Preliminary AZ Fraudit Results Are In
I have been interested in the election challenge conducted by Maricopa County, Arizona, Republicans. Well, I was born in Phoenix, grew up there, I have some ideas about the place. When I grew up it was Goldwater's town, and both the newspapers were bizarrely conservative -- there just wasn't any other point of view. At some point some of us realized how crazy it was, lots of people moved there from more sensible places, and some residents were exposed to points of view from outside the Valley of the Sun, and there are today a few clear-thinking people in the county. But even today the tone is set by those crusty desert-rats who live in trailers out by Apache Junction or Gila Bend, or near the Superstition Mountains, sitting under an awning in the hundred-ten-degree heat watching a little black and white TV with rabbit ears, and shooting at intruders.
It would have been no surprise at all if Trump had won Arizona, including the big-city capital of Phoenix, in the 2020 election. It woulda been a yawner, the most expectable thing in the world. "AZ" would have gone on an alphabetized list with other red states with no explanation required.
You might remember the flurry when Fox News, of all the networks, called Arizona for Biden on election night. Trump literally got on the phone to Rupert Murdoch and told him to take it back. It was a close race and still early in the evening when Fox painted Arizona blue. Nobody understood it, but Fox stood by it and many hours later the other networks confirmed the call.
Arizona went blue and Maricopa County, being by far the most populous part of the state, led the charge. Tucson was no surprise but ... again, you cannot imagine how deeply conservative Phoenix has always been.
The Republican nutty fringe, which is mainstream in that region, decided to challenge the election results with an "audit." Actually they were not only challenging the results, but were challenging the whole idea of voting, the idea of democracy. Trump should have won, because Trump should have won. Who cares if a bunch of dumb voters feel otherwise? Destiny cannot be diverted by something as trivial as an election.
The Maricopa County fraudit, as it is more appropriately called, violated every principle of rigorous research. They started with a conclusion -- Trump won and the election was stolen from him -- and worked back, looking for incriminating evidence, chasing down every paranoid rumor. I won't review the whole process here, but it was ... ugly. Oh and then remember, when they were going to issue the report they all caught covid and it was delayed.
This morning the Washington Post reports that they got a draft of the final report, pretty close to what will come out officially this week.
And guess what: fraudit results agree that Biden won the county. In fact, these jokers estimated that Biden won by an even greater margin than the official count. It was not a great difference, 360 more votes, but still.
A Republican-commissioned review of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast last year in Arizona confirmed the accuracy of the official results and President Biden’s win in Maricopa County, according to a draft report prepared by private contractors who conducted the recount.After nearly six months and almost $6 million — most of it given by groups that cast doubt on the election results — the draft report shows that the review concluded that 45,469 more ballots were cast for Biden in Maricopa County than for Trump, widening Biden’s margin by 360 more votes than certified results.
The draft report found the count to have “no substantial differences” from the county’s certified tallies.
Draft report of GOP-backed ballot review in Arizona confirms Biden’s win
You know the saying, "Garbage in, garbage out" -- there is absolutely nothing meaningful about the result of the Maricopa County fraudit. It does not mean that Biden "actually" got more votes than the official tally. They just could not come up with any way to twist the data so that Trump won.
About the only conclusion you can take from this is that the grifters who soaked the county for millions of dollars did not feel obligated to make the customer happy. They were like dowsers who did not find water, but got paid anyway. Does that make them "honest?" Of course not, everything about this, from the premise to the data-collection to the analysis, was dishonest. It never should have been done. The election was fine as it was.
The whole point of this was to undermine the public's confidence in the democratic process. Now other Republican-run states want to do the same thing, as we see them trying to destroy one of the most successful representative democracies in the history of mankind. It would be nice if this discouraged them, but they're not smart enough for that.
posted by JimK at 2:57 PM
186 Comments:
The report released Friday by the Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired by Republican lawmakers in Arizona to look for 2020 election fraud, came up with nothing that throws the election won by President Joe Biden into legitimate question. Instead it tried to paint routine election practices in Maricopa County as errors, irregularities or sinister efforts to deny Donald Trump another term.
Even with its skewed analysis, the report actually came up with more votes for Biden than he was certified to have won in the county last year.
Here's a look at some of the claims by Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, in a hearing to present its report on Friday:
LOGAN, claiming election results were deleted from Maricopa County’s election management system: “So some individual went into an application, and they chose specifically to run something that would clear all records in the system that was used to generate the official results, the day before an audit started.”
THE FACTS: No, the data never disappeared; it was just moved. Maricopa County officials made copies of the data and archived it before removing it from the election management system.
“We have backups for all Nov. data & those archives were never subpoenaed,” the county said in a statement on Twitter. County officials said data cannot be stored indefinitely on the election management system. “Cyber Ninjas don’t understand the business of elections," the county said. “We can’t keep everything on the EMS server because it has storage limits.”
___
LOGAN: “23,344 people voted when they should no longer have access, or would not normally have access" to voting in Maricopa County because they have moved.
THE FACTS: No, that’s not what happened. Logan reviewed the names of voters against a commercial database of addresses, not a database of voters. He found that 23,344 reported moving before ballots went out in October. While the review suggests something improper, election officials note that voters such as college students, those who own vacation homes and military members, can move to temporary locations while still legally voting at the address where they are registered.
“A competent reviewer of an election would not make a claim like that,” said Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.
___
LOGAN: There were 9,041 mail-in voters who “were mailed one ballot but somehow two ballots were received, which I do not know how you would have one ballot sent and two received."
THE FACTS: This isn't unusual, and it's not a sign of wrongdoing. The file Logan consulted, known as EV33, shows two returned ballot entries whenever a voter's mail-in ballot has a signature discrepancy that gets fixed.
When a voter mails in a ballot with a blank or mismatched signature, election officials contact the voter. If the discrepancy is resolved, they enter a second record in the EV33 file, election officials said.
"The appropriate conclusion to draw from this finding is that the early voting team was performing their statutory-required responsibility by reviewing signatures on all returned mail-in ballots," Maricopa County tweeted in response to Logan's claim.
"The whole point of this was to undermine the public's confidence in the democratic process"
Democrats are actively trying to undermine the public's confidence in the democratic with a campaign to immortalize procedures that were used because of the pandemic and employing the type of propaganda above as a rationale
voting should be done on a single day and done in person, showing valid ID, unless there are compelling reasons why an individual can't do so
this would do more to strengthen confidence in the democratic process than anything else
in November 2020, several states flipped when mail-in ballots were counted
this should be rare for two reasons: there should be a trivial amount of people who have to mail-in ballots and the mail-in vote should theoretically not be too different from the live vote
that it happened in key states naturally led to suspicion, whether there was anything wrong or not
another way that Dems perverted and undermined democracy was the fraudulent Russian collusion story created by Hillary to interfere with the voters' rejection of her in 2016
in the same way that making false reports to police is illegal, Hillary should have been prosecuted for this crime against democracy
further perverting of democracy happened in 2020 when the media suppressed the Hunter Biden emails before the 2020 election; we found out this week that emails, which the media characterized as Russian disinformation, were, in fact, valid
Senate Republicans released quietly released the report on their Hunter Biden investigation a year ago. Quietly, because they found none of the criminal activity they were accusing him of and hoping to find. What they found were the same kind of seedy business relationships Republican legislators have, which aren't illegal. And they can't harp on that too much without also turning the spotlight on themselves.
Why don't you bring up Hillary's 33,000 emails next? Or Obama's fake birth certificate?
The Cyber Ninja's report and now a similar investigation ordered by Rump in Texas was never intended to reverse the outcome of the election. Claim Rump really one in Arizona after all the recount strains credulity in all but the biggest tin-foil hat wearers. Flipping Arizona wouldn't get enough electoral college votes to reinstate Rumpy anyway - they'd have to do it in several other states. And there's no need to do it in Texas which Rump won.
The ENTIRE idea behind these is to sow much more doubt in the election process and justify new laws that will allow state legislators over-rule local election results and substitute their own outcome. That way, when Rump calls up an election official again and tells him to "find" 11,000 votes for him, Rump will get the result he wants.
"Senate Republicans released quietly released the report on their Hunter Biden investigation a year ago. Quietly, because they found none of the criminal activity they were accusing him of and hoping to find. What they found were the same kind of seedy business relationships Republican legislators have, which aren't illegal. And they can't harp on that too much without also turning the spotlight on themselves."
criminal prosecution is not the point
the American people had a right to know what Biden and his family were up to and it was covered up by the mainstream media, who is responsible for disclosing it
"The ENTIRE idea behind these is to sow much more doubt in the election process and justify new laws that will allow state legislators over-rule local election results and substitute their own outcome."
if that's the idea, it would easily be remedied by instituting voter integrity measures
the opposition to such safeguards tells you all you need to know about the Dems
"criminal prosecution is not the point"
Of course it's not. It's a slander campaign on the taxpayer's dime. Just like all those "Benghazi investigations." They never found anything to charge Hillary with, but they kept pretending that the smoking gun was just around the corner. It didn't convince most people, but with the electoral college, that didn't matter.
"if that's the idea, it would easily be remedied by instituting voter integrity measures"
Voter integrity measures don't mean squat if Republican legislators decide to overturn the election results like many of them voted to do on Jan. 6th.
Voter integrity wouldn't even be a issue if Rump didn't spend a year priming his idiot base with lies like 'The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.'
The distrust Americans - especially those on the right - have with election results was ENTIRELY MANUFACTURED by Rump and his right-wing state media. There was never any problem with Obama's birth certificate until Rump and right wing media sowed doubt in their gullible and not-too-bright base. It is painfully clear that there have been far more LIES about election fraud than there has been actual election fraud.
A small portion of the Republican party has realized they were being gas-lit and broken off - folks like Liz Cheney and those that formed The Lincoln Project.
Seeing how blinded by Rump the rest of them are however, it is clear they are never going to figure out how they are being manipulated. The only good news is that Rump and the same right-wing media started a whole anti-vax disinformation campaign, which has been slowly killing off the stupidest of the bunch.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov
"Of course it's not. It's a slander campaign on the taxpayer's dime."
no one has slandered Hunter Biden
the mainstream media slandered the NY Post, who disclosed the emails, by suggesting they were part of a Russian disinformation campaign
and this is similar to the slander committed by Dems like Adam Schiff against the President who was elected by the American voter in 2016
there may have been illegal activity by Hunter and, based on some statements in the emails, which have been shown to be valid, by Joe
but criminality is not the point because not being a criminal is not the only standard voters use to select their President
they inspect a level of integrity rather than mere technical adherence to the law
Hillary's actions in connection with Benghazi should have disqualified her from further government service, regardless of whether she broke the law
"Voter integrity measures don't mean squat if Republican legislators decide to overturn the election results like many of them voted to do on Jan. 6th."
actually, they mean a lot more than squat, unlike the typical comment of a TTFer
if voter integrity measures were employed, it would be very difficult for anyone to challenge election results
without such measures, election results will always be in question
"folks like Liz Cheney and those that formed The Lincoln Project"
the old TTF standby rhetoric: everyone that agrees with them are "folks"
if you'll just agree you'll get a heapin' helpin' of their hospitality
"“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov"
thanks, Isaac
Dems' abuse of science is the epitome of anti-intellectualism
"they inspect a level of integrity rather than mere technical adherence to the law
Hillary's actions in connection with Benghazi should have disqualified her from further government service, regardless of whether she broke the law"
If that were ACTUALLY the case, Rump would have never made it into office after his little bus episode where he freely admitted he has a sexual predator. He should be on a sex offender registry, not scamming gullible conservatives and raking in millions for his legal defense fund.
And he never would have been in a position to nominate another sexual predator on the Supreme Court.
"if voter integrity measures were employed, it would be very difficult for anyone to challenge election results"
BS. Despite dozens of cases being thrown out of courts for lack of actual evidence, Rump's lawyers continued to spread "the big lie" until they got up to 60 failed attempts. It's not clear why they even stopped there - did they start to realize Rump wasn't going to pay them?
There are few things that Rump is good at, but 3 of them are:
1. Selling the Rump brand
2. Identifying useful idiots
3. Convincing useful idiots to do his bidding
He has taught the Republican party that they have a large base of useful idiots that will do their bidding once properly motivated - and outright lies are sufficient to motivate them. It doesn't matter whether election results are questionable or not. Lack of evidence only delays Rump - it never stopped him. Republicans can MAKE elections questionable with enough of the right propaganda. At that point, a Republican legislature overturning a blue district's vote in favor of their own candidate will seem quite reasonable to them.
"Dems' abuse of science is the epitome of anti-intellectualism"
Your ability to misunderstand nearly every scientific concept you come across is not evidence of anti-intellectualism. It is evidence of your susceptibility to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
"If that were ACTUALLY the case, Rump would have never made it into office after his little bus episode where he freely admitted he has a sexual predator."
as any eighth grade history student knows, Hillary's husband blazed a path so that being sexual predator no longer disqualifies one from the presidency
however, we do expect our President not to peddle influence in exchange for foreign countries paying his kid millions
"And he never would have been in a position to nominate another sexual predator on the Supreme Court."
if Kavanaugh weren't in public office, he would have made millions suing those who made malicious and unsubstantiated lies defaming his character
if any evidence as since surfaced, do let us know
"Despite dozens of cases being thrown out of courts for lack of actual evidence,"
oh me gursh...
the Dems wrote the rules to make sure evidence could not be produced
reinstitution of pre-2020 voter integrity laws will make sure votes can be verified
"Your ability to misunderstand nearly every scientific concept you come across is not evidence of anti-intellectualism."
wow!
this site's push to advance advocacy as science in public schools epitomizes anti-intellectualism
how often have we heard some moron here insist a study is proof because it is peer-reviewed?
that's like saying Middle-Earth existed because Tolkien's works were consistent
only replication validates scientific findings
"only replication validates scientific findings"
Many of us agree the replication of findings by various US court that no voter fraud occurred in the 2020 election validates Biden's election.
"however, we do expect our President not to peddle influence in exchange for foreign countries paying his kid millions"
Except of course, if El Presidente's name is "Trump" and you keep your DC Hotel and have rich foreigners stay there while they court his favor, and his kids make millions running his companies while one of them works in the White House. It's not like there's an emoluments clause in the Constitution...oh wait a minute... here it is in Article 1 section 9!
"as any eighth grade history student knows, Hillary's husband blazed a path so that being sexual predator no longer disqualifies one from the presidency"
Clinton did indeed have a number of affairs in his various offices - but they appeared to be consensual. Rump however clearly stepped into predator territory with his rebuffed assaults. It would be nice to conflate the two so you could claim "Dems did it first" but while what Clinton did was unsavory, and unkind to his wife and family, it didn't devolve into felony territory the way Rump's behavior did. But Republicans will keep pushing that line because their gullible base will somehow think they are equivalent.
For the record, I never voted for Bill, and I had no intention of voting for Hillary. However, when Republicans went full psychopath nominating Rump, there wasn't much choice.
"the Dems wrote the rules to make sure evidence could not be produced"
Really? Which ones were those? Many of the judges were Rump/McConnell appointees, and most of the election laws were were written years ago. Go look at the reasons that judges kept throwing Rudy and his "Kraken" team out of the courts... it was lack of EVIDENCE.
"reinstitution of pre-2020 voter integrity laws will make sure votes can be verified"
The voter integrity laws didn't change, the way they could submit their ballots changed to accommodate a world-wide, air-spread pandemic. You keep on promoting the BIG LIE about wide spread voter fraud without a shred of evidence. Democrats can't even organize themselves well enough to pass the infrastructure bills they want. Yet right-wing propagandists like yourself keep insinuating that they somehow secretly organized enough simultaneous voter fraud across several different states around our vast nation to throw the vote for Biden, and yet left no hard evidence for it.
You are the epitome of what conservatives have devolved into - you can see the writing on the wall and voter demographics are changing. Republican policies have left a large swath of angry poor white people ready to blame everything on the most convenient target. But rather than actually address the root causes of those problems, you've resorted to destroying democracy by undermining the election process itself, trying to make sure that the next time around, your side wins the election even if they don't win the majority of votes.
"how often have we heard some moron here insist a study is proof because it is peer-reviewed?"
Probably less often than your side uses a non-peer reviewed, non-replicated "study" by some right-wing religious group as evidence for your side.
waiting for the truth from the media
https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/28/media-outlets-quick-to-call-hunter-biden-laptop-russian-disinformation-ignore-confirmation-it-was-real/
Slidin' Biden is in a lose-lose situation
failure to pass the 3.2 trillion will probably end his presidency
but so will passing it
yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
some facts TTF should probably be aware of:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/27/democrats-repeat-the-mistakes-of-2016/
"Many of us agree the replication of findings by various US court that no voter fraud occurred in the 2020 election validates Biden's election"
legal and scientific have different standards
however, no court found no voter fraud occurred in the 2020 election
they simply said there was no evidence
as we've discussed, the rules were changed to make it unlikely proof could be produced
as I've also discussed, I'm not saying there was fraud, but loose vote integrity rules will always encourage suspicion
and, thus, undermine democracy
"Except of course, if El Presidente's name is "Trump" and you keep your DC Hotel and have rich foreigners stay there while they court his favor, and his kids make millions running his companies while one of them works in the White House. It's not like there's an emoluments clause in the Constitution...oh wait a minute... here it is in Article 1 section 9!"
the courts ruled against that interpretation of the emoluments clause
Hunter was on the payroll of hostile countries, and the emails suggest Slidin' Joe Biden got a take
"Clinton did indeed have a number of affairs in his various offices - but they appeared to be consensual."
you may have missed the me-too movement
what Clinton did to an entry-level female employee just out of college is never consensual
look at the Clinton's good buddy, Harvey Weinstein
"It would be nice to conflate the two so you could claim "Dems did it first""
Clinton was far from the first Dem to sexually harass a powerless employee
just the first to think he could remain President after it was discovered
"Really? Which ones were those?"
oh, allowing mail-in voting without valid reason, eliminating voter ID, allowing ballot harvesting
ample opportunity for fraud, with little hope of detection
"The voter integrity laws didn't change, the way they could submit their ballots changed to accommodate a world-wide, air-spread pandemic"
that probably wasn't an adequate reason, people was standing in line t get into Costco
but even if it was an adequate reason, that doesn't justify a permanent degradation o our voting integrity policies
"Probably less often than your side uses a non-peer reviewed, non-replicated "study" by some right-wing religious group as evidence for your side."
ah, before you said it was me
having failed to substantiate that insinuation, you now hold me responsible for "my side"
sorry, don't have one
do my own thinking
"as we've discussed, the rules were changed to make it unlikely proof could be produced"
No, that is an assertion you keep making with no evidence to back it up - it was not a discussion.
Obama's birth certificate could be fake too, but without actual evidence, you're just trying to muddy the waters. But that's what conservatives are left with - making lots of baseless claims and sowing enough doubt to try and overthrow an election. And when that doesn't work, sow enough doubt to make new laws to make it exceedingly difficult for poor people to vote - take away voting hours, and voting locations just to start.
"you may have missed the me-too movement"
Actually I didn't. Republicans ignored it entirely though when they elected Rump and then let him shove through Kavanaugh. They're so proud of that.
"what Clinton did to an entry-level female employee just out of college is never consensual"
Since when do conservatives care about consent? Certainly not when a woman is raped and doesn't want to carry the criminal's child. It's also conservatives that have block efforts to outlaw child marriage:
"A bill that would have ended child marriage in Idaho — which has no minimum age for couples who want to wed — died in the Statehouse [in 2019].
Republican lawmakers, who control the Legislature, opposed it, including state Rep. Bryan Zollinger, who said it "went too far."
"Obviously, I'm against child marriage," the GOP lawmaker told NBC News. "But basically marriage is a contract between people that shouldn't require government permission."
Lewinsky was 22. Republicans don't even want to limit the "marriage" age to 16:
"Idaho has the highest rate of child marriages in the U.S., according to a national report from Unchained at Last, an organization dedicated to ending the practice in the U.S. The Democratic sponsor of the Idaho legislation, which would have set the marriage age at 16, said that she thought her bill was "a modest compromise."
Your sanctimonious drivel is rendered moot by actual conservative actions.
"oh, allowing mail-in voting without valid reason, eliminating voter ID, allowing ballot harvesting
ample opportunity for fraud, with little hope of detection"
Voter ID was never eliminated - even mail-in votes had to match signatures - that same standard that states that use mail-in voting for all of their voting.
And yet fraud was detected - typically it was angry Republicans casting votes for their recently deceased relative, and then claiming they only did it because that's what Democrats do.
"but even if it was an adequate reason, that doesn't justify a permanent degradation o our voting integrity policies"
No one is recommending degrading voter integrity. Having the polls open more hours on weekends and more polling places to go to in densely populated areas don't degrade voter integrity. But given how desperate you are to undermine the election process, you can't stop yourself from obsessively regurgitating the Big Lie narrative.
"that probably wasn't an adequate reason, people was standing in line t get into Costco"
Trump's super-spreader rallies showed mail-in voting was a perfectly adequate reason, and assuming people were standing too close together while not wearing masks (if that's what they were doing - you didn't specify) in line for Costco doesn't negate that reason. It's just a measure of their stupidity.
"ah, before you said it was me
having failed to substantiate that insinuation, you now hold me responsible for "my side"
sorry, don't have one
do my own thinking"
Unless you leave a name, like Theresa sometimes does, it is all but impossible to distinguish you from any of the supposed "other" conservative posters. Although I will admit, Theresa's shrill whining is sometimes recognizable. If you can't bother to distinguish yourself from the other conservatives, there is no way for me to distinguish you and I'm not going to waste my time with that. I recommend you use the name "G. Orwell" - it's a distinguished name with a good pedigree, and it will remind folks that you're here to try and rewrite history.
As for "you're own thinking," that's not what regurgitating the talking points from right-wing media means.
"the courts ruled against that interpretation of the emoluments clause"
No, it didn't. The DC Court of appeals ruled that Congress lacked the legal standing to sue under the Foreign Emoluments Clause.
McConnell's stacked courts has left our Judicial Branch a tool for business and cronyism, at the expense of our Constitution:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-court-ducks-opportunity-trump-emoluments-cases
"Notably, all three of these cases presented unprecedented legal issues: in the more than 200 years since our nation was founded, no court had ever litigated either Emoluments Clause. So how did the Supreme Court deal with these novel cases? For all intents and purposes, it didn’t.
In the suit brought by Congress, the justices simply declined to review the case in October, thus upholding the ruling by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that members of Congress lacked the legal standing to sue under the Foreign Emoluments Clause. And on January 25, the Supreme Court dismissed the other two cases as moot since Trump was no longer in office.
At the very least, the optics of this are embarrassing: the justices sat on these cases for months and waited for Trump to get voted out of office instead of grappling with the weighty legal questions. This has echoes of Bush v. Gore where the Supreme Court’s running out the clock benefited one party.
Had the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court cases in the CREW v. Trump and DC v. Trump, then discovery against the Trump Organization would have begun. Now the Emoluments cases have been unceremoniously ended without resolution.
But there is a bigger problem here. Donald Trump is unlikely to be the last businessperson to win the presidency. If we have a President Bezos or a President Theil, then their foreign business entanglements are likely to be larger than the hotelier president’s. But any future president can use the Trump experience as a guide to avoid the constitutional prohibition on foreign emoluments. So long as foreign governments’ political spending is laundered through a future president’s business, he or she can make the argument that this is perfectly fine since Trump did it.
This precedent is also particularly obnoxious for any president who anticipates serving only one term. They can accept domestic emoluments from states that want to curry favor, safe in the knowledge that the federal courts are unlikely to move quickly enough to stop their unconstitutional behavior. All they have to do is run out the clock. Litigation in Trump’s cases took exactly four years, and at the end of the day he got to keep all the likely monetary gains — even if they were plainly unconstitutional."
A just-retired Department of Homeland Security official who filed a whistleblower complaint last year ticked off the dangerous ways Donald Trump “politicized” DHS and why it would be a “disaster” if he ever returned to the White House.
Brian Murphy said Trump allies Chad Wolf, then acting head of DHS, and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli downplayed the Kremlin’s support for Trump and its attempted interference in the 2020 election, along with the mounting danger of white supremacy in the U.S.
At the same time, department officials inflated the problems along the Mexican border to back Trump’s messaging, added Murphy, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2016.
Murphy, who was principal deputy undersecretary in the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis before he left his job Friday, told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that he was under “intense pressure” at work to “take intelligence and fit a political narrative.”
Rather than using real intelligence to keep the nation safe, administration officials demanded that information be manipulated to make Trump look better and to support his electioneering.
“When I got to DHS [in 2018], it was all about politics,” Murphy noted. DHS was expected to lie about “anything that made the president look bad.”
Murphy said another Trump presidential run would be a “disaster.”
He “puts out disinformation, and that’s an existential threat to democracy, and he is one of the best at putting it out and hurting this country,” Murphy said.
Murphy filed a whistleblower complaint outlining his concerns a year ago. The ABC interview was the first time he spoke publicly about his complaint.
For the 2020 presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved efforts to “denigrate the Democratic candidates” in order to aid Trump, according to an intelligence report early last year, Murphy pointed out. Putin also authorized a campaign “undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.” — something that Trump and his supporters are also doing.
DHS also fabricated the dangers along the southern U.S. border to fuel support for Trump’s border wall, Murphy said.
He said that any discussion about the rising threat of white supremacy became an avoided “third rail” at the Department of Homeland Security after the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, 2017, by a “Unite the Right” supporter who espoused neo-Nazi and supremacist beliefs.
A majority of Americans questioned in a new survey says President Biden cannot be trusted on the coronavirus pandemic
The Axios-Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that 53 percent of respondents said they didn't have very much trust or no trust at all in Biden to provide accurate information about the coronavirus. Forty-five percent trust the president either a great deal or fair amount, according to the survey.
When Biden first took office in January, 58 percent said they trusted him to provide accurate information about COVID-19.
The results come as the nation deals with a rise in coronavirus infections fueled by the delta variant. While the U.S. has not gone back to the same lockdowns seen at this time last year, there's still no clear end to the pandemic in sight. And Slidin' Biden hasn't a clue what to do!
"No, that is an assertion you keep making with no evidence to back it up"
what kind of evidence did you want?
the laws have been loosened and people across the land are suspicious
are you denying that?
"that's what conservatives are left with - making lots of baseless claims"
I haven't made any claim about the elections
I simply point out that if IDs aren't checked in person, people will be suspicious
they're entitled to be
they don't owe anyone an explanation
"make new laws to make it exceedingly difficult for poor people to vote - take away voting hours, and voting locations just to start"
there's no reason they can't go polls like everyone else
if you're concerned, give them the day off and provide rides to the polls
"Actually I didn't. Republicans ignored it entirely though when they elected Rump and then let him shove through Kavanaugh. They're so proud of that."
neither of them has done anything like the Lewinsky affair
Kavanaugh did nothing at all and Trump had the gall to be a heterosexual
"Since when do conservatives care about consent? Certainly not when a woman is raped and doesn't want to carry the criminal's child."
oh, conservatives believe in enforcing rape laws
but a kid doesn't deserve to be killed because of what his father did, you evil monster
"Lewinsky was 22"
yes, and her boss, the most powerful man in the world, should have been charged
"Voter ID was never eliminated - even mail-in votes had to match signatures - that same standard that states that use mail-in voting for all of their voting."
except voting is supposed to be secret and there is no way to assure the person hasn't been coerced
only if they vote in privacy, in person
"No one is recommending degrading voter integrity."
actually, you are
"you can't stop yourself from obsessively regurgitating the Big Lie narrative"
I've never said there was any voter fraud
isn't that what the lunatic fringe is calling the "Big Lie"?
"Unless you leave a name, like Theresa sometimes does, it is all but impossible to distinguish you from any of the supposed "other" conservative posters."
then, deal with the post at hand
truth is no one here has said any of the things you allege
"As for "you're own thinking," that's not what regurgitating the talking points from right-wing media means."
my points often diverge from the right-wing media
the only conservative source I read regularly is WSJ
"Notably, all three of these cases presented unprecedented legal issues: in the more than 200 years since our nation was founded, no court had ever litigated either Emoluments Clause. So how did the Supreme Court deal with these novel cases? For all intents and purposes, it didn’t."
they idea that Trump was swayed by someone paying a few hundred dollars to stay at his hotel is ridiculous
btw, the voters were perfectly aware he owned the hotel when they voted for him
"But there is a bigger problem here."
yes, too many Ivy League lawyers have been President
"Donald Trump is unlikely to be the last businessperson to win the presidency."
hopefully
The New York Times published a striking front-page report last week with a headline that read, "Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers' Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows." As the article detailed, Donald Trump's political operation carefully examined key election conspiracy theories, found them to be baseless, and prepared an internal memo on the findings.
Trump's lawyers, of course, pushed the falsehoods anyway.
We learned of this, not through a whistleblower or investigative reporting, but because of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems employee, who was targeted by the former president's team.
As we've discussed, however, there's no reason to believe this memo will be the only relevant revelation. On the contrary, the Coomer vs Trump Campaign case has also produced depositions from a variety of political players who were also involved in propagating nonsensical claims about the 2020 election. They've already answered questions, under oath, about their role in spreading conspiratorial falsehoods.
Take Rudy Giuliani, for example.
In this same defamation case, attorneys sat down with Donald Trump's infamous lawyer last month and asked about the origins of the Republican conspiracy theories, specifically related to voting machines — a core element of the GOP's anti-election push. As part of the deposition process, Giuliani, among others, was required to answer questions under oath, which in turn offers the public a window into how the nonsense became an animating principle for the former president and his allies.
The core question for the former New York City mayor was simple: Where did all this weird stuff come from? Giuliani was asked, for example, about media reports in which he said he'd relied on some media accounts and social media posts in order to go after a Dominion Voting Systems executive. Giuliani responded that he couldn't remember if it was Facebook or some other platform. "Those social media posts get all one to me," he said.
