Juanita McNeely, “Is it Real? Yes It Is!” from 1969, a series of nine panels about the painter’s illegal abortion and medical emergency, It is displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
When my parents were trying to sell me in 4th grade on moving across the Missouri River, I clearly remember sitting in the back seat and telling them I didn’t like it here. I couldn’t really articulate how awful the boxy brick grade school looked compared to mine, which was built of granite by the WPA. Across the main road was a set of equally bricky and boxy stores in a shopping center.
All I could remember were the beautiful stores in the downtown area of Council Bluffs. There was the Hotel Ogden that looked straight out of a Western Movie, plus my Dad’s original dealership location, which was a typical auto dealership storefront straight out of the 1920s. I loved the old Victorian Houses nestled into the Bluffs and longed to own one when I grew up. I had dreams like that until we moved to Omaha. Then, my dreams were mostly of getting out of there as soon as possible. I could’ve graduated early and begged my parents to let me attend university and get out of here. My mother kept telling me these were the best days of my life. Then, I realized my mother was speaking for herself because I mostly remember her being as bored as I was. And we both hated football in a state where that’s about it for entertainment.
I can tell you that with certainty the best decades of my life came when I finally packed a car and headed out for good.
My daughter is 20 weeks pregnant, and her water broke last week at 19. The first question I get now is what state she is in. I don’t want to go into that, but you can google how exactly bad that is for a pregnancy. She was a high-risk pregnancy for me. I was placenta previa. I can tell you that my oldest daughter is an OB/GYN because of that pregnancy and the inoperable and incurable cancer that followed. I found out that the Insurance Company covering us and employing him wanted to send me to a Catholic Hospital. I said I’d pay to go to Methodist with my last dime if I had to. I badgered him to talk to the clerk, calling the shots on me and getting them to send me to Methodist. Luckily, Methodist Hospital had the only neontologist in my backward city. My husband worked for what I was told by my fifth-grade teacher was basically the employer of last resort. If we didn’t get grades, we would get stuck working in the land of endless file cabinets, evil bosses, and taxidermy animal decorations. I was due mid-December and drove myself to the hospital, bleeding profusely on Halloween.
The only good thing about that damned insurance company was it covered everything from the pre-birth trauma to the cancer treatment and surgery. It took my husband, a Vice President, to pressure them to let me go to Methodist Hospital with a good Jewish neonatologist(who later supervised Dr. Daughter’s Residency) that’s situated right across the street from Children’s Hospital’s Neonatology Unit. I gave my daughter a purple stethoscope when she entered Med school. I gave her an autographed copy of “This Common Secret ” when she graduated. My Journey as an Abortion Doctor.” She said, “But Mom, this won’t be my central practice.” She hadn’t read it when I last asked at the fall for Roe. I told her to just learn the procedure and ensure she could do it. One day, you may have to teach it secretly to save lives.
Yet in setting down her story, Wicklund has done something brave, not only by refusing to cower in the shadows but also by recounting experiences that don’t always fit the conventional pro-choice script. Before receiving her medical training, Wicklund had an abortion herself. She was asked no questions, offered no advice and left the clinic feeling violated. Years later, she terminated the pregnancy of a woman who’d been raped and wanted an abortion. Afterward, Wicklund examined the product of conception and discovered the pregnancy had occurred two weeks earlier, meaning it was not a consequence of the rape. Both she and the patient were horrified.
Opponents of abortion might view such episodes as proof that abortion is evil. For Wicklund, they are what drove and inspired her to help each woman she encountered make an informed, truly independent choice. At a clinic she ran in Montana, this meant placing the emphasis on counseling, which sometimes strengthened a patient’s resolve to terminate her pregnancy and other times led her to reconsider and bear the child instead. Wicklund may never convince the protesters who demonized her that women should be free to make such decisions on their own. But in sharing her secrets, she has shown why there is much honor in having spent a lifetime attempting to ensure they do.
Until now, very few can spend a lifetime ensuring they do. Count the states, remember the map, and be prepared to help someone you know. Be prepared for fines, jail, and neighbors reporting you.
I’ve always been a fighter, and fighting the patriarchy has been my thing ever since I found out I couldn’t play Little League baseball and was forced to wear a dress to school. One story that typifies the entire state came from one of the two Physicians performing abortions in Omaha. The biggest, most nasty of the protestors in front of his clinic was this woman and her daughter. One Sunday, he opened his clinic just for her so her daughter could have an abortion. The next day they both were out screaming crap that obviously they believed was for everyone else but them. Our bodies are in the hands of religious freaks, politicians, and insurance bureaucrats. This is not the world I planned for the girls and women coming after me.
I never thought we’d lose Roe completely. But we have. I live on an island at the edge of the rest of the state, which is primarily insane from too much religion and neo-Confederate rage. Almost all of us would love to be a city-state. But, since cancer took the one thing these nuts want to regulate the most, I don’t have to worry about the things I used to. It’s only for my daughters and now granddaughters. Location. Location. Location is everything if you have a functioning uterus. One is in Washington State. The other is in Colorado. Right now, they’re safe, but hopefully not in the way Anne Franck thought she would be in a hidey hole in the attic.
Here in Lousyana and up there in Nebraska, the state owns women’s bodies. We are chattel. The doctors, the parents, and confidants guiding such decisions in a free society no longer matter. This old, stale religion used to burn women and Jewish people at the stake and African-Americans on a cross wants its Dark Ages back. They’re in Africa trying out the death penalty for not loving and fucking their idea of the proper sex. Will we never be rid of these patriarchal missionaries who consider us chattel? I’ll shut up now. Just know that my child is safe and has her bills covered right now because she is not poor and is in Colorado. None of this makes it easier for me as I look at the faces of young women who walk my neighborhood streets, wondering if they’ll be able to make it to the Promised Land if need be.
Jessica Burgess, a Nebraska mother accused of helping her teenage daughter use pills to end her pregnancy, was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison.
Burgess and her daughter, Celeste Burgess, stand accused of working together to end Celeste Burgess’s pregnancy in April 2022.
According to prosecutors, after the pair bought pills to end the pregnancy, Celeste Burgess gave birth to a stillborn fetus. At the time, Nebraska law banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Celeste Burgess’s pregnancy was well past that point, according to court records.
Police say that the Burgesses buried the fetal remains. An examination of the remains suggested they may have also been burned, according to court documents.
Jessica Burgess pleaded guilty in July to charges of false reporting, providing an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, and concealing, removing or abandoning a dead human body. She was sentenced to one year in prison each charge, but the sentences for false reporting and tampering with human remains will run concurrently, with the sentence for the illegal abortion to served consecutively with the sentences for the other charges, a spokesperson for the Madison county courthouse said.
Celeste Burgess also took a plea deal and was sentenced to 90 days for concealing or abandoning a dead body earlier this year.
Although the case occurred before the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, it has been seen as a harbinger of how law enforcement may prosecute people for ending their own pregnancies in a post-Roe era – and how giant tech companies could go along with it.
One of the worst states of the Union is Texas. You can tell precisely how Pro-life Governor Abbott is from this headline from ABC News yesterday. “3-year-old dies while crossing the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas. The family was attempting to cross the river near a floating marine barrier.
The fetish fetishists omit this once-breathing, speaking, and walking child in the same class as a fertilized egg. This child already had dreams.
The Texas Tribune examined the reality of Abbot’s reign of terror. One year before, Grand Inquisitor Alito followed a judge who liked Witch Burning to decide that women’s reproductive health should be criminal. “A year after the Dobbs decision, Texas has settled into a post-abortion reality. The impact of Texas’ near-total ban on abortion is coming into focus as patients and providers leave the state, legal challenges languish, and the state’s social safety net braces for a baby boom.: This is reported by Eleanor Klibanoff.
A year after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, an uneasy acceptance has settled over Texas, as even the most ardent abortion advocates acknowledge these new laws aren’t changing anytime soon.
“I don’t see the legal landscape of our state shifting in a major way, certainly not in the short-term future,” said Neesha Davé, executive director for the Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity, an Austin-based abortion fund. “And so, unfortunately, we have had to figure out how to navigate the current legal landscape, if for no other reason than there are people who need abortion care today, yesterday, tomorrow.”
There are ongoing court challenges to Texas’ laws, but they are narrow and could drag through the courts for years. There is still momentum around meaningful political change, but that is the work of decades and much of the focus has shifted to shoring up the social safety net as a stop-gap measure.
Meanwhile, despite exceptions to the law, the number of monthly abortions in Texas has dropped into the low single digits. Women are nearly dying from pregnancy complications, or actually dying after having to travel out-of-state for abortions, or facing million-dollar lawsuits for helping friends acquire abortion medication. An unknown number are having babies they never planned for.
A year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson that there is no constitutional right to abortion, some long-time advocates see hope in the hopelessness. They’ve been sounding the alarm about the overturn of Roe and its consequences for years, and finally, people are forced to pay attention.
“There are so many more conversations happening about abortion today than there were two years ago,” Davé said. “I do think a tide is turning. It just takes time.”
Two states are trying to come out of the Reproductive Health Care Dessert. The next battlefield is Pennsylvania. This is one of the reasons you really have to watch your state legislature. Forced Birthers are learning the numbers are against them if voters get their way. They’re not for states making their own decision. Now, they’re going straight for a Federal law banning all abortions. Every vote counts for this. Lousyana will invariably get worse after our election. A lot of us will vote with our feet. Women and children are not safe in Red State America. Neither are members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, or people of color.
A battle over abortion rights is set to play out on multiple fronts this coming November with votes that could affect access to the procedure in several states.
Voters will go to the polls for key elections in half a dozen states this year, but abortion rights advocates in particular are looking at votes in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
A battle over abortion rights is set to play out on multiple fronts this coming November with votes that could affect access to the procedure in several states.
Voters will go to the polls for key elections in half a dozen states this year, but abortion rights advocates in particular are looking at votes in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
But the contests in Virginia and Pennsylvania will also be seen as proxy elections for the broader battle over abortion rights.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has devoted much of his time and energy to working to help elect Republicans in this November’s state legislative races. He received a political boost in June after the slate of candidates he endorsed for these seats won their primaries.
But Youngkin has been unable to achieve the 15-week abortion ban he has called for with Democrats controlling the state Senate and Republicans controlling the state House.
The state of Idaho has a law that will not even allow an Art Exhibit of Abortion Art in its Universities and Colleges. This is dated from yesterday from the Democrat & Chronicle. Rochester gives haven to censored art, letting people see an abortion health exhibit. The exhibition entitled “Unconditional Care: Listening to People’s Health Needs” is on display through Sept. 21.
An art exhibit censored at an Idaho college because of references to abortion can be seen at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, known as RoCo.
But that school removed six pieces from it. The college cited a 2021 state law that bars public dollars from funding speech that would promote abortion rights, according to the Idaho Capital Sun.
RoCo stepped in to share the exhibition without censorship, and “Unconditional Care” is on display at the Rochester art center through Friday, Sept. 22.
“It’s one of the first examples of art censorship in the post-Rowe era,” said Bleu Cease, RoCo’s executive director. “The artworks are touching on abortion and abortion care, not advocating for it. We’re really proud to support the artist and the overall exhibition and the educational component.”
“Unconditional Care” is curated by artist Katrina Majkut, who said she avoided including protest art in the exhibition to help people move past politics and into spaces of empathy and reflection.
Some of the themes explored in “Unconditional Care” include:
Maternal mortality rates
Racial disparity
Chronic illness
Body autonomy and safety
Cease said that once news of the censorship went national, he reached out to Majkut, eventually providing her the opportunity to curate an exhibit in Rochester that would give the pulled pieces a platform.
Among the works:
Majkut’s piece titled “Medical Abortion” is a cross-stitch showing bottles of mifepristone and misoprostol, medicines that will yield a miscarriage.
Lydia Nobles made three documentary videos from a series titled “As I Sit Waiting,” featuring women describing their abortion experiences.
Michelle Hartney’s work showcases handwritten letters written in the 1920s by a woman seeking information about birth control from Planet Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
“The show is really not about abortion, but abortion gets all the attention because the issue is so divisive,” Cease said. “The common thread with all the artworks in the exhibition is that they relate to the human right to health wellness and body autonomy, especially in the U.S.”
We’re not well, America.
What’s on your reading and blogging post today?
(p.s. I’m sorry this took so long. It took a lot out of me today to write this. I’ve spent the week feeling unable to do any good for any life circumstances. Please keep my personal stories here, especially the current one.)
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If you’re watching cable TV, you know that the House Judiciary Committee is questioning Attorney General Merrick Garland this morning. The purpose of this, of course, is for Republicans to berate Garland about Hunter Biden and about the refusal of the Justice Department to reveal details of ongoing investigations that Republicans want to interfere with. It is maddening to watch. At least Democratic members like Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell are providing some pushback.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is testifying Wednesday morning before the House Judiciary Committee, a session that has been contentious at times as Republicans press the nation’s top law enforcement official on a host of politically charged cases. It is Garland’s first congressional appearance since federal grand juries indicted former president Donald Trump — twice — and since he appointed a special counsel to handle the investigation and prosecution of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden. The hearing also comes as the GOP-controlled House moves toward impeachment proceedings against the president.
Here’s what to know:
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) asked the attorney general if the rhetoric from Republicans “had any basis in reality.” Garland answered with a simple, “No, it does not.”
Early questions from Republican lawmakers centered on special counsel David Weiss’s authority in the Hunter Biden case. Garland said he gave him full authority from the start. “I had promised that I would not interfere with this investigation,” Garland said.
As Republicans criticize Attorney General Merrick Garland for picking David Weiss to oversee the special counsel investigation into Hunter Biden after the collapse in July of a plea deal that Biden’s lawyers had negotiated with Weiss, Democratic lawmakers on the dais have stated repeatedly that Weiss was appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware by Donald Trump.
“Mr. Weiss was appointed by then-President Trump,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said, addressing Garland. “Your decision was to leave the Trump-appointed attorney on this — hands off from you,” she added.
Expect Democrats to continue to remind the room that Weiss is a Trump appointee as Republicans continue to try to tie Weiss to President Biden and press Garland on decisions made to keep him on the investigation in a special counsel capacity. Republicans have charged that Weiss hatched what they’ve called a “sweetheart” deal with Hunter Biden’s lawyers and can’t be trusted to aggressively prosecute the president’s son….
Attorney General Merrick Garland repeatedly told lawmakers that special counsel David Weiss, who is heading the Hunter Biden investigation, had full authority and independence to pursue charges in jurisdictions across the country.
Upon questioning from Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), Garland insisted that Weiss, who is the top federal prosecutor in Delaware, had authority to bring charges outside Delaware — despite allegations to the contrary.
Attorney General Merrick Garland addressed what he described as an “astounding number of threats” that American public servants have received over the past few years, tying them to incendiary political rhetoric.
Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, by DonkeyHote
He said that flight attendants, poll workers and Justice Department workers have been on the receiving end of them.
He told Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) that the Justice Department will “not be intimidated” and will continue to do its job amid these violent threats. He specifically said Wednesday that FBI agents working on the Hunter Biden investigation have been targeted.
In his opening statements, Garland also mentioned the threats.
“All of us recognize that with this work comes public scrutiny, criticism, and legitimate oversight. These are appropriate and important given the matters and the gravity of the matters before the Department,” Garland said in his opening statement. “But singling out individual career public servants who are just doing their jobs is dangerous — particularly at a time of increased threats to the safety of public servants and their families.”
There are many more helpful updates at the WaPo live update page. The hearing has been surprisingly substantive, despite efforts of Republican wackos.
Quite a few stories today deal with the ongoing struggle of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to pass a budget and prevent an immanent government shutdown.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy is struggling to pass a bill to fund the government — and the White House isn’t about to throw him a lifeline.
With just days to go before the government runs out of money, Biden’s team is watching Congress steam toward a shutdown, resigned to the reality that there’s little they can do now to fix the situation and confident the politics will play out their way.
President Joe Biden has steered well clear of the chaos engulfing the House, where Republicans are battling each other over a government funding bill. Within the White House, aides have settled on a hard-line strategy aimed at pressuring McCarthy to stick to a spending deal he struck with Biden back in May rather than attempt to patch together a new bipartisan bill.
Kevin McCarthy
“We agreed to the budget deal and a deal is a deal — House GOP should abide by it,” said a White House official granted anonymity to discuss the private calculations. Their “chaos is making the case that they are responsible if there is a shutdown.”
Biden world’s wait-and-see approach comes against the backdrop of an increasingly likely shutdown, which would be the first of the Biden era.
For now, the White House is staying out of the mix, trying instead to draw a contrast between the House majority that can’t complete the task of keeping the government’s lights on and Biden, who on Tuesday addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. It’s also highlighting the price of the latest GOP plan, such as, in their estimation, cutting 800 Customs and Border Protection agents and 110,000 Head Start positions for children.
Michael Wolff has a new gossipy book out, this time about Fox News.
Gov. Ron DeSantis may have kicked Tucker Carlson’s dog, Rupert Murdoch may have called his longest-running primetime star an ableist slur, and Lachlan Murdoch has a knack for anti-Trump toiletries—these are some of the many outrageous pieces of gossip revealed in provocative author Michael Wolff’s upcoming new book about the Fox News universe.
The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, due out Sept. 26 via Henry Holt & Co., purports to give readers a behind-the-curtains look into Fox’s handling of the Dominion defamation lawsuit over its 2020 election lies, its post-election clashes with former President Donald Trump, its shocking firing of Carlson, and the Murdoch family’s Succession-like turmoil.
In Wolff’s telling, both Fox News and the Murdoch empire are in a slow-motion decline….
The book, which The Daily Beast has obtained and reviewed, is billed as a juicy tell-all and is chock full of eye-opening and at-times absurd anecdotes that occasionally strain credulity. During one chapter, Wolff writes that prior to being fired from his top-rated primetime perch, Carlson considered a run for president in order to escape his Fox News contract. The author also details a bizarre incident that allegedly occurred when Carlson shared a meal with DeSantis.
Rupert Murdoch
With Fox urging its stars to be “open-minded” about the Florida governor, then Murdoch’s “favored candidate” for 2024, Wolff writes, Carlson and his wife Susie welcomed DeSantis and his wife Casey to their Florida home for lunch. Despite hoping to impress Carlson—arguably a top GOP kingmaker—the presidential hopeful and Trump rival failed the “Susie Carlson test” during the visit, Wolff claims.
The DeSantis couple allegedly failed “to read the room,” especially with Carlson’s wife, “a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house,” Wolff notes. “For two hours Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversation ritual or propriety, reeling off an unselfconscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments.”
Making matters worse, Wolff claims, an “impersonal” DeSantis seemed dismissive and may have used physical force against one of the Carlson family’s four beloved spaniel pups.
During the dinner, Wolff writes, “DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: she did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a ‘fascist.’ The pot calling the kettle even blacker. Forget Ron DeSantis.”
Rupert Murdoch loathes Donald Trump so much that the billionaire has not just soured on him as a presidential candidate but often wishes for his death, the author Michael Wolff writes in his eagerly awaited new book on the media mogul, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.
According to Wolff, Murdoch, 92, has become “a frothing-at-the-mouth” enemy of the 77-year-old former US president, often voicing thoughts including “This would all be solved if … ” and “How could he still be alive, how could he?”
The Fall was announced last month and will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Author Michael Wolff
Wolff has written three tell-all books about Trump – Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide – and one about Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. In his second Murdoch book, he says he may be “the journalist not in his employ who knows [Murdoch] best”.
Wolff also describes his source material as “conversations specifically for this book, and other conversations that have taken place over many years … scenes and events that I have personally witnessed or that I have recreated with the help of participants in them”.
After Trump entered US politics in 2015, winning the White House the following year, he, along with an increasingly extreme Republican party, Fox News and other properties in Murdoch’s rightwing media empire formed a symbiotic relationship.
ut Murdoch has long been reported to have soured on Trump – a process which, according to Wolff, saw Murdoch personally endorse the Fox News call of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020 that fueled Trump’s campaign of lies about voter fraud, culminating in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.
By the beginning of this year, Wolff writes, what Murdoch “adamantly didn’t want … was Trump.
“Of all Trump’s implacable enemies, Murdoch had become a frothing-at-the-mouth one. His relatively calm demeanor from the early Trump presidency where, with a sigh, he could dismiss him merely as a ‘fucking idiot’ had now become a churning stew of rage and recrimination.
“Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme: ‘We would all be better off …?’ ‘This would all be solved if …’ ‘How could he still be alive, how could he?’ ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like? What he eats?’”
Read more at The Guardian.
There’s an excerpt from the book at New York Magazine. The page isn’t letting me copy anything, but you can read it at this link if you’re interested. They usually let you have one free article.
Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump aide turned crucial January 6 witness, says in a new book she was groped by Rudy Giuliani, who was “like a wolf closing in on its prey”, on the day of the attack on the Capitol.
Describing meeting with Giuliani backstage at Donald Trump’s speech near the White House before his supporters marched on Congress in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Hutchinson says the former New York mayor turned Trump lawyer put his hand “under my blazer, then my skirt”.
“I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh,” she writes. “He tilts his chin up. The whites of his eyes look jaundiced. My eyes dart to [Trump adviser] John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin.
“I fight against the tension in my muscles and recoil from Rudy’s grip … filled with rage, I storm through the tent, on yet another quest for Mark.”
Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, was Hutchinson’s White House boss. Hutchinson’s memoir, Enough, describes the now 27-year-old’s journey from Trump supporter to disenchantment, and her role as a key witness for the House January 6 committee. It will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
And that wasn’t the end of Rudy’s attacks:
Describing the events on January 6, the deadly culmination of Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, Hutchinson writes that she “experience[d] anger, bewilderment, and a creeping sense of dread that something really horrible [was] going to happen”.
“I find Rudy in the back of the tent with, among others, John Eastman,” she continues. “The corners of his mouth split into a Cheshire cat smile. Waving a stack of documents, he moves towards me, like a wolf closing in on its prey.
“‘We have the evidence. It’s all here. We’re going to pull this off.’ Rudy wraps one arm around my body, closing the space that was separating us. I feel his stack of documents press into the small of my back. I lower my eyes and watch his free hand reach for the hem of my blazer.
“‘By the way,’ he says, fingering the fabric, ‘I’m loving this leather jacket on you.’ His hand slips under my blazer, then my skirt,” Hutchinson writes.
Federal prosecutors are scrutinizing personal benefits Tesla may have provided Elon Musk since 2017—longer than previously known—as part of a criminal investigation examining issues including a proposed house for the chief executive.
Elon Musk by Ricardo Galvao
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York also has sought information about transactions between Tesla and other entities connected to the billionaire, people familiar with the investigation said. Prosecutors have referenced the involvement of a grand jury.
The new information indicates that federal prosecutors have a broader interest in the actions of Musk and Tesla than was previously known and that they are pursuing potential criminal charges. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the Justice Department is investigating Tesla’s use of company resources on a secret project that was described internally as a house for Musk.
The house effort was known within the carmaker as “Project 42,” and plans called for an expansive glass building to be constructed near Tesla’s Austin-area factory and headquarters.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a separate civil investigation into the project, the Journal has reported.
On X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, Musk hassaid there isn’t a glass house “built, under construction or planned.” He didn’t address past work or plans; neither he nor his representatives have responded to requests for comment.
There’s more at the WSJ. I got in by clicking on the Memeorandum link.
President Biden on Friday will announce the creation of a new office for gun violence prevention, an escalation of the administration’s efforts to tackle the issue amid stalled progress in Congress, according to four people briefed on the action who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that were not yet public.
Biden and Vice President Harris are scheduled to announce the new office at an event in the White House Rose Garden on Friday afternoon, the people said.
Greg Jackson, a gun violence survivor who is the executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, and Rob Wilcox, the senior director for federal government affairs at Everytown for Gun Safety, are expected to have key roles in the office, the people said.
The new office will report up through Stefanie Feldman, the White House staff secretary and a longtime Biden policy aide who has worked on the firearms issue for years, the people said. Feldman previously worked on the Domestic Policy Council and still oversees the gun policy portfolio at the White House….
Since Biden was elected, gun violence prevention groups have pressed the White House to create such an office, arguing that it would help coordinate efforts across the federal government to reduce gun violence. Activists say this type of office would also allow the White House to exert more leadership on the issue.
“If this announcement is, in fact, the creation of a single point of leadership on gun violence in the administration, it’s a very big deal for the movement,” Shannon Watts, the founder emerita of Moms Demand Action, a group working to stop gun violence, said in a statement after The Washington Post approached her with the news.
Thousands of LGBTQ+ veterans who were kicked out of the military because of their sexuality could see their honor restored under a new initiative the Defense Department announced Wednesday, on the 12th anniversary of the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning gays and lesbians from openly serving in the military.
In a statement commemorating the anniversary of the repeal, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged the military fell short in correcting the harms of its past policies against LGBTQ+ service members.
“For decades, our LGBTQ+ Service members were forced to hide or were prevented from serving altogether,” Austin said. “Even still, they selflessly put themselves in harm’s way for the good of our country and the American people. Unfortunately, too many of them were discharged from the military based on their sexual orientation — and for many this left them without access to the benefits and services they earned.”
In a statement commemorating the anniversary of the repeal, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged the military fell short in correcting the harms of its past policies against LGBTQ+ service members.
“For decades, our LGBTQ+ Service members were forced to hide or were prevented from serving altogether,” Austin said. “Even still, they selflessly put themselves in harm’s way for the good of our country and the American people. Unfortunately, too many of them were discharged from the military based on their sexual orientation — and for many this left them without access to the benefits and services they earned.”
More details at the link.
That’s it for me today–lots of gossip in the news today. Have a great Wednesday, everyone!!
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Dakinikat turned me on to the world of truck drivers who have cat companions along for the ride. Here’s an article that discusses the phenomenon. CharityPaws.com: Trucker Cats May Be The Coolest Cats!
For what it’s worth, having a pet is hard work.
Love is easy enough to provide while on the road – but food, water, space, and entertainment are all needs too, and sometimes hard to come up with.
In the case of dogs especially, playtime is the hardest need to fill for truckers. After several hour-long walks, a game of tug-of-war, and an afternoon in the sun spent playing fetch, who wouldn’t be tired? But for truckers this can be time consuming and delay important deliveries!
That’s why many truckers have turned to cats as the solution for those lonely road trips. Trucker cats are the coolest cats with their chill laid back personalities and ability to make truckers feel awesome. They also have some great hearing which is why the made it to our list of “what animal has the best hearing” list. Having a companion with good hearing on board can help you find critters that may sneak around while you are sleeping or even alert you to danger!
With most of their time spent on the road in a little truck cab, cats are the perfect companion for truckers– and here’s some of the best reasons why according to one trucker’s resource:
Cats are low-maintenance: they eat less than their canine counterparts, take up less room, and don’t need as much playtime.
They’re loving and affectionate: cats are just as sweet as any other animal, once they have a chance to warm up to you.
They’re obedient, and trainable: cats can do tricks and walk on leashes, with the proper time and training!
They’re protective: though not as scary as a dog, cats are perfectly capable of altering truckers if something looks, sounds, or even smells off.
Other reasons topping truckers’ lists include cleanliness, cuteness, and the fact that having a cat in a truck is a pretty good conversation starters. Some even say that having a feline friend is a constant reminder to drive and act safely during the long haul. They are also incredibly loyal as shown by the Room 8 cat – and having that kind of loyalty on the road will make any trucker feel amazing!
Read more at the link above.
Here’s a video about trucker cats, posted on YouTube by Cheezburger.
Long Read: Are Americans Experiencing Collective Trauma?
I want to call your attention to an excellent, but very long read in The New Republic by Anna Marie Cox: We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized. Subhead: “The pandemic. The mass shootings. Insurrection. Trump. We’ve been through so much. What if our entire national character is a trauma response?”
This is a very long piece, so I’m just going to give you some samples to help you decide if you want to tackle reading the whole thing.
As of last year, four in 10 Americans knew at least one person who died from Covid. This year, three in 10 Americans say they know someone who has been affected by an opioid addiction, and one in five knows someone who’s died from a painkiller overdose. In 2022, more than three million adults were displaced by some form of natural disaster—that’s more than three times as many displaced per year between 2008 and 2021. Last year, some cities saw a 50 percent increase in evictions over pre-pandemic levels. One in five knows someone who’s died due to gun violence; one in six has witnessed a shooting; 21 percent have been personally threatened by a gun. Half of Americans know someone personally who has experienced at least one of those events.
After Trump’s “grab her by” tape became public, calls to the national sexual assault hotline jumped up by 35 percent (as Michelle Goldberg observed, Trump was a walking trigger for assault survivors). During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, calls to the sexual assault hotline spiked 201 percent. Lockdown—the first two months of the pandemic—saw a rise in intimate partner violence of 101 percent, with the rate stabilizing at an increase of about 8 percent from pre-pandemic numbers as of 2022.
Another photo of Trucker cat Percy, by Paul Robertson
And then there are the frontline workers and “essential personnel,” those who risked their lives for our safety and comfort during the spring of 2020. I assume that we agree health professionals faced trauma (and may well still). There are 22 million of them in the United States, and after the pandemic, 55 percent reported experiencing burnout, and three in 10 said they were now considering leaving the profession. The 55 million essential personnel who worked through the worst days of Covid suffered a similar toll: A year into the pandemic, the American Psychiatric Association found that 34 percent of essential workers had been treated by a mental health professional, 80 percent had trouble over- or under-sleeping, and 39 percent said they were drinking more alcohol than they had before….
These are traumas at the individual level in numbers so large that they demand national attention because there are national consequences—think of the nationwide therapist shortage and “the Great Resignation.”
So, what if the reason so many people identify as trauma survivors is that they are? What if the horrors of the last seven years do translate into a nation that is suffering more than mere political dysfunction? What if the polarization, paranoia, conspiracism, and hopelessness that bog us down have a more holistic origin than structural malfunctions or individual malfeasance?
What if our entire national character is a trauma response?
Before you say “bullshit,” remember: Cynicism is a trauma response.
Next Cox explores expert opinions about the concept of “collective trauma.”
The origin of the academic study of “collective trauma” has been credited to Kai Erikson’s 1977 book, Everything in Its Path, an account of the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek flood in Logan County, West Virginia, five years prior, which killed 125 people and destroyed 550 homes in a small mining community. In the book, Erikson writes of grappling with “thousands of pages of transcript material, whole packing boxes full of it,” that confounded him “not because the material is contradictory or difficult to interpret but because it is so bleakly alike.” He found respondents echoing one another to a frustrating degree, so much so that “a researcher is very apt to conclude after rummaging through these data that there is really not very much to say.” Eventually, however, he came to believe that the uniformity itself was meaningful; the damage done at Buffalo Creek was something more than a mere collection of individual harms.
Collective trauma, he wrote, means “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.” Collective trauma happens in slow motion, “A form of shock all the same…. ‘I’ continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. ‘You’ continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But ‘we’ no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body.”
Trucker Abdirahman Abdul and Aisha
In other words, the defining characteristic of collective trauma—and what makes it almost impossible to self-diagnose—is that people who have been through it no longer believe in the integrity of their community. How does anyone see themselves as a traumatized collective if no one feels that they belong?
So, pull back to the macro level. For a moment, put aside your or anyone else’s individual experience. Think of the country itself as a patient.
In the past seven years, the country has sustained significant, repeated damage to its institutions. The courts, elections, law enforcement, and so on are its vital organs. Trump has been punching America in the kidneys since he first floated the idea of a “rigged election.” January 6 was a heart attack. The musculature that is the justice system, well, it was always spasmodic. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery shocked many white people into awareness of our already dysfunctional law enforcement apparatus, and then the Dobbs decision drove home how easily the rights that support us can be yanked away. Were we ever really as strong as we thought?
The country was already weakened by Trumpism when the pandemic attacked our nervous systems more than figuratively. It cut away at the millions of tiny threads that knit up our towns and cities. Think of the loose social ties that grow from just seeing the same people at the grocery store (or the office) every day—think of the mail. Our national proprioception—our awareness of where our parts are in relation to one another—deteriorated. Our creaky supply chain is another symptom of this disconnect. So is “you’re on mute.”
I won’t quote any more, but these excerpts are just from the introductory part of the article. Cox later demonstrates with examples how the notion of trauma can apply to our collective experience as a nation. There is so much in the piece, that I wonder if Cox is planning to turn it into a book.
I’m not sure how the MAGA world fits into this hypothesis, but after my reading about the traumas of Appalachia–from poverty, drugs, unemployment, and breakdown of families (see my Wednesday post), I wonder if an argument could be made that the attraction to Trump as powerful father figure could also have arisen out of trauma. At any rate, I highly recommend this article.
Citing threats against individuals former President Donald Trump has targeted, special counsel Jack Smith has asked a federal judge for a narrowly tailored gag order that restricts the 2024 presidential candidate from making certain extrajudicial statements about the election interference case brought against him.
A redacted copy of a government filing — released Friday, after an order from U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — comes in connection with the election interference case, one of four criminal cases the former president is facing, two of which are federal.
“The defendant has an established practice of issuing inflammatory public statements targeted at individuals or institutions that present an obstacle or challenge to him,” the special counsel’s office wrote.
Whispur and DanDan, photo by Whispurer on Reddit
The government said Trump “made clear his intent to issue public attacks related to this case when, the day after his arraignment, he posted a threatening message on Truth Social.”
Trump’s Aug. 4 post read: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
Trump, the office wrote, “has made good on his threat,” spreading “disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis regarding the citizens of the District of Columbia, the Court, prosecutors, and prospective witnesses.
“Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election, the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution—the judicial system—and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals—the Court, the jury pool, witnesses, and prosecutors,” the prosecutors wrote.
Naturally, Trump responded publicly to the filing:
At an event in Washington, Trump made his first public remarks on the filing by attacking Smith, arguing that the special counsel “wants to take away my rights under the First Amendment, wants to take away my right of speaking freely and openly.”
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, responded earlier Friday by calling the filing “nothing more than blatant election interference because President Trump is by far the leading candidate in this race.”
The federal prosecutors who charged former President Donald J. Trump with a criminal conspiracy over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election obtained 32 private messages from his Twitter account through a search warrant this winter as part of their investigation, court papers unsealed on Friday said.
Questions have lingered about what prosecutors were looking for in Mr. Trump’s Twitter account ever since it was revealed last month that the government had served the warrant on Twitter in January. In an earlier release of documents, prosecutors disclosed that they had obtained some private messages from Mr. Trump’s account but not how many.
The 32 messages, whose content has not been disclosed, were only a small fraction of the larger body of data that Twitter was forced to turn over under the terms of the warrant, the new court papers said. Much of the legal wrangling over the matter focused on the Justice Department’s demand that Twitter, purchased last year by Elon Musk and now known as X, not inform Mr. Trump of the search warrant.
Mr. Trump’s posts on the platform in the chaotic months after the election were mentioned several times in the indictment that the special counsel, Jack Smith, filed against him in Washington last month. What remains unclear is whether Mr. Smith’s team sought the warrant for Mr. Trump’s account merely to confirm that he had posted the messages that appeared in public, or whether they suspected that some private data in the account might also be important.
What were investigators looking for in the private messages?
The newly unsealed documents — an exhaustive record of the legal fight between Twitter and the Justice Department over whether to hide the execution of the warrant from Mr. Trump — added a few new details about what the government may have been seeking.
Waylon the Trucker Cat, photo by owner Nick
For example, the materials showed that prosecutors wanted to learn if there were other accounts that Mr. Trump had been logging into from the same internet address he used for his Twitter account, which during his presidency was a main channel for his public statements. But it was not clear whether looking for other accounts was merely a routine step or whether investigators had a specific reason to be asking.
The new materials — unsealed at the request of a coalition of news media organizations, including The New York Times — opened a broader window into the back and forth between the special counsel’s office and Twitter. The dispute touched on how to balance the government’s need to protect a sensitive investigation with the social media company’s desire to be transparent with its most famous user.
The documents were particularly sharp in describing Mr. Trump’s repeated attempts to obstruct federal inquiries — an argument that prosecutors used in securing permission from a judge in Washington not to tell the former president for months that they had obtained the warrant for his account.
In detailing Mr. Trump’s “pattern of obstructive conduct,” the new papers cited his attempts to interfere with the special counsel’s other inquiry — one in which the former president stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after leaving office.
The attorney for President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who is facing felony gun charges, said Friday that the statute is “likely unconstitutional” and he expects “the case will be dismissed before trial.”
“On the facts, we think we’ll have a defense,” Abbe Lowell told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an interview on “Good Morning America.”
The younger Biden has been indicted by special counsel David Weiss on three felony gun charges, bringing renewed legal pressure on him after a plea agreement he struck with prosecutors imploded in recent months.
The conduct described in the indictment dates back to October 2018, when Hunter Biden procured a Colt Cobra 38SPL despite later acknowledging that he was addicted to drugs around that time.
While the criminal statutes cited in the indictment are clear — it is a crime to lie on a gun application form or to possess a firearm as a drug user – Hunter Biden’s attorney suggested that the charges could be unconstitutional, citing a recent appeals court ruling that drug use alone should not automatically prevent someone from obtaining a gun.
“The only change that has occurred between when they investigated [this alleged crime] and today is that the law changed,” Lowell said. “But the law didn’t change in favor of the prosecution. The law changed against it.”
With Republicans launching an impeachment inquiry on Capitol Hill, Lowell suggested that political pressure on prosecutors played into their decision, questioning the timing of the charges in light of revelations from whistleblowers about the investigation.
No kidding. The political pressure from right wing Congresspeople has been off the charts. And Special Counsel David Weiss himself was appointed by Bill Barr after political pressure from Donald Trump.
“History is also our best teacher. Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice. But can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now?” Jackson said at the church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Trucker cat, photo by abbenquesnel on flicker
“We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them and vow never to repeat them. We must not shield our eyes. We must not shrink away lest we lose it all,” she said.
The justice didn’t invoke a particular case, but as a whole her speech nodded to efforts targeting the teaching of critical race theory in schools and books about the struggle for racial equality and other topics.
“If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about,” she said. “I know that atrocities like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive. But I also know that it is dangerous to forget them.”
At times, Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, drew a personal connection to the tragedy, in which a bomb exploded at the church on September 15, 1963, killing Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson. Nearly two dozen others were injured.
“As a mother of two young women who will always be my little girls, I can imagine no greater horror than to lose a child this way,” Jackson said.
“And even now, six decades later, the magnitude of that tragic loss weighs heavily on all of us because those girls were just getting started. They could have broken barriers. They could have shattered ceilings. They could have grown up to be doctors or lawyers or judges appointed to serve on the highest court in our land,” she added.
Read more at CNN.
That’s a sampling of today’s news. Feel free to discuss anything and everything in the comment thread.
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I got a bit of a start this morning when I got an email from the town housing authority about preparations for hurricane Lee. The storm is supposed to impact the Boston area around 2AM on Saturday until 2AM on Sunday. The email provided links to find out if I’m in a evacuation zone. It doesn’t look like I am, but we are sure to get lots of rain and wind and we could lose power. I guess I’ll be watching the Weather Channel in the coming days.
We are already having catastrophic flooding in some parts of the state, because we have had so much rain and fog here for weeks on end. There are more thunderstorms coming tonight and tomorrow. The area with the worst flooding recently got more than 10 inches of rain. It is so humid in my apartment fthat everything seems damp, and food gets stale quickly. Of course, none of this can compare to the awful weather that Dakinikat has been experiencing throughout this summer.
Hurricane Lee continues to churn north as a powerful storm over the open ocean, retaining major hurricane status as of 8 a.m. Eastern. While the forecast will become clearer in coming days, the forecast track has shifted west over the last 24 hours, and a farther west track is looking increasingly likely at this point — which could mean growing concern in New England.
Hurricane-force winds could threaten Cape Cod, Downeast Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia by the weekend. Farther inland, tropical storm conditions are possible. Currently, the storm is set to spare the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic any adverse impacts.
A building on Water Street by Monoosnoc Brook in Leominster, collapsed when the brook flooded after 11 inches of rain fell on city. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
“There is an increasing risk of wind, coastal flooding, and rain impacts from Lee in portions of New England and Atlantic Canada beginning on Friday and continuing through the weekend,” wrote the National Hurricane Center. “Due to Lee’s large size, hazards will extend well away from the center, and there will be little to no significance on exactly where the center reaches the coast.”
Lee is a powerhouse hurricane. It still had 115 mph winds Wednesday morning, but its wind field was expanding. Think of an ice skater outstretching their arms while spinning — they would slow down, since they’re tracing bigger circles. Same thing with Lee. It’s now a bigger storm, but maximum sustained winds are diminishing some.
That expansion of Lee’s wind field will churn up cooler waters from below the sea surface, hastening the weakening of its winds. By Friday, it will also begin to transition into a nontropical storm, tapping into jet stream energy and changing it structure.
You can read about the three possible scenarios at the WaPo. The big problem for Massachusetts is that we have already had heavy rain for weeks. One town, Leominster, had to be evacuated. Other areas have significant flooding.
Down the Rabbit Hole
I haven’t been paying as much attention to political news as usual over the past couple of weeks, because I “went down a rabbit hole,” as Dakinikat calls it. First, I read a book by Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead. It is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, specifically in Virginia. The book deals with a number of issues, including social services and foster care of orphaned or abused children and the opiod crisis. Much of the book is actually painful to read, but Kingsolver is such a fine writer that I couldn’t put it down.
I have chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis, but it has never occurred to me to try to get powerful pain killers, because I am a recovering alcoholic and I have also experienced addictions to Valium and Percocet. I was prescribed tranquilizers beginning when I was about 19 or 20. I was given phenobarbital, then Lithium and later I took Valium for years.
I have paid so little attention to the story of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, that I didn’t know that the Sacklers made their fortune on Librium and Valium in particular. The withdrawal from Valium is very serious, but it’s nothing compared to Oxycontin, which further enriched the Sackler family and has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. people who were hooked on Oxycontin eventually turned to heroin and fentanyl.
After I finished Demon Copperhead, I wanted to learn more about the opiod crisis and what happened with Oxycontin. First I watched a very good (partly fictionalized) documentary on Netflix, called Painkiller. Yesterday, I watched another Netflix series called The Pharmacist, which takes place in New Orleans. To say I was shocked by these shows is a serious understatement. I had no idea that Purdue Pharma pushed their drugs with sophisticated ad campaigns targeting doctors, and even went so far as to hire young women to approach doctors and flirt with them in order to convince them to prescribe more and more of the drug. Now I’m reading the book Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is a history of the Sackler family, how they made their huge fortune, and how they laundered their reputations through philanthropy.
This is definitely a political issue, and a difficult one, because rich corporations and individuals are rarely held to account and are usually allowed to buy their way out of legal issues. The Sacklers have now lost their “good name” at any rate. Their names have been taken off the many art collections, museum wings, etc. that they paid for. But none of them has gone to jail. They were allowed to declare bankruptcy and pay billions in restitution, but be protected from further lawsuits. The DOJ had a problem with that and right now the case is on hold in the Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a challenge by President Joe Biden’s administration to the legality of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement, putting on hold a deal that would shield its wealthy Sackler family owners from lawsuits over their role in the country’s opioid epidemic.
The justices paused bankruptcy proceedings concerning Purdue and its affiliates and said they would hold oral arguments in December in the administration’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling upholding the settlement. The Supreme Court’s new term begins in October.
Richard Sackler was head of Purdue Pharma during the marketing of Oxycontin.
Purdue’s owners under the settlement would receive immunity in exchange for paying up to $6 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits filed by states, hospitals, people who had become addicted and others who have sued the Stamford, Connecticut-based company over its misleading marketing of the powerful pain medication OxyContin.
In a statement, Purdue said it was disappointed that the U.S. Trustee, the Justice Department’s bankruptcy watchdog that filed the challenge at the Supreme Court, has been able to “single-handedly delay billions of dollars in value that should be put to use for victim compensation, opioid crisis abatement for communities across the country and overdose rescue medicines.”
“We are confident in the legality of our nearly universally supported plan of reorganization, and optimistic that the Supreme Court will agree,” the company added.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
At issue is whether U.S. bankruptcy law allows Purdue’s restructuring to include legal protections for the members of the Sackler family, who have not filed for personal bankruptcy.
Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019 to address its debts, nearly all of which stemmed from thousands of lawsuits alleging that OxyContin helped kickstart an opioid epidemic that has caused more than 500,000 U.S. overdose deaths over two decades.
I hope I’ve inspired a few people to learn more about this important issue. Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family single-handedly caused pain, heartache, and death to millions of people with Librium, Valium, and then Oxycontin, each of which they claimed were not addictive drugs. I can testify that Valium is definitely addictive. In the sober community, some refer to it as alcohol in pill form. Similarly, experts came to see Oxycontin as heroin in pill form. These people are monsters.
One more interesting link to the Sacklers: Rudy Giuliani stepped in to help them.
The new Netflix series “Painkiller” offers a fictionalized retelling of the rise of the powerful opioid OxyContin, depicting the real-life characters involved in manufacturer Purdue Pharma’s rapid ascent and subsequent downfall, including America’s most infamous mayor himself — Rudy Giuliani.
While certain aspects of the drama series have been embellished or altered amid the Hollywood treatment, Giuliani’s legal involvement in the Sackler family saga is rooted in reality.
The former New York City mayor and larger-than-life Trump ally helped Purdue Pharma continue to sell OxyContin even after federal prosecutors sought to make a case that the drug maker misled the public in claiming OxyContin was less addictive than other narcotics on the market.
Arthur Sackler made his fortune in the 1960s and 1970s by pushing the drugs Librium and Valium, claiming they were not addictive.
Purdue Pharma hired Giuliani back in 2002, representing the first client his consulting firm ever landed, The New York Times reported in 2007. Then-beloved as the mayor who saw New York City through the September 11 attacks, Giuliani was brought on to convince public officials that Purdue was a trustworthy company, according to the newspaper.
Giuliani emerges as a key character in “Painkiller” in the mid-aughts as fictional lawyer Edie Flowers, played by actress Uzo Aduba, is working on behalf of the US attorney’s office to bring a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma. Despite prosecutors’ best efforts, the office ultimately reaches a deal with Purdue, which sees the company plead guilty to charges of fraudulent marketing and misbranding of OxyContin.
Part of the reason the company was able to reach that agreement was thanks to Giuliani’s efforts as Purdue’s lawyer. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who wrote the New Yorker article upon which the Netflix show draws heavily, reported that Giuliani originally tried to “scuttle the case.”
Later, however, Giuliani and the other Purdue lawyers went above lead prosecutor John Brownlee’s head to complain to James Comey, who was the deputy attorney general at the time, The Guardian reported.
That’s my post for today. Feel free to react to what I’ve written or to discuss the latest news. I couldn’t face writing about Trump today.
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The theories themselves are so well-worn that they have progressed all the way to memes: the common refrain that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”, once an earnestly communicated part of conspiracy lore, has now become so hackneyed that it is almost meaningless. But there are many others, which either tend to suggest that the US could have intervened but decided not to, or that it actually orchestrated the attacks itself.
At the same time, however, they borrowed from tropes and ideas that had existed for centuries before, and which have continued to prove popular in the decades since. For the most part, 9/11 conspiracy theories are the same as those that went before, and those that followed, with the nouns swapped.
Perhaps the most distinct facet about the 9/11 conspiracy theories is the way they were pushed through formats that are familiar now in everything from advertising to the arts. In 2005, as the early viral internet we know today was finding its feet – it was the year of the first Pepe the Frog drawing, the beginnings of “Chuck Norris facts” and the “Million Dollar Homepage” – there appeared a video known as Loose Change, a documentary that presented the central ideas of the 9/11 conspiracy theory in a way that sent it swiftly across the internet.
Korey Rowe, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who made the film with friend Dylan Avery after returning from those wars confused and disillusioned, has drawn a straight line from the film to the various conspiracy theories that surround us today.
“Look at where it’s gone: you have people storming the Capitol because they believe the election was a fraud. You have people who won’t get vaccinated and they’re dying in hospitals,” he told the Associated Press. “We’ve gotten to the point where information is actually killing people.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will visit Russia, both countries said Monday, and he is expected to hold a highly anticipated meeting with President Vladimir Putin that has sparked Western concerns about a potential arms deal for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
A brief statement on the Kremlin’s website said the visit is at Putin’s invitation and would take place “in the coming days.” It also was reported by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, which said the leaders would meet — without specifying when and where.
“The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un will meet and have a talk with Comrade Putin during the visit,” it said.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin and Kim will lead their delegations in talks and could also meet “one-on-one if necessary.”
The Justice Department is dropping its five-year-old criminal case against Bijan Kian, the former lobbying partner of Michael Flynn whom prosecutors had accused of illicit lobbying for Turkey during the 2016 US presidential election.
The move wraps up a long-running tangent of the Mueller-era Russia investigation that originally had been used as leverage to pressure Flynn. Investigators had looked into the Trump ally’s unregistered work for Turkey before becoming the US national security adviser, charged him with false statements and sought his testimony against Kian, then allowed his guilty plea and cooperation to unravel.
Kian’s case has wound through the courts for years. After his indictment in 2018, the Iranian-American businessman went to trial, with prosecutors planning on calling Flynn to testify against him to solidify their evidence of a connection between Flynn’s lobbying group and the government of Turkey.
But Flynn was already working on contesting own case with prosecutors—which he ultimately achieved with the agreement of then-Attorney General Bill Barr – and avoided being called to testify.
A jury in the Eastern District of Virginia voted to convict Kian on charges of conspiring to hide lobbying work for Turkey from the Justice Department and acting as an illegal foreign agent. Yet Judge Anthony Trenga threw out the verdict, citing insufficient evidence and other issues related to Flynn’s role in the lobbying effort. The judge found there wasn’t evidence that Kian agreed to act as a foreign agent for Turkey. The case then went into appeals, hanging in the criminal justice system for years.
In a court filing on Monday, the Justice Department told Trenga it sought to dismiss the charges against Kian, who is also known as Bijan Rafiekian.
“After carefully considering the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in this case and the principles of federal prosecution, the United States believes it is not in the public interest to pursue the case against defendant Bijan Rafiekian further,” prosecutors wrote.
The judge hasn’t yet formally dismissed the case but is expected to.
To better understand Trump’s enduring appeal, Popular Information spoke with Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Why talk to the biographer of a wrestling executive to understand Trump? McMahon is one of Trump’s closest associates and, Riesman reports, one of the few people whose calls Trump takes in private. McMahon, who inducted Trump into the WWE Hall of Fame, could be serving as something of a role model to Trump right now. How many other people beat federal felony charges in court, weathered multiple sex scandals (so far), and emerged wealthier and more powerful?
Perhaps more importantly, McMahon is the creator of neo-kayfabe, the blending of fact and fiction — and good and evil — until it is all impossible to distinguish. McMahon himself became the most popular character on WWE shows, assuming the character of the arch-villain Mr. McMahon. There is now little distinction between McMahon and his WWE persona.
In her book, Riesman makes the case that Trump’s political strategy is shaped directly and indirectly by McMahon. “For more than three decades, Trump has watched and admired Vince’s product,” Riesman writes. “He has been both host and performer at many of Vince’s wrestling extravaganzas, honing his abilities as a rabble-rouser. Through Trump, Vince’s wrestling-infused mentality has reached the highest levels of the American system.”
Popular Information spoke to Riesman about what McMahon and WWE wrestling can teach us about Trump’s continued popularity, Trump’s response to federal indictments, and whether Trump believes his lies about the 2020 election. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
On how some people on the left misunderstand Trump’s appeal:
What we have with Trump is a guy who a lot of people on the left misunderstand as being just loved by the people who vote for him. And I think the feeling is not just, “Oh, Trump is good and strong and loves people and is a good Christian.” Very often, people will approach Trump in the way that they approach what they call in wrestling a “tweener.” Somebody who’s not exactly good or not exactly evil, where they go, “Yeah, I don’t approve of all of his methods or the things he says, but he’s cool, and he gets the job done.” I think thinking in terms of face [a “good guy” in wrestling] and heel [a “bad guy” in wrestling] for Trump is too binary, because it’s too much in the old way of doing things. The old kayfabe, not the neo-kayfabe. Trump is not perceived just as a good guy or a bad guy.
On the wrestler who is most similar to Trump:
Stone Cold Steve Austin is the person who, more than anyone else, altered the way the wrestling public uses their protagonists. Because Steve Austin was billed as a heel. He was introduced as a bad guy. And they were pushing him hard as a bad guy. But the crowd was seeing all these evil acts and just eating them up. They were obsessed, and cheering for this horrible character who was doing awful things. And that’s a real sea change for wrestling that, and then it ends up being a sea change for the culture.
On how WWE primed a generation for Trump:
You can’t deny that millennial boys grew up watching Stone Cold Steve Austin, and then the Rock and Triple H, and all these other people in that mold. These are people who are not quite face, not quite heel, but beloved by the crowd, despite their evil acts. Millennial boys shaped their whole worldviews when they’re 11 to 15 around that sense of morality. Not: Is it good, or is it evil? Just: Is it exciting? Is it cool? That’s what the premium is placed on. And that’s true now in politics, too. Maybe it’s always been true in politics to a certain extent. But right now, the thing that grabs people to vote is very often just: Do I find this person entertaining, recognizable, iconic, or funny? As opposed to: Will this person do a good job in the elected office that I’m voting for them for? And wrestling turned that into a science.
Several college football fans flipped the bird to former President Donald Trump as he waved to a crowd from a private suite at the Iowa vs. Iowa State game on Saturday.
Trump, who received a sea of cheers during a visit to a fraternity house before the game, got the one-finger salute from a number of fans as he and other GOP presidential candidates were on hand to check out the state’s intense college football rivalry.
In his quest to uncover evidence of corruption by President Joe Biden, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) has only managed to undermine his key allegations against the president, according to the committee’s top Democrat.
“Chairman Comer’s investigation has conclusively disproven the Republican allegations against President Biden,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Monday in a statement accompanying a report summarizing the committee’s work so far this year.
It’s a scathing document that portrays the Republican investigation as a transparent effort to create a false equivalence between Biden and former President Donald Trump, who faces four criminal trials for conduct during and after his presidency.
The main corruption allegations against Biden are that he participated in his son’s business deals with foreign nationals and that as vice president he twisted U.S. foreign policy to benefit a Ukrainian gas company that employed his son as board member. House Republicans have said they may launch an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden based on the Oversight Committee’s material.
“Mounting evidence reveals that then-Vice President Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his family sold around the world to enrich the Bidens,” a spokesperson for Comer said Monday. “Then-Vice President Biden spoke over 20 times by speakerphone with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates, dined with corrupt oligarchs who funneled millions to Hunter Biden, had coffee with one of his son’s associates in Beijing, and may have engaged in a bribery scheme.”
Earlier this year, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) uncovered an FBI file indicating that a trusted source spoke to a Ukrainian oligarch who claimed to have bribed Joe and Hunter Biden. The source said the claim was characteristic of braggadocio among post-Soviet businessmen; Raskin has said FBI officials told him they assessed the material and found it not credible enough for a full investigation. (The bureau has declined to publicize its assessment.)
Oooooo. Real Russians. Now, for real Communists? Alright, this is from Red State, so I doubt it, but sheesh. What is with these people? “Communists Burn Flags Outside Jason Aldean Concert, but the Response Shuts Them Down.”
Some don’t wish us well today. They would like to see us taken down and defeated as a nation. There are those who despise the very principles upon which this nation was built. Over the weekend, the Revolutionary Communists showed up outside a Jason Aldean concert in Tinley Park, a suburb of Chicago, not only to bash him over his viral hit song but to slam America, burn the flag, and call for a Communist revolution. You can see a video of them burning American flags here.
So, I see no evidence of anything other than folks burning the US Flag in protest. Again, these folks love an excellent Conspiracy Plotline.
An ex-Secret Service agent who was feet away from John F Kennedy when the former president was shot dead has broken his decades-old silence to cast doubt on the single-bullet theory held by the commission which investigated the assassination.
In an interview published by the New York Times over the weekend, Paul Landis said that he long believed the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy.
But, based on discrepancies between things he saw on the day of the assassination and the report from the commission, “I’m beginning to doubt myself,” Landis said. “Now I begin to wonder.”
Landis’s recollection of Kennedy’s death is bound to fuel those who believe multiple shooters killed the late president in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Yet his remarks – coming about a month before he releases a memoir – differ from two written statements which he turned in shortly after the assassination, surely keeping one of the darkest chapters in US history shrouded in mystery.
Landis was on the running board of a car trailing the open-top limousine that Kennedy was riding when – as he tells it – he heard a barrage of gunshots and a bullet struck the president from behind. The Warren commission, convened to examine the investigation, concluded that one bullet then continued forward, striking fellow passenger and Texas governor John Connally in his back, thigh, chest and wrist.
As the New York Times noted, the main reason for that conclusion was because the bullet was found on a stretcher used to move Connally around a hospital afterward.
Enter Landis’s new interview and his upcoming memoir, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years. Landis told the New York Times that he was the person who discovered that bullet, which he remembers being stuck in the limousine seat behind Kennedy’s seat after the president had been brought to the hospital.
Landis also said he did not think the bullet went too deeply into Kennedy’s back before “popping back out” prior to the president’s removal from the car he was in. Worried someone would try to pocket it as a souvenir, Landis said he took the bullet and placed it next to a stretchered Kennedy.
“It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important,” Landis said. “And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it.”
And they say yellow journalism is dead.
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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.
. This is one of the reasons you really have to watch your state legislature. Forced Birthers are learning the numbers are against them if voters get their way. They’re not for states making their own decision. Now, they’re going straight for a Federal law banning all abortions. Every vote counts for this. Lousyana will invariably get worse after our election. A lot of us will vote with our feet. Women and children are not safe in Red State America. Neither are members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, or people of color.
One more from CBS News: 
After I finished Demon Copperhead, I wanted to learn more about the opiod crisis and what happened with Oxycontin. First I watched a very good (partly fictionalized) documentary on Netflix, called Painkiller. Yesterday, I watched another Netflix series called The Pharmacist, which takes place in New Orleans. To say I was shocked by these shows is a serious understatement. I had no idea that Purdue Pharma pushed their drugs with sophisticated ad campaigns targeting doctors, and even went so far as to hire young women to approach doctors and flirt with them in order to convince them to prescribe more and more of the drug. Now I’m reading the book Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is a history of the Sackler family, how they made their huge fortune, and how they laundered their reputations through philanthropy.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Today’s headlines also include a heavily armored train carrying the North Korean Dictator on its way to a meeting with Russia’s Putin. It’s like a 2fer day in Bond villains. 
Other Bond Villians in the news include the vile Ex-President Trump. Judd Legum from Popular Information writes this analysis. “
Well, it’s one possible hypothesis. Trump has another extravaganza ready for your TV viewing. The Daily Beast Reports that “
Oooooo. Real Russians. Now, for real Communists? Alright, this is from Red State, so I doubt it, but sheesh. What is with these people? “Communists Burn Flags Outside Jason Aldean Concert, but the Response Shuts Them Down.”
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