It is past midnight local time. I only have the energy to mention the obvious: The perv sharing photos with other members of the party of Morals and Religion, without being censored by his colleagues in congress.
Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity
In a way, John Cleese’s poem can be seen as a follow-up to comment 25 in the previous chapter of this thread.
Thanks, PZ, for renewing the Political Madness thread.
Two guardsmen were injured early Sunday morning when someone fired at a Minnesota National Guard and Minneapolis Police Department neighborhood security team, the Minnesota National Guard said.
According to the Minnesota National Guard, the shooting occurred around 4:19 a.m., when someone in a light-colored SUV opened fire on an Operation Safety Net security team that was watching over the neighborhood.
One guardsman was injured from shattered glass and was taken to a local hospital to be treated, and another sustained superficial injuries.
“I am relieved to know none of our Guardsmen were seriously injured,” Maj. Gen. Shawn Manke, Minnesota National Guard adjutant general, said in a statement.
“This event highlights the volatility and tension in our communities right now. I ask for peace as we work through this difficult time,” he added.
The Minnesota National Guard, according to a statement, was activated as part of Operation Safety Net, a joint undertaking by the Minneapolis Police Department, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, the state of Minnesota and local jurisdictions to “protect people, freedom of speech and property during the Derek Chauvin trial as well as the aftermath of the police involved shooting of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center.”
The incident on Sunday comes amid a surge in police-involved shootings throughout the country.
On April 11, the 20-year-old Wright was killed by police in Brooklyn Center, Minn. The local police chief, who later resigned, said he believes the officer meant to draw her Taser but mistakenly pulled her gun instead.
A Chicago police officer shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo last month. The body camera footage of the shooting was released on Thursday. […]
Rob Grigjanissays
Lynna @3:
In other news, the actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” has gone full QAnon
I mainly remember Jim Caviezel from The Thin Red Line (1998), but damn, that was a fine performance in a beautiful (if somewhat muddled) film. I assumed he’d have a bright future. Pity.
Rieuxsays
I feel like the comic sort of under-sells its reference to the Python sketch. “I expected this” is a nice twist, but I wonder how many people will pick it up.
Since even you didn’t notice the additional references to the Holy Grail movie (the laden swallow and the holy hand grenade snowball), clearly it’s too subtle.
GerrardOfTitanServersays
holy hand grenade snowball
Damn. The swallow should be obvious to any passing fan of Monty Python, but I even missed the holy hand grenade reference on my first reading. I feel bad.
[…]
Clergy and staff who complained of racism in the Church of England were paid off to “buy their silence”, according to the church’s former race adviser.
Dr Elizabeth Henry, who resigned from her post last year, said some of those who received compensation had to sign non-disclosure agreements.
In the BBC One Panorama programme Is the Church Racist?, to be broadcast on on Monday, she recalls a “really shocking” incident in 2019 concerning a “young black man who received a picture of a banana. But that banana had his head superimposed upon it — and underneath it said: Banana Man. That is a deeply offensive and deeply racist image.
“He took it to HR {human resources department} and he did file a grievance. And the decision was that it wasn’t racist. That person left, and he received a very small compensation — however he was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement.”
[… more examples & details…]
Twenty reports have examined the issue of racism within the C of E over the past 35 years, making a total of more than 160 recommendations.
blfsays
Away from creeps doing bad things and to good people, the essential workers, and the good things they’re doing, Now playing: The Barista! Movie posters at Paris cinemas feature lockdown heroes (video): “Parisian cinemas are displaying movie posters of local heroes — like real-life baristas, bakers, grocers and hairdressers — as movie houses remain shuttered due to Covid-19. Aimed at boosting local businesses, some 240 posters will occupy spaces usually dedicated to Hollywood blockbusters for the next two weeks.”
blfsays
Even further away from the creeps, Ingenuity, the mars helicopter, has successfully flown.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
blf#12 NASA/JPL video of mission control of the flight. Link
blf @11, that is good news. Nice move by the cinemas in Paris.
blf & Nerd, thanks for the reminder about Ingenuity. So aptly named.
Rob @6, he was good in that movie. One has to wonder what the heck happened. Now he is a QAnon idiot?
Campaign weirdness:
In Missouri, Kimberly Guilfoyle, closely aligned with Team Trump, has agreed to serve as the national chair of former Gov. Eric Greitens’ (R) U.S. Senate campaign. The main reason I find this notable: U.S. Senate campaigns generally don’t have national chairs, since candidates want to be seen as focusing on their own home states.
From Republican Fantasy Land:
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the current chair of the NRSC, wrote a curious open letter to “Woke Corporate America,” published by Fox Business today, which read in part, “There is a massive backlash coming. You will rue the day when it hits you. That day is November 8, 2022. That is the day Republicans will take back the Senate and the House. It will be a day of reckoning.”
Upon taking office three months ago, President Joe Biden and his team didn’t just confront historic challenges related to a pandemic and the economy. They also faced a real personnel challenge.
Like every new administration, Biden and his aides had to take on the task of finding qualified officials to fill key posts throughout the executive branch, but this year, the new president also had to deal with officials appointed by his predecessor who were unlikely to be valued members of the Democrat’s team.
And so, a gradual process began in which the new administration cleaned house, at least to the extent possible. Two weeks after Inauguration Day, for example, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made a clean sweep of the Pentagon’s Trumpified advisory boards.
Around the same time, the National Security Agency put its top lawyer, Michael Ellis, on administrative leave. As the Washington Post reported over the weekend, Ellis has now resigned.
The NSA director, Gen. Paul Nakasone, had placed Ellis on administrative leave the day President Donald Trump left the White House — just as Ellis was taking up the position. The reasons: a pending Pentagon inspector general probe, […] and a security inquiry into Ellis’s handling of classified information […]
[…] In 2017, Ellis’ name first started appearing in national reports when he was accused of using his position in the White House counsel’s office to feed sensitive information to then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
Ah, yes, Devin Nunes. Just as slimy as Trump … and proud of it. Of course Ellis and Nunes were connected.
Two years later, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified under oath that Ellis, a former Republican operative, was one of the officials responsible for transferring the infamous Trump/Zelensky call summary to the National Security Council’s top-secret computer server.
Last fall, the day after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential race, Team Trump tapped Ellis to serve as general counsel of the National Security Agency, but the news wasn’t well received: Gen. Paul Nakasone, the NSA’s director, didn’t want Ellis for that post.
In response, Christopher Miller, Trump’s acting Defense secretary, ordered the NSA director to install the Trump loyalist as the agency’s top lawyer, whether Nakasone wanted him or not.
National security experts were not pleased, and it was easy to understand why: NSA general counsel is an important job, and not a position for partisan operatives.
With this in mind, it didn’t come as too big of a surprise when Nakasone put Ellis on administrative leave literally the same afternoon as Biden’s inauguration, at which point the NSA director no longer had to worry about Team Trump’s directives.
There are still plenty of Trump appointees who’ve “burrowed” into career civil-service positions, but as of now, they won’t be in the NSA’s general counsel’s office.
A group of right-wing House Republicans eyed an America First Caucus to protect “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” It didn’t work out well.
For several decades, far-right members of Congress [joined] a special group, intended to be separate from the GOP mainstream. It was called the Republican Study Committee, and it was home to the House’s most rigid ideologues and reactionary voices.
[…] the more radicalized House Republicans became, the more the Republican Study Committee included nearly everyone from the GOP conference. The Study Committee became fine for run-of-the-mill far-right members, but some really conservative members wanted an even more exclusive caucus that would exclude those who weren’t quite far enough to the right.
The House Freedom Caucus was born — and it racked up some victories. Two members — Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows — went on to serve as White House chief of staff, while Florida’s Ron DeSantis became governor of Florida.
But what if some extremists decided the far-right Republican Study Committee was too moderate, and the even-further-to-the-right House Freedom Caucus wasn’t quite unhinged enough? NBC News reported late last week:
A group of ultraconservative House Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., are discussing launching an “America First Caucus” that would protect “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, told reporters Friday that he’s “looking at” joining. “There is an America First Caucus,” he said, confirming that Greene is involved.
Punchbowl News obtained a copy of the America First Caucus’ seven-page “policy platform,” […] The document called for a “common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and a return to, of all things, an architectural style that “befits the progeny of European architecture.”
The “platform,” not surprisingly, went on to call for a “pause” to all immigration to the United States.
By all accounts, the initial membership list for the caucus was tiny. Marjorie Taylor Greene was initially described as a founding member, as was Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who’s been dogged by questions in recent months about his white-nationalist ties. Gohmert publicly conceded that he was considering joining the faction, and while some reports said Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., had agreed to be involved in the effort, the Alabaman soon after said otherwise.
And then, of course, there was Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., currently at the center of a burgeoning scandal and ongoing criminal investigation, who published a tweet on Friday announcing that he was “proud to join” Greene in the America First Caucus.
Over the weekend, however, the whole initiative […] started to unravel. As NBC News reported, Greene released a statement Saturday saying the right-wing platform was “a staff-level draft proposal from an outside group that I hadn’t read.” Around the same time, Gosar issued a statement of his own, insisting that he hadn’t authored the document and adding that he intended to “continue to work on America First issues in the House Freedom Caucus.”
All of which leaves us with a few questions.
First, Greene distanced herself from the ugly “policy platform,” but she didn’t explicitly say whether she intended to move forward with the creation of an America First Caucus or not. Will this entity exist or not?
Second, as Greene and Gosar distance themselves from the America First Caucus draft blueprint, where does this leave Gaetz? Remember, he publicly declared his “pride” in joining this right-wing offshoot after the platform reached the public through news accounts. […]
Let’s also remember that other reporting concluded that there were no “staff-level” proposals. That means Greene and Gosar are trying to blame their staff personnel for white supremacy documents that they themselves authored.
This is a follow-up to comment 52 and other comments in the previous chapter of this thread.
President Joe Biden’s White House officials have removed Betsy Weatherhead, a top climate science researcher at the White House who was brought on board by a Trump political appointee.
[…] Weatherhead had been removed from her leadership role at the White House Office of Science Technology Policy (OSTP), where she led the federal government’s report on the effects of climate change, and was reassigned to the Interior Department.
Weatherhead was appointed in November by then-OSTP director Kelvin Droegemeier, who had been tapped by former President Donald Trump, who routinely slashed government efforts to combat climate change.
But the Post notes that unlike Trump and most of his officials, both Weatherhead and Droegemeier accepted climate change as real. Additionally, the former was a career official who was widely respected as a mainstream climate scientist.
However, Weatherhead had clashed with other officials on her proposed structure of the report, which is meant to boost climate change policy […] One of her ideas that reportedly drew backlash was to incorporate more authors from the private sector.
Weatherhead’s removal speaks to the Biden administration’s emphasis on making a full 180 on the previous administration’s infamous refusal to take climate change seriously and Trump’s practice of installing climate change deniers and coal lobbyists in science-based government agencies.
billseymoursays
Lynna @14 quotes:
In Missouri, Kimberly Guilfoyle, closely aligned with Team Trump, has agreed to serve as the national chair of former Gov. Eric Greitens’ (R) U.S. Senate campaign.
Argh! My disgraced former governor has a good chance of becoming my disgraceful junior senator. In any event, my atrocious junior senator will become my senior senator.
We have open primaries in Missouri. I might have to vote in the Republican primary…if I can identify a least objectionable candidate.
A federal judge is preparing to revoke bail for two top leaders of the Proud Boys, a paramilitary right-wing extremist group, who had been free while awaiting trial on charges stemming from their role in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Ethan Nordean of Washington state and Joseph Biggs of Florida are charged with conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 election — and with organizing and leading dozens of Proud Boys to the Capitol, many of whom were among the earliest to breach the building.
[…] Kelly said new evidence presented by prosecutors showing Nordean and Biggs’ men’s central role in orchestrating the incursion was a decisive factor in his ruling. He delivered a painstaking retelling of the case against the two men, reciting their profanity-laden social media posts vowing violence against lawmakers and others preparing to certify the results of the 2020 election, as well as their private communications revealed by prosecutors as the investigation unfolded. […]
President Biden will nominate Coast Guard Vice Adm. Linda Fagan to be the service’s No. 2 officer, the White House announced Monday.
If confirmed as vice commandant, Fagan would be the first woman in the Coast Guard’s history to become a four-star admiral. […]
Fagan currently commands the Coast Guard’s Pacific Area, a job she has held since June 2018 and that oversees operations from the Rocky Mountains to the waters off Africa’s east coast, according to her Coast Guard bio.
Prior to that, she was the Coast Guard’s deputy commandant for operations, policy and capabilities. Her resume also includes time as commander of the First Coast Guard District and deputy director of operations for U.S. Northern Command.
[…] Fagan is the latest woman in defense and national security being elevated by Biden. He previously nominated Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost to lead Transportation Command and Army Lt. Gen. Laura Richardson to helm Southern Command, setting them up to the second and third women to lead combatant commands.
On the civilian side, Biden’s deputy Defense secretary, Kathleen Hicks, is the first Senate-confirmed woman in the job, and last week, the White House announced Biden was nominating Christine Wormuth to be the first female Army secretary.
[…] “For too long, social media platforms have failed to adequately protect Americans by not taking sufficient action to prevent the spread of vaccine disinformation online,” wrote Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) in a Friday letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was viewed by Recode. “Despite your policies intended to prevent vaccine disinformation, many of these accounts continue to post content that reach millions of users, repeatedly violating your policies with impunity.”
In particular, the senators urged the companies to take action against 12 anti-vaccine influencers — 11 individuals and one couple — who spread anti-vaccine content on the internet. These accounts include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed distrust in vaccines, and Joseph Mercola, an online alternative medicine proponent who was recently flagged by the Food and Drug Administration for promoting fake Covid-19 cures, including through his still-active Twitter account.
[…] up to 73 percent of that content, including posts sharing it across Facebook, came from websites affiliated with these 12 superspreaders, who have built reputations in the anti-vaccine online world through multiple accounts on various social media services. More broadly, up to 65 percent of anti-vaccine content on both Facebook and Twitter identified by the researchers seemed to come from these entities. At the time of the report’s publication in March, nine of these superspreaders were active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. […]
Wonkette: OAN Employees Real Sorry About Poisoning Your Nana’s Brain, Please Stop Calling Them ‘Nazis’ Now?
“We’re not Nazis,” a One America News producer told the New York Times. “Just, like, everyday people.” Because if you think about it, the real victims here are the poor OAN staffers, cruelly misjudged when they’re just following orders.
In this case, those orders come from the network fuhrer himself, Charles Herring, the owner of OAN, who insists his employees scrape up all the sticky bits from floors of wingnut chat rooms and call it “news.”
Times reporter Rachel Abrams writes:
Assignments that the elder Mr. Herring takes a special interest in are known among OAN staff as “H stories,” several current and former employees said. The day after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Herring instructed OAN employees in an email, which The New York Times reviewed, to “report all the things Antifa did yesterday.”
That would be a short report, since Antifa did nothing on January 6 when Trump’s maniac supporters were sacking the seat of government.
But it gets better! Some “H stories” are crafted by Kristian Rouz, a former correspondent for Sputnik, the media outlet explicitly backed by the Russian government. Rouz has voiced support for QAnon, suggested that Hillary Clinton is funding Antifa, and endorsed the Plandemic lunacy about George Soros, Bill Gates, and Hillary Clinton creating the coronavirus as part of a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control.”
Rouz tried and failed to get $10 million from Rachel Maddow and MSNBC for “defaming” him by suggesting that he was “on the payroll for the Kremlin.”
[…] Herring continues to support Rouz’s questionable work.
In an email to staff last month, [Lindsay] Oakley, the news director, warned producers against ignoring or playing down Mr. Rouz’s work. “His stories should be considered ‘H stories’ and treated as such,” she wrote in the email […] “These stories are often slugged and copy-edited by ME as per Mr. H’s instructions.”
Oakley has reportedly castigated OAN employees for referring to “President Biden,” because reality should have nothing to do with their “journalism.”
OAN has consistently supported the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen due to vote fraud, pouring poison into the minds of millions of television viewers and YouTube subscribers. But sources were quick to assure the Times that they don’t actually believe the shit they pump out day after day.
During the Trump presidency, it moved right, [OAN producer Marty] Golingan said. And when he was watching coverage of the pro-Trump mob breaking into the Capitol, he said, he worried that his work might have helped inspire the attack.
He added that he and others at OAN disagreed with much of the channel’s coverage. “The majority of people did not believe the voter fraud claims being run on the air,” Mr. Golingan said in an interview, referring to his colleagues.
He recalled seeing a photo of someone in the Capitol mob holding a flag emblazoned with the OAN logo. “I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Mr. Golingan said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.”
Indeed, this is “what happens when people listen” to OAN, and it was “not good.”
Look, we’ve all had bad takes, but if your shit reporting gets people killed, what bloody difference does it make whether you believed it or not? Those people are still dead, and millions of Americans still believe the Big Lie.
And if your job requires you to constantly explain that you’re not a Nazi, maybe it’s time to seriously examine your life choices.
For those who value and celebrate science, today is a historic day. About 180 million miles away, for example, NASA is directing a helicopter on Mars, making the first powered flight on another planet.
As NBC News reported, “The 4-pound solar-powered helicopter ascended above the Martian surface, hovered and then touched back down, mission control said. The feat was documented by a photo received from the helicopter’s onboard navigation camera, showing a shadow cast by Ingenuity above the Mars surface. A color video showing the flight came moments after.”
On the same day, the Biden administration announced that every adult American who wants a vaccine is now eligible to get one. The fact that COVID-19 vaccines exist at all is truly extraordinary — an achievement on par with the greatest scientific breakthroughs ever achieved — and the fact that the United States has reached this point is something the country can be proud of.
At least, that is, in theory.
About a month ago, the Pew Research Center published an interesting report, noting that as recently as a couple of years ago, 70% of Republicans said that science has a positive effect on society. This year, that number dropped to 57%.
It’s against this backdrop that the New York Times reported over the weekend on the degree to which vaccination rates appear to have been influenced by politics.
The disparity in vaccination rates has so far mainly broken down along political lines. The New York Times examined survey and vaccine administration data for nearly every U.S. county and found that both willingness to receive a vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. The phenomenon has left some places with a shortage of supply and others with a glut.
The article noted one county health official in Wyoming who had to ask the state to “stop sending first doses of the vaccine because the freezer was already stuffed to capacity with unwanted vials,” while a clinic in Iowa had to turn away volunteers who’d signed up to give shots — because local residents didn’t want them.
[…] A national Quinnipiac poll showed nearly identical results: no group was more eager to avoid vaccinations than self-identified Republicans.
[…] Trump may have eventually endorsed the vaccines, but he also spent a year downplaying the significance of COVID-19, telling his followers not to fear the virus, dismissing the importance of mitigation efforts (including mask wearing), and urging rank-and-file conservative Republicans not to trust the relevant federal agencies, scientists, or subject-matter experts.
The nation is now dealing with the consequences, which may linger: the more some refuse to get vaccinated, the harder it will be to achieve broad immunity against the virus.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Monday proposed a rule ordering debt collectors to inform tenants about their rights under a federal eviction ban if they’ve been unable to pay rent during the pandemic.
The rule would order any firm attempting to collect owed rent to tell tenants that they may be protected from eviction under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium. Debt collectors would have to inform tenants about their rights under the CDC ban no later than when the renter receives an eviction notice.
President Biden last month extended the CDC’s eviction ban through the end of June with millions of households still struggling to find their financial footing amid the coronavirus pandemic. While housing advocates have praised Biden for extending the Trump-era ban, they’ve also blasted the administration for failing to patch the various holes in the order.
While landlords that violate the ban can face a $200,000 fine and a year in jail, not one has faced federal charges for plowing ahead with evictions despite the order. Federal district courts in Ohio and Texas have also ruled against the CDC order, but it remains in place pending appeals.
The CFPB rule, set to take effect May 3, would attempt to hit the brakes on thousands of evictions of tenants protected by the ban that may otherwise go forward.
“With COVID-19 killing hundreds of Americans every day, kicking families out into the street during this pandemic may literally be a death sentence,” said CFPB acting Director Dave Uejio. […]
The Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee will hold an important hearing tomorrow: “Jim Crow 2021: The Latest Assault on the Right to Vote.” Among the witnesses will be Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), former state Sen. Stacey Abrams (D-Ga.), and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Sherrilyn Ifill.
The need for the hearing should be obvious: Republican officials nationwide have launched the most dramatic attack on the franchise in generations. Nevertheless, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a member of the panel, apparently sees a degree of irony to the partisan circumstances. [Cruz tweeted]:
“Impressive candor for Senate Dems to hold a hearing on the history of Jim Crow laws. Bull Connor, Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of KKK), George Wallace, Robert Byrd, ALL Democrats. Dems wrote Jim Crow. Sadly, they’ve got a lot of expertise in bigotry [and] discrimination.”
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Cruz has pushed a similar line before. Four years ago, the GOP senator told Fox News, “The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan. You look at the most racist — you look at the Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan. The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats.”
As regular readers know, we usually revisit this larger point about once a year, and in light of Cruz’s cheap and misleading rhetoric, now is as good a time as any to set the record straight once more.
The Democratic Party, in the first half of the 20th century, was home to two broad, competing constituencies: southern whites with abhorrent views on race, and white progressives and African Americans in the north, who sought to advance the cause of civil rights. The party struggled with this conflict for years, before ultimately siding with an inclusive, liberal agenda.
The result was a dramatic shift in both parties. After “Dixiecrats” began their exodus in 1948, and in the wake of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Republican Party welcomed segregationists who no longer felt comfortable in the Democratic Party. Indeed, in 1964, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater boasted of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and made it part of his platform.
It was right around this time when figures like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond made the transition — leaving the progressive, diverse, tolerant Democratic Party for the conservative GOP.
[…] To be sure, Cruz’s surface-level understanding of history isn’t entirely wrong: Southern Democrats were, for generations after the Civil War, on the wrong side of the issue. Practically all of the major segregationists of that era were Dixiecrats.
The trouble is the context and the relevance of the observation. Which matters more in contemporary politics: that segregationists were Southern Democrats or that segregationists made a new home in the Republican Party in the latter half of the 20th century?
[…] If either party has reason for embarrassment, it’s the one that welcomed the segregationists, not the party that showed them the door.
If history ended a half-century ago, Cruz may have a slightly more legitimate point. But given what we’ve seen over the last several decades, the more salient point is that Democrats have been part of the solution, not part of the problem, on race.
If the Texas Republican is eager to prove otherwise, he can drop his deceptive take on history and start denouncing his own party’s voter-suppression efforts, including those in his adopted home state. […]
Kevin McCarthy and extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene accuse Waters of inciting violence
The Republican leader in the House of Representatives and an extremist congresswoman who champions Anglo-Saxon political traditions have demanded action against the Democratic representative Maxine Waters, after she expressed support for protesters against police brutality.
On Saturday, Waters spoke in Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb where Daunte Wright […] was shot and killed by police last week.
The California congresswoman spoke before final arguments on Monday in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin […].
“I’m going to fight with all of the people who stand for justice,” said Waters, who is Black. “We’ve got to get justice in this country and we cannot allow these killings to continue.”
[…]
On Sunday night the Republican minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, said: Maxine Waters is inciting violence in Minneapolis — just as she has incited it in the past. If Speaker Pelosi doesn’t act against this dangerous rhetoric, I will bring action this week.
[…]
Observers said McCarthy’s most likely course of action is to seek formal censure — a move unlikely to succeed unless enough Democrats support it.
From the far right of McCarthy’s party, the Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene compared Waters’ words with those of Trump, when he told supporters to march on Congress and overturn his election defeat, resulting in the deadly Capitol riot[insurrection] of 6 January.
Speaker Pelosi, she tweeted. You impeached President Trump after you said he incited violence by saying ‘march peacefully’ to the Capitol. So I can expect a yes vote from you on my resolution to expel Maxine Waters for inciting violence, riots, and abusing power threatening a jury, right?
Trump did tell supporters to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. He also said: If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.
Update on the growing Russian military presence on the Ukraine-Russia border:
The European Union’s (EU) top foreign policy minister warned Monday that tensions on the Ukraine-Russia border were at an all-time high, adding that “a spark” could set off a war between the two countries.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign policy, added Monday in an address to foreign affairs ministers of EU nations that the organization commended Ukraine for its measured response thus far, while calling on Russia to “defuse” tensions.
“We commented about the situation on the border. The Russian military build-up at the Ukrainian border is very concerning. There are more than 150,000 Russian troops amassing at the Ukrainian borders and in Crimea. The risk of further escalation is evident,” he said, though the figure was revised down to 100,000 in an official transcript of his remarks.
[…] His remarks come as the U.S. has moved at least two warships to the Black Sea in support of Ukraine’s government, which is not a member of NATO but has applied for membership, while Russia’s navy has also beefed up its presence in the area and restricted the movement of foreign warships near Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
In Borrell’s statements Monday, he again referred to the annexation of Crimea as “illegal,” […]
“All in all, the relations with Russia, are not improving, but the contrary, the tension is increasing in different fronts,” Borrell said.
“We call on Russia to withdraw their troops,” he added.
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have led to fears that Russia’s tens of thousands of troops near the border could soon launch an invasion, forcing the U.S. to choose between watching the country in all likelihood lose a military conflict with Russia or support its much-smaller military.
Video and technology details are available at the link.
Excerpt:
[…] these machines will battle challenges that terrestrial technology never has to deal with, including Mars’s super-thin atmosphere, limited resources, incredibly cold temperatures, and delayed communication with human overlords on Earth.
Key to its mission’s success is the ability for Perseverance to self-drive. The vehicle has a computer devoted to its autonomous capabilities, and as Wired explains, it was designed and built specifically for this mission. The autonomous driving feature is essential because Mars is simply too far away for humans to give the vehicle constant, real-time instructions. So the rover needs to fend for itself.
“One of the fundamental constraints of any kind of space exploration — whether you’re going to Mars or Europa or the moon — is that you have limited bandwidth, which means a limit on the amount of information you can send back and forth,” David Wettergreen, research professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, told Recode. “During the periods of time when the robot can’t communicate, autonomy is important for it to enable it to keep doing tasks, to explore on its own, to make progress, rather than just sitting there waiting for the next time it hears from us.” […]
[…] The blades of the helicopter can make more than 2,000 revolutions a minute, several times the speed of helicopter blades whipping around in Earth’s atmosphere. […]
Wonkette: “Mike And Susan Pompeo Grifted State Department Like A Costco: Cheaply And In Bulk”
[…] “In response to a whistleblower complaint, OIGreviewed allegations that Department staff members were asked to complete tasks of a personal nature by U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo (the “Secretary”) and his spouse, Susan Pompeo (Mrs. Pompeo),” the report opens. And SPOILER ALERT, it found those allegations to be entirely substantiated.
What. A. Fucking. Surprise.
OIG found that both Secretary and Mrs. Pompeo requested that the political appointee and other employees in the Office of the Secretary undertake work of a personal nature, such as picking up personal items, planning events unrelated to the Department’s mission, and conducting such personal business as pet care and mailing personal Christmas cards. OIG found that such requests were inconsistent with Department ethics rules and the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch.
In plain English, sounds like the Pompeos were too cheap to pay a personal assistant out of their own pockets, so they put Pompeo’s longtime assistant Toni Porter on the federal payroll and made her run errands and book brunch reservations at the Cheesecake Factory in additional to her official duties. This would be an ethical breach amounting to theft of government service, as Mike Pompeo, a Harvard-trained lawyer, knows perfectly well.
“On an almost daily basis,” Susan Pompeo would send an email to Porter’s work account telling her to calendar events both personal and professional for her husband.
She asked Porter to buy extra copies of a magazine article about her husband because “I know Mike’s family would get a kick out of seeing this.” She asked Porter to arrange delivery of flowers and gifts to her personal friends. And the fact that she later reimbursed the government for the cost of the purchases is entirely beside the point — it’s the government employees’ time she stole, not the stuff itself. (Haven’t we been through this with Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator Extraordinaire? We have.)
Mrs. P asked Porter to accept package delivery for the Pompeos at her home to spare the Amazon guy the hassle of having to run the gantlet of guards at the government residence the Pompeos had wrangled for themselves. She had Porter arrange for delegations of visiting Kansas grandees in emails in which she “stressed the prior political support of several members to Secretary Pompeo’s campaigns for the House of Representatives, but did not reference any connection between the visit and Departmental business.” She also forced Porter to devise a workaround to fund the purchase of hostess gifts and swag for the Pompeos to dole out as they used the Secretary’s official position to schmooze political allies who might help his future career. Apparently she was a big fan of “gold nut bowls.”
According to the report, there were over 100 inappropriate requests during the two and a half years Pompeo was at the State Department.
Pompeo’s lawyer Bill Burck took a page from Lindsey Graham in his response to Politico. That’s right, he screamed bloody murder and started lobbing nonsensical counter-accusations.
Despite the fact that the investigation began under the Trump administration and was substantially delayed by Pompeo’s months-long refusal to sit down for questioning, Burck described it as “a politicized document in the guise of an investigative one” that takes revenge on Pompeo for engineering the ouster of Steve Linick, the former State Department Inspector General. Which makes complete sense if you ignore the fact that the investigation was initiated by a whistleblower long before Linick was fired.
Burck went on to make a convoluted argument that simultaneously throws Susan Pompeo under the bus while accusing the IG of sexism.
“We had thought the time was long past that anyone would consider wives to be mere extensions of their husbands, but that antiquated and offensive view animates the entire draft report,” he fumed.
Pompeo himself took a slightly different angle, arguing that asking staff to come in on weekends to help Susan Pompeo address Christmas cards — which had already been printed up by the State Department’s print shop — was perfectly fine because it was only “a tiny task” and anyway it was “perfectly fine for friends to help each other.” In this version of events, Susan Pompeo was just emailing Porter a daily list of tasks to complete during and after business hours as a “friend.”
As the IG notes drily, “Unlike other areas of the Standards of Ethical Conduct, the regulation concerning use of a subordinate’s time does not include a personal relationship exception.”
The Pompeos are unlikely to face repercussions for their habitual grifting — they’re out of office now, and Republicans are too busy trying to get their automated contributions back from the Trump PAC and the NRCC to notice a little government waste. But Mike Pompeo’s successor, Secretary Tony Blinken, has accepted the IG’s recommendation to knock that shit off.
[…] People say, ‘Well, you still think President Trump might become president again?’ [right-wing pastor Todd] Coconato said on his YouTube channel. I do, because I prayed about it, and I’ll tell you what God said to me was kind of shocking.”
When I prayed about if we’d ever see President Trump as our president again, God just reminded me that he’s the one that chooses the leadership, not us, Coconato continued. He allows certain things to happen, but he also responds to the prayers of the righteous. And what he was telling me is that just like David — and I think I said this in a past livestream — but just like David, President Trump has the mantle of leadership, has the anointing of leadership.
[…]
flangesays
@#7, Rieux:
The first thing it said to me was, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
And, yes, @#8, The (Dirty?) Vicar, the swallow was a nice throwaway.
marnersays
@28
Maxine Waters:
“I hope we get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty,” she said in response to reporters’ questions. “And if we don’t, we cannot go away. We’ve got to stay on the street. We get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
This could legitimately be interpreted as a call for violence. The defense requested a mistrial, and while the judge denied it, he said:
“I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch and our function,” said Judge Peter Cahill. He told the defense that Waters’ comments may be grounds for the case to be overturned on appeal.
Re: 33
Would it be inappropriate to refer to the “Mantle of Anointing” as an “invisible glowing wife-beater” if I see it in the wild? The use of domestic violence seems risky.
Half of all adults in the U.S. have received at least one Covid-19 shot, the government announced Sunday, marking another milestone in the nation’s largest-ever vaccination campaign but leaving more work to do to convince skeptical Americans to roll up their sleeves.
Reuters:
Five people were hospitalized after being shot and injured in Shreveport, Louisiana, CBS-affiliated television station KSLA reported late on Sunday, the third multiple shooting reported in the United States with 24 hours.
Washington Post:
Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick suffered two strokes and died of natural causes a day after he confronted rioters at the Jan. 6 insurrection, the District’s chief medical examiner has ruled. The ruling, released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death. Two men are accused of assaulting Sicknick by spraying a powerful chemical irritant at him during the siege.
NBC News:
The Justice Department on Friday sued Roger Stone, a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, accusing Stone and his wife, Nydia, of owing nearly $2 million in unpaid federal income taxes and fees.
Texas Tribune:
Electricity outages in Texas could occur again this summer — just a few months after the devastating winter storm that left millions of Texans without power for days — if the state experiences a severe heat wave or drought combined with high demand for power, according to recent assessments by the state’s grid operator.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading member of the new America First caucus, is calling for the development of what she called “Anglo-Saxon space lasers.”
“Anglo-Saxons have for too long ceded space-laser superiority to the airborne laser beams of foreign banking élites,” she said. “This shall not stand on my watch.”
She took the opportunity to reassure her concerned QAnon supporters that she would be able to serve both QAnon and Anglo-Saxonhood at the same time. “I can multitask,” she promised.
Greene concluded her remarks by invoking the name of the mighty Anglo-Saxon deity who inspired her space-laser vow. “By Woden’s will, we shall prevail!” she shouted, brandishing an oversized hammer.
2020 election truther Mike Lindell’s firm MyPillow launched a bizarre lawsuit on Monday against Dominion Voting Systems, accusing the election software firm of taking part in a coercive and byzantine plot to defame the bedding company.
The suit portrays Dominion as the puppeteer behind a vast conspiracy that uses “lawfare” to “tear at the fabric of our constitutional order.”
It’s a lawsuit that likens Dominion to Senator Joe McCarthy and his witch-hunt against Communist in the 1950s. The voting machine company has launched legal battles against those who spread the myth that it somehow juiced vote counts for Joe Biden across the country in the 2020 election.
Lindell, along with attorney Sidney Powell, spent much of the presidential transition claiming that Dominion took part in an international necro-marxist conspiracy instigated by late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to flip the results of the 2020 election to Biden.
Dominion sued MyPillow and Lindell in February for defamation over the claims.
MyPillow, in Monday’s countersuit, wants $1.6 billion in damages from Dominion.
The new suit also manages to up the zany level of the whole episode, if that were at all possible.
It characterizes Dominion’s legal claims as those of a “Third World county,” and accuses it of running a national campaign to hunt down and “cancel” its critics.
“MyPillow employees live in fear. Their lives have been threatened. They have been canceled and shut down. They have been compelled to self-censor,” reads one dramatic portion of the suit, filed in federal court in Minnesota.”In addition, MyPillow has lost numerous major customers who ended their long-term relationships to sell MyPillow’s product line due to Dominion’s highly publicized attacks.”
In a separate livestream that Lindell said would last 48 hours, the pillow pitchman announced the lawsuit while also appearing with Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Ted Nugent. [All the best clowns.]
Lindell used the broadcast to hype a social network that he is building called “Frank,” telling viewers that it was meant to go live at 9 a.m. Monday morning, and it would have, if not for a “massive attack” that thwarted it.” Lindell added that it was “probably hacked by the Dems.”
But the new lawsuit takes pains to allege that MyPillow and Lindell are lone truth-tellers facing a terrifying and powerful array of forces hell-bent on covering up the Truth of the 2020 election.
The pillow company claims that Dominion, because it engages in contracts with government bodies, “is a governmental actor” and should be treated as such. “In its capacity as — and using its authority as — a governmental actor, Dominion allowed manipulation or changing of votes in the 2020 election [Lie], as well as suppressed public debate about the election which deprived MyPillow of its rights,” the suit reads.
[…] The Dominion lawsuits largely argue that those who falsely accused it of tampering with ballots in the 2020 election defamed it in doing so.
In the fever swamp of Lindell and his bedding firm, that’s yet another example of creeping authoritarianism.
“Yet Dominion, an agent of the government, has intentionally and wrongfully inflicted great harm upon MyPillow and its employees,” the company argued.
Wonkette: “MyPillow Guy Invites Ted Nugent And Michael Flynn To Self-Pity-A-Thon For Non-Functioning Website”
[…] So sad!
According to Lindell, this is all happening because the site is being attacked by hackers and trolls who want to destroy his dreams because they hate free speech and don’t want there to be a site where people can express their oh-pinions, as long as they don’t include any swearing or taking the Lord’s name in vain. It is the biggest attack ever, in the history of the whole internet.
But he’s trying to make up for it by having a whole day-long Sad-A-Thon with a bunch of his sad friends where they all talk about how totally oppressed and lonely they are just for wanting to say incorrect things all of the time. They’re not even selling any tote bags.
When we caught up with the livestream, Lindell was very upset because he was expecting a phone call from Ted Nugent, but kept getting prank calls instead. Eventually, they got in touch with Nugent’s wife Shemane, who spent some time talking about how very sad all of the censorship was. Also she kind of seems like she might be a hologram. Then Ted Nugent got on to talk about all of the very bad censorship he’s had to deal with in his career.
Now, given that Nugent was in fact a musician during some pretty big times in censorship — back in the heady days of PTA moms and Tipper Gore freaking out over Ozzy Osbourne having bit the head off a dead bat he had assumed was a fake bat (because who throws real dead bats at people during a concert?), whatever it was they were mad at Dee Snider about, and supposed Satanic lyrics and “porn rock,” the latter of which Nugent’s music could certainly be classified as — you might think he’d have at least one story about actual censorship. Or something approximating that. I’m certainly not big into censorship, but I do think I’d think twice about letting my non-existent children listen to songs about gang-raping middle schoolers.
But no! His big tale of censorship woe came in the form of criticism of his 1998 “Behind The Music” special on VH1, in which an anti-hunting person said stuff about how hunting was bad. […]
Lindell brought on Michael Flynn, who said we were all very lucky to hear Nugent’s “jewels of wisdom” about how he didn’t like his episode of “Behind The Music,” and also dogwhistled to the QAnon folks by talking about “digital soldiers.” He seemed to think censorship is when you are lonely because you think you’re the only one who believes your own bullshit. He was very happy, he explained, for all of the people who would get to feel less alone thanks to Frank. […]
In addition, MyPillow has lost numerous major customers who ended their long-term relationships to sell MyPillow’s product line due to Dominion’s highly publicized attacks.
I am pretty sure that customers are not rejecting MyPillow products because of Dominion but because Lindell has proven himself to be a lying liar who advocated the insurrection against the legitimate government of the US, wanted to use the military against those who voted for Biden, and continues to promote The Big Lie.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Rachel Maddow just reported that former vice president and presidential candidate Walter Mondale died to the age of 93. His selected running mate was Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman be on the ballot in that position. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) was an intern for him when she was in college, and acknowledged his public service and mentor-ship that lead to her being in her present job.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been having a rough go of it. Hitching your huckster caboose to the Trump-train and riding it off the tracks into the land of baseless election fraud claims has led to big losses for the conservative former business fraud-settler. His most recent move is the promise of launching his own social media platform called FRANK. This is the website social media thingy Lindell has been promoting for the past couple of weeks; the “free speech” platform with a list of censored words and things you cannot talk about. True story.
On Monday, Lindell attempted to hold a 48-hour “FRANK-a-thon” event to support this launch. The event is streaming live on YouTube and last I looked, about 30 people were watching it. He launched it with the news that he was countersuing Dominion, which is suing him for defamation. If you thought watching a two-minute segment of Lindell was 119 seconds too long, wait until you get a load of five minutes!
Salon writer Zachary Petrizzo has been live tweeting this train wreck of a situation, which included the platform being completely unavailable at launch. But a highlight came a couple hours into the event while Lindell was interviewing a COVID-19 skeptic who has also been “canceled” by “cancel culture.” In the middle of the interview, Lindell looked at his phone and seemed to believe he had a special guest: twice impeached, one term, buried under lawsuits former president Donald Trump! What a get! Well … get ready for the best thing on the internet today.
While Lindell leaned over, groveling into his phone, we all get to hear what sounds like Trump saying, “Hello everyone.” Lighting up like a true heel, Lindell ebullient tells his FRANK-a-thon audience: “We have the president here, the real president everyone. Hello Mr. President.” Very quickly, it becomes clear that the caller is someone promoting their own website and using some foul language. Lindell quickly hangs up his phone and tells his audience that like his website, this is all a part of the infiltration of the amorphous powers that be trying to take down his “free speech” platform. […]
Video/audio is available at the link.
logicalcatsays
Ignoring cancel culture where it tends to be akin to left wing #gamer-gate, is problematic. It will destroy the movement just like the toxic elements of the skeptic movement destroyed new-atheism.
Here’s a link to the April 20 Guardian (support the Guardian if you can!) coronavirus world liveblog.
From their morning summary:
The EU will have enough Covid-19 vaccine doses to cover 70% of its adult population by mid-July, internal markets commissioner Thierry Breton told French daily Le Figaro in an interview.
The European Medicines Agency is preparing to present the conclusions of its investigation into possible links between the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine and very rare cases of unusual clotting disorders detected in the US.
The US state department is planning to drastically ratchet up the warnings it is giving Americans about international travel during the pandemic. Roughly 80% of countries worldwide would soon be marked at the highest warning of “Level 4: Do Not Travel”.
Osaka prefecture in Japan is expected today to ask the government to declare a state of emergency in the region, the country’s third most populous.
…
British prime minister Boris Johnson is expected to hold a coronavirus press conference this afternoon, after the UK put India on its “red list” of travel destinations.
Israel has registered eight cases of a coronavirus variant first identified in India, and believes that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is at least partially effective against it, an Israeli health official said.
…
World leaders are facing a call to act immediately to stop multiple famines breaking out, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and caused by conflict, climate crisis and inequality.
Alexei Navalny has been transferred to a prison hospital as concerns have grown among supporters that the Russian opposition leader is dangerously ill and could die “at any minute”.
Navalny’s transfer came after his doctors warned at the weekend that the Kremlin critic, who has been on hunger strike for nearly three weeks, was in danger of a heart attack or kidney failure.
…
His doctors and other representatives do not know what regime has been prescribed and whether he freely consented to it.
Navalny’s supporters say the authorities are hiding information about his condition and described the infirmary in the IK-3 prison colony as specialising in critically ill tuberculosis patients.
…
Navalny’s top aides have announced large protests in his support on Wednesday, setting up a potential clash between demonstrators and police. Russia’s Internet watchdog Roskomnadzor has ordered YouTube to take down a video featuring Navalny’s aides Leonid Volkov and Zhdanov announcing plans to hold Wednesday’s protest, saying that it urged people to join an unsanctioned rally. As of Monday evening, YouTube had not taken down the video.
A court in Moscow has also set a hearing for next week in a case brought by prosecutors to recognise Navalny’s organisation as extremist. If a decision is taken quickly, then the courts could order the liquidation of much of Navalny’s organisation by the end of the month, threatening fines and jail time for those who continue to support him.
One of his top allies, Vladimir Milov, announced on Monday he had fled Russia for Europe to avoid possible arrest ahead of the rally.
…
On Monday, the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said “we make the Russian authorities responsible for the health situation of Mr Navalny”, as the US has threatened consequences if Navalny were to die in prison.
Borrell’s remarks came ahead of a meeting of EU foreign ministers, where European envoys are expected to discuss Navalny’s case and growing tensions with Moscow over a military buildup on the Ukrainian border, as well as revelations of a suspected GRU plot behind a deadly explosion at a Czech ammunition warehouse in 2014.
There are few signs the Kremlin is willing to relent or give in to demands by the US president, Joe Biden, and other western leaders for Navalny to be released from custody. On Sunday, Russia’s ambassador to the UK, Andrei Kelin, accused Navalny of attention-seeking behaviour.
“He will not be allowed to die in prison, but I can say that Mr Navalny, he behaves like a hooligan, absolutely,” Kelin told the BBC. The ambassador added: “His purpose for all of that is to attract attention for him[self].”
Washington’s ambassador to Moscow has announced that he will return to the US for consultations, days after the Russian government recommended he leave the country during what it said was an “extremely tense situation”.
John Sullivan’s departure will leave both countries’ embassies without their top diplomats at a crucial moment, with Washington and Moscow recently announcing new sanctions, a Russian military buildup near Ukraine, and concerns about the opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s health while in detention.
…
Biden and Putin discussed a possible summit last week, but the Kremlin has said it would take time to organise and would be “impossible” to hold in the coming weeks.
Russia recalled its ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, for consultations in March after Biden agreed with a television journalist that Putin was “a killer” and said Putin would “pay a price” for its alleged interference during the 2020 elections.
The Biden administration last week expelled 10 Russian diplomats and announced sweeping sanctions against Russia for its alleged elections interference and role in the SolarWinds supply chain hack. It was the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the 2018 Salisbury poisonings.
Russia in response expelled 10 US diplomats and targeted US embassy operations, also recommending the ambassador leave the country.
…
While Sullivan was not expelled, it appears that Russian government pressure influenced his decision to leave the country temporarily….
…Where the religion of whiteness was not able to win converts with persuasion or fear, it deployed cruder measures to secure its power, conscripting laws, institutions, customs and churches to enforce its prerogatives. Above all, it depended on force. By the middle of the 20th century, the presumption that a race of people called white were superior to all others had supplied the central justification not just for the transatlantic slave trade but also for the near-total extinction of Indians in North America; for Belgian atrocities in Congo; for the bloody colonisation of India, east Africa and Australia by Britain; for the equally bloody colonisation of north and west Africa and south-east Asia by France; for the deployment of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany; and for the apartheid state in South Africa. And those are merely the most extreme examples. Alongside those murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of whiteness, the total number of whom runs at least to nine figures, are an almost unthinkable number of people whose lives were shortened, constrained, antagonised and insulted on a daily basis….
[…]
The Brazilian government’s negligent response to Covid-19 has plunged the South American country into a snowballing “humanitarian catastrophe” that is likely to intensify in the coming weeks, the medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières has warned.
“I have to be very clear in this: the Brazilian authorities’ negligence is costing lives,” the group’s international president, Christos Christou, told reporters on Thursday after Brazil’s official death toll rose to more than 362,000, second only to the US.
Meinie Nicolai, MSF’s general director, said the actions of the Brazilian government — which under its far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro, has downplayed the epidemic, shunned containment measures and promoted treatments with no scientific basis — had made it “a threat to its own population”.
“There is no coordination in the response. There is no real acknowledgment of the severity of the disease. Science is put aside. Fake news is being distributed and healthcare workers are left on their own,” Nicolai said.
“The government is failing the Brazilian people … All Brazilians can tell you that they have people around them that have been buried or intubated {in places} where there are no drugs and no oxygen. This is unacceptable,” Nicolai added.
Asked if Bolsonaro’s government had responded worse than any other on Earth, Nicolai agreed on the basis of Brazil’s failure to learn from more than a year’s global experience in the fight against Covid using techniques such as physical distancing, testing and tracing and the promotion of face masks. “Is it the worst by not implementing what is known? I would say yes,” the MSF chief said.
There is growing international concern over Brazil’s unchecked outbreak and the spread of the more contagious P1 variant […]
[…]
Bolsonaro and his supporters defend the government’s response, claiming their resistance to containment measures is designed to protect the economy. On Monday Bolsonaro’s politician son, Eduardo, falsely claimed on Twitter that lockdown helped the coronavirus to spread. The social media company later said the message had violated its rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information about the pandemic.
Disclaimer: I am a regular contributer to MSF (Doctors Without Borders).
Straight White American Jesus – “How White Evangelicals Use the Family to Attack the LGBTQ+ Community and Deny Systemic Racism”:
Dr. Sophie Bjork-James is an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University. She discusses her new book, The Divine Institution: White Evangelical’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press). In her conversation with Brad, Dr. Bjork-James explains how White evangelicalism enforces racial inequality by drawing moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles, and political support for anti-LGTBQ policies.
The English public school is one of the country’s strangest and often most sinister institutions. James Scudamore, author of the moving and gripping novel of memory, friendship and abuse English Monsters, talks to Arthur Snell about his own experience with the mad and petty regime of the English boarding school. How did this culture spread the “profound damage” of men who’d seen true horror in war down to generations of pupils? And why do public schools produce an emotionally damaged elite?
A crossover episode with Alexis Papazoglou of The Philosopher & The News Podcast. We discuss Brexit and Freedom, Berlin’s positive and negative distinction, and J S Mill.
The new episode of Maintenance Phase, on Olestra, is also worthwhile:
In 1996, Proctor & Gamble launched an artificial fat substitute that promised all of the taste but none of the calories. There was just one problem.
birgerjohanssonsays
I remember when Walter Mondale campaigned against The Asshole. Of course he did not win the election, RR ran on populism.
The US has warned against travel to India, where cases are rising to staggering levels and a new coronavirus variant has been detected.
India has registered more than three million new infections and 18,000 deaths this month, AFP reports, ,making its caseload second only to the United States.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that “even fully vaccinated travellers” should avoid travelling to India. It comes after the State Department said on Monday it would advise against travel to around 80% of the world’s countries.
[…]
France has become the first EU member state to begin testing a digital coronavirus travel certificate as part of a Europe-wide scheme that Brussels hopes will allow people to travel more freely within the bloc by the summer.
The TousAntiCovid app [the “test-and-trace app” I frequently refer to –blf], part of the country’s contact tracing programme, has been upgraded to store negative Covid-19 test results on travellers’ mobile phones and is being trialled on flights to Corsica and overseas départements from this week.
The trial will be extended from 29 April to include vaccination certificates, officials told Le Monde, and the system could eventually be adopted for public events such as concerts, festivals and trade fairs, although not for bars and restaurants.
The French trial will form one part of a “reinforced, consolidated and standardised” Europe-wide system, the minister for digital transition, Cédric O, said, with talks already under way with several countries and airlines to ensure early recognition.
[…]
The scheme has deliberately not been called a “vaccine passport” to avoid discriminating against people not yet offered a shot. Brussels has stressed that while it should make travel easier, it must not become a pre-condition of free movement.
[…]
In France, people taking a coronavirus test from Tuesday will receive a text message or email giving them access to a state-certified online document that can be downloaded and either printed off or stored in the TousAntiCovid app.
The same will apply to those being vaccinated from next week, with a complete database of past tests and vaccinations open for download by everyone from mid-May. Antibody test results should be incorporated at a later stage.
The app will generate a secure QR code containing a range of information including the traveller’s name, the date and type of their test or vaccine, and details of the relevant doctor or laboratory, all of which can be checked against a national database.
[…]
I noticed the additions to the app this morning. Here in France, where vaccine hesitancy is exceptionally high, I’m unsure of the wisdom of making such travel certificates non-mandatory for non-essential travel outside of one’s local area.
As an aside, this also makes me wonder if the French app is using the joint Generalissimo Google–Archführer Apple bluetooth-based technology (the French app is bluetooth-based & is now non-centralised (the original version, which was not downloaded much at all, was centralised)). Google and Apple have been insistent the data is not centralised (to make it much harder to do nefarious surveillance / tracking), and recently, for example, refused to allow one national(?) app to be updated via their services as its vaccination certificate scheme addition was deemed to be a possible non-anonymous centralisation (apologies for being vague, I cannot recall which country(?) and now cannot find the article on the refusal).
Somewhat related, my (current) understanding is many of the EU track-and-trace apps are non-communicative; e.g., my French app won’t “talk” to the German app. So if, e.g., a German visitor (or me!) has a positive test, the other person won’t find out, despite both of us trying to be responsible. It seems to me that as travel opens up, this could become a serious problem.
It’s a mess, but at least there is an actively-maintained app (c.15m downloads, according to the app itself, with c.280,000 reported positive tests, and c.173,000 notifications of close / extended contact with those reported positive tests).
Opponents of Myanmar’s junta announced a National Unity Government on Friday including ousted members of parliament and leaders of anti-coup protests and ethnic minorities, saying their aim was to end military rule and restore democracy.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the Feb. 1 coup that ousted a civilian government led by democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi which had held power for five years and was starting its second term after a landslide election victory in November.
People have taken to the streets day after day to demand the restoration of democracy, defying crackdowns by the security forces in which more than 700 people have been killed, according to a monitoring group.
At the same time, political leaders, including ousted members of parliament from Suu Kyi’s party, have been trying to organise to show the country and the outside world that they and not the generals are the legitimate political authority.
“Please welcome the people’s government,” veteran democracy activist Min Ko Naing said in a 10-minute video address announcing the formation of the National Unity Government (NUG).
While setting out few positions, Min Ko Naing said the will of the people was the unity government’s priority, while acknowledging the scale of the task at hand.
…
One of the unity government’s primary objectives will be to win international support and recognition.
“We are the democratically elected leaders of Myanmar,” said the unity government’s minister of international cooperation, Dr Sasa, who goes by one name.
“So if the free and democratic world rejects us that means they reject democracy.”
International pressure has been building on the Myanmar military, particularly from Western governments that have imposed limited sanctions, though the generals have a long record of dismissing what they see as outside interference.
The unity government released a list of office holders including members of ethnic minorities and protest leaders, underlining the unity of purpose between the pro-democracy movement and autonomy-seeking minority communities, some of whom have battled the central government for decades.
…
Sasa told Reuters the objective was to end violence, restore democracy and build a “federal democratic union”. The military, while playing lip service to the idea of federalism, has long seen itself as the core power holding the country together.
Unity government leaders said they intended to form a federal army and were in talks with ethnic minority forces.
The Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, a group of international experts including former United Nations officials, hailed the creation of the NUG as historic and said it was the legitimate government.
After darkness fell over Myanmar’s biggest city Yangon, people clapped at their windows and chanted “our government”, video posted by activists on Twitter showed. Some community groups reported the sound of explosions and gunfire shortly afterwards.
While the politicians were announcing the unity government, other opponents of military rule observed a “silent strike” staying home to mourn those killed or wearing black in small marches in half a dozen cities and towns, media reported.
…
The military has also been rounding up critics and state media announced arrest warrants for 20 doctors on charges of encouraging dissent in the armed forces. The junta is seeking more than 200 people, including several internet celebrities, actors and singers, on the same change….
naturalistguysays
In other more minor news of note, Richard Dawkins seems have been declared something of a heretic by the American Humanist Association. The atheist/humanist world turned upside down, indeed.
birgerjohansson@50, The thing I remember about that campaign was Ronaddled Raygun’s use of flip-flopping to describe(? assert?) Mondale’s alleged changing of position on various issues.
So what?
What I want to know is WHY he changed his position (assuming he did). I don’t care too much that he did (broadly speaking), I am much Much more interested in the rationale, the reasons, the arguments which caused — and the sincerity of — the change.
Not changing one’s position in the light of (possibly new) compelling evidence, etc., can be much more negative than holding a position one disagrees with.
This is all(?) in the abstract, of course. Some positions — e.g., bigotry, loonytarianism, nazi, anti-rational / -science, actively pro-magic sky faerie, etc. — (basically anything hair furor claimed) is more than simply a disagreement. Those are unacceptable, full stop, and the only reason to vote “for” such candidates is as a tactical measure to (try and) ensure a even worse candidate is not elected (or, in the case of primaries, is selected as a candidate).
blf @ 55
What I recall from that campaign is the usual platitudes from RR, and getting little critical scrutiny from the media. “We’re number one! The Russkies are bad and those who oppose spending a trillion on weapons are unpatriotic” (not those exact words but that was the gist of it).
Re “flip-flopping” that was something the conservative media also claimed about its preceived opponents during Dubya.
(Changing your opinion is good if you are a Republican. Changing your opinion shows you are unreliable if you are a Democrat. The only evil Republican change of opinion is if you decide to raise taxes -as George H Bush did to finace the war)
I think this preceded Fox News, so the lying was not quite as blatant as it is today. Still, the spectacle was painful to watch.
BTW back then Saddam was still getting support from USA as was Khmer Rouge, Unita and South Africa. Death squads in El Salvador and genocide in Guatemala. It was not a good time.
birgerjohansson@60, As far as I can recall, the idoitic flip-flopping smear has happened in every presidential campaign since then (always a claim made by teh thugs), albeit not perhaps not as blatantly or with as much prominence as Ronalded Raygun’s claims about Mondale. There were numerous other thug lies, but it was the insinuation that changing one’s opinion was always bad which infuriated me at the time (and still does!). And has ensured I will never ever vote thug except as a tactical measure. (Note for the hard-of-understanding: “never ever vote thug” ≠ “always vote dummie”; translation, “never ever vote rethuglican” ≠ “always vote democrat”.)
Rahul Gandhi, an opposition Congress party leader has said he has tested positive for coronavirus after experiencing mild symptoms.
Gandhi, 50, said in a tweet on Tuesday “All those who’ve been in contact with me recently, please follow all safety protocols and stay safe.”
Gandhi last week called off political rallies in West Bengal state where provincial elections are being held.
On Monday, another Congress party leader and former prime minister, Manmohan Singh, also tested positive. He has been hospitalised as a precaution, citing a mild fever on Sunday.
India’s Health Ministry reported 259,170 new infections and 1,761 deaths on Tuesday. The country has reported daily infections above the 200,000 mark for six days.
Experts at the European Medicines Agency have said a warning about very unusual blood clots should be added to labels for Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Last week, Johnson & Johnson halted its European roll-out of the vaccine after U.S. officials recommended a pause in the vaccine, after detecting six very rare blood clot cases among nearly 7 million people who had been vaccinated.
European officials said they considered all currently available evidence from the U.S., including eight reports of serious cases of rare blood clots associated with low blood platelets, including one death.
Johnson & Johnson advised European governments to store their doses until the EU drug regulator issued guidance on their use; widespread use of the shot in Europe has not yet started.
The delay is a further blow to vaccination efforts in the European Union, which have been plagued by supply shortages, logistical problems, and concerns over blood clots from those who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine.
[…]
After Republicans launched a long-shot attempt to censure and expel Maxine Waters from Congress over comments on the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, which the judge said could provide grounds for appeal, the veteran California progressive stayed defiant.
“I am not worried that they’re going to continue to distort what I say,” Waters, 82, told the Grio. “This is who they are and this is how they act. And I’m not going to be bullied by them.”
Waters, who is African American, has served in Congress since 1991. She has a long record of campaigning for civil rights and confronting political opponents in blunt terms […]
Long a favorite target of Republicans, she attracted such focused ire in 2018, when she said Trump aides and officials should be confronted by the public. Last week, she told the hard-right Republican congressman Jim Jordan to “shut your mouth” during a hearing with Dr Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser.
[…] Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, defended Waters, saying she did not need to apologize.
“Maxine talked about ‘confrontation’ in the manner of the civil rights movement,” Pelosi said.
Indeed. The whole kerfuffle is mostly an attempt to redefine “fight” — when said by a dummie (democrat) and no matter what the context — into meaning revolt, insurrection, violence, or similar. But when said by a thug (rethuglican), such as hair furor, and essentially always regardless of context, it means oppose, disagree, disprove, wrong, or so on.
Jury Begins Deliberations in Derek Chauvin Murder Trial
Jury deliberations have begun in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murder and manslaughter for killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for over nine minutes last May. On Monday, jurors heard closing arguments in one of the most closely watched criminal trials in years. This is prosecutor Steve Schleicher.
Steve Schleicher: “You can believe your eyes. It’s exactly what you believed. It’s exactly what you saw with your eyes. It’s exactly what you knew. It’s what you felt in your gut. It’s what you now know in your heart. This wasn’t policing. This was murder.”
Judge Peter Cahill gave final instructions to 12 jurors, who will remain sequestered at a hotel during their deliberations.
Thousands Protest in Minnesota as Derek Chauvin Murder Trial Wraps Up
Thousands of students from dozens of Minnesota schools walked out of classes Monday, demanding justice for George Floyd — and for Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man shot dead by a white police officer during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center on April 11. The city’s mayor, Mike Elliott, a Black man who was born in Liberia, told CNN Monday, “It’s not safe to drive in Minnesota while you’re Black.”…
Ahead of the verdict, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called up 3,000 members of the National Guard, along with 1,100 police officers from around the state….
U.N. Warns Planet Is “On the Verge of the Abyss” from Relentless Climate Change
The World Meteorological Organization warned Monday of a “relentless” worsening of the climate crisis in 2020, as average temperatures soared to 1.2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That’s close to the 1.5-degree upper limit advocated by scientists to stave off the worst impacts of climate change. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres announced the findings of the annual State of the Global Climate report.
Secretary-General António Guterres: “We are seeing, indeed, that we live in a triple crisis: a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis and a pollution crisis. And if we don’t act immediately, we are, as I said, on the verge of the abyss. There is no time to lose.”
The WMO says record heat has accumulated in the world’s oceans, which are becoming more acidic and less oxygenated. 2020 saw sea level rise from melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, near-record-low sea ice in the Arctic, severe flooding in Asia and Africa, extreme drought in South America and a record 30 named storms during the Atlantic hurricane season.
Hundreds of Climate Scientists Warn Against Criminalizing Peaceful Protests
Meanwhile, over 400 climate experts have warned that governments are criminalizing and silencing peaceful environmental protesters, including Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement and School Strike for Climate. Their open letter reads, “It has become abundantly clear that governments don’t act on climate without pressure from civil society: threatening and silencing activists thus seems to be a new form of anti-democratic refusal to act on climate.”
White House Holds Virtual Climate Summit as U.S. and China Pledge Cuts to Emissions
The United States and China said Sunday the two nations will work together with other countries on tackling climate change. The commitment by the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters came ahead of a virtual climate summit this week hosted by President Joe Biden.
…
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel to Replace Raúl Castro as Communist Party Leader
The Cuban Communist Party has chosen President Miguel Díaz-Canel as its new leader, replacing Raúl Castro, who announced his retirement last week. This marks the first time the party is led by a person outside of the Castro family since Fidel Castro led the Cuban revolution in 1959. The party’s change in leadership comes amid an economic crisis in Cuba, exacerbated by harsh U.S. sanctions.
…
Amazon Hit with 23 Unfair Labor Practices Complaints over Union-Busting Campaign in Alabama
In Alabama, the labor union that failed in its months-long battle to organize an Amazon warehouse in the city of Bessemer has filed 23 complaints against the online retailer with the National Labor Relations Board. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union says Amazon unlawfully interfered with union efforts by threatening to cut workers’ pay, benefits and time off work, while creating an “impression of surveillance” by installing private mailboxes at the warehouse so it could monitor workers’ votes. This is Bessemer Amazon worker Jennifer Bates.
Jennifer Bates: “There was illegal things taking place and fear tactics that was done to people who didn’t have any idea about what a union could do for them, young people who thought that they were going to lose their job because the company said, ’We’re going to shut down.’”
Survey finds most children turn 11 before they can play outside unsupervised
Primary-age children in Britain are losing the freedom to play independently and typically are not are allowed to play outside on their own until two years older than their parents’ generation were, according to research.
While their parents were allowed to play outside unsupervised by the age of nine on average, today’s children are 11 by the time they reach the same milestone, according to the study, which says not enough adventurous play could affect children’s long-term physical and mental health.
One expert said the findings showed that British children had been subject to “a gradual, creeping lockdown over at least a generation”.
[…]
The average age a child was allowed to play outside alone was 10.7 years, while their parents recalled being allowed out before their ninth birthday (8.9 years on average). In line with previous studies, the findings confirm that children play less as they get older.
“In the largest study of play in Britain, we can clearly see that there is a trend to be protective and to provide less freedom for our children now than in previous generations,” said Helen Dodd, a professor of child psychology at the University of Reading, who led the study.
“The concerns we have from this report are twofold. First, we are seeing children getting towards the end of their primary school years without having had enough opportunities to develop their ability to assess and manage risk independently. Second, if children are getting less time to play outdoors in an adventurous way, this may have an impact on their mental health and overall wellbeing.”
[…]
Whilst indisputably not born in the States, I mostly grew up and was educated there. As far as I can now recall, I was allowed to play “unsupervised” from a fairly young age. Once incident I do recall was learning to ride a bicycle. My father had fitted “training wheels” (albeit deliberately non-level, so as to encourage me to learn to balance), and one afternoon, I was talked into letting a slightly older child remove the training wheels. Perhaps not a good idea, as the path to our garage (driveway) was up a steep hill. The wheels were removed at the top, I climbed abroad, and shot downhill into the street barely under control. I managed to turn and continued down the street for some distance at speed. I recall falling over on my side at the end, but don’t recall now if I crashed or managed to break / slowdown beforehand; as far as I can recall, I wasn’t (seriously) hurt.
My parents were not amused, but did, to their credit, acknowledge I probably was ready to try riding without the training wheels. Dad then bought a nice bicycle so he could go out on rides with me; I later rode that bicycle for some years and eventually took it to University (where it was, unfortunately, stolen).
“So I was officially tested positive for COVID-19 today.” — Ted Nugent
That was singer Ted Nugent, 72, who has called COVID-19 “not a real pandemic” as well as a “scammy pandemic,” revealing in a Facebook Live post on Monday that he now has the virus.
“Everybody told me that I should not announce this, but I have had flu symptoms for the past 10 days. I thought I was dying,” he says in the almost nine-minute video. “Just a clusterf—.”
The “Just What the Doctor Ordered” singer describes suffering symptoms such as “body aches” and “a stuffed-up head.”
“My god, what a pain in the ass. I literally could hardly crawl out of bed the last few days,” he says.
Yet Nugent said that he still won’t get one of the available COVID-19 vaccines because “nobody knows what’s in it,” even though half of American adults have safely received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, which has proven to be highly effective in containing the spread of the virus in some countries. [Also, people know what’s in it.]
…
His name was trending on Twitter on Tuesday morning — just a week after he went viral for appearing to be confused about what “COVID-19” actually means.
While complaining about the yearlong pandemic canceling his tour for a second time, he asked in another Facebook Live video, “Why weren’t we shut down for COVID 1-18?”…
[…]
My unborn child doesn’t have a name yet, but she has already had her very first court hearing. On Monday, my partner, E, and I made (minor) history when we became the first couple in New York to be granted a pre-birth parentage order under a new suite of laws protecting same-sex families. Because of the pandemic, we had our court hearing virtually, meaning I officially became a mother on Microsoft Teams. Just like I’d always dreamed I would! You know how babies born on planes sometimes get free plane tickets for life? Well, I think I deserve at least a lifetime subscription to Microsoft Office.
You may be wondering what exactly a pre-birth parentage order is. The situation is this: E is giving birth in a few weeks to a baby we planned to have. After long discussions along the lines of “your womb or mine?”, we decided she would be the one to carry. We picked out a sperm donor together. We paid for the (very expensive) sperm and multiple rounds of artificial insemination together. We went to doctor’s appointments together. We brainstormed names — and have so far failed to decide on one — together. The baby may not be genetically mine but, in our hearts and minds, we are equal parents to She Who Has Yet to Be Named. In the eyes of the law, however, it’s more complicated. We can both be listed as parents on the birth certificate but, as the nongestational mum, my rights aren’t 100% clear.
Until very recently, lesbian parents in New York had to go through a second parent adoption in order to secure more legal recognition for the non-birth mother. That’s a gruelling process: it can take a year and cost thousands in legal fees. It’s also incredibly invasive: you have to list everywhere you’ve lived in the past 28 years, provide fingerprints for a background check, have a home visit from a social worker and more. You also can’t start the adoption process until the baby is born, meaning you can be stuck in legal limbo if a medical emergency happens during childbirth. Extremely luckily for us, however, a new law came into effect in February streamlining this process. All you need to do now is get several documents notarised and appear before a judge; you can do all this before the baby is born — although it took about 57 phone calls to different people in the court system until we established this to be the case.
[…] Alas, not everyone has it so easy. The EU court of justice is deliberating over the case of a child born to Bulgarian and British lesbian mothers in Spain: the baby is at risk of being stateless because same-sex relationships are not legally recognised in Bulgaria and the child isn’t able to obtain British citizenship from the other mother. […]
The column does not explain why that child wouldn’t be Spanish (location of birth), nor why the child “isn’t” British (citizenship of a parent (possibly non-biological, but so teh feck what?)). Bulgaria is just being arseholes.
The hearing in which I was permitted parentage of my unborn kid lasted under 10 minutes, but was a very long time in the making. When I first came out, almost 20 years ago, the Netherlands was the only place in the world where same-sex marriage was legal. Now, I’m able to marry the person I love in our respective home countries of the UK and US — and have our child legally recognised as belonging to both of us. I don’t take any of that for granted. Love may make a family, but legal recognition makes having a family a hell of a lot easier.
UCL data of 10,000 volunteers shows cases 30% higher among those who slept poorly in their 50s, 60s and 70s
People who regularly sleep for six hours or less each night in middle age are more likely to develop dementia than those who routinely manage seven hours, according to a major study into the disease.
Researchers found a 30% greater risk of dementia in those who during their 50s, 60s and 70s consistently had a short night’s sleep, regardless of other risk factors such as heart and metabolic conditions and poor mental health.
The study does not prove that sleeping too little causes dementia, since sleep loss itself may be one of the earliest symptoms of the disease. But some scientists believe the results bolster evidence that persistent poor sleep may at least contribute to the neurodegenerative disease.
Researchers do not know whether improving sleep can reduce the risk of dementia, but sleep is known to clear toxic waste from the brain. One hypothesis is that when people sleep less, this process becomes impaired.
[…]
While smoking, heavy drinking and obesity are risk factors for dementia, the chances of developing the disease rise steeply with age. Dementia is estimated to affect one in 14 over-65s and one in six people aged over 80. The risk of developing Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia doubles roughly every five years above the age of 65.
The first pathological changes that lead to dementia occur one to two decades before the disease becomes obvious, as sticky proteins called amyloid and tau build up in the brain. When the […] study [started in 1985 and] first assessed the sleep of volunteers who later developed dementia, this process had probably not started. This meant that if they were sleeping too little, it was unlikely to have been caused by dementia-related brain changes.
“It strengthens the evidence that poor sleep in middle age could cause or worsen dementia in later life,” said Dr Liz Coulthard, a consultant senior lecturer in dementia neurology at Bristol University, who was not involved in the study. […]
The article is at pains to point out that poor sleep may be a symptom rather than a part of the cause: “Robert Howard, professor of old age psychiatry at UCL, said: ‘We know that the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease appear in the brain 20 years before detectable cognitive impairment, so it is always possible that poor sleep might be a very early symptom of the condition, rather than a treatable risk factor.'”
Republicans have had plenty of time to come up with their best arguments against D.C. statehood. They just can’t seem to come up with anything compelling.
The Democratic-led House is expected to vote this week on the “Washington, D.C. Admission Act” (H.R. 51), which would welcome D.C. as the nation’s 51st state. The plan entails carving out a new federal district — limited to the National Mall, to the west of Capitol Hill — where there are no residents, while making the rest of D.C. a state.
Republican opponents are apparently still working on their talking points. Here, for example, was Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) making her case this morning:
“D.C. wouldn’t even qualify as a singular congressional district and here they are, they want the power and the authority of being an entire state in the United States — and they want that power.”
At face value, this argument may appear vaguely persuasive. The average population of a U.S. congressional district — not a whole state, just a district — is over 700,000 residents, and D.C.’s population is a little shy of that total.
The trouble is, two states — Wyoming and Vermont — have fewer people than D.C. By Mace’s reasoning, those states “wouldn’t even qualify as a singular congressional district,” either. The fact that the South Carolina congresswoman was standing a few feet from House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney — Wyoming’s sole representative in the House — made the circumstances a bit more ironic.
[…] Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) noted that D.C. doesn’t have any mining, which is true, but irrelevant. Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) insisted that D.C. would be the only state “without a car dealership.” In addition to being irrelevant, this one isn’t even true.
The Heritage Foundation’s Zack Smith, a witness Republicans invited to testify at the hearing, argued that congressional representation for these 700,000 American taxpayers is unnecessary because local residents “already impact the national debate” — because members of Congress see their yard signs while driving to Capitol Hill. He did not appear to be kidding.
After the hearing, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) thought it’d be a good idea to argue via Twitter, “The Founding Fathers never intended for Washington D.C. to be a state.” That’s very likely true, but the Founding Fathers, among other things, also didn’t intend for there to be two Dakotas — 19th-century Republicans created two states out of the Dakota Territory in order to have extra U.S. senators […]
Not only are these hundreds of thousands of Americans being denied representation in Congress, but the issue took on considerably greater importance during the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 — because the federal government controls the D.C. National Guard. It meant local elected officials, unlike every governor in the country, were powerless as radicalized rioters launched an attack.
It’s partly why the White House issued an official Statement of Administration Policy this morning, expressing President Joe Biden’s “strong support” for the pending legislation. While Barack Obama also supported D.C. statehood during his time in office, this was reportedly the first time any White House has given its official, written support for the D.C. statehood effort.
The bill is expected to pass the House this week, before heading to the divided Senate. Democratic leaders have vowed to hold a vote, but overcoming a Republican filibuster will likely be impossible.
Postscript: For the record, it wasn’t that long ago when Republicans felt differently about this issue. As the Washington Post recently noted, “Both conservative icon Barry Goldwater and former president Richard M. Nixon favored D.C. statehood. The 1972 and 1976 Republican Party platforms endorsed voting rights for Washington in the House and Senate. […]
Montana’s Republican-led state government has ended same-day voter registration and changed the state’s voter-ID law to exclude student ID cards. The new restrictions were signed by Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) yesterday.
The gunman in an Indianapolis shooting that left eight people dead at a FedEx facility browsed White supremacist websites a little over a year before the attack, police said.
In March 2020, the mother of gunman Brandon Hole contacted police because she was worried about his behavior after he purchased a gun, according to recently released details from Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD). She told police he told her “he was going to point a recently purchased shotgun at police officers so they would shoot him.” And when police went to their home, they observed he had visited White supremacist websites, the report said.
In an attack that lasted only a matter of minutes, Hole opened fired at the facility near Indianapolis’ main airport before taking his own life Thursday night. Of the eight people killed in the violence, four were members of the area’s Sikh community, Maninder Singh Walia, a member of the Sikh community in Indianapolis, told CNN on Friday.
The attack marks at least the 50th mass shooting — defined as four or more casualties excluding the shooter — since the Atlanta-area spa shootings March 16. It was the US’s deadliest shooting since 10 people were killed March 22 at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado.
The case has also raised concerns over access to guns, as Hole had his gun seized in the 2020 incident.
After his mother told officers on March 3 that she feared for her safety after her son purchased a gun a day earlier, the IMPD detained Hole, seized the gun, put him on an immediate mental health temporary hold and then transported him to a local hospital for evaluation, the police report said.
…
Despite the temporary mental health hold in March, Hole was able to legally purchase assault rifles in July and September 2020, Indianapolis police said.
The case “illustrates the limitations” of state law, The Marion County, Indiana, Prosecutor Ryan Mears said Monday.
…
On Friday night, Indianapolis police released the names of the eight deceased victims. They were Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jasvinder Kaur, 50; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74.
Four individuals remained hospitalized Monday with injuries sustained in the attack, FedEx said.
While the shooter’s motive isn’t yet known, “he targeted a facility known to be heavily populated by Sikh employees, and the attack is traumatic for our community as we continue to face senseless violence,” said Satjeet Kaur, executive director of the Sikh Coalition.
…
As of late Sunday night, a verified GoFundMe campaign for the families of the victims set up by the National Compassion Fund has raised more than $1 million, with FedEx donating $1 million.
The fund said 100% of the donations “will go to the families and those affected by the tragedy.”
More atl.
blfsays
Lynna@73, “[T]he federal government controls the DC National Guard. It meant local elected officials, unlike every governor in the country, were powerless as radicalized rioters[insurrectionists] launched an attack.”
Indeed. I recall making, or at least trying to make, that point (albeit perhaps not as simply) at the time, and then getting lectured on how individual state governors control the National Guard — completely missing the point.
[…] At this point, 1.1% of people in India have tested positive for COVID-19. The relatively low level of testing—193 tests per 1,000 people puts India 115th in terms of testing per capita—and the 6% rate of positive tests indicate that a real number is likely considerably higher. Even so, India ranks 121 out of 195 nations when it comes to the rate of COVID-19 infections per capita. It’s got a better rate than nations like Norway or Greece that have been held up as exemplars of nations that have taken proper actions and handled the pandemic well.
So why worry about India? There are four reasons:
1. In the last month, the daily count of new cases in India is up by 1,500%.
2. That rise coincides with a new “double mutant” variant.
3. India has just 0.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people.
4. India’s population is nearly 1.4 billion.
At a current 7-day moving average of 232,000 cases per day, the number of new cases in India is currently just under the 250,000 cases a day that the United States experienced for about a week in January.
[…] When it comes to vaccination rates, India is badly lagging. Not only has only 8% of the population been vaccinated, the current rate of vaccination means that it’s unlikely to reach 70% until somewhere around the end of the year. Add that to the relatively existing low percentage of people who have had COVID-19 in India, and the nation stands as a potential pool of over a billion people with a population a dozen times that of the United States.
[…] If, in the next eight months, India were to see the same kind of growth the United States did over the course of 2020, the number of people infected would be 136 million. […] And if India were to see the same kind of death rates seen in the United States, its death toll could easy approach the 3 million now dead worldwide.
India alone, right now, stands on the brink of an epidemic that could match the scale of the entire global pandemic to date. And that’s without taking into account that 0.5 hospital beds per person. If India were to see case fatality rates like those in Mexico—which has twice the hospital beds per capita—reaching just 10% of the population infected would see over 13 million dead.
India at this moment represents a unique and massive challenge to global health. As AlJazeera reports, the B.1.617 variant now becoming dominant in India carries a pair of mutations that have been seen separately in variants elsewhere. It has both the E484Q and the L452R changes to the spike proteins. Both of these are thought to make it more evasive of current vaccines and more capable of reinfecting those already infected by past variants of COVID-19.
A failure to address the rapidly growing case count in India doesn’t just stand ready to create an incredible tragedy for that nation, it threatens to provide the world with a new burst of variants that starts from a base that’s already among the most evasive to current vaccines. India could have more cases, more deaths, and more variants than everywhere else in the world combined, and it could have them incredibly quickly, unless the world—definitely including the United States—moves swiftly to provide additional support in dealing with a crisis there that is threatening to spiral out of control.
[…] A weary world that’s eager to put this pandemic to bed, may find that the greatest crisis is actually only now at hand. And it had better lend that hand now, while it’s still possible.
But of course Biden is still backing patent protection for vaccines, which remains the biggest obstacle for mass vaccinations worldwide. Sort of like how they are still backing the Dakota Access Pipeline — we want to save the world, but definitely not if the very rich can’t turn a profit off of it! We’d literally rather die instead!
“In restraining our physical desires, Muslims, in monk-like fashion, flex our muscles of self-control in the hope of developing a greater mastery over our beastial nature, allowing our angelic nature to rise.”
I couldn’t hate this sentence more if I tried. In refraining from reading the article at the link, I, in compassionate fashion, flex my muscles of self-control in the hope of showing solidarity with my animal kin, allowing my rejection of religious claptrap to rise.
[…] While attending a protest in Minneapolis on Saturday, the longtime Congress member and chair of the House Committee on Financial Services said she thought Chauvin needed to be convicted of murder and urged protesters to “get more confrontational.”
These comments received enormous attention in conservative media — with critics distorting Waters’s comments to claim she had encouraged protesters to riot if they didn’t like the verdict. (Waters’s actual comments fell far short of that, and she insisted in a subsequent interview that she was “nonviolent.”)
[…] “I’m aware that Congresswoman Waters was talking specifically about this trial, and about the unacceptability of anything less than a murder conviction, and talk about being ‘confrontational,’” said Judge Cahill. “I wish elected officials would stop talking about this case, especially in a manner that is disrespectful to the rule of law and to the judicial branch.”
Cahill denied the mistrial request, saying the jury had been told to avoid media coverage and he didn’t think jury members would be prejudiced about Waters’s comments. He also opined that “a congresswoman’s opinion really doesn’t matter a whole lot.” […]
Those on the right have exaggerated, distorted, and opportunistically spotlighted Waters’s remarks. She didn’t tell anyone to riot. However, the larger context here is that Waters has long believed, as have many on the left, that comfortable, privileged Americans are too willing to turn a blind eye to violence against Black people and other marginalized communities — and riots are, if not justified, at least an understandable response.
Moderates and conservatives, meanwhile, have long argued that some on the left have been reluctant to fully condemn or work to prevent unrest that can result in death, injury, or financial ruin. This decades-old discourse was revived amid the unrest that followed Floyd’s killing in May 2020 […]
What Waters actually said:
While attending a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis Saturday night, Waters responded to questions about the unfolding trial. She repeatedly said that protesters should “stay in the street” and “fight for justice.” She said that she was looking for a guilty verdict for Chauvin — and for murder, not merely the lesser charge of manslaughter. And then, asked again what protesters should do, she said the following:
“Well, we’ve got to stay on the street. And we’ve got to get more active. We’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
Video of her remarks went viral, particularly among conservatives, who asserted that Waters was urging protesters to riot if Chauvin was not convicted of murder. “Maxine Waters is inciting violence in Minneapolis,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted.
The “incitement” accusation is vastly overstated. Waters wasn’t addressing or directing a crowd in a speech, she was speaking off the cuff to questioners, and her comments only went so viral because conservatives made them viral.
And while Waters made clear she wanted a guilty verdict, it’s not clear that her advice for protesters was meant to be contingent on a “not guilty” verdict. One questioner used that framing, but Waters said she couldn’t hear him, and her eventual answer was to the broader question of “what should protesters do?”
As for the accusation that Waters was urging violence or riots, that hinges on her use of the phrase “get more confrontational.” In a subsequent interview with theGrio, Waters said she was absolutely not endorsing violence, saying, “I am nonviolent.” When she used the word “confrontational,” she said, she was talking “about confronting the justice system, confronting the policing that’s going on, I’m talking about speaking up.” And, asked by CNN’s Manu Raju if she stood by the word “confrontational,” Waters answered, “The whole civil rights movement is confrontational.”
[…] Most politicians have tended to speak out against such violence [against rioting and against property damage], with many Democrats viewing it as obviously politically counterproductive to demonstrators’ aims (or, perhaps, to their own political fortunes). “Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response,” Joe Biden tweeted days after Floyd’s killing last May. “But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not.”
[…] There has been a strain of thinking on the left that riots motivated by racial injustice are “the language of the unheard,” to quote Martin Luther King Jr. — and that understanding and sympathy, rather than condemnation, are called for. And Waters has long held this belief.
[…] Waters’s core view that many in the US are too comfortably willing to excuse injustice against marginalized people, and that more aggressive protest tactics are often needed as a result, surfaced again in 2018. During the controversies over the Trump administration’s family separation policy, Waters again endorsed public (nonviolent) confrontation of Trump Cabinet officials, and a very similar cycle of controversy to the current one ensued.
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them,” Waters said at a rally that year. […]
The stakes in 2018 — about whether Trump officials could eat in DC restaurants without getting yelled at — were pretty low. But people can and do get killed and badly injured in riots, and property damage that big corporations can shrug off can ruin small business owners.[…]
Beyond the point about unrest, others have objected to Waters’s insistence that only one outcome in the trial […] the criticism is that such statements from public officials in particular jeopardize the right to a fair trial and risk interfering with that trial — the latter of which is a criticism Democrats often made of Trump as he opined on his associates’ trials during his presidency.
And as for Judge Cahill’s hope that politicians would “stop talking” about what the verdict should be? President Joe Biden subsequently said Tuesday that he was “praying” for “the right verdict” and that he thought the evidence was “overwhelming.”
UPDATE: One America News has fired Marty Golingan, who told us staffers don’t think many of OAN’s stories are true. “I’ve given up my journalistic integrity already, and to be fired, that would make me feel good,” he had told me. “I would wear it like a badge of honor.”
BREAKING: Derek Chauvin has been convicted of the murder of George Floyd.
For the first time in Minnesota state history, a white police officer has been held accountable for killing a Black man.
While today’s verdict is a small win for police accountability and may help heal a grieving community, the systems that allowed George to be murdered — ripping him away from his family and the communities that loved him so much — remain fully intact.
George Floyd will never again play games with his daughter, Gianna.
He’ll never go on walks through the park with his fiancée, Courteney.
He will never play basketball with his brother, Philonise.
True justice would mean George Floyd was never killed in the first place.
This racist system of policing also resulted in the killing of Daunte Wright by police less than 10 miles from this trial.
And it will continue taking lives by police violence and incarceration until we overhaul it entirely.
George Floyd should not have died under an officer’s knee — he should still be alive today.
So should Daunte Wright, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people killed by police.
