Donald Trump and his allies were peddling lies about the 2020 presidential election within hours of the polls closing on Nov. 3 […] The intensity of the deceptive propaganda reached dangerous levels in early January, culminating in an insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol.
A few days later, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and was asked about colleagues such as Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose recklessness contributed to the unrest. “They’re going to have a lot of soul searching to do,” Toomey said in the interview. “And the problem is they were complicit in the Big Lie…. That’s going to haunt them for a very long time.”
There was no mystery as to what the Pennsylvania senator was referring to. Much of the political world had already recognized the significance of the “Big Lie” framing and the degree to which Trump and his followers had embraced it. NBC News added yesterday, use of the Big Lie “to describe Trump’s false narrative of a stolen election — a reference to a Nazi propaganda strategy — was popularized earlier this year.”
And now, evidently, the former president has decided to rebrand it, issuing this written statement yesterday. “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!”
In other words, as far as Trump is concerned, his lie isn’t the lie. The former president would have people believe that the real lie is that he lost the election.
As a matter of political propaganda, this is ham-fisted, clumsy, and impossible to take seriously. But I’m also struck by the frequency with which Trump has decided that he’s unsatisfied with the actual meaning of words and phrases, leading him to try to commandeer the language to suit his own purposes.
[…] When Russian disinformation sources tried to boost the Republican’s 2016 candidacy, Trump decided to change the meaning of “fake news,” applying it to independent journalism he didn’t like.
[…] Trump similarly tried to change the labels and definitions of everything from the coronavirus to the “Southern White House.”
At issue is a political figure who believes the existing definitions of words and phrases are fine, until he thinks of a way to manipulate language to his benefit. At that point, the language should be redefined — or at times, un-defined — in order to suit his purposes.
About a month into his White House term, Trump bragged at a meeting with business leaders, “I’m good at branding.” What I think the Republican probably meant with the boast is that he’s preoccupied with branding, and as we were reminded yesterday, he still is.
When the Proud Boys and their far-right cohorts led the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, they did so largely operating under their longstanding belief that the police were on their side. This weekend, breaking their weeks of quiet amid a stream of post-Jan. 6 arrests, they held an armed “Second Amendment” rally in Salem, Oregon—without a whiff of police presence.
That meant that the Proud Boys, acting as gun-bearing “security” for the “One Nation, One God” rally on Saturday at Salem’s Riverfront Park—an event that had no permit from the city—were able to close off access to anyone deemed undesirable, threatening both journalists and citizens with impunity. The only sign of law enforcement was a police helicopter hovering overhead.
Journalist Tim Gruver of The CenterSquare Oregon was threatened by Proud Boys and refused entrance to cover the event. “Riverfront is a public park,” Gruver noted on Twitter. “Families are gathered right next door.”
[…] Promoted online as a “May Day 2A Rally,” the event drew 100-200 attendees, according to reporters. They were observed carrying semi-automatic pistols or rifles. And despite the lack of any authority to do so, they “closed” the public park to media and forced out anyone they believed didn’t belong, including at least one elderly man who was just walking through the park.
Oregon Proud Boys have deep connections to the Jan. 6 insurrection, including two brothers who were arrested for their roles in the Capitol siege. Moreover, their participation in the invasion of the Oregon State Capitol in Salem on Dec. 21 was in many ways a powerful precursor of the Jan. 6 event, especially in terms of the far right’s antidemocratic strategies.
The leading scheduled speaker for the event was Rep. Mike Nearman, the Dalles-based state House member who was seen on video opening a door to allow insurrectionists into the building on Dec. 21. Nearman has been charged with two misdemeanors—official misconduct in the first degree and criminal trespass in the second degree—for that act.
However, Nearman was a no-show. Instead, the best-known speaker Saturday was Jo Rae Perkins, the QAnon-loving Republican nominee for Oregon’s U.S. Senate seat in 2020. Perkins called COVID-19 vaccines a “bioweapon,” repeated false “stolen election” claims, and claimed the state is “going after your children.” [OMFG]
[…] “The Proud Boys are basically illegally taking over Riverfront park for the day and are forcefully ejecting people they don’t like,” tweeted one citizen. “They have weapons. Salem PD are doing nothing […]”
One elderly man posted a description of the scene on Facebook:
Just took a stroll through our Riverfront Park which Republicans and other fascists had commandeered for their meeting. A large number of men, mostly with sidearms, in Proud Boys uniforms, mainly military belts and camouflage, and also American flags and Trump paraphernalia.
[…] The atmosphere of hatred and blind, ignorant fury was unbelievable.
I was going to stay until Representative Nearman gave his speech but before we got to that part of the program four heavily armed and uniformed Proud boys sat down next to me and said they were going to escort me out of there, saying the “organizers” didn’t want me there.
I naturally complied and as we were walking out I asked the one who seemed to be their spokesman what would happen if I didn’t agree to leave as told, would they forcibly evict me. He said we could do it either way it was up to me. […]
Another Salem resident posted about his experience on Reddit:
I was walking past the fisherman statue towards the carousel with one of the kids I support when we saw a group of them walking by, so we cut through the grass towards the front of the carousel. I snapped a picture to post to snapchat and they started following me, yelling “give me that phone fucker.” They started getting closer so we started hurrying to the gates. I had to stop when I got separated from the kid I support. They started shoving me telling me that I needed to go. One grabbed a hold of me so I tried to stabilize myself and one of them held me while a couple others started swinging at me. It felt like four or five were there but it was more likely only two or three of them involved in the scuffle. They smacked me in the head a couple times and got my ribs and back before throwing me on the ground. They wouldn’t let me go back to the kid I support while she was still in the park so I had to walk along the train tracks and she had to follow me on the opposite side of the fence. She was being followed by somebody wearing a ballistic vest and holding a pistol at their side. We ended up back together at the parking lot by the gilbert house and they stopped following her.
The same man commented later that police did come to his home for a statement:
Police came by the house I’m working at and asked me questions. Dude spent the entire time basically trying to ask whether or not I was agitating them. Officer said “It’s not normal for them to do that unprovoked, but you’re not the first person they’ve thrown out today.”
[…] “Hate and intimidation has no place in our community, and those who explicitly or subtly encourage violence should be held accountable.”
Washingtonians will be able to get a free beer alongside their coronavirus vaccine this week.
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced on Tuesday that individuals can get Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot coronavirus vaccine and a beer from Solace Brewing Co., a Washington area craft brewery, on Thursday.
The giveaway will be held at The Reach, an expansion outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Residents do not need to make an appointment to receive their vaccine. […]
A federal judge has ordered the Department of Justice to release a March 2019 legal memo that advised then-Attorney General William Barr that the special counsel’s investigation did not support prosecuting former President Trump, issuing a scathing decision that accused Barr and department lawyers of deceiving the public.
District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Monday ordered the DOJ to release the legal memo in two weeks in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW).
The DOJ had argued in court that the full memo, portions of which have already been released, should be withheld because it fell under exceptions to the public records law for attorney-client privilege and deliberative government decision making.
But Jackson said on Monday that those claims were not consistent with her own review of the unredacted memo nor the timeline revealed by internal emails among top Justice Department officials.
[…] “not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege.”
“The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the Attorney General to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time,” she added.
When the leaders of a review of Arizona’s election were trying to convince a judge not to halt their sketchy audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 results, they claimed they’d be perfectly happy to find that nothing was amiss in the tally.
[…] Far-right blogs like Gateway Pundit have seen criticisms of the review as a sign that Democrats are “terrified” of the “alleged massive fraud” the audit may expose.
One America News Network (OAN) has framed up its coverage of the Arizona review as just the first in what could be a series of audits in other states where former President Trump contested his defeat.
Trump himself, speaking to a crowd at Mar-A-Lago last week, remarked on the “interesting things” that were happening in Arizona.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump said, as he rattled off several other battleground states that he had targeted with his claims of mass voter fraud.
Trump may be watching the audit from afar. But several of his supporters who boosted his crusade to overturn the election have a direct hand in the audit, which started last month at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. And as the recount chugs along, the wider MAGA world is pinning its hopes on the effort as a key step to finally — finally — overturning the election.
[…] Arizona’s Republican-controlled legislature was one of several GOP state houses across the country to entertain President Trump’s voter fraud theories after he lost his reelection bid. Over time, state Republican lawmakers came to embrace the idea of an audit spearheaded by the Senate that, in the words of one committee chairman, would “put this to rest.”
[…] Cyber Ninjas [CEO Doug Logan], [Cyber Ninjas is the Florida-based firm hired to lead the audit] promoted false claims of a stolen election in 2020 […]
He authored a document, titled “Election Fraud Facts & Details,” which was published on the website of Sidney Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer who filed several Trump-aligned court challenges and now faces a 10-figure defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems.
Another fringe pro-Trump lawyer, Lin Wood, confirmed to TPM last month that Logan was at Wood’s property in November last year, “working on the investigation into election fraud” with others.
Wood has helped to raise private funding for the Arizona recount […]
The official audit Twitter page has leaned into the fringe fundraising effort. On Saturday, a few hours after the account promoted fundtheaudit.com — a website “powered by” Byne’s group The America Project — Fund The Audit said that it had raised $1 million. OAN anchor Christina Bobb is reporting on the audit while also fundraising for it.
It’s just another scam to raise money.
[…] Other election conspiracists have their handprints on the audit itself. A former state representative who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential results in Arizona, Anthony Kern, is working at the audit as a “temporary hired employee” of one of its contractors. Kern, in his last days in office, riled up a D.C. crowd a day before the attack by pledging his life for Trump. A picture the following day showed him on the Capitol steps as the attack took place.
The audit is also employing technology developed by Jovan Pulitzer, another election conspiracy theorist who Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) referred to as a “failed inventor and failed treasure hunter” when Pulitzer’s claims popped up in that state.
[…] fantasies of mass fraud in the 2020 election. For instance, the procedures instruct auditors to take note of how certain ballots are folded and the ink being used — details that don’t really make a difference in the context of how Arizona elections are run but seem to play into conspiracy theories about counterfeit ballots flooding the election.
[…] Peter Navarro, a Trump White House advisor and the author of several reports asserting mass election fraud, told OAN last week that he believed the Arizona audit could precede a similar audit in Georgia, where the scale of voter fraud was, in his universe, “much larger.”
Speaking to Steve Bannon Thursday, Trump supporter Boris Epshteyn said that if the audit shows “even a small fraction” of what the former president’s devotees expect, “the freight train of audit is coming down the way. It’s on the train to Georgia.”
And at a Monday town hall in Windham, New Hampshire — one of the states Trump mentioned in his remarks about the Arizona recount last week — attendees demanded a Maricopa-style audit while chanting “stop the steal!”
One of the “auditors” is a guy named Kern, a former state legislator who was found to have stolen a laptop AND who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Real cool guy and so neutral…NOT
————————
I’ve never understood the game plan. “Oh sure, nobody will mind if our losing candidate tries to overthrow the government” seems like they haven’t really thought this through. The only plausible theory is that they are grifting the heck out of their rubes, but that seems shortsighted too. If you can’t hold the con, marks are going to come looking for you.
—————————–
The marks really, really don’t want to acknowledge the con. Their psyches would collapse.
————————–
Peter Navarro and Boris Epshteyn, huh? Short of actual stakes through the heart nothing will stop these undead ghouls from raving on.
—————————
The game plan is to keep the ‘big lie’ in the news and justify giving the ‘former guy’ another free pass through the GOP primaries in 2024.
Where they hope between gerrymandering and voter suppression to win again.
——————————-
How is it possible for people to embrace the preposterous fever dream of the far right noise yet ignore the myriad of court cases that put this nonsense out of its misery is anybody s guess…it is terrifying spectacle on its own level…
lumipunasays
Re 489 on previous page:
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.
Journalist Amanda Marcotte has long argued that the US needs to end covid restrictions reasonably soon, with less than optimal vaccine coverage, because waiting until herd immunity is not realistic. Especially not when Republicans are bent on sabotaging the vaccine drive, and will then politically weaponize the resulting “endless lockdown” if given half a chance. According to Marcotte’s estimate, shaming and pleading conservative anti-vaxxers will only cause them to double down. On the contrary, she suggests that Republican voters will likely lose some of their interest in the anti-vaccine stance if it can’t be used to escalate cultural division and hold the nation hostage.
The Department of Justice must produce a memo cited by then-attorney general Bill Barr as his justification for not charging then-president Donald Trump with obstruction of justice following the release of the Mueller report, a federal judge ruled on Monday.
After special counsel Robert Mueller released his findings in March 2019, Barr purported to “summarize the principal conclusions” in a letter to congressional leaders that condensed the nearly 400-page report into just over three pages, which did not include a single completed sentence from the report.
[…]
Jackson’s opinion offers a detailed description of the document by way of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.
[Snipped–details of the document and the legal wrangling that followed.]
The upshot of the memo, the court determined, “calls into question the accuracy of Attorney General Barr’s March 24 representation to Congress.” The judge also noted that the Justice Department’s prior description of the memo “served to obscure the true purpose of the memorandum.”
Jackson determined that her secret “in camera review of the document, which DOJ strongly resisted, raises serious questions about how the Department of Justice could make this series of representations to a court.”
“What remains at issue today is a memorandum to the Attorney General dated March 24, 2019, that specifically addresses the subject matter of the letter transmitted to Congress,” the order notes. “It is time for the public to see that, too.”
The Justice Department has two weeks to respond to the court’s order.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s hold on the Premiership of Israel looks a little less secure after a deadline to build a new government passed at midnight (5pET).
Seconds before the deadline passed, a statement from the Prime Minister’s Likud party announced he had returned the mandate to form a new government back to President Reuven Rivlin.
The onus is now on the President to decide which of Israel’s other political leaders he might entrust with the task of trying to form a governing coalition, or whether to pursue a different path to secure a breakthrough.
The favourite to get the nod is centrist Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party came second behind Netanyahu’s Likud in the March 23rd election.
…
But even if Lapid is given the mandate, the key man in coalition negotiations looks set to be Naftali Bennett, a former Defense Minister and leader of the right-wing Yamina party.
Even though his party won only seven seats in the 120-seat Knesset, Bennett finds himself in the extraordinary position of having been offered the Prime Ministership by both Netanyahu and Lapid, both of whom have offered him a rotation arrangement and said he can go first.
Up to now, Bennett has said his preference is for a right-wing administration, but he has not ruled out a unity government straddling a wide array of parties from right to left.
When asked by CNN how quickly such a unity government could be formed if Lapid were given the mandate, one individual close to negotiations said, “As quickly as Bennett wants.”
…
Israel’s fourth election in under two years, like the previous three, was seen first and foremost as a referendum on Israel’s longest-serving leader.
Netanyahu has been on trial since last May on bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges.
…
But his campaign was not enough to prevent another deadlocked parliament, which prompted the Israeli leader to attempt to bring together some unlikely bedfellows in his efforts to stay in power.
His hopes were dashed when the extreme-right wing Religious Zionist party refused to be part of any government which had the support of the United Arab List, an Islamist party which had itself broken new ground by making clear it could support a government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu.
With the mandate now back in his hands, the President is set to consult again Wednesday with the parties before deciding on his next move, expected within the next few days.
Instead of giving it to an individual, he could choose to hand the mandate over to parliament, effectively inviting any of the parliamentarians to come back to him as the head of a 61-seat majority.
Until any new government is agreed and sworn into office, Benjamin Netanyahu remains Israel’s Prime Minister.
Jair Bolsonaro ignored repeated warnings that his anti-scientific response to Covid-19 was leading Brazil down an “extremely perilous path” and putting tens of thousands of lives at risk, the country’s former health minister has claimed.
Giving oral evidence to a senate inquiry into Brazil’s coronavirus calamity on Tuesday, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who led the health ministry at the start of the pandemic, said he believed the Brazilian president’s conduct had helped generate an unnecessarily large tragedy.
Asked by one senator if Bolsonaro – whose sabotage of social distancing has been globally condemned – had understood that failing to heed international scientific consensus on Covid containment measures could cause “death on an enormous scale”, Mandetta replied: “Yes, sir.”
“I warned him systematically, with projections even,” added the 56-year-old doctor-turned-politician who is the inquiry’s first witness.
Not long before he was sacked in April last year, Mandetta claimed he had warned Bolsonaro 180,000 Brazilians could die by the end of the year unless restrictions were introduced by the federal government. They were not, and by the end of the year 191,000 Brazilians had died.
…
Brazil’s Covid emergency has gone from bad to worse in 2021, with the official death toll more than doubling to 408,000, the second highest number after the US. Before Mandetta’s testimony on Tuesday, the inquiry’s rapporteur, Renan Calheiros, said Brazil needed answers over who was to blame for the “Dantesque situation” facing South America’s biggest country.
The parliamentary inquiry was set up last week amid growing public anger at Bolsonaro’s handling of one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks, his refusal to impose lockdowns and his government’s failure to acquire sufficient vaccines.
At its inaugural sitting last week, Calheiros drew an indirect but unmistakable parallel between Bolsonaro and the “butcher of the Balkans”, Slobodan Milosevic, who ended up on trial in the Hague. “There are culprits … and they will be held responsible,” Calheiros vowed.
“The country has the right to know who contributed to all these thousands of deaths and those people must be punished immediately and emblematically.”
…
The former minister produced a three-page letter he claimed he had delivered to Bolsonaro in March 2020, which concluded: “We expressly recommend that the presidency reconsiders the stance it has adopted, in accord with health ministry guidelines, since taking steps in the opposite direction could cause the health system to collapse and extremely serious consequences for the health of the population.”
Mandetta said he suspected Bolsonaro had been convinced that herd immunity could be achieved by allowing Covid to spread unchecked through the population “and only those who have to die [such as the elderly], will die”. Humberto Costa, a leftwing politician who is one of 11 senators on the inquiry, said: “If this is true, it represents an absolutely criminal act.”
Bolsonaro still has the backing of about a third of Brazilians but appears rattled by the senate investigation, with hardcore supporters staging protests in several major cities last Saturday….
So, remember when ex-President Donald J. Trump insanely told the United States that injecting yourself with bleach might be a cure for the coronavirus? It turns out that there’s a whole slew of wackos who have been promoting bleach drinking—disguised under the name of “miracle mineral solution”—for a range of health problems long before #45 took office and let more than 400,000 Americans die from COVID on his watch. That includes a scammy father-son duo who tried to form a church of bleach so they could claim it was their religious right to sell their chlorine dioxide snake oil. The feds didn’t buy it and now they’ve been indicted (after a brief stint on the lam in South America) in the biggest takedown yet of these dangerous bleach peddlers.Plus! Sportswriter David J. Roth walks us through how anti-vaxx stubbornness among some players is causing big-time chaos in baseball.
As Johnson’s odious comments about “bodies piling up” collide with Carrie Antoinette’s golden wallpaper splurge and the Vengeance of the Cummings, has this barrage of sleaze finally putting the PM on the ropes? Tech expert Alexi Mostrous of Tortoise joins us to explore what Big Tech and Bigger Data have in store for our democracies. Brexit eats another of its children in the shape of Arlene Foster. And what will our film critics make of Matt Hancock’s blockbuster COVID: The Movie?…
blfsays
Today, May 5th 2021, is the Grauniad’s 200th anniversary (founded in Manchester in 1821). There’s an ongoing series of articles about themselves, Guardian 200. (Please support the Grauniad if you can!)
Today, also 200 years ago, happens to be when a well-known French dictator died.
Speaking of (wannabe-)dictators, hair furor is in a snit. Instead of sending congratulations to the Grauniad, or permanently shutting up, today(-ish) he started his own blog with a 200 years old-seeming look-and-feel, Donald Trump returns to social media with glorified blog: “Ex-president unveils retro webpage featuring series of statements resembling blogposts […]”. (The link goes to the Grauniad’s story, not teh blogbog.) A snippet:
Tabs on Trump’s new website allow users to like or share the posts on their own Facebook or Twitter accounts, but there is no option for them to reply.
Visitors are also invited to “sign up for alerts”, so that Trump’s musings can be beamed directly into their inboxes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, options to “shop” and “contribute” figure prominently.
Another still-active dictator is still at it, probably also in a snit because his pet hair furor is no longer in a position to do things for him, like shudown Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Kremlin bears down on Moscow bureau of US-funded radio station:
[…]
In 1991, Boris Yeltsin gave Radio Liberty, the US government-funded broadcaster that had fought for decades to bypass Soviet jamming equipment, permission to open its own Moscow bureau. Now, 30 years later, the Kremlin looks close to shutting it down.
A deadline for Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty to pay the first of an estimated $2.4m (£1.7m) in fines will pass for the foreign broadcaster next week, threatening its bureau in Russia with potential police raids, blocked bank accounts, or the arrest of senior employees.
RFE/RL says it will not pay the fines, which have accrued for its refusal to brand all its digital and video content as the product of a “foreign agent”. Roskomnadzor, the Russian mass media regulator, has initiated 520 cases against the broadcaster so far, and that number appears likely to grow.
“They either want us to lose our physical presence in the country or neuter us, render us ineffective and not engaging with our audience,” said Jamie Fly, the broadcaster’s president. “That’s the choice they are trying to force on us.”
RFE/RL has aggressively grown its operation in Russia, investing heavily in digital media and in building out its network of freelancers and reporting in Russia’s regions, including a recent expose on the industrial-scale theft of oil from the country’s network of pipelines. It has also provided blanket coverage of the arrest of Alexei Navalny, covering his return from Germany and subsequent street protests among his supporters to demand his release from prison.
[…]
The broadcaster is at the intersection of two Kremlin targets: the US, whom Vladimir Putin has accused of stirring up internal dissent, and critical media outlets caught in an accelerating crackdown.
[…]
In a major decision last week, Meduza, a leading Russian news site headquartered in Riga, was also declared a foreign agent. Unlike RFE/RL, the site quickly took precautionary measures, affixing a disclaimer to its online content and even its tweets (that content has been displayed in the Comic Sans font with several facepalm emojis).
Poopyhead isn’t the only one use eejit quotes 😉!
[…]
Dmitri Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said: The current mass media market is such that a disappearance of any particular mass media outlet will not matter. Nobody would even feel that disappearance.
Other journalists critical of the government have also been targeted by police in recent weeks. Police have raided the offices and detained journalists from the student publication Doxa and also raided the offices and home of Roman Anin, a Russian investigative journalist, as part of a slander case related to his investigation into a top Putin ally’s wealth. Police have also arrested reporters who covered protests in support of Navalny, despite their being accredited journalists.
Millions of people around the world already eat insects, which are also a more environmentally friendly alternative to rearing cattle and other larger sources of protein.
Frog legs rolled in worm flour could be the next culinary delight for European haute cuisine after the European Union gave its blessing for the first time for an insect food.
Dried yellow mealworm can now be sold across the 27-nation bloc after a Monday decision from EU governments and a food safety assessment, the European Commission said on Tuesday.
EU officials suggest it could be used as a protein boost for cookies, pasta or baked goods, as they try to reassure fussy eaters that millions of people around the world already eat insects. It’s also a more environmentally friendly alternative to rearing cattle and other larger sources of protein. The market for edible insects is set to reach $4.6 billion by 2027, according to one report earlier this year.[†]
Some 11 other insect foods are waiting for food safety evaluations from the EU.
“It is up to consumers to decide whether they want to eat insects or not,” the EU said on its web page. “The use of insects as an alternate source of protein is not new.”
As far as I know, up to now there were only a few sources of edible bugs (here in Europe): Fresh ones on your salad or in your beer, Fried ones at a few Mexican restaurants, and In certain cheeses and so on. The Mexican ones are quite tasty, the wasps in the beer less so.
[…]
Federal government documents obtained by the Guardian show a wide range of explosives, flamethrowers and incendiary devices found by law enforcement agencies outside political conventions, public buildings and protests during 2020 and 2021.
The extent of the weaponry — including timed devices deposited as part of a suspected pro-Trump bomb plot — reveals the perils and potential violence circulating through American politics in the grip of unrest linked to pandemic shutdowns, anti-racism protests and rightwing activism and insurrection that culminated in the attack on the Capitol in Washington.
A separate New York police department intelligence document circulated in the wake of the Capitol attack defines groups including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, QAnon adherents and the Oath Keepers as potential risks to officer safety, characterizing all of the rightwing groups as extremists in the strongest terms yet seen from any law enforcement agency.
[…]
The [National Explosives Task Force’s] document also depicts improvised flamethrowers that it is claimed were confiscated from protesters in Portland and in Erie, Pennsylvania, last June. The document claims the Portland device — a propane-powered weed burner — was confiscated when “individuals were seen testing {the} device in the back of a truck”. The Erie device, though homemade, appears to be modeled on instructions that circulated widely online after Elon Musk’s Boring company launched their own consumer flamethrower device in 2018.
[…]
The [NTPD’s] document, which notes the “enduring threat” posed by “by far-right, neo-Nazi and white supremacist world views”, describes the Proud Boys as a “far-right extremist, neo-fascist organization that has promoted and engaged in acts of violence throughout the US and Canada”.
It describes QAnon as a “broad conspiracy movement with antisemitic underpinnings that falsely alleges, based on purportedly classified intelligence, that an elite cabal of pedophiles, led by Democrats, is plotting to harm children and undermine President [sic] Trump”.
[…]
Asked about the evidence of a newfound focus on far-right groups in the documents his organization obtained, the [transparency group] Property of the People’s executive director, Ryan Shapiro, said: “Intelligence agencies have monitored violent, far-right groups for years, but overwhelmingly the results of those investigations have simply gathered dust.”
He added: “Intelligence and law enforcement’s longstanding political policing of the left while simultaneously ignoring or even aiding literal fascists was one of the driving forces behind the January 6 attempted coup.”
Facebook was justified in banning then-President Donald Trump from its platform the day after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, but it needs to reassess how long the ban will remain in effect, the social network’s quasi-independent Oversight Board said Wednesday.
The decision to uphold the ban is a blow to Trump’s hopes to post again to Facebook or Instagram anytime soon, but it opens the door to him eventually returning to the platforms. Facebook must complete a review of the length of the suspension within six months, the board said.
“Given the seriousness of the violations and the ongoing risk of violence, Facebook was justified in suspending Mr. Trump’s accounts on January 6 and extending that suspension on January 7,” the board said in its decision.
The board said that Trump “created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible” by maintaining a narrative that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.
The oversight board said, however, that it was not appropriate for Facebook to vary from its normal penalties when it made the ban indefinite. Facebook’s normal penalties include removing posts, imposing a limited suspension or permanently disabling an account, the board said.
“As Facebook suspended Mr. Trump’s accounts ‘indefinitely,’ the company must reassess this penalty,” the board said. “It is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored.”
The ruling pushes Facebook to more clearly define what the penalties are for world leaders who violate its rules, a topic that sparked worldwide debate even before Trump and that hangs over the company as Trump considers his own future.
…
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, said in a blog post responding to the board’s criticism that the company will “now consider the board’s decision and determine an action that is clear and proportionate.”
“In the meantime, Mr. Trump’s accounts remain suspended,” Clegg wrote.
…
Its decision focused on two Trump posts from Jan. 6, both praising people involved in the Capitol attack: one post telling the rioters, “We love you. You’re very special,” and the other calling them “great patriots,” and saying “remember this day forever.”
“At the time of Mr. Trump’s posts, there was a clear, immediate risk of harm and his words of support for those involved in the riots legitimized their violent actions,” the board said.
…
The Oversight Board’s decision is likely to become fodder for Republican lawmakers and other critics of the increasing power that Facebook and other tech companies wield over political debate and online speech.
It also could be a far-reaching precedent for how some of the internet’s biggest platforms treat the speech of world leaders and politicians. The board rejected the idea of a separate standard for political leaders, saying: “The same rules should apply to all users of the platform; but context matters when assessing issues of causality and the probability and imminence of harm.”
…
The Oversight Board’s decision helps to flesh out a much broader debate about who gets to decide the rules for social media platforms. Congressional Republicans, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, have pushed the idea that federal law ought to require tech companies to be “neutral” in the content they allow, and at least one Supreme Court justice appears open to it.
Last week, Florida’s Republican-led Legislature passed a first-in-the-nation bill to punish tech companies that “deplatform” candidates for office, with fines of up to $250,000 a day.
In Texas, state Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into five tech companies for their bans of Trump, a move that prompted Twitter to file a lawsuit asking a federal court to help defend Twitter’s “internal editorial policies.”…
Myanmar’s military junta has banned satellite dishes, threatening prison sentences for anyone who violates the measure, as it intensifies its crackdown on access to independent news outlets.
The junta, which faces unanimous opposition from the public and has struggled to maintain order, has imposed increasingly tough restrictions on communication since seizing power on 1 February.
Mobile data has been cut for most people for more than 50 days, while broadband access has also been subject to severe restrictions. Several media outlets have been banned but continue to operate in hiding, either publishing online or broadcasting for television.
…
More than 80 journalists have been arrested in recent months, according to the independent Irrawaddy news outlet, which is itself facing legal action under Article 505(a) of the Penal Code. This law states that publishing information that causes fear or spreads false news is punishable by up to three years in prison.
On Monday, Yuki Kitazumi, a Japanese journalist, was charged under the same law, according to a report by Kyodo news agency. Kitazumi became the first foreign reporter to face charges since the coup.
Thousands of people have been arrested under the junta, including 3,677 people who have been sentenced or are in detention, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) advocacy group. It reported that 769 people have been killed by the military.
Despite the risks of military violence, protesters have continued to gather to oppose the coup. Teachers, students and parents marched outside schools in Mandalay on Wednesday morning, according to local media, calling for a boycott of the education system under the junta. On Tuesday night, a candlelit vigil was held in northern Kachin state.
…
On Tuesday, Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations told the US Congress to intensify pressure on the military by imposing more targeted sanctions. Kyaw Moe Tun called for measures against the state-run Maynamar oil and gas company Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, and the state-owned bank Myanmar Foreign Trade Bank.
“I wish to stress that Myanmar is not just witnessing another major setback to democracy, but also the crisis is threatening the regional peace and security,” he said….
Here’s a link to the May 5 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Dr David Nabarro, a special envoy on Covid-19 for the World Health Organization, warned the “majority of the world is heading into a very, very dark period”.
He told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme:
This pandemic is fearsome and it’s accelerating faster than ever and it’s a global phenomenon. There are a few countries that are able to demonstrate that they’ve got much lower levels of disease and they’re actually feeling that they’re recovering, but the majority of the world is heading into a very, very dark period. The reason why it’s particularly dark is that now we don’t have the full data because more and more the pandemic is spreading in places where testing is not available, so the numbers that we have we know are a major under-estimate. It’s bigger than ever, it’s fiercer than ever and it’s causing more distress than ever, this is a bad phase.
India Reports New Record Death Toll as Indian G7 Delegation Self-Isolates in London
India reported another record daily COVID-19 death toll today with close to 3,800 fatalities. The World Health Organization says India accounted for nearly half of all global COVID-19 cases reported last week and one in four deaths, as the government of Narendra Modi is coming under mounting calls to impose a national lockdown. India’s official infection and death figures are believed to be vast undercounts.
In Britain, India’s entire delegation to the G7 summit in London is in self-isolation after two of its members tested positive for COVID-19. India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and all Indian delegates will attend meetings virtually.
…
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Reported in NY, SF as New Study Shows Surge in Crimes Against AAPI People
In California, police arrested a suspect in the stabbing attack of two Asian American women Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco. This comes after at least four assaults on Asian Americans were reported in New York City over the weekend, including a hammer attack on two women walking in Manhattan. A new study by Cal State San Bernardino found a 164% increase in reports of anti-Asian violence in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year.
Chauvin Lawyer Files Motion for New Trial as AG Seeks Harsher Sentence for Murder of George Floyd
An attorney for former Minneapolis police officer and convicted murderer Derek Chauvin filed a motion for a new trial Tuesday, alleging prosecutorial misconduct, juror misconduct, witness intimidation and negative publicity around the case. The office of Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison said it would oppose the defense’s arguments. Last week, Ellison called for a harsher prison sentence for Chauvin because of the “particular cruelty” of his crime. Chauvin is due to be sentenced on June 25.
…
Women in Puerto Rico Demand Action After Surge in Femicides
In Puerto Rico, hundreds of protesters have taken to the streets in recent days in response to the femicides of 27-year-old Keishla Rodríguez and 35-year-old Andrea Ruiz. Ruiz’s body was found Friday, covered in burns. Her ex-partner confessed to her murder. Ruiz had sought protection against him, but the courts denied it. And Rodríguez — who was pregnant — was found lifeless floating in the San José Lagoon Saturday after being reported missing the day before. Prominent boxer Félix Verdejo Sánchez, who represented Puerto Rico at the 2012 Olympics, has been charged with Rodríguez’s murder. Feminist leaders are demanding Puerto Rican Governor Pedro Pierluisi take action against skyrocketing gender violence on the island.
Feminist leader: “We demand the state hold itself accountable and tell us where the real state of emergency is. The entire country is shocked by the recent murders of women, horror stories that resonate with so many of us, not only because we see ourselves reflected in each of them, but because we also share the same vulnerability.”
Trump’s DOJ Threatened MIT Researchers over Report on 2019 Bolivian Election
The Intercept is reporting the Trump Justice Department repeatedly contacted and eventually threatened to subpoena two researchers at MIT over their analysis of the 2019 Bolivian presidential election. The MIT study debunked claims of electoral fraud in Bolivia, which were used to help justify a coup against President Evo Morales.
U.N. Condemns Crackdown on Colombian Protests as Rally Planned Against NYU Event with Ex-Pres. Uribe
In Colombia, as massive demonstrations against poverty and inequality continue, the United Nations has condemned police and military officers for violently cracking down on protesters. At least 19 people have been killed since protests erupted last week against now-withdrawn proposed tax reforms introduced by right-wing President Iván Duque. Over 400 people have reportedly been detained and hundreds more injured.
Meanwhile, here in New York, a demonstration is planned today to protest a New York University event featuring former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. Uribe has long been accused of human rights abuses and linked to right-wing paramilitary groups. He’s also celebrated recent violence against protesters.
Zapatistas Set Sail to Europe to Mark 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance
A group of Indigenous leaders and members of Mexico’s Zapatista movement have set sail on the Atlantic Ocean to Spain. The group is marking 500 years of Indigenous resistance after Spanish colonizers arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which later became Mexico City. The Zapatistas hope to arrive in Spain in August and will go on to tour Europe and share their plans to fight the inequities triggered by capitalism.
Mexico Apologizes for Centuries of Abuse Against Maya Indigenous Community
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has offered a formal apology to the Maya Indigenous community.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador: “We offer the most sincere apologies to the Mayan people for the terrible abuses committed by national and foreign authorities during the conquest, during the three centuries of colonial domination and two centuries of independent Mexico.”
AMLO was joined by Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei at the ceremony, which was held in the southern state of Quintana Roo. This comes as AMLO continues to support the construction of a massive railway in southern Mexico that would cut through sacred Indigenous land and ancient sites. And in Guatemala, Indigenous land and water defenders continue to be brutalized, criminalized and displaced under Giammattei’s government.
…
“New Normal” for U.S. Climate Is Hotter and Wetter, According to New NOAA Data
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its updated figures for U.S. climate averages, with the “new normal” one degree hotter than it was just 20 years ago. The data also shows the U.S. is much wetter in the eastern and central parts of the country and drier in the West. The rising temperatures mean that places like Fairbanks, in Alaska, are no longer classified as a sub-Arctic climate, but are now considered part of a “warm summer continental zone.”…
I just want to be able to come on and say, ‘Look, it’s May and what’s coming can’t be stopped.’ There’s all kinds of amazing things that are happening, and I’m talking about President Trump, I’m talking about him coming back into power, and I’m talking about the church, I’m talking about everything that God promised — back-to-back terms — everything that God has promised with this election and overturning corruption. [The Chicago Cubs did not win the 2016 World Series, Bill Gates is putting vaccines into your computer’s microchips, and the mildly deranged penguin does not like cheese!]
Relying entirely on an article from an obscure conspiracy theory website in India that claimed the next wave of COVID-19 will kill up to 70 percent of those who have been vaccinated, Wiles bellowed that he intends to survive this genocide by refusing to get vaccinated while noting that the upside of this mass death campaign will be that a lot of stupid people will be killed off. [And the Cubs didn’t win the World Series, Microchips are putting Bill Gates clones into vaccines, and the mildly deranged penguin is fictional!]
Murillo said that God is calling conservative Christians to engage in political and moral action and to organize, educate ourselves on how to terrify national Democrat leaders, how to win local elections, and train our people to know why they believe what they believe and to believe it with conviction[: The real Cubs didn’t win because they were all vaccine clones made by an artificial penguin built by Bill Gates under the control of a mildly deranged cheese!]
Calling the proposed law “dangerous” and “unprecedented”, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) decried a new voting rights bill Thursday as a shameless power grab by the American people to control the country. “The proposed legislation is nothing more than a brazen attempt by the calculating American people to seize congress by electing representatives,” said Cruz, who warned that the nation’s 328 million residents “would stop at nothing” to carry out their sinister ploy. “[…] Clearly, the American people are way out of touch with the GOP.” At press time, Cruz had raised concerns the bill would lead to a wave of non-senators casting ballots[, the Cubs winning a World Series, vaccines working safely (and doing so without microchips), and the mildly deranged penguin confusing Bill Gates for cheese].
She quickly realised her mistake and spat out the unchewed bits. No microchips were harmed in this (not-quite-)cheese tasting.
Nepal’s decision to allow people to continue to climb its Himalayan peaks as a vicious Covid-19 wave sweeps the country was dealt a further blow after 19 more climbers tested positive for the virus.
Last month it was reported that the pandemic had reached Everest base camp and though officials later denied it, climbers have reported a wave of infections that were being covered up.
Now it has emerged that 19 people, both foreign climbers and sherpas, at the base camp of Dhaulagiri, the world’s seventh highest mountain and part of the same range as Everest, have tested positive….
Covid-19 infections continue to spread fast across the Americas as a result of relaxed prevention measures and intensive care units are filling up with younger people, Reuters quotes the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Carissa Etienne as saying.
In Brazil, mortality rates have doubled among those younger than 39, quadrupled among those in their 40s and tripled for those in their 50s since December, she said.
Hospitalisation rates among those under 39 years have increased by more than 70% in Chile and in some areas of the United States more people in their 20s are now being hospitalised for Covid-19 than people in their 70s.
blf @14, ha! I liked the addition of a cat recycling The Guardian as a liner for the litter box … along with a reminder to recycle.
SC @15, so it looks like planet earth will be spared Facebook and Instagram posts from Hair Furor for at least another six months. That’s good. I do hope Facebook suspends Trump’s account indefinitely. The move by Florida legislators to punish social media platforms that ban the accounts of politicians is ridiculous.
Bits and pieces of other news:
* Punchbowl News reported this morning that the U.S. House’s top two Republican leaders — Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise — are both “quietly working behind the scenes” to oust House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney and replace her with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. [No so quietly I’d say.]
* On a related note, Donald Trump reportedly spoke to Stefanik yesterday, and this morning offered his “complete and total endorsement” for her bid to become the new #3 in the House Republican leadership. [Anything to get back at Liz Cheney for spotlighting Trump’s lies.]
* The former president also issued a new written statement this morning, lashing out at Cheney, and blaming former Vice President Mike Pence and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for his 2020 defeat. [Oh, FFS.]
* Politico reported this morning that the American Greatness Fund, a non-profit advocacy group aligned with Trump’s operation, is creating something called the Election Integrity Alliance, which it says will be “focused on ending election fraud and strengthening election safeguards by providing information, resources, endorsements of allies’ efforts, and solutions to secure free and fair elections.” As for what that means in practical terms, I haven’t the foggiest idea.
* During a Fox News interview yesterday, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) was asked whether the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” The Wyoming Republican — the #3 Republican in the Senate leadership — wouldn’t answer the question directly.
* The Ohio Republican Party’s state central committee is scheduled to meet this week to discuss whether to censure Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) for his vote to impeach Donald Trump in January.
* Though national Republicans tend to see Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) as vulnerable in 2022, for now, the incumbent senator has only one rival: Jim Lamon, a power company executive and Trump donor, kicked off his statewide candidacy this week.
DeSantis’ plan will leave voters in Florida’s 20th without a representative until January. If that seems like a long time, it’s not your imagination.
It was just four weeks ago when the late Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) died at the age of 84. There’s already a crowded field of candidates eager to succeed the longtime Miami-area congressman, in a heavily Democratic district.
[…] The U.S. House seat left vacant by the death of Rep. Alcee Hastings will be filled through a special election, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday. Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, DeSantis said the primary for the District 20 seat will be held on Nov. 2, with the general election on Jan. 11, 2022.
[…] a closer look raises some questions about the calendar.
Right off the bat, note that the Republican governor waited nearly a full month before scheduling the special election. Then he announced a schedule that will leave the voters in Florida’s 20th district — most of whom are Black — without a representative until January.
[…] As Daily Kos’ David Nir explained, thanks to DeSantis’ plan, Hastings’ seat “will remain without representation for 280 days. That’s almost twice as long as the gap that proceeded the state’s two most recent special elections: In 2014, specials were held in the 13th District just 144 days after Rep. Bill Young died and in the 19th District just 148 days after Rep. Trey Radel resigned. Both were Republicans.”
[snipped other examples of Republicans seats being filled in a timely manner.]
So why would DeSantis adopt a different kind of schedule and leave this Democratic district without a representative longer than necessary?
[…] as David Nir’s report added, “Local election officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties initially proposed the dates that DeSantis wound up choosing, including a primary on Nov. 2. Soon after, however, they suggested the primary take place on Sept. 14 and the general on Nov. 9, with one official saying, ‘People would like it to be earlier.'”
Evidently, the governor is not among those people.
[…] Trump responded to the news in predictably hysterical fashion, saying in a statement that the social-media giant “must pay a political price” for enforcing the company’s rules in a way he doesn’t like. He added, “Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left are afraid of the truth.”
First, Trump isn’t president. Second, the “radical left” is singular. And third, the former president’s free speech rights remain intact, whether he runs afoul of social-media companies’ terms of service or not.
Lynna@23 notes “so it looks like planet earth will be spared Facebook and Instagram posts from Hair Furor for at least another six months.”
Putting aside the dubiousness of factsborked’s review board, not necessarily… SC@15 quotes, “Facebook must complete a review of the length of the suspension within six months, the board said.” Said review could be completed within the hour and result in hair furor being reinstated.
“Instead of addressing the core problems in its platform, {Facebook} exploited this fragile moment in our society in order to sell us the fiction of this oversight group,” said Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America. “Don’t buy it. Now, they’re kicking the can down the road again.”
The scale of Trump’s coronavirus misinformation makes the decision to remove him particularly important at this moment in the pandemic, said Jessica J González, the co-chief executive officer of the non-profit anti-hate speech organization Free Press.
“Given Trump’s history of spreading pandemic disinformation, it’s particularly crucial to deny him a megaphone at a time when we’re still struggling to contain the virus and increase vaccinations.”
Activists have pointed out other platforms, including Twitter and Snapchat, banned the former president outright without taking such pains to explain themselves. González said that the oversight board’s decision announced on Wednesday does not address many of the issues activists have brought up regarding hate speech and misinformation on Facebook.
“Mark Zuckerberg designed the oversight board to deflect attention from the structural rot at the heart of Facebook’s hate-and-lie-for-profit business model,” she said. “Facebook’s content moderation efforts are dysfunctional by design. The tech giant earns revenues by engaging people in hate.”
In March, Jason Miller said Trump’s new tech platform would “completely redefine the game.” Two months later, that boast is kind of hilarious.
As Donald Trump settled into his semi-retirement phase, there was all kinds of speculation about what he might do next. Would he start a television network? Maybe form a new political party?
Much of the speculation focused on social media — the former president had been forced from his beloved Twitter — and Trump’s interest in creating a rival platform of his own. In fact, the Associated Press reported in March that the Republican was planning to unveil his own social-media platform “in two or three months.”
[…] It was against this backdrop that Fox News ran this report yesterday on Team Trump’s new tech rollout.
Former President Trump launched a communications platform on Tuesday, which will serve as “a place to speak freely and safely,” and will eventually give him the ability to communicate directly with his followers, after months of being banned from sites like Twitter and Facebook. The platform, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” appears on http://www.DonaldJTrump.com/desk.
The same report added that the former president’s project appears to be powered by Campaign Nucleus — the “digital ecosystem made for efficiently managing political campaigns and organizations,” created by Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager.
For now, it’s not clear how much Trump and his team paid for this “communications platform,” though I’m awfully curious to find out just how big an investment this was — because the project is hilariously underwhelming.
In fact, to describe this as a “communications platform” is itself generous to the point of comedy. What Team Trump has created is, for all intents and purposes, a rudimentary blog for the former president.
At issue is a straightforward website in which Trump can publish some thoughts, and then people can share those thoughts with others through social media. This technology and this format has existed for many years. In fact, it’s not dissimilar to the website you’re reading right now.
The principal difference is, Trump’s blog doesn’t appear to link to any other websites — suggesting the former president has a new blog, but it’s not an especially good one.
[…] after the hype about Trump getting ready to “completely redefine the game,” it seemed that the former president would unveil something more impressive than a website the teenager who lives on your block could’ve thrown together in an afternoon.
Analysis: Trump will try to have it both ways over the verdict — decrying censorship but also eyeing an eventual return
It was not so much “Release the Kraken!” as “please tell the Kraken to pace around the room a few more times while we think about it”.
Facebook’s oversight board ruled that Donald Trump should remain banned from the platform for incendiary posts on the day of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol. But it also told the company that its “vague, standardless penalty” should be reviewed within six months.
The former president has made a career of portraying defeats as victories, bankruptcies as financial successes, the 2020 election as an epic win that was stolen. Facebook’s fudge will again allow him to have it both ways.
In the short term, the continued ban will feed the rightwing narrative of “cancel culture” and the perception that both mainstream media and social media censor conservative voices. Trump is the master of the politics of grievance and victimhood, constantly telling his supporters that “they” are taking away “your voice”.
[… I]n the longer term, the quasi-independent board’s quasi-ruling leaves open the door for Trump to return to Facebook in plenty of time for the 2024 presidential election, whether as candidate or kingmaker.
[…]
But Facebook was arguably a more important engine of his election campaigns [than Twitter]. It was a tool to raise money, mobilise his supporters and spread disinformation about his opponents. According to the Axios website, Trump spent about $160m on Facebook ads in 2020, compared with Joe Biden’s $117m.
[…]
Columnist Thomas Friedman told CNN this week: “There’s a sense out there that everything’s OK. Everything is not OK. Our democracy today is as threatened as at any time.”
Trump’s national relevance has ebbed away with shocking speed since he left office on 20 January. The Facebook ruling, while prolonging that trend, will also help maintain the comforting illusion that America has achieved herd immunity against his Big Lie. Unfortunately, you cannot kill an idea, even an untrue one; you have to learn to live with it.
blf @26, good points. Thanks for the additional info. Also, I’ll note that Trump’s new blog encourages others to share his sludge on social media platforms.
House Republican leadership turned against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) very quickly. Muffled grumbles of discontent grew into leaked hot mic denunciations and public endorsements of possible replacements.
While the tension has been palpable for months — remember that painfully awkward split on whether former President Trump should participate in CPAC — the antagonism has been thrumming at a higher volume since the House GOP retreat in Florida last month.
While there, Cheney broke with GOP leadership publicly on a number of issues orbiting the central schism: that Cheney wants to hold Trump and his allies responsible for the big election lie and the violence it wrought. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and nearly all of the rest of the congressional GOP caucus have long-since dropped any pretense of wanting to hold Trump accountable. Quite the opposite: they think they need Trump to flip at least the House in 2022 and to shore up their own political futures.
[…] Cheney contradicted McCarthy the necessary scope of a 9/11-style commission to investigate January 6 and the events that led to it.
“What happened on January 6 is unprecedented in our history, and I think that it’s very important that the commission be able to focus on that,” she told reporters from the Florida retreat.
[…] McCarthy, like the rest of GOP leadership, has insisted that if the probe entails more than the security breakdown on January 6 itself […] they also want to investigate the Black Lives Matter protests last summer and “antifa” generally.
It mostly seems like an attempt to both-sides their participation in the election lie, and to insert a poison pill into the counter-proposal for Democrats, who are loath to concede that the overwhelmingly peaceful protests are on par with the Capitol attack.
For McCarthy, revisiting that time could hamper his party’s ability to win back the majority and make him Speaker of the House. But there’s an additional, personal, layer to the events of January 6 for him.
He reached out to Trump while the violence was unfolding to ask him to call off his mob. It’s an easy event to forget about, in part because McCarthy has been studiously avoiding talking about it. […] “My conversations with the President are my conversations with the President.”
Other sources have provided some insight. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) briefly electrified Trump’s second impeachment trial when she shared her account of the call. She said that when McCarthy reached Trump and told him of the attack, Trump insisted that antifa was behind it. When McCarthy contradicted him, Trump shrugged — “‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,’” he said, per Herrera Beutler’s statement.
Other reporting has surfaced accounts that the conversation was explosive and expletive-laden.
Trump did not put out his milquetoast statement telling the rioters to go home — and that he loves them — until hours after the call with McCarthy.
If there ever is a January 6 commission whose members have subpoena power, it seems all but certain that McCarthy will be asked to finally answer some questions about that conversation.
[…] There are a lot of reasons McCarthy wants to get rid of Cheney, and the prevailing one is that standing by Trump and absolving him of blame is simply the litmus test to be a Republican right now. […]
But he also has possibly the greatest insight into what Trump was doing and saying that day, while his supporters mobbed the Capitol and called for his Vice President’s murder. In this day and age, that’s very dangerous information for a Republican to have.
Sandra Ortíz and her son Bryan Chávez have hugged for the first time in more than three years. Separated at the southern border by the prior administration in 2017, the family reunited at the San Ysidro, California, port of entry on Tuesday. They’re the first of four families expected to be reunited this week, following the Biden administration announcing on Monday that it would be returning parents deported by the prior administration to the U.S. on humanitarian parole.
“Ortíz, 48, from central Mexico, had packed her bag days earlier: three outfits, a pair of shoes and the birth certificate of her son, whom she hadn’t seen since they were separated at the border in 2017, when he was 15,” The Washington Post reported. “He’s now almost 19.”
The previous administration had separated the family in October 2017. It had already been stealing children from their parents at the southern border for several months but would not officially announce the inhumane “zero tolerance” policy until the following May. Like many other parents, Ortíz was kept in the dark by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials about the whereabouts of her child. And like many other parents, Ortíz was told her child would be put up for adoption.
Ortíz was then told she would be deported after she failed her asylum interview. While it’s unclear the circumstances behind why she failed it, the previous administration took steps to undermine the interviews of other asylum-seekers. Then Ortíz found out she would be deported without her son. When she finally got to talk to him over the phone, it was after she’d been deported. “I assumed, ‘This is it. I’ll never see him again,’” she told the Post.
On Tuesday, they had a joyous and tearful reunion, but with some sorrow. Ortíz secured necessary travel paperwork, airline tickets, and other assistance from Al Otro Lado, which has done important advocacy for asylum-seekers and their families. But during a video chat shortly before leaving for the U.S. Ortíz told the Post she noticed something about her son. First, he looked grown-up. “’He looks like a man,’ she thought,” the report said. “And then she thought: ‘He looks sad. He’s not the same son I had. This whole thing has changed him.’” [video is available at the link]
[…] Three more families are expected to be reunited this week, including at least one family that has also been separated for three years. “In total, more than 1,000 families are expected to be reunited,” the Post reported. “Being together again will be beautiful,” Ortíz continued in the report. “But it might not be easy.” […]
President Biden plans to address the nation Wednesday on the implementation of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package passed by Congress in March that included $1,400-per-person stimulus payments, aid to state and local governments, and other measures. Earlier in the day, he visited a Mexican restaurant that is benefiting from a relief program that was part of the package. […]
Biden on Wednesday made an unadvertised trip to a Mexican restaurant in Washington to celebrate Cinco de Mayo and highlight a program to aid restaurants that was part of his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package and has become popular among both parties.
The White House said Taqueria Las Gemelas in Northeast Washington is among the beneficiaries of funding from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which provides aid to restaurants and bars that took a financial hit from the pandemic. In a statement, the White House said the restaurant went from 55 to seven employees during the pandemic.
“The restaurant industry was so badly hurt nationwide, and that’s why we put this … together,” Biden said of the fund.
[…]
The restaurant program, which was officially launched this week, has been touted by congressional Democrats as well as some Republicans […] [Republicans ALL voted against the relief package.]
According to statistics released by the White House, 186,200 restaurants, bars and other eligible businesses in all 50 states, Washington and five U.S. territories applied for relief in the program’s first two days.
Several Republican lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), promoted the government website with information on applications. [Hypocrite]
During his stop at the restaurant, Biden greeted several patrons before departing with tacos and enchiladas.
So much better than watching Trump eat a Trump Tower “taco bowl.”
blfsays
Lynna@27 quotes, “Trump’s blog doesn’t appear to link to any other websites — suggesting the former president has a new blog, but it’s not an especially good one.”
No(-ish): Each post (bellowing) does have links (for re-posting on) factsborked and twittering (whether or not either works I don’t know, but they look plausible), and what appears to be a Like button (albeit no count of likes?).
On the other hand, there does not seem to be any links within the bellowings, nor anything like a sidebar with links (such as here at FtB). There are links, most intra-site, and the few which aren’t are to deeply problematic other sites (e.g., winred and 45office).
Amusingly, all the bellowings are titled Donald J Trump. (The earliest is dated March 24th (the date seems genuine?).) And the Privacy Policy is very long… and I presume contains numerous traps for the unwary. (One I noted — mostly because there’s a long complicated rationale — is they do not obey “Do Not Track” signals. (I use the EFF’s Privacy Badger with Firefox as one of multiple precautions.)) The T&C is also very long (I didn’t try to work my way through that morass).
As noted previously, there is no reply / comment facility, and the entire design seems inspired by 1980’s dial-up bulletin boards. It’s rather an eyesore, even ignoring the hair furor photo(s?).
“BREAKING: CVS announces it is now accepting walk-in appointments for #coronavirus vaccines across the country. No appointment necessary. This comes after President Biden’s order yesterday for all pharmacies taking part in the federal vaccine program to allow walk-ins.”
blfsays
Lynna@31, But but but… that’ll lead to “taco trucks on every corner!”
It never occurred to me that a Facebook-appointed panel could avoid a clear decision about Donald Trump’s heinous online behavior. But that is what it’s done.
[…] the question of how to treat speech on social media platforms is a major and perhaps impossible one to wrangle with — especially when it comes to important political figures […]Which is why the external board decided to punt the fetid Trump situation back to the Facebook leadership.
It’s kind of perfect, actually, since it forces everyone’s hand — from the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to our limp legislators in Congress.
In general, I have considered the case of Mr. Trump to be much less complex than people seem to think. And it has been made to appear highly complicated by big tech companies like Facebook because they want to exhaust us all in a noisy and intractable debate.
Mr. Trump should be seen as an outlier — a lone, longtime rule breaker who was coddled and protected on social media platforms until he wandered into seditious territory. He’s an unrepentant gamer of Facebook’s badly enforced rules who will never change. He got away with it for years and spread myriad self-serving lies far and wide.
In other words, Trump broke Facebook’s rules. And he did so repeatedly. He should have been kicked off the platform much earlier, just like any other rule-breaker. He wasn’t. He wasn’t held to account.
So why should Mr. Trump stop now?
One way to answer that would be to ask why so many Republicans believe the Big Lie that President Biden was not elected fairly. Or why do so many of the same people resist Covid-19 vaccinations?
It’s all because of the inexhaustible Trump digital army, which is both organized and scattered, and has been enabled by social media companies.
[…] Mr. Trump (and his acolytes) spent years crossing lines in the digital sand. […]
The main problem is that Facebook has offloaded important decisions, like that of Mr. Trump’s fate on the platform, to its Oversight Board, an unwieldy and ultimately ineffective body that makes the United Nations look decisive. The board is apparently independent — but it’s a system essentially created by Facebook. It’s paid for by Facebook, and its members are picked by Facebook. It’s a glorified corporate advisory board of just 20 people who have made a key decision for the rest of us. And it appears as if the board members realized that this decision was not theirs to make.
[…] This lazy abrogation of responsibility by the Facebook leadership is par for the course for the most hopelessly compromised company in tech, which has bungled controversies for years.
At least, in his various and sundry heinous behaviors, Mr. Trump has been explicit […]
In moving the key decision over Mr. Trump out of its own hands (where it belonged), the company has passed along the hottest of potatoes and said good riddance to responsibility. Facebook is pretending that its hands are tied, even though Facebook executives were the ones who tied them.
I can’t get the phrase “arbiter of truth” out of my head.
“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview with Fox News in mid-2020. “Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”
Mr. Zuckerberg was trying to wrangle out of making the hard decision about Mr. Trump that the head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, eventually made when he permanently banned the president from that service. The Twitter ban came at the bitter end, in the wake of the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6; it was too little, too late. But Mr. Dorsey did it — and he has stuck to it.
Not Mr. Zuckerberg.
Here are some questions I would ask the Facebook chief if given the chance: Why build a platform that requires an arbiter of truth if you don’t want to be one? […]
Remember, Mr. Zuckerberg said that “arbiter of truth” gem almost a year ago, in yet another attempt to ingratiate his company with the then-ruling Trump administration. And we now know how that dereliction of duty turned out. A smash and a grab for democracy, for which the instigator-in-chief will never be punished.
For now, though, we are saved by a decision of a body that cannot keep doing this over and over, with no fail-safe for the next time, when a smarter, more savvy version of Mr. Trump emerges and makes no unforced errors.
It also shines a spotlight on the actual problem: Facebook has grown too powerful and the only fix is to get government legislators to come up with a way to allow more competition and to take impossible decisions out of the hands of too few people.
Until then, it’ll be an endless and exhausting game of hot potato, in which no one wins.
In January, Pat Toomey said senators like Josh Hawley “have a lot of soul searching to do.” Alas, that introspection never happened.
It’s fair to say Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has had an eventful 2021, starting with the senator’s anti-election efforts that turned him, at least temporarily, into a political “pariah” on Capitol Hill.
[…]. Hawley was denounced by former allies; prominent businesses distanced themselves from the Republican; several independent media outlets called on the Missouri senator to resign in disgrace; and several of his Senate colleagues filed an ethics complaint against him.
Many Republicans, in particular, marveled in late December at Hawley’s efforts to undermine the results of an American election. Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, concluded, “The ambitions of this knowledgeable, talented young man are now a threat to the republic.” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) added, in reference to Hawley, “Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”
A week later, in the wake of the insurrectionist riot at the Capitol, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and was asked about colleagues such as Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose recklessness contributed to the unrest. “They’re going to have a lot of soul searching to do,” the Pennsylvania Republican said in the interview. “And the problem is they were complicit in the Big Lie…. That’s going to haunt them for a very long time.”
[…] But four months after the insurrectionist violence, Hawley clearly regrets nothing.
[Hawley], who led the effort in the Senate to contest Biden’s election victory, said he does not regret raising his fist to a pro-Trump mob gathered outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 ahead of the violent insurrection. “I waved to them, gave them the thumbs up, pumped my fist to them and thanked them for being there, and they had every right to do that,” Hawley said during an interview Tuesday with Washington Post Live.
In the same interview, the Missouri Republican also continued to stand by his decision to vote against certifying 2020 election results he didn’t like, telling the Post he was merely raising “concerns about election integrity.”
[…] there’s no great mystery behind his indifference: Hawley is enjoying some of the most robust fundraising of his career; he was still able to publish a book; he maintains a high media profile […]
As far as Hawley is concerned, there’s no point in dwelling on his anti-election efforts, because from his perspective, there were no adverse consequences for his actions. All the senator sees is rewards for misconduct. […]
“And now it’s official: With Netanyahu failing to form a government, Israel’s president has tasked opposition leader Yair Lapid with trying to cobble one together and oust Bibi. If he can’t, Israel’s fifth elections in 2.5 years loom on the horizon.”
Alberta drops vaccine age to 12 as Covid cases surge
Alberta will become the first Canadian province to offer Covid vaccines to everyone aged 12 and over from 10 May, premier Jason Kenney has said, a day after he introduced tighter measures to combat a third pandemic wave.
Alberta, home to Canada’s oil patch, has the highest rate per capita of Covid-19 in the country, with nearly 24,000 active cases and 150 people in intensive care, Reuters reports.
“We must act to bend the curve down one last time,” United Conservative Party premier Kenney told a news conference, adding based on current trends Alberta’s health care system will be overwhelmed within a month.
Under the new curbs, schools will be confined to online learning for two weeks, while other measures including restaurant patios being closed will last for three weeks.
On Tuesday, Alberta recorded 1,743 new daily cases, exploding from less than 200 in early February.
The latest conspiracy theory being chased by the sketchy ‘audit’ of Arizona’s 2020 election is that fraudulent ballots were supposedly smuggled in from China and therefore have bamboo in the paper.
THEY ARE CHECKING FOR BAMBOO IN THE BALLOTS….
This is after we learned that the ‘auditors’ are also using UV lights to check for secret watermarks that President Trump supposedly put on ballots as a trap for Democrats.”
France has granted citizenship to over 2,000 foreign-born frontline workers to reward them for their services to the nation during the coronavirus pandemic […]
Marlene Schiappa, junior interior minister in charge of citizenship, said that 2,009 people, including 665 minors, had been fast-tracked for naturalisation for “showing their attachment to the nation”.
[…]
Those involved include health workers, security guards, checkout workers, garbage collectors, home-care providers and nannies.
Over 8,000 people have applied for citizenship under the scheme, Schiappa’s office said, adding that all requests were being given “the greatest consideration”.
A fairly short France24 interview with Alice Doyard, who produced the Grauniad’s Oscar-winning Colette (video) short documentary, ‘Colette’ revisits World War II trauma and wins Academy Award for best documentary short (video): “In just 24 minutes, the charismatic and courageous “Colette” reminds us just how close, and how personal, Second World War history can be. This concise, powerful film saw producer Alice Doyard and director Anthony Giacchino pick up this year’s Academy Award for best documentary short. Alice tells us more about working with former resistant Colette to prepare a trip to the Nazi camp where her brother died in 1945.”
…The warning was given a long time ago, with the crimes of the regime in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. Those, even if of lesser intensity, committed on European soil, are only an extension of them. They are the consequence of our inaction and loss of awareness of what they mean. Crimes, including war crimes that are liable to the International Criminal Court, must be designated as such. They cannot be considered as business as usual.
The ‘mortality penalty’ that the US pays every year is equivalent to the number of Americans who died of Covid in 2020
A 30-year-old American is three times more likely to die at that age than his or her European peers. In fact, Americans do worse at just about every age. To make matters more grim, the American disadvantage is growing over time.
In 2017, for example, higher American mortality translated into roughly 401,000 excess deaths — deaths that would not have occurred if the US had Europe’s lower age-specific death rates. Pre-pandemic, that 401,000 is about 12% of all American deaths. The percentage is even higher below age 85, where one in four Americans die simply because they do not live in Europe.
[…]
There have been many efforts to account for the US mortality disadvantage. There is no single answer, but three factors stand out. First, death rates from drug overdose are much higher in the US than in Europe and have risen sharply in the 21st century. Second is the rapid rise in the proportion of American adults who are obese. In 2016, 40% of American adults were obese, a larger proportion than in Europe. Higher levels of obesity in the US may account for 55% of its shortfall in life expectancy relative to other rich countries. Third, the US stands out among wealthy countries for not offering universal healthcare insurance. One analysis suggests that the absence of universal healthcare resulted in 45,000 excess deaths at ages 18–64 in 2005. That number represents about a quarter of excess deaths in that age range.
When I moved to “Europe” last millennium, one easily noticeable difference was there were less obese people, and those who were obese looked (in general) to be less obese, than in the States. Health care is also quite different. No idea about illicit or “recreational” drugs, and albeit there is considerable alcohol consumption, it seems to be a bit more restrained / responsible (albeit British (especially?) pubs near closing time challenge that assertion!).
[…]
The systemic racism present in US society generates inequalities in resources and power, which in turn have a major impact “downstream” on the health of people of color. Healthcare inequalities and provider bias are importantly associated with infant and maternal mortality. For example, many physicians (usually white and male) have been shown to take the health concerns of Black and Latinx people less seriously during pregnancy and childbirth, resulting in poorer health outcomes for both mothers and their children. Black infants have significantly better outcomes when treated by Black doctors.
The US also has exceptionally high income inequality, superimposed on its yawning racial divide. And social policy in the US is less likely to correct inequality than elsewhere. One study concluded that US life expectancy would be three to four years longer if the country had the social policy generosity of other OECD countries. A factor in the social policy shortcomings in the US, including in providing health insurance, is the sense on the part of the white majority that more generous policies would disproportionately benefit African Americans.
All of this suggests that our shortcomings are not simply a product of what happens in a sector called “medicine and public health”. Rather, these shortcomings are deeply embedded in enduring features of American society. […]
These extraordinary times and circumstances of call for extraordinary measures.
The US supports the waiver of IP protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help end the pandemic and we’ll actively participate in @WTO negotiations to make that happen.
[…]
The Blackfeet tribe in northern Montana has provided about 1,000 surplus vaccines to its First Nations relatives and others in Canada, in an illustration of the disparity in speed at which the US and its norther [sic] neighbor are distributing doses. While more than 30% of adults in the US are fully vaccinated, in Canada that figure is about 3%.
Ah good! A classic Grauniadian typo on its 200th anniversary. “Norther” is apparently slang (primary Texas?) for a cold wind from the north.
[…]
More than 95% of the Blackfeet reservation’s roughly 10,000 residents who are eligible for the vaccine are fully immunized, after the state prioritized Native American communities — among the most vulnerable US populations — in the early stages of its vaccination campaign.
The tribe received vaccine allotments both from the Montana health department and the federal Indian Health Service, leaving some doses unused. With an expiration date fast approaching, it turned to other nations in the Blackfoot Confederacy, which includes the Blackfeet and three tribes in southern Alberta that share a language and culture.
“The idea was to get to our brothers and sisters that live in Canada,” said Robert DesRosier, emergency services manager for the Blackfeet tribe. “And then the question came up — what if a nontribal member wants a vaccine? Well, this is about saving lives. We’re not going to turn anybody away.”
[…]
As news of the effort spread in Canada, first by word of mouth, then through social platforms and media reports, people traveled from farther away. Some drove five hours from the city of Edmonton.
Last year, racing to develop a vaccine in record time, Pfizer made a big decision: Unlike several rival manufacturers, which vowed to forgo profits on their shots during the Covid-19 pandemic, Pfizer planned to profit on its vaccine.
On Tuesday, the company announced just how much money the shot is generating.
The vaccine brought in $3.5 billion in revenue in the first three months of this year, nearly a quarter of its total revenue, Pfizer reported. The vaccine was, far and away, Pfizer’s biggest source of revenue.
The company did not disclose the profits it derived from the vaccine, but it reiterated its previous prediction that its profit margins on the vaccine would be in the high 20 percent range. That would translate into roughly $900 million in pretax vaccine profits in the first quarter….
But the company’s vaccine is disproportionately reaching the world’s rich — an outcome, so far at least, at odds with its chief executive’s pledge to ensure that poorer countries “have the same access as the rest of the world” to a vaccine that is highly effective at preventing Covid-19.
As of mid-April, wealthy countries had secured more than 87 percent of the more than 700 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines dispensed worldwide, while poor countries had received only 0.2 percent, according to the World Health Organization. In wealthy countries, roughly one in four people has received a vaccine. In poor countries, the figure is one in 500.
[…]
The company pledged to contribute up to 40 million doses to Covax, a multilateral partnership aimed at supplying vaccines to poor countries. That represents less than 2 percent of the 2.5 billion doses that Pfizer and its development partner, BioNTech, aim to produce this year….
The doses that Pfizer pledged to Covax are “a drop in the ocean,” said Clare Wenham, a health policy expert at the London School of Economics.
The World Health Organization figures make clear that Pfizer has provided minimal help to the world’s poorest countries.
[…]
US District Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington DC, said on Wednesday the “plain language” of a federal law called the Public Health Service Act, which governs the response to the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID-19, blocked the CDC’s moratorium.
The National Association of Realtors welcomed the judge’s decision, saying a better solution would be to help tenants pay rent, taxes and utility bills.
With rental assistance secured, the economy strengthening and unemployment rates falling, there is no need to continue a blanket, nationwide eviction ban, the group said.
[…]
Landlords and real estate trade groups that challenged the moratorium in court said the CDC lacked the power to impose it, and unlawfully took away their right to deal with delinquent tenants.
Friedrich, a Trump appointee, said there was “no doubt” Congress intended to empower the CDC to combat COVID-19 through a range of measures, such as quarantines, but not a moratorium.
[…]
According to the White House, one in five renters had fallen behind on rent as of January, while UDS[? US Department of Housing and Urban Development(?)] agencies have said between 4 million and 8.8 million adults are behind on their rent.
[…]
blfsays
From yesterday, Mars Helicopter and the Future of Extraterrestrial Flight (video), which is interesting, but, as the presenter said, is also a celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (May). The presenter (Ms Jia-Rui Cook) and engineers (Mr Johnny Lam (Ingenuity, Mars) and Mr Nishant Mehta (Dragonfly, Titan (future mission))) are all of Asian Pacific heritage, and the discussion ended with a wonderful montage of Asian Pacific Nasa / JPL employees.
A soldier in the Wisconsin National Guard was charged Monday in connection with the Capitol riot Jan. 6, becoming the fourth service member linked to the violent attempt to thwart the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president.
Wall Street Journal:
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Tuesday she is neither predicting nor recommending that the Federal Reserve raise interest rates as a result of President Biden’s spending plans, walking back her comments earlier in the day that rates might need to rise to keep the economy from overheating.
Reuters:
Declaring Lubbock a ‘sanctuary city’ for the unborn, voters have approved a local ban on almost all abortions, and the Texas legislature is considering a law to bar the procedure as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.
Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times:
To be a leader in today’s G.O.P. you either have to play dumb or be dumb on the central issue facing our Republic: the integrity of our election. You have to accept everything that Trump has said about the election — without a shred of evidence — and ignore everything his own attorney general, F.B.I. director and election security director said — based on the evidence — that there was no substantive fraud. What kind of deformed party will such a dynamic produce? A party so willing to be marinated in such a baldfaced lie will lie about anything, including who wins the next election and every one after that.
[…] You are no doubt familiar with Rick Santorum’s latest word-burp, this one brushing off all Native American culture as “there isn’t much” while extolling the genius of da white folks who “birthed a nation from nothing,” which is one of very very many racist, bigoted, or just plain gross things that Rick Santorum has always said at regular intervals during the periods in which we have been forced to know of his existence.
Native American organizations were of course then obliged to point out that Native American culture is absolutely everywhere in America, from the structure of the Constitution to our art to our beliefs to the names on a continent full of signs, and that if you are not aware of that culture perhaps it has more to do with centuries of systemic genocide than the inherent superiority of Rick Santorum’s cousin’s neighbor’s ancestor’s European genes […]
Asserting bigoted things at regular intervals is Rick Santorum’s thing. […] It is the basis for every one of his theocratic musings, and for his every condemnation of Everyone Else. It was his entire political career, a career that ended in humiliating loss Over A Freaking Decade Ago. He attempted a comeback by running for Republican theocracy—er, presidency—in 2012, got flattened by Mitt Romney despite obvious appeal to the same protofascists that would later declare Typhoid Hitler their new Jesus, and has done Not Much since then except when bored network bookers find his crumb-covered business card between couch cushions and for some reason decide he needs to be inflicted on us again.
[…] He is a “culture warrior,” which is the conservative term for saying vile and racist things while pretending you are Only Asking Questions. The man has no policy chops on any subject. He has no insights into world events. […]
CNN knew this when they hired him, but did it anyway because their extant conservative pundit crop was aghast at the garbage fire that was the Donald Trump “campaign” and refused to defend him. Enter a new line of conservative CNN contributors who would.
That the CNN lineup would soon feature an array of flagrant liars, professional bullshitters, longtime grifters and other wackadoodles from the fringes of the party was inevitable. […] Since nobody reputable had the stomach for it, CNN executives simply reached further and further down the food chain of the discredited and the malodorous until they found movement rejects willing to praise whatever new idiocy the Trump camp flung out next.
[…] What’s still not clear is why Rick Santorum, in specific, still appears on CNN airwaves even after the Trump era is over, everyone involved has been outed as crooked scheming lying fascist, and Santorum himself has proven himself to be (again) a cheap, substanceless nobody who is less professional pundit than he is smallpox outbreak personified.
[…] Why is Rick Santorum even still here? Why is Rick Santorum, the pundit equivalent of a slice of white bread, relevant? Why is Rick Santorum, period?
[…] At heart, every network hack who asks Rick Santorum to weigh in on anything, in this actual year of 2021, ought to ask themselves whether this is literally all they can muster up for their audience. Whether booking Bland But Angry Meatlump is intended as the insult to viewers as it comes across as, or whether it is mere apathy. […]
It remains amazing that Rick Santorum still exists, in this reality—one would have thought he would have faded away […] But no, the man found a second wind in being one of the people in America most willing to defend grotesqueries nobody else could stomach. Sure, he’s a bigot. Sure, he’s blazingly ignorant about every single subject he holds forth on. But his most notable point is being a self-made monument to arrogant white male mediocrity. It’s as if all the cookie-cutter conservative child pundits of the past merged together […]
It’s been a tough year, and a tough four years, and an actual insurrection occurred just a few months back based on the exact sort of reality-denying gaslighting you relied on nightly for low-cost titillation during times of crisis, and we are tired of you and your performative indifference on every existential threat facing the country. We don’t care anymore. Maybe call us back when you’ve figured yourselves out.
Wednesday’s White House press briefing began with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack speaking about the Biden administration’s plans to use the USDA to invest millions in grants to local and regional food producers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. He touched on the inequities that non-white farmers have faced historically, and the need for action on the part of the federal government to even the playing field and support all farmers. After taking a few questions, Vilsack handed off the microphone to White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
Psaki fielded questions about everything from COVID-19 public health guidelines to Biden’s travel plans over the next few weeks. A highlight came when Psaki was asked whether Biden and the current administration were “worried” about being able to work with Republicans when GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell continue to tout their unity in opposition to allowing Biden to enact any of his agenda. Psaki explained that the administration really didn’t have to worry about Republican Party obstructionist rhetoric. The reason there was nothing to talk about is that the Biden administration has zero to the power of zero interest in paying attention to obstruction. There is only one job the current administration and Democratic Party-led legislative branch has, and while it is technically identical to the GOP’s job, only one political party is interested to doing it.
Psaki’s response to all of the fact-free, hand-wringing culture war baloney and policy-free anti-science bleating by Republicans was simply perfect: “I guess the contrast for people to consider is that 100% of our focus is on delivering relief to the American people.” To make it clear, Psaki went on to explain exactly what the GOP is promising to obstruct: “Getting the pandemic under control and putting people back to work. And we welcome support, engagement, and work with Republicans on that. The President has extended an open arm to that. The door to the Oval Office is open.” […]
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) on Wednesday sharply criticized House Republicans for what appears to be an imminent effort to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from House Republican leadership, calling the efforts “#coverupJan6.”
“Every GOP member of Congress needs to go on the record as to how they will vote on @RepLizCheney in operation #coverupJan6 and concerned donors should take notes,” tweeted Kinzinger, who has repeatedly defended Cheney while criticizing former President Donald Trump.
“I will vote for Liz,” Kinzinger added.
[…] Kinzinger agreed with Cheney’s communications director on Twitter on Tuesday, saying the problem Republicans find with Cheney is that she will not say the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent or “whitewash” the Capitol riot.
[…] “We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be,” Cheney wrote.
Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Ruslan Ryaboshapka said in an interview published on Wednesday that he believes he was fired from his position last year for refusing to investigate President Biden’s son Hunter Biden at the request of Rudy Giuliani and former President Trump.
Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Ryaboshapka said a recently published transcript of a phone call between Giuliani and Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, was proof that he had been fired for political reasons.
“It reveals an important detail,” Ryaboshapka told BuzzFeed. “Yermak promised Giuliani to open an investigation into Hunter Biden.”
“I didn’t know about the essence of the call. I didn’t know Yermak promised to help Giuliani,” he added.
In February, Time magazine obtained a transcript of a phone call between Giuliani and Yermak in which Giuliani demanded an investigation be opened that would help Trump win a second term in office.
“Let these investigations go forward,” Giuliani said to Yermak. “Get someone to investigate this.”
“Zelensky asked me several times if there are violations of the law in this case started by [former prosecutor general Yuriy] Lutsenko, violations by Hunter Biden,” Ryaboshapka said regarding the requested investigation. “We looked at 15 or 16 cases. We reviewed all of them and didn’t find anything that could be a violation of the law.” […]
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney (Wyo.) on Wednesday urged the GOP to steer away from what she called a “Trump cult of personality” while vowing to continue speaking out in the face of Republican backlash.
[…] “Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work — confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this,” Cheney wrote.
[…] “History is watching. Our children are watching. […].
Wonkette: “You’re Still Paying The Secret Service To Cart Trump’s Grown-Ass Hatchlings Around America. Isn’t That GREAT?”
Oh boy, the Trump grift continues, even though the motherfucker is out of office, after his historic loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Turns out, on his way out the door, Donald Trump made the highly irregular HEREBY ORDER to extend Secret Service protection for his filthy grown-ass children for an extra six months. He did it for the filthy grown-ass spawn and the two spouses among them (Jared and Lara), and he also did it for former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, and current slobbering Trump sycophant Mark Meadows. (That garbage loser said just today that Facebook’s decision to keep Trump off the platform is a “sad day for America,” LOL.)
Why? Because these people are mooches. Is that Trump’s hand in your pocket […]
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) got ahold of records for just the month after Joe Biden’s inauguration, AKA the first month of Trump living in infamy as a common citizen worried when and if the law might catch up to him, and just for that month, the total for the grubby Trump spawn was $140,000. As CREW notes, that number does not include costs paid directly to Trump properties for lodging, only properties outside the Trump family. SPOILER, a lot of the travel has been to places where there are Trump properties. CREW also notes that this is a family that traveled TWELVE TIMES as much as the Obamas during Trump’s time in office.
[…] For example, here are some expenses:
The new records reveal that in just thirty days, the Trump children maintained their breakneck speed of travel, and racked up significant hotel and transportation bills for the Secret Service. The transportation amounted to $52,296.75, and hotel costs totalled at least $88,678.39, according to the records.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump went directly from their jobs at the White House to a ten day vacation in Salt Lake City with their three children, which cost $62,599.39 for hotel stays alone for their detail. From there, they went to Miami for the month of February, with a short stay at Trump’s Bedminster property from February 19-21. The Secret Service turned over no receipts for that leg of the trip, though it almost certainly funnelled taxpayer money to the Trump business.
Again, this was also for Eric and Tiffany […] And again, this little perk is going for six months after the guy who beat their daddy was inaugurated. Can you imagine the bills they’ve charged you for by now? […]
data is simply not provided for a bunch of travel destinations where Trump has properties. Do you really think the Trump spawn was staying elsewhere, or that they weren’t charging you to put up the Secret Service for protection these ungrateful shitholes shouldn’t be entitled to? You’d be pretty dumb to think that, considering who we’re dealing with, so you probably don’t think that. Also these are just the records for the spawn. No idea how much Mnuchin, O’Brien, and Meadows are still charging American taxpayers and maybe funneling into Trump’s [wallet]
The point of this post is GRIIIIIIIIIIIIFT, just like it is with so many Trump posts.
[…]
Rudy Giuliani’s supporters, including his son, are publicly calling on Donald Trump’s campaign to help Giuliani with his mounting legal fees, CNN reports:
The nut may crack in the next 36 hours, Andrew Giuliani told CNN, saying Trump could be the hero by jumping in to help Rudy with his mounting legal costs. […]
Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tweeted that Trump told an associate this week that the decision of whether or not to help Giuliani is somehow not his “call.” […]
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said Wednesday that it would support waiving patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines after weeks of pressure from the international community as cases surge brutally in India and other countries.
“The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
[…]
Tai said the Biden administration would negotiate the text of the waiver at the World Trade Organization, which is meeting this week, but she said the “negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.”
President Joe Biden has faced increased pressure from the global community and some Democratic lawmakers to suspend drugmakers’ patents for Covid-19 vaccines so other countries could produce generic vaccines.
[…]
Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “intellectual property rights is part of the problem.”
“But really, manufacturing is the biggest problem. We have a factory here in the U.S. that has the full intellectual property rights to make the vaccine. They aren’t making doses because the factory has problems,” he said.
The whole situation recalls that when Dr. Salk developed the polio vaccine in the 1950s, he was asked in an interview, who owned the patent. He famously replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
The young Democratic staffers who dominate the White House and Capitol today have never known a Republican party worth negotiating with. They are tired of the Republicans and are convincing their principals [the president, the senators and the cabinet secretaries] to join them. And so a huge, popular stimulus package that includes child tax credits, increased health care subsidies and direct relief payments made its way through the Senate within two months of Biden’s inauguration, without a single Republican vote. When Washington pundits howled that the package was too large and not bipartisan, White House staff simply pointed to public opinion polling demonstrating the overwhelming popularity of the bill, marking a generational shift away from the centralised gatekeepers of Washington’s “Sunday shows”, the political talkshows that have represented and defined the mainstream current of Washington opinion for decades.
This generation of staffers haven’t just got different tactics: their ideological commitments are different too. Many of them lived through the Great Recession, have accumulated significantly less wealth than their baby boomer and gen X elders, and therefore have a much more positive view of how government action can improve people’s lives.
[… T]he Biden administration’s clear-sighted, progressive vision for domestic policy doesn’t extend to foreign policy. Unlike the numerous former Warren staffers running around the National Economic Council and treasury departments, the Situation Room doesn’t have leftwing Senate staffers moving through its doors.
Still, some good signs are perhaps emerging. The Democrats who now staff the White House came of age knowing that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were failures, and that Washington’s foreign policy “blob” — from the state department to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies — led us astray. And the agreement on what went wrong has paid some immediate dividends, with Biden overriding the national security apparatus to announce that the United States will leave Afghanistan this year after two long, largely pointless decades spent in the country.
This insight — younger domestic staff who know there’s no point to engaging with or waiting for the thugs, combined with long-time military-industrial profiteering staff for foreign affairs — is an interesting way of looking at the current administration. As the opinion column notes, things like reallocating funds spent on police for non-policing purposes (“defund the police”) haven’t made much traction (yet?), at least in part due “the principles” seemingly-ingrained thinking. Seemingly-ingrained, perhaps, but not necessarily rigid or frozen.
The author, “Joel Wertheimer is a civil rights attorney and was formerly associate staff secretary for Barack Obama”.
Republican lawmakers across the country are pushing to ban critical race theory from schools in a giant effort to create a culture war and distract from the fact that what they really want to ban is any teaching about race and racism in the U.S. since the early 1960s. There’s one key question all of these Republicans need to be asked, and Marc Lamont Hill got one of them on his show Black News Tonight and asked it.
The question? “What is critical race theory?”
Hill posed that question to Vernon Jones, a Democrat turned Trump Republican currently running for Georgia governor who has vowed to ban critical race theory, and—as would probably be the case with a minimum 98% of the Republicans vowing to ban critical race theory in schools—Jones had not a clue. He started talking about Christopher Columbus and people who use “their own ideology and their own party affiliation to go to the extreme.”
Hill pressed, because that isn’t a definition of critical race theory.
“Well, first of all, I can tell you, but it’s left up to you to understand,” Jones responded. “I can’t make you understand. The fact is that critical race theory, even on this basis, should not be taught in our schools, period. Now if you can’t understand—”
“But what is it?”
“Well, to me, what it does, to me, my interpretation as well as many others …”
“No, not what it does, what is it? How do you define it? I’m just asking you to define critical race theory because my audience may not know.”
“Well, obviously you don’t know and you haven’t told your audience.”
At this point, Hill’s delighted chuckle and disbelieving “I don’t know?” pointed to the trap he’d sprung. But Jones thought he was winning this exchange and began haranguing Hill to answer the question he himself had started off by asking, becoming increasingly abusive as he mocked the idea that an Ivy League PhD—which Hill has—could be a sign of expertise in the definition of critical race theory. At the point where Jones called him “as dumb as two left shoes,” Hill had his microphone muted, saying “We’re not going to name-call on this show. I have not name-called you, sir. You have come on this show, you’re a Black Republican, I have not called you a name”—and then he went on to list all of the names he had not called Jones, just in case anyone was wondering what it would have looked like if he’d decided to name-call.
“And you’re not going to come on my show and call me dumb,” he concluded. “What I will tell you is that critical race theory is a theory that actually emerged out of critical legal studies. It is a theory that makes an attempt to understand the law through the lens of race and it’s founded on some fundamental presumptions. One is the intractability of race and racism, meaning it’s an intractable problem in America and that we have to use the lens of race to make sense of things. It also is based on the use of counterstories, listening to the, as Derrick Bell, the critical race scholar, said, the voices at the bottom of the well, to make sense of the world and to make sense of the law. These are two big theories, two big pillars of it. And so what we want to do is, if you want to ban it, you have to explain to me why.”
Okay, so Lamont Hill definitely knows what critical race theory is. Shocking from a scholar who’s taught relevant subjects at Temple University, Columbia University, and Morehouse College. But it’s what he said next that really gets to the heart of these efforts to ban critical race studies—not just the reason Jones is joining the trend, but the whole point of the effort.
”[…] The fact of the matter is, he can’t define it because he don’t know what it is. They look for things to ban to signal to white people ‘Hey, I got your back,’” Hill said.
”They ban things that aren’t even an issue. There is no public school teacher in America who is attempting to put critical race theory in schools. Critical race theory isn’t even taught in high schools. It’s not even really taught in college. It is taught in law school and it has increasingly been taught in graduate school.”
Hill directed his closing comments at Jones as a Black Republican—“You want to ban a theory that nobody is trying to bring in in the first place? That is a smoke signal to white America and really to white racists” […] They are all trying to ban something that is not seriously being taught in the schools, because using a term that sounds a little jargon-y and advanced is a lot more palatable to the (white) general public than saying “we just want to ban schools from talking about the existence of racism or teaching about the contributions of anyone but white people.” Which is actually what’s going on here, to the extent that there’s a real effort to influence school curriculum.
Pasta comes in many shapes and sizes, which is part of its inherent delight. But all those irregular shapes tend to be inefficient when it comes to packaging. So what if you could buy your pasta of choice in a simple, compact 2D form and then watch it take on the desired final 3D shape as it cooks, thereby doubling the fun factor? Scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) have figured out a simple mechanism to do just that, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.
“We were inspired by flat-packed furniture and how it saved space, made storage easier, and reduced the carbon footprint associated with transportation,” said co-author Lining Yao, director of the Morphing Matter Lab at CMU’s School of Computer Science. “We decided to look at how the morphing matter technology we were developing in the lab could create flat-packed pastas that offered similar sustainability outcomes.” According to the team’s calculations, even if you pack macaroni pasta perfectly, you will still end up with as much as 67 percent of the volume being air. The ability to make flat pasta for shipping that takes on a specific 3D shape when cooked is one potential solution.
…
The solution: something Wang, Yao, and their co-authors term “groove-based transient morphing.” They found that stamping flat pasta sheets with different groove patterns enabled them to control the final pasta shape after cooking. According to the authors, the grooves increase how long it takes to cook that part of the pasta. So those areas expand less than the smooth areas, giving rise to many different shapes.
…The researchers were able to produce simple helical and cone shapes, as well as more complex saddles and twists (the latter achieved by introducing double-sided grooves).
The basic principle should be applicable to any material that swells when immersed in water. The researchers demonstrated as much using the same groove technique to morph silicon (PDMS) sheets into different shapes, analogous to their pasta experiments. In addition to the benefits to sustainable packaging and shipping, the authors believe this approach could be useful in soft robotics and biomedical devices….
More, including a fun video, atl. “Groove-based transient morphing” is my new favorite phrase. It seems like this has even more potential applications, but I’m not sure what exactly.
…The insurrectionist generals are a warning. If polls are prologue to next year’s presidential race, the Republic will face its real danger: Marine Le Pen.
Incidentally, I spent the early part of this week Inside the Mind of Marine Le Pen, a disturbing place to be. As always when looking at far-right ideology, I was struck by both the malignant inanity of it all and the complete lack of any positive vision for people.
Health officials are worried that pockets of the country slow to get vaccinated against Covid-19 could turn into breeding grounds for more dangerous virus variants, mimicking the experience in South Africa and Brazil.
Vaccination rates have been falling for weeks in parts of the South and mountain West, prompting the White House to rethink its vaccination strategy to reach those reluctant or unwilling to get the shots.
Nearly 45 percent of all Americans have at least one dose compared to 33 percent of Alabamans. The rates are roughly the same in Mississippi and Louisiana and only slightly better in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Tennessee and Wyoming, where hospitals are no longer overrun but case counts have plateaued. Officials say the virus remains a persistent enough threat to kill hundreds each day and potentially mutate into something that puts even vaccinated people at heightened risk.
Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday it is essential to quickly get vaccination rates to 70 percent in each community to cut chains of virus transmission, because “variants are a wildcard that could reverse this progress we have made and could set us back.”
But with doubts growing about the ability to reach the 70 percent target, the question is whether the country’s luck curbing the pandemic will hold out. Sequencing of the virus to detect mutations may be one of the best public health tools for warding off a potential disaster. But the actual sequencing being done in the U.S. is still below ideal levels, and there are no guarantees that it can provide enough early warning that the stealthy, evolving virus won’t turn into something far more dangerous.
“Every successive transmission is an opportunity for a new variant to emerge,” said Joseph Kanter, Louisiana’s state health officer. “We have been quite fortunate that the variants that have emerged remain fairly good matches to the vaccines we have. We are not guaranteed to be so fortunate in the future.”
…
“Every time there is a new variant, there is a nervous question we ask: ‘Is this the doomsday scenario?'” said Shereef Elnahal, CEO of University Hospital in Newark, N.J., and a former state health commissioner.
The U.S. to date has been fortunate that all three vaccines authorized for use appear to work relatively well against the known variants, even though the one first identified in South Africa has posed a challenge for some other shots in use elsewhere or still under development.
Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, told POLITICO Wednesday that the risk of dangerous variants may already be diminished because of the recent pace of vaccinations.
“If an overwhelming portion of the population is vaccinated, it’s unlikely you’ll see the kind of surge like we saw in January,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to get to that end game.”
The states struggling the most to vaccinate are the same ones that have a host of poor public health outcomes, particularly in rural communities. Local and state officials point to conservative-leaning populations often skeptical of government, as well as spotty health infrastructure that leaves lower-income residents struggling to access a medical provider. Mississippi state health officer Thomas Dobbs last week said many rural residents are unaccustomed to seeking care until they are sick, and that it’s going to take more than a few public service announcements to change the culture.
In Alabama, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, cases have increased slightly over the last month, concerning public health officials who fear it’s only a matter of time before a variant of concern emerges.
“It’s a very real threat,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the infectious disease division at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. “If you have a population that is not well vaccinated and you combine that with a lot of activity likely to spread the virus — where things could take off.”
The Biden administration is still grappling with how to address these pockets of the country with stubbornly high Covid caseloads and low vaccine uptake….
…
For now, though, public health officials have been reluctant to mandate the vaccine or set up any kind of government passport system to verify a person’s vaccination status. Instead, they’re stressing that the country break down vaccine resistance incrementally and not resign itself to pockets of unvaccinated Americans where Covid spreads.
“This laissez-faire attitude is not the right one,” said Oscar Alleyne, chief of programs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
In an open field outside the prairie town of Bowden, Alberta, hundreds of people braved chilly winds and the threat of spring rain to attend their first rodeo in more than a year.
For the unmasked attendees cheering on as riders clung into bucking horses, the gathering this weekend must have seemed like a long-awaited return to normality.
But the province is currently battling the worst coronavirus outbreak in North America: this week, Alberta had an active case rate of 534 per 100,000 – more than double the country’s average, and one of the worst in the world.
And the illegal “No More Lockdowns Rodeo Rally” highlighted the challenges officials face in containing a brutal third wave in a province long averse to perceived governmental overreach.
On Wednesday, the province became the first in Canada to offer the Pfizer vaccine to residents aged over 12, beginning next week, a day after premier Jason Kenney announced online schooling, increased fines for lockdown violations, and the closure of some businesses in areas with high case rates.
“We will not permit our healthcare system to be overwhelmed. We must not and we will not force our doctors and nurses to decide who gets care and who doesn’t,” Kenney said during a televised address on Tuesday.
Police are reviewing the rodeo, but local reports suggest that no officers were dispatched to break up the event, and it is unclear if any organizers or attendees had received fines for breaking the province’s rules, which limit outdoor gatherings to 10 people.
“The reason we are at this critical stage of the pandemic in Alberta, with record high daily case counts and intensive care numbers, is precisely because, for whatever reason, too many Albertans are ignoring the rules we have in place,” Kenney told reporter on Monday, adding that it was “astounding” that more than a year into the pandemic, many in the province believe the virus is a hoax or government conspiracy.
One recent poll found that 75% of Albertans believed the premier was doing a bad job of handling the pandemic – but a portion of that displeasure came from groups who feel Kenney has gone too far.
Even though the conservative leader has been wary to implement aggressive restrictions seen in other provinces Kenney has faced insurrection from within his own party, with 16 lawmakers recently publishing a letter criticizing restrictions on retail and dining.
But an unwillingness to bring in strict measures has led to a “predictable and preventable” new surge in cases, said Joe Vipond, an emergency room doctor in Calgary.
…
Even with new restrictions in place, critics worry the measures might not be enough and aggressive case growth in the coming weeks is already baked in.
“For somebody who went into medicine with a view to protecting life and health of my fellow citizens, the hardest part about this is knowing that every single illness that we see now, every single death is a preventable one,” said Vipond.
“Unless something dramatically changes with the numbers, it’s hard to imagine how we get out of this without a healthcare disaster on our hands.”
Greg Gianforte says the financial assistance program is doing more harm than good. You know, Governor, Covid isn’t over yet?
The coronavirus pandemic — heard of it? It’s famously still going on! Though national case numbers are finally starting to drop and recent regional outbreaks in the midwest have begun to subside, there were still about 50,000 new Covid-19 infections recorded in the US on Tuesday and just over 700 new virus-related deaths.
But Greg Gianforte, Montana’s governor, has other priorities: he’s been talking about a labor shortage in a cynical attempt to cut public assistance. The Republican governor released a statement on Tuesday announcing his state will stop participating in the federal program that has given unemployed workers additional unemployment payments since the start of the pandemic — in an apparent attempt to get Montanans back to work, and he plans to give those who choose to do so something he calls a return-to-work bonus.
Here’s why it won’t work:
(1) The return-to-work bonus is not a replacement for added unemployment benefits.
[… A] one-time payment of $1,200, which will only go to the first 12,500 workers to claim it — a tactic which, by the way, has huge “while supplies last!!” vibes — simply does not compare to $300 a week for the duration of the pandemic, ie, the foreseeable future.
[…]
(2) What could “labor shortage” be another term for?
[… T]here aren’t enough job openings for the number of people unemployed; even if the governor’s plan succeeds in filling those vacant positions as intended, there will still be over 10,000 people without jobs to apply for, forced to subsist on less. […]
(3) Workers also aren’t to blame for making more on unemployment than they would at their jobs.
[…]
Full-time workers earning minimum wage in Montana earn about $346 per week — far less than MIT estimates an average single Montanan needs to live. For those living with children, even the enhanced unemployment benefits wouldn’t cut it.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans have been living paycheck-to-paycheck since the pandemic hit stateside. So if I were a governor and wanted to, say, prevent an already-mounting housing crisis from mounting any further, want to give my residents enough to live on. But maybe that’s far too simple.
…Morrison’s longstanding sense of distrust – the result of some dubious contracts he signed in the 1960s – long ago calcified into a weltanschauung in which everyone was lying, with the exception of a certain Northern Irish singer. He’s sounded like a conspiracy theorist before – on 2005’s They Sold Me Out, he averred that being “sold out for a few shekels” [!!!] was “the oldest story that’s ever been told”; “brainwashed the suckers again and perpetrated the myth,” he sang on 2008’s School of Hard Knocks, “propaganda far and wide” – but on Latest Record Project Volume 1, the sheeple are truly awoken.
It’s M15 this and mind-control that, secret “meetings in the forest”, mainstream media lies and Kool Aid being drunk by the gallon. On Western Man, there’s some troubling alt-right-y stuff about how the west’s “rewards” have been “stolen” by foreigners unknown and we should be “prepared to fight”. And he’s convinced that the shadowy forces of the establishment are engaged in efforts to silence him: “You have to be careful of everything you say”, “I’m a targeted individual”. The latter seems a fairly weird claim to make in the middle of a two-hour long album released by a major label: as far as can be ascertained, Sony is a multinational conglomerate with interests in banking and insurance, rather than an anarchist collective devoted to fearlessly speaking truth to power. Clearly the shadowy forces of the establishment need to up their game a bit.
…
It’s a genuinely depressing listen, but at least there’s a kind of purpose here, even if it isn’t the purpose its creator intends. The album opens with the title track, which demands to know why people are more interested in Morrison’s work “from long ago” than what he’s doing now. Should anyone be wondering the same thing, Latest Record Project then answers said question in the most exhaustive detail imaginable.
Two British naval patrol vessels have arrived off the coast of Jersey as about 80 French boats also gathered at the port in St Helier in protest over post-Brexit rules on fishing rights.
HMS Severn and HMS Tamar were deployed a mile off the coast of Jersey while observing the French flotilla amassing at about 6am south of the Channel Island’s capital before it headed into the port just before 7am.
Downing Street said the patrol vessels, which are armed, had been sent to “monitor the situation”, but some criticised the decision as a heavy-handed reaction designed to boost the Conservatives’ credentials on the day of local elections across Britain.
French authorities also sent in patrols to monitor the situation.
…
The standoff is expected to continue throughout the morning but hopes of a breakthrough rose after Jersey’s government said the environment minister, Gregory Guida, and external affairs minister, Ian Gorst, would talk to them.
They are expected to go out on a boat to meet protest leaders at around midday but restrictions mean talks will involve shouting from one vessel to the other.
French fishers are protesting over new licences issued on Friday that restrict for the first time the number of days they can operate in shared waters.
…
The EU also backed the claims of French fishers. In a statement issued overnight, the European Commission said the conditions set on licences for fishing in the Channel Island’s waters were in breach of the trade agreement struck on Christmas Eve.
…
The mobilisation echoes the cod wars of the 1970s, when there were violent clashes on the high seas between British vessels and Icelandic fishers.
A Downing Street spokesperson said Johnson had “underlined his unwavering support for Jersey” in the crisis, describing any threat to blockade Jersey’s main entry point for vital supplies as “unjustified”.
“As a precautionary measure the UK will be sending two offshore patrol vessels to monitor the situation … They agreed the UK and Jersey governments would continue to work closely on this issue.”
Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, said he could “not believe how stupid, on every level, it is to send gunboats”….
More atl. (The article appears to have been updated several times and is kind of a mess at this point.)
The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has said the bloc is “ready to discuss” a US-backed proposal for a waiver on the patents for Covid-19 vaccines and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he was “absolutely in favour” of the plan as pressure built for a move that could boost their production and distribution around the world.
Pharmaceutical companies reacted with anger, and some countries with private astonishment, at the Joe Biden administration’s decision on Wednesday to back the temporary suspension of vaccine patent rights. One diplomat accused the US of grandstanding and coming up with crowd-pleasing simplistic solutions to long-term problems.
Von der Leyen said the EU’s vaccination effort was accelerating, with 30 Europeans vaccinated each second while it was also exporting more than 200m doses, but it was “also ready to discuss any proposals that address the crisis in an effective and pragmatic manner … That’s why we are ready to discuss how the US proposal for a waiver on intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines could help achieve that objective.”
Macron’s support for the US move marked a shift for France, which had previously argued that a patent waiver would discourage innovation. The German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said Berlin too was open to discussion.
The head of the panel reviewing the World Health’s Organization handling of the pandemic, Helen Clark, the former New Zealand prime minister, earlier called on countries that have obstructed the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines, such as the UK, Switzerland and EU states, to follow the US lead and back the initiative.
She described the Biden administration’s announcement as a game-changer and said that pharmaceutical companies that had received billions in public money now needed to spread knowledge to scale up vaccine production.
“When the US moves it is such a powerful signal,” Clark told the BBC. “One would expect the UK, the EU and Switzerland and others that have been obstructing the discussion on the waiver need to say: ‘Yes, we are prepared to negotiate’.”…
Here’s a link to the May 6 Guardian (support them if you can!) coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
France to open up Covid vaccines to all those over-50 from Monday
France will lower the age of those eligible for Covid-19 vaccines to all French people aged 50 and over from next Monday onwards, five days ahead of an initial timetable, president Emmanuel Macron has said.
Dutch researchers have trained bees, which have an unusually keen sense of smell, to identify samples infected with Covid-19, a finding they said could cut waiting times for test results to just seconds.
To train the bees, scientists in the bio-veterinary research laboratory at Wageningen University gave them sugary water as a reward after showing them samples infected with Covid-19.
They would get no reward after being shown a non-infected sample.
Having got used to the system, the bees were able to spontaneously extend their tongues to receive a reward when presented with an infected sample, said Wim van der Poel, a professor of virology who took part in the project.
The extending of the bees’ straw-like tongues to drink is confirmation of a positive coronavirus test result, according to the researchers.
It can take hours or days to get a Covid-19 test result, but the response from the bees is immediate.
The method is also cheap, potentially making it useful for countries where tests are scarce, they said.
Rachel Maddow looks at what is happening with the pro-Trump ballot-examining spectacle in Maricopa County, Arizona that state senate Republicans are calling an “audit,” where observers are reportedly not allowed to share their observations, and a special (?) camera is being used on ballots to look for traces of bamboo to confirm a theory that 40,000 fake ballots were flown in from China.
Video atl.
blfsays
@73, Great, murder hornets and now covid bees! </snark>
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday morning signed into law a controversial voting bill aimed at curbing access to mail-in voting in the state, joining a host of other GOP-led states pushing new limits in connection with former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
In signing the bill during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” the Florida Republican highlighted provisions of the bill including stricter voter ID requirements for voting by mail, creating limits on who can pick up and return a voter’s ballot, and banning private funding for elections.
…
Local media outlets told CNN that they were not allowed to go inside the morning signing event and that it was a Fox News exclusive.
Some of the restrictions created by the bill, Senate Bill 90, also include expanding partisan observation power during ballot tabulation and creating additional restrictions for drop box use.
The new Florida voting law faces immediate legal challenges.
A coalition that includes the League of Women Voters of Florida and the Black Voters Matter Fund announced it had filed a lawsuit within minutes of DeSantis signing the law. It challenges several provisions, including its new restrictions on ballot drop boxes and the prohibition on organizations and volunteers returning ballots on behalf of voters.
A separate lawsuit filed Thursday morning by Common Cause, Florida branches of the NAACP and a disabilities rights group describes the new law as “the latest in a long line of voter suppression laws targeting Florida’s Black voters, Latino voters, and voters with disabilities.”
Last week, after days of contentious debate and last-minute amendments bouncing between chambers, the Florida Republican-controlled state House and Senate came to an agreement and approved SB90 along party-line votes on the eve of the state’s final day of the legislative session.
The bill is part of a Republican-led effort nationwide to restrict voting access at the state level in the wake of record turnout in last November’s elections. A tally by the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found that 361 bills with provisions that restrict voting had been introduced in 47 states as of March 24.
In the past month, the effort to restrict voting has intensified as state legislatures begin to head into the final months of their respective sessions.
Democrats frequently mentioned the continued public fallout from Georgia’s recent election overhaul bill during debate on the Florida measure, which they called a “revival of Jim Crow in this state.”…
The U.S. Department of Justice expressed concern Wednesday about ballot security and potential voter intimidation arising from the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate’s unprecedented private recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County.
In a letter to GOP Senate President Karen Fann, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said the Senate’s farming out of 2.1 million ballots from the state’s most populous county to a contractor may run afoul of federal law requiring ballots to remain in the control of elections officials for 22 months.
And Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pamela S. Karlan said that the Senate contractor’s plans to directly contact voters could amount to illegal voter intimidation.
“Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” Karlan wrote. “Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future.”
Karlan wants Fann to lay out how the Senate and its contractors will ensure federal laws are followed. She pointed to news reports showing lax security at the former basketball arena where the ballots are being recounted by hand.
Fann said Senate attorneys were working on a response she promised to share when it was completed.
…
The developments come as the counting of 2.1 million ballots from the November election won by President Joe Biden are off to a slow pace. Bennett told the Associated Press Tuesday night that teams doing a hand recount of the presidential race lost by former President Donald Trump and the U.S. Senate race won by Democrat Mark Kelly has tallied less than 10% of the ballots since starting on April 23.
Bennett said it is clear the count can’t be done by the time the deal allowing the Senate to use the Coliseum ends on May 14. Several days of high school graduations are set to begin on May 15.
[…]
For all the attention around the audit, the thing that stood out to me the most when I watched it up close on Tuesday was how slow and sleepy things were. Of the 46 tables in the arena, less than half were filled with people counting. Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state who is serving as the senate’s liaison to the audit, said officials hoped to have more counters in the arena soon, but temporary workers were undergoing background checks.
Audit counters are divided into several teams and wear colored shirts to denote which they are a part of (there’s pink, blue, green, and yellow). Three members of each team are at each table and mark down what’s on the ballot as it rotates on a lazy susan around the table. The whole process isn’t quick — I timed one table counting 29 ballots in three minutes on Tuesday.
Once a batch of ballots is counted, a designated person at the table makes sure the tallies of all three counters match. The ballots then are moved over to a second station, where workers photograph them and put them through a device resembling a scanner. The purpose of this station appears to be to verify the authenticity of the ballots. It reportedly relies on dubious technology from Jovan Pulitzer, an election conspiracy-theory advocate, that purports to verify the authenticity of ballots by checking the paper folds and ink. Auditors are also reportedly looking for traces of bamboo in the ballot paper, an echo of a baseless conspiracy theory that ballots were smuggled in from Asia. Even some people helping with the audit are skeptical of Pulitzer’s technology.
“This guy is nuts,” John Brakey, an election transparency advocate who was brought in to help with the audit, told reporters on Tuesday. “He’s a fraudster … It’s ridiculous that we’re doing some of this.”
[…]
That Pulitzer nutcase has come up before — he’s the nutter other nutters (and possibly he himself?) claim invented the QR code, which he most emphatically did not: Masahiro Hara at Japanese company Denso Wave invented it. The Pulitzer Phraud was also pushing some sort of magic scanning back then (after hair furor lost).
Text quoted by SC in comment 76: “In signing the bill during an appearance on “Fox & Friends […]”
He signed the bill on Fox & Friends?! WTF?
Text quoted by SC in comment 71:
“When the US moves it is such a powerful signal,” Clark told the BBC. “One would expect the UK, the EU and Switzerland and others that have been obstructing the discussion on the waiver need to say: ‘Yes, we are prepared to negotiate’.”…
Yes! And that’s exactly why President Biden is right to have the U.S. lead this effort.
Text quoted by blf in comment 79:
“This guy is nuts,” John Brakey, an election transparency advocate who was brought in to help with the audit, told reporters on Tuesday. “He’s a fraudster … It’s ridiculous that we’re doing some of this.”
Yep. Definitely whacko. Thanks or additional information about the false “invented the QR code” claim.
Akira MacKenziesays
Yep. Definitely whacko. Thanks or additional information about the false “invented the QR code” claim.
Reminds me of Shiva Ayyadurai, the conspiracy kook who appeared on Mike Lindell’s “docu-movie” [sic] Absolute Proof. He claims that he invented email.
blfsays
@81, “Shiva Ayyadurai, the conspiracy kook […] claims that he invented email.”
Good grief. Don’t think I’ve ever heard of him before, but a quick search indicates his (possibly retracted?) claim is based on some program he allegedly wrote in the very late 1970s (1978 or 1979). Which therefore must be false, since at that very time I was using e-mail, using programmes and protocols dating back years, including e-mail sent & received over UUCP networking. (I didn’t have access to the ARPAnet — now the Internet — at the time.)
Twitter has suspended the account @DJTDesk, which had been tweeting out statements from Donald Trump, who remains banned from the social media platform.
A Twitter spokesperson told NBC News that the account violated the platform’s ban evasion policy, which prohibits accounts with the apparent intention to promote content from a suspended user.
Internet service providers funded an effort that yielded millions of fake comments supporting the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of so-called net neutrality rules in 2017, the New York attorney general said on Thursday.
Internet providers, working through a group called Broadband for America, spent $4.2 million on the project, the attorney general said. The effort generated roughly nine million comments to the agency and letters to Congress backing the rollback, almost all of which were signed by people who had never agreed to the use of their names on such comments, according to the investigation. Some of the names had instead been obtained earlier, in other marketing efforts, and were then used to submit comments, officials said. The agency approved the repeal in late 2017.
Broadband for America’s members include some of America’s most prominent internet providers, like AT&T, Comcast and Charter, as well as several trade groups representing the industry.
[…]
“Instead of actually looking for real responses from the American people, marketing companies are luring vulnerable individuals to their websites with freebies, co-opting their identities, and fabricating responses that giant corporations are then using to influence the policies and laws that govern our lives,” Letitia James, the New York attorney general, said in a statement.
[…]
The attorney general’s office said it had reached agreements with three “lead generation” services that were involved — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media, companies that gather customers for clients as part of marketing efforts. Under the agreements, the companies said they would more clearly disclose to individuals how their personal information was being used. The companies also agreed to pay over $4 million in penalties.
[…]
Ajit Pai, then the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, announced a plan to repeal the net neutrality rules in April 2017….Investigators said that Broadband for America acted to give Mr. Pai “cover” to repeal the broadband regulations.
Now that the total is below 500,000 for the first time in 14 months, it’s getting easier to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
[…] progress on weekly unemployment claims has been hit or miss in the early months of 2021, but the new report from the Labor Department represents great news. CNBC reported this morning:
The U.S. employment picture improved sharply last week, with first-time claims for unemployment insurance hitting a fresh pandemic-era low. Initial claims totaled 498,000 for the week ended March 1, against the Dow Jones estimate of 527,000.
[…] it was in March 2020 when jobless claims first spiked in response to the COVID-19 crisis, climbing to over 3 million. That weekly total soon after reached nearly 7 million as the economy cratered. For 55 consecutive weeks, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits was worse than at any time during the Great Recession.
And now, that’s no longer the case.
[…] To be sure, it’d be a mistake to see 498,000 jobless claims as good news on its own. In fact, under normal circumstances, this would be an awful total. In the early months of 2020, for example, the U.S. average on unemployment claims was roughly 211,000 — well under half of the total from today’s report.
But given what Americans have been dealing with throughout the pandemic, these new figures are worth feeling good about.
As for the politics, when President Joe Biden signed the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID relief package a couple of months ago, 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: The official tally for job creation in April will be released by the Department of Labor tomorrow. The numbers from March were heartening, and expectations are high that the April totals will be even better.
As one observer put it, “So this is what it looks like when the people in charge of ‘Obamacare’ want to enroll as many people as possible.”
Last spring, as the coronavirus crisis first started to intensify, the Trump administration considered creating a special open-enrollment period through the Affordable Care Act. […]
As Politico reported at the time, the decision appeared to be largely political: Team Trump didn’t want to turn to “Obamacare” to help people in a crisis.
That was then; this is now.
About a week after Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden signed an executive order, re-opening the healthcare.gov marketplace. The Hill reported this morning that the policy is working as intended.
The Biden administration’s special enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act has seen almost 940,000 Americans sign up for ObamaCare coverage this year. Officials released the updated numbers on Thursday showing that between Feb. 15 and April 30, nearly 940,000 people have enrolled under the extra signup period instituted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
[…] These are heartening numbers, but they actually understate the scope of the good news. As the New York Times recently noted, “The new enrollment figures cover the 36 states that use Healthcare.gov to run their health insurance marketplaces. They do not include Americans enrolling in coverage in the 14 states and District of Columbia that manage their own markets, many of which also have extended enrollment periods this year.”
What’s more, this good news coincides with the expansive new ACA benefits included in the Democrats’ COVID relief package: Some will see their premiums cut in half, while millions will see their premiums fall to literally zero, thanks entirely to the investments in the American Rescue Plan.
That’s working well, too: the Department of Health and Human Services also announced this morning that after the new ACA benefits kicked in on April 1, nearly 2 million consumers — who already had coverage — returned to the marketplace and reduced their monthly premiums.
[…] the issue is one of political will. Donald Trump and his team could’ve taken these steps more than a year ago. The options were on the table to create new open-enrollment periods, alert the public to the coverage opportunities, make premiums even more affordable, and so on.
[…] Team Biden not only created a new enrollment period, the Democratic administration also launched an “ad blitz” and forged “partnerships with community organizations and advocacy groups” on this […]
The current administration wants more Americans to get coverage they can afford, and it’s taken effective steps to make that happen. The results speak for themselves.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) this week signed into law a bill to automatically restore the voting rights of New Yorkers after they’re released from prison. It codified a policy the governor created through a 2018 executive order.
In other news, Ron DeSantis fails again, (summary of the Tampa Bay Times report if from Steve Benen):
Remember when former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg eyed paying off Floridians’ court debts so they could vote in the 2020 elections? Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) requested a criminal investigation, and the Tampa Bay Times reported yesterday, “After devoting more than 700 man hours to the case, which included reviewing 7,600 records and trying to interview more than 100 people, agents found no evidence that anyone was told to vote for a specific political party as a condition of having their outstanding court fees and fines paid off, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Wednesday. Agents didn’t find any evidence that Bloomberg had donated to the effort, either.”
The previous administration’s war on so-called “sanctuary cities” will be no more, Immigration Impact reports. Following a January order from President Joe Biden that began the process of repealing the previous president’s retaliatory policy blocking federal funds from these localities, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Attorney General Merrick Garland has issued an order that resumes such grants without impediments.
“Nearly all the courts to review the issue blocked the Trump administration’s denial of federal funds to sanctuary cities,” Immigration Impact reported. “The Trump administration appealed one of these cases to the Supreme Court. The Court later dismissed the case at the Biden administration’s request.”
When he wasn’t busy happily terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy or ordering that babies be stolen from their parents at the southern border, former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was an eager player in the previous president’s anti-immigrant agenda. That included issuing his own threats against U.S. cities, claiming that “sanctuary” policies put “the safety of their communities and their residents at risk.”
That, of course, has always been a big giant lie. “Cities that have adopted ‘sanctuary’ policies did not record an increase in crime as a result of their decision to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, according to a new Stanford University report,” The Washington Post reported last year. Just as importantly, these policies have helped keep families together, with the research showing “deportations decreased by about one-third overall in jurisdictions that adopted sanctuary policies,” that report continued. […]
The United States has enough COVID-19 vaccine to cover every person in the nation—and then some. In every state, pharmacies and clinics are offering shots on a walk-in basis, no appointment necessary. States and localities are offering everything from free beer to a $100 cash payment for those ready to take a jab. Even so, just 57% of adults have been vaccinated, and even as the availability of vaccine has been increasing, the rate of vaccination has been steadily decreasing.
[…] Nearly half of all Republicans refuse to be vaccinated. The reason behind this reason is equally clear: a steady stream of conspiracy theories and false information designed to make the vaccine seem either ineffective or downright dangerous. And no one, on any sort of media, may be more responsible for fueling vaccine aversion than Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
Carlson seems to be feeling out the edges of the First Amendment each day, testing, probing, and practically daring anyone to do anything about it. In a way, Carlson is conducting an experiment, or challenge, like a diver plunging ever deeper into the sea without an oxygen tank. Only Carlson isn’t putting his own life at risk, or even his career—the Fox lawyers are surely standing by with stacks of paper and suitcases of money.
No. It’s everyone else’s life that Carlson is endangering. And on Wednesday evening, he plunged to new depths.
On his Wednesday program, Carlson again used his platform to push a variety of half truths and full bore lies concerning the vaccines. That included a statement that “3,362 people have died after getting the COVID vaccine in the United States.” He then extends this to “almost four thousand” after speculating over another 300-odd deaths not originally included. Carlson then helpfully breaks this down to “30 people a day” and then claims that the “actual number is almost certainly higher than that, perhaps vastly higher.”
Of course, over 146 million people in the United States have gotten at least one shot, and over 106 million have been fully vaccinated. That last number includes more than 38 million people over the age of 65. In the United States, an average of 2.9 million people die each year—a mortality rate of 869.7 deaths per 100,000 people. Given that number, 1,269,762 people who have received the vaccine would be expected to die within a year of that vaccination for reasons that have nothing to do with the vaccine. So the number of vaccine recipients dying each day really should be “vastly higher” than 30. It should be more like 3,480. Because people die.
[…] If Carlson left his statement there, it would be simply incredibly deceptive. […] But Carlson didn’t stop there.
After referencing an unconnected paper on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)—the apparent source of Carlson’s deceptive statistics—Carlson shows that, having been utterly disingenuous in one direction, he can pivot into being just as misleading in another. After popping off his “30 deaths a day” value, Carlson suggests that VAERS catches only 1% of vaccine events. Then … “So what is the real number of people who have been killed or injured by the vaccine? Well, we don’t know that number, nobody does, and we’re not going to speculate about it on this show.”
[…] Carlson never directly says that the vaccine is causing thousands of deaths a day. He just does everything he possibly can to plant that impression in the minds of his viewers.
[…] He’s scripting up statements that scare the crap out of people, and doing it in a way that is designed to leave him an easy retreat if a lawsuit or angry prosecutor should happen his way. This is a game he’s playing, one that’s utterly dependent on the broad protections of the First Amendment and the cushy depth of Fox’s legal team. […]
In a nation where 100% of adults could be vaccinated and COVID-19 could genuinely be brought under control, over 46,000 people tested positive on Wednesday and 740 died—on top of the 3,400 who would have died normally. That’s the cost of the fun Carlson is having. […]
An officer who suffered a heart attack and concussion after being assaulted by a pro-Trump mob during the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection has written a letter to Congress describing his ongoing trauma. In his letter, shared Wednesday, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan police officer Michael Fanone urged officials to not only “fully recognize” the bravery of officers working that day but called those who downplayed the failed coup “disgraceful.”
“In many ways I still live my life as if it is January 7, 2021,” Fanone said in a letter obtained first by CBS News. “I struggle daily with the emotional anxiety of having survived such a traumatic event but I also struggle with the anxiety of hearing those who continue to downplay the events of that day and those who would ignore them altogether with their lack of acknowledgment.”
While Fanone did not name specific officials in his letter, this isn’t the first time he has called out elected officials for downplaying the events of Jan. 6. In a tear-jerking interview with CNN on April 27, Fanone publicly spoke of his experience during the Capitol insurrection for the first time in months. Multiple Republicans including former President Donald Trump and Sen. Ron Johnson have downplayed the insurrection by using language to make the events seem less serious.
[…] In an interview regarding his letter, Fanone told CBS News he is not looking for an award but wanted to describe the attack and those who defended democracy to individuals including elected officials. […]
Read the entire letter below:
To all elected members of the United States Government,
My name is Michael Fanone and I have been a sworn officer with the Metropolitan Police Department for almost two decades. On January 06, 2021 I participated in the defense of the United States Capitol and as a result of my efforts was severely injured. I was pulled out into the crowd, away from my fellow officers, beaten with fists, metal objects, stripped of my issued badge, radio and ammunition magazine and electrocuted numerous times with a Taser. I am writing to you so that you may better understand my experience that day.
I am assigned to the First District’s Crime Suppression Team and while my daily responsibilities involve combating violent crime and narcotics related offenses, I, like many other officers, took it upon myself to respond to the numerous calls for help coming from my colleagues at the Capitol Complex. Upon my arrival my partner, Jimmy Albright, and I searched for an area where we could be of most assistance and eventually found our way to the West Terrace Lower Tunnel entrance to the Capitol. The fighting here was nothing short of brutal. I observed approximately thirty police officers standing shoulder-to-shoulder maybe four or five abreast using the weight of their own bodies to hold back the onslaught of violent attackers. Many of these officers were injured, bleeding and fatigued but they continued to fight.
In the midst of this fighting I observed Commander Ramey Kyle, cool calm and collected giving commands to his officers. “Hold the line.” It was the most inspirational moment of my entire life. Even as I write this it brings me to tears. I tried to render assistance to some of the injured officers asking them if they needed a break. There were no volunteers, only those that identified injured colleagues who may be in need of assistance. I have never experienced such bravery, courage and selflessness.
Since then I have struggled with many aspects of that day. As the physical injuries gradually subsided in crept the psychological trauma. In many ways I still live my life as if it is January 07, 2021. I struggle daily with the emotional anxiety of having survived such a traumatic event but I also struggle with the anxiety of hearing those who continue to downplay the events of that day and those who would ignore them altogether with their lack of acknowledgment. The indifference shown to my colleagues and I is disgraceful.
It has been 119 days since 850 Metropolitan Police (MPDC) Officers responded to the Capitol and stopped a violent insurrection from taking over the Capitol Complex saving countless Members of Congress and their staff from almost certain injury and even death. The time to fully recognize these Officers actions is NOW!
The Kushner-owned management company charged “deceptive” fees to thousands of tenants.
It’s been six years since Dionne Mont first saw her apartment at Fontana Village, a rental housing complex just east of Baltimore. She was aghast that day to find the front door coming off its hinges, the kitchen cabinet doors stuck to their frames, mouse droppings under the kitchen sink, mold in the refrigerator, the toilet barely functioning and water stains on every upstairs ceiling, among other problems. But she had already signed the lease and paid the deposit.
Mont insisted that management make repairs, but that took several months, during which time she paid her $865 monthly rent and lived elsewhere. She was hit with constant late fees and so-called “court” fees, because the management company required tenants to pay rent at a Walmart or a check-cashing outlet, and she often couldn’t get there from her job as a bus driver before the 4:30 p.m. cutoff. She moved out in 2017.
Four years later, Mont has received belated vindication: On April 29, a Maryland judge ruled that the management company, which is owned by Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm, violated state consumer laws in several areas, including by not showing tenants the actual units they were going to be assigned to prior to signing a lease, and by assessing them all manner of dubious fees. The ruling came after a 31-day hearing in which about 100 of the company’s current and former tenants, including Mont, testified.
“I feel elated,” said Mont. “People were living in inhumane conditions—deplorable conditions.”
[…] The article revealed the company’s aggressive pursuit of current and former tenants in court over unpaid rent and broken leases, even in cases where tenants were in the right, as well as the shoddy conditions of many units.
[…] In her 252-page ruling last week, which was first reported by the Baltimore Sun, Daneker determined that the company had issued a relentless barrage of questionable fees on tenants over the course of many years, including both the fees identified in the 2017 article and others as well. In more than 15,000 instances, Westminster charged in excess of the state-maximum $25 fee to process a rental application. In more than 28,000 instances, the company also assessed a $12 “agent fee” on court filings against tenants even though it had incurred no such cost with the courts—a tactic that Daneker called “spurious” and which brought the company more than $332,000 in fees. And in more than 2,600 instances, the Kushner operation assessed $80 court fees to tenants at its two complexes within the city of Baltimore, even though the charge from the courts was only $50. “The practice of passing court costs on to tenants, in the absence of a court order,” Daneker wrote, “was deceptive.”
[…] In previous statements, the company had alleged that Frosh, a Democrat, had brought the suit for political reasons, and was singling out the company owned by the then-president’s son-in-law for a host of practices that the company said were common in the multi-housing rental industry. In her ruling, Daneker stated that she found no evidence of an “improper selective prosecution” in the suit.
[…] Despite the drawn-out process, including a three-month delay because of the pandemic, former tenants took satisfaction in the first judicial affirmation of their accounts of improper treatment. Kelly Ziegler, an orthodontic assistant, lived for two years in Highland Village, just south of Baltimore. She also didn’t get to see her unit before she moved in, in 2015, and was confronted with a litany of problems: a leak from the tub into the kitchen, a loose bedroom window that she worried her young child might fall out of, and a roach infestation so bad that she couldn’t use her stove. After some neighbor kids rolled a tire into her yard to use as a swing, she was fined $250 with no warning. “They did a lot of petty stuff,” she said.
But when she asked to break her lease over the problems with the house, management warned her that they would take her to court. She finally got out of the lease in 2017.
[…] Kushner has of course since left the White House and moved to Florida. Ziegler now lives with her family on a dead-end street in southwest Baltimore. It’s near a high-crime strip where, not long ago, a 17-year-old friend of her daughter was fatally shot. But Ziegler is still glad to be out of Highland Village, out of Kushner’s reach.
“Thread: For six+ years I covered @EliseStefanik @RepStefanik as closely as any journalist, following her through rural Upstate #adirondack towns in #ny21, watching her build political strength, visiting her in Washington DC. Here are my takeaways….”
Interesting. “Reporting at @ncpr found however that she was eager to downplay her DC cred and her identity as a political insider. She claimed to have grown up in a rural #adirondacks community in #ny21. I couldn’t find anyone there who knew her.” Wikipedia says she was born in Albany (her parents own a plywood business) and attended a prep school there. The local Republican Party chair’s defense of her bullshit was that she “summered in Willsboro,” the small town where her parents have a vacation home.
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have hatched an agreement with the Olympics’ governing body to help vaccinate participants in the Tokyo games set for July.
Under the deal between the companies and the International Olympics Committee, they agreed to donate additional vaccine doses to ensure that those going to the games have access to them. Those shots will be separate from contracts already in place to secure doses for a country’s general populace and will be determined in coordination with individual countries’ Olympics organizations.
“We are inviting the athletes and participating delegations of the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games to lead by example and accept the vaccine where and when possible,” IOC President Thomas Bach said in a release on Thursday. “By taking the vaccine, they can send a powerful message that vaccination is not only about personal health, but also about solidarity and consideration of the wellbeing of others in their communities.” […]
Caitlyn Jenner, a Republican candidate for California governor, lamented on Wednesday that her wealthy friends were leaving the state in droves, recounting the story of one man who decided to pack up his private airplane hangar because he was tired of seeing homeless people.
The remarks from Jenner came in her first major media appearance since announcing her gubernatorial bid last month: a sit-down interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, conducted in Jenner’s own Malibu-area hangar.
“My friends are leaving California,” Jenner said. “Actually, my hangar, the guy across … he was packing up his hangar. I said, ‘Where are you going?’ And he says, ‘I’m moving to Sedona, Arizona. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t walk down the streets and see the homeless.’”
“I don’t want to leave,” Jenner added. “Either I stay and fight, or I get out of here.”
Jenner’s complaints about her friends’ exodus from California were criticized by some on social media as tone-deaf and unhelpful to her developing campaign. As of Thursday morning, “Sedona” was still trending on Twitter.
The comments also seemingly undercut Republican efforts to portray Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is facing a recall election, as an elite career politician who remains out of touch with the state’s residents amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Jenner and other Republicans have particularly sought to highlight Newsom’s attendance last November at a multi-person birthday dinner at California’s upscale French Laundry restaurant, as Newsom was urging constituents to stay home and avoid congregating in groups.
In her interview with Hannity, Jenner also offered praise for former President Donald Trump, describing him as a “disrupter” who “shook the system up” and saying she was “all for the wall” Trump pledged to construct separating the U.S. and Mexico. […]
Jenner, a socialite and reality television personality, is herself one of the most high-profile transgender Americans and a former Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete. […]
Jenner is opposed to allowing female transgender athletes to compete on all–girls school sports teams. Those transgender athletes are often children. They should not be punished.
Wonkette: “Homeless People Just Ruining California For Caitlyn Jenner’s Private-Plane-Owning Friends”
You know, when we talk about unhoused people, we’re always talking about the way not having homes affects them, or how we might be able to better help them. Few people are willing to stand up and discuss the way the existence of unhoused people hurts people who have homes — and even fewer are willing to stand up and discuss the way the existence of unhoused people hurts extremely rich people who not only have homes but who also have homes for their private planes.
Certainly, most aspiring politicians would not have the courage to say that kind of thing out loud, on television.
But not Caitlyn Jenner, the star of a long-running reality series about her very rich family, who is running for governor of California as a Republican and hoping to replace Gavin Newsom if he is recalled. Speaking last night to Sean Hannity, the gubernatorial hopeful discussed the impact of unhoused people on her very rich friends who find them aesthetically displeasing. Why must they be on the street? Why can’t they stay in their own private airplane hangers? […]
Jenner did not explain what it was she planned on doing about the homelessness problem, though given her admiration of Donald Trump, she could very well go the Giuliani route and just arrest people for not having homes.
The sight of homeless people should be upsetting. It is absolutely appalling that we live in a country where some people are Kardashians and Jenners, where some people have private planes, and other people don’t even have homes. It’s grotesque. If you are a person with a private plane, you should feel like the biggest asshole on earth walking past unhoused people. And if you move to Sedona to escape feeling that way, or because you find them aesthetically displeasing, then you are an even bigger asshole than you would be otherwise. […]
It is an established fact that the most effective (and least expensive) way to help unhoused people is to … wait for it … give them a place to live. Perhaps, instead of moving to Sedona, people who have enough money to own private planes could pool some of their meager savings and buy up some houses where these people could live. That way, they could not only avoid whatever aesthetic issues they find displeasing, but they could feel slightly less like assholes.
I have never actually seen the show, but my sister tells me that Caitlin was not always like this, and that in the first season of Keeping Up With The Kardashians she took the kids to a homeless shelter or something to help them understand that not everyone is as lucky as they are. Granted, there’s a lot that’s gross about using people’s real lives to teach your spoiled kids a lesson … but it certainly seems like a step up from “Homeless people are totally ruining the California vibe for my rich friends and now they have to move to Sedona to escape them!!”
This was not Jenner’s only mention of plane travel. Later in the interview, she criticized those who want to build a high speed railway system from LA to San Francisco, because people can just get on a plane and fly between the two cities.
That, however, would cost them upwards of $77, which is not actually something everyone can afford. Of course, it’s not surprising that Jenner is unclear on what it costs to fly commercial. Or what anything costs, really. […]
Lynna@99 quotes “[Caitlyn Jenner] criticized those who want to build a high speed railway system from LA to San Francisco, because people can just get on a plane and fly between the two cities.”
As someone who used to live in several different California locations in-between those two cities — and despite ignoring the environmental and other costs of flying — that is exceptionally offensive. One of those locations is very unlikely to be on or “conveniently” close to a high speed rail line, but all the other locations are very (in most cases, very very) likely. Living in Europe, and particularly here in France with its high-speed TGV, any (putative) flying is now limited to destinations where trains cannot go, and so on.
[…]
The top lobby group for the US wireless industry is quietly seeking to weaken proposed legislation that has been designed to protect victims of domestic violence by allowing them to remove themselves from family phone plans.
[…]
At the centre of the dispute lies an effort by members of Congress to tackle what victims’ advocates say is a major issue in helping victims leave abusive relationships: getting out of a family mobile phone plan that can give abusers, the vast majority of whom are men, a dangerous level of access to a victim’s network of support, from friends to family to their workplace.
Sources familiar with the matter say that the CTIA, a Washington-based lobby group that calls itself the “voice of America’s wireless industry” has been lobbying behind the scenes for a change in language in the proposed legislation that would protect the companies from lawsuits and enforcement by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The sources say that such a change would, in effect, make the law voluntary, because it would make it impossible for regulators to enforce the law or for the companies to be held accountable in civil litigation if they failed to comply.
[…]
The Safe Connections Act was introduced by the Democratic senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii in January. It unanimously passed the commerce committee last week, winning bipartisan support. If passed into law, the proposal would allow survivors to exit a shared family phone plan […] within 48 hours of making the request. Any children in the care of the survivor would also be removed from the contract.
[…]
It would also have cellphone companies remove domestic abuse hotlines from call and text records and provide survivors temporary access to the FCC program for discount phone service for low-income people, Lifeline.
Cornell University’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse (Ceta) has been a driving force in the legislation and researchers there said a priority is making sure the final legislation has as few hurdles as possible for survivors who don’t want to share private information with their mobile company.
[…]
As of August, at least one company charged up to $350 per line to leave the contract, according to a letter sent that month to Congress from anti-domestic violence, civil liberties and consumer privacy organizations. People seeking to exit these plans may also still be required to cover the cost of the device if it was being paid for in installments.
[…]
The domestic abuse supporters & profiteers named in the article include Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T Wireless (i.e., the usual suspects).
New York’s attorney general wrote to a federal judge on Thursday, asking to be tagged into an ongoing lawsuit against the right-wing hucksters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who allegedly sent robocalls targeting Black voters in an attempt to suppress voter turnout ahead of the 2020 election.
The lawsuit, filed in October by the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, focuses on a robocall that falsely warned thousands of recipients in several states that voting by-mail could be used against them — specifically, by sharing personal information with law enforcement pursuing old warrants, credit card companies pursuing debtors and public health officials seeking to administer “mandatory vaccines.”
“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man, stay home safe and beware of vote by mail,” said a voice on the robocall, claiming to be “Tamika Taylor from 1599 Project.”
The robocall is already at the heart of two criminal cases against the duo — in Michigan, they face felony charges of conspiracy to violate election law, among other offenses. In Ohio, they’ve separately been indicted on eight counts of telecommunications fraud and seven counts of bribery. They’ve pleaded not guilty in both cases.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, in her request to intervene in the civil suit Thursday, alleged that it specifically targeted Black voters. She cited the pair’s own communications.
“We should send it to black neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Richmond, Atlanta and Cleveland,” Wohl allegedly wrote to Burkman in an email that included the audio file for the call.
The next day, after the calls were sent to thousands of people, Burkman allegedly emailed Wohl, “i love these robo calls…getting angry black call backs…win or lose…the black robo was just a great jw idea.”
In late October, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero issued a temporary restraining order barring Wohl or Burkman from sending further such robocalls, and further ordered them to send a corrective call with the following script:
“At the direction of a United States district court, this call is intended to inform you that a federal court has found that the message you previously received regarding mail-in voting from Project 1599 contained false information that has had the effect of intimidating voters, and thus interfering with the upcoming presidential election, in violation of federal voting-rights laws.”
“Wohl and Burkman used misinformation to try to disenfranchise Black communities ahead of the election, in a clear attempt to sway the election in the favor of their preferred presidential candidate,” James said in a statement Thursday.
[…] James proposed complaint also targets a telecom provider, Message Communications, Inc., and its owner Robert Mahanian, who Burkman and Wohl allegedly hired to send their robocall across the country. The call, according to the New York attorney general’s office, was sent to 85,000 phone numbers nationally, including 5,500 with New York area codes.
[…] “Message Communications worked with Wohl and Burkman to target specific zip codes to maximize the threatening effects the robocall would have on Black voters in New York and other large metropolitan areas.” […]
Wohl and Burkman, working through Burkman’s lobbying firm and the purported “Project 1599” organization, “concocted a racist campaign that trafficked in stereotypes and spread lies and deception all for their shared goal of intimidating voters and depressing voter turnout to disrupt a presidential election,” the proposed complaint read.
[…] Burkman admitted during an October hearing in the civil suit that “Yes, that is our call,” the proposed New York complaint noted.
The purported voice on the other end of the robocall — “Tamika Taylor” — may have been a reference to the police killing of Breonna Taylor: Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, was often misidentified in the media as Tamika Taylor. […]
The proposed New York suit seeks permanent injunctions preventing Wohl and Burkman from further engaging in unlawful robocalls directed at voters, among other steps including a financial penalty of $500 for each violation of New York civil rights law committed against New Yorkers who received the robocall.
“among other steps including a financial penalty of $500 for each violation of New York civil rights law committed against New Yorkers who received the robocall.”
5500 NY calls mentioned, that’s $2.75 million. That’ll leave a mark, and will leave them without resources for further shenanigans. But stick their sorry asses in jail anyways. It’s the only deterrent that matters with white collar criminals and political operative wannabes.
————————————
“David M. Schwartz, an attorney for the defendants, told TPM that “This case is nothing more than a furtherance of the cancel culture movement and that only people holding a certain opinion have a right to be heard.”
“If you listen to the calls, there is nothing threatening about any of the calls,” Schwartz asserted. “We will fight this case in court and we look forward to a trial challenging all of these fictional claims.”
Yeah,…this sounds like a total trumpian “attorney” who wouldn’t be able to defend his way out a paper bag. Pro tip: any “attorney” that uses cancel culture as part of a defense, stiff them on their payment.
————————————
Hell, even James O’Keefe would be embarrassed by their ineptitude. The unzipped fly press conference was one of the high points of the MAGA era.
———————————–
My favorite Wohl/Burkman meltdown was the former Marine turned male escort they’d paid to tarnish Elizabeth Warren as one of his SMBD clients who just couldn’t keep a straight face while reading his scripted lines on the front steps of Burkman’s house.
————————————
Jesus, those emails. They may as well have written, “I’m glad we’re guilty of voter suppression, aren’t you?”
Whether or not you’re closely versed in Colorado state politics, you’ve likely heard of Colorado state Rep. Richard Holtorf. For example, while speaking to the Denver Post, Holtorf identified himself as having had a Black, gay friend in college as a defense when called out for downplaying a Black colleague’s concerns about racism at the Colorado Capitol. In February, Holtorf also told a colleague he should “let go” of his son’s murder. Disturbing no matter what, of course, but this colleague’s son, Alex Sullivan, was killed during the Aurora movie theater shooting.
As seen in a clip quickly going viral, the colleague in question—Democratic state Rep. Tom Sullivan—is unafraid to call out Holtorf’s inappropriate and offensive comments. What did Holtorf say this time? While speaking on the House floor about an amendment to a bill he proposed, Holtorf was seemingly interrupted by a colleague and said, “I’m getting there; don’t worry, Buckwheat, I’m getting there.” Perhaps picking up the absolute horror of the room, he added, “That’s an endearing term, by the way.” Then Sullivan confronted him.
Holtorf repeatedly asked Sullivan why he was “yelling” at him, in just about the most typical reaction you might imagine coming from someone who just slurred a colleague and tried to play it off as a term of endearment. Back and forths became so heated, so fast, that Democratic state Rep. Leslie Herod had to diffuse the situation after another colleague had to try and hold Holtorf back and wave him away from the mic. Unsurprisingly, the session was called into recess.
You’re probably wondering: Who was Holtorf referring to as “buckwheat”? We don’t know. What we do know, as Stephen A. Crocket Jr. pointed out at The Root, is that “white people don’t call other white people ‘Buckwheat.’” [video is available at the link]
[…] Surprising no one, when Holtorf returned to the floor, he offered a meager apology, stating, “I apologize if I’ve offended anybody in any way. It is not my intent, ladies and gentlemen. If anyone would like to talk to me afterward, I’d be more than happy to visit with them,” […]
A summary of fiascos associated with the Cyber Ninjas ballot recount in Arizona:
[…] * Observers reported that the ballot auditors were using black- and blue-ink pens on the counting floor. These are banned in real recounts, because they can obviously be used to alter ballots and change votes. Organizers had to scramble to procure the customary red pens instead.
• Both ballots and computers used in the audit procedure have been left unattended at times, raising the possibility that they could have been tampered with.
• There are no fixed procedures for doing the counting. Ballots are being evaluated according to varying standards depending on which workers are doing it and when.
• Observers have warned of a possible intermingling of counted and uncounted ballots, which could result in ballots being counted multiple times or not at all.
• Cyber Ninjas claim that their methods of counting ballots are a trade secret, and thus has refused to divulge their procedures. A judge has declared that to be absolute bullshit, in the very real and legally binding sense, and ordered them to produce it.
As a result of those court battles, we now know that while the private auditing team had no apparent standards for evaluating how the ballots should actually be counted, once they got to the actual counting part, they did spend considerable time gaming out what would be done if antifa attacked the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in an attempt to ruin their counting efforts.
[…] “somebody is going to end up in jail by the end of this, and it’s not going to be antifa.”
Actual non-seditionist authorities are, after two weeks of this bumbling, now paying close attention. The potentially criminal incompetence in how Arizona voters’ official ballots are being handled has resulted in the Arizona secretary of state, a Democrat, penning a six-page letter asking the Senate’s appointed “Audit Liaison” what they intend to do to rein in this clown show, only to be quickly rebuffed by clown management.
More ominously for the audit’s backers, the Department of Justice is now warning the Arizona Senate that its audit appears to be breaking federal laws. […] [See SC’s comment 80]
Already, then, we have at least one sure outcome of this Republican-ordered, propaganda-premised audit: These Arizona ballots will never be able to be recounted again, because chain-of-custody concerns and incompetent ballot handling has resulted in ample opportunities for just the sort of crooked ballot tampering the auditors claim they themselves are looking for. […]
In any case, this truly is a ballot “audit” unlike any government-conducted election audit in modern U.S. history. In exchange for spoiling every presidential ballot in Arizona, what crack tools are being brought to bear by the hired team now “checking” the ballots for evidence of conspiracy?
• Holding them up to UV light. This is, um, never actually done in real audits, but is ostensibly being used by this team to check for fingerprints on each ballot, with some theorists speculating that all of the ballots on which such traces of bodily fluids are not readily apparent may have been mass-produced by robot and dumped into the ballot stream “somehow.”
• Looking under microscopes to determine the manner in which they were folded, if they were folded. This one’s a stumper, but apparently hand-folded and machine folded ballots would look different, under a microscope, enabling the crack Ninja team of “whoever we could find” to sort them into human piles and robot shenanigans piles.
• Looking for bamboo fibers in the ballots.
No, really. I am not f–king making that up.
In an interview, volunteer observer John Brakey explained that one piece of equipment is meant to take high-definition images of the ballots to test for “bamboo in the paper.” This is because there is an insurrection-backing conspiracy theory that supposes “that 40,000 ballots were flown into Arizona and stuffed into the box, okay, and that it came from” Asia. Obviously, the way to test this theory is to look carefully to see if any of the ballots have “bamboo” in them. Or pandas. Or fragments of communist literature. Mostly the bamboo, though.
So after the ballots are tested for Suspicious Asian Bamboo, what tests are next? […]
The Senate Republican audit of Donald Trump’s election loss appears, literally, to be a carte blanche means of poking at the ballots to test any and all conspiracy theories any anonymous brickhead on the planet ever tweeted out in the past six months.
The premise of the audit, at least according to the Republican sedition-backers justifying it, is that if this collection of incompetent, inexperienced yahoos can find no bamboo fibers or robot sperm on the ballots even after a comprehensive regime of whatever, it will reinstall “confidence” in the election that they have lied about since last November. A more likely scenario might be that the Cyber Ninjas collection of Some Guys will file a report declaring that they still believe trickery was afoot, but the plot between Communist China and sexy robots was simply too complicated to unravel in the limited time available.
[…] The ballot free-for-all is scheduled to end on May 14, because the Veterans Memorial Coliseum has been booked next for the Phoenix Union High School District’s graduation ceremonies. […] the conspiracy team is already trying to weasel out of that deadline by proposing that, like, what if we just move the ballots into some other room so the high schoolers can graduate, then move them back. […]
The Arizona Senate will simply declare that the results are whatever they wanted them to be, much like William Barr announced that Robert Mueller’s conclusions were whatever William Barr said they were. The propaganda is the strategy; the goal is to stoke the notion that elections not won by the Republican Party are illegitimate […] It is a fascist movement; the insurrection is still going on.
[…]
The US Fish and Wildlife Service received quite a big surprise last week, when they caught a giant fish, estimated to be more than 100 years old, in the Detroit River.
The 240-pound lake sturgeon was caught by a three-person crew on 22 April, just south of Detroit near Grosse Ile. The agency described the huge fish, which measured almost 7ft long, as “a real life river monster”.
[…]
The agency said it quickly released the fish back into the river after it was weighed and measured.
Wigren recalled thinking at the time that capturing the sturgeon would result in “a real good fish story”.
“She was tired out and didn’t fight us very much,” Wigren said. “Imagine everything that fish has lived through and seen.”
[…]
Anglers can keep one sturgeon per year, but only if the fish is a certain size and is caught in a few state waters. All sturgeon caught in the Detroit River must be released.
[…]
Giant California condors are rare — but not at Cinda Mickols’ home.
More than 15 condors, an endangered bird whose population hovers at around 160 in the state and under 500 in the US, have recently taken a liking to Mickol’s house in Tehachapi […]
Mickols’ daughter, Seana Quintero, began posting photos of the rowdy guests on Twitter on Tuesday, documenting her mom’s encounters with the creatures.
[…]
On twittering, Ms Quintero observed, “Still wild to me that in my lifetime there went from being about 25 condors left alive to now almost that many descending on my moms house at once. Makes me wonder if we will start seeing more giant flocks as their numbers rise (I’ve only ever seen 3–4 by her house before)”.
I’m jealous! Some of my relatives used to live in that very area, and I never never saw a California condor. In fact, the only live one I’ve ever seen was an individual at the LA Zoo who had become habituated to humans and could never be released into the wild.
The twitterings make clear Ms Mickols is well aware they are a very endangered bird, and she will not (intentionally) harm them. Not all of the twittering commentators are so clewed-in, however…
Some journalists have postulated that Ron DeSantis signed the Florida voter-suppression bill on Fox News because he is desperate for Trump’s attention.
There’s sucking up to Donald Trump and then there’s this: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took it to the next level on Thursday morning when he not only signed a voter suppression bill inspired by Trump’s election lies, he turned the event at which he signed the bill into a Fox News exclusive. And not just Fox News—specifically Trump’s favorite show, Fox & Friends.
The signing had an audience of hundreds of supporters of DeSantis and Trump, but all the reporters other than Fox were shut out.
[…] Turning the signing into a spectacle for Fox News really shows off the partisan intent here. DeSantis has praised how well Florida’s 2020 elections were run—elections in which 40% of voters used mail ballots—yet his embrace of Trump’s election lies is so complete that he wanted to make extra certain Trump saw that Republicans in the state were pivoting their laws around those lies. And how better to make sure Trump notices something than to put it on Fox & Friends? This law is equal parts about making it more difficult for Democratic-leaning groups to vote—a longtime Republican goal—and about showing loyalty to Trump through embrace of his claims that they only reason he lost is because of a rigged election. […]
DeSantis is showing his determination to be Trump’s favorite special boy, but what does he think the endgame is? […] if Trump does run in 2024, DeSantis functionally can’t be his vice presidential pick unless one of the men changes his residency from Florida, because electors cannot vote for both a president and a vice president from their own states, and Florida’s electoral votes are kind of a big deal. Do you think Trump is going to bother changing residency for someone else’s political ambitions?
But wherever DeSantis thinks his own personal political ambitions are going, the voter suppression law he just signed is another case of Republicans going to the extreme both to rig elections in their own favor at whatever cost to representative democracy, and to show their fealty to Trump despite the electoral losses he brought to their party.
A defiant Donald J. Trump is urging his supporters to follow him on Facebook Total Landscaping, a new social network he has created.
“Facebook Total Landscaping will be the biggest social network in the world, way bigger than what that loser Zuckerberg came up with,” he said. “No one’s on Facebook.”
Trump said that his new social-media platform, which will operate out of a parking lot outside Philadelphia, will be run by his former attorney Rudolph Giuliani, “so you know it’s going to be terrific.”
“Rudy’s out buying a computer right now,” he said. “He had to replace the one that the F.B.I. took last week.”
Boasting about his social network’s explosive growth, Trump said that he had already friended Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, and was waiting to hear back on a friend request to Melania Trump.
A Utah man [Landon Kenneth Copeland] accused of assaulting police officers during the Capitol riots invited several of his MAGA friends to his Thursday court appearance—then wreaked havoc during the hearing, screaming at the judge and court officials to “come f*** with me.”
A few more disturbing details:
[…] The second he was taken off mute, Copeland began to scream, “I’m going to tell the truth.”
“I don’t like you people… you’re a robot to me… you can’t come get me if I don’t want you to… Fuck all of you… Fuck all of you,” he shouted during his tirade, at which point a judge put him in a separate Zoom room so that he could no longer interrupt the proceeding. “I wanna talk in open court you mother fuckers!”
Earlier in the hearing, Copeland also told a court clerk, “You are evil!” and asked, “At what point am I a free individual versus a pre-trial confinement individual?” “Is any of this negotiable? I used to be a free man…until you locked me up,” Copeland insisted. […]
When federal authorities interviewed Copeland on Feb. 11, he admitted he went to a rally in D.C. to support President Donald Trump—and that he fought with officers outside the Capitol.
Copeland then allegedly insisted that he felt “police officers were trying to ‘penetrate the line’ of the protesters and ‘steal’ individual members of the crowd, including one person who Copeland described as having been shot in the face by an officer.” Copeland, who insisted he did not enter the Capitol, was seemingly referring to Ashli Babbitt, one of the five individuals who died as a result of the siege.]
[…] “I guess peacefully protesting at the Capitol is now illegal and they are trying to hunt us all down to try and teach us a lesson. Unfortunately, only one option remains when we return. We bring guns and take the Capitol building without intention of being peaceful. This ends with the government bombing their own people. I had hopes it wouldn’t. But here we are.”
About 54 percent of schools that serve the nation’s kindergarten through eighth grades have reopened, according to an Education Department survey, fulfilling a promise that President Biden made to reopen more than half of schools within 100 days.
At least 25 people have been killed after heavily armed police stormed one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas in pursuit of drug traffickers, in what was the deadliest raid in the city’s history.
About 200 members of Rio’s civil police launched their incursion into Jacarezinho in the early hours of Thursday, sprinting into the vast redbrick community as a bullet-proof helicopter circled overhead with snipers poised on each side. By lunchtime at least 25 people were reported dead, among them André Frias, a drug squad officer who was shot in the head. Police and local media described the other victims as “suspects” but offered no immediate evidence for that claim.
Photographs and videos taken by residents and shared with the Guardian showed bloodied corpses splayed out in the favela’s narrow alleyways and beside the heavily polluted river from which Jacarezinho takes its name. The lifeless body of one young man had been propped up on a purple plastic garden chair, with one finger placed inside his mouth.
Police officials and their cheerleaders in Rio’s tabloid press celebrated the mission as an essential attack on the drug gangs who have for decades used the favelas as their bases. “It would be great if the police could launch two operations like this every day to free Rio de Janeiro from the traffickers, or at least reduce their power,” the host of Balanço Geral, a popular television crime show, told viewers saluting what he called the “surgical” strike.
But there was outrage from human rights activists and public security specialists as the scale of the carnage became clear.
“It’s extermination – there’s no other way to describe it,” said Pedro Paulo Santos Silva, a researcher from Rio’s Centre for Studies on Public Security and Citizenship. “This was a massacre.”
Pablo Nunes, a public security expert from the same group, said the assault had claimed more lives than one of the most notorious slaughters in Rio’s history: the 1993 Vigário Geral massacre in which 21 people were shot dead when police rampaged through a favela just north of Jacarezinho. “It is unbelievable, despicable,” said Nunes.
Joel Luiz Costa, a Jacarezinho-born lawyer and activist, said that in more than three decades in the favela he had never seen such bloodshed. “It was a complete slaughter,” said Costa, who shared disturbing images of the aftermath on social media. “Today was frightening even for those of us who work with public security … The only conclusion you can draw is that in the favelas there is no democracy.”
…
Located in north Rio, a 20-minute drive from Ipanema beach, Jacarezinho is home to tens of thousands of working-class Brazilians and has long been a bastion of one of Brazil’s most important criminal organizations, the Red Command.
Rio’s decades-long war on drugs – which has intensified since the mid-1980s and claims thousands of lives each year – has done nothing to change that reality, with Jacarezinho’s streets policed by the gang’s rifle-toting gunmen and barricaded with concrete blocks and barricades improvised from train tracks.
Thursday’s raid, which police said was to prevent children and teenagers being lured into crime, took place despite a supreme court order last June outlawing such incursions during the coronavirus pandemic. The number of police operations in the favelas fell dramatically after that decision but has been increasing again since last October. Recently released figures show police killed 797 people in Rio state between June last year and March, the overwhelming majority in or around the capital.
Santos Silva said his city’s war on drugs was effective when it came to killing but did nothing to protect citizens or reduce crime. “It’s repugnant,” he said of the photographs showing Jacarezinho’s streets littered with dead bodies.
“Irrespective of whether they were ‘traffickers’ or residents, these are lives, these are bodies – somebody’s child, somebody’s brother,” Santos Silva added. “There’s no way of looking at these photos and not wanting to cry over just how sick our society i[s].”
Here’s a link to the May 7 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
WHO warns of new Covid wave in Africa
The World Health Organization on Thursday warned of a new wave of Covid-19 infections in Africa due to delayed vaccine supplies, a slow rollout and new variants, AFP reports.
The African bureau of the UN agency said the continent had to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of vaccine rollouts.
“The delay in the delivery of vaccine doses from the Serum Institute of India earmarked for Africa, the delay in the deployment of vaccines and the emergence of new variants means that the risk of a new wave of infections remains very high in Africa,” it said in a statement.
It added that new variants such as the ones that emerged in India and South Africa could unleash a “third wave” on the continent.
…
Africa now accounts for only one percent of vaccine doses administered globally, the WHO said – down from two percent a few weeks ago, as other regions’ rollouts are progressing much faster.
The first vaccines deliveries to 41 African countries under the Covax scheme began in March but nine countries have so far administered only a quarter of the doses received, while 15 countries have used less than half of their allocations.
The vaccination rate in Africa is the world’s lowest. Globally an average of 150 vaccine doses per 1,000 people have been administered, but in sub-Saharan Africa it is hardly eight doses per 1,000, according to the WHO.
India cases rise by world record 414,188
India on Friday reported a record daily rise in coronvirus cases of 414,188, while deaths from Covid-19 swelled by 3,915, according to health ministry data.
India’s total coronavirus infections now stand at 21.49 million, while its total fatalities have reached 234,083. The South Asian nation has added 1.57 million cases and nearly 500 deaths this week alone.
US employees are concerned about safety, others have caregiving responsibilities and some are using their job loss as an opportunity to find other work
At restaurants across the country […] the same sign is popping up: “We are short staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did show up. No one wants to work anymore.”[†]
The implication is that the federal government’s expanded unemployment benefits of $300 each week are keeping people at home instead of behind cash registers and in fast food kitchens.
[… W]hat’s happening is a feature, not a bug, of the US economic system and the blame can’t entirely be placed on a $300 weekly check.
University of Pennsylvania economist, Ioana Marinescu, said: “In the absence of the benefits there would probably be a little bit more applications and hiring would be a little bit easier, but the main drive of the recent change in sentiment is that hiring is accelerating.”
[…]
If job openings accelerate faster than people apply for work, there will be pain for business owners. The pandemic has added some quirks to this economic reality.
It is true that a sliver of people would rather stay home for a few months making as much, or more, from unemployment than they would defrosting meat patties or answering phones.
But would-be employees are also concerned about safety — 46% of the population hasn’t received a single vaccine dose and the spread of Covid-19 is uncontrolled in the US. Potential employees also have caregiving responsibilities: this recession has disproportionately affected women, who largely take up these duties and in late March more than half of schools were still doing remote learning or a combination of remote and in-person classes.
[… using the time to obtain education / training / other skills…]
Unemployment benefits have also allowed out of work people to help support the economy.
University of Chicago researchers found that the unemployment expansion of $600 a week in 2020 allowed people to spend money in a way they wouldn’t without it. That means some of the same businesses complaining about hiring might not earn as much money without unemployment.
[…]
† I dithered about setting that sign in eejit quotes, but decided the request to be patient was very reasonable (albeit unfortunate it has to be said), vastly outweighing the nonsensical No one wants to work anymore assertion.
Debris from a Chinese rocket is expected to fall back to Earth in an uncontrolled re-entry this weekend.
The main segment from the Long March-5b vehicle was used to launch the first module of China’s new space station last month.
At 18 tonnes it is one of the largest items in decades to have an undirected dive into the atmosphere.
The US on Thursday said it was watching the path of the object but currently had no plans to shoot it down.
“We’re hopeful that it will land in a place where it won’t harm anyone,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said. “Hopefully in the ocean, or someplace like that.”
Various space debris modelling experts are pointing to late Saturday or early Sunday (GMT) as the likely moment of re-entry. However, such projections are always highly uncertain.
Originally injected into an elliptical orbit approximately 160km by 375km above Earth’s surface on 29 April, the Long March-5b core stage has been losing height ever since.
Just how quickly the core’s orbit will continue to decay will depend on the density of air it encounters at altitude and the amount of drag this produces. These details are poorly known.
Most of the vehicle should burn up when it makes its final plunge through the atmosphere, although there is always the possibility that metals with high melting points, and other resistant materials, could survive to the surface.
When a similar core stage returned to Earth a year ago, piping assumed to be from the rocket was identified on the ground in Ivory Coast, Africa.
The chances of anyone actually being hit by a piece of space junk are very small, not least because so much of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean, and because that part which is land includes huge areas that are uninhabited.
…
China has bridled at the suggestion that it has been negligent in allowing the uncontrolled return of so large an object. Commentary in the country’s media has described Western reports about the potential hazards involved as “hype” and predicted the debris will likely fall somewhere in international waters.
The Global Times quoted aerospace expert Song Zhongping who added that China’s space monitoring network would keep a close watch and take necessary measures should damage occur.
But the respected cataloguer of space activity, Jonathan McDowell from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, US, said the situation did reflect poorly on China.
“It is indeed seen as negligence,” he told BBC News.
“This is the second launch of this rocket; the debris in Ivory Coast last year was from the previous launch, i.e. a basically identical rocket.
“These two incidents [the one now and the Ivory Coast one] are the two largest objects deliberately left to re-enter uncontrolled since Skylab in 1979.”
Fragments of the US space station Skylab scattered across Western Australian in 1979, attracting worldwide attention.
Hugh Lewis, who models space debris at Southampton University, UK, noted that more than 60 years of spaceflight had left a large legacy of junk in orbit. The responsibility for this litter rests on several countries, but principally Russia and the US.
“It’s worth remembering that there are approximately 900 orbital rocket stages in low-Earth orbit, left behind by nearly every launch-capable nation and with a combined mass orders or magnitude greater than the one expected to re-enter the atmosphere this [weekend],” Dr Lewis posted on Twitter.
Modern practice now calls for rocket stages to be de-orbited as soon as possible after their mission….
Today was a rough, more than most. The website [N-t-r-l N-ws] called on their followers to contact me, providing contact info phones emails, comparing me to Mengele sending image after image of Nuremberg. Then Sharyl Attkisson endorsed it on her website. This was my 1st email today…
Radical right-wing pastor Shane Vaughn […], reacting to the news that Facebook’s Oversight Board had upheld the company’s decision to ban [hair furor …], actually thought the decision was a good thing, declaring that Facebook made the same mistake that Satan made when he killed Jesus Christ.
Vaughn [bleated …] it will now be up to patriots to become evangelists of the Trump revival by taking the messages Trump posts on his website and reposting them to their own social media accounts.
A Capitol defendant who bought into former President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election came down with “Foxitus” and “Foxmania” after watching too much Fox News, his attorney told a court on Thursday.
Anthony Antonio’s attorney told a D.C. magistrate judge that after Antonio was laid off because of the coronavirus pandemic last year, he spent all his time living in a home with four other individuals who watched a lot of Fox News.
“For the next approximate six months, Fox television played constantly,” lawyer Joseph Hurley said. “He became hooked with what I call ‘Foxitus’ or ‘Foxmania’ and became interested in the political aspect and started believing what was being fed to him.”
Another Capitol defendant on the Zoom hearing, Landon Copeland, soon interrupted Hurley and objected to him disparaging the former president. (Copeland continued interrupting the proceeding over the next several hours, and the judge eventually ordered a competency hearing).
Hurley, whom the Wilmington, Delaware-based News Journal described as an attorney “known for his bravado and courtroom theatrics,” said that Antonio believed he was following Trump’s orders to march on Washington and that he was taking part in what he saw as a patriotic movement to serve the United States.
…
Antonio surrendered to police in Delaware last month. He was charged with five federal crimes linked to his presence at the Jan. 6 riot: knowingly entering or remaining on restricted grounds without lawful authority, violent entry and disorderly conduct, impeding law enforcement during civil disorder, disrupting Congress and damaging government property.
In several videos, he was seen among the mob at the Lower West Terrace Entrance of the Capitol building, which “saw a tremendous amount of violent criminal activity” that day, according to an FBI affidavit.
In one video captured on a police body-worn camera, Antonio shouted at officers, “You want war? We got war. 1776 all over again.”
He wore a black tactical bulletproof vest adorned with a far-right “Three Percenter” patch, a camouflage shirt, and had a tattoo of the words “Carpe Diem” on his right wrist, the affidavit said.
Antonio is accused of climbing the scaffolding outside the Capitol, entering the building through a broken window, obtaining a riot shield and gas mask, threatening police and squirting water at Michael Fanone, the police officer who was dragged down a set of stairs by rioters and repeatedly tased and beaten.
…
In an interview with federal authorities in February, Antonio said he locked eyes with Fanone, who begged for help. He said he could see “death in the man’s eyes” and would not be able to get the image of the officer out of his head….
Countries wrestling with new coronavirus surges are trying to ensure they aren’t hit by an India-style disaster. More world cases have been reported in the past two weeks than in the entire first six months of the pandemic, the WHO director general said.
SC @113, this part of the text you quoted was one of the first things I thought of when I started reading about the raid: “Thursday’s raid, which police said was to prevent children and teenagers being lured into crime, took place despite a supreme court order last June outlawing such incursions during the coronavirus pandemic.”
Yep, looks like slaughter. Looks like no due process was observed. And it looks like a good way to spread coronavirus.
blf @120, it was also funny that the cartoon dog noted that we can all still join an insurrection after we get vaccinated and stop Covid transmission. (paraphrasing)
Whoops! Comment 124 was in reference to comment 112.
Bits and pieces of other news:
* Texas Democrats fought as long as they could, but in the early hours of this morning, Texas Republicans advanced a new voter-suppression bill. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is expected to sign it.
* In a huge surprise, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) has decided not to seek re-election this fall. It’s a rather dramatic reversal for a rising star in Democratic politics who’d already begun raising money for her campaign, including hold an event with President Biden.
* We can now add Ohio to the list of states where Republican legislators are eyeing new voting restrictions.
* Virginia Republicans are scheduled to hold their nominating convention tomorrow to choose the party’s candidates for 2021 statewide races. We may not get the results for a while.
* In Arizona, Republican Senate hopeful Jim Lamon, hoping to take on Sen. Mark Kelly (D) next year, has criticized federal COVID relief spending, despite the fact that his company received $2.6 million in relief aid last year. [hypocrite!]
* And while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is on record saying she intends to step down as Speaker at the end of the current Congress, even if Democrats are able to maintain their majority, yesterday she seemed to hedge on the question. “Well, let’s take it one step at a time,” Pelosi said during a PBS interview.
[…]
Located in a booth on Via Catania, close to Piazza Bologna in Rome, Mr Go Pizza offers up four varieties, […] each costing between €4.50 and €6. The vending machine kneads and tops the dough, a process that customers can watch through a small glass window.
It started operating on 6 April and has since sold about 900 pizzas, which are delivered in a box and with cutlery.
The concept has been met with a mix of curiosity and incredulity from Roman pizza-lovers in a city filled with street food outlets serving pizza al taglio (pizza by the slice).
[…]
Sebastiano Di Troia, who owns a pizza al taglio shop nearby, is taking the new rival in his stride. He honed his pizza-making skills at a pizza school in Rome and says his is “true Roman pizza”. The dough he uses is fermented for 72 hours, a process used in traditional pizza-making that gives the product its flavour and crunch.
“The difference is in the taste — you go and try one from the machine, and then come back here and try a real one,” said Di Troia.
There was an attempt to do just that, but by the time the Guardian returned to the Mr Go Pizza booth, the machine was not functioning properly […]
“Pizza vending machine” — three words that never go together, like “Peas are edible”. Or a candy vending machine churning out Mike Gaetz clones.
For Lindsey Graham, if Donald Trump can be used as a tool to win elections and benefit his party, nothing else matters.
One of the weirdest political relationships of the last several years is Sen. Lindsey Graham’s fidelity to Donald Trump. Part of the oddity of their connection is how difficult it would’ve been to predict.
The Republican Party, Graham said in Feb. 2016, would get “slaughtered” with Trump as the nominee. Exactly five years ago this week, the South Carolinian added, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.”
Even then, the senator’s argument was more tactical than moral. Graham believed Republicans would lose if it nominated a racist television personality, and since his party winning elections was Graham’s principal goal, he denounced the future president. Graham didn’t see Trump as disgusting; he saw Trump as dangerous to his party’s electoral prospects.
Five years later, the dynamic has largely been turned on its head — Graham effectively became Trump’s caddy for four years and positioned himself as a sycophant for a man he once labeled a “kook” — but the transactional nature of the senator’s vision remains the same. HuffPost noted overnight:
Sen. Lindsey Graham weighed in on the looming Republican purge of Rep. Liz Cheney from House leadership over her opposition to former President Donald Trump. […] But Graham wasn’t all that sympathetic to her plight.
“Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,” Graham argued during a Fox News appearance. “I’ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she’s made the determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
Holy fuck … the Republican Party is so screwed … and maybe democracy in the USA is also screwed.
[…] The senator really did set his credibility on fire. But just below the surface, the South Carolinian has been unyieldingly consistent about his principal focus: Graham’s sole interest is in seeing Republicans win elections. When Trump was seen as a likely impediment to that goal, Graham condemned him. Now that he sees Trump as useful toward achieving the goal, Graham embraces him.
Note, the senator last night didn’t suggest that Liz Cheney was wrong about Trump and the value of democracy, but instead, Graham made the case that Liz Cheney’s assessment is inconvenient in the context of the party’s electoral strategy.
It’s a vision rooted entirely in a transactional model. Period. Full stop. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes added last night, Graham’s reasoning “is independent of any moral considerations whatsoever.”
[…] as Graham told Fox News in February, “To the Republican Party, if you want to win and stop the socialist agenda, we need to work with President Trump. We can’t do it without him…. I’m into winning. And if you want to get something off your chest, fine. But I’m into winning.”
In this calculus, Trump’s corruption is irrelevant. His hostility toward democracy is irrelevant. His failures, incompetence, and inability to govern are all irrelevant. If the former president can be used as a tool to benefit his party, nothing else matters.
Also, Trump’s hand in the death of more than half a million Americans is irrelevant to Lindsey Graham.
[…] Graham’s convinced the only way to win is with the disgraced former president who lost.
Republicans keep touting the Democratic relief bill that received literally zero GOP votes. This is more than just a passing curiousity.
President Joe Biden signed the Democrats’ COVID relief package on March 11, but it was on March 10 when Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) celebrated the American Rescue Plan’s beneficial “targeted relief” for restaurants. The Mississippi Republican neglected to mention the fact that he voted against the bill that provided the relief.
He soon had plenty of company. Reps. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) and Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) took similar steps in March, touting funds for community health centers in their respective districts, overlooking the inconvenient detail that those health centers wouldn’t have received the money if they’d had their way.
Anecdotes like these — which congressional Democrats publicly predicted before the bill’s passage — keep coming up. The Associated Press ran this report yesterday alongside a perfect headline: “Republicans promote pandemic relief they voted against.”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said it pained her to vote against the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. But in the weeks that followed, the first-term Republican issued a news release celebrating more than $3.7 million from the package that went to community health centers in her district as one of her “achievements.” She said she prided herself on “bringing federal funding to the district and back into the pockets of taxpayers.” [Liar! Hypocrite!]
[…] While many Republicans have been misleading in their rhetoric, Malliotakis’ pitch is more brazen in its dishonesty.
But the larger point remains the same: Republicans, from high-profile leaders to more obscure rank-and-file members, keep touting the Democratic bill that received literally zero GOP votes.
And the more Republicans play this game, the more embarrassing headlines it generates about the GOP’s hypocrisy and willingness to try to deceive the public.
[…] Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) condemned the American Rescue Plan as “one of the worst pieces of legislation I’ve seen pass here in the time I’ve been in the Senate.” The GOP leader added that he and his party intended to spend the next several months telling the American people just what a terrible mistake the Democrats’ COVID relief package is. His House counterpart, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggested the proposal would move the United States one step closer to becoming Venezuela.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), whose predictions about the future have routinely been amusing, boasted with certainty that the COVID relief package would be “bad politics” for Democrats because of the “narratives” it would generate.
And yet, here we are: the American Relief Plan was, and is, quite popular. In fact, it’s so popular that a growing band of Republicans want to pretend they played a role in passing it — reality notwithstanding.
[…] Everything Republicans said at the time turned out to be the opposite of the truth.
So when those same GOP lawmakers make the same predictions now — voters don’t want a partisan-but-popular infrastructure bill; voters won’t tolerate a $2 trillion bill; and on and on — Democrats need to realize that Republicans were wrong about this before, so there’s no reason to see their cries as credible now.
The former president may not be in office anymore, but some Republican officials continue to carry his water.
Donald Trump’s Stormy Daniels scandal broke in earnest more than three years ago, and though it was ultimately overshadowed by the other Republican fiascos, the controversy was a doozy.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018 on Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, paying the porn star $130,000 in pre-election hush money. In exchange, Daniels agreed not to discuss her alleged extramarital affair with the future president. Cohen was later convicted and sentenced to prison for, among other things, breaking campaign finance laws. Trump, meanwhile, was referenced in the case as “Individual 1” — in effect, an unindicted co-conspirator — after Cohen identified his client as having directed him to make the illegal payment.
Trump, who was caught brazenly lying about his role in the mess, has never faced any legal consequences. As the New York Times reported, the Federal Election Commission, not surprisingly, took an interest in the scandal, but we know that the case is closed — at the insistence of Republican commissioners.
In December 2020, the F.E.C. issued an internal report from its Office of General Counsel on how to proceed in its review. The office said it had found “reason to believe” violations of campaign finance law were made “knowingly and willfully” by the Trump campaign. But the election commission — split evenly between three Republicans and three Democratic-aligned commissioners — declined to proceed in a closed-door meeting in February. Two Republican commissioners voted to dismiss the case while two Democratic commissioners voted to move forward. There was one absence and one Republican recusal.
The result of that February vote was announced yesterday.
If recent history is any guide, the former president will seize on this as proof that he’s been “fully exonerated” by the Federal Election Commission, but that’s clearly not what happened.
On the contrary, FEC officials recommended further investigation into the allegations, at which point Republican commissioners — appointed by Trump — intervened to ensure that Trump faced no consequences for his actions.
Two of the Democratic commissioners on the FEC, Shana Broussard and Ellen Weintraub, wrote in an objection, “To conclude that a payment, made 13 days before Election Day to hush up a suddenly newsworthy 10- year-old story, was not campaign-related, without so much as conducting an investigation, defies reality. But putting that aside, Cohen testified under oath that he made the payment for the principal purpose of influencing the election. This more than satisfies the Commission’s ‘reason to believe’ standard to authorize an investigation.”
For his part, Cohen told the Times, “The hush money payment was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump. Like me, Trump should have been found guilty. How the F.E.C. committee could rule any other way is confounding.”[…]
[…] the New York congresswoman [Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik] did exactly what one might expect her to do: Stefanik started making more Fox News appearances and aligning herself with Trump […]
Soon, the moderate version of Stefanik was gone, replaced with an entirely new persona — which included asking the U.S. Supreme Court to keep Trump in power despite his defeat, and voting on Jan. 6 against legitimate election results.
With [Liz] Cheney becoming a villain to her party for telling inconvenient truths, Stefanik is effectively on the campaign trail again, running for the House Republican Conference chair post. Yesterday, that included cringe-worthy nonsense.
