This will be a quickie post, because I’m still sick. I can testify that coughing all day and all night for 5 days in a row is exhausting and debilitating.
There’s not a lot of exciting news, which is to be expected during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. But there’s always something in politics to gossip about. Today’s juicy story is about George Santos, the newly elected New York representative who seems to have lied about his life and history in every way you can imagine. This story has been going on for awhile, and it just keeps getting worse.
GOP Rep.-elect George Santos of New York admitted in two separate interviews on Monday to lying about parts of his resume but claimed that he hasn’t committed any crimes and intends to serve in Congress.
Santos has faced scrutiny over discrepancies in his employment and education history, as well as other public claims he has made about his biography. In interviews with WABC radio and the New York Post – the first times Santos has spoken publicly about the controversy – he acknowledged that he had fabricated some facts.
“I am not a criminal. Not here, not abroad, in any jurisdiction in the world have I ever committed any crimes,” Santos said in an interview with WABC radio host John Catsimatidis.
“To get down to the nit and gritty, I’m not a fraud. I’m not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress. I’ve been around a long time. I mean, a lot of people know me. They know who I am. They’ve done business dealings with me,” he added.
“I’m not going to make excuses for this, but a lot of people overstate in their resumes, or twist a little bit. … I’m not saying I’m not guilty of that,” he said.
Santos also admitted that he never worked directly for the financial firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, as he has previously suggested, but claimed that he did do work for them through his company, telling the New York Post it was a “poor choice of words” to say he worked for them.
He also told the Post that he didn’t graduate from any college or university, despite claiming he had degrees from Baruch College and New York University.
“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume,” he told the Post, adding that he owns up to that and that “we do stupid things in life.”
Do we even know for sure his name is George Santos?
Santos, elected to Congress on Nov. 8 to represent the Long Island- and Queens-based 3rd District, was also accused of lying about his family history, saying on his campaign website that his mother was Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Nazis during World War II.
Tower of London Ice Rink, by Andrew Macara .
Santos now says that he’s “clearly Catholic,” but claimed his grandmother told stories about being Jewish and later converting to Catholicism.
“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos said. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
Santos, the first openly gay non-incumbent Republican elected to the House, also faced accusations that he lied about his sexual orientation, with the Daily Beast reporting last week that he was previously married to a woman until shortly before he launched his unsuccessful 2020 campaign against Democrat Tom Suozzi.
The soon-to-be lawmaker confirmed to The Post on Monday that he was indeed married to a woman for about five years, from 2012 until his divorce in 2017, but insisted that he is now a happily married gay man.
Santos admitted to financial problems:
Santos also acknowledged being a deadbeat tenant in Sunnyside, Queens, where the Times reported he was ordered by a judge to pay more than $12,000 to a former landlord who claimed non-payment of several months of rent — as well as that Santos had tried to pass a check that bounced.
On Monday, Santos claimed that at the time of the lawsuit, his family was deep in medical debt from his mother’s cancer battle.
“We were engulfed in debt,” he said. “We had issues paying rent at the time. It’s the vulnerability of being human. I am not embarrassed by it.”
Santos said his mother died of cancer on Dec. 23, 2016, after living with him at the Queens apartment and acknowledged the judgment against him.
Asked if he ever actually paid the arrears, Santos admitted: “We didn’t pay it off. I completely forgot about it.”
Santos also admitted to lying when he claimed that he owned 13 different properties, saying he now resides at his sister’s place in Huntington but is looking to purchase his own place.
There’s more on Santos’ lies at the link. It’s just endless.
George Santos, a Long Island Republican who won a pivotal U.S. House race in November, acknowledged Monday night that he embellished his biography, seeking to explain his actions by saying in a radio interview that “a lot of people overstate in their résumés.”
While Santos played down the harm done with his claims, first raised in a New York Times story last week, he did briefly address how his wealth has skyrocketed in the past several years to enable him to lend hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign.
He told City and State NY that after different jobs, he opened his own firm and “it just worked because I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money. And I fundamentally started building wealth.” With that, he added, “I decided I’d invest in my race for Congress. There’s nothing wrong with that.” [….]
This past week, after the New York Times report raised a host of questions about whether Santos had fabricated much of his biography, Santos’s lawyer said the congressman-elect had been defamed, but he did not address specifics. The Times noted that Santos claimed that he worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Spokesmen for both companies confirmed to The Post that they had no record of his employment.
Santos said during the 11-minute radio interview on Monday that “the way it’s stated on the résumé, doing work for — I have worked ‘for,’ not ‘on’ or ‘at’ or ‘in’.” He said that he learned a lesson but that it doesn’t mean “I’m some fictional character.”
When Santos in June 2021 announced his bid forNew York’s 3rd District, which largely represents an affluent section of the North Shore of Long Island, he made a promise that few other candidates could match. If elected, he said in a campaign video, “I pledge to never take a salary.”
He furthered the impression that he was independently wealthy by lending his campaign at least $580,000, and his political action committee at least $27,000, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The loans played a key role in his surprising victory and helped give Republicans a narrow majority in the House.
Read more about Santos’ finances at the WaPo link.
Democratic lawmakers are calling for Rep.-elect George Santos to resign from the House seat he won in November, after the Long Island Republican admitted to “résumé embellishment” — dialing up the pressure on GOP leadership to respond.
“GOP Congressman-elect George Santos, who has now admitted his whopping lies, should resign,” tweeted Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), urging Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to call a vote to expel Santos if he does not quit.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) said that if Santos takes his new seat, it would set a precedent encouraging others to seek public office by falsifying their credentials, while Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) accused Santos of “defrauding the voters of Long Island about his ENTIRE resume.”
McCarthy (R-Calif.) has so far not responded to allegations that Santos misled voters about key details of his biography, which were first reported in a New York Times story last week.
Of course not. McCarthy needs this guy for his tiny House majority. Besides Santos fits in perfectly with the party of Trump. Maybe Santos can run for president next.
McCarthy on November 19th says with the election of George Santos, they have the largest Republican Jewish Caucus in 24 years pic.twitter.com/3NfdEady39
It’s warming up here, and I feel like a wet noodle. My body has just gone limp from the current temperatures in the house. It got pretty cold in the front two rooms, but I managed to head off any pipe bursts. It’s headed toward the 70s, and that’s fine for me! I can only imagine what the banana trees in the backyard look like because I’m not going there right now. I’m going to deal with the sideyard gardens first.
This year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won “The Republican Grinch” award. This reporting is by Noah Gray at CNN. “More migrants dropped off outside vice president’s home in freezing weather on Christmas Eve.” Greg Abbot represents the worst of our country and of humanity. I’m sure he’s got a hot meal and acting all smug about his religion. Probably even went to church to be all joyous. But, really, is this what it’s about America? Is this what White American Christian nationalists are all about?
Several busloads of migrants were dropped off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in Washington, DC, on Christmas Eve in 18 degree weather late Saturday.
An initial two busloads were taken to local shelters, according to an administration official. More buses arrived outside the vice president’s residence later Saturday evening. A CNN team saw migrants being dropped off, with some migrants wearing only T-shirts in the freezing weather. They were given blankets and put on another bus that went to a local church.
Amy Fischer, a volunteer with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, which has been receiving migrants sent to DC since the spring, said the organization had been prepared for Saturday night’s arrivals, having been informed about it earlier by an NGO working at the border in Texas.
The arrivals included asylum seekers from Ecuador, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Peru and Colombia, according to Fischer, who told CNN the buses were supposed to go to New York but were diverted to DC due to the weather. Busloads of migrants have been arriving in Washington weekly since April.
“The DC community has been welcoming buses from Texas anytime they’ve come since April. Christmas Eve and freezing cold weather is no different,” Fischer said. “We are always here welcoming folks with open arms.”
SAMU First Response, a nonprofit that has been assisting migrants since the buses began coming to Washington earlier this year, was also on the ground Saturday night helping arrivals. The organization’s managing director, Tatiana Laborde, described the stunt as “extremely inhumane,” but said, if done properly, it could provide a road map to easing tensions at the southern border.
Siberian Dogs in the Snow, 1909-1910, by Franz Marc
Twitter was acting cranky all weekend. Maybe, this is why. The Economic Times of Indiana reports,”‘Threat actor’ puts 400 million Twitter users’ data up for sale. If you still have an active account there, I suggest you use 2FA and immediately change your password. I really can’t take much of the place. I’ve already bumped into more right-wing trolling than I ever want to experience, and my feed looks like bedlam.
Data belonging to about 400 million Twitter users have been obtained through an exploit in Twitter up to early 2022 and put on sale by a “threat actor”.
Going by the username Ryushi, the person posted a sample database of 1,000 users with private information of well-known personalities such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Brian Krebs, Vitalik Buterin, Kevin O’Leary and Donald Trump Jr, as well as the account of India’s information and broadcasting ministry.
The person warned Twitter and its chief executive Elon Musk of the consequences, including hefty fines under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), of such a sizeable data breach.
He wrote: “Twitter or Elon Musk, if you are reading this, you are already risking a GDPR fine over 5.4 million breach. Imagine the fine for a 400 million users breach.”
The threat actor was referring to the hefty fines that might be coming Musk’s way after a top privacy regulator in the European Union opened a probe into reports of a suspected data breach that compromised the personal details of 5.4 million users last year.
He added: “Your best option to avoid paying $276 million in GDPR breach fines like Facebook did (due to 533 million users being scraped) is to buy this data exclusively.”
Friends of the Wind, by Oksana Kravchenko, is for sale here.
Washington Post has this informative report on the runners-up to the Fascist Grinch awards this year. “Here’s who helped Elon Musk buy Twitter. Who pulls the financial strings at Twitter? These are Musk’s backers.” Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud tops the list at a cool $2 billion. We also know about The Qatar Investment Authority, that’s estimated to have contributed $375. The really interesting part of the list includes many of the US’ worst vulture capitalists, many of the worst parasite companies, and then Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays.
Andreessen Horowitz, for example, chipped in around $400 million.
One of the most famous venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, this firm has invested in Airbnb, Lyft and Coinbase. Co-founder Marc Andreessen was one of the people who privately messaged Musk about the Twitter deal, according to court filings. “If you are considering equity partners, my growth fund is in for $250 [million] with no additional work required,” Andreessen wrote. His firm would go on to give even $400 million. He has cheered on Musk in recent weeks on Twitter, particularly during the release of the “Twitter Files,” a string of releases on behavior inside the company before the takeover.
The other co-founder, Ben Horowitz, said in several tweets that the venture capital firm believes in “Elon’s brilliance” to make Twitter “what it was meant to be.” Horowitz went on to say that Twitter suffers from a range of issues, including censorship. He said that Musk was “perhaps the only person in the world” who could build the public square people hoped for, echoing the praise that conservatives have directed toward Musk, who they see as a champion of free speech.
Terry Hubbard, 63, was among 20 people arrested last August on criminal charges of illegal voting in 2020 in what was the first major action taken by the the Republican’s controversial new Office of Election Crimes and Security.
A judge in Broward County this week tossed out the case on the grounds that the Office of Statewide Prosecution does not have jurisdiction to prosecute since it can only prosecute crimes that occurred in two or more counties. Two other cases were dismissed on similar grounds.
The elections police unit drew widespread criticism from Democrats and voting rights groups who feared it would serve as a political tool for the governor.
The arrests of the 20 defendants last August targeted people who were convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense and therefore exempt from a constitutional amendment that restores voting rights to some felons. Most of those charged were from Broward, Miami-Dade or Palm Beach counties, all Democratic strongholds.
DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, pushed the state legislature to create the election police unit to address voter fraud concerns that have proliferated in the GOP following former President Donald Trump’s false claims that his reelection was stolen.
Tiger in the Snow, by Katsushika Hokusai, 1849
Lawyers, Journalists, and the politically curious are still sifting through the January 6th Committee’s final report. Here’s more on the winner of the Fascist Grinch’s attempt to use Fraudulent Electors to overturn democratic election results. The analysis is from Philp Rotner’s writing for The Bulwark. ” What the Jan. 6th Report Says About the Fake Electors Scheme.” “Freaking Trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate President.”
The fake electors were hardly the worst of what Trump visited on us. For sheer journalistic sex appeal, a scheme by a bunch of unknown, bumbling state functionaries to phony up some documents just can’t compete with a president siccing an armed mob on the Capitol. But the fake elector scandal, while not the most shocking of Trump’s predations, has long looked like the straightest route to cracking open the entire 2020 election scheme, and to getting Donald Trump indicted andconvicted of a crime (at least until the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents scandal was revealed, but that’s another story). If Trump was a knowing participant in the scheme (more on that later), his reasons for doing so would make absolutely no difference. Even if he really, truly believed the election was stolen, it would not be a defense to criminal charges for participating in a fraudulent scheme to submit forged documents as the official results of state presidential elections. To the contrary, his belief that he was stealing back a stolen election would be highly incriminating proof of his motive, not a defense.
Contrast that, for instance, with a potential charge that Trump tried to corruptly alter the result in Georgia in his infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. When Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip the Georgia election, was he asking him to legitimately root out and disqualify votes that he honestly believed were fraudulent, or was he asking him to manufacture votes?
Snow Horses, Chen Yong, 2008
The Guardian‘s Peter Stone writes this. “January 6 panel’s body of work boosts DoJ case against Trump, experts say. Former prosecutors say exhaustive report from Capitol attack committee ‘amounts to a detailed prosecution memo.’”
The wealth of evidence against Trump compiled by the panel spurred its unprecedented decision to send the DoJ four criminal referrals for Trump and some top allies about their multi-track planning and false claims of fraud to block Joe Biden from taking office.
Although the referrals do not compel the justice department to file charges against Trump or others, the enormous evidence the panel amassed should boost its investigations, say ex-federal prosecutors.
The massive evidence assembled by the panel was the basis for accusing Trump of obstruction of an act of Congress, inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the US and making false statements
“The central cause of January 6 was one man, former president Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the committee wrote in a detailed summary of its findings a few days before the release of its final 800-plus-page report on Thursday.
The panel’s blockbuster report concluded that Trump criminally plotted to nullify his defeat in 2020 and “provoked his supporters to violence” at the Capitol with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.
Former prosecutors say the committee’s detailed factual presentation should boost some overlapping inquiries by DoJ including a months-long investigation into a fake electors scheme that Trump helped spearhead in tandem with John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who was also referred to the justice department for prosecution.
“The January 6 committee’s final hearing and lengthy executive summary make out a powerful case to support its criminal referrals as to Trump, Eastman, and unnamed others,” former DoJ inspector general Michael Bromwich told the Guardian.
“Although the referrals carry no legal weight, they provide an unusual preview of potential charges that may well be effective in swaying public opinion,” Bromwich said.
There are more interviews with former prosecutors at the link.
I’m off to do some dishes and other exciting stuff. Hopefully, the New Year that starts next Sunday will bring tidings of comfort and joy to us and many subpoenas to these law-breaking Republicans.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today? How about an animated Frank Sintra singing Jingle Bells?
or Some Keb’ Mo’?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
The story is really fascinating and reads like a political thriller. The authors explain how the Committee carefully structured its presentations with the help of former TV executive James Goldston. Everything in the hearings was very deliberate and planned out. From the article:
One afternoon in early May, a lanky, bespectacled and mostly bald 53-year-old British American named James Goldston sat in a conference room in the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. House Office Building before the expectant gazes of 25 or so men and women: the staff of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. For almost a year, they had been amassing evidence against former President Donald J. Trump and his associates. In less than a month, the committee would be presenting this evidence in a succession of live televised hearings. Goldston, who had left his position as president of ABC News a year earlier, had just been hired by the committee to assist in this endeavor.
“So what have we got?” he asked the staff members.
Quite a lot, replied the committee’s lead investigator, Tim Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney. The committee staff had conducted nearly 1,000 witness interviews. It had collected over a million pages of documents from the National Archives and other sources. It had obtained hundreds of phone records, in addition to thousands of text messages sent by and to Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. The committee’s cache of visual material included hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage that security cameras captured during the attack.
The committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, and its vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, had worked with the staff to organize the hearings around seven specific methods by which Trump and his allies sought to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election: the willful spreading of lies that the election had been stolen; trying to coerce the Department of Justice into disputing the election results; pressuring Vice President Mike Pence; pressuring state and local officials; seeking to recruit phony electors in several contested states; summoning a mob to Washington; and then, upon inciting that mob, sitting back for more than three hours and doing nothing to stop the violence. The idea, Heaphy said, was for every hearing to include a significant audiovisual representation of the evidence the staff had gathered.
I can’t possibly summarize this long story, but here’s just a bit more. I do hope you’ll go read it; it’s really excellent.
The most consequential congressional committee in generations was immersed in high drama from beginning to end. It originated six months after a domestic siege of the Capitol. It devoted a year to seeking evidence from sources who were often reluctant or even hostile. It then presented that evidence in the form of captivating televised hearings that were watched by more than 10 million Americans at a time, leading up to the November 2022 midterms in which a clear majority cast their ballots against election denialism. And then the committee concluded its work by making history with its criminal referrals of a former president to the Department of Justice.
Mujer con gato – Sonya Grassman
But the inner workings of the Jan. 6 committee — members of Congress, lawyers, video producers and assorted staff members totaling about 80 people tasked with investigating a violent attack on American democracy and a sitting president’s role in that attack — have been almost completely shrouded from public view. Through extensive interviews with all nine of the committee’s members and numerous senior staff members and key witnesses, we have been able to reconstruct a previously unreported account of the committee’s fevered, fraught and often chaotic race to a finish line that has always been understood to be Jan. 3, 2023, when the new Congress is sworn in and a new Republican majority in the House would immediately dissolve the committee. Those same efforts took place at a time when the Republican Party was resolutely united behind the committee’s principal target, Trump, with politicians and voters alike joining the former president in lustily condemning the inquiry at every opportunity.
The committee’s first few months were rocky, even “tumultuous,” in the words of one member, as the lawmakers struggled to plot out a strategy to investigate what they saw as a sprawling, complex conspiracy. It was only after they hired around a dozen former federal prosecutors, including two U.S. attorneys and a lawyer who helped put the drug lord known as El Chapo in prison, that things began to get serious: The committee sent requests to telecommunications companies to preserve phone and text records of some 700 potential witnesses. Soon, witnesses started agreeing to testify, with dozens of interviews coming in a week. If a high-ranking Trump official refused to comply, the committee tried to bring in an aide. If the aide refused, the former prosecutors went after the aide’s aide.
Some of the most interesting parts of the story focus on Nancy Pelosi’s decision to ask Liz Cheney to join the Committee and Cheney’s very important role in the investigation. Whatever you think of her politics, Cheney is a remarkable woman.
It will take weeks to absorb the massive, 845-page report from the House Jan. 6 select committee. No doubt, certain sections will receive more attention than others, such as Chapter 1, about Donald Trump’s role in constructing election lies, and Chapter 7, about the near-total absence of White House records during the four-hour siege of the U.S. Capitol. (Was any evidence destroyed?)
But from a historical, legal and national security perspective, the most alarming information comes in Chapters 6 and 8 and Appendix 1. Those sections cover the right-wing extremists who jointly planned and executed the violent uprising — and the degree to which Trump enabled their attack.
First and foremost, the report busts a myth promoted by right-wing apologists that because some insurrectionists began the assault on the Capitol before Trump concluded his “Stop the Steal” speech, he was not the inspiration for the attack. Wrong.
Chapter 6 details the degree to which members of extremist groups (e.g., Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters) seized upon Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election. They heard his call to come to D.C. and believed he wanted them to do what was needed to keep him in power. The Proud Boys planned to move ahead of the crowd, which later — at Trump’s instruction — followed them down Pennsylvania Avenue.
In Chapter 8, the report details the early removal of barricades at the Peace Circle by the Proud Boys and their associates. That cleared the way for thousands of protesters to move down Pennsylvania Avenue directly to the Capitol. That provides evidence of the meticulous preparation that went into the assault.
Much of the country experienced a huge winter storm yesterday, and today millions of people are being hit with record cold temperatures.
A massive winter storm battered the US on Friday with frigid temperatures, high winds and heavy snow, leaving at least nine people dead, knocking out power to over a million customers and wrecking holiday plans from coast to coast.
By Pierre-John Maurel
The storm – expected to intensify throughout Friday as it barrels through the Midwest and East – is making for grim road conditions with poor visibility and ice-covered streets. Coastal flooding is also an issue, particularly along the shorelines of the Northeast.
All modes of travel – planes, trains and automobiles – were being disrupted: There were hundreds of miles of road closures and flight cancellations were growing rapidly. In New York, flooding along the Long Island Rail Road forced part of the Long Beach branch to temporarily shut down.
“Christmas is canceled,” said Mick Saunders, a Buffalo, New York, resident who was two hours into blizzard conditions that are expected to last through Sunday morning. “All family and friends agreed it’s safer this way.”
At least 9 deaths have been reported since Wednesday.
In north-central Kansas, three people were killed in separate car crashes on Wednesday evening; one death was confirmed to be weather-related, and two were believed to be weather-related but need more investigation, according to Kansas Highway Patrol spokesperson Lt. Candice Breshears.
In Kansas City, one person died after losing control of their Dodge Caravan on icy roads Thursday afternoon, according to the Kansas City Police Department. “The Dodge went down the embankment, over the cement retaining wall and landed upside down, submerged in Brush Creek,” police said in a statement.
In Kentucky, three people died due to the storm, including two in vehicle crashes and the other a “housing insecure” person in Louisville, Gov. Andy Beshear said. The man’s body was found outside with no obvious signs of trauma and an autopsy would determine the cause of death, police said.
And in Ohio, four people have died “as a result of weather-related auto accidents” and several others have been injured, according to Gov. Mike DeWine.
Life threatening cold has pushed all the way to the Gulf Coast and the Mexican border, with below zero wind chills reported as far south as Austin and Atlanta. Many locations in the eastern US are in for their coldest Christmas Eve in decades as the Arctic blast reaches its peak.
More than one million customers in the US are experiencing power outages amid the winter weather and frigid temperatures, according to the website PowerOutage.US. Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania have the most outages.
Mother and Cat, by Mine Ocubo
In Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s grand jury investigating the Trump gang’s interference in the state’s 2020 presidential election has finished its work.
A special grand jury investigating whether then-President Donald Trump and his allies illegally tried to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election in Georgia appears to be wrapping up its work, but many questions remain.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who began investigating nearly two years ago, has said she will go where the facts lead. It would be an extraordinary step if she chooses to bring charges against Trump himself.
“Even if he’s acquitted by a jury, for him to face trial and to have a public trial with evidence on the record would be an epic thing for American history,” Georgia State University law professor Clark Cunningham said….
Over about six months, the grand jurors have considered evidence and heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, including high-profile Trump associates and top state officials. A prosecutor on Willis’ team said during a hearing in November that they had few witnesses left and didn’t anticipate the special grand jury continuing much longer.
The grand jurors are expected to produce a final report with recommendations on potential further action. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who’s supervising the panel, will review the report and recommend to the court’s chief judge that the special grand jury be dissolved. The judges of the county Superior Court will then vote on whether to let the special grand jurors go or whether more investigation is necessary.
The special grand jury cannot issue indictments. Willis will decide whether to go to a regular grand jury to pursue criminal charges.
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday significantly changed the information that will be in every box of the most widely used emergency contraceptive pills to make clear that they do not prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. The agency explained in an accompanying document that the products cannot be described as abortion pills.
Up to now, packages of the brand-name pill, Plan B One-Step, as well as generic versions of it have said that the pill might work by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb — language that scientific evidence did not support. That wording led some abortion opponents and politicians who equate a fertilized egg with a person to say that taking the morning-after pill could be the equivalent of having an abortion or even committing murder.
By Paul Kulsha (the mysterious P.A.R.K., the artist behind last week’s illustration of the cat in an overcoat, walking a pet mouse.)
The F.D.A. revised the leaflets inserted in packages of pills to say that the medication “works before release of an egg from the ovary,” meaning that it acts before fertilization, not after. The package insert also says the pill “will not work if you’re already pregnant, and will not affect an existing pregnancy.”
In a question-and-answer document posted on the F.D.A.’s website, the agency explicitly addressed the abortion issue. In answer to the question, “Is Plan B One-Step able to cause an abortion?” the agency writes: “No.” It added: “Plan B One-Step prevents pregnancy by acting on ovulation, which occurs well before implantation. Evidence does not support that the drug affects implantation or maintenance of pregnancy after implantation, therefore, it does not terminate a pregnancy.”
Since the Supreme Court overturned the ruling that ensured the national right to abortion, advocates of abortion rights have warned that some conservative states may outlaw or restrict morning-after pills on the erroneous grounds that they might cause abortions. Advocates and reproductive health providers have also worried that people who are misinformed about how the pills work may decline to use an effective tool to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
For at least a decade, the pills have figured in political debates about abortion. During the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney called emergency contraceptives “abortive pills,” and two other Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, made similar statements.
The crazies won’t buy it, but it’s still a good thing.
Speaking of enabling crazies, Elon Musk continues to make a mess of Twitter.
Twitter Inc removed a feature in the past few days that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking up certain content, according to two people familiar with the matter who said it was ordered by new owner Elon Musk.
After publication of this story, Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin told Reuters in an email that “we have been fixing and revamping our prompts. They were just temporarily removed while we do that.” [….]
The removal of the feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, had not been previously reported. It had shown at the top of specific searches contacts for support organizations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, COVID-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.
Its elimination had led to increased concerns about the well-being of vulnerable users on Twitter. Musk has said that impressions, or views, of harmful content are declining since he took over in October and has tweeted graphs showing a downward trend, even as researchers and civil rights groups have tracked an increase in tweets with racial slurs and other hateful content….
Boy with Cat, by Ivan Generalic, 1959
Eirliani Abdul Rahman, who had been on a recently dissolved Twitter content advisory group, said the disappearance of #ThereIsHelp was “extremely disconcerting and profoundly disturbing.”
Even if it was only temporarily removed to make way for improvements, “normally you would be working on it in parallel, not removing it,” she said.
Washington-based AIDS United, which was promoted in #ThereIsHelp, and iLaw, a Thai group mentioned for freedom of expression support, both told Reuters on Friday that the disappearance of the feature was a surprise to them.
AIDS United said a webpage that the Twitter feature linked to attracted about 70 views a day until Dec. 18. Since then, it has drawn 14 views in total.
Damar Juniarto, executive director at Twitter partner Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network, tweeted on Friday about the missing feature and said “stupid actions” by the social media service could lead his organization to abandon it.
Twitter has restored a feature that promoted suicide prevention hotlines and other safety resources to users looking up certain content, after coming under pressure from users and consumer safety groups.
The feature, known as #ThereIsHelp, placed a banner at the top of search results for certain topics, listing contacts for support organizations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation, Covid-19, gender-based violence, natural disasters and freedom of expression.
Reuters said on Friday the feature had been taken down this week. Citing two people familiar with the matter, the report said the removal was ordered by the social media platform’s owner, Elon Musk.
After publication of the story, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, confirmed the removal but said it was temporary….
Musk then denied the feature had been removed, and called the Reuters report “fake news”.
Nonetheless, the report appeared at the start of the Christmas holiday, a fraught time for many, prompting widespread concern. The anonymous sources cited by Reuters said millions had encountered #ThereIsHelp messages on Twitter….