True justice for George Floyd means renewing our conviction to create a world where police do not have the opportunity to use violence to target Black people.
We must ensure police are not the only resort for addressing harm.
We must remove police from low-level enforcement of offenses that shouldn’t be criminalized.
We must divert funding from policing and towards community-based services.
Russian police have arrested key supporters of Alexei Navalny and begun closing down central squares in Moscow and other cities before demonstrations planned for Wednesday evening in support of the jailed opposition leader.
One of Navalny’s top aides, Lyubov Sobol, was dragged from a taxi by uniformed police on Wednesday morning, her lawyer said. A press aide to Navalny, Kira Yarmysh, was also arrested by police outside her apartment.
The Kremlin critic’s regional headquarters have also been raided as police seek to disrupt, and eventually liquidate, his political organisation across Russia.
…
The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, who put down mass protests stemming from fraudulent elections last year, is expected to arrive in Moscow on Thursday to meet Putin. The Federation Council, the Russian law-making body that approves foreign policy initiatives, plans to convene on Friday.
Many in Belarus would see greater integration with Russia as a loss of the country’s sovereignty. Video from the capital, Minsk, on Wednesday showed riot police in the city centre, despite the lack of large protests planned . Meanwhile, in Russia, pro-Navalny demonstrations have been called in more than 100 cities, with the largest expected in Moscow and St Petersburg….
The Guardian’s Rory Carroll talks to Anushka Asthana about the recent eruption of violence in Northern Ireland that began at the end of March, triggered, Rory says, by the decision of the police and prosecutors not to arrest or charge anyone who attended the funeral of a former IRA commander Bobby Storey last summer. According to loyalists, the police are now biased towards Sinn Féin.
It is part of a loyalist narrative, Rory tells Anushka, that set in after the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Instead of a settlement, a new dawn, Sinn Féin and its allies used the agreement to chip away at Northern Ireland, removing royal symbols, removing the union jack from Belfast city hall and erecting Irish-language signs. Brexit has further increased the tensions. Loyalists believe the DUP let Boris Johnson weaken Northern Ireland’s link to the UK in order to clinch a deal.
Here’s a link to the April 21 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
The leisure and hospitality industry in the US was hit the hardest by the coronavirus, with overall employment in the industry falling by 23%, roughly 4m jobs. It has also been the slowest industry to start recovering from initial job losses when the pandemic first hit the US.
And after more than a year, many workers in the industry remain jobless and unsure if they will be offered their jobs back. Those workers have, however, been cheered by some recent good news.
In California, workers and unions were successful in pushing through a statewide measure that was signed into law on 16 April, granting rehire rights based on seniority to hospitality workers throughout the state.
“It’s historic,” said Kurt Petersen, president of Unite Here Local 11 which represents workers in California and Arizona. “This is the biggest victory for workers during the pandemic.”
Marvin Alvarenga, a busser at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California for 11 years, was laid off during the pandemic and is relieved the recall rights legislation passed given the uncertainty and anxiety he’s experienced over the past year, including the loss of his health insurance which his wife relied on as she is currently battling cancer.
“Luckily, I still have my house but it’s been really tough to make ends meet while not having a job and I haven’t been able to send money to my mom in El Salvador,” said Alvarenga. “I’m really happy this law passed because it gives me and other workers hope we’ll be able to return to our jobs. It’s a lifeline to thousands of hospitality workers going through the same thing I’ve been going through.”
Similar legislation guaranteeing recall rights for workers in the hospitality industry has been passed in New York City, Philadelphia, New Haven, Honolulu, Minneapolis, Washington and Baltimore.
From their morning summary:
India’s authorities scrambled to shore up supplies of medical oxygen to hospitals in the capital, Delhi, as coronavirus stretched medical infrastructure to breaking point. Tuesday marked the seventh day in a row of more than 200,000 new cases being recorded.
…
Demonstrators have gathered in Berlin this morning to protest against a law parliament is set to pass giving Germany’s national government power to impose lockdowns on areas with high coronavirus infection rates to curb a third wave of the pandemic.
…
The archbishop of Canterbury has called on the UK government to start a public inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic, saying it should call out “reckless error” and have the power to compel witnesses to attend….
NEW: a deep-dive into the situation in India, where a devastating second wave is overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums, eclipsing global records as it goes…
250,000 new cases every day, and test positivity is soaring suggesting many are still missed
To put this into a global context, much has been made of the resurgences in Europe and North America over recent weeks, but India’s wave has accelerated straight past all of them.
The situation there really is beyond what we’re seeing anywhere else worldwide.
In many parts of the country including the capital Delhi, cases are doubling every five days. Compared to the steady rise seen in the first wave last year, the current climbs are almost vertical.
And in many places, test positivity is rising at the same pace. Even as more and more tests are done, the share of them that come back positive is still climbing, suggesting tens of thousands of cases are going undetected.
All of this is feeding through into a crisis in hospitals beyond what we’ve seen anywhere else in the world over the whole pandemic.
ICUs are twice as full in Nagpur as they ever got in Lombardy last March. Mumbai’s ICU’s are more full than Liège was in Belgium’s brutal peak.
The stories on the ground are grim.
Authorities have taken emergency measures, requiring than any and all oxygen produced anywhere in the state be sent to hospitals as supplies run out.
With thousands simply unable to find a hospital bed, death tolls are mounting at a similarly rapid pace.
But a look at this chart shows another issue: although official Covid death counts are rising, the numbers themselves remain incredibly low.
And I stress in-*credible*
Essentially, none of those numbers are correct; all are vast undercounts.
I collated local news reports (HT @muradbanaji) across seven districts, finding that overall, numbers of Covid victims who have been cremated are 10x larger than official Covid death counts in same areas.
If applied nationally, that would mean that instead of 1,700 deaths per day, India is currently seeing 17,000.
And as more reports come in, that undercounting estimate has been rising, so the true toll may be higher still.
Read our full story here with @b_parkyn @jyots43 @SJFindlay @AnnaSophieGross for more, including the debate over the role of the new variant B.1.617 in driving the surge…
“Tucker Carlson had a complete meltdown tonight in response to a former New York corrections officer who criticized Derek Chauvin for using excessive force on George Floyd. Here’s how the interview (abruptly) ended….”
Merrick Garland is announcing that the DoJ is opening a civil pattern/practice investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department. (This is separate from the criminal investigation into George Floyd’s death.)
Looking out over a sea of jostling, maskless faces gathered at a political rally in West Bengal on Saturday, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, proudly proclaimed that he had “never ever seen such huge crowds”. A mask was also noticeably absent from Modi’s face.
That same day, India registered a record-breaking 234,000 new coronavirus cases and 1,341 deaths – and the numbers have kept rising since.
The country has descended into a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Almost 1.6 million cases have been registered in a week, bringing total cases to more than 15 million. In the space of just 12 days, the Covid positivity rate doubled to 17%, while in Delhi it hit 30%. Hospitals across the country have filled to capacity but this time it is predominately the young taking up the beds; in Delhi, 65% of cases are under 40 years old.
While the unprecedented spread of the virus has been partly blamed on a more contagious variant that has emerged in India, Modi’s government has also been accused of failures of political leadership from the top, with lax attitudes emulated by state and local leaders from all parties and even health officials across the country, which led many to falsely believe in recent months that India had defeated Covid.
“Leadership across the country did not adequately convey that this was an epidemic which had not gone away,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
“Victory was declared prematurely and that ebullient mood was communicated across the country, especially by politicians who wanted to get the economy going and wanted to get back to campaigning. And that gave the virus the chance to rise again.”
In West Bengal, where Modi’s government has refused to curtail the drawn-out state elections that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hoping to win, Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah, continued their public meetings and roadshows into this week even as queues of ambulances lined up outside hospitals across India. On Saturday, the same day as Modi’s rally, the state registered 7,713 new cases – the highest since the pandemic began. Three candidates running in the election have died from the virus. By Sunday, #ModiMadeDisaster began trending on Twitter.
Doctors on the frontline broke down, speaking of the deluge of dying Covid patients they had been unable to treat due to a lack of beds and inadequate state and central government preparation.
…
States such a Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh stand accused of covering up the true death toll from coronavirus, with the numbers of bodies stacking up in hospital morgues far outnumbering official fatality figures….
…
Twitter and Facebook have become a devastating catalogue of hundreds of thousands of urgent pleas for help finding hospital beds, oxygen, plasma and remdesivir, the drug experimentally used to help treat Covid patients, which remains in short supply in hospitals across the country.
The dead, meanwhile, have continued to overload crematoriums and graveyards in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi faster than they could be burned, and families waited days to cremate their loved ones….
…
An edict from the government ruled that all oxygen meant for industrial use would now be diverted to hospitals to meet the unprecedented demand, and Indian railways said they were all set to operate special trains specially designed to carry liquid oxygen and oxygen cylinders, dubbed the “Oxygen Express”. Thousands of Covid beds have also been arranged in train carriages.
Still, many fear that it is too little, too late. “The seriousness of the situation should have been realised months ago but instead governments were in denial and gave out messages that the virus was not that dangerous any more,” said Thadhani. “I’m worried that we still have not seen the worst.”
Arizona House just passed bill #SB1485 to purge over 100,000 voters from state’s Permanent Early Voting List, which will no longer be permanent. They will no longer automatically receive a mail ballot. Republicans silenced Dems who objected & refused to allow full debate
Arizona Republicans rolling back voting rights after Latino turnout increased by 5 points & Native American turnout by 8 points in 2020
Attention @SenatorSinema: this directly impacts voters who elected you to Senate
Myanmar anti-coup activists launched protests on Wednesday calling for the release of detained prisoners, as junta chief General Min Aung Hlaing was reported to be planning to attend a regional summit to discuss the crisis in the country.
Saturday’s summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) would be its first since the coup in Myanmar on Feb. 1 and a test of how the traditionally consensual organisation will respond.
…
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), an activist group, says 738 people have been killed by Myanmar’s security forces since the coup and 3,300 people are in detention. Another 20 people have been sentenced to death and are in hiding.
On Wednesday, people shared photos on social media wearing blue shirts and holding up a hand with the name of an arrested person written on it.
The shirts are a tribute to pro-democracy activist Win Tin who was imprisoned by the military for 19 years and died on April 21, 2014. After his release, he pledged to wear a blue shirt until all political prisoners were freed.
“Please raise your voice and demand the release of all the people who are being unfairly detained under the junta government,” protest leader Ei Thinzar Maung said on Facebook.
…
Mynamar’s home affairs ministry has declared the NUG [see #53 above] unlawful, but the NUG says it is the legitimate authority in Myanmar and has requested international recognition and an invitation to the Jakarta meeting.
A grouping of ASEAN lawmakers also said the NUG should be invited.
“ASEAN cannot adequately discuss the situation in Myanmar without hearing from and speaking to the National Unity Government,” ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights said in a statement.
On the invitation to Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, it said: “ASEAN must make it abundantly clear that he is not there as a representative of the Myanmar people…”
Human Rights Watch said the 10-member bloc should immediately withdraw the invitation to the junta’s leader.
“Min Aung Hlaing, who faces international sanctions for his role in military atrocities and the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, should not be welcomed at an intergovernmental gathering to address a crisis he created,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
…When I see polls of the vaccine hesitant I’m really much interested in these breakdowns because the strategies you would use to vaccinate the vaccine hesitant in the African-American community are quite different from the more current and deeply ideological opposition of white evangelical Trumpers. (The highest resistance is among white Republicans and particularly white evangelical Republicans.) The focus group discussed in this Washington Post article suggests a Trumpite ‘hesitancy’ which is refusal looking for a rationale. The biggest explanation given in the most recent was the Pfizer CEO’s recent statement that booster shots will likely be necessary. Again a ‘hesitancy’ looking for clinical rationales rather than one based on them.
People who are worried about side effects, unknown health risks or false rumors they’ve heard on social media can likely be convinced in many cases with time, public education and reassurance from trusted community leaders. But among Trump supporters the opposition seems primarily based on ideological commitments unrelated to safety: a generalized refusal to believe that COVID was ever that big a deal and opposition to anything that comes from sectors of society they generally view as enemies, the scientific establishment, the highly educated, COVID hawks generally. The lede of the WaPo article describes the message of the hesitant like this. “Stop talking about the possibility of coronavirus booster shots. Don’t bully people who are vaccine holdouts. And if you’re trying to win over skeptics, show us anyone besides Dr. Fauci.”
In other words, on the Trump right, vaccines are the new masks.
SC @101, yeah, Tucker Carlson is ranting about “this current insanity” after Derek Chauvin was pronounced guilty. Tucker also claimed that “decent people will leave this country.” I assume he means himself. Is Tucker threatening to leave the USA? Hope so. However, I’m not sure what other country I would send him to if there was a choice. Maybe Putin would welcome him?
* House Republicans will be attending a retreat in Orlando next week, and according to House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the focus will be on “the substance and the policy of conservatism.” Asked if Donald Trump would be part of the event, Cheney told reporters yesterday, “I haven’t invited him.” [LOL]
* Following a tense committee exchange with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) yesterday, Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) was pressed on MSNBC today about a possible U.S. Senate campaign in Florida next year. “What I can tell you is I am going to continue to do what I have tried to do in every position I have had,” the Florida congresswoman replied, “which is to remember my oath and fulfill our most important mission, and that is the protection of the American people, and I am going to continue to do that — regardless of the title that I hold.”
* The New York Times pointed to an interesting observation related to money in politics: “A dozen megadonors and their spouses contributed a combined $3.4 billion to federal candidates and political groups since 2009, accounting for nearly one out of every 13 dollars raised, according to a new report.”
* An unspecified number of employees at Simon & Schuster, one of the nation’s largest publishers, circulated a petition in the hopes that the company would not proceed with a book deal for former Vice President Mike Pence. Simon & Schuster Chief Executive Jonathan Karp announced yesterday that the project is moving forward, employees’ objections notwithstanding.
re Lynna @109: The claim of “decent people will leave this country” in response to “this action” or “that action” is and always has been a ruse. Carlson would never leave the US because he is making way too much money spouting his bullshit and his faithful followers would rather stay here and make life miserable for people they don’t like. And NONE of them are “decent people”. If Carlson and his ilk WOULD leave the country for destinations unknown, the US would be a much better place for the rest of us.
The city of Columbus, Ohio has been gripped by protests after a police killing of a Black girl was reported within 20 minutes of the Derek Chauvin verdict being announced in Minneapolis on Tuesday.
Local press have identified the teen killed as Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16 year old, citing local government and the teen’s mother.
Paula Bryant tells me her 16 year-old daughter Ma’Khia Bryant was an honor roll student and a sweet child. Ma’Khia was shot and killed by a @ColumbusPolice on Legion Lane at 4:30p today. https://twitter.com/LaceyCrisp/status/1384665355046592519
[…] WBNS-TV, a Columbus TV station, cited Paula Bryant and another family member as saying that Ma’Khia Bryant had called the police to help stop a fight outside her house.
The police said at a Tuesday evening press conference that the caller hung up before identifying themselves and that they had not yet been able to establish the person’s identity.
Police offered a timeline of the incident. Columbus police said that a 9-1-1 call was made at 4:35 p.m. A caller said that a female was trying to stab people, according to police.
Body cam footage shown by Columbus police on Tuesday evening and recorded by local reporters appears to show officers arriving at a house in a squad car. Police officials said that officers responded at 4:45 p.m.
A group of people are standing outside and, as an officer approaches and asks “what’s going on,” two of those gathered appear to tumble over each other.
The victim begins to run away from the officer towards another woman. The officer draws his firearm and fires at her, and she collapses. The video begins with the officer exiting his car; around 10 seconds elapse between the start of the video and the point at which the officer shoots.
“She’s a fucking kid, man!” one bystander screamed immediately after the shooting, according to the body cam footage.
Police said that the victim, subsequently identified as Bryant, was pronounced dead at 5:21 p.m.
Facebook video taken by a local resident appears to show a police officer yelling “Blue Lives Matter” as a group of onlookers discusses the shooting. The person videotaping replies angrily, while another person at the scene describes it as “an insult.”
It’s not clear whether the teen was armed. Police have suggested she was, but Bryant’s aunt told The Dispatch that her niece had dropped the knife by the time of the shooting.
Protestors began to gather at the site of the shooting on Tuesday evening. Video from the scene shows protestors gathering and decrying the use of lethal force in the incident. […]
Yes. I did not hear “drop your weapon” nor “put your hands up” nor STOP!
The officer instead pulled his gun & yelled “get down” as he shot & killed a child.
The craziest part is the kid he killed called for the police to come.
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There’s no reason to shoot someone in the back! Cops need to stop using lethal force as their go to method.
Reading the article, the implication seems to be that the officer shot the girl as she was running towards another girl with a weapon (TBD).
So let’s hear from the other girl. Was she in danger/afraid? Did she see a knife?
I need more details and, seriously want to know this girl has a freaking knife in the first place.
——————–
The officer literally shot the girl mid-stab. Another second of hesitation and the girl’s target might have suffered a life-threatening knife wound.
Like all of you, I was sick when I first heard of this incident. Then I saw the tape.
One thing is consistent here: people no longer trust the descriptions given by police. There are still a lot of questions to be answered here.
The knife, and the hand wielding the knife being raised to stab someone are visible in the video.
tomhsays
In the wake of the Chauvin verdict, there is renewed interest in the original press release on the response to “a report of a forgery in progress.”
Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.
Marjorie Taylor Greene continues to spout obnoxious nonsense:
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) responded to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) calling Black Lives Matter “the most powerful domestic terrorists [sic] organization in our county” by demanding that the NRCC return her donation.
“In her brief time as a Republican star, she has peddled QAnon inspired conspiracies, promoted rhetoric that egged on the insurrection at the United States Capitol, planned a white supremacist caucus in Congress, and tweeted a racist statement in the wake of the Derek Chauvin verdict,” the DCCC chair told Politico. “While Democrats are fighting for racial justice, Republicans continue to let Taylor Greene’s disgraceful actions go unpunished.”
Greene also tweeted that D.C. was “completely dead” Tuesday night due to “fear of riots.” Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer, was found guilty on all charges related to his May 2020 killing of George Floyd, which sparked protests in D.C. and throughout the country last summer. In reality, D.C. had beefed up security in anticipation of a potential acquittal in the Chauvin case […]
Maloney homed in on Greene’s $175,000 pledged donation to the NRCC, […] “While they continue to dodge questions about Greene’s racist platform, the NRCC has refused to return the $175,000 in campaign cash Greene funneled into their coffers,” a DCCC press release said. […]
On April 12, the United States hit a record 4.6 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine administered in a single day. One day later, the rolling seven-day average of vaccinations in the United States hit its peak. Then, after weeks of steady increases that pointed to the U.S. reaching herd immunity over the next two months, the vaccination rate actually started to fall. It’s now down by 10%, and that decline seems to be continuing.
[…] On April 14, data from Civiqs showed that half of American adults remaining unvaccinated said they would not accept the vaccine. In the week since, those saying “No” to the vaccine has moved slightly ahead of those saying “Yes” among the general population. And the biggest reason is that three-quarters of Republicans who have not yet been vaccinated are turning down their chance to get a jab. [chart available at the link]
[…] Assumptions that Republicans would “quietly” accept the vaccine while continuing to spout anti-science views on other topics have proven unfounded.
[…] At this point, expecting Republicans to “do the right thing” out of the spotlight on vaccines is about as reasonable as expecting that they’ll do the right thing on gun safety or protecting democracy. It is not happening, and will not happen without some incentive. [chart available at the link]
Republican hesitancy is leading not only to disparity in the rates of vaccination among states, but massive imbalances within states. As the Chicago Tribune reports, clinics in deep-red southern Illinois have been able to fill only about 10% of their vaccine appointment slots, despite dropping all requirements. Meanwhile, vaccine demand is still so great in the Chicago area that area clinics cannot meet the demand.
One big reason is that communities of color are strongly supportive of the vaccine, and anxious to gain immunity against a deadly disease. […] Vaccine demand also remains high in Latino communities. Meanwhile, thanks to that high level of resistance by Republicans, white Americans overall are 2.5 times more likely to turn down vaccination.
The same dynamic is being seen in Kansas, where KCUR public radio reports that over half of all counties actually “rejected” their allocation of COVID-19 vaccine this week, even though only about a third of residents have been vaccinated. These counties are hitting a plateau of vaccination well below half of adults. Five counties in Kansas haven’t accepted any vaccine for over a month. Vaccine is actually expiring or being wasted because opened vials contain more than a single dose.
[…] With a week to go before his 100th day in office, President Joe Biden has met the steep goals he set for himself when he came into the White House. More than 200 million doses of vaccine have been administered (213 million and counting). Over half of all adults in the nation have now received at least one dose of vaccine. Those are real accomplishments—huge accomplishments—and they represent turning around a program that was flailing and transforming it into a logistical powerhouse that has mastered providing states with vaccine when promised.
However, even as this is happening, the United States is still seeing new COVID-19 cases at a rate that matches the highs of the summer spike during 2020. The same goes for the rate of deaths, with the nearly 900 deaths logged on Tuesday being far too typical.
[…]. To achieve herd immunity, the United States needs to vaccinate somewhere between 70% and 90% of the population, where the range of numbers represents different measures of the transmissibility of the many COVID-19 variants. Right now, if every American adult who says they will get vaccinated actually gets the vaccine, the total number vaccinated will hit: 69%.
[…] it’s frightening to see that all the work done to make the vaccine safe, effective, and available is running up against a wall composed of deliberate ignorance and fear. It means that tens of millions of Americans will remain unvaccinated. It means that COVID-19 will never really “go away,” but will become an endemic disease prone to throwing off new variants. […]
Right now, there are two things that should be done:
1. Get the vaccine where it’s wanted. There is nothing just, fair, appropriate, or moral about having 90% of vaccine in some areas go unused, while other areas are still having trouble getting enough to meet demand. Delivering more vaccine to communities that are anxious to get a jab will protect more people, more quickly. It’s the right thing to do.
2. Provide incentives to vaccination. Those incentives can be negative, as in “you can’t board a plane without proof of vaccination.” Or they could be positive, such as providing vaccinated Americans a free pass to national parks. Whatever they are, they will need to be substantial. After all, we’re talking about white people who have already spurned a free Krispy Kreme every day for a year, and that’s a pretty high hurdle.
President Biden will address the nation today on the subject of vaccines. It’s expected that he will officially announce hitting the 200 million dose target. But hopefully, he will also explain how the nation will go forward with the next 200 million doses.
Republican lawmakers in 34 states have introduced more than 80 anti-protest bills thus far in the 2021 legislative session […] already more than double the number introduced in any other year.
[…] Among the wave of anti-protest bills is one signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday. Known as the “anti-riot bill,” the measure requires that cities receive state approval before cutting police budgets and makes it a felony to destroy historical structures, including flags and memorials, during protests.
The law, which goes into effect immediately, also includes a number of other penalties, including increasing the charge for battery on a police officer during a riot to a minimum of six months in jail.
DeSantis praised the law during a news conference Monday, calling it “the strongest anti-rioting, pro-law enforcement piece of legislation in the country.”
GOP-controlled legislatures in Oklahoma and Iowa have recently passed bills that seek to grant immunity to drivers who strike or injure protesters with their vehicles in public streets during demonstrations, and a Republican bill in Indiana would prohibit anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from working in a state or local government role.
In Minnesota, a bill proposed in the state Senate earlier this month would prevent those convicted of an unlawful protest violation from receiving student loans or other forms of financial aid, including unemployment benefits.
While the measures have secured widespread support from Republicans, Democrats and civil rights advocacy groups argue that the wave of proposals could threaten Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech and lawful assembly.
Vera Eidelman, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Times Wednesday that the bills are “consistent with the general trend of legislators’ responding to powerful and persuasive protests by seeking to silence them rather than engaging with the message of the protests.”
Wonkette: “New York Times Real Sad That We Can’t Make Nice With MAGA Thugs Who Want To Destroy Us”
This week, Nate Cohn at the New York Times suggested that violent rightwing extremism and the demonstrated authoritarian bent within the GOP aren’t exclusively to blame for the fall of American democracy. No, the true problem is that Democrats don’t want to Netflix and chill with unhinged conspiracy theorists.
The country is increasingly split into camps that don’t just disagree on policy and politics — they see the other as alien, immoral, a threat. Such political sectarianism is now on the march.
Eric Boehlert pointed out how Cohn “could only find examples of rightwing behavior that threatens our democracy, yet he insisted Both Sides were to blame.” […]
Cohn is regurgitating conservative rhetoric that buries the larger problem rather than appraising it.
The first image we see in Cohn’s piece after the headline, “Why Political Sectarianism Is a Growing Threat to American Democracy,” is a photo of MAGA supporters confronting Joe Biden supporters outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center as ballots were still being counted after the election. One of President Lost Cause’s supporters is wearing a “Not Today Satan” shirt. We’re presumably supposed to wonder why these fellow Americans are so angry with each other. […]
almost everyone who voted for Biden wanted to move on, to heal. […] Democrat Pete Buttigieg shared similar sentiments: “If someone you love and care about voted the other way, today might be a good day to reach out. Not to talk politics, but to talk about things that will remind them (and yourself) why you love and care about them.”
The one-term loser’s supporters spat in our faces. They didn’t congratulate us however insincerely. Instead, they embraced a Big Lie and rejected both democracy and reality. […] a sitting president had refused to concede an election he lost.
Cohn acknowledges MAGA’s “efforts to subvert the peaceful transition of power,” but laments that “the two political parties see the other as an enemy.” […]
It’s an outlook that makes compromise impossible and encourages elected officials to violate norms in pursuit of an agenda or an electoral victory. It turns debates over changing voting laws into existential showdowns. And it undermines the willingness of the loser to accept defeat — an essential requirement of a democracy.
Yes, it is awful that REPUBLICANS keep doing these things. This paragraph reads as if dictated by Mitch McConnell. Republicans attempting to disenfranchise minority voters is literally an existential showdown. Black people aren’t behaving like melodramatic teenagers over white supremacists’ efforts to disenfranchise us. Baseless accusations of voter fraud aren’t policy differences. This was cruel slander.
Whether religious or political, sectarianism is about two hostile identity groups who not only clash over policy and ideology, but see the other side as alien and immoral. It’s the antagonistic feelings between the groups, more than differences over ideas, that drive sectarian conflict.
This is blatant whitewashing. White supremacists stormed the Capitol, some of whom were carrying the Confederate flag, and Cohn still can’t describe the “two hostile identity groups” as angry white people and minorities who just want to exist. This “sectarian conflict” isn’t a result of liberals and conservatives disagreeing over marginal tax rates. […]
Defending his article on Twitter, Cohn accused Democrats of feeling that “Republicans are an immoral, alien enemy.” A self-described “very liberal” white guy agreed with Cohn and claimed Democrats believed Republicans were “evil and subhuman,” which proved Cohn’s point about sectarian hostility. This is what Malcolm X described as the oppressors’ guilt complex. They feel as if you’re calling them “evil and subhuman” if you just accurately describe their actions! […]
Cohn infantilizes the modern GOP, suggesting they are simply acting out because they are in the minority. But Republicans are just as brutal to us when they’re in power. Cohn also can’t offer examples of Democrats embracing violence or authoritarianism in reaction to the past four years. Democrats nominated Joe Biden for president, and Republicans still refused to accept the election results.
[…] The New York Times might’ve published The 1619 Project, but I wonder if everyone who works there bothered to read it.
blfsays
Both arrggghhhh!!!1! and Yea!!!, France ‘to start easing Covid-19 travel restrictions in May’ — arrggghhhh because whilst R is just below 1, J&J’s vaccine will start to used, and the number of vaccinations is (slowly) creeping up, everything else isn’t so good (ICU occupancy is still notably over 100%, etc), and Yeah because outdoor dining, etc — which is very Very much missed! — will be allowed (albeit it is probably too early, so arrggghhhh):
France plans to lift travel restrictions and ease a nationwide curfew on May 2 on expectations that daily Covid-19 cases will soon begin falling, but new entry restrictions on travellers from India will be imposed to fight the spread of a contagious coronavirus variant, a government official said.
President Emmanuel Macron also intends to stick to a goal of allowing restaurants to serve patrons outdoors from mid-May, while also reopening cinemas, theatres and museums with reduced capacity, a source close to the presidency told AFP.
Non-food businesses will also open their doors mid-May, after Macron announced their closure from April 3 to contain a third wave of coronavirus infections that have again pushed hospitals to the brink.
[…]
Government spokesman Gabriel Attal confirmed Wednesday that France would lift its ban on domestic travel as planned on May 3, but said it would maintain its nighttime curfew, now in place from 7pm to 6am.
Non-essential shops, closed since the partial lockdown of the country at the beginning of April, won’t reopen before mid-May, he said
[…]
Macron will chair a meeting with top ministers Wednesday to evaluate the government’s efforts to combat the crisis.
Hopefully they will tell him to stop waffling and put as much people and resources, and encouragements & incentives to get vaccinated, and (increasing?) disincentives for the vaccine-hesitant (a major, major problem here in France; a famous poll end of last year found only c.40% will willing to be vaccinated!). There are other recommendations and issues (and successes) to “evaluate”, but the lackadaisical vaccination campaign — the best known method of ending the pandemic — needs some serious focused attention.
The prospect of relief from the quasi-lockdown reflects the government’s conviction that the number of daily Covid cases will fall to around 20,000 within a month, the source said. [fantasy? (I have not checked the trends), today‘s total is just over 43,000 cases! –blf]
Macron is also betting that France will meet its target of vaccinating 20 million people with at least one dose by mid-May, up from 13 million currently. […]
Fantasy! (Probably.) Vaccination started at the very end of last year, c.15 weeks ago. Only 13m vaccinations(? jabs?); i.e., an average of less than 1m a week. There are 3–4 weeks to “mid-May” (let’s call it 4), and 7m vaccinations(? jabs(probably)?) to meet that rather low target of 20m; i.e., c.2m each week (on average) — double the average to-date. Whilst I’m happy the goal (probably) requires an ever-improving trend in the correct direction, I’m disappointed the goal is so modest, and fairly skeptical even that modest goal will be reached. And it’s a possible example of a missed incentive; e.g., one can only make a reservation for outdoor dining, or work at a restaurant, with proof of a jab (or having a legitimate medical reason preventing vaccination). The willfully unvaccinated can still dine, but no reservations (critical point here is reservations will probably be highly recommended, at least at first)… and no essentially public-facing work.
Woke culture FTW! And by woke culture we mean “treating children with basic human decency and getting the hell out of their underpants and doctors’ offices.” In a season of repeated assaults on the health and safety of trans kids, let’s celebrate the fact that two such bills died yesterday in the Montana and Florida legislatures. […]
The GOP has decided the best new wedge issue for 2022 is to cancel trans kids. Because the biggest danger to the Republic, after BLM and “Marxism” of course, is this little girl. [video available at the link.]
This season’s best-dressed bigots are styling themselves as protectors of “the children.” They’re either “helping” trans kids by barring them from receiving medically necessary treatment, even going to so far as to remove them from their homes if their parents accede to doctor’s recommendations to administer gender-affirming care (FOR THE CHILDREN!), or they’re protecting female athletes by barring trans kids from playing on the appropriate team. This requires them to invoke a horde of giant, hairy boys slapping on pink shirts and stealing the mountain of full college scholarships from girl athletes.
Spoiler alert: Neither one of those things exists.
As the parent of kids who play league sports in a state that allows for full participation by trans athletes, I can tell you from personal experience that this is not a thing. If approximately 1 person in 250 is transgender, and the average high school has 526 students, we’re talking about two kids. One of them is probably a boy, in which case no one cares. And if the girl wants to participate in college sports, she has to be taking testosterone suppressants to be eligible to play at all under current NCAA rules.
[…] But this is a nicetimes post, so we get to write today that state legislators are finally starting to get the message that this might be bad politics — in addition to being unspeakably bad generally.
Yesterday in Montana HB 427, a bill to deprive trans kids of healthcare, was indefinitely postponed in the Senate after eight Republicans crossed party lines to oppose it. And it appears that the legislators have grokked that they risk a fight with the Biden Department of Education if they try to exclude trans kids from school sports. […] There’s also concern that the NCAA will make good on its threat to withhold sanctioned events from states that bar trans athletes. Because actions have consequences!
Florida bigots had high hopes for a bill which would have forced trans girls to undergo hormone therapy for a year before participating in school sports. […]
SB 2012 empowered any member of the school community to challenge the gender of an athlete, forcing the child to submit to invasive medical testing or genital inspection. It was extremely gross, and the public outcry over it means it’s extremely dead right now.
As Florida Politics notes, currently a trans student has to attest that their gender identity does not confirm to their birth gender when requesting to play on the appropriate sports team, and only 11 kids in the entire state have done so. Because this is a “problem” which does not exist.
Republicans are going to keep coming with this bullshit. They’ve already passed anti-trans laws in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. But clearly they’re getting the message that this isn’t the magic bullet in the culture war that they dreamed it would be.
An update on the Biden administration’s climate goals:
President Biden will announce a goal of cutting U.S. emissions in half by the year 2030 […]
Biden is expected to announce the updated target under the Paris Agreement in conjunction with both Earth Day and a climate summit that will feature 40 heads of state.
The announcement follows Biden’s return to the agreement, under which countries are expected to periodically update their interim targets.
[…] The Obama administration had aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025 when compared to 2005 levels.
The administration has said that it will raise ambition with its own target and push other countries to do the same. […] some progressive groups, including those that had been pushing for a 70 percent reduction by 2030, reacted with disappointment at the news.
“While many will applaud the President’s commitment to cut U.S. emissions by at least half by 2030, we have a responsibility to tell the truth: it is nowhere near enough,” Sunrise Movement Political Director Evan Weber said in a statement. “If the US does not achieve much, much more by the end of this decade, it will be a death sentence for our generation and the billions of people at the frontlines of the climate crisis.”
Biden will meet with world leaders on Thursday as part of a climate summit, where he and other administration officials are expected to broadly outline their climate goals for the coming years. Other heads of states are likely to offer similarly ambitious goals.
The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced it would aim to slash its carbon emissions by 78 percent by the year 2035.
[…] Right-wing reaction to the verdict was just as one would expect: ugly.
As protests erupted across the country protesting the death of Floyd and killings of Black Americans last spring, right-wing operative Candace Owens cast Floyd as a horrible human being, implying that Floyd somehow deserved to be killed. But she didn’t stop there: Owens also criticized the outrage expressed over his death as catering to the bottom denominator of our society. So it came as no surprise last night when we learned that she thought the verdict was wrong, telling Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Tuesday that the verdict was mob justice.
No person can say this was a fair trial, she added.
Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis [… bellowed] Chauvin was convicted of murdering Floyd because the jury was influenced by leftists to make him pay for the sins of white people, collectively.
[… and on. and on. and so on. and still some more loons…]
Omar Navarro, who was arrested in 2019 for stalking his ex, DeAnna Lorraine, also blamed Waters for the conviction. George Floyd was a crack head and Chauvin was not guilty. Sad part a bunch of leftist jurors are biased because of people like Maxine Waters, he said on Twitter. Navarro unsuccessfully ran against Waters in 2018 and again in 2020.
Far-right podcast host Ethan Ralph, who was accused of posting revenge porn of an 18-year-old woman last summer, lashed out at Black Lives Matter. BLM has their knee on the neck of America right now, he claimed on Twitter.
Scott Morefield of Townhall suggested that the jury chose the verdict they did not because of the video from multiple angles showing Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, but because they felt threatened by protesters.
[… yet more loons wailing…]
Gun activist Kaitlin Bennett claimed, There is only institutional racism against whites. There is only police brutality against conservatives and small business owners.
[…] So Republicans are working on their counterproposal to Biden’s American Jobs Plan, which will fall somewhere between $600 and $800 billion and will contain the things they would support to pass through regular order. They reject the very popular corporate tax hike in Biden’s plan and instead want to pay for the bill by—get this—punishing people who drive electric vehicles and by taking away any of the unspent state and local assistance they hated in the coronavirus relief bill to spend here.
They want to tax people who are trying to save the environment […] Biden has ruled out a gas tax hike in part because it is regressive, disproportionately hitting low-income and rural people who don’t have access to public transportation and have to drive. […] Republicans once again are completely missing the mark on this.
There are 10 Republicans, led by West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, on the effort. They say their proposal could come as early as the end of this week. Capito claims that “lines of communications are open” between Republican senators and they will likely “settle on a conceptual sort of idea” for their proposal this week. She’s also endorsing the plan that Thune rejected last month: bipartisan cooperation on the stuff they can agree on and leaving the rest for Democrats to do by reconciliation.
“I’m already engaged with Senator Carper on the water bill and also on the highway bill so you know these engagements are not just—they’ve been ongoing, in some areas,” Capito said, referencing the water infrastructure bill under consideration in the Environment and Public Works Committee, with Chair Tom Carper. “So hopefully we can use our committee process to work through that and do it the old fashioned way. Give and take,” Capito said. Good luck with that. A $287 billion, five-year highway bill like she’s talking about passed unanimously out of committee in 2019, but died afterward because Republicans couldn’t come up with a way to pay for it. Finding consensus among Republicans on a way to pay for this could be the largest obstacle to getting even the GOP behind this effort.
[…] Democrat Chris Coons […] is playing along. “Out of the whole, more than $2 trillion worth of things proposed in the jobs and infrastructure plan, that means we would take, let’s say $800 billion of it out, move that in a bipartisan bill, partly paid for with fees. And then several weeks later passed by reconciliation, a Democrat-only bill that would do the rest of that agenda,” Coons told reporters. Never mind getting the fee-based stuff passed by Democrats and in the House. And never mind Republicans like Wicker low-balling the package.
And never mind that Republicans, spearheaded by Lindsey Graham, are already plotting how they won’t let Democrats pass anything by reconciliation. For now, though, Coons and his magical bipartisan unicorns aren’t the story.
The story is that Republicans have a glimmer of an idea that they’ve been losing. Sure, Mitch McConnell might bluster on the floor, declaring, “It won’t build back better. It’ll build back never.” But the thing Republican leadership said they absolutely wouldn’t do last month, they’re doing now. When the whole thing crumbles because 10 Republicans can’t agree among themselves, much less get any of the remaining 40 on board, Democrats like Coons and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are going to get the clue. It’s time to cut them out, and time to end the filibuster.
Best thing you can say about this is that at least Republicans are doing some work. Usually they refuse to work at anything other than propaganda or PR.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) broke Republican ranks on Wednesday to advance the nomination of Vanita Gupta for associate attorney general.
Murkowski joined all Democratic senators in voting to advance Gupta’s nomination 51-49 toward a final vote, which is expected to take place later Wednesday.
Murkowski said on the Senate floor that after an “extensive” sit-down with Gupta, she was impressed by her professional credentials and her level of experience as well as the “passion that she carries with her with the work that she performs.”
Murkowski said that although Gupta has made some “troubling and concerning” statements in other areas, she was “going to give the benefit of the doubt to a woman who I believe has demonstrated through her professional career to be deeply, deeply committed to matters of justice.”
“And so I will be casting my vote in support of her in about an hour here,” Murkowski concluded. [….]
Judge lambasts worsening crisis amid ‘rhetoric, promises and plans’ and requires housing within 180 days
A federal judge overseeing a sweeping lawsuit about homelessness in Los Angeles ordered the city and county to find shelter for all unhoused residents of Skid Row within 180 days.
In a fiery 110-page order, Judge David O Carter on Tuesday condemned Los Angeles officials’ inability to address the rise in homelessness in the region.
“All of the rhetoric, promises, plans, and budgeting cannot obscure the shameful reality of this crisis – that year after year, there are more homeless Angelenos, and year after year, more homeless Angelenos die on the streets,” Carter wrote in granting a preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiffs last week.
Carter ordered the city and county to find shelter for all women and children on Skid Row within 90 days, and every homeless person in the downtown area must have a place to stay by mid-October.
In addition, Carter mandated the city auditor examine all public money spent in recent years to combat homelessness, including funds from a 2016 bond measure approved by voters to create 10,000 housing units over a decade. That project has been slow to ramp up.
Carter’s filing was made a day after the Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, vowed to spend nearly $1bn in the coming year to get people off the streets. Carter on Tuesday ordered “that $1bn, as represented by Mayor Garcetti, will be placed in escrow” with a spending plan “accounted for and reported to the Court within seven days”.
[…]
Skip Miller, an attorney representing LA county, said the judge’s order goes well beyond what the plaintiffs asked for in their preliminary injunction.
We’re now evaluating our options, including the possibility of an appeal, Miller said, adding that the county had spent millions on proven strategies that have produced measurable results throughout the region, not just on Skid Row.
[…]
The mayor [Garcetti] also raised doubt about the judge’s timeline under which the city and county would be required to provide shelter to every person on Skid Row by October. That would be an unprecedented pace not just for Los Angeles but any place that I’ve ever seen with homelessness in America,he said.
[…]
“This order is a vote of no-confidence in the mayor, the city council and county officials,” said Daniel Conway, policy adviser for the alliance [“of business owners, residents and community leaders” who filed the lawsuit].
Conway said he was struck by Carter’s grand prose in the court filing, which quoted Abraham Lincoln and traced the history of homelessness back from slavery through decades of redlining, containment, eminent domain, exclusionary zoning and gentrification.
“Carter is able to put together a history of racist and discriminatory policies and connect them to the policy failures of today. It shows the culpability of the city and county of LA for decades. Now they have to make it right,” Conway said Tuesday.
Gary Blasi, professor emeritus of law at University of California, Los Angeles, agreed that the judge’s order contained “a compelling description in all the ways that public policy has failed poor people and homeless people in particular”.
[…]
Professor Blasi points out Judge Carter didn’t define “shelter”, creating a loophole big enough to fly the Starship Enterprise through (the not-excerpted remainder of the article is about this loophole and the dubious “shelter” antics already in-use).
Wonkette: “Senate GOP Never Guessed Voting Law Expert Stacey Abrams Would Know So Much About Voting Laws”
It’s quite a treat watching Stacey Abrams [respond to] Republicans during the Senate hearings about voting rights. They clearly didn’t expect that this fierce Black woman would come correct. It’s as if they assumed she’d melt under the pressure of their rigorous questioning and confess that she knows nothing about voting laws or birthing babies.
That didn’t happen.
[…] Texas Senator John Cornyn tried to push the rightwing talking point that Georgia’s new voter suppression laws are no more restrictive than similar laws in so-called “blue” states. […] This is a dumb argument even if it were based in facts, which it’s not.
CORNYN: Georgia has a no-excuse absentee voting provision in that law. As Miss Jones, I think, has said, certainly in her written statement, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York do not have any no-excuse absentee voting. Are the voting laws in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York racist?
ABRAMS: I would say that they are behind the eight-ball and they need to be improved. And that’s why I support For the People Act voting rights provisions that would expand access to no-excuses absentee voting.
See how seamlessly she dropped that promo for the H.R. 1 bill? […]
ABRAMS: The state of Georgia targeted communities that used these resources for the first time to their benefit. And thus, after 15 years of Republican-dominated use of absentee balloting, it suddenly changed its mind about the utility, the processing, the timeliness, and the ability —
The lady was making too much sense, so Cornyn cut her off and kept trying to press her on whether states that vote for Democrats are racist. When she wouldn’t fall for his clever ruse, he accused her of “filibustering” his question. […] Eventually, Abrams told Cornyn, “I’m happy to respond to your questions. But if you’re going to mischaracterize my responses, that’s inappropriate.” She might’ve sent him to his room, as well.
Republicans had tried to grill Abrams on voter ID, which polls show most voters support, but apparently no one of their staff informed them that Abrams very much supports voter ID. There was no “gotcha” there. Instead, she explained, without breaking a sweat, that she opposed “restrictive voter identification laws that narrow the set of permissible materials.” Glad that was cleared up.
They spent a lot of time defending the honor of perfect angel GOP officials who just wanted to pass a racist voting law without people calling them racist. Abrams had to remind these dummies that Jim Crow laws were covertly racist. That was the point. If they could’ve flat-out banned Black people from voting, they wouldn’t have bothered with poll taxes and jellybean jar quizzes. […]
ABRAMS: The intent always matters, sir. And that is the point of this conversation. That is the point of the Jim Crow narrative, that Jim Crow did not simply look at the activities. It looked at the intent. It looked at the behaviors. And it targeted behaviors that were disproportionately used by people of color. […]
Then came Louisiana Senator and Foghorn Leghorn impersonator John Kennedy. His grand plan was for Abrams to just tell him what she didn’t like about Georgia’s voter suppression laws. Maybe he thought she’d forgotten. […]
KENNEDY: Tell me specifically, just give me a list of the provisions that you object to.
Oh, the clever old white man’s got her! […]
ABRAMS: It shortens the federal run-off period from nine weeks to four weeks, it restricts the time a voter can request and return an absentee ballot application, it requires that voters have a photo identification or some other form of identification that they are willing to surrender in order to participate in the absentee ballot process …
He’d gone about 50 seconds without interrupting her, which few men can do without exploding. He asked, “What else?” and she kept telling him while he kept trying to interrupt before he gave up and said, “I get the idea.” (He doesn’t get any ideas. He’s a fucking idiot.)
I could watch Stacey Abrams outclass Republican men all day […]
Education, education, education. The Biden administration plan aims to reduce inequities by infusing hundreds of billions of dollars into virtually every level of the education system.
The federal government has long been a bit player in education. Under an expansive vision being rolled out this spring by President Biden, that would change.
Biden has proposed […] a half dozen education programs that would constitute the largest federal investment in education in at least a half century. Any one of them would be significant on its own. Taken together, if approved by Congress, they form a cradle-to-college plan that aims to reduce inequities that course through American schools by infusing hundreds of billions of dollars into virtually every level of the system.
[…] Much of Biden’s strategy is focused on cold, hard cash, a show-me-the-money plan that would more than double federal support to high-poverty districts, rebuild crumbling schools and subsidize pre-K and community college alike. […]
Should Biden’s entire agenda become law, the U.S. educational system could morph from a 13-year guarantee — where children are entitled to free education from kindergarten through 12th grade — to a 17-year promise, where prekindergarten is available starting at age 3 and tuition is free through two years of community college.
“Think of it this way: Joe Biden is adding four years to a student’s education. It’s the largest increase in educational time since high school became universal,” said Rahm Emanuel […]
Already, Biden has signed into law the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which injects $125 billion into the K-12 system and nearly $40 billion for higher education — more than doubling the Education Department’s annual budget. It also included a one-year expansion of the child tax credit, expected to reduce child poverty by half, that Democrats hope to make permanent.
Then Biden proposed a huge infrastructure package, which includes $100 billion to rebuild schools, plus $48 billion for the workforce development system and $12 billion for community colleges.
This month, Biden unveiled a discretionary budget proposal that seeks a 41 percent increase in the Education Department pre-pandemic budget, far more than any presidential request since the agency was created in 1979. It includes additional money for community schools, students with disabilities and school counselors. Biden also signaled that he would request a big increase in the Pell Grant, which subsidizes college tuition for low-income students, when he makes his full budget request.
A $200 billion pre-K plan, along with tuition-free community college and $225 billion for child care, is expected this month as part of a package the White House calls the American Families Plan.
[…] The Biden program could, in some cases, reach far into the middle class — such as with the pre-K and community college plans. Much of it is targeted, though, to those who need it most.
Because schools are funded primarily by local property taxes, there are large gaps between tax collections in wealthy, mostly White school districts and high-poverty districts, which are more likely to educate students of color. The big boost to Title I could close some of the gap because the funding would disproportionately aid school districts with large concentrations of poverty.
At the college level, Biden is asking for an increase of $600 million more for programs at minority-serving institutions, historically Black and tribal colleges, and community colleges. These schools have fewer resources than others, and most of their students have low incomes.
[…] “He’s investing in things like apprenticeships and community colleges and pre-K and all kinds of things that moderate Democrats love,” said Lanae Erickson, who heads social policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “There’s something in there for everybody in the party and that’s how he’s keeping folks on board.” [chart available at the link]
[…] Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say government should do more, but the share has risen among people in both parties. […]
blf @130, thanks. I appreciated the cartoon reference to “government whitewash.”
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
In a chorus of outrage directed at the President, Republicans accused Joe Biden of making millions of Americans’ arms hurt in his first hundred days in office.
Leading the attack was Senator Ron Johnson, who claimed that Biden was hurting “between three and four million arms a day.”
“Once your arm stops hurting, don’t get too comfortable,” he said. “In a few weeks, Joe Biden will make your arm hurt for a second time.”
Johnson did not speculate about why the President wanted Americans’ arms to hurt, but said that Biden bears “full responsibility” for the nation’s epidemic of sore arms.
“None of this would be happening if Donald Trump was President,” he charged.
President Joe Biden announced a new tax credit Wednesday to reimburse small businesses that give workers paid time off to get vaccinated against Covid-19 as he touted reaching his goal of administering 200 million shots in his first 100 days.
Politico:
Negotiators trying to get the U.S. and Tehran back into compliance with the Iran nuclear deal are making progress, according to officials, with some even saying the talks have reached a halfway point.
Reuters:
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly confirmed President Joe Biden’s nominee, Lisa Monaco, as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the Justice Department. Monaco, approved by a vote of 98-2, will oversee a vast portfolio encompassing criminal and national security investigations, as well as all U.S. Attorney’s Offices across 94 districts.
Wall Street Journal:
Brazil’s government, widely criticized by environmental groups as a negligent steward of the Amazon rainforest, has made an audacious offer to the Biden administration: Provide $1 billion and President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration will reduce deforestation by 40%.
NBC News:
Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn is drastically scaling back a planned $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, confirming its retreat from a project that former President Donald Trump once called ‘the eighth wonder of the world.
Orlando Sentinel:
Gov. Ron DeSantis quietly signed into law late Monday a bill that will cost Florida consumers who shop online an estimated $1 billion a year in sales taxes, with the money used to cut business taxes.
blfsays
me@129, Another Oops!
Creeps of England bribing people to not ignore bigotry → Creeps of England bribing people to ignore bigotry
Sorry sorry !
Joe Biden is expected to formally recognize the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the first world war as an act of genocide, according to US officials.
The anticipated move – something Biden had pledged to do as a candidate – could further complicate an already tense relationship with the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Administration officials had not informed Turkey as of Wednesday, and Biden could still change his mind, according to one official who spoke to the Associated Press.
Lawmakers and Armenian-American activists are lobbying Biden to make the announcement on or before Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which will be marked on Saturday.
One possibility is that Biden would include the acknowledgement of genocide in the annual remembrance day proclamation typically issued by presidents. Biden’s predecessors have avoided using “genocide” in the proclamation commemorating the dark moment in history.
…
A bipartisan group of more than 100 House members on Wednesday signed a letter to Biden calling on him to become the first US president to formally recognize the atrocities as genocide.
“The shameful silence of the United States government on the historic fact of the Armenian genocide has gone on for too long, and it must end,” the lawmakers wrote. “We urge you to follow through on your commitments, and speak the truth.”
Turkey’s foreign minister has warned the Biden administration that recognition would “harm” US-Turkey ties.
…
The relationship between Biden and Erdoğan is off to a chilly start. More than three months into his presidency, Biden has yet to speak with him….
Tens of thousands of Russians have rallied in cities across the country in a last-ditch effort to secure the freedom of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The unsanctioned demonstrations have shown the determination of Navalny’s core supporters, who called for “freedom for political prisoners” in tense standoffs with riot police in helmets and body armour, who had vowed to disperse any gatherings.
The nationwide protests fell short of the 500,000 demonstrators that Navalny’s team had sought to bring out on to the streets, but large crowds of up to 10,000 in Moscow and a similarly robust turnout in St Petersburg may at least let them call the evening a draw.
The show of strength is important as the Kremlin prepares to deliver a potentially lethal blow to Navalny’s political organisation nationwide by declaring it extremist.
“Even if they lock [Navalny] up, tonight shows that other figures will come forward, people will come out, that there is a future for the opposition,” said Arkady, a university professor, who was standing among Navalny supporters on a street corner across from the Kremlin.
On Wednesday morning, police arrested Navalny’s aides Lyubov Sobol and Kira Yarmysh, and raided his regional headquarters in cities across the country in a show of strength designed to keep people off the streets.
The day of action coincided with Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the nation, in which the Russian president warned western leaders they would “regret” crossing Russia’s “red lines”.
…
At least 1,500 people have been arrested nationwide, with nearly half of them in St Petersburg.
…
Before the speech, the Ukrainian president gave a televised address, saying that the country did not want war and calling on Putin in Russian to meet for talks….
Here’s a link to the April 22 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From their morning summary:
India’s desperate Covid situation has worsened. The country has set a new world record for daily recorded infections at 314,835 cases.
Some hospitals in New Delhi have run out of oxygen, with officials complaining that neighbouring states are refusing to send supplies.
Australia will reduce the number of its citizens able to return from India and other red-zone countries to contain the risk of more virulent strains of Covid-19 spreading, the government has said.
Pfizer has said it is in discussions with India, and has committed to make its Covid-19 vaccine available for deployment in the country on a not-for-profit basis.
The global vaccine-sharing initiative Covax has so far delivered about one in five of the Oxford/AstraZeneca doses it estimated would arrive in countries by May, according to a Guardian analysis, starkly illustrating the cost of exports bans, hoarding and supply shortages on a scheme that represents a key lifeline for many in the developing world.
There are more concerns in Japan about whether it can really host the Summer Olympics. Tokyo has announced it will not host its motor show in October-November this year because of the global pandemic, and a police officer who was assisting with the Olympic Torch relay at the weekend has tested positive for coronavirus, further denting optimism about the Olympics.
Coronavirus was no longer the leading cause of death in both England and Wales in March, new figures show. That’s the first time since October….
[…]
A scientific paper claiming current smokers are 23% less likely to be diagnosed with Covid-19 compared to non-smokers has been retracted by a medical journal, after it was discovered some of the paper’s authors had financial links to the tobacco industry.
The World Health Organization has warned that because smoking impairs lung function, there is an increased risk of severe symptoms if respiratory infections, including coronaviruses, are acquired by smokers. Covid-19 is an infectious disease that primarily attacks the lungs.
But the paper, published in July last year by the European Respiratory Journal, found current smoking was not associated with adverse outcome in patients admitted to hospital with Covid, and claimed smokers were at a significantly lower risk of acquiring the virus. The paper was reported on by several mainstream media outlets.
The latest edition of the European Respiratory Journal included a retraction notice for the paper, stating: “It was brought to the editors’ attention that two of the authors had failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest at the time of the manuscript’s submission.”
[…]
The retraction notice said the authors did not agree with the decision. It said while failure to disclose a potential conflict of interest was not normally sufficient grounds for retraction, the editors felt the decision was justified based on the nature of the undisclosed relationship, and “in the context of the sensitive subject matter presented”.
[…]
The senior author of the paper, Konstantinos Farsalinos, said in a statement to the website Retraction Watch that the conflicts of interest were irrelevant to the study’s main aims and objectives.
Additionally, I proposed to publicly release the full dataset and the statistical script so that all findings could be independently verified, he said. The editors declined. I requested my proposal to be mentioned in the retraction letter, but that was also rejected by the editors. I disagree with the retraction and I consider it unfair and unsubstantiated.
People more familiar with submissions, etc., to such journals can explain(correct?), but I myself seriously doubt they need the permission or resources of the journal to publish the data, analysis scripts, etc. Whilst the editors may have refused (albeit isn’t it standard practice nowadays to require the data, etc., to made readily available as a pre(?)-condition to publication?), I’m finding it difficult to believe the implication that the alleged refusal somehow prevents the data, etc., from being made readily available. This smells, to me, like stale tobacco smoke in the eyesobfuscation; and with the history of the industry, quite possibly deliberate obfuscation.
[…]
An analysis for the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine “identified several biases and knowledge gaps which may give the false impression that smoking is protective in Covid-19”.
The authors of that paper said there had been several studies that reported a so-called “smoker’s paradox” with Covid-19, suggesting smokers might somehow be protected from infection and severe complications.
“As of now, the data supporting smoker’s paradox claims are limited and questionable,” the review found.
“In the context of smoking and Covid-19, poor data collection can lead to several erroneous conclusions. If patients with missing smoking data are not eliminated from the total pool, smokers may be wrongly underrepresented. Furthermore, it is difficult to get accurate history from patients who are either intubated or in respiratory failure.
“If data from these patients are missing, and these patients are not removed from the denominator, it can give a false impression that smokers are less likely to develop severe disease. Second, it must be noted that most published studies have not reported the duration (years) or frequency (number of cigarettes) of smoking, hence these cannot be accounted for.”
…Judge Denies Dismissal of Prison Sentence for Officer Who Shot and Killed Walter Scott in 2015
A judge has denied a motion to toss the 20-year prison sentence of former police officer Michael Slager, who murdered unarmed Black motorist Walter Scott in South Carolina in 2015. Slager tried to argue that his defense was ineffective, but the federal judge ruled “a careful review of this entire tragic episode makes plain that [Slager] has no one to blame for his present predicament and sentence but himself. What sealed his fate … was [his] own willful act of shooting an unarmed man in the back five times as he ran for his life.”
…
Idriss Déby’s Son Named Interim Leader Following Chadian President’s Death
In Chad, Mahamat Idriss Déby, the son of late President Idriss Déby, has been named interim head of state by a military council after his father died, reportedly while visiting frontline soldiers as they battled a rebel advance in the north of the country. The army has also enacted a nationwide curfew and announced Chad’s land and air borders will be shut down. Rebel forces threatened to move toward the capital, prompting fears of further unrest. Idriss Déby had been in power for over 30 years and was just announced the winner of a recent presidential election before his death. Rights groups are calling for a quick transition to democratic civilian rule and an accounting of human rights abuses under Déby’s reign.
Journalists in Over 100 Countries Have Been Blocked from Reporting on Pandemic
A new report by Reporters Without Borders says journalists in over 100 countries have been blocked from reporting on the coronavirus pandemic and other stories or retaliated against for their work. In its annual report on press freedom, the group also highlighted attacks on U.S. journalists by law enforcement while covering racial justice protests last summer.
…
Standing Rock Activist Who Was Jailed After Refusing to Testify Before Grand Jury Is Released
Standing Rock water protector Steve Martinez has been released after more than 60 days behind bars for refusing to give testimony to a federal grand jury. Martinez was summoned as a witness in the case of Sophia Wilansky, a water protector whose arm was severely wounded during a police crackdown on anti-pipeline protests in 2016. Prosecutors were attempting to shift blame for Wilansky’s injuries from law enforcement to water protectors. The campaign to free Steve Martinez blasted the use of grand juries as a “divisive and cruel tool of repression.”…
[…]
The Gambia has become the second country in Africa to eliminate trachoma, one of the leading causes of blindness.
The achievement, announced by the World Health Organization on Tuesday, came after decades of work on the disease, which has damaged the sight of about 1.9 million people worldwide. Ghana was the first country in Africa to eliminate the disease in 2018.
The Gambian government and aid organisations have spent years identifying and treating patients in rural areas, often going from door to door. It can cause a person’s eyelashes to turn inwards and scratch against the eyes, causing permanent damage.
[…]
Trachoma is one of the WHO’s 20 neglected tropical diseases, which predominantly affect low-income countries and are historically underfunded in research for treatments.
Despite a decline in the number of people with the condition, from 1.5 billion to 135,000 over the past 20 years, it remains a problem in 44 countries.
Sightsavers, which supported the Gambia’s campaign against trachoma, said the success was the result of antibiotics, surgery, and improving sanitation. The charity’s director Balla Musa Joof said: “To know that elimination can be achieved through hard work, commitment and collaboration is important and acts as an encouragement to other countries to keep going with their own attempts.
He said the elimination of the illness meant “the government will be able to use resources previously spent on defeating trachoma on other public health problems”.
Congratulations to the Gambia!†
† British media has a habit of adding “the” to a country’s name; the Argentine is(? was?) a common way to refer to Argentina (República Argentina).‡ So I checked, the Gambia’s official name (in English) is Republic of the Gambia, so “the Gambia” is a reasonable shortened version. Indeed, as that link points out, “The [definite] article is also officially used by the country’s government and by international bodies.” So the Gruaniad — please consider supporting the Grauniad if you can — isn’t doing anything offensive here in using “the Gambia”.
birgerjohansson@124, “before Hitler set out to invade Poland, he urged ruthlessness, adding no one thinks of the Armenians today.”
A small caveat: There is some reasonable scholarly dispute whether or not such a thing was actually said, and the allegedly-contemporaneous document (known as L-3) containing the quote (Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?) was not accepted at the Nuremberg trials. However, since then, the consensus seems to be it was said.
blfsays
me@144, Oops! That was referring to @142, not @124.
And I do hope Biden goes through and formally recognises the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the first world war as an act of genocide. As the cited Grauniad article notes, Obama chickened out despite his campaign pledge.
Audit will include a hand recount of all 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county in alarming consequence of Trump’s baseless lies
Nearly five months after Joe Biden was declared the official winner of the presidential race in Arizona, state Republicans are set to begin their own audit of millions of ballots, an unprecedented move many see as a thinly-veiled effort to continue to undermine confidence in the 2020 election results.
The GOP-controlled state senate ordered the audit, set to formally get underway this week, which may be one of the most absurd and alarming consequences to date of Donald Trump’s baseless lies about the 2020 election. It will be executed by a private Florida-based company. It also reportedly will be supported from far-right lawyer Lin Wood and observers from the far-right news network One America News Network.
Find the most biased “observers” possible for seems likely to be an opaque procedure carried out by a very likely biased private for-profit, Cyber Ninjas (more on them below). And paid for in an opaque manner (more on this below). Geesh!
The audit will be solely focused on Maricopa county, the largest in the state and home to a majority of Arizona’s voters. Biden narrowly defeated Trump in the county […]
[…] The audit also comes as Arizona Republicans are advancing legislation in the state that would make it harder to vote by mail.
“They’re trying to find something that we know doesn’t exist,” said Arizona secretary of state Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, who serves as the state’s top election official. “It’s ludicrous that people think that if they don’t like the results they can just come in and tear them apart.”
David Becker, an election administration expert and the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the effort was so shoddy he was hesitant to acknowledge it as a legitimate investigation.
“I’ve never seen an ‘audit’ that was remotely similar, and given the fundamental flaws, I don’t think this process can even be described as an audit,” he said in an email.
Other voting rights groups have expressed similar concerns.
[…]
Alarm over the audit has escalated in recent weeks after Republicans announced the firms that would be leading the effort. The company that will lead the audit, a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, is led by Doug Logan, who supported several baseless conspiracy theories about the election. In December, he retweeted a post that questioned the validity of Maricopa’s ballot count and falsely said Trump may have gotten 200,000 more votes than were reported in Arizona, according to the Arizona Mirror, which first reported his involvement in the audit.
He also made statistical comparisons between elections in Venezuela and the 2020 race in a tweet that included a stop the steal hashtag, according to the Mirror. Cyber Ninjas is not accredited by the US Election Assistance Commission to inspect voting machines, the Washington Post reported.
“You’re bringing in this firm that’s on a treasure hunt,” Hobbs said. “They are not qualified, they don’t even know what they’re doing.”
Alls teh bestingerist peoples !
It’s not clear how Cyber Ninjas was chosen to lead the audit. Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona senate, did not return a request for comment. […]
The Arizona state senate is renting a Phoenix arena to conduct the audit and there is growing scrutiny over how the process is being funded. While the state senate has allocated $150,000 towards the effort, it is also being backed by private donors. L Lin Wood, an attorney who promoted some of the most inflammatory lies about the 2020 election, told Talking Points Memo he had donated $50,000 to a fundraiser to support the effort. Wood also told the outlet that he hosted Logan at his South Carolina home last year.
“That should scare a lot of people,” said Martin Quezada, a Democrat in the Arizona state senate. “Who are the people that are gonna be donating to this? It’s already shown that this is the people who have an agenda and that agenda is to show that there was some sort of fraud, that there was a stolen election.”
It’s also unclear how much access media and other independent observers will have to the audit. Reporters will be prohibited from using pens and paper and will have to sign up to serve as official observers, a spokesman for the audit told an Arizona Mirror reporter on Wednesday. The Arizona Republican party also tweeted that the process will be live-streamed and that observers from One America News Network, the far fight outlet, would ensure nonpartisan transparency.
There is also concern the audit could lead to voter intimidation. In its statement of work, Cyber Ninjas wrote it had already performed non-partisan canvassing in Arizona after the 2020 election and knocked on voters’ doors to confirm if valid voters actually lived at the stated address. The company said it would continue that work during the audit to validate that individuals that show as having voted in the 2020 general election match those individuals who believe they have cast a vote.
Such activity could amount to illegal voter intimidation, a group of voting rights lawyers wrote to Cyber Ninjas and others involved in the audit earlier this month.
[…]
“[Teh thugs] want to justify all of the changes that they are already proposing to election laws because they need to have some sort of legitimacy behind it to justify the severe restrictions they’re hoping to put in place here,” [state senator Martin Quezada] said. “Every element of this audit, from the beginning, to the end, it just stinks to high hell.”
blfsays
Apropos of not really anything, whilst browsing the local specialist beer bar’s site (they are currently offering a takeaway service only due to the pandemic), I noticed a “Fake News” series of beers from a French microbrewery, Brasserie Sainte Cru (Colmar, near-ish Strasbourg, on the German border). Each bottle (well, actually, can) is illustrated with a portrait of a well-known source of fake news (scroll about halfway down that link):
● El Dorado, hair furor.
● Motueka, Xi Jinping.
● Nelson Sauvin, Putin.
● Idaho 7, Kim Jong-un.
All(?) the names are of hops varieties, so they missed a snark, albeit in Spanish El Dorado means (I think) “golden”, something of a snark on hair furor’s questionable tastes.
AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — Texas state Republican lawmakers Wednesday advanced a bill that would bar drive-thru voting, legislation critics say is aimed at the state’s largest county, a Democratic stronghold where more than 100,000 voters cast ballots from their cars in the November election.
[…]
Then-Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins rolled out drive-thru voting with resounding success for the November elections, as more than 127,000 people cast votes in this manner, with residents of the county seat Houston raving about how easy it was, how it only took 10 to 20 minutes and expressing hope it would be an option for future elections.
[…]
Jen Ramos of the Texas Democratic Party’s executive committee said a study found that while nonwhite voters make up about 30% of Harris County early voters, they made up 54% of voters who used a drive-thru polling location for the November elections….
Record numbers of Texans cast their ballots in last year’s presidential election and state election officials assessed it as “smooth and secure.” Still, … HB 4322 is one of numerous Republican-sponsored bills ostensibly aimed at preventing elections from being undermined by fraud.
The Houston Chronicle wrote in a recent editorial that since 2005, 174 Texans have been prosecuted for election fraud, a period in which 94 million votes were cast in state elections.
“Together, they represent 0.000185 percent of the total votes cast — or 1 in 540,000 voters. Statistically, voters are more likely to get struck by lightning (1 in 500,000) than to commit voter fraud,” the editorial states….
HB 4322 … is expected to easily pass both the House and the Texas Senate and be signed into law by Governor Abbott.
blfsays
Ingenuity, Nasa’s helicopter on Mars, has successfully performed its second flight: Up 5 metres, sideways 2 metres, hover and turn to take multiple colour images, then return and land (about 50(?) seconds in total). Data is downloading to Earth now as I type.
The Maricopa county board of supervisors, which is controlled by Republicans, isn’t on board with the effort. It agreed to turn over ballots and election equipment after Republicans got a court order, but refused to allow the audit to take place in a county-owned facility. Republicans are now paying to rent out an entire stadium to conduct the audit.
The thug-controlled county — which has already done two legitimate audits — isn’t co-operating! (The article doesn’t say, but I presume the county also thinks this new audit is absurd.)
The Senate passed up a pitch from a firm specializing in elections and instead hired four different companies to run the audit for a $150,000 contract.
As per @147, “Cyber Ninjas is not accredited by the US Election Assistance Commission to inspect voting machines […] ‘You’re bringing in this firm that’s on a treasure hunt,’ [Arizona secretary of state Katie] Hobbs said. ‘They are not qualified, they don’t even know what they’re doing.'” Cyber Ninjas is leading / controlling the fraud-of-an-audit, the other firms are presumably subcontrators.
[… T]he effort has attracted a host of former Trump aides and supporters who see this as just the start of a process they have waited for since his defeat in November.
We’re at the top of the first inning of this. The lawsuits are going to come. This is where the grind really starts, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon said on his podcast Wednesday.
Whatever happens, the Senate is on its own. The county, which normally takes great care to ensure proper custody and security of the ballots, has absolved itself of all liability and county officials trained in election audits and security will not provide advice and guidance as the contractors take on the work.
[… T]he county made the Senate sign an indemnification agreement. This means the county is not liable for any loss or damages.
The county’s Elections Department said it followed careful procedures to ensure that the voting machines and ballots are safe during transport — at least while they had custody of them. […]
It turns out the security at the rented site is being provided a private firm (see the link for details).
Observers who already were approved to watch the audit were told Wednesday to send in three letters of recommendation. A new online form for volunteers posted on the Twitter account for the effort included this requirement, as well.
Local reporters were first told that they could observe the audit inside the coliseum. Later, they were told that they would need to serve as official observers in order to watch the audit. Journalists would be required to serve five 6-hour shifts like other observers and would not be allowed to bring in recording devices or notebooks.
The auditors will attempt to validate the legitimacy of voter rolls. Not much information was released about how this will happen. [… A]uditors [sic] will use the information to find invalid voters such as deceased voters and non-citizens, and find people whose votes weren’t counted. It’s unclear where the Senate will get its information to verify that voters who cast ballots are dead or are not legal US citizens.
What could be a critical player in this fraud is a company called CyFIR, which will apparently attempt to inspect the voting machines (and tabulators?). I have no idea how legit or experience this company is, or whether or not there are any warning signs (red flags) like there is with Cyber Ninjas and their CEO(?) Doug Logan. (The Cyber Ninjas site doesn’t seem to say anything about their management, which is very weird for the industry.)
[…]
The Trump administration delayed more than $20bn in hurricane relief aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, according to a report by the Office of the Inspector General.
The efforts to deliver recovery funding to the island were “unnecessarily delayed by bureaucratic obstacles”, according to the 46-page report. The hurricane, which hit the island in 2017, killed thousands of people and left thousands more without electricity or water for months.
One of the main hurdles was the requirement imposed by the Office of Management Budget, which established an interagency review before grant approvals, according to a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The process, which was never before required for allocating disaster funds, prevented HUD from publishing its draft notice of funding by the target date.
The investigators were unable to determine why the extra layer of review was required due “denials of access and refusals to cooperate”, according to the report.
The Office conducted 31 interviews of 20 current and former HUD officials and two now-former Puerto Rico Department of Housing senior officials to write the report. However, investigators did not have access to former HUD Secretary Ben Carson and other political officials. The investigators were also denied or delayed HUD information on several occasions.
[… the pandemic used as an excuse by HUD to delay funding the report…]
On Monday, HUD removed restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on access to $8.2bn in Community Development Block Grant Mitigation. The agency stalled the release of the disaster relief aid in 2019 and imposed additional restrictions on how the island could access the funds The agency cited corruption and financial mismanagement concerns for the blocks.
A group of seven House Republicans, led by Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), announced yesterday that they would no longer accept campaign contributions from major tech companies or their top executives. The group claims tech companies are conspiring against conservative voices, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Washington Post:
Despite the group’s alleged bankruptcy, the National Rifle Association announced plans yesterday for a $2 million campaign against the White House’s agenda, including a focus on trying to derail President Joe Biden’s ATF nominee.
President Biden has nominated David Chipman, policy adviser to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, to be director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Atlanta Journal:
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (R) has resigned from the Republican Attorneys General Association, citing, among other things, the group’s role in promoting the Jan. 6 event that precipitated the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol.
It stood to reason that some on the right would be critical of Derek Chauvin’s conviction in Minnesota this week, but I didn’t fully expect so many conservatives to slam the members of the jury in his case.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported yesterday, for example:
Gov. Ron DeSantis implied that the guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial could have happened because “the jury is scared of what a mob may do.”
The Florida Republican appeared on Fox News the night of the verdict and heard Laura Ingraham raise the prospect of jurors voting guilty because of fear of possible violence.
Though the governor said on the air that he wasn’t explicitly saying jurors were definitely swayed by public-safety fears, DeSantis also said, “[I]f that’s what a lot of people think, and I don’t know what happened with this verdict, but if that’s something that can potentially happen, where you basically have justice made meted out because the jury is scared of what a mob may do?”
Others on the right were even less subtle. Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis argued, for example, that jurors must’ve been “influenced” by leftist “social-justice warriors.” Soon after, Tucker Carlson added, “The jury in the Derek Chauvin trial came to a unanimous and unequivocal verdict this afternoon: ‘Please don’t hurt us.'”
Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase, a leading Republican candidate for governor this year, said the guilty verdict made her “sick,” adding that she believes the jurors in the case didn’t acquit the murder because they feared a violent backlash.
In other words, after a year of national and international scrutiny into George Floyd’s death, many on the right have settled on a new culprit worthy of their scorn: members of a jury in Hennepin County, Minn., whom some conservatives perceive as cowards.
It’s an argument predicated on the idea that the evidence was on Chauvin’s side — reality notwithstanding — and those rascally jurors put the facts aside in order to prevent social unrest.
The idea that the jurors did their duty, honored their oaths, evaluated the case on the merits, and rendered a fair judgment based on the evidence and the law is apparently too fanciful for some on the right to believe.
But for the American mainstream, it seems far more reasonable to express gratitude to the jurors for their willingness to do their duty under difficult circumstances.
The Los Angeles Dodgers have created a special section at Dodger Stadium for fans who are fully vaccinated. A few other teams have introduced similar set asides. This is a good idea and we need more of it. The reward for being vaccinated should be to get back to life as usual as much as possible and as quickly as possible. Now that vaccines are pretty widely available for people 16 and over there’s no reason you should need to be seated near or with others who’ve chosen not to get vaccinated when you’re enjoying a ball game.
That language can sound a bit forbidding. But remember, not being vaccinated isn’t a class or an identity, as much as some would like to make it one. It’s mainly a decision to be reckless with your own health and indifferent to the well-being of the society at large. Creating these safe zones for the vaccinated is not only fair to those who are vaccinated. It creates incentives for people to get vaccinated. So it’s win-win all around.
I say this with the knowledge that there is a very, very small population of people with medical conditions which prevent them from getting vaccinated. In those very few cases where there is a genuine clinical reason why someone cannot be vaccinated there can and should be some accommodations. But this doesn’t change the calculus; it strengthens it. Those who really can’t be vaccinated are the ones most in need of mass vaccinations because their only protection will come in the form of herd immunity.
I concede there are some complicated questions at the margins. What’s a no-brainer for a baseball game implicates different equities for governmental or essential services. Kids under 16 still can’t get vaccinated. But in general public policy should avoid indulging and coddling those who make the anti-social decision to forego vaccination.
[…]
Russia has said that it will recall many of its troops from Crimea and the border regions of Ukraine, rolling back an aggressive military buildup that had sparked fears that Moscow was preparing an invasion force.
The decision, announced by defence minister Sergei Shoigu, came after video on social media and satellite imagery last month revealed a buildup of tanks, artillery, fighter jets and even short-range ballistic missiles massing just 150 miles from Ukraine. US officials called it the largest muster of Russian military power along the border since the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Russian officials announced military exercises after the buildup was exposed, but western observers believe that Moscow had an ulterior motive and was sending a pointed message to Kyiv and to the Biden administration that it was ready to use force to defend what Vladimir Putin this week called Russia’s core security interests.
On Thursday, after several days of exercises, the Russian military command announced personnel from Russian army and airborne units would return to their bases. But some heavy artillery, including powerful rocket artillery and other missiles, will remain behind, leaving Russia with more heavy firepower on the Ukrainian border than it had before.
[…]
The troop movements will be closely watched in the coming days, which are set to begin on Friday and continue through to the end of April. All soldiers would go back in their usual “deployment points” by May 1, Shoigu said, according to Russia’s defence ministry.
[…]
Meanwhile, Putin is still trying to intimidate the Czech Republic (from the same article, and quoting essentially in full):
[… T]he Kremlin has been embroiled in worsening spy scandal with the Czech Republic. On Thursday the Czech government said it would expel more Russian diplomats from the embassy in Prague, in addition to the 18 already told on Saturday to leave the country.
The move comes after the Czech security service blamed Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency for a 2014 explosion at a weapons dump which killed two people. It said Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the two assassins who allegedly poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury [England (2018)], had been in the country shortly before the explosion took place.
The pair, real names Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, had arranged to visit the depot using false passports. The open source outfit Bellingcat revealed that four other GRU officers flew into Prague during the operation, including the commander of the GRU’s secret 29155 military unit, Gen Andrei Averyanov. The depot had been due to send the weapons to Ukraine.
Russia responded to Saturday’s expulsions by ordering out 20 diplomats from the Czech Republic’s mission in Moscow. The Czech embassy is much smaller than its giant Russian counterpart. The Czech government said it had now been paralysed and gave the Kremlin a deadline for its staff to be reinstated — without success.
On Thursday Czech foreign minister Jakub Kulhánek said more Russian diplomats would therefore be expelled in order to equalise staffing at the two missions. They had to leave by end May, he said. “We do not want to escalate. But the Czech Republic is a sovereign country,” he pointed out.
He described Kremlin spying as a “huge security challenge” and said the stand-off with Moscow over the GRU’s clandestine activities was “the biggest problem in this area in several decades”.
The Covid situation is improving in France, three weeks after the country entered its third lockdown to rein in the disease, Prime Minister Jean Castex is reported by Reuters to have said during a press conference.
PA Media reports:
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said there had been 168 cases up to 14 April of blood clots with low platelet counts in the UK in people who had had the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.
The cases, reported through the Yellow Card scheme, occurred in 93 women and 75 men aged from 18 to 93 years old.
The regulator, which gave the figures in its weekly summary of Yellow Card reporting, said the overall case fatality rate was 19% with 32 deaths.
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy can’t be bothered to ensure that his organization, the U.S. Postal Service, does its sole job of delivering the mail on time. In fact, he’s working to undermine that mission […] While he’s not running the Postal Service, he is apparently overseeing a covert operations program monitoring Americans’ social media activity. Yes. You read that right. DeJoy has a force of federal law enforcement officers who are monitoring internet activity. To make it worse, he has pulled the officers who protect the actual mail and letter carriers off the streets. Clearly his priority is not the U.S. mail.
This bombshell exclusive in at Yahoo News is real, uncovered by a document sent to state, local, and federal law enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security detailing one of its operations. The law enforcement branch of the USPS has been conducting surveillance, in what they call iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, for an undetermined length of time according to the document obtained by Yahoo News. It is tracking and collecting social media posts, including information about planned protests.
[snipped details from the document] That the government is monitoring those groups is not a surprise. That the USPS is doing it is just bizarre.
[…] “The U.S. Postal Inspection Service is the primary law enforcement, crime prevention, and security arm of the U.S. Postal Service,” the statement said. “As such, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service has federal law enforcement officers, Postal Inspectors, who enforce approximately 200 federal laws to achieve the agency’s mission: protect the U.S. Postal Service and its employees, infrastructure, and customers; enforce the laws that defend the nation’s mail system from illegal or dangerous use; and ensure public trust in the mail.” Again, how that mission is furthered by this iCOP is not made clear in this statement. “The Internet Covert Operations Program is a function within the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which assesses threats to Postal Service employees and its infrastructure by monitoring publicly available open source information,” the statement read.
[…] This could be a joint venture between DeJoy and whichever Trump DHS acting chief was around at the time—Ken Cuccinelli or Chad Wolf. In fact, it sounds very much like Trump DHS kind of thing that the Biden administration didn’t know exists. Who knows who’s burrowed into the DHS or Department of Justice from the last guy’s administration and has been working with DeJoy to keep this thing going.
Here’s one thing we do know about DeJoy and law enforcement. Last August, he ordered Postal Police Officers (PPO), the uniformed police force of the Postal Service, to stop patrolling. The order was to “end all mail-protection and other law-enforcement activity away from the confines of postal real estate,” according to a complaint filed by the the Postal Police Officers Association (PPOA). That meant ending protection for letter carriers on unsafe routes. It meant patrols to protect blue mail collection boxes and mail vehicles.
[…] “It seems that the Inspection Service trusts its predominantly white criminal investigators with law enforcement authority which is ostensibly unbounded, but the opposite is true for the predominantly Black and Brown postal police officers,” Albergo told Daily Kos. “I would argue that PPOs are one of the most successful police forces in America insofar as respecting the rights of citizens. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the Agency. Our officers are the wrong color. It’s disgraceful.”
It could also be coming to an end. The confirmation hearing in the Senate Homeland Security Committee for President Joe Biden’s nominees for the Postal Service Board of Governors is Thursday morning. The board will have the power to fire Louis DeJoy and the power to reinstate the PPO force and its mission to protecting postal employees and the mail. It even has the power to make delivering the mail quickly and efficiently the USPS main mission once again.
It said Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the two assassins who allegedly poisoned Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury [England (2018)], had been in the country shortly before the explosion took place.
SC, your comment 158 and the news I posted in comment 160 go together to show just how urgent it is to get rid of DeJoy. I can see his end coming soon.
lumipunasays
Almost but not quite entirely irrelevant to politics: Archaeologists have discovered what is likely Harriet Tubman’s childhood cabin in Dorchester County, Maryland:
At one time, the United Mine Workers of America boasted more than 800,000 members. When the union went on strike, it brought the nation to its knees, got U.S. presidents involved in negotiations with mine owners—and became the target of mercenary armies, federal troops, and military bombers sent by the Army.
But that was then. Today the UMWA still counts 80,000 members, but fewer than 20,000 are actually working coal miners. Considering that there are now just 43,600 people employed in the entire coal industry—and that includes office workers and management—that’s not an unexpected number. It’s also not a recent development. Well before the current collapse of the coal market, which began around 2008 when fracking made natural gas cost-competitive with coal, the number of coal miners in the U.S. had already dropped by over 90%.
That decline is continuing. In just the last year under Donald Trump, 7,000 coal miners lost their job, In fact, there were 12,000 fewer coal miners at the end of Trump’s time in the White House than there were when he came in. That’s how much Trump dug coal. The industry was never more than a prop to him—it was just another way to “own the libs.”
For decades, the idea of coal mining has been much bigger than the number of actual coal miners. Even so, this is still a very big deal: The president of the largest coal mining union has acknowledged it’s time to stop talking about preserving coal jobs, and to move on to talking about what happens next. […]
The president of the UMWA, Cecil Roberts, made an online speech to the National Press Club on Monday in which his main concern was not keeping miners in the mines, but dealing with the fact that many workers in fossil fuels—not just coal, but also oil and gas—are losing them jobs, or soon will be, as both the market and climate change demand a switchover to clean power. And Roberts introduced a plan for “preserving coal country” that, notably, includes endorsement of expanding federal tax incentives for renewable energy, supporting Biden’s plan to plug old oil and gas wells, and additional funding to clean up abandoned mines.
Roberts announced that he was willing to support President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, if that plan includes helping to provide jobs for those displaced from mining. “I think we need to provide a future for those people, a future for anybody that loses their job because of a transition in this country, regardless if it’s coal, oil, gas or any other industry for that matter.″ […]
Of course, the cure for public anxiety about one’s judicial bias isn’t to write a book about one’s lack of judicial bias. It’s to actually be unbiased.
Mobiles are now a luxury in world’s fifth most costly place for data as cooking oil tax adds to rising prices
Hundreds of people have taken to Malawi’s streets to protest against rising mobile call and data charges.
There were demonstrations in Lilongwe, the capital, in the city of Blantyre, and in the southern district of Mulanje on Wednesday.
Sylvester Namiwa, executive director of the Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives (CDEDI), a pressure group, said: “Malawians are struggling to make ends meet due to … the high cost of essential commodities and services such as water, electricity, cooking oil, fuel and mobile phone charges.”
Namiwa described the mobile tariffs as “exorbitant” and said vulnerable and marginalised Malawians were being punished. He added: “It is against this background that CDEDI has launched a crusade to liberate Malawians from decades of economic bondage.”
[…]
Gospel Kazako, the information minister, has held meetings with the country’s regulatory authorities to engage mobile companies to reduce charges.
