These numbers should be higher

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This is MAGA

This is so sad.  And so shameful.  White Americans unironically pass bills to keep themselves from feeling any discomfort in the learning of history.  Black people can be slaves and be subjected to discrimination, but god forbid white people should be made to feel uncomfortable.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Let the opining begin

Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring. We all understand that he's doing so in order that Joe Biden can get a liberal judge on the court while the getting is good. We also understand that Trump's nominees were not only ultra-conservative, they were young in order that there would be ultra-conservatives on the court for years to come. We also all understand that the Supreme Court is political, regardless of claims to the contrary.

The Washington Post has published an editorial opinion about how Biden should handle this situation. Please recall that Biden ran on the promise that if he got a chance to nominate a justice it would be a black woman.

From the Post:  

Justice Stephen G. Breyer will retire at the end of the Supreme Court’s current term, concluding a nearly three-decade career as one of the nation’s top judges — and giving President Biden a rare chance to shape the judicial branch. Mr. Biden should resist partisan pressure to place the youngest, most ideologically strident judge on the high court. Instead, he should pick the best candidate for the job.

The first and foremost qualification — a commitment to judicial independence — is the opposite of what many progressive activists desire.

  WaPo

I highly doubt it's the opposite of what they desire. One wonders: did the Post offer the same opinion when Trump nominated any of the three ultra-conservatives during his one term? I'm not going to research that. I'm going to hope they did.

Mr. Biden has himself suggested another reasonable consideration: diversity, pledging during his presidential campaign to nominate a Black woman for the job. This would be a welcome first, and there are well-qualified Black women on the federal bench whom he could promote. But the president also should not feel restricted to the pool of candidates serving on appeals courts, from which every sitting justice but one hails. Some of the nation’s best justices traveled different paths to the court.

For their part, Republicans should give Mr. Biden’s pick a fair shake. This might seem like a fantasy. The hardball they played in recent years to force a 6-to-3 conservative court majority did more to poison the judicial nomination process and politicize the court than any act since President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack it. They would harm the country even more if they now condemned a qualified Black female nominee as a radical.

[...]

The nation’s leaders should consider ways to reduce the high stakes of any single Supreme Court pick and cut the element of luck that determines which president gets to decide the court’s composition. Imposing 18-year term limits would do both. Along with Mr. Biden’s nominee, lawmakers should consider this idea with open minds.

That is absolutely right. Term limits are obviously needed. On the other hand, there's an even better solution: floating number of justices. Perhaps combine that with term limits.

Also, I'm not too concerned about Republicans giving Biden's pick "a fair shake."  They have a whopping majority of their idealogues on the bench.  Even if Roberts - or rarely Kavanaugh - vote in a non-idealogical way, it would take both of them at the same time to side with the "liberals" to thwart a conservative outcome, and that's highly unlikely to happen.  When it comes to things really important to Republicans - abortion, immigration and corporate power - there's no question which way the Court will go.  They can afford to look as though they're not obstructionists on this vote.

At any rate, it's a good idea to look at the Post's op-ed from the view of a non-white person.

Michael Harriott has a long Twitter thread doing just that. He begins...

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Neeeeeext

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I guess it worked

They'll bring it out again next time they need it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Again

The shit MAGAland puts out about CRT

What is West Nova News? And what does it have to do with Ian Prior, the former spokesperson for Attorney General Jeff Sessions? This is where things get interesting.

West Nova News appears to be a standard local news website. It is not. Rather it is part of a massive network of websites linked to "conservative businessman Brian Timpone." There are more than 1300 sites currently in the network, including at least 28 that operate in Virginia.

The sites in Virginia look identical and feature much of the same content. Most of the articles do not have a byline and are automatically generated.

[...]

Journatic was rebranded Locality Labs and is now part of the Metric Media network, which operates the 1300+ local news sites. Metric Media boasts that it produces "over 5 million news articles every month." It has claimed to be "the largest producer of local news in the United States."

  Popular Info

"Producing" local news.  I see what they did there.

Prior and other clients can use the network to launder partisan attacks as "news." Quotes from sites in the Metric Media network can then be used in political mailers or in television ads with the authority of a neutral source.

Right out of the Dick Cheney playbook. You remember Dick Cheney. And how Dick Cheney leaked information to news sources and then quoted those news sources to support his public assertions.

[A Prior ordered article] published in September 2020, is one of the first to claim that Critical Race Theory is infiltrating Virginia schools. It claims that "Loudoun County Public Schools has spent $422,500 in taxpayer funds 'training' staff on critical race theory." This is false. The money was allocated to create an equity plan and provide related services to help implement the plan.

[...]

Neither the contract for the plan nor the plan itself mentions Critical Race Theory. It does talk about strategies to "ensure student growth and success for every child." This includes the "[r]ecruitment and retention of a high performing, diverse workforce." The West Nova News story describes this as "hiring fewer white teachers."

[...]

Asked by Vice to provide an example as to how Critical Race Theory is reflected in Loudoun County instruction, Prior said "his second-grade daughter was taught about Christopher Columbus’ genocidal history."

Do NOT teach our children the truth about our beloved icons.

This year Prior founded Fight for Schools, a group pushing parents to fight Critical Race Theory and organizing recalls of school board members that oppose its agenda. Prior and Fight for Schools are also a member of the American Schools Coalition, which operates the CRT Central website. CRT Central aggregates anti-CRT stories from across the Metric Media network.

[...]

A Popular Information investigation reveals that, in 2021, Metric Media published thousands of articles promoting the notion that Critical Race Theory is taught in Virginia schools. Many, but not all, of these articles are automated.

Nationwide, tens of thousands of articles about Critical Race Theory have been published across the Metric Media network. That number is growing every day.

MAGA messaging is on the warpath.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bingo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

MAGA to the dark ages

Inmates at an Arkansas prison said they weren’t told that they were treated for COVID-19 with the drug Ivermectin, a known livestock de-wormer, according to The Associated Press.

In an interview with the newswire, three inmates at a Washington County, Ark., jail said they didn’t know they were given the anti-parasite drug as medication for the virus until last week.

Inmate William Evans said that inmates felt that they were being tested as guinea pigs for the medication, saying he was given the drug two weeks after testing positive for coronavirus, the AP noted.

[...]

“I asked what are they, and they’d just tell me vitamins,” Inmate Edrick Floreal-Wooten told the AP.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Performance legislating

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Critical race theory

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Goosestepping on a roll

The return of McCarthyism.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: