I’m off to a late start today. Doctor Daughter called and we talked forever! She delivered over 50 babies in March so there’s evidently a Pandemic Baby Boomlet happening! It’s kinda like the pattern that happens 9 months after blizzards or having to stay at home all summer because everything is basically shut down!
I was talking to BB yesterday about the the expert medical testimony from the pulmonary doctor yesterday and thinking Derick Chauvin might as well get used to the idea of prison. I brought up the other two officers who were as seemingly helpless as the bystanders at stopping Chauvin. I keep wondering what’s in store for them. There’s an Op Ed by Rosa Brooks at Politico today that addresses just that question. “What About the Cops Who Watched George Floyd Die?” The author says the two officers were a perfect example of “Bystander Effect.”
They were paralyzed by the powerful social forces that too often operate to prevent even decent people from taking action to halt abuses.
Edouard Manet Peonies In A Vase
I really didn’t know much about their individual backgrounds until I read this piece. Officer Thao was the one who ‘controlled’ the bystanders. BB has written about the Kitty Genovese case which is one of the most famous crimes where the bystander effect could be documented.
Although Officer Thao was a nine-year police department veteran with several prior misconduct complaints of his own, Lane and Kueng were unjaded rookies, each less than a week out of field training, and they were perceived by their peers as caring, idealistic young officers. Kueng, one of just 80 Black officers in a department of 900, had joined the Minneapolis police because he hoped an increasingly diverse force would reduce police racism and aggression toward people of color. Lane, who tutored Somali children in his spare time, was known for his calmness and his ability to defuse tense situations. Both had received instruction at the police academy about the dangers of using bodyweight to keep a suspect in a prone position for an extended period.
So why did neither man intervene when it became clear that Floyd was struggling to breathe? For that matter, why didn’t any of the half-dozen New York City police who watched Officer Daniel Pantaleo place Eric Garner in a chokehold in 2014 step in to aide Garner? Why did none of the six Baltimore officers involved in Freddie Gray’s 2015 arrest point out the need to secure Gray’s seat belt after loading him into a police van? In far too many police abuse cases, other officers could have intervened to prevent harm, but instead remained passive.
The bystander effect, which social psychologists have puzzled over for decades, is hardly limited to police officers. Think of the millions of ordinary Germans who watched Nazi abuses with dismay but didn’t speak out as their Jewish neighbors were rounded up. Or Kitty Genovese’s neighbors, who neither intervened nor called 911 as she was stabbed to death on a Queens street in 1964. On a more mundane level, think of all the people who look away and pretend not to notice when a school or workplace bully taunts some unlucky victim.
Scores of studies have documented the bystander effect, and we now have a fairly clear understanding of the factors that can lead ordinary people to do nothing even when morality seems to demand intervention. People are less likely to intervene when faced with ambiguous rather than clear situations, for instance. They’re less likely to intervene when surrounded by peers who are also doing nothing, or when intervention would require challenging those they perceive as having authority. They’re also less likely to intervene when they believe someone else will, or should, take action, or to help those whom they view as culturally different from themselves.
All of these factors appear to have been at play in the moments leading to Floyd’s death. Chauvin was the most experienced officer on the scene, and the less experienced officers deferred to his judgment; Chauvin was insistent about keeping Floyd on the ground and indicated that he was taking steps to keep Floyd alive, creating, for the other officers, a degree of ambiguity about whether Chauvin’s actions were inappropriate. Each of the three officers could see that none of his colleagues was intervening to stop Chauvin, thus diffusing responsibility for any bad outcomes. Finally, differences of class, race and culture might have allowed the officers to view Floyd as “other,” rather than as someone they felt obligated to help
Med examiner testifies that Floyd died, slowly, from low oxygen, not heart attack, & as a result of Chauvin's knee on his neck. If jury accepts, shuts off Chauvin's last line of defense. Looking forward to discussing with @TheRevAl on @DeadlineWH w/ @NicolleDWallace at 4:20 ET.
President Biden announced the creation of a commission to study the idea of expanding the Supreme Court today. This is from the New York Times: “Biden Creating Commission to Study Expanding the Supreme Court. The commission will also examine other potential changes such as term limits for justices. Progressives are pushing President Biden to add seats to balance the court’s conservative majority.”
President Biden on Friday will order a 180-day study of adding seats to the Supreme Court, making good on a campaign-year promise to establish a bipartisan commission to examine the potentially explosive subjects of expanding the court or setting term limits for justices, White House officials said.
The president acted under pressure from activists pushing for more seats to alter the ideological balance of the court after President Donald J. Trump appointed three justices, including one to a seat that Republicans had blocked his predecessor, Barack Obama, from filling for almost a year.
The result is a court with a stronger conservative tilt, now 6 to 3, after the addition of Mr. Trump’s choices, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just days before last year’s presidential election.
But while Mr. Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asserted that the system of judicial nominations is “getting out of whack,” he has declined to say whether he supports altering the size of the court or making other changes — like imposing term limits — to the current system of lifetime appointments.
It is not clear that the commission established by Mr. Biden will by itself clarify his position. Under the White House order establishing it, the commission is not set to issue specific recommendations at the end of its study — an outcome that is likely to disappoint activists.
President Biden on Friday asked Congress to authorize a massive $1.5 trillion federal spending plan in 2022, seeking to invest heavily in a number of government agencies to boost education, expand public housing, combat the coronavirus and confront climate change.
The request marks Biden’s first discretionary spending proposal, a precursor to the full annual budget he aims to release later in the spring that will address programs including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The president’s early blueprint calls for a nearly 16 percent increase in funding across nondefense domestic agencies, reflecting the White House’s guiding belief that a bigger, better resourced government in Washington can help close the country’s persistent economic gaps.
Many of the programs Biden seeks to fund at higher levels starting in 2022 are initiatives that President Donald Trump had unsuccessfully sought to slash while in the White House. In a further break with Trump, who sought to spend sizable sums on defense during his term, Biden’s new plan calls for a less-than 2 percent increase for the military in the upcoming fiscal year.
But the administration’s approach quickly divided lawmakers from both parties. Senior Senate Republicans accused the president of trying to shortchange the Pentagon, which they alleged would put the country at a disadvantage against China. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressives demanded cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, though they endorsed the domestic investments Biden put forward in his plan.
Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that over the course of the 2020 election, the Trump campaign ripped off unwitting supporters for tens of millions of dollars. It did so through an extremely simple yet wildly deceitful scheme in which the default option for donations authorized the campaign to transfer the pledged amount from people’s bank accounts not once but every single week. Later, the campaign introduced a second prechecked box that doubled a person’s contribution and was known internally as a “money bomb.” In order for people to have picked up on this before it was too late, they would have had to wade through “lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.” Few people did, hence why the two and half months leading up the the election, the Trump campaign, the RNC, and their shared accounts were forced to issue a whopping 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors, compared to the 37,000 online refunds of $5.6 million that Joe Biden‘s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees refunded. “Bandits!” Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian whose $990 donation turned into nearly $8,000, told the Times of the scheme, and you can probably understand why!
Yet apparently, Republicans associated with Donald Trump have not changed their tactics in light of the very bad press; they’ve upped the ante. By which we mean that in addition to continuing to use prechecked boxes to bilk supporters, they’re threatening to rat out anyone who doesn’t agree to recurring donations to the ex-president.
This is the NRCC's homepage prechecked donation box right now.
Ole Ring, Danish painter, 1902-1972, natural landscape,
Good Morning!!
I’m going to focus on Covid-19 news today, because–despite the fact that 110 million Americans have been vaccinated–it looks like we are headed into a dangerous surge of new cases. Here’s the latest:
The number of new Covid-19 cases has plateaued at a “disturbingly high level,” and the US is at risk from a new surge, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned on Wednesday.
While lower than the peak earlier this year, there were still more than 61,000 new cases reported on Wednesday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And the lack of continued significant decreases in infections is a concern, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, particularly given the spread of variants.
“It’s almost a race between getting people vaccinated and this surge that seems to want to increase,” Fauci said, noting Europe is experiencing a spike much like the one experts worry about for the US.
The US is vaccinating people quickly, with just over 33% of the population — more than 109 million people — having received at least one dose of the vaccine and all 50 states committed to opening vaccinations to all adults by April 19.
A highly infectious variant of the coronavirus that was first identified in Britain has become the most common source of new infections in the United States, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday. The worrisome development comes as officials and scientists warn of a possible fourth surge of infections.
At that point, new cases, hospitalizations and deaths were at an all-time high. From that peak, the numbers all declined until late February, according to a New York Times database. After several weeks at a plateau, new cases and hospitalizations are increasing again. The average number of new cases in the country has reached nearly 65,000 a day as of Tuesday, concentrated mostly in metro areas in Michigan as well as in the New York City region. That is an increase of 19 percent compared with the figure two weeks ago.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, who warned last week that she felt a recurring sense of “impending doom,” said on Wednesday that 52 of the agency’s 64 jurisdictions — which include states, some major cities and territories — are now reporting cases of these so-called “variants of concern,” including B.1.1.7.
More on the British variant:
B.1.1.7, the first variant to come to widespread attention, is about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the coronavirus, according to the most recent estimates. The C.D.C. has also been tracking the spread of other variants, such as B.1.351, first found in South Africa, and P.1, which was first identified in Brazil.
The percentage of cases caused by variants is clearly increasing. Helix, a lab testing company, has tracked the relentless increase of B.1.1.7 since the beginning of the year. As of April 3, it estimated that the variant made up 58.9 percent of all new tests.
That variant has been found to be most prevalent in Michigan, Florida, Colorado, California, Minnesota and Massachusetts, according to the C.D.C. Until recently, the variant’s rise was somewhat camouflaged by falling infection rates over all, leading some political leaders to relax restrictions on indoor dining, social distancing and other measures.
Doctors and hospitals are seeing more infections in young people.
After-school activities are creating clusters where coronavirus can spread among children, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Peder Mørk Mønsted, Danish, View of Fredensborg, 1893
“We know that these increases are due, in part, to more highly transmissible variants, which we are very closely monitoring,” Walensky said Monday at the White House COVID-19 Response Team briefing.
The virus was linked to high school wrestling tournaments in Florida last December where 38 people tested positive, according to a CDC report published in January.
In Minnesota, the B.1.1.7 variant of SARS-CoV-2 spread through Carver County with at least 68 cases linked to youth sport activities including hockey, wrestling and basketball, according to the Minnesota Department of Health….
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned about the spread of Covid-19 among children who participate in youth sports.
“We’re finding out that it’s the team sports where kids are getting together, obviously many without masks, that are driving it, rather than in the classroom spread,” Fauci told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Tuesday on “Good Morning America.” “When you go back and take a look and try and track where these clusters of cases are coming from in the school, it’s just that.
As states lift restrictions and coronavirus variants spread, scientists and federal health officials have warned that a fourth surge of cases could arise in the United States even as the nation’s vaccination campaign gathers speed. The seeds of such a surge may now be sprouting in the Upper Midwest and the Northeast.
Michigan is in tough shape. New cases and hospitalizations there have more than doubled in the last two weeks, and the six metro areas in the United States with the greatest number of new cases relative to their population are all in Michigan.
Several other states in the Upper Midwest, including Minnesota and Illinois, have also reported significant increases in new cases and hospitalizations. And in the Northeast, New York and New Jersey have continued to see elevated case counts.
Illinois is seeing a spike in cases as well. The daily average for new cases there has jumped about 56 percent in the past two weeks, to about 2,832 a day. Hospitalizations have risen about 28 percent from two weeks ago. Wisconsin and North Dakota have also seen their average case counts jump 50 percent or more in the last two weeks.
Amid Michigan’s worst-in-the-nation coronavirus surge, scientists and public health officials are urging the Biden administration to flood the state with additional vaccine doses.
Henri Lebasque, Summer Woman
So far, though, their plea has fallen on deaf ears. Instead, the federal government is sticking to a vaccine-allocation strategy that largely awards doses to states and territories based on their population. As a result, most jurisdictions are still receiving similar per-capita vaccine supplies, regardless of how many people there are getting sick — or how many excess vaccine doses they have.
Experts have cast a surge in Michigan’s vaccine supply as a critical tool in combating the state’s most recent Covid-19 crisis. The state is currently recording nearly 7,000 new cases per day, just shy of its all-time peak in December. Hospitalizations and deaths, which tend to lag a few weeks behind increasing case counts, are also on the rise.
“I would be surging a lot of vaccines to Michigan right now,” said Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “To me, this is a no-brainer policy, and I would be curious to hear why the Biden team hasn’t done this.”
During a media briefing on Wednesday, White House officials acknowledged that Michigan’s situation is dire. They gave no indication, though, that they would send additional vaccines there to help quell the surge, when STAT asked. They argued that it is too early in the national vaccine campaign to begin targeting supply based on case rates.
More than 100 million Americans have gotten at least one shot of vaccine and more than 200 million doses have been sent to states, a dramatic acceleration of the bumpy vaccine operation itinherited. Virus-related cases and deaths, which peaked in January, have fallen by about two-thirds since President Biden’s inauguration.
Gustave Léonard de Jonghe
But the Biden White House is seeing new infections climb on its own watch — a potential crisis that could erase many of the hard-won gains of the president’s first 75 days, should the numbers keep rising. After railing for a year about the last administration’s responseand vowing a more muscular strategy, Biden is encountering the limits of his own authority. The president can help secure and distribute supplies and medicines, issue guidance and urge caution — but like President Donald Trump before him, he has few toolswhen governors decide tolift coronavirus protections at the wrong moment,manufacturers botch vaccine production, or Americans refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated.
“We need you to spread the word,” Biden told faith leaders last week, saying he was worried about Americans becoming “cavalier” about the virus. “They’re going to listen to your words more than they are me as president of the United States.”
Biden also has no more sway than Trump over a mutating virus that scientists have only begun to understand.The Washington Post’s rolling seven-day national average of coronavirus casesis more than 65,000 new cases per day, an 19 percent uptick since the middle of last month, even as many states drop public health restrictions and new variants spread. More than 146,000 new cases were reported on Thursday and Friday,the highest two-day count in several weeks, according to state data tracked by The Post.
…the [current] surge—driven by the spread of dangerous new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and a reckless rush by governors and mayors to end a year of mask mandates and social distancing rules—isn’t just an immediate threat to unvaccinated people.
It also represents a long-term danger to the whole country. More cases mean more opportunities for the novel coronavirus to mutate. And the more the pathogen mutates, the greater the chance it will evolve into an even deadlier variant—“lineage” is the scientific term—than even the ones we’re dealing with now.
It’s even possible that, given time and a certain critical mass of cases, SARS-CoV-2 could mutate into a lineage that can overpower our vaccines.
Nicolaas van der Waay
That’s the worst-case scenario—and potentially the biggest cause for concern as the spring surge spreads across the United States. “The greater the spread of the virus populations to new individuals, because of relaxation of social measures, the more the chances of new mutations,” Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida, told The Daily Beast.
If all this sounds like conjecture—it’s not. The steady mutation of the novel coronavirus over the 16 months since it first took root in China is a big reason America’s experiencing another surge.
Any given patient’s load of the virus mutates every two weeks, on average. Niema Moshiri, a geneticist at the University of California-San Diego, compared each case to a slot machine that an infection pulls twice a month. Jackpot is a new and deadlier lineage.
Now imagine tens of millions of Americans with active COVID infections, with each case pulling that handle every 14 days. The more gamblers, and the more time they have to gamble, the better chances of a big win for SARS-CoV-2. Our goal, Moshiri said, should be “to lessen the number of parallel slot machines we give to the virus.”
The New York Times: Top Official Warned That Covid Vaccine Plant Had to Be ‘Monitored Closely.’ “An Operation Warp Speed report last June flagged staffing and quality control concerns at Emergent BioSolutions’ factory in Baltimore. The troubled plant recently had to throw out up to 15 million doses.”
I’m feeling a little bit safer today because I got my second dose of the Moderna vaccine yesterday morning. I didn’t even have any arm soreness after the shot, but by bedtime my whole upper arm was aching. This morning all my joints ache. It’s difficult to know if these are reactions to the vaccine or just my “normal” chronic pain symptoms. Whatever. It’s worth it to be fully vaccinated, especially since Massachusetts now leads the nation in cases of the Brazilian variant of Covid-19.
Now that most of us oldsters are protected, it’s time for people in younger age groups to get their shots. President Biden is now calling for states to make vaccines available to all adults by April 19. CNN:
With all states having opened eligibility to the public or at least having announced when they plan to do so, Biden will announce that every adult in the country will be eligible to be vaccinated by April 19, according to an administration official, instead of Biden’s original deadline of May 1.
Biden announced last week that 90% of adults will be eligible to get a coronavirus vaccine by April 19, as well as have a vaccination site within five miles of where they live. Biden said the number of pharmacies participating in the federal pharmacy vaccination program was increasing from the current 17,000 locations to 40,000.
CNN has previously reported that all 50 states have announced when they plan to open vaccinations to everyone who is eligible, if they haven’t done so already. New Jersey, South Dakota and Nebraska have announced plans to expand eligibility to those 16 years and older before Biden’s new deadline, and other states currently plan to open eligibility by May 1. Biden is expected to credit the governors’ effort to meet his May 1 deadline for this change.
Massachusetts’ vaccine effort is moving so quickly that almost 38% of residents have received at least one dose, and the massive new system for getting shots into arms has plenty of untapped capacity.
“We could double our vaccination rate without too much effort,” said Paul Biddinger, a physician and chair of the state’s vaccine advisory committee.
Almost half of U.S. states had opened vaccination to everyone 16 and older by the end of last week. That will rise to 36 by the end of this week….
Nationwide, vaccinations hit a seven-day average of more than 3 million a day last weekend, and the country logged a 4-million-shot Saturday. (On Monday, the daily vaccination count plummeted to 2.1 million, but the drop was an expected anomaly after a holiday weekend.)
“Quite a turnaround,” tweeted medical researcher and author Eric Topol. “Who would ever have thought that the same country that couldn’t even get a COVID test working and scalable for two months could vaccinate more than 4 million people in a day?”
It’s amazing what a competent government can accomplish.
On Monday night, the Senate parliamentarian — an in-house rules expert — determined that Democrats would be able to do a third budget reconciliation bill this year, a massive development that gives lawmakers more room to pass legislation without Republican support.
Already, Democrats had the ability to do two budget reconciliation bills: one focused on fiscal year 2021 and one focused on fiscal year 2022. Unlike most other bills, budget measures can pass with just 51 votes, instead of 60, which means Democrats are able to usher through the legislation they want if all 50 members of their caucus are onboard. (With the American Rescue Plan, for instance, 50 Democrats were able to approve the $1.9 trillion package as part of the FY2021 budget bill, even though no Republicans backed it.)
“The Parliamentarian has advised that a revised budget resolution may contain budget reconciliation instructions,” said a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a statement. “This confirms the Leader’s interpretation of the Budget Act and allows Democrats additional tools to improve the lives of Americans if Republican obstruction continues.”
With the new decision from the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, Democrats can now do a third budget reconciliation bill, which means they can push through more ambitious measures as long as they are related to taxing and spending. The decision is based on MacDonough’s interpretation of Section 304 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which allows lawmakers to revise a budget resolution before the end of the fiscal year that it covers. Given her decision, Democrats can now edit the 2021 budget resolution they already passed, and include instructions for another bill.
That could mean finally addressing infrastructure. Read more at Vox.
Congressman Alcee Hastings, whose life was marked by perseverance, calamity and a comeback, has died. He was 84.
Hastings crusaded against racial injustice as a civil rights lawyer, became a federal judge who was impeached and removed from office, and went on to win 15 congressional elections, becoming Florida’s senior member of Congress.
He died Tuesday morning, a longtime friend said.
In late 2018, Hastings was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. For much of the ensuing two years, he continued public appearances between medical treatments, but more recently he hadn’t been in public. In recent days, he had been in hospice care….
From the early days of his career, Hastings was a fighter for Civil Rights and voting rights. Some early history:
As a newly licensed young lawyer, Hastings moved to Fort Lauderdale, where he partnered with W. George Allen starting in 1964. Broward was not a welcoming place for a young Black man in the early 1960s. When he arrived to join Allen’s firm, a motel wouldn’t rent him a room.
Alcee Hastings
During much of the ’60s and ’70s, Hastings has said, there were parts of the county where it wasn’t safe for Black people. The many civil rights cases filed by Hastings and Allen, who died in 2019, included lawsuits against a restaurant popular with other lawyers and judges — which wouldn’t serve them because they were Black — and desegregating Broward County schools.
Speaking at a national gathering of Black elected officials at the Westin Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Hastings recalled what it was like when he came to the community. “I couldn’t go to that beach that you all see now,” he said.
In the early days of his career, the justice system in which Hastings practiced was dominated by racists, Finkelstein said at the 2019 luncheon honoring him. Hastings was a “howling voice” attempting to change Broward from a “little cracker town that was racist and mean and vicious.”
Eager for attention for himself, his law practice, and the cause, Hastings made several unsuccessful runs for public office, most notably a candidacy for the 1970 Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. It wasn’t a race the 29-year-old expected to win. Rather, it was a campaign to show people of all races that a Black candidate could run for such an important job. It also brought him death threats.
Nathan Nelson, Gaetz’s former director of military affairs, said two agents questioned him at his house after they had heard from members of the media that Nelson knew of Gaetz’s alleged involvement in illegal activities. The media tipsters told the FBI that Nelson resigned as a result of that knowledge, the ex-aide said….
Nelson said his departure from Gaetz’s office last fall was not related to the Department of Justice’s probe of allegations against the 38-year-old congressman. The investigation into whether Gaetz trafficked an underage girl began in the final months of former President Donald Trump’s term, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
In response to CNBC’s report on Nelson’s remarks, Gaetz slammed the FBI, claiming the agency is “literally running down false media rumors.”
When it first came out last week that Rep. Matt Gaetz was under investigation for his sexual involvement with a 17-year-old, the Florida Republican said his travel records would exonerate him….
What Gaetz knew—or should have known—is that there are no such public records, at least not when it comes to his private life.
There are, however, campaign filings. Among all the Matt Gaetz revelations last week was the news that the Justice Department is looking into the Florida Republican’s potential use of campaign funds for personal expenses. And the reality of those campaign finance reports is that they raise more questions than they answer about these alleged scandals.
“The spending surrounding the Gaetz campaign simply doesn’t say what he wants it to say,” Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a campaign-finance watchdog, told The Daily Beast. “One, the reports don’t offer specific information; and two, it’s not clear whether he’s even saying that his campaign filings will exonerate him. If he’s paying out of pocket, we won’t know the answers without a subpoena.”
As Gaetz knows, his campaign filings don’t have any sort of information that would prove he never participated in a sex ring or paid for the travel of an underage minor. What his filings do show, though, is that Gaetz had a close relationship with Joel Greenberg—the Seminole County tax collector indicted on sex trafficking charges.
Air Force veteran and “research consultant” Bob Kent verified to Sirius Radio personality Michael Smerconish that he had approached Gaetz’s deep-pocketed father, former Florida Senate President Don Gaetz, last month seeking a $25 million loan. The funds would ransom the release of Robert Levinson, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who disappeared in Iran more than a decade ago. Levinson’s own family believes him to be dead, but Kent has insisted he has evidence Levinson is alive and remains a hostage of the Islamic Republic, though credible experts have dismissed his claims.
Kent said he was aware at the time that Matt Gaetz might have “legal issues” and that he suggested that assisting in the mission would create “good will” toward the congressman. Although Kent didn’t say it outright, those issues seem to be the recently surfaced allegations that the lawmaker paid women for sex—including, possibly, an underage girl—and misused campaign funds.
“Matt Gaetz is in need of good publicity, and I’m in need of $25 million to save Robert Levinson,” Kent told Smerconish….
Despite having coupled his request for money with an allusion to the congressman’s alleged improprieties, and despite working on the project with serial Florida fraudster Stephen Alford, Kent maintained he had not sought to extort the Gaetz clan.
While serving in the Florida Legislature, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz opposed a bill meant to stop people from sharing sexually explicit images of their ex-lovers because Gaetz believed that recipients of those images had a right to share them, according to the sponsor of the legislation.
Former state Rep. Tom Goodson, a Republican from Brevard County, spent three years sponsoring legislation to outlaw nonconsensual pornography — sometimes called “revenge porn.”
And Goodson said Monday that Gaetz was the chief opponent to that legislation. Goodson said he remembered a meeting in which Gaetz said that if someone sends an intimate image to their romantic partner, then that image becomes the partner’s property to use however they want.
“Matt was absolutely against it. He thought the picture was his to do with what he wanted,” Goodson said. “He thought that any picture was his to use as he wanted to, as an expression of his rights.”
So, my Senator Foghorn Leghorn is on TV embarrassing my state again. I can’t even start with a decent opening paragraph I’m so livid right now.
Oliver Willis writes “GOP senator compares Kamala Harris to notorious drug kingpin”. Of course this comes via Fox & Friends a notorious propaganda show rooted in conspiracy theories and lies.
Kennedy falsely claimed that Harris favors “open borders” — a frequent Republican accusation against Democrats. Like other Democrats, Harris supported a path to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants, as well as the decriminalization of border crossings, during her own presidential run.
Nevertheless, Kennedy continued in his lies about Harris.
“Making her the illegal immigration czar, as I said the other day, is like making El Chapo the drug czar,” Kennedy said. Biden has not created an “illegal immigration czar” position for Harris or anyone else in his administration.
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán is a Mexican drug lord who formerly led the Sinaloa Cartel, an international drug and crime syndicate. Guzmán’s cartel produced, smuggled, and sold cocaine, meth, marijuana, and heroin in America and Europe.
Worth an estimated $1 billion, Guzmán has been accused of murder, assault, kidnapping, and torture. He is currently serving a life sentence in a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
Harris, when she was California attorney general, prosecuted drug traffickers reportedly affiliated with El Chapo’s cartel.
The crazy thing is that there will be Republicans that will believe this and anything despite the facts on the ground. I’m still not getting over my shock at this from Colby Hall at MediaITEe: “Shock Poll: Half of Republicans Believe False Accounts of January 6th Capitol Riots.” You can feed these people anything and they’ll believe it!
A new poll by Reuters and Ipsos reveals that half of all Republicans believe false accounts of the deadly insurrection on the Capitol building led by Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
For those with a blissfully short memory, following the “Save America” rally at the White House Ellipse where former President Donald Trump addressed thousands of his supporters, the vast majority marched on the Capitol while Congress was in the process of certifying the Electoral College results amid baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud.
Protestors turned to rioters as they breached the US Capitol, attacked Capitol Police, and eventually took over the Senate chamber amid calls to “Hang Mike Pence” and shouts of “Where the f*ck is Nancy?”
But despite numerous videos that have emerged, many of which were shown during Trump’s second impeachment trial, half of Republicans polled believed that the insurrection was either a peaceful protest or led by leftists groups as some calculated way to make Trump supporters look bad. For real.
Analysts at Reuters/Ipso Facto argue that the inability of Republican elected officials to speak the truth coupled with Trump’s continuing push of The BIg Lie have contributed to the belief in the false narrative.
Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have listened.
Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.
Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.
Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.
Trump’s Easter Greetings were unhinged and that’s putting it mildly.
After repeating false claims about last year's election, Trump closed his message by saying, "we will not become a Socialist Nation. Happy Easter!" https://t.co/Z0xKumVwuK
The problem is that this craziness is translating into a portion of society so detached from reality that they are not only living in a vacuum, they are killing people.
— Dr. Kat PhD. … not your kiddo, buddy🇺🇦🌻 (@Dakinikat) April 5, 2021
I have argued that hyperreligousity that’s related to any fundamentalist brand of religion is a combination of mental illness and brainwashing. However, I’m the economist on the blog and I should stay out of BB’s lane. But seriously, THIS IS CRAZY.
Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell tissue.”
Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”
Lauri Armstrong, a Bible-believing nutritionist outside of Dallas, said she did not need the vaccine because God designed the body to heal itself, if given the right nutrients. More than that, she said, “It would be God’s will if I am here or if I am not here.”
The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.
The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.
There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.
“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.
And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur by Leonora Carrington, 1953, via MoMA, New York
These people are a problem. Like, a serious national problem. How can a democracy function with people that are actually counterfactual?
Now-former President Donald Trump had about 89 million followers on Twitter before the platform suspended his account earlier this year, but the Supreme Court signaled Monday it isn’t interested in how he got along –or didn’t–with some of them.
The justices dismissed as moot a high-profile case about whether Trump was on solid legal ground when he blocked several of his critics on his once-favorite social media website, wiping away a federal appeals court ruling that found Trump’s actions violatedthe First Amendment.
Both sides in the suit had agreed the case is moot since Trump is no longer president and no longer has access to Twitter. The company permanently suspended his account in January following the riot at the U.S. Capitol that took place following a rally the then-president held near the White House.
L’Oeil Fleuri ( El Ojo Florecido) – Salvador Dali 1944
In the past Mr Trump spoke often of the pulling-power he credited to his family name, from high-rises and hotels to TV shows, to stimulus cheques.
But his official, new website, 45Office, and collection of old tweets, @WhiteHouse45, diverges from both past presidents and decades of his own branding tradition, by not featuring his name in the title at all.
In his biography on the site it claims: “Donald J. Trump launched the most extraordinary political movement in history, dethroning political dynasties, defeating the Washington Establishment, and becoming the first true outsider elected as President of the United States.”
I’ve passed from livid to nauseous so I will end here.
The Matt Gaetz scandal keeps getting worse. It appears that his pal Joel Greenberg–who is already in deep trouble–is in the process of throwing Gaetz under the bus. I admit, I’m really enjoying watching this Trumpist creep go down in flames. Here’s the latest:
Rep Matt Gaetz is expected to be indicted within the next few weeks as former Florida official and friend Joel Greenberg is believed to have turned on the congressman in the sex trafficking investigation against him, a source close to the probe tells DailyMail.com.
Greenberg, who was elected Seminole County Tax Collector in 2016, is currently in jail awaiting trial after being slapped with a string of charges last year including sex trafficking a minor between the age of 14 and 17.
Earlier this week Gaetz was revealed to be under investigation for allegedly engaging in a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old – who on Thursday was reported to be the same girl Greenberg is accused of sex trafficking, according to The New York Times.
The Florida Republican, 38, has furiously denied the allegations, instead insisting they are part of an alleged $25million extortion plot led by former Justice Department official David McGee.
But sources familiar with the matter say Gaetz’s claims are just an attempt to divert attention from his connection to the Greenberg case as the investigation closes in on him.
‘The congressman impugned and damaged the reputation of someone who had nothing to do with this,’ the source told DailyMail.com.
‘Gaetz is a sleaze-bag who used a professional with a sterling reputation to divert the attention on a sex investigation focused on him.
‘Rest assured that Greenberg has been singing to the feds about his friend Matt Gaetz. That’s why Matt is so freaked out,’ the source added.
Gaetz’s arrest is said to be imminent after the alleged victim, who has not been named, testified before a Florida grand jury this week saying she had sex with the conservative Republican before she turned 18, DailyMail.com has learned.
As The Daily Beast reported on Friday, it was text messages about Gaetz and Greenberg’s off-hours trips to a government office that alerted investigators to the congressman’s involvement in alleged crimes—and eventually led them to what they determined to be a criminal sex ring….
Like Gaetz, Greenberg is the son of a wealthy local businessman. Dr. Andrew Greenberg co-founded a dental company with 92 offices across the state. Joel, who holds a stake in that company, went on to establish his own advertising agency, DG3. For a time, he also hosted “The Joel Greenberg Show,” a sports-themed talk radio show on WRSO 810 AM. He sold the ad company in 2015 and ran the next year for Seminole County tax collector, defeating the 78-year-old who had held the office since 1988.
Once in office, Greenberg immediately took outlandish steps for what should have been a low-profile and boring job. He moved the agency out of its rent-free government offices. He hired his friends. He handed out questionable contracts to longtime associates. He used his tax collector “badge” to pose as law enforcement and pull over a speeder. He even tried to get some tax employees to carry guns.
But it was another type of alleged abuse of power that would eventually rope in his friend, Matt Gaetz.
Greenberg, whose government agency was tasked with shredding expired drivers licenses, was illegally creating fake IDs, according to investigators. And Gaetz was with him when the pair was caught on surveillance footage visiting the Lake Mary branch of the tax collector’s office on a weekend in April 2018, according to several people with knowledge of the incident.
There are many more details about these two frat boy creeps at the link above.
CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash on Friday indicated how some Republicans are currently feeling toward embattled Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
“New Day” anchor John Avlon observed that Republicans are hardly rallying to defend the Donald Trump sycophant, who is under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct with a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz denies the allegations.
“If you could see my text messages from some of his current and former colleagues, I actually can’t repeat what some of them say on morning television,” claimed Bash.
“It’s because he has not made himself popular with most of his colleagues,” she continued. “Again, we’re talking about his fellow Republicans, John. We’re talking about people who he has antagonized in the name of being … as beholden and as loyal to the former president, Donald Trump, as possible. In the name of being on conservative media, being on Fox News. Being the darling of that.”
In the days following revelations about the federal investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz’s alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, advisers to Donald Trump have consistently offered him a simple message: Please, please keep your mouth shut.
According to two people familiar with the matter, the twice-impeached former president has closely been monitoring the scandal engulfing one of his favorite allies on Capitol Hill. The ex-president has, in his typical fashion, casually quizzed several confidants about what they think of the situation and if there’s anything that he should do about it.
But multiple people close to Trump have flatly advised him to stay out of it—refrain from publicly defending Gaetz, they are telling him, at least for the time being.
The two sources said that, in all of the conversations they’re aware of, Trump has appeared to ultimately agree with the recommendations to keep quiet. One of the sources added that the former president has lamented that the whole thing seems “really bad” for Gaetz, while also mentioning that the allegations could be a “smear” against the Trump uber-loyalist.
The Matt Gaetz story increasingly reads like a script written by a pervert high on a cocktail of ADHD meds and MDMA. Even if you’ve been following the scandal-prone Republican congressman’s latest controversy closely it’s hard to keep track of what on earth is happening….
While the allegations against Gaetz are still being investigated, it’s worth noting that Gaetz has faced accusations of disturbing sexual conduct before. In January 2020 Chris Latvala, a Republican congressman, tweeted that Gaetz “created a game where members of the FL House got ‘points’ for sleeping with aides, interns, lobbyists, and married legislators”. Gaetz also reportedly bragged of his sexual exploits and showed other lawmakers nude photos of women he’d slept with. According to CNN, he showed his colleagues these photos while he was at work. Gaetz, by the way, was also the only lawmaker to vote against a bipartisan anti human-trafficking bill. A number of his colleagues have also spoken out about “love of alcohol and illegal drugs, as well as his proclivity for younger women”.
I don’t know exactly what Gaetz has or hasn’t done, but I do know he’s spent his career reveling in scandal rather than actually doing his job. He even joked with Elon Musk last week about how a scandal involving him would be called GaetzGate. The fact that this guy is a sitting member of Congress boggles the mind. It shows just how low we set the bar for our (male) politicians.
Rep. Matt Gaetz repeatedly boasted to people involved in Florida politics about women he met through a county tax collector who has since been charged by federal authorities with sex trafficking of a minor, according to two people who heard his comments directly.
They said the Republican congressman, first elected in 2016, also showed them videos on his phone of naked or topless women on multiple occasions, including at parties with Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector for Seminole County. The women appeared to be adults, and could be seen dancing, hanging out by a pool and, in one case, using a hula hoop without clothing, the people said.
“Matt was never shy about talking about his relationship to Joel and the access to women that Joel provided him,” said one of these people who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “What these videos implied was that there was something of a sexual nature going on with everyone.” [….]
Federal law enforcement officials suspect that Greenberg procured a number of women for Gaetz and are exploring whether they sometimes shared sexual partners, including at least one girl who was 17 years old at the time of the alleged encounter, a person familiar with the matter said.
In addition to the charge of child sex trafficking, Greenberg faces a host of other allegations. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial this summer. His attorney declined to comment.
Gaetz is suspected of patronizing websites that allow men to set up dates with women in exchange for dinners or hotel stays, a person familiar with the matter said. It is not a crime to use such services unless money is exchanged explicitly for sex. Investigators have obtained witness testimony and other evidence suggesting Gaetz did so, a person familiar with the matter said. Some of that evidence was first reported by the New York Times.
Investigators also are exploring allegations that Gaetz and others used illegal drugs during some of their encounters with women, a person familiar with the matter said.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
I’m feeling a little bit safer today because I got my second dose of the Moderna vaccine yesterday morning. I didn’t even have any arm soreness after the shot, but by bedtime my whole upper arm was aching. This morning all my joints ache. It’s difficult to know if these are reactions to the vaccine or just my “normal” chronic pain symptoms. Whatever. It’s worth it to be fully vaccinated, especially since 
After a slow start, my state’s vaccination effort is going very well. In fact, according to Bloomberg, yesterday was a banner day for vaccinations across the U.S.: 
“The Parliamentarian has advised that a revised budget resolution may contain budget reconciliation instructions,” 
Nathan Nelson, Gaetz’s former director of military affairs, said two agents questioned him at his house after they had heard from members of the media that Nelson knew of Gaetz’s alleged involvement in illegal activities. The media tipsters told the FBI that Nelson resigned as a result of that knowledge, the ex-aide said….
Former state Rep. Tom Goodson, a Republican from Brevard County, spent three years sponsoring legislation to outlaw nonconsensual pornography — sometimes called “revenge porn.”
The Matt Gaetz scandal keeps getting worse. It appears that his pal Joel Greenberg–who is already in deep trouble–is in the process of throwing Gaetz under the bus. I admit, I’m really enjoying watching this Trumpist creep go down in flames. Here’s the latest:
From The Daily Beast, background on Joel Greenberg: The Strange Friendship That May Bring Down Matt Gaetz.
Gaetz’s Congressional colleagues are apparently rooting for his political destruction. HuffPost: CNN’s 
The Matt Gaetz story increasingly reads like a script written by a pervert high on a cocktail of ADHD meds and MDMA. Even if you’ve been following the scandal-prone Republican congressman’s latest controversy closely it’s hard to keep track of what on earth is happening….
Gaetz is suspected of patronizing websites that allow men to set up dates with women in exchange for dinners or hotel stays, a person familiar with the matter said. It is not a crime to use such services unless money is exchanged explicitly for sex. Investigators have obtained witness testimony and other evidence suggesting Gaetz did so, a person familiar with the matter said. Some of that evidence was first reported by the New York Times.
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