For example, Stefanik stressed her eagerness to “work with the president” — and she was referring to Trump, not Joe Biden. She proceeded to peddle all sorts of bizarre nonsense about the 2020 election, even expressing support for the utterly bonkers “audit” in Arizona and celebrating the former president as “the strongest supporter” of the U.S. Constitution, reality notwithstanding.
[…] It’s possible that the congresswoman’s earlier moderation was a charade, and this new far-right iteration reflects her sincere beliefs. It seems more likely that she knows she’s cynically pushing absurdities, and is choosing this course anyway to get ahead.
Either way, the end result is the same.
What does it take to be a Republican leader in 2021? Elise Stefanik is answering the question in painfully embarrassing ways.
“We Build The Wall” founder Brian Kolfage declared an income of $63,574 to the IRS in 2019.
But in reality, he had hundreds of thousands of dollars pouring into a personal bank account from the GoFundMe-powered border wall project and other organizations, according to yet another federal indictment filed against Kolfage this week.
We Build the Wall’s leadership — except for Steve Bannon, who received a last-minute presidential pardon from Donald Trump — already faces federal charges in New York. (Bannon is reportedly under scrutiny from New York state authorities.)
The new indictment, from a grand jury in Northern Florida, adds even more potential prison time for Kolfage, a triple-amputee Air Force veteran who became the poster boy for the private border wall project.
The latest indictment alleges that Kolfage filed a false tax return and committed wire fraud. The allegations add to those from the New York grand jury, which charged that he and others conspired to commit wire fraud and money laundering.
According to the Florida grand jury, the deposits into Kolfage’s bank account “were obscured by passing through multiple organizations, corporations, entities, and persons.”
[…] In the New York case, Kolfage and his fellow defendants have pled not guilty. Last month, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres said she would seek a trial in the fourth calendar quarter of 2021.
Aside from allegedly scamming donors, We Build the Wall also engaged in a back-and-forth with the Trump administration over the organization’s desire to donate a border wall to the government. Kris Kobach, the group’s general counsel, even met with Mark Morgan, then the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in August 2019 […]
That November, then-Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and Border Patrol El Paso Sector Chief Gloria Chavez discussed We Build The Wall at a press conference. Kolfage’s wall in the region, Chavez said, was “very effective.”
Accusations of shady dealings against the border wall fundraising group became a meme even before the federal charges. During one fundraising push, Bannon even joked to Kolfage that the Air Force vet “took all that money from Build the Wall” and bought a boat with it.
According to the New York indictment, Kolfage actually did use part of the $350,000 he allegedly received in We Build The Wall funds for “home renovations, payments toward a boat, a luxury SUV, a golf cart, jewelry, cosmetic surgery, personal tax payments and credit card debt.”
Aside from Bannon, We Build The Wall attracted a who’s-who of the nativist, Trumpian right: Advisory board members included Erik Prince, Kobach, former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, Curt Schilling, and others. Some in the group had relationships with border vigilantes and right-wing extremists like Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.
Steve Bannon can be brought in as a witness, since his pardon eliminates any 5th Amendment defense. If he refuses to answer questions or lies, these are new crimes. (Obstruction and perjury) Indict and imprison him.
———————-
They were indicted in August 2019. Skated for two years and counting. White, connected, Privileged.
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Kolfage is doing a public service here by showing that even a very sympathetic and terribly wounded serviceman can be a greedy conman. I guess that is what happens when you hitch your star to a Trump vanity project and surround yourself with lifelong grifters. There is a part of me that has a deep sympathy for him – I am fairly certain that none of the money, toys or celebrity brought him much peace or happiness.
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In fairness after splashing on the boat and cosmetic surgery he probably didn’t have the $250,000 necessary to purchase a pardon through Roger Stone.
————————–
Trump bragged about not paying taxes: “That makes me smart.”
WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal grand jury brought civil rights charges early Friday against the four former police officers involved with the death of George Floyd: Derek Chauvin, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao.
In just four short pages, the indictment slams the ex-Minneapolis officers with three counts of depriving Floyd of his rights under color of law.
“Specifically, the defendants saw George Floyd lying on the ground in clear need of medical care, and willfully failed to aid Floyd, thereby acting with deliberate indifference to substantial risk of harm to Floyd,” the indictment states. “This offense resulted in bodily injury to, and the death of, George Floyd.”
The governmental response to the global deadly pandemic has been night and day since Joe Biden took charge in the White House, and the American people, by and large, get that. [graph available at the link]
Before Inauguration Day, American satisfaction with the pandemic response stood at a record-low 31% approve, 66% disapprove. Biden entered office immediately setting ambitious vaccination goals, while pushing through the American Rescue Plan—both factors that clearly moved public opinion in a positive direction.
While Democrats were obviously thrilled to finally have competent grownups in the White House again, people who wouldn’t be advocating the injection of Clorox to fight the virus, independents also moved into positive territory, from 29% satisfied and 68% dissatisfied, to 52% satisfaction today.
But Republicans? Why, they’ve surveyed the world-leading vaccination effort, the dramatic drop in cases and deaths, and they’ve decided that nope, they’re not happy. [graph available at the link]
Can you imagine digesting Donald Trump’s bumbling of the pandemic, literally suggesting shoving UV lights up your ass, while downplaying the carnage the pandemic was causing and flat-out admitting to lying about it … and thinking, “looks good!”
When you’re that deep into cognitive dissonance, there’s no way you’re letting a pesky election snap you out of it. You believe that yes, Trump was indeed robbed of his rightful victory, ignoring every shred of reality proving otherwise. And yes, you suddenly believe that the pandemic response is now inadequate. [graph available at the link]
A lot of people died because of Trump’s evil bumbling of the pandemic. Biden turned things around quickly, and we could see even lower numbers if his cultists would take the f’n vaccine. But regardless, we’re finally on a path to normalcy. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
And Republicans are pissed about that.
blfsays
There’s an appalling statistic mentioned at the end, paraphrasing, “about 25% of the AZ vaccine is being wasted because people are afraid of the very rare side-effects”, Is France’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign up to scratch? (video). It’s not as exhaustive as the title implies, focusing mostly on supply problems and the notorious French vaccine hesitancy.
Footage showing the moment a woman berated a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop last month, referring to him as a “Mexican racist” and telling him he would “never be white,” is going viral.
In an edited clip of body camera footage from the stop, which has racked up over 5.7 million views on Twitter, the deputy could be seen approaching the car of the unidentified woman, whose face is blurred.
The officer, who has also not been identified, told the woman at the start of the clip that he was pulling her over for holding her phone while driving.
[…] When the deputy asked her for her driver’s license, the woman said it was at her residence, and added that she had her son in the car with her, as well.
Later in the clip, the woman asks the deputy to call his supervisor, to which he responds that he “already did.”
“And so, you’re giving me a cell phone ticket? Is that why you’re harassing me?” the woman later asks.
“It’s not harassment, I am enforcing the law, ma’am,” the officer replied.
At one point, another man in uniform appears on the footage and informs the woman the other deputy is giving her a citation for using her phone while driving.
All he needs is your signature, he’s only citing you for using your cell phone while you’re driving, that’s it,” he states.
“For him being a Mexican racist? What is that name? Gasto?” she says as she appears to sign the citation.
“You’re always going to be a Mexican. You’ll never be white, you know that right? You’ll never be white, which is what you really want to be. You want to be white,” she said. “You want to be white so bad.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, the incident took place on April 23.
After the incident, the woman reportedly filed a complaint against the officer alleging “discourtesy.”
In a tweet earlier this week, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva commended how the deputy responded during the stop.
“This Deputy exemplifies the core values of our Department, his demeanor during this traffic stop is just an example of professionalism and patience our @LASDHQ Deputies have,” he said. […]
A federal grand jury has indicted Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers on charges of violating George Floyd’s civil rights during the arrest that led to his death last year, according to the indictment unsealed Friday.
ABC 15 News in Arizona:
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has assigned protection to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs after death threats amid the latest election audit.
In other news that is awful:
Having a conversation with a child following a traumatic event is paramount in maintaining mental health.
But how do you broach that subject? How do you handle talking to your child about events like Thursday morning’s school shooting at Rigby Middle School? How do you handle that conversation once it is initiated?
This school shooting in Idaho was not far from where I live. My nephew and his daughter are the people in the photo. “Mental health counselors offers insight for handling grief, emotions of children following school shooting.” Link. Our whole extended family feels terrified.
If Florida won’t allow Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings to require proof of COVID-19 vaccination for passengers and crew, the company’s CEO says it will take its ships elsewhere.
CEO Frank Del Rio made the threat during an earnings call Thursday, just days after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill passed by the Republican-controlled state Legislature that bans businesses, schools and government entities in Florida from asking anyone to provide proof of a COVID-19 vaccination.
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings is the world’s third largest cruise company, parent to cruise brands Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas. Miami-Dade County spent $263 million building a terminal for Norwegian at PortMiami that finished construction last year.
[…] On Fox News’ Laura Ingraham show on April 29 shortly after legislators passed the restriction for businesses, schools and government, DeSantis said, “You have a right to participate in society without them asking you to divulge this type of health information like just to go to a movie, just to go to a ball game.”
[…] The CDC has a Level 4 travel warning in place for cruise travel — the agency’s highest — citing the increased risk of getting COVID-19 on a cruise ship. […]
Team Trump pioneered the practice of raising money through pre-checked boxes and recurring contributions. The FEC is unanimous in calling for a ban.
Members of the Federal Election Commission tend not to agree on much. The nation’s top watchdog agency for election laws is divided evenly between Democratic and Republican members, and since they tend to vote along party lines, the FEC routinely deadlocks on important issues.
Indeed, we learned this week that FEC officials recommended further investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged campaign-finance misdeeds, but nothing happened because of the stalemate between the divided commissioners.
With this context in mind, it was striking to see FEC members vote unanimously on an increasingly important issue. The New York Times reported:
The Federal Election Commission voted unanimously on Thursday to recommend that Congress ban political campaigns from guiding donors by default into recurring contributions through prechecked boxes, a month after a New York Times investigation showed that former President Donald J. Trump’s political operation had steered huge numbers of unwitting supporters into repeated donations through that tactic.
[…] the New York Times first reported last month on Trump’s 2020 political operation and the brazenly underhanded tactics it employed to swindle its unsuspecting donors. […] the tactics and the scope of the scam were breathtaking.
[…] Team Trump set up a default system for online donors: by adding easily overlooked pre-checked boxes and opaque fine print, the then-president’s operation was able to fleece unsuspecting donors for months. Not surprisingly, banks and credit card companies were soon inundated “with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.” Some donors even canceled their cards just to make the recurring payments to Trump stop.
[Trump] was effectively fleecing his own supporters […]
The original article added that the tools Team Trump relied on are being “exported … across the Republican Party, presaging a new normal for G.O.P. campaigns.” […] the National Republican Congressional Committee was relying on similar tactics, “deploying a prechecked box to enroll donors into repeating monthly donations — and using ominous language to warn them of the consequences if they opt out.” […]
[…] What made Trump’s and his party’s tactics unusual was the predatory nature of their tactics. The specific tool may be relatively common, but Republicans’ efforts to hide and intimidate stood out […]
The National Republican Congressional Committee’s donation page read last month, for example, “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems. CHECK this box and we can win back the House and get Trump to run in 2024.” All of that text is bolded. Below it, in text that isn’t bold, the box added, “Make this a monthly recurring donation.”
The appeal came on the heels of a different recent NRCC fundraising pitch with a similar pre-checked yellow box. “If you want Trump to run for President in 2024, check this box,” it read. “If we flip 5 seats and the House RED, Trump says he’ll run. Uncheck this box, we lose.”
Trump didn’t actually say this, of course. The National Republican Congressional Committee simply wanted to separate its supporters from their money. […]
For some conservatives, the White House National Day of Prayer proclamation lacked specific spiritual language the right wanted to hear.
As “holidays” go, the official National Day of Prayer is probably a little obscure for much of the public. […] Congress established an annual prayer day in 1952, and in 1988, lawmakers agreed to set the date for the occasion as the first Thursday in May.
[…] according to federal law, the National Day of Prayer in the United States was yesterday.
For now, let’s put aside the constitutional incongruity of a secular government having a state-sanctioned day in which elected leaders encourage Americans to honor prayer. Instead, what was of particular interest this year was President Joe Biden’s proclamation recognizing the 2021 National Day of Prayer.
At first blush, the Democrat — the nation’s second Roman Catholic president, and a regular church-goer — issued a straightforward proclamation that reads the way one might expect it to read:
“Throughout our history, Americans of many religions and belief systems have turned to prayer for strength, hope, and guidance. Prayer has nourished countless souls and powered moral movements — including essential fights against racial injustice, child labor, and infringement on the rights of disabled Americans. Prayer is also a daily practice for many, whether it is to ask for help or strength, or to give thanks over blessings bestowed.”
From there, Biden’s statement explained that our First Amendment protections, including religious liberty, “have helped us to create and sustain a Nation of remarkable religious vitality and diversity across the generations.”
The declaration went to recognize the nation’s ongoing crises and the fact people of faith “can call upon the power of prayer to provide hope and uplift us for the work ahead.” It then quoted the late-Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who said, “Nothing can stop the power of a committed and determined people to make a difference in our society. Why? Because human beings are the most dynamic link to the divine on this planet.”
It concluded with an inclusive and optimistic message that was entirely in line with Biden’s larger vision:
“On this National Day of Prayer, we unite with purpose and resolve, and recommit ourselves to the core freedoms that helped define and guide our Nation from its earliest days. We celebrate our incredible good fortune that, as Americans, we can exercise our convictions freely — no matter our faith or beliefs. Let us find in our prayers, however they are delivered, the determination to overcome adversity, rise above our differences, and come together as one Nation to meet this moment in history.”
So why am I mentioning all of this? Because it turns out that quite a few folks on the right found the president’s declaration outrageous.
[…] The Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody, for example, slammed Biden’s proclamation as “pathetic” because it referenced climate change and racial justice, but didn’t explicitly use the word “God.”
Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer for Team Trump, added, “Joe Biden’s Godless Prayer Proclamation: no mention of God or even a Bible quote! Instead we get a quote from John Lewis and a proclamation invoking climate change. It looks like a DNC Memo!”
For his part, Franklin Graham wrote, “Why would President Biden omit God? … That speaks volumes doesn’t it? It is hard to believe we have come this far. Omitting God is a dangerous thing.”
[…] Though I don’t imagine these Biden critics intended to make such a point, their criticisms help reinforce why the National Day of Prayer is itself so dubious. For the faithful, every day is a day of prayer, and faith communities don’t need a government or a president to promote prayer’s importance.
In fact, when government tries to intervene, even delicately, it leads to the kind of public pushback the White House is receiving from the likes of Graham, Ellis, and Brody, who are apparently disgusted that their spiritual beliefs weren’t endorsed by the government in a way they found satisfying.
It’s possible that next year, Biden and his team will accommodate such criticisms by including direct “God” references, though that could lead to related criticisms from polytheists, pantheists, or atheists who might expect the White House to endorse their beliefs, too. […]
One possible solution to such thorny theological issues is for the government to stay out of the religion-promotion business altogether.
On Jan. 6, in the hours just before insurgents overran the Capitol, Republican Rep. Mo Brooks stood on the “Stop the Steal” stage and delivered a message designed to set the stakes for the already riled-up crowd.
“I’ve got a message that I need you to take to your heart and take back home and along the way, stop at the Capitol,” said Brooks. “Today, Republican senators and congressmen will either vote to turn America into a godless, amoral, dictatorial, oppressed and socialist nation on the decline, or they will join us and they will fight and vote against voter fraud and election theft and vote for keeping America great.” And in case that invitation to “stop at the Capitol” was too subtle, Brooks made his intentions absolutely clear.
“Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” said Brooks. “Our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives to give us, their descendants, an America that is the greatest nation in world history. So I have a question for you. Are you willing to do the same?” Brooks then repeatedly shouted at the crowd, “Will you fight for America?” before saying, “We, American patriots are going to come right at them!”
In March, Brooks kicked off his campaign for senator in Alabama, with the goal of filling the seat left by retiring Senator Richard Shelby. As CNN noted at the time, Brooks has placed his support for the Big Lie and that speech on Jan. 6 right at the center of his campaign. Brooks is literally running on his support for the insurgency.
But when it comes to facing a court case based on charges of incitement, Brooks is running away.
As Axios reported on March 5, Rep. Eric Swalwell filed suit in U.S. District Court citing both Brooks and Donald Trump as being “responsible for the injury and destruction” of the Jan. 6 attack. That lawsuit states that the deadly attack on the Capitol, including the attempt to kidnap and execute members of Congress, came “As a direct and foreseeable consequence of the Defendants’ false and incendiary allegations of fraud and theft, and in direct response to the Defendants’ express calls for violence at the rally.”
More than a month later, Swalwell says Brooks is continuing to dodge process servers and refusing to be served with the lawsuit. Others charges in the suit, including Trump, have waived service—meaning that the case can proceed to court—but Brooks remains as a lone holdout. He has neither waived service, nor acknowledged the paperwork that has been delivered to his office.
[…] On Jan. 6, Brooks put out a brief statement that he “always condemns violence.” However, he followed this almost immediately with a tweet insisting that the cause of violence was not the people he had just told to “kick ass” and “come right at them” in an effort to save the nation. Instead, wrote Brooks, the assault was conducted by “fascist ANTIFA”—a term that may set the record for cognitive dissonance.
Brooks has continued to repeat claims that antifa was behind the attack. However, in his campaign he has also highlighted scenes of the Jan. 6 rally and stated that on that day, “I did my duty for my country.” The level of ridiculous self-contradictory elements in Brooks’ statements may seem obvious, but then he is running as the most MAGA of a number of MAGA candidates vying for Shelby’s spot. Being ridiculous is part of the job description.
[…] Brooks previously ran for the Senate in 2017 in the hopes of capturing the seat that once belonged to Jeff Sessions. He enjoyed the support of Trump along with Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. He came in third in the Republican primary.
On Friday, the White House press briefing included the conspiracy-addled jumble of thoughts from right-wing Newsmax reporter (big question mark if she can be called a reporter) Emerald Robinson. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki does charity work every briefing by allowing right-wing outlets a chance to ask what passes for “questions” about made up right-wing things at virtually every press conference. Newsmax and Fox News and other organizations overselling the word “news” in their name will frequently raise their hand and then attempt to ask what passes for gotcha journalism in the conservative blogosphere.
This means creating false narratives filled with strawman arguments and made up facts, that like the twice impeached former president are always prefaced with phrases like, “Some people are saying,” or “Lots of people are saying,” or some other such construction of a fake audience wondering about things most people are not wondering about. An example would be today, when Psaki called on Robinson, who proceeded to just babble on endlessly from one conspiracy theory to another. But Psaki isn’t a two-bit confidence shill like the previous administration’s merry-go-round clown parade cast of press secretaries, and she isn’t having any of this. […]
EMERALD ROBINSON: Given the number of former Obama administration officials that are now in this Biden administration, and the president’s relatively light schedule, there’s a growing perception that this is really just the third term of President Obama. What do you say to people who say that?
It’s like watching a pre-school kid trying to retell you a knock knock joke […] Psaki matches Robinson’s question by being as serious as she can be […] by asking Robinson, “Who is saying that?” Robinson responds with, “You hear that a lot in the media,” which is interesting as no one around these here parts has heard this thing that Robinson’s media is saying.
Psaki then asks Robinson, “Who in the media?” to which Emerald Robinson, a grown adult person, literally says, “Different people.” It not only reads like a bad high school movie, it plays out like a truly terrible one. Psaki just lets Robinson try to explain herself, offering her a chance to dig her grave of ignorance and petty ambition deeper and deeper.
Robinson, unable to give the names […] attempts asking a question that implies Vice President Kamala Harris did all of the heavy lifting when Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga came to town. Psaki reminds Robinson that she can’t react to imaginary people who are saying imaginary things, but if Robinson ever runs into these people, she can remind them President Biden met with Prime Minister Suga, had a meal with Prime Minister Suga, held a long press conference with Prime Minister Suga. […]
Robinson has zero at this point and attempts to say that Harris has more responsibilities than any other previous vice president. It’s “unprecedented,” in fact. Psaki smiles and says she would love to see the “data” on that, and would welcome it from Robinson […]
Robinson, seeing the clock begin to tick down on her relevance, goes for the big conspiracy question: Why did Dr. Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health help fund a virology lab in Wuhan, China, and where does Biden stand on the YouTube conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is a lab leak? (By the way, the conspiracy theory is not that there’s a lab leak being covered up, it’s that this lab leak is being covered up because Fauci and others have purposefully used this pandemic to turn everybody’s children into Chinese Muslim atheists who want to enslave white people. Or something in that lane.)
Psaki reiterated the White House position that they would like a full impartial investigation into the origins of the 2019 novel coronavirus, but until there is real evidence presented, investigated, and analyzed, speculating in the fashion that people like Newsmax’s Emerald Robinson was makes an ass out of you and you. Robinson, having taken up almost four minutes of time with her fact-free nonquestions, attempts to continue following up until finally Psaki semi-politely tells her, “I’m sorry, Emerald, I think you’ve had plenty of time today.”
This isn’t the first time Emerald Robinson has attempted to push the conspiracy-soaked half-meanderings of the MAGA audience […], and it likely will not be the last time. But Psaki understands that Robinson is a lightweight and seems content to just let Newsmax spin its fact-free wheels and not give any credence to their deluded world view. […]
As the paper’s head of investigations, Paul Lewis, […] puts it: “When you go to a story where there are lots of reporters, the Guardian journalists are always the most underdressed there. And the ones with beards.”
He didn’t explain if the female journalists grew their own, or used faked breads. 😉
A property owner that leases a crowded, windowless warehouse in New Jersey to private prison company CoreCivic has sued to end its contract, alleging the private prison profiteer has failed to protect immigrants detained at the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC) amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, NorthJersey.com reports.
Portview Properties says CoreCivic, which holds a federal contract to detain up to 145 people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has failed to meet basic safety standards inside, resulting in more than 50 cases of COVID-19. The report said that during one nine-day period last month, a dozen detained people tested positive.
“The company alleges that CoreCivic failed to meet the basic safety, health care, sanitation and hygiene needs of all those detained,” NorthJersey.com reports. “Furthermore, the lawsuit states, the company does not permit individuals to maintain social distancing, and that detainees sleep in dorms with 40 beds or cots in one room, clustered closely together, and must share a restroom.”
Oh, FFS. Long past time to get rid of private prisons! And think about this: taxpayer money is being used to pay CoreCivic for these inhumane actions.
[…] The allegations against CoreCivic are in no way shocking. Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, the first detained person to die from the virus while in ICE custody, had been detained at a California facility operated by CoreCivic. EDC itself made headlines in the first days of the pandemic, when a staffer went into self-quarantine after testing positive for the virus. […]
“How long has @CoreCivic ‘s ICE detention center in Elizabeth, NJ, been a problem?” tweeted reported Matt Katz. “In 1995 detainees attempted to take over the facility, making same allegations that continue today: inedible food, lack of fresh air, bugs, filth & crowded sleeping quarters.”
“Given the grave concerns expressed by those individuals who have experienced first-hand the dangerous conditions within the EDC, Plaintiff demanded assurances from Defendant that it is operating the EDC in accordance with its contractual obligation to adhere to and implement federal COVD-19 safety guidelines, regulations and requirements,” Gothamist reports, as stated in the lawsuit. “In response, Defendant offered only a naked statement that it is in compliance with its obligations under the ICE Contract.” [Bullshit]
[…] Should Portview succeed in its lawsuit, its contract with CoreCivic would be terminated more than a year early. NorthJersey.com reports the company had expressed interest in renewing its lease until 2027 (highlighting the ongoing need for the Biden administration to take steps to cancel ICE’s contracts altogether). […]
“The news of a potential possibility of closing the center came with a relief that no one would have to go through the horrible system as I did,” Okporo said in that report. “It’s coming late, but slow progress is better than no progress.”
In case you didn’t already know that Ron DeSantis is an awful […] human being, the following eye-opening revelations about the country’s foremost COVID-19 superspreader are bound to disabuse you of any notion that he’s got a soft spot […]
Seems he’s not simply awful to state employees who think COVID-19 is a serious problem that needs to be honestly confronted. […]
So this guy appears to have presidential aspirations, assuming Donald Trump realizes that he’s just a cacophonous panic yam who has no business in politics or, more likely, spontaneously sluices through a sewer grate after the vaccine he took turns him into the powerful X-Men mutant Languid Goop Puddle. (I really don’t think Trump will run again. He will, however, sop up lots of money and attention, leaving mini-Trumps like DeSantis in an indefinite holding pattern.)
In Friday’s edition of Politico’s Playbook, the curtain is pulled back a bit more on the inner workings of Team DeathSantis, and what we’re treated to is an unnerving glimpse at Prince Dick himself. The news outlet spoke with “a dozen or so” former DeSantis aides and consultants who all agreed: “DeSantis treats staff like expendable widgets.”
— A “support group” of former DeSantis staffers meets regularly to trade war stories about their hardship working for the governor. The turnover in his office and among his campaign advisers is well known among Republicans: […] he has only two staffers who started with him when he was a junior member of Congress.
— Within six months of taking office as governor in 2019, DeSantis fired five staffers. One was a 23-year-old scheduler who’d been with him since the beginning of his gubernatorial race. Shortly after she was sent packing, an unnamed member of DeSantis’ administration was quoted in a Florida blog trashing her performance. A month later, his deputy chief of staff left […]
— Another story relayed to us by five former staffers: At the beginning of his administration, DeSantis directed the Florida Republican Party leader to fire a party official who had cancer — on that person’s first week back from surgery.
[…] Politico also notes that DeSantis frequently blames staff for his own mistakes. […]
Another former staffer was particularly blunt about DeSantis: “Loyalty and trust, that is not a currency he deals in.” […]
johnson catmansays
blf @143:
He didn’t explain if the female journalists grew their own, or used faked breads. 😉
That is either a hilarious typo or an awesome use of subtle humor!
One of the largest pipelines in the U.S. was forced to halt some of its operations Friday after a crippling cyberattack on its energy infrastructure.
Colonial Pipeline, which funnels refined gasoline and jet fuel from Texas to New York, said in a statement late Friday that it was shuttering 5,500 miles of pipeline in an attempt to contain the breach.
The company has already reached out to law enforcement and tapped a third-party company to conduct an investigation into the attack, though it did not reveal who it believes is behind the breach.
“On May 7, the Colonial Pipeline Company learned it was the victim of a cybersecurity attack. In response, we proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems. Upon learning of the issue, a leading, third-party cybersecurity firm was engaged, and they have already launched an investigation into the nature and scope of this incident, which is ongoing,” the company said. […]
The attack struck a company that transports 2.5 million barrels each day, supplying fuel from the Gulf Coast to New York Harbor and many of New York’s major airports […]
[…] “He’s going to get stiffed. All right?” Cohen said, adding that Trump “does not pay legal bills.”
[…] “He doesn’t care about anyone or anything other than himself.”
The New York Times first reported this week that Giuliani’s advisers were in talks with Trump’s team and attempting to get it to use some of the funds in its $250 million campaign bank account to reimburse the attorney for his work in the multistate legal effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The requests to Trump’s team reportedly increased after FBI agents executed a search warrant on Giuliani’s apartment and office and obtained electronic devices as part of a probe into the embattled attorney’s dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs.
Reid on Friday asked Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018, if he was “surprised” that Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York City mayor, “didn’t try to get paid up front.”
“He thought Donald Trump was going to pay him $140,000 a day. He has a better chance of sling-shooting himself to the moon,” Cohen responded while laughing.
“It’s impossible. Donald Trump wouldn’t pay him two cents,” he continued. “His feeling is, it is an honor and a privilege to go to prison for him, to do his dirty work.”
Cohen, who later in the interview called Giuliani “dopey,” said he wanted to “welcome” the fellow ex-personal attorney of Trump to the “under-the-bus club.” […]
Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) on Friday argued that they were “ahead” of their Republican colleagues in an effort to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) from her role in GOP leadership. [LOL]
Cheney, the House Republican Conference chairwoman, is facing a vote next week on whether she should keep her position. The vote is shaping up to be a loyalty test to former President Trump, whom Cheney has vocally criticized.
Gaetz and Greene, who have put themselves forward as some of Trump’s most ardent defenders in Congress, spoke during an event Friday at The Villages in Florida, the first stop on their “America First Tour.”
The pair noted that they have long pressed for Cheney’s removal from her leadership post after she voted earlier this year to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 mob attack at the U.S. Capitol. […]
Wonkette: “Sovereign Citizen Streams Self Stealing Vial Of Vaccine, To Save Us All From ‘Poisoning”
Currently making the rounds of “patriot” social media is this nutso video of a Minnesota gentleman, one Thomas Humphrey, walking out of a drugstore with what appears to be a full vial of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine. He states that he’s going to have it analyzed in a lab, so everyone will know what’s really in it. […] [video is available at the link]
Nothing like recording yourself committing an act of theft!
Now, we haven’t been able to chase down a lot of information on Mr. Humphrey, except that he has apparently pulled a similar stunt at a walk-in clinic recently, too. On Tuesday, he posted a video to Facebook of his visit to “take his vaccine,” by which he meant grabbing the vial, shouting to others in the clinic that the vaccine would kill them, and then leaving in a hurry. […] An alert person on Twitter pointed out to me that the clinic seems to be in Minnesota or in Western Wisconsin, because that’s where Allina Health operates. [video available at the link]
In both instances, staff at the clinic and the drugstore appear to have called the police […]
Mr Humphrey is also a sovereign citizen, and posted video Thursday of his encounter with two incredibly patient police officers, because he doesn’t have a license plate or a driver’s license. (He explained that he cut up his driver’s license and returned it to the DMV, because he declined to enter a contract with the state.) We were impressed by the male cop, who clearly has studied up on sovereign citizen loon.
And yes, he even told the cops that any information they found about him in their system referred only to the fictional legal entity that has his name, not to him, because that person does not exist. He also warned that if they arrested him, he would have to bill the cops $1,000 a minute for the entire time they detain him. After all, he’s a private American national, and no law is binding on him except the Constitution, as he understands it.
Spoiler: They arrested him and he went to jail, briefly. Later, he posted another video proclaiming, “My kidnappers have set me free.” […]
Thank goodness, before all that happened, Humphrey got the two vials of stolen vaccine mailed off to a lab, carefully documenting part of the process on Facebook, and of course thanking God for all the help. [Facebook post is available at the link.]
Before he managed to make that contact, Humphrey posted video of himself walking into “a lab” Wednesday, though he didn’t actually have any luck getting the “poison” analyzed. No doubt because they’re all in on the plot together, you know.
Rep. Liz Cheney had been arguing for months that Republicans had to face the truth about former president Donald Trump — that he had lied about the 2020 election result and bore responsibility for the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — when the Wyoming Republican sat down at a party retreat in April to listen to a polling briefing.
The refusal to accept reality, she realized, went much deeper.
When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee rose to explain the party’s latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump’s weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump’s support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired.
Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.
Cheney was alarmed, she later told others, in part because Republican campaign officials had also left out bad Trump polling news at a March retreat for ranking committee chairs. Both instances, she concluded, demonstrated that party leadership was willing to hide information from their own members to avoid the truth about Trump and the possible damage he could do to Republican House members […]
At issue: Should the Republican Party continue to defend Trump’s actions and parrot his falsehoods, given his overwhelming support among GOP voters? Or does the party and its leaders need to directly confront the damage he has done?
[…] Cheney and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had come down on opposite sides of the divide, undermining the party’s efforts to put on a united front. Even before the riot, when McCarthy was calling on Republicans to “not back down” after the election, Cheney had quietly organized an essay by 10 former defense secretaries declaring the election results settled and warning the military not to be involved in Trump’s election protest.
She was shocked when McCarthy signed on to an amicus brief in a Texas case seeking to overturn the election, after he’d told her in a private conversation that he did not plan to, according to a person familiar with the conversation. More recently, she has sought to undermine McCarthy’s efforts to dilute the potency of a congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 riot. McCarthy wants to broaden the inquiry’s scope to include antifa and Black Lives Matter violence, as well as the slaying of a Capitol Hill police officer in April.
[…] She has been willing to sacrifice her House leadership ambitions and put at risk her reelection hopes, allies say, to try to push the party away from the former president. After McCarthy visited with Trump in January in an effort to broker a truce that he hoped could pave the way for a Republican takeover of the House — and, potentially, McCarthy’s speakership — she called McCarthy out for backing away from earlier saying the former president “bears responsibility” for the riot.
Even if she is cast out of power in the House, she has made clear that she will not stop, promising to take her argument against Trump to the campaign trail in Wyoming, where he garnered 70 percent of the vote in 2020. She has told others that blocking Trump from leading the party is a fight she sees as just beginning, no matter how Wednesday’s vote goes.
“The Republican Party is at a turning point,” Cheney wrote Wednesday in a Washington Post op-ed, “and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”
That is a remarkable statement from a Republican conference chairwoman, whose job description requires her to develop, coordinate and elevate the party’s communications strategy against Democrats, which she has continued to do at times with far less fanfare. […]
Even before the Jan. 6 riot, she had been working to stem the threat she saw in Trump.
“She called me and said, ‘You know, I’m really worried about this. What should we do?’ ” said former U.S. Ambassador Eric Edelman, who worked with her to write the essay by the former defense secretaries. “Liz was a prime mover of the whole thing, really.”
[…] The backlash to Liz Cheney’s focus on Trump has been fierce. As recently as Monday, Trump met with his advisers in Florida to discuss 2022 endorsements, according to people familiar with the meeting. One of Trump’s major priorities was to pick a single candidate from the ever-expanding ranks of Republican rivals in Wyoming who are seeking to run against her, so the anti-Cheney vote is not divided. Trump political advisers have already begun making calls to officials in Wyoming, circulating polling memos and meeting with potential candidates. Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, said knocking off Cheney was “one of the highest priorities as far as primary endorsements go.”
[…] In a Feb. 7 appearance on Fox News Sunday, she leaned into her complaints about Trump’s election denial and role in the riot, even suggesting that he should be investigated by prosecutors for the possibility that he intended to incite an attack against Vice President Pence.
“This is not something that we can simply look past, or pretend didn’t happen, or try to move on [from],” she told host Chris Wallace. “We’ve got to make sure this never happens again.” […]
She has recently told others that she believes the voters of Wyoming will ultimately reelect her, understanding that assaults on constitutional processes like elections cannot be accepted.
But even her reelection, a much lower ambition, may require a transformation in the Republican Party away from its current dependence on and adoration of Trump.
In early February, the last time Republicans gathered to determine her fate, she was the one to demand a formal vote on whether she stayed in her leadership position. She is expected to make the same demand on Wednesday, forcing her Republican colleagues to once again confront the former president’s role in a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol — at least privately.
“The choice is so clear,” said one Cheney ally. “Is it okay to be in leadership and tell the truth? That is what members are going to have to weigh in on.”
The Justice Department under […] Trump secretly obtained the phone records of three Washington Post reporters over reporting they did in the early months of the Trump administration, the Washington Post reported on Friday night.
The Post said that the Justice Department wrote in letters addressed to its reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, and former reporter Adam Entous, that they were “hereby notified that pursuant to legal process the United States Department of Justice received toll records associated with the following telephone numbers for the period from April 15, 2017 to July 31, 2017.”
The letters do not specify the purpose of the seizure which also included an effort to obtain records from work email accounts which investigators ultimately did not obtain.
The Post notes, however, that in July 2017, the reporters named had written a story that detailed discussions about the Trump campaign between then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Sessions was at the Justice Department serving as Trump’s first attorney-general when the article appeared.
[…] The high-profile seizure, which listed, work, home or cell phone numbers for the reporters, is the latest example of a controversial government practice of obtaining journalists’ records in likely efforts to identify the sources of leaks.
A department spokesman told the Post that the decision to seek a court order for the records must be approved by the attorney general came in 2020 during the Trump administration.
For the majority of 2020 that would have been Bill Barr who resigned Dec. 23.
A department spokesman, Marc Raimondi, defended that “rare” decision, in a statement to the Post, saying that the DOJ follows established procedures within its media guidelines policy when seeking legal process to obtain telephone and email records from media members “as part of a criminal investigation into unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”
“The targets of these investigations are not the news media recipients but rather those with access to the national defense information who provided it to the media and thus failed to protect it as lawfully required,” Raimondi said.
Cameron Barr, the Post’s acting executive editor said in a statement that the paper was “deeply troubled by this use of government power to seek access to the communications of journalists.”
“The Department of Justice immediately make clear its reasons for this intrusion into the activities of reporters doing their jobs, an activity protected under the First Amendment,” he said.
Americans nationwide are being vaccinated in record numbers. To date, over 100 million Americans are considered fully vaccinated with the COVID-19 vaccine. As these individuals post pictures of their vaccination cards, experts are urging them to edit out not only personal information but the batch number of their dose. This is due to the increasing number of fraudulent vaccination cards being offered online and the risk of scammers stealing one’s identity.
In a recent incident, a California bar owner was arrested after officials found he sold fake COVID-19 vaccine cards for $20 per card […] The bar owner, Todd Anderson, was arrested Tuesday after selling the counterfeit cards to undercover agents […] According to the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, at least eight cards were sold to customers from the bar, The Old Corner Saloon in Clements.
“We were able to purchase four, and then today we located 30 blank cards, laminating machines, laminate, cutters and things to manufacture the cards,” Luke Blehm, a spokesperson from the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, told the local news outlet KOVR. Investigators from the department took over after a local sheriff’s office got a tip that the fake vaccine cards were being manufactured, laminated, and sold out of the bar. They were able to buy the fake vaccine cards on multiple occasions in April, a press release said, noting that the act was “a violation of the California Penal Code.”
[…] 59-year-old Anderson was charged with falsifying a medical record, falsifying a seal, several counts of identity theft, and possession of a loaded, unregistered firearm, authorities said. Being in possession of a loaded, unregistered firearm is a felony in California, officials said.
[…] While experts have warned of the risk of fraudulent cards being distributed, Blehm noted that this criminal case may be the first of its kind. […]
Warnings of fraudulent cards come amid the announcements of easing restrictions for those who get the COVID-19 vaccine nationwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, individuals who are vaccinated no longer need to observe the most stringent COVID-19 safety regulations, including wearing a mask.
Additionally, experts believe the cards may eventually be needed for traveling and other activities, thus increasing the demand for them. The vaccination cards are provided to all those who are vaccinated and include the date and location of each shot alongside one’s personal information.
[…] those who refuse to get vaccinated are looking into fake cards. In March, the FBI issued a warning regarding this trend, noting that not only does it increase the risk of COVID-19 but it is illegal to both buy or sell the fraudulent cards, […]
“It is disheartening to have members in our community show flagrant disregard for public health in the midst of a pandemic,” San Joaquin County District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar said in the statement.
“Distributing, falsifying or purchasing fake COVID-19 vaccine cards is against the law and endangers yourself and those around you,” she continued. “The San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office is grateful for the partnership with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control for their work in this case.”
In efforts to decrease the rise in fraudulent cards, cybersecurity experts are urging individuals not to share images of their vaccination cards online. For those who want to still share their cards, experts suggest editing out not only your personal information but the batch number of your dose. For those who would like to post on social media but do not want to share their card, stickers and other graphics are also being shared to encourage others to be vaccinated without risking public safety and threats of fake cards.
The Biden administration made a splash this past week when it backed a temporary waiver of international patent protections for COVID-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The sudden announcement delighted U.S. progressives and drug pricing advocates, but roiled the pharmaceutical industry, sending stock prices tumbling.
Yet the move by administration officials was largely symbolic, and carefully worded.
Numerous hurdles need to be overcome before the intellectual property (IP) waiver can be turned into policy. And despite the immediate pushback from the pharmaceutical industry, experts are skeptical of just how big of an impact it will have on those companies.
“I think the IP issue is an important one, but I think, frankly, opening up IP is really just one part of a much larger effort,” said Tom Frieden, who was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama administration.
“It may signal to parts of the society that the government is serious about it, it may signal to industry that the government is serious about it, but it is not in itself going to make any difference in a short term in terms of vaccine access,” Frieden said.
It will be many months before the WTO even votes on the matter, and if a waiver passes it will likely be even longer before manufacturing can be scaled up to develop enough vaccines to have a meaningful impact in the global fight against the coronavirus.
[…] the head of the WTO said she would press member countries to reach an agreement on the waiver petition no later than December, setting up a vote on the final language at the body’s Dec. 3 meeting.
The lengthy timeline raises questions about the effectiveness of an IP waiver, especially since it might only be narrowly tailored for the length of the global pandemic.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai on Wednesday said she will pursue “text-based negotiations” on the WTO waiver, acknowledging that they “will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.”
[…] Negotiating an agreement could be a long and messy process.
“It’s really crucial that we begin ramping up manufacturing immediately, because we’re going to have the likelihood of big outbreaks around the world in the coming months and years,” Frieden said. “So, a multi-month negotiation is not a formula for rapid improvement in global vaccine and supply.”
In order for a waiver to pass, every country needs to agree. […] key American allies in Europe have been raising concerns, and any one of them could block the move.
“If history is any guide, you know those negotiations are long, protracted, difficult, complex,” said Josh Michaud, an associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. […]
the U.S. decision to enter the negotiation process puts pressure on other countries and the pharmaceutical industry to find a way forward. Governments might use their leverage to work with pharmaceutical companies, or move companies toward technology transfer and licensing deals. […]
Wonkette: “No, Human Traffickers Are Not Using Cheese To Kidnap People”
[…] we want you to know that if you happen to find a slice of cheese on your car, it is much more likely that you were visited by a kindly cheese fairy and not in fact being targeted as chattel for a sex trafficking ring.
Whew! Glad we cleared that one up!
But like so many other notions that once seemed too absurd for anyone to believe — like this lady’s assertions that Hillary Clinton died eight months ago from kuru, a disease associated with cannibalism — it is in fact a thing that people are saying is a thing. Go figure, right?
An article published earlier this week on IHeartRadio warned women that if they go outside and see slices of cheese on their car, they could be being targeted to be kidnapped by sex traffickers. The source of this article was a TikTok video from a girl named Mimi, who claimed that this very thing happened to her. Not the sex trafficking part. Just the cheese. But she was pretty sure some dudes in a van put the cheese on her car and totally would have trafficked her had she not called her friend to help her get the cheese off of her car.
Via IHeartRadio:
It might sound silly, but a TikTok user named Mimi is very serious about her experience. She posted a video which she said is “for all my ladies out there.” In it, Mimi explains how she came out of church on Sunday to find cheese melted on her car. Likely thinking it was just some kids’ prank, she called a friend to help scrape it off, but when her friend arrived, a white van with men in it two parking spots down from her pulled out and went to a lot across they street, where they parked so they could watch the women clean off the cheese.
Mimi said it took an hour to get rid of the mess and stated, “I personally had no idea that they were using this as a tactic to take people now and if I hadn’t called my friend, I could have easily been taken in the hour that it took me to scrape off the cheese and this happened at my church, so I can’t even imagine where they’re trying to use this on people.”
So just to recap: A couple of human traffickers were looking for adult women to kidnap, for the purpose of turning them out, so they got in their classic molester van and headed to a church parking lot early one Sunday morning, with a stack of Kraft singles. Then they watched as people came to church, set their sights on this lady and then placed two Kraft singles on her car hood hoping that when she came out, she would take the cheese off herself right there instead of doing it at home, providing them with an opportunity to steal her away.
It sounds ridiculous, but apparently enough people saw this and thought it seemed plausible for Snopes to have to write an article debunking it. As they explained, that is just not even sort of how human trafficking works and there no ongoing issues with cheese-related kidnappings that anyone has ever heard of.
The thing is, it’s pretty understandable that this woman felt scared and vulnerable. Women generally have to be on high alert. […] But coming up with outlandish “tactics” that nefarious and shadowy trafficking groups are using to abduct innocent ladies from parking lots does not actually help with anything. […]
As the Montgomery Advisor article cited in the Snopes article explains:
[E]xperts say these stories — young girls snatched from their mothers in broad daylight, stalked in crowded supermarkets and kidnapped across the U.S. border — aren’t true.
And worse, spreading them can hurt, not help, efforts to dismantle human trafficking.
Traffickers are too smart to try to snatch unwitting victims from grocery store parking lots and city parks, authorities say, despite urban legends that continue to circulate on social media. Though there are some cases of kidnapping in human trafficking operations, they are relatively rare. Some victims are coerced or forced into trafficking through familial or romantic relationships … Tuscaloosa Police Department Lt. Darren Beams said he’s encountered victims who were promised money for college from a part-time job, only to become trapped in a trafficking ring. Victims most at risk [are] those without familial or community resources to turn to, or those fearful of authorities.
The belief in freakishly competent criminal networks who lure unsuspecting churchgoing women with cheese or ship children in Wayfair cabinets or build secret tunnels underneath daycare centers for the purpose of molesting children doesn’t help anyone, least of all victims. Neither did “Stranger Danger,” which had kids and parents looking out for nefarious strangers rather than people they knew […]
So now we can clear the good name of cheese, which is delicious and not a danger to anyone who is not lactose intolerant.
Wonkette: “‘Macho Jesus’-Loving Trump Prophet Kicked Out Of Own Church For ‘Unbiblical Behavior'”
[…] The last time we encountered Jeff Jansen, he was talking about how he believed in a Big Tough Macho Jesus who went around whipping people on the regular.
Alas, it seems like his prediction on who would be getting kicked out of office was a little off — because on Friday, his church, Global Fire Ministries International sent out an email announcing that Jansen himself would be stepping down himself, due to “unbiblical behavior,” and “bad moral choices and coping mechanisms.” Taking over the ministry is his wife, Jan Jansen, who almost definitely wrote the email herself.
Well, at least the part that read “[r]ather than submit to the process of healing and restoration, Jeff recently made an intentional decision to leave his wife and family to pursue his own desires. He remains unrepentant and unremorseful”
[Full text of email is available at the link.]
[…] One would think that someone who regularly chats with God about the ins and outs of US politics would have gotten some kind of heads up that his own behavior was about to get him kicked out of his church, but apparently that never came up.
Jan Jensen also wrote another email further explaining her husband’s behavior.
Via Newsweek:
“Unfortunately, Jeff struggled for many years dealing with the stress and warfare of his travels. Being a high-level, recognized minister, this led to poor choices in coping mechanisms. I don’t believe he was strong enough to withstand what was coming at him because of his very public stand for President Trump and against the dark side. When you take a stand like that, you must have no cracks in your armor. Jeff never really humbled himself enough to get healing for his soul and seal the cracks,” she wrote.
Jan Jansen reiterated that her husband had chosen to leave her and his children to “pursue his own desires.” She wrote that it “grieves me and breaks my heart to have to announce this, and I just pray to healing over you as I say it.” She asked supporters to “pray” for her husband and said that he “will wake up and seek full restoration.”
Sure, Jan. Your husband was so distraught over left-wing blogs making fun of him and his love of Macho Jesus and Donald Trump that he was driven to leave you and do a bunch of “unbiblical behavior.” We are entirely to blame here. Surely, if no one had pointed out that Donald Trump had not been elected president again as he predicted, he would have remained completely holy. It’s hardly as if other well-known socially conservative preachers have ever done anything like this before. Except for literally every single one we have ever heard of — including Ernest Angley, the homophobic evangelical preacher known to sexually harass his male subordinates, who died on Friday at the age of 99.
Of course, if we could get a Jimmy Swaggart-style sobbing video, that would be super great, thanks.
Lynna@155, At mention of cheese trafficking, the mild deranged penguin stopped trying to trafficeat my after-dinner cheesees, and pointed put that real cheese abusers have secret caves underneath pizza parlours where they make bamboo-stuffed ballots to be added to the vaccines in your microchips. They wouldn’t be wasting the bamboo on melted cars to alert gullible eejits.
[…] State Senate President Karen Fann (R) said in a letter to the Department of Justice Friday that the door-to-door effort to interview voters as part of an audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results would not go forward after federal officials raised concerns that the canvassing could violate civil rights laws protecting against voter intimidation.
The audit has persisted amid former President Donald Trump’s ongoing promotion of the lie of a stolen election, even as county officials say the 2020 election results which favored President Joe Biden have been validated repeatedly.
The head of the department’s civil rights division, Pamela Karlan, had written to Fann on Wednesday suggesting that the recount by Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm contracted by the state Senate to conduct the recount may not comply with federal law.
In the letter Karlan cited concerns over “risk of damage or loss” to the nearly 2.1 million ballots and raised questions about Cyber Ninjas’ stated plans to “statistically identify voter registrations that did not make sense” and conduct interviews with voters by phone and “physical canvassing.”
“Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future,” Karlan wrote.
She also said similar investigation efforts around the country had “raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act.”
Cyber Ninjas had said it put together a “registration and votes cast team” which had plans to knock on doors to confirm if valid voters lived at their stated address.
According to the Arizona Republic, Doug Logan, the company’s chief executive, declined to reveal during a press conference late last month how the company had gone about selecting which voters it would investigate. […]
[…] Fann left open the possibility of canvassing at a later date but said voters would not be selected based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, gender, or party affiliation.
She also said canvassers would not carry a weapon [Say, what now!?]
“If canvassing is necessary to complete the audit, we believe these protocols, which will be reinforced by thorough training programs, would permit the Senate to discharge its legislative oversight and investigation functions without compromising the rights or privacy of any voter,” Fann wrote. [Bullshit]
While successive audits of last year’s election results have continued to show there is no evidence of widespread election fraud, the state Senate’s sweeping audit has lended legitimacy to wild conspiracy theories made by right-wing activists — to the point that auditors have employed UV search lights and have reportedly scanned ballots for flecks of bamboo fibers.
The origin of Mother’s Day as we celebrate it dates back to a woman named Anna Jarvis, in West Virginia, in 1905, who wound up fighting against the commercialization of the holiday she established. We’re here to offer you a musical alternative, or a supplement to cards and flowers on this #BlackMusicSunday. We’ll be listening to musical tributes to moms from Black artists across genres. These are songs for moms, grandmas, aunties, and godmothers too—for the moms who gave us life, and the moms who may not have birthed us but raised us.
Happy Mother’s day y’all!
I felt moved to open today with Ray Charles, whose music crossed the borders of multiple genres, from blues, to gospel, to soul, to R&B and country-western. Hearing him makes me think of my grandmother from Kansas, who was the country and gospel fan in our home.
Born on September 30, 1930 in Albany, Georgia, Charles was raised in extreme poverty in Greenville, Florida. “Even compared to other blacks, we were on the bottom of the ladder looking up at everyone else,” Charles recalled in his autobiography, Brother Ray. “Nothing below us except the ground.”
Charles persevered over the personal tragedies that marked his early life. He contracted glaucoma at age 5, lost his sight completely by age 7, and lost his parents soon thereafter. In spite of these hardships, Charles learned to read and write music in Braille, and became skilled on several musical instruments at the St. Augustine School for the Deaf and Blind. Charles later told Jet Magazine that his mother’s advice guided him through life. “You might not be able to do things like a person who can see. But there are always two ways to do everything. You’ve just got to find the other way.
Charles attributes much of what he achieved in life to the early influence of his mom, who he talked about in this interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project [Video available at the link]
[…] Here’s his song “Mother” from the album Thanks For Bringing Love Around Again, which was the last album released in his lifetime. [video is available at the link]
Much more at the link, including “La Mamma,” biographical snippets and music Kirk Franklin, songs of praise for adoptive parents, “Sadie” by the The Spinners (one of my favorites), and more.
[…] Segueing to another key Philadelphia group, one can’t forget the importance of The Intruders, who were instrumental to the birth of “Philly Soul.” Their hit “I’ll Always Love My Mama” was about legendary producer Kenny Gamble’s mother […]
Shifting cities, we’ll end in Chicago, with one of the greatest bands of all time, who blended soul, rock, funk, and rhythm into a group who would become known as EWF—Earth, Wind & Fire. I featured them for the holidays in 2019. Included on Last Days and Time, was EWF’s recording of “Mom,” which was also released as a single. […]
[…] “Right now, it’s basically the Titanic. We’re like, you know, in this in the middle of this slow sink, we have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it’s fine. And meanwhile, as I’ve said, you know, Donald Trump’s running around trying to find women’s clothing and get on the first lifeboat,” Kinzger [GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, from Illinois] said.
“And I think there’s a few of us that are just saying ‘guys this is not good,’ not just for the future of the party, but this is not good for the future of this country,” he added.
Kinzinger also zeroed in on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) comments regarding former President Trump’s role in the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, adding that Cheney has been consistent.
“Liz Cheney is saying exactly what Kevin McCarthy said the day of the insurrection. She’s just consistently been saying it. And a few weeks later, Kevin McCarthy changed to attacking the other people,” Kinzinger said. […]
Nasa / JPL’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity has successfully completed its fifth flight, a one-way hop of about 130 metres to a new landing site. Before touching down, it flew to an altitude of 10 metres (highest ever) to take series of images of the surroundings and new landing field. This is the last of its flight-demo flights, transitioning into its new aerial-scouting-demo flight mission (“operations demonstration”).
On the fourth flight, the Perseverance rover’s science microphone was turned on and succeeded in capturing the sound of Ingenuity flying on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hears Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight (video (obviously with audio)). That hadn’t been attempted previously since the microphone had neither been designed nor tested to avoid interference with rover–helicopter communications. On-Earth analysis showed it would be safe, and despite being 80 or more metres away from the rover, the sound was detected in the very thin Martian atmosphere.
As coronavirus cases in India shot upward last month, millions of people converged on the Ganges River to bathe at a holy spot offering a chance at salvation.
When the pilgrims returned to their homes across the country, some brought the virus with them.
The precise role of the Hindu religious festival — the Kumbh Mela — in India’s raging outbreak is impossible to know in the absence of contact tracing. But the event was one source of infections as cases skyrocketed […]
More than 414,000 new cases were reported in India on Friday, a global record. About 4,000 people are dying a day, but such figures are an undercount. Experts believe the number of fatalities will rise in coming days, since deaths from covid-19 lag behind new cases. [chart available at the link]
[…] The combination of an enormous wave of coronavirus cases and one of the biggest mass gatherings on the planet has fueled criticism that India’s government should have curtailed the religious event or canceled it altogether. Last year, when India had just several hundred coronavirus cases, the government swiftly imposed a nationwide lockdown.
The Kumbh Mela “may end up being the biggest superspreader in the history of this pandemic,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University […]. “It brought so many people together from across India.” […]
“I’m pretty good at running ‘human’ in emulation mode.”
From the Washington Post:
The stars of “Saturday Night Live” were well aware that there was plenty of controversy leading up to Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s stint as host — and made sure to address it during the broadcast.
“A space rocket that was spinning out of control just minutes ago crashed into the ocean. And for once, we know it’s not Elon’s fault,” Colin Jost said during “Weekend Update,” referencing the debris from a Chinese space rocket booster that reentered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. “A lot of people have been wondering: Why is he hosting our show? And now we know it’s because he needed an alibi.”
Indeed, that was a question ever since the controversial billionaire — who gained even more notoriety recently by spreading misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and downplaying the risks — was announced as SNL host. Even several cast members did not seem thrilled about this decision, and a source told Page Six that creator Lorne Michaels would excuse anyone who didn’t want to participate in the episode.
SNL announced Elon Musk as a host. The disgust on Twitter may be just what the show is after.
Yet even though Musk tried to tease that something controversial might happen (“Let’s find out just how live ‘Saturday Night Live’ really is,” he tweeted with a devil emoji), the show proceeded mostly as usual. After a very earnest Mother’s Day opening sketch, in which the cast appeared with their moms as musical guest Miley Cyrus sang a cover of her godmother Dolly Parton’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” Musk arrived for his monologue.
“I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL,” he said, to much applause from the audience. “Or at least the first to admit it. So I won’t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don’t worry, I’m pretty good at running ‘human’ in emulation mode.”
[…] former SNL cast member Dan Aykroyd, who returned to host in 2003, has spoken out over the years about his Asperger’s diagnosis as a child.
Then Musk attempted to explain his tweets, known to have quite an impact on the stock market. “Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say: I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
[…] He also appeared on “Weekend Update” as a financial adviser, and Jost and Michael Che repeatedly demanded to know an explanation for Dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency that counts Musk among its biggest fans.
“It’s the future of currency. It’s an unstoppable financial vehicle that’s going to take over the world,” Musk explained.
“I get that, but what is it, man?!” Che asked.
“I keep telling you, it’s the crypto currency you can trade for conventional money,” Musk explained.
A viral TikTok video captured an everyday reality reflected in the allegations against Matt Gaetz […]
At first the girl is animated and fast-talking, gesturing with her hands as she speaks to the camera. She’s wearing a tie-dye shirt that hangs cavernously around her thin frame; her long blond hair is stick straight. She speaks with the unrestrained enthusiasm of a kid. Later, I learn that she is 18. When the man approaches her, just out of frame, at first she thinks he just wants to take one of the empty chairs that is at her table and drag it away somewhere else; she’s in the courtyard of the motel where she’s staying with her mom, and she’s sitting at one of the outdoor tables alone. But he doesn’t want to take the chair, he wants to sit down in it. The man never enters the frame, but we can tell he is older, and he must be much bigger than she is: the girl, still seated, cranes her face to look up at him. The calm confidence behind her large glasses snuffs out; her shoulders tense up, rising toward her ears. He’s trying to sleep with her. Off camera, the man can be heard commenting on the girl’s visible discomfort. I see your hesitancy, he says. On the screen, the caption the girl eventually added to the video reveals that she has given him a fake name. Eventually, she reveals to him that she is taping. “I’m just doing a live and talking to some people,” she says, and glances towards her phone. That’s when he finally leaves her alone: not when he notices that she’s uncomfortable, but when he realizes that he is being watched.
[…]
Those early experiences of male sexual aggression are maybe one of the most reliable rites of passage for female children. It’s more common than any of the other rituals that signal impending adulthood, more universal than the bat mitzvahs, or quinceañeras, or sweet sixteen parties, or proms. By the time a girl reaches any of these milestones, she has likely already developed a skill set for navigating the unwanted attention of adult men, and started to learn the delicate balance of signaling their own lack of interest, or of curtailing men’s interest, without escalating. Sometimes mothers will speak to their daughters about these incidents and how to defuse them, but more often girls are told to understand the approaches as flattering, or left to navigate them with little more than their own instincts and the commiseration of their similarly young and confused friends.
The message that all of this sends to young girls is that womanhood is a state that consists largely of receiving unsolicited male attention, much of it benign but much of it threatening, exploitative or hostile, and that their ownership over their own bodies, their ability to peacefully occupy public space, and their right to be perceived as the children that they are can all be abridged by the whims of a man’s desire. When the Florida politician Joel Greenberg discovered that one of the women he and Congressman Matt Gaetz were allegedly paying for sex was not a woman but a girl at 17 years old, Greenberg, according to reporting by the Daily Beast, told the girl that she was at fault. She apologized and recognized that by lying about her age, she endangered many people, Greenberg wrote. This, too, is one of the surest signs that a girl is becoming a woman: suddenly, she finds herself being held responsible for men’s actions.
Vaccinations are picking up pace in the European Union, a stunning turnaround after the bloc’s immunization drive stalled for months.
On average over the last week, nearly three million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine were being administered each day in the European Union, a group of 27 nations, according to Our World in Data, a University of Oxford database. Adjusted for population, the rate is roughly equivalent to the number of shots given each day in the United States, where demand has been falling.
The E.U. vaccination campaign, marred by disruptions in supplies of the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines, pivoted last month to rely heavily on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Last month, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said that Pfizer had agreed to an early shipment of doses that she said should likely allow the bloc to reach its goal of inoculating 70 percent of adults by the end of the summer. The European Union is also on the verge of announcing a deal with Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for 2022 and 2023 that will lock in 1.8 billion doses for boosters, variants and children’s vaccines.
The United States moved aggressively under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed to procure millions of doses by funding and prodding vaccine production. But the European Union, rather than partnering with drugmakers as the United States did, acted more like a customer than an investor.
“I think it is overdue that the E.U. has stepped up their vaccination campaign,” said Beate Kampmann, director of the Vaccine Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“I think in the context of the rate of deaths we’ve seen and new cases we’ve seen in the E.U., it is absolutely vital that we get the vaccine to people there very, very quickly,” she added.
The E.U.’s increase underscores the global disparities in vaccination efforts.
About 83 percent of Covid shots have been given in high- and upper-middle-income countries, while only 0.3 percent of doses have been given in low-income countries. In North America, more than 30 percent of people have received at least one dose, according to Our World in Data. In Europe, the figure is nearly 24 percent. In Africa, it’s slightly more than one percent.
Experts warn that if the virus can run rampant in much of the world, untamed by vaccines, dangerous variants will continue to evolve and spread, threatening all countries.
[…]
Among the things Americans say they’re looking forward to most when pandemic-related restrictions ends is “having dinner in a restaurant with friends”. But if the restaurant industry doesn’t support higher wages, there will be fewer restaurants for customers to return to.
There is an unprecedented shortage of job applicants for restaurant jobs. In a new survey this week by One Fair Wage of more than 2,800 workers, more than half (53%) reported that they are thinking about leaving restaurants. More than three-quarters of workers surveyed (76%) said they are leaving restaurants because of low wages and tips — by far the most important reason for leaving — and a slightly higher percentage (78%) said that the factor that would make them stay in restaurants is a “full, stable, livable wage”.
So this isn’t, as many industry representatives would have you believe, a shortage of workers. It’s a wage shortage that is racist and sexist in that it disproportionately affects women and people of color, and is a legacy of slavery. It is created by the narrow-sighted greed of the industry and its trade lobby, the National Restaurant Association, which has a history of fighting against fair wages since it was formed by white restaurant owners in 1919.
There are, in fact, plenty of qualified and experienced restaurant workers, many or even most of whom were laid off and left destitute over the last year. The National Restaurant Association is now, for the most part, a conglomerate of corporate chain restaurants and a powerful lobby. As part of its transparent but sadly effective (until now, at least), propaganda campaign, members of “The Other NRA”, as many call it, have suggested that workers would rather stay home and collect unemployment than take jobs as they become available.
But that’s not true: more than half of unemployed restaurant workers were denied unemployment insurance during the pandemic, largely because their base pay was too low to qualify, according to the One Fair Wage survey. In fact, those fortunate enough to receive unemployment benefits would immediately lose them if they turned down work; that’s how unemployment insurance works. Their low pay is the result of the sub-minimum wage laws for tipped workers (still $2.13 per hour at the federal level), the very same laws that the NRA has spent millions of dollars, over decades, lobbying to keep in place.
[…] Had Congress continued to increase the minimum wage in line with productivity growth of the last few decades, the minimum wage today would be around $24 an hour, which actually approaches its stated intent, a livable wage. […] Black women working for tips in restaurants make $4.79 an hour less than their white male counterparts.
[…]
Being unwilling to risk health and welfare for poverty wages doesn’t make restaurant workers lazy; rather, it makes them smart, cautious and strategic, even if they’re desperate for work. […]
The simple question is: where is the relief for workers?
Because, so far, a Congress still overwhelmingly dominated by anti-worker white men, has failed to pass the Raise the Wage Act, which would end the sub-minimum wage and establish the full, fair federal wage for all workers to $15 an hour, with tips on top when appropriate. It is difficult not to see this failure to end a direct legacy of slavery as racist.
[…] Restaurants are only as wonderful as the people who work in them. And to truly save the restaurant industry — not just its owners — we have to ensure that restaurant workers are paid a full, fair livable wage.
You know that issue where bigots aren’t going to be happy in their own space because they want to go and dominate what they don’t like? That’s happening in real time on the nextdoor politics board I’m in. The Trumpkins went and made their own board and made implied assertions about the original board in posts about the new board, but just can’t stay away.
Now to figure out more characteristics of the situation.
@Lynna 142
Interesting. I’ve seen and engaged with that general political gossip method used by Trump using the word “they” in his supporters. I hope it gets more attention.
The ongoing battle to make the French language kinder to women — or at least take better account of their existence in French society — lost some ground this week as France’s education ministry came down against one form of gender-inclusive writing as an existential threat to the language of Molière. But proponents of more inclusive French also made significant gains.
Warning that the well-being of France and its future are at stake, the government banned the use in schools of a method increasingly used by some French speakers to make the language more inclusive by feminising some words.
Specifically, the education minister’s decree targets what is arguably the most contested and politicised letter in the French language — “e.” Simply put, “e” is the language’s feminine letter, used in feminine nouns and their adjectives and, sometimes, when conjugating verbs.
But proponents of women’s rights are also increasingly adding “e” to words that normally wouldn’t have included that letter, in a conscious — and divisive — effort to make women more visible.
Take the generic French word for leaders — “dirigeants” — for example. For some, that masculine spelling suggests that they are generally men and makes women leaders invisible, because it lacks a feminine “e” toward the end. For proponents of inclusive writing, a more gender-equal spelling is “dirigeant·es,” inserting the extra “e,” preceded by a middle dot, to make clear that leaders can be of both sexes.
Likewise, they might write “les élu·es” — instead of the generic masculine “élus” — for the holders of elected office, again to highlight that women are elected, too. Or they might use “les idiot·es,” instead of the usual generic masculine “les idiots,” to acknowledge that stupidity isn’t the exclusive preserve of men.
Éliane Viennot, a historian and literature professor at Jean-Monnet University in Saint-Étienne, told FRANCE 24 in February that similar contractions have long been commonplace in French paperwork, most notably identity cards, which use the form “Né(e)” — for born — to introduce one’s date of birth.
“Critics obsess over an abbreviation — the median point — which feminists didn’t even invent,” she argued. “The feminist contribution is to have looked for a more appropriate sign, since the use of parentheses conveys a lesser degree of importance.”
[… F]or the government of centrist President Emmanuel Macron, the use of “·e” threatens the very fabric of France. Speaking in a Senate debate on the issue on Thursday, a deputy education minister said inclusive writing is a danger for our country and will sound the death knell for the use of French in the world.
By challenging traditional norms of French usage, inclusive writing makes the language harder to learn, penalising pupils with learning difficulties, the minister, Nathalie Elimas, argued.
Absolute nonsense. One reason my French is shite is because I cannot get my head around the idea words must have a “gender”. (That and verb conjugation, another minefield.) In the video embedded at the link, the academic expert (Éliane Viennot?) interviewed makes essentially the same point: The gendering makes the language more difficult to learn. She postulates that’s one reason for the resistance to the change, people who have managed to learn the gendering are reluctant to learn some “new” rules.
Plus a significant dose of the traditional French paranoia about English:
It dislocates words, breaks them into two, she said. With the spread of inclusive writing, the English language — already quasi-hegemonic across the world — would certainly and perhaps forever defeat the French language.
[… examples of similar arguments in other European countries over their native languages…]
The French Education Ministry circular that banished the “·e” formula from schools did, however, accept other more inclusive changes in language that highlight women.
They include systematically feminising job titles for women — like “présidente,” instead of “président,” or “ambassadrice” rather than “ambassadeur” for women ambassadors. It also encouraged the simultaneous use of both masculine and feminine forms to emphasise that roles are filled by both sexes. So a job posting in a school, for example, should say that it will go to “le candidat ou la candidate” — man or woman — who is best qualified to fill it.
Until recently, many job titles didn’t even have a feminine form in France, at least not for the Académie française, the overwhelmingly male language watchdog, which only dropped its insistence on calling female presidents “Madame le président” two years ago.
Raphael Haddad, the author of a French-language guide on inclusive writing, said that section of the new education ministry circular represented progress for the cause of women in French.
“It’s a huge step forward, disguised as a ban,” he said. “What’s happening to the France language is the same thing that happened in the United States, with ‘chairman’ replaced by ‘chairperson,’ {and} ‘’fireman’ by ‘firefighter.’”
My own example is a term I’ve introduced at every company I worked for post-University: “workhour(s)” (and “workday(s)”, etc.), as a replacement for the sexist (and also frequently dubiously-applied concept (a different issue)) “manhour(s)” — the number of hours used or expected to be used on some task, allowing for interruptions, other tasks, contingencies, holidays / vacations, etc. A workhour is some fraction of a clock-measured (real) hour, the exact percentage depending on the individual, their other tasks, and other factors. (Another possibility is “personhour(s)”, but similar to the cited “firefighter” example, “workhour(s)” (IMHO) describes what is being discussed, and avoids any misconstruing of the -son — albeit “workhour(s)” can be misconstrued as meaning the times when one is “clocked on” (not really a problem for me as I’m salaried, not paid by-the-clock).)
(What I’ve never had any success in introducing is error bars on workhour(s) estimates — for some reason, they always freak the managers out.)
Brony @169, yeah it was good to see faux journalists at the White House press conference called out on their use of “they say,” or “lots of people say.” Who is “they”? If there’s no specific answer to that, then you know that a straw-man is the foundation of the bogus argument.
blf @168, thanks for that thorough report. It highlights the real problems.
In other news, “A Pennsylvania Lawmaker and the Resurgence of Christian Nationalism.”
How Doug Mastriano’s rise embodies the spread of a movement centered on the belief that God intended America to be a Christian nation.
Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and parts of neighboring counties, was a little-known figure in state politics before the coronavirus pandemic. But, in the past year, he has led rallies against mask mandates and other public-health protocols, which he has characterized as “the governor’s autocratic control over our lives.” He has become a leader of the Stop the Steal campaign, and claims that he spoke to Donald Trump at least fifteen times between the 2020 election and the insurrection at the Capitol, on January 6th. He urged his followers to attend the rally at the Capitol that led to the riots, saying, “I’m really praying that God will pour His Spirit upon Washington, D.C., like we’ve never seen before.” Throughout this time, he has cast the fight against both lockdowns and Trump’s electoral loss as a religious battle against the forces of evil. He has come to embody a set of beliefs characterized as Christian nationalism, which center on the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation, and which, when mingled with conspiracy theory and white nationalism, helped to fuel the insurrection. “Violence has always been a part of Christian nationalism,” Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist and co-author of “Taking America Back for God,” told me. […]
Mastriano grew up mostly in New Jersey, in a military family, and attended Eastern College, a Christian university outside Philadelphia. After he graduated, in 1986, he joined the military, and, as a junior intelligence officer, was stationed at the border of West Germany and Czechoslovakia. Mastriano, like many conservative Christians, came to see the Cold War as a spiritual campaign, applying religious notions of good and evil to U.S. foreign policy. […]
In 1991, as the Cold War was winding down, Mastriano was deployed to Iraq to fight in the Gulf War. He believed that he was on the front lines of a new religious conflict, this time against radical Islam. Mastriano’s wife, Rebecca, knew little about his posting, which was classified, and gathered people to engage in what she called “spiritual warfare,” praying that he would prevail against evil on the battlefield. [snipped tall take claiming God sent a sandstorm to save Mastriano]
[…] For the next three decades, he continued to serve in military intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he appears to have developed a dim view of Islam. In recent years, he has often spread Islamophobic memes online. In one, he spread a conspiracy theory that Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, directed fellow-Muslims to throw a five-year-old over a balcony. […] he encouraged the idea that the fire at the Notre-Dame cathedral, in Paris, was started by Muslims […]
In 2019, after retiring […], Mastriano decided to run for office. “Our freedoms are being encroached,” […] He soon began attending events held by a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, a loosely linked network of charismatics and Pentecostals that, over the past decade, has played an influential role in conservative American circles. […] Many members believe that God speaks to them directly, and that they have been tasked with battling real-world demons who control global leaders. […]
The N.A.R.’s overarching agenda—to return the United States to an idealized Christian past—is largely built upon the work of the pseudo-historian David Barton, who has advanced the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. […] Bills that Mastriano supported in the legislature would have mandated teaching the Bible in public schools and would have made it legal for adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples, among other things.
[…] On nightly Facebook fireside chats, he suggested that his viewers find new congregations if their pastors weren’t leading in-person worship services. He gained increasingly extreme followers; last June, at a gun-rights protest on the steps of the state capitol, he posed for pictures with white men in fatigues carrying AR-15s and several others in Hawaiian shirts, a hallmark of the Boogaloo Bois, a white-nationalist militia. […]
“Christian nationalism doesn’t exist,” Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader, told me, calling it “just another name to throw at Christians.” He added, “The left is very good at calling people names.” […] But historians and sociologists have found the term useful to describe an undercurrent of nativist religion that runs through American history. [snipped supporting details]
“In the early two-thousands, among conservative pastors, you’d often hear that the gays are softening up our society in preparation for Islam,” Michelle Goldberg, the author of “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” told me.
The election of Donald Trump intensified certain strains of Christian nationalism. He fanned fears of pluralism with Islamophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric. […] “The greatest ethnic dog whistle the right has ever come up with is ‘Christian,’ because it means ‘people like us,’ it means white,” Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of “Taking America Back For God,” told me. […]
“The tactic has been to use Christian nationalism to cool down the idea of fascism without losing the fascism,” Ross said. For example, after the white-nationalist organization Identity Evropa was dissolved, a former leader aligned himself with America First, a movement to make America a “white Christian nation.” (America First was one of the most prominent groups at the Capitol insurrection.)
A long-standing distrust of educational institutions and the mainstream media, coupled with a tradition of anti-intellectualism, has also left white evangelicals vulnerable to conspiracy theory. […] QAnon, which holds that America must be saved from a cabal of pedophilic Democrats, speaks of believers as an “elect,” and references Scripture and end-times theology. […]
As a result, during Trump’s Presidency, many white evangelicals came to believe that his government, the one chosen by God, was under threat from an internal enemy: a shadowy conspiracy of leftists. And, when Trump started claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, many evangelicals took up the call. […]
[Mastriano] appeared on Steve Bannon’s radio show, “War Room,” as well as on a right-wing Christian show called “The Eric Metaxas Radio Show,” during which Trump called in and said, “Doug is a hero!” In Pennsylvania, Mastriano supported a barrage of lawsuits and a bid to appoint special electors. […]
On December 12th, Mastriano returned to Washington, D.C., to participate in a series of “Jericho Marches” organized by leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation in which conservative Christians, among a hodgepodge of QAnon followers and white nationalists, gathered to pray that God would keep Trump in office. Alex Jones, of Infowars, attended, as did members of the Oath Keepers militia. […]
Two days before the Capitol riots, Mastriano said that he was heading to Washington, D.C., and “calling out to God for divine revelation.” He used campaign funds to charter six buses to shuttle followers to Washington, D.C., and told them that he would speak on the Capitol steps. Around 1 p.m., rioters broke into the Capitol, some wielding Bibles, “Jesus 2020” signs, “An Appeal to Heaven” flags, and shofars. […]
Later that evening, Mastriano appeared on Facebook Live for his fireside chat, looking spooked. He told viewers that he had left the Capitol after he saw things “get weird,” saying, “When it was apparent that this was no longer a peaceful protest, my wife and I left the area.” Mastriano later told a radio interviewer that he stayed long enough to witness both the first and second breaches of the building. […]
Brian Sims, a Democratic state representative, has called for Mastriano to be court-martialed. “He’s not just a preacher screaming from the rooftops. He has been trained in subterfuge and destabilization in military intelligence for other countries. Mirroring those actions here is very, very dangerous,” he said.
[…] Christian-nationalist ideas don’t seem to be receding. “There’s been a doubling down,” Perry, the sociology professor, told me. […] The majority of white evangelicals still believe that the Presidential election was illegitimate. (Around sixty-eight per cent also believe that the January 6th insurrection was the work of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.) […] Christian nationalism is well positioned to become more dominant in the Republican Party, cloaking Trump’s inflammatory xenophobia in religious language that may be more broadly palatable.
Mastriano […] continues to push Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and has introduced legislation to limit mail-in voting in the state. […] He appears to be preparing to run for governor in 2022. “He’s built this relationship with Donald Trump that I don’t think any other Republican in Pennsylvania has,” J. J. Abbott, the executive director of Commonwealth Communications […] told me.
[…] On a Monday afternoon in February, at the statehouse, Mastriano stood at a lectern, wearing a gray suit and a yellow tie, and gave a speech celebrating the first day of the Fast of Jonah. He spoke of the Assyrian Christians who were forced by ISIS to flee Iraq, and compared them to early American settlers […] Following Mastriano’s speech, Tim Kearney, a Democratic state senator, addressed his colleagues via Zoom. He called for further investigation into Mastriano’s role in inciting violence at the Capitol […] “If you call for a death match with your political opponents, you cannot be surprised when people turn to violence.”
blf @170, I see no problem with making some changes to the French language in order to more equally represent both men and women. I would not call it feminizing … it is more like equalizing. I like the use of “workhour(s)” —that makes sense.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) talked some sense today during an interview on CNN.
[…] Clyburn turned his focus to McConnell’s remark last week that “100 percent of my focus is standing up to [the Biden] administration” — a remark the Senate minority leader made when he dodged a question about [Liz] Cheney and her tumult within the GOP.
After criticizing McConnell’s comments in 2010 saying that Republican Party’s goal was for then-President Obama to be a one-term president, Clyburn decried McConnell’s “personal animus toward Democrats that ought not be” and blamed the Senate minority leader for the GOP “losing its way.”
“We are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Let’s operate like that,” Clyburn said. “This Republican Party is losing its way on all fronts. And Mitch McConnell is contributing to that in a big way.”
Most prominent Republicans have refused to throw their support behind Cheney as she continues to warn the party against feeding into Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has repeatedly refused to go to bat for Cheney amid Republicans’ outrage in the aftermath of her vote to impeach Trump.
Like McCarthy, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) has also openly boosted Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) in a bid to replace Cheney as conference chair.
Ted Cruz and his allies have spent years criticizing Facebook, even as the network was propelling Donald Trump to victory
When Donald Trump’s ban from Facebook was upheld this week, the howls of bias could be heard from Republicans far and wide. Those shrieks, ironically, came mostly on social media.
Republicans have spent recent years criticizing Facebook and Twitter, demonizing them as biased against the right. But they, not Democrats, have been the most enthusiastic embracers of social media, and the most successful in harnessing its potential[its designed-in intention of harassing and lying].
Between 1 January and 15 December last year, right-leaning Facebook pages accounted for 45% of all interactions on Facebook, according to a study by Media Matters for America [MMFA], a progressive non-profit which monitors US media.
[…]
The years-long dominance on Facebook has translated to notable successes — most memorably in 2016, when Donald Trump’s win was propelled by his social media reach. “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” Brad Parscale, the digital director of the 2016 Trump campaign, said in the aftermath of the election.
“Twitter for Mr Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.”
[…]
Those successes appeared to have been forgotten in the last week, when prominent Republicans […], condemned Facebook in particular. […]
If the big tech oligarchs can muzzle the former president, what’s to stop them from silencing you? Cruz said. [I note Cruz slipped up here and called hair furor the former White House occupant –blf]
If they can ban President Trump, all conservative voices could be next. A House Republican majority will rein in big tech power over our speech, was McCarthy’s take[fearmongering].
Cruz and other Republicans have been accusing Facebook of bias for years — even as the platform was propelling Trump to victory, while being criticized on the left for being slow to remove rightwing lies or conspiracy theories.
“Because Republicans have such a disproportionate amount of influence on these platforms and engagement, the real effect is that by constantly crying bias, it works the refs in such that they don’t enforce the rules against them in a consistent way,” Angelo Carusone, the president of MMFA, said.
[…]
“It’s part of the overall strategy of playing the victim,” [author of How To Go Viral and Reach Millions and editor-in-chief of Front Page Live, a news site “dedicated to elevating fact-based stories”, Joe] Romm said. “Donald Trump showed that it’s part of the overall strategy of: accuse your opponents of doing what you’re doing before they can accuse you.
“And so it just makes it so much harder, because if you accuse them first, then when progressives then accurately say: ‘Oh, we’re being disadvantaged on social media,’ no one is going to believe it, because they bought into this big lie that the conservatives are being punished on social media.”
As Republicans have cried foul, several rightwing politicians have even written books about such perceived bias — the most recent by Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a millionaire Yale law school graduate turned earthy, blue collar, man of the people.
[…]
The claims of conservative bias are only like to continue as the 2022 midterms approach, but experts sayany [sic] bias is actually against the other side.
“I would say that, in fact, big tech right now is biased against liberals — the thumb is on the scale for those who put out the rightwing lies,” Romm said.
“The thing that the social media apps want to do is keep you on their site. That’s what they care about. They don’t care about the truth, they care about keeping you on their site. [Which is a reasonably good summary of why I refer to them as, e.g., factsborked, &tc, and refuse to have an account, and (generally) try to avoid them altogether — I’m “allegoric” to deliberate intentional lying, not to mention the tracking, commercialisation of “me” (the (captive) user is their “product” (how they make their money)), &tc –blf]
[…]
“I think the right will leverage this moment to make big tech the new Hillary,” Carusone said. “And that’s going to be a galvanizing force for them leading into 2022 and then again in 2024.”
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Sunday pushed back on the idea that unemployment relief is hurting the job market as Republican governors begin slashing jobless benefits in their states, arguing that the move would force more people to return to work.
[…] On Friday, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers added a modest 266,000 jobs last month, which falls short of the one million that economists had forecast and the weakest monthly gain since January […]
Asked about the Biden administration’s take on the slowdown in hiring, Raimondo said that there is no data suggesting that Americans are out of work due to unemployment insurance.
Instead, Raimondo pointed to the fear of COVID-19 or the inability to find childcare as key reasons for why people aren’t able to go back to work.
Raimondo was then specifically asked about governors of states such as South Carolina and Montana that are rolling back unemployment benefits due to their belief that it has a negative impact on the job market. Republican lawmakers have expressed their opposition to enhanced unemployment payments and unanimously voted against extending them earlier this year.
After saying that it’s appropriate for governors in different regions to tailor their response to unemployment benefits depending on the circumstances within their regional labor market, the commerce secretary doubled down on denying that unemployment insurance is to blame for a job market that falls short of economists’ expectations.
“But if you look nationally, wages aren’t going up. People are still telling us the number one reason they’re not going back to work is fear due to the virus. And more people were looking for work last month than the month before,” Raimondo said. “So we are — I am engaged with businesses constantly listening, monitoring. But at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be that that’s the major impediment.”
Gee, don’t suppose companies could offer things like living wages that are better than unemployment benefits to encourage people to get back into the workforce.
We never really did away with the slavery mentality in America, we just exchanged it for exploitation of the working class with nominal wages that are never quite enough to get by.
————————-
Not only are Republican policies heartless, they’re also not based in reality. Lack of government support for childcare in the US is a major problem and puts us in the company of third world countries on this issue. If we solve this, we remove a major impediment for workers, especially women, to enter the workforce.
Having said that, what does it say about our society when unemployment insurance ( basically the least amount of money necessary for sustenance) is highly competitive with prevailing wages?
————————-
We also have the on/off valve with unemployment that other countries don’t. Make a dollar, you’re out of it and losing money. Other places wean people off over certain levels, so getting a low-wage job in the interim doesn’t just cut you off.
—————————
Why not come back and work at tipped-employee wages when the house is half empty or worse?
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Paris and other French cities on Sunday to call for stronger action against man-made climate change.
Reports of the demonstrations on social media indicated that protesters marched in Paris, Nancy, Toulouse, Rennes, Lyon, Grenoble and other towns in support of stronger measures to combat climate change than are currently included in a bill addressing the issue currently under consideration by France’s legislature. […]
Lynna@172 observes, about changes to the French language, “I would not call it feminizing … it is more like equalizing.”
Good point! I missed that. Possibly because, at least in part, as the video examples, the default rule in French is “masculine” (le masculin l’emporte sur le féminin) — citing the example of if it’s one individual, the phrase for a male is “un title” and for a female “une titlee” — but for more than one person, if any are male, it’s “les titles” (the actual spelling of the title can differ as well, just to make things even more confusing); with the modified spelling, it’d be “les title·es” (broadly speaking), acknowledging there are females in the group.
blfsays
Lynna@177, There was a march here in the village. I didn’t go, partly due to my own confusion about the time / date, and partly due to concerns about the pandemic. From the sounds (I could hear it), it was either well-attended, very noisy, or both.
The April unemployment numbers showed that women got hit very hard. Almost all of the job gains went to men. The female workforce remains where it was in the late 1980s.
The increased burdens of family in the covid-19 pandemic play a major role in this. Many schools, after-school programs and child-care centers remain closed, or not open for full-time, in-person learning. Someone needs to take care of the kids at home. And, yes, mothers are taking on the bulk of the responsibilities, as they almost always do.
As if on cue, a lousy old myth about women, motherhood and work is making a return, too: that many of these women are better off for cutting their (paid) work hours and downscaling their professional aspirations in favor of tending to family responsibilities.
The Los Angeles Times found a woman who couldn’t simultaneously telework and care for a newborn — no kidding! — so she’s offering online parenting classes, which, she admits, might not earn her a full replacement income. “It’s been a blessing in disguise,” she said. The Atlantic, in turn, reported on a group of high-achieving professional women who, facing the demands of pandemic parenting, cut back from full-time jobs to part-time hours or freelance work. They are taking, the writer said, “a brief, low-speed detour” and “are happier as a result.”
Give. Me. A. Break.
We’ve been here before. In 2003, a New York Times headline coined the term “opt out” to describe a Lisa Belkin article about highly educated, high-achieving women who, overwhelmed by the demands of the workplace and parenting, decided to downscale or totally jettison their careers for a time, seemingly convinced that they could get back on a professional track when they needed or wanted to.
As later reporting and research revealed, the reality was more complicated and less cheerful. Many of the women, it turned out, had left work largely because they could not manage the demands of work and home. Their spouses, usually high earners, had little bandwidth or willingness to pitch in. The employers often proved less than accommodating. And when the women tried to opt back in, they often returned to lower-paid positions. If they divorced, they were likely to experience major financial trouble. The “short detour” became permanent and life-altering.
These narratives, then and now, have the same theme. It is, after all, an American character trait to take personal responsibility for solving a systemic failure […] as Pamela Stone, a professor at Hunter College and author of “Opting Out?” and co-author of “Opting Back In,” told me when I interviewed her a few years back, “Their perception was all about choice, but the stories they told were all about constraints.”
