Nice For a Change
It is nice to have a competent government again. You see the media complaining about things like, President Biden has not held a press conference, and it's ... kinda cute. Migrants at the border? Sure -- it's a hundred times better than it was last year, but yes the problem needs some good, rational attention and is finally getting it. Did you see, he wears a Rolex! Woo, those are some scandals. It's nice, isn't it? We have regular problems again, and they are being solved in a professional way. We now have a leader who can speak in sentences, has plans and executes them, a press secretary who explains decisions, policies, issues. Competent Cabinet Secretaries getting sworn in. Fact-checkers twiddling their thumbs.
In the meantime the Republicans are off in "Cancel Culture" land, talking themselves into a tizzy about whatever that is supposed to be, as if anybody 1.believed them, or 2.cared. President Biden is ignoring their silliness; if they want to be part of modern American politics then they are going to have to come up with some promise of competent leadership, and they are nowhere close to that.
Here's the kind of thing they're into. In the past year Republicans introduced more than twenty state bills about transgender athletes. They insist it's not fair for transgender athletes to compete in sports. Is it fair for poor people to pay more taxes than billionaires? Is it fair for Montgomery County police to pull over Black drivers at twice the rate of white ones? Is it fair for women to be paid less than what men make for the same job? Oh, I see, fairness is not really the issue. The Republicans are working themselves up over an issue-that-is-not-an-issue. There is a certain small percentage of the population which they call "their base," who might vote on the basis of something like Doctor Seuss or transgender athletes, and that's who they perform for now. It has become clear that the base is unreachable, they're gonna be what they're gonna be. "Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate" (Swift, 2014).
Transgender athletes do not seem to have any systematic advantage, there are some who win and some who lose. Like everybody else, some are better and some worse in their events. There are many kinds of variations between people, and no reason in the world to make this particular quality the focus of any controversy unless, as the front page of The Post print edition said yesterday, the question of gender identity is being made into a "political flash point." There are so many ways that Republicans could make athletic competition more equitable (**cough** Colin Kaepernick **cough**), but they don't care about that. They only care about humiliating and punishing those people who have the courage to live as God made them.
So while the Democrats are leading a recovery after the Trump years, the Republicans are concerned with things like making it harder to vote, reading "Green Eggs and Ham" on the Internet, and trying to keep transgender athletes out of sports.
Some small percentage of the US population is just going to be obsessed with these things. Those people can be noisy, they can be violent, they have their own TV networks and nutty people in public offices. They turn up in the news disproportionately. But at this point it just seems kind of sad. Conservatives don't have anything to offer other than bizarre conspiracy theories, white supremacist beliefs, and weird obsessions with kids' books and cartoons and people who are different from themselves. There is one competent political party, and they are in the Presidency and both houses of Congress. It's nice, things will be going well for a while.
posted by JimK at 12:57 PM
62 Comments:
Fewer than 24 hours after the senseless, violent killings of seven women — six of them of Asian descent — by a white supremacist gunman in Atlanta, the majority of House Republicans voted *against* the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Why? Because the NRA is not happy that the bill would take away access to firearms for abusers, specifically intimate dating partners and stalkers. Now GOP Senators, many of whom are funded by the NRA, are feeling the pressure to block this bill. It's despicable.
Every single day the Violence Against Women Act goes without reauthorization is another day that women go without the critical protections they need and deserve.
Be sure to watch these almost 23 minutes all the way to the standing ovation at the end.
"...Some politicians did not approve of the choice made by the majority of voters in a hard-fought election in which each side got the chance to make its case to the voters. And, rather than adjusting their agenda and changing their message, they are busy trying to change the rules. We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights and voter access unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era.
This is Jim Crow in new clothes...
...I stand before you saying that this issue — access to voting and preempting politicians’ efforts to restrict voting — is so fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held hostage by a Senate rule, especially one historically used to restrict the expansion of basic rights.
It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society...."
"It is nice to have a competent government again."
I'm going to archive this for use in 2024. Civil? yes Competent? no way
Start with retaining the addled, octogenarian, attention-grabbing legend in his own mind, Anthony Fauci
it won't spread
it's super-spreading
masks are worthless
wear double masks
65% for herd immunity
85% for herd immunity
stay six feet apart
stay three feet apart
et al, et al
then, there's Joe: can't walk off a stage without Jill leading him by the elbow
enough vaccine for everyone by May 1st
thinks if we are very, very careful, we may be able to have small backyard gatherings on July 4th
"thinks if we are very, very careful, we may be able to have small backyard gatherings on July 4th"
yeah, Biden has an even looser grip on reality than these guys that think they're really, evidence be damned, girls
The Covid-19 pandemic represented a test of elites in the U.S., from public-health experts to the corporate media. The results have been disappointing. Policy makers who bucked the elites and challenged the narrative have been proven right to do so.
To begin with, highly publicized epidemiological models were as consequential as they were wrong. The model produced by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London—which forecast millions of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. without mitigation efforts—sparked panic among public-health elites and served as the pretext for lockdowns throughout the U.S. and Great Britain. The lockdowns failed to stop the virus but did a great deal of societal damage along the way—damage that a more targeted approach, seeking to reduce total harms, would have been able to avoid (and did, in places like Sweden and Florida).
Similarly, models predicting massive shortages of hospital beds helped to precipitate the disastrous policy—enacted by states like New York, New Jersey and Michigan—to send contagious, Covid-positive hospital patients back to nursing homes. States like Florida that rejected the models and adopted policies to protect nursing-home residents had comparatively lower nursing-home mortality rates as a result.
The reliance on faulty models was matched by poor public messaging. Elites sent conflicting messages about the efficacy of cloth masks, the uniformity of risk across age brackets, the danger of outdoor transmission and the practical benefit of taking a Covid vaccine.
Perhaps most damaging to public trust was the public-health campaign urging “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” This short-term mitigation, we were told, was necessary to buy time to prepare hospitals for any patient surges. But that reasonable aim was soon transformed into a lockdown-until-eradication approach that left no end in sight for most Americans. Going from “save the hospitals” to “zero Covid” represents one of the greatest instances in history of moving the goal post.
Lockdowns proved a huge boon to America’s corporate media, which primed its captive audience with fear and partisanship. Everything the corporate press did regarding Covid coverage was inseparable from its yearslong obsession with attacking Donald Trump. Weaponizing Covid in an election year superseded any obligation to present the facts with needed context and perspective.
Florida cut against the grain of elite opinion and bucked the media narrative.
While it was abundantly clear by May that schools represented low-risk environments for the spread of Covid and that the consequences of prolonged school closures were potentially catastrophic, the corporate media did its best to obscure the data and stoke fear and panic among parents and teachers. After all, the media had to take the position opposite Donald Trump.
Had the media presented the data on schools in a rational fashion with proper context and perspective, it is quite possible that the extended school closures we’ve seen in lockdown states would have been untenable and millions of students would be in markedly better shape academically and socially.
For months we were told to “trust the experts,” but far too often over the past year those who were most influential in our society—in public health, government and media—proved incapable of rising to the moment.
Florida cut against the grain of elite opinion and bucked the media narrative. The result is open schools, comparatively low unemployment and per capita Covid mortality below the national average. We cannot simply undo the harm caused by flawed policies advocated by our elites, but we can resolve that we never let this happen to our country again.
—Mr. DeSantis is the governor of Florida.
Florida really doesn't have all that much to crow about. It's doing worse than California and DC in Deaths per Million:
# State Deaths per Million
20 Maryland 1,351
21 California 1,447
22 West Virginia 1,454
23 Missouri 1,464
24 District Of Columbia 1,488
25 Florida 1,525
26 Ohio 1,569
27 Delaware 1,570
28 Texas 1,641
29 Kansas 1,673
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
For a "middle of the pack" state, DeSantis makes it sound like he's a very stable genius.
"Florida really doesn't have all that much to crow about. It's doing worse than California and DC in Deaths per Million:"
the difference is trivial, especially compared to the Blue Fab Five states:
New Jersey 2,722
New York 2,555
Rhode Island 2,450
Massachusetts 2,427
Connecticut 2,197
now:
California 1,447
DC 1,488
Florida 1,525
Keep in mind, that Florida has a greater percentage of elderly residents than any other state and the average age of those dying of COVID is 78.
Also, keep in mind that in DC and California, the economy is devastated and the poor and small businesses have been hurt much worse than anyone else. Also, in DC and California, kids have lost a year of school. Suicide, drug addiction, alcoholism are all way up.
And, Florida did all this without shutting anything down.
"For a "middle of the pack" state, DeSantis makes it sound like he's a very stable genius."
If you think California and DC look favorable compared to Florida, you're a very stable moron.
Those voting in 2022 won't be morons.
"Those voting in 2022 won't be morons."
True dat!
And the Dems' hold on both the Senate AND House are very unstable
they'll basically have one more chance to enact anything: push something through next year's reconciliation bill, if Joe Manchin agrees
"And, Florida did all this without shutting anything down."
Only in your dreams. Florida followed nearly the same path every other state did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_local_government_responses_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic
Florida:
Stay at home ordered: Apr 03
Gatherings banned: 10 or more
Out of state travel: Limited Quarantine / Screen
Closures ordered: Schools (remainder of term), daycares, bars & restaurants, non-essential retail
Masks required: No
California
Stay at home ordered: Mar 19
Gatherings banned: All
Out of state travel: No
Closures ordered: Schools (remainder of term), daycares, bars & restaurants, non-essential retail
Masks required: Yes
Wash DC
Stay at home ordered: Mar 30
Gatherings banned: 10 or more
Out of state travel: No
Closures ordered: Schools (remainder of term), daycares, bars & restaurants, non-essential retail
Masks required: Yes
Florida shut down a few days after DC and setup travel restrictions, the biggest difference for Florida is that they didn't have a public mask order, whereas the majority of states did.
In today's news:
Miami Beach Extends State Of Emergency 3 Weeks To Crack Down On Spring Break Crowds
The city extended restrictions until the end of spring break as maskless, out-of-control crowds mob the streets.
Susan Denson
@DensonSusan
I think all the Spring breakers who came to Florida because it’s “open”, should all go to Tallahassee and spend their vacation at the mansion of @GovRonDeSantis; he is the one who invited them here after all! #GOPCorruptionOverCountry
7:21 AM · Mar 21, 2021
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The Cathi
@cathilundgren
Replying to @DensonSusan and @GovRonDeSantis
Don’t invite them to Tallahassee so we have to suffer—the Governors Mansion is still closed to the public because of...wait for it...COVID. @GovRonDeSantis Wants all of FL exposed except his family.
1:31 PM · Mar 21, 2021
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"the biggest difference for Florida is that they didn't have a public mask order, whereas the majority of states did"
you left a few things out, didn't you?
do you consider CNN to have a conservative bias?
because they say DeSantis took a very different approach from the blue states
so do the LA Times and the NY Times
"A little bird told it to me"
a lot of TTFers suffer from delusions
"I think all the Spring breakers who came to Florida because it’s “open”, should all go to Tallahassee and spend their vacation at the mansion of @GovRonDeSantis; he is the one who invited them here after all! #GOPCorruptionOverCountry"
they should have run it by the TTF moron-in-residence,"Check your mask - it may be cutting off circulation to your "brain""
he says Florida did the same things as everyone else
The Honest Elections Project is releasing polling on Tuesday showing that H.R. 1, Democrats' sweeping election reform and voting rights bill passed by the House earlier this month, is “out of sync with American voters.”
“H.R. 1 is out of sync with American voters. Few embrace its particular provisions, or its guiding principle that election integrity and voter confidence measures make voting ‘hard’ and that Congress must impose new laws that eliminate them,” Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead writes in the memo.
The House passed the election reform and voting rights bill mostly along party lines in early March, but the measure faces an uncertain fate in the 50-50 Senate, where it is unlikely to be passed absent a change to filibuster rules.
The legislation would require states to offer mail-in ballots, establish electronic voter registration to enable same-day voting and expand early voting. It also includes a workaround for voter identification laws by saying that states that have them should allow voters without identifications to provide a sworn written statement attesting to their identity.
And it calls for the establishment of an independent commission to redraw congressional districts every 10 years in an effort to put a stop to partisan gerrymandering.
The legislation says that states should permit a voter to designate a person to return their absentee ballot, which Republicans say amounts to ballot harvesting. It also overhauls the campaign finance system, including by imposing a 6 to 1 federal campaign match on small donations.
Democrats have described H.R. 1 as vital to restore faith in the election process, uphold voting rights and reform campaign finance.
The survey of 1,200 registered voters conducted by the Polling Company. The poll was conducted from March 4 to March 10 and lists a margin of error of 2.83 percentage points.
It found that 77 percent of respondents agree that voters should be required to show a photo identification when they vote and that 66 percent agree that voters who cast absentee or mail-in ballots should have to comply with a photo identification requirement.
The poll also found that 80 percent agree that “election fraud disenfranchises voters and casts doubt on the legitimacy of the democratic process” and 80 percent also agree that “strong safeguards and ballot protections inspire confidence by making it harder to hide fraud, and easier to dispel false allegations of fraud.”
Sixty-two percent of respondents believe the practice of political candidates, campaigns or paid organizers going door to door to collect absentee ballots directly from voters should be illegal
President Joe Biden needs to be a little more magnanimous. Granted, that could be politically challenging given that the person Biden is short-shrifting is his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, who was charitable to no one. But the nation is on the cusp of something truly historic.
Daily COVID-19 vaccinations are about 2.5 million and rising. New cases, hospitalizations and deaths have fallen. The end of a national nightmare that has claimed nearly 543,000 American lives might be in sight.
It will be a defining moment for Biden when and if the crisis ends. And the truth will be that he didn't do it alone.
Biden and his team moved with remarkable speed in days to secure hundreds of millions of doses and get them disseminated to ever larger numbers of people. None of that would have been possible if the vaccines didn't already exist.
The lightning speed at which they were created was on Trump's watch. The fastest turnaround for a new vaccine before that — from research and development to clinical trials to regulatory approval — was in the 1960s, for the mumps, and that took four years.
From start to finish, the first COVID-19 vaccine was produced in eight months.
Biden often likes to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt in promising Americans he'll always given them the facts "straight from the shoulder.” But since taking office, he has never really acknowledged the Trump administration's considerable accomplishment.
A few days after taking office, Biden offered some weak-tea recognition to "everyone involved in this vaccine effort and the prior administration and the science community and the medical sphere." And that was only in the context of complaining that the vaccine program Trump left was in "worse shape than we anticipated or expected."
Vice President Kamala Harris went even further, asserting that "we're starting from scratch," a remark that earned a ding from The Washington Post fact-checker. The truth is that when Trump left office, the weekly vaccination average was nearly a million doses per day, which Biden promptly set as his first-100-days goal.
Under the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed, longstanding research on vaccine development — including some exciting new science on using messenger RNA to train the immune system to block a virus — was turbocharged with a $14 billion federal investment to insulate six vaccine makers from financial risk.
For all his anti-science divisiveness, Trump proved keen on throwing large sums of money at a possible solution. And it worked. By December, emergency-use authorizations had been granted for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. While Pfizer didn't take federal research-and-development funding, it was guaranteed $2 billion in vaccine sales. Moderna's efforts would have taken far longer without a $4.1 billion U.S. investment.
None of this excuses Trump's considerable failures in responding to the pandemic. There were his early deceptions about the severity of it and the botched creation and dissemination of tests. His administration tossed out an urgent-response playbook from the previous administration. He mocked the wearing of masks, agitated against states for following medical guidelines and undermined public health agencies for their thorough drug and vaccine reviews. And, oh yes, he suggested looking into snake-oil remedies like injecting people with bleach.
But the truth — straight from the shoulder — is that when this virus finally abates because of vaccinations, it will be to the credit of two presidents.
Does President Biden need to declare a national holiday for his predecessor?
No.
It would be fair and honest at some point, and in keeping with Biden's image as a straight shooter, to simply acknowledge Trump's singular vaccine success.
A good time might be during Biden's rolling "Help is Here" tour as he extolls the benefits of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package.
Trump's self-aggrandizing character would never allow him to share credit with anyone. But Biden would be the bigger man for doing so.
"It would be fair and honest at some point, and in keeping with Biden's image as a straight shooter, to simply acknowledge Trump's singular vaccine success."
I imagine TTF is going to want to apologize to rump, as well!
It’s been amply established that Sidney Powell bears a large measure of moral responsibility—at the very least—for creating the poisonous environment that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Powell was one of the main legal lowlights behind Trump’s misbegotten legal effort to steal another term.
Powell’s claims to fame were a series of lawsuits that alleged Dominion Voting Systems was in cahoots with Venezuela to steal victory from Trump—the infamous “Kraken” lawsuits. All four of them crashed and burned—but not before her claims led to Dominion and its employees facing vicious harassment and trolling. At least one Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, was driven into hiding.
Partly due to this, Dominion filed a whopping $1.3 billion defamation suit against Powell, her law firm, and her nonprofit organization, Defend the Republic. Well, earlier today, Powell sought to throw out the suit. Her reasoning? Wait for it—she now says “no reasonable person” would believe her claims.
No, this isn’t really snark. She actually said this in an actual legal filing.
In her motion to dismiss, Powell does not argue that the statements were true. She claims they are not actionable because they are protected statements of political opinion.
“Reasonable people understand that the ‘language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes … is often vituperative, abusive and inexact,'” her motion to dismiss argues. “It is likewise a ‘well recognized principle that political statements are inherently prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.'”
During the course of the outbreak, President Trump has expressed confidence that the virus would quickly go away ["One day -- it's like a miracle -- it will disappear."] and skepticism about the value of wearing masks.
Trump suggests 'injection' of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and 'clean' the lungs
Trump touts hydroxychloroquine even as U.S. revokes emergency use status
"President Trump is receiving off-label, novel immunotherapy investigational drug combinations to fight his COVID-19 infection."
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday called for a ban on assault weapons and tighter gun control measures as he stepped into the familiar role of grief counselor for a traumatized nation after a mass shooting left 10 people dead in Colorado.
"I don't need to wait another minute, let alone another hour, to take common sense steps that will save lives in the future," Biden said, adding that "we can ban assault weapons."
"This is not and should not be a partisan issue," Biden said at the White House. "It's an American issue that will save lives, American lives. We must act.""
great idea, Joe
no wonder Sarah Plain called you Joe Genius
anytime something bad happens, we'll just make it against the law
we should have done that from the beginning with the pandemic
we should have made it against the law
problem solved
we'll just makes guns illegal and then if anyone gets shot we'll know it wasn't an innocent mistake but a bad guy
question: it's already against the law to shoot people - if people break that law, why won't they break laws against owning guns?
"She claims they are not actionable because they are protected statements of political opinion."
she's right
"her claims led to Dominion and its employees facing vicious harassment and trolling. At least one Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, was driven into hiding."
oh dear
that happened to Christine Ford Blasey too
he should have set up a gofundme page
Christine and she's now set for life!
"During the course of the outbreak, President Trump has expressed confidence that the virus would quickly go away ["One day -- it's like a miracle -- it will disappear."] and skepticism about the value of wearing masks."
Anthony Fauci did both of those and Biden is thinking about naming an airport after him
"Trump suggests 'injection' of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and 'clean' the lungs"
he suggested scientists look into it
he didn't claim to be a scientist
you seem to think are an expert virologist
"Trump touts hydroxychloroquine even as U.S. revokes emergency use status"
it showed promise and should have been studied further
lives might have been saved
"President Trump is receiving off-label, novel immunotherapy investigational drug combinations to fight his COVID-19 infection."
seems to have worked
if only Dems didn't want to delay progress until after the election
"For all his anti-science divisiveness, Trump proved keen on throwing large sums of money at a possible solution."
So Trump spent $14 Billion in hard-earned US taxpayer dollars on vaccine development and you're upset HE isn't getting a big enough "atta-boy" for it?
Trump is great as spending OPM - Other People's Money - especially from banks, contractors, and US tax payers to keep his businesses and golf courses afloat. Of all his many short comings, spending OPM is not one of them.
Spending OUR tax money to protect OUR lives is the most basic part of a president's job.
Maybe people would be more grateful if he didn't nearly overturn 200+ years of democracy before he left office.
"So Trump spent $14 Billion in hard-earned US taxpayer dollars on vaccine development and you're upset HE isn't getting a big enough "atta-boy" for it?
Trump is great as spending OPM - Other People's Money - especially from banks, contractors, and US tax payers to keep his businesses and golf courses afloat. Of all his many short comings, spending OPM is not one of them.
Spending OUR tax money to protect OUR lives is the most basic part of a president's job."
You really are a sad case. Do you really imagine you are making a cogent argument?
Oh yeah, that Abraham Lincoln tried to take all the credit for freeing the slaves but he was just spending other people's money to hire all those union soldiers.
LOL!
Truth is, there are many ways to spend OPM that wouldn't have worked.
Right now, Joe Biden is running around the country crowing how he is going to spend 1.9 trillion of OPM!
He's really been good at that over the years, throwing OPM around when he served in Congress.
At least sometimes the money is not ours but China's.
You know, when they gave Hunter millions and Joe got a cut.
I assume, since you are disturbed by politicians spending OPM, you'll oppose Joe's plan to raise taxes.
"Maybe people would be more grateful if he didn't nearly overturn 200+ years of democracy before he left office"
Maybe a mainstream newspaper like USA Today wouldn't be suggesting Biden give Trump credit if Joe and Kamala weren't running around lying and making it look like Trump did nothing.
Consider this:
Vice President Kamala Harris recently asserted that "we're starting from scratch,"
Even the Washington Post fact-checker dinged that.
The truth is that when Trump left office, the weekly vaccination average was nearly a million doses per day, which Biden promptly set as his first-100-days goal.
Are you willing to admit that Joe and Kamala are lying?
You want to be hypocrite by lying yourself, do you?
btw, Trump didn't "nearly overturn 200+ years of democracy."
I assume the incident you refer to was when a few hundred unarmed protesters entered the Capitol overwhelming a Capitol police force the size of Atlanta's and who had additional help from DC police.
The whole thing was revolting but not revolutionary. No one "nearly" overturned 200+ years of democracy.
People are laughing at you now...
How does authoritarianism take hold in a country? The elite exaggerate a danger to such an extent that the populace will agree to anything the elitists want in order to save themselves. Preserving their elitist status.
Despite parts of the fencing being removed this weekend, the nation’s capital is still protected by armed troops and razor wire because government officials claim to fear invasion by Trump-supporting QAnon followers.
Seriously.
The concern is they will drive to D.C., get hotel rooms, grab their free breakfast, then strike at dawn with fire extinguishers or anything that counts under the present hysteria as an armament; i.e., shoes, purses or bear spray.
The attack was expected on March 4 but never materialized. Federal law enforcement recalibrated, shifting the anticipated coup de main to March 20. That never happened either.
Notably, the federal government failed to similarly protect the capital in 1814, when the Brits burned down the White House, and in 1861, when the Army of Northern Virginia encamped at what is now a shopping mall in Manassas, Virginia.
C’mon, man!
Immediately after the events of January 6, The National Pulse called out The Insurrection Lie, specifically questioning the political narrative then being fabricated around Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick’s unfortunate death.
Eventually the New York Times would back down from its fake news claim that Office Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by Trump supporters using a fire extinguisher.
It is now obvious that the continued military occupation of Washington D.C. under a phony, Q-pretext is a purposeful overreaction to silence objections over the use of mass mail-in ballots to swing the 2020 election.
In support of our election skepticism, we cite Time Magazine’s comprehensive report, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.
If everything in that account is taken as true, then Trump supporters were correct to discern a “conspiracy” (Time’s word) to assure a Biden-win, and were well within their constitutional rights on January 6 to protest.
Of the relative few who breached the Capitol, some were not Trump supporters; some were waved in; and none who initiated the incursion were present at the president’s speech taking place 45-minutes beforr, where he called for a patriotic and peaceful march.
A few in the Capitol may have been associated with the internet conspiracy known as “QAnon”. What is the appropriate response to that?
Polling shows that infinitesimally small numbers of Republicans embrace Q and few know any of its details. Even that polling is flawed, though.
When pollsters describe Q as an internet theory proposing that the deep state tried to thwart Trump’s presidency, some will say, sure, count me in. Because such a broad assertion is undeniably true.
QAnon is a peculiar form of internet apocrypha, though. It proposes pedophiles exist in the upper echelons of the global elite, which may be true. Pedophiles sadly exist in all walks of life. Where Q differs is in the belief that Trump was sent from on high as part of a secret plan to arrest them, in coordination with Robert Mueller and the U.S. Military, among others.
Nobody who is anybody in the Trump movement believes that.
The Q overreaction is especially alarming because equally outlandish conspiracy theories have been trumpeted by political leaders, the FBI, the CIA, foreign intelligence services, and the legacy media, causing incalculable damage.
If you have not already done so, please read The Russia Lie. It shows, conclusively with irrefutable evidence, how powerful people in Washington created a phony scandal around Trump and Russia.
Based on that Putin-did-it canard, leaders in the Democratic Party declared Trump’s election to be illegitimate and used the levers of power to obstruct his policy initiatives.
Trump’s inauguration was accompanied by violent rioting and, a few weeks later, armed insurrection (under the current definition) as a Putin-truther shot up a Congressional softball practice.
Where was the FBI when we really needed it to stop actual political violence based on a wild conspiracy theory?
The Q-defying truth is that 75-million (and counting) Americans have concluded that Washington’s elite are inept.
Rather than admit their failure, Washington’s preening and powerful try to preserve their excessive self-regard by casting any political opposition as a white-supremacist Q plot.
How ridiculous is the Q lie? The armed insurrectionists somehow left their only guns in the trunk of a car in metered parking, calling into question the entire “threat-level-red” narrative.
The most visible representative of the group is a person known ominously as Q Shaman. His connection to Trump appears to be that he craves the center of attention wherever he can find it.
Q Shaman in full face paint and Viking regalia had last been seen at an Arizona climate-change rally, near a sign that declared “the ice caps are melting.”
He claims he was waved into the Capitol and guided through its hallways by security officials. There is video evidence to support his claim. Several Capitol police officers have been suspended.
Perhaps the FBI should be investigating whether Ashli Babbitt was waved in, and if there should be some additional training in federal law enforcement about when it’s okay to kill an unarmed invitee on federal property.
Because, let’s face it, had Amy Schumer and Emily Ratajkowski been gunned down when they breached the Dirksen Hart Senate Office Buildings based on a ridiculous conspiracy theory about Brett Kavanaugh, someone would at least be in trouble.
In truth, when viewed outside its Twitter-enforced orthodoxy, the real scandal of January 6 rises to irony: the federal government failed to protect the Capitol from an unruly crowd that had assembled partly to protest the government’s failure to perform its basic functions capably.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, none stranger, maybe, than the alignment of Trumpists with the left’s last remaining honest intellectuals.
This is what Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Glenn Greenwald wrote recently about the lies being told about insurrection:
“That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.”
The Q Lie is an excuse for politicians to grab power from the people. It is, to borrow an expression, a form of insurrection.
"Trump’s inauguration was accompanied by violent rioting and, a few weeks later, armed insurrection (under the current definition) as a Putin-truther shot up a Congressional softball practice."
Riiiiiiighhhhtt... because a lone gunman trying to shoot politicians in Virginia while they played baseball has exactly the same implications as HUNDREDS of people smashing windows to break into the Capitol building with the intent of stopping the vote for the next president.
Your Q apologist screed is laughable.
"That is the core formula of authoritarianism" describes what Trump did in year leading up to the insurrection. Now, somehow, trying to keep democracy safe from that is "authoritarianism."
How Orwellian.
"Riiiiiiighhhhtt... because a lone gunman trying to shoot politicians in Virginia while they played baseball has exactly the same implications as HUNDREDS of people smashing windows to break into the Capitol building with the intent of stopping the vote for the next president."
it actually had a greater implication for the democratic process
when Scalise was shot, his vote was gone from Congress for a time
when the small crowd of unarmed nuts broke into the capitol, they were cleared within hours and Congress resumed its ordinary operation
the Capitol see larger protests all the time, many very enraged
how a police larger than a major city, concentrated into a single block, could fail to hold off the hundreds who broke in is incomprehensible
you may remember, during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Susan Collins received many death threats and needed a police escort to her office since the halls of the Senate office building were filled with crazed demonstrators
and Chuck Schumer whipped up the crowd saying Collins would "reap the whirlwind"
the Dem threats of physical intimidation could be said to be an attempt to overturn 200+ years of democracy.
"Your Q apologist screed is laughable."
saying they are a non-significant fringe is apologetics?
You really are a sad case. Do you really imagine you are making a cogent argument?
"That is the core formula of authoritarianism" describes what Trump did in year leading up to the insurrection. Now, somehow, trying to keep democracy safe from that is "authoritarianism.""
actually, trying to overturn the election of 2016 by a completely concocted tale
and trying to shut down any speech that disagrees with you
and using lies to stir anger against those who disagree with you
is the core formula of authoritarianism
"How Orwellian."
wow
conservatives aren't the ones who regularly redefine words
On Monday morning, a caravan of National Guardsmen were transporting COVID-19 vaccines to Matador, Texas, when they were assaulted and pulled over on the road by an Arizona man, Larry Lee Harris, just outside of Idalou. According to reports, the 11 Guardsmen were unarmed in three National Guard vans when Harris “attempted multiple times to run the vans off of the roadway. He then turned his vehicle into oncoming traffic” and stopped the vans in the road. At this point he trained a gun on the Guardsmen, made them get out of their vans, and demanded to see what was inside.
The Idalou police chief told reporters that Harris “appeared to be mentally disturbed”—he believed that the vans held a kidnapped “woman and a child.” Idalou officers arriving at the scene were able to take Harris into custody peacefully. None of the Guardsmen were injured in the incident. Harris reportedly first identified himself to the uniformed Guardsmen as a “detective.”
This is a lot like the QAnon phenomenon. Saying that Harris is “mentally disturbed” may be an honest assessment of his facilities at this time. But Harris had a drivers license, guns and ammo, and the perverse conspiracy theory that a caravan of National Guardsmen were trafficking a woman and a child. They weren’t even transporting any other human beings.
QAnon might just be Trump-adjacent cult, but it has spread like a plague. Feeding off of classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—the world of powerful pedophiles with so much control over the world that they can do just about anything—may have caused the group to shed some believers who aren’t able to keep their senses muted to reality, but it continues to hold strong across the country. The Tea Party and then Trump’s ascension caused the group to gain acolytes like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have real political power.
The delusion of QAnon, which is easily passed off as a disturbed mental state, is seemingly shared by millions of other people. Even as Trump and Q’s lies were exposed this past November, December, and January, QAnon believers continue to twist and wring out the most tortured logic in the hopes of proving that they weren’t simply right, but that they haven’t been tricked by the hucksters who continue to steal their money and democratic vote. Like all grand conspiracy theories, there is a touch of the eschatological to QAnon. And any theory that believes it has an end game where all perceived debts are paid and all justices meted out inevitably evolves into authoritarianism.
Harris now faces charges that include “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful carrying of a weapon, impersonating a public servant, unlawful restraint of 11 National Guard soldiers, and interference with Texas military forces.”
"This is a lot like the QAnon phenomenon."
so, this guy has nothing to do with QAnon but you'll take any excuse to restate your conspiracy theory: that Trump shares and promotes all the ideas of QAnon
"The delusion of QAnon, which is easily passed off as a disturbed mental state, is seemingly shared by millions of other people."
any documentation for this false statement
what do millions of people believe?
you mentioned the pedophile theory
where are the polls that "millions" believe that?
"Even as Trump and Q’s lies were exposed this past November, December, and January,"
what lies were exposed?
when TTFers say that, they usually are talking about the election results
truth is, because of the vast expansion of mail-in voting and the overwhelming use of mail-in voting by Dems, there is no feasible way to tell if the vote was legitimate
that obviously led to conspiracy theories
looks like the GOP will defeat the national voting bill being pushed in Congress
that way, voters can have confidence in the 2022 election and no conspiracy theories will be feasible
In 2015 Rump said, "How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?"
And in 2016, Rump said “I love the poorly educated," after the Nevada caucus.
More recently, Rump said he did not know much about the bizarre conspiracy theory about QAnon, except that its adherents like him and that's good enough for him to want QAnon lies to be spread far and wide.
"that's good enough for him to want QAnon lies to be spread far and wide."
surprise, surprise, surprise!
another TTF conspiracy theory
you have no idea if Trump wants QAnon lies to be spread far and wide
tell us whyyYYyyyyyyYYyyy
you lie
Down in Georgia, a rogue legislator was arrested for trying overturn 200+ years of democracy. That's right! She tried to invade the chambers where a duly passed bill was being signed, in an attempt to stop it. Here's the horrifying details:
Georgia state troopers arrested Democratic state Rep. Park Cannon on Thursday after she pounded on Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s statehouse office door as he signed an elections bill passed to prevent voter fraud into law.
Video of the incident shows Cannon being handcuffed after she pounded on Kemp’s door to stop the bill signing. She was then removed from the Capitol, while she repeatedly screamed she was an important legislator, and placed into a police car.
A flurry of bills have been introduced and passed by state legislatures to enhance voting laws after former President Donald Trump lost the election due to a widespread surge of unverified mail-in ballots.
Cannon was charged with two misdemeanors under state law: obstruction of law enforcement and preventing or disrupting General Assembly, according to police.
She was taken to the Fulton County Jail and was greeted by an enraged crowd. Cannon was released Thursday evening, and so far has made no more attempts at insurrection.
Lt. W. Mark Riley, spokesman for the Georgia State Patrol, said in a statement Thursday evening that Cannon was warned repeatedly to stop pounding on the door and screaming because the area reserved was for the governor's staff.
"She was advised that she was disturbing what was going on inside and if she did not stop, she would be placed under arrest. Rep. Cannon stepped back for a moment and then stepped back up to the door ... again," Riley said. "She was again advised if she did not stop, she would be arrested for obstruction and disturbing the press conference."
Cannon was part of an enraged mob who were protesting Thursday at the statehouse after passage of the law to prevent voter fraud, which followed weeks of debate in the Georgia Legislature. The new law adds a host of enhanced procedures to prevent voter fraud, including changes in identification requirements for mail voting.
Kemp signed the bill into law immediately, calling it "common sense" and said he and state lawmakers set out to make it "easy to vote and hard to cheat."
Cannon was a black woman duly elected to the legislature.
Bill signings are usually public, unless you are embarrassed by how Jim Crow-like the bill you are signing is.
Keep the voters in line for hour after hour by not opening enough polling places and then deny them food and water while they wait.
Why?
Cuz da man say so, dats's whhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
Yesterday, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law nearly 100 pages of voting restrictions.
These restrictions include limiting the amount of time Georgians have to cast their ballots in a runoff election and making it ILLEGAL to hand out water or snacks to voters waiting in incredibly long lines.
Kemp also made it significantly harder to vote by mail — which is how hundreds of thousands of troops and veterans cast their ballot every election.
If you’re against mail-in ballots, you’re against our military voting. Period. End of story.
That’s why VoteVets is fighting back against outrageous voter suppression laws like the one Kemp just signed into law.
"Rep. Park Cannon on Thursday after she pounded on Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s statehouse office door"
"after she pounded on Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s statehouse office door"
"while she repeatedly screamed she was an important legislator"
"so far has made no more attempts at insurrection."
Theses are gross misrepresentations of what actually happened. You can see the video of it for yourself here:
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/26/981471672/police-arrest-georgia-lawmaker-as-governor-signs-law-overhauling-elections
She was arrested after KNOCKING on the door with her knuckles, the same way you might knock on your neighbor's door.
This was NOTHING like the insurrection of Jan 6th. She did not assault any of the police officers or anyone else. The handful of bystanders at this supposed "insurrection" repeatedly asked the officers to "cite the code" under which she was being arrested. They offered no discernable answer as they escorted her unobstructed through a nearly empty hall.
But we have come to expect conservatives to take simple facts and spin them into terrible stories of supposed Democratic malfeasance.
Lacking good ideas to get the majority of people to vote for them, Republicans have resorted to suppressing the vote, and Orwellian re-writes of basic facts.
Good news! Looks like our originalist Supreme Court will allow states to ban murdering unborn children after 15 weeks:
https://www.aol.com/news/u-supreme-court-takes-bid-140024615-142214047.html
huzzah!
the gay, anti-child agenda is coming down to an ignominious end!
"the gay, anti-child agenda is coming down to an ignominious end!"
You must have missed a few days in sex-ed class...
It's the heterosexuals that are killing off their unwanted babies.
Gay people simply don't have unwanted babies.
It's straight people wanting to murder the babies - gay people often adopt them from straight couples - helping to keep babies from being murdered.
"Good news! Looks like our originalist Supreme Court will allow states to ban murdering unborn children after 15 weeks:"
Any reason to believe banning abortion will be any more successful now than it was before Roe v. Wade? - When it was about as successful as Prohibition? Do you think the fact that there are more plastic coat hangers rather than metal ones will make that big of a difference?
"You must have missed a few days in sex-ed class...
It's the heterosexuals that are killing off their unwanted babies.
Gay people simply don't have unwanted babies."
did they teach you that is sex-ed class?
they taught you a lie
while, it's probably true they would prefer for heterosexuals not to conceive at all
they do have a plan B if a pregnancy occurs: kill the kid
the reason is they hate the idea of nuclear families headed by kids' real parents
and that's because it's a demonstration that homosexual "marriage" is not marriage at all
"Any reason to believe banning abortion will be any more successful now than it was before Roe v. Wade?"
yes
because this time, doctors who break the law, and the Hippocratic oath, will tried and jailed for murder, where the practice will cease
"When it was about as successful as Prohibition?"
alcoholism is a victimless crime
not so, murder
there is no other type of murder we would legalize because we couldn't stop it anyway
the idea is as asinine as most TTF logic
"Gay people simply don't have unwanted babies."
did they teach you that is sex-ed class?
they taught you a lie"
Really? Tell me very stable genius, how are two gay people going to have sex and make an unwanted baby? Some Infinity Stones? Or were you expecting another virgin birth?
"while, it's probably true they would prefer for heterosexuals not to conceive at all"
For the most part, gay people don't care what heterosexuals do to each other, as long as they don't try to force them to get involved.
And for the most part they don't care if they conceive or not - unless of course they are the obnoxious religious zealot types who like to indoctrinate their herd of kids. Then everyone is better of if they don't procreate.
"because this time, doctors who break the law, and the Hippocratic oath, will tried and jailed for murder, where the practice will cease"
Ahh, I see you are living in imaginary land, where rich women never think to cross the boarder to go into a country where it's legal, and poor women don't know anyone who can buy abortion pills over the internet.
Just what we need - more doctors in prison during a global pandemic. You must be a very stable genius!
"alcoholism is a victimless crime"
Tell that to people who had a loved one die from someone else's DUI.
"there is no other type of murder we would legalize because we couldn't stop it anyway"
It was heterosexuals who fought to legalize abortion, not gay people - most of them were hiding in the closet back then - the few who were out fought for things like getting out of the DSM and keeping their jobs.
Heterosexuals have been aborting their offspring for centuries. Some societies allowed it, others didn't.
Not allowing it simply isn't going to stop it. You haven't addressed the underlying problem - parents who don't want or can't afford to take care of a child. If you want to stop abortions, pay those couples to have their babies and give it to someone who really WANTS a child and can afford to support it. There are plenty of couples spending THOUSANDS of dollars on artificial in-vitro fertilization methods, and they don't always work.
Then, to make sure couples don't game the system and just pop out babies for the cash, tie tubes on both of them so they can't make another unwanted child.
Give those couples a better option than abortion and I suspect the majority of them will take you up on it. But that's never been part of the Conservatives' plans. Apparently, enforcing control over everyone's genitals is the main goal.
"Really? Tell me very stable genius, how are two gay people going to have sex and make an unwanted baby? Some Infinity Stones? Or were you expecting another virgin birth?"
oh, sorry if you didn't catch the ball
homosexuals are accomplices, supporting the murder of the unborn, because they want to see as few nuclear families with children living with their parents as possible
"For the most part, gay people don't care what heterosexuals do to each other, as long as they don't try to force them to get involved."
what homosexuals care about is that their relationship be considered the equivalent of heterosexuality
"Tell that to people who had a loved one die from someone else's DUI."
did you know that random homosexuality spread AIDS in America?
tell the relatives of those who died that homosexuality is the equivalent of homosexuality
"It was heterosexuals who fought to legalize abortion, not gay people"
how about now?
do you oppose murdering unborn children?
"Taxing the uber rich and tax dodging corporations are my favorite"
the uber rich?
they already pay most of the taxes collected in the US
Jbiden came in saying he'd only raise the taxes of those over 400K
he's already lowered that to 200K
and even Bernie Sanders opposes JBiden's tax on miles driven, since it will fall disproportionately on the working poor
you know the working class, that has given up on Dems
as for corporations, they shouldn't be taxed
they aren't individuals but collections of individuals who all pay tax on any income distributed
"homosexuals are accomplices, supporting the murder of the unborn, because they want to see as few nuclear families with children living with their parents as possible"
Ohhh, I see, just like conservatives are all accomplices with the White Nationalists overrunning the Capitol on January 6th, after promulgating Rump's big lie about all the voter fraud. Well, now that you explained it like that, it's a whole lot clearer.
"because they want to see as few nuclear families with children living with their parents as possible"
Hate to break it to you Bub, but this isn't 1950 any more. LOTs of kids were brought up by single parents. You're desperate to keep blaming that on gay people but it's the heterosexuals that keep dissolving their own marriages:
https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/
5. The divorce rate per 1000 married women is nearly double that of 1960, but down from the all-time high of 22.6 in the early 1980s.
6. Almost 50 percent of all marriages in the United States will end in divorce or separation.
7. Researchers estimate that 41 percent of all first marriages end in divorce.8. 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce.
9. 73 percent of all third marriages end in divorce.
10. The United States has the 6th highest divorce rate in the world.
11. Every 13 seconds, there is one divorce in America.
17. Over a 40 year period, 67 percent of first marriages terminate.
18. Among all Americans 18 years of age or older, whether they have been married or not, 25 percent have gone through a marital split.
19. 15 percent of adult women in the United States are divorced or separated today, compared with less than one percent in 1920.
20. The average first marriage that ends in divorce lasts about 8 years.
8 Years isn't long enough to raise a kid.
SAME-SEX DIVORCE STATISTICS
37. About 1 percent of married same-sex couples get divorced each year, while about 2 percent of married straight couples divorce.
"what homosexuals care about is that their relationship be considered the equivalent of heterosexuality"
Yeah, most people want to have their most important personal relationship on the same legal level as everyone else's, and not subject to the whim of obnoxious individuals who want to deny their spouse insurance cover, the ability to see their spouse in the hospital, or pick up their kids from school.
If you weren't allow to pick up your kids from school because of who you were married to, you'd fight for legal recognition too.
Go figure.
"did you know that random homosexuality spread AIDS in America?"
Did you know that both random and non-random heterosexuality spread AIDS in America?
In fact it is easier for AIDS to spread among heterosexuals than it is in lesbians.
Mike Pence found out the hard way when he cut funding for the needle exchange program at Planned Parenthood in Indiana, that IV drug users were a bigger source of AIDS than gay people.
Live and learn.
"they already pay most of the taxes collected in the US"
That's because they've amassed a disproportionate amount of wealth. Poor people are one paycheck away from bankruptcy despite the fact that many of them worked multiple jobs before the pandemic.
"you know the working class, that has given up on Dems"
Lots of working class people voted for Dems in the last two elections. In fact, if it wasn't for the biased Electoral college system, Rump wouldn't have made it into office in the first place. He didn't get in there just on "elites" alone - there aren't enough of them. He did a good job of pissing of working class women too.
"as for corporations, they shouldn't be taxed
they aren't individuals but collections of individuals who all pay tax on any income distributed"
Your premise is ridiculous. Corporations are the ones most responsible for the degradation of the environment with their operations and have the most need for things like roads for their workers to arrive on, fire companies and police to protect their huge factories, and schools to educate workers for them, so they don't spend years trying to teach idiots that end up being of no use to them. They are the FIRST ones who should be taxed.
Oh, and you can thank conservatives for income tax:
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=57
In 1909 progressives in Congress again attached a provision for an income tax to a tariff bill. Conservatives, hoping to kill the idea for good, proposed a constitutional amendment enacting such a tax; they believed an amendment would never received ratification by three-fourths of the states. Much to their surprise, the amendment was ratified by one state legislature after another, and on February 25, 1913, with the certification by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, the 16th amendment took effect. Yet in 1913, due to generous exemptions and deductions, less than 1 percent of the population paid income taxes at the rate of only 1 percent of net income.
This document settled the constitutional question of how to tax income and, by so doing, effected dramatic changes in the American way of life.
"Ohhh, I see, just like conservatives are all accomplices with the White Nationalists overrunning the Capitol on January 6th,"
conservatives favor prosecuting those who trespassed in the Capitol building and threw all Nancy Pelosi's papers up in the air
homosexuals overwhelmingly favor considering the murder of the unborn a constitutional right
see the subtle difference, you amoral moron...
"after promulgating Rump's big lie about all the voter fraud."
because the election was largely conducted in a completely unverified manner, it's hard to know if Trump was lying
states across the country are enacting rules to make sure that won't happen again and liberal Dems are howling
it's more than a little suspicious that Dems seem to fear voter ID, although nothing can ever be proven
"Hate to break it to you Bub, but this isn't 1950 any more. LOTs of kids were brought up by single parents."
irrelevant
homosexuals want to see as few kids living with their real parents as possible
"Yeah, most people want to have their most important personal relationship on the same legal level as everyone else's, and not subject to the whim of obnoxious individuals who want to deny their spouse insurance cover, the ability to see their spouse in the hospital, or pick up their kids from school.
If you weren't allow to pick up your kids from school because of who you were married to, you'd fight for legal recognition too."
most insurance plans let you name your dependent
as hospital rules, ignore them
if you want a homosexual to be a parent of your kid, have them appointed legal guardian
but this is all beside the point
the point is homosexuals support killing unborn children because they prefer kids to not live with their real parents because they want homosexual relationships to be equivalent to heterosexual relationships
whether or not homosexuals have a rationalization for their amoral position is not germane to the discusssion
"Did you know that both random and non-random heterosexuality spread AIDS in America?"
no, no one does
it's not true
random sexual encounters among heterosexuals has never been as prevalent as it was among homosexuals when AIDS spread across America
"That's because they've amassed a disproportionate amount of wealth."
but the fact remains, they are paying for most of our government already
"Poor people are one paycheck away from bankruptcy despite the fact that many of them worked multiple jobs before the pandemic."
under Trump, the poor were making more progress than under Presidents like Clinton and Obama
but we're talking about taxes
George W Bush's tax cuts eliminated Federal income tax on the lower half of income earners in America
and conservatives don't favor raising it
Biden will increase the tax burden of the poor
"Lots of working class people voted for Dems in the last two elections"
not as many as used to
first thing Biden did was eliminate jobs by cancelling the pipeline, for no reason
"In fact, if it wasn't for the biased Electoral college system,"
yeah, it's biased in favor of America
if it weren't for the electoral college, NY and California would rule us all
"Your premise is ridiculous. Corporations are the ones most responsible for the degradation of the environment with their operations and have the most need for things like roads for their workers to arrive on, fire companies and police to protect their huge factories, and schools to educate workers for them, so they don't spend years trying to teach idiots that end up being of no use to them. They are the FIRST ones who should be taxed."
corporations are phantoms
they are collections of people
if you think people that own corporations should be taxed more, be honest and support taxing them directly
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Joe Biden released his first slate of 11 federal judicial nominations on Wednesday, including three Black women for federal circuit court vacancies, a Muslim American and an Asian American and Pacific Islander."
for the last four years, conservatives could install originalist judges en masse on the nation's courts, without hindrance
Dems won't have that pleasure because each and every nominee can only be confirmed if they have the approval of Joe Manchin, the DINO from a red state
"homosexuals overwhelmingly favor considering the murder of the unborn a constitutional right"
That's just nefarious right-wing propaganda promulgated by bitter conservative misanthropes like yourself.
LGBT people want ALL kids to grow up in good households surrounded by love and support - a situation denied many of them by religious dogma and persistent right-wing efforts to demonize innocent LGBT people. LGBT people tend to lean left politically because they are not masochists who would enjoy the denigrating treatment afforded by the political right in this country.
"most insurance plans let you name your dependent
as hospital rules, ignore them
if you want a homosexual to be a parent of your kid, have them appointed legal guardian"
They tried that with civil unions, only to find that obnoxious idiots would deny LGBT couples insurance, hospital visits, and picking up children because they weren't MARRIED.
"but this is all beside the point"
Actually those ARE the points, but you would like people to ignore them and focus on your daily anti-homosexual screeds instead. The problem for you is that once you sit down and consider the situation calmly and intelligently, there really is no reason to deny gay people all of these civil rights, but if you can keep their attention focused on how "evil" and "murderous" of babies they never produced, the ease with which HIV spreads among gay men - but ignore that it doesn't among gay women - the easier for you it is to stir up hate and animus against gay people and promote your anti-LGBT agenda.
But that kind of dehumanizing propaganda is an effective tactic that has worked against minorities for centuries, whether they were Jews, Native Americans, blacks, or other nationalities. All it takes is a lack of moral character, the ability to totally ignore other peoples' humanity, and a chosen target to use it.
It is the simplest of rhetorical weapons to use - even grade school kids figure out how to employ it and ostracize some poor soul who probably didn't deserve it - accusing him or her of anything from "having cooties" to being a faggot.
"Did you know that both random and non-random heterosexuality spread AIDS in America?"
"no, no one does
it's not true"
Magic Johnson estimates he has slept with more than 1,000 women, but has said that it was so many he lost count and had no idea which one of his trysts infected him with HIV, which he announced in 1991.
After a physical before the 1991–92 NBA season, Johnson discovered that he had tested positive for HIV. In a press conference held on November 7, 1991, Johnson made a public announcement that he would retire immediately.[11] He stated that his wife Cookie and their unborn child did not have HIV, and that he would dedicate his life to "battle this deadly disease".[11]
Johnson initially said that he did not know how he contracted the disease,[11] but later acknowledged that it was through having numerous sexual partners during his playing career.[101] He admitted to having "harems of women" and talked openly about his sexual activities because "he was convinced that heterosexuals needed to know that they, too, were at risk".[101] At the time, only a small percentage of HIV-positive American men had contracted it from heterosexual sex,[87][102] and it was initially rumored that Johnson was gay or bisexual, although he denied both.[87] Johnson later accused Isiah Thomas of spreading the rumors, a claim Thomas denied.[71][103]
Johnson's HIV announcement became a major news story in the United States,[102] and in 2004 was named as ESPN's seventh-most memorable moment of the previous 25 years.[11] Many articles praised Johnson as a hero, and the then-U.S. President George H. W. Bush said, "For me, Magic is a hero, a hero for anyone who loves sports."[102]
Despite his retirement, Johnson was voted by fans as a starter for the 1992 NBA All-Star Game at Orlando Arena, although his former teammates Byron Scott and A. C. Green said that Johnson should not play,[104] and several NBA players, including Utah Jazz forward Karl Malone, argued that they would be at risk of contamination if Johnson suffered an open wound while on court.[105] Johnson led the West to a 153–113 win and was crowned All-Star MVP after recording 25 points, 9 assists, and 5 rebounds.[106] The game ended after he made a last-minute three-pointer, and players from both teams ran onto the court to congratulate Johnson.[107]
Johnson was chosen to compete in the Barcelona 1992 Summer Olympics for the U.S. national team, dubbed the "Dream Team" because of the NBA stars on the roster.[108] The Dream Team, which along with Johnson included fellow Hall of Famers such as Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and Larry Bird, was considered unbeatable.[109] After qualifying for the Olympics with a gold medal at the 1992 Tournament of the Americas,[110] the Dream Team dominated in Olympic competition, winning the gold medal with an 8–0 record, beating their opponents by an average of 43.8 points per game. Johnson averaged 8.0 points per game during the Olympics, and his 5.5 assists per game was second on the team.[109][111] Johnson played infrequently because of knee problems,[112] but he received standing ovations from the crowd, and used the opportunity to inspire HIV-positive people.[34]
obviously, there are some straight who are randomly promiscuous
but, never, nowhere as widespread as homosexuals in America when AIDS arrived
and, yes, I'm referring to the male homosexual community which is responsible for the spread of the disease
thanks, for rambling on about Magic Johnson for several paragraphs, as if to demonstrate that you have nothing else to say
"President Joe Biden is so committed to bipartisan cooperation and fact-based governance that he has launched an ignorant and incendiary attack on the new Georgia voting law. Biden says the legislation is “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and an “un-American law to deny people the right to vote.”
It is now practically mandatory for Democrats to launch this kind of unhinged broadside. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, accusing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp of having stolen his 2018 election victory over Democratic activist Stacey Abrams (a poisonous myth), tweeted, “The Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair just signed a despicable voter-suppression bill into law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.”
Anyone making this charge in good faith either doesn’t understand the hideousness of the Jim Crow regime or the provisions of the Georgia law.
The old Jim Crow was billy clubs and firehoses; the alleged new Jim Crow is asking people to write a driver’s-license number on their absentee-ballot envelopes.
The old Jim Crow was poll taxes; the new Jim Crow is expanding weekend voting.
The old Jim Crow was disenfranchising voters en masse based on their race; the new Jim Crow is limiting ballot drop boxes to places they can’t be tampered with.
It is hard to believe that one real voter is going to be kept from voting by the new rules.
To better ensure the security of absentee ballots, the law requires that voters provide a driver’s-license or state-ID number to apply for a ballot and one of those numbers (or the last four digits of a Social Security number) when returning the ballot.
The law narrows the window for requesting absentee ballots, although it still allows plenty of time. A voter can request a ballot as early as 11 weeks before and as late as 11 days before an election; any later risks the ballot not being delivered in time.
Ballot drop boxes were a pandemic-era innovation in Georgia. The law keeps them, while limiting their location to early-voting sites.
After getting blowback over proposed limits on weekend early voting, when black churches run their “souls-to-the-polls” events, Georgia lawmakers expanded the potential for weekend voting.
The law gives the state election board more authority to take over local election operations, but there is no doubt that election officials in Fulton County, where metro Atlanta is located and long lines at the polls are common, have been incompetent.
Perhaps most controversially, it bans people from distributing food or drink to voters standing in line, an effort to keep partisans from trying to sway voters near polling places. But poll workers can provide food and drink for general use.
The deeper point is that in the contemporary United States, with such wide and ready access to the ballot, changes in the rules or process around the edges don’t disenfranchise people.
Georgia considered limiting no-excuse absentee voting to voters age 65 and over. Even this wouldn’t have dissuaded anyone from voting. A study published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that turnout increased in 2020 just as much in states without no-excuse absentee voting as in states with it.
Strict voter-ID laws have long been denounced as voter suppression. It’s not true. According to a 2019 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “strict ID laws have no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup.”
And Democrats issued dire warnings about the effects of the Supreme Court in 2013 ending pre-clearance that required certain jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to get federal approval before making changes in their election laws.
This, too, was wrong. A paper by a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Oregon concludes, “The removal of preclearance requirements did not significantly reduce the relative turnout of eligible black voters.”
None of the facts, though, can possibly overcome the attachment that Biden and other Dems have to their emotionally resonant and politically powerful Jim Crow smear
Once again, we see that locked-down blue states lead in helping the virus spread:
As those numbers make clear, the pandemic isn’t over yet. And it may get worse in the next few weeks.
What’s driving cases up?
A more contagious variant (the one first identified in Britain, called B.1.1.7) is spreading.
Many experts aren’t surprised. “For literally a month and a half, we’ve all been predicting that the second half of March is when B.1.1.7 would become the dominant variant in the United States,” says Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health. “And sure enough, here we are.”
The increase is not distributed equally. “New York and New Jersey have been bad and are not getting better, and Michigan’s cases are rising at an explosive rate,” Mitch Smith, a Times reporter covering the pandemic, said.
Hospitalizations are also rising rapidly in Michigan, with Jackson, Detroit and Flint among the metro areas experiencing the highest rates of new cases in the country.
The outlook is more encouraging in much of the West and South.
"Once again, we see that locked-down blue states lead in helping the virus spread:
As those numbers make clear, the pandemic isn’t over yet. And it may get worse in the next few weeks.
What’s driving cases up?
A more contagious variant (the one first identified in Britain, called B.1.1.7) is spreading."
Sooooooo... the answer is to have the people the states with the more contagious variant go out and spread the virus more - rather than stay away from others and limit its spread?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, very stable genius.
"Sooooooo... the answer is to have the people the states with the more contagious variant go out and spread the virus more - rather than stay away from others and limit its spread?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, very stable genius."
the answer is to let people know what's happening and encourage them to protect themselves and stop relying on government to do it for them
the government makes bad decisions, based on politics
just ask people whose parents died because Andrew "predator with an ethically challenged talking head brother" Cuomo decided to dump contagious people in their retirement facility
just ask parents whose kids were set back a year to accommodate teacher unions' denial of science and CDC guidance
just ask workers on the harmless Keystone pipeline, now out of work
Quick sanity check: locked-down blue states, NJ, NY, RI, Massachusetts are still the top four in deaths per million and those top two are now having a renewed surge.
Think about Florida and COVID-19. What do you imagine?
Actually, Florida is doing just fine. The state is successfully balancing coronavirus measures with economic issues like the ability work and play, otherwise known as “living.” The state never came close to becoming another New York or New Jersey, overwhelmed with cases and fatalities. Even California, a Democratic state run by a liberal governor, a state that was supposedly doing everything right by locking down normal life for months, is doing relatively worse than Florida by most measurements, both virus- and employment-related.
As the virus spread through the United States in March 2020, Florida’s tourism-dependent economy and senior-skewed population appeared to put the state at a disadvantage, both economically and therapeutically, against a virus that was particularly dangerous to the elderly. Florida did all sorts of things that were supposed to bring mass death, including opening up beaches and theme parks and attractions before other states dared. Frightening projections were made when the state reopened schools in August.
Yet the feared surge of cases never transpired. Florida’s local press, where DeSantis has few friends, admits he made the right call: “Defensive DeSantis still drawing heat for virus policies, but not on reopening schools,” read the headline to a story in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Even though the dire predictions of death in Florida never came to pass, the ignorant shrieking of “DeathSantis!” continues unabated.
Rebekah Jones, who for a time ran the state’s coronavirus data dashboard, became popular for a moment among the DeSantis-hating media after she accused the governor of cooking the virus numbers to reopen the state — until stories about her interesting personal life seeped out. Even Jones’ supposedly more scientific measurements were based on discredited assumptions, as the New York Times reluctantly admitted deep into a loaded anti-DeSantis story.
No governor has taken more flack over the pandemic than DeSantis, who stopped Florida officials from closing businesses or penalizing people without masks, even while other governors moved toward lockdowns. DeSantis started lifting lockdown restrictions back in May of last year and lifted all remaining restrictions in September.
The governor’s favorability ratings have rebounded as residents have grown to appreciate their quasi-normal existence. Floridians are eating in restaurants and going to movies and even comedy clubs. Children attend school, play together at recess, and compete in sports with fans in the stands.
Recently I did something in a medium-sized Central Florida city that remains illegal in the cultural meccas of Los Angeles and New York City. I attended a concert by a Bee Gees tribute band, albeit with a somewhat masked-up audience and socially distanced seating. If it had been up to the “follow-the-science” types, there would still be zero concerts, no theme park visits, no sports on any level, and of course no Super Bowl — no fun diversions from the sadness and fear of the past year.
Yet even though the dire predictions of death in Florida never came to pass, the ignorant shrieking of “DeathSantis!” continues unabated. Objective measurements of success won’t assuage the Left’s mask-based moral superiority. In any case, people in Florida, or at least the sliver I see every day, are quite mask-compliant, which makes it odd to read horrified accounts from people who don’t live here that claim otherwise.
Proof that anti-DeSantis loathing has broken the press is this staggering sentence from a hostile NBC News online story: “Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, ignored federal guidelines and prioritized getting senior citizens — one of Florida’s most potent voting blocs — vaccinated first.”
Yes, after a year of accusations that Republicans want to “kill Grandma,” the press is now blaming DeSantis for protecting Grandma.
Florida has avoided the dark imaginings of the Left, controlling the pandemic while not wrecking the lives of its citizens and allowing a semblance of normal life to continue. Even the DeSantis foes at the New York Times were forced to acknowledge on a recent Sunday front page, with a healthy dose of petulance, that in Florida “Much of life seems normal … ”
Perhaps worried it had been too fair, the Times followed up with this snark from reporter Apoorva Mandavilli: “Scientists view Florida — the state furthest along in lifting restrictions, reopening society and welcoming tourists — as a bellwether for the nation. If recent trends there are any indication, the rest of the country may be in trouble.”
Yes, it’s that gruesome wishful thinking of “wait two weeks” again — predicting a rise in Florida’s case and death rate that never actually arrives. Expect the Left, locked into defending their year-long lockdown policy, to never forgive Gov. DeSantis for being right.
Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, has commented that he was “enjoying the irony of … [Sen. Bernie] Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of socialism and what it really means ... In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself.”
The soul-sapping nature of socialism was my subject last week, so I won’t go through the same stuff again, much though it bears repeating. Nevertheless, Kasparov’s comment led to further discussion of socialism after I reposted it on social media, and one respondent, a highly civilized left-wing friend I’ve known for about 20 years, said interestingly that without the “socialist impulse,” there would be no free education and healthcare and no pensions for the elderly.
I won’t quibble over the word “free,” for my interlocutor didn’t mean these benisons of modern society cost nothing but that the cost isn’t borne by the user in the form of fees. He knows full well that we pay for them with taxes and borrowing. And it can be conceded that they’d provide strong if not necessarily compelling grounds to support socialism if it deserved credit for them.
But does it? Does our impulse to help others start with a socialist impulse or any ideology? Or is the truth entirely different? Is socialism, which I think of as a set of arrangements by which central government delivers goods and services (of varying quality) to the public, actually an outgrowth or distortion of the deeper instinct of compassion? I don’t suggest that socialists are more compassionate than others, much though they often think of themselves that way. They obviously aren’t. But there’s a link between the political ideology and the human instinct, no matter how misshapen the connection has become.
In 1985, singer Bob Geldof was interviewed backstage at London’s Wembley Stadium about the massive Live Aid rock concert he’d organized with fellow musician Midge Ure both there and simultaneously at John. F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. They were raising money for famine relief in Ethiopia and did so on a stunningly huge scale. Copycat concerts took place all over the world, linked by satellite, and the combined events were watched in 150 countries by nearly 2 billion people.
At this moment, the greatest triumph in his already successful career, Geldof remarked with a note of bitter irony that Live Aid involved “the privatization of compassion.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. “Privatization” had become a dirty word in the left-wing lexicon, as industries previously taken over by socialist governments were released from central control and sold to the public as businesses quoted on stock exchanges.
Geldof’s comment struck me forcefully at the time, for it was the precise opposite of what I took then and still take to be the gem-like truth stated by columnist T.E. Utley that one of the cruelest aspects of socialism is that it delegates compassion to the state. Socialism encourages individuals to think caring for their neighbor is not their responsibility but is, instead, a function of government.
Socialists often suggest that private provision of help for the needy is a failure of the state. Sanders has spoken disdainfully of charity, as have many unappealing politicians elsewhere. They regard the care of others through individual acts of kindness as demeaning the recipient because they believe or at least declare that goods and services received should be taken as a right rather than accepted as a gift. One also suspects that socialists dislike charity because it places a claim on them as individuals, which they’d rather shrug off.
It is here that Kasparov hits the bull's-eye. Socialism, the sloughing off of personal responsibility, corrodes our humanity. Churches and other charities provided education, health services, and care for the elderly, admittedly somewhat patchily, long before the “socialist impulse” became entrenched in government. It was motivated by the finest instincts — the word “charity” is interchangeable with “love” in Christian social teaching — but that instinct and the community effort it produces are now denigrated as an insult to its beneficiaries.
When helping others is distanced or detached from our finer impulses, it is ungoverned, untempered by humane reasoning. It becomes a limitless and constantly lengthening list of rights. Not rights such as the right to say what one thinks, or worship as one chooses, but the duty of others to supply us with free college, free child care, automatic pay raises, free abortions, free housing, and reparations for past wrongs paid by those who didn’t inflict them to those who weren’t their victims
if you're a guy and you have a fantasy that you want to be a girl, no problem in the Biden administration
sign up for the military and the US taxpayer will pay for surgery to have your dreams come true:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon on Wednesday swept away Trump-era policies that largely banned transgender people from serving in the military, issuing new rules that offer them wider access to medical care and assistance with gender transition.
The new department regulations allow transgender people who meet military standards to enlist and serve openly in their self-identified gender, and they will be able to get medically necessary transition-related care authorized by law, chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters during a briefing.
The changes come after a two-month Pentagon review aimed at developing guidelines for the new policy, which was announced by President Joe Biden just days after he took office in January.
Biden’s executive order overturned the Trump policy and immediately prohibited any service member from being forced out of the military on the basis of gender identity. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin then gave the Pentagon two months to finalize the more detailed regulations that the military services will follow.
The new rules also prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. Their release Wednesday coincides with International Transgender Day of Visibility, and they will take effect in 30 days. Kirby said that will give the military services the time they need to update their policies and provide guidance to commanders.
“The United States military is the greatest fighting force on the planet because we are composed of an all-volunteer team willing to step up and defend the rights and freedoms of all Americans,” Austin said in a statement Wednesday. “We will remain the best and most capable team because we avail ourselves of the best possible talent that America has to offer, regardless of gender identity.”
Austin has also called for a reexamination of the records of service members who were discharged or denied reenlistment because of gender identity issues under the previous policy. Stephanie Miller, the director of military accession policy, told reporters there is no data yet on how many people that may be.
Until a few years ago, service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender, but that changed during the Obama administration. In 2016, the Pentagon announced that transgender people already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly, and that by July 2017 they would be allowed to enlist.
And when did you serve in uniform, Mr. Cis?
I bet like your idol, former President Bone Spurs, who called Americans who died in war "losers and suckers," you didn't.
Three siblings of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) say he’s one the key instigators of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol carried out by pro-Trump insurrectionists ― and they want him held accountable.
“He should have criminal consequences,” one of his brothers, Tim Gosar, said in a video from the conservative group Republican Accountability Project. “And if he’s found guilty, he should go to jail.”
The video shows how Gosar helped spread false conspiracy theories after the election and allegedly worked with one of the key organizers of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, which turned into an attack on the Capitol.
“There is no one member of Congress more responsible for the attack on the Capitol than Congressman Paul Gosar,” one of his sisters, Jennifer Gosar, said in the ad, which will run next week on Fox News in Gosar’s district as well as in Flagstaff, where he lives, but which is not part of his district.
The three siblings featured in the video suggest that he be expelled from Congress over his role in the insurrection and his attempts in the House to overturn the election results from multiple states.
Gosar’s siblings have spoken out against him in the past. In 2018, six of his brothers and sisters united to endorse his opponent.
“It would be difficult to see my brother as anything but a racist,” one of his sisters, Grace Gosar, said in a video.
Since then, the congressman has done little to change that impression: Gosar spoke at a white nationalist event in Florida earlier this year and last month he tweeted a message with the motto of a white nationalist organization.
Republican Accountability Project, which has been calling out enablers of former President Donald Trump’s election lies by name, also created an online feature to allow voters to see if their lawmakers tried to overturn the election results and make a pledge not to support anyone who did.
The greatest con artist in history
Trump likes to brag about how he’s the “greatest” everything. And it’s always a lie. But in one specific case, which he never acknowledges, for obvious reasons, it’s true. Jonathan Chait’s story about Trump’s fundraising scam opens with this:
"Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people.
Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular expose of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony."
He goes over the New York Times story I wrote about below and then makes this further observation which I think is sharp:
"Trump has been operating like this all along. His business hires contractors and then — by the hundreds — pays them half the promised fee, or nothing at all, knowing it can just find new contractors to unwittingly work for the famous Donald Trump. He bilks his fans into buying expensive vitamin scams, or investing in a casino that he loots, or signing up for expensive courses where the instructors take the students for all they’re worth.
Trump’s political career was — or, more pessimistically, is — an extension of his grifting career. He recognized conservative media as the perfect vehicle to identify a new and vast collection of marks. He ran as a populist and used the trust his voters placed in him to govern as a plutocrat. All the promises of restoring the factories that disappeared in the 1980s simply gave way to another tax cut for the rich.
It is a testament to Trump’s grifting genius that his victims continue to venerate him. Goldmacher’s story contains this utterly perfect sentence, describing one of the victims who was tricked into giving the campaign more than ten times what he intended to donate: “Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling The Times, ‘I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.’”
Almost every confidence artist has had to flee from his victims after they realized the trick. Trump may be the greatest con man in history. His victims still adore him."
They do. Why so many people worship this corrupt, phony, weirdo is beyond me.
I mean, really?
America is Better Off in the Long Run With the Drop in Church Attendance
This past week, a Gallup poll found that only 47% of Americans now say they belong to a house of worship, marking the first time ever that the number has dipped below 50%. It’s a watershed moment for American religiosity.
I wrote about a number of possible explanations for this decline, and I think it’s important to recognize the drop in churchgoing does not mean there’s been a corresponding rise in atheists. A lot of these people may be leaving organized religion while still clinging to a belief in God (or some nebulous Higher Power).
Now, Phil Zuckerman, an associate dean of Pitzer College and author of Society Without God, writes in the LA Times about how this is all good news for the country. In essence, he says societies that are less religious fare better in so many meaningful ways:
Secularity is highly correlated with a host of moral orientations that will markedly improve our nation. For instance, secular people — when compared to their religious peers — are far more likely to understand and respect the scientific method, which results in their increased willingness to get vaccinated, for instance, and adhere to empirically grounded health recommendations, a rational orientation that saves lives. Secular people are also more supportive of sex education, which reduces unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
Research shows that secular people are more likely to support women’s reproductive rights, universal healthcare, gay rights, environmental protections, death with dignity, gun safety legislation and treating drug abuse as a medical rather than criminal problem — all of which will serve to increase dignity, liberty and well-being in America.
The weird thing is that while the churchgoing numbers are dropping nationally, we still live in a country that’s very much controlled by the Religious Right — if not in the White House and Congress (for the time being), then certainly in a number of states.
But Republicans are imitating their Christian colleagues by pushing away so many people who might otherwise be supportive with their extremist, racist policies. We can only hope that they learn absolutely nothing from the conservative Christians who bear so much of the responsibility for the declining churchgoing numbers.
Federal prosecutors have requested an emergency stay to prevent the release of Capitol defendant Jack Wade Whitton, who was arrested last week after he was identified as the Trump fan captured on film dragging a D.C. police officer by the neck down the steps of the Capitol and into a violent mob.
Whitton, who the feds say is the man who wore a “TRUMP 2020” hat as he brutally assaulted officers at the Capitol, was indicted by a federal grand jury on a host of federal charges. The Georgia CrossFit enthusiast was one of the first suspects who became the target of online “Sedition Hunters” who have sought to identify the violent insurrectionists who tried to stop the certification of the election on Jan. 6. They nicknamed the suspect “Scallops” because an overhead photo of him dragging a police officer down a set of Capitol steps by the neck showed him wearing what one online investigator called a “distinctive scalloped grey backpack.”
Magistrate Judge Regina Cannon of the Northern District of Georgia ordered Whitton released pending trial following an initial hearing last week. But federal prosecutors filed a motion for an emergency stay, and have asked a judge in D.C. to order Whitton held until trial.
In a court filing, prosecutors pointed to the role that “unknown Twitter users” had played in identifying Whitton and tracking his movements and actions on Jan. 6 under the #scallops hashtag. “In the photographs tagged, Whitton is seen in various stages of dress during the assault,” they write.
Prosecutors said the FBI received a tip identifying “Scallops” as Jack Wade Whitton from a confidential source on Jan. 17, and at some later an FBI task force officer interviewed the tipster, who said they knew Whitton from high school and had attended the same CrossFit gym as Whitton and his girlfriend. The confidential source provided the FBI with a copy of a text message that Whitton allegedly sent to a mutual acquaintance.
“This is from a bad cop,” the message said, showing an image of a bloody hand. “Yea I fed him to the people. Idk his status. And don’t care tbh.”
It’s not clear from the court filing when exactly law enforcement first spoke to the confidential informant who sent in a tip about Whitton on Jan. 17, but it would be more than a month before the FBI interviewed the owner of the CrossFit gym they attended, who identified Wade to the FBI on Feb. 25. As HuffPost has previously reported, the overwhelmed FBI has been struggling to keep up with the influx of tips it has received about the Capitol attack, and key information has been overlooked during the course of the investigation.
Now that he’s been arrested, the feds told a D.C. court that he poses a danger to the community and that there were no conditions of release that would reasonably assure the safety of the community.
“The defendant assaulted an officer with a weapon — a crutch — and while doing so, kicked another officer who had been forced to the ground by a separate rioter. The defendant then dragged the officer he assaulted with a crutch into the mob, pulling him by the head, in a prone position, down a flight of steps. The evidence shows that the defendant is a danger to the community,” prosecutors wrote.
Long before bombshell allegations of federal sex trafficking rocked the political world this week, Rep. Matt Gaetz's rumored sexual conduct was already a source of controversy.
When Gaetz was a young state lawmaker in the Florida House of Representatives, he allegedly participated in a competition with fellow male lawmakers to earn points for their sexual conquests, the Business Insider reported Friday.
Having sex with married lawmakers and spending the night in a college sorority house earned the lawmakers extra points. And the ultimate prize was sleeping with one particular conservative woman, they dubbed the "snitch," in a nod to the "Harry Potter" game of Quidditch, a Republican who worked with Gaetz in the 2010s revealed in an interview with the Insider.
The game was the "worst kept secret in Tallahassee," the GOP insider said.
The sex competition in Tallahassee has been alleged before by Chris Latvala, a Republican state representative. During a 2020 Twitter feud with his former colleague, Latvala said Gaetz "created a game where members of the FL House got 'points' for sleeping with aides, interns, lobbyists, and married legislators."
Gaetz replied to Latvala at the time, "just because I own you on twitter, don’t confuse me for your daddy when it comes to abusing power for sex." That was a reference to Latvala’s father, Jack, who resigned from the Florida Senate in December 2017 amid sexual harassment allegations.
Gaetz's past has come under renewed scrutiny this week amid a steady stream of damning headlines against the 38-year-old congressman -- a top ally to former President Donald Trump who rose to national prominence as a TV-ready surrogate for the president's causes.
Since a federal sex trafficking probe involving Gaetz was made public this week, more reports have surfaced about the conservative firebrand's conduct around women.
In Congress, Gaetz would brag about his sexual escapades to his colleagues on the House floor and allegedly showed fellow lawmakers nude photos and videos of women he had slept with, CNN reported Thursday. One video Gaetz revealed to colleagues allegedly showed a naked woman with a hula hoop.
In Tallahassee, where Gaetz served from 2010 to 2016, some women allegedly referred to the young lawmaker as "Creepy Gaetz" because they were made uncomfortable by him, ABC News reported.
Years ago, the Miami Herald first reported on the scoring system that young male lawmakers had used to rank women, but didn't name the lawmakers involved. There were special points given out in sexual conquests for "virgins," a source told ABC News.
Gaetz was often seen trying to pick up young women at 101 Restaurant in Tallahassee, where students from nearby Florida State University would frequent, ABC News reported.
These past tales have emerged in recent days as Gaetz is faced with a federal criminal investigation that apparently started during the Trump Administration under former Attorney General William Barr. Despite the barrage of bad press -- even losing his communications director on Friday -- Gaetz has remained defiant.
"I'm not resigning," Gaetz told the Washington Examiner on Friday....
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