“To own a smartphone is like a crime because of the cost of data,” Kazako was quoted by the Malawi News Agency as saying last year. “Internet data is being sold at 80 cents per second and expires within the specified time usage yet in our neighbouring country, Tanzania, the cost of data is as less as 4 cents per second.”
The Grauniad is unclear on what currency Minister Kazako is refering to. The Malawi currency is Malawian kwacha, which “is divided into 100 tambalas”, so his use (as quoted (in translation?)) of “cents” suggests USD, albeit other currencies are also divided into cents. People in the States can perhaps correct me, but 0,80USD per second is very exorbitant. (I cannot meaningfully compare to my plan here in France, which is up to so-and-so many gigabytes per month on a fast network for a flat fee.) The recently-published Worldwide mobile data pricing 2021: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 230 countries (cited in the Grauniad’s article), puts Malawi at, on average, 25,46USD, Tanzania at 0,75USD, France at 0,41USD, teh “U”K at 1,42USD, and the States at 3,33USD (all figures per 1GB (and transcribed by hand, so apologies for any errors)).
“Malawians feel like they are being skinned alive and they are much worried with the development because it is the mobile companies that are celebrating for making huge profits.”
A fourth grade teacher at Jefferson Road Elementary in Pittsford, N.Y., used a worksheet that asked “Why did slaves come to America?”
A fill-in-the-blank answer was provided that read “As an exchange for the trip to America, African Americans agreed to work for colonists for _____ years, but then were kept as slaves.”
While the incident occurred in January, a parent brought the worksheet to the attention of district officials Tuesday. […]
“The worksheet was in no way an accurate depiction of slavery during Colonial Times and was highly insensitive in tone,” school officials said. […]
Here’s some good news for people who don’t like it when children go hungry. The USDA announced Tuesday that it’s extending the universal free lunch services through the 2021 to 2022 school year. This will (positively!) impact the estimated 12 million kids who experience food insecurity. It also (positively!) impacts all the children.
In March, the USDA said the waivers that made school meals more flexible to administer during the COVID-19 pandemic would extend only to September 30. This left schools and families uncertain about what would happen during the next school year.
The Washington Post reports:
Child nutrition program waivers, which aimed to cut through red tape to allow kids to eat free even outside normal meal times, were implemented at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, at a time when millions of families faced financial strain, hunger and hardship. The waivers allowed schools and community organizations to adapt programs to better meet the needs of children and families.
The waivers provided access to free, nutritious meals for all children, which they could pick up outside of traditional group settings and rigid mealtimes. Parents could pick up multiple days of food at once for students learning at home. Meals in many cases were also dropped off at a student’s home if they were remote learning either part or full-time.
“States and districts wanted waivers extended to plan for safe reopening in the fall. USDA answered the call to help America’s schools and childcare institutions serve high quality meals while being responsive to their local needs as children safely return to their regular routines,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement. “This action also increases the reimbursement rate to school meal operators so they can serve healthy foods to our kids. It’s a win-win for kids, parents and schools.”
Lisa Davis, a senior vice president at Share Our Strength, a charity combating hunger, said the advance notice regarding the upcoming school year offers much-needed lead time for schools and community organizations to plan and budget. According to Davis, last year was more chaotic than necessary. This was because the previous White House squatter’s administration resisted calls to extend the benefit last summer. This was while childhood hunger rates were rising to the highest levels in decades.
It apparently bugged the past horror show administration that, as the pandemic raged through the nation, families were able to pick up free meals at whichever school was closest to them. They also weren’t required to provide evidence of their poverty. Keep in mind that Betsy DeVos was still Education secretary, and she famously boasted about telling Bernie Sanders to his face that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” […] In fairness, though, the school lunch program falls under the purview of the Agriculture secretary. That was Sonny Perdue, who Made School Lunches Great Again! by freeing children from the tyranny of vegetables, we guess.
Anyway, the waiver increased the reimbursement rate to schools from $3.60 per lunch served at the free rate to the summer rate of $4.25. This helped fund the higher costs for boxes and bags for to-go options, increased transportation and labor costs, as well as additional personal protective equipment. […]
Universal free lunch programs can also address the “lunch debt” crisis, where K through 12 students didn’t have enough money to pay for meals in the school cafeteria so they were racking up debt. According to 2018 survey of 1,550 districts nationwide by the School Nutrition Association, 75 percent of US school districts had unpaid student meal debt. Betsy DeVos could’ve covered that debt with the change from her couch cushions. Sonny Perdue could’ve chipped in, as well.
A family of four had to make less than $32,630 a year to qualify for free lunch under the National School Lunch Program. That’s a set level across every state, except for Alaska and Hawaii. Kids who lived in high-cost regions, such as Washington DC, Los Angeles, and New York, for example, were at a disadvantage compared to (mostly white) children in rural areas. We’re sure that was a coincidence. […]
Wonkette: “Whiny-Ass Republicans Don’t WANNA Go To President Joe Biden’s First Address To Congress”
[…] President Joe Biden is giving his first address to Congress next Wednesday, which will roughly coincide with his 100th day in office. It’s not a State of the Union, because those don’t happen in a president’s first year. And it’s not going to be the same foofaraw it usually is, because of this damned pandemic.
Nevertheless, the show will go on!
But Punchbowl News reports that a number of Republicans don’t WANNA go. “The GOP leadership tells us the appetite by the rank-and-file members to be there in person is nil,” Punchbowl says, noting that the House isn’t in session that day, which means some members would have to make special arrangements […]
As far as GOP senators, Tom Cotton says “Ha. No comment.”
[…] Josh Hawley says, “I don’t know the answer to that” and “I haven’t decided.” He probably is just never sure whether he’ll be busy helping incite a domestic terrorist attack against the Capitol on any given day, and if this event is also at the Capitol, that could just make things confusing.
Over in the House, Rep. Rodney Davis says, “I’m not going to go. They announced it late and we already have plans for our week not being here.” […] Cathy McMorris Rodgers says “I haven’t been invited.” And it’s true, not everybody is getting invited this year, because pandemic. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is giving out invites evenly between Rs and Ds, but some House Republicans are very upset about this and fired off a letter earlier this week demanding Pelosi reschedule the address for a time that’s better for them and to please invite everyone. Pelosi has not seen fit to respond […]
[…] Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski is in, and Lindsey Graham says, “I don’t agree with his policies but he’s a fine man.” Even Marsha Blackburn says, “I imagine we’ll attend.”
As for the whiny-asses, we figure we’ll be hearing from people both-sides-ing over the next week about how some Democrats didn’t go to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union, or to his inauguration. And you know what? Good point, Chuck-Todd-Of-The-Future!
[…] Donald Trump was an un-American authoritarian white supremacist who lost the popular vote by millions in 2016, and it’s increasingly clear he only pulled his Rust Belt squeaker in the Electoral College because of a direct pipeline between his campaign and Russian intelligence services.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, won the popular vote by approximately seven million and won the Electoral College by the same margin Russia won it in 2016. He is a legitimate president, and not an authoritarian un-American white supremacist. This is different.
Punchbowl notes that it’s going to be quite a visual, as for the first time in the history of everything, the president will be flanked by TWO women. We’re used to seeing Speaker Nancy Pelosi up there, but now she’ll be sitting next to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Politicians from the UK, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania tricked by fake meetings with opposition figures
A series of senior European MPs have been approached in recent days by individuals who appear to be using deepfake filters to imitate Russian opposition figures during video calls.
Those tricked include Rihards Kols, who chairs the foreign affairs committee of Latvia’s parliament, as well as MPs from Estonia and Lithuania. Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, has also said he was targeted.
“Putin’s Kremlin is so weak and frightened of the strength of @navalny they’re conducting fake meetings to discredit the Navalny team,” Tugendhat posted in a tweet, referring to the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. “They got through to me today. They won’t broadcast the bits where I call Putin a murderer and thief, so I’ll put it here.”
Kols uploaded a photograph of Leonid Volkov, an ally of Navalny, and a screenshot of his doppelganger taken from the video call. Volkov said the two looked virtually identical. “Looks like my real face — but how did they manage to put it on the Zoom call? Welcome to the deepfake era …” he wrote.
[… tangled tale of who may, or may not, be responsible…]
“You didn’t see Republicans, when we had control of the Senate, try to rig the game,” Cruz claimed, referring to the Supreme Court. Actually, senator…
Realistically, the odds of Democrats approving major judicial reforms aren’t great. A group of Democrats unveiled a bill this week to increase the size of the U.S. Supreme Court from 9 justices to 13, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters she has “no plans” to bring the proposal to the floor.
[…] the bill now has just 12 co-sponsors, and in the Senate, a companion bill was introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), but it currently has zero co-sponsors.
Nevertheless, Republicans are pretending to be deeply concerned about the matter, leading Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Ted Cruz (Texas), and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to hold a press conference in front of the Supreme Court this morning. Much of the rhetoric was boilerplate — there were several references to a “power grab” — but Cruz went a little further than his GOP colleagues with this line:
“You didn’t see Republicans, when we had control of the Senate, try to rig the game. You didn’t see us try to pack the court.”
Well, a couple of things.
[…] when there was a GOP majority in the Senate, Republicans didn’t have much of a need to “rig the game,” because the Supreme Court was already conservative. Remember, at no point in Ted Cruz’s lifetime has a majority of the high court been appointed by Democratic presidents.
[…] The late Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly on Feb. 13, 2016. Exactly one day later, the Texas senator appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to insist that the Senate had “no obligation” whatsoever to consider any nominee to fill the Supreme Court’s vacancy. In fact, Cruz endorsed an unprecedented partisan blockade, insisting that the high court have eight members for 11 months.
He and his party, in other words, were eager to “rig the game” in their favor.
As Election Day 2016 drew closer, and Cruz — like nearly everyone else on Capitol Hill — assumed that Donald Trump would lose, the Texas Republican went further and suggested he was prepared to leave Scalia’s vacancy unfilled for another four years.
[…] Cruz wasn’t alone. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said in the runup to Election Day, “If Hillary [Clinton] becomes president, I’m going to do everything I can do to make sure that four years from now, we’re still going to have an opening on the Supreme Court.” […]
Four years later, after the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, Senate Republicans conveniently abandoned every principal they swore to value in 2016 and confirmed a new Supreme Court justice – eight days before Election Day 2020, as tens of millions of voters cast early ballots.
All of which brings us back to Cruz’s insistence this morning: “You didn’t see Republicans, when we had control of the Senate, try to rig the game.”
QAnon conspiracy theorist and supposed “prophet” Johnny Enlow […] claimed that former President [sic] Donald Trump is working with angels, specifically the archangels Gabriel and Michael, to take down Bill Gates, George Soros, and other powerful figures who supposedly control the world. [what? no Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome, Illuminati, poopyhead and teh evil cat, &tc? the loons seem less creative these days… –blf]
[This loony] insisted that Trump is still the legitimate president but was removed from office by God so that he could work behind the scenes to take down members of the evil cabal that secretly controls world events, such as the Rothchild and the Rockefeller familes. [ah, good, some old-fashioned antisemitism… –blf]
President Trump is on assignment and he’s anointed by God and the archangels are working with him, Enlow continued [eyes spinning furiously as spittle dripped off the microphone… –blf]. Michael is working with — it’s not that he’s serving Trump, it’s the other way around — and Zerachiel and Gabriel; but what they are going after and what is being contended for — and it’s just about done — is the seats that we’re talking about, like the Soros and the Gates and the Rothchilds, those seats that really control and effect world dynamics. Those things are being taken care of behind the scenes, and it would have been harder for President Trump to do so staying seated in the other seat. [and we’ll prove the Chicago Cubs didn’t win the 2016 World Series, π = 3, and flying saucers from outer space are colluding with Bigfoot to put a taco truck on every street corner! –blf]
birgerjohanssonsays
The British local elections are up. They have a tradition of joke candidates, and one running for mayor of London has some excellent ideas. You could try google
“Count Binface has released his political manifesto for London”
blfsays
Follow-up to @173, Count Binface (formerly known as Lord Buckethead) Mayoral Manifesto 2021:
[…] (4) No shop to be allowed to sell a croissant for more than £1. [1,15€ or so (croissants locally sell for around 1€)] (5) Free parking between Vine Street and The Strand (for electric vehicles only). [broadly, from Piccadilly Circus to The Strand, around 2km, through central London …] (8) At Trafalgar Square, Sir David Attenborough to be placed on the Fourth Plinth. Or a statue of him. Either’s fine. (9) Speaker phones on public transport to be banned. Offenders to be forced to watch the movie version of Cats every day for a year. (10) London to join the EU. (11) All government ministers’ pay, including the mayor’s, to be tied to that of nurses for the next 100 years. [YES! …] (15) I will create a Smart Speaker’s Corner, replacing the usual nutters who stand around at Hyde Park Corner with state-of-the-art technology that (a) understands the Earth is round, and (b) will perform a fart sound on command. The current incumbents can only do the latter.
[…]
Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) took the floor Thursday morning, one of a long line of representatives getting a minute of floor time to make the case for D.C. statehood before the House passed it this afternoon.
“I have had enough of my colleagues’ racist insinuations that somehow the people of Washington D.C. are incapable or even unworthy of our democracy,” he started.
“One Senate Republican said that D.C. wouldn’t be a ‘well-rounded working class state,’” he chuckled, referring to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). “I had no idea there were so many syllables in the word ‘white.’”
“One of my House Republican colleagues said that D.C. shouldn’t be a state because the district doesn’t have a landfill — my goodness!” he exclaimed. “With all the racist trash my colleagues have brought to this debate, I can see why they’re worried about having a place to put it.”
About halfway through his sentence, the Republican side of the chamber erupted. “Mr. Speaker, point of order!” someone shouted. Jones glanced over, but continued speaking.
“The truth is, there is no good faith argument for disenfranchising over 700,000 people, Mr. Speaker, most of whom are people of color,” he said.
The yells on the Republican side grew louder, as representatives demanded that Jones’ words be struck from the record.
“Do your job!” Republicans yelled at the presiding speaker. “Read the rules!”
Jones gave his consent for his words to be withdrawn, then finished his speech.
“These desperate objections are about fear — fear that in D.C., their white supremacist politics will no longer play,” Jones said. “Fear that soon enough, their white supremacist politics won’t work anywhere in America. Fear that if they don’t rig our democracy, they will not win.”
With that, Jones left the microphone, leaving Republicans stewing in his wake.
The House voted on H.R. 51 Thursday, passing the bill along party lines that would make Washington D.C. the 51st state, with one representative and two senators.
Republicans are adamantly against the measure, offering up a series of arguments — people in D.C. don’t have “real” jobs, D.C. isn’t capable of self-governance — that many have panned as racist in a city in which Black residents comprise 47 percent of the population. The largely unspoken crux of their resistance is that if bright blue D.C. does become a state, its senators and representatives would reliably be Democrats.
Some Republican arguments have become targets for mockery: earlier this week, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) claimed that “D.C. wouldn’t even qualify as a singular congressional district.” Standing over her shoulder was Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) whose entire state is less populous than Washington D.C.
Republicans also like arguing that granting D.C. statehood would be unconstitutional, because the Constitution gives Congress the power “to exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” over “the Seat of the Government of the United States.”
The House bill addresses this though, and would silo “the principal federal monuments, the White House, the Capitol Building, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and the federal executive, legislative, and judicial office buildings located adjacent to the Mall and the Capitol Building” into a federal district separate from the rest of the city, which would become a state.
Still, while GOP objection to D.C. statehood is more rooted in political calculus than anything else, the House bill’s passage through the Senate faces long odds with the legislative filibuster still in place. And even aside from the near certainty that it would attract no Senate GOP support, multiple moderate Democrats have so far declined to come down one way or another.
The Biden administration officially came out in favor of D.C. statehood this week in a policy statement.
“For far too long, the more than 700,000 people of Washington, D.C. have been deprived of full representation in the U.S. Congress,” the statement said. “This taxation without representation and denial of self governance is an affront to the democratic values on which our nation was founded.”
[…]
The Senate has passed the anti-Asian hate crimes bill in a vote of 94 to 1, after Democrat Mazie Hirono worked with some of her Republican colleagues to ensure bipartisan support for the legislation.
Josh Hawley, a Republican of Missouri, was the only senator to vote against the bill. Five others — Republicans Marsha Blackburn, Mike Lee and Rand Paul and Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith — did not vote.
(Klobuchar and Smith were both in their home state of Minnesota to attend the funeral of Daunte Wright, the 20-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by Brooklyn Center police earlier this month.)
[…]
The bill now heads to the Democratic-controlled House, where it is expected to pass. Joe Biden has also signaled he will sign the bill once it reaches his desk.
The legislation would create a new justice department position to more quickly review hate crime reports linked to the coronavirus pandemic and provide support to state and local officials responding to hate crimes.
Last week, Hawley indicated his opposition to the bill, saying it was too broad and open-ended since it mandates all this data collection in expansive categories that the federal government will collect and maintain.
[…]
The legislation, while somewhat narrow, intends to bolster hate crime tracking by designating a Justice Department official to specifically review potential hate crime incidents, providing grants for regional law enforcement agencies to set up reporting hotlines, and offering training to police on how to handle hate crime response.
[…]
The passage of this bill […] makes some inroads to gathering better information about hate crimes in general: Currently, thousands of hate crimes go unreported each year, and federal data is also lacking since local law enforcement agencies don’t always keep tabs on or communicate their numbers.
The evidence suggests that many police agencies across the country are not working very hard to count hate crimes. Thousands of them opt not to participate in the FBI’s hate crime program at all. Among the 15,000 that do, some 88 percent reported they had no hate crimes. According to federal records, the Huntsville Police Department has never reported a hate crime.
Local law enforcement agencies reported a total of 6,121 hate crimes in 2016 to the FBI, but estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the federal government, pin the number of potential hate crimes at almost 250,000 a year — one indication of the inadequacy of the FBI’s data.
The Supreme Court of the United States on Thursday significantly rolled back the rights of juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the opinion of a 6-3 conservative majority over the objection of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was joined by liberal colleagues Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan in a “brutal” dissent that repeatedly cited Kavanaugh’s own words back at him.
Details of the case at the link, including quotes from the dissent. Sotomayor is the best.
tomh @177, this text seems to also be very important:
“Rather than read Miller and Montgomery fairly, the Court reprises Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s dissenting view in Montgomery that Miller requires only a ‘youth-protective procedure,’” the dissent argued. “Justice Scalia’s view did not prevail, however. Montgomery’s interpretation of Miller is binding precedent, just as Miller itself is.”
The Supreme Court spent more than a decade putting limits on the punishments dealt out to people who commit crimes as children. The Trump Supreme Court abruptly turned back that progress on Thursday, with a 6-3 decision making it easier to sentence a juvenile to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent for the ages, shredding Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion with repeated reference to Kavanaugh’s own past writing in which he preached respect for precedent.
“Today, the Court guts Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana,” Sotomayor wrote—the first a decision banning mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles and the second making Miller retroactive and banning not just mandatory life-without-parole sentences but going a step further, limiting life without parole to “all but the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.” In Jones v. Mississippi, the case decided Thursday, a man who killed his grandfather as a 15-year-old in 2004 challenged a judge’s imposition of life without parole because the judge did not describe him as permanently incorrigible.
[…] In prison, he [Brett Jones, the man seeking to be released from a life sentence without parole] has earned his GED. His grandmother—the widow of the man he killed—is “steadfast in her belief that Brett is not and never was irreparably corrupt.”
To Kavanaugh, the fact that the judge exercised discretion without formally considering whether Jones was permanently incorrigible was good enough. To Sotomayor, “the court is fooling no one” in the pretense that this was not a major rollback of earlier decisions—the kind of rollback that should require an admission that a precedent is being overturned.
”The Court simply rewrites Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court knows what it is doing.”
Of course it does. But it comes as no surprise that the man who, red-faced and screaming, lied his way through his confirmation hearing would write opinions lying about what he was doing to precedent once he was on the court. […]
We also learned that Brett Jones “was a victim of abuse by multiple people in his life, including the grandfather he stabbed to death—then tried to save with CPR.”
Kavanaugh’s brain does not work well enough to be a Supreme Court Justice. He is a disgrace.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) excommunicated a prominent sex therapist on Wednesday, citing her criticism of the church and its leaders on social media.
Natasha Helfer was excommunicated in a letter from a regional LDS official, Stake President Stephen Daley, who wrote that her “clear and deliberate opposition to the Church, its doctrine, its policies, and its leaders” prevented her from being a member in good standing, according to The Washington Post.
The expulsion occurred after she was summoned to a disciplinary hearing in Derby, Kan., despite living in Utah, which she refused to enter after from being barred from entering the hearing with her cellphone upon which she had written notes for her defense.
Helfer has contended, according to the newspaper, that her expulsion was due to her work as a therapist, which Daley denied in his letter.
“After carefully and prayerfully considering this matter,” read the letter, according to the Associated Press. “it was the decision of the council to withdraw your church membership in response to conduct contrary to the law and order of the church.”
“Your professional activities played no part in the decision of the council,” Daley wrote, according to the Post. “Rather, as stated in my prior letter to you, the sole purpose of this council was to consider your repeated, clear and public opposition to and condemnation of the church, its doctrines, its policies and its leaders.”
In one social media post with which church officials took issue, Helfer referred to high-ranking LDS members as “patriarchal pricks,” a term she defended in an interview with the Post as a response to homophobia being spread by church elders.
“When will they stop calling homosexual people degenerate and perverse and unholy?” Helfer told the Post. “They’re upset that I called them patriarchal pricks. If they want me to stop saying bad words, they need to stop calling other people bad words.”
The Mormon church has traditionally taken a combative stance towards the LGTBQ community, including opposing gay marriage and more recently opposing Utah’s bill to ban “conversion therapy,” a widely discredited field that seeks to alter a person’s sexual orientation, for minors. That opposition failed, despite the political power of the church in Utah, and the practice was banned for minors in 2020.
[…]
A new Oklahoma law [HB 1674] protects drivers who unintentionally injure or kill demonstrators from any liability, while simultaneously subjecting protesters who block roadways to jail time and hefty fines.
[…]
“They are targeting groups of protesters who are just wanting to use their freedom of speech, passing bills that will intimidate them in the hopes of keeping people from using their first amendment rights, passing bills that decriminalize the murder of protesters, which is absolutely insane,” said Adriana Laws, founder of the Collegiate Freedom and Justice Coalition.
Because of HB 1674, a driver who unintentionally causes injury or death while exercising due care will not be criminally or civilly liable if they reasonably believe they’re fleeing from a riot where they will be harmed.
Obstruction of a public street, highway or road will now constitute a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in a county jail and fees as high as $5,000. Anyone who commits the offense will be liable for damages.
[… C]ars have become a weapon among those hoping to disrupt demonstrations, or drivers who get flummoxed and enraged. People drove their vehicles into protests more than 100 times last summer, and at least two protesters were fatally struck, according to USA Today.
[…]
The bill was among a series of reactionary legislative proposals that some fear could hinder Oklahomans’ ability to protest. Another — which criminalizes posting personal information about law enforcement officers online, and which advocates believe could deal a blow to accountability — has also become law.
[…]
Don Spencer, president of the Oklahoma 2nd Amendment Association, spoke in a video from February about his desire for legislation like HB 1674. Beyond protecting drivers who run people over, he hoped those who were obstructing traffic would be held liable — I guess if they’re alive — if there’s anything left of ’em.
If you’re unlawfully blocking a roadway for the intent purpose of possibly doing damage, to scare people, to harm people, he warned, folks, you could be treaded on with the car tires.
“People are marching in the street. It means they know and understand everything,” said Navalny. “They won’t give up their future, the future of their children, their country. Yes, it will be difficult and dark for some time. But those pulling Russia back historically are doomed. There are more of us in any case.”
People need money in order to live. In order to get money to live, those people need jobs. Not just any jobs, mind you, they need jobs that pay them enough to live on. Unfortunately, in these United States, we don’t currently have enough living wage jobs for everyone to have one, which means that 9.71 million American adults are currently unemployed and 30 million American adults are earning less than $15 an hour. That’s really, really bad. That’s “the population of the state of California” bad. Or “78 Wyomings” bad. We only have 328 million people in this country.
We also need to start doing more to take care of the planet because, well, we live here.
This week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Ed Markey, and other congressional Democrats introduced legislation to do something about both of those problems. The plan is to create a Civilian Climate Corps that will help the United States get its act together environmentally while also providing 1.5 million good jobs for people who need them. Nice!
The bill states:
The Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act of 2021 establishes a Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service within AmeriCorps. A diverse and equitable group of 1.5 million Americans over 5 years will complete federally funded projects that help communities respond to climate change and transition to a clean economy. CCC work will reduce carbon emissions, enable a transition to renewable energy, build healthier and more resilient communities, implement conservation projects with proven climate benefits, and help communities recover from climate disasters. At the same time, participants, or “corpsmembers,” will receive education and training in coordination with local institutions, including labor unions, to usher them into good jobs, and especially good union jobs. The corps will coordinate closely with local groups to help develop career pathways and union opportunities in new green sectors.
It’s like chocolate and peanut butter — two great tastes that taste great together. And America agrees. According to a poll conducted by Data for Progress, 60 percent of us are behind the idea of a Civilian Climate Corp, and only 14 percent strongly oppose it. The Biden administration supports it, progressives like Markey and AOC are drafting it up, and moderates like Pete Buttigieg are behind it as well, so … unity! […]
When Texas’ natural gas supplies froze up, prices soared, and now Minnesota’s customers are looking at an $800 million bill. One utility, headquartered in Houston, is taking an especially aggressive tack.
When that big freeze hit Texas in February, the Lone Star State couldn’t help but share its pain.
With its ill-equipped natural gas systems clocked by the cold, Texas’s exports across the Rio Grande froze up and 4.7 million customers in northern Mexico went without electricity — more than in Texas itself. The spot price of gas jumped 30-fold as far west as Southern California. And all the way up by the Canadian border, gas utilities in Minnesota that turned to the daily spot market to meet demand say they had to pay about $800 million more than planned over the course of just five days as the Texas freeze-up pinched off supplies.
“The ineptness and disregard for common-sense utility regulation in Texas makes my blood boil and keeps me up at night,” Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, said in an interview. “It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas’s lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country.”
[…] in a state that eschews regulation, driving energy producers to cut costs as deeply as they can to remain competitive, things went spectacularly wrong the week of Valentine’s Day.
Minnesota’s biggest gas companies are putting forward plans to recoup their expenses by adding a surcharge to customers’ bills, which the state utility commission would first have to approve. Normally, such adjustments to account for winter prices go into effect in September, but Minnesota’s biggest gas utility, Houston-based CenterPoint Energy, says the financial pinch is so great it wants to start billing customers next month — and charging them nearly 9 percent interest until the extraordinary costs are paid off.
At the same time, the company’s CEO, David Lesar, has been assuring investors that the company has access to plenty of cash and its weather-related costs nationally are not a concern.
[…] In Minnesota, where the temperature dropped below minus-20 degrees in February and scarcely a single customer lost gas or electricity, state officials are struggling to come up with an equitable solution to a debacle made in Texas.
Gas prices in Minnesota rose to 70 times their normal level, as deliveries to the state’s main trading hub dropped by 39 percent.
“I don’t think we even yet truly understand what happened,” said state Sen. David Senjem (R-Rochester), a former Minnesota legislature majority leader. “I hope they realize they better get their system a little more solid,” he said of Texas. “Unfortunate. You could use stronger words, but I better not. […]
Senjem sponsored a bill that would provide $115 million in state funds as relief for hard-pressed residents and municipally owned small utilities. It passed the Senate and is awaiting action in the House. He said he hopes federal funds from the American Rescue Plan act could also come into play.
[…] CenterPoint says it needs to impose a monthly surcharge on its customers for the next two years to recover the extra $500 million it spent on gas during that one week in February. Tacked onto the surcharge would be interest of 8.75 percent. The total, the company says, would amount to between $300 and $400 per residential account. And it wants to begin billing right away, even before the utility commission has sorted out its position on what CenterPoint calls the “February market event.”
That approach is similar to plans the company is apparently preparing to put forward in Oklahoma and Arkansas. […]
As Republicans ponder the government’s fiscal landscape, they see nothing but reasons for despair. In response to the coronavirus pandemic and the recession, Congress passed enormous spending bills which not only addressed short-term problems but threaten to alter Americans’ expectations for how much support they should receive from the government. The deficit is extremely large — and Republicans tell themselves that contrary to their own record, they really do hate deficits.
Perhaps worst of all for Republicans, a Democratic president and Congress are no longer intimidated by talk of rising debt, no longer cowed into accepting austerity policies. President Biden is ignoring the deficit and riding high in the polls.
So what are they to do? Some of them are contemplating an economic suicide bombing, in the form of a refusal to raise the debt ceiling: […]
This would be a rerun of Barack Obama’s presidency, when Republicans used the threat of a default on the United States’ debts to blackmail him into accepting spending cuts while the economy was still recovering from the Great Recession, making that recovery longer and slower than it needed to be.
One suspects that Democrats, including Biden, have learned the lesson of those years, which is to not negotiate with economic terrorists. But they need to go farther.
They have to kill the debt ceiling entirely. Kill it with fire. Drown it and shoot it and bury it. Strap it to a rocket and launch it into the sun. Enough is enough.
The debt ceiling is a bizarre quirk of the U.S. budgeting process that exists in almost no other country in the world. Its history dates to World War I-era conflicts between the executive and legislative branches, but what’s most important about it is that it does not determine how much debt the government takes on.
The debt ceiling is an extra vote Congress has to take. Budget and tax bills actually determine how much the government spends and takes in — and therefore what the deficit and debt will be. After that, they have to pass another bill raising the debt ceiling to cover the difference.
Until a decade ago, the debt ceiling vote was just theater: A few members of the opposition party would condemn the majority’s profligate ways and vote against it, but it would always pass. Until Obama became president and Republicans realized that if they credibly threatened to block it, the potential economic consequences of the world no longer trusting the United States’ willingness to honor obligations would be so catastrophic that it would make Obama do anything they wanted.
Of course, they had to convince him they were reckless enough to make good on the threat. But given how crazy the GOP had become during the tea party era, it wasn’t a hard sell. At one point, Standard and Poor’s downgraded America’s debt for the first time, just on the possibility that Republicans might follow through.
And now they want to put us through that again?
We have to end this madness. In the past, Congress has always raised the debt ceiling to cover the spending in the budget — but only by enough to last for a year or two, ensuring that they have to keep coming back to do it again.
So there are two ways Democrats can take care of this problem. The first is simply to write the debt ceiling out of U.S. law. Nothing about our budget will change. It won’t mean more spending or more debt, it will just mean that neither party will be able to threaten a global economic crisis to get what they want.
If they feel that goes too far, there’s another option: Keep the debt ceiling, but make this the last time they have to vote on it. They could raise the ceiling by, let’s say, 50 quadrillion dollars. It would still be on the books, but it would be high enough that we’d never have to worry about it again.
And they can do it through reconciliation, which they’re probably going to have to use in order to pass an infrastructure bill anyway.
It should have happened a long time ago. So Democrats need to take this step for the good of the country, both now and in the future. Let Republicans squawk all they want.
US President Joe Biden will propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6 percent, sources tell Bloomberg News.
President Joe Biden will propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6%, which, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for investors could be as high as 43.4%, according to people familiar with the proposal.
The plan would boost the capital gains rate to 39.6% for those earning $1 million or more, an increase from the current base rate of 20%, the people said on the condition of anonymity because the plan is not yet public. A 3.8% tax on investment income that funds Obamacare would be kept in place, pushing the tax rate on returns on financial assets higher than the top rate on wage and salary income, they said.
[…]
The proposal could reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor. Biden campaigned on equalizing the capital gains and income tax rates for wealthy individuals, saying it’s unfair that many of them pay lower rates than middle-class workers.
[…] Biden is expected to release the proposal next week as part of the tax increases to fund social spending in the forthcoming “American Families Plan.”
That proposal, expected at around $1 trillion, will come as Congress debates how to proceed on Biden’s separate $2.25 trillion infrastructure-focused package known as the American Jobs Plan, which would be funded by tax increases on corporations.
[…]
Congressional Democrats have separately proposed a series of changes to capital-gains taxation, including imposing the levies annually instead of when they are sold.
In what might be the boldest initiative of his Presidency, Joe Biden announced that he would strive to cut [Tucker] Carlson emissions by as much as ninety per cent by 2025.
Underscoring the urgency of his proposal, Biden observed that Carlson emissions, even when compared to other notorious polluters like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, were especially toxic.
The President’s ambitious plan, which includes retrofitting the nation’s televisions to automatically change the channel when Carlson appears, is unlikely to garner Republican support, but Biden remained undaunted.
“We owe it to our children and grandchildren to do this,” he said.
* Climate: “The U.S. aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 as part of its new commitment to the Paris climate agreement, President Joe Biden announced Thursday. Biden made the pledge, called the ‘nationally determined contribution,’ while speaking at a two-day virtual climate summit attended by dozens of world leaders Thursday morning.”
* Ma’Khia Bryant: “Police in Columbus, Ohio, released more body-camera video Wednesday showing an officer’s point of view as he pulled his weapon, opened fire and killed a 16-year-old girl while responding to a 911 call.”
* D.C. statehood: “A decades-long movement to reshape the American political map took a further step Thursday as the House of Representatives approved a bill to make the nation’s capital the 51st state. Voting along party lines with minority Republicans in opposition, the House approved the bill 216-208.”
* […] “The Senate passed legislation Thursday targeting anti-Asian hate crimes after an uptick of incidents during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lawmakers approved the measure in a 94-1 vote. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., was the only member to oppose the bill.”
[…] * Lowering the temperature: “Russia has ordered its troops to withdraw from the border with Ukraine after a massive military buildup that raised alarm from Western Europe to Washington. Moscow said Thursday that forces should begin returning to their permanent bases, signaling a potential end to the standoff that sparked fears of a fresh military conflict.”
* She’ll require Senate confirmation: “President Biden on Wednesday nominated Stacey A. Dixon, an expert in intelligence technology, to serve as the nation’s No. 2 intelligence official. The nomination of Dr. Dixon, the former head of the intelligence community’s advanced research project agency, to be the office’s principal deputy director reflects the Biden administration’s interest in making technological innovation in intelligence gathering a priority.”
* Kahl deserves better than this: “Vice President Harris cast her fourth tiebreaking vote in the Senate and her first on a nomination Wednesday night to advance Colin Kahl to be the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy. The Senate split 50-50 along party lines on a vote to discharge Kahl’s stalled nomination from the Armed Services Committee, which was deadlocked last month on moving him to the Senate floor for confirmation.”
* It’s not your imagination that we’re still learning more about Trump-era controversies: “The Trump administration put up bureaucratic obstacles that stalled approximately $20 billion in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico and then obstructed an investigation into the holdup, according to an inspector general report obtained by The Washington Post.”
* The intra-party debate over earmarks continues to be quite odd: “Senate Republicans on Wednesday afternoon stuck with their conference’s internal earmark ban, but that won’t prevent those who want funding for home-state projects from requesting it.”
Vague and incomplete, that’s fairly good description of the Republican infrastructure plan:
A group of Republican senators unveiled a thin outline of their infrastructure counter-proposal Thursday, an attempt to give their members something to support rather than just opposing President Joe Biden’s expansive infrastructure package outright.
After introducing the plan in a press briefing — $568 billion for narrowly-defined “roads and bridges”-type infrastructure — Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), the effort’s leader, was candid with reporters about the pressure her conference was under to put some plan forward, even a vague one that seems to ensure its own failure by taking most payment methods off the table.
The White House, she said, wanted to see a proposal encompassing the points of Republican dissension and their own proposals “sooner than later,” she said.
“That’s why I went ahead and insisted that we go ahead and put something out that our members can talk about, because if we don’t put any ideas on the table — shame on us,” she said.
[…] The infrastructure counterproposal skimps on the details. What it does not skimp on, however, is messaging.
Replete with statements of principle like that the bill should raise neither taxes nor the national debt (call us if you can figure out how that would work), the GOP “plan” does exactly what Capito said: provide talking points against the Biden proposal.
Part of this is theater, making a show of the pains they’re taking to compromise while flaunting the thought and effort that went into the counterproposal. It conveys the message that they’re hardworking legislators just like everyone else, and why can’t we all just roll up our sleeves and compromise?
But the lack of substance speaks not only to earlier failures to define an alternative to Democratic legislation, but to a broader point: when your party has spent the last 12 years on obstruction and then repealing whatever President Obama was able to pass, there’s not much of a positive legislative agenda to push.
Republicans still don’t know how to do the hard work it takes to come up with an actual counter proposal to anything the Biden administration has proposed.
A political operative who was behind robocalls urging Trump supporters to march to the Capitol on the day of the joint session of Congress ratifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory was hired on Thursday by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) — a prominent GOP group that has come under fire for promoting the rally that occurred shortly before the deadly Capitol insurrection.
The board of RAGA voted to appoint Peter Bisbee as its new executive director, according to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution on Thursday. Bisbee previously served as the head of RAGA’s policy arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which financed robocalls urging its backers to “stop the steal” at the Capitol on Jan. 6. […]
he story here–connecting this piece with all the other stuff TPM is reporting–is that the GOP is quickly regrouping and preparing, at the state level, to steal or contest forthcoming elections with a beefed up personnel of judicial/legal criminals.
———————
Hopefully the DOJ and FBI and Georgia police investigative arms are closing in on RAGA associated operatives.
Despite the declining reporting of anti-Asian crimes, hate crimes against the AAPI community are continuing to rise. In California a new case is reported almost every day. Multiple incidents are also going unreported, therefore remaining under the radar of media outlets. In a recent incident, a man was arrested in connection to not one but two hate crimes.
The man—identified as 25-year-old Michael Orlando Vivona—was arrested on suspicion of elder abuse and committing a hate crime, according to the Orange Police Department. Vivona allegedly punched an elderly Asian man and woman in their 70s while they were walking through a park on April 18. According to officials, Vivona ran up to the couple and first punched the man and then the woman. After the incident, bystanders quickly crowded around the suspect before officers arrived.
[…] According to the Associated Press, during Vivona’s arrest, he told police he had a “hate” or “fixation” about Asians. This led police to believe the attack was racially motivated. Vivona has been charged with two felony counts of elder abuse, two felony counts of battery hate crime causing injury, and two felony hate crime enhancements for the “unprovoked attack” against the Korean couple, District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement. Vivona pleaded not guilty to every charge.
But that’s not all: Vivona has also been identified as the same man who threatened U.S. Olympian Sakura Kokumai earlier this month. He is currently under investigation in connection with that incident.
In a video of the incident from April 1, Vivona can be heard telling Kokumai to “go home” and calling her “Chinese” and “disgusting.” Kokumai, a Japanese American Olympic athlete, told NBC News she was on a run in a park she normally trains in when he started berating her. “When he walked closer, that’s where I did get scared a little bit, because you just never know what could happen,” she said.
Kokumai said she shared the video to spread awareness of the harassment and fear Asian Americans are facing. “I want everybody to know, especially in the AAPI community, that you’re not alone,” Kokumai told NBC News. “I think it’s really important to have compassion, share love and look out for one another.” She added that “it makes me emotional just to think about it because at the time I did feel that I was alone.” […]
[…]
A vaccine against malaria has been shown to be highly effective in trials in Africa, holding out the real possibility of slashing the death toll of a disease that kills 400,000 mostly small children every year.
The vaccine, developed by scientists at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University, showed up to 77% efficacy in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months.
The hunt for a malaria vaccine has been going on the best part of a century. One, the Mosquirix vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline, has been through lengthy clinical trials but is only partially effective, preventing 39% of malaria cases and 29% of severe malaria cases among small children in Africa over four years. It is being piloted by the World Health Organization in parts of Kenya, Ghana and Malawi.
The Oxford vaccine is the first to meet the WHO goal of 75% efficacy against the mosquito-borne parasite disease. Larger trials are now beginning, involving 4,800 children in four countries.
[…]
The vaccine will be manufactured at large scale and low-cost, say the researchers, who have arranged a deal with the Serum Institute of India, which is involved in manufacturing the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.
The Serum Institute has had to delay supplies of the Covid vaccine to the rest of the world because of the huge rise in cases in India, but has promised to deliver 200m doses a year of the malaria vaccine if it is licensed.
[Director of the Jenner Institute, Prof Adrian] Hill said the best-case scenario was approval by the end of 2022, by which time the Serum Institute would have plenty of capacity.
[…]
The children in the trial, which is published in the Lancet journal, were five to 17 months old and lived in Nanoro, an area encompassing 24 villages with an approximate population of 65,000 people. They were split into three groups; two had the vaccine, but with either a low or high dose of adjuvant, while the third group were given a rabies vaccine, so acted as a control.
The children had three doses and have since had a further booster jab. The Mosquirix vaccine is also given as four doses.
Hill said mothers were keen to bring their children back for further shots because of their experience of malaria. Efficacy was 77% in the high-dose adjuvant group and 74% in the lower dose group.
Rachel Maddow reports on the bizarre conspiracy theories that underpin the effort by Arizona Republicans to conduct (another) taxpayer funded recount of only the presidential election ballots from last November from Maricopa County in the belief that they’ll discover that Donald Trump secretly won.
Rachel Maddow points out the bitter contradiction in the Supreme Court choosing Brett Kavanaugh as the one to write a majority opinion that shatters the precedent of a judge considering whether a teenager’s crimes should be held against them for the entire rest of their life.
Rachel Maddow looks at the Democratic effort to end taxpayer subsidies for the oil and gas industry while at the same time Chevron is reportedly lobbying the U.S. to get in the way of potential sanctions on the oil revenue that funds the new military junta in Burma.
…Latin American Nations Suffer “Worst Moment” of Coronavirus Pandemic
In Latin America, Uruguay and Colombia are reporting record deaths this week, Brazil is averaging over 3,000 deaths a day, and Argentina just passed 60,000 deaths in a year. Argentina’s health minister called this week the “worst moment” of the pandemic.
In Turkey, Health Ministry data suggests about 1% of the working-age population — or more than a half-million people — currently has an active COVID-19 infection. Turkish officials have so far delivered about 20 million vaccine doses nationwide for a population of over 80 million people.
U.S. Vaccination Pace Slows as White House Hits Goal of 200 Million Doses in 100 Days
The United States reported another 63,000 coronavirus cases and over 800 COVID deaths on Wednesday as the White House said it has reached a goal of administering 200 million vaccine doses within President Biden’s first 100 days. The pace of U.S. vaccinations has begun to slow, with an 11% drop in a weekly rolling average. Polls show about one in four U.S. residents might not get vaccinated. On Wednesday, President Biden urged U.S. employers to provide paid time off for workers to receive vaccines and time to recover from any side effects.
…
NC Protesters Demand Release of Footage Showing Police Killing of Andrew Brown
In North Carolina, protesters took to the streets of Elizabeth City overnight, demanding the release of body-camera footage showing the police killing of Andrew Brown, a 42-year-old father and Black man. Police haven’t revealed details of the shooting, though an eyewitness said Brown was fired on multiple times while trying to drive away from officers. This is Keith Rivers, president of the local NAACP chapter.
Keith Rivers: “People are feeling tired, people are frustrated, and people want this to stop. And the only way it’s going to stop is if we first have transparency, because transparency brings about trust. And when you have trust, then we can move forward in the march and the fight for justice.”
…
Manhattan District Attorney Will Stop Prosecuting Sex Work
Here in New York, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced it will stop prosecuting sex work and “unlicensed massage.” The DA is also dismissing over 5,000 cases of “loitering” connected to sex work, or what’s commonly known as the “walking while trans” law, which was repealed earlier this year. Advocates welcomed the news but said full decriminalization of sex work is still needed….
Here’s a link to the April 23 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
In the depths of Mount Everest, the first cases of coronavirus have been identified at an Everest base camp, renewing the controversy over the decision by Nepal to open the world’s highest mountain to climbers.
The Norwegian climber Erlend Ness was originally thought to be suffering from pulmonary edema – a condition associated with altitude sickness – and was evacuated by helicopter to Kathmandu, where he tested positive for coronavirus.
“My diagnosis is Covid-19,” said Ness. “I’m doing OK now … The hospital is taking care (of me).”
With access from the Chinese side of Everest closed to outside climbers, and some expedition operators on the Nepalese side increasing prices, the Nepalese decision in the midst of a global pandemic has come under scrutiny….
Japan has declared “short and powerful” states of emergency for Tokyo, Osaka and two other prefectures, as the country attempts to contain the virus just three months ahead of the Olympics…
Under a new state of emergency from 25 April to 11 May, restaurants, bars, and karaoke parlours serving alcohol will be required to close, while big sporting events are to be held without spectators, economy minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said.
Breaching the restrictions will in some cases carry penalties under a recently revised law, he added.
“We absolutely have to limit the movement of people, and we have to do it decisively. We need powerful, short and focused measures,” Nishimura said, asking people to remember the lockdowns of last spring and stay at home.
…
The state of emergency – a third round for Japan that also includes Kyoto and Hyogo – will cover nearly a quarter of the population and last through the “Golden Week” holidays, dealing a further blow to the tourism and services industries.
In some news from Australia, health authorities have said another three cases of rare blood clots – including in an 80-year-old Victorian man – are very likely linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The medicines regulator on Friday night said the suspected cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome were in a 35-year-old New South Wales woman, a 49-year-old Queensland man and the 80-year-old.
Symptom onset ranged from nine to 26 days after vaccination with AstraZeneca, the Therapeutic Goods Administration said in a statement. The Vaccine Safety Investigation Group “concluded all three of the cases were likely linked to vaccination”….
Hospitals in Delhi issued SOS alerts on Friday morning, warning they had just a few hours supply of oxygen left, as another unprecedented surge in Covid-19 cases overwhelmed health systems in major Indian cities.
Hospital staff posted emergency messages on social media throughout Thursday and Friday, saying they were unable to cope with demand and pleading for assistance from government….
johnson catmansays
“Just as every cop is a criminal . . .”:Hialeah motorcycle cops charged with issuing bogus tickets to drivers they never pulled over:
Two Hialeah police motorcycle officers surrendered on Wednesday to face allegations they issued dozens of bogus traffic tickets to motorists.
…There is not only one injustice in this story. The first is clear: hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown soldiers who died for Britain were not given the graves, memorials or commemoration that they deserved. The second is that it took so long for this travesty to be recognised, let alone corrected. It should not have taken me to present a TV documentary for action to be taken or for apologies to be made. The research that The Unremembered was based on was completed by academic Michèle Barrett a decade previously, but it was ignored. This fact reflects poorly on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but it is typical of so many institutions in this country that are reluctant to see prejudice even when it is staring them in the face.
Let this teach us a lesson: we cannot hide from the worst parts of our history if we want to move forward as a nation….
The CEO of Moderna has said the firm was working hard to have a booster vaccine against Covid variants approved by the late summer or early autumn, Reuters reports.
Speaking at a virtual event on vaccine manufacturing, Stéphane Bancel added that the US pharmaceutical company was on course to make up to a billion doses of Covid vaccines this year and up to 1.4bn in 2022.
One year ago today, President Donald Trump took to the White House briefing room and encouraged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting Covid. It was a watershed moment, soon to become iconic in the annals of presidential briefings. It arguably changed the course of political history.
Some ex-Trump aides say they don’t even think about that day as the wildest they experienced — with the conceit that there were simply too many others. But for those there, it was instantly shocking, even by Trump standards. It quickly came to symbolize the chaotic essence of his presidency and his handling of the pandemic. Twelve months later, with the pandemic still lingering and a U.S. death toll nearing 570,000, it still does.
“For me, it was the craziest and most surreal moment I had ever witnessed in a presidential press conference,” said ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, who was the first reporter at the briefing to question Trump’s musings about bleach.
For weeks, Trump had been giving winding, stream-of-consciousness updates on the state of the Covid fight as it clearly worsened. So when he got up from the Oval Office to brief reporters gathered in the The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on April 23, there was no expectation that the day’s proceedings would be any different than usual.
Privately, however, some of his aides were worried. The Covid task force had met earlier that day — as usual, without Trump — to discuss the most recent findings, including the effects of light and humidity on how the virus spreads. Trump was briefed by a small group of aides. But it was clear to some aides that he hadn’t processed all the details before he left to speak to the press.
…
“A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world,” Trump began, clearly thinking the question himself, “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
…
That Trump was even at the lectern that day was head-scratching for many. For weeks, he and his team had downplayed the severity of the Covid crisis even as the president privately acknowledged to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that it had the potential to be catastrophic. But as it became clearer that the public was not buying the rosy assessments, Trump had decided to take his fate into his own hands — assembling the press on a daily basis to spin his way through the crisis.
He loved it. The former administration official said Trump was elated with the free airtime he was getting on television day after day. “He was asking how much money that was worth,” the aide recalled. The coverage was so ubiquitous that, at one point, Fox News’ Bret Baier attended the briefing and peppered the president with questions because his own show was being routinely interrupted.
“BREAKING: The Virginia GOP will not allow religious Jews who cannot travel due to Shabbat to participate in its convention. There were 38 votes in favor of providing a religious exemption, 28 against, and 3 abstentions. The motion needed 75% in favor to pass.”
[…]
The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s […]
The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. Changes in how the Earth’s mass is distributed around the planet cause the axis, and therefore the poles, to move.
In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions.
The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995 and that the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995.
Since 1980, the position of the poles has moved about 4 metres in distance.
“The accelerated decline {in water stored on land} the team, led by Shanshan Deng, from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In Brazil, the Covid vaccination program is being put at risk by people failing to show up for their second shot, with 1.5m missing appointments for the follow-up dose, according to the health ministry.
Authorities involved in the campaign said the low turnout seemed to be due to poor communication, with people either not realising the importance of the second shot or simply forgetting when they were meant to go, Reuters reports.
Specialists say that is particularly concerning after a recent real-world study from Chile found that the Sinovac Biotech Covid vaccine, which has accounted for some 80% of Brazil’s program, is just 16% effective after one shot.
In total, Covid-19 has claimed more than 380,000 lives in Brazil, the world’s second highest death toll behind the US.
The European Commission said it expects to seal the world’s biggest vaccine supply deal within days, buying up to 1.8 billion doses of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine for the next few years, Reuters writes.
Speaking during a visit to Pfizer’s vaccine plant in Puurs, Belgium, Ursula von der Leyen, the commission president, said the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines would be delivered over 2021-2023.
The agreement would be enough to inoculate the 450m EU population for two years.
It is the third contract agreed by the bloc with the two companies, which have already agreed to supply 600m doses of the two-dose vaccine this year under two previous contracts.
“NEW: US special envoy for so-called northern triangle – the Central American countries from which most migrants flee – says US considering sanctions against corrupt leaders. This would be a first. Many enjoyed good relations with Trump as long as they cooperated with his plans.”
Scores of people have been injured in clashes in East Jerusalem between far-right Jewish activists, Palestinians and Israeli police.
The violence erupted as police tried to keep Palestinians and ultra-nationalist Jewish protesters apart.
It follows nights of confrontations in the Israeli-occupied sector amid rising nationalist and religious tensions.
East Jerusalem has long been a flashpoint, with an uneasy coexistence there between Jews and Arabs.
Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since the 1967 Middle East war and considers the entire city its capital, though this is not recognised by the vast majority of the international community. Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the future capital of a hoped-for independent state.
The worst fighting in days broke out on Thursday night after hundreds of Jewish extremists from the ultra-nationalist Lehava group marched towards the Damascus Gate entrance of Jerusalem’s Old City – where large numbers of Palestinians had gathered – chanting “Death to Arabs”.
Stones and bottles were thrown between the two sides, and police used stun grenades, tear gas and water cannon to try to disperse the crowds.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said at least 100 Palestinians were injured, while police said 20 officers were hurt. More than 50 people were arrested.
Tensions in East Jerusalem have escalated since the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on 13 April….
birgerjohanssonsays
Tom Meyer at Shasta Bible College is going nuts over the discovery of a dinosaur fossil he thinks proves the world is 6000 years old.
tomhsays
Covid Vaccine Mandatory at State Universities in California
April 22, 2021 NATHAN SOLIS Over one million college students and faculty will need to get their Covid jab by this fall under a new plan announced by two of California’s biggest university systems.
(CN) — For more than a year, state university campuses across California have been largely empty and students and professors have been forced to adapt to an online college experience. But the CSU and UC systems have their eyes set on reopening this fall, announcing Thursday they will require Covid-19 vaccines for students and faculty in order to return to campus
The California State University and the University of California’s vaccination requirements affect more than a million students and faculty across the Golden State.
[…]
CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro called the approach “the most comprehensive and consequential university plan for Covid-19 vaccines in the country.”
….officials announced the plan now to give students, faculty and staff time to prepare. Students will need to update their vaccination records or provide an approved exception or medical exemption before they enroll for their fall semester….
News of the university vaccine plan comes as California has one of the lowest case rates in the country.
As of Thursday, roughly 43% of all Californians 16 years and older have received at least one vaccine dose.
“Does ‘Burn their towns’, ‘Death to Arabs,’ represent you?” star reporter @SuleimanMas1 asks young Lehava marcher. “Maybe more like ‘when you leave the towns we’ll move in– like we’re doing in the Old City!’” she tells Maswadeh, who grew up in the Old City
[…] In an interview first noticed by Forbes, Johnson told right-wing Wisconsin radio host Vicki McKenna on Thursday, “Why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine, to the point where you’re gonna impose it, you’re gonna shame people.”
“I see no reason to be pushing vaccines on people, and I certainly am going to vigorously resist any government use of vaccine passports,” Johnson added.
Johnson tested positive for COVID-19 in October, as Wisconsin faced a large outbreak. The senator later used that as a justification to avoid getting the vaccine, against CDC guidelines, telling a Wisconsin CBS affiliate that he had no plans to get the shot.
The vaccine skepticism expressed by Johnson puts him at odds with party leadership, but likely won’t come as a surprise to those who have followed the Wisconsin senator’s career. Johnson has used his platform to push COVID-19 pseudoscience, narratives that it was really “agents provocateurs” who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, [etc.]
[…] Johnson’s remarks to McKenna came as part of a larger conversation about alleged leftist plots to “take control,” be it via COVID-19, climate change, or convincing people to trust the government.
“You heard President Biden address the nation, begging Americans, please, trust the government, trust Dr. Fauci,” Johnson told McKenna. “Eh, sorry. I’ve got my doubts.”
The Wisconsin host replied: “Please trust the government? The guy can’t figure out what flavor of pudding he wants for lunch.”
She went on to ask the senator whether he believed that efforts to combat climate change would replace COVID-19 as “the next step to locking Americans down and controlling them in perpetuity.”
“That and the vaccine passports,” Johnson replied.
He added that the government “should have limited distribution” of the COVID-19 vaccine “to the vulnerable” because its not “fully approved.”
[…] “You’re talking about climate change as the next step — I don’t think they’re going to let go of COVID-19 anytime soon,” he added.
Johnson then doubled down on the idea that there is no reason to get vaccinated beyond protecting one’s own health. Studies show that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are 95 percent effective, Johnson said, “So if you have a vaccine, quite honestly what do you care if your neighbor has one or not? What is it to you?”
“I’m getting highly suspicious about whats happening here,” Johnson concluded.
McKenna then closed the segment, reiterating that “it’s about control and power,” before ending with: “Sen. Ron Johnson, I hope you have a wonderful Earth Day.”
On Thursday, [Marjorie Taylor] Greene posted a video on her Facebook page announcing that she has now read the 14-page [Green New Deal] bill and is ready for the debate, declaring that if Ocasio-Cortez refuses to participate, she’ll just be showing the world that she’s “a scared little girl that is pretty stupid and doesn’t know anything about the economy or economics.”
“I’ve read all 14 little pages, and I’m very ready to debate her on the House floor,” Greene said. “She better show up. If she chickens out, then she shows exactly who she really is: a scared little girl that is pretty stupid and doesn’t know anything about the economy or economics. She boasts that she does because she has ‘a degree’ in economics, but she doesn’t have enough common sense to actually be able to produce anything in the real world, she just has a government job.”
Commentary from Wonkette:
LOL OK, a couple things here.
Greene’s qualifications for this “debate” appear to be “What do I know? I just like to read a lot EMOJI,” which is what she literally wrote on Facebook when she advanced her Jewish Space Laser theory of wildfires. Now she’s read a 14-page summary of the Green New Deal, so she’s READY. […]
Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez was a double major at Boston U., graduating with degrees in international relations and economics. So there’s that. Which Greene acknowledges in her post, while calling AOC stupid.
Also, Greene may not be clear on this, but “she just has a government job” is not a very good insult when you have the exact same government job as the person you are insulting. […]
And what, praytell, has Marjorie Taylor Greene produced in her life? This garbage internet troll who literally buys into the QAnon conspiracy theory out here talking about the “real world”? [She] got a construction company from her daddy and then changed careers to “CrossFit”? OK. […]
We’re not mad, we’re just trying to wrap our heads around all of this.
One more thing about “government job”: Has anyone told MTG that when you are in Congress and the person you are harassing to DEBATE ME! is also in Congress, you don’t actually have to get on Twitter to yell DEBATE ME? Because, like, debating them is part of their “government job”? Happens on the floor of the House of Representatives? Has she heard about that?
She may not have heard about that.
Of course, this is just MTG’s latest [rude] behavior. Earlier this week, she was on Twitter spreading racist bullshit about how DC — a place the people who voted for her are scared of — was completely dead and impassable after the Derek Chauvin verdict, because of how she imagines everybody else was as scared of Black people as she seems to be. Or, you know, maybe she was just lying for lying’s sake.
[…] Marjorie Taylor Greene is just so goddamn stupid […]
On Aug. 4, 2019, the day after a gunman who had posted a hateful diatribe against Hispanics fatally shot 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, a leader of a tea party group in Texas said on Facebook: “You’re not going to demographically replace a once proud, strong people without getting blow-back.”
[…] Ten days later, amid a brewing backlash over the comments by Fred and Julie McCarty, the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party posted an undated testimonial from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) wishing the group a happy 10th anniversary as it rebranded itself as True Texas Project.
“Thank you for the incredible work you do,” Cruz said, in the only on-camera endorsement from an elected official posted on the group’s Facebook and YouTube pages to mark the occasion. “Julie, Fred, thank you for your passion.”
A Washington Post review of True Texas Project’s activities and social media shows that Cruz has continued to embrace the group, even as its nativist rhetoric and divisive tactics have alienated some other conservative elected officials. Cruz’s father, a frequent campaign surrogate for his son, spoke at a meeting of the group shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, at a time when the group’s leadership was defending the pro-Trump mob on social media.
[…] Cruz’s ongoing ties to TTP contrast with the group’s fraught relationship with much of the Republican establishment in Texas. The group has lashed out at Republicans it perceives as too moderate — including Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.) and Gov. Greg Abbott — and has backed candidates against officeholders it once helped elect. “We are not here to be best buddies with our electeds,” Julie McCarty says in a recruitment video.
[…] James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, said Cruz appears to have “turned a blind eye” to the group’s most extreme rhetoric. Many Cruz supporters would not view the group’s messaging as racist, he added.
“From a political standpoint, there probably isn’t a downside for him supporting this group because they represent a large segment of the Republican Party in Texas,” he said. “So Cruz sees no downside, but he does see the upside because they have organization and can bring votes.” […]
Donald Trump’s attack on American democracy after he lost the 2020 election has seeped down into his cultists as GOP lawmakers rush to restrict voting access due to his baseless insistence that the election was marred by fraud. In more than 60 trips to the courthouse, Trump lawyers never proved a single instance of fraud, and now those claims are being abandoned by the attorneys themselves as they face a barrage of defamation suits.
But forget about the facts. Trumpers are wrongly convinced fraud occurred, and their support for many formerly noncontroversial voting access initiatives has taken hit, according to Pew Research Center polling released Thursday. As The New York Times notes, the share of Republicans and GOP leaners who now back no-excuse early absentee voting has dropped nearly 20 points, from 57% in 2018 to 38% now. Nonetheless, the concept still enjoys broad popularity at 63% overall. […]
One more thing about “government job”: Has anyone told MTG that when you are in Congress and the person you are harassing to DEBATE ME! is also in Congress, you don’t actually have to get on Twitter to yell DEBATE ME? Because, like, debating them is part of their “government job”? Happens on the floor of the House of Representatives? Has she heard about that?
A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.
[…]
Some of these efforts involve removing from power those who stood up to President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Georgia law removes the secretary of state from decision-making power on the state election board….
…. Michigan’s Republican Party refused to renominate Aaron Van Langevelde to the state’s canvassing board. Mr. Van Langevelde voted with Democrats to accept Michigan’s Electoral College vote for Mr. Biden as legitimate. He was replaced by Tony Daunt, the executive director of a conservative Michigan foundation that is financially backed by the DeVos family.
[…]
Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes…. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications….
Combating efforts that can undermine the fair administration of elections and vote counting is especially tricky. Unlike issues of voter suppression, which are easy to explain to the public (what do you mean you can’t give water to voters waiting in long lines?!?), the risks of unfair election administration are inchoate. They may materialize or they may not, depending on how close an election is and whether Mr. Trump himself or another person running for office is willing to break democratic norms and insist on an unfair vote count….
Too long to quote, but the whole thing is worth reading. For those who have a problem with NYT articles…try Reader View on Chrome, Reader Mode on Firefox, or Reader Mode on iPad/iPhone. Most browsers have a Reader mode that strips clutter (which often includes subscription requirements.)
Harvard’s big @harvardiop poll of young Americans is out today, and the findings are striking…
First of all: Biden has the highest favorability among 18-29 year olds of any first-term President in the entire history of the poll. Higher than Obama. That’s huge.
Much of that favorability comes from support from young people of color.
In 2017, only 17% of young Black Americans felt hopeful about the future. Now: 72% feel hopeful. A FIFTY-FOUR point increase
AND young Americans are significantly more politically engaged now than at any time over the past decade.
In 2009, 24% of young ppl considered themselves politically active- that has now increased by HALF, to 36%. (Among young Black people, more than 40% are politically active)
Trump has a net unfavorable of 65% with people under 30. A full 30% believe he was the WORST PRESIDENT IN HISTORY.
Only 56% of young Republicans said they want Trump to play a role in the future of the GOP. 42% of young Rs say they ID more as Rs than as Trump supporters
So… the people “auditing” Arizona’s 2020 election are using pens that could be used to change the appearance of ballots that were cast in November.
Unless I’m misunderstanding the situation, this seems like a monumental fuck up.
Democrats in Arizona were already suing to stop the QAnon election “audit” nonsense. It appears from this thread [at the link] that the use of potentially ballot-altering pens by the “auditors” helped convince a judge to halt everything immediately.
The pause is to last until noon on Monday, before which there will be another hearing.
[…] it was just a few weeks ago when [Senator Mitch] McConnell, seemingly aware of recent polling, explicitly issued an appeal to GOP men, urging them to get vaccinated. “I can stand here as a Republican man — as soon as it was my turn, I took the vaccine,” the senator said at an event in his home state. “I would encourage all Republican men to do that…. Take the vaccination.”
That’s good advice — which one of McConnell’s members is eager to undermine.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, questioned the need for widespread COVID-19 vaccinations, saying in a radio interview “what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?” Johnson, who has no medical expertise or background, made the comments Thursday during an interview with conservative talk radio host Vicki McKenna.
To the extent that the senator’s question wasn’t rhetorical, Johnson might care whether his neighbors are vaccinated because he doesn’t want them to get sick, die, or put others at risk. Even if the senator is indifferent to his neighbors’ wellbeing, Johnson might well care about local hospitals and morgues being pushed to the breaking point — a problem many communities have confronted since the start of the crisis.
[…] The problem is not just that the senator’s rhetoric is dumb, it’s also the risks associated with his irresponsible nonsense. There were likely unvaccinated people who heard this radio interview and were persuaded not to get the shot because they heard Johnson’s ridiculous, dangerous rhetoric.
What’s more, let’s not lose sight of the larger context. As regular readers may recall, in mid-March 2020, as the scope of the coronavirus crisis was just coming into view, the Wisconsin Republican went further than most in downplaying the importance of mitigation efforts. As part of his case, the senator told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “[W]e don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about.” This was a tragically bad argument, for reasons he didn’t seem to fully grasp.
A couple of months later, Johnson was seen on the Senate floor without any facial covering. “I wear a mask when I go into grocery stores, that type of thing,” the GOP senator said. “I think around here, we probably won’t have to.” This, too, was wrong.
In July 2020, Johnson argued that the United States “overreacted” in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which was unfortunate at the time, and which is a perspective that looks much worse now, as the death toll approaches 570,000 Americans.
In late 2020, Johnson sunk lower, holding multiple Senate hearings to promote pseudo-science and conspiracy theories. Dr. Ashish Jha, dean at Brown University School of Public Health, appeared as a witness at one of the Senate hearings and was amazed by the Wisconsin senator’s apparent suspicion that there’s a “coordinated effort by America’s doctors” to deny patients hydroxychloroquine because of a corrupt scheme involving physicians and the pharmaceutical industry.
All of this, of course, is unrelated to Johnson’s ugly rhetoric about immigration and efforts to “remake the demographics of America,” his efforts to downplay the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and his ridiculous conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election.
The far-right senator’s second term ends next year. He has not yet said whether he’ll ignore his earlier term-limits pledge and run for re-election.
Postscript: Just as I was publishing this, Johnson’s office issued a statement on his latest controversy. It read:
“Everyone should have the right to gather information, consult with their doctor and decide for themselves whether to get vaccinated. I strongly supported Operation Warp Speed, and celebrated its astonishingly rapid success. Now I believe government’s role (and therefore my role) is to help ensure transparency so that people have as much information as possible to make an informed decision for themselves. It is a legitimate question as to whether people at very low risk of suffering serious illness from Covid, particularly the young and healthy, should be encouraged to take a vaccine that is being administered under an Emergency Use Authorization — in other words, before it has been fully tested and fully approved. I was the champion of ‘Right to Try’ legislation. A reasonable corollary to that is the right to choose or not to choose treatment. I also support health privacy laws and will vigorously oppose any efforts by the government to utilize or impose vaccine passports.”
[…] As Forbes reports, Johnson has declared himself “highly suspicious” of the “big push to get everyone vaccinated.” Part of this appears to be back to that not understanding math thing. Johnson has argued that because the vaccine is 95% effective, that means “only a limited number” of people really need to be infected. How that works in Johnson’s head is unclear, and no one really wants to go in there, but however this is supposed to work, it doesn’t.
Johnson then went on to encourage young people not to get vaccinated, and pushed back against the use of any sort of vaccine passport to protect public safety, calling it “a very freedom-robbing step.”
Johnson then turned to the ultimate basis of all Republican policy: selfishness. “If you have a vaccine quite honestly what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?” said Johnson said. “What is it to you? You’ve got a vaccine and science is telling you it’s very, very effective. So why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine?”
The Republican Party no longer has a platform beyond “Obey Trump,” but if they were adding planks, “I’ve got mine, why the hell should I care about anything else?” would certainly be high on the list. Only it shouldn’t be surprising that Johnson has this thing completely upside down. […]
looking at it from Vladimir Putin’s point of view, convincing people not to get vaccinated does make America weaker. So … good job, Ron.
“A right wing American tech billionaire funded Tommy Robinson in the UK by running the money through Rebel Media in Canada, the New York Times has found….”
[…]
Six Extinction Rebellion protesters have been cleared of causing criminal damage to Shell’s London headquarters despite the judge directing jurors that they had no defence in law.
[…]
Prosecutor Diana Wilson told jurors that each of the defendants deliberately sprayed graffiti or smashed windows of the Shell building in Belvedere Road, central London, on 15 April 2019.
The protest, which saw activists pour fake oil, glue themselves to windows and doors, break glass, climb on to a roof and spray graffiti, was part of wider Extinction Rebellion demonstrations across the capital.
[…]
All those who stood trial explained they had targeted the Shell building because the oil giant was directly contributing to the climate crisis, thereby causing serious injury and death, and argued that it was a “necessary” and “proportionate” response to the harm being caused.
[Senan] Clifford quoted Sir David Attenborough and former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in his evidence.
He said: “I believe if I don’t do whatever I can to protect our Earth, to protect life on this Earth, to stop the death and injury that is and will be happening, I’m committing a crime, a really serious crime, and I’m willing to break a window, to paint a message on a wall, I’m willing to break the glass on that emergency button, even if some say that’s a crime.
“Because this is a much bigger crime and I’m trying to stop that crime, I’m trying to protect life in the only way I feel I can.”
Judge Gregory Perrins directed jurors that even if they thought the protesters were “morally justified”, it did not provide them with a lawful excuse to commit criminal damage.
[…]
But the jury of seven women and five men took seven hours and four minutes to acquit them of both charges. Some of the defendants waved at jurors, several of whom were visibly emotional, as they left court.
Before reaching their verdicts, the jury had asked to see a copy of the oath they took when they were sworn in.
Thanking jurors for their “care and attention”, the judge said: “This has been an unusual case.”
[…]
Experts are trying to assuage concerns and combat misinformation about how the Covid-19 vaccines may affect menstrual cycles and fertility, after anecdotal reports that some people experienced earlier, later, heavier or more painful periods following the jab.
[… C]onspiracy theorists on social media […] have spread outlandish myths about individuals experiencing period abnormalities or miscarriages simply by being in the presence of others who have been vaccinated.
“I suspect the awful people who invented this lie saw the reports of menstrual irregularities post Covid-19 vaccine online and decided to warp it for their campaign of chaos,” Dr Jen Gunter, an obstetrician-gynecologist and pain medicine physician, wrote in an explanatory post [The COVID-19 vaccine is a vaccine, not a spell].
“No, the Covid-19 vaccine is not capable of exerting reproductive control via proxy. Nothing is. This is because it is a vaccine, not a spell.”
[…]
Even with medical experts trying to clear up confusion, the misinformation could stir even more vaccine hesitancy among women, many of whom have already fallen for false narratives about the shots causing infertility or posing risks to nursing children.
Meanwhile, “actually catching Covid-19 has a very good chance of messing with your menstrual cycle”, Gunter wrote, and “the best way to protect your overall health and your menstrual cycle is to get vaccinated”.
“Think of potential menstrual irregularities as a vaccine side-effect like fever, it’s a sign the immune system is being activated,” she continued. “And in the same way that fever doesn’t make people permanently hot after a vaccine, menstrual irregularities will not be permanent either.”
lumipunasays
(Re: vaccine fearmongering and some other semi-recent stuff)
US rightwing pundits earlier this year: “Why is Jill Biden regularly using the ‘Dr’ title when she’s a scholar of humanities? People might mistake her for a medical doctor in some contrived emergency scenario!”
Meanwhile, Dr. Naomi Wolf: “I think these reports that some women have suffered negative health effects from being near vaccinated people should warrant a through investigation”
‘Unlike the wall, these ladders are functional,’ artist and activist Scott Nicol points out to local magazine Texas Monthly
For millennia two bitter foes have been in constant conflict with one another: the imposing, stout wall and the nimble, convenient ladder. […] A look at this structural struggle came this week in a story in Texas Monthly. In the piece the magazine follows along with a local artist and activist named Scott Nicol, a man who has become an expert spotter of wall ladders, which he often finds discarded after one use and photographs them. “It’s made of cheap, rough wood, quickly nailed together because it is only going to be used once,” Nicol says of one he finds along a walk by the border.
“Unlike the wall, these ladders are functional.”
It’s a joke but it also happens to be true, and points up the absurdity of the money poured into what amounts to little more than a broad symbol of xenophobia.
What’s more, the slapdash nature of the ladders often used to circumvent the efforts of border patrols seems all the more ridiculous when compared with the ever-inflating price tag of building the walls in the first place.
“These ladders are probably $5 worth of hardware, and they’re defeating a wall that cost $12m a mile in that location,” adds Nicol, himself an opponent of border walls. […]
Perhaps the framing of this conflict is all wrong. Considering how well the two tools work together, instead of antagonistic, the relationship between walls and ladders should instead be seen as a more complementary partnership. As one border patrol agent tells the magazine: “Ladders and walls go together like peas and carrots.” You can have one without the other, but they go best together.
One snippet from the Texas Monthly article, A Section of Trump Border Wall in South Texas Cost $27 Million a Mile. It’s Being Foiled by $5 Ladders (link embedded in above excerpt):
Ladders have been used to counter walls for thousands of years, pointed out Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US–Mexico Boundary. “A wall is a medieval war technology, and the responses to it are antiquated technologies that have been proven to surmount it, that includes ladders, catapults, and tunnels,” said Rael, who made headlines in 2019 with a short-lived art project titled Teeter-Totter Wall, which placed pink seesaws between the slats in the border fence that separates El Paso from Juarez.
The fact that a DIY ladder is enough to beat it makes spending billions of dollars on further construction seem folly, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. The sections of levee wall that broke ground under the George W Bush administration and continued under the Obama administration cost about $12 million per mile. Though contractors are still billing for Trump’s wall, the average cost per mile in Hidalgo County, based on contracts and appropriations, is roughly double that amount. “The companies that build the wall are the ones who are benefiting, not just from building it, but maintaining it and adding technology to it,” said Correa-Cabrera.
Despite securing about $6 billion in funding from Congress and diverting nearly $10 billion more from the Department of Defense budget, the Trump administration managed to complete only forty miles of big, beautiful wall, about twenty of them in the Rio Grande Valley. One of its unfinished projects can be found in Granjeno, where a section of levee wall (with no fencing on top) built during the Obama years abruptly ends at the edge of this no-stoplight town. The Trump administration set out to fill in the gap between Granjeno and Hidalgo, building a new section of levee wall topped with steel bollards rising some thirty feet high. But contractors didn’t manage to finish installing all of the bollards before President Joe Biden paused construction. […]
People turn against the Duterte administration after a military-led agency accuses volunteers of a popular feeding initiative of being communist sympathisers.
In the past week, little charitable grocery booths have sprouted on street corners and alleys all over the Philippines, offering free food to needy people and soliciting donations from anyone willing to give them, as many families in the country go hungry during the extended COVID-19 lockdown.
“Give what you can afford, take what you need,” read the signs on each booth, which organisers call “community pantry”.
The movement, helped along by social media, has gone viral in the archipelago, whose economy now languishes because of the pandemic.
[…]
It all began on April 14, when Ana Patricia Non, a young furniture designer and businesswoman, left a wooden cart stacked with food on a street corner in a university village in Manila.
Passersby initially hesitated to take stuff from the cart — it seemed too good to be true, and the needy tend to be ashamed of their poverty. Non had to assure them there was no catch, and they really did not have to pay for what they would take.
“I am tired of complaining. I am tired of inaction,” Non told the Manila-based news website Rappler when her community pantry started drawing public attention.
“This community pantry became a way to prove to ourselves that we can help one another, and we are able to organise ourselves,” she added during a media conference.
The Philippine government has been widely criticised by experts and citizens for its tepid response to the pandemic. President Rodrigo Duterte recently called the crisis a small thing, even as COVID infections reached record numbers.
On Friday, the health department reported 8,719 new infections and a total caseload of almost 980,000. The country’s COVID death toll crossed 16,500.
[…]
Days after Non’s initiative attracted popular attention, the government’s military-led anti-communist task force started “checking the background” of organisers.
Lieutenant General Antonio Parlade Jr, the spokesman of the agency, said some community pantries were distributing leaflets containing anti-government propaganda.
They distribute food, and with it is the poison of hate and mistrust towards a government that is ceaseless and faithful in its service to the Filipino people. This is simply not right and in defense of our people and State, must be corrected, Parlade said in a statement on Tuesday.
[…]
Although the general has yet to show evidence of his claims, government social media platforms have carried his statements. The local police unit that covers Non’s community pantry later posted a warning on its social media pages claiming that the organisers had links to the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines. The post has since been deleted.
The government’s response to the citizen-based action quickly sparked fear among organisers, who feared for their lives. Non was forced to briefly suspend her project fearing for her safety and that of her fellow volunteers.
[…]
“In all honesty, I have no links to the communist party. I am sorry, but that question is so malicious,” Non said when she was asked to comment on Parlade’s allegations.
“I’ve said that I’m disappointed with the {government’s} response. It’s true. I know that the government is working, but, in my opinion, it falls short, because people won’t stand in line that long if they’re getting enough support,” she added.
[…]
Outraged by the government’s response, many Filipinos voiced their support for Non and the community pantry movement on social media. They slammed the government for getting in the way of a good thing.
[…]
The tide has since turned for Non and community pantries after the anti-communist task force’s statements backfired.
A group of senators spoke defending Non, and proposed to defund the anti-communist task force, which received a budget equivalent to $390m this year.
[…]
Non has reopened her community pantry, with more vendors and displaced business owners offering to help. She said it will remain open as long as donations keep coming.
[…]
“The decision shows our solidarity with our ally after an unprecedented and dangerous incident in the Czech Republic,” Lithuania’s foreign ministry said, announcing the expulsion of two Russians.
Lithuania also signalled its readiness to help the Czech embassy in Moscow carry out its functions following the expulsion of the Czech diplomats.
Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics announced the expulsion of a Russian diplomat, saying: “Latvia will not tolerate subversive activities on its soil or that of its partners and allies.”
[…]
Estonia is also expelling one Russian diplomat.
Slovakia […] said on Thursday it would expel three Russian diplomats in solidarity with Prague and because of information received from its intelligence services.
[…]
On Thursday, the Baltic governments said there had been “information attacks” after their lawmakers were contacted by someone pretending to be a top aide to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“These attacks were meant to spread false information, discredit Russian opposition and undermine Baltic politicians’ support for it,” the foreign ministries said in a joint statement.
Another Trump boondoggle that is slowly being cleaned up:
In the summer of 2017, the newly elected Donald Trump and Wisconsin’s soon-to-be-former governor Scott Walker announced the big deal that only Republican leadership could strike: Foxconn was coming to build manufacturing infrastructure in the Badger state! The promise to the American public was that this would mean more than 13,000 new jobs building LCD screens. The moment anyone took even the most cursory glance at the details of this mega-deal, it became instantly clear that it was bad news for the state of Wisconsin. With billions in corporate tax breaks and environmental regulations waived, estimates predicted that Wisconsin would be mired in 25-years worth of debt.
By the end of the summer of 2019, […] the promised 13,000 jobs had dwindled to something around 1,000 jobs. The big LCD manufacturing plant touted by Trump, Walker, and Foxconn’s CEO Terry Gou never materialized. […] Foxconn realized that while they were being offered billions in tax subsidies, the deal wasn’t the best business move for the company, and it wanted to try and squeeze out millions in tax payouts, while providing next to nothing. Wisconsin was hoping to at least come away with some working presence of the company in the state.
This disastrous boondoggle has dragged on into 2021, but a deal has reportedly been struck. Hold onto your seats, as it turns out that Donald Trump, Scott Walker, and the Republican Party lied to workers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that “Foxconn is scaling back plans” of investing $10 billion into the Badger state. How much will they be “scaling back?” Oh, no less than nine-billion, two-hundred-twenty-eight million dollars back. CNN and the WSJ report that the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and Foxconn had signed a “revised incentive deal outlining a $672 million investment from Foxconn […]
One of the reasons this took so long to happen was that when Gov. Scott Walker was defeated by Democratic challenger Tony Evers in 2018, Foxconn was still trying to pretend that while they weren’t sure what they were going to manufacture, if they were going to manufacture anything at all, they still wanted those billions in Republican tax giveaways, and continued to promise that they could figure out a way to reach the 13,000 employment numbers needed to be met by 2032. […]
The new deal reportedly stipulates that if Foxconn can invest $672 million (that’s a “m” not a “b”) and create 1,454 jobs by 2025, they will qualify for $80 million in incentives. Gov. Evers says this new deal will save Wisconsin taxpayers “a total of $2.77 billion compared to the previous contract, maintain accountability measures requiring job creation to receive incentives, and protect hundreds of millions of dollars in local and state infrastructure investments made in support of the project.” Evers explained that the tax incentives in this new deal match the incentive deals offered to all companies coming to the state.
Senior economist Tim Bartik at the WE Upjohn Institute for Employment Research told CNN that the original deal’s incentive package would have paid out “conservatively” more than $200,000 per job created by Foxconn. […]
But while this news brings back some form of equilibrium to the state, the damage done by Walker and friends’ ill-advised publicity and money grab, remains. The site that was cleared and created for the original deal is reportedly “bigger than Central Park, with nearly 100 homes and small farms bulldozed to make way for Foxconn.”
Follow-up to comments 51, 63, 77, 98, 104, 137, and 196.
Some details from the ongoing disaster in India:
[…] Indian authorities said they are commandeering trains and using air force planes to speed up the distribution of medical supplies to hard-hit regions. Some of India’s crematories have been put out of service from overuse.
Many hospitals have suspended new admissions. In New Delhi, hospitals petitioned the city’s high court to compel authorities to ensure oxygen deliveries.
India reported 346,786 new cases — including 2,624 deaths — the third consecutive day of record-breaking infections […]
“Urgent sos help,” Moolchand Healthcare, a private hospital chain, tweeted in a message to India’s government Saturday. “We have less than 2 hours of oxygen supply @Moolchand_Hosp. We are desperate. . . . Have over 135 COVID pt [patients] with many on life support.”
It was already too late at another hospital in New Delhi. At least 20 critically ill patients died late Friday at the Jaipur Golden Hospital after a seven-hour delay in oxygen delivery, according to medical director DK Baluja.
“Everything we had was exhausted,” Baluja told CNN. “The oxygen was not supplied on time. It was supposed to come in at 5 p.m. but it came around midnight.”
The hospital’s oxygen supply was close to running out again, Baluja said.
[…] India’s sudden exponential surge, driven in part by highly transmissible variants of the coronavirus, has caught the country entirely off guard.
At the start of the year, daily new coronavirus cases had dropped to fewer than 20,000. Emboldened by the decline, the government reopened public places and permitted crowded election rallies and religious ceremonies.
In March, India’s health minister, Harsh Vardhan, said the country was near the pandemic’s “endgame.” The government began increasing exports of medical resources, including oxygen tanks and coronavirus vaccines.
By mid-April, infections in India were rising so fast that everything from coronavirus tests to ventilators were suddenly in short supply. On Friday, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders said it had restarted its emergency response in Mumbai. […]
[…] Each day, the government reports more than 300,000 new infections, a world record, and India is now seeing more new infections than any other country by far, almost half of all new cases in a global surge.
But experts say those numbers, however staggering, represent just a fraction of the real reach of the virus’s spread, which has thrown this country into emergency mode. […]
Interviews from cremation grounds across the country, where the fires never stop, portray an extensive pattern of deaths far exceeding the official figures. Nervous politicians and hospital administrators may be undercounting or overlooking large numbers of dead, analysts say. And grieving families may be hiding Covid connections as well, adding to the confusion in this enormous nation of 1.4 billion.
“It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.”
At one of the large cremation grounds in Ahmedabad, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, bright orange fires light up the night sky, burning 24 hours a day, like an industrial plant that never shuts down. Suresh Bhai, a worker there, said he had never seen such a never-ending assembly line of death.
But he has not been writing down the cause of death as Covid-19 on the thin paper slips that he hands over to the mournful families […]
“Sickness, sickness, sickness,” Mr. Suresh said. “That’s what we write.”
When asked why, he said it was what he had been instructed to do by his bosses […]
Over 13 days in mid-April, Bhopal officials reported 41 deaths related to Covid-19. But a survey by The New York Times of the city’s main Covid-19 cremation and burial grounds, where bodies were being handled under strict protocols, revealed a total of more than 1,000 deaths during the same period.
“Many deaths are not getting recorded and they are increasing every day,” said Dr. G.C. Gautam, a cardiologist based in Bhopal. He said that officials were doing this because “they don’t want to create panic.”
The same phenomenon appeared to be happening in Lucknow and Mirzapur — major cities in Uttar Pradesh State — and across Gujarat, where, during a similar period in mid-April, the authorities reported between 73 and 121 Covid-related deaths each day.
But a detailed count compiled by one of Gujarat’s leading newspapers, Sandesh, which sent reporters to cremation and burial grounds across the state, indicated that the number was several times higher, around 610 each day. […]
Wonkette: “Biden Becomes First US President To Say The Armenian Genocide Happened, Which It Obviously Did”
On this day, in 1915, Talaat Pasha, one of the leaders of the Ottoman Empire’s “Committee of Union and Progress” (CUP) […] ordered the systemic mass arrests of hundreds of Armenian community leaders and intellectuals, most of whom were not so much arrested as killed. A month later, the government would approve his “Deportation Plan,” to remove all the Armenians from Anatolia (an area that makes up the majority of modern day Turkey), sending 800,000 to 1.2 million of them on foot to the Syrian desert, where they were then placed in concentration camps. Most of them would be killed as well, either on the way there or in 1916 when another massacre was ordered. Historians estimate that around 1 million Armenians were killed by leaders of the Ottoman Empire and CUP from 1915-17.
That is, surely, what any reasonable person would call a genocide. And today, on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, Joe Biden became the first United States President to do so. The US now joins the majority of Europe — with the notable exceptions of the U.K. and Ukraine — in acknowledging it.
Here is the official statement [full statement is available at the link]:
Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.
Of those who survived, most were forced to find new homes and new lives around the world, including in the United States. […] We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated. […]
The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today.
This is actually a pretty big deal. There’s a reason other presidents have not officially recognized the Armenian Genocide and that is because Turkey does not recognize it and has basically said, for decades, that any country that does recognize will be on their shit list — which was not a thing the US wanted. […]
While the Turkish government admits that they “deported” Armenians during that time, they claim this was a reasonable response to “Armenian violence,” that the overall number of Armenians killed has been inflated and that there was never any purposeful genocide. This runs contrary to actual statements and documents from Talaat Pasha and other CUP officials, who were often very explicit in stating their desire to annihilate the Armenian people.
“In their communications – both with Istanbul and with one another – the governors did not see the need to use vague language or euphemisms in referring to the annihilation of the Armenians, but spoke of it openly, even offering a number of tangible ideas regarding how such an extermination could or should be carried out,” said historian Taner Akcam, a prominent scholar of the Armenian Genocide.
The Turkish government’s response has not been exactly warm.
Via Politico:
[Turkish President Tayyip] Erdogan has been adamant in not referring to the World War I-era events as genocide, and in 2019, Erdogan spokesperson Fahrettin Altun said any such recognition would “endanger the future of [U.S.-Turkish] bilateral relations.” In 2014, the Turkish president called the events “inhumane.”
[…] “We have not forgotten and will never forget our colleagues martyred by Armenian terror!”
It is hardly as though Turkey has had an unblemished human rights record since then, so it’s unclear what the government believes it is accomplishing by continuing to try to gaslight the world on this. They have certainly no problem with everyone knowing they torture people. They do not exactly have a rep to protect.
Former Turkish President/Dictator Turgut Ozal (who certainly had some problems of his own) didn’t seem to know either, noting that the country’s insistence on denying that the Armenian Genocide happening was harming their relationships with other countries.
What happens if we compromise with the Armenians and end this issue? What if we officially recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide and face up to our past? Let’s take the initiative and find the truth. Let’s pay the political and economic price, if necessary.
That probably would have been the reasonable thing to do. Eventually, hopefully, there is going to be no country left willing to pretend this never happened for fear of hurting Turkey’s feelings and they will either have to get over it or have no allies.
Rawdah Mohamed, whose Instagram selfie went viral, says she wants to fight ‘deeply rooted stereotypes’
A Somali-Norwegian model whose Instagram post criticising a proposed ban on the hijab in France went viral has said she wants to fight “deeply rooted stereotypes” against Muslim women.
Rawdah Mohamed posted a selfie on Instagram with “hands off my hijab” written on her hand, starting a campaign that has been trending on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
#Handsoffmyhijab, along with its counterpart #PasToucheAMonHijab, has been taken up by the Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad and the US congresswoman Ilhan Omar, as well thousands of women internationally. They have used the hashtag to protest against the French senate’s vote to ban anyone under 18 from wearing the garment in public. [I was unaware of this presumably recent vote –blf]
“I started the hashtag as I felt the need to humanise the movement,” Mohamed told the Guardian. […]
Mohamed added that the proposed legislation “stems from discrimination and deeply rooted stereotypes against Muslim women”.
France was the first country to ban the niqab in public spaces, in April 2011, and French provinces have banned the burkini, starting a national conversation around nationalism, identity and feminism.
From memory, the Grauniad is somewhat incorrect about that absurd burkini ban: No “province” banned it, only cites (like Nice) and villages (sadly, including the one I live in). At least one of the bans was overturned in court, in a ruling which was interpreted to apply to all the bans. As far as I am aware, burkinis are no longer banned anywhere in France.
“I wanted my oppressors to see my face and the women who look like me,” she said. “They don’t get to hide in their luxurious parliament offices and regulate women’s bodies without a fight.”
On Instagram, Mohamed wrote: “The hijab ban is hateful rhetoric coming from the highest level of government and will go down as an enormous failure of religious values and equality.”
Go Ms Mohamed ! 🧕🏽 👏👏
The article continues with examples from Ms Mohamed of times she has been or felt threatened for wearing a hijab.
[…]
As Joe Biden welcomed a series of polls showing majority approval for his first 100 days in the White House, and prepared to address Congress for the first time on Wednesday, Republicans attacked his progressive record in office.
[Lindsey Graham] said: AOC said his first 100 days exceeded her expectations. That’s all you need to know.
[…]
Graham was not the only senior GOP figure to complain about something many on the left have praised: that Biden campaigned as a moderate but is governing more as a progressive.
Also speaking to Fox News Sunday, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, accused Biden of a bait and switch. The bait was he was going to govern as bipartisan but the switch is, he’s governed as a socialist.
[…]
Sunday brought a slew of polls. Fox News put the president’s approval rating at 54% positive to 43% negative, nine points up on Donald Trump at the same time four years ago. NBC put Biden up 51%–43%, ABC made it 52%–42% and CBS reported a 58%–42% split.
Graham also insisted Biden had been a disaster on foreign policy.
[…]
The border is in chaos, Graham said, the Iranians are off the mat … Afghanistan is gonna fall apart, Russia and China are already pushing him around. So I’m very worried.
I think he’s been a very destabilising president, and economically thrown a wet blanket over the recovery, wanting to raise taxes a large amount and regulate America basically out of business.
So I’m not very impressed with the first 100 days. This is not what I thought I would get from Joe Biden.
I’m extremely dubious about Biden’s letting Mohammed bin Salman (Saudia Arabia) off the hook for the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, keeping the US Embassy in Jerusalem, deciding to visit teh NKofE on (and as) his first foreign trip, proposing to pay-off Jair Bolsonaro, and so on — none of which probably annoys Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy. Moscow Mitch, or Putin. Albeit, to Biden’s credit (and Congress previously in 2019),† there was a genocide in Armenia.
† To my surprise, Ronaddled Raygun also called it genocide in 1981, according to Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge. (And yes, for the Putin-trolls, President Obama reneged on his campaign promise to call it genocide.)
blfsays
Nasa’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity has successfully completed its third flight, up 5 metres, high-speed (2 metres/second) flight for 50 metres, return and land, about 80 seconds in total. That 50 metres is much much further than ever been flown or tested before (on-Earth testing was limited to less than 2 metres due to the size of the test chamber). At most two more flights in the next week-ish, before Perseverance moves on to its primary mission.
blf @239, I think the Republicans are getting in as many blows as they can before Biden takes the very public stage on Wednesday to deliver his first address to a joint session of Congress.
Biden is more popular than Trump was, and Biden is getting a lot more done that actually benefits middle class and poverty-level people. That has the Republicans running scared and screaming “socialist!” with their hair on fire.
Biden is far from perfect, but he is such an improvement over Trump that I don’t think the Republicans have a leg to stand on.
Amid hysterical claims that wolves are driving ranchers out of business, Idaho’s Republican state Senate this week approved legislation that would enable hired contractors to exterminate up to 90% of the state’s wild wolf population. The bill, if signed (as expected) by GOP Gov. Brad Little would end tag limits on wolves and allow year-round trapping on private land.
It may have had the appearance of being a simple anti-environmental move by conservative Republicans taking advantage of a late-tenure maneuver by Donald Trump that green-lighted the state to kill more wolves. But it was also part of a long Idaho tradition of conspiracist fearmongering in which killing wolves is seen as a way of fighting back against the federal government and liberal environmentalists.
[…] The bill passed by a 26-7 vote. Little has not said whether or not he will sign it, but he did sign similar anti-wolf legislation in 2017.
The door to the legislation was opened by Trump’s decision in late October 2020, just before the election, to hand wolf management decisions over to the states and local tribes. At the time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director claimed the wolf populations were fully recovered, though there was no scientific data to support that claim. The wolves officially lost their federal protection 60 days later.
[…] there is also a powerful political element, particularly in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, that is fueled by far-right anti-government paranoia and conspiracy theories.
For years, wolf recovery efforts have been depicted in the rural West as the imposition of the “New World Order” on residents of the rural areas where the creatures roam. A number of far-right outlets, including the John Birch Society’s magazine and the conspiracist website World Net Daily, have run pieces describing how wolf recovery is a key component of a plot by radical environmentalists on behalf of the United Nations to destroy private property rights in America. In the Mountain West, holding such views is not uncommon.
When militias were first organizing in Idaho and Montana in the early to mid-1990s, much of the anti-government sentiment that drove recruitment revolved around resentment for the just-instituted wolf recovery efforts.
[…] “Simply put, the ‘wolf recovery’ program is a form of environmental terrorism. Thus while the U.S. government is working through the UN to fight a war against terrorism abroad, it is collaborating with UN-linked environmental radicals to wage an eco-terrorist campaign against rural property owners here at home.”
The embodiment of the extreme nature of these sentiments came in the winter of 2013 when a group of men wearing Klan-like hoods posed with the corpse of a freshly killed wolf and an American flag and then posted it on Facebook. […] “Frontier Justice! Wyoming hunters are fed up!”
[…] The problem with Wildlife Services’ numbers is that they were recently changed to be much broader, so that they now include killings even where there is no evidence of predation, injury, or struggle, since the Services claim—without scientific evidence—that cattle can die from overexertion hours or even days after encounters with wolves.
Moreover, wolf predation represents only a tiny portion of cattle losses each year. While proponents of the Idaho bill note that 753 cattle, 952 sheep, and 54 other animals were killed by wolves between 2015 and 2020, the state is home to some 2.5 million cattle; those losses represent less than 1% of that population.
Predation overall represents only 4% of all livestock deaths on an annual basis—and the largest portion of that predation (over 40%) is by coyotes. Wolves, at 4%, represent the second-smallest class of cattle predator (with bears coming in last).
The Humane Society of the United States called the Idaho bill “a blatant attempt to usurp state biologists tasked with managing Idaho’s wolves.
“This bill doesn’t just cross an ethical line; it sprints right past it. It is an embarrassment to the state of Idaho, and there is absolutely no scientific or ethical justification for this deeply misguided and dangerous legislation. In a race to slaughter one of America’s most treasured animals, this bill allows fear and hate to win. Idaho’s wolves deserve better; the environment deserves better. This bill must be vetoed by Governor Little if it comes to his desk.”
This video of @VP Kamala Harris helping this nervous man get through his speech today is everything! Joe and Kamala have so much heart. Watch to the end.
“You can’t call it anything but redlining: public sector reinforcing private-sector discrimination.”
[…] In Kansas City neighborhoods seared by decades of government-imposed racial discrimination, the Paycheck Protection Program’s forgivable loans arrived last year at lower rates than in the rest of the city. East Side areas “redlined” in the 1930s because Black people lived there—a federal decision that effectively blocked investment—received 17% fewer PPP loans than if they’d gotten an amount proportionate to their share of the city’s small employers. Affluent, largely white ZIP codes given preferential treatment by redlining received 23% more.
“Sometimes we look at this as an isolated situation,” said Answer, who is active in community development […] “But I think all of these things have to be experienced in light of history.”
This pattern keeps repeating—here and across the country. In Kansas City, your level of wealth and even the length of your life are often defined by whether you live east or west of Troost Avenue, a longstanding racial dividing line. It’s a similar story in many other once-redlined cities.
At the same time, most of the government incentives intended to combat blight and joblessness in Kansas City flow downtown rather than to the East Side. Variations on that theme keep happening around the nation, too, an eerie—and legal—echo of what the 1930s federal Home Owners’ Loan Corp. wrought with its red pen.
“You can’t call it anything but redlining: public sector reinforcing private-sector discrimination,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which tracks and researches economic subsidies. “The net effect is reverse Robin Hood. You’re favoring places that need help the least.”
In Kansas City, people determined to put a stop to this may be making some headway. In 2017, Black community leaders convinced voters to earmark a slice of sales-tax revenue for economic development and stability efforts in a portion of the East Side. Some of that money has flowed as COVID-19 relief to small businesses that largely missed out on the federal help. […]
Congress asked the Small Business Administration to prioritize small firms in “underserved” markets for PPP loans, which should have quickly boosted places like Kansas City’s East Side. And yet assumptions in the program design—about business owners’ access to banking or certain documents or even clear information about who qualifies—didn’t account for the reality that many firms in such markets face, according to interviews with several dozen experts and entrepreneurs.
Sixty-three percent of eligible applicants for the East Side coronavirus relief grants from Kansas City sales tax revenue did not get a PPP loan. […]
[…] A White House spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters that administration officials are “in active conversations at high levels and plan to quickly deploy additional support to the Government of India and Indian health care workers as they battle this latest severe outbreak.”
“We will have more to share very soon,” the spokesperson added. […]
A spokesperson for the Indian Embassy told Reuters that both the U.S. and India are engaged at various levels to ensure components for vaccine production from the U.S. reached India. […]
“To help treat COVID-19 patients and protect front-line health workers in India, the United States has identified supplies of therapeutics, rapid diagnostic test kits, ventilators, and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that will immediately be made available for India,” Horne added. “The United States also is pursuing options to provide oxygen generation and related supplies on an urgent basis.” […]
birgerjohanssonsays
A man in Algeria has been sentenced to prison for saying not all statements in the koran are literally true.
[…]
Mr Djabelkhir had said the animal sacrifice during the Muslim festival of Eid was based on a pre-Islamic pagan ritual.
He also suggested that parts of the Quran, such as the story of Noah’s Ark, might not be literally true and criticised practices including the marriage of young girls in some Muslim societies.
Islam is Algeria’s religion of state. The law imposes a fine or prison sentence on anyone who offends the Prophet or denigrates the dogmatic precepts of Islam, whether it be by writings, drawings, a statement or another means.
[…]
Speaking to AFP news agency after being released on bail, Mr Djabelkhir said: “The fight for freedom of conscience is non-negotiable. It is a fight which must continue.”
[…]
He has been quoted in media reports as calling for “reflection” on Islam’s founding texts.
He said his accusers believe that everything in the Quran is literally true, and do not distinguish between “history” and “myth” — such as the story about Noah’s Ark.
“Everyone thinks of history with a capital ‘H’,” he was quoted as saying.
He recently told AFP that “the traditional readings {of the Quran} no longer meet the expectations, needs and questions of modern man”.
[…]
Rights group Amnesty International’s deputy regional director Amna Guellali described the three-year sentence as “outrageous” and a “chilling setback for freedom of expression” in Algeria.
“Punishing someone for their analysis of religious doctrines is a flagrant violation of the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of belief — even if the comments are deemed offensive by others,” Ms Guellali added.
This is not the harshest sentence handed down for offending Islam in Algeria.
Last year, anti-government activist Yacine Mebarki was given a 10-year sentence after police found a copy of the Quran with ripped pages when they raided his house. The sentence was later reduced to one year.
At Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, in one of America’s worst coronavirus hot spots, entire units are still filled with Covid-19 patients. People weak with the virus still struggle to sit up in bed. And the phone still rings with pleas to transfer patients on the verge of death to units with higher-tech equipment.
But unlike previous surges, it now is younger and middle-aged adults — not their parents and grandparents — who are taking up many of Michigan’s hospital beds. A 37-year-old woman on a ventilator after giving birth. A 41-year-old father. A 55-year-old autoworker who has been sick for weeks.
“We’re getting to the point where we’re just so beat down,” said Alexandra Budnik, an intensive care nurse who works in a unit with lifesaving machines, or circuits, that are in short supply. “Every time we get a call or every time we hear that there’s another 40-year-old that we don’t have a circuit for — it’s just like, you know, we can’t save them all.”
Across Michigan, which is experiencing by far the country’s most dangerous outbreak, more younger people are being admitted to hospitals with the coronavirus than at any other time in the pandemic. Michigan hospitals are now admitting about twice as many coronavirus patients in their 30s and 40s as they were during the fall peak, according to the Michigan Health & Hospital Association.
[…] the vaccinations of older people do not explain rising hospitalizations among people younger than 60, including those in their 20s and 30s. Public health experts say the outbreak — driven by the B.1.1.7 variant of the virus, which is more contagious and more severe — is spreading rapidly in younger age groups. And across the state, doctors and nurses are increasingly reporting a concerning trend: Younger patients are coming in more often with serious cases of Covid-19.
“I am putting more patients in their 20s and 30s and 40s on oxygen and on life support than at any other time in this pandemic,” said Dr. Erin Brennan, an emergency room physician in Detroit.
The B.1.1.7 variant — first identified in Britain and now the most common source of new infection in the United States — is believed to be about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the coronavirus. A federal estimate of Covid-19 hospitalizations based on a sample of counties in 14 states, including Michigan, showed more patients between the ages of 18 and 49 hospitalized in mid-April than those over age 65. In early December, it was the other way around, and by a large margin, with more than twice as many patients over 65 than in the younger group.
[…] Public health experts point to a number of factors for the changing demographics, including the vaccination of older people. As pandemic restrictions have loosened across the country, younger people are also out and about, socializing and in the work force, at a time when just one-third of American adults are fully vaccinated.
“The restrictions were our pause button,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “As soon as you press play, you are going to see the virus race back as quickly as it can.” […]
While millions of people struggled to make ends meet, many of the companies hit hardest in 2020 showered their executives with riches.
Boeing had a historically bad 2020. Its 737 Max was grounded for most of the year after two deadly crashes, the pandemic decimated its business, and the company announced plans to lay off 30,000 workers and reported a $12 billion loss. Nonetheless, its chief executive, David Calhoun, was rewarded with some $21.1 million in compensation.
Norwegian Cruise Line barely survived the year. With the cruise industry at a standstill, the company lost $4 billion and furloughed 20 percent of its staff. That didn’t stop Norwegian from more than doubling the pay of Frank Del Rio, its chief executive, to $36.4 million.
And at Hilton, where nearly a quarter of the corporate staff were laid off as hotels around the world sat empty and the company lost $720 million, it was a good year for the man in charge. Hilton reported in a securities filing that Chris Nassetta, its chief executive, received compensation worth $55.9 million in 2020. [chart of “the highest-paid chief executives last year” is available at the link]
[…] The divergent fortunes of C.E.O.s and everyday workers illustrate the sharp divides in a nation on the precipice of an economic boom but still racked by steep income inequality. The stock markets are up and the wealthy are spending freely, but millions are still facing significant hardship. Executives are minting fortunes while laid-off workers line up at food banks.
“Many of these C.E.O.s have improved profitability by laying off workers,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has proposed new taxes on the ultrawealthy. “A tiny handful of people who have shimmied all the way to the top of the greasy pole get all of the rewards, while everyone else gets left behind.”
For executives who own large stakes in giant companies, the gains have been even more pronounced. Eight of the 10 wealthiest people in the world are men who founded or ran tech companies in the United States, and each has grown billions of dollars richer this year, according to Bloomberg. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, which saw profits skyrocket with people stuck at home, is now worth $193 billion. Larry Page, a Google co-founder, is worth $103 billion, up $21 billion in the last four months alone, as his company’s fortunes have only improved during the pandemic.
[…] “We’ve created this class of centimillionaires and billionaires who have not been good for this country,” said Nell Minow, vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, an investment consulting firm. “They may build a wing on a museum. But it’s not infrastructure — it’s not the middle class.”
The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.
The pandemic only compounded these disparities, as hundreds of companies awarded their leaders pay packages worth significantly more than most Americans will make in their entire lives. […]
blfsays
The tomato fanatic is back! An organic vegetable stall at today’s outdoors market is famous (at least to me) for, in season, having a bazillion types and numbers of fresh (generally local) tomatoes. I joke they have a fetish… Anyways, today they had the bazillion tomatoes, fresh garlic and several different peppers (not quite a bazillion, however), and so on… everything needed for Gazpacho. Now I just need to make enough room in the refrigerator to cool it down after a session with the food processor. (And I’ll still have about half a bazillion tomatoes left (yes, I also went tomato-fetish!)). One annoyance is yesterday one of the best containers for holding / cooling Gazpacho (and many other dishes / leftovers), after years of service, broke. So I’ll need to improvise, so the (lack of) room in the refrigerator may or may not be a problem… (Yes, sorry, first world problems.)
[…]
Months after Donald Trump’s election defeat, Republicans in Arizona are challenging the outcome with an unprecedented effort to audit results in their most populous county — all run by a Florida company, Cyber Ninjas, with no elections experience.
The state senate used its subpoena power to take possession of all 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county and the machines that counted them, along with computer hard drives full of data. The materials were then handed to Cyber Ninjas, a consultancy run by a man who has shared unfounded conspiracy theories claiming official election results are illegitimate.
Elections professionals fear the process will severely undermine faith in democracy.
“I think the activities that are taking place here are reckless and they in no way, shape or form resemble an audit,” said Jennifer Morrell, a partner at The Elections Group, a consulting firm advising state and local officials which has not worked in Arizona.
[…]
Cyber Ninjas began a manual recount on Friday, a day after Democrats asked a judge to put an end to the audit. The judge ordered the company to follow ballot and voter secrecy laws and demanded it turn over written procedures and training manuals before a hearing on Monday. He offered to pause the count over the weekend if Democrats posted a $1m bond to cover added expenses. The party declined.
For fecks sake you stoopid seemingly-Putin-influenced judge (Christopher Coury), this about proper election security, etc., procedures, not ensuring Cyber Nijinas makes a profit. You very very appear to be a failure.
Logan refuses to disclose who is paying him or who is counting the ballots, and will not commit to using bipartisan teams for the process.
The Republican-dominated Arizona senate refuses to let media observe the count. Reporters can accept a six-hour shift as an official observer but photography and note-taking are prohibited. It would be a violation of journalistic ethics for reporters to participate in an event they were covering.
The state senate has put up $150,000 for the audit but Logan has acknowledged that is not enough to cover his expenses. A rightwing cable channel, One America News Network, raised money from unknown contributors which went directly to Cyber Ninjas. Logan would not commit to disclosing the donors and would not provide an estimate for the cost of his audit.
[… numerous other fraudulent or highly-dubious antics…]
The audit has been beset by mistakes. Hand counters began the day using blue pens, which are banned in ballot counting rooms because they can be read by ballot machines. A crew from a group of Phoenix television stations, azfamily, had unfettered access to the supposedly secure facility as auditors were setting up equipment and receiving ballots and machines.
Election experts said hand counts are prone to errors and questioned a lack of transparent procedures for adjudicating voter intent.
[… A]s the recount was starting, officials seemed to be figuring out rules and training on the fly. Later, the daily press briefings that were promised were placed on an indefinite hiatus.
An attorney representing Cyber Ninjas asked the state Supreme Court on Friday if it could submit these documents [the “written procedures and training manuals”] to the court under seal, which would keep them private. The court did not rule on that question, but it signaled that the public might not get much insight soon.
FSMDAMNIT YOU FECKING FRAUD OF A JUDGE, ELECTIONS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE TRANSPARENT!
The audit goes on to discuss numerous other problems, irregularities, obfuscations, and so on.
KGsays
The stench of corruption around Johnson and his cronies grows fouler by the day. Now Dominic Cummings has turned on his former boss – enraged by being accused of leaking texts between Johnson and billionaire tory donor James Dyson. Up to now, the flood of stories about cronyism (aka corruption) has not dented the Tory lead in the polls – it appears Johnson’s supporters, like Trump’s, simply don’t care about it (the excuse they give is often that all politicians are corrupt, which is simply not true) – but Cummings’ apostasy must worry Johnson, because he most certainly knows where the bodies are buried – and how they got there. (What’s usually a metaphor in politics is quite literal in this case – dishing out fat contracts to friends and party hacks and donors undoubtedly cost many lives.)
[…]
In 1955, after the Sinixt [“an Indigenous people whose territory once spanned Canada and the United States”] were pushed down into Washington state, the Canadian government declared them extinct. Nearly 60 years later, Rick Desautel decided to challenge the idea that his people no longer existed.
In 2010, he crossed into British Columbia without a permit to hunt elk, arguing he had longstanding treaty rights to so. The province of British Columbia disagreed, slapped him with a fine, and fought him all the way to the supreme court.
At issue for the court was how to interpret section 35.1 of the Canada’s charter, which recognizes the treaty rights of “Aboriginal peoples of Canada”.
The court concluded that “Aboriginal peoples of Canada” refers to the modern-day successors of Indigenous societies that occupied Canadian territory during European contact, even if those societies and their members, including the Sinixt, are now located outside Canada.
“Excluding Aboriginal peoples who moved or were forced to move, or whose territory was divided by a border, would add to the injustice of colonialism,” the court wrote on Friday.
[…]
In addition to reaffirming Sinixt rights, legal experts have said, the ruling in Desautel’s favour could affect thousands of Indigenous peoples separated from ancestral territory in Canada when the border was drawn.
The decision could recognize Canadian hunting and fishing rights for peoples in the United States whose traditional territory was north of the border. The ruling also raises questions over whether the nations whose members live in the US but have treaty rights in Canada need to be consulted over resource projects.
Despite Desautel’s success, there are no comparable provisions in the US constitution that could apply to Indigenous peoples in Canada who pursue fishing or hunting rights south of the border.
[…]
Congratulations to Mr Desautel, the Sinixt, and Canada’s supreme court.
blf, The Canadian did a lot of things wrong and now they’re going to have to try to right those wrongs. It will be interesting to see to what extent, if any, the USA follows suit.
Pope Francis said Sunday that the assumed deaths of more than 130 migrants after their boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea last week was a “moment of shame” for all those who could have intervened to save those onboard.
The Associated Press reported that Francis condemned the tragedy during his Sunday remarks to onlookers in St. Peter’s Square, telling those gathered: “I confess to you I am very pained by the tragedy that once again played out in the last days in the Mediterranean.”
“One hundred and thirty migrants died in the sea. They are persons, human lives, who for two entire days implored in vain for help, help that didn’t arrive,″ the pope continued, adding: “Let us pray for these brothers and sisters, let us interrogate all of ourselves about this latest tragedy. It is a moment of shame.”
He asked his followers to “pray also for those who can help but who prefer to look the other way,” according to the AP.
Migrants frequently cross the Mediterranean Sea in roughly-constructed vessels in the hopes of reaching better economic prospects and safer lives in Europe. Libyan Coast Guard and Italian Coast Guard vessels as well as international organizations are frequently called to respond to distressed vessels in the area.
The latest tragedy occurred Tuesday, with merchant vessels and an international aid organization rallying to help the distressed vessel but discovering no survivors in the sea.
“Today, after hours of search, our worst fear has come true,’’ Luisa Albera, a search and rescue coordinator for the international aid group SOS Méditerranée told The Guardian. “The crew of the Ocean Viking had to witness the devastating aftermath of the shipwreck of a rubber boat north-east of Tripoli. This boat had been reported in distress with around 130 people onboard on Wednesday morning.”
“We are heartbroken. We think of the lives that have been lost and of the families who might never have certainty as to what happened to their loved ones,” Albera added.[…]
This news story gets worse and worse. The more reporters look into the Trump administration’s handling of funds allocated to Puerto Rico for hurricane relief, the more corrupt (and possibly racist) Trump and his lackeys look.
A pair of just-issued reports show just how bad “government” was under Donald Trump. A HUD inspector general’s report shows how funds already allocated by Congress to assist in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico were delayed by by a series of Trump officials. A second report from the EPA shows that agency didn’t follow its own processes or perform any technical analysis in issuing a rule that supported a Trump executive order. Further, the EPA under Trump seems to have forgotten to take any notes, so that it “did not document who decided to skip these milestones and why.”
What the two reports show is agencies being run by people who not only don’t have any experience in the critical roles being performed, they were actually inimical to those roles. Now that most of those in charge under Trump are out of office, they’re still working to cover up the chaos and deliberate sabotage that happened over the last four years.
In the case of funds for Puerto Rico, The Washington Post reports that during an investigation that began in 2019, access to information was “delayed or denied on several occasions.” HUD’s own inspector general found it difficult to move forward as senior officials refused to provide requested materials. As a result, the 46-page report is a “still incomplete picture” of why some funds for Puerto Rico never made it to the island, while others were awarded to companies or individuals who had neither the experience or ability to provide necessary services. And it took two years to get that incomplete answer.
Meanwhile, at the EPA, the failure to take notes or follow guidelines doesn’t really stop the agency from identifying the single individual behind the reason the EPA failed to even conduct an evaluation of a vital rule that changed fuel efficiency standards. The reason is that former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt simply decided that no technical review would take place, and that the EPA would sign its name to a change it had no part in either writing or evaluating.
When it comes to getting funds to Puerto Rico, the inspector general’s report identifies a series of key changes that got in the way of taking effective action. […] months of meetings with the Office of Management and Budget about the rules for releasing grants and who should be eligible to bid. As a result, HUD was blocked from even posting notices to release the funds. OMB was still making changes even as HUD was trying to post those notices, and kept batting back the notices even when HUD thought they were done, making for additional delays.
Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017. HUD and OMB were still unable to even get much of the relief funding posted by a self-imposed deadline of May 2019. In fact, much of the funding did not become available until January 27, 2020.
And that was just one of the problems. Other funds should not have been affected by these delays, as they weren’t subject to the same kind of OMB review that delayed the largest tranche of funds. Except that HUD chose to make them subject to the same negotiations, resulting in the same delays. Even though the funds were then available to distribute through grants, HUD chose that moment to revise the forms needed to apply for grants, and delayed assistance for Puerto Rico even longer while waiting for those new forms to be created.
The inspector general’s report does not conclude that this was a deliberate effort to slow walk the money and punish Puerto Rico for being insufficiently grateful for Trump throwing them some paper towels … but it certainly isn’t difficult to come to that conclusion. […] OMB had never previously required any agency grants to go through a review process like the one targeted at funds for Puerto Rico.
In the EPA inspector general’s report, the problem isn’t decisions that were made too slowly or given too much review. It’s decisions that were made more or less instantly, with no review at all.
[snipped details regarding the Trump administration’s handling of SAFE Vehicles rules, fuel efficiency standards and emission standards]
What both reports show is that under Trump, agencies felt free to ignore existing process, rules, or laws and simply do things as they wanted. Whether that meant the OMB acting to indefinitely stall funds going to Puerto Rico by insisting on a set of unprecedented reviews, or the EPA deciding to skip all reviews and just sign off on work that never happened, the result was giving Trump what he wanted—and hurting those he wanted to hurt.
And as similar language makes clear in both reports: “Delays and denials of access and refusals to cooperate negatively affected the ability of the [Office of Inspector General] to conduct this review.” So we know it was bad. We just don’t know how bad it was.
European Union leaders said on Sunday that they were ready to mobilize and provide support to India as it endures a new surge in coronavirus cases.
“Alarmed by the epidemiological situation in India. We are ready to support.,” President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen tweeted. “The EU is pooling resources to respond rapidly to India’s request for assistance via the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. We stand in full solidarity with the Indian people!” […]
Indonesia has found the wreckage of a navy submarine missing since Wednesday and declared all 53 of its crew members dead, the country’s military chief announced Sunday.
Underwater images captured by a remotely operated vehicle showed the wreckage in the Bali Strait at a depth of 838 meters, officials said. A search and rescue team found debris including a vertical rudder, anchor and safety jackets.
“Based on the authentic evidence, we confirm that the KRI Nanggala has sunk and all the crew members have fallen,” Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto told a news conference Sunday.
The announcement came a day after Indonesia’s navy said the vessel had almost certainly sunk. Officials said Saturday that rescuers had found debris floating in the Bali Strait near the Nanggala’s last known location.
Adm. Yudo Margono, the navy chief of staff, said the underwater images showed the submarine had split into three parts: the hull, the stern and the “main parts.” He ruled out an explosion, which he said would have been detected by sonar.
[…] The submarine was one of five operated by Indonesia’s military. It was built in the 1970s and refitted in 2012, according to media reports.
The Supreme Court will close out its April argument session next week with two major First Amendment cases.
..on Monday…a challenge to California’s requirement that charities and nonprofits operating in the state provide the state attorney general’s office with the names and addresses of their largest donors.
The case, Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Rodriguez (consolidated with Thomas More Law Center v. Rodriguez), has drawn considerable attention, not only because of what it could mean for nonprofits but also because three Democratic members of Congress have asked the court’s newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, to recuse herself from the case.
Detailed background and arguments at the link.
The recusal request, from Senators Whitehouse, Blumenthal and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia, is because The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, who announced in September, after Barrett was nominated, that it would spend at least a million dollars on a campaign to ensure Barrett’s confirmation, is the political advocacy arm of Americans for Prosperity (one of the litigants challenging the law.) At the very least, the letter added, if Barrett opts not to recuse, she should publicly explain why she is not doing so.
Barrett did not recuse herself from the decision to grant review in the foundation’s case, and there has been no indication so far that she will not participate in Monday’s argument.
On Wednesday, the Court will hear the case of a Pennsylvania student who was removed from her high school cheerleading team after posting offensive messages on social media.
Here’s a link to the April 26 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
The EU has launched legal action against pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca over delivery shortfalls of its coronavirus vaccine, the European Commission said on Monday, AFP reports.
EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen tweeted about an hour ago:
Vaccination has helped us beat many diseases. It can be the lasting way out of the [Covid-19] pandemic. Today, at the start of European Immunization Week, we reached 129 million vaccinations in EU.
We’ll have enough doses to have 70% of adults vaccinated in July.
In India, hoarding oxygen and vital medicines in homes is “creating panic” and causing shortages in hospitals, according to senior Indian doctors, prompting fears of shortages for critically ill patients amid the worsening Covid crisis.
It comes as India recorded 352,991 new cases, breaking the global record it set the day before, and 2,812 new deaths, its highest daily figure for fatalities. It was the fifth day in a row that cases topped 300,000.
…
Facebook has removed Australia’s federal independent MP Craig Kelly’s page for repeatedly breaching the social media company’s misinformation policy.
The president of the European commission has offered fresh hope of a summer holiday in the EU for those living outside its borders.
Ursula von der Leyen suggested in an interview with the New York Times that Americans who were fully vaccinated would be able to visit the EU in what would be a change of policy on non-essential travel….
What happens when your mom starts believing in QAnon? Charlotte Callanan is a young woman from Australia who has been in this exact situation for 4 years now. She speaks to us about the process of finding out about her mother’s beliefs, educating herself on the conspiracy theory and attempting to find some peace despite a series of painful arguments plaguing their close relationship. Time reporter Vera Bergengruen also drops by to explore her recent article about QAnon candidates winning local elections.
In this episode of FEVER DREAMS, hosts Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng go deep on the far-right “Health and Freedom Conference” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where thousands of attendees flocked to reaffirm their commitment to Donald Trump, the QAnon conspiracy, coronavirus denialism, and the belief that their high-profile political enemies deserve to be shot and killed. Sommer recounts his time reporting from the terrifyingly mask-free conference. Suebsaeng and Sommer also welcome Sara Kenigsberg, a former video producer for Biden 2020, who opens up about what it was like to become an object of the Trump campaign’s hate last summer. Her crime? Well, in part, it was loving pigs, and arguing that these animals don’t racially profile humans. Seriously.
Although it’s not mentioned in the description, the first segment of the QAA episode is about the insane Tulsa event (see Lynna’s #3 above). The audio clips are far more disturbing than transcripts.
#BREAKING Iranian-British national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been sentenced to 1 year in prison and will be banned from leaving Iran for one year on charge of attending a protest rally in front of Iran’s embassy in London back in 2009 and speaking to BBC Persian, lawyer says
Zaghari’s lawyer Hojjat Kermani says he will file an appeal. Zaghari had been recently released from jail after serving her term, but was tried for a second accusation, “propaganda activities against Islamic Republic”.
The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has said his job involves walking “the tightest tightrope anyone has to walk” – shedding light on his very public refusal to answer a question about a conversation with Donald Trump during the Capitol attack.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, the Republican dodged twice when asked whether during the deadly riot on 6 January, when he asked the former president to call off supporters told to “fight like hell” to overturn the election, Trump said: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people were more upset about the election than you are.”
The question concerned Trump’s refusal to act but McCarthy’s refusal to answer was widely noted – and mentioned in a profile in the New York Times.
“He could change the whole course of history,” McCarthy told the paper, discussing Trump’s sway on the party. “This is the tightest tightrope anyone has to walk.”
Critics say McCarthy is not walking it elegantly, given his support for Trump’s lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was caused by electoral fraud. Speaking to the Times, McCarthy said Trump “goes up and down with his anger. He’s mad at everybody one day. He’s mad at me one day.”
…
The Times described the scene in McCarthy’s office in the Capitol when the mob broke in, saying a friend, the Arkansas Republican Bruce Westerman, was left there alone, choosing a civil war sword to defend himself.
“Friends,” the paper said, “describe the post-election period as traumatic for Mr McCarthy, who publicly perpetuated the fiction that Mr Trump had won while privately asking him to stop.”
The paper also said that “whenever the former president’s name came up in these interviews, Mr McCarthy would lower his voice and speak haltingly, wary of not casting Mr Trump in a way that might upset him.
“‘Is this story going to be all about Trump?’ Mr McCarthy asked, after back-to-back questions on him. He then paused, seemingly bracing for a ceiling fan to drop on his head.”
johnson catmansays
re SC @262: McCarthy is acting like the victim of a domestic abuser where The Orange Toddler-Tyrant is handing out the abuse.
Larry Kudlow grumbles that Biden’s climate policies would force Americans to drink plant-based beer — instead of meat-based?
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has joined a flood of social media users gleefully trolling Larry Kudlow after the former economic adviser to Donald Trump complained that Joe Biden wanted Americans to drink plant-based beer.
Kudlow made the indignant claim on his Fox Business show on Friday, saying Biden’s climate policies and attempt to slash emissions would force Americans to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy and animal-based fats.
OK, got that? No burgers on 4 July. No steaks on the barbecue … So get ready. You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag.
Beer is typically made from grains, hops and yeast — not steak, sausages or chops.
Amid a blizzard of lacerating social media send-ups, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offered a sober analysis of what Kudlow was up to.
“So this seems to be the latest rightwing attempt to smear Bidenomics,” he wrote on Saturday. “There is, of course, nothing about eliminating meat in Biden’s plans; so this is like the imaginary mobs that burned our cities to the ground.
“If you read what Kudlow actually said, he’s cagey — doesn’t say that Biden proposed this, only that some people say this is what would happen. But Fox viewers won’t notice, which is the intention.”
[…]
“This is what rightwing politics is down to. It’s all false claims about evil liberals, which the base is expected to believe because it’s primed to believe in liberal villainy. They’re not even trying to engage on actual issues.”
But on Sunday night Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, chose a more sarcastic path.
“Excited to be watching the Oscars with an ice cold plant-based beer,” he tweeted. “Thanks Joe Biden.”
I am aware beer is plant-based (except perhaps for fining materials, which are typically animal-based). And I am also aware what the kook is suggestingmocking — a diet less rich in animals — can be sensible from multiple perspectives, such as environmental impact. So why the use of eejit quotes? Because the comments were made in bad faith, were deceptive (as pointed out by Krugman), and were made by a wanna-dalek (a hair furor stooge).
* In Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district, Troy Carter (D) defeated Karen Carter Peterson (D) by about 10 points in Saturday’s special election, and he’ll soon fill the vacancy left by former Rep. Cedric Richmond (D), who now works in the White House. Once Carter is sworn in, the House Democratic conference will return to 219 members in the narrowly divided chamber. [Yay! I’m celebrating all Democratic Party wins.]
* Former Rep. Doug Collins (R) unexpectedly announced this morning that he will not be a candidate for statewide office in Georgia next year, issuing a written statement that read in part, “Goodbye for now.” Collins, who came up short in a U.S. Senate campaign last year, was widely seen as a top GOP contender in 2022. [Yay! I’m celebrating Republicans dropping out.]
* Late last week in Kansas, Gov. Laura Kelly (D) vetoed two Republican-backed bill related to voting and elections. Veto overrides in the state’s GOP-dominated state legislature are a distinct possibility.
* The Democratic National Committee, which has been focusing quite heavily in recent months on billboards, today unveiled a new billboard campaign celebrating the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency. The new signs will be up for a week in 20 states. [Nice billboards!]
blf @266, the saying in Idaho is, “Mormon barley makes the best beer.”
In other news: Marco Rubio is a hypocrite, and a lying asshat:
More so than most in his party, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has paid lip-service to the idea that Republicans should expand their electoral reach. Early on in his ill-fated presidential campaign, for example, the Florida senator declared that he intended to make the GOP “the party of the bartenders and the maids, of the people that clean our rooms and fix our cars.”
[…] Does Rubio support a higher minimum wage? No. Does he support social-insurance programs such as the Affordable Care Act to ensure these families have health security? No. Has the senator championed paid-leave legislation? No. Is he prepared to back stronger labor union protections? No.
Rubio has, however, helped introduce a bill to eliminate the estate tax. The bill would exclusively benefit millionaires and billionaires.
So how is it, exactly, that Rubio intends to move the Republican Party toward the interests of bartenders, maids, and mechanics? The Floridian keeps writing op-eds on the subject […]
he condemned Amazon, not over wages and working conditions, but because he perceives the online behemoth as being “allies of the left in the culture war.” In all, Rubio’s op-ed referenced the so-called “culture war” four times, alongside derisive uses of the word “woke.”
The Florida Republican fleshed out his perspective a bit more in a new op-ed for the New York Post, in which Rubio initially sounded more like Bernie Sanders than a conservative GOP senator: “[W]ith the profits came a corporate duty to care for the strength of the nation and its citizens. That bargain has broken down. Many in corporate America feel no obligation to act in the best interest of our country.”
[…] Rubio kept going, eventually explaining his underlying concern: corporate America is “waging a merciless war against traditional values.”
[…] corporate America eagerly dumps woke, toxic nonsense into our culture, and it’s only gotten more destructive with time. These campaigns will be met with the same strength that any other polluter should expect.
[…] I haven’t the foggiest idea what “toxic” cultural “nonsense” Rubio is referring to, and he pointed to zero examples.
[…] the senator still doesn’t appear to have anything resembling a policy agenda. […]
Rubio seemed to suggest that businesses that disappoint him on “traditional values” should expect some kind of legal retribution.
There are vastly easier and more effective ways for a political party to represent the interests of bartenders, maids, and mechanics. Perhaps Rubio should stop writing unfortunate op-eds and start doing more meaningful policy work?
Republican nonsense and stupidity has consequences:
It’s tempting to roll one’s eyes at the new “audit” of election results in Arizona. […]
An official vote tally showed Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump in the state, thanks in part to a strong showing in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa County. Republicans, committed to the Big Lie, cried foul, so Arizona conducted an audit, relying on a federally accredited firm to oversee the process. Then there was a second audit, ordered by the GOP-led legislature. There was also a hand recount, supervised by both parties. All of this turned up nothing: no fraud, no sham ballots, and no wrongdoing.
Maricopa County’s board of supervisors, which has a Republican majority, voted unanimously to certify Biden as the winner. That was supposed to be that.
Except, it wasn’t. As the Washington Post reported:
An extensive effort to recount ballots from the November election moved forward in Phoenix on Friday as a private vendor hired by Republicans in the Arizona Senate began reviewing nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in the state’s largest county. The recount of the ballots from Maricopa County was sought by Senate Republicans to examine unsubstantiated claims that fraud or errors tainted President Biden’s win.
[…] the list of absurdities is not short. Republicans in the Arizona Senate have, for example, turned to a private firm to oversee this latest process despite the apparent fact that it is not known to have experience in this kind of work. […]
Late last week, the Arizona Republic reported that this latest ballot count “got off to a shaky start,” with rules and procedures that were finalized on the fly. […]
The result is a mess featuring lawsuits, court-ordered pauses, procedural changes, widespread confusion, and a general sense that this unnecessary circus is incapable of producing reliable information — all in response to hysterical fraud allegations with no basis in reality.
It doesn’t help that GOP officials are limiting the audit to the election results in which Democrats won: Republican victories in Maricopa County are not part of this latest review. (The idea, evidently, is that there were systemic problems with parts of ballots, not ballots themselves.)
All of which again leads us to the inevitable feeling that this nonsense deserves widespread eye-rolling. Except, it may not be quite that simple.
It’s hardly a stretch to think the fix is in: Arizona Republicans will, in the near future, appear before cameras and effectively declare, “Never mind the count, the hand recount, and the independent audits. Our new review, led by our conspiratorial allies, proves that Donald Trump secretly won Arizona.”
The idea, obviously, is to create a new truth for Republicans, at which point pro-Trump forces can exploit the lie to justify new voter-suppression efforts and perhaps even related efforts in other states, where Republicans can hire Cyber Ninjas of their own.
Indeed, Trump was unsubtle on this point in a written statement issued on Friday, envisioning Arizona as the first domino of many. The unhinged former president wrote, “The Democrats are desperate for the FRAUD to remain concealed because, when revealed, the Great States of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, New Hampshire, and the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, would be forced to complete the work already started.”
[…] The new, Republican-approved version of reality will fuel conspiratorial rage for quite a while, with rank-and-file conservative voters convinced that Americans can’t settle disputes at the ballot box because those rascally Democrats have rigged the system.
Arizona’s circus is clearly bonkers, but that doesn’t mean the nonsense will be inconsequential.
Jon Berger & Pascal Wyse in the Grauniad On mislaying face masks (cartoon). Something very similar happened to me yesterday when I was about to leave to go the outdoors market.
All of Trump’s “best people” are getting new jobs:
Remember Cleta Mitchell?
If you’ve been following our voting rights, voter suppression, ‘vote fraud’ bamboozlement coverage over the last couple decades you likely do. But even if not, you don’t have to back that far. She was the President’s legal advisor on that notorious January 2nd call with Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the soon-to-be ex-President demanded Raffensperger “find” the votes he needed to change the result in Georgia. Mitchell’s participation in that call and the subsequent insurrection, which constituted the last gasp of the President’s efforts, led to what was presumably Mitchell’s forced resignation from the law firm Foley & Lardner. She also appears to be under scrutiny in the Fulton County DA’s investigation into the aforementioned call and potential solicitation of election fraud.
But things are looking up for Mitchell!
The Guardian reports that the far-right group FreedomWorks has hired Mitchell to oversee a $10 million campaign to limit voting in seven key swing states, including Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. She’s also tasked with whipping opposition to HR1, the Democrats pro-democracy bill in Congress. She’s also been tapped as a “fellow” by a pro-Trump group called the Conservative Partnership Institute to organize opposition to HR1.
This should in a way hardly surprise us. Mitchell has been a top GOP voter suppression operative for years. That’s how she ended up on the call with Trump, who she’s apparently still in regular touch with. But it shows how resilient the right-wing money apparatus has been in the aftermath of the insurrection and the President’s broader attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Mitchell is still under investigation by the local DA in Atlanta, where she could conceivably be indicted along with Trump. But the key right-wing groups have already signed her up in the current campaign to crack down on voting in swing states around the country.
lizabeth City, North Carolina, is bracing for the release of body camera footage of the fatal police shooting last week of Andrew Brown, Jr.
Brown’s family expected to see the footage first at around 11:30 a.m. ET, WAVY reported, followed by a public release of the footage. But by around noon, an attorney for the family, Harry Daniels, said he’d heard from a county official that “redactions” could delay the release of the footage. […]
Correction to comment 272: “lizabeth City” should be “Elizabeth City.”
In other news, “Biden admin cancels outrageous ICE fines levied against undocumented immigrants in sanctuary.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced that it is ending a policy set by the previous administration that sought fines as high as $500,000 from undocumented immigrants who had gone into sanctuary. In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas called the outrageous policy, “ineffective and unnecessary.”
“After reviewing detailed data regarding the issuance of such fines since 2018, it was clear to Secretary Mayorkas and Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson that the fines were not effective and had not meaningfully advanced the interests of the agency,” DHS said. “ICE intends to work with the Department of Treasury to cancel the existing debts of those who had been fined.”
The federal government has the power to issue such fines but has rarely done so, The Washington Post reported in 2019. Advocates said that when it had, fines had typically been about $1,000. But unable to raid churches where undocumented immigrants had gone into sanctuary, the previous administration had issued the fines as a clear intimidation tactic. Rosa Ortez Cruz, an undocumented mom of four in North Carolina, was fined $314,007. Edith Espinal, another undocumented mom in Ohio, was fined $497,777.
Attorney David Bennion told ABC News in 2019 that the fines were “so egregiously over the top that it’s laughable.” Lizbeth Mateo, an attorney for Espinal, said that the agency was trying to “intimidate my client and other people like her and they’re trying to intimidate the community.” But there were even more sinister goings-on behind the scenes.
[…] former White House aide and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller sought to use the fines to pay for the previous president’s racist and useless border wall. In emails obtained through the Freedom of Information act, former Justice Department attorney Gene Hamilton “affirmed that the money could be used for such purposes as outlined, and added that the penalties could amount to ‘[u]p to $500 (now higher for inflation) per day, per alien.’ Miller replied, ‘Remarkable.’” […]
In an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was asked again about a conversation he had with then-President Donald Trump during the Capitol insurrection on January 6. In the aftermath of the riot, McCarthy said that Trump “bears responsibility” for it, and suggested the president should face censure. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump,” McCarthy said on the House floor the week after. (Of course, McCarthy himself voted to overturn the results of the presidential election in Arizona, legitimizing the theories of the rioters.)
He’s in a good position to know exactly what Trump thought about the insurrection as it unfolded. McCarthy spoke with Trump while the Capitol was under attack. And according to Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a fellow Republican, Trump had said something pretty chilling: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
But when Wallace asked McCarthy about his conversation with Trump, McCarthy chose to whitewash what happened. He refused to answer yes or no as to whether Herrera Beutler’s account was accurate—you can interpret what that means for yourself—but insisted that Trump 1) did not know the riots were going on until McCarthy called him, and 2) promised to put a stop to it.
“And that’s what he did—he put a video out later.”
McCarthy is right in a very narrow way—Trump did put a video out later. A full two hours after a mob broke into the Capitol, he put out a video in which he told the people who had defaced the Capitol, shit in the floor, shouted racist slurs, and beaten cops, “We love you, you’re very special,” and that “we had an election that was stolen from us.”
For a brief period on January 6, it perhaps seemed as though there might be some cracks in the Republican party’s wall of support for Trump—as evidenced by McCarthy’s contemporaneous statements. But in the months since, all but a handful of figures (Herrera Beutler being one of them) have committed themselves to a whitewashing of what happened that day. McCarthy would rather cover up what happened and throw his own Republican colleague under the bus than tell the truth about what we all watched with our own eyes, and what he had admitted to initially. It is crushingly cynical, and sort of clarifying; then, as now, Trump’s greatest source of power was the sheer cowardice of those who could have stopped him.
The U.S. will begin sharing its entire pipeline of vaccines from AstraZeneca once the vaccine clears federal safety reviews, the White House said, with as many as 60 million doses expected to be available for export in the coming months.
The move greatly expands on the Biden administration’s action last month to share about 4 million doses of the vaccine with Mexico and Canada. The AstraZeneca vaccine is widely in use around the world but not yet authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The move comes as the White House is increasingly assured about the supply of the three vaccines being administered in the U.S., particularly following the restart of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot over the weekend.
“Given the strong portfolio of vaccines that the U.S. already has and that have been authorized by the FDA, and given that the AstraZeneca vaccine is not authorized for use in the U.S., we do not need to use the AstraZeneca vaccine here during the next several months,” said White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients. “Therefore the U.S. is looking at options to share the AstraZeneca doses with other countries as they become available.” […]
The Origin Story Of GOP Outrage Over Totally Imaginary Biden Red Meat Ban
By Sunday afternoon, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) had dubbed President Joe Biden the “Hamburglar.” Pictures of steaks and hamburgers were rocketing around the rightwing media ecosystem, escorted by captions screaming that Biden’s climate plan would force Americans to cut 90 percent of red meat from their diets. We had entered the era of baseless meat fear-mongering.
But let’s rewind.
It all started on Thursday, when Biden delivered remarks during the “Virtual Leaders Summit on Climate.” During his speech, Biden sketched out his vision that the United States will cut its greenhouse emissions in half by 2030. His comments were short on specifics as his plan has not yet been released, more of a practice in goal-setting than a detailed outline of how to get there.
Enter: the Daily Mail. The British tabloid, known to compensate for its paltry fact-checking with all-caps sensationalism, shouldered the responsibility of filling in the blanks of Biden’s plan with shoot-from-the-hip speculation.
“How Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH, cost $3.5K a year per person in taxes, force you to spend $55K on an electric car and ‘crush’ American jobs,” the pithy headline exclaimed, published the same evening Biden made his remarks.
In the article, the Daily Mail cited a January 2020 study from the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems that explored how various dietary changes would affect greenhouse gas emissions. The researchers ran a number of scenarios, one of which tested what would happen if beef consumption dropped by 90 percent.
“Further reducing beef by 90 percent of current levels while replacing 50 percent of other animal based foods results in a per capita decrease in [greenhouse gas emissions] of 51 percent,” they wrote.
The Daily Mail calculated that deprivation to total just one “average sized” burger per month for each American.
And with that, the GOP faux outrage Rube Goldberg machine was triggered.
By Friday morning, Fox had sunk its teeth in. Hosts slyly painted the study and Biden’s plan as related, implying that the one-and-a-half-year-old research exercise was actually part of some analysis of requirements to satisfy Biden’s plan, which has still not been released. The topic was introduced on “Fox and Friends” early that morning and hammered by Fox News and Fox Business Network throughout the day.
“President Biden has been boasting about his plan to save the planet and cut carbon emissions by 50 percent,” said Fox News host Jesse Watters. “That sounds great, but what would Americans have to give up to make that happen? Americans would have to cut red meat consumption by a whopping 90 percent. That means only one burger a month.”
Fox Business host Larry Kudlow also conflated Biden’s plan with the Green New Deal, legislation re-introduced last week by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“Speaking of stupid, there’s a study coming out of the University of Michigan that says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to — get this — America has to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, diary and animal-based fats,” Kudlow said as a meat-grilling montage flashed across the screen. “Okay, got that? No burgers on July 4th. No steaks on the barbie. I’m sure middle America is just gonna love that.” […]
Donald Trump’s Big Lie continues to bear toxic, conspiracy-theorist fruit in Arizona, where the Republican state Senate’s effort to “audit” the vote from Maricopa County is an ever-worsening cluster in desperate need of oversight—oversight that was disrupted Sunday night when the judge in a case challenging the count was forced to step down. The situation starts with Arizona Republicans getting enthusiastically on board with a series of conspiracy theories bolstering Trump’s sore-loserdom and using the state Senate’s subpoena power to seize all 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County and hand them over to an unqualified company led by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist. And it goes on from there about like you’d expect […]
Arizona Senate Republicans retained a company called Cyber Ninjas to conduct the so-called audit. Cyber Ninjas has no elections experience—in contrast to the two professional auditing firms previously retained by the county as part of its series of audits and reviews of the vote—and is headed by Doug Logan, a man who has repeatedly tweeted election conspiracy theories, including sharing posts by lawyer Sidney Powell and Rep. Lauren Boebert, and was a witness in a Michigan lawsuit promoting conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems.
[…] In the days leading up to the count, a news team from Arizona Family repeatedly gained access to the areas where ballots and elections equipment were being unloaded and stored—not exactly feeding confidence in the security being employed. Following that, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, called on state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, to investigate potential violations of the law, writing in a letter that reports “suggest that the Senate has failed to secure the election equipment and ballots, resulting in unauthorized and unmonitored access to [ballots and voting equipment].” Brnovich refused to investigate, prompting Hobbs to respond “Apparently, #sharpiegate was more worthy of investigation than actual ballot integrity issues.”
[…] ”I think the activities that are taking place here are reckless and they in no way, shape or form resemble an audit,” Jennifer Morrell, a partner at Elections Group, a consulting firm advising state and local election officials, told the Associated Press. Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state, used similar language in a CNN interview. “I have been avoiding calling it an audit to be quite honest with you, because that’s not what it is. They have been making this up as they go along,” she said. “This is just a fishing expedition by people who are determined to find something wrong.”
”This is not like any audit I’ve ever seen,” Mark Lindeman, the acting co-director of the nonpartisan organization Verified Voting, said. “If it intends to be perceived as fair-minded and credible, they’ve made some bad mistakes.”
Sunday night, the judge in the Democratic Party’s suit to stop the effort stepped down, citing the fact that a lawyer for the firm representing Senate Republicans’ lead auditor had been an intern in his office within the past five years. With a Monday afternoon hearing scheduled, a new judge is being assigned to the case. This comes after, on Friday, the judge had ordered a pause in counting over the weekend … but only if the Arizona Democratic Party put up a $1 million bond to cover increased expenses due to the pause. The party refused, so counting continued despite the long list of reasons to question the process.
The count is expected to take weeks if allowed to proceed. Logan has estimated it will be completed in 16 days, but as has been established, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about in general. The counting is being done in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, which the state Senate has rented through May 14.
blfsays
Lynna@278 quotes “the judge in the Democratic Party’s suit to stop the effort stepped down, citing the fact that a lawyer for the firm representing Senate Republicans’ lead auditor had been an intern in his office within the past five years.”
So the faux-judge is even more of a fraud then I screamed about in @251.
In other news, and as follow-up to comment 272: “Attorneys For Family Of Police Shooting Victim Say They Only Saw ‘Snippet’ Of Body Cam.”
Another Brown family attorney, Chantel Lassiter, said she viewed the 20-second body camera video 10 or 20 times and took three pages of notes. She described police shooting Brown even though his hands were on the steering wheel of his vehicle.
“Let’s be clear, this was an execution,” Lassiter said.
“Andrew Brown was in his driveway,” she continued. “The sheriff truck blocked him in his driveway so he could not exit his driveway. Andrew had his hands on his steering wheel. He was not reaching for anything. He wasn’t touching anything. He wasn’t throwing anything around. He had his hands firmly on the steering wheel. They run up to his vehicle shooting. He still stood there, sat there, in his vehicle, with his hands on the steering wheel while being shot at.”
“I never was talked to like I was talked to in there,” attorney Bakari Sellers told the media. He quoted the county attorney, Michael Cox, saying that “he was not fucking going to be bullied.”
Ben Crump, one of the attorneys representing Brown’s family, said Brown’s family was only shown a 20-second “snippet” of a single body camera from the shooting, even though, Crump asserted, more video was available.
Attorney Lassiter also made it clear that when Andrew Brown attempted to drive away to escape being shot, he avoided all of the police officers and their vehicles. He did not ever put any police officers in danger with his vehicle, according to the attorney.
The police officers were shouting contradictory commands, (“Show us your hands!” and “Put your hands on the steering wheel”, when his hands were clearly visible on the steering wheel.) Attorney Lassiter also said that the police were continually shouting epithets at Brown, calling him “motherfucker” etc. The police continued to fire at Brown with an assault rifle and at least two glock pistols as he drove away. The police to continued to fire at Brown after his car hit a neighbor’s tree and stopped.
Brown’s attorneys said that at least nine police videos should be available, (8 body cams and one dash cam), but the family was not shown all of that video. When the 20-second video they were shown started, the attorney noted that there were already bullet casings visible on the ground. Whatever happened before the 20-second video was not shown to the family.
Other family members left the viewing room, but Brown’s son remained to watch the 20-second video more than a dozen times with the attorney.
NYT analysis confirms what we’ve known: ICE could have prevented COVID-19 disaster in its facilities.
The new analysis from The New York Times on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic confirms what immigrant rights advocates and medical experts have been trying to tell anyone who would listen for over a year now: ICE had the power to prevent a health disaster within its facilities, and largely chose not to. Instead, the agency worsened it.
“Our analysis compared estimated infection rates in ICE detention centers with infection rates in prisons and in the general population,” the report said. “As Covid-19 cases rose last June, ICE detention facilities had an average infection rate five times that of prisons and 20 times that of the general population.”
“There are a number of reasons Covid-19 hit ICE detention sites particularly hard, including spotty implementation of the agency’s own pandemic guidelines in its facilities,” The Times said in a number of takeaways. The analysis points to an incident described in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General report last month, which found that when immigrants detained at Arizona’s La Palma Correctional Center held a peaceful protest over the lack of sufficient personal protective equipment, they were violently sprayed by guards with chemical agents.
”A letter signed by 182 LPCC detainees indicates the facility used pepper spray, pepper balls, and chemical agents, and punished protesting detainees with lengthy stays in segregation. We confirmed LPCC used chemical agents to end the protests,” the report said.
Advocacy group Detention Watch Network said in a blockbuster report last December that “counties and multicounty economic areas with ICE facilities were more likely to confront serious COVID-19 outbreaks.” That report estimated that ICE’s failure to release more people amid the pandemic in fact added nearly 250,000 cases to U.S. numbers. In its analysis, The Times said “[i]nfections inside detention centers have ripple effects in surrounding communities.” […]
Former President Obama on Monday said he was “appalled” by the violence against civilians in Myanmar following a military coup in February.
“The world’s attention must remain on Myanmar, where I’ve been appalled by heartbreaking violence against civilians and inspired by the nationwide movement that represents the voice of the people,” Obama said in a statement. “The military’s illegitimate and brutal effort to impose its will after a decade of greater freedoms will clearly never be accepted by the people and should not be accepted by the wider world.”
[…] “Myanmar’s neighbors should recognize that a murderous regime rejected by the people will only bring greater instability, humanitarian crisis, and the risk of a failed state,” Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Southeast Asia in Indonesia, said. […]
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday announced a ‘pattern or practice’ investigation into the Louisville [Kentucky] Metro Police Department, which has faced intense scrutiny and criticism in the 13 months since officers of the department killed Breonna Taylor inside her own apartment as they served a no-knock warrant.
NBC News:
The Biden administration on Monday will announce the launch of a summer food program to feed more than 30 million low-income children, the Agriculture Department told NBC News.
NBC News:
A majority of the justices on the Supreme Court seemed inclined Monday to rule for conservative groups that don’t want to tell state regulators the names of their biggest donors for fear of chilling contributions.
Unsparing in his criticism of the President, Donald J. Trump blasted Joe Biden for firing almost no one in his first hundred days.
“It took me barely over a week to fire Sally Yates, and by March I’d axed forty-six U.S. attorneys,” he said. “I hit the ground running and I never looked back.”
At the rate Biden is going, Trump said, “He’s going to be looking across his desk at the same losers the entire time he’s in office.”
In another alleged failure of Biden’s first hundred days, Trump ripped the President for having picked “no fights whatsoever” with TV celebrities.
“It’s almost like he doesn’t even watch TV,” Trump said. “What does he do all day?”
The Netflix documentary Seaspiracy, made by the team behind the award-winning 2014 film Cowspiracy, critiques the idea of sustainable fishing and accuses the industry of using slave labour and other human rights abuses.
The 90-minute film is one of the 10 most watched Netflix programmes and has been praised by celebrities including Bryan Adams. The Guardian’s George Monbiot is among those interviewed in the film, and he tells Anushka Asthana that it shines a light on some of the murkiest aspects of the fishing industry that have been under-reported in the media.
The documentary, however, has also been heavily criticised for its approach, style and factual errors. The marine ecologist Bryce Stewart tells Anushka that fishing can be done sustainably, and that Seaspiracy’s take on the issue is overly simplistic.
(It’s worth noting that Stewart is also a “fisheries biologist.”)
Farm Sanctuary, a vegan rescue center seeking to end animal agriculture, has been nominated for an award at the acclaimed Annual Webby Awards.
The sanctuary is nominated in the highly competitive category ‘Social: Animals’ – and it’s up against a host of social media stars.
Moreover, it’s the only non-dog ’cause-led’ nominee in the category.
The New York Times described the annual awards ‘the internet’s highest honor’. Activist and podcaster Jameela Jamil is presenting them this year.
Moreover, the social category celebrates creativity across social media accounts that celebrate animals.
Each year the category sees a host of pure-bred dogs and cats. This makes Farm Sanctuary’s nomination a ‘seismic shift’ in the way society views animals, the charity claimed.
…
Chief Communications and Brand Creative Officer Marie Jones told PBN: “For over 35 years, we have been fighting to make farm animals visible by helping people see them as the thinking, feeling individuals they are.
“A vote for Farm Sanctuary is a vote for the billions of farm animals caught in the animal agriculture system.”
Moreover, the charity beat over 13,500 entries worldwide in securing a nomination.
…
Winners are announced at the virtual awards on Tuesday, May 18.
I think the correction was so mild and given so little airtime that it won’t really have an effect.
A Fox News anchor corrected a graphic and accompanying script the network aired last week which summed up the thrust of the disinformation the network and other right-wing media has been peddling for days: the false assertion that President Joe Biden’s climate plan will force a ban on red meat consumption.
The network seems to have picked up a highly speculative story from the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that conflated a University of Michigan study from 2020 with Biden’s plan, which is yet to be released in full.
The researchers of the study ran different scenarios to test how dietary changes would affect greenhouse gas emissions. In one of them, they found that dropping beef consumption by 90 percent along with dropping consumption of other animal-based foods by 50 percent would halve emissions.
The Daily Mail ran with the 90 percent figure, speculating that Biden’s yet-to-be-released climate change proposal could mean draconian beef limitations for Americans, to the tune of cutting back to one hamburger a month.
Various shows on Fox News covered the story, producing a graphic that then was frequently shared on social media.
On Monday, a Fox News host corrected one of those segments that had aired back on Friday.
“The data was accurate but a graphic and a script incorrectly implied that it was part of Biden’s plan for dealing with climate change,” anchor John Roberts said Monday afternoon of the study. “That is not the case.”
[…] “To our knowledge, there is no connection between our study and Joe Biden’s Climate plan,” Gregory Keoleian, director at the University’s Center for Sustainable Systems, and Martin Heller, the Center’s research specialist, wrote. “This appears to be an association made erroneously by the Daily Mail that has been picked up widely.”
“Our study merely identifies opportunities for emissions reductions that are possible from changes in our diet,” they added. “By no means does it suggest that these changes in diet would be required to meet climate goals.”
They also wrote that the study, the results of which they published a year and a half ago, was not intended to be a specific policy recommendation. Biden’s climate fact sheet, they noted, does not include a diet shift, making the linkage to their study “baseless.”
This is the equivalent of running an egregiously erroneous story above the fold on page 1, then printing a correction deep within the classifieds. Somewhere between “17 year olds wanted for interstate trafficking, excellent remuneration” and “best prices for your assault weapons; no registration, no problem”.
————————
They will, no doubt, spam the correction across the same “news” shows at the same frequency they did the fake graphics, right?
———————–
Doesn’t matter. It’s still the “truth” as far as the KKKult is concerned. Once they’ve adopted something as a “fact” they believe is useful to repeat in order to get what they want and establish their power, there is no taking it back. None.
Early on in his ill-fated presidential campaign, for example, the Florida senator declared that he intended to make the GOP “the party of the bartenders and the maids, of the people that clean our rooms and fix our cars.”
LOL.
These campaigns will be met with the same strength that any other polluter should expect.
(It’s interesting that the design/fashion/travel magazines and sites I read are completely the opposite – everything exciting is happening in Africa. It’s made them much more fun to read.)
If they see children wearing masks, Tucker says the response should be no different than when you see a kid being abused — ‘call the police immediately, contact child protective services’.”
A prominent ethnic armed group in Myanmar says it has captured a military base near the Thai border, as clashes escalated days after the junta chief committed to immediately end violence in the country.
The junta has launched brutal crackdowns against civilians in an attempt to suppress the opposition it faces from the public. Some of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups, which have spent decades fighting the military for greater autonomy, have voiced support for anti-coup protesters.
The Karen National Union (KNU), which is fighting the military near Myanmar’s eastern border, said on Tuesday morning it had occupied and burned down an army outpost.
The group’s head of foreign affairs, Padoh Saw Taw Nee, told Reuters the group was still determining deaths and casualties. The spokesman said there had been fighting in other locations, too, but did not give details.
Video footage of the clashes showed fire and smoke rising from the hills, as shots were heard in the distance.
Local people told Agence France-Presse many villagers had fled their homes, fearing the military would launch a harsh crackdown in retaliation.
…
Over recent weeks, intensified violence, including airstrikes, has forced more than 24,000 people to flee their homes in the border region, according to the aid group Free Burma Rangers.
The latest clashes comes days after the head of Myanmar’s junta, Min Aung Hlaing, attended a regional summit in Jakarta, where he agreed to end violence and enter dialogue.
The meeting by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) marked the first concerted international effort to find a resolution to the crisis in Myanmar, though rights groups pointed out that its concluding statement lacked specifics and made no mention of freeing political prisoners.
More than 750 people have been killed by security forces, including dozens of children, since the coup on 1 February, while 3,441 have been detained, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma.
On Tuesday, the military appeared to backtrack from the statement it had agreed to at the Asean meeting….
Killings and detentions have continued in recent days….
Dozens of people have been taken from their homes by the security forces, which have continued to inflict terror through night-time raids.
A man in Jerusalem who has worked for years as a rabbi and raised his family in an ultra-Orthodox community has been accused of faking his religion to mask his true identity as a Christian missionary from New Jersey….
…There are still many strands of the lobbying scandal that can be pulled, from Johnson’s flat to the lobbying of Greensill Capital, the departure of Lister and the texts between Johnson and business leaders, as well as world figures such as the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
One Tory source said the government was “lucky in a way to be fighting a war on so many fronts” and suggested it may mean the public may find the story confusing….
Here’s a link to the April 27 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
India has welcomed vital medical supplies as it battles a major surge in cases. The external affairs ministry tweeted pictures of ventilators and oxygen concentrators that arrived in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Even though India’s case load was down from Monday’s global record (323,144 new cases, down from 352,991) some medical experts warned it was due to reduced testing, not a reduced infection rate.
Gilead Sciences said yesterday it will give India at least 450,000 vials of its antiviral drug remdesivir and help boost production.
The World Health Organization says it is “doing everything we can, providing critical equipment and supplies,” to India as its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters the situation there was “beyond heartbreaking”.
The WHO said it was sending oxygen, mobile field hospitals and laboratory supplies and had transferred more than 2,600 experts from various programmes, including polio and tuberculosis, to work with Indian health authorities.
…
The World Health Organization said it was still in discussions about the Russian-made Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine and had not yet set a date to evaluate the shot’s clinical data for possible emergency use listing.
Brazil’s health regulator has denied a request from several states to import the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, saying it did not have the data needed to verify the jab’s safety and efficacy.
In England, the NHS coronavirus vaccine booking system has opened to healthy people aged 42 and over.
Also in England, MPs and peers have said that all 85,000-plus Covid fines issued during the pandemic should be reviewed, after more than a quarter of prosecutions in the first two months of the year for breaching the regulations were shown to have been wrongly brought.
Athletes representing Australia at the Tokyo Olympics and their support staff will be prioritised for vaccination ahead of the July Games.
Japan – which has been criticised for slow vaccine rollout – will open a mass vaccination centre in central Tokyo next month ahead of the Olympics….
US president Joe Biden marks 100 days in office on Friday, 30 April, and has more than fulfilled his promise of 100 million shots of Covid vaccine in Americans’ arms by his first 100 days in office: Some 290 million shots have been distributed, more than 230 million administered, and about 96 million Americans are fully vaccinated, 29% of the population.
In response to harsh effects of the pandemic on the US economy and rising unemployment, Biden will on Tuesday continue his push for a national $15 minimum wage with an executive order that raises pay to at least that level for hundreds of thousands of federal contract workers, according to senior White House officials.
The move will increase the current minimum wage of $10.95 by nearly 37% by March of next year and continue to tie future increases to inflation, Reuters reports.
It will apply to federal workers from cleaning and maintenance staff to food service contractors and laborers, sweeping in tipped workers who were previously left out of the last increase under former president Barack Obama….
…Anger and Grief After at Least 82 People Killed in Baghdad COVID Hospital Fire
In Iraq, a fire at a Baghdad hospital treating COVID patients killed at least 82 people Saturday, most of them patients. The blaze was sparked by an exploding oxygen cylinder. The hospital had no smoke detectors, sprinkler system or fire hoses. This is a family member of one of the victims.
Athar Al-Maliki: “Shouldn’t there be supervision over the hospital? Ministerial supervision? A supervising authority? This is neglect. Neglect. A hospital burnt, and there are no firefighting trucks immediately available on site?”
…
Maryland Will Review Cases Handled by Ex-Medical Examiner David Fowler
In Maryland, officials say they will review all cases of police-involved deaths that were handled by ex-chief medical examiner David Fowler, who testified in Derek Chauvin’s murder case. Fowler said the murder of George Floyd was not a homicide despite the overwhelming evidence. He has been sued by the family of 19-year-old Anton Black, a Black teen who died in 2018 after he was electrocuted with a Taser and pinned down by three white police officers….
We look at a slew of anti-protest laws pending in Republican-led states, and some that have already passed, such as in Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a controversial measure known as the “anti-riot bill” that is widely viewed as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement and calls to “defund the police.” Under the new law, a public gathering of three or more people can be classified as a “riot,” and anyone who “willingly” participates in such a gathering can be charged with a third-degree felony. Many of the anti-protest bills pending in other states have the exact same language as the Florida plan. “These are really extreme laws,” says Nick Robinson, a senior legal adviser with the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which has tracked 81 anti-protest bills introduced in 34 states so far this year. They “expand the definition of rioting” in order “to target protesters,” Robinson tells Democracy Now!…
Authorities in Delhi ordered a luxury hotel to be converted into a Covid-19 health facility for the exclusive use of high court judges and their families, drawing outrage in a city that has no hospital beds or life-saving oxygen for hundreds of people.
The local government said in a public notice on Monday night that it had received a request from the Delhi High Court because of the rapid rise in coronavirus infections and had reserved 100 rooms at the Ashoka Hotel for the higher judiciary, Reuters reports.
A top city hospital will run the facility, it said.
Jaiveer Shergill, a lawyer and spokesman of the main opposition Congress party, said the government decision flew in the face of the right to equality enshrined in the constitution and the court itself must reject the special treatment.
“For sake of justice, integrity and faith in the judicial system, Delhi’s high Court must quash the order,” he said.
The NRCC is sending out texts reading: “Ignore this text to abandon Trump. …you have 10min to tell us if you’ll join his new social media site. We won’t ask again:…”
90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine confronts her past by visiting the German concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora where her brother was killed. As a young girl, she fought Hitler’s Nazis as a member of the French Resistance. For 74 years, she has refused to step foot in Germany, but that changes when a young history student named Lucie enters her life. Prepared to re-open old wounds and revisit the terrors of that time, Marin-Catherine offers important lessons for us all….
25-minute video at the (YT) link. The film was presented by the Guardian.
Republicans appear to be having so much difficulty undermining Biden and his team that they’re leaning on manufactured nonsense.
The trouble started on Friday with a report in a conservative daily newspaper. The New York Post told readers, “Unaccompanied migrant kids brought from the U.S.-Mexico border to a new shelter in Long Beach, Calif., will be given a copy of [Vice President Kamala Harris’] 2019 children’s book, ‘Superheroes are Everywhere,’ in their welcome kits.” The article ran on the front page, along with a photo of a copy of the book alongside a backpack.
In theory, this raised the prospect of a legitimate controversy: if the Biden administration was using funds to purchase and distribute copies of the vice president’s book […]
The trouble, of course, was that the report was wrong. As the Washington Post explained this morning:
Long Beach city officials told The Washington Post that Harris’s book is not being handed out in welcome kits. A single copy of the book was donated during a citywide donation drive, officials said.
It turns out that reality is surprisingly simple. Long Beach has welcomed migrant children, and officials have taken up collections to provide the kids with food and other aid. Some locals donated books, and one person in the community donated one copy of the vice president’s children’s book.
Why is that controversial? It’s not.[…]
But after one conservative outlet ran with the false claim that every welcome kit for the migrant children will receive Harris’ book, others quickly followed. Fox News ran with the story, as did the Republican National Committee.
It wasn’t long before the nonsense spread to Capitol Hill. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) yesterday demanded to know whether “taxpayers paying for copies of the Vice President’s book to be handed out at migrant shelters.” A day earlier, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked whether Biden administration officials are “forcing taxpayers to buy Kamala Harris’s book to give to those illegal immigrants.”
[Sean] Spicer, whose wisdom knows no bounds, added that the Biden White House “refuses to answer how or why” this happened.
That’s because it didn’t happen. It’s a made-up story.
The timing of this unfortunate mess doesn’t help matters: as many conservatives touted this fake controversy, the right also pushed the bizarre claim that the president intends to ban Americans from buying meat.
The larger context is jarring: Republicans […] conceding that they’re unable to find actual controversies worthy of criticism. […]
On February 11, Donald Trump Jr. sat in front of his computer for a video deposition. He swore to tell the truth. But documents and a video obtained by Mother Jones—and recent legal filings—indicate that his testimony on key points was not accurate.
The matter at hand was a lawsuit filed in 2020 against Donald Trump’s inauguration committee and the Trump Organization by Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, DC. The suit claims that the inauguration committee misused charitable funds to enrich the Trump family. As the attorney general put it, the lawsuit “alleges that the Inaugural Committee, a nonprofit corporation, coordinated with the Trump family to grossly overpay for event space in the Trump International Hotel. Although the Inaugural Committee was aware that it was paying far above market rates, it never considered less expensive alternatives, and even paid for space on days when it did not hold events. The Committee also improperly used non-profit funds to throw a private party [at the Trump Hotel] for the Trump family costing several hundred thousand dollars.” In short, the attorney general has accused the Trump clan and its company of major grifting, and he is looking to recover the amounts paid to the Trump Hotel so he can direct those funds to real charitable purposes.
As part of the case, Racine has taken depositions from Tom Barrack, the investor and Donald Trump pal who chaired the inauguration committee; Rick Gates, the committee’s former deputy chair, who subsequently pleaded guilty to two charges stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation; and two of Trump’s adult children: Donald Jr. and Ivanka. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a top producer for the inauguration committee, was deposed as a lead witness cooperating with the investigation. Racine has also collected internal emails and material from the committee, its officials, and others who worked on the inauguration.
During his deposition, Trump Jr. frequently replied, “I don’t recall,” and he downplayed his involvement in preparation for his father’s inauguration in January 2017. In several exchanges, he made statements that are contradicted by documents or the recollections of others and that appear to be false….
SC @291, Rick Santorum is so irritating. He is pompous beyond belief … and he bases his pomposity on ignorance. And Fox News gives him a platform. I hope he is buried under the negative feedback he will get for his ignorant comments about Native Americans.
In other news, discussing threats from within the DHS:
[…] The New York Times reported overnight:
The Department of Homeland Security will undergo an internal review to root out white supremacy and extremism in its ranks as part of a larger effort to combat extremist ideology in the federal government, officials said on Monday.
“Recent events, including the January 6th attacks on the U.S. Capitol, have highlighted that domestic violent extremism poses the most lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to our country today,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a message to department employees. “As we work to safeguard the nation and our values, we must be vigilant in our efforts to identify and combat domestic violent extremism within both the broader community and our own organization. Violent extremism has no place at DHS and we will work with urgency and focus to address it.”
The Times’ report added that yesterday’s announcement, among other things, represents “a pivot from the approach taken by President Donald J. Trump, who pressured federal agencies to divert resources to target the antifa movement and left-wing groups, even though law enforcement authorities concluded that far-right and militia violence was a more serious threat.”
[…] a Washington Post report added that congressional Democrats “have pressed DHS officials to increase scrutiny of Customs and Border Protection and of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the country’s most important enforcement agencies.”
[…] As David Ignatius noted in a recent column, the United States is “finally catching up” to the threats posed by domestic extremists. It’s about time.
[…] For our discourse and our democracy to function, there needs to be something resembling a common reality. And for government to function, we need governing parties that care about the substance of policymaking.
And yet, there’s the Republican Party, in the midst of serious challenges, spending the first third of 2021 at the national level preoccupied with Dr. Seuss, Potato Head dolls, Muppets disclaimers, and now a meat ban that exists only in the imaginations of fringe far-right personalities.
House GOP lawmakers are in Orlando for a conference retreat, and party leaders keep telling reporters Republicans are focusing much of their attention on “policy.” That sounds like a delightful change of pace, though given the circumstances, I’d recommend some skepticism.
Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming:
If we minimize what happened on Jan. 6th and if we appease it, then we will be in a situation where every election cycle, you could potentially have another constitutional crisis. If you get into a situation where we don’t guarantee a peaceful transfer of power, we won’t have learned the lessons of Jan. 6.
And you can’t bury our head in the sand. It matters hugely to the survival of the country.
Yes, she’s right. It’s a pity that she an almost lone voice crying out against the Republican misinformation campaign. See comment 275.
Good news from some Republicans: “GOP Doctors’ Caucus Puts Out PSA Urging Constituents To Get COVID Vaccine”
The Republican Doctors’ Caucus put out a PSA on Monday endorsing the COVID-19 vaccine amid higher rates of vaccine hesitancy among Republican-identifying Americans — especially the men — compared to the rest of the population.
In the ad, caucus chairs Reps. Andy Harris (R-MD) and Michael Burgess (R-TX) and several other members highlight the safety of the vaccine and the government’s “vigorous and transparent” process of making it.
The PSA is largely framed around how receiving the vaccine will lead Americans to regain “freedom” and “end the government’s restrictions on our freedoms.”
[…] The PSA is part of some Republican lawmakers’ push to combat their voters’ disproportionate refusal to receive the vaccine after ex-President Donald Trump downplayed the importance of getting vaccinated and refused to receive the shot publicly.
“I’m a Republican man and I want to say to everyone, we need to take this vaccine,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said earlier this month. “These reservations need to be put aside because the only way, I think, we get to finally put this pandemic in the rearview mirror is with herd immunity.” […]
The leaders of organizations for Native Americans are raking CNN commentator Rick Santorum over the coals after he claimed that white European colonizers “birthed a nation from nothing” in America and that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), ripped Santorum’s “caveman mentality” on Monday night and demanded that CNN fire the former GOP senator.
“Before I correct the record, let me address Rick Santorum directly without mincing words: Rick Santorum is an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform,” Sharp said in a statement.
The NCAI leader asserted that CNN giving someone with Santorum’s views on Native American genocide a platform “is fundamentally no different than putting an outright Nazi on television to justify the Holocaust.”
“Make your choice. Do you stand with White Supremacists justifying Native American genocide, or do you stand with Native Americans?” Sharp said.
“Not much Native culture in American culture … could that be because of America’s colonial genocide, cultural genocide, displacement, systematic erasure and dehumanization of Native peoples?” Tara Houska, the founder of Giniw Collective and a co-founder of Not Your Mascots, tweeted. “We’re still here. We aren’t ‘nothing,’ we’re why you’re on this land. Read a book.”
IllumiNative also called on CNN to oust Santorum, saying that he “continues a long history of white supremacy by erasing the history of Native Americans.”
“The contributions of Natives are everywhere,” the organization tweeted. “Our land, ways of being & systems of [government] were, in fact, so important that they were stolen by the people who arrived here.”
Santorum made the racist comments during a speech to the conservative group Young America’s Foundation on Friday.
“We came here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here,” he said. “I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
History has largely forgotten Canasatego, the Iroquois chief who eloquently introduced American colonists to the federalist ideas that would shape their government.
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The federal structure of the US is modeled on the Iroquois Confederacy.
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suggesting that that racist homophobe attempt anything like understanding the complex civilizations that predated Columbus, or the savage slaughter of those civilizations is as useless as his existance.
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This seems to encapsulate the essence of the right-wing mind. Just a profound inability to recognize the value or even independent existence of anything that is not me or what I identify with at this moment. Whether it’s Native Americans, people of color, immigrants, poor people, liberals, non-Christians, the natural world, the planet—none of that has anything to do with me, so why should I care in the slightest? It’s a fundamental attitude of aggression and overriding indifference toward everything outside of the tiny circle of things I recognize as mattering.
