Enforce the Laws
Trump's rallies have always had a special moment where the crowd breaks into the chant "Lock her up! Lock her up!" Sometimes the chant erupts repeatedly, spontaneously, while Hair Furor speaks. Originally it meant they wanted to lock up Hillary Clinton, but the target is not really terribly important. It could be Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, Hunter Biden, President Biden himself; women are the preferred victims. Kamala Harris is a favorite.
This chant has a strange appeal to conservatives. It is a pure, concise icon of their belief system: we don't want to debate with liberals, we don't want to listen to their over-eddy-cated ideas, we want to throw them in prison.
The new fascist movement is almost literally peasants with pitchforks and torches storming the castle. It is not literally that because, though we have seen torches, I at least have not seen pitchforks at these rightwing events. Also, they like to attack and occupy state and federal capitol buildings, and not actually castles. But the fact is, the magas want to take direct action and punish somebody, bypassing legitimate pathways. Jail would make them happy, though they are in favor of execution of liberal leaders. Assassination, torture, whatever.
Of course the problem with that is that the US has stuff like a Constitution, laws, processes for charging people and giving them a fair trial. No matter how frustrated conservatives are with our system of government, the idea that we would imprison political rivals without a criminal conviction is deeply un-American. It runs against the most fundamental principles of our way of life. You cannot claim to support freedom and liberty and also set up gallows to execute political leaders without a trial. This logical inconsistency is obvious to any reasonable observer. But still: conservatism is the defiance of hypocrisy.
These days, the Democrats control Congress and the Presidency and have the ability on many levels to investigate and prosecute big-time criminals who are trying to break our country. These are not neighborhood burglars, these are people who grab hundreds of millions of dollars at a time from government accounts through tax evasion, subsidies, fraud, bribes, nepotism, and other kinds of corruption. They make sure tax cuts go to people who don't need them, and that ordinary people do not benefit from government programs that would make their lives better; they redirect government money to their friends and families rather than to the most qualified contractors and corporations, or to citizens in need.
We do not hear Democrats chanting "Lock them up." In fact what we see is that Democratic leaders, including district attorneys and leading Justice officials, are afraid to use legitimate government processes to enforce laws that were established with good reason, for the benefit of the people of the country.
Maybe their focus groups are telling them that it would "look bad" to prosecute criminals who belong to the Republican Party. Maybe it would "look political." And so we have people like Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Donald Trump and his family members and his former Cabinet members and advisors, all of them who ripped off the American people throughout the Trump years and now are running around promoting anti-American ideas and candidates who will implement them. We have people with pending sex charges, corruption charges, frauds and grifters, seditionists and liars out on the streets, enriching themselves while they do their best to try to bring our country to its knees.
The media direct our attention to the petty things, and we fall for it. "Illegal immigrants" are not getting all the baby formula. A Black women's lacrosse team is not smuggling drugs. Shooting Black guys for cracked tail-lights does not make us safer. Our media and our attention focus on petty incidents while billionaires and millionaires, preachers and politicians and gigantic corporations are robbing us blind. Why does the US have the worst technology in the developed world? Why do we have the worst healthcare? We pay our taxes and where does that money go? It goes to fund the arms industry and it goes into the pockets of billionaires and corporations with armies of lobbyists.
Joe Biden has a lot of good ideas, programs that really do make life better for people. He has increased employment, he nearly eliminated child poverty, wages are up and crime is down, except for gun crime. He is handling the situation in Ukraine skillfully. But his approval ratings are dragging the bottom. And why is that? It's because he is coddling criminals. Our leaders, from the top down, are too cowardly to enforce the law. People know the insurrectionists must be stopped, but our leaders won't stop them.
It is not enough to provide good services to the people, especially when you have preachers, posers, and politicians up and down the country telling people that the Democrats are communists and pedophiles. Our elected leaders need to defend our values and our country, aggressively and strongly.
We had an attempted coup, once the greatest country on the planet and now we are like some little dictatorship somewhere, with maga rednecks smearing their poop on the walls of our Capitol while Congress crouches behind blockaded doors. A violent insurrection, organized and directed by the president and his inner circle. Some of the suckers and minor-league sociopaths who went into the Capitol are getting jail sentences, while all the ringleaders -- all of them -- run around free, undermining our way of life. Congress and the Justice Department are afraid to disturb them -- oh, you don't want to obey a subpoena, no prob man, sorry to bother you. The corrupt rich and powerful are becoming exponentially more rich and powerful and our elected leaders are afraid to do anything about it.
The Constitution was carefully written to support robust government in the face of political abuse. Our government was designed to survive even when some citizens have criminal intentions. The justice system was set up to support and defend an orderly, secure, lawful way of life, and it is time to use it as it was intended. Maybe some defendants will be found not-guilty, fine. Try them. Put the evidence on the table. Bring consequences.
The recently leaked Supreme Court opinion regarding abortion, once it is issued, opens the door for the courts and the federal government to take away a lot of rights besides the right to manage your own reproduction. I do not personally understand the motives of people who want to take away American citizens' rights, but tighten your seatbelts, 'cause here we go. The rightwing Supreme Court is delivering the totalitarian state that the Republican Party dreams of. They are starting with abortion and you can expect your rights to drop like flies after this.
You will not get your freedom back once the unprosecuted criminals have had their way with our country. We need to enforce laws, from the Hatch Act, bribery, and emoluments, and up to fraud and tax evasion to foreign-agent violations, to perjury and conspiracy and sedition, to protect the system that makes lawful civilized life possible in the first place. But the media and government leaders are afraid of "how it would look."
164 Comments:
WASHINGTON (AP) — White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha issued a dire warning Thursday that the U.S. will be increasingly vulnerable to the coronavirus this fall and winter if Congress doesn't swiftly approve new funding for more vaccines and treatments.
In an Associated Press interview, Jha said Americans' immune protection from the virus is waning, the virus is adapting to be more contagious and booster doses for most people will be necessary — with the potential for enhanced protection from a new generation of shots.
His warning came as the White House said there could be up to 100 million infections from the virus later this year — and as President Joe Biden somberly ordered flags to half-staff to mark 1 million deaths.
"As we get to the fall, we are all going to have a lot more vulnerability to a virus that has a lot more immune escape than even it does today and certainly than it did six months ago,” Jha said. "That leaves a lot of us vulnerable.”
Jha predicted that the next generation of vaccines, which are likely to be targeted at the currently prevailing omicron strain, “are going to provide a much, much higher degree of protection against the virus that we will encounter in the fall and winter." But he warned that the U.S. is at risk of losing its place in line to other countries if Congress doesn't act in the next several weeks.
Speaking of a need to provide vaccination assistance to other nations, Jha cast the urgency in terms of the benefits to Americans, even if they never travel overseas.
“All of these variants were first identified outside of the United States," he said. "If the goal is to protect the American people, we have got to make sure the world is vaccinated. I mean, there’s just no domestic-only approach here.”
His comments came after he and Biden addressed the second global COVID-19 vaccination summit and pressed for the international community not to get complacent in addressing the pandemic.
Here in the U.S., Biden requested $22.5 billion in emergency funding for the virus response in March, but the money has been held up, first by sticker-shock in Congress and now amid wrangling over expiring pandemic-era migrant restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Jha said he’s been making the case to lawmakers for additional funding for weeks, calling it a “very pared down request” and “the bare minimum that we need to get through this fall and winter without large loss of life.”
The Food and Drug Administration is to meet in June to determine the specific strains of the virus that the fall vaccines will target, and Jha said it takes two to three months for manufacturers to develop them. Right now the U.S. has run out of federal COVID-19 response funding to place new orders of vaccines.
“If we had the resources we’d be there having those conversations today,” said Jha. “The window is really closing on us if we want to be in the front of the line.”
@GovAbbott slams @JoeBiden @POTUS for providing baby formula to undocumented immigrants during a national shortage and FOX NEWS' Jesse Watters wants to know "why are we feeding illegal babies ahead of American babies?"
These facts indicate SOME right-wingers are pro-SOME-lives.
The rest can starve.
In early March GOP Rep. Thomas Massie voted against a simple, nonbinding resolution declaring American support for Ukraine and demanding Russian President Vladimir Putin call a cease fire. Then later in the spring, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was the only other Republican to oppose a bill to protect religious freedoms in Ukraine.
Little by little, however, with each proposal to aid Ukraine against Putin's aggression, a few more Republicans would sign up: 8 Republicans opposed suspending trade privileges for Russia in mid-March; 17 Republicans opposed a resolution supporting Moldova, whose leaders fear their Ukraine-bordering nation could be Putin’s next target; 19 opposed a similar resolution in support for Georgia.
Then, on April 27, 55 House Republicans opposed legislation to build secure telecommunications networks in Ukraine and neighboring nations. Finally, on Tuesday, 57 Republicans opposed President Biden’s request for $40 billion in weapons and humanitarian aid, with some saying the legislation had been rushed to the floor without detailed consideration. All Democrats backed the president’s request.
Trump has espoused his own fondness for Putin repeated.
More and more GOPers are falling in line behind him.
Trump's Congressional GOPers vote against protecting Ukraine's democracy from Putin's invasion, just like Putin wants them to.
Justice Clarence Thomas says the court can't be "bullied" into making a decision that some would prefer.
"We can't be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want," Thomas told a group largely comprised of lawyers and judges Friday at the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference in Atlanta, NBC News reported. "The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that."
In response, Rep. Jeffies said:
"And if Justice Thomas really want to deal with bullying in America, or this problem of people supposedly unwilling to accept outcomes that they don't like, I've got some advice for Justice Thomas, start in your own home.
Have a conversation with Ginny Thomas.
She refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
Why?
Because she didn't like the outcome.
And so instead, she tried to steal the election, overthrow the United States government, and install a tyrant.
That's bullying.
That's being unwilling to accept an outcome because you don't like the results, because the former, twice impeached so-called President of the United States of America lost legitimately to Joe Biden.
How did she respond?
Instead she said the Bidens should face a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay on trumped up charges of sedition.
You've got to be kidding me.
And lastly, let me ask this question of Brother Thomas: Why are you such a hater?
Hate on civil rights.
Hate on women's rights.
Hate on reproductive rights
Hate on voting rights.
Hate on marital rights.
Hate on equal protection under the law.
Hate on liberty and justice for all.
Hate on free and fair elections.
Why are you such a hater?
And you think you can get away with it, escape public scrutiny because you think shamelessness is your superpower??
Well, here's a newsflash straight from the House Judiciary Committee: Truth crushed to the ground will rise again and truth will be your kryptonite.
"And lastly, let me ask this question of Brother Thomas: Why are you such a hater?
Hate on civil rights.
Hate on women's rights.
Hate on reproductive rights
Hate on voting rights.
Hate on marital rights.
Hate on equal protection under the law.
Hate on liberty and justice for all.
Hate on free and fair elections.
Why are you such a hater?"
add "hate " to the words redefined by lunatic liberals
it basically loses any meaning when it is used for every situation when someone disagrees with progressives
which, let's face it, means the majority of Americans
do you think it's wrong to kill unborn children?
hate
do you think we should reduce regulations against energy companies that reduce our energy independence?
hate
against redistributive economics that that cause inflation?
hate
favor showing photo ID to vote?
hate
it goes on and on...
The details emerging from America’s latest mass shooting were as stunning as they were familiar.
A lone gunman, allegedly driven by long-simmering racial animus, opened fire at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, with the apparent purpose of taking Black lives.
The 18-year-old, white suspect, dressed in body armor and armed with a rifle, killed 10 and wounded three, police say.
It is a grim scenario that has rattled federal, state and local law enforcement officials for years as racially motivated extremists have taken lives in Charleston, South Carolina; El Paso, Texas; Pittsburgh; Charlottesville, Virginia; and now Buffalo, New York.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, in testimony last year before a Senate committee, offered perhaps the most daunting assessment of an increasingly toxic threat, saying racially motivated attackers represented the most deadly and “biggest chunk” of an estimated 2,000 open domestic terror investigations.
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, called the surge in hate crimes targeting Blacks, Asians, Jews and others as "a fire season all year long."
An examination of hate crimes in major U.S. cities tracked by Levin's group and set to be published this year found a nearly 39% increase in such offenses from 2020 to 2021.
"Nearly every social science data marker is flashing an undeniable warning sign," Levin said of the volatile environment.
Though warnings have sounded for years, the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, pushed law enforcement to confront dangerous social and political divisions that have widened for the past decade.
The Biden administration, prompted by the Capitol insurrection, unveiled its National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism last year, based on the government's assessment of the threat landscape.
"The two most lethal elements of today’s domestic terrorism threat are ... racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race and antigovernmental or anti-authority violent extremists, such as militia violent extremists," the administration concluded last year.
The attack Saturday in Buffalo appeared to affirm the government's ugly assessment...
I’m sure you’ve heard about the right’s crusade to stop indoctrination of children in our schools. They have taken to calling teaching Black history and being open and welcoming to gay families “grooming” children.
Indoctrination may be a problem but it isn’t about Black history or gay families:
Wow — Former Trump Defense Dept official Kash Patel has written a children’s book perpetuating the lie that the FBI investigation into Trump-Russian collusion was because of the Steele Dossier, and not a Trump campaign aide telling an Australian diplomat about “dirt” on Clinton.
Patel claims in the illustrated children’s book — titled “The Plot Against the King” launching tomorrow — that the merchant Donald was wrongly accused of cheating by a slug Keeper Komey and Hillary Queenton, and was saved by Kash the magician and Duke Devin.
Originally tweeted by Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) on May 15, 2022.
Trump installed Patel in a number of highly sensitive posts in the government. He even tried to make him head of the CIA.
You can buy a signed copy for only $59.99.
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is facing intense scrutiny from extremism experts, media watchdogs and progressive activists who say there is a link between the top-rated host’s “great replacement” rhetoric and the apparent mindset of the suspect in the weekend’s deadly rampage in Buffalo, New York.
The white suspect accused of killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood apparently wrote a “manifesto” espousing the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory — elements of which Carlson has pushed on his weeknight show...
Carlson has repeatedly promoted parts of the “replacement” theory on his broadcast. In more than 400 episodes, according to an analysis recently published in The New York Times, Carlson backed the idea that elites want to substitute white voters with immigrants or people from the “Third World.”...
Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive nonprofit organization that tracks far-right media, said in his view, Carlson’s documented history of provocations evidently does not bother the leaders of Fox News...
In poll findings released last week, The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 1 in 3 U.S. adults believes there is an effort underway to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for an advantage in elections.
“Those views mirror swelling anti-immigrant sentiment espoused on social media and cable TV,” the AP wrote in an article summarizing the findings, “with conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson exploiting fears that new arrivals could undermine the native-born population.”
The AP article noted that these views are not held by a majority of Americans, reporting that two-thirds of the poll respondents felt the country’s diverse population makes it stronger.
“I think killers are ultimately responsible for their own actions,” Gertz said. “I also think that it is incredibly dangerous for influential public figures to be pushing these sorts of deranged conspiracy theories in ways that provide targets for their audience and their supporters.”
“Sooner or later, people do start taking that seriously,” he added, “and when they act, it becomes a deadly situation.”
"It is a pure, concise icon of their belief system: we don't want to debate with liberals, we don't want to listen to their over-eddy-cated ideas, we want to throw them in prison."
this is a hilarious comment
from Obama's using the IRS to attack Tea Party groups and trying to fine corporation that publicly opposed Obamacare to Biden's DDJ accusing parents at school board meetings of being terrorists and creating a Ministry of Truth, liberals know their ideas can't win in open debate and will always use the classic leftist tactic of trying to shut up the opposition by any means necessary
Dems even impeached Trump on the way out in hopes of intimidating anyone who dared to point out the sleaze in the business affairs of Hunter and the involvement of Slidin' Biden
oh, and get Trump kicked off social media so he can't say anything without it being filtered by the DNC PR department, aka the main-stream media
all for naught
the message is getting through and Dems will suffer an historic loss this November
Good luck selling hateful messages like that to voters.
There are few moments that better encapsulate Donald Trump’s 2016 bid for the Republican presidential nomination than when he was asked during a town-hall event in April of that year whether he thought that women who sought illegal abortions should face criminal punishment.
It’s clear that Trump — who’d become an overt opponent of abortion only a few years prior — had never really considered the question. So he considered it right then and there, sitting across from Chris Matthews of MSNBC.
“The answer is,” Trump said, pausing to think about it — “that there has to be some form of punishment.” When he said “has,” he did his characteristic karate-chop gesture of finality. The official position of the man poised to be the Republican candidate for president is that abortion should be illegal — and that women who had illegal abortions should be punished by law.
This was not the position of the antiabortion movement, at least publicly. The campaign scrambled to modify Trump’s affirmation, insisting that, should abortion be banned, “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.” After all, they didn’t want to alienate women who would be voting in November...
In 2019, the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a national poll asking Americans what repercussions should exist for performing or having an abortion in violation of law. Most Americans thought that neither doctors nor those receiving the abortion should face criminal penalties, including either fines or prison time. Among Republicans, though, most said that doctors should face criminal punishment and about half said that women who get abortions should.
Pew Research Center asked a more nuanced question in March. If a doctor performed or a woman received an abortion in violation of the law, what punishment should they face? Again, most Americans didn’t say a woman should face a penalty and less than half said doctors should face jail time or a fine. Among Republicans, more than half said doctors should face jail time or a fine and three-quarters said either that criminal punishment was warranted or were open to that being the case. Sixty-three percent of Republicans said either that the woman should face criminal punishment or that they were not sure.
the whole question centers around whether an unborn child is human or not
science has clearly answered that the unborn child is human
thus, killing an unborn child is murder and we already have penalties for that enacted
so this is a matter of hit man and who hired the hit man
the pollsters should stop euphemizing the murder of unborn children by calling it "abortion"
ask people what the penalty should be for killing an unborn child and see what happens
"Good luck selling hateful messages like that to voters"
what a moronic comment
no serious candidate is
maybe a few of your fellow inmates at the nuthouse
good luck with your lobotomy
And thanks too for again repeating your religious views about conception and your notions about US law.
Payton Gendron killed 10 people in a Tops supermarket in Buffalo. Of the 13 people Gendron shot, 11 were Black.
His manifesto was nearly word-for-word of Tucker Carlson's interpretation of the racist "Great Replacement" aired on FOX over 400 times. It is a far-right conspiracy theory that claims Democrats and/or Jews are importing immigrants of color to replace whites.
Here's Tucker:
When confronted or pressed for details, [proponents of diversity] retreat into familiar platitude, when they repeat like a zen koan: diversity is out strength. But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is is true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America. Nobody knows. Nobody's even allowed to ask the question.
Here's Tucker again:
How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you've made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions, such as, I don't know marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better with your neighbors or co-workers if you can't understand each other or share no common values?
And here's Payton Gendron:
Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It is spoken like a mantra and repeated ad infinitum "diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength..." Said throughout the media, spoken by politicians, educators, and celebrities. But no one ever seems to give a reason why.
What give a nation strength? And how does diversity increase that strength? What part of diversity causes the increase in strength? No one can give an answer.
"And thanks too for again repeating your religious views about conception"
not religious anymore than laws against any other type of murder are "religious"
you just are stoking hateful anti-religious bias
but, it fails to resonate, doesn't it
scientific evidence has continued to accumulate since 1973
dependency doesn't make one less human
and the evidence is scientific
"and your notions about US law"
I know one thing for certain
the right to kill an unborn child will soon no longer be law
"Payton Gendron killed 10 people in a Tops supermarket in Buffalo. Of the 13 people Gendron shot, 11 were Black.
His manifesto was nearly word-for-word of Tucker Carlson's interpretation of the racist "Great Replacement""
not that familiar with Tucker Carlson although I hear he opposes US assistance to Ukraine
so, I repeat in response to your asinine comment, "Good luck selling hateful messages like that to voters":
no serious candidate is trying to do that
your comment is pointless, much like your "mind"
you cannot debate without hurling insults.
Your words of derision don't hurt me any.
They make me pity you.
I have love for the human race in all its varieties in my heart.
now I feel bad
you've been so kind and compassionate, understanding and tolerant, even if it's uncertain what kind of "mind" you have
President Biden's administration is bracing for a wave of violence when the Supreme Court rules on Roe v. Wade in June.
A May 13 memo from the Department of Homeland Security details ongoing investigations into threats to "burn down or storm" the Supreme Court building. Threats against the court arose last month after a draft majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked to the press. The Supreme Court is expected to hand down the ruling next month.
The court's conservative justices have already faced targeted protests outside their homes following the leak. The DHS memo reportedly says those protests "are likely to persist and may increase leading up to and following the issuing of the Court’s official ruling."
The Senate unanimously voted to beef up security for justices following last month's leak. The legislation allows Supreme Court police to arrest individuals who interfere with the court's ability to perform its duties, and also creates a criminal penalty for individuals who impede or obstruct those duties.
"Attempts to intimidate Supreme Court Justices by the Radical Left are sadly nothing new, but dangerous nonetheless," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who introduced the legislation, said in a statement at the time. "We must protect the Justices and their families in case these protests do turn violent."
The U.S. has already seen examples of pro-choice violence in the wake of the leak, with an unknown assailant throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window of a Wisconsin pro-life group in early May
Shot Fired Through Blackmun's Window
Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who has been the target of frequent death threats since he wrote the court's controversial 1973 decision legalizing abortion, said yesterday that a bullet was fired through a window of his Arlington apartment Thursday night.
Virginia and federal law enforcement officials said they are investigating the possiblility that an antiabortion group may have been responsible for the shooting.
Both Blackmun and his wife, Dorothy, were at home at the time, but neither was injured by the single shot, which a law enforcement source said showered glass on Dorothy Blackmun as she sat in the living room of the Blackmuns' third-floor apartment. The source said Blackmun had just left the room when the shot was fired.
Lane Bonner, an FBI spokesman, said yesterday that a 9-mm bullet, which could have been fired by a pistol or a rifle, was recovered from a chair in the apartment. Other law enforcement sources said the shot left a hole in the window about the size of a baseball.
Although police said they had no suspects last night, Bonner said, "We are looking seriously at threatening letters from antiabortion groups, especially a recent one."
Bonner declined to comment further on the letter, but law enforcement officials said that Blackmun received a particularly graphic death threat in the past week.
Blackmun, who was hearing cases at the court yesterday, has been the target of numerous threats from antiabortion groups ever since he wrote the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that overturned antiabortion laws. Supreme Court officials said the justice routinely turns the threatening letters over to the police...
...In the past, Blackmun has said he received mail calling him "Butcher of Dachau, murderer, Pontius Pilate, King Herod, you name it."
Both Arlington police and the FBI were informed immediately after last week's shooting. It became public yesterday after Blackmun released a brief statement in response to a query from a United Press International reporter.
"A shot went through the window of the Blackmun home last Thursday, Feb. 28," the statement said. "No one was injured. The matter is under investigation."
The FBI conducted a forensic analysis of the evidence this weekend, but results have not been made public.
Blackmun, 76, appointed to the court in 1970 by President Nixon, has been placed under constant police protection, according to Wanda Martinson, the justice's secretary, and all his mail is screened.
Security was first stepped up for Blackmun in October after he received a threatening letter, purportedly from a small antiabortion group called the "Army of God." The group, three of whose members were convicted last year of the kidnaping of an Illinois abortion clinic director, has claimed attacks on abortion clinics around the country.
The shooting in Arlington comes six weeks after the 12th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade case, and at the end of a year-long period in which seven abortion clinics and related facilities in the Washington area have been hit by bomb blasts.
In January, more than 70,000 opponents of abortion gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court to protest the decision. President Reagan spoke to the crowd by loudspeaker hookup and encouraged them to "end the national tragedy of abortion."
The president also condemned the recent violence at the clinics, as have several other major figures in the antiabortion movement, including Moral Majority leader the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
Blackmun has said that being a justice is a "rotten way to earn a living" and has noted that abortion foes have picketed him regularly since the 1973 decision.
"How soon they forget"
well, assuming your post is all cut from one article, it sounds like an incident from 1988, 34 years ago
that would be 15 years after the Roe decision came down
so, 15 years after Roe, a bullet went through the window of the author of the opinion
no suspect was ever found and it was not uncommon for stray bullets to go through windows during this high crime era
but you imply it was a pro-lifer that did it and you think it justifies the threats of violence by pro-death forces now
got it
mind if we quote you?
Just skip over these parts and hope no one notices:
"Blackmun, 76, appointed to the court in 1970 by President Nixon, has been placed under constant police protection"
"The shooting in Arlington comes six weeks after the 12th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade case, and at the end of a year-long period in which seven abortion clinics and related facilities in the Washington area have been hit by bomb blasts."
"Blackmun has said that being a justice is a "rotten way to earn a living" and has noted that abortion foes have picketed him regularly since the 1973 decision."
If Blackmun and the other 6 signers of Roe v. Wade put up with multiple years of picketers, so can these conservatives justices who want to return American women to forced births and no privacy regarding their reproductive choices.
"If Blackmun and the other 6 signers of Roe v. Wade put up with multiple years of picketers, so can these conservatives justices"
picketing to advocate for the right to murder unborn children is constitutionally protected, even though heinous
but that's not what Homeland Security was referring to
they said there were threats to threats to "burn down or storm" the Supreme Court building
"threats to threats to "burn down or storm" the Supreme Court building"
Sounds like the M.O. of groups like the Army of God, abortion clinic bombers, and the killers of abortion doctors and clinic staff.
The Anti-Abortion Movement Has a Long History of Terrorism. A Roe Repeal Will Make It Worse.
Read all about it.
There is already an increase of anti-choice protesters at local abortion clinics in the DC area.
"Sounds like the M.O. of groups"
actually, it doesn't "sound like", it is the MO of pro-choice lunatics
they have no problem with killing innocent and weak unborn life
why would they have any problem with violence against those who defend innocent and weak unborn life?
An internal Department of Homeland Security memo warns about rising threats from abortion rights extremists after the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a copy of the memo obtained Wednesday by NBC News.
Axios was the first to report on the details of the memo, which DHS issued last Friday.
Since the draft opinion was published on May 2, the National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium has identified at least 25 violent threats on social media that were referred to law enforcement agencies for further investigation, according to the memo from DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
"why would they have any problem with violence against those who defend innocent and weak unborn life?"
Threats are threats.
Give us one example of any pro-choicer committing a violent act with a bomb or a bullet.
You can't because there isn't one.
But I had no problem providing multiple instances of violence, including murder in church, performed by people who call themselves God-fearing pro-lifers.
An internal Department of Homeland Security memo warns about rising threats from abortion rights extremists after the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade
keep in mind, this is Slidin' Biden's Department of Homeland Security
the threat is real
"No Forced Births"
if only you felt the same about forced death
science has documented that an unborn child is fully human
the only way to stop its birth is to kill it
A baroness gave a talk to students at a private girls’ school a few weeks ago. Afterwards, one girl was surrounded by a large group of her fellow pupils. They shouted, screamed, swore and spat at her. She escaped, but then collapsed, unable to breathe properly.
The word ‘bullying’ is thrown around lightly nowadays. Children see themselves as victims of bullying if they feel left out. Bosses who put staff under pressure to meet deadlines stand accused of bullying. Mostly these are just unpleasant experiences. But a pupil being targeted, surrounded, sworn and spat at by her classmates is surely a clear-cut case of bullying.
So in this instance, we might have expected teachers – fully trained-up in all the latest anti-bullying guidance – to intervene and put a stop to the targeted girl’s misery, yes? We would have expected her to be looked after and her tormentors punished, right?
But no. That’s not how things actually played out at all. Rather than being supported by her teachers, the targeted pupil – the girl surrounded by the baying mob – has been ‘driven out’ of school. And rather than her tormentors being punished, they have been treated as victims. Incredibly, the school’s headteacher apologized to the bullying students involved for ‘failing to maintain a “safe space” and for being seen to spend so much time giving support to the bullied student’, who by this point had been ‘isolated to the library’ for her own safety.
The heretical pupil in question apparently committed a crime so morally heinous that the spitting and swearing were considered an almost justifiable response. Following the baroness’s talk on ‘transphobia’, the girl at the center of the row dared to question the orthodoxies of gender identity. She even had the temerity to suggest that sex may be biological and immutable. These thoughtcrimes led her to be branded a transgressor who deserved punishment.
This incident came to light after a teacher at the school contacted Transgender Trend, a group of parents, professionals and academics who are concerned about the rapid increase in children being diagnosed as transgender. From there, it was picked up by The Times. And so finally, the Crucible-like scenes that played out in the school are being exposed to public scrutiny.
It’s worth noting that the school concerned is a Stonewall ‘diversity champion’ and the baroness, who came to talk to students during one of their classes, is a well-known LGBTQ speaker and activist. Her views on transgender issues would have echoed positions already familiar to the girls – if they hadn’t picked them up from wider culture, then they will have heard them from the likes of trans charity Mermaids, which was invited to address the school last year. The students – 17- and 18-year-olds – were not coming at the issue fresh, then. They have had years of training in ‘correct’ thinking. They were fully primed to agree with everything the baroness said. What their expensive education had seemingly not prepared them for was disagreement with this view. As a teacher at the school describes it, students assumed that the girl who dared to raise questions ‘was thoroughly deserving of the roasting that she had just received’.
For teenage girls to have behaved this way is one thing. But what about the teachers? Many were, according to The Times, initially supportive of the targeted pupil, but ‘withdrew their backing after complaints from other sixth-formers who accused the girl of transphobia’. Seemingly, they either agreed that the pupil was indeed a heretic, thus deserving of her treatment, or they were too cowardly to speak out in her defense.
When the girl returned to school following her run-in with the mob, she was told that she would have to work in the library if she said anything provocative in lessons. Continued name-calling and accusations of transphobia meant that she already spent her breaktimes and lunchtimes in the library. Teachers seem to have assumed that the targeted girl was in the wrong – that she was the problem for expressing disagreements and for daring to raise questions – and not the girls who surrounded her. Under any other circumstances this would have been called out as ‘victim-blaming’. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the girl left school in December and has been studying at home ever since.
It is utterly appalling that any 18-year-old pupil should have been treated in this way simply for asking polite questions of a guest speaker. That this happened shows not just the complete intellectual dominance of transgender ideology in our schools, but also how scientifically illiterate notions of gender identity have been taught to children as unquestionable moral orthodoxies. From nursery onwards, pupils are led to uncritically imbibe the belief that sex is meaningless, that gender is on a spectrum and that thinking anything else is transphobic.
What’s more, this particular case of the hounded pupil exposes the utter cowardice of many teachers. Not only are they unable to question dominant woke narratives themselves, they are also unable to defend pupils who do so. In the minds of many teachers, promoting intellectual curiosity and facilitating debate have been replaced as key goals of education by the need to promote woke dogma. These teachers seem to have so lost touch with their core moral purpose that they can no longer even be trusted to keep pupils safe in school.
One problem faced by those of us committed to impartiality in education is that woke thinking is increasingly presented as not political at all, but simply as a matter of good practice in promoting equality, diversity and inclusion. This could hardly be more wrong. What is going on in our schools is a form of moral indoctrination. And it is having a devastating effect on children.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its biggest loss since 2020 on Wednesday after another major retailer warned of rising cost pressures, confirming investors’ worst fears over rising inflation and rekindling the brutal 2022 sell-off.
The Dow shed 1,164.52 points, or 3.57%, to 31,490.07, the average’s biggest decline since June 2020.
The S&P 500 traded 4.04% lower to 3,923.68, also the worst drop since June 2020. The Nasdaq Composite slipped 4.73% to 11,418.15. The selling was broad and intense on Wall Street with just eight members of the S&P 500 in the green.
Markets returned to heavy selling after two back-to-back quarterly reports from Target and Walmart stoked investor fears of rising inflation taking a bite out of corporate profits and consumer demand. It’s the fifth Dow decline of more than 800 points this year, which all occurred as the stock sell-off intensified within the last month.
“The consumer is challenged,” said Megan Horneman, chief investment officer at Verdence Capital Advisors. “We started to see at the end of the year that consumers were turning to credit cards to pay for the rise in food prices, rise in energy prices, and that’s actually gotten much worse. ... This is going to hurt those bellwether retail places and Walmart tends to be one of them.”
Target shares tumbled 24.9% Wednesday after the retailer reported first-quarter earnings that were much lower than Wall Street estimated because of higher costs for fuel and compensation. The retailer also saw lower-than-expected sales for discretionary merchandise like TVs.
This follows Walmart on Tuesday posting earnings that fell short of expectations as it too cited higher fuel and labor costs. Walmart shares ended Tuesday lower by 11%. They dropped another 6.8% on Wednesday.
“It’s clear that transportation costs matter and they’re impacting some of the largest companies,” said Kim Forrest, founder of Bokeh Capital. “So I think investors are scratching our heads going, ‘so, who’s next?’ And they’re giving visibility into what’s happening with the consumer.”
Other retailers took a hit on the back of Target’s quarterly earnings miss — with the SPDR S&P Retail ETF falling 8.3%. Amazon’s stock price dropped 7.2%, and Best Buy’s stock price fell 10.5%. Dollar General’s fell 11.1%, and Dollar Tree’s declined 14.4%. Shares of Macy’s dropped 10.7%, while shares of Kohl’s fell 11%.
Lowe’s fell 5.3% after missing sales expectations in its first quarter report as shoppers bought fewer supplies for outdoor projects.
“Any company that relies on households and discretionary purchases will likely suffer this quarter because a lot of discretionary income has been funneled to food and energy prices,” said Jack Ablin, founding partner of Cresset Capital.
Stocks and other risk assets have been pressured by inflation and the Federal Reserve’s attempt to tamp down price increases through rate hikes, which have led to concerns about a potential recession.
In an appearance Wednesday on CNBC’s “The Exchange,” Jeremy Grantham said the current downturn is worse than the tech bubble of 2000. The investor, known for identifying market bubbles, said stocks can more than double their losses.
“The other day, we were down about 19.9% on the S&P 500 and about 27% on the Nasdaq. I would say at a minimum, we are likely to do twice that,” Grantham said. “If we are unlucky, which is quite possible, we would do three legs like that and it might take a couple of years as it did in the 2000s.”
The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note dipped below 2.9% after briefly topping 3% on Wednesday morning as investors huddled back into bonds as a safe haven.
The Dow has declined for seven straight weeks, but stocks had stabilized over the previous three trading sessions. Last week, the S&P 500 fell to the brink of a bear market — or 20% below its record high.
After Wednesday’s decline, the S&P 500 now sits 18.6% below its record and is off 17.7% for 2020.
Over the past few weeks, Democrats seem to be having a revelatory experience, discovering that simply increasing demand through government spending doesn’t work if there are limited products to buy. The supply side of the capitalism equation is essential, and when government layers on excessive regulations, it holds back business and slows the production of goods.
The inability of the Biden administration to both create a constructive environment for producers and a dependable, efficient supply chain to get goods to market has produced the worst inflation in 40 years.
Without supply, all increased demand does is increase prices. This administration needs to focus on fixing the supply side of the economy. But instead, Biden tweeted Friday, “You want to bring down inflation? Let’s make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.”
So, his solution to inflation is to increase taxes on businesses, who will then pass those costs on to consumers. Sounds like a recipe for higher inflation.
Biden’s head-scratching tweet sparked a bigger reaction than the White House probably expected when one of the Democratic Party’s biggest boosters, billionaire Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, tweeted back, “The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead.”
Bezos went on, “Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection.” Ouch. But it got worse.
Two days later, Bezos took to Twitter again: “The administration tried hard to inject even more stimulus into an already over-heated, inflationary economy and only Manchin saved them from themselves. Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent. Misdirection doesn’t help the country.”
By Monday, it was the new presidential press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, in the hot seat over Biden’s tweet when Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked her how taxing corporations translates into lower inflation.
Jean-Pierre served up a classic word salad that ignored the president’s focus on taxing corporations and instead leveled her sights on the rich: “Look, we have talked about … this past year, about making sure that the wealthiest among us are paying their fair share, and that is important to do.”
She went on, “So I think we encourage those who have done very well, especially those who care about climate change, to support a fairer tax code that doesn’t charge manufacturers, workers, cops, builders a higher percentage of their earnings than the most fortunate people in our nation, and not let that stand in the way of reducing energy costs and fighting an existential problem, if you think about it, that is an example. To support basic collective bargaining rights as well.”
Note that she avoided Doocy’s question, and for good reason — increasing taxes on business will increase the prices they charge, not lower them.
But Team Biden seems intent on ignoring well-founded criticism even from the Democratic fold. In February, Democratic economist Steven Rattner warned in The New York Times, “The bulk of our supply problems are the product of an overstimulated economy, not the cause of it. … It’s a classic economic case of ‘too much money chasing too few goods,’ resulting in both higher prices and, given the extreme surge in demand, shortages.”
In March, when Biden kicked off his blame game to explain newly released 7.9 percent inflation numbers and growing shortages, Rattner scoffed at the president’s argument that Putin was the real culprit along with the supply chain, greedy corporations and Republicans.
Rattner weighed in again, tweeting, “Well, no. These are Feb #'s and only include small Russia effect. This is Biden’s inflation and he needs to own it.”
Even former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers tried to pump up Biden but ended up doing the president little good with his tweet Monday supporting the idea of raising taxes that are “as progressive as possible.”
Summers wrote, “I say this even though I have argued vigorously that excessively expansionary macro policy from the [Federal Reserve] and the government have contributed to inflation. I have rejected rhetoric about inflation caused by corporate gouging as preposterous.” So much for the greedy corporations narrative.
Weeks of Biden’s disingenuous statements on inflation are now costing him precious capital with voters. In NBC News’ latest poll, released Sunday, people said the country was going off on the wrong track by a margin of 75 percent wrong track to 16 percent right track. Biden himself sunk to a new low in the poll, with a 51 percent negative rating to 37 percent positive.
But we’re beginning to see the Biden effect extend beyond the president’s own unpopularity to both congressional Democrats and the federal government itself. The poll found that Democrats in Congress are down 19 points in their net negative rating, which, according to NBC, is the highest net negative rating Democrats have received “in the 30 years that the poll has been conducted.” Not a good harbinger for the upcoming elections.
On top of that, confidence in the federal government to manage the nation’s challenges has also taken a beating. It started with a lack of COVID-19 tests, followed by shortages of everything from paper towels to cars to chicken and now baby formula, an embarrassing exit from Afghanistan, the negative effects of an open border, and inflation. The list is a long one.
In a survey done by The Winston Group for the S Corporation Association, we found the brand image of the federal government at an unbelievable low, with almost 2-to-1 negatives — 33 percent favorable to 59 percent unfavorable. It is even worse among independents, at 24 percent favorable to 68 percent unfavorable.
This puts the feds at the bottom behind Pelosi, Biden, Trump and both parties in Congress. Still, in the end, it is the president tasked with running the federal government, and if it is failing in its mission, so is the manager in chief.
It is hard to see a way out of the hole this president and his party find themselves in without a significant change in policy direction. But to listen to Biden over the past week, staying the course seems to be the operative strategy.
The Biden effect is real and not what the country needs
About two-thirds of Americans say they do not support overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
Seven-in-10 U.S. adults, however, say they are in favor of some degree of restrictions on abortion rights. That includes 52% of Democrats.
The issue of abortion rights was once again thrown into the hot spotlight of American politics after the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion from the Supreme Court earlier this month that showed the majority-conservative court ready to overturn Roe.
The draft decision — which could differ from how the court ultimately rules — is having an impact with voters, according to the survey. It has fired up Democrats, who had been less enthusiastic about the midterm elections than Republicans, who are favored to take back control of the House and possibly the Senate.
The poll shows that two-thirds of Democrats say the contents of the leak make them more likely to vote in November, as compared to just 40% of Republicans who said so.
"It definitely has them [Democrats] focused as no other issue in the recent months has," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll. "And to have a gap of that magnitude over the Republicans is something that, at this point, should not go unnoticed."
The survey of 1,304 adults, including 1,213 registered voters, has a margin of error of +/- 3.9 percentage points when adults are referenced and +/- 4.1 percentage points when referring to voters. That means results could be about 4 points higher or lower. The poll was conducted from May 9 to 13 by live interview callers, who reached respondents via cell phone and landline in English and in Spanish.
Democrats also got a boost on which party Americans want to control Congress. By a 47%-to-42% margin, this survey showed voters would cast their ballot in favor of a Democrat in their local congressional district if the election were held today...
A quarter of respondents said abortion should be available at any point during a pregnancy. That's up from 18% in 2019.
Just 9% said it should never permitted, which is unchanged from 2019.
But then there's the very gray middle — about 1-in-5 favor allowing abortion in the first three months only; another 13% say it should be allowed in the first six months; another quarter say it should be allowed only in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the pregnant person; and 10% say it should be allowed only to save that life.
Big majorities support the following changes to state laws:
82% would like to see abortion permitted at any time during pregnancy to protect the life or health of the pregnant person;
63% support providing safe haven for people seeking abortions from out of state;
63% support allowing abortion any time during pregnancy in cases of rape or incest.
Big majorities oppose the following:
80% don't want to allow private citizens to sue abortion providers or anyone who assists a pregnant person in getting an abortion;
75% oppose making abortion a crime requiring fines and/or prison time for doctors who perform abortions;
69% oppose allowing abortions only up to the time cardiac activity (about six to eight weeks) is detected;
60% are against allowing abortion only up to the time of viability outside the womb at about 24 weeks. Majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans feel this way, but obviously for different reasons.
"About two-thirds of Americans say they do not support overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll."
well, constitutional matters aren't decided by popular vote
perhaps this two-thirds could seek a constitutional amendment
but the traditional route would be to advocate for local and state laws where they live
"Seven-in-10 U.S. adults, however, say they are in favor of some degree of restrictions on abortion rights. That includes 52% of Democrats."
this and other in-depth results you provided would tend to lead to the conclusion that most people who say they favor Roe aren't familiar with it
"The draft decision — which could differ from how the court ultimately rules — is having an impact with voters, according to the survey. It has fired up Democrats, who had been less enthusiastic about the midterm elections than Republicans, who are favored to take back control of the House and possibly the Senate."
remains to be seen
with inflation out of control and a likely COVID surge in the fall, it's unlikely voters will be out to make a meaningless protest vote on Roe
Roe, btw, despite the intense campaign to pressure the justices to change their minds, is history
it will take its place with past egregious decisions like Plessy v Ferguson
"About two-thirds of Americans say they do not support overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll."
did you know that in 1974, when homosexuality was removed from DSSM list of mental illnesses, 2/3 of practicing mental health professionals disagreed?
The signs taped above a pair of water fountains in a Cincinnati-area high school hallway were reminiscent of life under Jim Crow laws: “Whites only,” the left one said; “Blacks only” read the one to its right.
A picture of the signs circulated on social media among students at Colerain High School earlier this month, igniting outrage among parents and triggering an investigation by the school district. One mother called the act a hate crime.
Now, the students responsible for the “tasteless and hurtful act have been issued significant disciplinary actions,” according to school officials.
“We want to make sure our staff, students, families and community understands where we stand on racial intolerance, discrimination, racism and hatred,” a statement released Monday from Northwest Local School District said. “We take this matter very seriously. This type of behavior is not and will not be condoned or tolerated.”
Colerain High School, which has an enrollment of 1,730 students, is about 30 percent Black and about 50 percent White, according to U.S. News & World Report.
The incident is the latest in a string of racist acts occurring in schools across the country. A day after the Ohio district announced the punishments, school officials in Florida’s Palm City announced they are investigating a photograph that circulated on social media of students holding up letters spelling out the n-word.
Last month, a student at a Chicago-area high school wrote a racist comment about picking cotton on a “prom-posal” sign. In the past few months, student-athletes in several states, including Georgia, Washington, Vermont, Minnesota and California, have reported hearing competitors or spectators yelling racial slurs at them during or after games.
A new Quinnipiac poll finds that if a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate supports abortion rights, 41% of Americans say they are more likely to vote for that candidate, while 22% say they are less likely, and 36% say it does not make a difference.
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3846
Michael Steele
@MichaelSteele
From one year ago...when that worm turns, it's a bitch!
Rep. Madison Cawthorn
@RepCawthorn
· May 12, 2021
Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney
11:30 PM · May 17, 2022·Twitter Web App
"The incident is the latest in a string of racist acts occurring in schools across the country"
any theory on why this is happening?
"No Forced Births"
if only you felt the same about forced death
science has documented that an unborn child is fully human
the only way to stop its birth is to kill it
"A new Quinnipiac poll finds that if a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate supports abortion rights, 41% of Americans say they are more likely to vote for that candidate, while 22% say they are less likely, and 36% say it does not make a difference"
few abortion advocates will vote because of this issue, unless they were already planning to before Roe was discarded as unconstitutional
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3846
"Michael Steele"
is a puerile jackass
thanks for reminding us
No one knows better than Nevadans when it’s time to put our cards on the table.
The Editorial Board, and Nevadans as a whole, are facing an agonizing problem. We have endorsed Republicans in the past and might do so again in the future. Yet as we survey the field of Republican candidates across the state, we are struggling to identify those who are not an active threat to American democracy or the institutions of government that have sustained our republic for 250 years.
Those are the stakes here for the GOP. For Nevada. For our voters.
Following his loss in the 2020 election, President Donald Trump told the Big Lie – that the election had been stolen from him by cheaters, frauds and a country hell-bent on keeping him out of office. Despite countless investigations and audits, no significant fraud or electoral irregularities were ever discovered.
But the words had been spoken. The lie was told.
Two months later, on one of the darkest days in U.S. history, we learned just how far the lie had traveled and just how important it might be. Following a rally at the White House, a violent insurrection took hold at the U.S. Capitol with the goal of overthrowing the duly elected government of the United States and stopping the peaceful transition of power. At least seven people died in connection with the attack, according to a congressional report, including three police officers who were simply doing their job.
Since the insurrection, Republican leadership across the nation has worked to disenfranchise voters, allow themselves to defy the will of voters outright and to allow partisan interference in the vote count. The GOP leadership’s assault on voting rights and basic fairness has been horrifying to watch. Happily, so far Nevada has escaped such corruption. But the coming election could change all that if Big Lie candidates gain office.
Trump told The Washington Post last month that he wished he could have marched on the Capitol with the rioters, but that the Secret Service wouldn’t allow it. And now, numerous GOP candidates in Nevada are saying they wish they had been there too — not to stop the violence, but to endorse it.
Gubernatorial candidate Joey Gilbert was actually at the Capitol that day, spinning unfounded conspiracy theories about election fraud and accusing those Republicans who believe the vote was legitimate of being “RINOs (Republicans in Name Only)” who should be removed from the party. He didn’t think that those who vandalized the halls of our Capitol or threatened police officers should be tossed out; he cheered them on. And he’s not alone.
As we wrote last October, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo disgraced himself by not condemning the violent right-wing groups that have been welcomed into the Nevada GOP, leaving Southern Nevadans to wonder whether their sheriff will protect and serve everyone in our community regardless of political persuasion.
Of the five leading Republican candidates for the governorship of Nevada, every one of them has gone on record as both supporting and contributing to the Big Lie. In doing so, they have all made a choice to subvert our democracy, undermine the integrity of our elections, and ignore the Constitution of the United States.
Will GOP leaders stand up for the rule of law and free and fair elections by rejecting autocracy and lies? Or will they continue to debase themselves and their formerly great party by kneeling to their unhinged demigod, Donald Trump, and his dreams of authoritarianism.
We pray this type of anti-democratic leadership does not represent the entirety of those candidates seeking office under the Republican banner in the Silver State. After all, this is the state that just seven years ago found common ground and reelected Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval with a staggering 70.5% of the vote.
Sandoval proved to be a fair, effective and honorable governor. And had the party not lurched into insanity, he would be considered a compelling GOP candidate for president in 2024. In today’s GOP, he wouldn’t stand a chance because honor and fairness doesn’t win primaries in the GOP anymore.
As we are working on evaluations for our primary endorsements, we are pained to admit that it’s difficult to find honesty and integrity in the GOP hopefuls on this ballot.
If you are a Republican running for office who believes in truth, believes that the last election was fair, who rejects the deranged calls to destroy our democracy, we need to hear from you. Nevada needs to hear from you. We want to endorse sanity, honesty, integrity and moderation.
As it stands right now, voters are faced with a slate of GOP candidates — nearly across the board — who aren’t fit for elective office because they buy into the Big Lie and its attempt to derail democracy. We hate finding people in the public sphere who want to destroy the very elections they now seek to win. We hate efforts to disenfranchise voters and rig future elections. We yearn for a dignified, honest and pro-democracy Republican leadership. We yearn for the Republicans of years past. Patriots, not insurrectionists.
So please, if you are such a Republican and are running for office, stand proud and reach out to us. We want to present a list of heroes trying to rescue their party from the madness afflicting it. We want to share your perspective with our readers and let them know that Republican candidates for office still exist who believe in the Constitution, who believe in democracy, and who believe that the peaceful transition of power among our duly elected officials is a hallmark of what not only has made America great in the past, but what can help us continue to be a great country moving forward.
Contact our editorial page editor, Justin R. Hager, at justin.hager@gmgvegas.com.
The House on Wednesday passed a $28 million emergency spending bill to address the nationwide shortage of baby formula.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the Democratic chair of the House Appropriations Committee who authored the bill, said the money would pay for additional U.S. Food and Drug Administration staffing to boost inspection of formula at domestic and foreign suppliers, prevent fraudulent products getting onto store shelves and improve data collection on the infant formula marketplace.
The bill, known as the Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act, passed 231 to 192 in a vote mostly along party lines. All House Democrats supported the legislation, along with 12 Republicans who bucked their party leadership to support it. Four Republicans and one Democrat did not vote.
Also on Wednesday, President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to boost the production of infant formula and authorized flights to import supply from overseas.
==================================================
Republicans have proven once again they only care about forcing women to give birth.
Once the child is born, they can starve to death for all they care. It must be lonely for the 12 Republicans who voted for this. I wouldn't be surprised if they got primaried.
Conservative pundit Charlie Sykes believes that Republicans have a weak spot that Democrats can exploit in the 2022 midterm elections.
Sykes was interviewed on Thursday by MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace one day after 203 Republicans voted against a bill targeting domestic terrorism.
Sykes said, "one of the seminal works of conservatism is ideas have consequences and I think it's inarguable that toxic, racist ideas often have consequences and they are fatal consequences. So this vote yesterday on the domestic terrorism legislation was fascinating to me this same or pretty much the same piece of legislation was passed unanimously by voice vote in 2020, so what's happened? What's changed? Why would the Republican Party make it a party line vote to say, we are not going to take domestic terrorism more seriously?"
He suggested Democrats should campaign on terrorism like Republicans did during the 2002 midterms following the 9/11 attack.
"This ought to be a major issue," he said. "Are we going to confront domestic terrorism? And take that to the Republicans, because this is the weak spot that, in fact, this is the party of law and order, this is a party that spent decades stressing that they were strong about terrorism, but who are the terrorists now? What is the threat? And I think what you saw yesterday was a tremendous reluctance to even acknowledge that this -- the reality of domestic terrorism and a certain, I don't know, maybe a guilty consciousness that if they took an aggressive position on this, that it might ensnare some of their allies and they might be held accountable for some of their own rhetoric."
"Yeah, their guilty conscience is showing," Wallace said.
---------------------------------------------
The biggest problem with Sykes' analysis is that he thinks Republicans still have a conscience.
"Why do conservatives hate the Constitution so much?"
yeah, they "hate" it so much that they have appointed originalist judges that now control the Supreme Court and protect the original meaning of the Constitution
I wonder if there's any part of the Constitution that TTF-type liberal lunatics don't want to eliminate by reinterpretation...
"as we survey the field of Republican candidates across the state, we are struggling to identify those who are not an active threat to American democracy or the institutions of government that have sustained our republic for 250 years"
oh me gursh, please elaborate
we all need to know about this threat
"Following his loss in the 2020 election, President Donald Trump told the Big Lie – that the election had been stolen from him by cheaters, frauds"
well, it's a little difficult to ascertain whether that's a lie because most measures that ordinarily protect the integrity of an election were sacrificed to inane pandemic concerns so there is no way to prove Trump is wrong
indeed, when the media says Trump's assertions have been proven false, they are telling a Big Lie
the biggest lie of all is the mantra that the media chanted repeatedly for months after the election: that the 2020 election was "the most secure in history"
because of the widespread relaxation of voter integrity rules, the 2020 election was not "the most secure in history"
"and a country hell-bent on keeping him out of office"
actually, you're lying: Trump says the country supports him
indeed, looking at the polls right now, it's hard to argue otherwise
since that's a fact, maybe you should teach it
"a violent insurrection"
it was an egregious incident but this is a hyperbolized mischaracterization
"At least seven people died in connection with the attack, according to a congressional report, including three police officers who were simply doing their job"
let's go through all seven and how they died
"Since the insurrection, Republican leadership across the nation has worked to disenfranchise voters, allow themselves to defy the will of voters outright and to allow partisan interference in the vote count"
another Big Lie that has been rejected by Americans
voter integrity laws that require documentation of eligibility to vote does not "disenfranchise voters", "defy the will of voters outright", or "allow partisan interference in the vote count"
"Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo disgraced himself by not condemning the violent right-wing groups that have been welcomed into the Nevada GOP"
what "violent right-wing groups" did he "not condemn"?
let's hear some details
a choice to subvert our democracy, undermine the integrity of our elections, and ignore the Constitution of the United States has been made by TTF-style liberal lunatics who want to immortalize the loosening of long-standing election rules that was done, ostensibly, because of pandemic considerations
Dems liked the result of that loosening so they want election integrity to be abandoned forever
those are the facts
TTF, it's time to teach them
"Hey, this is Fetus - is there any formula out there for me?"
sorry fetus
Biden was elected President so we are are running out of formula
but Biden does support killing you so you won't suffer from hunger
"The House on Wednesday passed a $28 million emergency spending bill to address the nationwide shortage of baby formula"
by "address", do you mean end the shortage?
"Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the Democratic chair of the House Appropriations Committee who authored the bill, said the money would pay for additional U.S. Food and Drug Administration staffing to boost inspection of formula at domestic and foreign suppliers, prevent fraudulent products getting onto store shelves and improve data collection on the infant formula marketplace."
wonderful
how would any of that end the shortage?
"The bill, known as the Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act, passed 231 to 192 in a vote mostly along party lines. All House Democrats supported the legislation,"
of course they did
any time you can produce legislation that won't fix a problem, Dems will be there to lend their support
"Also on Wednesday, President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to boost the production of infant formula and authorized flights to import supply from overseas"
well, that might help
but the shortage has been going on for months
why did he only do something when the media starting publicizing the situation?
"Once the child is born, they can starve to death for all they care. It must be lonely for the 12 Republicans who voted for this."
again, can you explain how "additional U.S. Food and Drug Administration staffing to boost inspection of formula at domestic and foreign suppliers, prevent fraudulent products getting onto store shelves and improve data collection on the infant formula marketplace" would increase supplies?
in the short-run, at least, it seems that would reduce supplies
"Conservative pundit Charlie Sykes believes that Republicans have a weak spot that Democrats can exploit in the 2022 midterm elections"
really?
Dems could use all the help they can get
"He suggested Democrats should campaign on terrorism like Republicans did during the 2002 midterms following the 9/11 attack"
uh, Charlie, I don't think this will work
Dems are well known for being soft on crime
no one will believe their rhetoric
any more genius ideas?
"President Biden's approval rating among Hispanic Americans has plummeted to 26%, according to a Wednesday poll from Quinnipiac University.
Biden is less popular among Hispanics than any other demographic, including age and gender ,the poll found. The same Quinnipiac poll conducted last year put Hispanic support for Biden at 55%."
remember how the media tried to say Trump was racist for saying that many illegal immigrants are rapists and drug dealers?
and yet, Hispanics liked him more than Obama and much more than Slidin' Biden
looks like Hispanics are too smart to fall for the liberals' big and little lies
One of the most galling aspects of the Hunter Biden laptop saga is that the 51 former intelligence officials who played such a critical role in suppressing The Post’s stories and giving Joe Biden cover before the 2020 election have never been brought to account.
The “Dirty 51” lied by painting our stories as Russian disinformation in an Oct. 19, 2020, letter they signed and delivered to Politico five days after The Post exposé and three days before the final presidential debate of the election campaign.
They used the institutional weight of their powerful former roles to legitimize partisan political propaganda designed to smear The Post and everyone associated with the story and dissuade the rest of the media from looking deeper into the laptop.
The letter, titled “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden emails,” and signed by former CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Mike Hayden, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and other ex-spooks, claimed the material on Hunter’s hard drive “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” although not one of them had seen it.
Their lie “probably affected the outcome” of the 2020 presidential race, as former Attorney General William Barr has said, describing the letter as “partisan hackery,” “baseless” and signed by “a coterie of retired intelligence officials who had lost their professional bearings.”
Yet they have never apologized or retracted their lie. In fact, when The Post contacted the group in March, after the New York Times belatedly acknowledged the laptop was real, some, like Clapper, doubled down.
One former CIA officer who signed the letter, John Sipher, boasted that he took “special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump.”
“I lost the election for Trump?” wrote Sipher during a Twitter spat with a former Trump official. “Well then I feel pretty good about my influence.”
The arrogance of these Deep Staters tells you that they believe they will get away with lying to influence an election.
But there’s one person with a bee in his bonnet who isn’t going to let the story go: Donald Trump.
The former president has sicced uber-attorney Tim Parlatore on the Dirty 51. On Wednesday, Parlatore launched the first stage of a multi-prong strategy to make those who signed the letter pay for the damage they have wrought to freedom of the press, election integrity and the welfare of the nation.
His goal is to uncover alleged communications between the Dirty 51 and the Biden campaign.
Parlatore began by filing five letters of complaint with the agencies that formerly employed the 51, including the CIA — which counted 43 of its former officials among the group — the National Security Agency, the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense.
Each letter complains of “an egregious breach” by former agency employees “that appears to have been overlooked by your agency, as it has gone uninvestigated and certainly unpunished. Specifically, the unauthorized publication and dissemination of an intelligence assessment, purportedly based on classified information, that was used wrongfully to influence the outcome of an election.”
It points out that each of the Dirty 51 was “bound by the lifelong obligation” to submit the letter to their former agencies for pre-publication security review to ensure it didn’t contain classified information, a process that could take several months. The letter then would have been stamped with a disclaimer that the agency was not vouching for its accuracy.
“That would have destroyed the usefulness of the document,” says Parlatore, “plus the process would have delayed it so long, it would not be useful” because the election would have been over.
Letters were sent to John Hoffister Hedley, chairman of the Prepublication Classification Review Board at the CIA; Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command; Christine Abizaid, director of the National Counterterrorism Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Caroline Krass, general counsel, Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review; and Avril Haines, director of the Information Management Division in the Office of the DNI.
The letters state: “Leading up to the 2020 election, the New York Post published stunning revelations which were lawfully obtained from a laptop that formerly belonged to Hunter Biden, son of then-candidate Joe Biden.
“This information, which raises significant concerns about the financial dealings of a presidential candidate and his potential ties to our nation’s primary adversaries, China and Russia, threatened to undermine his candidacy.
“To undermine these revelations, 51 former intelligence officials … published an intelligence assessment in the form of a letter for dissemination to the American people through the news media. This letter purportedly relied on the combined and established credibility of these intelligence officials, through collective experience and knowledge of intelligence information, including classified material, to assess that the laptop was not authentic and ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’
“Over a year after the election, it is conceded that the laptop and its contents are authentic, and the judgement espoused by these 51 former intelligence officials is baseless and false. Yet, the implications of this breach continue. Media outlets used this purportedly credible intelligence assessment as a justification to not report on the story. Some polls show that up to 17% of people who voted for President Biden would not have if they knew about the contents of the laptop at the time.”
Parlatore urges each agency to “proceed immediately with legal action to ensure that such breaches of vital security provisions do not continue to go unchecked.”
The same standard should be applied to the 51 as has been applied to other agency employees who have breached the prepublication review obligation: They should be stripped of their security clearances and never again allowed to work in the intelligence field.
The next step for Parlatore is to file a letter with the Federal Election Commission, requesting that the Dirty 51 letter be recorded as a campaign “in-kind contribution.”
Then will come litigation against the 51 and the Biden campaign in US District Court, in pursuit of any link between Democratic operatives and the letter.
Biden cited the letter in that final presidential debate of 2020 to dismiss as “garbage” and part of a “Russian plan” emails from the laptop that were published by The Post indicating he had met with Hunter’s Ukrainian paymaster in Washington, DC, when he was veep.
Barr, who was AG at the time, recently told Fox News he was “very disturbed during the debate when candidate Biden lied to the American people about the laptop. He’s squarely confronted with the laptop, and he suggested that it was Russian disinformation and pointed to the letter written by some intelligence people that was baseless — which he knew was a lie …
“When you’re talking about interference in an election, I can’t think of anything more than that kind of thing.”
Justice might be slow, but it is coming.
It was only one half-hour into Wednesday's congressional hearing on abortion access when it became clear that the Republican contributions to the day would be loonier than a QAnon message board.
"In places like Washington D.C.," fetuses are "burned to power the light's of the city's homes and streets," claimed Catherine Glenn Foster, who had, just minutes before, sworn not to lie under oath. The GOP-summoned witness let loose the wild and utterly false accusation that municipal electrical companies are powered by incinerated fetuses.
"The next time you turn on the light, think of the incinerators," she said, apparently repeating a misleading talking point from the same anti-choice activists caught stashing fetuses at home. Everything on the right is psychological projection.
So that's where Republicans are these days: Arguing that we live in a janky version of the Matrix, except powered by fetuses instead of actual people.
Foster is not some random nut that Republicans pulled off a soapbox at a subway station minutes before the hearing started. She is a Georgetown law school graduate who is paid $190,000 a year to be the president of Americans United for Life, one of the largest anti-abortion non-profits in the country. So it's not surprising that Foster believed she would get away with this absurd nonsense. Hers was merely one of a truly overwhelming number of lies that poured out of Republican lawmakers and witnesses alike throughout the course of Wednesday's hearing. When lies are coming out like chocolates on a conveyor belt aimed at Lucille Ball, the liars can be assured they've overwhelmed the fact-checkers beyond any hope of accountability.
The GOP contributions to the hearing were a blizzard of bullshit, meant to totally white out the efforts by Democrats and reproductive rights activists to remind the public of the great human cost that results from banning abortion. Poverty, child abuse, derailed lives, women trapped in abusive relationships, people mutilated or killed in attempted self-abortions, people being imprisoned for trying to get abortions, and even just the looming anxiety hovering over every sexual encounter: That's what the GOP wants to inflict on Americans, and it is not exactly the most popular politics.
Laugh at the weird anti-choice lady raving during a congressional hearing about fetus-powered street lamps. But remember the almost unfathomably deep cynicism that fuels such lies. Republicans are determined to set back women's rights by decades, punish people for having sex, and prop up racial inequities. They frankly do not care how many lives are ruined — or lost — in the process. And they don't care how stupid they sound when they roll out urban legends, so long as they finish the sadistic task of making unwanted childbirth mandatory across much, if not all, of the United States.
"Wednesday's congressional hearing on abortion access"
why was Congress having a hearing about how to make the murder of unborn children accessible?
hopefully, this will be banned in states across America but Congress is only relevant if interstate travel is utilized to facilitate the kiling
"the great human cost that results from banning abortion. Poverty, child abuse, derailed lives, women trapped in abusive relationships, people mutilated or killed in attempted self-abortions, people being imprisoned for trying to get abortions, and even just the looming anxiety hovering over every sexual encounter"
the great human cost of allowing abortion greatly exceeds any of this
and the unborn children are innocent
they aren't trying to kill anyone else
btw, "looming anxiety" is an anti-euphemism for "responsible sex"
President Joe Biden’s approval rating dipped to the lowest point of his presidency in May, a new poll shows, with deepening pessimism emerging among members of his own Democratic Party.
Only 39% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s performance as president, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research, dipping from already negative ratings a month earlier.
Overall, only about 2 in 10 adults say the U.S. is heading in the right direction or the economy is good, both down from about 3 in 10 a month earlier. Those drops were concentrated among Democrats, with just 33% within the president’s party saying the country is headed in the right direction, down from 49% in April.
Of particular concern for Biden ahead of the midterm elections, his approval among Democrats stands at 73%, a substantial drop since earlier in his presidency. In AP-NORC polls conducted in 2021, Biden’s approval rating among Democrats never dropped below 82%.
The findings reflect a widespread sense of exasperation in a country facing a cascade of challenges ranging from inflation, gun violence, and a sudden shortage of baby formula to a persistent pandemic.
“I don’t know how much worse it can get,” said Milan Ramsey, a 29-year-old high school counselor and Democrat in Santa Monica, California, who with her husband had to move into her parents’ house to raise their infant son.
Ramsey thinks the economic dysfunction that's led to her being unable to afford the place where she grew up isn't Biden's fault. But she's alarmed he hasn't implemented ambitious plans for fighting climate change or fixing health care.
“He hasn't delivered on any of the promises. I feel like the stimulus checks came out and that was the last win of his administration,” Ramsey said of Biden. “I think he's tired — and I don't blame him, I'd be tired too at his age with the career he's had.”
Gerry Toranzo, a nurse and a Republican in Chicago, blames Biden for being forced to pinch pennies by taking steps like driving slower to conserve gas after prices have skyrocketed during his administration.
“His policies are destroying the economy,” Toranzo, 46, said of Biden, blaming him for stopping the Keystone XL fuel pipeline to Canada and hamstringing domestic energy production. “It's a vicious cycle of price increases.”
Overall, two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy. That rating is largely unchanged over the last few months, though elevated slightly since the first two months of the year.
But there are signs that the dissatisfaction with Biden on the economy has deepened. Just 18% of Americans say Biden’s policies have done more to help than hurt the economy, down slightly from 24% in March. Fifty-one percent say they’ve done more to hurt than help, while 30% say they haven’t made much difference either way.
The percentage of Democrats who say Biden’s policies have done more to help dipped from 45% to 37%.
Joe Biden not long ago was eager to take credit for America's soaring stock markets.
"The stock market has gone up exponentially since I've been president," Biden said in September. "You haven't heard me say a word about it."
Well, actually, Mr. President, you said 20 words about it. But let's not quibble over hollow boasts of the fading past. Biden and the rest of us have more important – and more painful – things to worry about now.
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So far in 2022, Americans have suffered through the highest inflation rate in 40 years, the highest gas prices on record and the worst start of the year for the S&P 500 since 1939.
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Oh, my aching 401(k).
Now, those Americans who think Biden is doing a good job of handling the economy – both of them – have a ready-made retort: But Trump.
And while that comeback may still work at times, it's laughably ineffective with the economy. In August 2020, when pandemic shutdowns had sent unemployment soaring above 10%, half of Americans still said they approved of how President Donald Trump was handling the economy.
Nearly two years later, only 34% of Americans in a recent CNN poll said they approved of how Biden is managing the economy; two-thirds said he's doing a poor job of leading on an issue that directly affects every American.
Even within his own party, Biden isn't faring well – fewer than half of Democrats said he has improved the nation's economic standing. That's a brutal number in these days of tribal politics when partisans are apt to excuse all sorts of errors in judgment and execution.
But ordinary Americans' dissatisfaction with Biden isn't surprising given the pain that inflation is inflicting on people from Seaside to Seattle.
How bad is it? Workers suffered on average a 2.4% pay cut last year when adjusted for inflation, despite significant wage increases in many sectors.
Just getting to work and back home again is more expensive than ever – average gas prices are up 45% from a year ago, and the average price of used cars is up over 40%.
There's also little comfort in comfort food these days. The price of eggs is up 13%. Poultry prices are forecast to climb at least 7.5% this year. And the increase in beer prices is expected to be "off the charts." (So much for drowning our sorrows.)
Faced with the steady downpour of bad economic news, Biden and his apologists have tried to argue that it's all temporary, to blame it on Russia's Vladimir Putin, and to declare that Americans just don't understand how good they really have it.
But Larry Summers, who led the National Economic Council in the Obama administration, explained it to NPR in terms that even progressives should understand: "More unemployment is the difference between a job and not a job for 2 or 3% of the population. More inflation is higher prices for 100% of the population."
And that's the bottom line: On Joe Biden's watch, the inflation tiger was let out of its cage after 40 years. He owns it.
The president can argue that it's not really his fault. He can say it will pass in time (which is true; everything in this world is temporary if you wait long enough). Or he can blame it on the evil dictator in Moscow, the dunderheaded Republicans in Congress and the obstinate gentleman from West Virginia who wouldn't get on board with spending an additional $2 trillion.
But none of that really flies with the mother in Topeka or the father in Tallahassee who knows it's getting a bit harder every month to feed the kids and to pay the mortgage.
Like Biden, I'm old enough to remember when Americans were well acquainted with the Misery Index, a combination of the inflation and unemployment rates. In 1980, when Biden was still a young senator from Delaware, the Misery Index hit 19.7%, the highest level of pain since 1946. That same year, a first-term Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, lost reelection.
The Misery Index was back in the news this week as it hit a 12-year high. That's not to say Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter. At least not yet.
It does, however, help to explain why Americans feel so bearish about their president in our springtime of discontent.
The misery is real. Americans are hurting. And Biden has bungled one of the most important jobs he was elected to do
“His policies are destroying the economy,” Toranzo, 46, said of Biden, blaming him for stopping the Keystone XL fuel pipeline to Canada and hamstringing domestic energy production. “It's a vicious cycle of price increases.”
US oil companies are sitting on leases they haven't even bothered to put a rig onto. There is very little incentive for them to either. They're making record profits and keeping their investors quite happy.
As a bonus, they can distract the stupid half of the American public by blaming the problem on Biden and his policies.
The fact of the matter is that oil companies, both foreign and domestic have been jerking the American public around since the 1970s with fake shortages and reducing their output at will to maximize their profits. And they will keep jerking us around as long as we let them.
Then there is their massive dis-information campaign about green house gasses and climate change - using the same tactics (and sometimes even the same people) that tobacco companies used to try and convince people cigarettes weren't harmful.
The only long-term strategy to keep gas prices low is minimize how much gas people use. Ever increasing fuel standards help, and electric cars are even better. The less gas people use, the less the oil companies can jerk us around, the less money goes to fund regimes that hate us in the Middle East and Russia, and the more green energy we use to power our cars, the more money stays here in the US.
This isn't rocket science folks. OPEC has been jerking us around for 50 years, and US oil companies benefit because they base what they charge us on "world market" prices. There is really little incentive for them to pump more oil when prices are high. It's time we cut the cord.
Last year I spent a total of $180 at gas stations - for my car and my lawn tractor. I hope to keep reducing that every year going forward.
"The only long-term strategy to keep gas prices low is minimize how much gas people use"
everything seemed fine before Biden became President
indeed, under Trump, we were energy independent
drop the regulations, build the pipeline if it's not too late, fracking, nuclear energy
or try what Biden is trying: nothing
Examining U.S. ‘Energy Independence’ Claims
By D'Angelo Gore
Posted on March 9, 2022
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/03/examining-u-s-energy-independence-claims/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw-JyUBhCuARIsANUqQ_IzDB3QrPa-UDs4vIjVEP_vbyCzJcqx-hDAU1SH23HjADOBpJC9ZSMaAj77EALw_wcB
When politicians say that the United States was “energy independent” under former President Donald Trump, some people may get the false impression that the U.S. was 100% self-sufficient. The country still relied on foreign sources of energy, including oil.
To help meet domestic demand, the U.S. has imported oil and other forms of energy from abroad, including from Russia, for many years. And to some energy analysts, a scenario in which the U.S. relies only on the energy it produces is not likely to happen anytime soon.
Instead, those who tout this so-called “energy independence” may be referring to the fact that, on net, the country either produced more energy than it consumed, exported more energy than it imported, or, more specifically, had a greater number of exports than imports of petroleum, which includes crude oil and refined products from crude oil, such as gasoline and various fuels.
However, by any of those definitions, the U.S. was still “energy independent” in 2021 under President Joe Biden — contrary to claims made by Republicans who have suggested otherwise.
Net Energy Exports
“We were energy independent one year ago,” Trump said in a March 2 interview on Fox Business, in which he criticized Biden for not mentioning what is happening with oil in his State of the Union address, for example.
He added, “We were exporting energy for the first time ever in the history of our country,” falsely implying that that had never happened before and had ceased since he left office. (He made a related claim about energy in his keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.)
Trump is one of several Republican politicians to claim or suggest that Biden ended the “energy independence” America needs to stop relying on Russia for oil, as well as to combat rising gasoline prices, which reached an average weekly price of $4.10 for a gallon of regular gas on March 7.
Also, the U.S. was buying oil from Russia in 2020, and for many years before. For instance, Russia accounted for 7% of total U.S. imports of petroleum in 2020 and 7.9% of those imports in 2021.
In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden signed an executive order on March 8 blocking new U.S. purchases of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas and coal. It allows for a “45-day wind-down period” for orders already under contract, according to a senior administration official.
As for Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. was “exporting energy for the first time ever in the history of our country” when he was president, that’s false. The country has been supplying international markets with various forms of energy for decades. The former president presumably meant to refer to net energy exports during his administration.
U.S. exports of primary energy did exceed its energy imports from foreign sources under Trump in 2019 and 2020 — the first times that had happened since 1952, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
But through the first 11 months of 2021, the U.S. also was on its way to being a net exporter of energy last year — and, thus, by that definition, “energy independent.”
All forms of energy combined, the country exported 23.0 quadrillion British thermal units of energy in that time span, which was more than the 19.6 quadrillion BTUs of energy it imported, according to the EIA’s latest monthly figures.
In those same 11 months, the U.S. also produced 89.0 quadrillion BTUs of energy, slightly more than the 88.5 quadrillion BTUs of energy it consumed.
The U.S. also produced more total energy than it consumed under Trump in 2019 and 2020. The domestic use of energy in 2020 no doubt plummeted because of Trump's disastrous handling of the pandemic, which led to the loss of over 20 million jobs in April of that year.
Net Petroleum Exports
Trump also may have been thinking of net petroleum exports, since he mentioned oil multiple times in the Fox Business interview.
In 2020, the U.S. exported about 635,000 barrels per day more than it imported from other countries, “making the United States a net annual petroleum exporter for the first time since at least 1949,” the EIA has said. At the same time, the U.S. continued to be a net importer of crude oil, specifically, as it has been since the 1940s.
The trend line for the U.S. becoming a net exporter of petroleum began in 2006, under President George W. Bush, and continued under President Barack Obama and then Trump. The EIA said a decline in the global demand for oil during the COVID-19 pandemic finally pushed the U.S. into net exporter territory.
“International petroleum prices decreased in response to less consumption, which diminished incentives for key petroleum-exporting countries to increase production. This shift allowed the United States to export more petroleum in 2020 than it had in the past,” the EIA wrote in a February post on its website.
More important, the EIA said the U.S. “continued to export more petroleum (which includes crude oil, refined petroleum products, and other liquids) than it imported in 2021.”
Last year, the U.S. exported about 164,000 barrels per day more than it imported, according to annual EIA data.
The EIA does project in its March Short-Term Energy Outlook that the U.S. will import slightly more petroleum than it exports in 2022, making it a net importer for the year. But that is not a certainty.
In February 2021, the EIA also projected that the U.S. would be a net importer of petroleum for the year, which, based on the EIA’s most recent data, turned out not to be the case.
However, if the EIA’s most recent projections are accurate, the agency also estimates in the same report that the U.S., as soon as 2023, would once again be a net exporter of petroleum, or, based on that definition, “energy independent.”
It is really no surprise that the US economy is using more energy now than in 2020 or 2021. Biden added 6.727 million jobs his first 12 months in office. By comparison, Trump only added 6.500 million jobs in his first 3 YEARS in office, and he left office with 2.611 million fewer people with jobs than when he started.
Jobless people don't burn a lot of gas. But it can make your "energy independence" claim look compelling to anyone who doesn't bother to look at the numbers and see what that actually means.
Biden fixed Trump's 2.611 million job loss and then added 4 million more. Those folks need gas to get to work.
There is a plan for energy independence, and Democrats would certainly like to pass it. But since it means oil company profits might suffer, Republicans will never let it pass through congress, if they have any means at all for stopping it. Just ask Moscow Mitch.
you know TTF is getting worried when they start up the word games
yes, we were energy independent under Trump
no, we aren't under Slidin' Biden
it's not complicated
Empty baby formula shelves.
Feared summer power blackouts.
Plunging stocks.
Predictions of widespread $6-a-gallon gasoline.
Recession clouds.
Coming food shortages.
Soaring grocery prices.
And the refusal of a pandemic to ease its grip.
This current reality, mixed with forecasts of worse to come, is hardly the normality Americans craved, and that President Slidin' Joe Biden promised last year when he said, shortly after taking office, that "America is coming back."
Yet there is a growing sense of crises piling on crises as the shockwaves of a period of unusual global turmoil -- including a once-in-a-century pandemic and the worst war in Europe since 1945 -- burrow into the fabric of daily life.
It's all distilled a sense of pessimism and exhaustion among the American people, according to a CNN poll released this week that showed clear majorities worried about how things are going and an administration that seems unable to fix the most fundamental questions facing the country.
Millions of Americans are worrying about how to deal with high prices, or are going without. Predictions of a looming recession make everyone concerned about their jobs. And any pay increases that come with a new job are quickly gobbled up by inflation.
The secondary consequences of such duress are bound to be political. And for Biden and the Democrats, who were already facing an excruciating midterm election year, the prospect of repudiation by angry voters is growing. Almost by the day, the political environment worsens despite Biden's frantic efforts to convince the country he feels its pain and can lead it to better times.
"I know that families all across America are hurting because of inflation," Biden said earlier this month. "I understand what it feels like," he added, insisting that the high cost of living was his "top domestic priority."
Biden gets the blame
hat is Biden's plight right now. It's hard to break through with scripted presidential events and trips out of Washington amid a barrage of bad news.
In just the last week, for example, the President has touted the successes of his American rescue plan and announced steps to ease the cost of housing. He has ordered the use of wartime powers to end the baby formula shortage. The White House is encouraging communities to unlock funds from Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law.
Yet the President's approval rating languishes around 40% in most polls, amid questions about whether his administration really understands the challenges facing Americans and whether his government is doing enough to fix them.
It's a perilous political position when a President tries to highlight the positives in an economy many Americans think is performing poorly.
The political impact of the current situation is not limited to the fate of Biden's party in November's midterm elections, which history suggests would be a tough ride even without challenging economic times. A red wave in the midterms could lift a growing crop of pro-Trump extreme candidates to power in a way that could reshape the country in the longer term. Some of their number -- for example, newly minted Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano -- have adopted positions on 2020 voter fraud that will prevent Dem hijinks in future elections..
The baby formula crisis is a classic example of the cascading problems that can consume presidencies. There's nothing more harrowing for a parent than a hungry baby. And the very idea that babies might go hungry is a damaging metaphor for a country and a system that don't seem to be working. It's also a powerful rallying point for Biden's critics in the conservative media industry who suggest the country is on a precipice of devastation.
The formula problem started when one baby food manufacturer closed down a plant after several sickened infants were linked to possibly contaminated formula. Presidents quickly get saddled with crises no one else has solved. They get the blame when things go wrong, and end up with little credit when the problem is eventually solved. That's Biden's position now.
Another emotive issue sapping national morale is the high price of gas. The national average of a gallon of gasoline on Thursday was nearly $4.60, according to the American Automobile Association. Come high summer, that might feel like a bargain. Financial Services giant JPMorgan warned this week that California's $6-a-gallon hit could spread across the entire country by August.
High gas prices are a particularly painful blow to wallets, especially in rural areas where many people drive miles to work.
Again, Biden has tried to respond. He released millions of barrels of oil form strategic reserves and has shamed oil giants for not bringing prices down more quickly. But prices seem to keep rising. And who hasn't sought a scapegoat when the cost to fill a tank approaches $100?
In response to growing public anger, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill giving the Federal Trade Commission authority to investigate energy companies for alleged price gouging. But four Democrats joined Republicans in voting against it, with Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a Florida Democrat not running for reelection, blasting the move as window dressing.
"At best, this bill is a distraction that won't actually address the problem," she said in a statement. "At worst, it could make the problem more severe."
High inflation is giving Republicans an easy opening in the run-up to the midterms. The White House's previous insistence that the cost of living was a "transitory" result of the pandemic is going to haunt it for months. There's also little sign that pinning prices on vague culprits -- like pandemic-related supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine -- will cut it with fed-up voters.
"President Biden's strategy of blaming inflation on a new villain every month is failing. First, he denied inflation existed. Then, he called it temporary; and now, it's Putin's fault," Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, said in a hearing this week.
The daunting prospect for the White House is that although there are signs that inflation -- which was up 8.3% in the 12 months that ended in April -- is slowing, there is no guarantee that things will not get worse in the months to come.
The loss of a substantial portion of Ukraine's harvest later this summer could have a devastating impact on prices and could make some basic foodstuffs scarce. While the problem is likely to be most severe in developing nations -- and could even cause famines -- Americans are unlikely to be spared the consequences. Apart from grain, Ukraine is also a prime source of fertilizer and sunflower oils, shortages of which will have a direct impact on food prices.
This was the week that inflation finally caught up with the stock market, which is critical to the retirement savings of middle class Americans, as lower-than-expected earnings by retailers hit by consumers cutting back sent Wall Street into a spin. That coincided with new recession fears.
The Conference Board, a nonprofit business membership association, warned this week that 68% of CEOs surveyed think that the Federal Reserve's strategy of raising interest rates to combat inflation will trigger a slowdown.
Even a mild recession could have negative consequences for many Americans, not to mention devastating reverberations for Democrats in November.
If the picture was not gloomy enough, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned Thursday that extreme temperatures and drought could cause the power grid to buckle.
It looks like a long, hot, miserable summer that is unlikely to ease the country's disgruntled mood
"you know TTF is getting worried when they start up the word games
yes, we were energy independent under Trump"
It was Trump that started the word games - either because he doesn't understand "net imports" and "net exports," or because he was just making stuff up to make himself look better.
It is entirely possible he didn't understand the terminology or the economics of it - he thought China would pay for the tariffs he imposed - they didn't - US customers did. And he somehow thought he could get Mexico to pay for his wall - perhaps after he lobbed some missiles at them.
"no, we aren't under Slidin' Biden"
Look at the data:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51338
The US has been exporting more petroleum products than it has imported since 2011 - back in Obama's presidency, and it is continuing to increase under Biden.
Total net fossil energy trade still exceeded imports in 2021 - that was Biden's first year.
The 2022 forecast is that the trade will slight favor imports in 2022, but go back to more exports in 2023. Depending on how quickly we can start shipping LNG to Europe, there is still time in 2022 to make its exports exceed imports as well.
Play all the word games you like - other conservatives will believe them because they are easily manipulated by propaganda like that. The actual data though tells a different story.
Conservative Republicans running for school boards in North Carolina and New York overwhelmingly lost their elections Tuesday night, the latest sign that the GOP’s effort to wage a sweeping anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black culture war on public schools is failing.
In North Carolina, a slate of five right-wing ideologues ran together in Durham’s nonpartisan school board election, under the phrase “Better Board, Better Schools, Better Futures.” All were hoping to unseat Democratic incumbents. All were defeated in a landslide.
These candidates included Joetta MacMiller, who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C.; Curtis Hrischuk, who spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros; and Gayathri Rajaraman, who told INDY Week that she didn’t think students should learn about topics like historical racism, gender identity or politics.
None of these five candidates got endorsements from Durham’s three most influential political action committees. And as INDY Week put it, this was likely because some of these people “might be best described with the letter Q followed by ‘Anon,’” a reference to the bonkers conspiracy theory about a shadow government of Democratic pedophiles being at war with former President Donald Trump.
In New York, right-wing school board candidates who opposed diversity training, sex and gender education, and pandemic protocols were similarly trounced on Tuesday. There were at least 35 of these candidates in the Capitol Region alone, according to The Times Union, which reports largely on Albany and its suburbs. As of late Tuesday night, 27 of them had lost and four had won, with a handful of districts still reporting results.
These races generated a “huge swell in turnout,” reported the Times Union, which it attributed to parents’ strong rejection of right-wing “take back our schools” candidates.
These candidates are part of a nationwide push by conservatives to change the ideological make-up of public school boards — something they claim is necessary to keep books out of classrooms that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people and address historical racism. Prominent Republicans and right-wing media have propagated these candidates’ claims. Well-funded front groups like Moms for Liberty, which has pushed for banning “anti-American” books about Martin Luther King Jr., give money to these candidates. In some cases, GOP-led state legislatures have passed laws to give right-wing school board candidates an electoral advantage over Democrats.
For all their efforts, though, conservatives keep flopping in these races. In fact, the candidates in Tuesday’s elections were almost always the lowest vote-getters in their races.
It’s a trend that’s been playing out for months. Earlier in May, conservative school board candidates all across Montana overwhelmingly lost. Progressive school board candidates trounced in New Hampshire in March, even in conservative towns. In Wisconsin, the results were mixed, but a number of conservative candidates lost despite significant funding. In the town of Eau Claire, for example, all three right-wing school board candidates who ran on anti-LGBTQ platforms lost to incumbents and their allies.
It’s not to say that school board candidates who run on an anti-diversity, anti-LGBTQ platforms always lose.
Earlier this month, all but one of the 11 Tarrant County conservative school board candidates won their races in Texas. Here, candidates said they would use their board seat to prevent students from learning about racism and LGBTQ issues, which some parents in this very conservative county described as “pornographic.”
"The US has been exporting more petroleum products than it has imported since 2011"
and yet, Slidin' Biden is begging communist Venezuela to give us more and agreeing to lift sanctions against them if they will
yeah, makes sense
"It’s not to say that school board candidates who run on an anti-diversity, anti-LGBTQ platforms always lose."
understatement of the year
when candidates without other baggage run against the gay agenda and CRT, they usually win
"necessary to keep books out of classrooms that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people and address historical racism"
that would be to keep books advocating the normalcy of homosexuality to kids below third grade and teaching CRT, a theory that addresses historical racism with demonstrably false ideas
also, many school boards will face a reckoning over the irreparable damage done to children with unnecessary COVID lockdowns
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will no longer be able to receive communion in her hometown of San Francisco after the local archdiocese said her vow to make abortion legal crossed a line the Catholic church could not ignore.
In an announcement that he also tweeted out, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone notified Pelosi that her staunch support of abortion and her refusal to personally explain her position to him forced his hand.
"After numerous attempts to speak with Speaker Pelosi to help her understand the grave evil she is perpetrating, the scandal she is causing, and the danger to her own soul she is risking, I have determined that she is not to be admitted to Holy Communion," he said.
Pelosi has been a vocal advocate of abortion rights for decades. But her decision in September to bring to the floor a bill making Roe v. Wade the law of the land following passage of a Texas law that effectively bans terminating pregnancies beyond six weeks proved a bridge too far for her local archdiocese.
The Russia-Trump collusion narrative of 2016 and beyond was a dirty trick for the ages, and now we know it came from the top—candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. That was the testimony Friday by 2016 Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook in federal court, and while this news is hardly a surprise, it’s still bracing to find her fingerprints on the political weapon.
Mr. Mook testified as a witness in special counsel John Durham’s trial of Michael Sussmann, the lawyer accused of lying to the FBI. In September 2016, Mr. Sussmann took claims of a secret Trump connection to Russia’s Alfa Bank to the FBI and said he wasn’t acting on behalf of any client. Prosecutors say he was working for the Clinton campaign.
Prosecutors presented evidence this week that Mr. Sussmann worked with cyber-researchers and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to produce the claims on behalf of the Clinton campaign, and to feed them to the FBI. An FBI agent testified that a bureau analysis quickly rejected the claims as implausible. (Mr. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.)
Prosecutors asked Mr. Mook about his role in funneling the Alfa Bank claims to the press. Mr. Mook admitted the campaign lacked expertise to vet the data, yet the decision was made by Mr. Mook, policy adviser Jake Sullivan (now President Biden’s national security adviser), communications director Jennifer Palmieri and campaign chairman John Podesta to give the Alfa Bank claims to a reporter. Mr. Mook said Mrs. Clinton was asked about the plan and approved it. A story on the Trump-Alfa Bank allegations then appeared in Slate, a left-leaning online publication.
On Oct. 31, 2016, Mr. Sullivan issued a statement mentioning the Slate story, writing, “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.” Mrs. Clinton tweeted Mr. Sullivan’s statement with the comment: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” “Apparently” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
In short, the Clinton campaign created the Trump-Alfa allegation, fed it to a credulous press that failed to confirm the allegations but ran with them anyway, then promoted the story as if it was legitimate news. The campaign also delivered the claims to the FBI, giving journalists another excuse to portray the accusations as serious and perhaps true.
Most of the press will ignore this news, but the Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country. It disgraced the FBI, humiliated the press, and sent the country on a three-year investigation to nowhere. Vladimir Putin never came close to doing as much disinformation damage.
When faced with irrefutable evidence of failing policies and crumbling political fortunes, politically rational presidents undertake a course correction. They reverse unpopular policies and adopt more productive ones, even if only out of self-interest.
President Biden and the Democrats, however, are pointedly ignoring the laws of political rationality. They stubbornly cling to their disastrous agenda, even as it damages the country and collapses their own poll numbers. They’re acutely aware of the harm they’re inflicting, but instead of rushing to mitigate it, they’re doubling down.
In their relentless pursuit of a more Marxist America, they have abandoned the pretense of serving — or even caring about — the rest of us.
Struggling to pay for groceries? Thank Biden and the Democrats, who created and exacerbated the worst inflation in 40 years by spending trillions of dollars on their endless leftist wish list. Inflation most affects those whom the Democrats profess to champion — the middle class, working class and poor. But the left’s answer to their hardship is ever-more spending — and more crushing inflation. Let them eat cake — who cares if they can’t afford it!
They’re also dead set on achieving their ruinous Green New Deal, as they know that control over the energy sector is key to accelerating socialism. They’re waging total war on American domestic energy production, sending gas prices soaring and Americans into an economic tailspin. The United States has more energy resources than any other nation, yet Biden would rather beg our worst enemies for oil and gas than tap our own.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm repeatedly has laughed when asked about increasing oil production. And just this week, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland refused to acknowledge that gas prices were “too high,” because they want ever-higher prices to make it prohibitively painful for you to keep driving your fossil-fuel-consuming car.
Squeezed in the vise of skyrocketing prices and a drop in real wages, Americans are struggling to make ends meet, but the Democrats don’t care. In fact, they cheer on escalating economic desperation as a way to drive more people into the waiting embrace of government dependency.
They keep the southern border wide open, even though unchecked illegal immigration depresses wages and puts pressure on our economic, educational and health-care systems.
Particularly diabolical is the left’s war on kids. If everything is done “for the children” — as Democrats always say — why are they so intent on harming them? The Biden administration blocks charter schools, which offer kids — particularly minority children — a better education and brighter future. And by enforcing masks on the youngest students in defiance of the science, Democrats put their corrupt gravy train with teachers unions over your kids’ well-being.
If they cared about you, the country or even their own political survival, Biden and the Democrats would have deep-sixed their radical agenda by now. Instead, they’ve doubled down on it.
Your pain is their gain as they work ceaselessly to turn our republic into an increasingly authoritarian regime — with them on top and in control, of course.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/05/19/some-states-already-are-targeting-birth-control
PEW: Some States Already Are Targeting Birth Control
...Republicans revealed that their ambition wasn’t only to target a familiar abortion foe. They were going after specific forms of birth control as well, notably, emergency contraceptives, often sold under the brand name Plan B, and intrauterine devices, known as IUDs. GOP lawmakers tried to stop Missouri’s Medicaid agency from paying for those forms of contraception.
...as the Missouri episode demonstrated, skirmishing over birth control methods already has begun, as Republican lawmakers push to restrict access to birth control methods they claim are abortifacient, or causing abortions.
Emergency contraception, often known as the morning-after pill and sold over the counter without a prescription, is designed to prevent ovulation. In its labeling, the Food and Drug Administration says emergency contraception also could keep a fertilized zygote from implanting in the uterine lining, though the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says the evidence suggests that situation is “unlikely.” Nearly 25% of women ages 22 to 49 have used emergency contraception, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
IUDs, implanted in the uterus by a health provider, are a semi-permanent birth control method. They also prevent fertilization, but in some cases may prevent implantation. About 6.1 million women used IUDs over a one-month survey period in 2018, the same number as those relying on male condoms, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights advocacy and research organization.
This month, Idaho state Rep. Brent Crane, Republican chair of the powerful House State Affairs Committee, said he would hold hearings on legislation banning emergency contraceptives and possibly IUDs as well.
A Louisiana House committee earlier this month passed a bill saying that “human personhood” begins at the point of fertilization, an interpretation that critics say could potentially be used to outlaw Plan B drugs, IUDs and perhaps other forms of birth control.
"GOPers and Taliban limit womens rights"
only if you consider murder a right
which, I guess you do
and, yes, destroying fertilized eggs and calling that birth control, is killing
Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The findings of nearly 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years.
The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious institutions in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.
The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Many of the cases referred to in the report were considered outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.
The report, compiled by an organization called Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned more with protecting the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.
“While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations came to light in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states...
Thanks again for stating your religious opinion of women's reproductive health measures like contraception, Plan B, and abortion.
"Thanks again for stating your religious opinion"
"religious" and "moral" aren't the same
do you think all morality is religious, or just when it comes to killing the inconvenient innocent
"of women's reproductive health measures like contraception, Plan B, and abortion"
contraception is fine
destroying human life is evil
and using the phrase "women's reproductive health measures" to refer to this type of murder is Orwellianism at its evil peak
Former President Donald Trump is telling his close allies that the potential overturning of Roe v Wade could cost him politically, hurting his chances of winning reelection should he run again in 2024, according to Rolling Stone.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, Rolling Stone reported that Trump has been telling allies that the issue of abortion could turn "suburban women" against him.
"Suburban women have been a recurring concern for [former] President Trump, including during the 2020 campaign, when his smarter advisers were sounding the alarm to him about how he was losing suburbs," a source said, per Rolling Stone.
"He is … worried women in the suburbs could punish him for this one day, [too]," the source continued.
Since a draft opinion to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked, Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet about it. He has not referenced it on Truth Social and has only once alluded to it once during a rally, Rolling Stone reported. Two sources told the media outlet that the silence is "intentional and calculated."
Trump has reportedly been telling allies that suburban women don't like hearing about the issue as they are typically more pro-choice than the mainstream of the Republican Party, according to Rolling Stone.
He has told several associates that his enemies could "use it against him" in 2024 if he went too hard now on pushing for the overturning of Roe v Wade, the media outlet said.
"'Suburban women — some who voted for me — they don't like it when we talk about it," Trump reportedly said at a small gathering this month, a source told Rolling Stone.
Trump once described himself as pro-choice. Speaking to NBC in 1999, he declared: "I'm very pro-choice."
His position changed by the time he became president. In 2016, he promised to select judges for the Supreme Court who would "automatically" overturn Roe v Wade. Three of his appointees — Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch — have reportedly agreed to the draft opinion.
Trump's post-presidency office did not respond to Insider's request for comment on Saturday morning.
"Former President Donald Trump is telling his close allies that the potential overturning of Roe v Wade could cost him politically, hurting his chances of winning reelection should he run again in 2024"
glad he has an excuse
now, he should bow out and stop ruining the GOP chances at easy sweep this fall
when he tries to find out who's winning and then endorses them at the last second to make it look like he's responsible, it's pathetic
With midterm primaries helping set the direction for the Democratic and Republican parties, most Americans, including many of the parties' own voters, aren't terribly happy with direction of the country.
For starters, the Democratic Party — which controls Congress and the presidency — is not seen by a majority as either "effective" or "in touch," which are, no doubt, important measures for a party in power. The Democratic Party is more apt to be described as "weak," a label applied by a majority of Americans, than it is "strong."
The Republican Party, for its part, is described by a slight majority as "extreme," a term Americans apply to the GOP more so than to Democrats, though neither really escapes the label. Independents are more likely to call the GOP extreme. The GOP is described as "strong" more often than as "weak," but it is also described by Americans more often as "hateful" than as "caring" — by double digits.
Primaries tend to find candidates arguing over matters that appeal to their bases, but as different as each side's campaigns are, there is something voters of each side share: a desire for candidates to focus on inflation. Perhaps that's no surprise, given how large it looms for most Americans.
Among Democrats, who also want a focus on taxing the wealthy and racial justice, many also want their candidates to focus on protecting abortion rights. In fact, especially among those who care a lot about the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade — almost all say they want the party's nominees to focus on abortion rights.
Republicans want their nominees to focus on stopping illegal immigration and talk about traditional values. Illegal immigration is especially a priority among self-described conservative Republicans.
A majority of independents also want the Democrats to focus on abortion rights.
And there's an asymmetry on abortion focus between the parties: even more Democrats want their candidates to focus on supporting abortion rights than Republicans want their candidates to talk about opposing it.
But despite being in power during a time of inflation, Democrats don't cede that much ground to Republicans on who's trusted to deal with it. It's 51% of Americans who trust the GOP, not much more than the 49% who trust the Democrats on inflation. It's the same nearly even gap on the economy. And that may be because the parties' candidates aren't talking about it enough.
Democrats have an advantage being trusted on abortion and coronavirus.
The Trump factor
Within the Republican rank-and-file, there's a divide over how much they want to hear about loyalty to former President Donald Trump, some of which we're seeing play out in the primaries right now. A slight majority of Republicans do want their candidates to focus on showing loyalty to Trump, but nearly half don't. Related to this, four in 10 Republicans want the nominees focused on the 2020 election, but most don't...
...Americans overall are more likely to see the Republican Party as fighting for White people than for Black people — by more than two to one. In fact, more say the Republican Party fights against the interests of Black Americans than is neutral toward them. It's similarly true for views of the Republican Party's approach to Hispanic people, with more feeling it works against them, rather than for them, and by more than two to one, against LGBTQ people than for them. Americans do think the GOP fights more for people of faith than do Democrats.
Conversely, they see the Democratic Party as fighting for Black and Hispanic Americans more so than for White Americans.
Americans are more likely to believe the GOP fights more against the interests of women than for women, and women overall describe things this way.
Men, meanwhile, are much more likely to think the Democrats fight more for women than for men, but a majority of men think the Republican Party fights for them (and more so than for women)....
More of them polls that TTFers like so much:
President Biden’s approval hit a new low on Monday, according to a NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll.
Fifty-seven percent of registered voters said they disapproved of how Biden has handled the presidency, with 40 percent saying they “strongly disapprove” and 17 percent saying they “somewhat disapprove.”
Meanwhile, nearly 43 percent of voters said they approved of how Biden is handling his job. Roughly 16 percent said they “strongly approve,” while around 26 percent said they “somewhat approve.”
However, Biden is not the only political leader facing poor marks among voters. Roughly 48 percent of voters said they did not have “very much” trust in Congress, while roughly 20 percent said they have no trust in the institution at all. Only 22 percent said they had a “fair amount” of trust in Congress, while another 7 percent said they had “a great deal” of trust.
Biden’s latest disapproval rating marks a major increase from his disapproval rating last month, which sat at 53 percent.
On top of that, several other recent polls have shown bleak numbers for the president. A CBS News poll released on Sunday showed the president’s approval at 44 percent, while his disapproval rating came in at 56 percent.
The latest polling spells trouble for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections. The same News Nation/Decision Desk HQ survey showed Republicans leading Democrats on the generic ballot.
Republicans have employed a strategy of relentlessly attacking Biden and Democrats on issues like inflation and crime, which the NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll found to be the top issues for Americans. Out of inflation, unemployment, crime and COVID-19, roughly 64 percent of Americans said inflation was the “bigger problem facing the United States today.” Around 14 percent said the same about crime and the coronavirus pandemic, respectively. Another 6 percent said the same about unemployment.
Remember when gays introduced AIDS to America?
Getting ready for the next epidemic courtesy of our indulgence of open homosexual behavior:
MONKEYPOX
A leading adviser to the World Health Organization described the unprecedented outbreak of the rare disease monkeypox in developed countries as “a random event” that might be explained by risky sexual behavior at two recent mass events in Europe.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Dr. David Heymann, who formerly headed WHO’s emergencies department, said the leading theory to explain the spread of the disease was sexual transmission among gay and bisexual men at two raves held in Spain and Belgium. Monkeypox has not previously triggered widespread outbreaks beyond Africa, where it is endemic in animals.
And to think, a backlash was already in full swing.
Now this.
Remember the backlash from AIDS?
Even Elton John married a girl
President Biden has officially gone over 100 days without doing any mainstream media interviews, during which time a multitude of new crises and debates have gripped the country and the world.
Biden's last media interview was his pre-Super Bowl appearance on Feb. 10 with NBC's Lester Holt, which remains his only one-on-one interview with a mainstream journalist in 2022 to date. To get a sense of how much news has struck the country since that time, that was two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Holt and Biden covered Democratic governors and their state coronavirus policies, the "tense standoff" at the time between Russia and Ukraine, the chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and inflation, among other topics.
The only two other interviews Biden has participated in since then were friendly sit-downs in late February with historian Heather Cox Richardson and progressive YouTube host Brian Tyler Cohen.
If you don't do an interview in 102 days, that shows that his handlers are petrified he'll say things like he just said about defending Taiwan, for example, because that requires a cleanup on aisle five.
2022 is an election year and Democrats face a potentially dire November, according to recent polls.
"You would think that the commander-in-chief would be sat down somewhere, anywhere, maybe somewhere friendly that could at least give him a platform," he said. "You just get the feeling that the president's handlers now at this point think that it's probably going to do more harm than good if he does an interview, and that's pretty scary when you consider that again, this is the leader of this country. He should face questions and accountability, and they just don't want to put him out there, for whatever reason."
Biden had previously reached historic lows regarding the number of media interviews he gave in his first year in office, which has only carried on into his second year. He has only done 23 press interviews from January 20, 2021, through April 29, 2022, compared to Donald Trump's 95 and Barack Obama's 187 at the same point in their presidencies, according to data from Towson University's White House Transition Project.
Since his last media interview, Biden has been hit with major challenges from the Russia-Ukraine war, continued record inflation, looming fears of a recession, soaring gas prices, the immigration crisis at the southern border and the devastating baby formula shortage.
The leak of a majority draft opinion earlier this month that would overturn Roe v. Wade was another major story to break during Biden's media interview blackout. An internal memo from the Department of Homeland Security is already warning of potential violence by pro-choicers that could break out when the landmark abortion ruling is overturned.
Additionally, coverage of his son Hunter Biden, who is under federal investigation for his tax affairs, has been gaining steam among legacy media outlets who've shed light on his overseas business dealings.
Biden has still made headlines in remarks to reporters, particularly with his off-the-cuff remarks. In March, the president caused an international firestorm during his speech in Warsaw, Poland, when he declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power," something the White House immediately walked back.
Earlier this month, the president went viral after he reminisced about "the old days" when he broke bread with "real segregationists" while making remarks decrying the lack of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill.
Donald Trump’s pick for a Michigan state Senate seat is promising to ban all birth control if she gets the chance.
“I guess we have to ask ourselves, would that ever come to a vote in the Michigan state legislature? And if it should, I would have to side with it should not be legal,” Republican Jacky Eubanks said in a recent interview with the site Church Militant.
“People believe that birth control — it’s better, like you said, oh, because then you won’t get pregnant and you won’t need to have an abortion,” she added. “But I think it gives people the false sense of security that they can have consequence-free sex, and that’s not true and that’s not correct. Sex ought to be between one man and one woman in the confines of marriage.”
Eubanks’ comments are some of the most explicit from a conservative candidate about going after contraception. But some other Republicans have made clear that with abortion rights likely to be struck down this summer, they’re starting to eye contraception restrictions as well.
Republican politicians have started talking about Griswold v. Connecticut as another case they’d like to see the Supreme Court overturn after Roe v. Wade. That 1965 decision said married couples have a right to contraception access based on the constitutional right to privacy. That decision could set the stage for future decisions that further restrict birth control protections, abortion and marriage equality.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), for example, recently called Griswold “constitutionally unsound.” Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters’ campaign website said he would only support judges “who understand that Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion.”
Other Republicans in Congress have scoffed at the idea of banning contraception, dismissing the notion that the Supreme Court would go after something that’s overwhelmingly popular. But Roe is popular as well, and its days are likely numbered.
GOP lawmakers have also long pushed personhood legislation — and are continuing to do so in the midterm elections — that would classify fertilized eggs as persons under the U.S. Constitution, making abortion illegal. But it could also ban certain forms of contraception, such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and Plan B.
In his endorsement of Eubanks, Trump explicitly mentioned her support for the “big lie” — the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was marred by widespread fraud. Eubanks has called for another audit of Michigan’s 2020 election results despite the fact that a prior audit found no evidence outside interference. She has canvassed voters in search of purported evidence of fraud, prompting a complaint to police that she was intimidating voters.
“We are going up against the beast,” Eubanks said at a rally earlier this year. “The beast hates us, but the good news is God is on our side and God wins. If [we] continue to pray and to not comply and to stand up and peacefully fight back, we will see the regime’s power broken and finally the people will be put back in their rightful place as the true sovereigns in this nation.”
They were right. I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) a crisis. Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse.
Someone asked me a few weeks ago what I expected from the third-party investigation into the handling of sexual abuse by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee. I said I didn’t expect to be surprised at all. How could I be? I lived through years with that entity. I was the one who called for such an investigation in the first place.
And yet, as I read the report, I found that I could not swipe the screen to the next page because my hands were shaking with rage. That’s because, as dark a view as I had of the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.
The conclusions of the report are so massive as to almost defy summation. It corroborates and details charges of deception, stonewalling, and intimidation of victims and those calling for reform. It includes written conversations among top Executive Committee staff and their lawyers that display the sort of inhumanity one could hardly have scripted for villains in a television crime drama. It documents callous cover-ups by some SBC leaders and credible allegations of sexually predatory behavior by some leaders themselves, including former SBC president Johnny Hunt (who was one of the only figures in SBC life who seemed to be respected across all of the typical divides).
And then there is the documented mistreatment by the Executive Committee of a sexual abuse survivor, whose own story of her abuse was altered to make it seem that her abuse was a consensual “affair”—resulting, as the report corroborates, in years of living hell for her.
For years, leaders in the Executive Committee said a database—to prevent sexual predators from quietly moving from one church to another, to a new set of victims—had been thoroughly investigated and found to be legally impossible, given Baptist church autonomy. My mouth fell open when I read documented proof in the report that these very people not only knew how to have a database, they already had one.
Allegations of sexual violence and assault were placed, the report concludes, in a secret file in the SBC Nashville headquarters. It held over 700 cases. Not only was nothing done to stop these predators from continuing their hellish crimes, staff members were reportedly told not to even engage those asking about how to stop their child from being sexually violated by a minister. Rather than a database to protect sexual abuse victims, the report reveals that these leaders had a database to protect themselves.
Indeed, the very ones who rebuked me and others for using the word crisis in reference to Southern Baptist sexual abuse not only knew that there was such a crisis but were quietly documenting it, even as they told those fighting for reform that such crimes rarely happened among “people like us.” When I read the back-and-forth between some of these presidents, high-ranking staff, and their lawyers, I cannot help but wonder what else this can be called but a criminal conspiracy.
The true horror of all of this is not just what has been done, but also how it happened. Two extraordinarily powerful affirmations of everyday Southern Baptists—biblical fidelity and cooperative mission—were used against them.
Those outside the SBC world cannot imagine the power of the mythology of the Café Du Monde—the spot in the French Quarter of New Orleans where, over beignets and coffee, two men, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, mapped out on a napkin how the convention could restore a commitment to the truth of the Bible and to faithfulness to its confessional documents.
For Southern Baptists of a certain age, this story is the equivalent of the Wittenberg door for Lutherans or Aldersgate Street for Methodists. The convention was saved from liberalism by the courage of these two men who wouldn’t back down, we believed. In fact, I taught this story to my students.
Those two mythical leaders are now disgraced. One was fired after alleged mishandling a rape victim’s report in an institution he led after he was documented making public comments about the physical appearance of teenage girls and his counsel to women physically abused by their husbands. The other is now in civil proceedings about allegations of the rape of young men.
We were told they wanted to conserve the old time religion. What they wanted was to conquer their enemies and to make stained-glass windows honoring themselves—no matter who was hurt along the way.
Who cannot now see the rot in a culture that mobilizes to exile churches that call a woman on staff a “pastor” or that invite a woman to speak from the pulpit on Mother’s Day, but dismisses rape and molestation as “distractions” and efforts to address them as violations of cherished church autonomy? In sectors of today’s SBC, women wearing leggings is a social media crisis; dealing with rape in the church is a distraction.
Most of the people in the pews believed the Bible and wanted to support the leaders who did also. They didn’t know that some would use the truth of the Bible to prop up a lie about themselves.
The second part of the mythology is that of mission. I have said to my own students, to my own children, exactly what was said to me—that the Cooperative Program is the greatest missions-funding strategy in church history. All of us who grew up in Southern Baptist churches revere the missionary pioneer Lottie Moon. (In fact, I have a bronze statue of her head directly across from me as I write this.) Southern Baptist missionaries are some of the most selfless and humble and gifted people I know.
And yet the very good Southern Baptist impulse for missions, for cooperation, is often weaponized in the same way that “grace” or “forgiveness” has been in countless contexts to blame survivors for their own abuse. The report itself documents how arguments were used that “professional victims” and those who stand by them would be a tool of the Devil to “distract” from mission.
Those who called for reform were told doing so might cause some churches to withhold Cooperative Program funding and thus pull missionaries from the field. Those who called out the extent of the problem—most notably Christa Brown and the army of indefatigable survivors who joined that work—were called crazy and malcontents who just wanted to burn everything down. It’s bad enough that these survivors not only endured psychological warfare and legal harassment. But they were also isolated with implications that if they kept focusing on sexual abuse people wouldn’t hear the gospel and would go to hell.
Cooperation is a good and biblical ideal, but cooperation must not be to “protect the base.” Those who have used such phrases know what they meant. They know that if one steps out of line, one will be shunned as a liberal or a Marxist or a feminist. They know that the meanest people will mobilize and that the “good guys” will keep silent. And that’s nothing—nothing—compared to what is endured by sexual abuse victims—including children—who have no “base.”
When my wife and I walked out of the last SBC Executive Committee meeting we would ever attend, she looked at me and said, “I love you, I’m with you to the end, and you can do what you want, but if you’re still a Southern Baptist by summer you’ll be in an interfaith marriage.” This is not a woman given to ultimatums, in fact that was the first one I’d ever heard from her. But she had seen and heard too much. And so had I.
I can’t imagine the rage being experienced right now by those who have survived church sexual abuse. I only know firsthand the rage of one who never expected to say anything but “we” when referring to the Southern Baptist Convention, and can never do so again. I only know firsthand the rage of one who loves the people who first told me about Jesus, but cannot believe that this is what they expected me to do, what they expected me to be. I only know firsthand the rage of one who wonders while reading what happened on the seventh floor of that Southern Baptist building, how many children were raped, how many people were assaulted, how many screams were silenced, while we boasted that no one could reach the world for Jesus like we could.
That’s more than a crisis. It’s even more than just a crime. It’s blasphemy.
And anyone who cares about heaven ought to be mad as hell.
Russell Moore leads the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.
"Donald Trump’s pick for a Michigan state Senate seat is promising to ban all birth control if she gets the chance"
well, she won't get a chance so you might want to calm down before you burst a blood vessel
"some of the most explicit from a conservative candidate about going after contraception"
opposition to contraception is not common among non-catholic Christian believers
even among Catholic laity, its use is common
"But some other Republicans have made clear that with abortion rights likely to be struck down this summer, they’re starting to eye contraception restrictions as well"
personally, as a libertarian, I'd agree that contraception should be legal
but, like abortion, it's not a constitutional right
"Republican politicians have started talking about Griswold v. Connecticut as another case they’d like to see the Supreme Court overturn after Roe v. Wade."
no relevant ones have
"Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), for example, recently called Griswold “constitutionally unsound.”"
she's right
that's not to say it should be illegal
"Roe is popular as well"
actually, when Roe is properly understood, it's not popular
especially among liberals
"GOP lawmakers have also long pushed personhood legislation — and are continuing to do so in the midterm elections — that would classify fertilized eggs as persons under the U.S. Constitution, making abortion illegal. But it could also ban certain forms of contraception, such as intrauterine devices (IUDs) and Plan B."
well, that's not contraception
of any form
A set of unsettling images made the rounds on social media last week. In them, a lingerie-clad man, wearing a bra top, garter belt and fishnet stockings, is seen playing next to young children in a Lego pit at an Australian museum.
An anonymous Twitter user posted the images after complaining to security about the man and not feeling satisfied with its response. After investigating, the museum issued a statement saying it wanted to be a “safe place where everyone feels welcome,” and the man and his accompanying friend “had not done anything wrong.”
Welcome to yet another example of progressive acceptance being pushed to the extreme. Although it offers some consolation to know that the individual in question reportedly kept to himself, these types of incidents and the ambivalence they inspire reflect an increasing normalization of sexualizing children. We’re headed in a frightening direction.
In America, leftist activism has infiltrated schools under the banner of sex education, successfully molding the vulnerable minds of children beneath their parents’ noses. This has happened again and again, laid bare in grade K-12 classrooms by way of inappropriate educational materials.
Some may argue, as I once did, that these materials are, by and large, misunderstood — that they are meant to encourage children to have healthy views about their bodies and offer them the necessary language to report sexual abuse if it occurs.
I revised my opinion upon realizing how this very open-mindedness about sexuality is being exploited by those with less-than-pure intentions.
US Department of Education research estimates that one in 10 students experiences sexual misconduct by a teacher at some point from kindergarten through high school. This translates to millions of affected children.
If you have doubts, consider a recent case in which a high school counselor who organized a drag-show performance for students was arrested for allegedly having sex with a 15-year-old girl attending the school. As someone who has had many drag queens as friends, I have to wonder why anyone would take it upon herself to introduce minors to a highly sexualized subculture.
Of course, educators — or parents, for that matter — shouldn’t be immediately suspect if they have progressive views about sexuality or are in favor of sex education. As a former academic sex researcher, I believe that we should lessen the stigma that surrounds conversations between adults about sex.
From my experience studying paraphilias (unusual sexual interests), many paraphilic individuals struggle with unwarranted feelings of disgust and shame. So I understand the desire to turn these feelings on their head and embrace and celebrate one’s sexual expression.
But this celebration should remain in the privacy of one’s home, not foisted upon unaware children. Most law-abiding people, whether or not they have a paraphilia, would surely agree. It is morally questionable and potentially predatory for an individual to knowingly expose children to any of these ideas or ideologies.
As to why someone would feel compelled to don fetish wear in public and in the presence of children, there are several possible reasons. Exhibitionists find it sexually gratifying to expose their private anatomy to unsuspecting people without their consent.
Somebody with transvestic fetishism, also known as a penchant for sexual cross-dressing, is sexually aroused by wearing women’s garments, including clothing and underwear. An extension of this is an exotic-sounding paraphilia called autogynephilia, which translates from Greek to “love of oneself as a woman.” It involves sexual arousal at the thought of having female anatomy and identifying as a woman when interacting with people.
Sexual masochism, or sexual interest in being humiliated and degraded, can be found in men who enjoy being forced, often by a female partner, to sexually cross-dress in public (commonly dubbed “sissification” in online spaces).
Paraphilic infantilism revolves around taking on the behavior and dress of a child and playing with children’s toys. This is not necessarily due to having a sexual predilection for children; however, choosing to voluntarily spend large amounts of one’s time in places frequented by kids, regardless of whether someone partakes in paraphilic infantilism, can be an indicator of pedophilia, which is the sexual attraction to prepubescent children.
Sexual abuse usually involves the process of grooming a child. This consists of spending large amounts of time with them, encouraging secrets and fostering a relationship with their family to procure sexual access.
Parents should know that they have a right to safeguard their children and to voice their discomfort in educational settings, at public events and otherwise. The depraved will continue exploiting those who are well-meaning, dismissing and gaslighting parents into believing this is the new normal.
CNN's John Harwood wants you to know that it's unfair to expect President Joe Biden to do anything about inflation.
Also, he wants you to know that inflation isn't a big problem anyway, thanks to Biden.
Harwood's "analysis" conveniently covers every base for Biden, and the result is an incoherent mess. For starters, Harwood claims that inflation actually isn't that big of a problem because people have excess savings "thanks to COVID relief checks." People are still spending money, and according to Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, "American households are, for the most part, in a good financial place."
Yet, in truth, people now have the equivalent of $9,000 less in savings than they did last year. Wage gains have been erased by inflation, and low-income families are being hit particularly hard by price hikes for housing, groceries, utilities, and gasoline. Harwood is asking that you pay no attention to the financial struggles behind the curtain. Just ignore the 70% of people who are saying that inflation and the state of the economy are real issues they are concerned about and the 33% plurality that chooses "inflation" as "the most urgent issue facing the country today" from a list of 11 issues — three times as many people as those choosing the runner-up issue.
Harwood laments that Biden is taking the brunt of the blame because the White House holds press conferences and the Federal Reserve doesn't. The media question the White House, "home to the most visible public official of all," about inflation, "even though … no White House has much power to bring them down."
Perhaps Biden would be better off not promising to get an issue "under control" when he does not have the power to do so.
Harwood claims that "for unhappy voters, 'not much I can do' doesn't cut it." But that's not what Biden did. He claimed he could fix something, which put him on the hook with those "unhappy voters."
And yes, there are many things Biden could have done, or rather not done, to ease inflation. In fact, in his analysis, Harwood buries one of them after going out of his way to give Biden a free pass. "Indeed, economists across the political spectrum now believe that Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, while it accelerated growth and job creation, exacerbated inflation somewhat by over-stimulating consumer demand," he writes. Gee, ya think?
According to Andrew Prokop at Vox, the increase in prices "started to stand out shortly after President Biden took office." And although Harwood defends Biden by noting that "inflation has surged in countries around the world," Prokop notes that core inflation "has been significantly higher in the U.S. than in other wealthy countries."
Biden insisted that inflation wasn't a real issue last year. He claimed that there was just a temporary price surge. Inflation was transitory, Biden told everyone. When problems persisted, he blamed the meat industry. Then he blamed Russia's invasion of Ukraine, even though it was clear that gas prices and other costs had been increasing well before "Putin's price hike."
So, according to Harwood, inflation isn't a real problem because everyone is doing fine, and Biden can do nothing to fix the issue, even though he promised to make inflation better but made it worse.
To Harwood's credit, this is about as good of a defense as could be made for Biden's train wreck of an administration. But it won't save Biden's party in November because no one is stupid enough to believe it.
In an era where the hunt for disinformation has become a political obsession, Hillary Clinton has mostly escaped having to answer what role she played in spreading the false Russia collusion narrative that gripped America for nearly three years.
On Friday, that dodge ended with a most unlikely witness: her former campaign manager Robby Mook, who was supposed to be a witness helping the defense of her former campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann on a charge of lying to the FBI.
Instead, under cross-examination by Special Counsel John Durham's team, Mook was forced to concede two extraordinary facts.
First, the Clinton campaign wasn't "totally confident" about the accuracy of computer data suggesting Donald Trump had a secret communications channel to the Kremlin via Russia's Alfa Bank.
And second, Hillary Clinton herself personally approved spreading the story to the news media, despite the concerns about its accuracy.
"I discussed it with Hillary as well," Mook testified. "I don't remember the substance of the conversation, but notionally, the discussion was, hey, we have this and we want to share it with a reporter," Mook said.
Prosecutors asked Mook if Clinton approved leaking the story to the media.
"She agreed," Mook testified.
The testimony confirms what CIA Director John Brennan told President Barack Obama secretly in July 2016 and what the CIA later told the FBI two months later: There was intelligence that Clinton had approved a plan to dirty up Trump with Russia allegations to distract from her own email server scandal.
Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former assistant director for intelligence, called Mook’s revelation a “startling piece of testimony, particularly since he was a defense witness.”
“On the surface it looks like a major victory for John Durham,” Brock said. “Don't forget he's trying to paint an overall picture here. Sussmann is just one pixel on that photo.
“The trial is the vehicle that Durham is using to help bring out the truth, to tell a story of a political campaign that in two instances pursued information that was totally fabricated or at least misinterpreted with the Alfa Bank connection to Trump and use that disinformation to mislead the American voter,” he added.
Slowly over six years, the Russia collusion story has been exposed for what it was: a three-legged political dirty trick in which highly credible figures with deep law enforcement, intelligence and news media ties were paid by the Clinton campaign to flood the FBI, the CIA and the public with unproven allegations that Trump was secretly colluding with Russia to steal the election from Clinton.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, like other Democrats, recently framed the right to abortion in absolutist terms.
Adams and others have argued that the decision to abort must be left entirely to the woman, without limitations. If adopted into law, that would mean a nine-month-old fetus could be aborted at will.
It's an extreme position, but it's one echoed by other Democratic politicians such as Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who's running for the U.S. Senate.
A late-term abortion without medical justification is thankfully unlikely. However, embracing an absolute right to abortion is legally significant in how a politician interprets the Constitution. Under this approach, a woman could abort a full-term, "viable" baby shortly before going into labor. It would seem to support what President Joe Biden recently described as the right “to abort a child."
Of course, women will make these highly personal decisions based on a myriad issues, including consultation with physicians. However, in the end, if it is based solely on the decision of the woman, it is the definition of abortion on demand during the full course of a pregnancy.
If you do accept limitations, the question becomes what those limits should be and who gets to decide such questions.
Notably, after calling advocates for restricting abortions "extremists," Adams was asked at an abortion rights rally whether he believed that there should be any limitations on abortion. He answered: "No, I do not." And he added: "I think women should have the right to choose their bodies. Men should not have that right to choose how a woman should treat their body."
Yet, a majority of Americans support limits on abortion after 15 weeks, according to a Wall Street Journal survey. (The United States is one of only 12 among the world’s 198 countries that allow abortions for any reason after 20 weeks.)
Polls show that most Americans reject extreme or absolute positions on either side of the abortion issue. A survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also shows that 65% of Americans would make most abortions usually illegal in the second trimester, and that 80% would make most abortions illegal in the third trimester.
The effort to get politicians to address the limits of our rights is hardly new or unreasonable. It is the same question journalists often ask conservatives in demanding to know where they would draw the line on gun rights under the Second Amendment.
An absolutist position on abortion raises not just constitutional but political difficulties. Take Rep. Ryan's position. In Ohio, polls indicate that the public is split 48%-47% between those who believe abortion should be entirely legal or largely illegal.
Ryan's answer, therefore, alarmed political and media figures worried about his effort to secure the Senate seat for Democrats.
To paraphrase Hamlet, Ryan's defenders seemed to "protest too much." National Public Radio accused Republicans of misrepresenting Ryan's remarks.
However, Ryan answered a predictable, straightforward question on the issue without hesitation. He, like Mayor Adams, denounced "any limits to abortion." "Special Report" host Bret Baier followed up with a question about limits on abortion, and Ryan replied, "Look, you've got to leave it up to the woman."
Baier responded, "So no is the answer?"
Ryan then said, "You and I sitting here can't account for all of the different scenarios that a woman, dealing with all the complexities of a pregnancy, are going through. How can you and I figure that out?"
This was not an ambush interview, and the questions should have been expected. It is one of the key issues in politics today. If we are going to articulate a right in either opinions or legislation, we need to "figure that out."
Judges and politicians have spent decades debating such restrictions. The scope of the right goes to its constitutional foundations. Is this an area where the individual and government share interests? If so, how are those rival interests balanced?
While briefly acknowledging that Ryan might have messed up in his answer, NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro criticized efforts to seek clarity as really an attempt to mislead voters.
"Ryan could have been clearer about what restrictions he might specifically support, but he was largely reiterating Roe's tenets about the health of the mother being paramount," Montanaro wrote.
That is not true. Ryan stated that this is a matter that needs to be left entirely to the woman – a position expressly rejected in both the Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey decisions.
Montanaro further excused Ryan's answer on abortion restrictions by saying that he did not appear "comfortable – with two men on television talking about the subject – laying out what those might be."
Ryan is running for the U.S Senate, which is considering the codification of Roe. He did not appear uncomfortable in declaring what sounded like an absolute right to abortion. Moreover, we must decide this question collectively as a nation. It is not left to any particular gender to discuss or decide.
What was most interesting in the NPR story and other coverage is that, while crying foul when challenged over absolute statements on abortion, Democrats do not seem eager to bring clarity to their positions.
Fox News' Peter Doocy, for example, recently pressed now former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on the president's evolving views of abortion. Biden was once a staunch opponent of legalized abortion while in the Senate.
Doocy asked: "Does he support any limits on abortion right now?" Psaki would not answer the repeated question beyond saying that "the president has spoken – has talked about his position many times. He supports the right of a woman to make choices about her own body with her doctor."
The White House routinely restates the position of the president on policy and legal issues. Why would it be reluctant to clearly answer this question on his current stance, particularly in light of the news from the court?
It would seem an easy task to say that the president does support limits on abortion but believes that the right should rest largely with the woman.
There was nothing wrong in a reporter asking whether the president believes that the right to abortion extends "until the moment of birth." That should not be difficult to answer if the president's position is clear.
This is not a political game of "gotcha." Whether you allow limits (and what those limits may be) goes to a person's underlying view of the constitutional right. The refusal to discuss the outer edges of this right reduces the debate to mere sound bites.
If a politician truly believes that the matter should be left entirely to the woman throughout the course of her pregnancy, he or she is going far beyond anything that the Supreme Court has maintained in prior case law.
Politicians would like to continue to rally supporters with absolutist statements while refusing to address the implications of those statements. However, if we are going to resolve the debate of the right to abortion, we need to first understand what our leaders mean in declaring their support for the right of abortion
It was her first overseas trip, and Vice President Harris, recently deputized to address what the White House calls “the root causes of migration,” was in Guatemala trying to break through with a simple message. “Do not come,” Harris told would-be migrants last June. “Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders.”
They did not listen, or if any migrants did hear Harris last year, many ignored her message. Just last month, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, 234,088 migrants were apprehended at the southern border, the highest mark ever recorded.
Asked that same month if President Biden had confidence in Harris and her ability to handle the situation, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied, “he absolutely does.” But as the flow of migrants accelerates across the southern border, immigration has disappeared from the vice president’s public schedule.
A compilation of that schedule by the Los Angeles Times, reviewed by RealClearPolitics, shows that Harris has not hosted an immigration-specific event since last summer. The last one, a meeting with Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander leaders in the White House last August, touched briefly on immigration.
White House officials dispute any characterization that Harris’ public schedule tells the whole story. “The vice president continues to lead implementation of the Root Causes Strategy and has been engaging with Cabinet and other Administration officials on this effort,” Harris’ Press Secretary Kirsten Allen told RCP.
Addressing the challenge remains part of the vice president’s policy portfolio. She leads top-level meetings that are not always made public, and she has taken point in diplomatic efforts in the region. For instance, it was Harris who traveled to Honduras for the inauguration of President Xiomara Castro in January. Administration officials hoped to find a new ally in that executive, someone who would help stem the flow of the millions of people heading north through Central America to the southern border. According to an official White House readout, Harris and Castro discussed “a broad range of issues.” Among them migration, but also coronavirus and the economy as well as corruption and gender-based violence.
Despite those efforts, the influx has not slowed, and Biden is expected to end enforcement of Title 42, the pandemic policy that allowed Border Patrol to turn away hundreds of thousands of migrants on public health grounds. Warnings from some Democrats in border states, including Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, have gone unheeded.
The Department of Homeland Security is bracing for more record-breaking numbers at the border, and NBC News reports that there is concern in the department that they won’t have enough funding to address a surge if Title 42 is lifted, compounding a challenge that Biden has faced since the beginning of his presidency.
As the number of interdictions started to rise and chaotic images from the southern border flooded cable news, concern grew, even among Democrats. Biden’s own pollsters, the New York Times reported, warned that the issue was “a growing vulnerability." Biden still insisted that he could get the situation under control, albeit with divine intervention.
“Is there a crisis at the border?” RCP asked the president as he walked out of the East Room of the White House after a speech last March.
“No,” Biden replied over his shoulder. “We’ll be able to handle it,” he said while walking side-by-side with Harris. “God willing.”
Two weeks later, the Associated Press reported at the time, Biden tapped Harris to lead the administration efforts to tackle the migration challenge at the southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem. Republicans were eager to assign blame and dubbed Harris “border czar.”
The vice president rejected that framing and sought to clarify her mission. As the White House press secretary explained to reporters last March, Harris “will be helping lead that effort, specifically the root causes – not the border,” admitting that there has been “some confusion over that.”
The president was also confused: When Biden and Harris met with the Congressional Black Caucus in April that year, he praised his vice president, saying she would do “a hell of a job” handling immigration, according to a new book by New York Times’ reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. But Harris corrected him then and there, the two write. “Excuse me,” she said, “it's the Northern Triangle – not immigration.”
Biden eventually clarified the mission. “It’s not her full responsibility,” he later told reporters, but “when she speaks, she speaks for me.”
Whether she wanted the job or not, Harris embraced the challenge. She has made three trips to the region, and she traveled to the southern border to hear directly from Border Patrol. The vice president has met both with law enforcement and migrant groups, stressing all the while that the question “cannot be reduced to a political issue.”
Politics were there from the beginning though, and some feared that deputizing Harris to tackle such a mammoth challenge ran the risk of unfairly saddling her with a thankless mission for which there is no easy solution. “She is qualified to do the job,” Chuck Rocha told RCP of Biden’s decision to turn this part of his policy portfolio over to his vice president. Rocha helmed Latino outreach for Sen. Bernie Sanders in both of that candidate’s presidential bids, and Rocha credited Harris for being “a staunch advocate of the progressive wing of the immigration movement.”
All the same, Rocha warned last year that expectations should be tempered: “It has been an issue that we have been trying to fix for generations, one that I don’t think any one person can totally solve.”
Biden has called on Congress to take up comprehensive immigration reform since he got to the White House. There is no bipartisan appetite on Capitol Hill for the bill that he sent to Congress on his first day in office. The administration has subsequently been left to its own devices, and Harris released a 20-page plan last July to address the problem.
“We will build on what works, and we will pivot away from what does not work,” Harris wrote in an introduction to the plan that focuses on creating partnerships with Northern Triangle countries to combat corruption, violence, and poverty.
“It will not be easy, and progress will not be instantaneous,” the vice president warned, “but we are committed to getting it right.” Biden should know. He was deputized by then-President Obama to deal with a similar mission amid an earlier surge of migrants, many of them unaccompanied children. On a tour of Central and South American nations in 2014, he offered U.S. help to root out corruption, provide economic opportunity, and ensure safety in the Northern Triangle nations.
“We have to deal with the root causes,” Vice President Biden told reporters gathered for a press conference in the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, echoing the exact phrase his administration now uses eight years later.
Biden understands the challenge, and that tackling it without help from Congress is arduous and thankless, if not impossible.
“I said when we became a team and got elected, that the vice president was going to be the last person in the room,” he joked last March when he announced that Harris would helm the mission. “She didn’t realize that means she gets every assignment.”
“I gave you a tough job, and you’re smiling, but there’s no one better capable of trying to organize this for us,” the president continued after the levity. The vice president didn’t flinch. She thanked him “for having confidence in me.” Then Harris added, “there’s no question that this is a challenging situation.”
The Michigan Bureau of Elections recommended disqualifying half of the candidates in the Republican primary for Michigan governor because of invalid signatures on their candidate petitions.
The bureau, in a report dated Monday, named 36 people who circulated candidate petitions who “submitted fraudulent petition sheets consisting entirely of invalid signatures.” If the bipartisan Michigan Board of State Canvassers votes to accept the bureau’s report on Thursday, five of the 10 candidates in the Aug. 2 GOP gubernatorial primary will be disqualified.
“The Bureau’s review of sheets submitted by fraudulent-petition circulators has resulted in determinations that many candidates have insufficient petitions for this election,” the report says. It added that the bureau would report the suspected fraud to the police.
While invalid signatures on candidate petitions are hardly rare, the Michigan bureau said this was the first time it discovered wholesale fraud.
“The Bureau is unaware of another election cycle in which this many circulators submitted such a substantial volume of fraudulent petition sheets consisting of invalid signatures, nor an instance in which it affected as many candidate petitions as at present,” the report says.
The report affects Republican gubernatorial candidates James Craig, Perry Johnson, Michael Brown, Michael Markey Jr. and Donna Brandenburg, according to M Live.
There is no reason to suspect candidates or campaigns “were aware of the activities of fraudulent-petition circulators,” the report says.
Michigan law requires candidates for governor to collect at least 15,000 valid signatures and “a minimum of 100 signatures in each of at least half of the state’s congressional districts.”
This year’s elections are plagued by a scarcity of petition circulators due to an increase in the number of candidate petitions and fewer in-person events, according to news reports cited by the Bureau of Elections. The reports also note the cost of gathering signatures has quadrupled to $20 for each one.
“Regardless of the level of review candidates conducted before submitting nominating petitions, the Bureau’s recommendation to the Board is based on the number of valid signatures remaining after review,” the Bureau of Elections report continues.
Some of the affected candidates have objected to the disqualification recommendation.
"Republicans have given up on democracy and aren't even hiding it any more
The Michigan Bureau of Elections recommended disqualifying half of the candidates in the Republican primary for Michigan governor because of invalid signatures on their candidate petitions."
not condoning this, if the allegation is true
still, it's quite hilarious for a TTFer to accuse someone of "giving up on democracy" by trying to get a candidate voted on
yeah, it's breaking the rules but hasn't TTF been saying that the GOP opposes voting access when they try to establish rules for voting
maybe you should make up your mind: do we need rules by which to conduct elections fairly, or not
Amid a crashing stock market and a looming recession, President Biden has reiterated his plans to reduce inflation by raising taxes on corporations and upper-income Americans. Raising taxes won’t cure inflation, and this is no time to do so, as New Yorkers know better than most people. The Empire State has some of the nation’s highest taxes, and it has seen the largest numerical decline in residents between July 2020 and July 2021, with a loss of 319,000. Texas, with no income tax, saw the largest gain, with increase of 310,000 residents.
Biden proposes to hike corporate tax rates from 21 percent to 28 percent, well above the global average of 23 percent. Factoring in average state and local taxes, the overall rate would be 32 percent. A tax increase of this magnitude would discourage investment in the U.S., resulting in more offshoring and further reducing GDP growth.
For those with net worth above $100 million, Biden has proposed a wealth tax based on the value of stocks, bonds, and private companies even before they are sold. If the value of those assets declined in future years, households would not get a commensurate deduction.
One reason such wealth taxes are rarely used is that they are hard to administer and have negative effects on the economy. Asset values change not just daily or hourly, but by the minute, and it’s hard to determine their true value if they are not sold.
The imposition of Biden’s proposed tax would cause people to shift their wealth out of assets that could be taxed and into other assets, such as art, instruments, jewelry, and cars, that are harder for tax collectors to find or to value. Sotheby’s on the Upper East Side and Christie’s in midtown would see their businesses boom—but their gains would be our loss, as the economy would lose a source of liquidity.
The Tax Foundation estimates that the corporate tax and capital gains tax increases would shrink GDP by about 1 percent and cost more than 170,000 jobs. But the loss to the U.S. economy would go beyond just lost GDP growth and jobs. For the past few decades, many of the greatest inventions—including the Internet, wireless technologies, and biotech—were developed in the United States, in part because our tax policies were more competitive than those of other countries. If we adopt uncompetitive tax policies, jobs and innovation will go overseas.
If Biden really wants to cut inflation, he should begin by reversing his policies on domestic oil and natural gas production. Energy prices have risen by 30 percent over the past year; these prices are set by expectations of future production. That is why oil prices rise when meteorologists predict that a hurricane will turn toward the Gulf of Mexico, before it has destroyed any oil rigs. The United States, the world’s largest oil and gas producer, has demonstrated the ability to influence the price of oil.
The president could lower the price of a barrel of oil by $10 to $20 with new energy policies. Yet on Biden’s first day in office, he reduced oil and gas production by banning offshore drilling, expanding the boundaries of national monuments, placing a moratorium on leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought Canadian oil to U.S. refineries for processing into gasoline and heating oil.
In recent months, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Department of the Interior, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Securities and Exchange Commission have all issued reports or proposed regulations that make it more difficult to develop energy and associated infrastructure. If President Biden wants to tackle inflation, he should start by rolling back this added regulatory burden
"yeah, it's breaking the rules but hasn't TTF been saying that the GOP opposes voting access when they try to establish rules for voting
maybe you should make up your mind: do we need rules by which to conduct elections fairly, or not"
Trying to get on the ballot illegally when you don't have enough signatures is an entirely different problem from Republicans removing polling locations, prohibiting people from transporting to the polls, and prohibiting people from providing food and water to people standing in line for hours at fewer polls.
Your infantile attempt to conflate the issues is terribly lame.
Sad.
Try again.
"Trying to get on the ballot illegally when you don't have enough signatures is an entirely different problem from Republicans removing polling locations, prohibiting people from transporting to the polls, and prohibiting people from providing food and water to people standing in line for hours at fewer polls."
it's similar in the sense that it doesn't represent giving up on democracy
you claim that voting integrity disadvantages minorities that don't have enough support and the GOP in a certain is ALLEGEDLY trying to get someone on a ballot that may not have enough support
the point is, the rules aren't the essence of democracy, despite your puerile rhetoric, voting is
putting more people on the enhances democracy by increasing the choices for all voters
"Republicans showed Dems how it is acceptable to stack the Supreme Court"
they nominated and approved the justices by completely Constitutional procedures
that's only "stacking" to you because you prefer judges who want to re-interpret the Constitution rather than let the public amend it when they disagree
which comes back to how you don't believe in democracy
think about it
when you sober up
President Biden’s approval rating continues to be underwater on virtually every issue, according to a new survey from Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll.
Biden’s overall approval rating sits at 41 percent in the survey, and the numbers are not much better when broken down by each issue.
Only 35 percent of registered voters approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, 44 percent approve of his efforts to stimulate job growth and just 33 percent approve of his handling of inflation. Thirty-eight percent of respondents say they support his handling of immigration, and his approval rating on foreign affairs sits at 40 percent.
Overall, his sagging approval ratings portend a political atmosphere this midterm cycle that will heavily favor Republicans — and warn that a 2024 reelection bid could be a slog.
“Biden continues to struggle with the job and is particularly being slammed by the voters over inflation and immigration. No president has been reelected with numbers like these on job performance,” said pollster Mark Penn.
The survey results come as several polls underscore rising concern over inflation, which hit a four-decade high earlier this year. Republicans also continue to lambast him over what they say is a “crisis” at the southern border, last year’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan and more.
Biden has made tackling the coronavirus a priority since the start of his administration, but Democrats are currently laboring to get another pandemic funding bill across the finish line in Congress.
Negotiations with Republicans have already whittled the legislation down from a $30 billion request to just $10 billion, and efforts to hold a vote on it in the Senate are stuck amid GOP requests over a vote on an immigration-related amendment.
The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey of 1,963 registered voters was conducted from May 18 to 19. It is a collaboration between the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll.
"the point is, the rules aren't the essence of democracy, despite your puerile rhetoric, voting is"
That explains why it is so easy for conservatives to dismiss Rump's flaunting of the rules when he lost the vote, and embarked on a multi-pronged, multi-state attack on democracy to cancel the outcome of the vote and re-install himself as president.
You conveniently ignore the simple fact that the vote is functionally meaningless if the loser doesn't follow the rules.
More Republican malfeasance in the election progress is emblematic of their disdain for democracy, and when combined with the CPAC meeting in Hungary to get the blessing of an autocrat (while barring access to US journalists) is yet another data point showing that they have embraced right-wind Christian authoritarianism in lieu of democracy.
"that's only "stacking" to you because you prefer judges who want to re-interpret the Constitution rather than let the public amend it when they disagree"
No, it's stacking because Moscow Mitch made different rules for nominee hearings when Obama was in office than when Trump was. I can't wait until Democrats do the same thing to Republicans and call it the "McConnell" rule... there will be SOOO much teeth gnashing. No doubt there will be threats of "2nd Amendment Solutions" as well. This is of course assuming that conservatives don't complete destroy our democracy before then.
As for Biden, he is quietly leading NATO to help Ukraine hand Russia it's largest military losses per unit time since WWII. Russia will become a second rate power during Biden's term, only propped up by nuclear missiles - which Biden has carefully avoided pissing off Putin badly enough to use.
Inflation is a world-wide problem, no matter how much you try to blame Biden for it. Russia's invasion of Ukraine had pushed up petro, wheat, and food oil prices significantly just by itself.
The good news is that oil companies are making record profits - surely that means they can lower their prices a bit to help out US workers and reduce inflation, right? Right??
These Top 5 Oil Companies Just Raked In $35 Billion While Americans Pay More at the Pump
While families on tight budgets struggle to pay the sky-high price of gas, these five oil companies more than tripled their profits in the first quarter of 2022.
Since Russia’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which disrupted the global supply of fossil fuels and caused oil and gas shortages worldwide, oil and gas giants have quietly enjoyed unprecedented record profits. While people across the United States have seen gas prices as high as $6 per gallon—stretching budgets thin and driving worsening inflation—the oil majors have been absolutely raking in money, lining CEOs’ and shareholders’ pockets with profits.
It is hard to overstate how profitable the war in Ukraine and the resulting financial pain have been for oil executives. Companies already benefited from inflated gas prices in 2021 as the economy bounced back from the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns—in fact, the top 25 companies made more than $205 billion in profits in 2021—but the recently announced first-quarter profits for 2022 are even more astounding.
The top five oil companies alone—Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips—brought in more than 300 percent more in profits than in the first quarter of 2021. That is a total of more than $35 billion in profits in just three months. In fact, these five companies’ first-quarter profits alone are equivalent to almost 28 percent of what Americans spent to fill up their gas tanks in the same time period.
Gas prices are too high for families on tight budgets, but Congress can take action now—including directing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate price gouging, adopting a “use-it-or-lose-it” policy for drilling on public lands, and implementing a windfall profits tax—to help tackle high prices while reducing the United States’ reliance on volatile fossil energy markets and addressing ever-worsening climate change.
Oil executives should not be able to profit off everyone else’s financial pain as their companies earn record profits. Congress must provide some relief to consumers—and hold oil companies accountable.
The oil majors are flush with cash
Oil and gas corporations—and the trade groups they fund to lobby on their behalf—would have people believe that they need access to more places to drill, better market signals, and fewer regulations in order to make the investments needed to help lower prices. But the truth is that they are flush with the cash that could be used to make those very investments—a fact they are not even trying to hide. For example, the CEO of Shell is on record admitting to profiteering off Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Instead of using this cash to make the investments needed to help lower the price of oil or to fulfill their climate pledges, companies are giving most of it back to their already extremely wealthy shareholders in the form of stock buybacks or giving it back to themselves in the form of executive bonuses. Last year, 28 of the top oil and gas CEOs raked in $394 million in compensation—a nearly $45 million increase since 2020.
So just how rich have these companies gotten during the first three months of 2022?
Shell’s profits were 280 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2021.
Shell made $19.3 billion in total profits in 2021.
Shell bought back $8.5 billion in stocks for wealthy shareholders.
Shell cut 5,000 jobs from its workforce in 2021.
Shell’s CEO has not been shy about admitting that Russia’s war on Ukraine helped the company’s profits, saying on a recent shareholder call that “well, you know, can I also say that the performance we are seeing this quarter, of course, has been helped by the macro, and the macro has been impacted by the war in Ukraine.”
ExxonMobil’s profits were 320 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2021.
ExxonMobil made $23 billion in total profits in 2021.
ExxonMobil pledged to buy back $30 billion in stocks for wealthy shareholders through 2023.
ExxonMobil cut 9,000 jobs from its workforce in 2021 to “cut costs.”
Despite being one of the most profitable corporations in the United States, ExxonMobil paid an effective federal income tax rate of just more than 2 percent in 2021, and that is not for a lack of funds. ExxonMobil’s Chief Financial Officer Kathy Mikells underscored just how much the company expected to profit in the first quarter of 2022 and how that would benefit shareholders, saying in early March that “we expect to generate over $100 billion in excess cash flow beyond meeting our capital program and current dividend, and so I would say we have a very robust forward plan and we expect to have sustained excess cash flow and increasing shareholder distributions.”
Chevron’s profits were 380 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2021.
Chevron made $15.6 billion in total profits in 2021.
Chevron plans to buy back $10 billion in stocks for wealthy shareholders by the end of 2022.
Chevron cut its workforce by 5,000 jobs in 2021.
Despite being one of the most profitable corporations in the United States, Chevron paid an effective federal income tax rate of less than 2 percent in 2021. Moreover, Chevron’s CEO has been upfront about the profits they are raking in, saying amidst rising gas prices in January that “the last two quarters have been the best two quarters the company has ever seen.”
BP’s profits were 240 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2021.
BP made $12.8 billion in total profits in 2021.
BP expanded its stock buyback plan to $2.5 billion for wealthy shareholders in 2022.
BP cut its workforce by 2,000 jobs in 2021.
BP executives attributed their record profits to “exceptional oil and gas trading” conditions—conditions that included Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Americans suffering record-high gas prices.
ConocoPhillips’ profits were 480 percent higher than in the first quarter of 2021.
ConocoPhillips made $8 billion in total profits in 2021.
ConocoPhillips plans to buy back $10 billion in stocks for wealthy shareholders in 2022.
ConocoPhillips’ workforce numbers stayed essentially flat in 2021.
ConocoPhillips’ has tripled its lobbying expenditures to lock in oil and gas development for decades to come at its proposed Willow project in the Western Arctic. The proposed project threatens to erase the climate benefits of renewables on public lands and waters and would require the installation of artificial “chillers” to refreeze the Arctic’s melting permafrost in order to build the infrastructure needed to drill for oil. The company has also been under fire for a recent gas leak that “led to the temporary removal of 300 personnel [and] alarmed residents in the nearby village of Nuiqsut.”
"You conveniently ignore the simple fact that the vote is functionally meaningless if the loser doesn't follow the rules"
you may not even comprehend the fact that if someone is elected, the rules about how he got on the ballot are meaningless compared to the voters' choice
breaking "rules" is not the problem with Trump
it's not recognizing the voters' choice
he's a lot like TTFers in that regard
"More Republican malfeasance in the election progress is emblematic of their disdain for democracy"
much greater disdain for democracy exists among TTFers who think people should be able vote without showing ID
"No, it's stacking because Moscow Mitch made different rules for nominee hearings when Obama was in office than when Trump was"
it wasn't different rules
it was different circumstances
Garland didn't have the support to pass
Barrett did
because the American people gave Republicans control of the institution that confirms the nominee
which comes back to how you don't believe in democracy
if Obama had nominated someone who believed in the Constitution, they would probably have been confirmed
if Garland had been confirmed, America would still be saddled with the disgracefully unconstitutional Roe decision
"I can't wait until Democrats do the same thing to Republicans and call it the "McConnell" rule... there will be SOOO much teeth gnashing."
yes, perhaps Dems will have the power sometime in the 22nd century
not anytime soon though
after November, they'll have a hard time convincing Americans to give them another shot
inflation was non-existent for 40 years until Biden and the Squad got their chance to screw the country up
"The good news is that oil companies are making record profits - surely that means they can lower their prices a bit to help out US workers and reduce inflation, right? Right??"
we have a capitalist society and the oil companies have an obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders
you know, retirees and blue-collar union pension funds
you know, the types that used to vote for Dems
until they wised up
no, the oil companies shouldn't steal from retirees and union workers to bail out Biden and the Squad
"you may not even comprehend the fact that if someone is elected, the rules about how he got on the ballot are meaningless compared to the voters' choice"
Gee, why didn't I think of that argument when conservatives were screaming about Obama's birth certificate? "It doesn't matter how Obama on the ballot, he was the voter's choice!"
Yeah, I don't really think you'd believe that argument either.
"Garland didn't have the support to pass"
We will never know for sure because Mitch didn't allow the Senate to vote. For someone who is trying to convince me how importing voting is (as opposed to following the rules) you don't make a very good point.
It is more likely that Mitch didn't allow the Senate to vote because he was afraid there WAS support for him. After all, for many years - before Mitch started playing Senate king, SC nominees passed easily.
"Barrett did"
Only because Mitch shoved her through before people voted to change the Senate - something he specifically waited for to avoid seating Obama's candidate. Barrett barely passed 52-48, although that seems like a wide margin to compared to Brett "I like beer and didn't rape her" Kavanaugh who was so popular he got 50-48.
For comparison, Obama's picks were voted in by 63-37 (Kagan) and 68-31 (Sotomayor).
"if Obama had nominated someone who believed in the Constitution, they would probably have been confirmed"
Obama had a track record of recommending justices who got approved. Mitch wasn't going to let that happen again. Too bad Mitch only believes in voting when he knows he's got the majority.
"yes, perhaps Dems will have the power sometime in the 22nd century
after November, they'll have a hard time convincing Americans to give them another shot"
What Christian Dominionists don't realize is that America is the "land of the free." Once Dominionists start exercising all the power they're salivating over, a useful number of Republicans are going to start chafing under their authoritarianism. Some have already left the party, and are working against Republicans, hoping to help Democrats save the country from them. It may be too little too late, but people will sicken of authoritarian Republicans quickly and there will be a backlash.
"no, the oil companies shouldn't steal from retirees and union workers to bail out Biden and the Squad"
No one said they should - try reading what's on the page.
Our country would be better off with more small oil companies competing against each other for market share, rather than the oligopoly we have now which has engaged in a massive, unsanctioned transfer of wealth from the working class to the investor class.
America and other democracies thrive when there is a large healthy middle class. Conservative economic policies have distinctly advantaged the "supply side" since Raygun took office have transferred much of the middle class wealth to the investor class, stagnating wages for the vast majority of workers for 4 decades.
Much of the American workforce is now stuck working for desperation wages, and are a paycheck away from being homeless, despite the fact the some of them are working 2 or more jobs. Completely gone are the days when one worker could earn enough income to support a spouse and kids, as well as a pension. That all disappeared as unions got destroyed by conservative courts and congress.
Workers are so desperate now that they've turned back to Unions and won a few small victories at Amazon & Starbucks - not enough to turn the tide yet though.
If conservatives have their way, there will be a small number of very rich corporate owners who pay very little taxes, & a vast crowd of desperate workers hungry enough to work for scraps corporations deign to give them; & a slowly disappearing middle class made up mostly of lawyers, doctors, engineers, & politicians.
"Gee, why didn't I think of that argument when conservatives were screaming about Obama's birth certificate? "It doesn't matter how Obama on the ballot, he was the voter's choice!""
I don't remember any screaming. While I think Obama was a natural-born citizen, there were suspicious circumstances that needed to be looked into.
But you're analogy doesn't work. There is no constitutional provision about signatures on a petition being necessary to qualify for office.
There is a constitutional provision about the requirement to be s natural-born citizen to qualify for office.
You'd save yourself a lot of embarrassment if you review your crap before you post
"We will never know for sure because Mitch didn't allow the Senate to vote."
you could say that about any number of things the Senate didn't take up
it was McConnell's job to determine what the Senate should expend time on
it was obvious to him that there weren't enough votes to make considering Garland worth the time
he was chosen to be in his position by the DEMOCRATIC process in accordance with the CONSTITUTION
which comes back to how you don't believe in democracy
nor the Constitution
"Only because Mitch shoved her through before people voted to change the Senate"
historically, it's not unusual for justices to be confirmed along the timeline that Barrett was confirmed on
also, historically, we don't suspend government functions between election day and the time a newly elected Congress is seated
which comes back to how you don't believe in the Constitution
"Brett "I like beer and didn't rape her""
if he wasn't a public figure, Brett could have a substantial award for damages due to defamation
there was no proof of the allegations against him
which comes back to how you don't believe in the Constitution
"Obama's picks were voted in by 63-37 (Kagan) and 68-31 (Sotomayor)"
well, the Congress that approved those two failed
because neither believe in the Constitution and both believe the Constitution should be reinterpreted to align with the Dem agenda
"Too bad Mitch only believes in voting when he knows he's got the majority."
you're talking in circles
if he hasn't got the majority, he's not in the position to choose what the Senate takes up
which comes back to how you don't believe in democracy
"What Christian Dominionists don't realize is that America is the "land of the free.""
don't what this group is that you keep referring to but, whoever they are, they don't control the GOP
"Once Dominionists start exercising all the power they're salivating over, a useful number of Republicans are going to start chafing under their authoritarianism."
the GOP never established a ministry of truth or sent the FBI to investigate parents who dissented at school boards or used the IRS to harass political advocacy groups that opposed it
the Dems did all that and they are the type of actions taken by authoritarian regimes
"Some have already left the party, and are working against Republicans, hoping to help Democrats save the country from them."
George Conway? he's so sad and pathetic...
"It may be too little too late, but people will sicken of authoritarian Republicans quickly and there will be a backlash."
right now, polls show they wish they had stuck with the GOP in 2020
it's not an unknown
"No one said they should - try reading what's on the page."
oh, I read it
it was pretty disgusting
you said certain publicly traded companies, oil companies, should lower prices because they have high profits
those companies are owned by retirees and union workers
they shouldn't have t pay for the errors of Slidin' Biden and the Squad
which comes back to how you don't believe in capitalism
"America and other democracies thrive when there is a large healthy middle class. Conservative economic policies have distinctly advantaged the "supply side" since Raygun took office have transferred much of the middle class wealth to the investor class, stagnating wages for the vast majority of workers for 4 decades."
until the pandemic, Trump's economy was benefitting the working class
more than at any time since Reagan
Slidin' Biden has caused an inflation that has resulted in a decline in inflation-adjusted wages, hurting the working class most of all
which is why they now favor a return to GOP control of the government
"If conservatives have their way,"
except for the first two years of Clinton and Obama, conservatives have been in charge and we seem to have a thriving middle class
You'd save yourself a lot of embarrassment if you review your crap before you post
"there will be a small number of very rich corporate owners who pay very little taxes,"
actually, the people you refer to provide the vast majority of the tax revenue in this country already
You'd save yourself a lot of embarrassment if you review your crap before you post
President Joe Biden has been lecturing white Americans about hate again. On May 15, the day after an 18-year-old white supremacist massacred ten black shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket, Biden called on Americans to “address the hate that remains a stain” on the country’s soul. Those stained by hate were not named by race, but the reference was clear.
Two days later, Biden gave a longer speech in Buffalo about the attack. In Biden’s telling, white Americans are at best indifferent to the racist slaughter of their fellow black citizens. “We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America. None,” Biden insisted. Biden’s exhortations and moral clarity were the only forces impeding a slide back toward Jim Crow and the reign of the KKK: “I promise you. Hate will not prevail. And white supremacy will not have the last word. . . . We can’t allow . . . these hate-filled attacks . . . to destroy the soul of the nation.” We can’t allow this violence, the president intoned, to “be the story of our time.” To “confront the ideology of hate requires caring about all people”—something that whites, in their silent complicity with racist rampages, apparently fail to do.
Last week’s remonstrances were not new. In an August 2019 press briefing, then-presidential candidate Biden claimed that racism was a “white man’s problem visited on people of color.” “White folks are the reason we have institutional racism,” he said. On November 6, 2019, the day before the press declared Biden the president-elect, he claimed a “mandate” to eliminate “systemic racism.”
Biden carried over the conceit into his presidential victory speech—the same speech hailed across the political spectrum as “unifying.” Among the “great battles of our time” was the still-unaccomplished goal of “root[ing] out systemic racism in this country.” Millions of Americans represent what Biden called “our darkest impulses.”
The Buffalo rampage is indeed a horrifying reminder of this nation’s white supremacist past, a past that took far too long to move beyond. Because of that history, white acts of terror have an elevated significance over other racist assaults. It is appropriate to be vigilant against any revival of such racial cruelty. Blacks’ anger is understandable—as is their feeling, following any such assault, that they remain under racial siege.
But what is not justified, especially from the nation’s political leaders, is racial propaganda. Biden’s recurring suggestions that white hate crimes are America’s dominant reality are false. Whites are not the biggest source of hate crime and interracial violence in the U.S.; blacks are. From 2016 to 2020, blacks nationally were twice as likely to commit a hate crime as whites, according to FBI data, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known.
Local data tell the same story. In New York City, from 2010 to 2020, blacks were 2.42 times as likely as whites to commit a hate crime, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known. Blacks in Los Angeles committed anti-Asian hate crimes at 4.8 times the rate of whites in 2021, according to internal LAPD data. Blacks in L.A. committed anti-gay hate crimes at seven times the rate of whites, and anti-Semitic hate crimes at 2.4 times the rate of whites, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known. Blacks committed anti-trans hate crimes at 2.5 times the rate of Hispanics; there were no white suspects in anti-trans hate crimes in L.A. in 2021.
Biden, the mainstream media, and Democratic politicians claim that demographic angst is driving whites to paroxysms of violence. As Biden himself said in 2015, an “unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop,” was eliminating the white majority population share. If whites were lashing out against this immigration-fueled shift in U.S. culture, you would think Los Angeles would experience a particularly disproportionate level of white-committed hate crimes, since whites are only 28 percent of the L.A. population, and Hispanics 49 percent. But that is not the case. Blacks committed anti-Hispanic hate crimes in Los Angeles at 13.5 times the rate of whites in 2021.
The media and race activists seize on absolute numbers of hate-crime victims to argue that blacks are the target of disproportionate violence from whites. This is statistical sleight of hand, based on disparate population shares. Take a hypothetical population of 80 whites and 20 blacks, for example, where, for the sake of illustration, blacks commit hate crimes against whites at a 100 percent rate and whites commit hate crimes against blacks at one-quarter that rate. Blacks would commit 20 anti-white hate crimes and whites would commit 20 anti-black hate crimes. Every black would be victimized by a hate crime because of the smaller black population, not because of disproportionate white offending.
In the U.S., blacks commit the vast share of the interracial violence between blacks and whites that is not classified as a hate crime: 88 percent. Some portion of the gratuitously brutal beatings and carjackings that have become even more of a routine occurrence in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd race riots undoubtedly have racial animus behind them. The authorities treat black-on-white crime as unremarkable, however, and rarely look into motive. Authorities almost always scrutinize white-on-black crime, rare as it is, for a hate enhancement, precisely because it is so rare.
Maintaining the fiction of white hate-crime dominance takes work. Video evidence relentlessly shows that blacks are the predominant torturers of frail elderly Asians. Media still present the March 2021 Atlanta spa shooting as an anti-Asian hate crime, though religious torment and sexual guilt motivated it. In Dallas, Asian businesses experienced a wave of drive-by shootings starting in April 2022 and stretching into May, with bullets being fired into Asian-owned establishments from a passing car. On May 11, a man entered an Asian-run hair salon in Dallas and fired off at least 13 rounds, hitting three people, one in the lower back. The victims survived this attempted mass murder only because of the shooter’s poor aim. Police believe the assailant is connected to the previous drive-bys. Had he been white, his shooting spree would have been an international story. Because he was black, it was barely covered outside of Dallas. There has been no handwringing about black hate.
Teenage bullying is racially lopsided. On November 22 of last year, four white female Catholic school students were riding a city bus home in the Bronx. Two black male teenagers started taunting them and were joined by three black girls who beat the white girls up. Riders of mass transit in cities across the country know the dynamic and keep their heads down. Had the races on the Bronx bus been reversed, the incident would have been a national scandal—think the Covington Catholic hate-speech hoax.
The problem facing blacks today is not whites; it is black criminals. In his May 17 speech from Buffalo, Biden scolded his white listeners for their apparent apathy: “We have to refuse to live in a country where Black people going about a weekly grocery shopping can be gunned down by weapons of war deployed in a racist cause.” Biden may not have noticed, but sorrow and outrage over the attack were universal. Furthermore, awful as the Buffalo massacre was, it was almost sui generis. White-supremacist shootings like the Buffalo massacre are so rare that they do not show up statistically in the tidal wave of black homicide victims between the ages of ten and 34. Blacks going about their quotidian chores in inner-city areas do have reason to fear, but the threat is not from white supremacists. It is from other blacks.
On Thursday, May 19, a group of Baltimore city council members denounced a level of violence in the city that it called “beyond comprehension.” On Tuesday, May 10, a gunman had opened fire with an assault rifle at midday, spraying more than 60 bullets onto the street. He killed a 25-year-old male and injured three other people. There was another mass shooting hours later. Two days later, a pregnant woman and her fiancé were shot and killed in a car outside their home. The seven-month-old fetus, delivered prematurely, is fighting to survive.
The next day, Friday, saw two other homicides: an 18-year-old killed in East Baltimore and a man found dead inside a vacant house in the Carrollton Ridge neighborhood. Three other males were injured in separate shootings that Friday across the city, including a young man shot in the chest and seriously injured in South Baltimore.
A 51-year-old resident of Baltimore told the Baltimore Sun this month after another mass shooting: “It’s like a norm now.” Residents tear police tape down and “carry on like nothing happened,” he said. The man, a former gangbanger, said he has been afraid to leave his house at night, but now that fear extends to broad daylight.
The day of the Buffalo massacre, Saturday, May 14, a nine-year-old boy was fatally shot in an apartment building in Skokie, Illinois; a six-year-old was wounded in the same shooting.
The Wednesday before, May 11, in the West Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, a drive-by shooting from one car to another struck a six-year-old boy, an 11-year-old boy, a 21-year-old woman, and a 24-year-old man.
On Tuesday, May 10, in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, assailants emerged from a stolen Mazda and started spraying gunfire. They killed a 19-year-old with a bullet to the head and injured four other teenagers. The shooters took off, crashed the Mazda, and fled on foot. Investigators recovered three guns from the car and at the scene. Members of a crowd assaulted police officers who tried to administer first aid to the victims. Gunfire broke out in the same area a few hours later.
On Friday, May 13, at least 17 people were shot in a mass shooting in downtown Milwaukee after an NBA playoff game. Police recovered ten guns at the scene. Two hours before that shooting, three people were shot in another downtown nightlife area, following a fight among a group of females. An hour and a half later, another shooting occurred on the same block as the NBA playoff game shooting, wounding one person.
On Thursday, May 19, two people were killed and seven others wounded in downtown Chicago, blocks from the Magnificent Mile, in a fight between the usual hordes of violent teens who colonize downtown in the summer months. The police chased the shooter and several accomplices into a nearby subway station; a female accomplice was burned on the subway’s third rail. Bystanders yelled at responding officers. The next morning, subway commuters walked through puddles of blood outside the McDonald’s where the shooting happened, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
At least a hundred rounds were fired in a gunbattle at a state fair in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 30. Only poor marksmanship prevented a large loss of life.
On Friday, May 20, one person was killed and eight wounded in gunfire outside THA Blue Flame hookah lounge in Highland, California (in San Bernardino County), the latest outburst of the mayhem that trails large gatherings of black teenagers, whether at spring break in Miami or at New York’s West African Day Parade, on party buses or in AirBnB party rentals. That same Friday, May 20, another shooting took place at Chicago’s Millennium Park, following a fatal shooting at that same location on Saturday, May 14. From Friday night, May 20, though Saturday, 21 people would be shot and one killed in Chicago.
The typical mass shooter in America is not a white supremacist. He is black and either retaliating for a previous shooting or impulsively reacting to a current dispute. In 2020, more than two dozen blacks were killed every day—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined—even though blacks are only 13 percent of the population. The country turns its eyes away. As the former Baltimore gang member said of his community: “It’s like a norm now.” The black homicide toll will be higher in 2021 and 2022.
Fervent government pronouncements about soaring white supremacy are notable for their absence of data, as The Federalist has pointed out. The press invokes the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, the 2019 shootings in El Paso and at a San Diego synagogue, and the 2016 gay nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida. All were repugnant crimes resulting in tragic losses of life. But they are not, thankfully, an epidemic. The Waukesha Christmas parade massacre, the Brooklyn subway shooting, the 2016 cop assassinations in Dallas and Baton Rouge, among other shootings, are out of sight, out of mind.
The Democratic, media, and academic establishments are nevertheless going to exploit the Buffalo atrocity. The recently proposed government disinformation office may be on ice for now, but the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 could be an even more powerful tool for suppressing opposing viewpoints by falsely characterizing them as white supremacy. Though there is no shortage of government officials already investigating domestic terrorism, the bill would create three new offices in the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the FBI tasked with assessing white supremacist and neo-Nazi threats in the U.S. and inside public agencies.
A Democratic congresswoman laid out the chain of reasoning these bodies will likely use to characterize “white supremacist” terror groups: “America has a racism problem. America has a hate problem, and America has a domestic terrorism problem,” said Texas representative Veronica Escobar. Expect the government to use the college campus definitions of “racism” and “hate”: any political position with which the Left disagrees. If you don’t think that children should have their innocence stripped from them by premature knowledge of sexuality, you are filled with hate. If you think that a country has a right to determine who crosses its border, you are filled with hate. If you think that college admissions and faculty hiring should be based on academic merit, you are filled with hate. If you think parents should have a role in deciding whether their children are castrated, you are filled with hate.
The media and Democratic politicians are tying the Buffalo atrocity to discourse opposed to mass illegal immigration from Third World countries. Glenn Greenwald has laid out the definitive rebuttal of efforts to blame ideas and the people who hold those ideas for violence committed by homicidal madmen who may also share some of those ideas. As a legal matter, Greenwald’s free-speech absolutism is unequivocally correct. Yet his robust assertion of the bright-line distinction between speech and action fails to capture our intuition about the power of language and ideas. To be sure, our inclination to connect repugnant acts to speech is in direct proportion to the degree to which we find that speech repugnant. While the Left blames Great Replacement theory for the Buffalo massacre, others may see demonization of the police since 2015 as responsible for increased cop killings, which rose by 59 percent in 2021.
Figures from President Biden on down are telling blacks, nonstop, that they are under lethal threat from whites, and that it is white supremacists, not black criminals, who pose the greatest threat to their safety. “Buffalo attack ignites safety worries for Black Angelenos,” reads a headline in the May 22 Los Angeles Times. New York representative Jerrold Nadler, a sponsor of the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, says, “Democrats are taking the fight straight to the . . . violent extremists that are terrorizing minority institutions.” A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 75 percent of black Americans were very or somewhat worried that they or someone they love will be attacked because of their race. A respondent interviewed by the Post says that he is “apprehensive at stoplights, imagining a White man getting out and shooting him in his car.”
The false claim that we are living through an epidemic of racist shootings of black men by police officers arguably led to the crime waves of 2015 and 2016, and to the more dire anarchy since 2020. With the two-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death upon us, it’s not hard to imagine that the equally false claim that we are living through an epidemic of white-supremacist shootings of blacks could escalate America’s violence
On a Tuesday evening in April, nearly half a century after Joe Biden first publicly mused about running for president, an unsettled cross section of the Democratic Establishment assembled at Pinehurst, a golf resort in North Carolina. Inflation was at a 40-year high, Biden’s disapproval rating sat at 56 percent, and editors at the New York Times were readying a front-page report about how his signature achievement — $1.9 trillion in coronavirus-relief spending — has “barely registered with voters.” The lobbyists, donors, staffers, and elected officials were gathering for the spring policy meeting of the Democratic Governors Association, and the scheduled sessions concerned such topics as health care and diversity in governance. But between panel discussions, in the hallways and at the cocktail reception on the lawn, conversation shifted from grim — the midterms — to grimmer: the state of the party’s planning for 2024, when Biden will stand for reelection on the eve of his 82nd birthday.
Biden hasn’t formally announced his campaign for a second term, but in his mind there’s no question he’s running. “That’s my expectation,” he said early in his tenure. “Yes!” he told an interviewer nine months later, sighing a little performatively at having to keep repeating it. “It’s been his life,” says one of his longtime advisers. “It’s like a shark that keeps swimming. It’s how he stays alive.” Or as another top Democrat puts it, “He was told in ’16 he couldn’t cut it. He runs in ’20 and everybody rolls their eyes, and he still wins. So why in the world now would he be like, ‘You guys are right. I am old’?” And yet many of the plugged-in Democrats wandered Pinehurst not entirely persuaded, calculating contingencies: If Biden’s health turned, or if his polling truly collapsed, which of the party’s governors might step up and save them from electoral ruin — and the nightmare of a Trump comeback?
Governor Roy Cooper — the conference’s host, who had twice won North Carolina in the same years the swing state was carried by Donald Trump — was the most frequent topic of shadow-campaign chatter. Governor Phil Murphy, the New Jerseyan whose national ambitions are among Washington’s worst-kept secrets, was a close second. Also in heavy rotation, according to Democratic power brokers in the mix (and familiar with months of similar conversations): Governor J. B. Pritzker, the billionaire hotel-chain heir from Illinois, and Governor Jared Polis, the Coloradan with a mandate-light approach to COVID. When the conversation stretched into the bar, it lingered on Governor Gavin Newsom, who is coasting to reelection after defeating a recall attempt in California, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who knows from personal experience about the rising threat of white nationalism in Michigan.
Toward the end of the event, phones buzzed with an alert: A memo from Bernie Sanders’s last campaign manager had been leaked to the Washington Post. “In the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Sanders has not ruled out another run for president,” Faiz Shakir wrote to the senator’s aides and surrogates. It was the first acknowledgment that the two-time candidate is still considering his options. “So we advise that you answer any questions about 2024 with that in mind.”
Inside the White House, 330 miles north, a handful of Biden’s aides were monitoring Pinehurst and reading the Sanders memo with a measure of bafflement, even scorn. From their perspective, the hypothesizing was absurd. Every one of the would-be candidates has consistently maintained that their own presidential prospects are moot because Biden is running with their full support. As far as Biden’s camp is concerned, there isn’t any ambiguity about 2024 at all. He has said in private that he sees himself as the only thing standing between the country and the Trumpian abyss and has instructed his aides to redouble their planning for a rematch. “People ask me with some regularity, ‘When is Biden going to come out and say what he’s going to do?’ ” an exasperated longtime Biden adviser told me recently. “And I say, ‘Well, he has!’ ”
Relatively few people outside the White House totally buy it. With Trumpism reascendant, ambivalence about Biden’s age and political standing is fueling skepticism just as the image of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris, dips even further than his. The most recent analysis from the Los Angeles Times has her net approval rating at negative 11. The result is a bizarre disconnect within the Democratic Party, with two factions talking past each other. One group consists of Biden and his loyalists, who are convinced that while the ticket’s numbers are undeniably bleak, they’re historically unsurprising for a president and VP facing their first midterm and will surely bounce back. The second group comprises a broad swath of the Democratic elite and rank and file alike, who suspect that vectors of age, succession, and strategy have created a dynamic with no obvious parallel in recent history.
No one seriously wondered about Barack Obama’s plans to seek a second term in the spring of 2010, or Bill Clinton’s in 1994, or even Jimmy Carter’s in 1978. (He got a strong primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, but there was never any doubt Carter would re-up.) In the past few months, though, many of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors — even as they pledge to back Biden’s reelection in earnest — have quietly started to poke around for alternatives in 2024, partly out of a sense of responsibility just in case Biden steps aside. Several have bombarded Obama’s old associates with pleas for insight into some sort of top-secret real plan that must exist for the next presidential contest.
There is no substantial precedent for the volume of questions about Biden’s future. His inner circle’s insistence that his doldrums will pass, that there’s no cause for concern, is of little reassurance even to some close allies in the party. One person who fits this description has tried casually mapping out ways Biden could get away with avoiding a reelection bid without losing face, if it comes to that, such as insisting he is too busy to campaign because he’s trying to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from turning into World War III. But the ally hasn’t gotten anywhere. As this person puts it, “The fumes from the paint in the White House are pretty strong.”
It’s not clear if anything can change the dynamic — not even the epochal shock that the Supreme Court is all but certain to overturn Roe v. Wade. After Politico broke the news, Biden had an opportunity to revitalize his standing. But rather than galvanize his party around a cataclysmic moment, Biden, who has never been comfortable saying the word abortion out loud, issued a statement but didn’t upend his schedule. Others got out in front on the response, starting with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who joined a protest on the Supreme Court’s steps the next morning. Within hours, Newsom proposed an amendment to the California constitution codifying the right to abortion. “Where the hell is my party?” he asked before TV cameras. “Where’s the Democratic Party?”
As they look toward 2024, Democrats are unified in their conception of doom: the restoration of Trump, joined down-ballot by anti-democratic Republicans who will end fair elections and any hope of combating climate change. But Democratic divisions remain over how to prevent that dismal future.
19 children, 2 teachers killed by gunman
Thoughts and prayers to the Second Amendment.
Rest in as much peace as you can, George Floyd, after being squashed to death by four cops two years ago today because you passed a bad $20 bill.
"But you're analogy doesn't work. There is no constitutional provision about signatures on a petition being necessary to qualify for office.
There is a constitutional provision about the requirement to be s natural-born citizen to qualify for office."
I figured you would go there, but you are the one that stated:
"the point is, the rules aren't the essence of democracy, despite your puerile rhetoric, voting is"
You made no exception for the Constitution there, which is undoubtedly a list of rules, and was imperfect - it didn't even bother to mention women - or even allow them to vote originally - and has already required 33 amendments. If voting is truly the essence of our democracy, then shouldn't women and slaves been allowed to vote in our Constitution?
And if voting is truly the essence of our democracy, McConnell has no excuse for not allowing the Senate to vote on Garland, who was constitutionally submitted to the Senate for its "Advice and Consent."
The Constitution clearly states:
"He (the president) shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States,"
It doesn't say the Advice and Consent of the Senate majority leader - it says of the SENATE. And if voting truly is "the essence of our democracy" as you claim, then Mitch should have allowed a vote.
The fact that you keep giving him an excuse not to shows you don't even believe your own rhetoric about "the essence of democracy" much less democracy and prefer authoritarianism when it suits your agenda.
"well, the Congress that approved those two failed
because neither believe in the Constitution and both believe the Constitution should be reinterpreted to align with the Dem agenda"
They believe in the Constitution at least as much as you do. And you can stop pretending your overly restrictive view of what is "constitutional" doesn't align with the Republican agenda, if not the Christian Dominionist agenda.
Just because Dems have an agenda you don't like, doesn't mean it's not constitutional.
Mass shootings have become so common in the US that we have developed a pathology for how to react. The aggrieved families who have lost someone they loved are the recipients of thoughts and prayers. Law enforcement is praised for keeping the tragedy from becoming even more horrific. Counseling is offered to survivors. Politicians come to town to express their sympathy and outrage, and vow that the latest community will recover and stand "Texas strong" or "Sandy Hook strong" or "Parkland strong."
But nothing happens to prevent another shooting.
We pray. But don't legislate. And prayer clearly is not stopping the slaughter. In all the statements to come from conservative politicians following up Tuesday's deadly shooting in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were killed, do not expect to hear even a solitary voice suggest gun reform. The Second Amendment is always treated as more important than the lives of children. Words like "evil" and "incomprehensible" and "horrific" will be thrown around and, as Republican US Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas urged us, we will be encouraged to "come together as a nation." But I suspect we -- or some of us -- already have. Some of us came together and decided that no horror caused by guns can be worse than restricting access to guns.
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, a very conservative Republican, went before television cameras Tuesday and said, "When parents drop their kids off at school, they have every expectation to know they will be able to pick that child up when that school day ends." The governor ought to be asked how a parent can have that assurance when he said he was upset his constituents weren't buying enough guns.
"I'm EMBARRASSED," Abbott tweeted in 2015. "Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let's pick up the pace Texans."
He helped his state compete in that gun-buying contest with California. Just last year, Abbott proudly signed into law what he called a "constitutional carry" bill, which allowed anyone over 21 to carry a gun without getting a permit, and he did it after the El Paso mass killing in 2019. There is always the flawed premise that more guns will make it likely a murderer will be stopped by one. Prior to Abbott's signing of the measure, a license to carry required fingerprints, four to six hours of training, a written exam and a shooting proficiency test.
But that's over. Guns in Texas won. Regulations and reform lost. Wasn't even a real contest. Gov. Abbott is quick, however, to ban books that offend his political sensibilities, but gun ownership cannot be constrained.
When President Joe Biden, however, spoke in the hours after the Uvalde tragedy, his words were angry, though mostly aspirational because he knows the political reality confronting gun reform proponents. All he has right now is words, and his opponents have the votes. A bill to expand background checks on gun buyers passed the US House of Representatives two years ago but there is nowhere near the number of yeses in the Senate to get it to the president's desk...
"As a nation," President Biden said. "We have to ask, when in God's name will we stand up to the gun lobby. When in God's name will we do what we know what has to be done ... I am sick and tired of it. We have to act and don't tell me we can't have an impact on this carnage."
Biden pointed out that the previous ban on assault weapons reduced mass killings but when it was repealed, he said, they tripled. He said the public and politicians have to be encouraged to stand up to the gun industry and he wondered while on his 17-hour flight home from Asia why the US is the only nation in the world that deals with recurrent mass shooting incidents.
"These kinds of mass shootings rarely happen in other parts of the world," he said. "But they have mental health problems. They have people who are lost ... Why are we willing to let this happen? Where, in God's name, is our backbone? It's time to turn this pain into action."
Those other nations don't have gun lobbies?
Gun rights advocates seem to have plans while reformers struggle against a powerful manufacturers' lobby, the National Rifle Association and with how much regulation is too much.
The Second Amendment doesn't have to be destroyed to save our country. The Constitution is a living document. Maybe it needs to be tempered for the times and adjusted from a 1776 context to an era when there are computers that can talk to each other, and guns that can fire an astonishing number of rounds. Isn't there a law that can be written to order state and federal databases for mental health and criminal records and gun purchases to all interact and share information? Aren't we smart enough as a culture to find language to protect our fundamental rights and our children?
The era of mass shootings in which we live probably began in Texas on August 1, 1966, when a gunman climbed the University of Texas tower with a high-powered rifle and began shooting people walking on campus. Charles Whitman killed 16 people that bright summer day after he had already murdered his wife and mother. The incident was the first to transpire live and was broadcast to a horrified city of Austin. Since then, Texans have watched certain towns gain notoriety for dark reasons. Mass killings in Sutherland Springs and El Paso and Santa Fe and Midland-Odessa and Dallas and the cafeteria shooting in Killeen and a Fort Hood mass slaying. The full list is even longer.
Hard to deny that the horrors started here. Now let this be the time and place that creates the political will to let Texas be the place where it comes to an end.
"Brett "I like beer and didn't rape her""
if he wasn't a public figure, Brett could have a substantial award for damages due to defamation
there was no proof of the allegations against him"
There are reasons there is no proof of the allegations against him - mainly that the FBI wasn't allowed to investigate those allegations.
If you watched his hearings carefully there was a very telling line of questioning.
At one point, Rachel Mitchell (the Maricopa county attorney from the special victims division Republicans hand-picked to do the questioning) was going though his calendar day by day asking him to confirm or deny each entry as it was listed. Kavanaugh confirmed each one. As she got closer to the day of the alleged assault, there was the feeling you were watching a classic court movie where the lawyer leads the defendant through that series of questions that ultimately leads to him either admitting to the crime or pleading the 5th - because the evidence all just stacks up against him.
You could see it coming a mile away, and it looked like the we were finally going to get an answer to what happened, and you had to admire Rachel Mitchell's skill in getting to the root of the investigation.
Then suddenly, inexplicably, just before she got to the day of the alleged assault, Republicans called a recess to the hearing. You might think "so what?" courts often call recesses. Indeed they do. But when the recess was over, Rachel Mitchell was sidelined - she never finished her line of questions. In fact I don't recall her saying anything else during the hearing. Republicans stopped her from finding out the truth. How convenient.
It wasn't until many months later though the witnesses that had contacted the FBI to corroborate Ramirez and Ford's allegations were never interviewed:
"WASHINGTON — More than 40 people with potential information into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have not been contacted by the FBI, according to multiple sources that include friends of both the nominee and his accusers.
The bureau is expected to wrap up its expanded background investigation as early as Wednesday into two allegations against Kavanaugh — one from Christine Blasey Ford and the other from Deborah Ramirez.
But sources close to the investigation, as well as a number of people who know those involved, say the FBI has not contacted dozens of potential corroborators or character witnesses.
More than 20 individuals who know either Kavanaugh or Ramirez, who has accused the nominee of exposing himself to her while the two attended Yale University, have not heard from the FBI despite attempts to contact investigators, including Kavanaugh’s roommate at the time and a former close Ramirez friend.
A senior U.S. official and two other sources briefed on the details of the FBI investigation confirmed to NBC news that the FBI’s work on the Brett Kavanaugh matter remains significantly limited in scope, and that it’s unlikely agents will be allowed to interview many, if any, additional witnesses before the probe wraps up this week.
One current and two former FBI officials confirmed to NBC News that dozens of witnesses have come forward to FBI field offices who say they have information on Brett Kavanaugh, but agents have not been permitted to talk to many of them. To the extent that any interviews have been done, the officials say, it’s not clear the information will be considered as part of the FBI’s limited scope inquiry.
Internally, the bureau is concerned that the constraints of the investigation could damage its reputation for finding the truth, the officials said.
Ramirez’s attorney, John Clune, tweeted Tuesday that the FBI "is not conducting — or not being permitted to conduct — a serious investigation." Clune added, "We are not aware of the FBI affirmatively reaching out to any of those witnesses."
Who would be in a position to stop the FBI from interviewing sexual assault witnesses?
Apology to James, not John Moore.
"you said certain publicly traded companies, oil companies, should lower prices because they have high profits
those companies are owned by retirees and union workers
they shouldn't have t pay for the errors of Slidin' Biden and the Squad
which comes back to how you don't believe in capitalism"
This is what I actually said:
"The good news is that oil companies are making record profits - surely that means they can lower their prices a bit to help out US workers and reduce inflation, right? Right??"
There is nothing in that statement that implies I don't believe in capitalism. There's nothing in that statement that even says oil companies shouldn't make a profit.
Capitalism doesn't require companies to gouge consumers at every chance they get. There is plenty of room for oil companies to make a profit and not gouge their customers. It's not a difficult concept to grasp, if you had any ability to be reasonable.
I DON'T believe in CRONY capitalism and oligopolies though. It behooves you to look those up so you can understand what I'm talking about, and so you don't look so stupid.
"those companies are owned by retirees and union workers"
They only own a very small sliver:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html
As of October '21,:
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks
The wealthiest 10% of American households now own 89% of all U.S. stocks, a record high that highlights the stock market’s role in increasing wealth inequality.
The top 1% gained over $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund wealth during the pandemic, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve.
The bottom 90% of Americans held about 11% of stocks, and added $1.2 trillion in wealth during the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are about 333 million Americans. These numbers mean that the top 1% gained an average of $1.95 million each.
The bottom 90% gained an average of $4,000 each, or 0.205% of the investor windfall.
Retirees and the tiny number of union workers still left are getting the crumbs of what the investor class has cleared off the table. They would be able to buy more stocks if oil companies weren't gouging them at the gas pump.
The American economy would be a lot better off too, but oil companies don't care about what is good for America, its economy, or its people. If Americans suffer while they gouge them and keep the profits for themselves, buy off Republicans and blame the higher prices on Biden, well, that's just "capitalism!"
Like many Americans, I have 401k investments in the stock market, and I'm quite happy when it does well. But that doesn't blind me to the fact the most Americans are getting shafted by the oil companies right now, and Republicans are trying to blame that on Biden.
"You made no exception for the Constitution there, which is undoubtedly a list of rules,"
well, I should have
I thought it would be understood that I supported the Constitution
since I've said so here, about a ZILLION times
"and was imperfect - it didn't even bother to mention women - or even allow them to vote originally - and has already required 33 amendments."
well, it allowed for amendments
so, if you think the killing of unborn children should be a constitutional right, go for it
but having a judge re-interpret when it doesn't further the Dem agenda is unconstitutional
which comes back to how you don't believe in the Constitution
"If voting is truly the essence of our democracy, then shouldn't women and slaves been allowed to vote in our Constitution?"
well, they should have been
hence, the subsequent amendments
"And if voting is truly the essence of our democracy, McConnell has no excuse for not allowing the Senate to vote on Garland, who was constitutionally submitted to the Senate for its "Advice and Consent.""
as I said, the Senate can't vote on everything
the Senators ELECTED Mitch to sort this out
his advice and consent, on behalf of those who elected him, was that a nominee who didn't believe in the Constitution would not be confirmed
""He (the president) ... by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States,""
two things:
"by and with" don't imply a rubber-stamp - the Senate has the same standing as the President
further, this also applies, in the same way, to Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and all other Officers of the United States
yet, the Senate often fails to consider these when they are sent over by the President
why only the outrage about the Supreme Court?
it's because the Constitution doesn't contain he Dem agenda
"They believe in the Constitution at least as much as you do."
sorry, that's not true
the seek to replace it by re-interpretation
"And you can stop pretending your overly restrictive view of what is "constitutional" doesn't align with the Republican agenda, if not the Christian Dominionist agenda."
well, the Republican party does support the Constitution
that's only an agenda as a reaction to Dem attacks on it
"Just because Dems have an agenda you don't like, doesn't mean it's not constitutional."
I don't mean to imply that the Dem agenda is unconstitutional
only that its principles isn't required by the Constitution
you're really going all-in on word games
"But nothing happens to prevent another shooting."
contrary to media propaganda, nothing the Dems suggest would prevent another shooting
"There are reasons there is no proof of the allegations against him"
yes, it's because the allegations weren't true
"mainly that the FBI wasn't allowed to investigate those allegations"
please every reporter and Dem advocacy has been looking for proof ever since
none exists
"Internally, the bureau is concerned that the constraints of the investigation could damage its reputation for finding the truth, the officials said."
as opposed to its role in the Russian colloboration hoax?
"This is what I actually said:
"The good news is that oil companies are making record profits - surely that means they can lower their prices a bit to help out US workers and reduce inflation, right? Right??"
There is nothing in that statement that implies I don't believe in capitalism. There's nothing in that statement that even says oil companies shouldn't make a profit.
Capitalism doesn't require companies to gouge consumers at every chance they get."
"gouge" is not a definable term
expecting corporations to not maximize their profits in order to prop up an agenda that caused the inflation is anti-capitalist
"contrary to media propaganda, nothing the Dems suggest would prevent another shooting"
Yet GOPers suggest we each buy a guy to protect ourselves.
More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine
Do they want to arm second graders to protect themselves too?
WASHINGTON – Public approval of the Supreme Court tumbled sharply after a leaked draft opinion in a blockbuster abortion case indicated that the conservative wing of the court is considering overturning Roe v. Wade, according to a poll Wednesday.
About 44% of Americans approve of the way the nation's highest court is handling its job, down 10 points from March, the Marquette Law School poll showed.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion, leaked to Politico earlier this month and later confirmed by the court, was the driving factor in the shift. The unprecedented leak set off protests across the nation, was applauded by anti-abortion advocates and reshuffled the political landscape heading into this November's midterm election.
The survey was conducted from May 9 to May 19.
"It is hard to escape the conclusion that the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe is at the center of this decline," said Charles Franklin, the poll's director.
Approval of the court rose about 4 percentage points among Republicans, who are more likely to embrace anti-abortion positions. But that wasn't enough to offset a huge, 23-point drop among Democrats. Among independents, approval dropped 6 points.
With lifetime appointments for its members, the nine-justice Supreme Court was designed by the framers to be the one branch of government that doesn't respond to political pressure. At the same time, both liberal and conservative justices have discussed the importance of the court retaining its credibility as an impartial institution as Washington becomes increasingly partisan.
That has been easier said than done as Republican-nominated justices have split with those nominated by Democratic presidents in cases dealing with COVID-19 vaccination requirements, election laws that some view as discriminatory and the death penalty. Six of the nine current justices were nominated by GOP presidents.
In its most divisive case in years, the court must decide whether to uphold Mississippi's ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law contravenes Roe in 1973 and a subsequent ruling in 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Those decisions allowed people to obtain an abortion until about 24 weeks of pregnancy.
"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," Alito wrote in the leaked opinion. "We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled."
The court confirmed the authenticity of the draft but stressed the decision was not final. A majority of the court appeared to leaning Mississippi's way at argument in December.
Marquette interviewed 1,004 adults nationwide. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
Approval of the court fell to 49% in September, down from 60% two months earlier, in the wake of a decision allowing Texas to ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
"Yet GOPers suggest we each buy a guy to protect ourselves.
More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine
Do they want to arm second graders to protect themselves too?"
well, the security guard or assigned police should have them
again, Dems have proposed nothing that will prevent this from happening again
"Public approval of the Supreme Court tumbled sharply after a leaked draft opinion in a blockbuster abortion case indicated that the conservative wing of the court is considering overturning Roe v. Wade, according to a poll Wednesday."
that was the purpose of the leaker: to exert partisan pressure on the court
they are unlikely to succumb
Roe never established the right to abortion up to the moment of birth
it said it was a right up to three months
Roe was actually overturned by Casey which said it was a right up to viability
polls show that Americans have no idea what Roe says and the media shows no interest in educating them
"About 44% of Americans approve of the way the nation's highest court is handling its job, down 10 points from March, the Marquette Law School poll showed."
did they say what their objection was
"was the driving factor in the shift"
does the poll say that?
"That has been easier said than done as Republican-nominated justices have split with those nominated by Democratic presidents in cases dealing with COVID-19 vaccination requirements, election laws that some view as discriminatory and the death penalty. Six of the nine current justices were nominated by GOP presidents."
justices have always split along partisan lines
the difference now is that the Dem agenda no longer prevails and that's what the media believes in
so they characterize any view other than their own as "partisan"
Americans have never agreed with Roe when properly informed and once the ruling is issued it won't be a problem because the local consensus will determine what the law is
and then hearings for nominated judges can be about something other than Roe
that would probably be to the advantage of Dems
As you are all aware there was another mass shooting today, this time in my home town of Uvalde, Texas. Once again we have tragically proven that we are failing to be responsible for the rights our freedoms grant us.
The true call to action now is for every American to take a longer and deeper look in the mirror, and ask ourselves, "What is it that we truly value? How do we repair the problem. What small sacrifices can we individually take today, to preserve a healthier and safer nation, state, and neighborhood tomorrow?" We cannot exhale once again, make excuses, and accept these tragic realities as the status quo.
As Americans, Texans, mother and fathers, it's time we re-evaluate, and renegotiate our wants from our needs. We have to rearrange our values and find a common ground above this devastating American reality that has tragically become our children's issue.
This is an epidemic we can control, and whichever side of the aisle we may stand on, we all know we can do better. We must do better. Action must be taken so that no parent has to experience what the parents in Uvalde and the others before them have endured.
And to those who dropped off their loved ones today not knowing it was goodbye, no words can comprehend or heal your loss, but if prayers can provide comfort, we will keep them coming.
Matthew's right
we need to provide adequate security in our schools
we've shown we can do it in other places
let's do it in schools
taking guns away from law abiding citizens won't change a thing
A number of those gun owners were "law abiding citizens" right up to the moment they started shooting people.
Taking the guns away from them would have led to a very different outcome.
"A number of those gun owners were "law abiding citizens" right up to the moment they started shooting people.
Taking the guns away from them would have led to a very different outcome."
we will always have guns around
we have a military , a police force, and private security firms
a determined person will get ahold of them
all rhetorical anyway
Americans only favor banning "assault" weapons
is that what this guy used?
self defense is a Constitutional right
TTFers, so opposed to authoritarianism, should appreciate the problem when only the government has guns
the answer is better security at schools
considering the ridiculous sums we spent on COVID, we should be able to handle that
DALLAS -- In an emotional address hours after a mass shooting at a Uvalde, Tex., elementary school Tuesday, Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr criticized congressional leaders for their inaction on gun control legislation.
“When are we going to do something?” Kerr said during a news conference before Game 4 of the Western Conference finals. “I’m tired. I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough. There’s 50 senators, right now, who refuse to vote on H.R. 8, which is a background check rule that the House passed [last year]. ... There’s a reason they won’t vote on it: to hold on to power.
“I ask you, Mitch McConnell, and ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence, the school shootings, the supermarket shootings, I ask you, ‘Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children, our elderly and our churchgoers?’ Because that’s what it looks like."
The House of Representatives passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, which seeks to expand federal background checks for gun purchases. The legislation was conceived following a 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn. H.R. 8 would establish similar background checks.
“In the last 10 days, we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo. We’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California. Now we have children murdered at school,” Kerr said, slamming the table at one point for emphasis. “Do you realize 90 percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want universal background checks?. We’re being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote, despite what we, the American people, want. They won’t vote on it, because they want to hold on to their own power. It’s pathetic.”
for standing up, telling the truth, and supporting universal background checks for gun buyers.
NRA bans guns at Houston Trump speech after Texas shooting
Disgusting and predictable hypocrisy.
Hey NRA: "If 'guns don't kill people, people kill people,' then why ban them at your own event?"
On Friday, May 27—which will be three days after the horrific mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed 18 children and three adults—the National Rifle Association will meet in Houston, Texas, for their annual meeting. Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at their “leadership forum,” where guns will not be allowed.
You can have your gun at other events during the three-day convention; but if you attend the forum with Trump, NRA’s Executive Vice President, NRA-ILA’s Executive Director, and “our nation’s top Second Amendment supporters,” per NRA’s event announcement, then you will be prohibited from exercising your God-given, Second Amendment right to bear arms.
The irony is almost too disgusting and predictable to even bother pointing out. Yet, here we are again: another mass shooting, a million more worthless thoughts and prayers, and a bunch of hypocritical politicians who don’t want firearms allowed inside an event that’s being held by the very organization that lobbies said politicians to pass laws that make it easy for anyone to buy a gun and bring it wherever the hell they want. Like a shopping center. Or an elementary school.
In a post on the convention’s website, the organization states that since “President Donald J. Trump will be speaking at the forum,” the Secret Service insists that attendees be subject to search and guns be banned.
Per the U.S. SECRET SERVICE, firearms, firearm accessories, knives, and other items WILL NOT BE PERMITTED in the General Assembly Hall.
The NRA also makes clear that there will be “no storage available for firearms.” For the record, the NRA also banned guns when Trump and Mike Pence were scheduled to speak at their 2018 convention, again citing the Secret Service’s wishes. Seems to me like a true, gun-toting American wouldn’t let the Secret Service bully their precious gun rights—guns don’t kill people, people kill people—but what do I know?
In addition to Trump, confirmed speakers include Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), who, in June 2021, signed into law a bill that now allows Texans to carry a handgun without training or a background check or a license. Next on the roster is South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R), who, in March, signed into law a bill that gets rid of fees for concealed gun permits. And of course, Ted Cruz is slated to be there—the Texas senator who, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s massacre, tweeted “fervent” prayers for the bereaved and told reporters that, obviously, Democrats will try to politicize this by limiting guns.
When the aforementioned policies are the very thing that keeps allowing these atrocities to take place, what other fucking option do Democrats, or really anyone, have other than to look to the politicians who are refusing to do anything about it? If the NRA really believe guns were not the problem, they would allow anyone to carry them at their own fucking events.
President Biden’s approval rating fell to 36 percent in a Reuters-Ipsos poll released Tuesday, marking its lowest point to date in that particular poll.
The poll found Biden’s approval rating fell 6 percentage points from a week earlier, and it dropped from 76 percent to 72 percent among Democrats in that same span.
The low point for Biden in the Reuters poll came less than a week after he hit a new low in the Associated Press poll, which found the president’s approval rating sat at 39 percent.
Both polls reflect a consistent trend of Biden’s approval rating mired in the high 30 percent to low 40 percent range in recent months. The president has been hampered by rising costs, which have been exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Voters have consistently given Biden poor marks on his handling of the economy, which aides argue is strong despite persistent concerns about inflation. When confronted with bad polls, the White House has insisted its agenda benefits the American people and that officials must do a better job communicating that.
"NRA bans guns at Houston Trump speech after Texas shooting
Disgusting and predictable hypocrisy.
Hey NRA: "If 'guns don't kill people, people kill people,' then why ban them at your own event?""
it's a private event
people have a choice whether to go
not the same with common areas
Biden's not running in 2022 so who cares what his numbers are now?
"uteruses are more regulated than guns"
it's all centered on life
you can't kill anyone, even if they are unborn
you can't kill anyone, including with a gun
so, it's not regulation, which is indirect prevention of potential problems
it's the direct protection of life that counts
I think you are having trouble grasping this because gays don't value life
the ones here have repeatedly said there is too much life in the world
and, of course, they are scorned sexual activity that leads to life
"Biden's not running in 2022 so who cares what his numbers are now?"
apparently, all the Dems that are up for re-election in November
because they keep having meetings concerning what they can do about their problem....
but I'm with you
they should just chill and keep committing political suicide
hahahahaLOLOLLOLOLOLOLLOLhahahohohoheeteeheeROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Biblical Rod of Iron
The next generation of right wing gun nuts literally worships the AR-15
Mastriano is involved with a new religious movement that uses the AR-15 in liturgical ritual and believes it is the Rod of Iron from Revelations. I am not kidding:
While his participation in nationwide Christian Nationalist groups, and their attempts to overturn the election—he was subpoenaed by the January 6th committee for his plan to send pro-Trump electors to Congress—matter deeply, it’s also important to note that his ties to these groups date back much further than Trump and The Big Lie. One local Pennsylvania Q-affiliated religious group that Mastriano has repeatedly engaged with—with expansionist tendencies and both national and international interests—is “Rod of Iron Ministries.”
Rod of Iron Ministries is a schismatic offshoot of the Unification Church, often called the “Moonies,” led by Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon—son of the Unification Church’s late founder, Sun Myung Moon—who reorganized his ministry around a particular scriptural interpretation: that the “rod of iron” in Psalm 2:9 and Revelation 2:26 is, in fact, the AR-15.
The gun church is a messianic movement, planning a kingship when America falls, and has associated itself directly with Trump, QAnon, the “Black Robed Regiment” idea popular in Christian nationalist circles, and, of course, with January 6th, which Sean Moon attended with some of his followers. People like Steve Bannon regularly attend their fall “Freedom Festival”; Eric Trump spoke at the opening of Sean’s brother’s gun store, Tommy Gun Warehouse, in 2016; Lieutenant Governor candidate Teddy Daniels had Pastor Sean bless his campaign for Congress before switching to the race for Lt. Governor. Doug Mastriano is just one of a line of politicians in Pennsylvania who would engage with the church.
Rod of Iron is expanding its operations outside of Pennsylvania and the internet. They’ve purchased compounds in central Texas—some 40 miles north of Waco, which is relevant to the following commentary—and in east Tennessee. And, with both a gubernatorial candidate and candidate for lieutenant governor attending their events, as well as their interactions with Trump, it’s worth looking into their beliefs. ..."
"The next generation of right wing gun nuts literally worships the AR-15"
the world is full of nuts
but calling this fringe group "the next generation" means you are one of the nuts
"Rod of Iron Ministries is a schismatic offshoot of the Unification Church"
this is a cult and not a Christian church at all
btw, Joe Biden said yesterday that second amendment rights are "not absolute"
he actually feels that way about all constitutional rights
take freedom of speech, for example
he thinks it's a good right
but not ABSOLUTE
you can't just disagree with the Dem agenda
but other than that, say what you will
he even started a Ministry of Truth to rule on what people are permitted to say
also, if a parent can't just disagree with a school board and get away with it
the will be monitored by the FBI for their temerity
we must have order, people...
"Thank you, Beto for standing up, telling the truth, and supporting universal background checks for gun buyers."
also, Beto, thanks for that amusing prank where you placed a piece of your child’s poop in a bowl and told your wife that it was an avocado
I guess you're glad she didn't have a gun
The U.S. economic contraction to start the year was worse than expected as weak business and private investment failed to offset strong consumer spending, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
First-quarter gross domestic product declined at a 1.5% annual pace, according to the second estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That was worse than the 1.3% Dow Jones estimate and a write-down from the initially reported 1.4%.
Downward revisions for both private inventory and residential investment offset an upward change in consumer spending. A swelling trade deficit also subtracted from the GDP total.
The pullback in GDP represented the worst quarter since the pandemic-scarred Q2 of 2020 in which the U.S. fell into a recession spurred by a government-imposed economic shutdown to battle Covid-19.
Continuing jobless claims edged higher for the week for the week ended May 14 to nearly 1.35 million, the Labor Department reported.
"The U.S. economic contraction to start the year was worse than expected"
Wow!
contraction and inflation at the same time
that Slidin' Biden is a miracle worker
With the travel-heavy Memorial Day weekend upon us, the fast-rising cost of gasoline is getting a lot of attention.
Last week, gasoline rose above $4 a gallon in all fifty states. That’s the first time that has happened. Some are predicting gas could reach $6 a gallon this summer. If that comes to pass, the average American family could see a major impact on their budgets.
(It might be noted as well, that the price of home heating oil has nearly doubled this year. If that continues, the economic impact next winter, especially in the northeast, where a high percentage of homes are heated by oil, will be considerable.)
Why has the price of gasoline risen so far so fast? Easy: the Biden administration, driven by the ideological fantasy of a green-energy future, has hampered domestic production and exploration at every turn.
On Inauguration Day itself, the administration revoked the permit for the Keystone Pipeline that would have allowed the importation of 1,000,000 barrels of heavy Canadian crude per day and sent it to Gulf Coast refineries, which are designed to handle such oil. This was unprecedented, because while permits have often been denied by green-minded Democratic administrations, none has ever before been revoked while construction was actually already underway.
Many other areas that hold promise of considerable potential have been declared off-limits. The administration claims that there are plenty of oil and gas leases waiting to be exploited. That is true. But leasing a tract of land from the federal government is one thing, while getting the series of permits needed to explore and build is quite another. The Department of the Interior has been slow-walking those permits, despite the quickly rising price of fossil fuels.
The war in Ukraine has also complicated the situation. With Europe finally awake to the danger of depending on Russia for much of its energy needs, the United States needs to be the source of natural gas for our European allies. But this has been hampered by the lack of liquified natural gas terminals on the East Coast.
Again, this was caused by the difficulty of getting the needed federal and state permits. New York State has been denying permits for pipelines across the state throughout the Governor Cuomo (and now Hochul) administration. Despite the recession-mired upstate economy, New York State has forbidden the exploitation of the abundant natural gas resources that could be exploited by fracking. Neighboring areas in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, are thriving thanks to the new technology.
With political pressure building as fuel costs keep rising, the Biden administration has been begging oil-exporting countries, including Saudi Arabia and even heavily-sanctioned Venezuela, to increase production to ease shortages in the United States. They have not responded favorably. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia even recently refused to take a phone call from President Biden — an almost unprecedented act for a supposedly friendly foreign leader.
The administration has been allowing 1,000,000 barrels a day to be drawn from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That may sound good, but the United States uses 20,000,000 barrels a day, so it’s actually a drop in the bucket.
Political pressure is certain to rise as the summer driving season gets into full swing. Gas station pumps across the country have been sprouting stickers placed by irate drivers showing Joe Biden pointing to the price and saying, “I did that!”
With the midterm elections on the horizon and all the leading political indicators pointing to a grim outcome for Democrats, the question is: will the Biden administration stick it out? Or, fearing a wipeout, will Biden put the immediate crisis first and let the supposedly green future wait?
Democrats have always used racial division as a pathway to power. During slavery and Jim Crow, their leaders stoked false and ugly fears about the “Negro menace.”
Today, they use similar language about an alleged white menace to malign their opponents and frighten their supporters. In highly partisan and divisive remarks delivered following the racist May 14 mass murder in Buffalo that took 10 African American lives, President Slidin' Biden asserted, “White supremacy is a poison ... running through our body politic ... And it's been allowed to grow and fester right before our eyes.”
This claim, which echoes those of so many other Democrats – including the egregious Attorney General Merrick Garland, who says white supremacists pose “the most dangerous threat to our democracy” – is false.
Much of their “evidence” comes from groups with long histories of misinformation, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose business model depends on ginning up fears about supposed threats. In the aftermath of the Buffalo massacre, the New York Times trumpeted a 2021 “Murder and Extremism” report from the Anti-Defamation League to make the case that the “political right has a violence problem.”
But this characterization is as misleading as it is inflammatory. The ADL reports that white supremacists accounted for 244 (55%) of the 443 killings that the ADL “documented” between 2012 and 2021. Fifty-five percent – that sounds big! Varney notes that during that same period, there were about 165,000 murders in the United States. Thus, white supremacists accounted for 0.001% of the total.
Even that miniscule figure overstates the case because the ADL admits most of those murders were not hate crimes aimed at terrorizing minorities. “Over the past 10 years, only 86 of the 244 white supremacist killings (35%) were ideological murders,” the report said. “The remainder were group-related but not ideological attacks, were related to traditional criminal activities, or were murders for which no clear motive could be determined.”
Put another way, over the last decade the ADL reports that white supremacists committed an average of 8.6 hate-fueled murders per year during a period when 16,500 homicides occurred annually in the United States.
One murder is, of course, one too many. And the terror sparked by the four massacres that account for half of the white supremacist tally – Dylann Roof’s rampage at a black church in Charleston in 2015 (nine dead, one injured); the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018 (11 dead, six injured); and the 2019 attack at the El Paso Walmart (23 dead, 23 wounded) – resonate beyond their numbers. But to claim that the evil or deranged people who perpetrated these crimes represent a grave threat to our body politic is a gross distortion. To further suggest, as many Democrats and their media allies consistently do, that they represent the views and violent fantasies of tens of millions Americans is an ugly smear.
As Americans start the summer driving season this Memorial Day weekend, they face gasoline prices that are memorable — for all the wrong reasons.
A national-average gallon of regular gas cost $2.37 at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. This metric hit an all-time-high $4.60 Thursday, AAA reports — up 94%.
Biden does not feel Americans’ pain. Indeed, the sadist in chief gleefully inflicts this torture. Saying the quiet part aloud, he expects thanks for this punishment.
Visiting Tokyo Monday, Biden told journalists: “When it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger, and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”
Incredible!
Biden desperately wants Americans to abandon gasoline-powered cars and adopt electric vehicles. Of course, as a weekly communicant in the Church of the Green New Deal, Biden forgets that 80% of an EV’s volts stem from disgusting natural gas (38.3%), nasty coal (21.8%) and glow-in-the dark nuclear (18.9%). Only 20% flow from beautiful windmills (9.2%), gorgeous solar panels (2.8%), renewable-but-fish-spooking hydropower (6.3%) and other “green” sources.
Biden could not care less that inflation-depleted consumers will struggle to buy these largely fossil-fueled EVs. According to Kelley Blue Book, average transaction prices for new EVs ran $65,977 in March versus $45,927 across the auto industry (43.6% higher) and $26,052 for compact cars (253.2% more).
Inconvenient truth: Magic wands do not manufacture EVs. Building them requires natural resources, many too rare to square with Biden’s fantasy production expectations.
Lithium is scarce. This key EV component’s prices rocketed 438% year-on-year in April to what Tesla’s Elon Musk called “insane levels.”
Joe Lowry, aka “Mr. Lithium,” warns that there is no quick fix here. “You can build a battery factory in two years, but it takes up to a decade to bring on a lithium project,” the Global Lithium founder told Bloomberg. “In a 2050 scenario, there’s time for everything to happen that needs to happen. But in 2030, it just isn’t going to happen. Just look at the mess we’re in from a lithium supply standpoint with less than 10% EV penetration.”
Traditional cars use 18 to 49 pounds of copper, according to Copper.org. EVs need 183 pounds. Nickel is another key EV ingredient. So, naturally, Biden is encouraging copper and nickel production.
Wrong!
Biden’s Interior Department in January canceled Chile-based Antofagasta’s planned Twin Metals copper and nickel mine in Minnesota. Last fall, the White House announced a scheme to slap a 20-year mining ban on that state’s Boundary Waters region, where Antofagasta was to mine.
Biden’s left hand does not know what his far-left hand is doing.
Meanwhile, his war on oil has raised West Texas Intermediate crude from $53.24 per barrel when he arrived to $110.33 Wednesday — up 107.2%. This and massive Biden-Democratic federal spending increased April’s year-on-year inflation to 8.3%, nearly six times higher than Trump’s final 1.4% rate in January 2021. Bidenflation began long before the Ukraine-invasion-related “Putin’s price hikes” that Biden blames for falling buying power.
Biden also battles US oil as a poison worth locking underground. Simultaneously, he pleads for higher output from toxic autocrats in Caracas and Tehran. Burning Venezuelan and Iranian oil generates carbon dioxide (who knew?), which Biden considers cyanide. In fact, a 2018 paper in Science confirmed that their petroleum is more carbon-intensive than US oil. It also is produced without American-style environmental safeguards.
Caudillos and ayatollahs are exempt from Biden’s war on oil. He wants them to sell America the petroleum that he insists Americans leave untouched.
This makes no sense. Internal logic is lost on Biden and his neo-Marxist comrades. If this makes the American people cry, to hell with them.
Biden promised normalcy after the tumultuous Trump years. Instead, America’s sadist in chief pumps pain, poverty and policy incoherence by the tank.
Against all expectations and predictions from Democrats, the Georgia primary last Tuesday went off without a hitch. Not only that, but record early-voting turnout — including unprecedented minority participation — gave the lie to all the naysayers who called the law “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Slidin' Biden LIED
But for the left, there’s still time for their dire fantasies about the law to come true. Just you wait until November, they’re now saying. The general election will be a different story.
President Slidin' Joe Biden is said to be unhappy with his team regularly cleaning up after his comments as the White House denies doing so without his permission.
Top Slidin' Biden spokesman Andrew Bumblin' Bates repeatedly pushed back on a report Tuesday that Slidin' is "unhappy" with the cleanup campaign "pattern" that has emerged during his administration. Slidin' Biden has told advisers the efforts undermine him and feed Republican attacks suggesting "he’s not fully in command," according to NBC News.
Good point, Sir Slidin'!
You really don't seem fully in command.....
of your senses!!!!!!!!
Maybe Jill could help.
That's what happened when Woodrow Wilson lost it.
The good news is there are some top-rated assisted living facilities in the Washington area that would just love to have you!
"The breathlessness of graphs 1 & 2 versus the denial being relegated to graph 28 tells you what you need to know about this story," Bumblin' Bates tweeted. "As we've said before, no clarifications of the slidin' president's remarks are ever issued without his direct approval."
Slip-Slidin' Biden was particularly "furious" that aides retracted a line he ad-libbed during a speech in Poland amid Russian President Vladimir Putin's Ukraine invasion contending the strongman “cannot remain in power," NBC News reported.
"That was some of my best work," said Joe Slidin'
In response, Bumblin' Bates amplified a Washington Post article that reported Slidin' Biden had helped workshop the follow-up statement himself.
"WP is correct," the White House deputy press secretary reiterated, referring to the outlet. "No comments elaborating on Slidin' POTUS remarks are given without his expressed approval."
Slidin' Biden has routinely caused confusion regarding his administration's policy, most recently last week concerning his China-Taiwan position during his first Asia trip.
China condemned Slidin' Biden telling reporters beside new Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, "Yes," when asked whether the United States has promised to defend Taiwan militarily. It was the third time the White House insisted Slidin' Biden's China-Taiwan stance "has not changed."
"He reiterated our One China Policy," an official said. "He also reiterated our commitment under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the military means to defend itself."
Badly Slidin' Biden, too, has contradicted staff, including former White House press secretary Wacky Tobacky Smokin' Jen Psaki. Wacky Tobacky Psaki once defined Slidin' Biden's school reopening pledge to mean the majority of schools would open "at least one day a week" by day 100 of his presidency.
"No, that's not true. That's what was reported. That's not true. That was a mistake in the communication," Slidin' Biden countered during a town hall.
He also denied reports he and Hunter smoked some wacky tobacky with Psaki!
WASHINGTON (AP) — A lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign was acquitted Tuesday of lying to the FBI when he pushed information meant to cast suspicions on Donald Trump and Russia in the run-up to the 2016 election.
The jury in the case of Michael Sussmann deliberated on Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning before reaching its verdict.
The case was the first courtroom test of special counsel John Durham since his appointment three years ago to search for government misconduct during the investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. The verdict represents a setback for Durham’s work, especially since Trump supporters had looked to the probe to expose what they contend was sweeping wrongdoing by the FBI.
The trial focused on whether Sussmann, a cybersecurity attorney and former federal prosecutor, concealed from the FBI that he was representing Clinton’s campaign when he presented computer data that he said showed a possible secret backchannel between Russia-based Alfa Bank and Trump’s business company, the Trump Organization. The FBI investigated but quickly determined that there was no suspicious contact.
The bureau’s then-general counsel and the government’s star witness, James Baker, testified that he was “100% confident” that Sussmann had told him that he was not representing any client during the meeting. Prosecutors say he was actually acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and another client, and that he hid that information so as to make it seem more credible and to boost the chances of getting the FBI to investigate.
Lawyers for Sussmann deny that he lied, saying that it was impossible to know with certainty what he told Baker since they were the only participants in the meeting and neither of them took notes.
They argued that if Sussmann said he wasn’t acting on the Clinton campaign’s behalf that that was technically accurate since he didn’t ask the FBI to take any particular action. And they said that even if he did make a false statement, it was ultimately irrelevant since the FBI was already investigating Russia and the Trump campaign and would have looked into the Alfa Bank data no matter the source.
"The verdict represents a setback for Durham’s work, especially since Trump supporters had looked to the probe to expose what they contend was sweeping wrongdoing by the FBI."
the evidence presented at the trial exposed both the FBI - and Hilary as well
if Sussman was found innocent, it was as an individual and likely based on "reasonable doubt" considerations
but Clinton sleaze and FBI corruption was not innocent of anything
President Slidin' Joe Biden's approval rating is at a near-record low as the Democratic Party prepares for crucial midterm elections where Republicans could be poised to retake the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The slidin' president's approval rating has shown no sign of significant improvement as the country experiences high inflation with just over six months to go until Americans go to the polls on November 8.
Poll tracker FiveThirtyEight assessed Biden's approval rating by analyzing a wide variety of polls and using its own system of pollster ratings. They found the president's approval stood at 40.7 percent as of Monday, while 54.1 percent disapproved of Biden.
Those figures represent a decline over the past month as Biden's approval stood at 41.7 percent on April 29 and his disapproval rating was 52.3 percent.
At 40.7 percent, Biden's approval is also at a near-record low, according to FiveThirtyEight's analysis. The president's lowest approval rating came on February 27 when the poll tracker found his approval stood at just 40.4 percent, while disapproval of Biden was 53.3 percent.
Though there have been some fluctuations over the past month, individual polls also show disapproval of Biden outstripping approval.
An Emerson College poll conducted from May 24 to 25 showed Biden's approval at just 38 percent, while 52 percent of registered voters disapproved.
An Ipsos poll conducted from May 23 to 24 found Biden's approval was just 36 percent among U.S. adults and disapproval stood at 59 percent.
Democrats are facing potentially disastrous midterm losses that could see Republicans retake either the House, the Senate or both and stymie Biden's agenda for the next two years heading into the 2024 presidential election.
FiveThirtyEight's generic ballot also showed Republicans with a decisive edge in the upcoming midterm elections. The GOP enjoyed 45 percent support as of May 30, while Democrats had 42.8 percent.
Republicans have led Democrats in FiveThirtyEight's generic congressional ballot since November 16, while Biden's approval rating has been in negative territory since August 30 - the day before the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Biden is facing pressure amid the rising cost of living and Americans' concerns about inflation. The annualized inflation rate in April was 8.3 percent, a slight decline from March but still at a near 40-year high, while the price for a gallon of gas hit another new record high of $4.62 on Monday.
On Tuesday, the president is due to discuss inflation with Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve.
A White House official said Biden will discuss the "state of the American and global economy and discuss the president's top economic priority: addressing inflation to transition from an historic economic recovery to stable, steady growth that works for working families."
President Joe Biden is "really twisted" that his approval ratings are worse than President Donald Trump's as the White House contends with multiple crises just months out from the midterms, NBC News reports.
Only 41% of American adults approve of Biden's performance as president as of his 487th day in office, according to Gallup. Trump's job approval among all adults was at 42% at the same point in his presidency.
"He's now lower than Trump, and he's really twisted about it," a source close to the White House told NBC News.
Biden is growing progressively more frustrated that his team has failed to find a strong, consistent message heading into the 2022 midterm elections, sources told NBC News.
"What he's pushing for is to make a sharper case for all that we have accomplished thus far," a White House official told NBC in pushing back on the notion that Biden is miffed.
In addition to Biden's poor approval ratings, voter dissatisfaction with the economy, rising inflation and gas prices, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and a baby formula shortage are all engulfing the White House and threatening an all-out shellacking for Democrats in the midterms.
A large portion of Biden's domestic economic agenda remains stalled in Congress, and Democrats lack a large enough majority in the US Senate to deliver on other domestic priorities including voting rights, protecting abortion rights at the federal level with the Supreme Court expected to strike down Roe v. Wade, and passing gun safety legislation in the wake of two mass shootings.
Biden hammered his Republican opponents as "Ultra-MAGA" only for them to gleefully co-opt the term and make merchandise out of it after a team of political strategists spent six months coming up with the phrase, the Washington Post reported.
"He shares the view that we haven't landed on a winning midterm message," another person close to the White House told NBC News. "And he's putting a lot of pressure on people to figure out what that is."
Biden is also frustrated that not enough Democrats are going on television to defend him and his administration, sources told NBC.
The president's efforts to get out of DC and sell his agenda are falling flat when it comes to bolstering his approval ratings. Voters' concerns about the current state of the economy seem to be unmoved by the Biden administration's two big legislative accomplishments: the American Rescue Plan in early 2021 and the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress in late 2021.
But there may be a light at the end of tunnel for more than 40 million Americans with federal student loans.
In late April, Biden said he'd "have an answer" on relief in the coming weeks. That was a year after Biden asked the Department of Education to prepare a memo outlining his legal power to cancel student debt. Insider found that the Education Department created and circulated the memo, but Biden has not revealed its contents.
Instead of relief for all borrowers, so far, Biden has focused on targeted groups like borrowers with disabilities and those defrauded by for-profit schools, who have seen more than $9 billion in collective debt relief. He also extended the pandemic pause on student loan payments four times since taking office, following two from former President Donald Trump.
Democrats are pressuring him to relieve borrowers in fear of low midterm turnout, with some progressives urging him to cancel at least $50,000 for those in debt. Meanwhile, Republicans senators have introduced bills intended to prohibit cancellation.
Biden's approval rating among the young people who helped get him elected is tanking. With the payment pause set to expire after August 31, Americans are on pins and needles to find out what Biden will do.
"People confront him," a Democratic donor told NBC about interactions Biden has at fundraisers. "All he's hearing is 'Why can't you get anything done?'"
for all your thoughts and prayers.
"Thank you, Wayne LaPierre said...
for all your thoughts and prayers"
what a very clever comment...
alas, guns will not be banned because law abiding citizens have a constitutional right to possess them
it has nothing to do with the NRA
and any effective action always starts with thoughts and prayers
to realize that, you'd have to think and pray
have you ever done either?
our society needs to stop spending most of its law enforcement dollars on petty traffic enforcement and provide effective security to schools like they do to airports
when was the last time you heard of a mass shooting at an airport?
schools get shot up because we leave them open and available for amoral nuts to draw attention to themselves
Uh huh, we have shootings in public places, places that are open to the public.
The shootings are not caused by the open places.
They are caused because too many gun worshippers can get weapons of war and use them on any handy public access target.
Teachers are not soldiers but Junior Moonies sure want guns in our schools.
"NEWFOUNDLAND, Pa. (Reuters) - Hundreds of couples toting AR-15 rifles packed a church in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to have their marriages blessed and their weapons celebrated as “rods of iron” that could have saved lives in a recent Florida school shooting.
Women dressed in white and men in dark suits gripped the guns, which they had been urged to bring unloaded to the Sanctuary Church in the rural Pocono Mountains, about 100 miles (160 km) north of Philadelphia. Many celebrants wore crowns - some made of bullets - while church officials dressed in flowing bright pink and white garments to go with their armaments.
Reverend Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, son of the late founder of the Unification Church, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, blessed the roughly 250 couples at the service, a Sanctuary Church spokesman said."
His Sanctuary Church is a breakaway group and not part of the Unification Church, said Unification Church spokeswoman Nancy Jubb. Sanctuary Church did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Feb. 28 marriage blessing ceremony had been planned long before a man with an AR-15 assault-style rifle massacred 17 students and school staff in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, the spokesman said.
Moon said in a statement that the staff of the Florida school should have been armed, an option President Donald Trump has said should be explored nationwide and which teacher unions have criticized.
“Each of us is called to use the power of the ‘rod of iron’ not to arm or oppress as has been done in satanic kingdoms of this world, but to protect God’s children,” he said, citing the Book of Revelation in the Bible.
“If the football coach who rushed into the building to defend students from the shooter with his own body had been allowed to carry a firearm, many lives, including his own, could have been saved,” Moon’s statement said.
"Uh huh, we have shootings in public places, places that are open to the public.
The shootings are not caused by the open places."
no, they aren't
but they aren't caused by law-abiding citizens owning guns either
they can be prevented when places that have become targets for amoral, attention-seeking nuts are provided adequate security
if we stop wasting law enforcement budgets on enforcing petty and victimless crimes and dedicated to securing school campuses from intruders carrying guns, we could actually stop this
again, this doesn't happen at airports
"They are caused because too many gun worshippers can get weapons of war and use them on any handy public access target"
unless you disarm the military and law enforcement personnel, guns will always be available to amoral, attention-seeking nuts
Over the last four years, Special Counsel John Durham has built a compelling case, supported by evidence, that the entire Russia collusion narrative that gripped the country during Donald Trump's presidency was built on falsehoods.
An FBI lawyer, after all, has admitted he misled the FISA court by falsifying a document. Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic Party has paid a fine to federal election regulators for falsely disguising payments for Christopher Steele's dossier as legal work rather than opposition research.
Steele's primary source, Igor Danchenko, is charged with lying to the FBI. And before he was indicted, Danchenko told the FBI that Steele misrepresented some of his contributions to the dossier as intelligence when in fact they were based on "just talk" and "hearsay" and "conversation ... with friends over beers."
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified Hillary Clinton personally approved releasing Russia dirt on Trump in 2016 even though they weren't sure it was true.
And FBI supervisors who handled Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann's allegation of a secret Trump communications channel with the Kremlin misled their own agents, falsely claiming the evidence came from the Justice Department when instead it came from a private lawyer.
So when Durham asked a Washington, D.C. jury to convict Sussmann for an alleged lie, he again offered strong evidence.
Documents presented to jurors showed Sussmann texted the FBI's top lawyer he was bringing the allegations of the secret Alfa Bank communication channel to the bureau as a private citizen. But in fact he charged the work to the Clinton campaign.
And in later testimony to Congress, Sussmann gave a different story, claiming he did in fact approach the FBI on behalf of a client. One of the two statements could not be true, prosecutors argued.
In the end, it didn't matter. The case was made against a backdrop of so many prior falsehoods and a growing belief in America that lying has become a norm in politics in Washington.
The forewoman for the jury that acquitted Sussmann said as much in a brief statement to the news media Tuesday afternoon, suggesting it wasn't worth the jurors' time to convict someone for lying to the FBI.
"I don't think it should have been prosecuted," the jury forewomen said, according to an account in The Washington Times. "There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI."
"but they aren't caused by law-abiding citizens owning guns either"
The 18 year olds who bought the guns to kill in Buffalo and Uvalde were law-abiding citizens when they purchased them.
But they were 18 year old males, not the most stable part of the population.
Raising the age to 21 years to purchase a weapon of war at a gun shop will not put a dent in anyone's second amendment rights.
"again, this doesn't happen at airports"
Yet.
But thousands of guns -- many loaded -- are found at airports, more every year.
https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2022/01/18/tsa-detected-increase-guns-airport-checkpoints-baltimorewashington
https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/10/13/tsa-firearm-catches-checkpoints-sets-20-year-record-first-nine
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tsa-airport-checkpoints-record-guns-loaded-david-pekoske/
"Over the last four years, Special Counsel John Durham has built a compelling case"
What a knee-slapper!
Durham's case is as a full of holes as Trump's claims he won in 2020.
Donald Trump can fairly be described as a political crime boss. His contempt for democracy and the rule of law is reminiscent of the legendary organized-crime chieftains found in both fiction and reality. He used his presidency (and its aftermath) to enrich himself, along with his family and other members of his inner circle. Trump is deeply attracted to violence, although — like the head of a crime family — does not personally engage in it. He may be a sociopath or a psychopath, but regardless of clinical definitions is certainly antisocial and destructive.
Despite his uneven recent record of political endorsements, Trump remains the obvious leader of the Republican Party and the larger fascist movement in and around it. For millions of Americans, his orders and wishes are not to be disobeyed, and at least some of his loyal foot soldiers are willing to commit acts of violence at his command and perhaps to kill or die for him.
Trump runs his crime family from Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, which in a fictional narrative or a journalistic report from another nation would be described as a "compound." Republican candidates, party leaders and other members of his MAGA movement arrive there to make offerings of cash and undying loyalty, and to receive his praise (or admonition) and receive their further orders.
Faced with falling approval ratings and a number of crises plaguing his presidency — from inflation to rising COVID-19 cases — President Slidin' Joe Biden is seeking a stronger message.
NBC News reports that the president is seeking a shift in tone and could be looking to shake things up at the White House.
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Overall, as one person close to the president told NBC News, "Biden is frustrated. If it's not one thing, it's another."
Among the mounting frustrations, anonymous White House staffers tell the outlet, is that the president wasn't notified about the ongoing baby formula shortage weeks before Americans began to see empty store shelves.
While the shortages of some formulas first emerged late last year amid the pandemic, they've worsened in recent months due to challenges with the supply chain, product recalls by some American manufacturers and inflation.
Among the president's other frustrations, NBC News claims, is a pattern of his staff clarifying comments after he says them.
With frustrations mounting, poll numbers have fallen — adding to the issues brewing in the White House.
"He's now lower than Trump, and he's really twisted about it," one person close to the White House told NBC News.
Recent poll numbers — taken just five months ahead of the November midterm elections — indicate the president, and Democrats overall, face an uphill battle in the months ahead. Perhaps in response to that, the White House this week announced a renewed focus on the American economy, with Slidin' Biden saying his "top priority" is "addressing inflation in order to transition from historic recovery to a steady growth that works for American families."
LOL!
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"During this transition, growth will look different. We will likely see fewer record job-creation numbers, but this won't be cause for concern ... Things should also look different from the decades before the pandemic, when too often we had low growth, low wage gains, and an economy that worked best for the wealthiest Americans," he wrote.
LOL!
He continued: "The economic policy choices we make today will determine whether a sustained recovery that benefits all Americans is possible."
that was plagiarized from Obama
"I will work with anyone — Democrat, Republican, or independent — willing to have an open and honest discussion that delivers real solutions for the American people."
openly and honestly, Slidin' Biden needs the ol' heave-ho to retirement!
"Crime boss Don"
breathtakingly hypocritical statement from someone who voted for Slidin' Biden, Hunter's Big Man
"The 18 year olds who bought the guns to kill in Buffalo and Uvalde were law-abiding citizens when they purchased them."
yes, they were
and then they went and found a group that society does nothing to protect from gun violence, school kids, to kill for attention
since law enforcement in this country refuses to allocate the resources to secure schools, maybe it would safer to start holding classes in airports
then, we'll have the money to make damn sure no one gets away with driving without a seat belt
but since you think guns kill people rather than people killing people, maybe we should consider what else kills people
did you know gunmen usually hide their guns in their clothes?
maybe clothes kill people!
maybe we could outlaw clothes
then, no one could sneak guns into crowded places
sure, it would take some getting used to
but remember, safety First!
I'm sure some cowardly congressmen would cave in to the clothing industry
but we could mock them!
But they were 18 year old males, not the most stable part of the population.
"Yet.
But thousands of guns -- many loaded -- are found at airports, more every year."
thanks for proving my point
we somehow make airports safe even though we find lots of guns there
"What a knee-slapper!
Durham's case is as a full of holes as Trump's claims he won in 2020."
I'm sure Hillary hasn't been laughing
2022 — 21 people killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
2022 — 10 people killed at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.
2021 — 10 people killed at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado.
2019 — 23 people killed at a big-box store in El Paso, Texas.
2019 — 12 people killed at a municipal building in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
2018 — 12 people killed at a bar and grill in Thousand Oaks, California.
2018 — 11 people killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
2018 — 17 people killed at high school in Parkland, Florida.
2017 — 26 people killed at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
2017 — 60 people killed at a music festival in Paradise, Nevada.
2016 — 49 people killed at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
2015 — 14 people killed at a conference center in San Bernardino, California.
2012 — 27 people killed at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
2012 — 12 people killed at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
"With liberty and justice for all?"
do you have any idea what the word "justice" means?
because a lot of Dems don't know what the definition of the word "is" is...
"2022 — 21 people killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas"
Indeed, why is the White House against protecting kids in school by providing security?
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated during her Tuesday press briefing that President Biden does not support the 'hardening' of schools as part of the conversations on anti-mass shooting solutions. In this answer, it very much sounds like Jean-Pierre is ruling out beefed-up school safety as something Biden would be willing to consider.
She says that her boss does not believe in hardening schools, then strangely transitions to rote education-related talking points about funding the needs of teachers, which is not the point of this conversation (also, the 'under-funded schools' trope is especially dubious these days). It could be that she's once again communicating poorly, perhaps necessitating a walk-back -- a Biden administration speciality. Or he might be embracing a blinders-on fixation on gun control, at the exclusion of everything else, as the acceptable "solution" to America's mass shooting problem.
There was no 'good guy with a gun' at Robb Elementary as the Uvalde slaughter began, contra the official and wrong reports shared with the public for days. It's impossible to know if things would have turned out differently if there had been someone there to confront the gunman, but it's certainly plausible that the outcome could have been much less horrific. Armed officers have thwarted and cut short such attacks before. Nobody should pretend that any one-size-fits-all policy, or set of policies, will solve the issue. The discussion should be about what's acceptable and potentially effective. Why, then, would Biden shut down a key piece of what would have a chance of emerging as a bipartisan plan? This point from a GOP operative is correct: Jean-Pierre's pronouncement is "not helpful" because 'hardening schools' is a "likely piece in any potential legislative package, and Biden’s team is blowing up negotiations they’re not even involved in."
"why is the White House against protecting kids in school by providing security"
Look who favors federal control of state and county public schools.
Maybe JFK Jr. and Trump will win in 2024 so you can get them to provide nationwide school security, QT pie.
"There was no 'good guy with a gun' at Robb Elementary"
Are you claiming you didn't see the pictures of multiple cops, AKA good guys with guns, outside the school holding back parents while the shooting continued or you are another GOPer liar?
We know the answer to that.
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Mallory McMorrow
@MalloryMcMorrow
For the second straight day, the Michigan Senate GOP ended session early in a cowardly attempt to silence Democrats from speaking on the Senate floor about the slaughter of children in Texas. But we won't be silenced. Here's the speech Republicans were too afraid to hear.
4:32 PM · May 26, 2022·Twitter Web App
"Doing nothing will not stop this from happening"
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