[…] The Biden administration, to its credit, looked at the pandemic ground situation and concluded that tending to humans was as much a part of our societal infrastructure as building and maintaining roads and bridges, and it is now proposing to expand federal funds for universal pre-K.
[…] Republicans and conservatives are using the sentiment of the old opt-out movement to attack President Biden and the help he wants to offer American parents. [snipped many examples of Republicans saying retrograde and stupid things.] “Young children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent.”
And, make no mistake, when they say “parent,” Americans hear “mother.”
American mothers — and fathers — need help. But the moment we begin to wrap women’s life-altering decisions to leave or cut back on paid work and professional aspirations in the soft glow of motherhood, we are playing into flawed and disproven conservative tropes about society. Let’s not go there again.
KGsays
Here in the YooKay, we had a “Super Thursday” of elections to local councils, mayoralties, and the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments on 6th. I’ll try to write a longer account later (I have an important work deadline approaching), but here are a few key points:
1) The Tories did well, and Labour correspondingly badly, in the council elections. The Tories also did well in the Welsh Parliament, but so did Labour (gaining a seat to hold exactly half of the 60), who also did pretty well in the mayoralty elections (these city/city region mayors are fairly new in the UK – or rather, England, I think there are none elsewhere). But it’s the council elections that have got most of the attention as far as the Labour/Tory battle is concerned. Briefly, the Tories have hoovered up the slices of the bigot “socially conservative” vote that were previously going to UKIP, the Brexit Party and even further right outfits, by stealing their clothes, and Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader, has alienated the left, while failing to recapture the bigot “socially conservative” vote, much of which was traditional Labour before Brexit. Starmer has reacted to the poor results (having said in advance he would take responsibility) by demoting the deputy leader, Angela Rayner, from her posts as chair of the party and campaign coordinator (he can’t sack her as leader), and holding a badly mismanaged reshuffle, deflecting attention from the better Labour results from Wales and the mayoral elections, which came in after the poor council showing was making headlines.
2) The traditional third party, the Liberal Democrats (“LibDems”) roughly held their own in council seats, but lost their last seat in the Welsh Parliament, and a key seat in the Scottish Parliament (see below).
3) The Green Party of England and Wales did very well, more than doubling its holding of council seats, coming second to Labour in the mayoral election in Bristol and third in London (Sadiq Khan was re-elected for Labour, but less convincingly than expected), where they also got 3 London Assembly seats to the LibDem’s 2. Much of their increased support seems to have come from leftist Labour voters disillusioned with Starmer, but they also gained seats from the Tories.
4) Much of the attention, even in the UK-wide media, has been on the results in Scotland. Changes in seats numbers have been small, the numbers now (with those in 2016 in parentheses) being SNP 64(63), Tories 31(31), Labour 22(24), Scottish Greens 8(6), LibDems 4(5). The SNP fell just one shot of their desired overall majority (they needed 65 of the 129 seats), my own party (Scottish Greens) made the biggest gains (due to the vagaries of the electoral system, which I’ll explain later, we could easily have ended up with only 7 seats, or as many as 10), the LibDem’s fall from 5 to 4 is very bad news for them, as there’s a threshold of 5 for a party or alliance of parties to have a say in what gets debated and have a right to regularly question the First Minister. The SNP’s failure to get an overall majority (which pleased me as it of course enhances Green influence) is already being dishonestly exploited by anti-independence speakers, despite the fact that there is a 72:57 pro-independence majority, as the Scottish Greens are explicitly pro-independence, and included this on all our election material.
More later…
KGsays
Starmer of course can’t sack Rayner as deputy Labour leader – it’s an elected post.
In Scotland, it’s worth mentioning that former SNP leader Alex Salmond’s We-Hate-Nicola-Sturgeon Party (“Alba” is its official name) failed humiliatingly, getting nowhere near a seat anywhere. As did George Galloway’s George-Galloway-For-Life-President Party (“All For Unity” – anti-independence being its main policy). US readers may possibly remember Galloway debating with Hitchens on the invasion of Iraq, an issue where Galloway was on the correct side, but he’s a thoroughly obnoxious egotist. And the independent campaign of Andy Wightman, who was one of our MSPs but turned out to be something of a transphobe and left the party over that issue, failing to resign his seat as all our candidates promise in advance to do if they defect.
Just as the Terror was used by Robespierre and the Jacobins during the French Revolution two centuries ago, fear and draconian control is being used today to usher in… The Great Reset.
Or so Michael O’Fallon would have you believe. O’Fallon is the founder of Sovereign Nations, a Christian nationalist organisation that aims to “prepare warriors for the battleground of ideas”. He’s recently been collaborating with James Lindsay, renowned culture warrior and online troll, to teach us all how critical theory and social justice are hell bent on destroying Our (or at least Western) Civilisation.
Chris and Matt are joined by Aaron Rabinowtiz, host of Embrace the Void (@ETVPod) and Philosophers in Space podcasts, PhD student and lecturer at Rutgers University. Aaron has Done the Work, he has the Documents, he’s been privy to the secret conversations, and he’s here to help the boys decode just WTF is going on here.
So, what’s the deal with O’Fallon? Is he a sorely-needed, breathy and bombastic prophet bearing a critical message of our impending doom? Why does he take such long pauses? Where did he get such a laughably inaccurate understanding of the French Revolution? We can’t promise all the answers in this episode, but we’re going to give it a shot. The Future of our Civilisation…. Depends Upon It…..
Ron Watkins can’t stop talking about the Maricopa County ‘audit’ of the 2020 election. We dig into the details surrounding it, including a Q-friendly CEO using a fraudulent process developed by a failed inventor who once hunted for the Ark of the Covenant….
When the drones hum over the improvised cremation grounds of Delhi, what will the conspiritualist see in the livestream—if they even look? Will their Orientalist spell, fixated on fire ceremonies and mantras, finally be broken? In our interview this week, Matthew speaks with sociologist Sheena Sood about the hubris of Hindu nationalism as its yoga-boosting ministers show their pious ineptitude, telling their gasping citizens to stop being crybabies and consider drinking holy cow urine against COVID.
What about when other supposed zealots show their sell-out colors? Austin’s biohacking guru, Aubrey Marcus just sold his hipster supplement company to Unilever, of all companies. Derek breaks down the insanity of the COVID-contrarian set taking the buyout from the big-Ag, big-Pharm mack daddy. Julian looks at how, in the very same week, Marcus’s biz partner Joe Rogan, excuses his vax-hesitant comments by admitting he’s a moron. But isn’t the joke on us?
Priests and punks, preaching spirit and stockpiling cash. When will this be over?
Mike tells Sarah about an impending conflict, a dissident singer and America’s first internet-enabled cancellation. Digressions include “Freedom Fries” and 1990s record company shenanigans….
On this week’s episode of Stay Tuned, “The Chauvin Prosecutors,” Preet interviews Jerry Blackwell and Steve Schleicher, the two lead prosecutors in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering George Floyd.
Rudy Giuliani insists the FBI raid on his apartment was a total miscarriage of justice. His Trumpy allies swear the feds had no reason at all to execute a search warrant on his home.George Conway, a former top Republican lawyer, has a slightly different take. “I think he’s in deep shit,” Conway tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Then, science historian Steven Johnson—the man behind the new Extra Life Project—joins the pod to discuss the many lessons we’ve learned from the pandemic.
Myanmar poet Khet Thi, whose works declare resistance to the ruling junta, has died in detention and his body was returned with the organs removed, his family said.
A spokesperson for the junta did not answer calls to request comment on the death of Khet Thi, who had penned the line “They shoot in the head, but they don’t know the revolution is in the heart.” His Facebook page said he was 45.
Khet Thi’s wife said both of them were taken for interrogation on Saturday by armed soldiers and police in the central town of Shwebo, in the Sagaing region – a centre of resistance to the coup in which elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi was ousted.
“I was interrogated. So was he. They said he was at the interrogation centre. But he didn’t come back, only his body,” his wife, Chaw Su, told BBC Burmese language news .
…
“He died at the hospital after being tortured in the interrogation centre,” the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners activist group said in a bulletin that put the toll of civilians killed since the coup at 780.
The group, which monitors details of killings, did not identify the source of its information.
Khet Thi was at least the third poet to die during protests since the 1 February coup. Poet K Za Win, 39, was shot dead during a protest in Monywa in early March.
Cultural figures and celebrities have been prominent supporters of opposition to the coup with protests daily in different parts of the south-east Asian country in spite of the killings and thousands of arrests.
Khet Thi had been an engineer before quitting his job in 2012 to focus on his poetry and to support himself by making and selling ice-cream and cakes.
“I don’t want to be a hero, I don’t want to be a martyr, I don’t want to be a weakling, I don’t want to be a fool,” he wrote two weeks after the coup. “I don’t want to support injustice. If I have only a minute to live, I want my conscience to be clean for that minute.”
More recently, he wrote that he was a guitar player, a cake baker and a poet – not someone who could fire a gun. But he implied his attitude was changing.
“My people are being shot and I can only throw back poems,” he wrote. “But when you are sure your voice is not enough, then you need to choose a gun carefully. I will shoot.”
Israeli police have stormed the sacred Jerusalem compound that holds the Dome of the Rock amid mounting international concern over the worsening violence in the city.
Following the most serious clashes in the city since 2017, the Palestine Red Crescent reported 305 people had been injured after officers in riot gear clashed with Palestinian demonstrators in East Jerusalem….
Serving members of the French military have fired a second salvo at Emmanuel Macron’s government in an open letter accusing it of “cowardice, deceit, perversion”, just weeks after a first letter said the country was heading for “civil war”.
Like the first letter, it appears in the rightwing magazine Valeurs Actuelles. It was reportedly signed anonymously “by active military personnel” and is appended with a petition on the magazine’s website for others to sign.
…
It was published in support of the first letter, published on 21 April, the 60th anniversary of a failed coup d’état against General Charles de Gaulle over his support for Algerian independence.
Signed by a number of retired generals as well as at least 18 serving soldiers including four officers, it warned of the “disintegration” of France evoking what it called the “perils” of Islamic extremist and “the hordes from the banlieue”.
It also accused anti-racism groups of creating “hatred between communities” and cautioned that “lax” government policies could spark chaos requiring military action to “protect our civilisational values”.
Afterwards, furious ministers accused the signatories, who were supported by the far-right Rassemblement National party leader, Marine Le Pen, of breaking military rules and threatened legal action against them. The armed forces minister, Florence Parly, said: “The armies are not there to campaign but to defend France”, while the interior minister, Gérard Darmanin, accused Le Pen of having her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s “taste” for the sound of marching boots.
The second letter, published late on Sunday evening, batted off threats of punishment and launched an all-out attack on the government,…
…
It brought a swift and damning response from the French government and politicians across the spectrum. Darmanin said it was a crude manoeuvre in the run-up to regional elections next month and denounced the lack of courage of its unnamed authors.
“These are anonymous people. Is that courage? To be anonymous?” Darmanin said on BFMTV. “What a strange and courageous society that gives such a voice to anonymous people. It’s like being on social networks. I think I know that when you’re in the military, you don’t do this kind of thing on the sly.”…
(The article quotes too extensively from the letter and doesn’t sufficiently contextualize it, in my view.)
Here’s a link to the May 10 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
While most health authorities are trying to allay people’s fears over needles right now, in Romania they’re basically daring people to get jabbed. The Associated Press has the story:
At Dracula’s castle in picturesque Transylvania, Romanian doctors are offering a jab in the arm rather than a stake through the heart.
A Covid-19 vaccination centre has been set up on the periphery of Romania’s Bran castle, which is purported to be the inspiration behind Dracula’s home in Bram Stoker’s 19th-century gothic novel “Dracula.”
Every weekend through May “vaccination marathons” will be held just outside the storied 14th-century hilltop castle, where no appointment is needed, in an attempt to encourage people to protect themselves against Covid-19.
“We wanted to show people a different way to get the (vaccine) needle,” Alexandru Priscu, the marketing manager at Bran Castle, told The Associated Press.
Those brave enough to get a Pfizer vaccine shot receive a “vaccination diploma,” which is aptly illustrated with a fanged medical worker brandishing a syringe.
…Colorado Springs Shooting Claims 7 Lives During Weekend Marked by Rash of Mass Shootings
Back in the U.S., a gunman shot and killed six people at a birthday party in Colorado Springs on Sunday. The gunman, who was reportedly in a relationship with one of the female victims, also shot and killed himself. There were children present, but none of them were killed or injured.
The Colorado mass shooting comes after a rash of gun violence on Saturday. In Baltimore, four people, including the gunman, were killed during a shooting and two-alarm fire. In New York City’s Times Square, two women and a 4-year-old girl were injured after a shooting. And in South Florida, three people were wounded by gunfire in a shopping mall Saturday. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been nearly 200 mass shootings since the start of 2021.
…
Ransomware Attack Targeting Colonial Pipeline Shuts Fuel Shipments Across Eastern U.S.
The Colonial Pipeline company halted shipments of fuel across the eastern United States over the weekend after suffering what executives said was a ransomware attack on Friday. The cyberattack idled a pipeline network that transports nearly half of the East Coast’s fuel supply from Texas to New Jersey. In response, the Biden administration enacted emergency powers, lifting limits on the transport of fuels by road to compensate for any shortages. U.S. officials blamed the criminal gang DarkSide, which mostly operates out of Russia. It was the Colonial Pipeline company’s worst crisis since last summer, when a pipeline rupture in North Carolina spilled at least 1.2 million gallons of gasoline — the largest spill in the state’s history.
Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar Introduce Bill to Make School Meals Free
Senator Bernie Sanders, Congressmember Ilhan Omar and other Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill to make all school meals free for every student. Congressmember Omar noted 75% of school districts have school meal debt, and the new bill would “eliminate school meal debt, and strengthen local economies by incentivizing local food procurement.” Some 13 million children in the U.S. live in “food insecure” homes.
The U.S. will protect gay and transgender people against sex discrimination in health care, the Biden administration announced Monday, reversing a Trump-era policy that sought to narrow the scope of legal rights in sensitive situations involving medical care.
The action by the Department of Health and Human Services affirms that federal laws forbidding sex discrimination in health care also protect gay and transgender people. The Trump administration had defined “sex” to mean gender assigned at birth, thereby excluding transgender people from the law’s umbrella of protection.
“Fear of discrimination can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. “Everyone — including LGBTQ people — should be able to access health care, free from discrimination or interference, period.”
It marked the latest step by President Joe Biden to advance the rights of gay and transgender people across society, from military service, to housing, to employment opportunities.
…
Monday’s action means that the HHS Office for Civil Rights will again investigate complaints of sex discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Hospitals, clinics and other medical providers can face government sanctions for violations of the law.
The Biden administration action essentially restores the policy established during the Obama years. The Affordable Care Act included a prohibition on sex discrimination in health care but did not include the term “gender identity.” The Obama administration interpreted the law as shielding gay and transgender people as well. It relied on a broad understanding of sex shaped by a person’s inner sense of being male, female, neither or a combination.
…
HHS is a traditional battleground for conflicts over social issues. During the Trump administration the department clearly bent to the will of conservatives. Other Trump policies applauded by the right restricted abortion referrals and broadened employers’ ability to opt out of providing birth control to women workers covered by their health plans. Under Biden, the policy pendulum has been swinging back in the opposite direction, as officials unwind actions taken in the Trump years.
One of Biden’s first steps after taking office was a Jan. 20 executive order on combating discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. The new president directed every executive branch agency to examine what it could do to combat such discrimination.
Biden quickly followed that up with another order reversing a Trump-era Pentagon policy that largely barred transgender individuals from serving in the military.
And earlier this spring, the Department of Housing and Urban Development withdrew a Trump policy that would have allowed taxpayer-funded homeless shelters to deny access to transgender people.
At HHS, Biden’s term has seen the Senate confirmation of Dr. Rachel Levine to be assistant secretary for health, a senior position that involves oversight of public health initiatives, HIV/AIDS, women’s health and minority health, as well as other areas including research protections. Levine, formerly Pennsylvania’s top health official, is the first openly transgender person to be confirmed by the Senate.
The National Republican Congressional Committee apparently doesn’t want its own members to know about Trump’s unpopularity in key districts.
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump made up polling data that purportedly showed his widespread popularity. Independent surveys pointed in very different directions, but the Republican dismissed those polls by insisting they were part of an elaborate conspiracy against him.
During his semi-retirement, very little has changed. Trump recently appeared on Dan Bongino’s show, and when asked about the possibility of a third presidential campaign in 2024, the Republican said, “I am giving it the most serious consideration as you can imagine and based on every poll that I’m seeing and everything else. It’s something that is, you know, very positive, nobody’s seen anything more positive.”
[…] his boasts notwithstanding, the former president appears to have lost support in recent months. In NBC News polling, Trump’s national favorability rating stood at 43% shortly before Election Day. By January, as he prepared to exit the White House, that total had dipped to 40%, and as of two weeks ago, the Republican’s favorability rating had slipped further to just 32%.
These are not results to be proud of. […] inconvenient details like these are apparently being kept from Republican members of Congress. The Washington Post reported over the weekend on a Republican retreat held last month that featured a polling briefing for GOP members.
When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee rose to explain the party’s latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump’s weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump’s support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired. Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post.
In these battleground districts, “strongly unfavorable” views of the former president were twice as high as “strongly favorable” views.
[…] Cheney reportedly told others that Republican campaign officials “had also left out bad Trump polling news at a March retreat for ranking committee chairs.”
In other words, NRCC officials are aware of Trump’s unpopularity, but rather than make Republican members aware of the facts, the party believes Republicans would be better off not knowing.
As a rule, willful ignorance is an unwise strategy for a political party.
Willful ignorance is the trumpian way. It is also the way most cults operate.
Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman says rockets are ‘in response to its crimes and aggression against the Holy City and its abuse of our people in Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa Mosque’.”
How ridiculous is the Arizona Republicans’ ongoing election “audit”? As The New York Times reported, even one of the GOP state senators who helped open the door to this fiasco is finding the whole mess humiliating.
After a week marked by mounting accusations of partisan skulduggery, mismanagement and even potential illegality, at least one Republican supporter of the new count said it could not end soon enough. “It makes us look like idiots,” State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who supported the audit, said on Friday. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”
He’s not wrong. […] an official vote tally showed Joe Biden narrowly defeating Donald Trump in Arizona. There were two audits and a hand recount, each of which showed the same thing.
[…] As the review process began in earnest two weeks ago, it managed to become even more bonkers, with a combination of hidden procedures, security problems, weird inventions with unclear purposes, and rules that appeared to have been made up on the fly. (Don’t even get me started on the bizarre search for “kinematic artifacts.”)
Last week, one of the officials overseeing the process said on the record that auditors had started looking for — I kid you not — bamboo fibers in the ballots, as part of an unintentionally amusing conspiracy theory involving China.
The legislator’s comments are notable in part because it shows the degree to which this ongoing debacle has reached levels its own proponents can’t defend, but I think Boyer’s quote is also important because of what it tells us about the possible effects of the process.
It’s quite likely that at some point, possibly over the summer, this tragically flawed “audit” and its Cyber Ninja administrators will produce some kind of report telling Donald Trump and other far-right conspiracy theorists what they want to hear. […]
But by that point, it will still be a spectacular failure because the “audit” will obviously be the result of a corrupted process. No neutral observer will ever be able to take this nonsense seriously.
So why continue with the charade? Because Trump and his cohorts don’t much care what neutral observers are able to take seriously. What matters is creating a new reality for the Republican Party and its base — whether proponents of the Arizona circus end up looking “like idiots” or not.
If there’s a competition among Senate Republicans to see who can be the most irresponsible about the pandemic, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson has taken the lead.
On his Fox News program last week, Tucker Carlson suggested COVID vaccines may be linked to a “not even close to normal” number of deaths. The host relied on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), and said the statistics painted “a stunning picture.”
They did not. A Washington Post analysis characterized Carlson’s rhetoric as “sloppy” and “dangerous,” and the observations based on cherry-picked data that were quickly discredited.
And yet, a day after the Fox News broadcast, a prominent Republican senator was pushing an eerily similar line. CNN reported:
Under the guise of “just asking the questions,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin spread anti-vaccine misinformation on a right-wing radio show Thursday, questioning why efforts were being made to vaccinate the general US population, especially young people and those who had previously been infected with Covid-19. Johnson, who tested positive for coronavirus last fall, said he was “sticking up for people who choose not to get vaccinated.”
In the radio interview, the Wisconsin Republican brought up the VAERS system, saying, “We are over 3,000 deaths within 30 days of getting the vaccine. About 40% of those occur on day zero, one or two.”
A HuffPost report explained soon after, “As the VAERS website clearly states, the reports it contains have not been verified, and anyone with an internet connection can submit one. It’s not new; the CDC has been running it for three decades. But during the coronavirus pandemic, it has become a weapon for conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccination activists who use the numbers found there to spread misinformation about vaccines.”
[…] the GOP lawmaker brought up misinformation popular in anti-vaccine circles, and told a public audience about a possible connection between deaths and vaccinations.
It’s the kind of nonsense that undermines public health and puts people in danger for no reason.
[snipped many details of Johnson’s past attempts to spread disinformation]
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 — including his indifference to an FBI warning that he was “a target of Russian disinformation” during the last election cycle. […]
Democrats and other voting-rights advocates held a rally at Texas’ state capitol over weekend, protesting the Republicans’ new voter-suppression measure. The event was led in part by former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) and Julián Castro, a former San Antonio mayor and former cabinet secretary in the Obama administration.
Nepal has recorded its highest daily number of coronavirus cases, registering 9,127 new infections as it struggles to combat the staggering force of its second wave.
The country also reported a further 139 deaths, pushing the toll up to 3,859, while cases stand at 403,794.
The Covid positivity rate is at 47%, one of the highest in the world, and cases have surged by 1,200% in recent weeks.
Nepal is facing severe oxygen shortages, with some mid-size cities having no oxygen at all in any of their hospitals. In the capital of Kathmandu, ICU beds are full and Covid wards are at capacity.
England reports 0 Covid deaths for first time since July
No Covid deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test have been reported in England on Monday – the first time since 30 July last year.
No such deaths were also recorded in Scotland or Northern Ireland on Monday, however four deaths were recorded in Wales.
While the figures are only one measure of Covid-related deaths, and are often affected by time lags in reporting – meaning that they tend to be higher in the second half of the week – the data suggests the combination of lockdown and Covid vaccinations has had the desired effect, driving down the death toll….
The 14,000-account “political manipulation” network sent posts on Trump, Biden, and COVID.
A group of security researchers say they’ve unmasked a massive bot farm that aimed to shape public opinion on Facebook during the heat of the 2020 presidential election.
According to Paul Bischoff of Comparitech, a British cybersecurity company, the network includes 13,775 unique Facebook accounts that each posted roughly 15 times per month, for an output of more than 50,000 posts a week. The accounts appear to have been used for “political manipulation,” Bischoff says, with roughly half the posts being related to political topics and another 17 percent related to COVID-19. Each account has a profile photo and friends list—likely consisting of other bots, the researchers suggest—and they’ve joined “specific Facebook groups where their posts are more likely to be seen and discussed by legitimate users.”
The most-used keyword in the posts was “Trump,” the researchers found, followed by “Biden.” The accounts date back at least as far as October 2020, and, in addition to posts discussing specific events in the 2020 US presidential elections, were also active around the California wildfires, protests in Belarus, and US border issues. The researchers were able to determine that the fake accounts were created and controlled using Selenium, software designed to automate web application testing, but that can also be used to mimic human behavior in ways that could be difficult for automated bot detection software to spot.
According to a Comparitech spokesperson, Facebook did not respond to Bob Diachenko, an independent cybersecurity expert who helped lead the research, when he attempted to bring the teams’s findings to the platform’s attention. A Facebook representative said the company would look into a sample of the accounts identified by Comparitech, but declined further comment.
Facebook has become much more active and aggressive at publicly identifying and taking down what it calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior” operating on the platform since the 2016 Russian election interference operation. Such inauthentic activity, which the company defines as when posters seek “to mislead people about who they are and what they are doing while relying on fake accounts,” can include government-backed or private efforts. Just last month, the company claims it had removed 1,565 suspect Facebook accounts, along with 141 Instagram accounts, 724 pages, and 63 groups.
The Comparitech researchers were able to see the email addresses that purportedly registered the phony Facebook accounts. While many used “mail[.]ru” accounts seemingly originating in Russia, the researchers did not allege who was behind the bot farm, or who controlled the unsecured server.
And there it is: yet one more reason to distrust Facebook.
Facebook’s January decision to ban Donald Trump left many people who dislike Trump and the social media giant feeling like they had to pick sides.
There’s no need for that. That’s one takeaway from comments on Sunday by Michael McConnell, a Stanford University law professor who is co-chair of Facebook’s Oversight Board. Appearing on Fox News, McConnell faulted Facebook for its failure to set out clear rules governing content, while also batting aside claims that the company treated Trump unfairly. [video available at the link]
“Trump is the one who issued those inflammatory posts at the very time when rioters were invading the Congress and shutting down the constitutionally prescribed process for counting electoral votes,” McConnell told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “He issued those posts. He is responsible for doing that. He bears responsibility for his own situation. He put himself in this bed and he can sleep in it.”
McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge nominated by President George W. Bush, appeared on Fox to defend the board’s May 5 decision to extend Facebook’s ban on Trump while recommending that the company itself, not the board, review the question again within six months. The board said that Trump’s January 6 posts complimenting rioters “severely violated” Facebook’s rules against praise for people engaged in violence and that his lies about election fraud “created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.”
McConnell said Facebook’s rules governing content are a mess. “We gave them a certain amount of time to get their house in order,” he said. “They needed some time because their rules are a shambles. They are not transparent. They are unclear. They are internally inconsistent.”
But he rejected claims by Trump and many of his supporters that a private company barring Trump from posting violates his right to free speech. “He has no First Amendment rights” on the platform, McConnell said. “He’s customer. Facebook is not a government, and he is not a citizen of Facebook.”
“No judge in the country would rule” in Trump’s favor, McConnell said.
Actually, it’s part of what seems to be a rather clever strategy by Romania to get people vaccinated:
Romania’s government has turned to local vaccination drives and 24-hour “marathons” at major venues such as the National Library in Bucharest to get as many citizens as possible immunised.
“These centres are for everyone who wants to get vaccinated but doesn’t feel like making an appointment online,” Beatrice Mahler, the director of Marius Nasta hospital, told AFP.
I swear there’s a whole cottage industry around telling people to not freak out even after a @&# insurrection and the number 3 R is getting ousted this week and there are voter suppression laws passing across America. It is time to be alarmed. It is not always savvy to be chill.
I noted @181 that the vagaries of the Scottish Parliament electoral system meant the Sottish Geens, who secured 8 seats, could easily have had only 7, or as many as 10. It appears we may have been denied the extra 2 seats by a poor decision from the Electoral Commission, which allowed an unpleasant outfit called “Independent Green Voice” to use what appears to be an intentionally confusing logo on the ballot paper, with “Green” in large print, and the other words much smaller (of course the word “Green” is not party property, but it is the EC’s job to guard against confusing ballot papers). Despite having done almost no campaigning, and having no recent online presence (although registered in 2003, its website does not appear to have been updated since 2007), IGV got more votes than other fringe parties with similar lack of presence. Of course it can’t be proved that voters were fooled, but if only a small proportion (just over 100 out of of around 2,000) of those voting for IGV in Scotland South Region intended to vote for Scottish Greens, we wuz robbed! In Glasgow Region, just under 1,000 out of a similar number voting for us instead of IGV would have netted us a second seat there. The story was almost repeated in Central Scotland Region, where again IGV stood, and we scraped home by just over 100 votes.
Some information about IGV, which appears to be a fascist front, is available here.
I’ve described the Scottish parliamentary electoral system before, but as it’s relevant to this story, and also other interesting features of the results, I’ll do so again. There are 129 seats at Holyrood, of which 73 are constituency seats, decided by “First Past the Post” voting – whichever candidate gets most votes, even if well short of a majority, is elected. Interestingly, many anti-independence (“unionist”) voters appear to have been willing to vote for whichever unionist candidate (Tory, Labour or LibDem) was most likely to beat the SNP. But voters have a second vote: the other 56 seats are “regional list” seats – 7 for each of 8 regions. The ballot paper for these seats lists parties rather than individuals (except for independents, treated as one-person parties), and they are intended to give parties with “wide but shallow” support (like the Scottish Greens) a chance to be represented. The 7 seats are decided successively. On the first round, any party which won any constituency seats in that region has its list vote divided by the number of constituency seats it won, plus 1. Parties which did not win any constituency seats get their whole vote (so in fact, it’s “divided by 1” – i.e., again, the number of constituencies won in the region, plus 1). On subsequent rounds, division is by the total number of seats won so far in the region (constituency plus list seats), plus 1. Because it won 62 of the 73 constiuencies, the SNP ended up getting only 2 list seats – but the overall result was pretty fair, as they won just under half the total constituency vote, and 40% of the list vote. (They always press for their supporters to give them both votes, even though most of the list votes for them will not gain any extra seats – Salmond tried unsuccessfully to persuade SNP voters to support his party on the list using that “wasted vote” argument.) It’s said the system was devised to make it hard for one party to win a majority (supposedly aimed at the SNP, but they were not by any means the largest party when the system was set up), and in fact any roughly proportional system would do the same. But the system certainly has some odd features. The LibDems won 4 constituency seats (their dwindling support is highly concentrated in a few areas), while we Scottish Greens won 8 list seats, and no constituencies. In my region, Lothian, we ended up getting two list seats, the same as 2016. But if fewer Tory or LibDem voters had been prepared to switch to Labour to keep the SNP out of Edinburgh Southern, or fewer Tory and Labour to vote LibDem to keep the SNP out of Edinburgh Western, we’d have got only one list seat even with every party getting exactly the same number of list votes, because Labour (or the LibDems) would have had their list vote divided by 1 less at each stage. This would also have given the SNP their desired overall majority, so in that sense, the tactical voters at the constituency level were highly successful, but at the same time, gave us far more influence! (It was very odd to find myself, on Saturday, hoping for the Tories to hold Aberdeenshire West, the last constituency seat the SNP could hope to gain – if they had done so, again they would have ended up with an overall majority.)
KGsays
Sottish Geens -> Scottish Greens @204! If I weren’t a member, I’d suspect myself of doing that deliberately!
House Republicans are continuing down the path of self-immolation this week, having a very public fight for their future. Are they going to stick by the former guy and treason or the Constitution and the nation? At this point, it’s not looking good for the latter. […]
more opposition comes in the odious and opportunistic form of Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has decided her future in the party lies in treason. She’s the worm who got elected and reelected in New York by touting her “independence,” and who even called for the resignation of one of Trump’s worst lackeys, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Most recently, though, she’s been hyping the Big Lie, going to the Trumpiest of all outlets—Steve Bannon’s podcast—to declare she’s down with the QAnon MAGA infestation of the party. […]
Never mind that whole inciting a mob to attack the Capitol and threaten the lives of her and her colleagues to overthrow an election. You know, other than that. And the Russia thing. And the Ukraine thing. And the grift. And the letting more than half a million Americans die of COVID-19.
Stefanik’s full embrace of MAGAdom isn’t being returned, however. While Trump is calling her “a new Republican star,” his mob is breaking with him. Some of the choice comments coming from the ultra-right about her include “a slightly less annoying America Last Republican”; “neocon establishment twit”; “wolf in sheep’s clothing”; “the identity of a swamp creature [with] the most liberal voting record of anybody who represents a strong Republican district.” Lou Dobbs called her a “RINO.” This is all after Trump’s endorsement of her to oust Cheney.
That has everything to do with Stefanik’s initial opposition to Trump. She backed John Kasich in the 2016 primaries and even refused to use Trump’s name throughout that election, calling him “my party’s nominee.” Trump doesn’t give a damn about that now that she’s decided to kiss his ring […] While Stefanik voted with Trump less than 70% of the time in 2019 and 2020—and got reelected in New York for it—Cheney voted with Trump 93% of the time.
[…] Trump has never cared about the actual governing part. Stefanik is willing to go out publicly and mouth the Big Lie and echo the orange one’s insistence that he’s still the real president. That’s all that matters to him. […]
House leadership has apparently decided, and it’s not going to be truth and the Constitution. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is firmly aboard the Trump train. He’s publicly backing Stefanik’s insurrection against Cheney […]
It would all be hilarious to watch this massive unraveling of the GOP if it weren’t so damned dangerous to the country.
Amid the alarming, additional reports of mass shootings over the weekend, what does the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, do? He signs a bill banning gun regulations by local governments.
[…] The bill expands a 2011 law that allows citizens or gun groups to sue local governments for enacting gun restrictions and demand up to $100,000 in damages, according to the Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The bill, which takes effect July 1, expands the 2011 law in two ways, according to the newspaper: It will allow legal action for “unwritten” local policies that go against the regulation preemption, and it allows for local governments to still be forced to pay damages and attorney fees even if they alter their gun-related policies after the lawsuits are filed.
he Florida Senate passed the legislation by a 24-16 vote on April 26. Two days later, the bill cleared the state House in a 78-39 vote.
A Florida House sponsor of the bill, Rep. Cord Byrd (R), said during a floor debate in April that the legislation is intended to protect Second Amendment rights and “send a message” to local government, according to the Sun-Sentinel.
Democrats, however, argued that cities and counties should not be reprimanded for spearheading efforts to limit gun violence, the newspaper noted.
DeSantis’s signing of the bill comes around a month after a panel of the 1st District Court of Appeals upheld the 2011 law, which was challenged by dozens of local governments and officials in February 2018 following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, which left 17 people dead.
Lawyers for the local governments, however, filed a motion on April 23 requesting that the 1st District Court of Appeals send key issues in the case to the Supreme Court, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
According to the newspaper, the Florida-based appeals court had not acted on the request as of Monday morning.
President Biden on Tuesday will meet virtually with a group of bipartisan governors to discuss COVID-19 vaccination strategies as the nation moves into a new phase in its campaign to get shots in arms.
Biden will speak with Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R), Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D), Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R), Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) to hear about “innovative ways governors are working to get people in their states vaccinated,” the White House said.
“The bipartisan group will share with the president some best practices on promoting access to vaccination, building confidence in vaccines and ensuring that everyone is reached in the vaccine response,” press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.
[…] Biden will also look ahead to how states can help the administration reach its stated goal of having 70 percent of adult Americans receive at least one coronavirus vaccine dose and having 160 million fully vaccinated by the Fourth of July. […]
The BBC has a podcast series called The Anti-Vax Files, of which the eighth and final episode – “Vaccine heroes fight back” – was just posted today. I’m just learning of this, but the episodes look good.
Wonkette: “Former White House Trade Idiot Is Even Bigger Idiot About Dr. Fauci, COVID-19”
Former White House trade idiot Peter Navarro is not especially fond of Dr. Anthony Fauci. He’s written angry op-eds claiming Dr. Fauci is a big dummy who doesn’t know anything. But with all this unemployment-related free time on his hands, Navarro has now moved on to accusing Dr. Fauci of more serious offenses, such as literally fathering the coronavirus.
Navarro was a guest on moldy, flesh bag Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast this weekend. Here’s some of the deranged gibberish he spouted. [video is available at the link]
NAVARRO: For whatever reason, Fauci wanted to weaponize that virus. He is the father of it. He has killed millions of Americans if that thing came from the lab and now I’m 99.999 percent sure it did.
Whoa if true! This represents a significant escalation in hostilities and rhetoric since March 30, when he first smeared Dr. Fauci as the “father of the virus” after Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy triggered Navarro with a clip of Dr. Fauci taking credit for pushing for the vaccine, calling it the “best decision” he made.
CAMPOS-DUFFY: A quick reaction to that? I know that’s gotta be steaming you, Peter.
NAVARRO: Fauci is a sociopath and a liar. He had nothing to do with the vaccine. The father of the vaccine is Donald J. Trump.
Despite Navarro’s raging that his hero sired the vaccine […], there’s no evidence that President Pandemic did more than demand a vaccine NOW so people would stop talking about COVID-19 and he could win re-election. […]
In the best Fox tradition, Campos-Duffy appears to have taken Fauci’s remarks entirely out of context for maximum effect. In fact, the doctor told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta that seeing New York’s hospitals overrun was the moment when it “became very clear that the decision we made on January the 10th — to go all out and develop a vaccine — may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to an intervention as director of the institute.”
He’s not claiming sole proprietorship of the vaccine. He specifically said “we.” He’s also the director of the National Institutes of Health, so his decision to support moving quickly matters, especially since he would’ve actually taken responsibility if it hadn’t worked, unlike the one-term loser.
But Navarro went topsy-turvy on Dr. Fauci and called him the “father of the virus.”
NAVARRO: Fauci is the guy — this virus, according to [Robert] Redfield at the Centers for Disease Control, came from the Wuhan lab and basically we had Fauci not only funding that lab with American taxpayer dollars, he authorized this thing called gain of function research.
He allowed the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army to genetically engineer a virus using gain of function. I call it the Fauci virus now. If he wants to be the father of something, he is the father of the virus that’s killed over half a million Americans.
PolitiFact debunked this nonsense in February, but Navarro’s still repeating these lies […]
The predictable result of this incessant fulminating is that Dr. Fauci has received death threats […] Navarro’s unhinged rants go right up to the line of inciting violence against an 80-year-old public servant […]
And it’s not just stupid. It’s potentially lethal.
There’s a House hearing on the January 6th putsch going on right now. It’s on C-SPAN. Capitol Police IG Michael Bolton is giving his opening statement.
Republicans seem to have decided that lying is their best option. Rather than risk the wrath of the disgraced former president, they lie about who won the election and who is responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Rather than confront the donor class and anti-government activists who insists on plutocratic economics, they opposed the American Rescue Plan en masse — and then went out to promote its benefits.
Deception soon morphs into self-delusion. [Yes, that’s what I’m seeing.]
The Post reports on a polling briefing that took place at a recent GOP retreat:
When staff from the National Republican Congressional Committee rose to explain the party’s latest polling in core battleground districts, they left out a key finding about Trump’s weakness, declining to divulge the information even when directly questioned about Trump’s support by a member of Congress, according to two people familiar with what transpired.
Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the core districts, according to the full polling results, which were later obtained by The Washington Post. Nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of the former president as had a strongly favorable one.
Republicans do not want to deal with the unpleasant truth: The MAGA cult leader is bad for the party, yet they cannot bring themselves to break with him. […] The true sign of a cultist is that he will contort reality so as not to question the basic tenets of the cult.
[…] The truth-tellers and the deniers of the Jan. 6 insurrection cannot coexist. […]
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) at least does not try to sell his party a bill of goods. Also appearing on “Meet the Press,” he was blunt: “This is going to be a battle for the soul of the Republican Party.” In other words, Republicans need to dispense with the fantasy that abject liars willing to rewrite history can coexist with principled lawmakers who insist on defending the Constitution.
[…] United on policy? Few Republicans are talking about policy at all. Instead, they are fighting fictitious culture wars and cheering efforts to suppress the vote.
Republican politicians are deceiving themselves about the former president’s toxicity […] They try to keep up the pretense that all will be fine in the GOP, ignoring the party’s absence of viable policy ideas and its preference for performance politics and right-wing conspiracy theories. […] the GOP crackup will only intensify.
QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine […] railed against proposals to offer separate seating sections for vaccinated and non-vaccinated spectators at sporting events and other large gatherings, predictably likening it to Nazi Germany.
Lorraine, who has been an ardent COVID-19 denier and tireless anti-vaxxer from the very start of the pandemic, complained that offering separate seating sections for those who have been vaccinated is no different than Jim Crow.
They’re gonna start dividing up their sections of sporting events, churches, and other areas of public interest and it’s gonna say vaccinated people or non-vaccinated people, Lorraine griped. And we know that — because there’s so many mindless sheeple out there — that the vaccinated section is going to be a hell of a lot bigger than the non-vaccinated section, but that’s how it’s going to be. So, sporting events, if you go to a baseball game, a football game, etcetera, you can expect to be put in a different section, whether you’ve been vaccinated or not.
I’m actually okay with it, host Stew Peters responded, because I don’t really want to be hanging around these vaccinated people. All this talk about transmission and shedding and all of this other stuff, I mean, this is a contagious vaccination, it’s a self-spreading vaccination.
Exactly, Lorraine replied. Don’t shed on me. We need to start having ‘Don’t Shed On Me’ flags everywhere.
I don’t want to be hanging out with the vaxxed anyways, she continued, […] This is also {like} back in the day where racism was paramount and they had separate water fountains, separate schools, separate eating areas for blacks and whites. How is this any different?
I rather like the idea of Don’t Shed On Me flags, as it could provide a highly visible warning of to stay well clear, both for sanity and safety. Possibly should be sold — at a considerable mark-up, of course — with bottles of bleach for internal disinfecting?
Accusing educators of brainwashing children with a liberal agenda of barnyard sounds, conservative pundits criticized local preschool Butler Academy Monday for silencing right-wing animal voices. “Every day, our children get sent to schools just like this, and are brainwashed by antifa teachers who believe that cows, chickens, and pigs only speak one way,” said Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who held up a picture book, flipped through the pages, and demanded to know why there wasn’t a single conservative “moo,” “baa,” or “oink” to be found. […] At press time, conservative pundits had called a teacher from the preschool in order to shame her for only teaching left-wing shapes.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that public health capacities must be strengthened to prepare for the possibility of vaccine-evading Covid-19 variants.
Even in countries with a sliding trend in cases and with the highest vaccination rates.
FDA authorises Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for emergency use in adolescents
US regulators authorised the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for use in children as young as 12, widening the country’s inoculation program as vaccination rates have slowed significantly.
The US Food and Drug Administration said it was amending the Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) to include the millions of children aged 12 to 15.
The vaccine had previously been given emergency authorised to people as young as 16 in the United States.
So I’ve listened to several episodes of the BBC podcast series @ #211. They’re interesting. The most useful I think so far is #5, “One woman’s escape from the rabbit hole.” They also mention a site called Conspiracy Watch in the episode on France, which has a recent book excerpt, “Comment lutter contre la prolifération des théories du complot ?” (the site, despite its name, is in French). The excerpt discusses research-based ideas for countering belief in conspiracy theories, at the individual and societal levels. I laughed when reading it I came across “représentant·es,” just a few hours after reading blf’s #170. Endorse.
There were at least nine mass shootings in the country over the weekend that combined left at least 15 people dead and 30 more wounded, according to CNN reporting and an analysis of data from Gun Violence Archive (GVA), local media and police reports.
The junior senator from Missouri has been saying he waved to peaceful demonstrators who had nothing to do with the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
On Jan. 6, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) walked outside the U.S. Capitol, turned to a crowd of protesters and infamously saluted them with a raised fist before going inside to try to throw out November’s election results.
About an hour later, some of those protesters broke through police barricades and stormed up the steps of the Capitol, where the mob smashed on the door until they gained entry to the building and a melee with law enforcement awaited.
Hawley insisted earlier this week that he was saluting peaceful protesters and has maintained that he did nothing to encourage the violence that day.
“I don’t know which of those protesters, if any of them, those demonstrators, participated in the criminal riot,” Hawley said Tuesday during a live event with The Washington Post, calling it a “slur” to say they were all rioters.
But it’s ridiculous for Hawley to suggest he waved to a peaceful crowd and that he couldn’t possibly know if any of those people were part of the insurrection after he went inside. Photos and videos from that day show that many people on the east side of the Capitol were eager participants in the day’s events. HuffPost, working with members of the Sedition Hunters community and the group Capitol Terrorists Exposers, endeavored to help Hawley resolve the question of whether he’d saluted rioters on Jan. 6. The conclusion? He did.
Hawley waved to the crowd from across the Capitol plaza shortly before 1 p.m. At a distance of about 200 feet, it would have been tough for him to see all the people very clearly.
[…] Members of Congress had been warned to use the Capitol’s underground tunnels to reach the House chamber.
Videos from the east side of the Capitol that day also show Keith Lee, who later infiltrated the Rotunda, talking about how the barricades wouldn’t be strong enough to hold people back and telling a crowd he would “risk life, limb and injury.” Another part of the video shows a man screaming “storm the Capitol” into a bullhorn. During a livestream interview (that was deleted but viewed by HuffPost), Ann Vandersteel, a podcaster, reported that “a lot of people are talking about storming the Capitol if [the Electoral College vote certification] isn’t done the right way.”
[…] protesters on the east side, where Hawley raised his fist, also fought police. Roughly an hour after Hawley’s appearance, at the same location, violent rioters pushed past the barricades and a massive crowd flooded toward the building’s center steps, as seen in the video below. Few stayed behind.
Many stormed right up to the doors of the building, overwhelming the police who tried to stop them. Why wouldn’t they? They believed that the election was stolen and that Joe Biden was about to usurp the American presidency. […]
So what did Hawley see? He said Tuesday that when he stood there an hour before the riot exploded, he saw “demonstrators who were out there on the far end of the plaza on the east side standing behind barricades waving American flags,” adding that they had every right to be there.
The photographer who captured the senator’s raised fist also took a few pictures of the crowd arrayed along the barricades on the east side of the Capitol.
[…] Pro-Trump protesters had the right to demonstrate outside of the barriers that surrounded the Capitol complex ― but not to blow past those security barriers and enter restricted grounds, overwhelm law enforcement and break into the building. Under normal circumstances, it would’ve earned them a pair of flex cuffs courtesy of the U.S. Capitol Police.
When the pro-Trump mob stormed past the police line on the western front of the Capitol, they knocked a female Capitol Police officer unconscious. One Trump fan charged in her assault at a barricade told undercover FBI agents it was “fucking fun.” Then the mob brawled with police and used chemical weapons against Capitol Police officers, one of whom died the next day.
The violent rioters at the front of the mob used the size of the crowd to their advantage, telling cops there was nothing they could do to stop them. Eventually, the Capitol attackers, once again backed by a mob of thousands, fought their way to a Capitol entrance and engaged in a lengthy, violent battle. Several officers were dragged into the crowd and beaten by Trump supporters who thought they were fighting for America.
When Trump fanatic Danny “D.J.” Rodriguez, wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, electroshocked D.C. Police Officer Mike Fanone, there were thousands of Trump supporters behind him. Some of them may not have realized how brutal things were up front, but even their unlawful presence on Capitol grounds made it impossible for police to gain control over the situation. […]
The defendant later claimed to the FBI that he regretted not helping Fanone. Some of the other members of the mob did eventually come to Fanone’s aid. He survived. But by joining the mob that was storming the Capitol, the illegal protesters had contributed to a situation that left Fanone fighting for his life. […]
If a mass shooting is defined as an event where four or more people are shot, not counting the shooter, well, there were at least nine of those in the United States over the past weekend. At least 15 people died and 30 were wounded in those nine events, as Republicans continue to oppose even the most modest gun law reforms.
U! S! A!
Sorry, what else can we possibly say at that news?
The only one of the weekend’s minimum of nine mass shootings to make widespread headlines was at a birthday party in Colorado. Six people were killed in that one, and the suspected shooter—believed to be the boyfriend of one of his victims—also killed himself. While it’s common for your smaller, home-based mass shootings to involve intimate partner relationships, so much so that many of those shootings don’t get a lot of media coverage, the birthday party angle garnered this one some attention.
In other mass shootings, three were killed and one injured in Woodlawn, Maryland, in a bizarre incident that involved a man shooting and stabbing his neighbors, setting fire to his own home, and ultimately being shot and killed by police. Two people were killed and three injured in St. Louis County, Missouri, when a truck pulled up and bullets started flying. In Compton, California, two people were killed and two injured, while one person was killed and five were injured in a Los Angeles shooting. One person was killed and at least seven were wounded in an altercation at a Phoenix hotel. Four people were injured in each of three mass shootings, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Newark, New Jersey; and Citrus Heights, California. […]
Wonkette: “Another Accused Capitol Rioter MAYBE Bad At Crime, Caught After Bragging On Facebook”
It’s a tale as old as … about five months ago, really. Boy meets Capitol building, Boy illegally enters Capitol building, Boy riots inside Capitol building, Boy brags about entering Capitol building on Facebook, Twitter or a dating app, Boy gets arrested. (Allegedly, innocent until proven guilty, etc.)
John Maron Nassif, 55, of Chuluota, Florida, was arrested on Monday on charges of “entering a restricted building or grounds and violent entry or disorderly conduct,” after having bragged about his exploits on Facebook and subsequently being reported to the FBI by someone who knew him and saw the posts.
Via DOJ:
NASSIF’s public Facebook page revealed a conversation on January 8, 2021, in which NASSIF states, “You know I was there right?” In addition, on January 9, 2021, NASSIF has a conversation on Facebook in which he writes that he deleted his Twitter account and the application. NASSIF also writes, “Download this and turn off auto updates for your apps on your phones. Encrypted comms should we need them, https://signal.org/install.”
Yep! He encouraged people to use encrypted communications apps, because he was so stealthy, but also publicly bragged that he was part of the riots.
Yet another witness who was friends with Nassif on Facebook also reported him to the FBI, citing a January 20 post in which he uploaded multiple pictures of himself at the Capitol riots and talked about going into the building, which he was not legally allowed to do.
Text:
[F]ound myself inside the building. The Rotunda was nearly filled with people. No one was fighting or being violent. More pushing and I decided to leave. It wasn’t until I was walking back that I heard a rumor someone had been shot. It wasn’t till I got back to my hotel room I learned the specifics. Anyone telling you this was some type of coup etc is telling you lies.
Then what was it they were trying to do? Because it seemed pretty obvious they were trying to prevent the election from being certified so that Donald Trump could continue being president indefinitely.
I realize I have a somewhat advanced understanding of crime, as a result of the many episodes of “Dateline” I have seen, but even a child knows that if you do something you know you’re going to get in trouble for, you don’t go around bragging about it. Perhaps on the day of the riots they thought they wouldn’t get in trouble, because they felt they were just following orders from the president. Perhaps a case could be made that they actually were that stupid.
But by January 20 it was pretty clear this was a thing people were going to prison for. Yet Nassif still thought it was a good idea to share his crime scrapbook to Facebook.
The Orlando Sentinel also reports that Nassif, who “faces up to one year in prison, a year probation and a $100,000 fine,” refused to wear his mask during a court hearing today, and is otherwise a real piece of work.
After the hearing, Nassif yelled “Go away” and held up a hand to block his face as a group of reporters tried to ask about the charges against him.
A review of Nassif’s Facebook page also shows memes and news stories that say the riot was organized by left-wing groups such as Antifa.
He also posted news stories about anti-mask and lockdown mandates and another claiming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inflated COVID-19 deaths by 1600 percent. Multiple posts he shared were flagged for spreading false or misleading information. […]
[…]
The private company conducting the GOP 2020 election recount in Arizona is now demanding access to government internet routers and passwords, which the Maricopa County sheriff blasted as “mind-numbingly reckless and irresponsible” and a threat to law enforcement.
Sheriff Paul Penzone […] said in a statement that providing router information to a shadowy private company led by a conspiracy-embracing CEO would compromise sensitive and highly classified law enforcement data and equipment.
“The Senate Republican Caucus’ audit of the Maricopa County votes from last November’s election has no stopping point,” Penzone said. “Now, its most recent demands jeopardize the entire mission of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.”
In addition, citizens’ private information, including voting histories, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers, could fall into the hands of Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by the GOP-led Senate to conduct the recount.
In response to Senate subpoenas last week, county attorney Allister Adel explained in a letter that turning over the requested routers or “virtual images” of routers not only poses a significant security risk to the sheriff’s office, it also “puts sensitive, confidential data belonging to Maricopa County’s citizens — including Social Security numbers and protected health information — at risk as well,” reported the Arizona Republic.
Access to the routers “might compromise county and federal law enforcement efforts and put the lives of law enforcement personnel at risk,” Adel added.
[… Hair furor] has been telling guests at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida that a vote upset in Arizona claimed by the Cyber Ninjas could be his road back to the White House.
Also, the now-suspended door-to-door voter intimidation by Cyber Ninjaphrauds, was clarified that the squad of heavies at knocking on doors will not carry a firearm or other weapons.
A gunman attacked a school in the Russian city of Kazan on Tuesday morning, killing seven students and a teacher, officials have said.
Rustam Minnikhanov, the president of the Tatarstan republic where Kazan is the capital, said four male and three female eighth-grade students died in “a great tragedy for the whole country”. Minnikhanov’s press service later said a teacher was also killed. Eighth-grade children in Russia are 13 and 14 years old.
Footage posted on social media showed a young man being pinned to the ground outside the school by a police officer.
Minnikhanov said a 19-year-old “terrorist” had been arrested and that the firearm used in the shooting was registered in the suspect’s name. “Other accomplices haven’t been established, an investigation is under way,” he said after visiting the school, adding that security had been restored.
According to Tatarstan health officials, 21 people were taken to hospital with wounds after the attack, including 18 children, six of whom were in intensive care. Russia’s state RIA Novosti news agency reported earlier that 11 people had been killed.
…
While school shootings are relatively rare in Russia, there have been several violent attacks on schools in recent years, mostly carried out by students.
One of the last major shootings took place in Russian-annexed Crimea in 2018, when a student at a college killed 20 people before killing himself.
Wow, big move in Ukraine. The country’s security service is searching the Kyiv-area home of Viktor Medvedchuk, MP and leader of the country’s pro-Russia party and close friend of Putin’s, who is godfather of Medvedchuk’s daughter.
Reporter for @tweetsNV now says Ukraine’s prosecutor general signed a suspicion of treason against Viktor Medvedchuk and his closest associate and business partner, Taras Kozak….
Treason! Love this from the Prosecutor General’s autotranslated statement: “You can’t create an army of information clowns and puppet them in your own anti-Ukrainian interests.”
Four months after former President Donald Trump was banished from most mainstream social media platforms, he returned to the web last Tuesday with “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” essentially a blog for his musings.
A week since the unveiling, social media data suggests things are not going well.
The ex-president’s blog has drawn a considerably smaller audience than his once-powerful social media accounts, according to engagement data compiled with BuzzSumo, a social media analytics company. The data offers a hint that while Trump remains a political force, his online footprint is still dependent on returning to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube….
blfsays
“Senator” Paul and Dr Fauci sparred again (and again, the so-called “Senator” talked over Dr Fauci), this time on the bonkers Wuhan lab nonsense, so the follow-up question from the next Senator (a lady, but I missed her name (she’s remote so no name plate)) was about the conspiracy theories spouted by Paul and other eejits… hee hee
People in the US will be able to get a free ride to vaccination centres in Uber and Lyft vehicles after the companies partnered with the government as part of a new effort to boost vaccination figures.
Joe Biden will announce the scheme later today, alongside plans for some of the US’ biggest community colleges to host vaccination sites for students, staff and local communities during May and June.
States will also be offered more funding in order to support local efforts to encourage vaccine uptake, including door-to-door canvassing and phone banking.
Biden is aiming for 70% of US adults to have had one vaccine shot by 4 July.
blfsays
SC@242, Yeah as soon as Cassidy started his blatantly-obviously fake frustrated act, I tuned the entire exchange(s?) out. He also claimed to have been a virus researcher, but Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge does not seem to confirm.
To his credit, however, he did vote to convict hair furor (and what that link reports him doing as a doctor also seems very much to his credit).
As expected, Republican Senator Rand Paul clashed with Dr Anthony Fauci during the Senate committee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic.
Paul, who indicated yesterday that he would be confrontational with the president’s chief medical adviser, repeatedly pressed Fauci on whether he still supports the National Institutes of Health providing funding to the lab in Wuhan that has been blamed (without evidence) for creating the coronavirus.
“Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci said. […]
blfsays
Senator Murphy is now blasting the thugs on the committee and their conspiracy theories, acknowledging there are a lot of things we / science don’t know about Sars-CoV-2 / Covid-19, and praising the witnesses for not lying — taking a few swipes at hair furor and his dalekocrazy in the process.
[…]
Burger chain McDonald’s has announced it is partnering with the White House to promote vaccination information on its coffee cups.
Separately, Joe Biden announced on Tuesday a new program with Lyft and Uber which will offer free rides to anyone going to a vaccination site to get vaccinated.
Starting in July, US customers will see redesigned McCafé cups and delivery-box seal stickers featuring an upbeat message of “We Can Do This”, a slogan created by the US health department.
McDonald’s also said it will unveil a billboard in New York’s Times Square this month displaying vaccine information.
[…]
* California Republicans hoping to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) may want to lower their expectations. A new poll [measures] support for recalling the governor at just 36%. Newsom’s approval rating, meanwhile, is 52% in the statewide survey.
* As House Republicans prepare to purge Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from her leadership post, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) responded on Twitter, “Expelling Liz Cheney from leadership won’t gain the GOP one additional voter, but it will cost us quite a few.”
* On a related note, Denton Knapp, a retired U.S. Army colonel, announced plans to run against Cheney in a Wyoming primary. If my count is right, he’s the fifth Republican to file the paperwork to take on Cheney in 2022, and the larger the field, the more likely it is that Cheney will prevail.
* Though modern history suggests otherwise, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) predicted the other day that his party will gain seats in the 2022 midterms. Since Reconstruction, the president’s party has gained House seats in midterm cycles only three times: 1934, 1998, and 2002. […]
Some nutter is, again, pushing some Wuhan lab nonsense. Dr Fauci has just him “I am not going to be trapped into saying…”, which is possibly the angriest I’ve ever heard him (his voice even went up maybe a few millidecibels).
ust one week after his inauguration, President Joe Biden did what his predecessor would not: he issued an executive order to create a special enrollment period through the Affordable Care Act, citing a need created by the pandemic. Donald Trump was expected to do something similar, but the Republican refused, because he didn’t want people turning to “Obamacare” for help during a crisis.
Following up on our earlier coverage, Biden’s decision to do the right thing is paying off in dramatic ways. NBC News reported this morning:
One million people have signed up for health coverage under an Affordable Care Act special enrollment period announced earlier this year, officials said Tuesday.
“That’s 1 million more Americans who now have the peace of mind that comes from having health insurance,” Biden said in a statement. “One million more Americans who don’t have to lie awake at night worrying about what happens if they or one of their family members gets sick.”
The president’s victory lap is understandable, though as we’ve discussed, the heartening numbers, actually understate the scope of the good news. As the New York Times recently noted, “The new enrollment figures cover the 36 states that use Healthcare.gov to run their health insurance marketplaces. They do not include Americans enrolling in coverage in the 14 states and District of Columbia that manage their own markets, many of which also have extended enrollment periods this year.”
According to Charles Gaba’s research, the national total, including the states with their own exchange marketplaces, is roughly 1.5 million. […]
blf @246 and 250, OMG, Fauci must be so tired of testifying before Congress Critters, especially when Republicans abuse the occasion to propagate rightwing conspiracy theories.
SC @229, thanks! For my sake, Josh Marshall needs to be more obvious. Heh. He needs to say to himself, Lynna won’t get this “she’s tweeted stuff like this like 900 times today” as an exaggeration. I’d better say: “She’s tweeted stuff like this a gazillion times today.”
The House Republican leader had a week to figure out what he wanted to say about purging Liz Cheney. His letter suggests he couldn’t think of anything.
[…] Over the weekend, McCarthy returned to Fox News and was asked whether he supports Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) in her bid to replace Cheney. “Yes, I do,” he replied.
All of which led to yesterday, when McCarthy put it in writing. NBC News reported late yesterday:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sent a letter to his Republican colleagues saying it’s “clear that we need to make a change” ahead of a Wednesday vote that could remove GOP Rep. Liz Cheney from her position as conference chair.
[No, it’s not “clear” at all.]
[…] Cheney has been publicly critical of Donald Trump’s anti-election efforts, while also expressing support for democracy, putting her future in GOP politics in peril.
But what was surprising about McCarthy’s letter is how woeful it was. […]
“We are a big tent party,” McCarthy wrote. “We represent Americans of all backgrounds…. And unlike the left, we embrace free thought and debate.” [LOL a gazillion times]
Evidently, the irony was lost on him. The point of yesterday’s letter was for McCarthy to tell his members to purge a conservative Republican from the House GOP leadership team for her audacious apostasy against Trump orthodoxy. For McCarthy to add in the same letter that this is “a big tent party” that embraces “free thought” was absurd, even for him.
But even more important was the minority leader’s argument that Cheney has to go because of her apparent interest in trying to “relitigate the past.” It’s become the go-to talking point for the Wyoming congresswoman’s intra-party critics: Republicans are firing her because she’s too focused on the 2020 presidential election.
It’s a bizarre claim. For one thing, Cheney has been explicit in explaining her focus on the future of democracy, not just what transpired six months ago.
For another, if anyone’s desperate to “relitigate the past” it’s the failed former president whom McCarthy & Co. are so eager to please. In case the House minority leader missed it, I’d direct his attention to the outlandish “audit” of ballots in Arizona, and Team Trump’s interest in taking the same circus to a variety of other states, including Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire.
By any fair measure, one of Cheney’s principal partisan sins has been responding to Trump as he tries to relitigate the past.
Clearly, such details will have little bearing on the outcome of the House Republican Conference vote tomorrow, but the fact that McCarthy is struggling to come up with a coherent case against Cheney speaks to the merit of the exercise.
A New Hampshire town of just 16,000 residents has become the focal point of MAGA-world fantasies positing that a reversal of […] Trump’s 2020 defeat is just around the corner. Their hopes are pinned to an audit beginning on Tuesday that is looking at a discrepancy that arose in the recount of a state representative race in Windham.
[…] more than 500 people reportedly showed up at a meeting last week of the Windham Board of Selectmen — normally a sparsely attended affair — where the review was being discussed. Trump cheered on those agitating around the audit in a statement the day after the meeting that celebrated the “great Patriots of Windham, New Hampshire for their incredible fight to seek out the truth on the massive Election Fraud which took place in New Hampshire and the 2020 Presidential Election.”
[The audit] will not examine the presidential results and that it will cover a number of ballots that’s well short of Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state. […]
“This isn’t just about the town of Windham,” Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Monday evening, according to a video posted to Facebook of him speaking to a crowd of New Hampshire Trump supporters who have rallied around the audit. “We’re seeing things take place across this entire country.”
But the circumstances of the Windham audit are quite different than the baseless claims that drove Arizona’s Republican Senate to order the shambolic recount of Maricopa County’s results. The Windham audit is the result of a bipartisan push to review a legitimate discrepancy between the initial tabulation of the town’s state legislative results and the results that came out of a recount. The auditors chosen by state and local officials are known entities in the election administration world. […]
Many 2020 election truthers are now pushing for the Windham auditors to be replaced with Jovan Pulitzer, an election conspiracy theorist who was reportedly involved in crafting some of the most questionable aspects of the Arizona recount. [Oh, FFS!]
But with the Windham audit expected to be finished in the next two weeks, if not more quickly, they’re about to run out of options to hijack the New Hampshire review. Their latest gambit is a lawsuit filed Monday in New Hampshire state court seeking to stop the official audit so that the ballots could be turned over to the activists to do their own audit instead. The Democrats who sought the audit in the first place remain skeptical that the Trumpists will be able to derail the current plans.
[…] When November’s election results had St. Laurent just 24 votes shy of one of the four state representative seats up for grabs in the eight-person Windham race, she requested a recount. That recount produced discrepancies much larger than the normal variance that what would be expected for a hand recount of an election of this size. St. Laurent came out with 99 votes fewer, while the four Republican candidates who had beat her out each had 300 extra votes added to their tally. [That does not sound right.]
She then sought a further review to determine what was behind the discrepancy. […] Ultimately, the legislature unanimously passed legislation that authorized an audit of the Windham results. The bill laid out comprehensive and thorough rules for the review, which will also include a recount of the town’s votes in U.S. Senate and governor’s races, as well as an examination of the election machines. [There are rules!]
[…] The biggest flashpoint in the Windham audit so far has been the Board of Selectmen’s choice of Mark Lindeman as one of the auditors, as the town was allowed to hire one of the three members of the audit team. Lindeman is co-director of Verified Voting, a well known election technology non-profit.
Right-wing blogs like the Gateway Pundit seized on the fact that Lindeman had signed a letter, along with other election experts, opposing the Arizona’s Senate launch of the Maricopa audit. […]
In addition to the lawsuit, there was also a petition drive over the weekend to collect the signatures of those who want Pulitzer on the audit team. Pulitzer — derided by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) as a “failed treasure hunter” when he tried to meddle in the election there — has fashioned himself as a “pattern recognition expert,” according to the Daily Beast, who claims he’s created key technology to examine ballot folds. He previously invented a scan code that, the Beast noted, was deemed by a computer trade magazine to be among the “Worst Tech Products of All Time.” [All the best scam artists and grifters.]
[…] When Lewandowski — who is a Windham resident — spoke to Todd’s group on Monday, he was presented with a copy of the lawsuit filed Monday for him to show to Trump. Lewandowski told the crowd he was with Trump in Florida last week, the day before Trump put out his statement on the Windham audit, and that the former President “is actively watching whats happening.”
[…] Gov. Chris Sununu (R), who signed the bill sanctioning the audit, has pushed back on the commentary from Trump and his supporters about what the Windham audit will prove.
“A discrepancy of 300 votes out of over 800,000 cast does not define massive voter fraud by any means,” Sununu said, according to the AP. “We passed a bill, we’re going to do an audit in Windham. If anything, I think the fact that we focus on 300 votes goes to the integrity of our system.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves followed the lead of his Republican counterparts in Montana and South Carolina by announcing the state will refuse expanded federal unemployment benefits, costing unemployed Mississippians $300 a week in an effort to force them into low-wage jobs—despite a lot of data showing that Republican claims about the effects of the federal unemployment aid boost are simply false.
President Joe Biden pushed back on some of those claims in Monday remarks on the economy, saying “we don’t see much evidence” that people are staying home because of high unemployment benefits, and pointing out: “We still have 8 million fewer jobs than we did when the pandemic started.” At the same time, Biden emphasized that “anyone collecting unemployment who is offered a suitable job must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits.” […]
Mississippi’s maximum unemployment benefit without the added $300 a week is $235, so the benefits that “exceed normal wage levels for productive work” end up at $13.38 an hour, just under the $13.43 an hour that the MIT Living Wage Calculator says is a living wage for one adult with no children in Mississippi. […]
The real threat to our way of life — and Saturday night steak — is an oligopoly food system that teetered close to collapse last spring when its workers were overcome by Covid
First President Obama was coming for your guns. Didn’t happen. Then President [sic] Trump said the socialists were going to take away our energy. The lights are on after 100 days, although it got dicey in Texas for awhile (and no, wind turbines didn’t cause the ice storm).
But whoa, Nellie! We hear a Hamburglar will steal your right to beef before you can say “pass the ketchup”.
Since I don’t even own a BB gun, I was not alarmed by Obama. Since I barely have enough energy to get out of bed I ignored Trump’s warning. But I can get worked up if you have your eyes on my ribeye.
Turns out Fox News had to eat crow and retract a story claiming that Joe Biden will foreclose your divine right to slay a fatted calf. It was a Big Lie like all the rest […]
This lie started in the Daily Mail, which of course would know exactly what the US secretary of agriculture is thinking. The Daily Mail insisted that meat consumption would need to be cut 90% to meet President Biden’s climate goals, citing part of a University of Michigan study.
Meanwhile, here is what the secretary, Tom Vilsack, is really thinking about: cow burps and pig poop. He wants more cattle on grass as part of a system with reduced emissions resilient to extreme weather. […]
After Biden’s first 100 socialist days, Tyson is running full tilt cranking out pork and turkey from Storm Lake with non-union labor. Hoghouses are going up everywhere, spreading up the Missouri into South Dakota. Chicken hind quarters were only 69¢ a pound at the grocery store last week.
The opinion column’s author, Art Cullen, “is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing.” So no, Storm Lake is not an obscure reference to the qAnonsense.
I must admit I have no idea what industrial chicken parts cost here in France, but find that 0,69$/pound (c.1,50$/kg, or c.1,80€/kg) seems very low. My own chicken purchases are usually of whole bird — which, in France, really is the whole bird except for the feathers — with head & legs still attached, and guts still inside. The butcher weighs it and that is the cost is based on, and then cleans it for you as per your specification. Anyways, the last chicken I bought, not sure of the exact weight albeit it was rather hefty, was somewhere around 16€ but certainly not 8+ kg! (I finished up the last of the soup I made from the carcass this morning, as a sauce for my sausage-and-eggs.)
Anyways, back to Mr Cullen’s opinion column:
There are a fair number of NRA members deeply suspicious of Obama and Hillary Clinton who also want cleaner rivers and lakes, more grass buffers for habitat and limits on livestock confinements. They know the difference between BS and apple butter.
And they sense the real threat to their way of life — including Saturday night sirloin — is an ossified oligopoly food system that teetered on the brink of collapse last spring when its workers were overcome by Covid. Meat prices shot up 50% when the Waterloo and Sioux Falls pork plants shut down for a week. […]
The take away your meat scare belies the fear felt by Big Meat when its own, unsustainable system crashed up against its limits.
Livestock can be sheltered humanely for efficient food production and better protection from disease. We can finish a lot more cattle on grass for the benefit of the planet. We can enhance food security with more diversity in production and open, competitive markets. Almost everyone in the midwest understands those basic facts.
So when the meat scare is propagated it makes the messenger look stupid. It’s not going to sell, just like the idea that wind turbines kill geese. We know better.
[…]
Despite several fish kills from floods of manure in north-west Iowa rivers this spring, nothing will be done to prevent the next one. A meager fine will be assessed. People do care about that. They do care about antibiotic resistance and viral pandemics inherent in our system. They want reasonable solutions based on science and reality. When there is enough BS, they begin to think it stinks. That can have consequences.
In the beginning, the Big Lie was simple. When Rudy Giuliani first stepped up to talk about his supposed “proof” of election fraud in the hours and days following the election, his position was ridiculous, but always the same. There was, said Giuliani, “a plan” to plant fake ballots at polling stations. That plan was “specifically focused on big cities, and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats.”
So Giuliani’s basic accusation was that in “big cities controlled by Democrats,” Democrats turned out a lot of votes. Imagine that. Still, Giuliani said, “I know crimes, I can smell them.” And to Rudy, half a million or so Pennsylvania votes were stinky. As utterly unfounded, unsupportable, and unbelievable as it was, Giuliani’s basic version of the Big Lie was at least something that could be explained in a sentence: There was a grand plan to plant fake ballots in big cities across the country. Or, as this readily translates to Donald Trump’s core audience, Black people took away your president.
It wasn’t until Sidney Powell joined in at a press conference on Nov. 19, 2020 that the Big Lie became a theory that was so wild, Trump actually had Giuliani issue a statement distancing him from Powell’s claims. Then, over a surprisingly short time, Powell’s utterly ludicrous concoction—one that involved long-dead Venezuelan dictators and a conspiracy involving hundreds of Republican officials who threw the race to Joe Biden—became the official position of the never-ending Trump campaign.
There’s a reason. The Kraken didn’t emerge fully grown from Powell’s glistening forehead. It had been growing among Republican ranks for years, carefully nurtured and drip-fed. It started with presentations in a secret airplane hangar, and went door to door on visits with Republican donors.
And what it told them was exactly what they wanted to hear.
As The Washington Post reports, the origin story of Powell’s mythology doesn’t start with Giuliani, Powell, or anyone else who made an appearance at Four Seasons Landscaping. The man at the back of the story is a longtime Republican hustler named Russell Ramsland who has bounced among wildly different jobs in his effort to find “the next big thing.” That includes raising cattle on South Pacific islands, selling Tex-Mex cuisine in London, and growing crystals in space.
But in 2018, Ramsland was hooking into a real growth market, because that’s when he began selling Republicans on the idea that there was a vast conspiracy to steal elections using electronic voting machines. The 2018 midterm elections had just handed the House over to Democrats and left Republicans with aching losses at the state level in areas they thought were safely red. […]
Only Republicans—especially state- and county-level Republicans in places like Texas—already seemed convinced that Trump was supported by 101% of the American people, making the results of the election incomprehensible. They didn’t go looking for, “How can we do better?” They went looking for, “How did we get cheated?” And Ramsland was there, with top secret hearings conducted in an out of the way airplane hanger under strict “no electronic devices” protection.
At those hearings, hundreds of Republicans “learned” what the rest of the nation would have to wait two years to see blurted out while hair dye poured down Giuliani’s face: Republicans had actually won all those races they thought they lost in 2018, only electronic voting machines were changing the results in favor of Democrats. All voting machines, according to Ramsland, were actually based on the same code—code written by the company “Smartmatic.” That common code base meant that all the machines were “wide open,” filled with “backdoors,” and ripe for fraud.
None of this is, of course, true. Well before the hangar sessions, Ramsland had been trying to break into what he saw as the lucrative new field of selling Republicans bog-foolish conspiracy theories. That included claims that the deaths of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi were actually an intentional move by the “deep state,” […]
Ramsland knew a good story when he saw one. […] Not only were the meetings held at a secret location in a windowless hangar, and not only where the attendees required to leave all electronic devices outside—once his flock of GOP sheep arrived, they were greeted a “white hat hacker” who identified himself using only a code name. That hacker then spread out a tale that told Republicans they were all winners. They couldn’t fail. They could only be cheated.
Soon enough Ramsland’s company, Allied Security Operations Group, took the show on the road for big money Republican donors. […]
And when 2020 came around, Ramsland found that he had a candidate on his hands who was absolutely perfect: desperate, willing to believe anything that said he was a winner, and able to lay his hands on unlimited campaign funds.
And a hardworking con man finally had his ultimate pigeon.
Sally Buzbee, executive editor and senior vice president of The Associated Press, has been named the new executive editor of The Washington Post, the paper reported on Tuesday.
Buzbee will become the first woman to lead the Post’s newsroom when she begins work next month, replacing former executive editor Martin Baron, who retired in February.
[…] Other outlets that were seeking or are still searching for new leadership in recent months include ABC News, CBS News, HuffPost, Reuters and Vox. Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, is also expected to step down in the near future.
Buzbee inherits a media organization that earned 10 Pulitzer Prizes under Baron, the former Boston Globe editor who revitalized the Post’s newsroom after his 2012 hiring and bolstered its coverage of former President Donald Trump’s administration.
Crucial to the Post’s renaissance in recent years was the purchase of the paper in 2013 by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose investments helped facilitate an expansion of the newsroom to nearly 1,000 journalists and enabled the Post to flourish despite dire trends in the broader newspaper business. […]
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) offered fiery criticism of Republicans on Tuesday for efforts around the country to tighten voter laws amid unproven claims made by former President Trump that the 2020 election was stolen.
Schumer, speaking at a Senate Rules Committee meeting on a sweeping elections overhaul bill, accused Republicans of trying to act upon the “big lie that the election was stolen” to “placate” and “please” Trump.
“Unfortunately, the big lie is spreading like a cancer among Republicans. It’s enveloping and consuming the Republican Party, in both houses of Congress,” Schumer said. […]
COVID-19 vaccine booster shots will be free to the public if they are needed, a top U.S. health official said Tuesday.
David Kessler, the chief science officer for the White House’s COVID-19 response team, told senators at a hearing on Tuesday that the federal government has funding to purchase the next round of vaccines, so individuals won’t have to pay.
“We are planning, and I underscore the word planning, to have booster doses available if necessary for the American people,” Kessler told the Senate Health Committee. […]
“Beyond 2022? I look to your guidance, and your colleagues, on at what point do you transition back to a commercial market, but I think for this coming round we are going to proceed as we have proceeded,” he added. […]
Pfizer’s vaccine is currently the most expensive of those currently in use under the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization, at $39 for the two-shot regimen. Moderna’s vaccine costs about $32 per regimen and Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot dose costs $10.
Unlike several other rival companies that developed COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer did not use federal funds and said it planned to make a profit. […]
Frank D’Amelio, Pfizer’s chief financial officer, said on an earnings call in February that the $19.50 a dose is clearly “pandemic pricing” compared to what they typically charge for a vaccine, which is $150 to $175 a dose.
Moving into the future, after the pandemic period, normal market forces will kick in and Pfizer is “going to get more on price” and will increase output at its factories, driving production costs per unit lower, D’Amelio said.
In all, D’Amelio said there’s a “significant opportunity for those margins to improve once we get beyond the pandemic environment that we’re in.”
Wonkette: “Rand Paul Flogs Fever Dreams About Fauci Creating COVID”
Republicans are a pretty crass and nihilistic bunch, but Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is second to no Gipper in his willingness to burn down the country for the most evanescent of political gains. In preparation for another appearance by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a career public servant whose IRL job is to protect America’s health, he tweeted an article about the doctor decrying the politicization of his message.
“Looking forward to tomorrow’s hearing, Dr. Fauci!” he snarked. Which was marginally more civil than Paul’s chief strategist Doug Stafford, who said in response to a New York Post story quoting Fauci on mask use, “I cannot say this strongly or clearly enough: Go fuck yourself.”
Rand Paul was super stoked to go yet another round and PROVE that coronavirus is a hoax by discrediting the guy trying to save us from it. […] And so the senator showed up this morning ready to launder the latest rightwing fever dream that COVID-19 is Anthony Fauci’s fault because of his prior support for virus research in China. Having already convinced themselves that the virus was deliberately created in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and either released as a bioweapon or allowed to escape accidentally, Newsmax’s paint-huffing superfans were primed to believe this next iteration of the conspiracy theory.
“Can you imagine if a SARS virus that’s been juiced up and had viral proteins added to it, to the spike protein, if that were released accidentally? Dr. Fauci, do you still support NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?” Paul thundered.
“Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect. The NIH has not ever and does not now fund research in the Wuhan Institute,” Fauci responded, referring to lab experiments to engineer more lethal viruses for study or development of treatment, a crucial component of the wingers’ theory.
“Do you fund Dr. Barrack’s gain of function research?” Paul said, cutting off Fauci’s attempt to correct the record.
“Dr. Barrack is not doing gain of function research, and if it is, it’s according to the guidelines, and it’s being conducted in North Carolina.”
Paul went on to mischaracterize the research going on in North Carolina, telling Fauci that he was “in the minority” because two other scientists signed a statement disagreeing with him. Which is just how math works!
And then they went around and around with Paul shouting over Fauci and trying to prove that the doctor subsidized COVID because the NIH made grants to the Wuhan Institute for Virology to study animal-borne pathogens and stop them from infecting people, which is clearly a devious plot to murder Americans with a hoax virus and cripple the economy.
Is some rightwing loon posting shit in your Facebook feed about the EcoHealth Alliance like it’s the new Clinton Global Initiative? That’s because the NIH funded EcoHealth, which in turn hired the Wuhan Institute to research how viruses can jump from bats to humans. That’s it — that’s the whole gotcha theory as to how Fauci created COVID-19. According to these geniuses, we should never have subsidized research on viruses at their origin point, because if you never research something, it can never hurt you — that is just science.
After Paul finished his ridiculous rant, Democratic Senator Tina Smith took her turn at the microphone to ask, “Dr. Fauci, what is the impact of conspiracy theories peddled by Senator Rand Paul and others on Americans’ willingness to take this vaccine, a vaccine which by all accounts is remarkable for its safety and efficacy?”
“RAND PAUL IS A DERANGED PSYCHOPATH WHO WOULD SELL HIS OWN MOTHER FOR A GOOD NEWS CYCLE, AND HE’S DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THOUSANDS OF EXTRA AMERICAN DEATHS!” shouted the good doctor.
Oh, wait, that was your Wonkette. Dr. Fauci is a fuckin’ professional, so he conducted himself with his usual discretion.
“Well, conspiracy theories certainly are not helpful in what we’re trying to do,” he responded mildly. “I guess I can say that with some degree of confidence.”
But “helpful” is really not Rand Paul’s bag, so he just wandered back to Twitter to call Fauci a liar. Third verse, same as the first, little bit louder and a whole lot worse.
Wonkette: “HAPPY NICE TIME SIGH OF RELIEF, It Is Time To Vaxx Up Your Middle School Kids!”
As expected, the Food and Drug Administration on Monday gave emergency authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine to be given to kids aged 12 to 15. That means kids in middle school can get vaccinated in time for summer activities and before school starts in the fall, and we’ll all be just that much closer to something like having the pandemic under control.
There’s just one more regulatory step to get through, a meeting Wednesday of the vaccine advisory committee, which is likely to recommend the vaccine for use. After that, kids 12 and up could start being vaccinated as soon as this week.
The new authorization is hella good news, as NPR points out, since it
expands the pool of eligible vaccine recipients to about 87% of the total U.S. population, covering an additional 17 million children, and comes at a time when people under age 18 account for one 1 of every 5 newly reported coronavirus infections.
Even though children are less likely to experience severe cases of COVID-19, it’s still important to get them vaccinated, especially since kids in middle and high school are at more risk of getting the disease than elementary-aged kids.
There’s every indication the Pfizer vaccine works very well with young teens. In the company’s study of more than 2,000 kids, not a single child given the vaccine had a symptomatic case of COVID-19, but in the group given a placebo, 18 kids became infected. The vaccinated kids also showed a “robust” antibody response that appears to be even better than in a previous study of 16- to 25-year-olds.
The younger group had about the same range of side effects as adults do, mostly on the day after the second injection, ranging from injection site soreness, headaches, and fatigue to chills and muscle pain. Around 20 percent of the 12- to 15-year-olds also experienced fevers.
The authorization of a vaccine for older kids comes well ahead of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s April suggestion that we’d be able to vaccinate middle and high schoolers by the fall, and maybe younger kids in early 2022. Pfizer says it’s doing clinical trials for children aged two to 11 now, and expects to request authorizations for the vaccine to be used for those age groups in September. For infants, it’s shooting for November. And the company has just filed the paperwork for full FDA authorization of the vaccine for adults, a regulatory step beyond the emergency-use authorization already granted.
The other two vaccines currently authorized for use in adults aged 18 and up, from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, are undergoing trials in teens and kids as well. […]
Soon after he was elected leader of the Labour party, in 1994, [future “U”K PM Tony] Blair[liar] marched into the Guardian’s offices on Farringdon Road with a stack of clippings and his new spin doctor, Alastair Campbell. While Blair spoke, Campbell sat in the editor’s chair, swung back and put his feet on the desk, the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland remembers.
“It was like being hauled before the headteacher,” recalls the editor at the time, Alan Rusbridger, of the meeting with Blair and about 20 senior Guardian editorial staff. “He told us off for various articles, dropping them on the floor one at time, and then warned us that he would tell Labour party members to read the Telegraph because it was fairer.”
Rusbridger, who was newly installed in his role at the time, says he was “secretly longing” for Blair to follow through with his threat. “Money couldn’t buy that kind of marketing.”
That snippet reminds of possibly the best “marketing” the BBC ever had: After the attempted 1991 coup collasped, Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union said in an interview(? press briefing?) that whilst confined at his dacha, one of the staff found an old overlooked radio, so (paraphrasing) “We tuned into the BCC to learn what was happening.” (To be fair, this has since been disputed as a misleading paraphrase / translation, Gorbachev listens while being held captive.)
When the Guardian voiced concern about the looming conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands [Islas Malvinas] in 1982, the Sun warned of the traitors in our midst, such as the pygmy Guardian.
[Philip] Green threatened Guardian reporters with unpleasant things when they tracked him down to his £100m superyacht in Monaco to ask him about the looming collapse of his Arcadia retail empire putting 19,000 jobs at risk.
As recounted in the article, Green has “priors” with insulting the Grauniad
The Tesla billionaire Elon Musk emailed a reporter in 2018 to tell them that the Guardian is the most insufferable newspaper on planet Earth, in response to a question about whether it was appropriate for the chief executive of one of the world’s biggest companies to smoke marijuana on a live web show.
After articles expressed dismay at Morrissey’s support for a far right group, he performed in Los Angeles wearing a vest with a simple slogan: Fuck the Guardian.
Two Trump family members got “inappropriately – and perhaps dangerously – close” to agents protecting them while Donald Trump was president, according to a new book on the US Secret Service.
Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, by the Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, is published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
…
In her new book, she writes that Secret Service agents reported that Vanessa Trump, the wife of the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, “started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family”.
Vanessa Trump filed for an uncontested divorce in March 2018. Leonnig reports that the agent concerned did not face disciplinary action as neither he nor the agency were official guardians of Vanessa Trump at that point.
Leonnig also writes that Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail”.
Secret Service leaders, the book says, “became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent”.
Agents are prohibited from forming personal relationships with those they protect, out of concern that such feelings could cloud their judgment.
Both Tiffany Trump and the agent said nothing untoward was happening, Leonnig writes, and pointed out the nature of the agent’s job meant spending time alone with his charge. The agent was subsequently reassigned.
Leonnig also reports that it was not clear if Donald Trump knew what Secret Service personnel were saying about his daughter and daughter-in-law.
But she says the president did repeatedly seek to remove Secret Service staff he deemed to be overweight or too short for the job.
“I want these fat guys off my detail,” Trump is reported to have said, possibly confusing office-based personnel with active agents. “How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”
“Things are still really bad for a lot of people in this country, which makes it especially jarring when you remember that the wealthiest people in America have not just weathered the crisis—they have thrived,” says Chris Hayes.
This is a good episode, with Chris Hayes covering all the basics and then some.
[…] Between March 18, 2020 and March 18, 2021, the wealth held by the world’s billionaires jumped from $8.04 trillion to $12.39 trillion dollars […] That’s a 50% increase in wealth during the worst pandemic in this country. […]
The math here is obvious […] but orders of magnitude are hard. If you earn $50,000 a year, it would take twenty years to make a total of a million dollars. It would take twenty thousand years to get you a billion dollars, right? Jeff Bezos is worth nearly $200 billion dollars […]
Nine out of ten of the world’s richest people are in the USA. There are 724 billionaires in the USA. We added more than 100 billionaires last year.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 262
Unfortunately, the big lie is spreading like a cancer among Republicans. It’s enveloping and consuming the Republican Party, in both houses of Congress,”
OK Chuck, what are you prepared to DO about the Republicans and this cancerous “Big Lie?” I mean, beside making long-winded speeches, that is?
Nothing? OK, cool. Enjoy losing control of Congress next year.
Jeff Bezos’ new yacht will come with a smaller “support yacht” with a helipad.
blfsays
Lynna@265, “Follow-up to blf @250…”
Actually, it’s @240 & @246.
The nutter at @250 is someone else, maybe Cassidy (see @245) again, I didn’t catch his name.
A scorecard to keep track of all the different loons might help ?
I was watching an argument on nextdoor involving the vaccination IDs and I noticed that one of the people who is normally tough on crime was opining that we can’t do it because people will lie or make fake IDs. I pointed out they were normally tough on crime and posted this troll face mask image. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61FHeZufaCL.AC_SY355.jpg
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) has been one of the few congressional Republicans willing to publicly criticize Donald Trump, but the Illinois congressman isn’t limiting his intra-party concerns to the former president.
Yesterday, for example, Kinzinger said he specifically warned House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calf.) that their party was courting violence in the days preceding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, but McCarthy “dismissively” blew him off. In a National Press Club interview, Kinzinger added that in the wake of the insurrectionist riot, he considered bringing a vote of no confidence against McCarthy.
“I actually thought the person that should have their leadership challenged was Kevin McCarthy after Jan. 6, because that’s why this all happened,” the Illinois Republican said.
[…] Politico reported this morning that there are signs of a burgeoning “backlash” against McCarthy, with some House Republicans questioning his “leadership qualities” and “privately griping” that the GOP leader has fed Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) to the wolves in order to advance his own ambitions.
Politico added, “And no, we’re not just hearing this from Adam Kinzinger types.”
“Kevin McCarthy has pissed off enough members of his own conference that he’s going to have to go back to his former days as a whip to try to figure out where his votes are” to become speaker, said the member, who is neither a member of the Freedom Caucus nor a moderate. “I’d be worried if I was him…. You have people like me — who are here to do the right thing for all the right reasons and have an expectation of leadership — that are, shall we say, disgusted with the internal squabbling that results from having weak leadership. And it is weak leadership. Straight up.”
[…] This is consistent with the latest criticisms from the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, who said McCarthy deserves an award for “monumental smallness in a time demanding leadership.” […]
In late February, for example, Peter Navarro, a prominent voice in Trump World, lashed out at the House GOP leader, insisting, “Kevin McCarthy has to go. He no longer has the confidence of the MAGA portion of the Republican Party. He should not be welcome at Mar-a-Lago.”
[…] The minority leader is trying to lead a radicalized Republican conference, with no interest in governing and a set of wildly unpopular beliefs, while scrambling to satisfy his party’s failed former president, who has more power and influence than McCarthy, even over many of McCarthy’s own members. It’s a daunting challenge for anyone, much less an unaccomplished seven-term congressman.
But that doesn’t change the fact that McCarthy is struggling […]
McCarthy is no leader. He is just Trump’s lap dog.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 269
Gasp! How dare you express such blatant bigotry against our world’s poor, oppressed billionaires. They have it a lot harder than most people, what with class envy and finding new ways to skirt around those oppressive tax laws! I mean, just last week, Katlyn Jenner told this sad story of the man who rented the private airplane hanger next to hers being forced to emigrate to Sedona because he was forced to see homeless people! Leave Jeff and his superyacht alone!
Seriously, though, Chris talks a good game about how the upper class enjoy lives of carefree opulence while the rest of us scape by paycheck-to-paycheck, but what does he actually want to do to alleviate this situation… I mean, besides making the rich pay a few bucks more in taxes each year? Has it ever occurred to him that wealth inequality and poverty are a feature of the capitalist system that he and other liberals claim they can reform rather than a bug? Chris is worth about $5 million, so I doubt it.
This is funny … and a schadenfreude moment, when a Newsmax host was trolled on live TV by a former Obama speechwriter.
Newsmax host Rob Finnerty found himself getting bamboozled on live television on Monday morning by his own guest, former Obama speechwriter David Litt, who used the interview as an opportunity to call out the conservative media outlet for fueling Trumpland’s deranged conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
The segment went off the rails immediately after it began when Finnerty asked Litt what his thoughts were on SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s performance as the host of Saturday Night Live.
“Well Rob, it’s a great question,” the guest replied. “What happened on SNL this weekend was that people made stuff up and then said it on television like it’s true, and that actually happens pretty frequently in American TV.”
[…] “For example in 2020, Dominion Voting Systems sued Newsmax over its false claims about election fraud,” he continued. “Newsmax was lying to its own viewers and Newsmax had to settle that lawsuit.”
“Actually, I just need to check in: Are you still telling that lie or are you telling new lies?” Litt added.
Finnerty snapped, “I’m sorry David, do you want to talk about something completely non-related and try to catch me on a Monday morning totally off topic, or do you want to talk about Elon Musk?”
“I can see why you don’t want to talk about Dominion Voting Systems because if you do, Newsmax could get sued and lose billions of dollars because these are lies,” Litt replied.
He didn’t let up when the Newsmax host, grumbling that “this is a very funny moment for” Litt, attempted to steer the conversation back to SNL.
“Did Dominion Voting Systems have any impact on the 2020 election?” Litt asked Finnerty.
The show producers cut his feed.
“David, we look forward to having you back on very soon again. That was a stellar interview,” Finnerty huffed after his guest was removed.
In an interview with TPM, Litt explained what led up to that moment.
“I knew I wasn’t going to go on there and have a normal discussion, as though Newsmax hadn’t helped incite the riots on January 6, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to back out at the last minute or [instead] try to point out what most Newsmax viewers don’t get to see very often,” Litt said.
[Litt] said that Newsmax had planned for him and Finnerty to discuss “wokeness” in late night comedy, a common set-up for handwringing over right-wing culture grievances.
Litt nearly backed out of the interview at the last minute, believing that the pro-Trump network just wanted to bring on a Democrat to make themselves look more like a “legitimate” outlet after lying about the election being rigged against ex-President Donald Trump.
But the writer decided he’d use his appearance to expose Newsmax’s dishonesty after discussing it with his wife. […] That on-air callout “is the kind of thing I would hope someone else would do if they were in this position, so I had to at least give it a shot,” the writer said.
He said that his goal wasn’t just to call out Newsmax for its disinformation, but to make its audience aware that they were being “defrauded” by the outlet.
“It was very important to me not just to say ‘you’re lying,’ but ‘lying to your viewers,” Litt told TPM. […]
In contrast to CNN, Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC is interviewing a Palestinian man threatened with eviction (see the article @ #186 for more). (Who of course had to be followed by a former Israeli ambassador, but he’s asking him decent questions, which are being met with much whining and evasion.)
blfsays
Brony@273, paraphrased someone as claiming (about vaccinated IDs), “we can’t do it because people will lie or make fake IDs.”
Just like driving licenses and so on, up and including the usual “gold standard”, passports. Geesh!
But that comparison does point out an issue…
My current understanding is the States “plans” are for privately-issued “IDs” (like frequent-shopper discount cards) — not government-issued (like passports, etc.) — which seems like a nightmare in trying to work out whether or an “ID” is valid (in at least two senses: not-faked, and also as genuine (reputable) proof). There has already been at least case (albeit here in France) of a fraudulent test certificate scam, Coronavirus: Fake test certificate gang foiled at Paris airport.
The situation here in the EU is slightly better, in the sense most reputable-proof “plans” (as I last understood the situation) are for national-level proof-of-vaccination, but each country seems to be doing its own thing with not too much being said about mutual acceptance or ability for another EU country to confirm it’s valid. Which, given most “plans” seem to be for an app (often(?) tied to the country’s track-and-trace app), seems like a repeat of the track-and-trace app fiasco, where most apps are country-specific with next-to-no interoperability. E.g., if a German, say, visitor comes to my French village and we happen to be in close proximity to each other for awhile, then a few days later one of us is found to be infected, the other of us will never find out via their app of a potential Risk since (simplifying) their German app and my French app “cannot” talk to each other.
There are also concerns about whether or not such proof is a good approach, albeit perhaps not-so-much as the States-side thug Yellow Star tyranny! bellowings (e.g., @216), but the potential unfairness: E.g., younger people won’t be able to obtain the proof for some time, simply because they are last in the queue to be vaccinated.
blfsays
More on today’s @240 / @246 Dr Fauci–”Senator” Rand Paul exchange, from the Grauniad’s current Rand Paul is an eejit live blog, with video, and citing Axios for the transcript (all emboldening in the Grauniad, with Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
[…] Paul:For years, Dr Ralph Baric, a virologist in the US, has been collaborating with Dr Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create superviruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the {National Institutes of Health (NIH)} … Dr Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH lab in Wuhan?
Fauci: “With all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect. The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Paul:Do you fund Dr Baric’s gain-of-function research?
Fauci: “Dr Baric is not doing gain-of-function research, and if it is, it is according to the guidelines and is being conducted in North Carolina.”
And…
Paul:Will you categorically say that the Covid-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory?
Fauci: “I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I am fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and {National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)} categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
@blf 278
I’ve had to point out that we get to be “virus police” in our personal spaces where coworkers and customers are concerned. The use of symbols of authority and tyranny are interesting.
“The death toll in Gaza from Israeli airstrikes has risen to 30 Palestinians, including including 10 children, with over 200 wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. A couple of multi-story apartment blocks have also been leveled.”
The baby-faced Students for Trump founder was denounced as a “cold-blooded fraudster” by a judge before he was sentenced for posing as a lawyer.
John Lambert was sentenced to 13 months in prison for the scam targeting individuals with little experience seeking legal advice, for which he was paid at least $46,654 while delivering little of value to his victims, reported the New York Daily News.
…
The 25-year-old Lambert posed as Eric Pope, of the Manhattan-based firm Pope & Dunn, and falsely claimed to be a graduate of the New York University School of Law with a finance degree from the University of Pennsylvania, with 15 years of experience in corporate and patent law.
“I lost focus on who I was,” Lambert said in court. “My ignorance was a disrespect to the law and my country. My life will be forever marked by this poor choice at a young age.”
He and classmate Ryan Fournier founded Students for Trump, which ran a Twitter account photos of bikini-clad women and showed themselves at political events, while students in 2015 at Campbell University in North Carolina.
Fournier was listed as a co-conspirator in the fraud but reached a cooperation agreement with prosecutors in the case.
Loosely related to @15 — albeit you’d never know it from the title — Trillions of brood X cicadas move closer to emergence as soil temperatures rise. The article’s mostly about eating the cicadas, “some US chefs and bug enthusiasts are looking to adopt traditions of entomophagy — the consumption of insects — in both ceremonial and nutritional terms.”
A snippet:
Sean Sherman, founder and chief of the Sioux Chef and member of the Oglala Lakota, told the outlet that the non-profit wants to put insects on the menu at his new restaurant, Owamni, opening this month.
“We have all sorts of amazing, diverse proteins across North America. If you’re looking at food from an Indigenous perspective, you really have to include insects,” Sherman, who won the 2018 James Beard award for best American cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, told Indian Country Today.
“Edible insects such as grasshoppers are still used in Mexico today; the history of colonialism has stripped away our Indigenous foods, depicting them as inferior,” Sherman said, adding that “people should be open to exploring protein options beyond cows, chicken and pigs.”
I can certainly vouch for Mexican grasshoppers — albeit I’ve only had them here in France — they are quite tasty.
Amusingly, as I was typing this, I was, by coincidence, listening to Grace Petrie’s The Vegan Song (video).
A federal judge has dismissed the National Rifle Association’s petition for bankruptcy, saying it was filed in “bad faith” in order to avoid litigation by the New York Attorney General’s Office, which has sued to dissolve the NRA for allegedly misusing charitable funds.
Tuesday’s decision means the NRA will not have bankruptcy protections, which it has said is needed to protect against a “barrage of litigation” the organization is facing.
The decision from Judge Harlin Hale, of the Northern District of Texas, came after a month-long trial in which NRA attorneys and officials argued that their bankruptcy case should move forward in Texas. New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office intervened in the case and asked to dismiss the petition, saying the NRA’s decision to file for bankruptcy in Texas and ask to be reincorporated there was a way to “remove the NRA from regulatory oversight.”
Hale agreed with James’ office’s argument in his ruling issued Tuesday.
“The Court finds there is cause to dismiss this bankruptcy case as not having been filed in good faith both because it was filed to gain an unfair litigation advantage and because it was filed to avoid a state regulatory scheme,” Hale wrote in his decision.
Hale also declined to appoint a trustee or examiner to oversee the NRA’s finances.
…
In a statement posted to Twitter, James said, “The NRA does not get to dictate if and where it will answer for its actions, and our case will continue in New York court. No one is above the law.”
Hale declined to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the NRA could still decide to file a bankruptcy petition in another venue, but Hale warned that if the NRA choses to file a new bankruptcy case, his court would immediately take up some of its concerns about “disclosure, transparency, secrecy, conflicts of interest of litigation counsel,” among others, which could lead to the appointment of a trustee to oversee the organization’s affairs….
Over 100 former Republican officials will sign a letter on Thursday declaring that if the Republican Party does not break with former President Donald Trump and change course, they will back the creation of a third party.
The letter, headlined: “A Call For American Renewal,” is an exploratory move toward forming a breakaway party, two of its organizers said. The group is dismayed by what it says is a modern Republican Party driven by its allegiance to Trump, who continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“The Republican Party is broken. It’s time for a resistance of the ‘rationals’ against the ‘radicals,’” said Miles Taylor, one of the organizers. Taylor, while serving in the Trump White House, wrote an anonymous opinion piece in the New York Times in 2018 headlined: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”
The group first raised the threat in February, following the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters to try to disrupt congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
The letter highlights the wide intraparty rift over Trump.
Most Republicans remain fiercely loyal to the former president.
House Republicans are expected on Wednesday to oust Representative Liz Cheney from her No. 3 party leadership position within the chamber, because of her refusal to embrace Trump’s election claims and her move to back Trump’s second impeachment after the Capitol riot.
The letter signatories, who include former ambassadors, governors, congressional members and Cabinet secretaries, want the Republican Party to return to “principled” leadership and reject division and conspiracy theories, or face a new party dedicated to fighting for Republicans such as Cheney and against fearmongering and lies.
Backers of the reform group include former Republican Governors Tom Ridge, Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush-era Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and former House members Charlie Dent, Barbara Comstock, Reid Ribble and Mickey Edwards.
They may face an uphill battle in getting any current Republican officeholders to sign on – including Cheney herself, who in February rejected the idea of a third party, saying it would empower Democrats.
…
Evan McMullin, a former chief policy director for the House Republican Conference and an independent presidential candidate in 2016, said if the Republican Party does not reject lies and extremism, part of it “will have no choice but to part ways with it and build something new. We’re excited about that prospect.”
[…]
With less than six weeks to New York’s mayoral primaries, two candidates have left themselves electorally vulnerable for vastly underestimating the median cost of buying a home or apartment in Brooklyn.
In Brooklyn, huh? I don’t know for sure. I would guess it is around $100,000, Shaun Donovan, housing and urban development secretary under former President Obama and housing commissioner under the former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, told the New York Times.
[…]
In the same set of endorsement-seeking interviews, Ray McGuire, a wealthy former Citigroup executive, guessed that the median sales price was somewhere in the $80,000 to $90,000 range, if not higher.
[…]
The tech entrepreneur and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang guessed correctly [but see following excerpt –blf], while two other candidates, Maya Wiley and the former NYC financial comptroller Scott Stringer, both guessed over $1m, with Wiley suggesting $1.8m.
Brooklyn’s median sales price is $900,000.
[…]
Donovan and McGuire’s wild underestimation of housing costs, particularly in a borough where average individual income is about $32,000 and has, in parts, seen an affordable housing crisis develop as a result of rapid gentrification, was widely mocked on social media and by progressives.
“How could people running for mayor of the city not know this? Because most people want power, but few want responsibility,” podcast host Ashley C Ford posted on Twitter.
[…]
For many progressives, Dianne Morales, a former executive with Phipps Neighborhood, an affordable housing developer, has emerged as a favorite to replace De Blasio. In her interview with the Times editorial board, Morales came relatively close to guessing correctly.
“Oh, my gosh. The median sales price of a home or apartment. I don’t know, half a million.”
New York mayor hopeful Andrew Yang said he was asked not to attend an Astoria event where he was meant to distribute groceries ahead of Eid, after his staunch pro-Israel stance amid the attacks and forced expulsions in East Jerusalem.
Yang has come under fire after tweeting yesterday: I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists. The people of NYC will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.
But Yang failed to provide context for the Hamas attack that followed an Israeli government orders that would forcibly expel six Palestinians families from generational homes. Amid escalating tension over the order, Israeli officers escalated violence, stormed a mosque, and wounded over 300 unarmed Palestinians.
When Israel and Hamas exchanged fire today, Israeli strikes killed at least 25 Palestinians including nine children were killed in Gaza.
“Utterly shameful for Yang to try to show up to an Eid event after sending out a chest-thumping statement of support for a strike killing 9 children,” New York representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said.
[…]
Despite heavy criticism, Yang hasn’t backed off his pro-Israel statement.
[…]
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz: “Kevin McCarthy Forced to Fly to Mar-a-Lago to Sit and Listen to Things Trump Would Have Posted on Facebook”
Kevin McCarthy has been repeatedly summoned to Mar-a-Lago over the past week to sit and listen to Donald J. Trump recite things that he would have posted on Facebook, the House Minority Leader has confirmed.
Since Trump’s ban by the social-media platform was upheld, the former President has commanded McCarthy on three separate occasions to fly down to Palm Beach to hear the forbidden posts.
“It was really interesting, for example, to hear what he had to say about Elon Musk hosting ‘S.N.L’ ” McCarthy, who was returning from Reagan National Airport, said. “He thought that Musk was not nearly as good as he’d been.”
McCarthy said that the repeated summons to Mar-a-Lago were “in no way” interfering with his ability to attend to his duties in Washington.
“It’s no trouble at all,” McCarthy said. “Ivanka, Jared, Eric, and Don, Jr., are all there, too, and they’re not allowed to leave the room, either. It’s an honor to be included.”
The Biden administration is reversing a Trump-era policy that barred undocumented college students and others from receiving federal relief grants meant to help pay for expenses like food, housing, and child care during the coronavirus pandemic.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Tuesday finalized a new regulation that allows colleges to distribute tens of billions in federal pandemic relief grants to all students, regardless of their immigration status or whether they qualify for federal student aid.
“The pandemic didn’t discriminate which students got Covid, so the final rule does allow for all students” to access the funding, Cardona told reporters. The goal, he said, was to “make sure that all students have an opportunity to have access to the funds to help them get back on track.”
The policy change was unveiled on Tuesday as the Education Department announced it would begin distributing $36 billion in federal relief funding for higher education, part of the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package that President Joe Biden signed in March. Colleges and universities will each receive an allocation of the funding under a formula spelled out in that law, based in part on the share of Pell grant recipients enrolled at each school.
Colleges must pass along roughly half of their Covid relief dollars directly to students in the form of emergency financial aid cash grants. But unlike with previous rounds of Covid relief funding, colleges will now be free to provide that money to any of their students.[…]
The hidden hand
The secret power
He is reading all about it way beyond the wishing hour
I have seen documentaries
Indisputable proof
He can’t understand why so many just won’t face the truth
And there’s are a million others like him, down the rabbit hole
Who are looking for solutions to the sadness in their soul
And if its villains that you’re looking for, and YouTube’s crawling with ‘em
So question everything except the algorithm
So all he sees around him are imagined, enemies
So busy fighting them and not placating nemeses
While he’s looking at his iPhone and watching smart TV’s
Another storm
A forest fire
The fields lie yellow, and the tides are rising ever higher
It’s a crisis already
Soon there’ll be nothing to say
And the BBC calls it hashtag February heatwave
And the scientists are frantic
Trying to spell out what’s at stake
It’s convenient the president won’t believe that it’s not fake
Because there’s people in their habitat, don’t rate as high as profit
And they’re all against destruction unless they’re getting richer off it
So they poisoned all the river and they poisoned all the seas
They tore apart the forests and they cut down all the trees
While we were looking at our iPhones watching smart TV’s
The Covid pandemic was a preventable disaster that need not have cost millions of lives if the world had reacted more quickly, according to an independent high-level panel, which castigates global leaders and calls for major changes to bring it to an end and ensure it cannot happen again.
The report of the panel, chaired by Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia, found “weak links at every point in the chain”.
It said preparation was inconsistent and underfunded, the alert system too slow and too meek while the World Health Organization was under-powered. It concluded that the response has exacerbated inequalities. “Global political leadership was absent,” the report said.
Clark described February 2020 as “a month of lost opportunity to avert a pandemic, as so many countries chose to wait and see”.
“For some, it wasn’t until hospital ICU beds began to fill that more action was taken,” she said. “And by then it was too late to avert the pandemic impact. What followed then was a winner takes all scramble for PPE and therapeutics. Globally, health workers were tested to their limits and the rates of infection, illness and death soared and continue to soar.”
Sirleaf said: “The situation we find ourselves in today could have been prevented. An outbreak of a new pathogen, Sars CoV-2 became a catastrophic pandemic that has now killed more than 3.25 million people, and continues to threaten lives and livelihoods all over the world. It is due to a myriad of failures, gaps and delays in preparedness and response. This was partly due to failure to learn from the past.”
Urgent action must be taken, she said. “There are many reviews of previous health crises that include sensible recommendations. Yet, they sit gathering dust in UN basements and on government shelves… Our report shows that most countries of the world were simply not prepared for a pandemic.”
The report was commissioned by the WHO director general at the instigation of member states, who called at the World Health Assembly in May last year for an impartial review of what happened and what could be learned from the pandemic.
The panel calls for radical changes to bring heads of state together to oversee pandemic preparations, ensuring the finance and tools the world needs are in place. They want a faster-moving, better-resourced WHO. And they want a commitment now from leaders of affluent countries to supply vaccines for the rest of the world.
…
The panel says it is “deeply concerned and alarmed” about the current high rates of transmission of the virus and the emergence of variants. Every country must take the necessary measures to curb the spread, says the report. High income countries with enough vaccines ordered for their own needs must commit to providing at least 1bn doses by 1 September to Covax, the UN-backed initiative to get vaccines to 92 low and middle-income countries, and more than 2bn doses by mid-2022.
The G7 countries must provide 60% of $19bn (£13.45bn) needed for vaccines, therapeutics, tests and strengthening health systems, with the rest from the G20 and other high-income nations. The WHO and the World Trade Organization must bring together vaccine-producing countries and manufacturers to help scale up production around the world – and if nothing happens, then the patent waiver that middle-income countries have called for and the US has backed should come into force.
Animals are to be formally recognised as sentient beings in UK law for the first time, in a victory for animal welfare campaigners, as the government set out a suite of animal welfare measures including halting most live animal exports and banning the import of hunting trophies.
The reforms will be introduced through a series of bills, including an animal sentience bill, and will cover farm animals and pets in the UK, and include protections for animals abroad, through bans on ivory and shark fins, and a potential ban on foie gras.
Some of the measures – including microchipping cats and stopping people keeping primates as pets – have been several years in preparation, and others – such as the restriction of live animal exports – have been the subject of decades-long campaigns….
Liz Cheney won’t move on and stop speaking about the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump for a simple reason: It hasn’t gone away.
In a short, powerful speech late Tuesday, the lawmaker from Wyoming shamed colleagues who will vote on Wednesday to strip her of her No. 3 House GOP leadership post, showing the guts to speak truth to the ex-President’s malevolent power that most Republicans lack.
History is likely to remember her remarks far longer than the tortured explanations of Republican power brokers — like Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California — as to why she must be purged after pointing out Trump’s lies and dangerous authoritarianism.
Cheney spoke in a mostly empty House of Representatives on Tuesday night, after many of her fellow Republicans had spent the day saying it was time to move on from Trump’s insurrection and trashing of America’s tradition of peaceful transfers of power.
But Cheney made a blunt case that the party and the country cannot forget — not least because the peril from the seditious ex-President is still growing.
“Today we face a threat America has never seen before. A former President who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol, in an effort to steal the election, has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him,” said Cheney, speaking slowly and in devastating clarity.
“He risks inciting further violence. Millions of Americans have been misled by the former President. They have heard only his words, not the truth.”
…
“I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative principles is reverence for the rule of law,” Cheney said. “The election is over. That is the rule of law. That is our constitutional process. Those who refuse to accept the rulings of our courts are at war with the Constitution.”
In the short term at least, Cheney’s action is unlikely to do anything to drive Trumpism from a party it has consumed. McCarthy has wholeheartedly anchored the GOP’s hopes of winning the House back in midterm elections next year in Trump’s continued appeal. Millions of Republican voters, helped by round-the-clock lies from conservative media, buy Trump’s false narrative that the election was stolen from him with massive electoral fraud. There is very little sign — apart from a few honorable exceptions like Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — of any appetite in the party to change its delusional and anti-democratic course.
…
A former President George W. Bush speechwriter, Michael Gerson, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Cheney’s speech was a recognition that the United States was at a “hinge point” that would decide on the future of the rule of law.
“This is a terrible danger. We have one party at the national level that is not committed to accepting the outcome of legitimate elections,” Gerson said.
“That’s not something that you can tolerate in the long run; that is a recipe for edging towards authoritarianism. So I think that it is a stark choice.”
…
Cheney countered criticisms of her conduct by telling her colleagues they had a patriotic duty to speak up, not least because a new Cold War may be brewing, this time with China, and Trump’s malfeasance was playing into propaganda designed to show America as a failed nation.
“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Cheney said, in a passage that seemed especially directed at McCarthy.
“I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former President’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”
Here’s a link to the May 12 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From their summary:
Coronavirus cases are exploding in Asia and the Pacific with over 5.9 million new confirmed infections in the past two weeks, more than in all other regions combined, the International Federation of the Red Cross has said.
India recorded 348,421 new Covid cases in the past 24 hours, which is down on the 400,000-plus figures it was racking up earlier this month. However, India posted a record rise in deaths from Covid-19 in the 24 hours to Wednesday morning local time, pushing its total fatalities past the 250,000 mark.
The head of the main Indian health agency responding to the coronavirus has said districts reporting a high number of infections should remain locked down for another six to eight weeks to control the spread of the rampaging disease.
Taiwan’s health authorities have reported 16 new locally transmitted cases – the highest daily number in Taiwan during this pandemic.
French health minister Olivier Véran has warned his compatriots that they will have to adapt their summer holidays to fit around when they need their second vaccine.
France’s parliament, meanwhile, has overnight backed president Emmanuel Macron’s plan to introduce a Covid “health pass”, after deputies pushed back against the move, arguing it was discriminatory for those not yet vaccinated.
Spain’s Balearic and Canary islands and Greece are expected to be the preferred destinations for Europeans booking long-awaited summer holidays when the travel industry reopens, according to the travel group Tui….
Hungary has submitted to Brussels a national plan for accessing the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund, which it had previously threatened to veto over proposals to link some payments to rule of law conditions, the European Commission has said.
AFP reports:
The €750-billion rescue package of grants and loans comprises funds contributed by the EU’s 27 member states to help the bloc’s economies hard hit by the coronavirus.
Budapest and Warsaw threatened to veto the fund last year, along with the entire EU budget, over proposals to link some fund payments to rule of law conditions, describing it as “political blackmail”.
Hungary has requested €7.2 billion in grants to support its “green transition, healthcare, research, digital, cohesion and public administration” until 2026, the European Commission.
According to Worldometer, Hungary currently has the highest COVID deaths per million people (2,997) in the world.
Former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller is expected to tell Congress Wednesday that he was concerned sending US troops to Capitol on January 6 would have encouraged the conspiracy of a possible “military coup,” according to his prepared testimony obtained by CNN.
Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, at the same hearing, will reaffirm that the Justice Department did not find evidence of widespread voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the 2020 election….
In advance of Congressional hearing with former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller (finally!), @K8brannen and I prepared a Timeline.
Shows gross omissions in DoD’s public timeline.
Points to a COVER UP (see especially critical 2:22pm phone call)…
More atl.
blfsays
The only reason I chased this point a little bit is because last night Jimmy Kimmel (MyPillow Mike’s Ranting Rally, Jenner’s Poll Problems, Tiger on the Loose & Viral Menthol Soap Guy (video)) snarked on a rally by the mypilau eejit (apoligies to pilau rice, which is excellent), pointing out the arena he booked was only half-full. However, his numbers didn’t add up — assuming he wasn’t joking — saying (paraphrasing from memory) 30,000 were expected but only 1,500 showed up. I presumed that was a misstatement (misreading his autocue or something?). But as it turns out, all three values are (broadly) correct: Claims of by teh eejit of an expected 30,000, to be in a venue capable of only 3,200, with only 1,500 attendees (some of whom apparently queued for 7 hours beforehand), Mike Lindell’s South Dakota rally: Proud Boys, Joe Piscopo and a can’t-miss investment:
MyPillow CEO draws half-full house at the Corn Palace, vows Trump will be back, gets stuck with his own books
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell held his much-anticipated-by-fans Frank Speech rally Monday night at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, where there was no shortage of baseless claims about the 2020 election. The event was billed as providing a venue for Lindell to relaunch his failed social media platform Frank, but no announcement about the platform occurred.
Before the event began, a long line of people waiting to get into the venue wrapped around the outside of the building. But once they got inside, the situation was less impressive. Only around 1,500 people tuned out for the event, which Lindell had initially boasted might draw a crowd of 30,000 supporters. (In fact, the Corn Palace’s seating capacity is just 3,200.) Even so, Business Insider’s Grace Dean noted that some attendees waited in line for seven hours before the doors opened.
[…]
At one point, [former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Joe] Piscopo’s microphone stopped working, most likely a standard technical error of the sort that bedevils performers at all levels of the entertainment ecosystem. The once-popular late-night comedian chose to blame the malfunction on Chinese interference. We’re not racist, Piscopo declared, apropos of nothing. I travel around the country, and we’re a good country. They are criticizing us every which way, and tonight it stops.
[…]
With attendees reportedly on edge over the supposed threat that antifa might sabotage the event, Lindell, the evening’s Elvis equivalent, took to the stage, where he shared his life story but neglected to say anything about a relaunch of Frank, the supposed purpose of the event to begin with.
Lindell spoke for around 90 minutes, sprinkling in random tangents meant to support his baseless claims of 2020 voter fraud and allegations that China was somehow to blame. The pillow magnate once again suggested that once the truth is known, the Supreme Court will unanimously vote to void the election results and reinstall Trump as president. (No legal or constitutional mechanism exists that could accomplish that result.)
[…]
Salon also learned about an investment opportunity being pushed during the rally, which optimistically (yet reasonably) promised a 3,500% return. Seemingly too good to be true! The custom-made flyers touted, We are living in a time of war against the deep state, so it is wise to be prepared, while the investment scheme offered the opportunity to expel deep-state operatives, communists, and socialists from the US educational system.
[image at the link — it’s hilarious; especially if you goto the associated website (pay very close attention to the fine print!)†…]
Once the rally ended, representatives for Lindell encouraged attendees to take home multiple boxes of the pillow maven’s book. Apparently, Lindell was prepared to hand out 30,000-plus copies of his election fraud movies and books, but as it turns out, he literally couldn’t give them away.
[…]
If there really were 30,000 copies of teh Scrolls of Lin de lala my Pillow there, then he would seem to be so deluded he cannot even see the difference between 30,000 and 3,200 — which might explain why an extremely dubious alleged 3,500%-gain scam was promoted.
† Here’s an example of some of the fine print from the home page of the associated site (which I will not link to): Returns on your investment will be paid as GRANTS either to your own nonprofit (that you create / control and that may pay you for your services and related expenses), or to another nonprofit that you designate. The Offering […] is made exclusively to members of LOTA [“The Legacy of the Angels […], a nondenominational spiritual organization” …]
The hearing with Miller and Rosen has begun. I believe Carolyn Maloney, the House Oversight and Reform Committee chair, said in her opening that the FBI and DoJ haven’t turned over a single document to any of the five or six congressional committees that have requested them. She also said she had wanted Chris Wray to testify today, had sent him several invitations, and had even postponed the hearing twice to accommodate him, and he’s still not there. She did say he’s now scheduled to testify in June, but WTF.
I had to mute the opening statement from the Republican ranking member, Comer. I simply don’t know how much longer this can go on – the Republicans in the House just continue to get worse after January 6th. The Democrats on the committee include: Jamie Raskin, AOC, Katie Porter, and Jackie Speier. The Republicans include: Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, Clay Higgins, and Andy Biggs.
Coronavirus vaccines using mRNA technology like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna appear able to “neutralise” the variant of Covid-19 behind India’s outbreak, the EU’s drug watchdog said Wednesday.
AFP has the story:
There is “promising evidence” that such jabs could counter the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, first found in India in October and now in dozens of countries around the world, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said.
“The data seems to be rather reassuring on the fact that at least the messenger RNA vaccines will be able to neutralise this variant, at least to an extent that will guarantee sufficient protection,” Marco Cavaleri, the EMA’s head of vaccine strategy, told a news conference.
The Amsterdam-based regulator was “monitoring very closely” the data emerging about the Indian variant, he added.
Cavaleri said the EMA also believed rival vaccines using viral vector technology would be effective but they were waiting for “real world data” from the use of a version of AstraZeneca’s vaccine in India.
DC Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee is also testifying in the House Oversight hearing. I don’t know why his statement wasn’t discussed in the media beforehand.
The January 6 Capitol attack reverberates through the halls of Congress Wednesday as committees investigate what happened and a member of Republican leadership loses her job for telling the truth about it.
House Republicans gathered at 9 a.m. ET to decide the fate of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who incurred the wrath of her colleagues for refusing to absolve former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies for spreading the election fraud conspiracy theory. Minutes later, she was voted out.
While Congress is still reeling from Cheney’s ouster, various committees will grill high-profile witnesses on the January 6 attack and the conditions that caused it….
At the link is a liveblog of the Cheney meeting earlier (McCarthy chose to go with a voice vote rather than a private ballot) and the various hearings.
Dem Rep Seems Baffled At GOP ‘Revisionist History’
House Oversight: Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) expressed his incredulity at the “revisionist history” put forth by some Republicans on the committee so far today.
It has been nuts. Both Gosar and Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA) tried to argue that January 6 was not actually violent, and that Trump was totally innocent.
Lynch is now trying to arm-wrestle Miller into admitting that Trump provoked the mob to march on the Capitol. Miller has essentially said as much before, but is now trying to muddy it up.
It ended with an argument, as Lynch cried “you’re ridiculous!” after Miller called Lynch’s assessment that he reversed his testimony “ridiculous.”
Between the Republicans on the committee and the pathetic Trump stooges testifying, it’s insane.
blf @302, MyPillow Mike’s inability to even give his books away is a telling detail. That guy is not a competent grifter/scammer. He’s an eejit for sure.
SC @303, “I simply don’t know how much longer this can go on.” I was thinking the same thing.
SC @299, I am worried that, even if the EU gives a recovery grant to Hungary, the corrupt (and rightwing) officials in Hungary will not properly administer the grant funds. There’s a reason “Hungary currently has the highest COVID deaths per million people (2,997) in the world.”
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) yesterday signed a new law that will purge infrequent mail voters from the state’s ballot list. Democrats and other voting-rights advocates said the measure will make voting harder by removing voters from Arizona’s Permanent Early Voting List, but it nevertheless enjoyed support from GOP legislators.
Yet another thing that is going on longer than one would have hoped: voter suppression bills at the state level.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political action committee is unveiling new, bilingual ads targeting four congressional Republicans — each of whom represent districts with large Latino populations — who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. The targets include Reps. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.) and Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas).
Good. Those representatives should face consequences.
SC @312. Good for her. She is willing to continue the fight.
In other news that relates to stories of some Republicans willing to speak the truth (summarized from the New York Times):
In Arizona, Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates, a lifelong Republican, was asked about his party’s ongoing election audit. “My fear is that all of this is further tearing at the foundations of our democracy and tearing at people’s faith in our electoral systems,” he told the New York Times. “If there were fraud going on, if there was systematic corruption going on, I would be the first to speak out against it. But we have looked at this again and again and again with numerous audits here.”
Congressional Republican leaders have standards. They’re just not defensible standards.
When it comes to the current House Republican Conference, there’s no shortage of members burdened by serious controversies. Among the most notable:
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is currently facing a Justice Department investigation over allegations that he had a sexual relationship with a minor, possibly violating federal sex trafficking laws in the process.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) has been dogged by difficult questions in recent months about his ties to white nationalists.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has been connected to an active Russian agent believed by U.S. officials to have targeted our elections.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is among the most radical members of Congress elected in recent history, including her support for the deranged QAnon conspiracy theory. This year, the public also learned about Greene having expressed support for violence targeting U.S. officials, dismissing 9/11 and school massacres as hoaxes, harassing at least one survivor of a school shooting, and peddling bizarre nonsense about fire-causing space lasers.
Each of these Republican lawmakers have enjoyed the steadfast support of the House GOP conference.[…]
Those same Republican leaders said nothing in response to reports on Paul Gosar’s white-nationalist ties, and had no qualms about leaving Gosar on a national security panel of the House Oversight Committee. GOP leaders similarly left Devin Nunes as the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee.
And, perhaps most famously, nearly all House Republicans, including GOP leaders, stood by Marjorie Taylor Greene when Democrats decided to strip her of her committee assignments.
And yet, Republicans in the chamber were willing to act against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), ousting her from her role as chair of the House Republican Conference — not because she’s facing a criminal investigation, not because she’s palled around with white nationalists, not because of associations with Russian operatives, and not because of dangerous crackpot conspiracy theories.
No, GOP lawmakers instead punished Cheney, while ignoring her far more controversial colleagues, because she told inconvenient truths about the 2020 elections and called on her party to support democracy.
[…] GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill are willing to take action against one of their own, but only if one of their own challenges Donald Trump’s lies and insists that election results matter.
Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney
Commentary:
[…] it’s pretty hard to imagine anything more threatening than an entire party cheering on a leader who was single-handedly ensuring that at least half a million Americans would perish during the nation’s worst public health crisis in a century. But Sen. Thune, who’s up for reelection next year, would sure like to try.
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, also interested in moving along, still managed to emphasize why the current imbroglio will continue to haunt Republicans.
“Trying to re-litigate an election which is over and has been concluded by President Trump’s own Justice Department as being free and fair is not productive,” he told the Post.
Naturally, re-litigating the election is exactly where House Republicans have chosen to plant their flag as they eye the midterms.
On the other side of the aisle, Senate Democrats view the GOP mayhem as a political opening.
“There’s an iron rule in politics, which is that when your opponents are destroying themselves, don’t interfere,” said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is surely channeling the sentiments of the West Wing.
[…] a spokesperson for Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt had the gall to try to belittle the work of a journalist of color working for a Black-owned media outlet. Sarah Gray, who self-identifies as a “proud citizen of the Cherokee Nation and of Muscogee (Creek) Nation and Kiowa Tribe descent,” is a political correspondent and senior writer for The Black Wall Street Times. After Gray asked routine questions about how a commission voted on legislation and the governor’s involvement, Stitt’s director of communications Carly Atchison wrote and The Black Wall Street Times screenshot this response: “Hi Sarah, thanks for reaching out but our policy is to respond to journalists, not activists pretending to be reporters. Good luck!”
[…] “The governor’s message to the more than 1 million readers of The Black Wall Street Times is clear; he has no interest in sharing information with you, the journalists or Black-owned publication you trust,” the media company’s editorial board penned. “This anti-Black dog whistling is nothing new to members of the press who represent Black media. Anti-Blackness has inarguably become a cornerstone of the Stitt Administration’s general policy position.”
The news site fittingly based in Oklahoma, the birthplace of the economically thriving Black Tulsa community that is also the news organization’s namesake, was asking the governor about his attendance at a meeting of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission to discuss Stitt’s role on the commission—or more accurately, lack thereof. No one from his office showed up to the meeting on Monday despite being invited, while the governor twice “snubbed” the commission, The Black Wall Street Times reported. “Now more than ever, we need policies that bring us closer together – not rip us apart,” the Republican governor said in a statement on Friday. “And as governor I firmly believe that not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex.”
Stitt made the speech the same day he signed into law Oklahoma House Bill 1775, which The Black Wall Street Times defined as “a law that shields White students from learning about the trauma and effects of systemic racism if it makes them feel discomfort or guilt.” Let’s not forget, this is in a state where white supremacists burned and terrorized the wealthiest Black community in the country, that of Tulsa, in 1921. […]
Hours After Cheney Ouster, McCarthy Falsely Insists GOP Has Moved On From Election Fraud Falsehoods
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who initially condemned former President Trump for inciting the deadly Capitol insurrection before ultimately pushing for Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) ouster from leadership, acted as though the Republican Party has moved on from false claims of a stolen election just because he met with President Biden earlier today.
[The tweet, with video, reads: “House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, hours after ousting Rep. Liz Cheney from leadership: ‘I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. That’s all over with. We are sitting here with the president today’.”
Can’t be more clear than this: Fox contributor/former pres. daughter-in-law Lara Trump says Liz Cheney should be removed because she doesn’t represent “the views of most Republicans” who have “a lot of questions about this election” and “can’t just let it go.”
The growing effort to remove Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) from the third-ranking Republican leadership position in the House further accelerates her party’s full capitulation to Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election. The move against Cheney is a sign of political cowardice. While shocking, it is not surprising for a party that has lost its way. The majority of Republican lawmakers appear to have stopped believing in truth — or lack the courage to speak the truth.
stroppysays
Ok, this is silly, but it makes me smile. Apologies in advance.
Before House Republicans moved to oust Cheney, she urged them not to “let the former president drag us backward” and warned the party was going down a path that would bring their “destruction.”
Wonkette: “Dipsh*t Michigan Republican Wants To Register All Fact Checkers So They Can Be Punished”
A Michigan state legislator who has repeatedly promoted Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Joe Biden has now introduced legislation that would require all “fact checkers” to register with the state of Michigan and be bonded, so they can be sued if their journalism is bad.
Well yes, of course it flies in the face of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press. Why would that get in his way?
And with the Republican Party now devolving into a fascist gang, state Rep. Matt Maddock (R) even managed to get eight cosponsors for his “Fact Checker Registration Act,” instead of being laughed right out of the state Capitol. […]
Maddock’s dumb bill casts a pretty wide net in defining who would need to register with the secretary of state’s office, as HuffPo explains. Fittingly, the bill’s own definition of “fact checker” includes an error.
Under Maddock’s proposal, a “fact checker” is defined as someone who is paid by a national or international fact-checking organization, is a member of the International Fact Check Network, publishes content in Michigan and presents themselves to the public as a fact-checker. (The text of the bill appears to incorrectly refer to the International Fact-Checking Network, a Poynter Institute initiative that connects fact-checkers across the world, as the “International Fact Check Network.”)
Just for added fun, the bill specifies that fact checkers who fail to register with the state could be fined $1000 a day for each violation. That’s pretty rich, considering that most of those who fall under the bill’s purview wouldn’t actually be in Michigan, but would be in big trouble anyway if anything they write can reach Michigan via the internet tubes.
The bill would also require all such fact checkers to post a million-dollar fidelity bond with the secretary of state. Then, if someone wants to contest something written in a fact-checking piece, they could sue against that bond:
An “affected person” could bring a civil action in any county district court to claim the bond for “any wrongful conduct that is a violation of the laws of this state.” The bond could be forfeited at the discretion of the judge for “demonstrable harm” stemming from something a fact checker wrote, Maddock wrote.
The bill doesn’t bother defining “wrongful conduct,” because presumably that would include anything the lying media publishes.
Hilariously, the text of the bill doesn’t actually specify that anyone actually write about Michigan to be required to register. Presumably, Wonkette would need to register and post a million-dollar bond in Michigan because we’ve taken issue with the Washington Post’s fact-check columns.
This all sounds super legal and certain to be upheld by federal courts at all levels, assuming the judges have been lobotomized.
Maddock first floated the idea of registering fact checkers shortly after the election, and repeated his case for the idea in a Facebook post last week. He explained that
Social Media companies deplatform people, politicians, and businesses on the basis of “Fact Checkers” who relish their role punishing those whom they deem ‘false’. Many believe this enormous economic and social power is being abused. Who are these Fact Checkers? We’re going to find out. My legislation will put Fact Checkers on notice: don’t be wrong, don’t be sloppy, and you better be right.
We can certainly see why Maddock would want to go after fact checkers, since he and his wife, Meshawn Maddock, have played a large role in radicalizing the state GOP and also seem to be responsible for spreading a fair number of lies themselves.
Here, have a few f’rinstances from the Detroit Metro Times:
Three days after the general election, Maddock riled up a crowd of angry Trump supporters who descended on the TCF Center in downtown Detroit to disrupt vote counters. Earlier in the day, Matt Maddock falsely claimed on social media that 35,000 ballots “showed up out of nowhere” in the middle of the night and that Democrats “were pretty much cheating in front of poll watchers.” […]
On Jan. 5, a day before the insurrection, Maddock and 10 other Republican lawmakers from Michigan wrote a letter to Vice President Mike Pence, urging him not to certify the election, questioning “the validity of hundreds of thousands of ballots” in battleground states.
During the latest outbreak of COVID-19 infections in Michigan, Meshawn Maddock tweeted a lie claiming that face masks are “Ineffective, Harmful (physically n mentally) and Never Intended for General Population Use,” and urging people to sue employers who require they be worn.
Also too, following the election, the Detroit News points out, the Maddocks were
among a group of Republicans who tried to enter the Michigan Capitol to cast their own electoral votes for Donald Trump.
They were turned away by security.
However, according to a document filed in a court case, Meshawn was one of 16 Michigan Trump “electors” who signed a certificate of votes for the president, who lost the state’s election. The document said the GOP electors had “convened” in the Capitol, but they weren’t actually allowed inside the building.
Ms. Maddock also claimed to have organized 20 busloads of Michigan residents to travel to Washington DC to oppose the certification of the 2020 election on January 6. Say, any lies regarding that one?
The Maddocks claimed they weren’t able to get into the area where Trump was speaking that day, but Meshawn Maddock’s social media posts appear to contradict that claim.
“The most incredible crowd and sea of people I’ve ever walked with <3," Meshawn Maddock wrote in a quote-tweet of a video showing Trump supporters marching to the Capitol.
It’s really quite inspiring to see such nice truthy people fighting for accurate journalism, to be sure.
Republican members of Congress sought to minimize the Capitol insurrection at a House hearing on Wednesday, with statements calling pro-Trump rioters “patriots” and other lawmakers falsely denying demonstrators were supporters of the former president at all.
…
What they’re saying:
Rep. Ralph Norman (S.C.): “I don’t know who did the poll to say that they were Trump supporters.”
Rep. Jody Hice (Ga.): “It was Trump supporters who lost their lives that day, not Trump supporters who were taking the lives of others.”
Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.): “Do you recall the name of the young lady, a veteran wrapped in an American flag, who was killed in the U.S. Capitol?” Gosar asked former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. “As the death certificate says, it was a homicide. Who executed Ashli Babbitt?” Gosar added.
…
Rep. Andrew Clyde (Ga.): “There was no insurrection. To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie.”
I keep thinking about this interview (see #277 above for context). It was evasive throughout, but the end was essentially an attempt to justify ethnic cleansing.
Live on Israeli TV right now, a Jewish mob attacked a man they suspect of being an Arab. Police is nowhere in sight
Israeli TV captured the lynching because they were there filming an Israeli gang attacking Arab-owned shops. Some in the mob were wearing Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) shirts. Guess who ensured they make it into the Knesset?
The victim of today’s lynching on live TV, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, is in critical condition.
Footage of the lynching attempt [link atl] Multiple other attacks occurred tonight across Israel, mostly of Jewish mobs organized on Telegram attacking people they suspect of being Arabs
California governor Gavin Newsom said the state would stop requiring people to wear masks in almost all circumstances on June 15, describing a world he said will look “a lot like the world we entered into before the pandemic.”
“We’re not wearing face coverings. We’re not restricted in any way, shape or form from doing the old things that we used to do, save for huge, large-scale indoor convention events like that, where we use our common sense,” Newsom said in an interview with Fox 11’s Elex Michaelson.
California has required people to wear masks in public places since June 18. The guidance requires people to wear a mask when gathering indoors with people who are not vaccinated.
Fully vaccinated people can meet indoors without wearing a mask. They can also not wear a mask outdoors, except when attending large gatherings such as sporting events, festivals and concerts.
U.S. President Joe Biden has urged parents to get their children vaccinated after a government advisory panel authorised the Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for children aged 12 to 15.
“Now that vaccine is authorised for ages 12 and up, and I encourage their parents to make sure they get the shot,” Biden said.
“This is one more giant step on our fight against the pandemic.”
A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory panel backed use of the vaccine for younger adolescents in a unanimous vote, Reuters reports.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
SC#332
Here in IL we are also beginning to bridge from May 14, and if trends continue, we could be essentially open June 11, providing the present trends continue. Link
I’ll still follow the CDC recommendations if masking is recommended for certain situations, as I do transport Sr. Citizens, some of whom may not be vaccinated for health reasons.
Nerd @ #334, that’s good news. I just read that some states are tying it to the percentage of the population that’s vaccinated, which seems reasonable.
“This ethnic cleansing would be a lot easier if our Arab neighbors would help out.”
Listening to Ayman Mohyeldin interview the former Israeli ambassador was tough. The ambassador made me ill. “It is the politicization of international law.” (He was referring to some experts saying that Israel may be committing war crimes.) Give me a break. Israel should face up to the fact that some international laws are being broken.
The Biden administration on Tuesday approved the first large-scale offshore wind farm in the United States, a project that envisions building 62 turbines off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and creating enough electricity to power 400,000 homes.
Political Wire:
President Biden announced his third slate of nominations for federal judges, with the president now having put forward 20 names to fill judicial vacancies.
Two weeks from tonight on May 26th, we will announce a winner of a separate drawing for adults who have received at least their first dose of the vaccine. This announcement will occur each Wednesday for five weeks, and the winner each Wednesday will receive one million dollars….
Getting our 12- to 17-year-olds vaccinated is so important that we will have a separate incentive for them.
On Wednesday, May 26th, we will announce the winner of a drawing of all those 17 years old and under who have been vaccinated, and the winner will receive a full, four-year scholarship to our State of Ohio universities. This will include tuition, room and board, and books.
On May 18th, an electronic portal will be opened up for young people who have been vaccinated to be able to register. We will do this every Wednesday, for five straight Wednesdays — each time randomly selecting one student to receive the full, four-year scholarship.
[…] After a bipartisan leadership meeting with Biden on infrastructure Wednesday, McConnell made it abundantly clear that he won’t be doing any negotiating. “We’re not interested in reopening the 2017 tax bill, we both made that clear to the president, that’s our red line,” McConnell said. That’s not very bipartisan-y of him, is it? McCarthy was worse, blasting out a campaign text immediately after talking about “Corrupt Joe Biden” with a “radical Socialist agenda.” (Trumpist capitalization all his.)
With all that, Manchin [Democratic Senator Joe Manchin] still isn’t backing down from his insistence that this and every other bill be done with Republicans. That’s despite Republicans stating that they will oppose anything Biden wants out loud, repeatedly. It’s explicitly been made official Senate Republican policy. McConnell did that with this “100%” commitment to fighting Biden comment, and Sen. Ted Cruz reiterated it Tuesday, this time on the voting rights and elections reform bill that the Senate Rules Committee took up. The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman caught an exchange between Sen. Angus King and Cruz about the numerous Republican amendments they brought to the committee.
“If this amendment and others that you suggest are accepted, would you vote for the bill?” King asked, rhetorically. He knows better by now. Cruz answered truthfully and essentially, no. “To be candid, it is difficult to imagine a set of amendments being adopted that would cause me to vote for this bill—it would have to be a fundamentally different bill.” Like one that didn’t secure voting rights and didn’t keep dark money out of politics. “That being said,” he continued, “each of these amendments is a designed to strike out egregious aspects of this bill, so if some of these amendments were adopted, it might conceivably convince some Republicans to support it, if it ceased being a partisan power grab.”
In other words, a few Republicans might be willing to support a bill that essentially does nothing. And now Manchin is fully enabling that tactic. He’s telling Republicans that using the Big Lie to destroy democracy is a valid tactic.
The asshole actually said this: “I believe Democrats and Republicans feel very strongly about protecting the ballot boxes allowing people to protect the right to vote.” He has officially announced that he is going to oppose the For the People Act, but says instead he will support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
Which Republicans are also going to filibuster.
“It could be done bipartisan to start getting confidence back in our system,” he said. It won’t. Manchin also won’t support a limited exception to the filibuster rules to let voting rights legislation pass with a simple majority, which is one possible reform. “If you do it for one time you basically destroy the Senate as we know it,” Manchin said. Never mind that the Senate as we know it needs to be destroyed because the likes of Manchin and the Republicans he’s enabling are keeping it a white supremacist institution that subverts democracy.
[…] Maintaining the minority rule status quo that has allowed Republicans representing a significant minority of the populace to call all the shots on pretty much everything is the only thing Republicans will get behind. […]
Laurence O’Donnell, host ot the Last Word on MSNBC at 10 pm et, is holding a Town Hall meeting on Covid Vaccination tonight.
The interviewees include President Biden, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Murthy, head of HHS, and the 34 year old black woman who was instrumental (over a weekend) in the development of the Moderna Vaccine.
I’m drooling over hearing about the science in the development of the vaccine.
Across Europe, worker-led delivery collectives are springing up to reclaim control from corporate platforms
Cristina González[†] did a lot of waiting in 2018. Back then, the 29-year-old was a courier for the Spanish food delivery platform Glovo in her Basque home town, Vitoria-Gasteiz. She talks about feeling as if she was on standby the whole time: “You’re effectively having to be working constantly.”
While Glovo serves restaurants, customers can also order from supermarkets. This, González says, was “a complete shitshow: supermarket orders are really easy to screw up”. If the supermarket did not have an item in stock and González completed the order, she might get a poor rating from the customer because of the missing item. If she turned down the order, González worried that it might affect her score on the platform. “It was very, very stressful.”
González is still a courier but is making €10 (£8.70) an hour after tax and social security contributions, more than double her previous wage. She says customers of Eraman, the delivery cooperative she now rides for, are more understanding about minor issues, the jobs are more varied; she despatches as well as delivering, there is better communication, and she feels like she has more control.
The Spanish minimum age is 1050€/month (c.1267$/month), which assuming 20 days (four 5-day weeks) per month, works out to 52,50€/day — suggesting 10€/hour after tax is actually rather decent and does not require excessive time. As of 2019 (Living Wage Series — Spain — September 2019 — In Euro, per Month), that would be a livable pay. The actual estimated livable pay depends on the circumstances, and 10€/hour is livable regardless of the circumstances.
[… T]hese cooperatives are worker-led and pride themselves on being democratically governed. Eraman’s co-founder, Paul Iano, 28, says the 10-person cooperative reaches decisions via discussion. “The thing I like to say about cooperatives is that if you’re having to vote on it, you’ve already got a problem.”
But neither venture [Spanish Eraman & German Khora –blf] could exist without the bike delivery software they rely on.
Enter CoopCycle, the brainchild of Alexandre Segura, a computer programmer from Marseille. Back in the spring of 2016, Segura found himself heading to the Place de la République in Paris almost every evening for Nuit debout, a French protest movement that has been compared to Occupy.
Segura helped build a website for the movement and spent much of his time talking about how the gig economy could be exploitative and harmful, and how more of it should be run by the users. “It planted seeds in my mind,” he says.
[…] The result was a delivery app that offered software and support but required users to fulfil two conditions: they had to be worker-owned and all profits had to be distributed among the worker-owners.
“No CoopCycle, no party,” is how Carraro puts it, telling me that the cost of getting a bespoke delivery app designed would be prohibitively expensive for the average collective.
Recently, the world seems to have started thinking more like Segura does. Spain’s supreme court ruled in September that riders working for Glovo are not self-employed but salaried employees with the right to paid holidays and sick leave. […]
Deliveroo’s shares plunged 26% in its much-anticipated London stock exchange debut in March, with many investors expressing concerns about the conditions faced by its self-employed riders.
[…]
The co-ops say their business model offers a better deal for restaurants as well as riders. Eraman, for example, charges restaurants between 10–20% of the value of the order, while Deliveroo takes 32% […]
CoopCycle now has 67 co-ops across seven countries in its “federation” and has extended from Europe to Canada and Australia. It is on the cusp of deals with collectives in Argentina and Mexico for the first time, though there is a debate in process over whether motorcycles would be a breach of the federation’s environment-friendly values.
[Segura’s colleague Adrien] Claude sounds both fired up about the future and gently exhausted. “We’re trying to change the world — it’s tough because we’re human and nothing’s perfect. It probably never will be perfect but we’re trying to make things better by the day.”
† The Grauniad has managed to spell her surname as both González and Gonzalez, sometimes even in the same paragraph. I’ve assumed the former is her preferred spelling and have changed corrected the other spelling (unmarked). Please support another 200 years of typos if you can !
[…]
Caitlyn Jenner hopes to pull the same trick as Arnold Schwarzenegger: snatching away the governorship of bluer-than-blue California in the chaos of a free-wheeling recall election. So far, though, the voters are not buying it.
[… A] new poll this week shows Jenner gaining little traction. Just 6% of respondents said they would vote for her, putting her far behind other Republican contenders […]
Jenner’s media savvy is not quite so evident [as Schwarzenegger’s]. She told Sean Hannity on Fox News that she wanted to secure the border wall promoted by Donald Trump. But when asked in a subsequent interview how she would do that when the border was not within the state government’s control, she changed the subject.
In voicing her frustration with California’s large homeless population, she created an unflattering Twitter sensation by talking about a fellow private plane owner who can’t take it any more.
[…]
She alienated many transgender Californians and their supporters by saying, more than once, that she opposes trans girls competing on school sport teams that match their gender. And, on Tuesday, she told Dana Bash on CNN that she hadn’t found anything to get excited about in the 2020 general election and went golfing instead of going to the polls.
The statement raised questions about her interest in California policy issues, in a year when high-profile topics such as cash bail, the rights of ride-share drivers, rent control and affirmative action were on the ballot. It also turned out to be untrue, as revealed when Politico dug up documentation showing that she had voted last November after all.
With Jenner apparently unaware that who votes and who does not is a matter of public record in California, a former Republican campaign operative, Jack Pitney, told Politico: “This is not someone who is serious about public life.”
[…] Almost every poll predicts [Governor Gavin Newsom] will survive the recall challenge.
A candidate of Schwarzenegger’s charisma could potentially upend that support between now and election day, expected in October or November. But Jenner appears to have just a small political base. Only 13% of Republicans back her, according to this week’s poll, and she has little crossover appeal to Democrats. Her poor initial showing is likely to lead to problems with fundraising and courting the endorsement of Republican leaders in and out of California.
For now, the Caitlyn for California wine glasses are going for $35 a pair. It’s unclear, though, if anyone is buying.
In states like Kansas, energy companies want to impose charges on people who produce their own power with rooftop arrays
[…]
Kansas has about as much solar potential as Florida but lags far behind the state, powering only about 12,000 homes — or less than 2% of what is covered in Florida, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
That could be related to an ongoing debate in the states that is pitting utilities companies against solar energy.
The Kansas utility Evergy has vastly expanded wind power in the state, but it is advocating for policies that would make customers less likely to install rooftop solar panels. That’s because if customers generate their own power, they won’t need to buy as much from Evergy.
The fight has played out in state after state, from Arizona to California to Massachusetts — as power companies are threatened by the transition.
In 2018, Evergy got permission from state regulators to collect fees from rooftop solar users, but Kansas’s highest court recently ruled that illegal. So, Evergy went back to regulators and asked them to approve different charges — a grid access charge and a minimum monthly bill. The regulators, at the Kansas Corporation Commission, rejected both proposals. They have told the company to work with solar advocates on a more holistic compromise.
Andrew French, the chair of the commission, said in February that his state isn’t the only one in a standoff surrounding solar, particularly about how to rework a policy called net metering — where customers are compensated for power they send back to the grid.
[…]
Rick Gillam, a program director with the national solar advocacy group Vote Solar, said that Evergy is like most utilities in opposing customers reducing their usage of utility-supplied electricity. “Its general animosity has created uncertainty for solar developers and customers alike,” he said.
Utilities have for years battled against net metering. Now, they are also turning to other billing strategies to try to recoup the money they fear they will lose when their customers aren’t as reliant on them.
[…]
Power companies have worried about a future like they see in California, which is far ahead of other states on rooftop solar and is considering overhauling electricity rules to try to boost adoption further. Environmental advocates say that amid the green energy revolution that the Biden administration is touting and climate scientists are calling for, utilities are standing in the way.
[…]
The debate in Kansas specifically is not about whether climate change is happening and renewable power is necessary — but about how to shift the landscape to accommodate green energy despite pushback from powerful corporations.
Climate change deniers are increasingly out of place in the state, which has seen a significant economic boost from wind power. Kansas’s governor, Laura Kelly, is a Democrat, although the state legislature is controlled by Republicans. Kelly supports renewable power, especially wind.
One relatively new state senator, Mike Thompson, has attempted to propose anti-wind power legislation that one Kansas non-profit group has deemed among the “most restrictive”, in the US.
Thompson — a former meteorologist who has received campaign donations from both the fossil-fuel invested Koch brothers and a Pac for Evergy — denies the science that shows humans are heating the planet at an unsustainable rate. In a sign of the times, his fellow Republicans shot down his proposal, and it is unlikely to move forward.
[…]
Thompson’s complaints are ideological. He falsely argues the public has been subjected to a constant barrage of falsified, exaggerated and alarming claims, about climate change. He and other conservatives around the country have sought to cast renewables as unreliable and expensive.
[…]
From an issue of fundamental fairness, we just don’t believe that because you put a solar array on your house, {your neighbor should} have to pay more, [Evergy’s senior vice-president, Chuck Caisley] said. “It was never our intention to try and hurt the solar industry.”[†]
But utilities remain monopolies, meaning their customers typically don’t have other options. They are typically regulated by elected or appointed state officials, who determine how big of a profit they can make from running plants and power lines.
[…]
Dorothy Barnett, executive director of the Kansas-based Climate + Energy Project, said those profit motivations have stalled progress for years.
“We could have worked together to find common ground and could have been so far ahead on solar,” Barnett said. “There were so many opportunities along the way that were missed because Kansas utilities were slow to recognize we are in a period of transition with our electric system.”
† I’ve opted to not set that claim in eejit quotes because Evergy does generate a not-insignificant percentage of power from renewables (c.28% in total, according to the article), albeit coal is still it’s main method (39%). As Ms Barnett points out, at least with Evergy, the problems seem to originate more because of (excessive?-)profit than any ideological or quasi-technological opposition to renewables. (I write “quasi-technological” because there used to be, as I recall (so add some salt), blurtings that feeding power into the grid was dangerous and required utility-approved installations — but as far as I know, the real technology issues have been solved and any reputable installation is safe and a fairly-routine inspection by an electrician should normally suffice.)
This isn’t a flip question. It’s one prompted by the last four months of grappling with the fallout of the bloody insurrection on Capitol Hill, and by the last four years of grappling with the fallout of installing a fascist in the White House.
So, for real: what does the GOP stand for? Apart from trying to seize back power, what does it want to do?
The answer, as Liz Cheney has learned, is to pander to the ego of a single Florida resident who has no obvious or coherent political purpose.
This might just explain why the party has been struggling so hard to respond to the last four months of the most tenuous Democratic control in Washington.
The Biden team has not commanded the nation’s capital from a position of strength because of LBJ-like powers of persuasion, Democratic unity or structural majorities. They have succeeded because Republicans sorely lack — as George HW Bush used to put it — the vision thing.
[… H]ere we are nonetheless at a point where the Grand Old Party[Gross Odious Profiteers] has shrunk into a small old cult of personality, willing to twist and turn to the whims of its sociopathic former leader.
Consistency meant nothing inside the cult. More billions of spending on a nonsensical border wall? The deficit hawks said no problem. More bullying business leaders by presidential tweet? The capitalist caucus said bring it on. More cozying up to the leaders of Russia, China and even North Korea? The defense hawks thought that sounded fine. Paying off porn stars with campaign dollars? The party of family values barely blushed.
Each one of these big and small sellouts brought the party to the point where it fired Liz Cheney from the House leadership on Tuesday for stating the obvious: Trump lost the election last year and stoked an insurrection to save face.
Cheney is a conservative’s conservative, who voted with Trump 92.9% of the time — more than the party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. […]
Clearly most Republican members of Congress […] think they are on a winning track. There is a near-universal expectation that the Republicans will take back at least half of Congress next year, and that its lickspittle House leader Kevin McCarthy, will finally rise from his semi-prone position to become speaker.
But while incumbent presidents tend to lose power in their first midterms, there is nothing pre-ordained about this prognosis. It just gets repeated so often, it feels that way.
There was a president, not so long ago, who bucked that trend. His name was George W Bush and his vice-president was a man named Dick Cheney, father of Liz. […]
Two points this opinion column does not discuss are the voter-suppression efforts of the thugs, and the thug-friendly federal judges (notably including the Supreme Court). One and probably both seem very likely to severely distort the 2022 elections (at least). There is also the current 2020 election was fraudulent qAnonsense — albeit, fortunately, that has not convinced any courts in any significant manner (that I am currently aware of). On the other hand, the insurrectionist’s trials are beginning, with the potential to expose, on the public record, enough rot to make the non-fanatics stop and think…
[…]
Where does the GOP end up? Much like its sidekick for the last several decades, the National Rifle Association. The NRA has been a fearsomely effective political machine, blocking any attempt at gun safety laws by mobilizing just 5 million members. Along the way, it became a cult of personality and corruption revolving around its leader, Wayne LaPierre.
Now, after a failed legal gambit to declare bankruptcy, it faces the full force of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who is suing to shut the NRA down. “The rot runs deep,” she said on Tuesday. “No one is above the law. Not even one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country.”
The rot runs deep across the right. Powerful political parties and organizations can suddenly seem brittle after years of hollowing out. […]
[…]
EU citizens are being sent to immigration removal centres and held in airport detention rooms as the UK government’s hostile environment policy falls on them after Brexit, according to campaigners and travellers interviewed by the Guardian.
Europeans with job interviews are among those being denied entry and locked up. They have spoken of being subjected to the traumatic and humiliating experience of expulsion, despite Home Office rules that explicitly allow non-visa holders to attend interviews.
[…]
At least a dozen European citizens — mostly young women — were detained and expelled at Gatwick airport [London] alone over 48 hours last week, two female Spanish detainees told the Guardian. Some were sent two hours’ drive away to Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire, where a Covid scare meant they were confined to their rooms.
Other countries whose citizens have been held at a UK airport or detention centre include Italy, France, Bulgaria and Greece. It is understood one French man was held at Edinburgh airport for 48 hours recently, while the Bulgarian ambassador to the UK confirmed a number of his nationals had been held at immigration removal centres.
[…]
Between them, María and Eugenia ([the two Spanish ladies] who asked that their real names not be used) said they met a dozen other European citizens detained for similar reasons, accounting for half of the people in Gatwick’s detention rooms. They included two Spaniards with job interviews, a French woman with an internship and a Czech woman who had flown in from Mexico and was being sent back there.
“The Czech girl was desperate,” said Eugenia, who spent part of her 24 hours locked up in tears. “Like me, she knew we couldn’t start work immediately, but understood that you could look for jobs and come back to the UK later after obtaining a visa. When she offered to pay for a flight back to Prague, they said no — that they were expelling her to Mexico.”
Other travellers with Italian, Portuguese and eastern European passports were also being expelled.
[…]
Eugenia said she was told her airline, Vueling, was to blame. “We had all read the website and filled out the forms. Then they tell you that it is all the fault of the airline, which shouldn’t have let us board.”
Vueling denied airlines were meant to vet EU travellers. “It is officials in the country of destination who establish and enforce entry requirements,” a spokesperson, Tania Galesi, said.
Teh NKofE† has long pushed enforcement onto the airlines. I’ve been caught up in this nonsense myself, albeit (in my case) always easily resolved, for more understandable and clear(er) reasons, and admittedly not unique to teh NKofE. The “problem” as such is I am a dual-passport holder (being a dual-national), with one passport from the States and the other not. I learned a long time ago that when an airline asks to see your passport (on departure for an international flight), what they are interested in is your entry passport; i.e., that you will be allowed to enter the destination country. (Airlines usually have to pay a fine for passengers refused entry.) So, in teh NKofE, when flying to the States, I would show the airline my States passport.
However, that is not the passport I used to enter teh NKofE (especially when coming from the States (at that time)). Hence, there were no visas, stamps, nothing, in my States indicating it was legal for me to be in teh NKofE for as long as I was (I lived there for years). This (understandably) caused concerns I might be “fleeing” or similar; e.g., wanted in teh NKofE and attempting to “return” to frustrate legal actions, etc. In my case, at that time, the problem was simply solved by showing my other passport, which indisputably established my right to be in teh NKofE.
Eugenia said cabin staff on her return flight had seen several similar cases. Frontier police who met them at Barcelona confirmed this. “They didn’t understand why it was happening. British citizens entering Spain are not treated that way.”
Eugenia said the experience was so traumatic that she had given up on trying to live with her boyfriend. “I’m not going back,” she said. “I don’t want to go through that again. The idea of moving to Britain appals me.”
The Home Office claimed the new rules were clear and could be easily checked online. We require evidence of an individual’s right to live and work in the UK, a spokesperson said. Yet Home Office advice explicitly states that visitors without work visas may “attend meetings, conferences, seminars, interviews” and “negotiate and sign deals and contracts”.
Araniya Kogulathas, a barrister with the NGO Bail for Immigration Detainees, said EU citizens were experiencing Britain’s hostile environment for immigration.
[…]
Detainees complained that they were not informed of their right to seek legal assistance. […]
The Bulgarian ambassador to the UK, Marin Raykov, confirmed his consulate had dealt with “several cases, when a return flight was not available within 24 hours the arrival time … several Bulgarian citizens were detained at an immigration removal centre”.
He said citizens needed to be given a chance to contact the embassy. “The embassy expects to be promptly notified by the Home Office/Border Force regarding the temporary detention … so consular officials may provide them with the necessary advice, inform their relatives in Bulgaria if necessary, as well as assist in arranging their speedy return to Bulgaria.”
The Home Office has not released data on border detentions since Brexit came into force in January and it remains unclear how many of those detained have been able, or willing, to contact their consulates.
The Grauniad is asking “Are you an EU citizen who has been detained or expelled since January, or do you know anyone who has been?” Contact details are at the end of the article.
† Teh NKofE — N.Korea of Europe — (also known as teh “U”K) is a small self-isolated nuclear-armed authoritarian place with a cult of personality “ruled” by a very small wealthy paranoid elite in denial & completely uninterested in anyone else.
[…]
The Biden administration’s failure to impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has led to a increase in severe sentences for political prisoners in the kingdom […].
The UK-based human rights organisation Grant Liberty found that twice as many harsh sentences had been meted out to Saudi prisoners of conscience in April than in the first three months of this year combined. It followed the Biden administration’s decision on 26 February to publish an intelligence report that showed the crown prince, “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi”.
Grant Liberty said it had seen a renewed crackdown on political prisoners and claimed there was a direct link to the American failure to impose sanctions on the crown prince or his close circle of advisers. It said the decision had given the Saudi authorities carte blanche to mete out severe punishments to critics.
“News from the Saudi legal system can be notoriously slow, but at least eight individuals suffered stiff sentences in April alone — twice as many as the first three months of the year combined,” it said. There were no prisoners of conscience sentenced in either April 2019 or April last year. [I find that rather weird, as hair furor and his dalekocrazy were occupying Washington DC then… –blf]
[…]
Lucy Rae, of Grant Liberty, said: “The international community must demonstrate that the only way the kingdom can improve its standing is through genuine reform. That means we need the tough action {presidential} candidate Biden talked about, not the weakness President Biden has so far shown.”
Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, an aid worker who was one of the eight men sentenced in April, received a 20-year jail term and an additional 20-year travel ban for running a parody social media account. Abdulaziz Alaoudh al-Odah, who was arrested last September for his social media activity, was sentenced to five years in prison.
His nephew Abdullah Alaoudh, son of the imprisoned cleric Salman al-Odah, as well as a pro-democracy activist at the Washington thinktank Democracy for the Arab World Now, said that the administration’s choice to publish the report aided accountability but little else. “It absolutely helped transparency, and helped us to know where responsibility lay, but accountability was completely lacking, and that’s what was at stake from the very beginning,” he said.
“[…] What the prince took from all this is that everything {that Biden said} during the [presidential] campaign was just campaign talk, and therefore they won’t act on it.”
There’s also the point made previously, see me@65, “younger domestic [Biden] staff who know there’s no point to engaging with or waiting for the thugs, combined with long-time military-industrial profiteering staff for foreign affairs — is an interesting way of looking at the current administration”.
[…]
Alaoudh said that while the crown prince may be willing to shift on matters of foreign policy, he viewed control over free speech as a direct threat.
“You can normalise with everyone — Qatar, Turkey, Iran — but not your own people because that means sharing decision-making, which for them is so dangerous,” he said. “Agreeing to some kind of political participation or power-sharing is an end to the absolute monarchy, which is all they know.”
Election administration experts, who usually go out of their way to be non-partisan, are raising alarms about the process
[…]
I posed this question [“what exactly was happening that made this so dangerous?”] to Jennifer Morrell, who was on the floor observing the counting as a representative of the Arizona secretary of state’s office. Morrell, a former elections official from Colorado, specializes in the machinery of elections — the technology, the counting procedures and all the other wonky things that make elections run smoothly. She is not a flame-throwing partisan. But as we talked on the phone last week, I could tell from her voice that what she was seeing in the Arizona recount really bothered her.
One of the biggest red flags for her, she told me, came not during the counting, but afterwards, when workers entered the aggregated total tallies from counts into computers. Morrell was deeply worried that there was only a single person responsible for entering the data and no one to check that they weren’t inadvertently entering a wrong number or accidentally switching the candidates.
“There’s nobody verifying that what they entered was correct. There’s no reading out. These are things that you would typically see in an election office whether they were doing an audit, recount, where you want some sort of quality control mechanism in place,” she said.
Morrell also expressed concern with the procedures in place to keep a baseline count of the ballots being handled across the audit. If a box of ballots says it has a certain amount of ballots in it, workers should count when they open the box to make sure that there’s actually that amount of ballots in there. And when ballots leave each station, they should also ensure that all of the ballots are accounted for. Not every station in the audit is doing that.
[… more problems with the so-called “counting”…]
[… A]uditors are also performing a so-called forensic analysis of the ballot paper. The whole thing looks very hi-tech and official — ballots are photographed and then placed under a sophisticated-looking machine with microscopic cameras that is supposed to give a detailed analysis of the ballots.
Jovan Pulitzer, a failed inventor and conspiracy theorist, is reportedly helping auditors with this portion of their review. He purports to have developed technology that can detect fraudulent ballots by looking for folds in the paper, as well as analyzing whether the ballots were marked by a human or a machine, the latter of which is, in his view, suspicious.
Adrian Fontes, the former Maricopa county recorder who oversaw the 2020 election, said this process wouldn’t tell the auditors anything. If ballots arrive at an election office damaged, he said, they are duplicated electronically and then printed out with machine-made marks. This isn’t a sign of fraud — it’s a sign the process is working.
Tammy Patrick, a former Maricopa county election official who now works with election administrators across the country as a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, also noted that folds in a ballot don’t tell you anything about a ballot’s authenticity:
📬Not all VBM/EV ballots that were tallied in Maricopa will be folded.
✍Some may have been remade/duplicated onto ballot stock that was never mailed:
🌍Military & overseas votes
😎 Braille/lg print ballots
☕ Damaged/torn ballots
[…]
And some in person ballots WILL be folded–such as provisionals. […]
“They are taking advantage of the lack of information that the public has regarding the complexities of our system. And they’re creating a false narrative, and they’re setting themselves up to sell that false narrative.” Fontes told me. “I’m afraid they’re going to come out and say oh we found pre-printed ballots and there aren’t going to be enough people who stand up and say ‘well no shit.’”
The point about the alleged totals not being checked also occurred to me, albeit I don’t recall specifically flagging that (presumably-deliberate) flaw. And thanks to Mr Fontes and Mr Patrick for explaining some of the reasons the ballot’s folding is (nominally) meaningless — I don’t recall seeing any actual explanations before, and still haven’t seen any “reasoning” from teh thugs, etc., why it “is“…
The article does not mention, as one example, the abysmal security around the ballots and machines. One side-effect of this fraud is that it (very probably) won’t be possible to conduct yet another legitimate re-count / audit (should there be some reason to do so (there’s already been at least two!)), as it cannot be shown the ballots and / or machines were keep “secure”; e.g., not modified (tampered-with).
[…]
Today, public feeling toward labor is more positive, and public feeling toward big business more negative, than at any time in five decades. What’s more, workers increasingly want to be in unions: over half of Americans say they would vote for a union at work, while only 11 percent of US employees currently belong to one — largely because labor laws remain stacked in favor of big business.
Americans’ rising affinity for organized labor and antipathy toward big business opens up new possibilities for a more balanced economy and society — but not without reform to the labor laws that hold workers back. For instance, because penalties are negligible, Amazon management has repeatedly violated workers’ rights when workers acted collectively to improve their working conditions. When workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, recently started to unionize, management seems to have acted illegally again and the unionization effort failed. By making an example of one person, bank robbers can control a whole crowd; too many managers have felt free to follow that logic with impunity.
Salaried employees — such as me — have, in general, not been unionised. Nonetheless, it occurs to me now — I maintain a private list of people with whom I will never, ever, “work”-with again (to the point of refusing to work for any company that employs any of those individuals) — that every single individual on that list is not only a so-called “manager”, but was also contemptuous of, broadly speaking, working conditions and worker’s rights. (Some were also eejits, either always or outside their apparent area(s?)-of-expertise; and ALL where deliberate liars (the usual reason I cited when resigning).)
[…]
Today, all political and all age cohorts hold record or near-record positive views favoring labor over big business. Looking across generations, Americans born after 1975 have particularly strong positive feelings toward labor unions over big business. Democrats and independents have always felt more positively toward labor unions and less positively toward big business than Republicans, and that pro-union bent has risen to record heights since 2012. But even among Republicans, the union versus big business sentiment gap rose quickly between 2012 and 2016, and hit a record high in 2020.
So, why the recent public sentiment uptick? Since 2012, workers have organized and engaged in highly publicized minimum wage and union fights, which helped populist wings ascend and anti-labor, pro-business wings weaken within each party. Since 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders, long a vocal advocate of labor and antagonist of big business, has helped solidify a strong pro-labor constituency in the Democratic party and within the broader political landscape. Sanders’s prominent presidential campaigns served as an organizing vehicle for a pro-labor left, and he continues to help garner public support for union efforts. As president, Biden has taken unprecedented pro-labor stances and helped consolidate liberal support for unions.
The left isn’t the only reason why union support is up nationwide. Ironically, for all of Trump’s atrocious anti-labor and pro-corporate policies, his phony populism may have realigned labor-business opinion among Republican voters. His red-herring bloviating in support of unions and against corporations could be partly responsible for broadening labor and declining big business sentiment, especially among some Americans on the right.
[…]
The combination of the public’s heightened sympathy for unions and the widening representation gap underscores how biased our current labor laws are against workers. Because unionization pulls power toward workers and away from managers and owners, employers go to extreme lengths – from outright intimidation to illegally firing leaders ‐ to suppress unionization. Penalties for violating workers’ rights to organize are negligible, letting managers violate workers’ rights with impunity.
New legislation — like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act — can help rebalance bargaining power in the labor market, supporting workers’ ability to bargain on more-equal terms with representatives of concentrated wealth. If passed, the PRO Act would repeal state laws that undermine unions, institute tougher penalties for employers who violate workers’ rights to organize, and recognize gig workers’ right to collectively bargain.
[…] These days, Americans worry far more about organized capital than organized labor.
This opinion column reminds me of an incidence so many yonks ago writing was still transitioning from chiseled-stone to baked clay tablets: Debate(?) class in high school (in the States): Topic was something to do with unions. The team I was assigned-to was to argue, broadly speaking, unions were a good thing. The approach we took was to point out, using the statistics of the time, that the percentage of union workers was quite low and a minority cannot cannot control a majority, so the various (work-related) problems of the time could not possibly be due to unions. Our team “won” the debate (decided by vote of the student audience).
A largely nonsensical argument — which mostly shows the students were not paying attention in other classes: In a different class (civics?), I’d already seen a first-hand demonstration of essentially the precise opposite of our debating team’s position: One day, the teacher asked us to vote (by secret write-in ballot) for our “favourite person”. Second place was “Mom”, but the winner was someone no-one had ever heard of. The teacher then revealed he’d asked a small cohort of students, before class, to vote for this entirely-fictional person. The teacher’s point (paraphrasing from memory): “An organised minority can defeat the majority.”
This isn’t to say our team’s (assigned) position was wrong, only that a very poor argument carried the day. (I do not now recall now if I connected the dots here… i.e,, the example from the civics class with our poor argument in the debate class.) From admittedly very poor memory, the opposition debate team floundered during the debate’s rebuttal phase (again, either not paying attention elsewhere or also unable to (then) connect the dots).
Here’s a link to the May 13 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Reuters reports:
Pfizer Inc repeatedly offered to sell its Covid-19 vaccine to Brazil’s health ministry between August and November last year, but got no answer from the government, Pfizer’s chief executive for Latin America told lawmakers on Thursday.
A Senate commission is investigating whether President Jair Bolsonaro’s government mishandled the pandemic by failing to secure vaccines in time to curb a surge that has killed more than 420,000 Brazilians – the worst Covid-19 death toll outside the United States.
Pfizer executive Carlos Murillo said that on 12 September the company’s CEO sent a letter to Bolsonaro and others in his cabinet, including then health minister Eduardo Pazuello, expressing interest in providing Brazil with vaccines.
The letter went unanswered for two months, the parliamentary commission has established.
In France, the number of people treated in intensive care units for Covid fell by 141 to 4,442, a decrease for the 10th consecutive day, health authorities said on Thursday.
Vaccinated people seriously do not have to wear masks outside, Fauci says
Dr Anthony Fauci has offered a positive message to Americans wondering how many coronavirus-related precautions they can abandon now that they are fully vaccinated.
Speaking to CBS News this morning, the president’s chief medical adviser said Americans who are fully vaccinated can ditch their masks when they are outdoors, unless they are in extremely crowded settings for long periods of time.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi is now holding her weekly press conference, and she condemned her Republican colleagues for downplaying the violence of the Capitol insurrection during a committee hearing yesterday.
The Democratic speaker mocked congressman Andrew Clyde’s comments that footage from the insurrection looked like “a normal tourist visit”.
“I don’t know of a normal day around here when people are threatening to hang the vice-president of the United States or shoot the speaker in the forehead,” Pelosi said. “I don’t consider that normal. Multiple people were killed.”
She added, “It was beyond denial. It fell into the range of sick.”
During a hearing on the Capitol insurrection yesterday, Clyde suggested it was a “boldfaced lie” to describe the events of January 6 as an “insurrection”.
“Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos, pictures,” Clyde said.
“You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”
That is completely false. The January 6 insurrection resulted in six deaths and extensive property damage to the Capitol. Footage of that day shows insurrectionists breaking windows to gain access to the building, waving Confederate flags in Statuary Hall and attacking Capitol Police officers.
Pelosi noted that House appropriations committee chairwoman Rosa DeLauro may file the supplemental bill to provide more funding for Capitol security later today. The bill could come up for a floor vote next week.
* Shortly after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) exited the White House yesterday following infrastructure talks, his campaign supporters received a fundraising text that read, “I just met with Corrupt Joe Biden and he’s STILL planning to push his radical Socialist agenda onto the American people.” So much for good-faith, bipartisan talks.
* With only about five months remaining before Virginia’s gubernatorial race, the Democratic Governors Association has launched new ads trying to tie Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin (R) to Donald Trump, who lost the commonwealth by double digits last year. […]
[…] state Sen. Amanda “Trump in Heels” Chase (R) finished third in the race for her party’s gubernatorial nomination, and this week, she posted a Facebook message claiming that the state GOP’s convention process was “rigged.” Chase added, “I will have more to say in the days ahead.”
[…] * Though many politicians ordinarily keep their distance from controversial figures facing apparent criminal investigations, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) will reportedly host a fundraiser on Saturday alongside Rudy Giuliani. Mastriano faced calls for his resignation in January after organizing bus trips for pro-Trump activists on Jan. 6.
* Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, confirmed to NBC News this week that he’s advising Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio), as the far-right congressman considers a primary campaign against incumbent Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R). […]
Jimmy Kimmel (Liz Cheney Canceled by Same People Who Hate Cancel Culture (video)) snarked about Caitlyn Jenner (see @348) false claim she didn’t vote in 2020 (paraphrasing from memory), “She was so embarrassed by her lie she tried to hide in the women’s restroom but Republicans wouldn’t let her in.”
We’ve arrived at a point in which our discourse is so toxic, GOP members of Congress are comfortable telling us not to believe our lying eyes about Jan. 6.
In the immediate aftermath of the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol, no prominent voices made any serious effort to defend or rationalize the violence. The left, right, and center could agree: participating in a riot inside the nation’s seat of government is bad.
That consensus did not last.
A handful of fringe Republicans started pushing the ridiculous line in January that the pro-Trump attackers may have secretly been leftists trying to make the right look bad. This was preposterous but effective: a national Suffolk University/USA Today poll in late February found that 58% of Trump voters believed the assault was “mostly an antifa-inspired attack.”
Around the same time, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) argued the armed rioters may not have actually been armed, adding soon after that the rioters’ patriotism is worthy of praise. In March, Donald Trump, who played a key role in inciting the violence, got in on the game, insisting that the Capitol attackers posed “zero threat,” and were merely “hugging and kissing the police and the guards.”
Yesterday, as NBC News reported, the line from far-right Republicans about the events of Jan. 6 reached new depths.
Multiple Republican members of Congress on Wednesday offered a false retelling of the devastating events that occurred during the Capitol riot, with one calling the entire event a “bold faced lie” that more closely resembled a “normal tourist visit” than a deadly attack.
[…] Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), for example, rejected the idea that the insurrectionist violence constituted “an insurrection,” adding that Trump’s rabid mob behaved “in an orderly fashion.” The Georgia Republican went on to say, “[I]f you didn’t know that TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) blasted the Justice Department for “harassing” suspected rioters, whom he described as “peaceful patriots.” Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) added, “It was Trump supporters who lost their lives that day, not Trump supporters who were taking the lives of others.”
It was every bit as surreal as it sounds. For these far-right Republicans, now is the time to write an entirely new alternate history about the events of Jan. 6, with the villains recast as the heroes. The facts make pro-Trump forces look like dangerous criminals, so Clyde, Gosar, and their cohorts have decided to pretend their fiction is real.
Part of what makes this so extraordinary is the audacity. The world saw the riot on television. Trump’s recent impeachment trial added additional documentary evidence that had not previously been released, and reinforced the severity of the assault on the United States.
But for these congressional Republicans, the fact that we’re already familiar with reality creates no disincentive for spreading demonstrable nonsense.
[…] These elected officials fully expect to get away with brazenly lying about events — not from generations past, but from four months ago — confident that their allies will simply believe what they’re told to believe.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. “It was their final, most essential command.”
But just as notable is the fact that for these Republican lawmakers, political violence is now defensible, if not laudable. They saw a mob attack the Capitol, in the hopes of attacking U.S. officials and disrupting the certification of the nation’s elections, and these members’ judgment leads them to believe the violence is worthy of public defense.
Joel Greenberg, a friend of Rep. Matt Gaetz, has agreed to plead guilty in a criminal case connected to the federal sex-trafficking investigation of the Republican lawmaker and Trump ally, court records show.
Greenberg is scheduled to appear Monday morning in federal court in Orlando, Florida, for a change of plea hearing, the records state….
Law enforcement officials in Palm Beach County, Florida, are reportedly putting together contingency plans in case ex-President Donald Trump, who resides in his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, gets slapped with an indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance.
[…] part of that planning has included discussions on the issue of potentially extraditing Trump if necessary.
[…] Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), one of the ex-president’s top lackeys, has the authority to intervene in interstate extraditions.
Vance and his team are currently investigating Trump Organization for potential financial crimes, possibly including tax, bank, and insurance fraud. The prosecutor scored a major win for his probe in February when he was able to seize Trump’s long sought-after financial records, including his tax returns. […]
Posted by readers of the article:
Nab him while he’s in New Jersey for the summer.
I’m sure our Democratic governor would have no problem shipping him across the Hudson.
———————-
Added bonus if they nab him on his golf course!
———————–
Well it would behoove police departments that have a Trump property in their jurisdiction to make plans.
————————
It will be interesting to see if Trump remains at the shutdown Mar a Lago through the summer out of fear of indictment. Not being surrounded by adoring fans will drive him nuts.
Also, will this keep him from holding the rallies we are always being told are “coming soon”?
[…] his secret service protection will add a wrinkle to this. Would Biden pull protection for a fugitive from justice?
Late last month, an “unknown hill in the Chinese desert” was blanketed in scores of large red and white banners, flapping vitriol in the breeze. “I hope you die, [b—h],” said one. “Little [b—h], screw the feminists,” said others.
They were all actual messages sent to women, a direct act of harassment anonymised by social media. They were sent during weeks of intense debate about the treatment of women on platforms such as Weibo, sparked by the abuse of Xiao Meili who posted video of a man who threw hot liquid at her after she asked him to stop smoking.
After collecting more than 1,000 of the abusive messages posted to feminists and feminist groups, a group of young women artists stuck them on a hill, creating a temporary “internet violence museum”.
“When the Xiao Meili incident happened, a lot of feminists were being trolled, including myself,” said one of the artists, Yaqing, who did not want to use her real name. “We wanted to make the trolling words into something that could be seen, touched, to materialise the trolling comments and to amplify the abuse of what happens to people online.”
Much of the abuse has been driven by a growing nationalistic fervour, with people criticising or drawing attention to China’s human rights issues becoming targets of major online pile-ons, or worse.
Some women who have put themselves in the public eye to draw attention to human rights issues like the abuses in Xinjiang have been targeted with faked nude photographs, threats, accusations of being traitors, separatists, and paid actors, and harassment of family members. The attacks have come from regular citizens online as well as government officials and state media.
…
A study by Taiwan research group, Doublethink Labs, tracked online attacks on Chuang Tzu-i, the wife of the former US consul general in Chengdu. It found it was largely driven by reports in state media such as the Global Times which were picked up by other government-controlled outlets in subsequent days, and “amplified the focus of patriotic Weibo users and key influencers”.
The organisation said they found two main motivations behind influential accounts fanning the pile-ons: profit and ideology….
On Wednesday, Republicans in the House showed that they were completely done with even pretending to be concerned about threats to democracy. First, with the expulsion of Rep. Liz Cheney from Republican leadership, Republicans made it clear that the Big Lie is now not just acceptable, but a required part of Republican canon. Then at the House Oversight hearing, Republicans fully embraced the Jan. 6 insurgency, declaring it a “normal tourist visit” and engaging in a session of ugly gaslighting that denied there was an insurrection, denied there were Trump supporters involved, and denied that there was any violence. Where Republicans are going could be best seen in the statements from Rep. Paul Gosar, who flipped the truth on its head and declared that even investigating what happened on Jan. 6 represented an assault by the “deep-state” on “law-abiding citizens.”
[…] So it shouldn’t be a surprise that efforts by a member of the D.C. Metro Police to talk to Republican leader Kevin McCarthy are not going well. Officer Michael Fanone has been trying to get in touch with McCarthy for weeks. He wants the Republican leader to see what actually happened to him on Jan. 6, to see how the crowd of Trump supporters really acted. Fanone tried again this week, hoping that since it’s National Police Week, McCarthy might give him a few minutes. Instead McCarthy’s staff hung up on Fanone. But last night, CNN released Fanone’s body camera footage. […]
The body camera shows the exultant Trump supporters after Fanone has been tased and dragged from the building. Over and over, he tries to get through to the people who are carrying him away, crying out for his life and reminding them that he has a family as he is beaten and mocked. Part way down the Capitol steps, one person begins to shout, “Don’t hurt him,” and, “We’re better than this.” For a moment, it seems as if they’re listening to Fanone’s pleas and cries of pain. But then the assault resumes. Eventually Fanone is recovered by other officers and brought to safety behind the front lines of the assault.
By the time he’s recovered, the camera may still be running, but Fanone himself is unconscious. […]
More at the link, including excerpts from CNN that show body cam footage.
Wonkette: Mississippi Sending A Man To Prison For Life Over An Ounce Of Weed
Marijuana! It’s legal in 16 states now. Ninety-one percent of American adults think it should be legal for either recreational or medical use, or both. The number of people who think people should be spending ridiculous amounts of time in prison for possession of marijuana is now vanishingly small.
And yet. In Mississippi on Tuesday, an appeals court held up a life sentence for a man who had been caught in 2017 with an ounce of weed on him. It should probably not surprise you to hear that this happened in Mississippi. Or that Allen Russell, the 38-year-old man who is now going to spend at least the next 10 years (if he gets paroled for good behavior) of his life in prison, is Black.
You see, Mississippi has a three strikes law, and Russell was convicted over a decade earlier in 2004 of two home burglaries of the same house, days apart — for which he was given two concurrent 15-year sentences and served eight and a half. In 2015 he pleaded guilty to illegal possession of a firearm. While the home burglaries would not have counted towards any habitual offender statutes in the state in 2004, in 2014 the law changed to deem all burglaries — whether or not they actually involved any kind of actual violence — as “violent crimes.” Two “violent felonies” plus a marijuana conviction a decade later, and he gets life in prison.
Via AP:
In his appeal, Russell argued that a life sentence constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment and is grossly disproportionate” to his crime of marijuana possession.
The Court of Appeals disagreed in its majority opinion, stating that Russell’s life sentence is in accordance with Mississippi law. Russell is not being sentenced solely for having marijuana, but for being a habitual offender, the judges said.
But several dissenting judges argued that the court can — and should — make exceptions.
“The purpose of the criminal justice system is to punish those who break the law, deter them from making similar mistakes, and give them the opportunity to become productive members of society,” Judge Latrice Westbrooks wrote. “The fact that judges are not routinely given the ability to exercise discretion in sentencing all habitual offenders is completely at odds with this goal.”
You think?
What, exactly, is putting Allen Russell in prison doing for anybody? What is the purpose? Is anyone being protected? Do they expect this to have some positive effect on Russell’s life, which they are now taking away from him?
[…] The people of Mississippi are going to have to pay actual money to keep this man behind pars for decades, possibly. It will cost them $18,000 a year — nearly double the amount allocated to educate a child in the state. Absurdly disproportionate sentencing aside, it seems difficult to argue that keeping a guy who had some pot on him behind bars is worth $18,000 a year or $180,000 for 10 years. […] The state has the second highest prison population in the country per capita and citizens pay billions of dollars to keep that going. Because godforbid there might be a Black person walking around with an ounce of marijuana on them.
Putting someone in prison for life means taking their life away from them. There is obviously a difference between someone who murders three people and someone who robbed a house over a decade ago and then has some pot on them, and for the law to not treat them differently is cruel, and should be a hell of a lot more unusual than it is.
“The GOP has lost its way. Fellow Americans, join our new alliance.”
Washington Post link. The piece is written by Charlie Dent, Mary Peters, Denver Riggleman, Michael Steele and Christine Todd Whitman. Charlie Dent represented Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District in the U.S. House from 2005 to 2018. Mary Peters was secretary of transportation during the George W. Bush administration. Denver Riggleman represented Virginia’s 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House from 2019 to 2021. Michael Steele is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Christine Todd Whitman was governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.
The Republican Party made a grievous error this week in ousting Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) from the House leadership for telling the truth about Donald Trump’s “big lie,” which has wreaked havoc in our democratic republic by casting doubt over the 2020 election.
Cheney rightfully struck back against party leaders and warned about the GOP’s dangerous direction. She is not alone.
Alongside dozens of prominent Republicans, ex-Republicans and independents, we are announcing “A Call for American Renewal,” a nationwide rallying cry against extremist elements within the GOP, and highlighting the urgent need for a new, common-sense coalition.
[…] Our alliance includes former governors, members of Congress, Cabinet secretaries, state officials, seasoned political strategists and grass-roots leaders dedicated to offering a hopeful, principles-based vision for the country — and ensuring that our votes have decisive impact in key elections across the United States.
[…] Tragically, the Republican Party has lost its way, perverted by fear, lies and self-interest. What’s more, GOP attacks on the integrity of our elections and our institutions pose a continuing and material threat to the nation.
The Jan. 6 insurrection was a wake-up call for many who had remained loyal to the party, even while harboring concerns about its direction.
Many have since left. The GOP has effectively become a privileged third party, ranking behind independents and Democrats in voter registration.
Meanwhile, Republican legislators are trying to impede voting rights across the country as a last-ditch effort to retain power.
We will not wait forever for the GOP to clean up its act. If we cannot save the Republican Party from itself, we will help save America from extremist elements in the Republican Party.
That means hastening the creation of an alternative: a political movement dedicated to our founding principles and divorced from the GOP’s obsessive cult of personality around a deeply flawed (and twice-impeached) man, whose favorability ratings are reportedly tanking in key swing districts around the country.
We will fight for honorable Republicans who stand up for truth and decency, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney, to name a few.
[…] We intend to work across party lines with other Americans to oppose extremists and defend the republic wherever we can.
[…] We plan to invest in a deeper bench of effective leaders in cities and states across the country while recruiting a new generation of principled, pragmatic citizens to the cause.
Some no doubt will urge us to join the Democratic Party. We believe that inching toward a single-party system would be dangerous and would fail to represent the diverse viewpoints in our nation.
[…] the battle for the soul of the Republican Party — and our country — is not over. It is just beginning, which is why we are forming a “resistance of the rational” against the radicals. We still hope for a healthy, thriving Republican Party, but we are no longer holding our breath.
Next month, we will convene a nationwide town hall open to all Americans and featuring current and former U.S. leaders who will lay out where we must go from here, how we can ensure a freer America and how all citizens can join the fight.
[…]
[…] I don’t see anyone wildly praising Liz Cheney, white washing her record of deeply awful policies or really anything else. Some folks, who shall remain nameless, seem to have a great desire to manufacture this deeply frivolous caricature person for their own ends. But as far as I can see that person does not exist.
What I see are a lot of people who have a clear sense of who Cheney is but are giving her grudging credit for making a stand, at an apparently high political and professional cost, not even so much for what is “right” but simply for what is reality. The election was not stolen. Donald Trump is not the rightful President. The insurrection did in fact happen and insurrections are bad. Very bad. When the republic is in imminent peril we shouldn’t be creating litmus tests for who is allowed to defend it. […]
But could Cheney ride her newfound political celebrity to the presidency, with all her odious politics and policies in tow? The short answer is no. Unfortunately for Cheney the long answer is also no. And in fact the very long and long-term answer is also no. […]
Most people probably encounter a number of “get vaccinated” messages every day—television news and PSAs, posters on the bus and rail, web ads, sports/entertainment endorsements, politicians, billboards, etc. Digital highway displays that warn of an incident ahead are another obvious space, since they’re often blank or say not to drink and drive. The Arizona Department of Transportation recycles several Covid-related messages on their overhead signs. This one [“Want to return to normal? Get vaccinated.”] caught the eye of State Sen. Kelly Townsend, who left a comment. [Photo at the link]
“Seen in Communist China today. Oops, I mean Arizona”
See, encouraging drivers to get vaccinated is what Communist nations do, never freedom-loving people. I remember that chapter in Marx […] Sen. Townsend didn’t even mention the white lines on the highway, and all the sheep staying in their lane—friggin’ Communist roads!
You may have guessed that Sen. Townsend is a Republican. You might’ve even figured, given her tweet, that she’s awfully far-right, even for Arizona, which means cranked to 11 with a dose of Q. You’d be right on both counts.
Sen. Townsend and many in the Arizona GOP, the gang that demanded the re-reaudit, toss around “socialism” and “communism” (or Hugo Chavez) whenever Dems introduce anything that helps most of us. […] I’m going out on a limb here, but I’d wager that most Arizona Republicans who fear-monger about Communism probably haven’t read a lick of political theory beyond a tweet.
An anti-vaxxer before Covid-19, when she regularly said vaccines are a communist tool, […] Sen. Townsend was doing this the day before the Jan. 6 insurrection.
PHOENIX — A Trump supporter in the state legislature has crafted legislation designed to give the president the state’s 11 electoral votes even as some GOP lawmakers in Washington work to keep Congress from certifying the election Wednesday for Joe Biden.
SCR 1002, introduced by Sen. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa, is based on getting a majority of lawmakers from both the state House and Senate to approve a resolution — and quickly — saying that the general election “was marred by irregularities so significant as to render it highly doubtful whether the certified results accurately represent the will of the voters.”
This was after the Arizona election had been certified, then a hand recount and voting machine check found zip, zilch, nada, nothing. No matter, these bozos were still introducing legislation that would allow Republicans to throw out results they did not like. Happily Townsend’s bills went splat […]
Think about it: A state’s political party subpoenaed a major county, and threatened to arrest its elected supervisors if they did not turn over more than two million ballots. Then the group hired to conduct the audit, which had no experience with elections, screwed up every step of the process, to the point election experts have little confidence in anything they’re doing. […]
Yesterday the State decided to drop the display that upset Sen. Townsend, famous Commie hunter. She wrote in a followup tweet, “One Senator contacted ADOT [Arizona Department of Transportation] telling them to take it down b/c it was inappropriate, & they did.”
Arizona has removed a COVID-19 vaccine freeway message that a legislator compared with one that might be seen in communist China, but state officials say it wasn’t because of any specific complaint and that they’ll keep encouraging vaccinations.
Just keep it “appropriate,” ADOT. A lot of the lawmakers who control your budget would be okay with a blurb that says the 2020 election was stolen.
[…] what is most impressive about Republicanism’s (ongoing) Dear Leader is that the man manages to be a terrible human being in not just most circumstances, but every circumstance. […] There is no “but he likes puppies” or “but he’s good to his family” or “but at least he pays his son’s Boy Scout $7 membership fee out of his own pocket, rather than ripping off a charity to do it.” There’s nothing. Ever.
All of that is a long-winded introduction to the unfortunate news that Dear Asshole Probably The Actual Antichrist Leader may have gotten his electoral butt handed to him after killing off a half million Americans through bored and delusional incompetence, but he is determined to remain relevant. This requires subjecting his subjects to his momentary thoughts on all possible subjects. So how’s that been going? Not well.
After being permanently banned from Twitter for stoking violent insurrection through provably false hoaxes, and after Facebook begrudgingly and spinelessly decided they would kick a permanent decision on hosting the American fascist leader’s violent musings down the road for another half-year […] Trump recently announced he would be forming his own social media platform […] one consisting solely of his own word-burps, the all-important buttons allowing you to express appreciation for his word-burps, and not much else.
Yes, it’s the Donald Trump future, and the future consists of a Myspace universe in which Donald Trump is the sole inhabitant, screaming at himself, forever.
Some metrics on Trump’s new site are in, and the evidence suggests that Twitter and Facebook and […] DogsThatLookLikeChurchill have not a damn thing to worry about when it comes to being supplanted by Typhoid Hitler’s Daily Grievance. In the first week the blog “has attracted a little over 212,000 engagements” total “across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit,” reports NBC News. Compare that with Trump’s previous 88 million followers on just Twitter alone, and you can see that only the most diehard members of Dear Ex-Leader’s fascist base are tuning in to hear his thoughts on whether a racehorse is a “junky” or whether Marco Rubio’s key-jingling was entertaining enough to calm restless Leader’s nerves.
[…] Mind you, somebody probably billed Trump an absolute fortune to set up an internet web page in which Trump could post Twitter-like thoughts even after Twitter could no longer stomach him. Trump’s never going to pay that person, mind you […]
Trump and the people whose own careers depend on Trump’s favor are quite loud in warning lawmakers that “the American people” won’t stand for Republicans who don’t stand by Trump’s every seditionist burp and rant, but the actual American people seem to be moving the f–k on and then some.
[…] other people are begrudgingly keeping an eye on Typhoid Hitler’s whereabouts to make sure he doesn’t scuttle back to Munich with a new book to sell. Nobody wants to hear about Seditionist Treasonbag. It’s just a thing we have to put up with.
[…] Even among once-supporters, few people are actually seeking him out. This is how politics generally goes after losing an election […]
Trump is attempting to buck that trend because Trump is a malignant narcissist. […] Like Tinkerbell, he must receive constant attention or he will die. […] he is crashing weddings, cheating at golf, opining about the drug habits of sport horses, and making sure that every Republican lawmaker he ever so much as made eye contact with still knows that if they do not shine his shoes in every televised interview and public statement, he will personally devote himself to dragging them into the pits of primary hell. […]
The Republican base is moving on, at least so far. They have other heroes, heroes like neo-Nazi talking point machine Tucker Carlson and child sex trafficker Matt Gaetz. Heroes who are still allowed to advocate for crimes on Twitter. […] each of the new would-be heroes are just as hooked into white nationalism, sex crimes, corrupt acts, and “owning the libs” as the Trump clan itself, but it’s not a certainty that Trump can retain his position as the party’s top fascist dog.
He may yet succumb to the worst of all reality show endings: an audience that has gotten too bored to continue paying attention. Wouldn’t that be nice.
Over 120 retired U.S. generals and admirals published a disturbing open letter earlier this week pushing the false conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden stole the election while arguing that he might be mentally unfit for office.
The letter, released Monday by a group calling itself “Flag Officers 4 America,” reads like a screed ripped from former President Donald Trump’s now-defunct Twitter account, replete with erratic punctuation, far-right talking points and outright lies about the 2020 election.
The letter raised alarm among many current and former military members.
“This is really, to my mind, a classic very bad example of the erosion of civil-military relations in America, which is the bedrock of our democracy,” retired Army Col. Jeffrey McCausland, a visiting professor at Dickinson College and a national security consultant for CBS, told HuffPost.
…
To have these 124 retired officers attack the peaceful transfer of power in favor of their preferred candidate sets a dangerous precedent, McCausland said, and threatens America’s history as one of the world’s “few democracies in which the military hasn’t threatened to take over control of government.”
Details at the link. Might not be as bad as it first seems, but still.
Vaccinated people can participate in indoor activities without masks or distancing, CDC director says
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described the agency’s new guidance for fully vaccinated people as a pivotal moment in the country’s fight against coronavirus.
Speaking at the White House pandemic response team briefing, Dr Rochelle Walensky said the declining number of coronavirus cases in the US allowed the CDC to recommend that fully vaccinated Americans can participate in most indoor activities without wearing a mask.
“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing,” Walesnky said. “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”
The CDC director added, “We have all longed for this moment when we can get back to some sense of normalcy. Based on the continuing downward trajectory of cases, the scientific data on the performance of our vaccines and our understanding of how the virus spreads, that moment has come for those who are fully vaccinated.”
[…]
Annalena Baerbock, who is running to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor in September’s election, has been targeted in recent days by an increasingly vicious campaign across social media.
The onslaught has included fake images purporting to show her naked, in which the body depicted is that of a Russian model, and a photograph of her standing next to the billionaire financier George Soros that has been used to claim she is part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy of which the far right believe he is the mastermind.
[…]
She said soon after her candidacy was made public that Germany had to increase pressure on Russia over its military buildup at the Ukrainian border, and that political support for Nord Stream 2, a second German-Russian gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea which is near completion, should be withdrawn.
Fierce opposition towards the Greens has long existed in far-right and right-wing populist circles in Germany, but has increased since Baerbock was propelled into the limelight. Supporters of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and groups opposing the government’s anti-coronavirus measures have readily participated in the campaign against her.
Attila Hildmann, […] one of the protest movement’s main voices, accused Baerbock in a recent post on the instant messaging service Telegram of preparing to forcibly vaccinate Germans at regular intervals, of being a puppet of Merkel and Soros, and of being part of the so-called great reset conspiracy, according to which a power grab is taking place under the guise of the pandemic.
Cyber experts say the existing animosity makes it easy for foreign agents to stir trouble from behind the scenes. The tabloid newspaper Bild said security experts, including Nato specialists, believed “Moscow has pressed the anti-Baerbock button”.
German sensitivity towards the likelihood of Russian interference is considerable after several high-profile hack attacks. Scores of German MPs and activists were targeted earlier this year via phishing emails […]
[… more details & background…]
[Former Green party leader and now its foreign policy expert, Cem] Özdemir said what he saw as a Kremlin-backed campaign could be a direct result of her opposition to the project. “We are clearly standing on the side of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny and position ourselves very clearly against Nord Stream 2. That is not to Putin’s liking,” he said.
Gerd Schindler, the former boss of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, has been quoted as saying that an attempt by the Kremlin to agitate against the Greens “would fit into the existing picture”.
In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.
All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. With Heritage’s help, Anderson said, Georgia became “the example for the rest of the country.”
The leaked video reveals the extent to which Heritage is leading a massive campaign to draft and pass model legislation restricting voting access, which has been swiftly adopted this year in the battleground states of Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa. It’s no coincidence that so many GOP-controlled states are rushing to pass similar pieces of legislation in such a short period of time.
Republican legislators claim they’re tightening up election procedures to address (unfounded) concerns about fraud in the 2020 election. But what’s really behind this effort is a group of conservative Washington insiders who have been pushing these same kinds of voting restrictions for decades, with the explicit aim of helping Republicans win elections. The difference now is that Trump’s baseless claims about 2020 have given them the ammunition to get the bills passed, and the conservative movement, led by Heritage, is making an unprecedented investment to get them over the finish line.
“We’re working with these state legislators to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills,” Anderson told the Heritage Foundation donors. In addition to drafting the bills in some cases, “we’ve also hired state lobbyists to make sure that in these targeted states we’re meeting with the right people.”
To “create this echo chamber,” as Anderson put it, Heritage is spending $24 million over two years in eight battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin—to pass and defend restrictive voting legislation. Every Tuesday, the group leads a call with right-wing advocacy groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks to coordinate these efforts at the highest levels of the conservative movement. “We literally give marching orders for the week ahead,” Anderson said. “All so we’re singing from the same song sheet of the goals for that week and where the state bills are across the country.”
Days before the Georgia legislature would pass its sweeping bill rolling back access to the ballot, Anderson said she met with Gov. Brian Kemp and urged him to quickly sign the bill when it reached his desk…. Kemp followed Anderson’s advice, signing the bill right after its passage. Heritage called it a “historic voting security bill.”
Anderson said she delivered “the same message” to Republican governors in Texas, Arizona, and Florida. Texas is the next big fight for Heritage….
…
Heritage Foundation fellow Hans von Spakovsky, a former George W. Bush administration official who for two decades has been the driving force behind policies that restrict access to the ballot, spoke alongside Anderson at the donor summit.
“Hans is briefing governors, secretaries of state, state attorney generals, state elected officials,” Anderson said. “Just what three weeks ago, we had a huge call with secretaries of state, right?”
“We’ve now for several years been having a private briefing of the best conservative secretaries of state in the country that has so annoyed the left that they have been doing everything they can to try to find out what happens at that meeting,” von Spakovsky replied.
“So far unsuccessfully,” Anderson said. “No leaks.”
…
The mastermind behind the nationwide voting restrictions operation is von Spakovsky, who’s done more than just about anyone in GOP circles to spread the myth of widespread voter fraud over the past two decades.
…
Though Anderson called von Spakovsky “the premier election law expert across this country,” his work has not fared well in court….
…
“Then we provided testimony, expert witnesses, analysis, and actually how to draft these bills so that they were legally tight,” Anderson said. “So, [Democratic voting rights lawyer] Marc Elias, if you know that name from the progressive left, he’s like their legal pit bull. He goes after all of this with lawsuits, so that Marc Elias can’t find any holes.”
Elias has filed a suit challenging the Georgia law. “The Georgia law violates both the Voting Rights Act and the US Constitution,” Elias told Mother Jones. “Heritage Action claiming that this is legally tight is like hearing from the Titanic shipbuilders about how much confidence they have in its maiden voyage. This law is based on a Big Lie, denies Black, Brown, and young voters of their rights, and will be struck down in court.”
…
Other measures Anderson said Heritage drafted included “three provisions” in legislation adopted by Iowa Republicans a few weeks before Georgia’s law,…
“Iowa is the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly and we did it quietly,” Anderson said. “We worked quietly with the Iowa state legislature. We got the best practices to them. We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony…Little fanfare. Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’” (Elias has also filed suit against the Iowa law.)
…
In addition to pushing state-based voting restrictions, Heritage Action is leading the effort to block the passage of HR 1, Democrats’ sweeping democracy reform bill that would preempt many of these voter suppression laws by enacting policies like automatic and Election Day registration, two weeks of early voting, and expanded mail-in voting on a nationwide basis. “HR 1 is basically the dream bill of every left-wing advocacy group we’ve been fighting against for years on election issues,” von Spakovsky said at the donor event.
Von Spakovsky said at the beginning of the year that Heritage put out “a short summary of the worst provisions of a 900-page bill. Now, you all know congressional staffers don’t like reading 900-page bills. That fact sheet we put out is being used by congressional staffers, members of Congress, to go up and fight HR 1.” The group dubbed the bill the “Corrupt Politicians Act,” a label that was soon being used by leading Republicans like Ted Cruz.
“We’ve made sure that every single member of Congress knows just how bad the bill is,” Anderson added. “Then we’ve made sure there’s an echo chamber of support around these senators driven by your Heritage Action activists and sentinels across the country where we’ve driven hundreds of thousands of calls, emails, place letters to the editor, hosted events, and run television and digital ads.”
In March, the group organized a rally in West Virginia to urge centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to oppose the bill and “stand up for WV values,” according to an invitation obtained by Documented, even as it bused in conservative activists from states hundreds of miles away. Heritage Action announced on Wednesday it would run ads this summer pressuring Democratic senators in West Virginia, Arizona, Montana, and New Hampshire to preserve the filibuster in order to block HR 1.
…
To Elias, the video from the Heritage summit is proof that Republican state lawmakers are pursuing voting restrictions not in response to real local problems, but at the behest of well-funded Washington insiders. “It’s not being run by a coalition of state legislators,” he says. “It’s not being run by election administrators. It’s being run out of an office in Washington, DC, by people whose sole agenda is to make it harder for Black, Brown, and young voters to participate in the electoral process. Republicans who adopt these model laws should be ashamed of themselves.”
Shelley Moore Capito said her group of Senate Republicans had a “very productive” meeting with Joe Biden to discuss the president’s infrastructure plan.
“We did talk specifics,” Capito said. “And the president asked has asked us to come back and rework an offer so that he could then react to that and then re-offer to us, so we’re very encouraged.”
She added that she was “grateful to the President and his staff for the give and take that we shared in the Oval Office”. Capito described Biden as being “very much desirous of striking a deal”.
SC @373, I will add that some establishments may still require masks. If so, you should abide by that rule. One example: my doctor’s office. Another example: the local hospital.
Don McGahn helped expose multiple alleged incidents of Trump obstructing justice. After a two-year delay, he’ll now offer congressional testimony.
This didn’t generate as many headlines as expected, but Don McGahn’s upcoming congressional testimony is likely to matter in ways that may not be entirely obvious at first glance.
Former White House counsel Don McGahn will answer questions in private [I don’t like the “in private” part] from the House Judiciary Committee in an apparent resolution of a longstanding dispute over his testimony, according to a court document filed Wednesday evening. Democrats who run the committee have sought McGahn’s testimony for two years as part of an investigation of potential obstruction of justice by former President Donald Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
[…] So, let’s recap. (It’ll take a minute, but stick with me because this is going somewhere.)
Congress first sought testimony from Don McGahn, Trump’s first White House Counsel, about two years ago. Team Trump, true to form, fought against the subpoena, and there was no great mystery as to why.
McGahn was, for all intents and purposes, one of the star witnesses in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russia scandal. As we’ve discussed, the Republican lawyer spoke with investigators for dozens of hours, and in the redacted version of Mueller’s report, the former White House counsel was cited more than 150 times.
In some of the episodes in which Trump allegedly obstructed justice, the claims of suspected criminal misconduct are based heavily on what McGahn told investigators.
Indeed, as the former special counsel’s findings made clear, the former White House counsel very nearly resigned because the president directed him to “do crazy s**t,” including an incident in which, according to McGahn, Trump pressed the lawyer to push the Justice Department to derail the investigation by getting rid of Mueller and creating a false document to cover that up.
[…] And right about now, some of you are wondering why in the world you should still care. After all, the Mueller probe ended two years ago this month; Trump is no longer in the White House; and no matter what McGahn tells Congress, the former president won’t be impeached for a third time.
Trump could, however, face criminal prosecution.
Remember, the special counsel’s investigation, relying heavily on McGahn, documented at least 10 specific instances in which Trump arguably committed felony obstruction of justice. It is the Justice Department’s policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted, so nothing came of those findings.
But Trump, obviously, is no longer in office, and as Rachel explained on last night’s show, the statute of limitations has not expired on the former president’s alleged misconduct.
Indeed, all of this dovetails nicely with a federal court ruling, which we learned about just last week, that then-Attorney General Bill Barr was “disingenuous” with a judge on the question of why Trump wasn’t charged with obstruction of justice based on the evidence collected as part of the Mueller probe.
McGahn’s closed-door congressional testimony hasn’t yet been scheduled, but I have a hunch Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are looking forward to it.
Across the world, Eid al-Fitr celebrations have been taking place in another unprecedented year. With the uneven distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, Muslims in countries like the US and UK have been able to gather en masse for the first time in over a year, and celebrate the end of Ramadan. Meanwhile, across Asia, some ceremonies have been more muted and somber, as families continue to lose members to the virus.
Adding to the complex emotions around this year’s celebration, Muslim communities across the world have been demonstrating solidarity with the crisis in Gaza, where Israeli strikes have killed dozens of people, including many children. As millions share traditional feasts after a month of fasting, Eid will continue through the evening, and often through the week
Hundreds of people surrounded vehicle men were held in and chanted ‘these are our neighbours, let them go’
Campaigners have hailed a victory for Glaswegian solidarity and told the Home Office “you messed with the wrong city” as two men detained by UK Immigration Enforcement were released back into their community after a day of protest.
Police Scotland intervened to free the men after a tense day-long standoff between immigration officials and hundreds of local residents, who surrounded their van in a residential street on the southside of Glasgow to stop the detention of the men during Eid al-Fitr.
[… details, questions, and reactions…]
Wafa Shaheen, of the Scottish Refugee Council, told the Guardian: “To force people from their homes on the first day of Eid, with neighbours and families trying to honour the religious celebration in peace, shows — at best — a serious lack of cultural sensitivity and awareness on the Home Office’s part.
“Regardless of the immigration status of those targeted today, this heavy-handed approach from the Home Office is unnecessary and avoidable. It is frightening, intimidating and disproportionate. The hundreds of people on the streets this morning in solidarity with those affected shows people in Scotland are sick of these raids and have had enough.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: The UK government is tackling illegal immigration and the harm it causes, often to the most vulnerable people, by removing those with no right to be in the UK. The operation in Glasgow was conducted in relation to suspected immigration offences and the two Indian nationals complied with officers at all times.
blfsays
Oops, me@384: Related SC@278 → Related to SC@378… Sorry!
Nerd @ #382, yes, there are several exceptions (public transport, etc.). When I’m fully vaccinated and start going places, I’m still going to wear a mask and distance from people I don’t know are vaccinated for a while, and I’m sure I’ll be carrying a mask for even longer (though I don’t take it on walks anymore).
[…]
The Australian’s [a self-alleged newspaper owned by Murderoch] exclusive about a chilling document produced by Chinese military scientists is based on a discredited 2015 book containing conspiracy theories about biological warfare which is freely available on the internet.
Written by the paper’s investigations writer, Sharri Markson, the report last Saturday said Chinese military scientists discussed the weaponisation of Sars coronaviruses five years before the Covid-19 pandemic and predicted a third world war would be fought with biological weapons.
The story was published to promote Markson’s debut book, What Really happened in Wuhan, which argues that there is no scientific consensus that Covid-19 has a natural origin and that China has conspired to cover up the truth.
[…]
A deputy editor of Foreign Policy magazine and China expert, James Palmer, said the article has links to conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus which are popular on the right.
“The story is clearly framed in a way to make the reader think that this is secret or confidential information, using language such as that the State Department obtained the information,” Palmer told Guardian Australia.
“But this paper, or document as it’s described, is actually a book with a strong conspiratorial bent published in 2015 […] and easily available to any buyer in China.
“Discovering this is exactly as hard as Googling its title in Chinese. Chinese military academics are very given to bluster and conspiracy, especially when trying to sell books; similar texts come out in Chinese about any matter of subjects.”
[…]
Markson reported that the paper described Sars coronaviruses as heralding a new era of genetic weapons and said they could be artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before.
Palmer said the discussion in the book about the effects of biological weapons was in terms of fears these weapons would be used against China, not by China.
“That’s a long-term worry in China, going back to the accusations — almost certainly false, but widely believed in China — that the US deployed biological weapons against China during the Korean War,” Palmer said.
[…]
Markson dismisses criticism of her work about the origins of the virus as the mainstream media being incurious, telling Bannon [yes, that Bannon –blf] she was slammed by the leftwing media in Australia.
Markson told the Australian newspaper, in an interview about her book, that her reporting on Covid-19 had made her the target of shallow criticism from the leftwing press.
The leftwing media, the ABC [Ozland’s “BBC”], the SMH [Sydney Morning Herald], the Guardian, ridiculed me for investigating this a year ago, claiming it was a conspiracy theory, Markson said.
Chip Roy, a hardline conservative Republican congressman of Texas will run to replace Liz Cheney as GOP conference chair.
Roy had raised concerns that Elise Stefanik, the New York representative who is poised to ascend to conference chair after Republicans in the House ousted Cheney over her refusal to endorse false Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theory, is too moderate.
Despite Stefanik’s more moderate record on policy issues, the congresswoman has whole-heartedly embraced Trump and Trumpism, earning the favor of the former president. Roy, a member of the Freedom Caucus, wrote a letter to colleagues advising against electing Stefanik, based on her votes against Trump’s border wall and tax cuts, and her votes for climate action.
Roy blamed members like Stefanik for the party’s losses in 2018. It was members like her “playing footsie with Democrats on issues like HR 5 (Equality Act) that led to Democrats steamrolling us in 2018” he said in his letter. The Equality Act would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity – most Republican lawmakers have staunchly opposed the anti-discrimination law, but Stefanik voted for it once.
Philadelphia incinerated remains of police bombing victims without telling families
The public outcry over the handling of human remains retrieved from the ashes of the deadly 1985 bombing of a Black liberation organization in Philadelphia dramatically escalated on Thursday, with the revelation that the bones of an undisclosed number of Move victims were incinerated and dumped by the city without the knowledge or permission of living relatives.
In a bombshell disclosure, the mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenney, announced that he had fired the city’s health commissioner, Thomas Farley. The mayor said that Farley had told him earlier this week that several years ago he had become aware that remains of victims of the Move bombing – in which 11 people died – were still in the possession of the city’s medical examiner’s office.
It is understood that the health commissioner became aware of the bones’ existence in 2017. Instead of attempting to identify them and return them to the families of the deceased, Farley said “he made a decision to cremate and dispose of them”, the mayor said in a statement.
Kenney said he had asked the health commissioner to resign. “This action lacked empathy for the victims, their family, and the deep pain that the Move bombing has brought to our city for nearly four decades.”
The city’s medical examiner, Sam Gulino, was also placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.
Today’s u-turn from the CDC on mask requirements has caused confusion as state and local governments rush to reassess regional mask requirements.
Many states had already eased mask mandates. Today, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Kentucky and Connecticut changed their requirements to fit with the new CDC guidelines, but other states, including New York and Virginia, have yet to adjust their requirements.
In Michigan, the Detroit Free Press reports that a spokesperson for the health department said they are “reviewing this newly released guidance” and didn’t respond to questions about when requirements would change.
California is another state where masks are required on public transit and other settings for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The state’s governor Gavin Newsom yesterday said that most mask requirements would be eased next month when businesses will be able to reopen to a fuller extent.
Retailers were also caught by surprise at the CDC announcement. Macy’s, Target and the Gap said they were reviewing their mask policies, and Home Depot said it would still require customers and staff to wear masks, for now.
Unions representing retail and food workers have said they worry about the risks and burden the new rules place on workers – who will have no standard way to verify whether unmasked customers are vaccinated.
Barriers to getting the vaccine still exist for many workers, especially people of color. A poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among unvaccinated Hispanic adults, nearly two-thirds worried about missing work due to side effects. Language barriers and other difficulties signing up have also affected many workers’ ability to get the jab.
Farm Sanctuary: “Carrie was born at a foie gras facility where male ducks are force-fed until their livers are morbidly engorged. Since females are considered unsuitable for this process, they’re culled or raised for meat.
Thankfully, Carrie escaped this cruelty & has been with us 8 years today!”
Photos atl.
johnson catmansays
re SC @396: Not much different from chicken producers where LIVE male baby chicks are dumped into a grinder because only the female chicks are valued for production.
KGsays
blf@388,
It’s worth noting that Japan certainly did test biological weapons on Chinese victims during WWII.
Israel’s military has said its ground and air forces are attacking targets in the Gaza Strip as residents reported a massive bombardment, amid fears that Israel would launch an incursion into the blockaded territory.
…
The attacks mark a significant escalation in the worst bout of fighting in years, which has seen Israel bombard Gaza and Palestinian militants fire rockets at Israeli towns and cities. Shortly after the initial military announcement, in an apparent reference to the operation, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, tweeted: “The last word was not said and this operation will continue as long as necessary.”
Gaza’s health ministry said the death toll has climbed to 119 Palestinians, including 31 children. Eight people have been killed in Israel.
Israel was also hit by further communal violence for a fourth night with Jews and Arabs mobs clashing in the town of Lod.
Above Gaza, masses of red flames illuminated the skies in the early hours of Friday as the deafening blasts from the outskirts of Gaza City, which lies more than 1km from the frontier, jolted people awake as their apartment blocks shook. The strikes were so strong that people could be heard screaming in fear….
Here’s a link to the May 14 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
A petition calling for the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics which garnered 350,000 signatures in nine days was submitted to organisers today, reflecting growing public opposition to the event as a fourth wave of Covid-19 infections sweeps Japan.
“Stop Tokyo Olympics” campaign organiser Kenji Utsunomiya said the global festival of sport – already postponed from 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic – should take place only when Japan can welcome visitors and athletes wholeheartedly.
“We are not in that situation and therefore the Games should be cancelled,” he told a news conference. “Precious medical resources would need to be diverted to the Olympics if it’s held.”
Test events for the Olympics are continuing to be held without spectators.
Kiyoshi Takenaka and Sakura Murakami report for Reuters from Tokyo that the petition was submitted to the Olympic and Paralympic committee chiefs as well as Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike.
Asked about the anti-Games campaign, Tokyo governor Koike said she would continue to work towards a “safe and secure” Olympics.
“Though there is a global pandemic, it is important to hold safe and secure Tokyo 2020 Games,” she told a regular press conference.
…On Monday, we spoke to Mohammed El-Kurd, whose family is facing forceful eviction from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. He then spoke on CNN and MSNBC. After these interviews, Israeli forces arrested him and forcibly removed Mohammed from Sheikh Jarrah. It was captured in a dramatic video shared widely on social media.
For more, we go to Jerusalem to speak with Mohammed El-Kurd, writer and poet in occupied Palestine, who is organizing to save his family’s home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Mohammed, we spoke to you Monday. Describe what happened next.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Hi, Amy. Good to be back.
Yeah, I was standing in my neighborhood at night, and Israeli forces, while they were dispersing, violently dispersing, and suppressing the protesters and assaulting them and beating them, landed on me. And although they know that I live in the neighborhood, although they know my face, they forcibly took me out of the neighborhood. I would want to mention also that this has happened to me before, on the same day, in the morning, but there was no cameras to capture it.
I am unsure if this was targeted or not, or if this is because of what I said on national television. What I do know is that Palestinians are targeted constantly by Israeli violence, be they outspoken or not. So, for my Palestinian siblings, our silence will not protect us. We should all be speaking out against Israeli atrocities and [inaudible] —
AMY GOODMAN: But where were they taking you? They were taking you out of your home. I mean, there’s this other viral video of your twin sister who is telling a Jewish settler to leave your home. Where were these Israeli soldiers that we are showing now taking you?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: They just threw me in the street and told me that I couldn’t come back into the neighborhood. And they’ve done this many times to us, many of my family members, many of my neighbors. They do this routinely.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And could you talk also, Mohammed, about the reports of quite blatant collusion between settlers and Israeli security forces?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Thank God for social media, because not only in Sheikh Jarrah, in Haifa, in Lod, in Jaffa, in the Gaza Strip, we are seeing the Israeli settlers emboldened by the Israeli state. And there are many videos that have surfaced of Israeli police officers assaulting Palestinians, and doing it with brute force, and doing it with aggression, doing it like they have a personal vendetta against them, which they do. It’s nothing short of terrorism. But again, like I said, thank God for social media, because it appears to me that the world is finally waking up to the fact that Israel is an apartheid state and it treats Palestinians with such dehumanization. It treats Palestinians the way colonizers treat the colonized.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And also, as you point out, the role of social media, as a result, the whole world knows what’s going on. And there have been protests held in many cities around the world. What is the significance of solidarity from activists and others in these different cities, including many in Europe, as well as some in the U.S.?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Absolutely. I think those protests, that are in hundreds of cities, actually, are also spearheaded by Palestinians in the diaspora, much like the protests that are happening all across historic Palestine.
The first significance of these protests is that they’ve indicated to us that these colonial fragmentations that Israel has worked tirelessly, explicitly and implicitly, to implement within Palestinians, these tactics of intimidation, are not working, that we are all the Palestinian people, regardless of geography and regardless of, you know, legal status. We are all the Palestinian people, and we are rising up against this.
I also think grassroots people on the ground all over the world are realizing that they have the tools to end Israeli aggression towards Palestinians, to end the Israeli occupation once and for all, to end Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.
Faced with a surge in coronavirus cases, Cuba this week started immunizing members of the public, using two locally-produced vaccines that have yet to complete clinical trials.
The island nation of 11.2 million inhabitants recorded 1,207 new daily cases on Wednesday—a near record for Cuba—as inhabitants of Havana and other provinces received their first dose of Abdala, one of two candidate shots in Phase II trials.
“A slight sensation of warmth during the injection” but “all is well,” Cecilia Reyes, 69, one of the first Abdala recipients, said of the experience.
The rollout began with the blessing of the health ministry as authorities eye official approval of the Abdala and Soberana 2 vaccines by Cuba’s drug authority by June.
The communist state, which has stated it wants to vaccinate all inhabitants this year, has been relatively unscathed by the Covid-19 pandemic, with over 119,000 reported cases and 768 deaths to date.
Under American sanctions, Cuba has a long tradition of making its own vaccines, dating back to the 1980s.
Nearly 80 percent of its vaccines are produced locally, and Cuba is working on five coronavirus candidate vaccines. If one of them gets the green light, it will be the first coronavirus vaccine developed in Latin America.
Cuba has not bought or sought coronavirus vaccines from elsewhere.
In March, the country started vaccinating health care workers with Abdala and Soberana 2.
Abdala has completed its Phase III trial, but the results are still being analyzed. Soberana 2 is due to complete the final trial phase within days.
Phase II results, the authorities say, showed positive results in terms of efficacy and safety.
Initially, the government had planned to roll out its vaccine program to the public in June, after authorization.
“If it were not for this epidemical situation, (the authorities) would have waited longer,” said molecular biologist and researcher Amilcar Perez-Riverol of the Sao Paulo University, referring to the new infection surge.
Health Minister Jose Angel Portal said between 1.7 million of the 2.1 million inhabitants of Havana, the epicenter of the outbreak, will be vaccinated between now and August….
Maybe a year after the 2014 Gaza war I met a family in Beit Hanoun. The two sons were clambering around in a pit with some sewage at the bottom. It used to be their aunt’s house, destroyed by an Israeli shell. They were hauling out chunks of concrete and scraps of metal.
Their father would sell it. A wheelbarrow of concrete fetched ten shekels ($3) and would be crushed into aggregate for building roads—when you drive around Gaza, you’re literally driving on the ruins of people’s homes.
He was hoping to use that money to fix his own house, which was still standing but had severe damage to the support columns. His family had been living there for the past year even though the building looked like it could drop on their heads at any moment.
That’s the state of things in Gaza after 15 years of blockade. Cannibalizing the ruins, living in the ruins. Life is intolerably difficult even in the “quiet” times, and every war with Israel causes devastation that’s never going to be repaired for lack of money and materials.
Myanmar army artillery shelled positions held by civilian militias in a northwestern town for a second day on Friday, rebel fighters and a lawmaker said, after the ruling junta declared martial law there to quell a local rebellion against its rule.
The junta said martial law was imposed in Mindat in Chin State late on Thursday after whom it called “armed terrorists” attacked a police station and a bank.
The attacks posed a further challenge to the military as it struggles to restore order in the country amid widespread anger over its coup in February which ousted the elected civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The resistance has expanded in recent weeks from daily street protests and strikes to attacks on junta-appointed administrators and ambushes of security forces by civilians.
The newly-formed Chinland Defence Forces on Friday said it was behind the fighting in Mindat. It ambushed a convoy of military reinforcements on Friday, according to one fighter and a local legislator.
…
“They (the junta) can no longer rule the city except in some areas where they have bases. They have no control in the rural areas,” the spokesman said.
One of its fighters told Reuters six trucks were seized and many weapons taken.
…
Pro-democracy groups and ethnic minority armies have been rallying behind a National Unity Government (NUG) that is seeking domestic and international support to undermine the military as prevent it from consolidating power.
The NUG earlier this month announced the formation of a People’s Defence Force, to protect civilians from the military. Some fighters have sought training with insurgents that have battled the Tatmadaw for decades in border regions.
So far, 788 people have been killed in the military’s crackdown according to an advocacy group.
The military, which disputes that number, imposes tight restrictions on media, information and the internet. Reuters cannot independently verify arrests and casualty numbers.
In a sign of the continued defiance, pictures and video on social media showed demonstrators marching in the commercial capital Yangon on Friday chanting “we believe that we gonna win, we must win, we must win”.
CNN keeps showing a map of US states showing the percentage vaccinated, but the highest category is 25%+ and all of the states are there, so the entire map is the same color and it’s completely useless for distinguishing which states are doing better with vaccinations. It’s so funny that they keep putting it up.
SC@406, Most reporters ∩ Mathematical understanding → ∅
That is, in a Venn diagram of (most) Reporters and (reasonable familiarity with basic) Mathematical concepts, there is no overlap. Probably also applies to most computer UI and web graphics designers.
Consolidating her position as America’s foremost Trump loyalist, Representative Elise Stefanik stunned political insiders on Wednesday by replacing Ivanka Trump as one of the former President’s daughters.
According to those familiar with the shakeup, Donald Trump made the move after Stefanik spent months convincing him that she was substantially more loyal than his now former daughter.
In an official statement from Mar-a-Lago, Trump wished Ivanka well, adding, “She had a good run.”
Stefanik, who is running to replace Representative Liz Cheney as chair of the House Republican Conference, put to rest any doubt that she could handle that job while fulfilling her responsibilities as Trump’s daughter.
“They’re basically the same job,” she said. “I just have to say ‘Yes, Daddy.’ ”
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confronted Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez outside the House chamber on Wednesday afternoon. The incident, first reported by The Washington Post, was just the latest of several hostile confrontations the Georgia congresswoman has had with her Democratic colleagues, but her interactions with the New York Democrat predate Greene’s election to Congress in 2020.
During a February 2019 visit to congressional offices at the US Capitol with associates who include a man who would later enter the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection, Greene — then a conservative activist — can be seen taunting Ocasio-Cortez’s staff outside the congresswoman’s locked office by talking through a mailbox slot urging her to come out.
In the video, from a since-deleted Facebook Live of Greene’s that was saved by CNN’s KFile, Greene tells Ocasio-Cortez to “get rid of your diaper,” referring to the congresswoman’s office as a “day care.” Greene repeatedly indicates throughout her stream that security has been called on them.
“We’re going to go see, we’re going to visit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Crazy eyes. Crazy eyes. Nutty. Cortez,” Greene says to the camera on the way to the congresswoman’s office, mispronouncing “Ocasio.”
When Greene and her companions arrive at the office, Ocasio-Cortez’s office door is locked. Standing outside of the office, Greene and her associates taunt Ocasio-Cortez’s staff through the mailbox, mocking the staff for keeping the door locked.
Then Greene talks through the slot to the staff, urging them to unlock the door and let her and her cohorts inside.
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I’m an American citizen. I pay your salary through the taxes that you collect for me through the IRS because I’m a taxpaying citizen of the United States,” Greene says, noting elsewhere in the video that members of Congress are “employees” who “work for us.”
“So you need to stop being a baby and stop locking your door and come out and face the American citizens that you serve,” she says. “If you want to be a big girl, you need to get rid of your diaper and come out and be able to talk to the American citizens. Instead of having to use a flap, a little flap. Sad.”
CNN has reached out to the offices of Greene and Ocasio-Cortez for comment.
In the video, Greene and her companions continue to goad the staff while chuckling from outside the door. “You can’t stay in there forever. Come out and play,” taunts one Greene ally through the mailbox slot.
The video is from February 22, 2019 — the same day that Greene visited the Capitol and brought to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office a petition to impeach the California Democrat for treason, and suggested she should be executed or imprisoned for her “crimes.” On social media in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing other Democratic politicians, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and FBI agents.
Greene also visited Rep. Maxine Waters’ office that day, where she said the California Democrat was “just as guilty” of treason as Pelosi. She also went on to visit the offices of then-freshman Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, during which she falsely claimed the first two Muslim women elected to Congress weren’t “official” because they had been sworn in on the Quran. Greene stopped by the offices of Reps. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, and Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and suggested visiting then-Sen. Kamala Harris that day.
With Greene at the Capitol that day was her close ally Anthony Aguero, a former El Paso congressional candidate and conservative livestreamer who was captured on camera inside the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.
As they leave Ocasio-Cortez’s office, Greene says, “Bye. Bye. Bye, AOC. Ocasio-Cortez. Bye, bye, baby. Bye-bye, baby. Bye-bye, little baby girl. Ocasio-Cortez– she went and hid. She couldn’t take it,” said Greene, mispronouncing Ocasio-Cortez’s name again.
She and her companions then rearranged the sticky notes placed on Ocasio-Cortez’s office wall and signed the guest book outside the office by drawing a picture of a border wall before leaving to go to another member’s office.
Greene repeatedly says in the video that “we have security following us everywhere we go” and appears proud of it. By the end of the day, she and her companions appear to be escorted out by security. It’s unclear if the Capitol Police were involved.
“We’re headed back out. That was fun,” she says to the camera….
The top four members of the House Republican leadership — Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Minority Whip Steve Scalise, Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, and Republican Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer — all voted at least once to reject certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory.
[…] What I want to focus on is a clear political reality. This may look catastrophic but it is actually an unalloyed win for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Open and shut. Not even close.
As the evictions and Lehava marauding gangs were going on in East Jerusalem, Netanyahu was in the process of losing his job. Israeli President Rivlin had just chosen opposition leader Yair Lapid to form a new government. He seemed likely to do that by gaining the support of one of the right wing anti-Netanyahu parties by allowing its leader, Naftali Bennett, to share the Prime Ministership with him. Bennett would in fact be allowed to go first.
This new government involved a wildly delicate and ungainly bit of maneuvering that illustrates how much Israeli domestic politics are now freed from all ideological commitment beyond supporting or opposing Benjamin Netanyahu. Lapid would bring in the right wing Bennett and also, either formally or informally, the small Islamist Ra’am party into the same government.
First the leader of Ra’am, MK Mansour Abbas, canceled negotiations indefinitely in light of the spiraling pattern of violence. That’s probably temporary. His strategy is to get into an Israeli government of either the right or the left to secure funding for the Arab sector and a seat at the table of power. So that’s likely not a permanent withdrawal. But for the moment there’s no longterm and barely any medium term in Israeli politics.
Soon Bennett abandoned the anti-Netanyahu coalition and went back to negotiating with Netanyahu. (The two are in fact ideological soulmates and Bennet is actually an erstwhile Netanyahu protege. As I said, in today’s Israel ideology is secondary to pro- or anti-Netanyahu.)
In other words, the enveloping cycle of violence has effectively barred any path to a new government without Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Can Netanyahu himself form a new government? That’s not totally clear but it doesn’t really matter. He’s caretaker Prime Minister. So in the absence of a new government, he remains Prime Minister. That’s all he really needs and effectively the situation he’s been in for the last two years of inconclusive elections.
Television reports out of Israel say that the country’s police commissioner told Netanyahu yesterday that each time police start to get the violence under control in mixed Israeli cities Ben Gvir and his gangs show up to fan the flames. For him the situation is clear cut. His long term goal of driving Israel’s Arab citizens out of the country matches perfectly with his immediate goal of ensuring a new Netanyahu government in which he and his party are the critical kingmakers.
If he is going to be Prime Minister Netanyahu will have a country to run. So it doesn’t serve him to have endless escalation. But he also has no incentive to calm the waters. Because the climate of crisis is keeping him in power.
House Republicans made it official [today]: The former guy rules their world. Rep. Liz Cheney, who voted with Trump on policy nearly 100% of the time, is out of leadership. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who voted with him less than 70% of the time, has been crowned homecoming queen GOP conference chair.
Cheney’s problem with fellow Republicans has never been a policy one. Republicans don’t do that anymore. It’s all about the Big Lie, and Cheney not being willing to forgive and forget after Trump sicced his violent mob on Congress on Jan. 6 to overturn the results of the election. God help us all, Liz Cheney has proven to be too principled for the 2021 GOP. […] Because she met the lowest bar of integrity in acknowledging the results of the election and voting to impeach Trump for inciting a violent insurrection to overthrow Congress.
[…] Cheney’s got a massive media megaphone now and she’s going to use it to try to be the Republican who rises out of Trump’s ashes and becomes the next GOP president. Of course she is.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has ambitions, too. He wants to become speaker and believes that path goes through Trump. […]
Then there’s Stefanik. This one is quite the piece of work. Check out her evolution from Never Trumper to Trump cheerleader. [video available at the link]
True to her new form, whatever that is, Stefanik paid obeisance to the creator after her win: “I also want to thank President Trump for his support. He’s a critical part of our Republican team.” Uh huh. […]
Here’s something she might want to keep in mind, though, about the fickleness of fate in today’s GOP.
Who previously held the No. 3 House job, and is now the man getting blamed repeatedly by Trump for failing to toss the election results so Trump could stay in power anyway?
[…] Among the most prolific purveyors of falsehoods in Fox’s “Bullshit Factory” is Sean Hannity. He has spent most of his time for the past year maligning Biden as “frail, weak, cognitively struggling Joe.” It’s become an endless loop that Hannity repeats ad nauseum in the hopes that his shtick will stick. But Biden refuses to cooperate, and instead speaks with sincerity and intelligence.
Since Hannity can’t make a coherent argument to support the insults he aims at Biden, he has now resorted to producing deliberately deceptive videos that were edited to make Biden look bad. On Wednesday night Hannity played one such video. Hannity introduces the clip in a manner that he thinks is disparaging to Biden, but which actually makes Hannity sound like a cranky seven year old. [video is available at the link]
The subject was the recent cyber-attack on Colonial Pipeline that temporarily disrupted gasoline distribution (and that GOP wackos blame on Biden). Hannity called it “Joe Biden’s ongoing gas crisis” and complained that…
“Joe Biden didn’t want to talk about it. He was too worried and concerned he’d get in trouble if he answered too many questions. And his staff threatened, I guess, not to give him his hot cocoa before his afternoon nappy. […] When Joey addressed the crisis his remarks were pretty bizarre.”
Hannity’s assertion that “Biden didn’t want to talk about it” because he was “concerned he’d get in trouble,” was triggered by an obvious joke on Biden’s part. But the humor-challenged Hannity was too dense and consumed by hostility to get it. Then his inner toddler took over to whine about cocoa and naps.
However, the video posted below shows both Hannity’s edited segment as well as the uncut exchange between Biden and the reporter who made the inquiry. The uncut clip shows that Biden answered the question clearly and substantively. But Hannity’s version removed all of that and resumed the video later at a point where Biden’s remarks appear to be unrelated because they are out of context. [See video at the link.]
This is as dishonest as it gets. And it is sad that it was presented on a cable network that has the word “news” in its name. But it affirms just how unethical Hannity is, and Fox News as well for employing him. […]
Brandon Pope, a former aide to Doug Lamborn, accuses the Colorado congressman of recklessly endangering his staff.
“Well, I don’t care about you guys getting it.” That’s what Rep. Doug Lamborn (R–Colo.) allegedly told a staffer in October 2020, right after discovering that his Capitol Hill office was turning into a hotbed of Covid-19 infections.
It’s one of the many eye-popping accusations in a new lawsuit filed Thursday afternoon in the District Court for the District of Columbia by Brandon Pope, a former Lamborn staffer who says he vocally pushed back on what he called the congressman’s “reckless and dangerous approach” to the pandemic — and was fired for it.
The lawsuit claims that Lamborn ignored congressional pandemic protocols and endangered his own staff, mocked aides who wanted to wear masks, forced staffers to show up for work in person and dismissed social-distancing guidelines. Eventually, those actions resulted in “widespread transmission of the virus throughout both the district and Washington DC offices,” the lawsuit states, leading both offices to shutter for a time.
Pope — a Marine veteran who started with Lamborn as a Wounded Warrior fellow before being promoted to defense policy adviser — claims in the suit that early in the pandemic, he raised safety concerns to a superior. […]
According to Pope’s lawsuit, early on in the pandemic, when most congressional offices moved to remote work, Lamborn insisted that his staff continue to operate in-person — allegedly saying that he would not allow House leadership to dictate how he ran his office, and “belittl[ing] any staffer who raised health-related concerns.” When Pope suggested that one staffer with health conditions at least be afforded a “zip wall” to limit exposure to other staff, Lamborn denied those requests.
As late as April 2020, well after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic and many states had implemented stay-at-home orders, Lamborn allegedly told his staff that the pandemic was a “hoax” manufactured in an attempt to influence elections.
The lawsuit states that on or around Oct. 5, Lamborn was informed that his D.C.-based deputy chief of staff — with whom he had been working closely just days before — had tested positive for Covid-19, and that many others in his office were showing symptoms. Despite knowing this, and despite having slept in his office that week, the lawsuit alleges, Lamborn refused to self-isolate, going about his normal business and in-district work schedule, including attending a campaign event and military shipyard tour in the days that followed.
Within days, with more staffers testing positive, Lamborn had to shut down his D.C. office. But he required his district staff to continue to come to work in-person.
Contradicting contact-tracing guidelines, Lamborn allegedly told his staff not to tell anyone about their cases, “including their families, roommates and friends” with whom they came into physical contact — lest the media pick up on the office’s Covid problem.
[…] In a bid to establish that Lamborn “consistently disregarded ethical rules and norms” in Congress, the lawsuit includes several other allegations. Among them:
— Lamborn allowed his son to live in a storage area in the basement of the U.S. Capitol for several weeks when he moved to Washington D.C.;
— Lamborn’s taxpayer-funded congressional staffers had to help the congressman’s son apply for federal jobs, prepared him for job interviews with mock questions and “help[ed] him craft his [interview] responses”;
— Lamborn’s staffers ran personal errands for his family, including moving furniture for the congressman’s vacation home, setting up a video telecom system at his home […]
— Staff were instructed to use their official time to perform campaign work, “including preparing campaign mailings, purchasing supplies and preparing for campaign events like the campaign party on primary night.”
Wonkette: “A Bill To Make Louisiana ‘Sanctuary State’ For Fossil Fuels? Did Oil Write This?”
Back in Medieval times, it was possible all over Europe to murder someone or commit another crime and then run into a church and be safe from being arrested or otherwise punished — which usually resulted in being exiled instead. This, as you probably learned from reading or watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was called declaring sanctuary.
During the Trump administration (and even before that), cities across the country declared themselves sanctuary cities for immigrants — meaning that they would limit their cooperation with a bunch of exceptionally terrible federal immigration laws. California declared itself a sanctuary state. This was for both compassionate reasons and practical ones. People in these cities didn’t want to spend money and resources hurting their neighbors […]
But oh how the tables have turned! Somewhat. Late last month, Danny McCormick, a Republican Louisiana state rep and oil company owner, attempted to pass a bill that would declare the state a sanctuary state … for fossil fuels. […]
“I don’t know who would have a problem with it, honestly,” McCormick explained during the bill’s hearing. Apparently he had not met any of the many people — people in color in particular — who would have a problem with it and might dislike the idea of getting sick so oil company owners like McCormick can get rich.
Via The Guardian:
Nixing environmental requirements would disproportionately hit communities of color. Shreveport, which is 57% Black, is in the 90th to 95th percentile for cancer risk from breathing in air toxics, according to the EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment. In 2013, the EPA fined the Calumet refinery $326,000 for nine air violations, prompting a new fenceline monitoring system.
Shreveport is in north-west Louisiana, almost on the border with Texas. But south-east Louisiana, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, is also known for its heavy industrial presence and pollution. It has been dubbed “Cancer Alley”.
[…] While the bill has been stalled due to the fact that it would not exactly be entirely legal, McCormick and other Republicans are currently working hard to change the language in a way that would make it passable.
[…] The chairman of the Louisiana House Natural Resources and the Environment Committee, Jean-Paul P Coussan (R-Lafayette), said he would work with McCormick to resolve issues with the bill that could give the federal government more power over oil and gas companies in Louisiana.
“You’re not going to find a bigger support of oil and gas in this legislature than maybe you and I,” Coussan said to McCormick at the committee hearing. “We can tighten this up so all our oil and gas constituents can be proud of the bill. The intent is to help industry not to end up in court just for a headline.”
Aw! So helpful. To industry.
Unfortunately, this is not the only crap law meant to murder the environment that Louisiana legislators are trying to pass. It’s not even the only crap law meant to murder the environment that Danny McCormick is trying to pass. He’s also floating out HB 549, which would “stop Louisiana State Police from being able to ticket pipeline companies for failing to immediately notify them of small natural gas releases by changing the definition of a pipeline from a mode of transport, which the state police has authority over, to a facility, which they don’t.”
I mean really, just because something can kill people doesn’t mean you need to be notifying anyone that it is happening. Surely, if people in Louisiana really cared about not dying, they could walk around with their own portable oxygen tanks all day.
Josh Marshall re the report/video @ #410: “Pretty clear that if @mtgreenee hadn’t been elected to Congress she would have been there insurrecting and quite possible already arrested.”
Barry Morphew, who is charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of his wife who remains missing, is now accused of submitting a ballot for her in the November presidential election. Suzanne Morphew was last seen in May 2020, and while she has not been found, the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) announced earlier this month the arrest of her husband Barry and said they believe Suzanne is no longer alive.
Commentary:
[…] Suzanne Morphew hasn’t been seen in a year, and last week, her husband, Barry Morphew, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. That’s obviously tragic enough on its own, but what followed were additional charges for casting an illegal vote.
According to the local reporting, last October, Barry Morphew also allegedly submitted a ballot on behalf of the wife he allegedly killed. Her ballot was submitted without a signature — a requirement in Colorado’s vote-by-mail system — but it did include his name as a witness.
According to the arrest affidavit, asked why he submitted the ballot for his missing-and-presumed-dead wife, Barry Morphew said, “Just because I wanted Trump to win…. I just thought give him [Trump] another vote.”
He added, according to the affidavit, that he believed “all these other guys are cheating.”
[…] What stories like these actually help show is that fraud is extremely rare, and when would-be criminals try to cheat, the existing system is strong enough to catch them and charge them.
This doesn’t prove the need for new voter-suppression laws; it helps prove the opposite.
As for Texas’ Dan Patrick, we’ve now seen two examples in two weeks of Trump voters allegedly casting ballots on behalf of dead relatives. If the Republican lieutenant governor wants to send me a check, I promise to apply the money to a good cause.
Last November, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, (a Republican, of course) said that he would pay up to $1 million as a reward to those who could produce evidence of voter fraud. He has been presented with evidence of Republican voter fraud, but so far he hasn’t paid up.
The idea of a January 6 commission, previously on life support, was resurrected Friday as Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, reached a deal with ranking member Rep. John Katko (R-NY) to investigate the attack and events that led to it.
The two are proposing legislation to set up the commission, which will comprise 10 commissioners from outside the government. Each party will get to appoint five of them.
Most importantly, the scope of the proposed commission seems to be exactly what Democrats wanted. “The commission will be charged with investigating and reporting upon the facts and causes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol as well as the influencing factors that may have provoked the attack on our democracy,” read a fact sheet attached to the new bill.
Up to this point, Republicans have ardently opposed any investigation that encompasses the election fraud conspiracy theories — peddled in the months leading up to the attack by former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies — wanting to solely focus on the security breakdowns on January 6 itself. And if Democrats insisted on including the lead-up to the attack in the investigation, many Republicans warned, they wanted the commission to investigate “left-wing violence” like the Black Lives Matter protests last summer as well.
The new commission created by this bill would have subpoena power like the much-lauded 9/11 commission. A final report of its findings would be due to Congress and the President by December 31, 2021.
In a statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that the bill to set up the commission is set to reach a House floor vote “as soon as next week.”
The text of the bill itself refers to the January 6 riot as a “domestic terrorist attack,” a far cry from the peaceful image of the insurrection some hard-right congressmen have tried to paint during recent congressional committee hearings.
…
If the bill passes, all eyes will be on who the Republicans choose to fill their five commissioner slots: pro-Trump firebrands, or old school Republicans who may be willing to implicate the former President….
[…] For months there have been people proudly forging vaccination cards. States like Tennessee and Texas have even made it easy for them by publishing the template for the vaccination cards online. […] saying that people who have been fully vaccinated need not wear masks is no different than saying “masks off!” to everyone. And that’s not the formula for driving COVID-19 cases down at the fastest rate.
[…] Israel didn’t drop mask requirements until the number of cases per day was far below their current rate in the U.S., even when expressed as a percentage of the population. In fact, Israel was extraordinarily cautious, not dropping even requirements that people wear masks during outdoor activities until just two weeks ago.
[…] The reason for combining both vaccination and masks is that until vaccination reaches a very high level—somewhere well above 70%—both are required to effectively halt community circulation of the virus. It’s masks plus vaccine that are giving these countries a de facto herd immunity. In terms of new cases per million population, the U.K. is down to 39. Israel is at just three.
In the United States the cases per million value is at 120. […] Sweden, still battling both a mix of bad policy and low vaccination rates, is at 379 [per million]. A pair of South American countries where the P.1 variant is running out of control—Uruguay and French Guiana—are both seeing cases per million that exceed 1,000 (making both good targets for any excess vaccine the U.S. has lying around) […]
In any case … yes, people who have been fully vaccinated are very unlikely to catch COVID-19 and very unlikely to spread COVID-19. Allowing them to remove their masks makes little difference to the overall course of the epidemic in the United States, and if removing masks could be held out as an effective incentive to get vaccinated, the masks-off recommendation could be a net positive.
The problem is there are still a number of people out there who insist that they will not be vaccinated, as well as people who have already gleefully shown that they will falsify the easily duplicated vaccine card. Even more importantly, a number of venues are likely to simply drop mask requirements without bothering to ask for any sort of proof of vaccination. For many stores, restaurants, gyms, and other locations, no masks for the vaccinated will simply mean no masks.
That’s unlikely to bring on disaster—after all, 46% of the population is already vaccinated, nearly 2 million more are getting vaccinated each day, and with the extension of vaccination to those 12-15, there could be a boost in those vaccination rates. Even without masks, a general fourth wave of cases is highly unlikely at this point. But removing the mask requirement will definitely slow the period in which the U.S. drops that new cases per day value from 120 down to 39, or three. And every day of that delay means more people suffering lasting illness and more families losing a loved one.
President Biden ended his Thursday appearance by saying that the rules now are very simple: “Get vaccinated,” said Biden, “or wear a mask until you do.” Let’s hope it really is that simple.
For months, Civiqs polling has told the same story: A large number of Republicans say they have no intention of getting vaccinated. But in just the last two weeks, that graph has finally begun to move. Since the beginning of May, the percentage of Republicans saying they will refuse the vaccine has fallen from 47% to 40%. That final number is still too high, but it’s the lowest value Civiqs has recorded since vaccines became available last year. What’s more, when looking at the other categories, it seems those Republicans didn’t slide into the “unsure” category, or even the “yes, I intend to get vaccinated” column. The big change over that same period, up by 9%, was among Republicans who said they had already been vaccinated. […]
The Washington Post says that vaccination sites are seeing that change on the ground. After the rate of vaccination slowed from 3.4 million a day in April to around 2 million in May, the decline appears to have halted. For that same 10-day period when Civiqs showed Republicans finally moving to the “vaccinated” column, the rate of daily vaccinations in the U.S. remained around that 2 million mark.
The Post’s own polling also shows a decline in vaccine skepticism, including among Republicans. […]
Exactly why things have changed isn’t clear. But it does seem like they have, and that’s a very good development. […]
[…] According to CNN, 100% of Democrats in the Senate and House are now fully vaccinated. But that doesn’t mean Nancy Pelosi will be dropping the rule that House members remain masked except when speaking at the podium. The reason why: Only 45% of Republicans in the House say they are vaccinated.
That number actually puts the vaccination rate of Republican representatives lower than that of Republicans nationwide. […]
Over on the Senate side, where Mitch McConnell exemplifies the who-gives-a-damn attitude about everything except holding onto power, 92% of GOP senators confess to having been vaccinated.
It should be a surprise to no one that two Republican senators are loudly saying they will not get vaccinated. And those two are (drumroll completely unnecessary) … Rand Paul and Ron Johnson. […]
Right now[:] Rep. Louie [Gohmert] is on the House Floor defending those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th and downplaying the deaths that came after.
“There have been things worse than people without any firearms coming into a building.”
[Gohmert] suggesting that most of the people who came to the Capitol came with the proper intentions.
“They’re actually nonviolent peaceful Americans. Their only crime was supporting Donald Trump and concerned about the fraud Democrats have been telling us about elections.”
[Gohmert] now says the only thing the insurrections might actually be guilty of is obstructing the work of Congress for “less than 24 hours”. He accused Democrats of using legislative tactics of obstructing Congress for far longer than than those who stormed the Capitol.
“‘This is a woman that’s deeply unwell. And clearly needs help. And her kind of fixation has lasted for several years now. At this point I think the depth has raised concerns for other members as well’, AOC on MTG”
Jake Sherman says he’s heard it from both Democrats and Republicans.
A newly filed plea agreement for Rep. Matt Gaetz’s former buddy Joel Greenberg sheds new light on how other men allegedly participated in the sex trafficking scheme to which the former Seminole County tax collector is set to plead guilty.
According to the plea agreement, filed in federal court in Orlando on Friday, Greenberg is set to admit that he paid a minor to have sex with him, and introduced her to other men in the area.
“Greenberg also introduced the Minor to other adult men, who engaged in commercial sex acts with the Minor in the Middle District of Florida,” the agreement reads.
Greenberg will plead guilty to six felony counts including federal sex trafficking charges, the agreement says and Business Insider first reported.
After his June 2020 indictment, Greenberg contacted the minor and tried to convince her to lie to make their stories “line up, because he knew that his commercial sex acts with her were illegal,” the filing reads.
Gaetz reportedly had sex with the same minor, who was 17 at the time of the purported encounter. Gaetz reportedly paid for sex with the girl and for her to travel with him across state lines.
Gaetz denies that he has ever slept with a 17-year old since the time that he himself was 17.
In the agreement, Greenberg admitted to having paid more than $70,000 for sex, across 150 separate transactions.
Those were made through his Venmo account, but also via an American Express account at the tax collector’s office.
The payments for sex ranged from $200 to $1000, and Greenberg would try to conceal their purpose by saying they were for “school,” “food,” or “ice cream.”
In some cases, the agreement says, Greenberg would give the women (and the minor) ecstasy and take it himself, or pay them to do so.
“Oftentimes, Greenberg would offer to pay the Minor an additional amount to take Ecstasy,” the filing reads.
There’s a lot of stunning and yet not at all surprising information in a new big poll out from Democracy Corps. In short, in battleground states Republicans are pretty much totally united and energized behind Trump, the Big Lie-centric posture of congressional Republicans and well-positioned for 2022. That doesn’t mean Democrats won’t also be united and pumped up. But any questions you may have had about Republicans being divided, demoralized or any essence having second thoughts about the events of the last six months … well, they’re not.
Here’s the overview from Democracy Corps […]
We conducted a large, mostly cell phone survey with an oversample of Republicans in the 2022 battleground for the U.S. Senate, governorships, and House, and it is painfully clear Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, and Kevin McCarthy know their party. The Trump loyalists who strongly approve of him are two thirds of those who identify as, “Republican.” And they are joined by the Trump aligned to form a breathtaking, three quarters of the party in the electoral battleground states and districts that will decide who leads the country.
[…] We were also surprised by how much Donald Trump’s loyalist party is totally consolidated at this early point in its 2022 voting and how engaged it is. Yes, they have pulled back from historic presidential year levels: the percent scoring 10, the highest level of interest in the election, has fallen from 84 to 68 percent. But Democrats’ engagement fell from 85 percent to 57 percent. Republicans are following their political theater much more closely than are Democrats — producing an 11-point gap.
[…] with such high early engagement of Republicans and white working class voters in this survey, it means the era of Donald Trump shaping the electorate is not over either.
[…] Biden’s plan and the provisions in it are enormously popular at a time when millions of American workers are still on the sidelines in the aftermath of the pandemic’s economic toll. Polling also continues to show that most voters want congressional Republicans to work with Biden rather than simply serve as a blockade to progress.
[…] between the popularity of Biden’s proposals, the economic need that still exists, and voters catching on to the fact that Republicans live to kill progress, the Senate GOP has to at least pretend they are making an effort to work with Biden. They simply can’t ride into 2022 with the stench of having worked to kill Biden’s economic recovery efforts without so much as a nod to attempting to be part of the solution.
For his part, Biden seems to think (or is at least pretending) he can get a deal with Republicans on the order of one trillion dollars with some pretty in-the-weeds pay-fors that don’t involve unraveling the GOP’s 2017 tax giveaway to the rich. “I’m confident they would go for that,” Biden told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
It’s still unclear how much of this is just a performative way of getting Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to “yes” by playing out a failed deal with the GOP to its natural end. But if Biden did manage to get a scaled-back bill with Senate Republicans, then Democrats would surely work toward passing another Democratic-only bill through reconciliation that addressed more of Biden’s proposals while raising taxes on the rich and corporations to pay for them.
But let’s be clear: None of that is necessary from the standpoint of public opinion. The Republican position is that they have drawn a red line at unraveling their tax cuts for the rich and corporate-y. Instead, they are proposing user fees in order to pay for Biden’s jobs and infrastructure plan. In other words, they’re entirely willing to kill a giant job-generating bill in order to protect the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations from tax increases. Instead, they want user fees—otherwise known as a regressive tax on the poor and middle class—to pay for infrastructure that the nation’s corporations and wealthiest individuals will surely profit from.
Let’s say that again: Republicans want to pay for any jobs/infrastructure bill by raising taxes on poor and middle-class Americans.
[…] That is about the dumbest position Democrats could adopt as a message heading into 2022. Well, we wanted to raise taxes on those who could afford it to create jobs but instead we raised taxes on those who couldn’t afford it.
[…] Most Senate Democrats also haven’t been fooled by their GOP colleagues’ overtures. “Republicans aren’t serious about paying for anything,” Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio also told Axios.
[…] Americans like Biden’s proposals.
Americans favor raising taxes on corporations and those making more than $400,000 a year—especially for popular investments like universal pre-K, repairing roads and bridges, and extending high-speed internet to rural areas.
Americans don’t favor raising taxes on the poor/middle class […]
The nation needs to create jobs quickly for this economic recovery to continue and no one is better positioned to do that than the U.S. government.
If Republicans want to ride into 2022 claiming credit for killing a jobs deal because they prioritized protecting the nation’s wealthiest from tax increases, so be it.
If Republicans want to claim credit for killing a bipartisan deal because Biden wouldn’t let them raise taxes on nation’s poor and middle class, so be it.
But whatever Democrats do here, they can’t afford to do nothing. It would be political malpractice to squander this opportunity when public opinion is overwhelmingly on their side and Republicans are pushing a tax hike on middle-class Americans.
Democrats have a golden opportunity here and Republicans are only helping their case. Failure is not an option.
A Proud Boys leader charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection expressed shock that former President Donald Trump abandoned him and other rioters.
“Alright I’m gonna say it. FUCK TRUMP,” self-described Proud Boys sergeant-at-arms Ethan Nordean said in a Telegram message on Jan. 20. “Fuck him more than Biden. I’ve followed this guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all.”
Nordean, 30, from Washington state, wrote the grievance after Proud Boys Florida organizer Joseph Biggs, 37, was arrested for his role in the day’s violence, which left five people dead and 140 police officers injured.
“Yes he woke us up, but he led us to believe some great justice was upon us … and it never happened,” Nordean wrote of Trump in the Telegram message, revealed by federal prosecutors this week. “Now I’ve got some of my good friends and myself facing jail time cuz we followed this guys lead and never questioned it.”
Nordean, who was arrested a week after posting the Telegram message, seemed to realize Trump would not be issuing pardons for him and fellow members of his violent gang.
“We are now and always have been on our own,” Nordean wrote. “So glad he was able to pardon a bunch of degenerates as his last move and shit on us on the way out.”
Nordean, who has been jailed since early February, is charged with attempting to obstruct Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. He’s also charged with aiding and abetting, knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. He has pleaded not guilty.
…
“Thousands of people descended on Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 to protest the result of the 2020 presidential election,” public defender Corey Endothe [representing Nordean] wrote in a February court filing. “Egged on by Donald Trump, other politicians, his legal advocates, and the news media these people believed the election had been stolen. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people entered the Capitol building as Mr. Nordean is alleged to have done.”
The new Telegram messages uncovered by prosecutors also show how the Proud Boys coordinated their plans for the day’s violence.
“Drag them out by the fucking hair if they steal it,” one member wrote in the chats.
“Let them remember the day they decided to make war with us,” Nordean posted just days before the attack. “Fight we will.”
In April, bail was revoked for both Nordean and Biggs after federal prosecutors successfully argued the two men were central figures in planning the attack.
Trump, upon leaving office, relocated to his Florida country club.
“Fuck you Trump you left us on [t]he battlefield bloody and alone,” Nordean wrote on Trump’s last day in the White House.
Germany plans to classify Britain as a coronavirus risk region due to the emergence of the highly infectious variant first detected in India, government sources said on Friday.
Turkey is to ease coronavirus restrictions, emerging out of a complete lockdown, President Erdogan has said today. The country has been in a lockdown for two weeks after daily new cases rocketed to above 60,000.
France will have administered at least one Covid-19 vaccine injection to 20 million people by Saturday, Health Minister Olivier Veran said on his Twitter feed.
The B.1.617.2 variant first found in India will, over time, surpass the variant first discovered in Kent and become dominant in the UK, Britain’s Chief Medical Officer, Prof Chris Whitty, said on Friday.
A cohort of rightwing activists hatched a plan during Donald Trump’s administration to discredit his perceived foes – including a honey trap plot that used “female undercover operatives” – in an attempt to catch and discredit government employees criticizing the former president, the New York Times reported.
Their efforts included a “planned sting operation” targeting Trump’s then national security adviser, HR McMaster, and clandestine surveillance against FBI staffers, with the goal of exposing anti-Trump opinions in the law enforcement agency, according to the newspaper.
The work against FBI staffers was orchestrated by Project Veritas, a conservative organization, and carried out from a $10,000-a-month rental home in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, the paper reported. Project Veritas has long used sting operations against Democratic politicians, advocacy groups, and media outlets.
At this luxe home, “female undercover operatives” scheduled dates with FBI employees, hoping to surreptitiously record them making derogatory statements about Trump. They used fake dating app profiles to attract FBI members, the paper said.
…
An ex-British spy, Richard Seddon, was recruited by a security contractor to train Project Veritas activists “to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets.”
It’s not known whether Trump’s aides knew about these efforts.
However, Barbara Ledeen, who was reportedly among the participants in efforts against McMaster, told the Times that she was brought on by an individual “with access to McMaster’s calendar”. The newspaper points out that at the time, Ledeen worked as a staffer on the Senate judiciary committee when it was helmed by the Republican Iowa senator Charles Grassley.
This effort targeting McMaster involved a plot to hire a woman, who carried a secret video camera, to catch him making inappropriate statements that his enemies could use to get him booted from his position.
The plot was abandoned in March 2018, after McMaster resigned on 22 March of that year….
SC @429, that Popehat thread is a good one. Very informative.
In other news: No, unemployment benefits don’t stop people from returning to work. Study after study has debunked the myth that emergency benefits keep people out of the labor force.
Last week’s U.S. jobs report, which saw far fewer hires than expected, reignited an old, long-simmering debate about whether the social safety net creates a culture of dependence in American life. Too many American workers, the argument goes, would rather stay home, play video games and collect unemployment than go back to work. And the rest of us are suffering as a result.
“The disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market,” Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said last week. “We need a comprehensive approach to dealing with our workforce issues and the very real threat unfilled positions pose to our economic recovery from the pandemic.”
[…] Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy was a bit less subtle, tweeting that Democrats “have demonized work so Americans would become dependent on big government.”
The main problem with this line of thinking is that it simply isn’t true […] In the past year alone, study after study has debunked the myth that the emergency benefits and occasional payments provided by the government are disincentivizing people from returning to the labor force en masse. “We find no evidence that high UI [unemployment insurance] replacement rates drove job losses or slowed rehiring,” read one study by Yale economists last summer, back when enhanced federal unemployment benefits were $600 a week — or double the current amount. In a separate study of unemployed workers without a college degree last year, Arindrajit Dube at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, found no evidence that the additional pandemic compensation passed under the Cares Act last year “held back the labor market recovery.”
[…] even with help from the government, a large segment of jobless Americans aren’t receiving enough money from unemployment benefits to actually get by. According to a Census Bureau survey last month, nearly 1 in 3 Americans on unemployment said they were still failing to cover routine expenses such as food, housing and medical treatments. That’s not to say the rest of those on pandemic assistance rolls are coasting either. Of the recipients of jobless benefits with children, roughly 75 percent reported not having enough food for their children either sometimes or often. […] a study of how Americans spent the first stimulus by the Federal Reserve of New York revealed that only 29 percent of payments went toward consumption while the rest either went directly into debt repayment or savings.
[…] when we talk about the recovery and the return of the low-wage workers who were disproportionately affected by pandemic unemployment, we should be looking at the jobs on offer and not the people. Before the pandemic, the state of hourly work was fossilized by a federal minimum wage standard that hasn’t budged in more than a decade along with real wages that haven’t moved in over 40 years. […]
It’s an all-time understatement to say the professional lives of service workers and retail employees grew exponentially less sustainable during the past year. Across the country, hourly workers have been tasked with enforcing mask mandates and have been attacked, harassed and even shot at for protecting themselves and other customers from a public health crisis. […] Workers have labored long hours through supply shortages and shifting and often lax safety protocols, often without hazard pay or basic benefits like sick leave or health insurance, all in the middle of a pandemic.
As the country slowly begins to reopen, workers shouldn’t be shamed or punished for not returning to industries that haven’t materially improved work conditions from their pre-pandemic standards. A glut of low-wage job openings isn’t a sign of American laziness; it’s a sign of self-preservation. And it’s a clear signal that businesses need to make jobs more attractive, especially after a year in which 90 percent of the biggest American companies turned a profit while over half of the same companies laid off tens of thousands workers.
Of course, the irony is that so many of these front-line jobs just months ago were being heralded as “heroic” and “essential.” It’s more than past time for employers to treat them that way.
A joint report released Friday by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warns that lone wolf actors pose the greatest terror threat as incidents of domestic extremism steadily rise.
“The greatest terrorism threat to the homeland we face today is posed by lone offenders, often radicalized online, who look to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons. Many of these violent extremists are motivated and inspired by a mix of socio-political goals and personal grievances against their targets,” the two agencies wrote.
[…] The report found 2019 “represented the most lethal year” for domestic violent extremist attacks since 1995, the year the Oklahoma City bombing killed more than 160 people.
The two departments particularly highlighted the risks of white nationalists who are relying on “gamification…using fatality counts in attacks are referred to as ‘scores’” to motivate potential attackers.
“Widely disseminated propaganda on online forums and encrypted chat applications that espouse similar themes regarding kill counts could inspire future attackers to mobilize faster or attempt increasingly lethal and more sophisticated attacks,” the report states.
[…] The FBI arrested 229 subjects in fiscal year 2019, with that number dropping to 107 for fiscal year 2019. Those figures come from the roughly 1,000 domestic terror investigations conducted for the last three fiscal years in that period.
“[…] a large majority of the most significant attacks have been carried out by white supremacist extremists,” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a statement.
Today the Texas legislature sent to Governor Greg Abbott for his signature SB8, the state’s version of a “heartbeat” abortion law. Except in medical emergencies, it bans performing or inducing an abortion if the physician has detected a fetal heartbeat.
Unique to the Texas law is a provision that allows any private person to bring a civil action against a physician who has violated the statute, and against anyone who knowingly aids or abets the abortion, including reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance, regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced in violation of the statute… [Creating anti-abortion vigilantes]…. Plaintiff may recover statutory damages of not less than $10,000 for each abortion the defendant has been involved in.
Former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg is expected to share with investigators the identity of a woman who attended a GOP fundraiser with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) in 2019 as one of more than a dozen young women Gaetz paid for sex, the Daily Beast reported on Friday night.
The Daily Beast identified the woman as Megan Zalonka and described her as an amateur Instagram model. She accompanied Gaetz in 2019 to the “Trump Defender Gala” in Orlando, the outlet reported. She is allegedly among a group of more than 15 young women Gaetz paid for sex, a source familiar with the investigation told the Daily Beast.
Zalonka and Gaetz were also reportedly involved in a party after the event involving cocaine, two witnesses told the publication.
Two sources reportedly added that the pair had an ongoing financial relationship in exchange for sex. Gaetz has repeatedly denied all allegations of wrongdoing, including allegations that he paid women for sex.
According to the Daily Beast, he wrote off the stay at the hotel as a campaign expense. [That means donors to Gaetz’s political campaign(s) are paying, in part, for his commercial sex transactions.]
[…]According to sources who spoke to the Daily Beast and government records the outlet said it reviewed, Greenberg’s own relationship with Zalonka led to her landing a taxpayer-funded no-show job that, according to the Beast, earned her an estimated $7,000 to $17,500.
Zalonka, who is also the communications director for the American Medical Marijuana Physicians Association, had allegedly received $4,000 on Venmo from Greenberg during Greenberg’s first year in office in 2017 — mostly in $500 installments, the Daily Beast said.
According to the publication, Greenberg eventually awarded Zalonka a county contract that stated it would pay her $3,500 a month for “management of digital content” and “production of social media engagements.” The Beast reviewed records that suggesting some of the payments were made before being flagged by auditors.
Four people familiar with Zalonka’s arrangement told the Daily Beast it was a “no-show” contract and that Zalonka never worked at the office. According to those sources it was unclear what service she provided. […].
Another interesting connection. Pirozzolo is the Orlando area hand surgeon who organized a sleazy trip to the Bahamas for Gaetz and company. And Zalonka happens to be the Director of Communications for that organization. Not sure what it means yet, but the connection is there. [Maybe Zalonka had more than one no-show “job.” “Greenberg eventually awarded Zalonka a county contract that stated it would pay her $3,500 a month for “management of digital content” and “production of social media engagements.”]
———————
Matt Gaetz blowing rails with sex workers and assorted bros in a Florida hotel room after a Trump rally and charging it to his campaign account is the least surprising story ever.
Despite there being laws in place against it, companies that value homes for sale or refinancing often discriminate. Multiple cases have been reported in which people of color have noted that their homes were valued for less money based on a racial bias the appraiser had. In many situations, these homeowners even noted that during a second appraisal, staging their home to look like one owned by a white family increased the value significantly. In a recent incident, a Black homeowner in Indiana put this theory to the test.
After suspecting that she was low-balled in not one but two home appraisals, Carlette Duffy decided to ask a white friend to take her place during a third appraisal. The decision nearly doubled her home’s value. From being appraised at $125,000 and $110,000, Duffy’s home was valued to $259,000, the Indianapolis Star reported. “I had to go through all of that just to say that I was right and that this is what’s happening,” Duffy said. “This is real.”
After receiving her third appraisal, Duffy filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development against the mortgage lenders and appraisers, alleging they discriminated against her on the basis of race. The lawsuit hopes to spark a federal investigation into companies violating fair housing laws by allowing race to impact their appraisals and lending practices. Alongside the two appraisers, identified as Tim Boston and Jeffery Pierce, CityWide Home loans, Freedom Mortgage, and some of the two companies’ employees are the responders.
According to the complaint, Duffy did not understand why she was assigned the lower values until she read the appraisal report. “The wording in it just it sent out red flags,” Duffy said. “It said there were comps within the half mile, but it said the quality of construction of the other homes were far more superior to the quality of construction of my home.”
[…] In order to see if her appraisals were actually as data-driven as the appraisers argued, for her third appraisal Duffy did not declare her race or gender during the application and only communicated via email. As the time for the appraisal drew nearer, she told the lender she would be out of town and that her brother would be home. Her friend’s white husband then filled in as her brother.
[…] This isn’t an isolated case. Multiple incidents have been reported in which Black homeowners have been discriminated against and been given significantly lower appraisals than their white counterparts. Additionally, studies have found that homes in neighborhoods where there is a higher population of Black people are valued at about half the price of those with no Black residents, according to Brookings Institution.
In a similar incident to Duffy’s, a California couple went viral after unveiling that their home was undervalued by more than $500,000 before their second appraisal during which they had white friends pose as the owners, ABC 7 News reported.
[…] In another incident, a biracial couple in Colorado decided to only have one of them present during an appraisal after they suspected racism played a part in the interaction. During the first appraisal of Gwen and Lorenzo Mitchell’s home, an appraiser signed the value of $405,000. The couple was surprised at this number as other homes in the area were significantly higher.
“Because I’m Black, we realized he picked the houses from the Black side of Park Hill,” Lorenzo told The Washington Post. “That was the first red flag.”
The couple then scheduled a second appraisal with Gwen, who is white, arranging to be home alone. That appraisal gave a $145,000 higher value for the home.
“We didn’t change the house at all,” Gwen said “We didn’t paint any walls or mow the lawn or do anything different.”
While Duffy is satisfied with her third appraisal, what she went through to get it is beyond disheartening and is an example of the systemic oppression Black Americans continue to face nationwide. […]
Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a short-term problem: One member of his leadership team refused to accept the baseless lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. The third-ranking House Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, also refused to shut up about Trump’s lies, which also meant she was calling the majority of her caucus a bunch of liars, since so many of them continue to spout those lies, and most of them voted to reject certification of the election results. McCarthy decided she had to go.
[…] So it’s not like a small portion of the GOP base is delusional. It’s more like the bulk of the Republican Party has relocated to Fantasy Island for the foreseeable future, and Cheney was running around telling everyone […]
McCarthy concluded the best thing to do was just axe the messenger, so House Republicans could duck in and out of the Fantasy Island cocktail party whenever they pleased. He desperately hoped to live in two worlds—one where he could visit the White House and claim that questioning the legitimacy of the election was “all over with” now, and one where he could simultaneously send a fundraising text to the GOP base trashing the president as “Corrupt Joe Biden.”
[…] With Cheney in the rearview mirror, he could skim money and support from both real-world Republicans pretending the party might revert to form post-Trump, and the Fantasy Island Trumpers sloshing down that mesmerizing conspiracy Qool-Aid.
The problem is, when McCarthy axed Cheney, he didn’t actually silence her—that was just how things went in his fantasy land. Back in the real world, McCarthy handed her a megaphone and cut her loose to terrorize him and House Republicans for all time. Cheney, not exactly a political neophyte, is now a woman on a mission, with nothing to lose.
Following her ouster, Cheney immediately exited the room of her failed execution to step before cameras and pledge, “I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.” Then she flitted off to a sit-down in reality with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, followed by another fantasy-buster with Fox News’ Bret Baier.
[…] when Guthrie asked Cheney about a 2024 presidential bid, she landed on doing “whatever it takes” to keep Trump from ever reclaiming control over the U.S. government. Few things could grate on McCarthy more than a Cheney bid for the GOP nomination. Even though she would surely lose, she could also potentially drive a wedge through the party’s base. [And she could make certain that Trump loses.]
[…] Cheney will be fighting for her seat in what is sure to be one of the most highly scrutinized races of the 2020 cycle. Contrary to popular belief, she may still have a chance there, given a potentially crowded field and the fact that residents of any affiliation can vote in the Republican primary in Wyoming if they switch their party registration. Cheney also raised $1.54 million in the first quarter, her best fundraising quarter since she was elected in 2016, according to Reuters.
[…] “What they’re going to open the door to is a situation where nobody’s Trumpy enough,” said former GOP Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, who lost her suburban Virginia seat in 2018 in the blue wave of anti-Trump sentiment that swept the nation. “It’s a problem for everybody.”
That all remains to be seen. For now, liberals can just revel in the fact that Cheney will spend the next year-and-a-half dropping whatever little reality bombs she can on McCarthy’s world of make-believe. […]
[…] a TV station in her [Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s] home state has dug up paperwork pointing to a problem that is far more than a PR issue: that Greene and her husband seem to have been claiming a lucrative tax break on two houses in two different Georgia counties, in violation of the law.
Channel 2 Action News in Atlanta revealed last night that it had obtained paperwork through public records requests that showed Greene and her husband claiming what’s called a “homestead exemption” on two properties—one in Fulton Country and one in Floyd County, which is in the district that Greene now represents. The tax break lowers the amount of property tax homeowners must pay on their homes, but it can only be claimed for one house—the owners’ primary residence.
[…] “The property owners filed for homestead exemption in Fulton County in May of 2019 and it became effective for the 2020 tax year,” the Fulton County Board of Assessors told the network. “In this case, Fulton County will consult with Floyd County to confirm and determine in which county the exemption is not valid.”
Greene responded to the allegations by telling the network that the reporter on the story “needs to mind his own business instead of launching yet another pathetic attempt to smear me and my family.”
In response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updating its guidance to say vaccinated individuals can go indoors without masks, major retailers across the country are deliberating their mask policy.
There are some major retailers who are following the CDC’s guidance and have completely dropped their mask requirements for vaccinated individuals in their stores.
Walmart announced on Friday that vaccinated customers do not need to continue to wear masks in their stores, but did not comment on how they would know if an individual has been vaccinated.
Starbucks followed suit on Saturday saying that vaccinated individuals don’t need to wear masks starting May 17.
Trader Joe’s put on its website for “customers to follow the guidance of health officials, including, as appropriate, [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] CDC guidelines that advise customers who are fully vaccinated are not required to wear masks while shopping.”
Costco said vaccinated individuals in areas where the state or local officials do not have a mask mandate will be able to enter their stores without a mask.
Publix updated its guidance along with Sam’s Club to match the CDC.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board said it is also lifting the mask mandate for casinos for vaccinated individuals and said that proof of vaccination is not required. However, they will not stop individual casinos from deciding if they want proof of vaccination.
However, some businesses are choosing to keep their mask mandate for now as they review the guidance and the company policies they have created for the pandemic this past year.
“Target will continue to require all of our coronavirus safety measures in all stores, including masks and social distancing, while we review guidance from the CDC and evaluate the guidance we offer our team and guests,” Target said.
CVS is also keeping its mask mandate as it reviews the CDC’s policy. “The safety of our employees and customers will continue to guide our decision-making process,” the company said.
Home Depot will be keeping their mask mandate for the time being along with Dollar General.
Clothing stores such as Marshalls, T.J. Maxx and JCPenny will be requiring masks as well.
[…] most stores are relying on individuals not to lie about their vaccination status when dropping the mask mandate.
Many do not believe unvaccinated people will be honest about their status which could cause some hesitations for companies to drop the mandate.
Which is more surprising, that the alleged wife-murderer was also an alleged Trump vote frauder, or that the alleged Trump vote frauder was also an alleged wife-murderer? Trick question, they are equally unsurprising […]
To be fair, even though Donald Trump kept telling his followers to vote twice to “test the system,” which is absolutely illegal, and most of the “vote fraud” that was found in the 2020 election was his voters doing what he told them to, even he never suggested people should murder their wives and then vote their murdered wives’ ballots for them.
[…] While it might be occasion for some hollow mordant laughter, none of this is funny. A woman is presumed dead, allegedly murdered by her husband. That he then is alleged to have gone and voted her ballot for Trump is more “oh yeah figures […]
Barry Morphew’s wife, Suzanne, has been missing from Salida, Colorado, for a year — since Mother’s Day in May 2020 — and has not been found. It’s as yet unclear what caused authorities to arrest her husband for her murder, without a body as evidence.
“We do have information that led us to this point today, and how we think a certain scenario had occurred,” [DA Linda Stanley] said. “But as we investigate further that may change, so at this time I can’t comment.”
Earlier this month, Barry Morphew was arrested for “first-degree murder after deliberation, tampering with physical evidence and an attempt to influence a public servant.” Now he’s also accused of felony forgery and misdemeanor offenses relating to mail ballots.
Barry Morphew said he “didn’t know” he wasn’t allowed to vote the ballot of his wife […]
“Just because I wanted Trump to win,” he allegedly said […] “I just thought, give him another vote.”
[…] He allegedly told the FBI agents he didn’t realize it was illegal to submit someone else’s voter ballot. “I didn’t know you couldn’t do that for your spouse,” he allegedly said, according to the affidavit. […]
The Israeli military attack Saturday on a Gaza Strip high-rise housing the offices of media outlets including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera prompted international outrage and condemnation from media freedom advocates.
The airstrike obliterated a 12-story building [some sources say the building was 14 stories] that had also contained numerous residential apartments. Journalists and other tenants had evacuated after receiving a warning an hour before the missiles struck, and no casualties have been reported. [Some sources reported a 45-minute warning, while others reported a 20-25 minute warning.]
The Committee to Protect Journalists demanded a “detailed and documented justification” for the airstrike, noting that it could represent a violation of international law.
“This latest attack on a building long known by Israel to house international media raises the specter that the Israel Defense Forces is deliberately targeting media facilities in order to disrupt coverage of the human suffering in Gaza,” Joel Simon, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement.
Israel’s military claimed that the building was targeted because it housed “Hamas military intelligence assets,” who had been using the presence of civilian journalists as “human shields.” No evidence was provided for those claims.
“We have communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki wrote on Twitter.
Al Jazeera journalists continued to broadcast live as their offices were evacuated. Footage from the network showed the building’s owner begging for the airstrikes to be delayed 10 minutes so that reporters could dash inside and grab expensive camera equipment.
“You have destroyed our life’s work, memories, life,” the building owner, Jawwad Mahdi, said when the request was rejected, according to the Associated Press. […]
Mohammed Ali, a bureau assistant with Al Jazeera, said that he and other staff fled the building when the warning came from the Israelis an hour before the strike. But they went back in to try to retrieve something that was irreplaceable: the bureau’s archives.
“There are thousands of hours of videos and photos,” he said. “We were able to get some of it out, not even half of it. We tried our best, but in the end we were afraid for our lives,” he said.
If there was a Hamas office in the building, journalists weren’t aware of it, he said. The building also contained doctors’ and legal offices.
[…] The Associated Press said that a dozen of the newswire’s journalists and freelancers were inside the building when they received a warning that it would be hit. All managed to evacuate, narrowly averting a catastrophe.
“We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza. They have long known the location of our bureau and knew journalists were there,” the AP’s president and chief executive, Gary Pruitt, said in a statement.
Earlier in the day on Saturday, the Associated Press had published a personal account from Gaza correspondent Fares Akram, who lost his father to an Israeli airstrike during a previous conflict and had his family farm torn apart by bombs on Friday.
“The Associated Press office is the only place in Gaza City I feel somewhat safe,” Akram had written just hours before he was evacuated along with his colleagues. “The Israeli military has the coordinates of the high-rise, so it’s less likely a bomb will bring it crashing down.”
Al Jazeera characterized the attack as a deliberate attempt to “silence the truth by killing the messenger.”
“The aim of this heinous crime is to silence the media and to hide the untold carnage and suffering of the people of Gaza,” Mostefa Souag, the network’s acting director general, said in a statement.
Earlier this week, Israeli airstrikes also destroyed two office buildings in Gaza City that housed more than a dozen media outlets, including Palestinian newspaper Felestin and pro-Hamas broadcaster Sabq24 News Agency, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The attack also destroyed the office of the Forum of Palestinian Journalists, a press freedom group.
Israel defended those airstrikes by claiming that Hamas maintained offices in the buildings, and saying that the journalists had been given a warning to evacuate.
“It is quite clear that this isn’t an accident, this is systematic targeting of media in Gaza in order to prevent reporting from there,” Jeremy Dear, deputy general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, told Al Jazeera on Saturday.
[…]
For a decade the monks of Notre-Dame de Saint-Remy, in Rochefort, south Belgium — one of only 14 abbeys in the world producing Trappist beer — have been fighting with a quarry owner over the purity of the local spring water.
The monks have doggedly claimed that plans by Lhoist, an international company run by one of Belgium’s richest families, to deepen its chalk quarry and redirect the Tridaine spring risked altering the unique taste of their celebrated drink.
Now, thanks to a deed dating back to 1833, it appears that makers and drinkers alike need no longer worry. A court of appeal in Liège has confirmed that while the quarry owner also owns the spring, it does not have the right to “remove or divert all or part of the water which supply the abbey”.
[… A plan to deepen the Boverie quarry] would involve pumping underground water beneath the quarry. The monks […] said this would impact on the quality of the groundwater that is a crucial ingredient of their beer.
The quarry owner had conducted repeated tests to show that this was not true. But the monks of Rochefort were unconvinced and a David and Goliath battle ensued.
[…]
I don’t have a Trappistes de Rochefort on-hand, but do have an Orval (now in the cooler), with which I’ll celebrate later. Belgium artisanal breweries are famous for being very superstitious, to the point of not even cleaning away dusty cobwebs in corners, for fear changes will alter the taste of their beers. (Do not construe the beers, cheeses, etc., are produced under unsanitary conditions.) Having said that, tinkering with the critical water supply is known to be risky; e.g., from vague memory, a distillery(?) in Scotland(?) had taste-problems after some water supply changes.
[…] Matt Gaetz has compared allegations of sexual misconduct involving a minor to earmarks, a congressional process by which spending measures beneficial to representatives’ districts are attached to legislation.
I’m being falsely accused of exchanging money for naughty favors, he said, speaking to Republicans in Ohio on Saturday.
Gaetz also said he wanted to be Robin to Jim Jordan’s Batman.
More like Max Headroom to hair furor’s bellowings.
Jordan is an Ohio representative and hard-right leader[loon] in the House, like Gaetz a vocal ally of Donald Trump. He is also dogged by scandal, over his alleged failure to act on sexual abuse by a team doctor when Jordan was a wrestling coach at Ohio state. Jordan denies wrongdoing.
[…]
At the event in Ohio, Gaetz received a standing ovation.
I don’t follow the Robin–Batman analogy.
What is the “Gaetzsignal”? — an SMS message about a child? Or, maybe, suggesting an earmark… My first thought is I presume teh extra-creepy wannabe-RobinMax Headroom “thinks” providing him with underage children is a necessary part of the process of bribing him to “work” for an earmark benefiting the child’s pimp (and his own wallet). An earmark suggestion causes him to, um, “spring” into action, sort-of like the Batsignal.
Nevermind that he cannot think and doesn’t work, and as far as I know, has not initiated any legislation, amendments, earmarks, etc., at all. But that isn’t Robin–Batman-ish at all. A simpler possibly is just more deluded fantasy “thinking”.
blfsays
From memory, the story of Syrian chef Imad Alarnab’s highly-appreciated pop-up kitchens was mentioned in this series of poopyhead threads. And now, I fled Syria with just £12 … now I have my own restaurant in Soho. The restaurant was due to open last year, but the pandemic obviously affected that. It opens tomorrow (Monday), and already “his restaurant is booked solid every weekend for the next few months”.
[…]
President Joe Biden on Friday put the kibosh on his predecessor’s planned National Garden of American Heroes and revoked former President Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at social media companies’ moderation policies and branding American foreign aid.
[…]
Biden’s order also revoked Trump’s May 2020 order calling for the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate social media companies for labelling or removing posts or entire accounts in what Trump claimed was a restriction on free speech. […]
The president also ended Trump’s December 2020 order to brand all US foreign aid with a single logo that embodies the values and generosity of the American people [presumably a yuge, the yugest evar golden T –blf].
Also revoked was Trump’s June 2020 order that called for the federal government to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law acts of vandalism and destruction to statues on federal property. […]
Biden also took aim at a Trump proclamation that required immigrants to prove they would be covered by certain health insurance plans within 30 days of entering the US or prove they could cover medical costs.
“My Administration is committed to expanding access to quality, affordable healthcare,” Biden said in revoking that proclamation. “We can achieve that objective, however, without barring the entry of noncitizens who seek to immigrate lawfully to this country but who lack significant financial means or have not purchased health insurance coverage from a restrictive list of qualifying plans.”
The mailbox, located near the entrance of Amazon’s facility, has emerged as a key piece of evidence in a union bid to overturn election results.
Security guards at an Amazon […] warehouse in Alabama had keys to a mailbox the company encouraged employees to use to mail their ballots in a high-profile union election earlier this year, a worker said Friday in a National Labor Relations Board hearing.
Kevin Jackson, who has worked at the warehouse in Bessemer for more than a year, said he saw two guards approach the mailbox and use keys to open one of its doors. […]
In an April 16 complaint, the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union accused Amazon of misconduct — including issuing anti-union threats, firing an employee for distributing union cards and pressuring workers to use the mailbox to cast their votes.
The mailbox was provided by the US Postal Service at Amazon’s request, and union officials accused the company of having the box installed to keep an eye on workers voting. Federal law restricts surveillance of employees’ union election activities. The union also alleges that the installation of the mailbox created the impression that Amazon “controls the mechanics of the election,” according to an April 30 order from the labor board’s acting regional director.
[…]
Tampering with the mail, including USPS facilities (such as a mailbox, locked or not) is, if I recall correctly (not checked), a felony.
The social media giant failed to block a bid that could ban it from sending data about its 410 million European users to the United States.
Ireland’s data regulator can resume a probe that may trigger a ban on Facebook’s transatlantic data transfers, the High Court ruled on Friday, raising the prospect of a stoppage that the company warns would have a devastating impact on its business.
The case stems from European Union concerns that United States government surveillance may not respect the privacy rights of EU citizens when their personal data is sent to the US for commercial use.
The Republic of Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), Facebook’s lead regulator in the EU, launched an inquiry in August and issued a provisional order that the main mechanism Facebook uses to transfer EU user data to the US “cannot in practice be used”.
Facebook had challenged both the inquiry and the preliminary draft decision (PDD), saying they threatened devastating and irreversible consequences for its business, which relies on processing user data to serve targeted online ads.
[…]
While the decision does not trigger an immediate halt to data flows, Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, who forced the Irish data regulator to act in a series of legal actions over the past eight years, said he believed the decision made it inevitable.
“After eight years, the DPC is now required to stop Facebook’s EU-US data transfers, likely before summer,” he said.
[…]
Whilst neither Al Jazeera nor the Reuters report it is obviously based on say so, I presume this is all about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which, as the article implies, applies to EU citizens(? residents?) regardless of where they are in the world.
blf @450, I laughed when I saw the headline. Such a good schadenfreude moment. I always imaged Trump’s “National Garden of American Heroes” as not so much a garden but more a replica of the Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower decorating schemes, where tackiness rules.
KG @447, I’ve enjoyed reading that and other stories about communities working together to thwart outrageous anti-immigrant actions. “The only way that day could have ended was with our neighbours’ release; there were simply too many local people standing in the street for the police to have taken the van away. The strategy does work – and we want the world to understand that it was the people on the streets who won that victory, not the politicians.” Yep. And I like the way the immigrants were characterized as “our neighbors.”
KGsays
blf@452m
Facebook had challenged both the inquiry and the preliminary draft decision (PDD), saying they threatened “devastating” and “irreversible” consequences for its business
Indian authorities have discovered hundreds of bodies buried along riverbanks, with officials speculating they could be COVID-19 victims, the Associated Press reported.
An AP journalist estimated that 300 bodies were discovered on Saturday in Prayagraj, a city in Uttar Pradesh state. Senior police officer K.P. Singh told the news service that authorities had designated the area as COVID-19 cremation ground and said that police wouldn’t allow any more burials along the riverfront.
[…] Ramesh Kumar Singh, a member of an organization that helps cremate bodies, told the AP that people are dumping them in the rivers because of high prices in performing last rites and a shortage in wood.
This comes as India is struggling to deal with the ongoing wave of the virus, with two states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, being the worst affected.
On Sunday the Health Ministry reported that 311,170 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the past day along with 4,047 deaths, according to the AP.
[…]
The Republican who leads the Arizona county elections department targeted by a GOP audit of the 2020 election results is slamming Donald Trump and others in his party for their continued falsehoods about how the election was run.
Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.
“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.
[… T]he auditors [sic have moved as a snail’s pace and had to shut down on Thursday after counting about 500,000 [of 2.1m] ballots. They plan to resume counting in a week, after [previously-booked events have completed].
Trump’s statement said, in part, that the entire database of Maricopa county in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal and the Arizona State Senate, who is leading the forensic audit, is up in arms.
Richer and the board say that statement is just plain wrong. In recent days, both he and the board have begun aggressively pushing back at what they see as continuing falsehoods from Republicans who question Trump’s loss.
[… The Republican state senate president, Karen [ha! –blf]] Fann repeated the senate’s demand for access to administrative passwords for vote-counting machines and internet routers [see @231]. County officials say they have turned over all the passwords they have and have refused to give up the routers, saying it would compromise sensitive data, including classified law enforcement information held by the sheriff’s office.
[…]
The county says the passwords the senate is seeking are maintained by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the vote-counting machines and leases them to the county.
[…]
I’ve no experience with voting machines, but do have experience with POS / ATM / ticket / etc machines, which also have high-security requirements — and I’ve been told by experts who should know there is overlap in risks & technologies. As such, I have a suspicion there may be some garbling here on the passwords, with the “passwords” (usually called “(crypto-)keys”) in question either being randomly-generated per-machine(? -election?) and inaccessible (to anyone), or some form of public-private encryption, where different keys are used to encrypt and decrypt.
On the other hand, since supposedly “administrative passwords” are involved, then conventional passphrase — like for your computer, or the PIN for your mobile / bankcard — could be meant. But, again drawing on the POS, ATM, etc., analogy, that could easily be insufficient to access the most precious secrets — where it’s entirely possible they cannot be accessed by a human, even armed with maximal privilege, without the use of specialist equipment… which, if voting machines are anything like POS, ATM, etc., nominally trigger an automatic “self-destruct”. (No, the machine doesn’t burst into flames Mission Impossible style, but simply erases those secrets and possibly turns itself into a brick.)
[…] [Chuck] Todd took Crenshaw [Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX)] to task by asking about the GOP congressman’s record of refusing to accept that a free and fair election was held in November.
Todd pointed out that the GOP congressman signed onto Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) unsuccessful lawsuit that sought to overturn election results in several key battleground states.
Crenshaw’s feathers were ruffled.
“You guys in the press painted that as some extreme action. Of course, it wasn’t,” Crenshaw said. “That amicus brief was a simple question of the Supreme Court in saying, ‘can you please speak to this question of whether process changes in the election last minute, not approved by the legislature can be deemed constitutional?’ It was a question. They didn’t want to answer that question.”
Crenshaw added that he voted to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory, which happened hours after the deadly Capitol insurrection that former President Trump incited.
When Todd took Crenshaw to task by pointing out that the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit that he signed on to was weaponized by Trump, the GOP congressman insisted that it’s “time to move on” from the big lie that led to the breaching of the Capitol.
“[Trump is] one of many leaders in the party. He’s a former president. We’re five month into president Biden’s presidency. There is a time to move on,” Crenshaw said.
A testy exchange between Todd and Crenshaw ensued when the GOP congressman griped about the media calling out Trump’s bogus claims of a stolen election.
“You guys in the press love doing this, and I get it, right, that the press is largely liberal, they’re largely pro-Democrat,” Crenshaw said, prompting Todd to hit back.
“No, no, no. Don’t start that,” Todd said. “There’s nothing lazier than that excuse.”
Crenshaw then accused Todd of attempting to make him “take the bait.”
Todd wasn’t having it.
“I’m not trying to bait you. I’m try to figure out why do we sit here and have a political party that is basically rallying around this bizarre lie and mythology that the former president is doing,” Todd said. “You guys want to say, ‘hey, pay no attention to this, that we in the press are bringing it up.’ It’s the former president.”
We’ll move on when your party stops bending over for [Trump] and continuing to fundraise on and propagate the big lie.
Until then, answer for your quite literal crimes against democracy.
——————–
“just asking a question” schtick made him look pathetic.
———————-
I’m a little slow to catch on, but it seems as if the Republican commnications strategy, brilliantly executed by Crenshaw here, is not to permit interviewers to bring up certain questions at all. Tactics include repeatedly interrupting and talking over the interviewer and saying “I get that that all you guys in the media are liberals, but … [etc].”
I hate that “I get that you hate Trump” tactic.
——————
Crenshaw boasts he signed validating the election then blames the eternal and dominating “liberal media” for perpetuating the story. Yet 70% of Republicans think the election was stolen.
Wouldn’t that point the finger at the mostly conservative media obsessing on the story?
———————-
He claims we’re 5 months into Biden’s term and it’s actually 4 days shy of 4.
blf @457, thanks for posting that. It’s good to see the details when Republican election officials are calling the Maricopa, Arizona recount “unhinged.”
This is for Lynna who actually lives in Idaho.
I can see where living in Idaho has its moments.
Idaho Statesman
The price of Idaho’s vaccine hesitancy? COVID-19 ‘will be with us … permanently’
Ian Max Stevenson Sun, May 16, 2021, 3:00 AM
The state recently turned down 75% of its weekly COVID-19 vaccine allotment because of crashing demand — and it already owned one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. Just over one-third of Idahoans have started the vaccination process despite widespread availability.
and
Only five states have a lower rate than Idaho’s: Wyoming, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.
In some states the vaccination drives are starting to stall out.
Idaho is one.
They are at only 35% partially or wholly vaccinated.
We can see where the summer home and refuge of the Covid-19 virus will be already. Every single state at the bottom of the vaccine uptake list are Red GOP states.
PS Already in some states, the majority of the hospitalized Covid-19 virus patients are both younger and not vaccinated.
Soon it will be almost all of them.
Media Matters says Harris and Piton enjoy “roles of influence as two of the main promoters of the Arizona election fraud conspiracy theory, working behind the scenes” with authorities.
A report by the Arizona Republic cited by Media Matters claims Harris and Piton are influential figures in the audit.
Harris ran as a Republican for the Arizona House of Representatives in 2020, but lost. She runs “grassroots” efforts to find voter fraud and “commonly livestreams multiple videos per day related to the Arizona audit on YouTube and Facebook”, according to Media Matters.
Piton is the head of an investment planning firm in Illinois.
Media Matters also says the three [Harris, Piton, and Cyber Ninja’s CEO Doug Logan –blf] appear to be connected. It cites Piton’s claims on the far-right social media platform Gab he would give his research on alleged voter fraud in Maricopa to Logan, the person who won the bid to perform the audit [WHAT bid? –blf].
Piton confirmed to The Daily Beast in April he was working on the audit in an unofficial capacity after Logan requested his assistance. Piton also appeared on YouTube, praying a rosary for Logan and Harris.
Cyber Ninjas did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment. A call to Piton’s investment planning firm was not answered.
Harris told Al Jazeera in a text message: The fact that you are reporting on this tells me you are part of the problem.
Media Matters said “Harris and Piton’s involvement in the Arizona election audit is more than concerning — if their claims of working with audit officials and Arizona senators are true, it means that an attempt to overturn Arizona’s election results has been quietly influenced by two QAnon followers working from within.”
Arizona Republicans do not appear to be concerned. The Arizona Senate signed a lease to continue the audit on Friday. The lease lasts through the end of June.
Some snippets from the Media Matters report (link embedded above):
On February 28, Harris uploaded photos of herself with former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, two of the right-wing, pro-Trump millionaires funding the Arizona election audit, as well as Sidney Powell, the former Trump campaign attorney and conspiracy theorist who attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In the comments under the photos, Harris wrote, Arizona hold on to your hats… The storm has just begun! (The storm is a key phrase in the QAnon conspiracy theory.) Harris noted that this meeting occurred in Arizona but did not provide other specifics.
The Arizona audit isn’t the first brush Harris and Piton have had with promoting misinformation about election integrity. Harris also testified at Rudy Giuliani’s Arizona election fraud “hearing” in November, with Piton appearing as an expert witness to claim that his opinion, from reviewing Arizona voter data, was that between 120,000 and 306,000 ballots were cast by ‘fake people.’
[… W]hen The Daily Beast first reported on [Piton’s] unofficial involvement in the Arizona audit [sic] in late April, he said that he didn’t know much about QAnon. But his social media tells a different story. Posts explicitly supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory, and even a Q drop — the term for messages from the anonymous figure at the center of the conspiracy theory — are scattered throughout his public Facebook page.
Raven @462, the vaccination rate in my county is even lower than that of Idaho overall. Sigh. I’m just going to have to continue to live with minimum interaction with most other human beings here. I feel certain that one day, Idaho will be Number One! Number one in nurturing the growth of vaccine-resistant variants of COVID-19.
How many Ammon Bundy types do we have?
blfsays
Rather more tasty than the @463 et al antics in Arizona (albeit I presume Arizona has great-tasting Mexican / Latin American food!), I’m now enjoying an Orval (see @446), whilst considering what to prepare for dinner. Probably the (hopefully-still-fresh) fresh pasta, albeit Trappist beer and Italian pasta perhaps isn’t an ideal combination? No idea… albeit once at an restaurant in Edinburgh, I had a Trappist beer with Indian food (at the restaurateur’s suggestion), and that worked amazingly well. (Sadly, some years later, I wasn’t able to find that restaurant again — either they closed / moved, or I misremembered where they were (which was a rather hidden-away location).)
I mean, Indian and Italian are both very similar — I…ian — aren’t they ? (The mildly deranged penguin insists I name an Indian cheese and an Italian curry.)
Civilian deaths on both sides raise urgent questions about which military actions are legal, what war crimes are being committed and who, if anyone, will be held to account.
The Israeli missile that slammed into a Palestinian apartment exacted a shocking toll: eight children and two women, killed as they celebrated a major Muslim holiday, in one of the deadliest episodes of the war between Israel and Palestinian militants that has raged for nearly a week.
Israel said a senior Hamas commander was the target of the Friday attack. Graphic video footage showed Palestinian medics stepping over rubble that included children’s toys and a Monopoly board game as they evacuated the bloodied victims from the pulverized building. The only survivor was an infant boy.
“They weren’t holding weapons, they weren’t firing rockets and they weren’t harming anyone,” said the boy’s father, Mohammed al-Hadidi, who was later seen on television holding his son’s small hand in a hospital.
“Oh, love,” he said to his son.
Civilians are paying an especially high price in the latest bout of violence between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, raising urgent questions about how the laws of war apply to the conflagration: which military actions are legal, what war crimes are being committed and who, if anyone, will ever be held to account.
[…] Hamas has fired more than 3,000 rockets toward Israeli cities and towns, a clear war crime. And Israel, although it says it takes measures to avoid civilian casualties, has subjected Gaza to such an intense bombardment, killing families and flattening buildings, that it probably constitutes a disproportionate use of force — also a crime.
[…] some facts are clear. Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages on Gaza, an impoverished and densely packed enclave of two million people, killed at least 192 Palestinians, including 92 women and children, between last Monday and Sunday evening, producing stark images of destruction that have reverberated around the world.
In the other direction, Hamas missiles have rained over Israeli towns and cities, sowing fear and killing at least 10 Israeli residents, including two children — a greater toll than during the last war, in 2014, which lasted more than seven weeks. The latest victim, a 55-year-old man, died on Saturday after missile shrapnel slammed through the door of his home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. One Israeli soldier has also been killed.
With neither side apparently capable of outright victory, the conflict seems locked in an endless loop of bloodshed. So the focus on civilian casualties has become more intense than ever as a proxy for the moral high ground in a seemingly unwinnable war. […]
The leaders of the Insurrection Caucus (aka House Republicans) appeared on Sean Hannity’s Kavalcade of Kraven Klowns last night after ousting Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position. Aware that the Eye of Sour-Don was likely watching, Obergruppenführer Kevin McCarthy made certain to [pander to Trump]
[…] And since the conventional wisdom in Bizarro World these days is that Joe Biden’s health status ranges anywhere from long-dead to moderately comatose, Hannity figured he’d tee House Minority Leader McCarthy up, with a leading question about Biden’s health and mental acuity. [video is available at the link]
[…]
HANNITY: “What observations did you see as it relates to the president? Did he seem engaged, did he have a high level of energy? You’ve been around Donald Trump, you’ve been around Joe Biden. What’s the difference between the two men?”
MCCARTHY: “It was the first time I saw Joe Biden as president since he’s been … I saw him on the inaugural and the State of the Union night. He was with it and he was engaging and he was giving me numbers and he was talking, but at no time, having known Joe Biden for quite some time, does he have the energy of Donald Trump. We both know it. Donald Trump didn’t need to sleep five hours a night, and he would be engaged. If you called Donald Trump, he’d get on the phone before staff would. He’d … bring other people down.”
Okay, first of all, McCarthy’s and Elise Stefanik’s smiles are haunting me, because I know I’ve seen them somewhere before. They’re just … so … famil …
Oh, yeah: [video of Kim Jong-un receiving supposedly "joyous welcome" from children.]
Secondly, maybe someone who thought it was a good idea to brag about a test they only administer to people showing early signs of dementia should think about getting a full eight hours of sleep a night. Just a thought.
Finally, Hannity’s deeply held hope that Joe Biden will eventually be found at 4 a.m. on a random Wednesday playing with a dead raccoon on Abe’s lap at the Lincoln Memorial prompts him to ask absurd leading questions about our president. And since anyone can see Biden is clearly not senile or lacking in focus or energy, McCarthy couldn’t even confect a decent lie about it. But he did the next best thing: Pretend that Donald Trump, who at this point is 90% chicken skin and Adderall by volume, has far more vigor than Biden could ever hope to muster. (Erm, just because someone screams for a Diet Coke 22 times a day doesn’t mean they have “energy,” and it certainly doesn’t show that said energy is being put to productive use.)
I mean, all you have to do is read this New York Times exposé about Joe Biden working hard, demanding his people work hard, and taking his job seriously—a piece they somehow decided to preface with the headline “Beneath Joe Biden’s Folksy Demeanor, a Short Fuse and an Obsession With Details”—to know that the narrative Hannity and his ilk are trying to get us all to swallow is just a big, awkward horse pill of a placebo. […]
But several people familiar with the president’s decision-making style said Mr. Biden was quick to cut off conversations. Three people who work closely with him said he even occasionally hangs up the phone on someone who he thinks is wasting his time. Most described Mr. Biden as having little patience for advisers who cannot field his many questions.
“You become so hyperprepared,” said Dylan Loewe, a former speechwriter for Mr. Biden. “‘I’ve got to answer every conceivable question he can come up with.’”
Oh, gawd, WHAT A FUCKING NIGHTMARE! A president who strives to understand every facet of his job and demands his people come “hyperprepared”! Does that mean we’re done getting quack medical advice from our POTUS?
Of course, I read the Times’ entire “Biden is too deliberative” hit piece, but I could have just read this part and slept easy last night:
One item not on the daily agenda?
Watching hours of cable news. The television that Mr. Trump installed in the dining room next to the Oval Office is still there, but aides say it is rarely on during the day.
[…] The Three Spooges also did their best to convince Hannity’s audience that the country is falling apart, now that Trump isn’t fucking up the pandemic response anymore. The fact that we’re coming out of yet another ruinous Republican recession—made far worse by Trump’s small-to-no-government philosophy—appears lost on them. Instead, they chose to focus on a temporary blip in inflation, likely caused by pandemic-related supply bottlenecks, and a slowdown in oil pipeline shipments precipitated by a one-off ransomware attack that’s already been handled. Somehow, they forgot to mention the massive SolarWinds hack that occurred under Trump’s watch.
They also claimed that the CDC’s change in mask guidance was just a ploy to distract the country from all these “disasters.” […]
Full video is available at the link. Creepy smiles included. Hannity begins the interview by declaring that he “doesn’t care about Liz Cheney.”
[…]
A hidden pandemic market advertising fake vaccine and test certificates for as little as £25 [c.35$] has grown exponentially, with more than 1,200 vendors in the UK and worldwide, researchers have found.
After UK ministers announced the return of overseas holidays — with travellers required to show proof of negative tests, and vaccine passports on the horizon — the Guardian has also learned that anti-vaxxers and people arriving in Britain from poorer nations make up a significant number of those buying forged pandemic paraphernalia.
Last month MPs were told that more than 100 people a day are trying to enter the UK using fake Covid test certificates as individuals attempt to get around current entry requirements, which include tests before and after travel and can cost individuals hundreds of pounds.
Israel-based researchers found evidence of forgeries of vaccine cards by the NHS and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) alongside fake test certificates, all available for sale on the dark web and through easy-to-access platforms […]
[… Liad] Mizrachi, senior researcher at [cybersecurity firm] Check Point, said anti-vaxxers […] are among those buying the forged certificates.
“We have all the people against vaccinations,” he said. “These two groups are combining perfectly together. I don’t want to get vaccinated, {and} someone says: ‘Hey, you can get your vaccine certificate here.’ It’s significant.”
[…]
In October last year, Vanunu said they started to see vendors offering vaccines — mostly the Chinese-made Sinovac and Russian-produced Sputnik jabs. Later in the year, they saw Pfizer and Moderna jabs being offered, though the researchers have questioned the authenticity of the products due to the logistical challenges in storing the Pfizer and Moderna jabs at low temperatures.
[Head of product vulnerability research at Check Point, Oded] Vanunu and Mizrachi tried to buy a vaccine from one vendor and paid using cryptocurrency, but the product never surfaced and the vendor vanished. “As at March, vendors were supplying from all the countries in Europe — Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden … {plus} Mexico, Australia,” Vanunu said. “After vaccinations, the next step was the certificates and negative tests.”
The researchers showed the Guardian an easy method for purchasing the NHS vaccine cards issued to individuals who have received their jab. Save for a few minor punctuation errors, the cards bear a strong likeness to the genuine article. Similarly, the US equivalent at the CDC is widely available.
[…]
Mizrachi showed an open-web platform for purchasing so-called prank negative Covid tests for £25. The site showcases repeated disclaimers warning that the certificates are not to be used formally — but they bear an uncanny similarity to the real thing.
India and Russia show what happens when authoritarians deny reality. The Trumpists would have the US follow suit
A hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, is being charged under the country’s National Security Act for sounding the alarm over a lack of oxygen that resulted in Covid deaths. The hospital’s owner and manager says police have accused him of false scaremongering, after he stated publicly that four patients died on a single day when oxygen ran out.
Since Covid-19 exploded in India, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, seems to be trying to the control the news more than the outbreak. On Wednesday, India recorded nearly 363,000 cases and 4,120 deaths, about 30% of worldwide deaths that day. But experts say India is vastly understating the true number. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, estimates at least 25,000 Indians are dying from Covid each day.
The horror has been worsened by shortages of oxygen and hospital beds. Yet Modi and his government don’t want the public to get the true story.
One big lesson from the Covid crisis: lying makes it worse.
Vladimir Putin is busily denying the truth about Covid in Russia. Demographer Alexei Raksha, who worked at Russia’s official statistical agency, Rosstat, but says he was forced to leave last summer for telling the truth about Covid, claims daily data has been “smoothed, rounded, lowered” to look better. Like many experts, he uses excess mortality […] as the best indicator.
“If Russia stops at 500,000 excess deaths, that will be a good scenario,” he calculates.
Russia was first out of the gate with a vaccine but has fallen woefully behind on vaccinations. Recent polling puts the share of Russians who don’t want to be vaccinated at 60% to 70%. That’s because Putin and other officials have focused less on vaccinating the public than on claiming success in containing Covid.
The US is suffering a similar problem — the legacy of another strongman, Donald Trump. Although more than half of US adults have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, more than 40% of Republicans have consistently told pollsters they won’t get vaccinated. Their recalcitrance is threatening efforts to achieve “herd immunity” and prevent the virus’s spread.
[… faux news and other lie machines…]
Trump’s Republican party is coming to resemble other authoritarian regimes around the world in other respects as well — purging truth tellers and trucking in lies, misinformation and propaganda harmful to the public.
This week the GOP stripped Liz Cheney of her leadership position for telling the truth about the 2020 election. At last week’s congressional hearing about the 6 January attack on the Capitol, one Republican, Andrew Clyde, even denied it happened.
There was no insurrection, he said. To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie … you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.
Obviously. Normal tourists breach fencing, smash in doors, try to crush police officers in doors, invade private offices, etc., etc., etc.
Biden says he plans to call a summit of democratic governments to contain the rise of authoritarianism around the world. I hope he talks about its rise in the US too — and the huge toll it’s already taken on Americans.
Indeed. Where are the taco trucks on every corner ?
blfsays
From the Gruniad’s most-recent(?) pandemic live blog, Dr Fauci being his usual reasonable self and making excellent points:
Dr Anthony Fauci has said that “the undeniable effects of racism” have led to severe health disparities that especially impacted African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Covid-19 has shown a bright light on our own society’s failings,” Fauci said during a graduation ceremony for Emory University, AP reports.
Fauci highlighted that many members of minority groups work in essential jobs where they might be exposed to the coronavirus. He also said they are more likely to become infected if exposed because of medical conditions such as hypertension, chronic lung disease, diabetes or obesity.
“Now, very few of these comorbidities have racial determinants,” Fauci said. “Almost all relate to the social determinants of health dating back to disadvantageous conditions that some people of colour find themselves in from birth regarding the availability of an adequate diet, access to health care and the undeniable effects of racism in our society.”
Nothing surprising or unknown there — just very well put.
Covid-19 lockdowns led to an increase in anti-LGBT violence within families in France in 2020, according to associations supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. These groups say they have been under increased pressure to urgently find lodgings for young people thrown out on the street because of their sexual orientation.
“There have never been so many domestic violence situations to deal with,” said Matthieu Gatipon-Bachette, spokesman for the Inter-LGBT association, speaking with FRANCE 24 ahead of the the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia on May 17.
“For some young people, their coming-out to their family has gone very badly,” he added. “They usually have a support network in their school and from their friends. But, with the various lockdowns, they found themselves alone and some were confronted with violent reactions when their sexual orientation came out. Others were even thrown out of their homes by their families.”
Gatipon-Bachette, director of an accommodation centre for LGBT people in Metz, has received an unprecedented number of requests from young people living in outlying and suburban areas. Clémence Zamora-Cruz, a member of the association Au-delà du genre, which supports young transsexuals, reported a similar experience to FRANCE 24 […]
WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court took up a case Monday that will determine the constitutionality of Mississippi’s extreme ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy when fetus viability outside the womb is medically impossible.
Likely to go up for arguments in the fall, the case could allow the staunchly conservative court now to dramatically alter nearly 50 years of abortion rights jurisprudence….
Mississippi banned abortions at 15 weeks in 2018, but the law has been held up by court challenges. The state has only one abortion clinic, where pregnancies can be terminated up to 16 weeks. With evidence from the clinic that a fetus cannot survive outside the womb at 15 weeks, the Fifth Circuit called the central argument of the case irrefutable. It said the state “conceded that it had identified no medical evidence that a fetus would be viable at 15 weeks.”
Mississippi would allow exceptions to the 15-week ban in cases of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality. Doctors found in violation of the ban meanwhile would face mandatory suspension or revocation of their medical license. Mississippi is one of several states that separately has attempted to ban most abortions as early as six weeks — when a fetal heartbeat may be detected.
tomhsays
Re: #473
The Court will consider the single question, “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”
Text quoted by blf @469: “Narendra Modi seems to be trying to the control the news more than the outbreak […]” Yep. So very Trump-like. So like every authoritarian. Bad leadership. Incompetent governance. More people die of COVID.
Follow-up to tomh @473:
[…] Pete Williams, NBC News’ justice correspondent, appeared on MSNBC this morning and explained that the high court’s announcement is “a very big deal,” and it’s worth appreciating why.
Several Republican-led state governments started advancing new abortion bans after Donald Trump and GOP senators rushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court last fall. But Mississippi Republicans took related steps even earlier, approving the “Gestational Age Act” in 2018, banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
What followed was predictable. The Center for Reproductive Rights filed suit, challenging the constitutionality of the state measure; a district court agreed and struck down Mississippi’s policy; and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision.
For a while, the Supreme Court let Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization linger, right up until this morning. It will be the first key showdown on reproductive rights since conservatives gained a dominant, six-member majority on the nine-member Supreme Court.
Note, the Supreme Court actually struck down abortion restrictions in Louisiana last year, in a 5-4 ruling in which Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the more progressive justices. But since then, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has passed and been replaced by Barrett, who hasn’t been shy in her condemnations of abortion.
All of which suggests the Roe v. Wade precedent is facing a serious threat.
As a rule, it’s best not to engage in too much guesswork when assessing justices’ motivations, but I’ll note for context that the Supreme Court often takes up cases when there are divisions among appellate courts on the same issue. That doesn’t apply here: at least four justices agreed to take up this case because they wanted to, which probably shouldn’t ease the minds of reproductive rights advocates.
There’s also a political context to all of this. The justices will hear the case in the fall and issue a ruling next year, probably in the early summer. Or put another way, we’re faced with the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade — in part or in its entirety — just in time for the 2022 midterm elections, which will also coincide with a major new Second Amendment ruling. […]
What happens if/when Republicans become the dog that catches the car? In an election year?
Bad news for Georgia. Bad news for education in Georgia.
Sonny Perdue, Donald Trump’s loyal-till-the-end agriculture secretary, could use a new job. Georgia’s sprawling public university system needs a new chancellor. The University System of Georgia’s 19-member Board of Regents may be on the verge of resolving these two situations in one go: Perdue is reportedly a contender for the top post.
But he won’t be appointed without a fight. Students and faculty are organizing to oppose him, for reasons including Perdue’s utter lack of experience in university management, his proud embrace of climate change denial, and his record of using his power to tamp down independent research by public scientists.
“Sonny Perdue might be the least distinguished, least prepared potential university leader I’ve seen in my life,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and a longtime observer of university governance politics.
The chancellorship—which as of 2020 carried an annual salary of $523,949—would certainly be a reputation-laundering perch for a career politician and agribusinessman tainted by his association with a disgraced former president. The University System of Georgia is one of the state’s most vital public assets. It enrolls more than 340,000 students and houses 26 schools, including major research institutions the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech and three historically Black universities: Savannah State, Albany State, and Fort Valley State. The chancellor acts as the system’s executive director and its chief lobbyist, representing the interests of these schools and their students before the legislature and the public. […]
“Each governor basically chooses their own chancellor, even though the board is [nominally] independent,” Boedy [Matthew Boedy, an associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia] says. “It’s well known that the governor will get who he wants, whether he proposes a name or whether his allies propose a name.” [The governor appoints the regents responsible for hiring the chancellor.] […]
Much more at the link, including a summary of Sonny Perdue’s long and infamous record of bad management: pushing policies that harm low-income people; allowing poultry companies to speed up their slaughterhouse kill lines, making coronavirus precautions impossible and therefore spreading coronavirus; as a past governor of Georgia, Perdue enacted severe voter-suppression laws. There’s more, but I’ll add just one more: Perdue regularly waxes nostalgic for the Confederacy.
It is not immediately clear which countries will receive the doses.
The Biden administration is expected to ship doses from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson overseas this summer, marking the first time the administration is sharing vaccines approved for use in the U.S.
Biden will also reportedly announce coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients will lead the effort and will work with the National Security Council and other agencies.
Last month, the administration announced it would donate 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to other countries. […]
Wonkette: “Lin Wood Pretty Sure Election He Personally Lost Part Of Trump’s Mysterious 4D Chess Plan”
This weekend, attorney Lin Wood lost his bid to head up South Carolina’s Republican party to incumbent Drew McKissick, who will now be serving his third term as the party’s chair. Adding some salt to the wound was the fact that Wood’s hero and the man he basically torched his life for, Donald Trump, actually endorsed McKissick on three separate occasions.
Or so you would think.
But in a post on Telegram, Wood — who previously questioned the veracity of reports that Trump had endorsed McKissick — explained that he understands that Trump, in his great genius, knows exactly what he is doing here and accepts that this is all part of his plan.
President Trump is a genius. He plays chess at a level we will never fully understand.
I was honored by his description of me as a “strong and talented” opponent. Upon further reflection, I understand his endorsement of my opponent, Drew McKissick.
My faith in President Trump has never wavered. He is doing God’s will for our country.
I support President Trump 100%.
P.S. The SCGOP is a swamp. In time, the RINOS will be defeated. Watch it happen.
Oh, for sure. It all makes sense now. His loss was all part of Trump’s plan and had nothing to do with the fact that he was going around saying crazy shit like that Trump is still president, and that if the military has to nuke someone, he’s the one they’ll go to for the nuclear codes […]
Pretending that the election was “stolen” is one thing, but claiming Trump is literally still the president, as Wood has been doing, is another. It’s a bridge somewhat too far.
Wood is, of course, not the only one who believes this is the case. QAnon adherents on the Great Awakening message board also believe that the decision to endorse McKissick was “tactical and strategic” on Trump’s part.
You can tell a newbie/shill by the way they jump to conclusions about Trump. The veterans know better than to bet against him. Like discussed here yesterday I bet McKissick is going down at some point and Trump will have the perfect plausible deniability when people accuse him of orchestrating any military tribunal situation. NEUTRALITY ACHIEVED.
Also hilarious how liberals think we look at Trump like a God yet we don’t get vaccinated and voted for the guy ribbing against his endorsement
[…] These people do look at Trump as a God and follow him like a religion, and they do it exactly the way people follow every other religion on earth. By doing whatever they want and then claiming it is his will. We are watching this happen in real time.
Another user suggested this “plan” probably has something to do with Trump wanting McKissick to be known to people when he is arrested for his crimes.
Theoretical thought: if McKissick lost, and then something bad happened to him, then there would be no media coverage. On the other hand, if he won, and was arrested for say pedophilia, that probably would be amplified even more now that he’s a candidate of the republican party. Maybe this strategy is to ensure darkness is in the spotlight when it is revealed.
Well, that does seem plausible. Of course, if it doesn’t turn out to be the case, it’s not as if these people will suddenly believe that Trump is not a God-like super-genius playing 4D chess with South Carolina Republican Party elections. No, it will just be part of some other plan that they are not yet wise enough to know, but which will surely come to pass at some point in their lifetimes.
Guo Wengui, living in self-exile in New York City, is at the center of a digital web pushing election and covid falsehoods, according to Graphika research.
A sprawling online network tied to Chinese businessman Guo Wengui has become a potent platform for disinformation in the United States, attacking the safety of coronavirus vaccines, promoting false election-fraud claims and spreading baseless QAnon conspiracies, according to research published Monday by the network analysis company Graphika.
The report, provided in advance to The Washington Post, details a network that Graphika says amplifies the views of Guo, a Chinese real estate developer whose association with former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon became a focus of news coverage last year after Bannon was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht on federal fraud charges.
Graphika said the network includes media websites such as GTV, for which Guo last year publicly said he was raising funds, along with thousands of social media accounts that Graphika said amplify content in a coordinated fashion. The network also includes more than a dozen local-action groups over which Guo has publicly claimed an oversight role, Graphika found.
[…] the network’s fluency in American politics and ability to make use of other languages beyond English suggest it could remain a powerful asset.
“These groups don’t just lie dormant after an election, they shift focus and morph topics to maintain their relevance so they can be activated to achieve the goals of those who control them,” she [Lisa Kaplan, Alethea Group’s founder and chief executive] said.
Graphika, which has conducted research on Internet use for a wide variety of organizations including Facebook and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called Guo the “linchpin” of the network, though it stopped short of detailing his exact role. “He is the leading personality, appears to define goals and messaging, and is positioned as a wise leader who should be admired and followed,” the report says.
[…] Guo calls vaccines against the coronavirus “fake” and “poison.”
Images disseminated by the network on Instagram have portrayed coronavirus vaccines as grenades, bullets and handguns. Another meme that circulated on Instagram in January warned, “Don’t trust the vaccine, the medical industry is completely controlled by a special interest.”
[…] Graphika said its analysis found thousands of accounts apparently working together across social media platforms in a well-coordinated effort to push selected themes in a manner that amplifies their reach. Many of the accounts “appear to be run by real people but solely amplify Guo-related content,” Graphika said.
[…] Dozens of corporate entities, media organizations and activist groups participate in the network, Graphika said, including Saraca Media Group Inc., a Delaware-registered company that is listed as the entity offering the GNews and GTV apps in Apple’s App Store. Saraca also owns Guo Media, an entity that agreed to pay Bannon an annual fee of $1 million for consulting services, according to a 2018 contract published by Axios.
[…] The “ants” [workers] appear to coordinate their work on chat apps, including Discord, WhatsApp and Telegram, and to post content across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites, Graphika said. The researchers found identical posts appearing almost simultaneously from different Facebook accounts, a sign of tight coordination. […]
content across the network embraced President Donald Trump’s false election-fraud claims and the related #StoptheSteal hashtag, and promoted Trump’s plans for a Jan. 6 rally in Washington, Graphika found. During the rally and subsequent storming of the U.S. Capitol, GTV featured live streams of the action, which Guo supporters promoted on social media, along with material calling members of the mob “patriots.”
[…] the network has amplified the unsubstantiated claim that China purposely manufactured the virus as a bioweapon […] The video included images of the AstraZeneca vaccine and clips of Guo saying “How many people will die? The vaccine is a real poison,” and “The vaccines are all fake. … There is no vaccine, never ever. Because it is the bioweapon.” […]
The network has entire subset of workers who post social media content in Spanish.
Here’s a link to the May 17 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
The Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines should remain highly effective against two coronavirus variants first identified in India, according to research carried out by US scientists.
The lab-based study was carried out by the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Langone Center and is considered preliminary because it has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. “What we found is that the vaccine’s antibodies are a little bit weaker against the variants, but not enough that we think it would have much of an effect on the protective ability of the vaccines,” senior author Nathaniel Landau told AFP.
Two hundred Palestinians, including 59 children, have been killed during a week of attacks in Gaza, health officials in the territory have said, as Benjamin Netanyahu signalled Israel’s bombardment would rage on despite mounting global pressure to stop the bloodshed.
Early on Monday, warplanes launched more heavy airstrikes on Gaza City, rocking apartment blocks and sending fireballs into the air. Israel said it had “struck 110 targets” overnight, including in a densely-populated neighbourhood.
It was unclear how many people might have been killed. During the past week, Israeli attacks have destroyed a health clinic, hit the home of an aid worker, killed two doctors, destroyed high-rise residential towers, blown up a mattress factory and flattened the offices of international news organisations.
…
Unverified Israeli media reports have suggested the country rejected several proposals to stop the bombing, which the government claims is to degrade Hamas’ capabilities.
Yoav Limor, a commentator for the Israel Hayom newspaper, wrote last week that Israel was “playing for time” until diplomatic pressure became overwhelming. He wrote: “Israel said no to all the mediation proposals to reach a ceasefire, but in practice, it wants to increase the operation’s achievements before the whistle sounds.”
An international push for a unified call to end the hostilities has been stymied by Israel’s top ally, the United States, which has blocked UN security council statements demanding a ceasefire….
As “Operation Guardian of the Walls” [oh, FFS] enters its eighth day, a group of 29 Senate Democrats issued a short statement on Sunday, calling for a ceasefire agreement.
“To prevent any further loss of civilian life and to prevent further escalation of conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories, we urge an immediate ceasefire,” the senators said in a joint statement. Jon Ossoff, the first Jewish senator from Georgia, led the letter.
Among the senators who signed the letters are Sen. Cory Booker from New Jersey, Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts.
On Monday, eight House Democrats joined their Senate colleagues and issued another statement urging Biden to reach a ceasefire. Representatives David Price (D-NC), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), and Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) are among those who signed the statement. “The recent outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza has led to hundreds of casualties. Innocent lives have been lost,” they wrote. “It is of the utmost necessity that an immediate ceasefire be put in place and further bloodshed averted. The alternative is an unfolding human tragedy of unimaginable dimensions.”
“Long-deferred issues demand attention, but a ceasefire comes first. We urge the Biden administration, at the highest levels, to boldly lead and take decisive action,” they added….
Netanyahu’s representatives are publicly admitting that they’re not interested in a ceasefire. They are claiming that they’ve sent evidence to the White House that the building housing media that they destroyed was a valid military target, but the head of the AP says he’s seen no evidence showing that, and Jen Psaki was asked about it in today’s press conference and didn’t confirm it (just basically said she didn’t have anything to say about it). The Committee to Protect Journalists is calling for the evidence, if it exists, to be publicly released.
Some telling details related to Matt Gaetz’s “wingman.”
[…] As Rachel emphasized on Friday night’s show, the good news for Gaetz is that his former pal may have a credibility problem. After all, the guy just pleaded guilty to several felonies, including sex trafficking of a minor.
But prosecutors have already gone out of their way to highlight the safeguards in the plea agreement to ensure that Greenberg is entirely forthright — the punishments for deceptions would be severe — and as the Washington Post’s Michael Schmidt explained on the show on Friday night, prosecutors aren’t relying exclusively on Greenberg for information. […]
An update on voter-restriction laws being passed by various states:
State-Level Republicans Scramble To Make Voting Harder As The Clocks Runs Out
This year has featured a historic surge in proposals to restrict ballot access, and several states have made those proposals law. But elsewhere, GOP lawmakers are running out of time to overhaul their election systems.
Missouri closed its legislative session without passing proposed voter restrictions including a new ID requirements.
An Idaho bill that would have outlawed third party ballot collection also failed to get out of the legislature before its session ended.
An elections overhaul bill in South Carolina that would have banned drop boxes and limited voting sites did not advance before the session wrapped up this week.
But, but, but…Some of these states will have another chance to change their voting laws before the 2022 elections. South Carolina’s lawmakers will meet again before then, while Republicans in Missouri are calling for a special session so they can take up their election bills. And then there are the Republicans statehouses that are still racing ahead of their deadlines to pass out restrictive bills. With two weeks left for its regular session, Texas is now in a mad dash to get its package of restrictive measures over the finish line, and other states have made significant moves on ballot access in recent days as their legislative clocks ticked down.
Options Are Dwindling For How Dems In Congress Can Push Back
Passing a sprawling democracy overhaul legislation — in a bill known as the “For the People Act” or S1 — was always going to an uphill battle. But it looks likes the legislative push is close to running out of steam. The bill got its committee mark-up last week, but with Republicans united against it, it has no chancing of passing out of the full chamber.
What happens after it fails on the Senate floor is the question Democrats don’t have a good answer to right now. It was always unlikely that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) would vote in favor of weakening the filibuster to ram the bill through. Now Manchin is opposing the legislation on the merits as well, as he insists that any election overhaul should have bipartisan buy-in.
“Some people look at a donut and just see the hole,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) last week, when asked what the path forward was for the bill.”I guess that’s the media’s position on this.”
Manchin wants to focus on a VRA fix instead, but that presents its own challenges. Democrats wanted to restore the Voting Rights Act — which was gutted by the Supreme Court — in addition to passing S1, which would set national standards for ballot access amid a slew of ethical, campaign finance and redistricting reforms. In theory, fixing the VRA could get some Republican support. But getting 10 Senate Republicans to do anything in favor of voting rights is still an extremely heavy lift. Within a day of Manchin spelling out what he thought could be a bipartisan approach to boosting the VRA, a top Republican was going out of his way to criticize the idea.
Democrats might be left with just individual legal challenges to each state’s laws. And there’s no shortage of those. But this whack-a-mole approach will be costly — and risky — for Democrats and voting rights activists.
Other things you need to know about state election legislation advancing across the country:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a package of voter restrictions last Monday — and gave Fox and Friends the exclusive on the bill signing.
Arizona Republicans finally passed their measure to essentially end the state’s permanent mail voting list, after previous efforts failed in the legislature.
Oklahoma lawmakers added a day of early voting for even-year general elections, though it still has one of the shortest early voting periods in the country.
The author and journalist Michael Lewis has made a career of writing about people who see things coming that most of us don’t. His book The Big Short, which was turned into an Oscar-winning film, followed a group of investors who predicted the collapse of the American housing market in 2007.
He tells Rachel Humphreys about the group of individuals who have become the focus of his new book, The Premonition. As Covid case numbers began to rise at an alarming rate across America, Lewis discovered a group of medics and scientists who were trying to alert the US government to the dangers of its inaction.
The vastly wealthy Sackler family are known as respectable patrons of the arts, but the story behind their philanthropy is a dark one. The Sacklers made their billions from OxyContin or “Hillbilly Heroin”, the $35m prescription drug that precipitated America’s opioid crisis – an epidemic that has killed half a million people.
Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, tells Ros Taylor about the corruption and influence that turned a deadly addictive drug into a medical staple, how the Sacklers insulated themselves from what they’d done, and how racism in medicine – surprisingly – spared many African Americans while devastating poor whites.
If the federal investigation into Matt Gaetz does indeed end up spelling the MAGA congressman’s downfall, it’ll be partly because of a group of wannabe Instagram influencers.On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, hosts Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng welcome fellow Beast reporters Jose Pagliery and Roger Sollenberger, the duo that’s been breaking story after story on the Gaetz scandal in recent weeks. The pair reveal new details on the Gaetz saga that haven’t been publicly released before, including additional passages from the confession letter secretly written by disgraced Gaetz wingman Joel Greenberg, and sent to Trump associate and longtime GOP ratfucker Roger Stone.
And the most recent episode of Maintenance Phase, “The Wellness to QAnon Pipeline”:
Special guest Mike Rothschild tells us how the road to wellness can be an on-ramp to a conspiracy theory. Along the way we debunk oil pulling, explore Instagram aesthetics and bemoan anti-vaxx argumentation tactics . Mike gets the date of the January 6th insurrection wrong and he is sorry.
As the Trump gravy train, already on fire, with some clowns jumping from the boxcars, derailed from 2020 into 2021, the numerous queries into his corrupt administration continue to move forward. Some of Trump’s biggest public liars and supporters have earned deliberately methodical public investigations, and are facing down serious charges. One of the long-standing corrupt dirtbags being justifiably looked into is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. At the end of April, federal agents raided Giuliani’s Park Avenue apartment in New York, and reportedly took loads of potential evidence of dirty dealings into custody to be looked through. The general understanding of the investigation is that prosecutors are interested in concluding whether or not Giuliani acted legally and with the country’s best interests in mind during his dubious time spent as some kind of liaison with the Ukraine, trying to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
At the time, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen was interviewed by news outlets to give his thoughts on the Giuliani situation. Cohen, now serving a three-year house arrest sentence for his part in Trump’s operation, already experienced this process—as well as the cold shoulder the big orange one gives you when you no longer serve his needs. Say what you will about Michael Cohen, in a den of thieves, he’s shown himself, through his seemingly powerless contriteness, to be somehow the least offensive. He’s also been prescient in his statements about what the next life experiences of people like Giuliani will be. Two new reports support Cohen’s statements to CNN at the time that Trump would ditch Giuliani before you could say [the reader can insert their word here].
The Daily Beast reports that Trump’s silence on Rudy Giuliani’s plight is stressing the Giuliani camp out—bigly. […] Giuliani’s tiny group of miscreants have hoped the twice impeached former Mar-a-Lago golf guy would do anything in support of his former leaky-haired attack dog. But so far, every chance that the Donald has had to show that support has been met with the cold shoulder of sociopathy. […]
There is some speculation that Giuliani’s blundering and erratic behavior in the Ukraine is seen as the reason Donald Trump was impeached in the first place, and Trump—a pathological narcissist by trade—still blames Rudy.
As Michael Cohen told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, ”[Trump] was afraid even when they raided my home and my law office, because Donald Trump cares about only one person, and I say it all the time. He cares about only himself. So, he doesn’t care that they raided Rudy’s home. He doesn’t care that they raided Rudy’s law office. ‘What is it going to do to affect me?’ Is all that he’s thinking right now. ‘What did stupid Rudy do? What did stupid Rudy write? What sort of text messages or emails, what sort of stupid things was Rudy up to that’s now going to implicate me?’”
[…] These source leaks to the press come at the same time that Giuliani lawyers have reportedly sent their first response to the FBI raid on April 28. “Unfortunately for Giuliani, and even more unfortunately for the attorney-client privilege and executive deliberation privilege, and the public’s perception that those privileges are real, the SDNY simply chose to treat a distinguished lawyer as if he was the head of a drug cartel or a terrorist, in order to create maximum prejudicial coverage of both Giuliani, and his most well-known client—the former President of the United States.”
[…] The evidence collected seems to be the whole ballgame here. It surely was in the case of Michael Cohen who has said that Giuliani is erratic and sloppy. ”Who knows what Rudy was involved with? What we’re going to find out is there are text messages, there are emails, there are different types of communication apps that the FBI knows how to re-establish. Even if Rudy, who I don’t think is technological, tried to, you know, tried to delete or what have you.“
[…] Without the power of blanket pardoning, Donald Trump is unlikely to be much of a help if evidence exists showing Giuliani broke laws. If that evidence, seized from the many digital and physical files collected by federal agents, does exist, the only way Donald Trump might help Rudy Giuliani is in being the bigger fish. In that case, Cohen’s statement about Giuliani’s loyalty would be one of the final stories in this drama: “Do I think Rudy will give up Donald in a heartbeat? Absolutely.”
The Covid variant first detected in India is set to be become the dominant strain in the UK within days, experts have said, with the government and health teams struggling to contain cases which have risen by more than 75% since Thursday.
With the rapid spread of the more transmissible B.1.617.2 variant threatening to reverse moves to ease lockdown, the government faced intense pressure to more fully explain the delay in adding India to the so-called red list of countries.
The prime minister Boris Johnson is now set to delay plans to announce an end to social-distancing rules, postponing the conclusion of a review expected by the end of the month, casting significant doubt over the wider plan to relax most lockdown rules on 21 June….
Wonkette: “Liz Cheney’s ‘Revolution’ Will Be Televised”
Liz Cheney was ousted from her GOP House leadership position last week, and it appears her revolution to “save” the GOP is off to a rough start. She was all over the Sunday shows, though.
There were moments when it appeared Cheney may not realize the extent of the rot in conservatism. On “Fox News Sunday,” Chris Wallace set up the interview asking Cheney to respond to GOP Rep. Jim Banks’s ridiculous statement about Cheney being a “distraction” from the very important hard work the GOP is doing opposing Joe Biden and trying to win back Congress in 2022. Cheney explained why she could not ignore the truth and just play along with Donald Trump’s fantasies, so Wallace asked again with slightly different words:
WALLACE: But I guess the — the argument is, just as a practical politician, and you are a practical politician, what about the millions — tens of millions of Republican voters who still support Donald Trump? Why alienate them? I guess the question is, you know, just ignore them, just don’t take the bait and focus on your issues. He’s — he’s a — living in Mar-a-Lago.
CHENEY: Well, you know, I wish we could do that, Chris, but, unfortunately, as I’ve said over the course of the last several weeks, former President Trump continues to be a real danger. What he’s doing and what he’s saying, his claims, his refusal to accept decisions by the courts, his claims continued as recently as yesterday that somehow this election was stolen. You know, what he’s doing is he’s causing people to believe that they can’t count on our electoral process to actually convey the will of the people. […] Those millions of people that you mentioned who supported the president have been misled. They’ve been betrayed. And certainly as we see his continued action to attack our democracy, his continued refusal to accept the results of the last election, you see that ongoing danger.
But Trump is not just “living in Mar-a-Lago” enjoying his retirement, Wallace. He’s actively STILL encouraging the rhetoric that led to the January 6 attack. He’s set up a quasi-shadow presidency blog while being encouraged by the Republican Party, releasing “official” declarations as if he still was the President.
If telling the truth or acknowledging reality alienates Republicans, then what is the point of taking the Republican Party seriously? They should be looked at the same way we look at Libertarian Party “debates” or Dan Crenshaw’s faux-action movie political ads. [Images available at the link.]
Speaking of Dan Cringeshaw, he appeared on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” where he encountered a rare anomaly: Chuck Todd pushback. When Crenshaw tried the same Jim Banks “distraction” talking point and tried to blame the press for it, Todd actually called him out. […]
Before we overpraise Chuck Todd or make him feel like he actually did his job, we should note his pushback was more being incredulous that Crenshaw would call him or the press “liberal.” When Todd is not busy trying “both sides” everything, he’s busy insuring the GOP has his full megaphone. […]
This is not unique to NBC News, of course. On ABC’s “This Week,” Martha Raddatz wasted time and money flying to Wyoming to air out the grievances of Trump supporters. […]
Because when Trump was elected, we needed to understand his voters’ views and why they elected him. Now that Biden has been elected, we need to understand Trump voters’ views and why they are cool with insurrections to undo democracy. Seems fair, no? […]
So while we can respect Liz Cheney for not going along with insurrections or supporting Trump’s Big Lie, because it at least shows there is a red line left for a handful of Republicans, we have to understand that no amount of reason will make a lot of “sane” GOP voters suddenly vote for Democrats.
Hell, even Cheney made that clear to Jonathan Karl on a pre-taped interview on “This Week”:
KARL: Did you vote for Donald Trump in 2020?
CHENEY: I did.
KARL: Do you regret that vote?
CHENEY: Look, I think that the —
KARL: I mean, how could you not regret that vote, given what’s happened?
CHENEY: Yeah. I mean, look, I was never going to support Joe Biden, and I do regret the vote.
[…] They will not become Democrats no matter how much you “understand” or try to “sway them.” We do need an opposition party, just not a crazy one encouraged by Trump or a befuddled press platforming it.
Weeks after the 2020 presidential election, former Attorney General Bill Barr’s Department of Justice pursued a secret grand jury subpoena seeking to unmask an anonymous Twitter account that parodied Donald Trump-loyalist Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), according to a bombshell motion unsealed on Monday.
Twitter sought to quash that subpoena against the account @NunesAlt, which had been sealed since Nov. 24, 2020 and hushed up by a gag order, in a motion dated May 10.
“Under the First Amendment, the government cannot compel Twitter to produce information related to the account unless it ‘can show a compelling interest in the sought-after material and a sufficient nexus between the subject matter of the investigation and the information it seek[s],’” Twitter’s lawyers wrote in the 16-page motion.
“While Twitter does not have visibility into the purpose of the subpoena, Twitter has serious concerns whether the government can meet this standard given the context in which it has received the subpoena,” the motion continues.
Twitter catalogued what authorities wanted in an exhibit….
As documented in the motion, that context involved a scorched earth, and mysteriously funded, effort by Nunes to try to learn the identities of the many Twitter accounts mocking or otherwise criticizing him.
“His efforts to suppress critical speech are as well-publicized as they are unsuccessful,” Twitter’s lawyer John K. Roche, from the D.C. powerhouse firm Perkins Coie, notes in the motion, referring to Nunes….
Twitter claimed that history made the company wary of the Justice Department’s subpoena.
“Given Congressman Nunes’s numerous attempts to unmask his anonymous critics on Twitter—described in detail herein—Twitter is concerned that this subpoena is but another mechanism to attack its users’ First Amendment rights,” the motion states. “Recent litigation also alleges that Congressman Nunes may be using the government to unmask his critics.”
…
In addition to the subpoena, Twitter claims it also received a “gag order” barring them from “disclos[ing] the existence of the subpoena to any other person” except for their attorneys for 90 days because the Justice Department claimed to have “reasonable grounds to believe that such disclosure will result in flight from prosecution, destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, and serious jeopardy to the investigation.”
“The Gag Order does not describe the basis for this finding, and Twitter has not received any information from the government about the ‘reasonable grounds’ upon which the Gag Order was based,” Twitter added.
Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell ordered the filing unsealed on Sunday, and it became public a day later. The judge also ordered the Justice Department to respond by Wednesday, “with the name and contact information of the government attorney redacted,” information that is routinely made public in similar proceedings.
“Biden call with Israel PM. WH: Biden ‘encouraged Israel to make every effort to ensure the protection of innocent civilians’. …’The President expressed his support for a ceasefire…'”
re SC @495: When the Orange Idiot said that, my mind went directly to “Well, if that is the case, then a woman cannot be pregnant if she never takes a pregnancy test, right?”
A local administration in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has defied a state high court order and bulldozed a mosque, in one of the most inflammatory actions taken against a Muslim place of worship since the demolition of the Babri Mosque by a mob of Hindu nationalist rioters in 1992.
The mosque, in the city of Ram Sanehi Ghat in Uttar Pradesh, had stood for at least six decades, since the time of British rule, according to documents held by its committee.
On Monday, police and security services moved into the area and cleared it of people, then brought in bulldozers and demolished the mosque. Debris was then thrown into a river. Security services have been deployed to prevent anyone coming within a mile of where the mosque stood.
The state government of Uttar Pradesh is controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which also governs at national level.
The chief minister is a hardline Hindu nationalist called Yogi Adityanath, who is known for his vitriol against Muslims. He has made speeches laced with Islamophobia, referred to Muslims as terrorists, and passed legislation openly discriminatory to Muslims.
…
…Local Muslims in the area, including members of the mosque committee, said they had gone into hiding over fears they would be targeted and arrested.
The district where the mosque is located is adjacent to Ayodhya, where the Babri Mosque stood before its demolition in 1992. In a significant court ruling in 2019, judges declared that the land legally belonged to Hindus, rather than Muslims, and a new Ram Temple is under construction on the site where the Babri Mosque stood formerly.
‘The Big Lie’ is not a phrase in need of a new definition
Enjoy John Oliver calling Tucker Carlson a ‘scrunched-faced fear baboon’
Scroll down for the video. Most of the video covers Covid vaccine issues, with a put-down of Tucker Carlson beginning at the 6:15 mark.
Oliver debunks a lot of myths. It’s good.
Police go missing as Proud Boys shut down public park in Oregon for armed far-right rally
Here is a link back to the previous chapter of this thread.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2021/04/18/discuss-political-madness-all-the-time-19/comment-page-1/#comment-2092587
“Police go missing as Proud Boys shut down public park in Oregon for armed far-right rally”
DC offering free beer to residents who get a coronavirus vaccine
Judge orders release of Trump obstruction memo, accuses Barr of being ‘disingenuous’
MAGA World Thinks The Sketchy AZ Audit Will Pave The Way To A 2020 Reversal
It’s just another scam to raise money.
Follow-up to comment 4.
Posted by readers of the article:
Re 489 on previous page:
Journalist Amanda Marcotte has long argued that the US needs to end covid restrictions reasonably soon, with less than optimal vaccine coverage, because waiting until herd immunity is not realistic. Especially not when Republicans are bent on sabotaging the vaccine drive, and will then politically weaponize the resulting “endless lockdown” if given half a chance. According to Marcotte’s estimate, shaming and pleading conservative anti-vaxxers will only cause them to double down. On the contrary, she suggests that Republican voters will likely lose some of their interest in the anti-vaccine stance if it can’t be used to escalate cultural division and hold the nation hostage.
https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/1389168619842592769
DOJ Must Turn Over Secret Trump-Era Memo That Judge Finds ‘Calls Into Question’ Bill Barr’s Statement to Congress About Obstruction, Mueller Report
COLIN KALMBACHER May 4th, 2021
CNN – “Netanyahu misses deadline to build a new government. Here’s what comes next”:
Guardian (support the Guardian if you can!) – “Bolsonaro ignored repeated warnings about Covid, ex-health minister says”:
More atl.
Also in the Guardian – “Farmer moves border stone for tractor – and makes Belgium bigger.” Congrats!
Some podcasts:
You’re Wrong About – “‘Political Correctness'”:
(One of the hosts is also on the podcast Maintenance Phase, whose most recent episode on Ed McMahon’s diet book is also recommended.)
QAA – “Episode 140: Undercover at the Save the Children (Again) Rally”:
Fever Dreams – “Inside the Church of Bleach Drinkers”:
Oh God, What Now? – “Extreme Makeover: Golden Wallpaper Edition”:
Today, May 5th 2021, is the Grauniad’s 200th anniversary (founded in Manchester in 1821). There’s an ongoing series of articles about themselves, Guardian 200. (Please support the Grauniad if you can!)
Today, also 200 years ago, happens to be when a well-known French dictator died.
Speaking of (wannabe-)dictators, hair furor is in a snit. Instead of sending congratulations to the Grauniad, or permanently shutting up, today(-ish) he started his own blog with a 200 years old-seeming look-and-feel, Donald Trump returns to social media with glorified blog: “Ex-president unveils retro webpage featuring series of statements resembling blogposts […]”. (The link goes to the Grauniad’s story, not teh
blogbog.) A snippet:Another still-active dictator is still at it, probably also in a snit because his pet hair furor is no longer in a position to do things for him, like shudown Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Kremlin bears down on Moscow bureau of US-funded radio station:
Poopyhead isn’t the only one use
Mealworm on the menu: EU approves first insect protein (quoted in full):
As far as I know, up to now there were only a few sources of edible bugs (here in Europe): Fresh ones on your salad or in your beer, Fried ones at a few Mexican restaurants, and In certain cheeses and so on. The Mexican ones are quite tasty, the wasps in the beer less so.
† Al Jazeera does not provide any details nor a link to this report. I presume it’s this one, The Worldwide Edible Insects Industry is Expected to Reach $4.63 Billion by 2027, which is a press release about a commercial “report” which sells for over 3500€ (link at the link).
Explosives and weaponry found at US far-right protests, documents reveal (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
Fpllow-up to @11 on the Grauniad’s 200th anniversary, a former Grauniad cartoonist, Posy Simmonds returns with a new work to mark the Guardian’s 200th anniversary (cartoon). Complete with typos and San Serriffe.
NBC – “Trump’s Facebook ban upheld by Oversight Board”:
More at the link.
Guardian – “Myanmar junta bans satellite dishes in media crackdown”:
Here’s a link to the May 5 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
LOL.
From today’s DN! headlines:
Some snippets from RWW:
● It’s May, But ‘Prophet’ Jeff Jansen Still Insists His Prophecy That the Military Would Remove Biden From Office by April Is Coming True:
● Rick Wiles Says COVID-19 Vaccines Are a Plot to Carry Out :
● Mario Murillo Says God Is Calling Right-Wing Christians to Mobilize Politically and (my added emboldening):
Meanwhile, in The Onion, reality is restored, Ted Cruz Decries Voting Rights Bill As Shameless Power Grab By American People To Control Country:
She quickly realised her mistake and spat out the unchewed bits. No microchips were harmed in this (not-quite-)cheese tasting.
Also from DN!: “‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: Filmmaker Raoul Peck Explores Colonialism & Origins of White Supremacy.”
Guardian world liveblog:
blf @14, ha! I liked the addition of a cat recycling The Guardian as a liner for the litter box … along with a reminder to recycle.
SC @15, so it looks like planet earth will be spared Facebook and Instagram posts from Hair Furor for at least another six months. That’s good. I do hope Facebook suspends Trump’s account indefinitely. The move by Florida legislators to punish social media platforms that ban the accounts of politicians is ridiculous.
Bits and pieces of other news:
Link
DeSantis sparks questions with Florida’s upcoming special election
DeSantis’ plan will leave voters in Florida’s 20th without a representative until January. If that seems like a long time, it’s not your imagination.
Follow-up to SC @15.
Link
Lynna@23 notes “so it looks like planet earth will be spared Facebook and Instagram posts from Hair Furor for at least another six months.”
Putting aside the dubiousness of factsborked’s review board, not necessarily… SC@15 quotes, “Facebook must complete a review of the length of the suspension within six months, the board said.” Said review could be completed within the hour and result in hair furor being reinstated.
The Grauniad on the review board:
● Facebook has beefed up its ‘oversight board’, but any new powers are illusory (last month, April 2021).
● Facebook ruling on Trump renews criticism of oversight board. Some snippets (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
Why Trump’s new tech ‘platform’ is so hilariously underwhelming
In March, Jason Miller said Trump’s new tech platform would “completely redefine the game.” Two months later, that boast is kind of hilarious.
Follow-up to @15, @23, and @26, Facebook fudge potentially lets Trump live to lie another day:
blf @26, good points. Thanks for the additional info. Also, I’ll note that Trump’s new blog encourages others to share his sludge on social media platforms.
In other news: After Cheney Supported A Jan. 6 Commission, McCarthy Had A Personal Reason To Want Her Ousted
Family ripped apart at border by prior admin reunites after over three years of separation
Link
So much better than watching Trump eat a Trump Tower “taco bowl.”
Lynna@27 quotes, “Trump’s blog doesn’t appear to link to any other websites — suggesting the former president has a new blog, but it’s not an especially good one.”
No(-ish): Each (bellowing) does have links (for re-posting on) factsborked and twittering (whether or not either works I don’t know, but they look plausible), and what appears to be a button (albeit no count of ?).
On the other hand, there does not seem to be any links within the bellowings, nor anything like a sidebar with links (such as here at FtB). There are links, most intra-site, and the few which aren’t are to deeply problematic other sites (e.g., winred and 45office).
Amusingly, all the bellowings are titled . (The earliest is dated March 24th (the date seems genuine?).) And the is very long… and I presume contains numerous traps for the unwary. (One I noted — mostly because there’s a long complicated rationale — is they do not obey “Do Not Track” signals. (I use the EFF’s Privacy Badger with Firefox as one of multiple precautions.)) The T&C is also very long (I didn’t try to work my way through that morass).
As noted previously, there is no reply / comment facility, and the entire design seems inspired by 1980’s dial-up bulletin boards. It’s rather an eyesore, even ignoring the hair furor photo(s?).
“BREAKING: CVS announces it is now accepting walk-in appointments for #coronavirus vaccines across the country. No appointment necessary. This comes after President Biden’s order yesterday for all pharmacies taking part in the federal vaccine program to allow walk-ins.”
Lynna@31, But but but… that’ll lead to “taco trucks on every corner!”
Good Riddance, Donald Trump?
NY Times link
In other words, Trump broke Facebook’s rules. And he did so repeatedly. He should have been kicked off the platform much earlier, just like any other rule-breaker. He wasn’t. He wasn’t held to account.
“facebook oversight: however facebook should reconsider as long as trump admits there was no election frau…
trump literally today: ‘ELECTION FRAUD'”
Tweet o’ the day.
blf @34, yes. And I really want a taco truck on my corner!
In other news, Four months after the Capitol riot, Josh Hawley has no regrets
In January, Pat Toomey said senators like Josh Hawley “have a lot of soul searching to do.” Alas, that introspection never happened.
“And now it’s official: With Netanyahu failing to form a government, Israel’s president has tasked opposition leader Yair Lapid with trying to cobble one together and oust Bibi. If he can’t, Israel’s fifth elections in 2.5 years loom on the horizon.”
Guardian world liveblog:
“LMAOOOOO WHAT
The latest conspiracy theory being chased by the sketchy ‘audit’ of Arizona’s 2020 election is that fraudulent ballots were supposedly smuggled in from China and therefore have bamboo in the paper.
THEY ARE CHECKING FOR BAMBOO IN THE BALLOTS….
This is after we learned that the ‘auditors’ are also using UV lights to check for secret watermarks that President Trump supposedly put on ballots as a trap for Democrats.”
Video atl.
France grants citizenship to over 2,000 foreign workers for Covid-19 response:
Holy fucking shit, NYT.
A fairly short France24 interview with Alice Doyard, who produced the Grauniad’s Oscar-winning Colette (video) short documentary, ‘Colette’ revisits World War II trauma and wins Academy Award for best documentary short (video): “In just 24 minutes, the charismatic and courageous “Colette” reminds us just how close, and how personal, Second World War history can be. This concise, powerful film saw producer Alice Doyard and director Anthony Giacchino pick up this year’s Academy Award for best documentary short. Alice tells us more about working with former resistant Colette to prepare a trip to the Nazi camp where her brother died in 1945.”
Politico oped – “Enough warnings: Europe must act on Russian killings”:
SC@43, As an aside, here’s the Gruaniad’s article about the same CDC report, US birth rate sees biggest fall for nearly 50 years.
And from yesterday, Why do Americans die earlier than Europeans?:
When I moved to “Europe” last millennium, one easily noticeable difference was there were less obese people, and those who were obese looked (in general) to be less obese, than in the States. Health care is also quite different. No idea about illicit or “recreational” drugs, and albeit there is considerable alcohol consumption, it seems to be a bit more restrained / responsible (albeit British (especially?) pubs near closing time challenge that assertion!).
US Trade Rep Katherine Tai:
Statement atl.
Native American tribe gives surplus vaccines to First Nations relatives in Canada:
Ah good! A classic Grauniadian typo on its 200th anniversary. “Norther” is apparently slang (primary Texas?) for a cold wind from the north.
NYT:
Pfizer Reaps Hundreds of Millions in Profits From Covid Vaccine
Rebecca Robbins and Peter Goodman
May 5, 2021
US judge throws out pandemic-related moratorium on evictions:
From yesterday, Mars Helicopter and the Future of Extraterrestrial Flight (video), which is interesting, but, as the presenter said, is also a celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (May). The presenter (Ms Jia-Rui Cook) and engineers (Mr Johnny Lam (Ingenuity, Mars) and Mr Nishant Mehta (Dragonfly, Titan (future mission))) are all of Asian Pacific heritage, and the discussion ended with a wonderful montage of Asian Pacific Nasa / JPL employees.
Washington Post:
Wall Street Journal:
Reuters:
Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times:
Rick Santorum … why?
Link
WH press secretary is really good at her job—watch her flip the script on McConnell
Video is available at the link.
Kinzinger hits GOP on ‘operation #coverupJan6’ over Cheney ouster plot
Link
More on what Liz Cheney had to say:
Link
Wonkette: “You’re Still Paying The Secret Service To Cart Trump’s Grown-Ass Hatchlings Around America. Isn’t That GREAT?”
Link
Jimmy Kimmel: A Message for People Who Don’t Want the COVID Vaccine (video). And an interview, Dr Fauci on People Not Getting Vaccinated, Conspiracies & Misinformation and Last Talk with Trump — the last part of the interview, where Dr Fauci answers some questions from people on the street (especially, perhaps, the last question) is quite good.
From the Grauniad’s current insurrectionists live blog:
Biden administration supports waiving patent protections for Covid vaccines to raise global production
By Lauren Egan
The whole situation recalls that when Dr. Salk developed the polio vaccine in the 1950s, he was asked in an interview, who owned the patent. He famously replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Two snippets from To understand why Joe Biden has shifted left, look at the people working for him:
This insight — younger domestic staff who know there’s no point to engaging with or waiting for the thugs, combined with long-time military-industrial profiteering staff for foreign affairs — is an interesting way of looking at the current administration. As the opinion column notes, things like reallocating funds spent on police for non-policing purposes (“defund the police”) haven’t made much traction (yet?), at least in part due “the principles” seemingly-ingrained thinking. Seemingly-ingrained, perhaps, but not necessarily rigid or frozen.
The author, “Joel Wertheimer is a civil rights attorney and was formerly associate staff secretary for Barack Obama”.
blf @59, Thanks for posting those links. Kimmel’s interview with Dr. Fauci was really good, and quite useful.
In other news, Marc Lamont Hill asks the question every Republican seeking to ban critical race theory must answer
Video is available at the link.
Not politics, but interesting – Ars Technica – “Mighty morphin’ flat-packed pasta takes on 3D shapes as it cooks”:
More, including a fun video, atl. “Groove-based transient morphing” is my new favorite phrase. It seems like this has even more potential applications, but I’m not sure what exactly.
The Bulwark – “On the Anniversary of a Failed Coup, France Faces Its Nationalist Faction”:
Incidentally, I spent the early part of this week Inside the Mind of Marine Le Pen, a disturbing place to be. As always when looking at far-right ideology, I was struck by both the malignant inanity of it all and the complete lack of any positive vision for people.
Politico – “‘Doomsday scenario’: Lagging vaccine rates stir fears of dangerous variants”:
Guardian – “‘Are we in trouble? Absolutely’: Alberta battles worst Covid rate in North America”:
Montana’s Republican governor pulls pandemic payments — is he for real?:
Yiiiiiiikes – Guardian one-star review of Van Morrison’s new album – “Van Morrison: Latest Record Project Volume 1 review – depressing rants by tinfoil milliner”:
Guardian – “UK sends patrol vessels as 80 French protest boats gather off Jersey”:
More atl. (The article appears to have been updated several times and is kind of a mess at this point.)
Guardian – “EU ‘ready to discuss’ waiver on Covid vaccine patents”:
Here’s a link to the May 6 Guardian (support them if you can!) coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Guardian world liveblog:
Rachel Maddow last night on the story @ #41 above – “Bizarre Excuse Behind Cuckoo GOP-Led Vote Audit”:
Video atl.
@73, Great, murder hornets and now covid bees!
</snark>CNN – “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs restrictive voting bill”:
Politico – “U.S. Justice Department worried about Arizona vote recount”:
JFC.
I watched Arizona’s unprecedented election audit — here’s what’s happening:
That Pulitzer nutcase has come up before — he’s the nutter other nutters (and possibly he himself?) claim , which he most emphatically did not: Masahiro Hara at Japanese company Denso Wave invented it. The Pulitzer Phraud was also pushing some sort of magic scanning back then (after hair furor lost).
Text quoted by SC in comment 76: “In signing the bill during an appearance on “Fox & Friends […]”
He signed the bill on Fox & Friends?! WTF?
Text quoted by SC in comment 71:
Yes! And that’s exactly why President Biden is right to have the U.S. lead this effort.
Text quoted by blf in comment 79:
Yep. Definitely whacko. Thanks or additional information about the false “invented the QR code” claim.
Reminds me of Shiva Ayyadurai, the conspiracy kook who appeared on Mike Lindell’s “docu-movie” [sic] Absolute Proof. He claims that he invented email.
@81, “Shiva Ayyadurai, the conspiracy kook […] claims that he invented email.”
Good grief. Don’t think I’ve ever heard of him before, but a quick search indicates his (possibly retracted?) claim is based on some program he allegedly wrote in the very late 1970s (1978 or 1979). Which therefore must be false, since at that very time I was using e-mail, using programmes and protocols dating back years, including e-mail sent & received over UUCP networking. (I didn’t have access to the ARPAnet — now the Internet — at the time.)
From the Grauniad’s current States pandemic and politics live blog:
NYT:
Opposition to Net Neutrality Was Faked, New York Says
As economy recovers, unemployment claims dip below key threshold
Now that the total is below 500,000 for the first time in 14 months, it’s getting easier to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Biden’s ACA special enrollment period continues to pay off
As one observer put it, “So this is what it looks like when the people in charge of ‘Obamacare’ want to enroll as many people as possible.”
Good news, (CBS News source):
In other news, Ron DeSantis fails again, (summary of the Tampa Bay Times report if from Steve Benen):
Biden admin officially reverses policy retaliating against so-called sanctuary cities
Fox News is playing a deadly game with its viewers, and death is winning
Heh.
‘Even as I write this it brings me to tears’: police officer Michael Fanone pens letter to Congress
Kushner Companies Violated Multiple Laws in Massive Tenant Dispute, Judge Rules
The Kushner-owned management company charged “deceptive” fees to thousands of tenants.
“Thread: For six+ years I covered @EliseStefanik @RepStefanik as closely as any journalist, following her through rural Upstate #adirondack towns in #ny21, watching her build political strength, visiting her in Washington DC. Here are my takeaways….”
Interesting. “Reporting at @ncpr found however that she was eager to downplay her DC cred and her identity as a political insider. She claimed to have grown up in a rural #adirondacks community in #ny21. I couldn’t find anyone there who knew her.” Wikipedia says she was born in Albany (her parents own a plywood business) and attended a prep school there. The local Republican Party chair’s defense of her bullshit was that she “summered in Willsboro,” the small town where her parents have a vacation home.
Pfizer, BioNTech agree to send doses to vaccinate Olympic delegations
Oh, dear. The wealthy have so many problems:
Jenner is opposed to allowing female transgender athletes to compete on all–girls school sports teams. Those transgender athletes are often children. They should not be punished.
Follow-up to comment 98.
Wonkette: “Homeless People Just Ruining California For Caitlyn Jenner’s Private-Plane-Owning Friends”
Link
Lynna@99 quotes “[Caitlyn Jenner] criticized those who want to build a high speed railway system from LA to San Francisco, because people can just get on a plane and fly between the two cities.”
As someone who used to live in several different California locations in-between those two cities — and despite ignoring the environmental and other costs of flying — that is exceptionally offensive. One of those locations is very unlikely to be on or “conveniently” close to a high speed rail line, but all the other locations are very (in most cases, very very) likely. Living in Europe, and particularly here in France with its high-speed TGV, any (putative) flying is now limited to destinations where trains cannot go, and so on.
A bill aims to stop abusers stalking ex-partners. US telecom firms are lobbying against it:
The domestic abuse supporters & profiteers named in the article include Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T Wireless (i.e., the usual suspects).
blf @100, good points. I am finding every word that Caitlyn Jenner utters offensive.
In other news that is also about offensive and clueless people, (namely Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman): NY AG James Wants In On Lawsuit Against Wohl And Burkman Over Racist Robocall
Follow-up to comment 102.
Posted by readers of the article:
Oh, dear. Talk about Republican cluelessness:
Link
A summary of fiascos associated with the Cyber Ninjas ballot recount in Arizona:
Link
Giant sturgeon caught in Detroit River may be 100 years old:
Whilst in California, ‘They’re chilling’: endangered condors take up residence outside California woman’s home:
On twittering, Ms Quintero observed, “Still wild to me that in my lifetime there went from being about 25 condors left alive to now almost that many descending on my moms house at once. Makes me wonder if we will start seeing more giant flocks as their numbers rise (I’ve only ever seen 3–4 by her house before)”.
I’m jealous! Some of my relatives used to live in that very area, and I never never saw a California condor. In fact, the only live one I’ve ever seen was an individual at the LA Zoo who had become habituated to humans and could never be released into the wild.
The twitterings make clear Ms Mickols is well aware they are a very endangered bird, and she will not (intentionally) harm them. Not all of the twittering commentators are so clewed-in, however…
Follow-up to SC’s comment 79.
Some journalists have postulated that Ron DeSantis signed the Florida voter-suppression bill on Fox News because he is desperate for Trump’s attention.
Follow-up to SC@73, Steve Bell in the Grauniad, Boris Johnson sending patrol boats to Jersey (cartoon). The original is by James Gillray, A new map of England & France: the French Invasion (cartoon, 1793).
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
The Daily Beast:
A few more disturbing details:
Washington Post:
First Dog on the Moon in the Grauniad, I’m booked in to get my first dose of the Covid vaccine and truth be told I’m a bit nervous (cartoon): “But what is important is getting on top of Covid. What is important is other people!” (Slightly Ozland-specific.)
Guardian – “Rio de Janeiro: at least 25 killed in city’s deadliest police raid on favela”:
Here’s a link to the May 7 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Also in the Guardian:
“Texas lawmakers race against the clock to push through new voting restrictions.”
Marina Hyde – “After humiliation in Hartlepool, where now for smalltown detective DI Starmer?”
“What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years.”
: the truth behind this unemployment benefits myth:
† I dithered about setting that sign in , but decided the request to be patient was very reasonable (albeit unfortunate it has to be said), vastly outweighing the nonsensical assertion.
blf @ #112, I love that one, especially the personified vaccine hesitancy feelings.
BBC – “Big Chinese rocket segment set to fall to Earth”:
Peter Hotez:
Shane Vaughn Ordains His Followers as :
HuffPo – “Lawyer Says Capitol Defendant Had ‘Foxmania’ From Watching Too Much Fox News”:
AP (via the Guardian world liveblog):
SC @113, this part of the text you quoted was one of the first things I thought of when I started reading about the raid: “Thursday’s raid, which police said was to prevent children and teenagers being lured into crime, took place despite a supreme court order last June outlawing such incursions during the coronavirus pandemic.”
Yep, looks like slaughter. Looks like no due process was observed. And it looks like a good way to spread coronavirus.
blf @120, it was also funny that the cartoon dog noted that we can all still join an insurrection after we get vaccinated and stop Covid transmission. (paraphrasing)
Whoops! Comment 124 was in reference to comment 112.
Bits and pieces of other news:
Link
Nobody is as good at that job as Nancy Pelosi.
Dough to go: Rome’s first pizza vending machine gets mixed reviews:
“Pizza vending machine” — three words that never go together, like “Peas are edible”. Or a candy vending machine churning out Mike Gaetz clones.
For Lindsey Graham, allegiance to Trump is entirely transactional
For Lindsey Graham, if Donald Trump can be used as a tool to win elections and benefit his party, nothing else matters.
Holy fuck … the Republican Party is so screwed … and maybe democracy in the USA is also screwed.
Also, Trump’s hand in the death of more than half a million Americans is irrelevant to Lindsey Graham.
GOP starts to pay a price for opposing, then promoting, relief bill
Republicans keep touting the Democratic relief bill that received literally zero GOP votes. This is more than just a passing curiousity.
Republicans shield Trump from consequences in Stormy Daniels case
The former president may not be in office anymore, but some Republican officials continue to carry his water.
Link
TPM link
Fraudsters, grifters and tax cheats, all the best trumpian people.
Follow-up to comment 131.
Posted by readers of the article:
Federal Indictment Over George Floyd Killing Names Chauvin, 3 Other Officers
May 7, 2021 KAILA PHILO and ANDY MONSERUD
Republicans are objectively unhappy that fewer people are dying of COVID
There’s an appalling statistic mentioned at the end, paraphrasing, “about 25% of the AZ vaccine is being wasted because people are afraid of the very rare side-effects”, Is France’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign up to scratch? (video). It’s not as exhaustive as the title implies, focusing mostly on supply problems and the notorious French vaccine hesitancy.
Yikes:
Link
Link to Los Angeles Times
NBC News:
ABC 15 News in Arizona:
In other news that is awful:
This school shooting in Idaho was not far from where I live. My nephew and his daughter are the people in the photo. “Mental health counselors offers insight for handling grief, emotions of children following school shooting.” Link. Our whole extended family feels terrified.
Miami Herald:
This ban sounds like a good idea.
FEC targets Team Trump favorite: Pre-checked fundraising boxes
Team Trump pioneered the practice of raising money through pre-checked boxes and recurring contributions. The FEC is unanimous in calling for a ban.
Why the right is panning Biden’s ‘Day of Prayer’ proclamation
For some conservatives, the White House National Day of Prayer proclamation lacked specific spiritual language the right wanted to hear.
Rep. Mo Brooks has been hiding from process servers, after bragging about his role on Jan. 6
Video is available at the link.
Loosely, very loosely, related to Lynna@142, about “standout” reporters, a snippet from the Grauniad’s 200 years of newsroom style: what journalists wear to work:
He didn’t explain if the female journalists grew their own, or used faked breads. 😉
New Jersey landlord sues to end lease with private prison company that jails immigrants at property
Oh, FFS. Long past time to get rid of private prisons! And think about this: taxpayer money is being used to pay CoreCivic for these inhumane actions.
According to former DeSantis staffers, the governor is an awful person in private, too
blf @143:
That is either a hilarious typo or an awesome use of subtle humor!
Major US pipeline halts operations after cyberattack
Michael Cohen on Giuliani’s legal fees: He won’t get ‘two cents’ from Trump
Link
Well that’s a crime.
Wonkette: “Sovereign Citizen Streams Self Stealing Vial Of Vaccine, To Save Us All From ‘Poisoning”
Gonna be a long fight.
Liz Cheney’s months-long effort to turn Republicans from Trump threatens her reelection and ambitions. She says it’s only beginning.
Washington Post link
Trump DOJ Secretly Seized Post Reporters’ Phone Records
Small-town bar owner faces big-time consequences after selling fake vaccine cards to undercover cops
Vaccine patent waivers face more hurdles despite Biden support
Wonkette: “No, Human Traffickers Are Not Using Cheese To Kidnap People”
Link
Wonkette: “‘Macho Jesus’-Loving Trump Prophet Kicked Out Of Own Church For ‘Unbiblical Behavior'”
Link
Lynna@155, At mention of cheese trafficking, the mild deranged penguin stopped trying to
trafficeat my after-dinner cheesees, and pointed put that real cheese abusers have secret caves underneath pizza parlours where they make bamboo-stuffed ballots to be added to the vaccines in your microchips. They wouldn’t be wasting the bamboo on melted cars to alert gullible eejits.Arizona Audit Will ‘Indefinitely Defer’ Voter Interview Plans Over Intimidation Concerns Raised By DOJ
blf @157: Sounds reasonable.
And now back to my own after-dinner cheese nibbling.
A Sunday soul serenade for Mama’s Day
Much more at the link, including “La Mamma,” biographical snippets and music Kirk Franklin, songs of praise for adoptive parents, “Sadie” by the The Spinners (one of my favorites), and more.
Link
Link
Nasa / JPL’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity has successfully completed its fifth flight, a one-way hop of about 130 metres to a new landing site. Before touching down, it flew to an altitude of 10 metres (highest ever) to take series of images of the surroundings and new landing field. This is the last of its flight-demo flights, transitioning into its new aerial-scouting-demo flight mission (“operations demonstration”).
On the fourth flight, the Perseverance rover’s science microphone was turned on and succeeded in capturing the sound of Ingenuity flying on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hears Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight (video (obviously with audio)). That hadn’t been attempted previously since the microphone had neither been designed nor tested to avoid interference with rover–helicopter communications. On-Earth analysis showed it would be safe, and despite being 80 or more metres away from the rover, the sound was detected in the very thin Martian atmosphere.
In India’s surge, a religious gathering attended by millions helped the virus spread.
Washington Post link
Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger’s syndrome during SNL monologue
YouTube link
“I’m pretty good at running ‘human’ in emulation mode.”
From the Washington Post:
For too many girls, teenage years are a time of unwanted attention from older men:
New York Times:
Follow-up to @116, The US restaurant industry is lacking in wages, not workers:
You know that issue where bigots aren’t going to be happy in their own space because they want to go and dominate what they don’t like? That’s happening in real time on the nextdoor politics board I’m in. The Trumpkins went and made their own board and made implied assertions about the original board in posts about the new board, but just can’t stay away.
Now to figure out more characteristics of the situation.
@Lynna 142
Interesting. I’ve seen and engaged with that general political gossip method used by Trump using the word “they” in his supporters. I hope it gets more attention.
Fight to feminise French language enters new round (video) (France24 edits in {curly braces}):
Absolute nonsense. One reason my French is shite is because I cannot get my head around the idea words must have a “gender”. (That and verb conjugation, another minefield.) In the video embedded at the link, the academic expert (Éliane Viennot?) interviewed makes essentially the same point: The gendering makes the language more difficult to learn. She postulates that’s one reason for the resistance to the change, people who have managed to learn the gendering are reluctant to learn some “new” rules.
Plus a significant dose of the traditional French paranoia about English:
My own example is a term I’ve introduced at every company I worked for post-University: “workhour(s)” (and “workday(s)”, etc.), as a replacement for the sexist (and also frequently dubiously-applied concept (a different issue)) “manhour(s)” — the number of hours used or expected to be used on some task, allowing for interruptions, other tasks, contingencies, holidays / vacations, etc. A workhour is some fraction of a clock-measured (real) hour, the exact percentage depending on the individual, their other tasks, and other factors. (Another possibility is “personhour(s)”, but similar to the cited “firefighter” example, “workhour(s)” (IMHO) describes what is being discussed, and avoids any misconstruing of the -son — albeit “workhour(s)” can be misconstrued as meaning the times when one is “clocked on” (not really a problem for me as I’m salaried, not paid by-the-clock).)
(What I’ve never had any success in introducing is error bars on workhour(s) estimates — for some reason, they always freak the managers out.)
Brony @169, yeah it was good to see faux journalists at the White House press conference called out on their use of “they say,” or “lots of people say.” Who is “they”? If there’s no specific answer to that, then you know that a straw-man is the foundation of the bogus argument.
blf @168, thanks for that thorough report. It highlights the real problems.
In other news, “A Pennsylvania Lawmaker and the Resurgence of Christian Nationalism.”
New Yorker link
How Doug Mastriano’s rise embodies the spread of a movement centered on the belief that God intended America to be a Christian nation.
blf @170, I see no problem with making some changes to the French language in order to more equally represent both men and women. I would not call it feminizing … it is more like equalizing. I like the use of “workhour(s)” —that makes sense.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) talked some sense today during an interview on CNN.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/clyburn-mcconnell-gop-losing-its-way
Video of the interview is available at the link.
Republicans cry big tech bias — on the very platforms they have dominated (my added emboldening):
Follow-up to blf’s comment 168.
Link
Follow-up to comment 175.
Posted by readers of the article:
Link
Lynna@172 observes, about changes to the French language, “I would not call it feminizing … it is more like equalizing.”
Good point! I missed that. Possibly because, at least in part, as the video examples, the default rule in French is “masculine” (le masculin l’emporte sur le féminin) — citing the example of if it’s one individual, the phrase for a male is “un title” and for a female “une titlee” — but for more than one person, if any are male, it’s “les titles” (the actual spelling of the title can differ as well, just to make things even more confusing); with the modified spelling, it’d be “les title·es” (broadly speaking), acknowledging there are females in the group.
Lynna@177, There was a march here in the village. I didn’t go, partly due to my own confusion about the time / date, and partly due to concerns about the pandemic. From the sounds (I could hear it), it was either well-attended, very noisy, or both.
Washington Post link
Here in the YooKay, we had a “Super Thursday” of elections to local councils, mayoralties, and the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments on 6th. I’ll try to write a longer account later (I have an important work deadline approaching), but here are a few key points:
1) The Tories did well, and Labour correspondingly badly, in the council elections. The Tories also did well in the Welsh Parliament, but so did Labour (gaining a seat to hold exactly half of the 60), who also did pretty well in the mayoralty elections (these city/city region mayors are fairly new in the UK – or rather, England, I think there are none elsewhere). But it’s the council elections that have got most of the attention as far as the Labour/Tory battle is concerned. Briefly, the Tories have hoovered up the slices of the
bigot“socially conservative” vote that were previously going to UKIP, the Brexit Party and even further right outfits, by stealing their clothes, and Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader, has alienated the left, while failing to recapture thebigot“socially conservative” vote, much of which was traditional Labour before Brexit. Starmer has reacted to the poor results (having said in advance he would take responsibility) by demoting the deputy leader, Angela Rayner, from her posts as chair of the party and campaign coordinator (he can’t sack her as leader), and holding a badly mismanaged reshuffle, deflecting attention from the better Labour results from Wales and the mayoral elections, which came in after the poor council showing was making headlines.2) The traditional third party, the Liberal Democrats (“LibDems”) roughly held their own in council seats, but lost their last seat in the Welsh Parliament, and a key seat in the Scottish Parliament (see below).
3) The Green Party of England and Wales did very well, more than doubling its holding of council seats, coming second to Labour in the mayoral election in Bristol and third in London (Sadiq Khan was re-elected for Labour, but less convincingly than expected), where they also got 3 London Assembly seats to the LibDem’s 2. Much of their increased support seems to have come from leftist Labour voters disillusioned with Starmer, but they also gained seats from the Tories.
4) Much of the attention, even in the UK-wide media, has been on the results in Scotland. Changes in seats numbers have been small, the numbers now (with those in 2016 in parentheses) being SNP 64(63), Tories 31(31), Labour 22(24), Scottish Greens 8(6), LibDems 4(5). The SNP fell just one shot of their desired overall majority (they needed 65 of the 129 seats), my own party (Scottish Greens) made the biggest gains (due to the vagaries of the electoral system, which I’ll explain later, we could easily have ended up with only 7 seats, or as many as 10), the LibDem’s fall from 5 to 4 is very bad news for them, as there’s a threshold of 5 for a party or alliance of parties to have a say in what gets debated and have a right to regularly question the First Minister. The SNP’s failure to get an overall majority (which pleased me as it of course enhances Green influence) is already being dishonestly exploited by anti-independence speakers, despite the fact that there is a 72:57 pro-independence majority, as the Scottish Greens are explicitly pro-independence, and included this on all our election material.
More later…
Starmer of course can’t sack Rayner as deputy Labour leader – it’s an elected post.
In Scotland, it’s worth mentioning that former SNP leader Alex Salmond’s We-Hate-Nicola-Sturgeon Party (“Alba” is its official name) failed humiliatingly, getting nowhere near a seat anywhere. As did George Galloway’s George-Galloway-For-Life-President Party (“All For Unity” – anti-independence being its main policy). US readers may possibly remember Galloway debating with Hitchens on the invasion of Iraq, an issue where Galloway was on the correct side, but he’s a thoroughly obnoxious egotist. And the independent campaign of Andy Wightman, who was one of our MSPs but turned out to be something of a transphobe and left the party over that issue, failing to resign his seat as all our candidates promise in advance to do if they defect.
Thanks to everyone for the weekend news and analysis!
Some podcast episodes:
Decoding the Gurus – “Michael O”Fallon: The Jacobins are Back….. To Reset….. Everything…. Dun Dun Daah!”:
QAA – “Episode 141: Arizona Election ‘Audit’ Goes QAnon”:
Conspirituality – “50. Sellouts & Zealots (w/ Sheena Sood)”:
A few more podcasts:
You’re Wrong About – “The Chicks vs. The Iraq War”:
Stay Tuned with Preet – “The Chauvin Prosecutors (with Jerry Blackwell and Steve Schleicher)”:
The New Abnormal – “Rudy Giuliani Is in ‘Deep Shit’”:
Guardian – “Body of arrested Myanmar poet Khet Thi returned to family with organs missing”:
Guardian – “Israeli police storm al-Aqsa mosque ahead of Jerusalem Day march”:
Much more atl.
Guardian – “French soldiers accuse government of trying to ‘silence’ warnings of civil war”:
(The article quotes too extensively from the letter and doesn’t sufficiently contextualize it, in my view.)
Here’s a link to the May 10 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Photos atl.
From today’s DN! headlines:
LOL.
AP – “Reversing Trump, US restores transgender health protections”:
Republicans take steps to hide discouraging polls about Trump
The National Republican Congressional Committee apparently doesn’t want its own members to know about Trump’s unpopularity in key districts.
Willful ignorance is the trumpian way. It is also the way most cults operate.
“NEW: Hamas military wing confirms it is firing rockets from Gaza into Israel.
Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman says rockets are ‘in response to its crimes and aggression against the Holy City and its abuse of our people in Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa Mosque’.”
Arizona Republican: Election audit ‘makes us look like idiots’
Yes, it does.
Ron Johnson stoops lower with misguided anti-vaccine ‘questions’
If there’s a competition among Senate Republicans to see who can be the most irresponsible about the pandemic, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson has taken the lead.
As the New York Times reported:
Guardian world liveblog:
Researchers Say They’ve Uncovered a Massive Facebook Bot Farm from the 2020 Election
The 14,000-account “political manipulation” network sent posts on Trump, Biden, and COVID.
And there it is: yet one more reason to distrust Facebook.
Link
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day.
If you prefer to get your vaccine by bite rather than needle, ‘Dracula’s castle’ offers tourists Covid shots…
Actually, it’s part of what seems to be a rather clever strategy by Romania to get people vaccinated:
Sen. Schatz:
“The U.S. recorded 21,767 new coronavirus cases yesterday, the lowest daily total in 11 months….”
I noted @181 that the vagaries of the Scottish Parliament electoral system meant the Sottish Geens, who secured 8 seats, could easily have had only 7, or as many as 10. It appears we may have been denied the extra 2 seats by a poor decision from the Electoral Commission, which allowed an unpleasant outfit called “Independent Green Voice” to use what appears to be an intentionally confusing logo on the ballot paper, with “Green” in large print, and the other words much smaller (of course the word “Green” is not party property, but it is the EC’s job to guard against confusing ballot papers). Despite having done almost no campaigning, and having no recent online presence (although registered in 2003, its website does not appear to have been updated since 2007), IGV got more votes than other fringe parties with similar lack of presence. Of course it can’t be proved that voters were fooled, but if only a small proportion (just over 100 out of of around 2,000) of those voting for IGV in Scotland South Region intended to vote for Scottish Greens, we wuz robbed! In Glasgow Region, just under 1,000 out of a similar number voting for us instead of IGV would have netted us a second seat there. The story was almost repeated in Central Scotland Region, where again IGV stood, and we scraped home by just over 100 votes.
Some information about IGV, which appears to be a fascist front, is available here.
I’ve described the Scottish parliamentary electoral system before, but as it’s relevant to this story, and also other interesting features of the results, I’ll do so again. There are 129 seats at Holyrood, of which 73 are constituency seats, decided by “First Past the Post” voting – whichever candidate gets most votes, even if well short of a majority, is elected. Interestingly, many anti-independence (“unionist”) voters appear to have been willing to vote for whichever unionist candidate (Tory, Labour or LibDem) was most likely to beat the SNP. But voters have a second vote: the other 56 seats are “regional list” seats – 7 for each of 8 regions. The ballot paper for these seats lists parties rather than individuals (except for independents, treated as one-person parties), and they are intended to give parties with “wide but shallow” support (like the Scottish Greens) a chance to be represented. The 7 seats are decided successively. On the first round, any party which won any constituency seats in that region has its list vote divided by the number of constituency seats it won, plus 1. Parties which did not win any constituency seats get their whole vote (so in fact, it’s “divided by 1” – i.e., again, the number of constituencies won in the region, plus 1). On subsequent rounds, division is by the total number of seats won so far in the region (constituency plus list seats), plus 1. Because it won 62 of the 73 constiuencies, the SNP ended up getting only 2 list seats – but the overall result was pretty fair, as they won just under half the total constituency vote, and 40% of the list vote. (They always press for their supporters to give them both votes, even though most of the list votes for them will not gain any extra seats – Salmond tried unsuccessfully to persuade SNP voters to support his party on the list using that “wasted vote” argument.) It’s said the system was devised to make it hard for one party to win a majority (supposedly aimed at the SNP, but they were not by any means the largest party when the system was set up), and in fact any roughly proportional system would do the same. But the system certainly has some odd features. The LibDems won 4 constituency seats (their dwindling support is highly concentrated in a few areas), while we Scottish Greens won 8 list seats, and no constituencies. In my region, Lothian, we ended up getting two list seats, the same as 2016. But if fewer Tory or LibDem voters had been prepared to switch to Labour to keep the SNP out of Edinburgh Southern, or fewer Tory and Labour to vote LibDem to keep the SNP out of Edinburgh Western, we’d have got only one list seat even with every party getting exactly the same number of list votes, because Labour (or the LibDems) would have had their list vote divided by 1 less at each stage. This would also have given the SNP their desired overall majority, so in that sense, the tactical voters at the constituency level were highly successful, but at the same time, gave us far more influence! (It was very odd to find myself, on Saturday, hoping for the Tories to hold Aberdeenshire West, the last constituency seat the SNP could hope to gain – if they had done so, again they would have ended up with an overall majority.)
Sottish Geens -> Scottish Greens @204! If I weren’t a member, I’d suspect myself of doing that deliberately!
Tweet o’ the day.
House Republican leadership makes its choice: The Big Lie trumps the Constitution
Cartoon: The judgment of history.
Amid the alarming, additional reports of mass shootings over the weekend, what does the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, do? He signs a bill banning gun regulations by local governments.
Link
Link
The BBC has a podcast series called The Anti-Vax Files, of which the eighth and final episode – “Vaccine heroes fight back” – was just posted today. I’m just learning of this, but the episodes look good.
Wonkette: “Former White House Trade Idiot Is Even Bigger Idiot About Dr. Fauci, COVID-19”
Link
“Palestinian health ministry tells @NBCNews: 9 people, including three children, have been killed in #Gaza by Israeli airstrikes.
The strikes came after Hamas fired rockets towards Jerusalem.”
One person was “lightly injured” by the rockets.
There’s a House hearing on the January 6th putsch going on right now. It’s on C-SPAN. Capitol Police IG Michael Bolton is giving his opening statement.
Washington Post link
DeAnna Lorraine Complains that Offering Different Seating Sections to Vaccinated Spectators Is Just Like the Holocaust and Jim Crow (RWW edits in {curly braces}):
I rather like the idea of flags, as it could provide a highly visible warning of to stay well clear, both for sanity and safety. Possibly should be sold — at a considerable mark-up, of course — with bottles of bleach for internal disinfecting?
Follow-up of sorts to @174 in The Onion, Conservatives Criticize Local Preschool For Silencing Right-Wing Animal Voices:
Guardian world liveblog:
Guardian world liveblog:
So I’ve listened to several episodes of the BBC podcast series @ #211. They’re interesting. The most useful I think so far is #5, “One woman’s escape from the rabbit hole.” They also mention a site called Conspiracy Watch in the episode on France, which has a recent book excerpt, “Comment lutter contre la prolifération des théories du complot ?” (the site, despite its name, is in French). The excerpt discusses research-based ideas for countering belief in conspiracy theories, at the individual and societal levels. I laughed when reading it I came across “représentant·es,” just a few hours after reading blf’s #170. Endorse.
Also, the woman went to Harvard why can’t she compose a fucking consistent three-item list?
“‘Unlike the left, we embrace free thought and debate’, McCarthy says in a letter explaining why the party has to purge a member of the leadership team for too much free thought and debate.”
CNN:
Some of Stefanik’s tweets look like they were written by Trump.
Josh Hawley Says He Doesn’t Know If He Saluted Any Rioters, So We Checked.
The junior senator from Missouri has been saying he waved to peaceful demonstrators who had nothing to do with the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
SC @224, OMG! She tweeted crap like that 900 times (900 times!) today!
She must be automating her tweets.
Mass shootings didn’t dominate the weekend’s news … but FYI, there were nine of them
Wonkette: “Another Accused Capitol Rioter MAYBE Bad At Crime, Caught After Bragging On Facebook”
Link
Lynna @ #226, I think Marshall was exaggerating for effect, but she (or whoever’s using the account) has been tweeting up a storm.
fjgkhsdfjghdfhjadfkhjasfkhjsf
Via Stephen Colbert (Late Show), The GOP’s Purity Test: Loyalty To The Former President, Or Else (video), teh HuffPost (who in turn cites the Arizona Republic) is reporting Cyber Ninjaphrauds, the company doing that extremely dubious vote / voter in Arizona, is demanding the passwords for various internet servers and routers, Sheriff Goes Ballistic After Arizona Recounters Demand Access To County Passwords:
Also, the now-suspended door-to-door voter intimidation by Cyber Ninjaphrauds, was clarified that the squad of heavies at knocking on doors .
PZ posted about the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Guardian – “Eight dead in school shooting in Kazan, say Russian officials”:
Fauci and Walensky are testifying in a Senate hearing right now. It’s on C-SPAN.
Here’s a link to the May 11 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
Re SC@234, C-Span claims (paraphrasing) “you must login via your TV provider to watch”. No. The PBS live-stream, Fauci, Walensky testify on efforts to combat COVID-19 (video).
Christopher Miller, BuzzFeed:
Treason! Love this from the Prosecutor General’s autotranslated statement: “You can’t create an army of information clowns and puppet them in your own anti-Ukrainian interests.”
blf @ #236, NBC and other news outlets are also streaming live on YT.
NBC – “Trump’s blog isn’t lighting up the internet”:
“Senator” Paul and Dr Fauci sparred again (and again, the so-called “Senator” talked over Dr Fauci), this time on the bonkers Wuhan lab nonsense, so the follow-up question from the next Senator (a lady, but I missed her name (she’s remote so no name plate)) was about the conspiracy theories spouted by Paul and other eejits… hee hee
blf @ #240. I think it was Tina Smith (MN). I don’t think I’ve seen Walensky testify before. She’s good at it – shut Susan Collins right down.
Sen. Cassidy is an embarrassing doofus.
SC@241, I didn’t listen to Collins’ long ramble, but yeah, it did indeed sound like Dr Walensky addressed whatever batshitery Collins was bellowing.
Guardian world liveblog:
SC@242, Yeah as soon as Cassidy started his blatantly-obviously fake act, I tuned the entire exchange(s?) out. He also claimed to have been a virus researcher, but Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge does not seem to confirm.
To his credit, however, he did vote to convict hair furor (and what that link reports him doing as a doctor also seems very much to his credit).
Follow-up to @240, the Dr Fauci–”Senator” Rand Paul exchange, in the Grauniad’s current States pandemic and politics live blog:
Senator Murphy is now blasting the thugs on the committee and their conspiracy theories, acknowledging there are a lot of things we / science don’t know about Sars-CoV-2 / Covid-19, and praising the witnesses for not lying — taking a few swipes at hair furor and his dalekocrazy in the process.
Follow-up to SC@244, McDonald’s and Uber to help encourage vaccine-hesitant Americans:
Bits and pieces of news:
Link
Some nutter is, again, pushing some Wuhan lab nonsense. Dr Fauci has just him “I am not going to be trapped into saying…”, which is possibly the angriest I’ve ever heard him (his voice even went up maybe a few millidecibels).
Biden’s ACA special enrollment period reaches 1 million Americans
blf @246 and 250, OMG, Fauci must be so tired of testifying before Congress Critters, especially when Republicans abuse the occasion to propagate rightwing conspiracy theories.
SC @229, thanks! For my sake, Josh Marshall needs to be more obvious. Heh. He needs to say to himself, Lynna won’t get this “she’s tweeted stuff like this like 900 times today” as an exaggeration. I’d better say: “She’s tweeted stuff like this a gazillion times today.”
In other news: Kevin McCarthy makes weak case against Liz Cheney to House GOP
The House Republican leader had a week to figure out what he wanted to say about purging Liz Cheney. His letter suggests he couldn’t think of anything.
Excellent points.
Another audit … but this one is different.
Why MAGA-World’s Election Reversal Hopes For A NH Audit Are Not Rooted In Reality
Matt Gaetz is in even more trouble.
Link
Mississippi Republicans explicitly define ‘normal wage levels’ as below a living wage
The right’s new bogeyman: that Biden will take America’s hamburgers away:
The opinion column’s author, Art Cullen, “is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing.” So no, Storm Lake is not an obscure reference to the qAnonsense.
I must admit I have no idea what industrial chicken parts cost here in France, but find that 0,69$/pound (c.1,50$/kg, or c.1,80€/kg) seems very low. My own chicken purchases are usually of whole bird — which, in France, really is the whole bird except for the feathers — with head & legs still attached, and guts still inside. The butcher weighs it and that is the cost is based on, and then cleans it for you as per your specification. Anyways, the last chicken I bought, not sure of the exact weight albeit it was rather hefty, was somewhere around 16€ but certainly not 8+ kg! (I finished up the last of the soup I made from the carcass this morning, as a sauce for my sausage-and-eggs.)
Anyways, back to Mr Cullen’s opinion column:
“#BREAKING Massive rocket attack on Tel Aviv
#UPDATE Hamas claiming to have launched a barrage of 130 missiles towards Tel Aviv and surrounding area”
Lynna @ #252, ha. It was odd that he chose an actual number like that.
Holy shit.
Powell and Giuliani didn’t invent the Big Lie. The kraken was cooked up in a big-money scam
Washington Post hires AP’s Buzbee as executive editor
Link
Link
CNN can’t seem to manage to find a single Palestinian analyst.
Follow-up to blf @250.
Wonkette: “Rand Paul Flogs Fever Dreams About Fauci Creating COVID”
Link
Video is available at the link.
Wonkette: “HAPPY NICE TIME SIGH OF RELIEF, It Is Time To Vaxx Up Your Middle School Kids!”
Link
As part of the Grauniad’s 200th anniversary, few snippets from The rudest things they ever said about the Guardian:
That snippet reminds of possibly the best “marketing” the BBC ever had: After the attempted 1991 coup collasped, Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union said in an interview(? press briefing?) that whilst confined at his dacha, one of the staff found an old overlooked radio, so (paraphrasing) “We tuned into the BCC to learn what was happening.” (To be fair, this has since been disputed as a misleading paraphrase / translation, Gorbachev listens while being held captive.)
As recounted in the article, Green has “priors” with insulting the Grauniad
Far more creative is Grace Petrie’s I Wish The Guardian Believed That I Exist (video).
Guardian – “Trump family members got ‘inappropriately close’ to Secret Service agents, book claims”:
Jeff Bezos buys superyacht as Americans sink into poverty
“Things are still really bad for a lot of people in this country, which makes it especially jarring when you remember that the wealthiest people in America have not just weathered the crisis—they have thrived,” says Chris Hayes.
This is a good episode, with Chris Hayes covering all the basics and then some.
Nine out of ten of the world’s richest people are in the USA. There are 724 billionaires in the USA. We added more than 100 billionaires last year.
@ 262
OK Chuck, what are you prepared to DO about the Republicans and this cancerous “Big Lie?” I mean, beside making long-winded speeches, that is?
Nothing? OK, cool. Enjoy losing control of Congress next year.
Follow-up to comment 269.
Jeff Bezos’ new yacht will come with a smaller “support yacht” with a helipad.
Lynna@265, “Follow-up to blf @250…”
Actually, it’s @240 & @246.
The nutter at @250 is someone else, maybe Cassidy (see @245) again, I didn’t catch his name.
A scorecard to keep track of all the different loons might help ?
I was watching an argument on nextdoor involving the vaccination IDs and I noticed that one of the people who is normally tough on crime was opining that we can’t do it because people will lie or make fake IDs. I pointed out they were normally tough on crime and posted this troll face mask image.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61FHeZufaCL.AC_SY355.jpg
I think that image has more potential uses.
Is Kevin McCarthy digging his own grave?
Link
McCarthy is no leader. He is just Trump’s lap dog.
@ 269
Gasp! How dare you express such blatant bigotry against our world’s poor, oppressed billionaires. They have it a lot harder than most people, what with class envy and finding new ways to skirt around those oppressive tax laws! I mean, just last week, Katlyn Jenner told this sad story of the man who rented the private airplane hanger next to hers being forced to emigrate to Sedona because he was forced to see homeless people! Leave Jeff and his superyacht alone!
Seriously, though, Chris talks a good game about how the upper class enjoy lives of carefree opulence while the rest of us scape by paycheck-to-paycheck, but what does he actually want to do to alleviate this situation… I mean, besides making the rich pay a few bucks more in taxes each year? Has it ever occurred to him that wealth inequality and poverty are a feature of the capitalist system that he and other liberals claim they can reform rather than a bug? Chris is worth about $5 million, so I doubt it.
This is funny … and a schadenfreude moment, when a Newsmax host was trolled on live TV by a former Obama speechwriter.
Link
BTW, blf @272, thanks for the correction.
In contrast to CNN, Ayman Mohyeldin on MSNBC is interviewing a Palestinian man threatened with eviction (see the article @ #186 for more). (Who of course had to be followed by a former Israeli ambassador, but he’s asking him decent questions, which are being met with much whining and evasion.)
Brony@273, paraphrased someone as claiming (about vaccinated IDs), “we can’t do it because people will lie or make fake IDs.”
Just like driving licenses and so on, up and including the usual “gold standard”, passports. Geesh!
But that comparison does point out an issue…
My current understanding is the States “plans” are for privately-issued “IDs” (like frequent-shopper discount cards) — not government-issued (like passports, etc.) — which seems like a nightmare in trying to work out whether or an “ID” is valid (in at least two senses: not-faked, and also as genuine (reputable) proof). There has already been at least case (albeit here in France) of a fraudulent test certificate scam, Coronavirus: Fake test certificate gang foiled at Paris airport.
The situation here in the EU is slightly better, in the sense most reputable-proof “plans” (as I last understood the situation) are for national-level proof-of-vaccination, but each country seems to be doing its own thing with not too much being said about mutual acceptance or ability for another EU country to confirm it’s valid. Which, given most “plans” seem to be for an app (often(?) tied to the country’s track-and-trace app), seems like a repeat of the track-and-trace app fiasco, where most apps are country-specific with next-to-no interoperability. E.g., if a German, say, visitor comes to my French village and we happen to be in close proximity to each other for awhile, then a few days later one of us is found to be infected, the other of us will never find out via their app of a potential Risk since (simplifying) their German app and my French app “cannot” talk to each other.
There are also concerns about whether or not such proof is a good approach, albeit perhaps not-so-much as the States-side thug bellowings (e.g., @216), but the potential unfairness: E.g., younger people won’t be able to obtain the proof for some time, simply because they are last in the queue to be vaccinated.
More on today’s @240 / @246 Dr Fauci–”Senator” Rand Paul exchange, from the Grauniad’s current Rand Paul is an eejit live blog, with video, and citing Axios for the transcript (all emboldening in the Grauniad, with Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
Correction/update to #s 264 and 277 – CNN had him on earlier today (video clips atl).
@blf 278
I’ve had to point out that we get to be “virus police” in our personal spaces where coworkers and customers are concerned. The use of symbols of authority and tyranny are interesting.
“The death toll in Gaza from Israeli airstrikes has risen to 30 Palestinians, including including 10 children, with over 200 wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. A couple of multi-story apartment blocks have also been leveled.”
Raw Story – “‘Cold-blooded fraudster’: Students for Trump co-founder gets prison term for posing as a lawyer”:
Hayes Brown at MSNBC – “The latest Israel-Palestine crisis isn’t a ‘real estate dispute.’ It’s ethnic cleansing.”
Loosely related to @15 — albeit you’d never know it from the title — Trillions of brood X cicadas move closer to emergence as soil temperatures rise. The article’s mostly about eating the cicadas, “some US chefs and bug enthusiasts are looking to adopt traditions of entomophagy — the consumption of insects — in both ceremonial and nutritional terms.”
A snippet:
I can certainly vouch for Mexican grasshoppers — albeit I’ve only had them here in France — they are quite tasty.
Amusingly, as I was typing this, I was, by coincidence, listening to Grace Petrie’s The Vegan Song (video).
CNN – “Judge dismisses NRA’s bankruptcy petition, allowing New York AG lawsuit to move forward”:
More atl.
Reuters – “‘Rationals’ vs. ‘radicals’: Anti-Trump Republicans threaten third party”:
“Putin scored eight (8!) goals in his ice hockey game today, carrying his team to a 13:9 victory. His first goal came just 29 seconds into the first period. In case you’re wondering: yes, this is embarrassing….”
Really gross.
How much? Mayoral hopefuls red-faced after guessing New York housing costs:
Yang has more problems, from the Grauniad’s current States pandemic and politics live blog:
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz: “Kevin McCarthy Forced to Fly to Mar-a-Lago to Sit and Listen to Things Trump Would Have Posted on Facebook”
New Yorker link
Politico:
Cartoon: Defund
This is almost exactly one year old, I just found it, Fake News by Grace Petrie (video). Some of the lyrics:
Guardian – “Covid pandemic was preventable, says WHO-commissioned report”:
Guardian – “Animals to be formally recognised as sentient beings in UK law”:
Stephen Collinson at CNN – “Cheney shames colleagues who will purge her for disloyalty to Trump”:
Here’s a link to the May 12 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From their summary:
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day.
Guardian world liveblog:
According to Worldometer, Hungary currently has the highest COVID deaths per million people (2,997) in the world.
CNN – “Former acting defense secretary to say he worried about appearance of ‘military coup’ at US Capitol on January 6”:
More atl. The hearing will be at 10 ET.
Ryan Goodman:
More atl.
The only reason I chased this point a little bit is because last night Jimmy Kimmel (MyPillow Mike’s Ranting Rally, Jenner’s Poll Problems, Tiger on the Loose & Viral Menthol Soap Guy (video)) snarked on a rally by the mypilau eejit (apoligies to pilau rice, which is excellent), pointing out the arena he booked was only half-full. However, his numbers didn’t add up — assuming he wasn’t joking — saying (paraphrasing from memory) 30,000 were expected but only 1,500 showed up. I presumed that was a misstatement (misreading his autocue or something?). But as it turns out, all three values are (broadly) correct: Claims of by teh eejit of an expected 30,000, to be in a venue capable of only 3,200, with only 1,500 attendees (some of whom apparently queued for 7 hours beforehand), Mike Lindell’s South Dakota rally: Proud Boys, Joe Piscopo and a can’t-miss investment:
If there really were 30,000 copies of teh Scrolls of Lin de lala my Pillow there, then he would seem to be so deluded he cannot even see the difference between 30,000 and 3,200 — which might explain why an extremely dubious alleged 3,500%-gain scam was promoted.
† Here’s an example of some of the fine print from the home page of the associated site (which I will not link to):
The hearing with Miller and Rosen has begun. I believe Carolyn Maloney, the House Oversight and Reform Committee chair, said in her opening that the FBI and DoJ haven’t turned over a single document to any of the five or six congressional committees that have requested them. She also said she had wanted Chris Wray to testify today, had sent him several invitations, and had even postponed the hearing twice to accommodate him, and he’s still not there. She did say he’s now scheduled to testify in June, but WTF.
I had to mute the opening statement from the Republican ranking member, Comer. I simply don’t know how much longer this can go on – the Republicans in the House just continue to get worse after January 6th. The Democrats on the committee include: Jamie Raskin, AOC, Katie Porter, and Jackie Speier. The Republicans include: Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, Clay Higgins, and Andy Biggs.
Guardian world liveblog:
DC Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee is also testifying in the House Oversight hearing. I don’t know why his statement wasn’t discussed in the media beforehand.
TPM – “Cheney Officially Out As January 6 Attack Reverberates Through Congress”:
At the link is a liveblog of the Cheney meeting earlier (McCarthy chose to go with a voice vote rather than a private ballot) and the various hearings.
Follow-up to SC@121, Stephen Colbert (Late Show), Fix Your Foxitis With This One Simple Trick (video).
From the TPM liveblog:
Between the Republicans on the committee and the pathetic Trump stooges testifying, it’s insane.
“The CDC is reporting Native Americans have the highest vaccination rate in the country.
Local and state governments could learn a lot from the vaccination campaigns led by Native Nations.”
blf @302, MyPillow Mike’s inability to even give his books away is a telling detail. That guy is not a competent grifter/scammer. He’s an eejit for sure.
SC @303, “I simply don’t know how much longer this can go on.” I was thinking the same thing.
SC @299, I am worried that, even if the EU gives a recovery grant to Hungary, the corrupt (and rightwing) officials in Hungary will not properly administer the grant funds. There’s a reason “Hungary currently has the highest COVID deaths per million people (2,997) in the world.”
Summarized from NBC News:
Yet another thing that is going on longer than one would have hoped: voter suppression bills at the state level.
“Cheney: ‘I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office’.”
Summarized from the New York Times:
Good. Those representatives should face consequences.
SC @312. Good for her. She is willing to continue the fight.
In other news that relates to stories of some Republicans willing to speak the truth (summarized from the New York Times):
GOP tolerates plenty of scandal-plagued members, but not Cheney
Congressional Republican leaders have standards. They’re just not defensible standards.
Oh, FFS.
Representative Madison Cawthorn:
Commentary:
Link
Link
TPM liveblog:
Matthew Gertz:
Fox & Friends clip atl.
Yesterday’s (second) tweet o’ the day.
Washington Post:
Ok, this is silly, but it makes me smile. Apologies in advance.
PSA encouraging Singaporeans to get their vaccinations
Get your shot, Steady Pom Pi Pi
Glad to see they haven’t entirely succeeded in stamping out Singlish.
Catie Edmondson:
NYT link atl.
Wonkette: “Dipsh*t Michigan Republican Wants To Register All Fact Checkers So They Can Be Punished”
Link
Axios – “GOP lawmakers downplay Capitol riot at House hearing”:
I keep thinking about this interview (see #277 above for context). It was evasive throughout, but the end was essentially an attempt to justify ethnic cleansing.
“Sheikhb Jarrah resident @m7mdkurd was just attacked and kicked out of his entire neighbourhood by Israeli forces!”
Video atl. This is the young man who was interviewed yesterday on MSNBC and CNN (see #280 above).
Nitasha Kaul at The Conversation – “COVID in India: a tragedy with its roots in Narendra Modi’s leadership style.”
Update to #326 – he appears to be OK now, fortunately.
“Israeli mobs are marching through several cities, terrorizing Palestinians. In Bat Yam, they are attacking people in the streets and destroying shops and homes….”
Video atl.
“Video reportedly shows Israeli youth trashing Arab-owned shops and businesses in Bat Yam”
Video atl. Breaking glass. At night.
Elizabeth Tsurkov:
Guardian world liveblog:
Guardian world liveblog:
SC#332
Here in IL we are also beginning to bridge from May 14, and if trends continue, we could be essentially open June 11, providing the present trends continue.
Link
I’ll still follow the CDC recommendations if masking is recommended for certain situations, as I do transport Sr. Citizens, some of whom may not be vaccinated for health reasons.
Tweet o’ the day.
Nerd @ #334, that’s good news. I just read that some states are tying it to the percentage of the population that’s vaccinated, which seems reasonable.
SC @325, from the comments:
Listening to Ayman Mohyeldin interview the former Israeli ambassador was tough. The ambassador made me ill. “It is the politicization of international law.” (He was referring to some experts saying that Israel may be committing war crimes.) Give me a break. Israel should face up to the fact that some international laws are being broken.
Washington Post:
Political Wire:
Good. Let’s see more of that.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine:
There’s an incentive!
More from DeWine:
Manchin plants himself firmly in McConnell’s back pocket, rejects saving democracy
“The Israeli gov’t didn’t ‘lose control’ of the situation. It sowed the seeds for it.”
Parallel to what far-right politicians have brought about in the US, India, Brazil, Russia, Hungary, Turkey,…
Rep. Pocan:
Letter and signatures atl.
This is a good point.
Laurence O’Donnell, host ot the Last Word on MSNBC at 10 pm et, is holding a Town Hall meeting on Covid Vaccination tonight.
The interviewees include President Biden, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Murthy, head of HHS, and the 34 year old black woman who was instrumental (over a weekend) in the development of the Moderna Vaccine.
I’m drooling over hearing about the science in the development of the vaccine.
Dr. Kizzmekia (Kizzy) Corbett, who lead the team developing the Moderna Vaccine.
A very impressive person.
‘More than a job’: the meal delivery co-ops making the gig economy fairer:
The Spanish minimum age is 1050€/month (c.1267$/month), which assuming 20 days (four 5-day weeks) per month, works out to 52,50€/day — suggesting 10€/hour after tax is actually rather decent and does not require excessive time. As of 2019 (Living Wage Series — Spain — September 2019 — In Euro, per Month), that would be a livable pay. The actual estimated livable pay depends on the circumstances, and 10€/hour is livable regardless of the circumstances.
† The Grauniad has managed to spell her surname as both González and Gonzalez, sometimes even in the same paragraph. I’ve assumed the former is her preferred spelling and have changed corrected the other spelling (unmarked). Please support another 200 years of typos if you can !
Caitlyn Jenner’s bid to be California’s next Governator is falling flat (my added emboldening):
Solar surcharge: how US power firms try to make people pay for going green (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
† I’ve opted to not set that claim in because Evergy does generate a not-insignificant percentage of power from renewables (c.28% in total, according to the article), albeit coal is still it’s main method (39%). As Ms Barnett points out, at least with Evergy, the problems seem to originate more because of (excessive?-)profit than any ideological or quasi-technological opposition to renewables. (I write “quasi-technological” because there used to be, as I recall (so add some salt), blurtings that feeding power into the grid was dangerous and required utility-approved installations — but as far as I know, the real technology issues have been solved and any reputable installation is safe and a fairly-routine inspection by an electrician should normally suffice.)
The point of the Republican party? To stroke the ego of Trump:
Two points this opinion column does not discuss are the voter-suppression efforts of the thugs, and the thug-friendly federal judges (notably including the Supreme Court). One and probably both seem very likely to severely distort the 2022 elections (at least). There is also the current qAnonsense — albeit, fortunately, that has not convinced any courts in any significant manner (that I am currently aware of). On the other hand, the insurrectionist’s trials are beginning, with the potential to expose, on the public record, enough rot to make the non-fanatics stop and think…
EU citizens arriving in UK being locked up and expelled:
Teh NKofE† has long pushed enforcement onto the airlines. I’ve been caught up in this nonsense myself, albeit (in my case) always easily resolved, for more understandable and clear(er) reasons, and admittedly not unique to teh NKofE. The “problem” as such is I am a dual-passport holder (being a dual-national), with one passport from the States and the other not. I learned a long time ago that when an airline asks to see your passport (on departure for an international flight), what they are interested in is your entry passport; i.e., that you will be allowed to enter the destination country. (Airlines usually have to pay a fine for passengers refused entry.) So, in teh NKofE, when flying to the States, I would show the airline my States passport.
However, that is not the passport I used to enter teh NKofE (especially when coming from the States (at that time)). Hence, there were no visas, stamps, nothing, in my States indicating it was legal for me to be in teh NKofE for as long as I was (I lived there for years). This (understandably) caused concerns I might be “fleeing” or similar; e.g., wanted in teh NKofE and attempting to “return” to frustrate legal actions, etc. In my case, at that time, the problem was simply solved by showing my other passport, which indisputably established my right to be in teh NKofE.
The Grauniad is asking “Are you an EU citizen who has been detained or expelled since January, or do you know anyone who has been?” Contact details are at the end of the article.
Presumably related (I’ve not read either article yet), Cruel, paranoid, failing: inside the Home Office (“Something is badly wrong at the heart of one of Britain’s most important ministries. How did it become so broken?”), and One in 10 EU nationals in UK may leave after June (“Research shows lack of trust in government as deadline to apply for settled status approaches”).
† Teh NKofE — N.Korea of Europe — (also known as teh “U”K) is a small self-isolated nuclear-armed authoritarian place with a cult of personality “ruled” by a very small wealthy paranoid elite in denial & completely uninterested in anyone else.
One of the worst failures in President Biden’s foreign policy is the kowtowing to both Israel and Saudi Arabia. E.g., ‘Weak’ US let Saudis jail more dissidents, says rights group (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
There’s also the point made previously, see me@65, “younger domestic [Biden] staff who know there’s no point to engaging with or waiting for the thugs, combined with long-time military-industrial profiteering staff for foreign affairs — is an interesting way of looking at the current administration”.
Why the Arizona of 2.1m votes is dangerous:
The point about the alleged totals not being checked also occurred to me, albeit I don’t recall specifically flagging that (presumably-deliberate) flaw. And thanks to Mr Fontes and Mr Patrick for explaining some of the reasons the ballot’s folding is (nominally) meaningless — I don’t recall seeing any actual explanations before, and still haven’t seen any “reasoning” from teh thugs, etc., why it “is“…
The article does not mention, as one example, the abysmal security around the ballots and machines. One side-effect of this fraud is that it (very probably) won’t be possible to conduct yet another legitimate re-count / audit (should there be some reason to do so (there’s already been at least two!)), as it cannot be shown the ballots and / or machines were keep “secure”; e.g., not modified (tampered-with).
Mehdi Hasan talked to former Australian PM Kevin Rudd yesterday about Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. The interview begins around 1:44 into this 2-hour video.
An opinion column, Americans are more pro-union — and anti-big business — than at any time in decades:
Salaried employees — such as me — have, in general, not been unionised. Nonetheless, it occurs to me now — I maintain a private list of people with whom I will never, ever, “work”-with again (to the point of refusing to work for any company that employs any of those individuals) — that every single individual on that list is not only a so-called “manager”, but was also contemptuous of, broadly speaking, working conditions and worker’s rights. (Some were also eejits, either always or outside their apparent area(s?)-of-expertise; and ALL where deliberate liars (the usual reason I cited when resigning).)
This opinion column reminds me of an incidence so many yonks ago writing was still transitioning from chiseled-stone to baked clay tablets: Debate(?) class in high school (in the States): Topic was something to do with unions. The team I was assigned-to was to argue, broadly speaking, unions were a good thing. The approach we took was to point out, using the statistics of the time, that the percentage of union workers was quite low and , so the various (work-related) problems of the time could not possibly be due to unions. Our team “won” the debate (decided by vote of the student audience).
A largely nonsensical argument — which mostly shows the students were not paying attention in other classes: In a different class (civics?), I’d already seen a first-hand demonstration of essentially the precise opposite of our debating team’s position: One day, the teacher asked us to vote (by secret write-in ballot) for our “favourite person”. Second place was “Mom”, but the winner was someone no-one had ever heard of. The teacher then revealed he’d asked a small cohort of students, before class, to vote for this entirely-fictional person. The teacher’s point (paraphrasing from memory): “An organised minority can defeat the majority.”
This isn’t to say our team’s (assigned) position was wrong, only that a very poor argument carried the day. (I do not now recall now if I connected the dots here… i.e,, the example from the civics class with our poor argument in the debate class.) From admittedly very poor memory, the opposition debate team floundered during the debate’s rebuttal phase (again, either not paying attention elsewhere or also unable to (then) connect the dots).
Here’s a link to the May 13 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
From the Guardian US-politics liveblog:
Bits and pieces of news:
Link
Jimmy Kimmel (Liz Cheney Canceled by Same People Who Hate Cancel Culture (video)) snarked about Caitlyn Jenner (see @348) false claim she didn’t vote in 2020 (paraphrasing from memory), “She was so embarrassed by her lie she tried to hide in the women’s restroom but Republicans wouldn’t let her in.”
Why it matters that some Republicans see Jan. 6 rioters as victims
We’ve arrived at a point in which our discourse is so toxic, GOP members of Congress are comfortable telling us not to believe our lying eyes about Jan. 6.
CNBC – “Rep. Matt Gaetz friend Joel Greenberg will plead guilty in case that led to sex traffic probe, court records show”:
Palm Beach Officials Preparing For Potential Trump Indictment
Posted by readers of the article:
Guardian – “China’s feminists protest against wave of online abuse with ‘internet violence museum’”:
Kevin McCarthy refuses to look at body cam video as Republicans call Jan. 6 a ‘tourist visit’
More at the link, including excerpts from CNN that show body cam footage.
Wonkette: Mississippi Sending A Man To Prison For Life Over An Ounce Of Weed
“Active duty Marine Corps officer Major Christopher Warnagiris, a 40-year-old stationed at Quantico, was arrested today for allegedly assaulting a Capitol Police officer during the Jan. 6th riot….”
“The GOP has lost its way. Fellow Americans, join our new alliance.”
Washington Post link. The piece is written by Charlie Dent, Mary Peters, Denver Riggleman, Michael Steele and Christine Todd Whitman. Charlie Dent represented Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District in the U.S. House from 2005 to 2018. Mary Peters was secretary of transportation during the George W. Bush administration. Denver Riggleman represented Virginia’s 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House from 2019 to 2021. Michael Steele is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Christine Todd Whitman was governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.
Josh Marshall:
Link
Arizona ends ‘Communist’ highway signs that encourage people to get vaccinated
Link
New CDC guidelines: fully vaccinated people don’t have to wear masks or socially distance outdoors or indoors.
Former U.S. Military Leaders Sign Bizarre Open Letter Pushing Election Lies:
Details at the link. Might not be as bad as it first seems, but still.
Guardian US liveblog:
Suspected Russia-led cyber campaign targets Germany’s Green party leader:
“Hundreds and hundreds of Jerusalemites standing together against war & violence
‘In Gaza & Sderot, children want to live
Jews & Arabs refuse to be enemies'”
Photos and video atl.
MoJo – “Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country”:
Much more atl.
Guardian US liveblog:
Tweet o’ the day.
(Background from the BBC.)
SC @373, I will add that some establishments may still require masks. If so, you should abide by that rule. One example: my doctor’s office. Another example: the local hospital.
Steve Bell in the Grauniad On escalating Israel-Gaza conflict (cartoon). This is in direct response to Israel vows not to stop Gaza attacks until there is (“[Israeli d]efence minister [Benny Gantz] rules out ceasefire […]”).
Also in the Graunaid, Martin Rowson On Israel and Gaza (cartoon), which I believe pre-dates Herr Gantz’s declaration of intentional genocide.
blf @380, that Steve Bell cartoon is perfect!
In other news: Why the deal for testimony from Trump’s White House counsel matters
Don McGahn helped expose multiple alleged incidents of Trump obstructing justice. After a two-year delay, he’ll now offer congressional testimony.
SC#371 & 373, it appears that the new guidance does not extend to various health care facilities including doctor’s offices. Carry a mask if needed.
Eid al-Fitr celebrations around the world (photo essay):
Related to SC@278, the Grauniad’s article, Glasgow protesters rejoice as men freed after immigration van standoff:
Oops, me@384: Related SC@278 → Related to SC@378… Sorry!
Nerd @ #382, yes, there are several exceptions (public transport, etc.). When I’m fully vaccinated and start going places, I’m still going to wear a mask and distance from people I don’t know are vaccinated for a while, and I’m sure I’ll be carrying a mask for even longer (though I don’t take it on walks anymore).
LOL.
In Ozland, Murderoch’s “newspapers” are busy spreading Wuhan lab qAnonsense, News Corp exclusive on Chinese based on discredited 2015 book of conspiracy theories:
Guardian US liveblog:
There’s definitely a wave of disinformation about vaccines and COVID on Twitter this week – a noticeable uptick.
Crossposted with the other thread – excellent piece by Peter Beinart in Jewish Currents: “Teshuvah: A Jewish Case for Palestinian Refugee Return.”
Guardian US liveblog:
“Oh wow. Things really get interesting here when Liz Cheney says Fox News has an obligation to say the election wasn’t stolen…”
Video clip from Fox interview atl.
Mohammed El-Kurd: “Dozens and dozens of armed Israelis surround Sheikh Jarrah. 2 of them just walked into my yard. Police have brought dogs with them (unusual). Our minds still with Gaza.”
Guardian US liveblog:
Farm Sanctuary: “Carrie was born at a foie gras facility where male ducks are force-fed until their livers are morbidly engorged. Since females are considered unsuitable for this process, they’re culled or raised for meat.
Thankfully, Carrie escaped this cruelty & has been with us 8 years today!”
Photos atl.
re SC @396: Not much different from chicken producers where LIVE male baby chicks are dumped into a grinder because only the female chicks are valued for production.
blf@388,
It’s worth noting that Japan certainly did test biological weapons on Chinese victims during WWII.
Guardian – “Israel air and ground forces hit targets in Gaza Strip as death toll climbs”:
Here’s a link to the May 14 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
More re #328 and previous – Democracy Now! – “Poet Mohammed El-Kurd Detained in Sheikh Jarrah After Condemning Israeli Apartheid on U.S. TV”:
France 24 – “Cuba rolls out two Covid-19 vaccines still in clinical trials”:
Axios – “U.S. sees escalating climate change impacts, EPA report finds.”
The relevant information is there, but the way Axios structures their articles is too ridiculous for me to attempt to excerpt.
Gregg Carlstrom:
Reuters – “Myanmar troops battle militias as anti-coup resistance grows”:
CNN keeps showing a map of US states showing the percentage vaccinated, but the highest category is 25%+ and all of the states are there, so the entire map is the same color and it’s completely useless for distinguishing which states are doing better with vaccinations. It’s so funny that they keep putting it up.
Mano Singham has a new post on something I’ve been talking about for a while: “Using non-human animals as slurs.”
SC@406, Most reporters ∩ Mathematical understanding → ∅
That is, in a Venn diagram of (most) Reporters and (reasonable familiarity with basic) Mathematical concepts, there is no overlap. Probably also applies to most computer UI and web graphics designers.
Humor/satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
CNN – “Since-deleted video shows Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office during 2019 Capitol Hill visit”:
The video of the full CNN report is at the link, but you can also watch just the video here.
blf @408
It’s a pet peeve of mine. I keep trying to tell people that artists need supervision, but noooooo…
The top four members of the House Republican leadership — Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Minority Whip Steve Scalise, Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, and Republican Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer — all voted at least once to reject certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory.
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bibis-big-win
Via Mano Simgham here at FtB, Mary Poppins returns to describe the current GOP (video).
House Republicans make their choice: The Big Lie trumps the Constitution
Link
Eye-popping lawsuit portrays GOP lawmaker’s office as a Covid-19 petri dish
Brandon Pope, a former aide to Doug Lamborn, accuses the Colorado congressman of recklessly endangering his staff.
Wonkette: “A Bill To Make Louisiana ‘Sanctuary State’ For Fossil Fuels? Did Oil Write This?”
Link
Josh Marshall re the report/video @ #410: “Pretty clear that if @mtgreenee hadn’t been elected to Congress she would have been there insurrecting and quite possible already arrested.”
Denver 9 News:
Commentary:
Link
Last November, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, (a Republican, of course) said that he would pay up to $1 million as a reward to those who could produce evidence of voter fraud. He has been presented with evidence of Republican voter fraud, but so far he hasn’t paid up.
TPM – “Bipartisan Deal Reached On Jan. 6 Commission, Giving Democrats Win On Scope”:
Bill text atl.
Link
Follow-up to comment 422.
Ryan Nobles, CNN:
“‘This is a woman that’s deeply unwell. And clearly needs help. And her kind of fixation has lasted for several years now. At this point I think the depth has raised concerns for other members as well’, AOC on MTG”
Jake Sherman says he’s heard it from both Democrats and Republicans.
Big yuck factor.
Link
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/100-owned-by-trump-and-the-big-lie
GOP proposes middle-class tax hike to pay for Biden’s wildly popular jobs plan—it’s a political gift
Thread from Popehat on the Greenberg plea.
HuffPo – “Proud Boys Leader Charged In Capitol Attack Feels Betrayed By Trump: ‘You Left Us’”:
From the Guardian world liveblog summary:
Guardian – “Rightwingers tried to discredit Trump ‘foes’ with honey trap plot – report”:
SC @429, that Popehat thread is a good one. Very informative.
In other news: No, unemployment benefits don’t stop people from returning to work. Study after study has debunked the myth that emergency benefits keep people out of the labor force.
Washington Post link
Cartoon: Both sides blindness
Lone wolf actors post greatest domestic terror threat, FBI, DHS conclude
Follow-up to an old comment:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-15/china-says-spacecraft-landed-on-mars-and-deployed-rover/100141680
Texas Passes Heartbeat Abortion Law With Broad Civil Enforcement Provision
May 14, 2021
Daily Beast reports on the new statute.
Daily Beast Has New Wild Story Involving Gaetz, Greenberg, And A No-Show Contract
Talking Points Memo link
Follow-up to comment 438.
Posted by readers of the article:
Link
McCarthy desperately wanted to silence Cheney. He failed.
Link
Grifters gonna grift.
Here are the major retailers that have updated their mask policy
Wonkette link
An Israeli warning, an airstrike and then outrage over hit on Gaza media building.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/15/israel-airstrike-media/
Trouble brews between Trappist monks and Belgian mineral empire:
I don’t have a Trappistes de Rochefort on-hand, but do have an Orval (now in the cooler), with which I’ll celebrate later. Belgium artisanal breweries are famous for being very superstitious, to the point of not even cleaning away dusty cobwebs in corners, for fear changes will alter the taste of their beers. (Do not construe the beers, cheeses, etc., are produced under unsanitary conditions.) Having said that, tinkering with the critical water supply is known to be risky; e.g., from vague memory, a distillery(?) in Scotland(?) had taste-problems after some water supply changes.
How a Glasgow community halted an immigration raid.
: Matt Gaetz seeks to ridicule allegations he paid underaged girl for sex:
More like Max Headroom to hair furor’s bellowings.
I don’t follow the Robin–Batman analogy.
What is the “Gaetzsignal”? — an SMS message about a child? Or, maybe, suggesting an earmark… My first thought is I presume teh extra-creepy wannabe-
RobinMax Headroom “thinks” providing him with underage children is a necessary part of the process of bribing him to “work” for an earmark benefiting the child’s pimp (and his own wallet). An earmark suggestion causes him to, um, “spring” into action, sort-of like the Batsignal.Nevermind that he cannot think and doesn’t work, and as far as I know, has not initiated any legislation, amendments, earmarks, etc., at all. But that isn’t Robin–Batman-ish at all. A simpler possibly is just more deluded fantasy “thinking”.
From memory, the story of Syrian chef Imad Alarnab’s highly-appreciated pop-up kitchens was mentioned in this series of poopyhead threads. And now, I fled Syria with just £12 … now I have my own restaurant in Soho. The restaurant was due to open last year, but the pandemic obviously affected that. It opens tomorrow (Monday), and already “his restaurant is booked solid every weekend for the next few months”.
Biden cancels Trump’s planned :
Amazon had keys to USPS mailbox used for union ballots:
Tampering with the mail, including USPS facilities (such as a mailbox, locked or not) is, if I recall correctly (not checked), a felony.
Facebook faces EU-to-US data transfer ban:
Whilst neither Al Jazeera nor the Reuters report it is obviously based on say so, I presume this is all about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which, as the article implies, applies to EU citizens(? residents?) regardless of where they are in the world.
blf @450, I laughed when I saw the headline. Such a good schadenfreude moment. I always imaged Trump’s “National Garden of American Heroes” as not so much a garden but more a replica of the Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower decorating schemes, where tackiness rules.
blf @449, what a nice success story!
KG @447, I’ve enjoyed reading that and other stories about communities working together to thwart outrageous anti-immigrant actions. “The only way that day could have ended was with our neighbours’ release; there were simply too many local people standing in the street for the police to have taken the van away. The strategy does work – and we want the world to understand that it was the people on the streets who won that victory, not the politicians.” Yep. And I like the way the immigrants were characterized as “our neighbors.”
blf@452m
They say that like it would be a bad thing!
Authorities in India discover hundreds of bodies buried in riverbanks
Arizona Republican calls Trump ‘deleted database’ statement ‘unhinged’:
I’ve no experience with voting machines, but do have experience with POS / ATM / ticket / etc machines, which also have high-security requirements — and I’ve been told by experts who should know there is overlap in risks & technologies. As such, I have a suspicion there may be some garbling here on the passwords, with the “passwords” (usually called “(crypto-)keys”) in question either being randomly-generated per-machine(? -election?) and inaccessible (to anyone), or some form of public-private encryption, where different keys are used to encrypt and decrypt.
On the other hand, since supposedly “administrative passwords” are involved, then conventional passphrase — like for your computer, or the PIN for your mobile / bankcard — could be meant. But, again drawing on the POS, ATM, etc., analogy, that could easily be insufficient to access the most precious secrets — where it’s entirely possible they cannot be accessed by a human, even armed with maximal privilege, without the use of specialist equipment… which, if voting machines are anything like POS, ATM, etc., nominally trigger an automatic “self-destruct”. (No, the machine doesn’t burst into flames Mission Impossible style, but simply erases those secrets and possibly turns itself into a brick.)
MSNBC Host Fires Back At GOP Rep Who Says Media Should ‘Move On’ From Big Lie
Video is available at the link
Follow-up to comment 458.
Posted by readers of the article:
blf @457, thanks for posting that. It’s good to see the details when Republican election officials are calling the Maricopa, Arizona recount “unhinged.”
In other news: McKinnon returns as SNL’s Dr. Fauci
SNL’s latest cold open tackles mask-wearing scenarios and new CDC guidance. Video is available at the link.
Link to “Weekend Update” segment from Saturday Night Live.
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/weekend-update-cdc-lifts-mask-mandate/4363000
This is for Lynna who actually lives in Idaho.
I can see where living in Idaho has its moments.
In some states the vaccination drives are starting to stall out.
Idaho is one.
They are at only 35% partially or wholly vaccinated.
We can see where the summer home and refuge of the Covid-19 virus will be already. Every single state at the bottom of the vaccine uptake list are Red GOP states.
PS Already in some states, the majority of the hospitalized Covid-19 virus patients are both younger and not vaccinated.
Soon it will be almost all of them.
Not exactly a surprise, Arizona audit [sic] of 2020 votes has ‘QAnon problem’:
Some snippets from the Media Matters report (link embedded above):
Raven @462, the vaccination rate in my county is even lower than that of Idaho overall. Sigh. I’m just going to have to continue to live with minimum interaction with most other human beings here. I feel certain that one day, Idaho will be Number One! Number one in nurturing the growth of vaccine-resistant variants of COVID-19.
How many Ammon Bundy types do we have?
Rather more tasty than the @463 et al antics in Arizona (albeit I presume Arizona has great-tasting Mexican / Latin American food!), I’m now enjoying an Orval (see @446), whilst considering what to prepare for dinner. Probably the (hopefully-still-fresh) fresh pasta, albeit Trappist beer and Italian pasta perhaps isn’t an ideal combination? No idea… albeit once at an restaurant in Edinburgh, I had a Trappist beer with Indian food (at the restaurateur’s suggestion), and that worked amazingly well. (Sadly, some years later, I wasn’t able to find that restaurant again — either they closed / moved, or I misremembered where they were (which was a rather hidden-away location).)
I mean, Indian and Italian are both very similar — I…ian — aren’t they ?
(The mildly deranged penguin insists I name an Indian cheese and an Italian curry.)
When Fighting Erupts Between Israel and Gaza, Charges of War Crimes Follow
Civilian deaths on both sides raise urgent questions about which military actions are legal, what war crimes are being committed and who, if anyone, will be held to account.
House GOP leaders join Hannity to genuflect to the former guy, praise his ‘energy’
Full video is available at the link. Creepy smiles included. Hannity begins the interview by declaring that he “doesn’t care about Liz Cheney.”
Fake Covid vaccine and test certificate market is growing, researchers say (Grauniad edits in {curly braces}):
Republican Covid lies follow foreign strongmen’s lead — and are deadly for it:
The current excess deaths in Russia is unclear, albeit most sources put it at over 400,000; in a March BBC article, Coronavirus: How Russia glosses over its Covid death toll, Mr Raksha estimates it was (then) c.450,000.
Back to the opinion column in the Grauniad:
Obviously. breach fencing, smash in doors, try to crush police officers in doors, invade private offices, etc., etc., etc.
Indeed. Where are the taco trucks on every corner ?
From the Gruniad’s most-recent(?) pandemic live blog, Dr Fauci being his usual reasonable self and making excellent points:
Nothing surprising or unknown there — just very well put.
First Dog on the Moon in the Grauniad, What do you even say to young people about climate change? (cartoon) (SHOUTING in the original): “I’M SO SORRY ABOUT HOW YOUR FUTURES HAVE TURNED TO DUST! I TRIED TO STOP IT!”
Here in France, apparently Covid-19 lockdowns fuel anti-LGBT violence in French families:
Supreme Court will take up major abortion case next term
Re: #473
The Court will consider the single question, “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”
Text quoted by blf @469: “Narendra Modi seems to be trying to the control the news more than the outbreak […]” Yep. So very Trump-like. So like every authoritarian. Bad leadership. Incompetent governance. More people die of COVID.
Follow-up to tomh @473:
Link
Bad news for Georgia. Bad news for education in Georgia.
Link
Much more at the link, including a summary of Sonny Perdue’s long and infamous record of bad management: pushing policies that harm low-income people; allowing poultry companies to speed up their slaughterhouse kill lines, making coronavirus precautions impossible and therefore spreading coronavirus; as a past governor of Georgia, Perdue enacted severe voter-suppression laws. There’s more, but I’ll add just one more: Perdue regularly waxes nostalgic for the Confederacy.
Biden will send 20 million doses of vaccines abroad by end of June
It is not immediately clear which countries will receive the doses.
Wonkette: “Lin Wood Pretty Sure Election He Personally Lost Part Of Trump’s Mysterious 4D Chess Plan”
Link
More weirdness.
Chinese businessman with links to Steve Bannon is driving force for a sprawling disinformation network, researchers say.
Washington Post link
Guo Wengui, living in self-exile in New York City, is at the center of a digital web pushing election and covid falsehoods, according to Graphika research.
The network has entire subset of workers who post social media content in Spanish.
Here’s a link to the May 17 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Also in the Guardian – “‘Everybody is angry’: Modi under fire over India’s Covid second wave.”
Guardian – “Israel-Gaza conflict: 200 Palestinians killed in a week, say officials”:
Jerusalem Post – “Senate Democrats call for an immediate ceasefire between Israel, Hamas”:
Netanyahu’s representatives are publicly admitting that they’re not interested in a ceasefire. They are claiming that they’ve sent evidence to the White House that the building housing media that they destroyed was a valid military target, but the head of the AP says he’s seen no evidence showing that, and Jen Psaki was asked about it in today’s press conference and didn’t confirm it (just basically said she didn’t have anything to say about it). The Committee to Protect Journalists is calling for the evidence, if it exists, to be publicly released.
Some telling details related to Matt Gaetz’s “wingman.”
Link
An update on voter-restriction laws being passed by various states:
Link
Guardian podcast – “Big Short author Michael Lewis on the inside story of America’s failed Covid response”:
A few more podcast episodes:
The Bunker Daily – “PRESCRIPTION FOR DISASTER – The drug dynasty behind America’s opioid crisis”:
Fever Dreams – “How ‘Wannabe’ Instagram Models Kneecapped Matt Gaetz”:
And the most recent episode of Maintenance Phase, “The Wellness to QAnon Pipeline”:
Giuliani team is freaking out because Trump isn’t lifting any of his tiny fingers to help Rudy
Guardian world liveblog:
“NEW from Manchin and Murkowski to congressional leaders: ‘We urge you to join us in calling for the bipartisan reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act through regular order. We can do this. We must do this’…”
Letter atl.
Wonkette: “Liz Cheney’s ‘Revolution’ Will Be Televised”
https://www.wonkette.com/liz-cheneys-revolution-begins
This is great – this guy created a bot that tweets each day about global progress in vaccinations.
Law & Crime – “Bill Barr’s DOJ Secretly Tried to Unmask a Devin Nunes Parody Account in the Last Weeks of the Trump Presidency, Filing Reveals”:
“Biden call with Israel PM. WH: Biden ‘encouraged Israel to make every effort to ensure the protection of innocent civilians’. …’The President expressed his support for a ceasefire…'”
Readout atl.
Cartoon: Matt Gaetz
LOL.
Unsettling:
Screenshots atl.
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day.
re SC @495: When the Orange Idiot said that, my mind went directly to “Well, if that is the case, then a woman cannot be pregnant if she never takes a pregnancy test, right?”
Woooooooow.
Elie Mystal in the Nation – “Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Gunning for AOC—and There’s Only 1 Reason.”
“#BREAKING: HFAC Chair @RepGregoryMeeks will send a letter to Biden admin in next few days requesting a delay of the sale of $735 million in precision-guided missiles to Israel.
Delay would allow lawmakers to review the sale. Idea received support among HFAC Dems in mtg.”
Guardian – “Indian mosque bulldozed in defiance of high court order”: