, such as:
– Outreach to tenants: The city and property owners would be required to notify tenants of their right to counsel. When a case is filed, the city would reach out within 10 days to remind tenants of that right and how to exercise it.
– City staffing and centralized intake: Kansas City would hire a Tenants’ Legal Services and Assistance Director to coordinate.
– High quality legal representation: Kansas City would work with legal service providers to ensure trained representation for tenants.
[…] – Full funding: The city would eventually fund the program through a recurring, non-discretionary source to guarantee the right to counsel.
The only voice opposed to the new policy was Stacey Johnson-Cosby, the president of a local landlords’ organization who argued that the money should instead go to helping people pay rent, as the main reason for eviction is an inability to pay rent. But Gina Chiala, executive director and lead attorney with the Heartland Center, said that one of the things the legal representation for tenants will be doing is making sure rental assistance gets fairly distributed.
Kansas City has experienced an entirely unsurprising surge in evictions this year following the lifting of the eviction moratorium, which in turn has led (again, unsurprisingly) to an increase in crime and gun violence. The Star reported earlier this year that “of the 10 Jackson County census tracts with the highest numbers of shootings, all but one also had higher than average eviction rates.”
Kicking people out of their homes has consequences — serious ones. It’s hard to get housing again after being evicted, meaning that those who are evicted frequently end up on the streets. It puts people in an unnecessarily desperate position, and keeping people housed ought to be a high priority in every area in the country, because the fact is, when everyone is housed, everyone benefits. […] it costs taxpayers less money to keep people housed than it does to have them be homeless, so not letting people get kicked out of their homes in the first place is a win for everyone in Kansas City, whether they’re renters or not.
Nearly a quarter of college students wouldn’t be friends with someone who voted for the other presidential candidate — with Democrats far more likely to dismiss people than Republicans — according to new Generation Lab/Axios polling.
“Liberals are so intolerant!” they scream, because their plague-spreading, gun-toting, schoolchild-killing, antisemitic, racial- and ethnic-minority-hating, misogynistic, democracy-destroying ideology is totes no big deal. I mean, why shouldn’t I be required, in the name of “tolerance,” to go out with someone who dehumanizes my Latino brothers and sisters, and worships a guy who says they’re all drug dealers, criminals, and rapists? Ladies, so what if that guy is a forced-birther who wants to insert his unwelcome judgment when making decisions between you and your doctor. And really, who cares if they want to take away a gay couple’s right to marry? Intolerance, it seems, is a one-way street! […]
Of course, conservatives don’t feel similarly. We’re not trying to take away their rights. Legislate their morality. Destroy democracy. But as always, they’re the victim. […]
If the parties were divided over things like tax brackets and other economic policies, that would be one thing. But Republicans have literally built a machine to stoke culture war divisions, and then they cry when they divide the country. […]
I will say, as someone who was on dating apps within the last few years, that the number of “Trump supporters, swipe left” (left being “nope”) is huge. And I didn’t see this just in my liberal corner of the world, but even in redder parts of the country.
The conservative American Enterprise Institute actually commissioned a poll on the topic which confirmed that dynamic. […] This CNN story told tearful stories of conservatives shut out of the dating scene because of their bigoted politics. This is a fun look at the phenomenon by Andi Zeisler, “The question keeping Trump-loving men up at night: Why won’t women date us?” Politico gave voice to aggrieved and dateless young conservative staffers in D.C. Conservatives responded with conservative-only dating apps.
[…] it’s no surprise that liberals, fighting an existential battle for their rights and our very own democracy, would have little use for those who seek to burn it all down. That is no less “intolerant” than a Jewish person refusing to date a Proud Boy. There are dangerous people and dangerous ideologies, and it’s okay to shut them out of polite society.
If Ari Fleischer wants to go back to the days of trans-ideological comity, then he should work harder to purge his party of the dangerous anti-democracy forces that have taken control.
Until then, the story here is simple: “Young people don’t like assholes.”
ravensays
We’ve known for a long time that people who survive severe Covid-19 virus disease have long lasting medical problems. A lot of people who get off the ventilators/ECMO never leave rehab/assisted living. It’s not unusual for patients to go home, and then drop dead a few weeks later.
(They will often go home and keep on posting antivax propaganda, not having learned one single thing while almost dying and running up a $1 million hospital bill.)
This study quantifies it.
“Overall, just over 52% of severe covid patients died in a year’s time. ”
Half of them are dead within a year.
Many Severe Covid-19 Survivors Go on to Die Within a Year, Study Finds
Compared to people who tested negative for covid-19, those who survived severe illness were more than twice as likely to die within a year’s time.
ByEd Cara 12/01/21 2:20PM Gizmodo.com
New research this week finds that people who are hospitalized with severe covid-19 but survive often pay a heavy price afterward. The study concluded that these survivors were more than twice as likely to die in the subsequent 12 months compared to people who had tested negative for the virus. This relatively increased risk of death was even higher for people under the age 65.
While there remains much research to be done, studies thus far have made it clear that many covid-19 survivors can experience lingering symptoms even after the infection itself has cleared up. And those who are hospitalized are all the more vulnerable to these aftereffects. Severe covid often seriously damages the lungs and other organs, while life-saving interventions like steroids, ventilators, and life support devices like ECMO can take a toll on the body as well.
Researchers from the University of Florida had already published a study in July showing that hospitalized survivors were significantly more likely to be hospitalized again within six months, compared to those with mild to moderate covid-19. This new study of theirs, based on an examination of anonymous electronic health records, instead looked at the long-term mortality risk of patients up to a year later.
Nearly 14,000 patients in the same health care system were studied. These included 178 diagnosed with severe COVID-19 and 246 diagnosed with mild to moderate covid-19, as well as many others who tested negative for the virus but may have been sick for other reasons and received medical care in some way. Compared to covid-negative patients, and even after accounting for other factors like age and sex, those with severe covid were 2.5 times more likely to die in the next 12 months after their illness. Overall, just over 52% of severe covid patients died in a year’s time. There was no significant increased risk of mortality for mild to moderate cases, however.
“This study provides evidence that the increased risk of death from covid-19 is not limited to the initial episode of covid-19, but a severe episode of covid-19 carries with it a substantially increased risk of death in the following 12 months,” the authors wrote in their study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Medicine.
About 20% of the deaths among these patients post-infection were attributed to problems with either the respiratory or cardiovascular system, the authors noted, the areas of the body that tend to be affected directly by infection from the coronavirus. But it’s well known that the symptoms of severe covid are often the result of an overzealous immune response, one that can wreak havoc all throughout the body. And it’s this potential for widespread damage that is likely to blame for the majority of added deaths seen in these survivors.
“Since these deaths were not for a direct covid-19 cause of death among these patients who have recovered from the initial episode of covid-19, this data suggests that the biological insult from covid-19 and physiological stress from covid-19 is significant,” they wrote.
Older people are more likely to develop severe illness and die from covid-19. But among patients in this study, the associated risk of dying was actually relatively greater for survivors of severe covid under age 65 than it was for patients over 65. Compared to similarly aged but non-infected people, they were more than three times more likely to die in the months after their hospitalization.
The results are yet another reminder that the harms of the pandemic run deeper than any official death toll can illustrate. As many as 7.5 million Americans have been hospitalized by covid-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated. Given the risks that hospitalized survivors will face even after their initial ordeal, the authors say it’s “clear that prevention of significant covid-19 infection is the most effective way to decrease the risk of death following covid-19.”
raven @411, a distant relative of mine died a few days ago. She had covid and had supposedly recovered. She died at home. She was a long-hauler, with several continuing effects from the disease. I didn’t really know her and had not seen her for more than a decade, but it still is a wakeup call to have someone you know die from covid (covid-related) problems months after “recovery.” As far as I know, she was not vaccinated.
Inflation numbers for the USA look different if you remove gas prices.
Consumer prices rose by 6.8 percent in November over the previous year, the highest annual inflation rate since June 1982, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, released Friday.
[…] The greatest increases were seen in gasoline, up 6.1 percent; shelter, up 0.5 percent; food, up 0.7 percent; used cars and trucks, up 2.5 percent; and new vehicles, up 1.1 percent.
Rents also rose by 0.4 percent; and meat, poultry, fish and eggs were up by 0.9 percent. Pork prices rose especially sharply, up 2.2 percent.
“Today’s numbers reflect the pressures that economies around the world are facing as we emerge from a global pandemic — prices are rising,” President Joe Biden said Friday in a statement. He noted that developments in the weeks since the data was collected “show that price and cost increase are slowing, although not as quickly as we’d like.”
[…] Increased demand, coupled with shaky supplies tends to drive up prices: Total spending by all consumers is up nearly 25 percent as of November, compared to January 2020, according to research at the nonprofit Opportunity Insights.
“Inflation matters very much for those at the lower ends of the income and wealth spectrums,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst for Bankrate. “It is a kind of double blow to lower income households, which suffered from the short but dramatic recession as the pandemic began, serving to exacerbate both wealth and income inequality.” […]
Details, including an informative graph, are available at the link.
More difficulty for some families:
Some households also have members who have increased health risks from underlying conditions so they cannot take employment and benefit from some of the rising wage gains that would offset inflation.
Politico, signs that Mark Meadows is even more trouble:
Mark Meadows and the National Archives are in talks over potential records he did ‘not properly’ turn over from his personal phone and email account, the presidential record-keeping agency confirmed Thursday.
Roll Call report on Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s newest pitch:
The Democratic tax and spending package to expand the social safety net and combat climate change would increase federal deficits by $3 trillion over 10 years if most programs were made permanent, the Congressional Budget Office said Friday. Republicans seized on the new cost estimate to argue that the Democrats’ reconciliation measure is unaffordable and would only accelerate rising inflation.
Commentary:
[…] The problem, of course, is that the South Carolinian didn’t ask the CBO to examine the Democratic legislation; he had the CBO review a different bill, which does different things, but which looks like the Build Back Better package. The key difference is, this different bill would continue to spend money on priorities beyond the timeframe in the actual legislation.
As Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut put it, “Let’s be clear about what this is. Republicans have requested a score on a bill that doesn’t exist. They made up a version of BBB that costs more and sent it to CBO for a score. That’s it.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a related statement. “The Republicans are so desperate to justify their opposition to the popular, much-needed provisions in the Build Back Better Act that they’ve resorted to requesting fake scores based on mistruths,” the New York Democrat said, calling Graham’s stunt “partisan trickery.”
It’s difficult to see any substantive point to the Republican’s effort, but the senator will nevertheless get some headlines out of this, which will likely be used in 2022 campaign attack ads.
[…] Yesterday, the Senate moved forward with a comically convoluted scheme to raise the debt ceiling, which Republicans endorsed because the agreement forces Democrats to extend the borrowing authority by a specific dollar amount. That also didn’t serve a substantive point, but GOP officials have already said they intend to use this to attack Democrats next fall.
I’ve long made the case that the Republican Party is no longer a governing party. Lately, GOP lawmakers have been eager to prove the thesis true.
A terrible night of storms brings destruction and death across the central U.S.
On Saturday morning, many parts of the central United States are reporting temperatures over 30 degrees cooler than they stood on Friday afternoon. On Friday night, the energy of that difference was released in a series of severe storms that blasted cities and towns along a line that stretched from the upper Midwest to the Deep South. At least 30 tornadoes, some of them moving at 80 mph, tore across six states.
One of those tornadoes was a massive F5, reported at some points to be more than a mile across. It stayed on the ground for an astounding and terrifying 223 miles, drawing a line of pure destruction from Arkansas as it nicked the Missouri bootheel, crossed the Mississippi, continued into the northwest corner of Tennessee, then sliced onward through the entire western half of Kentucky. The storm may turn out to have cut the longest path of any tornado in history, besting the infamous “tri-state tornado” of 1925. Such “long-track” tornadoes are often extremely powerful.
[…] Especially hard hit was the town of Mayfield, Kentucky, where over 100 workers at a candle factory were trapped as that passing giant reduced the building to rubble. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced that that “dozens” of people had died in the Mayfield factory, and that at least 50 people had died across the state. The final tally of the night’s losses in Kentucky alone may be above 100. Much of the town of Mayfield (pop. 9,900) was completely destroyed, and a path of damage continued across much of the state.
In Edwardsville, Illinois, a massive Amazon fulfillment center was torn apart by a fast-moving tornado, leaving around 50 workers trapped and dozens more injured. As of Saturday morning, local officials had announced at least two deaths.
[…] At some points of the evening, the line of storms themselves was moving at over 80mph, bringing hurricane force winds even in areas where tornadoes did not touch down.
Gov. Beshear has declared a state of emergency in Kentucky. […] Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who has infamously opposed federal funds for victims of other catastrophes, has already announced his support for disaster relief in Kentucky.
In the nineteen-sixties, Syukuro Manabe drew a graph that foretold our world today—and what’s to come.
Late in 1966, in the sprawling computer lab of the Washington, D.C., office building that housed the United States Weather Bureau, Syukuro Manabe was waiting for a print job to finish. At stake was the fate of the planet. Manabe, who was thirty-five, had come to the U.S. from Japan almost a decade earlier. He managed a team of computer programmers, tasked with building a mathematical simulation of the planet’s atmosphere. It had taken years to perfect, and cost millions of dollars. Now the simulation was complete.
With an alarming clatter, the printer came to life, and a single continuous sheet, striped in light-green and white, unspooled to the floor. The I.B.M. 1403 could print six hundred lines per minute, but Manabe couldn’t stand the noise it made, and usually avoided it by going out for lunch. This job couldn’t wait. If successful, Manabe’s simulation would quantify, for the first time, the relationship between carbon dioxide and the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere.
That the Earth’s atmosphere retained heat from sunlight had been understood since the early nineteenth century. Water vapor was the primary driver, trapping heat energy at lower altitudes and warming the planet’s surface by about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. (If Earth had no atmosphere, its surface temperature would average zero degrees Fahrenheit.) The open question was whether other atmospheric gases contributed to this greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide was thought to have an effect, but it made up just three parts per ten thousand of Earth’s atmosphere by volume. Researchers wondered whether its impact was detectable.
Manabe speculated that it was. Three parts per ten thousand wasn’t much, but even a trace gas, with the right properties, could have an outsized impact. Without carbon dioxide, there would be no photosynthesis, and almost everything on the planet would die. Perhaps moving carbon-dioxide levels in the other direction—as the combustion of fossil fuels was doing—would have a similarly catastrophic effect.
[…] Manabe, who lived on Earth, did not have access to another, disposable planet on which to run experiments. Instead, he had to simulate the effects of atmospheric change from equations in basic thermodynamics. For the planet’s surface, these equations could be done by hand, but once additional atmospheric layers were added, the calculations grew more complex.
Fortunately, Manabe had access to a machine called Stretch, one of the most powerful computers ever built. Officially, it was an I.B.M. 7030, designed, at the request of the Pentagon, to simulate the effects of the hydrogen bomb. Nine such computers had been produced; others had been sent to the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Security Agency. This one, after much lobbying by Manabe’s boss, had been assigned to weather forecasting, to demonstrate to the public that computers could be useful. Stretch was larger than a single-family home, and had sixty freestanding components. The complete apparatus weighed about thirty-five tons, and was cooled by an air conditioner the size of a studio apartment.
Manabe had arrived in the U.S. in 1958; he had never before left Japan, and he spoke little English. […] “The hardest part was the Western toilet,” Manabe told me last year. “I’d never seen one before.”
[…] Last week, at the age of ninety, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The prize committee cited Manabe’s 1966 simulation as the first reliable prediction of climate change. The simulation included a plot of points representing the sensitivity of Earth’s temperature to carbon dioxide at different altitudes. The printer didn’t have the capability to fit a curve to the data, so, for the final step, Manabe had to draw it in himself. “I used a pencil,” he said. “It took a long time.”
Manabe’s pencil-line graph revealed three unexpected results. First, according to the simulation, boosting carbon dioxide from three parts per ten thousand to six could cause Earth’s average surface temperature to rise by more than four degrees Fahrenheit. A comparable temperature increase at the end of the last Ice Age had caused ocean levels to rise a hundred feet.
Second, Manabe’s simulation predicted that carbon dioxide would trap heat energy in the lower atmosphere. The Earth’s surface and its oceans would therefore get hotter, while the upper atmosphere would cool. This combination—cooler above, hotter below—is now regarded by climatologists as the smoking gun of human-caused climate change. (Other potential causes of global warming, like the sun growing brighter, would uniformly heat the atmosphere at every altitude.)
Finally, Manabe’s model implied that, as the upper atmosphere cooled, it would deform, causing atmospheric boundaries to pancake. The 1966 pencil-line graph was the first preview of the Earth’s future: the surface was going to cook, and the sky was going to collapse. […]
“I would spend hours drawing contour lines,” Manabe told me. He seemed nostalgic for the practice: “Drawing contours yourself, you can begin to notice things you’ve never noticed before. Maybe this primitive process is good, in some sense.”
Manabe never met von Neumann, who died in 1957, but, when I spoke with him in 2020, he remained astonished that the modern understanding of climate change originates with the man who also invented game theory, worked on the Manhattan Project, and designed the modern digital computer. “It’s amazing to me, to have worked on a problem proposed by von Neumann,” Manabe said of his climate model. Seeking to reduce the complexity of the problem, Manabe’s 1966 model used just one variable. Its success is due to its representation of the way carbon dioxide interacts with heat energy at different atmospheric layers. All other variables were simplified or ignored. Still, this primitive simulation would prove, over time, to have a startling amount of predictive power. When Smagorinsky saw the predicted rise in temperature, he compared it to the warning light on the dashboard of a car. […]
Manabe’s model was right. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is now four parts per ten thousand and rising. Global mean temperature has increased nearly two degrees Fahrenheit since Manabe’s results were first published, and the ten hottest years on record have occurred since 2005. Earlier this year, nasa published the results of a thirty-year satellite survey of the polar mesosphere, some fifty miles up. Temperatures there are dropping about five degrees per decade, and the entire layer is contracting. […]
On Monday, December 6th, Manabe received his Nobel medal at a ceremony at the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C. His Nobel lecture was broadcast in Stockholm on Wednesday. In it, Manabe repeated his warning. Computing power has increased by many orders of magnitude since the Stretch era—I.B.M.’s latest transistors are smaller than a strand of human DNA. Yet the forecasted range of warming effects have changed little since Manabe’s first prediction. “I would say, even with very primitive tools by today’s standards, he got us about eighty per cent of the way there,” Gavin Schmidt, a leading climatologist at nasa, told me. “Everything we’ve done since then is plus or minus ten per cent.” Modern climate models render the effects of global warming in astonishing detail, and we no longer need Manabe’s computer simulation. We’re living in it.
Lawsuit arrives four days after announcing his campaign
Republican candidate for Georgia governor David Perdue filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to inspect absentee ballots in Fulton County, repeating some of the same unproven allegations as in a lawsuit dismissed two months ago.
[…]
Perdue has put false claims of election fraud at the center of his campaign against incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. The former U.S. senator said he wouldn’t have certified the election results and wanted a special legislative session to delve into conspiracy theories about the outcome.
[…]
Perdue’s lawsuit echoes a case that also sought to inspect about 147,000 absentee ballots in Fulton County. Digital images of the ballots were made public earlier this year, but the plaintiffs want to review the originals.
A judge dismissed the prior ballot inspection lawsuit the day after Georgia investigators told the court they were unable to find any counterfeit ballots. Superior Court Judge Brian Amero based his decision on the legal principle of standing, that plaintiffs hadn’t suffered a specific injury that would give them a right to sue.
Perdue’s lawsuit will test whether a former candidate has standing in court.
“David Perdue wants to use his position and legal standing to shine light on what he knows were serious violations of Georgia law in the Fulton absentee ballot tabulation,” said his attorney, Bob Cheeley.
[…]
“David Perdue is so concerned about election fraud that he waited a year to file a lawsuit that conveniently coincided with his disastrous campaign launch,” Kemp spokesman Cody Hall said.
The case plays into Perdue’s campaign strategy to embrace the beliefs of some Republicans who think the 2020 election was illegitimate. Perdue is contrasting himself with Kemp, who refused to try to overturn Trump’s defeat in Georgia.
beholdersays
The Biden administration’s appeal to the High Court was successful. Julian Assange faces extradition to the U.S. again.
Proving once again that freedom of the press only means the freedom to say things the U.S. national security industry approves of, otherwise they may just kidnap you from the other side of the planet.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced Saturday that he would push for a new law modeled after Texas’ anti-abortion law to tackle gun control in his state.
Newsom said he directed his staff to work with the legislature and Attorney General to work on a bill that would allow private citizens to sue for up to $10,000 “anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in the State of California.”
“If the most efficient way to keep these devastating weapons off our streets is to add the threat of private lawsuits, we should do just that,” Newsom said.
[…]
“I am outraged by yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Texas’s ban on most abortion services to remain in place, and largely endorsing Texas’s scheme to insulate its law from the fundamental protections of Roe v. Wade,” Newsom wrote.
Newsom said that while Texas shielded their laws from review by the federal courts to “put women in harm’s way,” California would employ those legal tactics to “protect people’s lives.”
Yeah, that PowerPoint plan to discard the results of a legal and fair election was not just some kind of one-time deal that was then discarded. No, the person promoting the plan to overturn election results met with Trump’s Chief of Staff many times.
In addition to the information on PZ’s thread, “You’ve got a smoking gun, now do something about it,” I’ll add more details.
A retired Army colonel who circulated a PowerPoint document detailing a proposal to overturn the 2020 election results claimed to have visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election and met with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows […].
Phil Waldron, a retired U.S. Army colonel [said] that he met with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed several members of Congress the day before the deadly Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. Waldron reportedly claimed that he was working with former President Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a group that briefed lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN.”
According to the Post, Waldron said that he contributed claims of foreign interference in the vote to the presentation, and brought up those same claims during his discussions with the White House.
[…] “The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here’s the proof,” Waldron told the Post. “These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.”
Additionally, the PowerPoint included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” or replace them with Republican electors. It also included a third proposal seeking a delay in the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory, with the deployment of U.S. marshals and National Guard troops to help “secure” and count paper ballots in key states.
[…] On Friday, Terwilliger denied to the Post that the former Trump White House official did anything with the document after receiving it by email.
“We produced it [to the committee] because it was not privileged,” Terwilliger told the Post.
[…] Waldron denied that he was the person who sent the PowerPoint to Meadows. Waldron reportedly claimed that a meeting he and others had with Meadows in the days around Christmas last year involved questions about how to determine whether the election had been hacked. Waldron told the Post that Meadows asked, “What do you need? What would help?” Waldron said his team produced a list for Meadows that contained information on IP addresses, servers and other data that he believed needed to be investigated “using the powers of the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus.”
[…] According to the Post, Waldron said that he and Meadows “weren’t pen pals” and that their communication was often through Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who would sometimes ask Walldron to “explain this to Mark” over the phone.
Waldron also reportedly attended attended a Nov. 25 meeting with Trump and several Pennsylvania legislators in the Oval Office and claimed to have briefed Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) at the White House in Meadows’ office with Giuliani in attendance.
[…] CNN also reported last week that Meadows produced text messages and emails that show he was “exchanging with a wide range of individuals while the attack was underway” to the committee prior to going back to stonewalling the panel. Meadows reportedly handed over messages on his personal cell phone and email account voluntarily to the committee, without any claim of executive privilege.
[…] Waldron has said that the team behind the PowerPoint included former intelligence officers and military veterans and was supported by hundreds of “digital warriors” who provided research. Jovan H. Pulitzer, a Texas-based entrepreneur who is a vocal election denier, told The Post that he contributed material for it.
“It was a pretty wide variety of folks from around this country that jumped in to say how can we help,” Waldron told The Post.
The Waldron team’s 36-page presentation includes several slides that were previously published elsewhere, including graphs purporting to show “vote injections” in key states including Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Some of the graphs appeared in a Nov. 24 blog post by Patrick Byrne, the founder and former chief executive of Overstock.com. The following day, Waldron held up a copy of the Pennsylvania graph when he testified in support of Giuliani at a meeting with state legislators in Gettysburg. Waldron claimed that the graph showed “spike anomalies” that were signs of fraud.
The Arizona graph appeared, with the same design, text and font, in a Dec. 1 affidavit from Ramsland that pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell included as purported evidence of fraud in a lawsuit seeking to “decertify” Arizona’s election results. […]
Posted by a reader of the Talking Points Memo article referenced in comment 421:
I have seen the power point sludge. It is scary/shocking. And no one from the White House or Congress who saw it reacted as I have and went public with their opposition. That is scary as well.
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, one of the few high-profile news personalities who retained a reputation of integrity as the channel he worked for leaned hard into right-wing and conspiratorial programming, announced Sunday that he is departing the network and joining CNN+ to host a weekday show.
Wallace made the stunning announcement of his departure from Fox News at the end of “Fox News Sunday,” the channel’s flagship weekly program that he has moderated since 2003.
“After 18 years — this is my final ‘Fox News Sunday.’ It is the last time, and I say this with real sadness, we will meet like this,” Wallace said.
[…] Shortly after his announcement, CNN announced that Wallace will join CNN+, the news organization’s streaming product launching in early 2022, to host a show featuring interviews with newsmakers “across politics, business, sports and culture.”
“I am thrilled to join CNN+. After decades in broadcast and cable news, I am excited to explore the world of streaming. I look forward to the new freedom and flexibility streaming affords in interviewing major figures across the news landscape — and finding new ways to tell stories,” Wallace said in a statement.
[…] Wallace’s announcement was as surprising and abrupt as Shepard Smith’s sign-off from Fox in 2019. Both anchors shared their decisions at the end of a telecast and signed off permanently. But Smith quit in the middle of a long-term contract while Wallace’s deal was coming due.
Wallace is known for his tough, but fair, questioning of both Democratic and Republican politicians. His reputation for grilling members of both parties made him well-respected in journalistic circles, but often irked the Fox News audience which showed immense loyalty to former President Donald Trump. That was especially true when Wallace called out Trump directly, including when he said that the former president “engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on the free press in our history.”
In recent years, Fox News, which always did tilt toward the right, has transformed itself into a hyper-partisan, right-wing talk network that regularly pushes conspiracy theories on a wide variety of topics. Even many of the network’s so-called “straight news” anchors have abandoned any pretense of impartiality. […]
The Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly Fake ‘History’ Tour is the Biggest Flop of the Season 🤣
Last June Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly announced that they would team up for a series of four public appearances […]
As predicted, the conmen’s concert tour is turning out to be an epic bust. Reports reveal that the first stop in Sunrise, Florida, failed to attract much of a crowd. Many unsold seats were still available at showtime and organizers had to shut down the upper level of the arena. Attendees who purchased the cheapest tickets were “upgraded” to sections closer to the stage.
The event was billed as the “Trump/O’Reilly History Tour.” […] It was really just a new opportunity for the pair of failed TV grifters to fleece their flock further, promising a program of the same old regurgitated lies they’ve both told a thousand times before. The privilege of witnessing that boredom-fest would set back their dimwitted fans $100.00 each. Which apparently many weren’t willing to spend.
Trump pitched the show as offering “…hard-hitting sessions where we’ll talk about the real problems happening in the U.S., those that the Fake News Media never mention. I will be focusing on greatness for our Country” Instead, Trump tread the familiar territory of his still seething resentment for having lost to President Biden. He reprised relentlessly his “Big Lie” that the election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him. And rather than focusing on American greatness, he spent most of his time espousing his new slogan that America is “going to hell” under the Biden “regime.”
Both Trump and O’Reilly had moments wherein they displayed their utter disgust for America. While discussing his record on foreign relations, Trump admitted that the world leaders he “got along best with were tyrants. For whatever reason, I got along great with them.” Which shouldn’t surprise anyone given his affinity for, and subservience, to Vladimir Putin. And when the media that both of them despise was brought up, Trump suggested suppressing free speech with tougher libel laws. To which O’Reilly responded with an even harsher suggestion saying that “that’s better than my solution, which is a machine gun.” Yes, he’s referring to the mass murder of journalists.
Last week Trump did four impromptu call-in interviews with radio programs in Houston and Dallas. And if anyone wondered why, it’s because that’s where the duo are headed next, and their prospects for ticket sales are no better than they were in Florida. Trump may still be able to draw an audience at his free events in red counties. But even his most devoted disciples aren’t interested in shelling out cash to watch him whine the same old tedious crap for two hours.
The U.S. has reached the grim milestone of 800,000 deaths related to COVID-19, Reuters reports.
Over 450,000 people in the United States have died after contracting COVID-19 so far in 2021, according to the news service, which added that the total accounts for 57 percent of all U.S. deaths from the illness since the pandemic started.
The 2021 death toll in the U.S. had already surpassed the 2020 total in November. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that the total number of deaths involving COVID-19 in 2020 was 385,343.
The U.S. also ranks the worst in terms of per capita deaths from COVID-19 when compared to other G7 countries in the period between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30, according to the Reuters analysis.
Data show that the U.S. accounts for 14 percent of all reported COVID-19 deaths and 19 percent of cases worldwide. The country is set to soon surpass 50 million cases.
The data also show that the United States has some of the highest deaths per capita when compared with wealthy countries that have access to vaccines, Reuters said.
The death rate in the country is also three times higher than Canada and 11 times higher than Japan.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday ramped up the United Kingdom’s booster shot initiative ahead of a “tidal wave of omicron,” opening booster shots to all adults and deploying military units to set up additional vaccine sites.
Johnson’s pre-recorded address came hours after U.K. health officials raised the coronavirus alert level due to an increased spread of the new strain.
Johnson said that while it appears that two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine will not protect individuals against the new omicron variant, a booster shot will likely “bring our level of protection back up.”
“No one should be in any doubt. There is a tidal wave of omicron coming and I’m afraid it is now clear that two doses of vaccine are simply not enough to give the level of protection we all need,” he said. “But the good news is that our scientists are confident that with a third dose, a booster dose, we can all bring our level of protection back up.”
Johnson announced the launch of the omicron emergency booster national mission. He said all adults eligible for a booster shot will be able to get the jab on Monday. Individuals must be over the age of 18 and have received their second dose of the vaccine at least three months earlier.
The new timeline is an acceleration from previous plans. UK health officials had aimed to open access to booster shots for all adults by the end of January. […]
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday.
The government announced in a statement on Sunday that Ramaphosa was “receiving treatment for mild COVID-19” after testing positive that day.
“The President, who is fully vaccinated, is in self-isolation in Cape Town and has delegated all responsibilities to Deputy President David Mabuza for the next week,” the announcement read.
The 69-year-old president “is in good spirits” and in the care of the South African Military Health Service of the South African National Defense Force, according to the statement. The government also noted that he began “feeling unwell” after an event in Cape Town earlier on Sunday.
“President Ramaphosa says his own infection serves as a caution to all people in the country to be vaccinated and remain vigilant against exposure,” the statement said. “Vaccination remains the best protection against severe illness and hospitalization.” […]
Labor Day weekend 2021 up in Lake Tahoe, California, was spent evacuating residents and tourists while the Golden State threw everything it had to fight the Caldor fire. The wildfire, exacerbated by California’s long-standing drought burned over 221,000 acres of land, forest, and homes. The fire, which began on Aug. 14, was not until the third week of October that officials pronounced the fire fully contained.
On Wednesday the El Dorado County Attorney’s offie announced it had arrested David Scott Smith, 66, and his son Travis Shane Smith, 32 in connection with starting the blaze. The two men are each being held on $1 million bail. The Reno Gazette Journal reports that the Smiths are facing multiple charges of reckless arson, and of the multiple charges being faced by the two men, possessing a silencer and converting a firearm into a machine gun or manufacturing a machine gun are on the list […]
The attorney says that the Smiths were the ones who tried to call in that a fire started and were “baffled by the suggestion” that they set the fire. “My clients and I have literally just sat and waited for this day to come. As we sit here tonight, we have no idea what the prosecution’s theory is on how the fire started.” The Smiths claim that they spotted the fire and tried to call 911 “several” times, as calls kept dropping. He told news outlets that his clients are from the area and love the nature that California affords.
CalFire says that only about 10% of the wildfires in California are set on purpose. Most are either a combination of lightning and high winds, accidents, or oversight due to greedy negligence on the part of energy company PG&E. PG&E’s faulty and neglected equipment was determined to have caused the 2018 Camp fire that killed 84 people and destroyed the entire town of Paradise, California. The utility company took time away from one of its many attempts to plead bankruptcy in order to plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in June of 2020.
It remains to be seen whether authorities have evidence that the two Smith men started the fire, they seem to be potentially facing harsher sentences than PG&E.
Is huffing model airplane glue the latest crackpot COVID cure or something? Can she really be this stupid? A sitting congresswoman? Really? Or is it simply that her fundraising haul goes up every time she demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of … erm … everything?
She is the Lauren. […] Lauren Boebert (R-Inanimate Matter).
So, yeah, it’s a day ending in “y” in a month that ends in cold sweats over the fragile state of our democracy in the Year of our Lord 2021, so naturally Lauren Boebert remains locked in a death struggle with Reps. Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar to see whose brain can hatch its ravening alien larvae first.
And here’s Rep. Boebert’s latest entry […]:
365,348 children went missing in 2020.
You haven’t heard a word from the media about it.
There enlies the problem.
So which is more egregious? The lie or the rank stupidity?
Well, let’s start with the lie. The 365,348 number is hugely misleading, as it includes runaways who almost immediately return to their homes or are quickly found. PolitiFact checked a similar claim in the wake of Gabby Petito’s disappearance and noted that the number of children who remain missing is far smaller than the total number of children who are reported missing in a given year:
The counts include children who were reported missing to law enforcement more than one time. […]
The nonprofit National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said it assisted law enforcement, families and child welfare agencies with 29,782 cases of missing children in 2020.
Of those, 27,072 were runaways, the vast majority of whom are located quickly, said the center’s Rebecca Steinbach. The next-largest category was family abduction, 1,396 cases.
Also, this:
So many problems here:
1. trump was “president” in 2020
2. “There enlies” is not a thing
3. If you cared about child sex trafficking, you’d talk to your Venmo buddy and tell him to knock it off.
Therein lies your problem.
See how that works?
And this:
Dear Boebert:
“There were 45,000 gun-related deaths in America in 2020
45,000 children, parents, sisters, uncles, best friends. 45,000 fully-formed, sentient human beings with memories, families, careers, and dreams.”
And this:
Im sure Fox and Newsmax do a story every hour on it right? Never stop talking about it. Btw who was president when they all went missing? What was it he did about it? But sure they never talk about kids who go missing. 👇👇 Btw it’s “therein”. Nice mic drop. School matters huh?
[…] Lauren Boebert is tres stupid, but she’s also an inveterate liar. And all indications are that she doesn’t really believe in democracy—unless it somehow morphs into permanent white minority rule.
Then again, stupidity, ignorance, and racism are now unquestionably the GOP’s brand. Well, they always were, but now they’re far, far more proud of it than they’ve ever been. And therein lies the problem.
Mystery solved when a through postmortem was carried out. She had no antibodies. Her proof-of-vaccination was fake. She’d been treated with the assumption she had antibodies due to being fully-vaccinated, and so, e.g., no monoclonal antibodies were not tried (which is not to say the staff did anything wrong or those other treatments would have saved her).
The medical staff are furious at whoever sold her the fake proof-of-vaccination.
As an aside, the sorryantivaxxer.com link is a reportsuspicion that “David Nolde, 83, retired doctor, husband of Dr[plandemic quack] Judy Mikovitz notorious liar, [died] from COVID”.
Team Trump isn’t just trying to hide Jan. 6 information from Congress, it’s also trying to hide information about the federal response to Covid-19.
t’s not exactly a secret that Donald Trump and key members of his team are refusing to cooperate with the bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 attack. Generating less attention is their lack of cooperation with the House select panel investigating the Covid-19 crisis and the government’s response to the pandemic.
The New York Times reported over the weekend:
Peter Navarro, who served as trade adviser to former President Donald J. Trump and who fought with government scientists while helping to orchestrate the administration’s coronavirus response, is refusing to respond to a congressional subpoena for documents, telling lawmakers he is following a “direct order” from Mr. Trump not to comply.
Of course, the former president is a private citizen. The idea that he can give a “direct order” to another private citizen to defy a lawful subpoena is highly dubious.
[…] House Democrats ignored Navarro’s declaration and encouraged him to show up on Wednesday for a deposition before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told the former trade advisor on Saturday that his refusal to comply with a subpoena is “improper,” adding, “It is abundantly clear that you possess information responsive to the subpoena that is not covered by any colorable claims of executive privilege.”
For those who may need a reminder as to who Navarro is, Vanity Fair reported a few years ago that in 2016, then-candidate Trump directed Jared Kushner to help bolster his views on China. His son-in-law went to Amazon.com, where he was struck by the title of one book, ‘Death by China,’ which Navarro co-authored. Kushner cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade-deficit hawk, who joined the team as an economic adviser.
In the years that followed, Navarro became a strange political voice on the Republican’s White House team, and in early 2020, for reasons that went unexplained, Trump tapped Navarro to serve on the White House Coronavirus Taskforce — where he earned a reputation for picking strange fights in the Situation Room over hydroxychloroquine.
[…] “The demand sets up a clash that could result in a move by House Democrats to hold Mr. Navarro in contempt of Congress, if he fails to appear.” We should know more in about 48 hours.
It’s obviously a problem that Team Trump prepared and disseminated anti-election memos in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. But compounding the problem is the sheer volume of the documents.
Right off the bat, there’s John Eastman, one of Trump’s controversial attorneys, who wrote an outrageous memo, which was effectively a blueprint Republican officials could follow to reject the results of the election and keep the losing candidate in power. Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, also used his office to sketch out a map for Republican legislators to follow in which they could try to overturn the will of voters.
But there’s no reason to stop there. Less than a week before the Jan. 6 attack, John McEntee, a White House aide, prepared his own anti-election memo, complete with unfortunate historical inaccuracies. And as we discussed a month ago, Jenna Ellis, one of Donald Trump’s campaign lawyers, also drafted a memo that outlined a multi-step strategy to overturn the election.
As it turns out, however, the list of anti-election memos doesn’t stop there. Politico reported late last week that Ellis actually prepared more than one of these documents.
A Donald Trump campaign lawyer wrote two legal memos in the week before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack that claimed then-Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to refuse to count presidential electors from states that delivered Joe Biden the White House. The memos from then-Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, which contain widely disputed legal theories about Pence’s ability to stop a Biden presidency, underscore Ellis’ promotion of extreme arguments that she promulgated amid Trump’s effort to reverse the election results.
We were already aware of one of the two memos prepared by Ellis: Then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reportedly liked her Dec. 31 document enough to email it to then-Vice President Mike Pence’s top aide on New Year’s Eve.
The previously undisclosed memo was dated Jan. 5 and was delivered to Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s outside lawyers and the head of a controversial legal group created by televangelist Pat Robertson. In this document, Ellis outlined a strategy in which Pence would halt the certification process, claiming that Arizona failed to meet the legal standard for certifying its own electors and “require the final ascertainment of electors to be completed before continuing.” Politico characterized the plan as “far-fetched.”
It’s not altogether clear why this was sent to Sekulow, though he was publicly skeptical about Pence-related schemes, and Politico speculated that the document may have been intended to change his mind.
For her part, Ellis published a tweet on Friday, suggesting it was irresponsible and unethical to report on “attorney-client privileged documents.” In fact, the Republican lawyer made a point to emphasize that the memos “both have the banner ‘ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED.'”
It’s true that the materials say that, but it’s also true that the banner is irrelevant as it relates to journalism and the free press.
At issue are “privileged” documents between Team Trump and its attorneys. News organizations are neither the client nor the lawyer in a situation like this one, so there’s nothing irresponsible or unethical about reporting on the materials.
In fact, Ellis’ pushback is quite odd. Imagine how much easier it’d be for those willing to engage in political abuses if they simply put, “No one is supposed to know about this” at the top of their memoranda — and media professionals were expected to comply.
As for the bigger picture, I continue to believe we’ve arrived at a bizarre point in American history: When the political debate turns to Team Trump’s anti-election memo, we now have to ask, “Which one?
It’s a problem that Mark Meadows sent an email the day before the Jan. 6 attack, saying the National Guard would “protect pro Trump people.”
When it comes to the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been indecisive in recent weeks. A month ago, for example, the North Carolina Republican defied a subpoena from the bipartisan committee investigating the assault on the Capitol. He then changed direction and agreed to start cooperating with the congressional probe.
Last week, Meadows changed direction again, said he’d no longer cooperate, and filed a strange lawsuit against the committee, its members, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
[…] the committee is not only prepared to move forward with contempt proceedings against Donald Trump’s former right-hand man in the West Wing, it’s also making the case as to why Meadows needs to cooperate. NBC News reported overnight:
A report out Sunday that recommends that Trump administration chief of staff Mark Meadows be held in contempt of Congress alleges that he said National Guard troops would keep President Donald Trump’s supporters safe Jan. 6. In bullet points listing urgent questions for Meadows, the report by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot cites an email he is alleged to have sent Jan. 5 about the security of Trump supporters who would hit the streets the next day.
While we don’t yet know to whom Meadows sent the email, the then-White House chief of staff apparently said the National Guard would be present to “protect pro Trump people.”
This is among the revelations from a 51-page document released yesterday by the House select committee, in advance of today’s vote on holding Meadows in contempt. Assuming the panel approves the resolution — a safe bet — the full House will likely vote tomorrow to refer the former Trump aide to the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress.
[…] report added: In other messages described by the committee, Meadows appears to have asked members of Congress to help connect Trump with state lawmakers shortly after his defeat in November…. The messages also describe numerous contacts with members of Congress about Trump’s efforts to recruit state lawmakers and encourage them to help overturn the election results.
The picture that emerges is one of a then-White House chief of staff who was directly involved in efforts to overturn a free and fair American election — and who no longer wants to talk to congressional investigators about what he knows.
It’s worth emphasizing for context that Meadows, before his latest reversal, did provide the bipartisan committee with some relevant information. Indeed, the materials he recently turned over further implicated Meadows and showed the depth of his role in the post-election scheme.
As Rachel noted on the show last week, there was an email from Nov. 7, 2020 — the exact day Joe Biden was named the president-elect — in which Meadows discussed the appointment of alternate slates of electors as part of a “direct and collateral attack” after Trump’s defeat.
There was also a text message from one day earlier in which Meadows and an unidentified member of Congress discussed appointing alternate electors in certain states — in effect, having states decide to reward the Republican ticket in states in which the Democratic ticket won more votes. The lawmaker described the plan as “highly controversial,” to which Meadows apparently replied, “I love it.”
This added to what we already knew, including Meadows’ surprise visit to Georgia shortly before Christmas 2020, checking in on an election audit after his boss leaned on local officials to help him. Around the same time, Trump’s right-hand aide repeatedly pushed federal law enforcement to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories — some of which were quite weird — and alerted then-Vice President Mike Pence’s office to bonkers strategies to overturn the election results.
Meadows also hosted a notorious Jan. 2 phone meeting in which the then-president badgered election officials in Georgia, demanding that they “find” him enough votes to overcome his defeat.
But the new revelations make matters considerably worse. If Meadows was up to his waist in the scandal before, the level has now reached his shoulders.
GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker could pose a serious threat to Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock. Walker is a popular figure in Georgia, and it briefly looked as if he was going to run as a unifying figure, despite his endorsement from Donald Trump. […]
Walker could possibly flip Georgia in a tough year for Democrats, especially if he sticks to a Glenn Youngkin model that’s inoffensive to white moderates. Former senator and future Disney villain Kelly Loeffler basically ran as Attila the Hun. That gave Warnock an edge with voters who weren’t in favor of sacking and pillaging.
A major drawback for Walker right now is that his son seems like an asshole. Christian Walker is a lot like Donald Trump Jr. […] He’s a self-described “free-speech radicalist” and a Christian “conservative populist,” which are two different ways of saying “asshole.” He’s a Big Lie promoter and was permanently suspended from TikTok in February.
Walker whined last week about how President Joe Biden had made gas prices too high, presumably because of socialism. […]
WALKER: Y’all said Joe Biden was gonna be the great unifier. This is divisive to my bank account and my hard-earned money. Screw your unity! You think this is unifying. It just keeps going up. This is Joe Biden for you. Families struggling to afford to get to work. That’s unifying? That’s bringing the nation together? Screw this.
[…] he deliberately filled his tank with premium gas. Further reinforcing Christian Walker’s connection to the common man is his Givenchy hoodie, which costs about $1,200 […]
After everyone made fun of him good and hard, Christian Walker released another video where he feigned contrition over his comically expensive hoodie. It wasn’t convincing, but no one ever said his “hard-earned money” came from professional acting gigs. [Video is available at the link. It’s horrible.]
WALKER: The Democrats don’t like me because I’m RICH. I’m sorry my parents weren’t lazy on the couch all day waiting for handouts. I’m sorry that they built businesses and won championships. And now I can shop at Fendi and Givenchy. I just hope someday people realize it’s not my fault we work hard and built things worthwhile. And SCENE!
A 32-year-old man gloating over how much money his mommy and daddy give him is over-the-top […] Ivanka Trump was more grounded and self-aware. Christian Walker is hardly a boon for his dad’s campaign. He should just shut up and cash his allowance checks.
Christian Walker represents the new generation of young Republican voter that lives for “owning the libs.” They grew up in the festering shadow of Rush Limbaugh and don’t pretend they want to vote for “polite” Republicans like Jack Kemp or Colin Powell. If Herschel Walker wasn’t his dad, Christian would likely support Marjorie Taylor Greene in a Republican Senate primary.
Georgia, please show up to vote for Senator Warnock next year and give Christian Walker a reason to cry for real.
blfsays
An update on Ingenuity, Nasa/JPL’s Mars helicopter. It’s still suffering a communications blackout still thought to be due to hill(s?) blocking the line-of-sight with the Perseverance rover. There has been some intermittent contact, all to-date indicating Ingenuity landed safely after its 17th flight, but there is still a considerable amount of data (including images) onboard Ingenuity — including just precisely where it landed. Is it on level ground? Partially tilting due to a rock? Next to a crack or ravine? We don’t know…
Plan at the moment is to sit tight and wait for Perseverance to move into a position where reliable communications are possible. Ingenuity is capable of looking after itself, recharging it batteries, etc.
One option should the situation continue is Perseverance deliberately pointing high-gain antenna in the direction of Ingenuity, but as that “interferes” with Perseverance’s science mission, which has priority, such a plan needs to be specially signed-off… and isn’t thought necessary at this point in time.
One potential issue which I haven’t seen mentioned is the radio link between Ingenuity and Perseverance is fairly short range (something like 1km?), so it seems to me that as Perseverance goes about its science, it might not clear the line-of-sight problem until such a point where it’s also outside the comms range. And even if not, it might not leave the Ingenuity team much time to plan and execute the next flight before the rover really does move out-of-range.
Barring a bad landing (or subsequent post-landing failure, e.g., of the batteries) — and, to-date, nothing indicates that there are any problems — the basic problem should resolve itself. This just seems to be a frustrating wait-and-see situation…
It took the United States 119 days to go from 600,000 deaths to 700,000 deaths. It took us 74 days to go from 700,000 to 800,000.
[…] The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson noted in his latest column that many Republican officials are “actively discouraging citizens from taking routine medical precautions for their own welfare.”
It’s an uncomfortable truth to consider as we wonder how long it might take for the United States to reach our 900,000th Covid-19 fatality.
[…] As for gas prices, according to USA Today, the national average for a gallon of gas dipped 4 cents on the week—back down to where they were in October, AAA says—which is 7 cents less than a month ago and $1.19 more than a year ago.
Additionally, the U.S. Energy and Information Administration projected that gas prices will fall to $3.01 per gallon in January and will continue to drop to around $2.88 in 2022.
In an NPR story posted over the weekend, we discover that Dolly Parton turned down Donald Trump. She didn’t do it once, she turned the former president down twice in his offer of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was scheduled to be honored for many reasons, including her funding efforts toward finding a vaccine for COVID. Thanks in part to her generous donation, the Moderna vaccine was developed.
Dolly Parton’s efforts for promising causes give us all a reason to celebrate this American icon. […]
“I couldn’t accept it because my husband was ill, and then they asked me again about it and I wouldn’t travel because of the COVID,” she said in an interview with the Today show.
Only two weeks into his term, President Biden has not yet announced any new Medal of Freedom recipients. But Parton says she’d be hesitant to accept a possible third offer. “Now I feel like if I take it, I’ll be doing politics, so I’m not sure.”
And, she added, “I don’t work for those awards. It’d be nice, but I’m not sure that I even deserve it. But that’s a nice compliment for people to think that I might deserve it.” […]
Scroll down at the link to view videos of late night hosts showing how tired they are of Tucker Carlson. Other Republicans are also discussed:
Jimmy Kimmel said, “no one did more phony foaming at the mouth than the little dumber boy [Tucker Carlson].
“According to Tucker Carlson, this is not an isolated incident of some disturbed rando lighting their tree on fire,” Stephen Colbert said, even though the police have said the suspect was a homeless man, and that drugs or mental illness could have been a factor in the torching.
Seth Meyers:
“[imitating Carlson] When will it end? Will every new variant mean new powers for our political class? Will they be able to test you, trace you, come to your house and inject you with a microchip hidden in a vaccine that tracks your movements? And will that tracking microchip allow them to see that you went to the anime convention, in secret, of course, because you didn’t want your friends at Fox News to know you’re into that kind of thing. And will they find out about the time you asked Sean Hannity what he thought of ‘Dragon Ball Z,’ and he looked at you like you were crazy, and that hurt your feelings so much that you ran into the bathroom to cry, only to realize you had run into the women’s bathroom and you were so worried that someone would see you run out that you instead removed a ceiling panel and climbed into a heating duct for the purposes of shimmying back to your office, not knowing that the duct wouldn’t be strong enough to support your weight, causing you to, mid-shimmy, collapse through the ceiling, where you landed on top of Rupert Murdoch’s desk while he was sitting at it, causing him to look up from his soup and yell ‘Crikey!’ Will that happen to you? Well, I can tell you it will because it happened to me.”
Russia on Monday vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have classified climate change as a threat to international peace and security.
The vote crushed a longtime effort to make global warming a more prominent issue within the U.N. body, according to The Associated Press.
Some 113 of the U.N.’s 193 member countries supported the resolution, including 12 of the 15 members of the council, the AP reported.
The resolution had said that climate issues could present “a key risk to global peace, security and stability.”
The proposal was led by Ireland and Niger and called for “incorporating information on the security implications of climate change” into plans regarding conflicts, peacekeeping efforts and political decisions in addition to making climate-related security risks “a central component” in preventing conflict.
“It’s long overdue,” Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason said, per the AP. […]
beholdersays
@437 blf
One option should the situation continue is Perseverance deliberately pointing high-gain antenna in the direction of Ingenuity
How to kill your rover, part #898457:
Well, we think it’s communicating with the helicopter now, but we forgot to send instructions to point the high-gain antenna back at the Deep Space Network. Oops.
blfsays
beholder@444, It’s a standard safety measure built into Earth-communication-capable spacecraft for decades that in the event of a sustained loss of communications with Earth, to enter a safe mode in which, among other things, the antenna orientates itself in the direction of Earth. In other words, even if such an error happened (rather unlikely due to, among other things, on-Earth testing of the commands prior to transmission to the spacecraft), there is a built-in self-rectification mechanism.
In addition, the rover also communicates with some of orbiting satellites (both Nasa and ESA). I haven’t checked, but it is extremely probable that can be done through the various other antenna.
Pointing the rover’s high-gain antenna at the Ingenuity helicopter is unlikely to cause a sustained direct-to-Earth (nor to the satellites) communications problem, but as it does interrupt the rover’s science mission (which has priority), it would, if the teams decide to try that, require high-level sign-off.
beholdersays
@445 blf
With no prior navigational information, it is difficult for a spacecraft to find where Earth is, even if it’s in Earth orbit. It’s usually easier to orient a spacecraft toward the sun in typical safe mode programming.
Also, your usage of the term “decades” may be flexible enough to allow for this, but it wasn’t that long ago that we sent two faulty software updates to the Mars Global Surveyor, first activating its safe mode and then irretrievably locking it up.
ravensays
The Washington Post Coronavirus Updates
Important developments in the pandemic. By Derek Hawkins
The latest
The omicron variant is spreading quickly in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday announced the U.K.’s first death of a patient with the new pathogen. Johnson didn’t disclose the patient’s age, vaccination status or health conditions. But he said the fatality underscored the “sheer pace at which” omicron has swept through the population and urged Britons to get booster shots. British health authorities have confirmed more than 4,700 cases of omicron so far and say there are probably thousands more. Scotland’s first minister predicted Friday that omicron would overtake the widespread delta variant “within days, not weeks.”
We are getting more data about the Omicron variant. One paper says it is 4 times as transmissable as Delta.
It does seem to be more transmissable and is likely to take over from Delta.
We also know it is a partial immune escape variant.
We still don’t know how pathogenic it is.
That requires a lot more data and time.
[…] “No election is perfect, but there is no evidence of intentional malfeasance, no evidence that the election in 2020 wasn’t accurate,” said State Sen. Kathy Bernier (R), a member of the chamber’s Republican leadership and chair of the Committee on Elections, Election Process Reform and Ethics.
At one point Monday, Bernier choked back tears as she recited the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin, describing America’s newly-drafted constitution in 1787: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
“We’re in jeopardy of losing it,” Bernier said.
“We have a great system here, and no one should falsely accuse election officials of cheating,” she added separately, at a press event flanked by the prominent election lawyers Ben Ginsberg and Bob Bauer, as well as David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and Matt Masterson, a former election security official at the Department of Homeland Security.
The comments came amid serious Republican attacks s on Wisconsin’s election systems. Michael Gableman, a former Supreme Court justice tasked by State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) with investigating the 2020 election, recently threatened to jail the mayors of Green Bay and Madison, who he says are standing in the way of his investigation.
[…] Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has encouraged Republicans at the state level to take over control of elections themselves from the Wisconsin Election Commission, a bipartisan body that Republicans created six years ago.
Bernier […] described [Gableman’s investigation] as politics, not policy, influenced by “the pressure from Donald Trump.” She separately referred to “this constant drumbeat of all the ‘massive voter fraud’” as “a charade.”
[…] “My advice would be to have Mr. Gableman wrap up sooner rather than later, because the longer we keep this up, the more harm we’re going to do for Republicans,” she added
[…] In September, after Gableman attended MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s absurd “Cyber Symposium,” where attendees were promised non-existent proof of Chinese election hacking, Bernier held her own event in Wisconson — a nonpartisan crash course in election administration.
[…] “The evidence has been pretty clear, and is pretty clear, that there is not organized voter fraud,” she said. “We have enough evidence now to provide that we can have a lot of confidence in our election.” […]
Please apply two seconds of common sense to your election fraud conspiracies.
One of two things happened in Wisconsin in 2020. One option is that tens of thousands of voter registrations for people born more than a century ago escaped the notice of the state, registrations that were then used to cast illegal ballots in a widespread but undetected scheme to throw the election — until amateur sleuths, digging into the data, discovered all of these suspicious voter registrations and unveiled the whole plot.
The other option is that the amateur sleuths — and the former president who loves them — don’t actually know what they’re talking about. [LOL]
On Thursday evening, Donald Trump’s “Save America” political action committee shared a news item aimed at reinforcing Trump’s endlessly sprawling […] claims of rampant fraud in the 2020 election. In case you missed it, the message blared a “HUGE” news story: “Wisconsin Election Hearing Reveals 119,283 ‘Active Voters’ Who Have Been Registered For Over 100 Years!”
Then the first red flag […]: the claim pointed to a story at the conspiracy website Gateway Pundit.
Gateway Pundit, like Trump, is in the business of elevating nonsense. Trump does it to soothe the frustration of his election loss; the website does it to get attention from people like Donald Trump.
The Gateway Pundit’s report, such as it was, was based on a tweet from Trump’s own spokeswoman, Liz Harrington. She tweeted a snippet of a hearing from Wisconsin.
Here we’ll point out that the results of the 2020 election in Wisconsin have been scrutinized and upheld time and time again. Most recently, a review of the election conducted by a conservative group found no evidence of fraud, as it made clear in a report released this week. Those who consider the question with objectivity come to a unanimous determination. Those who are looking for weird things to amplify, though, always manage to pick out some readily explainable detail and misrepresent it. […]
“The thing that caught the eye is that there are nine that have been registered for more than 120 years,” the purported expert, software engineer Jeff O’Donnell, explained, “and 119,283 that have been registered between 110 and 119 years.”
There you go. That’s the claim. But then:
“The reason for that number, when we dug in more,” he continues, “is that there are 119,000 and change voters who have an application date of Jan. 1, 1918. We have heard that that number is a — perhaps a placeholder for information that is not available.”
Oh, you heard that, did you? Did you hear it from the state of Wisconsin, which has addressed this issue directly? From its website:
“Individuals and advocacy groups reporting that a 1/1/1900 date of birth or a 1/1/1918 registration date for a voter in WisVote is a sign of fraud, hacking or some other irregularity that impacted an election are unfortunately contributing to misinformation about Wisconsin elections, based on a lack of understanding of how SVRS and WisVote came into existence more than 15 years ago.”
What happened is bureaucracy. Before 2005, many counties in the state maintained their own voter rolls. Municipalities with fewer than 5,000 people didn’t even require registration. So a lot of people who were voting at that point didn’t have information like birth dates associated with their records. When the state put together a unified system for registration following the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, it used the placeholders above to complete voter profiles.
“As of fall 2021 there are still about 3,700 active voter records that contain default information for date of birth,” the state reports. “In addition, about 120,000 records exist in the system with a default date of voter registration.” Or: 119,000 and change.
L2, a voter data firm, correctly registers those voters as having unknown birth dates. Liz Harrington and her boss, however, would prefer to depict them as Mystery Voters, somehow part of the big nebulous conspiracy that Trump alleges but can never prove.
Again, though, step back. Trump is apparently asking you to believe that someone intent on committing wide-scale fraud was tripped up by deciding to generate tens of thousands of fake voters, all of whom were about 120 years old last year. They were flawlessly adept at submitting undetectable votes on behalf of those people but somehow incapable of considering that there aren’t a lot of 120-year-olds out there.
It is possible — possible! — that Trump is willfully misleading people on this point. […]
It’s not just the texts. As part of the Jan. 6 investigation, Liz Cheney raised the prospect of criminal misconduct from Team Trump and its allies.
Just a few days after the Jan. 6 attack, Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, and David Williams, the former inspector general for five federal agencies, wrote a joint op-ed for Politico that raised a few eyebrows. As we discussed at the time, McCabe and Williams said Donald Trump could face criminal charges for inciting a riot, noting that it’s a federal crime to “endeavor to persuade” another person to commit a felony that includes the threat or use of physical force.
The Washington Post reported soon after that the then-president’s legal advisers “expressed increasing concern” about the Republican’s “possible criminal liability.” The article added that Trump had been told by attorneys “that he could face legal jeopardy for inciting a mob.” An adviser close to Trump told CNN the then-president was “worried about” being prosecuted.
We now know, of course, that nothing came of this. But what if there were a different area of criminal liability for the former president related to his anti-election efforts?
Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican co-chair of the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, surprised many last night by reading important text messages sent to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the deadly riot. But what the Wyoming congresswoman said next was just as notable:
“Mr. Meadows’s testimony will bear on another key question before this committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’ official proceeding to count electoral votes?”
Cheney chose her words carefully because she was referring to statutory language: To corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’ official proceeding to count electoral votes is a crime. (She repeated the line to the House Rules Committee this morning.)
[…] Cheney’s public comments last night suggest the bipartisan select committee has possible criminal misconduct on its members’ minds.
It’s not just Trump. Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official Trump considered for attorney general to help him steal the election, recently pleaded the Fifth in response to questions from the Jan. 6 committee.
[…] Cheney said last night that Trump, after being told that his election conspiracy theories were wrong, wanted Clark to lead the Justice Department so that he could claim that the election conspiracy theories had merit. The GOP congresswoman then added, “Mr. Clark has informed this committee that he anticipates potential criminal prosecution related to these matters, and intends in upcoming testimony to invoke his Fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination. As Mr. Meadows’ non-privileged texts reveal, Meadows communicated multiple times with a member of Congress who was working with Mr. Clark.”
[…] texts from the former White House chief of staff suggest the lawyer was working directly with a member of Congress.
And while the public doesn’t know which member of Congress we’re talking about, Meadows’ texts have informed the committee of the member’s identity.
[…] As Rachel put it on the show, “Whether or not the federal Justice Department is ever going to investigate or prosecute anyone for this scheme, trying to interfere in a state’s elections, trying to induce officials to mess with the election results, pressuring officials to change election results, that’s a crime in every state in the country.”
And who allegedly engaged in such activities? According to the latest revelations, Republican officials in the Trump administration and in Congress.
As part of the contempt process for Mark Meadows, the Jan. 6 committee’s Liz Cheney read some explosive text messages sent during the attack.
[…] NBC News reported overnight:
The nine-member bipartisan committee voted unanimously Monday to advance a contempt referral for Meadows to the full House. The House is expected to take up the measure Tuesday. A majority vote would result in the Justice Department’s being asked to prosecute Meadows, a former House member. […]
If recent history is any guide, these events will unfold fairly quickly, following the vote from the full House. It also raises the prospect of a highly unusual event: A former member of Congress hasn’t been held in contempt of Congress since the 1800s.
But as part of last night’s proceedings, committee members also took some time to explain the importance of Meadows’ unique perspective and the critical information he has about the January attack on the Capitol. Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel’s Republican co-chair, read a series of text messages the former presidential chief of staff received on and around Jan. 6, shedding extraordinary new light on what was transpiring during the pro-Trump riot.
The White House knew what was happening during the attack: Cheney read specific messages, written by unidentified Republican members of Congress, who pleaded with Meadows to get Trump to intervene immediately. The then-president chose not to.
The texts help answer the question of culpability: The texts between GOP members and Meadows made clear that in the eyes of Trump’s own congressional allies, there was no doubt that the rioters were attacking at the behest of the then-president, and he had the power to stop them. These facts are now politically inconvenient in conservative politics, but at the time, the truth was unambiguous.
[…] Fox News hosts were among those sending text messages to Meadows: Cheney read texts sent directly from Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, and Sean Hannity, each of whom sounded as if they were members of the Republican White House’s political team, and each of whom recognized at the time that Trump had a responsibility to act. Ingraham, in particular, told the then-chief of staff, “Mark, the president needs to tell the people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” These same Fox hosts later saw value in downplaying the importance of the attack.
Trump’s own adult son knew, too: Donald Trump Jr. apparently recognized that his father wasn’t doing enough to address the violence. Meadows responded, “I’m pushing it hard. I agree.” Is this what a White House chief of staff would write if the president were taking the matter seriously and was fully engaged in trying to end the riot launched his own followers?
[…] As the dust settles on these revelations, I also can’t help but notice this information was in the materials Meadows was willing to share with the committee. If this is what the North Carolina Republican was comfortable disclosing, how explosive is the information he’s now trying to hide?
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who serves as vice chair of the Jan. 6 Committee, on Tuesday revealed yet more details about former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ communications as he worked with former President Trump to subvert the election results before and during the deadly Capitol insurrection.
[…] Cheney read aloud more texts, sent from unnamed GOP lawmakers to Meadows while the Capitol was invaded by Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
“‘It is really bad up here on the hill,’” Cheney read.
“‘The President needs to stop this ASAP,’” she added.
“‘Fix this now,’” said another.
After noting that the committee has also received texts from Trump officials and members of the media sent to Meadows during the Capitol insurrection, Cheney explained that Meadows has knowledge helpful to the committee about Trump’s efforts to persuade state officials to alter their official election results, pointing to the former Trump official’s participation in a phone call between Trump and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger.
Meadows “was on the phone when President Trump asked the secretary of state to ‘find 11,780 votes’ to change the election results in Georgia,” Cheney said.
According to Cheney, Meadows appeared to have been “texting at least one other participant on the call” at the time, citing Meadows’ texts that he has turned over to the committee.
“Again, Mr. Meadows has no conceivable privilege basis to refuse to testify on that topic and doing so puts him in contempt of Congress,” Cheney said.
Cheney then said that Meadows’ texts revealed that the former Trump official had communicated “multiple times” with a current member of Congress who was working with Jeffrey Clark, the DOJ official who Trump mulled making attorney general as part of his scheme to subvert the election.
Although the committee hasn’t named the GOP lawmakers who texted Meadows, chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told reporters after the House Rules meeting that he expects the panel to do so in the future.
[…] Watch Cheney’s remarks below: [video available at the link]
Donald Junior: “He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough,” the president’s son wrote, adding in another text that Trump needed to give an Oval Office address because the riots had “gone too far.”
Kilmeade fretted that Trump was “destroying everything you have accomplished.” “Please get him on TV,” he texted Meadows.
Hannity asked if the then-president could “make a statement” and urge his supporters to leave.
See comment 451 for Laura Ingraham’s text message to Mark Meadows.
A member of Congress texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows the day after the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection lamenting that it had been a “terrible day” … because their efforts to steal the election for Donald Trump had failed, according to new texts revealed by the House Jan. 6 select committee on Monday.
“Yesterday was a terrible day,” the lawmaker wrote in one of the text exchanges Meadows turned over to the committee. “We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked.”
The Jan. 6 panel, which unveiled the damning texts during a vote to recommend criminal contempt charges against Meadows, did not publicly identify the lawmaker who sent the message. […]
“The committee is not naming these lawmakers at this time, as our investigation is ongoing,” said committee member Adam Schiff (D-CA), who read the text aloud.
Schiff also presented another message from different unidentified lawmaker who had texted Meadows urging Vice President Mike Pence, who was slated to oversee Congress’ Electoral College vote certification on Jan. 6, to hijack the proceedings.
“On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all,” the lawmaker wrote.
Those texts were just some of Meadows’ shocking exchanges revealed by the committee on Monday. The panel also presented frantic texts from Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade and Sean Hannity during the insurrection pleading for Trump to call off the mob of his supporters as they were ransacking the Capitol.
“Mark, the President needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ingraham wrote. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
Ingraham would later go on the air that day to blame antifa for the Capitol attack, a preview of the right-wing media’s attempt to obscure how Trump had directly encouraged his enraged supporters to go to the Capitol. [OMFG]
Meadows voluntarily turned over his texts and emails to the Jan. 6 committee before defying the panel’s subpoena and refusing to show up for his scheduled hearing, claiming “executive privilege” despite already having handed over the texts. He is now suing the committee and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Regarding comments 450-454, Aaron Rupar has a good presentation of tweets that expose the worst of the worst. https://twitter.com/atrupar
Also, as Asha Rangappa pointed out:
BTW, it’s not just that FOX News hosts blamed Antifa while privately imploring Trump to stop riot that same day. The network made a three-part “documentary” *a month ago* claiming that Jan. 6 was a false flag operation BY THE FBI 🙄…and not one of those anchors has disavowed it.
Could the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers be about to follow in the footsteps of the Nazis recently hit with a $26 million verdict for their role in the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” violence? Washington, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine is suing the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers over their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, using a statute originally targeting the Ku Klux Klan.
Racine is seeking “full restitution and recompense” for the District of Columbia’s costs in treating and providing leave for hundreds of injured officers. “I think the damages are substantial,” he told The Washington Post. “If it so happens that it bankrupts or puts these individuals and entities in financial peril, so be it.”
[…] Racine’s suit includes both Proud Boys International LLC and Oath Keepers, plus dozens of their members, most of whom are already facing federal charges for the crimes they committed on Jan. 6. It’s not the first such lawsuit: Both Rep. Bennie Thompson—who is the chair of both the House Homeland Security Committee and the select committee investigating the attack—and a group of police officers who personally battled the insurrectionists have filed similar suits.
In addition to seeking financial damages, Racine is looking for information. “I’m particularly interested in understanding the financial apparatus of these individuals and entities and where the money came from,” he told the Post.
The lawsuit, though filed by the D.C. attorney general, comes with added legal firepower, including pro bono outside counsel from the States United Democracy Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and two law firms. It additionally draws on the voluminous Justice Department investigations and prosecutions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys for their role in the attack on Congress. According to the lawsuit, the defendants conspired “to prevent, interrupt, hinder, and impede, through force, intimidation, and threat … United States officials from discharging official duties of their offices and positions of trust as part of the formal process for counting and certifying the count of electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election and declaring a winner of the 2020 presidential election.”
Dozens of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys already face criminal charges that could lead to significant prison sentences. But finding out more about the financing of the two hate groups and weakening them financially or bankrupting them is an important goal to keep them from being the foot soldiers in the next Republican coup attempt.
[…] There is, in fact, voter fraud, but it continues to be Republican voters who commit it.
The latest example comes from three residents of The Villages, a senior community located just outside of Orlando, Florida.
Jay Ketcik, Joan Halstead, and John Rider are each charged with casting more than one ballot in an election, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
If you’re not familiar, The Villages is not just any retirement community—it is a massive place that’s home to 100,000 residents, spans two counties, and has its own census designation. It’s the fastest-growing area in the U.S. with 39% growth from 2012 to 2020 […]
The arrests were prompted by allegations of voting irregularities launched by the office of the Sumter County Supervisor of Elections Bill Keen, according to prosecutors.
Click Orlando reports that Ketcik, 63, is accused of voting by mail in Florida in October 2020 while also casting an absentee ballot in his original home state of Michigan.
Halstead, 71, voted in person in Florida but also cast an absentee ballot in New York, prosecutors allege.
According to court records, Rider, 61, was arrested at the Royal Caribbean cruise ship terminal at Port Canaveral on Dec. 3.
[…] Ketcik and Halstead have posts on their respective Facebook pages offering support of Herr Trump.
[snipped other examples of voter fraud perpetrated by Republicans] to be clear, cases of voter fraud in the U.S. remain few and far between. As the GOP continues to claim election irregularities, reality proves different. Research has proved again and again there is no evidence of Trump and supporters’ claims of widespread fraud.
[…] Despite everything to the contrary, however, most Republicans and supporters of Trump still don’t believe the 2020 election results were counted legitimately. […]
“There’s no way to understate the danger we’re in” with such a large chunk of a single party questioning the integrity of the nation’s very democracy, Executive Director David Becker told reporters in a conference call. “I personally believe this is as dangerous a moment for American democracy as the Civil War […]
Slapping down stupid questions from Fox News “reporters”:
Every once in a while we like to check in on the strange self-flagellation of Fox News’ coat hanger Peter Doocy. Doocy is their White House reporter and is tasked to take the GOP and ultra-right-wing talking points into the press briefings held by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. […]
In part because she is very good at her job, and also because Peter Doocy is the intellectual equivalent to Steve Doocy, who in turn is the intellectual equivalent to expired mustard, it is an entertainment to watch Ms. Psaki verbally slap Petey around a bit. On Monday […] Doocy arrived with two opportunities to have his ass handed back to him.
In the wee hours of the morning last week, a man climbed up and set the Fox News headquarters’ Christmas Tree ablaze. Fox News spent about 36-straight hours lamenting this terrible blow to Hannukah and freedom and Christianity and America in the War on Christmas. Over the weekend, reports came out that the suspect, 49-year-old Craig Tamanaha—now charged with arson, criminal mischief, reckless endangerment, endangering others, criminal trespass, criminal tampering, and disorderly conduct—was out on supervised release. […]
Doocy came out asking Jen Psaki to answer for the NYPD and New York’s legal system, saying, “We’ve seen an arsonist burn down a half a million dollar Christmas tree in New York City, back out on the streets. Does the President think that’s good governing?” Psaki tried very calmly to explain […] “for specific cases, I would point you to the local police departments or the Department of Justice.” […]
But Dooce […] was not finished with his penance. Citing Sen. Lindsey Graham’s CBO score on a phantom infrastructure bill that isn’t even being considered in Congress right now, Doocy wondered if Biden would be held to the made-up criteria that there be no debt incurred from the Build Back Better bill being worked on. Psaki reminded Doocy that Graham’s CBO score is about as worthwhile as the notepad Peter Doocy pretends to write notes on. It means nothing at all. […]
“It is important to understand when anyone raises a question about this new CBO score, it is a fake score about a bill that doesn’t exist and we should focus on the actual bill.”
[…] Psaki […] reminds Doocy that he is an imaginary reporter using imaginary information […]
Chris Wallace Ecstatic About Never Riding Elevator with Tucker Carlson Again
In his weekly appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Chris Wallace told his viewers that he was “ecstatic” about never having to ride an elevator with Tucker Carlson again.
“After eighteen years at Fox, I’m excited about my next chapter,” a visibly giddy Wallace said. “And that’s because I’ll never again share an elevator with that unhinged sociopath Tucker Carlson.”
Wallace revealed that for years he “dreaded” stepping into an elevator at Fox for fear of an unwanted encounter with the execrable Carlson.
“On the occasions when I found myself in the same elevator as that bastard, I’d stare at my shoes and pray he wouldn’t strike up a conversation,” Wallace said. “Those minutes seemed like hours.”
“Even Hannity was better,” he added.
Stressing that his decision to leave Fox “wasn’t about money,” Wallace said, “At CNN+, I’ll never have to ride an elevator with Tucker Carlson, and you can’t put a price tag on that.”
Sen Joe Manchin (“D”-West Virginia) spoke on the phone with President Joe Biden yesterday to discuss moving forward on the Build Back Better reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives in November. […] even though the overall size of the bill was slashed in order to address complaints from Manchin and from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-Arizona), Manchin has now found some very tricksy parts of the pared back legislation that he is not happy with, no not at all. […]
Manchin has found several new and continuing matters to complain about. For starters, he says he’s not willing to say whether he’ll support anything until the Senate version’s final legislative text is completed, and that process is still ongoing. For the bill to pass via the reconciliation process, with just 50 votes and VP Kamala Harris’s tie-breaker, the Senate parliamentarian has to sign off on all parts of the bill.
The new supposed furrow in Manchin’s brow, CNN explains, is that he is suddenly shocked, shocked to learn that in order to slash the Build Back Better package down enough to make it small enough to win at least grudging acceptance from Manchin and Sinema, the bill funds some of its proposals for a year, or a few years. This is a very common bit of alchemy used in reconciliation bills, and doesn’t seem at all to be a problem in the US military budget, which funds everygoddamnthing for one year at a time.
Specifically, Manchin is apparently astounded to learn that a […] new estimate, following exactly what [Senator Lindsey Dunderhead] Graham asked for, imagines that there’s a bill out there that extends all Build Back Better proposals for 10 years, but which neglected to plan for any new revenue. Nobody has proposed such a bill.
What a shocking discovery this is, says Manchin, who claims to be amazed at the “deceptive” planning for a much smaller total package. If you’re going to introduce a new program like universal pre-K, expanded child tax credits, or other plans in Build Back Better, well then you should plan them for 10 years out and pay for them for 10 full years. (Not that Manchin would support a fully funded 10-year bill, because look at how pricey it would be!)
This is all a load of bollocks, of course, because the short-term budgeting that’s in Build Back Better is mostly there because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema wanted absolutely nothing to do with the full Biden agenda as proposed in the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. Once some of the physical-infrastructure-only stuff was carved out of those two proposals — at Joe Manchin’s insistence, so he could pass a “bipartisan” infrastructure bill with some Republican support — what was left would have cost somewhere around $6 trillion over 10 years, but clearly that wasn’t going to get Manchin’s support, so instead, congressional Dems settled on a reconciliation proposal that would have cost about $3.5 trillion — again, over 10 years — which would largely be funded by rolling back parts of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
[…] Manchin said the bill should be “within the limits of what we can afford” — and argued that lawmakers should evaluate how much it would cost to extend temporary programs in the bill for 10 years to be “transparent” about the actual price tag of the bill.
[…] In Biden’s initial American Families Plan last spring, and in September’s House draft of Build Back Better, the expanded CTC would have run through 2025 and would have been funded, like most of the bill, through partial repeal of Trump’s tax cuts. Not quite the 10-year timeframe Manchin now says must be calculated, but it was indeed fully paid for.
Ah, but then Kyrsten Sinema insisted we couldn’t raise tax rates on corporations, the very richest Americans, or on capital gains at all, and both she and Manchin demanded the topline spending total be slashed roughly in half. The administration negotiated with them some more and announced the slimmed down Build Back Better framework in October, which was quite close to what the House passed last month.
To fit within what’s now a roughly $2 trillion top line, the Child Tax Credit extension had to be pared back, so that now instead of continuing — fully paid for — through 2025, it will only be extended a year, in hopes that people would like it and say “More please YES!” and keep Democrats in control of Congress. It’s a very popular idea!
But now Joe Manchin doesn’t like that the plan he demanded be slashed doesn’t include budgeting for a full 10 years. And if it did, it would clearly cost too much even if it included 10 years of new revenues.
[…] Honestly, we don’t know how the Senate will get Build Back Better past Manchin’s latest objections to the very mechanisms he forced to be used in the bill. We’re still fairly sure it’ll get done, and that no matter how much he tries to be a Republican now, he’ll be defeated in 2024 by some rightwinger who calls him a socialist anyway. […]
[…] Fox News didn’t air the hearing where Liz Cheney read the Fox News anchors’ texts, which happened just before primetime, and Newsmax and One America News didn’t either.
This was really remarkable for Hannity, since he had Meadows on as a guest last night. You’d think at some point he might have said, “FULL DISCLOSURE, but my clown ass is part of this drama too. Haha, remember when Michael Cohen fingered me as one of his three clients? Remember all my texts with Paul Manafort? This happens literally all the time, wonder why LOL.”
[…] During her show, Laura Ingraham didn’t mention how on January 6, the same day she was texting Mark Meadows freaking out and begging Trump to call off his insurgents, she was also going on her own network and insinuating that Antifa did it.
[…] Who else tried to blame it on Antifa? Hannity. Justin Baragona at the Daily Beast reminds us that on the afternoon of the 6th, Hannity told his morons that he “heard these reports” what said Antifas “might even wear MAGA gear” at the Capitol that day […]
Hoo boy.
And then there’s Brian Kilmeade. Here are some of the excuses he was making for the terrorists as they were terrorizing:
Kilmeade, after saying he did “not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation,” then blamed the Russia probe as a key factor in pushing MAGA followers to violence.
“I think this is a culmination of four years of them denying that their president won the election, claiming that the Russians flipped votes, this is four years of investigation, four years of a very frustrated electorate, 75 million that voted,” the Fox & Friends star fumed. “They feel that they have not had their day in court, let alone lost in court.”
Kilmeade’s been on the TV this morning, on his idiot show. Anything from him? Sounds like nope!
[…] what these texts really say is that these cynical shitbag Fox hosts knew exactly what was going on — a domestic terrorist insurrection against the Capitol — and they knew who caused it, and therefore who could shut it down. And yet immediately, in real time, they started telling their viewers an entirely different story, and they haven’t stopped telling that story since.
Remember several months ago when the Capitol and DC cops emotionally testified for Congress about the physical and psychological torture they endured that day and in the months afterward, and Laura Ingraham gave them awards for their theatrical performances in front of Congress? […]
The anti-LGBTQ organization Public Advocate made a video celebrating Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a modern-day Wonder Woman. Allow us to emphasize that this is 100 percent real and NOT A PARODY.
New research shows how rising temperatures have irreversibly altered both the Arctic and Antarctic. Ripple effects will be felt around the globe.
The ice shelf was cracking up. Surveys showed warm ocean water eroding its underbelly. Satellite imagery revealed long, parallel fissures in the frozen expanse, like scratches from some clawed monster. One fracture grew so big, so fast, scientists took to calling it “the dagger.”
“It was hugely surprising to see things changing that fast,” said Erin Pettit. The Oregon State University glaciologist had chosen this spot for her Antarctic field research precisely because of its stability. While other parts of the infamous Thwaites Glacier crumbled, this wedge of floating ice acted as a brace, slowing the melt. It was supposed to be boring, durable, safe.
Now climate change has turned the ice shelf into a threat — to Pettit’s field work, and to the world.
Planet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels and other human activities has already raised global temperatures more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). But the effects are particularly profound at the poles, where rising temperatures have seriously undermined regions once locked in ice.
In research presented this week at the world’s biggest earth science conference, Pettit showed that the Thwaites ice shelf could collapse within the next three to five years, unleashing a river of ice that could dramatically raise sea levels. Aerial surveys document how warmer conditions have allowed beavers to invade the Arctic tundra, flooding the landscape with their dams. Large commercial ships are increasingly infiltrating formerly frozen areas, disturbing wildlife and generating disastrous amounts of trash. In many Alaska Native communities, climate impacts compounded the hardships of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to food shortages among people who have lived off this land for thousands of years. […]
Late this afternoon the Senate passed its bill to raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion on a 50-49 vote. The House passed the same measure later. Disaster avoided.
After more than two years of waiting, a D.C. federal judge on Tuesday allowed a request from Congress for Trump’s tax returns to go forward.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden for the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee, approved a request from the House Ways and Means Committee to dismiss Trump’s claims.
But the ruling doesn’t mean that the panel will soon receive the returns, first requested in April 2019. The ruling’s enforcement is delayed for two weeks so that Trump can file an expected appeal.
The case has moved at a glacial pace, with panel chairman Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) reupping the request for Trump’s returns this year, and with the Office of Legal Counsel reversing a Trump-era opinion in July 2021 and thereby opening the door for the returns to be handed over.
The Trump administration refused to honor the request when it was initially made, echoing the then-president in calling it part of a vindictive campaign of harassment while claiming that the demand lacked a legislative purpose.
At its core, however, there was no real legal dispute to be had: the House Ways and Means Committee is one of the three congressional panels whose chairs are empowered, by law, to request the individual returns of any filer. Congress did so with Richard Nixon, discovering in the 1970s that the IRS had given him favorable treatment while in office.
McFadden went as far as he could in the opinion in siding with Trump, analyzing statements by both Reps. Neal and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) about wanting to get Trump’s returns.
“They suggest at least some mixed motives for Chairman Neal’s request; specifically, that he wants to expose former President Trump,” McFadden wrote.
But he added that though he found the statements “troubling, the law in question is clear that Congress “need only state a valid legislative purpose. It has done so.” […]
We’ve got new numbers rolling in on the success of military vaccination efforts. Are the patriots in our armed forces refusing to be vaccinated against this one particular deadly disease? Is it causing mass dissent in the ranks? Is our military hollowing out, what with all of the vaccine-refusers demanding that their commanding officers give them “freedom”?
Yeah, it turns out it isn’t even a blip. A new AP story reports that 97% of Air Force personnel have now been vaccinated; that’s mentioned a few paragraphs down from the main news of the day, which is that Air Force discharges for refusing vaccination have swelled to … 27.
[…] This is a good thing. We really ought to be saying this more: This is a very good thing. The military has long had a thing for making sure everybody is following orders, due to all the guns and bombs and billion-dollar planes and whatnot, and not following a military order intended to save military lives remains one of the best ways to get yourself discharged. […]
Senate Democrats on Tuesday voted to raise the debt ceiling, bypassing a GOP filibuster as part of a deal struck by congressional leaders.
Senators voted 50-49 along party lines to raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion. Though GOP senators supported legislation last week setting up the simple majority vote, none voted for the bill to increase the debt ceiling.
“As I have said repeatedly, this is about paying debt accumulated by both parties, so I’m pleased we came together to facilitate a process that has made addressing the debt ceiling possible,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said ahead of the vote.
“Responsible governing has won on this exceedingly important issue. The American people can breathe easy and rest assured there will not be a default,” he added.
The House is expected to vote to raise the debt ceiling as soon as Tuesday. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has given lawmakers until Wednesday to increase the nation’s borrowing limit and keep the government solvent.
Democrats unveiled the legislation to increase the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion hours before Tuesday’s vote. Senators estimate it would set the next debt ceiling cliff for sometime in 2023, getting Congress past the midterms.
The agreement to set up a one-time exemption to the filibuster sparked pushback from GOP senators, who believe that Republicans should have stuck by their months-long demand that Democrats raise the debt ceiling on their own through budget reconciliation.
But GOP leadership argue that the deal was a win because it accomplishes many of their goals: Making Democrats raise the debt ceiling on their own to a specific number and a fast-track process that lets them pivot the focus back to the Build Back Better legislation, which they view as a more promising target. […]
Mitch McConnell got on his high horse to claim that Democrats were being “reckless.” We can, for the most part, ignore him.
Looking to the future:
[…] Some Democrats are talking about trying to abolish the debt ceiling altogether, an idea that has been floated by lawmakers in both chambers but struggled to gain enough support to pass.
“This last round has made it clear that this is a tool of politicians, for politicians; it defies common sense,” Wyden said. “It needs to go.”
ravensays
Good news and just in time for the Happy Holiday of Winter Solstice.
US xianity continues to die.
Nones are now at 30%, the largest sect in the USA.
What the article doesn’t mention is that US xianity isn’t a unified block. They are hopelessly divided and when they don’t hate us, they hate each other.
The Week The weird spiral of declining Christianity in America
Joel Mathis, Contributing Writer Tue, December 14, 2021, 10:13 AM·2 min readThe Week
The decline of American Christianity is continuing apace. The Pew Research Center reports today that the number of self-identified Christians has declined by 12 percentage points since 2012, while religious “nones” have grown by 10 points during that time. (Other surveys have shown similar drops.) Christians are still the dominant cultural group in America — at 63 percent of the population, they still have a two-to-one advantage over the non-religious — but they’re not quite as dominant as they used to be.
Donald Trump was already facing a criminal inquiry, multiple civil suits, and criminal charges against his private business when the former president confronted another unwelcome headline last month: A second grand jury had been empaneled in New York as part of an investigation into his financial practices.
Yesterday, the news got a little worse for [Trump] when we learned who’s been talking to that grand jury. The Washington Post reported:
A longtime accountant for former president Donald Trump — who helped prepare Trump’s taxes and the financial statements his company used to woo lenders — testified recently before a New York grand jury investigating Trump’s financial practices, according to two people familiar with that investigation. Accountant Donald Bender, of the firm Mazars, appeared before a grand jury that was impaneled this fall by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D) to weigh potential criminal charges, the people said.
To be sure, Bender is not widely known to the public, but as the Post’s report explained, Trump’s accountant is a highly relevant figure in this investigation: “Prosecutors already obtained millions of pages of Trump-related documents from Bender’s firm, after a court battle that went to the Supreme Court twice. Now, they have sought testimony from a man who could serve as a human road map to that data.”
[…] prosecutors in recent weeks have interviewed Rosemary Vrablic, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank “who arranged hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Trump.” According to the article, Vrablic has not appeared before the grand jury, at least not yet, though she’s spoken to prosecutors “about Trump’s role in dealings with the bank.”
At this point, I suspect there will be some cynics who see developments like these and shrug their shoulders, assuming that Trump has avoided accountability before, so there’s no point in expecting a serious outcome now.
But let’s not forget that this grand jury process in Manhattan hasn’t been spinning its wheels. On the contrary, this is the same investigation that’s produced felony charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer.
This is not, in other words, a hollow exercise going nowhere.
As for the line of inquiry investigators are pursuing, by all accounts, the controversy surrounds how Trump’s operation valued its assets — which may sound like a boring topic, but it’s a surprisingly potent problem for the former president.
Mark Meadows failed as a congressman and a White House chief of staff. Now the institution where he once served has voted to hold him in criminal contempt.
During his seven years on Capitol Hill, Mark Meadows was not held in the highest regard. As Dana Milbank explained in a column last summer, the North Carolina Republican “developed an unsurpassed reputation for blowing things up and making sure bills didn’t pass.”
When Meadows wasn’t excelling at shutting down the government, he was trying — and failing — to work behind the scenes to oust then-House Speaker John Boehner. After his retirement, Boehner said of the North Carolinian, “He’s an idiot. I can’t tell you what makes him tick.”
Last year, Meadows managed to parlay this ignominious record into a promotion of sorts: Donald Trump tapped him to serve as his fourth White House chief of staff in four years. Meadows — who got the job because the then-president was impressed by his television appearances — quickly became a hindrance to governing.
As he prepared to exit the West Wing, a Washington Post analysis concluded that Meadows had “earned the title of worst chief of staff in history.”
It hardly seemed possible, but things managed to get quite a bit worse for Meadows after he left public service and found himself up to his neck in questions surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Republican struggled to make up his mind about cooperating with the investigation, before ultimately deciding to ignore a congressional subpoena.
The response from the institution where he once served was predictable. NBC News reported overnight:
The House voted Tuesday night to refer former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to the Justice Department for a potential criminal charge over his refusal to answer questions about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Lawmakers passed the measure largely along party lines in a 222-208 vote.
Wonkette: “Kamala Harris Will Oppress You With Affordable Electric Vehicles, Charging Stations”
The Biden administration rolled out its “action plan” to use $7.5 billion included in the bipartisan infrastructure law (the BIF) to build out what will eventually be a network of 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles all over the country, along with its goals to electrify 50 percent of the US car and truck market by 2030. To promote the strategy, Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday visited an EV charging facility in Brandywine, Maryland, near Washington DC, that will be used to recharge Prince George’s County’s planned fleet of fully electric county vehicles.
Harris said that the “future of transportation in our nation and around the world is electric,” and that the Biden administration seeks to make the transition from internal combustion engines to EVs “even faster, and make sure it is driven by the United States.”
“We want to make electric vehicles accessible for everyone,″ Harris said. “Absolutely make it accessible for everyone and easy. Just like filling up your car with gas.” […]
When public chargers are installed in rural, urban or suburban neighborhoods, “we make it easier for people to go electric,″ Harris said, adding that the biggest barrier most people cite to buying an electric car is “figuring out where and how to charge it.″
And yes, Harris even addressed an issue near and dear to Yr Wonkette, noting that people living in apartments with only street parking need to have convenient places nearby where they can charge an EV, as do folks in rural areas who may not currently have any public EV chargers near enough to make longer trips work out for them. (Of note, Walmart is just one of several chains putting in a lot of fast chargers in its parking lots, which can charge EV batteries to 80 percent in just a half hour.)
While at the facility, Harris connected a county EV to a charger, joking, “There’s no sound or fumes! How do I know it’s actually working?”
Mahidhar Reddy, the founder and CEO of SemaConnect, the company that built the charging station, explained that when the lights on the charger are fully green, the car is fully charged.
That little bit of “so how does this work?” Mr. Wizard theater was mocked by Fox News yesterday, because serious news outlets pretend that the lady vice president is a total airhead who doesn’t even know that an electric outlet has no gas fumes or noise. And she’s first in line to command our nuclear arsenal? Just one more reason she’s utterly unqualified! Yes, six goddamn minutes on it: [video is available at the link]
[…] Fox Serious Anchor Person Harris Faulkner got very performatively angry that Harris was so stupid, stupid, stupid, saying maybe the White House should have briefed the clueless idiot birdbrain VP on the fact that electricity doesn’t make noise, dummy. Also, she pretended to be outraged that Harris hadn’t instead gone to the US Mexico border to address something really worthwhile. […]
As for the actual Biden charging station plan, the precise details of where charging stations will be is left to the states, with guidelines to be developed by a “Joint Office of Energy and Transportation” to be established by the Departments of, you guessed it, Energy and Transportation. That office will get input from “industry leaders, manufacturers, workers, and other stakeholders” to coordinate EV infrastructure planning, and to serve as a “one-stop-shop” for resources on the transition to EVs.
The actual guidance for siting EV charging stations will be issued by February 11 of next year, after a process of examining
where we already have EV charging and where we need—or will need—more of it. It will focus on the needs of disadvantaged and rural communities, catalyze further private investment in EV charging, and ensure we’re smartly connecting to our electric grid.
That guidance will be followed up in May with a set of standards for the actual chargers in the network, to “ensure they work, they’re safe, and they’re accessible to everyone.” And yes, the plan emphasizes the need for some kind of standardization of “plug types, payment options, data availability, and hardware hookups” across the EV and charging station industry, a move that’s already underway in the industry, because it would be damned silly if gas station pumps had different nozzles for Fords and Toyotas.
The plan allots $5 billion in funding for states to build out the network, and another $2.5 billion that will go to grants for communities and transportation corridors to make sure that the EV charging network serves disadvantaged and rural communities, as well as places that currently have lousy air quality.
[…] Also too, there’ll be funding to develop a “reliable and sustainable end-to-end domestic supply chain for advanced batteries,” including making sure that domestic mining for minerals used in batteries is environmentally responsible, or at least as responsible as mining can be. That’ll include funding R & D for nationwide EV battery recycling, a point you may want to keep in mind when some doofus on Twitter insists that after three weeks your battery will die and you’ll need to spend a million dollars to replace it. (Current EV battery pack warranties typically run 10 years, 100,000 miles anyway, and that’s only likely to improve.)
Elon Musk, Time magazine’s least deserving man of the year, got into it on Twitter with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has the controversial opinion that he should pay taxes and otherwise contribute positively to society.
Warren tweeted: “Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.”
Musk has a financial worth of $297 billion. He paid nothing in federal income tax in 2018. He doesn’t take a salary as CEO of Tesla as part of his ongoing effort to avoid taxes. However, this year, he’s looking at a tax bill of $15 billion on $28 billion in stock options. He can’t catch a break unless you count all of them.
Billionaire Americans have the entire Republican Party plus at least two Democrats looking out for their interests, so Musk can afford to chill, especially since he’s still a billionaire many times over even after his tax bill. However, in response to Warren’s tweet, Musk shared a Fox News column from 2019 denouncing Warren for having claimed Native American heritage at one point in her life. (Conservatives generally oppose cancel culture and judging people’s past actions by today’s “woke” standards, but they’ll make an exception if it means calling Warren “Pocahontas.”) Musk tweeted: “Stop projecting!” but that’s makes no sense. Warren actually pays taxes.
Continuing his Twitter tantrum, Musk wrote: “Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen.”
You’re probably thinking, “Wait, Senator Warren’s name isn’t Karen. That’s not even close.” However, it seems as if Musk is the one projecting. As we all know from the past couple of years, a “Karen” is a white woman who throws her weight around to get people fired or arrested, depending on the level of her bloodlust and the day. According to Urban Dictionary, in what strikes us as a pretty odd definition, “Karen” is a “middle-aged woman, typically blonde, [who] makes solutions to others’ problems an inconvenience to her although she isn’t even remotely affected.” Warren has offered solutions to working people’s problems and Musk is the one acting out like he was asked to wear a mask at a suburban Whole Foods.
Of course, Musk isn’t blonde or a woman, which reveals the whole problem with how “Karen” is currently used. It’s become a catch-all term for any woman a man doesn’t like, especially if she’s asserting herself. If a woman asks a man to wear a mask indoors (as the law requires), she’s called a “Karen.” If a woman on Twitter suggests that Democrats should hurry up and pass voting rights legislation, very clever men will dismiss her as a “Karen” who’s “calling the manager.”
The “manager” is almost always a more powerful white man, and we all know that Musk has the numbers of countless powerful white “managers” on speed dial. He’s not exactly punching up.
Musk reinforced what “Karen” has become when he tweeted: “You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend’s angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason.”
[…] Musk is 50 but lacks the maturity and self-awareness to recall his childhood and realize that he and his friend were fucking annoying and probably driving that poor woman crazy. Political pundits claimed that men wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she “reminded them of their nagging wives.” This is the same mentality.
When Elon Musk, a literal comic book supervillain, calls a woman “Karen,” that means we all need to stop now. It’s over. “Karen” is yet another thing white men ruined, like the song “Tutti Frutti” and the New World (which was only “new” to them).
Don’t worry. We’ll continue dragging racist white women, but we’ll move on to treating them like individual terrible people and not a single dehumanizing term.
(CN) — A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by former President Donald Trump, which attempted to prevent the IRS and Treasury Department from giving his tax returns to a congressional committee.
In a 45-page opinion tossing out Trump’s case, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that a “long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference” to “facially valid” congressional inquiries.
The judge was unconvinced by arguments from the former president’s attorneys that a request by the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means for his tax returns lacks a valid legislative purpose or is unconstitutional. The committee must view the documents in a closed session, but has the power to vote to make some or all of the records public.
[…]
The judge ruled that the committee identified a legitimate legislative purpose behind its request: its study of the Presidential Audit Program.
IRS procedures since 1977 have required an audit of a sitting president’s tax returns.
The judge found that the records requested by the committee will help it carry out its investigation of the IRS’s ability to audit a president with complex business holdings.
According to the ruling, the committee said in its request that it has “’serious concerns’ about the IRS’s ability to audit a President” and worries that the program “is not advancing the purpose for which it was created.”
McFadden ruled that the committee has demonstrated Trump’s information “will uniquely aid its legislative efforts” and might help show whether the auditing program “sufficiently accounts for a President who, like Trump, controls hundreds of businesses and typically files ‘inordinately large and complex’ tax returns.”
[…]
McFadden expressed reservations about whether the tax returns should ever be made public.
“Anyone can see that publishing confidential tax information of a political rival is the type of move that will return to plague the inventor. It might not be right or wise to publish the returns, but it is the chairman’s right to do so,” the judge wrote. “Congress has granted him this extraordinary power, and courts are loath to second guess congressional motives or duly enacted statutes.”
McFadden put the opinion on hold for 14 days, giving Trump the chance to file an all-but-guaranteed appeal.
Wonkette: “New York Times Exposes Democrats As Almost Sort Of Bad Like Republicans 2% Of The Time”
The New York Times is simply not capable of covering this specific period in American politics. […]. It’s unclear what service the Times thinks it’s providing. Just check out this nonsense from reporter Maggie Astor, a self-described debunker of disinformation.
Astor’s piece “Now in Your Inbox: Political Misinformation” starts strong. She correctly calls out Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s lies about President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, which he sends directly to his supporters in fundraising emails. This isn’t a new development, as Republicans regularly fundraise off lies and even the violence they’ve incited against Democrats.
She writes:
Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.
I question the extent to which Republicans’ lie-laced tweets are “routinely fact-checked and scrutinized.” People might dunk on Rep. Lauren Boebert’s atrocious spelling (so not the point) but the fact-free content is freely retweeted. Sure, Twitter occasionally deletes an especially egregious tweet, but most of Boebert and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hateful drivel remains on the site. Democrats can challenge their lies but too often it’s perceived as two equally valid opinions. Astor will proceed to demonstrate this problem in her expose on political fundraising emails.
The Times reviewed more than 2,500 emails from 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022. The obvious conclusion should’ve been that Republicans are singularly graceless liars and Democrats struggle to write compelling subjects lines.
Both parties delivered heaps of hyperbole in their emails. One Republican, for instance, declared that Democrats wanted to establish a “one-party socialist state,” while a Democrat suggested that the party’s Jan. 6 inquiry was at imminent risk because the G.O.P. “could force the whole investigation to end early.”
[Oh, FFS!]
Hyperbole is an “exaggerated statement not meant to be taken literally.” Republicans aren’t kidding around. They’re liars who want their supporters to believe Democrats are un-American socialists hellbent on imposing permanent one-party role […]
However, it’s not hyperbole to state that the investigation into the January 6 insurrection is over as soon as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hands her gavel over to Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think the GOP has been fairly upfront about this. They will end the inquiry and probably immediately open a new one into Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Astor concedes that “Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about two percent for Democrats” … or not at all. Damn, two percent’s like a rounding error. Call me cynical but I usually assume even the best politicians lie at least five percent of the time. Your mother probably lies to you two percent of the time.
In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.
This is because Republicans collectively repeat shared talking points. That’s how propaganda works. Democrats are not part of an organized disinformation campaign. For instance, Senator Foghorn Leghorn John Kennedy claimed that President Joe Biden is “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.” While a great reality TV show premise, it’s also a total (and deliberate) lie.
The relatively small number of false statements from Democrats were mostly about abortion.
Oh no, are Democrats ramping up the “hyperbole” over the impending loss of Americans’ reproductive freedom? Astor tut-tutted Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s claim that the Mississippi law before the Supreme Court was “nearly identical to the one in Texas, banning abortions after 6 weeks.” See, Mississippi’s law actually bans abortion after 15 weeks and doesn’t rely on vigilante enforcement, which Astor considers the “defining characteristic of Texas’ law.” I’d argue that the lack of safe access to abortion is the “defining characteristic” of both laws, so Maloney isn’t lying when she says the laws are “nearly identical.”
A spokeswoman for Ms. Maloney called the inaccuracy an “honest mistake” and said the campaign would check future emails more carefully.
Campaign representatives for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Crenshaw did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Republican House and Senate campaign committees also did not respond to a request for comment.
This is the fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans, and the New York Times is too obsessed with its “both sides” agenda to see it.
The New York Times reported that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “frequently blocks out his daily schedule for eight hours of fund-raising calls.” Abbottt is up for re-election next year.
Judge wants ‘forgiveness and understanding’ after she’s caught on video calling suspect N-word.
Last weekend a Lafayette City Court judge and her family were the victims of a car burglary at their home. Police were called and the suspect was arrested. But, of course, that wasn’t the end of it.
Days later, Judge Michelle Odinet and her four children were captured on cellphone video watching security footage of the moment the suspected burglar was apprehended. And oh boy, did that family enjoy watching it. They whooped and hollered as they joyfully commented on the home surveillance video, calling the suspect, a Black man, a “roach” and using the N-word repeatedly.
“We have a n——. It’s a n—–, like a roach,” a female’s voice can be heard saying while laughing.
Now Odinet is asking for “forgiveness and understanding.”
“My children and I were the victim [sic] of an armed burglary at our home. The police were called and the assailant was arrested. The incident shook me to my core and my mental state was fragile,” Odinet said in a statement Monday, The Acadiana Advocate reports.
[…] Lafayette Police Sgt. Paul Mouton told KLFY that the suspect—identified as Ronald Handy—did not have a weapon with him at the time of his arrest despite the fact that [Judge Michelle Odinet] described the incident to police as an “armed burglary.”
Odinet added that she “was given a sedative at the time” and had “zero recollection of the video and the disturbing language used during it.”
“Anyone who knows me and my husband knows this is contrary to the way we live our lives. I am deeply sorry and ask for your forgiveness and understanding as my family and I deal with the emotional aftermath of this armed burglary,” she said.
[…] The sedative excuse and nonapology are not working as the judge had hoped for. And now the community is calling for her to lose her damn job—which she should.
“I’m sure that people of color will find it impossible to trust that they will be treated fairly and equally when they have to stand for judgment before Judge Odinet,” Lafayette City Marshal Reggie Thomas said in a statement Tuesday.
[…] On Monday, Lafayette NAACP chapter President Michael Toussain called for Odinet to resign.
Toussain’s letter reads in part:
“While we continue to strive to form the more perfect union there are still those who bare the mark of America’s original sin of racism. The recently reveal video is clear that Judge Michelle Odinet see people base on the color of their skin and she holds a firm belief they are no more than roaches, rats or lesser species than herself. Her quote “We got ——!” is the clearest expression of her heart in regards to respecting people of diverse racial backgrounds. If she had said “We got thieves” we would understand that, but the use of the word ——, clearly expresses that Judge Michelle Odinet places all black people in a position of inferiority and discontent. Her voice is remnant of the shouts at lynchings in years gone by and white mob’s mentality that is evident still today.”
Sen. Gerald Boudreaux called Odinet’s comments “reprehensible, offensive and unacceptable” from anyone serving as a judge, according to The Advocate, adding that he will officially petition the Judiciary Commission of Louisiana to investigate the ethical conduct and actions associated with the incident. […]
The day after Election Day 2020, a GOP lawmaker texted Mark Meadows about an “aggressive strategy” to overturn the results before knowing what they were.
As part of the contempt process against former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has released a series of texts the Republican received after Election Day 2020. The point, of course, is to demonstrate Meadows’ importance to the overall process.
[…] They’ve provided examples of important revelations they learned thanks to materials Meadows provided to investigators before he stopped cooperating.
Specifically, text messages the North Carolina Republican shared shed extraordinary light on the perspectives of GOP members and their allies before, during, and immediately after the assault on the Capitol. Last night, the collection grew, as Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland shared a text one lawmaker sent to Meadows on Nov. 4, 2020. If you saw Rachel’s A block from last night, you probably noticed this one:
“HERE’s an AGRESSIVE STRATEGY: Why can t the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS.”
In the interest of accuracy, I’ve published this exactly as it appeared, and included the abbreviations, typos, and grammatical errors that were part of the original. That said, what the unidentified Republican member was clearly referring to was a corrupt strategy in which GOP state officials in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and other states with Republican-led legislatures would agree to send pro-Trump slates of electors, regardless of voters’ will.
At that point, according to the plan, there’d be a legal dispute, which the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court could try to resolve.
[…] this was one of many related texts in which Republicans reached out to the then-White House chief of staff about plots to keep Trump in power, despite his defeat. But many of those text messages were sent in early January, shortly before the election results were scheduled to be certified.
What makes the text Raskin highlighted so notable is the date: Election Day 2020 was Nov. 3. The message about the “aggressive strategy” was sent on Nov. 4.
On Nov. 4, the presidential races in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania hadn’t even been called yet. The Democratic ticket ended up with narrow wins in these electoral battlegrounds, but the day after the election, the results were still uncertain.
[…] “A member of Congress suggested that GOP-controlled states anoint Trump electors before those states were even called. This wasn’t overturning the election. This was scrapping democracy before the votes were even counted.”
[…] there was also an email from Nov. 7, 2020 — the exact day Joe Biden was named the president-elect — in which Meadows discussed the appointment of alternate slates of electors as part of a “direct and collateral attack” after Trump’s defeat.
There was also a text message from one day earlier in which Meadows and an unidentified member of Congress discussed appointing alternate electors in certain states. The lawmaker described the plan as “highly controversial,” to which Meadows apparently replied, “I love it.”
[…]These Republicans hadn’t even had time to consider the possibility of evidence before exploring schemes to reject the results they didn’t like. It’s long been painfully obvious that the “voter fraud” pretense was baseless, but these texts — and their timing — help drive the point home.
As for the identity of those who sent Meadows these messages, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the Jan. 6 panel, told NBC News that “there won’t be any surprises as to who they are.”
[…] as Warnock knows, many Republicans did want to prevent the U.S. government from defaulting on its obligations and completely tanking the economy. They weren’t willing to openly vote on the measure that would prevent that from happening, but the end goal was important enough to enough of them to engage in some legislative shenanigans to make it happen. By contrast, there are not 10 Republican senators who want to save U.S. democracy by strengthening voting rights.
Again, Warnock knows this. But by talking about it publicly—including giving a powerful speech on the Senate floor [video available at the link] laying out his hesitation about voting to raise the debt ceiling despite inaction on voting rights—he’s sending a message about just how important this is to find the way to overcome that.
In his speech lashing the decision to bend the rules for the debt ceiling but not for voting rights, Warnock emphasized the history of Republicans admitting that they don’t want everyone to vote—placing the pressure squarely on Democrats to get voting rights done. In a blistering passage, he dismantled the rhetoric of bipartisanship when it comes to basic human and civil rights.
“Second thing I said to my Democratic colleagues today is that while we cannot let our Republican friends off the hook for not being equitable governing partners, if we are serious about protecting the right to vote that’s under assault right now, here’s the truth: It will fall to Democrats to do it. If Democrats alone must raise the debt ceiling, then Democrats alone must raise and repair the ceiling of our democracy. How do we in good conscience justify doing one and not the other? Some of my Democratic colleagues are saying, ‘But what about bipartisanship? Isn’t that important?’ I say of course it is. But here’s the thing we must remember. Slavery was bipartisan. Jim Crow segregation was bipartisan. The refusal of women’s suffrage was bipartisan. The denial of the basic dignity of members of the LGBTQ community has long been bipartisan. The Three-fifths Compromise was the creation of a punitive national unity at the expense of Black people’s basic humanity.
“So when colleagues in this chamber talk to me about bipartisanship—which I believe in—I just have to ask, ‘At whose expense?’ Who is being asked to foot the bill for this bipartisanship, and is liberty itself the cost? I submit that that’s a price too high and a bridge too far.”
Following Warnock’s Senate speech, Sen. Mark Warner announced his support for changing filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation. Sen. Michael Bennet, too, moved toward support for filibuster reform. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer addressed voting rights on the Senate floor on Wednesday morning, amid reports that he would put off a Build Back Better vote into 2022 and push to pass voting rights legislation before the end of 2021. The question is still where Democrats would find the Republican votes to even allow a simple majority vote on voting rights—or if they can get every single Democrat, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema included, on board to reform the filibuster. […]
The United Nations has reached a deal with Iran to replace cameras at an Iranian facility producing advanced centrifuges and other parts that enrich uranium for potential nuclear weapon development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency will reinstall cameras at the Karaj facility by the end of the month, which will replace those Iran had taken down in June after the complex was bombed in an attack Iranian officials blamed on Israel.
[…] IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, and the Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Mohammad Eslami, made the agreement on Wednesday and announced it in a press release on the agency’s website.
“The agreement with Iran on replacing surveillance cameras at the Karaj facility is an important development for the IAEA’s verification and monitoring activities in Iran. It will enable us to resume necessary continuity of knowledge at this facility,” Grossi said in a statement. “I sincerely hope that we can continue our constructive discussions to also address and resolve all outstanding safeguards issues in Iran.” […]
The agreement to reinstall cameras could be one sign of a breakthrough in ongoing discussions between Iran and Europe in Vienna, Austria, about potentially restarting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a 2015 pact between the west and Iran. The pact, scrapped in 2018 [scrapped by Trump], limited nuclear weapon development for Iran in return for an easing of economic sanctions on the nation. […]
The Federalist, a reliable GOP media ally, tried to run interference for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Wednesday and ended up stepping on a nice big rake instead.
The outlet published what was apparently meant to be a rebuttal to House Jan. 6 committee member Adam Schiff (D-CA) revealing on Monday that Mark Meadows had received a text from an unidentified lawmaker arguing that “On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”
Schiff didn’t identify the lawmaker by name at the time, but on Wednesday the Federalist went ahead and revealed that the sender was Jordan while simultaneously accusing Schiff of purposefully distorting the text.
In the telling of the Federalist, Schiff had deceptively edited the screenshot he presented to the House and misleadingly attributed the language to the unnamed “lawmaker.” The Federalist claimed that the text was actually written by a lawyer named Joseph Schmitz who was summarizing to Jordan his legal theory that Pence could throw out Biden electors, and that Jordan had merely forwarded Schmitz’s summary to Meadows. This, the Federalist seemed to suggest, was quite different from Jordan personally proposing that Pence do so.
The Federalist also accused Schiff of doctoring the screenshot to add a period at the end of the message and crop out an em dash. According to the Federalist, the message continued: “— in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence.” Schmitz’s purported summary to Jordan then continued for two more paragraphs.
Shortly after publishing its, uh, scoop, on Wednesday, the Federalist claimed in a triumphant follow-up post that the Jan. 6 committee had “admitted” to “doctoring” the text by … adding a period.
Checkmate!
Jordan’s office confirmed to Politico that the Republican had sent a longer text to Meadows than Schiff had presented […]
However, it’s unclear how Jordan forwarding Meadows someone else’s blueprint of how Pence could orchestrate a coup is any less damning than it would be for the lawmaker to have come up with it himself. It’s also unclear how Schiff presenting the entire coup blueprint instead of just a part of it would’ve made Jordan look any less involved in the plot.
Nonetheless, the Federalist gravely claimed that the lawmaker had been misrepresented.
[…] The Federalist’s bizarre screeds came a day after Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told CNN that the panel will soon make a decision on when to publicly identify the Republicans who texted Meadows. […]
On Friday, Dec. 10, the government won a key early ruling concerning a legal issue affecting hundreds of Jan. 6 Capitol Riot prosecutions.
[Trump appointee] U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich found that a central felony charge in a large subset of the Jan. 6 cases—“corruptly obstructing an official proceeding” —had been properly invoked and was not unconstitutionally vague. The provision has been lodged against about 270 of the more than 690 Capitol Riot defendants accused so far in federal court (about 40 percent of all cases). In many prosecutions, it is the only felony charged. Jacob Chansley, for instance—the so-called QAnon Shaman—pleaded guilty to a single charge of corruptly impeding an official proceeding. He is now appealing his 41-month sentence.
Prosecutors appear to have turned to the obstruction of an official proceeding law—which carries a 20-year maximum prison term—in lieu of invoking the more politically incendiary, rarely tested and challenging-to-prove charges of insurrection….
[Details of the case and legal issues snipped]
Judge Friedrich’s ruling does not, of course, end the dispute. At least one of these cases will be appealed, and the issue seems destined to land before the U.S. Supreme Court.
However…..this well-reasoned, textualist ruling from a Trump-appointed judge looks like a very big win for the government.
ravensays
Omicron variant may multiply 70 times faster than delta, study finds: Latest COVID-19 updates Celina Tebor John Bacon USA TODAY Dec. 16, 2021
The omicron variant multiplies 70 times faster in the human bronchial tubes than the initial COVID-19 infection or the delta variant, according to a new study from the University of Hong Kong.
The lightning-fast spread within people may explain why the variant may transmit faster among humans than previous versions, the researchers say. Their study also showed the omicron infection in the lung is significantly lower than the original SARS-CoV-2, which may be an indicator of lower disease severity. The research is currently under peer review for publication.
“By infecting many more people, a very infectious virus may cause more severe disease and death even though the virus itself may be less pathogenic,” said Dr. Michael Chan Chi-wai, the study’s principal investigator. “Therefore, taken together with our recent studies showing that the omicron variant can partially escape immunity from vaccines and past infection, the overall threat from omicron variant is likely to be very significant.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says said the omicron variant has now been reported in at least 36 states and 75 countries.
Looks like we are going into a 6th wave of Covid-19 virus here in the USA. The study says the Omicron virus multiplies 70 times faster than Delta. This is even more noteworthy since Delta is one of the most transmissable viruses we know of. In a month or two, Omicron will have taken over from Delta.
Going to be a long winter and it hasn’t even started yet until December 21, 2021.
The hospitals in a lot of places are already at capacity or way over capacity, thanks to the antivaxxers.
This affects everyone since this overcrowding is seriously pushing out medical care for everything that is non-Covid-19 virus related as well.
After Texas’ abortion ban took effect, it wasn’t long before copycats emerged. As of this week, four states are weighing Republican proposals to adopt bounty systems that effectively deputize random citizens, empowering them to file lawsuits to go after those who perform or receive abortions.
But there are different ways to copy the same “private right of action” model. As we discussed earlier this week, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, for example, announced plans to borrow Texas’ statutory chassis to target assault rifles. The Golden State could, in other words, effectively deputize random citizens, empowering them to use the courts to go after those who buy or sell illegal weapons.
Yesterday, as NBC News reported, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled a proposal, which the Republican is calling the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act” — or the “Stop WOKE Act” — using the model of Texas’ abortion ban to go after lessons on critical race theory.
Under the proposed measure, parents would be granted a “private right of action” to enforce the state’s ban on critical race theory in schools. The bill also takes aim at such training in companies, allowing individuals the right to sue businesses if they are forced to learn critical race theory…. The bill would also let parents collect attorneys fees if they are successful with their lawsuits, DeSantis said.
To be sure, it’s probably best to see this as a little political stunt from a Republican eager to score cheap points with far-right activists. There is, in reality, little to suggest critical race theory is being taught in Florida schools. The field of study was banned by state officials over the summer, so DeSantis’ plan to create anti-CRT bounty hunters is largely pointless.
[…] Going after private businesses is even more ambitious, and not entirely consistent with the right’s free-market principles. In Florida, however, it doesn’t matter whether job creators want to offer CRT-related employee training; DeSantis intends to use the courts and bounty hunters to shut that training down.
Race, history, power, and institutions will be discussed the way Republicans like — or else.
But what I find especially interesting about all of this is the sudden GOP support for trial litigation.
Democrats have tried to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, for example, which is intended to address the gender pay gap. Republicans have refused to support the bill and have killed it, more than once, with Senate filibusters. When pressed, GOP lawmakers have long argued that they’re not opponents of equal pay for equal work; they’re simply opposed to measures that reward trial attorneys, clog the courts, and put private businesses on the defensive.
And yet, it’s against this backdrop that Republicans have become enthusiastic proponents of rewarding trial attorneys, clogging the courts, and put private businesses on the defensive, just so long as the litigation relates to the far-right culture war.
If you thought the House Freedom Caucus was annoying, wait until you hear about the State Freedom Caucus Network, coming soon to a legislature near you.
[…] For much of its existence, the House Freedom Caucus was an annoyance to Republican leaders, but as GOP politics kept moving further and further to the right, its members took on greater influence. South Carolina’s Mick Mulvaney was a Freedom Caucus member who became White House chief of staff. He was succeeded by Mark Meadows, who used to lead the Freedom Caucus. Florida’s Ron DeSantis was a Freedom Caucus member who was elected governor.
Evidently, that’s just the start. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported this week on the far-right contingent’s plans to export its hardline tactics to state legislatures.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is making headlines in Washington today, but he’s also looking to make a mark on state legislatures, including Georgia’s, with the launch of the State Freedom Caucus Network. The network will be an extension of the House Freedom Caucus….
According to the Journal-Constitution’s reporting the State Freedom Caucus Network will be backed by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group led by former far-right Sen. Jim DeMint. The CPI — where Meadows has worked this year as a senior partner — is also home to Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who helped Donald Trump’s anti-election efforts.
The Conservative Partnership Institute said Tuesday that the State Freedom Caucus Network intends to seed state legislatures nationwide with “principled, America-First conservatives.” Among its principal policy priorities is “election integrity.”
[…] The network will provide a Freedom Caucus director to provide bill analysis and vote recommendations to part-time lawmakers, who are often strapped for resources…. In signature Freedom Caucus fashion, the network may also teach caucus members about its legislative rules and what procedural tools can be used as levers to exert pressure on Democrats and on their own party leaders.
As the State Freedom Caucus Network gets to work, it will reportedly have affiliates in nearly half of the nation’s state capitols. If recent history is any guide, that number will soon grow, to the detriment of governing from coast to coast.
If you thought the House Freedom Caucus was annoying, wait until you hear about the State Freedom Caucus Network, coming soon to a legislature near you.
[…] For much of its existence, the House Freedom Caucus was an annoyance to Republican leaders, but as GOP politics kept moving further and further to the right, its members took on greater influence. South Carolina’s Mick Mulvaney was a Freedom Caucus member who became White House chief of staff. He was succeeded by Mark Meadows, who used to lead the Freedom Caucus. Florida’s Ron DeSantis was a Freedom Caucus member who was elected governor.
Evidently, that’s just the start. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported this week on the far-right contingent’s plans to export its hardline tactics to state legislatures.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is making headlines in Washington today, but he’s also looking to make a mark on state legislatures, including Georgia’s, with the launch of the State Freedom Caucus Network. The network will be an extension of the House Freedom Caucus….
According to the Journal-Constitution’s reporting the State Freedom Caucus Network will be backed by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group led by former far-right Sen. Jim DeMint. The CPI — where Meadows has worked this year as a senior partner — is also home to Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who helped Donald Trump’s anti-election efforts.
The Conservative Partnership Institute said Tuesday that the State Freedom Caucus Network intends to seed state legislatures nationwide with “principled, America-First conservatives.” Among its principal policy priorities is “election integrity.”
[…] The network will provide a Freedom Caucus director to provide bill analysis and vote recommendations to part-time lawmakers, who are often strapped for resources…. In signature Freedom Caucus fashion, the network may also teach caucus members about its legislative rules and what procedural tools can be used as levers to exert pressure on Democrats and on their own party leaders.
As the State Freedom Caucus Network gets to work, it will reportedly have affiliates in nearly half of the nation’s state capitols. If recent history is any guide, that number will soon grow, to the detriment of governing from coast to coast.
Unless Kyrsten Sinema changes her mind, the Republican campaign against voting rights will go without a response from Congress.
Twice this month, the Senate made exceptions to the chamber’s filibuster rules, once to help prevent another Republican-imposed government shutdown, and again a week later to prevent a Republican-imposed debt-ceiling crisis. It wasn’t long, however, before voting rights advocates posed an important question: If the Senate can create carve outs to the filibuster to protect our economy, why not create another exception to protect our democracy?
With the Build Back Better package struggling — West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin isn’t close to supporting the measure — NBC News reported yesterday that Democratic leaders are “instead hoping to take action on voting rights.”
Senate Democrats are discussing changing the rules to allow for passage on a 50-vote majority, a move that remains uncertain. A group of four moderate Democrats, including Manchin, have held numerous meetings in the past several days to discuss a possible rule change.
As of yesterday afternoon, there was enough kinetic political activity to give the appearance of momentum. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock had made a compelling pitch in support of the idea of a carve-out to the filibuster rule, pointing to other recent exceptions from the last two weeks. The Georgian’s argument found favor with some of his more progressive colleagues, including Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, and some of his moderate colleagues, including Virginia’s Mark Warner.
Soon after, Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado also came out in support of changing the filibuster to protect voting rights, reasoning that “if we can change the process on the debt ceiling, then surely we can do the same to protect our democracy.”
[…] With all of this unfolding fairly quickly, democracy advocates started feeling at least some optimism. It was last night when Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona seemed to crush their hopes. Politico reported:
Kyrsten Sinema supports the elections reform bill that Democrats are considering a year-end push to pass. She doesn’t support a shortcut around the filibuster to get it done. The Arizona moderate is making clear that she intends to keep protecting the Senate’s 60-vote requirement on most legislation and she isn’t ready to entertain changing rules to pass sweeping elections or voting legislation with a simple majority.
As things stand, Sinema says she supports both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. That’s a good start. The problem, of course, is that the Republican minority won’t allow members to vote up or down on the proposals.
So why not create an exception to the filibuster in order to protect democracy? Sinema’s office said in a statement to Politico that if Democrats were to take such a course, their voting rights protections legislation could be “rescinded in a few years and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law, nationwide restrictions on vote-by-mail, or other voting restrictions currently passing in some states extended nationwide.”
The logic here is truly amazing: Democrats can’t pass voting rights protections on their own, because if they do, Republicans might try to undermine voting rights at some future date. And that’s why Sinema intends to do nothing as Republicans undermine voting rights right now. […]
Sen. Joe Manchin is giving himself his absolute favorite Christmas present this year: the continuing attention of the media, the president, and congressional leaders as he delays Build Back Better with his constantly shifting demands. It looks like the legislation will be delayed into 2022—and with midterm election campaigns expected to heat up quickly in 2022, that could be the kiss of death if Democrats don’t get right on it in January.
Build Back Better—often described as “social policy,” an irritating shorthand for a bill that includes health care, education, the most effective anti-child poverty measure in decades, climate change, affordable housing, and more—has already been not just trimmed but slashed in response to Manchin’s demands. But it’s like a game of whack-a-mole with one guy: Every time it seems like his most recent excuses for hesitating have been answered, he comes up with a new “concern.”
[…] Manchin’s ego has been fully on display for months now, but he’s growing increasingly thin-skinned and testy, calling a reporter “bullshit” simply for daring to ask where he currently lands on the expanded Child Tax Credit, which, when it went into effect last summer, almost immediately led to a 25% cut in child poverty. According to one estimate, 93% of West Virginia children benefit from the expanded Child Tax Credit, which has already led to a drop in food insecurity for the state’s households with children from 11.6% to 8.4%. But how dare HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney ask Lord Manchin where he stands on the issue?
The last check in the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit went out this week. The children who have not been living in poverty in recent months will soon see their fragile security torn away. […]
“I would like to see Build Back Better dealt with as quickly as possible, but if we can’t deal with it right now, it’s far more important that we deal with the voting rights issue,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. And it does seem that they can’t deal with Build Back Better right now: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer conspicuously did not offer a timetable for it when he said on Wednesday that Democrats “continue working on getting the Senate into a position where we can vote on the president’s Build Back Better legislation.”
The problem, of course, is Senate filibuster rules and the absolute opposition of Republicans to anything that might make it easier to vote. Or help poor children. Or give Democrats a win. Manchin gets to get in the way because as long as Democrats don’t have the votes to pass something, not one Republican will break ranks. Manchin gets to get in the way because Democrats have limited shots at passing legislation with a simple majority vote. And no Republican will break ranks if the stakes are high. Will Democrats find a way to overcome that blockade? It sure would be nice if they surprised us on that.
Wonkette: “Joe Biden Gonna Get The Lead Pipes Out!”
The US Centers for Disease Control makes no bones about it: There is no such thing as a safe level of lead in children’s bodies. It’s a neurotoxin that, even at very low exposure levels, has “been shown to negatively affect a child’s intelligence, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement.” And the damage it does is permanent, although there are things that can be done to help kids who’ve been affected by lead exposure.
[…] Joe Biden ran on a promise to replace all the lead water pipes in America. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in November includes $15 billion to start the job, plus another $9 billion focused on lead reduction in disadvantaged communities and an additional $970 million for upgrades to rural water systems. But because the bill had to be shrunk to make it “affordable” (hooray, bipartisanship) the new funding is simultaneously the biggest federal effort to replace lead pipes nationwide, and still well short of the estimated $60 billion it would cost to replace all of the lead water pipes out there — the Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are as many as 10 million of the things.
To help move the process along, the Biden administration announced a plan yesterday to boost lead removal beyond what the infrastructure law provides. The biggest element in the plan is the announcement that the EPA will develop new regulations that will toughen water and testing standards, effectively mandating that state and local governments speed up the replacement of lead pipes once and for all.
The Washington Post explains that this isn’t going to happen right away, though, because regulating the safety of drinking water is complicated […]
For three decades, federal requirements on how towns and cities control and test for lead in drinking water have failed to avert the worst lead-contamination crises. Numerous presidential administrations have undertaken efforts to rework the regulations, which have been criticized as complicated, poorly enforced and not stringent enough to protect Americans from a substance that scientists say is unsafe at any level.
And in fact, the EPA actually did manage last year to issue an updated rule on lead in water, possibly because Trump didn’t notice and nobody told him; it had been under development since 2010. Again, from today’s WaPo:
[…] rewrite included the first-ever requirement for utilities to test in schools and child-care facilities and to notify residents within 24 hours when tests show unsafe lead levels. But environmental advocates said a critical measure was missing: mandating the steady removal of millions of lead service lines that remain throughout the nation.
That’s the missing piece the new EPA rule will address […] The next step is to get all the lead pipes replaced everywhere. And that’ll a big damn challenge for EPA regulators:
The new rule has yet to be written, however, and it remains to be seen how exactly the agency will push water system operators to undertake costly and time-consuming replacements. The rulemaking could prove to be one of the most technically challenging regulations the Biden administration undertakes. The EPA plans to finalize the rule by October 2024, just before the next presidential election.
Yes, it’s taking (and has taken) a gallingly long time. But it’s absolutely worth taking the time to get right. And it’s going to make a huge difference for the future, according to National Resources Defense Council senior director Erik Olsen, who told the Post, “If fully implemented within 10 years, those ideas would change the course of history, by largely eliminating the scourge of lead from drinking water.”
The impacts of lead pipes and paint are not evenly distributed. Low-income people and communities of color are disproportionately exposed to the risks of lead-contaminated drinking water. Non-Hispanic Black people are more than twice as likely as non-Hispanic white people to live in moderately or severely substandard housing, which are more likely to present risks from deteriorating lead-based paint.
At the same time, EPA’s 2021 Economic Analysis of the benefits of lead service line replacement show significant increases in lifetime earnings, associated with avoided intelligence quotient (IQ) loss in children, as well as reduced risks of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and other adverse effects.
[…] And at the risk of sounding like one of those bleeding heart liberals who gives a shit about kids after they’re born, could we maybe find a way to work “savings from not having generations of kids poisoned and in poor health” in Congressional Budget Office scoring of legislation? […]
[…] Let’s take a moment to appreciate Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who have been nominating and confirming judges at a blistering pace all year. The Supreme Court may be a flaming dumpster fire, but Biden has nominated more judges than Trump did in his first disastrous year, filling vacancies at a historic pace, and judges are heading for the exits in droves while Democrats hold the Senate and the coast is clear.
Just yesterday Biden nominated nine more federal judges, bringing the total to 73, beating Trump’s record of 72. The nominees are a diverse group, not just racially but in their professional backgrounds. Yesterday’s cohort includes Nina Morris, executive director of the Innocence Project, which supports criminal justice reform and works to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners. US Magistrate Judge Kenly Kiya Kato, a former federal public defender, will be elevated to a district judgeship in California. And she’ll be joined by California Superior Court Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes, a member of the Navajo Nation and a descendant of the Coyote Pass-Jemez Clan. […]
None of these people look like GOP judicial nominees, and not just because they’re women or people of color. Republican nominees are overwhelmingly white men, who worked as federal prosecutors, and went to the same handful of law schools. You can bet your bottom dollar that none of Biden’s picks are going to be Federalist Society goons […]
And let’s give Chuck Schumer credit for moving these judges through at a clip, while celebrating their diversity.
“Our federal courts have long been presided over by former corporate lawyers and prosecutors and men,” he said in October. “They should better reflect the richness and diversity of our nation.”
[…] speaking of Chuck Grassley and disgusting bias, here’s what he said to then-US District Judge Lucy Koh in October when she came before the Committee:
What you said about your Korean background reminds me a lot of what my daughter-in-law of 45 years has said: “If I learned anything from Korean people, it’s a hard work ethic. And how you can make a lot out of nothing.”
So I congratulate you and your people.
Luckily Biden has ignored this disgusting bias. […] Koh was confirmed Monday to a seat on the Ninth Circuit, becoming the first Korean American woman ever on the federal appellate bench. She’ll be joined there by Jennifer Sung, a labor lawyer who founded SEIU’s Asian Pacific Islander caucus. Republicans tried hard to block Sung because she’d spoken out against Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a Yale alum, but Schumer forced the issue and Vice President Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote for her.
Both Chuck Schumer and V.P. Kamala Harris worked diligently, and they stood their ground when it came to confirming the first Korean American woman on the federal appellate bench.
[…] according to the people at Media Matters and the Daily Beast who are paid to watch Fox News every night of their lives, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are still totally not upset about their text messages to Mark Meadows being part of the congressional record of January 6. They are not upset that we can all see how cynical and dishonest they are as human beings, as they started manufacturing conspiracy theories about the not-an-insurrection at literally the same time they were freaking out trying to get Meadows to get Donald Trump to stop the not-an-insurrection he not-incited.
They were not upset two nights ago, and they were not upset last night. [video available at the link]
[…] Laura Ingraham pretends to cry like a real person with human emotions, saying, “I don’t think Liz Cheney likes us very much,” which makes Sean Hannity laugh. For the next however many seconds, they performatively reassure each other that they are OK and that their grief counseling is working, and Hannity says his “heart goes pitter-patter,” he is so upset. It is very convincing.
As Acyn from Media Matters suggests, this next video also serves as proof of how VERY NOT FURIOUS MAD Sean Hannity is at Liz Cheney. Maybe he’s feeling excited because he’s flanked by such super cool white people as Lara Trump and Jim Jordan — who’s also caught up in this — but the volume of his voice does strangely tick up as he says he’d like to see “all Cheney family texts, emails, transcripts, phone calls, kissing Donald Trump’s ASS to get a pardon for Scooter Libby.” [video available at the link]
[…]I n this next video [available at the link], Ingraham explains to Liz Cheney’s primary opponent Harriet Hageman, non-angrily, that Cheney is “not a Republican” because she “doesn’t seem to care about any of the issues people are really worried about.” You know how Republicans are into “issues” and “policy” LOL.
[…] “I’ve never seen anyone [referring to Liz Cheney] more obsessed with revenge and getting back at people.” [LOL]
[…] If your elderly white racist neighbors — the ones whose ugly Christmas lights say “Let’s Go Brandon” — turn on Fox News while sitting at home by themselves waiting to die, they’re going to inhale several hours in a row of seething people talking about how much they hate Liz Cheney, while trying to pretend they’re not really that mad.
Tucker Carlson got in on it two nights ago, in the bizarrest of ways, the same night Ingraham and Hannity were gaslighting America about how their diametrically opposed public and private statements on January 6 were actually the exact same. Tucker called Liz Cheney “power-drunk” and a “liar,” then continued to spread his own trademark white supremacist conspiracy theories about how January 6 wasn’t an insurrection, and how the peaceful, democracy-loving American patriot protesters who gently invaded the Capitol that day had a point about the election being unfair. […]
[From Justin Baragona]
Love that this is the big takeaway from Fox News and right-wing media and not that Jim Jordan was texting legal theories to Mark Meadows on Jan. 5 stating that Mike Pence had the legal authority to overturn the election.
Tucker Carlson: “So you always hear ‘Fox News is propaganda!’ No, there’s actually more news on Fox News than any other channel. More actual news, which is to say, facts.”
[…] In summary and in conclusion, none of these people are mad, they are all very glad, and Liz Cheney is the greatest devil tyrant Democrat in the history of devil tyrant Democrats, and Fox News is the newsiest news channel that ever said the news.
Whenever great people depart this world, it can feel as if they’ve never left. Their impact is too large and deeply felt. This is the case for bell hooks, who was born Gloria Jean Watkins 69 years ago in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. (Her pen name, which she kept in lowercase, is a tribute to her grandmother.) She passed away Wednesday […]
bell hooks wrote about the intersection of race, gender, and capitalism and how this resulted in systems that oppressed and dominated the marginalized. Her definition of feminism was simple but potent — the struggle to end sexist oppression. It was a call to action, not a bumper sticker.
As a child, she originally attended racially segregated schools, which she recalled positively compared to her experience at integrated schools where her teachers and classmates were predominately white. She graduated from Stanford with a BA in English and earned her master’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At 19, she started writing her first book, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Published in 1981, the book takes its title from activist Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech. It’s brilliant, scathing, and confrontational. hooks calls out the racism and misogyny Black women endure, while not sparing white feminist leaders throughout history. She strongly critiques Democrat (and former New York senator) Patrick Moynihan’s offensive theories about Black women, as well as patriarchal misogyny within the Black nationalist movement. [video available at the link]
An excerpt from Ain’t I A Woman:
It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.
hooks would address masculinity directly in her 2004 book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. She discussed how American society — specifically what she called the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” — criminalized and dehumanized Black men, starting at an early age. It’s especially relevant work within the context of police violence and how Black bodies are considered an inherent threat.
She challenged the impulse to connect material wealth with success or “true” manhood. […] hooks often explored the connection between art, culture, and politics. […] Her work had an astonishing diversity and breadth, ranging from sociopolitical theory, literary criticism, memoir, and poetry.
[…] Years before Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, hooks had presciently warned: “When we are taught that safety always lies in sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear — against alienation and separation. The choice to love is the choice to connect — to find ourselves in the other.”
It’s impossible to overstate her influence on today’s activists for social justice. One of the original Black Lives Matter organizers, Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State Los Angeles, said Wednesday that hooks “changed my life. Shaped me into who I am in so many ways. Thank you, Sister, for your beautiful, powerful, life work and Spirit.”
hooks wrote 40 books over her lifetime. She taught at Yale, Oberlin, and the City College of New York before returning to Kentucky in 2004 to teach at Berea College, where she eventually founded the bell hooks Institute. […]
As hospitals again reach bed capacity, we’re reminded that vaccination rates affect entire communities and health care systems.
[…] the Cleveland Clinic is “nearing hospital bed capacity” because of unvaccinated Covid-19 patients. There are countless stories like these from hospitals across the country.
[…] Bloomberg News published a report out of Kentucky this week that touched on a familiar but critically important point.
Immunization is often framed as an individual choice — particularly in Kentucky’s less-vaccinated regions. But a Bloomberg analysis of vaccine, infection and hospitalization data for the state, combined with interviews of more than 20 doctors, nurses and medical staff, show how low vaccination rates strain entire communities and health-care systems. As a new winter wave of cases hits, those same dynamics are pushing hospitals around the U.S. to the brink.
The article added, “Those states will not be the only ones. A worrying new variant is spreading, hospitals are filling, and millions remain unvaccinated. If America keeps stress-testing its hospitals and their staff, some of them will break.”
I will gladly concede that this is not an original point. The opposite is true: We’ve seen similar reports for months, each of which have tried to drive home the point that when Americans choose to go unvaccinated, their choice affects others.
But let’s reemphasize the facts anyway.
One of the most common assertions from those who refuse to get vaccinated and/or refuse to wear mask protections is that they’re making a personal choice. It is, the argument goes, a private matter, to be left to individuals and their consciences. They say that if they want to take risks, that’s up to them — and they’re prepared to accept the consequences as private citizens, come what may.
[…] reality tells a very different story. At issue is a dangerous contagion. There is a safe and effective vaccine that’s readily available for free. Those who believe they’re taking a personal risk by rejecting that vaccine are actually creating a societal hazard — one that, among other things, fills hospitals and delays medical care for everyone in the community, whether they’ve contracted the virus or not.
When areas run out of intensive-care-unit beds, which has happened this year and will likely continue to happen, it obviously affects Covid-19 patients in extreme distress. But it also affects those who have heart attacks. And strokes. And who get into car accidents.
People weighing whether to do the right thing need to understand that their personal choice isn’t just a personal choice.
Did you hear the one about Rep. Paul Gosar’s chief of staff trying to catch a Korean plane full of fraudulent ballots in Arizona?
Even among radical voices in Republican politics, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona stands out as extraordinary. Plenty of GOP officials peddle strange conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, but the Arizona congressman — best known for his associations with white nationalists and an animated video in which he was depicted killing one of his House colleagues — is a special case.
After all, Gosar has described President Joe Biden as a “fraudulent usurper.” He called the certification of the election results “sedition.” He praised Jan. 6 rioters as “peaceful patriots.” He recently claimed to have a secret CIA source who told him about hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes, pointing to an intelligence office that doesn’t appear to exist.
But this week, we gained new insights into just how seriously the far-right lawmaker and his office went in pursuit of these conspiracy theories.
The New York Times reported on the “band of loyalists” who worked closely with Trump in the aftermath of his defeat, taking on “an outsize role in pressuring the Justice Department, amplifying conspiracy theories and flooding the courts in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.”
Not surprisingly, Gosar was a member of this inner circle, and the article noted that he played a direct role in lobbying his home state’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, pressing him to investigate voting equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that’s been at the heart of many discredited right-wing claims.
But the Times’ article then referenced an anecdote I hadn’t heard before.
Mr. Gosar embraced the fraud claims so closely that his chief of staff, Tom Van Flein, rushed to an airplane hangar parking lot in Phoenix after a conspiracy theory began circulating that a suspicious jet carrying ballots from South Korea was about to land, perhaps in a bid to steal the election from Mr. Trump, according to court documents filed by one of the participants.
Over the course of 2021, there’s been a debate in some circles over the sincerity of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists. Some have argued that the Republicans who peddle this nonsense realize that they’re shoveling garbage, but they do so anyway because it’s good for fundraising; it helps justify new voter-suppression measures; it keeps the GOP base agitated ahead of the 2022 midterm cycle; and it undermines Joe Biden’s presidency. They know they’re lying, the argument goes, but Republicans have concluded that these are lies worth telling.
Others have argued that the GOP’s election conspiracy theorists are so far gone that they’ve started to believe that the nonsense is true. They’re lying, but they no longer appreciate the differences between fact and fiction.
The truth is, it’s not an either/or problem: There are plenty of Republican charlatans who are well aware of the scam, while others are true believers.
But this anecdote from the Times suggests Team Gosar has bought into the conspiracy theories to an unsettling degree.
In most congressional offices, absurd rumors about a Korean plane full of fraudulent ballots would’ve generated eye-rolling and indifference. But in Gosar’s office, the congressman’s chief of staff reportedly tried to catch the plane and uncover proof of a nefarious scheme.
The Times’ report added, “The claim turned out to be baseless.” You don’t say.
We knew the Republican National Committee was paying legal bills for Donald Trump. We didn’t realize just how much the party was spending.
Just eight months into Donald Trump’s term, the public learned that the Republican National Committee was helping pay the then-president’s legal bills as part of the investigation into the Russia scandal. […] no other American president had ever used donor money this way.
As regular readers may recall, however, the party had a plausible defense for the arrangement: RNC leaders said they felt the need to support their own party’s president. The Russia scandal was clearly part of Trump’s presidency — it’s not as if Republican donors were paying for legal expenses wholly unrelated to political developments — which in turn made the arrangement at least somewhat justifiable.
It was last month, however, when the story took a surprising turn. The Washington Post reported that the RNC had agreed to pay some of Trump’s personal legal bills as part of investigations into his financial practices in New York — practices that predated his political career. Even some in the party weren’t pleased in response to the revelations.
One RNC official told CNN the relationship between Trump and the national party is effectively “a hostage situation”: The RNC simply can’t afford to make the former president unhappy, so it pays these bills to prevent Trump from retaliating against the party.
At the time, the controversy stemmed from over $120,000 in RNC spending. As the Post reported overnight, it now appears the party is spending far more on Trump’s lawyers than we previously realized.
The Republican Party has agreed to pay up to $1.6 million in legal bills for former president Donald Trump to help him fight investigations into his business practices in New York, according to Republican National Committee members and others briefed on the decision. The party’s executive committee overwhelmingly approved the payments at a meeting this summer in Nashville, according to four members and others with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting of the executive committee.
The article added, “That means the GOP’s commitment to pay Trump’s personal legal expenses could be more than 10 times higher than previously known.”
There’s no suggestion that such an arrangement is illegal. If this is how the Republican National Committee wants to spend its money, it’s free to do so.
[…] Paul Seamus Ryan, a campaign-law expert at Common Cause, told the Post, “This is an abuse of donor trust,” Ryan said. “I’ve been following money in politics closely for more than two decades, and I’m unaware of any similar past abuse of donor trust and donor money to pay personal legal bills of private citizens.”
[…] Trump is dealing with investigations into alleged financial misdeeds that occurred before he went down the escalator in June 2015.
[…] Making matters even more amazing, the former president — who, again, claims to have vast wealth — has spent the last year aggressively raising as much money as humanly possible from his committed followers. As Rachel noted on last night’s show, Trump’s political operation has more than $100 million in the bank.
And yet, there’s the Republican National Committee, writing checks for Trump anyway.
[Trump]t does not work for the RNC. He’s not a nominee or a candidate for any public office. But this private citizen nevertheless sees the party as something he controls — and Republican officials are clearly willing to follow his lead.
[…] Almost two years into this pandemic we have managed to be at least partly caught off guard by another blowup of the disease.
How is that possible?
Let’s start with the fact that we in the US do not have the genomic testing and surveillance capacity we should. If you look state by state the quality and recency of the data seems to depend to a great degree on the research interests of the scientists in the major research centers in your state – which isn’t great. But it’s not just that. It takes some time to run these tests. And Omicron is spreading as fast or faster.
I’ve had some difficulty getting a clear read on how long it takes to do this sequencing. Certainly it will vary between the speed in which a national lab can sequence a first sample and how it works when a state or city labs is doing it with large numbers of samples. This researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine says it takes them 7 to 10 days. But there’s a shortcut you can take to be fairly certain you’re dealing with Omicron. It’s called S gene target failure. Basically it’s one signature that is not unique to Omicron but isn’t included in Delta, what was the dominant strain. So this S gene target failure is presumptively an omicron case even if it has to be confirmed by subsequent sequencing.
So, for example, Connecticut released data today that showed that 5% of specimens were confirmed for Omicron. But SGTF data from Yale New Haven Hospital shows that number is between 12% and 30%. These are small samples. And one day can be an outlier […] It’s also just one part of the state. But setting aside the precise numbers, the point is that Omicron is spreading much faster than its presence can be confirmed with sequencing. If you’re seeing Omicron numbers in your region, see whether they’re sequenced or if these rough approximations are based on SGTF.
Meanwhile a major medical center in San Diego says that 25% of new cases seem to be Omicron.
[…] Yesterday the CDC said that New York and New Jersey are seeing the fastest spread of Omicron: 13% vs 3% in the nation as a whole. It’s not clear to me whether those numbers are from sequenced specimens or approximated counts based on SGTF. The wording suggests it’s the former, in which case the number at this moment is likely much higher. But if it’s true that the percentage of Omicron’s share of cases is doubling every two days, how much does it really matter?
What does seem clear is that current explosive growth of cases in the Northeast, especially in the New York City metropolitan area, is being driven at least in part by the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. And it is growing rapidly as a share of COVID in circulation. It’s ahead of the rest of the country. But probably not by much.
Is this just a case of Mitch McConnell seeing which way the wind is blowing?
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has apparently had a change of heart about the Jan. 6 committee, saying Thursday that “the public needs to know” its findings on the “horrendous event.”
“I think the fact-finding is interesting,” he added during an interview with Spectrum News that aired Thursday. “We’re all going to be watching it.”
McConnell’s newfound eagerness is a markedly different tone than he struck during the creation of the committee. Back in May, he said that an investigation under Democratic leadership would be “slanted and unbalanced.” […]
Could this be Mitch McConnell gleefully seeing potential competitors for future Republican leadership in the Senate being taken down by the Jan. 6 committee? Does he see the committee’s findings finally knocking Trump off his gaudy pedestal?
Posted by readers of the article:
McConnell is doing some insider trading and getting out ahead of an upcoming news cycle. I wonder who’s feeding him info? Probably one of Cheney’s or Kinzinger’s aids who is hoping to move on up the ladder.
——————–
McConnell wouldn’t mind getting rid of a few traitors from the GOP caucus if the DOJ and Dems do it for him.
———————-
With Marjorie Taylor Greene badmouthing McConnell with trump’s support, McConnell’s statement allows him to do a bit of knife-twisting in return as well as beginning a plausible CYA
[…] The Senate parliamentarian delivered to Democrats another lump of coal late Thursday, shooting down their third consecutive attempt to craft an immigration reform measure that can slip by the Byrd Rule and make it into the reconciliation package.
“We strongly disagree with the Senate parliamentarian’s interpretation of our immigration proposal, and we will pursue every means to achieve a path to citizenship in the Build Back Better Act,” a host of senators, led by Schumer, said in a statement. But Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), a leader on the immigration push, told reporters soon after the opinion dropped that there is no Plan D “at this point.”
President Joe Biden promised future progress on both reconciliation and voting rights legislation in a statement. He wasn’t coy about pointing to the root of the problem, dropping Manchin’s name three times in the brief remarks.
“My team and I are having ongoing discussions with Senator Manchin; that work will continue next week,” he said of the reconciliation bill. “It takes time to finalize these agreements, prepare the legislative changes, and finish all the parliamentary and procedural steps needed to enable a Senate vote.”
“At the same time, we must also press forward on voting rights legislation, and make progress on this as quickly as possible,” he added. “I had a productive conversation today with several Senators about how we can get this vital legislation passed. […]
It can be so hard to find the perfect gift! But great news!
From the family that bought you An Organization That Will Give Some Undetermined Amount of Money to Children’s Cancer, But Mostly Won’t, and the malign, sentient random-word generator that produces all headlines now, comes: Melania Trump’s New NFT Platform!
Do you want to give to a charity, but not too much? Do you understand NFTs, but not too much? Well, rest easy: “Melania Trump is pleased to announce the Melania Trump non-fungible token (NFT) platform, which will release NFTs in regular intervals exclusively on MelaniaTrump.com.”
The first NFT will be called “Melania’s Vision,” apparently “a breathtaking watercolor art” (that is the correct unit, I think, for describing when someone paints something, just as the Mona Lisa is “a breathtaking oil art”) that “embodies Mrs. Trump’s cobalt blue eyes, providing the collector with an amulet to inspire.”
You know, initially I was a little worried there might be something not entirely aboveboard about Melania Trump’s new NFT venture, which also claims it will somehow provide children from foster care with computer science skills. […] But now that I know they are selling amulets, I am utterly reassured!
Nothing says “this is not a scam” like “we sell amulets.” Anyway, this art will also include an audio recording from Mrs. Trump with a “message of hope,” which almost certainly will not turn out to be her reading a snippet of “Becoming.”
Melania Trump is going to release more of these, including in “a one-of-a-kind auction of historical importance scheduled in January 2022” that will include “digital artwork, physical artwork, and a physical one-of-a-kind accessory,” which had better be another amulet or I’m going to riot.
“A portion of the proceeds” (definitely doesn’t need to be more specific!) “will assist children aging out of the foster care system by way of economic empowerment and with expanded access to resources needed to excel in the fields of computer science and technology.” Once again, I do not think, from the way this is worded, that you can rule out that Melania Trump has hired a specific child as her computer programmer and this is how she is describing paying their salary and letting them use a computer to set up her website.
[…] if there were one family in the world I would trust to take my money, claim they were using “a portion” of it for possibly charitable activity, and transform it into brass fixtures and grift, it would be this one. I’m just glad it’s in time for Christmas.
Guests of a holiday party thrown at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s home were urged to be vaccinated in order to attend, according to a report by Politico.
Kennedy, the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, is a longtime, prominent anti-vaccine advocate. Because of his history speaking against vaccination, guests were surprised when they received an invitation for a party at his California home that asked those attending to be vaccinated against the coronavirus and to take COVID-19 tests beforehand, Politico reported.
Kennedy, however, told Politico that it was the doing of his wife, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress Cheryl Hines, as he said the party was held for Hines’s friends in the entertainment industry. Kennedy stated that he had not been aware of the contents of the invitation prior to the day of the party.
Kennedy said to Politico, “I guess I’m not always the boss at my own house.”
[…] “It is criminal medical malpractice to give a child one of these vaccines,” Kennedy stated at a far-right conference, according to the AP, going against the consensus of medical experts.
Kennedy said at the same conference that profits from his book would go to his charity Children’s Health Defense, which has fueled misinformation against COVID-19 vaccines while drawing credibility from Kennedy’s family name, per to the AP.
Other members of Kennedy’s family, however, have called his anti-vaccine work “dangerous,” the AP reported.
Kennedy’s sister Kerry Kennedy has spoken out against his use of the former president’s name to promote his anti-vaccine disinformation, according to the AP.
“Anyone who believes this does not know their history. Vaccinations were a major effort of John F. Kennedy, both as a senator and later as president,” she said, per the AP.
“I love Bobby, I think he’s just completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous,” added Kerry. “Failure to take vaccines puts people’s lives at risk. It not only impacts the person who refuses the jab but imperils the community at large.”
Kennedy has been named one of the internet’s “Disinformation Dozen” — the top disseminators of disinformation about vaccines online — by the Center for Digital Hate, per the AP, in part because of the false information spread through the website for his charity.
Posts related to vaccines from Children’s Health Defense have been shared more often on Twitter than those from credible news sources including CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, per the AP.
Kennedy himself was banned from Instagram earlier this year for spreading disinformation about vaccines on the platform.
Young ‘long haulers’ featured in ad campaign targeted at unvaccinated
Hello, Readers, I see that the previous chapter of the Infinite Thread reached its 500-comment limit. It rolled over to start again at comment #1.
For your convenience, here are a few links back to the previous chapter:
White House seeks to boost Covid vaccine manufacturing by 1B doses a year
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/10/16/infinite-thread-xxi/comment-page-1/#comment-2112503
More intense weather systems … and the resulting damage: “A record heatwave killed hundreds in BC just months ago; today, rain cuts off Vancouver from Canada.”
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/10/16/infinite-thread-xxi/comment-page-1/#comment-2112502
Republican seeks credit for infrastructure bill he voted against
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/10/16/infinite-thread-xxi/comment-page-1/#comment-2112500
A white voter in Nevada cast an illegal ballot for his dead wife. He received a vastly lighter sentence than Crystal Mason. This keeps happening.
The space debris problem is getting dangerous
The ISS seems fine after a Russian weapons test blew up a defunct satellite, but these incidents could become more common.
Wonkette: “Jim Bob Duggar So Mad Son Canceled Just For ALLEGED Child Porn That He Is Running For Office”
Link
Bureau Of Labor Statistics Had One Job. Is That Job One Or 19 Jobs?
Followup to comment 490 in the previous chapter of this thread.
“Chuck Todd Pretty Sure Biden’s Historic Infrastructure Bill Is DOOOOOM For Democrats, DOOOOOM.”
Link
Kyrsten Sinema Would Like To Thank Kyrsten Sinema For Her Hard Work Passing The Bipartisan Sinema Bill
Link
“Art” that makes you shudder:
Link
You can view the awfulness at the link.
Followup to comments 439, 449, and 460 in the previous chapter of this thread.
Belarus moved migrants from the Polish border to a warehouse, easing the crisis for now.
Washington Post link
Water cannons were used against migrants that were already freezing, with some of them dying from the cold.
Lukashenko is cynically using migrants to gain a political advantage in negotiations with the E.U.
For now, it looks like international outrage against the inhumane conditions for migrants has forced a small improvement.
Lynna@8, Any suggestions on how I can unsee that McNaughtonian faeces?
US Capitol
rioter[insurrectionist] who wore horned headdress sentenced to 41 monthsThe Grauniad’s snark machine is snarking, Americans were horrified to be told to live like Europeans. Is it longer life expectancy they mind?:
As someone residing in France, sometimes considered to be in Europe, except when it’s confused with Réunion, which is part of France but a hemisphere away and listed as a separate location, uninhabited until 1665, meaning France was vacant until then, which would be a surprise to a lot of French. And most everyone else. Anyways, no, there aren’t any “computers” here, except for badly-paid young ladies graciously granted an education. I’m reading baked clay tablets imported from Londinium via the Germanic tribes (need anything, even a monk, hire a Norseman!), and replying with the older, more trustworthy, technology of chiselled stone. Perhaps you’re thinking of papyrus, albeit I didn’t think that had made it into the frozen wastelands to the north. Wasn’t too sure people had either. There is a plentiful supply of chains here, along with our own kookery of loons.
Don’t mention the cheese, you British Industrial Cheddar mongers! The mildly deranged penguin will soon fly over and explain at great length, LOUDLY!, that not only is your cheeseboard not up to snuff, not even being fit a mushy pea, you don’t know how to spell “whiskey”. And if you mention it’s spelled the same incorrect way here in France, I mean Réunion, she’ll point you also don’t know how to spell “ghoti”.
If we may interrupt this snark, yeah, that’s a point which continues to astonish me. I have a plan with provides mobile, landline (not really used), and optical fibre-into-the-lair (at fabulously fast down- and up-load speeds with a huge limit), for only a few dollars more than what the author says they’re paying…
What’s this “refrigerator”?
Bloomberg’s opinion column (linked embedded in first excerpt) seems very largely reasonable. Albeit with the caveat of speaking from experience (decades on both sides of the pond), even the title seems reasonable.
There doesn’t seem to be an isolated video (at the present time), but this excerpt from Jimmy Kimmel, Trump’s Pre-Riot Blowup with Pence, Aaron Rodgers Returns & New Book for Kids with Anti-Vax Parents (video) is brilliant — “Dot Got a Shot” (c.11:30 mark if the link is borked.)
blf in comment 10: “Lynna@8, Any suggestions on how I can unsee that McNaughtonian faeces?”
OMG, I have been trying and failing for hours. My next plan is to inundate my eyeballs with images I actually like, Ile aux Fleurs Near Vetheuil for example, and hope that works as the visual equivalent of cleansing one’s palate.
In Kansas, Reality and conspiracy collide at Lawrence COVID-19 vaccine clinic for kids:
Good grief, DeSantis Spokesperson Blames Vaccine Passport on the Rothschilds:
Apparently, Pushaw has since claimed an absurd explanation (something about the Georgian government trolling anti-vaxxers), see the article…
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Gene Simmons for vaccine comments:
Conspiracy theories run rampant during testimony on Gov DeSantis’ vax mandate ban:
Ah yes, there’s centuries of data for both ivermectin (discovered in 1975) and hydroxychloroquine (1955), to treat Covid-19 (2019), albeit not the virus causing it (SARS-Cov-19, 2019). The vaccines, specially designed to combat the virus, have been available for almost a year, and zillions of over 4 billion people jabbed have turned into Gates’s Magnetic Monster. Clearly !
And oh, b.t.w., whilst the vaccine is free, the costs of hospitalisation (potentially including an ICU stay), long-Covid, etc., is not. Clearly, it’s more cost-effective to get sick, and possibly die or suffer for (potentially) years, then get a jab. Makes perfect sense!
Good news: Gosar was censured.
House censures GOP’s Paul Gosar following violent video
The vote on censuring Paul Gosar was obviously about his indefensible video, but it was also about overdue accountability for an odious public figure.
Followup to comment 19.
Wyoming’s Liz Cheney and Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger voted with the Democratic majority to censure Gosar and to strip him of his committee assignments.
“Without committee assignments, the congressman’s day-to-day responsibilities as a federal legislator have been dramatically curtailed.”
Followup to comments 19 and 20.
More background on Arizona Republican Paul Gosar: He publicly associated with white nationalists, and he praised insurrectionist rioters. Gosar told voters that President Joe Biden is a “fraudulent usurper.” The most recent revelation of his rotten core became public via a threat to murder AOC, (with the threat thinly disguised as a cartoon). Gosar also fantasized about killing President Biden.
John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, is no longer holding back
It says a lot about the former president that the man who served at his side for a year and a half seems to hold him in barely contained contempt.
Followup to comments 19, 20 and 21.
Link
New Yorker link
The tacky, unethical show must go on:
Link
Damn, she’s good!
AOC on the House floor.
re Lynna @23: For the republican hypocrisy about depicted violence, I have two words: Kathy Griffin.
stroppy @26, yes. She knows whereof she speaks, and how to get her message across effectively. AOC is good at honing in on the core issue.
johnson catman @27, good point!
In other news, Republicans keep complaining about the Biden administration stopping illegal fentanyl shipments at the border. It’s getting a little weird.
Oh, FFS.
A partisan gap emerges on flu shots
That’s just peachy. It means that not only do I live in a state where fewer people are vaccinated against Covid, but I will also live in a community where more people refuse to get the flu vaccine.
I would not say that “the pandemic has created a partisan gap on flu shots.” The partisan gap on flu shots is sludge comprised of willful ignorance, misinformation being distributed relentlessly, and herd mentality focused around the Trump cult.
Record-setting judicial nominees weather GOP bluster
Four prospective federal judges are the latest to face down Republican criticism that their histories as public defenders and advocates will produce bias on the bench.
Rose Wagner / November 17, 2021
More Republican overwrought distress at the link.
Republicans are undermining U.S. foreign policy.
Link
Say, what now? Gosar Reposts, Then Deletes Again Violent AOC Vid After Censure
Followup to comment 32.
Posted by readers of the article:
Travis McMichael admits during cross-examination that Ahmaud Arbery had not even threatened him
Link
Washington Post link
Hmm.
Cowardly Republicans, a continuing series:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/top-republicans-gosar-abc-news-karl`
Comments posted by readers of the article:
Tweet from Aaron Rupar:
This is in reference to what stroppy mentioned in comment 37.
https://mobile.twitter.com/atrupar/status/1461391060962316292
Video is available at the link.
Even Rupert Murdoch Is Telling Trump To Get Over It, Loser
Nicolle Wallace Performs Live Autopsy On Pathetic Gasbag Chris Christie
The latest salvo in the debate on covid’s origins: A virologist argues the first case is tied to a Wuhan market, contradicting WHO.
Washington Post link
More at the link, including additional links embedded in the Washington Post article to lead readers to more information.
There’s what John Eastman says … and then there’s reality:
Link
Revenge! A major Republican theme.
GOP rallying cry for 2022: We’re going to make Democrats pay for governing
@ 44
You see, this is what the Democrats and American liberals just can’t wrap their heads around: It’s not just their political opponents disagree with Democrats/liberals/leftists, but they violently HATE them. The Republicans fervently believe that Democratic policies are morally depraved, totalitarian, and in the case of the more religious ones, literally diabolical. Therefore anything that happens to the Dems is not only justified, but a moral imperative; a righteous blow against the forces of “evil.”
Of course, my suggestion would be to hate them back and do onto others before. they do it on to you, but nooooooo. The Democrats and liberals still operate under the delusion they can reason with the Right, and if you just say “pretty please” enough they’ll see the light.
This is not some genteel debate club. This is war, start acting like it.
It wasn’t easy, but House Dems passed their Build Back Better Act
It is not an exaggeration to say that the benefits in this legislation will be life-changing for millions of families. It’s a transformative bill.
Ha! McCarthy shot himself in the foot.
Louisiana’s Kennedy dabbles in modern-day McCarthyism
If Sen. John Kennedy’s line of questioning against Saule Omarova sounded familiar, it’s probably because it echoed Joe McCarthy’s tactics.
Followup to comment 46.
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1461545599501807617
Kevin McCarthy shouted:
Biden To Take Key Step Toward Ousting Postmaster Louis DeJoy
President Kamala Harris … briefly.
Link
Sound and fury signifying nothing.
Link
Yes, Republicans are using McCarthy’s stunt for fundraising, but for the most part everyone is just making fun of McCarthy.
Link
“Jesus Goat Cheese-Gobblin’ Christ, this shit is bonkers.”
Representative Lauren BOEBERT [Republican and crackpot doofus extremis]: “Democrat policies are so pathetic and have done so poorly that the left has nothing else to do but troll the internet looking for ways to get offended, and then try to target members and strip them of their committees. This is a dumb waste of the House’s time. But since the speaker has designated the floor to discuss members’ inappropriate action, shall we? The jihad squad member from Minnesota has paid her husband—and not her brother-husband, the other one—over a million dollars in campaign funds. This member is allowed on the Foreign Affairs Committee while praising terrorists. A Democrat chairwoman incited further violence in the streets outside of a courthouse. And then the cherry on top. My colleague, and three-month presidential candidate from California [Eric Swalwell], who is on the Intelligence Committee, slept with Fang Fang, a Chinese spy. Let me say that again. A member of Congress who receives classified briefings was sleeping with the enemy. This is unacceptable and this would never see …”
Commentary:
Link
Coronavirus in Norway:
Link
Followup to comments 48 and 51.
Wonkette:
Link
FDA authorizes Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna boosters for all adults.
Washington Post link
As we previously discussed, the House censured Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, and stripped him of his committee assignments. Yesterday, Donald Trump issued a statement giving Gosar his “Complete and Total Endorsement!” Random capitalization is still a Trump thing.
I guess Trump likes it when people threaten to kill AOC with a sword.
Nazis try to out-white supremacist each other in closing arguments
@ 46
Now, let’s watch as this “success” get’s tuened into bitter failure as Manchin and Sinema vote against it.
Oh, FFS.
Jury finds Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges
Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty. It was not surprising at all. He was following the law. The stupid law that allows him, a private citizen, to carry assault rifles and shoot people as soon as he feels a tiny with threatened.
Far-Right Groups See ‘Precedent’ In Rittenhouse Acquittal
See also: https://twitter.com/RepJerryNadler/status/1461775482496724998
That last paragraph/tweet is from Representative Jerry Nadler
Wonkette:
https://www.wonkette.com/this-is-legal-now
New York Times link
Link
Video available at the link. Transcript:
Kyle Rittenhouse will be a guest on Fox News, on Tucker Carlson’s show. Of course.
Politico:
As a coal plant fights for life, it could enrich Manchin
By Scott Waldman / 11/20/2021
More on coal waste and the Manchin family at the link.
The money angle:
About “self-defense” and “stand your ground””
New Yorker link
Nasa/JPL released two videos of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity’s 13th flight (on September 4th, prior to solar conjunction (apparently, the data has only recently been downloaded)), shot with the two-camera Mastcam Z on the Perseverance rover, NASA’s Perseverance Captures Challenging Flight by Mars Helicopter (two videos). One is a relative close-up showing take-off, part of the flight, return, and landing; the other video is a wider-angle capturing most of the flight. The 13th flight did some additional surveying of Séítah, and the close-up Perseverance video was to observe the dust kicked up.
The next flight (16) will occur any time “now”, possibly even today (Nov 20th).
Cartoon: “Did you bring parliamentary procedure to a knife fight again?”
New Yorker link
tomh @67, that is very concerning. It looks like, to at least some degree, Joe Manchin is protecting his income instead of working to address climate change. That is so short sighted.
Followup to tomb’s comment #67.
Link
Nice tweet:
https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1462118955930247174
Glenn Youngkin is already being rebuked by right-wingers for insufficient loyalty to MAGA madness
Boston’s first woman, person of color, and Asian American mayor is wasting no time.
Link
OMG, Ted Cruz. Please just shut up.
Link
NYT:
G.O.P. Donors Back Manchin and Sinema as They Reshape Biden’s Agenda
Kenneth P. Vogel and Kate Kelly / November 21, 2021
Way too much detail to quote, but the bottom line is obvious. Millions are flowing to Manchin and Sinema. Obstructing the Democratic agenda is a very lucrative tactic.
John Oliver talks about union busting. Scroll down at the link for the video.
Link
Wonkette:” Pillow Guy, Kid Rock, Proud Boys: It’s A Big Weekend For Terrible Men Doing Weird Shit”
Link
An SUV has plowed into a Christmas parade in Waukesha Wisconsin this afternoon. Dozens injured, and possible fatalities.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/21/us/waukesha-car-parade-injured-dead/index.html
@ 80
Awww hell! I was born in Waukesha and I live only 10 miles from there.
Democracy scholars on voting rights: ‘Midnight is approaching’
“To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form would be a short-sighted blunder that future historians will forever puzzle over.”
Link
Dunderheads encouraging more violence: GOP congressman urges supporters to be ‘armed’ and ‘dangerous’
Following the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Rep. Madison Cawthorn told his allies, “Be armed, be dangerous and be moral.”
Fox News Contributors Call It Quits Over Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 Propaganda
Donald Trump Jr. Promoted Giving a New AR-15 to Kyle Rittenhouse
Coronavirus update:
Link
Followup to comment 82.
Poll shows Sinema’s popularity dropping further among Arizona Democrats
Too fucking late to save our democracy.
@ 82
It’s already well past midnight, and dawn is rising on our new, hellish, fascist future.
Lynna, OM @85
IOW, “responsible” propaganda is 1% less obvious than 100%, unadulterated Fox-pucky. Such discriminating taste rises to the level of true connoisseurship.
Trump wants to hide pandemic information from Congress, too
Team Trump isn’t just trying to hide Jan. 6 information from Congress, it’s also trying to hide information about the federal response to Covid-19.
Oh, shit.
Associated Press link
Yes, some of the January 6 insurrectionists were armed with guns:
Link
Sure, “nonviolent,” … not so much. He wanted to shoot Nancy Pelosi.
Oh, FFS.
Supreme Court leaves unconstitutional Texas abortion ban in place for at least another week
Wonkette:
Link
See also: https://twitter.com/MattNegrin
Followup to comments 80 and 81.
Five killed at Wisconsin parade by driver allegedly fleeing a knife fight are identified.
Washington Post link
Associated Press:
Washington Post:
NPR:
Followup to comment 96.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/stunning-details
@ 96 & 100
The fascists over at the Washington Examiner are claiming that a “BLM activist” says that the Waukesha incident was retaliation for the Rittenhouse verdict.
Trump said the Jan. 6 rioters posed “zero threat.” Ron Johnson said they weren’t really “armed.” Reality tells a different story.
Link
Some of the attorneys who wasted everyone’s time with baseless pro-Trump, anti-election litigation are now facing meaningful consequences.
Link
As Texas’ Louie Gohmert eyes a new office, it’s as if he’s passing the torch to a new generation of outlandish members of Congress.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder’s National Redistricting Action Fund filed suit yesterday challenging Ohio’s new congressional map. The litigation was filed in state court, alleging that the new district lines violate the Ohio’s state constitution.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/2021/11/22/redistricting-eric-holder-backed-lawsuit-challenges-ohio-congressional-map/8710272002/
Jim Jordan Still Isn’t Sure How Many Times He Spoke To Trump On Jan. 6
Link
The RNC is paying Trump’s personal legal fees for crimes he allegedly committed before he was even a candidate for president. Trump has thoroughly conned the RNC.
To just about nobody’s surprise, in teh “U”K, Post-Brexit scheme to lure Nobel winners to UK fails to attract single applicant:
For comparison, France also has a(? several?) scheme to attract scientists, but it’s neither elitist nor a joke — and has worked, French president’s climate talent search nabs 18 foreign scientists (December 2017):
That particular French scheme was set-up in response to hair furor’s tantrum at the Paris Climate Accord, and was largely targeting environmental / climate scientists in the States. I do not know if the scheme is still running, or how many in total have been accepted to-date (the 18 quoted above was the very first tranche).
Queue the nanoviolin (singular, and preferably out of tune), Seven doctors contract Covid after attending Florida anti-vaccine summit:
Full congratulations to quack Boros’ father for being double-jabbed (presuming teh quack isn’t lying).
In Germany, Carnival photos add to woe of coach accused of faking Covid pass:
The ironic spectacle of Kyle Rittenhouse’s Tucker Carlson interview
Days after his acquittal and as protests continued, he likened his jail cell to “a one-star hotel” and lashed out at the American legal system.
Wonkette: “Seven Magnificent COVID Deniers Somehow Get COVID After Florida COVID Denial Conference”
In Ozland,
Liberal[LNP (Lunatic nazi party)] MP Gerard Rennick’s Facebook reposts on Covid vaccines could be dangerous, health expert says (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}; my added emboldening):For fecks sake, Canadians End Up In ICU After Attending ‘Covid Party’ (Forbes edits in {curly braces}):
A snipped from the 5th September Forbes article about the lack of antibodies in people who have recovered from Covid-19 (link embedded in above excerpt):
More for feck’s sake, 2 Out Of 3 Americans Want A Vaccine Mandate For Domestic Air Travel, But Buttigieg Says It’s Not Going To Happen:
WHO is advising a “vaccine-plus” strategy, that is, vaccines plus other measures (especially masks), not vague handwaving.
Here in France, there is a national track-and-trace app, which is also the famous Health Pass, showing proof of full-vaccination (soon to include boosters). You must show it for many things, including long-distance travel (trains and all(?) flights). Vistors to France are not exempt (some foreign proof-of-vaccination is easy to convert into a Health Pass, others… not so much; the French Health Pass is compatible with the EU(-wide?) scheme).
New Yorker link
Remember the headlines about the Build Back Better bill lowering taxes on millionaires? That was based on an analysis that turned out to be wrong.
Link
Proud Boys march again by attaching themselves to New York, Los Angeles anti-vaccine rallies
The leaders of the German Social Democrats, Greens and “Free Democrats” (neoliberals) have reached a coalition agreement. This has to be approved by the SPD and FDP party conferences, and a vote of the Green membership. Supposedly combating climate change will be central to the coalition programme, but since the FDP, who oppose both tax rises and increasing government debt, have secured the finance ministry, it’s not clear where the money for any serious attempt to do this would come from.
Link
The new tallies on initial unemployment claims aren’t just better now than before the pandemic, they’ve actually improved to a 52-year low.
Link
Link
Misinformation that doesn’t come from Fox News:
Link
@119
Once again, neoliberalism will likely destroy us all. It’s a damn good thing we don’t have to worry about that here is Ameri… Wait a minute.
All Three Defendants Were Just Found Guilty of Murdering Ahmaud Arbery
This is GOOD
Link
Followup to KG @119 and Akira @124.
Olaf Scholz to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor.
Link
Wonkette: “Stupid White Murderers Who Murdered Ahmaud Arbery Almost All Guilty On Almost All Counts!”
Link
Toxic workplace:
Link
News summarized from a Wall Street Journal article:
Link
The legal headache Trump’s RNC-financed lawyers are tackling
Among the most serious of the former president’s potential legal liabilities has to do with — of all things — property valuations.
Followup to comment 133.
Posted by readers of the article:
Burner phones: more details that reveal coordination behind the January 6th insurrection:
Link
Followup to comment 135:
Link
“European authorities” (broadly speaking) are fed up with anti-vaxxers, Italy to tighten Covid rules for unvaccinated with ‘super green pass’:
I hadn’t heard that Franc was perhaps about to (mostly?) abolish the getestet loophole — in principle, I approve (concern here is about those who cannot be vaccinated for a valid medical reasion (or who are not eligible)) — but on the other hand, France24’s journalists (in France?) are apparently on strike…
Locally, I’ve noticed that after a considerable slacking-off in checking my Health Pass, many establishments are checking it again. I’ve no idea precisely why (I fully approve, however); my guess is the police have gone round and had a word in their ear… Mask-wearing continues to be erratic, and proper mask-wearing rare, with social distancing all-but-absent…
It occurs to me one possible “new” (actually, renewed) restriction is a requirement to wear masks except when seated (to eat / drink); apparently, that requirement was dropped sometime ago.
Note that even teh nazis have gotten fed up…
France faces Christmas cheese shortage (possibly paywalled; The Local’s edits in {cheese braces}):
What this really means — according to the mildly deranged penguin — is that brexit, and possibly Covid-related restrictions, have interfered with the cheeses’s migratory patterns.
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
US libraries report spike in organised attempts to ban books in schools:
Don’t mess with the librarians. Oook.
Last Sunday (21st November), Nasa/JPL’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity made its 16th(!) flight as it heads back to the original on-Mars testing ground (Wright Brothers Field) to rendezvous with the Perseverance rover, whence both will head north and, eventually, west, to the Jezero ancient river delta. This latest flight was a shot hop (just over 100 metres in about as many seconds), but it did take some colour images, which haven’t yet(?) been returned to Earth.
From the Grauniad’s current pandemic live blog:
And here in France, France to roll out Covid-19 booster jabs for all adults
So I only have to wait until December, rather than January, to become eligible for a booster.
The minister’s press conference was before the EMA’s announcement.
France, along with Spain, Portugal, and Italy, is one of the “safer” EU countries, in that the fifth wave doesn’t seem to as bad as it is in, say, Germany or Austria — two countries with notably lower vaccination rates than the beforementioned four.
(And it appears the strike at France24 is over?)
me@142, Oops! The missing first link should be “the Grauniad’s current pandemic live blog“.
From the Grauniad’s current pandemic live blog:
Gauteng is the smallest, but also most populated, province in S.Africa, containing the cites of Johannesburg and Pretoria.
From the earlier article about the new variant (link embedded in above excerpt):
Quack Scott Atlas, the “neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s rightwing Hoover Institution, where he works on healthcare policy [… but despite having] no expertise or experience in infectious diseases or epidemiology” was hair furor’s special “advisor” on the pandemic, “attack[ing] public health measures such as masks, stay-at-home orders and social distancing [and] called on residents of Michigan to against restrictions put in place by Governor Gretchen Whitmer” — remember that loon (quack Atlas, not Gov Whitmer)†? — is about to release a lie-fest, Former Trump adviser claims to of Covid in new book:
Projection for the win!
† All introductory quotes from Scott Atlas resigns as Trump pandemic adviser after controversial tenure (December 2020). There are further reminders of just how odious quack Atlas is in that older article.
Link
Oh, FFS.
Marjorie Taylor Greene introduces bill to award Congressional Gold Medal to Rittenhouse
France and Britain spar over illegal migration, after at least 27 drown in English Channel.
Washington Post link
For Thanksgiving Day, a story about turkeys:
Link
In my travels around Idaho I have seen dozens of wild turkeys.
blf @ 140: My wife is a children’s librarian, and I’m on our local school board. It’s weird to think we’re on the front-lines of defending democracy, but here we are.
Barbados Abandons Monarchy and Its Colonial Past
Link
Taking time to thank the people who have to work on Thanksgiving Day:
Link
Nordea Retracts Research Note Citing Conspiracy Theories and Nazi References:
The Bank and its two “analysts” have gone silent, “No further comment was available from a Nordea spokesman contacted by Bloomberg and the bank declined to say whether the analysts are still employed at the bank.”
For feck’s sake, why are these eejits still employed or licensed? COVID-19: 30% of healthcare personnel in US hospitals remain unvaccinated:
Head banging on
deskturkey time… 28 percent of Americans surveyed believe the is being deliberately hidden from the public:More details at the link.
@Lynna OM #151
Go, them! Congratulations, Bajans.
Wish Canada could do that. We’ve even graduated to having a G-G who’s First Nations, she’d make an excellent President.
“the”
Lying liars try to troll Representative Ilhan Omar … again:
Link
See also: https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1464037767005057024
Dr. Fauci speaking the truth:
Talking about the differing vaccination rates in counties where Biden won versus counties where Trump won:
Link
G.O.P. Cements Hold on Legislatures in Battleground States
Democrats were once able to count on wave elections to win back key statehouses. Republican gerrymandering is making that all but impossible.
Nick Corasaniti / November 25, 2021
Cartoon: Thanksgiving With Little Suzie Newsykins
Animated cartoon.
I’m thankful for this 94-year-old Polish antifa veteran who continues to slam neo-fascists
Followup to blf’s comment 144.
Announcement of new virus variant alarms world, crashing stocks and banning flights.
Washington Post link
Biden has delivered a wealth of accomplishments in one year.
Link
Biden admin reversing termination of programs that could reunite some Haitian and Filipino families
One way to disrupt the supply chain:
Link
About that “Nu” COVID variant:
Link
Unvaccinated people causing severe stress on Michigan’s hospital system:
Washington Post link
Siberian mine explosion kills more than 50, another tragedy in an industry plagued with safety lapses.
Washington Post link
Nerd @165, Yikes! We have enough problems with the supply chain. We don’t need people dumping packages into a ravine.
I need to have some repairs done in my bathroom. I had to put down a deposit with the plumbers just in order to get on a waiting list for repairs in March.
Follow-up to Lynna@166, “About that ‘Nu’ COVID variant”… It’s been named Omicron, and designated a Variant-of-Concern (VOC), joining Delta, Gamma, Beta, and Alpha. A snippet from the BBC, Omicron: Mutations prompt new coronavirus variant concern from WHO:
blf @170, thanks for the Omicron info.
It occurs to me the WHO’s skipping of (to quote the BBC (see @170)) “the slightly ridiculous position of calling the new variant the ‘Nu variant'” to call it Omicron will fuel — if it hasn’t already — some “entertaining” conspiracy theories. The mildly deranged penguin has, therefore, decided to start her own:
Actually, I distracted her with a piece of cheese…
Good news from Idaho, for a change:
Link
https://twitter.com/billprady/status/1464336425923481601
Good news: The former prosecutor charged with misconduct for her handling of the Ahmaud Arbery case was booked at a Georgia jail on Wednesday.
Omicron update:
Link
Followup to comments 166, 172 (blf), and 176.
NY governor declares state of emergency to prepare for omicron
I want to make gerrymandering a capital crime.
North Korea bans leather coats after Kim starts new fashion trend
Wonkette: “Right-Wing Conspiracists Come Up With Most Moronic Theory Yet”
Link
@ 180
The concept is called “predictive programming” where the conspiracy implant symbolism into the media to get the benighted masses to subconsciously accept their imminent tyranny.
Alex Jones takes it further by claiming that the universe operate on some sort of spiritual contract law. In order for Satan to triumph, humans must willinglyreject Gawd. Therefore, the satanic globalists “promote” witchcraft and pedophilia in the media to make the people reject Christianity and agree to allow Satan to oppress them.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but that’s to be expected from these loons,
As you probably all know by now, Stephen Sondheim died. Here are some excerpts from a remembrance written by Michael Schulman:
New Yorker link
Link
One private prison profiteer, MTC, donated to a PAC associated with Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema (a Democrat). She has not explained why she is getting so much money from for-profit immigrant detention contractors.
Lynna, OM@180,
The real question is how to pronounce “Omicron”. The image at your link has “o-me-cron”, but that itself is ambiguous: is the “o” pronounced as in “mole” or as in “troll”? Is the stress on “o” or on “me”, or even on “cron”? This link gives different pronunciations for American and British English. Until we know the correct pronunciation, how can vaccination against it possibly work???
I also note that your link explains that “Xi” was omitted from the roster of variants in order to avoid confusion with Xi Jinping. Could there be any clearer proof that Covid-19 was personally developed and unleashed on an unsuspecting world by Xi, who no doubt grew a moustache to twirl for the occasion?!?!?!!
Cruelty … during the holiday season. Unethical money-making schemes … during the holiday season. This time the emphasis is on prisons.
link
So the scans are low quality, and the tablets on which digital mail is supposedly displayed often don’t work. Worse and worse.
Moderna says an omicron variant vaccine could be ready in early 2022
Link
It’s so nice having mRNA technology.
Update on what Dr. Fauci is saying regarding Omicron:
Link
On Wednesday, Dec 1, the SC will hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which Mississippi asks the court to strike down Roe v. Wade. In an analysis at Howe on the Court (too long to quote) Amy Howe parses the issues at stake and arguments on both sides.
Roe v. Wade hangs in balance as reshaped court prepares to hear biggest abortion case in decades
tomh @188, I am going to be watching that closely.
In other news: As Congress returns to work, a daunting to-do list awaits
Probably wise:
Other news:
Why Michael Flynn’s weird ideas about the ‘global elite’ matter
If Trump were to reclaim power, he’d consider rehiring his former national security advisor.
Beware. If Trump returns to power, so will all the best people, like Michael Flynn.
Followup to comment 107.
CNN link
Commentary:
Link
The more Republicans succeed in extending the Covid-19 crisis, the more the party blames the president for the fact that the pandemic isn’t over.
JFC!
Link
Wyoming’s Barrasso also complained about booster shots.
Representative Ronny Jackson is pushing COVID misinformation:
(Text above is from HuffPost).
More: In a tweet published over the weekend, Jackson wrote, “Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!”
Commentary:
Link
Ex-CIA Officer Details Trump’s Paranoid [interactions] With Intel Community: Most ‘Difficult’ Transition Since Nixon
House Republican comes out and says it: Forcing tax cheats to pay up would ‘cost’ them billions
Powerful Variant of Stupidity Identified in Texas.
New Yorker link
Illustrated with a photo of Ted Cruz.
NBC News:
NBC News:
Kansas City News:
That judge was appointed by Trump.
NY Times:
‘You guys got the wrong guy’: Black man accused of stealing his own Jeep
Followup to comment 199.
Posted by readers of the article:
Former GOP Michigan elections canvasser and big lie supporter spent Thanksgiving in ICU with COVID
Presumably, we’ll be hearing more of this nutter now — he’s been mentioned a few times already in this series of poopyhead threads — French far-right TV pundit Zemmour announces bid for presidency (possibly paywalled):
Some snippets from the more-reliable France24, Far-right pundit Éric Zemmour launches 2022 bid for French presidency:
Both The Local and France24 misspelled the nutters name; I’ve corrected it (no markings).
† It is Le Pen, hence an automatic , even if she might be expressing a plausibility.
Good grief, there is, quite possibly, are eejits using hair furor’s bleach nonsense… from https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com/ is this, Johann Biacsics, 65, Kottingbrunn, AT [Austria], Self-employed anti-vaxxer. Dead from COVID, and stupidity:
Some snippets from the referenced article (link embedded in above except; reliably uncertain):
According to sorryantivaxxer.com (first excerpt), teh eejit discharged himself, which strikes me as highly plausible (see the eejit’s posts, etc., I’ve elucidated from that first excerpt).
I have absolutely no idea what is meant by the (presumably coded) phrase .
A relevant twittering thead… this eejit is a shoo-in for the Darwin Award. Supposedly, some other eejits hallucinate he was , which the thread’s commentators point out he did it himself.
As Iran talks resume, Trump’s failure starts to look even worse
As international nuclear talks with Iran continue, Donald Trump’s spectacular failure in this area is coming into sharper focus.
Not wise: Red states appear ready to reject funds for universal pre-K.
Link
Amazon workers in Alabama will get another shot to unionise:
Good grief, Outrage as Fox News commentator likens Anthony Fauci to Nazi
doctor[mass-murdering quack]:Authorities here in the EU (and probably Europe more generally) are extremely fed-up with anti-vaxxers. Austria will make vaccination mandatory, Greece will now apparently fine (older) unvaccinated people 100€ / month (the Grauniad’s pandemic live blog), apparently Germany’s chancellor-to-be Olaf Scholz ‘backs mandatory Covid jabs’, and so on… Here in France, the highly-successful Health Pass has been tweaked so that once a person becomes eligible, they have a reasonable amount of time to get a booster or else the Pass becomes invalid (I believe my own “Pass booster clock” starts ticking in about a week’s time?). Most of the beforementioned measures predate Omicron, but I am aware there are additional measures being added in response to concerns about Omicron (e.g., in teh “U”K (or at least England), MPs vote for stricter Covid rules on mask-wearing and isolation in England, and ‘If it prevents lockdown, I’ve no problem’: England wakes to mask mandate).
The Grauniad’s snark machine on teh “U”K’s recent Covid / Omicron rules (see links in @208), Let’s not pretend the anti-mask babies would have lasted a minute in the blitz:
As one commentator put it, ““
Wobbly-eyed loons, again (partially the so-called war on man-tortured-to-death-by-being-nailed-to-a-tree-invented-“birthday”-day), EU advice on inclusive language withdrawn after rightwing outcry (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
Sadly, the commissioner for equality, Helena Dalli, didn’t tell teh nazis to feck off, but instead withdrew the advice. (A revised version might be issued in the future, albeit I don’t see anything objectionable in the recommendations quoted in the excerpt.)
@ 205
THIS is why the Left’s dismissal of “culture war” issues in favor of economic reform to win over the Red States is foolish. They don’t want pre-K education, they want to end abortion rights. They don’t want national health care, they want to end same-sex marriage. They don’t want infrastructure improvements, they want to put mandatory prayer back in public schools and Creationism into the biology classes. If anything the progressive reforms are just as much a part of the culture wars as the moral and religious issuers because the right associates those policies with “godless communism.”
It’s not that the citizens of the Red States are “voting against their best interests.” It’s that they have a very different idea of what is in their best interests in the first place.
Trump has already lost the debate:
Link
Akira @211, good points.
blf @207, Sheesh! Lara Logan is a dangerous, whacky, lie-spewing loony person.
In Texas, Mark Middleton was indicted earlier this year for allegedly assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Dallas Morning News reported yesterday that Middleton has launched a Republican state legislative campaign.
Appeals Court Didn’t Signal Anything Positive For Trump
Link
More at the link, including a detailed debunking of the idea that we can simple wait COVID-19 out until it doesn’t matter, or becomes a mild flu-like illness.
Wonkette: “Crap Words From Dr. Oz’s Senate Announcement, Or Crap Medical Advice He Gave On His Show? A QUIZ!”
Link
Crap Words From Dr. Oz’s Senate Announcement, Or Crap Medical Advice He Gave On His Show? A QUIZ!
That’s from Wonkette, which tends to trigger PZ’s word filters. Hence, no excerpts posted here.
Link
Reuters is reporting that the rightwing thugs who illegitimately seized power in Honduras in 2009 and have illegitimately clung to it since are conceding their overwhelming loss in the presidential election to Xiomara Castro.
Democracy Now!: “‘A Moment of Hope’: Xiomara Castro’s Likely Win in Honduran Election Ends Years of Right-Wing Rule After Coup.”
Lynna,OM@215,
That’s an excellent refutation of the “viruses evolve towards mildness” fallacy so favoured by the pseudo-sophisticated. Smallpox is always my go-to counterexample. Meanwhile Nigeria’s CDC has identified the Omicron variant in a sample taken in October – also apparently from a traveller to the country, but where from is unspecified.
SC@218,
That’s good news! Less good news a week or so ago, when the fascist candidate narrowly came top in the first round of Chile’s Presidential election. He’s in a run-off with a progressive this month.
Guardian – “Trump tested positive for Covid few days before Biden debate, chief of staff says in new book”:
He was symptomatic!
Also, amusingly, “A colossal flop — fawning media can’t save Chris Christie’s new book.” (Link is to Eric Boehlert’s PressRun.)
While I’m here… Politico – “Amazon ordered to hold new union election at Alabama facility”:
Amazon still has options to challenge this. At the same time, unionization efforts at Amazon facilities in the US are gaining steam.
and
Another antivaxxer dies from Covid-19 virus.
Marcus Lamb was one of the worst of a bad lot.
One of the most prominent televangelists with his own broadcasting company, he spent huge amounts of time lying about the pandemic and promoting ineffective quack cures.
And, his family didn’t learn one single thing about watching him take several weeks to die on a ventilator. They still don’t believe in modern medicine.
The xian babble about the “enemy” is just pure Dark Ages superstition.
Marcus Lamb killed himself by his own stupidity by drinking his own Kool-aid.
No, satan doesn’t invent pandemics and no he doesn’t care about you one bit. Satan doesn’t even exist and if he did, you would be on his side anyway.
I’d never heard of this guy, Marcus Lamb.
He is the CEO of Daystar Television Network, the second largest xian TV network in the world.
Lamb is also what an inept lizard person trying to imitate a human would look like.
The world is a better place with him gone.
As the pandemic goes on and on, the patients who end up in the ICU are getting dumber and more ignorant. They are frequently hostile and combative, accuse the health care workers of trying to kill them etc.., and sometimes attack them.
Most of them have been treating their illness with Ivermectin horse paste and are surprised that it didn’t work like they read on Deathbook.
Quite a few of them don’t even make it to the hospital any more and are found dead at home with their supply of…horse dewormer.
Ah, so great to see raven and SC posting here today. I am having a difficult and busy time with my work-for-actual-money, so I haven’t been able to give this thread as much attention as I’d like.
KG @219, you’re right. And it has become increasingly important to debunk the “viruses evolve towards mildness” fallacy.
Schadenfreude moment: Sidney Powell’s group reportedly facing criminal investigation
After a difficult year of defeats, Team Trump’s Sidney Powell has a new problem: Her non-profit is reportedly facing a federal criminal investigation.
Of course. They all defraud their donors for the most part. Trump is still defrauding his donors. It’s past time for the donors to wise up. Would love to see Sidney Powell do some jail time.
We’re not just seeing House Republicans go after one another, we’re also seeing evidence of Kevin McCarthy being too weak to do anything about it.
OMFG. All the children are in the sandbox throwing shit at each other. And … Trump as “the grownup” …. LOL.
Link
Correction to my #219: it turns out the Nigerian sample from October was delta not omicron.
The Supreme Court takes up the future of U.S. reproductive rights
Lawyers arguing for the Mississippi abortion law have, so far, spent a lot of time decrying the “damage” done since 1973 when all of those “human lives were ended.”
Lynna lives in Idaho.
I’m not sure how she does it though.
An Idaho professor at Boise State wants women to be kicked out of engineering, medical, and law schools so they can bake cookies and push out babies.
BTW, more than half of all medical school (50.5%) and law school (52.4%) students are…women.
It is amusing that the Idaho lieutenant governor is Janice McGeachin, a far right wingnut kook.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/scott-yenor-boise-state-university-professor-calls-for-women-to-be-kept-out-of-engineering-and-law
@ 228
Yes, religion-spawned sentimentality for fetuses is going to help bring an end to freedom in this shitty country.
raven @229:
Living here can be very disconcerting at times. Yenor sounds über Mormon.
For the most part, I survive by limiting my interactions with my fellow human beings in Idaho. Not all Idahoans are like Yenor or McGeachin … just too many of them.
Well, on the bright side, when Idaho gets to be a bit much, you can always cross over the border into…Utah.
I can well imagine, having spent a fair amount of time in Utah. It’s one of my favorite places but the Mormons are not the best part of it.
Yenor sounds Mormon and I would expect that at BYU Rexburg. Actually he is Lutheran.
My first reaction was that Boise State should fire him. I don’t think even tenure will protect him here.
Then, that is clearly what he wants. If you read further on The Beast, he even gets worse as he goes along.
He wants to be a martyr to misogyny and get into the big money with talk radio or Fox NoNews. I would simply take away all his real classes, assign him to xian extremism 101, non-credit, pay him his salary, and ignore him until he retires and dies.
The Universities always have some way far gone old guy with tenure stuck away somewhere, that they ignore, and wait for them to die. I knew at least three at my undergraduate university.
Followup to comment 226.
Commentary from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
This is hilarious, Jesus Christ Superstar actor “Judas” Believes The Election Was Stolen (video). I must emphasise the actor / singer arrested was not the famous Carl Anderson (who played the role in the first movie (which the video is based on), and sadly died in 2004), but some qanonsene nutter & probable sovereign-citizen loon, James Beeks. From the BBC, Capitol riot: Michael Jackson imitator clashes with judge in court:
Um… if then why travel to DC and invade the building / institution which produces those laws?
Would congressional Republicans shut down the government to derail vaccine requirements during a pandemic? For some in the GOP, the answer is yes.
Link
@ #228
Listening to the oral arguments this morning was seriously depressing. I long for the days when Thomas kept silent. And I feel dumber for listening to Kavanaugh (who got Susan Collins to vote for him by assuring her that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”)
There seems little doubt that the decision will limit abortion, probably not by overturning Roe this time, but by allowing states to put and keep severe restrictions on it, such as the Texas six week limit. Down the road Roe will disappear, though it won’t matter much by then.
‘How will we survive?’ Sonia Sotomayor calls out threat to SCOTUS in Mississippi abortion law case
Audio recording is available at the link.
Followup to comment 237.
More from Justice Sonia Sotomayor:
Akira made the same point in comment 230.
Democratic senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy, calls out Republican hypocrisy:
Link
See also: https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1465853033523425280
Wonkette: “Democracy Had Good Run, But Trumpy Ratf*kers Now Taking Over Running Local Elections”
Link
First US recorded case of the omicron variant recorded in California.
Link
According to France24’s live pandemic blog, First confirmed case of new Omicron variant identified in
America[the States]:En banc Ninth Circuit upholds California ban on large-capacity gun magazines
BIANCA BRUNO / November 30, 2021
@ 240
Giving sole responsibility to the states to run elections. Just one of the many stupid fuck-ups or our beatified “Founding Fathers.”
Apparently Iceland isn’t mostly sane anymore, having been taken over by the Pealians, A Christmas hit: Iceland’s unusual green peas and red cabbage veggie beer (video).
Followup to SC’s comment 220.
“Trump didn’t just fail to deal responsibly with the national public health crisis, he also failed to deal responsibly with his own personal health crisis.”
Link
15-year-old Michigan school shooting suspect to be charged as an adult
Other news outlets are reporting that the shooter’s parent bought the gun during a Black Friday sale. There is some discussion of charging parents who do not properly store firearms in the home. State laws regarding proper, locked storage vary state by state.
re tomh @243:
The second amendment was ratified in 1791. At the time, the vast majority of firearms were of the single-shot variety. The contention that huge magazine capacity must be legal is a stretch for second amendment fanatics.
Here are two interesting, related podcast episodes:
Maintenance Phase – “Is Being Fat Bad For You?”:
Citations Needed – “Episode 149: How Fatness Became a Cheap Joke and Proxy for Moral Deficiency in Pop Culture”:
GOP’s Greene: ‘We are not the fringe; we are the base of the party’
WTF? Meadows Calls His Own Book ‘Fake News’ After Trump Attack
From Justin Baragona’s Twitter feed:
https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1466249857941839877
Video is available at the link.
House And Senate Leaders Say They’ve Reached Deal To Avert Shutdown
Followup to comment 252.
Posted by readers of the article:
Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and … Joe Manchin threaten government shutdown over vaccine mandates
The Biden administration plans to distribute an additional 25 million free tests to community sites in order to expand access to at-home tests in underserved communities.
“The fact is that people should wind up getting vaccinated and boosted if they’re eligible for a boost. I keep coming back to that because that’s really the solution to this problem,” Fauci said.
Biden will announce today that the U.S. is extending the mask requirement for domestic flights, rail travel and public transportation through March 18.
The religious right wants states’ tax dollars, and the Supreme Court is likely to agree
An emboldened religious right wants the public to pay for its schools.
Minnesota becomes the second state to confirm omicron infection.
Washington Post link
Trump as a spreader of infectious disease:
Stacey Abrams Says She’s Running for Georgia Governor.
New York times link
Followup to comment 259: In related news, Donald Trump responded to Abrams’ announcement by saying he intended to defeat her: “I beat her single-handedly, without much of a candidate, in 2018. I’ll beat her again.” The former president added, however, that he won’t support Kemp’s re-election campaign, because the GOP governor didn’t help him overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
JFC. Arizona Republican urges people to ‘be more like’ Joe McCarthy
Mary Murguia becomes chief judge of Ninth Circuit
MARIA DINZEO / December 1, 2021
Two videos that are very French; first, French chef Éric Pras whips up a storm for a festive Michelin-starred meal (video) (Trigger warning: Some individuals (vegans?) may find the initial sequence about chickens distressing). The mildly deranged chicken, I mean penguin, complains there’s no mention of cheese.
Second, A big fuss over a little word? New French pronoun « iel » sparks debate (video):
As the video notes, and something people (including myself) have been pointing out for years, it’s illegal in France to gather statistics related to (as one example) racism. That means what data which does exist about the problem is largely inferences and proxy-measurements. So it’s rather like asserting vaccines don’t look by only examining data from countries where few are vaccinated… there is no racism because none has been measured.
me@263, Oops! it’s rather like asserting vaccines don’t look → it’s rather like asserting vaccines don’t work…
Today’s date is
2x11x29x79x401
Today’s date, 20211202, is also a palindrome (when either multiplying out The Chigau Primes, or writing it in that ISO-like notation).
I noted the palindrome so I started by dividing by 11, and carried on from there.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/ted-cruz-dale-ho
Video is available at the link.
Looking back, these video clips make it clear Trump knew he had COVID before Biden debate
Scroll down to view the video at the link.
Study turns up amazing evidence of how mask mandates save lives and is immediately covered up.
Link
Charts and more details are available at the link.
UFC head reveals he has COVID-19 and asked Joe Rogan for medical advice
Wonkette: “Laura Ingraham Just Gently Threatening Conservative Justices If They Refuse To Overturn Roe”
Link
Coronavirus cases in South Africa nearly triple in three days as fears over omicron grow.
Washington Post link
Germany Shuts Unvaccinated People Out of Much of Public Life
New York Times link
Facing a huge coronavirus surge, Chancellor Angela Merkel, her successor, Olaf Scholz, and state governors agreed on tough new restrictions on people who have not been inoculated.
Senate Democrats make third immigration pitch to parliamentarian
Dr. Oz Hopes to Replace Rand Paul as Biggest Quack in Senate
New Yorker link
NBC News:
Link
NBC News:
Link
Miami Herald:
Link
Followup to comments 207 and 217.
Batshit bonkers Lara Logan goes a bit further to prove her bonafides as the worst of the worst.
Link
blf@266,
When’s the next palindromic date? I make it 21011012. Since I’d be 147 on that date, I suspect I’ve lived through my last palindrome!
Jim Jordan’s misguided claim that ‘real America is done’ with Covid
Jim Jordan apparently sees the pandemic as a fad that Americans can collectively grow tired of. That’s not how any of this works.
Axios:
About avoiding shutting down the government:
Link
Fauci ‘Astounded’ By Fox’s Silence After Host Compared Him To Nazi Doctor
Link
Video is available at the link.
Followup to comment 285.
Posted by readers of the article:
Interesting:
Posted by Ben Collins on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1466425106708713485
More commentary:
Link
Some Republicans ignoring Trump: In Alabama’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, Donald Trump has told local GOP voters to back Rep. Mo Brooks as retiring Sen. Richard Shelby’s successor. But as Politico reported, much of the party at the national level is ignoring the former president’s choice and instead backing Katie Britt, the former president of the Business Council of Alabama, whom Trump has disparaged.
Politico link
Following school shooting, GOP blocks background check bill (again)
In the wake of this week’s deadly mass shooting at Oxford High School, a Senate Democrat tried to advance a background checks bill. It didn’t go well.
Parents of suspected Michigan H.S. shooter are charged with involuntary manslaughter
KG@281 asks, “When’s the next palindromic date? I make it 21011012. Since I’d be 147 on that date, I suspect I’ve lived through my last palindrome!”
It depends on how you write it (i.e., the notation). E.g., using the (rare?) MM-D-YY 5-digit notation, that the first nine (9) days of this month are palindromes: 12-1-21, 12-2-21, … 12-9-21. With the 8-digit ISO-like notation YYYYMMDD, then I believe the next one is 2030-03-02, with the pattern repeating, e.g., 2040-04-02, 2050-05-02, … (those examples also work in the very(?) unusual 8-digit YYYYDDMM notation, albeit designate different days, and that notation adds yet other days, such as 2022-22-02 and 2031-13-02). And since it’s all depends on notation (and calendar), then very Very probably by using a different base (radix), and / or different calendar, there are yet other palindromic dates.
As an aside, this year’s USAian Presidential inauguration date was a palindrome when written MDDYY, 1-21-21. And as Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge points out:
(Apologies for any mistakes! I’ve just returned from the pub, a pair of very nice pints, and hopefully no Covid…)
Why an election workers’ lawsuit against a right-wing blog matters
Two Georgia women, who’d done nothing wrong, were terrorized, because of a conspiratorial pro-Trump lie. Now, they’re filing a lawsuit.
Link
What new kind of fuckery is this? DeSantis proposes civilian Florida State Guard military force he would control
A response from Charlie Crist: “No Governor would have his own handpicked secret police.”
Wonkette:
Link
Another Team Trump lawyer to plead the Fifth in Jan. 6 probe
For the second time this week, a lawyer close to Donald Trump has told the Jan. 6 committee that he will plead the Fifth.
Followup to comment 296.
The parents of the 15-year-old shooter are now on the run. The FBI and other law enforcement personnel are searching for them.
Follow-up to Lynna@296 & others, Michigan shooting: suspect’s parents missing after pair charged with manslaughter (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
@ 299
Expect the right-wingers to start in with the “false flag” nonsense again.
Expect them to also scream that the parents are being “persecuted” for being pro-gun, Trump-supporting, “Patriots.”
blf@292,
Of course, how did I miss 20300302? I have a pretty good chance of seeing that one.
YYYYMMDD is the only rational way of turning dates including year, month and day into a single number. Of course there’s also the “Julian Day” system, in which 2021/12/04 is day 2459553 (actually, I think that’s only so from 12.00 UCT, so as I write this, it’s day 2459552 – and it turns out we had a palindrome just 10 days ago, and there will be another on J.D. 2460642 or 2024/11/27.
The Crumbleys are now in custody.
KG, yeah. That didn’t take long.
Also, hiding in a warehouse in Detroit is not indicative of preparing to turn themselves in to law enforcement.
NBC News:
NBC News:
Reuters:
[head/desk]
Rep. Madison Cawthorn calls women ‘earthen vessels’ in weird anti-choice rant
New Evidence Suggests Trump DOJ Official Conspired With White House to Overturn 2020 Election
Link
Lawfare to consolidate significant Jan. 6 developments in one place.
Confronting the Capitol Insurrection
Link
Lynna, OM@307,
Cawthorn’s rant is certainly weird, but I think he’s referring to fetuses as “earthen vessels”:
Why he should complain, since “almighty God” can do whatever it likes with these “Eternal souls” (send them straight to heaven, stash them in limbo, weave them into another “earthen vessel”…) I’ve no idea. I wonder if anyone has asked him.
KG @312, that’s what I thought at first too. Careful reading shows that women are the earthen vessels into which the eternal souls of babies are woven. Either way, Cawthorn’s rant is not just weird, but offensive.
CNN Fires Chris Cuomo After ‘Additional Information’ Emerges
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/cnn-fires-chris-cuomo
Link
New York Times link
Much more at the link.
Public funding of religious education offers another test for conservative high court
KELSEY REICHMANN / December 3, 2021
Religion has been on an extraordinary winning streak at the Supreme Court. Studies shows an 81% success rate in favor of religion from the Roberts Court. And that was before Barrett, who attended a high school much like the ones described above, arrived.
Omar Is ‘Very Confident’ Pelosi Will Take ‘Decisive Action’ Against Boebert Over Islamophobic Slurs
Video is available at the link.
Representative Eric Swalwell:
https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/1465532961160372233
Commentary regarding Eric Swalwell’s statement (see comment 319):
Link
Link
Lynna at 313:
Crackpot calling the woman clayware.
Yes, we knew that, but it is still shocking to hear Republicans say it out loud.
GOP senator is ‘perfectly comfortable’ criminalizing abortion
Trump says a bit too much about James Comey’s FBI firing (again)
Donald Trump seemed to volunteer to Fox News that the FBI was on his trail, so he fired the FBI director in order to save his own skin.
Rep. Thomas Massie (a Republican from Kentucky) tweeted the a photo on Saturday, with the message: “Merry Christmas! 🎄 ps. Santa, please bring ammo. 🎁”
Link
The photo is available at the link. It’s seven family members smiling, Christmas tree in the background, everyone cradling a gun. At least six of the guns look like weapons of war, not hunting rifles.
Feds bust dozens in ‘modern-day slavery’ operation, migrant held at gunpoint on Georgia farms
Link
Cartoon: RIP, dad
Link
More;
The omicron variant of COVID-19 has now been identified in 17 U.S. states.
Svalbard: “To visitors, the Norwegian archipelago can seem both ethereal and eternal. But climate change all but guarantees an eventual collapse of its vulnerable ecosystem.”
New York Times link
Photos are available at the link.
On Ukrainian Front, Grinding War and Weary Anticipation of Invasion
New York Times link
After eight years in the trenches, Ukrainian soldiers are resigned to the possibility that the Russian military, which dwarfs their own in power and wealth, will come sooner or later.
Why the Electoral Count Act is suddenly generating so much attention
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 is badly in need of an overhaul. There are hints of bipartisan support for making that happen.
Trump got caught up in a double-negative on Saturday, issuing a statement that read, “Anybody that doesn’t think there wasn’t massive Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election is either very stupid, or very corrupt!”
Out of the government shutdown frying pan, into the debt ceiling fire for this week in Congress
DOJ Sues Texas, Alleging Redistricting Maps Discriminate Against Black And Latino Voters
Rampant narcissism:
Link
Photos and video are available at the link.
Wonkette: “Nikki Haley, Still An A-Hole”
https://www.wonkette.com/nikki-haley-still-an-asshole
Wonkette: “Conservatives Cry ‘False Flag’ Over Known White Supremacist Group’s DC Rally”
Link
WaPo:
Rep. Devin Nunes to leave Congress to become Trump media company CEO
Amy B Wang and David Weigel / December 6, 2021
tomh @340: Ha! Nunes leaving Congress makes me laugh.
This is sort of related:
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz.
New Yorker link
Former Pence Chief Of Staff Marc Short Is Cooperating With Jan. 6 Committee
Link
Today in Finnish political discourse: What’s the suitable homecoming time for a 36 year old mom who works two jobs as a parliament member and prime minister? Apparently, it’s 11 PM.
Incidentally, on Saturday, The Guardian published this rather generic “rare” interview with the Finnish PM Sanna Marin:
(The Guardian)
(Generally speaking, it’s rare enough that international papers would want to interview a Finnish leader. Marin has the media appeal of a good-looking young woman leader who’s also relatively progressive.)
On the evening of that same Saturday, Marin made the faux pas of going to a nightclub despite knowing she’d been exposed to Covid-19 on Friday (in a meeting with the foreign minister Pekka Haavisto, who tested positive shortly afterwards). Since Marin is vaccinated, some doctor had decided (according to standard practice) that there was no strict need for her to isolate after exposure.
During the evening, some cabinet security officials decided it’d be good idea and responsible to isolate anyway, or at least avoid parties. They first tried to call Marin’s secure cabinet phone, which she is supposed to carry at all times. There was some difficulty in reaching her, since as it turned out she was only carrying the separate parliament-issued phone, which she apparently uses as the primary work phone. That’s another faux pas.
All this was heavily criticized on social media, and analyzed in the news by Monday, which also incidentally was Independence Day (though the PM has no visible role in the public ceremonies, since those belong to the president). For the last couple months, Marin has been visibly more relaxed than she used to be in her approach to Covid-19 and partying, on the general principle that vaccinated people should be able to live normally and vaccine refusers can go fuck themselves. This principle is somewhat controversial, as infections have been steadily increasing and the strain on healthcare system is growing.
Partying out late is currently entirely legal for vaccinated people, but many commenters feel Marin should be more exemplary in her personal behavior, especially considering the recent covid exposure. There’s also been some general sniping and handwringing on Marin’s occasional appearances in public as the “partying prime minister”, on the account that she should be “more focused on working” or “more respectable in her public conduct” or somesuch. This is the sort of petty scandalism that USians might remember from Obama era, when the leader of the country is relatively free of real scandals and also not a white man.
In this analysis piece from today, legal experts weigh in on the latest “scandal”:
(link in Finnish)
The three law professors agree that no laws were broken, and the controversy is mostly made up, though some criticism is deserved on Marin’s part on both the phone issue and the covid precaution issue. One of the three men (Seppo Koskinen, a retired labor law professor) notes that the recent media attention on Marin’s partying is indeed odd, but he then recommends that Marin should try to avoid these kind of scandals by acting in a more dignified way. Specifically, she should go home by 11 PM rather than in the wee hours. Koskinen also weirdly suggests that a scandal would have been more justified if Marin had gone partying on her own, rather than with her husband.
It’s breathtaking in its brazenness: Republicans are doing what they can to undermine Biden’s efforts, while complaining about the efficacy of the efforts.
Link
Followup to comments 340 and 341.
Link
Sounds like Nunes is jumping head first into another pile of cow poop.
Worse and worse. At least Eastman leaves no doubt as to what kind of person he really is.
Link
Followup to comments 340, 341 and 346.
The Guy Who Tried to Sue a Fake Twitter Cow Is Going to Lead Trump’s Media Company
Wonkette: “Devin Nunes Quitting Congress To Graze In Trump’s Pastures. That’s It, That’s Your Final Cow Joke.”
Link
Nunes is an object of ridicule.
Washington Post:
In a Reversal, Meadows Refuses to Cooperate With Jan. 6 Inquiry.
New York Times link
Posted by a reader of the article:
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/prime/trumps-new-bribe-mill
Yes, a “bribe mill.” And, of course, yet another scam, con, grift.
Follow-up to Lynna@352, Trump’s social media platform hits roadblocks as major political battle looms (my added emboldening; Grauniad edits in {smells-of-fraud brackets}):
Senate needs to pass Build Back Better—it could literally save the lives of pregnant people
Video of Vice President Harris speaking is available at the link.
93% of West Virginia’s children need Joe Manchin to vote for Build Back Better before January 15
Link
Trump, Durham and Bill Barr were desperate to come up with something … and this paltry, unprovable and minor infraction (if it even exists!) is all they could come up with?
Followup to comment 356.
Posted by readers of the article:
Devin Nunes Idiotically Thinks Trump Will Pay Him
New Yorker link
The big story in the Yoo-Kay today is what I’m calling “Crackergate”. A video has been leaked of Johnson’s staff joking about a Christmas Party held last year, at a time when all such gatherings were banned, and people were not being allowed to see family members dying of Covid. The recording is of a mock-up press conference, and includes a reference to a “fictional” party, but it was taken a few days after the date that such a party has already been reported to have taken place. Johnson has denied that any regulations were broken, but has been obviously shifty, squirming to avoid either affirming or denying that there was a party until, shortly before the vido leaked, he came down on the side of denial. This morning, government ministers are completely absent from the airwaves, Tory backbenchers are reported to be furious. Johnson is due in the Commons for Prime Ministers’ Questions in a few hours. Will he be able to marshall his lies into an alert and disciplined formation* in time??
*H/t Robert Graves in I, Claudius: a description of the talent for lying of Sejanus, minister for the Emperor Tiberius.
Further to #359 – apparently Johnson himslef has continued to avoid explicit denial that there was a party, but “No. 10” has done so – and obviously, would not have done so without Johnson’s approval.
Nasa/JPL’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity apparently successfully completed its 17th flight on Sunday (5th Dec), albeit there was a lost of telemetry between the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity during the final stages of the flight, Flight 17 — Discovering Limits. Ingenuity appears to have landed safely — communications were restored several minutes later and seem to be nominal — but the “missing” telemetry data is useful to confirm. As the link explains, the lost-of-contact is not a technical glitch. The rover was not where it was expected to be to, resulting in a hill blocking the line-of-sight at the end of the flight. The rover, which has priority, had been driven to a slightly different spot than anticipated for its science mission.
The “missing” data should still be on-board the helicopter, and hence can be downloaded to Earth. As the link notes, lost of communications is to be expected, and the systems were designed to cope with the situation.
The first Crackergate scapegoat has resigned.
The current batch of Covid-19 virus patients in the ICU are the hard core antivaxxers. They are almost all fundie xians. They are also dumb, not educated, hostile, combatative, and often violent.
Health care workers have been burning out and quitting often because of this. My friend is now working in a Covid-19 virus ICU. She wasn’t supposed to be there because she has multiple comorbidities. She is there because there is no one else left.
Here is one doc’s story about his last day at work. An antivaxxer patient died on a ventilator. His family accused him of being a murderer and physically attacked him, leaving him seriously injured.
I’m not copying this because it isn’t my story to tell. The link takes you to a Reddit thread.
Trigger warning!!! This is not an easy story to read so you need to think about whether you even want to know.
https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/rakxun/my_career_of_treating_patients_has_ended
The current group of suicides by ICU antivaxxers are not sympathetic victims of a pandemic.
They really are the bottom quarter or so of our society in terms of cognitive capability.
Almost all organ transplant programs require patients to be vaccinated against about everything.
Organ transplants require good compliance to be successful and a lot of medications that leave patients vulnerable to diseases. There is also a huge shortage of transplantable organs so patients are chosen carefully.
Quite a few antivaxxer patients are refusing to get the Covid-19 virus vaccine.
These are sick patients that will die and usually soon without a new kidney, lungs, or whatever.
They still won’t get the vaccine and they get dropped from the waiting lists.
If you don’t care enough to take basic care of your health, we don’t care enough to spend over $1 million for a lung transplant that someone else can make better use of.
Biden administration policies struggle with Trump-appointed judges
Many of the Biden administration’s recent legal setbacks have something important in common: judges appointed by Donald Trump.
Oh, FFS
Gaetz says he’s talked to Trump about making him House speaker
Thompson Details Materials Obtained By Jan. 6 Committee Including Alleged November Plotting By Meadows
Full text of the letter is available at the link.
Good news regarding booster shots:
Link
Man who climbed up government-funded ladder endorses burning ladder now that he’s safely at the top
Four horsemen of the dumbocalypse hold outrageously ignorant press conference on Jan. 6 insurrection.
Link
Wonkette:
https://www.wonkette.com/defense-authorization-passes-house
Wonkette:
Link
A few related links:
QAA – “Episode 168: The Mutant QAnon Numerology Cult in Dallas”:
I listened to this as I decorated my tree. Turned out to be much sadder than I was expecting.
Guardian – “The life and tragic death of John Eyers – a fitness fanatic who refused the vaccine”:
First episode of the new MSNBC podcast, American Radical – “Who Killed Rosanne Boyland?”:
!!!
The Omicron variant is starting to come into focus.
It is apparently a partial immune escape variant that is still blocked by the vaccines.
It is probably 4 times as infectious as Delta.
This is ominous because Delta is already one of the most transmissable viruses we know of.
This study is preliminary so you can’t take it as the final word.
But it is consistent with what we’ve been seeing. In two weeks, the Omicron variant is showing up everywhere. It is the reverse of, Where’s Waldo.
Claims are milder disease.
Not enough data for this property.
Considering how pathogenic Delta is, this might not make much difference.
Good news. Jobless claims improve to a 52-year low as economy recovers.
The new tallies on initial unemployment claims aren’t just better now than before the pandemic, they’ve actually improved to a 52-year low.
NBC News:
Commentary from Steve Benen:
JFC. As a taxpayer, I don’t want to subsidize that.
Link
This means that the virus has (to anthropomorphise) the opportunity to explore a new part of the “fitness landscape”. Omicron is unlikely to sit right on a local peak, so we can expect to see more variants, some of them more transmissable andor better able to evade existing vaccines andor immunity acquired by inection than Omicron itself.
Washington Post:
Commentary:
Link
Cases are at record or near record levels in a lot of states right now.
To the point where they are calling out the National Guard.
“Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said Wednesday he thinks the whole country will see Covid-19 case numbers go up in coming weeks. Already 23 states have had more than a 20% increase in case numbers in just the last two weeks.” The biggest problem are the antivaxxers.
It’s going to be another long and ugly winter for all of us.
And Omicron is just getting started. 99% of all cases are still Delta.
Rogue ‘Canvassers’ Are Still Going Door-To-Door In Search Of 2020 Fodder (for the Big Lie)
Link
Say what now??
Link
Democrats introduce resolution condemning Boebert’s anti-Muslim hate, call for committee removal
Link
California plans to be abortion sanctuary if Roe overturned
State lawmakers may help pay for people from other states to come to California for abortions if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade
By ADAM BEAM Associated Press
December 8, 2021, 5:00 PM
And, of course:
Sidney Powell joins the list of people Trump pretends not to know
Donald Trump said Sidney Powell was never part of his team. That’s ridiculously untrue, but it’s also part of an amazing pattern.
Righting yet another wrong that Trump committed: Troops to get Purple Hearts from attack Trump downplayed
Donald Trump downplayed injuries troops suffered at the Al Asad Air Base and they didn’t receive Purple Hearts. The Army is now putting things right.
Josh Duggar Found Guilty Of Receiving And Possessing Child Pornography
Wonkette
Liberty Counsel helpfully provided phone numbers to call and many email addresses as well so that retailers could be endlessly harassed by Christian fanatics.
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz: “Putin Believes Negotiating with U.S. Would Be Easier if He Had a Pee Tape of Biden”
Link
NBC News:
Link
NBC News:
Re: #391
The NBC story doesn’t do justice to the 68 page opinion by the three judge panel, 2 appointed by Obama, one by Biden. For example:
Boston is seeing a spike in covid in their waste water equal to that seen last winter.
It’s going to be long winter.
Link
Supreme Court allows challenge to Texas’ abortion ban to proceed
The Supreme Court is allowing opponents of Texas’ abortion ban to challenge it in court, but the ban will remain in effect as the case is litigated.
Trump Coup Plot Now Includes Kanye’s Weirdo Publicist
Gaetz And Bannon Talk About Unleashing ‘Shock Troops’ If Trump Wins 2024, ‘Or Before’
Video is available at the link.
Wonkette: Missouri AG Orders County Health Dept To Do Nothing At All To Stop COVID, Hooray Freedom!
Joe Biden Gives Texas Family Their Seized WALL Land Back
Good news, I think: New York Attorney General Tish James said yesterday that she’s ending her Democratic gubernatorial campaign. “I have come to the conclusion that I must continue my work as attorney general,” James explained in a statement. “There are a number of important investigations and cases that are underway, and I intend to finish the job.”
OMFG.
Georgia Republicans purge Black Democrats from county election boards
The Spalding board’s new chairman has endorsed former president Donald Trump’s false stolen-election claims on social media.
@ 399, 400, and 403
And what are the Democrats going to do about it?
Partial answer to Akira in comment 404.
A carveout is necessary to protect voting rights.
Sotomayor Invokes John C. Calhoun In Takedown Of Texas Abortion Ban
@ 405
Yeah, I’m not going to hold my breathe until that comes along.
Wonkette: “Tucker Carlson Accuses Mitch McConnell Of ‘Crushing The Weak Because He Can,’ But Like In A Bad Way”
Why is Tucker Carlson calling Mitch McConnell an old woman. Does Carson think that calling a man a woman is the ultimate insult?
Kansas City Landlords About To Find It A Lot Harder To Throw Families Into The Street.
Link
Conservatives fret: Why are young liberals so intolerant of plague-spreading democracy killers?
We’ve known for a long time that people who survive severe Covid-19 virus disease have long lasting medical problems. A lot of people who get off the ventilators/ECMO never leave rehab/assisted living. It’s not unusual for patients to go home, and then drop dead a few weeks later.
(They will often go home and keep on posting antivax propaganda, not having learned one single thing while almost dying and running up a $1 million hospital bill.)
This study quantifies it.
“Overall, just over 52% of severe covid patients died in a year’s time. ”
Half of them are dead within a year.
raven @411, a distant relative of mine died a few days ago. She had covid and had supposedly recovered. She died at home. She was a long-hauler, with several continuing effects from the disease. I didn’t really know her and had not seen her for more than a decade, but it still is a wakeup call to have someone you know die from covid (covid-related) problems months after “recovery.” As far as I know, she was not vaccinated.
Inflation numbers for the USA look different if you remove gas prices.
Link
Details, including an informative graph, are available at the link.
More difficulty for some families:
Politico, signs that Mark Meadows is even more trouble:
Roll Call report on Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s newest pitch:
Commentary:
Link
A terrible night of storms brings destruction and death across the central U.S.
Link
Images and videos are available at the link.
The Man Who Predicted Climate Change
New Yorker link
In the nineteen-sixties, Syukuro Manabe drew a graph that foretold our world today—and what’s to come.
Much more at the link.
Perdue sues to inspect absentee ballots from 2020 Georgia election
By Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Biden administration’s appeal to the High Court was successful. Julian Assange faces extradition to the U.S. again.
Proving once again that freedom of the press only means the freedom to say things the U.S. national security industry approves of, otherwise they may just kidnap you from the other side of the planet.
Axios:
California governor to create Texas-like law to ban assault weapons
Yacob Reyes / December 12, 2021
Yeah, that PowerPoint plan to discard the results of a legal and fair election was not just some kind of one-time deal that was then discarded. No, the person promoting the plan to overturn election results met with Trump’s Chief of Staff many times.
In addition to the information on PZ’s thread, “You’ve got a smoking gun, now do something about it,” I’ll add more details.
Link
Washington Post:
Posted by a reader of the Talking Points Memo article referenced in comment 421:
Chris Wallace announces he is leaving Fox News, joining CNN+
Sounds to me like Chris Wallace was purged.
The Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly Fake ‘History’ Tour is the Biggest Flop of the Season 🤣
Link
US COVID-19 deaths reach 800,000
YouTube link
Fauci Holiday Message Cold Open from Saturday Night Live
UK’s Johnson pushes booster shots ahead of ‘tidal wave of omicron’
Link
Link
Still a lot of unknowns associated with that report.
Link
@ 430
Watch, the Right will embrace this the same way they embraced “Let’s Go Brandon” because they think it annoys us.
Spotted via a comment at sorryantivaxxer.com (English), Covid-19 : une femme de 57 ans avec un faux certificat de vaccination meurt dans un hôpital à Garches. Apparently, a young woman was admitted to hospital with a case of Covid-19, which became quite severe in the usual fashion and eventually killed her. What had the doctors puzzled is she presented proof of being fully-vaccinated, and had no underlying conditions. Apparently, her disease progressed in a manner much more rapidly and severely than expected in a fully-vaccinated person.
Mystery solved when a through postmortem was carried out. She had no antibodies. Her proof-of-vaccination was fake. She’d been treated with the assumption she had antibodies due to being fully-vaccinated, and so, e.g., no monoclonal antibodies were not tried (which is not to say the staff did anything wrong or those other treatments would have saved her).
The medical staff are furious at whoever sold her the fake proof-of-vaccination.
As an aside, the sorryantivaxxer.com link is a
reportsuspicion that “David Nolde, 83, retired doctor, husband ofDr[plandemic quack] Judy Mikovitz notorious liar, [died] from COVID”.It’s not just Jan. 6: Navarro wants to hide Covid info from Congress
Team Trump isn’t just trying to hide Jan. 6 information from Congress, it’s also trying to hide information about the federal response to Covid-19.
Yet another anti-election memo from Team Trump comes to the fore
It’s a problem that Mark Meadows sent an email the day before the Jan. 6 attack, saying the National Guard would “protect pro Trump people.”
Link
Wonkette link
Keith Edwards posted:
https://twitter.com/keithedwards/status/1470081071723208711
Video at the link.
More commentary:
An update on Ingenuity, Nasa/JPL’s Mars helicopter. It’s still suffering a communications blackout still thought to be due to hill(s?) blocking the line-of-sight with the Perseverance rover. There has been some intermittent contact, all to-date indicating Ingenuity landed safely after its 17th flight, but there is still a considerable amount of data (including images) onboard Ingenuity — including just precisely where it landed. Is it on level ground? Partially tilting due to a rock? Next to a crack or ravine? We don’t know…
Plan at the moment is to sit tight and wait for Perseverance to move into a position where reliable communications are possible. Ingenuity is capable of looking after itself, recharging it batteries, etc.
One option should the situation continue is Perseverance deliberately pointing high-gain antenna in the direction of Ingenuity, but as that “interferes” with Perseverance’s science mission, which has priority, such a plan needs to be specially signed-off… and isn’t thought necessary at this point in time.
One potential issue which I haven’t seen mentioned is the radio link between Ingenuity and Perseverance is fairly short range (something like 1km?), so it seems to me that as Perseverance goes about its science, it might not clear the line-of-sight problem until such a point where it’s also outside the comms range. And even if not, it might not leave the Ingenuity team much time to plan and execute the next flight before the rover really does move out-of-range.
Barring a bad landing (or subsequent post-landing failure, e.g., of the batteries) — and, to-date, nothing indicates that there are any problems — the basic problem should resolve itself. This just seems to be a frustrating wait-and-see situation…
It took the United States 119 days to go from 600,000 deaths to 700,000 deaths. It took us 74 days to go from 700,000 to 800,000.
Link
New Ad from the Democrats:
https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats/status/1468936031852453888
“Republicans: Too extreme to be in power.” Good ad.
Followup to comment 436.
Link
NPR link
New York Times link
Scroll down at the link to view videos of late night hosts showing how tired they are of Tucker Carlson. Other Republicans are also discussed:
Jimmy Kimmel said, “no one did more phony foaming at the mouth than the little dumber boy [Tucker Carlson].
“According to Tucker Carlson, this is not an isolated incident of some disturbed rando lighting their tree on fire,” Stephen Colbert said, even though the police have said the suspect was a homeless man, and that drugs or mental illness could have been a factor in the torching.
Seth Meyers:
Russia vetoes UN resolution highlighting climate change as security threat
@437 blf
How to kill your rover, part #898457:
Well, we think it’s communicating with the helicopter now, but we forgot to send instructions to point the high-gain antenna back at the Deep Space Network. Oops.
beholder@444, It’s a standard safety measure built into Earth-communication-capable spacecraft for decades that in the event of a sustained loss of communications with Earth, to enter a safe mode in which, among other things, the antenna orientates itself in the direction of Earth. In other words, even if such an error happened (rather unlikely due to, among other things, on-Earth testing of the commands prior to transmission to the spacecraft), there is a built-in self-rectification mechanism.
In addition, the rover also communicates with some of orbiting satellites (both Nasa and ESA). I haven’t checked, but it is extremely probable that can be done through the various other antenna.
Pointing the rover’s high-gain antenna at the Ingenuity helicopter is unlikely to cause a sustained direct-to-Earth (nor to the satellites) communications problem, but as it does interrupt the rover’s science mission (which has priority), it would, if the teams decide to try that, require high-level sign-off.
@445 blf
With no prior navigational information, it is difficult for a spacecraft to find where Earth is, even if it’s in Earth orbit. It’s usually easier to orient a spacecraft toward the sun in typical safe mode programming.
Also, your usage of the term “decades” may be flexible enough to allow for this, but it wasn’t that long ago that we sent two faulty software updates to the Mars Global Surveyor, first activating its safe mode and then irretrievably locking it up.
We are getting more data about the Omicron variant. One paper says it is 4 times as transmissable as Delta.
It does seem to be more transmissable and is likely to take over from Delta.
We also know it is a partial immune escape variant.
We still don’t know how pathogenic it is.
That requires a lot more data and time.
Prominent Wisconsin Republican Rebukes Fellow GOPers For Baseless Election Attacks
No, tens of thousands of Wisconsinites haven’t been registered to vote since 1918.
Washington Post link
Please apply two seconds of common sense to your election fraud conspiracies.
Liz Cheney raised the prospect of a possible Trump election crime
It’s not just the texts. As part of the Jan. 6 investigation, Liz Cheney raised the prospect of criminal misconduct from Team Trump and its allies.
As part of the contempt process for Mark Meadows, the Jan. 6 committee’s Liz Cheney read some explosive text messages sent during the attack.
Followup to comment 451.
Link
In that video, Liz Cheney is remarkably effective.
Followup to comments 450 and 451.
Donald Junior: “He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough,” the president’s son wrote, adding in another text that Trump needed to give an Oval Office address because the riots had “gone too far.”
Kilmeade fretted that Trump was “destroying everything you have accomplished.” “Please get him on TV,” he texted Meadows.
Hannity asked if the then-president could “make a statement” and urge his supporters to leave.
See comment 451 for Laura Ingraham’s text message to Mark Meadows.
Followup to comments 450-453.
Link
Regarding comments 450-454, Aaron Rupar has a good presentation of tweets that expose the worst of the worst.
https://twitter.com/atrupar
Also, as Asha Rangappa pointed out:
D.C. is using an anti-KKK law to sue the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers over Jan. 6 damages
Republicans commit voter fraud:
Link
Slapping down stupid questions from Fox News “reporters”:
Link
Video snippets are available at the link.
Chris Wallace Ecstatic About Never Riding Elevator with Tucker Carlson Again
New Yorker link
Wonkette:
Link
Wonkette:
Link
Lots of relevant video snippets are available at the link.
OMG. Really.
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1470476512323375104
Video is available at the link.
Climate change has destabilized the Earth’s poles, putting the rest of the planet in peril.
Washington Post link
New research shows how rising temperatures have irreversibly altered both the Arctic and Antarctic. Ripple effects will be felt around the globe.
Late this afternoon the Senate passed its bill to raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion on a 50-49 vote. The House passed the same measure later. Disaster avoided.
Congress Inches One Step Closer To Getting Trump Tax Returns
Air Force reaches 97% COVID-19 vaccination rate. Number of discharged refusers: 27
Followup to comment 464.
Link
Mitch McConnell got on his high horse to claim that Democrats were being “reckless.” We can, for the most part, ignore him.
Looking to the future:
Good news and just in time for the Happy Holiday of Winter Solstice.
US xianity continues to die.
Nones are now at 30%, the largest sect in the USA.
What the article doesn’t mention is that US xianity isn’t a unified block. They are hopelessly divided and when they don’t hate us, they hate each other.
What could be worse for Donald Trump than having his accountant talk to a grand jury? How about seeing his banker cooperate with investigators, too?
Mark Meadows failed as a congressman and a White House chief of staff. Now the institution where he once served has voted to hold him in criminal contempt.
Wonkette: “Kamala Harris Will Oppress You With Affordable Electric Vehicles, Charging Stations”
Wonkette”: “Oh Snap! Elon Musk Called Elizabeth Warren ‘Senator Karen’ Because He’s A Puerile Dipsh*t!”
Judge refuses to block Congress from seeing Trump’s tax returns
A Trump-appointed federal judge dismissed the former president’s lawsuit to stop the Treasury from turning over the records.
KAYLA GOGGIN / December 14, 2021
Wonkette: “New York Times Exposes Democrats As Almost Sort Of Bad Like Republicans 2% Of The Time”
The Omicron variant of Covid-19 is now in at least 35 states in the USA. Omicron has also been found in 77 countries.
The New York Times reported that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “frequently blocks out his daily schedule for eight hours of fund-raising calls.” Abbottt is up for re-election next year.
Judge wants ‘forgiveness and understanding’ after she’s caught on video calling suspect N-word.
Link
Do sedatives make you racist?
a specific text a GOP member sent to Meadows stands out
The day after Election Day 2020, a GOP lawmaker texted Mark Meadows about an “aggressive strategy” to overturn the results before knowing what they were.
Sen. Raphael Warnock: It’s on Democrats to save the democracy, and it must happen now
Good news:
Link
The Federalist Outs Jordan As Meadows Texter While Clumsily Trying To Defend Him
Lawfare:
Government Wins Key Ruling on Issue Affecting Hundreds of Capitol Riot Cases
Roger Parloff Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Looks like we are going into a 6th wave of Covid-19 virus here in the USA. The study says the Omicron virus multiplies 70 times faster than Delta. This is even more noteworthy since Delta is one of the most transmissable viruses we know of. In a month or two, Omicron will have taken over from Delta.
Going to be a long winter and it hasn’t even started yet until December 21, 2021.
The hospitals in a lot of places are already at capacity or way over capacity, thanks to the antivaxxers.
This affects everyone since this overcrowding is seriously pushing out medical care for everything that is non-Covid-19 virus related as well.
Stupidity spreading like a virus:
Link
If you thought the House Freedom Caucus was annoying, wait until you hear about the State Freedom Caucus Network, coming soon to a legislature near you.
Link
If you thought the House Freedom Caucus was annoying, wait until you hear about the State Freedom Caucus Network, coming soon to a legislature near you.
Link
Unless Kyrsten Sinema changes her mind, the Republican campaign against voting rights will go without a response from Congress.
Link
Lord Manchin’s ego will likely stay on display into 2022, as he keeps holding up Build Back Better
Wonkette: “Joe Biden Gonna Get The Lead Pipes Out!”
Good judges! Good news!
https://www.wonkette.com/it-s-the-judges-stupid
Both Chuck Schumer and V.P. Kamala Harris worked diligently, and they stood their ground when it came to confirming the first Korean American woman on the federal appellate bench.
Link
Remembering The Visionary bell hooks.
https://www.wonkette.com/may-bell-hooks-memory-be-a-revolution
As hospitals again reach bed capacity, we’re reminded that vaccination rates affect entire communities and health care systems.
Link
Sheesh.
How far did Team Gosar go to pursue election conspiracy theories?
Did you hear the one about Rep. Paul Gosar’s chief of staff trying to catch a Korean plane full of fraudulent ballots in Arizona?
RNC spending on Trump’s legal bills starts to look even worse
We knew the Republican National Committee was paying legal bills for Donald Trump. We didn’t realize just how much the party was spending.
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/are-we-in-omicron-covid-notes-4
Is this just a case of Mitch McConnell seeing which way the wind is blowing?
Link
Could this be Mitch McConnell gleefully seeing potential competitors for future Republican leadership in the Senate being taken down by the Jan. 6 committee? Does he see the committee’s findings finally knocking Trump off his gaudy pedestal?
Posted by readers of the article:
Link
Melania Trump’s new NFT is the perfect holiday g(r)ift.
Washington Post link
Guests urged to be vaccinated for party at anti-vax Kennedy’s home