Giuliani added that couldn't think of anything else "that I laid eyes on." This was itself amazing: Before going public with anti-election conspiracy theories, Giuliani's due diligence involved reading some stuff via social media — though he's not sure which platform.
The former president's lawyer also told the public he knew of a witness who could bolster the allegations against Dominion. In the deposition, Giuliani conceded that he didn't actually speak to the alleged witness, but he thinks someone else on Team Trump probably did.
Giuliani also said he didn't have any information about the alleged witness' credibility, and didn't make an effort to check. From the transcript:
"It's not my job in a fast-moving case to go out and investigate every piece of evidence that's given to me. Otherwise, you're never going to write a story."
He added that he didn't have the time to check whether the alleged witness' claims were reliable before sharing them with the public.
Rachel summarized Giuliani's message this way: "I read some stuff — I think it was maybe on Facebook — I laid it out to the public as what we knew to be the facts, and no, I had no idea if it was true or not. I didn't even try to check. Why would I try to check? You wouldn't have a story then."
At face value, it's tempting to laugh at the absurdity of Giuliani's deposition. Similarly, it's hard not to wonder how much longer he'll be permitted to have a law license.
But let's not forget that the bonkers conspiracy theories Giuliani and his associates pushed weren't just lies, they were toxins that entered the political world's bloodstream. The political system resulting sickness isn't going away.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/bidens-vaccine-mandate-causing-another-pandemic-hospital-staff
hospitals are sort-staffed because of vaccine mandates. I guess TTF thinks we should arrest 'em, strap 'em down and inject 'em
Nice lying piece of trash from a former Moonie newspaper editor-in-chief fully believed by the lying TTF Troll who claims:
"hospitals are sort-staffed because of vaccine mandates."
As usual, that's another GOPer lie.
Claims of anti-vax nurses fueling hospital staff shortages ignore the limited support and lack of mental healthcare for COVID's frontline workers
-Hospitals have told reporters unvaccinated workers are contributing to the nurse staffing shortage.
-But research has found poor work environments and PTSD contribute to whether a nurse will quit.
-Traumatized nurses can also make decisions against their self interest, like refusing a vaccine.
Sarah Chan, a registered nurse at St. Joseph's Hospital in New York, did not expect the pandemic to plague hospitals for the last nineteen months.
Chan said she believed the rollout of the vaccine would decrease the number of COVID-19 patients she had. But as cases involving the delta variant of COVID, which is more easily spread, rise and fewer people get shots, hospitals are once again crowded.
Some health systems have blamed unvaccinated healthcare workers for staffing shortages, but the problem with unvaccinated healthcare workers may be overstated: the American Nurses Association found 9 in 10 nurses have received a COVID-19 vaccine or are planning to.
Instead of leaving in protest of vaccine mandates, many of Chan's peers left their jobs caring for patients due to exhaustion, she said. The exodus of nurses has created staffing shortages at her hospital, which means she is working overtime to care for sick patients.
Poor work environments and burnout are putting pressure on already strained nurses — and without better resources, trauma and fatigue will cause a nurse staffing crisis, experts told Insider.
"The stress of working in a COVID ICU, and all the death that I've had to see, altogether, it has really set me back; I'm often very anxious, and angry," Chan told Insider. "So much death weighs heavy on me."..
Nearly every state has no limit on the number of patients a nurse can care for at once, leading many to care for too many people. A recent study by University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing found New York City hospitals — the epicenter of the pandemic back in April 2020 — were understaffed as early as December 2019.
Along with poor work environments, post-traumatic stress disorder among nurses who cared for COVID-19 patients may be fueling the staffing crisis.
"Hospitals have told reporters unvaccinated workers are contributing to the nurse staffing shortage.
But research has found poor work environments and PTSD contribute to whether a nurse will quit.
Traumatized nurses can also make decisions against their self interest, like refusing a vaccine."
throwing insults around doesn't help your case
your "but" doesn't mean the unvaccinated who are not allowed to work don't make the situation worse
it's really, really simple
there is a shortage of health care workers
when you tell a sizable number they can't come to work, that exacerbates the problem
by definition
it's unavoidable
and it doesn't take an Einstein to figure it out
And when a sizable number of GOPers refuse to get vaccinated, that exacerbates the problem even more, traumatizing overworked health care workers.
The Red/Blue Divide in COVID-19 Vaccination Rates
There continue to be differences in COVID-19 vaccination rates along partisan lines, a gap that has grown over time. We’ve documented this in our COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor surveys of the public, and we’ve been tracking county-level data to assess vaccination rates in counties that voted for Trump in the 2020 Presidential election compared to those that voted for Biden.
As of September 13, 2021, 52.8% of people in counties that voted for Biden were fully vaccinated compared to 39.9% of Trump counties, a 12.9 percentage point difference (Figure 1). While the rate of vaccination coverage has slowed in both county groups, the gap has widened over time (Figure 2).
"Here you go, Einstein. Figure it out."
figure out what?
the point I made, which you keep trying to obscure, is that vaccine mandates for health care workers necessarily reduce the number of health care workers, exacerbating staff shortages
there's no feasible way for you to dispute that
all this talk about partisan differences in vaccination rates is irrelevant
the fact is that a sizable swath of health care workers don't choose to be vaccinated means that excluding them will cost lives
I know socialist progressives fantasize that they can order people to get vaccinated
but health care workers have called your bluff
btw, only 53% in Biden counties are vaccinated?
I thought that was the number for the country as a whole, but I won't quibble
suffice it to say Slidin' Biden isn't a very persuasive leader
the enthusiasm gap will be fatal to Dems' chances next November
Yeah, just like your fantasy was going to get Rump re-elected in 2020.
"Yeah, just like your fantasy was going to get Rump re-elected in 2020."
actually, if I were to fantasize, that wouldn't be my object
personally, I never liked him
although, having said that, we'd all be better of with him in office if the alternative is Biden
but, back to the fantasies of the socialist progressives
they think they can order society and every one will just roll over
when they get power, they learn that isn't true and they become increasingly repressive to get their way
it never fails!
Cuba, North Korea, Bolshevik Russia, Red China....
In their fight over trillions of dollars, their paramount policy goals and perhaps their political fate, this isn’t helping: Democratic progressives and centrists say they don’t trust each other. They’re tossing around words like “stupid” and “insanity” and they’re drawing lines in the sand.
Democrats’ internal battling over a 10-year, $3.5 trillion package of social and environmental initiatives comes with virtually no margin for error and lots at stake.
They’ll need every Democratic vote in the 50-50 Senate and all but three in the House to succeed. Facing that arithmetic, public declarations of distrust for each other do little to promote the healing they’ll need to avoid sending the legislative essence of Joe Biden’s presidency down in flames, with potential long-term consequences
Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, slammed President Biden on Wednesday for attending the Congressional Baseball Game at Nationals Park and not focusing on his duties in the White House.
"The fact that Joe Biden has time to go to the Congressional baseball game but not time to take questions on Afghanistan or see the humanitarian crisis at the border is a disgrace." Haley tweeted.
Haley has been pushing for the president to explain what led up to the chaotic and deadly Afghanistan withdrawal last month, telling Fox News’ Martha MacCallum Biden claimed none of his military experts said anything to him about keeping forces on the ground or at Bagram Air Force Base. "Well, clearly your generals said they did tell you," Haley said of Pentagon Congressional testimony this week. "So we need an answer. We need the truth on that because you’ve already lied once on that."
Haley has drawn speculation recently that she might run for president in 2024, consistently calling out Biden for what she sees as failed policies and she held a rally in Iowa this summer.
She told the crowd last June the best reason to go to Iowa may be because "Iowa loves to elect badass Republican women," the DesMoines Register reported. She was talking about down-ballot candidates like U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst but the visit didn’t go unnoticed.
Last week, she criticized Biden for ignoring threats like China, Russia, North Korea and terrorism in his speech to the United Nations. "With Joe Biden asleep at the switch our friends don't trust us and our enemies are rejoicing," she said.
Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives delayed a vote on a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that had been set for Thursday, bowing to party progressives who had demanded action on a larger socialist bill first, and breaking a promise to moderate Democrats that the bill would be voted on by September 27, later amended to September 30, now delayed until infinity and beyond.
Speaker Pelosi and President Joe "Slidin'" Biden have been scrambling to patch up differences between progressive lawmakers, who want a $3.5 trillion socialist spending package to go along with the infrastructure plan, and moderates, who called the socialist bill fiscal insanity.
Said White House spokeswoman Jen "Airhead" Psaki. "we are not there yet, and so, we will need some additional time"
LOL!
Negotiations on the socialist legislation stretched into the evening. In a statement to her Democratic colleagues, Pelosi called it a "productive and crucial day" and said discussions continued.
But as the hours stretched on, it became clear no deal was apparent.
Progressive Democrats have vowed to vote against the bill to invest in the nation's roads, bridges and other infrastructure, angry that Democrats have not yet reached agreement on a multitrillion-dollar socialist bill pushed by AOC, the Bern, Pocahontas and the Squad.
Faced with increasingly stiff odds against passing their $3.5 trillion socialist spending proposal, Biden and his aides are trying to find out what type of proposal could fool moderate Democrats into voting for it.
Lawmakers on the party's left flank have said they will not vote for the infrastructure bill unless they feel certain their priorities will be reflected in a socialist spending bill.
Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, a leader of House progressives, told reporters: "Nothing has changed with our caucus members. We don't have the votes to pass infrastructure."
Moderate Democratic Senator Manchin has proposed a spending package of about $1.5 trillion. Another Democratic moderate, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, declined to say whether she agreed with Manchin's proposal. She has met with Biden multiple times to discuss the bill.
With razor-thin majorities in Congress, Democrats cannot afford to lose any votes if they want to pass their agenda. They are unlikely to win much support from House Republicans eager to take back the majority in the 2022 congressional elections.
In yet another high-stakes battle, congressional Democrats and Republicans continued brawling over giving the Treasury Department additional borrowing authority beyond the current statutory limit of $28.4 trillion. A historic U.S. debt default could occur around Oct. 18, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has estimated, if Congress fails to act.
Republicans want no part of the debt limit increase enabling the huge socialist bill, saying it is Democrats' problem since they control Congress and the White House.
The House approved a bill late on Wednesday suspending the debt limit through December 2022. The Senate could vote on it "as early as next week," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, but sad Democrats need 60 votes. Republicans said they should extend the debt limit as part of the reconciliation process that Democrats want to use to push through the socialist bill. Reconciliation only requires 50 votes, but can only be used once a year.
Yellen said on Thursday it would be a "catastrophe" if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling. The uncertainty is starting to filter into financial markets.
The looming debt crisis is rattling Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, according to an Ipsos national opinion poll conducted for Reuters on Tuesday and Wednesday.
It showed that 65% of adults are "very" or "somewhat" concerned that Congress will fail to reach a debt deal in time.
The poll also found that 30% think congressional Republicans deserve the most blame if there is a government shutdown, while 37% would blame Democrats in Congress or Biden.
the opinion of America has gelled:
Slidin' Joe Biden is a baaaaaaad President !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Terry McAuliffe lost the VA governor election Tuesday night when he told parent to get lost...
There has been an overwhelming media blackout of one of the most talked-about moments from the Virginia gubernatorial debate between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin.
Education has been a top issue in the tight race for Virginia's governor being closely watched across the country and is widely seen as a bellwether for the upcoming 2022 midterms.
During Tuesday's matchup, the Republican challenged the former Democratic governor for vetoing a bill that would have allowed parents to be informed about materials provided in Virginia schools after citing examples of books featuring pedophilia and other sexually explicit content that were recently voiced by parents.
"I'm not going to allow parents to come into schools and actually take books out, make their own decision," McAuliffe defended the veto. "Yeah, I stopped the bill that- I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."
Whatever you say, President Huckabee.
by September in his first year, Biden’s approval rating now is worse than any president’s since World War II with one exception: Donald Trump’s 39 percent approval rating at this point in his term was worse.
all decent folk are heartened to see the collapse of Biden and the socialist squad he cheerleads for
nice to see the loudmouths get their comeuppance!!
this is starting to look like Andrew Cuomo: the Sequel.......
The White House should be feeling alarm. It hasn’t been a good summer for the president, and it isn’t looking to be a good fall. The manner and timing of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a catastrophe that left Americans infuriated and ashamed. The president’s statements and interviews in the aftermath were highly unsuccessful. The testimony of his top military leaders that they advised him to leave 2,500 troops to keep the process safe made him look dodgy. The whole thing was a botch from beginning to end, and it will stick in history. The images it yielded (kids running to the planes, 13 Americans killed as they tried to bring order) seemed to sum up the political moment, making this seem not like merely a bad event for the president but a definitional one.
The White House pandemic response has been uneven to the point of baffling. Inflation is going up (in June the Federal Reserve estimated it at 3.4% for the year; by September, 4.2%.) Immigration is not a problem but a crisis, and there appears to be no administration plan to deal with the reality that those from other countries who want to come here approach our border as if there is no border. What the crisis requires, at a bare minimum, is a sense of urgency, of something being done. There is no such sense. Their only plan seems to be hoping Border Patrol agents will do something wrong, or at least something that looks bad, so White House officials can lay blame with indignation and performative compassion.
On Capitol Hill, months of fighting in the Democratic caucus, with liberal moderates versus progressives, has gone on just long enough that it looks not like the inevitable jostling in a divided party but like disarray and an absence of leadership.
All this makes Mr. Biden look unimpressive. And eight months is long enough for an impression to take hold. If I were a Democrat I would be starting to think Joe Biden’s historical purpose was to get rid of Donald Trump, but beyond that he is the answer to no political question.
FiveThirtyEight.com’s tracking poll has Mr. Biden underwater (49% disapprove, 45% approve). The Gallup poll has his approval down 13 points since June. An ABC News/Ipsos poll out this week shows his support eroding on a range of issues.
The sheer size and scope of Mr. Biden’s economic proposals show he is operating with a certain daring. His bills are mandate-size. But he didn’t have a mandate-size victory in 2020 when he was up against the most divisive and controversial president in modern history. Donald Trump got more votes than any Republican ever had. Mr. Biden in turn received more votes than any Democrat. He won by seven million of 159 million votes cast. A good solid win (51.3% to 46.9%), but not a mandate. His party won the House but only by a handful of seats. The Senate is 50-50.
The country is closely split. Mr. Biden’s governing margin is precarious. Yet his economic proposals are quite sweeping, as if he’d won the Great Society mandate of 1964. Lyndon Johnson’s landslide was huge—61% to Barry Goldwater’s 38.5%. Johnson came in with 68 Democratic senators and a 295-140 House majority.
At the same time Mr. Biden acts as if he has a mandate, he seems strangely absent from Hill negotiations. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D., Mich.) said Wednesday on MSNBC that Democratic members “need to know exactly where the president stands and what the president wants them to do, and they’re getting mixed signals depending on who you talk to.” They are told they have to be with the president, but “what is it that the president wants?”
He is letting progressives play the part of conscience of the party. They appear to be calling the shots, and he’s ceding to them the idea they’re not part of the party; they’re the heart of the party. But Mr. Biden didn’t run as a progressive—he beat the progressives in the primaries. In a party going left, he played the role of the middle’s man. What happened to politics as the art of the possible?
more:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-fall-summer-mandate-leadership-presidency-obama-11633040253
“An American ‘Caesarism’ has now become flesh.” I wrote this in March 2016, even before Donald Trump had become the Republican nominee for the presidency. Today, the transformation of the democratic republic into an autocracy has advanced. By 2024, it might be irreversible. If this does indeed happen, it will change almost everything in the world.
Nobody has outlined the danger more compellingly than Robert Kagan. His argument can be reduced to two main elements. First, the Republican party is defined not by ideology, but by its loyalty to Trump. Second, the amateurish “stop the steal” movement of the last election has now morphed into a well-advanced project. One part of this project is to remove officials who stopped Trump’s effort to reverse the results in 2020. But its main aim is to shift responsibility for deciding electoral outcomes to Republican-controlled legislatures.
Thus, health permitting, Trump will be the next Republican candidate. He will be backed by a party that is now his tool. Most important, in the words of David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter for George W Bush, “what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.” It does so because its members believe their opponents are not “real” Americans. A liberal democracy cannot long endure if a major party believes defeat is illegitimate and must be rendered impossible.
Here is a political leader who has ousted anybody who opposes him from positions of influence in his party. He believes himself unjustly persecuted, defines reality for his followers and insists that a legitimate election is one he wins. A constitutional crisis looms. The 2024 election, warns Kagan, could bring “chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power.”
Assume that Trump is re-elected, legitimately or by manipulation. One must assume that his naïve and incompetent approach to the wielding of power in his first term will not be repeated. He must now understand that he will need devoted loyalists, of whom there will be plenty, to run the departments responsible for justice, homeland security, internal revenue, espionage and defense. He will surely put officers personally loyal to himself in charge of the armed forces. Not least, he will get his loyal Republican party, as it will be, to confirm the people he chooses, if it holds the needed Senate majority, as is highly likely to be the case.
Equally surely, he will use the pressure that he can then exert on the wealthy and influential to bring them into line. Crony capitalism is among the probabilities. Ask the Hungarians who live in an “illiberal democracy” under a man admired by US rightwing pundits.
“Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it”, notes Kagan. “As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian.”
This is the best thing I’ve seen on the internet in a long time.
The whiner in chief can’t stand being off twitter:
Former president Donald Trump has asked a court to mandate that Twitter restore his social media account.
In a filing late Friday, Trump asked a federal district judge for a preliminary injunction enabling his return to Twitter while his lawsuit against the social media giant continues.
“Plaintiff Donald J. Trump respectfully moves for a preliminary injunction directing, inter alia, Defendant Twitter, Inc. and all persons acting in concert with Defendant, to reinstate Plaintiff’s access to Defendant’s social media platform(s),” the filing said.
It argued that Twitter was “censoring” Trump by indefinitely banning him from the platform, adding that the company “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate.”
The filing also argued that Twitter had suspended Trump’s account after being “coerced” by his political rivals in Congress.
Twitter banned Trump from its platform on Jan. 8, stating that two of his tweets had violated the company’s policies and citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” The unprecedented move came after the riot on Jan. 6 in which hundreds of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attack that resulted in five deaths and left about 140 police officers injured.
Trump’s office did not immediately respond to a request from The Washington Post for comment early Saturday. Twitter declined to comment.
What a little baby. Give him a bottle and put him to bed.
By the way, his official “spokeswoman” Liz Harrington has a tweeter feed and she tweets out everything he says. Nobody cares.
"The whiner in chief can’t stand being off twitter"
this is rich from a guy who whines if a business asks them to use the bathroom assigned to their gender
or anyone calls them a pronoun appropriate to their gender
the truth is that a few years back, social media platforms were bastions of free speech
places where all views could be discussed and countered by further discussions
now the media-entertainment complex have allied with liberal politicians to bully these companies into censoring discussion on voting rights and on the scamdemic
so, these companies aren't making independent decisions
when will they censor Bernie Sanders for promoting socialism or Slidin Joe Biden for claiming we can pay for 5 trillion in new spending by taxing the 1% or Hillary Clinton for claiming the 2016 election was stolen from her
hopefully, never
meanwhile, let's all keep "whining" about China shutting down free speech and press in Hong Kong
Opinion: The GOP has become the stupid party — and proud of it
Is there a purer, more perfect expression of the Trumpified Republican Party than the press release that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) sent out on Sept. 24?
It demanded that President Biden be removed from office for “colluding with the Taliban.” This was flagrantly hypocritical because in February she criticized Biden for not withdrawing from Afghanistan fast enough — and then in August she praised the Taliban for “building back better.” But what truly made the release so priceless and preposterous was the logo: “IMEACH BIDEN.” Boebert is showing her contempt not just for political norms but for spelling norms, too.
No one should be surprised that Boebert, who has expressed support for the QAnon cult as well as Biden’s impeachment, is a rising star on the right. Former president Donald Trump’s Twitter feed — back when he still had one — was rife with glaring misspellings as well as absurd lies. Some even suspected the misspellings were deliberate — intended to signal his contempt for eggheads who might care about such niceties.
In the 1980s, when I became a Republican, the GOP took pride in describing itself as the “party of ideas.” But under Trump’s leadership, Republicans have reclaimed their old reputation, dating back to the 1950s, as the “stupid party.” What’s even more telling: This is not a source of shame or embarrassment for the party’s populists. They’re the stupid-and-proud-of-it party.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) responded to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) criticism of a mask mandate by saying, “He’s such a moron.” My brilliant colleague Dana Milbank carefully examined this charge and concluded it was “mostly true.” Yet McCarthy is a veritable brainiac compared with many of his GOP colleagues.
On July 30, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) praised Medicare and Medicaid for protecting “the healthcare of millions of families” and warned: “To safeguard our future, we must reject Socialist healthcare schemes.” Somehow Republicans miss the obvious contradiction between defending Medicare/Medicaid and assailing socialized medicine.
That Stefanik is a Harvard graduate suggests she may only be playing dumb to establish her populist bona fides. This is a charade perfected by Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R.-La.), a graduate of Vanderbilt University, Oxford University and the University of Virginia Law School who pretends to be a country bumpkin. But it tells you something significant that even the brightest lights of the GOP feel compelled to act as if they were dim bulbs.
For some Republicans in Congress, of course, acting dumb comes more naturally than for others. Take Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) — please. He warns that the Green New Deal, which hasn’t actually passed, is already ushering in an avian apocalypse. Birds that aren’t killed by windmills, he said, are spontaneously combusting while flying over solar panels. He acts as if “flamers” — yes, that’s the term he uses — are actually a big thing. In fact, fossil fuel plants kill many more birds — and people — than solar arrays. Little wonder that, as Gohmert himself admitted, people think he is “the dumbest guy in Congress.”
Hold my dunce cap, says Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). She doesn’t believe in evolution but does believe in Jewish space lasers. Then there’s Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), who tweets that “1984 is a great fiction novel to read.” As opposed to a great nonfiction novel?
The covid pandemic has brought forth a corresponding pandemic of right-wing inanity. Greene and other Republicans have compared efforts to vaccinate Americans — i.e., to save lives — to the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he would support vaccine mandates only if “there’s some incredibly dangerous disease.” Covid-19, which has already killed at least 700,000 Americans, doesn’t qualify. Johnson just introduced the Prevent Unconstitutional Vaccine Mandates for Interstate Commerce Act. This raises the obvious question (obvious, that is, to everyone but Johnson): If mandates are unconstitutional, why is legislation needed to stop them? Won’t the courts overturn them?
More egregious examples of Republican ignorance can be found in all their accusations that Democrats are turning America socialist. “They’re forcing their communism through the corporations,” Greene charges, as if “communist corporations” weren’t an oxymoron. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) warns that a “socialistic government” won’t “allow women … to be on stage, or entertain.” She seems to have confused the communists with the Taliban. Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is upping the rhetorical ante. “The $3.5 trillion Biden plan isn’t socialism, it’s marxism,” he tweets. By his logic, we should already have gulags in America since Trump added $7.8 trillion to the national debt.
I wish I could report some sign that the GOP is wising up. In fact, it is continuing to dumb itself down. Josh Mandel, who is seeking the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in Ohio, recently tweeted: “You can’t spell panDEMic without ‘DEM.’ Is this a coincidence?” That is a level of reasoning that would seem more at home on an elementary school playground than on the floor of the Senate. But Mandel should fit right in with his Republican colleagues if he is elected. They “imeach” themselves with every witless word.
the GOP needs to wise up?
they aren't the part trying to expand Federal spending by 7 trillion
news flash: the total wealth of the 1% in America is around 4 trillion
even confiscating it all won't come close to covering the socialist extravaganza
meanwhile, the two Dem Senators with a little common sense are being harassed and bullied by progressive lunatics who can never win by suasion in a rational debate
"they aren't the part trying to expand Federal spending by 7 trillion"
"https://www.thebalance.com/trump-plans-to-reduce-national-debt-4114401"
"During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Donald Trump promised he would eliminate the nation’s debt in eight years
Instead, his budget estimates showed that he would actually add at least $8.3 trillion, increasing the U.S. debt to $28.5 trillion by 2025.2 However, the national debt reached that figure much sooner. When President Trump took office in January 2017, the national debt stood at $19.9 trillion. In October 2020, the national debt reached a new high of $27 trillion. That's an increase of almost 36% in less than four years."
"even confiscating it all won't come close to covering the socialist extravaganza"
"Confiscating it all" is what right-wing propagandists scream about when Dems suggest billionaires pay the same rate of taxes that the middle class has to pay on their income. Throw in the "socialism" scare and they've cut off all reasonable discussion about tax rates that will allow us to escape a looming debt crisis.
No one has suggested "confiscating it all" except in right-wing fever dreams. The debt has been going closer to the edge of the cliff ever since Ronnie Raygun tripled it. It won't be paid off over a year, but rather decades. But only if adults somehow manage to take over Congress - or at least the Republican Party.
"meanwhile, the two Dem Senators with a little common sense are being harassed and bullied by progressive lunatics who can never win by suasion in a rational debate"
Remind me again who it was chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" when he wouldn't unconstitutionally overthrow the vote on January 6th. I'll give you a hint - they were beating up cops on Capitol Hill with "Blue Lives Matter" flags.
The National School Boards Association, which claims to represent 90,000 school board members across the country [Narrator: That’s pretty unlikely] wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to crack down on parents who are upset at mask mandates and the teaching of CRT in schools using every federal agency and statute they could think of, including the Patriot Act. Not only does the letter repeat the laughable notion that schools don’t teach CRT because it is “a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class” (no doubt schools don’t teach gravity as it is a complex subject for graduate physics students either), but it gives a hint as to which offenses the Feds should be cracking down on. Among incidents in which parents or concerned citizens have actually become violent, they also include incidents in which people have mocked school board members and accused them of attempting to sneak CRT into the curriculum.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names are also a violation of the Patriot Act, according to the Education Blob.
So what are parents to do to fight back against the blob? Trafalgar Polling conducted a nationwide survey in July asking over one thousand parents how they should react if CRT becomes part of the curriculum in their children’s public schools. Overall, 29% of parents said they would teach their children what to believe at home without interfering in the school, almost 28% said they would remove their children from public school and send them to private schools or homeschool them, and 24% said they would work to take over the school board (19% said they had no opinion on the matter). These three options seem to be the main ones available.
Democrats, who made up 39% of the respondents, and those claiming no party/other, were much more likely to say they would just teach their children at home and not interfere (39.9% and 36.2%) than Republicans (12.9%). Republicans were much more likely to take their children out of the schools or try to take over the school board (38.1% and 33.2%) than Democrats (20.9% and 17.9%) or No Party/Other (22.9% and 20.8%).
To put it bluntly, Republicans are more in the right here. Without any effective action, public school bureaucracies will continue to embrace CRT, critical gender theory, and every other destructive fad that comes down the pike. To push back against all this has to be a matter of pushing back—and that involves either getting into their governance (Trafalgar’s third option) or putting pressure on them economically by pulling kids out (the second).
The difficulty with the taking over of school boards is that it takes a lot of time and effort. That doesn’t mean there are not groups out there who are dedicated to doing it. In fact, there are a lot of groups doing it. Ballotpedia has been keeping track of school board recall events since 2006, recording on average about 23 recall efforts against 52 board members per year up to 2020. In 2021, however, they have recorded as of September 71 recall efforts targeting 183 board members. These grass roots efforts to recall board members, win elections, and influence existing boards have been helped out by groups such as Parents Defending Education, a Loudoun County, Virginia, group, and No Left Turn in Education, an organization started by Elana Fishbein in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia suburb). These groups have themselves been aided by about thirty national conservative organizations and foundations, according to an Associated Press article focusing on efforts in Mequon, Wisconsin (a Milwaukee suburb) to recall board members who have been pursuing divisive “diversity” goals.
In addition to the recall efforts, Politico reports that parents are putting up campaigns for school board that are explicitly against diversity and oppression curricula. While dutifully repeating the “no CRT is really taught here!” lines, the article notes that candidates all over the country are opposing them, many successfully in Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere. In Houston all the anti-CRT candidates in a recent school board election won while in Southlake, Texas, two such candidates won with over 70% of the vote. It can be done in many parts of the country.
Many parents, however, do not have the time to both fight City Hall—or its educational equivalent—and make sure their own children are being educated apart from and often against what they’re learning in their public schools. This is why the move to opt out of public schools has been so great over the last decade. This year, 1.45 million children left the system, a number that was made even greater by so many schools’ determination to stay online. (To say that makes me vulnerable to the Patriot Act, I suppose.) If parents can no longer influence public schools, the best option for them is to take their kids elsewhere. To facilitate this, however, takes money.
That’s why the development of school choice options is so important. Now is the time, given that a RealClearOpinion poll in June showed a striking 74% of American parents support school choice—a full 10% increase since 2020! Perhaps the best development this year has been the passage of HB 2013 in West Virginia, known as the Hope Scholarship program. This education savings account allows students leaving the public school system to take up to $4600 with them to pay for tuition, books, and other costs at private schools or in homeschooling. The American Federation for Children has interactive maps showing the expanded school choice programs in 2021 as well as all those available in the U. S. right now.
Simply helping parents take control over their children’s education where they cannot influence their public schools is a big first step, but one final one remains. State and local governments can work toward building an accountability mechanism into the equation. I mean something guaranteeing local school budgets will be cut when there are lower class sizes. School board members may go along with the wokeness for a while, but if their budgets shrink, they may well ask whether they ought to rethink what kind of loco they want to be in relation to parents.
Legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight used to say that one should lead, follow, or get out of the way. More parents are demanding to be recognized as the “primary stakeholders” in their children’s education. They are refusing to “follow” educators who think that good education involves explicit sex, divisive and harmful notions about race, or the denial of opportunities in the name of equity. They are either going to lead the fight to take back these schools or get out of the way, taking their money with them and building up an education that is truly fit for the public.
With the "War on Christmas" propaganda losing effectiveness, Republicans have moved on to their next boogey man, Critical Race Theory:
On January 12, Keith Ammon, a Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, introduced a bill that would bar schools as well as organizations that have entered into a contract or subcontract with the state from endorsing “divisive concepts.” Specifically, the measure would forbid “race or sex scapegoating,” questioning the value of meritocracy, and suggesting that New Hampshire—or the United States—is “fundamentally racist.”
Ammon’s bill is one of a dozen that Republicans have recently introduced in state legislatures and the United States Congress that contain similar prohibitions. In Arkansas, lawmakers have approved a measure that would ban state contractors from offering training that promotes “division between, resentment of, or social justice for” groups based on race, gender, or political affiliation. The Idaho legislature just passed a bill that would bar institutions of public education from compelling “students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere” to specific beliefs about race, sex, or religion. The Louisiana legislature is weighing a nearly identical measure.
The language of these bills is anodyne and fuzzy—compel, for instance, is never defined in the Idaho legislation—and that ambiguity appears to be deliberate. According to Ammon, “using taxpayer funds to promote ideas such as ‘one race is inherently superior to another race or sex’ … only exacerbates our differences.” But critics of these efforts warn that the bills would effectively prevent public schools and universities from holding discussions about racism; the New Hampshire measure in particular would ban companies that do business with government entities from conducting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. “The vagueness of the language is really the point,” Leah Cohen, an organizer with Granite State Progress, a liberal nonprofit based in Concord, told me. “With this really broad brushstroke, we anticipate that that will be used more to censor conversations about race and equity.”
Most legal scholars say that these bills impinge on the right to free speech and will likely be dismissed in court. “Of the legislative language so far, none of the bills are fully constitutional,” Joe Cohn, the legislative and policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told me, “and if it isn’t fully constitutional, there’s a word for that: It means it’s unconstitutional.” This does not appear to concern the bills’ sponsors, though. The larger purpose, it seems, is to rally the Republican base—to push back against the recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses. The shorthand for the Republicans’ bogeyman is an idea that has until now mostly lived in academia: critical race theory.
The late Harvard law professor Derrick Bell is credited as the father of critical race theory. He began conceptualizing the idea in the 1970s as a way to understand how race and American law interact, and developed a course on the subject. In 1980, Bell resigned his position at Harvard because of what he viewed as the institution’s discriminatory hiring practices, especially its failure to hire an Asian American woman he’d recommended.
Black students—including the future legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who enrolled at Harvard Law in 1981—felt the void created by his departure. Bell had been the only Black law professor among the faculty, and in his absence, the school no longer offered a course explicitly addressing race. When students asked administrators what could be done, Crenshaw says they received a terse response. “What is it that is so special about race and law that you have to have a course that examines it?” Crenshaw has recalled administrators asking. The administration’s inability to see the importance of understanding race and the law, she says, “got us thinking about how do we articulate that this is important and that law schools should include” the subject in their curricula.
Crenshaw and her classmates asked 12 scholars of color to come to campus and lead discussions about Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law. With that, critical race theory began in earnest. The approach “is often disruptive because its commitment to anti-racism goes well beyond civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other liberal measures,” Bell explained in 1995. The theory’s proponents argue that the nation’s sordid history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination is embedded in our laws, and continues to play a central role in preventing Black Americans and other marginalized groups from living lives untouched by racism.
For some, the theory was a revelatory way to understand inequality. Take housing, for example. Researchers have now accumulated ample evidence that racial covenants in property deeds and redlining by the Federal Housing Authority—banned more than 60 years ago—remain a major contributor to the gulf in homeownership, and thus wealth, between Black and white people. Others, perhaps most prominently Randall Kennedy, who joined the Harvard Law faculty a few years after Bell left, questioned how widely the theory could be applied. In a paper titled “Racial Critiques of Legal Academia,” Kennedy argued that white racism was not the only reason so few “minority scholars” were members of law-school faculties. Conservative scholars argued that critical race theory is reductive—that it treats race as the only factor in social identity.
As with other academic frameworks before it, the nuances of critical race theory—and the debate around it—were obscured when it escaped the ivory tower. It first entered public discourse in the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton nominated the University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Lani Guinier to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Republicans mounted an aggressive and ultimately successful campaign to prevent her appointment, tagging her the “Quota Queen.” Among the many reasons her adversaries said she was wrong for the job was that she had been “championing a radical school of thought called ‘critical race theory.’” The theory soon stood in for anything resembling an examination of America’s history with race. Conservatives would boil it down further: Critical race theory taught Americans to hate America. Today, across the country, school curricula and workplace trainings include materials that defenders and opponents alike insist are inspired by critical race theory but that academic critical race theorists do not characterize as such.
Fox News gave only passing thought to critical race theory until last year. The first mention on the network occurred after Bell died, in 2012. A video of President Barack Obama praising him 21 years earlier began circulating online. “Open up your minds and your hearts to the words of Mr. Derrick Bell,” Obama said. That introduction was followed by a hug between the two men, which Fox cited as further evidence of Obama’s tendency to consort with radicals. A guest on Hannity offhandedly alluded to the theory during a segment on George Zimmerman’s trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2014; network regulars briefly referred to it twice in 2019. Then, in 2020, after Derek Chauvin was captured on video kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, and the United States became awash in anti-racist reading lists—some of which included books and articles that discussed critical race theory—Fox suddenly took a great interest in the idea. It became the latest in a long line of racialized topics (affirmative action perhaps being the most prominent) that the network has jumped on. Since June 5, 2020, the phrase has been invoked during 150 broadcasts.
If a single person bears the most responsibility for the surge in conservative interest in critical race theory, it is probably Christopher Rufo. Last summer, Rufo, a 36-year-old senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a libertarian think tank, received a tip from a municipal employee in Seattle. (Rufo had lived in the city and, in 2018, ran unsuccessfully for city council.) According to the whistleblower, the city was conducting “internalized racial superiority” training sessions for its employees. Rufo submitted a Freedom of Information Act request and wrote about his findings for the institute’s public-policy magazine.
“In conceptual terms,” Rufo wrote, “the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of ‘blackness’ and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of ‘whiteness’—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.” The training was rampant, he wrote, infecting every part of the city’s municipal system. “It is part of a nationwide movement to make this kind of identity politics the foundation of our public discourse. It may be coming soon to a city or town near you.” His article—which did not include the phrase critical race theory—inspired a rush of whistleblowers from school districts and federal agencies, who reached out to him complaining about diversity training they had been invited to attend or had heard about.
A month later, Rufo employed the term for the first time in an article. “Critical race theory—the academic discourse centered on the concepts of ‘whiteness,’ ‘white fragility,’ and ‘white privilege’—is spreading rapidly through the federal government,” he wrote. He related anecdotes about training influenced by critical race theory at the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the Treasury Department, among others. In early September, Tucker Carlson invited him on his Fox News show during which Rufo warned viewers that critical race theory had pervaded every institution of the federal government and was being “weaponized” against Americans. He called on President Donald Trump to ban such training in all federal departments.
“Luckily, the president was watching the show and instructed his Chief of Staff to contact me the next morning,” Rufo wrote to me. (He would agree to be interviewed only by email.) Within three weeks, Trump had signed an executive order banning the use of critical race theory by federal departments and contractors in diversity training. “And thus,” he wrote to me, “the real fight against critical race theory began.”
Trump’s executive order was immediately challenged in court. Nonprofit organizations that provide these training sessions argued that the order violated their free-speech rights and hampered their ability to conduct their business. In December, a federal judge agreed; President Joe Biden rescinded the order the day he took office. But by then, critical race theory was already a part of the conservative lexicon. Since Trump’s executive order, Rufo told me, he has provided his analysis “to a half-dozen state legislatures, the United States House of Representatives, and the United States Senate.” One such state legislature was New Hampshire’s; on February 18, the lower chamber held a hearing to discuss Keith Ammon’s bill. Rufo was among those who testified in support of it.
Concerned that the measure might fail on its own, Republicans have now included its language in a must-pass budget bill. In March, Republican Governor Chris Sununu signaled that he would object to “divisive concepts” legislation because he believes it is unconstitutional, but he has since tempered his stand. “The ideas of critical race theory and all of this stuff—I personally don’t think there’s any place for that in schools,” he said in early April. But, he added, “when you start turning down the path of the government banning things, I think that’s a very slippery slope.” Almost everyone I spoke with for this article assumed that Sununu would sign the budget bill, and that the divisive-concepts ban would become law.
Although free-speech advocates are confident that bills like Ammon’s will not survive challenges in court, they believe the real point is to scare off companies, schools, and government agencies from discussing systemic racism. “What these bills are designed to do is prevent conversations about how racism exists at a systemic level in that we all have implicit biases that lead to decisions that, accumulated, lead to significant racial disparities,” Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, told me. “The proponents of this bill want none of those discussions to happen. They want to suppress that type of speech.”
Conservatives are not the only critics of diversity training. For years, some progressives, including critical race theorists, have questioned its value: Is it performative? Is it the most effective way to move toward equity or is it simply an effective way of restating the obvious and stalling meaningful action? But that is not the fight that has materialized over the past nine months. Instead, it is a confrontation with a cartoonish version of critical race theory.
For Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years. What’s less clear is whether average voters care much about the debate. In a recent Atlantic/Leger poll, 52 percent of respondents who identified as Republicans said that states should pass laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory, but just 30 percent of self-identified independents were willing to say the same. Meanwhile, a strong majority of Americans, 78 percent, either had not heard of critical race theory or were unsure whether they had.
Last week, after President Biden’s first joint address to Congress—and as Idaho was preparing to pass its bill—Senator Tim Scott stood in front of United States and South Carolina flags to deliver the Republican response. “From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress,” Scott said. “You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.” Rufo immediately knew what he meant. “Senator Tim Scott denounces critical race theory in his response to Biden’s speech tonight,” he tweeted. “We have turned critical race theory into a national issue and conservative political leaders are starting to fight.”
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump has railed against it. Republicans in the U.S. Senate introduced a resolution condemning any requirement for teachers to be trained in it. And several Republican-controlled states have invoked it in legislation restricting how race can be taught in public schools.
The concept known as critical race theory is the new lightning rod of the GOP. But what exactly is it?
The term seemed to appear in statehouses and at political rallies almost from nowhere. Over the past few months, it has morphed from an obscure academic discussion point on the left into a political rallying cry on the right.
On Wednesday, for instance, critical race theory became a flashpoint during a congressional hearing into the military’s approach to addressing racism and extremism, when Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pushed back forcefully against accusations by Republican lawmakers that the effort is creating division and hurting morale.
Yet, even those who condemn or seek to ban critical race theory in schools often struggle to define what it is. Real-world examples of students being indoctrinated in its principles are difficult to find.
WHAT IS CRITICAL RACE THEORY?
Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism. Scholars developed it during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.
The architects of the theory argue that the United States was founded on the theft of land and labor and that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race. Proponents also believe race is culturally invented, not biological.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum, a social justice think tank based in New York City, was one of the early proponents. Initially, she says, it was “simply about telling a more complete story of who we are.”
IS CRITICAL RACE THEORY BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS?
There is little to no evidence that critical race theory itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it, such as lingering consequences of slavery, have been. In Greenwich, Connecticut, some middle school students were given a “white bias” survey that parents viewed as part of the theory.
Republicans in North Carolina point to the Wake County Public School System as an example, saying teachers participated in a professional development session on critical race theory. County education officials canceled a future study session once it was discovered but insist the theory is not part of its classroom curriculum.
“Critical race theory is not something we teach to students,” said Lisa Luten, a spokeswoman for the school system. “It’s more of a theory in academia about race that adults use to discuss the context of their environment.”
WHY ARE REPUBLICANS UPSET?
Many Republicans view the concepts underlying critical race theory as an effort to rewrite American history and persuade white people that they are inherently racist and should feel guilty because of their advantages.
But the theory also has become somewhat of a catchall phrase to describe racial concepts some conservatives find objectionable, such as white privilege, systemic inequality and inherent bias.
WHERE DID REPUBLICAN PUSHBACK BEGIN?
Republicans often cite the 1619 Project as a cause for concern. The New York Times initiative, published in 2019, aimed to tell a fuller story of the country’s history by putting slavery at the center of America’s founding.
Critical race theory popped into the mainstream last September when then-President Trump took aim at it and the 1619 Project as part of a White House event focused on the nation’s history. He called both “a crusade against American history” and “ideological poison that... will destroy our country.”
HOW ARE STATES ADDRESSING IT?
So far, 25 states have considered legislation or other steps to limit how race and racism can be taught, according to an analysis from Education Week. Eight states, all Republican-led, have banned or limited the teaching of critical race theory or similar concepts through laws or administrative actions. The bans largely address what can be taught inside the classroom. While bills in some states mention critical race theory by name, others do not.
Last week Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill prohibiting public school teachers from making any of 10 concepts part of their curriculum. That includes the idea that the advent of slavery in what is now the United States marks the true founding of the nation.
At the request of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, that state’s education board approved a resolution last week stating that teaching critical race theory and using instructional material related to the 1619 Project violate state standards. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, and two other GOP senators introduced a resolution last month that “condemns the practice of requiring teachers to receive Critical Race Theory education.”
WHAT IS THE RESPONSE TO THE GOP ACTIONS?
Teachers’ unions, educators and social studies organizations worry the limits will whitewash American history by downplaying the role past injustices still play today. They also fear a chilling effect on classroom discussions.
Leading critical race theory scholars view the GOP-led measures as hijacking the national conversation about racial inequality that gained momentum after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minnesota.
Some say the ways Republicans describe it are unrecognizable to them. Cheryl Harris, a UCLA law professor who teaches a course on the topic, said it’s a myth that critical race theory teaches hatred of white people and is designed to perpetuate divisions in American society. Instead, she said she believes the proposals have a clear political goal — “to ensure that Republicans can win in 2022.”
It is just amazing what the Department of Justice and FBI will do and what they won't do.
Last year, we had a series of violent riots that caused $2 billion worth of damage and killed dozens of people. They attacked the White House, federal courthouses, police precincts, hundreds of American businesses.
And the Department of Justice and FBI were basically nowhere to be found.
And how little they did with the gymnastics coach Larry Nasser, who had credible reports of him raping people and the FBI was nowhere to be found.
Yet, here, when parents very reasonably are concerned about all sorts of things happening in their school whether it's teaching their students, teaching their children to hate other people, based on their race, or to think that they're victims who can never succeed because of their race, or that the country is systematically racist in a way that is irredeemable.
Of course, parents are going to want to weigh in on that. And to intimidate them and to declare war on American parents, particularly when the FBI and DOJ have been nowhere to be found on issues where they actually were needed is just unconscionable.
A politicization of our DOJ that is not tenable.
"With the "War on Christmas" propaganda losing effectiveness, Republicans have moved on to their next boogey man, Critical Race Theory"
thanks for the multi-post apologetics on CRT
it's a flawed concept that views everything through a skew of racial bias
it is usually supported by false assertions
this was the catalyst, for example, the "defund the police" movement last year
CRT proponents claimed that police departments were created solely to protect white property owners from minorities
with the alarming rise of inner city violence since, it's clear that the police also protect minorities
America didn't begin in 1776, when we declared independence
it started in 1619 when the first slaves came to Virgina
the Bill of Rights?
irrelevant
breaking down all life into racial components, CRT is essentially racist
we live in a land of opportunity for all, unparalleled in the world
CRT is also slander
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the centrist Democratic hurdle to President Joe Biden’s spending and voting agenda, also faces intense voter pressure back home that has him squeezed on several critical issues.
If he listens to his voters, Manchin will stick to his opposition to killing the filibuster, drop his support for eliminating voter identification, and walk away from the liberal bid managed by Vice President Kamala Harris to impose national rules on state and local elections.
The advice is packed into a new survey from Honest Election Project Action, that could heighten pressure on Washington’s middleman just a day before the Senate Judiciary Committee works on election reform and as Biden has given up his promised unity to force spending, tax, and debt votes by Democrats.
The September poll focused mostly on election reform packages in Congress, including one backed by Manchin that would allow same day voter registration, mass mail-in voting, and make Election Day a national holiday.
In the survey, 73% of West Virginians and 79% of self-identified Manchin supporters do not want Washington dictating voting laws to states. And 69% of Manchin supporters believe a politician who votes for the liberal reforms “is voting against his constituents’ interests.”
On key aspects of the new voting proposals, the percentages are even higher. On voter ID, for example, 78% of West Virginians and 87% of Manchin supporters favor voter photo ID laws. The group said that the legislation Manchin backs would eliminate voter ID.
While he may face voter wrath on his voting reform positions, it’s Manchin’s support for the filibuster that is helping him in the Mountain State.
According to the poll memo, “Joe Manchin’s political future may hinge on his continued defense of the filibuster. Leftwing activists and dark money special interests are pressuring Manchin to renege on his pledge to protect the filibuster. But in West Virginia, the filibuster is more popular than Joe Manchin. 56% of West Virginians report they would be less likely to re-elect him if he eliminates or weakens the filibuster. Six in 10 Manchin supporters (59%) would be less likely to vote for him if he destroys the filibuster.
Slidin' Joe Biden traveled to Michigan on Tuesday to promote his stalling "Build Back Better" agenda – but found an angry group of protesters waiting for him not far from the site where he delivered his speech.
Those opposing Biden made profane chants against the president. Howell is located about midway between Detroit and the state capital city of Lansing.
At one point, the protesters cheered when a green front-end loader with a "No Biden" sign traveled down the road, according to the newspaper.
Another sign in the crowd read, "Build Back Broke," the Detroit News reported.
Many in the crowd said that they didn’t like the size of the Democrats’ proposed $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill or the $3.5 trillion so-called reconciliation bill of safety-net spending that most members of Biden’s party hope to pass as a package.
"The money has to come from somewhere," protester Londa Gatt said. "You can’t keep printing it."
The protesters also spoke about the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border as well as vaccination mandates as reasons for opposing Biden.
"I think this is reflective of how upset people in everyday America are, when you leave the Washington bubble, about the spending going on in Washington, D.C.," Meghan Reckling, chair of the Livingston County Republicans in Michigan, said.
Some in the crowd of protesters were asked for their theories on why Biden chose to speak in Howell.
"The easy answer is, he is probably trying to boost Slotkin and give her some props," Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, said, referring to Democratic U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, who will be up for reelection in 2022. "I think it is a clear indication of where Slotkin is going to be on this infrastructure vote."
"Slotkin is not the moderate she said she was," Republican Paul Junge, Slotkin’s 2020 opponent, said at the demonstration. "The people of this district are going to see it and vote her out. I intend to be that alternative."
"Sleepy Joe thinks that this is sleepy little Howell and it’s not," protester Jackie Ludwig said.
"We just want Biden to know we’re not happy with his spending," Ludwig’s husband, Philip Ludwig, added. "We’re not happy with the way our country’s going and the job he’s performing. And we would like him to step down."
Biden spoke at a training facility for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 324.
Biden’s visit to Michigan came amid a steep drop in his approval ratings, both in Michigan and around the nation.
He was joined in Howell by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, and most of the state’s congressional Democrats.
It was Biden’s first visit to Michigan since July 3, the day before he declared victory over COVID.
"thanks for the multi-post apologetics on CRT"
...And the dismissal continues.
When black athletes protested against the deadly treatment of black people by police, the right-wing media machine re-cast their entire effort as "disrespecting the flag" and dismissed it for injecting racial issues into sports where folks just wanted to have fun - both blaming the victims and undermining their message at the same time.
Last summer, after even more high-profile murders by cops of black US citizens, the Black Lives Matter movement inspired protests around the country to try and ensure that ALL citizens are treated equally before the law - and given the chance to defend themselves in the court of law instead of being suffocated or otherwise murdered in broad daylight before they even got into a police car. We are supposed to have a Bill of Rights and a functioning Judicial Branch, not Judge Dredd - who gets to capture, try, convict, and execute citizens at his own discretion.
The movement started a LOT of conversations around the country, including ones that scared the crap out of conservatives - like "defund the police" - the shift of community resources away from the brutal harm of citizens to ones that might actually help them - like job, training, drug, and mental health services.
Conservatives, reacting with the only knee-jerk reaction they know, started condemning anything and everything about BLM, and completely ignoring the fact that if white citizens were murdered in the streets at the same rates as black people, their "2nd Amendment Rights" would locked and loaded and ready to take down the "jack-booted thugs" that had turned our democratic country into a "police state."
As usual, conservatives prefer to pretend the problems don't exist, and create a new narrative to blame the victims and stifle any discussion of the issues. That's why they have latched on to CRT theory, and trying to go through the legal system to squash even the mention of it. The fact that it slaps "freedom of speech" right across the face and is inherently unconstitutional is conveniently ignored.
But problems don't go away just because you ignore them. Ignoring the athletes quietly kneeling in protest didn't get them to consider how to improve policing or our criminal justice system. As we watched more black citizens murdered by cops, the protests got bigger, and conservatives have dug their heels in even harder to blame those trying to fix the issues and pretend there's nothing to see here.
But what do you expect from a political party that made a comfortable home for white nationalists with their last president?
"Conservatives, reacting with the only knee-jerk reaction they know, started condemning anything and everything about BLM, and completely ignoring the fact that if white citizens were murdered in the streets at the same rates as black people, their "2nd Amendment Rights" would locked and loaded and ready to take down the "jack-booted thugs" that had turned our democratic country into a "police state.""
actually, more whites are killed by cops every year than blacks
it's true the rate is higher for blacks, but not by much, and the variance can be explained if you filter out contributing factors
truth is, black people want to live in safe communities as much as white people do, and they don't think the answer is to slash law enforcement and replace it with "like job, training, drug, and mental health services"
what a freakin' airhead!
Last Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney seized the opportunity during a House Armed Services Committee hearing to apologize to Gen. Mark Milley. She went on to assail the ‘despicable’ questioning of her Republican colleagues, who wanted information about phone calls Milley had made to a Chinese official last fall, in which the general had assured him that, were President Trump to launch a nuclear attack against China (presumably out of sheer frustration, or perhaps idle curiosity to learn what the result would be), he would tip him ahead of the fact.
This, of course, was a direct affront to the 70 percent of Wyoming citizens for had voted for Trump in 2020. Several days before that, Cheney had confessed to 60 Minutes that she had been wrong to oppose gay marriage in the past. (About the only people in Wyoming who believe in homosexual weddings are the staffs of the University of Wyoming and the community colleges, a few members of various school boards and assorted social workers.)
Cheney, as vice chairman of the January 6 Committee, continues to bang on about the Capitol riot as if it were the most monstrous thing since Fort Sumter. This despite the fact that it was scarcely more disruptive than the public’s invasion of the White House on Andrew Jackson’s Inauguration Day, and the only person killed, poor Ashli Babbitt, was shot by dead by a Capitol policeman inside the People’s House, which was as much hers as Speaker Pelosi’s and Sandy Cortez’s.
Meanwhile, back in Wyoming, pro-Trump challenger Harriet Hageman is hot on Cheney’s heels in the GOP primary race for Wyoming’s sole congressional seat. Could it be that Cheney is scheming to win the Democratic vote in the Cowboy State? Or even that she is considering switching from the Elephants to the Donkey party? (Wyoming has not had a Democratic House member since Teno Roncalio left office in 1967.)
La Cheney is clearly running scared. Her minions have announced that George W. Bush’s first public act in next year’s fall campaign will be to host a fundraiser for her in Texas. Yet the Bush dynasty is by now what our Central Asian generalissimos are calling ‘over-the-horizon.’ And Wyomingites have a strong prejudice against Texans, whom they view as reckless drivers whose titanic black pickup trucks blast clouds of diesel smoke in their faces while passing them at 95 miles an hour on two-lane roads while poaching more than their fair share of big game animals.
No one here cares how much money the Bushes, or any other foreigners, dump into Cheney’s coffers. Money isn’t going to win this election.
Cheney is persona non grata in Wyoming, and it is too late for her to jump to another lily pad.
"it's true the rate is higher for blacks, but not by much, and the variance can be explained if you filter out contributing factors"
There you go again pulling stuff out of your nether regions and expecting people to believe it. You know we have this thing called Google don't you - where you can look up actual facts and statistics and see what they are rather than making them up, right?
https://policescorecard.org/?gclid=CjwKCAjwkvWKBhB4EiwA-GHjFgMsPDLJTxWr-ZAaNHF5LCi0weWPotTQ6FJtyRsbxTKUi2tR7yIqzxoCUewQAvD_BwE
8,768 KILLINGS BY POLICE
Based on population, a Black person was 2.9x as likely and a Latinx person was 1.4x as likely to be killed by police as a White person in America from 2013-20
So very stable genius, what "contributing factors" can explain the "variance" of nearly 3 times as many black people getting killed as white ones?
Especially since 3.14 times as many mass shooters are white compared to those that are black? (66 to 21, between 1982 and 2021)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-race/
In a "normal" world, statistical pun intended, that statistic alone would make one expect that 3x as many white folks should be shot compared to black folks - or even higher, considering that there are about 7.5x as many white folks compared to black.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
here's some stats
in 2020, 457 white people were killed by police
in 2020, 241 black people were killed by police
"So very stable genius, what "contributing factors" can explain the "variance" of nearly 3 times as many black people getting killed as white ones?"
how about living in a neighborhood where more crimes happen and there are more contacts from the police?
watching the evening news, it seems like there's more crime in inner city neighborhoods
likelihood of living in a nuclear family with both genders as parents?
drug use?
factor all those things in and see how the numbers stack up
in any case, even without that, the numbers don't suggest that police are targeting blacks for murder
the whole thing is blown up
Slidin' Biden is doing the Oval Office limbo
How low can he go?
As his agenda flounders on Capitol Hill, President Joe Biden’s popularity among everyday Americans is taking a beating.
Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 38%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.
“Battered on trust, doubted on leadership, and challenged on overall competency, President Biden is being hammered on all sides as his approval rating continues its downward slide to a number not seen since the tough scrutiny of the Trump administration,” Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy said in a prepared statement.
Biden's approval rating among Republicans and independents has cratered, according to Quinnipiac.
About 32% of independents approve of Biden’s job as president. His approval rating among Republicans is only 4%.
Respondents panned his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, with only 28% saying the withdrawal was the right move. He had negative approval for his handling of the military, taxes, foreign policy, immigration and the Mexican border, according to the poll.
Biden also hit low points in the latest poll on two key questions: his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy. About half of those polled said they disapprove of the way he has handled the coronavirus, and 55% disapprove of his handling of the economy.
The White House has ramped up pressure on Americans to get vaccinated, but about 20% of respondents said they still do not plan to receive a vaccine.
"Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 38%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. Biden's approval rating among Republicans and independents has cratered, according to Quinnipiac. About 32% of independents approve of Biden’s job as president. His approval rating among Republicans is only 4%."
Gee, TTF sure picked a winner this time!
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the GOP will only agree to raise the debt limit enough to cover the one trillion physical infra structure bill
reconcile that!!!!
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 38%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday."
That sounds bad, until you realize that Trump spent a bunch of time in the 30s (most of 2017, in fact), bottoming out at 34% at the beginning of this year, and NEVER got above 49%:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx
Not really a surprise, given that he was never able to win over the majority of voters in either of his races, and his only chance for staying in power this year was destroying our democracy.
"That sounds bad, until you realize that Trump spent a bunch of time in the 30s"
actually, it still sounds bad
horrible, in fact
btw, there's a great new stand-up special on Netflix
catch it before the gay Nazis get it taken down:
Dave Chappelle is drawing a growing attacks by the LGBTQ+ "community" over his newest Netflix stand-up special.
The special, titled “The Closer,” premiered on the streamer on Tuesday and is meant to serve as a final entry in a series of stand-up routines by Chappelle on Netflix. In the new release, the comedian makes hilarious jokes about trans women and offers defenses for incisive comments made by figures such as “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling and rapper DaBaby concerning transgenderism.
In a statement, GLAAD demonstrated the missing sense of humor so prevalent in the homosexual "community", saying that “Chappelle’s brand has become synonymous with ridiculing trans people and other marginalized communities.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) withheld support for a joint statement condemning last weekend's protests against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)
The move is emblematic of the hostility between the progressive and moderate members, who have been sparring over the cost and scope of President Biden's agenda. Sanders says he wants Sinema to drop her opposition to prescription drug reform, as well as Biden's $3.5 trillion social safety net expansion if she wants to be treated civilly..
An email exchange between Senate Democratic leadership aides reveals Sanders withheld his name from a joint statement declaring protesters who followed Sinema into a bathroom — and filmed her while using the restroom — as "plainly inappropriate and unacceptable."
An aide to Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who organized the statement, said Booker would not accept the edits when Sanders said he will not be signing, so please cut 'Senate Democratic Leadership Team' from headline.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.) all signed onto the statement in addition to Booker.
"That sounds bad, until you realize that Trump spent a bunch of time in the 30s"
glad to see that even TTFers realize that the only positive thing you can say about Biden is that he's not Trump
no wonder everyone says Biden is slidin'
LOLOLOLOLOROFLOLOLOL!!!!!!@@@@LOLOOLOLOLOLLROFLROFLBGQTHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAOHOHOHOHOHOHEEHEELOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLTEEHEEHARDYHARHARROFLROFLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"LOLOLOLOLOROFLOLOLOL!!!!!!@@@@LOLOOLOLOLOLLROFLROFLBGQTHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAOHOHOHOHOHOHEEHEELOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLTEEHEEHARDYHARHARROFLROFLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
I take issue with this
it would be more accurate to say
ROFLOLOLOLOROFLOLOLOL!!heeheeho!!!!-@@-OOLOLOLOLHIDEYHIDEYHOROFLROFLBGQTHAHAHAHAOOLOLOLOLHIDEYHIDEYHOROFLROFLBGQTHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAOHOHOHOHOHOHEEHEELOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLTEEHEEHARDYHARHARROFLROFLOLOLOLOLOL!!!$$$$$$$$$$!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oklahoma’s top public education official on Thursday switched her party affiliation to Democratic and announced a bid for governor, blasting Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Joy Hofmeister, a lifelong member of the GOP first elected as state superintendent in 2014, stressed that her values have not changed and that her decision was not an easy one. But she said she was bothered by what she called Stitt’s “toothless health response.” She has previously broken with him over mask policies in schools.
“Tens of thousands of Oklahomans are grieving the loss of their loved ones,” Hofmeister told The Washington Post. “We have seen the impact of the mismanaged pandemic response by Governor Stitt — and it is the children of Oklahoma, and families, that are bearing the brunt and cost of that.”
.
.
.
In New Hampshire, another state politician switched his affiliation from Republican to Democratic last month due to concerns with the GOP’s coronavirus response: State Rep. William Marsh, an ophthalmologist, took issue with state Republicans’ opposition to masks and coronavirus vaccines.
“I’m a doctor first, so I stood up for my patients and said, ‘I’m done with this,’ ” he told The Post at the time. “And I left.”
.
.
.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade/2020/2020-census-results.html
remember how Biden said he would fix the pandemic that Trump had "handled so poorly"?
down in Virginia, McAuliffe has tried hard to argue that Youngkin is another Trump
the race is now a dead-heat because the voters realize McAuliffe is another Biden
say what you will about Trump, everyone knows until China unleashed COVID on the world, Trump had all boats rising in the economy
The U.S. economy created jobs at a much slower-than-expected pace in September, a pessimistic sign about the state of the economy.
Nonfarm payrolls rose by just 194,000 in the month, compared with the Dow Jones estimate of 500,000, the Labor Department reported Friday.
“This is quite a deflating report,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director at job placement site Indeed. “This year has been one of false dawns for the labor market. Demand for workers is strong and millions of people want to return to work, but employment growth has yet to find its footing.”
Americans by significant margins now view the Republican Party as better than the Democratic Party at protecting the nation from international threats (54% to 39%, respectively) and at ensuring the nation remains prosperous (50% to 41%). The 15-percentage-point GOP advantage on security matters is its largest since 2015, while its nine-point edge on prosperity is its largest since 2014. Last year, the GOP had a narrow advantage on international matters while the parties were essentially tied on economic matters. More of this change has come from declines in Americans perceiving the Democratic Party as better on these issues than from increases for the Republican Party.
The latest results are from Gallup's annual Governance survey. The survey was conducted just after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and amid heightened numbers of coronavirus infections and a weaker-than-expected U.S. employment report.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released an interim Senate Judiciary Committee Report covering the testimony of various high-level Department of Justice officials during that period between the election and the insurrection and it is a blockbuster. It's titled "Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election," which pretty much says it all.
We knew quite a bit of this already. There was earlier reporting about how Trump had called Acting Attorney General Rosen to instruct him to "just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen." And we knew that an obscure Justice Department lawyer in the civil division by the name of Jeffrey Clark had somehow found his way into Trump's inner circle and was pushing some corrupt schemes to overturn the election which Trump liked very much. But until this report we didn't know the scale of this plotting to get the DOJ to step in and use its muscle to carry out Trump's coup.
Trump worked hard to twist Rosen's arm. He had Clark calling him with threats that he was going to replace him and demanding that he send a letter to Georgia and other states to advise them of "serious irregularities" in their elections, telling them to call special sessions of their legislatures and deal with the electoral votes however they chose. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was haranguing him as well demanding that he look into Giuliani's crazy conspiracy theories, as well as odd lawyers involved in Trump lawsuits around the country, one of whom told Rosen "you're going to force me to call the President and tell him you're recalcitrant," as if that would frighten him into compliance.
Trump himself inappropriately called Rosen and his deputy nine times, and met with him personally several more, the final denouement coming just days before the January 6th insurrection in which he literally said, "one thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything to overturn the election." As usual, he said the quiet part out loud.
The report is damning. The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup.
GOP rebuttal to the report. It is truly mind boggling and makes you wonder if the Republicans even bothered to read it. It suggests that Trump was right to be skeptical of Rosen and Donohue because of Carter Page and the FBI and some other irrelevant nonsense from the Russia investigation. This was pure red meat for their base, of course. But this line is so fatuous you have to wonder if they were just trolling for laughs:
"The available evidence shows that President Trump did what we'd expect a president to do on an issue of this importance: He listened to his senior advisers and followed their advice and recommendations,"
Yes, we expect our presidents to refuse to admit they lost elections and plot a coup to stay in power. It's perfectly normal. And yes, he did back down on firing Rosen and replacing him with his lackey — only once his White House counsel's office and the entire top level of the Department of Justice said they would quit en masse if he did it. I guess you can call that "advice and recommendations" but Trump's White House counsel had another term for it: "a murder-suicide pact."
And anyway, once that part of the plot was foiled, he just switched to plan B — the right-wing lawyer John Eastman's plot to have Pence refuse to count the electoral votes. At the same time, he had his crack legal team of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani all over the country filing half-baked, embarrassing lawsuits and was egging on activists to come to the Capitol on January 6th saying it was going to be "wild." He was juggling several coup plots at the same time. And he's still at it today, calling for "forensic audits" even in states he won! This deranged plot is still unfolding even though he's been out of office for nine months.
That Senate Republicans would actually defend these actions is outrageous. It's also chilling.
It's quite clear that that brief moment after January 6th when the Republicans seemed shaken by Trump's incitement of a violent insurrection passed very quickly and they have comfortably settled back into rationalizing their complicity by saying that it's no harm no foul if the president tries to extort foreign leaders to help him sabotage a rival's campaign or plan a coup to overturn an election if he doesn't manage to pull it off.
Grassley is appearing with the former president at a rally this weekend where Trump will no doubt insist that he actually won the election. Grassley won't blink an eye, apparently believing that if Trump gets back in power, it will be perfectly fine if he behaves exactly the same way as he did during those insane final weeks of his term. This is how pathetically corrupt and compromised the GOP's moral reasoning has become. According to one of the major political parties in the country, attempted coups are now normal politics in America. And as a result we can be quite sure this isn't the last time that will happen. The only question is whether they can corral enough accomplices to actually succeed next time.
"The report is damning. The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup."
actually, it isn't the definition of an attempted coup
if it were, Trump would have tied to arrest Rosen
instead, Rosen went on his merry way
disputing election results and trying to get others to support you is the definition of free speech
Dems do it all the time
"It's quite clear that that brief moment after January 6th when the Republicans seemed shaken by Trump's incitement of a violent insurrection"
if it was a violent insurrection, why did they not kill anyone?
it was similar to college students in the 60s who took over the Dean's office to protest the Vietnamese War
not to be encouraged but hardly the Bolshevik Revolution
vi·o·lent | ˈvī(ə)lənt |
adjective
using or involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something: a violent confrontation with riot police.
Former President Donald Trump continues to promote the false and totally debunked claim that he won Arizona in the 2020 election. But when three Arizona Republicans testified before the House Oversight Committee on October 7, they reiterated that in fact, now-President Joe Biden won their state fairly and decisively in 2020.
The Republicans were former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett and two members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors: Chairman Jack Sellers and Vice-Chairman Bill Gates (not to be confused with the tech entrepreneur).
Sellers told members of the House Oversight Committee, "The election of November 3, 2020 in Maricopa County was free, fair and accurate." And Gates had a stern warning during his testimony, stressing that the United States is in deep trouble if other members of his party refuse to accept democratic election results.
Gates testified, "If elected officials continue to choose party over truth, then these procedures are going to continue on — these privately funded government-backed attacks on legitimate elections. As a Republican who believes in democracy, I dreamed of one day going to a nation that was trying to build a democracy and help them out. Perhaps a former Soviet republic like Belarus or Tajikistan. I never could have imagined that I would be doing that work here in the United States of America."
The Republicans' testimony before Congress follows the release of Cyber Ninjas' report on its audit of the election results in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix (Arizona's largest city). The audit, which found that Biden did, in fact, receive the most votes in Maricopa County, was not an official government recount. Rather, Cyber Ninjas is a Florida-based private firm run by Doug Logan, a far-right MAGA Republican and QAnon supporter — and even Cyber Ninjas found that Biden won Arizona. Logan refused to testify during the hearing.
The Cyber Ninjas audit, which was ordered by MAGA Republicans in the Arizona State Legislature, was pointless. After the initial vote count in November 2020 showed a Biden victory in Arizona, those votes were recounted by actual election officials and confirmed that Biden won the state.
"using or involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something: a violent confrontation with riot police"
no riot police were killed
however, the riot police did kill one of the protestors
once they got in the building, everything was pretty peaceful
the protestors did trespass but they didn't hurt anyone and they clearly could have if they intended to
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/direction_of_country-902.html
as the country moves toward socialism and TTFism with our "moderate" President kowtowing to Bernie and the Squad, only 32 % of Americans say we're moving in the right direction
with crime soaring and Dems pushing to defund the police, only 32 % of Americans say we're moving in the right direction
with the DOJ looking for ways to prosecute anyone who goes to a school board meeting and dares to dissent against critical race theory, only 32 % of Americans say we're moving in the right direction
with inflation skyrocketing and the Dems trying to abolish the filibuster so they can push through another 7 trillion in spending, only 32 % of Americans say we're moving in the right direction
with the pandemic raging and an impotent President acting like a founding member of the Keystone Cops, only 32 % of Americans say we're moving in the right direction
with our President deserting hundreds of US citizens to the Taliban and giving terrorist the largest transfer of military equipment in history, only 32 % of Americans say we're moving in the right direction
and in November 2024, we won't get fooled again!
You know the saying, "Garbage in, garbage out"
we put Slidin' Biden in
we get crap out
Officers maced, trampled: Docs expose depth of Jan. 6 chaos
Two firefighters loaned to Washington for the day said they were the only medics on the Capitol steps Jan. 6, trying to triage injured officers as they watched the angry mob swell and attack police working to protect Congress.
Law enforcement agents were “being pulled into the crowd and trampled, assaulted with scaffolding materials, and/or bear maced by protesters,” wrote Arlington County firefighter Taylor Blunt in an after-action memo. Some couldn’t walk, and had to be dragged to safety.
Even the attackers sought medical help, and Blunt and his colleague Nathan Waterfall treated those who were passing out or had been hit. But some “feigned illness to remain behind police lines,” Blunt wrote.
The memo is one of hundreds of emails, texts, photos and documents obtained by The Associated Press. Taken together, the materials shed new light on the sprawling patchwork of law enforcement agencies that tried to stop the siege and the lack of coordination and inadequate planning that stymied their efforts.
The AP obtained the materials through 35 Freedom of Information Act requests to law enforcement agencies that responded to the Capitol insurrection.
“We were among the first mutual aid teams to arrive and were critical to begin the process of driving protestors off the Capitol,” wrote Blunt. Other emergency medical personnel also responded to incidents at the U.S. Capitol, including on the Capitol steps earlier in the day.
Five people died in the attack, including a police officer. Two other officers killed themselves after. There were hundreds of injuries and more than 300 people, including members of extremist groups Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, have been charged with federal crimes. Federal agents are still investigating and hundreds more suspects are at large. Justice Department officials have said they may charge some with sedition.
The Arlington firefighters ended up at the Capitol because, two days earlier, Washington Metro Police Chief Robert J. Contee had formally asked the Arlington County Police Department, along with police departments from Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland, and Arlington County in Virginia, to lend them some officers trained for protests and riots, according to the documents.
Arlington’s acting police chief Andy Penn said they’d send help for the “planned and unplanned first amendment activities,” according to emails.
At the time, the Capitol Police department had issued a security assessment warning that militia members, white supremacists and other extremists were heading to Washington to target Congress in what they saw as a “last stand” to support President Donald Trump.
A federal judge said Friday he hopes a three-month sentence behind bars in a U.S. Capitol insurrection case will send a message to other defendants who don’t seem to be “truly accepting responsibility.”
U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan spoke as he sentenced Robert Reeder, a Maryland man who had originally described himself as an “accidental tourist” before video emerged of him grabbing a police officer.
“It’s become evident to me that many of the defendants pleading guilty do not truly accept responsibility. They seem, to me, to be trying to get this out of the way as quickly as possible, stating whatever they have to say ... but not changing their attitude,” Hogan said.
He said he believed Reeder is sorry now and sentenced him to half of the six months prosecutors had wanted, but the judge said some of Reeder's previous statements had been “disingenuous and self-serving.” Hogan said he hopes the sentence sends a signal that people convicted in the riot will face jail time.
“This was an attack on the operations of Congress and the Capitol of the United States, a really sacrosanct building,” he said.
Reeder had been expected to get probation last month, after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor and saying he had not been involved in any violence that day. Then armchair detectives who call themselves Sedition Hunters unearthed the video online. Prosecutors said the recording captured an assault on an officer, though they opted not to file new charges.
Reeder said he touched or grabbed the officer’s shoulder, and forgot to mention it in previous FBI interviews where he voluntarily shared video with agents.
“Immediately after the interaction with the police officer I just wanted to get out of there. It just wasn’t me,” he said. “I’ve always been regretful and ashamed of being there, not because I’m in trouble but because I saw what happened and it was disgusting.”
More than 630 people have been charged in the insurrection, where a pro-Trump mob beat and bloodied police in an effort to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden's victory. The throng sent lawmakers running for their lives and caused $1 million damage.
"Reeder had been expected to get probation last month, after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor and saying he had not been involved in any violence that day. Then armchair detectives who call themselves Sedition Hunters unearthed the video online. Prosecutors said the recording captured an assault on an officer, though they opted not to file new charges."
in other words, the judge sentenced him based on a crime that he wasn't charged with and had no opportunity to defend himself in court against
his lawyers should be able to get his sentence thrown out on appeal without any trouble
Over the last four years, Donald Trump has moonlighted as literary muse, creating an entire publishing subgenre of tell-alls from former staffers and confidantes and hangers-on inspired to wield the mighty pen directly into his back. Team of Vipers, by Cliff Sims; Unhinged, by Omarosa Manigault Newman; The Room Where it Happened, by John Bolton; Disloyal, by Michael Cohen; A Warning, by Anonymous (later revealed to be Miles Taylor); and Tower of Lies, by Barbara Res. (This is a separate category from the neutral-to-positive memoirs churned out by politicos who have worked for or advised him, a group that includes Sean Spicer, Chris Christie, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Nikki Haley, and Oval Office secretary Madeleine Westerhout.)
And yet among these authors, Grisham — the former White House press secretary and chief of staff to the First Lady — represents the most serious breach. Though her book is a more casual affair than those by Bolton and Anonymous, and less of a takedown than those by Manigault Newman and Cohen, she spent more time working in a powerful position in close contact with the president and the First Family during his term in office than anyone who has made the decision to spill their guts to date.
“I was weighing the fact that I myself had said so many nasty things about people who had written books. I was weighing my own loyalty, because even though I resigned, I still am to this day —” she hesitated. “I feel guilty,” she said, “because I was so entrenched with them. They were a huge part of my life for a really long time, and I gave up a lot to work for both of them, and I really believed in them, and I don’t think you just shut all that off overnight. I’m not a cyborg.”
Still, she swears that turning on the Trumps was never her plan. She didn’t keep a diary during the 2016 campaign or the four years she worked in the White House. She didn’t take contemporaneous notes. She didn’t save troves of documents or download an archive of her official communications before she resigned on January 6, during the insurrection at the Capitol. She had not been preparing, in other words, to become a MAGA defector. She once hated those people. She helped the White House draft statements attacking those people. She worked to discredit those people. She thought she was better than those people.
“Stephanie Winston Wolkoff — when her book came out, I was disgusted,” she told me. “I remember saying to Mrs. Trump how I would never do that.”
"When he first started, I loved the stuff he said,” Grisham said. “I loved that he wasn’t worried about talking points. He just said what was on his mind. The way I saw people react made me excited. Like, The Republican Party can be exciting again, and we can have this new, fresh way of doing things. Maybe it won’t be all these old white men telling women what to do with their bodies.”
By the time Trump became the Republican nominee, she said, “you’re in it, and you’ve been on this journey for a year with the same people, and, yes, a bunker mentality has set in. For people like me — and I’m not proud of this — you have a sick sense of pride. All the people who told you how terrible he was? You’re like, Oh? He’s the nominee, buddy! I’m not proud of that. And then he wins, and you get into the White House, and you’re in the White House.” She raised her eyebrows in an expression of awe. “I thought that they were the only ones who would ever get me there,” she said. “My lack of confidence in myself as a single mother and someone who has made mistakes in my past, I thought, Well, this is my only shot. Nobody’s gonna ever want me, really, but these people did. So I’ll stick around.”
Being inside the White House, she said, brought out the worst in her. “You’re catered to and you do feel important and you do become power hungry. If people say they don’t love the powerful feeling in there, they’re lying. It’s kind of gross. I’m not saying something nice about myself right now. I was so proud that I was surviving over everyone else, and I had such a complex that I hadn’t been let into the inner circle in the beginning, so once I was there, I took a lot of joy out of it. You get into this bubble of behavior and you lose track of the outside world. You lose track of real life.”
Back on the afternoon of January 6, Grisham told me that she had resigned but that she didn’t want to publicly announce it. “Not today. A woman died,” she said. (The death toll would eventually amount to nine, including the suicides of four Capitol police officers.) “I’ll ensure people know when it happened — I have time stamps — but today feels cheap.”
Now, [Grisham is] hoping there exist others like her and that she can convince them it’s not too late to change their minds before the next election, when she believes Trump will seek the presidency again. “If I was going to write the book, I wanted to be really honest and not make myself out to be some hero. I hate when people do that,” she said. “Even if you hate me, I hope some of the things in my book make you rethink 2024. If he runs and wins, he won’t have to worry about reelection this time and he can do whatever he wants. That’s scary.”
That’s the justification in the public interest. In the private interest, Grisham said, there were the matters of profit, of reputation, and of revenge. “I thought, I’m going to tell people what he’s really like and get my story out, and in the meantime, selfishly, at the end, a lot of bad things happened to me and I wanted to get that out, too. My children, my nephews, my family will read stories about me, and I want to chronicle what really happened. That’s the selfish piece.”
Early Saturday morning, Grisham and her sister brought me to the Hays Regional Airport, where we boarded a flight to Denver. From there, they were off to La Guardia and more media interviews. “I don’t think I can rebrand. I think this will follow me forever,” Grisham said. “I believe that I was part of something unusually evil, and I hope that it was a one-time lesson for our country and that I can be a part of making sure that at least that evil doesn’t come back now.” For the next week, Grisham would be explaining and apologizing and seeking understanding. But she wasn’t asking for redemption.
“I feel like one of the most hated people in the country,” she said. “The right hates me. They really hate me now. And the left is never going to come around. I have no illusions that people are going to be like, ‘Oh, you’re so brave.’”
Earlier this week she said she believed her role in enabling the administration and its perverse response to the COVID pandemic cost lives.
“I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself with respect to COVID,” she told CNN “New Day” co-anchor Brianna Keilar. “I don’t think I can ever redeem myself.”
She said the “way we handled COVID was tragic. I think that the president’s vanity got in the way,” Grisham added. “He was working for his base. He was not working for this country.”
"A Maryland man who had originally described himself as an “accidental tourist” before video emerged of him grabbing a police officer."
After a "recording captured an assault on an officer" was found, that Maryland man admitted "I’ve always been regretful and ashamed of being there, not because I’m in trouble but because I saw what happened and it was disgusting.”
As a result, Judge Hogan said, "It’s become evident to me that many of the defendants pleading guilty do not truly accept responsibility. They seem, to me, to be trying to get this out of the way as quickly as possible, stating whatever they have to say ... but not changing their attitude."
the judge's comment makes no sense
the guy wasn't charged with assault
the judge has no excuse for sentencing someone for a crime he didn't receive a trial for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_discretion
Happy National Coming Out Day!!!
Nazi Riley Williams is a nasty piece of work. A tipster told authorities that Williams had stolen a computer from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, and the feds have decided to indict her on this additional charge of theft and selling the computer. Williams had originally been charge with trespassing, violent entry and disorderly conduct.
But because she is 22 and white, a judge allowed her to make bail and was released into the custody of her mom.
However, young white woman Williams is a Nazi.
"The woman accused of stealing a laptop used by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staff during the January 6 Capitol Hill mob-attack appears to have also been posting in a notorious neo-Nazi chatroom.
An anonymous tipster provided screenshots allegedly showing Riley June Williams under a known alias that was previously reported, participating in "The Camps"—a racist and neo-Nazi chat room linked to military veteran and moderately-known, Christopher Pohlhaus, 34, and his online network. Pohlhaus, an ex-Marine, said that the alias believed to be Williams’ no longer has anything to do with his online following and was only inside chats that he described as a basic and open “vetting” room. (Posts inside The Camps are littered with racist epithets and antisemitic screeds).
VICE News shared the screenshots with four independent extremism researchers who all said the images appeared to be authentic and undoctored. Three of them, who have studied Williams closely since January 6, said the alias, dates of the posts, and general content matched-up to her known social media behavior and activities."
There is video of Willams dancing and giving a Nazi salute, but the owner of the music she used for this repugnant display has made a copyright issue of this. Therefore, the video has been pulled. But they did show it on the news back in Jan of this year.
Now, supposedly the feds were trying to work out a plea deal, but…
"Prosecutors had been in plea negotiations with Williams, but last month indicated in court that those talks had broken down and that the government was preparing for a trial.
According to the FBI, Williams took a video during the riot of an HP laptop on a desk in Pelosi's office. A woman, whom prosecutors claim is Williams, says, "Dude, put on gloves," and a gloved hand grabs the laptop off the desk. The FBI alleges that a social media account with the user name "Riley" posted about having stolen from Pelosi and having taken Pelosi's "hard drives.""
Considering how many of the Jan 6th insurrectionists have had slaps on the wrist if they make a plea deal, you know Willams must have been an asshole for her to screw up a plea agreement. Nazi girl must feel that she is in the right to have given the finger to the feds. So they decided to hit her with an additional charge.
Smart move Nazi girl!
"You apparently skipped this class said...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_discretion"
judicial discretion doesn't override constitutional rights
the accused has the right to a trial
in this case, the judge pronounced sentence without a trial
not only should the sentence be thrown out, the judge should be impeached and disbarred
Conflict of interest concerns have arise with Attorney General Merrick Garland over the Biden law enforcement chief’s son-in-law’s education company following a controversial Justice Department memo about alleged threats and intimidation at school board protests.
Panorama Education, co-founded by Xan Tanner, who is the group’s president and is married to Garland’s daughter, claims it has made its way into thousands of schools in the United States, selling race-focused student and teacher surveys and conducting training on systemic racism and oppression, white supremacy, implicit bias, and intersectionality, all under the rubric of "Social-Emotional Learning.”
The company makes it clear that “SEL” is a “vehicle” for achieving its goals related to “equity.”
The DOJ memorandum appears intended to intimidate parents across the country into silence.
Equally concerning, however, is reporting about an alleged connection between your family members and controversial curricula that will directly benefit from this memorandum and the chilling of speech.
Garland’s memo alleged that there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation's public schools.
The memo was released just a few days after the National School Boards Association argued to President Joe Biden that “the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and called upon the DOJ to review whether the PATRIOT Act, “in regards to domestic terrorism,” could be deployed.
looks like Merrick Garland is a Nazi with a cause
he needs to be given the ol' heave-ho!
[Lyin'] GOP senators raise conflict of interest concerns over Garland's son-in-law’s education company while they refuse to pay for all the bills they got their beloved Rump to sign into law for them.
Conflict of interest concerns have arise with Attorney General Merrick Garland over the Biden law enforcement chief’s son-in-law’s education company following a controversial Justice Department memo about alleged threats and intimidation at school board protests.
Republican senators raised conflict of interest concerns with Attorney General Merrick Garland over the Biden law enforcement chief’s son-in-law’s education company following a controversial Justice Department memo about alleged threats and intimidation at school board protests.
Panorama Education, co-founded by Xan Tanner, who is the group’s president and is married to Garland’s daughter, claims it has made its way into thousands of schools in the United States, selling race-focused student and teacher surveys and conducting training on systemic racism and oppression, white supremacy, implicit bias, and intersectionality, all under the rubric of "Social-Emotional Learning.”
The company makes it clear that “SEL” is a “vehicle” for achieving its goals related to “equity.”
The DOJ memorandum appears intended to intimidate parents across the country into silence.
GOP Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Marsha Blackburn published a letter to Garland saying that “actual violence, harassment, and threats are criminal activities and must be condemned” but adding that “the memorandum appears intended to intimidate parents across the country into silence.”
The Republicans continued: “Equally concerning, however, is reporting about an alleged connection between your family members and controversial curricula that will directly benefit from this memorandum and the chilling of speech.”
Equally concerning, however, is reporting about an alleged connection between your family members and controversial curricula that will directly benefit from this memorandum and the chilling of speech.
Garland’s memo alleged that there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation's public schools.
The memo was released just a few days after the National School Boards Association argued to President Joe Biden that “the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and called upon the DOJ to review whether the PATRIOT Act, “in regards to domestic terrorism,” could be deployed....
even without the conflict of interest, the DOJ and FBI involvement in monitoring those who disagree with their local school board is fascist and un-American
Garland needs to be given the ol' heave-ho!
America is fortunate he was blocked from the Supreme Court!!
vaccine mandates are shutting down airflights
https://www.aol.com/finance/southwest-airlines-flight-cancellations-continue-114948909-162937298.html
Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate and conspiracy theorist Allen West has spent the past couple of days going on a tirade against the COVID-19 vaccine ― all while being hospitalized with the coronavirus.
The unvaccinated former congressman tweeted on Sunday that he and his wife had received monoclonal antibody treatments at an emergency room in Dallas a day earlier. He said “the results were immediate,” although health care providers kept him at the hospital due to concerns over his COVID-19 pneumonia and low blood oxygen levels. His wife, who is vaccinated, was allowed to be discharged from the hospital and go home.
But despite benefiting from an intensive and likely expensive medical intervention by trained professionals ― one he may not have needed had he chosen to get vaccinated ― the right-wing figure went on Twitter to attack vaccines, which are based on years of research and proven to lessen the likelihood and severity of a COVID-19 infection.
“I can attest that, after this experience, I am even more dedicated to fighting against vaccine mandates,” West tweeted. “Instead of enriching the pockets of Big Pharma and corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, we should be advocating the monoclonal antibody infusion therapy.”
In fact, pharmaceutical giants like Regeneron and GlaxoSmithKline manufacture monoclonal antibody injections. The treatment is also expensive, while the government has made the vaccine free to the public to increase its accessibility.
On Monday, West continued his tirade from his hospital bed by accusing the federal government of “manipulative deception” and “running propaganda commercials” of families saying they wish their unvaccinated loved ones who died of COVID-19 would have agreed to get the shot.
He also endorsed unproven, often dangerous methods of “treating” COVID-19 ― such as by using the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin and the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. Despite West’s claims, neither drug has been proven to treat the virus.
West announced on Saturday that he and his wife had tested positive for COVID-19 and that he would likely be admitted to the hospital after his chest X-rays detected COVID-19 pneumonia. Before getting hospitalized, West acknowledged that he was taking hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin ― the very drugs he falsely claimed would help him combat a serious infection.
West was a congressman in Florida before becoming chair of the Texas Republican Party, a title he gave up a month before announcing in July that he would be challenging Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott is running for a third term and has been endorsed by Donald Trump.
West, a tea party favorite, rose in the GOP ranks by becoming a lightning rod for controversy, at one point accusing Democrats of having as many as 80 communists in their House caucus while he was a congressman. In Texas, he began attacking Republicans as well, calling the GOP speaker of the state House a “traitor” for working across the aisle.
West also led a protest outside Abbott’s mansion over COVID-19 restrictions in October 2020, criticizing the governor’s executive orders that included a statewide mask mandate and lockdowns. Those restrictions are no longer in place ― in fact, Abbott signed an executive order on Monday that prohibits all COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the state.
Anxiety. Depression. Stress. These are some of the emotions LGBTQ Americans experienced during the Trump administration, according to two recent studies. The reports, conducted independently, both landed on the same conclusion: There was a significant decline in the mental well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people while Donald Trump was president.
“Everybody’s worst fears came into reality,” said Adrienne Grzenda, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA and lead author of one of the studies. “We were noticing this undercurrent of despair and hopelessness among our clients,” many of whom are LGBTQ.
Before Trump's election, LGBTQ advocates sounded the alarm about his track record and that of his running mate, Mike Pence, who publicly opposed same-sex marriage. Once sworn in, the Trump administration took numerous steps to roll back LGBTQ rights and protections, including banning transgender people from the military, withdrawing Title IX protections for transgender students and reversing plans to count LGBTQ people on the census.
While Trump is no longer in the White House, the ongoing introduction of anti-LGBTQ legislation in the states continues to expose LGBTQ people, especially children, to the risk of significant mental health consequences, according to some advocates and researchers.
A study scheduled to be published in the December issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology found that “extreme mental distress” — defined as reporting poor mental health every day for the past 30 days — increased among LGBTQ people during Trump’s rise and presidency.
The report, written by Masanori Kuroki, an associate professor of economics at Arkansas Tech University, compared the likelihood of extreme mental distress among LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people by using data on more than 1 million people interviewed from 2014 to 2020 for the government’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.
This study found that the “extreme mental distress gap” between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people “increased from 1.8 percentage points during 2014–2015 to 3.8 percentage points after Trump’s presidency became a real possibility in early 2016.” Even seemingly small increases in extreme distress are important, the study notes, because such distress is not common.
While Trump was not the first president to advocate and enforce policies widely considered anti-LGBTQ, his tenure followed the extremely pro-LGBTQ Obama presidency. The possibility of removing recently gained special rights and more-than-equal protections “might be more damaging to LGBT people’s mental well-being than simply not having equal rights in the first place,” the study states.
While Kuroki’s report does include a cautionary note about attributing the increase in mental distress among LGBTQ people to the rise and presidency of Trump, he does note that “the findings do suggest that the Biden administration may have inherited higher rates of mental distress among LGBT people” than they would have “if Trump had not run and won the 2016 election.”
In his conclusion, Kuroki suggests that future research examine LGBTQ mental health under the Biden administration, which has already implemented measures to advance LGBTQ rights and protections.
“If presidents affect LGBT people’s mental health, then we should expect that the extreme mental distress gap between LGBT people and non-LGBT people to narrow under the Biden presidency,” he stated in his report’s conclusion.
Grzenda’s study used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to measure whether the 2016 election and transition to the Trump administration led to a change in the number of sexual and gender minority (SGM) adults reporting “frequent mental distress” compared to cisgender, heterosexual respondents (frequent mental distress is defined as feeling depressed, stressed or unable to control one’s emotions during at least 14 of the last 30 days). Between 2015 and 2018, LGBTQ respondents reporting frequent mental distress increased by 6.1 percentage points, from 15.4 percent to 21.5 percent, while non-LGBTQ respondents reported a 1.1 percentage point increase, from 10.4 percent to 11.5 percent.
“A clear association exists between the 2016 election and the changeover to a decisively anti-LGBT administration and the worsening mental health of SGM adults, although a completely causal relationship cannot be fully established,” the report, published this year in the journal LGBT Health, states.
The effects, however, were not seen evenly among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.
“We’ve got to start looking at sub-populations more,” Grzenda said. “When we break it down, it was bisexual individuals and especially transgender individuals who were really hit the hardest.”
When it was revealed last week that Jon Gruden used some offensive racist language about ten years ago, everyone denounced the remarks. But he remained coach. Now, when he offends the lunatic fringe homosexual advocacy groups, he's got to go.
Fortunately, there are homosexuals that have a more sane viewpoint:
Former NFL offensive lineman Ryan O'Callaghan condemned the homophobic language used by former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden.
But O'Callaghan, who came out as gay in 2017 after a six-year career with the Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots, said he's waiting to pass judgment until he hears more from Gruden, because times have changed over the last decade when it comes to LGBTQ inclusion in the sports world.
"It doesn't matter when he said the f-word or used (homophobic) slurs, it's never OK," O'Callaghan told USA TODAY Sports. "My hope is that he's educated himself since then to know better. But part of it isn't surprising. I used to hear 'no homo' type comments in the NFL and slurs in locker rooms growing up. If we dug through other coaches' trash, it'd be interesting to see what we'd find."
Republicans are becoming frantic that Trump is going to ruin 2022 and 2024 for them. The party wants to talk about inflation and Afghanistan and crime etc, while Trump is out there ginning up the MAGA faithful with non-stop talk about the Big Lie. Republicans are reportedly very nervous that "in focusing on that issue above all others, Trump effectively makes the 2022 election a referendum on him instead of Biden."
Republican Senators are also deeply concerned that Trump is going to mess up their chances of retaking the upper chamber, according to The Hill:
"I think we're better off when he's not part of any story," said a Republican senator, who said his view is widely shared in the GOP conference.
That's a shame for them because he's not going anywhere. In fact, this past weekend the Senate's elder statesman Chuck Grassley, R-IA, decided if you can't beat them, join them and attended Trump's rally to receive his blessing from the Dear Leader himself.
Trump's meddling in the primaries is causing huge headaches as well.
There is no vetting of the candidates he's choosing and a good number of them are very dicey characters accused of violent behavior and criminal financial activity. Their only qualification is their total loyalty to Donald Trump. They will no doubt be popular with the Trump base but they will have difficulty winning general elections.
Republicans have a very big, orange albatross around their necks right now and even though they know it could cripple their chances to regain the majority, they can't get it off.
"My hope is that he's educated himself since then to know better. But part of it isn't surprising. I used to hear 'no homo' type comments in the NFL and slurs in locker rooms growing up. If we dug through other coaches' trash, it'd be interesting to see what we'd find."
Flashback:
Jan 8, 2021 -- With less than two weeks left in office, the administration of US President Donald Trump has finalized yet another rule rolling back nondiscrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people seeking the services of health and welfare programs funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Previously, a federal regulation expressly prohibited health and welfare programs receiving federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. But the administration’s new rule, first proposed in 2019, erases this language. It also deletes a requirement that recipients recognize the marriages of same-sex couples, replacing it with a generic statement that the US Department of Health and Human Services will respect Supreme Court decisions.
Jonathan Kent, son of Clark Kent also known as Superman, and Lois Lane, is coming out as bisexual on the pages of the upcoming DC Comics, the publisher announced on Monday, which is also National Coming Out Day.
Jon Kent, currently known as “the Superman of Earth”, will come out in the November 9 issue of “Superman: Son of Kal-El #5” when he starts a romantic relationship with reporter Jay Nakamura indicating the Kryptonian apple does not fall far from the tree, reports variety.com.
The decision to have the superhero currently carrying the mantle of the Man of Steel come out as bisexual is the most high-profile example yet of comic book publishers expanding the scope of LGBTQ representation within their pages. In August, DC published an issue in which Tim Drake or Robin, Batman’s loyal sidekick also came out as bisexual.
Other major LGBTQ comic characters include DC’s Batwoman, Harley Quinn and Alan Scott (the first Green Lantern), and Marvel’s Iceman, America Chavez (Miss America) and Northstar — one of the very first openly gay comic book characters when he came out in 1992
Former President Trump and several right-wing Republican lawmakers claimed over the holiday weekend that hundreds of canceled and delayed Southwest Airlines flights resulted from pilots and other airline employees resisting vaccine mandates. But the airline, the pilots union and the FAA have all said that Southwest's vaccine requirements had nothing to do with this weekend's issues.
Southwest canceled more than 2,000 flights between Saturday and Monday and at least 1,400 other flights were delayed. The airline blamed severe weather, air traffic control staff shortages and a lack of hotel accommodations for employees for creating a cascading series of issues that led to inadequate staffing on more than one-fourth of Southwest's weekend flights. The union representing Southwest pilots blamed the airline's complicated technological system, which reassigns and reroutes pilots during disruptions, for causing a "domino effect" that forced the company to reassign more than 70% of its pilots over the weekend. Southwest saw a similar string of cancellations in June, which the airline later blamed on overly optimistic projections about how quickly it could scale up flights as passengers began to return over the summer.
This weekend's cancellations came just two days after the Southwest pilots' union asked a federal judge to block the company's vaccine mandate. Republican lawmakers, without evidence, quickly seized on an imaginary link, tying the travel chaos to the company's new policy and President Biden's call for a federal vaccine mandate.
"Joe Biden's illegal vaccine mandate at work. Suddenly, we're short on pilots & air traffic controllers," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, declared on Twitter — while actually linking to a CNBC article that quoted an airline spokeswoman refuting his claim as an "unfounded rumor" and "inaccurate."
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., claimed that Southwest employees were "standing up for their rights as Americans."
"You will NEVER be able to comply your way out of tyranny," she tweeted.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said he stands with Southwest employees who are "fighting against these mandates."
"This isn't about a vaccine, this is about freedom," he wrote.
"Shut them down," wrote Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Donald Trump also sought to link the issues to vaccine mandates, as well as his endlessly repeated false claims about the 2020 election.
"I think it has a lot to do with a lot of things. I think it has something to do with the election that was rigged," he said in a radio interview this weekend. "I think these are big fans of your favorite president, I think that this has something to do with that. I think it has something to do with the ... I think it has a lot to do with mandates."
Donald Trump Jr., also amplified the baseless claim on Twitter, claiming that employees had gone on "strike" over the mandates.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson amplified these unfounded claims to his primetime audience, saying that the flight cancellations were the "direct consequence" of Biden's vaccine mandate.
But there's no evidence of a strike or sick-out by airline employees. The pilots' union has said that pilots called in sick at a normal rate over the weekend.
House Speaker Nancy said on Tuesday that she was “very disappointed” that President Biden’s domestic agenda will have to be slashed because of opposition from Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
“If there are fewer dollars to spend, there are choices to be made,” Pelosi said during her weekly press conference at the U.S. Capitol. The two Senate centrists have said that the president’s proposal to spend $3.5 trillion on expanding childcare, health coverage and environmental protections is much too expensive to win their necessary support.
Manchin has indicated he’d like to see Build Back Better, as the president’s “human infrastructure” proposals are collectively known, end up costing around $1.5 trillion. Without any Republican support for those proposals, and with the Senate evenly divided between the two parties, the demands of Manchin and Sinema carry veto weight.
Now that the red pens have come out, every member of Congress with any say in the matter wants to make sure that their priorities make the final cut and aren’t trimmed too severely in the process.
“Housing. Is. Everything,” said a recent tweet from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the influential House Financial Services Committee chairwoman. She wants to see affordable housing remain a priority in the pared-down Build Back Better agenda.
Other progressives are making similar demands. “The Congresswoman has repeatedly said ‘no climate, no deal,’” a spokeswoman for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wrote to Yahoo News in an email.
Some Democrats just want to see something — anything — make it into law. They fear that failure to pass either the Build Back Better bill or a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that has some Republican support could indicate to the American people that Democrats are incapable of governing when in control of both the White House and both chambers of Congress. It is not lost on Democrats that they used precisely that argument to wrest the House from Republican control in the 2018 congressional midterms.
“The stakes are too high,” veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told Yahoo News, “and the voters will not forgive Congress for doing nothing.”
Unfortunately for the Dems, if they gain Manchin by cutting back, they lose AOC and Waters.
Dems are screwed!!!!
"House Speaker Nancy said on Tuesday that she was “very disappointed” that President Biden’s domestic agenda will have to be slashed because of opposition from Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona."
I love to laugh
Dems can't even win with majority and control
hahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, then much of the Democratic Party and media establishment should have been indicted for their behavior following the 2016 election. In fact, the last time Democrats fully accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.
After the 2000 election, which hinged on the results of a recount in Florida, Democrats smeared President George W. Bush as "selected, not elected." When Bush won re-election against then senator John Kerry in 2004, many on the left claimed that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver fraudulent votes to Bush.
HBO even produced and aired the Emmy-nominated "Hacking Democracy," a documentary claiming to show that "votes can be stolen without a trace," adding fuel to the conspiracy theory fire that the results of the 2004 election were illegitimate. But nothing holds a candle to what happened in 2016 after Donald Trump’s surprising defeat of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Rather than accept that Trump won and Clinton lost fair and square, the political and media establishments desperately sought to explain away Trump’s victory. They settled on a destructive conspiracy theory that crippled the government, empowered America’s adversaries, and illegally targeted innocent private citizens whose only crime was not supporting Hillary Clinton.
The Russia collusion hoax had all the elements of an election conspiracy theory, including baseless claims of hacked voting totals, illegal voter suppression, and treasonous collaboration with a foreign power. Pundits and officials speculated openly that President Trump was a foreign asset and that members of his circle were under the thumb of the Kremlin.
But despite the patent absurdity of these claims, the belief that Trump stole the 2016 election had the support of the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even government agencies in the country. To question the legitimacy of the 2016 election wasn’t to undermine our democracy; it was considered by some of our most elevated public figures a patriotic duty.
"You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you," Clinton told her followers in 2019.
"I know he’s an illegitimate president," Clinton claimed of Trump a few months later. She even said during an interview with "CBS Sunday Morning" that "voter suppression and voter purging and hacking" were the reasons for her defeat.
Former president Jimmy Carter agreed. "Trump lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf," he told NPR in 2019. "Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016."
Their view was shared by most prominent Democrats in Congress. Representative John Lewis of Georgia, for example, said he was skipping Trump’s inauguration in 2016 because he believed Trump was illegitimate: "The Russians participated in helping this man get elected.... That’s not right. That’s not fair. That’s not an open democratic process." Lewis had also skipped the inauguration of President George W. Bush, claiming Bush, too, was an illegitimate president.
A few members of Congress joined him in 2001. By 2017, one out of three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives boycotted Trump’s inauguration. Many said they refused to take part in the installation of an "illegitimate" president.
The corporate media didn’t condemn leading Democrats’ refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election. In fact, the media amplified the most speculative claims of how Trump and Russia had colluded to steal the election from Clinton. They dutifully regurgitated inaccurate leaks from corrupt intelligence officials suggesting Trump and his staff had committed treason. They ran stories arguing that Republicans who didn’t support their conspiracy theory were insufficiently loyal to the country or somehow compromised themselves.
It was all nonsense. Even Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who ran a multi-year and multi-million-dollar government investigation into claims that Trump personally colluded with Russian president Vladimir Putin to steal the election from Clinton, found no evidence to support the fevered accusations.
The reporters who pushed this conspiracy theory were never held accountable by their peers for peddling leaks and lies. They received raises and promotions, honors and awards, and the applause of their colleagues. Some were given Pulitzer Prizes for "reporting" that was closer to fan fiction than an accurate description of events.
From 2016 through 2020, the easiest way to achieve stardom on the political left was to loudly proclaim one’s belief that the 2016 election was illegitimate—stolen by the Russians on behalf of a corrupt traitor. Conspiracy-mongering, up to and including the assertion that the president of the United States was a secret Russian spy, was the highest form of patriotism.
And then 2020 happened.
At the drop of a hat, America’s electoral system went from irredeemably corrupt and broken in 2016 to unquestionably safe in 2020. Voting methods that were allegedly used to steal elections in 2004 and 2016 suddenly became sacrosanct and unquestionable in 2020. Whereas so-called election experts repeatedly warned pre-2020 about the pitfalls of electronic voting and widespread mail-in balloting, by November 2020 any discussion about the vulnerabilities of those methods was written off as the stuff of right-wing cranks and conspiracy-mongers.
Such dismissals required ignoring quite real problems with election integrity affecting hundreds of U.S. elections at the state and local levels, and even the 1960 presidential election, when John F. Kennedy won just 118,574 more votes than Richard Nixon. That Electoral College win hinged on victories in Illinois, where Chicago vote totals were suspiciously high for Kennedy, and Texas, a state where Kennedy’s running mate Lyndon B. Johnson had been known to exert control over election results. Official biographers and historians have claimed one or both states would have been won by Nixon in a fair election.
If concerns about election integrity were valid from at least 1960 through 2016, then surely those concerns were even more valid in 2020, an election year unlike any other in American history.
In the lead-up to the election, thanks in part to the coronavirus pandemic that gripped the world, wide-ranging electoral reforms were implemented. Across the country at the state, local, and federal levels, political actors rammed through hundreds of structural changes to the manner and oversight of elections, resulting in what Time magazine would later call "a revolution in how people vote." Some of these changes were enacted by state legislatures, some by courts, and others by state and county election officials. Many changes, allegedly justified by the global pandemic, were broad reforms that Democrats had long desired. The crisis was their chance to sneak in contentious policies through the back door.
The bedrock of the American republic is that elections must be free, fair, accurate, and trusted. Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact, and that to fight it, strong rules and regulations are needed on the front end. That’s why Democrats and Republicans fight so bitterly about the rules and regulations that govern the process.
What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened.
They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote.
They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true.
They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.
Dean Cain says there's nothing "bold or brave" about the current Superman coming out as bisexual. The actor, best known for playing Superman in the '90s. He criticized the types of issues tackled in the new comic book series.
"It's hard for me to keep track of all the different Supermen and the different worlds and adventures that he has in the comics," he said. "They said it's a bold new direction, I say they're bandwagoning."
Cain continued, "Robin just came out as bi — who's really shocked about that one? The new Captain America is gay. My daughter in Supergirl, where I played the father, was gay. So I don't think it's bold or brave or some crazy new direction. If they had done this 20 years ago, perhaps that would be bold or brave."
The 55-year-old actor starred on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman alongside Teri Hatcher from 1993 to 1997. He also appeared in a handful of episodes of CW's Supergirl series.
"Brave would be having him fighting for the rights of gay people in Iran where they'll throw you off a building for the offense of being gay," Cain continued. "They're talking about having him fight climate change and the deportation of refugees and he's dating a hacktivist — whatever a hactivist is."
The new Superman is 17-year-old Jon Kent, son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. He will be coming out as bisexual in the Nov. 9 issue of Superman: Son of Kal-El. Since the series was released in July, Jon has fought wildfires caused by climate change, stopped a school shooting and protested the deportation of refugees in Metropolis.
"Why don't they have him fight the injustices that created the refugees whose deportation he's protesting?" Cain asked. "That would be brave, I'd read that. Or fighting for the rights of women to attend school and have the ability to work and live and boys not to be raped by men under the new warm and fuzzy Taliban — that would be brave. There's real evil in this world today, real corruption and government overreach, plenty of things to fight against. Human trafficking — real and actual slavery going on … It'd be great to tackle those issues."
DC Comics made the announcement about Jon's sexuality on Monday, which was National Coming Out Day.
In politics, success tends to beget success. That truism apparently eluded leftwing Democrats on Sept. 30 when they refused to vote for President Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Instead of basking in accolades for having passed a second landmark achievement to go with Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, Democrats are treating the public to an extended exhibition of their inability to forge the internal consensus necessary to govern.
Even as clogged U.S. ports and long delays in delivering goods of all kinds underscore the urgent need for upgrading the nation’s economic infrastructure, the Congressional Progressive Caucus vows to persist in blocking the bill if they don’t get their way on a follow-on reconciliation bill that would spend trillions more on new social entitlements and climate protection.
That’s sewn anger and mistrust among moderate House Democrats, who were promised a vote and stood ready to pass the infrastructure bill last month. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) set a new deadline for a vote — Halloween, fittingly enough.
Buffeted by vaccine hesitancy and the delta variant’s surge, as well as the chaotic U.S. exit from Afghanistan, the president’s approval ratings have tumbled by 10 points since June. That’s a worry for Democratic candidates, especially former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who’s locked in a tight race for a second term in a state Biden won by 10 points in 2020.
The impasse over infrastructure is odd in two respects. First, progressives claim they too want to spend big on nation-building at home. But it doesn't seem to be their top priority. Their message couldn’t be clearer: Redistributing wealth takes precedence over strengthening the economy. Is that really the message Democrats want to run on in next year’s midterm elections?
Even more perplexing, the White House, and sometimes the president himself, seemed to encourage leftist obstruction as a way of pressuring two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), into supporting the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
The strong-arm tactics haven’t worked, and have left bruised feelings among not only the senators but also many moderate House Democrats who also don’t support the entire progressive wish list. Now the fate of both bills is uncertain as the White House belatedly struggles to broker a compromise that balances the needs of both leftwing and centrist Democrats.
What we’ve witnessed is anything but a deft exercise in coalition management. Despite all the heady rhetoric about ushering in “transformative change,” it was never likely that Democrats would pass changes on a New Deal scale with razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate.
What’s more, Democrats representing battleground districts and states face electorates that are skeptical of the left’s big tax and spending ambitions. Since they make the difference between their party being in the majority or out of power, their values and interests also must be accommodated
The honeymoon is over. Democrats are alarmed by President Joe Biden's decline in job approval among groups central to his base — most notably Black voters, Hispanics and women.
Voters support his plans to overhaul U.S. infrastructure, expand Medicare, fund universal pre-K and put money into clean energy, if they can be done at reasonable cost.
But the bills have been caught up in a complex legislative logjam for months. Since late June, Biden's approval rating has fallen from 52.7 percent to 44.5 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average, with disapproval outstripping approval since the end of August.
Since late June, Biden's approval rating has fallen from 52.7 percent to 44.5 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average, with disapproval outstripping approval since the end of August.
sounds like a trend
LOL!
A parent who was arrested during a June school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia, is accusing the district of trying to cover up an alleged bathroom sexual assault by a gender-fluid individual against his daughter in order to further its transgender rights agenda.
Scott Smith was found guilty of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in August after he was filmed being dragged by police from the Loudoun County School Board meeting on June 22. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail, all suspended, contingent on a year of good behavior, Loudoun Now reported at the time.
Smith’s image went viral among left-wingers as an example of parents run amok, and the National School Boards Association cited his arrest in a letter last week requesting the Department of Justice to provide federal law enforcement to respond to an increase in violence against school officials across the country. Attorney General Merrick Garland later pledged to have the Department of Justice and the FBI investigate harassment of school board members.
Now, Smith says there’s much more to his story, saying that his behavior at the June 22 meeting stemmed from an incident weeks earlier at his ninth-grade daughter’s school, Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, in which he said a boy wearing a skirt entered the girls’ bathroom and assaulted his daughter on May 28.
"We can confirm a May 28, 2021 case that involved a thorough 2-month-long investigation that was conducted to determine the facts of the case prior to arrest," the sheriff’s office said. "This case is still pending court proceedings. The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office is not able to provide any documents that pertain to a pending case." The sheriff's office confirmed that the case involved sexual assault.
All juvenile records are sealed, but Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster revealed that the boy was subsequently charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio.
In response to a public records request, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that a May 28 report with "Offense: Forcible Sodomy [and] Sexual Battery" at Stone Bridge High School does exist.
The suspect was arrested two months later following an investigation by the sheriff's office.
Minutes before Smith’s arrest at the June 22 board meeting, Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) Superintendent Scott Ziegler declared that "the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist," and that to his knowledge, "we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,".
Smith told the outlet that he flew into a rage at the meeting after Ziegler's comments, and after a local progressive activist said she did not believe his daughter’s story.
"If someone would have sat and listened for 30 seconds to what Scott had to say, they would have been mortified and heartbroken," Lancaster, Smith's attorney said.
On Aug. 11, nearly two months after Smith’s arrest, the school board voted to approve its transgender rights policy, which requires teachers to call students by the pronouns they identify with and requires bathroom renovations in order to make them more private.
Smith said he received a letter before the vote informing him he was banned from the school board building.
Then on Oct. 6, the sheriff’s office said a 15-year-old boy was charged with sexual battery and abduction of a fellow student at Broad Run High School in Ashburn. In an Oct. 7 press release, the sheriff's office said the suspect forced a female victim into an empty classroom where he held her against her will and inappropriately touched her.
The outlet, citing a government official, reported that the boy accused in the Broad Run case had the same name as the student who allegedly assaulted Smith's daughter.
Lancaster, Smith's attorney, also told the outlet the suspect in the Oct. 6 incident was the same boy who allegedly attacked Smith’s daughter.
Rosiak reported in a tweet thread that the school district had "quietly" transferred the boy to Broad Run High School after the alleged May 28 incident at Stone Bridge. It is unclear whether any disciplinary action was taken against him.
The school district did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Smith’s wife, Jess, said prosecutors told her the suspect’s court date had been postponed from this Thursday to Oct. 25 in order to handle both cases together.
"It has been so hard to keep my mouth shut and wait this out. It has been the most powerless thing I’ve ever been through," Scott Smith said. "I don’t care if he’s homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, transsexual. He’s a sexual predator."
A new presidential tracking poll shows that the number of Americans with a low opinion of President Joe Biden’s job performance has hit a shocking high.
If you’ve been paying attention, it certainly comes as no surprise that more and more people are waking up to the disaster that is the Biden administration. Still, seeing it in the polling really makes you wonder how Democrats at this point can even defend the madness.
A daily presidential tracking poll released Tuesday by Rasmussen Reports shows that Biden’s disapproval rating among likely voters has skyrocketed. In the Tuesday poll, 50 percent of those who responded to Rasmussen said they “strongly disapprove” of Biden’s job performance.
Only 20 percent, meanwhile, “strongly approve” of Biden’s performance, giving him a Daily Approval Index of -30.
Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley discussed Wednesday a new report alleging that Hunter and Joe Biden previously held shared bank accounts. Turley said it's time for an independent special counsel to be appointed to look into the allegations.
"With these disclosures, we have accounts being used to pay both Hunter and Joe Biden and money being reimbursed to Hunter Biden from an individual associated with a company called Rosemont Seneca. Now that’s a company that has been tied to payments from China and Russia. And so this is getting more and more serious. The question is why the Justice Department hasn’t considered the appointment of a special counsel. We know there's a criminal investigation into the tax issues, possible money laundering. But there are also serious questions about whether the Biden family conducted an extensive influence-peddling operation involving not just Hunter but his uncle and potentially the president of the United States."
remember when the head of the gays, Barney Frank, screwed up our economy and caused the 2008 super-recession?
well, another gay is screwing us up again
America is running out of everything and inflation is soaring because of supply chain breakdowns involving shipping and transportation of goods
and who's in charge?
the clearly inexperienced and unqualified Pete Buttagieg
Three years ago, the only people who’d ever heard of Pete Buttigieg were likely to be residents of South Bend, Ind., the town of 103,000 people where he served as mayor.
South Bend has a bus station with a fleet of 60 buses, a small train station and a small regional airport. So, who better for Team Biden to nominate as secretary of the Department of Transportation, which employs more than 58,000 employees – more than half the population of South Bend – and has a budget of $87 billion?
After a quiet first nine months in office, the former mayor has his first crisis on his hands: a massive supply-chain breakdown exploding across the country that will impact every American, particularly the lower and middle classes. Restaurants, stores and small businesses that provide products and services to people will all be negatively affected as the cost to the consumer goes up.
Per a recent CBS News report: “A growing number of shipments are stuck at sea because of supply chain issues, leading to growing concern that holiday shipments may not arrive in time. Container ships are crowding ports from New York to Los Angeles, where 250,000 containers are floating off the coast waiting to be unloaded," the report reads.
The Washington Post ominously breaks down the situation as well. "Ships wait off the California coast, unable to unload their cargo. Truckers are overworked and overwhelmed, often confronting logjams. Rail yards have also been clogged, with trains at one point backed up 25 miles outside a key Chicago facility," the publication reported on Sunday.
One major reason this is happening is a shortage of workers to get cargo off of these ships, and another shortage of truck drivers to transport them where they need to go. A worker shortage has been a common theme throughout the first 10 months of the Biden era, where no one in the administration – including Labor Secretary Marty Walsh – has any good answers as to why it is happening.
So, to what level of accountability are the media holding the Transportation secretary?
A quick Google check of "Pete Buttigieg,” when using the "News" search option, reveals the following headlines in this exact order as of Monday afternoon.
"Pete Buttigieg Calls Parenting Twins 'Most Demanding Thing': 'Yet I Catch Myself Grinning Half the Time’ ” - People Magazine
"Pete Buttigieg calls parenting twins 'the most demanding thing I think I've ever done’ ” - USA Today, under the "Celebrities" section
"Buttigieg quiet on growing port congestion as shipping concerns build ahead of holidays" - Fox News
"Buttigieg on parenthood: 'Most demanding thing' I’ve ever done" - NBC News
"Pete Buttigieg Dishes on His Future As a Presidential Candidate" - Business Insider
As you can see, almost all outlets are focusing on Buttigieg's foray into fatherhood and not on the one major issue he's in charge of fixing, or at least getting under some semblance of control, as cargo ships continue to pile up off the coast of America’s port cities.
Buttigieg was finally asked about this issue in an interview with Bloomberg News last week, during which he warned that the "challenges" will continue, possibly for years, before pitching President Biden's stalled $3.5 infrastructure plan, which surely will make everything all better.
"These challenges are definitely going to continue in the months and years ahead," Buttigieg said. "This is one more reason why we do need to deliver this infrastructure package, so that we can have a more resilient, flexible physical infrastructure to support our supply chain in this country."
But let's say the Biden infrastructure plan – which contains a majority of items that the administration calls "human infrastructure,” to the tune of trillions of dollars of additional spending while core inflation is already at a 30-year high – doesn't pass. What is Buttigieg doing *right now* to address the crisis?
"The White House set up a task force," he explained to MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Oct. 7. "Look, this is obviously an incredibly complicated situation that we're talking about. We're talking about global supply chains. And it's mostly private-sector systems. But we have a big role to play, and that's why we've been convening all of the different players ... held roundtables, bringing together everyone connected to the ports."
The Washington-speak is impossible to ignore: We've "set up a task force,” we've "held roundtables."
Buttigieg is beloved by many in the American press for a variety of reasons, including because he checks off many boxes in the sizzle department. But chief among them is not his experience with supply chains, small business, Big Labor or transportation.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/576478-amateur-hour-pete-buttigiegs-inexperience-exposed-as-supply-chain-breaks
Keep spinning but it's clear, Buttigieg has NOTHING to do with supply shortages around the world like these:
The global supply chain nightmare is about to get worse
Fox News: Expert warns of worsening chemical supply shortages
From coffee to microchips – how the supply chain crisis is disrupting UK plc
Fears of a ‘Bottleneck Recession’: How Shortages Are Hurting Germany
Supply chain crisis causes rethink at multinationals
Russian supply curbs exacerbate squeeze on European gas market
"Keep spinning but it's clear, Buttigieg has NOTHING to do with supply shortages around the world like these"
didn't say he started it
the problem is that he is completely clueless what to do about it
he had no qualifications for the position and was only hired as a gay token
he should have told Biden to find someone who knows what he's doing
we'll all suffer from his incompetence
Prominent Democrats from across the country are mobilizing to try to lift Terry McAuliffe to victory in the final weeks of the Virginia governor’s race, a critical election that has put Democrats on edge and carries significant national ramifications for the party.
Former president Barack Obama will hit the campaign trail for McAuliffe later this month as part of an effort to boost turnout among Black voters. So will Stacey Abrams, a rising Democratic star from Georgia, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta. First lady Jill Biden will also stump for McAuliffe, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will host a fundraiser for the gubernatorial hopeful.
Public opinion polls show sow the race a toss-up, amid other troubling indicators for the Democratic party brand. Some Democratic leaders believe the Virginia race could have a tectonic impact on the party’s legislative agenda and political standing heading into next year’s midterm elections, suggesting a defeat would be close to devastating.
“It would be a Scott Brown moment, I think,” said retiring Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), referring to the Republican senator’s shocking win in a special Massachusetts election during the final negotiations over the Affordable Care Act. Brown’s 2010 victory was an early indicator of the drubbing Democrats endured in the midterms later that year.
In a sign of how politics is increasingly nationalized, many of the issues that have dominated the Virginia campaign — coronavirus vaccine mandates, education and crime, among others — mirror those in other battlegrounds across the country. The flurry of high-profile Democrats on the ground in the final weeks further underlines the national dimensions of the race.
McAuliffe’s enlistment of prominent Democrats contrasts with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin’s quieter approach to national figures in his party
A majority of Americans say that the government is doing too much, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday.
Fifty-two percent of respondents said government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses.
The findings come in contrast to when Gallup conducted the poll last year and found that 54 percent of Americans wanted the government to have a more active role in solving the nation's problems. That poll came amid economic struggles resulting from the coronavirus pandemic and racial injustice issues.
Thursday's poll found that members of all parties were less likely now than they were a year ago to favor a more active role for government, with the opinions of Independents changing the most.
Fifty-seven percent of Independents say the government is doing too much, compared to 38 percent who held the same opinion last year.
The poll also found that eighty percent of Republicans held that the government is trying to do too many things, while 15 percent said the government should be doing more.
Gallup also found that the public prefers lower taxes and fewer government services.
Given the choice, 50 percent of respondents said they preferred less services and reduced taxes, while 19 percent said they wanted more services and taxes.
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 1-17, 2021, with a random sample of 1,005 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 70% cellphone respondents and 30% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.
"Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 1-17, 2021, with a random sample of 1,005 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia."
fascinating....
do you disagree with he poll results?
LOL!
Thursday, October 14, 2021
Problems affecting the U.S. supply chain have a majority of Americans concerned, as they are already noticing shortages in stores, and they expect the federal government to take action to solve the crisis.
A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports and Human Events finds that 85% of American Adults are concerned that supply chain problems may lead to shortages of basic items, including 49% who say they are Very Concerned. Only 11% are not concerned about the problem. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Concerns have grown amid reports that dozens of cargo ships are waiting to be unloaded near the port of Los Angeles, while thousands of cargo containers are piled up in the port of Savannah. Sixty-two percent (62%) of Americans say they’ve already noticed shortages of basic items in stores where they live, while 30% say they haven’t noticed shortages.
Sixty-five percent (65%) believe the federal government should take action to help fix the problems currently affecting the U.S. supply chain, while 18% are against federal action and 17% are not sure.
The survey of 1,000 U.S. American Adults was conducted on October 11-12, 2021 by Rasmussen Reports and Human Events. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
Seventy-five percent (75%) of those surveyed say they have closely followed news stories about problems with the U.S. supply chain, including 39% who have followed the news Very Closely. Twenty-one percent (21%) haven’t closely followed news about the supply chain problem.
Among those who say they’ve followed news about the supply chain problem Very Closely, 74% say they are Very Concerned that supply chain problems may lead to shortages of basic items.
More Republicans (62%) than Democrats (40%) or those unaffiliated with either major party (47%) are Very Concerned that supply chain problems may lead to shortages of basic items.
Among Americans who say they have already noticed shortages of basic items in stores where they live, 62% say they are Very Concerned that supply chain problems could cause future shortages.
More whites (65%) than blacks (61%) or other minorities (55%) say they have noticed shortages of basic items in stores where they live.
Older Americans are more concerned about the supply chain problem than those under 40, but younger Americans are more in favor of federal action to help fix the problems currently affecting the U.S. supply chain.
More investors (50%) than non-investors (31%) have followed news about problems with the U.S. supply chain Very Closely.
Married Americans are more likely than their unmarried counterparts to be Very Concerned that supply chain problems may lead to shortages of basic items, but the unmarried are more in favor of federal action to fix supply chain problems.
Support for federal action to help fix problems currently affecting the U.S. supply chain is a majority across party lines, with 72% of Democrats, 64% of Republicans and 58% of the unaffiliated in favor of federal action.
yes, most Americans would like the government to ensure the free flow of goods through the physical infrastructure
which is why it's such a shame Biden installed an unqualified gay token as Transportation Secretary
almost as big a blunder as the Afghan pullout
what Americans don't want the government doing is supervising their personal life from cradle to grave
Donald Trump, who has insistently pushed the baseless notion that the 2020 election was marred by sweeping election fraud, appears to be dissuading his supporters from voting in the 2022 and 2024 elections if the GOP fails to "solve" the apparent fraud.
"If we don't solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in '22 or '24," Trump said in a Wednesday statement. "It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do."
Last year, Trump's allies echoed a similar message to the former president's voters, urging them to sit out of the Georgia runoffs until the party's Senate incumbents – former U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., and David Perdue, R-Ga. – backed demands to hold a legislative session to probe Trump's defeat in the Peach State.
"They have not earned your vote," pro-Trump attorney L. Lin Wood told voters. "Don't you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election, for god's sake! Fix it! You gotta fix it!"
Ultimately, Loeffler and Purdue were narrowly ousted by their Democratic opponents, former pastor Raphael Warnock and former investigative journalist Jon Osofff.
As it stands, no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in the 2020 presidential election has emerged, despite the host of Republican-backed efforts to unearth foul play.
Chief among these efforts was Arizona's election audit of Maricopa County, which was run by Cyber Ninjas, a company that had no apparent experience in conducting recounts. In October, after months of circus-like operational dysfunction, Cyber Ninjas produced results indicating that President Biden had in fact beaten Trump by a greater margin than was originally reported. Outside election experts strongly doubted whether all the ballots were even counted in the recount, The New York Times reported.
Other audit efforts have taken place in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
This week, Michigan Trump supporters launched a ballot drive calling for a "full forensic audit" of the 2020 election, according to The Detroit Free Press. GOP congressional candidate Jon Rocha said that the state will need to procure 340,000 signatures in order to prompt a "veto-proof" investigation from the state's legislature. The ballot drive demand's fly in the face of strong evidence indicating that Biden, who saw 150,000 more votes than Trump in Michigan, won fairly. Back in March, the Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced that 250 separate audits throughout the state confirmed the "accuracy and integrity" of the state's election.
This week in Georgia, one of the last remaining Trump-backed lawsuits alleging fraud was dismissed by a state superior court, ruling that the case's plaintiffs did not have proper standing. The decision likely spells failure for any attempted Arizona-style audits in the Peach State, Forbes noted.
In Pennsylvania, Trump's election crusade appears running smoother. Last week, NPR reported, state Republicans had issued a "wide-ranging subpoena for the personal information of millions of voters." The information will reportedly encompass voter addresses, driver's license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers in order for the state GOP to verify voters' identities. Past court rulings and previous audits have indicated that there is no need for an official audit.
Wisconsin, meanwhile, is conducting three separate reviews of 2020 election results. They are respectively being led by conservative former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, state Rep. Janel Brandtjen, and Wisconsin's nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, according to NPR. Like every other state under review, Wisconsin has in the past conducted multiple routine audits of the 2020 election, and found no indication of outcome-altering fraud.
Justice Samuel Alito wants desperately for us to believe that everything is just fine at the Supreme Court. Indeed, in his view the court is a victim.
Before an audience at Notre Dame on Sept. 30, Alito denounced "unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court." He aimed his outrage at the media, at leading legal academics, and at people like me who are concerned about, as he put it, the Supreme Court "deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way in the middle of the night, hidden from public view."
The problem for Justice Alito's sense of grievance is that the evidence supports our concerns. Alito has participated in a pattern of decisions — like the court's recent "shadow docket" ruling suspending abortion rights in our second-biggest state — that deliver wins for big Republican donors. Americans' perception that the court lacks independence, and the court's related drop in approval, doesn't flow from some left-wing conspiracy. It's a recognition that the evidence shows a pattern whenever certain interests come before the court.
How strong a pattern? During Chief Justice John Roberts' tenure, the Court has issued more than 80 partisan decisions, by either a 5-4 or 6-3 vote, involving big interests important to Republican Party major donors. Republican-appointed justices have handed wins to the donor interests in every single case. The decisions greenlit rampant voter suppression and bulk gerrymandering (Shelby County v. Holder and Husted v. Randolph Institute); closed courthouse doors to workers wronged by their employers (Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis); unleashed floods of dark money to corrupt our politics and foul our democracy (Citizens United v. FEC and Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta); and more. Eighty to zero is a pattern so strong that it could serve as compelling evidence in a trial alleging bias and discrimination.
This pattern did not just happen. It is the fruit of a half-century-long operation by right-wing donors to win through the Supreme Court what they can't win through elected branches of government. In 1971, a corporate attorney from Virginia named Lewis Powell wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce laying out a game plan for corporations and right-wing ideologues to use "an activist-minded Supreme Court" as an "instrument for social, economic, and political change." (Within months, Powell himself would be appointed by Richard Nixon to the court to advance the plan from within. His memo was never disclosed to the Senate.)
Powerful interests have a long, sordid history of "regulatory capture." Volumes have been written on that history. For big donors, turning the techniques of regulatory capture to the Supreme Court was a short leap. Of course it can't be obvious, so the court-capture operation would obscure its influence using front groups and anonymous secret funding.
The Federalist Society emerged as gatekeeper, monitoring Republican-appointed judges for allegiance to right-wing donor interests, while accepting gobs of anonymous donations. The Judicial Crisis Network and its offshoots sprang up as political attack dogs in the confirmation fights for Federalist Society-approved judges, funded by anonymous donations as big as $17 million. Other front groups groomed convenient plaintiffs to manufacture controversies to give the selected justices cases that would generate precedent favorable to donor interests. Secretly-funded groups also began to lobby the court in orchestrated flotillas — through so-called "friend of the court" briefs — signaling which cases are important to donor interests and advising judges which way the donors want them to rule. They have a perfect winning record.
All of this required boatloads of anonymous money; what people who study this clandestine activity call "dark money." The Washington Post has exposed how the right-wing donor network spent upwards of $250 million in dark money on its judicial influence operation; testimony before my Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee has since upped that dark money figure to $400 million. Because the funding is covert, we do not know exactly who contributed that money or what interests they have before the court. But rarely do people spend $400 million for no reward.
The success of this operation is undeniable. And it is not legal conservatism at work. To reach the desired results, Republican justices often abandon the principles and doctrines of legal conservatism, like textualism and originalism. Take last term's Americans for Prosperity Foundation decision, which created sweeping First Amendment protections for the funders behind dark-money political groups, like the Koch-backed plaintiff in the case. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, the "decision discards decades of First Amendment jurisprudence" to produce a novel, activist creation in the law: constitutional protection for dark money. Good luck finding support for massive dark-money, special-interest spending in the debates at the Constitutional Convention.
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Perhaps Justice Alito is so touchy because his fingerprints are all over this pattern of Republican judicial activism. Consider his decades-long judicial campaign against public sector unions, a prime political target of major Federalist Society donors like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. In a series of cases over a few short years (Knox v. SEIU Local 100, Harris v. Quinn, and Janus v. AFSCME), Alito invited successive challenges to a bedrock 40-year-old precedent protecting unions. Anti-labor front groups with financial ties to the Federalist Society and Bradley Foundation eagerly rushed cases to the court tailored to that invitation, and Alito delivered new First Amendment rights to strike the precedent and gut the unions. Textualist or originalist principles were nowhere to be found in his opinion.
If Alito and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court want the public to believe the court is not a secretive political "cabal" (his word) doing the bidding of big donors who helped put them there, they should deal with the evidence. Explain the 80-0 donor win record. Disclose who's behind the dark-money briefs. Stop the special-interest fast lane around the "case or controversy" requirement. Report gifts and hospitality — not worse than the other branches of government do, but better. Take precedent seriously when it doesn't suit you, not just when it does. Ditto recusal. Put yourself under a code of ethics, like every other federal judge. And understand that you have fouled your nest, not us, and that the Supreme Court must now at least match every other political institution with a renaissance of transparency. Democracy demands it. And the Court That Dark Money Built has squandered the benefit of the doubt.
Trust in Judicial Branch Falls Sharply as Executive, Legislative Remain Low
In every reading dating back to 1997, the public has expressed more trust in the judicial branch of the federal government than in the executive and legislative branches. Although it remains the most trusted of the three branches, Americans' trust in the judicial branch (headed by the U.S. Supreme Court) has dropped precipitously, to a nearly record-low 54%. This decline comes at a time when approval of the U.S. Supreme Court has hit its historical low point after drawing the ire of many Americans for refusing to block a Texas law banning most abortions, ending a nationwide eviction moratorium and refusing to block vaccine mandates on college campuses.
Over the past decade, U.S. adults' confidence in the executive branch (headed by the president) has exceeded confidence in the legislative branch (composed of both houses of Congress). Currently, 44% of Americans say they trust the executive branch and 37% trust the legislative branch. The executive branch reading has been steady since 2017, while confidence in the legislative branch has risen slightly this year but has not climbed above 40% since 2009.
Americans in all party groups have lost considerable confidence in the judicial branch over the past year. Republicans' trust is down 23 points, Democrats' fell eight points, and independents' declined 12 points since 2020, when Republicans were much more trusting of the judicial branch than were the other party groups. Republicans remain the most confident in the judiciary at 61%, compared with 50% of Democrats and 51% of independents. Trust among Democrats and independents are at their lowest points in Gallup's trend.
"Sen Sheldon Whitehouse"
is just about the biggest ass on Capitol Hill, although Adam Schiff is stiff competition
"Justice Samuel Alito wants desperately for us to believe that everything is just fine at the Supreme Court."
oh. it's more than fine
we finally have a court that will defend the constitution
"Indeed, in his view the court is a victim."
it is a victim
of attacks by the media
they desperately for us to believe that Americans want abortion of any age fetus for any reason to be legal
and they are using every propaganda trick in the book to make sure matricide is considered a constitutional right
they are wasting their time
the Supreme Court will defend the right of unborn children to equal protection under the law
extremism in the defense of the innocent is no vice
The callousness is what is so hard to stomach from the progressive elites of Loudoun County, Virginia, the wealthy dormitory community of Washington, DC.
They laughed and cheered when plumber Scott Smith was crash-tackled by police and humiliated at a school board meeting on June 22 as he tried to raise the plight of his 15-year-old daughter, who he says was raped and sodomized in the school bathroom by a boy in a skirt. No one expressed any concern for his daughter.
There was no compassion, either, from superintendent Scott Ziegler, who claimed bafflingly at the meeting that there had been no assault in a school restroom anywhere in Loudoun County and airily dismissed parents’ concerns about the risks of transgender bathrooms. Then he gave a little woke homily to show those powerless parents in the room who really was in charge.
“Time magazine in 2016 called that a red herring … we’ve heard it several times tonight from our public speakers but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” he said.
Tell that to the Smith family.
The rainbow activist who allegedly threatened Smith’s livelihood at that meeting told him point-blank his daughter’s rape three weeks earlier did not happen, as if she would know.
He raised his voice and called her a “bitch.”
For that mild response to her provocation, he was arrested. The video of his humiliation, his T-shirt ripped, his belly exposed, his pants pulled down, went viral globally.
No one cared about his shattered family.
The Soros-funded left-wing prosecutor, Buta Biberaj, reportedly a decarceration proponent, tried to get Smith jailed for his disruptive behavior.
She’s against jailing criminals but all for locking up an apolitical dad looking for accountability from a school that failed to protect his daughter.
Jeering progressives demonized and dehumanized him. They fat-shamed him on social media and toasted their success at getting him banned from the next school board meeting at which they passed their policy to turn all Loudoun County school bathrooms transgender.
The subterfuge might have been successful if it hadn’t been for an enterprising reporter at the Daily Wire who bothered to find out Smith’s side of the story — and a horrific tale it is.
The alleged rapist of his daughter was quietly shipped to another school, where he struck again. That’s a failure of the school system of Loudoun County, which quite obviously did not take the Smiths’ complaint seriously.
“If someone would have sat and listened for 30 seconds to what Scott had to say, they would have been mortified and heartbroken,” Smith’s attorney, Elizabeth Lancaster, told the Daily Wire.
But no one listened. Instead, Smith, 48, became the poster boy for the new “domestic terrorism” the Biden administration has concocted to destroy anyone who gets in the way of its agenda.
Hillary Clinton said Monday in an appearance on “The View” that we’re “in the midst of a concerted, well-funded effort to undermine American democracy.”
She’s half-right. There is indeed a concerted, well-funded effort to undermine American democracy, but it doesn’t come from Donald Trump, whom Clinton claims is responsible for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and ongoing efforts to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election. (Clinton would know all about questioning the legitimacy of elections; as recently as 2019 she was still repeating the outrageous accusation that Trump was an “illegitimate president” who seized the office by colluding with Russia.)
The former secretary of state and 2016 Democrat presidential nominee is wrong that Trump and GOP leaders are undermining election integrity — they have nothing on her when it comes to that — but she’s right about efforts to seize elections and thwart the will of the voters. Those efforts aren’t coming from Trump but from her own Democratic Party, which colluded with corporate media and Big Tech to tip the scales in favor of Joe Biden and actually undermine the 2020 election.
That’s the subject of an important new book out this week by Mollie Hemingway. “Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, And The Democrats Seized Our Election,” which grew in part from reporting at The Federalist in the months before and after the November 2020 election, which chronicled unprecedented changes to election laws in key swing states, as well as appalling abuses of power by local election officials in the days and weeks after Election Day.
“Rigged” doesn’t argue or allege that the election was stolen, but that it was corrupted by corporate media, Big Tech censorship, the courts, and Democratic activists. Taken together, it all amounted to heavy-handed election interference of a kind we have never seen before.
What happened, exactly? Hemingway doesn’t point to any one thing, because what happened was the combined efforts of the most powerful institutions in America.
Those efforts are too numerous to recount here (hence the book), but they include Big Tech controlling what kind of political reporting voters could see online, Facebook infiltrating the supposedly non-partisan offices that administer our elections, and Democratic Party operatives launching a fusillade of lawsuits to make outrageous changes to election laws in key swing states. Just to mention a few.
From Big Tech, there was unprecedented censorship by Twitter and Facebook of The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, which chronicled not just Hunter’s drug problems but his influence-peddling operations trading on his father’s name to mint lucrative overseas business deals in places like China and Ukraine. The corporate press followed Big Tech’s lead, disparaging and dismissing the Post story as “Russian disinformation.” (Only last month did Politico admit what everyone knew was true at the time, that the emails at the center of the scandal were genuine.)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured an unprecedented $419 million into local government election offices through a pair of non-profit organizations called The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) in the form of grants that came with strings attached. As William Doyle recently explained in The Federalist, these funds had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, lobbying, or other expenses that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. It had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by left-wing activists, and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, and data-sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive outreach campaigns in areas heavy with Democratic voters.
From Democrats, there came a coordinated campaign of lawsuits to change election laws in ways that would benefit Democrats, using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse. Writes Hemingway, “Democrats were able to convince legislatures, courts, and election officials to open elections up to ballot trafficking, voting without showing identification, voting without following state law or guidelines, and counting ballots without oversight from independent observers.” All of this, we were told, was necessary because COVID-19 made it unsafe to vote in person.
Some of these changes were seemingly technical or obscure, and went largely unnoticed (because they were ignored by leftist media) in the months leading up to the election. Often, GOP-controlled state governments simply capitulated to Democrat demands.
For example, Georgia settled a lawsuit in March 2020 brought by Democratic Party-affiliated groups that changed the rules for mail-in ballots. Instead of the signature on the ballot having to match the signature on the voter rolls, it only had to match the signature on the mail-in ballot application. You can see how that might invite mail-in ballot fraud, but Georgia went along with it.
Many other states made similar changes under pressure from Democrats. A dozen states temporarily expanded mail-in voting. Others took the incredible step of mailing ballots to everyone on the voter rolls. Still others extended their mail-in ballot deadline, set up ballot drop boxes, or allowed ballot harvesting on a mass scale.
During the election itself and in the days following, Republican election observers in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania claimed they were harassed, lied to, and in some cases thrown out of ballot-counting rooms where they had a legal right to observe the proceedings. One election observer in Detroit told me that every time a GOP poll challenger questioned a ballot, he or she would be harassed by city workers, ballot-counters, and Democratic poll challengers for not social distancing. “It was very clear that they were targeting us and finding any reason to get us removed,” she said.
Taken together, Americans had — and have — good reasons not to trust the outcome of the 2020 election. As Hemingway said on The Federalist Radio Hour this week, 2020 was “the weirdest national election we’ve gone through in memory — it was, you know, massive changes to election laws, massive changes to the procedures by which we handled voting, massive propaganda, massive tech suppression.” And if you dared to notice these changes or complain about them, you were labeled a conspiracy theorist.
Democrats, Big Tech, and the corporate press would like very much for Americans to forget all of this ever happened. Certainly, they don’t want anyone digging into the details and revealing how, exactly, they interfered with the election, mainly because they plan to do it again in 2024.
That might be harder for them to pull off now, thanks in part to Hemingway’s timely and deeply disturbing book
William Shatner this week inspired the world by becoming the first 90-year-old to travel to space.
And, of course, the petty and nasty head of the homosexuals in America, George Takei, was resentful.
Takei threw shade at his former Star Trek co-star following Shatner's historic trip to space. When asked by Page Six what he thought about Shatner's ride on Blue Origin, Takei quipped, "He's boldly going where other people have gone before."
"He's a guinea pig, 90 years old and it's important to find out what happens,” Takei, 84, added. The actors starred together on the original 1966 series.
"So 90 years old is going to show a great deal more on the wear and tear on the human body, so he'll be a good specimen to study," Takei continued. "Although he's not the fittest specimen of 90 years old, so he'll be a specimen that's unfit!"
Shatner is well aware his age made him the oldest person ever to go into space on Wednesday.
"I had to walk up that platform, I was exhausted. My muscles hurt from all this training, I'm aching, I'm in pain," the actor quipped on Thursday's CBS Mornings. "And I'm up there, and I'm saying, 'Holy s***, I am 90!'"
Shatner admitted to getting nervous before blastoff.
"You're lying back there and you know there's all this explosive material. And we know it's safe. They've made this, Blue Origin has made it safe. I want to emphasize that. So it's safe. But it's one thing to say it's safe, and it's another thinking 'Oh, I remember O-rings, and I remember explosions," he shared, admitting the feeling of being in G-force was an emotional experience.
"You're floating. Your gut is floating, your head is floating. The outside is, you're immersed in things that are indescribable," Shatner continued. "I was so moved. And what I wanted when I said I want to hold on to it, it's like a truth that suddenly comes to you. And you don't want to dissipate it. You don't want to lose it. You want to hold it for the rest of your life."
A couple of weeks ago, President Joe Biden and congressional Democratic leadership claimed that his $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan would cost zero dollars. Despite the obvious absurdity of the statement, two weeks later, Biden and company have not changed course and continue to cling to this talking point, with the credibility of an errant student claiming, “The dog ate my homework.”
Roll Call decided to dig a little deeper ask whether the public is buying what Biden is selling when it comes to the cost of his reconciliation bill. They aren’t, or at least a sizable majority aren’t.
In our Oct. 8-10 survey, they asked voters a pretty straightforward question: “Do you believe or not believe the following statement: The Build Back Better Plan costs zero dollars.”
Voters, overall, said they didn’t believe the statement, 62 percent to 21 percent. If we were grading credibility, Biden and his Democratic colleagues on the Hill would be getting a big fail.
But the numbers among key groups were even worse. Nor surprisingly, only 12 percent of Republicans believed the claim, while 78 percent didn’t. The numbers among independents were even worse: Seventy percent said they didn’t believe it while only a meager 9 percent did. But here’s the real kicker.
Biden, for all of his speeches and tweets and despite the best efforts of his surrogates and liberal pundits, hasn’t even been able to convince the majority of his own party that his centerpiece legislation won’t cost them a dime. In the survey, Democrats were split at 38 percent who believed to 41 percent who weren’t on board with the cost of Build Back Better. When you single out moderate Democrats, the group represented by Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the numbers were worse, with only 27 percent believing the “zero dollars” statement compared with 53 percent who didn’t. Liberal Democrats gave Biden the benefit of the doubt, 46 percent to 31 percent, but he still lost almost a third of this group. Not good. Not good at all.
Digging deeper still, they found Biden also hasn’t made the sale with women: Sixty-one percent didn’t believe the claim and only 15 percent did. Among suburban women, a key group for both parties in 2022, only 12 percent believed it while 67 percent didn’t. Men were just as skeptical, with 28 percent believing the statement compared with 63 percent who didn’t.
Last but certainly not least, 60 percent of Hispanics didn’t believe the statement either.
But the “zero dollar” $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill isn’t Biden’s only problem. Public polls over the past two weeks have shown the president under water over his handling of nearly every major issue. An Oct. 1-4 Quinnipiac poll put his overall job approval rating among registered voters at 40 percent approve to 53 percent disapprove, and his approval among all adults was only 38 percent. An Oct. 2-4 Politico/Morning Consult poll found Biden’s approval among registered independent voters was as low as 35 percent.
Biden isn’t faring any better on the issues. Looking at approve/disapprove numbers from several public polls, he’s under 50 percent on almost every major issue.
According to Quinnipiac, among registered voters, he’s polling at 49 percent to 48 percent on the coronavirus; 41 percent to 55 percent on the economy; 39 percent to 54 percent on taxes; and 26 percent to 67 percent on immigration.
An Oct. 6-8 CBS News/YouGov survey of U.S. adults found Biden at 47 percent to 53 percent on infrastructure; 37 percent to 63 percent on Afghanistan; and 47 percent to 53 percent on climate change.
Worse for the president, Quinnipiac asked registered voters whether the Biden administration was competent. Forty-four percent said yes, while 54 percent said no. On the question of whether he has good leadership skills, Biden stumbled at 43 percent yes and 55 percent no. These are bleak numbers after what was supposed to be a summer of “joy and freedom,” promised by the White House.
And what’s over the horizon for Biden, beyond his stalled infrastructure and reconciliation bills? Ships so backed up in the nation’s ports, waiting to unload, that the running joke is you can walk from Long Beach to Seoul these days. A chip shortage that is disrupting the supply chain for major industries and products across the country and warnings to buy Christmas gifts early or risk empty stockings. If Biden is not careful, he may end up being the Grinch who stole Christmas.
Meanwhile, airlines, flight control operations, law enforcement, schools, hospitals and the military are facing staffing pressures as the unintended consequences of vaccine mandates begin to emerge. Troubling jobs reports, rising energy prices and the inflation the Biden administration has been telling us was only temporary are dragging down an already wobbly economy. And then there’s the continuing problem of an out-of-control southern border and the possibility of a new crisis overseas.
So what does Joe Biden have to say about all this?
“I’ve never been more optimistic about this country than I am right now. We are going to pass both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal and the Build Back Better Agenda — and start building this economy to beat the competition and deliver for working families.”
Yet the no court or recount has found in Rump's favor.
Keep believing and spinning as long as you feel the need to comfort yourself, poor baby, since Rump lost, fair and square.
"Yet the no court or recount has found in Rump's favor."
I never said Biden didn't win. But Mollie Hemingway's new book does show how Dems weakened voter integrity policies, using COVID as an excuse, and may be trying to immortalize these emergency measures. You have to wonder why.
She explains how mainstream media and Big Tech conspired to conceal information from voters that would probably have changed the result
Biden's family is clearly guilty of influence-peddling. The only unclear is whether it was illegal. But, regardless of legalities, it would probably have excluded him from consideration by voters
Voters are also showing remorse:
Joe Biden is a radical president. Especially when it comes to the role government can and should play in the lives of everyday Americans.
Biden's policy agenda -- from the $1 trillion "hard" infrastructure bill to the as-yet-unpriced social safety net package -- would, if passed, fundamentally alter the relationship we have with government.
In short: The era of small government (such as it ever existed) would be over. The era of expansive government would begin.
Except that a majority of Americans don't want more government in their lives, according to new data from Gallup.
In the poll, just 43% said they wanted government to "do more to solve the country's problems," while 54% said they thought that government "is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses."
That's a MAJOR shift in public opinion from where we were just one year ago, when 54% -- a record high in Gallup polling -- said they wanted government to do more to solve the country's problems.
That reaction, quite clearly, was the result of the Covid-19 pandemic -- and a general desire for the federal government to do whatever it could to get the country through the worst of it.
As Gallup's Jeffrey M. Jones notes:
"Last year marked only the second time in Gallup's 29-year trend that at least half of Americans endorsed an active role for the government on this item. The other pro-government response came in the weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks amid heightened concern about terrorism and a surge in trust in government."
With the virus -- finally -- appearing to recede after the latest wave caused by the Delta variant, people have returned to their past desire to have government in their lives less rather than more.
Much of the shift from 2020 to 2021 comes among independents. In 2020, 56% of unaffiliated voters said they wanted the government to do more to solve the problems facing the country. This year? Just 38% said the same.
That swing away from more government involvement -- especially among independents -- has to be a major concern for Biden and his party as they a) work to push through these two giant pieces of government-growing legislation and b) seek to hold their House and Senate majorities in November 2022
Bad news for liberals: they won't be able to politicize the court.
President Biden’s commission evaluating potential reform of the Supreme Court cautioned that increasing the size of the court might be perceived as partisan maneuvering, and noted that imposing term limits on the justices would require a constitutional amendment.
The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States will meet Friday to begin writing a report to the president, likely to be presented next month. Mostly made up of academics, the draft materials that the commission has collected so far, released Thursday night, read much like a textbook on history and available options.
Biden named the commission in response to liberal demands that something be done to stop originalists on the court form defending the Constitution. Originalists have a 6-3 majority. Liberals were particularly livid that a Republican-controlled Senate refused to hold a hearing on Merrick Garland in 2016. Garland is now attorney general and is active in suppressing free speech and ending the petitioning for the redress of grievances at local school boards. It then approved the nomination of originalist Amy Coney Barrett to take the seat of the late radically partisan Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020.
While a subcommittee said there was no “legal obstacle” to expanding the court — its size has varied over the centuries but has remained at nine since 1869 — its report said “the risks of Court expansion are considerable, including that it could undermine the Court’s legitimacy.”
Expansion efforts, the report says, might hurt the high court’s “long-term legitimacy or otherwise undermine its role in our legal system.” The report cautions that it could lead to a “continuous cycle” of expansions, citing one estimate of as many as 29 justices in the next 50 years.
“The public might come to see the court as a ‘political football,’ a pawn in a continuing partisan game,” it said.
At the same time, term limits for justices would require the Constitution to be amended to make such a change, a difficult undertaking.
"Bad news for liberals: they won't be able to politicize the court."
It's already been politicized/
Mitch McConnell, who held up Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court pick, says he’d fill a 2020 vacancy
And then RBG died on September 18, 2020 and Mitch McConnell allowed Rump another Supreme Court pick weeks before the 2020 election.
Then the election happened and Biden beat Rump by 6 million votes and the Democrats kept their House majority and gained a VP majority in the Senate.
"It's already been politicized"
right you are
the Dems started this all because they refused Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork because he wasn't liberal enough
the problem with Dems is they classic whiners who start a game and then get mad when their opponent plays better than them
losing at Monopoly?
flip the board over and stomp off in a pout!
"And then RBG died on September 18, 2020 and Mitch McConnell allowed Rump another Supreme Court pick weeks before the 2020 election."
that's called playing by the rules
Dems were free to persuade Bader to resign while Obama was President
blame her
it's mostly her fault
but also the Dems who nominated Hillary
did they really think that ditzy, corrupt narcissist could win?
any decent candidate would have beaten a clown like Trump
btw, no one named Rump was involved, you pathetic jackass
It only took Biden about seven or eight months to really screw the economy up
Just a few months ago, the U.S. economy looked like it was roaring back from the pandemic slump. Now the recovery is starting to look more like a grind.
Millions of Americans are holding back from spending on services like restaurants and hotel rooms.
Supply chains are still creaking. And high inflation is stretching household budgets.
The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s real-time estimate of economic activity now predicts growth of 1.2% in the quarter that ended in September. Two months ago it was forecasting 6%
it's sad
Biden thinks he's FDR & LBJ reincarnated
he's actually just Slidin' Joe Biden
more like Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter - without the personality
LOL!!!!!!!!!!
one other difference: Jerry and Jimmy were honest people with decent kids
Biden is a corrupt influence-peddler
"And then RBG died on September 18, 2020 and Mitch McConnell allowed Rump another Supreme Court pick weeks before the 2020 election."
that's called playing by the rules
We all see you skipped the bit about "Mitch McConnell, who held up Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court pick"
What rules were those?
That's how you politicize the Supreme Court, using different rules for presidents of different parties.
"What rules were those?"
glad you asked
the rules are that the Senate decides whether to approve Supreme Court justices
if a Democrat is President, he needs to submit a nominee acceptable to the Senate
when Obama sent over the nomination of the egregious Merrick Garland, the Senate was filled with believers in judicial originalism
Obama should have called up Mitch before sending the nominee over and make sure the nominee was alright with Mitch
btw, the Senate was Republican because Obama had so screwed up as President
when he came in, the Senate was Republican
as Amy C Barrett, both the President and Senate were believers in judicial originalism so the matter was settled quickly
them's the rules
whoever Americans elect to the Senate will have a veto on Supreme Court nominees
that's democracy
It’s all CRT these days.
I’m teasing a bit here, but only a bit. As the debate over the teaching of various critical theories in U.S. public schools has heated up, major papers have published wave after wave of articles denying that critical race theory is taught much at all outside law schools, while other writers have drawn the most technical of distinctions between “CRT” and other academic specialties like critical theory, whiteness studies, critical pedagogy, intersectionality, white fragility, white privilege theory, and so on.
This debate over semantics might provide an interesting basis for a panel at a scholarly conference, but it’s of little use or interest for parents concerned that their children are being taught partisan nonsense. While technical differences exist between the various critical paradigms, virtually all of them share three baseline assumptions: that racism is “everywhere,” and supposedly neutral systems, such as policing or standardized tests, are set up to oppress minorities; that to prove the existence of this oppression one need only note that large groups perform at different levels; and that the solution to this problem is equity—or proportional representation of all groups across all endeavors.
None of this is an exaggeration. The quote about racism being “everyday” and constant comes from Richard Delgado, one of the founders of critical race theory. The claim that group differences must indicate racism or other prejudice comes from no less a critical eminence than Ibram X. Kendi, who has famously said that the only possible explanations for such gaps are either oppression or literal genetic inferiority. Kendi has also proposed a federal-level Department of Anti-Racism. Along with these core ideas of “systemic racism” generally come a basket of other woke concepts like white privilege, “cultural appropriation,” “intersectionality,” the Black Lives Matter take on policing, and the idea of constant interracial conflict and crime.
Parents reject most of this package not because they are bigots or too complacent in suburbia but because they believe it is wrong. As analysts like Thomas Sowell have pointed out for more than 40 years, the idea that gaps in performance between large groups must be due either to racism or to genetics is absurd.
Groups of people who vary in race and religion also often vary across other cultural and situational traits. For example, the most common age for a black American, which could be fairly called the modal average, is 27; the most common age for a white American is 58. Simply adjusting for these differences in age (and thus work experience), and for a few other traits like the regions people live in and their scores on standard aptitude tests, closes black-white gaps in income to almost nothing. In fact, either seven or eight—depending on how you count South Africans—of the top ten income-earning groups in the United States these days are made up of “people of color.”
Most of the ideas associated with the major critical paradigms collapse as easily and totally as their core concepts. After years of flattering mainstream media coverage of Black Lives Matter, a large recent study revealed that the majority of “very liberal” Americans believes that in a typical year police kill anywhere from “about 1,000” to “more than 10,000” unarmed black men. Last year, the actual number of blacks killed in this manner was 18.
A serious look at the data on interracial crime and conflict reveals similar patterns. Major papers run nonstop stories about cruel whites or mobs attacking minorities. Meantime, figures from the U.S. National Crime Victimization Study reveal that only about 3 percent of all serious crimes in a normal year, like 2019, are violent crimes involving a white perpetrator and a black victim or a black perp and a white victim. Further, 70 percent to 90 percent of these incidents are generally black-on-white, rather than the reverse.
Facts matter, but so does context. Critical theorists say some things that are essentially true, but meaningless—and likely to mislead unless one has a nuanced understanding of history or other disciplines. For example, it is undeniably true that slavery once existed in the United States. However, it is also undeniably true that almost every other powerful nation in history held slaves as well.
A trans-African slave trade run largely by Muslim merchants lasted far longer than even the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and it subjected far more people (about 18 million) to human bondage. The same amoral traders didn’t hesitate to sell battle captives or shipwrecked sailors with pale skin: the conveniently forgotten Barbary slave trade shipped more than 1 million Caucasian slaves to Arab and black masters for centuries. Focusing lesson plans and curricula on the horrors of slavery without ever mentioning the universal nature of the practice or the fact that it was ended by Western countries is hardly “just being honest.”
Just being honest: that phrase really sums up what parents demand—not, generally, a jingoistic system of education, but also not a reflexively critical one. Parents want an honest, fair, and reasonably apolitical curriculum that depicts the United States as it was and is, warts and all
Througout the 21st century, Dems have refused to admit George Bush won the presidency. Last week, Terry McAuliffe still couldn't quite bring himself to admit that President Bush won in 2000. Amazing.
When the reporter pushes him, McAuliffe throws up his hands and says that once Bush was sworn in, they had to "move on," but based on his destructive lies in the ensuing years, he didn't move on. He kept telling Democrats that the election was "stolen," which was not true. Bush won, every way you slice it. Tellingly, McAuliffe concludes his answer with this hilarious point: “At the time, let’s be clear, I wasn’t running for governor.” Yes, he was merely the DNC Chairman, a position from which he had a wider ability to sow the "Big Lie" on a national scale. Things are different now, you see, because he's running for governor. And he's chosen to make election lies an issue. So he'd prefer that he simply be allowed to lie about his opponent on the subject of election lies, rather than be asked about his own actual lying about elections. It's all just so unfair for Terry.
Conservative pundit Charlie Sykes on Friday lamented what he described as the “race to the bottom” to “see who can be the most MAGA” between Republicans in Florida, Arizona and Texas.
“I know that Republicans in Texas have been conservative for a long time but there was a time when conservative Republicans in Texas were not absolutely batshit crazy,” Sykes, founder of the conservative website The Bulwark, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace in video shared online by Mediaite.
“Texas Republicans used to be respectable,” Sykes continued. “And now we are almost in this competition … between Florida, Arizona and Texas to see who can be the most MAGA, who can play the most hair-on-fire culture war games, because that seems to be this race to the bottom that we’re talking about here.
Sykes’ comments came during a discussion about a Texas law that instructs teachers to offer opposing perspectives on historical events. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) recently banned COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the state, which is also now subject to a highly restrictive abortion law.
A school administrator faced backlash this week after saying educators should “make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one” with alternative viewpoints.
Sykes said it was “easy to beat up on the administrator” but “the focus ought to be on the law and the fact that the teachers are terrified. They don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“What is the other side of the Holocaust?” Sykes later asked. “Are you going to assign fourth-graders ‘Mein Kampf’? Are you going to make them listen to Seb Gorka’s radio show? I just don’t know what she actually had in mind. But again, this is exactly what you get when you have politicians playing culture war and then trying to ram that into badly thought out draconian legislation.”
"But again, this is exactly what you get when you have politicians playing culture war and then trying to ram that into badly thought out draconian legislation.”
actually, that's what's going on with CRT
don't get me wrong, I don't think there's any other side to the Holocaust and kids should be told the truth, not the Muslim spin
but CRT is the same problem
its proponents slant everything into a racism paradigm to advance a political agenda
to them, truth is irrelevant
The recent drop in support for President Biden and his administration has imperiled Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, according to recent polling conducted by Schoen-Cooperman Research.
Though Biden won both states by double-digits in 2020, our data indicates that the president’s declining ratings — brought on by his stalled domestic agenda, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the southern border crisis and the unchecked surge of progressivism — have demonstrably weakened Democrats in both races.
To that end, our poll found that two key likely voter subgroups — those who say they are absolutely certain to vote in November and those who say they vote in all gubernatorial elections — are less likely to support their respective Democratic gubernatorial candidate. This signals that both Democrats may be in an even more fragile position than most overall voter polls make it seem.
To be sure, these trends are more pronounced in Virginia, where a direct line can be drawn from Biden’s declining ratings to McAuliffe’s tenuous lead.
Biden beat Donald Trump by 10 points in Virginia in 2020, though we found that the majority of likely voters now disapprove (51 percent) rather than approve (47 percent) of Biden’s job performance.
While McAuliffe has worked to distance himself from the president — by calling on Democrats and Biden to “get their act together” on infrastructure and criticizing the progressives’ reconciliation bill — political polarization and the nationalization of state races can make it difficult for individual Democrats to fare better than their party.
Furthermore, our poll found that, among those who say they are absolutely certain to vote, McAuliffe’s position is even worse. Notably, these voters disapprove of President Biden by an 11 point margin.
And in the horserace among those who vote in all gubernatorial elections, Youngkin leads, garnering 49 percent of the vote compared to McAuliffe’s 45 percent. President Biden’s approval rating is also underwater with these voters, who disapprove of him by a 14 point margin.
Our subgroup analysis might beg the question: Why would data among those absolutely certain to vote and those who habitually vote in gubernatorial elections be especially predictive in this election?
Winning off-election year contests is largely a matter of excitement and intensity. Given the national Democratic infighting, Biden’s lagging ratings, and the absence of Donald Trump or a true Trump-like foe, there is no indication that fair-weather Virginia Democratic voters who are currently on the fence about voting will be motivated to turn out like they were in the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections and in the 2017 gubernatorial election.
On the other hand, Youngkin’s approach is clearly motivating Republicans and conservatives. Youngkin’s strategy has been to attack Biden’s failures and stoke cultural anxieties about the rise of progressivism — especially as it relates to education and critical race theory in schools, which has become a divisive issue in the race — without directly tying himself to Donald Trump.
As Washington Post’s James Homann observed this week, “railing about critical race theory lets Youngkin appeal to his coalition of Never Trumpers and Forever Trumpers without talking about Donald Trump.”
“Republicans are in striking distance of winning statewide in Virginia for the first time since 2009, and Democrats seem to be sleepwalking into disaster,” Homann added.
A similar trend exists in New Jersey as in Virginia in terms of those absolutely certain to vote and those who habitually vote in gubernatorial elections being more likely to vote Republican in the governor’s race.
Democrats need to understand that the broader electorate, and especially swing-state voters “are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.”
In other words, Democrats need to find a way to come together on a moderate and inclusive agenda that centers on unity, greater fiscal responsibility, responsible tax policies, and growing the economy for all.
White House chiefs of staff should never use emojis.
Using two of them, President Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, stepped on a landmine when he endorsed a Harvard economist’s tweet which suggested the rising cost of goods across the country is a "high class problem."
An incredibly tone-deaf message to deliver by an administration already under fire for being out of touch with ordinary Americans (a recent Quinnipiac poll showed the number of people who say President Biden cares about ordinary Americans dropped from 58% to 49% since April).
Inflation is real and so is the pain the average American is feeling.
On Election Day 2020, the price of a gallon of gasoline was $2.122. Today it is $3.306.
In November 2020 the price of coffee cost $4.485 per lb. Last month, it costs $4.733.
In November 2020 the price of orange juice was $2.285 per 12 oz. can. Last month, it was $2.544.
And get ready for the pain about to be caused this winter as the prices people pay for home heating oil and natural gas surge.
These aren’t high class problems. They’re costly problems that disproportionately harm low-income and middle-income Americans, who already have enough to worry about.
Beyond being oblivious to the harm inflation causes, another problem is how the Democrat party is increasingly becoming a party of elite upper-income Americans, post-graduate degree Americans, Harvard economists and college graduates who can afford to pay higher costs.
Democrats, who used to brag they are the champions of working Americans, are increasingly alienating themselves from America’s middle-class—while Republicans are increasingly appealing to them.
President Biden promised he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year, yet the massive tax hike approved by the House Ways & Means Committee last month raised taxes by $96 billion on people who smoke or use e-cigarettes. I guess those people don’t count. The Democrats must view them as low-class people who don’t have high class problems.
Democrats can claim they’re only raising taxes on the rich, even though their legislation is a direct, tax-hiking contradiction of that claim. Democrat tax hikes on corporations will also be paid by all Americans.
Every time the Democrats claim they’re taxing the rich, middle-income Americans end up paying the tab.
Democrats are also the party that wants to restore a massive tax deduction that allows the truly wealthy to fully deduct the cost of state and local taxes, along with interest on expensive mortgage payments, from federal income tax. These wealthy taxpayers do indeed have a high-class problem—one the modern-day Democrat party is eager to fix.
Democraps are so screwed. They can get anything passed because two of their own are listening to voters. But this year's reconciliation bill, an annual exception to the filibuster, is likely their last chance to pass legislation for a long while. It is very unlikely that the might GOP won't regain the Senate next November!
Democraps are terrified of what the future holds for them in the United States Senate.
The party currently controls half the seats in the chamber, giving them, with Vice President Harris’s tie-breaking vote, the narrowest possible majority. But some in the party — like pollster David Shor, recently profiled by Ezra Klein in the New York Times — believe demographic trends put Democraps at grave risk of falling into a deep hole over the next two election cycles.
That risk exists even if Democraps continue to win more votes nationwide. “If 2024 is simply a normal year, in which Democraps win 51 percent of the two-party vote, Shor’s model projects a seven-seat loss, compared with where they are now,” Klein writes.
In other words, Republicans could well get a 57 to 43 Senate majority, the mighty GOP’s biggest in about a century, even if Democraps win more votes.
This sense of impending Senate doom is the backdrop for many of Democraps’ debates right now — the messaging fight over whether the party should embrace “popularism,” the legislative fight over the reconciliation package that may be Democraps’ last chance to legislate for some time, and the frustration with a conservative Supreme Court majority that looks likely to be entrenched for years to come.
Democraps’ main problem is that they’ve been doing poorly among white voters without a college education, who are spread out across many states, while Democraps’ voters are concentrated in fewer, bigger states. (This is why Shor has been arguing that the party needs to change its message to better appeal to such voters.)
Recent presidential election results show how Democraps’ votes are packed into fewer states. When Biden won about 52 percent of the two-party popular vote in 2020, he won 25 states. But when Trump won about 49 percent of the two-party popular vote in 2016, he won 30 states. (If mighty GOP Senate candidates had managed to replicate Trump’s map in 2018 and 2020, they would have won a 60-vote supermajority.)
Democrap presidential candidates’ struggle to win more states isn’t entirely new — George W. Bush won less than 50 percent of the national vote in 2000 but still won 30 states. What was different back then was voters were much more willing to split their tickets, voting for a presidential candidate from one party and a Senate candidate from the other. Ten states split their results like that in 2000 but zero did in 2016 and only one (Maine) did in 2020. The increased polarization and nationalization of politics are producing more uniform results.
To get a better sense of this, though, it’s worth delving into the specific seats that are in play. There are three Democraps representing states Trump won in 2020, all of whom are up in 2024. But there’s a second tier of vulnerability in the 10 Democraps representing states Biden just narrowly won. There are fewer Republican senators in comparable positions, and those that do exist seem to be on safer ground than their Democrap counterparts.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) said Sunday that former President Donald Trump’s ongoing comments about the 2020 election are “not constructive” and could spell disaster for the GOP in the 2022 midterms.
Hutchinson was asked on NBC’s “Meet The Press” about a Trump statement released Wednesday that said Republicans “will not be voting” in the 2022 midterm election and the 2024 presidential election unless the party “solves” his debunked allegations about 2020 voter fraud.
“Relitigating 2020 is a recipe for disaster in 2022,” Hutchinson said. “Let’s talk about the future. The election is past. It’s been certified. The states made decisions on the integrity of each of their elections and made improvements where need be.”
He added: “It’s about the future. It’s not about the last election. And those kinds of comments are not constructive.”
Hutchinson was among a smattering of sitting Republican officials to publicly acknowledge President Joe Biden won the 2020 election in the weeks after the Nov. 3 vote. At the time, most Republicans had remained silent or stood behind Trump as he refused to concede and brayed about supposed electoral fraud.
Nearly a year since the election, Trump continues to devote considerable energy to pushing conspiracy theories that the election was stolen from him, despite dozens of failed legal challenges, recounts and audits that confirmed Biden’s victory.
Trump openly admitted at a recent rally that the issue is the one that gets him the most attention and “biggest cheers.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) made a similar prediction to Hutchinson on “Meet The Press” last Sunday.
“If we relitigate 2020 over and over again, it won’t change the result in 2020, but we are sure to lose in 2024,” he said. “If we choose to look forward, bringing positive solutions to the American people who have needs, we win. If we choose to be bullied, we lose.”
As Washington Post’s James Homann observed this week, “railing about critical race theory lets Youngkin appeal to his coalition of Never Trumpers and Forever Trumpers without talking about Donald Trump.”
Never underestimate the ability of conservatives to fear monger about race and/or LGBT issues to motivate their base to vote.
Conservatives also like to pretend slavery really wasn't a big problem:
"Much of the controversy about the Texas standards has focused on comments made in 2010 by Patricia Hardy, a Republican member of the education board, who said, “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”
Dan Quinn, communications director for the liberal Texas Freedom Network, criticized the textbooks, saying, "[T]he books muddy things by presenting sectionalism and states’ rights ideas throughout. ... A lot of white Southerners have grown up believing that the Confederacy’s struggle was somehow a noble cause rather than a war in the defense of a horrific institution that enslaved millions of human beings.”
This isn’t the first time the Texas standards have caused controversy. After the state adopted the guidelines in 2010, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times blasted the Texas education board for casting Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as “moral equivalents.”
Meanwhile, in Texas' own Declaration of Causes (1861):
https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html
"Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated States to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility [sic] and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretenses and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States."
CRT is a false conspiracy theory that is much more than that slavery was a problem
slavery was evil but that's not CRT
police departments weren't created to subjugate minorities
the Civil War wasn't an uprising of slaves
et al et al
More evidence emerges that Attorney General Merrick Garland has allowed the Department of Justice to become outrageously politicized on behalf of liberal interests. Indeed, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer is breaking the law.
Nine months into the Biden presidency, Garland has yet to comply with a perfectly legitimate order issued by former President Donald Trump on his last day in office. The order, made in the worthy cause of public transparency, would declassify much of the material from the investigation into Russia’s efforts to help Trump win the presidency.
Even though it is a wild overstatement to say the entire Russia investigation was a “hoax,” key parts of it were hopelessly compromised from the very beginning in ways that appear at least borderline criminal. We know that as an indisputable fact. We know that Democratic operatives ginned up surveillance operations based on patently false accusations. And we know that the worst suspicions, namely that Trump or his aides engaged in an illegal conspiracy with Russian operatives, were unsubstantiated.
Even former Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos, now with ABC News, has taken a tough line on much of this bogus information. ABC’s This Week on Sunday aired excerpts from an interview Stephanopoulos conducted with Christopher Steele, the extremely dodgy former intelligence agent from Great Britain whose “dossier” full of now-debunked allegations played a huge role in catalyzing the Russia inquiry. Judging from the excerpts, Steele comes out looking dodgier than ever. (The full interview will stream on Hulu beginning Oct. 18.)
The public has good reason to want as much information as possible about involvement in this illegitimate hit job by people working on behalf of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Whatever Trump’s motives in ordering most of the information released, the public interest in rooting out political corruption supports that order.
When U.S. senators — who are, of course, elected delegates of the public and rightly enjoy oversight authority vis-a-vis executive agencies such as the Justice Department — repeatedly request documents declassified by a president, the department has an absolute duty to comply in a timely fashion. In this instance, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have been requesting the documents since Feb. 25, eight months ago. Since then, they say they have made “countless emails and phone calls requesting updates.” They say the department “has not produced a single declassified record to Congress and the American people.”
Absent a countervailing public order by President Joe Biden, it is the absolute, lawful duty of Garland to comply with Trump’s order and with the senators’ demands. In this case, it would be highly improper for Biden to issue such an order, as it would amount to protecting his close political allies at the expense of the public’s right to know how its own government was compromised.
In thumbing his nose at a presidential order and at duly elected senators, Garland is on shaky ground. If Democrats in Congress cared, as they should, about their institutional authority rather than covering up what would be a short-term political embarrassment, they would join Republicans in insisting that Garland do his duty.
Garland right now is in violation of the law and in obvious contempt of Congress. If he continues this course, Congress should make a formal finding of contempt and President Biden should order Garland’s deputies to enforce it against their boss.
you wonder who's worse:
the Attorney General who is using anti-terrorism laws against parents at school board meetings
or the Transportation Secretary who's been on paternity leave or the last two months while our shipping infrastructure is failing
or the VP who was sent to fix up the border (ha-ha)
or maybe creepy Slidin' Biden himself who made the largest transfer of military equipment to terrorists in the history of the world and is trying to add 5 trillion in spending to an inflationary environment
The only thing more laughable than Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim that spending two months on paternity leave counts as “work” is that the massive infrastructure bill in Congress would do anything to fix the supply chain crisis.
When asked on CNBC why the administration waited so long to take action, Buttigieg responded that “we’ve been working this issue from day one”.
Well, not exactly.
As Politico reported, Buttigieg was “mostly offline” starting in mid-August, and only went on a media blitz after Politico disclosed the fact that he’d been on an unannounced leave.
It’s true that Biden issued a supply chain executive order in early February, saying that “we’re not going to wait for a review to be completed before we start closing the existing gaps.”
In June, Biden announced the creation of a new Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force with Buttigieg one of the key members. The next month, Buttigieg said, he’d “convened the entire ecosystem of supply chain actors.”
Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in an attempt to defend the administration’s response, told reporters that “we’ve not only been talking about this since January, we’ve been working to put in place a range of steps to help address the challenges in the supply chains.”
In August, just as Buttigieg was clearing out for the next two months, Vice President Kamala Harris was warning that “if you want to have Christmas toys for your children, it might be the time to start buying them because the delay may be many, many months.”
So Buttigieg’s absence during this was inexcusable. And other than acknowledging that the supply chain crisis existed, it’s hard to see what “work” anyone in the Biden administration was actually doing
"or the Transportation Secretary who's been on paternity leave or the last two months while our shipping infrastructure is failing"
If you would stop obsessing about the gay folks for 5 minutes you might notice that the supply chain problem and the inflation its causing is a world-wide problem. It's not something the US is going to fix on its own.
Over recent months, there has been supply chain disruption resulting in delayed deliveries, increased prices and, in some cases, gaps on supermarket shelves. Nandos, Ikea and BP are just some of the companies reporting problems.
The causes of this disruption are complex. Part of the problem is that demand in the UK economy has recovered from the low levels seen during the pandemic more quickly than supply.
The single biggest cause of supply chain disruption is staff shortages, with Brexit, Covid and wider economic conditions all contributing. For example, at a recent Institute for Government event, Ian Wright, chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation, highlighted that, across the whole UK food supply chain, there were about half a million staff shortages, representing 12.5% of the total workforce required.
The haulage sector, which is essential for the transport of both components and finished goods across many supply chains, is particularly badly affected, with industry bodies estimating a shortage of 90,000[1]–100,000[2] drivers. A lack of drivers has delayed fuel deliveries, forcing some petrol stations to close.[3] In some cases, this prompted panic buying, making shortages worse – not helped by weaknesses in government communications."
Meanwhile, in Vietnam...
New York (CNN)Surging shopper demand coupled with shipping container shortages and bottlenecks at ports have already triggered tighter supply of products, from cars to shoes.
In particular, some of America's biggest sellers of clothing and shoes cite one catalyst that has compounded the pressure: factory closures in Vietnam stemming from a second wave of the coronavirus outbreak there. That's led brands from PacSun to Nike to warn about the effects on their supply.
In late September, Nike (NKE) cut its full-year sales outlook due to supply chain issues, despite its CEO noting strong consumer demand.
Nike makes about three-quarters of its shoes in Southeast Asia, with 51% and 24% of manufacturing in Vietnam and Indonesia respectively.
But as the Vietnam government imposed pandemic-related restrictions, including a mandatory shutdown of factories for several weeks from July into September, Nike said it incurred 10 weeks of lost production.
Even when factories start to reopen, which the company expects to happen in phases beginning in October, ramping up to full production could take several months, Nike's chief financial officer Matthew Friend said in a recent earnings call. Half of Nike's clothing factories in Vietnam are currently closed, company executives said during that call.
Vietnam is a crucial supplier to the US in particular for apparel and footwear.
"It's a very big partner of the United States. It's our second largest source of apparel and footwear," said Steve Lamar, president and CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association, an industry group. China is the largest supplier of clothing and shoes, according to the AAFA.
In July, Vietnam was caught in the throes of a coronavirus outbreak caused by a suspected new variant of the virus, which Vietnam's health minister said led to a fast spread of new infections in the nation's industrial zones.
The government subsequently imposed strict lockdowns and temporarily shut factories there until mid-August, then extended it into September. Some factories are still closed.
All of this means that production for everything from sneakers and sandals to jeans, dresses, T-shirts, jackets and more is stalled.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-31/what-s-happening-in-the-world-economy-germany-squeezed-by-supply-chains
Supply Chain Strains
Europe’s largest economies are starting to feel the squeeze from fraying supply chains.
The speed of Germany’s recovery is being put at risk as companies in the manufacturing powerhouse report shortages of materials ranging from memory chips to lower-tech parts and even basics such as wooden pallets.
Pandemic jolts everywhere are throttling even an economy with a brand built on efficiency and a reputation for precision and durability. The supply problems are wreaking havoc on companies from Siemens to BMW, and they could persist into next year or even longer.
Getting Expensive
Germany companies are planning to jack up prices for customers
“In my career we haven’t had a situation with so many commodities being scarce at the same time, and I’ve been dealing with the same materials since 1996,” said Thomas Nuernberger, managing director of sales at Mulfingen, Germany-based EBM Papst, a maker of industrial fans. “This is the most difficult situation in the global supply chain I’ve witnessed.”
Germany is enduring the squeeze in other ways too: imported inflation there surged to 15% in August, fueling a surge in overall consumer price growth in the euro region that was the fastest in a decade, according to data released Tuesday.
Meanwhile, U.K.-based supermarkets and fast-food chains are running short of some supplies amid a shortage of truckers and post-Brexit bureaucracy.
Consumers can’t get milkshakes at British branches of McDonald’s, some stores are running low on bacon, milk and bread, and there have been warnings of shortages at Christmas.
The experience in both countries exposes how supply chain problems are no longer a short-term phenomenon and risk hobbling supply, curbing demand and fanning inflation into 2022.
"If you would stop obsessing about the gay folks for 5 minutes you might notice that the supply chain problem and the inflation its causing is a world-wide problem. It's not something the US is going to fix on its own."
actually, as the world's leading economy, we have more influence to affect the solution than any other country
unfortunately, Slidin' Biden had to pay back some homosexual mayor from a small town for dropping out of the race and clearing the lane for him
he's the person who should be overseeing our amelioration of this problem and he's home doing - who knows what?
even if he weren't AWOL, he'd be severely unsuited to the task
if Slidin' Biden wanted to dole out political payback, he should have made him ambassador to Jamaica, or something
we need someone competent in that job at this time!
"The causes of this disruption are complex."
that's why we need a qualified person on it
not a gay token!
"we need someone competent in that job at this time!"
Since when has competency been a requirement for Republicans?
Just look at their last 2 Presidents. Both of them were known for their poor business practices before they got into office.
Nepotism seems their favorite qualification.
Both Bush and Rump destroyed the economies they were handed. It will be up to Democrats to fix it again while Republicans try to destroy the economy as much as they can.
Like Clinton and Obama before him, there is every reason to believe that when Biden leaves office, the economy will be in better shape than when the Republican before him left office.
Granted, that's not a really high bar, given how miserably the Republicans performed, but at least it is something to look forward to. Well that, and not having to worry about an insurrection based on gaslighting voters with lies.
from the Bolsheviks of the early 20th century to "TTF" of the early 21st century, rewriting history is what the radical leftists do
"Both Bush and Rump destroyed the economies they were handed. It will be up to Democrats to fix it again while Republicans try to destroy the economy as much as they can."
2008: there was a downturn caused by a homosexual chairman of a House committee that Democrats, unpatriotically exacerbated by Dems because it was so close to the election
a key element of economic well-being has to do with the confidence the public has in the economy
Dems and their media co-conspirators made sure the public had no confidence
Obama's "fix" was so incompetent that most speeches at the 2012 Dem convention had the theme that Bush is to blame for why the economy still hadn't recovered 4 years later
but the growth sluggishness and poor jobs environment Obama created was due to over-regulation
although the Dems and their media co-conspirators tried to convince everyone that Obama's malaise was the new normal, Trump came in and showed that wasn't true
he produced the lowest minority unemployment rate in history and a booming economy
it was setback a few months by the Chinese biological attack on us, it was recovering and now Biden is destroying the economy
"Like Clinton"
Clinton was as bad as Obama and Biden for the first two years and then, to survive, he began to take orders from Newt Gingrich
"and Obama"
Obama presided over the weakest downturn recovery in the Reagan era
"there is every reason to believe that when Biden leaves office, the economy will be in better shape than when the Republican before him left office."
sure, he will lose the House and Senate in 2024 and it will be Clinton and Gingrich deja vu
Mitch will run the country
"2008: there was a downturn caused by a homosexual chairman of a House committee that Democrats, unpatriotically exacerbated by Dems because it was so close to the election"
Stop trying to re-write history, Orwell.
The housing market had been unsustainably propped up for years by Greenspan keeping interest rates ridiculously low and never bothering to question why he had to do that.
Republican deregulation fanaticism led to "liar loans," so what few regulations were left regarding mortgages weren't even followed, much less enforced by the Bush administration.
And Goldman-Sachs invented "credit default swaps" that lead to the investor class dumping vast sums of money into that deregulated housing market blowing it up into a classic investment bubble. You can blame Clinton for signing the bill that got rid of Glass-Steagall, but that profoundly stupid idea came right out of the Republican's deregulation handbook.
"a key element of economic well-being has to do with the confidence the public has in the economy"
This explains why you are so desperate to hype the economy when a Republican is in the Oval Office, and disdain and disparage it as much as humanly possible when a Democrat is in office. Not very patriotic of you.
"Dems and their media co-conspirators made sure the public had no confidence"
Voters didn't need dems or the media to tell them when they were unceremoniously let go from their jobs because Wall Street speculators crashed the economy. It was pretty obvious to them what happened.
"but the growth sluggishness and poor jobs environment Obama created was due to over-regulation"
That's what your broken record keeps playing but you have yet to point out which regulations stopped any American jobs.
Meanwhile, Republicans did everything they possibly could to stop job growth by enforcing "sequestration" during Obama's tenure, making sure the govt could not encourage any job growth, all the while claiming is was necessary to keep from growing the deficit.
Very shortly after Rump came into office though, the need for "sequestration" and limiting deficit growth magically disappeared and federal expenditures started increasing again, creating more jobs.
"he produced the lowest minority unemployment rate in history and a booming economy"
Yet Obama still created more jobs during his last 3 years than Rump did during his first 3, (before the pandemic) in spite of Republicans cynically holding back funds for economic growth.
Maybe if Rump had spent less time golfing he would have had more time to concentrate on doing something useful.
Rump's only real numbers to increase were the deficit and debt.
"it was setback a few months by the Chinese biological attack on us, it was recovering and now Biden is destroying the economy"
The economy was destroyed by a poor response to the pandemic. The inflation we see now is due to classic supply and demand - lots of demand, not enough supply - prices go up. It's how capitalism works. The fact that demand is high is a good sign - it means there is money that folks want to spend - and will spend once the goods are available. Once the supply chain straightens out, prices will come down.
"Mitch will run the country"
Mitch has no idea how to run the country. He could be replaced by a rock with "No" painted on it.
Whenever congress wanted to do something outside of cutting corporate and billionaire taxes, they could consult the Rock of Mitch and it would tell them "No."
Which is exactly what his corporate overlords want him to do.
"The housing market had been unsustainably propped up for years by Greenspan keeping interest rates ridiculously low and never bothering to question why he had to do that."
is that what happened?
interestingly, the rates never have gone up
despite massive deficits and low interest rates, Obama couldn't make a go of anything
sluggish economics which he spent most of his term blaming on Bush
LOL!
"Republican deregulation fanaticism led to "liar loans," so what few regulations were left regarding mortgages weren't even followed, much less enforced by the Bush administration."
Barney Frank, a homosexual that had a male prostitution ring running out of his house, insisted on this as a misguided attempt to increase minority home-ownership
Barney owns the recession that resulted
"You can blame Clinton for signing the bill that got rid of Glass-Steagall, but that profoundly stupid idea came right out of the Republican's deregulation handbook."
so, you admit Clinton was actually doing what the might GOP told him to...
"This explains why you are so desperate to hype the economy when a Republican is in the Oval Office,"
the economy during the Reagan era, 1980 - 2006, doesn't need any hyping
it was the envy of the world and defeated the Soviet Union
"and disdain and disparage it as much as humanly possible when a Democrat is in office. Not very patriotic of you."
unlike what the Democraps did in 2008, I'm not making anything up to depress the economy
it can all be cured with lower taxes and lower government spending and lower regulations
read the polls
Americans already know this, I'm not talking them into it
"That's what your broken record keeps playing but you have yet to point out which regulations stopped any American jobs."
they all do
the point is they shouldn't be what's necessary
Trump eliminated thousands of regulations and the economy soared!
"Meanwhile, Republicans did everything they possibly could to stop job growth by enforcing "sequestration" during Obama's tenure, making sure the govt could not encourage any job growth, all the while claiming is was necessary to keep from growing the deficit."
there you have it
the Democrap answer to unemployment is for the government to hire all the unemployed people and borrow the money from China to do it
"Yet Obama still created more jobs during his last 3 years than Rump did during his first 3,"
LOL, why not compare Obama's first 3 to Trump's first 3?
Obama produced lousy burger-flipping jobs and lowered unemployment by lowering labor participation
Trump took care of minorities and gave them hop
"Maybe if Rump had spent less time golfing he would have had more time to concentrate on doing something useful."
Trump's economy was a success
he could afford to get exercise
"The economy was destroyed by a poor response to the pandemic."
Democraps convinced Americans of the last November, but now we've seen what Biden can do
Trump's warp speed worked
nothing Slidin' Biden has done has worked!
"Mitch has no idea how to run the country. He could be replaced by a rock with "No" painted on it."
interesting thing for you to say, considering he's currently running rings around the Democraps
the scary thing about how dumb the average TTFer is:
half of them are even dumber!
Andrew McCabe, the former acting FBI director who became a frequent subject of Donald Trump’s rage, will get his pension after Trump pushed to strip him of it, with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions firing McCabe hours before he could retire. The Justice Department has settled a lawsuit with McCabe, rescinding his firing and returning his pension and benefits, along with about $200,000 in back payments.
As acting FBI director following Trump’s abrupt firing of James Comey, McCabe drew Trump’s rage by approving the decision to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Russia and possible acts of obstruction of justice. McCabe also said publicly that on their first meeting, Trump had described his wife as a “loser” because of a failed Virginia state Senate run. Jill McCabe’s campaign as a Democrat became a frequent subject in Trump’s attacks claiming that Andrew McCabe owed political favors to former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and, through him, to Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Trump made McCabe a frequent target and explicitly threatened his pension, saying in one tweet, “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!” Go figure: When Sessions fired McCabe just in time to deny him his full pension, it looked suspicious. McCabe sued, claiming he was illegally fired for political reasons.
The Justice Department did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
“Politics should never play a role in the fair administration of justice and civil service personnel decisions,” McCabe said in a statement released by Arnold & Porter, the law firm representing him. McCabe added, “I hope that this result encourages the men and women of the FBI to continue to protect the American people by standing up for the truth and doing their jobs without fear of political retaliation.”
McCabe was also previously investigated for lying to investigators about authorizing a subordinate to talk to a reporter about Hillary Clinton’s emails, with the decision not to charge him coming in February 2020 and causing a new set of Trump temper tantrums. A judge in that case, Reggie Walton, warned about Trump’s public attacks: “I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road and we have those type of statements being made that are conceivably, even if not, influencing the ultimate decision.”
In a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, Jill McCabe described her husband as a “reliable Republican” and detailed their efforts to ensure that her candidacy did not pose ethical conflicts for him; nonetheless, Trump turned it into evidence of Andrew McCabe’s partisan intent.
“I have spent countless hours trying to understand how the president and so many others can share such destructive lies about me,” she wrote. “Ultimately I believe it somehow never occurred to them that I could be a serious, independent-minded physician who wanted to run for office for legitimate reasons. They rapidly jumped to the conclusion that I must be corrupt, as part of what I believe to be an effort to vilify us to suit their needs.”
Corrupt people tend to believe that others are behaving in a corrupt manner. Angry at McCabe for daring to challenge him, Donald Trump jumped to the assumption that McCabe must be corrupt, and did his best to ruin the man’s life. Getting back the retirement benefits he earned won’t undo the damage to McCabe’s family, but it’s at least a measure of justice. And Trump is probably in a bad mood today.
"so, you admit Clinton was actually doing what the might [sic] GOP told him to"
I've said that several times before - I never voted for Bill and he made a poor leader. He licked his finger, stuck it in the air, and followed the ways the polls were blowing. He should have stood up to Republicans and did what was right for this country. Letting hedge funds invest in the housing market was a bad idea in the 1920's and it was a bad idea in the 1990's and 2000's. But Republicans kept insisting on "this is a new economy! We don't need 70 year old regulations!" It wasn't a new economy. It was the same old economy just with new fools.
Clinton isn't the only one to blame though. Before the SEC instituted Rule 10B-18 in 1982 under Ronnie Raygun, corporations rarely bought much of their own stocks back. That again was because of rules put in place after the Great Recession to keep corporate America from crashing the economy again.
Despite the crash of the dot com bubble, the telecom bubble, the housing bubble, and a number of smaller bubbles, Republicans are still deluded into thinking corporations pumping trillions of their profits into stock buybacks is a good idea. It simply isn't.
Previously, those profits would have gone to building up their workforce, and long-term research and development. Now most companies are chasing quarterly profits and their CEOs are lining their nests with stock options. Few US corporations are innovating the way they used to. Tesla is a notable exception, but Musk is an immigrant and doesn't follow conventional US corporate thinking.
"Trump eliminated thousands of regulations and the economy soared!"
Rumpy never even did as well as Obama in terms of GDP growth. In fact, Obama had years that beat all 3 of Rump's positive years:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-growth-rate
Obama best: 2015: 3.08% Worst: 2009: -2.54%
Rumpy best: 2018: 3.00% Worst: 2020: -3.49%
But you've never let pesky little facts get in the way of your delusions.
"LOL, why not compare Obama's first 3 to Trump's first 3?"
Because Obama got stuck cleaning up the Bush recession. Rump was handed a working economy, just like Bush was. But like Bush, Rump ruined it.
"the Democrap answer to unemployment is for the government to hire all the unemployed people and borrow the money from China to do it"
You haven't been paying attention - Democrats have been all about taxing the rich and even adding a wealth tax to pay for their stuff. Of course, finally getting out of Afghanistan gives them roughly 300million per day to pay for stuff.
And paying those people to build a new green power infrastructure where the fuel is wind and sunlight will mean lower power bills everywhere they are built. It's really hard for coal and gas to compete on cost with air and sunshine.
"say what you will about Trump, everyone knows until China unleashed COVID on the world, Trump had all boats rising in the economy"
If Rump had a bit of foresight, and not disbanded Obama's pandemic response dept., there's a reasonable chance to expect he would have done better. After all, it would have been hard for him to do worse.
"In or around May 2018, the White House dissolved the National Security Council (NSC) Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. Established in 2014, the Directorate was responsible for monitoring global health risks, including disease outbreaks, and coordinating the federal government's response thereto. It was dissolved as part of a broader reorganization of the NSC, which was oversee by then National Security Advisor John Bolton. As part of the reorganization, Directorate staff were reassigned to other NSC units, including one focused on weapons of mass destruction, and another responsible for international organizations. The Directorate's senior director, Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer, was reportedly "pushed out" and left the NSC."
Joe Biden’s not having a great fall. His legislative agenda is treading water, his poll numbers are slipping, and even his core supporters are unhappy. While they are prone to point the finger at the GOP and the press corps, the reality is that the White House has largely itself to blame.
Indeed, for all the sturm und drang about Biden’s lousy polling, the question that could be asked is why so many Americans approve of the job the president is doing.
September was another brutal month for Covid-19 cases and deaths, and though the numbers are finally starting to decline, more than 1,600 Americans are still dying every day.
Biden did not announce his plan for vaccine mandates until early September. While federal employees and members of the military are now required to be vaccinated, amazingly the Occupational Safety and Health Administration still hasn’t issued guidelines for employers to impose mandates on their workers.
Had the president acted sooner, like in the spring when it was clear that vaccine rates had stalled, vaccination rates would almost certainly be higher now — and many deaths could have been averted. Biden’s apparent fear of sparking a political backlash might have seemed politically prudent then, but in retrospect it was a major missed opportunity. The growing frustration over America’s inability to return to normal, the masking requirements that still exist in a number of states, the tentative economic recovery, the fact that millions of Americans are still working from home and, of course, the ever-rising death toll have likely been the biggest contributor to Biden’s weak polling numbers.
While Biden came into office and moved quickly in proposing and enacting his bold policy agenda, he’s replicating his tentativeness on Covid on other fronts.
It’s easy to blame Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema for the legislative roadblock in Congress, but where is the urgency from the White House? Biden is acting more like an interested bystander than a politician whose presidency is riding on Congress’s ability to deliver on his Build Back Better agenda. Democratic partisans complain that the media has done a poor job of explaining the bill’s specifics to the American people. But perhaps Congress spending the past few months haggling over price tags is part of the reason.
Biden billed himself as a guy who can get things done — and right now, nothing is getting done in Washington. In addition, Biden is not doing nearly enough to use the presidency’s bully pulpit to his advantage. This is his bill, and he is ceding ground to feuding Democrats in Congress and allowing them to be the face of his policy agenda.
Ironically, the one place where Biden threw political caution to the wind and acted decisively came in August, in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet, that is when Biden’s numbers began to spiral down, and in part because it punctured the aura of competence that he had cultivated on the campaign trail and in his first few months in office.
In addition, the president’s liberal supporters, who had their hopes set on police reform or progress on voting rights, are being stymied left and right. The blame for police reform not happening or the details of the Afghanistan withdrawal are Biden's for the vast majority of voters
Even the death of a widely admired, barrier-breaking leader has been reduced to a political talking point. And Donald Trump has taken it to a new level.
After four-star General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell died, emotional tributes poured out from elected officials honoring Powell's character and longtime service to his country. President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama issued long, personal statements about what Powell had meant to them. Former President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, expressed their deep personal sadness over the loss. And sitting Secretary of State Anthony Blinken delivered formal remarks recalling how kindly Powell had treated career diplomats and what a mentor Powell had been to many.
There was nothing from the immediate past president, Donald Trump – not even a brief, rote statement of condolence. And on Tuesday morning, Trump unloaded on the recently deceased man, dead at 84 from COVID-19 complications, who had crossed party lines to endorse Trump's Democratic opponents in 2016 and 2020.
"Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media," Trump said in a statement. "Hope that happens to me someday. He was a classic RINO [Republican in Name Only], if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans. He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!"
Republicans aligned with Trump or that wing of the party toed the line, not going so far as to openly insult Powell, but by remaining quiet or putting out brief and impersonal statements of condolence. Only a handful – such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who angered Trump when the Kentucky Republican said Trump was morally responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection – made more effusive remarks...
Report: Trump disparaged US war dead as ‘losers,’ ‘suckers’
DELRAY BEACH, FLa. — A new report details multiple instances of President Donald Trump making disparaging remarks about members of the U.S. military who have been captured or killed, including referring to the American war dead at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 as “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump said Thursday that the story is “totally false.”
The allegations were first reported in The Atlantic. A senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press, including the 2018 cemetery comments.
The defense officials said Trump made the comments as he begged off visiting the cemetery outside Paris during a meeting following his presidential daily briefing on the morning of Nov. 10, 2018.
Staffers from the National Security Council and the Secret Service told Trump that rainy weather made helicopter travel to the cemetery risky, but they could drive there. Trump responded by saying he didn’t want to visit the cemetery because it was “filled with losers,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The White House blamed the canceled visit on poor weather at the time....
The Defense officials also confirmed to The AP reporting in The Atlantic that Trump on Memorial Day 2017 had gone with his chief of staff, John Kelly, to visit the Arlington Cemetery gravesite of Kelly’s son, Robert, who was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, and said to Kelly: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
The senior Marine Corps officer and The Atlantic, citing sources with firsthand knowledge, also reported that Trump said he didn’t want to support the August 2018 funeral of Republican Sen. John McCain, a decorated Navy veteran who spent years as a Vietnam prisoner of war, because he was a “loser.” The Atlantic also reported that Trump was angered that flags were flown at half-staff for McCain, saying: “What the f—- are we doing that for? Guy was a f—-ing loser.”...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/09/03/report-trump-disparaged-us-war-dead-as-losers-suckers/
Trump's a loser but, I agree, he's the only hope of Dems
he may be a Dem mole, he's so bad
he has no future
A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Joe Biden's approval numbers continuing to slip through his first year in office, stuck in the upper 30s.
Respondents gave Biden a negative 37% job approval rating, with 52% disapproving and 12% not offering an opinion. That's down from Oct. 6.
Additionally, 38% said they hold an overall "favorable opinion" of Biden, down significantly from May, when he was still fresh in office, with 49% rating him favorably.
Biden's numbers may be sinking like a ship, but Democratic members of Congress are faring even worse.
Per the Quinnipiac poll, respondents gave congressional Democrats a negative 30% approval rating to 60% disapproval.
A look at what respondents chose as their top issues may provide insight as to why the approval numbers sit where they do. Quinnipiac determined the economy to be the most urgent issue facing the country today, selected by 19% of respondents. That was followed by COVID-19 (16%) and immigration (14%).
Over the past decade, the woke agenda has crested like a giant tsunami, covering virtually the entirety of academia, the media, the corporate world and even the military. The Gramscian concept of ‘the long march through the institutions’, embraced by 1960s radicals like Germany’s Rudi Dutschke, has achieved overwhelming success.
Yet there are signs that the woke progressive model may be losing its appeal, even among some liberals. The bulk of public opinion is not in progressives’ favour. In the US, activist progressives, notes a recent study, represent eight per cent of the electorate – barely half the size of moderates and barely a third of the size of conservatives. What they lack in numbers, however, they make up for with single-minded determination; progressive whites, notes the Atlantic, are the most intolerant of all Americans, led by those in the Boston area, while people in smaller towns and cities seem far more open.
The scalps of those targeted by the woke are strewn across the landscape. There’s the cancellations of ideologically unacceptable speakers, the delisting of books and the increasingly selective media coverage, evident particularly in the 2020 election and its aftermath. Yet the very vehemence of progressives, their lack of humour or grace, may prove to be their undoing.
Among Republicans, wokeness drives them further away from the mainstream media, as many of them now regard certain outlets as little more than vehicles for proselytising progressivism. But it’s not just the nutjobs of the far right. A recent Rasmussen survey found that 58 per cent of likely voters ‘at least somewhat agree that the media are the enemy of the people, including 34 per cent who strongly agree’.
‘Cancel culture’ is no more popular than the rest of the woke agenda. More millennials oppose than support cancel culture, notes a recent Morning Consult poll. The older generations are much more firmly against it. But most heartening is that those in the younger generation, the so-called Zs, are the most hostile to cancel culture, with 55 per cent disapproving of it and only eight per cent supporting it.
Simply put, what progressives are offering the populace does not much like, particularly on social issues. There’s been a record-breaking surge of violent crime, but some progressive politicians and media enablers have refused to combat disorder. Some have even embraced riots, particularly the looting, and backed defunding or even abolishing the police. This has not worked out well for the progressives. In the New York City mayoral elections, a black ex-cop won the Democratic nomination against candidates sympathetic to the ‘defund the police’ approach. Even left-leaning constituencies are horrified by crime, disorder and massive homelessness, as demonstrated when Austin voted overwhelmingly to end camping on the street.
Perhaps most important of all, the far-left agenda pushed by Bernie Sanders and the progressives in Congress – who are essentially setting up a new green, politically correct system financed by taxpayers – is failing with the public, particularly independents. Public support for big government has decreased, notes Gallup, and is now the minority position. In Ohio, a Bernie Sanders-style candidate for Congress was soundly defeated. The Biden administration continues to struggle with low poll ratings as it continues to identify with the progressives.
Race has been a particular problem for Biden. The administration has embraced the racialist agenda of the progressives built around critical race theory. Remarkably, parents opposing CRT in schools have been singled out as potential ‘terrorist threats’ that should be monitored by the FBI. Yet this parents movement seems to be gaining strength – including in upper-middle-class suburbs in places like Loudoun County, Virginia, the Philadelphia ‘ring’ counties and north Dallas, where the Democrats had made gains previously but now stand to lose ground. In 2021, the number of school-board recalls has more than doubled from previous years, according to Ballotpedia, and there are numerous legal challenges to CRT across the country.
But when it comes to Biden’s political malpractice, nothing compares to the mounting disaster at the border. Most Americans favour legal immigration, but support for ‘open borders’, amid the biggest surge in illegal crossings in 20 years, is not deep. This massive movement of migrants started in earnest after Biden’s election and is deeply unpopular across the country. Latinos, including some border-state Democrats, are themselves deeply concerned about the mass incursions. Some of them are now shifting to the GOP.
But it’s not just among newcomers or minorities that the woke are losing their grip. Many long-time liberals have been shocked by the abandonment of concepts of free speech and open inquiry by many Democrats, including by some in the Biden administration. Trump may perform like a dime-store Mussolini, but it’s increasingly clear that the push towards censorship comes largely from the left, which has captured most of the media. Liberal journalists like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald have uncovered the odd ties between Democratic operatives, including in the media, and organisations like the CIA and FBI, once widely suspected as right-wing enforcers.
This is less a shift to the right, as occurred with neoconservatives under Reagan and Thatcher, and more an internal rebellion. As long as Republican politicians remain loyal to Trump, while adopting extreme views on social issues like abortion and flirting with white-nationalist themes, there’s little chance liberals will embrace the GOP. But liberals increasingly can’t share the stage with progressives, either. The 2020 Harper’s letter against cancel culture, signed by many left-of-centre writers and academics and published in a left-of-centre magazine, was no endorsement of conservatism. It was blowback against ‘illiberalism’ and a ‘stifling atmosphere’ which its signatories say has ‘intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity’.
The best way for Biden and the Democrats to revive themselves, as Bill Clinton political guru James Carville notes, would be to detach the party from gender, race and other lunacies of the ‘faculty lounge’. In contrast, an approach that seeks reform within the framework of the constitutional order and favours middle- and working-class upward mobility would work well – particularly with working-class whites and Latinos as well as the suburban moderates who hold the balance of power in American politics.
Perhaps the most impregnable part of the woke empire may be the formerly right-leaning corporate sector. The shift to progressive politics has snaked there through the human-resources departments, and led many executives to sing the praises of, and give money to, groups like Black Lives Matter, whose agenda, among other things, includes demolishing capitalism.
Some firms are already acting to enforce wokeness, denying credit and payment services to unacceptably rightist candidates or movements. Google, for example, now routinely demonetises political movements that offend progressive sentiments, although this standard does not always apply to the vitriol of Iran’s mullahs or the Nation of Islam. Woke tech firms like Amazon, Facebook and Google seem particularly vulnerable. As Bay Area council president Jim Wunderman suggests, they are ‘scared of their own employees’, and are adopting positions simply to keep militants in their ranks quiet.
Some companies, like Coca-Cola, may be beginning to rethink swallowing whole the progressive agenda, which has led to a backlash among consumers and local politicians. Coke and Wall Street firms like BlackRock may be big backers of the craze for so-called ethical investing, but they are also deeply committed to making money, including by doing business in autocratic China. Microsoft and a host of other firms are helping to build China’s surveillance state, while others, like Kodak, take down pictures of what’s going on in Xinjiang to please the Mandarins. Companies like Apple emit airs of progressivism, but they are opposing efforts to denounce Uyghur concentration camps or repression in Hong Kong and would likely sit idly by during an invasion of Taiwan.
Hypocrisy on a grand scale is nothing new, but the brazenness of all this could begin to wear down the corporate woke tide. This is not to suggest that the dour radical fringe will leave us alone in the near future, given their outsized cultural, political and societal influence. But at least their assertions are no longer being left unchallenged, even among liberals. If we are lucky, their joyless reign may not ever quite be consummated, to the vast relief of most of us.
You know conservatives are desperate when one of them has suddenly changed his tune and is now complaining about a LACK of government mandates:
"Biden did not announce his plan for vaccine mandates until early September. While federal employees and members of the military are now required to be vaccinated, amazingly the Occupational Safety and Health Administration still hasn’t issued guidelines for employers to impose mandates on their workers.
Had the president acted sooner, like in the spring when it was clear that vaccine rates had stalled, vaccination rates would almost certainly be higher now — and many deaths could have been averted. Biden’s apparent fear of sparking a political backlash might have seemed politically prudent then, but in retrospect it was a major missed opportunity."
This rhetorical reversal is enough to give someone whiplash.
No one is going to believe that after nearly 2 years of bashing masks, vaccines, and mandates, conservatives NOW suddenly want Biden to engage in some government intervention to fix the problem.
Assuming there is no new variant to come along in the next three months, the steadily declining numbers show Covid should be pretty much taken care of in the US at the beginning of 2022, and we can start getting back to normal, with some time for the economy to recover before the next election.
That of course, would be bad news for Republicans. So they are trying to shift the narrative now to blame him for NOT imposing mandates when they have been opposing even considering them all along.
Did they really think no one would notice this and recognize its naked cynicism and hypocrisy for the desperate machinations that it is?
"You know conservatives are desperate when one of them has suddenly changed his tune and is now complaining about a LACK of government mandates:"
actually, it seems like that individual was showing how, even applying the Dem's logic, Biden is a failure
"Assuming there is no new variant to come along in the next three months, the steadily declining numbers show Covid should be pretty much taken care of in the US at the beginning of 2022, and we can start getting back to normal, with some time for the economy to recover before the next election."
it will only recover if Biden's agenda is unsuccessful and taxes are not raised and government spending is not increased
otherwise, it's Jimmy Carter, the Sequel
A revamped bill aimed at weakening voting integrity and overhauling the nation's election systems failed to advance in the Senate on Wednesday.
The procedural vote to begin debate on the Freedom to Vote Act was 49 in favor to 51 against, far short of the 60 votes needed to advance the measure.
Putin slams ‘cancel culture’ and trans rights, calling teaching gender fluidity ‘crime against humanity’
...The authoritarian leader has sought to portray himself as a symbol of virile masculinity — for instance, by being photographed shirtless on horseback — while ramping up a state-led pressure campaign on sexual minorities in Russia.
Putin rules a country where there have been numerous credible reports of the torture and imprisonment of gay men. In 2013, he signed an anti-“gay propaganda” law that Human Rights Watch said prompted increased hostility toward LGBTQ communities and made it harder for children to access information about nontraditional relations.
The effect has been particularly profound in schools, where some Russian teachers characterize LGBTQ people “as a symptom of perversion imported from Western Europe or North America,” the rights watchdog said.
Putin’s rhetoric is not dissimilar to those of many right-wing populist leaders in Eastern Europe and the United States, who have targeted sexual minorities in an attempt to shore up support.
The Thursday remarks reflect efforts to rally “hardcore conservatives and supporters of traditional values” around Putin, wrote Tatiana Stanovaya, head of the Moscow-based R.Politik think tank, on a Telegram channel.
“This ideological spin, which is becoming more and more official and concrete, is the main aid to repressions, much stronger than any election,” she said.
Putin is trying to show that he “stands for values that will not divide society and throw it into chaos,” said Matthew Sussex, a Russia expert at the Australian National University. “On the one hand, it’s a unifying message. But on the other hand, it does hit … the transgender and gay communities that the Russian government has continued to target.”...
Unlike you and Putin, God doesn't make mistakes.
We are all God's children.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) offered up a massive cash reward for evidence of voter fraud following Donald Trump’s loss almost a year ago, and this week paid out his first bounty ― to a progressive poll worker who caught a Republican trying to vote twice.
Eric Frank, who worked at a polling station in Chester County, Pennsylvania, during the 2020 election, said it was “extremely ironic” he received the $25,000 payout, given Patrick’s apparent intention to support Trump’s claim the election was stolen from him.
“I never thought in a million years that I would get paid,” Frank told Maddow.
“I just think it’s extremely ironic that they were ― it’s my opinion that they were trying to see voter fraud from someone that was a Democrat,” Frank added. “And it turns out that, at least for me, for my case that I witnessed, it was a Republican voter. So, in fact I think it kind of blew up in their face a little bit.”
Patrick, a staunch Trump supporter, repeatedly bolstered the former president’s lies after the election last year, and announced in November that he had set aside $1 million of campaign cash for tipsters who could turn in evidence of voter fraud.
He said anyone whose report resulted in a conviction would get a minimum of $25,000.
Frank reported 72-year-old registered Republican Ralph Thurman after seeing him vote twice on Election Day. Thurman tried to vote once for himself and once for his son, who was a registered Democrat, according to the Dallas Morning News.
He pleaded guilty in Pennsylvania last month to repeat voting and has been barred from voting for four years.
Patrick’s first payout to a Pennsylvanian comes after persistent trolling from Pennsylvania’s Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman . Fetterman insisted the Texas politician should pay the bounty after three Trump supporters were charged in separate voter fraud incidents in his state.
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