“This is the worst time of the year to remove the suicide prevention feature,” wrote Jane Manchun Wong, a software developer and Twitter user. “Instead of leaving a time gap without suicide prevention feature for a revamp, they could’ve kept the old prompt and replaced it with a new one when it’s ready.”
Early on Saturday, Musk responded, tweeting: “1. The message is actually still up. This is fake news. 2. Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.”
What an asshole. I hope Tesla stock drops to zero.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you all have a nice holiday weekend, celebrating in whatever manner you wish.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
There’s an arctic blast over the country, bringing snow and freezing temps to levels that create hardships! I hope you and yours can stay warm, fed, and inside this weekend! I spent time winterizing the Kathouse to prepare for at least 4 days of below 30 degrees Fahrenheit weather! I’m a hothouse flower after nearly 30 years in tropical New Orleans.
The January 6th Committee’s final report was released last night if you’re in the mood to read a killer thriller over the winter weeks ahead. Analysis can be found at all media outlets all around the world. Here are some highlights from Just Security.
What follows are highlights of the January 6th Select Committee’s final report from our initial review. Our discussion includes but is not limited to the report’s findings and treatment of issues including:
Criminal misconduct in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Racism as a driver of efforts to overturn the popular vote in different parts of the country and in fueling some of the organized groups and individuals who attacked the Capitol.
The apparent intelligence and law enforcement failure and the Committee’s perspective on it.
The pressure campaign on state election officials to deviate from their legal obligations, and
The role of social media in propagating false claims about the election and serving as a mechanism to plan acts of violence.
With so much at stake for American democracy, the January 6th Report provides the public an opportunity to reflect on persistent threats to the rule of law, elections, racial justice, and freedom from political violence.
The Magpie by Claude Monet (1868-69)
This is an excellent place to figure out where to start reading the report. The section on the role of extremists and racists is frightening and compelling. The section on social media made me think about what it would have been like with the current ownership structure of Twitter.
Ronald Brownstein from The Atlantic wrote this. “The Biggest Takeaway from the January 6 Report: Rather than conducting a large-scale dragnet, the committee zeroed in on the former president.”
The congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection delivered a comprehensive and compelling case for the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump and his closest allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
But the committee zoomed in so tightly on the culpability of Trump and his inner circle that it largely cropped out the dozens of other state and federal Republican officials who supported or enabled the president’s multifaceted, months-long plot. The committee downplayed the involvement of the legion of local Republican officials who enlisted as fake electors and said almost nothing about the dozens of congressional Republicans who supported Trump’s efforts—even to the point, in one case, of urging him to declare “Marshall Law” to overturn the result.
With these choices, the committee likely increased the odds that Trump and his allies will face personal accountability—but diminished the prospect of a complete reckoning within the GOP.
The Sea of Ice, 1823–1824, by Caspar David Friedrich.
Politico goes straight for role of extremists in the J6 Insurrection. “Extremists at the vanguard of a siege: The Jan. 6 panel’s last word. The voluminous final report from the Capitol attack committee dug deep into the unspoken alliance between Trump allies and far-right groups that showed up to riot” The bylines here go to Nicholas Wu and Kyle Cheney.
Far-right extremists who believed they were answering Donald Trump’s call to stop the transfer of presidential power didn’t just join the Jan. 6 mob — they led it.
The first wave of rioters to enter the Capitol during the siege, according to the Jan. 6 select committee’s final report released Thursday night, was disproportionately comprised of members of the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, QAnon fanatics and so-called Groypers loyal to Nick Fuentes, the former president’s racist and antisemitic recent Mar-a-Lago dinner guest.
Among the central findings of the select panel’s report: Trump’s incendiary lies about the 2020 election activated an extraordinary coalition of far-right militants and conspiracy theorists who not only joined the mob but were its vanguard smashing through police lines. Those extremists chose Jan. 6, the report outlines, in large part because Trump told them to in a now-infamous tweet: “Be there. Will be wild.”
“The January 6th attack has often been described as a riot — and that is partly true. Some of those who trespassed on the Capitol’s grounds or entered the building did not plan to do so beforehand,” the committee found. “But it is also true that extremists, conspiracy theorists and others were prepared to fight. That is an insurrection.”
In other news, Politico reports that the “House prepares for passage of $1.7T spending bill. Roughly 40 percent of the chamber has voted by proxy this week, and still more members are expected to do so during Friday’s pre-holiday vote.
The House is on track for Friday approval of a colossal $1.7 trillion government funding package, as party leaders dash to avoid a shutdown and an intensifying winter storm — hours before Christmas.
The spending bill, which includes a pile of high-profile year-end priorities from Ukraine aid to an election law overhaul, will be Democrats’ final legislative act before surrendering their House majority to Republicans in January. And with their post-midterm leverage boost, GOP leaders successfully negotiated huge hikes to the bill’s military spending, adding billions of dollars beyond what President Joe Biden sought, to the consternation of many progressives.
Democrats, meanwhile, touted the funding measure’s highest-ever level for domestic spending — $800 billion, or a 9.3 percent increase from last year’s levels
“These investments support our communities with the urgency they need,” House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) told members of the chamber’s Rules panel on Thursday night.
Like anything in this bitterly divided Congress, the path to passage of the spending package has been winding and slow. Resistance from conservatives held it up for days in the Senate, though Majority Leader Chuck Schumer ultimately reached a time agreement on Thursday that will prevent weekend House votes.
Kandinsky – Winter Landscape, 1911
Mitch McConnell is flexing his political muscle and rhetoric at Trump. Sahil Kapur of NBC News has this report. “McConnell calls out ‘diminished’ Trump, vows not to bow to his candidates in 2024. Exclusive: The Senate GOP leader says in an interview that Trump hurt the party in the 2022 elections by making swing voters see Republicans as “nasty” and attracted to “chaos.””
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell deferred to former President Donald Trump’s handpicked candidates in competitive midterm races, culminating in jarring defeats and a larger Democratic majority that bucked the odds.
He promises not to let that happen again, insisting he will “actively look for quality candidates” to promote in the 2024 primaries.
In a rare and pointed criticism of the former president, who’s seeking a comeback in two years, McConnell said Trump’s power is on the wane and called on him to back off Senate primaries.
“Here’s what I think has changed: I think the former president’s political clout has diminished,” McConnell told NBC News on Wednesday in a wide-ranging interview in his Capitol Hill office.
The diminished standing has made McConnell — and by extension his allies, like the deep-pocketed Senate Leadership Fund super PAC — “less inclined to accept cards that may be dealt to us,” he said.
“We can do a better job with less potential interference,” he said. “The former president may have other things to do.”
McConnell also blamed Trump for tarnishing the party’s image among crucial independent and swing voters, who rejected GOP Senate contenders in the states that decided the majority. He said that the party underperformed in “every state” — including the red state of Ohio, which Republicans narrowly won — and that its performance was “fatal” in Arizona, New Hampshire and Georgia.
“We lost support that we needed among independents and moderate Republicans, primarily related to the view they had of us as a party — largely made by the former president — that we were sort of nasty and tended toward chaos,” McConnell said. “And oddly enough, even though that subset of voters did not approve of President Biden, they didn’t have enough confidence in us in several instances to give us the majority we needed.”
So that’s it for me today. I’ll be back on Monday when it starts to warm up again!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Note Betty Garrett singing with Red Skelton. She was my mother’s cousin from St Joe, Missouri.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
This will be an abbreviated post, because I’m down with a bad chest cold–at least it isn’t Covid.
Top stories in the news today: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to Congress last night, Trump’s taxes and the IRS, the January 6 Committee, and Republicans in disarray, including an incoming Congressman whose backstory seems to be completely fictional.
Reactions to Zelensky’s Speech
and here is Churchill and Roosevelt speaking in Washington, during Churchill's visit, Christmas 1941 https://t.co/yVwcPNWheV
This is the world that Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley, the Trump family and the many members of the cult of autocracy apparently wish we inhabited. Full description here: https://t.co/uMRWSC0Sg5
I am impressed with the January 6 Committee’s report. It reads like a prosecution memo. I see the fingerprints of committee counsel Tim Heaphy, a former U.S. Attorney, all over this. Some of the proposed charges were expected. Two others are intriguing. https://t.co/hrxk0JC8dI
Jeffries: House Republicans are attacking Senate Republicans. Marjorie Taylor Greene is fighting with Lauren Boebert and George Santos appears to be starring in the sequel to Catch Me If You Can and it’s not even January 3rd. pic.twitter.com/4aygy3pAF4
It's obvious that Republicans are terrified the #TrumpTaxReturns will end up making Trump look like #GeorgeSantos … Jim Jordan is threatening to retaliate by releasing @POTUS' returns, guess what Jim, he already released them…Republicans are in complete disarray meltdown mode pic.twitter.com/am7HYYG0gz
McCarthy threatening Republican Senators, Marge and fellow ‘Freedom Caucus’ members attacking each other, everyone attacking Ronna, Trump hiding out and raging in Palm Beach. Republicans in disarray. Who could see this coming with a Great Unifier like Trump leading the party? pic.twitter.com/0myNFHvtYi
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.
He told City and State NY that after different jobs, he opened his own firm and “it just worked because I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money. And I fundamentally started building wealth.” With that, he added, “I decided I’d invest in my race for Congress. There’s nothing wrong with that.” [….]
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments