What we need is freedom FROM religion

The Christofascists are out of control.

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

Speaking of Missouri

A 36-year-old man from Missouri who prosecutors allege left a loaded pistol on U.S. Capitol grounds amid the rioting on Jan. 6, 2021 is facing multiple charges.A criminal complaint alleges that Jerod Thomas Bargar illegally traveled across state lines with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol and had it with him while on Capitol grounds the day of the riot.

Bargar told authorities that he had been on Capitol grounds on the day of the riot, but asserted that he did not enter the building itself, officials said.

He later said that he had had the pistol on him on Jan. 6, though he was not licensed to carry in Washington, D.C., according to court documents, with prosecutors saying he “stated that he did not know at the time he travelled to Washington, D.C. that it was illegal to possess a handgun in Washington, D.C. or on Federal property.”

  The Hill

Ignorance of the law is no defense. Also, idiot.

Bargar is charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon; unlawful possession of a firearm on Capitol grounds or buildings; unlawful possession a pistol outside their home or place of business in the District of Columbia without a valid license and registration certificate issued by the District of Columbia; and unlawful possession, sell, or transfer of any large-capacity ammunition feeding device in the D.C.

I want to know how he "left" it there. Here's the brilliant Jerod proud of himself on January 6...

"Parcially"

A later examination of Bargar’s Facebook account, the charging document said, showed he had made some alterations.

“He had changed the name on the account to Thomas Bargar, and the place of residence to New Jersey.”

[...]

The firearm was a 9mm semi-automatic pistol “held in a distinctive holster that displayed an image of the American flag and had the words ‘We The People’ written on it,” the charging document said.

[...]

The firearm contained one 9mm cartridge stamped “WIN 9mm LUGER” in the chamber and approximately 15 9mm cartridges in the magazine, the document said, with a total capacity of more than 10 rounds.

  AOL

He had a fucking bullet in the fucking chamber.

Bargar, 36, is the 23rd Missouri resident to be charged in connection with the Capitol riot.

Now I want to know the breakdown of the various states' participants.

“Bargar stated that he did not enter the Capitol building or participate in illegal activity because he knew where the ‘line’ was” and that it “was obvious officers were trying to keep protesters out,” the document said.

Then WTF did he bring a loaded semi-automatic for? That wasn't over the line? Did he think there would be no police protection against armed insurrectionists?

“Bargar stated that he is always armed and wanted to be armed when he went to the ‘belly of the beast’ for his own ‘self-protection.’”

[...]

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducted a search based on the serial number, and the results gave the owner’s name as someone with the initials “D.F.”

FBI agents interviewed “D.F.” at his home in Missouri on June 14, 2021, the document said. The man told agents he hadn’t owned the firearm for several years and couldn’t remember whether he’d sold it or pawned it. He gave them the name of a Jefferson City pawn shop. Agents went to the shop two days later and were told that “D.F.” had pawned the firearm in November 2011 and that it was purchased by “R.N.” that same month.

On July 13, 2021, the document said, FBI agents interviewed “R.N.” at his Missouri home. He said he’d given the firearm to his stepson, Jerod Bargar, about a year-and-a-half earlier.

[...]

Bargar told agents that he and his friend were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and were in a group of protesters outside the building when police began to spray tear gas and deploy other munitions into the crowd. He said a woman was knocked to the ground, and he and his friend helped her up. Soon after that, he said, he realized he had lost his firearm.

Jesus. Not a lot of protection if you can't even keep up with your gun. So now we know how he came to leave it there.  As to where the insurrectionists hail from...

The 377 people did not come from pro-Trump counties. In fact, the majority of them came from “blue counties that [Joe] Biden won comfortably,” Pape found. But he also analyzed recent demographic changes in the home counties of the protesters, leading him to this finding:

“By far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.”

  MinnPost

I didn't find the state by state breakdown. You'd think someone would have published that. There's a searchable DOJ tracker of charged individuals showing where the arrests were made.  I don't want my question answered badly enough to make the compilation myself.

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

Our own Josh Holly continues to be an embarrassment

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

What happens when federal money goes to states for aid to the poor?

I bet you already guessed it, but ProPublica has the receipts, as the younguns say.

When Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, states were given more autonomy over how they could use federal funding for aid to the poor. They could demand welfare recipients find work before receiving cash assistance. They could also use their federal “block grants” to fund employment and parenting courses or to subsidize childcare.

Twenty-five years later, however, states are using this freedom to do nothing at all with large sums of the money.

According to recently released federal data, states are sitting on $5.2 billion in unspent funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. Nearly $700 million was added to the total during the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, with Hawaii, Tennessee and Maine hoarding the most cash per person living at or below the federal poverty line.

  ProPublica

Each year, the federal government awards states a block grant, or lump sum, of funding, with the intention that the money be spent to help poor people meet their basic needs, become employed and start two-parent families. States have discretion in how they can use, or not use, the money and have increasingly used it to fill unrelated budget gaps.

[...]

The coronavirus pandemic and accompanying economic travails did not make a dent in states’ TANF reserves. Between June and November 2020, the national poverty rate made its largest jump since the government began tracking it 60 years ago, from 9.6% to 11.7%. Other parts of the federal government’s social safety net increased aid to help some of the 7.8 million Americans who fell into poverty, with stimulus packages and expanded unemployment benefits. TANF, conversely, is helping fewer people.

[...]

“During the COVID pandemic, when unemployment rates and hunger rates were skyrocketing nationwide, TANF funds were still sitting unused,” said Ashley Burnside, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a national advocacy organization for low-income Americans. The devastation wrought by the pandemic “is as much of a ‘rainy day’ as states could have had. If funds are still left unused, it makes me question what states are waiting to use this money for.”

[...]

“Many families living below the poverty line are deciding that the benefits TANF provides are not worth the onerous upfront requirements to get on and stay on the program,” said LaDonna Pavetti, a welfare expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Reserves are going up because caseloads are going down.”

If they qualify for TANF, applicants also risk losing any child support they might receive from a noncustodial parent.

[...]

According to its “TANF to poverty ratio,” many states, including Tennessee, are largely failing to meet the needs of poor families. In 2019, the state assisted only 18 out of 100 poor families with children, down from 67 when the program began in 1996, according to the analysis.

A report this year found that TANF serves only one in four Maine children living at or below the federal poverty level, and that 84% of families in the state leaving the cash assistance program in 2019 were still living in poverty.

And with the anti-abortion laws going into effect, there will undoubtedly be more people - and specifically children - who need this assistance. Oh, well, they shouldn't have been bore poor and lazy, I guess. 

Do you need something else to disturb your sleep?

I've got it for you right here.

he U.N. nuclear chief warned that Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine “is completely out of control” and issued an urgent plea to Russia and Ukraine to quickly allow experts to visit the sprawling complex to stabilize the situation and avoid a nuclear accident.

Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press that the situation is getting more perilous every day at the Zaporizhzhia plant in the southeastern city of Enerhodar, which Russian troops seized in early March, soon after their Feb. 24. invasion of Ukraine.

“Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated” at the plant, he said. “What is at stake is extremely serious and extremely grave and dangerous.”

Grossi cited many violations of the plant’s safety, adding that it is “in a place where active war is ongoing,” near Russian-controlled territory.

[...]

The IAEA chief said he and his team need protection to get to the plant and the urgent cooperation of Russia and Ukraine.

[...]

“So I’m pleading as an international civil servant, as the head of an international organization, I’m pleading to both sides to let this mission proceed.”

  AP

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

Speaking of Alex Jones' trial

Maybe he's hoping the judge will be lenient if she believes he's simply out of his mind.

He's probably not going to get it after badmouthing the judge in public, but he's going to need it, because he's not likely to get any favors from the jury.

And to top off the lying on the stand and the idiocy....

Is that prejudicial?

Courts are about analysis, and the entire project of the law is about words meaning specific things.

But modern American political culture is emotive and even artistic. It uses language like a musician uses notes or an impressionist uses brush strokes. Whether it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about Bill Gates' efforts to colonize our bowels through "peach tree dishes" or Alex Jones ranting about gay frogs, modern politicians and pundits use language to convey feelings and attitudes and values, not specific meanings. If you demand Alex Jones defend the specific meaning of his words, it’s like demanding your eight-year-old defend his statement that his birthday party was the best day ever when previously that’s what he said about Disneyland. Trump was the Salvador Dali of this movement, his speeches full of melting clocks of ire and resentment. As an artist of lies he was prolific.

I’m offering a descriptive observation, not a positive normative judgment. Truth exists. Truth matters. Even if Alex Jones’ broadcasts are dreamscapes of spleen, they have real-world effects. Some people take them literally and act accordingly, as we’ve seen as the parents of murdered children tell their harrowing stories of the harassment Jones encourages. And a society where words are unaccountable, where language is just us finger-painting with our own shit, is ungovernable and unlivable.

The point is that courts are ill-equipped to deal with people like Alex Jones, and people like Alex Jones are ill-equipped to deal with courts. Jones’ catastrophic testimony in his own defense illustrates this. Jones struggled to fit his bombast within the framework of the law, within the distinction between fact and opinion. It’s a bad fit because that’s not how he uses words. If Jones had been honest — an utterly foreign concept to him — he might have said “I just go out there and say what I feel.” The notion that Sandy Hook was a hoax is a word-painting, a way of conveying Jones’ bottomless rage at politics and media and modernity, and he can no more defend it factually than Magritte could defend the logical necessity of a particular brushstroke.

It’s fit that Alex Jones is held accountable for the impact of his words. He used false statements of fact to paint his picture, and those false statements of fact caused harm. But I suspect that a vast judgment against Jones won’t have much value as a deterrent or proclamation of truth. Jones is loathsomely rich because people want to consume his art. His landscapes of hate and fear and mistrust resonate with a frightening number of Americans. The people who enjoyed his Sandy Hook trutherism didn’t enjoy it because it was factually convincing or coherent; they enjoyed the emotional state it conveyed because it matched theirs. The plodding technicalities of law are probably inadequate to change their minds.

Defamation cases like this one — or Dominion’s case against Sidney Powell, or the parade of defamation claims against Trump — are just, and it’s just that the victims receive compensation. But they don’t solve the problem. America can survive the demagogues themselves, it’s their audience that will kill us.

  Ken White: "Alex Jones at the Tower of Babel"

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

Oopsie

[A] stunning revelation surfaced during an exchange in court between Jones and Mark Bankston, a lawyer representing the parents of a six-year-old boy killed in the 2012 attack.

Bankston provided to the Infowars host a copy of a text message he received that criticized his platform’s coverage in 2020 of the coronavirus and likened it to his false theory that the Sandy Hook killings were fake. This was deeply unfavorable to Jones because he had provided sworn testimony at a deposition that he had no text messages on his phone that referenced the Sandy Hook massacre.

[...]

Bankston replied: “Do you know where I got this? Your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of your entire cellphone, with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years.”

  Guardian

Ouch!

Bankston said he told Jones’s lawyers about the mistake, but they did not take “any steps” to label the texts as privileged, and thereby keep them out of court.

[...]

Jones mockingly told Bankston he now had his “Perry Mason moment”, referring to the TV attorney who often won cases by getting those he was questioning to confess to wrongdoing on the witness stand.

“You know what perjury is, right?” Bankston said, referring to the crime of lying under oath. “I just want to make sure before we go further.”

Ouch.

Shortly after the engrossing exchange, Rolling Stone reported that the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former president Donald Trump would subpoena Jones’ texts.

That's gonna leave a mark.

Plaintiff is asking for $150 million.

If you're going to do the bad stuff, you should probably hire good lawyers. Perhaps Trump is paying for them and that's the best he could get?

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

GOP looks quite foolish - Part whatever

After making fools of themselves blocking it just a few days ago.

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

Other Tuesday results

Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.), two progressive lawmakers who are members of the “Squad,” fended off primary challengers on Tuesday, making them favorites to win their third and second terms, respectively.

Bush earned 69.5 percent of the vote in her primary, easily beating out Missouri state Sen. Steve Roberts, who garnered 26.6 percent of the vote.

[...]

In Michigan, Tlaib also easily won her primary against three major challengers, garnering 66.5 percent of the vote. The AP called the race early Wednesday morning.

[...]

In a member-on-member primary in Michigan’s 11th District, moderate Rep. Haley Stevens defeated Rep. Andy Levin, who was backed by progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

And in Missouri’s Democratic Senate primary, Lucas Kunce, who was also backed by Sanders, lost the race to philanthropist Trudy Busch Valentine.

  The Hill

Elsewhere, Trump-endorsed candidates beat out anyone who dared to cross him.

Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), who voted last year to impeach former President Trump, is projected to lose his primary Tuesday to Trump-backed challenger John Gibbs.

Gibbs’s victory is a major win for Trump, who vowed to exact revenge on any Republican who broke with him over his false claim that 2020 election was stolen or in the wake of the attack on the Capitol.

  The Hill

There may be no hope for Arizona.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R), who offered dramatic public testimony to the House Jan. 6 select committee about his resistance to the pressure campaign on state officials waged by former President Trump to overturn the 2020 election results in the state, has lost his reelection bid.

State Sen. David Farnsworth, who was endorsed by the former president in late June, has been projected to win the race by The Associated Press and several other news outlets.

  The Hill

An Arizona lawmaker who embraces election conspiracies and was endorsed by former President Donald Trump won the Republican primary Tuesday for the top elections post in the presidential battleground.

[...]

Finchem, who attended Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceded the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, has said he only intends to ensure that election laws are followed to address concerns by many Republicans about how elections are run. Still, he tried to get the Legislature to overturn the 2020 election results and has spoken about making major changes to election rules that are written by the secretary.

[H]e contends tens of thousands of fake ballots led to Biden’s win, a claim for which there is no credible evidence.

  The Hill

[Rep. Paul Gosar] Won with 64 percent of the vote. He voted to overturn 2020 election results.

Trump endorsed the incumbent representative the day after Gosar’s chamber passed a resolution to remove the congressman from committee assignments for posting an anime video appearing to attack Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden.

Gosar has been on the margins within the House this year, even gaining rebuke from House minority leader Kevin McCarthy for speaking at a white nationalist event in March. But Trump said the congressman “has been a loyal supporter of our America First agenda, and even more importantly, the USA.”

  Politico

And it looks like election-denier and Trump endorsed Kari Lake will be the winner for GOP governor candidate in Arizona.

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

UPDATE:

I'll believe it when I see it

I don't think he actually will, but if he does, I wouldn't miss it for the world.