Saturday, July 31, 2021
Jesus Christ
Sixty years of sanctions already haven't done anything but deprive Cuban citizens of decent lives.The Biden administration announced new sanctions on Friday against Cuba’s National Revolutionary Police and its top two officials, as the US looks to increase pressure on the communist government following this month’s protests on the island.
The Police Nacional Revolcionaria and the agency’s director and deputy director, Oscar Callejas Valcarce and Eddie Sierra Arias, were targeted in the latest sanctions announced by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
[...]
The administration said it is considering a wide range of additional options in response to the protests, including providing internet access to Cubans, and has created a working group to review US remittance policy to ensure that more of the money that Cuban Americans send home makes it directly into the hands of their families without the government taking a cut. Biden added that more sanctions were in the offing.
alJazeera
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Meanwhile at the Olympics
Okay, so maybe he's innocent, but a suspension was definitely not "inappropriate to the allegations." The allegations were rape.The American fencing team is not happy to have Alen Hadzic representing the U.S. at the Tokyo Olympics.
Almost immediately after making it on to the roster, the 29-year-old was accused of sexual misconduct between 2013 and 2015 by three women.
Hadzic denies the allegations and successfully appealed a suspension that would have kept him off the U.S. team.
[...]
The fencer was prohibited from staying in the Olympic village. Instead, he's been staying at a hotel nearby. He also was forced to travel to Tokyo separately from his teammates and forbidden from practicing with female teammates.
[...]
Hadzic had been suspended from all fencing activities by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an independent agency that investigates sexual abuse in Olympic sports. But weeks later, an arbitrator ruled that the suspension was "inappropriate to the allegations," The New York Times reported.
NPR
FFS. The whole thing could have been avoided by suspending him.In the end, Hadzic, an alternate on the team, did not compete in the Games.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
One baby step
Christ.The US Department of Justice on Friday ordered the Internal Revenue Service to hand Donald Trump’s tax returns to a House committee, saying the panel had “invoked sufficient reasons” for requesting them.
The news was a second blow for Trump in a matter of hours, after released DoJ memos revealed that as part of his campaign to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, he pressured top officials to falsely label the 2020 election as corrupt, then “leave the rest to me”.
[...]
“Access to former President Trump’s tax returns is a matter of national security. The American people deserve to know the facts of his troubling conflicts of interest and undermining of our security and democracy as president.” [-- Nancy Pelosi]
[...]
Bill Pascrell, a New Jersey Democrat who chairs the House ways and means subcommittee on oversight, said: “It is about damn time. Our committee first sought Donald Trump’s tax returns on 3 April 2019 – 849 days ago. Our request was made in full accordance with the law and pursuant to Congress’s constitutional oversight powers.”
[...]
Michael Stern, a former senior counsel for the House Office of General Counsel, told Politico Trump had options to stop the release of his returns.
“I think Trump will be given an opportunity to either file a new case or file something in this case in which he states his legal grounds for objecting to his tax returns being produced,” he said, adding: “It’s definitely not over yet.”
Guardian
Let's move that along, Cy.Elsewhere, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, has obtained copies of Trump’s personal and business tax records as part of a criminal investigation.
Anyway, I don't expect anything more than embarrassment to Trump in the returns, but I hope I'm wrong.
Friday, July 30, 2021
Deplorable
That's assuming the Republicans and Trump cultists have a conscience, and that's an assumption I'm not willing to make.Donald Trump pressed senior Justice Department officials in late 2020 to “just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me” and Republican lawmakers, according to stunning handwritten notes that illustrate how far the president was willing to go to prevent Joe Biden from taking office.
The notes, taken by Justice Department official Richard Donoghue, were released to Congress this week and made public Friday
[...]
The documents show the extent to which senior Justice Department officials “were on a knife’s edge” in late 2020 as Trump sought to prevent Biden from becoming president, said David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official.
[...]
In one Dec. 27 conversation, according to the written account, acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen told Trump that the Justice Department “can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election.”
The president replied that he understood but wanted the agency to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” according to the notes written by Donoghue, a participant in the discussion.
[...]
“These notes reveal that a sitting president, defeated in a free and fair election, personally and repeatedly pressured Justice Department leaders to help him foment a coup in a last-ditch attempt to cling to power,” [David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official] said. “And that should shock the conscience of every American, regardless of political persuasion.”
WaPo
The people being Trump and John Barron.The notes were made public by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on the same day the Justice Department announced that it would support the release of Trump’s personal and business tax returns to a different Democratic-controlled House committee — another legal setback for the former president, who could continue to fight the issue in court.
[...]
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the Oversight Committee, said the notes “show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency.”
[...]
The notes also say that Trump suggested to Rosen that he might be replaced at the helm of the Justice Department and even dropped the name of his possible successor.
“We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election,” Trump said, according to the notes. “People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership.”
Which is why they weren't buying the bullshit.Donoghue’s notes show that Trump repeatedly brought up unsubstantiated tales of voter fraud in various states, which the Justice Department officials told him were not true.
“You guys may not be following the Internet the way I do,” Trump responded, according to the notes.
Fucking idiot.Trump and his lawyers could have sought to block the release of Donoghue’s notes to Congress. There were days of discussion among Trump advisers about whether to do so, one adviser said, but the former president did not believe that the notes showed anything problematic, even though some of his advisers feared that the disclosures would be damaging.
“If it gets more attention on the election, he welcomes it,” this adviser said.
And then impose no consequences?[T]he Justice Department informed Rosen and others this week that their conversations with the president about the election were not protected by executive privilege.
In a statement revealing the content of the notes Friday, Maloney said that her committee “has begun scheduling interviews with key witnesses to investigate the full extent of the former President’s corruption, and I will exercise every tool at my disposal to ensure all witness testimony is secured without delay.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Mr. Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call, he mentioned Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to bottom of things.”
Mr. Jordan and Mr. Johnson denied any role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department.
NYT
UPDATE:
A word to the wise
Bill Barr would have.On Wednesday, the Department of Justice released two documents warning states that they have to follow federal law before, during and after elections. Without naming names, the first set of guidelines generally called out states that have moved to change their election laws to restrict voters’ access to the polls after the 2020 election. The second is focused on the “audit” still taking place in Arizona, along with potential copycats.
[...]
Nowhere in the first document does it explicitly say the department will be targeting state legislators, election officials or anyone else using Trump’s rhetoric to make voting harder. Instead, it just casually points out that several federal laws could be violated in the process of doing so, even if that just involves rolling procedures back to their pre-pandemic standards:Since the 2020 election, some States have responded by permanently adopting their COVID-19 modifications; by contrast, other States have barred continued use of those practices or have imposed additional restrictions on voting by mail or early voting. In view of these developments, guidance concerning federal statutes affecting methods of voting is appropriate.[...]
The Department’s enforcement policy does not consider a jurisdiction’s re-adoption of prior voting laws or procedures to be presumptively lawful; instead, the Department will review a jurisdiction’s changes in voting laws or procedures for compliance with all federal laws regarding elections, as the facts and circumstances warrant.
The department has already made clear it is willing to go to court to enforce those laws. Last month, the Justice Department sued Georgia under the Voting Rights Act, alleging that the state’s recently passed election law unfairly targeted minority voters. The guidelines issued Wednesday are a shot across the bow of any states that would like to follow Georgia’s lead.
Even more interesting — and ominous — is the document focused on “Federal Law Constraints on Post-Election ‘Audits.’” (Scare quotes theirs!) In it, the Justice Department reminds readers the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and that none of the recounts required under state law “produced evidence of either wrongdoing or mistakes that casts any doubt on the outcome of the national election results.”
[...]
The Justice Department had already warned the Arizona Senate, which approved this farce, that the probe might risk violating federal law. Wednesday’s guidelines are more explicit about what laws might have been broken — and the consequences for breaking them.
[...]
First, it warned that handing over election records to “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling such records and who are unfamiliar with the obligations imposed by federal law” — i.e., Cyber Ninjas, the firm running the show in Arizona — would likely be a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
[...]
Second, the guidelines stress that intimidation of voters — which a door-knocking scheme could qualify as — is, in fact, super illegal and that intimidation doesn’t have to involve physical threats.
[...]
“Jurisdictions that authorize or conduct audits must ensure that the way those reviews are conducted has neither the purpose nor the effect of dissuading qualified citizens from participating in the electoral process,” the Justice Department wrote. “If they do not, the Department will act to ensure that all eligible citizens feel safe in exercising their right to register and cast a ballot in future elections.”
[...]
Taken together, the two documents can be considered part of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s “f--- around and find out” doctrine on voting rights. (Not that he’d ever call it that.)
MSNBC
And if Congress doesn't get the job done, what Garland can do won't be enough.Garland announced in June that his department will make countering new election restrictions a major priority for the Civil Rights Division. Already this year, 18 states have enacted 30 laws that make voting more difficult, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Hundreds more bills have been proposed in states across the country. The new guidelines are a sharp promise that any future shenanigans will be met with a swift challenge.
Are these guidance documents enough on their own to stop Republicans' three-step plan to thwart democracy? No: That will require Congress passing new laws to bolster the Justice Department's currently flagging arsenal. But it’s heartening to see that Garland intends to do what he can in the meantime.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Pro-life
Like higher insurance premiums for risky lifestyles (eg: smoking), people who don't get vaccinated should at the very least be paying more for their medical insurance, and/or paying their own covid-related hospital bills.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Wake up Democrats
This is a nice write-up about Levin. But I need his death to be a wake-up call to Democrats. Levin retired from the Senate in 2014, so the Dems haven't lost their slimmest of slim margins in that body. But there are a lot of old ones still there. While an accident or illness (or crazed Trump supporter) could claim the life of anyone, old age is just piling on the probability. Let's hope this is a reminder to them all that they have one chance to save democracy from the GOP, and they don't have any time to waste doing it. I'm not feeling optimistic.
And, while I'm on my soapbox, there is an urgent need for court reform, to include the Supreme Court. Holy cow, Breyer could well croak in a GOP presidency if Dems in Congress haven't done a thorough job on protecting voting rights, something that has to be done yesterday to avoid losing ground to GOP gerrymandered state districts. He's too fond of himself and his role as senior leftist on the court to retire during this probably short window of Dems holding the other two governmental branches to put the country first. And yes, that same thing applied to RBG. Her refusal to step down during Obama's presidency, even though her health was worsening, got us a 6-3 conservative court. Egos will be the death of democracy.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Thursday, July 29, 2021
Oh yeah, Jordan was part of the coup attempt
He'll fight the subpoena he's going to get to testify before the Select Committee.
Guilt?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE: Even more evidence.
UPDATE:
Just fucking assholes
This really pisses me off.
Also...these people are as deplorable as the people who vote for them...
Jesus Christ. What an embarrassment for our country.
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
This is why we should all be concerned
The indisputable fact is that a leading and longstanding conservative institute in the United States hosts a podcast by someone who served as a senior official in the presidential administration of a man who may run again for the nation's highest office in a few years. And on an episode of that podcast, this former official and his invited guest genially rehearsed arguments about why a future president would be justified in turning himself into a tyrant, and how he could set about accomplishing this task.
The Week
Companion piece:
Hopefully an omen for 2022
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Jake Ellzey defeated fellow Republican Susan Wright in a special runoff in Texas’s 6th Congressional District on Tuesday night, dealing a blow to both her and former President Trump, who had backed Wright in the race.
[...]
“Big election tomorrow in the Great State of Texas! Susan Wright supports America First policies, our Military and our Veterans, is strong on Borders, tough on Crime, Pro-Life, and will always protect our Second Amendment. She will serve the people in the 6th Congressional District of Texas, and our Country, very well. Susan has my Complete and Total Endorsement,” Trump said in a statement Monday.
Conservatives had also sought to downplay Ellzey’s Republican bona fides by highlighting a past donation he received from Bill Kristol, a prominent GOP critic of Trump.
[...]
The Associated Press called the race for Ellzey, who won more than 53 percent of the vote with nearly all precincts reporting.
Ellzey and Wright were the top vote-getters in a May special election in which nobody won an outright majority of the vote, sparking the Tuesday contest.
The election was triggered after the February death of Rep. Ron Wright (R), Susan Wright’s husband.
The Hill
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Here's your answer to why the GOP is so against the Jan 6 investigation
They're complicit.
He's not the only one. Bet on it.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
Looking forward to getting some info from this lawsuit, too.
Jan 6 Committee - Day 1
Today's Jan 6 committee hearing - testimony of four police officers. Worth watching in its entirety as you have the time. In turns infuriating, heart-rending and inspiring.
There are no more hearings scheduled for this week or next.
Monday, July 26, 2021
Fine
Better they believe this than think they need to take up arms to "reinstate" Trump next month.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Shame on us for thinking we might get truth telling post-Trump
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
And still no meaningful gun legislation
So I guess we'll just sit around and wait for the next mass killing. Then cry out for legislation a few days. Then chalk up hundreds more individual deaths until the next mass killing.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Pesticides are still killing the world
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.The Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal and filled up an ancient basin in the desert, creating an oasis for migratory shorebirds and, by the middle of the 20th century, for celebrities and dignitaries. Developers dotted the shores with palm trees and built up luxury resorts around its perimeter, and the area became a destination for Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and the Beach Boys. President Dwight Eisenhower used to come by the golf course.
[...]
After the breached canal that created the lake was mended, it was mostly sustained by runoff water from nearby farms - water that was full of pesticides and nitrates, which blended with salt deposits in the lake bed to create an increasingly salty sea. By the 1990s, the sea had started getting even smaller, and saltier, killing off masses of fish and birthing noxious algal blooms. Over the past few decades, tens of thousands of migratory birds around the lake have died of either starvation or poisoning.
“And then came the odor,” said Miriam Juárez, 37, who has lived near the sea for most of her life. “It’s repugnant.” Her parents used to take her and her brothers to fish in the sea as well, she said. But her kids have only ever known the lake as a toxic void that periodically spews up fish bones and poison dust.
Guardian
Sunday, July 25, 2021
And they buy this bs?
Yes, all those corporations that are now state-owned, like....uh, like...
Words in MAGAland have no meaning, they only have feelings.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Saturday, July 24, 2021
Idiot Dems will allow our democracy to crumble
It doesn't matter if 100% of Democratic voters vote when a district is gerrymandered. They still lose. FFS.
And some of those laws are seeking to give state legislatures the right to overturn elections.A quiet divide between President Biden and the leaders of the voting rights movement burst into the open on Thursday, as 150 organizations urged him to use his political mettle to push for two expansive federal voting rights bills that would combat a Republican wave of balloting restrictions.
In the letter, signed by civil rights groups including the Leadership Conference and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, activists argued that with the “ideal of bipartisan cooperation on voting rights” nowhere to be found in a sharply divided Senate, Mr. Biden must “support the passage of these bills by whatever means necessary.”
[...]
Republicans have passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country this year that are likely to make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities, which lean Democratic. Several of the laws give state legislators more power over how elections are run and make it easier to challenge the results.
NYT
So again, 100% Democratic turn-out is meaningless under gerrymandering and laws that Republican legislatures are passing.Ultimately, the advocates fear that the Biden administration — currently focused on a bipartisan infrastructure deal and an ambitious spending proposal — has largely accepted the Republican restrictions as baked in, and is now dedicating more of its effort to juicing Democratic turnout.
You know what? When the Republicans take back the Senate in 2022, THEY will damned sure do away with the filibuster and pass whatever the fuck they want.Mr. Biden, a veteran of the Senate who for decades has believed in negotiating on the particulars of voting rights legislation, has faced calls to push Democratic senators to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow the two major voting bills proposed by the party to pass with a simple majority. The president and his advisers have repeatedly pointed out that he does not have the votes within his own party to pass federal voting legislation, and does not have the power to unilaterally roll back the filibuster even if he supported doing so.
[...]
“As you noted in your speech, our democracy is in peril,” the groups said in their letter. “We certainly cannot allow an arcane Senate procedural rule to derail efforts that a majority of Americans support.”
Seriously? You've got less than a month to pass these voting rights acts. You have all the information you need.Inside the White House, officials say they are hard at work bringing together voting rights advocates, poll workers and others who can tell them more about problems on the ground. Dozens of advisers hold several meetings a day on the subject. The president requests updates on the issue daily, according to three advisers familiar with his schedule.
Some advocates found this approach — the idea that the vaunted voter registration, education and get-out-the-vote efforts that helped propel Mr. Biden to victory could be used against G.O.P. voting laws — naïve at best, signaling that the White House viewed the issue as simply an election challenge, rather than a moral threat to broad civil rights progress.
[...]
“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’” [Biden] said during a speech in Tulsa, Okla., last month. “Well, because Biden only has a majority of, effectively, four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”
Joe, we're not asking you to effect a miracle, we're just asking you to fucking try.
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the founder of the Poor People’s Campaign and a prominent civil rights leader, urged Mr. Biden to wield his influence. “Go to Texas, and meet with a diverse group of people on the ground to put a face on this issue. Then go to Arizona. Go to West Virginia,” he said. “There ought to be a speech from the well of Congress.”
[...]
“Talking about grass-roots organizing, talking about voter registration is important, and we are grateful for the amplification of what our work is — and I want to be clear that that’s our work,” said Nsé Ufot, the executive director of the New Georgia Project, a civil rights group. “That’s what we’ve been doing. That’s what got us to this moment. That’s what gave us a Biden-Harris administration. And now we need them to do their jobs. I can’t write legislation. I can’t whip votes. I don’t have 47 years in that body, in the United States Senate. I’m not the president of that body. But they are.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
The fix was in
The point was to uncover all possible witnesses and bury their probable testimony while giving Kavanaugh a heads up about what he would need to deny.[T]he FBI sent a letter to Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), who wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray two years ago with questions about how the investigation into [Supreme Court Justice Brett] Kavanaugh was conducted. On June 30, the FBI responded to the senators, revealing new information about the investigation.
[...]
"The letter from the Department of Justice, released by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's office today, confirms what we knew: The FBI’s investigation into Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's serious allegations about Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh's sexual misconduct was a sham and a major institutional failure,” Blasey Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, said in the Thursday statement. “Not only did the FBI refuse to interview Dr. Ford or the corroborators listed in our letter to FBI Director Wray, it failed to act on the over 4,500 tips it received about then-nominee Kavanaugh. Instead, it handed the information over to the White House, allowing those who supported Kavanaugh to falsely claim that the FBI found no wrongdoing.”
[...]
On Thursday, Whitehouse's office said that a group of seven Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Wray, asking for additional information on the FBI’s 2018 background investigation into Kavanaugh.
“The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information ‘highly relevant to ... allegations’ of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored,” the senators wrote in the letter. “If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all.”
Politico
Impeach Kavanaugh.
Is this supposed to make us angry?
In fact, it's something WE should have done. At least as it pertains to Wilbur Ross.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
No doubt.China said on Friday that it has imposed counter-sanctions on United States individuals including former US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross in response to recent US sanctions on Chinese officials in Hong Kong.
[...]
It was the second time this year that China has imposed sanctions on officials who served under former US President Donald Trump, who adopted a tough line on Beijing and confronted it over trade, business practices, human rights and other issues.
[...]
China also imposed unspecified “reciprocal counter-sanctions” on current and former representatives of a range of organisations, including the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Other institutions named included the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, Human Rights Watch, and the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC).
[...]
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a regular news briefing that the US was “undeterred” by China’s move [...] .
alJazeera
Isn't that why everybody imposes sanctions?“These actions are the latest examples of how Beijing punishes private citizens, companies and civil society organisations as a way to send political signals,” Psaki said.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Friday, July 23, 2021
Ron Johnson has seen the handwriting on the wall
Like Trump, Johnson knows that if he says he's not running, the money will stop coming in. I'll bet, though, he's not running. It's the media's fault, of course. It has nothing to do with the fact that he's a full-blown idiot.Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he may not be the best candidate for the 2022 midterms, ahead of what is expected to be a competitive Senate race in the Badger State.
[...]
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), former Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, and Marine veteran and former Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson have been floated as potential GOP Senate candidates in the case that Johnson does not run.
[...]
"I want to make sure that this U.S. Senate seat is retained in Republican hands," Johnson told conservative talk show host Lisa Boothe on Wednesday.
"You see what the media’s doing to me. I may not be the best candidate. I wouldn’t run if I don’t think I could win if I don’t think I was the best person to be able to win," he continued.
Johnson went on to describe Washington as "incredibly frustrating," citing what he was "dysfunction" within the political scene. The senator also revealed that he did not think his time on Capitol Hill has been "particularly successful," pointing to issues that he campaigned on tackling, including rising debt and abolishing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
The senator has yet to formally announce whether he is running or not.
The Hill
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Mother Nature is not kidding around any more
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Health officials are warning of a fungus “superbug” outbreak in Dallas and Washington, D.C., that seem to be resistant to treatment.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday there were outbreaks of the Candida auris fungus in a nursing home in D.C. and two hospitals in Dallas, The Associated Press reported.
Three cases in D.C. and two cases in Dallas were resistant to all three major classes of medication.
Both the patients in Dallas who had cases resistant to medicine died, and one patient in D.C. died from a similar case.
“This is really the first time we’ve started seeing clustering of resistance” and patients getting infected from each other, CDC medical officer Meghan Lyman said, according to the AP.
[...]
[T]he outbreak is still ongoing, according to the CDC, but the cases have not been reported yet.
The fungus has been known for years, but evidence that it can spread from person to person is new.
The Hill
I'm not impressed.
Whoever designed the Olympic costumes for the USA team just phoned it in this year.
If they'd had any imagination, with the necessity of wearing masks, they could have been dressed as American wild west cowboy bandits. Would have been appropriate, too.
And what's with this fucker?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Ronny Jackson out there stirring the shit with other Republicans
Ummm, Ronny? They've already said. 100% of them.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Are Republicans still trying to paint THIS guy as addled?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
How long before Sinema changes her tune?
The first-term Arizona Democrat [Kirsten Sinema] has often defended the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority requirement as a necessary check on partisan whiplash, arguing that it forces the chamber to put together “durable” coalitions. But according to a new survey shared with Mother Jones from the progressive polling and policy firm Data for Progress, her stance has left her far less popular in Arizona than either President Joe Biden or her recently elected Senate colleague, Mark Kelly—and perhaps even vulnerable to a primary challenge.
[...]
Sinema is viewed favorably by 38 percent of voters, compared to 47 percent for Kelly and 51 percent for Biden [...] .
[...]
Democratic voters overwhelmingly support a $15 minimum wage according the survey; Sinema drew the ire of activists this spring for casting a largely symbolic vote against adding such a minimum-wage hike to the coronavirus stimulus package. They support getting rid of the legislative filibuster and overwhelmingly back the PRO Act, which would expand rights and protections for labor unions, but which Sinema has not signed onto.
[...]
Although she was once a progressive state legislator who condemned the “false pressure to get to 60” votes for major legislation in DC, Sinema has cultivated a reputation in the Capitol as Republicans’ best Democratic friend—someone who is averse to public expressions of partisanship, and who has called the late Republican Sen. John McCain a political idol. She started a bipartisan spin class while serving in the House, and her ability to win the votes of people who have voted Republican in the past is part of the reason she’s in office now.
[...]
Sinema won’t be up for reelection for another three years
Mother Jones
Now do Joe Manchin.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
There ought to be a test before you can get into Congress
There ought to be a test before you can get into Congress.
No. No it isn't.
No. No it doesn't. You don't have to answer the question, but it doesn't violate your HIPAA rights.
I bet newly confirmed citizens know more than this idiot.
Also...
Information began circulating last week about an America First rally at Pacific Hills Banquet & Event Center in Laguna Hills planned for Saturday. The venue’s general manager told the Orange County Register it opted to cancel it after learning Gaetz and Greene would be speaking.
By Thursday, the rally had been moved to the Riverside Convention Center. Many Riverside residents condemned the event and several organizations planned to protest, prompting concern from city officials. By late Friday, that venue was out as well.
“Riverside is a diverse and inclusive community, so it is heartening to hear that this event will not move forward,” Riverside Mayor Pro Tem Gaby Plascencia said in a statement. “I am disappointed we even got to this point, because these speakers are the antithesis of everything Riverside stands for.”
Hours later, organizers announced the event would be back in Orange County at the Anaheim Event Center. Dozens of residents contacted the city to decry the event. A few sent messages of support, Lyster said.
“As a city we respect free speech but also have a duty to call out speech that does not reflect our city and its values,” he said.
LA Times
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)