Tucker Carlson has crossed the line into reckless endangerment:
[…] On Monday, Carlson devoted a large portion of his Fox News show to encouraging the harassment of people wearing masks. In this segment, Carlson walked through a series of lies to claim that: most liberals are crazy, the only reason to wear a mask is because you’re crazy, and that it’s the job of right-thinking Americans to harass these crazy people until they shape up.
Carlson started his tirade with statements clearly tuned to his favorite themes: right-wing victimhood and turning back the clock to the pre-Civil Rights era.
“They’re the aggressors,” said Carlson. “It’s our job to brush them back and restore the society we were born in. So the next time you see somebody in a mask, on the sidewalk or on a bike path, do not hesitate. Ask politely but firmly, ‘Would you please take off your mask? Science shows there is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable.’ We should do that, and we should keep doing it … It’s repulsive.“
All of that is ugly, and laden with dog whistles and calls for taking action against the “aggression” of other people doing something that not only causes no harm, but is a demonstrable public good. However, that’s just the start. Following this, Carlson had a particular message for how to handle children wearing masks.
“Your response to seeing children wearing masks when they play should be no different from seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart,” said Carlson. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse, and you’re morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”
On the one hand, what Carlson is doing here is aimed not at an individual person, but at a group of people: those who wear masks. […] Carlson is calling for very specific actions that would not only cause harm to both parents and children, but also damage the proper operation of both police and child services.
[…] Carlson could just as easily be encouraging people to harass someone for wearing a hijab, or telling his viewers to order Black people to get off the sidewalk because their presence “makes them uncomfortable,” or encouraging people to call the police if they don’t think someone’s child is dressed “gender-appropriately” in Walmart. None of those statements might meet the definition of calling for imminent violence. However, they are clear and specific calls to cause harassment and assault in response to specific situations. It’s unclear that any of these still qualify as protected speech.
As for the argument that Carlson’s statements deserve special protection because they are political speech, they’re not. They’re politicized speech, and that’s something very, very different. Carlson—along with a large portion of the right—has chosen to take scientific facts and medical recommendations and incorporate them into false claims. A virus is not political. A mask is not political. Defining this as political speech casts a wide net that invites further abuse.
[…] Carlson telling his viewers to remove their own masks may be foolish, and it may achieve no legitimate political goal, but it’s foolishness that can at least pretend to a tradition of protected speech. However, when it comes to calling for people to specifically harass those who are wearing masks in an attempt to protect their health, the health of their families, and the health of the nation, that tradition is much, much harder to find.
The American tradition of strong protection of free speech is a vital part of this nation. The robust defense of free speech is vital, ongoing, and worthy of support at every turn. […]
But what Carlson—and others like him—are doing when they encourage their viewers to take aggressive action toward American citizens who are doing their best to safeguard the lives of their families and others … it’s simply unclear whether this is protected speech. It’s unclear that it should be. And if this statement doesn’t cross the line, what does?
Ugly as Carlson’s statements may be, there’s little doubt that they’ve been pre-screened by the attorneys at Fox News. They’re likely confident that, even if someone should suffer the exact abuse that Carlson specified, there would be little chance of those victims having standing to sue Carlson directly. The chance of any public prosecutor seeking charges of endangerment or culpable negligence are so vanishingly small as to be safely ignored. Still, there can be no doubt that with these statements, the dial on the stove has been turned up another notch, bringing the frog ever closer to boil. There will be a point at which courts are brought in to rule on statements such as this. […]
[…] #RemoveRick began trending before you could spell G-A-R-B-A-G-E F-I-R-E.
[…] erasing Black Americans from our white supremacist history, and being wildly incorrect about the history of other regions in the world, all at the same time.
Santorum’s offensive ideas—if they can be called ideas—on everything from race and culture to women and the rights of people not named Rick Santorum, are just some of the reasons he shouldn’t be allowed on television as a pundit. […] #RemoveRick very quickly became a trending topic on Twitter as calls grew for Santorum’s tenure on CNN to end. […]
Washington Post reporter Jeremy Barr reported that Santorum had this piece of new revisionist history to add to the conversation, tweeting: “I reached out to CNN PR for comment on this and got the following statement from an outside comms person representing Rick Santorum: Santorum: ‘I had no intention of minimizing or in any way devaluing Native American culture.’ That is the whole statement.” […]
[…] the Justice Department made clear over the weekend that it expects to charge more than 500 people in the matter.
And in fact the arrests and accompanying charges […] continue to pile up. The cases against some of the insurrection’s leading components, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, not only have deepened, but also appear to be expanding to include militiamen who were not members of those groups. At the same time, the FBI’s cozy relationship with the Proud Boys was underscored with the revelation that the FBI collected information from at least four members of the group about leftists, but does not appear to have used that opportunity to examine the organization itself.
[…] The scope of the threat certainly is now clear to the Justice Department, which in a filing made Thursday warned federal judges that it anticipates charging another 100 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol. Currently, some 440 people have been charged.
[…] about 90% of those charged have been men, with an average age of 40. Another study found that 40% of the Capitol arrestees are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Their occupations include CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants—and notably, only 9% are unemployed. Two-thirds of them are 35 or older.
[…] Several dozen face more serious charges, such as assaulting police officers or damaging government property.
Among the recent Jan. 6-related arrests:
A New York man, Robert Chapman, was arrested after he boasted to a would-be date on the dating platform Bumble about his participation in the siege. He texted her on Jan. 6 that “I did storm the Capitol,” adding that he had “made it all the way into Statuary Hall” and that he had been interviewed by members of the media. His correspondent replied: “We are not a match.” She promptly reached out to the FBI and provided screenshots of the conversation; he was charged on April 13.
A Proud Boy from Syracuse, New York, named Matthew Greene, was charged last week in a superseding indictment along with Proud Boys Dominic Pezzola and William Pepe—who are believed to have stolen a police shield and used it to break a window that provided the rioters their first entry point into the Capitol. Greene was fired from his job as chief technology and operating officer at Happy Mushroom, a virtual art studio. “We are extremely appalled to learn Mr. Greene held beliefs that are so counter to what Happy Mushroom stands for,” said CEO and Creative Director Felix Jorge.
A North Texas couple, Mark and Jalise Middleton, were charged last week with assault of a law enforcement officer, interference with a law enforcement officer during civil disorder, obstruction of an official proceeding, unlawful entry on restricted grounds, and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, bringing Texas’ total number of indictees to 22. Video shows Mark Middleton pushing against police barriers and his wife striking officers trying to prevent him from doing so. […]
Two Kansas women, Jennifer Ruth Parks and Esther Schwemmer, were arrested last week for their roles in the Capitol siege. They told FBI agents that they believed they were participating in a peaceful pro-Trump rally. […]
A 61-year-old man from Westminster, California, was charged Friday with participating in a violent brawl with a police officer that left the latter man with serious head injuries. Kevin Galletto, an engineer and conservative Orange County activist, was charged with assaulting a police officer, obstruction of law enforcement, obstruction of justice, and knowingly entering a restricted building and committing physical violence. […]
the documents involving three self-described “Patriots” who were unaffiliated with the other conspiracies—Josiah Colt of Boise, Idaho; Ronnie Sandlin of Memphis, Tennessee; and Nate DeGrave of Las Vegas, Nevada—indicate that the three men coordinated a plan to attack the Capitol and ended up playing key roles in the invasion of the Senate chambers.
[…] “For months, the government has seemingly focused on the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to the detriment of a focus on the more organic networks formed online or in in-person protests,” she writes. “That may be about to change.”
Democrats criticized Justice Amy Coney Barrett over her decision not to recuse herself from a case that the Supreme Court heard on Monday morning involving a conservative group who financially supported her confirmation last year.
“Justice Barrett is ignoring important ethical standards to rule on a case that could open our democracy to further infiltration by dark-money influence, perhaps permanently,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told Forbes. “Her choice to press forward in spite of recusal laws also creates a troubling new precedent, and undermines public confidence in the integrity of the Court.”….
The nation’s high court heard oral arguments in two consolidated cases stylized as Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Rodriquez and Thomas More Law Center v. Bonta on Monday morning….
The lead petitioner in the case is a nonprofit run by billionaires David Koch and Charles Koch. During Barrett’s relatively painless confirmation process, the group spent in excess of $1 million on ads boosting her image….
On February 11, Donald Trump Jr. sat in front of his computer for a video deposition. He swore to tell the truth. But documents and a video obtained by Mother Jones—and recent legal filings—indicate that his testimony on key points was not accurate.
The matter at hand was a lawsuit filed in 2020 against Donald Trump’s inauguration committee and the Trump Organization by Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, DC. The suit claims that the inauguration committee misused charitable funds to enrich the Trump family. […] In short, the attorney general has accused the Trump clan and its company of major grifting, and he is looking to recover the amounts paid to the Trump Hotel so he can direct those funds to real charitable purposes.
[…] During his deposition, Trump Jr. frequently replied, “I don’t recall,” and he downplayed his involvement in preparation for his father’s inauguration in January 2017. In several exchanges, he made statements that are contradicted by documents or the recollections of others […].
One of the clearest instances of Trump Jr. not testifying accurately came when he was asked about Winston Wolkoff. As the lawsuit notes, during the organization of the inauguration, Winston Wolkoff, then a close friend of Melania Trump, had raised concerns with the president-elect, Ivanka Trump, and Gates about the prices the Trump Hotel was charging the inauguration committee for events to be held there. This included a written warning to Ivanka Trump and Gates that Trump’s hotel was trying to charge the committee twice the market rate for event space. (Gates ignored the warning, the lawsuit notes, and the committee struck a contract with the Trump Hotel for $1.03 million, an amount the lawsuit says was far above the hotel’s own pricing guidelines.)
During his deposition, Trump Jr. was asked about Winston Wolkoff: “Do you know her?” He replied, “I know of her. I think I’ve met her, but I don’t know her. If she was in this room I’m not sure I would recognize her.” He added, “I had no involvement with her.”
[…] Here Trump Jr. can be seen profusely praising Barrack and Winston Wolkoff for the “incredible” work they did. It seems he did know her. [Video is available at the link]
And documents obtained by Mother Jones shows there’s evidence that Trump Jr.’s claim of having “no involvement” with Winston Wolkoff was false. On January 17, 2017, an assistant for Ivanka Trump texted Winston Wolkoff and said that Trump Jr. wanted to speak to her, providing Winston Wolkoff with his cell number. […]
[…] According to the CDC, fully vaccinated people do not need to wear masks during small, outdoor gatherings even if there’s a mixture of vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
Dining at an outdoor restaurant with friends from multiple households is also considered a safe activity for vaccinated people to do without a mask, the agency said.
“The release of these new guidelines is a first step at helping fully vaccinated Americans resume what they had stopped doing because of the pandemic, at low risk to themselves, while being mindful of the potential risk of transmitting the virus to others,” the CDC said.
People are considered fully vaccinated by the CDC two weeks after the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines or two weeks after the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. […]
CDC emphasized that it’s ultimately up to individuals to consider their own personal situation and the risk to themselves, their family and community before venturing out without a mask.
Even vaccinated people should wear a mask when outdoors in a crowded public space, indoors in public spaces like a mall, or even a small indoor gathering with a mixture of vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
[…] the guidelines for unvaccinated people have not changed. The agency still recommends wearing a mask when outside in public spaces. […]
Wonkette: “Miami Private School Will Only Employ Staff Open To Spreading COVID-19 To Kids”
Conservatives have expressed hesitancy about the COVID-19 vaccine, as well as skepticism compounded with banana pants conspiracy theories. […]
You can’t reason with stupid, but you also can’t ignore it. Stupidity spreads more quickly than COVID-19, and it’s mutated to the point that idiots aren’t just refusing to get vaccinated themselves. They’re now making it harder for sensible people to do so.
[…] The Centner Academy, a private school in Miami’s Design District, sent a letter to its faculty and staff decreeing that if they took the COVID-19 vaccine, they’d have to stay away from students.
The school’s co-founder, Leila Centner, shared this news with supposedly a “very heavy heart” and, we assume, an empty head. Centner is a flake who’s shared anti-vaccine screeds on Facebook. She claims in the letter that “reports have surfaced recently of non-vaccinated people being negatively impacted by interacting with people who have been vaccinated.”
This is not in any way how vaccines work. […]
From the New York Times:
“Even among our own population, we have at least three women with menstrual cycles impacted after having spent time with a vaccinated person,” she wrote, repeating a false claim that vaccinated people can somehow pass the vaccine to others and thereby affect their reproductive systems. (They can do neither.)
Centner gave employees three options of dubious legality: 1) Inform the school if they’ve already been vaccinated, so they can be kept physically distanced from students (only teachers lousy with COVID-19 can apparently get up close and personal). 2) Let the school know if they get the vaccine before the end of the school year because Centner won’t allow “recently vaccinated people to be near our students until more information is known.” 3) Wait until the school year is over to get vaccinated.
Teachers who receive the vaccine during the summer can’t return to the Centner Academy at all until “clinical trials are completed.” The vaccines were already tested before their release to the general public. […]
Ms. Centner directed questions about the matter to her publicist, who said in a statement that the school’s top priority throughout the pandemic has been to keep students safe. The statement repeated false claims that vaccinated people “may be transmitting something from their bodies” leading to adverse reproductive issues among women.
“We are not 100 percent sure the Covid injections are safe and there are too many unknown variables for us to feel comfortable at this current time,” the statement said.
The Centner Academy has made continued employment contingent on refusing to take the vaccine. This seems like it would violate Florida state law, as Governor Ron DeSantis earlier this month signed an executive order banning “vaccine passports,” and Centner has implemented the Bizarro World version. […]
[…] Republican governors were happy to jeopardize public health to appease the MAGA dummies, but there’s no satisfying these people. Now they want to impose their vaccine resistance on the nation. […].
CARLSON: I agree with you completely. I would even actually up the analogy and say a vaccinated person, someone with the antibodies wearing a mask outside is like watching a grown man expose himself in public. “That’s disgusting, put it away please. We don’t do that here.”
The revelations about Madoff’s immense Ponzi scheme and how he pulled it off introduced many of us to the concept of affinity fraud: scams that prey upon people by exploiting a sense of shared identity. […]
A similar approach has long been an essential part of the Republican political strategy. As the party’s economic policies have become ever more elitist, ever more tilted toward the interests of the wealthy, it has sought to cover its tracks by running candidates who seem like regular guys you’d like to have a beer with.
The flip side of this strategy is a continual attempt by the G.O.P. to convince voters that Democrats, who represent a much more diverse set of voters than Republicans, aren’t people like them; call it disaffinity fraud.
The goal is to portray Democrats as woke feminist vegetarians who don’t share the values of Real Americans. Hence the right’s obsessive focus on “cancel culture” and Democratic women of color, and the continual assertions that the white male senior citizen who leads the party [Biden] is somehow a passive puppet.
Right-wing media are pushing this narrative nonstop. According to a Morning Consult poll last month, more Republicans said they’d heard “a lot” about the move to withdraw some Dr. Seuss books than said the same about Biden’s huge Covid-19 relief bill.
It doesn’t matter that Joe Biden isn’t actually trying to ban hamburgers or — to take another false claim right-wing pundits and politicians keep repeating — that he hasn’t “taken down” the border with Mexico. Republicans have pretty much given up even trying to make a case against Biden’s actual policies, let alone proposing serious policies themselves.
[…] the point is that Kudlow and others consider it OK to throw out wild claims about what Democrats are up to […]
Will the public go along? The Biden administration thinks not, betting it can overcome the power of affinity fraud with policies that offer real benefits to working Americans. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that this strategy will work.
Here’s a bit of nice news, now that Joe Biden is president and closing in on the end of his first 100 days in office, and Donald Trump is not president: The world hates America a little less!
Obviously the world is not going to be able to unsee the Trump era, nor is it going to ignore that America is currently a nation with one viable democratic (little “d”) political party and one authoritarian, conspiracy-theory-obsessed insurgency (big “R”). And the world got a really stupid education in our stupid, undemocratic system in 2016, which allowed the Electoral College to team up with Russia and the Trump campaign to create a “win” for a man who lost the vote of the people by almost three million. The world saw that. It was not impressed.
But things are getting a little better, because the world also saw in 2020 that the good guys still outnumber the bad guys, and enough of us came out to vote that, our fucked up system be damned, we resoundingly put a decent American president back in office.
[…] On average, people like America nine percent better than they did before Biden became president.
We assume Morning Consult wouldn’t lovingly make a nice chart like this if they didn’t want us to lovingly borrow it, so here, have a Morning Consult chart! [chart is available at the link]
As you can see, just about everybody likes us better than they did six months ago. Germany’s numbers have moved bigly, with now 46 percent of Germans definitely liking us, up from 24 percent. France went from 29 percent amour to 46 percent. Most European democracies feature similar shifts in public opinion of America.
Another big increase is in Japan, from 36 percent to 55 percent. Haha, that’s a majority! Thanks, Japan! (We have so much work to do, Jesus Christ.)
As for our neighbors, during the Trump Times, 26 percent of Canadians had a good opinion of America. Now it’s up to 40 percent. Still not a ringing endorsement. […]
Russia went from 40 percent “we guess you’re OK” to 43 percent “we guess you’re OK.” Which isn’t impressive, but is also only marginally less support than we get from Western Europe. […]
“Biden is widely considered as a more than welcome relief, especially with the return to the Paris Accord and his administration’s attempt to recover the transatlantic bond.” […]
“International opinion of the United States, in many nations, is genuinely contingent on American actions,” said Dr. David Farber, a University of Kansas professor who edited the book, “What They Think of Us,” on post-9/11 international perceptions of the United States. “People in many nations around the world are, I think, hopeful, that the election of Joe Biden marks a rejection of Trump’s ‘America First’ bullying and go-it-alone international policies and a return to a more collaborative, pro-democracy approach to international affairs.”
So this is nice. We got a Biden bump. A big one. […]
Lynna@319
Thanks, but you know, I made the mistake of reading the replies to the tweet, and the fuckers responding need to go fuck an electrical outlet.
Belgian police scrambled to seize Lagos amid widespread speculation the far-right extremist was poised to flee the country. A Greek government spokeswoman, Aristotelia Pelonia, said steps had been taken for the European arrest warrant to be issued “immediately” after he lost his immunity.
Writing moments after his arrest, Lagos tweeted: I am in a Belgian police van. The thieves, atheists and anti-Greeks are taking me to prison. I remain faithful to Christ and Greece.
A founding member [of golden dumbshites], Lagos sat on the group’s central council. He was its top official in the working-class districts of Athens where Golden Dawn hit squads reaped terror, targeting immigrants, leftwing trade unionists and other perceived enemies before it began to unravel following the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, a Greek rap artist.
The brazenness with which Lagos had evaded justice was source of embarrassment in both Athens and Brussels.
The Black man who died during an attempted arrest in North Carolina last week was shot five times, including once in the back of the head, his family said Tuesday. And less than hour after an independent autopsy concluded Andrew Brown Jr., 42, was killed by a bullet in the back of his head, the FBI announced it was opening a federal civil rights investigation into this police shooting.
President Biden, in an effort to pay for his ambitious economic agenda, is expected to propose giving the Internal Revenue Service an extra $80 billion and more authority over the next 10 years to help crack down on tax evasion by high-earners and large corporations, according to two people familiar with the plan.
Well, this funny … and it serves as a good schadenfreude moment:
[…] Imagine you are a person who has a job that’s say, 851.64 miles from your house, if you use roads, and are willing to travel through Canada to get there. By air it is 573.44 miles.
Imagine there is only one airline that takes that flight, which takes about an hour and a half.
Yes, you might have imagined that your job is in Alaska.
Do you think it would be an A) good idea or a B) bad idea, to really piss off the one airline that operates the flight that takes you to work?
Alaska state Senator Lora Reinbold (R-obviously) thought it was a good idea. And you know what she did? She was a fucking [dunderhead] about Alaska Airlines’ mask policy, which is in place because there’s this whole pandemic. […]
So Alaska Airlines said fine, you don’t get to fly with us. Maybe you could use a different airline, HAHA WE’RE THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN […]
“We have notified Senator Lora Reinbold that she is not permitted to fly with us for her continued refusal to comply with employee instruction regarding the current mask policy,” spokesman Tim Thompson said by email.
[…] The Anchorage Daily News explains that Reinbold “drove more than 700 miles from her home in Eagle River through a swath of Alaska and part of the Yukon to the Southeast town of Haines, where she caught a five-hour ferry ride to Juneau.” That’s right, she literally had to drive through Canada and then take a five-hour boat ride. It took 14 hours when all was said and done. All because she’s a stupid asshole.
Of course, like a cartoon dipshit, she’s pulling the whole “I MEANT to do that!” card, braggin’ about how fun ferries are and bellyaching about the “monopoly in air transport.” Also she ruined her husband’s birthday. […]
We’ll see how fun that 14-hour Yukon expedition and ferry ride is in a few weeks, depending on how long this MENSA-ready brain wizard is banned from Alaskan airspace.
Reinbold is also complaining on the internet, in a public post, about how Alaska Airlines gave her name to the media, we guess by confirming that her poor behavior resulted in this ban.
Here are some videos of Reinbold at the Juneau airport being an asshole to flight staff a few days back. This is what apparently got her cancel cultured from airplanes: [Video is available at the link.]
Back in November, Reinbold got on the internet and complained that airline staff are “mask bullies” who did “mask tyranny” to her. She said she got in trouble because a “scaredy cat Karen” (LOL heal thyself, asshole) decided to be a “Tattle tail” (really) who got her in big trouble. In another post, she gave hot tips for how to evade requirements for showing a recent COVID test, saying you should “sneak by if you are bold fir they cannot force you” [sic].
[…] Reinbold reportedly sent some flight staff a cake that said “I’m sorry if I offended you.”
Look at this stupid goddamn cake. [Photo is available at the link.]
[…]
The [Biden] administration estimates that giving the I.R.S. an additional $80 billion over a decade could raise at least $780 billion in new tax revenue, for a net gain of at least $700 billion. Mr. Biden plans to use money raised by the effort to help pay for the cost of his “American Families Plan,” which he will detail before addressing a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. It will be the largest single revenue raiser for the plan.
Commentary from Wonkette:
[…] Over the past decade, IRS enforcement declined precipitously as the agency was starved of resources and staff. […] millionaires in 2018 were 80 percent less likely to be audited than their wealthy peers in 2011. And indeed the top 1 percent of earners were audited at the same rate as those making less than $20,000, people who are likely to wind up owing no federal income tax at all (more or less).
Even Larry Summers (hardly a bleeding heart liberal) says Uncle Sam is leaving trillions of dollars on the table. […] scholars emphasized that concentrating on high earners would drastically improve the efficiency of American revenue collection, while maximizing the bang for the buck.
In 2013 the IRS estimated that an extra hour spent auditing someone who earns $200,000 annually generated only $650. An extra hour spent auditing someone who earns $5 million or more per year generated around $4,900. It is thus hard to explain from an efficiency perspective why in 2018 individuals who made $500,000 or more were audited at similar rates as earned income tax credit recipients whose top income is below $50,000.
[…] What exactly is the purpose of auditing someone who makes minimum wage? Why is the federal government expending the same amount of energy chasing down a waitress’s unreported tips as it does on a titan’s failure to report income?
That’s a trick question — it’s bad optics, and bad math, any way you slice it. The real issue is how Republicans are going to spin effective collection as woke socialism. Particularly since we’re not talking about raising taxes to soak the rich; this is money people owe, and they’ve just decided not to pay it. […] a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that high income earners underreport their income by as much as 20 percent on average.
[…] Let [Republicans] try to explain to Americans that we can’t have universal pre-school because the GOP opposes auditing millionaires. […]
Shit, no wonder they’d rather make up nonsense about Biden banning cheeseburgers.
“Wayne LaPierre has cultivated his image as an exemplar of American gun culture, but video of his clumsy marksmanship—and details regarding his Rodeo Drive shopping trips—tells another story.”
After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, told Americans agitating for new gun regulations, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Less than a year later, LaPierre and his wife, Susan, travelled to Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where they hoped to show N.R.A. members that they had the grit to take on a different adversary: African bush elephants, the largest land mammals on Earth. The trip was filmed by a crew from “Under Wild Skies,” an N.R.A.-sponsored television series that was meant to boost the organization’s profile among hunters—a key element of its donor base. But the program never aired, according to sources and records, because of concerns that it could turn into a public-relations fiasco.
The Trace and The New Yorker obtained a copy of the footage, which has been hidden from public view for eight years. It shows that when guides tracked down an elephant for LaPierre, the N.R.A. chief proved to be a poor marksman. After LaPierre’s first shot wounded the elephant, guides brought him a short distance from the animal, which was lying on its side, immobilized. Firing from point-blank range, LaPierre shot the animal three times in the wrong place. Finally, a guide had the host of “Under Wild Skies” fire the shot that killed the elephant. Later that day, Susan LaPierre showed herself to be a better shot than her husband. After guides tracked down an elephant for her, Susan killed it, cut off its tail, and held it in the air. “Victory!” she shouted, laughing. “That’s my elephant tail. Way cool.”
For three decades, LaPierre has led the N.R.A.’s fund-raising efforts by railing against out-of-touch “élites” and selling himself as an authentic champion of American self-reliance and the unfettered right to protect oneself with a gun. But the footage, as well as newly uncovered legal records, suggest that behind his carefully constructed Everyman image, LaPierre is a coddled executive who is clumsy with a firearm, and fearful of the violent political climate he has helped to create. […]
The footage of LaPierre in Botswana first shows him walking through the bush dressed in loose-fitting safari attire and an NRA Sports baseball cap. He is accompanied by several professional guides and his longtime adviser, Tony Makris, a top executive at the N.R.A.’s former public-relations firm, Ackerman McQueen, and the host of “Under Wild Skies.” The heat, at times, causes LaPierre to sweat. As he walks, his wire-framed glasses slide down his nose. After a guide spots an elephant standing behind a tree, LaPierre takes aim with a rifle. As LaPierre peers through the weapon’s scope, the guide repeatedly tells him to wait before firing. LaPierre is wearing earplugs, doesn’t hear the instructions, and pulls the trigger. The elephant drops. “Did we get him?” LaPierre asks.
The guide at first says yes, but then, as he approaches the elephant, it appears that the animal is still breathing. The guide brings LaPierre within a few strides of the elephant, which lays motionless on the ground. He tells LaPierre that another bullet is needed. “I’m going to show you where to shoot,” the guide says. “Listen, hold your rifle—I’m going to tell you when. Just hold it up.” The guide pushes the rifle’s barrel skyward as other men involved in the expedition move around in the distance. “I’m going to point for you where to shoot. Just waiting for these guys.”
The guide walks over to the elephant, crouches down, and points near the animal’s ear, telling LaPierre to shoot the elephant there. Makris directs LaPierre to shoot low, accounting for the rifle scope.
LaPierre fires and a confused expression comes over his face. Once again, he shoots the elephant in the wrong place. It’s still alive. The guide tells LaPierre to sit down and reminds him to reload, as he physically moves LaPierre into place. Now on one knee, the N.R.A. leader asks, “Same spot?” and then shoots again. The bullet misses the mark.
“I don’t think it’s quite done yet,” the guide says to Makris. “Do you want to do it for him?” The guide then says to LaPierre, “I’m not sure where you’re shooting.”
““Where are you telling me to shoot?” LaPierre responds, sounding frustrated. The guide again walks over to the elephant and points toward the ear. “Oh, O.K.,” LaPierre says. “Alright, I can shoot there.” He takes a third shot at point-blank range.
“Uh-uh,” the guide says, indicating that LaPierre has missed his mark again.
“No?” LaPierre asks.
As the guide chuckles, Makris asks, “Do you want me to do it?”
“Go ahead, finish him,” the guide says.
Makris cocks his rifle and shoots. “That’s it,” the guide declares, before turning to the N.R.A. chief to congratulate him.
Makris, ignoring his own role, praises LaPierre’s marksmanship, “You dropped him like no tomorrow.”
Later, LaPierre and the guide chat beside the dead elephant, a species that was declared endangered earlier this year. LaPierre acknowledges that his initial shot wasn’t “perfect.” The guide encourages him. “He went down, so that’s what counts.” Looking sheepish, LaPierre lets out a laugh and says, “Maybe I had a little luck.” […]
The article also provides details of Susan LaPierre shooting an elephant, as well as details of Wayne LaPierre spending obscene amounts of money on his clothes: “nearly three hundred thousand dollars in payments that Ackerman McQueen made to Ermenegildo Zegna, a luxury men’s fashion retailer on Rodeo Drive, in Beverly Hills, to dress LaPierre between 2004 and 2017.”
johnson catmansays
Lynna @327: That is HORRIFYING! It nearly brought me to tears thinking of the poor elephant. If only people like LaPierre could be turned out without weapons onto the African plains and have to fend for themselves, the animals could show them what nature is all about. I would include Don Jr. and Eric in that group because they are of the same mindset that the wild animals are only there for them to take pleasure in shooting. I apologize if this violates the blog policy against violence.
…As for where all this will or won’t lead, one of the worst aspects of British political life is that no piece of alleged wrongdoing is permitted to emerge without a load of the in-crowd rushing to the airwaves to explain loftily how the out-crowd don’t understand or care about it. Talking about whether people are really talking about something now accounts for about 80% of the commentator economy. In not so many words, these know-alls suggest the public are too thick or busy surviving for whatever it is to “cut through” – more in-group lingo – which probably doesn’t end up being the anti-elitist look they were going for.
The Conservatives are doing rather a lot of this at the moment. If Johnson did make the remark about allowing the bodies to pile up, opined his biographer Andrew Gimson, it will simply “strengthen his reputation as a man who talks as a man in the pub would”. Elsewhere, I very much enjoyed Thérèse Coffey’s haute-Ladybird book explanation of the flat saga for Sky News viewers this morning. As the work and pensions secretary put it: “These sorts of things often get tidied up in something called the annual accounts.” Something called the annual accounts … Okaaaaay, Thérèse, I THINK I get it? Just about? You’ve gone on something called a television to tell something called the public that something called money is normally featured in something called the annual accounts? Sorry, we’re probably being idiots – does that sound right? Also: let us know when the prime minister tidies up the accounts of how many something-called-kids he has.
Maybe the geniuses of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street will keep insulting the public’s intelligence. But you don’t have to be in with the in-crowd to have a stake in politics or a deep understanding of how you’re viewed. I keep reading that Dominic Cummings “knows where the bodies are buried”. Unfortunately, so do 127,000 families.
Brazil’s congress has launched a parliamentary inquiry into what critics call Jair Bolsonaro’s disastrous and potentially criminal response to a Covid pandemic that has killed nearly 400,000 Brazilians.
The politically charged investigation, which rivals of Brazil’s far-right president hope will torpedo his chances of re-election, will be conducted by 11 of the country’s 81 senators, including several of Bolsonaro’s fiercest opponents.
Officially, their task will be to scrutinise the government’s overall handling of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks on Earth. Brazil has suffered the world’s third-highest number of infections after the US and India and second-highest death toll, with at least 392,204 fatalities.
The inquiry, which Bolsonaro’s detractors call the “CPI da Morte” or “death committee”, will pursue multiple lines of inquiry. They include why the government promoted ineffective treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, why three health ministers were removed during the pandemic, and what caused January’s devastating healthcare collapse in the Amazon when hospitals ran out of oxygen and patients died of asphyxiation. Investigators will also examine the government’s failure to impose lockdowns or promote social distancing and the conduct of Bolsonaro’s former health minister Eduardo Pazuello, an army general who was appointed despite having no background in public health.
…
The most potentially damaging areas of investigation are likely to revolve around Brazil’s failure to acquire sufficient vaccines to protect its 212 million citizens and Bolsonaro’s allegedly calculated pursuit of herd immunity by letting Covid run wild. Critics claim that strategy cost many thousands of Brazilians their lives.
“The CPI is going to want to show that there was a deliberate push for herd immunity – and the ultimate manifestation of this herd immunity is the 400,000 deaths we have, which could well reach 600,000,” Fernandes said.
There were reports on Tuesday that Brazil’s health ministry had ignored at least 11 offers to supply vaccines, including a proposal for 70m Pfizer shots last August.
The inquiry catches Bolsonaro, a 66-year-old Trump-admiring populist, at arguably his lowest ebb since he took office in January 2019. Polls suggest rising anger at his pandemic response, although he retains the backing of perhaps a third of voters. Bolsonaro appears rattled by the political revival of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the charismatic former union leader who was president until 2011 and looks likely to challenge him for the presidency next year.
…
On Friday Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper notorious for his praise of Latin American autocrats, threatened to deploy the army if state governors tried to prevent citizens going to church or work with Covid lockdowns.
Cláudio Couto, a political scientist from the Getulio Vargas Foundation, said such braggadocio betrayed Bolsonaro’s irritation and anxiety over the investigation: “It’s the reaction of someone who is clearly shaken and understands the danger he’s in.”…
Here’s a link to the April 28 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
WHO boss urges people to donate $7 and fund a Covid vaccine
People across the world are being encouraged to donate $7 for a dose of coronavirus vaccine in a World Health Organization-led push to raise extra funds for the COVAX international Covid-19 vaccine-sharing programme.
Launching the “Go Give One” campaign on Wednesday, the WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it would allow anyone who wants to “to play their part in vaccinating the world with a simple donation” and, in time, help end the pandemic.
The WHO estimates that $7 would cover the cost of buying and delivering a vaccine dose for someone in a low income country.
The campaign also will seek matching funds from businesses whose employees and customers make contributions.
“The best way out of this pandemic is by getting vaccines to everyone, starting with health workers and the world*s most vulnerable people,” Tedros said in a statement.
The campaign is scheduled to launch country by country over the coming year, starting with the UK, the US, Israel and Kenya. It is backed by global charities and companies, with an online giving platform at: http://gogiveone.org.
The COVAX facility is aiming to secure 2 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses for lower-income countries by the end of 2021.
A DC Metropolitan Police officer who was brutally assaulted while defending the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection said Tuesday evening that it’s been difficult to watch some elected officials and others “whitewash” the episode in its aftermath.
Michael Fanone, who was stun-gunned several times and beaten with a flagpole during the attack, told CNN’s Don Lemon on “CNN Tonight” that “some of the terminology that was used, like ‘hugs and kisses,’ and ‘very fine people,’ is like very different from what I experienced and what my co-workers experienced on the 6th.”
Though Fanone didn’t name Donald Trump specifically, the former President falsely claimed in an interview with Fox News last month that the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol behaved properly with law enforcement and there was “zero threat” to the building.
Trump also claimed that some of the rioters “went in, and they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards.”
His false account conflicts with reams of video evidence of the violence that broke out on January 6, criminal charges filed against participants, law enforcement officials’ testimony, police officers’ accounts of the violence and lawmakers’ descriptions of the fear they experienced that day.
Fanone suffered a heart attack and a concussion during the insurrection and is now dealing with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I experienced the most brutal, savage hand-to-hand combat of my entire life,” he said Tuesday. “Let alone my policing career, which spans almost two decades. It was nothing that I had ever thought would be a part of my law enforcement career, nor was I prepared to experience.”
Federal prosecutors have filed charges against Thomas Sibick, who allegedly participated in the assault of Fanone. Prosecutors said Sibick was seen in police body-camera footage assaulting Fanone while he lay on the ground outside the Capitol during the riot.
During the brawl outside the Capitol, Sibick allegedly grabbed Fanone’s badge and radio, and he later posted a photo of himself holding a police shield on Facebook, court filings say.
“I want people to understand the significance of January 6,” Fanone said Tuesday. “I want people to understand that thousands of rioters came to the Capitol hell-bent on violence and destruction and murder.”
The World Health Organization said in its weekly epidemiological update that India accounted for 38% of the 5.7 million cases reported worldwide to it last week.
Early modelling showed that the B.1.617 variant of the virus detected in India had a higher growth rate than other variants in the country, suggesting increased transmissibility, it said.
Indians struggle to register online for vaccination appointments the government plans to offer to all adults over the age of 18 from 1 May, as the second wave of infections has seen at least 300,000 people test positive each day for the past week.
But the country, which is one of the world’s biggest producers of vaccines, does not yet have the stocks for an estimated 600 million people becoming eligible, on top of ongoing effort to inoculate the elderly and people with other medical conditions.
Some people who tried to register said they failed, Reuters reports, while some people with appointments were told there were no vaccines available.
I was surprised looking at the CDC site to see that, in terms of per capita deaths over the past week, Florida is in the same category as Michigan.
These are the states with the highest death rate over the past week: Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia.
The New England states are leading the way in vaccinations, and the northeastern states generally are doing very well at vaccinating people.
johnson catmansays
re SC @335: WHY would you be surprised? It is FLORIDA! Home of Florida-man and Florida-woman, and the place where schools want to prohibit vaccinated people from interacting with students.
A reporter at Rupert Murdoch’s New York tabloid has resigned after she claimed she was forced to write an incorrect front page story about migrants and Kamala Harris.
The New York Post published an article on 23 April headlined “Kam on in”, which claimed migrant children were being given welcome packs that contained copies of the US vice-president’s 2019 children’s picture book, Superheroes Are Everywhere. A follow-up article claimed thousands of copies had been distributed.
In reality, officials said a single copy of the book had been donated by a member of the public as part of a call for presents to give to unaccompanied child migrants.
Despite this, the story was followed up by several rightwing media outlets including Fox News. One of the cable channel’s reporters even asked the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, about the supposed mass distribution of Harris’s book by the government, while Republican politicians suggested it was part of a plot to direct government funds into Harris’s pocket.
Laura Italiano, a long-serving New York Post reporter, was credited with writing the article. On Tuesday, she announced she was quitting at the tabloid.
“Today I handed in my resignation to my editors at the New York Post,” she said. “The Kamala Harris story – an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against – was my breaking point.”…
johnson catman @ #336, I wasn’t surprised about Florida so much as that I hadn’t heard about it. So much of the focus has been on Michigan and there’s little attention paid to Florida (or Georgia, for that matter). They don’t have a high case rate, but their high positivity rate suggests a good number of cases are being missed. The thing about some of these states is that their vaccination rates are also relatively low; so while I’d expect states like New Jersey to turn the corner soon, I’m more troubled about Florida (particularly with the variants), Georgia, Nevada,… I don’t think they’ll have a big spike, but a lot of people can die if they plateau at that rate.
Yesterday Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed SB 1457 (full text) placing additional limits on abortion in the state. The new law bans abortions sought because of a genetic abnormality of the fetus, except in medical emergencies. It prohibits performance of abortions in facilities run by or located on the property of public educational institutions, except when necessary to save the life of the mother. It prohibits the use of public funds for research that involves fetal cells. It prohibits mail delivery of abortion-inducing drugs. It requires that bodily remains from a surgical abortion be disposed of by cremation or burial, and gives the mother the right to determine the method to be used….
The coronavirus situation is improving in France, prime minister Jean Castex said on Wednesday.
As we reported earlier, president Emmanuel Macron will outline on Friday how restrictions will be progressively relaxed.
Reuters reports that the French government also plans to replace from the current state of health emergency – which gives officials greater power to impose tough measures to contain the spread of the virus – with a “transition regime” from 2 June that will run until 31 October.
This would allow the government to react swiftly if infections and hospitalisations were to climb again as France exits its lockdown, Castex told reporters following a cabinet meeting.
“The epidemic situation continues to improve at a regular pace. Virus circulation remains high but is on a real downward trend even though its impact on hospitalisation is limited, notably on the number of people in intensive care units,” Castex said.
He said weekly new cases numbers were declining and the R rate that measures the spread of the virus was now at 0.89, meaning that, on average, every 100 people infected will infect 89 other people, indicating another downward trend.
France started its third national lockdown at the end of March.
Macron is hoping the lockdown and an accelerated vaccination campaign will improve France’s Covid-19 figures which would then allow certain businesses and leisure activities – such as outdoors dining – to reopen in mid May.
Indoor venues will not re-open before June, and only in regions where the Covid-19 figures have dropped sufficiently to allow this.
French schools reopened on Monday after a three-week closure.
johnson catman @328, so much for LaPierre’s idea of “a good guy with a gun.”
In good news, tomorrow will mark two weeks since my second vaccination shot. I should be good now … well as good as it gets. We may all need boosters eventually.
SC @330, news of Bolsonaro’s actions, inactions and inane statements always reminds me of Trump. Sorry to see there’s more than one “Trump” in the world. One is too many.
Doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine sent to Slovakia in March will have to be kept in storage for at least another month, after Moscow asked for some doses to be sent back for testing, Slovakia’s health ministry said on Wednesday.
Reuters reports:
Slovakia received the 200,000 doses at the beginning of last month, part of what was intended to be a deal for 2 million doses that caused a political storm which led the prime minister to resign.
The vaccines have so far sat unused, with Slovakia’s drug agency SUKL refusing to endorse the product, citing a lack of data.
Russia has yet to win approval from the EU regulator, the European Medicines Agency, for Sputnik V. So far, Hungary is the only EU country to have begun inoculations with Sputnik V without waiting for EMA approval.
Slovakia’s Health Ministry said a sample of 600 doses had been sent back to Russia for further tests at Moscow’s request, and that vaccinations with Sputnik V would not begin for at least a month, until those tests were complete. It did not say what sort of tests the Russians planned to carry out.
“The Russians asked us for this opportunity and we granted it,” Health Minister Vladimir Lengvarsky told a news conference shown online. “They want to check the batches.”
Slovakia’s purchase of Sputnik V caused a political storm, as then-prime minister Igor Matovic had bought the vaccine without telling his coalition partners. Matovic was forced to resign but returned to the new cabinet as finance minister.
Following the Slovak regulator’s refusal to endorse the vaccine, Matovic asked Hungary for additional testing. Russia asked Slovakia to return the 200,000 doses, which it declined to do.
Lengvarsky said on Wednesday he wanted Slovak experts to be satisfied with the vaccine’s safety before it is used in the country.
Slovakia has vaccinated nearly a fifth of its population with at least one dose, so far using only vaccines approved by the EMA.
When Obama raised the minimum wage for contractors, Republicans were apoplectic. When Biden did the same thing, the GOP reaction was … different.
On Jan. 28, 2014, the White House let the public know that then-President Barack Obama would sign an executive order, raising the minimum wage for federal contractors. It was later that same day when the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), condemning the Democrat’s move.
Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts…. The president’s taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology.
The Texas Republican was apparently so outraged over Obama’s minimum-wage move that the same op-ed lamented the Democrat’s “imperial presidency.”
A day later, on Jan. 29, 2014, a variety of other Republicans joined the offensive. The Hill published this report:
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Republicans would not sit idly by as Obama takes unilateral actions like raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. “We’re going to watch very closely, because there’s a Constitution that we all take an oath to, including him, and following the Constitution is the basis for House Republicans,” Boehner said.
This came to mind seven years later because President Joe Biden took a nearly identical step yesterday, issuing a new executive order that raised the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 an hour.
The response from congressional Republicans was … effectively non-existent.
In fairness, there are more than 250 GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and it’s possible that some of them were displeased with the president’s new policy. But I made a good-faith effort to uncover any kind of complaint about Biden’s minimum-wage move, and I couldn’t find a thing. [Amazing.]
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), for example, ignored the news — no press releases and no tweets — and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was similarly uninterested.
[…] it’s possible GOP officials realize that minimum-wage increases are popular, so they don’t see much of an upside to launching an attack on this front.
Maybe Republicans are distracted by trivia such as fake stories about non-existent meat bans. Perhaps GOP leaders realize that the fierce response to Obama’s 2014 order amounted to nothing, so there’s no point in doing it again. Maybe the whole “imperial presidency” nonsense lost its salience for Republicans when Donald Trump furiously tried to circumvent Congress on a wide range of issues.
Or perhaps there’s some unexplained difference between Barack Obama and Joe Biden that causes GOP officials to respond differently, even in response to the same policy efforts.
blf @344, ha! I had a fatigue reaction to the second shot. I slept for most of two days … and didn’t feel refreshed. I postulate that Bill Gates was busy futzing with my operating system then. Russian trolls became extremely bored with me long ago. They departed for more interesting or manipulatable landscapes, like Trump’s lizard brain.
In other news:
President Joe Biden recently wrapped up a White House discussion by asking Republicans to craft a counterproposal to the American Jobs Plan by mid-May. GOP lawmakers easily beat that deadline, unveiling a blueprint last week.
Though the Republican plan was obviously too small, it did include priorities such as investments in broadband and water-system overhauls, suggesting the GOP was prepared to move past its initial position that only investments in things such as bridges and highways counted as real, actual infrastructure.
It was not immediately clear whether the White House would treat the Republican pitch as a joke or as a serious starting point for negotiations. […] The fact that the talks exist is notable, though the report added that the negotiations “remain preliminary,” and “both sides are far from reaching any substantial deal.”
[…] GOP lawmakers continue to balk at raising any tax on anyone by any amount.
What’s more, even if the president were to work out some kind of deal with a handful of Senate Republicans, there’s little to suggest that 10 GOP senators — the number necessary to overcome a filibuster — would be on board with an agreement.
[…] an important detail is coming into sharper focus. The price tag on the White House infrastructure plan is $2.3 trillion. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) initially told CNBC an infrastructure package between $600 billion and $800 billion would be in a “sweet spot” for a larger compromise.
Soon after, when Republicans presented their alternative to the American Jobs Plan, the party had moved further away from Biden’s offer, not closer to it, unveiling a $568 billion package.
Except, even that wasn’t quite right. As Catherine Rampell explained yesterday:
[I]n reality, Republicans are offering nothing remotely close to a serious or reasonable counter-bid, and they know it. This is obvious from their use of an accounting gimmick that inflates their “compromise” and makes it look more similar in size to Biden’s plan. Once you un-cook the books and use apples-to-apples budgeting rules to compare the proposals, you’ll realize that what the GOP has offered is mere pennies on the dollar of what Biden has requested. Specifically, Republicans have offered to tender 8 cents of new spending for every $1 Biden wants. Even less, in some cases.
[…] a separate Washington Post analysis explained, “[T]he Senate GOP would propose spending an additional $189 billion, not $568 billion.” [Sneaky, slimy, unethical Republicans]
It’s easy to celebrate bipartisan negotiations and the idea of a breakthrough compromise on a key national priority, but as things stand, to see the Republican position as serious and credible is to make a mistake.
The miserable infrastructure plan offered up by Republicans has fallen completely flat and President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan is extremely popular. […] the infrastructure plan enjoys more support than Biden’s COVID-19 relief plan—the plan that mailed most Americans a check. What’s more, despite Republican claims that Biden’s COVID plans would soon be forgotten and that his own popularity would “wither,” neither has happened. The infrastructure plan looks like it is building on that momentum, generating genuine excitement across a nation ready to emerge from a stagnant year and recover […]
So, naturally, West Virginia road bump Joe Manchin has decided that he needs to get in the way of this plan and replace it with something else. As The Hill reports, Manchin is now negotiating exclusively with Republicans for a plan that is much smaller, doesn’t pay for itself, and leaves out most of the things that made Biden’s plan a real win with the public. […]
Manchin is insisting to his colleagues that he’s seeking a good old-fashioned bipartisan solution—just like those that existed in the fantasy realms of his imagination. […] Right now, President Biden’s plans are more popular than even President Biden. If Democrats move quickly, they can reshape the nation in a way that makes the biggest changes in a generation.
The plan that Manchin is determined to bring down singlehandedly contains not only roads and bridges, but assistance for elder care, veteran’s health care, and repairs to public schools. There’s not one item on the list that doesn’t enjoy a thumb’s up from the public. That includes funding the projects through an increase in the tax on corporations.
But the importance of passing the plan quickly doesn’t just affect the odds of getting most of what Biden proposed over the finish line and out there generating actual jobs and services. The faster the infrastructure plan is passed, and the more likely the other items on Biden’s list are to follow its path through Congress.
[…] momentum may be even more important when it comes to hitting—and exceeding—the targets that Biden set last week when he hosted a virtual climate summit featuring 40 world leaders.
[…] Despite the reports from fake news Fox, Biden’s plan for America’s energy future doesn’t call for cutting back to one hamburger a month. Now, as Reuters reports, it’s beginning to look as if Biden may be able to beat the promises he made in his energy plan. With support from utilities, unions, and groups across the policy spectrum, the White House is now hoping to produce 80% of U.S. power from carbon-free sources by 2030. That target could lead to another just five years later—a completely carbon-free power grid by 2035.
[…] Right now, America’s power grid is just 40% carbon-free energy. But these utilities believe that the nation can get to 80% in this decade “at no additional cost to ratepayers in every region because the cost of renewables and batteries have come down so much.” […] the change would result in expected savings of $1.7 trillion in the cost of health care and remediating environmental damage caused by mining, drilling, and burning coal or natural gas. It would also help save 93,000 lives lost to premature death.
A plan that is achievable, won’t raise electrical rates, is supported by major utilities, and more than pays for itself just in the costs it saves—all while preventing tens of thousands of premature deaths? Yes, please. Let’s have that.
It’s not just the public and utilities that are onboard with change, the nation’s largest coal mining union is ready to step away from coal and support a program that takes them to 21st century jobs. […] All the players are onboard.
[…] if it’s going to happen, it needs to happen quickly. While Manchin is worried about pleasing Republicans and protecting corporations that currently pay zero taxes, momentum is bleeding away. And if this opportunity is lost, not just for America, but specifically for West Virginia, it may literally never come again.
Update on that Republican recount of votes in Arizona:
A judge hearing a challenge to voter privacy policies during the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate’s recount of 2.1 million 2020 election ballots in the county that includes metro Phoenix said Tuesday he is not convinced voter secrecy is being upheld.
The comment from Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin came at the end of a lengthy hearing where he also declined to extend a previous judge’s order that auditors hired by the Senate comply with state voter privacy laws — at least until he hears more at a hearing on Wednesday.
“I will share with you all, I am not yet persuaded that there has been a showing that the rights of the voters in Maricopa County are being protected,” Martin said. “And I think we will touch on this tomorrow when we address the policies and procedures and whether or not they can be withheld from public view.”
The Arizona Democratic Party and the lone Democrat on the GOP-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors sued the state Senate and the contractor overseeing the election audit, Cyber Ninjas, Thursday. They want the recount of the 2020 presidential election won by President Joe Biden halted unless they get guarantees that voter privacy and ballot secrecy is ensured.
[…] Cyber Ninjas is a Florida firm with no election experience run by Doug Logan, who has shared unfounded conspiracy theories claiming the official 2020 presidential election results are illegitimate. His attorney is seeking to have its policies and procedures for protecting voter privacy kept secret, arguing that they are trade secrets. [bullshit]
[The judge] also said he plans to consider whether to again order the recount halted or renew the previous judge’s orders on ballot secrecy rules.
He started Tuesday’s hearing by rejecting the Senate lawyers’ arguments that they are not required to follow state elections law outlining how voters’ constitutional rights are protected. [LOL]
“The Arizona Senate has the constitutional authority to conduct the audit as part of its legislative function,” Martin said. “However, the manner in which that audit is conducted must be balanced against the constitutional rights of the voters in Maricopa County, including the rights to secrecy and confidentiality of information.”
Oregon’s governor announced Wednesday that more than a dozen state counties would move into an “extreme risk” category that involves new countywide restrictions on local businesses and public life in an effort to blunt surging COVID-19 case rates.
[…] “If we don’t act now, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and other health care providers in Oregon will be stretched to their limits treating severe cases of COVID-19,” Gov. Kate Brown (D) said in the news release. “Today’s announcement will save lives and help stop COVID-19 hospitalizations from spiking even higher. With new COVID-19 variants widespread in so many of our communities, it will take all of us working together to bring this back under control.”
[…] “The fastest way to lift health and safety restrictions is for Oregonians to get vaccinated as quickly as possible and follow the safety measures we know stop this virus from spreading. I recognize the burden these restrictions place on Oregon businesses and working families,” she continued. “My goal is to lift these restrictions as soon as it is safely possible, and keep Oregon on the path for lifting most health and safety requirements by the end of June so we can fully reopen our economy.” […]
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert, early Wednesday shot down recent comments from Joe Rogan after the popular [rightwing] podcast host suggested young, health Americans do not need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Speaking to NBC’s “Today,” Fauci called Rogan’s comments “incorrect.”
“You’re talking about yourself in a vacuum,” Fauci said of the podcast host. “You’re worried about yourself getting infected and the likelihood that you’re not going to get any symptoms. But you can get infected, and will get infected, if you put yourself at risk.”
Fauci also said there are still cases of asymptomatic people infected with the coronavirus “inadvertently and innocently” spreading the virus.
“So if you want to only worry about yourself and not society, […]” Fauci said. “But if you’re saying to yourself, even if I get infected, I could do damage to somebody else even if I have no symptoms at all, and that’s the reason why you’ve got to be careful and get vaccinated.”
When asked directly if young, healthy people should get vaccinated, Fauci replied: “Absolutely.”
“Are you healthy?” Rogan said during a recent episode of his podcast. “Are you a healthy person? Like, look, don’t do anything stupid, but you should take care of yourself. You should — if you’re a healthy person, and you’re exercising all the time, and you’re young, and you’re eating well, like, I don’t think you need to worry about this.”
Rogan also suggested that COVID-19 is not “statistically dangerous for children.”
“I can tell you as someone who has — both my children got the virus. It was nothing,” he continued. “I mean, I hate to say that if someone’s children died from this. I’m very sorry that that happened. I’m not in any way diminishing that. But I’m saying the personal experience that my children had with COVID was nothing.”
Wonkette: “Colorado Cops Share Laughs Over Video Of Them Beating Up 73-Year-Old Woman”
Last June, Karen Garner, a 73-year-old woman with dementia, allegedly walked out of a Colorado Walmart with $13 worth of unpaid merchandise. […] this was immediately reported to the cops. Austin Hopp of the Loveland Police Department found this threat to society wandering home, picking flowers by the side of the road. The confused Garner didn’t immediately comply with Hopp, so she had to pay the price for her defiance.
“I don’t think you want to play it this way,” Hopp said, before eventually tackling the frightened old woman to the ground, handcuffing her and slamming her hard against his cruiser. Maybe it’s possible she looked like a spry 63-year-old woman with dementia. Maybe Hopp thought she had “superhuman strength.” That’s a common cop go-to.
Garner’s family claims that her arm was fractured, her wrist sprained, and her shoulder dislocated during the arrest. Officer Daria Jalali assisted Hopp with the beat down. At no point did the officers demonstrate any compassion or even the slightest awareness that Garner might have a mental impairment. (She also reportedly suffers from sensory aphasia, which impacts her ability to communicate or understand why uniformed thugs are attacking her.) Jalali angrily yelled, “Quit!” as Garner cried that she just wants to go home. She was only two blocks away.
This was all caught on the body camera footage, which was released this month. You need to watch the whole thing, no matter how difficult. This is what your tax-dollars fund. [Video is available at the link.]
“Are you finished?” Hopp said like he was a bad-ass action star taking out a terrorist. Garner kept repeating, through her pain, “I’m going home.” Jalali barked, “Stand up! We’re not going to hold you.” [The elderly woman collapsed in pain after the cop dislocated her shoulder. You can hear the pop on the video.]
A concerned citizen stopped to ask if the cops “have to use so much aggression,” and Hopp snapped, like a gangster caught disposing of a body, “What are you doing? Get out of here! This is not your business.” But agents of the state abusing their authority is the public’s business […]
Jalali was asked if she’s okay (because she’s the one to worry about) and after examining her hands, Officer Lady Macbeth declared, “Little bloody, little muddy. That’s how it works.” This was Garner’s blood.
The Loveland police didn’t take Garner to the hospital or call her family. Instead, they let her sit in a cell, handcuffed, for six hours, while she cried out in pain.
Here’s where things get really sick. Garner’s attorney, Sarah Schielke, released surveillance footage that shows Hopp, Jalali, and Sergeant Phil Metzler watching this literal gag reel and laughing like ghouls. [Video available at the link.]
From The Daily Beast:
“Ready for the pop?” Hopp said to Jalali and other officers while they gathered to watch the footage of the violent arrest. “What popped?” another officer asked. “I think it was her shoulder,” Hopp replied.
Hopp can be heard saying, “I can’t believe I threw a 73-year-old on the ground,” while Jalali comments: “It’s like live TV… Body-cams are my favorite thing to watch, I could watch livestream body-cams all day.” The third officer can be heard suggesting “The Body-Cam Show” as a title for a proposed television special, and says to Hopp, “Impressive, buddy.”
These people are sociopaths. They claimed the arrest “went great” and mocked Garner as “ancient,” “senile,” and “flexible.”
“We crushed it,” one of the officers says.
Garner’s family filed a federal lawsuit against the officers involved earlier this month. The suit alleges that they knew Garner was hurt but didn’t give her medical care for the six hours she was in custody. Hopp, Jalali, Phil Metzler and community service officer Tyler Blackett are currently on administrative leave pending an investigation into how gross they are.
In case you were worried about the struggling Walmart corporation, the staff apparently retrieved the valuable soda and laundry detergent from Garner before she’d even left the parking lot. She tried to pay but they wouldn’t let her. This was all over $13.
Schielke, speaking for everyone with a human soul, said: “This is utterly disgusting. These videos cannot be unseen or unheard. I am sorry to have to share them with the public. This will be traumatic and deeply upsetting for everyone to see.”
Police departments across the country are either failing to screen out violent monsters who get off on hurting people or police training deliberately turns cops into monsters. That’s the question we have to answer before any meaningful reforms can occur.
Lynna@346, “blf@344, ha! I had a fatigue reaction to the second shot. I slept for most of two days”.
Classic symptom of teh Hugo Chavez voting-machine malware. Please don’t pass by any polling stations during elections, as your mere presence will cause most ballots to mysteriously not be marked for teh robber barons and their lackeys & referendumsorders, greatly upsetting hair furor, Putin, and the stock “market”.
Florida’s Republican-led state Senate advanced a new voter-suppression bill this week, which “includes limits on casting ballots by mail and drop boxes.” The GOP-led state House in Florida has not yet approved a related measure, but voting-rights advocates fear new and unnecessary voting restrictions in the state are increasingly inevitable.
More voter-restriction news:
In case the litigation targeting Georgia’s new voting restrictions weren’t already enough, a sixth federal lawsuit was filed yesterday. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, “The suit by the Concerned Black Clergy of Metropolitan Atlanta, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and several other organizations alleges that drop box restrictions, earlier absentee ballot deadlines, quicker runoffs, long lines and ID requirements will have a disproportionate impact on Black voters and other historically disenfranchised communities.”
Hair Furor spouted some nonsense concerning Liz Cheney. Trump issued a statement:
Liz Cheney is polling sooo low in Wyoming, and has sooo little support, even from the Wyoming Republican Party, that she is looking for a way out of her Congressional race.
Trump is so full of bullshit that I’m surprised he can still walk.
After months of being stymied by Trump-appointed leadership at the Justice Department, federal investigators executed a search warrant at Rudy Giuliani’s New York apartment Wednesday, the New York Times reported, as part of an investigation into his Ukraine-related conduct.
[…] electronic devices were seized in the search of the apartment.
[…] Investigators have been probing Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine, and how those dealings related to his efforts to oust the U.S. ambassador there. Giuliani’s Ukraine meddling was the focus of the 2019 impeachment proceedings against President Trump, which examined how Trump and his allies, including the former New York mayor, pressured Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.
The investigation has been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. They and their FBI counterparts first began considering seeking the search warrant last summer, according to the Times. But they were unable to get approval for the warrant from the leadership in the Justice Department’s D.C. headquarters, the Times said, in part because of the election that was approaching. (The DOJ has a policy avoiding public investigatory actions in the weeks leading up to the election that could affect the election). Those prosecutors tried to get the okay for the warrant again after the election, according to the Times, and again faced objections from leadership, who pointed to Trump’s ongoing challenges to the election results.
The Justice Department cleared the way for the search warrant after the Senate confirmed Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Uh, oh. They’re going after someone’s laptop…and it ain’t Hunter Biden’s. I love the comeuppance.
——————-
I would say that by this time Rudy has gotten rid of the evidence but then I realize who I am talking about. This clown isn’t even smart enough not to get scammed by Russian spies and SBC.
——————
Right. He’s no doubt uploaded it to the cloud where it’s safe from the authorities.
—————-
Does this mean that Giuliani’s about to hold another press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping?
———————–
Giuliani has to go down as one of the stupidest public figures in world history. He could have cashed in on portraying himself as the 9/11 hero for the rest of his life. The fact that he is a former prosecutor makes it even harder to believe that he tried to pull off all this crazy BS
——————–
Wasn’t he the Grand Poobah of Technology in the last administration?
I’m sure he was really careful about everything.
—————————-
He’s as crafty as Mike Lindell when it comes to technology.
[…]
A number of serving defence force members are believed to have signed the letter published last week in the right-wing Valeurs Actuelles magazine, which warned that laxist policies would result in chaos requiring the intervention of our comrades on active duty in a perilous mission of protection of our civilizational values.
The hour is grave, France is in peril, the retired generals wrote, adding that failure to act against the suburban hordes — a reference to residents of the mainly immigrant areas that ring French cities [Banlieues] — and other unnamed groups who scorn our country will lead to civil war and deaths in the thousands.
The government and left-wing parties strongly condemned the letter, which was published on the 60th anniversary of a failed coup d’etat by generals opposed to France granting independence to Algeria.
It’s probably worth nothing the language (as quoted in translation) is very reminiscent of teh lepenazis. And the senior Le Pen (Jean-Marie), was a French paratrooper(?) during Algeria’s battle for independence, where he is accused of participating in torture. I have no idea if Le Pen is known to have been, or even accused to have been, involved in the attemped coup d’etat. That coup attempt was part of a series of events which resulted in de Gaulle returned to the Presidency, and the beginning of the Fifth Republic, which is still France’s political governing system.
[…]
The letter comes as candidates begin jockeying for position on immigration, security and the spread of radical Islam in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election.
An Ifop poll published in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper on Sunday showed security and the fight against terrorism among voters’ top priorities […]
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whom polls show likely to face off against Emmanuel Macron next year in a re-run of the 2017 race, told the retired generals she shared their sentiments and invited them to back her campaign.
I invite you to join us in taking part in the coming battle, which is the battle of France, she wrote in a response to the letter published in Valeurs Actuelles.
Le Pen was widely criticized by her opponents on both the left and the right for her overtures to the soldiers behind what the left-wing daily Liberation described as a call to sedition.
On Tuesday, she told France Info that while she shared the soldiers’ diagnosis of a country afflicted by lawless areas, crime, self-hatred and our leaders’ rejection of patriotism she agreed that these problems can only be solved by politics.
[…]
The public foray by the generals, most of whom are close to far-right circles according to France Info, comes in the midst of a heated debate in France about racism and colonialism led by young, non-white French activists.
The generals accused them of whipping up hatred between communities with their rhetoric and support for tearing down statues of French figures from colonial times.
[…]
The lead signatory of the letter in Valeurs Actuelles, Christian Piquemal, is a former Foreign Legion commander who was arrested for taking part in an anti-migrant demonstration in 2016.
[…]
The unfounded claims [about limiting meat consumption and forcing all beers to be plant-based …] have dealt a hefty blow to Republicans’ latest efforts to present themselves as committed to taking on the climate crisis.
A week prior to the White House climate summit, Republicans released what they framed as a sensible, market-based alternative to Biden’s climate plan. […]
Critics [of teh thugs’s plan] say the proposals are wildly inadequate to avoid disastrous global heating, which scientists say must involve sharply cutting emissions this decade before reaching net zero by the middle of the century. In lieu of any mention of phasing out fossil fuels — the primary cause of the climate crisis — the Republican plan [sic] instead calls for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, an oil project halted by Biden.
[…]
Neither [House thug führer Kevin] McCarthy’s office nor Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), a conservative group that created a website for the plan [sic], responded to questions on what emissions reductions the assorted proposals would achieve.
Last week, Heather Reams, executive director of CRES, accused Biden of radically impacting our already battered economy by promising to cut US emissions in half by the end of the decade.
[…]
“These guys need to get a new PR agency, it’s like they are talking about climate change in the 1990s,” said [visiting professor of the environment and society at Brown University, Robert] Brulle. “It’s just recycled arguments from the past or, on the meat thing, just outright lies. These arguments may have worked in the past to delay climate action but it’s so exhausted now. It’s different day, same old shit.”
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, said it was pleasing to see most Republicans shift away from outright denial of climate science but that a “new climate war” was opening up involving “reassuring sounding but empty rhetoric” to stymie regulations to reduce emissions.
“They have the same intent as outright denial — to keep us addicted to fossil fuels as long as possible so that fossil fuel interests, who now have such great influence over the Republican party, can continue to make trillions of dollar profits, at our collective expense,” Mann said.
[…]
“The GOP is an extraordinary outlier in the political spectrum around the world, they have backed themselves into a political and rhetorical cul de sac,” said Brulle.
“They are stuck in a really bad position that no other major political party in the world is in. Climate obstructionism is now a core part of Republican creed, much like opposition to abortion and gun control. As long as they remain competitive in elections I don’t see that changing.”
[…] The Times’ report, which has been confirmed by NBC News, added how “extraordinary” it is see federal prosecutors execute a search warrant against a former president’s lawyer.
The same article went on to note, “To obtain a search warrant, investigators need to persuade a judge they have sufficient reason to believe that a crime was committed and that the search would turn up evidence of the crime.”
[…] It’s also worth noting for context that the New York Times reported last December that Donald Trump had discussed “pre-emptive pardons” for a variety of figures in his immediate orbit, including Giuliani. The article added that the then-outgoing president had talked to Giuliani about pardoning him as recently as late November.
We now know, of course, that there was no such pardon — though as investigators entered Giuliani’s apartment, it’s hard not to wonder how much he regrets not having one.
Postscript: Just as I was hitting the publish button on this, the Times updated its report to note that investigators also executed a warrant on the Republican lawyer’s office, too.
Update: The Wall Street Journal reported that Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, confirmed the execution of the search warrant.
The same article added, “Mr. Costello said authorities, who arrived at Mr. Giuliani’s apartment at 6 a.m., seized Mr. Giuliani’s electronic devices. He said the search warrant describes the investigation as an investigation into a possible violation of foreign lobbying rules. Mr. Costello said the warrant sought communications between Mr. Giuliani and individuals including John Solomon, a columnist who was in communication with Mr. Giuliani about his effort to push for investigations of Joe Biden in Ukraine.”
The Washington Post reports that President Joe Biden will make a push for an immigration overhaul during his first address to Congress on Wednesday night [tonight], and will call for passage of his “ambitious” immigration bill introduced this past February that puts millions of undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship. Under that legislation, certain immigrants, like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and farmworkers, would be eligible for accelerated paths.
Biden will also reportedly “use his address to a joint session of Congress to push for more targeted legislation” that has already passed the House with support from Republicans, The Post said. The Dream and Promise Act, which protects DACA recipients and temporary status holders, passed with votes from nine Republicans. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act passed with support from 30 Republicans. Both bills are vastly popular among the public. Of course, the top Senate Republican is already throwing cold water on any movement.
NBC News reporter Sahil Kapur tweeted that the Senate Republican minority leader dusted off the same old talking point that Republicans have used for years now as an excuse to block progress on humane legislation: we need to secure the border first. […]
[…] “Speaker Pelosi has already indicated her support for including immigration legislation in legislative packages advanced through budget reconciliation given the clear ‘case about the budget implications of immigration.’”
Republicans will likely claim they really are trying to find solutions, and point to a bill from Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema targeting the border and that does nothing to address the 11 million undocumented overall. Plus, history has already told us that when Cornyn’s involved in immigration talks in particular, it is not a serious effort. Read about the “Cornyn con” to find out why.
But back to the president. “To make his sell, especially to skeptical Republicans, Biden will outline how immigrants play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy and competitive economy, the official said,” The Post continued. A new report this week from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) and Joint Economic Committee (JEC) continued to shine an important light not only on how immigrants and their entrepreneurial spirit have long been key drivers in our economy, but how they’ll also play critical roles in the nation’s economic recovery […]
[…] An immigration overhaul would in fact be an economic boon not just to immigrant families, but all families everywhere. “Immigration reform would increase U.S. GDP by at least 0.84 percent,” the American Immigration Council said in 2010. “This would translate into at least a $1.5 trillion cumulative increase in GDP over 10 years, which includes approximately $1.2 trillion in consumption and $256 billion in investment.” But even more important than that, an immigration overhaul would bring permanent relief to millions of undocumented immigrants. It’s long overdue. They need certainty. The time is now.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed into law on Wednesday a bill that ends religious exemptions for school vaccinations.
“Governor Ned Lamont today announced that he has signed into law legislation that updates Connecticut’s immunization requirements for students attending preK-12 schools, day care centers, and institutions of higher education by removing exemptions that are not medical,” the governor’s office said in a press release.
The coronavirus vaccine is not included in the list of mandatory vaccines.
The bill requires those in public and nonpublic schools to be vaccinated against “diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, rubella, [hemophilus] haemophilus influenzae type B and any other vaccine required by the schedule for active immunization.”
The law will take effect for the 2022-2023 school year.
Students who are already in K-12 can still claim religious exemptions under the law, but those entering the school system after the law takes effect will not be able to.
“This legislation is needed to protect our kids against serious illnesses that have been well-controlled for many decades, such as measles, tuberculosis, and whooping cough, but have reemerged. In recent years, the number of children in our state who have not received routine vaccinations has been steadily increasing, which has been mirrored by significant growth in preventable diseases across the nation,” Lamont said. […]
Coronavirus vaccines have not yet been approved for children under the age of 16.
Wonkette: “Supreme Court Looks Ready To Ditch ALL Gun Laws, Won’t That Be Fun?”
This week, the Supreme Court decided to hear a gun case, granting cert in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett.
It’s bad.
It’s very bad.
At the very least, this case is almost certainly going to make it easier for people to carry guns with them in public. And at the worst, it could be used to gut any number of gun control laws across the country.
Concealed carry for everyone!
New York and seven other states make people show “good cause” to get a concealed carry permit. More than one-quarter of the US population lives in those states.
Concealed carry laws were some of the first firearms restrictions in the country and the New York law at issue in this case has been on the books since 1913. If you want to carry a gun in public for something like going to a shooting range, you can get a limited license to carry it specifically for that purpose. But to get an unrestricted concealed carry license, you have to “show a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.”
Now, the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association and two men who were denied concealed carry permits are arguing that “law-abiding citizens” have a god-given Second Amendment right to take their guns wherever they please — and the Supreme Court appears poised to agree with them. The crazies are represented by former George W. Bush solicitor general and go-to Republican lawyer Paul Clement.
The fact that the Court took the case at all indicates which way it’s going to rule. The Second Circuit upheld the lower court’s dismissal of Corlett and courts that get to pick and choose which cases to hear don’t tend to agree to hear something just to say, “Great job! Well done!”
There’s also the little matter of our current Court …
[…] The text of the Second Amendment reads in full, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
A lot of people don’t realize this, but the first Supreme Court case to recognize an individual right to bear arms wasn’t decided until 2008. And, spoiler alert, it wasn’t good.
Until recently, the controlling Supreme Court case was US v Miller, which held that the Second Amendment was a collective right, not an individual right, and looked at whether the law in question had “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.”
In DC v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to own guns. The Scalia-drafted opinion, while touting itself as “textualist,” almost entirely ignored the part about the “well regulated militia.” Striking down DC’s handgun ban, the Court ruled that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to own and use guns.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who served on the Court for 35 years, called Heller “the Supreme Court’s worst decision of [his] tenure.” And, in a memoir written after his retirement, Justice Stevens said that Anthony Kennedy, then the Court’s swing vote, was able to get “some important changes” made to Scalia’s original draft of the Heller opinion.
Justice Kennedy’s hedging is what likely resulted in the passages in Heller that offered moderation, like the part about how “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms[,]” and other “presumptively lawful regulatory measures[.]”
Our new Court is unlikely to have any such qualms about obliterating our nation’s gun control laws. At least two of Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees have already written about how much they love guns. In 2011, on the DC Circuit, Justice Kegstand [Kavanaugh] dissented in another case styled Heller v. DC, arguing that DC’s gun registration requirement and ban on semi-automatic assault rifles were unconstitutional. And on the Seventh Circuit in 2019, Amy Bony Carrot declared in her Kanter v. Barr dissent that it was unconstitutional to prevent felons from owning guns — at least without “proving the felon is violent.” These dissents put them to the right of even Scalia’s opinion in Heller.
Yup, it’s all bad.
I’m sorry. I have no glimmer of hope to offer with this one. Unless Democrats magically grow spines and do a little court-packing, there is no way to save us from the horrors this Supreme Court is going to make a reality.
The Heller and McDonald opinions, while terrible, at least included some caveats. With no voice of moderation left on the right side of the SCOTUS bench, there may be no end to what formerly “presumptively lawful” gun control laws this Court obliterates. […]
“Former President Donald J. Trump continues to make forceful public comments about the ‘stolen election,’ chastising individuals who did not reject the supposedly illegitimate results that put the current administration in place,” Judge Emmet Sullivan wrote in a recent opinion ordering the detention of Jan. 6 defendant Jack Whitton, charged with one of the most brutal assaults that day.
“[S]uch comments reflect the continued threat posed by individuals like Mr. Whitton, who has demonstrated that he is willing and able to engage in extreme and terrifying levels of violence against law enforcement with a chilling disregard for the rule of law … seemingly based on mistaken beliefs about the illegitimacy of the current administration.”
Prosecutors have also begun citing and echoing Sullivan’s rationale. The latest incarnation came Monday, when assistant U.S. attorney Jessica Arco noted in court that Trump “as recently as today is still talking about this ‘rigged’ election.” Arco was arguing for the pretrial detention of Nathaniel DeGrave, a Trump loyalist charged with assaulting a police officer outside the Senate chamber.
“The defendant is of course entitled to his political preferences,” Arco said. “But given his prior acts of traveling across the country with weapons to ‘stop the steal’ and interfering with the peaceful transition of power on behalf of his idol, and his idol’s continued inflammatory rhetoric about a stolen election, the defendant continues to pose a … threat to the community.”
Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump remains a threat, even in his diminished state. Trump continues to inspire violence.
Kind of ironic that the result will be more January 6 insurrectionists kept in jail while they await trial.
Yet another white supremacist link to Trump: “The Organizer of a Series of Trump Boat Rallies Shouted “White Power” While Celebrating at the First”
Dion Cini has links to prominent Trump backers—and once went to sea with Trump’s son Eric.
Unless you’re from a certain slice of Florida—the Gulf Coast side near Tampa—you’ve probably never heard of Gasparilla, the city’s annual and well-attended pirate-themed bacchanal. Unless you’re both from Tampa and are fully into the weeds of post-Trump presidency MAGA minutiae, you also have probably have never heard of Trumparilla—a Gasparilla for people who have decided the 2020 election was a sham and that Donald J. Trump ought to still be president.
Though the actual Gasparilla was canceled this year because of the coronavirus, MAGA troll Dion Cini and Cliff Gephart held their pro-Trump flotilla earlier this month in Tampa, which dozens of boaters attended. The entrepreneurs have promised to take the event to a city near you, with follow-ups planned for San Diego, Cleveland, and Las Vegas, according to Trumparilla’s Facebook page.
The MAGA movement has long attracted notable racist supporters and people who readily spout racist things. Cini is one of them. A video shared with Mother Jones by @the_cancel_mob, an anonymous Twitter user who tracks the American right, shows Cini loudly shouting “White power!” during a land-side evening gathering at the Tampa Trumparilla. [Video is available at the link.]
Cini’s invocation of white supremacy came as he was being recognized from the stage by Gephart for his efforts to organize the event. “I wanna thank Dion, he’s worked his ass off to make this happen. He has struggled with venue after venue,” Gephart said. In response, Cini raised his hands up and rotated to acknowledge applause while shouting “white power,” and flashing an okay hand symbol which, in certain contexts, is shorthand for white power. Prominent Trump ally Roger Stone stands within an arm’s length.
When asked for comment, Cini responded to Mother Jones through email and Twitter direct messages. He wrote that his yelling white power was “a troll,” and claimed “several black people” were in attendance. “Of course [you] won’t show that,” he wrote. Cini also told Mother Jones that his wife is Jewish and sent a picture of himself with a Black person at an event. It’s unclear if the picture was taken at Trumparilla or elsewhere.
“White power or white lives matter is just my fishhook and there’s always a taker,” Cini wrote. “I do the White Lives Matter on multiple occasions, because as a Latino, I think that it’s only it’s fair that white people get their voices heard.” Cini, who clarified that he is actually of Italian descent, explained that he sometimes claims to be Latino, because of the Latin language’s Roman history.
In some ways, Cini is a fringe figure in MAGA world. He has a modest social media following of around 3,000 Twitter followers and has mostly shown up in local news stories for repeatedly brandishing Trump flags where they are unwelcome—like an ice rink in Central Park, Disney World, aboard a kayak on the Hudson River, and so forth.
Despite such hijinks, Cini maintains ties to prominent people in Trump world, like Stone, who was the star of a VIP event at Trumparilla. Photos obtained by Bend the Arc: Jewish Action and Jews Against White Nationalism show Cini hanging out on vessels during 2020 Trump campaign boat parades with Trump sons Eric and Don Jr., as well as former deputy assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka. According to those Jewish activist groups, Cini has also appeared in photographs with neo-Nazi event organizer Jovi Val and neo-Confederate Billy Sessions.
Cini says the picture showing him with Jovi was taken “before he decided to go extreme,” and that he didn’t know Sessions and “never saw him again.” When pressed on if he disagrees with Jovi Val or Sessions, Cini wrote, “Of course I’ve reamed Jovi’s ass many times. But again, he’s not a nazi, he an extreme troller.”
Cini didn’t explain why he thought Val was only trolling. Val has been disowned by the Proud Boys, the neo-fascist group, for organizing a rally supporting far-right individuals who attended 2017’s Unite The Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, according to New York magazine. One of those individuals included James Fields, the man who drove a car into a group of protestors, killing Heather Heyer.
Cini is just one of many Trump backers who have continued to construct events praising him since he lost the White House—a role that helps elucidate just who is taking leadership in sustaining the post-presidency MAGA movement.
Wonkette: “Louisiana State Rep: Slavery Wasn’t ‘Good,’ But Should Schools Be So Negative About It?”
A Louisiana lawmaker offered some very compelling testimony yesterday against his own bill to banish “critical race theory” and other “divisive concepts” from all levels of public education in the state, including colleges and universities. Way to go, guy! During a four-hour meeting of the House Education Committee, state Rep. Ray Garofalo, who chairs the committee, was trying to explain that when teaching about history, schools must stick only to the “facts,” and present all sides of anything controversial. Like for instance, the history of chattel slavery in the United States.
“If you are having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery: the good, the bad, the ugly,” Garofalo tried to explain. But he was immediately interrupted by state Rep. Stephanie Hilferty, a fellow Republican, who pointed out the rather obvious point that “There’s no good to slavery, though.” That prompted everyone in the hearing room to erupt in laughter, as Garofalo tried to backpedal:
Well, then whatever the case may be … You’re right. You’re right. I didn’t mean to imply that and I don’t believe that and I know that that’s the case. But I’m using that “good, bad, and ugly” as a generic way of saying that you can teach any facts, any factually based anything, regardless.
Hilferty then walked Garofalo through why “just the facts” is just plain antithetical to how history works, because the very process of doing history is a matter of interpretation. And damn it, if you say “divisive concepts” shouldn’t be taught, well then you’re making the teaching of real history impossible. [Video is available at the link]
Also, a great big shout-out to Louisiana’s Bayou Brief for observing that Hilferty came really
close to unraveling the central mistake of Garofalo’s entire premise: His fundamental failure to recognize the ways in which our understanding of history is both constructed by and contingent on who we empower with its retelling.
That’s the very flaw in the entire GOP project to suppress “critical race theory” in general, and the “1619 Project” in particular: They pretend that there’s only a single, “factual” way to teach US history (that is, “patriotically”) and emphasizing any other perspective, like making slavery and the experience of African Americans central to understanding the USA, is somehow “political.” As if an exclusive emphasis on the Founders, without calling too much attention to the detail that most held human beings in bondage, were merely objective, apolitical “fact.”
In the effort to “depoliticize” education, it’s worth looking at all the assumptions Garofalo’s bill, Louisiana HB 564, would enshrine as facts. Garofalo’s personal spin on history and truth would require that teachers and school districts be legally punished for teaching any of the following, in the bill’s cartoonish version of what critical race theory supposedly is.
Mind you, nobody actually favors teaching that anyone has “negative or positive characteristics that inhere in the individual’s DNA” except possibly Andrew Sullivan. That, however, is what the bill claims is the upshot of pointing out that American history is full of white supremacy, because it might make some white people feel bad. It would outlaw teaching:
– That either the United States of America or the state of Louisiana is fundamentally, institutionally, or systemically racist or sexist.
[…] – That an individual should be discriminated against, favored, or receive differential treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race or sex.
– That an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility or is to be held accountable for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.
– That any individual should feel or be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological or emotional distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.
– That the concept of meritocracy or traits such as a strong work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by a particular race or sex to oppress another race or sex.
– That the concepts of capitalism, free markets, or working for a private party in exchange for wages are racist and sexist or oppress a given race or sex.
Similar language appears in other GOP bills, like a recently passed Iowa law prohibiting virtually all the same “divisive concepts” in diversity training.
Most of this, of course, is bafflegab [yep] that not only caricatures what actually gets taught in schools, but also dresses up white grievance in the language of “equality,” right down to prohibiting any emphasis on “racial equity and gender equity” (bad and discriminatory!) instead of “racial equality and gender equality” (good and fair). Somehow, the bill didn’t manage to slip in any gripes about “reverse racism.”
Ultimately, the Education Committee didn’t buy Garofalo’s arguments, such as they were; it voted 7 to 7 on moving the bill forward, which neither killed it nor advanced it to the full state House. Garofalo withdrew the bill and said he’d work on it a bit more. […]
Wow. Boris Johnson lost ir during the prime minister questioning time in parliament.
Eventually he flew in a rage, which is unwise when questioned by a former prosecutor….
[…]
Since it was unveiled at a hospitality industry fair last month, the world’s first robotic paellero has been causing a bit of a stir. Set the programme, load the sofrito, rice, stock and seafood, leave it alone and the robotic arm, which is hooked up to a computerised stove, will do the rest.
[…]
“[… Y]ou could hook it up to a fryer so it fries potatoes, or you could attach a grill so it can cook burgers, or an oven so it can cook pizza or croissants,” [inventor(?)] Enrique Lillo said. […]
Mr Lillo, having now started a “war” with Spanish paella purists, seems intent on opening new battlecookings with France (croissants) and Italians (pizza). USAians (burgers) and teh British (chips (fried pototoes)) will probably be disgusted the robot-cooked stodge possibly isn’t as stodgy, greasy, and inedible as usual — and is furrin / European — presumably all a part of Biden’s “no meat” diktat and caused by brexit. Dr Seuss is probably behind it, “Green Brussel Sprouts and Oily Robot Parts” !
[…]
The far-right group Britain First has been duped into protesting outside hotels which do not contain asylum seekers after being supplied with a fake list including the Dorchester on Park Lane, London, and a pub hotel owned by an associate of Dominic Cummings.
Supporters of Britain First last year entered hotels used by the Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers and started banging on bedroom doors and antagonising the asylum seekers there.
They are now resuming these hotel visits and put out an appeal to members of the public to give them the names of hotels where they knew asylum seekers were being accommodated.
Pro-migrant groups responded in droves. About 600 people contacted Britain First provided the names of decoy hotels.
[…]
Police were called to one Nottingham hotel on 17 April when supporters of Britain First entered and went from hotel room to hotel room demanding to know if the occupants of the rooms were asylum seekers and which countries they had come from.
Hope Not Hate and Migration Exchange say that along with an increase in visits to hotels, some of the far right are filming on an almost daily basis at Dover where small boats arrive containing migrants. They report that the far-right figure Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has recently turned his attention to hotels believed to be accommodating asylum seekers.
[…]
The invaded hotels, and guests at those hotels, are probably not quite as amused.
[Labour leader] Keir Starmer strips away Johnson’s gloss to reveal a narcissistic teenager in full meltdown
Not even a trained arsonist could have imagined such spectacular pyrotechnics. This was Dominic Cummings’s wildest dreams come true. Revenge didn’t come sweeter than Boris Johnson having a breakdown during prime minister’s questions. And not just a minor hissy-fit, but a full-on disintegration of the psyche.
This was the Boris that the prime minister goes a long way to conceal. Normally we get to see the careful construct of the happy-go-lucky joker, but here he was stripped back to something much uglier: the primal rage of the narcissistic teenager who has been caught out and has no place left to hide. An anger made worse by the knowledge that, as so often, most of the damage was self-inflicted.
[…]
Starmer started with the bodies. Had the prime minister said piling up the bodies or something like that after a row about the second lockdown last October? Absolutely not, Johnson insisted. And anyone who said different was a liar. Fine, replied Keir. He was only checking because several people appeared to contradict him and it would be important at some stage to determine who was telling the truth. After all, it was an offence to mislead parliament.
There are reports Johnson said something to the effect he’d rather have bodies pile up than a second pandemic lockdown.
Johnson had the PM’s flat (the famous “No 10 Downing Street”) refurbished, for an unknown total paid-for in an unknown manner, albeit which he’s been noticeably evasive. Questioning about that is when he went volcanic:
[…]
The Labour leader then moved on to the decorations. [… W]ho had paid the initial £56,000 invoice for the new soft furnishings?
Now Boris started ranting. I’ve paid the bill personally, he said. And it hurt. It was bad enough that he had been forced to take a major pay cut to be prime minister — how could anyone get by on £150K per year? — but it had never occurred to him that he would expected to pay for his own living arrangements. Parting with cash was for the little people. And if he had ever suspected for a minute he would have to fork out for a £10K sofa, he would never have let Carrie order one from the posh catalogue.
Most people he cross-examined generally just said “no comment” at this point, Starmer observed, before having another go. This time he tried multiple choice. Had it been the taxpayer, the Conservative party, a Tory donor or the prime minister who had paid the initial invoice? Again Boris avoided the question by repeating that he had ended up by paying and he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. He might find that the Electoral Commission isn’t so easily fobbed off with him answering a different question from the one asked.
By now Johnson was in full rant, oblivious to everything but his own fury and a burning sense of injustice at being asked to pay for anything himself. Labour had spent £500K on doing up Downing Street, he said, so anything he had spent was chicken feed. He already seemed to have forgotten the £2.6m he spent on a brand-new media suite that he’s now too frightened to use in case people ask him any further awkward questions.
Apparently impressed by the media briefing room in the White House, Johnson ordered one of his own (along with some additional lackeys), possibly envisioning daily(?) Biden / Psaki-style briefings. (One of the new lackeys was a press secetrary type of position (I’m unsure if it was ever filled).) After it was built, then — or so the story goes (as I recall) — it occurred to him that if there were frequent briefings, he and his staff might get some pointed questions from the notoriously persistent press. Oops! So the briefing room has never(? rarely?) been used.
[…] This had shown the real Boris. The nasty, self-serving Boris. The Boris for whom ordinary rules do not apply. The Boris he went out of his way to keep hidden.
It’s not just that Democrats are reversing Trump’s dangerous methane rule, it’s also how they’re doing it.
Last fall, the Trump administration completed work on a misguided priority. To help combat the climate crisis, the Obama administration created new requirements on oil and gas companies, forcing them to monitor and address methane emissions, and as Donald Trump’s term neared its end, his Republican team dramatically weakened the safeguards, delivering “a gift to many beleaguered oil and gas companies.”
From an environmental perspective, the move was a disaster. […]
The Senate voted on Wednesday to effectively reinstate an Obama-era regulation designed to clamp down on emissions of methane, a powerful, climate-warming pollutant that will have to be controlled to meet President Biden’s ambitious climate change promises.
The resolution cleared the Senate on a 52-42 vote, and now heads to the Democratic-led House, where passage appears to be a foregone conclusion. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it soon after, which will have the effect of re-imposing Obama-era safeguards on the relevant industries.
And while this is obviously good news for those who care about the climate crisis, one of the things that made yesterday’s developments in the Senate so notable was not just what members did, but also how they did it.
There’s a relatively obscure law called the Congressional Review Act of 1996, which allows policymakers to overturn regulations finalized toward the end of the previous administration. For years, the CRA was hardly used at all: In 2001, George W. Bush and lawmakers undid a Clinton-era rule on workplace ergonomics, which was hardly front-page news.
But in 2017, after more than two decades in which the Congressional Review Act was seen as little more than an afterthought, Donald Trump and Republicans started swinging the CRA like a bat to crush 14 policies approved in the waning months of Barack Obama’s second term.
In fact, remember the controversy over GOP lawmakers, in Trump’s first term, making it easier for the mentally impaired to buy guns? That was one of the 14 safeguards Republicans scrapped by using the Congressional Review Act.
Now, Democrats are using the same tool for the first time, focusing first on methane emissions, and thanks to the way the law is structured, there’s no 60-vote threshold to worry about: CRA resolutions cannot be filibustered.
Senate Democrats are likely to use the Congressional Review Act again, but the window is closing. The New York Times’ report added, “Democrats plan to use the procedure just once more in the coming weeks, before their window to do so expires in late May, with a vote to repeal a labor rule that had made it easier for employers to deny worker claims of employment discrimination.”
The Trump-era campaign to move the courts to the right was as relentless as it was effective. The opposite push is now well underway.
[…] Republicans in the Trump era prioritized judicial nominees above almost every other consideration. […] the former president managed to appoint about 230 judges to the federal courts. […]
The White House’s task of turning the tide is well underway. NBC News reported overnight on Biden’s latest picks for the federal bench, which further reflect the president’s intention to pick jurists who are both qualified and diverse.
The nominees include David Estudillo, now presiding judge of Grant County Superior Court in Ephrata, Washington, for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington…. Biden’s other two picks are Tana Lin, also for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, and Christine O’Hearn, for the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. Lin, who would be the first Asian American judge for that district.
As White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain has explained, modern presidents haven’t generally made much of an effort to put forward nominees for the federal bench this early in their terms. At the 100-day marks, for example, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton hadn’t yet nominated anyone for the judiciary. Donald Trump, meanwhile, sent two judicial nominees in his first 100 days, while Back Obama had three.
As of this morning — Biden’s 100th day in office — the current president has sent 14 judicial nominees to the Senate for consideration, which appears to be a record by a wide margin.
[…] Most of the focus on Wednesday was on two nominees to federal appeals courts — usually the last stop for major cases before the Supreme Court — Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, chosen for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Candace Jackson-Akiwumi for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago. Both are Black. Judge Jackson, currently a district court judge in Washington, is considered a potential future Supreme Court nominee by Democrats, and Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi would be the only Black judge on the Seventh Circuit.
As of this morning, there are 73 vacancies on the federal bench — 78 if we include the Court of International Trade and the Court of Federal Claims — and that number is likely to be around 100 later this year as sitting judges retire and take senior status. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, has said filling every vacancy by the end of 2022 is his party’s “very prudent goal.”
That’s an ambitious target, which will require a concerted effort on the part of Democratic leaders, but so far, the White House is doing its part by taking big steps in the right direction.
Postscript: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted via Twitter last month, “Just a reminder that the Democrats are one random, awful sudden illness or death away from losing their majority and [Supreme Court Justice Stephen] Breyer should probably consider that.”
I like to reemphasize Chris’ tweet from time to time because I think about the underlying point every day.
Last month, Mitch McConnell scrambled to deny Democrats credit for an improving economy. We were reminded today why he made such an effort.
[…] CNBC reported this morning:
Economic activity boomed to start 2021, as widespread vaccinations and more fuel from government spending helped get the U.S. closer to where it was before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced in the U.S. economy, jumped 6.4% for the first three months of the year on an annualized basis.
[…] I can appreciate the fact that a number like 6.4%, in isolation, may not have much meaning for much of the public, but it’s evidence of robust economic growth. Indeed, Americans haven’t seen GDP growth this strong in the first quarter since 1984 […]
[…] It was exactly one year ago today when Jared Kushner told a national television audience, “The hope is by July, the country is really rocking again.” […] Kushner clearly had the wrong July in mind.
Also this morning, the latest report from the Labor Department showed initial unemployment claims improving, for the third consecutive week, to the lowest level since the start of the pandemic.
Last month, as President Joe Biden signed the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) scrambled to set public expectations. “The American people are going to see an American comeback this year,” the GOP leader said, “but it won’t be because of this liberal bill.”
McConnell added, “We’re about to have a boom. And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion.”
It was foolish rhetoric for a variety of reasons, and as the economy picks up steam in response to the American Relief Plan, McConnell’s efforts to deny Democrats credit suddenly looks a little worse.
Postscript: It’s worth clarifying that today’s 6.4% quarterly figure refers to growth at an annualized rate, which is the standard way of reporting the data. In other words, if we saw 12 months of economic activity like what we saw in the fourth quarter, the economy would grow by roughly 6.4%.
You may also see some focus today on a different figure: 1.6%, which reflects the change between the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year.
The concerned father of a transgender child in Arkansas was arrested after his testimony in opposition to a bill targeting transgender youths went approximately 30 seconds over his allotted time.
Chris Attig, 49, appeared before lawmakers in the Arkansas statehouse on March 9 to read prepared remarks in opposition to HB1570, also known as the Arkansas Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act (SAFE Act), which bans gender-affirming medications or procedures for transgender minors….
Attig, who is a licensed attorney and legal advocate for veterans, then said the bill was unconstitutional in light of the landmark Supreme Court decision Bostock v. Clayton County.
“The Supreme Court has already found that transgender Americans are protected from discrimination,” Attig said….
After exactly two minutes, Rep. Jack Ladyman (R) interrupted Attig, saying, “Your time is up,” then cut his microphone. Attig appears to continue speaking but is no longer audible in the video. Ten seconds later, Ladyman asks the State Capitol Police to “remove him from the table.”…
…. Attig was then jailed for several hours and hit with a charge of disorderly conduct….
It’s likely McCarthy knows Biden isn’t going after anyone’s hamburgers.
[…]
[O]n Fox News, McCarthy repeated the now-debunked falsehood that Biden’s climate plan seeks to limit the amount of red meat that Americans can eat. “It just continues, he wants control of your life,” McCarthy told prime-time personality Sean Hannity. “He’s going to control how much meat you can eat. Can you imagine that?”
Is that a rhetorical question?
[…] There is no such plan. Even a Fox News host conceded on the air that it is “not the case” that Biden’s climate plan is targeting meat consumption.
That was on Monday. Two days later, Kevin McCarthy — a man who expects to be elevated to the Speaker’s office next year — nevertheless pushed the bogus idea that rascally Joe Biden intends to “control how much meat” Americans can eat.
It’s possible that the House Republican leader is simply confused. Maybe he saw some false headlines last weekend and doesn’t realize that the “controversy” over the White House’s agenda is entirely made up. Or put another way, maybe McCarthy just isn’t keeping up with current events as well he should.
But it’s possible that the GOP leader knows full well that Biden isn’t going after anyone’s hamburgers, but he peddled the line anyway because it suits his party’s political agenda.
For every pundit who wonders why the president doesn’t reach out more to the House Republican leadership for bipartisan policy negotiations, McCarthy’s comments offer a fresh reminder as to why such talks wouldn’t go well.
Biden wants to govern to defend democracy and discredit authoritarianism.
[…] Plenty of observers characterized Biden’s remarks as a “laundry list” of progressive priorities, and it’s easy to understand why: the president’s policy to-do list isn’t short, and he implored Congress to follow his lead on a wide range of issues. From climate to health care, voting rights to immigration, child care to gun violence, education to tax policy, elder care to criminal justice issues, Biden intends to overhaul the public sector’s role in American public life.
The president presented these ideas, not as a bold transformation, but as common-sense measures that are obviously necessary to make a material difference in American families’ lives. […]
But last night’s address, with varying degrees of subtlety, included a principled, overarching concern that took on a greater significance than any one policy priority: Biden doesn’t just want to champion the needs of the middle class, he also feels the need to champion democracy itself.
After four years of an American president whose overt hostility toward democracy tested the nation’s foundations, and against a backdrop in which authoritarian powers seek to undermine the appeal of self-governance around the globe, Biden repeatedly used his address to defend our system of government — and urging members of Congress to help him prove democracy’s merits.
Plenty of politicians talk about “getting tough” with China, but the president last night framed the international competition in a unique way:
“When [Chinese President Xi Jinping] called congratulate, we had a two-hour discussion. He’s deadly earnest on becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others, autocrats, think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies, because it takes too long to get consensus.”
To that end, Biden spent a surprising amount of his speech championing democracy […]
Describing the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, for example, the president described the riot as “desecrating our democracy,” before adding, “The insurrection was an existential crisis, a test of whether our democracy could survive.”
In his next breath, Biden presented the challenge:
“The question of whether our democracy will long endure is both ancient and urgent, as old as our republic, still vital today? Can our democracy deliver on its promise that all of us — created equal in the image of God — have a chance to lead lives of dignity, respect and possibility? Can our democracy deliver on the most pressing needs of our people? Can our democracy overcome the lies, anger, hate and fears that have pulled us apart? America’s adversaries, the autocrats of the world, are betting we can’t. […] They believe we are too full of anger and division and rage. They look at the images of the mob that assaulted this Capitol as proof that the sun is setting on American democracy. But they are wrong. […] But we have to prove them wrong. We have to prove democracy still works, that our government still works, and we can deliver for our people.”
He went to say, “The comment I hear most of all from [world leaders]? They say: ‘We see America’s back, but for how long? But for how long?’ My fellow Americans, we have to show not just that we’re back, but that we’re back to stay, and that we aren’t going to go alone.”
As the president’s address neared its conclusion, Biden said “the central challenge” of our is time is to prove that “democracy is durable and strong. Autocrats will not win the future. We will.”
Biden doesn’t just want to govern for the sake of progressive priorities; he wants to govern to discredit authoritarianism. It’s a message no modern American president has delivered, because no modern American president has had to.
tom @372, I don’t think being arrested will discourage Chris Attig. That kind of over-reaction from conservatives will only strengthen his resolve.
In other news, this analysis is from Josh Marshall:
Tim Scott had a tough job following Biden and it showed. His speech seemed premised on Biden delivering a confrontational and aggressive speech that he didn’t give. Scott seemed to argue that Biden had brought to an end some glorious era of national unity. This is absurd. I don’t think it was effective.
I agree. From his first line, when Scott said that Biden seems like a nice guy, I thought, “Something is wrong with Scott.”
Also, Scott told several lies during his response, including a blatant lie about Georgia’s new voter-restriction laws. It was as if a bunch of white supremacist Republicans had invaded Tim Scott’s body so that it would look like a black man was repeating all of their noxious talking points.
Rudy Giuliani posted a rambling statement from his lawyer Wednesday night calling the search warrants executed on the former mayor’s home and apartment a “disturbing example of complete disregard for the attorney-client privilege protected by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.” The statement claimed that the Justice Department was “running roughshod over the constitutional rights” of anyone who represented former President Trump.
“It is outrageous that the Trump Derangement Syndrome has gone so far that hatred has driven this unjustified and unethical attack on the United States Attorney and Mayor who did more to reduce crime than virtually any other in American history,” the statement said.
The statement — replete with misspellings and curious capitalization choices — reiterated the lawyer Robert Costello’s claim that they had offered to speak to federal prosecutors.
“Twice the offer was rejected by the SDNY by stating that while they were willing to listen to anything Mr. Costello had to say, they would not tell Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Costello, the subject matter they wanted him to address,” the statement said.
It also took several swipes at the Hunter Biden, a target of Giuliani’s Ukraine smear campaign.
“Of course, I’m sure you will not be surprised that the FBI left behind the only electronics that contain evidence of crimes, the Hunter Biden hard drives,” the statement said.
Giuliani’s Ukraine-linked conduct is, in fact, what the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office — which Giuliani once led — is investigating. Per Giuliani’s statement, the search warrants that were executed Wednesday listed only one potential crime, an alleged violation of foreign lobbying registration law. The statement called this allegation “entirely untrue.”
Federal investigators searched Giuliani’s New York apartment and office Wednesday morning — “(at dawn)” the statement said — in what was a dramatic escalation of a many-months-long investigation into the personal attorney to former President Trump.
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office had reportedly twice last year been stymied by the political leadership at DOJ’s headquarters in its efforts to obtain the warrant.
“What changed?” the statement said. “A new Administration — a new Attorney General. Were they ever informed of Mr. Costello’s offer? Was the Judge who signed the search warrant ever informed of Mr. Costello’s offer? We think not.”
you kind of have to assume from the get-go that any lawyer representing Trump is involved in a criminal enterprise and trying to engage in or cover up multiple federal and state crimes.
——————-
“Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot. He does these things — he just loves this country, and they raid his apartment,” Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo in an interview. “It’s, like, so unfair and such a double — it’s like a double standard like I don’t think anybody’s ever seen before.”
———————-
bat sh!t crazy lawyers may be the undoing of the GQP
———————
They’ve lived so long in a right-wing media bubble so airtight that they can’t even tell anymore when their argle-bargle bullshit isn’t playing.
——————-
Sounds like Rudy has hired a clone of himself as a lawyer.
——————–
As an indication of how serious this investigation is, they served search warrants to not one, but two attorneys in Trump’s orbit yesterday. While I’m not a lawyer, I understand DoJ thinks long and hard before doing such things, but needless to point out, a judge obviously agreed with the investigators …
———————–
So Rudy picked an attorney, Costello, who is as loony and illiterate as he is?
———————-
Attorney client privilege does not apply to coconspirators or criminal acts.
————————
Yes, Costello was Steve Bannon’s lawyer (for his “We Built The Wall” swindle.)
[…] Republicans got their opportunity to provide a response [to Biden’s speech to the joint session of Congress] provided, this time, by Sen. Tim Scott. That response? Please stop doing anything that might help. Or anything at all.
Honestly, the entire Republican presentation went by without offering a single moment that looked like a policy or a proposal, other than a passing mention of school choice. Instead, other than give the kind of autobiographic handwaving that fills too many of these responses (Tim Scott once worked at Chick-fil-A, and in case you were wondering, he liked his boss) the entire message was that Biden is not doing what Republicans want. Darn it. Biden might have promised to be bipartisan, but when Republicans try to stop his bills, he passes them anyway. So down with Biden.
[…] Scott may have set a record for using the word “bipartisan,” which Republicans now define as anything they initiate. For example, Scott complained that when Republicans proposed COVID-19 relief packages, many Democrats voted with them. But when Biden put up a relief bill, no Republican voted for it. This, according to Scott, means that Biden is at fault. […]
In the process of attempting to show how partisan those Democrats are, Scott looked at Biden’s call for police reform and noted that Democrats had actually filibustered a police reform package put forward by Republicans. What Scott didn’t mention is that the reason the bill got filibustered—other than the fact that it was wholly inadequate, actually gave more money to police forces, and was opposed by every major civil rights organization—was that Republicans refused to even talk to Democrats about the bill before it was written, submitted, or put up for a vote. That’s right, the prime example of bipartisanship presented in this paean to bipartisanship was a bill written completely by Republicans who refused to let Democrats so much as see it before it hit the Senate floor. […]
What was missing from the Republican response was a response. That is, anything that looked like a competing vision for America. […]
Biden spent a large part of his speech calling for national unity and working together. Biden’s history in Washington shows that he means it—he won’t just extend an olive branch, he would accept a helping hand, even if that means compromise. But what Republicans are calling bipartisanship is really surrender. […]
And if Tim Scott really believes that Democrats would “rather have the issue” of police reform than an actual solution, he can shock them and vote for the police reform bill when it hits the Senate floor. That would actually be … bipartisan.
A few more details concerning the speech Biden delivered last night, and concerning some of the polling:
President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night drew high marks from viewers, according to two snap polls. More than 70% of viewers said the speech made them feel more optimistic about the U.S. […] After the speech, CNN found a greater percentage of people saying that Biden’s proposals would move the country in the right direction than had said so before the speech. [Success!]
Biden opened the speech by hailing the leaders sitting behind him: “Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President. No president has ever said those words from this podium. No president has ever said those words. And it’s about time.”
He went into the speech with more achievements in the 99 days of his presidency than most presidents could claim at that point. The American Rescue Plan has “already sent more than 160 million checks out the door. It’s making a difference,” and the law is delivering expanded nutrition assistance, so that “hunger is down sharply already.” The COVID-19 vaccination effort provided Biden with another major accomplishment to point to, and he did so, saying: “We will have provided over 220 million COVID shots in those 100 days, thanks to all the help of all of you. […].”
[…] He made that point [about taxes] by taking on the Republican tax law of 2017, noting: “It was supposed to pay for itself—that was how it was sold—and generate vast economic growth. Instead, it added $2 trillion to the deficit. It was a huge windfall for corporate America and those at the very top. Instead of using the tax saving to raise wages and invest in research and development, it poured billions of dollars into the pockets of CEOs.”
In addition to making the case for his economic plans—and Biden also called on Congress to pass a $15 minimum wage, strengthen the Affordable Care Act, and pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act—Biden spoke to systemic racism and white supremacy, calling on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and saying directly that his administration “won’t ignore what our intelligence agents have determined to be the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today: White supremacy is terrorism.” The president of the United States said that in one of his highest-profile speeches.
[…] Speaking on immigration, Biden touted the comprehensive plan he’d sent to Congress at the beginning of his presidency, but also put pressure on Republicans to do something […]
”Now look, if you don’t like my plan,” he said, “let’s at least pass what we all agree on. Congress needs to pass legislation this year to finally secure protection for Dreamers, the young people who have only known America as their home. And permanent protection for immigrants who are here on temporary protective status who came from countries beset by man-made and natural-made violence and disaster. As well as a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers who put food on our tables.
“Look, immigrants have done so much for America during this pandemic and throughout our history. The country supports immigration reform. We should act. Let’s argue over it. Let’s debate over it. But let’s act.” […]
[…] Griggers’ others statements reveal the true threats posed by white supremacists and our racism-infected law enforcement system. According to the News-Democrat, the affidavit highlighted Griggers’ claims to the text thread group that he planned on violating the civil rights and liberties of Georgia’s Black citizens, saying that he was planning on just arresting Black folks to trump up charges. “Also I’m going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote,” he claimed. […]
To be honest, I’m not all that concerned that the COVID vaccine I took last Friday might have a tracking device in it. For one thing, it doesn’t, because that would be bonkers. For another, I can’t fathom who the hell would want to track me. I can just imagine the folks at the NSA gawking at my 24-hour feed and thinking, “He’s going to the cupboard again? How many Little Debbie Fig Bars can one guy eat?”
Also, I have a phone in my pocket that’s tracking me pretty much everywhere I go—which is basically nowhere except the aforementioned cupboard. If the government really wants to send in an artillery strike, they can just check the iPhone coordinates. Or look up my address, FFS.
Honestly, Republicans need to come up with better, more plausible horror stories […]
Sadly, though, the way this conspiracy theory so effortlessly glides off this doofus’ tongue makes me think he represents thousands, if not millions, of his fellow travelers in the International Bizarro World Party.
So for your endless entertainment, here’s Don Wagner, a Republican member of the Orange County, California, Board of Supervisors asking Dr. Clayton Chau, director of the county’s health care agency, whether his constituents need worry about Joe Biden slipping on his Professor X Cerebro helmet to find out where they hide their freeze-dried bunker snacks: [video is available at the link}
WAGNER: “Does it … is there any intention of tracking folks?”
CHAU: “Nope.”
WAGNER: “Is there any, in the vaccine, we heard about an injection of a tracking device. Is that being done anywhere … in Orange County?”
CHAU: “I’m sorry, I have to compose myself. There’s not a vaccine with a tracking device embedded in it that I know of … exists in the world. Period.”
[…] if I don’t get vaccinated, it’ll be really easy to find me. I’ll be buried at Evergreen Cemetery next to the other anti-vax dipshits.
“America is not a racist country,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C) boldly declared in his response to President Joe Biden’s Joint Address to Congress on Wednesday evening. If Biden jam packed lofty policy goals with proposals for ambitious government initiatives into his one-hour speech, Sen. Scott’s rebuttal offered a safe space for white conservatives who live in constant fear as they face the menacing specter of incremental progress in racial and social justice.
[…] His take on racism, division, and who’s-to-blamism was quintessential whitewashing—precisely what his white conservative audience was hungering for after Trump’s defeat last fall.
[…] “Kids today are being taught that their skin color defines them, that if they look a certain way, they’re oppressors.” Scott said apparently referring to efforts to teach children the real history of America’s foundation. If you tease this out, his message was clear: Racism is only over for Black people. Racism against whites? Well, that’s just getting started.
[…] The GOP needed a Black friend. By laundering and displaying the party’s tired talking points, Sen. Scott served as just that. His speech gave white conservatives cover. After all, we all know that it’s impossible to be racist if you happen to have a Black friend.
Last night, Republicans chose South Carolina Senator Tim Scott to deliver their rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s speech to Congress. And so Scott gave a speech, a rather non-specific speech, about how Biden wasn’t doing unity right and how the United States is not a racist country despite all of the racism he has personally experienced here. Although to be fair, he also suggests that a not-insignificant part of that racism has come from other Black people calling him “Uncle Tim.”
Scott’s initial and primary complaint is that while Joe Biden talks a good game about unity, he is still doing things that Democrats want instead of things that Republicans want. […]
Good evening. I’m Senator Tim Scott from the great state of South Carolina. We just heard President Biden’s first address to Congress. Our president seems like a good man. His speech was full of good words.
But President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership. He promised to unite a nation. To lower the temperature. To govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted. This was the pitch. You just heard it again.
But our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes. We need policies and progress that bring us closer together. But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.
So let’s just address this right here.
We just had four years of waking up every morning to Donald Trump ranting about conspiracy-laden nonsense, insulting people, acting like a middle school bully, refusing to send aid to blue states during natural disasters, etc., etc. Platitudes, empty or not, are a step up in terms of lowering the temperature. In fact, practically anything would be. You will notice that while those of us on the Left are pushing for specific things we think would benefit people as a whole, we are not going around accusing Tim Scott or any other Republicans of eating babies to get high. This is a step up, as would be someone who “seems like a good man.” The bar was extremely low.
That being said.
Republicans in Congress have made it clear over the years that they have absolutely no interest in working with Democrats, on anything, as a matter of principle. That they will settle only for getting exactly what they want all of the time, and they are not known for sending out thank you cards or I.O.U.s when they get it, either. So how does anyone craft policy that would hypothetically “bring us closer together” when that is the case? The best way to govern for all Americans in this case is to govern for all Americans, not solely for office-holding Republicans. […]
Scott then complained about schools not reopening, and then praised “school choice” out of nowhere.
Most of all, I’m saddened that millions of kids have lost a year of learning when they could not afford to lose a single day. Locking vulnerable kids out of the classroom is locking adults out of their future. Our public schools should have reopened months ago. Other countries’ did. Private and religious schools did.
Science has shown for months that schools are safe. But too often, powerful grown-ups set science aside. And kids like me were left behind. The clearest case I’ve seen for school choice in our lifetime is because we know that education is the closest thing to magic in America.
Yeah, the reason many schools didn’t open is because while schools have been shown to be safe when they can follow the proper safety protocols, not all school districts can afford to do that. You know what takes money away from school districts that would ostensibly need that money in order to follow said safety protocols? “School choice.” Because while it may individually benefit some children who are either more financially well off than their peers or particularly gifted, it hurts even more the most vulnerable students. […]
Another issue should — that should unite us is infrastructure. […] Ah yes, we all recall the infrastructure week that never happened under Trump. It seems more that while Republicans say they are in favor of these things, they’re not really interested in actually helping to get them done.
[…] Scott then went on to criticize Biden for not building common ground by doing what Republicans want in the areas of abortions and the Supreme Court. […]
Nowhere do we need common ground more desperately than in our discussions of race. I have experienced the pain of discrimination. I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while I’m shopping. […]
I’ve also experienced a different kind of intolerance. I get called “Uncle Tom” and the n-word by progressives, by liberals. Just last week, a national newspaper suggested my family’s poverty was actually privilege because a relative owned land generations before my time.
[…] It seems fair to say that it’s usually Black people who call other Black people Uncle Toms. Is Scott actually suggesting that criticism of his behavior in this way, from other Black people, is the same thing as active discrimination from white people with power? Because that seems like a stretch.
[…] Then what is a racist country? Would America prior to the Civil Rights Act count? Would apartheid-era South Africa? Or does it only count if every single person in the country is “racist in their hearts” and open about that? Because sure, that’s probably not a thing. However, if getting pulled over by people who work for this country for driving while Black is a part of Tim Scott’s everyday life, then clearly something is wrong. Because it’s not just the personal prejudice of cops that is the problem here, it’s that we live in a society where it is reasonable for them to believe they will get away with it. That’s why racism is frequently described as “prejudice plus power.”
[…] Biden may have made a mistake when he promised “unity” — since promises that involve other people are frequently difficult to make good on — but so far, the fact that he has failed to achieve this is the only thing Republicans are leaning on to criticize, and it doesn’t seem like anyone cares.
Follow-up to comments 354, 355, 358, 376, and 377.
Commentary and analysis from Steve Benen:
[…] It stood to reason that Giuliani and his lawyers would deny that he’d done anything wrong. What was unexpected, however was the truly bizarre written statement issued yesterday afternoon by Robert Costello, in his capacity as Giuliani’s attorney. Consider the first sentence:
The Biden department of justice has completely ignored clear evidence (which the FBI has had for over a year) in texts and emails on Hunter Biden’s hard drive of failing to register numerous times as a foreign agent, child pornography, money laundering, and 30 years of the Biden Crime family taking millions and millions in bribes to sell his public offices.
Oh. So, as federal investigators moved forward with their investigation into Giuliani, the first thing we heard from Giuliani’s lawyer was a series of unsubstantiated allegations against Hunter Biden. How is the president’s son relevant to the allegations surrounding the former mayor? Your guess is as good as mine.
But the written statement — filled with odd grammatical errors and an idiosyncratic approach to capitalization — kept going, making six references to Hunter Biden, alongside references to Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and the “compliant media.” [Hillary Clinton?!]
Conservative media voices, not surprisingly, also rallied to Giuliani’s defense, claiming that the Justice Department is pursuing a partisan political vendetta because of the Republican’s connection to Donald Trump. A Fox News host told viewers, for example, that it “didn’t take long for Biden to start using the Justice Department to go after political enemies” and “our justice system has been politicized.”
Among the many problems with this is the fact that federal investigators were interested in Giuliani’s possible criminal wrongdoing many months before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
And then, of course, there’s Giuliani’s client at Mar-a-Lago, who told Fox Business this morning, “Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot. He does these things — he just loves this country, and they raid his apartment. It’s, like, so unfair.”
To the extent that reality matters, Giuliani spent a considerable amount of time partnering with an active Russian agent as part of a campaign against the U.S. political system, and then spent the post-election period losing an almost comical number of lawsuits while trying to undermine the results of his own country’s democracy. On Jan. 6, Giuliani also appeared at a pre-riot rally in which he talked up the idea of “trial by combat” to a group of riled up radicals — only to keep his anti-election efforts going after the attack on the U.S. Capitol subsided.
He’s also currently facing a criminal investigation for possibly having acted as an unregistered foreign agent.
A variety of words come to mind. “Patriot” isn’t one of them.
Some details about all the best people who were insurrectionists:
Last week, Mark Middleton and his wife Jalise Middleton were arrested for their part in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. The rural Montague County, North Texas, couple can be seen on Capitol Police body cameras hitting and cursing at officers as the officers try to hold back the siege of rioting MAGA supporters. NBC reports that at one point in the video, when asked to “Get back” by an officer, Mark Middleton screams “Fuck you” at him. Jalise Middleton, according to the FBI, is also allegedly videotaped repeatedly grabbing and striking a police officer over the barricade with her hand. The couple also posted damning Facebook statements after the riots, which have since been deleted.
And while NBC reports that Mark Middleton is “a volunteer firefighter and pilot, worked at Nortex Communications, an internet service provider in Muenster, and has a master’s degree in theology from Liberty University,” CNN has an even more interesting report as to what Mark Middleton does. It turns out that about one month after Donald Trump lost the national election, and one month before the Jan. 6 insurgency, Mark Middleton “was appointed as the chair of Precinct 14 in Cooke County” for the Republican Party.
[…] According to VICE, two weeks after the Middletons’ participated in what would later result in one of the single most depressing attacks on our democracy, Mark Middleton served as a poll worker for a special election in Cooke County. The charges the couple face include:
Assaulting, Resisting, or Impeding Certain Officers
Obstruction of Law Enforcement During Civil Disorder
Obstruction of Justice/Congress
Knowingly Entering or Remaining in any Restricted Building or Grounds Without Lawful Authority
Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds
Engaging in Physical Violence in a Restricted Building or Grounds, Violent Entry and Disorderly Conduct on Capitol Grounds […]
Cooke County Republicans had not seen any reason to remove Middleton after Jan. 6. “We were aware that he went up to D.C. in January, but he assured us that he didn’t participate in any of the insurrection activities. […]
Middleton is still listed as the 14th precinct chair on the Cooke County Republican Party website.
From Wonkette, a discussion of how Fox News is covering the FBI raid of Giuliani’s house:
Fox News is having a hard time with the FBI showing up at Rudy Giuliani’s house and stealing his computers and his Jitterbug phones. If they can do this to a man so fine and upstanding and normal and sane as Rudy Giuliani, then they are going to do it to YOU. (And by “you,” they mean white Republicans who break the law.)
Never mind that Roodles, like so many Trump associates, first found himself under investigation for his Ukraine dealings by the Southern District of New York during the era of the TRUMP Justice Department, despite how the TRUMP Justice Department was completely geared toward protecting Trump’s buddies and pals. Even in that environment, these fuckers got investigated, and sometimes even prosecuted. This goes at least as far back as 2019, when Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman got indicted. Point is, despite how TRUMP Attorney General Bill Barr tried to memory-hole a lot of this, it’s apparently survived.
[…] Let’s start with Tucker Carlson, because he’s always the most pathetic man in the room. On his show last night, Tucker called the Rudy raid the “hallmark of tyranny” and said Joe Biden is on a rampage to “punish his political opponents.” […]
the feds called the Lincoln Project to tell them they were raiding Rudy, because that’s how things work. Does Tucker have any proof for this allegation? PFFFFFT who needs “proof” when you can just say words? [video is available at the link]
[…] A few minutes later, Tucker outright defended Konstantin Kilimnik, a literal actual Russian spy, the guy to whom Paul Manafort passed Rust Belt polling models and data from the Trump campaign in 2016, after which Kilimnik handed them to Russian intelligence. In this clip, Tucker cites “John Solomon’s reporting” (LOLOLOLOL) to “prove” Kilimnik is not a Russian spy, but rather an “informant for the US government.” Of the allegation Kilimnik is a Russian spy, Tucker said “That was a LIE,” and accused Robert Mueller of failing to include John Solomon’s very important reporting (LOLOLOLOL) in his report. [video is available at the link]
Tucker, unsurprisingly, did not address how the then-Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee outright called Kilimnik a fucking Russian spy in its Russia report. It’s almost like Tucker is full of shit and knows it.
This is important because Solomon, whose “reporting” is widely and hilariously discredited, was all up the ass of the same group of chucklefucks as Rudy Giuliani, regarding the very same Ukraine matters the FBI is investigating Giuliani over. Hey, remember how the FBI also knock-knock-motherfucker-ed hairball lawyer Victoria Toensing yesterday? Same group of chucklefucks. Konstantin Kilimnik also factors into the Russian influence op against the 2020 election, which has a significant bit of overlap with the pro-Russia Ukrainians the chucklefucks were working with.
[…] A few minutes later, Tucker defended Matt Gaetz for some reason, because for Tucker, this is all part of “Biden Admin Sends Message To Dissidents,” which is what his chyron said. Watch this clip if only to hear Tucker puberty-yelp the words, “Matt Gaetz is a sex trafficker!” [video is available at the link]
[…] And Then There Was Hannity.
Poor Sean Hannity, who has had all these chucklefucks on his show one gabillion times the past several years, and whose name just kept weirdly coming up in Trump’s first impeachment, which was about … all this Rudy Ukraine shit!
Here are some things poor Sean Hannity said on his radio show yesterday [audio file is available at the link]
HANNITY: [T]his is interesting, sad on one level, I’m suspicious on another level, and — didn’t take long for Biden to start using the Justice Department to go after political enemies, and clearly at the top of the list is a guy by the name of Rudy Giuliani, America’s mayor.
This investigation started, again, in Trump’s DOJ, but OK.
Also that fucking loser hasn’t been “America’s mayor” since Joe Biden made fun of him for never saying anything besides “a noun, a verb and 9/11” way back in 2007.
HANNITY: Now, Giuliani, of course, he was front and center investigating Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings with Ukraine.
Translation: Rudy was in Ukraine trying to help Trump pressure that country into ginning up fake investigations into fake dirt on the Bidens to help steal the 2020 election for Trump, long before Joe Biden even got the nomination.
Here’s some victim shit:
HANNITY: If you’re a Republican, if you’re a conservative, if you’re a Trump supporter it’s even worse, I mean, they’ll put you in jail for years for spitting on the sidewalk or jaywalking. You know, we have, look at Roger Stone’s case, in particular.
You’ve got 20 guys, tactical gear, frogmen, pre-dawn raid, guns blazing, and CNN cameras tipped off, they’re watching and filming the whole thing, for what, a process crime of lying to Congress?
Roger Stone was convicted on all counts he was charged with, of obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and lying to Congress, and this all happened during the TRUMP administration. And yes, we know it’s wingnut gospel that CNN was “tipped off” to the Roger Stone arrest, but that’s a paste-eating conspiracy theory just like everything else Hannity believes.
Hannity also whined about “what they did to Paul Manafort,” before doing some more victim talk:
HANNITY: […] I don’t feel that there’s equal justice and equal application of our laws. And I do believe our justice system has been politicized.
Now is it possible Rudy Giuliani did something wrong here? I would assume it’s unlikely, because he is a lawyer and he is smart.
Hahahaha, that is literally Sean Hannity saying with a straight face that Rudy Giuliani can’t possibly be guilty because he is “lawyer” and “smart.”
[…] In summary and in conclusion, Tucker is going to have Rudy on this evening, we are guessing for what will end up being an entirely accidental confession. This even though, as this Media Matters report fully documents, the suits at Fox News are well aware Rudy is full of shit. […]
Three Georgia men previously charged in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery were indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury and charged with hate crimes and attempted kidnapping.
NY Times:
City officials in Chicago released body camera footage on Wednesday showing a police officer fatally shooting Anthony Alvarez, 22, after an early-morning foot chase on the city’s Northwest Side in March.
NBC News:
Gerardo Gonzalez traveled home this month from North Carolina, where he attends college, to Oakland, California, to spend time with his two brothers and their mother for her 45th birthday. But instead of cutting a birthday cake last Tuesday, he and his family were mourning the loss of his eldest brother, Mario, 26, who died in police custody April 19 after officers in Alameda County pinned him facedown on the ground for five minutes.
The Senate overwhelmingly authorized $35 billion to improve the nation’s water infrastructure, offering a show of bipartisan support for a sliver of infrastructure legislation even as lawmakers remained divided over the scope of President Biden’s $4 trillion economic agenda.
Biden’s three nominees to the U.S. Postal Service’s governing board won approval from a Senate committee Wednesday and will advance to the full chamber for a final confirmation vote.
The fundraising gambit spearheaded by ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is being promoted by the auditors.
Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne — who egged on President Trump’s election reversal crusade at a bizarre White House meeting last year — is the latest prominent 2020 election conspiracy theorist to put his weight behind financially supporting the questionable audit of Arizona’s 2020 election.
Byrne, in Telegram posts and interviews, claims to have launched The America Project, which he describes as a “continuation” of his “fight” against the “election fraud scandal” of 2020.
So far, the organization’s only public focus appears to be raising money for the audit of Arizona’s largest county, which has been wrought with controversy since it started last week. An official Twitter account for the audit promoted a fundraising page connected to The America Project, fundtheaudit.com.
The fundraising website says The America Project is now aiming to collect $2.8 million — a sum that dwarfs the $150,000 in public funding that the GOP-controlled state Senate, which ordered the audit, has put up for it.
In an interview with the outlet New Tang Dynasty on April 18, Byrne claimed to have donated $1 million to the America Project — and $4 million overall “since this whole fight started.” On Telegram a few days later, he said he’d given $500,000 to fundtheaudit.com. […]
The audit is racing to finish a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots by May 14, when its lease of the counting site ends.
Byrne is the latest pro-Trump conspiracy theorist to hype the GOP audit as a beacon for dejected Trump supporters: Lin Wood, the litigious pro-Trump attorney currently running for chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, claims his foundation, “Fight Back,” has donated $50,000 to a fundraiser for the audit being led by a One America News anchor who has also been reporting on the recount.
[…] Byrne’s new group has apparently reunited several other figures from the 2020 bid to undo Trump’s electoral defeat
During a speech at the “Health and Freedom Conference” at Rhema Bible College earlier this month, Byrne said that he’d be working with the people who he collaborated with while trying to challenge the election results.
“We’re taking different corners of the fight,” he said, referencing My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell and former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn. [All the best people, as usual.]
[…] Byrne concluded his remarks by brandishing a $100 bill and saying a plumber had given it to him for his efforts to save the republic. Flynn — who, along with Wood, urged Trump in December to declare martial law — has promoted the Maricopa audit fundraising page on his Parler channel.
At the December White House meeting, Byrne reportedly got into a shouting match with White House lawyers whom he told Trump were not doing enough to challenge the election results.
[…] The audit’s Twitter account also claimed that the new fundraising bid would support a legal defense fund, as the audit faces a lawsuit from Democrats.
In the litigation, Democrats allege that the auditors are failing to comply with the state’s laws and policies regarding ballot security. The Democrats so far have not been successful in their efforts to get a court order halting the audit while the case proceeds. But the judge in the case did order that the auditors release publicly their procedures, rejecting auditors’ claim the trade secrets and legislative immunity should allow them to keep those documents secret. […]
They’ve been waiting breathlessly I read for an attack by Antifa and BLM to stop them from doing the audit. I am laughing my ass off because nobody has showed up to start a war with them. Poor things.
——————-
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne may be facing legal trouble for his role in spreading false claims of election fraud. Dominion Voting Systems sent a letter to major social platforms on Thursday demanding they preserve posts from several users […] [Salt Lake Tribune]
An explosive video that emerged last night appears to show President Joe Biden plotting to use his power to improve living conditions in the United States.
In the video, in which Biden is flanked by Vice-President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the President seemingly admits to having a radical scheme to use taxpayers’ money for the benefit of taxpayers.
After the video was unearthed, the response from Republicans to Biden’s controversial plot was swift and ferocious.
“Joe Biden works hard to project a ‘nice guy’ image, but this tape reveals the real Joe Biden,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “A man who, all along, has been scheming to expand education and child care.”
Senator Rand Paul said that the video, if authentic, should prompt an immediate congressional investigation.
“Joe Biden promised the American people that, if elected, he would do nothing,” he said. “Joe Biden has broken that promise.”
But the judge in the case did order that the auditors release publicly their procedures, rejecting auditors’ claim the trade secrets and legislative immunity should allow them to keep those documents secret.
The proprietary counting procedure entails placing ballots in one of three piles: votes for Biden, votes for The Orange Toddler-Tyrant, or votes for neither of them. After that, the counting begins at one for each pile and increases by one for each ballot in the designated pile until all ballots in that pile are depleted. Finally, the number of votes for each candidate (or neither) are compared and Biden is declared the loser. The process is obviously a trade secret so the black-robed tyrant who is persecuting them should be removed.
blfsays
johnson catman@394, That’s what They™ want you to think is the procedure. However, even a cursory glance shows it cannot be the actual procedure — e.g., it requires auditors who can count as high as 3. A few can, sometimes, manage to do so, so those are placed at the tables most visible to the webcam and any watching reporters, albeit both the alleged-ballots they are allegedly-counting, and any alleged-results they produce, are not included in the pre-cooked final result.
The actual procedure, as far as can be discerned by the reporters, et al., who have wandered in, unchallenged, through the storage rooms for genuine ballot boxes and voting- / tabulating-machines, seems to be: Wheel out a bin labeled ballots, through doors marked “Exit Only” and nowheres near the ballot box storage rooms; Dump the contents into a another bin labelled TrumpHair furor wins huge HUGELY!; Anything which fails to go into that bin is put into another bin labelled bigly losers! on side, with Biohazard ☣ and Radiation ☢ warning symbols on the other sides. When the hair furor bin fills up, it’s wheeled back out through that same “Exit Only” exit, and returns, moments later, no longer overflowing. What happens to the other bin is unknown, as it’s yet to fill up. How the procedure finishes and produces the final tallies has obviously not yet been observed. Whilst there are auditors standing around with paper pads making occasional marks, some of which have been seen to be erased, most of them appear to be either playing Sudoku or doodling. One once shouted “Bingo!”
The actual contents of the ballots bin has been seen to include banana peels, coffee grounds, several rats (not always dead), and a burned-out car. The auditors have also been observed throwing empty whiskey bottles into either that bin, or the predetermined-winner’s bin. As no mobile phones or cameras are allowed, and the webcam’s view is restricted, nothing(?) has been filmed.
The propriety trade secret is probably that emptying bins over and over again doesn’t cost much — especially when you hire undocumented workers to do so, who can then be conventionally sent back across the border† as soon as they are fired (i.e., the audit is done), before they are paid (or discover their paycheque bounced) — so most of the unknown amount of money being paid is pure profit. I.e., standard hair furorian operating procedure, complete with predetermined outcome for an inflated price, gold-ish paint not included.
How the actual voting- / tabulating-machines are being checked is largely unknown. Despite trivially easy all-hours access to their storage rooms, no-one seems to paying them much attention.
† Most, very probably all, of them can actually count up to, and well beyond, 3… but not in the language used for the employment test. No copy of the test has been found — it was probably verbal — albeit some (as yet untranslated) slips of paper have been found containing кириллица. There is some speculation this is the survey of (possibly genuine) voters which is supposedly being done.
(This comment should be not be construed as fiction.) </snark>
It’s hard to convey the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity that people are being subjected to. Meanwhile, Modi and his allies are telling us not to complain…
…An outbreak the size of India’s second wave, apparently fuelled by Covid-19 variants that appear to be more infectious than earlier strains, would have overwhelmed most public health systems – let alone one of the most chronically underfunded in the world, serving a vast, spread-out population.
But public health experts, including some involved in advising the government, say the scale of India’s current outbreak was also partly manmade, the result of a feeling of exceptionalism that emanated from the top of the Indian government and rippled across society, leading to countless administrative and personal decisions that, within a few months, would prove disastrous.
“There was a misreading of the situation in January that we had attained herd immunity and were unlikely to see a second wave,” says K Srinath Reddy, the president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “India went into full-blown celebratory mode. And we know the virus travels with people, and celebrates with crowds.”
Alongside warnings that people should maintain precautions, governments at all levels relaxed restrictions, allowed massive social events to resume and pressed ahead with raucous electioneering, confident the continued circulation of Covid-19 in states such as Kerala or Maharashtra were the dying embers of the virus, not evidence of the sparks that would ignite a second firestorm.
“There was a lot of mixed messaging coming through which made people very complacent,” Shahid Jameel, a virologist at Ashoka University, told a forum there on Tuesday. Some politicians and scientists boasted of low infection and death rates that gave Indians the impression “that somehow we are special”, Jameel added. “We are not special.”…
…The political implications of the second coronavirus wave on Modi’s government are becoming apparent. According to the Global Leader Approval Tracker, Modi has suffered an unprecedented six-point drop in popularity in the past week, with his approval rating at its lowest ever – though still high at 67% – and his disapproval rating going up to 28%.
Many believe vaccines are the only long-term way out of India’s coronavirus crisis, but Delhi’s citizens were dealt a blow this week when the local government said plans to open up vaccinations to anyone aged over 18 from Saturday were being delayed indefinitely because of a lack of supplies. Similar shortages are being experienced across India.
Though Delhi state chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said authorities would make vaccines available “as soon as possible”, several private clinics in Delhi said they were not expecting stocks for at least another month or even two.
So for now, Delhi’s crematoriums and graveyards will continue to bear the burden of death that shrouds the city every day. At Ghazipur, as the sun set and all the pyres were finally assembled, they were set alight at the same time – going up in a fiery roar of heat and pain.
At least 44 people have been killed and about 150 injured in a crush at a Jewish religious gathering in northern Israel attended by tens of thousands of people, in one of the country’s worst peacetime disasters.
Children were among the dead, Eli Beer, the director of an Israeli volunteer ambulance service, United Hatzalah, said. “Unfortunately, we found small children trampled there, and we performed CPR. We were able to save some of them,” he told Army Radio.
The national ambulance service, Magen David Adom, said the injured had been rushed to hospitals around the country. Six people were in a critical condition and 18 in a serious condition.
The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the scene briefly on Friday, said it was “one of the worst disasters that has befallen the state of Israel” and offered condolences to the families. Sunday would be a day of national mourning, he added.
Permission had been given for 10,000 people to attend the largest event held in Israel since the start of the Covid pandemic last year, but the crowds at Mount Meron were estimated at up to 10 times that number.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews had travelled to the Galilee tomb of the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai for annual Lag Baomer commemorations that include all-night prayer, mystical songs and dance.
The cause of the crush in the early hours of Friday was not confirmed, but witnesses said people were asphyxiated or trampled in a narrow passageway while trying to exit. Footage from the night showed men frantically pulling down corrugated iron walls to escape.
Children were separated from their parents in the confusion. An emergency rescue officer told Channel 12 news: “There are more than 30 children here right now … whose mothers and fathers aren’t answering the phone.”
Israeli television published the photos of seven boys, appealing for help in locating them.
Mobile phone reception crashed at Mount Meron as families tried to reach missing loved ones. A 24-year-old man, identified only by his first name, Dvir, told Army Radio “masses of people were pushed into the same corner and a vortex was created”. He added: “I felt like I was about to die.”…
…In the months since the takeover, the junta has raided newsrooms, revoked the licenses of prominent news publications, and arrested at least 71 journalists. As of this week 46 remain behind bars, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. The crackdown on the press has crushed the halting but significant media freedom gains since the country began a transition to democracy a decade ago. Authorities have also imposed sweeping internet restrictions and barred international journalists from independent access to the country.
But a new generation of citizen journalists, or “CJs” as they are informally known in Myanmar, has entered the struggle, using social media platforms, smartphones and older technologies like radios and pamphlets to spread information.
Many have no traditional background in journalism.
…
Apart from covering protests, citizen journalists have filmed security forces killing, beating and using forced labor. Experts say the evidence could be vital in attempts to hold them accountable for abuses in international courts.
…
One advantage of citizen journalism is that almost anyone can do it. Videos have been taken from balconies and behind openings in curtains, often at great personal risk as soldiers prowl the streets nearby.
But it has also drawn people into the fold who have some overlapping skills. With the coup disrupting countless professions, many CJs have simply transferred what they learned in previous jobs.
…
Citizen journalism isn’t new to Myanmar. In 2007, it was a critical part of the coverage of the Saffron Revolution in the country and the violent military crackdown on protesters. But that was in an era of text messages, blurry cell phone quality, and footage that needed to be smuggled out of the country. Today’s CJs use encrypted messaging services, Twitter and other easy-to-share platforms. While Myanmar authorities have restricted mobile internet data, it has not stopped the flow on social media.
…
The hashtag #WhatsHappeninginMyanmar has been a key driver of the Twitter coverage. It has been mentioned in more than 100 million tweets over the past 12 months, according to the social media platform.
One account, Latt Thone Chaung, is run by a collective of filmmakers and videographers. It has been documenting forms of creative protest in Myanmar through visual storytelling. The founder, Maw Kun Thit, said the close-knit network came together with a shared vision to film the events after the coup happened.
Their videos include interviews of front-line protesters and even poems as a means to give perspective on the creative resistance. But with the escalation in violence, it is getting more difficult, and the team has to decide when it is safe to go out. In February, they filmed almost every day, but that has declined significantly….
“‘I want to continue my role as a documenter in this revolution’, Khin said. ‘The only thing I fear is people will go back to their normal lives’.”
Here’s a link to the April 30 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Proportion of Covid infections in England at lowest level since September- ONS
The prevalence of Covid infections in England has fallen sharply for a third consecutive week, the Office for National Statistics has said, with the estimated proportion of people infected at its lowest level since early September.
According to the ONS, an estimated 1 in 1,010 people in England had Covid-19 in the week ending 24 April, compared to 1 in 610 a week earlier….
Ecuador’s Constitutional Court on Wednesday decriminalized abortion in cases of rape, the country’s human rights ombudsman announced, a major step in Catholic-majority Latin America where termination of pregnancy is largely taboo.
Ombudsman Freddy Carrion announced the court’s decision on Twitter, and said the ruling “was possible thanks to the women and feminist groups who have consistently battled for a more fair and egalitarian society.”
In Ecuador, a conservative country with an 80 percent Catholic population, a woman risks up to three years in prison for having an abortion.
The procedure is only allowed when a woman’s life or health is at risk or if a pregnancy is the result of the rape of a woman with a mental disability.
In 2019, the National Assembly had voted against decriminalising abortion in other cases of rape or fetal malformation.
[…]
Carrion’s office said the court’s decision was taken with seven votes to two.
“From today, no raped woman will be criminalized,” it said.
Every day six girls have an abortion in Ecuador, according to figures from the ombudsman’s office.
Among those under the age of 14, 80 percent of pregnancies are due to sexual violence.
Some 2,500 girls under the age of 14 give birth each year in Ecuador after they were raped, according to local feminist groups.
A fugitive mafia boss has been hoisted by his own petard, which is in this case to say: identified via his own Italian cooking vlog. Interpol reportedly located Marc Feren Claude Biart — allegedly a member of the powerful ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate, based in the toe of Italy’s boot — in the Dominican Republic, after spotting his tattoos in tutorials he and his wife posted to YouTube. For seven years, Biart evaded authorities seeking to arrest him on drug trafficking charges, but ultimately, police said it was his “love for Italian cuisine” that did him in.
Interpol views ‘Ndrangheta as “one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organizations in the world” and also “the only Italian mafia organization present on every world continent.”…
…Italy is currently undertaking a massive mob trial, involving 335 defendants and potentially also more than 900 witnesses.
As for Biart, NBC reports that he spent five quiet years in the town of Boca Chica, keeping “his distance from the Italian community” and identifying himself only as Marc. But police apparently noticed his wife on YouTube, and this, combined with “the knowledge that the fugitive had previously worked at a restaurant in Italy,” reportedly led them to Biart, who had always been careful to keep his face out of frame. Imagine, being so aware of the stakes yet determined to share your passion with the world, whatever the cost — even if it gets you arrested, and your cooking show removed from the internet. Ah well. Sometimes that really is amore.
Thousands facing removal threats from the Department of Homeland Security have a chance to be allowed to remain in US.
The United States Supreme Court on Thursday offered new hope to thousands of long-term immigrants seeking to avoid deportation in a ruling that faulted the US government for improperly notifying a man who had come illegally from Guatemala to appear for a removal hearing.
In a 6–3 decision that divided the high court’s conservative bloc, the justices overturned a lower court’s decision that had prevented Agusto Niz-Chavez from pursuing his request to cancel the attempted expulsion based on the length of time he has lived in the United States.
[…]
Niz-Chavez lives in Michigan with his family after entering the US irregularly in 2005.
The justices decided that federal immigration law requires authorities to include all relevant details for a notice to appear for a hearing in one document rather than sending the information across multiple documents. The ruling could affect hundreds of thousands of immigration cases.
“In this case, the law’s terms ensure that, when the federal government seeks a procedural advantage against an individual, it will at least supply him with a single and reasonably comprehensive statement of the nature of the proceedings against him,” conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the ruling.
[…]
In a dissent, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, said the ruling was perplexing as a matter of statutory interpretation and common sense.
Multiple snail-mailings written in often difficult-to-comprehend “legalise” is common sense? Sounds more like an ambulance-chaser scam; i.e., a reason to hire an expensive lawyer who can then charge for receiving and reading all those mailings. The better ones will, of course, actually then do / advise as appropriate to assist their client, but the whole thing reeks of a scam to rack up charges.
The ruling upends years of practice by the US Department of Homeland Security and in the short term will slow down the number of people placed in immigration proceedings, said Cornell University immigration law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr.
“It does give them a second chance to try to prove that they qualify for cancellation of removal and other forms of relief,” Yale-Loehr said.
[… details of Mr Niz-Chavez’s case…]
Other Supreme Court rulings could prove challenging for immigrants seeking to remain in the US.
In arguments on April 19, justices appeared reluctant to let people who have stayed on humanitarian grounds apply to be allowed to become permanent residents if they entered the country without required documentation.
KGsays
According to the Global Leader Approval Tracker, Modi has suffered an unprecedented six-point drop in popularity in the past week, with his approval rating at its lowest ever – though still high at 67% – and his disapproval rating going up to 28%. – SC@396
Dreadful as the situation in India is, I find it eqaully horrifying that the people of India, apparently, overwhelmingly approve of the fascist mass-murderer Modi.
“Permanently banning its most famous user, [name deleted], and cracking down on the postings of right-wing figures does not appear to have hurt Twitter’s financial performance. The company’s revenue jumped by 28% in the first quarter of the year….”
SC@406, Whilst the image is genuine, the accompanying text / caption is misleading, as per Snopes, Is ‘Long Boi’ the Tallest Mallard Duck in the World?: The duck is an Indian Runner, not a Mallard, and is only 70cm tall (c.28in, typical for an Indian Runner), not over 1m. Indian Runners were apparently developed from Mallards, and can resemble them. The mildly deranged penguin points out they have also been called “Penguin Ducks” (I think she just looked that up on Ye Pffft! of Knowledge, which points out they cannot fly, walk rather than waddle, lay lots of eggs hither-and-yon without bothering to build nests or incubate the eggs — “typical stupid duck”, she mutters).
tomhsays
Re #402, on the SC decision to require one notice for immigrants contesting deportation.
…The question in the case was whether the government had to provide all of the information at once or could do so piecemeal. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said the statute’s use of the article “a” in “a notice to appear” was crucial.
“To an ordinary reader — both in 1996 and today — ‘a’ notice would seem to suggest just that: ‘a’ single document containing the required information, not a mishmash of pieces with some assembly required,” he wrote, giving other examples.
“Someone who agrees to buy ‘a car’ would hardly expect to receive the chassis today, wheels next week, and an engine to follow,” Justice Gorsuch wrote….
Two of Congress’ most outlandish right-wing members, Florida’s Matt Gaetz and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, are going on tour together. No, seriously. Politico reported that the Republican duo will be “holding rallies across the nation” together.
SC @404, sounds like Joe Greenberg is trying to blame the underage girl. By his own account, he told her that she got a lot of people in trouble by lying about her age. Whole thing is sickening. And who thinks Roger Stone is a good advisor for anything?
Giuliani effectively ran a foreign operation against the American ambassador in Ukraine. That’s of renewed interest to U.S. prosecutors.
[…] As the New York Times, which was first to report on the search warrant, explained on Wednesday, “It is a federal crime to try to influence or lobby the United States government at the request or direction of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department. At least one of the search warrants for Mr. Giuliani’s devices explicitly stated that the possible crimes under investigation included violations of that law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
If, for example, the Justice Department had evidence of Giuliani trying to influence the Trump administration’s foreign policy toward Ukraine because of his associates’ interests, and the Republican lawyer then failed to disclose his lobbying, that could lead to charges.
Two years ago, Rudolph W. Giuliani finally got one thing he had been seeking in Ukraine: The Trump administration removed the U.S. ambassador there, a woman Mr. Giuliani believed had been obstructing his efforts to dig up dirt on the Biden family. It was a Pyrrhic victory. Mr. Giuliani’s push to oust the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, not only became a focus of President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment trial, but it has now landed Mr. Giuliani in the cross hairs of a federal criminal investigation into whether he broke lobbying laws […]
The article helps make sense of why Giuliani has found himself in such hot water.
Some of these elements came into view a couple of years ago, during the first of Donald Trump’s two impeachments. Indeed, in 2019, Giuliani was surprisingly candid when describing his efforts to derail Yovanovitch’s career in Ukraine, explaining that he effectively ran a foreign operation against the American ambassador.
The New York Times’ report published overnight explained the significance of Giuliani’s motivations for having targeted her.
The warrant also sought his communications with Ukrainian officials who had butted heads with Ms. Yovanovitch, including some of the same people who at the time were helping Mr. Giuliani seek damaging information about President Biden, who was then a candidate, and his family, the people said. At issue for investigators is a key question: Did Mr. Giuliani go after Ms. Yovanovitch solely on behalf of Mr. Trump, who was his client at the time? Or was he also doing so on behalf of the Ukrainian officials, who wanted her removed for their own reasons?
The worrisome scenario is relatively straightforward: with Yovanovitch, the United States had a strong and capable ambassador in Ukraine. Corrupt players in Ukraine saw her as an obstacle — precisely because of Yovanovitch’s anti-corruption stance — and they came to believe they could force her ouster by partnering with Giuliani and trying to help Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
Or as the Times’ report put it, “Even if the Ukrainians did not pay Mr. Giuliani, prosecutors could pursue the theory that they provided assistance by collecting information on the Bidens in exchange for her removal.” […]
Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is raising money to run for a House seat in Montana!?
Republicans really do not care that their political candidates are crooks.
[…] Arguably no cabinet secretary from the Trump era was more controversial than the Republican secretary of the Interior. Roll Call’s report noted that Zinke “came under at least 15 different investigations” before resigning, and that is not an exaggeration.
In Dec. 2018, the New York Times published a round-up of pending investigations into the Montana Republican, and it was a strikingly long list. Media Matters also put together a timeline of “the Interior secretary’s questionable actions and controversies,” and that list was even longer.
[…] we’re talking about a political figure who faced “at least 15 different investigations,” found it necessary to resign under a cloud of controversy, and was referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. In the abstract, after developments like these, that political figure’s future prospects are supposed to dim.
[…] what makes Ryan Zinke’s effort all the more notable is how recent his controversies are. He exited the Trump cabinet just two years ago. The fact that he’s moving forward with a new congressional campaign is emblematic of a larger truth: accountability is a thing of the past in Republican politics
Ryan Zinke almost had to face up to his crimes … almost. A Trump political appointee at the Justice Department told prosecutors the case against Zinke wasn’t strong enough. Zinke is running around claiming that he’s innocent.
blfsays
Re SC@404, The Orlando Sentinel’s article is unavailable in the EU (yet another site whose technical and legal staff fail to understand the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)†), and the original Daily Beast article is behind a paywall. Fortunately, Salon’s article is easily-available, Matt Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg claims in letter that Gaetz paid for sex with minor (“Daily Beast publishes letter from indicted Gaetz associate — who allegedly tried to buy pardon through Roger Stone”).
† And Yes, I know there are tricks to work-around their stupidity and incomprehension.
Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed, denouncing “woke corporations” — a Republican concern that went from non-existent to mind-numbingly tiresome with amazing speed — and executives who’ve had the audacity to criticize the GOP’s voter-suppression efforts.
The ostensible point o f[Cruz’s] essay was an announcement that he would no longer accept corporate PAC contributions. But while making this declaration, Cruz went quite a bit further about how he believes the system on Capitol Hill works:
This is the point in the drama when Republicans usually shrug their shoulders, call these companies “job creators,” and start to cut their taxes. Not this time. This time, we won’t look the other way on Coca-Cola’s $12 billion in back taxes owed. This time, when Major League Baseball lobbies to preserve its multibillion-dollar antitrust exception, we’ll say no thank you. This time, when Boeing asks for billions in corporate welfare, we’ll simply let the Export-Import Bank expire.
Hmm. So according to this sitting Republican senator, he and his own GOP colleagues have been content to “look the other way” when corporations have failed to act in the public interest. Indeed, by Cruz’s telling, it’s worse than that: Republicans didn’t just “look the other way,” they also cut corporations’ taxes and delivered “corporate welfare,” too, while accepting the businesses’ campaign contributions.
The Texan’s op-ed added:
In my nine years in the Senate, I’ve received $2.6 million in contributions from corporate political-action committees. Starting today, I no longer accept money from any corporate PAC. I urge my GOP colleagues at all levels to do the same. For too long, Republicans have allowed the left and their big-business allies to attack our values with no response. We’ve allowed them to ship jobs overseas, attack gun rights, and destroy our energy companies.
Cruz concluded, in a message directed at corporate executives, “When the time comes that you need help with a tax break or a regulatory change, I hope the Democrats take your calls, because we may not. Starting today, we won’t take your money either.”
Again, it’s striking to see a senator put all of this in writing. As Cruz tells it, Republicans didn’t much care what corporations did, just so long as corporate PACs threw money at them and expressed indifference to the party’s broader agenda. In fact, according to the senator’s own op-ed, he and his colleagues would “help” executives with tax breaks and regulatory changes, in response to phone calls, thanks in part to the business’ financial support.
But now that some executives have hurt Republicans’ feelings — by supporting Americans’ voting rights — Cruz is now uncomfortable with the pay-to-play dynamic he tolerated for nearly a decade.
Jon Chait joked, “I am not exactly a fan of the modern Republican Party, and even I think it’s a little unfair and reductive to accuse them of allowing firms to destroy American jobs simply so they can vacuum up campaign donations. But Cruz is confessing to this. Not on a secretly recorded conversation. In public!” [LOL, yes. Bitter laughter, but yes. He confessed]
As a headline on a Washington Post analysis added yesterday, “You’re not supposed to say that out loud, Ted Cruz.”
[…] Senator Ron Johnson helped take the lead in the search for anti-Biden dirt, and a Russian agent claimed he fed information to Johnson. Asked last summer whether he’d possibly relied on information from Kremlin-backed sources, the Wisconsin Republican evaded direct questions.
What we didn’t know at the time was that the FBI specifically alerted Johnson that he was “a target of Russian disinformation,” but he questioned the value of the briefing.
In other words, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee was targeted by the Kremlin, while the senator was seeking dirt on the future American president, and when the FBI warned him directly about what was transpiring, Ron Johnson thought the smart thing to do would be to blow off the FBI’s concerns.
I realize that Johnson remains a sitting U.S. senator in good standing. I’m less sure why. Under normal circumstances, today would be the day in which other Republican senators started putting some distance between themselves and their beleaguered Wisconsin colleague.
The FBI last summer also gave what is known as a defensive briefing to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who ahead of the election used his perch as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to investigate Biden’s dealings with Ukraine […]
The proud tradition of Republican lawmakers touting provisions of the American Rescue Plan that they voted against continues this week. One entry comes courtesy of a lawmaker with a rather high-profile sibling: Rep. Greg Pence (R-IN), brother of former Vice President Mike Pence. “Help is on the way” Greg Pence tweeted Wednesday, flanking his tweet with siren emojis.
Greg Pence was referring to the restaurant revitalization money provided by the Democratic Party legislation.
Commentary from Steve Benen:
Either this bill is “one of the worst pieces of legislation” [that’s what Mitch McConnell and other Republicans called it] in a generation, or “help is on the way” thanks to a bill that’s going to do a lot of good for a lot of people.
[…] In April 2010, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put together a list of the House Republicans who tried to take credit for economic recovery efforts in their districts, thanks to investments from a law they vehemently opposed. The list included more than 70% of the House GOP conference.
Same old story when it comes to Republican legislators now touting the American Rescue plan and COVID relief packages that Democrats have passed.
blfsays
Nasa’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, has been so successful — and the Perseverance rover’s operations are ahead-of-schedule — Nasa / JPL have decided to extend Ingenuity’s mission to at least a sixth (and possibly additional) flights, serving as an aerial scout for the rover, NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter to Begin New Demonstration Phase.
The fourth flight was to have happened yesterday, but (probably) the same issue which delayed the first flight happened again (there’s c.15% probability of the problem occurring). The work-around is to simply try again, which is supposed to have happened earlier today. Data from this second attempt at the fourth flight should be en route to Earth as I type. (There is actually fixed software onboard the rover, but downloading it to the helicopter, including a new round of testing, would consume something like a week — so the simpler “just try again” approach is being used.)
Contrasting data from both sides of the Atlantic show that the eurozone economy contracted by 0.6 percent while the American economy expanded by 1.6 percent.
The diverging recoveries underway in the U.S. and Europe underscore the value of effective vaccination and public spending in the pandemic.
Trump operated from the assumption that Wall Street offers a real-time barometer of a president’s performance.
Two weeks before Election Day 2020, Donald Trump and Joe Biden met for their final debate, and the incumbent president made a prediction. “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash,” […]
Biden was elected soon after. The stock market, at least for now, has not crashed. In fact, the headline on this Wall Street Journal report yesterday read, “Stocks Are Off to Best Start to a Presidential Term Since Great Depression.”
[…] The S&P 500 has risen 11% since Mr. Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration. The index recorded its strongest performance since the start of Mr. Roosevelt’s first term in 1933 […]
CNBC ran a similar report earlier this week, noting the stock market’s performance in the nascent Biden era “easily trounces” any of his modern predecessors.
At a certain level, none of this should come as too big of a surprise. The nation is starting to crawl out of its pandemic hole, and the robust federal response — widespread investments, coupled with vaccinations and Federal Reserve support — is fueling a strong recovery. A Wall Street upturn seemed inevitable.
What’s more, any such analysis should come with all kinds of caveats, starting with the most important: the major stock market indexes are not the economy and do not always reflect economic health.
[…] It’s not just that [Trump] promised Americans “the stock market will crash” in the event of a Biden presidency […]
Though the former president’s tweets have been removed, Trump spent much of his term in the White House bragging about assorted bull markets. As regular readers may recall, it was a matter of intense preoccupation for the Republican, with every new high seen as proof of his genius.
He even incorporated Wall Street into entirely unrelated stories. In late 2019, for example, Trump argued via Twitter that if he were impeached, “it would lead to the biggest FALL in Market History. It’s called a Depression, not a Recession!” Soon after, he was impeached. Investors didn’t much care.
Trump spent years operating from the assumption that Wall Street was a direct reflection of the American presidency — and upturns were proof of Oval Office excellence. That never made any sense, but as the major indexes climb under Biden, I’ll look forward to the explanation as to why the stock markets are no longer politically relevant.
LOL
blfsays
Lynna@420 quotes “I’ll look forward to the explanation as to why the stock markets are no longer politically relevant.”
Well… Corporations / CEOs should stay out of politics (Moscow Mitch); It’s all FAKE NEWS!; Dr Seuss got cancelled; Banning trans people is much more important; Teh microchips in the vaccines cause hallucinations; Zillions of furriners are streaming across one particular border to takesteal all that money; Teh ticker-tape machines were rigged by Hugo Chávez; Biden’s tax raises will takesteal all that money several times over; So will the Green New Deal; and perhaps most importantly, Shares aren’t priced in rubles.
“DOD announces formal cancellation of #Trump border wall funding, will now work to prioritize which milcon projects that took hits to support wall will be reinstated first….”
In a rare move for the indicted Ukrainian gas middleman, oligarch Dmytro Firtash issued a statement on Friday denying any involvement in Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to smear President Joe Biden.
“Mr. Firtash has previously stated that he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it,” reads the statement, issued by Firtash attorneys Dan Webb and Lanny Davis. “Mr. Firtash never authorized anyone on his behalf to have any involvement in an investigation about the Bidens in the Ukraine.”
The statement comes after FBI agents executed a search warrant on Giuliani’s home and office, and also seized Victoria Toensing’s phone under a warrant.
Firtash was indicted in 2014 on federal foreign bribery charges. The indictment left the oligarch stranded in Vienna, where he has spent the the last seven years fighting extradition to stand trial in a Chicago federal courtroom.
In summer 2019, he hired Toensing and her husband Joe DiGenova in a bid to convince the Justice Department to call off the prosecution. The two former Reagan-era prosecutors also hired a Giuliani associate, Lev Parnas, reportedly for $200,000 to work as a translator. Prosecutors later said that they had found evidence that Parnas had received a $1 million loan from longtime, Geneva-based Firtash attorney Ralph Isenegger.
Toensing and DiGenova secured a meeting with then-Attorney General Bill Barr in August 2019, but it had no discernible effect on the case. At the same time as the engagement took place, however, a document from Firtash’s case in Vienna found its way into the hands of conservative journalist John Solomon and Giuliani, who took the document with him on TV appearances and used it to bolster his conspiracy theories about the Bidens.
It’s not clear how that document was leaked from the case….
“He did not provide any ‘dirt-digging efforts,’” the statement reads….
“Mr. Firtash reiterates that did not have any information, did not collect any information, and did not finance anyone who would collect that information,” the oligarch’s attorneys added.
Davis, who stopped working for Firtash once Toensing and DiGenova were hired, was rehired by Firtash this month, FARA registrations show.
Josh Duggar, the oldest child of the sprawling fundamentalist Christian family that starred in TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting,” has been arrested by U.S. Marshals in Arkansas.
…
Duggar appeared before Chief Magistrate Judge Erin Wiedemann at U.S. District Court in Arkansas’ western district at 12 p.m. ET Friday. Duggar’s charges were not read at the arraignment hearing, though he did plead not guilty to “all counts.”
…
Josh Duggar and the rest of his family enjoyed widespread popularity for years as a result of their show, which depicted the day-to-day of a cheerfully pious, enormous clan. That fame cratered in 2015, after allegations surfaced that Josh Duggar molested girls in the early 2000s. It was later discovered that some of the alleged victims were his sisters.
Soon after, Duggar also admitted that he’d cheated on his wife, Anna, through Ashley Madison, a site designed to help people cheat on their spouses or partners.
Duggar also got sued over a real estate deal in 2019 in a dispute he ultimately lost.
Soon after the cancellation of “19 Kids and Counting” in 2015, a spinoff called “Counting On” started to air on TLC in its wake. Josh Duggar’s wife and children are listed as cast members and the show is currently on the air. The couple is still together, and they are expecting their seventh child.
Canada will start getting Pfizer Covid-19 vaccines from the US next week, a company spokesperson said, in what will be the first time the U.S. has allowed that company’s vaccine exported to Canada.
Canada has been getting Pfizer’s vaccines from Belgium until now, Reuters reports. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said starting next week, Canada will be receiving 2 million doses a week from Pfizer alone. Vaccinations have ramped up in the country in recent months. Every adult in Quebec will be eligible to make a vaccine appointment on May 14 and in Ontario every adult can book an appointment starting May 24.
US president Joe Biden is expected to impose new travel restrictions on India starting on Tuesday amid the Covid-19 epidemic, barring most non-U.S. citizens from entering, a White House official told Reuters.
The new restrictions are on the advice of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and are imposed “in light of extraordinarily high Covid-19 case loads and multiple variants circulating in India,” the official said….
The US is hearing “huge demand” from countries around the world for vaccines not needed by Americans but has not developed a criteria [sic] for allocating them, its government said.
The White House said on Monday it will start to share up to 60 million doses of AstraZeneca Plc’s coronavirus vaccine with other countries, as soon as the next few weeks, but the Federal Drug Administration still needs to approve those doses, Reuters reports.
Gayle Smith, the U.S. State Department’s coordinator for global Covid-19 response, said Washington has not decided yet on how to allocate those vaccines that will be shared with other countries, despite the clamor from allies like India, where the virus is surging.
“I think we certainly will be making a decision based on what impact we can have on the spread of the virus, where needs are most acute and what will be the most effective,” said Smith.
She said the situation in India was “very, very serious” but had not yet peaked and would need persistent attention for some time and the immediate aid that the United States was already providing, such as protective gear and vaccine manufacturing supplies.
“We’re also looking at other things that can be done to build up supply chains within India so there can be a more steady supply of all those things that are needed to manage this overtime.”
…Over and over, they [Republicans] presented claims that proved to be unsubstantiated, noncredible or irrelevant. Over and over, courts tossed lawsuits either because there were no grounds to sue or because there wasn’t evidence for the claims being made. Over the course of the past six months, all of that effort to prove that Trump actually won has, according to a database compiled by a conservative group, resulted in one criminal prosecution for one act of manipulating a ballot.
A father in Michigan signed his daughter’s ballot to send it in while she was at college.
…How many people actually believe that President Biden’s election wasn’t legitimate? New polling from CNN, conducted by SSRS, answers that question.
About 3 in 10 Americans think Biden didn’t legitimately win, despite the utter lack of evidence to bolster that claim. More alarmingly, 1 in 5 believe there’s actually solid evidence that Biden didn’t win, which there is not. And more alarming still, that position — that there’s this solid evidence the election was stolen — is held by half of Republicans.
….CNN also asked respondents to identify which was a more potent problem in American elections, voter fraud or rules making it too hard to vote…. Among Republicans, 4 in 5 said the former was the bigger problem.
…The Republican base has been convinced by Trump and others that some widespread, nefarious conspiracy stole the presidential election from Trump; Florida and other states respond by scaling back drop boxes and tightening absentee ballot rules. They’re small changes that will necessarily make it harder to vote, not sweeping changes uprooting fraudulent activity. Because, you know, that doesn’t happen to any significant degree.
…Republicans feel like fraud happened and believe that there’s evidence it did, so legislators who are happy to limit voting opportunities leverage that sense to offer up changes they present as vaguely centered on the base’s concerns.
It’s like a guy in the year 1100 worrying that the clouds will become animate and devour him, and his village mystic handing him a pendant that will prevent that from happening. Maybe that guy had strong evidence that the clouds would eat him and maybe the mystic was trying to get rid of the pendant anyway, so everyone comes away happy.
President Joe Biden will restrict travel from India starting Tuesday on the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as India battles a deadly second wave of coronavirus infections.
Washington Post
The Biden administration is charting a new course in an attempt to end North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile program, striking a balance between President Donald Trump’s grand bargain, leader-to-leader diplomacy and President Barack Obama’s arm’s-length approach to the crisis, said U.S. officials familiar with the plan.
CNN
The number of unaccompanied migrant children held in jail-like conditions by US Customs and Border Protection dropped nearly 84% in the span of a month, according to a White House official, underscoring the significant progress made by the administration after reaching record high custody figures.
Yay! Still a ways to go, but at least some good is being done.
NBC
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed a bill Wednesday banning transgender athletes from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender. On Friday, when pressed by MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle to provide an example of a trans child ‘trying to gain an unfair competitive advantage’ at a school in the state, Justice, a Republican, said he couldn’t.
Update on that whole vote-counting thing in Arizona, which will soon spread to other states:
Right off the bat, the fact that Arizona is still recounting 2020 presidential ballots is itself ridiculous. As we’ve discussed, the official vote tally in the state showed Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump, thanks in part to a strong showing in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa County. When Republicans, committed to the Big Lie, cried foul, Arizona conducted an audit, relying on a federally accredited firm to oversee the process.
Then there was a second audit, ordered by the GOP-led legislature. There was also a hand recount, supervised by both parties. All of this turned up nothing: no fraud, no sham ballots, and no wrongdoing.
And yet, here we are, nearly six months after the election, watching Arizona review Maricopa County’s ballots once again, this time by way of an audit led by an obscure company — called “Cyber Ninjas” — with dubious credentials and led by a fringe conspiracy theorist.
As the review process began in earnest this week, it’s managed to become even more bonkers, with a combination of hidden procedures, security problems, weird inventions with unclear purposes, and rules that appear to have been made up on the fly. NBC News added today, “One America News Network, a right-wing cable channel, has been given special access to cover the audit and reported that audit workers were using ultra-violet light to search for watermarks,” which (a) stems from a QAnon conspiracy theory; and (b) extra weird since the ballots don’t have watermarks.
There’s also some kind of bizarre search for “kinematic artifacts,” which is every bit as odd as it sounds.
Part of the problem is the point of this utterly bonkers ordeal: in response to hysterical fraud allegations with no basis in reality, Arizona Republicans appear eager to create a new, alternative truth, in the hopes that Trump’s defeat can be made to look like a victory.
But the other part of the problem is that the madness probably won’t be limited to the Grand Canyon State. The Washington Post reported yesterday on the degree to which the former president has “seized on” Arizona’s nonsense to feed his ridiculous beliefs.
Several advisers said the former president has become fixated on the unorthodox process underway in Phoenix…. Ensconced at his private club in Florida, Trump asks aides for updates about the process multiple times a day, advisers said, expressing particular interest in the use of UV lights to scrutinize Maricopa’s ballots — a method that has bewildered election experts.
The article quoted one person who recently visited Mar-a-Lago and listened to Trump discuss the recount for about 45 minutes. The person, referring to the former president, added, “He talks about it constantly.”
In other words, as President Joe Biden governs, and Democrats look for ways to advance their policy agenda, the most powerful voice in Republican politics is obsessed on Cyber Ninjas, preposterous watermarks, and an indefensible scheme designed to raise doubts about election results that have already been proven valid.
As for what Trump expects from the process, he told Dan Bongino this week, in reference to Arizona, “I think it’s going to be incredible. I think it’s going to be eye-opening.” He added that he has “no question” that he won Arizona — a state he lost in reality — because “we had rallies.”
[…] what will happen after the circus in Arizona ends.
It’s quite likely there will be related efforts in other states, where Republicans can hire Cyber Ninjas of their own. We can say this with some confidence because Trump has been unsubtle on this point, issuing a statement this week that said once the imagined fraud in Arizona is “revealed,” the “Great States of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, New Hampshire, and the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, would be forced to complete the work already started.”
In fact, the Cyber Ninjas company was among the entities to start pushing back against election results in Michigan this week.
For Trump and his allies, the madness in Arizona this week is the start, not the end, of a larger effort.
On Thursday, Joe Biden was walking to Marine One with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. The current president, who possess human emotions, bent down, plucked a dandelion from the grass, and tenderly presented it to the first lady before they boarded the helicopter. It was a sweet moment between two people who can still stand the sight of each other. Even if you don’t like Biden, because you’re a Republican who prefers seditious commanders in chief, you should consider the romantic scene good news because it demonstrates that the 78-year-old president can successfully bend over and recognize Dr. Biden as his wife. […]
But no! Rightwing media needs to keep the outrage engine churning, so they hopped on this.
[…] Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield, whose declared mission is revealing “liberal lunacy and the ills of socialism,” attacked Biden for his spontaneous ecological assault.
STINCHFIELD: OK, folks, I want you to take a look a this. Joe Biden today getting on Marine One and he stops and picks up … I think it’s a dandelion, but it’s a dandelion that hasn’t even blossomed into a flower yet.
I’ll let him finish, but I should point out that this wasn’t dandelion abortion. The plant had reached its seed head stage and its glory days as a flower were now the stuff of a Bruce Springsteen song.
STINCHFIELD: It gives everybody asthma.
Dandelions can trigger seasonal allergies, but they don’t literally make people asthmatic. Biden probably wouldn’t expose Dr. Biden to something that would make her break out in hives. That was the upside of the one-term loser not inviting Biden to the White House.
STINCHFIELD: So, you blow it. It goes everywhere and everyone starts sneezing.
Sweet Christ. This asshole sounds like Anakin Skywalker, who thought complaining about sand was somehow romantic. […]
Stinchfield’s anger escalates during his 30-second diatribe. It’s unclear whether he hates dandelions or wants to protect them from monsters who’d cut their lives short like they were a common African elephant. What’s obvious is that he really doesn’t like Joe Biden.
STINCHFIELD: Well, he picks up the weed and gives it to Jill like what I guess is supposed to be some kind of a sweet gesture. He’s getting dandelions all over the place.
Remember when the not-quite first lady, Melanie, introduced the one-term loser at a 2017 US Air Force event, and he shook her hand like he’d just met the woman? He mumbled a curt “thank you” and told her to “go and sit down now.” She wasn’t allowed to share the stage. […]
But sure, the guy who picks dandelions for his wife has a problem.
Stinchfield ends his gripping exposé with this weird line: “I say it was a planted dandelion there. Who knows”
Huh? No one plants dandelions because no one wants them around. They just show up. It’s like Ted Cruz at any Senate gathering.
We kid, but Newsmax’s target audience is people who can see an old guy dote on his charming wife and still hate him because he’s a Democrat who likes gay people. Stinchfield’s tirade is probably effective, just not with anyone you’d want to spend time around.
Now, go pick some flowers for your sweetie! (I’ll just send mine chocolate.)
The apartment company of Jared Kushner violated Maryland’s consumer protection laws numerous times at Baltimore-area properties by collecting debts without the required licenses, charging tenants improper fees, and misrepresenting the condition of rental units, a judge has ruled.
