More adventures of QAnon shaman and friends

The ridiculous figure known as QAnon shaman whose real name is Jacob Chansley and is now in jail for his role in the January 6th insurrection, has lost his latest attempt to be released from jail, this time on (wait for it) religious grounds.

According to court documents, a lawyer representing the 33-year-old Chansley — who also led others in prayer as they occupied the U.S. Senate chamber during the insurrection — asked in February that his client be released from prison while he awaits trial in part because of complications derived from his refusal accept a vaccine for COVID-19.

The request involved Chansley’s religious beliefs, which borrow from conspiracy theories and several religious traditions: The attorney claimed his client’s “longstanding status as a practicing Shaman precludes him from feeding into his body any vaccination.” The request noted that Chansley was removed from the U.S. Navy in 2007 for refusing to take a vaccine for anthrax.

Chansley’s refusal to be vaccinated, combined with various COVID-19 protocols in place at prisons where he is being held, have made “meaningful un-monitored communication” with his attorney impossible, the lawyer claimed.

But U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth flatly rejected Chansley’s request on Monday (March 8), dismissing several of his lawyer’s arguments — including religious ones.

“To put it plainly, defendant’s religious objection to the COVID-19 vaccine is not a relevant reason, let alone a ‘compelling reason,’ to grant his temporary release,” Lamberth wrote in the 32-page opinion.

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Great moments in hyperbole

A 65-year old woman was arrested because she refused to wear a mask inside a bank in Texas.

Police issued a warrant for the arrest of Terry Wright, 65, of Grants Pass, Oregon. The incident on Thursday at a Bank of America in Galveston was captured by the officer’s body camera, the Galveston County Daily News reported.

Police said they had obtained an arrest warrant on resisting arrest and criminal trespassing charges.

Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, has ended statewide orders requiring people to wear face masks in public places, declaring businesses should decide for themselves what Covid-19 precautions to take on their properties. Many businesses have kept their own mask rules in place.
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Wright told the officer the law said she didn’t have to wear a mask. As the officer took out handcuffs, she pulled away and began to walk toward the door. The officer stopped her and forced her to the ground. After she was handcuffed, she complained her foot was injured.
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Police said Wright suffered minor injuries during the struggle and was taken to a hospital for treatment.

Wright told the Washington Post she has never covered her face inside stores, even when the statewide mandate was in place.

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What is happening to the Republican party?

When a candidate loses an election for president, they usually brace themselves for blame. When they take down their party with them, they would normally slink off into the sunset while the party regroups and rethinks its strategies. In the case of Donald Trump, he not only lost the presidency, during his time the Republicans lost their majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. And yet, when Trump made his first public outing to the annual CPAC conference, he was treated like a conquering hero and party leaders are making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring and going on TV to swear allegiance to him.

In a long article in The New Yorker Jelani Cobb takes a shot at answering the widely discussed question of what this means for the Republican party and he thinks its prognosis is not good.
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Children still being held in cages on the southern border

It appears that the appalling conditions under which migrant children were held during the Trump administration are still continuing under the Biden administration.

Hundreds of immigrant children and teenagers have been detained at a Border Patrol tent facility in packed conditions, with some sleeping on the floor because there aren’t enough mats, according to nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight of immigrant detention centers.

The lawyers interviewed more than a dozen children Thursday in Donna, Texas, where the Border Patrol is holding more than 1,000 people. Some of the youths told the lawyers they had been at the facility for a week or longer, despite the agency’s three-day limit for detaining children. Many said they haven’t been allowed to phone their parents or other relatives who may be wondering where they are.
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John Oliver on how badly the US handles unemployment

Losing one’s job is not only a traumatic experience, it often leads to a cascade of disasters such as losing one’s home. Unemployment insurance is meant to tide people over until they find another job. But some political leaders, especially Republicans, seem to view it as a reward for lazy people. He describes how hard it is for people to get unemployment benefits and how some states like Florida cut the premiums that companies are supposed to put into the unemployment fund and then go out of their way to make things difficult for people to apply for relief.

50th anniversary of an epic break-in of an FBI office

On March 8th, 1971, antiwar protestors broke into the offices of the FBI in Media, PA and stole every file they could lay their hands on. These people were not criminal masterminds. They were ordinary people involved in peaceful antiwar movements, such as college professors, a homemaker, a taxi driver, and the like who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. The documents they stole and released revealed the existence of secret and illegal surveillance programs to infiltrate, harass, and discredit peaceful antiwar groups. The existence of these programs was widely suspected but unproven.
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Don’t mess with Katie

Congresswoman Katie Porter has shown time and time again that she prepares carefully for congressional hearings and yet industry executives keep trying to patronize and snow her and she keeps putting them in their place as happened again recently.

They never seem to learn that she does her homework.

We need more Chelsea Handlers and fewer Piers Morgans

Smarmy Piers Morgan has resigned as co-host from a British morning show after getting blasted for saying he did not believe what Meghan Markle said in her interview with Oprah Winfrey and storming off the set when another host criticized him for his remarks. His behavior did not surprise me. What does is that people keep giving Morgan jobs even though he has demonstrated over and over again that he is a grade A reactionary jerk.

After his latest exit, Chelsea Handler posted on Instagram a clip of her experience with Morgan when she was invited onto his show when he was on CNN as the replacement for Larry King.

I am sure that Morgan can get another job with some Murdoch outfit or Newsmax or something. That would be a natural home for a person such as he, smug, arrogant, and proud of his ignorance.

What happens when you elect a smug know-nothing

You know how it is when a small child is bored and they discover something that annoys people and repeatedly do it just to get attention? That seems to be what is happening with Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon). After being stripped of all her committee assignments for being an unreconstructed conspiracist, she has decided to use one of the procedural rules to slow down the work of Congress. Her choice of tactic is to put forward a motion to adjourn, something that has to be dealt with before business can continue and can take up to half an hour. She has started using it so often that even some of her Republican colleagues are getting fed up at the waste of time with nothing to gain, and more and more of them are voting against her motion. Her latest effort was opposed by forty Republicans, double the week before. Basically, Greene is generating bipartisanship!

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Court overturns conviction of Lula in Brazil, enabling him to run for president again

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known to all as Lula, is a socialist who was elected as president of Brazil as leader of the Workers Party and uplifted the conditions of its poorest people. He was one of the most popular leaders in the world. He was convicted of corruption in a very dubious proceeding in which the judge colluded with prosecutors but that conviction had the desired effect of preventing him from running for re-election as president. Lula was leading in the polls when he was removed from the race by this move, enabling the utterly reactionary Jair Bolsonaro to become president in 2019.

Back in November 2019, when Lula was released from prison pending appeals against his conviction, I posted about his case and linked to a Netflix documentary The Edge of Democracy (2019) that shows the whole process by which the right-wingers removed Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, imprisoned Lula, and captured power in Brazil.
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