In a 252-page decision issued Thursday, Administrative Law Judge Emily Daneker found that violations by Westminster Management and the company JK2 were “widespread and numerous.”….
Daneker heard months of testimony, from September to December. [Snipped–testimony about rodents, mold, a collapsing ceiling, etc.]
Westminster has repeatedly alleged that Frosh’s case was politically motivated.
In her ruling, Daneker found no evidence of that.
“The evidence does not establish differential treatment or selective enforcement based on any politically motivated basis, as opposed to motivation to protect Maryland consumers,” she wrote….
The wide-ranging case dealt with issues from maintenance problems such as mold and rodents, to fees charged to the consumers….
[Overcharging fees] “This occurred a total of 2,642 times over the course of more than two years,” Daneker wrote. “These circumstances do not support a finding that this was the result of isolated or inadvertent mistakes.”
In another finding, Daneker said that Dutch Village and Pleasantview at times lacked the proper city rental licenses. During these periods, the properties were not legally permitted to offer units for rent, or to charge or collect rent….
An official with the Consumer Protection Division will issue a final order, which could address penalties and restitution…
[Attorney General Brian] Frosh has previously estimated the damages could total millions of dollars.
[…] in response to the sexual abuse the family sent Josh to be ‘mentored’ by a guy named Bill Gothard [back in 2015] at a place he founded called the Institute for Basic Life Principles.
Posner calls the IBLP “an insular and authoritarian evangelical homeschooling ministry whose charismatic founder, former followers say, sexually harassed female employees, blamed rape victims for provoking their attackers, and subjected young disciples to grueling physical labor for little or no pay.” It’s a fascinating part of the Duggar backstory. But more than that it is a fascinating look into part of the world of rightwing evangelical politics where a climate of sexual repression and adulation of charismatic leaders creates its own world of sexual abuse and predation
[…] This is like the guy at McDonald’s who walks up to every customer he sees to tell them he got shorted a McNugget.
How many years before he turns into Gollum? Someone just sit him down in front of Matlock, pour him a glass of Ovaltine, and at the end of the day maybe sweep up the larvae husks that have fallen out of his ears. […] [Video is available at the link.]
The one time leader of the free world who now lives alone in a hotel sharing buffets, common areas, and staff with strangers, yearns for attention and relevance so badly, he now stands on a patio step every night ranting to tens of people about a 6 month old election that he lost.
To be fair, some people in the audience do yell, “Yeah!” And some people applaud.
Apparently, you can’t go to Mar-a-Lago to eat dinner and listen to a band without Trump interrupting to repeat all his lies. “Take a look,” Hair Furor says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands of votes … they found a lot of votes up in New Hampshire just now.”
The instinct to simply never worry about what Donald Trump is up to a good one. It should be nurtured. As a nation, as human beings, the more days that can pass without even using the word “Trump,” the better. […]
In almost every circumstance, the best Trump is no Trump. And when no Trump won’t do, the answer is the least Trump. Deliberately going out of the way to check in on what’s happening to the Man Who Cannot Tweet seems like an intrinsically self-destructive activity. Like smashing your thumb with a hammer one one more time, just to see if it still hurts.
And yet … sometimes, just maybe, there are reasons why it’s worth tipping back that rock and taking just one quick look at what’s squiggling underneath. […]
Thousands of people gathered across cities in France on Saturday in honor of May Day, with many demonstrators vocalizing their opposition to recent proposed changes to unemployment benefits.
Despite continued coronavirus-era restrictions across the country, demonstrators from trade unionists to members of the “Yellow Vest” movement that rose to prominence three years ago gathered for roughly 300 rallies across France Saturday.
The demonstrations come a year after the pandemic canceled most in-person events in the country in honor of May Day, or International Workers’ Day, the annual celebration of spring which for decades has been used as an occasion to defend workers’ rights.
Photos and videos shared on social media showed protesters gathered in the streets of Paris, as well as other French cities like Lyon, Nantes, Lille and Toulouse. [video is available at the link]
he protesters, most of whom wore face masks, held signs like, “We want to live, not survive,” and, “Dividends, not unemployment benefits are the income of lazy people.”
Philippe Martinez, head of the CGT labour union, told Reuters that the recent unemployment reform plan proposed in France would give “loads of money [to] those who have plenty and less to those who have nothing.”
While the majority of French protests Saturday remained peaceful, Reuters noted that about 5,000 police officers were deployed to respond to the protests in Paris, where at least 17 people were arrested.
In Lyon, police disbanded a group of roughly 200 people who were throwing fireworks, according to the news agency.
The demonstrations come as much of France remains under its third coronavirus lockdown, though French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday outlined plans to gradually lift restrictions, starting with the reopening of schools next week, followed by museums, outdoor cafes and other specified shops later in the month.
As demonstrators marched in France, May Day protests in other countries across the globe were less peaceful as police sought to carry out coronavirus-related curfews and other safety measures. […]
blfsays
Follow-up to @418, Nasa’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, did indeed successfully complete its fourth flight on the second attempt.
Top Republicans are turning on Rep. Liz Cheney, the party’s highest-ranking woman in Congress, with one conservative leader suggesting she could be ousted from her GOP post within a month.
The comments by Reps. Steve Scalise, the minority whip, and Jim Banks, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, carry weight because of their close relationship with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who is openly feuding with Cheney.
…During an interview with Axios on Friday, he [Scalise] said of Cheney: “This idea that you just disregard President Trump is not where we are, and, frankly, he has a lot to offer still.”
[….]
Cheney (R-Wyo.) told reporters during several interviews at a GOP retreat in Orlando, Florida, that anyone challenging the 2020 election results should be disqualified from a presidential campaign in 2024, and that she herself would not rule out a run….
State representative Mike Nearman was charged with official misconduct and criminal trespass over December 2020 incident
[…;]
Mike Nearman was charged with official misconduct in the first degree and criminal trespass in the second degree. Oregon state police struggled to force the rioters out of the Capitol, which was closed to the public, on 21 December as lawmakers met in emergency session to deal with economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
The Marion county deputy district attorney, Matthew Kemmy, told Nearman’s attorney, Jason Short, in a letter his client must appear in court on 11 May or face arrest.
[…]
Nearman was seen on security cameras letting violent protesters into the Oregon state capitol. They attacked authorities with bear spray. Outside the building, some protesters assaulted reporters and broke glass doors.
[…]
In January, after Nearman’s role became clear from the security footage, the state house speaker, Tina Kotek, called for his resignation and stripped his committee assignments.
“Representative Nearman put every person in the Capitol in serious danger,” Kotek said on 11&nbso;January.
[…]
The charge is a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum 364 days in prison and a $6,250 fine. The trespass charge accused him of unlawfully letting others into the Capitol. It is a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum of 30 days in jail and a $1,250 fine.
So, “put[ting] every person in the Capitol in serious danger” amounts to 13 months jailed and 7.5k$ (maximums), after a conviction — unless the culprit is black…
[…]
A recording aired by WNBC-TV showed Howard Zlotkin, a Dickinson high school science teacher, talking about Floyd and Black Lives Matter during what was supposed to be a climate change discussion in a Zoom class on landscape and design.
In the footage, Zlotkin, who is white, is heard to say people are whining and crying about Black Lives Matter. He then refers to Floyd with a profanity as a criminal who got arrested and he got killed because he wouldn’t comply. Another profanity is heard as he says Floyd is being treated as a hero.
[…]
The video of Slotkin’s remarks and another taken the next day also included a profanity directed at a student and a vulgar gesture, WNBC reported. The student said Zlotkin grew irate when she and three other students challenged him, and the four were told to write an essay on Why Black lives should matter[†] — an assignment not given to other students.
[…;]
“The comments that were made were very biased and he shouldn’t be having that kind of discussion with the children — that had nothing to do with the subject matter in the classroom,” [Superintendent Franklin] Walker said. “The position that he put the children in certainly was a very uncomfortable one by doing and saying those kinds of things.”
The teachers’ union declined comment until it had more information, the union president, Ron Greco, said. [i.e., until they can think up an excuse supporting the alleged-teacher and ensuring the complaining students are jailed or deported… –blf]
[…]
Zlotkin, who has been at the school for 20 years, was also suspended with pay from his adjunct professor position at Hudson County Community College, NJ.com reported.
A spokeswoman said “offensive and derogatory language” violates the college’s anti-harassment policy and professional conduct policy.
Zlotkin declined comment to the New York Times, citing the investigation, but called the footage a very well-edited soundbite and said he would love one day to give my side of the story.
Your union will see that a very well-edited soundbite does give [your fabricated] side of the story.
† Black lives do matter. That quote is set in eejit quotes because, as the context makes clear, the bigoted teacher misunderstands, disagrees, or both.
[…]
According to Republicans, Joe Biden was supposed to be sleepy, senile and socialist. He was also allegedly a puppet of secret powers — unlike his predecessor, who acted like the puppet of a former KGB officer.
Sean Hannity of Fox News claimed, last month, to be worried about Biden’s cognitive health.
This is quite something, coming from Hannity. He began a recent interview, with a Florida man by the name of Donald Trump, as follows:
I know a lot of people that are around you every day. This is what they are all telling me: You are working as hard as you did when you were in the White House, except you play a little golf more. That you’re keeping an insane schedule, seven days a week. You really don’t stop.
In one sense, it’s true that Trump keeps an outrageous schedule. In that same sense, he’s working as hard as he ever did.
[…]
The challenge for Biden’s critics is not merely that he is nothing like their caricature of a walking communist corpse. It’s that he’s always been at the dead center of the Democratic party: a spirit level finding the most balanced point between wherever the left and right stands.
[…]
Extreme, he is not. You can’t say that with a straight face about this Republican party. This is a supposedly conservative group whose extremist base idolizes a failed one-term president and thinks there wasn’t much wrong with a violent insurrection that tried to hang its own vice-president.
Back in the 1980s, when Biden was admiring Britain’s Labour leader, the cultural warriors of liberalism and socialism were caricatured — not least by the rightwing Murdoch press — as the Loony Left. By that measure, today’s Republican party is barely on planet earth.
[…]
Speaking of stupid, the man who led Trump’s economic policy doesn’t know what goes into beer. He also doesn’t know how delicious grilled Brussels sprouts are.
The Trumpified brains of Republican leaders are trying — really hard — to make sense of the planet Biden lives on. They somehow believe that Democrats are the ones who are outlandish radicals who don’t believe in American traditions.
Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, told Punchbowl News on Monday that Democrats were retiring from Congress — like Republicans last year — because they know they are headed for defeat.
[…]
Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday will certainly go far: $1.8 trillion gets you a long way down the road you’re headed. But is it really socialist to pay for roads and bridges and childcare?
Republicans will try to pretend it is, for sure. But they risk sounding strangely out of touch with the reality of the suburban voters who will decide their fate in those congressional elections next year.
They risk looking sleepy, supercilious and seditionist. It’s not a good look.
lumipunasays
Re 436:
As demonstrators marched in France, May Day protests in other countries across the globe were less peaceful as police sought to carry out coronavirus-related curfews and other safety measures. […]
Here in Helsinki, some 60 people were arrested and fined for disobeying police dispersal order after about 300 cranks gathered to protest against the (not very strict) covid restrictions. Due to said restrictions, protesting is only allowed in separate groups of at most six people each. Previous freedompaloozas have at least once violated this rule, but this time it was really blatant, and IIRC the first time the police dispersed the protest. It was very much a planned-on-social-media violation, so it’s no wonder that many people also made a show of refusing to disperse.
BTW, about two weeks ago English-language media noted a number of small “white lives matter” protests coordinated by the far-right cranks in various countries. Here we also had a small protest that weekend, that Finnish media described as being “against coronavirus restrictions”. However, I did see a news photo of a few people carrying a huge-ass banner that said “white lives matter” in English.
A journalist in the White House publicly supporting Donald Trump and trying to discredit Joe Biden? Social media accounts belonging to “Rob Petrosian” have attracted a large following on TikTok and other platforms. But an investigation conducted by the FRANCE 24 Observers suggests that “Rob Petrosian” is not a real journalist, and that he is most likely based outside of the United States.
In fact, he’s everywhere. On Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Parler, YouTube, Telegram and even Pinterest, a user calling himself “Rob Petrosian” shares daily photos and videos of his alleged life as a White House reporter. On his TikTok bio, he had written until November 2020 that he was a White House correspondent for the Washington Post. Today, his bio reads: Events and News President (TRUMP) United States, The White House, US. Patriot. Even though the Washington Post has said no one by that name works for the newspaper, the user continues to use the hashtags #washingtonpost and #reporter.
On most of these platforms, “Rob Petrosian” tags the White House as his workplace, implying that he works there, either as a member of the presidential staff, or as a journalist. He mainly posts videos of Joe Biden — along with critical or sarcastic comments — but also shares videos of Trump.
Analysis of the social media accounts suggests that the life of this self-described “White House reporter” is actually invented. Photographs appearing to show “Rob Petrosian” at the White House have in fact been Photoshopped, while the videos of White House events have been taken from the accounts of real White House correspondents.
By posing as a journalist, “Rob Petrosian” has turned his accounts into disinformation machines. In [a tweet at the link], he claims that many Americans refuse to call the current tenant of the White House “president”, citing a poll that does not exist.
A video posted on the Instagram account @rabertpetrosian shows President Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, with this caption: “The goal of these two people is to destroy America and the Americans with their wrong policies. […]”.
On April 5, the @RobPetrosian Twitter account shared a video from the White House that was viewed over 130,000 times, along with a caption saying that Biden was about to be hospitalised. The Observers team analysed the tweet. The conclusion? The shared video is old, and Biden was not at the White House that day, but appeared in good health the next day.
On March 26, the same account falsely tweeted that Kamala Harris was not American but Indian, and a week earlier published the results of a survey — also non-existent — concluding that 40 percent of the votes in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania had been changed by China and Iran.
[… and so on… I]s his content really harmful? Marianna Spring, BBC’s specialist disinformation and social media reporter, has a clear opinion on the matter:
“Disinformation which is spread by accounts impersonating people that you might trust — whether that’s a journalist or a doctor or an expert, or brandishing credentials in some way — can be very dangerous because it plays on our trust in those people and in those systems, and then exploits that trust in order to promote false information, or stuff that’s just simply not true.”
Spring says she is not aware of any other case of someone impersonating a US political journalist. […]
The FRANCE 24 Observers team tried to contact “Rob Petrosian” to find out the motives behind the accounts — political or not. We sent multiple requests via direct message and email, but the accounts ignored our requests and blocked our access to their profiles.
The @RobPetrosian Twitter account did however share an excerpt from a FRANCE 24 Observers video analysing one of the fake items he had posted, referring to our team as French people who have formed a group in France to discredit American patriots.
As a reminder, France24 is France’s attempt to provide an international news service similar to BBC World Service.
[…]
The accounts feature several photographs that appear to show “Rob Petrosian” at the White House, posing with Trump and his wife Melania, or standing at the press secretary’s podium. In all of the photos, however, the face has been Photoshopped into the frame.
[… examples at the link…]
France24 goes on to tentatively identify the origin of the fraudulent journalist as Turkey, albeit does not name names.
The big push is on to blame the American Rescue Plan for businesses not being able to find enough workers to fill their jobs. Business owners—restaurant owners in particular—are lining up to tell reporters how those darn lazy workers would rather stay home and collect unemployment than go back to work. Rarely do these stories of employer pain ask questions like, say, how much pay they’re offering or how careful they’re being with their workers’ health in the midst of the pandemic. Stories asking people why they’re hesitating to go back to work are mysteriously not so common.
[…] A woman who bartends as second job in Florida explained to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that she’d seen a lot of people leaving the restaurant industry for other careers “partially due to COVID and the hours changing and not making consistent money.” The people she was talking about had gone into fields like nursing and accounting—but business owners looking for applicants aren’t talking about the people who went elsewhere, they’re talking like everyone is just sitting home.
And about that. People still have kids at home they’re responsible for taking care of, as even this series of employer sob stories from The Wall Street Journal acknowledges. They’re still afraid of contracting COVID-19, because, again, many have experienced bosses who will put their health at risk.
Some of those bosses are the very same ones who are featured in articles wailing about how difficult it is to hire people, as Anne Helen Petersen found: “In Waterville, Ohio, for instance, there’s this sad, sad song about the difficulties finding workers at Dale’s Bar & Grill—which somehow fails to mention that the owner is a Covid hoaxer (he believes that doctors have been falsely labeling deaths as covid-related) and has brazenly violated masking rules, and did not require employees to wear masks.”
[…] Florida provides another dispatch from the “struggling employers” genre, and a high-profile politician—Sen. Marco Rubio—tweeting “Florida small business owners are all telling me the same thing, they can’t find people to fill available jobs. You can come up with all kinds of reasons & wave around all the Ivy League studies you want, but what does common sense tell you is the reason?”
What does common sense tell me is the reason, Marco? Well, the maximum state unemployment benefit is $275 a week, which means that with the extra $300, people are getting $575 a week at most. That means if unemployment is paying more than work, the work is paying less than $14.50 an hour if they’re working full-time—and again, that’s the maximum, and in a state that’s become notorious for delays in unemployment benefits. Most people are probably getting significantly less, and a living wage for a single person with no children is $14.82 an hour in Florida. So I’m thinking that Florida employers need to offer higher pay.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about American capitalism,” Anne Helen Petersen writes, “it’s the skill and swiftness with which it translates resistance into personal, moral failure—which is precisely what so many of these business owners and politicians have done.” Exactly. Workers are saying “enough.” If bosses won’t pay a living wage and respect their workers’ health and safety, people who’ve gutted it out through a year of terror and watching their loved ones get sick and die may not be so willing to come crawling. That’s not a personal failing […]
blf @443, wow. That’s a lot of disinformation. And a lot of social media outlets for that disinformation.
That’s also a lot of work for one person, which makes me think that “Rob Petrosian” is more likely to be a state-sponsored group of purveyors of disinformation. Turkey is listed as a possible source. I hope further investigation is done. Let’s see if Putin is backing “Rob Petrosian.”
Hillary Clinton on Friday weighed in on a host of foreign policy issues facing the Biden administration, including the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Russian treatment of Alexei Navalny and the FBI investigation into Rudy Giuliani.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, the former secretary of State said she was concerned about the potential fallout for the Afghan people, especially women, if the Taliban were to come back into power.
When asked if she was “comfortable” with President Joe Biden’s announced timeline to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, Clinton declined to answer. Instead, she called it a “wicked problem” and said Biden “made the decision that he thought was the right decision.”
Her focus, however, would be “on what happens to the people, particularly the women in Afghanistan, if the Taliban come back into power, if the government collapses,” she said, echoing concerns among some about a potential power vacuum after U.S. forces leave. If that happened, she said she hoped the U.S. and its allies would help Afghans out of the country to “deal with what I expect to be a very large refugee flow.”
Clinton also criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying she approved of the U.S. sanctions over Navalny, an imprisoned regime critic whose treatment she called “particularly troubling.”
“He represents millions of Russians who deserve to have a better government that is actually, you know, working to move Russia forward, which Putin is not,” she said, adding that the White House and Congress should speak out “very forcefully” about Navalny’s release.
The former New York senator also talked about Giuliani, the longtime political opponent she defeated in her successful 2000 Senate campaign. On Wednesday, FBI agents raided Giuliani’s home and office, seizing materials in connection with an investigation into his work in Ukraine while serving as President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.
Clinton said she would “let the justice system work,” but added that Giuliani has “been behaving so erratically and seemingly illegally for so long” that “I don’t recognize him now.”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into him, and we’ll see what the investigation concludes,” she added.
Clinton also touched upon a pressing domestic issue, urging the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, saying that “its usefulness has passed us by.”
It’s a stance that many Democrats have adopted, due to concerns that Republicans will use it as a roadblock to the Biden agenda. Barring that, she said she supported lifting the filibuster for “constitutional matters,” such as voting rights.
The former Democratic Party nominee also nodded to the historic moment of two women — Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — sitting behind Biden during his first joint address to Congress on Wednesday.
“It really was a watershed moment,” she said. “I think it’s still not sinking in on people, that the, you know, combination of the speaker of the House and our vice president has shattered so many barriers and, as you say, the glass ceiling. It’s just thrilling to see.”
Hillary Clinton certainly is knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects. She would have made a good president.
Hospitals in Nepal have run out of beds and vaccine supply is dwindling as India’s massive coronavirus outbreak has spilled past its border into the small, neighboring country.
The Nepal Health Ministry on Friday issued a statement saying that the coronavirus situation in the country has become “unmanageable.”
“As the number of infections has been increasing, the health system is not able to cope and a situation has already arisen in which hospital beds cannot be made available,” the statement read.
According to The New York Times, Nepal recorded 5,657 new coronavirus infections on Friday, the highest daily number recorded in the South Asian country since October.
Health experts have theorized that the outbreak in Nepal was spurred by migrant workers who have returned home in recent weeks amid lockdown orders in India, which recorded more than 400,000 new COVID-19 cases for the first time on Saturday.
More than one-third of coronavirus tests in Nepal are coming back positive, and officials have urged Nepalis experiencing minor symptoms to stay home in order to keep the number of hospitalizations down, according to the Times.
Vaccine supply has also been disrupted by the outbreak in India, which had donated one million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Nepal.
Nepal had signed an agreement for an additional two million shots from Indian manufacturer the Serum Institute of India, but as of Saturday, just 380,000 of the roughly 1.7 million people in Nepal who have been vaccinated have received their second dose, the Times reported. […]
[…] “Two Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputies have been notified of their termination after separate internal investigations determined they committed serious policy violations,” the Harris County Sheriff’s Office announced Friday.
Deputy Bert Dillow was fired on April 28 after a video appeared on social media in March showing him punching a teenager in the face at a convenience store […]
Don’t run from me, boy. I’ll beat your f—ing ass right here,” Dillow told high school sophomore Carlos Rodriguez in the video posted by the outlet. “Turn around and put your hands behind your back before I beat the shit out of you.”
“Don’t be f—ing stupid,” Dillow said before Rodriguez tried to move away from him again.
The officer then proceeded to punch Rodriguez in the face, knocking him to the ground and punching him again multiple times before handcuffing him.
“All I was gonna do is talk to you, but now you’re f—ed,” Dillow said.
The sheriff’s investigation found that Dillow violated police policies on “Conduct Prohibited, De-Escalation and Response to Resistance (Use of Force), and Reports.” […]
Wonkette: “Well Of Course Joe Manchin Won’t Support DC Statehood”
Get out your smelling salts, because Joe Manchin has announced that he will not support the DC Statehood bill that passed in the House last week. Which means, unfortunately, that it is highly unlikely to pass the Senate, because at this point all that matters with any bill is whether or not Joe Manchin can be personally persuaded to vote for it.
His line here is that it would just be wrong for a state to be admitted by legislation from Congress — as many states, including his own state of West Virginia, have been — and that instead
“If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment and let the people of America vote,” Manchin said in a radio interview on Friday.
He also claimed that the issue was “complicated” by the 23rd Amendment, which gave DC electoral votes.
It gave D.C. residents the right to vote in presidential elections, but it complicates D.C.’s pathway to statehood, because Congress had three options to choose from back in 1961. They could either have D.C. statehood, they could have retrocession to Maryland … or they could have granted electoral votes to D.C.
Manchin says he believes that because a constitutional amendment gave DC the electoral votes, a constitutional amendment would be needed to make it a state. He did not explain exactly why he thought that, but insisted that “legal scholars” backed him up on this.
Making Washington DC a state has been a priority for Democrats for some time now, and not just because it might result in an electoral advantage. It just feels wrong for 700,000 American citizens to not have representation in Congress or the Senate — and the fact is, if DC were a swing state it wouldn’t even be an issue. […] But because the Senate is currently 50-50, it’s not going to pass without every Democrat voting for it.
In fact, almost nothing is. Which makes Joe Manchin the most important person in the whole Senate.
While the conservative Democrat is frequently the biggest impediment to getting Democratic legislation passed, there’s something especially poetic about it this time. Republicans fear that admitting DC as a state could lessen their power, because the District is reliably Democratic. That much is obvious. But were DC to be made a state, Manchin would likely lose his power as well. With two more Democratic Senators, his would not be the only opinion that mattered when it came to getting things passed. In fact, it is likely that no one (except Republicans, depending on the makeup of the Senate at the time) would care what he wanted at all, because Democrats would be able to pass bills without his say-so.
[…] It’s clear he imagines himself as the dam that prevents things from going too far to the left whenever a majority of people in this country vote for Democrats […] But the fact is, as much as he may like things this way, as much as Republicans may like holding onto their power, as much as some American citizens might fear that DC statehood would result in the country going further left than they would like, that doesn’t change the fact that DC residents are American citizens and as such, should be entitled to representation in Congress. 700,000 American citizens, most of them people of color, should not have to take a pass on having that representation because one old white dude wants to hold on to his power.
Wonkette: “Kansas Lawmaker Arrested For Assaulting Student After Long Day Of Yelling At Teens About God”
Republican Kansas State Representative Mark Samsel was arrested this week after assaulting a student at the public high school in Wellsville where he was working as a substitute teacher. The assault reportedly involved Samsel taking the student by the shoulders and kneeing him in the testicles, after which he asked other students in the classroom if they, too, would like to kick him in the balls.
Does it get more messed up than that? Somehow it actually does. Several videos taken by students throughout the day show that […] Samsel spent the day ranting hysterically about God, the Bible, teenage suicide, lesbian foster parents and “the Devil’s music.”
Via Kansas City Star:
In one video shared with The Star, Samsel tells students about “a sophomore who’s tried killing himself three times,” adding that it was because “he has two parents and they’re both females.”
“He’s a foster kid. His alternatives in life were having no parents or foster care parents who are gay,” Samsel tells students. “How do you think I’m going to feel if he commits suicide? Awful.”
In another video, Samsel is recorded telling students, “make babies. Who likes making babies? That feels good, doesn’t it? Procreate. … You haven’t masturbated? Don’t answer that question….God already knows.”
Videos shared with The Star — by parents of students in the class — show Samsel focusing most of his attention on one male student. Both Samsel and the student paced around the classroom, talking back and forth. Samsel is shown following the student around and grabbing him. In one video, he puts his arms around the student and says that he was being hard on him.
At one point, Samsel tells the student, “You’re about ready to anger me and get the wrath of God. Do you believe me when I tell you that God has been speaking to me?” He then pushes him, and the student runs to the other side of the classroom.
It was after that incident that Samsel grabbed the student and kneed him in the balls.
He is also shown in a video instructing the student and one of his classmates to go outside, hold hands and run around the track, seemingly as punishment.
“Do you think we want to do this? No, we had a lesson to do. Is it kind of funny? Yeah. Are they ever going to learn? God only knows,” he says while watching the two students run outside.’
Videos show Samsel’s classroom in chaos as he talks about the devil, God and how the Bible was edited.
“Are you doing the Lord’s work as you’re listening to the devil’s music?” he asks a student.
And he continually references suicide, and tells the class, “I’m not going to lose one more of my kids to suicide. Are we clear?”
Samsel’s story here was that it was actually a staged incident and that most of the students were in on it. Here he is explaining that in a manner almost as confusing as his rants about Jesus. [Video is available at the link]
Transcript:
A few kids that were scared and probably didn’t — I don’t even know that they were scared, ’cause they were surrounded by their friends, and the comfort zone, we were in the art room, nobody was ever in danger. Did we make it look like we were in anger or outrageous or hurting kids? Yeah, we did! We made it look that way. It would not have been outrageous if I hadn’t dropped the F-bomb …
I’m going to stop him right here and say that “dropping the f-bomb” was not the most outrageous thing about this incident.
… If I didn’t say “I’m gonna bring the wrath of God on Theresa,” nobody cares, everyone keeps their head down and keep on going.
Again, everyone keeping their heads down seems preferable to kneeing a student in the balls.
Altercation’s a strong word, there was no altercation. I’m sure there’s some, one or two students that probably perceived it as one, but it was exactly as we planned it! […]
Do I like that it happened? No. Do I like that I used the F-bomb or had to take it to that extreme or? No. I absolutely do not.
Even if that were true that it was staged, which it obviously is not, yelling about God or claiming that gay foster parents were the cause of a teen’s suicide attempt is not a thing you are actually allowed to do while teaching in a public school. Also to what end were they meant to be “staging” this? What was it he thought was happening here? And why did he have to take it to any extreme?
The Kansas City Star also reports that Samsel recorded a Snapchat in which he tried to explain that he and the kids planned the whole thing to send a message. An incredibly unclear, violent and first-amendment-violating message.
“Every little bit of it. That’s right. The kids and I planned ALL this to SEND A MESSAGE about art, mental health, teenage suicide, how we treat our educators and one another. To who? Parents. And grandparents. And all of Wellsville,” he posted.
He wrote that he gave one particular student “hope.”
About what? If one is going to “send a message” one should figure out what that message is before kneeing someone in balls about it.
“I went to jail for battery. Does that really make me a criminal? Time will tell.”
Yes, it literally does make you a criminal. A criminal is someone who commits a crime, and battery is a crime, and so therefore, someone who commits battery is a criminal. Of course, Samsel seems to be confused about the concept of battery as a crime in general, having been one of 13 Republicans to vote against ending an exemption for spouses in the state’s sexual battery law — and then justified it by saying that getting married means giving “implied consent.” To being battered.
This is not a man who should be around children. Hell, he probably shouldn’t be around adults or any other living things. He is, however, a man that people in Wellsville, Kansas voted for to represent them and their interests in the state legislature, which suggests that we may never get a satisfactory answer to the question of what the hell is wrong with whoever thought that was a good idea.
Universal pre-school, paid family leave, subsidized childcare … who could possibly object to Biden’s plans to help children?
Joe Biden wants to spend big money on small children. On Wednesday the president announced an ambitious $1.8tn plan to boost family assistance programs, childhood education and student aid. If passed, the American Families Plan would overhaul the current (dire) childcare system and inject billions into universal preschool, paid family leave and subsidized childcare. It would be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy.
Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t support investing in children? The party of family values, of course! The party that loves advocating for embryos but doesn’t seem quite so keen on helping kids. Predictably Republicans are up in arms about the idea that the US, which one recent survey [The US is the second-worst country for raising a family, survey shows] ranked as the second-worst place in the world to raise children, might become a little more family-friendly. As soon as Biden had finished speaking, out came the usual talking points about how Biden was pushing a dangerous socialist agenda and trying to indoctrinate American children. You know who else liked universal day care? the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, linking to a 1974 article about day care in the Soviet Union.
Think that’s an unhinged response? I think it may have been surpassed by JD Vance’s incomprehensible contribution to the debate. On Thursday, the Hillbilly Elegy author and vocal Republican tweeted that ‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people. His line of reasoning, if you can call it that, was that: normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.
Perhaps Republicans should just cut to the chase and say that they don’t support any policy that makes it easier for women to leave their houses. […]
Universal pre-school, paid family leave, subsidized childcare … who could possibly object to Biden’s plans to help children?
Joe Biden wants to spend big money on small children. On Wednesday the president announced an ambitious $1.8tn plan to boost family assistance programs, childhood education and student aid. If passed, the American Families Plan would overhaul the current (dire) childcare system and inject billions into universal preschool, paid family leave and subsidized childcare. It would be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy.
Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t support investing in children? The party of family values, of course! The party that loves advocating for embryos but doesn’t seem quite so keen on helping kids. Predictably Republicans are up in arms about the idea that the US, which one recent survey [The US is the second-worst country for raising a family, survey shows] ranked as the second-worst place in the world to raise children, might become a little more family-friendly. As soon as Biden had finished speaking, out came the usual talking points about how Biden was pushing a dangerous socialist agenda and trying to indoctrinate American children. You know who else liked universal day care? the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, linking to a 1974 article about day care in the Soviet Union.
Think that’s an unhinged response? I think it may have been surpassed by JD Vance’s incomprehensible contribution to the debate. On Thursday, the Hillbilly Elegy author and vocal Republican tweeted that ‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people. His line of reasoning, if you can call it that, was that: normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into [REDACTED] daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.
Perhaps Republicans should just cut to the chase and say that they don’t support any policy that makes it easier for women to leave their houses. […]
blfsays
Why are Republicans so threatened by universal daycare? (poopyhead’s filter rejected this comment, so I’ve tried to redact what might be the objectionable wording, however, the total lack of feedback when this happens means I’m guessing):
Universal pre-school, paid family leave, subsidized childcare … who could possibly object to Biden’s plans to help children?
Joe Biden wants to spend big money on small children. On Wednesday the president announced an ambitious $1.8tn plan to boost family assistance programs, childhood education and student aid. If passed, the American Families Plan would overhaul the current (dire) childcare system and inject billions into universal preschool, paid family leave and subsidized childcare. It would be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy.
Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t support investing in children? The party of family values, of course! The party that loves advocating for embryos but doesn’t seem quite so keen on helping kids. Predictably Republicans are up in arms about the idea that the US, which one recent survey [The US is the second-worst country for raising a family, survey shows] ranked as the second-worst place in the world to raise children, might become a little more family-friendly. As soon as Biden had finished speaking, out came the usual talking points about how Biden was pushing a dangerous socialist agenda and trying to indoctrinate American children. You know who else liked universal day care? the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, linking to a 1974 article about day care in the Soviet Union.
Think that’s an unhinged response? I think it may have been surpassed by JD Vance’s incomprehensible contribution to the debate. On Thursday, the Hillbilly Elegy author and vocal Republican tweeted that ‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people. His line of reasoning, if you can call it that, was that: normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t [REDACTED] their kids into [REDACTED] daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.
Perhaps Republicans should just cut to the chase and say that they don’t support any policy that makes it easier for women to leave their houses. […]
blfsays
Why are Republicans so threatened by universal daycare? (poopyhead’s filter rejected this comment, so I’ve tried to redact what might be the objectionable wording, however, the total lack of feedback when this happens means I’m guessing):
Universal pre-school, paid family leave, subsidized childcare … who could possibly object to Biden’s plans to help children?
Joe Biden wants to spend big money on small children. On Wednesday the president announced an ambitious $1.8tn plan to boost family assistance programs, childhood education and student aid. If passed, the American Families Plan would overhaul the current (dire) childcare system and inject billions into universal preschool, paid family leave and subsidized childcare. It would be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy.
Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t support investing in children? The party of family values, of course! The party that loves advocating for embryos but doesn’t seem quite so keen on helping kids. Predictably Republicans are up in arms about the idea that the US, which one recent survey [The US is the second-worst country for raising a family, survey shows] ranked as the second-worst place in the world to raise children, might become a little more family-friendly. As soon as Biden had finished speaking, out came the usual talking points about how Biden was pushing a dangerous socialist agenda and trying to indoctrinate American children. You know who else liked universal day care? the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, linking to a 1974 article about day care in the Soviet Union.
Think that’s an unhinged response? I think it may have been surpassed by JD Vance’s incomprehensible contribution to the debate. [REDACTED]
Perhaps Republicans should just cut to the chase and say that they don’t support any policy that makes it easier for women to leave their houses. […]
blfsays
Oh for feck’s sake. Poopyhead’s filter isn’t letting an excerpt of this Grauniad opinion column through, and as per usual, I cannot figure out what the problem is… Why are Republicans so threatened by universal daycare?: “Universal pre-school, paid family leave, subsidized childcare … who could possibly object to Biden’s plans to help children?”
stroppysays
@450
Another day, another sick Republican puppy representin’.
The Utah Republican Party’s resolution to censure Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for his votes to convict former President Trump failed during the party’s organizing convention, after the senator was booed at the event.
The vote narrowly failed 711-798, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
Romney was greeted with a chorus of boos by the more than 2,100 Republican delegates that attended the party’s state convention.
“Now you know me as a person who says what he thinks, and I don’t hide the fact that I wasn’t a fan of our last President’s character issues,” Romney told the crowd.
Audience members audibly booed Romney in response, prompting the senator to attempt to deflect the boos from the audience by asking: “Aren’t you embarrassed?,” before stopping his speech.
Yeah, the Trump Party is trying to purify its ranks so that only totally bonkers, irredeemably ignorant people are left.
[…] “So yeah I understand that there are a few folks who don’t like me very much and I’m sorry about that but I express my mind as I believe is right and I follow my conscience as I believe is right,” Romney said, before the senator stressed that he is “not a fan” of President Biden’s policies.
The resolution to censure Romney was submitted by Don Guymon, a party delegate from Davis County, who espoused bogus conspiracy theories about Biden and the President’s family while also alleging that [Romney’s] public criticisms of Trump “not only hurt President Trump’s reelection but hurt other Republicans on the ballot,” according to CNN.
Unlike Romney, Trump loyalist Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) drew a standing ovation as he took the podium, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. [LOL, Mike Lee is Trump’s lickspittle.]
Romney was among the handful of Republican senators who voted to convict Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” and faced censure resolutions by Republicans in their states in the aftermath. […]
This is, in a nutshell, where the Republicans are: half are willing to burn their leadership at the stake in reverence to Trump, while the other half just wants to pretend nothing has happened.
———————-
Things are bad when asshats get booed by similar asshats. There’s no bottom in the Tepub camp.
———————–
There have been 2 Republican parties for a while, but I don’t see how they can work together in the next election.
———————
[Trumpism] doesn’t hold to any traditional republican values or policies. It’s dictatorial, anti-democracy in the extreme, brain dead and a cancer in our country. […] We cannot reason with that “republican” group. We just cannot.
At the moment our Senate is veerrry narrowly democrat controlled. And McConnell is drooling to get back in control so he can fuck the system up good and proper. […]
————————–
“Can Desantis from FL bring the Trump victims/voters back to the poles in 2024?”
The citizens of Poland respectfully request that there be no organized effort to bring Trump voters to their nation.
In 2022 vote for democrats like you life depends on it because that’s exactly what we are faced with.
Cindy McCain on Sunday called Arizona Republican’s audit of the 2020 election results in the Phoenix area “ludicrous.”
[…] “The election is over. Biden won,” McCain said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I know many of you don’t like the outcome, but elections have consequences.”
Republicans in Congress are increasingly lashing out at President Biden’s decision to freeze funding for the wall along the southern border.
GOP lawmakers are zeroing in on Biden’s proclamation from January, immediately upon taking office, in which he followed through on a campaign promise to halt construction of the wall, which had become the centerpiece of former President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies.
The White House on Jan. 20 said it would take 60 days to review the use of border wall funds.
Congressional Republicans argue Biden’s actions were illegal, given that Congress appropriated $1.4 billion for the wall in December, and have led to this year’s surge in border crossings.
[…] The number of migrants apprehended crossing the border reached a 15-year high of 170,000 in March, fueled by an uptick in minors making the journey alone. The White House said this past week that the number of children being held in Border Patrol facilities has fallen 84 percent from its March peak.
In addition to the border implications, Republican appropriators argue that the freeze interfered with Congress’s constitutionally mandated power of the purse by not implementing funding that was approved by lawmakers.
[…] On Friday afternoon, the administration announced a move that’s likely to infuriate Republicans further. The White House said it would cancel border wall projects that had been funded through the Defense Department, and return the funds to the military construction projects from which they were pulled during the Trump administration.
Trump had diverted billions in defense dollars toward the wall, using emergency powers after a standoff with Congress over wall funding that led to the longest government shutdown in the nation’s history.
“Border wall construction under the previous administration tied up more than $14 billion in taxpayer funds, shortchanged our military, and diverted attention away from genuine security challenges, like human traffickers,” a Biden administration official said Friday.
“Rushed and haphazard wall construction also resulted in serious life, safety, and environmental issues,” the official added.
The White House plans to use some of the appropriated wall funds to address those concerns, such as repairing a dam system in the Rio Grande Valley they said was damaged by border wall construction efforts and mitigating soil erosion along the 14-mile barrier in San Diego.
[…] The Biden White House, which says it intends to spend the border wall funds within the required legal framework, could argue that its decision to review the use of wall funds meets the requirements stipulated by the GAO. […]
“It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security,” Biden said in his January proclamation, adding that the wall was “not a serious policy solution.”
[…] The practical implications of a GAO ruling against Biden, however, would be minimal.
“Nobody’s going to jail over any of this,” said Bill Hoagland, a budget expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It’s a slap on the hand and says, ‘Don’t do this in the future.’”
I received my second shot COVID-19 vaccine Saturday. Walking home afterward from my local Walgreens felt like the intro to Austin Powers.
Yeah, baby, in just a couple more weeks I’ll be indestructible! But my hoorays are delayed if not outright denied because 15 Oregon counties, including Portland’s Multnomah, have just moved into the “extreme risk” category. […] COVID-19 hospitalizations are surging, so Governor Kate Brown shut down indoor dining in bars and restaurants in the “extreme risk” areas. Indoor visits at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are now prohibited.
The “extreme risk” category limits large gyms and movie theaters to no more than six patrons. […]
The situation had worsened to the point that Brown cancelled a proposed “warning week” buffer. […]
From the Oregonian:
“I was presented with data showing two paths that Oregon could take: One in which we took no additional action and stood by while more people die from this disease,” Brown said during a live-streamed news conference Friday. “Or another that required a temporary tightening of restrictions for certain counties but could save hundreds of lives and prevent as many as 450 hospitalizations over the next three weeks. As your governor, I chose to save lives.”
It’s encouraging to have a governor who, after careful study, wouldn’t choose the mass death option. […]
Republicans (because they lie all the time) like to attack Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 management while praising Noem’s. Yet, Michigan has 9,241 cases per 100,000 residents compared to South Dakota’s 13,816 per 100,000 residents.
Oregon is averaging “only” 123 cases per 100,000 people, but cases are rising higher than any other state right now. This is what happens when you let up on controlling the virus just slightly. Fewer people were infected early on, which means there’s more people for the virus to infect now. But there’s hope in sight, and that’s the vaccine.
Dr. Peter Graven, lead data scientist at Oregon Health & Science University, said the data “shows that we just have three or four more weeks until we are in good shape.” That’s when vaccine rates will be high enough that the virus can’t effectively grow.
Unfortunately, Oregon’s demand for vaccines has fallen recently. State data reveals a 17 percent drop in the daily average of administered shots. The Oregon Health Authority is concerned people are choosing not to get vaccinated. At present, 37 percent of the eligible population is vaccinated, which is slightly below the national average. We need to roughly double that number to reach herd immunity. Then we can all resume leading whatever passed for a normal life.
So, go get vaccinated, please! It’s already worked wonders for me.
About 25% of the people in the county where I live, in Idaho, have been vaccinated. Worse than in Oregon. That 25% is way too low. It’s not safe. And vaccination rates are falling here too.
People choosing not to get vaccinated … it’s so frustrating.
tomhsays
@ Lynna #458
“People choosing not to get vaccinated … it’s so frustrating.”
There are few things more frustrating these days, and it’s also frustrating trying to reason with them. I’ve pretty much given that up.
Security forces in Myanmar have opened fire on some of the biggest protests against military rule in days, killing eight people, media reported.
The protests, after a spell of dwindling crowds and what appeared to be more restraint by the security forces, were coordinated with demonstrations in Burmese communities around the world to mark what organisers called “the global Myanmar spring revolution”.
“Shake the world with the voice of Myanmar people’s unity,” the organisers said in a statement.
Streams of demonstrators, some led by Buddhist monks, made their way through cities and towns across the country, including the commercial hub of Yangon and the second city of Mandalay, where two people were shot and killed, the Mizzima news agency reported….
Here’s a link to the May 3 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Severe Covid-19 vaccine shortages have hampered India’s plan to administer jabs to all adults, with fewer then half of India’s states able to begin vaccinating over-18s amid warnings the shortfall could last months.
Over the weekend, more than 600 million Indians became eligible for the coronavirus vaccine in a policy that was introduced in the wake of a deadly second wave hitting the country last month.
However, as many had predicted, vaccine shortages have proved a huge impediment to the rollout and so far only 12 of India’s 36 states and union territories have had enough vaccines in stock to begin vaccinating over-18s, and many only in small numbers….
Reuters reports:
The annual Oktoberfest, the world’s largest beer festival, will not take place this year due to the coronavirus crisis, Die Welt reported on Monday, citing news agency DPA.
The Oktoberfest, which was cancelled last year due to Covid-19 pandemic, attracts around 6m visitors to Munich every year, with many travelling from abroad….
tomh @459, I agree. The only equally frustrating thing might be Republicans refusing to accept the fact that Joe Biden won. He is the legitimate president.
There’s quite a bit to mull over in the latest national CNN poll, but these were the results that struck me as the most striking.
Although there is no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing in the 2020 election, many still say that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to become president. The poll suggests the share of Americans who believe that falsehood has held roughly steady since just before he took office in January at 30%. Those doubts are concentrated among Republicans, 70% of whom say they do not think Biden won enough votes to be president.
In other words, six months after Election Day 2020, and more than 100 days into Joe Biden’s presidency, a leading national poll found that 7 in 10 Republican voters still question the legitimacy of the president’s victory.
[…] What’s more, the same CNN poll broke down that 70% figure a little further: 50% of Republican voters believe there’s “solid evidence” that the president “did not legitimately win,” while 20% said their beliefs are based on “suspicions.”
Following up on our earlier coverage, my hope for months has been that reality would set in gradually over time. Sure, there were polls like these late last year, but it was hardly outlandish to think they were more of an emotional reaction than a meaningful assessment of the facts. Many GOP voters were led to believe that Trump would win, so perhaps their rejection of Biden’s legitimate victory was little more than reflexive anger that would ease as the nation’s focus shifted to post-inaugural governance.
Except, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Biden’s immediate predecessor continues to pretend he won, and a ridiculously large percentage of Trump’s party believes the nonsense.
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser noted in response to the latest polling data, “This is a big red flashing light of trouble for American democracy.” I think that’s true in part because of the challenges associated with a major political party living in a weird fantasyland, but also because of the degree to which the GOP’s alternate reality can be weaponized.
The more people can be conned into rejecting the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency, the easier it becomes to rationalize a hopelessly bonkers election “audit” in Arizona — which in turn helps lay the groundwork to attack election results elsewhere.
When former Olympian and reality TV personality Caitlyn Jenner announced that she planned to challenge California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in the state’s expected recall election this year, many trans activists across the country were quick to make it clear that she did not speak for them.
A brief TMZ interview with Jenner Saturday — where she outlined her views on trans athletes participating in school sports — makes it clear why. When a reporter asked Jenner during the impromptu interview for her opinion on the efforts by some Republican legislatures to ban transgender athletes from participating in sports consistent with their gender identities, she replied that she does not support trans girls playing on girls’ teams.
“This is a question of fairness. That’s why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls’ sports in school,” said Jenner, a Republican who is one of the most high-profile transgender Americans in public life. “It just isn’t fair. And we have to protect girls’ sports in our schools.” She did not answer a follow-up question from the reporter about whether that view delegitimizes the identity of children who transition and now identify as girls.
Jenner, who won a gold medal in the 1976 Olympics, added in a tweet: “I didn’t expect to get asked this on my Saturday morning coffee run, but I’m clear about where I stand. It’s an issue of fairness and we need to protect girls’ sports in our schools.” Her campaign did not immediately respond to questions about whether she believes the issue should be determined locally or at the state level, and what her views are on the specific bans that have been enacted in half a dozen states prohibiting trans girls and women from competing on teams that match their gender identity.
Jenner’s remarks triggered a swift backlash from many LGBTQ activists on social media. Though Jenner was sharply critical of Newsom’s response to the pandemic when she launched her campaign, she has yet to offer much insight into her views on many of the key issues facing the country. Her brief comments to TMZ on trans athletes in sports exemplified the tensions that are rising between a candidate who has spoken prominently about trans rights and her own transition, yet has often found herself at odds with trans activists who do not want her as their spokesperson….
At the heart of the Republicans’ case against the American Families Plan is a dubious position: the efficacy of Biden’s proposals is irrelevant.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) appeared on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday, and Chris Wallace reminded him of some striking statistics: the child poverty rate in the senator’s home state of Louisiana is 25%, and 42% of parents in the state lack access to child care.
“Forget whether it’s infrastructure or not,” the host asked, “wouldn’t they benefit” from provisions in the White House’s domestic agenda? “I don’t know if they would,” the Republican replied, before quickly pivoting to complaining about teachers’ unions.
The exchange was emblematic of an increasingly exasperating conversation. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that in the wake of President Joe Biden’s national address last week, GOP officials are focusing less on price tags and more on “cultural” concerns.
Days after President Biden rolled out his American Families Plan — a sprawling $1.8 trillion proposal to expand federal investment in child care, higher education, employee leave and more — Republicans have, alongside their deep fiscal misgivings, launched a broad social critique of the plan. Key GOP voices are accusing Biden of engaging in a stealth attempt to reshape American life, trying to reframe their opposition to the plan away from dollars and cents toward the culture-war terrain on which they have recently been much more politically successful.
Note the degree to which this is unrelated to governance. The argument is not that the president’s agenda is meritless or would prove ineffective, rather, Republicans are eager to try to convince the public that the proposals should be rejected for ideological and philosophical reasons.
[…] What matters, according to Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley, is whether the efforts resemble “social engineering.”
The explicit theme of the president’s 2020 candidacy was the idea that he wanted to “build back better” — that is, it wouldn’t be enough to simply get the United States back on its feet post-Trump, post-COVID, and post-recession. The goal, the Democrat argued, would be to establish a stronger and more stable status quo for working families.
A New York Times report explained over the weekend, “President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar suite of economic proposals is aiming to both reinforce and rebuild an American middle class that feels it has been standing on shifting ground. And it comes with an explicit message that the private sector alone cannot deliver on that dream and that the government has a central part to play.”
[…] For Republicans, the trick is to convince people that a weaker foundation is preferable to stability provided by the public sector. “Sure, investments in child care, higher education, and employee leave might help your family,” GOP officials are effectively telling the public, “but these programs constitute ‘big government’ so you should side with us in rejecting them.”
[…] To be sure, a relentless conservative campaign may change public attitudes, but for now, Biden and his allies have the upper hand as the debate begins in earnest.
[…] The Washington Post, which was the first to report that the FBI issued the warning to Giuliani and the pro-Trump media organization One America News (OAN), updated its article with a correction on Saturday.
“An earlier version of this story, published Thursday, incorrectly reported that One America News was warned by the FBI that it was the target of a Russian influence operation. That version also said the FBI had provided a similar warning to Rudolph W. Giuliani, which he has since disputed. This version has been corrected to remove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings.”
NBC News made a similar update on its story on Giuliani’s “defensive briefing” from the FBI, stating that an unnamed source had told the outlet that the briefing had been prepared for Giuliani but not delivered to him, in part out of concern that it might affect the ongoing criminal investigation into the lawyer.
“An earlier version of this article included an incorrect report that Rudolph Giuliani had received a defensive briefing from the FBI in 2019 warning him that he was being targeted by a Russian influence operation,” NBC News’ correction read. “The report was based on a source familiar with the matter, but a second source now says the briefing was only prepared for Giuliani and not delivered to him, in part over concerns it might complicate the criminal investigation of Giuliani. As a result, the premise and headline of the article below have been changed to reflect the corrected information.”
The New York Times also corrected its report that had mentioned Giuliani receiving the FBI’s warning.
“An earlier version of this article misstated whether Rudolph W. Giuliani received a formal warning from the F.B.I. about Russian disinformation. Mr. Giuliani did not receive such a so-called defensive briefing,” the Times said in a correction note at the bottom of its report. […]
…Like the Netherlands, although for different reasons, Belgium’s rollout was not quick in the early months of this year. Faced with some of the worst death statistics in Europe, the government focused on getting jabs to its most vulnerable: 86.8% of over 80s are fully vaccinated and 84.18% of 65- to 84-year-olds. But it is now firing through the younger, more easily accessed age groups, reducing the time between delivery of doses and administration from 18 days in March to around four in the last week.
This evolution is being witnessed elsewhere in the EU. Apart from the stragglers of Bulgaria, Latvia, Croatia and Romania, solidly over 20% of the population in each of the other EU member states has now received a vaccine jab, with the tiny island state of Malta leading the way with 52.43%, and as the difficult-to-get-to priority groups are being ticked off the pace of jabs is increasing.
Among the 23 EU member states who have reported to the European centre for disease control and prevention, the median uptake among the over-80s is 73.1%. With that accomplished, Germany celebrated the milestone of administering 1m doses in a day last Thursday and France broke its record at the end of last week of giving 545,000 shots on Thursday and 549,000 on Friday.
“We really see that within the EU the vaccination is increasing dramatically,” said a European Commission official as plans were announced on Monday to reopen the borders to non-EU holidaymakers potentially including from the UK by June.
Crucially, internal commission estimates shared with the Guardian offers significant reassurance that supply, the biggest problem in the early months of the year, should not be an obstacle to further acceleration.
While just 14m doses were delivered to member states in January, 28m in February and 60m in March, officials said that 105m had arrived into the hands of healthcare workers in April.
The commission expects around 125m doses this month and 200m in June putting the bloc on track to have an annual capacity of 4bn doses a year.
It is a far cry from the scenario facing the EU just a few months ago when AstraZeneca had twice downsized the deliveries it expected to make to the EU, and there was a faint whiff of panic in Brussels.
…
Given the Covid whirlwind being experienced in India and elsewhere, it is argued that there are also compelling grounds to further shift the focus from domestic rollout to aiding the poorest. The latest EU contract for 1.8bn Pfizer doses over two years explicitly provides for the right to donate some of those to countries outside the bloc.
“When Joe Biden is using the rhetoric of the US being the arsenal of vaccines, you can see how the US is building up the rhetoric of them riding to the world’s rescue but the EU has already exported 160m doses and by the time the US will really begin to export, the EU will be exporting 250m to 300m doses,” Kirkegaard said. “There is a great story to tell.”…
Republicans are gerrymandering state Supreme Court seats. And that’s not all. Republicans are putting their thumb on the scale in other ways as well:
After winning total control over state government in 2020 for the first time in 16 years, Montana Republicans have orchestrated an all-out assault on voting rights, democracy, and the rule of law that culminated in late April with GOP legislators voting to put a statutory measure on the November 2022 ballot that would effectively gerrymander Montana’s Supreme Court to cement a future GOP majority if approved by voters next year.
The GOP’s bill would replace the current system of using statewide elections to elect Supreme Court justices with districts drawn by GOP legislators and redistricted by lawmakers every 10 years thereafter. According to calculations by Daily Kos Elections, the GOP’s proposed 2020s court districts could have seen Republican candidates lose the statewide vote by 7 points yet still carry a majority of seats last year. Republicans would thus likely be favored in a 5-2 majority of seats, whereas the court currently lacks a secure majority for either party and has seen the all-important swing justices side with Democrats in some recent major cases.
Republicans’ attempt to gerrymander the state Supreme Court is especially notable because GOP lawmakers have also recently passed new voting restriction laws that immediately sparked a Democratic lawsuit arguing that they violate Montana’s constitution, which the justices could eventually decide. The GOP’s newly adopted laws include two that eliminated Election Day voter registration and adopted stricter voter ID requirements that limit student IDs in particular, while the GOP passed a third measure in the legislature in the final week of April that would revive a restriction on who may turn in someone else’s mail ballot, something a court had struck down last year for discriminating against Native American voters.
Gerrymandering isn’t the only tool that Republicans are using to try to take over the courts in Montana, and Republicans also recently passed a law that eliminated Montana’s judicial nominating commission to give GOP Gov. Greg Gianforte free rein to appoint more partisan judges directly to the bench instead of having to choose from a list of potential nominees that commissioners screened based on supposed merit. […]
Republicans lastly passed legislation for Gianforte to sign that aims to ward off future progressive ballot measures. That bill bans citizens from using ballot initiatives to expand eligibility for government programs after voters narrowly failed to pass a measure to expand Medicaid in 2018 and prohibits initiatives from appropriating revenue anywhere besides the state’s general fund after a voter-approved 2020 marijuana legalization measure dedicated the resulting tax revenue to land conservation efforts.
The ballot measure restrictions would also insert warnings on the petitions that voters must sign to qualify initiatives for the ballot whenever the proposal would supposedly hurt businesses. The bill would grant lawmakers the power to vote on whether or not they approve of proposed ballot initiatives before supporters could begin gathering signatures, the results of which votes would also be included on petition-signature forms, meaning the GOP legislature would be able to put its thumb on the scale in ways that initiative proponents simply couldn’t.
Newsmax, the far-right news outlet that boosted the Trump campaign’s false claims of 2020 election rigging, admitted on Friday that there was “no evidence” that an executive at Dominion Voting Systems had tampered with election results.
The statement was part of a settlement in the defamation lawsuit against Newsmax and a number of other Trump allies and conservative news outlets brought by top Dominion employee Eric Coomer. In the aftermath of the 2020 campaign, Newsmax repeatedly aired claims that Coomer had manipulated electronic voting records in favor of Biden.
The Newsmax statement admitted the company had found no evidence that Coomer interfered with the election or that he “participated in any conversation with members of ‘Antifa.” It went on, “Many of the states whose results were contested by the Trump campaign after the November 2020 election have conducted extensive recounts and audits, and each of these states certified the results as legal and final.” […]
Sydney Powell: “no reasonable person” could conclude my lies about the election were fact.
Joe DiGenova: Publicly apologizes for slandering former CISA Dir. @C_C_Krebs who confirmed the 2020 election was the most secure in history.
Now Newsmax… [WaPo link re their apology to Dominion employee atl]
Democracy deniers currently engaged in the ongoing scam on the American people, in places like AZ, FL, TX, etc., should be watching this trend closely, as their fellow con-artists are forced to tell the truth (as well as shell out some cash for the damage they’ve caused).
Moderna will supply COVAX with up to 500 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine starting at the end of the year, the U.S. drugmaker announced Monday, just as Sweden pledged it would send 1 million doses via the vaccine-sharing mechanism.
Under the deal, Moderna will work with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to supply 34 million doses to COVAX — a mechanism established with the World Health Organization and Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to provide vaccines for low- and middle-income countries — in late 2021.
The vaccines will be offered at Moderna’s “lowest tiered price,” and Gavi will be able purchase an additional 466 million doses in 2022.
“We recognize that many countries have limited resources to access COVID-19 vaccines,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel wrote in a press release. “We support COVAX’s mission to ensure broad, affordable and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines and we remain committed to doing everything that we can to ending this ongoing pandemic with our mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”
The WHO listed Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use at the end of last week, paving the way for four vaccines to be used around the globe via COVAX. The WHO has already added BioNTech/Pfizer, two manufacturers of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and Johnson & Johnson to its emergency use list.
However, COVAX had only delivered a fraction of the vaccines it had planned to supply by May, as large, wealthy countries have purchased many of the available doses. In addition, the Serum Institute of India, which was meant to produce many of COVAX’s Oxford/AstraZeneca doses, has not been able to export due to India’s temporary ban on vaccine exports.
COVAX “urgently” needs 20 million doses in the second quarter of this year after large demand for doses in India led to “interruptions” in supply, the WHO wrote in a press release….
As indoor venues remain closed, a Catholic church has offered up its open-air cloisters for people to eat and pray together.
With COVID-19 restrictions preventing Barcelona’s Muslim population from celebrating Ramadan at the usual indoor venues, a Catholic church has offered up its open-air cloisters for people to eat and pray together.
Every evening, between 50 and 60 Muslims, many of them homeless, stream into the centuries-old stone passages of the Church of Santa Anna, where volunteers offer a hearty meal of home-cooked food.
[…]
Faouzia Chati, president of the Catalan Association of Moroccan Women, used to organise Iftar gatherings in the city, but limits on indoor dining forced her to seek an alternative space with good ventilation and space for distancing.
She found a receptive ear in Father Peio Sanchez, Santa Anna’s rector, who sees the meeting of different faiths as emblematic of civic coexistence.
[…]
“Even with different cultures, different languages, different religions, we are more capable of sitting down and talking than some politicians,” said the rector.
Liz Cheney tweeted: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) has pleaded with the G7 to fund the global Covid-19 recovery, warning the crisis cannot be resolved worldwide if they do not step up.
The WHO said the Group of Seven industrial powers had the ability to fund the vaccines, tests and treatments needed to conquer the pandemic – and knock down the barriers blocking faster production. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged the G7 to take decisive action at their June 11-13 summit, being hosted by the UK’s prime minister Boris Johnson in Cornwall. “The G7 countries are the world’s economic and political leaders. They are also home to many of the world’s vaccine producers,” Tedros told a news conference. “We will only solve the vaccine crisis with the leadership of these countries.” Tedros was backed up by former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who warned the pandemic was becoming a “man-made catastrophe”.
According to an Axios report, the Democratic National Committee raised $15.4 million online during President Joe Biden’s first 100 days, “beating its fundraising during either President Obama or President Trump’s first 100 days.”
So that’s the good news. Now the bad news: look the bottom states in terms of vaccinations ID WY AL GA TN LA, across the nation a blue state vs red states vaccination divide is emerging. We need to fix this
The White House’s proposal is to make these educational benefits available, but not to make them mandatory.
In his national address last week, President Joe Biden touted the virtues of making universal pre-K and two years of community college available to families. Evidently, one of his Senate Republican detractors flubbed the details of the White House’s plan.
Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn tried Wednesday to portray President Joe Biden’s new $1.8 trillion American Families Plan proposal as an “anti-family” initiative that would reduce Americans’ control over their own lives. “Three-year-old pre-K: they’re going to mandate this. Two years of college whether you like it or not. These are the things that take away choices from the American people,” Blackburn said in an interview on Fox Business.
Just so we’re clear, the senator’s claims were the opposite the truth. […] Under the president’s plan, young adults who want to go to a community college for two years would be able to, without having to worry about tuition costs, but no one would be required to enroll.
The Tennessee Republican’s office told CNN, “As happens on live TV, she misspoke.” […]
But as a rule, people misspeak when they say “million,” when they meant “billion.” Or perhaps referencing “Iran,” when they meant “Iraq.” It’s a little tougher to say it was a slip of the tongue when a senator tells a national television audience, “Three-year-old pre-K: they’re going to mandate this. Two years of college whether you like it or not. These are the things that take away choices from the American people.”
That seems like more of a false argument than an example of misspeaking.
Complicating matters a bit, Blackburn published a tweet featuring her on-air appearance, including the false claim, and as of this morning, that tweet has not been removed.
[…] I’m glad the senator’s office has acknowledged the error. But if you get an email from your angry uncle who consumes conservative media all day, claiming that Biden plans to impose new, mandatory educational opportunities, alongside his made-up plans to ban hamburgers and buy a thousands of copies of Kamala Harris’ children’s book, at least you’ll know why.
[…] The Washington Post spoke to Debra Ell, a Republican organizer in Michigan, who said, “I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified.”
[…] To be a Republican in good standing in 2021 is to pretend the Big Lie is true.
Are Republicans shooting themselves in the foot with their voter-restriction laws?
As Republican-held Florida joins Republican-held Georgia in adopting a panoply of new measures meant to curtail absentee voting after Dear Unmentionable Leader [bellowed] about invisible “fraud” being the only possible reason for his election loss, The Washington Post brings us the tale of “some” Florida Republicans sweating over the wisdom of, say it with me now, directly targeting the method of voting Republicans themselves championed and relied on to boost turnout in their own key constituencies.
Yes, that’s right. Somebody on the red team finally noticed that passing flurries of new laws predicated on Donald CheatsAtGolf’s continued insistence that Actually He Is the Real President is going to have consequences not just for the working poor—the group Republicans are most trying to target—but for the elderly and military voters that Republicans have relied on to keep them relevant even as they kneecap themselves with other constituencies. They’re talking to a brick wall when it comes to explaining it to Republican lawmakers, but they’ve noticed.
To reiterate, yet again: Republicans originally backed (and authored) laws promoting mail-in balloting for self-serving reasons. The most loyal Republican voters tend to be older, and older voters tend to have more difficulty getting to the polls than their younger counterparts. Transportation can be more difficult. Even leaving home can be more difficult. Standing in line can be intolerable. To ensure elderly loyalists could continue to vote for straight-ticket Republicanism even if their opportunities to get to the polls had at some point dwindled, Republicans lobbied for more widespread use of mail-in voting. It worked, and very well—up until a deadly worldwide pandemic made mail-in voting a popular means of avoiding, you know, death […]
[…] it was Donald Trump who flipped Republican lawmakers, in some cases overnight, on the subject. A narcissistic conspiracy crank and ignorant buffoon in all subjects, Trump began to see the promotion of mail-in balloting as an insult to him, personally, in that calls to vote by mail emphasized the dangers of the deadly pandemic that he also believed was being inflated solely to make him look bad. Because Trump is Trump, this almost immediately evolved into claims that mail-in voting was itself a conspiracy against him; as Trump slid in the polls and it began to look more improbable that he could step over half a million corpses to win a second term, Trump’s team began to overtly say that if they lost, they would blame it on “fraud” rather than acknowledge his loss.
A coping mechanism for a decompensating malignant narcissist in the throes of mental crisis thus became a new Republican Party core belief. […]
Wonkette: “Facebook To Announce Whether Washed-Up Ex-President Can Come Back And Incite More Riots
This morning, Facebook announced that its Oversight Board had made a final decision in the case of whether or not Donald Trump should be let back on the site, and would announce that decision on Wednesday, May 5 at 9 a.m.
[…] Trump was kicked off the site January 7, following the Capitol riots, on the grounds that his rhetoric was inciting people to violence and that things could get exponentially worse were he allowed to continue spreading misinformation through social media. The risks, they claimed, were “simply too great.” […]
And the thing is, it actually worked. In the two weeks following Trump’s ban, misinformation about the 2020 election being spread on social media dropped by 73 percent.
The block was placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts “indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.” A few days later, the site banned all “Stop the Steal” content in general.
Trump’s case was referred to the board on January 21. […]
While funded through a trust created by Facebook, the Oversight Board is supposedly an entirely independent review board whose job it is to review bans and other moderation decisions by the company and determine whether or not they should stand.
The thing is, Trump wasn’t banned just because he was obnoxious or even because he was cruel; he was banned because the lies he was telling made those who believed him do dangerous things like storm the Capitol building. And he hasn’t stopped. Just this morning he released a “statement” claiming to have won the 2020 election. […]
Just last Wednesday, he stood at Mar-a-Lago ranting to a crowd about how the election was stolen from him.
It’s not less likely that Trump will continue to claim the election was stolen from him. It’s not now less likely that someone will do something dangerous in the name of restoring Trump to the White House. After all, they’ve still got those QAnon people recounting ballots in Arizona. They’ve got Lin Wood going around telling people Trump is not only still president, but is still in the White House. They’ve got their preachers and prophets claiming he is still president as far as Heaven is concerned.
Things have not subsided, but they also haven’t spread as much as they might have had Trump been on social media throughout. They’ve been a little more contained, and that’s been pretty nice for all of us.
[…] If Trump returns to Facebook, it’s likely his non-stop talking about how the election was stolen from him will rile them up again, and we could see a repeat of January 6.
The mystery surfaced early in the pandemic. Hospitals were jammed with coronavirus victims, but the official death count in Mexico City appeared suspiciously low. Sitting at her dining-room table one afternoon, Laurianne Despeghel, a 31-year-old economic consultant, clicked from chart to chart on her laptop, puzzling over how to uncover the real toll.
“I think the data exist,” she typed to Mario Romero Zavala, a fellow math geek. She’d heard that death certificates were stored in a database at the city’s civil registry. But it would be tough to crack. A day later, Romero Zavala messaged back with an idea. “I’m going to hurry,” the 37-year-old software developer wrote. “I think by tomorrow morning we’ll have the data.”
“WOW!!!” Despeghel typed.
Thus began a cat-and-mouse game with the government that would last nearly a year and catapult the pair to national prominence. Just days after their conversation, they’d conclude that around 8,000 more people had died in Mexico’s capital in the first five months of 2020 compared to prior years. By February 2021, they’d count 83,235 excess deaths — more than twice the government’s confirmed covid-19 fatality total.
[snipped details of citizen sleuths discovering the scale of the tragedy in other countries]
In Mexico, calculating the fatalities has been particularly fraught. The pandemic response has been led by highly trained scientists, including Mexico City’s leftist mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who has a PhD in energy engineering. They’ve produced detailed mortality reports, but released them well after the fact, while announcing far-lower daily totals of confirmed covid-19 deaths. That’s led to suspicions the government is masking the size of the disaster. [chart available at the link]
[…] “What we wanted to do was say, we will find the number,” Despeghel said i[…]
Their first clue came from a report by a civic group, Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, issued last May 18. Its investigators revealed that there were at least 4,577 confirmed or suspected covid-19 deaths in Mexico City — three times the official count. Their source was a trove of leaked death certificates. To confirm the documents’ authenticity, they checked a sample against the city’s civil registry, using a feature on its website for obtaining copies of death certificates.
Sitting in her apartment the next day, Despeghel studied the group’s report. She had loved math since her childhood in France, its order and unyielding discipline, and met her Mexican husband at the London School of Economics. “Numbers are my thing,” she said. Now, on this Tuesday afternoon, she was examining how the anticorruption investigators had penetrated the civil registry. They just typed in the numbers from a death certificate, and it appeared — a bit like downloading a boarding pass with a flight confirmation number.
The problem was, “you need the info for each one” of the death certificates, Despeghel told Romero Zavala.
That didn’t stop him from playing with the site, plugging in numbers. The son of an engineer, Romero Zavala had been fascinated with the Internet since he was a boy […] Sites like the civil registry page were another kind of challenge.
“I’m really intrigued,” he typed to Despeghel at 5:09 p.m.
Three minutes later, he realized something odd. The death certificates were issued in ascending order by each of the city’s 52 civil registry offices, starting from No. 1 in 2020. “A rookie mistake, if this was the programmer’s decision,” Romero Zavala noted. And then it hit him: All they had to do was identify the highest-numbered certificate in each office. Add them up, and you’d have the Mexico City death toll.
An algorithm could do the work. Romero Zavala, a graduate of Mexico’s prestigious Tec de Monterrey, wrote it quickly. It would act like a citizen seeking a copy of a death certificate, but bombard the system with ever-more-refined guesses about the top numbers.
Five days later, on a Sunday afternoon, Sebastián Garrido glanced at his email. He was editor of the data blog at Nexos, a Mexican magazine. He’d never heard of these two young data experts but was stunned by their pitch. Romero Zavala and Despeghel had found 8,072 excess deaths in the capital from January through May 20, while the government had confirmed only 1,832 covid-19 fatalities. “There was no other source of information that came close,” he said. The blog post, published on May 25, exploded on social media and rippled across the Mexican and international press.
When Romero Zavala returned to the civil registry site two days later, he was greeted with a captcha — one of those “I’m not a robot” boxes meant to block automated users. He and Despeghel would have to do their subsequent updates for Nexos by hand. By June 7, they found 17,310 excess deaths in the city. That jumped to 22,705 at the end of June. By late August, the total had soared past 31,000.
[…] In August, the city posted its full database of deaths, scrubbed of IDs. […]
In Mexico, the data was especially crucial. The tally of covid-19 fatalities announced each day was a vast undercount because of a dearth of testing and a large number of deaths at home. But by October, Romero Zavala and Despeghel stopped publishing their articles. There was no need for their time-consuming detective work, they figured. The city had promised to release weekly updates of its mortality data.
Shortly before Christmas, the pair returned to the city’s excess-mortality webpage. A record wave of infections was crashing over the city. But to their astonishment, there hadn’t been an update for nearly a month. And the civil registry had gone offline.
“Can you please explain why the site is no longer working?” Romero Zavala tweeted at Merino. He responded that the servers had been overwhelmed, and were being fixed. As for the weekly updates, city officials said processing the information turned out to be too complicated to do that fast. “We have never hidden or modified information,” Merino tweeted.
The delay was just one problem. The city’s reports had consistently painted a comparatively optimistic picture, focusing on the decline in deaths after a first coronavirus peak in May. Romero Zavala and Despeghel highlighted a more disturbing pattern. Unlike in New York or Madrid, deaths in Mexico City didn’t plummet after the initial pandemic spike. Instead, the numbers hit a plateau. The capital became stuck, churning out fatalities at least 50 percent greater than normal, week after week, their Nexos studies found.
In an academic paper issued in March, senior government scientists essentially confirmed the trend. […]
For 2020 and the first nine weeks of 2021, according to government reports, the country, led by Mexico City, suffered a staggering 444,722 more deaths than usual.
[…] By January, Romero Zavala was frustrated. He and Despeghel had resumed their regular Nexos posts. But “every week it’s becoming more difficult to report the numbers,” he tweeted. […] “To be honest,” he wrote, “I’m now motivated by rage.”
Then, in March, two new boxes popped up on the civil registry’s page.
To get a death certificate, you now had to type in the first and last name of the deceased. Romero Zavala and Despeghel were effectively locked out. They had never sought the identities of the dead — just the numbers. But officials were uneasy about their access to the database. […]
After 10 months, the collaboration between Romero Zavala and Despeghel was over. For Mexico City, too, an era had ended. For the first time in nearly a year, the capital notched three days in a row with no excess deaths. As the city’s famed purple jacaranda trees blossomed, its exhausted residents emerged from a lockdown that had begun before Christmas.
While most states pursue ways to boost renewable energy, Wyoming is doing the opposite with a new program aimed at propping up the dwindling coal industry by suing other states that block exports of Wyoming coal and cause Wyoming coal-fired power plants to shut down. […]
The state of New Jersey introduced a new program on Monday offering a free beer to those who get a Covid-19 vaccine in May. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced on Twitter that the state was teaming up with over a dozen breweries for the ‘Shot and a Beer’ project.
Wonkette: “QAnon Lady So Mad Satan Tricking People To Believe Science Instead Of Their Guts.”
On some internet news show hosted by some guy named Stew Peters, whoever the hell he is, QAnon conspiracy theorist and former Republican congressional hopeful DeAnna Lorraine posited that encouraging people to get vaccinated against a virus that could kill them just might be a “modern-day Holocaust.” Apparently conspiracy theorists think they can get people to take them more seriously if they compare whatever they’re mad about to the Holocaust. Like these anti-vaxxers who held a protest in which they wore yellow Star of David badges in order to compare their own plight in being pressured to get vaccines to that of victims of systemic genocide. […] [video is available at the link]
She explained:
This is truly the final take over. This is like the modern-day Holocaust, except for it’s global, and they’re trying to separate people from their families, they’re trying to separate people from polite society and ostracize people if they’re not getting the vaccine.
Refusing to get a vaccine is really just one of a number of reasons these people should be ostracized by polite society. Because they’re not polite. It is bad manners for someone to put the rest of us in danger and compromise our ability to even get close to herd immunity, all because they insist upon believing things that are not true.
However, nobody is actually advocating they should be forcibly separated. That would be different.
Anyone who’s hesitant about the vaccine for obvious reasons because of vaccine shedding and missed periods and spontaneous abortions, death, cerebral palsy …
Vaccine shedding is not a real thing, it is another ridiculous conspiracy theory made up by anti-vaxxers who think they can turn the tables on normal people and ostracize them by claiming vaccinated people can “shed” the virus, which will somehow cause pregnant women to have miscarriages. […] The “spontaneous abortion” thing is also bullshit. And no one is getting cerebral palsy from a vaccine, as cerebral palsy is a congenital disorder, meaning it is something people are born with. She may be thinking of temporary Bell’s Palsy, which a few people in the Pfizer study had, but which was later determined likely to not be related to the vaccine.
Stew Peters then interjected to suggest Democrats probably want all of those things and are especially excited about the spontaneous abortions, because of how we hate families and want to murder all of the babies.
That these things are not true, however, does not matter to Lorraine, because the truly evil thing about this vaccine push, according to her, is that it is part of Satan’s plan to get people to trust science instead of their gut. So if she were to stop believing all that stuff she just made up was true, she would basically just be giving in to Satan. Satan loves science and hates DeAnna Lorraine’s guts. […]
In an employment trend that industry leaders are calling “dire,” thousands of Presidential fact checkers have been laid off during Joe Biden’s first hundred days in office.
Harland Dorrinson, the executive director of the American Society of Presidential Fact Checkers, said that Biden has single-handedly destroyed the employment picture for many of the group’s members.
“Over the past three months, America’s Presidential-falsehood infrastructure has all but collapsed,” Dorrinson said. “We have not experienced such a devastating downturn since Richard M. Nixon left office, in 1974.”
Dorrinson acknowledged that many in the Presidential-fact-checking profession had got complacent during the four years prior to Biden’s Inauguration. “Those were boom times for our industry,” he said. “We should have realized that they were too good to last.”
He said that his group’s members were hoping that the 2024 Presidential election would bring a much-needed recovery, and were “keeping their fingers crossed” that figures such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marjorie Taylor Greene would run.
Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.
Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
[…]
Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said….
Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 to 70 percent of the population. Most experts, including Dr. Fauci, expected that the United States would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.
But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B.1.1.7 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 percent more transmissible.
As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.
<b<Polls show that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is still reluctant to be vaccinated.
[…]
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci… acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.
“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said….
Many parts of the world lag far behind the United States on vaccinations. Less than 2 percent of the people in India have been fully vaccinated, for example, and less than 1 percent in South Africa….
Unnerving scenarios remain on the path to this long-term vision.
Over time, if not enough people are protected, highly contagious variants may develop that can break through vaccine protection, land people in the hospital and put them at risk of death.
“That’s the nightmare scenario,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University.
How frequent and how severe those breakthrough infections are have the potential to determine whether the United States can keep hospitalizations and deaths low or if the country will find itself in a “mad scramble” every couple of years, he said.
“I think we’re going to be looking over our shoulders — or at least public health officials and infectious disease epidemiologists are going to be looking over their shoulders going: ‘All right, the variants out there — what are they doing? What are they capable of?” he said. “Maybe the general public can go back to not worrying about it so much, but we will have to.”
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Reports that Pfizer vaccine works for 12-15 year olds, and is likely to be approved. Link
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Tucker Carkson decided to criticize Joy Reid. She responded. OUCH!
blfsays
Lynna@487 quotes “Vaccine shedding is not a real thing, it is another ridiculous conspiracy theory made up by anti-vaxxers who think they can turn the tables on normal people and ostracize them by claiming vaccinated people can shed the virus […].”
At issue is the fact that the oral polio vaccine — preferred in some places because of its ease of delivery and the lack of need for sterile syringes — uses an attenuated or weakened version of polio.
When a child receives the oral vaccine, the weakened virus replicates in the intestine, encouraging the production of antibodies, and can be present in excreta. In an area where there are high enough levels of immunity in the population, this usually does not present a problem, even if sanitation is poor.
But in areas where there is both poor sanitation and a lack of general immunisation the virus can survive and circulate for months, mutating over time until it poses the same risk of paralysis-causing disease as wild polio.
That’s real vaccine shedding. The Covid-19 vaccine conspiracy theory is bonkers; e.g., no Covid-19 is a live-vaccine so real vaccine shedding is impossible. From the CDC’s Myths and Facts about COVID-19 Vaccines:
Can a COVID-19 vaccine make me sick with COVID-19?
No. None of the authorized and recommended COVID-19 vaccines or COVID-19 vaccines currently in development in the United States contain the live virus that causes COVID-19. […]
Here’s a link to the May 4 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
Their morning summary:
India has passed a grim milestone of 20 million Covid-19 cases amid growing calls for the country to go into a national lockdown. As the country continued to grapple with oxygen shortages and a lack of hospital beds and ICU facilities for coronavirus patients, as well as crematoriums overloaded with bodies, the Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi called for a nationwide lockdown.
The Indian Premier League has been postponed with immediate effect. With multiple reports of team bubbles being breached by positive Covid cases, the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s governing council unanimously voted to suspend the action.
The suspension casts Australia’s ban on any citizens returning home from India in a new light, with former Test cricketer Michael Slater accusing the Australian PM of having “blood on his hands” for leaving Australian citizens stranded amid the pandemic.
Nepal has said it urgently needs at least 1.6m AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine doses to administer second shots as the Himalayan country is recording a surge in new coronavirus cases.
Data about Covid in North Korea has been scarce, but Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling Workers’ Party, has said the pandemic was only worsening, despite the development of vaccines. It urged people to brace for a protracted pandemic, describing it as an “inevitable reality”.
Recent data on Covid deaths and rates of infection in the UK are “very encouraging”, and though a third wave of infections was possible in late summer it was unlikely to overwhelm the NHS, the leading epidemiologist Neil Ferguson has said.
UK minister Liz Truss has hinted that Britain is set to announce the green list for countries that people can travel to on holiday shortly.
Hong Kong authorities have rowed back on plans to make Covid-19 vaccines mandatory for foreign domestic workers, after human rights groups slammed the policy as being discriminatory.
Denmark will allow elementary schools to fully reopen and a range of indoor activities to resume this week, the health ministry has said.
The US Food and Drug Administration is preparing to authorise Pfizer and German partner BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for adolescents aged between 12 and 15 years by early next week, the New York Times reported. In the US, the seven-day rolling average of new cases has fallen below 50,000 for the first time since October.
The EU will reopen to holidaymakers from countries with low Covid infection rates, such as the UK, and to anyone who has been fully vaccinated, by the start of June under a European Commission plan.
The Biden administration on Monday announced that it will raise the refugee cap to 62,500 this fiscal year, following backlash the President faced last month for keeping the historically low Trump-era refugee cap of 15,000 intact.
“I am revising the United States’ annual refugee admissions cap to 62,500 for this fiscal year,” the President said in a statement issued Monday. “This erases the historically low number set by the previous administration of 15,000, which did not reflect America’s values as a nation that welcomes and supports refugees.”
Additionally, the President said that he intends to set the goal of 125,000 refugee admissions for the 2022 fiscal year.
“It is important to take this action today to remove any lingering doubt in the minds of refugees around the world who have suffered so much, and who are anxiously waiting for their new lives to begin,” Biden said.
The President also acknowledged “the sad truth” that his goal of 62,500 refugee admissions will likely not be met this year.
“We are working quickly to undo the damage of the last four years. It will take some time, but that work is already underway.”
Biden added that his goal of 125,000 refugee admissions within the first fiscal year of his presidency “will still be hard to hit.”
“We might not make it the first year. But we are going to use every tool available to help these fully-vetted refugees fleeing horrific conditions in their home countries,” the President said.
Biden’s announcement follows swift and stern criticism from refugee advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers for initially signing an order last month that would keep in place a Trump-era limit on U.S. refugee admissions for the fiscal year — a significant reversal from his administration’s previous proposal to lift the cap to 62,500.
Biden administration officials defended the President amid criticism by denying that the President had broken his initial promise of raising the refugee cap to 62,500, but rather that the current administration inherited the “broken system” that was implemented in the Trump era and that 15,000 was only an initial target….
* Inching further from subtlety, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told Fox News this morning that he’s spoken to GOP members who are “concerned” about House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) “ability to carry out the job.”
* Soon after, the Wyoming congresswoman’s office responded to McCarthy’s comments, telling an NBC News reporter, “This is about whether the Republican Party is going to perpetuate lies about the 2020 election and attempt to whitewash what happened on Jan 6. Liz will not do that. That is the issue.”
[…] the New York Times reports that a group of large corporations — including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Patagonia — is planning to issue a joint statement today “calling for expanded voting access in Texas, wading into the contentious debate over Republican legislators’ proposed new restrictions on balloting after weeks of relative silence from the business community in the state.”
It is past midnight local time. I only have the energy to mention the obvious: The perv sharing photos with other members of the party of Morals and Religion, without being censored by his colleagues in congress.
“Ode to Sean Hannity”
by John Cleese
In a way, John Cleese’s poem can be seen as a follow-up to comment 25 in the previous chapter of this thread.
Thanks, PZ, for renewing the Political Madness thread.
Another link back to the previous chapter of this thread:
Pro-Trump website ‘TheDonald’ confirms detailed plans to storm Capitol and kill members of Congress
“60 Minutes” on CBS” is featuring the storming of the Capitol right now.
In other news, the actor who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” has gone full QAnon. Link
Border weed: How the hometown of tater tots became a cannabis capital
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/18/ontario-oregon-marijuana-481211
I still don’t miss living there.
Minnesota National Guard says joint team with Minneapolis police was target of drive-by shooting
Lynna @3:
I mainly remember Jim Caviezel from The Thin Red Line (1998), but damn, that was a fine performance in a beautiful (if somewhat muddled) film. I assumed he’d have a bright future. Pity.
I feel like the comic sort of under-sells its reference to the Python sketch. “I expected this” is a nice twist, but I wonder how many people will pick it up.
@#7, Rieux:
Since even you didn’t notice the additional references to the Holy Grail movie (the laden swallow and the holy
hand grenadesnowball), clearly it’s too subtle.Damn. The swallow should be obvious to any passing fan of Monty Python, but I even missed the holy hand grenade reference on my first reading. I feel bad.
Creeps of England (teh ministry of creepy
walkstalks?), Church of England clergy ‘paid off to keep quiet about racism’ (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):Away from creeps doing bad things and to good people, the essential workers, and the good things they’re doing, Now playing: The Barista! Movie posters at Paris cinemas feature lockdown heroes (video): “Parisian cinemas are displaying movie posters of local heroes — like real-life baristas, bakers, grocers and hairdressers — as movie houses remain shuttered due to Covid-19. Aimed at boosting local businesses, some 240 posters will occupy spaces usually dedicated to Hollywood blockbusters for the next two weeks.”
Even further away from the creeps, Ingenuity, the mars helicopter, has successfully flown.
blf#12 NASA/JPL video of mission control of the flight. Link
blf @11, that is good news. Nice move by the cinemas in Paris.
blf & Nerd, thanks for the reminder about Ingenuity. So aptly named.
Rob @6, he was good in that movie. One has to wonder what the heck happened. Now he is a QAnon idiot?
Campaign weirdness:
From Republican Fantasy Land:
Sounds like a threat wrapped in a fantasy.
Sigh. Cleaning up after Trump is still ongoing.
Ah, yes, Devin Nunes. Just as slimy as Trump … and proud of it. Of course Ellis and Nunes were connected.
Link
The rapid rise and fall of the misguided ‘America First Caucus’
A group of right-wing House Republicans eyed an America First Caucus to protect “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” It didn’t work out well.
Let’s also remember that other reporting concluded that there were no “staff-level” proposals. That means Greene and Gosar are trying to blame their staff personnel for white supremacy documents that they themselves authored.
This is a follow-up to comment 52 and other comments in the previous chapter of this thread.
Follow-up to comment 15.
More clean up: Biden WH Removes Trump-Era Climate Scientist From Top Research Role
Lynna @14 quotes:
Argh! My disgraced former governor has a good chance of becoming my disgraceful junior senator. In any event, my atrocious junior senator will become my senior senator.
We have open primaries in Missouri. I might have to vote in the Republican primary…if I can identify a least objectionable candidate.
Cartoon: The never ending news
billseymour, right. Kimberly Guilfoyle seems to making a career out of cheerleading for men of questionable character.
Link
Biden to nominate Coast Guard’s first female four-star admiral
Fighting vaccine disinformation:
Link
This is a follow-up to Comment 72 in a previous chapter of this thread.
Wonkette: OAN Employees Real Sorry About Poisoning Your Nana’s Brain, Please Stop Calling Them ‘Nazis’ Now?
Link
I live in what could be called a pro-virus, anti-vaccine state. It is really frustrating.
Update on eviction bans:
Link
On the legacy of Jim Crow, Ted Cruz picks the wrong partisan fight
Republicans demand action against Maxine Waters after Minneapolis remarks:
Update on the growing Russian military presence on the Ukraine-Russia border:
Link
Watch NASA’s new autonomous helicopter take flight on Mars
Video and technology details are available at the link.
Excerpt:
Follow-up to comment 30.
Another excerpt:
Wonkette: “Mike And Susan Pompeo Grifted State Department Like A Costco: Cheaply And In Bulk”
Link
Todd Coconato Says Christians Don’t Believe Biden Is President Because God’s Remains on Trump:
@#7, Rieux:
The first thing it said to me was, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
And, yes, @#8, The (Dirty?) Vicar, the swallow was a nice throwaway.
@28
Maxine Waters:
This could legitimately be interpreted as a call for violence. The defense requested a mistrial, and while the judge denied it, he said:
Re: 33
Would it be inappropriate to refer to the “Mantle of Anointing” as an “invisible glowing wife-beater” if I see it in the wild? The use of domestic violence seems risky.
NBC News:
Reuters:
Washington Post:
NBC News:
Texas Tribune:
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
MyPillow Targets Dominion With Otherworldly Legal Claim
Off the deep end.
Follow-up to comment 39.
Wonkette: “MyPillow Guy Invites Ted Nugent And Michael Flynn To Self-Pity-A-Thon For Non-Functioning Website”
Link
re Lynna @39:
I am pretty sure that customers are not rejecting MyPillow products because of Dominion but because Lindell has proven himself to be a lying liar who advocated the insurrection against the legitimate government of the US, wanted to use the military against those who voted for Biden, and continues to promote The Big Lie.
Rachel Maddow just reported that former vice president and presidential candidate Walter Mondale died to the age of 93. His selected running mate was Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman be on the ballot in that position. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) was an intern for him when she was in college, and acknowledged his public service and mentor-ship that lead to her being in her present job.
johnson catman @41, yes, that’s right … and because the pillows are a crappy product full of shredded foam bits.
Also fun: MyPillow CEO getting pranked into believing he’s talking to Trump is the best thing on internet
Video/audio is available at the link.
Ignoring cancel culture where it tends to be akin to left wing #gamer-gate, is problematic. It will destroy the movement just like the toxic elements of the skeptic movement destroyed new-atheism.
https://youtu.be/C7aWz8q_IM4
Here’s a link to the April 20 Guardian (support the Guardian if you can!) coronavirus world liveblog.
From their morning summary:
From the Guardian:
“Alexei Navalny moved to prison hospital amid fears for Putin critic’s life”:
“US ambassador to leave Moscow as tensions rise”:
Great piece in the Guardian – “The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea”:
Brazil’s Covid-19 response is worst in the world, says Médecins Sans Frontières (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
Disclaimer: I am a regular contributer to MSF (Doctors Without Borders).
Some podcast recommendations:
Straight White American Jesus – “How White Evangelicals Use the Family to Attack the LGBTQ+ Community and Deny Systemic Racism”:
The Bunker Daily – “Bulletproof Confidence, Blunted Empathy – How boarding schools produce warped leaders”:
(Somewhat related, in the Guardian: “Derek Chauvin trial highlights use of restraint holds in Minnesota schools.”)
Political Philosophy Podcast – “BREXIT & FREEDOM With The Philosopher & The News Podcast”:
The new episode of Maintenance Phase, on Olestra, is also worthwhile:
I remember when Walter Mondale campaigned against The Asshole. Of course he did not win the election, RR ran on populism.
Guardian world liveblog:
France is first EU member state to start testing digital Covid travel certificate:
I noticed the additions to the app this morning. Here in France, where vaccine hesitancy is exceptionally high, I’m unsure of the wisdom of making such travel certificates non-mandatory for non-essential travel outside of one’s local area.
As an aside, this also makes me wonder if the French app is using the joint Generalissimo Google–Archführer Apple bluetooth-based technology (the French app is bluetooth-based & is now non-centralised (the original version, which was not downloaded much at all, was centralised)). Google and Apple have been insistent the data is not centralised (to make it much harder to do nefarious surveillance / tracking), and recently, for example, refused to allow one national(?) app to be updated via their services as its vaccination certificate scheme addition was deemed to be a possible non-anonymous centralisation (apologies for being vague, I cannot recall which country(?) and now cannot find the article on the refusal).
Somewhat related, my (current) understanding is many of the EU track-and-trace apps are non-communicative; e.g., my French app won’t “talk” to the German app. So if, e.g., a German visitor (or me!) has a positive test, the other person won’t find out, despite both of us trying to be responsible. It seems to me that as travel opens up, this could become a serious problem.
It’s a mess, but at least there is an actively-maintained app (c.15m downloads, according to the app itself, with c.280,000 reported positive tests, and c.173,000 notifications of close / extended contact with those reported positive tests).
“Buddhist monks in Mandalay took to the streets in protest at the military regime for the 73rd day in a row on Apr. 20.”
Photos at the link. They’re carrying signs proclaiming their support for the NUG (National Unity Government), which was formed on Friday – Reuters – “Opponents of Myanmar coup form unity government, aim for ‘federal democracy'”:
In other more minor news of note, Richard Dawkins seems have been declared something of a heretic by the American Humanist Association. The atheist/humanist world turned upside down, indeed.
https://twitter.com/americnhumanist/status/1384238178643582979
birgerjohansson@50, The thing I remember about that campaign was Ronaddled Raygun’s use of to describe(? assert?) Mondale’s alleged changing of position on various issues.
So what?
What I want to know is WHY he changed his position (assuming he did). I don’t care too much that he did (broadly speaking), I am much Much more interested in the rationale, the reasons, the arguments which caused — and the sincerity of — the change.
Not changing one’s position in the light of (possibly new) compelling evidence, etc., can be much more negative than holding a position one disagrees with.
This is all(?) in the abstract, of course. Some positions — e.g., bigotry, loonytarianism, nazi, anti-rational / -science, actively pro-magic sky faerie, etc. — (basically anything hair furor claimed) is more than simply a disagreement. Those are unacceptable, full stop, and the only reason to vote “for” such candidates is as a tactical measure to (try and) ensure a even worse candidate is not elected (or, in the case of primaries, is selected as a candidate).
Per the CDC re vaccinations:
Total population:
39.9% have received at least one dose
25.7% are fully vaccinated
Population 18+ Years of Age:
50.7% have received at least one dose
33% are fully vaccinated
Population 65+ Years of Age:
80.1% have received at least one dose
64.9% are fully vaccinated
Re #54: Good for the AHA.
LOL.
“No way! I don’t belive it!”: Reaction to shocking news Tories are all corrupt http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2021/04/16/no-way-i-dont-believe-it-reaction-to-shocking-news-tories-are-all-corrupt/
(sark)
blf @ 55
What I recall from that campaign is the usual platitudes from RR, and getting little critical scrutiny from the media. “We’re number one! The Russkies are bad and those who oppose spending a trillion on weapons are unpatriotic” (not those exact words but that was the gist of it).
Re “flip-flopping” that was something the conservative media also claimed about its preceived opponents during Dubya.
(Changing your opinion is good if you are a Republican. Changing your opinion shows you are unreliable if you are a Democrat. The only evil Republican change of opinion is if you decide to raise taxes -as George H Bush did to finace the war)
I think this preceded Fox News, so the lying was not quite as blatant as it is today. Still, the spectacle was painful to watch.
BTW back then Saddam was still getting support from USA as was Khmer Rouge, Unita and South Africa. Death squads in El Salvador and genocide in Guatemala. It was not a good time.
Good thread by Josh Marshall.
birgerjohansson@60, As far as I can recall, the idoitic smear has happened in every presidential campaign since then (always a claim made by teh thugs), albeit not perhaps not as blatantly or with as much prominence as Ronalded Raygun’s claims about Mondale. There were numerous other thug lies, but it was the insinuation that changing one’s opinion was always bad which infuriated me at the time (and still does!). And has ensured I will never ever vote thug except as a tactical measure. (Note for the hard-of-understanding: “never ever vote thug” ≠ “always vote dummie”; translation, “never ever vote rethuglican” ≠ “always vote democrat”.)
Guardian world liveblog:
Follow-up to me@28 and marner@35, Maxine Waters says she won’t be ‘bullied’ by Republicans over Chauvin remarks:
Indeed. The whole kerfuffle is mostly an attempt to redefine “fight” — when said by a dummie (democrat) and no matter what the context — into meaning , , , or similar. But when said by a thug (rethuglican), such as hair furor, and essentially always regardless of context, it means , , , , or so on.
From today’s DN! headlines:
UK children not allowed to play outside until two years older than parents’ generation:
Whilst indisputably not born in the States, I mostly grew up and was educated there. As far as I can now recall, I was allowed to play “unsupervised” from a fairly young age. Once incident I do recall was learning to ride a bicycle. My father had fitted “training wheels” (albeit deliberately non-level, so as to encourage me to learn to balance), and one afternoon, I was talked into letting a slightly older child remove the training wheels. Perhaps not a good idea, as the path to our garage (driveway) was up a steep hill. The wheels were removed at the top, I climbed abroad, and shot downhill into the street barely under control. I managed to turn and continued down the street for some distance at speed. I recall falling over on my side at the end, but don’t recall now if I crashed or managed to break / slowdown beforehand; as far as I can recall, I wasn’t (seriously) hurt.
My parents were not amused, but did, to their credit, acknowledge I probably was ready to try riding without the training wheels. Dad then bought a nice bicycle so he could go out on rides with me; I later rode that bicycle for some years and eventually took it to University (where it was, unfortunately, stolen).
MarketWatch – “Ted Nugent tests positive for COVID-19: ‘I thought I was dying’”:
A touching opinion column in the Grauniad, The world is changing for same-sex parents — and this week I made history:
The column does not explain why that child wouldn’t be Spanish (location of birth), nor why the child “isn’t” British (citizenship of a parent (possibly non-biological, but so teh feck what?)). Bulgaria is just being arseholes.
“White House backs DC statehood:
‘Establishing the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth as the 51st state will make our Union stronger and more just’.”
Here’s more from CNBC.
“President Biden tells us he waited until the jury was sequestered to call George Floyd’s family. ‘I can only imagine the pressure and the anxiety they’re feeling’, he said. ‘They’re a good family and they’re calling for peace and tranquility’.”
Great ! If this is the case, I’m not at much risk of dementia, but probably am at risk of undementia (excessive
pedantrypenguin?), Middle-aged people who sleep six hours or less at greater risk of dementia, study finds:The article is at pains to point out that poor sleep may be a symptom rather than a part of the cause: “Robert Howard, professor of old age psychiatry at UCL, said: ‘We know that the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease appear in the brain 20 years before detectable cognitive impairment, so it is always possible that poor sleep might be a very early symptom of the condition, rather than a treatable risk factor.'”
“‘I am praying the verdict is the right verdict’, President Biden says. ‘I think it’s overwhelming, in my view. I wouldn’t say that, but the jury is sequestered now’.”
Follow-up to comment 69.
GOP arguments against DC statehood get a little worse
Republicans have had plenty of time to come up with their best arguments against D.C. statehood. They just can’t seem to come up with anything compelling.
Associated Press:
CNN – “A year before the Indianapolis FedEx mass shooting, the gunman browsed White supremacist websites, police say”:
More atl.
Lynna@73, “[T]he federal government controls the DC National Guard. It meant local elected officials, unlike every governor in the country, were powerless as
radicalized rioters[insurrectionists] launched an attack.”Indeed. I recall making, or at least trying to make, that point (albeit perhaps not as simply) at the time, and then getting lectured on how individual state governors control the National Guard — completely missing the point.
Link
Tweet o’ the day.
Wow.
@#77, Lynna:
But of course Biden is still backing patent protection for vaccines, which remains the biggest obstacle for mass vaccinations worldwide. Sort of like how they are still backing the Dakota Access Pipeline — we want to save the world, but definitely not if the very rich can’t turn a profit off of it! We’d literally rather die instead!
The jury has reached a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial. We’ll know what it is between 4:30 and 5:00 ET (in about an hour).
“In restraining our physical desires, Muslims, in monk-like fashion, flex our muscles of self-control in the hope of developing a greater mastery over our beastial nature, allowing our angelic nature to rise.”
I couldn’t hate this sentence more if I tried. In refraining from reading the article at the link, I, in compassionate fashion, flex my muscles of self-control in the hope of showing solidarity with my animal kin, allowing my rejection of religious claptrap to rise.
What Maxine Waters actually said about the Chauvin trial
She didn’t tell anyone to riot.
https://twitter.com/mgolingan1/status/1384183553777233928
TPM is liveblogging the Chauvin verdict here.
Guilty, guilty, guilty!
(I wrote #86 before the verdicts were read, because I was optimistic.)
Chauvin is remanded. Hallelujah.
Video of #86.
SC#88 AMEN!
Yes!!!
Thank goodness. “Are these your true and correct verdicts?” Yes!
“America: where you’re surprised and relieved that a public official faces consequences for kneeling on someone’s neck as they beg for their life until they die.”
ACLU:
Guardian – “Top Navalny aides arrested in run-up to mass protests”:
I forgot to include this in my podcast recommendations @ #49:
Guardian Today in Focus – “What is really behind the riots in Northern Ireland?”:
Here’s a link to the April 21 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
From their morning summary:
John Burn-Murdoch, FT (via the Guardian liveblog):
Graphs and FT link atl.
“George Floyd’s great-great-grandfather acquired 500 acres of land during Reconstruction.
All of it was stolen by white farmers who seized the land, using legally questionable maneuvers that were common in the postwar South….”
WaPo link atl.
“Certainly sounds like Tucker is trying to get ahead of an embarrassing story here….”
Video clip atl. Sure does.
“Tucker Carlson reacts to Derek Chauvin’s conviction by characterizing public support for Floyd as ‘an attack on civilization’…”
Video atl.
“Tucker Carlson had a complete meltdown tonight in response to a former New York corrections officer who criticized Derek Chauvin for using excessive force on George Floyd. Here’s how the interview (abruptly) ended….”
Video atl.
Merrick Garland is announcing that the DoJ is opening a civil pattern/practice investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department. (This is separate from the criminal investigation into George Floyd’s death.)
Guardian – “‘The system has collapsed’: India’s descent into Covid hell”:
Ari Berman:
Reuters – “Myanmar activists hold ‘blue shirt’ protests; report says junta chief to attend summit”:
Josh Marshall at TPM – “Among the Vaccine Hesitant”:
“Facebook comms accidentally sent a journalist its strategy for downplaying leak of its users data.
It notes with some relief major news outlets are moving on from the story…”
SC @101, yeah, Tucker Carlson is ranting about “this current insanity” after Derek Chauvin was pronounced guilty. Tucker also claimed that “decent people will leave this country.” I assume he means himself. Is Tucker threatening to leave the USA? Hope so. However, I’m not sure what other country I would send him to if there was a choice. Maybe Putin would welcome him?
Bits and pieces of news.
Link
re Lynna @109: The claim of “decent people will leave this country” in response to “this action” or “that action” is and always has been a ruse. Carlson would never leave the US because he is making way too much money spouting his bullshit and his faithful followers would rather stay here and make life miserable for people they don’t like. And NONE of them are “decent people”. If Carlson and his ilk WOULD leave the country for destinations unknown, the US would be a much better place for the rest of us.
What We Know About The Police Killing Of A Black Teen In Columbus Tuesday
Follow-up to comment 112.
Posted by readers of the TPM article:
One thing is consistent here: people no longer trust the descriptions given by police. There are still a lot of questions to be answered here.
The knife, and the hand wielding the knife being raised to stab someone are visible in the video.
In the wake of the Chauvin verdict, there is renewed interest in the original press release on the response to “a report of a forgery in progress.”
Full Press Release
Marjorie Taylor Greene continues to spout obnoxious nonsense:
Link
200 million doses? Check. Half of adults vaccinated? Double check. Herd immunity? Still not close
34 states considering anti-protest bills introduced by Republicans
Wonkette: “New York Times Real Sad That We Can’t Make Nice With MAGA Thugs Who Want To Destroy Us”
Both arrggghhhh!!!1! and Yea!!!, France ‘to start easing Covid-19 travel restrictions in May’ — arrggghhhh because whilst R is just below 1, J&J’s vaccine will start to used, and the number of vaccinations is (slowly) creeping up, everything else isn’t so good (ICU occupancy is still notably over 100%, etc), and Yeah because outdoor dining, etc — which is very Very much missed! — will be allowed (albeit it is probably too early, so arrggghhhh):
Hopefully they will tell him to stop waffling and put as much people and resources, and encouragements & incentives to get vaccinated, and (increasing?) disincentives for the vaccine-hesitant (a major, major problem here in France; a famous poll end of last year found only c.40% will willing to be vaccinated!). There are other recommendations and issues (and successes) to “evaluate”, but the lackadaisical vaccination campaign — the best known method of ending the pandemic — needs some serious focused attention.
Fantasy! (Probably.) Vaccination started at the very end of last year, c.15 weeks ago. Only 13m vaccinations(? jabs?); i.e., an average of less than 1m a week. There are 3–4 weeks to “mid-May” (let’s call it 4), and 7m vaccinations(? jabs(probably)?) to meet that rather low target of 20m; i.e., c.2m each week (on average) — double the average to-date. Whilst I’m happy the goal (probably) requires an ever-improving trend in the correct direction, I’m disappointed the goal is so modest, and fairly skeptical even that modest goal will be reached. And it’s a possible example of a missed incentive; e.g., one can only make a reservation for outdoor dining, or work at a restaurant, with proof of a jab (or having a legitimate medical reason preventing vaccination). The willfully unvaccinated can still dine, but no reservations (critical point here is reservations will probably be highly recommended, at least at first)… and no essentially public-facing work.
Wonkette:
An update on the Biden administration’s climate goals:
Link
In perhaps the least-surprising news, Right-Wing Activists Attack Conviction of Derek Chauvin, Engage in Whataboutism:
Yeah, like that’s going to work:
Link
Best thing you can say about this is that at least Republicans are doing some work. Usually they refuse to work at anything other than propaganda or PR.
Good news:
Link
Judge orders Los Angeles to shelter all homeless Skid Row residents:
Professor Blasi points out Judge Carter didn’t define “shelter”, creating a loophole big enough to fly the Starship Enterprise through (the not-excerpted remainder of the article is about this loophole and the dubious “shelter” antics already in-use).
Wonkette: “Senate GOP Never Guessed Voting Law Expert Stacey Abrams Would Know So Much About Voting Laws”
Link
Education, education, education. The Biden administration plan aims to reduce inequities by infusing hundreds of billions of dollars into virtually every level of the education system.
Washington Post link
Lynna@126, Quotes “I could watch Stacey Abrams outclass Republican men all day”.
So the author isn’t interested in Ms Abrams having, e.g., loonie Greene for a quick snack ?
</snark>Snarking aside, I’d would have put that as something like “I could watch Stacey Abrams outclass Republicans all day”.
Follow-up to both @113(earlier thread), about teh NKofE’s† ludicrous recent report on racial bigotry, and @10(this page), about the Creeps of England bribing people to not ignore bigotry, Henny Beaumont in the Grauniad On the UK government’s race report (cartoon).
† NKofE: N.Korea of Europe, also known as teh “U”K. Both N.Koreas are nuclear-armed isolated klepocracys run by small paranoid sleazy elites.
me@129, Oops! Borked link, such be Henny Beaumont on the UK government’s race report (cartoon). Sorry !
blf @130, thanks. I appreciated the cartoon reference to “government whitewash.”
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
NBC News:
Politico:
Reuters:
Wall Street Journal:
NBC News:
Orlando Sentinel:
me@129, Another Oops!
Creeps of England bribing people to not ignore bigotry → Creeps of England bribing people to ignore bigotry
Sorry sorry !
blf @ #128, not much opportunity yesterday. Abrams was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has one Republican woman and ten Republican men.
Guardian – “Joe Biden set to formally recognize Armenian genocide, officials say”:
Guardian – “Thousands of Russians attend rallies calling for Alexei Navalny’s release”:
Here’s a link to the April 22 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From their morning summary:
Big To-addict is still at it, Scientific paper claiming smokers less likely to acquire Covid retracted over tobacco industry links:
People more familiar with submissions, etc., to such journals can explain(correct?), but I myself seriously doubt they need the permission or resources of the journal to publish the data, analysis scripts, etc. Whilst the editors may have refused (albeit isn’t it standard practice nowadays to require the data, etc., to made readily available as a pre(?)-condition to publication?), I’m finding it difficult to believe the implication that the alleged refusal somehow prevents the data, etc., from being made readily available. This smells, to me, like
stale tobacco smoke in the eyesobfuscation; and with the history of the industry, quite possibly deliberate obfuscation.From yesterday’s DN! headlines:
“Tucker Carlson seems to be losing his marbles…”
Video atl.
And some great news, The Gambia[†] becomes second African state to end trachoma:
Congratulations to the Gambia!†
† British media has a habit of adding “the” to a country’s name; is(? was?) a common way to refer to Argentina (República Argentina).‡ So I checked, the Gambia’s official name (in English) is Republic of the Gambia, so “the Gambia” is a reasonable shortened version. Indeed, as that link points out, “The [definite] article is also officially used by the country’s government and by international bodies.” So the Gruaniad — please consider supporting the Grauniad if you can — isn’t doing anything offensive here in using “the Gambia”.
‡ Albeit Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge does note “the typical Spanish usage [is] la Argentina“.
Joe Biden set to formally recognize Armenian genocide, officials say https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/21/armenian-genocide-joe-biden-turkey
before Hitler set out to invade Poland, he urged ruthlessness, adding “no one thinks of the Armenians today”.
:).
birgerjohansson@124, “before Hitler set out to invade Poland, he urged ruthlessness, adding .”
A small caveat: There is some reasonable scholarly dispute whether or not such a thing was actually said, and the allegedly-contemporaneous document (known as L-3) containing the quote () was not accepted at the Nuremberg trials. However, since then, the consensus seems to be it was said.
me@144, Oops! That was referring to @142, not @124.
And I do hope Biden goes through and formally recognises the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the first world war as an act of genocide. As the cited Grauniad article notes, Obama chickened out despite his campaign pledge.
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day.
Arizona Republicans to begin auditing 2020 ballots in effort to undermine election results:
Find the most biased “observers” possible for seems likely to be an opaque procedure carried out by a very likely biased private for-profit, Cyber Ninjas (more on them below). And paid for in an opaque manner (more on this below). Geesh!
Alls teh bestingerist peoples !
Apropos of not really anything, whilst browsing the local specialist beer bar’s site (they are currently offering a takeaway service only due to the pandemic), I noticed a “Fake News” series of beers from a French microbrewery, Brasserie Sainte Cru (Colmar, near-ish Strasbourg, on the German border). Each bottle (well, actually, can) is illustrated with a portrait of a well-known source of fake news (scroll about halfway down that link):
● El Dorado, hair furor.
● Motueka, Xi Jinping.
● Nelson Sauvin, Putin.
● Idaho 7, Kim Jong-un.
All(?) the names are of hops varieties, so they missed a snark, albeit in Spanish El Dorado means (I think) “golden”, something of a snark on hair furor’s questionable tastes.
Texas GOP Bill to Bar Drive-Thru Voting Advances
CAMERON LANGFORD April 21, 2021
AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — Texas state Republican lawmakers Wednesday advanced a bill that would bar drive-thru voting, legislation critics say is aimed at the state’s largest county, a Democratic stronghold where more than 100,000 voters cast ballots from their cars in the November election.
[…]
Then-Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins rolled out drive-thru voting with resounding success for the November elections, as more than 127,000 people cast votes in this manner, with residents of the county seat Houston raving about how easy it was, how it only took 10 to 20 minutes and expressing hope it would be an option for future elections.
[…]
Jen Ramos of the Texas Democratic Party’s executive committee said a study found that while nonwhite voters make up about 30% of Harris County early voters, they made up 54% of voters who used a drive-thru polling location for the November elections….
Record numbers of Texans cast their ballots in last year’s presidential election and state election officials assessed it as “smooth and secure.” Still, … HB 4322 is one of numerous Republican-sponsored bills ostensibly aimed at preventing elections from being undermined by fraud.
The Houston Chronicle wrote in a recent editorial that since 2005, 174 Texans have been prosecuted for election fraud, a period in which 94 million votes were cast in state elections.
“Together, they represent 0.000185 percent of the total votes cast — or 1 in 540,000 voters. Statistically, voters are more likely to get struck by lightning (1 in 500,000) than to commit voter fraud,” the editorial states….
HB 4322 … is expected to easily pass both the House and the Texas Senate and be signed into law by Governor Abbott.
Ingenuity, Nasa’s helicopter on Mars, has successfully performed its second flight: Up 5 metres, sideways 2 metres, hover and turn to take multiple colour images, then return and land (about 50(?) seconds in total). Data is downloading to Earth now as I type.
Follow-up to @147, a snippet from Fight to vote: Arizona county’s ‘ludicrous’ election audit (perhaps a slightly misleading title, as Maricopa county isn’t doing the , the state-level thugs are):
The thug-controlled county — which has already done two legitimate audits — isn’t co-operating! (The article doesn’t say, but I presume the county also thinks this new is absurd.)
Some snippets from The Arizona Senate’s audit of the Maricopa County election starts Thursday. Here’s what you need to know:
As per @147, “Cyber Ninjas is not accredited by the US Election Assistance Commission to inspect voting machines […] ‘You’re bringing in this firm that’s on a treasure hunt,’ [Arizona secretary of state Katie] Hobbs said. ‘They are not qualified, they don’t even know what they’re doing.'” Cyber Ninjas is leading / controlling the fraud-of-an-audit, the other firms are presumably subcontrators.
It turns out the at the rented site is being provided a private firm (see the link for details).
What could be a critical player in this fraud is a company called CyFIR, which will apparently attempt to inspect the voting machines (and tabulators?). I have no idea how legit or experience this company is, or whether or not there are any warning signs (red flags) like there is with Cyber Ninjas and their CEO(?) Doug Logan. (The Cyber Ninjas site doesn’t seem to say anything about their management, which is very weird for the industry.)
Trump delayed $20bn in aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, report finds:
Bits and pieces of news.
NY Times:
Washington Post:
President Biden has nominated David Chipman, policy adviser to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, to be director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Atlanta Journal:
Following Chauvin’s conviction, many on the right slam jurors
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/yay-for-ball-game-vaccine-passports
Putin may have blinked, Russia to pull back troops from Crimea and Ukraine border:
Meanwhile, Putin is still trying to intimidate the Czech Republic (from the same article, and quoting essentially in full):
ACLU:
ACLU:
Guardian world liveblog:
Postmaster General DeJoy is running a ‘covert operation’ to monitor social media
blf @156, I thought I recognized those names.
SC, your comment 158 and the news I posted in comment 160 go together to show just how urgent it is to get rid of DeJoy. I can see his end coming soon.
Almost but not quite entirely irrelevant to politics: Archaeologists have discovered what is likely Harriet Tubman’s childhood cabin in Dorchester County, Maryland:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/21/harriet-tubman-lost-maryland-home-discovered
I just read some Wikipedia, and found it’s been about exactly 200 years since Tubman’s birth, inasmuch as that can be dated.
Link
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate – “Amy Coney Barrett Should Just Judge Without Bias Before Writing a Book on Judging Without Bias.”
Protests across Malawi as mobile phone charges soar:
The Grauniad is unclear on what currency Minister Kazako is refering to. The Malawi currency is Malawian kwacha, which “is divided into 100 tambalas”, so his use (as quoted (in translation?)) of “cents” suggests USD, albeit other currencies are also divided into cents. People in the States can perhaps correct me, but 0,80USD per second is very exorbitant. (I cannot meaningfully compare to my plan here in France, which is up to so-and-so many gigabytes per month on a fast network for a flat fee.) The recently-published Worldwide mobile data pricing 2021: The cost of 1GB of mobile data in 230 countries (cited in the Grauniad’s article), puts Malawi at, on average, 25,46USD, Tanzania at 0,75USD, France at 0,41USD, teh “U”K at 1,42USD, and the States at 3,33USD (all figures per 1GB (and transcribed by hand, so apologies for any errors)).
School apologizes for teaching fourth-graders that slaves freely chose to come to America
Tucker Carlson’s college yearbook reveals he belonged to club for Harvey Milk’s murderer
Wonkette:
Link
Wonkette: “Whiny-Ass Republicans Don’t WANNA Go To President Joe Biden’s First Address To Congress”
Link
It’s unclear if this was a prank, or more skullduggery by Russia, European MPs targeted by deepfake video calls imitating Russian opposition:
On the Supreme Court, Ted Cruz pretends to forget his own record
“You didn’t see Republicans, when we had control of the Senate, try to rig the game,” Cruz claimed, referring to the Supreme Court. Actually, senator…
Johnny Enlow Claims Trump From God to take down George Soros, Bill Gates, and Others:
The British local elections are up. They have a tradition of joke candidates, and one running for mayor of London has some excellent ideas. You could try google
“Count Binface has released his political manifesto for London”
Follow-up to @173, Count Binface (formerly known as Lord Buckethead) Mayoral Manifesto 2021:
blf @174, all very good ideas as far as I can tell. :-)
In other news, Republicans Erupt After Dem Rep. Calls Their DC Statehood Arguments ‘Racist Trash’
From the Grauniad’s current live States politics blog:
According to CNN, Senate overwhelmingly passes anti-Asian hate crimes bill:
Vox explains what Hawley might be objecting to, The Senate strongly condemns anti-Asian hate crimes by passing new bill:
Sotomayor Pens ‘Brutal’ Dissent by Repeatedly Citing Kavanaugh Back at Himself as Conservative Majority ‘Guts’ Precedent in Juvenile Punishment Case
COLIN KALMBACHER Apr 22nd, 2021
Details of the case at the link, including quotes from the dissent. Sotomayor is the best.
tomh @177, this text seems to also be very important:
Follow-up to comments 177 and 178.
Link
We also learned that Brett Jones “was a victim of abuse by multiple people in his life, including the grandfather he stabbed to death—then tried to save with CPR.”
Kavanaugh’s brain does not work well enough to be a Supreme Court Justice. He is a disgrace.
Link
She’s better off being out of that religion.
New Oklahoma law targets protesters while protecting drivers who hit them:
Navalny in an Instagram post:
The entire post, in Russian, can be viewed Here
Wonkette:
Link
WTF? What kind of fuckery is this?
“Minnesota gasps at the financial damage it faces from the Texas freeze.”
Washington Post link
When Texas’ natural gas supplies froze up, prices soared, and now Minnesota’s customers are looking at an $800 million bill. One utility, headquartered in Houston, is taking an especially aggressive tack.
Republicans are plotting to use economic blackmail. Here’s how Democrats can stop them.
Washington Post link
Biden to propose nearly doubling capital gains tax for the rich:
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
Bits and pieces of news.
Link
Vague and incomplete, that’s fairly good description of the Republican infrastructure plan:
Link
Republicans still don’t know how to do the hard work it takes to come up with an actual counter proposal to anything the Biden administration has proposed.
Link
What could go wrong?
Posted by readers of the article:
Police arrest man in connection with not one but two anti-Asian hate crimes in California
Oxford Malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial:
From Maddow last night (YT links):
“Arizona Republicans Embrace The Ridiculous Pursuing Recount For Trump”:
“Kavanaugh An Ill-Considered Choice To Pen Ruling On Incorrigible Childhood Offenses”:
“To Protect Bottom Line, Chevron Aims To Tie US Hands Against Military Junta In Burma”:
From yesterday’s DN! headlines:
Here’s a link to the April 23 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Guardian – “Delhi hospitals issue SOS alerts over oxygen supplies as India’s Covid crisis mounts”:
“Just as every cop is a criminal . . .”:Hialeah motorcycle cops charged with issuing bogus tickets to drivers they never pulled over:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article250832779.html
David Lammy in the Guardian – “This war graves report shows Britain must face its colonial past with honesty”:
Guardian world liveblog:
Politico – “Trump’s bleach news conference happened one year ago today. We’ve never been the same.”:
More atl.
“BREAKING: The Virginia GOP will not allow religious Jews who cannot travel due to Shabbat to participate in its convention. There were 38 votes in favor of providing a religious exemption, 28 against, and 3 abstentions. The motion needed 75% in favor to pass.”
“MOSCOW (AP) — Imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny says he’s ending his hunger strike after more than three weeks.”
Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis, study shows (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day. (And same.)
The story – or one of them, anyway – Tucker Carlson was trying to get ahead of: membership of the “Dan White Society”. Dan White was the murderer of Harvey Milk and George Moscone.
Guardian world liveblog:
Bumble is trending on Twitter. This is why:
Screenshots atl.
“Ukraine/Russia – locals in Ukraine thanking Putin for uniting Ukrainians again. Gift to Zelensky who has seen his ratings increase. Russia ALWAYS misreads Ukraine – because they cannot be bothered to really understand the country.”
“NEW: US special envoy for so-called northern triangle – the Central American countries from which most migrants flee – says US considering sanctions against corrupt leaders. This would be a first. Many enjoyed good relations with Trump as long as they cooperated with his plans.”
BBC – “East Jerusalem clashes leave over 100 injured”:
Tom Meyer at Shasta Bible College is going nuts over the discovery of a dinosaur fossil he thinks proves the world is 6000 years old.
Covid Vaccine Mandatory at State Universities in California
April 22, 2021 NATHAN SOLIS
Over one million college students and faculty will need to get their Covid jab by this fall under a new plan announced by two of California’s biggest university systems.
The Israeli far right:
Oh, FFS.
RonJon Wants To Know: Why Is The Government Rushing To Vaccinate Everyone?
Right Wing Watch:
Commentary from Wonkette:
Link
“Ted Cruz maintains ties to right-wing group despite its extremist messaging.”
Washington Post link
Link
Quoted in #215:
LOL.
“Trump ran up a $200,000 bill for security costs when he held a rally in Albuquerque. His campaign didn’t pay up, so now the city has referred the request to a collection agency.
The mayor doesn’t expect to get paid, citing Trump’s ‘shady’ past dealings.”
Rick Hasan of Election Law Blog has an op-ed in the NYT.
Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections
By Richard L. Hasen April 23, 2021
Too long to quote, but the whole thing is worth reading. For those who have a problem with NYT articles…try Reader View on Chrome, Reader Mode on Firefox, or Reader Mode on iPad/iPhone. Most browsers have a Reader mode that strips clutter (which often includes subscription requirements.)
Nice:
Nick Martin:
The pause is to last until noon on Monday, before which there will be another hearing.
“BREAKING — Biden told Erdogan that he intends to recognize the Armenian Genocide tomorrow, per Bloomberg”
Follow-up to comment 214.
Link
“Gladys Pentecost”
As Dr. Fauci said, we have emergency authorizations for vaccines because we are in an emergency. Almost 570,000 people have died.
Follow-up to comments 214 and 224.
Link
“A right wing American tech billionaire funded Tommy Robinson in the UK by running the money through Rebel Media in Canada, the New York Times has found….”
NYT link atl.
An important, albeit uncodified, part of trial by jury is jury nullification (or jury equity), where (in general) a jury “believe that a defendant is guilty, but choose to acquit the defendant anyway, because the jurors consider that the law itself is unjust”. This just happened in the UK, Jury acquits Extinction Rebellion protesters despite ‘no defence in law’:
Dr Jen Gunter has some antivax loons for a snack, ‘No data’ linking Covid vaccines to menstrual changes, US experts say:
(Re: vaccine fearmongering and some other semi-recent stuff)
US rightwing pundits earlier this year: “Why is Jill Biden regularly using the ‘Dr’ title when she’s a scholar of humanities? People might mistake her for a medical doctor in some contrived emergency scenario!”
Meanwhile, Dr. Naomi Wolf: “I think these reports that some women have suffered negative health effects from being near vaccinated people should warrant a through investigation”
For reasons that should become obvious, I suggest listening to Grace Petrie, You Build a Wall (video), whilst reading Ups and downs: Trump’s $27m-a-mile border wall being scaled with $5 ladders:
One snippet from the Texas Monthly article, A Section of Trump Border Wall in South Texas Cost $27 Million a Mile. It’s Being Foiled by $5 Ladders (link embedded in above excerpt):
Sanity Tip: Don’t read the comments.
Food pantries for hungry Filipinos get tagged as communist:
Follow-up to @156 Putin trying to intimidate the Czech Republic, and also @170 deepfake video call imitating Alexei Navalny aide Leonid Volkov, EU’s Baltic states expel four Russian diplomats in solidarity with Prague:
Another Trump boondoggle that is slowly being cleaned up:
Link
Follow-up to comments 51, 63, 77, 98, 104, 137, and 196.
Some details from the ongoing disaster in India:
Washington Post link
New coronavirus cases in India are probably being undercounted, perhaps by a factor of 5.
“As Covid-19 Devastates India, Deaths Go Undercounted”
New York Times link
Wonkette: “Biden Becomes First US President To Say The Armenian Genocide Happened, Which It Obviously Did”
Model’s ‘hands off my hijab’ post sparks protest over France’s proposed ban:
From memory, the Grauniad is somewhat incorrect about that absurd burkini ban: No “province” banned it, only cites (like Nice) and villages (sadly, including the one I live in). At least one of the bans was overturned in court, in a ruling which was interpreted to apply to all the bans. As far as I am aware, burkinis are no longer banned anywhere in France.
Go Ms Mohamed ! 🧕🏽 👏👏
The article continues with examples from Ms Mohamed of times she has been or felt threatened for wearing a hijab.
Republicans fret over AOC backing for Biden as 100-day mark draws near:
I’m extremely dubious about Biden’s letting Mohammed bin Salman (Saudia Arabia) off the hook for the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, keeping the US Embassy in Jerusalem, deciding to visit teh NKofE on (and as) his first foreign trip, proposing to pay-off Jair Bolsonaro, and so on — none of which probably annoys Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy. Moscow Mitch, or Putin. Albeit, to Biden’s credit (and Congress previously in 2019),† there was a genocide in Armenia.
† To my surprise, Ronaddled Raygun also called it genocide in 1981, according to Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge. (And yes, for the Putin-trolls, President Obama reneged on his campaign promise to call it genocide.)
Nasa’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity has successfully completed its third flight, up 5 metres, high-speed (2 metres/second) flight for 50 metres, return and land, about 80 seconds in total. That 50 metres is much much further than ever been flown or tested before (on-Earth testing was limited to less than 2 metres due to the size of the test chamber). At most two more flights in the next week-ish, before Perseverance moves on to its primary mission.
blf @239, I think the Republicans are getting in as many blows as they can before Biden takes the very public stage on Wednesday to deliver his first address to a joint session of Congress.
Biden is more popular than Trump was, and Biden is getting a lot more done that actually benefits middle class and poverty-level people. That has the Republicans running scared and screaming “socialist!” with their hair on fire.
Biden is far from perfect, but he is such an improvement over Trump that I don’t think the Republicans have a leg to stand on.
You are right about Jamal Khashoggi, btw.
Idaho indulges in its traditional anti-environmental hysteria with new wolf extermination bill
https://twitter.com/tommyxtopher/status/1385694155561701379
PPP Lending Was Supposed to Help Small Businesses in Kansas City. That’s Not What Happened.
“You can’t call it anything but redlining: public sector reinforcing private-sector discrimination.”
Follow-up to comment 236.
US sending aid to India as COVID-19 cases spike
A man in Algeria has been sentenced to prison for saying not all statements in the koran are literally true.
This is presumably what birgerjohansson@246 is referring to, Algerian author Said Djabelkhir sentenced to jail for offending Islam (BBC edits in {curly braces}):
Update on coronavirus infections in Michigan:
NY Times link
“C.E.O. Pay Remains Stratospheric, Even at Companies Battered by Pandemic”
NY Times link
While millions of people struggled to make ends meet, many of the companies hit hardest in 2020 showered their executives with riches.
The tomato fanatic is back! An organic vegetable stall at today’s outdoors market is famous (at least to me) for, in season, having a bazillion types and numbers of fresh (generally local) tomatoes. I joke they have a fetish… Anyways, today they had the bazillion tomatoes, fresh garlic and several different peppers (not quite a bazillion, however), and so on… everything needed for Gazpacho. Now I just need to make enough room in the refrigerator to cool it down after a session with the food processor. (And I’ll still have about half a bazillion tomatoes left (yes, I also went tomato-fetish!)). One annoyance is yesterday one of the best containers for holding / cooling Gazpacho (and many other dishes / leftovers), after years of service, broke. So I’ll need to improvise, so the (lack of) room in the refrigerator may or may not be a problem… (Yes, sorry, first world problems.)
More about that fraud of an in Arizona, Arizona Republicans deploy Cyber Ninjas in pro-Trump election audit:
For fecks sake you stoopid seemingly-Putin-influenced (Christopher Coury), this about proper election security, etc., procedures, not ensuring Cyber Nijinas makes a profit. You very very appear to be a failure.
Some snippets from First day of Arizona Senate election audit nearly stopped before it began. Here’s what happened:
FSMDAMNIT YOU FECKING FRAUD OF A JUDGE, ELECTIONS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE TRANSPARENT!
The audit goes on to discuss numerous other problems, irregularities, obfuscations, and so on.
The stench of corruption around Johnson and his cronies grows fouler by the day. Now Dominic Cummings has turned on his former boss – enraged by being accused of leaking texts between Johnson and billionaire tory donor James Dyson. Up to now, the flood of stories about cronyism (aka corruption) has not dented the Tory lead in the polls – it appears Johnson’s supporters, like Trump’s, simply don’t care about it (the excuse they give is often that all politicians are corrupt, which is simply not true) – but Cummings’ apostasy must worry Johnson, because he most certainly knows where the bodies are buried – and how they got there. (What’s usually a metaphor in politics is quite literal in this case – dishing out fat contracts to friends and party hacks and donors undoubtedly cost many lives.)
‘An indescribable moment’: Indigenous nation in US has right to lands in Canada, court rules. A somewhat twisty tale:
Congratulations to Mr Desautel, the Sinixt, and Canada’s supreme court.
blf, The Canadian did a lot of things wrong and now they’re going to have to try to right those wrongs. It will be interesting to see to what extent, if any, the USA follows suit.
In other news: Pope calls migrant tragedy in Mediterranean ‘a moment of shame’
This news story gets worse and worse. The more reporters look into the Trump administration’s handling of funds allocated to Puerto Rico for hurricane relief, the more corrupt (and possibly racist) Trump and his lackeys look.
Link
We still don’t know how bad it was.
Follow-up to comments 236 and 245.
Link
“Indonesian submarine wreckage found, all 53 crew members dead, officials say.”
Washington Post link
Justices to consider constitutionality of donor disclosure rule
Detailed background and arguments at the link.
The recusal request, from Senators Whitehouse, Blumenthal and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia, is because The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, who announced in September, after Barrett was nominated, that it would spend at least a million dollars on a campaign to ensure Barrett’s confirmation, is the political advocacy arm of Americans for Prosperity (one of the litigants challenging the law.) At the very least, the letter added, if Barrett opts not to recuse, she should publicly explain why she is not doing so.
Barrett did not recuse herself from the decision to grant review in the foundation’s case, and there has been no indication so far that she will not participate in Monday’s argument.
On Wednesday, the Court will hear the case of a Pennsylvania student who was removed from her high school cheerleading team after posting offensive messages on social media.
Here’s a link to the April 26 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
New podcast episodes:
QAA – “Episode 139: Mother, Anon feat Charlotte Callanan & Vera Bergengruen”:
Fever Dreams – “Pro-Trump Meet-Up Features Call to Kill Political Enemies”:
Although it’s not mentioned in the description, the first segment of the QAA episode is about the insane Tulsa event (see Lynna’s #3 above). The audio clips are far more disturbing than transcripts.
Reza Khaasteh:
Guardian – “Republican Kevin McCarthy says he walks ‘tightest tightrope’ because of Trump”:
re SC @262: McCarthy is acting like the victim of a domestic abuser where The Orange Toddler-Tyrant is handing out the abuse.
Michelangelo Signorile – “Tucker Carlson’s pathological obsession with homosexuality, exposed.”
Some responses in Signorile’s Twitter thread led me to this Out article: “This Docuseries Could Explain Why Tucker Carlson Hates Trans Women.” I didn’t even know this series existed.
I cried laughing.
I was drinking some beer at the time I saw, and managed to swallow my sip rather than spraying it onto the screen and keyboard and mouse and opposite wall, Ex-Trump adviser mocked for claiming Biden pushing :
I am aware beer is plant-based (except perhaps for fining materials, which are typically animal-based). And I am also aware what the kook is
suggestingmocking — a diet less rich in animals — can be sensible from multiple perspectives, such as environmental impact. So why the use of ? Because the comments were made in bad faith, were deceptive (as pointed out by Krugman), and were made by a wanna-dalek (a hair furor stooge).Bits and pieces of campaign news:
Link
blf @266, the saying in Idaho is, “Mormon barley makes the best beer.”
In other news: Marco Rubio is a hypocrite, and a lying asshat:
Link
Republican nonsense and stupidity has consequences:
Link
Jon Berger & Pascal Wyse in the Grauniad On mislaying face masks (cartoon). Something very similar happened to me yesterday when I was about to leave to go the outdoors market.
All of Trump’s “best people” are getting new jobs:
Link
The commentary above was written by Josh Marshall.
“Redactions”? WTF?
Link
Correction to comment 272: “lizabeth City” should be “Elizabeth City.”
In other news, “Biden admin cancels outrageous ICE fines levied against undocumented immigrants in sanctuary.”
Link
Cartoon: The norm-respecters.
Kevin McCarthy Is Still Whitewashing What Happened on January 6
Link
The Origin Story Of GOP Outrage Over Totally Imaginary Biden Red Meat Ban
Link
Sigh. So much faux outrage.
Big Lie-driven Arizona vote ‘audit’ is becoming more and more of a cluster [fuck]
Lynna@278 quotes “the judge in the Democratic Party’s suit to stop the effort stepped down, citing the fact that a lawyer for the firm representing Senate Republicans’ lead auditor had been an intern in his office within the past five years.”
So the faux- is even more of a fraud then I screamed about in @251.
blf, @279, yep. That was my conclusion too.
In other news, and as follow-up to comment 272: “Attorneys For Family Of Police Shooting Victim Say They Only Saw ‘Snippet’ Of Body Cam.”
Link
Attorney Lassiter also made it clear that when Andrew Brown attempted to drive away to escape being shot, he avoided all of the police officers and their vehicles. He did not ever put any police officers in danger with his vehicle, according to the attorney.
The police officers were shouting contradictory commands, (“Show us your hands!” and “Put your hands on the steering wheel”, when his hands were clearly visible on the steering wheel.) Attorney Lassiter also said that the police were continually shouting epithets at Brown, calling him “motherfucker” etc. The police continued to fire at Brown with an assault rifle and at least two glock pistols as he drove away. The police to continued to fire at Brown after his car hit a neighbor’s tree and stopped.
Brown’s attorneys said that at least nine police videos should be available, (8 body cams and one dash cam), but the family was not shown all of that video. When the 20-second video they were shown started, the attorney noted that there were already bullet casings visible on the ground. Whatever happened before the 20-second video was not shown to the family.
Other family members left the viewing room, but Brown’s son remained to watch the 20-second video more than a dozen times with the attorney.
NYT analysis confirms what we’ve known: ICE could have prevented COVID-19 disaster in its facilities.
Link
More details are available at the link.
Follow-up to SC’s comment 106.
Link
NBC News:
NBC News:
NBC News:
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
In other food news…
I’ve had a hard time following what’s happening with this, since the actions of the EU Council are quite opaque, but…reportedly they were debating the absurd Amendment 171 this past week, and it somehow stands a chance. Here’s Oatly’s explainer/petition: “Are you stupid? The milk lobby thinks you are.” (I’m sure there’s a yogurt cancel culture joke here somewhere…)
Guardian podcast – “The Seaspiracy controversy: should we stop eating fish?”:
(It’s worth noting that Stewart is also a “fisheries biologist.”)
Plant Based News – “Farm Sanctuary Receives Acclaimed Award Nomination Against Social Media Stars “:
Webby voting is open until May 6.
Follow-up to comment 277.
Fox Corrects Graphic, Script After Days Of Hammering Fake Biden Red Meat Ban
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fox-news-meat-biden-ban
I think the correction was so mild and given so little airtime that it won’t really have an effect.
Follow-up to comment 286.
Posted by readers of the article:
Quoted in Lynna’s #268:
LOL.
So, a total pass from Republicans, then.
Yesterday’s tweet (thread) o’ the day.
(It’s interesting that the design/fashion/travel magazines and sites I read are completely the opposite – everything exciting is happening in Africa. It’s made them much more fun to read.)
“Tucker Carlson is now telling his audience to harass people who wear face masks outside.
If they see children wearing masks, Tucker says the response should be no different than when you see a kid being abused — ‘call the police immediately, contact child protective services’.”
Video atl.
Tweet o’ the day.
Guardian – “Myanmar: ethnic armed group seizes military base near Thai border”:
Wild Guardian news:
“Jerusalem rabbi accused of being undercover Christian missionary”:
“Boris Johnson ‘isolated and at risk of becoming uncontrollable’”:
Here’s a link to the April 27 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
From yesterday’s DN! headlines:
Also from DN! – “GOP Criminalizes Dissent with Anti-Riot Laws Targeting Black Lives Matter & Anti-Pipeline Protests”:
Guardian world liveblog:
The NRCC is sending out texts reading: “Ignore this text to abandon Trump. …you have 10min to tell us if you’ll join his new social media site. We won’t ask again:…”
TPM – “All Of The Things That Matt Gaetz Most Definitely Did NOT Exchange For Sex”:
“Colette: The French resistance fighter confronting fascism – Oscars 2021 Short Documentary Winner”:
25-minute video at the (YT) link. The film was presented by the Guardian.
JFC.
Right wasted no time touting bogus story about Kamala Harris’ book
Republicans appear to be having so much difficulty undermining Biden and his team that they’re leaning on manufactured nonsense.
David Corn at MoJo – “In Sworn Testimony in Inauguration Scandal Case, Donald Trump Jr. Made Apparently False Statements”:
All of the details atl.
SC @291, Rick Santorum is so irritating. He is pompous beyond belief … and he bases his pomposity on ignorance. And Fox News gives him a platform. I hope he is buried under the negative feedback he will get for his ignorant comments about Native Americans.
In other news, discussing threats from within the DHS:
Link
Link
See comment 277 for the origins of the bogus meat ban story.
Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming:
Yes, she’s right. It’s a pity that she an almost lone voice crying out against the Republican misinformation campaign. See comment 275.
Jeet Heer on Substack – “Embarrassing Fans of the Super-Rich.”
“It’s rare to encounter so simplistic a worldview outside the pages of an Ayn Rand novel.”
Good news from some Republicans: “GOP Doctors’ Caucus Puts Out PSA Urging Constituents To Get COVID Vaccine”
Link
You can view the PSA at the link.
‘Embarrassing Racist’: Native American Orgs Rip Santorum For Claiming There Was ‘Nothing’ Before Colonizers Arrived
Follow-up to comment 308.
Posted by readers of the article:
Tucker Carlson has crossed the line into reckless endangerment:
Link
Follow-up to comment 308.
Link
The Lincoln Project:
Jemele Hill:
Arrests, evidence keep mounting in Capitol siege prosecutions, GOP gaslighting notwithstanding
Democrats Criticize Justice Barrett for Declining to Recuse from Case of Koch-Funded Group that Spent Heavily on Ads to Confirm Her
COLIN KALMBACHER Apr 26th, 2021
In Sworn Testimony in Inauguration Scandal Case, Donald Trump Jr. Made Apparently False Statements
CDC says it is safe for vaccinated people to unmask outdoors
Wonkette: “Miami Private School Will Only Employ Staff Open To Spreading COVID-19 To Kids”
Link
https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1386838009631420416
Video snippet is available at the link.
Paul Krugman:
New York Times link
https://twitter.com/BreakingNews/status/1387082353647005699
Helpful graphic to explain CDC guidelines for wearing masks.
Wonkette link
Lynna@319
Thanks, but you know, I made the mistake of reading the replies to the tweet, and the fuckers responding need to go fuck an electrical outlet.
Convicted Greek nazi Golden Dawn MEP Ioannis Lagos arrested in Brussels as soon as his parliamentary immunity was lifted. Some snippets:
Follow-up to comment 280.
NBC News:
New York Times:
Well, this funny … and it serves as a good schadenfreude moment:
Link
New York Times:
Commentary from Wonkette:
Link
“Wayne LaPierre has cultivated his image as an exemplar of American gun culture, but video of his clumsy marksmanship—and details regarding his Rodeo Drive shopping trips—tells another story.”
New Yorker link to an article by Mike Spies.
The article also provides details of Susan LaPierre shooting an elephant, as well as details of Wayne LaPierre spending obscene amounts of money on his clothes: “nearly three hundred thousand dollars in payments that Ackerman McQueen made to Ermenegildo Zegna, a luxury men’s fashion retailer on Rodeo Drive, in Beverly Hills, to dress LaPierre between 2004 and 2017.”
Lynna @327: That is HORRIFYING! It nearly brought me to tears thinking of the poor elephant. If only people like LaPierre could be turned out without weapons onto the African plains and have to fend for themselves, the animals could show them what nature is all about. I would include Don Jr. and Eric in that group because they are of the same mindset that the wild animals are only there for them to take pleasure in shooting. I apologize if this violates the blog policy against violence.
Marina Hyde in the Guardian – “Decor without decorum – this is home economics, Johnson-style”:
Here’s Ian Dunt’s livetweeting of PMQs this morning.
Guardian – “Brazil begins parliamentary inquiry into Bolsonaro’s Covid response”:
Here’s a link to the April 28 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
LOL.
CNN – “DC police officer: ‘It’s been very difficult’ seeing elected officials trying to whitewash brutal insurrection”:
Guardian world liveblog:
I was surprised looking at the CDC site to see that, in terms of per capita deaths over the past week, Florida is in the same category as Michigan.
These are the states with the highest death rate over the past week: Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia.
The New England states are leading the way in vaccinations, and the northeastern states generally are doing very well at vaccinating people.
re SC @335: WHY would you be surprised? It is FLORIDA! Home of Florida-man and Florida-woman, and the place where schools want to prohibit vaccinated people from interacting with students.
Update to #s 286 and 301 – Guardian – “New York Post reporter quits citing pressure to write incorrect story about Kamala Harris”:
More atl.
johnson catman @ #336, I wasn’t surprised about Florida so much as that I hadn’t heard about it. So much of the focus has been on Michigan and there’s little attention paid to Florida (or Georgia, for that matter). They don’t have a high case rate, but their high positivity rate suggests a good number of cases are being missed. The thing about some of these states is that their vaccination rates are also relatively low; so while I’d expect states like New Jersey to turn the corner soon, I’m more troubled about Florida (particularly with the variants), Georgia, Nevada,… I don’t think they’ll have a big spike, but a lot of people can die if they plateau at that rate.
Arizona Enacts New Abortion Restrictions
April 28, 2021
Guardian world liveblog:
johnson catman @328, so much for LaPierre’s idea of “a good guy with a gun.”
In good news, tomorrow will mark two weeks since my second vaccination shot. I should be good now … well as good as it gets. We may all need boosters eventually.
SC @330, news of Bolsonaro’s actions, inactions and inane statements always reminds me of Trump. Sorry to see there’s more than one “Trump” in the world. One is too many.
SC @331, that sounds like a good idea!
Guardian world liveblog:
Nasa’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, managed to image the Perseverance rover on its third flight, Mars helicopter Ingenuity spots Perseverance rover from the air (image).
Lynna@341,”[T]omorrow will mark two weeks since my second vaccination shot. I should be good now …”
Remember to click
okso Bill Gates can download your update. If you seeдаorda, it’s probably one of the Russian troll farms.(Oh, and congratulations!)
blf @343, wow! That was great.
In other news: Why the muted GOP reaction to Biden’s minimum-wage move matters
When Obama raised the minimum wage for contractors, Republicans were apoplectic. When Biden did the same thing, the GOP reaction was … different.
blf @344, ha! I had a fatigue reaction to the second shot. I slept for most of two days … and didn’t feel refreshed. I postulate that Bill Gates was busy futzing with my operating system then. Russian trolls became extremely bored with me long ago. They departed for more interesting or manipulatable landscapes, like Trump’s lizard brain.
In other news:
Link
Follow-up to comment 346.
Link
Update on that Republican recount of votes in Arizona:
Link
15 Oregon counties moving to ‘extreme risk’ category as COVID-19 hospitalizations surge
Portland is in that “extreme risk” category.
Link
Rightwing assholes spewing misinformation.
Wonkette: “Colorado Cops Share Laughs Over Video Of Them Beating Up 73-Year-Old Woman”
Link
Lynna@346, “blf@344, ha! I had a fatigue reaction to the second shot. I slept for most of two days”.
Classic symptom of teh Hugo Chavez voting-machine malware. Please don’t pass by any polling stations during elections, as your mere presence will cause most ballots to mysteriously not be marked for teh robber barons and their lackeys &
referendumsorders, greatly upsetting hair furor, Putin, and the stock “market”.blf @352, good advice. :-)
In other news from NBC:
More voter-restriction news:
Hair Furor spouted some nonsense concerning Liz Cheney. Trump issued a statement:
Trump is so full of bullshit that I’m surprised he can still walk.
NYT: Giuliani Probe Heats Up With Search Warrant Executed At His Apartment
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/giuliani-search-warrant
Follow-up to comment 354.
Posted by readers of the article:
I have no idea what is actually going on here, or if this is anything other than a bunch of nutters squawking and dribbling spittle into their bières, Ex-generals spark backlash as they warn of in France:
It’s probably worth nothing the language (as quoted in translation) is very reminiscent of teh lepenazis. And the senior Le Pen (Jean-Marie), was a French paratrooper(?) during Algeria’s battle for independence, where he is accused of participating in torture. I have no idea if Le Pen is known to have been, or even accused to have been, involved in the attemped coup d’etat. That coup attempt was part of a series of events which resulted in de Gaulle returned to the Presidency, and the beginning of the Fifth Republic, which is still France’s political governing system.
Republicans’ climate credibility hit by make-believe claim:
Follow-up to comments 354 and 355.
Link
Advocates say the time is now for immigration overhaul as Biden to make push in address to Congress
Connecticut ends religious exemption for school vaccinations
Coronavirus vaccines have not yet been approved for children under the age of 16.
Wonkette: “Supreme Court Looks Ready To Ditch ALL Gun Laws, Won’t That Be Fun?”
https://www.wonkette.com/scotus-guns
From Politico:
Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump remains a threat, even in his diminished state. Trump continues to inspire violence.
Kind of ironic that the result will be more January 6 insurrectionists kept in jail while they await trial.
Yet another white supremacist link to Trump: “The Organizer of a Series of Trump Boat Rallies Shouted “White Power” While Celebrating at the First”
Dion Cini has links to prominent Trump backers—and once went to sea with Trump’s son Eric.
Link
Wonkette: “Louisiana State Rep: Slavery Wasn’t ‘Good,’ But Should Schools Be So Negative About It?”
Link
Wow. Boris Johnson lost ir during the prime minister questioning time in parliament.
Eventually he flew in a rage, which is unwise when questioned by a former prosecutor….
Robot that can cook a paella is causing quite a stir in Spain:
Mr Lillo, having now started a “war” with Spanish paella purists, seems intent on opening new battlecookings with France (croissants) and Italians (pizza). USAians (burgers) and teh British (chips (fried pototoes)) will probably be disgusted the robot-cooked stodge possibly isn’t as stodgy, greasy, and inedible as usual — and is furrin / European — presumably all a part of Biden’s “no meat” diktat and caused by brexit. Dr Seuss is probably behind it, “Green Brussel Sprouts and Oily Robot Parts” !
Hee hee, Britain First duped into protesting at hotels with no asylum seekers:
The invaded hotels, and guests at those hotels, are probably not quite as amused.
Follow-up to birgerjohansson@365, John Crace in Grauniad, Primal rage at PMQs as Boris the joker is unmasked:
There are reports Johnson said something to the effect he’d rather have bodies pile up than a second pandemic lockdown.
Johnson had the PM’s flat (the famous “No 10 Downing Street”) refurbished, for an unknown total paid-for in an unknown manner, albeit which he’s been noticeably evasive. Questioning about that is when he went volcanic:
Apparently impressed by the media briefing room in the White House, Johnson ordered one of his own (along with some additional lackeys), possibly envisioning daily(?) Biden / Psaki-style briefings. (One of the new lackeys was a press secetrary type of position (I’m unsure if it was ever filled).) After it was built, then — or so the story goes (as I recall) — it occurred to him that if there were frequent briefings, he and his staff might get some pointed questions from the notoriously persistent press. Oops! So the briefing room has never(? rarely?) been used.
Why it matters that Democrats are scrapping Trump’s methane rule
It’s not just that Democrats are reversing Trump’s dangerous methane rule, it’s also how they’re doing it.
White House takes bold steps to fill judicial vacancies
The Trump-era campaign to move the courts to the right was as relentless as it was effective. The opposite push is now well underway.
Fresh evidence points to a robust US economic recovery
Last month, Mitch McConnell scrambled to deny Democrats credit for an improving economy. We were reminded today why he made such an effort.
Father of Transgender Child Was Arrested in Arkansas Statehouse After Testimony Opposing Bill Went 30 Seconds Over Allotted Time
JERRY LAMBE Apr 29th, 2021
Oh, FFS.
McCarthy tries to keep bogus ‘meat’ claim alive a little longer
It’s likely McCarthy knows Biden isn’t going after anyone’s hamburgers.
Biden defines the era’s ‘central challenge’
Biden wants to govern to defend democracy and discredit authoritarianism.
tom @372, I don’t think being arrested will discourage Chris Attig. That kind of over-reaction from conservatives will only strengthen his resolve.
In other news, this analysis is from Josh Marshall:
I agree. From his first line, when Scott said that Biden seems like a nice guy, I thought, “Something is wrong with Scott.”
Also, Scott told several lies during his response, including a blatant lie about Georgia’s new voter-restriction laws. It was as if a bunch of white supremacist Republicans had invaded Tim Scott’s body so that it would look like a black man was repeating all of their noxious talking points.
Giuliani’s Lawyer Releases Manic Statement On ‘Disturbing’ DOJ Search Warrants
Follow-up to comment 376.
Posted by readers of the article:
Follow-up to comment 375.
A few more details concerning the speech Biden delivered last night, and concerning some of the polling:
Link
Ex-Georgia deputy boasted of charging Black people with felonies to make sure they lost their vote.
Link
Follow-up to comments 375 and 378.
The GOP’s Black Friend Says America Is Not a Racist Country
Wonkette:
Follow-up to comments 354, 355, 358, 376, and 377.
Commentary and analysis from Steve Benen:
Link
Some details about all the best people who were insurrectionists:
Link
re Lynna @385:
The “assurance” by this (or any current) republican is as good as a confession since his lips were moving.
From Wonkette, a discussion of how Fox News is covering the FBI raid of Giuliani’s house:
Link
NBC News:
NY Times:
NBC News:
NY times:
Guess who voted “no.” Only Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.
Almost time to say goodbye to Louis DeJoy:
Oh, FFS.
Another 2020 Election Reversal Crusader Is Fundraising For AZ Audit
The fundraising gambit spearheaded by ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is being promoted by the auditors.
Follow-up to comment 391.
Posted by readers of the article:
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
re Lynna @391:
The proprietary counting procedure entails placing ballots in one of three piles: votes for Biden, votes for The Orange Toddler-Tyrant, or votes for neither of them. After that, the counting begins at one for each pile and increases by one for each ballot in the designated pile until all ballots in that pile are depleted. Finally, the number of votes for each candidate (or neither) are compared and Biden is declared the loser. The process is obviously a trade secret so the black-robed tyrant who is persecuting them should be removed.
johnson catman@394, That’s what They™ want you to think is the procedure. However, even a cursory glance shows it cannot be the actual procedure — e.g., it requires who can count as high as 3. A few can, sometimes, manage to do so, so those are placed at the tables most visible to the webcam and any watching reporters, albeit both the alleged-ballots they are allegedly-counting, and any alleged-results they produce, are not included in the pre-cooked final result.
The actual procedure, as far as can be discerned by the reporters, et al., who have wandered in, unchallenged, through the storage rooms for genuine ballot boxes and voting- / tabulating-machines, seems to be: Wheel out a bin labeled , through doors marked “Exit Only” and nowheres near the ballot box storage rooms; Dump the contents into a another bin labelled ; Anything which fails to go into that bin is put into another bin labelled on side, with Biohazard ☣ and Radiation ☢ warning symbols on the other sides. When the hair furor bin fills up, it’s wheeled back out through that same “Exit Only” exit, and returns, moments later, no longer overflowing. What happens to the other bin is unknown, as it’s yet to fill up. How the procedure finishes and produces the final tallies has obviously not yet been observed. Whilst there are standing around with paper pads making occasional marks, some of which have been seen to be erased, most of them appear to be either playing Sudoku or doodling. One once shouted “Bingo!”
The actual contents of the bin has been seen to include banana peels, coffee grounds, several rats (not always dead), and a burned-out car. The have also been observed throwing empty whiskey bottles into either that bin, or the predetermined- bin. As no mobile phones or cameras are allowed, and the webcam’s view is restricted, nothing(?) has been filmed.
The propriety trade secret is probably that emptying bins over and over again doesn’t cost much — especially when you hire undocumented workers to do so, who can then be conventionally sent back across the border† as soon as they are fired (i.e., the is done), before they are paid (or discover their paycheque bounced) — so most of the unknown amount of money being paid is pure profit. I.e., standard hair furorian operating procedure, complete with predetermined outcome for an inflated price, gold-ish paint not included.
How the actual voting- / tabulating-machines are being checked is largely unknown. Despite trivially easy all-hours access to their storage rooms, no-one seems to paying them much attention.
† Most, very probably all, of them can actually count up to, and well beyond, 3… but not in the language used for the employment test. No copy of the test has been found — it was probably verbal — albeit some (as yet untranslated) slips of paper have been found containing кириллица. There is some speculation this is the of (possibly genuine) voters which is supposedly being done.
(This comment should be not be construed as fiction.)
</snark>From the Guardian’s India coverage:
Arundhati Roy – “‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe”:
“‘We are not special’: how triumphalism led India to Covid-19 disaster”:
“Grief and anger as Covid victims overwhelm Delhi’s crematoriums”:
Guardian – “Dozens killed in crush at Lag Baomer religious festival in Israel”:
Vice – “In Myanmar, Citizen Journalists Step Up As Junta Targets Traditional Media”:
“‘I want to continue my role as a documenter in this revolution’, Khin said. ‘The only thing I fear is people will go back to their normal lives’.”
Here’s a link to the April 30 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Ecuador’s top court decriminalises abortion in rape cases:
I had missed this last month – New York magazine – “Italian Mafia Boss Brought Down by His Own Cooking Vlog”:
US Supreme Court hands victory to immigrants facing deportation:
Multiple snail-mailings written in often difficult-to-comprehend “legalise” ? Sounds more like an ambulance-chaser scam; i.e., a reason to hire an expensive lawyer who can then charge for receiving and reading all those mailings. The better ones will, of course, actually then do / advise as appropriate to assist their client, but the whole thing reeks of a scam to rack up charges.
Dreadful as the situation in India is, I find it eqaully horrifying that the people of India, apparently, overwhelmingly approve of the fascist mass-murderer Modi.
Orlando Sentinel – “Joel Greenberg wrote a letter for Roger Stone saying he and Matt Gaetz paid for sex with minor, website reports.”
Too convoluted to excerpt.
“Permanently banning its most famous user, [name deleted], and cracking down on the postings of right-wing figures does not appear to have hurt Twitter’s financial performance. The company’s revenue jumped by 28% in the first quarter of the year….”
NYT link atl.
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day.
Wednesday’s tweet o’ the day.
SC@406, Whilst the image is genuine, the accompanying text / caption is misleading, as per Snopes, Is ‘Long Boi’ the Tallest Mallard Duck in the World?: The duck is an Indian Runner, not a Mallard, and is only 70cm tall (c.28in, typical for an Indian Runner), not over 1m. Indian Runners were apparently developed from Mallards, and can resemble them. The mildly deranged penguin points out they have also been called “Penguin Ducks” (I think she just looked that up on Ye Pffft! of Knowledge, which points out they cannot fly, walk rather than waddle, lay lots of eggs hither-and-yon without bothering to build nests or incubate the eggs — “typical stupid duck”, she mutters).
Re #402, on the SC decision to require one notice for immigrants contesting deportation.
NYT:
A Sharp Divide at the Supreme Court Over a One-Letter Word
In an immigration ruling that scrambled the usual alliances, the justices differed over the significance of the article “a.”
By Adam Liptak
Two of Congress’ most outlandish right-wing members, Florida’s Matt Gaetz and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, are going on tour together. No, seriously. Politico reported that the Republican duo will be “holding rallies across the nation” together.
SC @404, sounds like Joe Greenberg is trying to blame the underage girl. By his own account, he told her that she got a lot of people in trouble by lying about her age. Whole thing is sickening. And who thinks Roger Stone is a good advisor for anything?
The allegations against Rudy Giuliani come into sharper focus
Giuliani effectively ran a foreign operation against the American ambassador in Ukraine. That’s of renewed interest to U.S. prosecutors.
Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is raising money to run for a House seat in Montana!?
Republicans really do not care that their political candidates are crooks.
Link
Ryan Zinke almost had to face up to his crimes … almost. A Trump political appointee at the Justice Department told prosecutors the case against Zinke wasn’t strong enough. Zinke is running around claiming that he’s innocent.
Re SC@404, The Orlando Sentinel’s article is unavailable in the EU (yet another site whose technical and legal staff fail to understand the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)†), and the original Daily Beast article is behind a paywall. Fortunately, Salon’s article is easily-available, Matt Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg claims in letter that Gaetz paid for sex with minor (“Daily Beast publishes letter from indicted Gaetz associate — who allegedly tried to buy pardon through Roger Stone”).
† And Yes, I know there are tricks to work-around their stupidity and incomprehension.
blf @ #408, I don’t know that the accuracy of the height claim is relevant to the humor, but thanks for the deep dive.
:)
Link
Link
Washington Post:
Talking Points Memo:
Greg Pence was referring to the restaurant revitalization money provided by the Democratic Party legislation.
Commentary from Steve Benen:
Same old story when it comes to Republican legislators now touting the American Rescue plan and COVID relief packages that Democrats have passed.
Nasa’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, has been so successful — and the Perseverance rover’s operations are ahead-of-schedule — Nasa / JPL have decided to extend Ingenuity’s mission to at least a sixth (and possibly additional) flights, serving as an aerial scout for the rover, NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter to Begin New Demonstration Phase.
The fourth flight was to have happened yesterday, but (probably) the same issue which delayed the first flight happened again (there’s c.15% probability of the problem occurring). The work-around is to simply try again, which is supposed to have happened earlier today. Data from this second attempt at the fourth flight should be en route to Earth as I type. (There is actually fixed software onboard the rover, but downloading it to the helicopter, including a new round of testing, would consume something like a week — so the simpler “just try again” approach is being used.)
New York Times:
The part of Biden’s record that must bother Trump the most
Trump operated from the assumption that Wall Street offers a real-time barometer of a president’s performance.
LOL
Lynna@420 quotes “I’ll look forward to the explanation as to why the stock markets are no longer politically relevant.”
Well… Corporations / CEOs should stay out of politics (Moscow Mitch); It’s all FAKE NEWS!; Dr Seuss got cancelled; Banning trans people is much more important; Teh microchips in the vaccines cause hallucinations; Zillions of furriners are streaming across one particular border to
takesteal all that money; Teh ticker-tape machines were rigged by Hugo Chávez; Biden’s tax raises willtakesteal all that money several times over; So will the Green New Deal; and perhaps most importantly, Shares aren’t priced in rubles.“DOD announces formal cancellation of #Trump border wall funding, will now work to prioritize which milcon projects that took hits to support wall will be reinstated first….”
Statement atl.
TPM – “Indicted Ukrainian Oligarch Issues Statement Distancing Self From Giuliani”:
TPM – “Former Reality Star And Scion Of Famed Evangelical Family Josh Duggar Arrested”:
Tweet o’ the day.
Guardian world liveblog:
WaPo:
Half of Republicans think there’s evidence Biden didn’t win legitimately
By Philip Bump
April 30, 2021
blf @421, “Shares aren’t priced in rubles.” Right. That might be the most important part. :-)
Daily Cartoon, from The New Yorker: “More Guidelines.”
Bits and pieces of news:
NBC
Washington Post
CNN
Yay! Still a ways to go, but at least some good is being done.
NBC
Update on that whole vote-counting thing in Arizona, which will soon spread to other states:
Link
OMFG. When will this end?
Wonkette:
Link
Video snippets are available at the link.
Jared Kushner’s apartment company violated consumer laws in Maryland, judge rules
By ALISON KNEZEVICH
BALTIMORE SUN APR 29, 2021
Follow-up to SC @424
Josh Marshall:
Sad clown in frowzy suit shares febrile election fantasies to tepid applause
To be fair, some people in the audience do yell, “Yeah!” And some people applaud.
Apparently, you can’t go to Mar-a-Lago to eat dinner and listen to a band without Trump interrupting to repeat all his lies. “Take a look,” Hair Furor says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands of votes … they found a lot of votes up in New Hampshire just now.”
Follow-up to comment 434.
Link
Thousands march in May Day protests across France
Follow-up to @418, Nasa’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, did indeed successfully complete its fourth flight on the second attempt.
GOP leaders threaten Cheney ouster
(Axios) Jonathan Swan, Glen Johnson, Alayna Treene
May 1, 2021
Republican who let violent protesters into Oregon state capitol is charged:
So, “put[ting] every person in the Capitol in serious danger” amounts to 13 months jailed and 7.5k$ (maximums), after a conviction — unless the culprit is black…
George Floyd: New Jersey teacher suspended over rant to pupils:
Your union will see that a does .
† Black lives do matter. That quote is set in because, as the context makes clear, the bigoted teacher misunderstands, disagrees, or both.
An opinion (snark) column in the Grauniad, As Biden glides past 100 days in office, Republicans can’t seem to land a punch (albeit dated today, 1st May, some of the content makes it clear it was written before Biden’s joint congressional speech):
Re 436:
Here in Helsinki, some 60 people were arrested and fined for disobeying police dispersal order after about 300 cranks gathered to protest against the (not very strict) covid restrictions. Due to said restrictions, protesting is only allowed in separate groups of at most six people each. Previous freedompaloozas have at least once violated this rule, but this time it was really blatant, and IIRC the first time the police dispersed the protest. It was very much a planned-on-social-media violation, so it’s no wonder that many people also made a show of refusing to disperse.
BTW, about two weeks ago English-language media noted a number of small “white lives matter” protests coordinated by the far-right cranks in various countries. Here we also had a small protest that weekend, that Finnish media described as being “against coronavirus restrictions”. However, I did see a news photo of a few people carrying a huge-ass banner that said “white lives matter” in English.
‘Rob Petrosian’, the Trump supporter impersonating a White House reporter:
As a reminder, France24 is France’s attempt to provide an international news service similar to BBC World Service.
France24 goes on to tentatively identify the origin of the fraudulent journalist as Turkey, albeit does not name names.
Employers are outraged that workers won’t come crawling to work for peanuts in a pandemic
blf @443, wow. That’s a lot of disinformation. And a lot of social media outlets for that disinformation.
That’s also a lot of work for one person, which makes me think that “Rob Petrosian” is more likely to be a state-sponsored group of purveyors of disinformation. Turkey is listed as a possible source. I hope further investigation is done. Let’s see if Putin is backing “Rob Petrosian.”
Hillary Clinton talks Afghanistan, Russia and Giuliani
Hillary Clinton certainly is knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects. She would have made a good president.
Follow-up to SC’s comment 195.
Nepalese hospitals run out of beds as India coronavirus outbreaks spills across border
Cops behaving badly:
Link
See also the ABC 13 link here to view the video.
Wonkette: “Well Of Course Joe Manchin Won’t Support DC Statehood”
Link
Wonkette: “Kansas Lawmaker Arrested For Assaulting Student After Long Day Of Yelling At Teens About God”
Link
Why are Republicans so threatened by universal daycare?:
Why are Republicans so threatened by universal daycare? (poopyhead’s filter rejected this comment, so I’ve tried to redact what might be the objectionable wording):
Why are Republicans so threatened by universal daycare? (poopyhead’s filter rejected this comment, so I’ve tried to redact what might be the objectionable wording, however, the total lack of feedback when this happens means I’m guessing):
Why are Republicans so threatened by universal daycare? (poopyhead’s filter rejected this comment, so I’ve tried to redact what might be the objectionable wording, however, the total lack of feedback when this happens means I’m guessing):
Oh for feck’s sake. Poopyhead’s filter isn’t letting an excerpt of this Grauniad opinion column through, and as per usual, I cannot figure out what the problem is… Why are Republicans so threatened by universal daycare?: “Universal pre-school, paid family leave, subsidized childcare … who could possibly object to Biden’s plans to help children?”
@450
Another day, another sick Republican puppy representin’.
Romney Booed At Utah GOP Convention Before Vote To Censure Him Fails
Yeah, the Trump Party is trying to purify its ranks so that only totally bonkers, irredeemably ignorant people are left.
Follow-up to comment 453.
Posted by readers of the article:
Link
Link
Wonkette:
Link
About 25% of the people in the county where I live, in Idaho, have been vaccinated. Worse than in Oregon. That 25% is way too low. It’s not safe. And vaccination rates are falling here too.
People choosing not to get vaccinated … it’s so frustrating.
@ Lynna #458
“People choosing not to get vaccinated … it’s so frustrating.”
There are few things more frustrating these days, and it’s also frustrating trying to reason with them. I’ve pretty much given that up.
Guardian – “Eight killed as security forces open fire on protesters in Myanmar”:
Also in the Guardian:
“Narendra Modi loses key state election as Covid grips India.”
“‘Ground zero of the opioid epidemic’: West Virginia puts drug giants on trial.”
Here’s a link to the May 3 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
tomh @459, I agree. The only equally frustrating thing might be Republicans refusing to accept the fact that Joe Biden won. He is the legitimate president.
Link
CNN – “Jenner opposes transgender girls participating in girls’ sports”:
Why the GOP’s case against the American Families Plan is so weak
At the heart of the Republicans’ case against the American Families Plan is a dubious position: the efficacy of Biden’s proposals is irrelevant.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Yikes. This is a mess:
TPM link
Also, why wasn’t Giuliani briefed?
Guardian – “Covid vaccine rollout rapidly gathering pace across Europe”:
More atl.
Lynna@466 asks “why wasn’t Giuliani briefed?”.
Because he is the Russian influence operation ?
Republicans are gerrymandering state Supreme Court seats. And that’s not all. Republicans are putting their thumb on the scale in other ways as well:
Link
Cartoon: The right-wing outrage cycle
Apologies from rightwing outlet Newsmax:
Link
David Becker:
Politico – “Moderna commits up to 500M vaccine doses to COVAX”:
‘We are all the same’: Barcelona church opens to Ramadan diners:
Tweet o’ the day.
Liz Cheney tweeted: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
Guardian world liveblog:
Good news:
Ashish Jha:
Peter Hotez:
The divide is increasingly clear on the CDC map.
Oh, FFS.
GOP falsely says Biden pushing mandatory pre-K, community college
The White House’s proposal is to make these educational benefits available, but not to make them mandatory.
Aiyiyiyi
Link
Are Republicans shooting themselves in the foot with their voter-restriction laws?
Link
Wonkette: “Facebook To Announce Whether Washed-Up Ex-President Can Come Back And Incite More Riots
Link
Re #463 – of course.
How two young math geeks solved the mystery of Mexico City’s covid-19 dead.
Washington Post link
What a strange lawsuit:
Link
NBC News:
Wonkette: “QAnon Lady So Mad Satan Tricking People To Believe Science Instead Of Their Guts.”
Link
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
NYT:
“Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe”
Widely circulating coronavirus variants and persistent hesitancy about vaccines will keep the goal out of reach.
May 3, 2021
Reports that Pfizer vaccine works for 12-15 year olds, and is likely to be approved.
Link
Tucker Carkson decided to criticize Joy Reid. She responded. OUCH!
Lynna@487 quotes “Vaccine shedding is not a real thing, it is another ridiculous conspiracy theory made up by anti-vaxxers who think they can turn the tables on normal people and ostracize them by claiming vaccinated people can the virus […].”
Well… There actually is such a thing called “vaccine shedding“, where a live-vaccine does shed the virus, and this can cause unprotected people to become sick. This is currently a problem with polio in parts of Africa, Vaccine-derived polio spreads in Africa after defeat of wild virus (September 2020):
That’s real vaccine shedding. The Covid-19 vaccine conspiracy theory is bonkers; e.g., no Covid-19 is a live-vaccine so real vaccine shedding is impossible. From the CDC’s Myths and Facts about COVID-19 Vaccines:
Here’s a link to the May 4 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
Their morning summary:
TPM – “Biden Raises Refugee Cap To 62,500 After Backlash For Keeping Trump Era Limit”:
This tweet perfectly captures my mood.
Follow-up to comment 305.
It’s nice to see Liz Cheney not backing down: